Building Faith

By Ellf

Fools Rush In 14

Disclaimer: Jim Butcher owns the Dresden Files, any other works of fiction mentioned are not owned by me.

Drums. Magic. Magic and drums. And ghouls, let's not forget the ghouls. No. Ghouls unimportant. Black magic important. One more thing. God, I needed to stop watching Jackie Chan reruns, and I needed to focus. Okay. There were drums beating up ahead in the room with the ghouls, thumping rhythmically. What kinds of magic did I know of that used drums? Well, one would obviously be some sort of ritual magic, but that couldn't be it. There wouldn't be a need for a ritual that had drums going this rhythmically. It had to be something else. What it was, I just couldn't put my finger on, but I knew that I knew it.

Necromancy. Molly sent to me. Maintaining the illusion that we weren't actually there became all the more important if there was a necromancer in the next room. Drums and necromancy were intrinsically intertwined. Something about drums echoing the heartbeat of the living. Drums allowed a necromancer to either keep the dead animated or under their control or something of the like. I couldn't really remember much as, well, it wasn't really a subject Harry would bring up. Necromancy was deep black magic. I remembered… oh. Oh shit. There were only a few necromancers that I could remember from the book series, and none of them were beings that we wanted to mess with. The Heirs to some K-named bigshot that took the Council fifteen tries to kill him before they finally managed to blow him up with some major bomb event. And they still weren't sure the guy was actually dead. Lord, I prayed that the man actually was and the necromancer in the other room had nothing to do with his heirs, but given that there were ghouls and they were after the songs of the Erlking… I honestly didn't know what was going on, and… Fuck. Empty fucking night.

Molly, we need to get out of here. We know where they are. We need… we need muscle. I felt my hand trembling where it was intertwined with her own. We just needed to leave. Get Thomas. Hell. Call Marcone. Get Gard as backup. Get Harry. Get Murphy. Get fucking Lara. We had necromancers. Chicago was going to go to Hell in a handbasket, if any sort of major necromancers were here and active, and oh God it was too soon. Harry wasn't here, and he wasn't ready to animate Sue. I didn't have the control or power to animate a dinosaur, even if it'd be cool to ride, and I didn't have the leeway with the Council to pull it off and not get my head chopped off. Bob. Bob could help, but I didn't want to ask him about necromancy and Mister K-named bigshot because I didn't want to trigger any crazy memories that he might have somewhere in that mind of his. I didn't want to trigger any evil personalities, and… oh God, we needed to get out of there.

Focus. We need to find out what's going on in there. Then we can get out.

Necromancers, Moll. And ghouls. And God knows what else. We're fucked. Worse than fucked. We need Harry. We need someone. Going this alone is suicide.

We're under a veil. A pretty good one if I do say so myself. Molly wanted to go in further. I swallowed as quietly as I could. We need the information. You can get us out quick, right?

I supposed that my fear was an excellent motivator and source that I could use for my casting if it came to that. Yeah. But it's not like we're going to come across them discussing their plans or anything.

I felt Molly's grin as she squeezed my hand. Never know.

We approached the corner, and we paused at its edge, looking around it carefully. While we were under a veil, there really wasn't any need to take chances in case the veil dropped. Normal stealth measures were important too. Around the corner was what appeared to maybe have once been a meat locker. Hooks with long-dead emaciated carcasses of animals hung from them were spread out throughout the room, but what drew the eye were the two ghouls from last night and the three other figures in the room. The ghouls looked much the same as the night before; they even wore the same clothing, whereas the other figures in the room were human. Well, human-ish, anyway. It was hard to tell just how human they were from this distance, when the energies they gave out were so sickening.

The taller one on the right, judging from his visible hands holding drumsticks that pounded upon the marching drum hanging around his neck, was likely a fairly young man, but his face and the rest of his body were obscured by a hooded black cloak. The cloak itself wasn't all that elaborate, clearly just some sort of black canvas cloth formed into a cloak. He stood at just over six feet tall, and the man underneath the cloak could have been anywhere from his early twenties to his early thirties, as his hands were unwrinkled. Given that he had magic, it was entirely possible that he could have been older, but I was fairly confident about my age assessment of the drummer.

"What do you mean, you want more payment?" The voice came from the drummer's… partner, for lack of a better term. She was obviously a woman, but I couldn't make any features out from behind her hood save for a single strand of dark hair. Her voice held the faint lilt of a Scottish brogue, but it mostly sounded American. She was probably just shy of five and a half feet tall, but from the way the ghouls were cowering from her, she was the person of power. Within her right hand, she held a blackened wood blank for a staff, and her left was empty. She wore a similar cloak to her partner. "You didn't complete the job I paid you for in the first place."

