Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,97

me. But if I didn’t live to walk out of the pub, it wouldn’t matter how much soulfire I had stored up for a rainy day.

I expected a roar of flame, a flash of white and gold light, the concussion of superheated air suddenly expanding, right in Sharkface’s ugly mug.

What I got was an arctic-gale howl and a spiraling harpoon of blue-white fire burning hotter than anything this side of a star.

Sharkface hurled furniture at me, trying to shelter behind it, but the fire I’d just called vaporized chairs and tables in the instant it touched them. They shattered with enormous, screaming detonations of thunder, and every impact made sounds that by all rights should have belonged to extremely large and poorly handled construction vehicles.

Sharkface crossed its bony grey forearms before it in a last-ditch effort to deflect the spell. If I’d been focused on it, concentrating on pushing the spell past its defenses, maybe it would have burned right through Sharkface and its stupid cloak. But that wasn’t the plan. Instead, I sprinted across the distance between us, through the hideous heat of my spell’s thermal bloom. It was like running through an oven. I saw my spell splash against Sharkface’s crossed forearms, and the thing managed to deflect almost all of the spell away—but not all of it. Fire scorched across one of its cheeks and splashed over its right shoulder, setting a large mass of sackcloth strips aflame.

It screamed in pain, a sound that raked at my ears, and began to lower its arms to retaliate.

The second it did, I drove my right fist into its stupid, creepy face.

Man, the yahoos I scrap with never seem to anticipate that tactic. They all assume that what with me being a wizard and all, I’m going to stand back and chuck Magic Missiles at them or something, then scream and run away the second they get close enough to let me see the whites of their eyes.

Okay, granted, that is how a lot of wizards operate. But all the same, you’d think they would remember that there’s no particular reason why a wizard can’t be as comfortable with physical mayhem as the next guy.

Two things happened.

First, as my fist sailed forward, there was a sudden thrill that flowed up my arm from my hand, something delicious and startling. I had barely processed that when I heard a crackling noise, and then saw glacial blue and green ice abruptly coating my fist.

Second, I hit Sharkface like a freaking truck, starting right on the tip of its chin and driving straight toward South America. The ice coating my fist shattered into tiny shards that laced and sliced, but I barely felt it. Sharkface flew back as if I’d slugged it with a sledgehammer, and hit the wall with enough violence to crack and splinter the heavy oak paneling. Sharkface’s cloak fluttered hard as it went backward—the freaking thing was cushioning his impact, just as it had managed to stop shotgun pellets at short range.

Sharkface bounced off the wall, staggering, and I gave it a left and another right, and then kicked its legs out from underneath it as brutally as I knew how. It went to the floor hard.

Once Sharkface was down I stomped for its head with my hiking boots, going for a quick kill, which was exactly what this asshole had coming to it for messing with my favorite joint—but that stupid cloak got in the way. Strips flew out to gain purchase and hauled him out from beneath my boot. Even as I reacted, moving to follow him up, more of the sackcloth tendrils seized a dozen bottles of liquor from behind the bar—and flung them harshly onto the puddles of vicious blue-white fire still burning upon the floor where Sharkface had deflected them.

I slashed at the tumbling bottles with an effort of will, but I hadn’t had a soft-touch spell in mind during the previous seconds. My clumsy grab accomplished nothing but to shatter one of the bottles early, and flames roared up from where the spilled liquor fell.

Alcohol fires are a nasty business. Booze burns a good deal hotter and faster than, for example, gasoline. In seconds it can take the temperature from below freezing to seven hundred degrees, hot enough to turn flesh into briquettes. Mac and Thomas were both down. There was no way I could get them both out of the fire in time—which meant my only option was to stop it from