Changes (The Dresden Files 12)

Chapter 41

The first leg of the trip was simple, a walk down a forest trail next to a backward-flowing river until we reached a menhir - that's a large, upright standing stone, to those of you without a pressing need to find out what a menhir is. I found where a pentangle had been inscribed on the stone, a five-pointed star within a circle, like the one around my neck. It had been done with a small chisel of some kind, and was a little lopsided. My mother had put it there to mark which side of the stone to open the Way on.

I ran my fingers over it for a moment. As much as my necklace or the gem that now adorned it, it was tangible proof of her presence. She had been real, even if I had no personal memories of her, and that innocuous little marking was further proof.

"My mother made this mark," I said quietly.

I didn't look back at Thomas, but I could all but feel the sudden intensity of his interest.

He had a few more memories than I did, but not many. And it was possible that he had me outclassed in the parental-figure issues department, too.

I opened another Way, and we came through into a dry gulch with a stone wall, next to a deep channel in the stone that might once have held a river - now it was full of sand. It was dark and chilly, and the sky was full of stars.

"Okay," I said. "Now we walk."

I summoned a light and took the lead. Martin scanned the skies above us. "Uh. The constellations . . . Where are we?"

I clambered up a stiff little slope that was all hard stone and loose sand, and looked out over a vast expanse of silver-white beneath the moon. Great shapes loomed up from the sand, their sides almost serrated in the clear moonlight, lines and right angles that clashed sharply with the ocean of sand and flatland around them.

"Giza," I said. "You can't see the Sphinx from this side, but I never claimed to be a tour guide. Come on."

It was a stiff two or three miles from the hidden gully to the pyramids, and sand all the way. I took the lead, moving in a shambling, loosekneed jog. There wasn't any worry about heat - dawn was under way, and in an hour the place would be like one giant cookie pan in an oven, but we'd be gone by then. My mother's amulet led me directly to the base of the smallest and most crumbly pyramid, and I had to climb up three levels to reach the next Waypoint. I stopped to caution the party that we were about to move into someplace hot, and to shield their eyes. Then I opened the Way and we continued through.

We emerged onto a plain beside enormous pyramids - but instead of being made of stone, these were all formed of crystal, smooth and perfect. A sun that was impossibly huge hung in the sky directly overhead, and the light was painfully bright, rebounding up from the crystal plain to be focused through the pyramids and refracted over and over and over again.

"Stay out of those sunbeams," I said, waving in the direction of several beams of light so brilliant that they made the Death Star lasers look like they needed to hit the gym. "They're hot enough to melt metal."

I led the group forward, around the base of one pyramid, into a slim corridor of . . . Well, it wasn't shade, but there wasn't quite so much light there, until we reached the next Waypoint - where a chunk the size of a large man's fist was missing from one of the perfectly smooth edges of the pyramid. Then I turned ninety degrees to the right and started walking.

I counted five hundred paces. I felt the light - not heat, just the sheer, overwhelming amount of light - beginning to tan my skin.

Then we came to an aberration - a single lump of rock upon the crystalline plain. There were broad, ugly facial features on the rock, primitive and simple.

"Here," I said, and my voice echoed weirdly, though there was seemingly nothing from which it could echo.

I opened another Way, and we stepped from the plain of light and into chilly mist and thin mountain air. A cold wind pushed at us. We stood in an ancient stone courtyard of some kind. Walls stood around us, broken in many places, and there was no roof overhead.

Murphy stared up at the sky, where stars were very faintly visible through the mist, and shook her head. "Where now?"

"Machu Picchu," I said. "Anyone bring water?"

"I did," Murphy said, at the same time as Martin, Sanya, Molly, and Thomas.

"Well," Thomas said, while I felt stupid. "I'm not sharing."

Sanya snorted and tossed me his canteen. I sneered at Thomas and drank, then tossed it back. Martin passed Susan his canteen, then took it back when she was finished. I started trudging. It isn't far from one side of Machu Picchu to the other, but the walk is all uphill, and that means a hell of a lot more in the Andes than it does in Chicago.

