Rudolph turned and ran.

That made things simple.

I took off after my prey.

Chapter

Twenty-three

   Hate is comforting.

Hate is pure.

There aren’t any questions, any worries about right and wrong, any quibbles about your motivations or goals. There are no doubts.

Hate is serene.

Rudolph ran. I pursued. And when I caught him, I would kill him. Horribly.

Nothing else entered into it.

I’ll give the guy this much credit: He could move. He’d always been careful about his looks, and evidently that meant a lot of cardio as well as expensive suits. He ran well.

But he didn’t have my focus, my clarity, and he hadn’t been running himself half to death every morning for months and months. He was human. He felt pain. It was an enormous disadvantage.

I gained.

He made funny sounds as he ran. Little gasps and whimpers. He was terrified. He should have been. In a city of monsters, he’d just pissed off one of the worst.

He took a right turn into a little loading area behind a building, tried a door, and found it locked. Obviously. Everyone who wasn’t running was forting up. There were more monsters than unlocked doors in Chicago that night. I don’t know what he was thinking.

He turned from the door, desperate, lifted his gun, and started shooting at me as fast as he could pull the trigger.

I raised my shield and slowed to a walk. Some of the shots went wide. Some bounced off the shield. None of them threatened me.

“You can’t!” Rudolph screamed. He fumbled at his armpit and withdrew another magazine. “You can’t!”

Before he could reload, I just walked forward into him, holding up the shield, and smashed him back against the steel door behind him.

Then I set my legs against the ground and started pushing.

Rudolph made a short, high-pitched sound of pain. The shield caught the barrel of his gun and forced it one way, his wrist another. The idiot still had his finger locked on the trigger. I heard the finger break.

“Dresden, no!” Rudolph screamed.

I pushed harder. Fire might have been good, but my damned arm would make it difficult. This felt better. Felt right. I thought about saying something about grinding his bones to make my bread, but I didn’t feel like conversation at that moment. Besides. Why waste breath on a corpse?

We were in pandemonium.

No one was going to ask any questions about one more body.

I pushed harder. Rudolph tried to scream again. There wasn’t enough room between my shield and the metal door for his lungs to expand all the way, so it came out breathy and weak. His eyes were wide and terrified, I noted, but that was to be expected. He was dying, after all.

The sour scent of urine filled the air.

I took note of it and adjusted my feet slightly so that I could lean in harder.

He went for his phone, of all the stupid things. His goddamned phone. As if anything there would do him any good. As if it would function and let him call for help. As if it would arrive in time to do him any good.

The phone fell from his fingers as he tried to gasp for breath.

I saw it on his face when he realized what was going to happen. When the panic took him, and the tears. When his hope faltered and died.

It made me feel something hot and sweet deep in my guts.

You killed her.

Feel what I feel, you bastard.

My teeth were bared. I felt sick, and hollow, and strong.

I pushed harder.

I heard a bone break. I didn’t care where it might have been. I just liked the sound and wanted to hear more of it.

“Bozhe moi,” came a sudden, startled voice from somewhere behind me. “Dresden. What is the meaning of this?”

“Fuck off, Sanya,” I snarled. “Won’t be a minute.”

Rudolph made a gurgling sound.

“Dresden,” Sanya said. His deep voice was troubled, which stood to reason. He didn’t have much clarity, like I did. “He is no threat to you. Stop this.”

“He killed Murphy,” I said. My voice sounded calm. “I’m going to balance those scales real quick. Then we’ll get to work.”

“No,” Sanya said. “That is not your place.”

I heard the steel in his voice.

I turned my head slowly and looked at him.

The Knight of Hope drew Esperacchius from his side. The saber gleamed with a harsh, threatening light in the dimness of the alleyway.

“Let him go,” Sanya said. “You are killing a man. If he has done wrong, he will face justice. But not like this.”

“Just a second,” I said, as if I was putting together a sandwich.

Sanya’s expression was strange. I couldn’t track what it was. But I knew it wasn’t appropriate to the situation. He stalked closer, moving well. Very well. He was a more worthy opponent. “Harry Dresden. I will not ask again.”

Something disturbed the purity of my hatred then. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it pissed me off.

What had been a profoundly pure experience had been disrupted. This creature, this Rudolph, didn’t deserve even the death I was about to give him. He couldn’t even die properly, forcing me to work for it. He was beyond contempt.

“Walk away, Sanya,” I said shortly. “This is happening.”

Sanya wouldn’t walk away. That wasn’t the Knight’s style. He wasn’t going to let me finish my business. I would have to reason with him.

Sanya closed his eyes for a second, as if in pain.

Which, come on. That was just stupid.

I dropped the shield, whipped toward him, and kicked him in the balls.

I was fast and strong. But Sanya had been fighting for his life against various bad guys for a while now and wasn’t going to be taken down by a sucker punch. He managed to move his hips at the last second, taking some of the impact out of the kick. So instead of dropping him to the ground, the blow knocked him back and staggered him, but he kept his feet.

I gave Sanya no time to recover. I followed up, inside the reach of Esperacchius, getting my left forearm across his right, driving his arm back and up and not letting it come back down. He was big and strong. I was bigger, stronger. I crowded him against a wall, drove my knee up into his belly, once, twice, hard enough to break boards.

Then the Russian’s head snapped forward into my face. There was a burst of static pain in the general area of my head, and then I was on my way back across the alley. My shoulders hit the wall, hard. There was a crackling noise, a flash of heat in my shoulder—and then I could move my right arm readily again.