Changes: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Author:Jim Butcher [Butcher, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781101186305
Google: I6BQ9yxgSaoC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

30

The third repetition of her name hung ringing in the air, and deafening silence came after as I awaited the response.

When you trap something dangerous, there are certain fundamental precautions necessary to success. You’ve got to have good bait, something to draw your target in. You’ve got to have a good trap, something that works and works fast. And, once the target is in the trap, you’ve got to have a net or a cage strong enough to hold it.

Get any of those three elements wrong, and you probably won’t succeed. Get two of them wrong, and you might be looking at a result far more disastrous than mere failure.

I went into this one knowing damned well that all I had was bait. Mab, for her own reasons, had wanted to suborn me into her service for years. I knew that calling her by her name and title would be enough to attract her interest. Though the mechanism of my improved summoning circle would have been a fine trap—if it still existed, I mean—the cage of my will had always been the weakest point in any such endeavor.

Bottom line, I could get the tiger to show up. Once it was there, all I had was a really good chalk drawing of a pit on the sidewalk and “Nice kitty.”

I wasn’t going into it blind and ignorant, though. I was desperate, but not stupid. I figured I had the advantage of position. Mab couldn’t kill a mortal. She could only make him desperately wish he was dead, instead of enduring her attentions. I didn’t have a lot to lose. She couldn’t make me any more useless to my daughter than I was already.

I waited, in perfect darkness, for the mistress of every wicked fairy in every dark tale humanity had ever whispered in the night to put in an appearance.

Mab didn’t disappoint me.

Surprise me, yes. But she didn’t disappoint.

Stars began to appear in front of my eyes.

I figured that was probably a really bad thing, for a moment. But they didn’t spin around in lazy, dizzy motion like the kind of stars that mean your brain is smothering. They instead burned steady and cold and pure above me, five stars like jewels on the throat of Lady Night.

Seconds later, a cold wind touched my face, and I became conscious of a hard smoothness beneath me. I laid my hands carefully flat, but I didn’t feel the cot and the backboard under me. Instead, my fingers touched only cold, even stone, a planar surface that seemed level beneath my entire body. I wriggled my foot and confirmed that there was stone beneath it there, too.

I stopped and realized that I could feel my foot. I could move it.

My whole body was there. And it was naked. I wavered between yelping at the cold suddenly being visited upon my ass, and yelling in joy that I could feel it at all. I saw land to one side and scrambled to get off the cold slab beneath me, crouching down and hanging on to the edge of the slab for balance.

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