Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5)

by Jim Butcher

“How long have you been a Wiccan?” “A what?” “A pagan. A witch.” “I’m not a witch,” I said, glancing out the door. “I’m a wizard.” Sanya frowned. “What is the difference?” “Wizard has a Z.” He looked at me blankly. “No one appreciates me,” I muttered. “Wicca is a religion. It’s a little more fluid than most, but it’s still a religion.” “And?” “And I’m not really big on religion. I do magic, sure, but it’s like…being a mechanic. Or an engineer. There are forces that behave a certain way. If you know what you’re doing, you can get them to work for you, and you don’t really need a god or a goddess or a whatever to get involved.” Sanya’s expression became surprised. “You are not a religious man, then.” “I wouldn’t burden any decent system of faith by participating in it.”

I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.

I hear that they make disinfectants that don’t hurt these days. But Charity used iodine.

I glowered at his cigar and said, “Those things will kill you.” The old man smiled again. “Not tonight.” “I’d think a good Christian boy wouldn’t be puffing down the cigars.” “Technicality,” Shiro said. “The cigars?” “My Christianity,” Shiro said. “When I was a boy, I liked Elvis. Had a chance to see him in concert when we moved to California. It was a big revival meeting. There was Elvis and then a speaker and my English was not so good. He invited people backstage to meet the king. Thought he meant Elvis, so I go backstage.” He sighed. “Found out later I had become a Baptist.” I barked out a laugh. “You’re kidding.” “No. But it was done, so I tried not to be too bad at being Baptist.” He rested a hand on the handle of his sword. “Then came into this. Made the whole thing more simple. I serve.” “Serve who?” “Heaven. Or the divine in nature. The memory of my fathers past. My fellow man. Myself. All pieces of the same thing.

The cold grew more intense, more painful. I couldn’t escape it. I panicked, thrashing wildly, dull pain flaring in my bound limbs, and fading away into numbness under the cold. I screamed a few times, I think. I remember choking on water while I tried. I didn’t have much energy. After a few minutes, I hung panting and hurting and too tired to struggle any more, the water only getting colder, bound limbs screaming. I hurt, but I figured the pain couldn’t possibly get any worse. A few hours went by and showed me how wrong I was.

To live outcast from your own kind, laughed at and mocked by most mortals. Living in a hovel, barely scraping by. Spurning wealth and fame. Why do you do it?” “I’m a disciple of the Tao of Peter Parker, obviously,” I said. I guess Nicodemus was a DC Comics fan, because he didn’t get it.

If she said she could jump out of a speeding car and keep us both from dying, I believed her. What the hell, I thought. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this before—albeit at a fifth the speed. But there was something deeper than that, something darker that Susan’s vulpine smile had stirred inside of me. Some wild, reckless, primal piece of me had always loved the danger, the adrenaline, had always loved testing myself against the various and sundry would-be lethalities that crossed my paths. There was an ecstasy in the knife edge of the struggle, a vital energy that couldn’t be found anywhere else, and part of me (a stupid, insane, but undeniably powerful part) missed it when it was gone. That wildness rose up in me, and gave me a smile that matched Susan’s. I took her hand, and a second later we leapt from the car. I heard myself laughing like a madman as we did.

Susan sagged down after a moment, until with my hands, with my mouth, with the thrusts of my body, I kindled the quiet moans once again to cries of need. She screamed again, the motions of her body swift, liquid, desperate, and there wasn’t any way I could keep her from driving me over the brink with her. Our cries mingled together as we intertwined. The strain of muscles and bodies and hungers overwhelmed me. Pleasure like fire consumed us both and burned my thoughts to ash. Time drifted by and did not touch us. When I recovered my senses, I found myself on the floor.

Smut