Changes (The Dresden Files 12)

Chapter 29

It didn't take me long to talk Sanya and Molly out of taking me to the hospital. The Eebs, as it turned out, had shown up, pitched their fire-bomb from a moving car, and kept going, a modus operandi that was consistent with the earlier attempt on my life, except this time they'd been identified. Molly's description of the thrower was a dead ringer for Esteban.

I had to admit, the vampire couple had a very practical long-term approach to violence - striking at weakness and harassing the victim while exposing themselves to minimal risk. If I'd been a couple of steps higher up when that Molotov hit, I'd be dead, or covered in third-degree burns. Individually, their attempts might not enjoy a high success rate - but they needed to get it right only once.

It would be consistent with that practical, cold-blooded style to keep an eye on the hospitals in order to come finish me off - during surgery, for example, or while I was still in recovery afterward. Sanya, though, had EMT training of some kind. He calmly stole a backboard out of an open ambulance while its techs were seeing to the Willoughbys, and they loaded me onto it in a procedure that Sanya said would protect my spine. It seemed kind of "too little, too late" to me, but I was too tired to rib him over it.

I couldn't feel anything below the waist, but that apparently didn't mean that the rest of me got to stop hurting. I felt them carrying the board out, and when I opened my eyes it was only to see nearly a third of the building give way and crash down into the basement - into my apartment. The building was obviously a lost cause. The firemen were focusing on containing the blaze and preventing it from spreading to the nearby homes.

They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he'd reserved but couldn't have. As it drove away during the confusion and before the cops could lock everything down, I got to watch my home burn down through the back window of the van.

Even after we were several blocks away, I could see the smoke rising up in a black column. I wondered how much of that smoke was made of my books. My secondhand guitar. My clothes. My comfy old furniture. My bed. My blankets. My Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The equipment in my lab that I'd worked so hard to attain or create - the efforts of years of patient effort, endless hours of concentration and spellcraft.

Gone.

Fire is as destructive spiritually as it is materially, a purifying force that can devour and scatter magical energy. In a fire that large everything I'd ever built, including purely magical constructs, would be destroyed.

Dammit.

Dammit, but I hated vampires.

I'd had one hell of a day, all in all, but practically the only thing I had left to me was my pride. I didn't want anyone to see me crying. So I just kept quiet in the back of the van, while Mouse lay very close to me.

At some point, sorrow became sleep.

I woke up in the utility room at St. Mary of the Angels, where Father Forthill kept several spare folding cots and the bedding to go with them. I'd visited several times in the past. St. Mary's was a surprisingly stout bastion against supernatural villains of nearly any stripe. The ground beneath it was consecrated, as was every wall, door, floor, and window, blessed by prayers and stately rituals, Masses, and communions over and over through the decades, until that gentle, positive energy had permeated the ground and the very stone from which the church was built.

I felt safer, but only a little. Vampires might not be able to set foot on the holy ground, but they knew that, and someone like the Eebs would certainly take that into account. Hired human killers could be just as dangerous as vampires, if not more so, and the protective aura around the building couldn't make them blink an eye.

And, I supposed, they could always just set it on fire and burn it down around me if they really, really wanted to get me. I tried to imagine myself a century from now, still dodging vampires and getting my home burned to the ground on an irregular basis.

No way in hell was I gonna accept that. I'd have to deal with the Eeb problem.

And then I remembered my legs. I reached a hand down to touch my thigh.

I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. It felt like touching the limb of someone else entirely. I tried to move my legs and nothing happened. Maybe I'd been too ambitious. I pulled at my blanket until I could see my toes. I tried wiggling them. I failed.

I could feel the backboard beneath me, and the band around my head that kept me from moving it to look around. I gave up on my legs with a sharp surge of frustration and lifted my eyes to the ceiling.

There was a piece of paper taped to it, directly over my head. Molly's handwriting in black marker was scrawled in large letters across it: Harry. Don't try to get up, or move your neck or back. We're checking in on you several times an hour. Someone will be there soon.

There was a candle burning nearby, on a folding table. It was the room's only light. I couldn't tell how long it had been burning, but it looked like a fairly long-lived candle, and it was nearly gone. I breathed in and out steadily, through my nose, and caught some half-remembered scents. Perfume of some kind, maybe? Or maybe just the scent of new leather, still barely tinged with the harsh aroma of tanning compounds and the gummy scent of dye. Plus I could smell the dusty old room. The church had only recently begun to use its heating system for the winter. I could smell the warm scent of singed dust that always emerges from the vents the first time anyone turns on a heater after it's been unneeded for a while.

I was glad that I wasn't cold. I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, otherwise.

The candle guttered out and left me alone in the dark.

In my memories, a bloody old caricature of a man, his skin more liver spots than not, leered at me in mad satisfaction and whispered, "Die alone."

