
ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER
THE DRESDEN FILES
FOOL MOON
GRAVE PERIL
SUMMER KNIGHT
DEATH MASKS
BLOOD RITES
DEAD BEAT
PROVEN GUILTY
WHITE NIGHT
THE CODEX ALERA
FURIES OF CALDERON
ACADEM'S FURY
CURSOR'S FURY
CAPTAIN'S FURY
ROCPublished by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
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Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc mass market edition.
Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2000All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK---MARCA REGISTRADA
ISBN: 1-101-12865-8
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Debbie Chester, who taught me everything Ireally needed to know about writing. And for myfather, who taught me everything I really neededto know about living. I miss you, Dad.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go out to Caroline, Fred, Debra, Tara, and Corin: the original Harry Dresden fans. Without the perverse desire to make you guys scream at me to write the next chapter, Harry would never have gotten into so much trouble. More thanks are due to Ricia Mainhardt and to A. J. Janschewitz, great agents and good people, and to Chris Ely, who is just an all-around neat person.
Superspecial thanks to my son, J.J., who believed his dada had written a good book even if he couldn't read it.
And thank you, Shannon, for too many things to list. You're my angel. One day, I will learn to turn my socks right side out before throwing them on the bedroom floor.
I heard the mailman approach my office door, half an hour earlier than usual. He didn't sound right. His footsteps fell more heavily, jauntily, and he whistled. A new guy. He whistled his way to my office door, then fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed.
Then he knocked.
I winced. My mail comes through the mail slot unless it's registered. I get a really limited selection of registered mail, and it's never good news. I got up out of my office chair and opened the door.
The new mailman, who looked like a basketball with arms and legs and a sunburned, balding head, was chuckling at the sign on the door glass. He glanced at me and hooked a thumb toward the sign. "You're kidding, right?"
I read the sign (people change it occasionally), and shook my head. "No, I'm serious. Can I have my mail, please?"
"So, uh. Like parties, shows, stuff like that?" He looked past me, as though he expected to see a white tiger, or possibly some skimpily clad assistants prancing around my one-room office.
I sighed, not in the mood to get mocked again, and reached for the mail he held in his hand. "No, not like that. I don't do parties."
He held on to it, his head tilted curiously. "So what? Some kinda fortune-teller? Cards and crystal balls and things?"
"No," I told him. "I'm not a psychic." I tugged at the mail.
He held on to it. "What are you, then?"
"What's the sign on the door say?"
"It says 'Harry Dresden. Wizard.'"
"That's me," I confirmed.
"An actual wizard?" he asked, grinning, as though I should let him in on the joke. "Spells and potions? Demons and incantations? Subtle and quick to anger?"
"Not so subtle." I jerked the mail out of his hand and looked pointedly at his clipboard. "Can I sign for my mail please?"
The new mailman's grin vanished, replaced with a scowl. He passed over the clipboard to let me sign for the mail (another late notice from my landlord), and said, "You're a nut. That's what you are." He took his clipboard back, and said, "You have a nice day, sir."
I watched him go.
"Typical," I muttered, and shut the door.
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I'm a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I'm the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under "Wizards." Believe it or not, I'm the only one there. My ad looks like this:
HARRY DRESDEN---WIZARD
LOST ITEMS FOUND. PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS.
CONSULTING. ADVICE. REASONABLE RATES.
NO LOVE POTIONS, ENDLESS PURSES, PARTIES,
OR OTHER ENTERTAINMENT.
You'd be surprised how many people call just to ask me if I'm serious. But then, if you'd seen the things I'd seen, if you knew half of what I knew, you'd wonder how anyone could not think I was serious.
The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal. Psychics, haunts, vampires---you name it. People still didn't take them seriously, but all the things Science had promised us hadn't come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn't changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.
Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something---I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.
Anyway, it had been a slow month. A slow pair of months, actually. My rent from February didn't get paid until the tenth of March, and it was looking like it might be even longer until I got caught up for this month.
My only job had been the previous week, when I'd gone down to Branson, Missouri, to investigate a country singer's possibly haunted house. It hadn't been. My client hadn't been happy with that answer, and had been even less happy when I suggested he lay off of any intoxicating substances and try to get some exercise and sleep, and see if that didn't help things more than an exorcism. I'd gotten travel expenses plus an hour's pay, and gone away feeling I had done the honest, righteous, and impractical thing. I heard later that he'd hired a shyster psychic to come in and perform a ceremony with a lot of incense and black lights. Some people.
I finished up my paperback and tossed it into the DONE box. There was a pile of read and discarded paperbacks in a cardboard box on one side of my desk, the spines bent and the pages mangled. I'm terribly hard on books. I was eyeing the pile of unread books, considering which to start next, given that I had no real work to do, when my phone rang.
I stared at it in a somewhat surly fashion. We wizards are terrific at brooding. After the third ring, when I thought I wouldn't sound a little too eager, I picked up the receiver and said, "Dresden."
"Oh. Is this, um, Harry Dresden? The, ah, wizard?" Her tone was apologetic, as though she were terribly afraid she would be insulting me.
No, I thought. It's Harry Dresden the, ah, lizard. Harry the wizard is one door down.
It is the prerogative of wizards to be grumpy. It is not, however, the prerogative of freelance consultants who are late on their rent, so instead of saying something smart, I told the woman on the phone, "Yes, ma'am. How can I help you today?"
"I, um," she said. "I'm not sure. I've lost something, and I think maybe you could help me."
"Finding lost articles is a specialty," I said. "What would I be looking for?"
There was a nervous pause. "My husband," she said. She had a voice that was a little hoarse, like that of a cheerleader who'd been working a long tournament, but had enough weight of years in it to place her as an adult.
My eyebrows went up. "Ma'am, I'm not really a missing-persons specialist. Have you contacted the police or a private investigator?"
"No," she said, quickly. "No, they can't. That is, I haven't. Oh dear, this is all so complicated. Not something someone can talk about on the phone. I'm sorry to have taken up your time, Mr. Dresden."
"Hold on now," I said quickly. "I'm sorry, you didn't tell me your name."
There was that nervous pause again, as though she were checking a sheet of written notes before answering. "Call me Monica."
People who know diddly about wizards don't like to give us their names. They're convinced that if they give a wizard their name from their own lips it could be used against them. To be fair, they're right.
I had to be as polite and harmless as I could. She was about to hang up out of pure indecision, and I needed the job. I could probably turn hubby up, if I worked at it.
"Okay, Monica," I told her, trying to sound as melodious and friendly as I could. "If you feel your situation is of a sensitive nature, maybe you could come by my office and talk about it. If it turns out that I can help you best, I will, and if not, then I can direct you to someone I think can help you better." I gritted my teeth and pretended I was smiling. "No charge."
It must have been the no charge that did it. She agreed to come right out to the office, and told me that she would be there in an hour. That put her estimated arrival at about two-thirty. Plenty of time to go out and get some lunch, then get back to the office to meet her.
The phone rang again almost the instant I put it down, making me jump. I peered at it. I don't trust electronics. Anything manufactured after the forties is suspect---and doesn't seem to have much liking for me. You name it: cars, radios, telephones, TVs, VCRs---none of them seem to behave well for me. I don't even like to use automatic pencils.
I answered the phone with the same false cheer I had summoned up for Monica Husband-Missing. "This is Dresden, may I help you?"
"Harry, I need you at the Madison in the next ten minutes. Can you be there?" The voice on the other end of the line was also a woman's, cool, brisk, businesslike.
"Why, Lieutenant Murphy," I gushed, overflowing with saccharine, "it's good to hear from you, too. It's been so long. Oh, they're fine, fine. And your family?"
"Save it, Harry. I've got a couple of bodies here, and I need you to take a look around."
I sobered immediately. Karrin Murphy was the director of Special Investigations out of downtown Chicago, a de facto appointee of the Police Commissioner to investigate any crimes dubbed unusual. Vampire attacks, troll maraudings, and faery abductions of children didn't fit in very neatly on a police report---but at the same time, people got attacked, infants got stolen, property was damaged or destroyed. And someone had to look into it.
In Chicago, or pretty much anywhere in Chicagoland, that person was Karrin Murphy. I was her library of the supernatural on legs, and a paid consultant for the police department. But two bodies? Two deaths by means unknown? I hadn't handled anything like that for her before.
"Where are you?" I asked her.
"Madison Hotel on Tenth, seventh floor."
"That's only a fifteen-minute walk from my office," I said.
"So you can be here in fifteen minutes. Good."
"Um," I said. I looked at the clock. Monica No-Last-Name would be here in a little more than forty-five minutes. "I've sort of got an appointment."
"Dresden, I've sort of got a pair of corpses with no leads and no suspects, and a killer walking around loose. Your appointment can wait."
My temper flared. It does that occasionally. "It can't, actually," I said. "But I'll tell you what. I'll stroll on over and take a look around, and be back here in time for it."
"Have you had lunch yet?" she asked.
"What?"
She repeated the question.
"No," I said.
"Don't." There was a pause, and when she spoke again, there was a sort of greenish tone to her words. "It's bad."
"How bad are we talking here, Murph?"
Her voice softened, and that scared me more than any images of gore or violent death could have. Murphy was the original tough girl, and she prided herself on never showing weakness. "It's bad, Harry. Please don't take too long. Special Crimes is itching to get their fingers on this one, and I know you don't like people to touch the scene before you can look around."
"I'm on the way," I told her, already standing and pulling on my jacket.
"Seventh floor," she reminded me. "See you there."
"Okay."
I turned off the lights to my office, went out the door, and locked up behind me, frowning. I wasn't sure how long it was going to take to investigate Murphy's scene, and I didn't want to miss out on speaking with Monica Ask-Me-No-Questions. So I opened the door again, got out a piece of paper and a thumbtack, and wrote:
Out briefly. Back for appointment at 2:30. Dresden
That done, I started down the stairs. I rarely use the elevator, even though I'm on the fifth floor. Like I said, I don't trust machines. They're always breaking down on me just when I need them.
Besides which. If I were someone in this town using magic to kill people two at a time, and I didn't want to get caught, I'd make sure that I removed the only practicing wizard the police department kept on retainer. I liked my odds on the stairwell a lot better than I did in the cramped confines of the elevator.
Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.
Karrin Murphy was waiting for me outside the Madison. Karrin and I are a study in contrasts. Where I am tall and lean, she's short and stocky. Where I have dark hair and dark eyes, she's got Shirley Temple blond locks and baby blues. Where my features are all lean and angular, with a hawkish nose and a sharp chin, hers are round and smooth, with the kind of cute nose you'd expect on a cheerleader.
It was cool and windy, like it usually is in March, and she wore a long coat that covered her pantsuit. Murphy never wore dresses, though I suspected she'd have muscular, well-shaped legs, like a gymnast. She was built for function, and had a pair of trophies in her office from aikido tournaments to prove it. Her hair was cut at shoulder length and whipped out wildly in the spring wind. She wasn't wearing earrings, and her makeup was of sufficient quality and quantity that it was tough to tell she had on any at all. She looked more like a favorite aunt or a cheerful mother than a hard-bitten homicide detective.
"Don't you have any other jackets, Dresden?" she asked, as I came within hailing distance. There were several police cars parked illegally in front of the building. She glanced at my eyes for a half second and then away, quickly. I had to give her credit. It was more than most people did. It wasn't really dangerous unless you did it for several seconds, but I was used to anyone who knew I was a wizard making it a point not to glance at my face.
I looked down at my black canvas duster, with its heavy mantling and waterproof lining and sleeves actually long enough for my arms. "What's wrong with this one?"
"It belongs on the set of El Dorado."
"And?"
She snorted, an indelicate sound from so small a woman, and spun on her heel to walk toward the hotel's front doors.
I caught up and walked a little ahead of her.
She sped her pace. So did I. We raced one another toward the front door, with increasing speed, through the puddles left over from last night's rain.
My legs were longer; I got there first. I opened the door for her and gallantly gestured for her to go in. It was an old contest of ours. Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts. Try and convict me if I'm a bad person for thinking so. I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers---all that sort of thing.
It irritates the hell out of Murphy, who had to fight and claw and play dirty with the hairiest men in Chicago to get as far as she has. She glared up at me while I stood there holding open the door, but there was a reassurance about the glare, a relaxation. She took an odd sort of comfort in our ritual, annoying as she usually found it.
How bad was it up on the seventh floor, anyway?
We rode the elevator in a sudden silence. We knew one another well enough, by this time, that the silences were not uncomfortable. I had a good sense of Murphy, an instinctual grasp for her moods and patterns of thought---something I develop whenever I'm around someone for any length of time. Whether it's a natural talent or a supernatural one I don't know.
My instincts told me that Murphy was tense, stretched as tight as piano wire. She kept it off her face, but there was something about the set of her shoulders and neck, the stiffness of her back, that made me aware of it.
Or maybe I was just projecting it onto her. The confines of the elevator made me a bit nervous. I licked my lips and looked around the interior of the car. My shadow and Murphy's fell on the floor, and almost looked as though they were sprawled there. There was something about it that bothered me, a nagging little instinct that I blew off as a case of nerves. Steady, Harry.
She let out a harsh breath just as the elevator slowed, then sucked in another one before the doors could open, as though she were planning on holding it for as long as we were on the floor and breathing only when she got back in the elevator again.
Blood smells a certain way, a kind of sticky, almost metallic odor, and the air was full of it when the elevator doors opened. My stomach quailed a little bit, but I swallowed manfully and followed Murphy out of the elevator and down the hall past a couple of uniform cops, who recognized me and waved me past without asking to see the little laminated card the city had given me. Granted, even in a big-city department like Chicago P.D., they didn't exactly call in a horde of consultants (I went down in the paperwork as a psychic consultant, I think), but still. Unprofessional of the boys in blue.
Murphy preceded me into the room. The smell of blood grew thicker, but there wasn't anything gruesome behind door number one. The outer room of the suite looked like some kind of a sitting room done in rich tones of red and gold, like a set from an old movie in the thirties---expensive-looking, but somehow faux, nonetheless. Dark, rich leather covered the chairs, and my feet sank into the thick, rust-colored shag of the carpet. The velvet velour curtains had been drawn, and though the lights were all on, the place still seemed a little too dark, a little too sensual in its textures and colors. It wasn't the kind of room where you sit and read a book. Voices came from a doorway to my right.
"Wait here a minute," Murphy told me. Then she went through the door to the right of the entryway and into what I supposed was the bedroom of the suite.
I wandered around the sitting room with my eyes mostly closed, noting things. Leather couch. Two leather chairs. Stereo and television in a black glossy entertainment center. Champagne bottle warming in a stand holding a brimming tub of what had been ice the night before, with two empty glasses set beside it. There was a red rose petal on the floor, clashing with the carpeting (but then, in that room, what didn't?).
A bit to one side, under the skirt of one of the leather recliners, was a little piece of satiny cloth. I bent at the waist and lifted the skirt with one hand, careful not to touch anything. A pair of black satin panties, a tiny triangle with lace coming off the points, lay there, one strap snapped as though the thong had simply been torn off. Kinky.
The stereo system was state of the art, though not an expensive brand. I took a pencil from my pocket and pushed the PLAY button with the eraser. Gentle, sensual music filled the room, a low bass, a driving drumbeat, wordless vocals, the heavy breathing of a woman as background.
The music continued for a few seconds more, and then it began to skip over a section about two seconds long, repeating it over and over again.
I grimaced. Like I said, I have this effect on machinery. It has something to do with being a wizard, with working with magical forces. The more delicate and modern the machine is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong if I get close enough to it. I can kill a copier at fifty paces.
"The love suite," came a man's voice, drawing the word love out into luuuuuuuv. "What do you think, Mister Man?"
"Hello, Detective Carmichael," I said, without turning around. Carmichael's rather light, nasal voice had a distinctive quality. He was Murphy's partner and the resident skeptic, convinced that I was nothing more than a charlatan, scamming the city out of its hard-earned money. "Were you saving the panties to take home yourself, or did you just overlook them?" I turned and looked at him. He was short and overweight and balding, with beady, bloodshot eyes and a weak chin. His jacket was rumpled, and there were food stains on his tie, all of which served to conceal a razor intellect. He was a sharp cop, and absolutely ruthless at tracking down killers.
He walked over to the chair and looked down. "Not bad, Sherlock," he said. "But that's just foreplay. Wait'll you see the main attraction. I'll have a bucket waiting for you." He turned and killed the malfunctioning CD player with a jab from the eraser end of his own pencil.
I widened my eyes at him, to let him know how terrified I was, then walked past him and into the bedroom. And regretted it. I looked, noted details mechanically, and quietly shut the door on the part of my head that had started screaming the second I entered the room.
They must have died sometime the night before, as rigor mortis had already set in. They were on the bed; she was astride him, body leaned back, back bowed like a dancer's, the curves of her breasts making a lovely outline. He stretched beneath her, a lean and powerfully built man, arms reaching out and grasping at the satin sheets, gathering them in his fists. Had it been an erotic photograph, it would have made a striking tableau.
Except that the lovers' rib cages on the upper left side of their torsos had expanded outward, through their skin, the ribs jabbing out like ragged, snapped knives. Arterial blood had sprayed out of their bodies, all the way to the mirror on the ceiling, along with pulped, gelatinous masses of flesh that had to be what remained of their hearts. Standing over them, I could see into the upper cavity of the bodies. I noted the now greyish lining around the motionless left lungs and the edges of the ribs, which apparently were forced outward and snapped by some force within.
It definitely cut down on the erotic potential.
The bed was in the middle of the room, giving it a subtle emphasis. The bedroom followed the decor of the sitting room---a lot of red, a lot of plush fabrics, a little over the top unless viewed in candlelight. There were indeed candles in holders on the wall, now burned down to the nubs and extinguished.
I stepped closer to the bed and walked around it. The carpet squelched as I did. The little screaming part of my brain, safely locked up behind doors of self-control and strict training, continued gibbering. I tried to ignore it. Really I did. But if I didn't get out of that room in a hurry, I was going to start crying like a little girl.
So I took in the details fast. The woman was in her twenties, in fabulous condition. At least I thought she had been. It was hard to tell. She had hair the color of chestnuts, cut in a pageboy style, and it seemed dyed to me. Her eyes were only partly open, and I couldn't quite guess at their color beyond not-dark. Vaguely green?
The man was probably in his forties, and had the kind of fitness that comes from a lifetime of conditioning. There was a tattoo on his right biceps, a winged dagger, that the pull of the satin sheets half concealed. There were scars on his knuckles, layers deep, and across his lower abdomen was a vicious, narrow, puckered scar that I guessed must have come from a knife wound.
There were discarded clothes around---a tux for him, a little sheath of a black dress and a pair of pumps for her. There were a pair of overnight bags, unopened and set neatly aside, probably by a porter.
I looked up. Carmichael and Murphy were watching me in silence.
I shrugged at them.
"Well?" Murphy demanded. "Are we dealing with magic here, or aren't we?"
"Either that or it was really incredible sex," I told her.
Carmichael snorted.
I laughed a little, too---and that was all the screaming part of my brain needed to slam open the doors I'd shut on it. My stomach revolted and heaved, and I lurched out of the room. Carmichael, true to his word, had set a stainless-steel bucket outside the room, and I fell to my knees throwing up.
It only took me a few seconds to control myself again---but I didn't want to go back in that room. I didn't need to see what was there anymore. I didn't want to see the two dead people, whose hearts had literally exploded out of their chests.
And someone had used magic to do it. They had used magic to wreak harm on another, violating the First Law. The White Council was going to go into collective apoplexy. This hadn't been the act of a malign spirit or a malicious entity, or the attack of one of the many creatures of the Nevernever, like vampires or trolls. This had been the premeditated, deliberate act of a sorcerer, a wizard, a human being able to tap into the fundamental energies of creation and life itself.
It was worse than murder. It was twisted, wretched perversion, as though someone had bludgeoned another person to death with a Botticelli, turned something of beauty to an act of utter destruction.
If you've never touched it, it's hard to explain. Magic is created by life, and most of all by the awareness, intelligence, emotions of a human being. To end such a life with the same magic that was born from it was hideous, almost incestuous somehow.
I sat up again and was breathing hard, shaking and tasting the bile in my mouth, when Murphy came back out of the room with Carmichael.
"All right, Harry," Murphy said. "Let's have it. What do you see happening here?"
I took a moment to collect my thoughts before answering. "They came in. They had some champagne. They danced for a while, made out, over there by the stereo. Then went into the bedroom. They were in there for less than an hour. It hit them when they were getting to the high point."
"Less than an hour," Carmichael said. "How do you figure?"
"CD was only an hour and ten long. Figure a few minutes for dancing and drinking, and then they're in the room. Was the CD playing when they found them?"
"No," Murphy said.
"Then it hadn't been set on a loop. I figure they wanted music, just to make things perfect, given the room and all."
Carmichael grunted, sourly. "Nothing we hadn't already figured out for ourselves," he said to Murphy. "He'd better come up with more than this."
Murphy shot Carmichael a look that said "shut up," then said, softly, "I need more, Harry."
I ran one of my hands back over my hair. "There's only two ways anyone could have managed this. The first is by evocation. Evocation is the most direct, spectacular, and noisy form of expressed magic, or sorcery. Explosions, fire, that sort of thing. But I doubt it was an evocator who did this."
"Why?" Murphy demanded. I heard her pencil scritching on the notepad she always kept with her.
"Because you have to be able to see or touch where you want your effect to go," I told her. "Line of sight only. The man or woman would have had to be there in the room with them. Tough to hide forensic evidence with something like that, and anyone who was skilled enough to pull off a spell like that would have had the sense to use a gun instead. It's easier."
"What's the other option?" Murphy asked.
"Thaumaturgy," I said. "As above, so below. Make something happen on a small scale, and give it the energy to happen on a large scale."
Carmichael snorted. "What bullshit."
Murphy's voice sounded skeptical. "How would that work, Harry? Could it be done from somewhere else?"
I nodded. "The killer would need to have something to connect him or her to the victims. Hair, fingernails, blood samples. That sort of thing."
"Like a voodoo doll?"
"Exactly the same thing, yes."
"There's fresh dye in the woman's hair," Murphy said.
I nodded. "Maybe if you can find out where she got her hair styled, you could find something out. I don't know."
"Is there anything else you could tell me that would be of use?"
"Yes. The killer knew the victims. And I'm thinking it was a woman."
Carmichael snorted. "I don't believe we got to sit here and listen to this. Nine times out of ten the killer knows the victim."
"Shut up, Carmichael," Murphy said. "What makes you say that, Harry?"
I stood up, and rubbed at my face with my hands. "The way magic works. Whenever you do something with it, it comes from inside of you. Wizards have to focus on what they're trying to do, visualize it, believe in it, to make it work. You can't make something happen that isn't a part of you, inside. The killer could have murdered them both and made it look like an accident, but she did it this way. To get it done this way, she would have had to want them dead for very personal reasons, to be willing to reach inside them like that. Revenge, maybe. Maybe you're looking for a lover or a spouse.
"Also because of when they died---in the middle of sex. It wasn't a coincidence. Emotions are a kind of channel for magic, a path that can be used to get to you. She picked a time when they'd be together and be charged up with lust. She got samples to use as a focus, and she planned it out in advance. You don't do that to strangers."
"Crap," Carmichael said, but this time it was more of an absentminded curse than anything directed at me.
Murphy glared at me. "You keep saying 'she,'" she challenged me. "Why the hell do you think that?"
I gestured toward the room. "Because you can't do something that bad without a whole lot of hate," I said. "Women are better at hating than men. They can focus it better, let it go better. Hell, witches are just plain meaner than wizards. This feels like feminine vengeance of some kind to me."
"But a man could have done it," Murphy said.
"Well," I hedged.
"Christ, you are a chauvinist pig, Dresden. Is it something that only a woman could have done?"
"Well. No. I don't think so."
"You don't think so?" Carmichael drawled. "Some expert."
I scowled at them both, angry. "I haven't really worked through the specifics of what I'd need to do to make somebody's heart explode, Murph. As soon as I have occasion to I'll be sure to let you know."
"When will you be able to tell me something?" Murphy asked.
"I don't know." I held up a hand, forestalling her next comment. "I can't put a timer on this stuff, Murph. It just can't be done. I don't even know if I can do it at all, much less how long it will take."
"At fifty bucks an hour, it better not be too long," Carmichael growled. Murphy glanced at him. She didn't exactly agree with him, but she didn't exactly slap him down, either.
I took the opportunity to take a few long breaths, calming myself down. I finally looked back at them. "Okay," I asked. "Who are they? The victims."
"You don't need to know that," Carmichael snapped.
"Ron," Murphy said. "I could really use some coffee."
Carmichael turned to her. He wasn't tall, but he all but loomed over Murphy. "Aw, come on, Murph. This guy's jerking your chain. You don't really think he's going to be able to tell you anything worth hearing, do you?"
Murphy regarded her partner's sweaty, beady-eyed face with a sort of frosty hauteur, tough to pull off on someone six inches taller than she. "No cream, two sugars."
"Dammit," Carmichael said. He shot me a cold glance (but didn't quite look at my eyes), then jammed his hands into his pants pockets and stalked out of the room.
Murphy followed him to the door, her feet silent, and shut it behind him. The sitting room immediately became darker, closer, with the grinning ghoul of its former chintzy intimacy dancing in the smell of the blood and the memory of the two bodies in the next room.
"The woman's name was Jennifer Stanton. She worked for the Velvet Room."
I whistled. The Velvet Room was a high-priced escort service run by a woman named Bianca. Bianca kept a flock of beautiful, charming, and witty women, pandering them to the richest men in the area for hundreds of dollars an hour. Bianca sold the kind of female company that most men only see on television and the movies. I also knew that she was a vampiress of considerable influence in the Nevernever. She had Power with a capital P.
I'd tried to explain the Nevernever to Murphy before. She didn't really comprehend it, but she understood that Bianca was a badass vampiress who sometimes squabbled for territory. We both knew that if one of Bianca's girls was involved, the vampiress must have been involved somehow, too.
Murphy cut right to the point. "Was this part of one of Bianca's territorial disputes?"
"No," I said. "Unless she's having it with a human sorcerer. A vampire, even a vamp sorcerer, couldn't have pulled off something like this outside of the Nevernever."
"Could she be at odds with a human sorcerer?" Murphy asked me.
"Possible. But it doesn't sound like her. She isn't that stupid." What I didn't tell Murphy was that the White Council made sure that vampires who trifled with mortal practitioners never lived to brag about it. I don't talk to regular people about the White Council. It just isn't done. "Besides," I said, "if a human wanted to take a shot at Bianca by hitting her girls, he'd be better off to kill the girl and leave the customer healthy, to let him spread the tale and scare off business."
"Mmph," Murphy said. She wasn't convinced, but she made notes of what I had said.
"Who was the man?" I asked her.
Murphy looked up at me for a moment, and then said, evenly, "Tommy Tomm."
I blinked at her to let her know she hadn't revealed the mystery of the ages. "Who?"
"Tommy Tomm," she said. "Johnny Marcone's bodyguard."
Now it made sense. "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone had been the thug to emerge on top of the pile after the Vargassi family had dissolved into internal strife. The police department saw Marcone as a mixed blessing, after years of merciless struggle and bloody exchanges with the Vargassis. Gentleman Johnny tolerated no excesses in his organization, and he didn't like freelancers operating in his city. Muggers, bank robbers, and drug dealers who were not a part of his organization somehow always seemed to get ratted out and turned in, or else simply went missing and weren't heard from again.
Marcone was a civilizing influence on crime---and where he operated, it was more of a problem in terms of scale than ever before. An extremely shrewd businessman, he had a battery of lawyers working for him that kept him fenced in from the law behind a barricade of depositions and papers and tape recordings. The cops never said it, but sometimes it seemed like they were almost reluctant to chase him. Marcone was better than the alternative---anarchy in the underworld.
"I remember hearing he had an enforcer," I said. "I guess he doesn't anymore."
Murphy shrugged. "So it would seem."
"So what will you do next?"
"Run down this hairstylist angle, I guess. I'll talk to Bianca and to Marcone, but I can already tell you what they'll tell me." She flicked her notebook closed and shook her head, irritated.
I watched her for a minute. She looked tired. I told her so.
"I am tired," she replied. "Tired of being looked at like I'm some sort of nutcase. Even Carmichael, my own partner, thinks I've gone over the edge in all of this."
"The rest of the station think so too?" I asked her.
"Most of them just scowl and spin their index fingers around their temples when they think I'm not looking, and file my reports without ever reading them. The rest are the ones who have run into something spooky out there, and they're scared shitless. They don't want to believe in anything they didn't see on Mister Science when they were kids."
"How about you?"
"Me?" Murphy smiled, a curving of her lips that was a vibrantly feminine expression, making her look entirely too pretty to be such a hardass. "The world's falling apart at the seams, Harry. I guess I just think people are pretty arrogant to believe we've learned everything there is to know in the past century or so. What the hell. I can buy that we're just now starting to see the things around us in the dark again. It appeals to the cynic in me."
"I wish everyone thought like you do," I said. "It would cut down on my crank calls."
She continued to smile at me, impish. "But could you imagine a world where all the radio stations played ABBA?"
We shared a laugh. God, that room needed a laugh.
"Hey, Harry," Murphy said, grinning. I could see the wheels spinning in her head.
"Yeah?"
"What you said about being able to figure out how the killer did this. About how you're not sure you can do it."
"Yeah?"
"I know it's bullshit. Why did you lie to me about it?"
I stiffened. Christ, she was good. Or maybe I'm just not much of a liar. "Look, Murph," I said. "There's some things you just don't do."
"Sometimes I don't want to get into the head of the slime I go after, either. But you do what needs to be done to finish the job. I know what you mean, Harry."
"No," I said, shortly. "You don't know." And she didn't. She didn't know about my past, or the White Council, or the Doom of Damocles hanging over my head. Most days, I could pretend I didn't know about it, either.
All the Council needed now was an excuse, just an excuse, to find me guilty of violating one of the Seven Laws of Magic, and the Doom would drop. If I started putting together a recipe for a murder spell, and they found out about it, that might be all the excuse they needed.
"Murph," I told her. "I can't try figuring this spell out. I can't go putting together the things I'd need to do it. You just don't understand."
She glared at me, without looking at my eyes. I hadn't ever met anyone else who could pull that one off. "Oh, I understand. I understand that I've got a killer loose that I can't catch in the act. I understand that you know something that can help, or you can at least find out something. And I understand that if you dry up on me now, I'm tearing your card out of the department Rolodex and tossing it in the trash."
Son of a bitch. My consulting for the department paid a lot of my bills. Okay, most of my bills. I could sympathize with her, I supposed. If I was operating in the dark like she was, I'd be nervous as hell, too. Murphy didn't know anything about spells or rituals or talismans, but she knew human hatred and violence all too well.
It wasn't as though I was actually going to be doing any black magic, I told myself. I was just going to be figuring out how it was done. There was a difference. I was helping the police in an investigation, nothing more. Maybe the White Council would understand that.
Yeah, right. And maybe one of these days I'd go to an art museum and become well rounded.
Murphy set the hook a second later. She looked up at my eyes for a daring second before she turned away, her face tired and honest and proud. "I need to know everything you can tell me, Harry. Please."
Classic lady in distress. For one of those liberated, professional women, she knew exactly how to jerk my old-fashioned chains around.
I gritted my teeth. "Fine," I said. "Fine. I'll start on it tonight." Hooboy. The White Council was going to love this one. I'd just have to make sure they didn't find out about it.
Murphy nodded and let out a breath without looking at me. Then she said, "Let's get out of here," and walked toward the door. I didn't try to beat her to it.
When we walked out, the uniform cops were still lazing around in the hall outside. Carmichael was nowhere to be seen. The guys from forensics were there, standing around impatiently, waiting for us to come out. Then they gathered up their plastic bags and tweezers and lights and things and filed past us into the room.
Murphy was brushing at her windblown hair with her hand while we waited for the ancient elevator to take its sweet time getting up to the seventh floor. She was wearing a gold watch, which reminded me. "Oh, hey," I asked her. "What time is it?"
She checked. "Two twenty-five. Why?"
I breathed out a curse, and turned for the stairs. "I'm late for my appointment."
I fairly flew down the stairs. I've had a lot of practice at them, after all, and I hit the lobby at a jog. I managed to dodge a porter coming through the front doors with an armload of luggage, and swung out onto the sidewalk at a lope. I have long legs that eat a lot of ground. I was running into the wind, my black duster billowing out behind me.
It was several blocks to my building, and after covering half of them I slowed to a walk. I didn't want to arrive at my appointment with Monica Missing-Man puffing like a bellows, with my hair windblown and my face streaming with sweat.
Blame it on being out of shape from an inactive winter season, but I was breathing hard. It occupied enough of my attention that I didn't see the dark blue Cadillac until it had pulled up beside me, and a rather large man had stepped out of it onto the sidewalk in front of me. He had bright red hair and a thick neck. His face looked like someone had smashed it flat with a board, repeatedly, when he was a baby---except for his jutting eyebrows. He had narrow little blue eyes that got narrower as I sized him up.
I stopped, and backed away, then turned around. Two more men, both of them as tall as me and a good deal heavier, were slowing down from their own jog. They had apparently been following me, and they looked annoyed. One was limping slightly, and the other wore a buzz cut that had been spiked up straight with some kind of styling gel. I felt like I was in high school again, surrounded by bullying members of the football team.
"Can I help you gentlemen?" I asked. I looked around for a cop, but they were all over at the Madison, I supposed. Everyone likes to gawk.
"Get in the car," the one in front of me said. One of the others opened the rear door.
"I like to walk. It's good for my heart."
"You don't get in the car, it isn't going to be good for your legs," the man growled.
A voice came from inside the car. "Mister Hendricks, please. Be more polite. Mister Dresden, would you join me for a moment? I'd hoped to give you a lift back to your office, but your abrupt exit made it somewhat problematic. Perhaps you will allow me to convey you the rest of the way."
I leaned down to look into the backseat. A man of handsome and unassuming features, dressed in a casual sports jacket and Levi's, regarded me with a smile. "And you would be?" I asked him.
His smile widened, and I swear it made his eyes twinkle.
"My name is John Marcone. I would like to discuss business with you."
I stared at him for a moment. And then my eyes slid aside to the very large and very overdeveloped Mister Hendricks. The man growled under his breath, and it sounded like Cujo just before he jumped at the woman in the car. I didn't feel like duking it out with Cujo and his two buddies.
So I got into the back of the Caddy with Gentleman Johnny Marcone.
It was turning out to be a very busy day. And I was still late for my appointment.
Gentleman Johnny Marcone didn't look like the sort of man who would have my legs broken or my jaw wired shut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, and there were lines from sun and smiling etched into the corners of his eyes. His eyes were the green of well-worn dollar bills. He seemed more like a college football coach: good-looking, tanned, athletic, and enthusiastic. The impression was reinforced by the men he kept with him. Cujo Hendricks hulked like an all-pro player who had been ousted for extreme unnecessary roughness.
Cujo got in the car again, glowered at me in the rearview mirror, then pulled out into the street, driving slowly toward my office. The steering wheel looked tiny and delicate in his huge hands. I made a mental note: Do not let Cujo put his hands around your throat. Or hand. It looked almost like one of them could manage it.
The radio was playing, but as I got in the car it fouled up, squealing feedback out over the speakers. Hendricks scowled and thought about it for a second. Maybe he had to relay the message through his second brain or something. Then he reached out and fiddled with the knobs before finally turning the radio off. At this rate I hoped the car would make it all the way to my office.
"Mister Dresden," Marcone said, smiling, "I understand that you work for the police department, from time to time."
"They throw the occasional tidbit my way," I agreed. "Hey, Hendricks. You should really wear your seat belt. Statistics say you're fifty or sixty percent safer."
Cujo growled at me in the rearview mirror again, and I beamed at him. Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.
Marcone seemed somewhat put off by my attitude. Maybe I was supposed to be holding my hat in my hand, but I had never really liked Francis Ford Coppola, and I didn't have a Godfather. (I do have a Godmother, and she is, inevitably perhaps, a faery. But that's another story.) "Mister Dresden," he said. "How much would it cost to retain your services?"
That made me wary. What would someone like Marcone want me for? "My standard fee is fifty dollars an hour plus travel expenses," I told him. "But it can vary, depending on what you need done."
Marcone nodded along with my sentences, as if encouraging me to speak. He wrinkled up his face as if carefully considering what he would say, and taking my well-being into account with grandfatherly concern. "How much would it set me back to have you not investigate something?"
"You want to pay me to not do something?"
"Let's say I pay you your standard fee. That comes out to fourteen hundred a day, right?"
"Twelve hundred, actually," I corrected him.
He beamed at me. "An honest man is a rare treasure. Twelve hundred a day. Let's say I pay you for two weeks' worth of work, Mister Dresden, and you take some time off. Go catch a few movies, get some extra sleep, that sort of thing."
I eyed him. "And for more than a thousand dollars a day, you want me to...?"
"Do nothing, Mister Dresden." Marcone smiled. "Nothing at all. Just relax, and put your feet up. And stay out of Detective Murphy's way."
Ah-hah. Marcone didn't want me looking into Tommy Tomm's murder. Interesting. I looked out the window and squinted my eyes, as though thinking about it.
"I've got the money with me," Marcone said. "Cash on the spot. I'll trust you to fulfill your end of the deal, Mister Dresden. You come highly recommended for your honesty."
"Mmmm. I don't know, John. I'm kind of busy to be accepting any more accounts right now." The car was almost to my office building. The car door was still unlocked. I hadn't worn my seat belt, either---just in case I needed to throw the door open and jump out. See how I think ahead? It's that wizardly intellect---and paranoia.
Marcone's smile faltered. His expression became earnest. "Mister Dresden, I am quite eager to establish a positive working relationship, here. If it's the money, I can offer you more. Let's say double your usual fee." He steepled his hands in front of him as he talked, half-turning toward me. My God, I kept expecting him to tell me to go out there and win one for the Gipper. He smiled. "How does that sound?"
"It isn't the money, John," I told him. I lazily locked my eyes onto his. "I just don't think it's going to work out."
To my surprise, he didn't look away.
Those who deal in magic learn to see the world in a slightly different light than everyone else. You gain a perspective you had never considered before, a way of thinking that would just never have occurred to you without exposure to the things a wizard sees and hears.
When you look into someone's eyes, you see them in that other light. And, for just a second, they see you in the same way. Marcone and I looked at one another.
He was a soldier, a warrior, behind that relaxed smile and fatherly manner. He was going to get what he wanted and he was going to get it in the most efficient way possible. He was a dedicated man---dedicated to his goals, dedicated to his people. He never let fear affect him. He made a living on human misery and suffering, peddling in drugs and flesh and stolen goods, but he took steps to minimize that suffering because it was simply the most efficient means of running his business. He was furious over Tommy Tomm's death---a cold and practical kind of fury that his rightful dominion had been invaded and challenged. He intended to find those responsible and deal with them in his own way---and he didn't want the police interfering. He had killed before, and would again, and it would all mean nothing more to him than a business transaction, than paying for groceries in the checkout line. It was a dry and cool place, inside Gentleman Johnny Marcone. Except for one dim corner. There, hidden away from his everyday thoughts, there lurked a secret shame. I couldn't quite see what it was. But I knew that somewhere in the past there was something that he would give anything to undo, would spill blood to erase. It was from that dark place that he drew his resolve, his strength.
That was the way I saw him when I looked inside, past all his pretenses and defenses. And I was, on some instinctual level, certain that he had been aware of what I would see if I looked---that he had deliberately met my gaze, knowing what he would give away. That was his purpose in getting me alone. He wanted to take a peek at my soul. He wanted to see what sort of man I was.
When I look into someone's eyes, into their soul, their innermost being, they can see mine in return---the things I had done, the things I was willing to do, the things I was capable of doing. Most people who did that got really pale, at least. One woman had passed out entirely. I didn't know what they saw when they looked in there---it wasn't a place I poked around much, myself.
John Marcone wasn't like the other people who had seen my soul. He didn't even blink an eye. He just looked and assessed, and after the moment had passed, he nodded at me as though he understood something. I got the uncomfortable impression that he had duped me. That he had found out more about me than I had about him. The first thing I felt was anger, anger at being manipulated, anger that he should presume to soulgaze upon me.
Just a second later, I felt scared to death of this man. I had looked on his soul and it had been as solid and barren as a stainless-steel refrigerator. It was more than unsettling. He was strong, inside, savage and merciless without being cruel. He had a tiger's soul.
"All right, then," he said, smoothly, and as though nothing had happened. "I won't try to force my offer on you, Mister Dresden." The car was slowing down as it approached my building, and Hendricks pulled over in front of it. "But let me offer you some advice." He had dropped the father-talking-to-son act, and spoke in a calm and patient voice.
"If you don't charge for it." Thank God for wisecracks. I was too rattled to have said anything intelligent.
Marcone almost smiled. "I think you'll be happier if you come down with the flu for a few days. This business that Detective Murphy has asked you to look into doesn't need to be dragged out into the light. You won't like what you see. It's on my side of the fence. Just let me deal with it, and it won't ever trouble you."
"Are you threatening me?" I asked him. I didn't think he was, but I didn't want him to know that. It would have helped if my voice hadn't been shaking.
"No," he said, frankly. "I have too much respect for you to resort to something like that. They say that you're the real thing, Mister Dresden. A real magus."
"They also say I'm nutty as a fruitcake."
"I choose which 'they' I listen to very carefully," Marcone said. "Think about what I've said, Mister Dresden. I do not think our respective lines of work need overlap often. I would as soon not make an enemy of you over this matter."
I clenched my jaw over my fear, and spat words out at him quick and hard. "You don't want to make an enemy of me, Marcone. That wouldn't be smart. That wouldn't be smart at all."
He narrowed his eyes at me, lazy and relaxed. He could meet my eyes by then without fear. We had taken a measure of one another. It would not happen in such a way again. "You really should try to be more polite, Mister Dresden," he said. "It's good for business."
I didn't give him an answer to that: I didn't have one that wouldn't sound frightened or stupidly macho. Instead, I told him, "If you ever lose your car keys, give me a call. Don't try offering me money or threats again. Thanks for the ride."
He watched me, his expression never changing, as I got out of the car and shut the door. Hendricks pulled out and drove away, after giving me one last dirty look. I had soulgazed on several people before. It wasn't the sort of thing you forgot. I had never run into someone like that, someone so cool and controlled---even the other practitioners I had met gazes with had not been that way. None of them had simply assessed me like a column of numbers and filed it away for reference in future equations.
I stuck my hands in the pockets of my duster, and shivered as the wind hit me. I was a wizard, throwing around real magic, I reminded myself. I was not afraid of big men in big cars. I do not get rattled by corpses blasted from life by magic more intense than anything I could manage. Really. Honest.
But those dollar-bill-colored eyes, backed by that cool and nearly passionless soul, had me shaking as I took the stairs back up to my office. I had been stupid. He had surprised me, and the sudden intimacy of the soulgaze had startled and frightened me. All added together, it had caused me to fall apart, throwing threats at him like a frightened schoolkid. Marcone was a predator. He practically smelled my fear. If he got to thinking I was weak, I had a feeling that polite smile and fatherly facade would vanish as thoroughly and as quickly as it had appeared.
What a rotten first impression.
Oh, well. At least I was going to be on time for my appointment.
Monica No-Last-Name was standing outside of my office when I got there, writing on the back of the note I had left taped to my office door.
I walked toward her, but she was too intent upon her writing to look up. She was a good-looking woman, in her mid-thirtysomethings. Ash blond hair that I thought must be natural, after a morbid and involuntary memory of the dead woman's dye job. Her makeup was tasteful and well applied, and her face was fair, friendly, with enough roundness of cheek to look fresh-faced and young, enough fullness of mouth to look very feminine. She was wearing a long, full skirt of palest yellow with brown riding boots, a crisp white blouse, and an expensive-looking green cardigan over it, to ward off the chill of early spring. She had to be in good shape to pull off a color combination like that, and she did it. Overall, it was a naggingly familiar look, something like Annette Funicello or Barbara Billingsley, maybe---wholesome and all-American.
"Monica?" I asked. I put on my most innocent and friendly smile.
She blinked at me as I approached. "Oh. Are you, um, Harry..."
I smiled and offered her my hand. "Harry Dresden, ma'am. That's me."
She took my hand after a tiny pause and kept her eyes firmly focused on my chest. At this point, I was just as glad to be dealing with someone who was too nervous to risk looking at my eyes. I gave her a firm but gentle handshake, and let go of her, brushing past her to unlock the office door and open it up. "I apologize for being late. I got a call from the police that I had to look in on."
"You did?" she asked. "You mean, the police, um..." She waved her fingers instead of finishing the sentence and entered when I held the door open for her.
"Sometimes." I nodded. "They run into something and want my take on it."
"What sorts of things?"
I shrugged and swallowed. I thought of the corpses at the Madison, and felt green. When I looked up at Monica, she was studying my face, chewing on her lip nervously. She hurriedly averted her gaze.
"Can I get you some coffee?" I asked her. I shut the door behind us, flicked on the lights.
"Oh. No, thank you. I'm fine." She stood there, looking at my box of discarded paperbacks and holding her purse over her tummy with both hands. I thought she might scream if I said boo so I made sure to move carefully and slowly, making myself a cup of instant coffee. I breathed in and out, going through the familiar motions, until I had calmed down from my encounter with Marcone. By the time I was done, so was my coffee. I went to my desk, and invited her to have a seat in one of the two chairs across from me.
"Okay, Monica," I said. "What can I do for you today?"
"Well, um. I told you that my husband was...was..." She nodded at me, gesturing.
"Missing?" I supplied.
"Yes," she said with an exhalation of almost relief. "But he's not mysteriously missing or anything. Just gone." She flushed and stammered. "Like he just packed up a few things and left. But he didn't say anything to anyone. And he hasn't showed up again. I'm concerned about him."
"Uh-huh," I said. "How long has he been gone?"
"This is the third day," she said.
I nodded. "There must be some reason why you're coming to me, rather than a private investigator or the police."
She blushed again. She had a good face for blushing, fair skin that colored girlishly. It was quite fetching, really. "Yes, um. He had been interested in...in..."
"Magic?"
"Yes. He had been buying books on it in the religion section at the bookstore. Not like those Dungeons and Dragons games. The real thing. He bought some of those tarot cards." She pronounced it like carrot. Amateurs.
"And you think his disappearance might have had something to do with this interest?"
"I'm not sure," she confessed. "But maybe. He was very upset. He had just lost his job and was under a lot of pressure. I'm worried about him. I thought whoever found him might need to be able to talk to him about all of this stuff." She took a deep breath, as if the effort of completing so many sentences without a single um had tired her.
"I'm still not clear on this. Why me? Why not the police?"
Her knuckles whitened on her purse. "He packed a bag, Mr. Dresden. I think the police will just assume he left his wife and his children. They won't really look. But he didn't. He's not like that. He only wants to make a good life for us. Really, that's all he wants."
I frowned at her. Nervous that maybe hubby has run out on you after all, dear? "Even so," I said, "why come to me? Why not a private investigator? I know a reliable man if you need one."
"Because you know about..." She gestured, fitfully.
"About magic," I said.
Monica nodded. "I think it might be important. I mean, I don't know. But I think it might."
"Where did he work?" I asked her. While I spoke, I got a pad of paper out of my pocket and jotted down a few notes.
"SilverCo," she told me. "They're a trading company. They locate good markets for products and then advise companies where they can best spend their money."
"Uh-huh," I said. "What is his name, Monica?"
She swallowed, and I saw her twitching, trying to think of something to tell me other than his real name. "George," she supplied at last.
I looked up at her. She was staring furiously down at her hands.
"Monica," I said. "I know this must be really hard for you. Believe me, ma'am, there are plenty of people who are nervous when they come into my office. But please, hear me out. I am not out to hurt you or anyone else. What I do, I do to help people. It's true that someone with the right skills could use your names against you, but I'm not like that." I borrowed a line from Johnny Marcone. "It isn't good business."
She gave a nervous little laugh. "I feel so silly," she confessed. "But there's so many things that I've heard about..."
"Wizards. I see." I put my pencil down and steepled my fingers in wizardly fashion. The woman was nervous and had certain expectations. I might ease her fears a little if I fulfilled some of them. I tried not to look over her shoulder at the calendar I had hanging on the wall, and the red circle around the fifteenth of last month. Late rent. Need money. Even with the fee from today and what I would make in the future, it would take the city forever to pay up.
Besides, I could never resist going to the aid of a lady in distress. Even if she wasn't completely, one hundred percent sure that she wanted to be rescued by me.
"Monica," I told her. "There are powers in the universe that most people don't even know about. Powers that we still don't fully understand. The men and women who work with these powers see things in a different light than regular people. They come to understand things in a slightly different way. This sets them apart. Sometimes it breeds unwarranted suspicion and fear. I know you've read books and seen movies about how horrible people like me are, and that whole 'suffer not a witch to live' part of the Old Testament hasn't made things all roses. But we really aren't any different from anyone else." I gave her my best smile. "I want to help you. But if I'm going to do that, you're going to have to give me a little trust. I promise. I give you my word that I won't disappoint you."
I saw her take this in and chew on it for a while, while staring down at her hands.
"Victor," she said at last. "Victor Sells."
"All right," I said, picking up my pencil and duly noting it. "Is there anyplace he might have gone that you can think of, offhand?"
She nodded. "The lake house. We have a house down by..." She waved her hand.
"The lake?"
She beamed at me, and I reminded myself to be patient. "In Lake Providence, over the state line, around Lake Michigan. It's beautiful up there in the autumn."
"Okay, then. Are you aware of any friends he might have run off to see, family he might have visited, anything like that?"
"Oh, Victor wasn't on speaking terms with his family. I never knew why. He didn't talk about them, really. We've been married for ten years, and he never once spoke to them."
"Okay," I said, noting that down, too. "Friends, then?"
She fretted her lip, a gesture that seemed familiar to her. "Not really. He was friends with his boss, and some people at work, but after he was fired..."
"Uh-huh," I said. "I understand." I continued writing things down, drawing bold lines between thoughts to separate them. I spilled over onto the next page before I was finished writing down the facts and my observations about Monica. I like to be thorough about this kind of thing.
"Well, Mr. Dresden?" she asked. "Can you help me?"
I looked over the page and nodded. "I think so, Monica. If possible, I'd like to see these things your husband collected. Which books and so on. It would help if I had a picture of him, too. I might like to take a look around your house at Lake Providence. Would that be all right?"
"Of course," she said. She seemed relieved, but at the same time even more nervous than before. I noted down the address of the lake house and brief directions.
"You're aware of my fees?" I asked her. "I'm not cheap. It might be less costly for you to hire someone else."
"We've got quite a bit of savings, Mr. Dresden," she told me. "I'm not worried about the money." That seemed an odd statement from her, at the time---out of tune with her generally nervous manner.
"Well, then," I told her. "I charge fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses. I'll send you an itemized list of what I do, so you'll have a good idea what I'm working on. A retainer is customary. I'm not going to guarantee that I work exclusively on your case. I try to handle each of my customers with respect and courtesy, so I can't put any one of them before another."
She nodded to me, emphatically, and reached into her purse. She drew out a white envelope and passed it over to me. "There's five hundred inside," she told me. "Is that enough for now?"
Cha-ching. Five hundred dollars would take care of last month's rent and a good bit of this month's, too. I could get into this bit with nervous clients wanting to preserve the anonymity of their checking accounts from my supposed sorcerous might. Cash always spends.
"That will be fine, yes," I told her. I tried not to fondle the envelope. At least I wasn't crass enough to dump the money on my desk and count it out.
She drew out another envelope. "He took most of his things with him," she said. "At least, I couldn't find them where he usually keeps them. But I did find this." There was something in the envelope, making it bulge, an amulet, ring, or charm of some kind, I was betting. A third envelope came out of her purse---the woman must be compulsively well organized. "There's a picture of him in here, and my phone number inside. Thank you, Mr. Dresden. When will you call?"
"As soon as I know something," I told her. "Probably by tomorrow afternoon or Saturday morning. Sound good?"
She almost looked at my eyes, caught herself, and smiled directly at my nose instead. "Yes. Yes, thank you so much for your help." She glanced up at the wall. "Oh, look at the time. I need to go. School's almost out." She closed her teeth over her words and flushed again, as though embarrassed that she had let such an important fact about her slip out.
"I'll do whatever I can, ma'am," I assured her, rising, and walking her to the door. "Thank you for your business. I'll be in touch soon."
She said her goodbyes, never looking me in the face, and fled out the door. I shut it behind her and went back to the envelopes.
First, the money. It was all in fifties, which always look new even when they're years old because they get so little circulation. There were ten of them. I put them in my wallet, and trashed the envelope.
The envelope with the photo in it was next. I took it out and regarded a picture of Monica and a man of lean and handsome features, with a wide forehead and shaggy eyebrows that skewed his handsomeness off onto a rather eccentric angle. His smile was whiter-than-white, and his skin had the smooth, dark tan of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun, boating maybe. It was a sharp contrast against Monica's paleness. Victor Sells, I presume.
The phone number was written on a plain white index card that had been neatly trimmed down to fit inside the envelope. There was no name or area code, just a seven-digit number. I got out my cross-listing directory and looked it up.
I noted that down as well. I wondered what the woman had expected to accomplish by only giving out first names, when she had been going to hand me a dozen other ways of finding out in any case. It only goes to show that people are funny when they're nervous about something. They say screwy things, make odd choices which, in retrospect, they feel amazingly foolish for making. I would have to be careful not to say anything to rub that in when I spoke to her again.
I trashed the second envelope and opened the last one, turning it upside down over my desk.
The brown husk of a dead, dried scorpion, glistening with some sort of preservative glaze, clicked down onto my desk. A supple, braided leather cord led off from a ring set through the base of its tail, so that if it was worn, it would hang head down, tail up and curled over the dried body to point at the ground.
I shuddered. Scorpions were symbolically powerful in certain circles of belief. They weren't usually symbols of anything good or wholesome, either. A lot of petty, mean spells could be focused around a little talisman like that. If you wore it next to your skin, as such things are supposed to be worn, the prickly legs of the thing would be a constant poking and agitation at your chest, a continual reminder that it was there. The dried stinger at the tail's tip might actually pierce the skin of anyone who tried to give the wearer a hug. Its crablike pincers would catch in a man's chest hair, or scratch at the curves of a woman's breasts. Nasty, unpleasant thing. Not evil, as such---but you sure as hell weren't likely to do happy shiny things with magic with such an item around your neck.
Maybe Victor Sells had gotten involved in something real, something that had absorbed his attention. The Art could do that to a person---particularly the darker aspects of it. If he had turned to it in despair after losing his job, maybe that would explain his sudden absence from his home. A lot of sorcerers or wannabe sorcerers secluded themselves in the belief that isolation would increase their ability to focus on their magic. It didn't---but it did make it easier for a weak or untrained mind to avoid distractions.
Or maybe it wasn't even a true talisman. Maybe it was just a curiosity, or a souvenir from some visit to the Southwest. There wasn't any way for me to tell if it was indeed a device used to improve the focus and direction of magical energies, short of actually using it to attempt a spell---and I really didn't want to be using such a dubious article, for a variety of good reasons.
I would have to keep this little un-beauty in mind as I tried to run this man down. It might well mean nothing. On the other hand, it might not. I looked up at the clock. A quarter after three. There was time to check with the local morgues to see if they had turned up any likely John Does---who knew, my search might be over before the day's end---and then to get to the bank to deposit my money and fire off a check to my landlord.
I got out my phone book and started calling up hospitals---not really my routine line of work, but not difficult, either, except for the standard problems I had using the telephone: static, line noise, other people's conversations being louder than mine. If something can go wrong, it will.
Once I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a twitch of motion from the dried scorpion that sat on my desk. I blinked and stared at it. It didn't move. Cautiously, I extended my senses toward it like an invisible hand, feeling about for any traces of enchantment or magical energy.
Nothing. It was as dry of enchantment as it was of life.
Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn't going to let it ruin my concentration.
So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.
So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me.
McAnally's is a pub a few blocks from my office. I go there when I'm feeling stressed, or when I have a few extra bucks to spend on a nice dinner. A lot of us fringe types do. Mac, the pub's owner, is used to wizards and all the problems that come along with us. There aren't any video games at McAnally's. There are no televisions or expensive computer trivia games. There isn't even a jukebox. Mac keeps a player piano instead. It's less likely to go haywire around us.
I say pub in all the best senses of the word. When you walk in, you take several steps down into a room with a deadly combination of a low clearance and ceiling fans. If you're tall, like me, you walk carefully in McAnally's. There are thirteen stools at the bar and thirteen tables in the room. Thirteen windows, set up high in the wall in order to be above ground level, let some light from the street into the place. Thirteen mirrors on the walls cast back reflections of the patrons in dim detail, and give the illusion of more space. Thirteen wooden columns, carved with likenesses from folktales and legends of the Old World, make it difficult to walk around the place without weaving a circuitous route---they also quite intentionally break up the flow of random energies, dispelling to one degree or another the auras that gather around broody, grumpy wizards and keeping them from manifesting in unintentional and colorful ways. The colors are all muted, earth browns and sea greens. The first time I entered McAnally's, I felt like a wolf returning to an old, favorite den. Mac makes his own beer, ale really, and it's the best stuff in the city. His food is cooked on a wood-burning stove. And you can damn well walk your own self over to the bar to pick up your order when it's ready, according to Mac. It's my sort of place.
Since the calls to the morgues had turned up nothing, I kept a few bills out of Monica Sells's retainer and took myself to McAnally's. After the kind of day I'd had, I deserved some of Mac's ale and someone else's cooking. It was going to be a long night, too, once I went home and started trying to figure out how whoever it was had pulled off the death spell used on Johnny Marcone's hatchet man, Tommy Tomm, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Stanton.
"Dresden," Mac greeted me, when I sat down at the bar. The dim, comfortable room was empty, but for a pair of men I recognized by sight at a back table, playing chess. Mac is a tall, almost gangly man of indeterminate age, though there's a sense to him that speaks of enough wisdom and strength that I wouldn't venture that he was less than fifty. He has squinty eyes and a smile that is rare and mischievous when it manifests. Mac never says much, but when he does it's almost always worth listening to.
"Hey there, Mac," I hailed him. "Been one hell of a day. Give me a steak sandwich, fries, ale."
"Ungh," Mac said. He opened a bottle of his ale and began to pour it warm, staring past me, into the middle distance. He does that with everyone. Considering his clientele, I don't blame him. I wouldn't chance looking them in the face, either.
"You hear about what happened at the Madison?"
"Ungh," he confirmed.
"Nasty business."
Such an inane comment apparently didn't merit even a grunted reply. Mac set my drink out and turned to the stove behind the bar, checking the wood and raking it back and forth to provide even heating for it.
I picked up a prethumbed newspaper nearby and scanned the headlines. "Hey, look at this. Another ThreeEye rampage. Jesus, this stuff is worse than crack." The article detailed the virtual demolition of a neighborhood grocery store by a pair of ThreeEye junkies who were convinced that the place was destined to explode and wanted to beat destiny to the punch.
"Ungh."
"You ever seen anything like this?"
Mac shook his head.
"They say the stuff gives you the third sight," I said, reading the article. Both junkies had been admitted to the hospital and were in critical condition, after collapsing at the scene. "But you know what?"
Mac looked back at me from the stove, while he cooked.
"I don't think that's possible. What a bunch of crap. Trying to sell these poor kids on the idea that they can do magic."
Mac nodded at me.
"If it was serious stuff, the department would have already called me by now."
Mac shrugged, turning back to the stove. Then he squinted up and peered into the dim reflection of the mirror behind the bar.
"Harry," he said, "you were followed."
I had been too tense for too much of the day to avoid feeling my shoulders constrict in a sudden twinge. I put both hands around my mug and brought a few phrases of quasi-Latin to mind. It never hurt to be ready to defend myself, in case someone was intending to hurt me. I watched someone approach, a dim shape in the reflection cast by the ancient, worn mirror. Mac went on with cooking, unperturbed. Nothing much perturbed Mac.
I smelled her perfume before I turned around. "Why, Miss Rodriguez," I said. "It's always pleasant to see you."
She came to an abrupt stop a couple of paces from me, apparently disconcerted. One of the advantages of being a wizard is that people always attribute anything you do to magic, if no other immediate explanation leaps to mind. She probably wouldn't think about her perfume giving her identity away when she could assign my mysterious, blind identification of her to my mystical powers.
"Come on," I told her. "Sit down. I'll get you a drink while I refuse to tell you anything."
"Harry," she admonished me, "you don't know I'm here on business." She sat down on the barstool next to me. She was a woman of average height and striking, dark beauty, wearing a crisp business jacket and skirt, hose, pumps. Her dark, straight hair was trimmed in a neat cut that ended at the nape of her neck and was parted off of the dark skin of her forehead, emphasizing the lazy appeal of her dark eyes.
"Susan," I chided her, "you wouldn't be in this place if you weren't. Did you have a good time in Branson?"
Susan Rodriguez was a reporter for the Chicago Arcane, a yellow magazine that covered all sorts of supernatural and paranormal events throughout the Midwest. Usually, the events they covered weren't much better than "Monkey Man Seen With Elvis's Love Child," or "JFK's Mutant Ghost Abducts Shapeshifting Girl Scout." But once in a great, great while, the Arcane covered something that was real. Like the Unseelie Incursion of 1994, when the entire city of Milwaukee had simply vanished for two hours. Gone. Government satellite photos showed the river valley covered with trees and empty of life or human habitation. All communications ceased. Then, a few hours later, there it was, back again, and no one in the city itself the wiser.
She had also been hanging around my investigation in Branson the previous week. She had been tracking me ever since interviewing me for a feature story, right after I'd opened up my business. I had to hand it to her---she had instincts. And enough curiosity to get her into ten kinds of trouble. She had tricked me into meeting her eyes at the conclusion of our first interview, an eager young reporter investigating an angle on her interviewee. She was the one who had fainted after we'd soulgazed.
She smirked at me. I liked her smirk. It did interesting things to her lips, and hers were already attractive. "You should have stayed around for the show," she said. "It was pretty impressive." She put her purse on the bar and slid up onto the stool beside me.
"No thanks," I told her. "I'm pretty sure it wasn't for me."
"My editor loved the coverage. She's convinced it's going to win an award of some kind."
"I can see it now," I told her. "'Mysterious Visions Haunt Drug-Using Country Star.' Real hard-hitting paranormal journalism, that." I glanced at her, and she met my eyes without fear. She didn't let me see if my gibe had ruffled her.
"I heard you got called in by the S.I. director today," she told me. She leaned toward me, enough that a glance down would have afforded an interesting angle to the V of her white shirt. "I'd love to hear you tell me about this one, Harry." She quirked a smile at me that promised things.
I almost smiled back at her. "Sorry," I told her. "I have a standard nondisclosure agreement with the city."
"Something off the record, then?" she asked. "Rumor has it that these killings were pretty sensational."
"Can't help you, Susan," I told her. "Wild horses couldn't drag it out of me, et cetera."
"Just a hint," she pressed. "A word of comment. Something shared between two people who are very attracted to one another."
"Which two people would that be?"
She put an elbow on the counter and propped her chin in her hand, studying me through narrowed eyes and thick, long lashes. One of the things that appealed to me about her was that even though she used her charm and femininity relentlessly in pursuit of her stories, she had no concept of just how attractive she really was---I had seen that when I looked within her last year. "Harry Dresden," she said, "you are a thoroughly maddening man." Her eyes narrowed a bit further. "You didn't look down my blouse even once, did you?" she accused.
I took a sip of my ale and beckoned Mac to pour her one as well. He did. "Guilty."
"Most men are off-balance by now," she complained. "What does it take with you, anyway, Dresden?"
"I am pure of heart and mind," I told her. "I cannot be corrupted."
She stared at me in frustration for a moment. Then she tilted back her head to laugh. She had a good laugh, too, throaty and rich. I did look down at her chest when she did that, just for a second. A pure heart and mind only takes you so far---sooner or later the hormones have their say, too. I mean, I'm not a teenager or anything, anymore, but I'm not exactly an expert in things like this, either. Call it an overwhelming interest in my professional career, but I've never had much time for dating or the fair sex in general. And when I have, it hasn't turned out too well.
Susan was a known quantity---she was attractive, bright, appealing, her motivations were clear and simple, and she was honest in pursuing them. She flirted with me because she wanted information as much as because she thought I was attractive. Sometimes she got it. Sometimes she didn't. This one was way too hot for Susan or the Arcane to touch, and if Murphy heard I'd tipped someone off about what had happened, she'd have my heart between two pieces of bread for lunch.
"I'll tell you what, Harry," she said. "How about if I ask some questions, and you just answer them with a yes or a no?"
"No," I said promptly. Dammit. I am a poor liar, and it didn't take a reporter with Susan's brains to tell it.
Her eyes glittered with cheerfully malicious ambition. "Was Tommy Tomm murdered by a paranormal being or means?"
"No," I said again, stubbornly.
"No, he wasn't?" Susan asked. "Or no, it wasn't a paranormal being?"
I glanced at Mac as though to appeal for help. Mac ignored me. Mac doesn't take sides. Mac is wise.
"No, I'm not going to answer questions," I said.
"Do the police have any leads? Any suspects?"
"No."
"Are you a suspect yourself, Harry?"
Disturbing thought. "No," I said, exasperated. "Susan---"
"Would you mind having dinner with me Saturday night?"
"No! I---" I blinked at her. "What?"
She smiled at me, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips, which I'd admired so much, felt very, very nice. "Super," she said. "I'll pick you up at your place. Say around nine?"
"Did I just miss something?" I asked her.
She nodded, dark eyes sparkling with humor. "I'm going to take you to a fantastic dinner. Have you ever eaten at the Pump Room? At the Ambassador East?"
I shook my head.
"Steaks you wouldn't believe," she assured me. "And the most romantic atmosphere. Jackets and ties required. Can you manage?"
"Um. Yes?" I said, carefully. "This is the answer to the question of whether or not I'll go out with you, right?"
"No," Susan said, with a smile. "That was the answer I tricked out of you, so you're stuck, there. I just want to make sure you own something besides jeans and button-down Western shirts."
"Oh. Yes," I said.
"Super," she repeated, and kissed me on the cheek once more as she stood up and gathered her purse. "Saturday, then." She drew back and quirked her smirky little smile at me. It was a killer look, sultry and appealing. "I'll be there. With bells on."
She turned and walked out. I sort of turned to stare after her. My jaw slid off the bar as I did and landed on the floor.
Had I just agreed to a date? Or an interrogation session?
"Probably both," I muttered.
Mac slapped my steak sandwich and fries down in front of me. I put down some money, morosely, and he made change.
"She's going to do nothing but try to trick information out of me that I shouldn't be giving her, Mac," I said.
"Ungh," Mac agreed.
"Why did I say yes?"
Mac shrugged.
"She's pretty," I said. "Smart. Sexy."
"Ungh."
"Any red-blooded man would have done the same thing."
"Hngh," Mac snorted.
"Well. Maybe not you."
Mac smiled a bit, mollified.
"Still. It's going to make trouble for me. I must be crazy to go for someone like that." I picked up my sandwich, and sighed.
"Dumb," Mac said.
"I just said she was smart, Mac."
Mac's face flickered into that smile, and it made him look years younger, almost boyish. "Not her," he said. "You."
I ate my dinner. And had to admit that he was right.
This threw a wrench into my plans. My best idea for poking around the Sells lake house and getting information had to be carried out at night. And I already had tomorrow night slated for a talk with Bianca, since I had a feeling Murphy and Carmichael would fail to turn up any cooperation from the vampiress. That meant I would have to drive out to Lake Providence tonight, since Saturday night was now occupied by the date with Susan---or at least the premidnight portion was.
My mouth went dry when I considered that maybe the rest of the night might be occupied, too. One never knew. She had dizzied me and made me look like an idiot, and she was probably going to try every trick she knew to drag more information out of me for the Monday morning release of the Arcane. On the other hand, she was sexy, intelligent, and at least a little attracted to me. That indicated that more might happen than just talk and dinner. Didn't it?
The question was, did I really want that to happen?
I had been a miserable failure in relationships, ever since my first love went sour. I mean, a lot of teenage guys fail in their first relationships.
Not many of them murder the girl involved.
I shied away from that line of thought, lest it bring up too many old memories.
I left McAnally's, after Mac had handed me a doggy bag with a grunt of "Mister," by way of explanation. The chess game in the corner was still in progress, both players puffing up a sweet-smelling smog cloud from their pipes. I tried to figure out how to deal with Susan, while I walked out to my car. Did I need to clean up my apartment? Did I have all the ingredients for the spell I would cast at the lake house later tonight? Would Murphy go through the roof when I talked to Bianca?
I could still feel Susan's kiss lingering on my cheek as I got in the car.
I shook my head, bewildered. They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we've got nothing, nothing at all, on women.
Mister was nowhere to be seen when I got home, but I left the food in his dish anyway. He would eventually forgive me for getting home late. I collected the things I would need from my kitchen---fresh-baked bread with no preservatives, honey, milk, a fresh apple, a sharp silver penknife, and a tiny dinner set of a plate, bowl, and cup that I had carved myself from a block of teakwood.
I went back out to my car. The Beetle isn't really blue anymore, since both doors have been replaced, one with a green clone, one with a white one, and the hood of the storage trunk in front had to be replaced with a red duplicate, but the name stuck anyway. Mike is a super mechanic. He never asked questions about the burns that slagged a hole in the front hatch or the claw marks that ruined both the doors. You can't pay for service like that.
I revved up the Beetle and drove down I-94, around the shore of Lake Michigan, crossing through Indiana, briefly, and then crossing over the state line into Michigan itself. Lake Providence is an expensive, high-class community with big houses and sprawling estates. It isn't cheap to own land there. Victor Sells must have been doing well in his former position at SilverCo to afford a place out that way.
The lakeshore drive wound in and out among thick, tall trees and rolling hills down to the shore. The properties were well spread out, several hundred yards between them. Most of them were fenced in and had gates on the right side of the road, away from the lake as I drove north. The Sells house was the only one I saw on the lake side of the drive.
A smooth gravel lane, lined by trees, led back from the lakeshore drive to the Sells house. A peninsula jutted out into the lake, leaving enough room for the house and a small dock, at which no boats were moored. The house was not a large one, by the standards of the rest of the Lake Providence community. Built on two levels, it was a very modern dwelling---a lot of glass and wood that was made to look like something more synthetic than wood by the way it had been smoothed and cut and polished. The drive curved around to the back of the house, where a driveway big enough to host a five-on-five game of basketball around a backboard erected to one side was overlooked by a wooden deck leading off the second level of the house.
I drove the Blue Beetle around to the back of the house and parked there. My ingredients were in a black nylon backpack, and I picked that up and brought it with me as I got out of the car and stretched my legs. The breeze coming up from the lake was cool enough to make me shiver a little, and I drew my mantled duster closed across my belly.
First impressions are important, and I wanted to listen to what my instincts said about the house. I stopped for a long moment and just stared up at it.
My instincts must have been holding out for another bottle of Mac's ale. They had little to say, other than that the place looked like a pricey little dwelling that had hosted a family through many a vacation weekend. Well, where instinct fails, intellect must venture. Almost everything was fairly new. The grass around the house had not grown long enough, this winter, to require a cutting. The basketball net was stretched out and loose enough to show that it had been used fairly often. The curtains were all drawn.
On the grass beneath the deck something red gleamed, and I went beneath the deck to retrieve it. It was a plastic film canister, red with a grey cap, the kind you keep a roll of film in when you send it in to the processors. Film canisters were good for holding various ingredients I used, sometimes. I tucked it in my duster's pocket and continued my inspection.
The place didn't look much like a family dwelling, really. It looked like a rich man's love nest, a secluded little getaway nestled back in the trees of the peninsula and safe from spying eyes. Or an ideal location for a novice sorcerer to come to try out his fledgling abilities, safe from interruptions. A good place for Victor Sells to set up shop and practice.
I made a quick circuit of the house, tried the front and rear doors, and even the door up on the deck that led, presumably, to a kitchen. All were locked. Locks really weren't an obstacle, but Monica Sells hadn't invited me actually to take a look inside the house, just around it. It's bad juju to go tromping into people's houses uninvited. One of the reasons vampires, as a rule, don't do it---they have enough trouble just holding themselves together, outside of the Nevernever. It isn't harmful to a human wizard, like me, but it can really impair anything you try to do with magic. Also, it just isn't polite. Like I said, I'm an old-fashioned sort of guy.
Of course, the TekTronic Securities control panel that I could see through the front window had some say in my decision---not that I couldn't hex it down to a useless bundle of plastic and wires, but a lot of security systems will cause an alarm with their contact company if they abruptly stop working without notice. It would be a useless exercise, in any case---the real information was to be had elsewhere.
Still, something nagged at me, a sense of not-quite-emptiness to the house. On a hunch, I knocked on the front door, several times. I even rang the bell. No one came to answer the door, and no lights were on, inside. I shrugged and walked back to the rear of the house, passing a number of empty trash cans as I did.
Now that was a bit odd. I mean, I would expect a little something in the trash, even if someone hadn't been there in a while. Did the garbage truck come all the way down the drive to pick up the trash cans? That didn't seem likely. If the Sellses came out to the house for the weekend and wanted the trash emptied, it would stand to reason that they'd have to leave it out by the drive near the road as they left. Which would seem to imply that the garbagemen would leave the empty trash cans out by the road. Someone must have brought them back to the house.
Of course, it needn't have been Victor Sells. It could have been a neighbor, or something. Or maybe he tipped the garbagemen to carry the cans back away from the road. But it was something to go on, a little hint that maybe the house hadn't been empty all week.
I left the house behind me and walked out toward the lake. The night was breezy but clear, and a bit cool. The tall old trees creaked and groaned beneath the wind. It was still early for the mosquitoes to be too bad. The moon was waxing toward full overhead, with the occasional cloud slipping past her like a gauzy veil.
It was a perfect night for catching faeries.
I swept an area of dirt not far from the lakeshore clear of leaves and sticks, and took the silver knife from the backpack. Using the handle, I drew a circle in the earth, then covered it up with leaves and sticks again, marking the location of the circle's perimeter in my head. I was careful to focus in concentration on the circle, without actually letting any power slip into it and spoil the trap. Then, working carefully, I prepared the bait by setting out the little cup and bowl. I poured a thimbleful of milk into the cup and daubed the bowl full of honey from the little plastic bear in my backpack.
Then I tore a piece of bread from the loaf I had brought with me and pricked my thumb with the knife. In the silver light of the moon, a bit of dark blood welled up against the skin, and I touched it daintily to the underside of the coarse bread, letting it absorb the blood. Then I set the bread, bloody side down, on the tiny plate.
My trap was set. I gathered up my equipment and retreated to the cover of the trees.
There are two parts of magic you have to understand to catch a faery. One of them is the concept of true names. Everything in the whole world has its own name. Names are unique sounds and cadences of words that are attached to one specific individual---sort of like a kind of theme music. If you know something's name, you can associate yourself with it in a magical sense, almost in the same way a wizard can reach out and touch someone if he possesses a lock of their hair, or fingernail clippings, or blood. If you know something's name, you can create a magical link to it, just as you can call someone up and talk to them if you know their phone number. Just knowing the name isn't good enough, though: You have to know exactly how to say it. Ask two John Franklin Smiths to say their names for you, and you'll get subtle differences in tone and pronunciation, each one unique to its owner. Wizards tend to collect names of creatures, spirits, and people like some kind of huge Rolodex. You never know when it will come in handy.
The other part of magic you need to know is magic-circle theory. Most magic involves a circle of one kind or another. Drawing a circle sets a local limit on what a wizard is trying to do. It helps him refine his magic, focus and direct it more clearly. It does this by creating a sort of screen, defined by the perimeter of the circle, that keeps random magical energy from going past it, containing it within the circle so that it can be used. To make a circle, you draw it out on the ground, or close hands with a bunch of people, or walk about spreading incense, or any of a number of other methods, while focusing on your purpose in drawing it. Then, you invest it with a little spark of energy to close the circuit, and it's ready.
One other thing such a circle does: It keeps magical creatures, like faeries, or even demons, from getting past it. Neat, huh? Usually, this is used to keep them out. It's a bit trickier to set up a circle to keep them in. That's where the blood comes into play. With blood comes power. If you take in some of someone else's blood, there is a metaphysical significance to it, a sort of energy. It's minuscule if you aren't really trying to get energy that way (the way vampires do), but it's enough to close a circle.
Now you know how it's done. But I don't recommend that you try it at home. You don't know what to do when something goes wrong.
I retreated to the trees and called the name of the particular faery I wanted. It was a rolling series of syllables, quite beautiful, really---especially since the faery went by the name of Toot-toot every time I'd encountered him before. I pushed my will out along with the name, just made it a call, something that would be subtle enough to make him wander this way of his own accord. Or at least, that was the theory.
What was his name? Please, do you think wizards just give information like that away? You don't know what I went through to get it.
About ten minutes later, Toot came flickering in over the water of Lake Michigan. At first I mistook him for a reflection of the moon on the side of the softly rolling waves of the lake. Toot was maybe six inches tall. He had silver dragonfly's wings sprouting from his back and the pale, beautiful, tiny humanoid form that echoed the splendor of the fae lords. A silver nimbus of ambient light surrounded him. His hair was a shaggy, silken little mane, like a bird of paradise's plumes, and was a pale magenta.
Toot loved bread and milk and honey---a common vice of the lesser fae. They aren't usually willing to take on a nest of bees to get to the honey, and there's been a real dearth of milk in the Nevernever since hi-tech dairy farms took over most of the industry. Needless to say, they don't grow their own wheat, harvest it, thresh it, and then mill it into flour to make bread, either.
Toot alighted on the ground with caution, scanning around the trees. He didn't see me. I saw him wipe at his mouth and walk in a slow circle around the miniature dining set, one hand rubbing greedily at his stomach. Once he took the bread and closed the circle, I'd be able to bargain information for his release. Toot was a lesser spirit in the area, sort of a dockworker of the Nevernever. If anyone had seen anything of Victor Sells, Toot would have, or would know someone who had.
Toot dithered for a while, fluttering back and forth around the meal, but slowly getting closer. Faeries and honey. Moths and flame. Toot had fallen for this several times before, and it wasn't in the nature of the fae to keep memories for very long, or to change their essential natures. All the same, I held my breath.
The faery finally hunkered down, picked up the bread, dipped it in the honey, then greedily gobbled it down. The circle closed with a little snap that occurred just at the edge of my hearing.
Its effect on Toot was immediate. He screamed a shrill little scream, like a trapped rabbit, and took off toward the lake in a buzzing flurry of wings. At the perimeter of the circle, he smacked into something as solid as a brick wall, and a little puff of silver motes exploded out from him in a cloud. Toot grunted and fell onto his little faery ass on the earth.
"I should have known!" he exclaimed, as I approached from the trees. His voice was high-pitched, but more like a little kid's than the exaggerated kind of faery voices I'd heard in cartoons. "Now I remember where I've seen those plates before! You ugly, sneaky, hamhanded, big-nosed, flat-footed mortal worm!"
"Hiya, Toot," I told him. "Do you remember our deal from last time, or do we need to go over it again?"
Toot glared defiantly up at me and stomped his foot on the ground. More silver faery dust puffed out from the impact. "Release me!" he demanded. "Or I will tell the Queen!"
"If I don't release you," I pointed out, "you can't tell the Queen. And you know just as well as I do what she would say about any dewdrop faery who was silly enough to get himself caught with a lure of bread and milk and honey."
Toot crossed his arms defiantly over his chest. "I warn you, mortal. Release me now, or you will feel the awful, terrible, irresistible might of the faery magic! I will rot your teeth from your head! Take your eyes from their sockets! Fill your mouth with dung and your ears with worms!"
"Hit me with your best shot," I told him. "After that, we can talk about what you need to do to get out of the circle."
I had called his bluff. I always did, but he probably wouldn't remember the details very well. If you live a few hundred years, you tend to forget the little things. Toot sulked and kicked up a little spray of dirt with one tiny foot. "You could at least pretend to be afraid, Harry."
"Sorry, Toot. I don't have the time."
"Time, time," Toot complained. "Is that all you mortals can ever think about? Everyone's complaining about time! The whole city rushes left and right screaming about being late and honking horns! You people used to have it right, you know."
I bore the lecture with good nature. Toot could never keep his mind on the same subject long enough to be really trying, in any case.
"Why, I remember the folk who lived here before you pale, wheezy guys came in. And they never complained about ulcers or---" Toot's eyes wandered to the bread and milk and honey again, and glinted. He sauntered that way, then snatched the remaining bread, sopping up all the honey with it and eating it with greedy, birdlike motions.
"This is good stuff, Harry. None of that funny stuff in it that we get sometimes."
"Preservatives," I said.
"Whatever." Toot drank down the milk, too, in a long pull, then promptly fell down on his back, patting at his rounded tummy. "All right," he said. "Now, let me out."
"Not yet, Toot. I need something first."
Toot scowled up at me. "You wizards. Always needing something. I really could do the thing with the dung, you know." He stood up and folded his arms haughtily over his chest, looking up at me as though I weren't a dozen times taller than he. "Very well," he said, his tone lofty. "I have deigned to grant you a single request of some small nature, for the generous gift of your cuisine."
I worked to keep a straight face. "That's very kind of you."
Toot sniffed and somehow managed to look down his little pug nose at me. "It is my nature to be both benevolent and wise."
I nodded, as though this were a very great wisdom. "Uh-huh. Look, Toot. I need to know if you were around this place for the past few nights, or know someone who was. I'm looking for someone, and maybe he came here."
"And if I tell you," Toot said, "I take it you will disassemble this circle which has, by some odd coincidence no doubt, made its way around me?"
"It would be only reasonable," I said, all seriousness.
Toot seemed to consider it, as though he might be inclined not to cooperate, then nodded. "Very well. You will have the information you wish. Release me."
I narrowed my eyes. "Are you sure? Do you promise?"
Toot stamped his foot again, scattering more silver dust motes. "Harry! You're ruining the drama!"
I folded my arms. "I want to hear you promise."
Toot threw up his hands. "Fine, fine, fine! I promise, I promise, I promise! I'll dig up what you want to know!" He started to buzz about the circle in great agitation, wings lifting him easily into the air. "Let me out! Let me out!"
A promise thrice made is as close to absolute truth as you can get from a faery. I went quickly to the circle and scuffed over the line drawn in the dirt with my foot, willing the circle to part. It did, with a little hiss of released energy.
Toot streaked out over Lake Michigan's waters again, a miniature silver comet, and vanished in a twinkling, just like Santa Claus. Though I should say that Santa is a much bigger and more powerful faery than Toot, and I don't know his true name anyway. You'd never see me trying to nab Saint Nick in a magic circle, even if I did. I don't think anyone has stones that big.
I waited around, walking about to keep from falling asleep. If I did that, Toot would be perfectly within his rights as a faery to fulfill his promise by telling me the information while I was sleeping. And, given that I had just now captured and humiliated him, he'd probably do something to even the scales---two weeks from now he wouldn't even remember it, but if I let him have a free shot at me tonight, I might wake up with an ass's head, and I didn't think that would be good for business.
So I paced, and I waited. Toot usually took about half an hour to round up whatever it was I wanted to know.
Sure enough, half an hour later he came sparkling back in and buzzed around my head, drizzling faery dust from his blurring wings at my eyes. "Hah, Harry!" he said. "I did it!"
"What did you find out, Toot?"
"Guess!"
I snorted. "No."
"Aw, come on. Just a little guess?"
I scowled, tired and irritated, but tried not to let it show. Toot couldn't help being what he was. "Toot, it's late. You promised to tell me."
"No fun at all," he complained. "No wonder you can't get a date unless someone wants to know something from you."
I blinked at him, and he chortled in glee. "Hah! I love it! We're watching you, Harry Dresden!"
Now that was disconcerting. I had a sudden image of a dozen faery voyeurs lingering around my apartment's windows and peering inside. I'd have to take precautions to make sure they couldn't do that. Not that I was afraid of them, or anything. Just in case.
"Just tell me, Toot," I sighed.
"Incoming!" he shrilled, and I held out my hand, fingers flat and palm up. He alighted in the center of my palm. I could barely feel his weight, but the sense, the aura of him ran through my skin like a tiny electric current. He stared fearlessly at my eyes---the fae have no souls to gaze upon, and they could not fathom a mortal's soul, even if they could see it.
"Okay!" Toot said. "I talked to Blueblossom, who talked to Rednose, who talked to Meg O' Aspens, who said that Goldeneyes said that he was riding the pizza car when it came here last night!" Toot thrust out his chest proudly.
"Pizza car?" I asked, bewildered.
"Pizza!" Toot cried, jubilant. "Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!" His wings fluttered again, and I tried to blink the damned faery dust out of my eyes before I started sneezing.
"Faeries like pizza?" I asked.
"Oh, Harry," Toot said breathlessly. "Haven't you ever had pizza before?"
"Of course I have," I said.
Toot looked wounded. "And you didn't share?"
I sighed. "Look. Maybe I can bring you guys some pizza sometime soon, to thank you for your help."
Toot leapt about in glee, hopping from one fingertip to the other. "Yes! Yes! Wait until I tell them! We'll see who laughs at Toot-toot next time!"
"Toot," I said, trying to calm him, "did he see anything else?"
Toot tittered, his expression sly and suggestive. "He said that there were mortals sporting and that they needed pizza to regain their strength!"
"Which delivery place, Toot?"
The faery blinked and stared at me as though I were hopelessly stupid. "Harry. The pizza truck." And then he darted off skyward, vanishing into the trees above.
I sighed and nodded. Toot wouldn't know the difference between Domino's and Pizza Hut. He had no frame of reference, and couldn't read---most faeries were studiously averse to print.
So, I had two pieces of information. One, someone had ordered a pizza to be delivered here. That meant two things. First, that someone was here last night. Second, that someone had seen them and talked to them. Maybe I could track down the pizza driver, and ask if he had seen Victor Sells.
The second piece of information had been Toot's reference to sporting. Faeries didn't think too much of mortals' idea of "sporting" unless there was a lot of nudity and lust involved. They had a penchant for shadowing necking teenagers and playing tricks on them. So Victor had been here with a lover of some kind, for there to be any "sport" going on.
I was beginning to think that Monica Sells was in denial. Her husband wasn't wandering around learning to be a sorcerer, spooky scorpion talismans notwithstanding. He was lurking about his love nest with a girlfriend, like any other husband bored with a timid and domestic wife might do under pressure. It wasn't admirable, but I guess I could understand the motivations that could cause it.
The only problem was going to be telling Monica. I had a feeling that she wasn't going to want to listen to what I had found out.
I picked up the little plate and bowl and cup and put them back into my black nylon backpack, along with the silver knife. My legs ached from too much walking and standing about. I was looking forward to getting home and getting some sleep.
The man with the naked sword in his hands appeared out of the darkness without a warning rustle of sound or whiff of magic to announce his presence. He was tall, like me, but broad and heavy-chested, and he carried his weight with a ponderous sort of dignity. Perhaps fifty years old, his listless brown hair going grey in uneven patches, he wore a long, black coat, a lot like mine but without the mantle, and his jacket and pants, too, were done in dark colors---charcoal and a deep blue. His shirt was crisp, pure white, the color that you usually only see with tuxedos. His eyes were grey, touched with crow's-feet at the corners, and dangerous. Moonlight glinted off those eyes in the same shade it did from the brighter silver of the sword's blade. He began to walk deliberately toward me, speaking in a quiet voice as he did.
"Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Irresponsible use of true names for summoning and binding others to your will violates the Fourth Law of Magic," the man intoned. "I remind you that you are under the Doom of Damocles. No further violations of the Laws will be tolerated. The sentence for further violation is death, by the sword, to be carried out at once."
Have you ever been approached by a grim-looking man, carrying a naked sword with a blade about ten miles long in his hand, in the middle of the night, beneath the stars on the shores of Lake Michigan? If you have, seek professional help. If you have not, then believe you me, it can scare the bejeezus out of you.
I took in a quick breath, and had to work not to put it into a quasi-Latin phrase on the exhale, one that would set the man's body on fire and reduce him to a mound of ashes. I react badly to fear. I don't usually have the good sense to run, or hide---I just try to smash whatever it is that is making me afraid. It's a primitive sort of thing, and one I don't question too much.
But reflex-based murder seemed a tad extreme, so rather than setting him on fire, I nodded instead. "Evening, Morgan. You know as well as I do that those laws apply to mortals. Not faeries. Especially for something as trivial as I just did. And I didn't break the Fourth Law. He had the choice whether to take my deal or not."
Morgan's sour, leathery face turned a bit more sour, the lines at the corners of his mouth stretching and becoming deeper. "That's a technicality, Dresden. A pair of them." His hands, broad and strong, resettled their grip upon the sword he held. His unevenly greying hair was tied into a ponytail in the back, like Sean Connery's in some of his movies, except that Morgan's face was too pinched and thin to pull off the look.
"Your point being?" I did my best to keep from looking nervous or impressed. Truth be told, I was both. Morgan was my Warden, assigned to me by the White Council to make sure I didn't bend or break any of the Laws of Magic. He hung about and spied on me, mostly, and usually came sniffing around after I'd cast a spell of some kind. I would be damned if I was going to let the White Council's guard dog see any fear out of me. Besides, he would take it as a sign of guilt, in the true spirit of paranoid fanatics everywhere. So, all I had to do was keep a straight face and get out before my weariness made me slip up and do or say something he could use against me.
Morgan was one of the deadliest evocators in the world. He wasn't bright enough to question his loyalties to the Council, and he could do quick-and-dirty magic like few others could.
Quick and dirty enough to rip the hearts out of Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton's chests, in fact, if he wanted to.
"My point," he said, scowling, "is that it is my assigned duty to monitor your use of your power, and to see to it that you do not abuse it."
"I'm on a missing-persons case," I said. "All I did was call up a dewdrop faery to get some information. Come on, Morgan. Everybody calls up faeries now and then. There's no harm in it. It's not as though I'm mind-controlling the things. Just leaning on them a little."
"Technicality," Morgan growled.
I stuck out my chin at him belligerently. We were of a height, though he outweighed me by about a hundred pounds. I could pick better people to antagonize, but he'd really gotten under my skin. "A technicality I'm prepared to hide wildly behind. So, unless you want to convene a meeting of the Council to call me on it, we can just drop the discussion right here. I'm pretty sure it will only take them about two days to cancel all their plans, make travel arrangements, and then get here. I can put you up until then. I mean, you'd be dragging a bunch of really crotchety old men away from their experiments and things for nothing, but if you really think it's necessary..."
Morgan scowled at me. "No. It isn't worth it." He opened his dark trench coat and slid the sword away into its scabbard. I relaxed a little. The sword wasn't the most dangerous thing about him, not by a long shot, but it was his symbol of the authority given to him by the White Council, and if rumors were true, it was enchanted to cut through the magical spells of anyone resisting him. I didn't want things ever to go far enough for me to find out if the rumors were true.
"I'm glad we agree about something," I said. "Nice seeing you again." I started to walk past him.
Morgan put one of those big hands on my arm as I went by, and his fingers closed around it. "I'm not finished with you, Dresden."
I didn't dare mess around with Morgan when he was acting in his role as a Warden of the White Council. But he wasn't wearing that hat, now. Once he'd put the sword away, he was acting on his own, without any more official authority than any other man---or at least, that was the technical truth. Morgan was big on technicalities. He had scared the heck out of me and annoyed the heck out of me, in rapid succession. Now he was trying to bully me. I hate bullies.
So I took a calculated risk, used my free hand, and hit him as hard as I could in the mouth.
I think the blow startled him more than anything. He took a step back, letting go of my arm in surprise, and just blinked at me. He put one hand to his mouth, and when he drew his fingers away, there was blood on them.
I planted my feet and faced him, without meeting his eyes. "Don't touch me."
Morgan continued to stare at me. And then I saw anger creep over his face, set his jaw, make the veins at his temple stand out.
"How dare you?" he said. "How dare you strike me?"
"It wasn't so hard," I said. "If you've got Council business with me, I'm willing to give you whatever respect is your due. When you come on strong to me on personal business, I don't have to put up with it."
I saw the steam coming out of his ears as he mulled it over. He looked for a reason to come after me, and realized that he didn't have one, according to the Laws. He wasn't too bright---did I mention that already?---and he was a big one for following the Laws. "You're a fool, Dresden," he sputtered finally. "An arrogant little fool."
"Probably," I told him. I tensed myself to move quickly if necessary. I may not like to run away from what scares me, but I try not to fight hopeless battles, either, and Morgan had me by years of experience and a hundred pounds, at least. There was no Law of Magic that protected me from him and his fists, either, and if that occurred to him, he might decide to do something about it. That punch I'd landed had been lucky, coming out of the blue. I wouldn't get away with it again.
"Someone killed two people with sorcery last night, Dresden. I think it was you. And when I find how you did it and can trace it back to you, don't think you're going to live long enough to cast the same spell at me." Morgan swiped at the blood with one big fist.
It was my turn to blink. I tried to shift mental gears, to keep up with the change in subject. Morgan thought I was the killer. And since Morgan didn't do too much of his own thinking, that meant that the White Council thought I was the killer. Holy shit.
Of course, it made sense, from Morgan's narrow and single-minded point of view. A wizard had killed someone. I was a wizard who had already been convicted of killing another with magic, even if the self-defense clause had kept me from being executed. Cops looked for people who had already committed crimes before they started looking for other culprits. Morgan was just another kind of cop, as far as I was concerned.
And, as far as he was concerned, I was just one more dangerous con.
"You're not serious," I told him. "You think I did it?"
He sneered at me. His voice was contemptuous, confident, and seething with absolute conviction. "Don't try to hide it, Dresden. I'm sure you think you're clever enough to come up with something innovative that we hidebound old men won't be able to trace. But you're wrong. We'll determine how you did it, and we'll follow it back to you. And when we do, I'll be there to make sure you never hurt anyone again."
"Knock yourself out," I told him. It was hard, really hard, to keep my voice as blithe as I wanted it to sound. "I didn't do it. But I'm helping the police find the man who did."
"The police?" Morgan asked. He narrowed his eyes, as though gauging my expression. "As if they could have any authority on this matter. They won't do you any good. Even if you do set someone up to take the fall for you under mortal law, the White Council will still see that justice is done." His eyes glittered, fanatic-bright underneath the stars.
"Whatever. Look, if you find something out about the killer, anything that could help the cops out, would you give me a call?"
Morgan looked at me with profound distaste. "You ask me to warn you when we are closing in on you, Dresden? You are young, but I never thought you stupid."
I bit back the obvious comment that leapt to mind. Morgan was on the edge of outrage already. If I'd realized how rabid he was to catch me slipping, I wouldn't have added more fuel to his fire by hitting him in the mouth.
Okay. I probably still would have hit him in the mouth. But I wouldn't have done it quite so hard.
"Good night, Morgan," I told him. I started to walk away again, before I could let my mouth get me into more trouble.
He moved faster than I would have given a man his age credit for. His fist went across my jaw at approximately a million miles an hour, and I spun down to the dirt like a string-cut puppet. For several long moments, I was unable to do anything at all, even breathe. Morgan loomed over me.
"We'll be watching you, Dresden." He turned and started walking away, the shadows of the evening quickly swallowing up his black coat. His voice drifted back to me. "We'll find out what really happened."
I didn't dare spout out a snappy comeback. I felt my jaw with my fingers, and made sure it wasn't broken, before I stood up and walked back to the Beetle, my legs feeling loose and watery. I fervently hoped that Morgan would find out what had really happened. It would keep the White Council from executing me for breaking the First Law, for one thing.
I could feel his eyes on my back, all the way to the Beetle. Damn that Morgan. He didn't have to take quite so much pleasure in being assigned to spy on me. I had a sinking feeling that anywhere I went over the next few days, he would be likely to turn up, watching. He was like this big, cartoon tomcat waiting outside the mousehole for the little mouse to stick its nose out so he could smash it flat with one big paw. I was feeling a lot like that little mouse.
I let that analogy cheer me up a bit. The cartoon cats always seemed to get the short end of the stick, in the final analysis. Maybe Morgan would, too.
Part of the problem was that seeing Morgan always brought up too many memories of my angsty teenage days. That was when I'd started to learn magic, when my mentor had tried to seduce me into Black wizardry, and when he had attempted to kill me when he failed. I killed him instead, mostly by luck---but he was just as dead, and I'd done it with sorcery. I broke the First Law of Magic: Thou Shalt Not Kill. There is only one sentence, if someone is found guilty, and one sword that they use to carry it out.
The White Council commuted the death sentence, because tradition demands that a wizard can resort to the use of deadly force if he is defending his own life, or the lives of the defenseless, and my claim that I had been attacked first could not be contested by my master's corpse. So instead, they'd stuck me on a kind of accelerated probation: One strike and I was out. There were some wizards who thought that the judgment against me was a ludicrous injustice (I happened to be one of them, but my vote didn't really count), and others who thought that I should have been executed regardless of extenuating circumstances. Morgan belonged to that latter group. Just my luck.
I was feeling more than a bit surly at the entire White Council, benevolent intentions aside. I guess it only made sense that they'd suspect me, and God knows I'd been a thorn in their side, flying in the face of tradition by practicing my art openly. There were plenty of people on the Council who might well want me dead. I would have to start being more careful.
I rolled down the Beetle's windows on the way back to Chicago to help me stay awake. I was exhausted, but my mind was racing around like a hamster on an exercise wheel, working furiously, getting nowhere.
The irony was thick enough to make my tongue curl. The White Council suspected me of the killings, and if no other suspect came forward, I was going to take the rap. Murphy's investigation had just become very, very important to me. But to pursue the investigation, I would have to try to figure out how the killer had pulled off that spell, and to do that, I would have to indulge in highly questionable research that would probably be enough to get me a death sentence all by itself. Catch-22. If I had any respect at all for Morgan's intelligence, I would have suspected him of pulling off the killings himself and setting me up to take the blame.
But that just didn't track. Morgan might twist and bend the rules, to get what he saw as justice, but he'd never blatantly violate them. But if not Morgan, then who could have done it? There just weren't all that many people who could get enough power into that kind of spell to make it work---unless there was some flaw in the quasiphysics that governed magic that let hearts explode more easily than other things; and I wouldn't know that until I had pursued the forbidden research.
Bianca would have more information on who might have done it---she had to. I had already planned on talking to the vampiress, but Morgan's visit had made it a necessity, rather than merely a priority. Murphy was not going to be thrilled that I was thrusting myself into her side of this investigation. And, better and better, because White Council business was all hush-hush to nonwizards, I wouldn't be able to explain to her why I was doing it. Further joy.
You know, sometimes I think Someone up there really hates me.
By the time I got home, it was after two o'clock in the morning. The clock in the Beetle didn't work (of course), but I made a pretty good guess from the position of the stars and the moon. I was strung out, weary, and my nerves were stretched as tight as guitar strings.
I didn't think sleep was likely, so I decided to do a little alchemy to help me unwind.
I've often wished that I had some suave and socially acceptable hobby that I could fall back on in times like this. You know, play the violin (or was it the viola?) like Sherlock Holmes, or maybe twiddle away on the pipe organ like the Disney version of Captain Nemo. But I don't. I'm sort of the arcane equivalent of a classic computer geek. I do magic, in one form or another, and that's pretty much it. I really need to get a life, one of these days.
I live in a basement apartment beneath a big, roomy old house that has been divided up into lots of different apartments. The basement and the subbasement below it are both mine, which is sort of neat. I'm the only tenant living on two floors, and my rent is cheaper than that of all the people who have whole windows.
The house is full of creaks and sighs and settling boards, and time and lives have worn their impressions into the wood and the brick. I can hear all the sounds, all the character of the place, above and around me all through the night. It's an old place, but it sings in the darkness and is, in its own quirky little way, alive. It's home.
Mister was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs that led down to the apartment's front door. Mister is an enormous grey cat. I mean, enormous. There are dogs smaller than Mister. He weighs in at just over thirty pounds, and there isn't an undue amount of fat on his frame. I think maybe his father was a wildcat or a lynx or something. I had found Mister in a garbage can about three years before, a mewling kitten, with his tail torn off by a dog or a car---I was never sure which, but Mister hated both, and would either attack or flee from them on sight.
Mister had recovered his dignity over the next few months, and shortly came to believe that he was the apartment's tenant, and I was someone he barely tolerated to share the space with him. Right now he looked up and mrowed at me in an annoyed tone.
"I thought you had a hot date," I told him.
He sauntered over to me and rammed one shoulder playfully against my knee. I wavered, recovered my balance, and unlocked the door. Mister, as was his just due, entered before I did.
My apartment is a studio, one not-too-large room with a kitchenette in the corner and a fireplace to one side. There's a door that leads to the other room, my bedroom and bathroom, and then there's the hinged door in the floor that goes down to the subbasement, where I keep my lab. I've got things pretty heavily textured---there are multiple carpets on the floor, tapestries on the walls, a collection of knickknacks and oddities on every available surface, my staff and my sword cane in the corner, and several bulging bookshelves which I really will organize one day.
Mister went to his spot before the fireplace and demanded that it be made warm. I obliged him with a fire and lit a lamp as well. Oh, I have lights and so on, but they foul up so often it almost isn't worth turning them on. And I'm not even about to take chances with the gas heater. I stick with the simple things, the fireplace and my candles and lamps. I have a special charcoal stove and a vent to take most of the smoke out, though the whole place smells a little of woodsmoke and charcoal, no matter what I do.
I took off my duster and got out my heavy flannel robe before I went down into the lab. That's why wizards wear robes, I swear to you. It's just too damned cold in the lab to go without one. I clambered down the ladder to the lab, carrying my candle with me, and lit a few lamps, a pair of burners, and a kerosene heater in the corner.
The lights came up and revealed a long table in the center of the room, other tables against three of the walls around it, and a clear space at one end of the room where a brass circle had been laid out on the floor and fastened into the cement with U-shaped bolts. Shelves over the tables were crowded with empty cages, boxes, Tupperware, jars, cans, containers of all descriptions, a pair of unusual antlers, a couple of fur pelts, several musty old books, a long row of notebooks filled with my own cramped writing, and a bleached white human skull.
"Bob," I said. I started clearing space off of the center table, dumping boxes and grocery sacks and plastic tubs over the brass circle on the floor. I needed room to work. "Bob, wake up."
There was a moment of silence, while I started getting some things down from the shelves. "Bob!" I said, louder. "Come on, lazybones."
A pair of lights came up in the empty sockets of the skull, orangish, flickering like candle flames. "It isn't enough," the skull said, "that I have to wake up. I have to wake up to bad puns. What is it about you that you have to make the bad puns?"
"Quit whining," I told him, cheerfully. "We've got work to do."
Bob the Skull grumbled something in Old French, I think, though I got lost when he got to the anatomical improbabilities of bullfrogs. He yawned, and his bony teeth rattled when his mouth clicked closed again. Bob wasn't really a human skull. He was a spirit of air---sort of like a faery, but different. He made his residence inside the skull that had been prepared for him several hundred years ago, and it was his job to remember things. For obvious reasons, I can't use a computer to store information and keep track of the slowly changing laws of quasiphysics. That's why I had Bob. He had worked with dozens of wizards over the years, and it had given him a vast repertoire of knowledge---that, and a really cocky attitude. "Blasted wizards," he mumbled.
"I can't sleep, so we're going to make a couple of potions. Sound good?"
"Like I have a choice," Bob said. "What's the occasion?"
I brought Bob up to speed on what had happened that day. He whistled (no easy trick without lips), and said, "Sounds sticky."
"Pretty sticky," I agreed.
"Tell you what," he said. "Let me out for a ride, and I'll tell you how to get out of it."
That made me wary. "Bob, I let you out once. Remember?"
He nodded dreamily, scraping bone on wood. "The sorority house. I remember."
I snorted, and started some water to boiling over one of the burners. "You're supposed to be a spirit of intellect. I don't understand why you're obsessed with sex."
Bob's voice got defensive. "It's an academic interest, Harry."
"Oh yeah? Well, maybe I don't think it's fair to let your academia go peeping in other people's houses."
"Wait a minute. My academia doesn't just peep---"
I held up a hand. "Save it. I don't want to hear it."
He grunted. "You're trivializing what getting out for a bit means to me, Harry. You're insulting my masculinity."
"Bob," I said, "you're a skull. You don't have any masculinity to insult."
"Oh yeah?" Bob challenged me. "Pot kettle black, Harry! Have you gotten a date yet? Huh? Most men have something better to do in the middle of the night than play with their chemistry sets."
"As a matter of fact," I told him, "I'm set up for Saturday night."
Bob's eyes fluttered from orange to red. "Oooooo." He leered. "Is she pretty?"
"Dark skin," I said. "Dark hair, dark eyes. Legs to die for. Smart, sexy as hell."
Bob chortled. "Think she'd like to see the lab?"
"Get your mind out of the gutter."
"No, seriously," Bob said. "If she's so great, what's she doing with you? You aren't exactly Sir Gawain, you know."
It was my turn to get defensive. "She likes me," I said. "Is that such a shock?"
"Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle."
I stared at Bob for a moment, and realized with a somewhat sinking feeling that the skull was probably right. Not that I would admit that to him, not in a million years, but he was.
"We're going to make an escape potion," I told him. "I don't want to be all night, so can we get to work? Huh? I can only remember about half the recipe."
"There's always room to make two if you're making one, Harry. You know that."
That much was true. The process of mixing up an alchemical potion is largely stirring, simmering, and waiting. You can always get another one going and alternate between them. Sometimes you can even do three, though that's pushing it. "Okay, so, we'll make a copy."
"Oh, come on," Bob chided me. "That's dull. You should stretch yourself. Try something new."
"Like what?"
Bob's eye sockets twinkled cheerfully. "A love potion, Harry! If you won't let me out, at least let me do that! Spirits know you could use it, and---"
"No," I said, firmly. "No way. No love potion."
"Fine," he said. "No love potion, no escape potion either."
"Bob," I said, warningly.
Bob's eye lights winked out.
I growled. I was tired and cranky, and under the best of circumstances I am not exactly a type A personality. I stalked over, picked up Bob by the jaws and shook him. "Hey!" I shouted. "Bob! You come out of there! Or I'm going to take this skull and throw it down the deepest well I can find! I swear to you, I'll put you somewhere where no one can ever let you out ever again!"
Bob's eyes winked on for a moment. "No you won't. I'm far too valuable." Then they winked out again.
I gritted my teeth and tried not to smash the skull to little pieces on the floor. I took deep breaths, summoning years of wizardly training and control to not throw a tantrum and break the nice spirit to little pieces. Instead, I put the skull back on the shelf and counted slowly to thirty.
Could I make the potion by myself? I probably could. But I had the sinking feeling that it might not have precisely the effect I wanted. Potions were a tricky business, and a lot more relied upon precise details than upon intent, like in spells. And just because I made a love potion didn't mean I had to use it. Right? It would only be good for a couple of days, in any case---surely not through the weekend. How much trouble could it cause?
I struggled to rationalize the action. It would appease Bob, and give him some kind of vicarious thrill. Love potions were about the cheapest things in the world to make, so it wouldn't cost me too much. And, I thought, if Susan should ask me for some kind of demonstration of magic (as she always did), I could always---
No. That would be too much. That would be like admitting I couldn't get a woman to like me on my own, and it would be unfair, taking advantage of the woman. What I wanted was the escape potion. I might need it at Bianca's place, and I could always use it, if worse came to worst, to make a getaway from Morgan and the White Council. I would feel a lot better if I had the escape potion.
"Okay, Bob. Fine. You win. We'll do them both. All right?"
Bob's eye lights came up warily. "You're sure? You'll do the love potion, just like I say?"
"Don't I always make the potions like you say, Bob?"
"What about that diet potion you tried?"
"Okay. That one was a mistake."
"And the antigravity potion, remember that?"
"We fixed the floor! It was no big deal!"
"And the---"
"Fine, fine," I growled. "You don't have to rub it in. Now cough up the recipes."
Bob did so, in fine humor, and for the next two hours we made potions. Potions are all made pretty much the same way. First you need a base to form the essential liquid content, then something to engage each of the senses, and then something for the mind and something else for the spirit. Eight ingredients, all in all, and they're different for each and every potion, and for each person who makes them. Bob had centuries of experience, and he could extrapolate the most successful components for a given person to make into a potion. He was right about being an invaluable resource---I had never even heard of a spirit with Bob's experience, and I was lucky to have him.
That didn't mean I didn't want to crack that skull of his from time to time, though.
The escape potion was made in a base of eight ounces of Jolt cola. We added a drop of motor oil, for the smell of it, and cut a bird's feather into tiny shavings for the tactile value. Three ounces of chocolate-covered espresso beans, ground into powder, went in next. Then a shredded bus ticket I'd never used, for the mind, and a small chain which I broke and then dropped in, for the heart. I unfolded a clean white cloth where I'd had a flickering shadow stored for just such an occasion, and tossed it into the brew, then opened up a glass jar where I kept my mouse scampers and tapped the sound out into the beaker where the potion was brewing.
"You're sure this is going to work, Bob?" I said.
"Always. That's a super recipe, there."
"Smells terrible."
Bob's lights twinkled. "They usually do."
"What's it doing? Is this the superspeed one, or the teleportation version?"
Bob coughed. "A little of both, actually. Drink it, and you'll be the wind for a few minutes."
"The wind?" I eyed him. "I haven't heard of that one before, Bob."
"I am an air spirit, after all," Bob told me. "This'll work fine. Trust me."
I grumbled, and set the first potion to simmering, then started on the next one. I hesitated, after Bob told me the first ingredient.
"Tequila?" I asked him, skeptically. "Are you sure on that one? I thought the base for a love potion was supposed to be champagne."
"Champagne, tequila, what's the difference, so long as it'll lower her inhibitions?" Bob said.
"Uh. I'm thinking it's going to get us a, um, sleazier result."
"Hey!" Bob protested. "Who's the memory spirit here! Me or you?"
"Well---"
"Who's got all the experience with women here? Me or you?"
"Bob---"
"Harry," Bob lectured me, "I was seducing shepherdesses when you weren't a twinkle in your great-grandcestor's eyes. I think I know what I'm doing."
I sighed, too tired to argue with him. "Okay, okay. Sheesh. Tequila." I got down the bottle, measured eight ounces into the beaker, and glanced up at the skull.
"Right. Now, three ounces of dark chocolate."
"Chocolate?" I demanded.
"Chicks are into chocolate, Harry."
I muttered, more interested in finishing than anything else, and measured out the ingredients. I did the same with a drop of perfume (some name-brand imitation that I liked), an ounce of shredded lace, and the last sigh at the bottom of the glass jar. I added some candlelight to the mix, and it took on a rosy golden glow.
"Great," Bob said. "That's just right. Okay, now we add the ashes of a passionate love letter."
I blinked at the skull. "Uh, Bob. I'm fresh out of those."
Bob snorted. "How did I guess. Look on the shelf behind me."
I did, and found a pair of romance novels, their covers filled with impossibly delightful flesh. "Hey! Where did you get these?"
"My last trip out," Bob answered blithely. "Page one seventy-four, the paragraph that starts with, 'Her milky-white breasts.' Tear that page out and burn it and add those ashes in."
I choked. "That will work?"
"Hey, women eat these things up. Trust me."
"Fine," I sighed. "This is the spirit ingredient?"
"Uh-huh," Bob said. He was rocking back and forth on his jawbones in excitement. "Now, just a teaspoon of powdered diamond, and we're done."
I rubbed at my eyes. "Diamond. I don't have any diamonds, Bob."
"I figured. You're cheap, that's why women don't like you. Look, just tear up a fifty into real little pieces and put that in there."
"A fifty-dollar bill?" I demanded.
"Money," Bob opined. "Very sexy."
I muttered and got the remaining fifty out of my pocket, shredding it and tossing it in to complete the potion.
The next step was where the effort came in. Once all the ingredients are mixed together, you have to force enough energy through them to activate them. It isn't the actual physical ingredients that are important---it's the meaning that they carry, too, the significance that they have for the person making the potion, and for those who will be using it.
The energy for magic comes from a lot of places. It can come from a special place (usually some spectacular natural site, like Mount St. Helens, or Old Faithful), from a focus of some kind (like Stonehenge is, on a large scale), or from inside of people. The best magic comes from the inside. Sometimes it's just pure mental effort, raw willpower. Sometimes it's emotions and feelings. All of them are viable tinder to be used for the proverbial fire.
I had a lot of worry to use to fuel the magic, and a lot of annoyance and one hell of a lot of stubbornness. I murmured the requisite quasi-Latin litany over the potions, over and over, feeling a kind of resistance building, just out of the range of the physical senses, but there, nonetheless. I gathered up all my worry and anger and stubbornness and threw them all at the resistance in one big ball, shaping them with the strength and tone of my words. The magic left me in a sudden wave, like a pitcher abruptly emptied out.
"I love this part," Bob said, just as both potions exploded into puffs of greenish smoke and began to froth up over the lips of the beakers.
I sagged onto a stool, and waited for the potions to fizz down, all the strength gone out of me, the weariness building up like a load of bricks on my shoulders. Once the frothing had settled, I leaned over and poured each potion into its own individual sports bottle with a squeeze-top, then labeled the containers with a permanent Magic Marker---very clearly. I don't take chances in getting potions mixed up anymore, ever since the invisibility/hair tonic incident, when I was trying to grow out a decent beard.
"You won't regret this, Harry," Bob assured me. "That's the best potion I've ever made."
"I made it, not you," I growled. I really was exhausted, now---way too tired to let petty concerns like possible execution keep me from bed.
"Sure, sure," Bob agreed. "Whatever, Harry."
I went around the room putting out all the fires and the kerosene heater, then climbed the ladder back to the basement without saying good night. Bob was chortling happily to himself as I did.
I stumbled to my bed and fell into it. Mister always climbs in and goes to sleep draped over my legs. I waited for him, and a few seconds later he showed up, settling down and purring like a miniature outboard motor.
I struggled to put together an itinerary for the next couple of days through the haze of exhaustion. Talk to the vampire. Locate missing husband. Avoid the wrath of the White Council. Find the killer.
Before he found me.
An unpleasant thought---but I decided that I wasn't going to let that bother me, either, and curled up to go to sleep.
Friday night, I went to see Bianca, the vampiress.
I didn't just leap out of bed and go see her, of course. You don't go walking into the proverbial lion's den lightly. You start with a good breakfast.
My breakfast took place around three in the afternoon, when I woke up to hear my phone ringing. I had to get out of bed and pad into the main room to answer it.
"Mmmrrmmph," I grumbled.
"Dresden," Murphy said, "what can you tell me?"
Murphy sounded stressed. Her voice had that distinct edge that she got whenever she was nervous, and it rankled me, like fingernails scraping on bones. The investigation into Tommy Tomm's murder must not be going well. "Nothing yet," I said. Then I lied to her, a little. "I was up most of the night working, but nothing to show yet."
She answered me with a swearword. "That's not good enough, Harry. I need answers, and I need them yesterday."
"I'll get to it as quick as I can."
"Get to it faster," she snarled. She was angry. Not that this was unusual for Murphy, but it told me that something else was going on. Some people panic when things get rough, harried. Some people fall apart. Murphy got pissed.
"Commissioner riding your back again?" City Police Commissioner Howard Fairweather used Murphy and her team as scapegoats for all sorts of unsolvable crimes that he had dumped in her lap. Fairweather was always lurking around, trying for an opportunity to make Murphy look bad, as though by doing so he could avoid being crucified himself.
"Like a winged monkey from The Wizard of Oz. Kind of makes you wonder who's leaning on him to get things done." Her voice was sour as ripe lemons. I heard her drop an Alka-Seltzer into a glass of liquid. "I'm serious, Harry. You get me those answers I need, and you get them to me fast. I need to know if this was sorcery, and, if so, how it was done and who could have done it. Names, places---I need to know everything."
"It isn't that simple, Mur---"
"Then make it simple. How long before you can tell me? I need an estimate for the Commissioner's investigative committee in fifteen minutes or I might as well turn in my badge today."
I grimaced. If I was able to get something out of Bianca, I might be able to help Murph on the investigation---but if it proved fruitless, I was going to have spent the entire evening doing nothing productive, and Murphy needed her answers now. Maybe I should have made a stay-awake potion. "Does the committee work weekends?"
Murphy snorted. "Are you kidding?"
"We'll have something by Monday, then."
"You can have it figured out by then?" she asked.
"I don't know how much good it will do you, even if I can puzzle it out. I hope you've got more to go on than this."
I heard her sigh into the phone and drink the fizzy drink. "Don't let me down, Harry."
Time to change the subject, before she pinned me down and smelled me lying. I had no intention of doing the forbidden research if I could find a way out of doing it. "No luck with Bianca?"
Another swearword. "That bitch won't talk to us. Just smiles and nods and blows smoke, makes small talk, and crosses her legs. You should have seen Carmichael drooling."
"Well. Tough to blame him, maybe. I hear she's cute. Listen, Murph. What if I just---"
"No, Harry. Absolutely not. You will not go over to the Velvet Room, you will not talk to that woman, and you will not get involved in this."
"Lieutenant Murphy," I drawled. "A little jealous, are we?"
"Don't flatter yourself. You're a civilian, Dresden, even if you do have your investigator's license. If you get your ass laid out in the hospital or the morgue, it'll be me that suffers for it."
"Murph, I'm touched."
"I'll touch your head to a brick wall a few times if you cross me on this, Harry." Her voice was sharp, vehement.
"Hey, wind down, Murph. If you don't want me to go, no problem." Whoops. A lie. She'd be all over that like a troll on a billy goat.
"You're a lousy liar, Harry. Godammit, I ought to take you down to lockup just to keep you from---"
"What?" I said, loudly, into the receiver. "Murph, you're breaking up. I can't hear you. Damn phone again. Call me back." Then I hung up on her.
Mister padded over to me and batted at my leg. He watched me with serious green eyes as I leaned down and unplugged the phone as it started to ring again.
"Okay, Mister. You hungry?"
I got us breakfast. Leftover steak sandwich for him, SpaghettiOs heated up on the woodstove for me. I rationed out my last can of Coke, which Mister craves at least as badly as I do, and by the time I was done eating and drinking and petting, I was awake and thinking again---and getting ready for sundown.
Daylight savings time hadn't cut in yet, and dark would fall around six. I had about two hours to get set to go.
You might think you know a thing or two about vampires. Maybe some of the stuff you've heard is accurate. Likely, it's not. Either way, I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of going into Bianca's lair to demand information from her. I was going to assume that things were going to get ugly before all was said and done, just to make sure I didn't get caught with my staff down.
Wizardry is all about thinking ahead, about being prepared. Wizards aren't really superhuman. We just have a leg up on seeing things more clearly than other people, and being able to use the extra information we have for our benefit. Hell, the word wizard comes from the same root as wise. We know things. We aren't any stronger or faster than anyone else. We don't even have all that much more going in the mental department. But we're god-awful sneaky, and if we get the chance to get set for something, we can do some impressive things.
As a wizard, if you're ready to address a problem, then it's likely that you'll be able to come up with something that will let you deal with it. So, I got together all the things I thought I might need: I made sure my cane was polished and ready. I put my silver knife in a sheath that hung just under my left arm. I put the escape potion in its plastic squeeze-bottle into my duster's pocket. I put on my favorite talisman, a silver pentacle on a silver chain---it had been my mother's. My father had passed it down to me. And I put a small, folded piece of white cloth into my pocket.
I had several enchanted items around---or half-enchanted items, anyway. Carrying out a full enchantment is expensive and time-consuming, and I just couldn't afford to do it very much. We blue-collar wizards just have to sling a few spells out where we can and hope they don't go stale at the wrong time. I would have been a lot more comfortable if I had been carrying my blasting rod or my staff, but that would be like showing up at Bianca's door in a tank, walking in carrying a machine gun and a flamethrower, while announcing my intention to fight.
I had to maintain a fine balance between going in ready for trouble and going in asking for trouble.
Not that I was afraid, mind you. I didn't think Bianca would be willing to cause problems for a mortal wizard. Bianca wouldn't want to piss off the White Council by messing with me.
On the other hand, I wasn't exactly the White Council's favorite guy. They might even look the other way if Bianca decided to take me quietly out of the picture.
Careful, Harry, I warned myself. Don't get entirely paranoid. If you get like that, you'll be building your little apartment into a Basement of Solitude.
"What do you think?" I asked Mister, once I was decked out in what paraphernalia I was willing to carry.
Mister went to the door and batted at it insistently.
"Everyone's a critic. Fine, fine." I sighed. I let him out, then I went out, got into my car and drove down to the Velvet Room in its expensive lakeside location.
Bianca runs her business out of a huge old mansion from the early days of the Roaring Twenties. Rumor has it that the infamous Al Capone had it built for one of his mistresses.
There was a gate with an iron fence and a security guard. I pulled the Beetle up into the little swath of driveway that began at the street and ended at the fence. There was a hiccoughing rattle from back in the engine as I brought the machine to a halt. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out, peering back. Something went whoomph, and then black smoke poured out from the bottom of the car and scuttled down the slope of the drive and into the street.
I winced. The engine gave an almost apologetic rattle and shuddered to its death. Great. Now I had no ride home. I got out of the Beetle, and stood mourning it for a moment.
The security guard on the other side of the gate was a blocky man, not overly tall but overly muscled and hiding it under an expensive suit. He studied me with attack-dog eyes, and then said, through the gate, "Do you have an appointment?"
"No," I told him. "But I think Bianca will want to see me."
He looked unimpressed. "I'm sorry," he said. "Bianca is out for the evening."
Things are never simple anymore. I shrugged at him, folded my arms, and leaned on the hood of the Beetle. "Suit yourself. I'll just stay until a tow truck comes by, then, until I can get this thing out of the drive for you."
He stared at me, his eyes narrowed down to tiny slits with the effort of thinking. Eventually, the thoughts got to his brain, got processed, and were sent back out with a message to "pass the buck." "I'll call your name in," he said.
"Good man," I approved. "You won't be sorry."
"Name," he growled.
"Harry Dresden."
If he recognized my name, it didn't show on his face. He glared at me and the Beetle, then walked a few paces off, lifting a cellular phone from his pocket and to his ear.
I listened. Listening isn't hard to do. No one has practice at it, nowadays, but you can train yourself to pay attention to your senses if you work at it long enough.
"I've got a guy down here says that Bianca will want to talk to him," the guard said. "Says his name is Harry Dresden." He was silent for a moment. I couldn't quite make out the buzz of the other voice, other than that it was female. "Uh-huh," he said. He glanced back at me. "Uh-huh," he said again. "Sure. Sure, I will. Of course, ma'am."
I reached in through the window of the Beetle and got out my cane. I rested it on the concrete beside my boots and tapped it a few times, as though impatient.
The guard turned back to me, leaned over to one side, and pushed a button somewhere. The gate buzzed and clicked open.
"Come on in, Mr. Dresden," he said. "I can have someone come tow your car, if you like."
"Super," I told him. I gave him the name of the wrecker Mike has a deal with and told him to tell the guy that it was Harry's car again. Fido the Guard dutifully noted this down, writing on a small notebook he drew from a pocket. While he did, I walked past him toward the house, clicking my cane on the concrete with every pace.
"Stop," he told me, his voice calm and confident. People don't speak with that kind of absolute authority unless they have a gun in their hands. I stopped.
"Put the cane down," he told me, "and put your arms up. You are to be searched before you are allowed inside."
I sighed, did what he said, and let him pat me down. I didn't turn around to face him, but I could smell the metal of his gun. He found the knife and took it. His fingers brushed the nape of my neck, felt the chain there.
"What's this?" he said.
"Pentacle," I told him.
"Let me see it. Use one hand."
I used my left to draw it out of my shirt and show it to him, a silver five-pointed star within a circle, all smooth geometry. He grunted, and said, "Fine." The search went on, and he found the plastic squeeze-bottle. He took it out of my pocket, opened it, and sniffed at it.
"What's this?"
"A health cola," I told him.
"Smells like shit," he said, capped it, and put it back in my pocket.
"What about my cane?"
"Returned when you leave," he said.
Damn. My knife and my cane had been my only physical lines of defense. Anything else I did would have to rely wholly upon magic and that could be dicey on the best of days. It was enough to rattle me.
Of course, Fido the Guard had missed a couple of things. First, he'd overlooked the clean white handkerchief in my pocket. Second, he'd passed me on with my pentacle still upon my neck. He probably figured that since it wasn't a crucifix or a cross, I couldn't use it to keep Bianca away from me.
Which wasn't true. Vampires (and other such creatures) don't respond to symbols as such. They respond to the power that accompanies an act of faith. I couldn't ward off a vampire mosquito with my faith in the Almighty---He and I have just never seemed to connect. But the pentacle was a symbol of magic itself, and I had plenty of faith in that.
And, of course, Fido had overlooked my getaway potion. Bianca really ought to trust her guards with more awareness of the supernatural and what sort of things to look for.
The house itself was elegant, very roomy, with the high ceilings and the broad floors that they just don't make anymore. A well-groomed young woman with a short, straight haircut greeted me in the enormous entry hall. I was passing polite to her, and she showed me to a library, its walls lined with old books in leather bindings, similar to the leather-cushioned chairs around the enormous old dogfoot table in the room's center.
I took a seat and waited. And waited. And waited. More than half an hour went by before Bianca finally arrived.
She came into the room like a candle burning with a cold, clear flame. Her hair was a burnished shade of auburn that was too dark to cast back any ruddy highlights, but did anyway. Her eyes were dark, clear, her complexion flawlessly smooth and elegantly graced with cosmetics. She was not a tall woman, but shapely, wearing a black dress with a plunging neckline and a slash in one side that showed off a generous portion of pale thigh. Black gloves covered her arms to above the elbows, and her three-hundred-dollar shoes were a study in high-heeled torture devices. She looked too good to be true.
"Mister Dresden," she greeted me. "This is an unexpected pleasure."
I rose when she entered the room. "Madame Bianca," I replied, nodding to her. "We meet at last. Hearsay neglected to mention how lovely you are."
She laughed, lips shaping the sounds, head falling back just enough to show a flash of pale throat. "A gentleman, they said. I see that they were correct. It is a charmingly passé thing to be a gentleman in this country."
