Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,109

like harpoons into a floundering whale. It hurt so much that I could barely open my eyes and look up at my attacker.

I recognized him.

Ace, a changeling, one of his parents mortal, the other fae. He was the onetime victim of Lloyd Slate, the onetime betrayer of Fix and Lily and a girl named Meryl. He stared down at me with hate-filled eyes and bounced an aluminum baseball bat a few times in his hand. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”

And then he started clubbing me over the head.

Chapter

Twenty-six

Taking a beating well is not for amateurs.

You have to get started early, maybe by getting beaten up a lot as a child in school. Then you refine your raw talent by taking more beatings as you get older. Generally, you can seek out almost any crew of athletic types, and you’ll find several willing to oblige you, under one guise or another. True craftsmen then seek out gifted individuals with a particular skill set to deliver the most skilled and professional beatings.

That’s how you learn to fight, really. You take beatings, and you get tougher, and if you don’t start avoiding all the fights, you continue taking beatings until you learn how it’s done. Or they kill you.

Some guys are born lucky, with mad natural fighting skills, and they hardly ever take a beating—but that’s never been me. I’ve had to learn the hard way.

Like every other kind of pain, beatings are educational.

Ace started swinging the aluminum bat, and I learned two things about him right away. First, he wasn’t any stronger than any other guy about his size—don’t get me wrong; that was plenty strong enough to kill me at the moment. But he wasn’t going to deliver the coup de grâce by dropping a forklift on my head. Second, he was emotionally invested.

See, beatings have only a couple of purposes. You are either deterring someone from something—flirting with your girl, stealing your wallet, strangling you, whatever—in which case the point of the beating is to convey a very simple message: Stop it. The second “reason” to deliver a beating is to simply inflict pain. There’s no actual reason involved, of course. It’s all an emotional drive, a need to make someone hurt. Sometimes that kind of drive is well justified. Sometimes it’s misdirected rage. And sometimes, maybe more often than we really want to believe, people just enjoy making someone else feel pain.

The third motivation for a beating is to kill someone. There’s some bleedover, ah hah, between the second reason and the third.

Ace was handing me a beating of the second kind. He wasn’t thinking. He had a need to make me feel pain. And I was obliging the hell out of him.

The nails were the worst, like frozen points of pure fire in my flesh. Beside that agony, the first couple of blows from the bat were a dull ache. I got my arms between my noggin and the bat, getting the meat of my forearms in the way wherever I could. Arm bones are considerably less robust than broomsticks, and a solid swing with a club will snap them. Get the muscle and soft tissue in the way, though, and it spreads out the impact, both in surface area and in duration. It disperses the force—and hurts like a son of a bitch.

He swung at me several times. I blocked some. One clipped my forehead. I wriggled out of the way of the rest, the bat throwing up chips from the concrete sidewalk. I kicked at his knees with my feet, though I was in a poor position to do it. That was the part of the conflict that was important to me.

Meanwhile, I gave Ace the part that was important to him. I screamed. It didn’t take a lot in the way of Method acting to make it convincing. The nails hurt so badly, I was pretty much going to start screaming anyway. So I screamed bloody murder, and he all but frothed at the mouth as he kept after me, swinging faster, more powerfully—and more erratically.

Swinging a club down at a struggling target is harder work than everyone thinks it is, and doing that and dodging clumsy kicks at the same time is the kind of aerobic workout you just don’t get at the gym. The longer it went on, the heavier he would be breathing, and the more intently he would be focused on me.

Screaming, howling, very noisy me.

See, surprises like this are