"All right," I said, stopping beside a large mound built of many rising tiers that, if you squinted up your eyes enough, looked a lot like a ziggurat-style pyramid. Or maybe an absurdly large and complicated wedding cake. "When I open the next Way, we'll be underwater. We have to swim ten feet, in the dark. Then I open the next Way and we're in Mexico." I was doubly cursing the time we'd lost in the Erlking's realm. "Did anyone bring any climbing rope?"

Sanya, Murphy, Martin - Look, you get the picture. There were a lot of people standing around who were more prepared than me. They didn't have super-duper faerie godmother presents, but they had brains, and it was a sobering reminder to me of which was more important.

We got finished running a line from the front of the group to the back (except for my godmother, who sniffed disdainfully at the notion of being tied to a bunch of mortals), and I took several deep breaths and opened the next Way.

Mom's notes on this Waypoint hadn't mentioned that the water was cold. And I don't mean cold like your roommate used most of the hot water. I mean cold like I suddenly had to wonder if I was going to trip over a seal or a penguin or a narwhal or something.

The cold hit me like a sledgehammer, and it was suddenly all I could do just to keep from shrieking in surprise and discomfort - and, some part of my brain marveled, I was the freaking Winter Knight.

Though my limbs screamed their desire to contract around my chest and my heart, I fought them and made them paddle. One stroke. Two. Three. Four. Fi - Ow. My nose hit a shelf of rock. I found my will and exhaled, speaking the word Aparturum through a cloud of blobby bubbles that rolled up over my cheeks and eyelashes. I tore open the next Way a little desperately - and water rushed out through it as if thrilled to escape.

I crashed into the Yucat¨¢n jungle on a tide of ectoplasmic slime, and the line we'd strung dragged everyone else through in a rush. Poor Sanya, the last in line, was pulled from his feet, hauled hard through the icy water as if he'd been flushed down a Jotun's toilet, and then crashed down amidst the slimed forest. Peru to Mexico in three and a half seconds.

I fumbled back to the Way to close it and stopped the tide of ectoplasm from coming through, but not before the vegetation for ten feet in every direction had been smashed flat by the flood of slime, and every jungle creature for fifty or sixty yards started raising holy hell on the what-the-fuck-was-that party line. Murphy had her gun out, and Molly had a wand in each hand, gripped with white knuckles.

Martin let out a sudden, coughing bellow that sounded like it must have torn something in his chest - and it was loud, too. And the jungle around us abruptly went silent.

I blinked and looked at Martin. So did everyone else.

"Jaguar," he said in a calm, quiet voice. "They're extinct here, but the animals don't know that."

"Oooh," said my godmother, a touch of a child's glee in her voice. "I like that."

It took us a minute to get everyone sorted out. Mouse looked like a scrawny shadow of himself with his fur all plastered down. He was sneezing uncontrollably, having apparently gotten a bunch of water up his nose during the swim. Ectoplasm splattered out with every sneeze. Thomas was in similar straits, having been hauled through much as Sanya was, but he managed to look a great deal more annoyed than Mouse.

I turned to Lea. "Godmother. I hope you have some way to get us to the temple a little more swiftly."

"Absolutely," Lea purred, calm and regal despite the fact that her hair and her slime-soaked silken dress were now plastered to her body. "And I've always wanted to do it, too." She let out a mocking laugh and waved her hand, and my belly cramped up as if every stomach bug I'd ever had met up in a bar and decided to come get me all at once.

It. Hurt.

I knew I'd fallen, and was vaguely aware that I was lying on my side on the ground. I was there for, I don't know, maybe a minute or so before the pain began to fade. I gasped several times, shook my head, and then slowly pushed myself up onto all fours. Then I fixed the Leanansidhe with a glare and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Or tried to say that. What came out was something more like, "Grrrrrrbrrrr awwf arrrr grrrrr."