"You and I are of another world," I said.
She approached me and extended her hand, a motion oozing feminine grace. I bowed over her hand briefly, taking it and brushing my lips against the back of her glove. "Do you really think I'm beautiful, Mister Dresden?" she asked me.
"As lovely as a star, Madame."
"Polite and a pretty one, too," she murmured. Her eyes flickered over me, from head to toe, but even she avoided meeting gazes with me, whether from a desire to avoid inadvertently directing her power at me, or being on the receiving end of mine, I couldn't tell. She continued into the room, and stopped beside one of the comfortable chairs. As a matter of course, I stepped around the table, and drew out the chair for her, seating her. She crossed her legs, in that dress, in those shoes, and made it look good. I blinked for just a moment, then returned to my own seat.
"So, Mister Dresden. What brings you to my humble house? Care for an evening of entertainment? I quite assure you that you will never have another experience like it." She placed her hands in her lap, smiling at me.
I smiled at her, and put one hand into my pocket, onto the white handkerchief. "No, thank you. I came to talk."
Her lips parted in a silent ah. "I see. About what, if I might ask?"
"About Jennifer Stanton. And her murder."
I had all of a second's warning. Bianca's eyes narrowed, then widened, like those of a cat about to spring. Then she was coming at me over the table, faster than a breath, her arms extended toward my throat.
I toppled over backward in my chair. Even though I'd started to move first, it almost wasn't enough to get away from her reaching nails in time. One grazed my throat with a hot sensation of pain, and she kept coming, following me down to the floor, those rich lips drawn back from sharp fangs.
I jerked my hand out of my pocket, and flapped open my white hanky at her, releasing the image of sunlight I'd been storing for use in potions. It lit up the room for a moment, brilliant.
The light smashed into Bianca, hurled her back across the old table into one of the shelves, and tore pieces of flesh away from her like bits of rotten meat being peeled off a carcass by a sandblaster. She screamed, and the flesh around her mouth sloughed and peeled away like a snake's scales.
I had never seen a real vampire before. I would have time to be terrified later. I took in the details as I tugged my talisman off over my neck. It had a batlike face, horrid and ugly, the head too big for its body. Gaping, hungry jaws. Its shoulders were hunched and powerful. Membranous wings stretched between the joints of its almost skeletal arms. Flabby black breasts hung before it, spilling out of the black dress that no longer looked feminine. Its eyes were wide, black, and staring, and a kind of leathery, slimy hide covered its flesh, like an inner tube lathered with Vaseline, though there were tiny holes corroded in it by the sunlight I had brought with me.
It recovered quickly, crouching and spreading long arms that ended in claw-tipped fingers to either side with a hiss of rage.
I drew my pentacle into my fist, raised it like every vampire slayer you ever saw does it, and said, "Jesus Christ, lady. I just came here to talk."
The vampire hissed and started toward me with a gangling, weirdly graceful step. Its clawed feet were still wearing the three-hundred-dollar black pumps.
"Back," I said, taking a step toward it myself. The pentacle began to burn with the cold, clear light of applied will and belief---my faith, if you will, that it could turn such a monster aside.
It hissed, and turned its face aside, lifting its membranous arms to shield its eyes from the light. It took one step back, and then another, until its hunched back was pressed against a wall of books.
Now what did I do? I wasn't going to go try to put a stake through her heart. But if I lowered my will, she might come at me again---and I didn't think I had anything, even the quickest evocations, that I could get out of my mouth before she tore it off of my head. And even if I got past her, she probably had mortal lackeys, like the security guard at the gate, who would be happy to kill me if they saw me trashing their mistress.
"You killed her," the vampire snarled, and its voice was exactly the same, sultry and feminine, even though twisted by rage and coming from that horrid mouth. It was unsettling. "You killed Jennifer. She was mine, mageling."
"Look," I told her. "I didn't come here for any of this. And the police know I'm here. Save yourself a lot of trouble. Sit down, talk with me, and then we'll both go away happy. Christ, Bianca, do you think that if I'd killed Jennifer and Tommy Tomm I'd just be waltzing in here like this?"
"You expect me to believe that you didn't? You will never leave this house alive."
I was feeling angry myself, and frightened. Christ, even the vampire thought I was the bad guy. "What'll it take to convince you that I didn't do it?"
Black, bottomless eyes stared at me through the burning fire of my faith. I could feel some sort of power there, trying to get at me, and held off by the force of my will, just as the creature itself was. The vampire snarled, "Lower the amulet, wizard."
"If I do, are you going to come at my throat again?"
"If you do not, I most certainly will."
Shaky logic, that. I tried to work through the situation from her point of view. She had been scared when I showed up. She'd had me searched and divested of weapons as best she could. If she thought that I was Jennifer Stanton's murderer, would the mere mention of that name have brought that sudden violence out of her? I began to get that sinking feeling you get when you realize that not everything is as it appears.
"If I put this down," I told her, "I want your word that you'll sit down and talk to me. I swear to you, by fire and wind, that I had nothing to do with her death."
The vampire hissed at me, shielding its eyes from the light with one taloned hand. "Why should I believe you?"
"Why should I believe you?" I countered.
Yellowed fangs showed in its mouth. "If you do not trust my word, wizard, then how can I trust yours?"
"Then you give it?"
The vampire stiffened, and though its voice was still harsh with rage and pain, still sexy as a silk shirt without any buttons, I thought I heard the ring of truth in its words. "You have my promise. Lower your talisman, and we will talk."
Time for another calculated risk. I tossed the pentacle onto the table. The cold light drained away, leaving the room lit by mere electricity once more.
The vampire slowly lowered its arms, blinking its too-big eyes at me and then at the pentacle upon the table. A long, pink tongue flickered out nervously over its jaws and lower face, then slipped back into its mouth. It was surprised, I realized. Surprised that I had done it.
My heart was racing, but I forced my fear back down out of my forebrain and into the background. Vampires are like demons, like wolves, like sharks. You don't let them think that you are potential food and get their respect at the same time. The vampire's true appearance was grotesque---but it wasn't as bad as some of the things I had seen in my day. Some demons were a lot worse, and some of the Elder Things could rip your mind apart just by letting you look at them. I regarded the creature with a level gaze.
"How about it?" I said. "Let's talk. The longer we sit around staring at one another, the longer Jennifer's killer stays free."
The vampire stared at me for a moment more. Then it shuddered, drawing its wing membranes about itself. Black slime turned into patches of pale, perfect flesh that spread over the vampire's dark skin like a growth of fungus. The flabby black breasts swelled into softly rounded, rosy-tipped perfection once more.
Bianca stood before me a moment later, settling her dress back into modesty again, her arms crossed over her as though she was cold, her back stiff and her eyes angry. She was no less beautiful than she had been a few moments before, not a line or a curve any different. But for me, the glamour had been ruined. She still had the same eyes, dark and fathomless and alien. I would always remember what she truly looked like, beneath her flesh mask.
I stooped and picked up my chair, righting it. Then I went around the table, turned my back on her, and stood hers up as well. Then I held it out for her, just as I had when I had entered the room.
She stared at me for a long minute. Some expression flickered across her face. She was disconcerted by my apparent lack of concern about the way she looked, and it told. Then she lifted her chin, proud, and settled gracefully into the chair again, regal as any queen, every line stiff with anger. The Old World rules of courtesy and hospitality were holding---but for how long?
I returned to my seat and leaned over to pick up my white handkerchief, toying with it. Bianca's angry eyes flickered down to it, and once again she repeated the nervous gesture of licking her teeth and lips, though this time her tongue looked human.
"So. Tell me about Jennifer and Tommy Tomm," I said.
She shook her head, almost sneering. "I can tell you what I told the police. I don't know who could have killed them."
"Come on, Bianca. We don't have to hide things from one another. We're not a part of the mortal world."
Her eyebrows slanted down, revealing more anger. "No. You're the only one in the city with the kind of skill required to cast that sort of spell. If you didn't do it, I have no idea who else could have."
"You don't have any enemies? Anyone who might have been wanting to make an impression on you?"
A bitter little line appeared at the corner of her lips, something that was not quite a smile. "Of course. But none of them could have managed what happened to Tommy and Jenny." She drummed her fingernails over the tabletop, leaving little score marks in the wood. "I don't let any enemies that dangerous run around alive. At least, not for long."
I settled back in my chair, frowning, and did my damnedest not to let her see how scared I was. "How did you know Tommy Tomm?"
She shrugged, her shoulders gleaming like porcelain, and just as brittle. "You may have thought he was just a bruiser for Johnny Marcone, Mister Dresden. But Tommy was a very gentle and considerate man, underneath. He was always good to his women. He treated them like real people." Her gaze shifted from side to side, not lifting. "Like human beings. I wouldn't take on a client if I thought he wouldn't be a gentleman, but Tommy was better than most. I met him years ago, elsewhere. I always made sure he had someone to take care of him when he wanted an evening of company."
"You sent Jennifer out to him that night?"
She nodded, her expression bleak. Her nails drummed the tabletop again, gouging out more wood.
"Was there anyone else he saw on a regular basis? Maybe someone who would have talked to him, known what was going on in his life?"
Bianca shook her head. "No," she said. But then she frowned.
I just watched her, and absently tossed the handkerchief on the tabletop. Her eyes flicked to it, then up to mine.
I didn't flinch. I met her bottomless gaze and quirked my mouth up in a little smile, as though I had something more, and worse, to pull out of my hat if she wanted to come after me again. I saw her anger, her rage, and for just a moment I got a peek inside, saw the source of it. She was furious that I had seen her true form, horrified and embarrassed that I had stripped her disguise away and seen the creature beneath. And she was afraid that I could take away even her mask, forever, with my power.
More than anything else, Bianca wanted to be beautiful. And tonight, I had destroyed her illusion. I had rattled her gilded little world. She sure as hell wasn't going to let me forget that.
She shuddered and jerked her eyes away, furious and frightened at the same time, before I could see any deeper into her---or she into me. "If I had not given you my word, Dresden," she whispered, "I would kill you this instant."
"That would be unfortunate," I said. I kept my voice hard. "You should know the risks in a wizard's death curse. You've got something to lose, Bianca. And even if you could take me out, you can bet your pretty ass I'd be dragging you into hell with me."
She stiffened, then turned her head to one side, and let her fingers go limp. It was a silent, bitter surrender. She didn't move quickly enough for me to miss seeing a tear streak down one cheek.
I'd made the vampire cry. Great. I felt like a real superhero. Harry Dresden, breaker of monsters' hearts.
"There may be one person who might know something," she said, her lovely voice dull, flat, lifeless. "I had a woman who worked for me. Linda Randall. She and Jennifer went out on calls together, when customers wanted that sort of thing. They were close."
"Where is she now?" I asked.
"She's working as a driver for someone. Some rich couple who wanted a servant that would do more than windows. She wasn't the type I usually keep around in any case. I think Jennifer had her phone number. I can have someone fetch it for you, Mister Dresden." She said my name as though it were something bitter and poisonous that she wanted to spit out.
"Thank you. That would be very kind." I kept my tone carefully formal, neutral. Formality and a good bluff were all that was keeping her from my throat.
She remained quiet, controlling her evident emotions, before she started to look up again, at last. Her eyes froze, then widened when they came to my throat. Her expression went perfectly, inhumanly still.
I grew tense. Not just tense, but steel-tight, wirebound, spring-coiled. I was out of tricks and weapons. If she came after me now, I wasn't going to get the chance to defend myself. There was no way I would be able to drink the potion before she tore me apart. I gripped the arms of my chair hard, to keep myself from bolting. Do not show fear. Do not run away. It would only make her chase me, snap her instincts into the reaction of pursuing the prey.
"You're bleeding, Mister Dresden," she whispered.
I lifted my hand, slowly, to my throat, where her nails had scored me, earlier. My fingertips came away slick with my own blood.
Bianca kept on staring. Her tongue flickered around her mouth again. "Cover it," she whispered. A strange, mewling sound came out of her mouth. "Cover it, Dresden."
I picked up my handkerchief, and pressed it over my throat. Bianca blinked her eyes closed, slowly, and then turned away, half-hunched over her stomach. She didn't stand up.
"Go," she told me. "Go now. Rachel's coming. I'll send her down to the gate with the phone number in a little while."
I walked toward the door, but then stopped, glancing back at her. There was a sort of horrid fascination to it, to knowing what was beneath the alluring exterior, the flesh mask, but seeing it twist and writhe with need.
"Go," Bianca whimpered. Fury, hunger, and some emotion I couldn't even begin to fathom made her voice stretch out, thinner. "Go. And do not think that I will not remember this night. Do not think that I will not make you regret it."
The door to the library opened, and the straight-haired young woman who had greeted me earlier entered the room. She gave me a passing glance, then walked past me, kneeling at Bianca's side. Rachel, I presumed.
Rachel murmured something too soft to hear, gently brushing Bianca's hair back from her face with one hand. Then she unbuttoned the sleeve of her blouse, rolled it up past her elbow, and pressed her wrist to Bianca's mouth.
I had a good view of what happened. Bianca's tongue flashed out, long and pink and sticky, smearing Rachel's wrist with shining saliva. Rachel shuddered at the touch, her breath coming quicker. Her nipples stiffened beneath the thin fabric of the blouse, and she let her head fall slowly backwards. Her eyes were glazed over with a narcotic languor, like those of a junkie who had just shot up.
Bianca's fangs extended and slashed open Rachel's pale, pretty skin. Blood welled. Bianca's tongue began to flash in and out, faster than could really be seen, lapping the blood up as quickly as it appeared. Her dark eyes were narrowed, distant. Rachel was gasping and moaning in pleasure, her entire body shivering.
I felt a little sick and withdrew step by step, not turning my back on the scene. Rachel toppled slowly to the floor, writhing her way toward unconsciousness with an evident glee. Bianca followed her down, unladylike now, a creature of bestial hunger. She crouched over the supine woman, and in the hunch of her pale shoulders I could see the batlike thing beneath the flesh mask, lapping up Rachel's blood.
I got out of there, fast, shutting the door behind me. My heart was hammering, too quickly. The scene with Rachel might have aroused me, if I hadn't seen what was underneath Bianca's mask. Instead, it only made me sick to my stomach, afraid. The woman had given herself to that thing, as quickly and as willingly as any woman to her lover.
The saliva, some part of me rationalized, desperate to latch on to something cold and logical and detached. The saliva was probably narcotic, perhaps even addictive. It would explain Rachel's behavior, the need to have more of her drug. But I wondered if Rachel would have been so eager, had she known Bianca's true face.
Now I understood why the White Council was so hardnosed with vampires. If they could get that kind of control over a mortal, what would happen if they could get their hooks into a wizard? If they could addict a wizard to them as thoroughly as Bianca had the girl I'd just seen? Surely, it wasn't possible.
But if it wasn't, why would the Council be so nervous about them?
Do not think I will not make you regret it, she had said.
I felt cold as I hurried down the dark driveway toward the gate.
Fido the security guard was waiting for me at the front gate, and passed back my knife and my cane without a word. A tow truck was out front, latching itself to the Beetle. I put one hand on the cold metal of the gate and kept the other, with its handkerchief, pressed to my throat, as I watched George the tow-truck guy work. He recognized me and waved, flashing a grin that showed the white teeth in his dark face. I nodded back. I wasn't up to answering the smile.
A few minutes later, the guard's cellular phone beeped at him. He withdrew several paces, repeated several affirmatives, then took a notebook from his pocket, writing something down. He put the phone away and walked back over to me, offering me the piece of paper.
"What's this?" I said.
"The phone number you were looking for. And a message."
I glanced at the paper, but avoided reading it just then. "I thought Bianca was going to send Rachel down with it."
He didn't say anything. But his jaw tightened, and I saw his eyes flick toward the house, where his mistress was. He swallowed. Rachel wasn't coming out of the house, and Fido was afraid.
I took the paper. I kept my hand from shaking as I looked at it.
On it was a phone number. And a single word: Regret.
I folded the piece of paper in half and put it away into the pocket of my duster. Another enemy. Super. At least with my hands in my pockets, Fido couldn't see them shaking. Maybe I should have listened to Murphy. Maybe I should have stayed home and played with some nice, safe, forbidden black magic instead.
I departed Bianca's place in George's loaner, a wood-panel Studebaker that grumbled and growled and squealed everywhere it went. I stopped at a pay phone, a short distance from the house, and called Linda Randall's number.
The phone rang several times before a quiet, dusky contralto answered, "Beckitts', this is Linda."
"Linda Randall?" I asked.
"Mmmm," she answered. She had a furry, velvety voice, something tactile. "Who's this?"
"My name is Harry Dresden. I was wondering if I could talk to you."
"Harry who?" she asked.
"Dresden. I'm a private investigator."
She laughed, the sound rich enough to roll around naked in. "Investigating my privates, Mr. Dresden? I like you already."
I coughed. "Ah, yes. Ms. Randall---"
"Miss," she said, cutting in. "Miss Randall. I'm not occupied. At the moment."
"Miss Randall," I amended. "I'd like to ask you some questions about Jennifer Stanton, if I could."
Silence on the other end of the line. I could hear some sounds in the background, a radio playing, perhaps, and a recorded voice talking about white zones and red zones and loading and unloading of vehicles.
"Miss Randall?"
"No," she said.
"It won't take long. And I assure you that you aren't the subject of anything I'm doing. If you could just give me a few moments of your time."
"No," she told me. "I'm on duty, and will be the rest of the night. I don't have time for this."
"Jennifer Stanton was a friend of yours. She's been murdered. If there's anything you could tell me that might help---"
She cut me off again. "There isn't," she said. "Goodbye, Mr. Dresden."
The line went dead.
I scowled at the phone, frustrated. That was it, then. I had gone through all the preparation, the face-off with Bianca, and possible future trouble for nothing.
No way, I thought. No way in hell.
Bianca had said that Linda Randall was working as a driver for someone, the Beckitts, I presumed, whoever they were. I'd recognized the voice in the background as a recorded message that played outside the concourses at O'Hare airport. So she was in a car at the airport, maybe waiting to pick up the Beckitts, and definitely not there for long.
With no time to lose, I kicked the wheezing old Studebaker into gear and drove to O'Hare. It was far easier to blow off someone over the phone than it was to do it in person. There were several concourses, but I had to trust to luck---luck to guide me to the right one, and luck to get me there before Miss I-am-not-occupied Randall had the opportunity to pick up her employers and leave. And a little more luck to keep the Studebaker running all the way to O'Hare.
The Studebaker did make it all the way there, and on the second concourse I came across a silver baby limo, idling in a parking zone. The interior was darkened, so I couldn't see inside very well. It was a Friday evening, and the place was busy, business folk in their sober suits returning home from long trips about the country. Cars continually purred in and out of the semicircular drive. A uniformed cop was directing traffic, keeping people from doing brainless things like parking in the middle of one of the traffic lanes in order to load up the car.
I swerved the old Studebaker into a parking place, racing a Volvo for it and winning by dint of driving the older and heavier vehicle and having the more suicidal attitude. I kept an eye on the silver limo as I got out of the car and strode over to a bank of pay phones. I plopped my quarter in, and once more dialed the number provided by Bianca.
The phone rang. In the silver limo, someone stirred.
"Beckitts', this is Linda," she purred.
"Hello, Linda," I said. "This is Harry Dresden again."
I could almost hear her smirk. There was a flicker of light from inside the car, the silhouette of a woman's face, then the orange glow of a cigarette being lit. "I thought I told you I didn't want to talk to you, Mr. Dresden."
"I like women who play hard to get."
She laughed that delicious laugh. I could see her head move in the darkened car when she did. "I'm getting harder to get by the second. Goodbye again." She hung up on me.
I smiled, hung up the phone, walked over to the limo, and rapped on the window.
It buzzed down, and a woman in her mid-twenties arched an eyebrow at me. She had beautiful eyes the color of rain clouds, a little too much eye shadow, and brilliant scarlet lipstick on her cupid's-bow lips. Her hair was a medium brown, drawn back into a tight braid that made her cheeks look almost sharp, severe, except for her forelocks, which hung down close to her eyes in insolent disarray. She had a predatory look to her, harsh, sharp. She wore a crisp white shirt, grey slacks, and held a lit cigarette in one hand. The smoke curled up around my nose, and I exhaled, trying to push it away.
She looked me up and down, frankly assessing. "Don't tell me. Harry Dresden."
"I really need to talk to you, Miss Randall. It won't take long."
She glanced at her watch and then at the terminal doors. Then back up at me. "Well. You've got me cornered, don't you? I'm at your mercy." Her lips quirked. She took a drag of her cigarette. "And I like a man who just won't stop."
I cleared my throat again. The woman was attractive, but not unduly so. Yet there was something about her that revved my engines, something about the way she held her head or shaped her words that bypassed my brain and went straight to my hormones. Best to head directly to the point and minimize my chances of looking moronic. "How did you know Jennifer Stanton?"
She looked up at me through long lashes. "Intimately."
Ahem. "You, uh. Worked for Bianca with her."
Linda blew more smoke. "That prissy little bitch. Yes, I worked with Jen. We were even roommates for a while. Shared a bed." She wrapped her lips around the last word, drawing it out with a little tremor that dripped wicked, secret laughter.
"Did you know Tommy Tomm?" I asked.
"Oh, sure. Fantastic in bed." She lowered her eyes and shifted on the car's seat, lowering one of her hands out of sight, and making me wonder where it had gone. "He was a regular customer. Maybe twice a month Jen and I would go over to his place, have a little party." She leaned toward me. "He could do things to a woman that would turn her into a real animal, Harry Dresden. You know what I mean? Growling and snarling. In heat."
She was driving me crazy. That voice of hers inspired the kinds of dreams you wish you could remember more clearly in the morning. Her expression promised to show me things that you don't talk about with other people, if I would give her half a chance. Your job, Harry. Think about your job.
Some days I really hate my job.
"When was the last time you talked to her?"
She took another drag, and this time I saw a small shake to her fingers, one she quickly hid. Just not quickly enough. She was nervous. Nervous enough to be shaking, and now I could see what she was up to. She was wearing the alley-cat mask, appealing to my glands instead of my brain, and trying to distract me with it, trying to keep me from finding something out.
I'm not inhuman. I can be distracted by a pretty face, or body, like any other youngish man. Linda Randall was damned good at playing the part. But I do not like to be made the fool.
So, Miss Sex Goddess. What are you hiding?
I cleared my throat, and asked, mildly, "When was the last time you spoke to Jennifer Stanton, Miss Randall?"
She narrowed her eyes at me. She wasn't dumb, whatever else she was. She'd seen me reading her, seeing through her pretense. The flirting manner vanished. "Are you a cop?" she demanded.
I shook my head. "Scout's honor. I'm just trying to find out what happened to her."
"Dammit," she said, softly. She flicked the butt of the cigarette out onto the concrete and blew out a mouthful of smoke. "Look. I tell you anything and see a cop coming around, I never saw you before. Got it?"
I nodded.
"I talked to Jen on Wednesday evening. She called me. It was Tommy's birthday. She wanted to get together again." Her mouth twisted. "Sort of a reunion."
I glanced about and leaned down closer to her. "Did you?"
Her eyes were roving about now, nervous, like a cat who has found herself shut into a small room. "No," she said. "I had to work. I wanted to, but---"
"Did she say anything unusual? Anything that might have made you suspect she was in danger?"
She shook her head again. "No, nothing. We hadn't talked much for a while. I didn't see her as much after I split from the Velvet Room."
I frowned at her. "Do you know what else she was doing? Anything she might have been involved with that could have gotten her hurt?"
She shook her head. "No, no. Nothing like that. That wasn't her style. She was sweet. A lot of girls get like---They get pretty jaded, Mr. Dresden. But it never really touched her. She made people feel better about themselves somehow." She looked away. "I could never do that. All I did was get them off."
"There's nothing you can tell me? Nothing you can think of?"
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. She shook her head again, and she lied to me as she did it. I was just sure of it. She was closing in, tightening up, and if there was nothing to tell me, she wouldn't be trying to hide it. She must know something---unless she was just shutting down because I'd stomped all over her feelings, as I had Bianca's. Either way, she wasn't telling me anything else.
I tightened my fist, frustrated. If Linda Randall had no information for me, I was at a dead end. And I'd romped all over another woman's feelings---two in one night. You are on a roll, Dresden. Even if one of them had been something not-human.
"Why," I asked her, the words slipping out before I thought about them. "Why the slut act?"
She looked up at me again, and smirked. I saw the subtle shifting in her, magnifying that sort of animal appeal she had, once more, as she had been doing when I first approached her---but it didn't hide the self-loathing in her eyes. I looked away, quickly, before I had to see any more of it. I got the feeling that I didn't want to see Linda Randall's soul. "Because it's what I do, Mr. Dresden. For some people it's drugs. Booze. For me, orgasms. Sex. Passion. Just another addict. City's full of them." She glanced aside. "Next best thing to love. And it keeps me in work. Excuse me."
She swung open the door. I took a quick step back and out of her way as she moved to the back of the limo, long legs taking long steps, and opened the trunk.
A tall couple, both wearing glasses and dressed in stylish grey business clothes, emerged from the terminal and approached the limo. They had the look of lifestyle professionals, the kind that have a career and no kids, with enough money and time to spend on making themselves look good---a NordicTrack couple. He was carrying an overnight bag over his shoulder and a small suitcase in one hand, while she bore only a briefcase. They wore no jewelry, not even watches or wedding rings. Odd.
The man slung the luggage items into the limo's trunk and looked from Linda to me. Linda avoided his eyes. He tried to speak quietly enough not to be heard, but I have good ears.
"Who's this?" he asked. His voice had a strained note to it.
"Just a friend, Mr. Beckitt. A guy I used to see," she answered him.
More lies. More interesting.
I looked across the limo to the woman, presumably Mrs. Beckitt. She regarded me with a calm face, entirely devoid of emotion. It was a little spooky. She had the look I'd seen in films, on the faces of prisoners released from the German stalags at the end of World War II. Empty. Numb. Dead, and just didn't know it yet.
Linda opened the back door and let Mr. and Mrs. Beckitt into the car. Mrs. Beckitt briefly put a hand on Linda's waist in passing, a gesture that was too intimate and possessive for the hired help. I saw Linda shiver, then close the door. She walked back around the car to me.
"Get out of here," she said, quietly. "I don't want to get in any trouble with my boss."
I reached for her hand, grabbed it, and held it between both of mine, as an old lover might, I supposed. My business card was pressed between our palms. "My card. If you think of anything else, give me a call. Okay?"
She turned away from me without answering, but the card vanished into a pocket before she got back into the limo.
Mrs. Beckitt's dead eyes watched me through the side window as the limo went by me. It was my turn to shiver. Like I said, spooky.
I went on into the airport. The monitors displaying flight times flickered to fuzz when I walked by. I went to one of the cafés inside, sat down, and ordered myself a cup of coffee. I had to pay for it with change. Most of my money had gone into paying off last month's rent and into the love potion I'd let Bob talk me into making. Money. I needed to get to work on Monica Sells's case, finding her husband. I didn't want to get out of hot water with the White Council only to lose my office and apartment because I couldn't pay the bills.
I sipped coffee and tried to organize my thoughts. I had two areas of concern. The most important was finding who had killed Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton. Not only to catch the killer before any more corpses turned up, but because if I didn't, the White Council would probably use the opportunity to have me put to death.
And, while tracking down killers and avoiding execution squads, I had to do some work for someone who would pay me. Tonight's excursion wasn't something I could charge Murphy for---she'd have my ass in a sling if she knew I was running around asking questions, poking my nose in where it shouldn't be. So, if I wanted money from Chicago P.D., I would have to spend time doing the research Murphy wanted---the black-magic research that could get me killed all by itself.
Or, I could work on Monica Sells's missing-husband case. I thought I had that one pretty well pegged down, but it wouldn't hurt to get it fleshed out fully. I could spend time working on it, fill out the hours on the retainer, maybe even get a few more added on. That appealed to me a lot more than trying to work out some black magic.
So, I could follow up on the lead Toot-toot had given me. There'd been pizza delivered out to the Lake Providence home that night. Time to talk to the deliveryman, if possible.
I left the café, went out to the pay phones, and dialed directory assistance. There was only one place near the Lake Providence address that delivered pizza. I got the number and dialed through.
"Pizza 'Spress," someone with his mouth full said. "What'll it be tonight?"
"Hey there," I said. "I wonder if you can help me out. I'm looking for the driver who took an order out to an address on Wednesday night." I told him the address, and asked if I could speak to the driver.
"Another one," he snorted. "Sure, hang on. Jack just got in from a run." The voice on the other end of the line called out to someone, and a minute later the high baritone of a young man spoke tentatively into my ear.
"H-hello?"
"Hello," I answered. "Are you the driver who took pizza to---"
"Look," he said, his voice exasperated and nervous. "I said I was sorry already. It won't happen again."
I blinked for a minute, off balance. "Sorry for what?"
"Jeezus," he said. I heard him move across a room, with a lot of music and loud talk in the background, and then the background noise cut off, as though he had stepped into another room and shut the door behind him. "Look," he said in a half whine. "I told you I'm not gonna say anything to anyone. I was only looking. You can't blame me, right? No one answered the door, what was I supposed to do?" His voice cracked in the middle of his sentences. "Hell of a party, but hey. That's your business. Right?"
I struggled to keep up with the kid. "What, exactly, did you see, Jack?" I asked him.
"No one's face," he assured me, his voice growing more nervous. He gave a jittery little laugh and tried to joke. "Better things to look at than faces, right? I mean, I don't give a damn what you do in your own house. Or your friends, or whoever. Don't worry about me. Never going to say a thing. Next time I'll just leave the pizza and run a tab, right?"
Friends, plural. Interesting. The kid was awfully nervous. He must have gotten an eyeful. But I had a gut instinct that he was hiding something else, keeping it back.
"What else?" I asked him. I kept my voice calm and neutral. "You saw something else. What was it?"
"None of my business," he said, instantly. "None of my business. Look, I gotta get off this line. We have to keep it open for orders. It's Friday night, we're busy as hell."
"What," I said, separating my words, keeping them clipped, "else?"
"Oh, shit," he breathed, his voice shaking. "Look, I wasn't with that guy. Didn't know anything about him. I didn't tell him you were having an orgy out there. Honest. Jeezus, mister, I don't want any trouble."
Victor Sells seemed to have a real good idea of how to party---and of how to frighten teenagers. "One more question, and I'll let this go," I told him. "Who was it you saw? Tell me about him."
"I don't know. I don't know him, didn't recognize him. Some guy, with a camera, that's all. I went around the back of the house to try the back door, got up on your deck, and just saw inside. I didn't keep on looking. But he was up there, all in black, with this camera, taking pictures." He paused as someone pounded on the door he had closed earlier. "Oh, God, I have to go, mister. I don't know you. I don't know nothing." And then there was a scrambling of feet, and he hung up the phone.
I hung up the phone myself and ambled back to George's loaner. I worked out the details I had just learned on the way back to my apartment.
Someone else had called Pizza 'Spress, evidently just before I had. Someone else had gone asking after the pizza boy. Who?
Why, Victor Sells, of course. Tracing down people who might have information about him, his possible presence in the lake house. Victor Sells, who had been having some sort of get-together out there that night. Maybe he'd been drunk, or one of his guests had been, and ordered the pizza---and now Victor was trying to cover his tracks.
Which implied that Victor knew someone was looking for him. Hell, as far as I knew, he'd been in the house when I'd gone out there last night. This made things a lot more interesting. A missing man who doesn't want to be found could get dangerous if someone came snooping after him.
And a photographer? Someone lurking around outside of windows and taking pictures? I rummaged in my duster pocket and felt the round plastic film canister. That explained where the canister had come from, at any rate. But why would someone be out there at the house, taking pictures of Victor and his friends? Maybe because Monica had hired someone else, a PI, without telling me. Maybe just a neighbor with the hots for taking dirty pictures. No way to tell, really. More mysteries.
I pulled the Studebaker into my drive and killed the engine. I tallied the score for the evening. Enigmas: lots. Harry: zero.
My investigation for Monica Sells had netted me one husband throwing wild parties in his beach house after losing his job, and working hard not to be found. Probably an advanced case of male menopause. Monica didn't seem to be the kind of woman who would take such a thing with good grace---more like the kind who would close her eyes and call me a liar if I told her the truth. But at least it merited a little more looking into---I could log a few more hours in on the case, maybe earn some more money out of it before I gave her the bill. But I still didn't really know anything.
The angle with Bianca had come to a dead end at Linda Randall. All I had were more questions for Miss Randall, and she was as closed as a bank on Sunday. I didn't have anything solid enough to hand to Murphy to let her pursue the matter. Dammit. I was going to have to do that research after all. Maybe it would turn up something helpful, some kind of clue to help lead me and the police to the murderer.
And maybe dragons would fly out my butt. But I had to try.
So I got out of the car to go inside and get to work.
He was waiting for me behind the trash cans that stood next to the stairs leading down to my front door. The baseball bat he swung at me took me behind the ear and pitched me to the bottom of the stairs in a near-senseless heap. I could hear his footsteps, but couldn't quite move, as he came down the stairs toward me.
It figured. It was just the kind of day I was having.
I felt his foot on the back of my neck. Felt him lift the baseball bat. And then it came whistling down toward my skull with a mighty crack of impact.
Except that it missed my motionless head, and whacked into the concrete next to my face, right by my eyes, instead.
"Listen up, Dresden," my attacker said. His voice was rough, low, purposefully hoarse. "You got a big nose. Stop sticking it where it doesn't belong. You got a big mouth. Stop talking to people you don't need to talk to. Or we're going to shut that mouth of yours." He waited a melodramatically appropriate moment, and then added, "Permanently."
His footsteps retreated up the stairs and vanished.
I just lay there watching the stars in front of my eyes for a while. Mister appeared from somewhere, probably drawn by the groaning noises, and started licking at my nose.
I eventually regained my mobility and sat up. My head was spinning, and I felt sick to my stomach. Mister rubbed up against me, as though he sensed something was wrong, purring in a low rumble. I managed to stand up long enough to unlock my apartment door, let Mister and myself in, and lock it behind me. I staggered over to my easy chair in the darkness and sat down with a whuff of expelled breath.
I sat motionless until the spinning slowed down enough to allow me to open my eyes again, and until the pounding of my head calmed down. Pounding head. Someone could have been pounding on my head with a baseball bat just then, pounding my head into new and interesting shapes that were inconducive to carrying on businesslike pursuits. Someone could have been pounding Harry Dresden right into the hereafter.
I cut off that line of thought. "You are not some poor rabbit, Dresden!" I reminded myself, sternly. "You are a wizard of the old school, a spellslinger of the highest caliber. You're not going to roll over for some schmuck with a baseball bat because he tells you to!"
Galvanized by the sound of my own voice, or maybe only by the somewhat unsettling realization that I had begun talking to myself, I stood up and built up the fire in the fireplace, then walked unsteadily back and forth in front of it, trying to think, to work out the details.
Had this evening's visits triggered the warning? Who had reason to threaten me? What were they trying to keep me from finding? And, most importantly, what was I going to do about it?
Someone had seen me talking to Linda Randall, maybe. Or, more likely, someone had seen me showing up at Bianca's place, asking questions. The Blue Beetle may not be glitzy, but it is sort of difficult to mistake for anyone else's car. Who would have reason to have me watched?
Why, hadn't Gentleman Johnny Marcone followed me so that he could have a word with me? So he could ask me to keep out of this business with Tommy Tomm's murder? Yes he had. Maybe this had been another reminder from the mob boss. It had that kind of mafioso feel to it.
I staggered to my kitchenette and fixed myself a tisane tea for the headache, then added in some aspirin. Herbal remedies are well and good, but I don't like to take chances.
Working on that same principle, I got my Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special out of its drawer, took the cloth covering off of it, and made sure it was loaded. Then I stuck the revolver in my jacket pocket.
Wizardry aside, it's tough to beat a gun for discouraging men with baseball bats. And I sure as hell wasn't going to roll over for the tiger-souled Johnny Marcone, let him push me around, let him know that it was all right to walk all over me whenever he felt like it. No way in hell or on earth, either.
My head was throbbing, and my hands were shaking, but I went down the ladder to my workroom---and started figuring out how to rip someone's heart out of his chest from fifty miles away.
Who says I never do anything fun on a Friday night?
It took me the rest of the night and part of the morning, but I worked out how I could murder someone in the same manner that Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton had been killed. After the fifth or sixth time I'd checked the figures, I stared at my calculations.
It didn't make any sense. It was impossible.
Or maybe we were all underestimating just how dangerous this killer was.
I grabbed my duster, and headed out without bothering to check my looks. I don't keep any mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows---or doors---but I was pretty sure I looked like a wreck. The Studebaker's rearview mirror confirmed this. My face was haggard, with a shadow of a beard, deep circles under bloodshot eyes, and hair that looked as though it had been riding a speeding motorcycle through a cloud of greasy smoke. Smoothing your hair back with sweaty palms as a study habit will do that to you. Especially if you do it for twelve or fourteen hours straight.
It didn't matter. Murphy wanted this information, and she needed to have it. Things were bad. They were very, very bad.
I made quick time down to the station, knowing Murphy would want to hear this from me face-to-face. The police station Murphy worked in was one in an aged complex of buildings that housed the metro police department. It was rundown, sagging in places like an old soldier who nonetheless stood at attention and struggled to hold in his gut. There was graffiti along one wall that the janitor wouldn't come to scrub off until Monday morning.
I parked in the visitors' parking---easy to do on a Saturday morning---and headed up the steps and into the building. The desk sergeant wasn't the usual mustached old warhorse whom I had run into before, but a greying matron with steely eyes who disapproved of me and my lifestyle in a single glance, then made me wait while she called up Murphy.
While I waited, a pair of officers came in, dragging a handcuffed man between them. He wasn't resisting them---just the opposite, in fact. His head was down, and he was moaning in an almost musical way. He was on the thin side, and I got the impression that he was young. His denim jeans and jacket were battered, unkempt, as was his hair. The officers dragged him past the desk, and one of them said, "That DUI we called in. We're going to take him up to holding until he can see straight."
The desk sergeant passed a clipboard over, and one of the officers took it under his arm, before the two of them dragged the young man up the stairs. I waited, rubbing at my tired eyes, until the sergeant managed to get through to someone upstairs. She gave a rather surprised "Hmph," and then said, "All right, Lieutenant. I'll send him on up." She waved a hand at me to go on past. I could feel her eyes on me as I went by, and I smoothed my palm self-consciously over my head and jaw.
Special Investigations kept a little waiting area just within the door at the top of the staircase. It consisted of four wooden chairs and a sagging old couch that would probably kill your back if you tried to sleep on it. Murphy's office was at the end of a double row of cubicles.
Murphy stood just inside her office with a phone pressed to her ear, wearing a martyred expression. She looked like a teenager having a fight with an out-of-town boyfriend, though she'd tear my head off if she heard me saying any such thing. I waved my hand, and she nodded back at me. She pointed at the waiting area, then shut her office door.
I took a seat in one of the chairs and leaned my head back against a wall. I had just closed my eyes when I heard a scream from behind me in the hallway. There was a struggling sound, and a few startled exclamations, before the scream repeated itself, closer this time.
I acted without thinking---I was too tired to think. I rose and went into the hall, toward the source of the sound. To my left was the staircase, and to my right the hallway stretched ahead of me.
A figure appeared, the silhouette of a running man, moving toward me with long strides. It was the man who had hung so limply between the two officers, humming, a few minutes before. He was the one screaming. I heard a scrabbling sound, and then the pair of officers I had seen downstairs a few moments before came around the corner. Neither of them was a young man anymore, and they both ran with their bellies out, puffing for breath, holding their gun belts against their hips with one hand.
"Stop!" one of the officers shouted, panting. "Stop that man!"
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. The man running toward me kept on screaming, high and terrified, his voice a long and uninterrupted peal of...something. Terror, panic, lust, rage, all rolled up into a ball and sent spewing out into the air through his vocal cords.
I had a quick impression of wide, staring eyes, a dirty face, a denim jacket, and old jeans as he came down the shadowy hallway. His hands were behind his back, presumably held there by cuffs. He wasn't seeing the hall he was running through. I don't know what he was looking at, but I got the impression that I didn't want to know. He came hurtling toward me and the stairs, blind and dangerous to himself.
It wasn't any of my business, but I couldn't let him break himself apart in a tumble down the stairs. I threw myself toward him as hard as I could, attempting to put my shoulder into his stomach and drive him backward in a football-style tackle.
There is a reason I got cut every year during high school. I rammed into him, but he just whuffed out a breath and spun to one side, into a wall. It was as though he hadn't seen me coming and had no realization that I was there. He just kept staring blindly and screaming, careening off the wall and continuing on his way, toward the stairs. I went down to the floor, my head abruptly throbbing again where the unknown tough had rapped me with a baseball bat last night.
One good thing about being as tall as I am---I have long arms. I rolled back toward him and lashed out with one hand, fingers clutching. I caught his jeans at the cuff and gave his leg a solid sideways tug.
That did it. He spun, off-balance, and went down to the tile floor. The scream stopped as the fall took the wind from him. He slid to the top of the stairs and stopped, feebly struggling. The officers pounded past me toward him, one going to either side.
And then something strange happened.
The young man looked up at me, and his eyes rounded and dilated, until I thought they had turned into huge black coins dotted onto his bloodshot eyeballs. His eyes rolled back into his head until he could hardly have been able to see, and he started to shout in a clarion voice.
"Wizard!" he trumpeted. "Wizard! I see you! I see you, wizard! I see the things that follow, those who walk before and He Who Walks Behind! They come, they come for you!"
"Jesus Christ on a crutch," the shorter, rounder officer said, as they took the man by his arms and started dragging him back down the hall. "Junkies. Thanks for the assist, buddy."
I stared at the man, stunned. I caught the sleeve of the taller officer. "What's going on, sir?" I asked him.
He stopped, letting the prisoner hang between him and his partner. The prisoner's head was bowed forward, and his eyes were still rolled back, but he had his head turned toward me and was grinning a horrible, toothy grin. His forehead was wrinkled oddly, almost as though he were somehow focusing on me through the bones of his browridges and the frontal lobes of his brain.
"Junkie," the taller officer said. "One of those new ThreeEye punks. Caught him down by the lake in his car with nearly four grams of the stuff. Probably more in him." He shook his head. "You okay?"
"Fine, fine," I assured him. "ThreeEye? That new drug?"
The shorter officer snorted. "One that's supposed to make them see the spirit world, that kind of crap."
The taller one nodded. "Stuff hooks harder than crack. Thanks for the help. Didn't know you were a civilian, though. Didn't expect anyone but police down here this time of day."
"No problem," I assured him. "I'm fine."
"Hey," the stouter one said. He squinted at me and shook his finger. "Aren't you the guy? That psychic consultant Carmichael told me about?"
"I'll take the fifth," I said to him with a grin that I didn't feel. The two officers chuckled and turned back to their business, quickly shouldering me aside as they dragged their prisoner away.
He whispered in a mad little voice, all the way down the hall. "See you, see you, wizard. See He Who Walks Behind."
I returned to my chair in the waiting area at the end of the row of cubicles and sat down, my head throbbing, my stomach rolling uncomfortably. He Who Walks Behind. I had never seen the junkie before. Never been close to him. I hadn't sensed the subtle tension of power in the air around him that signified the presence of a magical practitioner.
So how the hell had he seen the shadow of He Who Walks Behind flowing in my wake?
For reasons I don't have time to go into now, I am marked, indelibly, with the remnants of the presence of a hunter-spirit, a sort of spectral hit man known as He Who Walks Behind. I had beaten long odds in surviving the enemy of mine who had called up He Who Walks Behind and sent him after me---but even though the hunter-spirit had never gotten to me, the mark could still be seen upon me by those who knew how, by using the Third Sight, stretching out behind me like a long and horribly shaped shadow. Sort of a spiritual scar to remind me of the encounter.
But only a wizard had that kind of vision, the ability to sense the auras and manifestations of magical phenomena. And that junkie had been no wizard.
Was it possible that I had been wrong in my initial assessment of ThreeEye? Could the drug genuinely grant to its users the visions of the Third Sight?
I shuddered at the thought. The kind of things you see when you learn how to open your Third Eye could be blindingly beautiful, bring tears to your eyes---or they could be horrible, things that made your worst nightmares seem ordinary and comforting. Visions of the past, the future, of the true natures of things. Psychic stains, troubled shades, spirit-folk of all description, the shivering power of the Nevernever in all its brilliant and subtle hues---and all going straight into your brain: unforgettable, permanent. Wizards quickly learn how to control the Third Eye, to keep it closed except in times of great need, or else they go mad within a few weeks.
I shivered. If the drug was real, if it really did open the Third Eye in mortals instead of just inflicting ordinary hallucinations upon its users, then it was far more dangerous than it seemed, even with the deleterious effects demonstrated by the junkie I had tackled. Even if a user didn't go mad from seeing too many horrible or otherworldly things, he might see through the illusions and disguises of any of a number of beings that passed among mankind regularly, unseen---which could compel such creatures to act in defense, for fear of being revealed. Double jeopardy.
"Dresden," Murphy snapped, "wake up."
I blinked. "Not asleep," I slurred. "Just resting my eyes."
She snorted. "Save it, Harry," she said, and pushed a cup into my hands. She'd made me coffee with a ton of sugar in it, just the way I like, and even though it was a little stale, it smelled like heaven.
"You're an angel," I muttered. I took a sip, then nodded down the row of cubicles. "You want to hear this one in your office."
I could feel her eyes on me as I drank. "All right," she said. "Let's go. And the coffee's fifty cents, Harry."
I followed her to her office, a hastily assembled thing with cheap plywood walls and a door that wasn't hung quite straight. The door had a paper sign taped to it, neatly lettered in black Magic Marker with LT. KARRIN MURPHY. There was a rectangle of lighter wood where a plaque had once held some other hapless policeman's name. That the office never bothered to put up a fresh plaque was a not-so-subtle reminder of the precarious position of the Special Investigations director.
Her office furniture, the entire interior of the office, in fact, was a contrast with the outside. Her desk and chair were sleek, dark, and new. Her PC was always on and running on its own desk set immediately to her left. A bulletin board covered most of one little wall, and current cases were neatly organized on it. Her college diploma, the aikido trophies, and her marksman's awards were on the wall to one's immediate right as you entered the office, and sitting there right next to your face if you were standing before her desk or sitting in the chair in front of it. That was Murphy---organized, direct, determined, and just a little bit belligerent.
"Hold it," Murphy told me. I stopped outside of her office, as I always did, while she went inside and turned off, then unplugged her computer and the small radio on her desk. Murphy is used to the kind of mayhem that happens whenever I get around machinery. After she was done, I went on in.
I sat down and slurped more coffee. She slid up onto the edge of her desk, looking down at me, her blue eyes narrowed. She was dressed no less casually on a Saturday than she was on a workday---dark slacks, a dark blouse, set off by her golden hair, and bright silver necklace and earrings. Very stylish. I, in my rumpled sweats and T-shirt, black duster, and mussed hair, felt very slouchy.
"All right, Harry," she said. "What have you got for me?"
I took one last drink of coffee, stifled a yawn, and put the cup down on her desk. She slipped a coaster under it as I started speaking. "I was up all night working on it," I said, keeping my voice soft. "I had a hell of a time figuring out the spell. And as near as I can figure it, it's almost impossible to do it to one person, let alone two at once."
She glared at me. "Don't tell me almost impossible. I've got two corpses that say otherwise."
"Keep your shirt on," I growled at her. "I'm just getting started. You've got to understand the whole thing if you're going to understand any of it."
Her glare intensified. She put her hands on the edge of her desk, and said in a deadly, reasonable tone, "All right. Why don't you explain it to me?"
I rubbed at my eyes again. "Look. Whoever did this did it with a thaumaturgic spell. That much I'm sure of. He or she used some of Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton's hair or fingernails or something to create a link to them. Then they ripped out a symbolic heart from some kind of ritual doll or sacrificial animal and used a whale of an amount of energy to make the same thing happen to the victims."
"This doesn't tell me anything new, Harry."
"I'm getting there, I'm getting there," I said. "The amount of energy you need to do this is staggering. It would be a lot easier to manage a small earthquake than to affect a living being like that. Best-case scenario, I might be able to do it without killing myself. To one person who had really, really pissed me off."
"You're naming yourself as a suspect?" Murphy's mouth quirked at the corner.
I snorted. "I said I was strong enough to do it to one person. I think it would kill me to try two."
"You're saying that some sort of wizard version of Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled this off?"
I shrugged. "It's possible, I suppose. More likely, someone who's just really good pulled it off. Raw power doesn't determine all that you can do with magic. Focus matters, too. The better your focus is, the better you are at putting your power in one place at the same time, the more you can get done. Sort of like when you see some ancient little Chinese martial-arts master shatter a tree trunk with his hands. He couldn't lift a puppy over his head, but he can focus what power he does have with incredible effect."
Murphy glanced at her aikido trophies and nodded. "Okay," she said, "I can understand that, I think. So we're looking for the wizard version of Mister Miyagi."
"Or," I said, lifting a finger, "more than one wizard worked on this at the same time. Pooled their power together and used it all at once." My pounding head, combined with the queasy stomach and the caffeine, was making me a little woozy. "Teamwork, teamwork, that's what counts."
"Multiple killers," Murphy drawled. "I don't have one, and you're telling me there might be fifty."
"Thirteen," I corrected her. "You can never use more than thirteen. But I don't think that's very likely. It's a bitch to do. Everyone in the circle has to be committed to the spell, have no doubts, no reservations. And they have to trust one another implicitly. You don't see that kind of thing from your average gang of killers. It just isn't something that's going to happen, outside of some kind of fanaticism. A cult or political organization."
"A cult," Murphy said. She rubbed at her eyes. "The Arcane is going to have a field day with this one, if it gets out. So Bianca is involved in this, after all. Surely she's got enough enemies out there who could do this. She could inspire that kind of effort to get rid of her."
I shook my head. The pain was getting worse, heavier, but pieces were falling into place. "No. You're thinking the wrong angle here. The killer wasn't taking out the hooker and Tommy Tomm to get at Bianca."
"How do you know?"
"I went to see her," I responded.
"Dammit, Harry!"
I didn't react to her anger. "You know she wasn't going to talk to you, Murph. She's an old-fashioned monster girl. No cooperation with the authorities."
"But she did talk to you?" Murphy demanded.
"I said pretty please."
"I would beat you to crap if you didn't already look like it," Murphy said. "What did you find out?"
"Bianca wasn't in on it. She didn't have a clue who it could have been. She was nervous, scared." I didn't mention that she'd been scared enough to try to take me to pieces.
"So someone was sending a message---but not to Bianca?"
"To Johnny Marcone," I confirmed.
"Gang war in the streets," Murphy said. "And now the out-fit is bringing sorcery into it as well. Mafioso magic spells. Jesus Christ." She drummed her heels on the edge of the desk.
"Gang war. ThreeEye suppliers versus conventional narcotics. Right?"
She stared at me for a minute. "Yeah," Murphy said. "Yeah, it is. How did you know? We've been holding out details from the papers."
"I just ran into this guy who was stoned out of his mind on ThreeEye. Something he said makes me think that stuff isn't a bunch of crap. It's for real. And you would have to be one very, very badass wizard to manufacture a large quantity of this kind of drug."
Murphy's blue eyes glittered. "So, whoever is the one supplying the streets with ThreeEye---"
"---is the one who murdered Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tomm. I'm pretty sure of it. It feels right."
"I'd tend to agree," Murphy said, nodding. "All right, then. How many people do you know of who could manage the killing spell?"
"Christ, Murphy," I said, "you can't ask me to just hand you a list of names of people to drag downtown for questioning."
She leaned down closer to me, blue eyes fierce. "Wrong, Harry. I can ask you. I can tell you to give them to me. And if you don't, I can haul you in for obstruction and complicity so quick it will make your head spin."
"My head's already spinning," I told her. A little giggle slipped out. Throbbing head, pound, pound, pound. "You wouldn't do that, Murph. I know you. You know damned well that if I had anything you could use, I would give it to you. If you'd just let me in on the investigation, give me the chance to---"
"No, Harry," she said, her voice flat. "Not a chance. I am ass deep in alligators already without you getting difficult on me. You're already hurt, and don't ask me to buy some line about falling down the stairs. I don't want to have to scrape you off the concrete. Whoever did Tommy Tomm is going to get nasty when someone comes poking around, and it isn't your job to do it. It's mine."
"Suit yourself," I told her. "You're the one with the deadline."
Her face went pale, and her eyes blazed. "You're such an incredible shit, Harry."
I started to answer her, I really did---but my skull got loose and shaky on my neck, and things spun around, and my chair sort of wobbled up onto its back legs and whirled about precariously. I thought it was probably safest to slide my way along to the floor, rubbery as a snake. The tiles were nice and cool underneath my cheek and felt sort of comforting. My head went boom, boom, boom, the whole time I was down there, spoiling what would have otherwise been a pleasant little nap.
I woke up on the floor of Murphy's office. The clock on the wall said that it was about twenty minutes later. Something soft was underneath my head, and my feet were propped up with several phone books. Murphy was pressing a cool cloth against my forehead and throat.
I felt terrible. Exhausted, achy, nauseous, my head throbbing. I wanted to do nothing so much as curl up and whimper myself to sleep. Given that I would never live that down, I made a wisecrack instead. "Do you have a little white dress? I've had this deep-seated nurse fantasy about you, Murphy."
"A pervert like you would. Who hit your head?" she demanded.
"No one," I mumbled. "Fell down the stairs to my apartment."
"Bullshit, Harry," she said, her voice hard. Her hands were no less gentle with the cool cloth, though. "You've been running around on this case. That's where you got the bump on the head. Isn't it?"
I started to protest.
"Oh, save it," she said, letting out a breath. "If you didn't already have a concussion, I'd tie your heels to my car and drive through traffic." She held up two fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Fifty," I said, and held up two of my own. "It's not a concussion. Just a little bump on the head. I'll be fine." I started to sit up. I needed to get home, get some sleep.
Murphy put her hand on my neck and pressed me back down on the pillow beneath my head, which was, apparently, her jacket, because she wasn't wearing it. "Stay down," she growled. "How did you get here? Not in that heap of a car, I hope."
"The Beetle is doing its phoenix impression," I told her. "I've got a loaner. Look, I'll be fine. Just let me out of here, and I'll go home and get some sleep."
"You aren't in any shape to drive," Murphy said. "You're a menace. I'd have to arrest myself if I let you behind a wheel in your condition."
"Murph," I said, annoyed, "unless you can pay up what you owe me already, right now, I can't exactly afford a cab."
"Dream on, Harry," Murphy said. "And save your breath. I'll give you a ride home."
"I don't need a---" I began, but she got up from her knees and stalked out of her office.
Foolishness, I thought. Stupidity. I was perfectly capable of moving myself around. So I sat up and heaved myself to my feet.
Or tried to. I actually managed to half sit up. And then I just heaved.
Murphy came back in to find me curled on my side, her office stinking from where I'd thrown up. She didn't, for a change, say anything. She just knelt by me again, cleaned off my mouth, and put another cool cloth over the back of my neck.
I remember her helping me out to her car. I remember little pieces of the drive back to my apartment. I remember giving her the keys to the loaner, and mumbling something about Mike and the tow-truck driver.
But mostly I remember the way her hand felt on mine---cold with a little bit of nervousness to the soft fingers, small beneath my great gawking digits, and strong. She scolded and threatened me the entire way back to the apartment, I think. But I remember the way she made sure she held my hand, as though to assure herself that I was still there. Or to assure me that she was, that she wasn't going anywhere.
There's a reason I'll go out on a limb to help Murphy. She's good people. One of the best.
We got back to my apartment sometime before noon. Murphy helped me down the stairs and unlocked the door for me. Mister came running up and hurled himself against her legs in greeting. Maybe being short gives her better leverage or something, since she didn't really wobble when Mister rammed her, like I do. Or maybe it's the aikido.
"Christ, Harry," she muttered. "This place is dark." She tried the light switch, but the bulbs had burnt out last week, and I hadn't had the cash to replace them. So she sat me down on the couch and lit some candles off of the glowing coals in the fireplace. "All right," she said. "I'm putting you in bed."
"Well. If you insist."
The phone rang. It was in arm's reach so I picked it up. "Dresden," I mumbled.
"Mister Dresden, this is Linda. Linda Randall. Do you remember me?"
Heh. Do men remember the scene in the movie with Marilyn standing over the subway grating? I found myself remembering Linda Randall's eyes and wondering things a gentleman shouldn't.
"Are you naked?" I said. It took me a minute to register what I'd said. Whoops.
Murphy gave me an arch look. She stood up and walked into my bedroom, and busied herself straightening the covers and giving me a modicum of privacy. I felt cheered. My slip had thrown Murphy off better than any lie I could have managed. Maybe a woozy Harry was not necessarily a bad Harry.
Linda purred laughter into the phone. "I'm in the car right now, honey. Maybe later. Look, I've come up with a few things that might help you. Can you meet me tonight?"
I rubbed at my eyes. It was Saturday. Tonight was Saturday night. Wasn't there something I was supposed to do tonight?
To hell with it, I thought. It couldn't have been all that important if I couldn't even remember it. "Sure," I told her. "Fine."
She mmmmed into the phone. "You're such a gentleman. I like that, once in a while. I get off at seven. All right? Do you want to meet me? Say at eight?"
"My car exploded," I said. My tongue felt fuzzy. "I can meet you at the Seven-Eleven down the street from my apartment."
She poured that rich, creamy laughter into my ear again. "Tell you what. Give me an extra hour or so to go home, get a nice hot bath, make myself all pretty, and then I'll be there in your arms. Sound good to you?"
"Well. Okay."
She laughed again, and didn't say goodbye before disconnecting.
Murphy appeared again as soon as I hung up the phone. "Tell me you didn't just make a date, Dresden."
"You're just jealous."
Murphy snorted. "Please. I need more of a man than you to keep me happy." She started to get an arm beneath me to help me up. "You'd break like a dry stick, Dresden. You'd better get to bed before you get any more delusions."
I put a hand against her shoulder to push her back. I didn't have that kind of strength, but she backed off, frowning. "What?"
"Something," I said. I rubbed at my eyes. Something was bothering me. I was forgetting something, I was sure of it. Something I said I would do on Saturday. I struggled to push thoughts of drug wars and people driven mad by the Third Sight visions given them by the ThreeEye drug, and tried to concentrate.
It didn't take long to click. Monica. I had told her I would get in contact with her. I patted at my duster pockets until I found my notepad, and took it out. Fumbled it open, and waved at Murphy.
"Candle. Need to read something."
"Christ, Dresden. I swear you're at least as bad as my first husband. He was stubborn enough to kill himself, too." She sighed, and brought a candle over. The light hurt my eyes for a moment. I made out Monica's number and I dialed her up.
"Hello?" a male child's voice asked.
"Hi," I said. "I need to speak to Monica, please."
"Who's this?"
I remembered I was working for her on the sly and answered, "Her fourth cousin, Harry, from Vermont."
"'Kay," the kid said. "Hold on." Then he screamed, without lowering the mouthpiece of the phone from his lips, "MOM! YOUR COUSIN HARRY FROM VERMONT IS ON THE PHONE LONG-DISTANCE!"
Kids. You gotta love them. I adore children. A little salt, a squeeze of lemon---perfect.
I waited for the pounding in my head to resolve into mere agony as the kid dropped the phone and ran off, feet thumping on a hardwood floor.
A moment later, there was the rattle of the phone being picked up, and Monica's quiet, somewhat nervous voice said, "Um. Hello?"
"It's Harry Dresden," I told her. "I just wanted to call to let you know what I'd been able to find out for y---"
"I'm sorry," she interrupted me. "I don't, um...need any of those."
I blinked. "Uh, Monica Sells?" I read her the phone number.
"Yes, yes," she said, her voice hurried, impatient. "We don't need any help, thank you."
"Is this a bad time?"
"No. No, it's not that. I just wanted to cancel my order. Discontinue the service. Don't worry about me." There was an odd quality to her voice, as though she were forcing a housewife's good cheer into it.
"Cancel? You don't want me looking for your husband anymore? But ma'am, the money---" The phone began to buzz and static made the line fuzzy. I thought I heard a voice in the background, somewhere, and then the sound went dead except for the static. For a moment, I thought I'd lost the connection entirely. Blasted unreliable phones. Usually, they messed up on my end, not on the receiving end. You can't even trust them to foul up dependably.
"Hello? Hello?" I said, cross and grumpy.
Monica's voice returned. "Don't worry about that. Thank you so much for all of your help. Good day, bye-bye, thank you." Then she hung up on me.
I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it. "Bizarre," I said.
"Come on, Harry," Murphy said. She took the phone from my hand and planted it firmly in its cradle.
"Aww, Mom. It's not even dark yet." I made the lame joke to try to think about something besides how terribly my head was going to hurt when Murphy helped me up. She did. It did. We hobbled into the bedroom and when I stretched out on the cool sheets I was reasonably certain I was going to set down roots.
Murphy took my temperature and felt my scalp with her fingers, careful around the goose egg on the back of my skull. She shined a penlight into my eyes, which I did not like. She also got me a drink of water, which I did like, and had me swallow a couple of aspirin or Tylenol or something.
I only remember two more things about that morning. One was Murphy stripping me out of my shirt, boots, and socks, and leaning down to kiss my forehead and ruffle my hair. Then she covered me up with blankets and put out the lights. Mister crawled up and lay down across my legs, purring like a small diesel engine, comforting.
The second thing I remember was the phone ringing again. Murphy was just about to leave, her car keys rattling in her hand. I heard her turn back to pick up the phone, and say, "Harry Dresden's residence."
There was a silence.
"Hello?" Murphy said.
After another pause Murphy appeared in the doorway, a small shadow, looking down at me. "Wrong number. Get some rest, Harry."
"Thanks, Karrin." I smiled at her, or tried to. It must have looked ghastly. She smiled back, and I'm sure hers was nicer than mine.
She left then. The apartment got dark and quiet. Mister continued to rumble soothingly in the dark.
It kept nagging at me, even as I fell asleep. What had I forgotten? And another, less sensible question---who had been on the line who hadn't wanted to speak to Murphy? Had Monica Sells tried to call me back? Why would she call me off the case and tell me to keep the money?
I pondered that, and baseball bats and other matters, until Mister's purring put me to sleep.
I woke up when thunder rattled the old house above me.
True dark had fallen. I had no idea of what time it was. I lay in bed for a moment, confused and a little dizzy. There was a warm spot on my legs, where Mister must have been until a few moments before, but the big grey cat was nowhere to be seen. He was a chicken about thunderstorms.
Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke. I could probably stand to learn something from that.
My stomach was growling. I got out of bed, wobbled a little, and rooted about for my robe. I couldn't find it in the dark, but came across my duster where Murphy had left it on a chair, neatly folded. Lying on top of it was a scattering of cash, along with a napkin bearing the words "You will pay me back.---Murphy." I scowled at the money and tried to ignore the flash of gratitude I felt. I picked up my duster and tugged it on over my bare chest. Then I padded on naked feet out into the living room.
Thunder rumbled again, growling outside. I could feel the storm, in a way that a lot of people can't, and that most of those who can put down to nerves. It was raw energy up there, naked and pulsing through the clouds. I could feel the water in the rain and clouds, the moving air blowing the droplets in gusts against the walls of the house above. I could sense, waiting, the fire of the deadly lightning, leaping from cloud to cloud above and seeking a path of least resistance to the patient, timeless earth that bore the brunt of the storm's attack. All four elements, interacting, moving, energy flashing from place to place in each of its forms. There was a lot of potential in storms, that a sorcerer could tap into if he was desperate or stupid enough. A lot of energy to be used, up there, where the forces of ancient nature brawled and tumbled.
I frowned, thinking about that. It hadn't occurred to me before. Had there been a storm on Wednesday night? Yes, there had. I remember thunder waking me for a few moments in the hours before dawn. Could our killer have tapped into it to fuel his spells? Possibly. It bore looking into. Such tapped magic was often too unstable or volatile to use in such a carefully directed fashion.
Lightning flashed again, and I counted three or four seconds before the rumble reached me. If the killer was using the storms, it would make sense that if he or she were to strike again, it would happen tonight. I shivered.
My stomach growled, and more mundane matters took my attention. My head was feeling somewhat better. I wasn't dizzy anymore. My stomach was furious with me---like a lot of tall, skinny men, I eat endlessly, but it never stays on. I have no idea why. I shambled into the kitchen and started building up the grill.
"Mister?" I called. "You hungry, bud? I'm gonna fry up some burgers, mmm, mmm, mmm."
Lightning flashed again, closer this time, the thunder following right on its heels. The flash was bright enough to sear through my half-sunken windows and make me wince against it. But, in the flash of light, I caught sight of Mister.
The cat was up on the top of my bookshelf, in the far corner of the apartment---as far as it was possible to get away from my front door. He was watching it, his eyes luminous in the half dark, and though he had the cat-lazy look of any lounging feline, his ears were tilted forward, and his gaze focused unwaveringly upon the door. If he'd had a tail, it would have been twitching.
There came a knocking, a rapping, at my chamber door.
Maybe it was the storm making me nervous, but I quested out with my senses, feeling for any threat that might have been there. The storm made a mess of things, and all of that noise, both physical and spiritual, kept me from being able to tell anything more than that there was someone outside my door.
I felt in the pocket of my duster for the gun---but I remembered that I had set it aside in the lab last night and not taken it with me down to the police station. Police don't take kindly to anyone but police toting firearms inside the station, don't ask me why. In any case, it was out of easy reach now.
And then I remembered that Linda Randall was supposed to be showing up. I berated myself for getting spooked so easily, and then again for sleeping so long, and then again for looking and smelling like I hadn't showered in a couple of days or combed my hair or shaved or anything else that might have made me marginally less unappealing. Ah, well. I got the impression that with Linda, that sort of thing didn't seem to matter too much. Maybe she was into eau des hommes.
I walked over to the door and opened it, smoothing back my hair with one hand and trying to keep a sheepish grin off of my face.
Susan Rodriguez waited outside in the rain, her black umbrella held above her. She wore a khaki trench coat and an expensive black dress beneath it, with heels. Pearls shone at her throat and ears. She blinked at me when I appeared in the door. "Harry?"
I stared at her. Oh my gosh. I had forgotten my date with Susan. How in the world could I have forgotten that? I mean, the White Council, the police, vampires, concussions, junkies, mob bosses, and baseball-bat-swinging thugs notwithstanding---
Well, no. There probably weren't any women incredible enough to make me keep my mind on them through all of that. But all the same, it seemed a little rude of me.
"Hi, Susan," I said, lamely. I peered past her. When had Susan said she was going to show up? Nine? And when had Linda said? Eight---no, wait. She'd said eight o'clock at first, and then said she'd be by in another hour after that. At nine. Hooboy. This was not going to be pretty.
Susan read me like a book and glanced back behind her in the rain, before looking back up at me. "Expecting someone, Harry?"
"Not exactly," I told her. "Uh, well. Maybe. Look, come on in. You're getting drenched." Which wasn't exactly true. I was getting drenched, my bare feet soaked, standing there in the open door, the wind blowing rain down the stairway at me.
Susan's mouth quirked in a malicious, predatory little smile, and she came in, folding down her umbrella and brushing past me. "This is your apartment?"
"Nah," I told her. "This is my summer home in Zurich." She eyed me as I closed the door, took her coat, and hung it up on a tall old wooden hat stand near the doorway.
Susan turned away from me as I hung up her coat. Her dress showed her back, the long curve of her spine, all the way down to her waist. It had a fairly tame hemline, and long, tight sleeves. I liked it. A lot. She let me see her back for a while as she walked away from me, toward the fireplace, then slowly turned to face me, smirking, leaning one smooth hip on the couch. Her midnight hair was bound up on top of her head, displaying a long and slender neck, her skin an advertisement for something smooth and wonderful. Her lips quirked up at the corners, and she narrowed her dark, flashing eyes at me. "The police having you put in overtime, Harry?" she drawled. "The killings must be sensational. Major crime figure, murdered with magic. Care to make a statement?"
I winced. She was still hunting for an angle for the Arcane. "Sure," I told her. Her eyes widened in surprise. "I need a shower," I said. "I'll be right back. Mister, keep an eye on the lady, eh?"
Susan gave me a little roll of her eyes, then glanced up and studied Mister on his perch on the bookcase. Mister, for his part, flicked an ear and continued staring at the door.
More thunder rumbled overhead.
I lit a few candles for her, then took one with me into the bathroom. Think, Harry. Get awake, and get your head clear. What to do?
Get clean, I told myself. You smell like a horse. Get some cool water over your head and work this out. Linda Randall is going to be here in a minute, and you need to figure out how to keep Susan from prying her nose into the murders.
So advised, I agreed with myself and hurriedly got undressed and into the shower. I don't use a water heater, and consequently I am more than used to cold showers. Actually, given how often I, and wizards in general, get to date actual real women, maybe that's just as well.
I was just lathering up with shampoo when the lightning got a lot worse, the thunder a lot louder, the rain a lot harder. The height of the storm had hit the old house and hit it hard. It was almost possible to see clearly in the violent electrical discharge. Almost impossible to hear over the thunder. But I caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye, a shadow that moved across the sunken window (covered by modest curtains) in the bathroom. Someone was moving toward the stairs down to my apartment.
Did I mention how I haven't had a ton of success with women? Nights like this are one reason why. I panicked, hard. I leapt out of the shower, my head all a-sudsy, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed out into the front room.
I couldn't let Linda just come to the door and have Susan answer it. That would be the cattiest thing you've ever seen, and I would be the one to get all the scratches and bites, too.
I rounded the corner from my bedroom into the main room and saw Susan reaching for the doorknob. Lightning flashed again, and thunder kept me from hearing the knob's click-clack. I heard something else, though, a snarling, spitting sound, and saw Mister, on his feet now, his back arched up and all his fur fluffed out, teeth bared, his no-longer-sleepy eyes fastened on the door.
The thunder passed as Susan swung the door open. I could see her face in profile. One hand was on her hip, and there was an amused, dangerous little smile on her pretty mouth.
As the door opened, I felt it, the cloud of energies that accompanies a spirit-being when it comes into the mortal world, disguised until now by the background clutter of the storm. A figure stood in the doorway, rather squat, less than five feet tall, dressed in a plain brown trench coat, illuminated by blue lightning overhead. There was something wrong to the shape, something that just wasn't a part of good old Mother Earth. Its "head" turned to look at me, and sudden twin points of fire, as blue as the lightning dancing above, flared up, illuminating the leathery, inhuman curves of a face that most closely resembled that of a large and warty toad.
Susan got a good look at the demon's eyes and face from two feet away and screamed.
"Susan!" I shouted, already moving toward the couch. "Get out of the way!" I threw myself to the floor behind the couch, landed with a whumph of hard floor hitting my ribs.
The demon's jaws parted in a silent hiss, and its throat constricted weirdly as I vanished behind the couch. There was a hissing sound, and a heart-sized section of the couch just dissolved in a cloud of mist and foul stench. Droplets of liquid spattered through, onto the floor near me, and where they touched little holes corroded outward in the space of two seconds. I rolled away from the couch and the demon's acid.
"Susan!" I shouted. "Get back toward the kitchen! Don't get between it and me!"
"What is it?" she screamed back at me.
"A bad guy." I poked my head up and peered through the smoking hole in the couch, ready to duck back down at a moment's notice. The demon, squat and bulkier than a human, was standing in the doorway, both long-fingered, pad-tipped hands leaning forward toward the inside of the house. It paused as though resting against a light screen.
"Why isn't it coming in?" Susan asked from the far corner, near the door. Her back was pressed to the wall, and her eyes were wide and terrified. My God, I thought, just don't pass out on me, Susan.
"Homestead laws," I said. "It isn't a mortal creature. It has to gather its energy to push through the barrier around a home."
"Can it get in?" she said. Her voice was thin, reedy. She was asking questions, gathering information, data, falling back on her ingrained career instincts---because, I suspected, her rational brain had short-circuited. That happens to people who get a good hard look at a demon for the first time.
I hurried over to her and grabbed her arm, dragging her back toward the door leading down to my lab. "Get down there," I shouted, jerking the door up and revealing the folding ladder-staircase.
"It's dark," Susan protested. "Oh, God." She blinked down at my waist. "Harry? Why are you naked?"
I looked down. And blushed. The towel must have fallen off while I was dancing around. Looking down made the shampoo suds still in my hair runnel down into my eyes, making them sting and burn. Could this evening get any worse?
There was a tearing sound from the doorway, and the toad-demon sort of surged forward a stumbling step. It was now in my house. Lightning still danced in the sky behind it, and I could only see it in ugly, hunchbacked outline, except for the electric light of its wide, round, googly eyes as it came toward me. Its throat was working in little, undulating motions.
"Crap," I said. I'm quite eloquent in times of crisis. I shoved Susan toward the stairs, and turned toward the demon, tips of my thumbs touching, fingers spread, palms out toward it.
The demon's mouth opened again, and it made a slick, spittooning sound.
"Vento Riflittum," I shouted, willing my fear and anxiety into a tangible shape, throwing it down from my pounding heart through my shoulders and arms, directed at the foe. The globule of demonacid sped toward my face.
My terror and adrenaline roared out of my fingertips in the form of wind, gathering up speed enough to tear the hair from a man's head. It caught the blob of acid and flung it back at the demon in a fine spray, stopped the thing dead in its tracks, and even drove it back several feet, its claw-tipped feet sliding on my smooth floor, catching on the rugs.
The acid sizzled and spat little electric blue sparks on its skin, but it didn't seem to harm the demon. It did, however, dissolve the trench coat to shreds in less time than it takes to draw a breath and wreaked havoc on my rugs and furniture.
The demon shook its head, gathering its wits. I turned to the far corner, near the door, and extended my hand, trumpeting, "Vento servitas!" The pale, smooth wood of my wizard's staff all but glowed in the darkness as it flew toward me, driven by a gentler, finer blast of the same wind. I caught it in my hand and spun it toward the demon, calling on the lines of power and force deep within the long, unbroken grains of wood in the staff. I extended the staff toward it, horizontally like a bar, and shouted, "Out! Out! Out! You are not welcome here!" A touch dramatic in any other circumstance, maybe---but when you've got a demon in your living room, nothing seems too extreme.
The toad-demon hunched its shoulders, planted its broad feet, and grunted as a wave of unseen force swept out from my staff like a broom whisking along the floor. I could feel the demon resist me, pressing against the strength of the staff, as though I were leaning the wood against a vertical steel bar and attempting to snap it across that length.
We strained silently for several seconds until I realized that this thing was just too strong for me. I wasn't going to be able to brush it off like a minor imp or a niggling poltergeist. It wouldn't take me long to exhaust myself, and once the demon could move again it was either going to dissolve me with its acid or else just waddle up to me and rip me into pieces. It would be stronger than a mortal, a hell of a lot faster, and it was not going to stop until I was dead or the sun had come up or one of any of a number of other unlikely conditions was met.
"Susan!" I shouted, my chest heaving. "Are you down there?"
"Yes," she said. "Is it gone?"
"Not exactly, no." I felt my palms get sweaty, the smooth wood of the staff begin to slip. The burning of the soapsuds in my eyes increased, and the lights of the demon's eyes brightened.
"Why don't you set it on fire? Shoot it! Blow it up!" Her voice had a searching quality to it, as though she were looking around, down there in the lab.
"I can't," I said to her. "I can't pump enough juice into it to hurt the thing without blowing us up along with it. You've got to get out of there." My mind was racing along, calculating possibilities, numbers, my reserves of energy, cold and rational. The thing was here for me. If I drew it off to one side, into my bedroom and bathroom, Susan might be able to escape. On the other hand, it might be under orders to kill me and any witnesses, in which case after it had finished me it would simply go after her as well. There had to be another way to get her out of here. And then I remembered it.
"Susan!" I shouted. "There's a sports bottle on my table down there. Drink what's in it, and think about being away from here. Okay? Think about being far away."
"I found it," she called up a second later. "It smells bad."
"Dammit, it's a potion. It'll get you out of here. Drink it!"
There was a gagging noise, and then a moment later she said, "Now what?"
I blinked and looked at the stairs going down. "It should have work---" I broke off as the toad thing leaned forward, reached out a clawed foot, and in that stride gained three feet of ground toward me. I was able to stop it again, barely, but I knew that it was going to be coming for my throat in a few more seconds.
"Nothing happened," she said. "Dammit, Harry, we have to do something." And then she came pounding up the ladder, dark eyes flashing, my .38 revolver in her hand.
"No!" I told her. "Don't!" I felt the staff slip more. The demon was getting ready to come through all my defenses.
Susan raised the gun, face pale, her hands shaking, and started shooting. A .38 Chief's Special carries six rounds, and I use a medium-speed load, rather than armor-piercing or explosive bullets or anything fancy like that. Fewer chances that something will go wrong in the presence of a lot of magic.
A gun is a pretty simple machine. A revolver approaches very simple. Wheels, gears, and a simple lever impact to ignite the powder. It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.
The revolver roared six times.
The first two shots must have gone wide and hit somewhere else. The next two struck the demon's hide and made deep dents in it before springing off and rebounding wildly around the room, as I had feared they would, more of a threat to us than to it. Fortunately, neither of us was injured or killed by the ricochets. The fifth shot went between its long, oddly shaped legs and past it.
The sixth hit the thing square between its lightning-lantern eyes, knocked it off-balance, and sent it tumbling over with a toady hiss of frustration.
I gasped and grabbed at Susan's wrist. "Basement," I wheezed, as she dropped the gun. We both scrambled down the ladder. I didn't bother to shut it behind me. The thing could just tear its way through the floor, if it needed to. This way, I would at least know where it would come down, rather than have it tunnel through the floor and come out on top of my head.
At my will, the tip of the staff I still held burst into light, illuminating the room.
"Harry?" Bob's voice came from the shelf. The skull's eye lights came on, and he swiveled around to face me. "What the hell is going on? Woo woo, who is the babe?"
Susan jumped. "What is that?"
"Ignore him," I said, and followed my own advice. I went to the far end of my lab table and started kicking boxes, bags, notebooks, and old paperbacks off the floor. "Help me clear this floor space. Hurry!"
She did, and I cursed the lack of cleaning skills that had left this end of the lab such a mess. I was struggling to get to the circle I had laid in the floor, a perfect ring of copper, an unbroken loop in the concrete that could be empowered to hold a demon in---or out.
"Harry!" Bob gulped as we worked. "There's, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder."
"I know that, Bob." I heaved a bunch of empty cardboard boxes aside as Susan frantically tossed some papers away, exposing the entirety of the copper ring, about three feet across. I took her hand and stepped into the circle, drawing her close to me.
"What's happening?" Susan asked, her expression bewildered and terrified.
"Just stay close," I told her. She clung tightly to me.
"It sees you, Harry," Bob reported. "It's going to spit something at you, I think."
I didn't have time to see if Bob was right. I leaned down, touched the circle with the tip of my staff, and willed power into it, to shut the creature out. The circle sprang up around us, a silent and invisible tension in the air.
Something splattered and hissed against the air a few inches from my face. I looked up to see dark, sputtering acid slithering off the invisible shield the circle's power provided us. Half a second earlier and it would have eaten my face off. Cheery thought.
I tried to catch my breath, stand straight, and not let any part of me extend outside the circle, which would break its circuit and negate its power. My arms were shaking and my legs felt weak. Susan, too, was visibly trembling.
The demon stalked over to us. I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn't. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it. It glared at us and drove a fist at the circle's shield. It rebounded in a shower of blue sparks, and the thing hissed, a horrible and windy sound.
Outside, the storm continued to rumble and growl, muffled by the thick walls of the subbasement.
Susan was holding close to me, and almost crying. "Why isn't it killing us? Why isn't it getting us?"
"It can't," I said, gently. "It can't get through, and it can't do anything to break the circle. So long as neither of us crosses that line, we'll be safe."
"Oh, God," Susan said. "How long do we have to stand here?"
"Dawn," I said. "Until dawn. When the sun rises, it has to go."
"There's no sun down here," she said.
"Doesn't work that way. It's got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air."
"When does the sun come up?" she asked.
"Oh, well. About ten more hours."
"Oh," she said. She laid her head against my bare chest and closed her eyes.
The toad-demon paced in a slow circuit around the circle, searching for a weakness in the shield. It would find none. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
"Uh, Harry," Bob began.
"Not now, Bob."
"But Harry---" Bob tried again.
"Dammit, Bob. I'm trying to think. If you want to be really useful, you could try to figure out why that escape potion you were so confident of didn't work for Susan."
"Harry," Bob protested, "that's what I'm trying to tell you."
Susan murmured, against my chest, "Is it getting warm in here? Or is it just me?"
A terrible suspicion struck me. I looked down at Susan and got a sinking feeling. Surely not. No. It couldn't be.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. "We're going to die, aren't we, Harry? Have you ever thought you'd want to die making love?"
She kissed my chest, almost absently.
It felt nice. Really, really nice. I tried not to notice all the bare, lovely back that was naked underneath my hand.
"I've thought that, many times," she said, against my skin.
"Bob," I began, my voice getting furious.
"I tried to tell you," Bob wailed. "I did! She grabbed the wrong potion and just chugged it down." Bob's skull turned toward me a bit, and the lights brightened. "You've got to admit, though. The love potion works great."
Susan was kissing my chest and rubbing her body up against me in a fashion that was unladylike and extremely pleasant and distracting. "Bob, I swear, I am going to lock you in a wall safe for the next two hundred years."
"It's not my fault!" Bob protested.
The demon watched what was happening in the circle with froggy eyes and kicked a section of floor clear enough of debris for it to squat down on its haunches and stare, restless and ready as a cat waiting for a mouse to stick its head out of its hole. Susan stared up at me with sultry eyes and tried to wrench me to the floor, and consequently out of the circle's protective power. Bob continued to wail his innocence.
Who says I don't know how to show a lady a good time?
Susan tugged at my neck and jerked my head down to hers for a kiss. As kisses went, well. It was, um, extremely interesting. Perfectly passionate, abandoned, not a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation to it. Or at any rate not from her. I came up for air a minute later, my lips itching with the intensity of it, and she stared up at me with burning eyes. "Take me, Harry. I need you."
"Uh, Susan. That's not really a good idea right now," I said. The potion had taken hold of her hard. No wonder she had recovered from her terror enough to come back up the stairs and fire my gun at the demon. It had lowered her inhibitions to a sufficient degree that it must also have dulled her fears.
Susan's fingers wandered, and her eyes sparkled. "Your mouth says no," she purred, "but this says yes."
I went up on my toes, and swallowed, trying to keep my balance and get her hand off me at the same time. "That thing is always saying something stupid," I told her. She was beyond reason. The potion had kicked her libido into suicidal overdrive. "Bob, help me out here!"
"I'm stuck in the skull," Bob said. "If you don't let me out, I can't do much of anything, Harry."
Susan stood up on tiptoe to gnaw at my ear, wrapped her shapely thigh around one of mine, and started whimpering and pulling me toward the floor. My balance wavered. A three-foot circle was not enough to perform wrestling or gymnastics or...anything else in, without leaving something sticking out for the waiting demon to chew on.
"Is the other potion still there?" I asked.
"Sure," Bob said. "I can see it where it fell on the floor. Could throw it to you, too."
"Okay," I said, growing excited---well. More excited. I might yet get out of this basement alive. "I'm going to let you out for five minutes. I want you to help me by throwing me the potion."
"No, boss," Bob said, his voice maddeningly cheerful.
"No? No?!"
"I get a twenty-four-hour leave, or nothing."
"Dammit, Bob! I'm responsible for what you do if I let you out! You know that!"
Susan whispered, into my ear, "I'm not wearing any underwear," and tried something approximating a pro-wrestling takedown to drop me to the floor. I wavered in balance and barely managed to stave her off. The demon's frog-eyes narrowed, and it came to its feet, ready to leap on us.
"Bob!" I yelled. "You slimy jerk!"
"You try living in a bony old skull for a few hundred years, Harry! You'd want to get a night off once in a while, too!"
"Fine!" I shouted, my heart leaping into my throat as my balance wavered again. "Fine! Just make sure you get me the potion! You have twenty-four hours."
"Just make sure you catch it," Bob replied. And then a flood of orangish lights flowed out of both of the skull's eye sockets and into the room. The lights swooped down in an elongated cloud over the potion bottle that lay on the floor at the far side of the lab, gathered it up, and hurled it through the air toward me. I reached up with my spare hand and caught it, bobbled it for a minute, and then secured it again.
The orange lights that were Bob's spirit-form danced a little jig, then whizzed up the ladder and out of the lab, vanishing.
"What's that?" Susan murmured, eyes dazed.
"Another drink," I said. "Drink this with me. I think I can cover us both in the focus department, get us out of here."
"Harry," she said. "I'm not thirsty." Her eyes smoldered. "I'm hungry."
I hit upon an idea. "Once we drink this, I'll be ready, and we can go to bed."
She looked up at me hazily and smiled, wicked and delighted. "Oh, Harry. Bottoms up." Her hands made a sort of silent commentary on her words, and I jumped, almost dropping the bottle. More shampoo from my hair trailed down my already burning eyes, and I squeezed them closed.
I slugged away about half the potion, trying to ignore the flat-cola taste, and quickly passed the rest to Susan. She smiled lazily and drank it down, licking her lips.
It started in my guts---a sort of fluttery, wobbly feeling that moved out, up through my lungs and out along my shoulders, down my arms. It also went down, over my hips and into my legs. I began to shake and quiver uncontrollably.
And then I just flew apart into a cloud of a million billion tiny pieces of Harry, each one with its own perspective and view. The room wasn't just a square, cluttered basement to me, but a pattern of energies, grouped into specific shapes and uses. Even the demon was only a cloud of particles, slow and dense. I flowed around that cloud, up through the opening in the ceiling pattern, and outside of the apartment and into the raging nonpattern of the storm.
It took maybe five seconds, and then the power of the potion faded. I felt all the little pieces of me abruptly rush back together and slam into one another at unthinkable speed. It hurt, and made me nauseous, a sort of heavy-duty thump of impact that didn't come from any one direction, but from every direction at once. I staggered, planted my staff on the ground, and felt the rain wash down over me.
Susan appeared next to me a heartbeat later, and promptly sat down on her butt on the ground, in the rain. "Oh, God. I feel terrible."
Inside the apartment, the demon screamed, a raging, voiceless hiss. I could hear it madly rampaging around inside. "Come on," I told her. "We've got to get out of here before it gets smart and starts looking outside for us."
"I'm sick," she said. "I'm not sure I can walk."
"The mixed potions," I said. "They can do that to you. But we have to go now. Come on, Susan. Up and at 'em." I bent down and got her up on her feet and moving away from my apartment.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Do you have your car keys?"
She patted the dress, as if looking for pockets, and then shook her head dazedly. "They were in my coat pocket."
"We walk, then."
"Walk where?"
"Over to Reading Road. It always floods when there's this much rain. It'll be enough water to ground that thing if it tries to follow us." It was only a couple of blocks away. The cold rain came down in buckets. I was shaking, shivering, and naked, and more soap was getting into my eyes. But hey. At least I was clean.
"Wha?" she mumbled. "What will the rain do to it?"
"Not rain. Running water. It kills him if he tries to go over it after us," I explained to her, patiently. I hoped the potions mixing together in her stomach hadn't done anything irreversible. There had been accidents before. We were moving at good speed, all things considered, and had covered maybe forty yards in the pouring rain. Not much farther to go.
"Oh. Oh, that's good," she said. And then she convulsed and pitched to the ground. I tried to hold her, but I was just too tired, my arms too weak. I nearly went down with her. She rolled to her side and lay that way, retching horribly, vomiting herself empty.
Thunder and lightning raged around us again, and I heard the sharp crack of the storm's power touching a tree nearby. I saw a bright flash of contact and then the subdued glow of burning branches. I looked in the direction we had been heading. The flooding Reading Road, safety from the demon, was still thirty yards away.
"I didn't think you'd last this long," someone said.
I almost jumped out of my skin. I picked my staff up in both hands and turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the voice. "Who's there?" There, to one side, a spot of cold---not physical cold, but something deeper and darker that my other senses detected. A pooling of shadows, an illusion in the darkness between lights, gone when lightning flashed and back again when it had passed.
"Do you expect me to give you my name?" the shadows scorned. "Suffice to say that I am the one who has killed you."
"You're an underachiever," I shot back, still turning, eyes searching. "The job's not done."
In the darkness underneath a broken streetlight, then, maybe twenty feet away, I could make out the shape of a person. Man or woman, I couldn't tell, nor could I distinguish from the voice. "Soon," the shape said. "You can't last much longer. My demon will finish you before another ten minutes have passed." The voice was supremely confident.
"You called that demon here?"
"Indeed," the shadowy shape confirmed.
"Are you crazy?" I demanded, stunned. "Don't you know what could happen to you if that thing gets loose?"
"It won't," the shape assured me. "It is mine to control."
I extended my senses toward the shape, and found that what I had suspected was true. It wasn't a real person, or an illusion masking a real person. It was only the seeming of one, a phantasm of shape and sound, a hologram that could see and hear and speak for its creator, wherever he or she was.
"What are you doing?" it demanded. It must have sensed me feeling it out.
"Checking your credentials," I said, and sent some of my remaining will toward it, the sorcerous equivalent of a slap in the face.
The image cried out in surprise and reeled back. "How did you do that?" it snarled.
"I went to school."
The hologram growled, then raised up its voice, calling out in rolling syllables. I tried to hear what had been said, but another peal of thunder blocked out the middle half of what was undoubtedly the demon's name.
From within my apartment, the distant, faint sound of the demon's smashing ruckus came to an abrupt halt.
"Now," the image said, a sneer to its voice. "Now you will pay."
"Why are you doing this?" I demanded.
"You're in my way."
"Let the woman go."
"Sorry," the image said. "She's seen too much. She's in the way, too, now. My demon will kill you both."
"You bastard," I snarled.
It laughed at me.
I looked over my shoulder, back toward the apartment. Through the rain I heard a dry and raspy hiss, underlaid with a sort of clicking growl. Blue frog-eyes, reflecting the storm's lightning, came up the stairs from my basement apartment. It focused on me immediately and started forward. The back fender of Susan's car, which she had parked outside my apartment, got in its way, and with the pad-tipped fingers of one skinny, soft-looking hand, it picked up the back end of the car and tossed it to one side, where it landed with a heavy crunch.
I tried not to think about those fingers around my throat.
"You see?" the image said. "Mine to call. Time for you to die, Mr. Dresden."
Another flash of lightning showed the demon falling to all fours and scrambling toward me like an overweight lizard scuttling across hot sand to shade, in an exaggerated wagging motion that looked ridiculous but brought it closer and closer at deceptive speed.
"Deposit another quarter to continue your call, asshole," I said. I thrust my staff toward the shadowy image, this time, focusing my will into a full-fledged attack. "Stregallum finitas."
Scarlet light abruptly flooded over it, devouring its edges and moving inward.
The image snarled, then gasped in pain. "Dresden! My demon will roll in your bones!" And then it broke off into a scream of anguish as my counterspell began to tear the image-sending apart. I was better than whoever had made the image, and they couldn't hold the spell in the face of my counter. The image and the scream alike faded slowly into the distance until both were gone. I allowed myself the smallest touch of satisfaction, and then turned to the woman on the ground.
"Susan," I said, crouching by her, keeping my eyes on the onrushing demon. "Susan, get up. We have to go."
"I can't," she sobbed. "Oh, God," she said, and she threw up some more. She tried to rise but collapsed back to the ground, moaning piteously.
I looked back at the water, gauging the thing's speed. It was coming, fast, but not quite as fast as a man could run. I could still escape it, if I ran, full out. I could get across the water. I could be safe.
But I couldn't carry Susan there. I'd never make it, with her slowing me down. But if I didn't go, both of us would die. Wouldn't it be better for one of us, at least, to live?
I looked back at the demon. I was exhausted, and it had caught me unprepared. The heavy rain would keep fire, man's ancient weapon against the darkness and the things it hid, from being effective in holding it back. And I didn't have enough left in me to do anything else. It would be as good as suicide to stand against it.
Susan sobbed on the ground, helpless in the rain, sick from my potions, unable to rise.
I leaned my head back and let the rain wash the last traces of shampoo from my eyes, my hair. Then I turned, took a step toward the oncoming demon. I couldn't leave Susan to that thing. Not even if it meant dying. I'd never be able to live with myself afterward.
The demon squalled something at me in its hissing, toady voice, and raised both its hands toward me, coming up onto its hind legs. Lightning flashed overhead, blinding bright. Thunder came hard on its heels, deep enough to shake the street beneath my bare feet.
Thunder.
Lightning.
The storm.
I looked up at the boiling clouds overhead, lit by the dancing lightning moving among them, deadly beautiful and luminous. Power seethed and danced in the storm, mystic energies as old as time, enough power to shatter stones, superheat air, boil water to steam, burn anything it touched to ashes.
At this point, I think it is safe to say, I was desperate enough to try anything.
The demon howled and waddled forward, clumsy and quick. I raised my staff to the sky with one hand, and with the other pointed a finger at the demon. This was dangerous work, tapping the storm. There was no ritual to give it shape, no circle to protect me, not even words to shield my mind from the way the energies of magic would course through it. I sent my senses coursing upward, toward the storm, taking hold of the formless powers and drawing them into patterns of raw energy that began to surge toward me, toward the tip of my staff.
"Harry?" Susan said. "What are you doing?" She huddled on the ground in her evening dress, shuddering. Her voice was weak, thready.
"You ever form a line of people holding hands when you were a kid, and scuff your feet across the carpeting together, and then have the last person in the line touch someone on the ear to zap them?"
"Yeah," she said, confused.
"I'm doing that. Only bigger."
The demon squalled again and drove itself into the air with its powerful toad-legs, hurtling toward me, sailing through the air with a frightening and unnatural grace.
I focused what little I had left of my will on the staff, and the clouds and raging power above. "Ventas!" I shouted. "Ventas fulmino!"
At my will, a spark leapt up from the tip of my staff toward the clouds above. It touched the rolling, restless belly of the storm.
Hell roared down in response.
Lightning, white-hot fury, with a torrent of wind and rain, all fell upon me, centered around the staff. I felt the power hit the end of the soaking wet wood with a jolt like a sledgehammer. It coursed down the staff and into my hand, making my muscles convulse, bowing my naked body with the strain. It took everything I had to hold the image of what I wanted in my mind, to keep my hand pointed at the demon as it came for me, to keep the energy surging through me to wreak its havoc on flesh less tender than mine.
The demon was maybe six inches away when the storm's fury boiled down my body and out through my arm, out of my pointing finger, and took it in the heart. The force of it threw the thing back, back and up, into the air, and held it there, wreathed in a corona of blinding energy.
The demon struggled, screamed, toad-hands flailing, toad-legs kicking.
And then it exploded in a wash of blue flame. The night was lit once more, bright as day. I had to shield my eyes against it. Susan cried out in fear, and I think I must have been screaming along with her.
Then the night grew quiet again. Flaming bits of something that I didn't want to think about were raining down around us, landing with little, wet, plopping sounds upon the road, the sidewalk, the yards of the houses around me, burning quickly to little briquettes of charcoal and then hissing into sputtering coolness. The wind abruptly died down. The rain slowed to a gentle patter, the storm's fury spent.
My legs gave out, and I sat down shakily on the street, stunned. My hair was dry, and standing on end. There was smoke curling up from the blackened ends of my toenails. I just sat there, happy to be alive, to be breathing in and out again. I felt like I could crawl back in bed and go to sleep for a few days, even though I'd gotten up not half an hour ago.
Susan sat up, blinking, her face blank. She stared at me.
"What are you doing next Saturday?" I asked her.
She just kept on staring for a minute. And then quietly lay down again on her side.
I heard the footsteps approach from the darkness off to one side. "Summoning demons," the sour voice said, disgusted. "In addition to the atrocities you have already committed. I knew I smelled black magic on the winds tonight. You are a blight, Dresden."
I sort of rolled my head over to one side to regard Morgan, my warden, tall and massive in his black trench coat. The rain had plastered his greying hair down to his head, and coursed down the lines of his face like channels in a slab of stone.
"I didn't call that thing," I said. My voice was slurred with fatigue. "But I damn well sent it back to where it belongs. Didn't you see?"
"I saw you defend yourself against it," Morgan said. "But I didn't see anyone else summon it. You probably called it up yourself and lost control of it. It couldn't have taken me anyway, Dresden. It wouldn't have done you any good."
I laughed, weakly. "You're flattering yourself," I said. "I sure as hell wouldn't risk calling up a demon just to get to you, Morgan."
He narrowed his already-narrow eyes. "I have convened the Council," he said. "They will be here two dawns hence. They will hear my testimony, Dresden, and the evidence I have to present to them against you." There was another, more subdued flash of lightning, and it gave his eyes a wild, madman's gleam. "And then they will order you put to death."
I just stared at him for a moment, dully. "The Council," I said. "They're coming here. To Chicago."
Morgan smiled at me, the kind of smile sharks reserve for baby seals. "Dawn, on Monday, you will be brought before them. I don't usually enjoy my position as executioner, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. But in your case, I am proud to fulfill that role."
I shuddered when he pronounced my full name. He did it almost exactly right---maybe by accident, and maybe not, too. There were those on the White Council who knew my name, knew how to say it. To run from the Council convened, to avoid them, would be to admit guilt and invite disaster. And because they knew my name, they could find me. They could get to me. Anywhere.
Susan moaned and stirred. "H-H-Harry?" she mumbled. "What happened?"
I turned to her, to make sure she was all right. When I glanced back over my shoulder, Morgan was gone. Susan sneezed and huddled against me. I put an arm around her, to share what little warmth I had.
Monday morning.
Monday morning, Morgan would bring his suspicions and level his accusations, and it would likely be enough to get me voted dead. Whoever Mister or Miss Shadows was, I had to find him, her, it, or them before Monday morning, or I was as good as dead.
I was reflecting on what a miserable date I was, when the squad car pulled up, turned its spotlights on us, and the officer said, over the loudspeaker, "Set the stick down and put your hands up. Don't make any sudden moves."
Perfectly natural, I thought, embracing a sort of exhausted stoicism, for the officer to arrest a naked man and a woman dressed in an evening gown, sitting on a sidewalk in the pouring rain like a couple of drunks fresh off a bender.
Susan shielded her eyes and then looked at the spotlight. All the throwing up she'd done must have gotten rid of the potion in her, ended its amorous effects. "This," she said, in a calm and dispassionate voice, "is the worst night of my life." The officers got out of the car and started toward us.
I grunted. "That's what you get for trying to go out with a wizard."
She glanced aside at me, and her eyes glittered darkly for a moment. She almost smiled, and there was a sort of vindictive satisfaction to her tone when she spoke.
"But it's going to make a fantastic story."
As it turned out, Linda Randall had a darn good reason for skipping out on our appointment Saturday night.
Linda Randall was dead.
I sneezed as I ducked under the yellow police tape in the sweatpants and T-shirt I had been allowed to pluck from the mess of my place before the police car had brought me across town to Linda Randall's apartment. And cowboy boots. Mister had dragged one of my sneakers off, and I hadn't had time to find it, so I wore what I had. Freaking cat.
Linda had died a bit earlier that evening. After getting to the scene, Murphy had tried to phone me, failed to get through, and then sent a squad car down to pick me up and bring me in to do my consultant bit. The dutiful patrolmen sent to collect me had stopped to check out the crazy naked guy a block away from my apartment, and had been surprised and more than a little suspicious when I turned out to be the very same man they were supposed to pick up and bring to the crime scene.
Dear Susan had come to my rescue, explaining away what had happened as "Just one of those things, tee-hee," and assuring the officers that she was all right and would be fine to drive home. She got a little pale around the edges when she saw once more the ruins of my apartment and the enormous dent the demon had put in the side of her car, but she made a bold face of it and eventually left the scene with that "I have a story to write" gleam in her eye. She stopped and gave me a kiss on the cheek on her way out, and whispered, "Not bad, Harry," in my ear. Then she patted my bare ass and got in her car.
I blushed. I don't think the cops noticed it, in the rain and the dark. The patrolmen had looked at me askance, but were more than happy to let me go put on some fresh clothes. The only things I had clean were more sweats and another T-shirt, this one proclaiming in bold letters over a little cartoon graveyard, "EASTER HAS BEEN CANCELED---THEY FOUND THE BODY."
I put those on, and my duster, which had somehow survived the demon attack, and my utterly inappropriate cowboy boots, and then I had gotten in the patrol car and been driven across town. I clipped my little ID card to my coat's lapel and followed the uniforms in. One of them led me to Murphy.
On the way, I took in little details. There were a lot of people standing around gawking. It was still fairly early, after all. The rain came down in a fine mist and softened the contours of the scene. There were several police cars parked in the apartment building's parking lots, and one on the lawn by the door leading out to the little concrete patio from the apartment in question. Someone had left his bulbs on, and blue lights flashed over the scene in alternating swaths of shadow and cold light. There was a lot of yellow police tape around.
And right in the middle of it all was Murphy.
She looked terrible, like she hadn't eaten anything that didn't come out of a vending machine or drunk anything but stale coffee since I had seen her last. Her blue eyes were tired, and bloodshot, but still sharp. "Dresden," she said. She peered up at me. "You planning on having King Kong climb your hair?"
I tried to smile at her. "We still need to cast our screaming damsel. Interested?"
Murphy snorted. She snorts really well for someone with such a cute nose. "Come on." She spun on one heel and walked up to the apartment, as though she wasn't exhausted and at the end of her rope.
The forensics team was already there, so we got some nifty plastic booties to put over our shoes and loose plastic gloves for our hands from an officer standing beside the door. "I tried to call earlier," Murphy said, "but your phone was out of service. Again, Harry."
"Bad night for it," I responded, wobbling as I slipped the booties on. "What's the story?"
"Another victim," she said. "Same M.O. as Tommy Tomm and the Stanton woman."
"Jesus," I said. "They're using the storms."
"What?" Murphy turned and fixed her eyes on me.
"The storm," I repeated. "You can tap storms and other natural phenomena to get things done. All natural fuel for the mojo."
"You didn't say anything about that before," Murphy accused.
"I hadn't thought of it until tonight." I rubbed at my face. It made sense. Hell's bells, that was how the Shadowman had been able to do all of that in one night. He'd called the demon and been able to send it after me, as well as appearing in the shadow he'd projected. And he'd been able to kill again.
"Have you got an ID on the victim?" I asked.
Murphy turned to go inside as she answered. "Linda Randall. Chauffeur. Age twenty-nine."
It was a good thing Murphy had turned away, or the way my jaw dropped would have told her that I knew the deceased, and she would have had all sorts of uncomfortable questions. I stared after Murphy for a second, then hurriedly veiled my expression and followed her inside the apartment.
Linda Randall's one-room apartment looked like the trailer of a rock band that did little besides play concerts, host parties, and fall into a stupor afterward. Dirty clothes were strewn on one side of a king-size bed. There was a disproportionate amount of clothing that looked as though it had been purchased from a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog---lacy and silky and satiny colors, all bright, designed to attract the eye. There were many candles around the bed, on shelves and dressers and a night table, most burned halfway down. The drawer of the night table was partly open, revealing a number of personal amusements---Linda Randall had, apparently, liked her toys.
The kitchenette, off to one side, looked largely unused, except for the coffeepot, the microwave, and the trash can, in which several pizza boxes were crammed. Maybe it was the pizza boxes that did it, that gave me a sudden pang of understanding and empathy for Linda. My own kitchen looked the same, a lot of the time, minus the microwave. Here had lived someone else who knew that the only thing waiting at home was a sense of loneliness. Sometimes it is comforting. Most often, it isn't. I'll bet Linda would have understood that.
But I'd never have the chance to know. The forensics team was gathered around the bed, concealing whatever was there, like a cluster of buzzards around the exposed head of the outlaws they used to bury up to their necks in the Old West. They spoke among themselves in low, calm voices, dispassionate as skilled dinner chatter, calling little details to the attention of their companions, complimenting one another on their observations.
"Harry?" Murphy said, quietly. Her tone of voice suggested that it wasn't the first time she'd said it. "Are you sure you're all right for this?"
My mouth twitched. Of course I wasn't all right for this. No one should ever be all right for this sort of thing. But instead of saying that, I told her, "My head's just aching. Sorry. Let's just get it over with."
She nodded and led me over toward the bed. Murphy was a lot shorter than most of the men and women working around the bed, but I had almost a head of height on all of them. So I didn't have to ask anyone to move, just stepped up close to the bed and looked.
Linda had been on the phone when she died. She was naked. Even this early in the year, she had tan lines around her hips. She must have gone to a tanning booth during the winter. Her hair was still damp. She lay on her back, her eyes half-closed, her expression tranquil as it hadn't been any time I'd seen her.
Her heart had been torn out. It was lying on the king-size bed about a foot and a half from her, pulped and squashed and slippery, sort of a scarlet and grey color. There was a hole in her chest, too, showing where bone had been splintered outward by the force that had removed her heart.
I just stared for a few moments, noting details in a sort of detached way. Again. Again someone had used magic to end a life.
I had to think of her as she sounded on the phone. Joking, a quick wit. A sort of sly sensuality, in the way she said her words and phrased her sentences. A little hint of insecurity around the edges, vulnerability that magnified the other parts of her personality. Her hair was damp because she'd been taking a bath before she came to see me. Whatever anyone said of her, she had been passionately, vitally alive. Had been.
Eventually, I realized how quiet the room was.
The men and women of the forensics team, all five of them, were looking up at me. Waiting. As I looked around, they all averted their gazes, but you didn't have to be a wizard to see what was in their faces. Fear, pure and simple. They had been faced with something that science couldn't explain. It rattled them, shook them to their cores, this sudden, violent, and bloody evidence that three hundred years of science and research was no match for the things that were still, even after all this time, lurking in the dark.
And I was the one who was supposed to have the answers.
I didn't have any for them, and I felt like shit for remaining silent as I stepped back and turned away from Linda's body, then walked across the room to the small bathroom. The tub was still full of water. A bracelet and earrings were laid out on the counter in front of a mirror, plus a little makeup, a bottle of perfume.
Murphy appeared beside me and stood with me, looking at the bathroom. She seemed a lot smaller than she usually does.
"She called us," Murphy said. "Nine one one has the call recorded. That's how we knew to come out here. She called and said that she knew who had killed Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tomm and that now they were coming for her. Then she started screaming."
"That's when the spell hit her. The phone probably went out right after."
Murphy frowned up at me and nodded. "Yeah. It did. But it was working fine when we got here."
"Magic disrupts technology sometimes. You know that." I rubbed at one eye. "Have you talked to any relatives, anything like that?"
Murphy shook her head. "There aren't any relatives in town. We're looking, now, but it might take some time. We tried to reach her boss, but he wasn't available. A Mr. Beckitt?" She studied my face, waiting for me to say something. "You ever heard of him?" she asked, after a moment.
I didn't look back at Murphy. I shrugged.
Murphy's jaw tensed, little motions at the corners of her face. Then she said, "Greg and Helen Beckitt. Three years ago, their daughter, Amanda, was killed in a cross fire. Johnny Marcone's thugs were shooting it out with some of the Jamaican gang that was trying to muscle in on the territory back then. One of them shot the little girl. She lived for three weeks in intensive care and died when they took her off life support."
I didn't say anything. But I thought of Mrs. Beckitt's numb face and dead eyes.
"The Beckitts attempted to lodge a wrongful-death suit against Johnny Marcone, but Marcone's lawyers were too good. They got it thrown out before it even went to court. And they never found the man who shot the little girl. Word has it that Marcone offered to pay them blood money. Make reparation. But they turned him down."
I didn't say anything. Behind us, they were putting Linda in a body bag, sealing her in. I heard men count to three and lift her, put her onto a gurney of some kind, and wheel her out. One of the forensics guys told Murphy they were going to take a break and would be back in ten minutes. She nodded and sent them out. The room got even more quiet.
"Well, Harry," she said. Her voice was hushed, like she didn't want to disturb the apartment's new stillness. "What can you tell me?" There was a subtle weight to the question. She might as well have asked me what I wasn't telling her. That's what she meant. She took her hand out of her jacket pocket and handed me a plastic bag.
I took it. Inside was my business card, the one I'd given to Linda. It was still curled a little, where I'd had to palm it. It was also speckled with what I presumed was Linda's blood. I looked at the part of the bag where you write the case number and the identification of the piece of evidence. It was blank. It wasn't on the records. It wasn't official. Yet.
Murphy was waiting for my answer. She wanted me to tell her something. I just wasn't sure if she was waiting for me to tell her that a lot of people have my card, and that I didn't know how it had gotten here, or if she wanted me to say how I had known the victim, how I had been involved with her. Then she would have to ask me questions. The kinds of questions you ask suspects.
"If I tell you," I said, "that I was having a psychic premonition, would you take me seriously?"
"What kind of premonition?" she said. She didn't look up at me.
"I sense..." I paused, thinking of my words. I wanted them to be very clear. "I sense that this woman will have a police record, probably for possession of narcotics and solicitation. I sense that she used to work at the Velvet Room for Madame Bianca. I sense that she used to be close friends and lovers with Jennifer Stanton. I sense that if she had been approached, yesterday, and asked about those deaths, that she would have claimed to know nothing."
Murphy mulled over my words for a moment. "You know, Dresden," she said, and her voice was tight, cool, furious, "if you'd sensed these things yesterday, or maybe even this morning, it's possible that we could have talked to her. It's possible that we could have found out something from her. It's even possible"---and she turned to me and slammed me against the doorway with one forearm and the weight of her body, suddenly and shockingly hard---"it's even possible," she snarled, "that she'd still be alive." She stared up at my face, and she didn't look at all like a cutesy cheerleader, now. She looked like a mother wolf standing over the body of one of her cubs and getting ready to make someone pay for it.
This time I was the one to look away. "A lot of people have my card," I said. "I put them up all over the place. I don't know how she got it."
"Goddammit, Dresden," she said. She stepped back from me and walked away, toward the bloodstained sheets. "You're holding out on me. I know you are. I can get a warrant for your arrest. I can have you brought in for questioning." She turned back to me. "Someone's killed three people already. It's my job to stop them. It's what I do."
I didn't say anything. I could smell the soap and shampoo from Linda Randall's bath.
"Don't make me choose, Harry." Her voice softened, if not her eyes or her face. "Please."
I thought about it. I could bring everything to her. That's what she was asking---not half the story, not part of the information. She wanted it all. She wanted all the pieces in front of her so she could puzzle them together and bring the bad guys in. She didn't want to work the puzzle knowing that I was keeping some of the pieces in my pocket.
What could it hurt? Linda Randall had called me earlier that evening. She had planned on coming to me, to talk to me. She was going to give me some information and someone had shut her up before she could.
I saw two problems with telling Murphy that. One, she would start thinking like a cop. It would not be hard to find out that Linda wasn't exactly a high-fidelity piece of equipment. That she had numerous lovers on both sides of the fence. What if she and I were closer than I was admitting? What if I'd used magic to kill her lovers in a fit of jealous rage and then waited for another storm to kill her, too? It sounded plausible, workable, a crime of passion---Murphy had to know that the DA would have a hell of a time proving magic as a murder weapon, but if it had been a gun instead, it would have flown.
The second problem, and the one that worried me a lot more, was that there were already three people dead. And if I hadn't gotten lucky and creative, there would have been two more dead people, back at my apartment. I still didn't know who the bad guy was. Telling Murphy what little more I knew wouldn't give her any helpful information. It would only make her ask more questions, and she wanted answers.
If the voice in the shadows knew that Murphy was heading the investigation to find him, and was on the right track, he would have no qualms about killing her, too. And there was nothing she could do to protect herself against it. She might have been formidable to your average criminal, but all the aikido in the world wouldn't do her any good against a demon.
Then, too, there was the White Council. Men like Morgan and his superiors, secure in their own power, arrogant and considering themselves above the authority of any laws but their own, wouldn't hesitate to remove one police lieutenant who had discovered the secret world of the White Council.
I looked at the bloodstained sheets and thought of Linda's corpse. I thought of Murphy's office, and what it would look like with her sprawled on the floor, her heart torn from her chest, or her throat torn out by some creeping thing from beyond.
"Sorry, Murph," I said. My voice came out in a rasping whisper. "I wish I could help you. I don't know anything useful." I didn't try to look up at her, and I didn't try to hide that I was lying.
I sensed, more than saw, the hardening around her eyes, the little lines of hurt and anger. I'm not sure if a tear fell, or if she really just raised a hand to brush back some of her hair. Then she turned to the front door, and shouted, "Carmichael! Get your ass in here!"
Carmichael looked equally as slobbish as he had a few days ago, as though the passage of time hadn't changed him---it certainly hadn't changed his jacket, only the food stains on his tie and the particular pattern of rumplement to his hair. There had to be something comforting, I reflected, in that kind of stability. No matter how bad things got, no matter how horrible or sickening the scene, you could count on Carmichael to look like the same quality of crap. He glared at me as he came in. "Yeah?"
She tossed the plastic bag to him, and he caught it. "Mark that and log it," she said. "Hang around for a minute. I want a witness."
Carmichael looked down at the bag and saw my card. His beady eyes widened. He looked back up at me, and I saw the shift in gears in his head, reclassifying me from annoying ally to suspect.
"Mr. Dresden," Murphy said. She kept her tone frosty, polite. "There are some questions we'd like to ask you. Do you think you could come down to the station and make a statement?"
Questions to be asked. The White Council would convene and execute me in a little more than thirty hours. I didn't have time for questions. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I've got to comb my hair tonight."
"Tomorrow morning, then," she said.
"We'll see," I said.
"If you aren't there in the morning," Murphy said, "I'm going to ask for a warrant. We'll come and find you and by God, Harry, I'll get some answers to this."
"Suit yourself," I told her, and I started for the door. Carmichael took a step forward and stood in my way. I stopped and looked at him, and he kept his eyes focused on the center of my chest. "If I'm not under arrest," I told her, "then I presume I'm free to go."
"Let him go, Ron," Murphy said. Her tone of voice was disgusted, but I could hear the hurt underneath it. "I'll talk to you again soon, Mr. Dresden." She stepped closer and said, in a perfectly even tone, "And if it turns out that you're the one behind all this, rest assured. Whatever you can do and whatever you can pull, I will find you and I will bring you down. Do you understand me?"
I did understand, really. I understood the pressure she was under, her frustration, her anger, and her determination to stop the killing from happening again. If I was some kind of hero from a romance novel, I'd have said something brief and eloquent and heartrending. But I'm just me, so I said, "I do understand, Karrin."
Carmichael stepped out of my way.
And I walked away from Murphy, whom I couldn't talk to, and from Linda, whom I couldn't protect, my head aching, weary to my bones, and feeling like a total piece of shit.
I walked down the block from Linda Randall's apartment building, my thoughts and emotions a far more furious thunderstorm than the one now rolling away from the city, out over the vastness of the lake. I called a cab from the pay phone outside a gas station and stood about with my back resting against the wall of the building in the misting rain, scowling and waiting.
I had lost Murphy's trust. It didn't matter that I had done what I had to protect both her and myself. Noble intentions meant nothing. It was the results that counted. And the results of my actions had been telling a bald-faced lie to one of the only people I could come close to calling a friend. And I wasn't sure that, even if I found the person or persons responsible, even if I worked out how to bring them down, even if I did Murphy's job for her, that what had happened between us could ever be smoothed over.
My thoughts were on that topic and similar issues of doom and gloom when a man with a hat pulled low over his face began to walk past me, stopped halfway, then turned and drove his fist into my belly.
I had time to think, Not again, and then he struck me a second, and third time. Each blow drove into my guts, thrust me back against the unyielding wall, made me sick. My breath flew out of my mouth in a little, strangling gasp, and even if I'd had a spell already in mind, I wouldn't have had the breath to speak it.
I sort of sagged when he stopped hitting me, and he threw me to the ground. We were at a well-lit gas station, just before midnight on a Saturday night, and anything he did was in full view of any cars going by. Surely, God, he didn't plan on killing me. Though at the moment, I was too tired and achy to care.
I lay there for a moment, dazed. I could smell my attacker's sweat and cologne. I could tell it was the same person who had jumped me the night before. He grabbed my hair, jerked my head up, and, with an audible snip of steel scissors, cut off a big lock of my hair. Then let me go.
My blood went cold.
My hair. The man had cut off my hair. It could be used in almost any kind of magic, any kind of deadly spell, and there wouldn't be a damned thing I could do to stop it.
The man turned away, walking quickly, but not running. In a flood of panic and desperation, I leapt at his leg, got him around the knee, and yanked hard. I heard a distinctive little pop, and then the man screamed, "Son of a bitch!" and fell heavily to earth. One fist, one very large and knob-knuckled fist, was clutched around my hair. I tried to suck in a breath, and leapt for that hand.
My attacker's hat had fallen off, and I recognized him---one of Johnny Marcone's men who had followed me from the hotel on Thursday afternoon, the one who had begun limping after jogging after me for several blocks. Apparently, Gimpy had a trick knee, and I had just made it jump through its hoop.
I grabbed his wrist and held on with both hands. I'm not a particularly strong man, but I'm made out of wire, and stubborn as hell. I curled up around his wrist and hung on, trying to pry at his thick fingers. Gimpy tried to jerk his arm away. He was carrying a lot of muscle on that arm, but it wasn't enough to move the weight of my whole body. He shoved at me with his other arm, trying to push me off of him, then started pounding at me with one fist.
"Let go of me, dammit," Gimpy shouted. "Get off of me!"
I hunched my head down, my shoulders up, and hung on. If I could dig my thumbs into his tendons for long enough, his hand would have to open, no matter how strong he was. I tried to imagine his wrist as Play-Doh and my thumbs as solid steel, pushing into him, and held on for everything I was worth. I felt his fingers start to loosen. I could see the dark, thin strands of my hair.
"Jesus Christ," someone shouted. "Hey, Mike, come on!"
There were running footsteps.
And then a couple of young guys dressed in jogging suits and sneakers came over and dragged me off Gimpy. I screamed, incoherently, as my hands slipped from Gimpy's wrist. Some of my hair spilled out, onto the wet concrete, but more stayed in his grip as his fingers closed over it again.
"Easy, easy, man," one of the guys was saying as they dragged me off. "Take it easy."
There wasn't any use struggling against the pair of them. Instead, I dragged in a breath and managed to gasp, "Wallet. He's got my wallet."
Considering the way I was dressed, compared to Gimpy's suit and coat, that was one lie that was never going to get off the ground. Or at least, it wouldn't have, if Gimpy hadn't turned and started hurrying away. The two men let me go, confused. Then, taking the cautious route, they started away, walking hurriedly back to their car.
I struggled to my feet and after Gimpy, wheezing like a leaky accordion. Gimpy headed across the street to a car, and was already in it and leaving by the time I got there. I shambled to a halt in a cloud of his exhaust, and stared dully after his taillights as he drove off into the misting rain.
My heart pounded in my chest and didn't slow down even after I recovered my breath. My hair. Johnny Marcone now had a lock of my hair. He could give it to someone who used magic, and use it to do whatever they damn well pleased to me.
They could use my hair to tear my heart from my chest, rip it right out, like they had done to Jennifer Stanton, Tommy Tomm, and poor Linda Randall. Marcone had warned me to stop, twice, and now he was going to take me out once and for all.
My weariness, fear, and fatigue were abruptly burned away by anger. "Like hell," I snarled. "Like hell you will!"
All I had to do was to find them, find Johnny Marcone, find Gimpy, and find Marcone's wizard, whoever he or she was. Find them, get my hair back, lay them out like ninepins, and send in Murphy to round them up.
By God, I wasn't going to take this lying down. These assholes were serious. They'd already tried to kill me once, and they were coming after me again. Marcone and his boys---
No, I thought. Not Marcone. That didn't make any sense, unless it had been Marcone's gang dealing the ThreeEye from the very beginning. If Marcone had a wizard in residence, why would he have tried to bribe me away? Why not just swipe a lock of hair from me when he'd sent the thug with the bat, and then kill me when I didn't pay attention?
Could it be Marcone? Or could his thug be playing two sides of the street?
I decided that ultimately it didn't matter. One thing was clear: Someone had a lock of my hair. Some wizard, somewhere, meant to kill me.
Whoever this wizard was, he wasn't much good---I'd seen that when I'd wiped out his shadow-sending spell. He couldn't stand up to me if I could force him into a direct confrontation---he might have a lot of moxie, and a lot of raw power, to harness the storms as he had and to slap a demon into servitude. But he was like a big, gawky teenager, new to his strength. I had more than just strength, more than just moxie. I had training, experience, and savvy on my side.
Besides. At the moment I was mad enough to chew up nails and spit out paper clips.
The Shadowman couldn't take a shot at me yet. He didn't have that kind of strength. He needed to wait for the storms that came each spring, and to use them to kill me. I had time. I had time to work. If I could just find out where they were, where Gimpy had taken my hair, I could go after him.
The answer came to me in a flash, and it seemed simple. If the hair could be used as a link to the rest of me, I should be able to reverse it---to create a link from me back to the hair. Hell, maybe I could just set it on fire, burn it all up from my apartment. The formula for a spell like that would be screwy as hell, though. I needed Bob. Bob could help me work out a spell, figure out a formula like that in minutes instead of hours or days.
I grimaced. Bob was gone, and would be for almost another twenty-four hours. There was no way I could work out that formula in less than ten or twelve hours by myself, and I didn't think my brain was coherent enough to come up with solid calculations at the moment, anyway.
I could have called Murphy. Murphy would have known where Marcone was lurking, and Gimpy would probably be nearby. She could have given me an idea, at least, of how to find Gentleman Johnny, Gimpy, and the Shadowman. But she never would, now. And even if she did, she'd demand to know the whole story, and after I'd told it to her, she'd try to take me into protective custody or something ridiculous like that.
I clenched my fists, hard, and my nails dug into my palms. I should trim them sometime---
I looked down at my nails. Then hurriedly crossed the street to stand under the gas station's lights, and stared at my hands.
There was blood under my fingernails, where they'd bitten into Gimpy's wrists. I threw back my head and laughed. I had everything I needed.
I moved back out of the misting rain and squatted down on the concrete sidewalk. I used a bit of chalk I keep in my duster pocket to sketch out a circle on the concrete, surrounding me. Then I scraped the blood out from under my nails and put it onto the concrete between my feet. It glistened in the fine, misty fall of rain.
The next part took me a moment to figure out, but I settled for using the tracking spell I already knew rather than trying to modify it to something a little more dignified. I plucked out a couple of nose hairs and put them in the circle, too, on top of the bits of Gimpy's skin and blood. Then I touched a finger to the chalk circle and willed energy into it, closing it off.
I gathered up my energy, from my anger, my renewed fear, my aching head and queasy stomach, and hurled it into the spell. "Segui votro testatum."
There was a rush of energy that focused on my nostrils and made me sneeze several times in a row. And then it came to me, quite strongly, the scent of Gimpy's cologne. I stood up, opened the circle again with a swipe of my foot, and walked out of it. I turned in a slow circle, all the way around. Gimpy's scent came to me strongly from the southwest, out toward some of the richer suburbs of Chicago.
I started laughing again. I had the son of a bitch. I could follow him back to Marcone, or whoever he was working for, but I had to do it now. I hadn't had enough blood to make it last long.
"Hey, buddy!" The cabby leaned out the window and glared at me, the engine running at an idle, the end of his cheroot glowing orange.
I stared at him for a second. "What?"
He scowled. "What, are you deaf? Did someone call for a cab?"
I grinned at him, still angry, still a little light-headed, still eager to go kick Gimpy and the Shadowman's teeth in. "I did."
"Why do I get all the nuts?" he said. "Get in."
I did, closing the door behind me. He eyed me suspiciously in the mirror and said, "Where to?"
"Two stops," I told him. I gave him my apartment's address, and sat back in the seat, my head automatically drawn toward the southwest, toward where the men who wanted to kill me were.
"That's one," he said. "Where's number two?"
I narrowed my eyes. I needed a few things from my apartment. My talismans, my blasting rod, my staff, a fetish that should still be vital. And after that, I was going to have a serious talk with one of Chicago's biggest gangsters.
"I'll tell you when we get there."
We ended up at the Varsity, a club Marcone owned in a Chicago suburb. It was a busy place, catering to much of the college-age crowd to be found on this side of the city, and even at one-thirty in the morning it was still fairly crowded for someplace so isolated, alone in a strip mall, the only business open at this time of the evening, the only lit windows in sight.
"Loony," the cabby muttered as he drove away, and I had to pause for a moment and agree with him. I had directed him about in a meandering line, the spell I'd cast letting me literally follow my nose along Gimpy's trail. The spell had begun fading almost the moment I'd cast it---I didn't have enough blood to make a more lasting enchantment---but it had held long enough for me to zero in on the Varsity, and to identify Gimpy's car in the parking lot. I walked past the windows and, sure enough, in a large, circular booth in the back I saw Johnny Marcone, the bull-necked Mr. Hendricks, Gimpy, and Spike, sitting together and talking. I ducked out of sight in a hurry, before one of them noticed me. Then walked back into the parking lot to consider exactly what I had at my disposal.
A bracelet on each wrist. A ring. My blasting rod. My staff.
I thought of all the subtle and devious means by which I might tilt the situation in my favor---clever illusions, convenient faltering of electricity or water, a sudden invasion of rats or cockroaches. I could have managed any of them. Not many people who use magic are that versatile, but very few have the kind of experience and training it takes to put such spells together on the fly.
I shook my head, irritated. I didn't have time to bother with subtlety.
Power into the talismans, then. Power into the ring. I reached for the power in both the staff and rod, cool strength of wood and seething anger of fire, and stepped up to the front door of the Varsity.
Then I blew it off its hinges.
