Small Favor

"The short version? It’s my ass if I don’t."

She squinted at me. "It’s personal?"

"Pretty much. I’ll give you my word on it, if you like."

She shook her head. "It’s not…your word that I doubt. That’s…always been good." She closed her eyes against the pain and panted for several seconds. "But I need something from you."

"What?"

"The White Council," she rasped. "I want you to call upon the White Council to recover Marcone."

I blinked at her. "Uh. What?"

She grimaced and began packing another couple inches of intestine back into her abdomen. "The Accords have been breached. A challenge must be lodged. An Emissary summoned. As a Warden"-she gasped for a moment, and then fumbled the glue into place-"you have the authority to call a challenge."

Her fingers slipped, and the wound sprang open again. She went white with pain.

"Dammit, Sigrun," I said, more appalled at her pain than her condition, and moved to help her. "Get your hands out of the way." When she did, I managed to close the wound a little more, giving the sharp-smelling glue a chance to bond the flesh closed.

She made an effort to smile at me. "We…we worked well together at the beer festival. You’re a professional. I respect that."

"I’ll bet you say that to all the guys who glue your stomach back together."

"Call the Council," Gard said. "Lodge the challenge."

"I’ve got a better idea," I said. "Tell me where Marcone is, I’ll go get him and bring him home, and this will all be over."

She started pushing the next bit back in, while I waited with the glue. "It isn’t that simple. I don’t know where he is."

I caught on. "But you do know who took him."

"Yes. Another signatory of the Accords, just as Marcone is now. I have no authority to challenge their actions. But you do. You may be able to force them into the light, bring the pressure of all the members of the Accords against them."

"Oh, sure," I said, laying out more glue. "The Council just loves it when one of their youngest members drags the entire organization into a fight that isn’t their own."

"You would know, wouldn’t you?" Gard rasped. "It’s not as though it would be the first time."

I held the wound together, waiting on the glue. "I can’t," I said quietly.

She was breathing too quickly, too hard. I could barely keep the wound closed. "Whatever you…nggh…say. After all…it’s your ass on the line."

I grimaced and withdrew my fingers slowly, making sure the wound stayed closed. We’d gotten the last few inches, and the opening no longer gaped. "Can’t deny that," I said. Then I squinted at her. "Who is it?" I asked. "Which signatory of the Accords swiped Marcone?"

"You’ve met them once already," Gard said.

From downstairs Thomas suddenly shouted, "Harry!"

I whirled toward the door in time for the window, behind me, to explode in a shower of glass. It jounced off my spell-layered leather duster, but I felt a pair of hot stings as bits of glass cut my neck and my ear. I tried to turn and had the impression of something coming at my face. I slapped it aside with my left hand even as I ducked, then hopped awkwardly back from the intruder.

It landed in a crouch upon the bed, digging one foot into the helpless Gard’s wounded belly, a creature barely more than the size of a child. It was red and black, vaguely humanoid in shape, but covered in an insect’s chitin. Its eyes were too large for its head, multifaceted, and its arms ended in the serrated clamps of a preying mantis. Membranous wings fluttered at its back, a low and maddening buzzing.

And that wasn’t the scary part.

Its eyes gleamed with an inner fire, an orange-red glow-and immediately above the first set of eyes another set, this one blazing with sickly green luminescence, blinked and focused independently of the first pair. A sigil of angelic script burned against the chitin of the insect-thing’s forehead.

I suddenly wished, very much, that my staff weren’t twenty feet away and down a flight of stairs. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me.

No sooner had that thought come out than the Knight of the Blackened Denarius opened its insectoid maw, let out a brassy wail of rage, and bounded at my face.

Chapter Thirteen

A t one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise.

But that time was pretty much in the past.

I’d spent the last several years on the fringes of a supernatural war between the White Council of the wizards and the Vampire Courts. In the most recent years, I’d gotten more directly involved. Wizards who go to a fight without getting their act together tend not to come home. Worse, the people depending on them for protection wind up getting hurt.

The second most important rule of combat wizardry is a simple one: Don’t let them touch you.

Whether you’re talking about vampires or ogres or some other kind of monstrous nasty, most of them can do hideous things to you if they get close enough to touch-as even a lesser member of the gruff clan had demonstrated on my nose the night before.

The prime rule of combat wizardry is simple too: Be prepared.

Wizards can potentially wield tremendous power against just about anything that might come along-if we’re ready to handle it. The problem is that the things that come after us know that too, so the favored tactic is the sudden ambush. Wizards might live a long time, but we aren’t rend-proof. You’ve got to think ahead in order to have enough time to act when the heat is on.

I’d made myself ready and taught young wizards with even less experience than me how to be ready too-for an occasion just such as this.

The coil of steel chain in my coat pocket came out smoothly as I drew it, because I’d practiced the draw thousands of times, and I whipped one end at the mantis-thing’s face.

It was faster than me, of course. They usually are. Those two clamps seized the end of the chain. The mantis’s jaws clamped down on it, and the creature ripped the chain from my hands with a wrench of its head and upper body, quicker than thought.

That was a positive thing, really. The mantis hadn’t had time to notice two important details about the chain: first, that the whole thing was coated in copper.

Second, that a standard electrical plug was attached to the other end.

I flipped my fingers at the nearest wall outlet and barked, "Galvineus!"

The plug shot toward the outlet like a striking snake and slammed home.