Hex Appeal by P. N. Elrod

ceased moving altogether. Her skin had become pure ivory white. She shuddered, her breaths coming in ragged gasps. She tilted her head back and a low, throaty moan came out of her throat. I’ve had sex that wasn’t as good as Connie sounded.
    Dammit, Dresden. Focus.
    I was out of time.
    “The Council will find out, Chuck. They’re wizards. Finding unfindable information is what they do .”
    He smirked. “I think we both know that their reputation is very well constructed.”
    We did both know that. Dammit. “You think nobody’s going to miss me?” I asked. “I have friends, you know.”
    Barrowill suddenly leaned forward, focusing on Connie, his eyes becoming a few shades lighter. “Perhaps, Dresden. But your friends are not here.”
    Then there was a crash so loud that it shook the building. Barrowill’s sleek, black Lincoln Town Car came crashing through the dorm room’s door, taking a sizable portion of the wall with it. The ghouls holding me down were scattered by the debris, and fine dust filled the air.
    I started coughing at once, but I could see what had happened. The car had come through from the far side of this wing of the dorm, smashing through the room where Barrowill had waited in ambush. The car had crossed the hall and wound up with its bumper and front tires resting inside Irwin’s room. It had smashed a massive hole in the outer brick wall of the building, leaving it gaping open to the night.
    That got everyone’s attention. For an instant, the room was perfectly silent and perfectly still. The ghoul chauffeur still sat in the driver’s seat—only his head wobbled loosely, leaning at a right angle to the rest of his neck.
    “Hah,” I cackled, wheezing. “Hah, hah. Heh hah, hah, hah. Moron.”
    A large figure leapt up to the hole in the exterior wall and landed in the room across the hall, hitting with a crunch only slightly less massive than the car had made. I swear to you, if I’d heard that sound effect they used to use when Steve Austin jumped somewhere, I would not have been shocked. The other room was unlit, and the newcomer was a massive, threatening shadow.
    He slapped a hand the size of a big cookie tray on the floor and let out a low, rumbling sound like nothing I’d ever heard this side of an amplified bass guitar. It was music. You couldn’t have written it in musical notation, any more than you could write the music of a thunderstorm, or write lyrics to the song of a running stream. But it was music nonetheless.
    Power like nothing I had ever encountered surged out from that impact, a deep, shuddering wave that passed visibly through the dust in the air. The ceiling and the walls and the floor sang in resonance with the note and impact alike, and Barrowill’s psychic assault was swept away like a sand castle before the tide. Connie’s eyes flooded with color, changing from pure, empty whiteness back to a rich blue as deep and rich as a glacial lake, and the humanity came flooding back into her features. The sense of wild panic in the air suddenly vanished, and for another timeless instant, everything, everything in that night went utterly silent and still.
    Holy.
    Crap.
    I’ve worked with magic for decades, and take it from me, it really isn’t very different from anything else in life. When you work with magic, you rapidly realize that it is far easier to disrupt than to create, far more difficult to mend than to destroy. Throw a stone into a glass-smooth lake, and ripples will wash over the whole thing. Making waves with magic instead of a rock would have been easy.
    But if you can make that lake smooth again—that’s one hell of a trick.
    That surge of energy didn’t attack anything or anybody. It didn’t destroy Barrowill’s assault.
    It made the water smooth again.
    Strength-of-a-River-in-his-Shoulders opened his eyes, and his fury made them burn like coals in the shadows—but he simply crouched, doing nothing.
    All of Barrowill’s goons remained still, wide