I blew it out, rather than in. Pieces flew toward me and bounced off the shield of air I held in front of me, while others rained back behind me, into the parking lot. It wouldn't do to injure a bunch of innocent diners on the other side. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
Once the door was off, I pointed my blasting rod inside and spoke a command. The jukebox slammed back against the wall as though a cannonball had impacted it, and then melted into a puddle of liquid-plastic goo. The music squealed out the speakers and stopped. I stepped into the doorway and released a pent-up wave of energy from my ring. Starting at the door and then circling throughout the room, the lightbulbs began to explode with sharp little detonations and showers of powdered glass and glowing bits of filament. People at the bar and at all the wooden tables scattered around the room reacted as people tend to do in this sort of situation. They started screaming and shouting, rising to their feet or ducking beneath their tables in confusion. A few ducked out the fire door at the back of one side of the room. Then there was an abrupt and profound silence. Everyone stood stock-still and stared at the doorway---they stared at me.
At the back table, Johnny Marcone regarded the doorway with his passionless, money-colored eyes. He was not smiling. Mr. Hendricks, beside him, was glaring at me, his single eyebrow lowered far enough to threaten him with blinding. Spike was tight-lipped and pale. Gimpy stared at me in pure horror. None of them made any moves or any sound. I guess seeing a wizard cut loose can do that to you.
"Little pig, little pig, let me in," I said, into the silence. I planted my staff on the ground and narrowed my eyes at Marcone. "I'd really like to talk to you for a minute, John."
Marcone stared at me for a moment; then his lips twitched up at the corners. "You have a singular manner of persuasion, Mr. Dresden." He stood up and spoke aloud to the room without ever taking his eyes off me. He must have been angry, but the icy exterior concealed it. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Varsity is closing early, it would seem. Please make an orderly exit through the door nearest you. Don't worry about your bills. Mr. Dresden, if you would step out of the doorway and allow my customers to leave?"
I stepped out of the doorway. The place cleared out fast, customers and staff alike, leaving me alone in the room with Marcone, Hendricks, Spike, and Gimpy. None of them moved as they waited for the customers, the witnesses, to leave. Gimpy started sweating. Hendricks's expression never changed. The big man was as patient as a mountain lion, ready to leap out on the unsuspecting deer.
"I want my hair back," I said, as soon as the last college-age couple had hustled out the door.
"Beg pardon?" Marcone said. His head tilted to one side, and he seemed genuinely puzzled.
"You heard me," I said. "This piece of trash of yours"---I swung my blasting rod up and pointed it at Gimpy---"just jumped me outside a gas station across town and cut off some of my hair. I want it back. I'm not going to go out like Tommy Tomm did."
Marcone's eyes abruptly shone with a terrible, cold, money-colored anger. He turned his head, deliberately, to Gimpy.
Gimpy's broad face went a bit more pasty. He blinked a trickle of sweat out of his eyes. "I don't know what he's talking about, boss."
Marcone's gaze never wavered. "I presume, Mr. Dresden," he said, "that you have some kind of proof?"
"Look at his left wrist," I said. "He's got several fingernail marks on his skin where I grabbed him."
Marcone nodded, those cold, tiger's eyes on Gimpy's, and said, almost gently, "Well?"
"He's lying, boss," Gimpy protested. He licked at his lips. "Hell, I got some fingernail marks from my girl. He knew that. You know what you said, he's for real, he knows things."
The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. "Whoever killed Tommy Tomm knows that I'm on his trail," I said. "Your rival, whoever it is selling the ThreeEye. Gimpy here must have gotten a sweet deal from him to turn on you. He's been providing your rival with information all along, running errands for him."
Gimpy couldn't have played a game of poker to save his life. He stared at me in horror, shook his head in protest.
"There's an easy way to settle this," Marcone said, his voice smooth and even. "Lawrence. Show me your wrist."
"He's lying, boss," Gimpy Lawrence said again, but his voice was shaking. "He's just trying to mess with your head."
"Lawrence," Marcone said, his tone the gentle reproof of parent to child.
Gimpy Lawrence knew it was over. I saw the desperate decision in his face before he actually moved. "Liar!" he howled at me. He got up, lifting his hand from underneath the table. I had time to realize he held a revolver, virtually a twin to my own .38, in his fist, before he started shooting.
Several things happened at the same time. I lifted my hand, focusing my will on the bracelet of tiny medieval-style shields around my left wrist, and hardened the protective energies around me. Bullets hammered against it with whining noises, striking sparks in the near dark of the restaurant.
Spike leapt clear of the table, staying low, a small Uzi-style automatic now in his hand. Hendricks was more ruthless and direct, reacting with the mindlessly violent instincts of a savage. With one hand, the big bodyguard hauled Marcone back, putting his own bulk between the mob boss and Gimpy Lawrence. With the other hand, he produced a compact semiautomatic.
Gimpy Lawrence turned his head and saw Hendricks and his gun. He panicked, turning his own weapon toward the larger man.
Hendricks shot him with a ruthless efficiency, three sharp claps of sound, three flashes of muzzle light. The first two shots hit Gimpy in the middle of his chest, driving him back a pair of steps. The third hit him over the right eyebrow, jerked his head back, and toppled him to the ground.
Gimpy Lawrence had dark eyes, like mine. I could see them. His head turned toward me as he lay there on the floor. I saw him blink, once. Then the lights went out of them, and he was gone.
I stood there for a moment, stunned. Grand entrance or not, this wasn't what I had wanted to happen. I didn't want to kill anyone. Hell, I didn't want anyone to die, not me and not them. I felt sick. It had been a sort of game, a macho contest of showmanship I had been determined to win. All of a sudden, it wasn't a game anymore, and I just wanted to walk away from it alive.
We all stood there, no one moving. Then Marcone said, from beneath Hendricks, "I wanted him alive. He could have answered several questions, first."
Hendricks frowned and got up off of Marcone. "Sorry, boss."
"That's all right, Mr. Hendricks. Better to err on the side of caution, I suppose." Marcone stood up, straightened his tie, then went and knelt by the body. He felt the man's throat, then wrist, and shook his head. "Lawrence, Lawrence. I would have paid you twice what they offered you, if you'd come to me with it. You never were very smart, were you?" Then, his face showing no more emotion than it had the entire evening, Marcone peeled back Gimpy Lawrence's left sleeve, and studied the man's wrist. He frowned, and lowered the arm again, his expression pensive.
"It would seem, Mr. Dresden," he said, "that we have a common enemy." He turned to focus his gaze on me. "Who is it?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't be here. I thought maybe it was you."
Marcone lifted his eyebrows. "You should have known me better than that, Mr. Dresden."
It was my turn to frown. "You're right. I should have." The killings had been more vicious, savage than Marcone would have cared to use. Competitors might have to be removed, but there would be no sense in making a production of it. Certainly, there was no reason to murder bystanders, like Linda, like Jennifer Stanton. It was inefficient, bad for business.
"If he has something of yours, you are welcome to take it, Mr. Dresden," Marcone said. He looked around the room and sighed. "Better hurry. I think the Varsity has seen its last crowd. A shame."
It was hard, but I walked over to Gimpy Lawrence's body. I had to set aside my staff, my rod, to rifle the corpse's pockets. I felt like a ghoul, crouched over the body of a dead man, picking what was valuable to me off of it, out of his pockets.
I didn't find my hair anywhere. I looked up at Marcone, and he regarded me, my eyes, without any readable emotion.
"Nothing," I told him.
"Interesting. He must have passed the material in question to someone else before he came here," Marcone said.
"Someone after he got here, maybe?"
Marcone shook his head. "I am quite sure he did not do that. I would have noticed."
"I believe you," I told him, and I did. "But who?"
"Our enemy," Marcone said. "Obviously."
I closed my eyes, suddenly sagging with weariness. "Dammit."
Marcone said nothing. He stood up, and issued a few quiet orders to Hendricks and Spike. Hendricks wiped down his gun with a napkin, then left it lying on the floor. Spike went over behind the bar and started to do something involving a power cord and a bottle of whiskey.
I gathered up my staff and rod, stood up, and turned to Marcone. "Tell me what else you know. I need everything you have if I'm going to catch this guy."
Marcone considered that, and nodded. "Yes, you do. Unfortunately, you chose a public forum for this discussion. You have set yourself up in the eyes of anyone who cared to watch as my enemy. As understandable as your reasons might have been, the fact that you have publicly defied me remains. I cannot let that go without response, regardless of my personal feelings, without inviting more of the same. I must maintain control. It isn't personal, Mr. Dresden. It's business."
I tightened my jaw, and my grip on my blasting rod, and made sure my shield was still there, ready to go. "So what are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing," he said. "I need do nothing. Either our enemy will kill you, in which case I need not risk myself or my people in removing you, or you will find him in time and bring him down. If you do defeat him, I will let it be understood to any who ask that you did so at my behest, after which I will be inclined to forget this evening. Either way, it profits me best to wait and see."
"If he kills me," I pointed out, "if I'm the next one to have my heart ripped out, you still won't know where he is. You won't be any closer to removing him and protecting your business."
"True," Marcone said. Then he smiled, an expression that lasted for only a fraction of a second. "But I think you will not be such easy prey. I think that even if he kills you, he will reveal himself in some way. And since our encounter the other day, I think I have a better feel for what sorts of things to look for."
I scowled at him and turned to go, moving briskly toward the door.
"Harry," he said. I stopped and turned back around.
"On a personal note---I know nothing that would profit you in any case. All of his people we managed to take revealed nothing. They were that afraid of him. No one seems to know just where the drug comes from, from what it is made, or where this person does business. Shadows, they say. That he is always in the shadows. That is all that I have learned."
I regarded Johnny Marcone for a moment, and then nodded, once. "Thank you."
He shrugged. "Good luck. I think it would be best if you and I did not encounter one another in the future. I cannot tolerate any more interference in my affairs."
"I think that's a good idea, too," I said.
"Excellent. It is good to have someone who understands." And then he turned back toward his remaining two men, leaving the corpse of Gimpy Lawrence on the floor behind him.
I turned and trudged out of the place, into the night and the cold and the misty rain. I still felt sick, could still see Gimpy Lawrence's eyes as he died. I could still hear Linda Randall's husky laughter in my head. I still regretted lying to Murphy, and I still had no intentions of telling her any more than I already had. I still didn't know who was trying to kill me. I still had no defense to present to the White Council.
"Let's face it, Harry," I told myself. "You're still screwed."
Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?
That's what it felt like, walking out of the Varsity, walking out into the rain. When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.
So I walked. It was pretty stupid, in retrospect, walking around Chicago late on a Saturday night. I didn't look up very often. I walked and let things roll around in my head, my hands in the pockets of my duster, which flapped around my long legs while the light rain gradually plastered my hair to my head.
I thought about my father. I usually do, when I get that low. He was a good man, a generous man, a hopeless loser. A stage magician at a time when technology was producing more magic than magic, he had never had much to give his family. He was on the road most of the time, playing rundown houses, trying to scratch out a living for my mother. He wasn't there when I was born.
He wasn't there when she died.
He showed up more than a day after I'd been born. He gave me the names of three magicians, then took me with him, on the road, entertaining children and retirees, performing in school gymnasiums and grocery stores. He was always generous, kind---more kind and more generous than we could afford, really. And he was always a little bit sad. He would show me pictures of my mother, and talk about her, every night. It got to where I almost felt that I knew her, myself.
As I got older, the feeling increased. I saw my father, I think, as she must have---as a dear, sweet, gentle man. A little naive, but honest and kind. Someone who cared for others, and who didn't value material gain over all else. I can see why she would have loved him.
I never got to be old enough to be his assistant, as he had promised me. He died in his sleep one night. An aneurysm, the doctors said. I found him, cold, smiling. Maybe he'd been dreaming of Mother when he went. And as I looked at him, I suddenly felt, for the very first time in my life, utterly, entirely alone. That something was gone that would never return, that a little hole had been hollowed out inside of me that wasn't ever going to be filled again.
And that was how I felt, that rainy spring night in Chicago, walking along the streets, my breath pluming into steam, my right boot creaking with every step, dead people occupying all of my thoughts.
I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, when after hours of walking, my steps carried me back to Linda Randall's apartment. The police were all gone, now, the lights all off, all the gawking neighbors cozy in their beds. It was quiet in the apartment complex. Dawn wasn't yet brushing the sky, but somewhere, on a window ledge or in a rooftop nest, a bird was twittering.
I was at the end of my strength, my resources. I hadn't thought of anything, hadn't come up with any brilliant ideas. The killer was going to get a spell together to kill me the next time he had a storm to draw on, and from the way the air felt that could be anytime. If he didn't kill me, Morgan would certainly have the White Council set to execute me at dawn on Monday. The bastard was probably out lobbying votes, already. If the matter came before the Council, I wouldn't stand a chance.
I leaned against the door to Linda's apartment. It was striped with POLICE LINE---DO NOT CROSS yellow-and-black tape. I didn't really realize what I was doing until I had already worked a spell that opened the door, unfastened the lowest strip of yellow tape, and walked into her apartment.
"This is stupid, Harry," I told myself. I guess I wasn't in the mood to listen. I walked around Linda's apartment, smelling her perfume and her blood. They hadn't come to clean up the blood, yet. The apartment manager would probably have to handle that, later. They never really show you details like that at the movies.
I eventually found myself lying on the floor, on the carpeting next to Linda Randall's large bed. I was curled on my side, my back to her bed, my face toward the sliding glass doors that led out to her little concrete patio. I didn't feel like moving, like going anywhere, like doing anything. Useless. It had all been useless. I was going to die in the next two days.
The worst part was that I wasn't sure that I cared. I was just so tired, exhausted from all the magic I'd had to use, from the walking, from the bruises and punches and lack of sleep. It was dark. Everything was dark.
I think I must have fallen asleep. I needed it, after everything that had happened. I don't remember anything else, until the sun was too bright in my eyes.
I blinked and lifted a hand against the light, keeping my eyes closed. Mornings had never been my best time, and the sun had risen above the tops of the buildings across the street, cheerful springtime sunshine that dashed down through Linda Randall's curtains, through my eyelids and into my brain. I grumbled something, and rolled over, face to the cool darkness under Linda's bed, back to the warm sunlight.
But I didn't go back to sleep. Instead, I started to get disgusted with myself.
"What the hell are you doing, Harry?" I demanded, out loud.
"Lying down to die," I told myself, petulantly.
"Like hell," my wiser part said. "Get off the floor and get to work."
"Don't wanna. Tired. Go away."
"You're not too tired to talk to yourself. So you're not too tired to bail your ass out of the alligators, either. Open your eyes," I told myself, firmly.
I hunched my shoulders, not wanting to obey, but against my better judgment, I did open my eyes. The sunlight had turned Linda Randall's apartment into an almost cheerful place, overlaid with a patina of gold---empty still, to be sure, but warm with a few good memories. I saw a high-school year-book lying nearby, underneath the bed, several photographs serving as bookmarks. There was also a framed picture of a much-younger Linda Randall, smiling brightly, none of the jaded weariness I had seen in her in evidence, standing in her graduation robes between a kind-looking couple in their late fifties. Her parents, I presumed. She looked happy.
And, lying just in the edge of a stray little beam of sunlight, one that was already retreating as the sun rose above the edge of the buildings, was a small, red plastic cylinder with a grey cap.
My salvation.
I snatched it out from under the bed. I was shaking. I shook the canister, and it rattled. A roll of film was inside. I opened up the canister and dumped the film into my hand. The plastic leader had been retracted into the case---there were pictures on the film, but they hadn't been developed yet. I closed the film up again and reached into the pocket of my duster and drew out another canister, the one I'd found at Victor Sells's lake house. The two were a match.
My mind spun around, taking off down a whole new track. An entirely new realm of possibility had opened up to me, and somewhere in it might be my opportunity, my chance to get out of this alive, to catch the killer, to salvage everything that had started going to hell.
But it still wasn't clear. I couldn't be sure what was going on, but I had a possible link now, a link between the murder investigation and Monica Sells's aborted inquiry into the disappearance of her husband, Victor. I had another lead to follow, but there wasn't much time to follow it. I had to get up, to get on my feet, and get going, fast. You can't keep a good wizard down.
I stood up, grabbed my staff and rod, and started toward the door. The last thing I needed was to get caught trespassing on a crime scene. It could get me arrested and stuck in holding, and I'd be dead before I could get bail. My mind was already rolling ahead, working out the next step, trying to find this photographer who had been at Victor's beach house, and getting these pictures developed and seeing if there was anything in them that was worth Linda Randall's death.
It was then that I heard a sound, and stopped. It came again, a quiet scraping.
Someone turned the key in the dead bolt of the apartment's front door and swung it open.
There was no time to flee beneath the bed, or into the bathroom, and I didn't want to be limited in mobility in any case. I leapt forward and stood behind the door as it opened, keeping very still.
A man entered---slim, short, harried-looking. His hair, a listless shade of brown, was drawn back into a ponytail. He wore dark cotton pants and a dark jacket, and carried a pouch on a strap at his side. He shut the door, most of the way, and looked around with great agitation. But, like most people who are too nervous to be thinking clearly, he was seeing less than he should have been, and though his head swept over where I would have been in his peripheral vision, he didn't notice me. He was a good-looking man, or so it seemed, with strong lines to his jaw and cheekbones.
He crossed the room and stopped short when he saw the bloodstained bed. I saw him clench his hands into fists. He made a strange, cawing little sound, then hurried forward, to throw himself down on the floor by the bed and start pawing underneath it. After a few seconds, his pawing grew more frantic, and I heard him curse out loud.
I slid my fingers over the smooth surface of the film canister in my pocket. So. The mysterious photographer lurking outside of Victor Sells's lake house was here looking for the film. I had a feeling in my stomach like I get when I finish a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle---a peculiar satisfaction mingled with a touch of smugness.
I settled my staff and rod silently into the corner by the door and flipped my official police consultant's badge, complete with my photograph on it, out of my duster, so that it showed against the black canvas. I covered my ratty old T-shirt with the coat and hoped that the man would be too rattled and nervous to notice that I was wearing sweatpants and cowboy boots beneath the duster.
I kept my hands in my pockets, pushed the door shut with a little nudge of my boot, and just as it closed, said, "So. Returning to the scene of the crime. I knew we'd catch you if I just waited."
The man's reaction would have had me rolling in laughter on any other day. He jerked, slammed his head against the bottom of the bed, yelped, drew himself back from the bed, turned to look at me, and all but leapt back over the bed in surprise when he saw me. I revised my opinion of his looks---his mouth was too pinched, his eyes too small and too close together, giving him the intent, predatory look of a ferret.
I narrowed my eyes and stalked toward him one slow pace at a time. "Just couldn't stay away, could you?"
"No!" he said. "Oh, God! You don't understand. I'm a photographer. See? See?" He fumbled with the case at his side and produced a camera from it. "Taking pictures. For the papers. That's what I'm doing here, just trying to get a good look around."
"Save it," I told him. "We both know you aren't here to take pictures. You were looking for this." And I pulled the film canister out of my pocket, held it up, and showed it to him.
His babbling stopped, and he stood stock-still, staring at me. Then at the canister. He licked his lips and started trying to say something.
"Who are you?" I asked. I kept my voice gruff, demanding. I tried to think of what Murphy would sound like, if I was downtown with her right now, waiting for her to ask me questions.
"Uh, Wise. Donny Wise." He swallowed, staring at me. "Am I in some kind of trouble?"
I narrowed my eyes at him and sneered, "We'll see about that. Do you have identification?"
"Sure, yeah."
"Let me see it." I speared him with a glance, and added, "Slowly."
He goggled at me and reached for his hip pocket with exaggerated slowness. With one hand, he drew out his wallet and flipped it open to his driver's license. I stalked toward him, snatched it, and studied it. His license and picture agreed with the name he'd given me.
"Well, Mr. Wise," I began, "this is an ongoing investigation. So long as you give me your cooperation, I don't think that we---"
I looked up to see him peering at my name badge, and my voice trailed off. He jerked his wallet back, and accused, "You're not a cop!"
I tilted my head back at an arrogant angle. "Okay. Maybe not. But I work with the cops. And I've got your film."
He cursed again and started stuffing his camera back into his bag, clearly meaning to leave. "No. You got nothing. Nothing that connects any of this to me. I'm out of here."
I watched him start past me, toward the door. "Don't be so hasty, Mr. Wise. I really think you and I have things to discuss. Like a dropped film canister underneath the deck of a house in Lake Providence, last Wednesday night."
He flicked a quick glance up at me. "I have nothing to say to you," he mumbled, "whoever the hell you are." He reached for the door and started to open it.
I gestured curtly to my staff in the corner, and hissed, in my best dramatic voice, "Vento servitas," jerking my hand at the doorway. My staff, driven by tightly controlled channels of air moving in response to my evocation, leapt across the room and slammed the door shut in front of Donny Wise's nose. He went stiff as a board. He turned to face me, his eyes wide.
"My God. You're one of them. Don't kill me," he said. "Oh, God. You've got the pictures. I don't know anything. Nothing. I'm no danger to you." He tried to keep his voice calm, but it was shaking. I saw him tilt his eyes at the glass sliding doors to the little patio, as though calculating his chances of making it there before I could stop him.
"Relax, Mr. Wise," I told him. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm after the man who killed Linda. Help me. Tell me what you know. I'll take care of the rest."
He let out a harsh little laugh, and eased a half step toward the glass windows. "And get myself killed? Like Linda, like those other people? No way."
"No, Mr. Wise. Tell me what you know. I'll put a stop to the killings. I'll bring Linda's murderer to justice." I tried to keep my voice soothing, even, fighting against the frustration I felt. Hell, I'd wanted to rattle him, but I hadn't meant to scare him so badly that he wanted to jump through a plate-glass sliding door. "I want these people stopped just as badly as you do."
"Why?" he demanded. I saw a little contempt in his eyes, now. "What was she to you? Were you sleeping with her, too?"
I shook my head. "No. No, she's just one more dead person who shouldn't be."
"You're not a cop. Why risk your ass to do this? Why go up against these people? Haven't you seen what they can do?"
I shrugged. "Who else is going to?" He didn't answer me, so I held up the film canister. "What are these pictures, Mr. Wise? What is on this film that was worth killing Linda Randall for?"
Donny Wise rubbed his palms over his thighs. His ponytail twitched as he looked about the room. "I'll make you a deal. Give me the film, and I'll tell you what I know."
I shook my head. "I might need what's on here."
"What's there isn't any good to you if you don't know what you're looking at," he pointed out. "I don't know you from Adam. I don't want any trouble. All I want is to get my ass out of this alive and in one piece."
I stared at him for a moment. If I traded him, I'd lose the film, and whatever was on it. If I didn't, and if he was telling me the truth, the film wouldn't do me any good. The trail had led me here, to him. If I didn't dig up a lead to somewhere else, I was dead.
So I snapped my fingers, letting my staff rattle to the floor. Then I tossed him the film, underhand. He dropped it, and stooped to recover it, studying me warily.
"After I get out of here," he said, "we're quits. I've never seen you before."
I nodded. "Fine. Let's have it."
Donny swallowed and ran a hand back over his hair, giving his ponytail a nervous little tug at the end of the motion. "I knew Linda from around. I'd taken some pictures of her, for a portfolio. I do shoots for some of the girls around town. They want to make it into magazines, most of them."
"Adult magazines?" I asked.
"No," he snapped, nervous still, "Uncle Abner's magazine for children. Of course adult mags. Nothing really classy, but you can make some good money even if you're not Hugh Hefner's type.
"So on Wednesday, Linda comes to me. She says she's got a deal for me. I shoot some pictures for her and give her the film, and I get---and she's real nice to me. All I have to do is show up where she says, shoot a roll through the windows, and go. Deliver to her the next day. So I did it. And now she's dead."
"Out in Lake Providence," I said.
"Yeah."
"What did you see there?" I asked.
Donny Wise shook his head, his eyes drawn past me to the bed again. "Linda. Some other people. No one I knew. They were having some kind of party. All candles and stuff. It was storming like hell, a lot of thunder and lightning, so I couldn't really hear them. I worried for a while about someone looking up and seeing me in the lightning, but I guess they were too busy."
"They were having sex," I said.
"No," he snapped. "They was playing canasta. Yeah, sex. The real thing, not fake stuff on a set. The real thing don't look as good. Linda, some other woman, three men. I shot my roll and got out."
I grinned, but he didn't seem to have noticed the double entendre. You just don't get quality lowlife often enough anymore. "Can you describe any of these other people?"
He shook his head. "I wasn't looking. But they wasn't being too particular, if you take my meaning. Turned my stomach."
"Did you know what Linda wanted with the pictures?"
He looked at me and then snickered, as though I were extremely simple. "Jesus, buddy. What do you think someone wants with pictures like that? She wanted to get leverage on somebody. Hell, it wouldn't hurt her reputation any if pictures of her in the middle of an orgy got out. But it might have, some of the people with her. What kind of simp, wannabe cop are you?"
I ignored the question. "What are you going to do with the film, Donny?"
He shrugged. "Trash it, probably." I saw his eyes flick from side to side, and I knew that he was lying to me. He'd keep the film, find out who was in the pictures, and if he thought he could get away with it, he'd try to weasel whatever profit he could out of it. He seemed the type, and I trusted my instincts.
"Allow me," I said, and snapped my fingers. "Fuego."
The canister's grey lid flew off in a little whoosh of flame, and Donny Wise yelped, drawing his hand back sharply. The red canister burst into flame on its way to the ground and landed there in a crumpled, smoking lump.
He stared at the film, then up at me, his mouth gaping.
"I hope I don't find out you've lied to me, Donny," I told him. He went white as a sheet, assured me that he hadn't, then turned and fled out of the apartment, knocking loose two bits of police tape on the way out. He didn't close the door behind him.
I let him go. I believed him. He didn't seem bright enough to make up a story on the fly, as rattled as he'd been. I felt a ferocious surge of triumph, of anger, and of the desire to find this person, whoever it was, who was taking the raw forces of life and creation and turning them to the ends of destruction, and to put him in the trash with the rest of the garbage. Whoever he was, murdering with magic and killing people by degrees with the ThreeEye drug, he was someone I wanted to put down. My brain lurched into gear, now that there was something to work with, some other possibility for tomorrow morning than me dying in a variety of gruesome ways.
Linda Randall had been planning on blackmailing someone. I took a staggering mental leap and figured it was Victor, or someone out at his house during the party. But why? I didn't have any pictures now, only the information I'd gotten from Donny Wise. I couldn't afford to wait around. I had to pursue the lead he'd given me if I was to get to the bottom of this, and find out who had killed Linda.
How had I managed to get into all of this trouble in only a few days? And how in the world had I managed to stumble across what appeared to be a complex and treacherous little plot by chance, out at the house in Lake Providence, on a separate investigation entirely?
Simple answer---it hadn't been an accident. It had all been by design. I had been directed there. Someone had wanted me out at the lake house, had wanted me to get involved and to find out what was going on out there. Someone who was nervous as hell around wizards, who refused to give out her name, who had carefully dropped phrases that would make me believe her ignorance, who had to rush out quickly from her appointment and who was willing to let five hundred dollars go, just to get me off the phone a few seconds faster. Someone had drawn me out and forced me into the open, where I had attracted all sorts of hostile attention.
That was the key.
I gathered up my staff and rod and stalked out the door.
It was time to talk to Monica Sells.
The cabby dropped me off a block away from Monica Sells's house in the suburbs. I was running out of time, out of Murphy's loan, and out of patience, so I didn't waste any daylight in walking down the street toward her place.
It was a cute little house, two stories, a couple of young trees in the front yard, just now starting to rival the house for height. There was a minivan in the driveway, and a basketball goal, well used. The lawn was grown rather long, but all the recent rains left a good excuse for that. The street was a quiet one, and it took me a moment to realize that most of the houses on it were not occupied. FOR SALE signs stood in many of the yards. Sparse curtains draped over empty, gaping windows, like cobwebs. There wasn't a lot of birdsong, for a street with so many trees, and I couldn't hear any dogs barking as I walked along the sidewalk. Overhead, clouds were thickening, building up for another thunderstorm.
Taken all together, it had the feel of someplace blighted, a place where a black wizard had set up shop. I swung up through the Sells yard and to the front door.
I rang the bell, and waited.
There was no answer.
I knocked. I leaned on the doorbell.
Still no answer.
I tightened my jaw and looked around. I didn't see anyone, so I turned back to the door, preparing to use a spell to open it.
Instead, the door swung open, maybe six inches. Monica Sells stood inside, peering out at me with her green eyes. She was dressed in jeans, a plain flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her hair was covered by a bandanna. She wore no makeup. She looked both older and more appealing that way---I think maybe because it was a more natural look for her, something that was closer to the sort of person she really was, rather than the nicer clothes and jewelry she'd worn when she visited my office. Her face went pale, her lips bloodless.
"I don't have anything to say to you, Mr. Dresden," she said. "Go away."
"I can't do that," I said. She started to swing the door shut, but I jammed the end of my staff into the doorway, keeping it from closing.
"I'll call the police," she said, voice strained. She leaned against the door, trying to keep me from coming in.
"Do it," I growled, and then I played a hunch, "and I'll tell them about you and your husband." I was taking a shot in the dark, but what the hell. She didn't know that I didn't know what the hell was going on.
My instincts paid off. I heard her suck in a breath and felt her resistance on the door sag a little. I put my shoulder to the door, leaned into it hard, and she stepped back from me in surprise. I don't think she'd expected me to physically force my way into her house. Hell, I hadn't expected me to do that. I hadn't realized how angry I was until I saw the look of panic on her face when she looked up at me. I don't know what I looked like, but it must not have been friendly.
I stopped. I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, and tried to get a handle on my anger. It wouldn't profit me anything to lose control.
That was when she went for the stunner.
I heard her move, opened my eyes in time to see her snatch a black plastic case the size of a cellular phone from the piano and lunge toward me. Her face was pale, frightened. Blue lightning danced between the two tines of the stunner as she shoved it at my stomach.
I swept my staff, upright, from right to left, and the buzzing device went past me, along with her lunge, striking the doorframe behind me. I slipped past her, into the living room, turning to face her as she recovered and turned around.
"I won't let you hurt them," she snarled. "Not you, not anyone. I'll kill you before I let you touch them, wizard." And then she was coming at me again, fury replacing the terror in her eyes, a grim determination to succeed that made me think of Murphy for a second. For the first time, she was looking me in the face. For the first time she forgot to keep her eyes averted from mine, and in that second, I saw inside of her.
Things seemed to slow down for a moment. I had time to see the color of her eyes, the structure of her face. To recognize where I had seen them before, why she had looked familiar to me. I had time to see, behind her eyes, the fear and the love that motivated every move she made, every step she took. I saw what had moved her to come to me, why she was afraid. I saw her grief, and I saw her pain.
And the pieces all fell into place. Knowing the emotions that drove her, the terrible love that she was showing even now, it all seemed perfectly obvious, and I felt stupid for not figuring it out days ago.
"Stop," I said, or tried to say, before she thrust the stunner at my chest. I dropped staff and rod alike in a clatter of falling wood, and caught her wrist in both of my hands. She pushed the stunner up at my face, and I let her do it.
It got to within about three inches of me, the light bright in my eyes. Then I drew in a breath and puffed it out onto the stunner, along with an effort of will. There was a spark, a little puff of smoke, and then it went dead in her hands, like every other electronic gizmo seemed to do whenever I came around. Hell, I was surprised it had taken as long as it did to stop working. And even if it hadn't, it wasn't any trouble for me to hex it into uselessness.
I continued holding her wrist, but the driving tension behind her arm had eased away to nothing. She was staring at my face, her eyes wide with shock from the meeting of our gazes. She started shaking and dropped the useless stunner from limp fingers. It clattered to the floor. I let go of her, and she just stared at me.
I was shaking, too. A soulgaze is never something pleasant or simple. God, sometimes I hated that I had to live with that. I hadn't wanted to know that she had been abused as a child. That she'd married a man who provided her with more of the same, as an adult. That the only hope or light that she saw in her life was in her two children. There hadn't been time to see all of her reasons, all of her logic. I still didn't know why she had drawn me into this entire business---but I knew that it was, ultimately, because she loved her two kids.
And that was all I really needed, that and one other connection, the nagging resemblance to someone that I had noticed in her at my office. The rest fell into place from there.
It took Monica Sells a moment to recover herself. She did it with remarkable speed, as though she were a woman used to drawing on a mask again after having it knocked off. "I...I'm sorry, Mr. Dresden." She lifted her chin, and regarded me with a fragile, wounded pride. "What do you want here?"
"A couple of things," I told her. I stooped down to recover my staff, my rod. "I want my lock of hair back. I want to know why you came to me last Thursday, why you dragged me into this mess. And I want to know who killed Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton and Linda Randall."
Monica's eyes grew even duller, and her face paled. "Linda's dead?"
"Last night," I told her. "And someone's planning on taking me out the same way, the next chance they get."
Outside, in the far distance, thunder rumbled. Another storm was in the works, slowly building. When it got to town, I was a dead man. It was as simple as that.
I looked back to Monica Sells, and it was all over her face---she knew about the storm just as well as I did. She knew about it, and there was a sort of sad and weary frustration in her eyes.
"You have to go, Mr. Dresden," she said. "You can't be here when...You've got to go, before it's too late."
I stepped toward her. "You're the only chance I have, Monica. I asked you once before to trust me. You've got to do it again. You've got to know that I'm not here to hurt you or your---"
A door opened in the hallway behind Monica. A girl, on the gawky end of preadolescence, with hair the color of her mother's, leaned out into the hallway. "Mom?" she said in a quavering voice. "Mom, are you okay? Do you want me to call the police?" A boy, perhaps a year or two younger than his sister, poked his head out, too. He was carrying a well-used basketball in his hands, turning it in nervous little gestures.
I looked back to Monica. Her eyes were closed. There were tears coming, trailing down her cheeks. It took her a moment, but she drew in a breath and spoke to the girl in a clear, calm voice, without turning around. "I'm fine," she told them. "Jenny, Billy, get back into the room and lock the door. I mean it."
"But, Mom---" the boy began.
"Now," Monica said. Her voice was strained.
Jenny put a hand on her brother's shoulder. "C'mon, Billy." She looked at me for just a moment. Her eyes were too old and too knowing for a child her age. "C'mon." The two vanished back into the room, closed the door, and locked it behind them.
Monica waited until they were gone, and then broke down into more tears. "Please. Please, Mr. Dresden. You have to go. If you're here when the storm comes, if he knows..." She buried her face in her hands and made a quiet, croaking sound.
I stepped closer to her. I had to have her help. No matter how much pain she was in, no matter what kind of agony she was going through, I had to have her help. And I thought I knew the names to invoke to get it.
I can be such a bastard sometimes.
"Monica. Please. I'm up against a wall. I'm out of options. Everything I have leads here. To you. And I don't have time to wait. I need your help, before I wind up just like Jennifer and Tommy and Linda." I sought her eyes, and she looked up at me without turning her gaze away. "Please. Help me." I watched her eyes, saw the fear and the grief and the weariness there. I saw her look at me as I leaned on her, and demanded more out of her than she could afford to give.
"All right," she whispered. She turned away and walked toward the kitchen. "All right. I'll tell you what I know, wizard. But there's nothing I can do to help you." She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. Her words fell with the weight of conviction, simple truth. "There's nothing anyone can do, now."
Monica Sells had a cheerful, brightly colored kitchen. She collected painted cartoon cows, and they ranged over the walls and cabinet doors of the room in a cheerful, bovine sort of indolence. The refrigerator was covered with crayon drawings and report cards. There was a row of colored glass bottles on the windowsill. I could hear wind chimes outside, restlessly stirred by a cool, rising wind. A big, friendly cow clock on the wall swung its tail back and forth, tick, tick, tick.
Monica sat down at the kitchen table. She drew up her legs beneath her, and seemed to relax by a few degrees. Her kitchen, I sensed, was her sanctuary, the place where she retreated when she was upset. It was lovingly maintained, sparkling clean.
I let her relax for as long as I could, which wasn't long. I could almost feel the air building up to greater tension, the storm brewing in the distance. I couldn't afford to play with kid gloves. I was just about to open my mouth, to start pushing, when she said, "Ask questions, wizard. I'll answer them. I wouldn't even know where to start, myself." She didn't look at me. She didn't look at anything.
"All right," I said. I leaned against the kitchen counter. "You know Jennifer Stanton, don't you? You're related to her."
Her expression didn't change. "We have our mother's eyes," she confirmed. "My little sister was always the rebel. She ran away to become an actress, but became a whore instead. It suited her, in her own way. I always wanted her to stop, but I don't think she wanted to. I'm not sure she knew how."
"Have the police contacted you yet, about her death?"
"No. They called my parents, down in St. Louis. They haven't realized, yet, that I live in town. Someone will notice soon, I'm sure."
I frowned. "Why didn't you go to them? Why did you come to me?"
She looked over at me. "The police can't help me, Mr. Dresden. Do you think they would believe me? They'd look at me like I was some kind of lunatic, if I went to them babbling about magic spells and rituals." She grimaced. "Maybe they'd be right. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going crazy."
"So you came to me," I said. "Why didn't you just tell me the truth?"
"How could I?" she asked. "How could I walk into the office of someone I didn't even know, and tell him---" She swallowed, and squeezed her eyes shut over more tears.
"And tell me what, Monica?" I asked. I kept my voice soft. "Who killed your sister?"
Wind chimes tinkled outside. The friendly cow clock went tick, tick, tick. Monica Sells drew in a long, shuddering breath and closed her eyes. I saw her gathering up the frayed threads of her courage, knotting them up as tightly as she could. I knew the answer, already, but I needed to hear it from her. I needed to be sure. I tried to tell myself that it would be good for her to face such a thing, just to say it out loud. I wasn't sure I bought that---like I said, I'm not a very good liar.
Monica squeezed her hands into tight fists, and said, "God help me. God help me. It was my husband, Mr. Dresden. It was Victor." I thought she would dissolve into tears, but instead she just hunched tighter into her little defensive ball, as though she expected someone to start hitting her.
"That's why you wanted me to find him," I heard myself say. "That's why you sent me out to the lake house, to look for him. You knew he was there. You knew that if you sent me out there, he would see me." My voice was quiet, not quite angry, but the words pounded around Monica Sells like sledgehammers throwing up chips of concrete. She flinched from each of them.
"I had to," she moaned. "God, Mr. Dresden. You don't know what it was like. And he was getting worse. He didn't start as a bad man, really, but he kept getting worse and worse, and I was afraid."
"For your kids," I said.
She nodded, and rested her forehead on her knees. And then the words started spilling out of her, slowly at first, and then in a greater and greater rush, as if she couldn't hold back the immense weight of them any longer. I listened. I owed it to her, for walking all over her feelings, for forcing her to talk to me.
"He was never a bad man, Mr. Dresden. You have to understand. He worked hard. He worked so hard for us, to give us something better. I think it was because he knew that my parents had been so wealthy. He wanted to give me just as much as they could have, and he couldn't. It would make him so frustrated, so angry. Sometimes he would lose his temper. But it wasn't always so bad. And he could be so kind, sometimes, too. I thought that maybe the children would help him to stabilize.
"It was when Billy was about four that Victor found the magic. I don't know where. But he started getting obsessed with it. He brought home books and books. Strange things. He put a lock on the door to the attic, and after dinner he'd vanish up there. Some nights, he wouldn't come to bed. Some nights, I thought I could hear things, up there. Voices. Or things that weren't voices." She shuddered.
"He started to get worse. He'd get angry, and things would happen. Little things. The drapes would catch on fire at one edge. Or things would fly off the walls and break." She turned her haunted gaze toward her cute, tacky cows for a moment, as though assuring herself that they were still there.
"He'd scream at us for no reason. Or burst out laughing for no reason. He...he saw things. Things I couldn't see. I thought he was going crazy."
"But you never confronted him," I said, quietly.
She shook her head. "No. God forgive me. I couldn't. I had gotten used to being quiet, Mr. Dresden. To not making a fuss." She took a deep breath and continued. "Then, one night, he came to me and woke me up. He made me drink something. He told me that it would make me see, make me understand him. That if I drank, I would see the things he saw. That he wanted me to understand him, that I was his wife." This time, she did start crying, tears that coursed silently down her cheeks, the corners of her mouth.
Something else clicked solidly into place, where I'd already thought it would go. "The ThreeEye," I said.
She nodded. "And...I saw things, Mr. Dresden. I saw him." Her face screwed up, and I thought she was going to vomit. I could sympathize. To have the Third Sight suddenly opened to you like that, not knowing what it was, what was happening to you; to look on the man you had wed, who had given you children, and to see him for what he truly was, obsessed with power, consumed by greed---it had to have been hell. And it would remain with her. Always. She would never find the memory fading, never find the comfort and solace of years putting a comfortable padding between her and the image of her husband as a monster.
She continued, speaking in a low, hurried rush. "I wanted more. Even when it was over, even though it was horrible, I wanted more. I tried not to let it show, but he could tell. He looked into my eyes and he knew, Mr. Dresden. Like you did just now. And he started to laugh. Like he'd just won the lottery. He kissed me, he was so happy. And it made me sick.
"He started making more of the drug. But he could never make enough. It drove him berserk, furious. And then he started to realize that when he was angry, he could do more. He'd look for excuses to be angry. He'd drive himself into rages. But it still wasn't enough." She swallowed. "That's when...when."
I thought of frightened pizza drivers and faery commentary on human "sporting." "That's when he realized that he could touch other people's emotions, too," I said. "Use them to help power his magic."
She nodded, and curled tighter in on herself. "It was only me, at first. He'd frighten me. And afterward I would be so exhausted. Then he found out that for what he was doing, lust worked better. So he started looking around. For backers. Investors, he called them." She looked up at me, her eyes pleading. "Please, Mr. Dresden. You have to understand. It wasn't always so bad. There were moments that I could almost see him again. That I thought he was going to come back to us."
I tried to look on her with compassion. But I wasn't sure I felt anything but fury, that someone, anyone should treat his family that way---or anyone else, for that matter. My feelings must have showed on my face, because Monica quickly averted her eyes, and huddled down in fear. She spoke in a hurried voice, as though to put off my rage, in the voice of a woman who has put off rage with desperate words more than once.
"He found the Beckitts. They had money. And he told them that if they would help him, he would help them get their vengeance on Johnny Marcone. For their daughter. They put their trust in him. They gave him all the money he needed."
I thought of the Beckitts, and their lean, hungry faces. I thought of Mrs. Beckitt's dead eyes.
"And he started the rituals. The ceremony. He said he needed our lust." Her eyes shifted left and right, and the sickened look on her face grew deeper. "It wasn't so bad. He would close the circle, and all of a sudden, nothing mattered. Nothing but flesh. I could lose myself for a while. It was almost like an escape." She rubbed her hand on the leg of her jeans, as if trying to wipe something foul off of it. "But it wasn't enough. That's when he started talking to Jennifer. He knew what she did. That she would know the right kind of people. Like her, like Linda. Linda introduced him to Marcone's man. I don't know his name, but Victor promised him something that was enough to bring him into the circle.
"I didn't have to go all the time, then. Either Jenny or I would stay with the children. Victor made the drug. We started to make money. Things got better for a little while. As long as I didn't think too much." Monica took a deep breath. "That's when Victor started getting darker. He called demons. I saw them. And he said he needed more power. He was hungry for it. It was horrible, like watching a starving animal, forever pacing. And I saw him start...start looking at the children, Mr. Dresden. It made me afraid. The way he looked at them, sometimes, I knew---" This time she buckled and doubled toward the floor with a groan. She shuddered and wept, out of control. "Oh, God. My babies. My babies."
I wanted to go over to her. To offer her my hand to hold, to put an arm over her shoulders and to tell her that it would be all right. But I knew her, now. I had looked inside. It would make her scream. God, Harry, I thought. Haven't you tortured this poor woman enough?
I rummaged in cabinets until I found a glass. I ran cold water from the sink, poured it into the glass, then went over and put it down by her. She straightened in her chair and took the glass between shaking hands. She took a sip, and spilled a little onto her chin.
"I'm sorry," I said. It was all I could think of to say.
If she heard me, it didn't show. She sipped water, then continued, as if desperate to finish, to get the taste of the words out of her mouth. "I wanted to leave him. I knew he'd be furious, but I couldn't let the children stay close to him. I tried to talk to Jenny about it. And she took matters into her own hands. My little sister, trying to protect me. She went to Victor and told him that if he didn't let me leave, she'd go to the police and to Johnny Marcone. She'd tell them all about him. And he...he..."
"He killed her," I said. Hell. Victor hadn't needed any of Jennifer Stanton's hair to kill her. Any kind of sample of bodily fluids would have worked. With the ceremonies of lust that he'd been holding, he'd have had ample opportunity to collect from poor Jennifer Stanton. Maybe he'd even had her bring him a sample from Tommy Tomm. Or maybe Jennifer and Tommy Tomm had just been too close, as they were making love, for the spell to affect just one of them when he killed them.
"He killed her," Monica confirmed. Her shoulders slumped with a sudden weariness. "That's when I came to you. Because I thought you might be able to see. Be able to do something, before he hurt my babies. Before he killed someone else. And now Linda's dead, too. And soon you, Mr. Dresden. You can't stop him. No one can."
"Monica," I said.
She shook her head and curled up in a miserable little ball. "Go," she said. "Oh, God. Please go, Mr. Dresden. I don't want to see it when he kills you, too."
My heart felt like a lump of cold wax in my chest. I wanted so badly to tell her that everything would be all right. I wanted to dry her tears and tell her that there was still joy in the world, that there was still light and happiness. But I didn't think she would hear me. Where she was, there was nothing but an endless, hopeless darkness full of fear, pain, and defeat.
So I did the only thing I could. I withdrew in silence and left her to her weeping. Perhaps it would help her start to heal.
To me, it only sounded like pieces of glass falling from a shattered window.
As I walked toward the front door, a little motion to the left caught my eye. Jenny Sells stood in the hallway, a silent wraith. She regarded me with luminous green eyes, like her mother's, like the dead aunt whose namesake she was. I stopped and faced her. I'm not sure why.
"You're the wizard," she said, quietly. "You're Harry Dresden. I saw your picture in the newspaper, once. The Arcane."
I nodded.
She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?"
It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers---or any answer at all?
I looked back into her too-knowing eyes, and then quickly away. I didn't want her to see what sort of person I was, the things I had done. She didn't need that. "I'm going to do everything I can to help your mom."
She nodded. "Do you promise?"
I promised her.
She thought that over for a moment, studying me. Then she nodded. "My daddy used to be one of the good guys, Mr. Dresden. But I don't think that he is anymore." Her face looked sad. It was a sweet, unaffected expression. "Are you going to kill him?"
Another simple question.
"I don't want to," I told her. "But he's trying to kill me. I might not have any choice."
She swallowed and lifted her chin. "I loved my aunt Jenny," she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. "Momma won't say, and Billy's too little to figure it out, but I know what happened." She turned, with more grace and dignity than I could have managed, and started to leave. Then she said, quietly, "I hope you're one of the good guys, Mr. Dresden. We really need a good guy. I hope you'll be all right." Then she vanished down the hall on bare, silent feet.
I left the house in the suburbs as quickly as I could. My legs drove me down the oddly silent sidewalk, and back to the corner where the cabby was waiting, meter ticking away.
I got in the cab and told the cabby to drive me to the nearest pay phone. Then I closed my eyes and struggled to think. It was hard, through all the pain I felt. Maybe I'm stupid or something, but I hate to see people like Monica, like little Jenny, hurting like that. There shouldn't be pain like that in the world, and every time I run into it, it makes me furious. Furious and sad. I didn't know if I wanted to scream or to cry. I wanted to pound Victor Sells's face in, and I wanted to crawl into bed and hide under the covers. I wanted to give Jenny Sells a hug, and to tell her that everything would be all right. And I was still afraid, all tight and burning in my gut. Victor Sells, of the shadows and demons, was going to kill me as soon as the storm rolled in.
"Think, Harry," I told myself. "Think, dammit." The cabby gave me an odd look in the rearview mirror.
I stuffed down all the feelings, all the fear, all the anger into a tight little ball. I didn't have time to let those feelings blind me now. I needed clarity, focus, purpose. I needed a plan.
Murphy. Murphy might be able to help me. I could tip her off about the lake house and send in the cavalry. They might find a stockpile of ThreeEye there. They could then arrest Victor like any other dealer.
But there were too many holes in that plan. What if Victor wasn't keeping his stores at the lake house? What if he eluded the police? Monica and her children would be in danger, if he did. Not only that, what if Murphy didn't listen to me? Hell, the judge might not issue a warrant to search private property on the word of a man who probably had a warrant out for his own arrest, now. Not only that, but the bureaucracy involved in working with the authorities in Lake Providence, on a Sunday, no less, would slow things down. It might not happen in time to save me from having my heart torn out. No, I couldn't rely on the police.
If this was any other time, if I was held in less suspicion by the White Council, I would report Victor Sells to them and let them handle the whole thing. They're not exactly soft on people using magic like Victor used it, to call up demons, to kill, to produce drugs. He had probably broken every Law of Magic. The White Council would waste no time in sending someone like Morgan to wipe Victor out.
But I couldn't do that, either. I was already under suspicion, thanks to Morgan's narrow-minded blindness. The Council was already meeting at sunrise on Monday. Some of the other members of the Council might listen to me, but they would be traveling, now. I had no way of reaching any of those who were sympathetic to me, no way of asking for help. There wasn't time, in fact, to try to round up any of my usual allies.
So, I concluded. It was up to me. Alone.
It was a sobering thought.
I had to confront Victor Sells, as strong a practitioner as I had ever gone up against, in his own place of power---the lake house. Not only that, but I had to do it without breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I couldn't kill him with sorcery---but somehow, I had to stop him.
Odds seemed really good that I was going to get killed, whether I tried to face him or not. To hell with it, then. If I was going to go out, it wasn't going to be while I was lying around moaning and bitching about how useless it all was. If Victor Sells wanted to take out Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, he was going to have to shove his magic right down my throat.
This decision cheered me somewhat. At least I knew what I was doing now, where I was going. What I needed was an edge, I decided. Something to pull on Victor, something he wouldn't expect.
Now that I knew who he was, I understood the magic I had run into outside of my apartment a little bit better. It had been potent, deadly, but not sophisticated, not well controlled. Victor was powerful, strong, a natural mage---but he wasn't practiced. He didn't have any training. If only I had something of his, something like his own hair, that I could use against him. Maybe I should have checked the bathroom at Monica's, but I had the feeling that he wouldn't have been that careless. Anyone who spends time thinking about how to use that sort of thing against people is going to be doubly paranoid that no one have the opportunity to use it against him.
And then it struck me---I did have something of Victor's. I had his scorpion talisman, back in the drawer of my desk at the office. It was one of his own devices, something close and familiar. I could use it to create a bond to him, to sort of judo his own power back against him and beat him with it, hands down, no questions asked.
I might have a chance, yet. I wasn't finished, not by a long shot.
The cabby pulled into a gas station and parked next to the pay phone. I told him to wait for me a minute and got out, fumbling a quarter from my pocket to make the call. If it did turn out that I wouldn't live to see tomorrow, I wanted to make damn sure that the hounds of hell would be growling at Victor Sells's heels.
I dialed Murphy's number, down at the station.
It rang several times, and finally someone answered. The line was scratchy, noisy, and I could barely make out who it was. "Murphy's desk, this is Carmichael."
"Carmichael," I said loudly into the phone. "It's Harry Dresden. I need to talk to Murphy."
"What?" Carmichael said. There was a squeal of static. Dammit, the phones go to hell on me at the worst times. "I can't hear you. Murphy? You want Murphy? Who is this? Anderson, is that you?"
"It's Harry Dresden," I shouted. "I need to talk to Murphy."
"Eh," Carmichael grunted. "I can't hear you, Andy. Look, Murphy's out. She took that warrant down to Harry Dresden's office to take a look around."
"She what?" I said.
"Harry Dresden's office," Carmichael said. "She said she'd be back soon. Look, this connection is awful, try to call back." He hung up on me.
I fumbled for another quarter, my hands shaking, and dialed my own office number. The last thing I needed was for Murphy to go poking around in my office, maybe impounding things. If she stuck the scorpion in evidence, I was done for. I'd never be able to explain it to her in time. And if she saw me face-to-face, she might be furious enough with me to just have me slapped into holding and left there overnight. If that happened, I'd be dead by morning.
My phone rang a couple of times, then Murphy answered. The line was blissfully clear. "Harry Dresden's office."
"Murph," I said. "Thank God. Look, I need to talk to you."
I could practically feel her anger. "Too late for that now, Harry. You should have come to talk to me this morning." I heard her moving around. She started opening drawers.
"Dammit, Murph," I said, frustrated. "I know who the killer is. Look, you've got to keep out of that desk. It could be dangerous." I thought I had been going to tell her a lie, but I realized as I said it that I was telling the truth. I remembered seeing, or thinking I had seen, movement from the talisman when I had examined it before. Maybe I hadn't been imagining things.
"Dangerous," Murphy growled. I heard her scattering pens out of the top drawer of my desk, moving things around. The talisman was in the drawer beneath. "I'll tell you what's dangerous. Fucking with me is dangerous, Dresden. I'm not playing some kind of game here. And I can't trust what you say anymore."
"Murphy," I said, trying to keep my voice even, "you've got to trust me, one more time. Stay out of my desk. Please."
There was silence for a moment. I heard her draw in a breath, and let it out through her mouth. Then Murphy said, her voice hard, professional, "Why, Dresden? What are you hiding?"
I heard her open the middle drawer.
There was a clicking sound, and a startled oath from Murphy. The receiver clattered to the floor. I heard gunshots, shockingly loud, whining ricochets, and then a scream.
"Dammit!" I shouted at the phone. "Murphy!" I slammed the phone down and sprinted back to the cab.
The cabby blinked at me. "Hey, buddy. Where's the fire?"
I slammed the door shut, and gave him the address to my office. Then I thrust all of my remaining cash at him, and said, "Get me there five minutes ago."
The cabby blinked at the money, shrugged, and said, "Crazies. Cabbies get all the crazies." Then he tore out into the street, leaving a cloud of smoke behind us.
The building was locked on Sunday. I jammed my key in the lock, twisted it hard to open it, and jerked the keys out again. I didn't bother with the elevator, just hurtled up the stairs as quickly as I could.
Five stories' worth of stairs. It took me less than a minute, but I begrudged every second of it. My lungs were burning and my mouth was dry as sand as I reached the fifth floor and sprinted down the hallway to my office. The halls were quiet, empty, dim. The only light came from the exit signs and from the overcast day outside. Shadows stretched and settled in the closed doorways.
The door to my office was ajar. I could hear my ceiling fan squeaking on its mounting, underneath the labored wheezing of my own breath. The overhead light wasn't on, but the reading light on my desk must have been, because yellow light outlined the doorway and laid a swath of gold across the floor of the hall. I stopped at the threshold. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold my staff and rod.
"Murphy?" I called out. "Murphy, can you hear me?" My voice was hoarse, breathless.
I closed my eyes, and listened. I thought I heard two things.
The first was a labored breath, with a faint moan on the exhale. Murphy.
The second was a dry, scuttling sound.
I could smell gunpowder on the air.
I clenched my jaw in sudden anger. Victor Sells's little beastie, whatever it was, had hurt my friend. Like hell I was going to stand out here and give it the run of my office.
I shoved the door open with my staff and stalked into the office, my blasting rod extended before me and words of power upon my lips.
Directly in front of my office door is a table arranged with a series of pamphlets with titles like Real Witches Don't Float So Good, and Magic in the Twenty-first Century. I had written some of them myself. They were meant for the curious, for people who just wanted to know about witches and magic. I squatted for a moment, blasting rod aimed beneath the table, but saw nothing. I rose again, looking back and forth, rod still ready.
To the right of the door is a wall lined with filing cabinets and a couple of easy chairs. The cabinets were shut, but something could have been hiding beneath one of the chairs. I slid to my left, checked behind the door to the office, and pressed my shoulders to the wall, keeping my eyes on the room.
My desk is in the back corner, to the right as you come in the door, diagonal from it. It's a corner office. There are windows on either of the outside walls. My shades were, as usual, drawn. The overhead fan, in the center of the room, spun around with a tired little groan on every rotation.
I kept my eyes moving, my senses alert. I choked down my anger, ferociously, and made myself remain cautious. Whatever had happened to Murphy, I wouldn't do her any good by letting it happen to me, too. I moved slowly, carefully, my blasting rod held ready.
I could see Murphy's tennis shoes behind my desk. She looked like she was curled on her side, from the way her feet were angled, but I couldn't see the rest of her. I pushed forward, striding to the center of the back wall, keeping my blasting rod leveled like a gun at the floor behind the desk as it became visible.
Murphy lay there, curled on her side, her golden hair in an artless sprawl about her head, her eyes open and staring blindly. She was dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt, and a Cubs satin jacket. Her left shoulder was stained with a blot of blood. Her gun lay next to her, a couple of feet away. My heart stepped up into my throat. I heard her take a little breath and groan when she let it out.
"Murphy," I said. Then, louder, "Murphy."
I saw her stir, a fitful little motion that was in response to my voice. "Easy, easy," I told her. "Relax. Don't try to move. I'm going to try to help you."
I knelt next to her, very slowly, watching the room all around. I didn't see anything. I set my staff aside, and felt her throat. Her pulse was racing, thready. There was not enough blood for it to be a serious injury, but I touched her shoulder. Even through the jacket, I could feel the swelling.
"Harry?" Murphy rasped. "Is that you?"
"It's me, Murph," I told her, setting my blasting rod aside and slowly reaching for the phone. The middle drawer of my desk, where the scorpion talisman had been, was open and empty. "Just hang on. I'm going to call an ambulance to help you."
"Can't believe it. You bastard," Murphy wheezed. I felt her stir around a little. "You set me up."
I drew the phone down and dialed 911. "Hush, Murph. You've been poisoned. You need help, fast."
The 911 operator came on and took my name and address. I told her to send an ambulance prepared to treat someone for poisoning, and she told me to stay on the line. I didn't have time to stay on the line. Whatever had done this to Murphy, it was still around, somewhere. I had to get her out of there, and then I had to recover Victor's talisman, to be able to use it against him when I went out to the lake house.
Murphy stirred again, and then I felt something hard and cool flick around my wrist and clicker-clack shut. I blinked and looked down at her. Murphy's jaw was set in a stubborn line as she clicked the other end of the handcuffs shut around her own wrist.
"You're under arrest," she wheezed. "You son of a bitch. Wait till I get you in an interrogation room. You aren't going anywhere."
I stared at her, stunned. "Murph," I stammered. "My God. You don't know what you're doing."
"Like hell," she said, her lip lifting in a ghost of its usual snarl. She twisted her head around, grimacing in pain, and squinted at me. "You should have talked to me this morning. Got you now, Dresden." She broke off in a panting gasp, and added, "You jerk."
"You stubborn bitch from hell." I felt at a loss for a second, then shook my head. "I've got to get you out of here before it comes back," I said, and I stooped forward to try to gather her up.
That was when the scorpion exploded toward me from the shadows beneath my desk, a harsh burst of dry, scuttling motion. It wasn't a bug I could squash with my fingers, anymore. It was the size of a large terrier, all brown and glinting, and it was almost too fast to see coming.
I convulsed away from it, and saw the flash of its tail, saw its stinger whip forward and miss my eye by a hairbreadth. Something cool and wet speckled my cheek, and my skin started to burn. Venom.
My startled motion made my leg jerk, and I kicked my staff and rod away from me. I rolled after the latter desperately. Murphy's handcuffs brought me up short, and both of us made sounds of discomfort as the steel bands cut at the base of our hands. I stretched for the rod, felt the smooth roundness of it on my fingertips, and then there was another scuttling sound and the scorpion came at my back. The rod squirted out from beneath my grasping fingers and rolled away, out of reach.
I didn't have time for a spell, but I grabbed at the middle drawer of my desk, jerked it all the way out of its frame and barely managed to shove it between the scorpion and myself. There was a hiss of air and a smacking sound of breaking wood. The scorpion's stinger plunged through the bottom of the desk drawer and stuck fast. A crab-claw pincer gouged a hole through my sweatpants and into my leg.
I screamed and hurled the drawer away. The scorpion, its tail still stuck, went with it, and they both landed in a heap a few feet away.
"Won't do you any good, Dresden," Murphy moaned incoherently. She must have been too far gone from the poison to understand what was going on. "I've got you. Stop fighting it. Get some answers from you, now."
"Sometimes, Murph," I panted, "you make things just a little harder than they need to be. Anyone ever tell you that?" I bent down to her, and slipped my cuffed wrist beneath her arm and around her back, drawing her own arm back with me, my right arm and her left bound by the handcuff.
"My ex-husbands," she moaned. I strained and lifted us both up off the ground, then started hobbling toward the door. I could feel the blood on my leg, the pain where the scorpion had ripped it, hot and hateful. "What's happening?" Confusion and fear trembled in Murphy's voice. "Harry, I can't see."
Shit. The poison was getting to her. The poison of the common brown scorpion found all over most of the United States isn't much more venomous than the sting of a bumblebee. Of course, most bumblebees aren't the size of the family dog, either. And Murphy wasn't a big person. If a lot of poison had been introduced into her system, the odds were against her. She needed medical attention, and she needed it immediately.
If my hands had been free, I would have taken up my staff and rod and done battle, but I didn't like my odds tied to Murphy---even if I could keep the thing off of me, it might land on her, sting her again, and put an end to her. I was at a bad angle to search for her keys, and I didn't have time to go down the ring trying them on the handcuffs one by one. Any magic that I could work fast enough to shatter the cuffs in time would probably kill me with flying shrapnel, and there wasn't time to work out a gentler escape spell. Dammit, Dad, I thought, I wish you'd lived long enough to show me how to slip out of a pair of handcuffs.
"Harry," Murphy repeated, her voice thready, "what's happening? I can't see."
I saved my breath and lugged Murphy toward the door without answering her. Behind me, there was a furious scraping and clicking. I looked back over my shoulder. The scorpion's stinger was stuck fast in the drawer, but the thing was rapidly ripping the wood to shreds with its pincers and legs.
I gulped, turned, and hobbled out of my office and down the hall with Murphy. I managed to swing the door to my office shut with one foot. Murphy's legs did little to support her, and the difference in our heights made the trip awkward as hell. I was straining to keep her upright and moving.
I reached the end of the hall, the door to the stairway on my right, the elevator on my left.
I stopped for a moment, panting, trying not to let the sounds of splintering wood down the hall rattle my judgment. Murphy sagged against me, speechless now, and if she was breathing, I couldn't tell. There was no way I was going to be able to carry her down the stairs. Neither one of us had enough left to manage that. The ambulance would be arriving in minutes, and if I didn't have Murphy down there when it arrived, I might as well just leave her on the floor to die.
I grimaced. I hated elevators. But I pushed the button and waited. Round lights over the elevator doors began counting up to five.
Down the hall from me, the splintering sounds stopped, and something crashed into my office door, rattling it on its frame.
"Hell's bells, Harry," I said aloud. I looked up at the lights. Two. A pause approximately ten centuries long. Three. "Hurry up," I snarled, and jabbed the button a hundred more times.
Then I remembered the bracelet of shields around my left wrist. I tried to focus on it but couldn't, with it twisted awkwardly beneath Murphy, supporting her. So I laid her down as gently and quickly as I could, then lifted my left hand and focused on the bracelet.
The lower third of my office door exploded outward, and the brown, gleaming form of the scorpion bounded across the hallway and into the wall. It was bigger, now. The damn thing was growing. It bounced off of the wall with a scrabbling, horrible agility, oriented on me, and hurtled down the hall toward me as fast as a man can run, its legs clicking and scuttling furiously over the floor. It leapt at me, claws extended, stinger flashing. I focused my will on the defensive shield the bracelet helped me form and maintain, struggling to get it together before the scorpion hit me.
I did it, barely. The invisible shield of air met the scorpion a handbreadth from my body and sent it rebounding back onto its back. There it struggled for a second, awkward and flailing.
Behind me, the elevator dinged, and the doors swooped graciously open.
Without time to be delicate, I grabbed Murphy's wrist and hauled her into the elevator with me, jabbing at the button for the lobby. In the hall, the scorpion thrashed its tail and righted itself, oriented on me again with an uncanny intelligence, and flew toward me. There wasn't time to get my shield together again. I screamed.
The elevator doors swooped shut. There was a sharp thud, and the car rattled, as the scorpion smashed into them.
The car started down, and I tried to regain my breath. What the hell was that thing?
It wasn't just an insect. It was too fast, too damn smart for that. It had ambushed me, waiting until I had set my weapons aside to come after me. It had to be something else, some kind of power construct, built small, but designed to draw in energy, to get bigger and stronger, an arthropod version of Frankenstein's monster. It wasn't really alive, just a golem, a robot, a programmed thing with a mission. Victor must have figured out where his talisman had gotten to, and set a spell on it to attack anyone it came in contact with, the crazy bastard. Murphy had stumbled right into it.
It was still growing, getting faster and stronger and more vicious. Getting Murphy out of danger wasn't enough. I had to find a way to deal with the scorpion. I didn't want to, but I was the only one on the block who could. There was too much potential danger involved. What if it didn't stop growing? I had to kill it before it got out of control.
The lights on the elevator panel kept counting down, four to three to two. And then the elevator shuddered and ground to a stop. The lights flickered and went out.
"Oh, crap," I said. "Not now. Not now." Elevators hate me. I jabbed at the buttons, but nothing happened, and a second later there was a cough of smoke, and the lights behind the buttons went out, too, leaving me in darkness. The emergency lighting came on for just a second, but then there was the pop of a burning filament, and it went away too. Murphy and I were left huddling in the darkness on the floor.
Overhead, outside in the elevator shaft, there was the sound of shrieking metal. I looked up at the invisible roof of the elevator car in the darkness. "You have got to be kidding me," I muttered.
Then there was a rattling bang, and something the weight of a small gorilla landed on the roof of the elevator. There was a second's silence, and then something started a deafening tearing at the roof.
"You have got to be kidding me!" I shouted. But the scorpion wasn't. It was wrenching back the roof of the elevator, rattling the bolts and supports, making it groan. Dust rattled down in the darkness, unseen grit for my unseeing eyes. We were sardines in a can, waiting to be torn up and eaten. I got the feeling that if the thing stung me now, the poison would be redundant---I would bleed to death before it became an issue.
"Think, Harry," I shouted at myself. "Think, think, think!" I was stuck in a frozen elevator, handcuffed to my unconscious friend who was dying of poison while a magical scorpion the size of some French cars tried to tear its way into me and rip me apart. I didn't have my blasting rod or my staff, the other gizmos I'd brought with me to the Varsity were drained and useless, and my shield bracelet would only prolong the inevitable.
A long strip of metal ripped away in the roof, letting in a strip of dim light, and I looked up at the scorpion's underbelly, saw it wedge a claw into the breach and start to tear it open wider.
I should have smashed it when it was just a bug. I should have taken off my shoe and smashed it right there on my desk. My heart leapt into my throat as the thing tilted up, drove an exploratory pincer down into the upper third of the elevator, then started tearing the hole even larger.
I gritted my teeth and started drawing in every ounce of power that I had. I knew it was useless. I could direct a firestorm up at the thing, but it would slag the metal it was on and that would come raining back down on us and kill us, make the elevator shaft too hot for us to survive. But I wasn't just going to let the thing have me, either, by God. Maybe, if I did it just right, I could catch it as it leapt, minimize the damage that I did to the surrounding scenery. That was the problem with not being too great at evocation. Plenty of speed, plenty of power, not much refinement. That's what the staff did, and the blasting rod---they were designed to help me focus my power, give me pinpoint control. Without them I might as well have been a suicide soldier carrying a dozen grenades strapped to his belt and ready to jerk out the pin.
And then it occurred to me. I was thinking in the wrong direction.
I swung my eyes down from the ceiling, to the elevator's floor, pressed my palms against it. Bits of something rained down on my head and shoulders, and the clicking and scuttling of the scorpion got louder. I took all the power I'd drawn in and focused it beneath my palms. There was airspace beneath the elevator, in the elevator shaft, and that was what I reached for---air, instead of fire.
This was a simple spell, one I'd done hundreds of times, I told myself. It wasn't any different from calling my staff to my hand. Just...a little bigger.
"Vento servitas!" I shouted, pouring every bit of strength, every ounce of anger, every shred of fear I had into the spell.
And, beneath the elevator, the winds rose up at my call, a solid column of air that caught the bottom of the elevator like a giant's palm and hurled it upward, through the darkness of the elevator shaft. The brakes squealed, threw off sparks, and fell to pieces that dropped through the hole the scorpion had torn, to land next to me. The force of it pressed me down to the floor with a groan. There was a long and rising whine as the car accelerated up the elevator shaft.
I hadn't meant for there to be quite that much wind, I thought, and prayed that I hadn't just killed me and Murphy both.
The elevator hurtled up and up and up, and I could feel my face sagging down with the speed of it. My office building is twelve stories high. We'd started at the second floor, so assuming an average of nine feet per story, it was almost a hundred feet to the building's roof.
The car shot up it in less than a half dozen of my frantic heartbeats, slammed past the blocks at the top of the line, and hammered into the roof of the shaft like the bell on the strongman's sledgehammer game at the amusement park. The impact crushed the scorpion into the concrete with a series of sharp popping sounds as chitinous plates cracked and splintered, flattening it into a shapeless brown splotch. Colorless goo, the ectoplasm of magically created mass, spattered out between the crushed plates and hide and down into the car.
At the same time, Murphy and I were hurled up, meeting the goo halfway. I kept Murphy in the shelter of my body, trying to stay between her and the roof, and my back hit it hard enough to make me see stars. We tumbled loosely back down to the elevator's floor in a sprawl of limbs, and Murphy groaned beneath me when I landed on her.
I lay still for a moment, stunned. The scorpion was dead. I'd killed it, crushed it between the elevator and the roof of the shaft, and drenched myself and Murphy in ichor doing it. I'd saved our lives from the murderous device, against the odds.
But I just couldn't shake the nagging impression that I was forgetting something.
There was a little groan from the elevator, and then it shuddered, and started sliding back down the shaft, no longer supported by the powerful but short-lived pillar of wind that had driven it up there. We were falling back down the way we had come, and I had the feeling that we weren't going to have a much better time of it at the bottom than the scorpion had at the top.
Now was the time for the bracelet, and I didn't waste a heartbeat grabbing Murphy close to me, and bringing the shield into being around us. I only had a couple of seconds to focus, to think---I couldn't make the globe around us too brittle, too strong, or we'd just smash ourselves against the inside of it in the same way we would if we just rode the elevator down. There had to be some give to it, some flexibility, to distribute the tremendous force of the abrupt stop at the first floor.
It was dark, and there wasn't much time. Murphy and I rose up to the center of the space of the elevator while I pushed the shield out all around us, filled up the space with layer after layer of flexible shielding, semicohesive molecules of air, patterns of force meant to spread the impact around. There was a sense of pressure all around me, as though I had been abruptly stuffed in Styrofoam packing peanuts.
We fell, faster and faster. I sensed the bottom of the shaft coming. There was an enormous sound, and I held on to the shield with all of my might.
When I opened my eyes again, I was sitting on the floor of the shattered, devastated elevator, holding a sagging, unconscious Murphy. The elevator doors gave a warped, gasping little ding, then shuddered open.
A pair of EMTs with emergency kits in hand stood staring at the elevator, at Murphy and me, their jaws hanging open to their knees. Dust billowed everywhere.
I was alive.
I blinked at that, somewhat stunned. I was alive. I looked down at myself, at my arms and legs, and they were all there. Then I let my head fall back and howled out a defiant laugh, a great, gawping whoop of primal joy.
"Take that, Victor Shadowman!" I shouted. "Hah! Hah! Give me your best shot, you murderous bastard! I'm going to take my staff and shove it down your throat!"
I was still laughing when the EMTs gathered me up and helped me and Murphy toward the ambulance, too stunned to ask any questions. I saw them both give me wary looks, though, and then trade a glance with one another that said they were going to sedate me with something as soon as they got the chance.
"The champion!" I howled, still on an adrenaline rush the size of the Colorado River, as they helped me out toward the ambulance. I thrust my fist into the air, scarcely noting or caring that my bracelet of silver shields had turned into a blackened ring of curled and wilted links, burned to uselessness by the energies I had forced through it. "I am the man! Shadowman, you'd better put your head between your legs and kiss your---"
The EMTs helped me outside. Into the rain. The wet slaps of raindrops on my face shut me up, made me cold sober faster than anything else in the world could have done. I was suddenly acutely aware of the handcuffs around my wrist, still, of the fact that I did not have Victor's talisman to use to turn his own power against him. Victor was still out there, out at his lake house, he still had a hank of my hair, and he was still planning on ripping my heart out as soon as he possibly could, when the storm gave him the strength he needed.
I was alive, and Murphy was alive, but my elation was premature. I didn't have anything to be celebrating, yet. I lifted my face to the sky.
Thunder growled, near at hand. Lightning danced overhead, somewhere in the clouds, casting odd light and spectral shadows through the roiling overcast.
The storm had arrived.
Raindrops pelted down around me, the big, splashy kind you only really see in the spring. The air grew thicker, hotter, even with the rain falling. I had to think fast, use my head, be calm, hurry up. Murphy's handcuffs still held me fastened to her wrist. Both of us were coated in dust that was stuck to the stinking, colorless goo, the ectoplasm that magic called from somewhere else whenever generic mass was called for in a spell. The goo wouldn't last long---within a few more minutes, it would simply dissipate, vanish into thin air, return to wherever it had come from in the first place. For the moment, it was just a rather disgusting, slimy annoyance.
But maybe one that I could put to use.
My own hands were too broad, but Murphy had delicate little lady's hands, except where practice with her gun and her martial arts staff routines had left calluses. If she had heard me thinking that, and had been conscious, she would have punched me in the mouth for being a chauvinist pig.
One of the EMTs was babbling into a handset, while the other was on Murphy's other side, supporting her along with me. It was the only chance I was going to get. I hunched over beside Murphy's diminutive form and tried to shroud what I was doing with the dark folds of my black duster. I worked at her hand, squeezing her limp, slimy fingers together and trying to slip the steel loop of the handcuffs over her hand.
I took some skin off of her, and she groaned a lot, but I managed to get the cuffs off of her wrist just as the EMT and I sat her down on the curb next to the ambulance. The other EMT ran to the back of the ambulance and swung it open, rummaging around inside of it. I could hear sirens, both police cars and fire engines, approaching from all directions.
Nothing's ever simple when I'm around.
"She's been poisoned," I told the EMT. "The wound site is on her right upper arm or shoulder. Check for a massive dose of brown scorpion venom. There should be some antivenin available somewhere. She'll need a tourniquet and---"
"Buddy," the EMT said, annoyed, "I know my job. What the hell happened in there?"
"Don't ask," I said, glancing back at the building. The rain came down more heavily by slow degrees. Was I too late? Would I be dead before I could get to the lake house?
"You're bleeding," the EMT told me, without looking up from Murphy. I looked down at my leg, but it didn't start hurting until I actually saw the injury and remembered I had it. The scorpion's claw had ripped me pretty good, opening a six-inch tear in the leg of my sweats and a comparable gash in the leg beneath, ragged and painful. "Sit down," the EMT said. "I'll take care of it in a second." He wrinkled up his face. "What the hell is this stinking shit all over you?"
I wiped rain from my hair, slicking it back. The other EMT came running with a bottle of oxygen and a stretcher, and they both bent over their work with Murphy. Her face had discolored, pale in parts, too brightly red in others. She was as limp as a wet dollar, except for the occasional shudder or flinch, quivers of her muscles that came from nowhere, pained her for a moment, and then apparently vanished.
It was my fault Murphy was there. It had been my decision to hold information away from her that had compelled her to take direct action, to search my office. If I'd just been more open, more honest, maybe she wouldn't be lying there right now, dying. I didn't want to walk away from her. I didn't want to turn my back on her again and leave her behind me, alone.
But I did. Before the support units arrived, before police started asking questions, before the EMTs began looking around for me and giving my description to police officers, I turned on my heel and walked away.
I hated myself every step. I hated leaving before I knew if Murphy would survive the scorpion's venomous sting. I hated that my apartment and my office building had been trashed, torn to pieces by demons and giant insects and my own clumsy power. I hated to close my eyes and see the twisted, mangled bodies of Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tomm, and Linda Randall. I hated the sick twisting of fear in my guts when I imagined my own spare frame torn asunder by the same forces.
And, most of all, I hated the one responsible for all of it. Victor Sells. Victor, who was going to kill me as soon as this storm grew. I could be dead in another five minutes.
No. I couldn't. I got a little more excited as I thought about the problem and looked up at the clouds. The storm had come in from the west, and was only now going over the city. It wasn't moving fast; it was a ponderous roller of a thunderstorm that would hammer at the area for hours. The Sellses' lake house was to the east, around the shore of Lake Michigan, maybe thirty or forty miles away, as the crow flies. I could beat the storm to the lake house, if I was fast enough, if I could get a car. I could get out to the lake house and challenge Victor directly.
My rod and staff were gone, dropped when the scorpion attacked. I might have been able to call them down from my office with winds, but as worked up as I was, I might accidentally blow out the wall if I tried. I didn't care to be crushed by hundreds of pounds of flying brick, called to my outstretched hand by the strength of my magic and my fury. My shield bracelet was gone, too, burned out by countering the tremendous force of the impact of the falling elevator.
I still had my mother's pentacle talisman at my throat, the symbol of order, of the controlled patterns of power that were at the heart of white magic. I still had the advantage of years of formal training. I still had the edge in experience, in sorcerous confrontations. I still had my faith.
But that was about all. I was weary, battered, tired, hurt, and I had already pulled more magic out of the hat in one day than most wizards could in a week. I was pushing the edge already, in both mystic and physical terms. But that just didn't matter to me.
The pain in my leg didn't make me weaker, didn't discourage me, didn't distract me as I walked. It was like a fire in my thoughts, my concentration, burning ever more brightly, more pure, refining my anger, my hate, into something steel-hard, steel-sharp. I could feel it burning, and reached for it eagerly, shoving the pain inside to fuel my incandescent anger.
Victor Shadowman was going to pay for what he'd done to all those people, to me and to my friends. Dammit all, I was not going out before I'd caught up to that man and shown him what a real wizard could do.
It didn't take me long to walk to McAnally's. I came through the door in a storm of long legs, rain, wind, flapping duster, and angry eyes.
The place was packed, people sitting at every one of the thirteen stools at the bar, at every one of the thirteen tables, leaning against most of the thirteen columns. Pipe smoke drifted through the air in a haze, stirred by the languidly spinning blades of the ceiling fans. The light was dim, candles burning at the tables and in sconces on the walls, plus a little grey storm light sliding in through the windows. The light made the carvings on the columns vague and mysterious, the shadows changing them in a subtle fashion. All of Mac's chessboards were out on the tables, but my sense of it was that those playing and watching the games were trying to keep their minds off of something that was disturbing them.
They all turned to stare at me as I came in the door and down the steps, dripping rainwater and a little blood onto the floor. The room got really quiet.
They were the have-nots of the magical community. Hedge magi without enough innate talent, motivation, or strength to be true wizards. Innately gifted people who knew what they were and tried to make as little of it as possible. Dabblers, herbalists, holistic healers, kitchen witches, troubled youngsters just touching their abilities and wondering what to do about it. Older men and women, younger people, faces impassive or concerned or fearful, they were all there. I knew them all by sight, if not by name.
I swept my gaze around the room. Every one of the people I looked at dropped their eyes, but I didn't need to look deep to see what was happening. Word has a way of getting around between practitioners of magic, and the arcane party line was working as it usually did. Word was out. There was a mark on my head, and they all knew it. Trouble was brewing between two wizards, white and black, and they had all come here, to the shelter offered by McAnally's winding spaces and disruptive configurations of tables and columns. They'd come here to shelter until it was over.
It didn't offer any shelter to me, though. McAnally's couldn't protect me against a sharply directed spell. It was an umbrella, not a bomb shelter. I couldn't get away from what Victor would do to me, unless I cared to flee to the Nevernever itself, and for me that was more dangerous, in some ways, than staying at Mac's.
I stood there in the silence for a moment, but said nothing. These people were associates, friends of a casual sort, but I couldn't ask them to stand beside me. Whatever Victor thought he was, he had the power of a real wizard, and he could crush any of these people like a boot could a cockroach. They weren't prepared to deal with this sort of thing.
"Mac," I said, finally. My voice fell on the silence like a hammer on glass. "I need to borrow your car."
Mac hadn't quit polishing the bar with a clean white cloth when I entered, his spare frame gaunt in a white shirt and dark breeches. He hadn't stopped when the room had grown still. And he didn't stop when he pulled the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to me with one hand. I caught them, and said, "Thanks, Mac."
"Ungh," Mac said. He glanced up at me, and then behind me. I took the gesture for the warning it was, and turned.
Lightning flashed outside. Morgan stood silhouetted in the doorway at the top of the little flight of stairs, his broad frame black against the grey sky. He came down the stairs toward me, and the thunder came in on his heels. Rain had made little difference in the lay of his dull brown and grey hair, except for changing the texture of curl in his warrior's ponytail. I could see the hilt of the sword he wore, beneath his black overcoat. He had a muscular, scarred hand on it.
"Harry Dresden," he said. "I finally figured it out. Using the storms to kill those people is insanely dangerous, but you are just the sort of ambitious fool who would do it." He set his jaw in a hard line. "Have a seat," he said, gesturing at a table. The people sitting at it cleared away, fast. "We're going to stay here, both of us. And I'm going to make sure that you don't have the chance to use this storm to hurt anyone else. I'm going to make sure you don't get to try your cowardly tricks until the Council decides your fate." His grey eyes glittered with grim determination and certainty.
I stared at him. I swallowed my anger, the words I wanted to throw back at him, the spell I wanted to use to blast him out of my way, and spoke gently. "Morgan, I know who the killer is. And he's after me, next. If I don't get to him and stop him, I'm as good as dead."
His eyes hardened, a fanatic's gleam. He spoke in two sharp little explosions of single syllables. "Sit. Down." He drew the sword out from its scabbard by a couple of inches.
I let my shoulders sag. I turned toward the table. I leaned against the back of one of the chairs for a moment, taking a little weight off of my injured leg, and drew the chair out from the table.
Then I picked it up, spun in a half circle with it to gather momentum, and smashed it into the Warden's stomach. Morgan tried to recoil, but I'd caught him off guard, and the blow struck home, hard and heavy with the weight of Mac's handmade wooden chair. In real life, the chair doesn't break when you slug somebody with it, the way it does in the movies. The person you hit is the one who breaks.
Morgan doubled forward, dropping to one hand and one knee. I didn't wait for him to recover. Instead, as the chair bounced off his ribs, I used the momentum of it to spin all the way around in a complete circle in the other direction, lifting the chair high, and brought it smiting down over the other man's back. The blow drove him hard into the floor, where he lay unmoving.
I sat the chair back at the table and looked around the room. Everyone was staring, pale. They knew who Morgan was, what his relationship to me was. They knew about the Council, and my precarious stance with it. They knew that I had just assaulted a duly appointed representative of the Council in pursuit of the execution of his duty. I'd rolled the stone over my own grave. There wasn't a prayer that I could convince the Council that I wasn't a rogue wizard fleeing justice, now.
"Hell with him," I said aloud, to no one in particular. "I haven't got time for this."
Mac came out from behind the bar, not moving in a hurry, but not with his usual laconic lack of concern, either. He knelt by Morgan and felt at his throat, then peeled back an eyelid and peered at the man. Mac squinted up at me and said, expressionless, "Alive."
I nodded, feeling some slight relief. However much of an ass Morgan was, he had good intentions. He and I wanted the same thing, really. He just didn't realize that. I didn't want to kill him.
But, I had to admit, in some gleeful little corner of my soul, that the look of shocked surprise on his arrogant face as I hit him with the chair was a sight worth remembering.
Mac stooped and picked up the keys, where I'd dropped them on the floor as I swung the chair. I hadn't noticed that I had. Mac handed them back to me and said, "Council will be pissed."
"Let me worry about that."
He nodded. "Luck, Harry." Mac offered me his hand, and I took it. The room was still silent. Fearful, worried eyes watched me.
I took the keys and walked up, out of the light and shelter of McAnally's and into the storm, my bridges burning behind me.
I drove for my life.
Mac's car was an '89 TransAm, pure white, with a big eight-cylinder engine. The speedometer goes to 130 miles an hour. In places, I went past that. The falling rain made the roads dangerous at the speed I was driving, but I had plenty of incentive to keep the car moving as quickly as possible. I was still riding the steel-hard edge of anger that had carried me away from the ruins of my office and through Morgan.
The sky grew darker, a combination of building banks of storm clouds and the approaching dusk. The lighting was strange, greenish, the leaves of the trees as I left the city standing out too sharply, too harshly, the yellows of the lines in the road too dim. Most of the cars I saw had their headlights on, and streetlights were clicking alight as I barreled down the highway.
Fortunately, Sunday evening isn't a busy one, as far as traffic goes. I'd have been dead any other night. I must also have been driving during the watch rotation for the highway patrol, because not one of them tried to pull me over.
I tried to tune in the weather station, on the radio, but gave it up. The storm, plus my own agitation, was creating a cloud of squealing feedback on the radio's speakers, but nothing intelligible about the storm. I could only pray that I was going to get over to Lake Providence before it did.
I won. The curtains of rain parted for me as I whipped past the city-limits sign for Lake Providence. I hit the brakes to slow for the turn onto the lakefront road that led to the Sells house, started hydroplaning, turned into the slide with more composure and ability than I really should have had, and got the vehicle back under control in time to slide onto the correct road.
I pulled into the Sells gravel drive, on the swampy little peninsula that stretched out into Lake Michigan. The TransAm slid to a halt in a shower of gravel and a roar of mighty engine, then sputtered and gasped into silence. I felt, for a giddy second and a half, like Magnum, P.I. Blue Beetle aside, I could get into this sports-car thing. At least it had lasted long enough for me to get to the Sells place. "Thanks, Mac," I grunted, and got out of the car.
The gravel driveway leading back to the lake house was half-sunk in water from the recent storms. My leg hurt me too much to run very fast, but I set off down the drive at a long-legged lope, rapidly eating the distance to the house. The storm loomed before me, rolling across the lake toward the shore---I could see columns of rain, dimly lit by the fading light, falling into its waters.
I raced the storm to the house, and as I did I drew in every bit of power and alertness that I could, keyed myself to a tighter level, tuned my senses to their sharpest pitch. I came to a halt twenty yards shy of the house and closed my eyes, panting. There could be magical traps or alarms strewn about, or spiritual or shrouded guardians invisible to the naked eye. There could be spells waiting, illusions meant to hide Victor Sells from anyone who came looking. I needed to be able to see past all that. I needed to have every scrap of knowledge I could get.
So I opened my Third Eye.
How can I explain what a wizard sees? It isn't something that lends itself readily to description. Describing something helps to define it, to give it limits, to set guardrails of understanding around it. Wizards have had the Sight since time began, and they still don't understand how it works, why it does what it does.
The only thing I can say is that I felt as though a veil of thick cloth had been lifted away from me as I opened my eyes again---and not only from my eyes, but from all of my senses. I could abruptly smell the mud and fish odor of the lake, the trees around the house, the fresh scent of the coming rain preceding the storm on the smoke-stained wind. I looked at the trees. Saw them, not just in the first green coat of spring, but in the full bloom of summer, the splendor of the fall, and the barren desolation of winter, all at the same time. I Saw the house, and each separate part of it as its own component, the timbers as parts of spectral trees, the windows as pieces of distant sandy shores. I could feel the heat of summer and the cold of winter in the wind coming off the lake. I Saw the house wreathed in ghostly flames, and knew that those were part of its possible future, that fire lay down several of the many paths of possibility that lay ahead in the next hour.
The house itself was a place of power. Dark emotions---greed, lust, hatred---all hung over it as visible things, molds and slimes that were strewn over it like Spanish moss with malevolent eyes. Ghostly things, restless spirits, moved around the place, drawn to the sense of fear, despair, and anger that hung over it, mindless shades that were always to be found in such places, like rats in granaries.
The other thing that I Saw over the house was a grinning, empty skull. Skulls were everywhere, wherever I looked, just at the edge of my vision, silent and still and bleach white, as solid and real as though a fetishist had scattered them around in anticipation of some bizarre holiday. Death. Death lay in the house's future, tangible, solid, unavoidable.
Maybe mine.
I shuddered and shoved the feeling away. No matter how strong the vision, how powerful the image gained with the Sight, the future was always mutable, always something that could be changed. No one had to die tonight. It didn't have to come to that, not for them and not for me.
But a sick feeling had settled into me, as I looked on this darkling house, with all of its stinking lust and fear, all of its horrid hate worn openly upon it to my Sight, like a mantle of flayed human skin on the shoulders of a pretty girl with gorgeous hair, luscious lips, sunken eyes, and rotting teeth. It repulsed me and it made me afraid.
And something about it, intangible, something I couldn't name, called to me. Beckoned. Here was power, power I had thrust aside once before, in the past. I had thrown away the only family I had ever known to turn away power exactly like this. This was the sort of strength that could reach out and change the world to my will, bend it and shape it to my desiring, could cut through all the petty trivialities of law and civilization and impose order where there was none, guarantee my security, my position, my future.
And what had been my reward for turning that power aside thus far? Suspicion and contempt from the very wizards I had acted to support and protect, condemnation from the White Council whose Law I had clung to when all the world had been laid at my feet.
I could kill the Shadowman, now, before he knew I was here. I could call down fury and flame on the house and kill everyone in it, not leave one stone upon another. I could reach out and embrace the dark energy he had gathered in this place, draw it in and use it for whatever I wanted, and the consequences be damned.
Why not kill him now? Violet light, visible to my Sight, throbbed and pulsed inside the windows, power being gathered and prepared and shaped. The Shadowman was inside, and he was gathering his might, preparing to unleash the spell that would kill me. What reason had I to let him go on breathing?
I clenched my fists in fury, and I could feel the air crackle with tension as I prepared to destroy the lake house, the Shadowman, and any of the pathetic underlings he had with him. With such power, I could cast my defiance at the Council itself, the gathering of white-bearded old fools without foresight, without imagination, without vision. The Council, and that pathetic watchdog, Morgan, had no idea of the true depths of my strength. The energy was all there, gleeful within my anger, ready to reach out and reduce to ashes all that I hated and feared.
The silver pentacle that had been my mother's burned cold on my chest, a sudden weight that made me gasp. I sagged forward a little, and lifted a hand. My fingers were so tightly crushed into fists that it hurt to try to open them. My hand shook, wavered, and began to fall again.
Then something strange happened. Another hand took mine. The hand was slim, the fingers long and delicate. Feminine. The hand gently covered mine, and lifted it, like a small child's, until I held my mother's pentacle in my grasp.
I held it in my hand, felt its cool strength, its ordered and rational geometry. The five-pointed star within the circle was the ancient sign of white wizardry, the only remembrance of my mother. The cold strength of the pentacle gave me a chance, a moment to think again, to clear my head.
I took deep breaths, struggling to see clear of the anger, the hate, the deep lust that burned within me for vengeance and retribution. That wasn't what magic was for. That wasn't what magic did. Magic came from life itself, from the interaction of nature and the elements, from the energy of all living beings, and especially of people. A man's magic demonstrates what sort of person he is, what is held most deeply inside of him. There is no truer gauge of a man's character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.
I was not a murderer. I was not like Victor Sells. I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. I was a wizard. Wizards control their power. They don't let it control them. And wizards don't use magic to kill people. They use it to discover, to protect, to mend, to help. Not to destroy.
The anger abruptly evaporated. The burning hate subsided, leaving my head clear enough to think again. The pain in my leg settled into a dull ache, and I shivered in the wind and the first droplets of rain. I didn't have my staff, and I didn't have my rod. The trinkets I did have with me were either expended or burned to uselessness. All I had was what was inside me.
I looked up, suddenly feeling smaller and very alone. There was no one near me. No hand was touching mine. No one stood close by. For just a moment, I thought I smelled a whiff of perfume, familiar and haunting. Then it was gone. And the only one I had to help me was myself.
I blew out a breath. "Well, Harry," I told myself, "that's just going to have to be enough."
And so, I walked through a spectral landscape littered with skulls, into the teeth of the coming storm, to a house covered in malevolent power, throbbing with savage and feral mystic strength. I walked forward to face a murderous opponent who had all the advantages, and who stood prepared and willing to kill me from where he stood within the heart of his own destructive power, while I was armed with nothing more than my own skill and wit and experience.
Do I have a great job or what?
The Sight of Victor's lake house will always be with me. It was an abomination. It looked innocuous enough, physically. But on a deeper level, it was foul, rotten. It seethed with negative energy, anger and pride and lust. Especially lust. Lust for wealth, lust for power, more than physical desire.
Shadowy spirit-beings that weren't wholly real, only manifestations of the negative energy of the place, clung to the walls, the rain gutters, the porch, the windowsills, glutting themselves on the negative energy left over from Victor's spellcasting. I was guessing that there was a lot of it. He didn't strike me as someone who would be able to make sure that his spells were energy-efficient.
I limped up the front steps. My Sight revealed no alarms, no sorcerous trip wires. I might be giving Victor Shadowman too much credit. He was as powerful as a full-blown wizard, but he didn't have the education. Muscle, not brains, that was Victor Shadowman. I had to keep that in mind.
I tried the front door, just for the hell of it.
It opened.
I blinked. But I didn't question the good fortune, or the overconfidence that had seen to it that Victor left his front door standing unlocked. Instead, I took a breath, gathered up what will I had, and pressed inside.
I forget how the house was furnished or decorated. All I remember is what the Sight showed me. More of the same as the outside, but more concentrated, more noxious. Things clung everywhere, things with silent, glittering eyes and hungry expressions. Some reptilian, some more like rats, some insectoid. All of them were unpleasant, hostile, and shied away from me as I came in, as the aura of energy I held in readiness around me touched them. They made quiet noises, things I would never have heard with my ears---but the Sight encompasses all of that.
There was a long, dark hallway coated with the things. I advanced slowly, quietly, and they oozed and crept and slithered from my path. The dark purple light of magic, that I had seen from the outside, was ahead of me, and growing brighter. I could hear music playing, and recognized it as the same piece that had been playing on the CD player at the Madison in Tommy Tomm's suite when Murphy had asked me there on Thursday. Slow, sensuous music, steady rhythm.
I closed my eyes for a moment, listening. I heard sounds. A quiet whisper, being repeated over and over, a man's voice repeating an incantation, holding a spell in readiness for release. That would be Victor. I heard soft sighs of pleasure from a woman. The Beckitts? I could only assume so.
And, in a rumble that I could feel through the soles of my boots, I heard thunder over the lake. The low, chanting voice took on an edge of vicious, spiteful satisfaction, and continued the incantation.
I gathered up what energy I had and stepped around the corner, out of the hallway, into a spacious room that stretched up to the full height of the house without interruption, yards of open air. The room below was a living room. A spiral staircase wound its way up to what looked like a kitchen and dining room on a sort of platform or balcony above the rest of the room. The elevated deck on the back of the house must be accessible from the platform.
There was no one in the main room. The chanting, and the occasional sigh, came from the platform above. The CD player was down in the room beneath, music flowing from speakers that were covered with an image of fire and dozens of bloated, disgusting creature forms, feeding on the music as it came out. I could see the influence of the music as a faint, violet mist, in tune with the light coming from the platform above. This was a complex ritual spell, then, involving many base elements coordinated by the central wizard, Victor. Tricky. No wonder it was so effective. It must have taken Victor a lot of trial and error to figure it out.
I glanced up at the platform, then crossed the room, keeping as far away as I could from the CD player. I slipped under the platform without making any noise, and dozens upon dozens of slimy not-physical spirit things oozed from my path. Rain increased to a dull, steady rhythm outside, on the roof and on the wooden deck and against the windows.
There were boxes stacked all around me, plastic cases and cartons and cardboard boxes and wooden crates. I opened the nearest one, and saw, inside, at least a hundred slender vials like the ones I had seen before, full of the liquid ThreeEye. Beneath the vision of my Sight, it looked different, thick and cloudy with possibility, potential disaster lurking in every vial. Faces, twisted in horror and torment, swam through the liquid, ghostly images of what might be.
I looked at the other boxes. In one, ancient liquor bottles full of an almost luminescent green liquid. Absinthe? I leaned closer, sniffing, and could almost taste the madness that swam latent in the liquid. I leaned back from the boxes, stomach churning. I checked the other boxes, quickly. Ammonia, reminiscent of hospitals and mental wards. Peyote mushrooms in plastic Tupperware---I was familiar with them. Alum, white and powdery. Antifreeze. Glitter in a hundred metallic shades in a huge plastic bag. Other things, deeper in the shadows, that I didn't take the time to look at. I had already figured out what all the articles were for.
Potions.
Ingredients for potions. This was how Victor was making the ThreeEye. He was doing the same thing I did when I made my little potions, but on a grander scale, using energy he stole from other places, other people. He used absinthe as the base, and moved out from there. Victor was mass-producing what amounted to a magical poison, one that probably remained inert until it was inside someone, interacting with their emotions and desires. That would explain why I hadn't noticed anything about it, before. It wouldn't have been obvious to a cursory examination, or to anything short of fully opening up my Sight, and that wasn't something I did very often.
I closed my eyes, shaking. The Sight was showing me too much. That was always the problem with it. I could look at these ingredients, the cases of the finished drug, and catch flash images of exactly how much suffering could be caused. There was too much. I was starting to get disoriented.
Thunder came again, more sharply, and above me, Victor's voice rose in pitch, to something audible. He was chanting in an ancient language. Egyptian? Babylonian? It didn't really matter. I could understand the sense of the words clearly enough. They were words of hate, malevolence. They were words that were meant to kill.
My shaking was becoming more pronounced. Was it only the effects of the Sight? The presence of so much negative energy, reacting with me?
No. I was simply afraid. Terrified to come out of my hiding place under the platform and to meet the master of the slithering horde that was draped over everything in sight. I could feel his strength from here, his confidence, the force of his will infusing the very air with a sort of hateful certainty. I was afraid with the same fear that a child feels when confronted with a large, angry dog, or with the neighborhood bully, the kind of fear that paralyzes, makes you want to make excuses and hide.
But there was no time for hiding. No time for excuses. I had to act. So I forced my Sight closed and gathered my courage as best I could.
Thunder roared outside and there was a flash of lightning, the two happening close together. The lights flickered, and the music skipped a track. Victor screamed out the incantation in a kind of ecstasy above me. The woman's voice, presumably Mrs. Beckitt's, rose to a fevered pitch.
"You pays your money, you takes your chances," I muttered to myself.
I focused my will, extended my right arm and open palm to the stereo system, and shouted, "Fuego!" A rush of heat from my hand exploded into flame on the far side of the room and engulfed the stereo, which began to emit a sound more like a long, tortured scream than music. Murphy's handcuffs still dangled from my wrist, one loop swinging free.
Then I turned, extended my arms and roared, "Veni che!" Wind swept up beneath me, making my duster billow like Batman's cloak, lifting me directly up to the platform above and over its low railing into the suspended room.
Even expecting the sight, it rattled me. Victor was dressed in black slacks, a black shirt, black shoes---very stylish, especially compared to my sweatpants and cowboy boots. His shaggy eyebrows and lean features were highlighted eerily by the dark light flowing up from the circle around him, where the implements of his ritual spell were ready to complete the ceremony that would kill me. He had what looked like a spoon, its edges sharpened to razor keenness, a pair of candles, black and white, and a white rabbit, its feet bound with red cord. One of its legs was bleeding from a small tear, staining the white fur. And tied against its head with a cord was the lock of my own dark, straight hair. Over to one side was another circle, laid out in chalk upon the carpeting, maybe fifteen feet across. The Beckitts were inside, writhing together in mindless, sweating desire, generating energy for Victor's spell.
Victor stared at me in shock as I landed upon the balcony, wind whipping around me, roaring inside the small room like a miniature cyclone, knocking over potted plants and knickknacks.
"You!" he shouted.
"Me," I confirmed. "There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about, Vic."
His shock transformed into snarling anger in a heartbeat. He snatched up the sharpened spoon, raised it in his right hand, and screamed out words of the incantation. He dragged the rabbit in front of him, the ceremonial representation of me, and prepared to gouge out its, and therefore my, heart.
I didn't give him the chance to finish. I reached into a pocket and hurled the empty plastic film canister at Victor Shadowman.
As a weapon, it wasn't much. But it was real, and it had been hurled by a real person, a mortal. It could shatter the integrity of a magic circle.
The canister went through the air above Victor's circle and broke it, just as he completed the incantation and drove the spoon's blade down at the poor rabbit. The energy of the storm came whipping down the cylinder of focus created by Victor's now-flawed circle.
Power shattered out into the room, wild, undirected, and unfocused, naked color and raw sound spewing everywhere with hurricane force. It sent objects flying, including Victor and me, and shattered the secondary circle the Beckitts were in, sending them rolling and bumping across the floor and into one wall.
I braced myself against the guardrail and held on as the power raged around me, charging the air with raw, dangerous magic, surging about like water under pressure, seeking an outlet.
"You bastard!" Victor screamed into the gale. "Why don't you just die!" He lifted a hand and screamed something at me, and fire washed across the space between us, instant and hot.
I tapped some of the ample power now available in the room and formed a hard, high wall in front of me, squeezing my eyes shut in concentration. It was a dozen times harder to shield without my bracelet, but I blocked the flame, sent it swirling high and over me, huddling under a little quarter dome of hardened air that would not let Victor's magic past it. I opened my eyes in time to see the flames touch the ceiling beams and set them alight.
The air still thrummed with energy as the wash of flame passed. Victor snarled when he saw me rise, lifted a hand to one side, and snarled out words of summoning. A crooked stick that looked like it might be some kind of bone soared through the air toward him, and he caught it in one hand, turning to me with the attitude of a man holding a gun.
The problem with most wizards is that they get too used to thinking in terms of one venue: Magic. I don't think Victor expected me to rise, lurch across the trembling floor toward him, and drive my shoulder into his chest, slamming him back into the wall with a satisfying thud. I leaned back a little and drove a knee toward his gut, missed, and got him square between the legs instead. The breath went out of him in a rush, and he doubled over to the ground. By this time, I was screaming at him, senseless and incoherent. I started kicking at his head.
I heard a metallic, ratcheting sound behind me and spun my head in time to see Beckitt, naked, point an automatic weapon at me. I threw myself to one side, and heard a brief explosion of gunfire. Something hot tore at my hip, spinning me into a roll, and I kept going, into the kitchen. I heard Beckitt snarl a curse. There were a number of sharp clicking sounds. The automatic had jammed. Hell, with this much magic flying around the room, we were all lucky the thing hadn't just exploded.
Victor, meanwhile, shook the end of the bone tube he held, and a half dozen dried, brown scorpion husks fell out onto the carpeting. His whiter-than-white teeth flashed in his boater brown face, and he snarled, "Scorpis, scorpis, scorpis!" His eyes gleamed with lust and fury.
One of my legs wasn't answering my calls to action, so I crab-walked backward into the kitchen on the heels of my hands and one leg. Out on the dining section of the balcony, the scorpions shuddered to life and started to grow. First one, and then the others, oriented on the kitchen and started toward me in scuttling bursts of speed, getting larger as they came.
Victor howled his glee. The Beckitts rose, both naked, lean and savage-looking, both sporting guns, their eyes empty of everything but a wild sort of bloodlust.
I felt my shoulders press against a counter. There was a rattle, and then a broom fell down against me, its handle bouncing off of my head and landing on the tile floor beside me. I grabbed at it, my heart pounding somewhere around my throat.
A roomful of deadly drug. One evil sorcerer on his home turf. Two crazies with guns. One storm of wild magic looking for something to set it into explosive motion. And half a dozen scorpions like the one I had barely survived earlier, rapidly growing to movie-monster size. Less than a minute on the clock and no time-outs remaining for the quarterback.
All in all, it was looking like a bad evening for the home team.
I was so dead. There was no way out of the kitchen, no time to use an explosive evocation in close quarters, and the deadly scorpions would rip me to pieces well before Victor could blow me up with explosive magic or one of the blood-maddened Beckitts could get their guns working long enough to put a few more bullets in me. My hip was beginning to scream with pain, which I supposed was better than the deadly dull numbness of more serious injuries and shock, but at the moment it was the least of my worries. I clutched the broom to me, my only pitiful weapon. I didn't even have the mobility to use it.
And then something occurred to me, something so childish that I almost laughed. I plucked a straw from the broomstick and began a low and steady chant, a bobbing about in the air with the fingers that held the straw. I reached out and took hold of the immense amounts of untapped energy running rampant in the air and drew them into the spell. "Pulitas!" I shouted, bringing the chant to a crescendo. "Pulitas, pulitas!"
The broom twitched. It quivered. It jerked upright in my hands. And then it took off across the kitchen floor, its brush waving menacingly, to meet the scorpions' advance. The last thing I had expected to use that cleaning spell for when I had laboriously been forced to learn it was a tide of poisonous scorpion monsters, but any port in a storm. The broom swept into them with ferocious energy and started flicking them across the kitchen toward the rest of the balcony with tidy, efficient motions. Each time one of the scorpions would try to dodge around it, the broom would tilt out and catch the beastie before it could, flick it neatly onto its back and continue about its job.
I'm pretty sure it got all the dirt on the way, too. When I do a spell, I do it right.
Victor screeched in anger when he saw his pets, still too small to carry much mass, being so neatly corralled and ushered off the balcony. The Beckitts lifted their guns and opened fire on the broom, while I hunkered down behind the counter. They must have been using revolvers, now, because they fired smoothly and in an ordered rhythm. Bullets smacked into the walls and the counters at the back of the kitchen, but none of them came through the counter that sheltered me.
I caught my breath, pressing my hand against the blood on my hip. It hurt like bloody hell. I thought the bullet was stuck, somewhere by the bone. I couldn't move my leg. There was a lot of blood, but not so much that I was sitting in a puddle. Out on the balcony, the fire was beginning to catch, spreading over the roof. The entire place was going to come crashing down before much longer.
"Stop shooting, stop shooting, damn you!" Victor screamed, as the gunfire came to a halt. I risked a peek over the counter. My broom had swept the scorpions off the edge of the balcony and to the floor of the room below. As I watched, Victor caught the broom by its handle and broke it over the balcony railing with a snarl. The straw I still held in my fingers broke with a sharp little twang, and I felt the energy fade from the spell.
Victor Shadowman snarled. "A cute trick, Dresden," he said, "but pathetic. There's no way you can survive this. Give up. I'll be willing to let you walk away."
The Beckitts were reloading. I ducked my head back down before they got any funny ideas, and hoped that they didn't have heavier rounds that could penetrate the counters I hid behind and whatever contents they contained, to kill me.
"Sure, Vic," I replied, keeping my voice as calm as I could. "You're known for your mercy and sense of fair play, right?"
"All I have to do is keep you in there until the fire spreads enough to kill you," Victor said.
"Sure. Let's all die together, Vic. Too bad about all your inventory down there, though, eh?"
Victor snarled and pitched another burst of flame into the kitchen. This time, it was much easier to cover myself, half-shielded as I already was by the counters. "Oh, cute," I said, my voice dripping scorn. "Fire's the simplest thing you can do. All the real wizards learn that in the first couple of weeks and move on up from there." I looked around the kitchen. There had to be something I could use, some way I could escape, but nothing presented itself.
"Shut up!" Victor snarled. "Who's the real wizard here, huh? Who's the one with all the cards and who's the one bleeding on the kitchen floor? You're nothing, Dresden, nothing. You're a loser. And do you know why?"
"Gee," I said. "Let me think."
He laughed, harshly. "Because you're an idiot. You're an idealist. Open your eyes, man. You're in the jungle, now. It's survival of the fittest, and you've proved yourself unfit. The strong do as they wish, and the weak get trampled. When this is over, I'm going to wipe you off my shoe and keep going like you never existed."
"Too late for that," I told him. I was in the mood to tell a white lie. "The police know all about you, Vic. I told them myself. And I told the White Council, too. You've never even heard of them, have you, Vic? They're like the Superfriends and the Inquisition all rolled up into one. You'll love them. They'll take you out like yesterday's garbage. God, you really are an ignorant bastard."
There was a moment's silence. Then, "No," he said. "You're lying. You're lying to me, Dresden."
"If I'm lying I'm dying," I told him. Hell, as far as I knew, I was. "Oh. And Johnny Marcone, too. I made sure that he knew who and where you were."
"Son of a bitch," Victor said. "You stupid son of a bitch. Who put you up to this, huh? Marcone? Is that why he pulled you off the street?"
I had to laugh, weakly. A bit of flaming cabinet fell off an upper shelf onto the tiles next to me. It was getting hot in there. The fire was spreading. "You never figured it out, did you, Vic?"
"Who?" Victor screamed at me. "Who was it, damn you? That whore, Linda? Her whore friend Jennifer?"
"Strike two, strike three, the other side gets a chance to steal," I said back. Hell. At least if I could keep him talking, I might keep him in the house long enough to go down with me. And if I could make him mad enough, he might make a mistake.
"Stop talking to him," Beckitt said. "He's not armed. Let's kill him and get out of here before we all die."
"Go ahead," I said in a cheerful tone. "Hell, I've got nothing to lose. I'll send this whole house up in a fireball that'll make Hiroshima look like a hibachi. Make my day."
"Shut up," Victor shouted. "Who was it, Dresden? Who, damn you?"
If I gave him Monica, he might still be able to get to her if he got away. There was no sense in risking that. So all I said was, "Go to hell, Vic."
"Get the car started," Victor snarled. "Go out through the deck doors. The scorpions will kill anything on the first floor."
I heard motion in the room, someone moving out the doors onto the elevated deck at the back of the house. The fire continued to spread. Smoke rode the air in a thick haze.
"I've got to go, Dresden," Victor told me. His voice was gentle, almost a purr, "but there's someone I want you to meet, first."
I got a sick, twisty little feeling in the pit of my stomach.
"Kalshazzak," Victor whispered.
Power thrummed. The air shimmered and shone, began to twist and spiral.
"Kalshazzak," Victor whispered again, louder, more demanding. I heard something, a warbling hiss that seemed to come from a great distance, rushing closer. The black wizard called the name for the third and final time, his voice rising to a screech, "Kalshazzak!"
There was a thundercrack in the house, a dull and sulfurous stench, and I craned my neck to see over the counter, risking a glance.
Victor stood by the sliding glass doors that led out onto the wooden deck. Red-orange flames wreathed the ceiling on that side of the house, and smoke was filling the room below, casting the whole place in a hellish glow.
Crouched down on the floor in front of Victor was the toad-demon I had banished the night before. I had known that I hadn't killed it. You can't kill demons, as such, only destroy the physical vessels they create for themselves when they come to the mortal world. If called again, they can create a new vessel without difficulty.
I watched in fascination, stunned. I had seen only one person call a demon before---and I had killed my old master shortly after. The thing crouched in front of Victor, its lightning blue eyes whirling with shades of scarlet hate, staring up at the black-clad wizard, trembling with the need to tear into him, to rend and destroy the mortal being who had dared summon it forth.
Victor's eyes grew wider and more mad, glittering with fevered intensity. Sweat ran down his face, and he tilted his head slowly to one side, as though his vision were skewing along the horizontal and by the motion he would compensate for it. I gave silent thanks that I had closed my Third Eye when I did. I did not want to see what that thing really looked like---and I didn't want to get a good look at the real Victor Sells, either.
The demon finally gave a hiss of frustration and turned toward me with a croaking growl. Victor dropped his head back and laughed, his will triumphant over that of the being he had called from beyond. "There, Dresden. Do you see? The strong survive, and the weak are torn to little pieces." He flapped his hand at me and said, to the demon, "Kill him."
I struggled to my feet, supporting my weight on the counter, to face the demon as it rose and began its slow stalk toward me.
"My God, Victor," I said. "I can't get over how clumsy you are."
Victor's smile immediately became a snarling sneer once again. I saw fear touch the corners of his eyes, uncertainty even though he was on top, and I felt a little smile quirk my lips. I moved my gaze to the demon's.
"You really shouldn't just hand someone else a demon's name," I told him. Then I drew in a breath, and shouted out in a voice of command, "Kalshazzak!"
The demon stopped in its tracks and gave a whistling howl of agony and rage as I called its name and drew my will up to hurl against it.
"Kalshazzak," I snarled again. The demon's presence was suddenly there, in my head, raging slippery and slimy and wriggling like a venomous tadpole. It was a pressure, a horrible pressure on my temples that made me see stars and threatened to steal enough of my balance to send me falling to the floor.
I tried to speak again and the words stuck in my throat. The demon hissed in anticipation, and the pressure on my head redoubled, trying to force me down, to make me give up the struggle, at which point the demon would be free to act. The lightning blue of its eyes became glaringly bright, painful to look upon.
I thought of little Jenny Sells, oddly enough, and of Murphy, lying pale and unconscious on a stretcher in the rain, of Susan, crouched next to me, sick and unable to run.
I had beaten this frog once. I could do it again.
I cried out the demon's name for the third and final time, my throat burning and raw. The word came out garbled and imperfect, and for a sinking moment I feared the worst, but Kalshazzak howled again, and hurled itself furiously to the floor, thrashing its limbs about like a poisoned bug, raging and tearing great swaths out of the carpet. I sagged, the weariness that came over me threatening to make me black out.
"What are you doing?" Victor said, his voice rising to a high-pitched shriek. "What are you doing?" He was staring at the demon in horror. "Kill him! I am your master! Kill him, kill him!" The demon howled in rage, turned its burning glare to me and then Victor, as though trying to decide whom to devour first. Its eyes settled on Victor, who went pale and ran for the doors.
"Oh no you don't," I muttered, and I uttered the last spell I could manage. One final time, on the last gasps of my power, the winds rose and lifted me from the earth. I hurtled into Victor like an ungainly cannonball, driving him away from the doors, past the demon as it made an awkward lunge at us, and toward the railing of the balcony.
We fell in a confused heap at the edge of the balcony that overlooked the room beneath, full of dark smoke and the red glow of flame. The air had grown almost too hot to breathe. Pain jolted through my hip, more bright and blinding than anything I had ever imagined, and I sucked in a breath. The smoky air burned, made me choke and gasp.
I looked up. Fire was spreading everywhere. The demon was crouched between us and the only way out. Over the edge of the balcony was only chaos and flame and smoke---strange, dark smoke that should have been rising, but instead was mostly settled along the floor like London fog. The pain was too great. I simply couldn't move. I couldn't even take in enough breath to scream.
"Damn you," Victor screamed. He regained his feet and hauled me up toward his face with berserk strength. "Damn you," he repeated. "What happened? What did you do?"
"The Fourth Law of Magic forbids the binding of any being against its will," I grated out. Pain was tight around my throat, making me fight to speak the words. "So I stepped in and cut your control over it. And didn't establish any of my own."
Victor's eyes widened. "You mean..."
"It's free," I confirmed. I glanced at the demon. "Looks hungry."
"What do we do?" Victor said. His voice was shaking, and he started shaking me, too. "What do we do?"
"We die," I said. "Hell, I was going to do that anyway. But at least this way, I take you out with me."
I saw him glance at the demon, then back to me, eyes terrified and calculating. "Work with me," he said. "You stopped it before. You can stop it again. We can beat it, together, and leave."
I studied him for a moment. I couldn't kill him with magic. I didn't want to. And it would only have brought a death sentence on my head in any case. But I could stand by and do nothing. And that's exactly what I did. I smiled at him, closed my eyes, and did nothing.
"Fuck you, then, Dresden," Victor snarled. "It can only eat one of us at a time. And I'm not going to be the one to get eaten today." And he picked me up to hurl me toward the demon.
I objected with fragile tenacity. We grappled. Fire raged. Smoke billowed. The demon came closer, lightning eyes gleaming through the hell-lit gloom. Victor was shorter than me, stockier, better at wrestling, and he hadn't been shot in the hip. He levered me up and almost threw me, but I moved quicker, whipping my right arm at his head and catching him with the flailing free end of Murphy's handcuffs, breaking his motion. He tried to break away, but I held on to him, dragged him in a circle to slam against the guardrail of the balcony, and we both toppled over.
Desperation gives a man extraordinary resources. I flailed at the balcony railing and caught it at the base, keeping myself from going over into the roiling smoke below. I shot a glance below, and saw the glistening brown hide of one of the scorpions, its stinging tail held up like the mast of a ship cutting through smoke at least four feet deep. The room was filled with angry clicking, scuttling sounds. Even in a single desperate glance, I saw a couch torn to pieces by a pair of scorpions in less time than it took to take a breath. They loomed over it, their tails waving in the air like flags from the back of golf carts. Hell's bells.
Victor had grabbed on to the railing a little above me and to the left, and he stared at the oncoming demon with a face twisted with hatred. I saw him draw in a breath, and try to plant a foot firmly enough to free one hand to point at the oncoming demon in some sort of magical attack or defense.
I couldn't allow Victor to get out of this. He was still whole. If he could knock the demon down, he might still slip out. So I had to tell him something that would make him mad enough to try to take my head off. "Hey, Vic," I shouted. "It was your wife. It was Monica that ratted on you."
The words hit him like a physical blow, and his head whipped around toward me, his face contorting in fury. He started to say something to me, the words of a spell meant to blow me to bits, maybe, but the toad-demon interrupted him by rearing up with an angry hiss and snapping its jaws down over Victor's collarbone and throat. Bone broke with audible snaps, and Victor squealed in pain, his arms and legs shuddering. He tried to push his way down, away from the demon, and the creature's balance wobbled.
I gritted my teeth and tried to hold on. A scorpion leapt at me, brown and gleaming, and I drew my legs up out of reach of its pincers, just barely.
"Bastard," Victor cried, struggling uselessly in the demon's jaws. There was blood running down his body, fast and hot. The demon had hit an artery, and it was simply holding on, wavering at the edge of the balcony as Victor struggled and started kicking at my near hand. He hit me once, twice, and my balance wavered, my grip slipping. A quick glance below me showed me another scorpion, getting ready to jump at me, this one closer.
Murphy, I thought. I should have listened to you. If the scorpions didn't kill me, the demon would, and if the demon didn't, the fire was going to kill me. I was going to die.
There was a certain peace in thinking that, in knowing that it was all about to be over. I was going to die. It was as simple as that. I had fought as hard as I could, done everything I could think of, and it was over. I found myself, in my final seconds, idly wishing that I could have had time to apologize to Murphy, that I could apologize to Jenny Sells for killing her daddy, that I could apologize to Linda Randall for not figuring things out fast enough and saving her life. Murphy's handcuffs lay tight and cold against my forearm as monsters and demons and black wizards and smoke closed in all around me. I closed my eyes.
Murphy's handcuffs.
My eyes snapped open.
Murphy's handcuffs.
Victor swung his foot at my left hand again. I kicked with my legs and hauled with my shoulders to give me a second of lift, and grabbed Victor Sells's pant leg in my left hand. With my right, I flicked the free end of the handcuffs around one of the bars of the guardrail. The ring of metal cycled around on its hinge and locked into place.
Then, as I started to fall back down, I hauled hard on Victor's leg. He screamed, a horrible, high-pitched squeal, as he started to fall. Kalshazzak, finally overbalanced by the additional weight and leverage I had added to Victor's struggles, pitched over the balcony guardrail and into the smoke below, crashing down to the floor, carrying Victor with him.
There was a rush of scuttling, clicking sounds, a piercing whistle-hiss from the demon. Victor's screams rose to something high-pitched and horrible, until he sounded more like an animal, a pig squealing at slaughter, than a man.
I swung from the balcony, my feet several feet above the fray, held suspended in an acutely painful fashion by Murphy's handcuffs, one loop around my wrist, the other locked around the balcony railing. I looked down as my vision started to fade. I saw a sea of brown, gleaming plates of segmented, chitinous armor. I saw the scorpions' stinging tails flashing down, over and over again. I saw the lightning eyes of Kalshazzak's physical vessel, and I saw one of them pierced and put out by the flashing sting of one of the scorpions.
And I saw Victor Sells, struck over and over again by stingers the size of ice picks, the wounds foaming with poison. The demon ignored the pincers and the stingers of the scorpions to begin tearing him apart. His face contorted in the final agony of rage and fear.
The strong survive, and the weak get eaten. I guess Victor had invested in the wrong kind of strength.
I didn't want to watch what was happening below me. The fires consuming the ceiling above were rather beautiful, actually, rolling waves of flame, cherry red, sunset orange. I was too weak to try to get out of this mess, and the entire thing had become far too annoying and painful to even consider anymore. I just watched the flames, and waited and noticed, oddly, that I was simply starving. And no wonder. I hadn't eaten a decent meal since...Friday? Friday. You notice odd things in those final moments, they say.
And then you start seeing things. For instance, I saw Morgan come through the sliding glass doors leading in from the outside deck, the silver sword of the White Council's justice in his hands. I saw one of the scorpions, now the size of a German shepherd, figure out the stairs, scuttle up them, and hurtle at Morgan. I saw Morgan's silver sword slash, snickersnack, and leave the scorpion in writhing pieces on the floor.
Then I saw Morgan, his expression grim, his weight making the fire-chewed balcony shudder, come for me. His eyes narrowed when he saw me, and he lifted the sword, leaning far over the balcony railing. The blade flashed bright silver in the firelight as it started to come down.
Typical, was my last thought. How perfectly typical, to survive everything the bad guys could do, and get taken down by the people for whose cause I had been fighting.
I awoke somewhere cool and dark, in tremendous pain, coughing my lungs out. Rain was falling on my face, and it was the greatest feeling I'd ever known. Morgan's face was over mine, and I realized he'd been giving me CPR. Eww.
I coughed and spluttered and sat up, wheezing for breath. Morgan watched me for a moment, then scowled and stood up, eyes flickering around.
I managed to get enough wind to speak, and said, numbly, "You saved me."
He grimaced. "Yes."
"But why?"
He looked at me again, then stooped to pick up his sword and slip it into the scabbard at his side. "Because I saw what happened in there. I saw you risk your life to stop the Shadowman. Without breaking any of the Laws. You weren't the killer."
I coughed some more, and said, "That doesn't mean you had to save me."
He turned and blinked at me, as though puzzled. "What do you mean?"
"You could have let me die."
His hard expression never changed, but he said, "You weren't guilty. You're a part of the White Council." His mouth twisted as though the words were fresh lemons. "Technically. I had an obligation to preserve your life. It was my duty."
"I wasn't the killer," I said.
"No."
"So," I wheezed, "that would make me right. And then that would make you---"
Morgan scowled. "More than ready to carry out the Doom if you cross the line, Dresden. Don't think this has gotten you off the hook, as far as I'm concerned."
"So. If I remember correctly, as a Warden, it is your duty to report on my conduct to the Council, isn't it?"
His scowl darkened.
"So you're going to have to go to them on Monday and tell them all about what really happened. The whole truth and nothing but the truth."
"Yes," he snarled. "It is even possible they will lift the Doom."
I started laughing, weakly.
"You haven't won, Dresden. There are many on the Council who know full well that you have consorted with the powers of darkness. We, at least, will not relax our vigil on you. We will watch you day and night, we will prove that you are a danger who must be stopped."
I kept laughing. I fell over on my side, I laughed so much.
Morgan arched an eyebrow and simply stared at me. "Are you all right?"
"Give me about a gallon of Listerine," I choked, "and I'll be just fine."
Morgan just stared at me, and I laughed harder. He rolled his eyes and growled something about the police being here any moment to provide medical care. Then he turned and stomped off into the woods, muttering to himself the whole way.
The police arrived in time to catch the Beckitts trying to leave and arrested them for, of all things, being naked. Later, they were implicated in the ThreeEye drug ring, and prosecuted on distribution charges. Just as well for them that they're in the Michigan justice system. They wouldn't have come out of a cell alive if they'd been in Chicago. It wouldn't have been good for Johnny Marcone's business.
The Varsity suffered a mysterious fire the night of my visit. I hear Marcone didn't have any trouble collecting the insurance money, in spite of all the odd rumors going around. Word hit the street that Marcone had hired Harry Dresden to take out the head of the ThreeEye gang, one of those rumors that you can't trace back to any one person. I didn't try to deny it. It was a cheap enough price to not have to worry about anyone bombing my car.
I was too hospitalized to show up at the meeting of the White Council, but it turned out that they decided to lift the Doom of Damocles (which I had always thought a rather pretentious name in any case) from me, due to "valorous action above and beyond the call of duty." I don't think Morgan ever forgave me for being a good guy. He had to eat crow in front of the whole Council, relentlessly driven by his anal-retentive sense of duty and honor. There's no love lost between us. But the guy was honest. I'll give him credit for that.
And hell. At least I don't have to look forward to him popping out from nowhere every time I cast a spell. I hope.
Murphy was in critical condition for nearly seventy-two hours, but she pulled through. They gave her a room right down the hall from me, in fact. I sent flowers to her hospital room, along with the surviving ring of her handcuffs. I told her, in a note, not to ask how the chain between the rings had been so neatly severed. I didn't think she'd buy that someone cut it with a magic sword. The flowers must have helped. The first time she got out of bed was to totter down the hall to my room, throw them in my face, and leave without saying a word.
She professed to have no memory of what had happened at my office, and maybe she didn't. But in any case, she got the warrant for my arrest rescinded, and a couple weeks later, when she went back to work, she called me in for advice the next day. And she sent a big check to cover my expenses in the murder investigations. I guess that means we're friends again, in a professional sense. But we don't joke anymore. Some wounds don't heal very quickly.
The police found the remains of the huge ThreeEye stash in what was left of the lake house, and Victor Sells eventually came up as the bad guy. Monica Sells and her children vanished into Witness Protection. I hope they've got a better life now than they had before. I suppose it couldn't be much worse.
Bob eventually came home again, more or less within the twenty-four-hour time limit, I suppose. I turned a deaf ear to rumors of a particularly wild party at the University of Chicago which lasted from Saturday night to Sunday night, and Bob wisely never mentioned it.
DATE WITH A DEMON was a headliner for the Arcane when it came out the following Monday, and Susan came by my hospital room to bring me a copy and to talk to me about it. She seemed greatly amused by the cast that held my hips immobilized until the docs could be sure that there wasn't too much fracturing (the X-ray machine kept fouling whenever they tried to use it on me, for some reason), and commented that it was a pity I wasn't more mobile. I used the sympathy factor to badger another date out of her, and she didn't seem to mind too much.