My faerie godmother looked at me and began laughing. Genuine, delighted belly laughter. She clapped her hands and bounced up and down, spinning in a circle, and laughed even more.

I realized then what had happened.

She had turned us - all of us, except for Mouse - into great, gaunt, long-legged hounds.

"Wonderful!" Lea said, pirouetting upon one toe, laughing. "Come, children!" And she leapt off into the jungle, nimble and swift as a doe.

A bunch of us dogs stood around for a moment, just sort of staring at one another.

And Mouse said, in what sounded to me like perfectly understandable English, "That bitch."

We all stared at him.

Mouse huffed out a breath, shook his beslimed coat, and said, "Follow me." Then he took off after the Leanansidhe, and, driven by reflex-level instinct, the rest of us raced to catch up.

I'd been shapeshifted one other time - by the dark magic of a cursed belt, and one that I suspected had been deliberately designed to provide an addictive high with its use. It had taken me a long time to shake off the memory of that experience, the absolute clarity of my senses, the feeling of ready power in my whole body, of absolute certainty in every movement.

Now I had it back - and this time, without the reality-blurring euphoria. I was intensely aware of the scents around me, of a hundred thousand new smells that begged to be explored, of the rush of sheer physical pleasure in racing across the ground after a friend. I could hear the breath and the bodies of the others around me, running through the night, bounding over stones and fallen trees, slashing through bits of brush and heavy ground cover.

We could hear small prey animals scattering before us and to either side, and I knew, not just suspected but knew, that I was faster, by far, than any of the merely mortal animals, even the young buck deer who went soaring away from us, leaping a good twenty feet over a waterway. I felt an overwhelming urge to turn in pursuit - but the lead runner in the pack was already on another trail, and I wasn't sure I could have turned aside if I had tried to do so.

And the best part? We probably made less noise, as a whole, than any one of us would have made moving in a clumsy mortal body.

We didn't cover five miles in half the time, an hour instead of two.

It took us - maybe, at the most - ten minutes.

When we stopped, we could all hear the drums. Steady, throbbing drums, keeping a quick, monotonous, trance-inducing beat. The sky to the northwest was bright with the light of reflected fires, and the air seethed with the scents of humans and not-quite humans and creatures that made me growl and want to bite something. Occasionally, a vampire's cry would run its shrill claws down my spine.

Lea stood upon a fallen log ahead of us, staring ahead. Mouse walked up to her.

"Gggrrrr rawf arrrgggrrrrarrrr," I said.

Mouse gave me an impatient glance, and somehow - I don't know if it was something in his body language or what - I became aware that he was telling me to sit down and shut up or he'd come over and make me.

I sat down. Something in me really didn't like that idea, but when I looked around, I saw that everyone else had done it too, and that made me feel better.

Mouse said, again in what sounded like perfectly clear English, "Funny. Now restore them."

Lea turned to look at the big dog and said, "Do you dare to give me commands, hound?"

"Not your hound," Mouse said. I didn't know how he was doing it. His mouth wasn't moving or anything. "Restore them before I rip your ass off. Literally rip it off."

The Leanansidhe tilted her head back and let out a low laugh. "You are far from your sources of power here, my dear demon."

"I live with a wizard. I cheat." He took a step toward her and his lips peeled up from his fangs in unmistakable hostility. "You want to restore them? Or do I kill you and get them back that way?"

Lea narrowed her eyes. Then she said, "You're bluffing."

One of the big dog's huge, clawed paws dug at the ground, as if bracing him for a leap, and his growl seemed to . . . I looked down and checked. It didn't seem to shake the ground. The ground was actually shaking for several feet in every direction of the dog. Motes of blue light began to fall from his jaws, thickly enough that it looked quite a bit like he was foaming at the mouth. "Try me."

The Leanansidhe shook her head slowly. Then she said, "How did Dresden ever win you?"

