Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,24

so fast that all I got was motion blur, and he hadn’t swept the silk tie at my neck—he’d aimed for my upraised left hand. The silk snaked around my wrist, and I caught it in my hand just in time for him to slip to one side, dragging my arm in close to his body. He used my forward momentum and my trapped arm to rob me of my balance and spin me in a circle, hauling at my arm with all his strength.

His strength was considerable, and his technique was sound. He suddenly reversed, using my own motion against me, and dislocated my arm from its shoulder socket with a loud pop and a flash of red-hot pain.

“Harry!” Sarissa screamed, grabbing uselessly at the ogre’s wrist. It was as thick as her own leg, and the ogre didn’t even seem to notice her struggling.

The Redcap kept hold of my arm, my wrist pulled up against his sternum and still trapped in the tie. He smiled broadly and walked backward in a small circle, the pain and the leverage forcing me to scramble along the floor in front of him. A gale of lovely, cold laughter went up from the Sidhe like a chorus of frozen chimes.

The Redcap took a miniature, mocking bow to the crowd and spoke to me. “I was worried for a moment, mortal. You’re faster than you look.”

He kicked me in the dislocated shoulder. He wasn’t trying to kick my arm off. He was just doing it for the hell of it. It hurt a lot.

“You should see the look on your face, mortal,” the Redcap said. “This is fun.”

“You know what, Red?” I gasped. “We’re all having fun.”

I took my weight onto my knees and back, and slammed the heel of my right hand into the side of the jackass’s knee.

I don’t know how much stronger Mab’s gift had made me, because I’d never been much of a weight lifter until I’d started therapy. I didn’t know too much about how much weight lifters could, for example, bench-press. So I didn’t have a very good idea how I stacked up against plain old me. Or plain old anybody. Plus the weights for the bench press were marked in metric units, and I kind of fell asleep the day we learned to convert them to pounds.

But I’m pretty sure four hundred kilos isn’t bad.

The Redcap’s knee popped like a balloon from the force of the strike, and bent in toward his other knee. He howled in startled agony and tried to throw himself away, but just as I hadn’t been able to move for a few critical seconds after he’d injured me, his body wasn’t responding properly either, and he fell next to me.

The left side of my body felt like it was on fire, but me and pain are old buddies. His grip on the tie had loosened, and I couldn’t move my left arm enough to get it loose. So before he could recover, I punched him in the neck with my good hand. He gagged and thrashed, and I was able to unwrap the silk from my useless arm. I tried to pull the tie away from him, but he’d already shaken off the hits I’d given him and held on. I jerked on it as hard as I could, but I had only the one arm and was fresh out of leverage. I could feel the tie sliding through my fingers.

So I let go without warning and snapped my hand at a different target as he fell back.

He dropped into a backward roll and came up six feet away. He perched on one hand and a knee, still gripping the tie.

I casually settled his red ball cap onto my head, touched a forefinger to its brim, winked at him, and said, “You have hat hair.”

Again there was a chorus of marrow-curdling laughter from the Sidhe. It wasn’t any more pleasant to have them laughing with me than it had been to have them laughing at me.

The Redcap’s face flushed a furious red, and I could see the blood vessels in his eyes bursting.

Hell’s bells, the twit hadn’t been particularly perturbed when I’d crippled his leg. But touch his hat and embarrass him in front of his peers and the dude flipped out. Nobody has their priorities straight anymore.

I made it to my feet before he simply leapt at me. He hit me before I could get my balance and we both