That time, we were not interrupted by a demon. And I didn't need any of Bob's love potions or advice, thank you very much.
Mac got his TransAm back. I got the Blue Beetle back. That didn't seem exactly equitable, but at least the Beetle still runs. Most of the time.
I made sure to send pizza out to Toot-toot and his faerie buddies every night for a week, and once a week ever since. I'm pretty sure the kid from Pizza 'Spress thought I was a loony, having him drop off pizza by the roadside. Heck with him. I make good on my promises.
Mister got a little shortchanged on the whole deal, but it is well beneath his dignity to notice such things.
And me? What did I get out of it? I'm not really sure. I escaped from something that had been following me for a long time. I'm just not sure what. I'm not sure who was more certain that I was a walking Antichrist waiting to happen---the conservative branch of the White Council, the men like Morgan, or me. For them, at least, the question has been partly laid to rest. For myself, though, I'm not so sure. The power is there. The temptation is there. That's just the way it's going to be.
I can live with that.
The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold.
But in my corner of the country, I'm trying to nail things down. I don't want to live in Victor's jungle, even if it did eventually devour him. I don't want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I'd rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don't come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p's and q's.
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call.
I'm in the book.
Author's Note
When I was seven years old, I got a bad case of strep throat and was out of school for a whole week. During that time, my sisters bought me my first fantasy and sci-fi novels: the boxed set of Lord of the Rings and the boxed set of the Han Solo adventure novels by Brian Daley. I devoured them all during that week.
From that point on, I was pretty much doomed to join SF&F fandom. From there, it was only one more step to decide I wanted to be a writer of my favorite fiction material, and here we are.
I blame my sisters.
My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C. S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber---you get the picture.
When I set out to become a writer, I spent years writing swords-and-horses fantasy novels---and seemed to have little innate talent for it. But I worked at my writing, branching out into other areas as experiments, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy. That's how the Dresden Files initially came about---as a happy accident while trying to accomplish something else. Sort of like penicillin.
But I never forgot my first love, and to my immense delight and excitement, one day I got a call from my agent and found out that I was going to get to share my newest swords-and-horses fantasy novel with other fans.
The Codex Alera is a fantasy series set within the savage world of Carna, where spirits of the elements, known as furies, lurk in every facet of life, and where many intelligent races vie for security and survival. The realm of Alera is the monolithic civilization of humanity, and its unique ability to harness and command the furies is all that enables its survival in the face of the enormous, sometimes hostile elemental powers of Carna, and against savage creatures who would lay Alera in waste and ruin.
Yet even a realm as powerful as Alera is not immune to destruction from within, and the death of the heir apparent to the Crown has triggered a frenzy of ambitious political maneuvering and infighting amongst the High Lords, those who wield the most powerful furies known to man. Plots are afoot, traitors and spies abound, and a civil war seems inevitable---all while the enemies of the realm watch, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.
Tavi is a young man living on the frontier of Aleran civilization---because let's face it, swords-and-horses fantasies start there. Born a freak, unable to utilize any powers of furycrafting whatsoever, Tavi has grown up relying upon his own wits, speed, and courage to survive. When an ambitious plot to discredit the Crown lays Tavi's home, the Calderon Valley, naked and defenseless before a horde of the barbarian Marat, the boy and his family find themselves directly in harm's way.
There are no titanic High Lords to protect them, no Legions, no Knights with their mighty furies to take the field. Tavi and the free frontiersmen of the Calderon Valley must find some way to uncover the plot and to defend their homes against a merciless horde of Marat and their beasts.
It is a desperate hour, when the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, when a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and when the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the Realm---or destroy it.
Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the books of the Codex Alera as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.
---Jim
Furies of Calderon, Academ's Fury, and Cursor's Fury are available in paperback from Ace Books.
ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER
THE DRESDEN FILES
STORM FRONT GRAVE PERILSUMMER KNIGHTDEATH MASKSBLOOD RITESDEAD BEATPROVEN GUILTYWHITE NIGHTSMALL FAVOR
THE CODEX ALERA
FURIES OF CALDERON ACADEM'S FURYCURSOR'S FURYCAPTAIN'S FURY
Table of Contents
ROC Published by New American Library, a division ofPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New York, New York 10014, USAPenguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandPenguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2,Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,New Delhi 110 017, IndiaPenguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
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Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc mass market edition.
Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2001
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I never used to keep close track of the phases of the moon. So I didn't know that it was one night shy of being full when a young woman sat down across from me in McAnally's pub and asked me to tell her all about something that could get her killed.
"No," I said. "Absolutely not." I folded the piece of paper, with its drawings of three concentric rings of spidery symbols, and slid it back over the polished oak-wood table.
Kim Delaney frowned at me, and brushed some of her dark, shining hair back from her forehead. She was a tall woman, buxom and lovely in an old-world way, with pale, pretty skin and round cheeks well used to smiling. She wasn't smiling now.
"Oh, come on, Harry," she told me. "You're Chicago's only practicing professional wizard, and you're the only one who can help me." She leaned across the table toward me, her eyes intent. "I can't find the references for all of these symbols. No one in local circles recognizes them either. You're the only real wizard I've ever even heard of, much less know. I just want to know what these others are."
"No," I told her. "You don't want to know. You're better off forgetting this circle and concentrating on something else."
"But---"
Mac caught my attention from behind the bar by waving a hand at me, and slid a couple of plates of steaming food onto the polished surface of the crooked oak bar. He added a couple of bottles of his homemade brown ale, and my mouth started watering.
My stomach made an unhappy noise. It was almost as empty as my wallet. I would never have been able to afford dinner tonight, except that Kim had offered to buy, if I'd talk to her about something during the meal. A steak dinner was less than my usual rate, but she was pleasant company, and a sometime apprentice of mine. I knew she didn't have much money, and I had even less.
Despite my rumbling stomach, I didn't rise immediately to pick up the food. (In McAnally's pub and grill, there aren't any service people. According to Mac, if you can't get up and walk over to pick up your own order, you don't need to be there at all.) I looked around the room for a moment, with its annoying combination of low ceilings and lazily spinning fans, its thirteen carved wooden columns and its thirteen windows, plus thirteen tables arranged haphazardly to defray and scatter the residual magical effects that sometimes surrounded hungry (in other words, angry) wizards. McAnally's was a haven in a town where no one believed in magic. A lot of the crowd ate there.
"Look, Harry," Kim said. "I'm not using this for anything serious, I promise. I'm not trying any summoning or binding. It's an academic interest only. Something that's been bothering me for a while." She leaned forward and put her hand over mine, looking me in the face without looking me in the eyes, a trick that few nonpractitioners of the Art could master. She grinned and showed me the deep dimples in her cheeks.
My stomach growled again, and I glanced over at the food on the bar, waiting for me. "You're sure?" I asked her. "This is just you trying to scratch an itch? You're not using it for anything?"
"Cross my heart," she said, doing so.
I frowned. "I don't know . . ."
She laughed at me. "Oh, come on, Harry. It's no big deal. Look, if you don't want to tell me, never mind. I'll buy you dinner anyway. I know you're tight for money lately. Since that thing last spring, I mean."
I glowered, but not at Kim. It wasn't her fault that my main employer, Karrin Murphy, the director of Special Investigations at the Chicago Police Department, hadn't called me in for consulting work in more than a month. Most of my living for the past few years had come from serving as a special consultant to SI, but after a fracas last spring involving a dark wizard fighting a gang war for control of Chicago's drug trade, work with SI had slowly tapered off---and with it, my income.
I didn't know why Murphy hadn't been calling me in as often. I had my suspicions, but I hadn't gotten the chance to confront her about them yet. Maybe it wasn't anything I'd done. Maybe the monsters had gone on strike. Yeah, right.
The bottom line was I was strapped for cash. I'd been eating ramen noodles and soup for too many weeks. The steaks Mac had prepared smelled like heaven, even from across the room. My belly protested again, growling its neolithic craving for charred meat.
But I couldn't just go and eat the dinner without giving Kim the information she wanted. It's not that I've never welshed on a deal, but I've never done it with anyone human---and definitely not with someone who looked up to me.
Sometimes I hate having a conscience, and a stupidly thorough sense of honor.
"All right, all right," I sighed. "Let me get the dinner and I'll tell you what I know."
Kim's round cheeks dimpled again. "Thanks, Harry. This means a lot to me."
"Yeah, yeah," I told her, and got up to weave my way toward the bar, through columns and tables and so on. McAnally's had more people than usual tonight, and though Mac rarely smiled, there was a contentment to his manner that indicated that he was happy with the crowd. I snatched up the plates and bottles with a somewhat petulant attitude. It's hard to take much joy in a friend's prosperity when your own business is about to go under.
I took the food, steaks and potatoes and green beans, back to the table and sat down again, placing Kim's plate in front of her. We ate for a while, myself in sullen silence and she in hearty hunger.
"So," Kim said, finally. "What can you tell me about that?" She gestured toward the piece of paper with her fork.
I swallowed my food, took a sip of the rich ale, and picked up the paper again. "All right. This is a figure of High magic. Three of them, really, one inside the other, like layered walls. Remember what I told you about magical circles?"
Kim nodded. "They either hold something out or keep it in. Most work on magic energies or creatures of the Nevernever, but mortal creatures can cross the circles and break them."
"Right," I said. "That's what this outermost circle of symbols is. It's a barrier against creatures of spirit and magical forces. These symbols here, here, here, are the key ones." I pointed out the squiggles in question.
Kim nodded eagerly. "I got the outer one. What's the next?"
"The second circle is more of a spell barrier to mortal flesh. It wouldn't work if all you used was a ring of symbols. You'd need something else, stones or gems or something, spaced between the drawings." I took another bite of steak.
Kim frowned at the paper, and then at me. "And then what would that do?"
"Invisible wall," I told her. "Like bricks. Spirits, magic, could go right through it, but mortal flesh couldn't. Neither could a thrown rock, bullets, anything purely physical."
"I see," she said, excited. "Sort of a force field."
I nodded. "Something like that."
Her cheeks glowed with excitement, and her eyes shone. "I knew it. And what's this last one?"
I squinted at the innermost ring of symbols, frowning. "A mistake."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that it's just gobbledygook. It doesn't mean anything useful. Are you sure you copied this correctly?"
Kim's mouth twisted into a frown. "I'm sure, I'm sure. I was careful."
I studied her face for a moment. "If I read the symbols correctly, it's a third wall. Built to withhold creatures of flesh and spirit. Neither mortal nor spirit but somewhere in between."
She frowned. "What kind of creatures are like that?"
I shrugged. "None," I said, and officially, it was true. The White Council of wizards did not allow the discussion of demons that could be called to earth, beings of spirit that could gather flesh to themselves. Usually, a spirit-circle was enough to stop all but the most powerful demons or Elder Things of the outer reaches of the Nevernever. But this third circle was built to stop things that could transcend those kinds of boundaries. It was a cage for demonic demigods and archangels.
Kim wasn't buying my answer. "I don't see why anyone would make a circle like this to contain nothing, Harry."
I shrugged. "People don't always do reasonable, sensible things. They're like that."
She rolled her eyes at me. "Come on, Harry. I'm not a baby. You don't have to shelter me."
"And you," I told her, "don't need to know what kind of thing that third circle was built to contain. You don't want to know. Trust me."
She glowered at me for a long moment, then sipped at her ale and shrugged. "All right. Circles have to be empowered, right? You have to know how to switch them on, like lights?"
"Something like that. Sure."
"How would a person turn this one on?"
I stared at her for a long time.
"Harry?" she asked.
"You don't need to know that, either. Not for an academic interest. I don't know what you've got in mind, Kim, but leave it alone. Forget it. Walk away, before you get hurt."
"Harry, I am not---"
"Save it," I told her. "You're sitting on a tiger cage, Kim." I thumped a finger on the paper for emphasis. "And you wouldn't need it if you weren't planning on trying to stick a tiger in there."
Her eyes glittered, and she lifted her chin. "You don't think I'm strong enough."
"Your strength's got nothing to do with it," I said. "You don't have the training. You don't have the knowledge. I wouldn't expect a kid in grade school to be able to sit down and figure out college calculus. And I don't expect it of you, either." I leaned forward. "You don't know enough yet to be toying with this sort of thing, Kim. And even if you did, even if you did manage to become a full-fledged wizard, I'd still tell you not to do it. You mess this up and you could get a lot of people hurt."
"If I was planning to do that, it's my business, Harry." Her eyes were bright with anger. "You don't have the right to choose for me."
"No," I told her. "I've got the responsibility to help you make the right choice." I curled the paper in my fingers and crushed it, then tossed it aside, to the floor. She stabbed her fork into a cut of steak, a sharp, vicious gesture. "Look, Kim," I said. "Give it some time. When you're older, when you've had more experience . . ."
"You aren't so much older than me," Kim said.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "I've had a lot of training. And I started young." My own ability with magic, far in excess of my years and education, wasn't a subject I wanted to explore. So I tried to shift the direction of the conversation. "How is this fall's fund-raiser going?"
"It's not," she said. She leaned back wearily in her seat. "I'm tired of trying to pry money out of people to save the planet they're poisoning or the animals they're killing. I'm tired of writing letters and doing marches for causes no one believes in anymore." She rubbed at her eyes. "I'm just tired."
"Look, Kim. Try to get some rest. And please, please don't play with that circle. Promise me."
She tossed her napkin down, left a few bills on the table, and stood up. "Enjoy your meal, Harry," she said. "And thanks for nothing."
I stood up as well. "Kim," I said. "Wait a minute."
But she ignored me. She stalked off toward the door, her skirt swaying along with her long hair. She cut an impressive, statuesque figure. I could feel the anger bubbling off her. One of the ceiling fans shuddered and let out a puff of smoke as she walked under it, then whirled down to a halt. She raced up the short flight of stairs and exited the bar, banging the door shut behind her. People watched her leave, then glanced back to me, speculation on their faces.
I sat back down, frustrated. Dammit. Kim was one of several people I had coached through the difficult period surrounding the discovery of their innate magical talents. It made me feel like crap to withhold information from her, but she had been playing with fire. I couldn't let her do that. It was my responsibility to help protect her from such things, until she knew enough to realize how dangerous they were.
To say nothing of what the White Council would think of a nonwizard toying with major summoning circles. The White Council didn't take chances with things like that. They just acted, decisively, and they weren't always particular about people's lives and safety when they did it.
I had done the right thing. Keeping that kind of information out of Kim's hands had been the right decision. I had been protecting her from danger she didn't, couldn't, fully appreciate.
I had done the right thing---even if she had trusted me to provide answers for her, as I had in the past, when teaching her to contain and control her modest magical talents. Even if she had trusted me to show her the answers she needed, to be her guide through the darkness.
I'd done the right thing.
Dammit.
My stomach was soured. I didn't want any more of Mac's delicious meal, steak or no steak. I didn't feel like I'd earned it.
I was sipping ale and thinking dark thoughts when the door opened again. I didn't look up, occupied as I was with brooding, a famous pastime of wizards everywhere. And then a shadow fell over me.
"Sitting here pouting," Murphy said. She bent over and absently picked up the wadded scrap of paper I had tossed aside earlier, tucking it tidily into her coat pocket rather than letting it lie about as clutter on the floor. "That's not much like you, Harry."
I glanced up at Murphy. I didn't have far to look. Karrin Murphy wasn't much more than five feet tall. She'd gotten her golden hair cut, from shoulder length to something far shorter, and a little longer in front than in back. It was a punky sort of look, and very appealing with her blue eyes and upturned nose. She was dressed for the weather in what must have been her at-home clothes: dark jeans, a flannel shirt, hiking boots, and a heavy woodsman's jacket. She was wearing her badge on her belt.
Murphy was extremely cute, for a grown adult who also held a black belt in aikido, and had several marksmanship awards from Chicago PD. She was a real professional, one who had fought and clawed her way up the ranks to become full lieutenant. She'd made enemies along the way, and one of them had seen to it that she was put in charge of Special Investigations soon after.
"Hello there, Murphy," I told her. I took a swig of ale and said, "Long time, no see." I tried to keep my voice even, but I'm pretty sure she heard the anger in it.
"Look, Harry---"
"Did you read the editorial in the Tribune? The one criticizing you for wasting the city's money hiring a 'charlatan psychic named Harry Dresden'? I guess you must have, since I haven't heard from you since it came out."
She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. "I don't have time for this."
I ignored her. "Not that I blame you. I mean, not many of the good taxpayers of Chicago believe in magic, or wizards. Of course, not many of them have seen what you and I have. You know. When we worked together. Or when I was saving your life."
Her eyes tightened at the edges. "I need you. We've got a situation."
"You need me? We haven't talked for more than a month, and you need me all of a sudden? I've got an office and a telephone and everything, Lieutenant. You don't need to track me down here while I'm having dinner."
"I'll tell the killer to be sure to operate during business hours next time," Murphy said. "But I need you to help me find him."
I straightened in my chair, frowning. "There's been a murder? Something in my field?"
Murphy flashed a hard smile at me. "I hope you didn't have anything more important to do."
I felt my jaw grow tense. "No. I'm ready." I stood up.
"Well then," she said, turning and walking away. "Shall we go?"
Murphy declined to ride in the Blue Beetle, my old Volkswagen bug.
The Beetle wasn't really blue, not anymore. One of the doors had been replaced with a green duplicate, the other one with white, when something with claws had shredded the originals. The hood had been slagged by fire, and my mechanic, Mike, had replaced it with the hood from a red vehicle. The important thing is that the Beetle runs, even if it doesn't do it very fast, and I'm comfortable with the car. Mike has declared that the VW bug is the easiest car in the world to repair, and so that's what I drive. He keeps it running eight or nine days in ten. That's phenomenal.
Technology tends to foul up around wizards---flip on a light switch, and it'll be the time the bulb burns out. Drive past a streetlight, and it'll pick just then to flicker and die. Whatever can go wrong will, automobiles included.
I didn't think it made much sense for Murphy to risk her vehicle when she could have taken mine, but she said she'd take her chances.
She didn't speak as she drove her Saturn down the JFK, out toward Rosemont. I watched her, uncomfortable, as we went. She was in a hurry, taking a few too many chances cutting in and out of traffic, and I put on my seat belt. At least we weren't on her motorcycle.
"Murph," I asked her, "where's the fire?"
She glanced aside at me. "I want you out there before some other people show up."
"Press?" I couldn't quite keep a nasty slur out of the word.
She shrugged. "Whoever."
I frowned at her, but she didn't say anything else---which seemed typical. Murphy didn't speak much to me anymore. We rode the rest of the way in silence, exited the JFK, and pulled into the parking lot of a half-completed little strip mall. We got out of the car.
A jet came in, low, heading for O'Hare International Airport, only a few miles to the west. I squinted at it for a moment, and then frowned at Murphy as a uniformed officer led us toward a building surrounded by police tape. There was an abundance of light, the moon overhead bright silver and almost a completely round circle. I cast an enormous, gangly shadow as I walked, my duster flapping around my legs. It towered beside Murphy's far smaller shadow ahead of me.
"Murphy?" I said. "Aren't we outside Chicago city limits?"
"Yeah," Murphy said shortly.
"Uh. Then aren't we out of your jurisdiction, technically?"
"People need help wherever they can get it, Dresden. And the last several killings happened in Chicago, so we want to look at this firsthand. I already worked things out with the local force. It's not really an issue."
"Several killings?" I said. "Several? As in more than one? Murphy, slow down."
But she didn't. Instead, she led me into a roomy building that proved to be under construction, though all the exterior work was finished. Some of the windows were still covered with board. I didn't see the sign on the building's front doors until I got close.
"The Varsity?" I said, reading it. "I thought Marcone burned it down last spring."
"Mmm-hmm," Murphy said, glancing at me over her shoulder. "Relocated and rebuilding."
Chicago's resident crime lord, Gentleman Johnny Marcone, was the robber baron of the mean streets. He kept all the rough business inside the city proper, leaving his legitimate interests out in the suburbs, like here in Rosemont. Last spring, when I had confronted him in his club, a previous incarnation of the Varsity, about a deadly new drug on the streets, the place had wound up burning to the ground.
After the whole mess was over, word got out that the drug dealer I'd taken out had been Marcone's enemy, and that I had nuked him at the crime lord's request. I hadn't refuted the rumor. It was easier to let people talk than to force Marcone to make an issue of things.
Inside the building, the floors were rough, unfinished. Someone had turned on a couple of halogen work lights, and they cast the interior into brilliant, clear white light. There was drywall dust everywhere. There were a few card tables set up, with workmen's tools left out on them in places. Plastic buckets of paint, tarps, and a sack of new paintbrushes waited for use off to one side. I didn't notice the blood until Murphy put her arm out in front of me to keep me from walking into it.
"Wake up, Dresden," she said. Her voice was grim.
I stopped, and looked down. Blood. A lot of blood. It began near my feet, where a long splatter had reached out like an arm from a drowning man, staining the dusty floor with scarlet. My eyes followed the path of the long bloodstain back to a pool, maybe an eighth of an inch deep, surrounding a mound of ripped cloth and torn meat that must have been the corpse.
My stomach quailed, threatening to eject the bites of steak I'd taken earlier that evening, but I forced it down. I walked in a circle around the body, keeping my distance. The corpse was, I guessed, that of a male in his thirties. He had been a large man, with a short, spiky haircut. He had fallen onto his side, facing away from me, his arms curled up toward his head, his legs up toward his vitals. A weapon, a little automatic pistol, lay seven or eight feet away, uselessly out of the victim's reach.
I walked around the corpse until I could see the face.
Whatever had killed him, it hadn't been human. His face was gone, simply torn away. Something had ripped his lips off. I could see his bloodstained teeth. His nose had been torn all the way up one side, and part of it dangled toward the floor. His head was misshapen, as though some enormous pressure had been put upon his temples, warping his skull in.
His eyes were gone. Torn out of his head. Bitten out. There were the ragged slash marks of fangs all around the edges of the sockets.
I closed my eyes, tightly. I took a deep breath. Another. A third. That didn't help. The body stank, a sickly sewer-smell that rose up from the torn innards. My stomach wanted to roll up my throat, out my mouth, and onto the floor.
I could remember the other details, even with my eyes closed, and catalogued them neatly for later reference. The victim's jacket and shirt had been torn to bloody ribbons along his forearms, in defensive wounds. His hands and arms were a mass of pulped, ripped meat, the palms and fingers slashed to ragged lumps. The curl of his body hid his abdomen from me, but that was where the blood was pooling from, spreading out like ink from a spilled bottle. The stench only confirmed that he had been eviscerated.
I turned away from the corpse and opened my eyes, staring down at the floor.
"Harry?" Murphy said, from the far side of the body. The note of hardness that had been in her voice all evening was absent. She hadn't moved while I had done my cursory examination.
"I recognize him," I said. "At least, I think I do. You'll need to check dental records or something, to be sure."
I could hear her frown in her words. "Yeah? Who was he?"
"I don't know his name. I always called him Spike. For the haircut. He was one of Johnny Marcone's bodyguards."
Murphy was quiet for a moment, then said, succinctly, "Shit."
"What, Murph?" I looked back at her, without looking down at Spike's mangled remains.
Murphy's face was set in concern, for me, her blue eyes gentle. I saw her wipe the expression away, as quickly as a shadow crosses the floor, a smoothing of lines that left her features neutral. I guess she hadn't expected me to turn to her. "Take a look around a little more," she said. "Then we'll talk."
"What am I looking for?" I asked her.
"You'll know it," she said. Then added, in a whisper that I think she didn't intend me to hear, "I hope."
I turned back to my work, and looked around the room. Off to one side, one of the windows was broken. Near it was a table, lying askew on the floor, its legs warped and bent. I walked over to it.
Broken glass littered the ground around the collapsed table. Since the glass was on the inside of the building, something must have come in through the window. There was blood on several of the broken pieces of glass. I picked up one of the larger ones and frowned at it. The blood was dark red, and not yet wholly dried. I took a white handkerchief from my pocket, folded the shard of glass into it, and then slipped it into the pocket of my duster.
I rose and paced over the floor, my eyes downcast, studying the dust. In one spot, it was rubbed almost clean off the floor, as though a struggle had taken place there without blood being spilled. In another spot, where the halogen lamps didn't quite reach, there was a pool of silver moonlight below a window. I knelt down beside it.
In the center of the pool was a paw print, in the dust, a paw print almost as big as my spread hand. Canine. Dots at the tips of the paw spoke of heavy nails, almost claws.
I looked up through the window at the rounded silver shape of the almost-full moon.
"Oh, hell," I breathed. "Oh, hell."
Murphy came toward me and watched me silently for a moment, waiting. I licked my lips, stood up, and turned to her. "You've got problems."
"No kidding. Talk to me, Dresden."
I nodded, then pointed at the window. "The attacker probably came in there. He went after the victim, attacked him, got the gun away from him, and killed him. It's the attacker's blood on the window. They struggled a while, over there by that clean spot, maybe, and Spike made a break for the door. He didn't make it there. He got torn to pieces first."
I turned toward Murphy, looking down at her solemnly. "You've had other murders happen in the same way. Probably about four weeks ago, when the moon was last full. Those were the other killings you were talking about."
Murphy glanced at my face for a moment, keeping her eyes off mine, and nodded her head. "Yeah. Four weeks ago, almost exactly. But no one else picked up the full moon angle. Just me."
"Uh-huh. Then you should see this, too," I said. I led her over to the window and showed her the paw print in the dust beneath it. She regarded it in silence.
"Harry," she said after a minute. "Are there such things as werewolves?" She brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek, a small and oddly vulnerable gesture. She folded her arms over her stomach, as though she were cold.
I nodded. "Yeah. Not like you see in the movies, but yeah. I figure that's what you got going here."
She drew in a deep breath. "All right, then. All right. What can you tell me? What do I need to know?"
I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn't get a chance to say anything. There was a brief bout of shouting outside, and then the front doors of the building banged open. Murphy tensed, and I saw her mouth set in a hard little line. Her back straightened, and she stopped hugging herself, putting her fists on her hips.
"Goddammit," she said. "How do those assholes get everywhere so fast?"
I stepped forward, so that I could see. A quartet of people in suits came through the door, fanned out in an almost military diamond formation. The man in front was not quite as tall as me, but still very tall, six feet and three or four inches. His hair was jet black, as were his eyebrows, while his eyes were a shade of grey as pale as wood smoke. His dark blue suit fit him well, and I had the impression that it concealed an athletic build, in spite of the fact that he had obviously seen more than four decades. A blue identification badge reading "FBI" in huge, obnoxious letters dangled from one lapel.
"Secure the scene," he said, his voice deep, tense. "Lieutenant Murphy, what the hell are you doing on a crime scene out of your jurisdiction?"
"Nice to see you, too, Agent Denton," Murphy said in a flat tone. "You get around fast."
"I told you that you weren't welcome on this investigation," Denton said, his words crisp. His grey eyes flashed, and I saw a vein bulge rhythmically on his forehead. His gaze shifted to me. "Who is this?"
"Har---" I started to say, but Murphy's snort cut over my words.
"No one," she said. She flashed me a look that said, very clearly, to shut up. That annoyed the hell out of me.
"Harry Dresden," I said, making the words loud and clear. Murphy and I exchanged a glare.
"Ah," Denton said. "The charlatan. I've read about you in the Tribune." His clear, tense gaze returned to Murphy. "You and your psychic friend might want to step out of the way. There's police work being done here. The real kind, where we worry about fingerprints, fibers, genetic matches---silly things like that."
Murphy's eyes narrowed, along with mine, but if the twin glares affected Denton, it didn't show in his face. Murphy and Denton had a brief staring match, her fury against his steely intensity.
"Agent Benn!" Denton called.
A woman, not quite into her thirties, with a shoulder-length mane of hair gone prematurely grey, turned toward us from her intent contemplation of the corpse. She had olive skin, deep, green eyes, and a thin, severe mouth. She walked toward us with a sort of hard-muscled sensuality, moving like someone who is capable of being fast and dangerous when necessary. Of the four FBI agents who had entered the room, she was the only one obviously sporting a weapon. Her jacket was unbuttoned, and I could see the straps of her shoulder rig against the white of her shirt.
"Yes, sir," Benn said. Her voice was very quiet. Her eyes took up a position midway between Murphy and me, looking at neither of us while watching us both.
"Please escort these two civilians," Denton stressed the word, "from the crime scene."
Benn nodded once, but didn't say anything in reply. Just waited. I gathered myself to go, but paused. Murphy planted her feet and lowered her arms casually to her sides. I recognized the stubborn out-thrust angle of her jaw. She had that look she got when she was behind on points in one of her martial-arts tournaments. Murphy was ready to fight. Damn. I had to get her cooled off before we could accomplish anything.
"Murphy," I said, quietly. "Can we talk outside?"
"Like hell," Murphy said. "Whoever this killer is, he's knocked off half a dozen people in the last month. I'm here, and I'm after this man. The Rosemont department has given their consent for me to be here." Murphy glared up at Benn. The FBI agent had her by a considerable margin of reach and muscle. I saw Benn's eyes narrow, her shoulders grow tenser.
"Do you have that in writing?" Denton demanded. The vein in his head throbbed more angrily. "And do you really think you want me reporting this to your superiors, Lieutenant?"
"Don't push me, Denton," Murphy said, her voice hot. I winced.
"Look, Murphy," I said. I put a hand on her shoulder. "Let's just go outside for a minute." I squeezed, just a little.
Murphy turned back toward me. She chanced a brief glance up at my eyes, and then relaxed a little, a flicker of uncertainty crossing her features. She started to ease down, and I let my breath out. I definitely didn't want this dissolving into violence. It wouldn't accomplish anything.
"Get them out of here," Denton said, and there was a note to his voice that I didn't like.
Benn didn't give us any warning. She just moved, fast and hard, stepping toward Murphy and flicking some sort of martial-arts blow I wasn't familiar with toward her temple. There was a quick blur of motion. Murphy's hands got there before the blow landed, and she turned, somehow levering Benn's weight off from her legs and slamming the grey-maned woman hard into a wall.
Benn's expression went from shocked and surprised to furious in the space of half a second. Her hand dipped into her jacket, hesitated for half a second, and then resumed motion. She drew her gun with an expert's precision, smooth and quick without seeming hurried. Her green eyes blazed. I threw myself at Murphy, colliding with her and driving her over and down as the gun went off, louder than a close clap of thunder in the interior of the half-finished restaurant. We landed in a heap on the dusty floor.
"Benn!" Denton shouted. He lunged for her, heedless of the gun, and got between the armed woman and us. I could hear him talking to her in a low, urgent voice.
"You crazy bitch!" I shouted. "What is the matter with you?"
The two other FBI guys and several patrol officers from outside came running. Murphy grunted and elbowed me in the gut, urgently. I grunted back and moved off of her. Both of us climbed to our feet unhurt.
"What the hell happened?" demanded one of the officers, an older man with thinning grey hair.
Denton turned to the officer, calm and cool. "Misfire. There was a misunderstanding and Agent Benn's weapon accidentally discharged."
The officer rubbed at his scalp and eyed Murphy. "Is that true, Lieutenant?"
"Like hell!" I said. I pointed a finger at Benn. "This crazy bi---"
Murphy jammed an elbow into my stomach and glared at me. "That's true," Murphy said, while I rubbed at my gut. "It happened just like Agent Denton said. An accident."
I stared at her. "Murph, give me a break. This woman---"
"Had an accident with her weapon," Murphy said, voice hard. "Could have happened to anyone." Murphy turned her glare on the aging officer, and he blinked mildly at her, then shrugged.
Denton turned back to us and studied Murphy intently for a second. Then he nodded. "Roj, George. Why don't you two make sure the Lieutenant is all right and help her to her car?"
"Sure, sure, Phil," said a skinny kid with red hair, big ears, and freckles. "Uh, Mr. Dresden, Lieutenant Murphy. Why don't we go outside and get some air? I'm Roger Harris, and this is Agent Wilson."
The other FBI guy, a bulky, overweight man in his late forties, his hair receding and his gut overhanging his belt, just beckoned us to follow him and walked toward the door. Murphy glared at Denton for a moment, then spun on her heel and stalked after the bulky Wilson. I followed her.
"I can't believe that. You all right? Why the hell didn't you tell them what she did?" I asked Murphy, sotto voce.
"That bitch," Murphy said back, not nearly as quiet. "She tried to sucker punch me."
"She tried to ventilate you, Murph," I countered.
Murphy let out a breath between her teeth, but kept walking. I glanced back at the room behind us and saw Spike's torn and mangled body being surrounded by more police tape. Forensics had arrived, and the team was getting set to sweep the room. Denton was kneeling down beside Benn, who had her face in her hands, and looked as though she were weeping. Denton was watching me, his grey eyes calculating and expressionless, filing me away under "tall, slender, dark hair, dark eyes, hawkish features, no visible scars."
I stared at him for a minute and got a hunch, a solid intuition of which I was completely sure. Denton was hiding something. He knew something, and he wasn't talking. Don't ask me how I knew it, but something about him, about the way the veins bulged in his forehead, or the way he held his neck so stiffly, made me think so.
"Um," the kid, Harris, said. I blinked and turned to him. He opened the door for Murphy and me, and we walked outside. "Maybe give Deborah some slack. She's really stressed out about these Lobo killings. She hasn't slept much the past month. She knew one of the guys who got killed. She's been tense ever since."
"Shut up, Harris," the overweight Agent Wilson said, his tone disgusted. "Just shut up." He turned to the two of us and said in a calm voice, "Get the hell out of here. I don't want to see either of you around a scene that isn't on your turf, Lieutenant Murphy. Internal Affairs has enough to do, don't you think?"
He turned and went back into the building. The redheaded kid gave us an apologetic, awkward smile, and then hurried to catch up with the overweight agent. I saw him shoot a glance back at me, his expression thoughtful. Then he was gone. The door shut, leaving Murphy and me on the outside, away from the investigation and the evidence at the crime scene.
I looked up through the clear night at the almost-full moon. Werewolves jumping through windows at gangster's lackeys in unfinished restaurants. A mangled corpse in the middle of a blood-drenched floor. Berserk FBI field agents drawing guns and shooting to kill. A little kung fu, a little John Wayne, and a few casual threats.
So far, I thought, my nerves jangling, just one more night on the job.
My stomach roiled around with disgust at the macabre sights inside the building, and with tension at what had nearly happened. One of my ears was still ringing from the sound of the gunshot. I was starting to shake all over now, the adrenaline rush fading and leaving me jumpy and wired. I stuck my hands in my duster's pockets, careful of the bloodstained shard of glass wrapped in my handkerchief, and turned my face into the wind, closing my eyes.
Relax, Harry, I told myself. Calm down. Breathe in and out, and just keep doing it. See? You aren't dead. Dead people don't breathe like that. You aren't Spike, all torn to pieces on the floor. You don't have any bullet holes in you, either. You're alive, and Murphy's all right, and you don't have to look at that eyeless face anymore.
But I could see the torn body, still, behind my eyelids. I could smell the ghastly stench of his opened innards. I could remember the blood, sticky on the dusty floor, congealing, thick with tiny flecks of drywall. I tasted bile in my throat, and fought to keep from throwing up.
I wanted to scream, to run, to wave my arms and kick something until I felt better. I could understand Agent Benn's reaction, almost, if she had been working a string of killings like the one I'd just seen. You can't stare at that much blood for very long without starting to see more of it everywhere else.
I just kept taking deep breaths, in and out. The wind was cool and fresh in my face, sharp with the smells of the coming autumn. October evenings in Chicago are chilly, breezy, but I love them anyway. It's my favorite time of year to be outside. I eventually calmed down. Murphy must have been doing the same thing beside me, making herself relax. We both started walking back toward the car at the same time, no words needing to be passed between us.
"I . . ." Murphy began, and fell silent again. I didn't look at her, didn't speak. "I'm sorry, Harry. I lost control. Agent Denton is an asshole, but he does his job, and he was right. Technically speaking, I didn't have any right to be on the scene. I didn't mean to drag you into all this."
She unlocked the doors and got in the car. I got in the passenger side, then reached out and plucked the keys from her hand as she began to start the engine. She quirked her head at me, narrowing her eyes.
I closed my hands around the keys. "Just sit down and relax for a while, Murph. We need to talk."
"I don't think that's a good idea, Harry," she said.
"This is the thanks I get for saving your life. Twice, now. You're going to hold out on me."
"You should know how it works," she said, scowling. But she settled back in her seat and looked out the windshield of the car. We could see the police, forensics, and the FBI suits moving back and forth inside the building. We were both quiet for a long time.
The funny thing was that the problems between Murphy and me came from the same source as the problems with Kim Delaney earlier tonight. Murphy had needed to know something to pursue an investigation. I could have given her the information---but it would have put her in danger to do so. I'd refused to say anything, and when I'd pursued the trail by myself all the way to its end, there had been some burning buildings and a corpse or two. There wasn't enough evidence to bring any charges against me, and the killer we'd been after had been dealt with. But Murphy hadn't ever really forgiven me for cutting her out of the loop.
In the intervening months, she'd called me in for work several times, and I'd given the best service I could. But it had been cool between us. Professional. Maybe it was time to try to bridge that gap again.
"Look, Murph," I said. "We've never really talked about what happened, last spring."
"We didn't talk about it while it was happening," she said, her tone crisp as autumn leaves. "Why should we start now? That was last spring. It's October."
"Give me a break, Murphy. I wanted to tell you more, but I couldn't."
"Let me guess. Cat had your tongue?" she said sweetly.
"You know I wasn't one of the bad guys. You have to know that by now. Hell's bells, I risked my neck to save you."
Murphy shook her head, staring straight forward. "That's not the point."
"No? Then what is?"
"The point, Dresden, is that you lied to me. You refused to give me information that I needed to do my job. When I bring you in on one of my investigations, I am trusting you. I don't just go around trusting people. Never have." She took a grip on the steering wheel, her knuckles whitening. "Less than ever, now."
I winced. That stung. What's worse, she was in the right. "Some of what I knew . . . It was dangerous, Murph. It could have gotten you killed."
Her blue eyes fixed on me with a glare that made me lean back against the car door. "I am not your daughter, Dresden," she said, in a very soft, calm voice. "I am not some porcelain doll on a shelf. I'm a police officer. I catch the bad guys and I put their asses away, and if it comes down to it, I take a bullet so that some poor housewife or CPA doesn't have to." She got her gun out of its shoulder holster, checked the ammo and the safety, and replaced it. "I don't need your protection."
"Murphy, wait," I said hastily. "I didn't do it to piss you off. I'm your friend. Always have been."
She looked away from me as an officer with a flashlight walked past the car, shining the light about on the ground as he looked for exterior evidence. "You were my friend, Dresden. Now . . ." Murphy shook her head once and set her jaw. "Now, I don't know."
There wasn't much I could say to that. But I couldn't just leave things there. In spite of all the time that had gone by, I hadn't tried to look at things from her point of view. Murphy wasn't a wizard. She had almost no knowledge of the world of the supernatural, the world that the great religion of Science had been failing to banish since the Renaissance. She had nothing to use against some of the things she encountered, no weapon but the knowledge that I was able to give her---and last spring I had taken that weapon away from her, left her defenseless and unprepared. It must have been hell for Murphy, to daily place herself at odds with things that didn't make any sense, things that made forensics teams just shake their heads.
That's what Special Investigations did. They were the team specially appointed by the mayor of Chicago to investigate all the "unusual crimes" that happened in the city. Public opinion, the Church, and official policy still frowned at any references to magic, the supernatural, vampires, or wizards; but the creatures of the spirit world still lurked about, trolls under bridges, cradle-robbing faeries, ghosts and spooks and boogers of every kind. They still terrorized and hurt people, and some of the statistics I'd put together indicated that things were only getting worse, not better. Someone had to try to stop it. In Chicago or any of its sprawling suburbs, that person was Karrin Murphy, and her SI team.
She had held the position longer than any of her many predecessors---because she had been open to the idea that there might be more than was dreamt of in Horatio's books. Because she used the services of the country's only wizard for hire.
I didn't know what to say, so my mouth just started acting on its own. "Karrin. I'm sorry."
Silence lay between us for a long, long time.
She gave a little shiver, finally, and shook her head. "All right," she said, "but if I bring you in on this, Harry, I want your word. No secrets, this time. Not to protect me. Not for anything." She stared out the window, her features softened in the light of the moon and distant streetlights, more gentle.
"Murphy," I said, "I can't promise that. How can you ask me to---"
Her face flashed with anger and she reached for my hand. She did something to one of my fingers that made a quick pain shoot up my arm, and I jerked my hand back by reflex, dropping the keys. She caught them, and jammed one of them in the ignition.
I winced, shaking my stinging fingers for a moment. Then I covered her hand with mine.
"Okay," I said. "All right. I promise. No secrets."
She glanced at me, at my eyes for a breath, and then looked away. She started the car and drove from the parking lot. "All right," she said. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you because I need every bit of help I can get. Because if we don't nail this thing, this werewolf, we're going to have another truckload of corpses on our hands this month. And," she sighed, "because if we don't, I'm going to be out of a job. And you'll probably end up in jail."
"Jail?" I said. "Jail? Hell, Murphy. Were you planning on mentioning this to me anytime soon?"
She shot me an irritated scowl, headlights of cars going the opposite way on the highway flaring across her face. "Don't even start with me, Harry. I've had a long month."
A dozen questions tried to fight their way out of my mouth. The one that ended up winning was, "Why didn't you call me in on the other killings, last month?"
Murphy turned her eyes back to the road. "I wanted to. Believe me. But I couldn't. Internal Affairs started riding me about what happened with Marcone and Victor Sells last spring. Someone got the idea that I was in cahoots with Marcone. That I helped to murder one of his competitors and took out the ThreeEye drug ring. And so they were poking around pretty hard."
I felt an abrupt twinge of guilt. "Because I was on the scene. You had that warrant out for me and then had it rescinded. And then there were all those rumors about me and Marcone, after the whole thing was over . . ."
Murphy's lips compressed, and she nodded. "Yeah."
"And if you'd have tried to tell me about it, it would have been throwing gasoline on the fire." I rubbed at my forehead. And it would have gotten me looked at harder, too, by whoever was investigating Murphy. She had been protecting me. I hadn't even considered what those rumors Marcone had spread might do to anyone besides myself. Way to go, Harry.
"One thing you're not is stupid, Dresden," she confirmed.
"A little naive, sometimes, but never stupid. IA couldn't turn anything up, but there are enough people who are certain I'm dirty that, along with the people who already don't like me, they can screw me over pretty hard, given the chance."
"That's why you didn't make an issue out of what Agent Benn did," I guessed. "You're trying to keep everything quiet."
"Right," Murphy said. "I'd get ripped open from ass to ears if IA got word of me so much as bending the rules, much less tussling with one of the bureau's agents. Believe me, Denton might look like a jerk, but at least he isn't convinced that I'm dirty. He'll play fair."
"And this is where the killings come in. Right?"
Instead of answering, she cut into the slow lane and slowed to a leisurely pace. I half turned toward her in my seat, to watch her. It was while I did this that I noticed the headlights of another car drift across a couple lanes of traffic to drop into the slow lane behind us. I didn't say anything about it to Murphy, but kept a corner of my eye on the car.
"Right," Murphy said. "The Lobo killings. They started last month, one night before the full moon. We had a couple of gangbangers torn to pieces down at Rainbow Beach. At first, everyone figured it for an animal attack. Bizarre, but who knew, right? Anyway, it was weird, so they handed the investigation to me."
"All right," I said. "What happened then?"
"The next night, it was a little old lady walking past Washington Park. Killed the same way. And it just wasn't right, you know? Our forensics guys hadn't turned up anything useful, so I asked in the FBI. They've got access to resources I can't always get to. High-tech forensics labs, that kind of thing."
"And you let the djinni out of the bottle," I guessed.
"Something like that. FBI forensics, that redheaded kid with them, turned up some irregularities in the apparent dentition of the attackers. Said that the tooth marks didn't match genuine wolves or dogs. Said that the paw prints we found were off, too.
Didn't match real wolves." She gave a little shudder and said, "That's when I started thinking it might be something else. You know? They figured that someone was trying to make it look like a wolf attack. With this whole wolf motif, someone started calling the perpetrator the Lobo killer."
I nodded, frowning. The headlights were still behind us. "Just a crazy thought: Have you considered telling them the truth? That we might be dealing with a werewolf here?"
Murphy sneered. "Not a chance. They hire conservatives for jobs at the bureau. People who don't believe in ghosts and goblins and all that crap out there that I come to you about. They said that the murders must have been done by some sort of cult or pack of psychos. That they must have furnished themselves with weapons made out of wolf teeth and nails. Left symbolic paw prints around. That's why all the marks and tracks were off. I got Carmichael to check up on you, but your answering service said you were in Minnesota on a call."
"Yeah. Someone saw something in a lake," I confirmed. "What happened after that?"
"All hell broke loose. Three bums in Burnham Park, the next night, and they weren't just dead, they were shredded. Worse than that guy tonight. And on the last night of the full moon, an old man outside a liquor store. Then the night after that, we had a businessman and his driver torn up in a parking garage. IA was right there breathing down my neck the whole time, too. Observing everything." She shook her head with a grimace.
"That last victim. All the others were outside, and in a bad part of town. Businessman in a parking garage doesn't fit that pattern."
"Yeah," Murphy said. "James Harding III. One of the last of the red-hot industrialists. He and John Marcone are business partners in some development projects up in the Northwest."
"And tonight, we have another victim linked to Marcone."
"Yeah." Murphy nodded. "I'm not sure what's scarier. Thinking that these are just regular animal attacks, that they're being done by a bunch of psychos with knives edged with wolf teeth, or that they're organized werewolves." She let out a strained little laugh. "That still sounds crazy, even to me. Yes, Your Honor, the victim was killed by a werewolf."
"Let me guess. After the full moon it got quiet."
Murphy nodded. "IA wrapped up with inconclusive findings, and nothing much else happened. No one else died. Until tonight. And we've got four more nights of bright moonlight left, if whoever they are sticks to their pattern."
"You sure there's more than one?" I asked.
"Yeah," Murphy said. "There's bite marks, or bitelike marks, according to Agent Denton, from at least three different weapons. As far as all the lab guys are concerned, it could be multiple perpetrators, but there's no way for forensics to be sure."
"Unless it's real werewolves we're dealing with. In which case each set of marks goes with a different set of teeth, and we're looking at a pack."
Murphy nodded. "But there's no way I'm going to just come out and tell them that. That would put the nails in my career's coffin."
"Uh-huh," I said. "This is the part where you tell me about your job being in danger."
She grimaced. "They only need a good reason to get rid of me, now. If I don't catch these guys, whoever they are, politics will hang me out to dry. After that, it'll be simple for them to get some charges going on me for complicity or obstruction. And they'll probably try to get to you, too. Harry, we've got to catch the killer, or killers. Or I'm history."
"You ever get any blood or hair from the scenes?" I asked.
"Yeah, some," Murphy said.
"What about saliva?"
Murph frowned at me.
"Saliva. It would be in the bite wounds."
She shook her head. "If they've found it, no one has said anything. Besides, all the samples won't do us a lot of good without a suspect to match them against."
"It won't do you a lot of good," I corrected her. "Something left blood on the window when it came through. Maybe that'll turn something up."
Murphy nodded. "That would be great. Okay, Harry. So you know what's going on now. What can you tell me about werewolves?"
I pursed my lips for a minute. "Not much. They weren't ever anything I studied too hard. I can tell you what they're not, mostly. Give me until morning, though, and I'll put together a full report on them." I glanced out the back window as Murphy pulled off the JFK Expressway. The car that I thought had been following us exited as we did.
Murphy frowned. "Morning? Can you do it any sooner?"
"I can have it on your desk by eight. Earlier, if you tell the night sergeant to let me in."
Murphy sighed and rubbed at her eyes. "Okay. Fine." We got back to McAnally's, and she pulled in next to the Blue Beetle. Behind us, the car that had been following us also came into the parking lot. "Jesus, Harry. I can't believe I'm sitting here talking to you about werewolves killing people in downtown Chicago." She turned her face to me, her eyes anxious. "Tell me I'm not going nuts."
I got out of the car, but leaned down to the window. "I don't think you're going nuts, Murph. I don't know. Maybe the FBI is right. Maybe it's not werewolves. Crazy things happen sometimes. " I gave her half of a smile, which she answered with a faint snort.
"I'll probably be in my office, Dresden," she said. "Have that report on my desk by morning."
And then she pulled out of the parking lot, turning quickly out onto the street. I didn't get into the Beetle. Instead, I watched the car that had followed us into the parking lot. It cruised around the far side of the lot, then started down the row, toward me, and kept on going.
The driver, a striking woman with shaggy, dark brown hair, peppered with grey, did not turn to look at me as she went past.
I watched the car go, frowning. It left the lot, turning the opposite way Murphy had, and vanished from sight. Had that been the same vehicle that had followed us down the JFK? Or had it only been my imagination? My gut told me that the woman in the car had been following me, but then again, my instincts had cried wolf before.
I got into the Blue Beetle and thought for a minute. I was feeling guilty and a little queasy still. It was my fault Murphy had gotten in trouble. I had put her in the middle of extremely questionable circumstances by not telling her what was going on last spring. The pressure she was under now was my responsibility.
I have what might be considered a very out-of-date and chauvinist attitude about women. I like to treat women like ladies. I like to open doors for them, pay for the meal when I'm on a date, bring flowers, draw out their seat for them---all that sort of thing. I guess I could call it an attitude of chivalry, if I thought more of myself. Whatever you called it, Murphy was a lady in distress. And since I had put her there, it only seemed right that I should get her out of trouble, too.
That wasn't the only reason I wanted to stop the killings. Seeing Spike torn up like that had scared the hell out of me. I was still shaking a little, a pure and primitive reaction to a very primal fear. I did not want to get eaten by an animal, chewed up by something with a lot of sharp teeth. The very thought of that made me curl up on my car's seat and hug my knees to my chest, an awkward position considering my height and the comparatively cramped confines of the Beetle.
What had happened to Spike was as brutal and violent a death as anyone could possibly have. Maybe the thug had deserved it. Maybe not. Either way, he was only one victim of many that had been torn apart by something that regular people shouldn't have to face. I couldn't just stand aside and do nothing.
I'm a wizard. That means I have power, and power and responsibility go hand in hand. I have a responsibility to use the power I've been given, when there is a need for it. The FBI was not in any sense prepared to deal with a pack of ravening werewolves stalking down victims in the midst of a Chicago autumn. That was more my department.
I let out a long breath and sat up again. I reached into my duster's pocket for car keys, and found the shard of glass wrapped up in my white handkerchief.
I unwrapped it slowly and found the blood-smeared glass still there.
Blood has a kind of power. I could use the blood, cast a spell that would let me follow the blood back to the person who had spilled it. I could find the killer tonight, simply let my magic lead me to him, or them. But it would have to be now. The blood was almost dry, and once it was, I would have a hell of a lot more trouble using it.
Murphy would be royally pissed if I took off without her. She would probably assume that I had intended to follow the trail tonight, purposely leaving her out of the loop. But if I didn't follow the trail, I'd lose the chance to stop the killer before another night fell.
It didn't take me long to make up my mind. In the end, saving lives was more important than keeping Murphy from being pissed off at me.
So I got out of the Beetle and opened the storage trunk at the front of the VW. I took out a few wizardly implements: my blasting rod, the replacement for my shield bracelet, and one other thing that no wizard should be without. A Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special.
I carried all of these back to the front of the car with me and got out the shard of glass with smeared blood.
Then I made with the magic.
I got out the lump of chalk I always keep in my duster pocket, and the circular plastic dome compass that rides a strip of velcro on my dashboard, then squatted down, my voluminous coat spreading out over my legs and ankles. I drew a rough circle upon the asphalt around me with the chalk. The markings were bright against the dark surface and almost glowed beneath the light of the nearly full moon.
I added an effort of will, a tiny investment of energy, to close the circle, and immediately felt the ambient magic in the air around me crowd inward, trapped within the confines of the design. The hairs at the nape of my neck prickled and stood on end. I shivered, and took the shard of glass with its swiftly drying bloodstain and laid it down in the circle between the toes of my boots.
I began a low little chant of nonsense syllables, relaxing, focusing my mind on the effect I wanted. "Interessari, interressarium, " I murmured, and touched the plastic dome of the compass to the damp blood. Energy rushed out of me, swirled within the focusing confines of the circle I had drawn, and then rushed downward into the compass with a visible shimmer of silver, dustlike motes.
The compass needle shuddered, spun wildly, and then swung to the bloodstain on the dome like a hound picking up a scent. Then it whirled about and pointed to the southeast, whipping around the circle to hover steadily in that direction.
I grinned in anticipation and smudged the chalk with my boot, releasing the remaining stray energy back into the air, then took up the compass and returned to the Blue Beetle.
The problem with this particular spell was that the compass needle would point unerringly at whomever the blood had come from until the sun rose the next morning and disrupted the simple magical energies I had used to make the spell; but it didn't point out the swiftest way to get to the target, only the direct direction in which he, she, or it lay.
Traffic in Chicago isn't ever what any sane person would call friendly or simple, but I had lived there for a while and had learned to survive. I drove past Cook County Hospital, a virtual city of its own inside Chicago, and down past Douglas Park, then turned south on Kedzie. The compass needle slowly aligned to point hard to the east as I traveled south, and I wound up turning east on Fifty-fifth, toward the University of Chicago and Lake Michigan.
It wasn't exactly a good part of town. In fact, as far as neighborhoods go in Chicago, it was pretty bad. There was a high crime rate, and a lot of the buildings were rundown, abandoned, or only infrequently used. Streetlights were out in a lot of places, so when night closed in, it was darker than most areas. It's always been a favorite haunt for some of the darker things that come crawling out of the Nevernever for a night on the town. Trolls lurked about like muggers some nights, and any new vampire that came through the city always ended up in this neighborhood or one like it, searching for prey until he could make contact with Bianca or one of the lesser vampire figures of the city.
I pulled over as the compass swung to point at what looked like an abandoned department store, and I killed the engine. The faithful Beetle rattled to a grateful halt. I got the map of the city out of the glove box and squinted at it for a moment. Washington Park and Burnham Park, where four of last month's deaths had taken place, were less than a mile away on either side of me.
I felt a little shiver run through me. This sure as hell looked like the place to find Murphy's Lobo killer.
I got out of the car. I kept the blasting rod in my right hand, the dashboard compass in my left. My shield bracelet dangled on my left wrist. My gun was in the left pocket of my duster, within easy reach. I took a moment to take a deep breath, to clear my mind, and to clarify what I wanted to do.
I wasn't here to bring the killer down, whoever he was. I was just locating him for Murphy. Murphy could put the guy under surveillance and nail him the next time he tried to move. Even if I did capture him, Murphy couldn't exactly bring him up on charges, based on the word of a professional wizard. Municipal judges would love having a cop appear before them and start spouting such crazy talk.
I spun my blasting rod around in my fingers, grinned, and started forward. That was all right. I didn't need the justice system to recognize my power to be able to use it.
There were boards over the front windows of the once department store. I tested each one as I went past and found one that swung in easily. I stopped and examined it carefully, wary of any alarms that might be attached to it.
Such as the string tied across the bottom, lined with little jingle bells. If I had pushed the wooden sheet any farther inward, I would have set it to jangling. Instead, I slipped the string off the head of one of the nails it hung by, lowered the bells carefully, and slipped inside the dim confines of the abandoned store.
It was a skeletal place. There were still the bones of shelves, forming long aisles, but now barren of merchandise. Empty fluorescent light fixtures dangled in forlorn rows from the ceiling, and the powdered glass of shattered, tubular bulbs dusted the floor beneath them. Light seeped in from the street, mostly moonlight, but more light came from the back of the store. I checked my bloodstained compass. The needle was pointing firmly toward the light. I closed my eyes, and Listened, a skill that isn't hard to pick up, but that most people don't know how to do anymore. I heard voices, at least a pair of them, talking in hushed, urgent tones.
I crept toward the back of the store, using the barren shelves to keep myself from being seen. Then I held my breath and peeked up over the top of the last row of shelves.
Gathered around an old Coleman lantern were several people, all young, of various shapes and sizes and both genders. They were dressed in all shades of black, and most wore jackets and bracelets and collars of dark leather. Some had earrings and nose rings; one had a tattoo showing on his throat. If they had been tall, muscular folk, they would have looked intimidating, but they weren't. They looked like college students, or younger, some still with acne, or too-oily hair, beards that wouldn't quite grow all the way in, and the thinness of youth. They looked awkward and out of place.
Four or five of them were gathered behind and around a stout young man less than five and a half feet tall. He had thick glasses and pudgy fingers, and would have looked more at home with a pocket protector than with the spiked leather gloves on his fingers. He stood with his hands on his hips, glaring up at a rail-thin blond girl at least a head taller than he, the lines of her willowy body all awkward, her long, sad face set in an expression of anger. Her hair fell about her face and head in a ragged mane, but her eyes sparkled with contained wrath. Another five or six of the young people were gathered behind her, and everyone seemed tense.
"And I'm telling you," the young man snarled in a muted voice, "that we should be out there right now. We can't allow ourselves to rest until we've found them all and torn them apart." There was a murmur of agreement from the people behind him.
"I swear, Billy," the blonde said. "You're such a testosterone-laden idiot. If we were out there right now, they might catch on to us."
"Use your head, Georgia," Billy snapped back. "You think they haven't figured it out by now? They could take all of us out right this minute if they hit us."
"They haven't," Georgia pointed out. "She told us not to move again tonight, and I'm not moving. And if you try it, so help me, I'm going to tie your ankles to your ears."
Billy growled, actually growled, though it sounded posed and forced, and stepped forward. "You think you can handle me, bitch?" he said. "Bring it on."
Georgia's eyes narrowed. "I didn't sign on to this wolf thing to fight hapless losers like you, Billy. Don't make me start now." She glared at the young people standing behind Billy. "You know what she told us. Are you going to start going up against her word?"
"Listen, Alphas," Billy said, turning to look at those behind him, and then at those backing his opponent. "I've led you for all this time. I've done what I've promised to do. Are you going to stop trusting me?"
I peered at the discussion and then lowered my head again, back into the shadows. Holy I-Was-a-Teenage-Werewolf, Batman. I checked my compass, and it pointed firmly at the lit room, the group gathered around the lantern. Were these the killers? They looked more like a group of computer nerds geared up for Leather Night.
This was a start at least. I could clear out now, and let Murphy know what I had seen. I'd need to check around the building outside first, see if any of the group had any cars parked nearby, to be able to give Murphy the license plate numbers. Hell, we weren't far from the university. Maybe some of them would have parking passes.
"What is the meaning of this?" came a clear, strident woman's voice.
I craned my neck up to the edge of the shelf again. A dark-complected woman, as tall as the long-faced blonde, but older, solid with muscle and moving with an animal surety, had come into the room from a back door. Her brown hair was peppered with grey, and it took me only a second to recognize the woman from the car in the parking lot outside of McAnally's. My heart started to pound a little more quickly with excitement. She had been following Murphy and me, after all. She glared at the two groups of young people, her eyes an almost eerie shade of amber that could barely be construed as brown. "Have I taught you no better?" the woman demanded.
Billy and Georgia were both looking down at the floor uncomfortably. The other young people had assumed similar postures, like a group of children caught planning to go out after curfew.
"This isn't a game. Someone followed me here. They're on to us. If you start making mistakes now, you'll pay for them with your life," the woman said, stalking back and forth around the group. I checked my compass.
The needle swung back and forth as she walked, pointing solidly at her. My heart leapt into my throat. I considered this woman, with her almost animal vitality, her commanding presence and force of will. This woman, I thought, might be a killer. And she knew she had been followed. How? How in the hell had she known I was after her?
I looked up at her again, excited, only to find her staring intently at the thick patch of shadows around the shelves I hid behind. One of the young people started to say something, and the woman raised her hand for silence. I saw her nostrils flare as she breathed in through her nose, and she took a step in my direction. I held my breath, not daring to duck back down behind the shelves, lest the motion give me away.
"Join hands," snapped the woman. "Now." And then she turned to the Coleman lantern on the floor and snuffed it out, plunging the room into blackness.
There was a moment of confused murmuring, a commanding hiss from the woman, and then there was nothing but silence and the sound of shoes and boots moving over the tiles, toward the back of the store. They were getting away. I rose, blind, and headed around the shelves toward them as quickly as I could, trying to follow.
In retrospect, it wasn't the smartest decision, but I knew that I couldn't afford to let them get away. The spell I'd wrought on my compass wouldn't last long, not long enough to find the woman again, much less any of her pack of young people. I wanted to follow them out, to get the license plates on their cars, anything that would let me help Murphy locate them after they'd run.
I miscalculated the length of my stride and bounced into the wall at the end of the aisle. I sucked in a hiss of pain and reoriented myself, following them, using the darkness to conceal me as much as they did. I could have made some light for myself---but as long as no one could see, no one would start shooting, either, I reasoned. I moved out carefully, Listening, and following the sounds.
I had only a second's warning, the sound of claws sliding on the old tile, and then something large and furry slammed into my legs below the knee, taking them out from under me and sending me heavily to the floor. I let out a shout and swung my blasting rod like a baseball bat, feeling it crack down solidly on something hard and bony. There was a snarl, a deep, animal sound, and something tore the rod from my hand and sent it flying away. It clattered hollowly on the tile floor. I dropped my compass, scrabbled for my gun, and got my feet underneath me, backpedaling, yelling my fear out into a wordless challenge.
I stood still for a moment, staring at nothing, breathing hard, my gun heavy in my hand. Fear made my heart pound, and as always, anger followed hard on the heels of fear. I was furious that I had been attacked. I'd half expected something to try to stop me, but in the dark whatever had been snarling had scared me a lot more than I'd thought it would.
Nothing happened after a minute, and I couldn't hear anything. I reached into my shirt and drew out the silver pentacle that had been my mother's, the five-pointed star upright within a circle, the symbol of order, symmetry, balance of power. I focused my will on it, concentrating, and the pentacle began to glow with a faint, gentle light---hardly the blinding luminescence that came as the result of focusing power against a being of the Nevernever, but adequate enough to navigate by, at least. I moved toward the back room, blue-white light like moonlight pooled around me.
It was definitely stupid to keep going forward, but I was angry, furious enough to bumble my way through the back room of the department store, until I saw the dark blue outline of an open doorway. I headed for it, tripping over a few more things along the way that I couldn't quite make out in the werelight of my amulet, angrily kicking a few things from the path of my feet, until I emerged into an alley behind the old building, breathing open air, able to see again in dim shapes and colors.
Something hit me heavily from behind, driving me to the ground, gravel digging into my ribs through my shirt. My concentration vanished, and with it the light of my amulet. I felt something hard and metallic shoved against the back of my skull, a knee pressed into the small of my back, and a woman's voice snarled, "Drop the gun, or I blow your head off."
Call me crazy, but I'm not big on defiance when I've got a gun rammed against my skull. I carefully set the .38 in my left hand down and moved my fingers away from it.
"Hands behind your back. Do it," snarled the woman. I did it. I felt the cold metal of the handcuffs around my wrists, heard the ratcheting sound of the cuffs closing around them. The knee lifted off of my back, and my attacker shoved me over with one leg, snapped on a flashlight, and shone it in my eyes.
"Harry?" she said.
I blinked and squinted against the light. I recognized the voice now. "Hi, Murphy. This is going to be one of those conversations, isn't it?"
"You jerk," Murphy said, her voice harsh. She was still only a shadow behind the flashlight, but I recognized the contours now. "You found a lead and followed it, and you didn't contact me."
"Those who live in glass houses, Lieutenant," I said, and sat up, my hands still held tightly behind my back. "There wasn't time. It was hot and I couldn't afford to wait or I might have lost it."
Murphy grunted. "How did you find this place?"
"I'm a wizard," I told her, and waggled my arms as best I could. "Magic. What else?" Murphy growled, but hunkered down behind me and unlocked the cuffs. I rubbed at my wrists after they were freed. "How about you?"
"I'm a cop," she said. "A car tailed us back to McAnally's from the murder scene. I waited until it was gone and followed it back here." She stood up again. "You were inside. Did anyone go out the front?"
"No. I don't think so. But I couldn't see."
"Dammit," Murphy said. She put her gun away in her coat. "They didn't come out the back. There must be some way up to the roof." She stood up and peered around at the closely packed buildings, shining her flashlight around the roof's edge. "They're long gone by now."
"Win some, lose some." I got to my feet.
"Like hell," she said and turned and started into the building.
I hurried to catch up with her. "Where are you going?"
"Inside. To look for stairs, a ladder, whatever."
"You can't follow them," I said, falling into step beside her as she went into the darkened building. "You can't take them on, not with just you and me."
"Them?" Murphy said. "I only saw one." She stopped and looked at me, and I explained to her in terse terms what had happened since we parted in the parking lot. Murphy listened, the lines at the corners of her blue eyes serious.
"What do you think happened?" she asked when I was finished.
"We found werewolves," I said. "The woman, the dark one with the grey in her hair, was their leader."
"Group killers?" Murphy said.
"Pack," I corrected her. "But I'm not so sure that they were the killers. They didn't seem . . . I don't know. Cold enough. Mean enough."
Murphy shook her head and turned to walk outside. "Can you give me a good description?"
I kept up with her. "Good enough, I guess. But what do you want it for?"
"I'm going to put out an APB for the woman we saw, and I want you to describe the kids you heard talking."
"What do you need that for? Don't you have the plates off the car she was driving?"
"I already called them in," Murphy said. "Rental. Probably taken out under a false ID."
"I think you've got the wrong people, Murph," I said. "Don't put out that APB."
"Why shouldn't I?" Murphy asked. "Someone follows me back to town from the scene of a murder. Not only that, but you can confirm to me that they were the killer from the scene. Not in a court of law, I know, but you can give it to me, and that's enough. Standard investigation will turn up the rest if we know where to look."
I held up my hand. "Hold on, hold on. My spell didn't tell me that the woman was the killer. Only that it was her blood at the scene."
Murphy folded her arms and glared up at me. "Whose side are you on, anyway?"
"You still don't get it, Murphy," I said, my own temper rising a little. "You don't start something with the kind of people who live in boogety-land unless you're willing to take it all the way, right there, right then. If you start harassing a pack of werewolves, setting the police after them, you've just declared war. You'd better be ready to fight it."
Murphy thrust her jaw out. "Don't worry about me. I can handle it."
"I'm not saying you can't," I said. "But whatever it was that tore apart Spike back at Marcone's club wasn't the same thing that was with me in the dark back there." I jerked my head at the main room of the department store.
"Oh yeah?" Murphy said. "Why not?"
"Because it could have killed me and it didn't."
"You don't think you could have taken care of yourself against a wolf, Harry?"
"In the dark?" I said. "Murphy, it's been nearly a hundred years since the wolf went extinct in most of the United States. You've got no idea, none at all, of how dangerous they can be. A wolf can run faster than you can drive a car through most of Chicago. His jaws can snap your thighbones with one jerk. A wolf can see the heat of your body in the complete dark, and can count the hairs on your head from a hundred yards off by starlight. He can hear your heart beating thirty or forty yards away. The wolf that was there in the dark with me could have killed me, easy. It didn't. It disarmed me, even after I'd hit it, and then it left."
"That doesn't mean anything," Murphy said---but she folded her arms over her stomach and glanced at the shadows around us with a little shiver. "Maybe the killer knows you. Maybe it didn't want to risk killing a wizard. Maybe, just maybe, the wolf did it to throw you off. Maybe it spared you just so you would react in this way, just to avoid suspicion."
"Maybe," I admitted. "But I don't think so. The kids I saw . . ." I shook my head. "Don't put out the APB, yet. Hold off on it, until I can get you some more information. Look, you pay me to give you my advice, to be your consultant on the supernatural. I'm your expert, right? Listen to me. Trust me."
She stared up at my face, her expression intent, looking away quickly when her eyes met mine. Murphy had known me for a while. You don't go looking into a wizard's eyes without a darned good reason. Wizards see too much.
"All right," she said finally. "I'll hold off on it---but only until tomorrow morning, when I have that report. If you can't show me anything by then, I'm going ahead after the people we saw tonight." Her mouth quirked in a fierce little grin. "I'd have a hell of a time explaining what I was doing out at the crime scene in Rosemont, anyway." The grin vanished, leaving only ferocity. "But you will have that information for me, Dresden, bright and early. Make no mistake. I will catch the killer before anyone else dies."
I nodded to Murphy. "In the morning," I said. "You got it."
Murphy's flashlight flickered and then went out as the filament burst with an audible pop.
Murphy sighed in the darkness. "Nothing ever works right when you're here. Sometimes, Harry," she said, "I really hate hanging out with you."
I entered my apartment, tossed my blasting rod, which I had recovered from the abandoned department store, into the corner next to my wizard's staff and my sword cane, and locked the door behind me. It was one of those steel-frame doors, the antiburglar kind. I bought it after a demon had come stomping into my apartment six months ago and wrecked my place.
My apartment is in the basement of a huge old rooming house that somehow managed to survive all the Chicago fires. It's made almost entirely of wood, and it creaks and groans when the wind blows, which is all the time in this city, and makes gentle, soothing music. It's a place with a history, the neighbors are quiet, and my rent is cheap---though less so than it was before the demon trashed my place.
The apartment itself is devoid of electrical devices, for reasons that should be evident by now. There is a fireplace, and a kitchenette off the main room, a little bedroom adjacent to that, and a bathroom inside the bedroom. Sunken windows are high on each of the four walls, and one is on the wall of the bathroom.
I decorate in textures more than I do in colors; there were thick rugs all over the bare stone floors, layered on top of one another in most places. Demon acid had burned away most of my furniture, and I had been obliged to scavenge secondhand stores for replacements. I like furniture with a lot of old wood and soft cloth, and I had made my purchases accordingly. Tapestries hung from my walls, the oldest tapestries that I could find, covering the bare stone. In the ruddy firelight, the oranges and browns and reds that constituted the primary colors of the decor didn't look half bad.
I went over to the fireplace and built up the fire. October in Chicago is a cold, breezy month, and my dank little haven is usually chilly until I get a fire going. I dropped a few logs on the fire, and Mister made an appearance, rubbing up against my leg and purring fondly, staggering my balance off to one side.
"Been getting into the steaks again, eh, Mister?" I said, and rubbed the big, grey cat's ears. Mister is larger than a lot of dogs. Maybe one of his parents was part wildcat. I found him in a Dumpster one day when he was a kitten and he promptly adopted me. Despite my struggles, Mister had been an understanding soul, and I eventually came to realize that I was a part of his little family, and by his gracious consent was allowed to remain in his apartment. Cats. Go figure.
I fired up the wood-burning stove and prepared a quick meal of Spaghettios, grilled chicken, and toast. Mister shared in my meal, and split a can of Coke with me, as usual, and I tossed the dishes in the sink to soak before I went to my bedroom and put on my robe.
Let the wizardry commence.
I went to a spot in the far corner and moved the rug there, then lifted up the door in the floor beneath it, revealing the steep stepladder that led down to the subbasement, where I kept my lab.
I teetered down the stairs, holding a lit candle that cast a golden glow on the cheerful havoc that is my laboratory. Tables lined the walls, and the longest table filled most of the center of the room, leaving a cramped walk space around it, except for an area at the far side of the lab that I kept completely clear for my summoning circle, a ring of bright copper set into the floor. Books, notebooks, defunct ballpoint pens, broken pencils, boxes, plastic containers, old butter bowls, empty jelly jars, and plastic Baggies lay next to other containers of every size and shape that held the spices, rare stones, bones, fur, blood, oddments, jewelry, and other ingredients useful to wizardly pursuits and studies.
I reached the bottom of the ladder, stepped over a precariously balanced stack of comic books (don't ask), and started lighting the other candles that lay on dishes around the chilly room, finally bending to light up the kerosene heater that I keep down in the lab in an effort to at least blunt the cold. "Bob," I said then. "Wake up, sleepyhead."
Up on one of the shelves, huddled in the midst of a thick stack of hardbacks, was the bleached, smooth form of a human skull, its empty eye sockets gaping. Deep in those eye sockets, there was a flickering of orange light, which grew and solidified into twin points of lambent illumination. "Sleepyhead. Oh, that's rich, Harry. With a sense of humor like that, you could make a living as a garbage man anywhere in the country." The skull's mouth gaped open in the parody of a yawn, though I knew the spirit within, Bob, didn't feel fatigue in the same way that living beings did. I put up with his lip, so to speak---Bob had worked for several wizards over the course of a dozen mortal lifetimes, and he knew more about the nuts and bolts of magic than I ever would.
"What are we doing, now?" Bob sniggered. "More weight-loss potions?"
"Look, Bob," I said. "That was only to get me through a rough month. Someone's got to pay the rent around here."
"All right," Bob said smugly. "You going to get into breast enhancement, then? I'm telling you, that's where the money is."
"That isn't what magic is for, Bob. How petty can you get?"
"Ah," Bob said, his eye lights flickering. "The question is, how pretty can you get them? You aren't a half-bad wizard, Dresden. You should think about how grateful all those beautiful women will be."
I snorted and started cleaning off a space on the center table, stacking things up to one side. "You know, Bob, some of us aren't obsessed with sex."
Bob snorted, no easy feat for a guy with no nose or lips. "Some of us don't take a real, working body and all five senses for granted, either, Harry. When's the last time you saw Susan?"
"I don't know," I responded. "Couple weeks ago. We're both pretty busy with work."
Bob heaved a sigh. "A gorgeous woman like that, and here you are, down in your musty old lab, getting ready to do more ridiculous nonsense."
"Precisely," I said. "Now, shut up and let's get to work."
Bob grumbled something in Latin, but rattled a few times to shake the dust off of the skull. "Sure, what do I know? I'm just a pathetic little spirit, right?"
"With a photographic memory, three or four hundred years' worth of research experience, and more deduction capacity than a computer, Bob, yeah."
Bob almost seemed to smile. "Just for that, you get my best effort tonight, Harry. Maybe you're not such an idiot after all."
"Great," I said. "I want to work up a couple of potions, and I want to know everything you know about werewolves."
"What kind of potions, and what kind of werewolves?" Bob said promptly.
I blinked. "There's more than one?"
"Hell, Harry. We've made at least three dozen different kinds of potions down here ourselves, and I don't see why you wouldn't---"
"No, no, no," I growled at Bob. "Werewolves. There's more than one kind of werewolf?"
"Eh? More than one kind of what?" Bob tilted his skull over to one side, as though cocking an invisible hand to his ear bones.
"Werewolf, werewolf."
"There wolf," Bob replied solemnly, his voice seething with a hokey accent. "There castle."
I blinked at him. "Uh. What the heck are you talking about?"
"It's a joke, Harry. Stars almighty, you never get out, do you?"
I eyed the grinning skull and growled in frustration. "Don't make me come up there."
"Okay, okay. Sheesh. Aren't we grumpy tonight?" Bob's jaws stretched in a yawn again.
"I'm working another murder case, Bob, and I don't have time to goof around."
"Murder. Mortal business is so complicated. You never hear about murder charges in the Nevernever."
"That's because everything there is immortal. Bob, just shut up and tell me what you know about werewolves. If there's a bunch of different flavors, tell me what they are." I got out a notebook and a fresh pencil, then a couple of clean beakers with alcohol-flame burners to heat whatever liquid I put in them.
"All right," Bob said. "How much do you know?"
"Exactly nothing about werewolves. My teacher never covered that with me."
Bob barked out a harsh little laugh. "Old Justin had a lousy sense of just about everything. He got what was coming to him, Harry, and don't let anyone on the White Council tell you any different."
I stopped for a moment. A sudden rush of mixed feelings, anger and fear and mostly regret, washed through me. I closed my eyes. I could still see him, my teacher, dying in flames born of my will and anger. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Hell, the Council even suspended the sentence on you. You were vindicated. Say, I wonder what ever happened to Elaine. Now there was a sweet piece of---"
"Werewolves, Bob," I said, in a very quiet, very angry voice. One hand started to hurt, and I saw that my fingers had clenched into a fist, the knuckles turning white. I turned my eyes to him, glaring.
I heard the skull make a gulping sound. And then he said, "Right. Okay. Werewolves. And, uh, which potions did you want?"
"I want a pick-me-up potion. A night's rest in a bottle. And I want something that will make me imperceptible to a werewolf. " I reached for the notebook and my pencil.
"First one's tough to do. There's nothing quite like a decent night's sleep. But we can make some super-coffee, no problem." He spouted out the formula to me, and I noted it down as he went, my handwriting too dark and angular. I was still angry from the mere mention of my old master's name. And the welter of emotions that rushed up with my memories of Elaine wouldn't subside for an hour.
We all have our demons.
"What about the second one?" I asked the skull.
"Can't really be done," Bob said. "Wolves have just got way too much on the ball to hide from every one of their senses without doing some major work. I'm talking, like, a greater Ring of Invisibility, not just a Shadowcape or something."
"Do I look like I'm made of money? I can't afford that. What about a partial-hiding potion, then?"
"Oh, like a blending brew? Look like an unobtrusive part of the background, something like that? I would think that would be the most useful, really. Keep you from being noticed to begin with."
"Sure," I said. "I'll take what I can get."
"No problem," Bob assured me, and rattled off another formula, which I jotted down. I checked the ingredients list, and thought that I had them all in stock among the countless containers on my shelves.
"Fine. I can get started on these. How much do you know about werewolves, Bob?"
"Plenty. I was in France during the Inquisition." Bob's voice was dry (but that is to be expected, considering).
I started on the first potion, the stimulant. Every potion has eight parts. One part is a base liquid to hold the others and provide a medium for mixing. Five parts are symbolically linked to each of the five senses. One is similarly linked to the mind, and another to the spirit. The basic ingredient to the stimulant potion was coffee, while the base for the scent-masking potion was water. I got them both to boiling. "Lot of werewolfery going on then?"
"Are you kidding?" Bob said. "It was werewolf central. We had every kind of werewolf you could think of. Hexenwolves, werewolves, lycanthropes, and loup-garou to boot. Every kind of lupine theriomorph you could think of."
"Therro-what?" I said.
"Theriomorph," Bob said. "Anything that shapeshifts from a human being into an animal form. Werewolves are theriomorphs. So are werebears, weretigers, werebuffalo . . ."
"Buffalo?" I asked.
"Sure. Some Native American shamans could do a buffalo. But almost everyone does predators, and until pretty recently, wolves were the scariest predator anyone around Europe could think of."
"Uh, okay," I said. "And there's a difference between types of werewolves?"
"Right," Bob confirmed. "Mostly it depends on how you go from human form to wolf form, and how much of your humanity you retain. Don't burn the coffee."
I turned down the flame beneath the beaker of coffee, annoyed. "I know, I know. Okay, then. How do you get to be a wolf?"
"The classic werewolf," Bob said, "is simply a human being who uses magic to shift himself into a wolf."
"Magic? Like a wizard?"
"No," Bob said. "Well. Sort of. He's like a wizard who only knows how to cast the one spell, the one to turn him into a wolf, and knows how to get back out of it again. Most people who learn to be werewolves aren't very good at it for a while, because they keep all of their own humanity."
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Bob said, "they can reshape themselves into the form of a wolf, but it's pretty much just topology. They rearrange their physical body, but their mind remains the same. They can think and reason, and their personality doesn't change---but they don't have a wolf's instincts or reflexes. They're used to being sight-oriented bipeds, not smell-oriented quadrupeds. They would have to learn everything from scratch."
"Why would someone do something like that?" I said. "Just learn to turn into a wolf, I mean."
"You've never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry," Bob said. "Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too."
"Okay, I think I've got it," I said. "Do you need silver bullets or anything? Do you turn into a werewolf if you get bitten?"
"Bah," Bob said. "No. Hollywood stole that from vampires. And the silver-bullet thing is only in special cases. Werewolves are just like regular wolves. You can hurt them with weapons just like you can a real wolf."
"That's good news," I said, stirring the potion. "What other kinds are there?"
"There's another version of a werewolf---when someone else uses magic to change you into a wolf."
I glanced up at him. "Transmogrification? That's illegal, Bob. It's one of the Laws of Magic. If you transform someone into an animal, it destroys their personality. You can't transform someone else without wiping out their mind. It's practically murder."
"Yeah. Neat, huh? But actually, most personalities can survive the transformation. For a little while at least. Really strong wills might manage to keep their human memories and personality locked away for several years. But sooner or later, they're irretrievably gone, and you're left with nothing but a wolf."
I turned from the potions to scribble in my notebook. "Okay. What else makes a werewolf?"
"The most common way, back in France, was to make a deal with a demon or a devil or a powerful sorcerer. You get a wolf-hide belt, put it on, say the magic words, and whammy, you're a wolf. A Hexenwolf."
"Isn't that just like the first kind?"
"No, not at all. You don't use your own magic to become a wolf. You use someone else's."
I frowned. "Isn't that the second kind, then?"
"Stop being obtuse," Bob chided me. "It's different because you're employing a talisman. Sometimes it's a ring or amulet, but usually it's a belt. The talisman provides an anchor for a spirit of bestial rage. Nasty thing from the bad side of the Nevernever. That spirit wraps around a human personality to keep it from being destroyed."
"A kind of insulation," I said.
"Exactly. It leaves you with your own intellect and reason, but the spirit handles everything else."
I frowned. "Sounds a little easy."
"Oh, sure," Bob said. "It's really easy. And when you use a talisman to turn into a wolf, you lose all of your human inhibitions and so on, and just run on your unconscious desires, with the talisman-spirit in charge of the way the body moves. It's really efficient. A huge wolf with human-level intelligence and animal-level ferocity."
I eyed Bob, and gathered up the other ingredients for the stimulant potion: a morning doughnut, for taste; a cock's crow, for hearing; fresh soap, for smell; bits of a washcloth, for touch; and a beam of dawn sunshine for sight; a to-do list, for the mind; and a bit of bright, cheerful music, for the spirit; and the potion was simmering along nicely.
Bob said nothing while I added the ingredients, and when I was finished I said, "Most people don't have the strength to control a spirit like that, I'd think. It would influence their actions. Maybe even control them. Suppress their conscience."
"Yeah. So?"
"So it sounds more like you'd be creating a monster."
"It's effective," Bob said. "I don't know about the good or the evil of the thing. That's something that only you mortals worry about."
"What did you call this flavor again?"
"Hexenwolf," Bob said, with a strong Germanic accent. "Spell wolf. The Church declared war on anyone who chose to become a Hexenwolf, and burned a huge number of people at the stake."
"Silver bullets?" I asked. "Bitten and turn into a werewolf?"
"Would you get off this 'bitten and turn into a werewolf' kick, Harry?" Bob said. "It doesn't work that way. Not ever. Or you'd have werewolves overrunning the entire planet in a couple of years."
"Fine, fine," I sighed. "What about the silver bullets?"
"Don't need them."
"All right," I said, and continued jotting down information to put together for Murphy in a report. "Hexenwolf. Got it. What else?"
"Lycanthropes," Bob said.
"Isn't that a psychological condition?"
"It might also be a psychological condition," Bob said. "But it was a reality first. A lycanthrope is a natural channel for a spirit of rage. A lycanthrope turns into a beast, but only inside his head. The spirit takes over. It affects the way he acts and thinks, makes him more aggressive, stronger. They also tend to be very resistant to pain or injury, sickness; they heal rapidly---all sorts of things."
"But they don't actually shapeshift into a wolf?"
"Give that boy a Kewpie," Bob said. "They're just people, too, but they're awfully fierce. Ever heard of the Norse berserkers? Those guys were lycanthropes, I think. And they're born, not made."
I stirred the stimulant potion, and made sure it was at an even simmer. "And what was the last one? Loop what?"
"Loup-garou," Bob said. "Or that was the name Etienne the Enchanter used for them, before he got burned at the stake. The loup-garou are the major monsters, Harry. Someone has cursed them to become a wolflike demon, and usually at the full moon. That someone's got to be really powerful, too, like a major heavyweight sorcerer or a demon lord or one of the Faerie Queens. When the full moon comes, they transform into a monster, go on a killing spree, and slaughter everything they come across until the moon sets or the sun rises."
A sudden little chill went over me, and I shivered. "What else?"
"Supernatural speed and power. Supernatural ferocity. They recover from injuries almost instantly, if they become hurt at all. They're immune to poison and to any kind of sorcery that goes for their brain. Killing machines."
"Sounds great. I guess this hasn't happened all that often? I'd have heard something by now."
"Right," Bob said. "Not often. Usually, the poor cursed bastard knows enough to shut himself away somewhere, or to head out into the wilderness. The last major loup-garou rampage happened around Gevaudan, France, back in the sixteenth century. More than two hundred people were killed in a little more than a year."
"Holy shit," I said. "How did they stop it?"
"They killed it," Bob said. "Here's where the silver bullets finally come in, Harry. Only a silver weapon can hurt a loup-garou, and not only that, the silver has to be inherited from a family member. Inherited silver bullets."
"Really? Why would that work and not regular silver?"
"I don't make the laws of magic, Harry. I just know what they are and have an idea of when they're changing. That one hasn't changed. I think maybe it has something to do with the element of sacrifice."
"Inherited silver," I mumbled. "Well. We'll just have to hope that this wasn't a loup-garou, I guess."
"If it was a louper, you'd know," Bob said wisely. "In the middle of this town, you'd have a dozen people dead every time the full moon came around. What's going on?"
"A dozen people are dying every time the full moon comes around." I filled Bob in on the Lobo killings, giving him all the information Murphy had given to me, and started on the next potion. Into the water went the ingredients: plastic wrap for sight; a bit of plain white cotton, for touch; a little deodorant for smell; a rustle of wind for hearing; a leaf of plain old lettuce, for taste; and finally I threw in a blank piece of paper, for the mind, and some elevator music for the spirit. The ingredients were boring. The potion looked and smelled boring. Perfect.
"Lot of dead people," Bob commented. "I'll let you know if I think of anything good. I wish I knew something else."
"I want you to learn more," I told him. "Go out and see what else you can round up on werewolves."
Bob snorted. "Fat chance, Harry. I'm a spirit of intellect, not an errand boy." But when I said the word "out," Bob's eyes glittered.
"I'll pick you up some new romance novels, Bob," I offered.
Bob's teeth clicked a couple of times. "Give me a twenty-four-hour pass," he said.
I shook my head. "Forget it. The last time I let you out, you invaded a party over at Loyola and set off an orgy."
Bob sniffed. "I didn't do anything to anyone that a keg wouldn't have done."
"But those people didn't ask for you to get into their systems, Bob. No way. You had your fun, and I'm not letting you out again for a while."
"Oh, come on, Harry."
"No," I said flatly.
"It would only be one little night o---"
"No," I said again.
Bob glowered at me and demanded, "New romances. None of those tatty used ones. I want something off the bestseller list."
"I want you back by sunrise," I countered.
"Fine," Bob snapped. "I can't believe how ungrateful you are, after everything I've done for you. I'll see if I can get someone's name. There might be a spirit or two who could get you some juicy information." The orange lights that were his eyes glittered and then flowed out of the skull in a misty cloud of lambent illumination. The cloud flowed up the ladder and out of my laboratory.
I sighed and set the second potion to simmering. It would take another hour or two to cook the potions, and then to shove the magic into them, so I sat down with my notebook and started writing up my report. I tried to ignore the headache that was creeping up the back of my neck toward the crown of my head, but it did little good.
I had to help Murphy nail the killer, whoever it was, while avoiding any trouble with the FBI. Otherwise, she was out of a job, and even if I didn't end up in jail, I would be out of a living myself. Johnny Marcone's man had been killed, and I would be a fool to think he would stand idly by and do nothing in response. I was sure the gangster would rear his head sooner or later.
Aside from all of that, there was a monster of one kind or another lurking in the dark, and the police and the FBI had been helpless to stop it. That left only me, Harry Dresden, your friendly neighborhood wizard, to step in and do something about it. And, if the killer figured out that I was getting involved, he would doubtless start gunning for me next. My troubles were multiplying.
Hexenwolves. Werewolves. Lycanthropes. Loup-garou.
What will they think of next?
The police headquarters downtown consists of a sprawling collection of buildings that have sprung up over the years as the need for law enforcement has increased. They don't match, and they come from a wildly varying selection of styles and designs, but they have somehow adapted themselves into a cohesive whole---much like the force itself. Special Investigations operates out of a big, rundown old building, a huge cube that has managed to hold up solidly in spite of the years, the grime, the smog, and the graffiti sprayed on its walls. It has bars over the windows and the doors and sits hunkered amidst buildings much taller than it, like a faithful old bulldog amidst a crowd of unruly children, struggling to maintain peace and order.
The inside of the building is plain, even dingy, but they keep it clean. The old warhorse of a desk sergeant eyed me as I entered the station, his grey mustache bristling over an impressive jaw. "Hiya, Bill," I told him, and held up the manila envelope I had under one arm. "Bringing something up to Murphy in SI."
"Dresden," he said warily and jerked a thumb toward the stairs behind him, giving me permission to go.
I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, but I had showered and dressed nicely before I left the house, in neat business clothes, for once, instead of my usual western shirt and blue jeans. I kept the battered old duster, though, with my blasting rod dangling from a thong inside of it. I took the stairs two at a time and passed a few cops along the way. Several recognized me, and one or two even nodded, but I thought I could detect a sense of uneasiness from each of them. Apparently, I was carrying a distinct odor with the law at the moment.
I wrinkled up my nose. The police had always known me as something of a nut, the crazy guy who claimed to be a wizard, but a useful nut, who could provide good information and whose apparent "psychic abilities" had helped them on a number of occasions. I was used to being seen as one of the good guys, but now the cops were giving me the neutral, professional glances that they would give to a potential criminal, rather than the casual greetings one would give to a comrade in arms. It was to be expected, maybe, since rumor had associated my name with Johnny Marcone's, but it was still disturbing.
I was muttering to myself and deep in my own sleep-deprived thoughts when I bumped into a tall, lovely woman, dark of hair and eye, full of mouth, long of leg. She was wearing a tan skirt and jacket with a crisp white blouse. Her raven brows furrowed in consternation until she looked up at me, and then her eyes glowed with a sort of friendly avarice. "Harry," she said, her lips curving into a smile. She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. "Fancy seeing you here."
I cleared my throat. "Hi, Susan," I said. "Did that syndication deal go through?"
She shook her head. "Not yet, but I'm hoping. After those stories you gave me last spring, people started taking me a little more seriously." She paused, drawing in a little breath. It made her chest rise and fall most attractively. "You know, Harry. If you're working with the police again, and if you should happen to be able to let me in on whatever is going on . . ."
I shook my head and tried to scowl at her. "I thought we agreed. I won't poke into your business deals and you won't poke into mine."
She smiled up at me and touched a finger to my chest. "That was whenever we were out on a date, Harry." She let her eyes wander down the length of my body, and then back up. "Or staying in on one."
"Susan Rodriguez, I never knew you were a lawyer as well as a journalist."
"Now you're getting nasty," she said, grinning. "Seriously, Harry. Another exposé like last spring could make my career."
"Yeah, well after last spring, the city made me sign about two tons of nondisclosure agreements. I can't tell you anything about the case."
"So don't tell me about the case, Harry---but if you could mention, say, a nice spot in the street where I might stand and get some good pictures, I would be very," she leaned up and kissed my neck. "Very"---the kiss traveled to my earlobe---"grateful."
I swallowed and cleared my throat. Then took a step back down the stairs, away from her. I closed my eyes for a second and listened to the thunder of my suddenly pounding heart. "I'm sorry. I can't do that."
"Oh, Harry. You're no fun." She reached out and ran a hand over my hair, then smiled to let me know that there were no hard feelings. "But let's get together soon, all right? Dinner?"
"Sure," I said. "Hey. What are you doing down here this early?"
She tilted her head, considering me. "Trade me? I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours. Off the record, even."
I snorted. "Susan, give me a break."
She let out a little sigh and shook her head. "I'll call you about dinner, all right?" She started down the stairs past me.
"All right," I said. "All right. I'm bringing a report on werewolves to Murphy."
"Werewolves," she said, her eyes lighting. "Is that who's behind the Lobo murders?"
I frowned. "No comment. I thought the FBI was keeping that under wraps."
"You can't kill a dozen people and expect no one to notice," Susan said, her voice sly. "I keep track of the city morgues."
"God, you're so romantic. All right, your turn. Give."
"I was trying to talk to the investigator from the department's Internal Affairs. Word is that they're putting pressure on Murphy, trying to clear her out of Special Investigations."
I grimaced. "Yeah. I heard that, too. Why does it concern you and the Arcane?"
"The most successful preternatural investigator the police department has gets hung out to dry? Even if people don't believe it, Murphy does a lot of good. If Murphy gets fired, and I can show how the numbers of mysterious crimes and unexplained deaths go up after she leaves, maybe I can get people to listen to papers like the Arcane. And to people like you."
I shook my head. "People don't want to believe in magic anymore. Or things that go bump in the dark. For the most part, they're happier not knowing."
"And when not knowing gets someone killed?"
I shrugged. "That's where people like me and Murphy come in."
Susan eyed me doubtfully. "All I need is something solid, Harry. An eyewitness account, a photograph, something."
"You can't photograph anything really supernatural," I pointed out. "The energies around things like that will mess up cameras. Besides, the stuff I'm dealing with right now is too dangerous. You could get hurt."
"What if I shot from a long way off?" she pressed. "Used a telephoto lens?"
I shook my head. "No, Susan. I'm not going to tell you anything. It's for your own good as much as for mine."
She pressed her lips together. "Fine," she said, her tone crisp, and went on down the stairs. I watched her go, dismayed. It seemed I was making a habit of excluding people from certain brands of information. Not only were my job and my freedom on the line, and Murphy's job, too---now it seemed that my love life, or what passed for it, was in danger as well.
I took a moment to try to sort through my thoughts and feelings on Susan, and gave it up as hopeless. Susan was a reporter for the Midwestern Arcane, a tabloid circulated widely from Chicago. It usually ran headlines about Elvis and JFK singing duets in Atlantic City, or on similar topics, but once in a while Susan managed to slip in something about the real world of the supernatural, the one that people had forgotten about in favor of science. She was damned good at her job, absolutely relentless.
She was also charming, gorgeous, funny, and sexy as hell. Our dates often ended in long, passionate evenings at my place or hers. It was an odd relationship, and neither one of us had tried to define it. I think maybe we were worried that if we did, we would change our minds and write it off as a bad idea.
I continued up the stairs, my mind a tired muddle of blood-spattered corpses, savage beasts, angry ex-apprentices, and sultry, dark eyes. There are times when my work is hard on my love life. But one thing I'm not is a boring date.
The doors to the SI office swung open just before I reached for them, and I drew up short. Agent Denton of the FBI was there, tall and immaculate in his gray suit. He stopped, too, and looked at me, holding open the door with one arm. There were bags under his grey eyes, but they were still calculating, assessing, and the veins in his forehead bulged with hypertension.
"Mr. Dresden," he said, and nodded to me.
"Agent Denton," I replied, keeping my tone polite, even friendly. "Excuse me. I need to get something to Lieutenant Murphy."
Denton frowned a little, and then glanced at the room behind him, before coming all the way out into the hall and letting the door swing shut. "Maybe now isn't the best time for you to see her, Mr. Dresden."
I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was five minutes before eight. "She wanted it early." I stepped to one side, to go around him.
Denton put a hand on my chest---just that. But he was strong. He might have been shorter than me, but he was carrying a lot more muscle. He didn't look at my eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was very quiet. "Look, Dresden. I know what happened last night didn't look good, but believe me when I say that I've got nothing against Lieutenant Murphy. She's a good cop, and she does her job. But she's got to follow the rules, just like everyone else."
"I'll keep that in mind," I told him and started to move again.
He kept up the pressure against my chest. "There's an agent from Internal Affairs in there with her right now. He's already in a bad mood from being hassled by some reporter. Do you really want to go in there and make him start asking all sorts of questions?"
I glanced at him, frowning. He lowered his hand from my chest. I didn't go around him, yet. "You know about the investigation she's under?"
Denton shrugged a shoulder. "It's to be expected, all things considered. Too much of what has happened in the past looks suspicious."
"You really don't believe, do you?" I asked him. "You don't believe that I'm a real wizard. You don't believe in the supernatural."
Denton straightened his tie. "What I believe doesn't matter, Mr. Dresden. What is important is that a lot of the scum out there believe in it. It affects the way they think and operate. If I could make use of your advice to solve this case, I would, the same as any other law officer." He glanced at me and added, "Personally, I think you are either slightly unstable or a very intelligent charlatan. No offense."
"None taken," I said, my voice wry. I nodded to the door. "How long will Murphy be busy?"
Denton shrugged. "If you like, I'll take the report in to her, drop it on her desk. You can go down the hall and call her. It doesn't matter to me, but I don't mind helping out a straight cop."
I thought it over for a second, and then passed the folder to him. "I appreciate it, Agent Denton."
"Phil," he said. For a second, he almost smiled, but then his face resumed its usual tense expression. "Do you mind if I take a look at it?"
I shook my head. "But I hope you like fiction, Phil."
He flicked the folder open and studied the first page for a moment, expressionless. He looked up at me. "You can't possibly be serious."
It was my turn to shrug. "Don't knock it. I've helped Murphy out before."
He glanced over the rest of the report, the look of skepticism on his face growing more secure. "I'll . . . give this to Murphy for you, Mr. Dresden," he said, then nodded to me and turned to walk toward the SI office.
"Oh, hey," I said casually. "Phil."
He turned to me and lifted his eyebrows.
"We're both on the same team here, right? Both of us looking for the killer?"
He nodded.
I nodded back. "What is it that you're not telling me?"
He stared for a long moment, and then blinked slowly. The lack of reaction gave him away. "I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Dresden," he said.
"Sure you do," I told him. "You know something you can't or won't tell me, right? So why not just put it out on the table, now?"
Denton glanced up and down the hall and repeated, in precisely the same tone of voice, "I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Dresden. Do you understand?"
I didn't understand, but I didn't want him to know that. So I just nodded again. Denton nodded back, turned, and went into the SI office.
I frowned, puzzling over Denton's behavior. His expression and reaction had conveyed more than his words, but I wasn't sure exactly what. Except for that one flash of insight the night before, I was having trouble reading him. Some people were just like that, very good at keeping secrets with their bodies and motions as well as with their mouths.
I shook my head, went to the pay phone down the hall, dropped in my quarter, and dialed Murphy's number.
"Murphy," she said.
"Denton's dropping off my report. I didn't want to wander in on you with Internal Affairs hanging around."
There was a note of relief in Murphy's voice, subtle but there. "Thank you. I understand."
"The investigator is in your office now, isn't he?"
"Right," Murphy said, her tone neutral, polite, professional, and disinterested. Murphy keeps a great poker face when it's necessary, too.
"If you have any questions, I should be at my office," I said. "Hang in there, Murph. We'll nail this guy." There was the sound of a deeper voice, Denton's, and then the slap of a folder hitting the surface of Murphy's desk. Murphy thanked Denton, and then spoke to me again.
"Thank you very much. I'll be right on it." Then she hung up on me.
I hung up the phone myself, and realized that I was vaguely disappointed that I hadn't gotten to really speak to Murphy, that we hadn't had the chance to exchange our usual banter. It bothered me that I couldn't just walk into her office anymore, made me feel a little queasy and tense inside. I hate politics, but it was there, and as long as I was being held in any amount of suspicion, I could get Murphy in trouble just by being around.
Brooding all the while, I stomped down the stairs and out the front door of the station, toward the visitor parking, where the Blue Beetle waited for me.
I had gotten in and was preparing to coax it to life when I heard footsteps. I squinted up into the morning sunshine at the skinny form and big ears of the redheaded young FBI agent from the scene in Rosemont last night. I rolled down the window as he stepped up to my car. He glanced around, his face anxious, and then knelt down beside the window so that he could not be easily observed.
"Hi there, Agent . . ."
"Harris," he said. "Roger Harris."
"Right," I said. "Can I help you, Agent Harris?"
"I need to know, Mr. Dresden. I mean, I wanted to ask you last night, but I couldn't. But I need to ask you now." He glanced around again, restless as a rabbit when a fox goes by, and said, "Are you for real?"
"A lot of people ask me that, Agent Harris," I said. "I'll tell you what I tell them. Try me and see."
He chewed on his lip and looked at me for a minute. Then nodded a jerky little nod, his head bobbing. "All right," he said. "All right. Can I hire you?"
My eyebrows went up in surprise. "Hire me? What for?"
"I think . . . I think I know something. About the Lobo killings. I tried to get Denton to let us check it out, but he said that there wasn't enough evidence. We'd never be able to get a surveillance put on them."
"On who?" I asked, wary. The last thing I needed was to be getting involved in any more shady goings-on. On the other hand, as an independent operator, I could sometimes go poking my nose where the police couldn't. If there was a chance that I could turn up something for Murphy, or find the killer and stop him outside of legal channels entirely, I couldn't afford to pass it up.
"There's a gang in Chicago," Harris began.
"No kidding?" I asked, affecting puzzlement.
It was lost on the kid. "Yeah. They call themselves the Streetwolves. They've got a really rough reputation, even for this town. A spooky reputation. Even the criminals won't go near them. They say that the gang has strange powers. Streetwolf territory is down by the Forty-ninth Street Beach." He stared at me intently.
"Down by the university," I filled in. "And by the parks where last month's murders took place."
He nodded, eager as a puppy. "Yeah, right, down there. You see what I'm getting at?"
"I see, kid, I see," I told him and rubbed at my eye. "Denton couldn't go there and look around, so he sent you down here to get me to do it."
The kid flushed, his skin turning bright red, until his freckles vanished. "I . . . Uh . . ."
"Don't worry about it," I told him. "You didn't do a bad job with the act, but you've got to get up pretty early in the morning, et cetera."
Harris chewed on his lip and nodded. "Yeah, well. Will you do it?"
I sighed. "I guess you can't go on record as paying my fee, can you?" It wasn't really a question.
"Well. No. Officially, you are a suspect source, as a consultant."
I nodded. "I thought so."
"Can you do it, Mr. Dresden? Will you?"
I was regretting it even before I spoke. "All right," I said. "I'll check it out. But in exchange, tell Denton I want any of the information that the FBI or the Chicago police has on me."
Harris paled. "You want us to copy your files?"
"Yeah," I said. "I could get them through the Freedom of Information Act, anyway. I just don't want to spend the time and postage. Do we have a deal or not?"
"Oh, God. Denton would kill me if he found out. He doesn't like it when someone bends the rules." He chewed his lip until I thought it would fall off.
"You mean like he's doing by sending you here to me?" I shrugged. "Suit yourself, kid. That's my price. You can find my number if you change your mind." I coaxed the Beetle to life, and it rattled and coughed and started running.
"All right," he said. "All right. Deal." He offered me his hand.
I shook it, sealing the bargain, and got an uneasy feeling as I did. Harris walked away from the Beetle as quickly as he could, still looking around nervously.
"That was stupid, Harry," I told myself. "You shouldn't be getting yourself into anything more complicated than you already have."
I was right. But the potential gains made the risk worth it. I could possibly find the killers, stop them, and additionally find out why the cops had a bug up their collective ass about me. It might help me to work things out with Murphy. It might even help me get her out of the trouble she was having.
"Cheer up, Harry," I told myself. "You're just going to go poke around a biker gang's lair. Ask them if they happen to have killed some people lately. What could possibly go wrong?"
A block from the Forty-ninth Street Beach there was a rundown garage, the sort of place you only find in the worst sections of big cities. The building consisted of corrugated metal on a steel frame, oxidating in the rain and the mist rising off the lake so that gobbets of rust ran down the walls in streaks and pooled on the sidewalks in uneven puddles. On one side of the garage was a vacant lot; on the other, what looked like the sort of pawn shop where crooks traded in their spare guns and knives for a few extra dollars when things were tight. A faded sign hung askew over one of the garage doors, reading FULL MOON GARAGE. I pulled the Beetle into the gravel parking lot, and parked a few feet from the building.
"Thank God it's not too obvious or anything," I muttered, and killed the engine. It died with a new, moaning note to its usual rattle. I got out of the car, squinted at the building, and headed toward it. I didn't have my gun with me, but I did have my blasting rod, my shield bracelet, and a ring on my right hand in which I had stored up about as much energy as someone twice my size could put into a solid punch. Gravel crunched under my shoes as I walked, and rare autumn sunshine glared in my eyes and cast a long shadow behind me.
I wasn't sure who to expect inside, if anyone. The people I'd seen with the dark-haired woman the night before, the rather nerdy bunch of young people clad in imitation biker-leathers, didn't seem to be the sort of folk to inspire fear in other criminal toughs as the Streetwolves apparently had. But maybe there was a connection. Maybe the dark-haired woman from last night was linked with the Streetwolves, somehow, as well as with the young people I had seen. What had the stout young man, Billy, called them? The Alphas.
What, then, had the Alphas been? Biker thugs in training? That sounded ridiculous, even to me. But what if those young people had been lycanthropes, like the ones Bob had told me about? What if they were being trained, somehow, as junior members of the Streetwolves until they could be brought in as full werewolves? Presuming the Streetwolves themselves were lycanthropes or werewolves, that is. Sometimes, a biker gang is just a biker gang. There might be no connection to the Alphas at all. My head spun a little, trying to sort out the possibilities.
All in all, it was far better to hope that the building was empty, and that I wouldn't have to deal with anyone, werewolves or otherwise. I would much rather just poke around and find something incriminating inside, something that I could bring back to Murphy and Denton that would point them in the correct direction.
There was a regular door beside the pair of big, roll-up garage doors. Both of them were closed. I tried the regular door, and it opened easily enough, so I went on inside. There were no windows, and the only light in the garage fell into it from the open door behind me.
"Hello?" I called into the darkness. I tried to peer around, but saw nothing other than dim shapes and outlines, what might have been a car with the hood up, a couple of those rolling tool-cabinets. There was a dull reflection of glass windows off to one side, where there might have been an office. I stepped to one side of the doorway, squinting, and waited for my eyes to adjust.
There was a quiet sound, a dull rustle of clothing.
Dammit. I reached a hand into my duster, wrapping my fingers around my blasting rod, and Listened. I could hear the sound of breathing in the room, from multiple sources in a variety of directions. There was a scuffling sound, shoes on the concrete floor.
"I'm not a cop," I said into the darkness. I had the feeling that might be important for them to know. "My name is Harry Dresden. I just want to speak to the Streetwolves."
The room dropped into dead silence. No moving. No breathing. Nothing.
I waited, tense and ready to run.
"Take your hand out of your jacket," a male voice said. "And keep your hands where I can see them. We've heard of your kind, wizard. We've heard of you. You're with the cops."
"You're late on the gossip," I said wryly. "I'm playing doubles with Johnny Marcone now. Didn't you know?"
There was a snort from the dark. "Like hell. That's just Marcone's story. We know the real deal with you, wizard."
Christ. I wished the police were as savvy as these ne'er-do-wells. "I've heard a few things about you all, too," I said. "Not much of it is too friendly. Some of it might even be considered a little weird."
There was a rough laugh. "What do you think they say about you, Dresden? Get your hands where I can see them. Now." There was the click-clack of a pump shotgun's action.
I swallowed and took my hand slowly off my blasting rod, then held both of my hands innocuously out in front of me, palms up. I willed strength through my shield bracelet as I did, drawing its protective energies about me. "All right," I said. "Come up where I can see you."
"You don't give the orders here," the male voice snarled. "I do."
I pressed my lips together and drew in a breath through my nose. "I just want to talk to you."
"About what?" said the voice.
I tried to come up with something, something believable--- but I'm not much of a liar. So I told them the truth. "Some dead people last month. More dead last night."
The voice didn't answer me for a moment. I licked my lips and kept going.
"There were fake wolf tracks around the murder scenes. And the feds think someone used a weapon lined with wolf teeth to tear the victims up. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
There was a flurry of mutters around the room, low voices in hushed tones all around me. A dozen, maybe. More. I got a sudden, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. If these people were the murderers, if they were responsible for last month's deaths, I was in big trouble.
And if they were real werewolves, if they could shapeshift and come after me before I could clear out of there, I was as good as dead, shield bracelet or no. I choked down a surge of panic and forced myself not to turn and run for the door.
"Kill him," someone said from the darkness, off to my left, a female voice with a deep, growling tone to it. There was an answering chorus of mewling sounds from the dark around me, repetitions of "Kill him, kill him, kill him."
My eyes were starting to adjust to the lack of light. I could see them now, the shapes of people restlessly pacing. Their eyes glowed like dogs' eyes in the glare of headlights. Both men and women moved around me, though I couldn't tell their ages. There were blankets and pillows made into pallets on the floor, thrown aside while their occupants had risen. The female voice I had heard continued to chant, "Kill him, kill him, kill him," while the others followed her lead. The air grew tight and heavy with a kind of energy I had never sensed before, a power that was gaining momentum as they chanted, a feral, raging current.
Directly in front of me, not fifteen feet away, stood the large shape of a man holding a shotgun. "Stop it," he snarled, turning his head toward the others in the room. I could see his body responding as the energy grew, growing tenser, more ready. "Fight it. Hold it in, dammit. You can't let it loose here. There will be cops all over us."
When his head turned, I darted toward the doorway. I kept my left palm up and turned out toward the leader, the one with the shotgun, and held on to my shield as hard as I could.
My motion triggered a frenzied howl from the others in the room and they came surging toward me like a dozen creatures with one controlling mind. The shotgun roared and threw a flash of white light over the room, showing me a frieze of half-dressed or naked men and women hurtling toward me, their faces twisted with grimaces of berserk anger. The force of the blast slammed into my shield. It wasn't quite enough to shatter the protective field, but it made my bracelet grow warm and shoved my opposite shoulder hard against the wall.
I stumbled, thrown off balance. One of the men, a heavyset fellow with his shoulders covered in tattoos, got between me and the door. I ran at him, and he spread his arms to grab me, assuming I would try to go past him.
Instead, I drove my fist at his nose as hard as I could. I don't carry a lot of power on my own when I punch. But when I added in the kinetic energy stored in the ring, my fist became a battering ram of bone and flesh, flattening the man's nose in a gout of blood, and sending him sprawling to the ground six feet away.
I was through the door in a flash and felt the sun's welcome heat on my back. I pelted toward the Beetle, my long legs covering the ground quickly.
"Stop! Stop!" the leader shouted, and I cast a glance over my shoulder to see him, an older man with greasy hair beginning to go grey. He planted his feet in the doorway, facing inside, holding the shotgun across his body and shoving at the people trying to get past him.
I threw myself into the Beetle and jammed my key in the ignition.
The car wheezed and rattled, but didn't start. Dammit.
My hands were trembling, but I kept trying to get the car going, using every trick I knew to coax the engine to life, while watching the door. The leader of the Streetwolves was still there, fighting to hold the frenzied group inside. They were screaming and howling, but he shoved them away, clubbed them down with the shotgun like wild dogs, the muscles in his shoulders and back straining. "Parker!" screamed one of them, the woman who had begun the killing chant, "Let me through!" He swatted her down with the butt of the shotgun without hesitation.
Then Parker turned his head toward me, and I met his eyes. There was a swimming moment, and then I was past his eyes, to what lay behind them.
Fury overwhelmed me, naked lust for meat, for the hunt. I needed to run, to kill. I was invincible, unstoppable. I could feel the power in my arms and hands, feel the raw energy of the wild coursing through me, sharpening my senses to animal keenness.
I felt his emotions like they were my own. Fury beneath rigid control, the ocean beating at a tide wall. The fury was directed at me, Dresden, at the man who had invaded his territory, challenged his authority, and driven his people out of control, endangering them. I saw that he was the leader of the lycanthropes called the Streetwolves, men and women with the minds and souls of beasts, and that he was aging, was not as strong as he once had been. Others, like the woman earlier, were beginning to challenge his authority. Today's events might tear him from leadership, and he would never live through it.
If Parker was to live, I had to die. He had to kill me, pure and simple, and he had to do it alone to prove his strength to the pack. That was the only thing that kept him from coming at my throat that very second.
Worse, he didn't know a damned thing about the last month's killings.
And then the moment was past, the soulgaze over. Parker's face was stunned. He had seen me in much the same way I had seen him. I don't know what he saw when he looked upon my soul. I didn't want to know what was down there.
I recovered from it before he did and fumbled at the keys again. The Beetle coughed to life, and I pulled out and onto the street, swerving wildly before gathering speed and heading back uptown as quickly as I could.
I shook the entire way, my shoulders so tight with fear and reaction that I could hear my collarbones creaking with strain. I could still hear the mewling chants of "Kill him, kill him," in my head. Those things in that garage had not been people. They had looked like people, but they weren't. And they scared the hell out of me.
While sitting at an intersection, I slammed my hand on the steering wheel, abruptly angry. "Stupid, Harry," I said. "How could you have been so stupid? Why in the hell did you go wandering in there like that? Do you realize how close those Neanderthal freaks came to tearing you apart?" I glared ferociously out my side window, at an old lady in a business suit who was staring at me as though I were a ranting madman. Which, I suppose, was what I looked like.
I stopped myself from glaring at her, took a deep breath, and tried to calm down. A couple of blocks later, I was able to start thinking straight again.
Parker and the Streetwolves were not responsible for the murders last month. That didn't make them any less dangerous. They were lycanthropes, the kind Bob had told me about, and I could see now why they had been feared. People with the souls of beasts, possessed of a ferocity so great that it could transform them into something inhuman without altering a single cell of their bodies.
They lived in a pack, and Parker was their leader. I had challenged his dominance in my clueless, bumbling way, and now he couldn't afford to let me live, or he would be killed himself. So now I had to worry about someone else coming after me, trying to kill me. Not only that, all of this trouble had come gratis, without giving me any lead on the true culprit of the Lobo killings.
Maybe it was a good time to leave town for a while.
I brooded over that for a block or so, and then shook my head. I wouldn't run. I had made this trouble for myself, and I would get out of it myself. I had to stay, to help Murphy find the killer, and to help save lives before the full moon rose again. And if Parker wanted to kill me, well---he'd find that doing in a full-fledged wizard is no easy task.
I gripped the steering wheel grimly. If it came to it, I would kill him. I knew I could do that. Technically, I suppose, Parker and his lycanthropes weren't human. The First Law of Magic, Thou Shalt Not Kill, wouldn't necessarily apply to them. Legally, I might be able to make a case for the use of lethal magic to the White Council.
I just wouldn't be safe from myself. I wouldn't be safe from the loathing I would feel, using a tool made of life's essence, its energy, to bring an end to life. Magic was more than just an energy source, like electricity or petroleum. It was power, true, but it was a lot of other things as well. It was all that was deepest and most powerful in nature, in the human heart and soul. The ways in which I applied it were crude and clumsy in comparison to magic in its pure form. There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don't let anyone tell you any different.
Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can't weave together a spell that you don't believe in.
I didn't want to believe that killing was deep inside of me. I didn't want to think about the part of me that took a dark joy in gathering all the power it could and using it as I saw fit, everything else be damned. There was power to be had in hatred, too, in anger and in lust, in selfishness and in pride. And I knew that there was some dark corner of me that would enjoy using magic for killing---and then long for more. That was black magic, and it was easy to use. Easy and fun. Like Legos.
I parked the Beetle in the lot of my office building and rubbed at my eyes. I didn't want to kill anybody, but Parker and his gang might not give me any choice. I might have to do a lot of killing, if I was going to live.
I tried not to think too much about what sort of person it might be who survived. I would burn that bridge when I came to it.
I would go up to my office and hold business hours for the rest of the day. I would wait for Murphy to call me, and give her any aid that I could. I would keep my eyes and ears open in case Parker or any of his gang came after me. There wasn't much more I could do, and it was frustrating as hell.
I went up to my office, unlocked it, and flipped on the lights. Gentleman Johnny Marcone was seated at my desk in a dark blue business suit, and his hulking bodyguard, Mr. Hendricks, was standing behind him.
Marcone smiled at me, but it didn't touch the corners of his eyes. "Ah, Mr. Dresden. Good. We need to talk."
Marcone had eyes the color of old, faded dollar bills. His skin was weatherworn, with an outdoorsman's deep tan. Creases showed at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as though from smiling, but those smiles were rarely sincere. His suit must have cost him at least a thousand dollars. He sat at ease in my chair, my chair, mind you, and regarded me with professional calm.
From behind him, Mr. Hendricks looked like an all-star collegiate lineman who hadn't been smart enough to go into the pros. Hendricks's neck was as big around as my waist, and his hands were big enough to cover my face---and strong enough to crush it. His red hair was buzz cut, and he wore his ill-fitting suit like something that he planned to rip his way out of when he turned into the Hulk. I couldn't see his gun, but I knew he was carrying one.
I stood in the doorway and stared at Marcone for a minute, but my gaze did nothing to stir him. Marcone had met it already, and taken my measure more than I had taken his. My eyes held no more fear for him.
"Get out of my office," I said. I stepped inside and closed the door.
"Now, now, Mr. Dresden," Marcone said, a father's reproof in his tone. "Is that any way to talk to a business partner?"
I scowled. "I'm not your partner. I think you're scum. The worst criminal this city has. One of these days the cops will nail you, but until then, I don't have to put up with you here in my own office. Get out."
"The police," Marcone said, a hint of correction in his voice, "would be best off run by private agencies, rather than public institutions. Better pay, better benefits---"
"Easier to bribe, corrupt, manipulate," I injected.
Marcone smiled.
I took off my duster and dropped it over the table in front of the door, the one covered in pamphlets with titles like "Witches and You," and "Want to Do Magic? Ask Me How!" I untied my blasting rod from its thong and set it calmly on the table in front of me. I had the satisfaction of seeing Hendricks tense up when he saw the rod. He remembered what I had done to the Varsity last spring.
I glanced up. "Are you still here?"
Marcone folded his hands in front of him. "I have an offer to make you, Mr. Dresden."
"No," I said.
Marcone chuckled. "I think you should hear me out."
I looked him in the eyes and smiled faintly. "No. Get out."
His fatherly manner vanished, and his eyes became cold. "I have neither the time nor the tolerance for your childishness, Mr. Dresden. People are dying. You are now working on the case. I have information for you, and I will give it to you. For a price."
I felt my back stiffen. I stared at him for a long minute, and then said, "All right. Let's hear your price."
Marcone held out his hand and Hendricks handed him a folder. Marcone put the folder down on the battered surface of my old wooden desk and flipped it open. "This is a contract, Mr. Dresden. It hires you as a consultant for my firm, in personal security. The terms are quite generous. You get to name your own hours, with a minimum of five per month. You can fill in your salary right now. I simply want to formalize our working relationship."
I walked over to my desk. I saw Hendricks's weight shift, as though he were about to jump over the desk at me, but I ignored him. I picked up the folder and looked over the contract. I'm not a legal expert, but I was familiar with the forms for this kind of deal. Marcone was on the up and up. He was offering me a dream job, with virtually no commitment, and as much money as I could want. There was even a clause that specified that I would not be asked or expected to perform any unlawful acts.
With that kind of money, I could live the life I wanted. I could stop scraping for every dollar, running my legs off working for every paranoid looney who wanted to hire me to investigate his great-aunt's possessed cow. I could catch up on reading, finally, do the magical research I'd been itching to do for the past few years. I wouldn't live forever, and every hour that I wasted looking for UFOs in Joliet was one more hour I couldn't spend doing something I wanted to do.
It was a pretty damned tempting deal.
It was a very comfortable collar.
"Do you think I'm an idiot?" I said, and tossed the folder down on my desk.
Marcone's eyebrows went up, his mouth opening a little. "Is it the hours? Shall I lower the minimum to one hour per week? Per month?"
"It isn't the hours," I said.
He spread his hands. "What, then?"
"It's the company. It's the thought of a drug-dealing murderer having a claim on my loyalty. I don't like where your money comes from. It's got blood on it."
Marcone's cold eyes narrowed again. "Think carefully, Mr. Dresden. I won't make this offer twice."
"Let me make you an offer, John," I said. I saw the corner of his cheek twitch when I used his first name. "Tell me what you know, and I'll do my best to nail the killer before he comes for you."
"What makes you think I'm worried, Mr. Dresden?" Marcone said. He let a fine sneer color his words.
I shrugged. "Your business partner and his pet bodyguard get gutted last month. Spike gets torn to bits last night. And then you crawl out from under your rock to dangle information in my face to help me catch the killer and try to strong-arm me into becoming your bodyguard." I bent down and rested my elbows on the surface of the desk, then lowered my head until my eyes were a few inches from his. "Worried, John?"
His face twitched again, and I could smell him lying. "Of course not, Mr. Dresden. But you don't get where I have in life by being reckless."
"Just by being soulless, right?"
Marcone slammed his palms down on the desktop and stood. I rose with him, enough to stand over him, and to keep my eyes on his. "I am a man of business, Mr. Dresden. Would you prefer anarchy in the streets? Wars between rival crime lords? I bring order to that chaos."
"No. You just make the chaos more efficient and organized," I shot back. "Stick whatever pretty words you want onto it, but that doesn't change the fact that you're a thug, a fucking animal that should be in a cage. Nothing more."
Marcone's normally passionless face went white. His jaw clenched over words of rage. I pressed him, hard, my own anger spilling out with a passion gone out of control. I poured all of my recent frustration and fear into venomous words and hurled them at him like a handful of scrap metal.
"What's out there, John? What could it possibly be? Did you see Spike? Did you see how they'd torn his face off? Did you see the way they'd ripped his guts open? I did. I could smell what he had for dinner. Can you just imagine it happening to you next, John?"
"Don't call me that," Marcone said, his voice so quiet and cold that it set my momentum back on its heels. "If we were in public, Mr. Dresden, I'd have you killed for speaking that way to me."
"If we were in public," I told him, "you'd try." I drew myself up and glared down my nose at him, ignoring Hendricks's looming presence. "Now. Get the hell out of my office."
Marcone straightened his jacket and his tie. "I presume, Mr. Dresden, that you are going to continue your investigation with the police department."
"Of course."
Marcone walked around my desk, past me, and toward my door. Hendricks followed in his wake, huge and quiet. "Then in my own interests, I must accept your offer and aid the investigation however I might. Look up the name Harley MacFinn. Ask about the Northwest Passage Project. See where they lead you." He opened the door.
"Why should I believe you?" I asked him.
He looked back at me. "You have seen the deepest reaches of my soul, Mr. Dresden. You know me in a way so profound and intimate that I cannot yet fathom its significance. Just as I know you. You should know that I have every reason to help you, and that the information is good." He smiled again, wintry. "Just as you should know that it was unwise to make an enemy of me. It need not have been this way."
I narrowed my eyes. "If you know me so well, you should know that there's no other way it could be."
He pursed his lips for a moment, and did not try to refute me. "Pity," he said. "A true pity." And then he left. Hendricks gave me a pig-eyed little glare, and then he was gone, too. The door shut behind them.
I let out a long, shaking breath, and slumped against my desk. I covered my face with my hands, noticing as I did that they were shaking, too. I hadn't realized the depth of the disgust in me for Marcone and what he stood for. I hadn't realized how much it had sickened me to have my name associated with his. I hadn't realized how much I wanted to launch myself at the man and smash him in the nose with my fists.
I stayed that way for a few minutes, letting my heart beat hard, catching my breath. Marcone could have killed me. He could have had Hendricks tear me apart, or put a bullet in me right there---but he hadn't. That wasn't Marcone's way. He couldn't eliminate me now, not after working so hard to spread the word throughout the underworld that he and I had some sort of alliance. He would have to be more indirect, more subtle. Having Hendricks scatter my brains out on the floor wasn't the way to do it.
I thought over what he had said, and the implications of his acceptance of the deal I'd offered. He was in danger. Something had him scared, something that he didn't understand and didn't know how to fight. That was why he had wanted to hire me. As a wizard, I take the unknown and I turn it into something that can be measured. I take that cloak of terror off of things, make people able, somehow, to deal with them. Marcone wanted me to stand by him, to help him not be afraid of those things lurking in the dark.
Hell. It was only human.
I winced. I wanted to hate the man, but disgust, maybe anger, was as far as I could go. Too much of what he said was true. Marcone was a businessman. He had reduced violence in the streets---while sending the number of dollars made by criminals in this town soaring. He had protected the city's flesh while si-phoning away its blood, poisoning its soul. It changed nothing, nothing at all.
But to know that the man I knew, the tiger-souled predator, the businessman killer---to know that he was frightened of what I was about to go up against: That scared the hell out of me, and added an element of intimidation to the work I was doing that hadn't been present before.
That didn't change anything, either. It's all right to be afraid. You just don't let it stop you from doing your job.
I sat down on the desk, forced thoughts of blood and fangs and agonizing death from my mind, and started looking for the name Harley MacFinn and the Northwest Passage Project.
The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn't. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free.
"Satisfied, Chauncy?" I asked it.
The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, "Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities." Then it took a pair of wholly incongruous wire-frame spectacles from beneath a scale and perched them upon the beaklike extremity of its nose. "You have questions?"
I let out a sigh of relief, and sat down on the edge of the worktable in my lab. I had cleared away all the clutter from around the summoning ring in the floor, and I'd have to move it before I could clamber up out of my lab, but I didn't like to take chances. No matter how comfortable Chaunzaggoroth and I were with our working relationship, there was always a chance that I could have messed up the summoning. There were rules of protocol that demonic beings were obliged to follow---one of them was offering resistance to any mortal wizard who called them. Another was doing their best to end the life of the same wizard, should they be able to escape the confines of the circle.
All in all, squeezing information from faeries and spirits of the elements was a lot easier and safer---but Bob had turned up nothing in his search among the local spirits. They weren't always up on information to be had in the city, and Bob now resided in his skull again, exhausted and unable to help any further.
So I'd gone to the underworld for assistance. They know when you've been bad or good, and they make Santa Claus look like an amateur.
"I need information about a man named Harley MacFinn, Chauncy. And about something he was working on called the Northwest Passage Project."
Chauncy clacked his pincers pensively. "I see. Presuming I have this information, what is it worth to you?"
"Not my soul," I snorted. "So don't even start with that. Look, I could dig this up myself in a few days."