"He didn't," Mouse said. "I won him."

Lea arched an eyebrow as if baffled. Then she shrugged and said, "We have a quest to complete. This bickering does not profit us." She turned to us, passed a hand through the air in our general direction, and murmured, "Anytime you want it back, dears, just ask. You'd all make gorgeous hounds."

Again, agony overwhelmed me, though I felt too weak to scream about it. It took a subjective eternity to pass, but when it did I was myself again, lying on my side, sweating and panting heavily.

Mouse came over and nuzzled my face, his tail wagging happily. He walked around me, sniffing, and began to nudge me to rise. I got up slowly, and actually braced my hand on his broad, shaggy back at one point. I felt an acute need to be gripping a good solid wizard's staff again, just to hold me up. I don't think I'd ever appreciated how much of a psychological advantage (i.e., security blanket) it was, either. But I wouldn't have one until I'd taken a month or so to make one: Mine had been in the Blue Beetle, and died with it, too.

I was on my feet before anyone else. I eyed the dog and said, "You can talk. How come I never hear you talk?"

"Because you don't know how to listen," my godmother said simply.

Mouse wagged his tail and leaned against me happily, looking up at me.

I rested my hand on his head for a moment and rubbed his ears.

Screw it.

The important things don't need to be said.

Everyone was getting back up again. The canteens made a round, and I let everyone recover for five minutes or so. There was no point in charging ahead before people could get their breath back and hold a weapon in a steady hand.

I did say something quietly to Susan, though. She nodded, frowned, and vanished.

She was back a few minutes later, and reported what she'd found into my ear.

"All right, people," I said then, still quietly. "Gather in."

I swept a section of the jungle floor clean and drew with my fingertip in the dirt. Martin lit the crude illustration with a red flashlight, one that wouldn't ruin our night vision and had less chance of being glimpsed by a nearby foe.

"There are guards stationed all over the big pyramid. The girl is probably there, in the temple on top. That's where I'm going. Me, Susan, and Lea are going to move up through the gallery, here, and head for the temple."

"I'm with Susan," Martin said. "I go where she does."

This wasn't the time or place to argue. "Me, Susan, Lea, and Martin will go in that way. I want all eyes facing north when we head for the pyramid. So I want the rest of you to circle that way and come in from that direction. Right here, there's a cattle truck where they're storing their human sacrifices. Get close and spring them. Raise whatever hell you can, and run fast. Head west. You'll hit a road. Follow it to a town. Get into the church there. Got it?"

There was a round of nods and unhappy expressions.

"With any luck, that will draw off enough of them to let us pull a smash and grab on the temple.

"Also," I said, very seriously, "what happens in the Yucat¨¢n stays in the Yucat¨¢n. There will be no jokes about sniffing butts or chasing tails or anything like that. Ever. Agreed?"

More sober nods, this time with a few smiles.

"Okay, folks," I said. "Just so you know, friends - I'm in your debt, and it's one I'll never be able to repay. Thank you."

"Gush later," Murphy said, her tone wry. "Rescue now."

"Spoken like a true lady," I said, and put my hand out. Everyone piled hands. Mouse had to wedge in close to put his paw on the pile. All of us, every single one of us, except maybe my godmother, were visibly, obviously terrified, a circle of shivers and short, fast breaths.

"Good hunting, people," I said quietly. "Go."

Everyone had just gotten to their feet when the brush rattled, and a half-naked man came sprinting almost directly into us, his expression desperate, his eyes wide with mindless terror. He smashed into Thomas, rebounded off him, and crashed to the ground.

Before anyone could react, there was a muted rustle, and a Red Court vampire in its black-skinned monstrous form came bounding out of the forest five yards away and, upon seeing us, went rigid with startled shock. An instant later, it tried to reverse its course, its claws gouging at the forest floor.

I've heard it said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

It's true.

The vampire let out an earsplitting screech, and all hell broke loose.