Small Favor

Given that they’d chosen this location for the greater circle precisely because it was a source of intense dark energy, I had no trouble believing that it connected to some nasty portions of the Nevernever. There was every chance that Nicodemus was not bluffing.

"How do I know that you won’t kill me the minute you get what you want?" I called back.

"Harry!" Michael hissed.

I shushed him.

"We both know what my word is worth," Nicodemus said, his voice dry. "Really, Dresden. If we can’t trust each other, what’s the point in talking at all?"

Heh. Gaining enough time to await the second half of what those Fireballs were supposed to accomplish, that’s what.

The twin two-hundred-fifty-foot jets of fire had briefly blinded our enemies, true.

But they’d done something else, too.

Marcone tilted his head to one side for a moment and then murmured, "Does anyone else hear…strings?"

"Ah," I said, and pumped my fist in the air. "Ah-hahahah! Have you ever heard anything so magnificently pompous and overblown in your life?"

Deep, ringing French horns joined the string sections, echoing over the hilltop.

"What is that?" Sanya murmured.

"That," I crowed, "is Wagner, baby!"

Never let it be said that a Chooser of the Slain can’t make an entrance.

Miss Gard brought the reconditioned Huey up from the eastern side of the island, flying about a quarter of an inch over the treetops, blasting "The Ride of the Valkyries" from loudspeakers mounted on the chopper’s underside. Wind, sleet, and all, still she flew flawlessly through the night, having used the twin jets of the Fireball rounds, visible for miles over the pitch-black lake, to orient herself as to where to arrive. The Huey turned broadside as it rose over the hilltop, music blaring loud enough to shake snow from the treetops. The side door of the chopper was open, revealing Mister Hendricks manning a rotating-barreled minigun fixed to the deck of the helicopter-completely illegally, of course.

But then, I suppose that’s really one major advantage to working with criminals. They just don’t care about that sort of thing.

The barrels began to spin, and a tongue of flame licked out from the front of the gun. Snow and earth erupted into the air in a long trench in front of the cannon. I risked a peek and saw men clad in dark fatigues leaping for cover as a swath of devastation slewed back and forth across the open hilltop and pounded the mound of stones into a mound of gravel.

"There’s our ride!" I said. "Let’s go!"

Sanya led the way, firing off more or less random shots at anyone who wasn’t already lying flat in an effort to avoid fire from the gun on the helicopter. Some of Nicodemus’s troops were crazier than others. Several of them jumped up and tried to come after us. That minigun had been designed to shoot down airplanes. What the rounds left of human bodies was barely recognizable as such.

There was no place for the chopper to land, but a line came down from the other side, lowered by a winch while the aircraft hovered above us. I looked up to see Luccio operating the winch, her face pale, but her eyes glittering with excitement. She was how Gard had been able to know where to look for the signal-I’d given Anastasia a couple of my hairs to use in a tracking spell, and she’d been following me ever since I left to meet Rosanna for the trade.

The line came down with a lift harness attached to it. "Marcone," I shouted over the sound of the rotors and the minigun-which is to say, I was more or less mouthing it exaggeratedly. "You first. That was the deal."

He shook his head and pointed his finger at Ivy.

I snarled and pushed the girl into his arms, then started slapping the harness over him. He got it after a second, and in a couple more we had him secured in the harness and holding the semiconscious Ivy tight against him. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Marcone and Ivy went zipping gracefully up the line to the chopper, wrapped in the white cloak, the scarlet crosses on it standing out sharply in the winter light. Luccio helped haul them in, and a second later the empty harness came down again.

"Sanya!" I said.

The Russian passed me the Kalashnikov and slipped into the harness, then ascended to the helicopter. Again the empty harness came down-though now there were occasional bursts of heavier rounds coming from down the slope of the hillside, as evidenced by tracer fire that would sometimes go tumbling by in the night. It would be immediately answered by the far heavier fire of the minigun, but Gard couldn’t possibly keep the chopper there for long.

"Harry!" Michael said, offering me the harness.

I was about to take it, but by chance I looked up and saw Gard looking down at us through the Plexiglas bubble around the pilot’s seat-looking at Michael with an absolutely unnerving intensity that I had seen on her face once before, and my heart started hammering in terror.

The last time she’d looked like that, I’d been in an alley outside Bock Ordered Books back in Chicago, and a necromancer named Corpsetaker and a ghoul named Li Xian had been about to murder me. A few minutes later Gard had told Marcone that she had seen that it was my fate to die then and there. The only reason that I survived it was that Marcone had intervened.

But even if I’d never seen that look on her face before, I figured that anytime a Valkyrie hovering over a battlefield suddenly gets real interested in a particular warrior, it ain’t good.

I’d made the grasshopper a promise. If things were about to get hairy for whoever was left on the ground, it wouldn’t be Molly’s dad that had to deal with it.

"You first," I said.

He started to argue.

I shoved the harness into his chest. "Dammit, Michael!"

He grimaced, shook his head at me, and then sheathed Amoracchius. Still holding Fidelacchius in his hand, he shrugged quickly into the harness. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Michael began to rise. Gard frowned faintly, and some of my screaming tension started to ease.

Tessa and Rosanna came out from behind veils that were as good as anything Molly could have done, and I didn’t have to be Sherlock to deduce who had done the lion’s share of the work on the greater circle that had contained the Archive. I had half a second to act, but I got tangled in the strap of Sanya’s gun, which he’d handed me so that I could defend myself in case I was suddenly attacked. Thank you, Sanya.

Tessa, her pretty human face showing, her eyes gleaming with manic glee, swept a mantis claw at my head, and I at least managed to interpose the rifle before she ripped my head off. Only instead of smashing the gun, as I’d expected, she ripped it out of my hand, just as easily as taking candy from a baby and spun away from me.