Chauncy tilted his head, birdlike. "Ah. But time is of the essence, yes? Come now, Harry Dresden. You do not call upon me lightly. The possible dangers, both from myself and from your own White Council, are far too great."
I scowled at him. "Technically," I said, "I'm not breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I'm not robbing you of your will, so I'm clear of the Fourth Law. And you didn't get loose, so I'm clear of the Seventh Law. The Council can bite me."
The bone ridges above Chauncy's eyes twitched. "Surely, that is merely a colorful euphemism, rather than a statement of desire."
"It is."
Chauncy pushed the glasses a bit higher up on his nose. "The moral and ethical ramifications of your attitudes are quite fascinating, Harry Dresden. I am continually amazed that you remain in the Council's good graces. Knowing full well that most of the Council would look the other way while their enforcers killed you, should they learn that you have willfully brought a demon into this world, you still summon me not once, but a half-dozen times. Your attitudes are much more contiguous with those of many of my brethren in the World Below---"
"And I should throw in with your side, accept the dark powers, et cetera, et cetera," I finished for him, with a sigh. "Hell's bells, Chauncy. Why do you keep on trying to sucker me into signing on with Downbelow, eh?"
Chauncy shrugged his bulky shoulders. "I admit that it would give me no small amount of status to gather a soul of your caliber into our legions," he said. "Additionally, it would free me from the onerous duties which make even these excruciating visits to your world seem pleasant by comparison."
"Well, you aren't getting my soul today," I told him. "So make me a counteroffer, or we can call a close to the negotiations and I can send you back."
The demon shuddered. "Yes, very well. Let us not be hasty, Harry Dresden. I have the information you need. Additionally, I have more information of which you are not aware, and which would be of great interest to you, and which I judge, additionally, may help to preserve your life and the lives of others. Given the situation, I do not think the price I will ask inappropriate: I wish another of your names."
I frowned. The demon had two of my names already. If he gained my whole name, from my own lips, he could use it in any number of magical applications against me. That didn't particularly disturb me---demons and their ilk had great difficulty in reaching out from the Nevernever, the spirit world beyond the physical one we inhabited, with sorcery.
But Chaunzaggoroth was a popular source of information among wizards who went to the underworld in need of it. What bothered me was the possibility that one of them would get it. Chauncy was correct---there were a lot of people on the White Council who would be happy to see me dead. If one of them got my name, there was the chance that they would use it against me, either to kill me or to magically force me to do something that would openly violate one of the Seven Laws and have me brought to trial and killed.
On the other hand, Chauncy never lied to me. If he said he had information that could save people's lives, he had it, and that's all there was to it. Hell, he might even know who the killer was, though a demon's grasp of individual human identity was somewhat shaky.
I decided to gamble.
"Done," I said. "All pertinent information on the subject of my inquiry in exchange for another of my names."
Chauncy nodded once. "Agreed."
"All right," I said. "Let's have the information on MacFinn and the Northwest Passage Project."
"Very well," Chauncy said. "Harley MacFinn is an heir to a considerable fortune made in coal mining and railroads at the turn of the twentieth century. He is one of the ten richest men in the country known as the United States. He served during the police action in Vietnam, and when he returned to this country he began divesting himself of business interests, merely accruing capital. His favorite color is red, his shoe size is---"
"We can skip the little details unless you think they will be really relevant," I said. "I could hear about his favorite food and his problems in middle school all day and it wouldn't help anything. " I got out my notebook and started taking notes.
"As you wish," Chauncy assented. "The object of his endeavors for the past several years has been the Northwest Passage Project. The project is an effort to buy enormous tracts of land, beginning in the central Rocky Mountains of the American Southwest, and moving northwest into Canada, to provide for an enormous, migratory-sized preserve for North American wildlife."
"He wants to make his own private playground out of the Rocky Mountains?" I blurted.
"No, Harry Dresden. He wishes to acquire the lands that are not already owned by the government, then donate them, provided the government guarantees that they will be used as a part of the Northwest Passage Project. He has considerable backing from environmentalist groups throughout the country, and support in your capital, as well, provided he can get the land."
"Wow," I said, impressed. "You said he has a lot of support. Who wants to stop him?"
"Industrial interests still looking to expand into the Northwest, " Chauncy said.
"Let me guess. James Harding III was one of them," I said, already writing it down.
"How did you know?" Chauncy asked.
"He was killed by a werewolf last month, along with his bodyguard. Several other people died as well."
Chauncy beamed. "You are a clever man, Harry Dresden. Yes. James Douglas Harding III was exceptionally interested in blocking MacFinn's efforts to acquire property. He came to Chicago to have negotiations with MacFinn, but died before they were complete."
I closed my eyes for a minute, thinking. "Okay. Harding comes to town to talk to MacFinn. Harding's in cahoots with Marcone, so maybe Marcone is hosting the talks. Harding and his bodyguard get et-all-up by a werewolf. So . . . MacFinn is the werewolf in question?"
Chauncy smiled, a rather intimidating expression. "MacFinn is a member of an ancient family line from an island known as Ireland. His family has a notable history. Sometime in the murky past, legend would have it, the man known as Saint Patrick cursed his ancestor to become a ravening beast at every full moon. The curse came with two addenda. First, that it would be hereditary, passing down to someone new each and every generation. And second, that the cursed line of the family would never, ever die out, lasting until the end of days."
I wrote that down as well. "A Catholic saint did that?"
Chauncy made a sound of distaste. "I am not responsible for the sorts of people the Other Side employs, wizard. Or the tactics they use."
"Considering the source, I think I'll note it as a biased opinion. Your folk have done a thousand times worse," I said.
"Well. True," Chauncy admitted. "But we tend to be quite honest about the sort of beings we are and the sorts of things we stand for, at least."
I snorted. "All right. This is making a lot more sense now. MacFinn is a loup-garou, one of the legendary monsters. He's trying to do some good in his spare time, make the big park for all the furry critters, but Harding puts himself in the way. MacFinn goes on a killing spree and wipes him out." I frowned. "Except that Harding was the last person to be murdered last month. You would have thought that if MacFinn was going to lose it, Harding would be the first to go." I peered at Chauncy. "Is MacFinn the murderer?"
"MacFinn is a murderer," Chauncy said. "But among humankind, he is one of many, and not the most monstrous."
"Is he the one who killed Marcone's bodyguard? The other people last month?"
"My information on that point is inconclusive, Harry Dresden, " Chauncy said. His black eyes gleamed. "Perhaps for the price of another name, I could inquire of my brethren and give you a more precise answer."
I scowled. "Not a chance. Do you know who murdered the other people, last month?"
"I do," Chauncy said. "Murder is one of the foremost sins, and we keep close track of sins."
I leaned forward intently. "Who was it?"
Chauncy laughed, a grating sound. "Really, Harry Dresden. In the first place, our bargain was for information regarding MacFinn and the Northwest Passage Project. In the second, I could not tell you the answer to such a direct question, and you know it. There is a limit to how much I may involve myself in mortal affairs."
I let out a breath of frustration and rubbed at my eyes. "Yeah, yeah. All right, Chauncy. What else can you tell me?"
"Only that Harley MacFinn was planning to meet with John Marcone tomorrow night, to continue the talks."
"Wait a minute. Is Marcone the major opponent to the project now?"
"Correct," Chauncy said. "He assumed control of a majority of the business interests shared with Harding upon Harding's death."
"So . . . Marcone had a fantastic motive to have Harding killed. It broadened his financial empire, and put him in a position to gouge MacFinn for as much money as he possibly could."
Chauncy adjusted his wire-frame spectacles. "Your reasoning would seem to be sound."
I thumped my pencil on my notebook, staring at what I had written. "Yeah. But it doesn't explain why everyone else got killed. Or who did it. Unless Marcone's got a pack of werewolves in his pocket, that is." I chewed on my lip, and thought about my encounter at the Full Moon Garage. "Or Streetwolves."
"Is there anything else?" Chauncy asked, his manner solicitous.
"Yes," I said. "Where can I find MacFinn?"
"Eight eighty-eight Ralston Place."
I wrote it down. "But that's right here in Chicago. In the Gold Coast."
"Where did you expect a billionaire to live when he was in Chicago, Harry Dresden? Now, I seem to have lived up to all of my obligations. I expect my payment now." Chauncy took a few restless steps back and forth within the circle. His time on earth was beginning to wear on him.
I nodded. "My name," I said, "is Harry Blackstone Dresden. " I carefully omitted "Copperfield" from the words, while leaving the tones and pronunciation the same.
"Harry. Blackstone. Dresden," Chauncy repeated carefully. "Harry as in Harry Houdini? Blackstone, the stage illusionist?"
I nodded. "My dad was a stage musician. When I was born, he gave me those names. They were always his heroes. I think if my mother had survived the birth, she would have slapped him for it." I made a few more notes on my page, getting ideas down on paper before they fled from memory.
"Indeed," Chauncy agreed. "Your mother was a most direct and willful woman. Her loss was a great sadness to all of us."
I blinked, startled, and the pencil fell from my fingers. I stared at the demon for a moment. "You . . . you knew my mother? You knew Margaret Gwendolyn Dresden?"
Chauncy regarded me without expression or emotion. "Many in the underworld were . . . familiar with her, Harry Blackstone Dresden, though under a different name. Her coming was awaited with great anticipation, but the Dark Prince lost her, in the end."
"What do you mean? What are you talking about?"
Chauncy's eyes gleamed with avarice. "Didn't you know about your mother's past, Mr. Dresden? A pity that we didn't have this conversation sooner. You might have added it into the bargain we made. Of course, if you would like to forfeit another name, to know all about your mother's past, her . . ." his voice twisted with distaste, "redemption, and the unnatural deaths of both mother and father, I am certain we can work something out."
I gritted my teeth in a sudden rush of childlike frustration. My heart pounded in my ears. My mother's dark past? I had expected that she was a wizardess, but I had never been able to prove anything, one way or another. Unnatural deaths? My father had perished in his sleep, of an aneurism, when I was young. My mother had died in childbirth.
Or had they?
A sudden, burning desire to know filled me, starting at my gut and rolling outward through my body---to know who my mother was, what she had known. She had left me her silver pentacle, but I knew nothing of the sort of person she was, other than what my gentle and too-generous father had told me before his death. What were my parents like? How had they perished and why? Had they been killed? Did they have enemies lurking out there, somewhere? If so, had I inherited them?
My mother's dark past. Did that explain my own fascination with the darker powers, my somewhat-less-than-sterling adherence to the rules of the White Council that I considered foolish or inconvenient?
I looked up at the demon, and felt like a sucker. I had been set up. He had intended, all along, to dangle this information in front of me as bait. He wanted to get my whole name, if he could, or more.
"I can show them to you, Harry Blackstone Dresden, as they really are," Chaunzaggoroth assured me, his voice dulcet. "You've never seen your mother's face. I can give that to you. You've never heard her voice. I can let you hear that as well. You know nothing of what sort of people your parents were---or if you have any other family out there. Family, Harry Blackstone Dresden. Blood. Every bit as tormented and alone as you are . . ."
I stared at the demon's hideous form and listened to his soothing, relaxing voice. Family. Was it possible that I had a family? Aunts? Uncles? Cousins? Others, like me, perhaps, moving through the secret societies of the wizards, hidden from the view of the mortal world?
"The price is comparatively low. What need have you for your immortal soul when your body is finished with it? What harm to pass on to me only one more name? This is not information easily gained, even by my kind. You may not have the chance to garner it again." The demon pressed his pincers against the barrier of the conjuring circle. His beaklike maw fairly trembled with eagerness.
"Forget it," I said quietly. "No deal."
Chaunzaggoroth's jaw dropped open. "But, Harry Blackstone Dresden---" he began.
I didn't realize that I was shouting until I saw him flinch. "I said forget it! You think I'm some kind of simp for you to sucker in, darkspawn? Take what you have gained and go, and feel lucky that I do not send you home with your bones torn from your body or your beak ground into dust."
Chaunzaggoroth's eyes flashed with rage and he hurled himself against the barrier again, howling with blood lust and fury. I extended my hand and snarled, "Oh no you don't, you slimy little shit head." The demon's will strained against mine, and though sweat burst out on my forehead, I came out ahead once more.
Chaunzaggoroth began to grow smaller and smaller, howling out his frustrated rage. "We are watching you, wizard!" he screamed. "You walk through shadows and one night you will slip and fall. And when you do, we will be there. We will be waiting to bring you down to us. You will be ours in the end."
He went on like that until he shrank to the size of a pinpoint and vanished with a little, imploding sound. I let my hand drop and lowered my head, breathing hard. I was shaking all over, and not only with the cold of my laboratory. I had badly misjudged Chaunzaggoroth, thought him a somewhat reliable, if dangerous, source of information, willing to do reasonable business. But the rage, the fury, the frustrated malice that had been in his final offer, those last words, had shown his true colors. He had lied to me, deceived me about his true nature, played me along like a sucker and then tried to set the hook, hard. I felt like such an idiot.
The phone began to ring upstairs. I stirred into sudden motion, shoving stacks of things out of my way, pushing past them and over them, to reach the stepladder stairs that led up to my apartment. I hurried up them, my notebook in one hand, and caught the phone on its fifth ring. My apartment was dark. Night had fallen while I had interviewed the demon.
"Dresden," I said, puffing.
"Harry," Murphy said, her voice weak. "We've got another one."
"Son of a bitch," I said. "I'm coming. Give me the address." I set down the notebook and held my pencil ready to write.
Murphy's tone was numb. "Eight eighty-eight Ralston Place. Up in the Gold Coast."
I froze, staring at the address I had written down on the notebook. The address the demon had given me.
"Harry?" Murphy said. "Did you hear me?"
"I heard," I told her. "I'm coming, Murph." I hung up the phone and headed out into the light of the full moon overhead.
Eight eighty-eight Ralston was a townhouse in the Gold Coast, the richest area of Chicago. It was set on its own little plot, surrounded by trees that hid the house from view almost entirely. High hedges, worked around the house in a small garden, added to the concealment as I drove up the white pebble drive, and parked the Beetle at the rear of a small fleet of police cars and emergency vehicles.
The strobing blue lights were almost comforting, by now. I'd seen them so many times that it felt, in an unsettling way, like a homecoming. Murphy had called me in early---I didn't see the forensics van yet, and only now were officers putting up yellow tape around the property.
I got out of my car, dressed in my jeans, button-down shirt, and boots again, my old black duster flapping around my calves. The wind was brisk, cold. The moon was riding high overhead, barely visible through the city's haze of pollution.
A chill ran down my neck, and I stopped, looking at the rows and rows of elegantly illuminated hedge sculptures, flower beds, and rows of shrubbery around me. I was abruptly certain that someone was out in the darkness; I could feel eyes on me.
I stared out at the night, sweeping my gaze slowly around. I could see nothing, but I would have bet money that there was someone out there. After a moment, the sense of being watched faded, and I shivered. I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked quickly toward the townhouse.
"Dresden," someone called, and I looked up to see Carmichael coming down the front stairs of the townhouse toward me. Carmichael was Murphy's right hand in Special Investigations. Shorter than average, rounder than average, slobbier than average, and with piggier eyes than average, Carmichael was a skeptic, a doubter, and a razor-sharp cop. He came down the stairs in his soup-stained old tie and shirtsleeves. "It's about fucking time. Jesus Christ, Dresden." He wiped a hand over his sweating brow.
I frowned down at Carmichael as we went up the stairs side by side. "That's the nicest greeting you've ever given me, I think," I said. "You change your mind about me being a fake?"
Carmichael shook his head. "No. I still think you're full of shit with this wizard-magic business. But Christ almighty, there are times when I wish you weren't."
"You never can tell," I said, my voice dry. "Where's Murphy?"
"Inside," Carmichael said, his mouth twisting with distaste. "You go on up the stairs. The whole place belongs to this guy. Murphy figures you might know something. I'm going to stay here and bog down the Feds when they show."
I glanced at him. "She still worried about looking bad for Internal Affairs?"
Carmichael grimaced. "Those assholes in IA would be all over her if she kicked the Feds out. Christ almighty, I get sick of city politics sometimes."
I nodded agreement and started up the stairs.
"Hey, Dresden," Carmichael said.
I looked over my shoulder at him, expecting the familiar jeers and insults. He was studying me with bright, narrow eyes. "I hear things about you and John Marcone. What's the deal?"
I shook my head. "No deal. He's lying scum."
Carmichael studied me intently, and then nodded. "You ain't much of a liar, Dresden. I don't think you could keep a straight face about something like this. I believe you."
"But you don't believe me when I say I'm a wizard?" I asked.
Carmichael grimaced and looked away. "Do I look like a fucking moron to you? Huh? You better get upstairs. I'll make some noise when Denton and the Stepford agents get here."
I turned to go and saw Murphy standing at the head of the stairs in a crisp grey business jacket and slacks, with sensible low heels and jewelry the color of steel. Her earrings seemed to be little more than bright beads of silver in her ears, which I had never really noticed when she had worn her golden hair long. Murphy's earlobes were cute. She'd kill me, just for thinking it.
"About time, Dresden. Get up here." Her voice was hard, angry. She vanished from the top of the stairway, and I took the rest of the stairs two at a time to catch up with her.
The apartment (though it was too big for the word to really apply) was brightly lit, and smelled, very faintly, of blood. Blood has a sweet sort of metallic odor. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and mine snapped to attention at once. There was another smell as well, maybe incense of some kind, and the fresh scent of the wind. I turned down a short hall at the top of the stairs, and followed Murphy into what was apparently a master bedroom, where I found the source of all the scents.
There was no furniture inside the master bedroom---and it was huge, large enough to make you wince at how far you'd have to go to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. There was no carpeting. There were no decorations on the walls. There was no glass in the huge, single-pane window, letting in the October wind. The full moon shone down through it like a picture in a frame.
What the room did have was blood. There was blood all over, scattered in droplets and splashed in spurts against one wall. The scarlet footprints of something like a large wolf led in a straight line toward the shattered window. In the center of the room were the remains of a greater circle of summoning, its three rings of symbols carefully wrought in white chalk upon the wooden floor, burning sticks of incense interspersed among the symbols of the second ring.
What was left of Kim Delaney lay naked and supine on the bloodstained floor a few feet from the circle. The expression of shock and surprise on her face wouldn't change until rigor set in. Her dark, once-glittering eyes stared up at the ceiling, and her lips were parted, as though in the middle of an apology.
A large, wheel section of flesh beneath her chin was missing, and with it Kim's larynx and trachea. Bloody red meat was showing, the ragged ends of arteries and torn sections of muscle, and pale white bones gleamed at the bottom of the wound. Long rakes down her body had opened her like a Ziploc bag, leaving her covered in scarlet.
Something went "click" in my head. Someone threw some kind of switch that just turned off my emotions entirely and immersed me in a surreal haze. I couldn't be seeing this. It simply couldn't be real. It had to be some sort of game or hoax, in which the actors would start giggling in a few moments, unable to contain the mirth of their prank.
I waited. But no one started giggling. I wiped at my forehead with my hand and found cold sweat there. My fingers began to shake.
Murphy said, her voice still tight with anger, "Apparently, the incense set off the fire alarm in the hall. When the fire department got here, no one answered, so they came on in. They found her up here, around eight o'clock. She was still warm."
Eight o'clock. When I had been talking to the demon. Moonrise?
Behind me, Murphy closed the door to the bedroom. I turned to her, away from the grisly corpse. There was anger in every inch of her, in the way she glared at me.
"Murph," I said. "I don't know if I can do this."
"What's there to figure?" Murphy said. "There's a monster in the middle of the circle. I figure it's one of those loup-garou from your report. I figure it's Harley MacFinn, the owner of this house. Someone who knows he's going to go nuts when the moon rises. The girl tries to hold the monster inside the magic circle, right? Something goes wrong when MacFinn goes furry; he gets out of the circle, wastes her, then leaves."
"Uh-huh," I said, without turning around to look at Kim's body again. "It makes sense." And I told her what I had learned from the demon about Harley MacFinn, the Northwest Passage Project, and his antagonism with Marcone's business interests. Murphy listened to me in utter silence. When I was finished, she nodded, and turned to leave the room.
"Follow," she said shortly.
I followed, almost on her heels. I didn't turn around to see the room again before I left.
She led me down the hall, into another bedroom, this one furnished and neatly kept. "Come here," she said, moving to a dresser. I did, and she handed me a photograph of a middle-aged, starkly handsome man, his skin deeply tanned, the bones of his face gaunt and sharp. He was smiling.
Beside him in the picture was the amber-eyed woman from the department store where I'd run across the Alphas. She was also smiling. Her teeth were very white, very even, and her dark skin and silver-peppered hair went well with the man beside her. I chewed on my lip for a second, trying to think.
"That's Harley MacFinn," Murphy said. "Matches the picture on his driver's license. I didn't turn up any ID on the woman next to him, though." She studied my face critically. "She matches the description of the woman you said you saw in the department store, though. The one who followed us back from the scene in Rosemont. Is that her?"
I nodded. "Yeah. That's her."
Murphy nodded, took the picture from me, and set it back on the dresser. "Follow," she said again and walked out. I stared after her. What was wrong with Murphy? Had the scene unsettled her so much? I shook my head, still stunned from what I had seen, from too many facts coming together all at once, slam-bang in my brain.
"Murph, wait," I said. "Stop a minute. What's going on?"
She didn't answer me, just shot me a glare over her shoulder and continued walking. I hurried to catch up with her.
We went down what looked like a servant's narrow spiral staircase, down into the basement. She led me to the back of a storage room and pushed open a heavy, steel door there that opened onto a small, stark chamber, all of concrete, with no other exits. In the center of the chamber was another three-ring summoning circle, but this one's symbols had been made from silver and set into the concrete of the floor. Short bars of what looked like a mixture of silver and obsidian were interspersed around the second circle, creating what would, if the circle was functional, be a very formidable barrier.
But the symbols had been marred, torn, broken. Several from the critical inner ring had been pried up from the floor and were simply missing. Some of the bars had been broken. The circle, as it was, was nonfunctional and worthless---but whole, it would have served to contain Harley MacFinn when he shifted into his beast form. The room was a prison he had created for himself, something to contain the fury of the beast inside of him.
But someone had intentionally marred the circle, made the prison useless.
And I abruptly understood Kim Delaney's request. She had to have known Harley MacFinn, maybe through her environmental activism. She must have learned of his curse, and wanted to help him. When I had refused to help her, she had attempted to re-create the greater summoning circle upstairs in the bedroom, to hold in MacFinn once the moon rose. As I had warned her would happen, she had failed. She hadn't had the knowledge necessary to understand how such a construct would function, and consequently, she hadn't been able to make it work.
MacFinn had killed her. Kim was dead because I had refused to share my knowledge with her, because I hadn't given her my help. I had been so secure in my knowledge and wisdom; withholding such secrets from her had been the action of a concerned and reasoned adult speaking to an overeager child. I couldn't believe my own arrogance, the utter confidence with which I had condemned her to death.
I started to shake, harder, too many things pressing against my head, my heart. I could feel the pressure, somewhere inside of me, that switch on the inside of my head quivering, getting ready to flick back beneath a tide of raging anger, fury, regret, self-hatred. I took deep breaths and closed my eyes, trying not to let it happen.
I opened my eyes and looked up at Murphy. God, I needed to talk to her. I needed a friend. I needed someone to listen, to tell me it would be all right whether it was the truth or not. I needed someone to let me unload on them, to keep me from flying apart.
She regarded me with cold, angry eyes.
"Karrin," I whispered.
She drew from her pocket a crumpled piece of paper. She unfolded it, and held it up to me, so that I could see Kim Delaney's graceful handwriting, the sketch of the summoning circle that she had brought to me in McAnally's. The sketch I had refused to tell Kim about. The sketch I had crumpled into a little ball and tossed on the floor, and which Murphy had picked up, absently, just to get the trash out of people's way.
And I realized why there was so much anger in Murphy's eyes.
I stared at the sketch. "Karrin," I began again. "Stars above, you've got to listen to me." I took the sketch from her hands, my fingers trembling.
"Harry," she said, in a calm tone. "You lying bastard," and on the word she drove her fist into my stomach, hard, doubling me over. The motion put my head within easy reach, and her fist took me across the jaw in a right cross that sent me to the floor like a lump of wet pasta, stars dancing in my vision.
I was only dimly aware of her taking the sketch back from me. She twisted my arms painfully behind my back, and snapped her handcuffs around my wrists. "You promised me," she said, her voice furious. "You promised. No secrets. You lied to me all along. You played me like a sucker the entire while. Goddammit, Dresden, you're involved in this and people are dying."
"Murph," I mumbled. "Wait."
She grabbed my hair, jerked my head back, and slammed me across the jaw again, near-berserk anger lending her strength. My head swam, and blackness closed over my vision for several seconds.
"No more talking. No more lies," I heard her say, and she dragged me to my feet, shoved my face and chest against a wall, and began searching me for weapons. "No more people torn up like meat on a block. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
She took my blasting rod. My shield bracelet. The energy ring. Even my lump of chalk. Her voice went on, hard, cold, and professional, letting me know my rights.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the stone wall. Next to my head, it was the softest thing in the room. I didn't try to fight or to explain.
What was the point?
Walking down stairs with your hands fastened behind your back is more difficult than you would think. You depend upon your arms for balance, whether you realize it or not. With my hands cuffed at the small of my back, and Murphy walking me up the narrow servant's staircase, and then down the front stairs of MacFinn's building in front of a gaggle of staring police officers, my balance was gone.
As we came down, I could hear arguing voices. "You want to get in my face about this?" Carmichael demanded. "Look. I'm doing my job. My boss said no one was to go up, so no one goes up. Do I need to use shorter words or what?"
I looked up to see Denton towering over Carmichael, the veins in his forehead athrob, his three associates spread out in a fan behind him. "You are interfering with a duly appointed officer executing his duties," Denton snarled. "Get out of my way, Detective Carmichael. Or do you want to get added to Internal Affairs' to-do list along with your boss?"
"It's all right, Ron," Murphy said. "I'm done with my business up there, anyway."
Carmichael looked up at me and stared, his mouth opening. Denton and his crew looked, too. I saw Denton's face twist in surprise, and then close again, hedging out any emotion from his expression. Roger, the redheaded kid who worked for Denton, was staring at me openly, his jaw dropped. Benn, the woman who had attacked Murphy last night, regarded me with an almost bored expression, and Wilson, the overweight one, let out a satisfied snort.
"Lieutenant," Carmichael said. "You sure about this?"
"He was arguing with the most recently deceased last night. I can connect him to at least one resident of the house, as well as some of the . . . decorations there. I'm taking him in for obstructing and for conspiracy to commit murder. Put him in the car, Carmichael, and then get your ass upstairs." Murphy gave me a sharp push toward Carmichael, and I stumbled. Carmichael caught me.
"So let's go, Denton," Murphy said, and turned and stalked away. Denton gave me an expressionless glance, and stepped after Murphy, beckoning his companions to follow.
Carmichael shook his head and walked me to one of the police cars. "Fuck, Dresden. And here I was getting ready to throw in on your side. Guess I'm just a sucker for the underdog."
Carmichael unlocked the back of the car and put his hand on the back of my head as I bent down to get into it. "Watch your head. Christ, what happened to your jaw?"
I sat down in the back of the car and looked straight ahead. I didn't answer him. Carmichael stared at me for a while, and then shook his head. "We'll have someone drive you downtown as soon as the scene is secure. You can get in touch with your lawyer, then."
I kept my eyes forward and still didn't answer him.
Carmichael studied me some more, then stood and shut me into the car.
I closed my eyes.
I have felt low before in my life, have experienced events that left me broken and groveling and wishing I was dead. That was pretty much how I felt now, too. It wasn't that I hadn't found the killer---I've been beaten before, taken the blow on the chin, and come out fighting the next round. I can roll with the punches as well as anyone. But I hated feeling that I had betrayed a friend.
I had promised Murphy that I would keep no secrets from her---and I hadn't. Not really. But I had been stupid. I should have been putting pieces together more quickly, more instinctively. Perhaps I had some excuse in that I had been distracted by nearly having my head blown off at the Full Moon Garage, that I had been distracted by my soulgaze upon the Streetwolves' leader, and the knowledge that he wanted to kill me. But it wasn't a good enough excuse to clear things with Murphy. I wasn't sure anything would have been. I felt alone. I felt frustrated. I felt like shit.
And I felt worse, a moment later, when I looked out the car window at the full moon and realized something that I should have put together an hour before---the real killer or killers were still out there.
MacFinn couldn't have been responsible for all of the deaths the previous month. Two of the murders had occurred on the nights before and after the full moon. If MacFinn's curse was indeed to become a ravening beast during the full moon, he could not have murdered either of last month's victims, or Spike at the Varsity last night.
Which begged the question: Who had done the killings?
I didn't have any answers. If the dark-haired woman who had led the Alphas was indeed connected with MacFinn, could she have been responsible? Something wolflike had attacked me in the abandoned department store when all the lights had been out---had it been her? One of the Alphas? Perhaps that would explain how the other murders happened.
But if it had been true, why hadn't the killer finished me off while I was floundering in the dark, virtually helpless?
More and more questions, and no answers.
Not that it mattered to me now. A nice, quiet jail cell didn't sound too bad, once I thought about it. At least it would keep the criminal element off of my back. Provided they didn't shut me up with a four-hundred-pound con named "Hump" or anything.
And then an odd feeling crept over me, derailing my train of thought. Once more, the hairs on my neck were standing up. Someone was watching me.
I looked around. There was no one in sight. All of the police were inside the house. I was alone in the back of the patrol car, with my hands bound. I was helpless and alone, and I suddenly became very aware of the fact that Harley MacFinn had yet to be found or apprehended. He was still lurking in the night, unable to keep from tearing apart anyone he saw.
I thought of Spike's torn corpse. Of poor Kim Delaney, covered in her own blood upstairs in the townhouse. I added imaginary (and far more horrible) images of half a dozen other victims, stacking scene upon scene of blood and death in my mind within a few seconds.
I broke out in a cold sweat and looked out the other window.
Directly into a pair of brilliant, feral, amber eyes.
I yelled and flinched away, lifting my legs to kick should something come rushing through the vehicle's window. Instead, the door opened, and the dark-haired, amber-eyed woman from the department store said, "Be quiet, Mr. Dresden, or I will not be able to rescue you."
I blinked at her, over my upraised knees. "Huh?"
"Rescue you, Mr. Dresden. Get out of the car and come with me. And quickly, before the police return." She peered past me, toward the house. "There is not much time."
"Are you crazy?" I demanded. "I don't even know who the hell you are."
"I am Harley MacFinn's fiancée, Miss West," she said. "I am called Tera."
I shook my head. "I can't leave. I'd be buying more trouble than you could imagine."
Her amber eyes glinted. "You are the only one who can stop my fiancé, Mr. Dresden. You cannot do that from a jail cell."
"I'm not the Lone Ranger," I snapped in reply. "I'm a hired consultant. And I don't think the city is going to foot the bill for this sort of thing."
Tera West's teeth showed. "If money is your concern, I assure you that it is not a problem, Mr. Dresden. Time presses. Will you come, or not?"
I studied her face. She had clean, striking features, exceptional more than attractive. There were crow's-feet at the edges of her eyes, though they were the only sign of age on her that I could see. There was, along the edge of her forehead, at the hairline, a long, slender, purpling bruise.
"You," I said. "It was you who attacked me in the department store. I hit you, and you took my rod away from me."
She glared at me. "Yes," she said.
"You're a werewolf."
"And you," she said, "are a wizard. And we have no more time." She crouched a bit lower, staring past me. I looked in that direction, and saw Denton and his cronies exiting the townhouse, engaged in an animated discussion. "Your friend," she said, "the police detective, is close to finding my fiancé. Do you really want her to be the one to face him? Is she prepared to deal with what she will find? Or will she die, as the others did?"
Dammit. The bitch (no pun intended) was right. I was the one who was capable of actually doing something about MacFinn. If Murphy was the one to catch up to him first, people would get killed. She was a fantastic cop, and was becoming more adept at dealing with the supernatural, but she wasn't able to handle a major werewolf berserker. I turned back to Tera. "If I go with you, you'll take me to MacFinn."
She stopped in the midst of turning to leave. "When I can. At dawn. If you think you can create the circle, hold him in when the moon again rises. If you can help him."
I nodded once. My decision was made. "I can. I will."
"She who was called Kim Delaney said the same thing," Tera West said, and spun on her heels to head away from me, crouched low to the ground.
I rolled out of the backseat and followed Tera West out into the shrubberies and garden shadows around the building, away from the police cars and the lights.
Someone shouted in surprise, somewhere behind me. Then there was a cry of "Stop!" I just stood and ran, as fast as I could, to get out of the lights and the line of sight of any possible shooters.
Apparently, the one shout was all the warning I was going to get. Gunfire erupted behind me as I ran. Bullets tore up the dirt next to my feet. I think I started screaming without slowing down, hunching my shoulders and ducking my head as best I could.
I was maybe five feet away from the sheltering shadows behind the hedges when something slammed into my shoulder and threw me through the hedge and out the other side. I landed in a roll and stumbled halfway back to my feet. There was a second of screaming, confused input from my shoulder, as though my joints could suddenly hear a welter of sound, feel a broad variety of sensation and texture beneath my skin. And then my shoulder went numb entirely, and my vision started spinning. I reached out a hand to support myself as I started to fall---and remembered that my wrists were still cuffed behind me. I went into the turf, felt the grass against my cheek.
"He's down, he's down!" came a cold, female voice---Agent Benn's, I thought. "Take him!"
There was no warning of presence, just the feeling of someone jerking me up to my feet by my duster. I felt Tera's hand slide beneath my jacket, then vanish as she pressed it to the numbed area of my arm.
"You are not bleeding badly," Tera said, her voice calm. "You were shot in the shoulder. Not the leg. Run or die." Then she turned and started making her way through the hedges.
Some encouragement---but I had a hunch I would be feeling a lot worse a few minutes from now. So I swallowed the sickly taste of fear and loped after Tera West as best I could.
We started a game of shadow-haunted hide-and-seek in the little garden, Tera and me against the agents behind us. She moved like a wraith, in utter silence, smooth and steady in the black shadows and silver light of the moon overhead. She immediately cut into the hedges, taking lefts and rights every few paces. She did not slow down for me, and I was somehow very certain that MacFinn's fiancée would not stop and wait for me should I fall. She wouldn't hesitate to leave me behind if I could not keep the pace.
I did it for a while. It wasn't even too hard. Oh, I felt a little out of breath, a little hampered by the handcuffs, but other than that, it was almost as though I hadn't been shot, aside from the trickling warmth I could feel sliding down my ribs and over my belly. Endorphins---what a rush.
Our pursuers plunged into the maze of hedges, shrubs, and statuary, but my guide seemed to have an uncanny knack for avoiding them. She kept to the darkest parts of the garden as we went, checking behind her to make sure I was keeping the pace.
I wasn't sure how much time passed that way, ghosting through the darkness while our pursuers struggled to coordinate their efforts and remain quiet at the same time, but it couldn't have been long. I've read somewhere that the initial shock of gunshot injuries always wears off after a few moments---besides, I was out of shape. I couldn't have kept up with Tera West for long. She was that fast, that good.
My shoulder began to pound double time to my laboring heart as we emerged from the last of the hedges to the street outside---and the eight-foot wrought iron fence that surrounded the property. I slid to a halt and stumbled against the fence, wheezing.
Tera looked over her shoulder, her amber eyes bright beneath the moon. She was breathing through her nose silently, the crouched run having not tired her in the least, it seemed.
"I can't climb the fence," I said. The pain from my shoulder was starting to become very real now---it felt like a runner's cramp, only higher up. "There's no way. Not with my hands cuffed."
Tera nodded once. "I will lift you," she said.
I stared at her, through a growing haze of pain. Then sighed. "You'd better hurry, then," I said. "I'm about to pass out."
She took the words in stride and said, "Lean against the fence. Keep your body stiff." Then she seized my ankles. I did my best to follow her directions, and she heaved, straining with effort.
For a second, nothing happened. And then she started, very slowly, to move me up, my good shoulder against the fence. She kept pressing my ankles higher, until I bent forward at the waist, scrabbled with my legs for a second---and then tumbled gracelessly to the ground on the far side of the fence. I hit the ground, and as I did a nuclear weapon went off in my shoulder, white fire, blinding heat.
I sucked in a breath and tried not to scream, but some sound must have escaped. There was a shout from somewhere behind me, and the sound of voices converging on our position.
Tera grimaced and turned to face the oncoming voices.
"Hurry up," I gasped. "Climb it and let's go."
She shook her head, a stirring of dark hair. "No time. They are here."
I gritted my teeth until they creaked and got my feet underneath me. She was right. The oncoming voices were close. Someone, Benn again, I thought, shouted out orders not to move. If Tera tried to clamber over the fence now, she'd be a perfect target at the top. The pursuers were too close. Tera didn't stand much chance of escaping, and if she didn't, I wouldn't make it far. I'd be caught, and in more trouble than ever---and MacFinn would be on a rampage, with no one to oppose him.
I blinked sweat out of my eyes and knelt down as my blood pattered to the sidewalk. Little curls of steam came up where it hit the cold concrete.
I took a breath and drew in every bit of will I could summon, drew in the pain and my fear and sick frustration and shoved it all into a hard little ball of energy.
"Ventas veloche," I murmured. "Ubrium, ubrium." I repeated the words in a breathless chant, curling my fingers in toward my palm as I did.
The curls of steam from my blood began to thicken and gather into dense tendrils of mist and fog. Back along our trail, where more of my blood had spilled, more fog arose. For a few seconds, it was nothing, just a low and slithering movement along the ground---and then it erupted forth, billows of fog rising to cover the ground as the energy rushed out of me, covering Tera from my sight and causing shouts of confusion and consternation to come from the law officials pursuing us.
I dropped to my side, overwhelmed by pain and fatigue.
There was a whisper of sound, a creak of wrought metal, and then a light thump as Tera West landed beside me, invisible in the fog though she was only a few feet away. She moved toward me, and then I saw her expression, her eyes wide with wonder, the first emotion I had seen on her face.
"Wizard," she whispered.
"Don't wear it out," I mumbled. And then everything went black.
I woke up someplace dark and warm. But then I opened my eyes, and it wasn't dark anymore. Just dim.
I was in a hotel room, a cheap one, lying on my back in a double bed. Heavy curtains were drawn, but cheap curtain rods sagged in the middle and let light in from outside. I felt that I had been lying there for a while. I took a deep breath and it made my shoulder begin a dull, pounding throb. I moaned, before I could think to keep quiet. I'm not a wimp; it just hurt that bad. My throat was parched, my lips chapped.
I turned my head, which made my jaw ache where Murphy had socked me. My left shoulder was covered in thick, white bandages and wrapped firmly in tape. It looked clean and neat, except for the bruises that I could see spreading out toward my chest and down my arm from beneath the bandages. As a side note, I noticed that I was naked, and the list of candidates for who could have undressed me was awfully short.
Beyond my shoulder, on the nightstand beside the bed, was a pile of miscellany. A book entitled SAS Survival Manual lay open to a page with several black and white illustrations of bandaging techniques. Beside it were some empty cardboard boxes whose labels declared them to have once contained cotton gauze wrapping, medical tape, that sort of thing. A brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide lay on its side atop a hacksaw with a nicked blade. A paper sack sat on the floor beside the bed, its top folded closed.
I moved my right hand up to rub at my aching head. One bracelet of Murphy's handcuffs hung around my wrist, the chain swinging from the base of the bracelet, where it had apparently been severed by the hacksaw. The other bracelet was down on my left wrist. I could feel it as a dull, throbbing band around the lower part of my arm.
I did my best not to move too much, but the pain didn't go away. After a few minutes, I decided that my wound wasn't going to start hurting any less, so I sat up. Slowly. Rising wasn't too much more trouble, though my legs shook a little. I made it to the bathroom and made use of the facilities, then splashed water on my face with my right hand.
This time, she didn't surprise me. I heard her move out of the darkness of the back corner of the room. I glanced up into Tera West's amber-colored eyes in the mirror and said, "Tell me I didn't get lucky last night."
Her expression never blinked, as though the insinuation had flown past her. She was still dressed in the same clothes and still held herself with the same relaxed composure she had always displayed. "You were very lucky," she said. "The bullet went through the muscle and missed the bone and the artery. You will live."
I scowled. "I don't feel so lucky."
Tera shrugged. "Pain is to be endured. It ends or it does not." I saw her consider my back, and then lower portions. "You are in reasonably good condition. You should be able to withstand it."
I felt a hot rush of blood to my face, and I fumbled for a towel and awkwardly slung it around my hips. "Are you the one who bandaged me? And, uh . . ." I made a vague gesture with the fingers of the hand that was holding the towel and preserving my modesty.
She nodded. "I am. And I have procured clothing for you that is not soaked in blood. You must dress, so that we may help my fiancé."
I turned to face her, and tried out my best glower. She didn't twitch an eyebrow. "What time is it?"
She shrugged. "Late afternoon. The sun will set soon, and the moon will rise soon after. We have no time to waste if we are to reach him before the change."
"Do you know where he is?"
She shrugged again. "I know him."
I let out a breath and slowly walked past her. I went to the paper bag on the floor next to the bed. Inside it, I found a pair of enormous purplish sweatpants and a white T-shirt with Old Glory flying on it in rippling, metallic colors, subtitled: INVEST IN AMERICA---BUY A CONGRESSMAN. I wrinkled up my nose at the sweatpants, liked the shirt, and fumbled myself into the clothing, ripping off price tags as I went.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"A hotel in East Chicago," she said.
I nodded. "How did you pay for it?"
"I used cash. MacFinn told me that the police can track the plastic cards."
I squinted at her. "Yeah. They can." I rubbed a hand over my head and went to the mirror again to study myself. I was walking more easily now---the pain wasn't any less, but I was beginning to get more used to it. "Do you have any ibuprofen, anything like that?"
"Drugs," she said. "No." She picked up a set of rental-car keys and turned toward the door.
"Stop," I told her. She turned to me, her eyes narrowed.
"We are going now," she said.
"We are not going," I replied, "until I have a few answers."
Her eyebrows furrowed, and she glared at me. Then she turned and walked out of the room, letting in a brief flood of orange-tinted sunlight before the door slammed behind her.
I considered the door for a moment. Then I sat down on the bed and waited.
Perhaps three minutes passed. Then she reappeared. "Now," she said, "we will leave."
I shook my head. "I told you no. Not until I get some answers."
"MacFinn will answer your questions," Tera told me. "Now, you must leave this place."
I snorted and folded my arms over my chest. My shoulder took fire and I wobbled on the bed before I lowered my left arm again. I left the right one folded across my chest, but it just didn't have the same effect. "Where is MacFinn? Why did he kill Marcone's business partner and his bodyguard? Or did he kill them at all?"
"You will leave this pl---" Tera began.
"Who are you? Why did the pair of you mess up the first circle, the one in your basement? How did you know Kim Delaney?"
Tera West snarled and seized me by the front of my shirt. "You will leave this place now," she said, glaring into my eyes.
"Why should I?" I snarled, and for once I didn't avert my eyes. I stared into her gleaming amber eyes and braced myself for the impact of looking into her soul, and for her to peer into mine.
Instead, nothing happened.
That, in itself, was enough to make my jaw drop incredulously. I continued the stare, and she didn't blink, didn't turn away---and didn't fall into soulgaze with me. I shuddered in reaction. What was going on? Why didn't the 'gaze begin? There were only two kinds of people whose eyes I could meet for more than a second or two: the people who had already met my eyes in a soulgaze were one kind; inhuman beings from the Nevernever were the other.
I had never looked upon Tera West's soul before. I remembered a soulgaze, every time it happened. The experience wasn't the sort of thing you could forget. That only left one conclusion.
Whoever she was---whatever she was, Tera West wasn't human.
"We will leave now," she growled.
I felt a surge of defiant grumpiness course through me. "Why should I?" I whispered back.
"Because I have called the police and told them that you are here, that you are acting irrational and dangerous, and that you possess a weapon. They will be here momentarily. I think that the police might be feeling threatened, given all the recent deaths. They will be likely to shoot you rather than take chances." She let go of my shirt with a little push, and stalked out of the room.
I sat on the bed for about five seconds. Then I rose and hobbled after her, taking time to snatch my duster from where it was draped over a chair. There were holes in the upper left arm, one in the front of the sleeve, one in the back, and it was crusty with dried blood that didn't much show against the black canvas. It was disgusting, but hey, it was mine. The boots and socks I had been wearing last night were next to it, and I snagged them, too.
Outside, it was late afternoon. The streets and highways would soon be crowded with commuters going home from work. Tera had rented a beat-up old car, probably from an independent rental business, rather than from one of the major chains---good move on her part. It would draw things out while the police methodically went through agency after agency, looking for someone of her description, and they always started with the big places first.
I studied her as she got in the car. She was tall and lean and pretty in a knife-edge sort of way. Her eyes moved around constantly---not nervously or randomly, but with the cool precision of someone making herself aware of everything surrounding her at all times. Her hands were scarred, long-fingered, and strong. The bruise on her head, where I had smacked her with my blasting rod the night before (no, two nights before; I had lost a day sleeping in the hotel room) was probably hurting like hell, but she didn't seem to notice it.
She drove us out onto the streets of East Chicago, one of the distant suburbs of the big city, down at the south end of Lake Michigan, finally turning off into a quiet drive beside a sign that read WOLF LAKE PARK.
Tera West made me nervous. She had appeared from nowhere to save me from the back of a police car, true, but what were her intentions? Was she really trying to help her fiancé keep from falling victim to his family curse again? Or were the two of them working together to remove anyone who could rebuild the magical circle that could contain MacFinn and render him harmless? That would make sense, given that once Kim Delaney was dead, they came after me.
On the other hand, that didn't fit with a lot of the other facts. MacFinn, if he was truly a loup-garou, changed into a beast only during the nights of the full moon. At least half a dozen people had been killed when the moon was waxing full, but not yet all the way there, or after it had been full for three nights already and was waning back toward half full again.
And Tera West wasn't a werewolf. A werewolf was a human being who used magic to turn into a wolf. She had looked upon my eyes and not been drawn in. Therefore, she wasn't a human being.
Could she be some kind of shapeshifter from the Nevernever? MacFinn's partner in crime, killing on the off nights to keep suspicion from falling on him? Some sort of being with which I was unfamiliar? Most of my background on the paranormal was Western European in origin. I should have been reading more books on Native American beliefs, South American spooks and haunts, African legend, East Asian folklore---but it was a little late for such regrets. If Tera West was a monster, and wanted me dead, she could have killed me already---and she surely would not have bothered to clean and dress my injury.
Of course, that begged the question: What did she really want?
And that question led the way to many more. Who were the young people I had seen her with that first evening? What was she doing with them? Did she have some kind of cult of followers, like vampires sometimes built up? Or was it something else entirely?
Tera pulled over onto a little gravel lane, drove a quarter mile up it, and pulled off into the weeds. "Get out," she said. "He will be here, somewhere."
The bouncing car ride had come to an end, mercifully, and the sun was still solidly above the horizon, with moonrise not for at least an hour after sunset. So I ignored the pain and pushed my way out of the car, to follow her into the woods.
It was darker underneath the ancient oaks and sycamores, and quiet. Birdsong came to us, but from far away, as though the birds were choosing the better part of valor in remaining where the sun could still touch the tree branches. The wind sighed through the woods, sending leaves spinning down in all shades of gold and orange and russet, adding to the thick, crunchy carpeting under our feet. Our steps sounded out distinctly as we moved ahead through the leaves, and the cool wind made me grateful that I had thought to drape my duster over my shoulders.
I studied the usually quiet Tera. She was walking with exaggerated motions, planting her feet down solidly with each step, as though intentionally trying to make noise. Once or twice, she stepped out of her way to tread on a branch, snapping it with a dry popping sound. I was too tired and sore to go to any such effort. I just walked, and it made more noise than she did. Who says I can't do anything right?
We hadn't gone more than a few hundred yards when Tera abruptly tensed, crouching, her eyes scanning all around. There was a whistling sound, and then a bent sapling jerked upright, dragging a noose around Tera's ankles and hauling her across the rock-and leaf-covered floor of the woods with a yelp of surprise.
I blinked at her, and then something came up out of the leaves, rose right up like Hamlet's dad from the stage floor. But instead of bemoaning his fate and charging me with avenging him, he slugged me across the jaw (on the same side of my face that already sported dark purple bruises) and sent me spinning to the ground, stunned.
I landed badly, but on my unwounded side, and rolled out of the way as a muddy, naked foot stomped down at my head. I grabbed on to it and jerked with more desperation than strength, and the foot's owner fell down beside me. Instead of being slowed, he slapped his arms at the ground as he hit it, in much the same way Murphy did when practicing falls. Then he rolled as I struggled to my hands and knees, and slid a hard, strong forearm beneath my throat, locking it there with the other hand and pressing back against my windpipe.
"Got you. I got you," snarled my attacker. I struggled against him, but he was bigger than me, stronger than me. He had me down, and he hadn't been shot or beaten up anywhere near as often as I had in the last fifteen hours or so.
I didn't stand a chance.
So there I was being strangled by a ranting, half-naked madman in the middle of the woods, with a she-werewolf dangling from a rope snare somewhere nearby. My gunshot wound hurt horribly, and my jaw throbbed from where my buddy the cop had brutalized it the night before. I've had worse days. That's the great thing about being a wizard. I can always tell myself, honestly, that things could be worse.
I stopped trying to struggle against the man who was choking me. Instead, I grabbed his wrist and prepared to do something foolish.
Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape--- and words help to define those thoughts. That's why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster's mind. If you use words that you're too familiar with, words that are so close to your thoughts that you have trouble separating thought from word, that insulation is very thin. So most wizards use words from ancient languages they don't know very well, or else they make up nonsense words and mentally attach their meanings to a particular effect. That way, a wizard's mind has an extra layer of protection against magical energies coursing through it.
But you can work magic without words, without insulation for your mind. If you're not afraid of it hurting a little.
I drew in my will, my exhausted fear, and focused on what I wanted. My vision swam with dots of color. The man on my back snarled and growled incoherently, and spittle or foam dribbled onto the side of my face. Dried leaves and mud pressed against the other side of my face. Things started going black.
Then I ground my teeth together and released my will with a burst of sudden energy.
Two things happened. First, a rush of blinding thought, brilliant and wild and jangling, went through my head. My eyes swam with color, my ears with phantom sound. My senses were assaulted with a myriad of impressions: the sharp scent of the earth and dry leaves, the rippling scratch of a centipede's legs fluttering up the skin of my forearms, the sensation of warm sunlight against my scalp, dozens of others I couldn't identify--- things with no basis in reality. They were a side effect of the energy rushing through my head.
The second thing that happened was a surge of electricity gathered from the air around me to my fingertips, gripped on my attacker's wrist, and surged up through his arm and into his body. He convulsed against my back, out of control, and the strength of his own reaction threw him off of me and to his back on the leaves, jerking and flopping, his face stretched in a tight-lipped expression of shock and fear.
I wheezed in a breath, stunned and shaking, then scrambled back to my feet, only to stagger against a tree. I huddled there, watching my attacker's convulsions fade into a numb paralysis. Finally, he just stared at the sky, his lips open, his chest heaving in and out.
I studied the man a little more closely. He was big. He was really big, at least as tall as me and twice as broad. He was dressed only in a pair of cutoff blue jeans, and those looked like they were ill fit. He was in a condition best described as "overwhelmingly masculine," hairy-chested and muscled like a professional wrestler. There was grey in his hair and beard, and there were lines on his face, putting his age at well into maturity. It was his eyes that showed me the most about him. They burned green, wild and haunted, fastened on the distant sky now, but heavy with the weight of too much terrible knowledge. It couldn't have been easy to live with a curse like his.
There was a scrambling sound, a muffled thump, and I looked up to see MacFinn's noose trap hanging empty, the rope swinging back and forth. My eyes tracked down to earth to find an indistinct shape stir in the leaves, and then resolve itself into Tera West's long limbs and practical clothes. She gathered her legs beneath her and crossed at once to MacFinn, her chest heaving, her eyes vague and distant.
"MacFinn," she said. "MacFinn! You've killed him," she snarled, and her eyes snapped up to mine, bright and burning with amber anger. I could have sworn I saw her face start to change, her bared teeth begin to grow into fangs. Maybe that was just the effect of the magic on my perceptions, though, or a primitive, lizard-brain sort of reaction to Tera rising to her feet and charging toward me with a howl. There was murder in her eyes.
I hadn't gotten beaten up twice, shot, and nearly strangled to get taken out by a misguided werewolf bitch. I gathered in my dizzy, spinning will and extended my good hand toward the charging woman, flicking my wrist in a circle. "Vento giostrus!" I trumpeted.
The winds howled down from the trees and whipped into a savage circle of moving air, lifting up dried leaves, sticks, and small stones. The miniature cyclone picked the charging Tera up off the ground and hurled her a good twenty feet through the air, into the branches of a pine tree. It also hurled out a cloud of rocks and small debris, forcing me to seek shelter behind a tree trunk.
How embarrassing. It was a little more wind than I had wanted. That's the danger of evocation, of that instantaneous, kablowie sort of magic. Control can be somewhat tricky. All I had wanted was something to spin Tera around and then to plop her down on her ass.
Instead, rocks hammered against the tree trunk and zipped by, rattling against the trees all around in an almost deafening clatter. The wind shook the trees, tore branches from them, and cast half a ton of dirt and dust into the air in a choking cloud.
The wind died after about half a minute, leaving me choking and coughing on dust and dirt. I peered around the edge of my tree, to see what I could see.
The trees had been cleaned of their autumn colors in a fifty-foot-wide circle, leaving only stark branches behind. Where the bark had been brittle or dry, the cyclone had torn it from the trees, leaving pale, gleaming wood flesh visible. The leaves on the ground were gone as well, as were six or eight inches of topsoil---wind erosion gone berserk. A few stones, newly naked, could be seen in the torn earth, as could the roots of some of the trees and a number of startled worms.
MacFinn was sitting up, evidently recovered from the jolt I'd given him. His face was pasty and stunned as he looked around him. His chest rose and fell in uneven jerks.
There was a rustle, and then I caught sight of Tera West tumbling to the ground from the branches of the pine tree. She landed with a thump and sat there coughing and staring, her mouth hanging open in surprise. She blinked at me and nervously scooted a few inches backward over the ground.
"See there?" I wheezed, raising a hand and pointing at MacFinn. "He's breathing. He'll be all right." My mind was still spinning from my unshielded magic attack on MacFinn. I caught the strong scent of wildflowers and stagnant water, and felt what I was sure were the scales of a snake slithering across the palms of my hands, while something with wings and glittering, multifaceted eyes hovered at the edge of my vision, vanishing whenever I tried to look at it. I tried to shove everything that didn't make sense out of my way, to ignore it, but it was difficult to sort the false impressions from the ones that were in front of me.
Tera rose, and made her way toward the fallen man. She knelt down over MacFinn and wrapped her arms around him. I closed my eyes and wheezed until my head began to slow down a little. I focused on all the pain that was lurking in the midst of the confusion. Pain in my shoulder, my throat, my jaw, gave me a concrete foundation, a place that I knew was stable, if unpleasant. I fastened on it, concentrated, until I began to get less woozy. Once the pain returned in force, I wasn't sure I wanted to be less woozy, but I opened my eyes anyway.
MacFinn had his arms around Tera's shoulders, and she was kissing him as if she were trying to inhale him. I felt vaguely voyeuristic.
"Ahem," I said. "Maybe we should get somewhere out of the open?"
They disengaged, slowly, and Tera helped MacFinn to rise to his full, impressive height. He made her look like a slip of a girl, but he leaned against her a little as he stood. He studied me, and I kept my eyes away from his. I didn't want to see what was inside of him.
"Kim's dead," MacFinn said. "Isn't she?"
It wasn't a question, but I nodded. "Yeah. Last night."
The big man shuddered and closed his eyes. "Dammit," he whispered. "Dammit all."
"There was nothing you could do," Tera said, her voice low. "She knew the risks."
"And you must be Harry Dresden," MacFinn said. He glanced at the burns on his wrist, where my magic had taken him. "Sorry about that. I didn't see Tera with you. I didn't know who you were."
I shrugged. "Don't worry about it. But can we get out of the open? Last thing we need is a couple of runners or bikers to come back and report us to the police."
MacFinn nodded at me. "All right. Let's go." Tera gave me a last, wary look, and then turned with MacFinn to help him farther back into the woods. I followed them.
MacFinn's camp turned out to be hidden in the overhang of a bank of earth, heavily laced with the roots of the ancient trees above it that held it in place and kept it from simply spilling into a mound of mud. There was a small fire built at the back of the shelter the bank afforded, well shielded from sight. MacFinn made his way to the fire and settled down before it. Twilight would cast the sheltered camp into deep darkness, but for now it was only shady and out of the wind. The fire had made the place warm, comfortable. It didn't feel like we were within fifteen miles of the third largest city in the country.
Tera settled down beside MacFinn, her manner restless. I remained standing, though the throbbing in my arm made me wish I was lying down in a bed somewhere, instead of huddling in the middle of a small but genuine forest.
"All right, MacFinn," I said. "You want my help. And I want to keep more people from being hurt. But I need some things from you."
He peered up at me, his green eyes calculating. "I am hardly in a position to bargain, Mr. Dresden. What you need, I will give you."
I nodded. "Answers. I've got about a million questions."
"Dark will come in less than two hours. Moonrise is only slightly more than an hour after that. We don't have much time for questions."
"Time enough," I assured him. "Why did you come here?"
"I woke up about five miles from here this morning," MacFinn said, looking away from me as he did, staring at the fire. "I've got several stashes hidden around the city. Just in case. This is one of the older ones. The damp had gotten to the clothes, and all I had was these." He gestured at the jean shorts.
"Do you remember what you did?" The words had an edge to them, but at least I didn't say, "Do you remember murdering Kim Delaney?" Who says I can't be diplomatic?
MacFinn shuddered. "Pieces," he said. "Just pieces." He looked at me and said, "I didn't mean to hurt her. I swear to you."
"Then why is she dead?" The words came out flat, cool. Tera glared at me, but I watched MacFinn for his answer.
"The curse," he said quietly. "When it happens, when I change---have you ever been angry, Mr. Dresden? So angry that you lost control? That nothing else mattered to you but acting on your anger?"
"Once," I said.
"Maybe you can understand part of it then," MacFinn said. "It comes on me, and there's nothing left but the need to hurt something. To act on the rage. I tried to tell Kim that the circle wasn't working, that she had to get out, but she wouldn't listen." I heard the frustration in his voice, and his hands clenched into fists. "She wouldn't listen to me."
"It frustrated you," I said. "And when you changed . . ."
He nodded. "It's how I came back from 'Nam. Everyone else in my platoon died but me. I knew the full moon was coming. And I knew that I hated them, hated the soldiers who had killed my friends. When I changed, I started killing until there wasn't anyone left alive within maybe two miles."
I stared at MacFinn for a long moment. I believed that he was telling me the truth. That he didn't have much control, if any, over his actions when he transformed. Though it occurred to me that if he wanted someone dead, he could probably point his monster-self in the right direction before he lost control.
Note to self: Do not cut MacFinn off in traffic.
"All right," I said. "Why come here? Why to 'Wolf Woods'? Why not to one of the other stashes?"
He smirked at the flames. "Where else would a werewolf run, Mr. Dresden?"
"Someplace a little less freaking obvious," I shot back.
MacFinn shook his head. "The FBI doesn't believe in werewolves. They aren't going to make the connection."
"Maybe," I conceded. "But there are smarter people than the FBI looking for you now. I don't think we should stay here for long."
MacFinn glanced at me, and then around him, as though listening for pursuers. "You might be right," he admitted. "But I'm not going anywhere until my head stops spinning. You don't look so good, either."
"I'll make it," I said. "All right, then. How did you know Kim Delaney? From her activist functions, I assume."
MacFinn's face went pale at the mention of her name, but he nodded. "Originally. We came to know of her talents about a year ago. She told us how you were helping her control her abilities. She was helping me, indirectly, with the Northwest Passage Project. Then, last month, I asked her for her help."
"Why did you do that?"
MacFinn glanced warily at Tera, and then back at me. "Someone broke my circle."
I hunkered down on my heels, resting my aching arm on my knees. "Someone broke your circle? The one in the basement?"
"Yes," MacFinn said. "I don't know who. I'm not at home a lot. We found it broken when we went downstairs before moonrise, last month."
"And you asked Kim to fix it?"
MacFinn closed his eyes and nodded. "She said she could. She told us she would be able to make a new circle---one that would keep me from . . ."
I chewed on my lip as his voice trailed off. "Last month, you were meeting with Marcone's business partner, right? Negotiations over the project?"
"I didn't kill him," MacFinn said quickly. "He died the night after the full moon. I couldn't have made the change and done it then. And the other two nights, I made sure I was well away from human beings. I didn't kill anyone the second two nights, either. I was alone."
"Your fiancée could have done those killings," I said, and flicked a glance at Tera West. She glared at my eyes for a moment, and then looked away.
"She didn't," MacFinn said, his tone cool.
"Let's go back a bit," I said. "Someone messed up your circle. To do that, they would have had to know about your curse, right? And they would have had to get into your house. So, the question is, who could do those things? And then the question is, who would have done it, and why?"
MacFinn shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I just don't. I don't have much contact with the supernatural, Mr. Dresden. I keep my head down. I don't know anyone else who can make the change, except for her." He put his hand over that of the woman beside him.
A suspicion took root in my mind, someplace dark and sneaky. I studied Tera as I spoke to MacFinn. "You want to hear a theory?" I said. I didn't wait for him to answer. "Presuming you're telling the truth, I figure someone else did the killings the night before the full moon, last month. Some gangsters in town. Then they made sure that you would be the one going berserk the next three nights by fucking up your circle."
"Why would they do that?" MacFinn asked.
"To set you up. They kill some people, maybe just for kicks, maybe for a good reason, and then they lay the blame at your feet. Someone like me, or the White Council, comes poking around, and they go straight to you. You're notorious. Like a convicted felon. They find you over the body with a bloody knife, metaphorically speaking, and you're the one to burn at the stake. Literally."
MacFinn studied my face for a moment. "Or you think that there might be another reason."
I shrugged. "Maybe you are the killer. You could be trying to make it look like someone is setting you up to me and the Council. The police can't prove shit against you under the mundane justice system, and using this deception clears you with the supernatural community. So you moan and pose and say 'Woe is me, I am only the poor cursed guy,' and meanwhile a bunch of people end up dead. People who were standing in the way of your completing the Northwest Passage Project."
MacFinn showed me his teeth. "You think the world wouldn't be better off without people like Marcone and his lickspittles?"
"Good word, lickspittles," I replied, keeping my voice bland. "That doesn't really concern me right now, MacFinn. Men like Marcone know the risks and take their chances. What bothers me is that a bunch of other people are getting dead, and they don't really deserve it."
"Why would I be killing innocents?" MacFinn demanded, his voice growing tight, clipped.
"Innocents like Kim?" I said. I'm a wizard, not a saint. I'm allowed to be vindictive.
MacFinn went pale and looked down.
"Maybe you're doing it as a smoke screen. Maybe you can't help it. Or hell, maybe you really are just a poor cursed guy, and someone's using you like a puppet. There's no way for me to tell right now."
"Assuming I'm not lying," MacFinn grated, "who would have an interest in setting me up?"
I shook my head. "That's the million-dollar question. I'd say that it was Johnny Marcone---he stands to benefit if you can't oppose his business interests in the Northwest. As I understand it, the Northwest Passage would pretty much put nails in the coffin of a lot of industry up in that direction."
MacFinn nodded grimly. "It would."
"So that gives him a good motive. But how did he know about your curse? And how did he pull off ruining the circle? It doesn't sound like him. He would just have your brakes fail, or maybe arrange for you to meet a couple of big men in a dark alley. It's just his way." I shrugged. "Who else would be doing it? Can you think of anyone?"
MacFinn shook his head. "I've always been lucky. Been able to hold myself in, lock myself up. Or been able to go far away, out into the wilds where no one would find me. So that when I changed, no one would be killed."
"That's why you were backing the Northwest Passage," I guessed. "A place for you to go in safety when the full moon comes---a really big no-people zone."
MacFinn glanced aside at Tera, who was staring stoically into the distance. "That and other reasons." His jaw tightened, and he looked back to the fire. "You don't know what it's like, Mr. Dresden. To live with yourself."
I rubbed at my mouth and chin with my good hand. I needed a shave. I studied MacFinn and Tera for a moment, trying to make up my mind.
Was MacFinn telling me the truth? Was he just a victim, someone being used by a faceless villain still at large? Or was he lying to me?
If he was lying, if all of this had been his design, what purpose would he have had in luring me out here? Killing me, of course, getting rid of the only wizard who could pen up his monstrous form. That was, after all, exactly what he would have done if I hadn't have been able to shock him silly. But did that even make sense? What would he gain by removing me if I never stood in his way in the first place?
Careful, Harry. Don't get too paranoid. Not everyone is planning and plotting and lying. But I had to wonder about Tera West. A nasty scenario was laying itself out in my mind. What if the dear, sweet fiancée was tired of hubby? What if she had done the before-and after-moon killings, then set up her sweetiekins to take the fall for her? She could get rid of MacFinn and Marcone's partner all in one fell swoop.
Leaving her and Marcone alive. Marcone could have found out about MacFinn from Tera, and about the weakness of his circle from Tera as well. Tera wasn't human, not even a little. She was something else, maybe a being of the Nevernever. Who knew how her mind worked?
And then there was the group of young people Tera seemed to be in charge of. How did they fit into this? What was she using them for?
I went fishing. "How are Georgia and Billy, Tera?" I asked, my tone conversational.
She blinked. Her mouth worked for a second, and then she answered, "Fine. They are well." She pressed her lips together, clearly desiring the conversation to end.
I watched MacFinn. His face registered confusion, and then he looked between Tera and me uneasily. He didn't know who the hell I was talking about, and she didn't seem to want to let MacFinn in on what was apparently a secret.
Aha, little miss werewolf-shape-shifter-thing. What are you plotting?
I was going to press her harder, when MacFinn and Tera both looked up at exactly the same time, out toward the woods. I stared at them like a moron for a couple of seconds, my mind still running along trails of thought, tracing potential lies, possibilities. Then I shook that out of my brain and Listened.
"Both of you along that way," Murphy said from somewhere in the distance downslope. "Ron, take your three and fan out until we're even with the feds. Then we sweep west, up the hill."
"Christ, Murphy," Carmichael said. "We don't owe the feds shit. If they'd have showed up on time, we'd have been out here hours ago. If we hadn't got that report about the West woman in the hotel room, we still wouldn't be here."
"Can it, Carmichael," Murphy snapped. "Pictures of MacFinn and the woman have been passed out. And you all know what Dresden looks like. Spread out and nab them."
"You don't even know if they're here," Carmichael protested.
"I'll bet you sex to doughnuts that they are, Carmichael," Murphy said, her voice dripping sweet venom. "And that should tell you how certain I am."
Carmichael muttered something under his breath, and then growled orders to his men to fan out as Murphy had indicated.
"Dammit," MacFinn snarled. "How did they know I was here?"
"Where else would a werewolf go to hide?" I sniped. "Shit. How do we get out?"
"Wind," Tera said. She and MacFinn both came to their feet. "Or fog. Can you do one of those again?"
I grimaced and shook my head. "I don't think so. I'm worn out. I'd probably make a mistake and that could kill someone."
"If you don't," Tera said, "we will all be captured or killed."
"You can't solve all your problems by magic," I snapped.
"He's right," MacFinn said quietly. "We split up. The first one discovered makes a lot of noise, puts up a fight, and gives the others a chance to get away."
"No," I said. "MacFinn, you've got to stay with me. I can make the circle with some sticks and dirt, if necessary, but if I'm not there, I can't hold you in when the curse takes hold later tonight."
MacFinn's teeth showed again. "No time to argue, Mr. Dresden, " he said.
"Indeed there is not," said Tera, and then she took off at a dead run. MacFinn hissed a curse and grabbed for her as she ran, but missed. Tera flew on into the woods, rushing silently down the slope on an angle that would take her past the edge of the pursuers' line. She was noticed after only a few steps, shouts going up from three or four throats.
"Bitch," MacFinn cursed, and he started after her. I seized his arm, my fingers clamping on his bicep hard enough to make him stop and stare at me, his green eyes fierce and wild.
"Split up," I said, looking back down the hill. "If we're lucky, they won't even know that we were here."
"But Tera---"
"Knows what she's doing," I said. "If the police nail us, there's no way you're going to be able to hold it in tonight. We go, now, and we meet at the nearest gas station to the park. All right?"
From down slope came the sounds of running men, a warning call, and then a gunshot. For Tera's sake, I hoped that Agent Benn wasn't down there. MacFinn clenched his jaw, and then ran up the slope, on an angle. Down below us, there were more shouts, more shots fired, and a short, sharp cry of pain.
Call me crazy, but those sounds, added to all the other things that had happened that day, were just too much for me to handle. I turned, cradling my wounded arm against me, and stumbled up the hill into a long, loping run. I kept my head down, watching my feet, only looking up often enough to make sure that I didn't run into a tree, and fled.
I made it out of the park, exhausted and barely able to keep from screaming with pain. I stopped at the first gas station I could find, so I could take off my boots. Old and comfortable as they were, cowboy boots were not meant for running cross-country. I leaned against the side of the building by the pay phones, away from the street, and sat down on the sidewalk. My body throbbed with pain, slowing as my heart and breathing did.
I gave MacFinn an hour, but he didn't show up. No one did.
I got restless, fast. Could both MacFinn and Tera West have been captured? Murphy's cops may not have looked like much, but I knew they were tough and smart. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility.
I rummaged in my duster's pockets, came up with enough change to make a phone call, then made my painful way to the phone.
"Midwestern Arcane, this is Ms. Rodriguez," Susan said, when she picked up the phone. Her voice sounded tired, stressed.
"Hi, Susan," I said. My shoulder twinged, and I gritted my teeth, pulling my duster around me a little more tightly. The evening was bringing a cold wind and grey clouds, and the sweats and cotton T-shirt Tera West had given me weren't enough to keep out the chill.
"Harry?" she said disbelievingly. "My God. Where are you? The police are looking for you. They keep calling here. Something about a murder."
"Misunderstanding," I said and leaned against the wall. The pain was getting worse as chills soaked in and I started to shiver.
"You sound terrible," Susan said. "Are you all right?"
"Can you help me?"
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "I don't know, Harry. I don't know what's going on. I don't want to get into any trouble."
"I could explain it," I offered, struggling to keep my words clear through the pain. "But it's sort of a long story." I dropped a subtle emphasis on that last word. Sometimes it scares me how easy it is to get people to do what you want them to do, if you know something about them.
"Story, eh?" Susan said. I could hear the sudden twinge of interest in her voice.
"Sure. Murder, violence, blood, monsters. Give you the whole scoop if you can give me a ride."
"You bastard," she breathed, but I thought she was smiling. "I would have come to get you anyway."
"Sure you would have," I said, but I felt a smile on my own lips. I told her the address of the gas station and hoped that the feds hadn't taken the time to get a wiretap for Susan's phone.
"Give me half an hour," Susan said. "Maybe more, depending on traffic."
I squinted up at the sky, which was rapidly darkening, both with oncoming dusk and heavy, brooding clouds. "Time's important. Hurry if you can."
"Just take care of yourself, Harry," she said, worry in her voice. Then she hung up the phone.
I did, too, and leaned back against the wall. I hated to draw Susan into this. It made me feel cheap, somehow. Weak. It was that whole problem with chivalry that I had. I didn't want a girl to be riding to my rescue, protecting me. It just didn't seem right. And I didn't want to endanger Susan, either. I was a murder suspect, and the police were looking for me. She could get in trouble, for aiding and abetting, or something like that.
On the other hand, I didn't have much choice. I didn't have any money for a cab, even if I could get one this far from the city. I didn't have a car. I was in no shape to walk anywhere. My contacts, in the persons of MacFinn and Tera West, were gone. I had to have help, and Susan was the only one I thought I could trust to do it. If there was a story involved, she'd go to hell itself to get it.
And I had used that against her, to lever her into helping me. I didn't like it that I had. I'd thought better of myself. I ducked my head against the cold, and shivered, and wondered if I'd done the right thing.
It was while I was leaning against the wall, waiting, that I heard a scrabbling sound around the corner of the gas station. I tensed and waited. The sound repeated itself, a definite pattern of three short movements. A signal.
Warily, I made my way to the back of the building, ready to turn and run as best I could. Tera West was there, behind the building, crouched down between several empty cardboard boxes that smelled of beer and the garbage bin. She was naked, her body a uniform shade of brown, without an ounce of excess fat on her. Her hair was mussed and had leaves and bits of twig caught in it. Her amber eyes looked even more alien and wild than usual.
She rose and came toward me, evidently unconscious of the cold. She moved with a feral sort of grace that made me all too aware of her legs, and her hips, even though I was battered, fatigued, and brooding.
"Wizard," she greeted me. "Give me your coat."
I snapped my eyes back up to hers, then slipped out of my duster, though my shoulder screamed with pain as I pulled the coat off of it, and my body sent up an entirely different round of complaints as the cold wind gleefully cut through the thin clothes I wore beneath the duster. Tera took the coat and slid into it, wrapping it around her and buttoning it closed. The sleeves were too long, and the coat dangled to her ankles, but it covered her lean, strong body well enough. I found myself faintly regretful that I'd had it with me.
"What happened?" I asked her.
She shook her head. "The police do not know how game runs, or how to chase it. One grabbed me. I made him let go." She glanced around us warily, and raked her fingers through her hair, trying to comb out leaves and sticks. "I led them away from you and MacFinn, changed, and made my way back to the camp. I followed MacFinn's trail."
"Where is he?"
She bared her teeth. "The federal people caught him. They took him away."
"Hell's bells," I breathed. "Do you know where?"
"Into a car," she responded.
"No," I said, growing frustrated. "Do you know where the car went?"
She shook her head. "But they had an argument with the one called Murphy. Murphy had more people with her, more guns. MacFinn went where Murphy wanted him to go."
"Downtown," I said. "Murphy would want him in holding down at the station. Hell, it's on the same floor as Special Investigations."
Tera shrugged, her expression hard. "As you say."
"We don't have much time," I said.
"For what? There is nothing more to be done. We cannot reach him now. MacFinn will change when the moon rises. Murphy and the police people will die."
"Like hell," I said. "I've got to get to the station before it happens."
Tera studied me with narrowed eyes. "The police are hunting for you as well, wizard. If you go there, you too will be locked in a cage. You will not be allowed to go to MacFinn."
"I wasn't planning on asking permission," I said. "But I think I can get inside. I just have to get to my apartment."
"The police will be watching it," Tera said. "They will be waiting for you there. And in any case, we have no car and no money. How will you reach Chicago before moonrise? There is nothing more to be done, wizard."
There came the crunch of tires around the side of the gas station, and I peeked around the corner. Susan's car was just coming to a halt. Raindrops were starting to come down and to make little impact circles on her Taurus's windshield. I felt a little surge of defiant energy.
"There's our ride," I said. "Follow." I relished throwing the terse command at Tera, and she stared at me. I turned my back on her and stalked over to the car.
Susan leaned across and threw open the passenger door, then blinked at me in surprise. She blinked again when Tera slipped in front of me, threw the passenger seat forward, and slid into the backseat with a flash of long, lean legs, then regarded Susan with unreadable, distant eyes.
I pushed the seat back and settled into place. It was a real effort to shut the door, and a small sound of discomfort escaped my mouth. When I looked at Susan, she was staring at me, and at my arm. I looked down and found that the bandage, and a part of the T-shirt's sleeve were soaked through with blood. The purple bruises had spread a few inches, it seemed, and showed beneath the shirt's sleeve.
"Good Lord," Susan gasped. "What happened?"
"I got shot," I said.
"Doesn't it hurt?" Susan stammered, still stunned.
"Is this female always so stupid?" Tera asked. I winced. Susan turned in the seat and glowered at Tera, and I looked back to see Tera narrow her eyes and bare her teeth in what one could hardly say was a smile.
"It hurts," I confirmed. "Susan, take us to my place, but don't stop when you get there. Just drive past slowly. I'll tell you everything on the way."
Susan gave Tera one last, skeptical glance, particularly taking in my bullet-torn duster and Tera's bare limbs. "This better be good, Dresden," she said. Then she slapped the car into gear and started driving with irritated haste back toward the city.
I wanted to collapse into sleep, but I made myself explain most of what had happened over the past couple of days to Susan, editing out mentions of the White Council, demons, that sort of thing. Susan listened, and drove, and asked intent questions, fastening gleefully on to the information concerning the Northwest Passage Project, and Johnny Marcone's links to the businesses opposing it. Rain started coming down in a steady, murky veil, and she flicked on the windshield wipers.
"So you've got to get to MacFinn," Susan said, when I was finished, "before the moon comes up and he transforms."
"You've got it," I said.
"Why don't you call Murphy? Tell her what's going on?"
I shook my head. "Murphy isn't going to be in the mood to listen. She busted me and I fled arrest. She'd have me in a cell before I could say abracadabra."
"But it's raining," Susan protested. "We won't be able to see the moon tonight. Won't that stop MacFinn from changing?"
I blinked at the question and glanced back at Tera. She was watching the buildings pass out the side window as the streetlights started flickering on. She didn't look at me, but shook her head.
"No such luck," I told Susan. "And with these clouds, I can't even tell if the sun has gone down yet, much less how much time we have before moonrise."
Susan breathed out slowly. "How are you going to get to MacFinn, then?"
"I've got a couple things at my apartment," I said. "Drive on by. Let's see if there's anyone watching the old place."
Susan turned the car down my street, and we rolled slowly through the rain. The old boardinghouse huddled stoically beneath the downpour, its gutters gurgling and spouting streams of water. The streetlights glowed with silver halos as the rain came down. A bit down from my building, a plain brown sedan was parked, and a couple of shadowy forms could be seen inside it when Susan drove past.
"That's them," I said. "I recognize one of them from Murphy's unit."
Susan let out another breath and drew the car around the corner, parking it along the street. "Is there any way to sneak into your place? A back door?"
I shook my head. "No. There's only the one door in, and you can see the windows from here. I just need the police to not be looking for a few minutes."
"You need a distraction," Tera said. "I will do it."
I looked over my shoulder. "I don't want any violence."
She tilted her head to one side, her expression never changing. "Very well," she said. "For MacFinn's sake, I will do as you say. Open the door."
I stared at her fathomless eyes for a second, searching for any signs of deception or betrayal. What if Tera was the killer? She had known about MacFinn, and was able to transform in one fashion or another. She could have committed the murders last month, as well as the one two nights past. But if so, why had she seemingly sacrificed herself so that MacFinn and I could escape? Why had she come to find me?
Then again, MacFinn had been captured. And her words at the gas station may have been calculated to make me give up trying to help him, if one looked at them from a certain point of view. What if she was trying to take care of both MacFinn and me by throwing us to the mundane legal system?
My head spun with pain and weariness. Paranoid, Harry, I told myself. You've got to trust someone, somewhere---or else MacFinn goes furry and Murphy and a lot of other good people die tonight. There wasn't much choice.
I opened the door, and we both got out of the car. "What are you going to do?" I asked Tera.
Instead of answering, the amber-eyed woman stripped off my duster and handed it back to me, leaving herself nude and lovely under the rain. "Do you like to look at my body?" she demanded of me.
"Careful how you answer this one, buster," Susan growled from the car.
I coughed, and glanced back at Susan, keeping my eyes off of the other woman. "Yeah, Tera. That will work fine, I guess."
"Wait for twenty slow breaths," she said. There was a note of amusement in her voice. "Pick me up at the far end of this block." Then she turned on a bare heel and glided into the darkness between streetlights in a graceful lope. I frowned after her for a moment, and then drew my duster back on.
"You don't have to look quite so hard," Susan said. "Is she the human-interest angle for this story?"
I winced, holding my wounded arm close to my side, and leaned down to meet Susan's eyes. "I don't think she's human," I said. Then I stood and started walking down the street, slowing my steps so that I didn't round the corner until Tera's prescribed time limit had elapsed. Even when I did, I walked quickly, like someone hurrying home out of the rain, my hands in my pockets, keeping my head down against the grey downpour.
I crossed the street toward my apartment building, glancing at the sedan as I did.
The cops weren't watching me. They were staring at the pool of light beneath the streetlight behind them, where Tera spun gracefully through the steps of some sort of gliding dance, moving to a rhythm and a music I could not hear. There was a primal sort of intensity to her motions, raw sexuality, feminine power coursing through her movements. Her back arched as she spun and whirled, offering out her breasts to the chill rain, and her skin was slick and gleaming with water.
I tripped over the curb on the far side of the street and felt my cheeks start to flame as I hurried down the steps to my apartment. I unlocked the door and went inside, shutting it behind me. I didn't light any candles, relying upon my knowledge of the house to move around.
The two potions were in their plastic sports bottles on the counter where I had left them. I grabbed up my black nylon backpack from the floor and threw the bottles into it. Then I went into my bedroom and grabbed the blue coveralls with the little red patch over one breast pocket stenciled with MIKE in bold letters. My mechanic had accidentally left them in the trunk of the Blue Beetle the last time the Beetle was in the shop. I added a baseball cap, a first-aid kit, a roll of duct tape, a box of chalk, seven smooth stones from a collection of them I keep in my closet, a white T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, and a huge bottle of Tylenol, zipped up the backpack, and headed back out again. At the last moment, I took up my wizard's staff from the corner by the door.
Something flashed past my legs, moving out into the night, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Mister paused at the top of the stairs to look back at me, his cat eyes enigmatic and irritated, and then vanished into the darkness. I muttered something under my breath and locked the door behind me, then headed out once more, my heart rattling along too quickly to be comfortable.
Tera was on her hands and knees in the middle of the pool of light behind the sedan, her damp hair fallen all around her face, her lips parted, facing the two plainclothes officers, who had gotten out of the car and were speaking to her from several feet away. Her chest was heaving in and out, but having seen her in action, I doubted that it was merely from the exertion of her dancing. Looked nice, though. The policemen were sure as hell staring.
I gripped my staff in hand, along with the backpack, and walked away down the street again. It didn't take long to make it back to Susan's car, and she immediately wheeled the vehicle around the block without comment. Susan hardly had begun to slow down when Tera appeared from between a couple of buildings and loped over to the car. I leaned forward, opened the door, and she got into the backseat. I threw her the extra clothes I had picked up, and she began to dress without comment.
"It worked," I said. "We did it."
"Of course it worked," Tera said. "Men are foolish. They will stare at anything female and naked."
"She's got that right," Susan said, under her breath, and jerked the car into motion again. "Oh, we are going to talk about this one, mister. Next stop, Special Investigations."
Outside the battered old police building downtown, I pulled the baseball cap a little lower over my eyes, and drank the blending potion. It didn't really have any taste to it at all, but it twitched and bubbled all the way down my gullet until it hit my stomach.
I gave the potion a few seconds to work and shifted my hands on the handle of my wizard's staff. Even though the end of it was shoved into a wheeled bucket, it still didn't look much like the handle of a mop. And even though I was dressed in the dark blue coveralls, they were ridiculously short on me. I did not look much like a janitor.
That's where the magic came in. If the potion worked, I would look like background to any casual observers, a part of the scenery that they wouldn't glance at twice. So long as they didn't give me an intense scrutiny, the potion's power should be able to keep me from being noticed, which would let me get close to MacFinn, which would let me put the containment circle around him and keep his transformed self from going on a rampage.
Of course, if it didn't work, I might just end up studying the inside of a jail cell for a few years---provided the transformed MacFinn didn't tear me apart first.
I tried to ignore the pain in my shoulder, the nervous tension in my stomach. I was rebandaged, Tylenoled, and as reasonably refreshed as I could possibly have been without drinking the potion I had brewed just for that purpose.
If I could have had both potions going in my system without them making me too ill to move, I would have downed the refresher potion the moment I got my hands on it, but without the blending potion, there was no way I could get inside to MacFinn. I could only hope that I'd find a use for it eventually. I'd hate the effort to go to waste.
I waited impatiently in the rain, sure for a moment that I had messed something up when making the potion, that it wasn't going to have any effect at all.
And then I felt it start to work.
A sort of grey feeling came over me, and I realized with a start that the colors were fading from my vision. A sort of listless feeling came over me, a lassitude that advised me to sit down somewhere and watch the world go by, but at the same time the hairs on the back of my neck prickled up as the potion's magic took effect.
I took a deep breath and walked up the stairs of the building with my bucket and my "mop," pulled open the doors, and went inside. Shadows shifted and changed oddly, all greys and blacks and whites, and for a second I felt like an extra on the set of Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon.
The solid old matron of a sergeant sat at the front desk, thumbing through a glossy magazine, a portrait done in colorless hues. She glanced up at me for a second, and tinges of color returned to her uniform, her cheeks, and her eyes. She looked me over casually, sniffed, and lowered her face to her magazine again. As her attention faded, so did the colors from her clothing and skin. My perceptions of her changed as she paid attention to me or did not.
I felt my face stretch in a victorious smile. The potion had worked. I was inside. I had to suppress an urge to break into a soft-shoe routine. Sometimes, being able to use magic was so cool. I almost stopped hurting for a few seconds, from sheer enjoyment of the special effects. I would have to remember to tell Bob how much I liked the way this potion worked.
I kept my head down and moved past the desk sergeant, just one more janitor coming in to clean up the police station after hours. I picked up the bucket and my "mop" and went up the stairs, toward the holding cells and the Special Investigations office on the fifth floor. One cop passed me on the stairs and didn't so much as look at me. His uniform and skin remained entirely devoid of color. I grew more confident and moved with more speed. I was effectively invisible.
Now all I had to do was find MacFinn, trick my way into seeing him, and save Murphy and all the other police from the monster MacFinn would become---before they arrested me for trying to do it.
And time was running out.
Ever wish you had an almanac?
I did, that night. I had no idea what time the moon was supposed to rise, and I hadn't exactly had time to run to the library or a bookstore. I knew that it was supposed to happen an hour or so after sundown, but the way the clouds rolled in had made it uncertain exactly when sundown had happened. Did I have twenty minutes? Ten? An hour?
Or was I already too late?
As I climbed the stairs, I thought about being alone in the building with MacFinn after he had changed. For all my vaunted wizard's knowledge, I had no real idea of his capabilities; although after seeing Kim's body, I had something of an idea of what he could do. Bob had said that loup-garou were fast, strong, virtually immune to magic. What could I do against something like that?
I just had to pray that I would be able to get the circle up around MacFinn before I had to find out. I checked the bucket, to make sure I still had the chalk and the stones I would need to construct the greater circle around MacFinn. You didn't necessarily have to make them out of silver and gold and whatnot. Mostly, you just had to understand how the construct channeled the forces that were being employed. If you knew that, you could figure out how to make it out of less pure materials. The very best wizards don't need much more than chalk, table salt, and a wooden spoon to pull off some remarkable stuff.
My thoughts were rambling now, panic making them scamper around like a frightened chipmunk. That was bad. I needed focus, direction, concentration. I drove my legs a little harder, went up the stairs as fast as I dared, until I came out on the fifth floor. The door to Special Investigations was ten feet away. The holding cells were down the hall and around the corner, and I started that way at once.
"What do you mean, you can't find him?" Murphy's voice demanded as I walked past the office door.
"Just that. The men on his apartment said that they kept a real good eye on the place, but that he got in and out again without them seeing anything." Carmichael's voice was tired, frustrated.
Murphy snorted. "Christ, Carmichael. Is Dresden going to have to walk right into the office before you can find him?"
I hurried on past the door and down the hall. Tempting as it was to listen to a conversation about myself without the participants knowing, I just didn't have time. I wheeled my wobbling, squeaking bucket down the hall, half jogging in my hurry.
Holding was set up, unsurprisingly, behind bars. There was a swinging barred door that the station guard had to buzz to open, if you didn't have the key. Beyond that was a sort of antechamber with a couple of wooden chairs and not much else besides a counter with a window made of bulletproof glass. The jailer sat behind the glass at his desk, his expression baggy eyed and bored. Past the jailer's window was another door, made of steel with a tiny little window, which led into the row of cells. The jailer had the controls to that door at his desk as well.
I went to the first barred door, kept my head down, and rapped on the metal slats. I waited for a while, but nothing happened, so I rapped on the bars again. It occurred to me that it would add a nice touch of irony if the same blending potion that got me into the building also kept me from being noticed by the jailer and let inside. I rapped on the bars again, harder this time, with the shaft of my wooden "mop."
It took some determined rapping to get him to look up from his magazine, but he finally did, and peered at me through thick glasses. His colors swirled and gained a bit of tint before settling back toward grey. He frowned at me, glanced back at a calendar on the wall, and then pushed the button.
The barred door buzzed and I shoved it open with my bucket, wheeling inside with my head down. "You're early this week," the jailer said, his eyes back on the magazine.
"Out of town on Friday. Trying to get done sooner," I replied. I kept my voice in a monotone, as grey and boring as I could manage. To my surprise, it came out as I intended it. I'm usually not much of a liar or an actor, so the potion must have been helping me on some subtle and devious level. One thing I'll say for Bob: He's annoying as hell, but he knows his stuff.
"Whatever. Sign here," the jailer said in a bored tone, and shoved a clipboard and a pen at me through a slot at the base of the Plexiglas window. He turned a page in his magazine, showing me a picture of an athletic-looking young woman doing something anatomically improbable with an equally improbable young man.
I hesitated. How in the hell was I supposed to sign in and out? I mean, Bob's potion may have been good, but it wasn't going to change a signature after I'd put it on the paper. I glanced at the inner door, and then at the clock on the wall. To hell with it. I didn't have time to hang around. I went over to the counter and scribbled something unreadable on the admissions sheet.
"Have any trouble tonight?" I asked.
The jailer snorted, turning his magazine to the right by ninety degrees. "Just that rich guy they brought in earlier. He was yelling for a while, but he's shut up now. Probably coming down off of whatever he was on." He collected the clipboard, gave it a perfunctory glance, and hung it back up on its peg beside a bank of black-and-white monitors.
I leaned closer to the monitors, sweeping my eyes over them. Each was apparently receiving a signal from a security camera, because each one of them displayed a scene that was exactly the same except for the actors in it---a small cell, maybe eight feet by eight, with bars serving as one wall, smooth concrete for the other three, a bunk, a toilet, and a single door. Maybe two thirds of the monitors had a strip of masking tape stuck to the lower right-hand corner of the screen, with a name, like HANSON or WASHINGTON, written in black marker. I frantically scanned the bank of monitors until, in the lower corner, I found the one that said MACFINN. I looked at his monitor. The video was blurred, flecked with snow and static, but I could see well enough what had happened.
The cell was empty.
Concrete dust drifted in the air. The wall of bars was missing, apparently torn from the concrete and allowed to fall away. I could see the scraps of MacFinn's denim shorts lying on the floor of the cell.
"Hell's bells," I swore softly. There was a flicker of motion on another monitor, the one next to MacFinn's. The tape at the bottom of the screen read MATSON, and a starved-looking, unshaven man in a sleeveless white undershirt and blue jeans could be seen curled up on the bunk, his back pressed to the rear corner of the cell. His mouth was open and his chest straining, as though he was screaming, but I could hear nothing through the thick security door and the concrete walls. There was a flicker of motion, a huge and furry shape on the camera, out of focus, and Matson threw up his skinny arms to protect himself as something huge and quick shoved its way between the bars, like a big dog going through a rotten picket fence, and engulfed him.
There was a burst of static and violent motion, and then a spattering of black on the grey walls and floor of the cell, as though someone had shaken up a cola and sprayed the walls with it. Then the huge form was gone, and left behind was a ragged, quivering doll of torn flesh and blood-soaked clothing. Matson stared up at the security camera, his dying eyes pleading with mine---and then he jerked once and was gone.
The entire thing had taken perhaps three or four seconds.
My eyes swept over the other security monitors as a sick sort of fascination settled over me. Prisoners were straining to the front of their cells, shouting things out, trying to get enough of a look to see what was going on. I realized that they couldn't see what was happening---they could only hear. They wouldn't be able to look out and see the transformed MacFinn until he was at the bars of their cell.
Fear, sick and horrible and debilitating, swam over me and tangled up my tongue. The creature had gone through the bars of the cell as though they'd been made of cheap plastic, and it had killed without mercy. I stared at Matson's dead eyes, at the ruined mess of what had been his guts, at the detached pieces of meat and bone that had once been his right arm and leg.
Stars above, Harry, I thought to myself. What the hell are you doing in the same building with that thing?
On another monitor, there was a replay of what had happened seconds before, and an aging black man named CLEMENT went down beneath the creature, screaming as he died. Seeing what was happening set off some primal, ancient fear, something programmed into my head, a fear of being found in my hiding place, of being trapped in a tiny space from which there was no escape while something with killing teeth and crushing jaws came in to eat me. That same primitive, naked part of me screamed and gibbered and shouted at my rational mind to turn around right now, to turn around and run, fast and far.
But I couldn't let it go on. I had to do something.
"Look," I said and pointed at the monitor. My finger trembled, and my voice came out as a ghost of a whisper. I tried again, jabbing my finger at the monitors and half shouting, "Look!" at the jailer.
He glanced up at me, tilted his head, and frowned. I saw some colors start to bleed into his face, but that didn't matter now. I continued to point at the monitors and tried to step closer to them. "Look, look at the screens, my God, man!" By now my voice was coming out in a high, panicky tone. I pressed as close to the monitors as I could, yelling, excited.
I should have known better, of course. Wizards and technology simply do not mix---especially when the wizard's heart is pounding like the floor of a basketball court and his guts are shaking. The monitors burst into frantic displays of static and snow, flickering images sometimes visible, sometimes not.
The guard gave me a disgusted look and turned around to glance at the monitors. He blinked at them for a second, while a man named MURDOCH died in flickering, poor reception.
"What the hell is wrong with those things now?" the jailer complained, and took off his glasses to clean them. "There's always something going wrong with the damn cameras. I swear, it isn't worth the money they cost to keep on fixing them."
I frantically backed up from the monitors. "They're dying," I said. "God, you've got to let those men out of there before it kills them."
The man nodded. "Uh-huh. Tell me about it. Just goes to show you how smart the city is, right?" I stared at him for a second, and he put his glasses back on to give me a polite, bored smile. His colors had gone back to black and white, and I must have looked like a dull, humdrum old janitor to him once again. The potion had blended my words into something that the guard's brain would accept without comment, and let pass, just boring, everyday conversation like you have with people ninety percent of the time. The potion was fantastic. Way, way too good.
"Look at the monitors," I screamed in frustration and fear. "He's killing them!"
"The monitors won't stop you doing your job," the guard assured me. "I'll just buzz you in." And with that, he pressed a button somewhere behind the Plexiglas window, and the security door that led into the hallway of cells made a humming sound, clicked, and swung three or four inches open.
Screams poured out of the cells, high sounds that you wouldn't think could come from a man's throat, panicked and terrified. There was a horrible, wrenching sound, a screech of protesting metal, and one of the screams peaked at a shivering, violent point---then dissolved into a strangled mishmash of sounds, of tearing and snapping and popping, of gurgling and thudding. And when they were finished, something, something big, with a cavernous, resonating chest, snarled from not ten feet beyond the security door.
I shot a glance to the guard, who had stumbled to his feet and was grabbing for his gun. He headed out of his station, opening a door that led into the antechamber, presumably to investigate.
"No!" I shouted at him, and threw myself at the security door. I sensed, rather than saw, something else, on the other side of the wall, heading for the exit. I could hear its breath, feel its massive motion through the air, and I hurled my shoulder against the door, slamming it forward, just as something huge and strong thrust a paw through the doorway. The edge of the steel security door slammed forward onto the paw, a member that was neither wholly a paw nor a hand, but somewhere in between, tipped with huge black claws, and drenched in wet, dark, blood. I heard the creature on the far side of the door, only three inches of steel away, snarl in a fury and hatred so pure as to be painful to hear.
Then it started shoving at the door.
The first shove was tentative, but though I strained with all my strength, it still slapped me back a foot across the floor, my boots slipping on the tile. That paw-hand turned, and the talons sank into the steel door in a sudden, snapping motion as the thing took hold of it and started wrenching it back and forth in berserk anger.
"Help me!" I shouted at the guard, struggling to force the door closed. The jailer blinked at me for a second, then flooded with color.
"You!" he said. "My God. What is happening?"
"Help me close this door or we're both dead," I snarled, continuing to push forward with every ounce of strength I could summon. On the far side of the door, the loup-garou gathered its weight and hurled itself against the door again just as the guard rushed forward to help me.
The door exploded inward, throwing me back like a doll, past the guard, who stumbled back through the door that led behind the counter where he'd been sitting and fell to the ground. My upper back hit the barred door that led out into the hallway, eliciting an instant flash of hot agony from my wounded shoulder.
There was a snarl, and then the creature that had been Harley MacFinn came through the doorway. The loup-garou was a wolf, in the same way that a velociraptor is a bird---same basic design, vastly different outcome. It must have been five or five and a half feet tall at the tip of its hunched shoulders. It was wider than a wolf, as though a wolf had been squashed down with an extra five or six hundred pounds of muscle. Its pelt was shaggy, jet-black and matte, except where fresh blood was making it glisten. Its ears were ragged, upright, focused forward. It had a muzzle that was too wide to belong to anything natural, a mouthful of teeth, and MacFinn's blazing eyes done in monochrome grey, the whole stained with blood that looked black beneath the influence of the blending potion. Its limbs were disproportionate, though I couldn't say whether they looked too long or too short---just wrong. Everything about it was wrong, screamed with malice and hate and anger, and it carried a cloak of supernatural power with it that made my teeth hurt and my hair stand on end.
The loup-garou came through the door, swept its monochrome gaze past me, then turned to its left with unholy grace and flung itself at the jailer.
The man got lucky. He looked up and saw the creature as he was regaining his feet, then convulsed in a spastic reaction to the sight of the fanged horror. The reaction threw him a few inches out of the loup-garou's path. He scrambled back, behind the counter and out of my sight.
The loup-garou turned to pursue the jailer behind the counter, slowed because it had to shoulder its way between the counter and the wall, making the counter buckle outward into the room. The jailer got to his feet, gun in hand, took a creditable shooting stance, and emptied the pistol's clip into the loup-garou's skull in the space of maybe three seconds, filling the little antechamber with the sound of thunder and drowning out the cries of the prisoners in their cells in the hall beyond.
The monster kept coming. The bullets bothered it no more than a fly ramming the forehead of a professional wrestler. It rose up as the guard screamed, "No, no, no, nonononononono!" And then it fell upon him, claws and fangs slashing. The jailer tried to turn, to run where there was no place left to go, and the thing turned its head and sank its jaws into the small of the man's back, releasing a spray of blood. The jailer screamed and grabbed frantically at the console, but the loup-garou shook its head violently from left to right, tore him from the console, and hurled him to the floor behind the counter.
I didn't see the guard die. But I saw the way the blood flew up over the hunched, gnarled shoulders of the loup-garou, to decorate the walls and the ceiling. I felt silently grateful when the bent and warping panes of Plexiglas became obscured with scarlet.
It was sometime right around then, as paralyzing agony seared through my shoulder and terrified prisoners screamed and cried out to God or Allah to save them that I noticed that a new noise had been added to the din. The guard had tipped off the alarm when he had scrambled at the console, and it was hooting enthusiastically. Cops were going to come running, and one of the first was going to be Murphy.
The loup-garou was still savaging the jailer's body, and I hoped for his sake that the man wasn't still alive. My best option would have been to slip into the cell block, close the security door behind me, and hope the creature went out into the building at large. Within the cell block, I would have time to put up a warding barrier, something that would keep the monster from coming through the door or the walls to get at me and the prisoners in there. I could fort up there, wait for morning, and live through the night, almost certainly. It was the smart thing to do. It was the survivable thing to do.
Instead, I turned to my staff, at the other side of the little room, and held forth my hand. "Vento servitas," I hissed, forcing out tightly focused will, and a sudden current of air simultaneously threw my staff to me and slammed shut the door to the cells, giving the trapped prisoners what little protection it offered. I caught the staff in my outstretched hand and turned to the barred gate that held me shut in the antechamber with the loup-garou.
I thrust my staff in between the bars and leaned against it as though to pry the bars apart. Had it been only wood and muscle involved, I might have snapped the ancient ash. But a wizard's staff is a tool that helps him to apply forces, to manipulate them and maneuver them to his will. So I leaned my will and my concentration on the staff at the same time I did my body, and worked on multiplying the force I was applying to the steel bars.
"Forzare," I hissed. "Forzare." The metal began to strain and buckle.
Behind me, the loup-garou started thrashing around. I heard the shattering of Plexiglas and shot it a look over my shoulder. The scant protection offered by the potion collapsed, colors flooding my vision. The black of its muzzle warmed to a scarlet-smeared wash of dark brown, stained with wet scarlet. Its fangs were ivory and crimson. Its eyes became a brilliant shade of green. It cut through the blending potion with the ferocity of its stare, and focused on me with an intensity that sent every instinct in my body screaming that death was here, that it was about to jump down my throat and rip me inside out.
"Forzare!" I shouted, shoving against the staff with every ounce of strength I had. The bars bowed out in the middle, parted to an opening perhaps a foot wide and twice as long. The counter exploded outward as the loup-garou came through it, showering me with debris and minor, painful cuts.
I dove through the opening, heedless of my shoulder, conscious only of the beast closing in behind me. My body sailed through with more grace than I could have managed under less panicked circumstances, almost as though the rush of air moving before the charging creature had helped lift me through. And then something closed on my left foot, and I simply lost all sensation in it.
I fell short, to the floor, bumping my chin hard enough to draw blood from the corner of my tongue. I looked over my shoulder to see the loup-garou with one of my boots held in its jaws, its broad head shoved through the opening in the bars and caught there. It was shaking its body back and forth, but its paws were smeared with scarlet blood, and its feet slipped left and right on the tile floor. Incredible strength or no, it couldn't get the leverage it needed to tear the bars apart like tissues.
I heard myself making desperate animal sounds, struggling in a panic, writhing. The alarm was howling all around me now, and I could hear shouts and running footsteps. Dust was falling down around the edges of the bars, and I could see that the loup-garou was slowly tearing them from their mountings in the floor and ceiling, despite its bad footing.
I twisted my foot left and right, horrid images of simply losing it at the ankle flashing in my mind, and then abruptly shot forward several feet along the floor. I glanced down at my leg and saw a bloodstained sock before I scrambled up and started running for my staff.
Behind me, the loup-garou howled in frustration and began to throw itself about. It must have scraped enough of the blood off of its paws, because it then tore through the wall of bars in two seconds flat and rushed after me.
I took up my staff and spun to face the creature, planting my feet on the floor, holding the ash wood before me. "Tornarius!" I thundered, thrusting my staff upward, and the thing threw itself at me in a rush of power and mass.
My aim was to reflect the loup-garou's own power and momentum back against it, force equals mass times acceleration, et cetera, but I had underestimated just how much power the thing had. It overloaded my limits and we split the difference. The creature slammed against a solid force in the air that canceled its momentum and flung it to the floor.
Approximately equal force was also applied to me---but I was probably a fifth of the mass of the loup-garou. I was flung back through the air like a piece of popcorn in a sudden wind, all the way to where the hall turned the corner to lead down to Special Investigations. I hit the floor before I hit the wall, thankfully, bounced, rolled, and slapped into the wall at last, grateful to be at a stop and aching all over. I had lost my staff in the tumble. The tile floor was cool against my cheek.
I watched the loup-garou recover itself, focus its burning eyes on me, and hurtle down the hallway. I was in so much pain that I could appreciate the pure beauty of it, the savage, unearthly grace and speed with which it moved. It was a perfect hunter, a perfect killer, fast and strong, relentless and deadly. It was no wonder that I had lost to such a magnificently dangerous being. I hated to go, but at least I hadn't gotten beaten by some scabby troll or whining, angst-ridden vampire. And I wasn't going to turn away from it, either.
I drew in what was to be my last breath, my eyes wide on the onrushing loup-garou.
So I could clearly see as Murphy looked down at me with crystal-blue eyes that saw right through the potion's remaining effects. She gave me a hard glance and placed herself between me and the onrushing monster in a shooter's stance, raising up her gun in a futile gesture of protection.
"Murphy!" I screamed.
And then the thing was on us.
I tried to make my stunned body respond, to get to my feet, to unleash every ounce of magic at my command to protect Murphy, and to hell with the consequences.
I failed.
The loup-garou hurtled down the hallway, moving faster than I could have believed something so massive could move. Its claws gouged into the tile floor like it was soft clay. The walls shook around the beast, as though its very presence was enough to make reality shudder. Bloodstained drool spilled from its foaming jaws, and its green eyes blazed with hellish fury.
Murphy, standing at her full five-feet-and-change tall, was shorter than the loup-garou, its eyes on level with hers. She was wearing jeans again, hiking boots, a flannel shirt rolled up past the elbows, a bandanna around her throat. She was without makeup or jewelry, her earlobes curiously naked and vulnerable without earrings. Her punky little haircut fell down around her eyes, and as she raised her gun, she thrust out her lower lip and puffed out a breath, flipping her bangs up out of her vision. She started shooting when the loup-garou was about thirty feet away---useless. The thing had laughed off bullets fired into its skull at point-blank range.
I noticed three things at that point.
First, Murphy's gun was not the usual heavy-caliber Colt semiautomatic she carried. It was smaller, sleeker, with a telescopic sight mounted at its rear.
Second, the gun made a sharp little bark, bark, bark, rather than the more customary wham, wham, wham.
Third, when the first bullet hit the loup-garou's chest, blood flew, and the creature faltered and buckled, as though surprised. When the second and third shots slammed into its front leg, the limb slipped and went out from under it. The loup-garou snarled and rolled its momentum to the side, put its head down, and simply smashed its way through the wall and into the room beyond.
Murphy and I were left in the dust-clouded hallway, the escape alarm whooping plaintively in the background. Murphy dropped down next to me. "And I told Aunt Edna I'd never get any use out of those earrings," she muttered. "Christ, Dresden, you're covered in blood. How bad is it?" I felt her slip her hand inside an enormous tear in the blue jumpsuit that I hadn't seen before and run her palm over my chest and shoulders, checking the arteries there. "You're under arrest, by the way."
"I'm okay, I'm okay," I panted, when I could breathe. "What the hell happened? How did you do that?"
Murphy rose up, lifted the gun to half raised, and stalked toward the hole the loup-garou had left in the wall. We could hear crashing sounds, heavy thumps, and furious snarling somewhere on the other side. "You have the right to remain silent. What do you think happened, moron? I read your report. I make my own loads for competition shooting, so I ran off a few silver bullets last night. But they're only in twenty-two caliber, so I'm going to have to put one through his eye to take him out. If that will do it."
"Twenty-two?" I complained, still breathless. "Couldn't you have made some thirty-eights, some forty-fours?"
"Bitch and whine," Murphy snarled at me. "You have the right to an attorney. I don't make my loads for work, and I didn't have the materials for it. Be happy with what you have."
I scrambled to my feet and leaned against the wall by the ragged hole. There was the sound of running feet, moving toward us down the hall. "I can't believe you're arresting me. What's through that wall?"
"Records, archives," Murphy said, leveling the target pistol at the hole. "A bunch of big old file cabinets and computers. Everyone who works there went home hours ago. How's that thing react to tear gas?"
"Send some in there and I'll tell you," I muttered, and Murphy shot me a dire look.
"Just stay down, Dresden, until I can get you locked up somewhere safe and get a doctor to look at you."
"Murph. Listen to yourself. We're stuck in a building with one of the nastiest creatures around, and you're still trying to arrest me. Get some perspective."
"You made your bed, jerk. Now lie in it." Murphy then raised her voice, without turning her head from the hole in the wall. "Carmichael! Down here! I want four on the doors going out of Records, and the rest with me. Rudolph, get down here and get Dresden back to the office, out of the way." She glared at my wrists, where the handcuffs she'd put on me the night before still dangled. "Christ, Dresden," she added in a mutter. "What is it with you and my handcuffs?"
Police, most of them plainclothes guys from Special Investigations, came pouring into the hall. Some of them had pistols, some of them had pump-action riot guns. My vision blurred and swirled between grey tones and Technicolor, and adrenaline made my nerves jangle and jerk. The potion must have been wearing off; most potions only lasted for a couple of minutes, anyway.
I took inventory. The loup-garou's teeth had scored my foot, through the boot. It hurt, and my sock was soaked in blood. I would leave little red footprints on the floor when I started walking. I could taste the blood in my mouth, from where I had bitten into my tongue, and I either had to spit or swallow. I swallowed. No comments, please. My back was mostly numb, and what wasn't numb hurt like hell. My wounded shoulder, naturally, was pounding so hard that I could barely stand.
"Bastard chewed up my good boot," I muttered, and for some reason, the statement struck me as incredibly funny. Maybe I had just seen too much for the evening, but whatever had caused it, I sailed into panting, wheezing gales of laughter.
Carmichael dragged me back. His round face was red with exertion and tension, and his food-stained tie was loose around his throat. He passed me into the custody of a young, good-looking detective, who I didn't recognize. He must have been the rookie at SI. I leaned against the young man and laughed helplessly.
"Take him back to the office, Rudolph," Carmichael said. "Keep him there, out of the way. As soon as this is under control, we'll get him to a doctor."
"Jesus Christ," Rudolph said, his eyes wide, his short, dark hair coated with drifting dust. He had a tense, panicky voice, and in spite of his youth, he was panting twice as heavily as the veteran Carmichael. "You saw it on the security monitors, right? What that thing did to Sergeant Hampton?"
Carmichael grabbed Rudolph by the front of his shirt and shook him. "Listen up, rook," he said, his voice harsh. "It's still there, and it can do it to us just as quick as to Hampy. Shut your hole and do what I told you."
"R-right," Rudolph said. He straightened, and started jerking me back down the hall away from the records office. "Who is this guy, anyway?"
Carmichael glared at me. "He's the guy who knows. If he comes to and says something, listen to him." Then he picked up a riot gun and stomped over to where Murphy was getting set to lead a group through the hole in the wall after the loup-garou. She was going over instructions, that if she went down one of the men was to pick up her gun and try to put out the thing's eyes with it.
The rookie half dragged and half led me around the corner and down the hall to the Special Investigations office. I stared down at my feet as he did, at the trail of bloody footprints behind me, giggling. Something was nagging at me, somewhere behind the madness of the laughter, where a diffident, rational corner of my mind was waiting patiently for my consciousness to take notice of an important thought it had isolated. Something about blood.
"This isn't happening," Rudolph chanted to himself along the way. "This isn't happening. Sweet Jesus, this is a trick for the new guy. A prank. Got to be." He stank of sour sweat and fear, and he was shaking horribly. I could feel it in my biceps, where he held me.
I think it was his terror that let me see through my own hysteria, fight it down and shove it under control again. He hauled me through the door, into the Special Investigations office, and I stumbled to the battered, sunken old couch just inside the door. I gasped for air, while the rookie slammed the door and paced back and forth, his eyes bulging, wheezing for air. "This isn't happening," he said. "My God, this isn't happening."
"Hey," I managed, after a minute, struggling to sort out all the input raging through my body---tears, bruises, maybe a sprain or two, a little bit of chill where shock was lurking, and aching sides from the laughter, of all things. The rookie didn't hear me. "Hey, Rudy," I said louder, and the kid snapped his eyes over to me as though shocked that I'd spoken. "Water," I told him. "Need some water."
"Water, right," Rudolph said, and he turned and all but ran to the water fountain. His hands were shaking so hard that he crushed the first two paper cones he took from the dispenser, but he got the third one right. "You're that guy. The fake."
"Wizard," I rasped back to him. "Harry Dresden."
"Dresden, right," the kid said, and came back over to me with the paper cone. I took it and splashed the contents all over my face. It was a cool shock, something else to draw me back from the land of giggles and throbbing nerve endings, and I clawed for all the sane ground I could get. Then I handed the cone back to him. "One more for the inside."
He stared at me as though I was mad (and who's to say, right?) and went to get another cone cup of water. I drank the second one down and started sorting through my thoughts. "Blood, Rudy," I said. "Something about blood."
"God," the rookie panted, the whites of his eyes glaring. "It was all over Hampton. Blood all over the room, splashed on the Plexiglas and the security camera. Blood, goddamn blood everywhere. What the fuck is that thing?"
"Just one more tough bad guy. But it bleeds," I said. Then fastened on the idea, my brain churning to a ponderous conclusion. "It bleeds. Murphy shot it and put its blood all over the floor." I gulped down the rest of the water and stood. "It bleeds, and I can nail it." I lifted my fist to shake it defiantly over my head and strode past the stunned Rudolph.
"Hey," he said, feebly. "Maybe you should sit down. You don't look so good. And you're sort of under arrest, still."
"I can't be under arrest right now," I said back to him. "I don't have the time." I limped down the rows of desks and partitions to Murphy's office. It's a little tacked-on office, with cheap walls of wooden paneling and an old wooden door, but it was more than anyone else in the disfavored department had. There was a paper rectangle taped neatly to the door, where a name placard would be on any other office in the building, which read in neat, block letters of black ink: LT. KARRIN MURPHY, SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS. The powers that be refused to purchase a real name plaque for any director of SI---sort of their way of reminding the person they stuck in the position that they wouldn't be there long enough to matter. Underneath the neat paper square, at an angle, was a red and purple bumper sticker that said: TRESPASSERS WILL BE KILLED AND EATEN.
"I hope she didn't leave her computer on," I mumbled and went into Murphy's office. I took one look around the neatly organized little place and stepped in to pluck my blasting rod, bracelet, amulet, firearm, and other accoutrements I'd had in my possession when I'd been arrested from the table next to the computer. The computer was on. There was a cough from the monitor as my hand passed near it, and a little puff of smoke, then a bright spark from somewhere within the plastic console of the hard drive.
I winced and collected my things, putting on the shield bracelet with fumbling fingers, ducking my head into the loop of my pentacle amulet, stuffing my pistol into the jumpsuit's pocket, and taking my blasting rod firmly in my right hand, the side of the body that projects energy. "You didn't see that, Rudy. Okay?"
The rookie had a stunned look on his face as he stared at me and at the smoking computer and monitor. "What did you do?"
"Nothing, never came close, didn't do anything, that's my story and I'm sticking to it," I muttered. "You got that paper cup? Right, then. All we need is a stuffed animal."
He stared at me. "Wh-what did you say?"
"A stuffed animal, man!" I roared at him. "Don't mess with a wizard when he's wizarding!" I let out a cackle that threatened to bring the wild hysteria that still lurked inside of me back in full force, and banished it with a ferocious scowl. Poor Rudolph bore the brunt of both expressions, got a little more pale than he already was, and took a couple of steps back from me.
"Look. Carmichael still keeps a couple of toys in his desk, right? For when kids have to wait on their parents, that sort of thing?"
"Uh," said the rookie. "I, uh."
I brandished my blasting rod. "Go look!"
Maybe the kid would have taken any excuse at that point, but he seemed willing enough to follow my instructions. He spun and ran out into the main room and started frantically tearing open desks.
I limped out of Murphy's office and glanced back at the bloody footprints I left on the puke-grey carpet behind me with my soaking sock. The room was getting colder as I lost more blood. It wasn't serious, but it was all the way at the bottom of my considerably long body, and if I didn't get the bleeding stopped before too much longer it was bound to cause problems.
I was going to bend over and try to get a better look at my wounded foot, but when I started to, I swayed and wobbled dangerously, and thought it would be a better thing to wait until someone else could do it. I stood up and took a few deep breaths. Something nagged me about this entire deal, something that was missing, but I'd be damned if I could figure out what it was.
"Rudy," I called. "Get that animal yet?"
The rookie's hand thrust up from one of the partitioned cubicles with a battered stuffed Snoopy doll. "Will this work?"
"Perfect!" I cheered woozily.
And then all hell broke loose.
From out in the hallway, there came a scream that no human throat could have made, a sound of such fury and insane anger that it made my stomach roil and my guts shake. Gunfire erupted, not in a rattling series of individual detonations, but in a roar of furious thunder. Bullets shot through the wall, somewhere near me, and smashed out a couple of windows in the Special Investigations office.
I was on my last legs, exhausted, and terrified half crazy. I hurt, all over. There was no way I was going to have the focus, the strength I needed to go up against that monster. Easier to run, to plan something out, to come back when I was stronger. I could win a rematch. It's tough to beat a wizard who knows his enemy, who comes prepared to deal with it. It was the smart thing to do.
But I've never been known for my rational snap judgment. I gripped the blasting rod and started sucking in all the power I could reach, scooping up my recent terror, reaching down into the giggling madness, scraping up all the courage I had left, and pouring it into the kettle with everything else. The power came rushing into me, purity of emotion, complex energies of will, and raw hardheadedness, all combining into a field, an aura of tingling, invisible energy that I could feel enveloping my skin. Shivers ran over me, overriding the pain of my injuries, the ecstasy of power gathering my sensations into its heady embrace. I was pumped. I was charged. I was more than human, and God help anyone who got in my way, because he would need it. I drew in a deep, steadying breath.
And then I simply turned to the wall, pointed my rod at it, and snarled, "Fuego."
Power lanced out through the rod in a flood of scarlet light that charred a six-foot circle of wall into powder and ash and sent it flying. I stepped through it, wishing for my duster, for a second, just for the cool effect it would have.
The hallway was a scene out of hell. Two officers were hauling a third down the hall toward me, while three more with shotguns fired wildly around the corner. I don't think the rescuers had taken the time to note that the body they were dragging away from the combat had no head attached to it.
One of the cops screamed as the riot gun he held ran empty, and something I could not see jerked him forward, around the corner and out of my vision. There was a horrible shriek, a splash of blood, and the two remaining shooters panicked and fled up the hall and toward me.
The loup-garou came around the corner after them, hauling one of the men down and ripping its claws across his spine with a simple, savage motion that left the man quivering on the bloody tiles and hardly made the beast miss a step. It set its eyes on the next man, one of the plainclothes SI detectives, and hamstrung him with a slash of its jaws. The beast left him howling on the tiles and hurtled toward the retreating pair, still frantically dragging their corpse away.
I stepped forward, between the fleeing men and the beast, and lifted the blasting rod. "I don't think so, bub."
The loup-garou crouched down, its massive body moving with unholy grace, its head and forequarters soaked in blood. I saw its eyes widen, and its muscles bunch beneath its dark brown pelt. Power gathered at my fist, red and brilliant, and the length of my blasting rod turned an incandescent white. Energy seethed through me as I prepared to release hell on earth at the monster. My teeth ached and my hair stood on end. I tensed every muscle I had, holding it all back until I could put every scrap of strength I had into the strike.
And then there was the bark-bark-bark of Murphy's little target pistol, and the loup-garou's rear flank twitched and threw out little bursts of blood. Its head whipped to one side, back down the short hallway, and its body followed suit, faster than a serpent. There was a surge of enormous muscles, a howl of rage, and then the thing was gone.
I spat a curse and ran down the hall after it. The hamstrung officer lay on the floor screaming, and the other man, the one who'd had his spine ripped out, was choking and twitching, unable to draw in a breath. Red anger flooded me, rage that I realized with some dim part of my mind was as much a part of the beast and its blood-maddened frenzy as it was of me.
I rounded the corner in time to see Murphy, standing in front of a litter of bodies, take a last shot at the loup-garou. And then it snarled and she vanished underneath its bulk.
"No!" I screamed and ran forward.
Carmichael beat me to it. His round belly had been ripped open. There was blood all over his cheap suit, though his food-stained tie had somehow remained untainted. His face was grave pale and set with the sort of intensity that only a dying man can have. He held a bent and twisted riot gun in his hands and he hurled himself onto the loup-garou's back as though he weren't sixty pounds overweight and long past his agile years. He wedged the riot gun between the loup-garou's jaws, but the beast turned and slammed Carmichael into the wall with a sickening crunch of bone and a gout of blood from the man's mouth.
Murphy slithered out from between the beast's paws on her shoulder blades and buttocks, her cute little cheerleader's face set in a berserker's fury. She jammed the end of her little gun beneath the thing's chin. I saw her hands convulse on the trigger. But instead of a flash of light and a dead loup-garou, there was only the whooping of the alarm and a look of shocked surprise on Murphy's face. The gun had run empty.
"Murphy!" I shouted. "Roll!"
She saw me with the blasting rod and her eyes flew wide. The loup-garou shook its shoulders free of Carmichael's corpse and bit completely through the riot gun, thrashing its head left and right. Murphy scuttled sideways across the tiles and through the hole in the wall the beast had made earlier.
It took one snap at her and then whipped its head around to snarl at me. I saw the crimson light reflected in its eyes as I focused every bit of fury in the world on the tip of my rod, and shouted, "Fuego!" I saw the reflected image in the beast's eyes brighten to nuclear-white in front of a tall, lean figure of black shadow, saw the flood of energy as big around as my hips rush down the hall like a lance of red lightning and hammer into the beast. Sound rushed along with it, a mountain's roar that made the gunshots and screams of the evening seem like a child's whispers in comparison.
The power lifted the loup-garou, hurtling it over the wounded figures moaning on the floor, down the hall, into holding, through the security door, through the cell door immediately across from it, then through the brick exterior wall of the building and out into the Chicago night. But it wasn't over yet. The lance of power carried the loup-garou across the street, through the windows of the condemned building across from the station, and through a series of walls within, each one shattering with a redbrick roar. Before the red fire died away, I could see the far side of the building across the street, and the lights of the next block over through the hole the loup-garou had made.
I stood in a blood-splattered hallway, filled with the moans of the wounded and the wail of the escape alarm. The sounds of emergency vehicles drifted into the building through the ragged hole in the wall. A slender young black man stood up from the floor of the cell the loup-garou had smashed through and gawked at the hole in the wall, then followed the destruction back down the hallway to where I stood. "Damn," he said, and it had the same hushed tone to it as a holy word.
Murphy struggled out of the hole in the wall to pitch down on the floor of the hallway, gasping. I could see the bulge of bone warping out the skin of her lower arm where it had been snapped, somehow. She lay white-faced and gasping, staring at Carmichael's crushed body.
For a moment, I couldn't do anything but stand there gawking. There was another hole in the wall, where the loup-garou must have crashed back into the hall, putting itself between the two groups of policemen, where they couldn't risk shooting at it without hitting one another. Or maybe they had. Some of the men who were down looked as though they had bullet wounds.
And from outside, over the sirens and the moans and the noise of a city night, I heard a long, furious howl.
"You've got to be kidding me," I breathed. My limbs felt like bruised jelly, but I turned to limp back around the corner and found Rudy there, staring, a paper cup in one hand and the Snoopy doll in the other. I took both from him, and stalked back into the hallway, to the second hole the loup-garou had made.
I found what I was looking for at once---blood on the inside of the hole in the wall, where the beast had plowed through it. The loup-garou's blood was thicker, darker than human fluids, and I scooped it into the paper cup before going back into the hallway.
I swept clean a place with my foot, set down my blasting rod, got out my chalk, and drew a circle on the ground. Rudolph approached me, his head jerking back and forth between grisly corpses and splashes of blood. "You. My God. What are you doing?"
I slapped the Snoopy down in the middle of the circle, then smeared the beast's blood over its eyes and mouth, over its ears and nose. "Thaumaturgy," I said.
"Wha---?"
"Magic," I clarified grimly. "Make a symbolic link between a little thing," I nodded at the Snoopy doll, "and a big thing. Make it happen on the smaller scale and it happens on the larger scale, too."
"Magic," Rudolph echoed.
I glanced up at him. "Go downstairs. Send the emergency people up here, Rudy. Go on. Send them up here to help the wounded."
The kid twitched his eyes from the bloody Snoopy back to me and jerked his head in a nod. Then he turned and fled down the hallway.
I turned my attention back to the spell I was working. I had to keep the rage and anger I felt away from the working of my magic. I couldn't afford to flood my spirit with grief, fury, and thoughts of vengeance for the dead men, for their deaths, for the pain that would be visited on their families. But God as my witness, I wanted nothing more than to try to set that thing on fire and hear it burn somewhere outside.
I tried to remind myself that it wasn't MacFinn's fault. He was under a curse, and not to blame. Killing him wouldn't bring back any of the dead men in these bloody hallways. But I could keep any more men from dying tonight.
And I could do that without killing him.
In retrospect, it was just as well that I didn't try to murder MacFinn. Magic like that takes a lot of energy---certainly more than I had. I would probably have killed myself in the effort to finish off the loup-garou. Not to mention that the Council would get their feathers ruffled by the concept---even though technically, MacFinn wasn't a human being at the moment. Killing monsters isn't nearly as much of an issue with the Council. They don't hold with equal-opportunity mercy.
Instead, as my vision started to fade, I began to chant nonsense syllables in a low, musical refrain, focusing the energy I would need inside the circle I had closed around me. It wasn't until later that I would realize that I was babbling a chant of "Ubriacha, ubrius, ubrium," to the Peanuts theme music. I tore off a strip of my own bloodied jumpsuit and bound it across the Snoopy's eyes, its ears. I bound up the ends of its fuzzy, cute little paws. Then its mouth, as though muzzling it.
I felt the spell grow and prepare itself, and when it was ready, I released the power and broke the circle, feeling it flow out into the night, following the blood back to the loup-garou, winding itself about the creature, blinding its eyes, fouling its ears, lashing around its jaws and forcing them shut, crippling its taloned paws. The spell would hamper and confuse the beast, hopefully drive it to ground where no one could disturb it, keep it from venting its rage upon the people of the city. And it would last until dawn. The energy flowed out of me, left me feeling empty, exhausted, dizzy.
And then people were all around me, emergency folk in uniforms, cops and paramedics and firemen, oh my. I stood up from my circle, grabbed my blasting rod, and shambled off blindly.
I walked past Carmichael's corpse, stunned. Murphy was rocking back and forth over it, weeping, shaking, while a man tried to slide a blanket over her shoulders. She didn't notice me. Carmichael looked relaxed in death. I wondered for a minute if he had a family, a wife who would miss him. He'd died saving Murphy from the beast. He'd died a hero.