"There were complications," said the ghoul on the left, whose muzzle reminded me of a wolverine. It was less pronounced and not dripping with viscera the way my… No, push away the Sight memories, Faith. "A wizard was at the station."

"Not Dresden?" Why did she have to sound hot? Why couldn't she have sounded like a cackling madwoman or something? Some crone, or some evil Disney Queen or something? No, she had to sound hot. The cloak hid too much of her body for me to judge it.

Molly squeezed my hand, and my attention was drawn to the third figure. This figure wasn't cloaked at all. No instead, he stood there behind the woman and the man, breathing and looking over the room with glazed over eyes. His skin was a sickly pallor and in parts appeared to be falling off. Zombie.

"No, not that wizard. A girl. Young. Talented with lightning," the ghoul said, bowing slightly. "We did not get paid to deal with wizards, just mortals."

"Dresden is in the Ozarks, dealing with a gnoll uprising. You should have had no trouble," the necromancer said. "It should have been as simple as entering the station and removing the evidence from the locker. I even gave you a way to keep the police occupied."

"There was a wizard. Fee is higher." The ghoul let out a low growl, and I shivered.

"And Jackal got himself killed. Fee is double," added the second ghoul.

The necromancer laughed at this point. "You failed to grab what you were assigned to grab, and you think that you deserve more pay?"

The ghouls growled at her laughter. Or maybe they just growled. Either way they weren't happy.

"Here's what's going to happen." The necromancer gestured at the ghouls. I wish I knew who she was. I couldn't tell, and oh God, that frightened me worse. She could have been any of them. Or someone else entirely. "You will find me Maroni's copy of Die Lied der Erlking. You will bring it to me, or I will flay the flesh from your bones and feed it to my pets. If it is another copy of the same book, I will know. Are we perfectly clear?"

The ghouls growled again at her, and I shuddered, bumping into the wall. A brick must have been loose or something as it fell out of the wall and shattered upon impact with the ground. Five heads turned toward us. Ah. Shit. That wasn't good. Luckily we were still under a veil, and Molly had the endurance to keep us up for a bit longer.

"Must have been a rat," commented the drummer, even as he kept playing. His voice wasn't terrible either.

"Undertown doesn't have rats," the necromancer commented. "It has any number of supernatural creatures, but it does not have rats. Unless they are hiding."

…Shit. Molly I'm going to get us out of here, now. I started to prepare my spell. I just needed the mental focus. I had plenty of fear to ball up and use to run the fuck away, but I needed to have Molly able to come with me, which meant I needed to focus on it. Usually this wouldn't be a large issue, but it turns out that trying to come into focus while afraid is not the easiest thing in the world.

Good… Not too sure how much longer I can hold this up. While Molly had some pretty good endurance when it came to casting veils, she'd been holding this one fairly long. I knew she was nowhere near the peak amount she'd be able to do, but neither was I for that matter. The two of us together would be able to do some amazing things one day, assuming we managed to survive the next ten minutes.

"Come out, little rats," the necromancer sing-songed. "We can discuss things like rational adults and you can be forgiven for eavesdropping. Of course, if you don't… Lin, Po, find them."

"Them?" The first ghoul turned toward the woman.

"It's faint, but there are two sources of magic nearby. Find them. Alive or dead. I care not. I can ask my questions just as easily of the dead."

Anytime now, Fai. I could feel Molly's fear beginning to spike, and I drew upon it. God, I needed to focus, and I needed to pull this off. Even if we were planning on fighting these ghouls, this was their turf, and they had the advantage. They had magical artillery support in the form of the necromancer, and God knew how many zombies she'd be able to get under her control. Even one zombie was going to be an issue unless we got behind a threshold. Even then, there were things that could be done with zombies that I didn't want to think about but might have had to.

Almost there.I balled up the fear tight, remembering the path we took to get in. My knees were going to be in such pain tomorrow, but better in pain than dead. My mind went over what needed to happen, and sparks lightly went off in my vision. Thankfully we were still veiled, but not for much longer. I could feel Molly's control over it start to slip.

"There! It's the wizard from last night!" The second ghoul pointed at us.

Shit. The veil! Luckily for us, I was ready. "Uh… Final Technique! Soukotte!"

Time slowed. We ran for it. We made it to the cellar, and it looked like we were home free. It was almost too easy as we started for the door.

Of course, it was at that point that things went to Hell.