Cold Days by Jim Butcher

Author:Jim Butcher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Vampires, Azizex666, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adult
ISBN: 9780451464408
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2012-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Twenty-seven

I woke up when someone shoved a branding iron into my neck.

Okay, that isn’t what happened, but I was coming out of unconsciousness at the time, and that was what it seemed like. I let out a curse and flailed with my arms.

“Hold him, hold him!” someone said in an intent voice. Hands came down on my arms, pressing them back against a smooth, rigid surface beneath me.

“Harry,” Thomas said. “Harry, easy, easy. You’re safe.”

There were lights in my eyes. They weren’t pleasant. I squinted against them until I could see Thomas’s upside-down head looming over me.

“There you are,” Thomas said. “We were getting worried.” He lifted his hands from my arms and gave the side of my face something somewhere between a pat and a slap. “You weren’t waking up.”

I looked around me. I was lying on the table in Molly’s apartment, the same spot where we’d seen to Toot’s injuries earlier in the day. There was the sharp smell of disinfectant in the air. I felt terrible, but less terrible than I had in the car.

I turned my head and saw a wiry little guy with a shock of black hair, a beaky nose, and glittering, intelligent eyes. He picked up a metal bowl in one hand, and moved a pair of needle-nose pliers in the other, dropping something into the bowl with a clink. “And he just wakes up?” Waldo Butters, Chicago’s most polka-savvy medical examiner, asked. “Tell me that isn’t a little creepy.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Butters held up the metal bowl, tilting it so that I could see inside. Several tiny, bright, sharp, bloodied pieces of metal were inside. “Barbs from those fishhooks,” he said. “Several of them broke off in your skin.”

I grunted. My collapse in the car made more sense now. “Yeah,” I said. “Any kind of iron gets under my skin, it seems to disagree with the Winter Knight’s bundle of awesome. Takes the gumption right out of me.” I started to sit up.

Butters very calmly put his hands on my chest and shoved me back down. Hard. I blinked at him.

“I don’t do assertive much,” he said apologetically. “I don’t really like doctoring people who are still alive. But if I’m going to do it, dammit, I’m going to do it right. So. You stay put until I say you can get up. Got it?”

“I, uh . . .” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Smart,” Butters said. “You have two giant bruises where the lower halves of your arms usually go. You’re covered in lacerations, and a couple need sutures. Some are already inflamed. I need to clean them all out. That’ll work best if you hold still.”

“I can do that,” I said. “But I’m feeling all kinds of better, man. Look.” I held up my hands and wiggled my fingers. They felt a little tight. I glanced down at them. They were a mottled shade of purple and swollen. My wrists and forearms were blotchy with bruises and swollen, too.

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