It seemed so empty to me, at that moment. Meaningless to be a hero. I felt burned on the inside, as though the fire I had hurled at the creature had scoured away all the gentle feelings that had been there and left a fallow ground behind where only red emotions could flourish. I stumbled past Murphy and Carmichael and turned to walk out of the building, dimly realizing that in the confusion I might actually have fair odds of making it back outside where Tera and Susan would be waiting in the car. No one tried to stop me.
The stairs were tough, and for a minute I thought I might just lie down and die on the first landing, but a helpful old fireman lent me a hand down to the first floor, asking me several times if I needed a doctor. I assured him that I was fine and prayed that he didn't notice the handcuffs still dangling from either wrist. He didn't. He was as wide around the eyes as everyone else, stunned.
Outside was chaos. Police were struggling to establish some sort of order. I saw a couple of news vans rolling up the street, while other people crowded around, trying to see. I stood in the door, dismayed, trying to remember how to walk down the steps.
And then someone warm and gentle was at my side, taking some of my weight. I let her have it, and closed my eyes. I smelled Susan's hair when I inhaled, and it made me want to wail and hold on to her, to try to explain what I had seen, to try to clean the stains from inside my head. All that came out was a little choking sound.
I heard Susan speak to someone else, and another person got on the other side of me, helped me down the stairs. Tera, I thought. I dimly remember them guiding me through the hectic area in front of the police station, around ambulances and shouting men, around policemen who were trying to get the bystanders to move away. I heard Susan explain to someone that I was drunk.
Finally there was quiet, and then we were moving among cars in a parking lot, cool light gleaming on cool metal shapes, cool rain coming down on my head, my hair. I tilted my face up to feel the rain, and everything swam crazily.
"I've got you, Harry," Susan murmured against my ear. "Just relax. I've got you. Just relax."
And so I did.
I awoke in a dark place. It was like the inside of a warehouse, or a big, underground garage, all black, with a smooth, even floor, and a pool of bleak, sterile radiance in the middle of it that came from a source I could not see or identify. I felt like hell, and looked down to see myself covered in scratches, bruises, welts, blood, bandages, and ill-fitting clothing. I wore none of my implements or devices, and there was a curious sense of distance between me and the pain of my injuries---I was more than aware of them, but they seemed to be something that was merely noted in passing, and unimportant to my life as a whole.
I stood just outside the circle of light, and it seemed to me proper that I move forward into it. I did. And as I did, there appeared in the circle opposite me . . . me. Myself. Only better groomed, dressed in a mantled duster of black leather, not the sturdy, if styleless canvas that I wore. My double's pants and boots and shirt were all black as well, and they fit him as though tailor-made, rather than off-the-rack. His eyes were set deep, overshadowed by severe brows, and glittering with dark intelligence. His hair was neatly cut, and the short beard he wore emphasized the long lines of his face, the high cheekbones, the straight slash of his mouth, and the angular strength of his jaw. He stood as tall as I, as long limbed as I, but carried with him infinitely more confidence, raw knowledge, and strength. A faint whiff of cologne drifted over to me, cutting through my own sour sweat and blood smells.
My double tilted his head to one side, looked me up and down for a long minute, and then said, "Harry, you look like hell."
"And you look like me," I said, and limped toward him, peering.
My double rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Hell's bells, you make me sick with how thick skulled you are, sometimes." He took steps toward me, mirroring my own movements. "I don't look like you. I am you."
I blinked at him for a few seconds. "You are me. How does that work?"
"You're unconscious, moron," my double said to me. "We can finally talk to one another."
"Oh, I get it," I said. "You're Evil Harry, lurking inside Good Harry. Right? And you only come out at night?"
"Give me a break," my double said. "If you were that simple, you'd be so insufferably boring you'd probably blow your own head off. I'm not Evil Harry. I'm just Subconscious Harry. I'm your inner voice, bub. Your intuition, your instinct, your basic, animal reactions. I make your dreams, and I decide which nightmares to pop in the old psychic VCR at night. I come up with a lot of the good ideas, and pass them along to you when you wake up."
"So you're saying you're wiser than me? Smarter than me?"
"I probably am, in a lot of ways," my double said, "but that's not my job, and it's not why I'm here."
"I see. So what are you doing here, then? You're going to tell me how I'm going to meet three spirits of Harry Past, Present, and Future?" I asked.
My double snorted. "That's good. That really is, the banter thing. I can't do the banter very well. Maybe that's why you're in charge. Of course, if I was in charge more often, you'd get laid a lot more---but no, that's not it, either."
"Can we speed this along? I'm too tired to keep on guessing, " I complained.
"No joke, jerk. That's why you're asleep. But we don't have long to talk, and there are some issues we need to work through." He said "issues" in the British manner, iss-ewwws.
"Issues to work through?" I said. "What, am I my own therapist, now?" I turned my back on my double and started stalking out of the lighted circle. "I've had some weird dreams, but this has got to be the stupidest one yet."
My double slipped around me and got in my way before I could leave the circle of light. "Hold it. You really don't want to do this."
"I'm tired. I feel like shit. I'm hurt. And what I really don't want is to waste any more time dreaming about you." I narrowed my eyes at my double. "Now get out of my way." I turned to my right and started walking toward the nearest edge of the circle.
My double slipped in front of me again, apparently without needing to cross the intervening space. "It isn't that simple, Harry. No matter where you go, there you are."
"Look, I've had a long night."
"I know," my double said. "Believe me, I know. That's why it's important to get some of this out now, before it settles in. Before you blow a gasket on your sanity, man."
"I've not worried about that," I lied. "I'm as solid as a brick wall."
My double snorted. "If you weren't getting pretty close to crazy, would you be talking to yourself right now?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Shrugged. "Okay. You've got a point."
"I've got more than that," my double said. "Things have been happening to you so quickly that you haven't had time to think. You need to work through some of this, and then you need to do some hard thinking, fast."
I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. "All right, then," I said. "What do you want to hear?"
My double gestured, and there was Murphy as she had appeared in the hallway of the police station, the flesh of her bicep tented out by the broken bone, her face pale, spotted with blood, and streaked with tears and hopeless anguish.
"Murph," I said, quietly, and knelt down by the image. "Stars above. What have I done to you?" The image, the memory, didn't hear me. She just wept silent, bitter tears.
My double knelt on the other side of the apparition. "Nothing, Harry," he said. "What happened at the police station wasn't your fault."
"Like hell it wasn't," I snarled. "If I'd have been faster, gotten there sooner, or if I'd told her the truth from the beginning---"
"But you didn't," my double interjected. "And you had some pretty damned compelling reasons not to. Ease up on yourself, man. You can't change the past."
"Easy for you to say," I snarled.
"No, it isn't," my double said quietly. "Concentrate on what you will do, not what you should have done. You've been trying to protect Murphy all along, instead of making her able to protect herself. She's going to be fighting these kinds of things, Harry, and you won't always be there to babysit her. Instead of trying to play shepherd, you need to play coach, and get her into shape to do what she needs to do."
"But that means---"
"Telling her everything," my double said. "The White Council, the Nevernever, all of it."
"The Council won't like it. If I tell her and they hear about it, they might consider her a security risk."
"And if you don't make her able to understand what she's fighting, something's going to eat her face some dark night. Murphy's a big girl. The Council had better be careful if they decide to go messing with her." My double considered Murphy for a moment. "You should ask her out sometime, too."
"I should what?" I said.
"You heard me. You're repressing big time, man."
"This is all getting way too Freudian for me," I said, and stood up, intending to walk away again. I was confronted with an image of Susan, as she had appeared on the steps to the police station, tall in her heels and dress suit, elegant and beautiful, her face stretched with worry.
"Think she's going to get a good story out of this?" my double asked.
"Oh, that's below the belt. That's not why she's seeing me."
"Maybe, maybe not. But you're asking yourself that question, aren't you?" My double gestured to himself and to me, demonstratively. "Shouldn't that make you ask a few more questions?"
"Like what?" I asked.
"Like how come you don't trust anyone," my double said. "Not even someone like Susan who has been going out on a limb for you tonight." He lifted a long-fingered hand and stroked at the short beard with his fingertips. "I'm thinking this has to do with Elaine. How about you?"
And then there she was, a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age---gawky and coltish, all long legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet, identical to my own, if less battered, lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. Her smile lit up her face, made her eyes dance with secret fires that still, even after all the years, made me draw in a sharp breath. Elaine. Beautiful, vital, and as poisonous as any snake.
I turned my back on the image, deliberately---before I could see it change into the Elaine that I had last seen---naked, festooned in swirling paints that lent a savage aura to her skin. Her lips had been stained brilliant, wet red, curving around twisting, rolling phrases as she chanted in the midst of her circle, its sigils meant to focus pain and fury into tangible power that had been used to hold a foolish young man helpless while his mentor offered him one last chance to sip from a chalice of fresh, hot blood.
"That's been over for a long time," I said, my voice shaking.
My double answered me quietly, "It isn't over. It isn't over yet, Harry. As long as you hold yourself responsible for Justin's death and Elaine's fall, it still colors everything you think and do."
I didn't answer myself.
"She's still alive," my double said. "You know she is."
"She died in the fire," I said. "She was unconscious. She couldn't have lived through it."
"You'd have known if she died. And they never found a second set of bones."
"She died in the fire!" I screamed. "She's dead."
"Until you stop pretending," my double said, appearing before me, "and try to face reality, you're not going to be able to heal. You're not going to be able to trust anyone. Which reminds me . . ."
My double gestured, and Tera West appeared as I had seen her crouched behind the garbage bin at the rear of the gas station, naked, her body lean, feral, leaves and bits of bracken in her hair, her amber eyes gleaming with cold, alien intelligence. "Why in the hell are you trusting her?"
"I haven't had much choice," I snapped. "In case you haven't noticed, things have been sort of desperate lately."
"You know she's not human," my double said. "You know she was at the scene of the crime, at Marcone's restaurant, where Spike was torn up. You know she has some kind of hold on a group of young people, the favorite targets of the creatures of the Nevernever. In fact, you can be pretty damn sure that she is a shapeshifter of one kind or another, who isn't telling you the whole truth, but still comes asking for your help."
"Like I can throw stones for not telling the whole truth," I said.
Hngh, my double said in answer. "But you haven't confronted her about what she isn't telling you. Those kids. Who the hell were they, and what were they doing? What is she getting them into? And why was she keeping it a secret from MacFinn? He didn't recognize the names when you dropped them."
"All right, all right," I said. "I was going to talk to her anyway. As soon as I wake up."
My double chuckled. "If things are that leisurely. These murders are still happening, and they're starting to pile up. Are you serious about doing something about them?"
"You know that I am."
My double nodded firmly. "I'm glad we agree on something. Let's look at some facts. MacFinn couldn't have committed all the murders. Most particularly, he couldn't have committed the most important murder---the industrialist, Marcone's partner. He and his bodyguard were killed the night after the full moon. And Spike was wiped out the night before the full moon. MacFinn doesn't have any control over his shapeshifting. He couldn't have been the one to pull off those murders."
"So who could have?" I asked.
"His fiancée. The men were ripped apart by an animal."
"But the FBI lab said that it wasn't a true wolf that did it."
"Werewolves are slightly different from real wolves," my double said.
"How do you know that?" I demanded.
"I'm the intuition, remember?" my double said. "Think about it. If you were going to change yourself into a wolf, do you think you could hold that image in your head, perfectly exact? Do you think you could make all the millions of subtle, tiny changes in skeletal and muscular structure? Magic doesn't just work---a mind has to direct it, shape it. Your emotions, your feelings toward wolves would color it, too---change the image and the shape. Ask Bob, next chance you get. I'm sure he'll tell you I'm right."
"Okay, okay," I said. "I'll buy that. But the FBI said that there was more than one set of tooth marks and prints, too."
"MacFinn explains some of them. During last month's full moon, he probably killed some people when his circle went ka-blooey."
"And the group Tera had---they called themselves the Alphas---could explain the rest of them, if they were shapeshifters. "
"Now you're catching on," my double said, approval in his tone. "You're smarter than you look."
"Do you think they were behind spoiling MacFinn's containment circle? The fancy one with all the silver and stuff?"
"They had the knowledge to do it, through Tera. Tera could have let them in, providing opportunity," my double said.
"But they didn't have a motive," I said. "Why would they have done it?"
"Because Tera told them to, maybe?"
I frowned and nodded. "She is a creature of the Nevernever. Who knows what's going through her---its head. It doesn't necessarily have to be understandable by human logic."
My double shook his head. "I don't buy that. I saw the way she looked at MacFinn---and how she sacrificed herself to divert the FBI and the police so that he could escape. Your instincts are telling you that she is in love with MacFinn, and that she wouldn't act against him."
"Yeah. You told me that about Elaine, too," I shot back, another pang of memory going through my chest.
"That was a long time ago," my double said defensively. "I've had time to get keener since then. And less easy to distract."
"All right," I sighed. "So where does that leave us?"
"I don't think we've run into the real killers yet. The ones who ruined MacFinn's circle and whacked the mob guys on the non-full-moon nights."
I squinted at my double. "You think so?"
He nodded and stroked his beard again. "Unless the Alphas are doing it without Tera knowing, and they look a little too bright eyed and bushy tailed to be doing that. I think it's someone else entirely. Someone trying to set up MacFinn and take him out of the picture."
"But why?"
"Maybe because they didn't want him putting the Northwest Passage Project through. Or, gee, maybe because he's a freaking werewolf, Harry, and someone caught on to it and wanted him dead. You know that there are organizations who would do that---some of the Venatori Umbrorum, members of the White Council, others who are in the know."
"But you don't think I've seen them, yet?"
"I don't think you've picked them out from the background," my double said. "Keep your eyes open, all right? Which brings us to the next topic of discussion."
"Does it?"
My double nodded. "Threat assessment. You've got all kinds of things staring you right in the face, and you're not noticing them. I don't want you to get killed because you're too distracted. " He glanced to one side, frowned, and said, "We're almost out of time."
"We wouldn't be if you weren't such a wiseass."
"Bite me," my double said. "Don't forget Marcone. You pissed him off by not taking the deal he offered you. He thinks the killers are coming after him next, and he might be right. He's scared, and scared people do stupid things---like trying to off the only man in town who has a chance of stopping what's going on."
"Let me worry about Marcone," I said.
"I am you, and I'm worried. Next is the cops. Some of Murphy's people are dead. There is going to be hell to pay once she gets that arm fixed---and someone is going to remember that you were around, and with your luck, they won't remember that you kept even more people from dying. You see Murphy and the police again, you'd better be careful or you're going to get shot to death resisting arrest."
"I'll be careful," I said.
"One more thing," my double said. "You have forgotten about Parker and the Streetwolves entirely. Parker needs you dead if he's going to remain in control of his people."
"Yeah. You'd have thought he'd have been more on the ball than this."
"Exactly," my double said. "You've been hiding and away from your apartment for a while---but you show up in public again, and you can bet that Parker will be on your trail. And think. He knew the real deal between you and Marcone, and he's a petty thug in Chicago. There's probably a connection between them, and you've been too dumb to think of it."
"Stars above," I muttered. "It's not as if the situation is very complicated. No pressure, right?"
"At least you're willing to deal with it now, instead of just closing your eyes and pretending that they can't see you. Be careful, Harry. It's a real mess, and you're the only one who can clean it up."
"Who are you, my mother?" I asked.
My double snapped his fingers. "That reminds me, right. Your mother---" He broke off, glancing up and around him, an expression of frustration coming over his face. "Oh, hell."
And then someone was shaking my unwounded shoulder, shaking me roughly awake. I blinked open my eyes in shock, and all the pains of my body came flooding back into me with renewed energy and agony. My brain reeled for a few minutes, trying to shift gears.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of Susan's car. We were rolling down an expressway, somewhere, but rain was clouding the view of the skyline so that I couldn't orient myself to where we were. The glowing numbers of the dashboard clock said that it was only a few minutes after nine. I'd had less than half an hour's sleep. There was an old beach towel wrapped around my wounded foot, and my face felt cool, as though someone had wiped it clean.
"Is he awake?" Susan said, her voice high and panicky. "Is he awake?"
"I'm awake," I said blearily, blinking open my eyes. "Sort of. What? This better be good."
"It is not good," Tera said from the backseat. "If you have any power left, wizard, you should prepare to use it. We are being followed."
Chapter Twenty-one
I rubbed at my eyes and mumbled some vague curse at whoever was following us. "Okay, okay. Give me a minute."
"Harry," Susan said. "I'm almost on empty. I don't know if we have a minute."
"It never rains," I moaned.
Tera frowned at me. "It is raining now." She turned to Susan. "I do not think he is coherent."
I snorted and looked around blearily. "It's a figure of speech. Hell's bells, you really don't know anything about humans, do you?
"Are you sure there's someone following us?"
Tera glanced back at the traffic behind us. "Two cars back. And three cars behind that one. Two vehicles are following us."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
Tera turned those odd amber eyes back to me. "They move like predators. They move well. And I feel them."
I narrowed my eyes. "Feel them? On an instinctual level?"
Tera shrugged. "I feel them," she repeated. "They are dangerous."
The taste of blood was still in my mouth, annoying input, like static on a phone. Of all the people who might be chasing me in cars, I could only think of a few who would trigger the supernatural senses of an inhuman being. I thought that it might be a pretty good idea to listen to what my dapper double had to say. "Susan," I said, "I want you to get off the expressway."
Her dark eyes flashed beneath the streetlights as she looked at me, then down at her fuel gauge. "I have to in the next couple of miles anyway. What do you want me to do?"
"Pull off, and get to a gas station."
She flashed me another nervous look, and I had the time to note that she was gorgeous, like some sort of Latin goddess. Of course, I might have been a little less than entirely objective. "Then what?" she said.
I checked my foot and idly took off my remaining boot, so that my hips would be parallel with the floor while I was standing. "Call the police."
"What?" Susan exclaimed and guided her car off the freeway and down an exit ramp.
I felt around in the jumpsuit's tool pouch, until I came out with the little sports bottle with my second potion in it. "Just do it," I said. "Trust me on this one."
"Wizard," Tera said, her voice still utterly calm. "There is no one but you who can help my fiancé."
I shot Tera an annoyed glance. "I'll meet you where you hold your Cub Scout meetings."
"Harry?" Susan said. "What are you talking about?" She pulled the car down the exit ramp, onto a one-way access road.
"I understand what you're doing," Tera said. "I would do the same for my mate."
"Mate?" Susan said indignantly. "Mate? I am most certainly not his---"
I didn't get to hear the rest of what Susan said, because I grabbed my blasting rod in one hand, the potion in the other, opened the door to the car, unfastened my seat belt, and rolled out onto the shoulder of the road.
I know, I know. It sounds really stupid in retrospect, even to me. But it made a sort of chivalrous, cockamamie sense at the time. I was pretty sure that Parker and his cronies in the Streetwolves were shadowing us, and I had a precise idea of how dangerous they could be. I had to assume that they were even worse during the full moon. Susan had no idea of the level of danger she was in, and if I stayed near her I would only draw her more deeply into it. And Tera---I still didn't trust Tera. I wasn't sure that I wanted her fighting at my back.
I wanted to deal with my pursuers myself, to deal with my own mistake myself, and not to make an innocent bystander like Susan pay for it.
So I, uh, sort of threw myself out of the passenger seat of a moving car.
Don't look at me like that. I'm telling you, it made sense at the time.
I held out my arms and legs in a circle, as though I were trying to hug a barrel, and then scrape, scrape, rip, bumpity-bumpity-bumpity, whip, whip, whip, and thud. Everything whirled around the whole while. I managed, somehow, to keep my sense of direction, to maintain my momentum largely in a roll, and to angle myself toward the dubious comfort of the thick weeds at the side of the access road. By the time I came to a stop, I was among freshly crushed plants, all damp and cold from the rain, the smell of mud and gas and asphalt and exhaust clogging up my nose.
There was pain, pain everywhere, spreading out from my shoulder and my foot, whirling dizziness, blackness that rode on my eyelids and tried to force them down. I struggled to remember exactly what I had planned on doing when I had thrown open the door to Susan's car.
It came to me in a moment, and I jerked the squeeze top of the sports bottle open with my teeth and then crushed the plastic bottle, forcing the potion inside it out through the narrow nozzle and into my mouth. Eight ounces of cold coffee, I thought, dimly. Yum.
It tasted like stale cardboard and too-old pizza and burned coffee beans. But as it went down my gullet, I could feel the power in the brew spreading out into me, active and alive, as though I had swallowed a huge, hyperkinetic amoeba. My fatigue quite simply vanished, and energy came rushing into me, like it sometimes does at the end of a really good concerto or overture. The pain receded down to levels that I could manage. The soreness lifted out of my muscles, and my cloudy, cloggy thought processes cleared as though someone had flushed my synapses with jalapeño. My heart rate surged, and then held steady, and I came to the abrupt conclusion that things just weren't as bad as I had thought they were.
I pushed myself up using my bad arm, just to spite the injury that Agent Benn had dealt me, and brushed myself off. My jumpsuit was torn and there was fresh blood on it, scrapes from the asphalt and darkening bruises on my arms and legs that I could already see---annoying little bastards. I held them in contempt.
I shook my shield bracelet loose around my left wrist, took my blasting rod in my right hand, and turned toward the access road. I drew in a breath, smelling the odor of the rain on the asphalt, and more distantly the crisp, clean scent of autumn, almost buried by Chicago's stink. I considered how much I loved the autumn, and composed a brief poem about it as I watched traffic force Susan's car along and out of sight. I turned my head to view a pair of cars cut frantically across traffic and cruise down the access road. The lead car was a two-ton pickup, one of the really big ones, and Parker sat behind the wheel, looking around wildly until his eyes lit upon me, standing there in the tall weeds beside the road.
I smiled at him and contemplated his shocked expression to my own satisfaction.
Then I drew in a breath, and my renewed will with it, lifted the rod in my right hand, murmured a phrase in a language I didn't know, and blew the tires off his fucking truck.
They all went at once, in one satisfying THUMP, complete blowouts resulting from a sudden heating of the air inside the tires---a pretty slick spell to pull on the fly, heating up the air inside of the tires of a moving vehicle. The truck slewed left and right, and I could see Parker frantically rolling the steering wheel in an effort to maintain control. Two people sat in the cab with him, faces I didn't recognize from here, and they evidently didn't believe in seat belts. They were tossed about the inside of the truck like toys. The truck careened off the road in a spray of gravel, went past me into the weeds, hit some sort of ditch, and went into a ponderous roll.
There was an enormous crunching sound. Car wrecks, when they happen for real and not on television, are surprisingly noisy. They sound like someone pounding empty trash cans out of shape with a sledgehammer, only louder. Parker's truck tumbled over twice, crunched into the side of a hill, and lay on its passenger side.
"Well then," I said with a certain amount of professional pride. "That should take care of that."
I spoke too soon. There was a brittle, grinding sound, and the windshield of the truck exploded into a hectic spiderweb pattern. The sound repeated itself, and the safety glass shattered outward, followed by a foot wearing a heavy black combat boot. More glass flew outward, and then people started crawling out of the pickup, battered and bloodied. Besides Parker, there was the lantern-jawed lout whose nose I had flattened a few days ago, his nose now swollen and grotesque, and the bloodthirsty woman who had led the group into their berserk fit of lust. They were all dressed in the same variants of denim and leather, and cuts and bruises from the tossing they'd had were much in evidence.
Parker led them out of the truck, looked back at it, stunned--- and then he looked at me. I saw fear flicker in his eyes, and it brought out a satisfied surge within my own pounding heart. Served him right, the jerk. I spun my rod around once in my fingers, started whistling a bit from the overture to Carmen, and walked toward them through the grass, annoyed that I was limping and that I was dressed in a ridiculous blue jumpsuit that left inches of my arms and legs bare.
Flatnose saw me and grunted out some sort of Neanderthal noise of surprise. He drew a handgun from inside his jacket, and it looked tiny in his hands. Without preamble he started squeezing off shots at me.
I lifted my left hand, forced more of my boundless energy through the shield bracelet, and sang a few phrases in what I supposed could have been taken for Italian to verbally encase the spell. I continued walking forward as bullets bounded off the shield before my hand in cascades of sparks, and I even had enough breath left over to keep on whistling Carmen.
Parker snarled and slashed at Flatnose's wrist with the edge of his hand in a martial-arts-style movement. I heard a bone break, very clearly, but Flatnose only jerked his hand back toward his body and flashed Parker a scowl.
"Remember why we're here," the shorter man said. "He's mine."
"Hello there, Mr. Parker," I called cheerfully. I suppose that the image I presented as I walked toward them would have been comic---except for all the blood, and the big smile I felt spreading over my face. It seemed to have a somewhat intimidating effect on the Streetwolves at any rate. The woman snarled at me, and for a second I could feel a wild, savage energy, the same that had surrounded the frenzying lycanthropes at the Full Moon Garage, starting to build in the air around me.
I gave the bitch an annoyed look and slashed my hand at the air, drawling, "Disperdorus." I forced out an effort of will I might have found daunting on another night, one when I was feeling a little less all-powerful, and the woman jerked back as though I had slapped her in the mouth. The energy she had been gathering fractured and flew apart as though it had never been. She stared at me, growing tense and nervous, and reached a hand toward a knife in a case at her hip.
"Let's have none of that nonsense. As I was saying," I continued, "hello there, Mr. Parker. I know why you're here. Heard about the ruckus on a police scanner and came down by the station looking for me, right? Hate to disappoint you, but I'm not going to allow you to kill me."
Flatnose scowled and said, "How did you know th---"
Parker shoved the heel of his hand across Flatnose's mouth in a sharp blow, and the big man shut up. "Mr. Dresden," Parker growled. He eyed me up and down. "What exactly makes you think you can stop me from killing you?"
I had to smile at the man. I mean, you have to smile at idiots and children. "Oh, I don't know," I chuckled. "Maybe because the second you step out of line, I'm going to wreck you a whole hell of a lot worse than that truck. And because in just a couple of minutes, the police are going to be arriving to sort you out." There was a momentary flash of dimness, where the streetlight seemed to fade, the rain to grow very cold, and then it was gone again. I blinked a little blood out of my eyes, and renewed my smile. Mustn't let the children see weakness.
Parker snarled his thin lips into a smile. He had bad teeth. "The cops are after your ass too, Dresden," he said. "I don't believe you."
"Once they're here, I'm going to mysteriously disappear," I said. "Just like, well, gosh, magic. But you guys are . . ." I forgot what I had been going to say for a moment. There was something nagging at the back of my mind, a detail I had forgotten.
"I can smell your blood, wizard," Parker said, very quietly. "God, you got no idea what it smells like." Parker didn't move, but the woman let out a little mewling sound and pressed against Flatnose's side. Her eyes were focused intently on me.
"Get a good whiff," I managed to say. "It's the last time you'll smell it." But my smile was gone. A creeping vine of uncertainty was beginning to crack the wall of confidence I had been enjoying. The rain was getting colder, the lights dimmer. My extended left arm began to ache, starting at the wounded shoulder, and my hand shook visibly. Pain started leaking in again, from every part of my battered body.
Sanity returned in a rush. The potion. The potion was giving out on me. I had pushed myself way too hard while the first euphoria was going over me. Dispelling the intimate aura of rage and lust that the woman had begun to gather over them had been a feat I would never have considered in a stable frame of mind. There were too many unknowns. My heart was laboring along now, and I started panting. I couldn't get enough breath to slow down my rocketing heartbeat.
Parker and his two companions grew tense together, all at once, with no visible signal passing between them. I could feel that wild energy again, coursing down to the lycanthropes from beyond the rain clouds overhead. I swear to you, I could see the cuts on their body, from the crash, closing up before my eyes. Flatnose rolled the wrist that had just been broken, flexed his fingers at me, and gave me a grim smile.
Okay, Harry, I told myself. Keep calm. Do not panic. All you have to do is to hold them until the cops get here, and then you can bleed to death in peace. Or get to a doctor. Whichever hurts less.
"You know, Parker," I said, and my voice had a fluttering quaver to it, a fast, desperate quality. "I didn't really mean to show up at your garage. Hell, I wouldn't have been there at all if Denton's goon hadn't turned me on to the idea."
"That doesn't matter now," Parker said. His voice had a quiet, certain tone to it, and he had visibly relaxed. He smiled at me, and showed me more of his teeth. "That's all in the past." Then Parker took a step forward, and I panicked.
I jammed the rod at him and snarled, "Fuego." I funneled my will through it, and to hell with what the Council thought of me killing someone with magic.
Nothing happened.
I stared in disbelief, first at Parker, and then at the blasting rod. My fingers went numb as I looked at them, and the rune-engraved ash rod fell to the ground, though I tried a clumsy grab to catch it. Instead, my weight came down on my torn foot, and the ripped muscles went into a sudden cramp that sent fresh agony up through my leg. It buckled and pitched me forward into the weeds and the mud. The last wisps of my shield vanished as I fell. My magic had failed me altogether.
Parker laughed, a low and nasty sound. "Nice trick. Got another?"
"One more," I rasped, and fumbled at the jumpsuit's tool pouch. Parker walked slowly toward me, confident, relaxed, and moving like a man thirty years younger than he. My fingers were aching with cold, torn from the asphalt, numb from all the pain and scrapes and bruises. But the handle of my Chief's Special was easy enough to find.
I drew it out, thumbed back the hammer, and pointed it up at Parker. His eyes widened and his weight settled back on his heels---not quite retreating, but not coming any closer, either. From three feet away, even down in the mud, it would be tough to miss him, and he knew it.
"I didn't pick you for the kind to carry a gun," he said. The rain plastered his greasy hair down over his eyes.
"Only on special occasions," I said back. I had to delay him. If I could hold him in place, just for a few minutes, the cops would show up. I had to believe that they would, because if they didn't I was dead meat. Maybe literally. "Stop where you are."
He didn't. He took a step toward me.
So I shot him.
The gun roared, and the bullet smacked into his right kneecap. It exploded in a burst of blood and flying chips of bone, and the leg went out from under him, hurling him to the muddy ground. He blinked once, surprised, but the pain he must have been feeling didn't seem to register. He scooted back a couple of feet and stared at me for a second, reassessing me.
Parker then drew his legs beneath him, and ignoring his ruined knee, hunkered down on his heels and rested his elbows on his thighs as if we were old friends, keeping his hands in plain sight. "You're tougher than you look. We tried to catch you at your apartment, you know," he said, as though I hadn't just shot him. "But the cops were all over it. Police band said you'd gotten arrested, but I guess you got away. We paid the jailer to let us know when they rounded you up." He grinned his snaggle-toothed grin and looked almost friendly. "Hell, kid. We were hanging around in a bar two blocks from the station for almost two days, just hoping to be there when they brought you up the steps. Drive-by." He pointed his finger at me in a bang-bang motion, and let his thumb fall forward.
"Sorry to disappoint you," I mumbled. I was working hard not to give in to the shakes, the cold, or the darkness. I knew he was up to something, but there was too much to deal with--- too much injury, too much exhaustion, too much blood on my hands. I squinted past him to see Flatnose and the woman still in the same spot, both of them watching me with the intent look of hungry animals.
Parker chuckled. "And instead, everything goes to hell at the station. Gunshots, explosions, sounds like a war inside. Which was fun to watch. And then we see you stumbling out of the middle of it, right there in front of the cop station, with a cute little piece on either side helping you down the stairs. We just rolled out right after your ass."
"I hope you're insured."
Parker shrugged. "Truck wasn't mine." He plucked up a long blade of grass and traced it over the ruin of his knee, painting it red with his blood before crushing it up in his fingers. "Most of my people are out by the lake tonight. They got to let off some steam during the full moon. Damn, but I want to take you out right there in front of all of them. You got a real badass reputation, kid."
"Can't have everything you want," I said. I blinked rain, or blood, from my eyes.
Parker's smile widened. "You know, kid. I think there's something you don't know."
In the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens speeding down the freeway toward me. Hot damn, I thought. I finally did something right. "Oh yeah?" I asked, daring to feel a satisfied thrill of victory.
Parker nodded and looked off to one side. "There were two cars behind you."
And something smashed down on my right hand, making it go numb, and sending the gun to earth. I looked up and had time to see another of the lycanthropes from the garage lift a lead pipe wrapped in electrical tape, and bring it down hard at me. The woman screamed and rushed toward me. She had steel-toed boots. Flatnose lumbered after her, and was content to use the barrel of his pistol as a dumb club.
Parker just sat there, squatting on his heels, and watched them. I could see his eyes. My blood spattered onto his cheek.
I don't like thinking about what they did. They didn't want to kill me. They wanted to hurt me. And they were good at it. I couldn't fight. I couldn't even curl up into a ball. There wasn't that much spirit left in me. I could hear myself making choking sounds, gagging on my own blood, sobbing and retching in pathetic agony. I would have screamed if I could have. You hear stories about men who keep silent through all the torture and agony that anyone inflicts on them, but I'm just not that strong. They broke me.
At some point, the mind says "no more" and it gets the hell away from all that pain. I started going there, to that away-place, and I wasn't sorry to do it at all.
I could dimly hear Parker shoving people off of me, once I stopped moving. He broke a few more of their bones, and they backed off with snarls of rage. He was walking on the leg again already, though my shot must have torn the joint to pieces. At his orders, they picked me up and carried me to another car, just lugged me along like a sack of broken parts. Duct tape went around my wrists and ankles, knees and elbows and mouth. Then they threw me in the trunk.
Parker reached up to close the lid. I didn't have enough energy to move my eyes. I just stared out, letting them focus wherever they would.
I saw a face behind the wheel of a car going past on the access road---just a sedan, something that would blend in with all the other cars in the city. The face was young, strained, sprinkled with freckles, the hair red, the ears big.
Roger Harris, FBI. Denton's redheaded lackey.
The sedan rolled by without even slowing, and Harris didn't look over at me, didn't break his surveillance. I wasn't the only one, it seemed, who was being followed that night.
Parker slammed shut the trunk, leaving me in darkness. The car started going just as the sirens began to arrive at the access road. My captors' car bounced along and made a casual getaway, leaving me in an agony more thorough, sickening, and acute than any I had felt before.
And, behind the gag, I started laughing. I couldn't help it. I laughed, and it sounded like I was choking on raw sewage.
The pieces had all fallen into place.
Chapter Twenty-two
There's a point after which one cannot possibly continue doing complicated things like thinking and keeping one's eyes open. Blackness ensues and everything stops until the body, or the mind, is ready to function again. The blackness came for me and I welcomed it.
When I started to wake up, I smelled motor oil.
That in itself boded ill. I was seated upright, and an upright metal beam pressed into my back. I felt something constricting my wrists and my ankles. Duct tape, still, perhaps. There was cold concrete floor beneath me. I was aching everywhere, and stiff. But there was something soft over me, a blanket, maybe. I wasn't as cold as I might have been.
My first emotion was a vague surprise that I was still alive.
The second was a cold, nasty little shiver. I was a prisoner. And as long as I was, survival was by no means certain. First things first, then. Make it certain. Find out where I was, devise a plan, and get my skinny wizard ass out of there.
After all, it would be a real pity to die when I'd finally put tabs on who had gotten me into this mess---as well as who was responsible for the recent killings that couldn't be attributed to MacFinn, and probably who had set him up as well.
To that end, I opened my eyes and tried to get a look at my surroundings.
I was in the enemy's stronghold, the Full Moon Garage. It was dim inside, and from what I could hear, it was still raining without. There was a dirty, but warm blanket over me, which came as something of a surprise. There was also a little stand with a mostly empty plastic bag of what I took to be blood, dripping down a plastic tube that vanished behind me, out of my sight, and presumably ended at my arm.
I wiggled my feet out from beneath the blanket. My legs had been duct-taped together above and below the knee, and at the ankle. My bitten foot had been wrapped in clean bandages, then covered in my bloodied sock. In fact, I found a number of clean bandages on various cuts and scrapes, and I could smell, faintly, as though my nose had been given a while to get used to it, the sharp, medicine smell of disinfectant. I couldn't feel Murphy's sawed-through handcuffs on my wrists, and found myself vaguely missing them. At least they'd been familiar, if not comfortable.
So, not only was I alive, but I was in considerably better shape, after presumably several hours of sleep and medical attention.
But that didn't explain who had done this to me. Or why.
I looked around the dimness of the garage. My eyes were now adjusted to it, but even so, there were pockets of shadows too deep to see into. An L-shaped ribbon of yellow light showed beneath the door to the manager's office, and the sound of rain on the corrugated roof was a low, soothing roar. I closed my eyes, trying to orient myself, to determine what time it was from the feel of the air and the sound of the rain. Late afternoon? Early evening? I couldn't tell for sure.
I coughed and found my throat dry, but functional. My hands were bound, and I didn't have any way of making a circle. Without a circle, I couldn't use any delicate magic to free myself---all I had access to was the kaboom sort of power, which, while great against nasty loup-garou and other monsters, isn't much good for getting rid of several layers of duct tape resting within half an inch of my own tender skin. Magic was out.
Did I ever tell you about my dad? He was a magician---not a wizard, mind you, but a magician, the kind you see at old-fashioned magic shows. He had a black top hat, a white rabbit, a basket of swords, and everything. He used to travel around the country, performing for the kids and the old folks, barely making enough to scrape by. After Mom died during childbirth, Dad had the job of raising me all by himself, and I guess he did the best he could. He meant well.
I was real young when he died (I refused to believe Chaunzaggoroth's insinuations until I had looked into them further) of a brain aneurism. But I learned a thing or three about what he did before then. He'd named me after three magicians, after all, the first of which was Houdini himself. And one of Houdini's first rules was that the means to escape was always within your grasp. Positive attitude. It's a fact that a human being can escape from just about everything, given enough time.
The only question was, how much time did I have left?
The duct tape was strong, and it was fastened tightly---but it was also cheap, easy to transport, and simple to apply. Even though it was wound about me in multiple layers, it wasn't the best thing for holding people, or else the cops would use duct tape and not handcuffs and manacles. It could be beaten.
So I started looking for ways to beat it.
A little writhing showed me that my hands weren't fastened as tightly as they could have been. I could feel a sharp pain in my forearm, and guessed that was from the IV. They had to loosen the tape on my arms to get the needle into my forearm. I wiggled my shoulders, which set the wounded one to aching fiercely. The tape put pressure on my wrists and tore the hair from my arms with an audible ripping sound, and I clenched my teeth over this particular torment.
It hurt, and it took me the best part of ten minutes, but I got my wrists and hands free. I ditched the IV needle while I was at it, imagining some deadly fluid flowing down the tube into my veins. Then I flexed my arms repeatedly and got them free.
My fingers were numb, stiff, not really responding, but I started fumbling at the tape on my legs as best I could, trying to get tears started so that I could just flex my legs and get the whole thing to go at once. It took more effort than I thought it would, but I finally flexed my legs, thankful that the jumpsuit kept me from losing stripes of hair from my thighs and calves (if not from my ankles). My legs were much stronger than my arms, so snapping the layers of duct tape on them was a lot simpler and quicker.
Just not simple or quick enough.
Before I'd gotten out of the last loop of duct tape, there was a click-clack, and the office door swung open, accompanied by a murmur of low voices and a tinny din of old-time rock-and-roll music.
I panicked. I couldn't run---my ankles were still bound. By the time I got free and struggled to my feet, they'd be on me. So I did the next best thing. I whipped the blanket up and over me, snaked my hands back behind the pole, grabbing up the IV needle as I went and concealing it in my hand, and bent my head far forward as though I were still asleep.
"I still don't get why we can't just put a bullet in him and dump him," said a harsh voice with no nasal tone at all---Flatnose.
"Stupid," Parker growled, his voice like sandpaper. "One, we don't do it without having the others here to see. And two, we don't do it until Marcone's had a chance to see him."
"Marcone," Flatnose said with a sneer in his voice. "What's he want with him?"
Good question, I thought. I kept my head down, my body relaxed, and tried to think sleepy thoughts. Marcone was coming here?
"Who cares?" Parker answered. "I made sure he'd live through the day. Either way, I wanted him here tonight. No skin off my teeth."
Flatnose grunted. "Chicago sees a lot of mobsters. Marcone's just one more. But one call from him, and this wizard character gets a reprieve. Who is this guy, huh? The freaking governor?"
"Always thinking with your balls," Parker said, his voice calm. "Marcone isn't just a mobster. Running Chicago is just his sideline, see. He's got business all over the country, and he owns people from here to the governor's mansion to Washington and back, and he's got more money than God. He can set us up, take us out, have the police on our ass anytime he wants. You don't screw with someone like that lightly."
There was a pause, and then Flatnose said, "Maybe. Or maybe Lana's right. Maybe you're getting soft. Marcone isn't one of us. He doesn't give us orders. The Parker I knew ten years ago wouldn't have thought twice of telling Marcone to fuck off."
Parker's voice became resigned. "Don't do this, man. You were never good enough, even when we were young. The Parker you knew ten years ago would have gotten all of us killed by now. I've kept you in cash, in dope, women, whatever you wanted. So settle down."
"I don't buy it," Flatnose said back. "I think Lana's right. And I say we off this skinny son of a bitch right now." I felt myself tense and prepared to make a run for it, hopeless or not. I'd rather get killed trying to get away than trying to pretend I was asleep.
"Back down," Parker said, and then there was a scuffling noise of boots on old concrete. I heard a couple of grunts and an abrupt yelp, and smelled sour sweat and stale beer as Flatnose was forced to his knees less than a foot away. He kept making small noises of pain, thick with tension, as though Parker was holding him in some kind of lock. I forced myself to relax, not to just stagger up and start running, but I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my face.
Parker snarled over Flatnose's whimpers, "I told you. You were never good enough. Challenge me again, in public or alone, it doesn't matter---and I will rip your heart out." The way he spoke the threat was eerie; not with the hissing, villainous emphasis one would expect, but in a calm, measured, almost bored tone, as though he were mentioning switching out a carburetor or changing a lightbulb. There was a rippling sort of sound, and Flatnose let out a howl of pain that dissolved into a string of doglike whimpers. I heard Parker's boots move a few steps away. "Now, get up," he said. "Call Tully's and get the others back here before the moon rises. We'll have blood tonight. And if Marcone isn't polite enough, we'll have a lot more."
I heard Flatnose make his way to his feet and shuffle off in a slow and haphazard fashion. He vanished into the office and closed the door behind him. I waited for a few moments, hoping that Parker would wander off and I could make my escape, but he didn't. Dammit.
I was running out of time. If I waited until the rest of the lycanthropes returned to the garage, I'd never be able to get away. The numbers would be stacked too high. If I was going to make a break for it, logically, the time was now.
Of course, I was still bound. By the time I got my legs free, Parker would be on me. And I had just listened to him disable a man twice his size and threaten to rip his heart out. He'd meant it, too, I could tell. When I had looked inside of him, I had seen a dark and angry place, the source of all that power and force of will. He could tear me to pieces with his bare hands, literally---and what was worse, he would. I had to have a head start if I was going to run.
I could make him mad, maybe. Antagonize him into going to get a baseball bat, or another roll of duct tape for my mouth. Then I could run, make a clean getaway. The one problem with that plan was that he might just rip my heart out on the spot--- but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn't have time to be picky.
So I lifted up my head enough to squint at him in the semi-darkness and said, "You certainly have a way with people. You must have read a book or something."
My voice startled him, and he spun with the reflexes of a nervous cat. He stared at me for a long minute before starting to relax. "So. You're alive. It's just as well, I suppose."
"Mostly I was just tired. Thanks for the sack time."
He showed me his teeth. "No problem. Checkout is in a couple hours."
That scared me enough to make a rational man pee, but I only shrugged. "No problem. Good thing your people can't hit. They might have made me uncomfortable."
Parker laughed a rough laugh. "You got balls, kid. I'll give you that. At least, until Lana gets her teeth into them, later."
This wasn't going at all well. I had to find some way to piss him off, not make him laugh. "How's the knee?"
Parker narrowed his eyes. "A lot better. It didn't quite heal up before sunrise, but I figure it'll only take an hour or so after the moon comes up."
"I should have aimed higher," I said.
Parker's jaw clenched down a little. "Too late now, kid. Game over."
"Enjoy it while you can. I hear your people are getting a little sick of you. Do you think Lana will be the one to tear your balls off when they put you down?"
His boot came out of nowhere and hit me in the side of the head. It threw me hard to my right, and if I hadn't clenched my arms at the last minute, it would have thrown me to the floor and revealed my lack of bonds.
"You just don't know when to keep quiet, do you wizard?"
"What have I got to lose?" I shot back at him. "I mean, hell. It isn't as though all of the people that looked up to me have turned against me, right? It isn't as though I'm getting too old to manage wh---"
"Shut up," Parker snarled, his eyes taking on an eerie, greenish cast in the darkness, a trick of the light, and he kicked me again, this time in the stomach. My breath went out in a whoosh, and I fought to continue speaking.
"Waking up stiffer every morning. Eating less. Maybe not as strong as you used to be, right? Not as fast. Got to beat up on old dogs like Flatnose there, because if you try one of the younger ones, they'll take you down."
The plan was working beautifully. Now all that I needed was for him to stalk out of the room to calm down, or to fetch an instrument of mayhem or some more duct tape, anything. Instead, Parker just spun on his heel, picked up a tire iron, and turned back to me, lifting it high. "Fuck Marcone," he snarled. "And fuck you, wizard."
His muscles bunched beneath his old T-shirt as he raised the iron above his head. His eyes gleamed with the same sort of animalistic fury I had beheld in the other lycanthropes the night before. His mouth was stretched in a feral grin, and I could see the cords in his neck standing out as he wound up to give me the deathblow.
I hate it when a plan falls apart.
Chapter Twenty-three
I clenched my teeth and kicked my legs. The duct tape around my ankles gave way, but it was too late to do me any good. I didn't have time to get my weight beneath me, to run, but I made the gesture in any case. Just one of those things you do when you're about to die, I guess.
"Mr. Hendricks," came a very hard, very calm voice. "If Mr. Parker does not put down the tire iron in the next second or two, please shoot him dead."
"Yes sir, Mr. Marcone," Hendricks's rumbling basso answered. I looked over to my right, to see Gentleman Johnny Marcone standing at the door in a grey Italian business suit. Hendricks stood in front of him and a bit to one side, in a much cheaper suit, holding a pump-action shotgun with a short barrel, its stock worked into a pistol grip, in his meaty paws. The gaping black mouth of the barrel was leveled at Parker's head.
Parker's face snapped around to focus on Marcone at the same time as mine did. Parker's jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed to furious slits. His weight shifted from one foot to the other, as though he were preparing to throw the tire iron.
"That's a twelve-gauge riot gun, Mr. Parker," Marcone said. "I'm fully aware of your rather special endurance at this time of the month. Mr. Hendricks's weapon is loaded with solid-slug ammunition, and after several rounds have torn literal pounds of flesh from your body and ruptured the majority of your internal organs, I am reasonably certain that even you would perish. " Marcone smiled, very politely, while Hendricks clicked the safety off of the weapon and settled his feet as though he expected firing the gun to knock him down. "Please," Marcone said. "Put down the tire iron."
Parker glanced back at me, and I could see the beast raging in his eyes, wanting to howl out and bathe in blood. It terrified me, made me go cold, right through my gut and down through my loins. There was more fury and rage there than any of the other members of the Streetwolves had demonstrated. Their own berserk losses of control had looked like a child's tantrum next to what I saw in Parker's eyes.
But he controlled it. He lowered his arm, slowly, and took two steps back from me, and I felt my breath whisper out in a sigh of relief. I wasn't dead. Yet. My kick hadn't quite dragged the blanket off of me, and I was still settled with my back against the steel post. They didn't know that I was loose underneath the rough wool. It wasn't much of an advantage, but it was all I had. I needed to find a way to use it, and fast.
"My people are coming," Parker growled. "If you try more of that heavy-handed shit, I'll have you torn apart."
"They are coming," Marcone agreed placidly. "But they are not yet here. Their motorcycles have all suffered flat tires, quite mysteriously. We have time to do business." I heard his shoes cross the concrete floor toward me, and I looked up at him. Marcone met my eyes without fear, a man in his mature prime, his hair immaculately greying at the temples, his custom-made suit displaying a body kept fit in spite of the advancing years. His eyes were the faded green of dollar bills and as opaque as mirrors.
"Hi, John," I said. "You've got good timing."
Marcone smiled. "And you have a way with people, Dresden, " he said, glancing at the silent Parker with unveiled amusement. "You must have read a book. I'm already reasonably certain as to your reaction, but I thought I would give you another chance."
"Another chance to what?"
"I received a phone call today," Marcone said. "A Harley MacFinn somehow discovered my personal number. He was quite irate. He said that he knew that it was me who had destroyed his circle and set him up, and that he was going to deal with me tonight."
"I'd say you've had it, then, John. Harley can be fairly destructive."
"I know. I saw the news programs from the station last night. A loup-garou, is he?"
I blinked. "How did you---"
Marcone waved a hand. "The report you gave to Lieutenant Murphy. Such things have to be paid for, and thus copied and filed and copied and filed. It wasn't hard to obtain a copy for myself."
I shook my head. "Money isn't going to buy off Harley MacFinn."
"Quite," Marcone said. "And my parents, God rest their souls, were in no position to leave me anything, much less articles of silver, or I'd deal with him myself. I have no idea who told him that I had wronged him, or why, but it seems perfectly clear that he believes it. Which brings us to you, Mr. Dresden." He reached into that expensive Italian jacket and drew out a folded sheaf of papers---the contract I'd seen before. "I want to make a deal with you."
I stared at him in silence.
"The same stipulations as before," Marcone continued. "In addition, I will promise you, give you my personal oath, that I will see to it that the pressure is taken off of Lieutenant Murphy. I do have some friends in the mayor's office, and I'm certain something could be worked out."
I started to tell him to go to hell, but bit back the words. I was trapped, at the moment. If I ran, Parker would probably lose it and tear me apart. And if he didn't, Marcone would just point his finger and the hulking Mr. Hendricks would put me down with a twelve-gauge slug.
And Murphy, in spite of recent misunderstandings, was my friend. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that in spite of what had gone on lately, I was still Murphy's friend. Saving her job, getting the pressure from the politicians off of her---isn't that why I had gotten involved in this to begin with? Wouldn't Murphy thank me for helping her?
No, I thought. Not like that. She wouldn't want that kind of help. Magic, she could accept. Help from money generated by human suffering, graft, and deception was a different story. Marcone looked good in his grey suit and his perfect hair and his manicured hands, but he wasn't.
My own hands weren't clean---but they were free. Things were desperate, and getting worse the longer I waited. Maybe I could pull off enough magic to get myself out of this.
I drew in a breath, and focused on a pile of loose tools and metal parts on a workbench twenty feet away. I gathered together threads of will, feeling the pressure build with a sort of skewed intangibility to it, something I hadn't ever felt before. I focused on my goal, on the rush of air that would lift the tools and parts and hurl them at Marcone, Parker, and Hendricks like so many bullets, and I prayed that I wouldn't catch myself in the edges of it by accident and get myself killed. I'd be breaking the First Law of Magic if one of them died, and I might have to deal with the White Council later; but hell's bells, I did not want to die on that concrete floor.
My head pounded, but I pushed the pain aside, focused, and breathed out, "Vento servitas."
The energy I had gathered whispered out of me. The tools jumped and rattled in place---and then fell still again.
Fire erupted behind my eyes. The pain was blinding, and I sucked in a breath and bowed my head forward, struggling not to fall to one side and reveal my lack of duct-tapedness. Oh, stars, it hurt like hell, and I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out. My chest heaved and strained to give me enough breath.
I blinked tears out of my eyes and straightened again, facing Marcone. I didn't want him to see the weakness. I didn't want him to know that my magic had failed.
"Interesting," Marcone said, glancing at the workbench, and then back at me. "Perhaps you've been working too hard," he suggested. "But I'm still willing to make the offer, Mr. Dresden. Otherwise, you understand, I have no interest in your well-being, and I will be forced to leave you here with Mr. Parker and his associates. If you do not come to work for me, you'll die."
I glared up at Marcone and gathered in a breath to spit out a curse at him. To hell with him and his whole stinking breed of parasites. Polite and smiling bastards who didn't care about the lives they ruined, the people they destroyed, so long as business continued as usual. If I was going to die here, I was going to lay out a curse on Marcone that would make the grimmest old fairy tales you ever heard sound like pleasant daydreams.
And then I glanced at Parker, who was glaring suspiciously at Marcone, and stifled the curse as well. I lowered my head, to hide my expression from Marcone. I had an idea.
"He dies anyway," Parker growled. "He's mine. You never said anything about him leaving with you."
Marcone stood, his mouth settled in a tight smile. "Don't start with me, Parker," Marcone said. "I'll take what I want to take. Last chance, Mr. Dresden."
"This wasn't part of the deal," Parker said. "I need him. I'll kill you before I let you take him." Parker put one hand behind his back, as though scratching at an itch. I glanced over, toward the office door behind him, and saw Flatnose crouched there in the doorway, mostly shielded by the door and unnoticed. Perfect.
"You needn't worry, Parker," Marcone said, his tone satisfied. "He won't accept my offer. He'd rather die."
I lifted up my head, and kept my expression as blank as I could. "Give me a pen," I said.
Marcone's mouth dropped open, and it was an intense pleasure to see the surprise on his face. "What?" he said.
I enunciated each word carefully. "Give me a pen. I'll sign your contract." I glanced aside, at Parker, and said more loudly, "Anything to get away from these animals."
Marcone stared at me for a moment and then reached toward his pocket. I could see his eyes, see him searching my expression. The gears were spinning in his head as he tried to work out what I was doing.
Parker let out a sudden scream of rage and hurled the tire iron at Hendricks, who dodged to one side, too quickly for a man his size, and lifted his weapon. The office door exploded open, and Flatnose threw himself onto the big man. They both went down to the concrete, struggling for possession of the shotgun.
"The wizard's mine!" Parker howled, and threw himself at Marcone. Marcone moved like a snake in his zillion-dollar business suit and made a curved knife appear in his hands. He swept it in an arc that was followed by a spray of blood from Parker's wrist, and the lycanthrope howled.
I got up and ran like hell toward the door. My legs were shaky, and my balance wasn't great, but I was moving again, and I thought I had a fair chance of getting away. Over to my left, there was the roar of the shotgun going off, and a wet, red spray that went all over one wall and the ceiling. I didn't stop to see who had been killed, just jerked open the door.
Agent Phillip Denton stood five feet away from me, in the cold mist of autumn rain. The veins in his forehead were throbbing, and his short hair was frosted by the mist. He was flanked by the potbellied Agent Wilson, in his rumpled suit, his mostly bald head shining, and by the lean, savage-looking woman, Benn, her dark skin even darker in the evening's gloom and the glow of streetlights, her sensuous mouth peeling back into a startled snarl.
Denton blinked in surprise, and then narrowed his intensely grey eyes. "The wizard mustn't escape," he said, his voice calm and precise. "Kill him."
Benn's eyes gleamed, and she hissed something under her breath while reaching a hand into her jacket. Wilson did the same. I brought my forward momentum to a sudden halt, fell, and started scrambling back into the building.
But instead of drawing guns out of their jackets, they changed. It happened fast, nothing like you see in the movies. One moment, there were two human beings standing there, and the next there was a flicker of shadow and a pair of enormous, gaunt wolves, one the grey of Benn's mane, one the same brown as Wilson's receding hairline.
They were huge, six feet long not including the tail, and as high as my belly at their shoulders. Their entirely human eyes shone, as did their bared fangs. Denton stood between them, his eyes gleaming with some dark breed of joy, and then he hissed, throwing his hands toward me. As though thrown by the motion, both wolves hurtled forward.
I flung myself back through the door and slammed it closed. There were heavy thuds as the wolves hit the door behind me. I saw a motion to my right and threw myself down just before Hendricks pulled the trigger. The riot gun belched forth flame and huge sound and blew a hole the size of my face in the door behind me. I could still hear Parker's furious snarling somewhere in the dark, and I scrambled forward, behind the bulk of a car, and then ran toward the back of the cavernous garage, staying low.
Outside, there was the sudden thunder of a dozen engines, and the sharp, heavy sounds of gunfire. Evidently, the Streetwolves had returned.
I stumbled through the darkness and tried not to make enough sound to give someone a chance to shoot me. The door flew open at the front of the garage, letting in a flood of dim light that didn't help me much. I heard people screaming.
I reached the back corner and sank down into it, then grabbed at something that turned out to be a toolbox. I came out with a heavy wrench and gripped it tightly. I was alone. I'd hurt myself using too much of my magic while on the go-go potion, and I didn't have anything left to throw now. Except for the wrench in my hands, I was unarmed. All around me, in the garage, there were the sounds of gunshots and screams and thuds of flesh as the animals fought for control of the jungle, and it was only a matter of time before one of them stumbled across a weakened and exhausted wizard named Harry Dresden.
Talk about frying pans and fires.
Chapter Twenty-four
It couldn't possibly get any worse than this, I thought. I cowered in the corner, clutching my captured wrench like a child's teddy bear, with no way out, and full of the knowledge that my magic had failed me.
Oddly, that thought troubled me more than probable death. A lot more. Death was something that happened to everyone--- only the timing is different, for each of us. I knew that I would, eventually, die. Hell, I even knew that I might die horribly. But I had never thought that the magic would fail me. More accurately, I had never guessed that I might fail it. I had pushed too hard and my body wouldn't conduct the power I needed to utilize the forces I was accustomed to commanding. Granted, maybe I should have started with something smaller than a large and violent telekinesis, but the indication was there that I had burned out some internal circuitry. It might not ever come back.
It was a loss of identity. I was a wizard. It was more than just a job, more than just a title. Wizardry was at the core of my being. It was my relationship with my magic, the way I used it, the things it let me do that defined me, shaped me, gave me purpose.
I dwelled on these things while death danced over the concrete floor, clutching them like a sailor clinging to the wreckage of his ship, trying to ignore the storm that blasted it to pieces. I noted peripheral details from my pathetic hiding place. Marcone made a break for one of the garage doors, only to be pinned down behind a rusted truck by gunfire from some of the Streetwolves. Hendricks joined him, and a moment later, the truck roared to life and crashed out through the garage door and into the gravel parking lot. Hendricks, in the rear of the truck, fired several blasts from the big shotgun back into the building, while the Streetwolves sent rounds skewing off after the truck.
The real battle, though, took place between the Streetwolves and the FBI.
It was largely a gunfight. Denton was armed with his FBI-ISSUE automatic and what looked like an Uzi submachine gun. He cut down three of the lycanthropes with a swath of fire from the automatic weapon as he came in through the door, and the two great wolves with him hurtled into the darkness. Screams and savage snarling erupted from the shadows, and I could hear more of the lycanthropes dying, being torn apart by the enormous wolves that had once been Agents Benn and Wilson. Parker screamed orders somewhere in the dark, half incoherent with rage. Denton reached into his jacket for a fresh clip for the Uzi, and I saw something across his belly that I noted for future reference, should I have any future.
I watched the killing, and I hid, and I prayed that there would be an opportunity to flee toward the open doors of the garage before Denton or Parker noticed me. It went on forever. Oh, I knew, in some rational part of my brain, that only seconds were going by, but it felt like days. I was terrified, and my head and my body hurt, and I couldn't use magic to protect myself.
There was a sound near my ankle, and my heart leapt up out of my throat. I flinched violently away from it. The sound repeated itself in a continuous scrabble of noise. The floor, I noticed, was rough dirt and broken concrete in this corner, where the foundation platform was flawed. The scrabbling noise came from the very base of the wall, where the dirt was stirring and moving.
Something was trying to dig its way beneath the wall and into the garage, practically right underneath my butt. I felt a chill of fear, followed swiftly by anger at the thing that had added to an already overabundant flow of adrenaline. I clutched my makeshift weapon in hand and moved to crouch over the source of the disturbance, lifting it in preparation to strike at whatever came through.
I saw it in the dimness, and there was no mistaking the shape. A paw, a huge canine paw, scrabbled at the earth, digging out a shallow hole beneath the wall, frustrated by bits of concrete that got in the way. Between shots, I could hear animal sounds outside, panting whimpers of eagerness, it seemed. Whatever was out there wanted to dig its way inside, and wanted it bad.
"Dig this," I muttered, and swung the wrench down on the paw, hard.
There was an instant yelp of pain, and the paw jerked its way back out from beneath the corrugated-metal wall. It was followed by a snarl, and the paw appeared again, whereupon I slammed the wrench down on it once more, with similar results. I heard a furious snarling sound from the other side, and I released a small surge of vindictive satisfaction by leaning down close enough to the hole to say, "Hah. Bring another one in here and I'll give you the same."
I heard sounds outside for a moment, then a crunch of gravel, and Tera West's smooth, unmistakable voice. "Wizard," she hissed. "Stop that."
I blinked, startled, and leaned down close to the hole. "Tera? Is that you? How did you know it was me?"
"You are the only man I ever met," Tera growled, "who would smash the paws that are trying to free you from certain death." I flinched at another burst of gunfire from the far side of the garage. "I am going to tell them to dig again. Do not strike at their paws."
"Them?" I demanded. "Them who?"
But she didn't answer me. Instead, the scrabbling sounds began again. I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the room. I saw Streetwolves moving swiftly out through the door and the gaping hole Marcone had left in the garage door when he escaped. In a flash of automatic muzzle-flare, I saw Denton standing over the form of a lanky woman and firing down into it, apparently making absolutely certain that she would never rise again. I had enough time to recognize Lana's face, now screwed up with pain rather than bloodlust. Her body jerked and twitched as Denton emptied the remainder of the clip into her. And then everything went dark again.
By my feet, the scrabbling sounds continued---and then broke off in a yelp. I heard a series of vicious snarls and yelps from the half-dug hole beneath the wall, and I cursed.
"Tera," I whispered, as loudly as I dared. "What's going on?"
There was only more growling for answer, and a sharp yelp that carried to the far side of the garage.
I threw myself flat behind the toolbox and a pile of junk, just before a flashlight beam swept over the corner where I had been hiding. "It's that bitch," Denton snarled. "Roger's got her outside."
There was a whispering sound, and a tingling feeling along my spine. Then a throaty, sensual female voice purred, "Parker's still in here. So is that wizard. I can smell them."
"Dammit," Denton growled. "The wizard knows too much. Wilson, go help Roger."
"What about me, lover?" the female voice said, a husky laugh added to the end. Agent Benn sounded like she'd just had too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and was hungry for more.
"You and I stay in here. I'll cover the doors. Flush them toward me."
There was a mewling sound of pleasure from the woman. "Come with me," she urged. "Change. You know you love it so much. You know how good it feels."
I could visualize Denton's veins throbbing. "Smarter for one of us to cover the door with a gun." But there was a sort of heavy reluctance to his tone.
"Fuck smart," Benn purred. "Come with me. Change."
"It's not why we did this. Not why we made the bargain." Benn made another sound, utterly sexual in nature. "It doesn't matter now. Taste it," she urged him. "Taste the blood." The light wavered and dropped from the corner where I hid.
I chanced a look up. Agent Benn, spattered in gore, stood before Denton in the wash of his flashlight from the floor. She had three of her fingers pressed together, and was sliding them between his lips. Denton was shaking, and his eyes were squeezed tightly closed. He suckled at her fingers, something frighteningly erotic in the motion. One of the huge, gaunt beasts from earlier, Wilson I supposed, stood nearby, watching the pair of them with gleaming eyes.
Denton made a growling sound and grasped Benn by her mane of greying hair, jerking her chin up so that he could nuzzle and lick at the blood smeared over her throat. She laughed and arched into him, her hips undulating against him in urgent motions. "Change," she moaned. "Change. Do it."
There was a howl of rage, and flash of motion, and Parker staggered from the darkness, one arm dangling uselessly, a heavy knife in his other hand, and defiance and insane anger in his glazed eyes. Denton and Benn looked up, and then they reached to their waists, flickered, and changed into a pair of the nightmare-sized wolves, their eyes glowing in the ambient light, jaws dropping open to reveal lolling tongues and vicious fangs. Parker lurched forward, greasy hair flying, and the three wolves leapt on him.
I stared in a sort of sickened fascination. The wolves buried him under a mound of fangs and fur and blood and absolute fury. He screamed, the knife flailing, and then it was cast aside, out of his hands, to land spinning on the floor not far from me. Parker tried to fight, tried to struggle up and kick, but it was hopeless. There were flashes of blood, and he screamed again and went still.
And then the wolves started to eat him. They bit off chunks of muscle and gulped them down, ripping aside clothing to get to more meat. They snarled and snapped at one another, and one of the males mounted the female, even as she continued to tear at the body, burrowing her muzzle down through the layers of stomach muscle to get at the vitals. My gorge rose, and if I'd had anything in my stomach, I would have emptied it onto the concrete floor.
Instead, I turned back to the half-finished hole in the floor and started digging at it with my wrench, frantic. I didn't want to be the next thing on the menu.
There were more yelps from outside, more growls, and I opened the hole up enough that I thought I might be able to get out. I flattened myself down and wormed my way into the dirt, the corrugated metal scraping at my back, my wounded shoulder paining me again.
I jerked my way out into the open air, to find myself in an alley behind the garage, dimly lit by a distant streetlight.
There were wolves everywhere.
Three wolves, smaller than the ones I had seen before, were spread in a loose ring about a great russet-furred beast with batlike ears. The great wolf's coat was spattered with blood, and two of the smaller wolves lay nearby, yelping in pain, stirring weakly, blood matting their coats. Tera was a part of the ring around the great beast as well, naked and lean, a length of pipe held in either hand. When the great wolf turned toward one of the others, the rest would begin to close in around him, and he would spin, jaws flashing, trying to pin down one of those who encircled him.
"You took your time, wizard," Tera snarled, without looking back at me.
I got to my feet, wrench in hand, and shook my head to clear it of cold sweat. "Tera," I said. "We've got to get out of here. Denton and the others will be coming."
"Go," she responded. "Help MacFinn. We will hold them." The great russet wolf lunged at her, and she skittered back, cooly staying a hair's breadth from his fangs. She fetched him a sharp blow across the nose with more speed than I could have believed and a contemptuous snort. The three smaller wolves rushed the great beast, and he spun to drive them back and away from him, drawing a yelp from one that wasn't swift enough to entirely evade his jaws.
"You can't stop them all," I said. "There's three more like this one."
"There are pack on the ground," she snarled, and jerked her head toward the wounded wolves. "We do not abandon our own."
I let out an acid curse. I needed Tera. She could confirm everything, help me sort out all my facts, make sure that I understood what was going on. She was offering to give her life for me, to stay and occupy Denton and the others for as long as she and her compatriots could, but I had seen enough people dying already tonight. I wasn't going to accept another loss on my behalf.
And I was abruptly more furious than afraid. I'd been run around and treated like a piece of baggage or a choice item on the menu for long enough. I'd flailed around in the dark and been helpless and ineffective for way too long. Too many people had been hurt, too much suffering caused by creatures of magic and the night, things that I should have been handling. It didn't matter to me, at that moment, that I couldn't work any of my spells against them. I might not have any magic available to me, but that didn't make me any less of a wizard, one of the magi, the wise. That's the true power of a wizard.
I know things.
Knowledge is power.
With power comes responsibility.
That made the entire thing pretty simple. I clutched the wrench in my hand, took a deep breath, and threw myself forward, at the great wolf's back. The huge wolf sensed me coming, spun with abrupt speed, and met me in the air. It slammed me down to the concrete and bent its jaws toward my throat. I heard Tera cry out, and she and the other wolves moved forward---but they would never have been able to get to the thing before it killed me. That wasn't the point.
I jammed the wrench into the wolf's jaws, feeling some teeth tear at one of my fingers as I did. The wolf snarled and jerked the wrench out of my hands. It spun end over end away from me, and the great beast turned back toward me, its eyes glowing.
I had time to watch it all in great detail. The wolf's power, its speed, simply shocked me. It was huge, quick, and I didn't have a prayer against it. The distant streetlight gleamed off of its reddened fangs as its muzzle sped toward my throat.
Chapter Twenty-five
The wolf's fur was speckled with drops of blood that had beaded on it like rain. The gravel in the alley shone in the half-light from the distant street lamps. The wolf's muzzle, a little shorter and broader than I had seen on Wild Kingdom, was drawn back, black lips from fangs striped white and red like peppermints. Its eyes were blue, rather than any proper lupine shade, and gleamed with a sort of demented awareness.
I had time to see all those details because I didn't need my eyes for what I wanted to do. I thrust my hands into the beast's pelt as he went for my throat, and wormed my way down between his forelegs with my buttocks, fingers digging, until I felt what I was looking for---the sharp metal edges of a belt buckle, down against the skin, almost flush to the surface. As the wolf's jaws came toward my throat, I furiously worked the buckle, feeling skin rip and tear from the wolf's hide as I jerked it open, and then threw my arm to one side, clutching hard at the trailing strap.
And abruptly, a wolf-pelt belt was sliding out from beneath the grey suit jacket of Roger Harris, the forensic specialist for the local FBI office, the kid with the red hair and the big ears. He crouched over me for a second, blinking in stunned amazement at me, blood on his mouth and lips.
"Hexenwulf jerk-off," I snarled and slammed my knee up into his groin. It hit home hard.
Harris gasped and rolled off me, reaching into his jacket, but I didn't let him get his gun. I stayed with him, keeping too close to him to let him move his arms freely, grabbed him by those big ears, and started slamming his head repeatedly against the gravel. He struggled against me for a few seconds, but I'd taken him by surprise. His skull banged against the rocks over and over, and after a half-dozen solid blows, he stopped struggling.
I released his ears with a little jerk and looked up at Tera and the wolves. They were closing in around him like a pack of sharks around a wounded dolphin, and I could read the blood in their eyes, in the bared fangs, and in the white-knuckled grip of Tera's hands on her lead pipes. I felt a sudden surge of frustration. Bad enough to have bloodthirsty animals roaming all over the city---I didn't need more of them on my team.
"Everyone back off," I snarled.
"He's ours," Tera answered me in kind. "He hurt those of the pack."
"Then why don't you get them some help instead of wasting your time on this guy?" I said.
"His blood is ours," Tera said, and the wolves confirmed this with a chorus of angry growls.
"He can't hurt you now. Killing him won't make your friends any better. And the lost time might finish them."
"You do not understand, wizard," Tera snarled, and the wolves echoed her in a chorus, white fangs showing. "It is our way."
I stood up slowly, to my full height. "I understand," I said in a very low and even voice, "that you do not want to make me any more angry than I already am." I met Tera's eyes and stared, hard. My jaws ached from clenching. "There's been enough killing. Take him out now, and you're no different than he is."
"Wrong," Tera said. "I would be alive, and he dead."
"Not if you cross me, you won't be."
We held the tension for a moment, glaring at one another.
I saw uncertainty waver across her face. She didn't know that I was out of gas, magically speaking, and she had seen me do too many impressive things with my powers to want to defy me lightly. She blinked first and looked away from me with a sullen sound in the back of her throat. "As you wish, wizard," she said. "We don't have the time to waste fighting one another. The rest of his pack is coming. And we have wounded to tend to."
I nodded and swept my gaze around at the three wolves around me. "Anybody else?" I challenged. They all backed away from me, and didn't meet my eyes. "All right, then," I said, and stooped to recover Harris's gun and the wolf-pelt belt. "Do you have transportation out of here?"
"Yes," Tera said. "Georgia."
One of the wolves, a leggy, lanky, pale-brown beast shuddered and paced in a circle, making small, whimpering sounds. A moment later, there was a whisper of power. The she-wolf shivered, and went still, her head bowed. And then she shook herself, and all that pale-brown hair faded from paler skin, leaving me staring at the lanky, dark-blond girl I had seen in the department store a few days ago, sans all the black leather. Georgia rose to her feet and said, "I'll have her bring the van around on the next street. Can you get them to it?" Her expression was tense, her eyes a little wide.
"Yes," Tera said. "Everyone, come back to yourselves." The other two ambulant wolves began to pace in a slow circle, gathered their own power, and their own transformations commenced, until they stood before me as a pair of naked young men---one of them the short, stout boy who had been arguing against Georgia---Billy---and the other a face I recognized but couldn't name.
Tera took charge of the situation while I held Harris's gun and kept watch down the alley. She and the two young men made a litter for one of the wolves out of Harris's jacket, and the other Tera simply picked up with a flexion of wire-tight muscle and carried, though it must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. The wounded wolves yelped piteously, and Tera and the two young men cast dark glances at the downed Harris while they headed down the alley, and over toward the beach, leaving me alone with the kid.
I hunkered down beside him and slapped his face until his eyes rolled open. He blinked once and then jerked, as though he was about to sit up. I stuck the barrel of the semiautomatic in the hollow of his throat and said, in a calm voice, "Hold still."
He froze, staring up at me with wide eyes.
"I'm going to ask some questions, kid. I think I've got the answers already, but you're going to talk to me, quietly and honestly. Or I demonstrate point-blank bullet impact for you right here and now. Got it?"
Harris's mouth twitched a few times before he managed to speak. "If you kill me," he said, "Denton won't stop until you're dead."
"Give me a break, Roger," I said back in a reasonable tone. "Denton wants me dead anyway. I could kill you now and it wouldn't make any difference in what he has to do."
Roger licked his lips and rolled his eyes about without moving his head, as though hoping for rescue. "How did you know? About the belt."
"I saw Denton's inside. And I saw that before you all changed, you had to reach inside your jackets for something. I figure that first night, Agent Benn was reaching into her jacket to touch the belt and tear Murphy's head off, when she got mad. But she managed to remember not to do it in time and drew her gun instead. Right?"
Harris's head twitched in a slight nod.
"The bargain," I said. "You're Hexenwulfen, so you've made a bargain with someone to get the power to change, to get the belts. Who is it?"
"I don't know," Harris said, and his eyes widened. "God, I don't know. Denton handled all of it."
I narrowed my eyes at him and drew back the hammer on the gun.
"Please," he squealed, breathless. "I don't know. I swear to God, Denton handled all of that. He just came to us, asked us if we wanted to back him, if we wanted to nail some of the scum that kept getting away from the law, and I told him I did. Jesus, I didn't know it was going to lead to this."
"Lead to what, Roger?" I asked, my tone frosty. "Start from the beginning, and make it quick."
"Marcone," he said, eyes on the gun. "It was all about Marcone. Denton wanted to take him down."
"You mean kill him."
His eyes flickered up to me. "He told us there was no other way to get to him. That he was doing more to poison this city than anyone alive. And he was right. Marcone's bought enough influence in this town to stay clear of city police forever, and he carries weight on the national level, too. The bureau has had more than one investigation on him called off. He's untouchable."
"So you planned to use the belts to kill him."
He nodded. "But there would be evidence. No one would believe he'd just been mauled by wild dogs. There would be a full investigation, forensics, the works."
I understood and nodded. "So you needed someone to make it a neat package. Let me guess: the Streetwolves."
Harris showed his teeth. "A gang of felons and troublemakers with a wolf motif. Murder of a criminal figure by persons with a wolf motif. No one would bother to check the figures on that one. It's obvious. And we get one more dangerous group off the street."
"Yeah, Roger, except that they'd be innocent of that particular crime. Did you think of that? Innocent like those other people who died the nights around the full moon last month. You killed them. You and the rest of Denton's team."
He closed his eyes, his face going pale, and he shuddered. "The change. When . . . when you're changed, when you're a beast, it's so incredible. So much speed, power. Your body just sings with it. I tried coke once, in college, and it was nothing compared to this. The blood . . ." His tongue flicked out again over his bloodstained lips, a thirsty motion this time, rather than a nervous one.
"I think I'm starting to see. Denton didn't tell you about that part. About how your thoughts are influenced. He probably didn't know himself. And when you've done it once . . ."
Harris nodded emphatically. "You just can't stop, man. It gets to where you're pacing the room at night. And it's better than sleep, when you get finished hunting, you feel so alive." He opened his eyes again, staring up at me, pleading. "I didn't mean to kill those people. We started off with criminals. Some gangsters dealing drugs. We were just going to scare them, but it was too much. They screamed and ran and we were after them, and . . . We killed them. And my God, Dresden, it was beautiful."
"And it happened again," I said. "A couple of times. Innocent people. Just poor schmucks in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Harris turned his head away from me and nodded. "Denton said that we could salvage it. He said that we could pin those killings on the Streetwolves as well. Make everyone think they had done it. And we just went along with him."
I shook my head. "That doesn't explain why you dragged MacFinn into this."
"Denton," the kid said. "It was all him. He said there was someone else we could also set up to take the blame, to be certain we'd be in the clear. That he had the man for it. We broke into MacFinn's house, and there was all this occult stuff. We messed up some of it and left. And . . . the next night, more people were dead. And more, the next night. That's when we went after that slime Marcone's business partner, and wasted the bastard and his goon."
"And then you laid low for a month."
Harris swallowed and nodded. "Denton took the belts. He hid them from us. He'd held out better than anyone. And my God, poor Benn was so far gone, it was like she wasn't even human anymore. Wilson wasn't much better. But we lasted out the month."
"And then you killed Marcone's bodyguard at the Varsity."
Harris's eyes flared. "Yes. You should see his record. The things we know he did, but that we can't get through a court. My God, Dresden, he had it coming."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Who are we to judge?"
"Who are we not to?" Harris demanded. "The power was in our hands. We had a responsibility to use it for the good. To do our jobs. Hell, Dresden. If you're such a do-gooder, you should be helping us, not getting in the way. These men are untouchable and you know it."
I shifted my weight uncomfortably. "I don't agree with your methods. With setting people up to take the blame for your killings."
Harris sneered. "Like MacFinn has never killed anyone. Hell, he's a murderer now, isn't he? After that scene at the police station, anyone would be convinced he was a killer."
"Except me," I said. "MacFinn would never have been there if you hadn't messed up the circle that held him."
"Yeah," Harris said, a spiteful, frustrated edge to his tone. "Except you. You got to poking around in our business. Christ, that crazy report to Murphy even talked about the belts. That was when Denton started taking you seriously. If you had any brains at all, you'd pull that trigger and get the hell out now, before Denton and the others come out of the haze and come after you. Because you know way too much."
"Why the Streetwolves?" I said, instead of shooting him. "Why send me off to check them out?"
"Denton figured they'd kill you," Harris spat. "And get you out of our hair."
I nodded. It figured, that someone else had been trying to kill me the whole while, and I hadn't really noticed. "And he knew that they were after me, after I got away from them the first time."
"Yeah. And had me tailing them, so we could find you and make sure you were dead. When I saw you in the back of that car,
I figured you were. So we planned the hit on the Streetwolves to go down tonight, before MacFinn went after Marcone."
"How'd you know about that?" I asked.
Harris snorted. "Marcone told us. The snake called asking for police protection."
I almost smiled. "Did he get it?"
"Hell, no," Harris answered me. He lifted his chin, and balled his hands into fists, and I felt him tighten up beneath me. "I'm done talking," he said. "If you aren't going to sign on with us, then get the hell out of here. Or pull the trigger. But quit wasting my time."
"I'm not done talking," I said, and I jammed the gun crosswise over the kid's throat, strangling him. "You're going to give Denton a message for me. I'm sick of dancing around. Tell him that he'll get his shot at me at moonrise, at Marcone's place."
Harris squirmed beneath me, making rasping, gagging sounds. His eyes widened at my words. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that he'll try to be there when MacFinn shows up," I said. "That he'll want to make sure everyone there is dead so that he's the only one who can report what happened. You tell him that I'll be there. And tell him that he's not going to get away with it. Do you understand me, kid?"
I let up on the pressure, and Harris croaked out a vague affirmative. I rose away from him, keeping the gun in one hand and the belt in the other. I saw his eyes flicker to the belt, tracking its movement with a tense, strained sort of hunger.
"Why tell me?" the kid asked. "Why warn us?"
I stared down at him for long seconds before I answered him in a quiet voice. "Because I don't like what you're doing. What you are. You aren't using the power you've been given. It's using you. You're turning into animals. You're using savagery and fear to try to uphold the peace. Now it's your turn to see what it's like to be afraid."
Harris rose to his feet, his red hair askew, blood drying on his mouth, and backed several paces from me, his eyes darting around. "My belt," he said. "I want my belt."
"Forget it, kid," I told him. "The smartest thing you can do is go lock yourself in your room, and stay there until all of this is over. Because one way or another, you aren't using this belt again."
His face whitened, and he took a step toward me. I pointed the gun at him, and he froze, his hands balling into fists. "You won't get away with this," he said, his voice thick with tension.
"Moonrise," I told him, then turned on my heel and walked quickly from the alley, although my sock feet on the gravel, combined with my limp, probably spoiled the badass image.
Thirty feet down the alley, Tera appeared from the shadows and fell into step beside me, close enough to support me if I should fall. "You were wrong, wizard," she said.
I looked down at her, and she met my gaze with her soulless amber eyes. "How so?"
"They have not become animals." She looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed. "Animals do not do what they have done. Animals kill to eat, to defend themselves or their own, and to protect their territory. Not for the joy of it. Not for the lust of it." She looked back up at me. "Only humans do that, wizard."
I grimaced, but couldn't really refute her. "I guess you're right."
"Of course," Tera said. We walked in silence for a moment.
"You will try to help my fiancé?"
"I'll try," I said. "But I can't let his curse claim any more lives."
She nodded, her eyes dark. "He would want it that way. He thinks of others before himself."
"He sounds like a good man."
She shrugged, but there was a sudden, worried weight in her shoulders. "And these others. The FBI. They will try to stop you."
"Yes."
"And when they do?"
"I can't let them go on like they have. They're out of control. I don't think they can stop themselves from killing, now." I didn't look down at Tera, just focused on taking steps, one at a time. "When they do . . ." I said. "When they do . . . I guess I'm going to need to get very human."
Chapter Twenty-six
Tera and I walked toward the shores of Lake Michigan.
There, along Forty-ninth Street, idled a big old van, its engine rattling. Its headlights came on as we approached, and the driver got out to roll open the side door for us.
"Harry?" she said. "Oh, God. What did they do to you?" She hurried over to me, and then I felt Susan's warmth against me as she slid one of my arms over her shoulder and pressed up against my side. She was wearing jeans that showed off her long legs, and a dark red jacket that complemented her dark skin. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail, and it made her neck look slender and vulnerable. Susan felt soft and warm beyond belief, and smelled clean and delightfully feminine, and I found myself leaning against her. All the aches and pains that had faded into the background came throbbing back to the forefront of my awareness, in comparison to her soft warmth and gentle support. I liked the way Susan felt better than the way I did.
"They beat him," Tera explained. "But they kept him alive, as I told you they might."
"Your face looks like a sack of purple potatoes," Susan said, her dark eyes studying me, the lines in her face deepening.
"You say the sweetest things," I mumbled.
They loaded me into the van, where Georgia, Billy, and the other Alphas were crouched. Two of the young people, a boy with blinking, watery blue eyes, and a girl with mousy brown hair, lay on their backs, gasping quietly. Clean white bandages had been wrapped around their wounds. Georgia had, evidently, been the attending medic. All of the Alphas were dressed in plain, dark bathrobes, rather than in their birthday suits, and I felt an oddly grateful feeling toward them for it. Things were weird enough without needing to ride around in a van with a bunch of naked, somewhat geeky college students.
I put my seat belt on and noted the bruises on my hands and forearms---ugly, dark purple-and-brown splotches, so thickly scattered over my skin that in places I couldn't tell where one stopped and the next began. I sat down and leaned against the window, pillowing my head on my right hand.
"What are you doing here with these people?" I asked Susan when she got into the driver's seat.
"Driving," she said. "I was the only one old enough to rent the van."
I winced. "Ouch."
"Tell me about it," she said and started the engine. "After you jumped out of the car, and I finished with my heart attack, we called the police, just like you said. Tera went to look for you and told me that the police had shown up too late, and that the Streetwolves had taken you. How did that truck crash like that?"
"Bad luck. Someone made all their tires explode at the same time."
Susan gave me an arch look and started up the van. "Those bastards. Just lie still, Harry. You look like a train wreck. We'll get you to someplace quiet."
"Food," I said. "I'm starving. Tera, can you keep track of moonrise?"
"I will," she said. "The clouds are moving away. I can see the stars."
"Fantastic," I mumbled. And then I went to sleep, ignoring the jostling of the van. I didn't wake up until the smell of fried grease and charred meat made me look up at the drive-thru window of a fast-food burger joint. Susan paid for everything in cash, passing paper sacks to everyone. I snagged a golden paper crown from one of the bags and idly joined it into a circle and put it on my head. Susan blinked at me, then let out a brief laugh.
"I am," I intoned, with an imperious narrowing of my eyes, "the burger king." Susan laughed again, shaking her head, and Tera gave me a serious, level gaze. I checked the status of the young people in the back of the van, and found them, even the wounded ones, hungrily wolfing (no pun intended) down the food.
Tera caught the direction of my glance and leaned toward me. "Puppies," she said, as though the word should explain more than it did. "They were not hurt so badly as they thought. They will hardly have scars to show for it."
"That's good to know," I said and sipped at my cola and chomped down steaming-hot french fries. "But what I'm really interested in," I said, "is in knowing why your blood was in Marcone's restaurant the night before the full moon."
Tera took the hamburger patty off of the bun and started nibbling on it, holding it in her fingers. "Ask another time."
"No offense," I said, "but I'm not so sure there's going to be another time. So tell me."
Tera took another bite of meat, and then shrugged. "I knew that the pack that had harassed my fiancé was about. I deduced where they might strike, and went there to attempt to stop them."
"All by yourself?"
Tera sniffed. "Most of those who turn themselves into wolves know little about being wolf, wizard. But these had taken too much of the beast inside. I ran through the window glass and fought, but they outnumbered me. I left before I could be killed."
"And what about these kids?" I said, nodding toward the back of the van.
She glanced back at them, and for a moment, I saw warmth and pride gleaming in her eyes, subverting the remote, alien lines of her face. "Children. But with strong hearts. They wished to learn, and I taught. Let them tell you their tale."
"Maybe later," I said and finished off the french fries. "Where are we going?"
"To a safe place, to arm and prepare ourselves."
"Myself," I contradicted her. "To prepare myself. I'm not taking you with me."
"You are incorrect," Tera said. "I am going with you."
"No."
She fastened her amber eyes on mine. "You are strong, wizard. But you have not yet seen my beast. The men you will oppose would take my fiancé from me. I will not allow that. I will be with you, or you will kill me to stop me."
This time, it was I who looked away first. I sipped at my drink, scowling, while Tera placidly ate more of the hamburger patty. "Who are you?" I asked her finally.
"One who has lost too many of her family already," she said. And then she settled back on the seat and withdrew from the conversation, falling silent.
"One who has lost too many . . ." I grumbled, frustrated, mocking her beneath my breath. I turned back to the front of the van and hunched my shoulders over my burger. "Put some clothes on, you weird, yellow-eyed, table-dancing, werewolf-training, cryptic, stare-me-rightin-the-eyes-and-don't-even-blink wench."
There was a hissing sound from the backseat, and I flicked a scowl back over my shoulder. Tera was chewing on her meat. Her eyes were shining, her mouth was curved at the corners, and her breath was puffing out her nostrils in near-silent laughter.
The safe place we were going to turned out to be a big house up near the Gold Coast, not far from Marcone's own minipalace. The house wasn't large, by the neighborhood's standards, but that was like saying that a bale of hay isn't much to eat, by elephant standards. Susan drove the van up through a break in a high hedge, up a long driveway of white concrete, and into a six-car garage whose doors rolled majestically up before us.
I got out of the van, in the garage, and stared at the Mercedes and the Suburban also parked in it. "Where are we?" I said.
Tera opened the side door of the van, and Georgia, Billy, and the other young man emerged, assisting the two wounded werewolves. Georgia stretched, which did interesting things to the dark bathrobe, and drew her mane of tawny hair back from her lean face with one hand. "It's my parents' place. They're in Italy for another week."
I rubbed a hand over my face. "They aren't going to mind you having a party, are they?"
She flashed me an annoyed look and said, "Not as long as we clean up all the blood. Come on, Billy. Let's get these two inside and into bed."
"You go on," he said, fastening his eyes on me. "I'll be along in a minute."
Georgia looked like she wanted to give him an argument, but shook her head instead, and with the help of the other young man, took the two invalids inside. Tera, still naked and supremely unconcerned about it, followed them, glancing back over her shoulder at me before she disappeared. Susan promptly stepped in front of me, somewhat obstructing the view, and said, "Five minutes, Dresden. Come find me then."
"Uh," was my rapier reply, and then Susan went into the house, too.
I stood in the dark with Billy, the stout, short kid in thick glasses. He had his hands stuffed into his bathrobe pockets, and he was peering at me.
"Do all wizards," he said, "get the kiddie crowns and wear them around? Or is that only for special occasions?"
"Do all werewolves," I shot back, snatching the crown from my head, "wear glasses and too much Old Spice? Or is that only for full moons?"
He grinned at me, rather than taking umbrage. "You're quick," he said. "I always wanted to be that way." He stuck out his hand toward me. "Billy Borden."
I traded grips with him wearily, and he tried to crush my hand in his. "Harry Dresden," I told him.
"You look pretty beat up, Mr. Dresden," he said. "Are you sure you can handle going out again tonight?"
"No," I answered, in a spurt of brutal honesty.
Billy nodded, and pushed his glasses up higher onto his nose. "Then you need our help."
Oh, good grief. The Mickey Mouse Club of werewolves wanted to throw in on my side. Werewolfkateer role call: Billy. Georgia. Tommy. Cindy. Sheesh.
"No way," I said. "Absolutely not."
"Why not?" he said.
"Look, kid. You don't know what these Hexenwulfen can be like. You don't know what Marcone can be like, and you sure as hell have never seen anything like MacFinn outside of a movie theater. And even if you had the skills to deal with it, what makes you think you have a right to be going along?"
Billy considered the question seriously. "The same thing that makes you think that you do, Mr. Dresden," he said.
I opened my mouth. And closed it again.
"I know I don't know a lot, compared to you," Billy said. "But I'm not stupid. I've got eyes. I see some things everyone else tries to pretend aren't there. This vampire craze sweeping the nation. Why the hell shouldn't there be some genuine vampires in it? Did you know that violent crimes have increased nearly forty percent in the last three years, Mr. Dresden? Murder alone has almost doubled, particularly in heavy urban areas and isolated rural areas. Abductions and disappearances have gone up nearly three hundred percent."
I blinked at the kid. I hadn't really read the numbers. I knew that Murphy and some of the other cops said that the streets were getting worse. And I knew myself, on some deep level, that the world was getting darker. Hell, it was one of the reasons I did idiotic things like I was doing tonight. My own effort to lift up a torch.
"I'm sort of a pessimist, Mr. Dresden. I think that people are almost too incompetent to hurt themselves so badly. I mean, if criminals were trying, they couldn't increase their production by three hundred percent. And I hear stories, read the tabloids sometimes. So what if the supernatural world is making a comeback? What if that accounts for some of what is going on?"
"What if it does?" I asked him.
Billy regarded me steadily, without looking me in the eyes. "Someone has to do something. I can. So I should. That's why we're here, the Alphas. Tera offered us the chance to do something, when she met us through the Northwest Passage Project, and we took it."
I stared at the kid. I could have argued with him, but there wouldn't be much point to it. I knew his argument, backward and forward. I'd worked it out myself. If I was ten years younger, a foot shorter, and a couple of pounds heavier, that could have been me talking. And I had to admit, the kid did have power. I mean, turning yourself into a wolf is no cheap parlor trick. But I did have one angle to play, and I took it. I didn't want this kid's blood on my hands.
"I don't think you're ready for the big leagues yet, Billy."
"Could be," he said. "But there's no one else in the bull pen."
I had to give the kid credit. He had resolve. "Maybe you should sit this one out, and live to fight another day. It could all go bad, and if it does, those Hexenwulfen we took on down by the beach are going to be coming for you. Someone will need to stay with your wounded people, to protect them."
"More likely, if they go through you, they're going to go through us, too. It would be smarter to pile on everything we've got in one place. With you."
I chuckled. "All your eggs in one basket?"
He shook his head. "All the money on the most likely winner."
I studied him in silence for a long minute. I was confident of his sincerity. It just oozed out of him, in a way that only the really inexperienced and idealistic can manage. It was comforting, and at the same time it was the most frightening thing about him. His ignorance. No, not ignorance, really. Innocence. He didn't know what he would be going out to face. If I let him go along, I'd be dragging him down with me. Despite what he'd seen tonight, I'd be exposing him to a whole new, violent, bloody, and dangerous world. One way or another, if I let Billy Borden and his buddies go with me, these innocent children wouldn't live to see the sunrise.
But, God help me. He was right about one thing. I needed the help.
"Everyone who's going takes orders from me," I said, and he drew in a sharp breath, his eyes gleaming. "Not Tera. You do what I say, and you do it when I say it. And if I tell you to leave, you go. No questions. You got it?"
"I got it," Billy said, and gave me a cocky grin that simply did not belong on the face of a geeky little college nerd in a black bathrobe. "You're a smart man, Mr. Dresden."
I snorted at him, and just then the automatic light on the garage door opener went out, leaving us in darkness. There was a disgusted sound from the doorway, and then the lights came on again. Georgia, in all her willowy, annoyed glory, was standing in the doorway to the garage.
"Billy Borden," she said. "Don't you have any better sense than to stay here in the dark?" She stalked out toward him, scowling.
He looked up at her calmly and said, "Tell everyone we're going along. Dresden's in charge. If they can handle that, they're in, and if not, they're staying here to guard Cindy and Alex."
Georgia's eyes widened and she gave a little whoop of excitement. She turned to me and threw her arms around me for a moment, making my shoulder scream in pain, and then whirled to Billy and bent down to do the same thing. He winced when she did, and she stood up and jerked back his black bathrobe, clearing it off of one side of his pale chest. To give the kid credit, his stoutness was the result of what looked like quite a bit of solid muscle, and along the line of his chest there was a thickly clotted wound, still trickling blood in a few places.
"What's this?" Georgia said. "You idiot. You didn't tell me you'd gotten hurt."
Billy shrugged, and pulled his robe straight again. "It closed. And you can't bandage it and keep it on me when I change, anyway."
Georgia clucked her teeth, annoyed. "You shouldn't have gone for the hamstring on that wolf. He was too fast."
Billy flashed her a grin. "I almost got him, though."
"You almost got yourself killed," she said, but her voice had softened a few shades. I noticed that she hadn't moved her hand from the other side of Billy's chest, and he was looking up at her with an expectant expression. She fell silent, and they stared at one another for a minute. I saw her swallow.
Please, help me. Young werewolves in love. I turned to walk into the house, moving carefully.
I had never much believed in God. Well, that's not quite true. I believed that there was a God, or something close enough to it to warrant the name---if there were demons, there had to be angels, right? If there was a Devil, somewhere, there had to be a God. But He and I had never really seen things in quite the same terms.
All the same. I flashed a look up at the ceiling. I didn't say or think any words, but if God was listening, I hoped he got the message nonetheless. I didn't want any of these children getting themselves killed.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Susan's perfume led me to her. She was waiting for me in a bedroom on the first floor. She stood in the simply furnished room, in her jeans and a white T-shirt blazoned with the words, EAT IT? I WOULDN'T SIT ON IT! It was one of mine. She lifted her chin up high when she saw me, as though trying to keep the tears in her eyes from falling.
Our gazes met, and held. We had looked into one another before, more than a year ago. She'd fainted when she saw what was inside of me through the soulgaze. I don't know what it was she saw. I don't look too hard into mirrors.
Inside of her, though, I'd seen passion, like I'd rarely known in people other than myself. The motivation to go, to do, to act. It was what drove her forward, digging up stories of the supernatural for a half-comic rag like the Arcane. She had a gift for it, for digging down into the muck that people tried to ignore, and coming up with facts that weren't always easily explained. She made people think. It was something personal for her---I knew that much, but not why. Susan was determined to make people see the truth.
I shut the door behind me and limped toward her.
"They'll kill you," she said. "Don't go." As I reached her, she put her hands against my chest, then her cheek.
"I've got to. Denton can't afford to let me live now. I need to finish this business, before it gets any more out of hand. Before more people die. If I don't go tonight, Denton will be able to kill Marcone and MacFinn and set MacFinn up for all the killings. He'll get away clean, and then he'll be able to focus on me. And maybe on you, too."
"We could go somewhere," she said quietly. "We could hide." I blinked my eyes closed. She'd said "we." She hadn't really done that much, before. I hadn't really thought in those terms, either. I hadn't much thought in those terms for a lot of years. Not since the last time.
I should have said something about it. Acknowledged the implication. I knew it was there, and she knew that I had noticed it. She held still, waiting.
Instead, I said, "I'm not much good at hiding. Neither are you."
Her breath went out in a little whisper, and I felt her tighten a little against me. There would be tears on my shirt, I knew, but I didn't look down at her.
"You're right," she said a moment later. Her voice was shaking. "And I know you are. But I'm afraid, Harry. I mean, I know we haven't been really close. Friends, and lovers, but . . ."
"Work," I said. I closed my eyes.
She nodded. "Work." Her fingers tightened on my shirt, and she looked up at me, dark eyes swimming with tears, still more on the smooth lines of her cheek. "I don't want to lose you now. I don't want the work to be all that's left."
I tried to think of something smart to say. Something that would reassure her, calm her, help her to feel better, to understand what I felt for her. But I wasn't even sure what it was that I felt.
I found myself kissing her, the rough growth on my mouth and chin brushing her soft skin. She tensed at first, and then melted against me with a deliciously feminine sort of willingness, a soft abandoning of distance that left her body, in all its dark beauty, pressed against mine. The kiss deepened, slowed, became something intense and erotic and self-contained. The motion of our lips, the warmth of our bodies pressed together. The touch of my fingertips on her face, featherlight. The scratch of her nails as her fingers kneaded at my shirt. My heart was pounding, and I could feel hers, too, racing.
She broke the kiss first, and I swayed on my feet, my breath gone. Without speaking, she guided me down to the edge of the bed, and sat me there. Then she vanished into the bathroom, reappearing with a basin of warm water, some soap, and a washcloth.
She undressed me. Slowly. Delicately. She changed the bandages, murmuring softly to me when it hurt, kissing my eyes and forehead to soothe me. She bathed me with the water, its warmth washing away the dried sweat, the blood, and some of the pain. Patiently, more gentle than rain, she made me clean, while I drifted, my eyes closed. I could hear myself make a soft sound, now and then, in response to her touches.
I felt her come to me. Felt her bare skin against mine, hot and smooth. I opened my eyes and saw the silver haze of the moon on the far horizon, across the lake. I saw Susan outlined in it, all sweetly feminine curves and lines, a beautiful shadow. She kissed me again, and I returned it in kind, and it was a liquid, smooth thing, as restrained and desperate as the near-still surface of a rushing river. Her lips passed from my mouth and roamed over the skin she had just cleaned, and when I tried to touch her, she gently pressed my hands back down, telling me without words to be still.
It went on like that, all skin and light touches, soft sighs, pounding hearts, until she settled atop me, keeping her weight off me with her legs, her hands, afraid to cause any pain. We moved together, feeling the power of our need, our hunger for one another, a pure blend of desire and warmth and affection and incredible intimacy that shook us to the core. It ended in silence, the sensation all the more piercing for that, our mouths together, our breath mingling.
She lay down beside me until our pounding hearts slowed down. Then she rose, and said, "I don't know if I want to fall in love with you, Harry. I don't know if I could stand it."
I opened my eyes, and answered softly, "I've never wanted to hurt you. I don't know what's right."
"I know what feels right," she said, and kissed me again, then started touching my forehead, lifting her head up to study me with gentle, compassionate eyes. "You see so much pain. I just wanted to remind you that there was something else in the world."
I'm a pretty tough guy. I mean, look at me. I can handle some rough stuff. But some things I'm not so tough about. I started crying, hard, and Susan held me, rocked me gently, until the tears had gone away.
I wanted to stay there, where it was warm, and where I was clean, and where there wasn't anyone dying. There wasn't any blood or snarling animals, and no one was trying to kill me. I liked the idea of being there, with Susan, in her arms, a whole lot more than I liked the idea of going out into the silver light of the full moon, which was growing greater underneath the horizon, coming up in a hazy nimbus.
Instead, I drew away from her a little and sat up.
It was a fool's moon.
She rose from the bed and returned with an overnight bag and drew out a pair of my black jeans, my black sneakers, socks, a heavy, dark grey shirt, dark undies to complete the color theme, and bless her heart, ibuprofen. I rose to dress, but she pressed a hand on my shoulder and made me sit down---then dressed me herself, slowly and carefully, her attention focused on the task. Neither of us spoke.
Ever had a beautiful, naked woman dress you? Talk about girding your loins for battle. There was something indescribably soothing and at the same time, exciting, about it. I could feel my body becoming more relaxed and aware, my senses more in tune with what was around me.
I heard footsteps in the hall, and a knock at the door. Tera's voice called, "Wizard. It is time."
I stood up, but Susan grabbed my wrist. "Harry," she said. "Wait a minute." She knelt down by the bag and drew out a heavy box, flat and broad. "I was going to give it to you for your birthday. But I thought you could use it."
I tilted my head and took the box in hand. It was heavy. "What is it?" I asked her.
"Just open it, dummy," she answered, smiling up at me. I did, and inside was the smell of soft, worked leather, sensuous and thick, wrapped up in translucent paper. I tossed the lid aside, took the paper off, and found dark leather, new and matte black, hardly casting back the light. I took it out of the box, and it unfolded into a heavy, long coat, like my own duster in design, even to the mantle around the shoulders and arms, but all made of the finer material.
I blinked at the coat. "It must have cost you a fortune."
She laughed wickedly. "Yeah. But I got to wear it around naked, just to feel it on my skin." Her face sobered. "I want you to have it, Harry. Something from me. For luck." She glided to my side and helped me into the coat.
The coat settled around me with a comforting heaviness and a peculiar sort of familiarity. It just felt right. I plucked my mother's pentacle on its chain from beneath my shirt and wore it openly. And then I got Harris's confiscated side arm from my coveralls' tool pouch, and put it in the coat's pocket. I didn't have any other magical tools. And maybe not even any more magic. The gun, all things considered, seemed an uncertain weapon at best.
But I was as ready as I was going to be.
I turned to say goodbye to Susan, to find her hurriedly stepping into her clothes. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"Getting dressed," she said.
"Why?"
"Someone's got to drive the van, Dresden." She tugged on her T-shirt, slung her jacket over her shoulder, and walked past me, pausing to give me a narrow glance. "Besides. This could be the biggest paranormal event I've ever had the chance to cover. Did you expect me to stay behind?" She pushed the door open and gave me an expectant look.
Damn, I thought. And double damn. One more person to worry about. One more person to protect. Susan wasn't a werewolf. She wasn't a wizard. She didn't even have a gun. It was crazy to let her even think about going along. But I found myself wanting to make sure she was somewhere close.
"All right," I said. "But the same rules I gave the kids. I'm in charge. You do what I say, when I say, or you stay here."
Susan pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. "I kind of like the sound of that," she said, teasing me. "I like that look on you, too. Have you ever thought about growing a beard?" Then she smiled, and vanished out into the hallway.
I scowled after her. She'd stay away from the worst of it. I'd make sure of that, if I had to tie her to the van myself. I muttered something grouchy, bent my head to one side, and inhaled, smelling the smell of new leather, of fresh clothes and soap, and of eau de Susan still lingering on my skin. I liked it. The jacket creaked as I started forward, and I caught sight of myself in the dresser mirror.
My double, the one from the dream, stared back out at me. Only the roughness of the three-day growth of dark whiskers, and the bruises, were at contrast with the subconscious-me's neatly trimmed beard. Everything else was precisely the same.
I turned my face away rather quickly and paced from the room, out to the van, where the others were waiting.
Showtime.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The moon rose in silver splendor into an October sky strewn with pale clouds and brilliant stars. The clouds churned, a white-foam sea, and the moon was a vast, graceful clipper ship, its sails full of spectral light as it ran before the strength of the cold autumn winds. Pale light bleached each of the uncut stones on the nine-foot wall around Gentleman Johnny Marcone's estate, making edges sharper, shadows blacker, until it looked like a barrier made of gaping white skulls. Trees grew up thick on the other side of the wall, blocking the view of the interior, though no branches extended far enough to provide a way to climb over it.
"We've got to get over the wall," I said to the enormous, dark wolf beside me, keeping my voice low as we all crouched in the shadows of the bushes across the street from Marcone's estate. "There will be security on it. Maybe cameras, maybe infrared beams, maybe something else. I want you to find us a way past it." The wolf flickered her amber eyes toward me and made a soft, assenting growl. Then she simply turned and faded into the darkness, leaving five more furry, crouching shapes grouped around me.
The Alphas didn't exactly inspire confidence, but they had all managed to master enough rudimentary magic to transform themselves into very, very close approximations of wolves, at least. It was something.
Susan had parked the van on a hill leading up to Marcone's estate, and remained with it, in case we needed a quick getaway. When we'd arrived, a nude Tera West and five young people, three female and two male, had leapt out of the van, the Alphas hurriedly tumbling out of their robes.
"Hell's bells," I'd complained, "we're on a public street. Can you be something besides naked, here, people?"
Tera had smirked and, in a liquid shimmer, become a gaunt, dark wolf, a beast fully as large as Denton and his cronies had been, but with a narrower muzzle and cleaner proportions. Like Denton and his crew of Hexenwulfen, she kept the exact same shade and color of her eyes, even in wolfish form.
"Well?" I'd demanded of the others. "Let's hurry it up."
Georgia had slipped her lean body from her dark robe and melted in a few seconds into her wolf shape, then had quickly slipped past me to go to Tera. Billy had growled something under his breath as he shrugged out of his robe, catching one sleeve on his arm as he'd begun to change.
Billy-wolf had stumbled over the robe still hanging on to his forepaw, tripped, and tumbled onto the street with a whuff of expelled breath and a little whimper.
I'd rolled my eyes. Billy-the-wolf had snarled and struggled out of his robe, picked it up carefully in his teeth, like a large and particularly grumpy-looking Benji, and put it back in the van.
"Um," one of the other girls had said, a redheaded lass who filled out her robe a little too generously. "We're still a little new at this." She'd covered herself with her arms awkwardly, letting her robe fall from her shoulders as she whispered a little chant, and had become a rather round, hefty-looking she-wolf with dark auburn fur. She'd moved daintily to the edge of the cargo van and had minced, despite her weight, down to the street. The other two young people, a lanky, dark-haired boy and a scrawny girl with mouse-brown hair, had made the change and loped up the hill after Tera, and then we all had moved as quietly as we could to the rear of Marcone's estate.
Surrounded by a high stone wall, the property occupied an entire block, bounded on all four sides by individual streets. None of us had known the layout to Marcone's place, so we'd chosen to approach from the rear, on general principles of sneakiness. I hadn't thought it would be wise to walk in the front door, so I had dispatched Tera to find us a way in, while I'd remained behind with the Alphas.
I found myself tapping my fingers on my thighs as I crouched, restless. I soon realized that if I was tense, the would-be werewolves were twice as keyed up. The darkest-furred one, Billy, I thought, rose to his paws and started away, in the opposite direction from which Tera had gone. Georgia growled at him, Billy growled back, and the other male rose to follow him.
Great, I thought. I couldn't afford to let the Alphas wander off now, no matter how restless they were.
"Hey," I said quietly. "You can't go haring off now. If there's a way inside, Tera will find it."
The wolves all turned their heads, and their very human eyes, toward me.
Billy planted his paws stubbornly and growled.
"Oh, don't give me that," I snapped, glaring at him without meeting his eyes. "You promised you'd play this my way, Billy. This isn't a time to be messing around."
Billy's stance became less certain, and I beckoned all of them toward me. If I could keep them listening until Tera got back, I could at least be sure that they'd be around when I needed them. "Huddle up, everyone," I said. "I want to go over some things before we go in."
There was a brief silence, and then a crowding of furry, heavy bodies, and a snuffling of wet noses. Ten ears pricked up and rotated toward me, and ten bright, human eyes fastened upon me from lupine faces. I suppressed a sudden urge to say, "Good evening, class. I'm your teacher, Mr. Dresden," and instead put on my most serious expression.
"You all know what's at stake tonight," I said. "And that we could all get killed. We're going to be confronting a bunch of law-enforcement people who have gotten hold of some magic that's as black as anything I've ever seen, and are using it to turn themselves into wolves. They've lost control of the power they've grabbed. They're killing people, and if we don't stop them they're going kill a lot more. Especially me, because I know too much. I'm a danger to them.
"But I don't want that. I don't want anyone to get killed. Not us, and not them. Maybe they deserve it. Maybe not. The power they grabbed has turned into a drug for them, and they're not really in control of themselves anymore. I just don't think we'd be much different than them if we went in there planning to wipe them out. It isn't enough to stand up and fight darkness. You've got to stand apart from it, too. You've got to be different from it."
I cleared my throat. "Hell. I'm not good at this. Go for their belts, if you can, just like I did in the alley. Once their belts are off, they're not going to be as crazy, and maybe we'll be able to talk to them." I glanced up at the wall and back down. "Just don't get killed, guys. Do what you have to do to stay alive. That's your first priority. And if you've got to kill them to do it, then don't hesitate."
There was a chorus of growls from around me, led by the wolf Billy, but that was the great thing about being the only human being there---I was the only one who could talk. There wouldn't have been any arguments, even had they disagreed. Their enthusiasm was a little intimidating.
"If you are any louder, wizard," Tera's soft voice came from behind me, "we might as well walk through the front gate." I jumped and looked up to see Tera, naked and human, crouched down a few feet away.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," I hissed at her. "Did you find a way in?"
"Yes," she said. "A place where the wall has crumbled. But it is far for you to walk, around along the eastern wall, toward the front of the property. We must run if we are to get inside in time."
I grimaced. "I'm not in any shape to run anywhere."
"It would seem you have little choice. I also saw many streaks of light across the front gate. And there are black boxes with glass eyes every seventy or eighty paces. They do not see the crumbled place. It is a fortunate position."
"Cameras," I muttered. "Hell."
"Come, wizard," Tera said, crouching down on all fours. "We have no time to waste if you are to join us. The pack can cover the distance in moments, but you must hurry."
"Tera. I've had a rough couple of days. I'd fall over in about two minutes if I tried to run somewhere."
The woman blinked passionless amber eyes up at me. "Your point?"
"I'm going over the wall right here," I said.
Tera looked at the wall and shook her head. "I cannot bring the pack over that wall. They are not strong enough to keep changing back and forth, and they have no hands in their wolf form."
"Just me then. I guess you all can find me?"
Tera snorted. "Of course. But it is foolish for you to go over the wall alone. And what if the cameras see you?"
"Let me worry about the cameras," I said. "Help me up to the top. Then you and the Alphas circle around and rendezvous with me."
Tera scowled, the expression dark. "I think this foolish, wizard. If you are too wounded to run, then you are too wounded to go in alone."
"We don't have time," I said with a glance up at the moon, "to argue about this. Do you want my help or don't you?"
Tera let out a sound somewhere between a snort and a snarl, and for a moment tension in her muscles made them stand out hard against her skin. One of the Alphas let out a little whimper, and stepped away from us.
"Very well, wizard," Tera said. "I will show you the nearest camera and help you over the wall. Do not move from where you land. We do not know who is on the other side of the wall, or where."
"Don't worry about me," I said. "Worry about yourself. If there's a good way through the wall, Denton might show up there, too, to go in. Or MacFinn might."
"MacFinn," Tera said, traces of pride in her voice and fear in her eyes, "will not even notice that the wall got in his way."
I grimaced. "Just show me the camera."
Tera led me forward through the dark, silent and naked and looking as though she didn't mind the cold evening at all. The grass was damp, plush, and deep. Tera pointed out the small, silent square of the video camera settled onto the wall across the street, and almost entirely hidden by the shadows of the trees.
I licked my lips and leaned toward the camera, keeping my own form obscured by the bushes. I squinted my eyes and drew in my will, trying to focus. My head started to pound at once, and I felt sweat break out beneath my arms and across my forehead. Hexing up anything mechanical is usually fairly simple. The field of magic that surrounds practitioners of the Art plays havoc with the implements of technology. A passing thought, on the right kind of day, can blow out a cellular telephone or kill a photocopier.
This was the wrong kind of day. That field of energy around me was severely depleted from its usual levels, and the metaphysical "muscles" I would normally use to manipulate that energy were in screaming agony, reflected in pains throughout my body.
But I needed to get inside, and I really did think that I wouldn't be able to make it all the way around the property. I was running on empty already, and too much more would leave me gasping like a fish out of water and wishing I was at home in bed.
I forced calm on my thoughts and focused all the energy I had, and it hurt me, starting in my head and spreading into weary aches in my knees and elbows. But the energy built, and built, and with it the pain, until I could hold it together no longer.
"Malivaso," I whispered, and pushed my hand out at the square shape, like a grade-school girl throwing a baseball wrong handed. The power I'd gathered, though it felt like it was about to split me at the seams, rushed out in an almost impotent little hiccup of magic and swirled drunkenly toward the security camera.
For a long minute, nothing happened. And then there was a flash of light, and a tiny shower of sparks from the rear of the box. Smoke drizzled up from the camera in a quavering plume, and I felt a small surge of triumph. At least I had something left in me, even if it was aneurism-causing labor to perform the mildest of tasks.
"All right then," I said a second later, my voice somewhat thready. "Let's go."
We looked around and made sure no cars were about, and then Tera, the Alphas, and I rushed across the road, through some decorative, leafy bushes, to the high stone wall. Tera laced her fingers together to form a stirrup. I put my good foot into it, and pushed up hard. She heaved me up, and half threw me over the wall. I caught myself at the top, saw a car's headlights coming, and swiftly rolled down the other side, falling heavily to damp, muddy earth.
It was dark. It was really dark. I was crouched at the base of the wall, underneath a spreading canopy of bare tree branches and stubborn sycamore leaves. Moonlight filtered through in random places, but it only served to make the dark spots all the more gloomy. My own black leather duster was utterly invisible, and I remembered reading somewhere that the gleam of my eyes and teeth would be the most likely to give me away---but since I didn't feel like sitting in the dark with my eyes closed, I didn't. Instead, I crouched and got my confiscated gun ready in one pocket, and took my ace in the hole out of the other, getting that ready as well.
I shivered, and worked hard to remind myself not to be afraid. Then I waited in the darkness for my allies. And waited. And waited. Time passed, and I knew that a minute would feel like an hour, so I began counting, one number for every deliberate breath.
The wind blew through the trees, brisk and cool. Leaves rustled, and droplets of rainwater fell from the trees around me, making little pattering sounds as they struck my new coat. They clung to the leather in tight beads and caught pieces of moonlight in them, brilliant against the black. The smell of rich earth and damp stone rose up with the wind, and for a moment it did almost feel as though I was in a forest rather than on a crime lord's private estate in the north end of Chicago. I took deep breaths, a little comforted by the illusion, and kept on counting.
And waited.
Nothing happened. No wolves, no sounds.
Nothing.
It wasn't until I got to one hundred that I started to get really nervous, my stomach beginning a slow twist that made weak sensations lace out through my arms and legs like slivers of ice. Where was Tera? Where were the Alphas? It shouldn't have taken them nearly so long to get inside the wall and then to cover the distance back to me. Though the estate was huge, the distance surely meant little to the flashing speed of a wolf.
The evening had obviously been moving along entirely too smoothly, I thought.
Something had gone wrong. I was alone.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Alone.
It's one of those small words that means entirely too much. Like fear. Or trust. I'm used to working alone. It goes with the territory. Wizards of my level of skill and strength (well, my usual levels) are few and far between---maybe no more than two dozen in the United States, with a slightly higher concentration of them in Europe, Africa, and Asia. But there is a difference between working alone and finding yourself facing a hatful of foes, on a cold night, while wounded, and in the dark, and practically helpless. It took me about ten seconds to become acutely aware of that difference.
Fear settled in comfortably. Fear was something I was used to. I was able to think past it, to focus on my predicament. Yay for me. My body reacted the same old way, keying up for fight or flight, while I forced my breathing to stay even.
The smart thing to do would be to run, to turn around and go back to the van and to have Susan drive me the hell away. Granted, I probably couldn't even climb the wall on my own, but I could have tried.
But I was already committed. I was here to do battle with the forces of evil, such as they were. I had dropped the challenge to them, not the other way around. Besides, if Tera and the kids were in trouble, I was the only one who could help them.
I climbed to my feet, getting out the gun, and moved forward through the woods, in a direction that seemed perpendicular to the line of the stone wall behind me. The woods were thick, sycamores and poplars giving way to evergreens with scratchy, low branches. I slipped through them as best I could, moving as quietly as I could manage. I didn't think I made more noise than the wind did, as it rattled the branches and the fallen leaves, and stirred more droplets of water to fall. In time, maybe three or four minutes, I came to the edge of the woods, and looked out on to Gentleman Johnny Marcone's estate.
It was magnificent, something out of a home-and-garden magazine. You could have put a small golf course in Marcone's backyard. A long ways off, at the front of the property, Marcone's huge white house stood serene and flawless, artistically illuminated by dozens of lights, with a veranda or patio larger than a dance floor plotted out at its rear. Behind it, three enormous square plots, side-by-side, contained lit and lovely gardens, terraced down a gently sloping hill toward me. At the hill's base was a pretty little vale, and there lay a small pond, which I realized after a moment was an enormous, concrete-lined swimming pool, lit from beneath the surface. The pool was irregularly shaped, and one corner of the pool stirred, near the surface. Steam lay thick over the water.
Standing stately sentinel toward the center of the vale was a ring of evergreens, thick and stocky trees that concealed whatever was at their center. Two rounded hillocks decorated the left side of the vale's landscape, one of them surmounted by what looked like a replica of a small, ruined shrine or temple, all cracked marble and fallen columns.
The whole place was well lit, both by silver moonlight and by lighting placed at strategic intervals. The lawn was immaculate, and trees dotted the grounds in the sort of careless perfection that only an army of expensive gardeners could have maintained.
And they say that crime doesn't pay.
I took a position behind a screen of trees and brush and looked around the grounds with careful, stealthy caution. I didn't have long to wait.
There was a rush of motion from beneath one of the trees on the far side of the estate, and a swift form, a dark-furred wolf, Billy, I thought, flew from beneath one tree and toward a patch of dark shadow on the grass, not twenty feet from me. I tensed, and started to rise from my hiding place in the brush, to call out to the wolf as he ran.
A bright red dot of light appeared against the wolf's fur. There was a hollow sound, something I could barely hear, like a politely covered cough. I saw the wolf jerk as a flash of blue feathered against its fur, and then the beast tumbled into a roll and fell to the ground. It struggled for a moment, back to its feet, and reached for the dart in its flanks with its jaws. Its balance wavered, and the wolf staggered to one side and fell. I could see its chest heaving, and one of its rear legs twitched spasmodically. I thought I saw the beast's eyes, Billy's eyes, focus on me for a moment, and then they glazed over and went vacant.
"Nice shot," called a deep, tense voice. In the ring of evergreens, there was motion, and then Denton appeared, walking out across the grass toward the fallen wolf. His dark, short hair was still immaculately rigid. I couldn't see the veins in his forehead, despite the bright light. It was a subtle change in him, one of several. His tie was loose. His jacket was unbuttoned. He moved with less steel in his backbone, more fire in his belly. There was an animal quality to him, a surety and savagery of purpose that had been uncertain before, and what it meant was a lot more significant than the changes that showed on his exterior.
His restraint was gone. Whatever last remnants of doubt or regret that had enabled him to maintain his own self-control, and some measure of control over the other Hexenwulfen, had vanished with the blood frenzy in the Full Moon Garage. It was in every line of him now, in each step and every flicker of his eyes.
The man had become a predator.
From the evergreens behind him appeared the rest of the Hexenwulfen: Benn, now dressed only in a white dress shirt and a grey business skirt, her legs dark and rippling with muscle in the moonlight; Harris, his ears still sticking out, his freckles dark spots against pale skin, his manner restless and hungry; and Wilson, still in his wrinkled suit, but with the shirt unbuttoned, his potbelly overlapping the belt of dark fur around his waist. He stroked and patted it with his fat fingers. His mouth was set in an odd, dangerous grin.
Denton moved across the grass to the fallen wolf, and nudged it with his toe. "Six," he said. "Did you count six?"
"Six," Benn confirmed, her voice throaty. "Can we have them now?" She reached Denton's side and pressed up against him, lifting one leg to rub against his, baring it to the top of her thigh as she did.
"Not yet," Denton said. He looked around him thoughtfully, and my gaze followed his. Scattered around a circle of perhaps fifty-yards diameter were several dark lumps I had taken to be indentations in the ground, shadows cast by the moon and the grounds lighting. I looked again and saw, with a surge of fearful understanding, that they weren't indentations. They were the wolves, my allies. The dark patch Billy had been running for gave a little whimper, and I thought I saw the moon glint off of Georgia's tawny coat. I looked around and counted the fallen.
Six. I couldn't tell them apart very well, couldn't tell which of them, if any, was Tera, but I counted six fallen wolves upon the ground. All of them, I thought, with a panicked rush of fear. All of them had been taken.
"Come on," Harris said, his voice tight, strained. "Fuck MacFinn, he isn't showing up. Let's take them out, all of them, and go find Dresden."
"We'll get to your belt soon enough, kid," Wilson snorted, his fingers stroking at the fur belt over his belly. "If you hadn't been so stupid as to lose it---"
Harris snarled, and Denton shook Benn from his side to get between the other two men. "Shut up. Now. We don't have time for this. Harris, we'll go after the wizard as soon as we can.
Wilson, keep your fat mouth shut, if you like your tongue where it is. And both of you back off." The men made low, growling noises, but they took steps away from one another.
I licked my lips. I was shaking. The gun felt heavy in my hand. There were only the four of them, I thought. They weren't more than thirty feet away. I could start shooting right now. If I got lucky, I could down them all. They were werewolves, but they weren't invincible.
I slipped the safety off of the pistol, and drew in a steadying breath. It was a damn fool thing to do, and I knew it. Life is not the movies. It wasn't likely that I would be able to shoot them all before they could draw and shoot back. But I didn't have much choice.
Denton turned toward the first hillock, with its artfully ruined temple, and waved. "All right," he called. "That's all of them."
A pair of shapes appeared in the lights that shone on the temple, and then came down the hill toward Denton and the Hexenwulfen. Marcone was dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans, and a hunter's vest, and he bore a gleaming rifle, an enormous scope mounted on it, in one hand. Hendricks, hulking beside him in muscle-bound silence, was dressed in what looked like black military fatigues, bearing the gun I'd seen earlier, a knife, and various other gear. Hendricks's eyes flickered over Denton and his associates warily.
I stared at Marcone in shock. It took me a moment to pick my jaw up off the ground and to piece together what was going on. Marcone didn't know. He didn't know that Denton and company were out to get him. They must have blamed the other killings on MacFinn and the Alphas.
So now Denton had Marcone and the Alphas there. Once MacFinn arrived, he would be able to kill everyone he wanted dead, everyone who knew what was going on, and be able to make up any story he damned well pleased. Everyone but me, that is. He did not, as yet, have his hands on me.
"These are all we saw on the monitors," Marcone corrected. "There was a malfunction in camera six, at the rear line of the property. Mr. Dresden and such malfunctions tend to go hand in hand."
Dammit.
"Are you sure the wizard isn't one of them?" Denton demanded. "One of these wolves?"
"I think not," Marcone answered. "But I suppose anything is possible."
Denton scowled. "Then he's not here."
"If he truly offered you a challenge, he's here," Marcone said, his tone completely confident. "I'm certain of it."
"And he just watched his werewolf friends get shot down?" Denton asked.
"Wolves run faster than men," Marcone pointed out. "Possibly, he hasn't caught up to them yet. He could even be watching us now."
"You're giving him too much credit," Denton said. But I saw his eyes shift instinctively toward the blackness of the growth of woods. If I stood up, he would be looking right at me. I froze, holding my breath.
"Am I?" Marcone smiled, and leaned down to pluck the feathered dart from Billy's furry flank. "The tranquilizers likely won't hold these beasts for very long. Decisions need to be made, gentlemen. And if you are to hold to your end of the bargain, you had best get to work producing."
I don't know if Marcone noticed Benn's sudden tension, the way she slid her hands over her stomach, but I did. "Kill these dogs now," she said in a low, heated voice. "It prevents complications later in the evening."
Marcone tsked. "Shortsighted. Let MacFinn tear them to pieces when he arrives, and any medical examiner won't bother to look for the tranquilizers. If one of you does it, it will create awkward questions once forensics takes a look at things. And I thought that was the point of you coming to me with this offer. Reducing questions."
Benn lifted her lips away from her teeth, and I saw the tips of her breasts stiffen beneath her white shirt. "I hate slimy scum like you, Marcone," she purred, sliding her hand from her thigh up over her hip and beneath the buttons of her shirt. Marcone's eyes narrowed on her, and as though connected to the crime lord by a telepathic leash, Hendricks made one simple motion, a shift of his forward arm, that chambered a round on the gun with a cold little click-clack.
Denton gave Marcone a sharp look and took hold of Benn's wrist with his hand. The woman tensed for a second, resisting him, but then she allowed Denton to draw her hand away from the belt that was surely beneath her shirt. Denton released her, and Benn lowered her hands, visibly relaxing. Marcone and Hendricks never so much as blinked, or broke a sweat. Fragile situations like this one were evidently second nature to them.
I let out the breath I'd been holding for a long time. Six to one and ready for a fight. If I attacked them now, I didn't have a prayer. If I tried to move, to fade back into the trees, they would be likely to notice me. Damn.
Denton glanced at the trees once more, and I held my breath again. "Don't worry, Marcone," he said. "We'll turn the wizard over to you, once we find him. No questions asked."
"That being the case," Marcone said, "I suggest you start looking, while I make preparations for Mr. MacFinn. Please remember that I want Dresden alive, if possible."
My throat constricted, and if I hadn't been holding my breath, I think I would have let out a squeak. What in the world could John Marcone want with me, after the incident in the parking garage? Nothing good, certainly. Nothing I wanted to think about. Damn, damn. This night was getting spookier all the time.