I shivered and shook the image away. Cassius was thoroughly dead. I knew that. An outcast member of the society of demented freaks known as the Knights of the Blackened Denarius, Cassius had thrown in with an insane necromancer in order to get a chance to even a score with me. He'd come within a hairbreadth of dissecting me. I was able to take him down in the end - and he'd uttered a death curse as he croaked. Such a curse, a spell uttered in the last instants of life, could have hideous effects upon its victim. His curse, for me to die alone, was pretty vague as such things went. It might not even have had enough power or focus to take.

Sure. Maybe it hadn't.

"Hello?" I said to the darkness. "Is anyone there?"

There wasn't.

Die alone.

"Stop that," I snapped out loud. "Control yourself, Dresden."

That sounded like good advice. So I started taking deep, steady, controlled breaths and tried to focus my thoughts. Focus. Forethought. Reason. Sound judgment. That was what was going to get me through this.

Fact one: My daughter was still in danger.

Fact two: I was hurt. Maybe badly. Maybe forever. Even the efficient resilience of a wizard's body had its limits, and a broken spine was quite likely beyond them.

Fact three: Susan and Martin could not get the girl out on their own.

Fact four: There wasn't a lot of help forthcoming. Maybe, with Sanya along, the suicidal mission could be considered only mostly suicidal. After all, the Knights of the Cross were a big deal. Three of them were, apparently, enough Knights to protect the whole world. For the past few years, the dark-skinned Russian had been covering all three positions, and apparently doing it well. Which made a vague amount of sense, I suppose - Sanya was the wielder of Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope. We needed hope right now. At least, I did.

Fact five: I had missed the rendezvous with Ebenezar many hours ago. I'd never intended to go, and there was nothing I could do about the fact that he was going to be upset - but my absence had probably cost me the support of the Grey Council, such as it was.

Fact six: Sanya, Susan, Martin, and whatever other scanty help I could drum up couldn't get to Chich¨¦n Itz¨¢ without me - and I sure as hell couldn't get there in the shape I was in. According to the stored memories in my mother's jewel, the Way required a swim.

Fact seven: I was going to Show Up for my daughter, and to hell with what it would cost.

And there were only so many options open to me.

I took the least terrifying one. I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My now-ruined improved summoning circle was in the floor. Candles were lit at five equidistant points around it. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and burned wax. It took a few minutes to picture it all, in perfect detail, and to hold it in my mind, as rock solid to my imagination as the actual room the construct was replacing.

That took considerable energy and discipline.

Magic doesn't require props to function. That's a conceit that has been widely propitiated by the wizarding community over the centuries. It helped prove to frightened villagers, inquisitions, and whoever else might be worried that a person was clearly not a wizard. Otherwise he'd have all kinds of wizardly implements necessary to his craft.

Magic doesn't require the props, but magic is wrought by people, and people need them. Each prop has a symbolic as well as a practical reason for being a part of any spell. Simple stuff, lighting candles and the like, could be accomplished neatly in the mind, eventually becoming a task as easy and thoughtless as tying one's shoe.

Once you got into the complicated stuff, though, you had an enormous number of things to keep track of in your mind, envisioning flows of energy, their manipulation, and so on. If you have the real props, they serve as a sort of mnemonic device: You attach a certain image to the prop, in your head, and every time you see or touch that prop, the image is packaged along with it. Simple.

Except that I didn't have any props.

I was winging the whole thing. Pure imagination. Pure concentration.

Pure arrogance, really. But I was at a lower rock bottom than normal.

In my thoughts I lit the candles, walking slowly around the circle in a clockwise fashion - or deosil, as the fairy tales, Celtic songs, and certain strains of Wicca refer to it - gradually powering up the energy it required to operate. I realized that I had forgotten to make the floor out of anything specific, in my head, and the notional floor space, from horizon to horizon, suddenly became the linoleum from my first ratty Chicago apartment. Hideous stuff, green lines on a grey background, but simple to envision.

I imagined performing the spell without ever moving my body, envisioned every last detail, everything from the way the floor dug unpleasantly into my knees as I began to the slight clumsiness in the fingers of my left hand, which always seemed to be a little twitchy whenever I got nervous.

I closed the circle. I gathered the power. And then, when all was prepared, when I held absolutely everything in my imagination so vividly that it seemed more real than the room around me, I slid Power into my voice and called quietly, "Uriel, come forth."

For a second, I couldn't tell whether the soft white light had appeared only in my head or if it was actually in the room. Then I realized that it stabbed at my eyes painfully. It was real.

I kept the spell going in my head, easier now that it was a tableau. I just had to keep my concentration focused.

I squinted into the light and saw a tall young man there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a farmer's duck coat. His blond hair fell over his eyes, but they were blue and bright and guileless as he looked around the room. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets and nodded slowly. "I was wondering when I'd get this call."

