My wards. I’d forgotten about my wards.
I tried to focus my will again, but I couldn’t get it to gel. I tried again, and again, and finally I was able to perform the routine little spell that disarmed them.
I shoved my key into the lock and turned it. Then I leaned against the door.
It didn’t open.
My door is a heavy steel security door. I installed it myself, and I’m a terrible carpenter. It doesn’t quite line up with the frame, and it takes a real effort to get it open and closed. I had grown used to the routine bump and thrust of my shoulders and hips that I needed to open it up—but like the spell that disarmed my wards, that simple task was, at the moment, beyond me.
Footsteps crunched in the gravel.
I couldn’t get it open. I sort of flopped against it as hard as I could.
The door groaned and squealed as it swung open, pulled from the other side. Mouse, my huge, shaggy grey dog, dropped his front paws back to the ground, shouldered his way through the door, and seized my right arm by the biceps. His jaws were like a vise, though his teeth couldn’t penetrate the leather. He dragged me indoors like a giant, groggy chew toy, and as I went across the threshold, I saw Buzz appear at the top of the stairs, a black shadow against the blue morning sky.
He raised a gun, a military sidearm.
I kicked the door with both legs, as hard as I could.
The gun barked. Real guns don’t sound like the guns in the movies. The sound is flatter, more mechanical. I couldn’t see the flash, because I’d moved the door into the way. Bullets pounded the steel like hailstones on a tin roof.
Mouse slammed his shoulder against the door and rammed it closed.
I fumbled at the wards, babbling in panicked haste, and managed to restore them just in time to hear a loud popping sound, a cry, and a curse from the other side of the door. Then I reached up and snapped the dead bolt closed for good measure.
Then I fell back onto the floor of my apartment and watched the ceiling spin for a while.
In two or three minutes, maybe, I was feeling a little better. My head and shoulder hurt like hell, but I could breathe. I tried my arms and legs; three of them worked. I sat up. That worked, too, though it made my left shoulder hurt like more hell, and it was hard to see straight through the various pains.
I knew several techniques for reducing and ignoring pain, some of them almost too effective—but I couldn’t really seem to line any of them up and get them working. My head hurt too much.
I needed help.
I half crawled to my phone and dialed a number. I mumbled to the other end of the phone, and then lay back on the floor again and felt terrible. Buzz must have fallen back by now, knowing that the sound of the shots could attract attention. Now that the sword was behind the protection of my wards, there was no reason for him to loiter around outside my apartment—I hoped.
The next thing I knew, Mouse was pawing at the door, making anxious sounds. I dragged myself over to it, disarmed the wards, and unlocked it.
“Are these shell casings on the ground? Is this blood?” sputtered a little man in pale blue hospital scrubs and a black denim jacket. He had a shock of black hair like a startled haystack, and black wire-rimmed spectacles. “Holy Hannah, Harry, what happened to you?”
I closed the wards and the door behind him. “Hi, Butters. I fell down.”
“We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” he said, turning to reach for my phone.
I slapped my hand weakly down onto it, to keep him from picking it up. “Can’t. No hospitals.”
“Harry, you know I’m not a doctor.”
“Yes, you are. I saw your business card.” The effort of vocalizing that many syllables hurt.
“I’m a medical examiner. I cut up dead people and tell you things about them. I don’t do live patients.”
“Hang around,” I said. “It’s early yet.” Still too many syllables.
“Oh, this is a load of crap,” he muttered. Then he shook his head and said, “I need some more light.”
“Matches,” I mumbled. “Mantel.” Better.
He found the matches and started lighting candles. “Next, I’ll be getting out a big jar of leeches.”
He found the first aid kit under my kitchen sink, boiled some water, and came over to check me out. I sort of checked out for a few minutes. When I came back, he was fumbling with a pair of scissors and my duster.
“Hey!” I protested. “Lay off the coat!”
“You’ve dislocated your shoulder,” he informed me, frowning without stopping his work with the scissors. “You don’t want to wriggle it around trying to take your shirt off.”
“That’s not what I—”
The pin that held the two halves of the scissors together popped as Butters exerted more pressure on their handles, and the two halves fell apart. He blinked at them in shock.
“Told you,” I muttered.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess we do this the hard way.”
I won’t bore you with the details. Ten minutes later, my coat was off, my shoulder was back in its socket, and Butters was pretending that my screams during the two failed attempts to put it back hadn’t bothered him. I went away again, and when I came back, Butters was pressing a cold Coke into my hand.
“Here,” he said. “Drink something. Stay awake.”
I drank. Actually, I guzzled. Somewhere in the middle, he passed me several ibuprofen tablets and told me to take them. I did.
I blinked blearily at him as he held up my coat. He turned it around to show me the back.
There was a hole in the leather mantle. I flipped it up. Beneath the hole, several ounces of metal were flattened against the second layer of spell-toughened leather, about three inches below the collar and a hair to the right of my spine.
That was chilling. Even through my best defenses, that was how close I’d come to death.
If Buzz had shot me six inches lower, only a single layer of leather would have been between the round and my hide. A few inches higher, and it would have taken me in the neck, with absolutely no protection. And if he’d waited a quarter of a second longer, until my foot had descended to the first step leading down to my door, he would have sprayed my brains all over the siding of the boardinghouse.
“You broke your nose again,” Butters said. “That’s where some of the blood came from. There was a laceration on your scalp, too, which accounts for the rest. I stitched it up. You’re holding your neck rigid. Probably whiplash from where the round hit you. There are some minor burns on your left wrist, and I’m just about certain you’ve got a concussion.”
“But other than that,” I muttered, “I feel great.”
“Don’t joke, Harry,” Butters said. “You should be under observation.”
“Already am,” I said. “Look where it got me.”
He grimaced. “Doctors are required to report gunshot wounds to the police.”
“Good thing I don’t have any gunshot wounds, eh? I just fell down some stairs.”
Butters shook his head again and turned toward the phone. “Give me a reason not to do it, or I call Murphy right now.”
I grunted. Then I said, “I’m protecting something important. Someone else wants it. If the police get involved, this thing would probably get impounded as evidence. That’s an unacceptable outcome, and it could get a lot of people hurt.”
“Something important,” Butters said. “Something like a magic sword?”
I scowled at him. “How do you know that?”
He nodded at my hand. “Because you won’t let go of it.”
I looked down to find the burn-scarred fingers of my left hand clutching
“Think you can let it go now?” Butters asked quietly.
“I’m trying,” I said. “My hand’s kind of locked up.”