"Of course, Mr. Marcone," Denton said, his tone a little too polite. "Do you have any suggestions of where we should start looking?"
Marcone ignored the sarcasm, flicked a switch on the sight on his rifle, and pointed it negligently at the tree line. "Over there ought to do."
The red dot of the laser sight settled onto a leaf six inches to the left of my head, and the thready pulse of fear in my chest turned into an icy white streak of terror.
Damn, damn, damn.
If I ran, I would be seen and pursued, and likely torn apart. If I remained where I was hidden, I would be found and then torn apart, or shot, or tranquilized and given to Johnny Marcone. A poor set of choices, but I wasn't going to get any better ones by sitting on my ass. So I got my feet underneath me and started easing back into the woods, the confiscated semiautomatic still in my hand.
"Hold it," Denton said. "Did you hear that?"
"What?" Benn asked. I could hear the sudden, eager tension in her voice, and I struggled not to make any more noise as I hurried my pace back into the shelter of the deeper trees.
"Quiet," Denton snarled, and I froze in place. Wind and rain were the only sounds for a few moments, in the chilly autumn night. "Over there," Denton said after a moment. "I think I heard it over that way."
"Could be a raccoon. Squirrel. Or a cat," Wilson suggested.
"Don't be naive," came Marcone's voice, laced with scorn. "It's him."
There was the immediate sound of a slide being worked on a handgun, a round being chambered into place. "Move forward," said Denton. "That way. Fan out and we'll take him. Watch yourself. We don't know all of what he can do. Don't take any chances." His voice came closer as he spoke, and I nearly bolted. There was a chorus of assenting sounds, and another couple of weapons being readied. Footsteps came toward me through the grass.
After that, I did bolt, just stood up and ran bent over as low as I could. There was a shout from behind me and a bark of a gun being fired. I pointed the semiautomatic above me, afraid to fire back at them for fear of hitting Tera or one of the Alphas by mistake, and pulled the trigger twice. The gunshots must have surprised them, because Denton and the others scattered for cover behind the nearest trees.
I ran deeper into the woods, marshaling my thoughts. I had gained a little time, but time to do what? Running would only put me up against a stone wall. I doubted I'd be able to climb it, with a bum foot and a wounded shoulder. And I could only play the rabbit in the woods for so long before I was found.
Dammit, I thought. I'm no rabbit.
It was about time the hunters became the hunted around here. I moved ahead, silent and intent now, and scanned around me, searching for the sort of place I would need. I found it almost at once, an inward-curving hollow at the base of a large tree, and slid into it, nestling into the wood's embrace. I put my head down, hiding the paleness of my face and the gleam of the whites of my eyes. And Listened.
They came forward quietly, and without any lights flickering around at the edges of my vision. Maybe Denton and his cronies were getting used to the darkness. They were moving forward in a ragged line, twenty or thirty paces apart, and somehow keeping mostly parallel. They were all still on two feet, by the sound of the steps, thank my lucky stars. If they'd gone to wolf form they might have had me---of course, on two legs, they still had hands free to hold guns of their own. There are pros and cons to everything, I suppose.
I held my breath when footsteps approached me. They came within ten feet. Then five. I felt the brush stir when someone walked past no more than a foot away, making leaves brush up against me. They stopped, right there, and I heard a little, whuffling sound. Sniffing. I thought of the aroma of my brand-new leather jacket, and clenched my jaws down slightly, tension thrumming through me and making my legs shake.
About ten billion years went by. And then whoever it was began walking again, forward and past me. I would have let out a sigh of relief, if the most dangerous part of my plan wasn't still to come.
I got up from my hiding place, stepped forward and jammed the barrel of the semiautomatic against the back of the neck of the person before me. It was Denton. His back arched and he sucked in a stunned breath.
"Quiet," I whispered. "Don't move."
Denton hissed, but froze in place. "Dresden, I should kill you right now."
"Try it," I said, and thumbed back the hammer of the gun. "But after the loud noise, remember to keep going down the tunnel and toward the light."
Denton's shoulders shifted a fraction and I said, "Don't move your arms, at all. Reach for that belt and I'll kill you before you're halfway to furry, Denton. Drop the gun."
Denton moved his fingers enough to close the safety on his gun and let it fall. "Not bad, Dresden," he said. "But this isn't going to do you any good. Put the gun down, and we can talk about this."
"Smooth, polite, nice delivery," I said. "They teach you that at the FBI?"
"Don't make this any harder on yourself than it has to be, Dresden," Denton said, his voice toneless. "You can't get out of this."
"They always say that," I said and used my free hand, though it made my shoulder twitch, to take him by the collar and hold him steady. "My arm's feeling a little weak," I said. "Don't do anything to make me slip."
I felt his body tense at my words. "What are you doing, Dresden?"
"You and me, we're going to turn around," I said with a little shove of the gun against his neck to emphasize the point. "And then you're going to order all of your people out of the trees and back into the light. They'll each call to you from there, so that I know they're in front of me, and then we're going to go see them."
"What do you hope to accomplish here, Dresden?" Denton said.
I let go of his neck, pressed close, and reached around him to remove the wolf-pelt belt from around his middle. I saw his jaw-line shift as I took the belt away, but he remained still and quiet, his hands in the air. "I was just going to ask you the same thing, Denton," I said. "Now, call your buddies out of the trees."
Denton might have been a cool customer, maybe a treacherous sneak, maybe a murderer, but one thing he wasn't was a fool. He called out to the other three agents, and told them to get out of the trees.
"Dent?" Wilson called. "Are you okay?"
"Just do it," Denton answered. "It will all be clear in a minute."
They did it. I heard them move out of the woods and call to him from the cut, level grass of Marcone's estate. "Now," I said. "Walk. Don't trip, because I swear to God I would rather blow your head off over a misunderstanding than get suckered by a trick and killed."
"Maybe you should put the safety on," Denton said. "Because if you kill me, you'll never get out of here alive."
I hate it when the bad guys have a point, but I chose to err on the side of Denton getting blown apart, and left the safety where it was. I slung the wolf belt over my shoulder, took Denton's collar again, and said, "Walk." He did. We walked out of the deep darkness of the woods and into the light.
I kept at the edge of the darkness and put a tree's trunk to my back, keeping Denton between me and the bad guys. They were spread out, the three of them, in a half circle about thirty feet away, and they all had guns. It would have been one hell of a marksman who could get at me with Denton's broad, solid form in front of me, and the shadows veiling me, but I didn't take chances. I crouched down behind him some, leaving nothing but the corner of my head and one eye showing. At least that way, I thought, if they shot me, I'd never feel it.
"Uh. Hi guys," I said a bit lamely. "I've got your boss. Put the guns down, take your belts off, and walk away from them nice and slow, or I kill him." A part of me, probably the smarter part, groaned at my course of action and started cataloguing the number of federal and state criminal codes I was breaking into tiny pieces by taking a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation hostage and threatening to kill him and attempting to take hostage three more. I stopped counting broken laws at ten, and waited to see the Hexenwulfen's response.
"To hell with you," Benn snarled. The silver-haired young woman dropped her gun, and ripped off her shirt, revealing a torso that was impressive in a number of senses---and another wolf-hide belt. "I'll tear your fucking throat out myself."
"Deborah," Denton said, his voice strained. "Don't. Please."
"Go ahead, bitch," growled Harris. His big ears created little half-moon shadows of blackness on the sides of his head. "Denton buys it and we all get promoted. Hell, the wizard will probably shoot you, while he's at it." Benn whirled toward Harris, lifting her hands as though she would strangle him, fingers clenching like talons.
"Shut up," I said. "Both of you. Put your guns down. Now."
Harris sneered at me. "You won't, Dresden. You don't have the guts."
"Roger," Denton said very quietly. "You're an idiot. The man's in a corner. Now. Put down your gun."
I blinked, surprised at the unexpected support. It made me instantly suspicious. That Marcone was out of sight did not mean that he was out of mind, either. Where was he? Crouched somewhere, aiming that rifle at me? I kept an eye out for bright red dots.
"That's right," I appended to Denton's statement. "You are an idiot. Drop the gun. You too, Wilson," I added, glancing at the overweight agent. "And you and Benn, take the belts off, too. Leave them on the ground."
"Do it," Denton confirmed, and I got a little more nervous. The man was relaxed now, not resisting me. His voice was solid, confident, unimpressed. That was bad. Denton's pack obeyed him, if reluctantly. Benn dropped the belt to the ground in the same way Scrooge might have let fall a string of diamonds, a visible ache in the motion. Wilson grunted as his belt came unfastened, and his belly flopped out a little as the catch released. He left it on the ground by his gun. Harris glared at me, but he lowered his gun, too.
"Now, step back. All of you."
"Yes," Denton said. "Harris, Wilson. Step back to the trees and bring out what we left there."
"Hey," I said. "What the hell are you talking about? Don't move, any of you." Harris and Wilson smirked at me, and began walking toward the trees. "Get your asses back here."
"Shoot at them, Mr. Dresden," Denton said, "and you will have to take your gun off me. I think I can reach it, if you do that, and turn this into a fight. You are resourceful, and intelligent, but you are also wounded. I don't think you could overcome me in hand to hand."
I glanced between the two men and Denton. "Dammit," I said. "What are you up to, Denton? You try anything funny, anything at all, and you're not going to live to regret it."
"I'm with the FBI. I don't do anything that could be construed as funny, Mr. Dresden."
I swore quietly, and could all but feel Denton's mouth stretch into a smile. "Why?" I asked him. "Why did you get involved with these belts? Why are you doing this?"
Denton began to shrug, but evidently thought better of it. "Too many years of seeing men like Marcone laugh at the law. Of seeing people hurt by him, death, misery brought on by him and people like him. I was tired of just watching. I decided to stop him. And men like him."
"By killing them," I said.
"I was given the power. I used it."
"What gives you the right to mandate their deaths?"
"What gives them the right," Denton asked, "to kill? Should I stand by and let them slaughter, Dresden, if I can stop it? I have the power, and the responsibility to use it."
I felt a little shiver run through me, as the words struck close to home. "And the other people? The innocents who have died?"
Denton hesitated. His reply was quiet. "It was unfortunate. An accident. It was never my intention."
"The belts do more than make you fuzzy, Denton. They change the way you think. The way you act."
"I can control my people," Denton began.
"Like you did last month?" I asked.
He swallowed, and said nothing.
"And you knew, didn't you? You knew that I'd find out. That's why you sent me to the Full Moon Garage."
The vein on his forehead pulsed. "After the deaths, I was warned about a governing body. A sort of magic police. The White Council. That you worked for them."
I almost laughed. "Yeah, well someone told you part of the story, anyway, Denton. That's why you messed up MacFinn's circle, isn't it? You needed a patsy and you turned MacFinn loose knowing that the Council would suspect him. The Streetwolves for the cops, and MacFinn for the Council."
Denton snarled. "Necessary sacrifices. There was work to be done, Dresden."
"Oh yeah? As one of the aforementioned sacrifices, I don't find myself agreeing with you," I said. "To hell with the law, right? That's what you're saying---that you're above the law. Like Marcone."
Denton grew tense again and turned his head a bit toward me. Like he might have been listening.
I pressed him, hard, desperate to reach him. If I could, I might get out of this situation after all. "These belts, man, the power they've given you. It's bad. You can't handle it. It's gotten into your head and you aren't thinking straight. Give them up. You can still walk away from all of this, do the right thing. Come on, Denton. Don't throw away everything you fought for all those years. There's a better way than this."
Denton was silent for a long time. Harris and Wilson disappeared into the thick ring of pine trees. Benn watched us, her eyes bright, her body muscled and firm in the moonlight, her breasts rather pretty and distracting as she breathed. She looked from the pair of us to the fur belt on the ground, alternately, and her breaths became ragged. "Look at her," I said. "Those belts are like a drug. Is this the kind of person she was? Is this the kind of person you want to be? Wilson, Harris, were they always like they are now? You're turning into monsters, man. You've got to get out of this. Before you're all the way gone."
Denton closed his eyes. Then shook his head once. "You're a decent man, Mr. Dresden. But you've got no idea of how the world works. I'm sorry you've gotten in the way." He opened his eyes again. "Necessary sacrifices."
"Dammit," I said. "Don't you see that this won't do you any good? Even if you do get away with wiping out everyone here tonight, Murphy is going to piece together what happened."
Denton glanced at me and said, like a mantra, "Necessary sacrifices."
I swallowed, suddenly more cold than I had been. It was eerie, the way Denton said the words---so matter-of-fact, calm, rational. There was no doubt in him, when he should have been afraid. Only fools and madmen know that kind of certainty. And I had already noted that Denton was no fool.
Harris and Wilson emerged from the trees, carrying something between them. Someone, hooded, arms and legs bound.
Harris had a knife in one hand, and it was against the base of the hood, which looked to be a pillowcase. His big ears and freckles were at sharp odds with the arrogant competence with which he held the knife.
"Damn you," I said quietly. Denton said nothing. Benn's eyes glittered in the moonlight, bright and vacant of anything but lust and hunger.
The two agents brought the prisoner over, and Wilson dropped the legs. Harris kept the knife steady, while the overweight man went to remove the hood, but I had already seen the cast on the prisoner's arm.
Murphy's face was pale, her golden hair bleached to silver by the moonlight, and falling down around her eyes. Her mouth was covered in cloth or duct tape, one of the two, and there was blood clotted at the base of one nostril, a bruise purpling over one eye. She blinked for a moment, and then kicked at Wilson. With her legs bound, it was ineffective, and when Harris snarled and pressed the knife against her throat, she stopped struggling. Her blue eyes glared in fury at Harris and then Wilson. And then they settled on me and widened.
"Kill me, Mr. Dresden," Denton said quietly, "and Harris will cut the Lieutenant's throat. Benn will go for her gun, as will Wilson. Likely, they will kill you. And then they will kill these wolves you brought with you, your allies. But even if you get all of us first, Murphy will be dead, and you will be holding the weapon that killed four agents of the FBI."
"You bastard," I said. "You cold-blooded bastard."
"Necessary sacrifices, Mr. Dresden," Denton said, but it wasn't a calm phrase anymore. It was eager, somehow, warmth curving around and through the words like a lover's hands. "Drop your gun."
"No," I said. "I won't." He wouldn't kill another cop. Would he?
"Then Murphy dies," Denton said. "Harris."
The redhead's shoulders bunched, and Murphy tried to scream, through the gag. I cried out and swung the barrel of the gun toward Harris.
Denton's elbow came back into my gut and then his fist snapped up into my nose, casting a field of stars across my vision. The gun went off, pointed somewhere, but then Denton slapped it from my hand and drove another blow into my throat that sent me sprawling to the ground, unable to breathe or to move.
Denton stooped to recover the gun and said, "You should have shot me while you had the chance, Mr. Dresden, instead of moralizing." He pointed it at me, and I watched his lips curve into a slow, hungry smile. "Beautiful moon tonight," he said. "Sort of reminds me of a story. How did it go . . . ?"
I tried to tell him where he could stick the moon and his story, but it came out a strangled gasp. I still couldn't move. It hurt too much.
Denton thumbed back the trigger, sighted down the barrel at my left eye, and said, "Ah, yes. 'And I'll huff. And I'll puff. And I'll blow your house down.' Goodbye, wizard."
Death by nursery tale. Hell's bells.
Chapter Thrity-one
The barrel of Denton's gun looked bigger and deeper than the national debt as it swung to bear on my face. His grey eyes glittered down the sights at me, and I saw the decision to pull the trigger flash across them. Before he could, I met his eyes hard, shoved myself out toward him with a sudden screaming pain in my temples, and locked him into a soulgaze.
There was a rushing sensation, as there usually was, a feeling of movement forward and then down, like being sucked into a whirlpool. I rode the sensation into Denton's head, a brief doubt crossing my mind. Maybe getting shot would have been better than wading heart deep into Denton's soul.
I can't describe what I found there very well. Try to imagine a place, a beautifully ordered structure, like the Parthenon or Monticello. Imagine that everything is balanced, everything is in proportion, everything is smooth and secure. Stick in blue skies overhead, green grass all around, puffy white clouds, flowers, and children running and playing.
Now, add a couple hundred years of wear and tear to it. Dull the edges. Round the corners a little. Imagine water stains, and worn spots where the wind has gotten to it. Turn the skies dirty brown with smog. Kill the grass, and replace it with tall, ugly ragweed. Ditch the flowers, and leave in their places only dried up, skeletal rose vines. Age the male children into adult winos, faces haggard with despair and self-loathing and flushed with drink, and the girls into tired, jaded strumpets, faces hard, eyes cold and calculating. Give the place of beauty an aura of rage and feral abandon, where the people who walk about watch the shadows like hungry cats, waiting to pounce.
And then, after all of that, after all the cares and trials and difficulties of the world a cop inhabits have been fairly represented, coat everything in a thick, sticky black sludge that smells like swamps and things that attract dun-colored flies. Paint it on, make it a coating that emphasizes the filth, the decay, the despair all around, that brings out that painful decline to the utmost degree. The sludge makes things stronger, and more bitter, more rotten, more putrid all at the same time.
That was Denton, inside. A good man, jaded by years and poisoned by the power that had taken control of him, until that good man had been buried and only the filth and decay remained. Until the existence of the man who had once been was only a bitter reminder that made the man who was now seem all the more downfallen by comparison.
I understood Denton's pain and his rage, and I understood how the dark power he'd taken had pushed him over the edge. There was an image of him kneeling at someone's feet as a wolf-fur belt was passed into his hands, and then it was gone. Knowing the man he had once been made clear to me the beast he had become, all violence and hunger and craving.
I felt tears on my cheeks, and violent shudders shaking down my spine. I could pity Denton, and the others with him, but now, more than ever, they scared the crap out of me. I had bought myself a few seconds, at least, with the soulgaze---but would it be enough to keep Denton from blowing my head off?
Denton stared at me as the soulgaze broke and we were released. He wasn't reacting well to whatever it was he had seen inside of me. His face had gone white, and his hand was trembling, the barrel of the gun wavering every which way. He lifted his other hand to mop beads of cold sweat away from his face.
"No," Denton said, white showing all around the grey irises of his eyes. "No, wizard." He raised his gun. "I don't believe in hell. I won't let you." He screamed then, at the top of his lungs. "I won't let you!" I tensed up, preparing for a futile attempt to throw myself out of the way of a speeding bullet.
"Yes," said a calm voice. "You will." A bright red dot appeared right on the middle of Denton's chest, cheerful as a Christmas light. I twisted my head around to see Marcone walking over the turf, his weapon pointed steadily at Denton, Hendricks looming to one side. Denton's lackeys were watching Marcone with bright, steady eyes. Murphy lay on the grass, her feet toward me, her head away. I couldn't see what condition she was in, and both fear and frustration leapt up into me, for her sake.
"Marcone," Denton said. His back straightened and his eyes narrowed. "You treacherous scum."
Marcone clucked with his teeth. "Our bargain was that you would bring him to me alive. Not execute him. Additionally, you may want to rethink the wisdom of using your own weapons. Let MacFinn kill him when he arrives."
"If he arrives," Denton snarled.
"My spotters," Marcone said, "tell me that the animals I sent out with them went mad with fear about two minutes ago, three miles west of here. I think it will not take him much longer to show up, Mr. Denton." His smile widened, but his money-colored eyes grew harder. "Now. Shall we cease antagonizing one another and finish our business?" Marcone lowered the rifle and flicked the laser sight off.
Denton looked from me to Marcone, and I saw the blackness rise up in his eyes, gather behind them, and get ready to come rolling out. "Marcone," I said. "Just shoot him now."
"I think we've both had enough of your attempts to divide and conquer, Mr. Dresden," Marcone said, his voice bored. "You're beaten. Acknowledge it with grace."
I watched a slow smile spread over Denton's face as he kept the gun pointed at my head. My voice rose by a couple notes of alarm. "I mean it, John. I really do, I shit you not. This entire thing is about them killing you."
"What a vulgar reassurance," Marcone said. "Agent Denton, we have a few details to attend to. Lower your gun and let us be about them."
"I don't think so," Denton said. And he pointed the gun at Hendricks and started pulling the trigger. The gun roared so many times, so quickly, that I couldn't tell how often Denton fired.
Hendricks snapped back onto his heels and was driven flat onto his back by the force of the bullets slamming into him. He didn't have time to twitch, much less scream, and he dropped like a felled tree. I felt it in the earth when his massive body hit the ground.
Marcone started to raise his gun, but Wilson and Harris hurtled at his back and dragged him to the ground, pounding on him with their fists. Marcone writhed like an eel and slipped away from them, but Denton stepped into his path and thrust the gun into Marcone's face.
"That's enough," he said, his voice gone hoarse. "Get them all and take them to the pit. MacFinn will be here any moment."
I took the moment to roll to my hands and knees and attempt to slip away unnoticed, but was brought up short by a pair of bare, muscular, feminine legs. My gaze followed the legs up, past the skirt, to a magnificently bare-breasted torso encircled by a wolf-pelt belt, and then to a face dominated by eyes made eerie by the lack of anything recognizably sentient in them. Benn smiled at me, set her foot against my wounded shoulder, and with a sadistic twist of her ankle and a shove of her muscled leg, sent searing pain screaming through my body, making me crumple to the ground in agony.
I remember them dragging me across the grounds. We passed into the ring of evergreens, and I remember thinking that any sounds originating in that circle of pines would be heavily muffled by their branches and needles, further muffled by the trees surrounding the property, as well as the high stone wall. Gunshots, for example, might not even be heard at all, off the property. It was the clearest thought I had while my shoulder exploded.
The next thing I remember was being shoved roughly forward. I fell, straight and hard in the dispassionate grip of gravity, and after long enough for me to start to suck in a breath, I hit water. It was only about six or eight inches deep, and beneath it was swirling, soft mud. I had a brief pang for my leather duster and then I sank down into the water, my hands slipping into the mud and getting stuck there. Cold water burbled around my face, and felt nice, for a moment, on my aching shoulder.
Someone grabbed me by the collar and hauled me out of the water, to sit on my butt. Hands steadied me, and I sat with my shoulder aching and my head whirling until I could squint up at who was there.
Murphy dropped to one knee in the water beside me and smoothed back my damp hair. "Dresden," she said. "You okay?"
I took a look around me. I was at the bottom of an enormous pit, a square maybe twenty feet deep and twice that across. Muddy water, maybe from the rain, covered the bottom of the pit, and the moon tinted its surface silvery brown. Directly above the pit's center, maybe forty feet above me, was a square made of wooden planks, maybe five by five. It was a hunter's platform, suspended by ropes leading from the circle of evergreens that surrounded the pit. I could see the tops of the trees against the moon and the clouds.
"Dresden," Murphy said again. "Are you all right?"
"I'm alive," I said. I blinked at her for a second and then said, "I thought they killed you."
Her blue eyes sparkled briefly. Her hair was a mess, and her jeans and flannel shirt were rumpled and soaked with muddy water. She was shivering from the cold. "I thought they had, too. But they stopped as soon as Denton took you out, and tossed me down here. I can't figure why they didn't do the deed themselves, instead of leaving it to MacFinn."
I grimaced. "Trying to cover their tracks from the White Council," I said. "Denton wants MacFinn to take the fall for all the deaths. I think he's lost it."
"I always wind up in the nicest places when I hang with you, Dresden."
"You were tied up," I said. "How'd you get loose?"
"She had help," someone said in a slurred, heavy voice. "For all the good it will do her." I turned my head to see a naked and dirty Tera West, sitting with her back against another wall of mud. There were five soggy, motionless forms lying around her, the Alphas in their wolf-shapes. Tera held their heads upon her lap, up out of the water. She looked bedraggled and anguished, touching each of them in turn, very gently. Her amber eyes were dull.
"I don't get it," I said. "Why did they stick us down here? Marcone just keeps a pit trap dug in his yard?"
"He was planning on trapping MacFinn down here until morning," Tera said. "When he would be vulnerable."
"Whoa, whoa," Murphy said, face pensive. "You're saying Denton was responsible for the deaths? All of them?"
"One way or another. Yeah." I gave Murphy the rundown on Denton. The way he'd gotten the belts for him and his people, lost control of the power they'd given him, and set up the Streetwolves and then MacFinn to take the blame.
Murphy broke out into acidic swearing. "That was the angle I was missing. Dammit. No wonder Denton was so hot to keep you off of the case and out of the way, and why he wanted to find you so bad after the scene at MacFinn's place. That's how he kept showing up everywhere so fast, too---he already knew that someone was dead."
There were shouts from above, and we looked up to see Marcone swing out from the edge of the pit. He hung limply from a rope. His eyes were closed. I watched as he was drawn up in a series of short jerks until his bowed head bumped the bottom of the hunter's platform above and then was left there.
"What the hell?" Murphy said, her voice soft.
"Bait," I replied. I closed my eyes for a moment. "Denton's stringing him up as bait for MacFinn. The loup-garou comes in, jumps up to get Marcone, then Denton cuts the rope and drops MacFinn down in here."
"With us," Murphy said quietly. I felt her shivers grow a little more severe. "They're going to drop that thing into this pit with us. Oh, God, Harry."
"Denton or one of his people must have gotten some silver bullets made," I said. "They'll just let MacFinn slaughter us, then shoot him from up there." I squinted up at the edge of the pit. "Pretty good plan."
"What can we do?" Murphy asked. She hugged herself, hard.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
"Nothing," Tera said quietly. Murphy and I turned to look at her. One of the Alphas was stirring, Billy maybe, and wobbled and fell when he tried to sit up. But at least he could hold his head up out of the water. "Nothing," she repeated. "We are beaten."
I closed my eyes and tried to order my thoughts, to push the pain and fatigue back down and put together some sort of plan. Murphy settled beside me, a shivering spot against my side. The cast on her arm pressed against my ribs. I opened my coat, more a polite gesture than anything else, given that it, too, was soaked, and slipped the edge of it around her shoulders with my arm. Her back stiffened and she flashed me a look of indignation, but after a second just pressed as far under the coat as she could.
After a moment, she spoke. Her voice came out quiet, uncertain---a far cry from her normal, brisk tones. "I've done some thinking, Dresden. I've decided that there's a reasonable chance you aren't involved with the killings."
I smiled a little. "That's real big of you, Murph. Doesn't what Denton did to you sort of prove I'm not involved?"
She half smiled and shook her head. "No, Harry. It just means that he wants to kill you and me both. It doesn't mean that I trust everything you're saying."
"He wants me dead, Murph. That should mean something in my favor, shouldn't it?"
"Not really," she said, and squinted up at the top of the pit. "From what I can tell, Denton wants pretty much everybody dead. And you could still be lying to me."
"I'm not, Murph," I said, my voice soft. "Cross my heart."
"I can't just take your word on it, Harry," she whispered. "There are too many people dead. My men. My people. Civilians, the ones I'm supposed to protect. The only way to be sure is to take you all, everyone involved, and sort things out with you behind bars."
"No," I said. "There's more to it than what you can prove, Murph, more than what's going to stand up in court. Come on. You and me, we've known each other for years. You should be able to trust me by now, right?"
"I should be able to," Murphy agreed. "But after what I've seen, all the blood and death . . ." She shook her head. "No, Harry. I can't trust anyone anymore." She half smiled and said, "I still like you, Dresden. But I can't trust you."
I tried to match her smile, but my feelings were in too much turmoil. Pain, mostly. Physical pain, and a deeper heart hurt, both for Murphy's sake and for the sake of our friendship. She was so alone. I wanted to go to the rescue, somehow, to make her hurting go away.
She'd have spit in my face if I'd tried. Murphy wasn't the sort of person who wanted to be rescued, from anything. That she accepted as much comfort as my wet coat offered her came as a surprise to me.
I looked around the pit again intently. The other Alphas were recovering, enough to sit up, but apparently not enough to move. Tera just sat with her back against the wall, defeated and exhausted. Marcone swung from the platform high above me, not moving, though I thought I might have heard a moan from him at one point. I felt a pang of sympathy for him. However much of a heartless bastard he might be, no one deserved to dangle like bait from a hook.
The Alphas, Tera, Marcone, Murphy. They were all where they were because of me. It was my fault we were there, my doing that we were all about to die. Carmichael, the poor jerk, was dead, also because of me. So were other good cops. So was Hendricks.
I had to do something about it.
"I need to get out of here," I told Murphy. "Get me out of here, and maybe I can do something."
Murphy turned her head toward me. "You mean . . . ?" She waved the fingers of her unbroken arm in a vaguely mystic gesture.
I nodded. I still had my ace in the hole. "Something like that."
"Right. So how do we get you out of here?"
"You going to trust me, Murph?"
Her jaw clenched. "It doesn't look as though I have much choice, does it?"
I smiled back at her, and rose to my feet, sloshing around in the water. "Maybe we could dig into the walls a bit. Make climbing holes."
"You'll probably get shot once you get to the top," Murphy said.
"No," I said, "I don't think they'll want to hang around the pit with MacFinn coming. They're bloodthirsty, but not stupid."
"So," Murphy said. "All we need to do is get you up to the top of the pit, and then you're going to go one-on-four with a bunch of armed FBI agents-cum-werewolves and beat them in time to go up against the loup-garou that we couldn't stop before with all of your magical gizmos and a building full of police officers."
"Essentially," I answered.
Murphy looked up at me and then shrugged and let out a short, defiant laugh. She stood up too, flicked her hair back from her eyes with a toss of her head, and said, "I guess it could be worse."
There was a soft sound from above and behind me. Murphy froze, staring upward, her eyes becoming almost impossibly wide.
I turned my head very slowly.
The loup-garou crouched up at the lip of the pit, huge and gnarled and muscled and deadly. Its foaming jaws were open, showing the rows of killing teeth. Its eyes gleamed with scarlet flames in the moonlight, and they were fastened on the dangling figure of Gentleman Johnny Marcone. I quivered, and the motion made a slight sound against the water. The beast turned its head down, and when it saw me its eyes narrowed to glowing slits, and it let out a harsh, low growl. Its claws dug into the earth at the edges of the pit, tearing through it like sand.
It remembered me.
My heart started ripping a staccato rhythm in my chest. That same raw, sharp, primitive fear I'd felt before, the fear of simply being jumped on and eaten, returned in full force and for a moment swept away all thoughts and plans.
"You had to say that," I said to Murphy, my voice wan and pale. "Happy? It's worse."
Chapter Thirty-two
"Okay," I said, fear making my voice weak. "This is bad.
This is very, very bad."
"Wish I had my pistol," Murphy said, her tone resolute. "I wish we'd had some more time to talk things out, Harry."
I glanced over at Tera. One of the Alphas, the mouse-haired girl in her wolf-shape, was leaning against her and whimpering. "Close your eyes," Tera said softly and covered the little wolf's eyes with her hand. Her amber eyes met mine, without hope, without any sparkle of life.
They were going to die because of me. Dammit all, it wasn't fair. I hadn't done anything grossly stupid. It wasn't fair to have come so far, sacrificed so much, and to buy it down here in the mud, like some kind of burrowing bug. I searched the pit again desperately, but it was a fiendishly simple and complete trap. There were no options down here.
My eyes went up. Straight up.
"Marcone!" I shouted. "John Marcone! Can you hear me?"
The limp figure suspended above me stirred weakly. "What do you want, Mr. Dresden?"
"Can you move?" I asked. The loup-garou growled, low, and started pacing a circuit of the pit, glowing eyes flashing between us down at the bottom and Marcone, trying to decide who to rip apart first.
"An arm," Marcone confirmed a few seconds later.
"Do you still keep that knife on you? The one I saw at the garage?"
"Denton and his associates searched me and found it, I am afraid," came Marcone's voice.
"Dammit all. You're a miserable, stupid bastard for making a deal with Denton, Marcone. Now do you believe he wanted to kill you all along?"
The figure above me wiggled and writhed, swinging from the ropes that held him trussed up there. "Yes, do tell me that you told me so with your last breath, Mr. Dresden. I was already rather acutely aware of that," Marcone said, his voice dry. "But perhaps I'll yet have a chance to make amends."
"What are you doing?" I asked. I kept my eyes on the loup-garou, as it circled the pit, and kept myself opposite the creature, where I could see it.
"Reaching for the knife they didn't find," Marcone replied. He grunted, and then I saw a flicker of light on something shiny up above me.
"Forget it," Murphy said quietly, stepping close to my side as she watched Marcone. "He's just going to cut himself loose and leave us to rot here."
"We won't get the chance to rot," I pointed out. But I thought she was right.
Marcone started to spin slowly on his rope, wriggling around until his whole body was rotating on the end of it. He began to speak, his voice calm. "Ironic, isn't it? I'd planned to wait for the creature on the platform and tempt it into the pit. There are some nets ready to drop on it, after that. I would have held it until morning."
"You do know that it's right beneath you now, don't you, John?" I asked.
"Mr. Dresden," Marcone said crossly. "I've asked you not to call me that."
"Whatever," I said, but I had to admire the raw courage of the man to banter while dangling up there like a ripe peach.
"I use this place to conduct noisy business," Marcone said. "The trees muffle the sound, you see. You can barely hear even shotgun blasts on the other side of the wall." He continued to spin on the rope, slow and lazy, a shadow against the moon and the stars.
"Well. That's nice," I said, "and despicable." The loup-garou looked down at me and snarled, and I took an involuntary step back from it. The mud wall of the pit stopped me.
"Oh, quite," Marcone agreed. "But necessary."
"Is there anything you're not shameless about, Marcone?" I asked.
"Of course. But you don't think I'm going to tell you, do you? Now, be quiet if you please. I don't need the distraction." And then I saw Marcone's arm curl in and straighten outward. There was a flutter of metallic motion in the air, and a snapping sound from the base of on eof the ropes that held the platform suspended, at its far end where it was secured to one of the pine trees.
The rope abruptly sagged, and the platform---and Marcone with it---swayed drunkenly. Marcone grunted, and bounced against his ropes a few times, making the whole affair of ropes lurch about---and then the damaged line snapped and came entirely free. It whipped out toward Marcone, lost momentum, and then fell through the evening air.
Straight down into the pit in front of me. One end was still attached to the platform above, now off center from the pit and listing to one side.
I blinked at it for a moment, and Murphy said, "Holy shit. He did it."
"I don't recommend waiting about, Mr. Dresden," Marcone said. I saw him twist his head to look at the loup-garou, and tense up as the beast trotted around the edge of the pit to the side closest to him. If it had noticed the rope that had fallen down from above, it gave no sign.
Hope lurched in my chest like sudden thunder. I grabbed on to the rope with both hands and started shinnying up it like a monkey, pushing with my legs and using mostly my good arm to hang on with while I lifted my legs up higher for another grip.
I got up to even with the lip of the pit and started rocking the rope back and forth, getting a swinging momentum going so that I could leap off the rope and to the ground outside the pit. The ropes above creaked dangerously as I did, and Marcone swayed back and forth, still spinning about gently.
"Dresden," he shouted. "Look out!"
I had been intent on my escape, and given the loup-garou no thought. I turned my head around to see it flying through the air toward me. I could see its gleaming eyes and felt sure that I could have counted its teeth if I had waited around for it. I didn't. I let out a yelp and let go of the rope, dropping several feet straight down before clamping on to it again. The loup-garou sailed past me overhead like some huge, obscenely graceful bat, and landed on the far side of the pit with barely a sound.
My fingers felt weak, I was so shocked and terrified, but I started hauling my way up again, swinging desperately as I went. The loup-garou turned and focused its eyes on me again, but Marcone let out a sharp whistle, and the thing turned toward him, pricking its misshapen ears forward in a weirdly doggy mannerism, before it snarled and leapt upward. I bounced on the rope, and Marcone bobbed down and then back up again. The loup-garou missed him by bare inches, I think, but I didn't hang around to watch. I let out a yell and threw myself at the edge of the pit as the rope reached the apex of its swing.
I missed, my belly hitting the lip of the pit, but I started clawing at the earth and kept myself from falling. I strained and kicked, thrashing and whimpering in desperation, and managed to gain a few inches, slowly worming my way up onto the ground, until I got my feet underneath me. The loup-garou, on the far side of the pit, turned toward me and let out a sound that can best be described as a furious roar. Shouts erupted from elsewhere in the estate---Denton and his lackeys must have been watching the pit, I thought, but they were the second scariest bad guys on the field at the moment. I had bigger things on my mind.
Said thing threw itself at me, and I had a few seconds to start running, trying to arrange things so that the pit would be between me and it when it landed. I was only partly successful. The loup-garou tore up the earth where I had been standing when it came down, and turned toward me again, facing me across a scant ten feet of space, from one side of the square pit to the side adjacent to it.
The rope started bobbing again, and then with a motion full of grace and power, Tera swung up out of the pit and landed in a crouch on the ground beside me.
"Go, wizard," she snarled. "Denton and the others will kill us all if they are not stopped. I will handle MacFinn."
"No way," I said. "You can't possibly take him on."
"I know him," she responded. And then there was, in her place, the huge she-wolf, dark fur peppered with grey. She snarled and bounded at the loup-garou and it reared up like a cat about to take a mouse, plunging toward her with abrupt speed.
And that's when I saw the difference between Tera and the Alphas, Tera and Denton's Hexenwulfen, even Tera and the loup-garou. Where they were fast, Tera was fast and graceful. Where they were quick, Tera was quick and elegant. She made them look like amateurs. She was something more primal, more in tune with the wild than they would ever be.
As the loup-garou threw itself at her, she slipped to one side like wind, threw her shoulder beneath the beast's planted forepaw, and shouldered it off-balance, making it stumble. It recovered and spun toward her, but she was already gone, farther away from the pit, growling defiance at the supernatural creature. It followed, impervious and snarling with rage.
I heard a gunshot, and a bullet smacked into one of the trees behind me. Benn's voice repeated a low, frantic chant, and then I heard her words turn into an animal's snarls. Denton and the others were coming. It was time to play the last option I had, the one I hadn't wanted to be forced to use. I wasn't sure what would happen if I did, but there wasn't much choice.
I slipped my hand beneath my shirt and touched the wolf belt I'd taken from Agent Harris in the alley behind the Full Moon Garage.
It was vibrating beneath my fingers, warm to the touch, alive in its own fashion, and full of the power and strength that had been channeled into it. I closed my eyes and let that dark, wild power spill into me, mingle with all the fear and pain and weariness inside of me. It was easy. It was easier than any magic I'd ever done, leaping into me with a sort of hungry eagerness, seeping into me, making pain and fatigue and fear vanish and replacing it with nothing but strength, ferocity.
Power.
"Lupus," I whispered. "Lupus, lupara, luperoso."
It took no more of a chant than that for the change to take me. It wasn't something that I noticed, really. But when I opened my eyes again, things were simply as they should be, right in a way so fundamentally profound that I wondered why I had never noticed its lack before.
My vision was sharp and clear enough to count the hairs on the head of the she-wolf orienting on me a few feet away. I could hear the pounding of her heart, the restless motion of the wind, the heavy breaths of the other agents in the trees, moving toward me like great, clumsy cows. If the sun had suddenly risen into the sky, I could not have seen any more clearly than I did, all in glorious shades of blue and green and maroon and purple, as though God had dipped his brush into a late summer twilight and replaced all the darkness with those colors.
I dropped open my mouth in a silent laugh and felt my tongue glide over the gleaming, sharp tips of my fangs. What a beautiful night. I could smell blood on the air, hear the eagerness of my enemies to kill, and I felt that same hunger rising from my own heart and surging through me. It was perfect.
Benn came through the trees first, fast and powerful, but clumsy and impatient and stupid. I could smell her excitement, pitched to an almost sexual level. She was expecting an easy kill, a sudden rush over one of the slow, graceless two-legs and then the hot, spurting blood, the frenzied writhing. I did not oblige her. As she came through the trees, I leapt forward and was at her throat before she even realized I was there. A quick rip, hot blood, and she yelped in agony and fear, throwing herself to one side.
Stupid bitch. I'd missed the heart's blood, but she was badly hurt. Two snaps severed her hamstrings as she tried to flee and left her writhing on the ground, helpless and terrified. I felt my body thrill with abrupt and vicious excitement. The bitch was mine now. She would live or die as I wished.
The surge of power and elation that flew through me at that realization could have carried me off the earth and to the silver glory of the moon and stars themselves. To the victor go the spoils. Her blood, her life, was mine to take and that was exactly how it should be. I stalked forward to finish her, as was only proper.
There was a puff of breath, and then Wilson, in his wolf-form, came hurtling from the woods. I slipped aside easily as he rushed by. The wounded Benn snarled and snapped blindly at him. Wilson turned on her, his fury out of control, and latched his jaws onto her throat. Blood was a black, rich, heady smell in the moonlight, and I swayed, drunk on the aroma of it. My mouth watered, jaws growing damp with saliva, as I smelled the bitch's blood, and I wanted to fling myself at her, tear her apart myself as she went screaming to her death.
"Those wolves!" screamed Harris. "They got out! They got Benn!" He came plunging out of the trees, gun at the ready, his nearly useless eyes wide and staring and panicked. He started shooting at Wilson, who released the dead Benn's throat. The first bullet smashed his left front paw to pulp. The second and third slugs hammered into his chest, and Wilson-wolf staggered to one side, yelping in sudden agony. He twisted and strained as he went down, paws scrabbling at his own stomach, until there was abruptly a balding, overweight man lying on the earth beside the dead wolf, his jacket open, his shirt unbuttoned to show the unfastened wolf belt. There was blood all over Wilson, bubbling out of his mouth.
"Holy . . ." Harris breathed, pacing closer, his gun held up, until he could see what he had done. "George? Oh, God. Oh, God, I thought you were one of them. What the hell . . ."
Agent Wilson didn't answer the redheaded kid. He simply drew his gun from his jacket and started shooting.
In their human forms, they couldn't see each other very well in the dark, I thought. They both started shooting at the muzzle flashes. More blood flooded the air, along with the sharp, acrid smell of burning gunpowder. Both men went down, bleeding out onto the earth, and I felt my jaws open in another smile, on another sense of warm satisfaction. Idiots. Who did they think they were dealing with here? They'd been making my life miserable, and the lives of others, and now they had gotten their just deserts. It would have been better had I torn out their throats myself, admittedly.
But then, I thought, there was still Denton to deal with.
That thought cheering me, I turned and made my way into the woods, hunting the last of them. My heart was pounding hard, and relaxed and steady with excitement as I melded in with the night and searched for prey.
Denton and I met as I emerged from the circle of trees. He stood in the moonlight, in the right shape, the only real shape, the moon streaking his brown coat shades paler and making his eyes glow. He was powerfully built, as in his two-leg shape, and looked quick and strong. His eyes burned with the lust of the moon, the night, with blood need and raging, wild strength, just as mine did. We faced one another and there was a mad sort of joy in it. I would have giggled if I could have.
A snarl bubbled up out of my chest like music, and I launched myself at him. We met in a tangle of scratching claws, snapping teeth, dark fur. He was the stronger, I the quicker. The fight was silent, with no breath wasted. It was a duel between us; our fangs were our swords, thick fur ruffs used as shield and armor.
I tasted his blood in my mouth from a slash to an ear and it hit me like a drug, sent a fury and power coursing through me like I had never known. I threw myself at him again, and an instant later was rewarded for my overeagerness with a hot pain on my foreleg. Scarlet-black blood stained Denton's fangs in the moonlight.
We separated and stalked one another in a slow circle, looking for weakness, our eyes never leaving one another. I laughed at him silently, and he answered me in much the same way. I understood him, then, and rejoiced with him in the power he had found. In that moment, I loved the man, felt him a brother, and longed to hold his throat in my jaws as the last of his blood flowed out of him. It was the most ancient of struggles, the deepest of conflicts: survival of the fittest. One of us would live to run again, to hunt, to kill, to taste the hot blood. And the other would be dead and cold on the grass.
It was good.
We came together again like partners in a dance, moving over the grass together. Dimly, of course, I was aware of Tera dancing with the loup-garou, but that didn't matter to me, really. They were far away, dozens of yards, and I took no notice of them. My joy was here.
We danced under the moon---and he made the first misstep. I threw myself into the opening he'd left me, knocked him to the ground with my shoulder, and as he rolled and twisted away, I took his back leg, right across the big tendon. He screamed his fury, but I heard the fear in it, too. He scrambled to his three good paws again and turned to face me, but there was terrible knowledge in his eyes, just as there was in mine. We both knew that it was all over but the bleeding.
I shuddered. Yes. The bleeding.
He could still face me, could still hurt me if I were foolish--- but I wasn't. I began to wear him down, pressing him with short rushes and quick withdrawals that forced him to shift his weight awkwardly, stumble on his three working limbs, to wear him out. As his reactions became slower, I tested him with a few flashing passes of fangs. Once more, I tasted his blood.
I gave him a dozen small wounds and each taste of him made my frenzy all the more satisfying. The night, the dance, the violence, the blood---all of it was overwhelming, more than any power I had ever felt, any medicine I'd ever tasted, even in my dreams or in the wild realms of the Nevernever. It was pure beauty, pure pleasure, pure power. Victory was mine.
I grew contemptuous of him as he began to whimper, to seek escape. The fool. He should never have tested himself against me. Should never have tried his strength against mine. Had he yielded to me at once, I would have been content to lead him, to accept him as a follower, and taken him with me on the hunts. It was sad, in a way. But then, I could always find others. It would not be difficult to make the belts, I thought. To give them to a few people to try. Once they had, they'd never take them off again.
I stalked Denton as he faltered, and I thought of running with Susan, of filling our mouths with hot, sweet blood, of taking her in the ecstasy of the night and the kill and it made me shake with anticipation. I threw myself at Denton, knocked him over, and went for his throat. The fool scrambled and took his belt off, melting into the ugly two-leg form, his suit covered in blood.
"Please," he croaked. "Oh, God. Please. Don't kill me. Don't kill me."
I snarled in answer, and let my fangs tighten on his neck. I could feel his pulse against my tongue. Don't kill him. That he would beg at all was contemptuous. He should have known the law of the jungle before he started trying to rule it. Who did he think he was dealing with? Someone who would give him mercy, let him survive, crippled and pathetic, and feed him when he whined again? I wanted to laugh.
My jaws tightened on his throat. I wanted to feel him die. Something told me that everything else I'd experienced since I discovered my true self was child's candy next to the passing of a life beneath me. I shook with eagerness. Denton continued to beg, and it made me hesitate. I snarled, annoyed. No. No weakness. No mercy. I wanted his blood. I wanted his life. He had tried me and failed. Kill him. Kill him and take my rightful place.
Who did he think I was?
"Harry?" whispered a terrified voice.
Without releasing his throat, I looked up. Susan stood there in the moonlight, slender and graceful for a two-legs. Her camera was in one hand, dangling forgotten at her side. Her eyes were wide with desire, and she smelled of perfume and our mating and of fear. Something pressed at my awareness, and though part of me wanted to ignore her, to rip and rend, I focused on Susan, on her expression.
On her eyes. They weren't wide with desire.
They were terrified.
She was terrified of me.
"My God," Susan said. "Harry." She fell to her knees, staring at me. At my eyes.
I felt Denton's pulse beneath my tongue. Felt his whimpers vibrate into my mouth. So easy. One simple motion, and I would never have doubts, fears, questions. Never again.
And, something inside of me said in a calm tone, you'll never be Harry Dresden again.
Power. I could feel the belt's power in me, its magic, its strength. I recognized it now. That dark surety, that heady and careless delight. I recognized why there were parts of me that loved it so much.
I released Denton's throat and backed away from him. I scrambled with my paws, my stomach twisting in sudden nausea, rebelling at the very idea of what I had been about to do. I sobbed and tore the belt from my waist, ripping my shirt in the process, feeling my body grow awkward and heavy and clumsy and pained again. Injuries that had been nothing to my tru--- to the wolf form returned in vengeance to my human frailty. I threw the belt away from me, as far as it would go. I felt hot tears on my face, at the loss of that joy, that energy, that impervious strength.
"You bastard," I said to Denton. "Damn you. You poor bastard. " He lay on his side now, whimpering from his injuries, bleeding from many wounds, one leg curled limp and useless beneath him. I crawled to him and took his belt away. Threw it after the other.
Susan rushed over to me, but I caught her before she could embrace me. "Don't touch me," I told her, and I meant it with every cell in me. "Don't touch me now."
Susan flinched away from me as though the words had burned her. "Harry," she whispered. "Oh, God, Harry. We've got to get you away from all of this."
From the far side of the ring of trees, there was another furious bellow. There was motion in the trees, and then Murphy, leading a stumbling, clumsy string of naked Alphas, came out of the woods toward me, staying low. She had a gun, probably taken from one of the bodies, in her good hand.
"All right," I said, as they approached, and turned a shoulder to Susan, pressing her away. I couldn't even look at her. "Murphy, you and Susan get these kids out of here, now."
"No," Murphy said. "I'm staying." Her eyes flickered to Denton, narrowed in a flash of anger, and then dismissed him again as quickly. She made no move to examine his injuries. Maybe she didn't care if he bled to death, either.
"You can't hurt MacFinn," I said.
"And you can?" she asked. She leaned closer and peered at me. "Christ, Dresden. You've got blood all over your mouth."
I snarled. "Take the kids and go, Karrin. I'm handling things here."
Murphy, for answer, slipped the safety off of the gun. "I'm the cop here," she said. "Not you. This is a bust in progress. I'm staying until the end." She smiled, tight. "When I can sort out who is a good guy and who isn't."
I spat out another curse. "I don't have time to argue this with you. Susan, get the kids back to the van."
"But Harry . . ." she began.
Fury rose to the top of the rampant emotions coursing through me. "I've got enough blood on my hands," I screamed. "Get these kids out of here, damn you."
Susan's dark-toned face went pale, and she turned to the nearest of the naked, wet, shivering Alphas, Georgia as it happened. She took the young woman's hand, had the others line up in drug-hazed confusion and join hands, and then led them away. I watched them go and felt the seething anger and sorrow and fear in me twist around in confusion.
From the far side of the woods, there was another bellow of rage, a shaking of one of the evergreens, and then a sharp, sudden yelp of purest anguish. Tera. The sound of the she-wolf's pain rose to a frantic gargling sound, and then went silent. Murphy and I stared at the trees. I thought I saw a flicker of red eyes somewhere behind them, and then it was gone.
"It's coming around," Murphy said. "It will circle around to get to us."
"Yeah," I said. The loup-garou's blood was up, after the infuriating chase after Tera. It would go after whatever it saw next. My mouth twisted bitterly. I had a unique insight to its point of view now.
"What do we do?" Murphy said. Her knuckles whitened on the gun.
"We go after it and try to hold it long enough for Susan and the kids to get away," I said. "What about Marcone?"
"What about him?"
"He saved our lives," I said. Murphy's expression said she wasn't happy with that idea. "We owe him."
"You want to get him out of there?"
"I don't want to leave anyone else to that thing," I said. "How about you?"
She closed her eyes and let out a breath. "All right," she said. "But God, this smells like you're trying to set me up, Dresden. If you get me killed, there's no one left who saw what happened here, is there?"
"If you want to be safe, go after Susan," I said bluntly. "We split up. One of us attracts its attention, maybe the other one will get through."
"Fine," Murphy snarled. "Fuck you, Harry Dresden."
Famous last words, I thought, but I didn't waste any breath on voicing it.
It was time to face the loup-garou.
Chapter Thirty-three
I circled into the trees and stepped over Harris's corpse. The kid's face had been smashed in by two bullets, though the semiautomatic was still in his dead hand. Murphy must have had Wilson's gun. Wilson lay not far from Harris, also dead. Wounds to the chest, massive bleeding. Benn lay next to him, naked but for a business skirt soaked in blood. There was a line of greenish goo around her waist, probably the remains of the wolf belt. Its magic must have died when she did. I tried not to look at the mangled meat on the back of her thighs, or the tears near her jugular. I tried not to smell her blood, or to notice the dark surge of contemptuous pride that went through me, leftovers from my experience with my own wolf belt.
I shuddered and went past the bodies. The night was silent, but for wind, and the creaking of the ropes that supported the platform in the middle of the encircling evergreens. I could still see Marcone hog-tied up there. The position must have been excruciating---it isn't every day that you get crucified and hung up as dinner for a monster, and you can't really train your muscles for it. I couldn't see Marcone's expression, but I could almost feel his agony.
I waved a hand as he spun gently toward me, and he nodded his head, silent. I pointed at my eyes, and then around at the shadowed trees, trying to ask him if he knew where the loup-garou was, but he shook his head. Either he didn't understand me or he couldn't see it, and either way it didn't do me any good.
I grimaced and moved forward through the trees, skirting the edge of the pit. I looked for the rope that had been used to haul Marcone up to his current position. It had to have been tied off somewhere low. I peered through the near dark, followed the strand of rope back down to the tree it was tied to, and headed over toward it.
Maybe I could get out of this. Maybe Murphy and I could escape with Marcone, join Susan and the others, and get out of here.
No. That was a happy fantasy. Even if I did get everyone out, I knew I couldn't live with myself if I let the loup-garou go loose tonight, on another killing spree. I had to try to stop it.
I was already going to have a hard enough time living with myself.
The rope supporting Marcone had been secured with a hasty knot, easily undone. I started working it, rubbernecking all around, listening, trying to locate the loup-garou. It wouldn't have just run off and left us here alive. Would it?
I took a turn around the tree with the rope to give me a little leverage, and then, very carefully because of my bum arm, started lowering Marcone. If I could get him low enough, I could have him swing over to me from the pit's center, catch him, balance him, and then go back and release the rope. It would have been easier if Murphy was there, but I hadn't seen her.
A nasty thought hit me. What if Murphy had run across the loup-garou and it had killed her silently? What if it was, even now, trying to get to me?
I secured the rope and moved back over to the pit. Marcone, no dummy, was already swinging back and forth as best he could, trying to get himself over to me. I went to the edge of the pit and crouched down, keeping my weight well away from the crumbling earth at the pit's lip.
Marcone let out a sudden startled hiss and said, "Dresden! The pit!"
I looked down and saw the loup-garou's eyes glowing, down in the darkness of the pit, only a heartbeat before they surged toward me with a howl of rage. It was coming up the wall of the pit, simply gouging its claws into the mud and hauling itself upward, toward me. I reeled back from the thing, threw out a hand and screamed, "Fuego!"
Nothing happened, except a little puff of steam, like a breath exhaled on a cold night, and sudden, blinding pain in my head. The loup-garou hurtled toward me, and I threw myself down to the earth, rolling away from its claws as it came up over the edge of the pit. It raked at me, caught the edge of my leather duster, and pinned it to the earth.
I liked the coat, but I didn't like it that much. I slipped out of it, as the loup-garou clawed with its rear legs, much as I had only moments before, and inched up out of the pit. I was already running by the time it got out, and I heard it snarl, get its bearings, and then come after me.
I was dead. I was so dead. I had gotten the kids out, and Susan, and I had stopped Denton and his cronies, but I was about to pay the price. I slipped through the trees and out onto the grass again, panting, cold now that my jacket was off. My shoulder ached from the running, from all the motion, and my foot hurt abominably as well. I couldn't run any longer--- physically couldn't. My steps slowed, despite the commands of my brain, and I wept with frustration, weaving around just to keep on my feet.
I was at the end of my rope. It was over. I turned to face the trees, to watch the loup-garou coming. I wanted to see it coming, at least. If I was going to be killed, I wanted to face it on my feet, head on. Go down with a little dignity.
I saw its red eyes back among the trees. It came forward, slow, low to the ground, wary of some trick. I had stung it before, if not actually hurt it. It didn't want to fall victim to another such attack, I thought. It wanted to make absolutely sure that I was dead.
I drew in a breath and straightened my back. I lifted my chin, trying to prepare myself. If I was going to go down, I'd go down as a wizard should---proud and ready to face what was beyond. I could spill out my death curse, a potent working of magic, if I had time to speak it. Maybe I could counter MacFinn's curse with it, take the horrid transformation off of him that Saint Patrick had allegedly laid on him. Or maybe I could bring down Marcone's criminal empire with it.
I debated these things, as I drew out the silver pentacle amulet I had inherited from my mother, so that it would lie bright on my chest.
My mother's amulet.
Silver.
Amulet.
Inherited from my mother.
Inherited silver.
My eyes widened and my hands started to shake. A drowning man will reach for anything that floats. The idea floated---if only I could pull it off. If only my brainlessness hadn't kept me from realizing what I had until it was too late.
I took the silver pentacle off of my neck, breaking the chain in my haste. I caught the broken ends in my fist as I fastened my eyes on the loup-garou, and started to whirl the amulet in a circle above my head with my good arm. The amulet described a circle in the night air as I spun it, and I invested that circle with a tiny spark of will, a tiny bit of power. My head pounded. I felt the circle close around me, containing magical energies, focusing them.
I hurt. I was weary. I felt as though I had betrayed myself, given myself over to the darkness I'd tried so hard to resist by donning the evilly enchanted wolf belt---because let there be no mistaking, that is evil. Anything with that much power and that little control, that utter lack of concern for anything but self is evil in the most effective sense of the word. There was nothing left inside of me.
But I had to find it. I had to find enough magic to stop this bloodletting, once and forever.
I searched inside of me, where everything was numb and empty and tired. Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. That's why black magic is so easy---it comes from lust, from fear and anger, from things that are easy to feed and make grow. The sort I do is harder. It comes from something deeper than that, a truer and purer source---harder to tap, harder to keep, but ultimately more elegant, more powerful.
My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. It came from my love of a good steak, from the way I would sometimes cry at a good movie or a moving symphony. From my life. From the hope that I could make things better for someone else, if not always for me.
Somewhere, in all of that, I touched on something that wasn't tapped out, in spite of how horrible the past days had been, something that hadn't gone cold and numb inside of me. I grasped it, held it in my hand like a firefly, and willed its energy out, into the circle I had created with the spinning amulet on the end of its chain.
It began to glow, azure-blue like a candle flame. The light spread down the chain and to the amulet, and when it reached it the light became incandescent, the pentacle a brilliant light at the end of the chain, spinning a circle of light around me, trailing motes of dust that fell like starlight to the grass around me.
"Vento," I whispered, and then called, more loudly, "Vento servitas. Ventas, vento servitas!" In the bushes, the loup-garou snarled quietly, and its eyes brightened, burned with scarlet fury. It started moving toward me.
Without warning, Murphy stepped between me and the loup-garou, her gun held in both hands in a shooter's stance, though the cast made that awkward. She held her gun pointed directly at me. "Harry," she said in a very calm tone. "Get down on the ground. Right now."
My eyes widened. I could see over Murphy. I could see the loup-garou, moving rapidly toward her through the trees. I saw it focus on her, felt its malice and hunger spread toward her and envelop her.
I couldn't speak. I couldn't break the chant, or stop whirling the amulet. To do so would have released the energy I'd gathered, the very last strength I had in me. My head hammered with pain that would have had me screaming on any other night. I kept the amulet whirling, spraying motes of light, the brilliant white pentacle at the end of a leash of blue light.
"I mean it, Harry," Murphy said. "I don't know what you're doing, but get down." Her eyes were intense, and she lifted the gun, thumbing back the hammer.
Trust. Whatever trust she'd had in me was gone. She'd seen or thought of something that made her think I was trying to betray her. The loup-garou rushed closer, and I thought, with a sick feeling in my stomach, that Susan and the Alphas hadn't even had time to make it off the estate yet, much less all the way back to the van. If the loup-garou got through me, it would kill them, one by one, follow their trail like a hound and tear them apart.
"Harry," Murphy said, her voice pleading. Her hand was shaking. "Please, Harry. Get down."
The loup-garou came through the woods in a sudden rush, and Murphy drew in a breath, ready to fire. I kept the amulet whirling and felt the power grow, my head splitting with agony. And made my choice. I just hoped that I could finish the job before Murphy gunned me down. Everything of the past few days came down to that single instant.
It all slowed down, giving me time to view it in agonizing detail.
The loup-garou rose up behind Murphy, leaping toward her through the air. It was still huge, still powerful, and more terrifying than ever. Its jaws were open wide, aimed for her blond head, and could crush it with a single snap.
Murphy narrowed her eyes, peering down the shaking barrel of her gun. Flame blossomed from the barrel, reaching out toward me. She wasn't twenty feet away from me. I didn't think there was any way she could miss, and I thought, with a pang of sadness, that I wanted a chance to apologize to her before the end. For everything.
"Vento servitas!" I shouted and released the spell, the circle, and the amulet, as the sound of the shot hit me like a slap in the face. Power rushed out of me, everything I had left in me, focused and magnified by the circle and the time I had taken to refine it, flying forward at the leaping loup-garou. Something hot and painful hammered into my torso---almost like it had hit my back. I toppled forward, too weak and tired to care anymore. But I watched what happened to the amulet.
The pentacle flew toward the loup-garou like a comet, incandescent white, and struck the creature's breast like lightning hammering into an ancient tree. There was a flash of light, too much power unleashed in a flaring of energy as the mystic substance shattered the loup-garou's invulnerability, carved into it, coursed through it in a blinding blue-white shower of sparks. Blue fire erupted from its chest, its black heart's blood ignited into blinding flame, and the creature screamed, arching backward in agony. There was the sound of thunder, flashes of more light, someone screaming. Maybe it was me.
The loup-garou fell to earth. And changed. Muzzle melted back into human face. Fangs and claws faded. Warped muscles slithered away into globs of clear, preternatural ooze that would quickly vanish. Fur disappeared. Knotted limbs straightened into clean arms and legs---until Harley MacFinn lay before me, partly upon his side, one hand pressed to his heart.
The silver of my amulet's chain spilled out between his fingers and dangled down his chest. He stared down at the wound for a moment, and then I saw him relax. MacFinn looked up, and in his face I saw all the grief and agony and impotent rage, everything he'd felt during all those years of being unable to control himself, cursed to cause death and destruction when all he wanted was to open a park for the wildlife. And then it all flooded out of him. His eyes cleared and warmed as he looked at me, and he gave me a small, quiet smile. It was an expression of forgiveness. Something to let me know that he understood.
Then he laid down his head, and was gone.
My own blackness followed soon after.
Chapter Thirty-four
I woke up.
That surprised me, in itself.
I woke up to see the moon still high overhead, and to feel Murphy's hand on my forehead. "Come on, Harry," she whispered. "Don't do this to me."
I blinked my eyes a few times and whispered, "You shot me, Murph. I can't believe you shot me."
She blinked her eyes at me, to hold back tears. "You stupid jerk," she said, her voice gentle. "You should have got down when I told you to."
"I was busy."
She glanced over her shoulder, at MacFinn's silent, still form. "Yeah. I saw, after." She turned back to me, looking a little past me, focused elsewhere.
"It's all right," I said. "I forgive you." I thought it very generous of me, appropriate to the last moments of a man's life.
Murphy blinked at me. And then stiffened. "You what?"
"Forgive you, Murph. For shooting me. Your job and all, I understand."
Murphy's eyes narrowed dangerously. "You think . . ." she said. Her face twisted with disgust and she sputtered for a moment, and then spat to one side. She began again. "You think that I thought you were one of the bad guys, still, and I shot you because you wouldn't surrender?"
I felt too weak and dizzy to argue. "Hey. It's understandable. Don't worry about it." I shivered. "I'm so cold."
"We're all cold, moron," Murphy snapped. "A front came through about the same time they threw us in that freaking pit. It must be below forty, already, and we're wet besides. Sit up, El Cid."
I blinked at her. "I . . . Uh. What?"
"Sit up, dummy," Murphy said. "Look behind you."
I did sit up, and it didn't hurt much worse than it had earlier this evening, surprising me again. I looked behind me.
Denton was there. He held a fallen branch in one hand, like a club. His eyes were wide and staring and savage, his face pale with loss of blood. There was a neat hole in his forehead, right in the middle. I blinked at the body for a moment.
"But . . . How did he . . . ?"
"I shot him, you jerk. He came running up behind you, just as I came back from giving first aid to that naked woman. Tera West. I was shaking too hard to have a safe shot with you standing, and I didn't know the loup-garou was coming up behind me." Murphy stood up. "I can't believe this," she said and turned to walk away. "You thought I shot you."
"Murph," I protested. "Murph, give me a break. I mean, I thought . . ."
She snorted at me over her shoulder. She snorts well for someone with a cute little button of a nose. "You didn't think, Dresden," she said, flipping her hair back from her eyes. "Dramatic death scene. Noble sacrifice, right? Tragically misunderstood? Hah! I understand you, buddy. You're such a pompous, arrogant, pretentious, chauvinistic, hopelessly old-fashioned, stupidly pigheaded . . ." Murphy went on in graphic detail and at great length about me as she walked away to call the police, and an ambulance, and it was music to my ears.
I lay back on the grass, tired but smiling. Things were all right between us.
The police had one hell of a time sorting out the mess at Marcone's place. I made sure to collect all the wolf belts. Murphy helped me. We burned them, right there, in a stinking fire made of tree branches. It was too hard for me to throw them in. Murph did it for me. She understands things, sometimes, that I couldn't ever explain to her. Later, I went with Murph to Carmichael's funeral. She went with me to Kim Delaney's. Those are the kind of things friends do for each other.
Mr. Hendricks, as it turns out, had worn his Kevlar under the black fatigues. They put me next to him in the ambulance that night when I finally left the scene. They'd bared his chest, and it was a solid mass of purple bruises, so that we were a matched set. He glowered at me in silence, but he breathed steadily through the oxygen mask on his face. I felt absurdly cheered when I saw him alive. All things considered, can you blame me?
Marcone got arrested on general principles, but nothing stuck. Though everything had happened on his property, injuries on the FBI agents indicated that they had all done one another in, or been killed by an animal---except for Denton, of course. None of the peace officers there had possessed a warrant, et cetera, et cetera. I hear his lawyers had him out in less than three hours.
Marcone called me a few days later and said, "You owe me your life, Mr. Dresden. Are you sure we can't talk business?"
"The way I see it, John," I told him, "you owe me your life. After all, even if you'd cut yourself free, you'd have just fallen down into the pit and got eaten up with the rest of us. I figure you thought your highest chances of survival were in freeing me, the wizard who deals with this kind of thing, to handle it."
"Of course," Marcone said, with a note of disappointment in his voice. "I'd just hoped you hadn't realized it. Nonetheless, Harry---"
"Don't call me Harry," I said, and hung up on him.
Susan filmed the death of the loup-garou from less than fifty yards away with a pretty good zoom lens and special light-sensitive film. The light from my amulet illuminated the scene rather dramatically without really showing many details. You can only see my back, and it looks like I'm swinging a glow stick around, and then throwing it at the monster, which can be seen only in shadowy detail as something large and furry. At the point where I released the spell, there's a burst of static about a second long, where the magic messed up Susan's camera, even from that far away.
In the film, the static clears and you can see Murphy shoot Denton off of my back, just before he brains me with his club. Then she spins around like Rambo, jumps out of the way of the leaping furry somethingor-other, and empties the rest of her clip into the thing out of reflex.
Murph and I both know the bullets didn't hurt it at all, that it was just a reflexive gesture on her part, but I don't need the attention. She was quite the hero according to the camera, and that was fine with me.
Susan's film went on the morning news and was shown for about two days afterward, exclusively on WGN Channel Nine, and it impressed Chicago a lot. The film made Murphy popular enough, with voters, that a bunch of city councilmen went to bat for her, and the internal affairs investigation got called off. She carries a little bit more clout now than she did before. The politicians down at City Hall paid for a real name tag for her office door.
The weird thing was that the film just vanished after two days. No one knew what happened to it, but the film technician in the room with the exclusive WGN Channel Nine videotape disappeared, too, leaving only a few scattered and low-quality copies. A couple of days later, some experts spoke up claiming that the tape had to be fake, and decrying it as a simple hoax perpetrated by a tabloid.
Some people just can't deal with the thought of the supernatural being real. Federal government is like that, a lot. But I'm thinking that if anyone in the government did believe, they would just as soon not have had proof of the existence of werewolves and the instability of a local FBI agent showing at five, six, and ten.
The film's disappearance didn't stop Susan from getting a promotion at the Arcane, a big raise, and a guest slot on the Larry King show, plus a few other places. She looked good doing it, too, and made people think. She's getting her column syndicated. Maybe, in a few hundred years, people might actually be willing to consider what was real in the world with an open mind.
But I doubted it.
I didn't call Susan for a while, after she had seen me so far gone into being a monster that I might as well have been one. She didn't pressure me, but kept her presence known. She'd send me flowers, sometimes, or have a pizza delivered to my office when I was working late. Hell of a girl.
Tera was badly injured, but recovered thanks to her own reversion to human form, and Murphy's quick first aid. She asked me to meet her at Wolf Lake Park a few weeks later, and when I showed up, she was there, wearing just a long black cloak.
"I wished to tell you that what you did was necessary. And I wished to tell you goodbye," she said. And slipped the cloak off. She was naked, with a few new, wrinkled scars. "Goodbye."
"Where will you go?" I asked.
She tilted those odd amber eyes at me. "I have family," she said. "I have not seen them in a long time. I will return to them now."
"Maybe you'll call, sometime?"
Her eyes sparkled, and she smiled at me, a little sadly. "No, Harry Dresden. That is not the way of my kind. Come to the great mountains in the Northwest one winter. Perhaps I will be there." And then she shimmered into the shape of a great timber wolf, and vanished into the sunset.
All those people shapeshifting into wolves, and I had never once considered the possibility of a wolf shapeshifting into a person. I picked up Tera's cloak, musing, and took it home with me, as a reminder to keep my mind even more open to the realms of possibility.
The Alphas decided that I'm about the greatest thing since sliced bread. Which isn't exactly the most thrilling thing in the world for me. They asked me to a campout with them, which I reluctantly attended, where all dozen-odd young people swore friendship and loyalty to me, and where I spent a lot of time blinking and trying to say nothing. They're just itching for me to lead them in some meaningful crusade against evil. Hell, I have trouble just paying the bills.
When I took some time to think about all that had happened, I couldn't help but think that the last several months had been a little too crazy for coincidence. First, a power-drunk warlock had appeared out of nowhere, and I had to duke it out with him in his own stronghold before he murdered me outright. And then, Denton and his people showed up with enchanted wolf belts and raised hell.
I never had found out who exactly was behind the warlock who showed up the previous spring. Black wizards don't just grow up like toadstools, you know. Someone has to teach them complicated things like summoning demons, ritual magic, and clichéd villain dialogue. Who had been his teacher?
And Denton and company had shown up six months later. Someone had provided them with those belts. Someone had warned Denton that I was dangerous, that I or someone like me from the Council would go after him. And by telling him that, they had pointed him at me like a gun, determined to kill me.
I'm not much of a believer in coincidence. Could it have been one of my enemies on the White Council? One of the beings of the Nevernever who had come to hate me? I was on the list of a number of nasty things, for one reason or another.
"You know what?" I told Mister one night in front of the fire. "Maybe I've finally gone around the bend, but I think someone might be trying to kill me."
Mister looked up at me, his feline features filled with a supreme lack of concern, and rolled over so that I could rub his tummy. I did, pensive and comfortable before the fire, and thought about who it might be. And then thought that I might be getting a little stir-crazy. I hadn't gone anywhere but to work and back home for a couple of weeks. Too much work and no play makes Harry a paranoid boy.
I reached for the phone and started spinning the dial to Susan's number. Mister batted at my hand approvingly.
"Or maybe I'm just too stupid to get out of trouble's way, eh?"
Mister rumbled a deep, affirmative purr in his chest. I settled back to ask Susan over, and enjoyed the warmth of the fire.
ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER
THE DRESDEN FILES
STORM FRONT FOOL MOONSUMMER KNIGHTDEATH MASKSBLOOD RITESDEAD BEATPROVEN GUILTYWHITE NIGHTSMALL FAVOR
THE CODEX ALERA
FURIES OF CALDERON ACADEM'S FURYCURSOR'S FURYCAPTAIN'S FURY
Table of Contents
Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2001
eISBN : 978-1-440-65390-2
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There are reasons I hate to drive fast. For one, the Blue Beetle, the mismatched Volkswagen bug that I putter around in, rattles and groans dangerously at anything above sixty miles an hour. For another, I don't get along so well with technology. Anything manufactured after about World War II seems to be susceptible to abrupt malfunction when I get close to it. As a rule, when I drive, I drive malfunction when I get close to it. As a rule, when I drive, I drive very carefully and sensibly.
Tonight was an exception to the rule.
The Beetle's tires screeched in protest as we rounded a corner, clearly against the NO LEFT TURN sign posted there. The old car growled gamely, as though it sensed what was at stake, and continued its valiant puttering, moaning, and rattling as we zoomed down the street.
"Can we go any faster?" Michael drawled. It wasn't a complaint. It was just a question, calmly voiced.
"Only if the wind gets behind us or we start going down a hill," I said. "How far to the hospital?"
The big man shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He had that kind of salt-and-pepper hair, dark against silver, that some men seem lucky enough to inherit, though his beard was still a solid color of dark brown, almost black. There were worry and laugh lines at the corners of his leathery face. His broad, lined hands rested on his knees, which were scrunched up due to the dashboard. "I don't know for certain," he answered me. "Two miles?"
I squinted out the Beetle's window at the fading light. "The sun is almost down. I hope we're not too late."
"We're doing all we can," Michael assured me. "If God wills it, we'll be there in time. Are you sure of your . . ." his mouth twisted with distaste, "source?"
"Bob is annoying, but rarely wrong," I answered, jamming on the brakes and dodging around a garbage truck. "If he said the ghost would be there, it will be there."
"Lord be with us," Michael said, and crossed himself. I felt a stirring of something; powerful, placid energy around him---the power of faith. "Harry, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."
"Don't ask me to Mass again," I told him, uncomfortable. "You know I'm just going to say no." Someone in a red Taurus cut me off, and I had to swerve around him, into the turn lane, and then ahead of him again. A couple of the Beetle's wheels lifted off the ground. "Jerk!" I howled out the driver's window.
"That doesn't preclude asking," Michael said. "But no. I wanted to know when you were going to marry Miss Rodriguez."
"Hell's Bells, Michael," I scowled. "You and I have been chasing all over town for the past two weeks, going up against every ghost and spirit that has all of a sudden reared its ugly head. We still don't know what's causing the spirit world to go postal."
"I know that, Harry, but---"
"At the moment," I interrupted, "we're going after a nasty old biddy at Cook County, who could kill us if we aren't focused. And you're asking me about my love life."
Michael frowned at me. "You're sleeping with her, aren't you?" he said.
"Not often enough," I growled, and shifted lanes, swerving around a passenger bus.
The knight sighed. "Do you love her?" he asked.
"Michael," I said. "Give me a break. Where do you get off asking questions like that?"
"Do you love her?" he pressed.
"I'm trying to drive, here."
"Harry," he asked, smiling. "Do you love the girl or don't you? It isn't a difficult question."
"Speaks the expert," I grumbled. I went past a blue-and-white at about twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, and saw the police officer behind the wheel blink and spill his coffee as he saw me go past. I checked my rearview mirror, and saw the blue bulbs on the police car whirl to life. "Dammit, that tears it. The cops are going to be coming in right after us."
"Don't worry about them," Michael assured me. "Just answer the question."
I flashed Michael a glance. He watched me, his face broad and honest, his jaw strong, and his grey eyes flashing. His hair was cropped close, Marine-length, on top, but he sported a short, warrior's beard, which he kept clipped close to his face. "I suppose so," I said, after a second. "Yeah."
"Then you don't mind saying it?"
"Saying what?" I stalled.
"Harry," Michael scolded, holding on as we bounced through a dip in the street. "Don't be a child about this. If you love the woman, say so."
"Why?" I demanded.
"You haven't told her, have you? You've never said it."
I glared at him. "So what if I haven't? She knows. What's the big deal?"
"Harry Dresden," he said. "You, of all people, should know the power of words."
"Look, she knows," I said, tapping the brakes and then flattening the accelerator again. "I got her a card."
"A card?" Michael asked.
"A Hallmark."
He sighed. "Let me hear you say the words."
"What?"
"Say the words," he demanded. "If you love the woman, why can't you say so?"
"I don't just go around saying that to people, Michael. Stars and sky, that's . . . I just couldn't, all right?"
"You don't love her," Michael said. "I see."
"You know that's not---"
"Say it, Harry."
"If it will get you off my back," I said, and gave the Beetle every ounce of gas that I could. I could see the police in traffic somewhere behind me. "All right." I flashed Michael a ferocious, wizardly scowl and snarled, "I love her. There, how's that?"
Michael beamed. "You see? That's the only thing that stands between you two. You're not the kind of person who says what they feel. Or who is very introspective, Harry. Sometimes, you just need to look into the mirror and see what's there."
"I don't like mirrors," I grumbled.
"Regardless, you needed to realize that you do love the woman. After Elaine, I thought you might isolate yourself too much and never---"
I felt a sudden flash of anger and vehemence. "I don't talk about Elaine, Michael. Ever. If you can't live with that, get the hell out of my car and let me work on my own."
Michael frowned at me, probably more for my choice of words than anything else. "I'm talking about Susan, Harry. If you love her, you should marry her."
"I'm a wizard. I don't have time to be married."
"I'm a knight," Michael responded. "And I have the time. It's worth it. You're alone too much. It's starting to show."
I scowled at him again. "What does that mean?"
"You're tense. Grumpy. And you're isolating yourself more all the time. You need to keep up human contact, Harry. It would be so easy for you to start down a darker path."
"Michael," I snapped, "I don't need a lecture. I don't need the conversion speech again. I don't need the 'cast aside your evil powers before they consume you' speech. Again. What I need is for you to back me up while I go take care of this thing."
Cook County Hospital loomed into sight and I made an illegal U-turn to get the Blue Beetle up into the Emergency entrance lane.
Michael unbuckled his seat belt, even before the car had come to a stop, and reached into the backseat to draw an enormous sword, fully five feet long in its black scabbard. He exited the car and buckled on the sword. Then he reached back in for a white cloak with a red cross upon the left breast, which he tossed over his shoulders in a practiced motion. He clasped it with another cross, this one of silver, at his throat. It clashed with his flannel workman's shirt, blue jeans, and steel-toed work boots.
"Can't you leave the cloak off, at least?" I complained. I opened the door and unfolded myself from the Beetle's driver's seat, stretching my long legs, and reached into the backseat to recover my own equipment---my new wizard's staff and blasting rod, each of them freshly carved and still a little green around the edges.
Michael looked up at me, wounded. "The cloak is as much a part of what I do as the sword, Harry. Besides, it's no more ridiculous than that coat you wear."
I looked down at my black leather duster, the one with the large mantle that fell around my shoulders and spread out as it billowed in a most heavy and satisfactory fashion around my legs. My own black jeans and dark Western shirt were a ton and a half more stylish than Michael's costume. "What's wrong with it?"
"It belongs on the set of El Dorado," Michael said. "Are you ready?"
I shot him a withering glance, to which he turned the other cheek with a smile, and we headed toward the door. I could hear police sirens closing in behind us, maybe a block or two away. "This is going to be close."
"Then we best hurry." He cast the white cloak back from his right arm, and put his hand on the hilt of the great broadsword. Then he bowed his head, crossed himself, and murmured, "Merciful Father, guide us and protect us as we go to do battle with the darkness." Once more, there was that thrum of energy around him, like the vibrations of music heard through a thick wall.
I shook my head, and fetched a leather sack, about the size of my palm, from the pocket of my duster. I had to juggle staff, blasting rod, and sack for a moment, and wound up with the staff in my left hand, as was proper, the rod in my right, and the sack dangling from my teeth. "The sun is down," I grated out. "Let's move it."
And we broke into a run, knight and wizard, through the emergency entrance of Cook County Hospital. We drew no small amount of stares as we entered, my duster billowing out in a black cloud behind me, Michael's white cloak spreading like the wings of the avenging angel whose namesake he was. We pelted inside, and slid to a halt at the first intersection of cool, sterile, bustling hallways.
I grabbed the arm of the first orderly I saw. He blinked, and then gawked at me, from the tips of my Western boots to the dark hair atop my head. He glanced at my staff and rod rather nervously, and at the silver pentacle amulet dangling at my breast, and gulped. Then he looked at Michael, tall and broad, his expression utterly serene, at odds with the white cloak and the broadsword at his hip. He took a nervous step back. "M-m-may I help you?"
I speared him into place with my most ferocious, dark-eyed smile and said, between teeth clenched on the leather sack, "Hi. Could you tell us where the nursery is?"
We took the fire stairs. Michael knows how technology reacts to me, and the last thing either of us wanted was to be trapped in a broken elevator while innocent lives were snuffed out. Michael led the way, one hand on the rail, one on the hilt of his sword, his legs churning steadily.
I followed him, huffing and puffing. Michael paused by the door and looked back at me, white cloak swirling around his calves. It took me a couple of seconds to come gasping up behind him. "Ready?" he asked me.
"Hrkghngh," I answered, and nodded, still clenching my leather sack in my teeth, and fumbled a white candle from my duster pocket, along with a box of matches. I had to set my rod and staff aside to light the candle.
Michael wrinkled his nose at the smell of smoke, and pushed open the door. Candle in one hand, rod and staff in the other, I followed, my eyes flicking from my surroundings to the candle's flame and back.
All I could see was more hospital. Clean walls, clean halls, lots of tile and fluorescent lights. The long, luminescent tubes flickered feebly, as though they had all gone stale at once, and the hall was only dimly lit. Long shadows stretched out from a wheelchair parked to the side of one door and gathered beneath a row of uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs at an intersection of hallways.
The fourth floor was a graveyard, bottom-of-the-well silent. There wasn't a flicker of sound from a television or radio. No intercoms buzzed. No air-conditioning whirred. Nothing.
We walked down a long hall, our steps sounding out clearly despite an effort to remain quiet. A sign on the wall, decorated with a brightly colored plastic clown, read: NURSERY/MATERNITY, and pointed down another hall.
I stepped past Michael and looked down that hallway. It ended at a pair of swinging doors. This hallway, too, was quiet. The nurse's station stood empty.
The lights weren't just flickering here---they were altogether gone. It was entirely dark. Shadows and uncertain shapes loomed everywhere. I took a step forward, past Michael, and as I did the flame of my candle burned down to a cold, clear pinpoint of blue light.
I spat the sack out of my mouth and fumbled it into my pocket. "Michael," I said, my voice strangled to hushed urgency. "It's here." I turned my body, so that he could see the light.
His eyes flicked down to the candle and then back up, to the darkness beyond. "Faith, Harry." Then he reached to his side with his broad right hand, and slowly, silently, drew Amoracchius from its sheath. I found it a tad more encouraging than his words. The great blade's polished steel gave off a lambent glow as Michael stepped forward to stand beside me in the darkness, and the air fairly thrummed with its power---Michael's own faith, amplified a thousandfold.
"Where are the nurses?" he asked me in a hoarse whisper.
"Spooked off, maybe," I answered, as quietly. "Or maybe some sort of glamour. At least they're out of the way."
I glanced at the sword, and at the long, slender spike of metal set into its cross guard. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I could see flecks of red still upon it. Probably rust, I reasoned. Sure, rust.
I set the candle down upon the floor, where it continued to burn pinpoint-clear, indicating a spiritual presence. A big one. Bob hadn't been lying when he'd said that the ghost of Agatha Hagglethorn was no two-bit shade.
"Stay back," I told Michael. "Give me a minute."
"If what the spirit told you is correct, this creature is dangerous," Michael replied. "Let me go first. It will be safer."
I nodded toward the glowing blade. "Trust me, a ghost would feel the sword coming before you even got to the door. Let me see what I can do first. If I can dust the spook, this whole contest is over before it begins."
I didn't wait for Michael to answer me. Instead, I took my blasting rod and staff in my left hand, and in my right I grasped the pouch. I untied the simple knot that held the sack closed, and slipped forward, into the dark.
When I reached the swinging doors, I pressed one of them and it slowly opened. I remained still for a long moment, listening.
I heard singing. A woman's voice. Gentle. Lovely.
Hush little baby, don't say a word. Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird.
I glanced back at Michael, and then slipped inside the door, into total darkness. I couldn't see---but I'm not a wizard for nothing. I thought of the pentacle upon my breast, over my heart, the silver amulet that I had inherited from my mother. It was a battered piece of jewelry, scarred and dented from uses for which it was never intended, but I wore it still. The five-sided star within the circle was the symbol of my magic, of what I believed in, embodying the five forces of the universe working in harmony, contained inside of human control.
I focused on it, and slid a little of my will into it, and the amulet began to glow with a gentle, blue-silver light, which spread out before me in a subtle wave, showing me the shapes of a fallen chair, and a pair of nurses at a desk behind a counter, slumped forward over their stations, breathing deeply.
The soothing, quiet lullaby continued as I studied the nurses. Enchanted sleep. It was nothing new. They were out, they weren't going anywhere, and there was little sense in wasting time or energy in trying to break the spell's hold on them. The gentle singing droned on, and I found myself reaching for the fallen chair, with the intention of setting it upright so that I would have a comfortable place to sit down for a little rest.
I froze, and had to remind myself that I would be an idiot to sit down beneath the influence of the unearthly song, even for a few moments. Subtle magic, and strong. Even knowing what to expect, I had barely sensed its touch in time.
I skirted the chair and moved forward, into a room filled with dressing hooks and little pastel hospital gowns hung upon them in rows. The singing was louder, here, though it still drifted around the room with a ghostly lack of origin. One wall was little more than a sheet of Plexiglas, and behind it was a room that attempted to look sterile and warm at the same time.
Row upon row of little glass cribs on wheeled stands stood in the room. Tiny occupants, with toy-sized hospital mittens over their brand-new fingernails, and tiny hospital stocking caps over their bald heads, were sleeping and dreaming infant dreams.
Walking among them, visible in the glow of my wizard's light, was the source of the singing.
Agatha Hagglethorn had not been old when she died. She wore a proper, high-necked shirt, as was appropriate to a lady of her station in nineteenth-century Chicago, and a long, dark, no-nonsense skirt. I could see through her, to the little crib behind her, but other than that she seemed solid, real. Her face was pretty, in a strained, bony sort of way, and she had her right hand folded over the stump at the end of her left wrist.
If that mockingbird don't sing, Mama's going to buy you . . .
She had a captivating singing voice. Literally. She lilted out her song, spun energy into the air that lulled listeners into deeper and deeper sleep. If she was allowed to continue, she could draw both infants and nurses into a sleep from which they would never awaken, and the authorities would blame it on carbon monoxide, or something a little more comfortably normal than a hostile ghost.
I crept closer. I had enough ghost dust to pin down Agatha and a dozen spooks like her, and allow Michael to dispatch her swiftly, with a minimum of mess and fuss---just as long as I didn't miss.
I hunkered down, kept the little sack of dust gripped loosely in my right hand, and slipped over to the door that led into the roomful of sleeping babies. The ghost did not appear to have noticed me---ghosts aren't terribly observant. I guess being dead gives you a whole different perspective on life.
I entered the room, and Agatha Hagglethorn's voice rolled over me like a drug, making me blink and shudder. I had to keep focused, my thoughts on the cool power of my magic flowing through my pentacle and coming out in its spectral light.
If that diamond ring don't shine . . .
I licked my lips and watched the ghost as it stooped over one of the rolling cradles. She smiled, loving-kindness in her eyes, and breathed out her song over the baby.
The infant shuddered out a tiny breath, eyes closed in sleep, and did not inhale.
Hush little baby . . .
Time had run out. In a perfect world, I would have simply dumped the dust onto the ghost. But it's not a perfect world: Ghosts don't have to play by the rules of reality, and until they acknowledge that you're there, it's tough, very, very tough, to affect them at all. Confrontation is the only way, and even then, knowing the shade's identity and speaking its name aloud is the only sure way to make it face you. And, better and better, most spirits can't hear just anyone---it takes magic to make a direct call to the hereafter.
I rose fully to my feet, bag gripped in my hand and shouted, forcing my will into my voice, "Agatha Hagglethorn!"
The spirit started, as though a distant voice had come to her, and turned toward me. Her eyes widened. The song abruptly fell silent.
"Who are you?" she said. "What are you doing in my nursery?"
I struggled to keep the details Bob had told me about the ghost straight. "This isn't your nursery, Agatha Hagglethorn. It's more than a hundred years since you died. You aren't real. You are a ghost, and you are dead."
The spirit drew itself up with a sort of cold, high-society haughtiness. "I might have known. Benson sent you, didn't he? Benson is always doing something cruel and petty like this, then calling me a madwoman. A madwoman! He wants to take my child away."
"Benson Hagglethorn is long dead, Agatha Hagglethorn," I responded, and gathered back my right hand to throw. "As is your child. As are you. These little ones are not yours to sing to or bear away." I steeled myself to throw, began to bring my arm forward.
The spirit looked at me with an expression of lost, lonely confusion. This was the hard part about dealing with really substantial, dangerous ghosts. They were almost human. They appeared to be able to feel emotion, to have some degree of self-awareness. Ghosts aren't alive, not really---they're a footprint in stone, a fossilized skeleton. They are shaped like the original, but they aren't it.
But I'm a sucker for a lady in distress. I always have been. It's a weak point in my character, a streak of chivalry a mile wide and twice as deep. I saw the hurt and the loneliness on the ghost-Agatha's face, and felt it strike a sympathetic chord in me. I let my arm go still again. Perhaps, if I was lucky, I could talk her away. Ghosts are like that. Confront them with the reality of their situation, and they dissolve.
"I'm sorry, Agatha," I said. "But you aren't who you think you are. You're a ghost. A reflection. The true Agatha Hagglethorn died more than a century ago."
"N-no," she said, her voice shaking. "That's not true."
"It is true," I said. "She died on the same night as her husband and child."
"No," the spirit moaned, her eyes closing. "No, no, no, no. I don't want to hear this." She started singing to herself again, low and desperate---no enchantment to it this time, no unconscious act of destruction. But the infant girl still hadn't inhaled, and her lips were turning blue.
"Listen to me, Agatha," I said, forcing more of my will into my voice, lacing it with magic so that the ghost could hear me. "I know about you. You died. You remember. Your husband beat you. You were terrified that he would beat your daughter. And when she started crying, you covered her mouth with your hand." I felt like such a bastard to be going over the woman's past so coldly. Ghost or not, the pain on her face was real.
"I didn't," Agatha wailed. "I didn't hurt her."
"You didn't mean to hurt her," I said, drawing on the information Bob had provided. "But he was drunk and you were terrified, and when you looked down she was gone. Isn't that right?" I licked my lips, and looked at the infant girl again. If I didn't get this done quickly, she'd die. It was eerie, how still she was, like a little rubber doll.
Something, some spark of memory caught a flame in the ghost's eyes. "I remember," she hissed. "The axe. The axe, the axe, the axe." The proportions of the ghost's face changed, stretched, became more bony, more slender. "I took my axe, my axe, my axe and gave my Benson twenty whacks." The spirit grew, expanding, and a ghostly wind rustled through the room, emanating from the ghost, and rife with the smell of iron and blood.
"Oh, crap," I muttered, and gathered myself to make a dash for the girl.
"My angel gone," screamed the ghost. "Benson gone. And then the hand, the hand that killed them both." She lifted the stump of her arm into the air. "Gone, gone, gone!" She threw back her head and screamed, and it came out as a deafening, bestial roar that rattled the nursery walls.
I threw myself forward, toward the breathless child, and as I did the rest of the infants burst into terrified wails. I reached the child and smacked her little upturned baby butt. She blinked her eyes open in sudden shock, drew in a breath, and joined the rest of her nursery mates in crying.
"No," Agatha screamed, "no, no, no! He'll hear you! He'll hear you!" The stump of her left arm flashed out toward me, and I felt the impact both against my body and against my soul, as though she had driven a chip of ice deep into my chest. The power of the blow flung me back against a wall like a toy, hard enough to send my staff and rod clattering to the floor. By some miracle or other, I kept hold of my sack of ghost dust, but my head vibrated like a hammer-struck bell, and cold shivers racked my body in rapid succession.
"Michael," I wheezed, as loudly as I could, but already I could hear doors being thrown open, heavy work boots pounding toward me. I struggled to my feet and shook my head to clear it. The wind rose to gale force, sending cribs skittering around the room on their little wheels, tearing at my eyes so that I had to shield them with one hand. Dammit. The dust would be useless in such a gale.
"Hush little baby, hush little baby, hush little baby." Agatha's ghost bowed over the infant girl's cradle again, and thrust the stump of her left arm down and into the mouth of the child, her translucent flesh passing seamlessly into the infant's skin. The child jerked and stopped breathing, though she still attempted to cry.
I shouted a wordless challenge and charged the spirit. If I could not cast the dust upon her from across the room, I could thrust the leather bag into her ghostly flesh and pin her into place from within---agonizing, but undoubtedly effective.
Agatha's head whipped toward me as I came, and she jerked away from the child with a snarl. Her hair had come free in the gale and spread about her face in a ferocious mane well suited to the feral features that had replaced her gentle expression. She drew back her left hand, and there suddenly appeared, floating just above the stump, a short, heavy-headed hatchet. She shrieked and brought the hatchet down on me.
Ghostly steel chimed on true iron, and Amoracchius's light flared bright-white. Michael slid his feet into position on the floor, gritting his teeth with effort, and kept the spirit-weapon from touching my flesh.
"Dresden," he called. "The dust!"
I fought my way forward, through the wind, shoved my fist into Agatha's weapon-arm, and shook loose some of the ghost dust from the leather sack.
Upon contact with her immaterial flesh, the ghost dust flared into blazing motes of scarlet light. Agatha screamed and jerked back, but her arm remained in place as firmly as if it had been set in concrete.
"Benson!" Agatha shrieked. "Benson! Hush little baby!" And then she simply tore herself away from her arm at the shoulder, leaving her spirit flesh behind, and vanished. The arm and hatchet collapsed to the floor in a sudden spatter of clear, semifluid gelatin, the remnants of spirit-flesh when the spirit was gone, ectoplasm that would swiftly evaporate.
The gale died, though the lights continued to flicker. My blue-white wizard light, and the lambent glow of Michael's sword were the only reliable sources of illumination in the room. My ears shrieked with the sudden lack of sound, though the dozen or so babies, in their cribs, continued a chorus of steady, terrified little wails.
"Are the children all right?" Michael asked. "Where did it go?"
"I think so. The ghost must have crossed over," I guessed. "She knew she'd had it."
Michael turned in a slow circle, sword still held at the ready. "It's gone, then?"
I shook my head, scanning the room. "I don't think so," I responded, and bent over the crib of the infant girl who had nearly been smothered. The name on her wrist bracelet read Alison Ann Summers. I stroked her little cheek, and she turned her mouth toward my finger, baby lips fastening on my fingertip, cries dying.
"Take your finger out of her mouth," Michael chided. "It's dirty. What happens now?"
"I'll ward the room," I said. "And then we'll get out of here before the police show up and arres---"
Alison Ann jerked and stopped breathing. Her tiny arms and legs stiffened. I felt something cold pass over her, heard the distant drone of a mad lullaby.
Hush little baby . . .
"Michael," I cried. "She's still here. The ghost, she's reaching here from the Nevernever."
"Christ preserve," Michael swore. "Harry, we have to step over."
My heart skipped a beat at the very thought. "No," I said. "No way. This is a big spook, Michael. I'm not going to go onto her home ground naked and offer to go two out of three."
"We don't have a choice," Michael snapped. "Look."
I looked. The infants were falling silent, one by one, little cries abruptly smothered in mid-breath.
Hush little baby . . .
"Michael, she'll tear us apart. And even if she doesn't, my godmother will."
Michael shook his head, scowling. "No, by God. I won't let that happen." He turned his gaze on me, piercing. "And neither will you, Harry Dresden. There is too much good in your heart to let these children die."
I returned his stare, uncertain. Michael had insisted that I look him in the eyes on our first meeting. When a wizard looks you in the eyes, it's serious. He can see inside of you, all of your dark secrets and hidden fears of your soul---and you see his in return. Michael's soul had made me weep. I wished that my soul would look like his had to me. But I was pretty damn sure that it didn't.
Silence fell. All the little babies hushed.
I closed the sack of ghost dust and put it away in my pocket. It wouldn't do me any good in the Nevernever.
I turned toward my fallen rod and staff, thrust out my hand, and spat, "Ventas servitas." The air stirred, and then flung staff and rod into my open hands before dying away again. "All right," I said. "I'm tearing open a window that will give us five minutes. Hopefully, my godmother won't have time to find me. Anything beyond that and we're going to be dead already or back here, in my case."
"You have a good heart, Harry Dresden," Michael said, a fierce grin stretching his mouth. He stepped closer to my side. "God will smile on this choice."
"Yeah. Ask Him not to Sodom and Gomorrah my apartment, and we'll be even."
Michael gave me a disappointed glance. I shot him a testy glare. He clamped a hand onto my shoulder and held on.
Then I reached out, caught hold of reality in my fingertips, and with an effort of will and a whispered, "Aparturum," tore a hole between this world and the next.
Even days that culminate in a grand battle against an insane ghost and a trip across the border between this world and the spirit realm usually start out pretty normally. This one, for example, started off with breakfast and then work at the office.
My office is in a building in midtown Chicago. It's an older building, and not in the best of shape, especially since there was that problem with the elevator last year. I don't care what anyone says, that wasn't my fault. When a giant scorpion the size of an Irish wolfhound is tearing its way through the roof of your elevator car, you get real willing to take desperate measures.
Anyway, my office is small---one room, but on the corner, with a couple of windows. The sign on the door reads, simply, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD. Just inside the door is a table, covered with pamphlets with titles like: Magic and You, and Why Witches Don't Sink Any Faster Than Anyone Else---a Wizard's Perspective. I wrote most of them. I think it's important for we practitioners of the Art to keep up a good public image. Anything to avoid another Inquisition.
Behind the table is a sink, counter, and an old coffee machine. My desk faces the door, and a couple of comfortable chairs sit across from it. The air-conditioning rattles, the ceiling fan squeaks on every revolution, and the scent of coffee is soaked into the carpet and the walls.
I shambled in, put coffee on, and sorted through the mail while the coffee percolated. A thank you letter from the Campbells, for chasing a spook out of their house. Junk mail. And, thank goodness, a check from the city for my last batch of work for the Chicago P.D. That had been a nasty case, all in all. Demon summoning, human sacrifice, black magic---the works.
I got my coffee and resolved to call Michael to offer to split my earnings with him---even though the legwork had been all mine, he and Amoracchius had come in on the finale. I'd handled the sorcerer, he'd dealt with the demon, and the good guys won the day. I'd turned in my logs and at fifty bucks an hour had netted myself a neat two grand. Michael would refuse the money (he always did) but it seemed polite to make the offer; especially given how much time we'd been spending together recently, in an attempt to track down the source of all the ghostly happenings in the city.
The phone rang before I could pick it up to call Michael. "Harry Dresden," I answered.
"Hello there, Mr. Dresden," said a warm, feminine voice. "I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time."
I kicked back in my chair, and felt a smile spreading over my face. "Why, Miss Rodriguez, isn't it? Aren't you that nosy reporter from the Arcane? That useless rag that publishes stories about witches and ghosts and Bigfoot?"
"Plus Elvis," she assured me. "Don't forget the King. And I'm syndicated now. Publications of questionable reputation all over the world carry my column."
I laughed. "How are you today?"
Susan's voice turned wry. "Well, my boyfriend stood me up last night, but other than that . . ."
I winced a little. "Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. Look, Bob found a tip for me that just couldn't wait."
"Ahem," she said, in her polite, professional voice. "I'm not calling you to talk about my personal life, Mr. Dresden. This is a business call."
I felt my smile returning. Susan was absolutely one in a million, to put up with me. "Oh, beg pardon, Miss Rodriguez. Pray continue."
"Well. I was thinking that there were rumors of some more ghostly activity in the old town last night. I thought you might be willing to share a few details with the Arcane."
"Mmmm. That might not be wholly professional of me. I keep my business confidential."
"Mr. Dresden," she said. "I would as soon not resort to desperate measures."
"Why, Miss Rodriguez." I grinned. "Are you a desperate woman?"
I could almost see the way she arched one eyebrow. "Mr. Dresden. I don't want to threaten you. But you must understand that I am well acquainted with a certain young lady of your company---and that I could see to it that things became very awkward between you."
"I see. But if I shared the story with you---"
"Gave me an exclusive, Mr. Dresden."
"An exclusive," I amended, "then you might see your way clear to avoiding causing problems for me?"
"I'd even put in a good word with her," Susan said, her voice cheerful, then dropping into a lower, smokier register. "Who knows. You might get lucky."
I thought about it for a minute. The ghost Michael and I had nailed last night had been a big, bestial thing lurking in the basement of the University of Chicago library. I didn't have to mention the names of any people involved, and while the university wouldn't like it, I doubted it would be seriously hurt by appearing in a magazine that most people bought along with every other tabloid in the supermarket checkout lines. Besides which, just the thought of Susan's caramel skin and soft, dark hair under my hands . . . Yum. "That's an offer I can hardly refuse," I told her. "Do you have a pen?"
She did, and I spent the next ten minutes telling her the details. She took them down with a number of sharp, concise questions, and had the whole story out of me in less time than I would have believed. She really was a good reporter, I thought. It was almost a shame that she was spending her time reporting the supernatural, which people had been refusing to believe in for centuries.
"Thank you very much, Mr. Dresden," she said, after she squeezed the last drops of information out of me. "I hope things go well between you and the young lady tonight. At your place. At nine."
"Maybe the young lady would like to discuss the possibilities with me," I drawled.
She let out a throaty laugh. "Maybe she would," Susan agreed. "But this is a business call."
I laughed. "You're terrible, Susan. You never give up, do you?"
"Never, ever," she said.
"Would you really have been mad at me if I hadn't told you?"
"Harry," she said. "You stood me up last night without a word. I don't usually stand for that kind of treatment from any man. If you hadn't had a good story for me, I was going to think that you were out horsing around with your friends."
"Yeah, that Michael." I chuckled. "He's a real party animal."
"You're going to have to give me the story on him sometime. Have you come any closer to working out what's going on with the ghosts? Did you look into the seasonal angle?"
I sighed, closing my eyes. "No, and yes. I still can't figure why the ghosts seem to be freaking out all at once---and we haven't been able to get any of them to hold still long enough for me to get a good look at them. I've got a new recipe to try out tonight---maybe that will do it. But Bob is sure it isn't a Halloweeny kind of problem. I mean, we didn't have any ghosts last year."
"No. We had werewolves."
"Different situation entirely," I said. "I've got Bob working overtime to keep an eye on the spirit world for any more activity. If anything else is about to jump, we'll know it."
"All right," she said. She hesitated for a moment and then said, "Harry. I---"
I waited, but when she stalled I asked, "What?"
"I, uh . . . I just want to be sure that you're all right."
I had the distinct impression that she had been going to say something else, but I didn't push. "Tired," I said. "A couple of bruises from slipping on some ectoplasm and falling into a card catalog. But I'm fine."
She laughed. "That creates a certain image. Tonight then?"
"I'm looking forward to it."
She made a pleased little sound with more than a hint of sexuality in it, and let that be her goodbye.
The day went fairly quickly, with a bunch of the usual business. I whipped up a spell to find a lost wedding ring, and turned down a customer who wanted me to put a love spell on his mistress. (My ad in the Yellow Pages specifically reads "No love potions," but for some reason people always think that their case is special.) I went to the bank, referred a caller to a private detective I knew, and met with a fledgling pyromancer in an attempt to teach him to stop igniting his cat accidentally.
I was just closing down the office when I heard someone come out of the elevator and start walking down the hallway toward me. The steps were heavy, as though from boots, and rushed.
"Mr. Dresden?" asked a young woman's voice. "Are you Harry Dresden?"
"Yes," I said, locking the office door. "But I'm just leaving. Maybe we can set up an appointment for tomorrow."
The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. "Please, Mr. Dresden. I've got to talk to you. Only you can help me."
I sighed, without looking at her. She'd said the exact words she needed to in order to kick off my protective streak. But I could still walk away. Lots of people got to thinking that magic could dig them out of their troubles, once they realized they couldn't escape. "I'll be glad to, Ma'am. First thing in the morning." I locked the door and started to turn away.
"Wait," she said. I felt her step closer to me, and she grabbed my hand.
A tingling, writhing sensation shot up my wrist and over my elbow. My reaction was immediate and instinctive. I threw up a mental shield against the sensation, jerked my hand clear of her fingers, and took several steps back and away from the young woman.
My hand and arm still tingled from brushing against the energy of her aura. She was a slight girl in a black knit dress, black combat boots, and hair dyed to a flat, black matte. The lines of her face were soft and sweet, and her skin was pale as chalk around eyes that were sunken, shadowed, and glittering with alley-cat wariness.
I flexed my fingers and avoided meeting the girl's eyes for more than a fraction of a second. "You're a practitioner," I said, quietly.
She bit her lip and looked away, nodding. "And I need your help. They said that you would help me."
"I give lessons to people who want to avoid hurting themselves with uncontrolled talent," I said. "Is that what you're after?"
"No, Mr. Dresden," the girl said. "Not exactly."
"Why me, then? What do you want?"
"I want your protection." She lifted a shaking hand, fidgeting with her dark hair. "And if I don't have it . . . I'm not sure I'll live through the night."
I let us both back into the office, and flicked on the lights. The bulb blew out. It does that a lot. I sighed, and shut the door behind us, leaving stripes of golden autumn light pouring through the blinds, interweaving with shadows on the floor and walls.
I drew out a seat in front of my desk for the young woman. She blinked at me in confusion for a second before she said, "Oh," and sat. I walked around the desk, leaving my duster on, and sat down.
"All right," I said. "If you want my protection, I want a few things from you first."
She pushed back her asphalt-colored hair with one hand and gave me a look of pure calculation. Then she simply crossed her legs, so that the cut of her dress left one pale leg bare to midthigh. A subtle motion of her back thrust out her young, firm breasts, so that their tips pressed visibly against the fabric. "Of course, Mr. Dresden. I'm sure we can do business." The look she gave me was direct, sensual, and willing.
Nipple erection on command---now that's method acting. Oh, she was pretty enough, I suppose. Any adolescent male would have been drooling and hurling himself at her, but I'd seen acts a lot better. I rolled my eyes. "That's not what I meant."
Her sex-kitten look faltered. "It . . . it isn't?" She frowned at me, eyes scanning me again, reassessing me. "Is it . . . are you . . . ?"
"No," I said. "I'm not gay. But I'm not buying what you're selling. You haven't even told me your name, but you're willing to spread your legs for me? No, thanks. Hell's bells, haven't you ever heard of AIDS? Herpes?"
Her face went white, and she pressed her lips together until they were white, too. "All right, then," she said. "What do you want from me?"
"Answers," I told her, jabbing a finger at her. "And don't try lying to me. It won't do you any good." Which was only a marginal lie, in itself. Being a wizard doesn't make you a walking lie detector, and I wasn't going to try a soulgaze on her to find out if she was sincere---it wasn't worth it. But another great thing about being a wizard is that people attribute just about anything you do to your vast and unknowable powers. Granted, it only works with those who know enough to believe in wizards, but not enough to understand our limits---the rest of the world, the regular people who think magic is just a joke, just look at you like someone is going to stuff you into a little white coat any second now.
She licked her lips, a nervous gesture, not a sexy one. "All right," she said. "What do you want to know?"
"Your name, for starters."
She let out a harsh laugh. "You think I'm going to give you that, wizard?"
Point. Serious spellslingers like me could do an awful lot with a person's name, given by their own lips. "All right, then. What do I call you?"
She didn't bother to cover her leg again. A rather pretty leg, actually, with a tattoo of some kind encircling her ankle. I tried not to notice. "Lydia," she said. "Call me Lydia."
"Okay, Lydia. You're a practitioner of the Art. Tell me about that."
"It doesn't have anything to do with what I want from you, Mr. Dresden," she said. She swallowed, her anger fading. "Please. I need your help."
"All right, all right," I said. "What kind of help do you need? If you're into some kind of gang-related trouble, I'm going to recommend that you head for the police. I'm not a bodyguard."
She shivered, and hugged herself with her arms. "No, nothing like that. It's not my body I'm worried about."
That made me frown.
She closed her eyes and drew in a breath. "I need a talisman," she said. "Something to protect me from a hostile spirit."
That made me sit up and take notice, metaphorically speaking. With the city flying into spiritual chaos as it was, I had no trouble believing that a girl gifted with magical talent might be experiencing some bad phenomena. Ghosts and spooks are drawn to the magically gifted. "What kind of spirit?"
Her eyes shifted left and right, never looking at me. "I can't really say, Mr. Dresden. It's powerful and it wants to hurt me. They . . . they told me you could make something that would keep me safe."
True, in point of fact. Around my left wrist at that very moment was a talisman made from a dead man's shroud, blessed silver, and a number of other, more difficult to come by ingredients. "Maybe," I told her. "That depends on why you're in danger, and why you feel you need protection."
"I c-can't tell you that," she said. Her pale face pinched into an expression of worry---real worry, the kind that makes you look older, uglier. The way she hugged herself made her look smaller, more frail. "Please, I just need your help."
I sighed, and rubbed at one eyebrow with my thumb. My first rampant instincts were to give her a cup of hot chocolate, put a blanket around her shoulders, tell her everything would be all right and strap my talisman onto her wrist. I tried to rein those in, though. Down, Quixote. I still knew nothing about her situation, or what she needed protection from---for all I knew, she was trying to stave off an avenging angel coming after her in retribution for some act so vile that it stirred the Powers that be to take immediate action. Even vanilla ghosts sometimes come back to haunt someone for a darned good reason.
"Look, Lydia. I don't like to get involved in anything without knowing something about what's going on." Which hadn't slowed me down before, I noted. "Unless you can tell me a little bit about your situation, convince me that you are in legitimate need of protection, I won't be able to help you."
She bowed her head, her asphalt hair falling across her face for a long minute. Then she drew in a breath and asked, "Do you know what Cassandra's Tears is, Mr. Dresden?"
"Prophetic condition," I said. "The person in question has random seizures---visions of the future, but they're always couched in terms of conditions that make explanation of the dreams seem unbelievable. Doctors mistake it for epilepsy in children, sometimes, and prescribe a bunch of different drugs for it. Pretty accurate prophecy, as it goes, but no one ever buys into it. Some people call it a gift."
"I'm not one of them," she whispered. "You don't know how horrible it is. To see something about to happen and to try to change it, only to have no one believe you."
I studied her for a minute in silence, listening to the clock on my wall count down the seconds. "All right," I said. "You say that you have this gift. I guess you want me to believe that one of your visions warned you about an evil spirit coming after you?"
"Not one," she said. "Three. Three, Mr. Dresden. I only got one vision when they tried to kill the President. I got two for that disaster at NASA, and for the earthquake in Laos. I've never had three before. Never had something appear so clearly . . ."
I closed my eyes to think about this. Again, my instincts told me to help the girl, smash the bad ghost or whatever, and walk off into the sunset. If she was indeed afflicted with Cassandra's Tears, my actions could do more than save her life. My faith could change it for the better.
On the other hand, I'd been played for a sucker before. The girl was obviously a competent actress. She had shifted smoothly to the role of willing seductress, when she thought I had been asking for sex in payment. That she would immediately make that conclusion based on my own fairly neutral statement said something about her, all by itself. This wasn't a girl who was used to playing things fair and square. Unless I was grossly misreading her, she had bartered sex for goods and services before---and she was awfully young to be so jaded about the entire matter.
The entire Cassandra's Tears angle was a perfect scam, and people had used it before, among the circles of the magically endowed. The story required no proof, no performance on the part of the person running the scam. All she would need would be a smidgen of talent to give her the right aura, maybe enough kinetomancy to tilt the dice a little on their way down. Then she could make up whatever story she wanted about her supposed prophetic gifts, put on a little-girl-lost act, and head straight for the local dummy, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.
I opened my eyes to find her watching me. "Of course," she said. "I could be lying. Cassandra's Tears can't be analyzed or observed. I could be using it as an excuse to provide a reasonable explanation why you should help a lady in distress."
"That's pretty much what's going through my mind, Lydia, yeah. You could just be a small-time witch who stirred up the wrong demon and is looking for a way out."
She spread her hands. "All I can tell you is that I'm not. I know that something's coming. I don't know what, and I don't know why or how. I just know what I see."
"Which is?"
"Fire," she whispered. "Wind. I see dark things and a dark war. I see my death coming for me, out of the spirit world. And I see you at the middle of it all. You're the beginning, the end of it. You're the one who can make the path go different ways."
"That's your vision? Iowa has less corn."
She turned her face away. "I see what I see."
Standard carny procedure. Flatter the ego of the mark, draw him in, get him good and hooked, and fleece him for everything he's got. Sheesh, I thought, someone else trying to get something out of me. My reputation must be growing.
Still, there was no sense in being rude. "Look, Lydia. I think maybe you're just overreacting, here. Why don't we meet again in a couple of days, and we'll see if you still think you need my help."
She didn't answer me. Her shoulders just slumped forward and her face went slack with defeat. She closed her eyes, and I felt a nagging sensation of doubt tug at me. I had the uncomfortable impression that she wasn't acting.
"All right," she said, softly. "I'm sorry to have kept you late." She got up and started walking toward the door of my office.
My better judgment propelled me up out of my chair and across the room. We reached the door at the same time.
"Wait a minute," I said. I unbound the talisman from my arm, feeling the silent pop of energy as the knot came undone. Then I took her left wrist and turned her hand over to tie the talisman onto her. There were pale scars on her arm---the vertical kind that run along the big veins. The ones you get when you're really serious about killing yourself. They were old and faded. She must have gotten them when she was . . . what? Ten years old? Younger?
I shuddered and secured the little braid of musty cloth and silver chain about her wrist, willing enough energy into it to close the circle once the knot was tied. When I finished, I touched her forearm lightly. I could just feel the talisman's power, a tingling sensation that hovered a half-inch off of her skin.
"Faith magic works best against spirits," I said quietly. "If you're worried, get to a church. Spirits are strongest just after the sun goes down, around the witching hour, and again just before the sun comes up. Go to Saint Mary of the Angels. It's a church at the corner of Bloomingdale and Wood, down by Wicker Park. It's huge, you can't miss it. Go around to the delivery door and ring the bell. Talk to Father Forthill. Tell him that Michael's friend said that you need a safe place to stay for a while."
She only stared at me, her mouth open. Tears formed in her eyes. "You believe me," she said. "You believe me."
I shrugged, uncomfortable. "Maybe. Maybe not. But things have been bad, the past few weeks, and I would rather not have you on my conscience. You'd better hurry. It's going to be sundown soon." I pressed some bills into her hand and said, "Take a cab. Saint Mary of the Angels. Father Forthill. Michael's friend sent you."
"Thank you," she said. "Oh, God. Thank you, Mr. Dresden." She seized my hand in both of hers and pressed a tearstained kiss to my knuckles. Her fingers were cold and her lips too hot. Then she vanished out the door.
I shut it behind her and shook my head. "Harry, you idiot. Your one decent talisman that would protect you against ghosts and you just gave it away. She's probably a plant. They probably sent her to you just to get the talisman off you, so that they can eat you up the next time you go spoil their fun." I glared down at my hand, where the warmth of Lydia's kiss and the dampness of her tears still lingered. Then I sighed, and walked to the cabinet where I kept fifty or sixty spare lightbulbs on hand, and replaced the one that had burned out.
The phone rang. I got down off my chair and answered it sourly. "Dresden."
There was silence and scratchy static on the other end of the line.
"Dresden," I repeated.
The silence stretched on, and something about it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There was a quality to it that is difficult to describe. Like something waiting. Gloating. The static crackled louder, and I thought I could hear voices underneath it, voices speaking in low, cruel tones. I glanced at the door, after the departed Lydia. "Who is this?"
"Soon," whispered a voice. "Soon, Dresden. We will see one another again."
"Who is this?" I repeated, feeling a little silly.
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone before hanging it up, then ran my hand back through my hair. A chill crawled neatly down my spine and took up residence somewhere a little lower than my stomach. "All right, then," I said, my own voice a little too loud in the office. "Thank God that wasn't too creepy or anything."
The antique radio on the shelf beside the coffee machine hissed and squalled to life and I almost jumped out of my shoes. I whirled to face it in a fury, hands clenched.
"Harry?" said a voice on the radio. "Hey, Harry, is this thing working?"
I tried to calm my pounding heart, and focused enough will on the radio to let my voice carry through. "Yeah, Bob. It's me."
"Thank the stars," Bob said. "You said you wanted to know if I found out anything else ghostly going on."
"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
The radio hissed and crackled with static---spiritual interference, not physical. The radio wasn't set up to receive AM/FM any more. Bob's voice was garbled, but I could understand it. "My contact came through. Cook County Hospital, tonight. Someone's stirred up Agatha Hagglethorn. This is a bad one, Harry. She is one mean old biddy."
Bob gave me the rundown on Agatha Hagglethorn's grisly and tragic death, and her most likely target at the hospital. I glanced down at my bare left wrist, and abruptly felt naked. "All right," I said. "I'm on it. Thanks, Bob."
The radio squalled and went silent, and I dashed out the door. Sundown would come in less than twenty minutes, rush hour had been going for a while now, and if I wasn't at Cook County by the time it got dark, all kinds of bad things could happen.
I flew out the front door, the sack of ghost dust heavy in my pocket, and all but slammed into Michael, tall and broad, toting a huge athletic bag over his shoulder, which I knew would contain nothing but Amoracchius and his white cloak.
"Michael!" I burst out. "How did you get here?"
His honest face split into a wide smile. "When there is a need, He sees to it that I am there."
"Wow," I said. "You're kidding."
"No," he said, his voice earnest. Then he paused. "Of course, you've gotten in touch with me every night for the past two weeks. Tonight, I just thought I'd save Him the trouble of arranging coincidence, so I came on over as soon as I got off work." He fell into step beside me and we both got into the Blue Beetle---he got in the red door, I got in the white one, and we peered out over the grey hood as I pulled the old VW into traffic.
And that was how we ended up doing battle in the nursery at Cook County.
Anyway, you see what I mean about a day being fairly normal before it falls all to pieces. Or, well. Maybe it hadn't been all that normal. As we took off into traffic and I gave the Beetle all the gas it could take, I got that sinking feeling that my life was about to get hectic again.
Michael and I plunged through the hole I'd torn in reality and into the Nevernever. It felt like moving from a sauna into an air-conditioned office, except that I didn't feel the change on my skin. I felt it in my thoughts and my feelings, and in the primitive, skin-crawling part of me at the base of my brain. I stood in a different world than our own.
The little leather sack of ghost dust in my duster pocket abruptly increased its weight, dragging me off balance and to the ground. I let out a curse. The whole point of the ghost dust was that it was something extra-real, that it was heavy and inert and locked spiritual matter into place when it touched it. Even inside its bag, it had become a sudden stress on the Nevernever. If I opened the bag here, in the world of spirit, it might tear a hole in the floor. I'd have to be careful. I grunted with effort and pulled the little pouch out of my pocket. It felt like it weighed thirty or forty pounds.
Michael frowned down at my hands. "You know. I never really thought to ask before---but what is that dust made of?"
"Depleted uranium," I told him. "At least, that's the base ingredient. I had to add in a lot of other things. Cold iron, basil, dung from a---"
"Never mind," he said. "I don't want to know." He turned away from me, his arms steadily holding the massive sword before him. I recovered staff and rod, and stood beside him, studying the lay of the as-it-were land.
This part of the Nevernever looked like Chicago, at the end of the nineteenth century---no, strike that. This was the ghost's demesne. It looked like a mishmash of Agatha Hagglethorn's memories of Chicago at the end of her life. Edison's bulbs were mounted in some of the streetlights, while others burned with flickering gas flames. All of them cast hazy spheres of light, doing little to actually illuminate their surroundings. The buildings stood at slightly odd angles to one another, with parts of them seamlessly missing. Everything---streets, sidewalks, buildings---was made of wood.
"Hell's bells," I muttered. "No wonder the real Chicago kept burning down. This place is a tinderbox."
Rats moved in the shadows, but the street was otherwise empty and still. The rift that led back to our world wavered and shifted, fluorescent light and sterile hospital air pouring onto the old Chicago streets. Around us pulsed maybe a dozen shimmering disturbances in the air---the rich life forces of the infants back in the infirmary, showing through into the Nevernever.
"Where is she?" Michael asked, his voice quiet. "Where's the ghost?"
I turned in a slow circle, peering at the shadows, and shook my head. "I don't know. But we'd better find her, fast. And we need to get a look at this one if we can."
"To try to find out what's gotten it stirred up," Michael said.
"Exactly. I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of chasing all over town every night."
"Didn't you already get a look at her?"
"Not the right kind of look," I said with a grimace. "There could be spells laid on her, some kind of magic around her to clue me in on what's going on. I need to be not in mortal peril for a couple of minutes to examine her."
"Provided she doesn't kill us first, all right," Michael assented. "But time is short, and I don't see her anywhere. What should we do?"
"I hate to say it," I said, "but I think we should---"
I was going to say "split up," but I didn't get the chance. The heavy wooden timbers of the roadway beneath us exploded up and out in a deadly cloud of splinters. I threw one leather-clad arm across my eyes and went tumbling one way. Michael went the other.
"My little angels! Mine, mine, MINE!" screamed a voice that roared against my face and chest and made my duster flap around as though made of gauze.
I looked up, to see the ghost, quite real and solid now, clawing its one-armed way up from the sub-street. Agatha's face was lean and bony, twisted in rage, and her hair hung about her in a shaggy mane, sharply at odds with her crisp white shirt. Her arm was missing from its shoulder, and dark fluid stained the cloth beneath it.
Michael rose to his feet with a shout, one of his cheeks cut and bleeding, and went after her with Amoracchius. The spirit backhanded him away with her remaining arm as though he weighed no more than a doll. Michael grunted and went flying, rolling along the wooden street.
And then, snarling and drooling, her eyes wide with frenzied madness, the ghost turned toward me.
I scrambled to my feet and held out my staff across my body, a slender barrier between me and the ghost on its home turf. "I guess it's too late to have a reasonable discussion, Agatha."
"My babies!" the spirit screamed. "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"Yeah, that's what I thought," I breathed. I gathered my forces and started channeling them through the staff. The pale wood began glowing with a gold-and-orange light, spreading out before me in a quarter-dome shape.
The ghost screamed again and hurtled toward me. I stood fast and shouted, "Reflettum!" at the top of my lungs. The spirit impacted against my shield with all the momentum of a bull rhinoceros on steroids. I've stopped bullets and worse with that shield before, but that was on my home turf, in the real world. Here, the Nevernever, Agatha's ghost overloaded my shield, which detonated with a thunderous roar and sent me sprawling to the ground. Again.
I jammed my scorched staff into the ground and groaned to my feet. Blood stained my tingling fingers, the skin swelling with dark bruises and burst blood vessels.
Agatha stood several paces away, shaking with rage, or if I was lucky, with confusion. Bits of my shield-fire played over her shape and slowly winked out. I fumbled for my blasting rod, but my fingers had gone numb and I dropped it. I bent over to pick it up, swayed, and stood up again, red mist and sparkling dots swimming through my vision.
Michael circled the stunned spirit and arrived at my side. His expression was concerned, rather than frightened. "Easy, Harry, easy. Good Lord, man, are you all right?"
"I'll make it," I croaked. "There's good news and bad news."
The knight brought his sword to guard again. "I've always been partial to the good news."
"I don't think she's interested in those babies anymore."
Michael flashed me a swift smile. "That is good news."
I wiped some sweat from my eyes. My hand came away scarlet. I must have gotten a cut, somewhere along the way. "The bad news is that she's going to come over here and tear us apart in a couple more seconds."
"Not to be negative, but I'm afraid the news gets worse," Michael said. "Listen."
I glanced at him, and cocked my head to one side. Distantly, but quickly growing nearer, I could hear haunting, musical baying, ghostly in the midnight air. "Holy shit," I breathed. "Hellhounds."
"Harry," Michael said sternly. "You know I hate it when you swear."
"You're right. Sorry. Holy shit," I breathed, "heckhounds. Godmother's out hunting. How the hell did she find us so damned fast?"
Michael grimaced at me. "She must have been close already. How long before she gets here?"
"Not long. My shield made a lot of noise when it buckled. She'll home in on it."
"If you want to go, Harry," Michael said, "go on and leave. I'll hold the ghost until you can get back through the rift."
I was tempted. There aren't a lot of things that scare me more than the Nevernever and my godmother in tandem. But I was also angry. I hate it when I get shown up. Besides, Michael was a friend, and I'm not in the habit of leaving friends to clean up my messes for me. "No," I said. "Let's just hurry."
Michael grinned at me, and started forward, just as Agatha's ghost extinguished the last residual bits of my magic that had been plaguing it. Michael sent Amoracchius whistling at the ghost, but she was unthinkably swift, and dodged each blow with a circling, swooping sort of grace. I lifted my blasting rod and narrowed my focus. I tuned out the baying of the hellhounds, now a lot nearer, and the sound of galloping hoofbeats that sent my pulse racing. I methodically blanked out everything but the ghost, Michael, and the power funneling into the blasting rod.
The ghost must have sensed the strike gathering, because she turned and flew at me like a bullet. Her mouth opened in a scream, and I could see jagged, pointed teeth lining her jaws, the empty white fire of her eyes.
"Fuego!" I shouted, and then the spirit hit me, full force. A beam of white fire spewed out from my blasting rod and across the wooden storefronts. They burst into flame as though soaked in gasoline. I went down, rolling, the spirit going after my throat with her teeth. I jammed the end of the blasting rod into her mouth and prepared to fire again, but she tore it from my hands with a ferocious doglike worrying motion and it tumbled away. I swiped the staff at her awkwardly, to no avail. She went for my throat again.
I shoved a leather-clad forearm into her mouth and shouted, "Michael!" The ghost ripped at me with her nails and clamped down on my forearm. I dropped the ghost dust and scrabbled furiously at her with my free hand, trying to lever her off of me, but didn't do much more than muss up her clothing.
She got her hand on my throat and I felt my breath cut off. I writhed and struggled to escape, but the snarling ghost was a lot stronger and faster than me. Stars swam in front of my eyes.