"You know what's happening, then?" I asked.

"Yes, yes," he answered, with perhaps the slightest bit of impatience in his tone. He turned his gaze to me and frowned abruptly. He leaned forward slightly, peering at me.

I carefully fortified and maintained the image of the restraining magical circle in my imagination. When an entity was called forth, the circle was the only thing protecting the caller from its wrath.

"Please, Dresden," the archangel Uriel said. "It's a very nice circle, but you can't honestly think that it's any kind of obstacle to me."

"I like to play it safe," I said.

Uriel let out a most unangelic snort. Then he nodded his head and said, "Ah, I see."

"See what?"

He paused and said, "Why you called me, of course. Your back."

I grunted. It was more effort than usual. "How bad is it?"

"Broken," he said. "It's possible that, as a wizard, your body might be able to knit the ends back together over forty or fifty years. But there's no way to be sure."

"I need it to be better," I said. "Now."

"Then perhaps you shouldn't have climbed that ladder in your condition."

I let out a snarl and tried to turn toward him. I just sort of flopped a little. My body never left the surface of the backboard.

"Don't," Uriel said calmly. "It isn't worth getting upset over."

"Not upset?!" I demanded. "My little girl is going to die!"

"You made your choices," Uriel told me. "One of them led you here." He spread his hands. "That's a fair ball, son. Nothing to do now but play it out."

"But you could fix me if you wanted to."

"My wishes have nothing to do with it," he said calmly. "I could heal you if I were meant to do so. Free will must take precedence if it is to have meaning."

"You're talking philosophy," I said. "I'm telling you that a child is going to die."

Uriel's expression darkened for a moment. "And I am telling you that I am very limited in terms of what I can do to help you," he said. "Limited, in fact, to what I have already done."

"Yeah," I said. "Soulfire. Just about killed myself with that one. Thanks."

"No one is making you use it, Dresden. It's your choice."

"I played ball with you when you needed help," I said. "And this is how you repay me?"

Uriel rolled his eyes. "You tried to send me a bill."

"You want to set a price, feel free," I said. "I'll pay it. Whatever it takes."

The archangel watched me, his eyes calm and knowing and sad. "I know you will," he said quietly.

"Dammit," I said, my voice breaking. Tears started from my eyes. The colors and lines in my imagination began to blur. "Please."

Uriel seemed to shiver at the sound of the word. He turned his face from me, clearly uncomfortable. He was silent.

"Please," I said again. "You know who I am. You know I'd rather have my nails torn out than beg. And I am begging you. I am not strong enough to do this on my own."

Uriel listened, never quite looking at me, and then shook his head slowly. "I have already done what I can."

"But you've done nothing," I said.

"From your point of view, I suppose that's true." He stroked his chin with a thumb, frowning in thought. "Though . . . I suppose it isn't too much of an imbalance for you to know . . ."

My eyes were starting to cramp from looking to one side so fiercely without being able to move my head. I bit my lip and waited.

Uriel took a deep breath and looked as if he were considering his words with care. "Your daughter, Maggie, is alive and well. For now."

My heart skipped a beat.

My daughter.

He'd called her my daughter.

"I know you wanted Susan to be the woman you loved and remembered. Wanted to be able to trust her. But even if you weren't admitting it to yourself, you had to wonder, on some level. I don't blame you for it," he said. "Especially after those tracking spells failed. It's natural. But yes." He met my eyes. "Flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. Your daughter."

"Why tell me that?" I asked him.

"Because I have done all that I can," he said. "From here, it is up to you. You are Maggie's only hope." He started to turn away, then paused and said, "Consider Vadderung's words carefully."

I blinked. "You know Od . . . Vadderung?"

"Of course. We're in similar fields of work, after all."

I exhaled wearily, and stopped even trying to hold the spell. "I don't understand."

Uriel nodded. "That's the difficult part of being mortal. Of having choice. Much is hidden from you." He sighed. "Love your child, Dresden. Everything else flows from there. A wise man said that," Uriel said. "Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return."

And as quickly as that, he was gone.

I lay in the darkness, shivering with weariness and the effort of the magic. I pictured Maggie in my head, in her little-girl dress with ribbons in her hair, like the picture.

"For you, little girl. Dad's coming."

It took me less than half a minute to restore the spell, and not much longer than that to build up the next wave of energy I would need. Until the last second, I wondered if I could actually go through with it. Then I saw a horrible image of Maggie in her dress being snatched up by a Red Court vampire, and my whole outraged being seemed to fuse into a singularity, a single white-hot pinpoint of raw, unshakable will.

"Mab!" I called, my voice steady. "Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, Queen of the Winter Court! Mab, I bid you come forth!"