Michael shouted, and swept Amoracchius at the spirit. The great blade bit into her back with a wooden-sounding thunk and made her arch up, screaming in pain. It was a deathblow. The white light of the blade touched her spirit-flesh and set it alight, sizzling away from the edges of the wound. She twisted, screaming in fury, and the motion jerked the blade from Michael's hands. Agatha Hagglethorn's blazing ghost prepared to fly at his throat.
I sat up, seized the sack of ghost dust, and with a grunt of effort swept it at the back of her head. There was a sharp sound when the improvised cosh struck her, the superheavy matter I'd enchanted hitting like a sledgehammer on china. The ghost froze in place for a moment, her feral mouth wide---and then toppled slowly to one side.
I looked up at Michael, who stood gasping for breath, staring at me. "Harry," he said. "Do you see?"
I lifted a hand to my aching throat and looked around me. The sounds of baying hounds and thundering hooves had gone. "See what?" I asked.
"Look." He pointed at the smoldering ghost-corpse.
I looked. In my struggles with Agatha's ghost, I had torn aside the prim white shirt, and she must have ripped up the dress when she'd been crashing through sidewalks and strangling wizards and so on. I crawled a bit closer to the corpse. It was burning---not blazing, but steadily being eaten away by Amoracchius's white fire, like newsprint slowly curling into flame. The fire didn't hide what Michael was talking about, though.
Wire. Strands of barbed wire ran about the ghost's flesh, beneath her torn clothing. The barbs had dug cruelly into her flesh every two inches or so, and her body was covered with small, agonizing wounds. I grimaced, picking away at the burning cloth in tentative jerks. The wire was a single strand that began at her throat and wrapped about her torso, beneath the arms, winding all the way down one leg to her ankle. At either end, the wire simply vanished into her flesh.
"Sun and stars," I breathed. "No wonder she went mad."
"The wire," Michael asked, crouching down next to me. "It was hurting the ghost?"
I nodded. "Looks like. Torturing it."
"Why didn't we see this in the hospital?"
I shook my head. "Whatever this is . . . I'm not sure it would be visible in the real world. I don't think we would have seen it if we hadn't come here."
"God smiled on us," Michael said.
I eyed my own injuries, then glowered at the bruises already spreading over Michael's arm and throat. "Yeah, whatever. Look, Michael---this kind of thing doesn't just happen. Someone had to do it to this ghost."
"Which implies," Michael said, "that they had a reason to want this ghost to hurt those children." His face darkened into a scowl.
"Whether or not that was their goal, what it implies is that someone is behind all the recent activity---not some thing or condition. Someone is purposefully doing this to the ghosts in the area." I stood up and brushed myself off, as the corpse continued to burn, like the buildings around us. Fire raged up the sides of anything vertical, and began to chew its way across the streets and sidewalks as well. A haze of smoke filled the air, as the spirit's demesne in the Nevernever crumbled along with its remains.
"Ow," I complained. I keep my complaints succinct.
Michael took the handle of his sword and drew it out of the flames, shaking his head. "The city is burning."
"Thank you, Sir Obvious."
He smiled. "Can the flames hurt us?"
"Yes," I said, emphatic. "Time to go."
Together, we headed back to the rift at a quick trot. At one point, Michael shouldered me out of the way of a tumbling chimney, and we had to skirt around the pile of shattered bricks and blazing timbers.
"Wait," I said suddenly. "Wait. Do you hear that?"
Michael kept me hustling over the ground, toward the rift. "Hear what? I don't hear anything."
"Yeah." I coughed. "No more hounds howling."
A very tall, slender, inhumanly beautiful woman stepped out of the smoke. Reddish hair curled down past her hips in a riotous cascade, complementing her flawless skin, high cheekbones, and lush, full, bloodred lips. Her face was ageless, and her golden eyes had vertical slits instead of pupils, like a cat. Her gown was a flowing affair of deep green.
"Hello, my son," Lea purred, evidently unaffected by the smoke and unconcerned about the fire. Three great shapes, like mastiffs built from shadows and soot, crouched about her feet, watching us with flat, black eyes. They stood between us and the rift that led back home.
I swallowed and forced down a sudden feeling of childlike panic that started gibbering down in my belly and threatened to come dancing up out of my throat. I stepped forward, between the faerie and Michael and said, in a rough voice, "Hello, Godmother."
My godmother looked around at the inferno and smiled. "It reminds me of times gone by. Doesn't it remind you, my sweet?" She idly reached down and stroked the head of one of the hounds at her side.
"However did you find me so quickly, Godmother?" I asked.
She gave the hellhound a benign smile. "Mmmm. I have my little secrets, sweet. I only wanted to greet my long-estranged godson."
"All right. Hi, good to see you, have to do it again sometime," I said. Smoke curled up into my mouth and I started coughing. "We're kind of in a hurry here, so---"
Lea laughed, a sound like bells just a shade out of tune. "Always in such a rush, you mortals. But we haven't seen each other in ages, Harry." She walked closer, her body moving with a lithe, sensuous grace that might have been mesmerizing in other circumstances. The hounds spread out silently behind her. "We should spend some time together."
Michael lifted his sword again, and said, calmly, "Madame, step from our path, if you please."
"It does not please me," she spat, sudden and vicious. Those rich lips peeled back from dainty, sharp canines, and at the same time the three shadowy hounds let out bubbling growls. Her golden eyes swept past Michael and back to me. "He is mine, sir Knight, by blood right, by Law, and by his own broken word. He has made a compact with me. You have no power over that."
"Harry?" Michael shot me a quick look. "Is what she says true?"
I licked my lips, and gripped my staff. "I was a lot younger, then. And a lot more stupid."
"Harry, if you have made a covenant with her of your own free will, then she is right---there is little I can do to stop her."
Another building fell with a roar. The fires gathered around us, and it got hot. Really, really hot. The rift wavered, growing smaller. We didn't have much time left.
"Come, Harry," Lea purred, her voice gone, pardon the pun, smoky again. "Let the good Knight of the White God pass on his way. And let me take you to waters that will soothe your hurts and balm your ills."
It sounded like a good idea. It sounded really good. Her own magic saw to that. I felt my feet moving toward her in a slow, leaden shuffling.
"Dresden," Michael said, sharply. "Good Lord, man! What are you doing?"
"Go home, Michael," I said. My voice came out thick, dull, as though I'd been drinking. I saw Lea's mouth, her soft, lovely mouth, curl upward in a triumphant smirk. I didn't try to fight the pull of the magic. I wouldn't have been able to stop my legs in any case. Lea'd had my number for years, and as far as I could tell she always would. I hadn't a prayer of taking control back for more than a few seconds. The air grew cooler as I got closer to her, and I could smell her---her body, her hair, like wildflowers and musky earth, intoxicating. "There isn't much time before the rift closes. Go home."
"Harry!" Michael shouted.
Lea placed one long-fingered, slender hand upon my cheek. A wash of tingling pleasure went through me. My body reacted to her, helpless and demanding at the same time, and I had to fight to keep thoughts of her beauty from preoccupying me altogether.
"Yes, my sweet man," Lea whispered, golden eyes bright with glee. "Sweet, sweet, sweet. Now, lay aside your rod and staff."
I watched dully, as my fingers released both. They clattered to the ground. The flames grew closer, but I didn't feel them. The rift glowed and shrank, almost closed. I narrowed my eyes, gathering my will.
"Will you complete your bargain now, sweet mortal child?" Lea murmured, sliding her hands over my chest and then over my shoulders.
"I will go with you," I answered, letting my voice come out thick, slow. Her eyes lit with malicious glee, and she threw her head back and laughed, revealing creamy, delicious expanses of throat and bosom.
"When Hell freezes over," I added, and drew out the little sack of ghost dust for the last time. I dumped it all over and down the previously mentioned bosom. There isn't much lore about faeries and depleted uranium, yet, but there's a ton about faeries and cold iron. They don't like it, and the iron content of the dust's formula was pretty high.
Lea's flawless complexion immediately split into fiery scarlet welts, the skin drying and cracking before my eyes. Lea's triumphant laugh turned into an agonized scream, and she released me, tearing her silken gown away from her chest in a panic, revealing more gorgeous flesh being riven by the cold iron.
"Michael," I shouted, "now!" I gave my godmother a stiff shove, scooped up my staff and rod, and dove for the rift. I heard a snarl, and something fastened around one of my boots, dragging me to the ground. I thrust my staff down at one of the hellhounds, and the wood struck it in one of its eyes. It roared in rage, and its two pack mates came rushing toward me.
Michael stepped in the way and swept his sword at one of them. The true iron struck the faerie beast, and blood and white fire erupted from the wound. The second one leapt upon Michael and fastened its fangs onto his thigh, ripping and jerking.
I brought my staff down hard on the beast's skull, driving it off Michael's leg, and started dragging my friend back toward the swiftly vanishing line of the rift. More hellhounds appeared, rushing from the burning ruins around us. "Come on!" I shouted. "There's no time!"
"Treachery!" spat my godmother. She rose up from the ground, blackened and burned, her fine dress in tatters about her waist, her body and limbs stretched, knobby, and inhuman. She clenched her hands into fists at her sides, and the fire from the building around us seemed to rush down, gathering in her grasp in a pair of blazing points of violet and emerald light. "Treasonous, poisonous child! You are mine as your mother swore unto me! As you swore!"
"You shouldn't make contracts with a minor!" I shouted back, and shoved Michael forward, into the rift. He wavered for a moment on the narrow opening, and then fell through and vanished back into the real world.
"If you will not give me your life, serpent child, then I will have your blood!" Lea took two huge strides toward me and hurled both hands forward. A thunderbolt of braided emerald and violet power rushed at my face.
I hurled myself backwards, at the rift, and prayed that it was still open enough to let me fall through. I extended my staff toward my godmother and threw up whatever weak shield I could. The faerie fire hammered into the shield, hurling me back into the rift like a straw before a tornado. I felt my staff smolder and burst into flames in my hand as I went sailing through.
I landed on the floor of the nursery back in Cook County Hospital, my leather duster trailing with it a shroud of smoke that swiftly converted itself to a thin, disgusting coating of residual ectoplasm, while my staff burned with weird green and purple fire. Babies, in their little glass cribs, screamed lustily all around me. Confused voices babbled from the next room.
Then the rift closed, and we were left back in the real world, surrounded by crying babies. The fluorescent lights all came back up, and we could hear more worried words from the nurses back at the duty station. I beat out the fires on my staff, and then sat there, panting and hurting. None of the matter of the Nevernever may have come back to the real world---but the injuries gained there were very real.
Michael got up, and looked around at the babies, making sure that they were all in satisfactory condition. Then he sat down next to me, wiped the patina of ectoplasm from his brow, and started pressing the material of his cloak against the oozing gashes in his leg, where the hellhound's fangs had sunk through his jeans. He gave me a pensive, frowning stare.
"What?" I asked him.
"Your godmother. You got away from her," he said.
I laughed, weakly. "This time, yeah. So what's bothering you?"
"You lied to her to do it."
"I tricked her," I countered. "Classic tactics with faeries."
He blinked, and then used another section of his cloak to clean the ecto-gook off of Amoracchius. "I just thought you were an honest man, Harry," he said, his expression injured. "I can't believe you lied to her."
I started to laugh, weakly, too exhausted to move. "You can't believe I lied to her."
"Well, no," he said, his voice defensive. "That's not the way we're supposed to win. We're the good guys, Harry."
I laughed some more, and wiped a trickle of blood off of my face.
"Well, we are!"
Some kind of alarm started going off. One of the nurses stepped into the observation room, took one look at the pair of us, and ran out screaming.
"You know what bothers me?" I asked.
"What's that?"
I set my scorched staff and rod aside. "I'm wondering how in the world my godmother happened to be right at hand, when I stepped through into Nevernever. It isn't like the place is a small neighborhood. I wasn't there five minutes before she showed up."
Michael sheathed his sword and set it carefully aside, out of easy arm's reach. Then unfastened his cloak, wincing. "Yes. It seems an unlikely coincidence."
We both put our hands up on top of our heads, as a Chicago P.D. patrolman, his jacket and pants stained with spilled coffee, burst into the nursery, gun drawn. We both sat there with our hands on our head, and did our best to look friendly and nonthreatening.
"Don't worry," Michael said, quietly. "Just let me do the talking."
Michael rested his chin in his hands and sighed. "I can't believe we're in jail."
"Disturbing the peace," I snorted, pacing the confines of the holding cell. "Trespass. Hah. They'd have seen disturbed peace if we hadn't shown up." I jerked a fistful of citations out of my pants pocket. "Look at this. Speeding, failure to obey traffic signs, dangerous and reckless operation of a motor vehicle. And here's the best one. Illegal parking. I'm going to lose my license!"
"You can't blame them, Harry. It isn't as though we could explain what happened in terms that they would understand."
I kicked at the bars in frustration. Pain lanced up my leg and I immediately regretted it---they'd taken away my boots when I'd been put through processing. Added to my aching ribs, the wounds on my head, and my stiffening fingers, it was too much. I sat down on the bench next to Michael with a whuff of expelled breath. "I get so sick of that," I said. "People like you and me stand up to things that these jokers"---I made an all-encompassing gesture---"would never even dream existed. We don't get paid for it, we hardly even get thanked for it."
Michael's tone was unruffled, philosophical. "It's the nature of the beast, Harry."
"I don't mind it so much. I just hate it when something like this happens." I stood up, frustrated again, and started pacing the interior of the cell. "What really galls me is that we still don't know why the spirit world's been so jumpy. This is big, Michael. If we don't pin down what's causing it---"
"Who's causing it."
"Right, who's causing it---who knows what could happen?"
Michael half-smiled. "The Lord will never give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear, Harry. All we can do is face what comes and have faith."
I gave him a sour glance. "I need to get myself some bigger shoulders, then. Someone in accounting must have made a mistake."
Michael let out a rough, warm laugh, and shook his head, then lay back on the bench, crossing his arms beneath his head. "We did what was right. Isn't that enough?"
I thought of all those babies, snuffling and making cute, piteous little sounds as the nurses had rushed about, gathering them up and making sure that they were all right, carrying them off to their mommies. One, a fat little Gerber candidate, had simply let out an enormous burp and promptly fallen asleep on the nurse's shoulder. About a dozen little lives, all told, with an open future laid out before them---a future that would have abruptly ended if I hadn't acted.
I felt a stupid little smile playing at the corners of my mouth, and a very small, very concrete sense of satisfaction that my indignation hadn't managed to erase. I turned away from Michael, so that he wouldn't see the smile, and forced myself to sound resigned. "Is it enough? I guess it's going to have to be."
Michael laughed again. I flashed him a scowl, and it only drew more merry laughter, so I gave up trying, and just leaned against the bars. "How long before we get out of here, do you think?"
"I've never been bailed out of jail before," Michael said. "You'd be a better judge."
"Hey," I protested, "what's that supposed to mean?"
Michael's smile faded. "Charity," he predicted, "is not going to be very happy."
I winced. Michael's wife. "Yeah, well. All we can do is face what comes and have faith, right?"
Michael grunted, somehow making it wry. "I'll say a prayer to Saint Jude."
I leaned my head against the bars and closed my eyes. I ached in places I didn't know could ache. I could have dozed off right there. "All I want," I said, "is to get home, get clean, and go to sleep."
An hour or so later, a uniformed officer appeared and opened the door, informing us that we'd made bail. I got a sickly little feeling in my stomach. Michael and I shuffled out of the holding area into the adjacent waiting room.
A woman in a roomy dress and a heavy cardigan stood waiting for us, her arms folded over her seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. She was tall, with gorgeous, silken blonde hair that fell to her waist in a shining curtain, timelessly lovely features, and dark eyes smoldering with contained anger. "Michael Joseph Patrick Carpenter," she snapped, and stalked toward us. Well, actually she waddled, but the set of her shoulders and her determined expression made it seem like a stalk. "You're a mess. This is what comes of taking up with bad company."
"Hello, angel," Michael rumbled, and leaned over to give the woman a kiss on the cheek.
She accepted it with all the loving tolerance of a Komodo dragon. "Don't you hello angel me. Do you know what I had to go through to find a babysitter, get all the way out here, get the money together and then get the sword back for you?"
"Hi Charity," I said brightly. "Gee, it's good to see you, too. It's been, what, three or four years since we've talked?"
"Five years, Mr. Dresden," the woman said, shooting me a glare. "And the Good Lord willing it will be five more before I have to put up with your idiocy again."
"But I---"
She thrusted her swollen stomach at me like the ram on a Greek warship. "Every time you come nosing around, you get Michael into some sort of trouble. And now into jail! What will the children think?"
"Look, Charity, it was really imp---"
"Missus Carpenter," she snarled. "It's always really important, Mr. Dresden. Well, my husband has engaged in many important activities without what I dubiously term your 'help.' But it's only when you're around that he seems to come back to me covered in blood."
"Hey," I protested. "I got hurt too!"
"Good," she said. "Maybe it will make you more cautious in the future."
I scowled down at the woman. "I'll have you know---"
She grabbed the front of my shirt and dragged my face down to hers. She was surprisingly strong, and she could glare right at me without looking me square in the eyes. "I'll have you know," she said, voice steely, "that if you ever get my Michael into trouble so deep that he can't come home to his family I will make you sorry for it." Tears that had nothing to do with weakness made her eyes bright for a moment, and she shook with emotion. I have to admit, at that particular moment, her threat scared me, waddling pregnancy and all.
She finally released me and turned back to her husband, gently touching a dark scab on his face. Michael put his arms around her, and with a little cry she hugged him back, burying her face against his chest and weeping without making any sound. Michael held her very carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking her, and stroked her hair.
I stood there for a second like a floundering goob. Michael looked up at me and met my gaze for a moment. He then turned, keeping his wife under one arm, and started walking away.
I watched the two of them for a moment, walking in step beside one another, while I stood there alone. Then I stuck my hands into my pockets, and turned away. I hadn't ever noticed, before, how well the two of them matched one another---Michael with his quiet strength and unfailing reliability, and Charity with her blazing passion and unshakable loyalty to her husband.
The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn't ever really worked for me. I think it's had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.
As I stood there, brooding, I sensed her presence before I smelled her perfume, a warmth and energy about her that I'd grown to know over the time we'd been together. Susan paused at the door of the waiting room, looking back over her shoulder. I studied her. I never got tired of that. Susan had dark skin, tanned even darker from our previous weekend at the beach, and raven-black hair cut off neatly at her shoulders. She was slender, but curved enough to draw an admiring look from the officer behind the counter as she stood there in a flirty little skirt and half-top which left her midriff bare. My phone call caught her just as she'd been leaving for our rendezvous.
She turned to me and smiled, her chocolate-colored eyes worried but warm. She tilted her head back toward the hallway behind her, where Michael and Charity had gone. "They're a beautiful couple, aren't they?"
I tried to smile back, but didn't do so well. "They got off to a good start."
Susan's eyes studied my face, the cuts there, and the worry in her eyes deepened. "Oh? How's that?"
"He rescued her from a fire-breathing dragon." I walked toward her.
"Sounds nice," she said, and met me halfway, giving me a long and gentle hug that made my bruised ribs ache. "You okay?"
"I'll be okay."
"More ghostbusting with Michael. What's his story?"
"Off the record. Publicity could hurt him. He's got kids."
Susan frowned, but nodded. "All right," she said, and added a flair of melodrama to her words. "So what is he? Some kind of eternal soldier? Maybe a sleeping Arthurian knight woken in this desperate age to battle the forces of evil?"
"As far as I know he's a carpenter."
Susan arched a brow at me. "Who fights ghosts. What, has he got a magic nailgun or something?"
I tried not to smile. The muscles at the corners of my mouth ached. "Not quite. He's a righteous man."
"He seemed nice enough to me."
"No, not self-righteous. Righteous. The real deal. He's honest, loyal, faithful. He lives his ideals. It gives him power."
Susan frowned. "He looked average enough. I'd have expected . . . I'm not sure. Something. A different attitude."
"That's because he's humble too," I said. "If you asked him if he was righteous, he'd laugh at the idea. I guess that's part of it. I've never met anyone like him. He's a good man."
She pursed her lips. "And the sword?"
"Amoracchius," I supplied.
"He named his sword. How very Freudian of him. But his wife just about reached down that clerk's throat to get it back."
"It's important to him," I said. "He believes that it is one of three weapons given by God to mankind. Three swords. Each of them has a nail that is supposed to be from the Cross worked into its design. Only one of the righteous can wield them. The ones who do call themselves the Knights of the Cross. Others call them the Knights of the Sword."
Susan frowned. "The Cross?" she said. "As in the Crucifixion, capital C?"
I shrugged, uncomfortably. "How should I know? Michael believes it. That kind of belief is a power of its own. Maybe that's enough." I took a breath and changed the subject. "Anyway, my car got impounded. I had to drive fast and C.P.D. didn't like it."
Her dark eyes sparkled. "Anything worth a story?"
I laughed tiredly. "Don't you ever give up?"
"A girl's got to earn a living," she said, and fell into step beside me on the way out, slipping her arm through mine.
"Maybe tomorrow? I just want to get back home and get some sleep."
"No date, I guess." She smiled up at me, but I could see the expression was strained around the edges.
"Sorry. I---"
"I know." She sighed. I shortened my steps a little and she lengthened hers, though neither of us moved quickly. "I know what you're doing is important, Harry. I just wish, sometimes, that---" She broke off, frowning.
"That what?"
"Nothing. Really. It's selfish."
"That what?" I repeated. I found her hand with my bruised fingers and squeezed gently.
She signed, and stopped in the hall, turning to face me. She took both of my hands, and didn't look up when she said, "I just wish that I could be that important to you, too."
An uncomfortable pang hit me in the middle of my sternum. Ow. It hurt to hear that, literally. "Susan," I stammered. "Hey. Don't ever think that you're not important to me."
"Oh," she said, still not looking up, "it's not that. Like I said, just selfish. I'll get over it."
"I just don't want you to feel like . . ." I frowned and took a breath. "I don't want you to think that I don't . . . What I mean to say is that I . . ." Love you. That should have been simple enough to say. But the words stuck hard in my throat. I'd never said them to anyone I didn't lose, and every time I told my mouth to make the sounds, something shut down somewhere along the way.
Susan looked up at me, her eyes flickering over my face. She reached up a hand and touched the bandage on my forehead, her fingers light, gentle, warm. Silence fell heavy on the hallway. I stood there staring stupidly at her.
Finally, I leaned down and kissed her, hard, like I was trying to push the words out of my useless mouth and into her. I don't know if she understood, but she melted to me, all warm, soft tension, smelling of cinnamon, the sweetness of her lips soft and pliant beneath mine. One of my hands drifted to the small of her back, to the smooth, rounded ridges of muscle on either side of her spine, and drew her against me a little harder.
Footsteps coming from the other direction made us both smile and break away from the kiss. A female officer walked by, her lips twisted into a knowing little smirk, and I felt my cheeks flush.
Susan took my hand from her back, bending her mouth to put a gentle kiss on my bruised fingers. "Don't think you're getting off that easy, Harry Dresden," she said. "I'm going to get you to start talking if it kills you." But she didn't press the issue, and together we reclaimed my stuff and left.
I fell asleep on the drive back to my apartment, but I woke up when the car crunched into the gravel parking lot beside the stone stairs leading down to my lair, in the basement of an old boardinghouse. We got out of the car, and I stretched, looking around the summer night with a scowl.
"What's wrong?" Susan asked.
"Mister," I said. "He's usually running right up to me when I come home. I let him out early this morning."
"He's a cat, Harry," Susan said, flashing me a smile. "Maybe he's got a date."
"What if he got hit by a car? What if a dog got him?"
Susan let out a laugh and walked over to me. My libido noted the sway of her hips in the little skirt with an interest that made my aching muscles cringe. "He's as big as a horse, Harry. I pity the dog that tries something."
I reached back into the car for my staff and rod, then slipped an arm around her. Susan's warmth beside me, the scent of cinnamon drifting up to me from her hair, felt incredibly nice at the end of a long day. But it just didn't feel right, to not have Mister run up to me and bowl into my shins in greeting.
That should have been enough to tip me off. I'll plead weariness, achiness, and sexual distraction. It came as a total shock to me to feel a wave of cold energy writhe into my face, in tandem with a shadowy form rising up from the steps leading down to my apartment. I froze and took a step back, only to see another silent shape step around the edge of the boardinghouse and start walking toward us. Gooseflesh erupted up and down my arms.
Susan caught on a second or two after my wizard's senses had given me warning. "Harry," she breathed. "What is it? Who are they?"
"Take it easy, and get out your car keys," I said, as the two shapes approached us, the waves of cool energy increasing as they did. Light from the distant street lamp reflected in the nearest figure's eyes, gleaming huge and black. "We're getting out of here. They're vampires."
One of the vampires let out a velvet laugh, and stepped out into the dim light. He wasn't particularly tall, and he moved with a casual and dangerous grace that belied his crystal-blue eyes, styled blond hair, and the tennis whites he wore. "Bianca told us you'd be nervous," he purred.
The second of the pair kept coming toward us from the corner of the boardinghouse. She, too, was of innocuous height and build, and possessed the same blue eyes and flawless golden hair as the man. She too was dressed in tennis whites. "But," she breathed, and licked her lips with a cat-quick tongue, "she didn't tell us you would smell so delicious."
Susan fumbled with her keys, and pressed up against me, tight with tension and fear. "Harry?"
"Don't look them in the eyes," I said. "And don't let them lick you."
Susan shot me a sharp look from beneath raven brows. "Lick?"
"Yeah. Their saliva's some kind of addictive narcotic." We reached her car. "Get in."
The male vampire opened his mouth, showing his fangs, and laughed. "Peace, wizard. We're not here for your blood."
"Speak for yourself," the girl said. She licked her lips again, and this time I could see the black spots on her long, pink tongue. Ewg.
The male smiled and put a hand on her shoulder, a gesture that was half affection, half physical restraint. "My sister hasn't eaten tonight," he explained. "She's on a diet."
"Vampires on a diet?" Susan murmured beneath her breath.
"Yeah," I said back, sotto voce. "Make hers a Blood Lite."
Susan made a choking sound.
I eyed the male and raised my voice. "Who are you, then? And why are you at my house?"
He inclined his head politely. "My name is Kyle Hamilton. This is my sister, Kelly. We are associates of Madame Bianca's, and we are here to give you a message. An invitation, actually."
"It only takes one of you to deliver a message."
Kyle glanced at his sister. "We were just on the way to our game of doubles."
I snorted. "Yeah, right," I told him. "Whatever it is you're selling, I don't want any. You can go now."
Kyle frowned. "I urge you to reconsider, Mr. Dresden. You, of all people, should know Madame Bianca is the most influential vampire in the city of Chicago. Denying her invitation could have grave consequences."
"I don't like threats," I shot back. I hefted my blasting rod and leveled it at Kyle's baby blues. "Keep it up and there's going to be a greasy spot right about where you're standing."
The pair of them smiled at me---innocent angels with pointed teeth. "Please, Mr. Dresden," Kyle said. "Understand that I am only pointing out the potential hazards of a diplomatic incident between the Vampire Court and the White Council."
Whoops. That changed things. I hesitated, and then lowered the blasting rod. "This is court business? Official business?"
"The Vampire Court," Kyle said, a measured cadence to his words, "extends a formal invitation to Harry Dresden, Wizard, as the local representative of the White Council of Wizards, to attend the reception celebrating the elevation of Bianca St. Claire to the rank of Margravine of the Vampire Court, three nights hence, reception to begin at midnight." Kyle paused to produce an expensive-looking white envelope and to refresh his smile. "The safety of all invited guests is assured, by word of the assembled court, of course."
"Harry," Susan breathed. "What's going on?"
"Tell you in a minute," I said. I stepped away from Susan. "You are acting as an ordained herald of the court, then?"
"I am," Kyle said.
I nodded. "Bring me the invitation."
The pair of them started toward me. I lifted my blasting rod and muttered a word. Power flooded through the rod, and the far tip began to glow with an incandescent light. "Not her," I said, nodding to the herald's sister. "Just you."
Kyle kept his smile, but his eyes had changed from blue to a shade of angry black that was rapidly expanding to cover the whites. "Well," he said, his voice tense, "aren't we the little lawyer, Mr. Dresden."
I smiled back at him. "Look, Sparky, you're the herald. You should know the accords as well as I do. You've license to deliver and receive messages and to have safe passage granted you so long as you don't start any trouble." I waved the tip of the rod toward the girl beside him. "She doesn't. And she's not obliged to keep the peace, either. Let's just say I'd rather we all walked away from this."
They both made a hissing sound that no human could quite have duplicated. Kyle pushed Kelly roughly back behind him, where she remained, her soft-looking hands pressed to her stomach, her eyes flooded entirely black and empty of humanity. Kyle stalked toward me and thrust the envelope at me. I swallowed my fear, lowered my blasting rod, and took it.
"Your business here is complete," I told him. "Blow."
"You'd better be there, Dresden," Kyle snarled, pacing back to his sister's side. "My lady will be most upset if you are not."
"I told you to blow, Kyle." I lifted my hand, gathered my anger and my fear as handy sources of fuel, and said, quietly, "Ventas servitas."
Energy flowed out of me. Wind roared up in response to my command, and whipped out toward the pair of vampires, carrying a cloud of dust and dirt and debris with it. They both staggered, lifting a hand to shield their eyes against flying particles.
As the wind faded I sagged, wearied by the effort of moving that much air, and watched the vampires gather their wits and blink their eyes clear. Their perfect tennis whites were stained, their beautiful complexions were mussed, and best of all, their flawless hair was standing up every which way.
They hissed at me and crouched, bodies oddly balanced and held with an inhuman lightness. Then there was a blur of tennis whites, and they were gone.
I didn't assume that they had left until I let my senses drift out from me, tasting the air for the cold energy that had surrounded them. It had faded, as well. Only then, when I was absolutely sure they were gone, did I relax. Well, it felt like simple relaxing---but generally when I relax, I don't stagger and need to plant my staff firmly on the ground to keep from falling over. I stood there like that for a second, my head swimming.
"Wow." Susan came toward me, her face concerned. "Harry, you sure know how to make friends."
I wobbled a little, hardly able to stand. "I don't need friends like that."
She got close enough for me to lean on, and spared my ego by slipping underneath my arm as though for my protection. "Are you all right?"
"Tired. I've been working too hard tonight. Must have gotten out of shape."
"Can you walk?"
I gave her a smile that probably looked strained, and started walking toward the stairs leading down to my apartment. Mister, my grey cat, came flying over the ground from the darkness somewhere and threw himself fondly against my legs. Thirty pounds of cat is a lot of fondness, and I had to have Susan's help to keep from falling over. "Eating small children again, Mister?"
My cat meowed, then padded down the stairs and pawed at the door.
"So," Susan said. "The vampires are throwing a party."
I fished my keys out of my duster's pocket. I unlocked the door to the old place, and Mister bolted inside. I shut the door behind us, and stared wearily at my living room. The fire had died down to glowing embers, but still shed red-golden light over everything. I decorated my apartment in textures, not colors, in any case. I like the smooth grain of old woods, the heavy tapestries on the bare stone walls. The chairs are all thickly padded and comfortable looking, and rugs are strewn over the bare stone floor in a variety of materials, patterns, and weaves, from Arabian to Navajo.
Susan helped me hobble in until I could collapse on my plushly cushioned couch. She took my staff and blasting rod from me, wrinkling her nose at the charred smell, and set them in the corner next to my cane sword. Then she came back over to me and knelt down, flashing a lot of bare, pretty leg. She took my boots off, and I groaned as my feet came free.
"Thanks," I said.
She plucked the envelope from my hand. "Could you get the candles?"
I groaned, for an answer, and she sniffed. "Big baby. You just want to see me walk around in this skirt."
"Guilty," I said. She quirked a smile at me, and went to the fireplace. She added a few logs to it from the old tin hod, and then stirred the embers with a poker until licks of flame came up. I don't have any electric lights in my apartment. Gadgets go out so often that there's no point in constantly replacing them. My refrigerator is an old-style icebox. The kind with ice. I shuddered to think of what I could do to gas lines.
So, I lived without heat, except for my fireplace, and without hot water, without electricity. The curse of a wizard. It saves on the utilities bills, I have to admit, but it can be damned inconvenient.
Susan had to bend down far over the fire to thrust a long candlestick's tip down into the small flames. The orange light curved around the lean muscles of her legs in a fashion I found positively fascinating, even as wearied as I was.
Susan rose with the lighted candle in her hand and cast a smirk at me. "You're staring, Harry."
"Guilty," I said again.
She lit several candles on the mantel from the first, and then opened the white envelope, frowning. "Wow," she said, and held the invitation inside up to the light. I couldn't make out the words, but they had that white-yellow glint that you only get from true gold. "The bearer, Wizard Harry Dresden, and an escort of his choosing are hereby courteously invited to a reception . . . I didn't think they used invitations like this anymore."
"Vampires. They can be a couple hundred years out of style and not notice."
"Harry," Susan said. She flicked the invitation against the heel of her hand a couple of times. "You know, something occurs to me."
My brain tried to stir from its congealment. Some instinct twitched, warning me that Susan was up to something. "Um," I said, blinking my eyes in an effort to clear my thoughts. "I hope you're not thinking what a great opportunity it would be for you to go to the ball."
Her eyes glinted with something very much like lust. "Think of it, Harry. There could be beings there hundreds of years old. I could get enough stories from a half hour of chat to last me---"
"Hang on, Cinderella," I said. "In the first place, I'm not going to the ball. In the second, even if I was I wouldn't take you with me."
Her back straightened and she put one fist on her hip. "And just what is that supposed to mean?"
I winced. "Look, Susan. They're vampires. They eat people. You've got no idea how dangerous it would be for me there---or for you, for that matter."
"What about what Kyle said? The guarantee of your safety?"
"Talk is cheap," I said. "Look, everyone in the old circles is big on the old laws of courtesy and hospitality. But you can only trust them to adhere to the letter of the law. If I happened to get served a bad batch of mushrooms, or someone drove by and filled the whole place with bullets and I was the only mortal there, they'd just say, 'Oh my, what a terrible shame. So sorry, really, it won't happen again.' "
"So you're saying they'd kill you," Susan said.
"Bianca has a grudge against me," I said. "She couldn't just sneak up on me and tear my throat out, but she could arrange for something to happen to me more indirectly. It's probably what she has in mind."
Susan frowned. "I've seen you handle things a lot worse than those two out there."
I let out a breath in exasperation. "Maybe, sure. But what's the point in taking chances?"
"Can't you see what this might mean to me?" she said. "Harry, that footage I shot of the werewolf---"
"Loup-garou," I interrupted.
"Whatever. It was ten seconds of footage that was only aired for three days before it vanished---and it put me further ahead than five years of legwork. If I could publish actual interviews with vampires---"
"Sheesh, Susan. You're reading too much off the bestseller list. In the real world, the vampire eats you before you get to hit the record button."
"I've taken chances before---so have you."
"I don't go looking for trouble," I said.
Her eyes flashed. "Dammit, Harry. How long have I been putting aside the things that happen to you? Like tonight, when I was supposed to be spending the evening with my boyfriend and instead I'm bailing him out of jail."
Ouch. I glanced down. "Susan, believe me. If I could have done anything else---"
"This could be a fantastic opportunity for me."
She was right. And she had bailed me out of trouble often enough before that maybe I owed her that opportunity, dangerous as it might be. She was a big girl and could make her own choices. But dammit, I couldn't just nod my head and smile and let her walk into that kind of danger. Better to try to sidetrack her. "No," I said. "I've got enough problems without pissing off the White Council again."
Her eyes narrowed. "What's this White Council? Kyle talked to you as though it were some kind of ruling body. Is it like the Vampire Court, only for wizards?"
Exactly like that, I thought. Susan hadn't gotten as far as she had by being stupid. "Not really," I told her.
"You're a horrible liar, Harry."
"The White Council is a group of the most powerful men and women in the world, Susan. Wizards. Their big currency is in secrets, and they don't like people knowing about them."
Her eyes gleamed, like a hound on a fresh scent. "And you're . . . some kind of ambassador for them?"
I had to laugh at the notion. "Oh, God, no. But I'm a member. It's sort of like having a black belt. It's a mark of status, of respect. With the council, it means that I get to vote, when issues come up, and that I have to abide by their rules."
"Are you entitled to represent them at a function like this?"
I didn't like the direction this conversation was headed. "Um. Obligated to, really, in this case."
"So if you don't show up, you'll be in trouble."
I scowled. "Not as much trouble as I'll be in if I go. The worst the council'd be able to accuse me of is being impolite. I can live with that."
"And if you do show up? Come on, Harry. What's the worst that could happen?"
I threw up my hands. "I could get myself killed! Or worse. Susan, you really don't understand what you're asking of me." I pushed myself up off the couch, to go to her. Bad idea. My head swam and my vision blurred.
I would have fallen, but Susan dropped the invitation and caught me. She eased me back down to the couch, and I kept my arm around her, drawing her down with me. She felt soft and warm.
We lay there for a minute, and she rubbed her cheek against the duster. Leather creaked. I heard her sigh. "I'm sorry, Harry. I shouldn't hit you with this right now."
"It's all right," I said.
"I just think that it's something big. If we---"
I turned a little, tangled my fingers in the dark softness of her hair, and kissed her.
Her eyelids opened wide for a second, and then lowered. Her words broke off into a low, growling sound, and her mouth softened beneath mine, warm and getting warmer. In spite of my aches and bruises, the kiss felt good. It felt really good. Her mouth tasted nice, the softness of her lips mobile and eager beneath mine. I felt her slide a few fingers in between the buttons of my shirt, caressing the skin there, and electric sensation thrilled through me.
Our tongues met, and I dragged her closer. She moaned again, then abruptly pushed me back enough to straddle my hips with those long and lovely legs and begin to kiss me as though she meant to inhale me. I ran my hands over her hips, lingering on the small of her back, and she moved them, grinding against me. I moved my hands to the taut tension of her thighs and slid them up over the bare, smooth skin, lifting the skirt up, baring her legs, her hips.
I faltered in surprise for a half-second when I realized she wasn't wearing anything underneath---but then, we'd been planning on an evening in. A spasm of need and hunger pounded through all the exhaustion, and I clutched her, felt her gasp again, willing and as hungry as me, her body tensing against me, beneath my hands.
She started jerking at my belt, gasping, her breath hot in my face. "Harry. You jerk. Don't you think this is going to distract me forever."
Shortly after that, we made sure that neither of us could think of anything at all, and fell asleep a goodly while after that, tangled together in a sprawl of exhausted limbs, dark hair, and soft blankets in front of the fire.
All right, so. The entire day wasn't a living hell.
But, as it turned out, hell got up awfully early in the morning.
I dreamed.
The nightmare felt familiar, almost comfortable, though it had been years since I'd gone through it. It began in a cave, its walls made of translucent crystal, all but glowing in the dim light of the fire beneath the cauldron. The silver manacles were tight on my wrists, and I was too dizzy to keep my own balance. I looked to the left and right and watched my blood glide down over the manacles from where they pierced my wrists like thorns, then fall into a pair of earthen bowls set out beneath them.
My godmother came to me, pale and breathtaking in the firelight, her hair spilling down around her like a cloud of silk. The sidhe lady was beautiful beyond the pale of mortals, her eyes bewitching, her mouth more tempting than the most luscious fruit. She kissed my bare chest. Shudders of cold pleasure ran through me.
"Soon," she whispered, between kisses. "Only a few more nights of the dark moon, my sweetling, and you will be strong enough."
She kept kissing me, and I began to lose my vision. Cold pleasure, faerie magic, coursed through her lips like a drug, so sweet that it was almost an agony of its own, and made the torment of the bonds, the blood loss, almost worthwhile. Almost. I felt myself gasping for breath, and stared at the fire, focusing on it, trying to keep from falling into the darkness.
The dream changed. I dreamt of fire. Someone I had once loved like a father stood in the middle of it, screaming in agony. They were black screams, horrible screams, high-pitched and utterly without pride or dignity or humanity. In the dream, as in life, I forced myself to watch flesh blacken and flake away from sizzling muscle and baking bone, watched muscles contract in tortured spasms while I stood over the fire and, metaphorically speaking, blew on the coals.
"Justin," I whispered. In the end, I couldn't watch any longer. I closed my eyes and bowed my head, listening to the thunder of my own heart pounding in my ears. Pounding. My heart pounding.
I came out of the dream, blinked open my eyes. My door rattled on its frame under a series of hammering blows. Susan woke up at the same time, sitting up, the blanket we'd been curled under gliding down over the curves of her breasts. It was still dark outside. The longest candle hadn't yet burned away, but the fire was down to embers again.
My body ached all over, the day-after ache of tired joints and muscles demanding time to recuperate. I rose as the pounding went on, and went to the kitchen drawer. My .38 had been lost in the battle with the gang of half-mad lycanthropes the year before, and I'd replaced it with a medium-barreled .357. I must have been feeling insecure that day, or something.
The gun weighed about two thousand pounds in my hand. I made sure that it was loaded and turned to face the door. Susan pushed her hair out of her eyes, blinked at my gun, and backed away, making damn sure she was out of my line of fire. Smart girl, Susan.
"You're not going to have much luck breaking down that door," I called out. I didn't point the gun at the door, yet. Never point a gun at anything you aren't sure you want dead. "I replaced the original one with a steel door and a steel frame. Demons, you know."
The pounding ceased. "Dresden," Michael called from the other side of the door. "I tried to reach you on the phone, but it must be off the hook. We've got to talk."
I frowned, and put the gun back in the drawer. "Okay, okay. Sheesh, Michael. Do you know what time it is?"
"Time to work," he answered. "The sun will be up shortly."
"Lunatic," I mumbled.
Susan looked around at the remains of our clothing, scattered pretty much everywhere, the sprawl of blankets and pillows and cushions all over the floor. "I think maybe I'll just wait in your room," she said.
"Right, okay." I opened the kitchen closet and got my heavy robe out, the one I usually save for working in the lab, and slipped into it. "Stay covered up, all right? I don't want you to get sick."
She gave me a sleepy half-smile and rose, all long limbs and grace and interesting tan lines, then vanished into my little bedroom and shut the door. I walked across the room, and opened the door for Michael.
He stood there in blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a fleece-lined denim jacket. He had his big gym bag slung over his shoulder, and Amoracchius was a silent tension I could just barely feel within it. I looked from the bag to his face and asked, "Trouble?"
"Could be. Did you send someone to Father Forthill last night?"
I rubbed at my eyes, trying to get the sleep out of them. Coffee. I needed coffee. Or a Coke. Just as long as there was caffeine somewhere. "Yes. A girl named Lydia. She was worried that a ghost was after her."
"He called me this morning. Something spent the night trying to get into the church."
I blinked at him. "What? Did it get inside?"
He shook his head. "He didn't have time to tell me much. Can you come down there with me and take a look around?"
I nodded, and stepped back from the door. "Give me a couple of minutes." I headed for the icebox and got out a can of Coke. My fingers worked enough to open it, at least, though they still felt stiff. My stomach reminded me that I'd been ignoring it, and I got out the plate of cold cuts while I was there.
I swigged Coke and made myself a big sandwich. I looked up a minute later to see Michael eyeing the destruction that had been the living room. He nudged one of Susan's shoes with his foot, and glanced up at me apologetically. "I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was here."
"It's okay."
Michael smiled briefly, then nodded. "Well. Do I need to lecture you on sexual involvement before marriage?"
I growled something about early morning and inconvenient visitors and toads. Michael only shook his head, smiling, while I wolfed down food. "Did you tell her?"
"Tell her what?"
He lifted an eyebrow at me.
I rolled my eyes. "Almost."
"You almost told her."
"Sure. Got distracted."
Michael nudged Susan's other shoe with his foot and let out a delicate cough. "So I see."
I finished the sandwich and part of the Coke, then walked across the room and slipped into the bedroom. The room was freezing, and I could see Susan curled into a ball beneath the heavy blankets on my bed. Mister had lain down with his back against hers, and watched me with sleepy, self-satisfied eyes as I came in.
"Rub it in, fuzzball," I growled at him, and dressed quickly. Socks, jeans, T-shirt, heavy flannel work shirt over that. Mom's amulet, around my neck, and a little silver charm bracelet with a half-dozen shields dangling off it, fixed to my left wrist in place of the charm I'd given to Lydia. A plain silver ring, its interior surface inscribed with a number of runes, went onto my right hand. Both pieces of jewelry tingled with the enchantments I'd laid on them, still fairly fresh.
I leaned over the bed and kissed Susan's cheek. She made a sleepy, murmuring sound, and snuggled a little deeper beneath the covers. I thought about getting under there with her and making sure she was nice and warm before leaving---but instead went out, shutting the door carefully behind me.
Michael and I left, piling into his truck, a white (of course) Ford pickup with extra wheels and enough hauling power to move mountains, and headed for Saint Mary of the Angels.
Saint Mary of the Angels is a big church. I mean, a big church. It's been looming over the Wicker Park area for more than eighty years, and has seen the neighborhood grow up from a collection of cheap homes for immigrants mixed in with rich folks' mansions to Little Bohemia today, packed with yuppies and artsies, success stories, and wannabes. The church, I'm told, is modeled after St. Peter's Basilica in Rome---which is to say, enormous and elegant and maybe a bit overdone. It takes up an entire city block. I mean, sheesh.
The sun came up as we entered the parking lot. I felt the golden rays slice across the morning skies, the sudden, subtle shift of forces playing about the world. Dawn is significant, magically speaking. It is a time of new beginnings. Magic isn't as simple as good and evil, light and dark, but there's a lot of correlations between the powers particular to night and the use of black magic.
We drove around to the rear parking lot of the church and got out of the truck. Michael walked in front of me, carrying his bag. I stuffed my hands down in the pockets of my duster as I followed him. I felt uncomfortable, approaching the church---not for any weirdo quasi-mystical reason. Just because I'd never felt comfortable with churches in general. The Church had killed a lot of wizards in its day, believing them in league with Satan. It felt strange to just be strolling up on business. Hi, God, it's me, Harry. Please don't turn me into a pillar of salt.
"Harry," Michael said, bringing me out of my reverie. "Look."
He had stopped beside a pair of worn old cars parked in the back lot. Someone had done one hell of a job on them. The windows had all been smashed, their safety glass fractured and dented. The hoods were dented as well. The headlights lay mostly on the ground in front of the cars, and all the tires were flat.
I walked around to the back of the cars, frowning. The taillights lay shattered on the ground. The antenna had been torn off each car, and were not in sight. Long scratches, in three parallel rows ran down the sides of both cars.
"Well?" Michael asked me.
I looked up at him and shrugged. "Probably something got frustrated when it couldn't get inside the church."
He snorted. "Do you think?" He adjusted the gym bag until Amoracchius's handle lay jutting outside the zipper. "Any chances that it's still around?"
I shook my head. "I doubt it. Come daylight, ghosts usually head back to the Nevernever."
"Usually?"
"Usually. Almost without exception."
Michael eyed me and kept one hand on the hilt of the sword. We walked on up to the delivery door. Compared to the grandeur of the church's front, it looked stunningly modest. On either side of the double doors, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to plant and care for a half-dozen rosebushes. Someone else had gone to a lot of trouble to tear them to shreds. Each plant had been uprooted. Thorny branches lay strewn across several dozen square yards around the door.
I crouched down beside several fallen branches, picking them up one at a time, squinting at them in the dawn dimness.
"What are you looking for?" Michael asked me.
"Blood on the thorns," I said. "Rose thorns can poke little holes in just about anything---and something that tore them up this hard would have been scratching itself on them."
"Any blood?"
"No. No footprints in the earth, either."
Michael nodded. "A ghost, then."
I squinted up at Michael. "I hope not."
He tilted his head and frowned at me.
I dropped a branch and spread my hands. "A ghost can usually only manage to move things, physically, in bursts. Throwing pots and pans. Maybe really stretch things and stack up a bunch of books or something." I gestured at the torn plants, and then back toward the wrecked cars. "Not only that, but it's limited to a certain place, time, or event. The ghost, if it is one, followed Lydia here and rampaged around on blessed ground tearing things apart. I mean, wow. This thing is way stronger than any ghost I've ever heard about."
Michael's frown deepened. "What are you saying, Harry?"
"I'm saying we might be getting out of our depth, here. Look, Michael, I know a lot about spooks and nasties. But they aren't my specialty or anything."
He frowned at me. "We might need to know more."
I stood up, brushing myself off. "That," I said, "is my specialty. Let's talk to Father Forthill."
Michael knocked on the door. It opened at once. Father Forthill, a greying man of slight build and only medium stature, blinked anxiously up at us through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His eyes were normally a shade of blue so bright as to rival robin's eggs, but today they were heavily underlined, shadowed. "Oh," he said. "Oh, Michael. Thank the Lord." He opened the door wider, and Michael stepped over the threshold. The two embraced. Forthill kissed Michael on either cheek and stepped back to peer at me. "And Harry Dresden, professional wizard. I've never had anyone ask me to bless a five-gallon drum into holy water before, Mr. Dresden."
Michael peered at me, evidently surprised that the priest and I knew each other. I shrugged, a little embarrassed, and said, "You told me I could count on him in a pinch."
"And so you can," Forthill said, his blue eyes sparkling for a moment behind the spectacles. "I trust you have no complaints about the blessed water?"
"None at all," I said. "Talk about your surprised ghouls."
"Harry," Michael chided. "You've been keeping secrets again."
"Contrary to what Charity thinks, Michael, I don't go running to the phone to call you every time I have a little problem." I clapped Michael on the shoulder in passing and offered my hand to Father Forthill, who shook it gravely. No hug and kiss on each cheek for me.
Forthill smiled up at me. "I look forward to the day when you give your life to God, Mr. Dresden. He can use men with your courage."
I tried to smile, but it probably looked a little sickly. "Look, Father. I'd love to talk about it with you sometime, but we're here for a reason."
"Indeed," Forthill said. The sparkle in his eyes faded, and his manner became absolutely serious. He began to walk down a clean hallway with dark, heavy beams of old wood overhanging it and paintings of the Saints on the walls. We kept pace with him. "The young woman arrived yesterday, just before sunset."
"Was she all right?" I asked.
He lifted both eyebrows. "All right? I should say not. All the signs of an abused personality. Borderline malnutrition. She had a low-grade fever as well, and hadn't bathed recently. She looked as though she might be going through withdrawal from something."
I frowned. "Yeah. She looked like she was in pretty bad shape." I briefly recounted my conversation with Lydia and my decision to help her.
Father Forthill shook his head. "I provided fresh clothes and a meal for her and was getting set to put her to bed on a spare cot at the back of the rectory. That's when it happened."
"What happened?"
"She began to shake," Forthill said. "Her eyes rolled back into her head. She was still sitting at the dinner table, and spilled her soup onto the floor. I thought she was having a seizure of some sort, and tried to hold her down and to get something into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue." He sighed, clasping his hands behind his back as he walked. "I'm afraid that I was of little help to the poor child. The fit seemed to pass in a few moments, but she still trembled and had gone absolutely pale."
"Cassandra's Tears," I said.
"Or narcotic withdrawal," Forthill said. "Either way, she needed help. I moved her to the cot. She begged me not to leave her, so I sat down and began to read part of St. Matthew's gospel to her. She seemed to calm somewhat, but she had such a look in her eyes . . ." The old priest sighed. "That resolved look that they get when they're sure that they're lost. Despair, and in one so young."
"When did the attack begin?" I asked.
"About ten minutes later," the priest said. "It started with the most terrible howling of wind. Lord preserve me, but I was sure the windows would rattle out of their frames. Then we started to hear sounds, outside." He swallowed. "Terrible sounds. Something walking back and forth. Heavy footsteps. And then it started calling her name." The priest folded his arms and rubbed his palms against either arm.
"I rose and addressed the being, and asked its name, but it only laughed at me. I began to compel it by the Holy Word, and it went quite mad. We could hear it crushing things outside. I don't mind telling you that it was quite the most terrifying experience I have ever had in my life.
"The girl tried to leave. To go out to it. She said that she didn't want me harming myself, that it would only find her in any case. Well, I forbade her, of course, and refused to let her past me. It kept on, outside, and I kept on reading the Word aloud to the girl. It waited outside. I could . . . feel it, but could see nothing outside the windows. Such a darkness. And every so often it would destroy something else, and we'd hear the sound of it.
"After several hours, it seemed to grow quiet. The girl went to sleep. I walked the halls to make sure all the doors and windows were still closed, and when I came back she was gone."
"Gone?" I asked. "Gone as in left or as in just gone?"
Forthill gave me a smile that looked a bit shaky. "The back door was unlocked, though she'd shut it after herself." The older man shook his head. "I called Michael at once, of course."
"We've got to find that girl," I said.
Forthill shook his head, his expression grave. "Mr. Dresden, I am certain that only the power of the Almighty kept us safe within these walls last night."
"I won't argue with you, Father."
"But if you could have sensed this creature's anger, its . . . rage. Mr. Dresden, I would not wish to encounter this being outside of a church without seeking God's help in the matter."
I jerked a thumb at Michael. "I did seek God's help. Heck, is one Knight of the Cross not enough? I could always put out the Bat-signal for the other two."
Forthill smiled. "That's not what I meant, and you know it. But as you wish. You must come to your own decision." He turned to Michael and me both and said, "I hope, gentlemen, that I can trust your discretion on this matter? The police report will doubtless reflect that persons unknown perpetuated the vandalism."
I snorted. "A little white lie, Father?" I felt bad the minute I'd said it, but heck. I get tired of the conversion efforts every time I show up.
"Evil gains power from fear, Mr. Dresden," Forthill replied. "Within the Church, we have agencies for dealing with these matters." He put a hand on Michael's shoulder, briefly. "But spreading word of it to everyone, even to all of the brethren would accomplish nothing but to frighten many people and to make the enemy that much more able to do harm."
I nodded at the priest. "I like that attitude, Father. You almost sound like a wizard."
His eyebrows shot up, but then he broke into a quiet, weary laugh. "Be careful, both of you, and may God go with you." He made the sign of the cross over both of us, and I felt the quiet stirring of power, just as I sometimes did around Michael. Faith. Michael and Forthill exchanged a few quiet words about Michael's family while I lurked in the background. Forthill arranged to christen the new baby, whenever Charity delivered. They exchanged hugs again; Forthill shook my hand, businesslike and friendly, and we left.
Outside, Michael watched me as we walked back to his truck. "Well?" he asked. "What's next?"
I frowned, and stuffed my hands into my pockets. The sun was higher now, painting the sky blue, the clouds white. "I know someone who's pretty close to the spooks around here. That psychic in Oldtown."
Michael scowled and spat. "The necromancer."
I snorted. "He's no necromancer. He can barely call up a ghost and talk to it. He's got to fake it most of the time." Besides. Had he been a real necromancer, the White Council would already have hounded him down and beheaded him. Doubtless, the man I was thinking of had already been visited by at least one Warden and warned of the consequences of dabbling too much into the dark arts.
"If he's so inept, why speak to him at all?"
"He's probably closer to the spirit world than anyone else in town. Other than me, I mean. I'll send out Bob, too, and see what kind of information he can run down. We're bound to have different contacts."
Michael frowned at me. "I don't trust this business of communing with spirits, Harry. If Father Forthill and the others knew about this familiar of yours---"
"Bob isn't a familiar," I shot back.
"He performs the same function, doesn't he?"
I snorted. "Familiars work for free. I've got to pay Bob."
"Pay him?" he asked, his tone suspicious. "Pay what?"
"Mostly romance novels. Sometimes I splurge on a---"
Michael looked pained. "Harry, I really don't want to know. Isn't there some way that you could work some kind of spell here, instead of relying upon these unholy beings?"
I sighed, and shook my head. "Sorry, Michael. If it was a demon, it would have left footprints, and maybe some kind of psychic trail I could follow. But I'm pretty sure this was pure spirit. And a goddamned strong one."
"Harry," Michael said, voice stern.
"Sorry, I forgot. Ghosts don't usually inhabit a construct---a magical body. They're just energy. They don't leave any physical traces behind---at least none that last for hours at a time. If it was here, I could tell you all kinds of things about it, probably, and work magic on it directly. But it's not here, so---"
Michael sighed. "Very well. I will put out the word to those I know to be on the lookout for the girl. Lydia, you said her name was?"
"Yeah." I described her to Michael. "And she had a charm on her wrist. The one I'd been wearing the past few nights."
"Would it protect her?" Michael asked.
I shrugged. "From something as mean as this thing sounded . . . I don't know. We've got to find out who this ghost was when it was alive and shut it down."
"Which still will not tell us who or what is stirring up the spirits of the city." Michael unlocked his truck, and we got inside.
"That's what I like about you, Michael. You're always thinking so positively."
He grinned at me. "Faith, Harry. God has a way of seeing to it that things fall into place."
He started driving, and I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. First off to see the psychic. Then to send Bob out to find out more about what looked to be the most dangerous ghost I'd seen in a long time. And then to keep on looking for whoever it was behind all the spooky goings-on and to rap them politely on the head until they stopped. Easy as one, two, three. Sure.
I whimpered, sunk down in my seat a little more, and wished that I had kept my aching, sore self in bed.
Mortimer Lindquist had tried to give his house that gothic feel. Greyish gargoyles stood at the corners of his roof. Black iron gates glowered at the front of his house and statuary lined the walk to his front door. Long grass had overgrown his yard. If his house hadn't been a red-roofed, white-walled stucco transplant from somewhere in southern California, it might have worked.
The results looked more like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland than an ominous abode of a speaker to the dead. The black iron gates stood surrounded by plain chain-link fence. The gargoyles, on closer inspection, proved to be plastic reproductions. The statuary, too, had the rough outlines of plaster, rather than the clean, sweeping profile of marble. You could have plopped a pink flamingo down right in the middle of the unmowed weeds, and it would have somehow matched the decor. But, I supposed, at night, with the right lighting and the right attitude, some people might have believed it.
I shook my head and lifted my hand to rap on the door.
It opened before my knuckles touched it, and a well-rounded set of shoulders below a shining, balding head backed through the doorway, grunting. I stepped to one side. The little man tugged an enormous suitcase out onto the porch, never taking notice of me, his florid face streaked with perspiration.
I sidled into the doorway as he turned to lug the bag out to the gate, muttering to himself under his breath. I shook my head and went on into the house. The door was a business entrance---there was no tingling sensation of crossing the threshold of a dwelling uninvited. The front room reminded me of the house's exterior. Lots of black curtains draped down over the walls and doorways. Red and black candles squatted all over the place. A grinning human skull leered from a bookshelf straining to contain copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the lettering scraped off their spines. The skull was plastic, too.
Morty had a table set up in the room, several chairs around it with a high-backed chair at the rear, wood that had actually been carved with a number of monstrous beings. I took a seat in the chair, folded my hands on the table in front of me, and waited.
The little man came back in, wiping at his face with a bandanna handkerchief, sweating and panting.
"Shut the door," I said. "We need to talk, Morty."
He squealed and whirled around.
"Y-you," he stammered. "Dresden. What are you doing here?"
I stared at him. "Come in, Morty."
He came closer, but left the door open. In spite of his pudginess, he moved with the nervous energy of a spooked cat. His white business shirt showed stains beneath his arms reaching halfway to his belt. "Look, Dresden. I told you guys before---I get the rules, right? I haven't been doing anything you guys talked about."
Aha. The White Council had sent someone to see him. Morty was a professional con. I hadn't planned on getting any honest answers out of him without a lot of effort. Maybe I could play this angle and save myself a lot of work.
"Let me tell you something, Morty. When I come into a place and don't say a thing except, 'Let's talk,' and the first thing I hear is 'I didn't do it,' it makes me think that the person I'm talking to must have done something. You know what I'm saying?"
His florid face lost several shades of red. "No way, man. Look, I've got nothing to do with what's been going on. Not my fault, none of my business, man."
"With what's been going on," I said. I looked down at my folded hands for a moment, and then back up at him. "What's the suitcase for, Morty? You do something that means you need to leave town for a while?"
He swallowed, thick neck working. "Look, Dresden. Mister Dresden. My sister got sick, see. I'm just going to help her out."
"Sure you are," I said. "That's what you're doing. Going out of town to help your sick sister."
"I swear to God," Morty said, lifting a hand, his face earnest.
I pointed at the chair across from me. "Sit down, Morty."
"I'd like to, but I got a cab coming." He turned toward the door.
"Ventas servitas," I hissed, nice and dramatic, and threw some will at the door. Sudden wind slammed it shut right in front of his eyes. He squeaked, and backed up several paces, staring at the door, then whirling to face me.
I used the remnants of the same spell to push out a chair opposite me. "Sit down, Morty. I've got a few questions. Now, if you cut the crap, you'll make your cab. And, if not . . ." I left the words hanging. One thing about intimidation is that people can always think up something worse that you could do to them than you can, if you leave their imagination some room to play.
He stared at me, and swallowed again, his jowls jiggling. Then he moved to the chair as though he expected chains to fly out of it and tie him down the moment he sat. He balanced his weight on the very edge of the chair, licked his lips, and watched me, probably trying to figure out the best lies for the questions he expected.
"You know," I said. "I've read your books, Morty. Ghosts of Chicago. The Spook Factor. Two or three others. You did good work, there."
His expression changed, eyes narrowing in suspicion. "Thank you."
"I mean, twenty years ago, you were a pretty damn good investigator. Sensitivity to spiritual energies and apparitions---ghosts. What we call an ectomancer in the business."
"Yeah," he said. His eyes softened a little, if not his voice. He avoided looking directly in my face. Most people do. "That was a long time ago."
I kept my voice in the same tone, the same expression. "And now what? You run séances for people. How many times do you actually get to contact a spirit? One time in ten? One in twenty? Must be a real letdown from the actual stuff. Playacting, I mean."
He was good at covering his expressions---I'll give him that. But I'm used to watching people. I saw anger in the way he held his neck and shoulders. "I provide a legitimate service to people in need."
"No. You play on their grief to take them for all you can. You don't believe that you're doing right, Morty, deep down. You can justify it any way you want, but you don't like what you're doing. If you did, your powers wouldn't have faded like they have."
His jaw set in a hard line, and he didn't try to hide the anger anymore---the first honest reaction I'd seen out of him since he'd cried out in surprise. "If you've got a point, Dresden, get to it. I've got a plane to catch."
I spread my fingers over the tabletop. "In the past two weeks," I said, "the spooks have been going mad. You should see the trouble they've caused. That poltergeist in the Campbell house. The Basement Beast at U. of C. Agatha Hagglethorn, down at Cook County."
Morty grimaced and wiped at his face again. "Yeah. I hear things. You and the Knight of the Sword have been covering the worst of it."
"What else has been happening, Morty? I'm getting a little cranky losing sleep, so keep it short and simple."
"I don't know," he said, sullen. "I've lost my powers, remember."
I narrowed my eyes. "But you hear things, Morty. You've still got some sources in the Nevernever. Why are you leaving town?"
He laughed, and it had a shaky edge to it. "You said you read all of my books? Did you read They Shall Rise?"
"I glanced over it. End-of-the-world-type stuff. I figured you had been talking to the wrong kind of spirits too much. They love trying to sell people on Armageddon. A lot of them are cons like you."
He ignored me. "Then you read my theory on the barrier between our world and the Nevernever. That it's slowly being torn away."
"And you think it's falling to pieces, now? Morty, that wall has been there since the dawn of time. I don't think it's going to collapse right now."
"Wall." He said the word with a sneer. "More like Saran Wrap, wizard. Like Jell-O. It bends and wiggles and stirs." He rubbed his palms on his thighs, shivering.
"And it's falling now?"
"Look around you!" he shouted. "Good God, wizard. The past two weeks, the border's been waggling back and forth like a hooker at a dockworker's convention. Why the hell do you think all of these ghosts have been rising?"
I didn't let the sudden volume of his tone make me blink. "You're saying that this instability has been making it easier for ghosts to cross over from the Nevernever?"
"And easier to form bigger, stronger ghosts when people die," he said. "You think you've got some pissed-off ghosts now? Wait until some honor student on her way out of the south side with a college scholarship gets popped by accident in a gang shoot-out. Wait until some poor sap who got AIDS from a blood transfusion breathes his last."
"Bigger, badder ghosts," I said. "Superghosts. That's what you're talking about."
He laughed, a nasty little laugh. "New generation of viruses is coming, too. Things are going to hell all over. Eventually, that border's going to get thin enough to spit through, and you'll have more problems with demon attacks than gang violence."
I shook my head. "All right," I said. "Let's say that I buy that the barrier is fluid rather than concrete. There's turbulence in it, and it's making crossing over easier, both ways. Could something be causing the turbulence?"
"How the hell should I know?" he snarled. "You don't know what it's like, Dresden. To speak to things that exist in the past and in the future as well as in the now. To have them walk up to you at the salad bar and start telling you how they murdered their wife in her sleep.
"I mean, you think you've got a hold on things, that you understand, but in the end it all falls to pieces. A con is simpler, Dresden. You make order. People don't give a flying fuck if Uncle Jeffrey really forgives them for missing his last birthday party. They want to know that the world is a place where Uncle Jeffrey can and should forgive them." He swallowed, and looked around the room, at the fake tomes and the fake skull. "That's what I sell them. Closure. Like on television. They want to know that it's all going to work out in the end, and they're happy to pay for it."
A car honked outside. Morty glared at me. "We're through."
I nodded.
He jerked to his feet, splotches of color in his cheeks. "God, I need a drink. Get out of town, Dresden. Something came across last night like nothing I've ever felt."
I thought of ruined cars and rosebushes planted in consecrated ground. "Do you know what it is?"
"It's big," Morty said. "And it's pissed off. It's going to start killing, Dresden. And I don't think you or anyone else is going to be able to stop it."
"But it's a ghost?"
He gave me a smile that showed me his canines. It was creepy on that florid, eyes-too-wide face. "It's a nightmare." He started to turn away. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn't. The man had become a liar, a sniveling con, but he hadn't always been.
I rose and beat him to the door, taking his arm in one hand. He spun to face me, jerking his arm away, glaring defiantly at my eyes. I avoided locking gazes. I didn't want to take a look at Mortimer Lindquist's soul.
"Morty," I said, quietly. "Get away from your séances for a while. Go somewhere quiet. Read. Relax. You're older now, stronger. If you give yourself a chance, the power will come back"
He laughed again, tired and jaded. "Sure, Dresden. Just like that."
"Morty---"
He turned away from me and stalked out the door. He didn't bother to lock the place up behind him. I watched him head out to the cab, which waited by the curb. He lugged his bag into the backseat, and then followed it.
Before the cab pulled out, he rolled down the window. "Dresden," he called. "Under my chair there's a drawer. My notes. If you want to kill yourself trying to stand up to this thing, you might as well know what you're getting into."
He rolled the window back up as the cab pulled away. I watched it go, then went back inside. I found the drawer hidden in the base of the carved wooden chair, and inside I found a trio of old leather-bound journals, vellum pages covered in script that started out neat in the oldest one and became a jerky scrawl in the most recent entries. I held the books up to my mouth and inhaled the smell of leather, ink, paper; musty and genuine and real.
Morty hadn't had to give me the notes. Maybe there was some root of the person he had been, deep down somewhere, that wasn't dead yet. Maybe I'd done him a little good with that advice. I'd like to think that.
I blew out a breath, found a phone and called a cab of my own. I needed to get the Beetle out of impound if I could. Maybe Murphy could fix it for me.
I gathered the journals and went to the porch to wait for the cab, shutting the door behind me. Something big was coming through town, Morty had said.
"A nightmare," I said, out loud.
Could Mort be right? Could the barrier between the spirit world and our own be falling apart? The thought made me shudder. Something had been formed, something big and mean. And my gut instinct told me that it had a purpose. All power, no matter how terrible or benign, whether its wielder is aware of it or not, has a purpose.
So this Nightmare was here for something. I wondered what it wanted. Wondered what it would do.
And worried that, all too soon, I would find out.
An unmarked car sat in my driveway with two nondescript men inside.
I got out of the taxi, paid off the cabby, and nodded at the driver of the car, Detective Rudolph. Rudy's clean-cut good looks hadn't faded in the year since he'd started with Special Investigations, Chicago's unspoken answer to the officially unacknowledged world of the supernatural. But the time had hardened him a bit, made him a little less white around the eyes.
Rudolph nodded back, not even trying to hide his glower. He didn't like me. Maybe it had something to do with the bust several months back. Rudy had cut and run, rather than stick it out next to me. Before that, I'd escaped police custody while he was supposed to be watching me. I'd had a darn good reason to escape, and it wasn't really fair of him to hold that against me, but hey. Whatever got him through the day.
"Heya, Detective," I said. "What's up?"
"Get in the car," Rudolph said.
I planted my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets with a certain nonchalance. "Am I under arrest?"
Rudolph narrowed his eyes and started to speak again, but the man in the passenger seat cut him off. "Heya, Harry," Detective Sergeant John Stallings said, nodding at me.
"How you doing, John? What brings you out today?"
"Murph wanted us to ask you down to a scene." He reached up and scratched at several days' worth of unshaven beard beneath a bad haircut and intelligent dark eyes. "Hope you got the time. We tried at your office, but you haven't been in, so she sent us down here to wait for you."
I shifted Mort Lindquist's books in my arms. "I'm busy today. Can it wait?"
Rudolph spat, "The lieutenant says she wants you down there now, you get your ass down there. Now."
Stallings gave Rudolph a look, and then rolled his eyes for my benefit. "Look, Harry. Murphy told me to tell you that this one was personal."
I frowned. "Personal, eh?"
He spread his hands. "It's what she said." He frowned and then added, "It's Micky Malone."
I got a sickly little feeling in my stomach. "Dead?"
Stallings's jaw twitched. "You'd better come see for yourself."
I closed my eyes and tried not to get frustrated. I didn't have time for detours. It would take me hours to grind through Mort's notes, and sundown, when the spirits would be able to cross over from the Nevernever, would come swiftly.
But Murphy did plenty for me. I owed her. She'd saved my life a couple of times, and vice versa. She was my main source of income, too. Karrin Murphy headed up Special Investigations, a post that had traditionally resulted in a couple of months of bumbling and then a speedy exit from the police force. Murphy hadn't bumbled---instead, she'd hired the services of Chicago's only professional wizard as a consultant. She was getting to where she had a pretty good grasp on the local preternatural predators, at least the most common of them, but when things got hairy she still called me in. Technically, I show up on the paperwork as an investigative consultant. I guess the computer records system doesn't have numerical codes for demon banishment, divination spells, or exorcisms.
S.I. had gone toe to toe with one of the worst things anyone but a wizard like me was ever likely to see, only the year before---a half-ton of indestructible loup-garou. They'd taken some serious casualties. Six dead, including Murphy's partner. Micky Malone had gotten hamstrung. He'd gone through therapy, and had come along for one last job when Michael and I took down that demon-summoning sorcerer. After that, though, he'd decided that his limp was going to keep him from being a good cop, and retired on disability.
I felt guilty for that---maybe irrational, true, but if I'd been a little smarter or a little faster, maybe I could have saved those people's lives. And maybe I could have saved Micky's health. No one else saw it that way, but I did.
"All right," I said. "Give me a second to put these away."
The ride was quiet, except for a little meaningless chatter from Stallings. Rudolph ignored me. I closed my eyes and ached along the way. Rudolph's radio squawked and then fell abruptly silent. I could smell burnt rubber or something, and knew that it was likely my fault.
I opened one eye and saw Rudolph scowling back at me in the mirror. I half-smiled, and closed my eyes again. Jerk.
The car stopped in a residential neighborhood near West Armitage, down in Bucktown. The district had gotten its name from the number of immigrant homes once there, and the goats kept in people's front yards. The homes had been tiny affairs, stuffed with too-large families and children.
Bucktown had been lived in for a century and it was all grown up. Literally. The houses on their tiny lots hadn't had much room to expand out, so they'd grown up instead, giving the neighborhood a stretched, elongated look. The trees were ancient oaks and sycamores, and decorated the tiny yards in stately majesty, except where they'd been roughly hacked back from power lines and rooftops. Shadows fell in sharp slants from all the tall trees and tall houses, turning the streets and sidewalks into candy canes of light and darkness.
One of the houses, a two-story white-on-white number, had its small driveway full and another half-dozen cars parked out on the street, plus Murphy's motorcycle leaning on its kickstand in the front yard. Rudolph pulled the car up alongside the curb across the street from that house and killed the engine. It went on rattling and coughing for a moment before it died.
I got out of the car and felt something wrong. An uneasy feeling ran over me, prickles of sensation along the nape of my neck and against my spine.
I stood there for a minute, frowning, while Rudolph and Stallings got out of the car. I looked around the neighborhood, trying to pin down the source of the odd sensations. The leaves in the trees, all in their autumn motley, rustled and sighed in the wind, occasionally falling. Dried leaves rattled and scraped over the streets. Cars drove by in the distance. A jet rumbled overhead, a deep and distant sound.
"Dresden," Rudolph snapped. "Let's go."
I lifted a hand, extending my senses out, pushing my perception out along with my will. "Hang on a second," I said. "I need to . . ." I quit trying to speak, and searched for the source of the sensation. What the hell was it?
"Fucking showboat," Rudolph growled. I heard him start toward me.
"Hang on, kid," Stallings said. "Let the man work. We've both seen what he can do."
"I haven't seen shit that can't be explained," Rudolph growled. But he stayed put.
I drifted across the street, to the yard of the house in question, and found the first body in the fallen leaves, five feet to my left. A small, yellow-and-white-furred cat lay there, twisted so that its forelegs faced one way, its hindquarters the opposite. Something had broken its neck.
I felt a pang of nausea. Death isn't ever pretty, really. It's worst with people, but with the animals that are close to mankind, it seems to be a little nastier than it might be elsewhere in the wild kingdom. The cat couldn't have reached its full growth, yet---maybe a kitten from early in the spring, roaming the neighborhood. There was no collar on its neck.
I could feel a little cloud of disturbance around it, a kind of psychic energy left by traumatic, agonizing, and torturous events. But this one little thing, one animal's death, shouldn't have been enough to make me aware of it all the way over from my seat in the police car.
Five feet farther on, I found a dead bird. I found its wings in two more places. Then two more birds, without heads. Then something that had been small and furry, and was now small and furry and squishy---maybe a vole or a ground squirrel. And there were more. A lot more---all in all, maybe a dozen dead animals in the front yard, a dozen little patches of violent energies still lingering. No single one of them would have been enough to disturb my wizard's sense, but all of them together had.
So what the hell had been killing these animals?
I rubbed my palms over my arms, a sickly little feeling of dread rolling through me. I looked up to see Rudolph and Stallings following me around. Their faces looked kind of greenish.
"Jesus," Stallings said. He prodded the body of the cat with one toe. "What did this?"
I shook my head and rolled my shoulders in a shrug. "It might take me a while to find out. Where's Micky?"
"Inside."
"Well then," I said, and stood up, brushing off my hands. "Let's go."
I stopped outside the doorway. Micky Malone owned a nice house. His wife taught elementary school. They wouldn't have been able to afford the place on his salary alone, but together they managed. The hardwood floors gleamed with polish. I saw an original painting, a seascape, hanging on one of the walls of the living room, adjacent to the entryway. There were a lot of plants, a lot of greenery that, along with the wood grain of the floors, gave the place a rich, organic glow. It was one of those places that wasn't just a house. It was a home.
"Come on, Dresden," Rudolph snapped. "The lieutenant is waiting."
"Is Mrs. Malone here?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Go get her. I need her to invite me in."
"What?" Rudolph said. "Give me a break. Who are you, Count Dracula?"
"Drakul is still in eastern Europe, last time we checked," I replied. "But I need her or Micky to ask me in, if you want me to do anything for you."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
I sighed. "Look. Homes, places that people live in and love and have built a life in have a kind of power of their own. If a bunch of strangers had been trouping in and out all day, I wouldn't have any trouble with the threshold, but you're not. You guys are friends." Like Murphy had said---this one was personal.
Stallings frowned. "So you can't come in?"
"Oh, I could come in," I said. "But I'd be leaving most of what I can do at the door. The threshold would mess with me being able to work any forces in the house."
"What shit," Rudolph snorted. "Count Dracula."
"Harry," Stallings said. "Can't we invite you in?"
"No. Has to be someone who lives there. Besides, it's polite," I said. "I don't like to go places where I'm not welcome. I'd feel a lot better if I knew it was all right with Mrs. Malone for me to be here."
Rudolph opened his mouth to spit venom on me again, but Stallings cut him off. "Just do it, Rudy. Go get Sonia and bring her back here."
Rudolph glowered but did what he was told, going into the house.
Stallings tapped out a cigarette and lit up. He puffed for a second, thoughtfully. "So you can't do magic inside a house unless someone asks you in?"
"Not a house," I said. "A home. There's a difference."
"So what about Victor Sells's place? I hear you took him on, right?"
I shook my head. "He'd screwed up his threshold. He was running his business out of it, using the place for dark ceremonies. It wasn't a home anymore."
"So you can't mess with anything on its own turf?"
"Can't mess with mortals, no. Monsters don't get a threshold."
"Why not?"
"How the hell should I know," I said. "They just don't. I can't know everything, right?"
"Guess so," Stallings said, and after a minute he nodded. "Sure, I see what you mean. So it shuts you down?"
"Not completely, but it makes it a lot harder to do anything. Like wearing a lead suit. That's why vampires have to keep out. Other nasties like that. If you give them that much of a handicap, they have trouble just staying alive, much less using any freaky powers."
Stallings shook his head. "This magic crap. I never would have believed it before I came here. I still have trouble with it."
"Yeah? That's good. Means you aren't running into it too much."
He blew out twin columns of smoke from his nostrils. "Could be changing. Last couple of days, we've had some people go missing. Bums, street people, folks some of the cops and detectives know."
I frowned. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. It's all rumors so far. And people like that, they can just be gone the next day. But since I started working S.I., stuff like that makes me nervous."
I frowned, and debated telling Stallings what I knew about Bianca's party. Doubtless, there would be a whole flock of vampires in from out of town for the event. Maybe she and her flunkies were rounding up hors d'oeuvres. But I had no proof of that---for all I knew, the disappearances, if they were disappearances, could be related to the turbulence in the Nevernever. If so, the cops couldn't do anything about it. And if it was something else, I could be starting a very nasty exchange with Bianca. I didn't want to sic the cops on her for no reason. I'm pretty sure Bianca had the resources to send them back at me---and she could probably make it look like I'd done something to deserve it, too.
Besides that, in the circles of the supernatural community, an Old World code of conduct still ruled. When you have a problem, you settle it face to face, within the circle. You don't bring in the cops and the other mortals as weapons. They're the nuclear missiles of the supernatural world. If you show people a supernatural brawl going on, it's going to scare the snot out of them and the next thing you know, they're burning everything and everyone in sight. Most people wouldn't care that one scary guy might have been right and the other was wrong. Both guys are scary, so you ace both of them and sleep better at night.
It had been that way since the dawn of the Age of Reason and the rising power of mortal kind. And more power to the people, I say. I hated all these bullies, vampires, demons, and bloodthirsty old deities rampaging around like they ruled the world. Never mind that, until a few centuries ago, they really had.
In any case, I decided to keep my mouth shut about Bianca's gathering until I knew enough to be certain, either way.
Stallings and I made small talk until Sonia Malone appeared at the door. She was a woman of medium height, comfortably overweight and solid-looking. Her face would have been gorgeous when she was a young woman, and it still carried that beauty, refined by years of self-confidence and steady reliability. Her eyes were reddened, and she wore no makeup, but her features seemed composed. She wore a simple dress in a floral print, her only jewelry the wedding band on her finger.
"Mr. Dresden," she said, politely. "Micky told me that you saved his life, last year."
I coughed and looked down. Though I guess that was true, technically, I still didn't see it that way. "We all did everything we could, ma'am. Your husband was very brave."
"Detective Rudolph said that I needed to invite you in."
"I don't want to go where I'm not welcome, ma'am," I replied.
Sonia wrinkled up her nose and eyed Stallings. "Put that out, Sergeant."
Stallings dropped the cigarette and mushed it out with his foot.
"All right, Mr. Dresden," she said. For a moment, her composure faltered and her lips began to tremble. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, smoothing over her features, then opened her eyes again. "If you can help my Micky, please come in. I invite you."
"Thank you," I said. I stepped forward, through the door, and felt the silent tension of the threshold parting around me like a beaded curtain rimed with frost.
We went through a living room where several cops, people I knew from S.I., sat around talking quietly. It reminded me of a funeral. They looked up at me as I went by, and talk ceased. I nodded to them, and we went on past, to a staircase leading up to the second floor.
"He was up late last night," she told me, her voice quiet. "Sometimes he can't sleep, and he didn't come to bed until late. I got up early, but I didn't want to wake him, so I let him sleep in." Mrs. Malone stopped at the top of the stairs, and pointed down the hall at a closed door. "Th-there," she said. "I'm sorry. I c-can't . . ." She took another deep breath. "I need to see about lunch. Are you hungry?"
"Oh. Yes, sure."
"All right," she said, and retreated back down the stairs.
I swallowed and looked at the door at the end of the hall, then headed toward it. My steps sounded loud in my own ears. I knocked gently on the door.
Karrin Murphy opened it. She wasn't anyone's idea of a leader of a group of cops charged with solving every bizarre crime that fell between the lines of the law enforcement system. She didn't look like someone who would stand, with her feet planted, putting tiny silver bullets into an oncoming freight train of a loup-garou, either---but she was.
Karrin looked up at me from her five-foot-nothing in height. Her blue eyes, normally clear and bright, looked sunken. She'd shoved her golden hair under a baseball cap, and wore jeans and a white T-shirt. Her shoulder harness wrinkled the cotton around the shoulder where her sidearm hung. Lines stood out like cracks in a sunbaked field, around her mouth, her eyes. "Hi, Harry," she said. Her voice too was quiet, gruff.
"Hiya, Murph. You don't look so good."
She tried to smile. It looked ghastly. "I . . . I didn't know who else to call."
I frowned, troubled. On any other day, Murphy would have returned my mildly insulting comment with compounded interest. She opened the door farther, and let me in.
I remembered Micky Malone as an energetic man of medium height, balding, with a broad smile and a nose that peeled in the sun if he walked outside to get his morning paper. The cane and limp were additions too recent for me to have firmly stuck in my memory. Micky wore old, quality suits, and was careful never to get the jackets messy or his wife would never let him hear the end of it.
I didn't remember Micky with a fixed, tooth-baring grin and eyes spread out in that helter-skelter gleam of madness. I didn't remember him covered in small scratches, or his fingernails crusted with his own blood, or his wrists and ankles cuffed to the iron-framed bed. He panted, grinning around the neatly decorated little room. I could smell sweat and urine. There were no lights on in the room, and the curtains had been drawn over the windows, leaving it in a brownish haze.
He turned his head toward me and his eyes widened. He sucked in a breath and threw back his head in a long, falsetto-pitched scream like a coyote's. Then he started laughing and rocking back and forth, jerking on the steel restraints, making the bed shake in a steady, squeaking rhythm.
"Sonia called us this morning," Murphy said, toneless. "She'd locked herself into her closet and had a cellular. We got here right before Micky finished breaking down the closet door."
"She called the cops?"
"No. She called me. Said she didn't want them to see Micky like this. That it would ruin him."
I shook my head. "Damn. Brave lady. And he's been like this ever since?"
"Yeah. He was just . . . crazy mean. Screaming and spitting and biting."
"Has he said anything?" I asked.
"Not a word," Murphy said. "Animal noises." She crossed her arms and looked up at me, at my eyes for a second, before looking away. "What happened to him, Harry?"
Micky giggled and started bouncing his hips up and down on the bed as he rocked, making it sound as though a couple of hyperkinetic teenagers were coupling there. My stomach turned. No wonder Mrs. Malone hadn't been willing to come back into this room.
"You better give me a minute to find out," I said.
"Could he be . . . you know. Possessed? Like in the movies?"
"I don't know yet, Murph."
"Could it be some kind of spell?"
"Murphy, I don't know."
"Dammit, Harry," she snapped. "You'd damned well better find out." She clenched her fists and shook with suppressed fury.
I put my hand on her shoulder. "I will. Give me some time with him."
"Harry, I swear, if you can't help him---" Her voice caught in her throat, and tears sparkled in her eyes. "He's one of mine, dammit."
"Easy, Murph," I told her, making my voice as gentle as I knew how. I opened the door for her. "Go get some coffee, all right? I'll see what I can do."
She glanced up at me and then back at Malone. "It's okay, Micky," she said. "We're all here for you. You won't be alone."
Micky Malone gave her that fixed grin and then licked his lips before bursting out into another chorus of giggles. Murphy shivered and then walked out of the room, her head bowed.
And left me alone with the madman.
I drew up a chair beside the bed and sat down. Micky stared at me with white-rimmed eyes. I rummaged around in the inside pocket of my duster. I had some chalk there, in case I needed to draw a circle. A candle and some matches. A couple of old receipts. Not much, magically speaking, to work with.
"Hi, there, Micky," I said. "Can you hear me in there?"
Micky broke out in another fit of giggles. I made sure to keep my eyes away from his. Hell's bells, I did not want to get drawn into a soulgaze with Micky Malone at the moment.
"All right, Micky," I said, keeping my voice calm, low, like you do with animals. "I'm going to touch you---okay? I think I'll be able to tell if there's anything inside of you if I do. I'm not going to hurt you, so don't freak out." As I spoke, I reached out a hand toward his bare arm and laid it lightly upon Micky's skin.
He was fever-hot to the touch. I could sense some kind of force at work on him---not the tingling energy of a practitioner's aura, or the ocean-deep power of Michael's faith, but it was there, nonetheless. Some kind of cold, crawling energy oozed over him.
What the hell?
It didn't feel like any kind of spell I'd ever experienced. And it wasn't a possession, I was sure of that. I would have been able to sense any kind of spirit-being in him, through a physical touch.
Micky stared at me for a second and then thrust his head at my hand, his teeth making snapping motions. I jerked back even though he couldn't have reached me. Someone trying to bite you makes you react, more than if they take a punch at you. Biting is just more primal. Spooky.
Micky started giggling again, rocking the bed back and forth.
"All right," I breathed. "I'm going to have to get a little desperate, here. If you weren't a friend, Micky . . ." I closed my eyes for a moment, steeling myself, then focused my will into a spot right between my eyebrows, only a little higher. I felt the tension gather there, the pressure, and when I opened my eyes again, I'd opened my wizard's Sight, too.
The Sight is a blessing and a curse. It lets you see things, things you couldn't normally see. With my Sight, I can see even the most ethereal of spirits. I can see the energies of life stirring and moving, running like blood through the world, between the earth and the sky, between water and fire. Enchantments stand out like cords braided from fiber-optic cables, or maybe Las Vegas-quality neon, depending on how complicated or powerful they are. You can sometimes see the demons that walk among mankind in human form, this way. Or the angels. You see things the way they really are, in spirit and in soul, as well as in body.
The problem is that anything you see stays with you. No matter how horrible, no matter how revolting, no matter how madness-inducing or terrifying---it stays with you. Forever. Always right there in your mind in full technicolor, never fading or becoming easier to bear. Sometimes you see things that are so beautiful you want to keep them with you, always.
But more often, in my line of work, you see things like Micky Malone.
He was dressed in boxers and a white undershirt, stained with bits of blood and sweat and worse. But when I turned my Sight on him, I saw something different.
He had been ravaged. Torn apart. He was missing flesh, everywhere. Something had attacked him and taken out sections of him in huge bites. I'd seen pictures of people who'd been attacked by sharks, had hunks of meat just taken, gone. That's what Micky looked like. It wasn't visible to the flesh, but something had torn his mind, and maybe his soul, to bloody shreds. He bled and bled, endlessly, never staining the sheets.
And wound around him, starting at his throat and running down to one ankle was a strand of black wire, oversized barbs gouging into his flesh, the ends disappearing seamlessly into his skin.
Just like Agatha Hagglethorn.
I stared at him, horrified, my stomach writhing and heaving. I had to fight to keep from throwing up. Micky looked up at me and seemed to sense something was different, because he went abruptly still. His smile didn't look mad to me anymore. It looked agonized, like a grimace of pain twisted and cranked until the muscles of his face were at the snapping point.
His lips moved. Shook, his whole face writhing with the expression. "Uh, uh, uh," he moaned.
"It's all right, Micky," I said. I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. "I'm here."
"Hurts," he breathed at last, barely a whisper. "It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts . . ." He went on and on repeating it until he ran out of breath. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. Tears welled out and he broke into another helpless, maddened giggle.
What the hell could I do for that? The barbed wire had to be a spell of some kind, but it didn't look like anything I had ever seen before. Most magic throbbed and pulsed with light, life, even if it was being used for malevolent purposes. Magic comes from life, from the energy of our world and from people, from their emotions and their will. That's what I had always been taught.
But that barbed wire was dull, flat, matte-black. I reached out to touch it, and it almost seared my fingers with how cold it was. Micky, God. I couldn't imagine what he must have been going through.
The smart thing to do would have been to fall back. I could get Bob and work on this, research it, figure out how to get the wire from around Micky without hurting him. But he had already been suffering through this for hours. He might not make it through many more---his sanity was going to be hard-pressed to survive the spiritual mauling he had taken. Adding another day of this torture onto it all might send him someplace from where he'd never come back.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. "I hope I'm right, Micky," I told him. "I'm going to try to make it stop hurting."
He let out a whimpering little giggle, staring up at me.
I decided to start at his ankle. I swallowed, steeling myself again, and reached down, getting my fingers between the burning cold barbed wire and his skin. I clenched my teeth, forcing will, power, into the touch, enough to be able to touch the material of the spell around him. Then I started pulling. Slowly, at first, and then harder.
The metal strands burned into me. My fingers never went numb---they just began to ache more and more violently. The barbed wire resisted, barbs clinging at Micky's flesh. The poor man screamed aloud, agonized, though there was that horrible, tortured laughter added to it as well.
I felt tears burn into my eyes, from the pain, from Micky's scream, but I kept pulling. The end of the wire tore free of his flesh. I kept pulling. Barb by barb, inch by inch, I tore the wire-spell free, drawing it up through his flesh at times, pulling that dead, cold energy away from Micky. He screamed until he ran out of breath and I heard whimpers coming from somewhere else in the room. I guess it was me. I started using both hands, struggling against the cold magic.
Finally, the other end slithered free from Micky's neck. His eyes flew open wide and then he sagged down, letting out a low, exhausted moan. I gasped and stumbled back from the bed, keeping the wire in my hands.
It suddenly twisted and spun like a serpent, and one end plunged into my throat.
Ice. Cold. Endless, bitter, aching cold coursed through me, and I screamed. I heard footsteps running down the hall outside, a voice calling out. The wire whipped and thrashed around, the other end darting toward the floor, and I seized it in both hands, twisted it up and away from attaching itself at the other end. The loose strands near my neck started rippling, cold barbs digging into me through my clothes, my skin, as the dark energy tried to attach itself to me.
The door burst open. Murphy came through it, her eyes living flames of azure blue, her hair a golden coronet around her. She held a blazing sword in her hand and she shone so bright and beautiful and terrifying in her anger that it was hard to see. The Sight, I realized, dimly. I was seeing her for who she was.
"Harry! What the hell?"
I struggled against the wire, knowing that she couldn't see it or feel it, gasping. "The window. Murph, open the window!"
She didn't hesitate for a second, but crossed the floor and threw open the window. I staggered after her, winding the frozen wire around one hand, my mind screaming with the agony of it. I fought it down, dragged it into a coil, my face twisted into a snarl as I did it. Anger surged up, hot and bright, and I reached for that power as I jerked the wire from my throat and threw it out the window as hard as I could, sending it sailing into the air.
I snarled, jabbed a finger at it, took all that anger and fear and sent it coursing out of me, toward that dark spell. "Fuego!"
Fire came to my call, roared forth from my fingertips and engulfed the wire. It writhed and then vanished in a detonation that rattled the house around me and sent me tumbling back to the floor.
I lay there for a minute, stunned, trying to get a handle on what was happening. Damn the Sight. It starts blurring the lines between what's real and what isn't. A guy would go crazy that way. Fast. Just keep it open all the time and let everything pour in and really know what everything is like. That sounded like a good idea, really. Just bask in all the beauty and horror for a while, just drink it all in and let it erase everything else, all that bother and worry about people being hurt or not being hurt---
I found myself sitting on the floor, aching from cold that had no basis in physical reality, giggling to myself in a high-pitched stream, rocking back and forth. I had to struggle to close my Sight again, and the second I did, everything seemed to settle, to become clearer. I looked up, blinking tears out of my eyes, panting. Outside, dogs were barking all over the place, and I could hear several car alarms whooping, touched off by the force of the blast.
Murphy stood over me, her eyes wide, her gun held in one hand and pointed at the door. "Jesus," she said, softly. "Harry. What happened?"
My lips felt numb and I was freezing, all over, shaking. "Spell. S-something attacked him. L-laid a spell on him after. H-had to burn it. Fire even burns in the s-spirit world. S-sorry."
She put the gun away, staring at me. "Are you all right?"
I shook some more. "H-how's Micky?"
Murphy crossed the room to lay a hand on Micky's brow. "His fever's gone," she breathed. "Mick?" she called gently. "Hey, Malone. It's Murph. Can you hear me?"
Micky stirred, and blinked open his eyes. "Murph?" he asked quietly. "What's going on?" His eyes fell closed again, exhausted. "Where's Sonia? I need her."
"I'll get her," Murphy breathed. "You wait here. Rest."
"My wrists hurt," Micky mumbled.
Murphy looked back at me, and I nodded to her. "He should be all right, now." She unfastened the cuffs from him, but it looked as though he had already fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Murphy drew the covers up over him, and smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Then she knelt down on the floor beside me. "Harry," she said. "You look like . . ."
"Hell," I said. "Yeah, I know. He's going to need rest, Murph. Peace. Something tore him up inside, real bad."
"What do you mean?"
I frowned. "It's like . . . when someone close to you dies. Or when you break off a relationship with someone. It tears you up inside. Emotional pain. That's kind of what happened to Micky. Something tore him up."
"What did it?" Murphy asked. Her voice was quiet, steel-hard.
"I don't know yet," I said. I closed my eyes, shaking, and leaned my head back against a wall. "I've been calling it the Nightmare."
"How do we kill it?"
I shook my head. "I'm working on it. It's staying a couple steps ahead of me, so far."
"Damn," Murphy said. "I get sick of playing catch-up, sometimes."
"Yeah. So do I."
More footsteps came pounding down the hall, and Sonia Malone burst into the room. She saw Micky, lying quietly, and went to him as if she feared to stir the air too much, each movement fragile. She touched his face, his thinning hair, and he awoke enough to reach for her hand. She held on to it tightly, kissed his fingers, and bowed her head to rest her cheek against his. I heard her crying, letting it out.
Murphy and I traded a look, and rose by mutual consent to leave Sonia in peace. Murphy had to help me up. I ached, everywhere, felt as though my bones had been frozen solid. Walking was hard, but Murphy helped me.
I took a last look at Sonia and Micky, and then quietly closed the door.
"Thank you, Harry," Murphy said.
"Any time. You're my friend, Murph. And I'm always up to helping a lady in distress."
She glanced up at me, a sparkle in her eyes underneath the brim of the baseball cap. "You are such a chauvinist pig, Dresden."
"A hungry chauvinist pig," I said. "I'm starving."
"You should eat more often, beanpole." Murphy sat me down on the top step and said, "Stay here. I'll get you something."
"Don't take too long, Murph. I've got work to do. The thing that did this comes out to play at sundown."
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. I thought of dead animals and smashed cars and frozen agonies wrapped around Micky Malone's tortured soul. "I don't know what the hell this Nightmare is. But I'm going to find it. And I'm going to kill it."
"That sounds about right," Murphy said. "If I can help, you've got it."
"Thanks, Murph."
"Don't mention it. Um, Harry?"
I opened my eyes. She was watching me, her expression uncertain. "For a minute there, when I came in. You stared at me. You stared at me with the strangest damned expression on your face. What did you see?" she asked.
"You'd laugh in my face if I told you," I said. "Go get me something to eat."
She snorted and turned to go down the stairs and sort things out with the excited S.I. officers roaming around on the first floor. I smiled, remembering the vision, sharp and brilliant in my mind's eye. Murphy, the guardian angel, coming through the door in a blaze of wrath. It was a picture I wouldn't mind keeping with me. Sometimes you get lucky.
And then I thought of that barbed wire, the hideous torment I'd seen and briefly felt. The ghosts rising of late had been suffering from the same thing. But who could be doing it to them? And how? The forces used in that torture-spell weren't like anything I had seen or felt before. I had never heard of any kind of magic that could be slapped on a spirit or a mortal with the same results. I wouldn't have thought it possible. How was it being done?
More to the point, who was doing it? Or what?
I sat there shivering and alone and aching. I was starting to take this business personally. Malone was an ally, someone who had stood up to the bad guys beside me. The more I thought about it, the more angry and the more certain I became.
I would find this Nightmare, this thing that had crossed over, and destroy it.
And then I would find whoever or whatever had created it.
Unless, Harry, I thought to myself, they find you first.
"No," I said into the phone. I tossed my coat onto a chair and then sprawled out on the couch. My apartment lay covered in shadows, sunlight filtering in through the sunken windows high up on the walls. "I haven't gotten the chance yet. I lost a couple of hours detouring to pull a spell off of Micky Malone, from S.I. Someone had wrapped barbed wire around his spirit."
"Mother of God," Michael said. "Is he all right?"
"Will be. But it's four hours of daylight lost." I filled him in on Mort Lindquist and his diaries, as well as the events at Detective Malone's house.
"There isn't much more time to find this Lydia, Harry," Michael agreed. "Sundown's in another six hours."
"I'm working on it. And after I get Bob out the door looking, I'll see if I can hit the streets myself. I got the Beetle back."
He sounded surprised. "It's not impounded?"
"Murphy fixed it for me."
"Harry," he said, disappointed. "She broke the law to get you your car back?"
"Darn tootin' she did," I said. "She owed me a favor. Hey man, the Almighty doesn't arrange for me to be anywhere on time. I need wheels."
Michael sighed. "There isn't time to debate this right now. I'll call you if I find her---but it doesn't look good."
"I just can't figure it. What would this thing have to do with that girl? We need to find her and work out the connection."
"Could Lydia be responsible for the recent disturbances?"
"I don't think so. That spell I ran into today---I've never seen anything like it. It was . . ." I shivered, remembering. "It was wrong, Michael. Cold. It was---"
"Evil?" he suggested.
"Maybe. Yeah."
"There is such a thing as evil, Harry, in spite of what many people say. Just remember that there's good, too."
I cleared my throat, uncomfortable. "Murphy put out the word to the folks in blue---so if one of her friends on patrol sees a girl matching Lydia's description, we'll hear about it."
"Outstanding," Michael said. "You see, Harry? This detour of yours to help Detective Malone is going to help us a great deal. Isn't that a very positive coincidence?"
"Yeah, Michael. Divine fortune, yadda, yadda. Call me."
"Don't yadda yadda the Lord, Harry. It's disrespectful. God go with you." And he hung up.
I put my coat away, got out my nice, heavy flannel robe and slipped into it, then went over to the rug against the south wall. I dragged it away from the floor, and the hinged door there, then swung the door open. I fetched a kerosene lamp, lit it up and dialed the wick up to a bright flame, then got ready to descend the folding wooden ladder into the subbasement.
The telephone rang again.
I debated ignoring it. It rang again, insistent. I sighed, closed the door, put the rug back in place, and got to the phone on the fifth ring.
"What?" I said, uncharitably.
"I have to hand it to you, Dresden," Susan said. "You certainly know how to charm a girl the morning after."
I let out a long breath. "Sorry, Susan. I've been working and . . . it's not going so well. Lots of questions and no answers."
"Ouch," she said back. Someone said something to her in the background, and she murmured a response. "I don't want to add to your day, but do you remember the name of that guy you and Special Investigations took down a couple months ago? The ritual killer?"
"Oh, right. Him . . ." I closed my eyes, and grubbed about in my memory. "Leo something. Cravat, Camner, Conner. Kraven the Hunter. I didn't really get his name. I tracked him down by the demon he was calling up and nailed him that way. Michael and I didn't hang around for the paperwork afterwards, either."
"Kravos?" Susan asked. "Leonid Kravos?"
"Yeah, that might have been it, I think."
"Great," she said. "Super. Thank you, Harry." Her voice sounded a little tense, excited.
"Uh. Do you mind telling me what's going on?" I asked her.
"It's an angle I'm working on," she said. "Look, all I've got right now are rumors. I'll try to tell you more as soon as I've got something concrete."
"Fair enough. I'm sort of focused on something else right now, anyway."
"Anything you need help with?"
"God, I hope not," I said. I shifted the phone a little closer to my ear. "Did you sleep all right, last night?"
"Maybe," she teased. "It's hard to get really relaxed, when I'm that unsatisfied, but your apartment's so cold it's kind of like going into hibernation."
"Yeah, well. Next time I'll make sure it's a hell of a lot colder."
"I'm shivering already," she purred. "Call you tonight if I can?"
"Might not be here."
She sighed. "I understand. Potluck, then. Thanks again, Harry."
"Anytime."
We said goodbye, hung up, and I went back to the stairs leading down into the subbasement. I uncovered the trapdoor, opened it, got my lantern, and clumped on down the steep, folding staircase.
My lab never got any less cluttered, no matter how much more organization I imposed on it. The contents only grew denser. Counters and shelves ran along three walls. A long table ran down the center of the room, with enough space for me to slip sideways down its length on either side. Next to the ladder, a kerosene heater blunted the worst of the subterranean chill. On the far side of the table, a brass ring had been set into the floor---a summoning circle. I'd had to learn the hard way to keep it clear of the other debris in the lab.
Debris. Technically, everything in the lab was useful, and served some kind of purpose. The ancient books with their faded, moldering leather covers and their all-pervasive musty smell, the plastic containers with resealable lids, the bottles, the jars, the boxes---they all had something in them I either needed or had needed at one time. Notebooks, dozens of pens and pencils, paper clips and staples, reams of paper covered in my restless, scrawling handwriting, the dried corpses of small animals, a human skull surrounded by paperback novels, candles, an ancient battle axe, they all had some significance. I just couldn't remember what it was for most of them.
I took the cover off the lamp and used it to light up about a dozen candles around the room, and then the kerosene heater. "Bob," I said. "Bob, wake up. Come on, we've got work to do." Golden light and the smell of candle flames and hot wax filled the room. "I mean it, man. There's not much time."
Up on its shelf the skull quivered. Twin points of orangish flame flickered up in the empty eye sockets. The white jaws parted in a pantomime yawn, an appropriate sound coming out with it. "Stars and Stones, Harry," the skull muttered. "You're inhuman. It isn't even sundown yet."
"Stop whining, Bob. I'm not in the mood."
"Mood. I'm exhausted. I don't think I can help you out anymore."
"Unacceptable," I said.
"Even spirits get tired, Harry. I need rest."
"Time enough for rest when I'm dead."
"All right then," Bob said. "You want work, we make a deal. I want to do a ridealong the next time Susan comes over."
I snorted at him. "Hell's bells, Bob, don't you ever think about anything besides sex? No. I'm not letting you into my head while I'm with Susan."
The skull spat out an oath. "There should be a union. We could renegotiate my contract."
I snorted. "Any time you want to head back to the homeland, Bob, feel free."
"No, no, no," the skull muttered. "That's all right."
"I mean, there's still that misunderstanding with the Winter Queen, but---"
"All right, I said."
"You probably don't need my protection anymore. I'm sure she'd be willing to sit down and work things out, rather than putting you in torment for the next few hundred---"
"All right, I said!" Bob's eyelights flamed. "You can be such an asshole, Dresden, I swear."
"Yep," I agreed. "You awake yet?"
The skull tilted to one side in a thoughtful gesture. "You know," it said. "I am." The eye sockets focused on me again. "Anger really gets the old juices flowing. That was pretty sneaky."
I got out a relatively fresh notepad and a pencil. It took me a moment to clear off a space on the central table. "I've run into some new stuff. Maybe you can help me out. And we've got a missing person I need to look for."
"Okay, hit me."
I took a seat on the worn wooden stool and drew my warm robe a little closer about me. Trust me, wizards don't wear robes for the dramatic effect. They just can't get warm enough in their labs. I knew some guys in Europe who still operated out of stone towers. I shudder to think.
"Right," I said. "Just give me whatever you can." And I outlined the events, starting with Agatha Hagglethorn, through Lydia and her disappearance, through my conversation with Mort Lindquist and his mention of the Nightmare, to the attack on poor Micky Malone.
Bob whistled, no mean trick for a guy with no lips. "Let me get this straight. This creature, this thing, has been torturing powerful spirits for a couple of weeks with this barbed-wire spell. It tore up a bunch of stuff on consecrated ground. Then it blew through somebody's threshold and tore his spirit apart, and slapped a torture-spell on him?"
"You got it," I said. "So. What kind of ghost are we dealing with, and who could have called it up? And what is this girl's connection to it?"
"Harry," Bob said, his tone serious. "Leave this one alone."
I blinked at him. "What?"
"Maybe we could go on a vacation---Fort Lauderdale. They're having this international swimsuit competition there, and we could---"
I sighed. "Bob, I don't have time for---"
"I know a guy who's possessed a travel agent for a few days, and he could get us tickets cut rate. What do you say?"
I peered at the skull. If I didn't know any better, I would think that Bob sounded . . . nervous? Was that even possible? Bob wasn't a human being. He was a spirit, a being of the Nevernever. The skull was his habitat, his home away from home. I let him stay in it, protected him, and bought him trashy romance novels on occasion in exchange for his help, his prodigious memory, and his affinity for the laws of magic. Bob was a records computer and personal assistant all rolled into one, provided you could keep his mind on the issue at hand. He knew thousands of beings in the Nevernever, hundreds of spell recipes, scores of formulae for potions and enchantments and magical constructions.
No spirit could have that kind of knowledge without it translating into considerable power. So why was he acting so scared?
"Bob. I don't know why you're so upset, but we need to stop wasting time. Sundown's coming in a few hours, and this thing is going to be able to cross over from the Nevernever and hurt someone else. I need to know what it is, and where it might be going, and how to kick its ass."
"You humans," Bob said. "You're never satisfied. You always want to find out what's behind the next hill, open the next box. Harry, you've got to learn when you know too much."
I stared up at him for a moment, then shook my head. "We'll start with basics and work our way through this step by step."
"Dammit, Harry."
"Ghosts," I said. "Ghosts are beings that live in the spirit world. They're impressions left by a personality at the moment of death. They aren't like people, or sentient spirits like you. They don't change, they don't grow---they're just there, experiencing whatever it is they were feeling when they died. Like poor Agatha Hagglethorn. She was loopy."
The skull turned its eye sockets away from me and said nothing.
"So, they're spirit-beings. Usually, they aren't visible, but they can make a body out of ectoplasm and manifest in the real world when they want to, if they're strong enough. And sometimes, they can just barely have any physical existence at all---just kind of exist as a cold spot, or a breath of wind, or maybe a sound. Right?"
"Give it up, Harry," Bob said. "I'm not talking."
"They can do all kinds of things. They can throw things around and stack furniture. There have been documented incidents of ghosts blotting out the sun for a while, causing minor earthquakes, all sorts of stuff---but it isn't ever random. There's always some purpose to it, something related to their deaths."
Bob quivered, about to add something, but clacked his bony teeth shut again. I ginned at him. It was a puzzle. No spirit of intellect could resist a puzzle.
"So, if someone leaves a strong enough imprint when they go, you got yourself a strong ghost. I mean, badass. Maybe like this Nightmare."
"Maybe," Bob admitted, grudgingly, then spun his skull to face wholly away from me. "I'm still not talking to you, Harry."
I drummed my pencil on the blank piece of paper. "Okay. We know that this thing is stirring up the boundary between here and the Nevernever. It's making it easier for spirits to come across, and that's why things have been so busy, lately."
"Not necessarily," Bob chirped up. "Maybe you're looking at it from the wrong angle."
"Eh?" I asked.
He spun to face me again, eyelights glowing, voice enthusiastic. "Someone else has been stirring these spirits, Harry. Maybe they started torturing them in order to make them jump around in the pool and start causing waves."
There was a thought. "You mean, prodding the big spirits into moving so that they create the turbulence."
"Exactly," Bob said, nodding. Then he caught himself, mouth still open. He turned the skull toward the wall and started banging the bony forehead against it. "I am such an idiot."
"Stirring up the Nevernever," I said thoughtfully. "But who would do that? And why?"
"You got me. Big mystery. We'll never know. Time for a beer."
"Stirring up the Nevernever makes it easier for something to cross over," I said. "So . . . whoever laid out those torture spells must have wanted to pave the way for something." I thought of dead animals and smashed cars. "Something big." I thought of Micky Malone, quivering and mad. "And it's getting stronger."
Bob looked at me again, and then sighed. "All right," he said. "Gods, do you ever give up, Harry?"
"Never."
"Then I might as well help you. You don't know what you're dealing with, here. And if you walk into this with your eyes closed, you're going to be dead before the sun rises."
"Dead before the sun rises," I said. "Stars, Bob, why don't you just go all the way over the melodramatic edge and tell me that I'm going to be sleeping with the fishes?"
"I'm not sure that much of you would be left," Bob said, seriously. "Harry, look at this thing. Look at what it's done. It crossed a threshold."
"So what?" I asked. "Lots of things can. Remember that toad demon? It came over my threshold and trashed my whole place."
"In the first place, Harry," Bob said, "you're a bachelor. You don't have all that much of a threshold to begin with. This Malone, though---he was a family man."
"So?"
"So it means his home has a lot more significance. Besides which---the toad demon came in and everything after that was pure physical interaction. It smashed things, it spat out acid saliva, that kind of thing. It didn't try to wrench your soul apart or enchant you into a magical sleep."
"This is getting to be a pretty fine distinction, Bob."
"It is. Did you ask for an invitation before you went into the Malone's house?"
"Yeah," I said. "I guess I did. It's polite, and---"
"And it's harder for you to work magic in a home you haven't been invited into. You cross the threshold without an invitation, and you leave a big chunk of your power at the door. It doesn't affect you as much because you're a mortal, Harry, but it still gets you in smaller ways."
"And if I was an all-spirit creature," I said.
Bob nodded. "It hits you harder. If this Nightmare is a ghost, like you say, then the threshold should have stopped it cold---and even if it had gone past it, then it shouldn't have had the kind of power it takes to hurt a mortal that badly."
I frowned, drumming my pencil some more, and made some notes on the paper, trying to keep everything straight. "And certainly not enough to lay out a spell that powerful on Malone."
"Definitely."
"So what could do that, Bob? What are we dealing with, here?"
Bob's eyes shifted restlessly around the room. "It could be a couple of things from the spirit world. Are you sure you want to know?" I glared at him. "All right, all right. It could be something big enough. Something so big that even a fraction of it was enough to attack Malone and lay that spell on him. Maybe a god someone's dug up. Hecate, Kali, or one of the Old Ones."
"No," I said, flatly. "Bob, if this thing was so tough, it wouldn't be tearing up people's cars and ripping kitty cats apart. That's not my idea of a godlike evil. That's just pissed off."
"Harry, it went through the threshold," Bob said. "Ghosts don't do that. They can't."
I stood up, and started pacing back and forth on the little open space of floor of my summoning circle. "It isn't one of the Old Ones. Guardian spells all over the world would be freaking out, alerting the Gatekeeper and the Council of something like that. No, this is local."
"Harry, if you're wrong---"
I jabbed a finger at Bob. "If I'm right, then there's a monster out there messing with my town, and I'm obliged to do something about it before someone else gets hurt."
Bob sighed. "It blew through a threshold."
"So . . ." I said, pacing and whirling. "Maybe it had some other way to get around the threshold. What if it had an invitation?"
"How could it have gotten that?" Bob said. "Ding-dong, Soul Eater Home Delivery, may I come in?"
"Bite me," I said. "What if it took Lydia? Once she was out of the church, she could have been vulnerable to it."
"Possession?" Bob said. "Possible, I guess---but she was wearing your talisman."
"If it could get around a threshold, maybe it could get around that too. She goes to Malone's, looks helpless, and gets an invite in."
"Maybe." Bob did a passable imitation of scrunching up his eyes. "But then why were all those little animals torn up outside? We are going way out on a branch here. There are a lot of maybes."
I shook my head. "No, no. I've got a feeling about this."
"You've said that before. You remember the time you wanted to make 'smart dynamite' for that mining company?"
I scowled. "I hadn't had much sleep that week. And anyway, the sprinklers kicked in."
Bob chortled. "Or the time you tried to enchant that broomstick so that you could fly? Remember that? I thought it would take a year to get the mud out of your eyebrows."
"Would you focus, please," I complained. I pushed my hands against either side of my head to keep it from exploding with theories, and whittled them down to the ones that fit the facts. "There are only a couple of possibilities. A, we're dealing with some kind of godlike being in which case we're screwed."
"And the Absurd Understatement Award goes to Harry Dresden."
I glared at him. "Or," I said, lifting a finger, "B, this thing is a spirit, something we've seen before, and it's using smoke and mirrors within the rules we already know. Either way, I think Lydia knows more than she's admitting."
"Gee, a woman taking advantage of Captain Chivalry. What are the odds."
"Bah," I said. "If I can find her and find out what she knows, I could nail it today."
"You're forgetting the third possibility," Bob said amiably. "C, it's something new that neither of us understand and you're sailing off in ignorance to plunge into the mouth of Charybdis."
"You're so encouraging," I said, fastening on the bracelet, and slipping on the ring, feeling the quiet, humming power in them both.
Bob somehow waggled his eyebrow ridges. "Hey, you never went out with Charybdis. What's the plan?"
"I loaned Lydia my Dead Man's Talisman," I said.
"I still can't believe after all the work we did, you gave it to the first girl to wiggle by."
I scowled at Bob. "If she's still got it, I should be able to work up a spell to home in on it, like when I find people's wedding rings."
"Great," Bob said. "Give 'em hell, Harry. Have fun storming the castle."
"Not so fast," I said. "She might not have it with her. If she's in on this with the Nightmare, then she could have dumped it once she had it away from me. That's where you come in."
"Me?" Bob squeaked.
"Yes. You're going to head out, hit the streets, and talk to all of your contacts, see if we can get to her before sundown. We've only got a couple of hours."
"Harry," Bob pointed out, "the sun's up. I'm exhausted. I can't just flit around like some kinda dewdrop fairy."
"Take Mister," I said. "He doesn't mind you riding around. And he could use the exercise. Just don't get him killed."
"Hooboy," Bob said. "Once more into the breach, dear friends, eh? Harry, don't quit your job to become a motivational speaker. I have your permission to come out?"
"Yep," I said, "for the purposes of this mission only. And don't waste time prowling around in women's locker rooms again."
I put out the candles and the heater and started up the stepladder. Bob followed, drifting out of the eye sockets of the skull as a glowing, candleflame-colored cloud, and flowed up the steps past me. The cloud glided over to where Mister dozed in the warm spot near the mostly dead fire, and seeped in through the cat's grey fur. Mister sat up and blinked his yellow-green eyes at me, stretched his back, and flicked his stump of a tail back and forth before letting out a reproachful meow.
I scowled at Mister and Bob, shrugging into my duster, gathering up my blasting rod and my exorcism bag, and old black doctor's case full of stuff. "Come on, guys," I said. "We're on the trail. We have the advantage. What could possibly go wrong?"
Finding people is hard, especially when they don't want to be found. It's so difficult, in fact, that estimates run up near seven-digit figures on how many people disappear, without a trace, every year in the United States. Most of these people aren't ever found.
I didn't want Lydia to become one of these statistics. Either she was one of the bad guys and had been playing me for a sucker, or she was a victim who was in need of my help. If the former, then I wanted to confront her---I have this thing about people who lie to me and try to get me into trouble. If the latter, then I was probably the only one in Chicago who could help her. She could be possessed by one very big and very brawny spirit who needed to get some, pardon the pun, exorcise.
Lydia had been on foot when she left Father Forthill, and I don't think she'd had much cash. Assuming she hadn't come into any more resources, she'd likely still be in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, so I headed the Blue Beetle that way. The Beetle isn't really blue any more. Both doors had to be replaced when they'd gotten clawed to shreds, and the hood had been slagged, with a big old hole melted in it. My mechanic, Mike, who can keep the Beetle running most days, hadn't asked any questions. He'd just replaced the parts with pieces of other Volkswagens, so that the Blue Beetle was technically blue, red, white, and green. But my appellation stuck.
I tried to keep my cool as I drove, at least as best as I could. My wizard's propensity for blowing out any kind of advanced technology seems to get worse when I'm upset, angry, or afraid. Don't ask me why. So I did my best to Zen out until I got to my destination---parking strips alongside Wicker Park.
A brisk breeze made my duster flap as I got out. On one side of the street, tall town houses and a pair of apartment buildings gleamed as the sun began to go down over the western plains. The shadows of the trees in Wicker Park, meanwhile, stretched out like black fingers creeping toward my throat. Thank God my subconscious isn't too symbolically aware or anything. The park had a bunch of people in it, young people, mothers with kids, while on the streets, business types began arriving in their business clothes, heading for one of the posh restaurants, pubs, or cafes that littered the area.
I got a lump of chalk and a tuning fork out of my exorcism bag. I glanced around, then squatted down on the sidewalk and drew a circle around myself, willing it closed as the chalk marks met themselves on the concrete. I felt a sensation, a crackling tension, as the circle closed, encasing the local magical energies, compressing them, stirring them.
Most magic isn't quick and dirty. The kind of stunts you can pull off when some nasty thing is about to jump up in your face are called evocations. They're fairly limited in what they can do, and difficult to master. I only had a couple of evocations that I could do very well, and most of the time I needed the help of artificial foci, such as my blasting rod or one of my other enchanted doodads, to make sure that I don't lose control of the spell and blow up myself along with the slobbering monster.
Most magic is a lot of concentration and hard work. That's where I was really good---thaumaturgy. Thaumaturgy is traditional magic, all about drawing symbolic links between items or people and then investing energy to get the effect that you want. You can do a lot with thaumaturgy, provided you have enough time to plan things out, and more time to prepare a ritual, the symbolic objects, and the magical circle.
I've yet to meet a slobbering monster polite enough to wait for me to finish.
I slipped my shield bracelet off of my wrist and laid it in the center of the circle---that was my channel. The talisman I'd passed off to Lydia had been constructed in a very similar manner, and the two bracelets would resonate on the same pitches. I took the tuning fork and laid it down beside the bracelet, with the two ends of the shield bracelet touching either tine, making a complete circle.
Then I closed my eyes, and drew upon the energy gathered in the circle. I brought it into me, molded it, shaped it into the effect I was looking for with my thoughts, fiercely picturing the talisman I'd given Lydia while I did. The energy built and built, a buzzing in my ears, a prickling along the back of my neck. When I was ready, I spread my hands over the two objects, opened my eyes and said, firmly, "Duo et unum." At the words, the energy poured out of me in a rush that left me a little light-headed. There were no sparks, no glowing luminescence or anything else that would cost a special effects budget some money---just a sense of completion, and a tiny, almost inaudible hum.
I picked up the bracelet and put it back on, then took up the tuning fork and smudged the circle with my foot, willing it broken. I felt the little pop of the residual energies being released, and I rose up and fetched my exorcism bag from the Beetle. Then I walked away, down the sidewalk, holding my tuning fork out in front of me. After I'd taken several paces away, I turned in a slow circle.
The fork remained silent until I'd turned almost all the way around---then it abruptly shivered in my hand, and emitted a crystalline tone when I had it facing vaguely northwest. I looked up and sighted along the tines of the fork, then walked a dozen paces farther and triangulated as best I could. The direction change on the way the fork faced when it toned the second time was appreciable, even without any kind of instruments---Lydia must have been fairly close.
"Yes," I said, and started off at a brisk walk, sweeping the tuning fork back and forth, setting my feet in the direction that it chimed. I kept on like that to the far side of the park, where the tuning fork pointed directly at a building that had once been some kind of manufacturing facility, perhaps, but now stood abandoned.
The lower floor was dominated by a pair of garage doors and a boarded-up front door. On the lower two floors, most of the windows had been boarded up. On the third floor, truly bored or determined vandals had pitched stones through those windows, and their shattered edges stood sharp and dusty against the blackness behind them, like dirty ice.
I took two more readings, from fifty feet on either side of the first. All pointed directly to the building. It glowered down at me, silent and spooky.
I shivered.
I would be smart to call Michael. Maybe even Murphy. I could get to a phone, try to get in touch with them. It wouldn't take them long to get here.
Of course, it would be after sundown. The Nightmare, if it was inside Lydia, would be free to leave her then, to roam abroad. If I could get to her, exorcise this thing now, I could end the spree of destruction it was on.
If, if, if. I had a lot of ifs. But I didn't have much time. The sun was swiftly vanishing. I reached inside my duster and got out my blasting rod, transferring my exorcism bag to the same hand as the tuning fork. Then I headed across the street, to the garage doors of the building. I tested one, and to my surprise it rolled upwards. I glanced left and right, then slipped inside into the darkness, shutting the door behind me.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The room was lit only by the fading light that slipped its fingers beneath the plyboard over the windows, the edges of the garage doors. It was a loading dock that encompassed almost the entire first floor, I judged. Stone pillars held the place up. Water dripped somewhere, from a broken pipe, and there were pools of it everywhere on the floor.
A brand-new side-panel van, its engine still ticking, cooling off, stood parked at the far side of the loading dock, next to a five-foot-high stone abutment, where trucks would once have backed up to load and unload goods. A sign hanging by one hinge, over the van, read SUMNER'S TEXTILES MFG.
I approached the van slowly, my blasting rod held loosely at my side. I swept the tuning fork, and my eyes, around the shadowed chamber. The fork hummed every time it swept past the van.
The white van all but glowed in the half-light. Its windows had been tinted, and I couldn't see inside of them, even when I came within ten feet or so.
Something, some sound or other cue that I hadn't quite caught on the conscious level made the hair on the back of my neck prickle up. I spun to face the darkness behind me, the tip of my blasting rod rising up, my bruised fingers wrapped tight around its haft. I focused my senses on the darkness, and listened, honing my attention to the area around me.
Darkness.
Drip of water.
Creak of building, above me.
Nothing.
I put the tuning fork in my duster pocket. Then I turned back to the van, closed the distance quickly, and hauled open the side door, leveling my rod on the inside.
A blanket-wrapped bundle, approximately Lydia-sized, lay inside the van. One pale hand lay limp outside of it, my talisman, scorched-looking and bloodstained, wrapped around the slender wrist.
My heart leapt into my throat. "Lydia?" I asked. I reached out and touched her wrist. Felt the dull, slow throb of pulse. I let out a breath of relief, pulled the blankets from her pale face. Her eyes were open, staring, the pupils dilated until there was barely any color left in them at all. I waved my hand in front of her eyes and said again, "Lydia." She didn't respond. Drugged, I thought.
What the hell was she doing here? Lying in a van, covered up in blankets drugged and placed as neatly as could be. It didn't make sense, unless she was . . .
Unless she was a distraction. The bait for a trap.
I turned, but before I got halfway around that cold energy I'd felt the night before flooded over the side of my face, my throat. Something blonde and incredibly swift slammed into me with the force of a rushing bull, throwing me off my feet and into the van. I spun around onto my elbows to see the vampire Kyle Hamilton coming for me, his eyes black and empty, his face screwed up into a grimace of hunger. He still wore his tennis whites. I kicked at his chest, and superhuman strength or no, it lifted him up off the ground for a second, brought me a half-breath of life. I lifted my right hand, the silver ring there gleaming, and cried, "Assantius!"
The energy stored in the ring, all kinetic stuff that it saved back a little every time I moved my arm, unloaded in a flood, right in the vampire's face, an unseen fury of motion. The raw force split his lips---but no blood flowed out. It dug into the corners of his eyes and tore the skin away, but there was still no blood. It ripped the skin from his cheekbones, all rubbery black beneath the Anglo-Saxon pink, strips of flesh flapping back in the wave of force like flags in a high wind.
The vampire's body flew back and up. It thudded hard against the ceiling and then fell to the floor with a thump. I struggled out of the van, my chest aching with a dull sort of pain. I left the doctor's bag behind, shook out the shield bracelet and extended my left arm in front of me.
Kyle stirred for a moment and then flung himself to all fours, his body weirdly contorted, shoulders standing up too much, his back bent at a crooked angle. Shreds of flesh dangled from his face, slick-looking, rubbery black beneath them. His eyes also had the skin torn away from them, like pieces of a rubber mask, and bulged out black and huge and inhuman. His jaws parted, showing dripping fangs, saliva pattering to the damp floor.
"You," the vampire hissed, his voice calm, normal, disconcerting.
"Whoah, that was original," I muttered, drawing in my will. "Yeah, me. What the hell are you doing here? Where do you think you're going with Lydia?"
His inhuman expression flickered. "Who?"
My chest panged, hard, sharp, hot, as if something was broken. Broken badly. I remained standing, though, not letting him see weakness. "Lydia. Bad dye job, sunken eyes, in your van, wearing my talisman on her wrist."
He hissed out a dripping runnel of laughter. "Is that what she told you her name was? You've been used, Dresden."
I got a shivery feeling again, and narrowed my eyes. I didn't have any warning but instinct to make me throw myself to one side in an abrupt leap.
The vampire's sister, Kelly, as blonde and pretty as he had been a moment before, landed in the space I had occupied. She too dropped to her knees with a drooling hiss, fangs showing, eyes bulging. She wore a white cat suit, clinging tight to her curves, along with white boots and gloves, and a short white cape with a deep hood. Her clothing was smudged, imperfect, spotted with flecks of scarlet, and her blonde hair in disarray. Blood stained her mouth, like smeared lipstick, or a child with a big cup of juice. A blood mustache. Hells bells.
I kept my blasting rod trained on Kelly, my left hand thrust out before me. "So you two are putting the snatch on Lydia, eh? Why?"
"Let me kill him," moaned the female, her eyes all black, empty and hungry. "Kyle. I'm hungry."
So sue me, I weird out when someone starts talking about eating me. I swung the blasting rod right at Kelly's face and started sending power into it, setting the tip to glowing. "Yeah, Kyle," I said. "Let her try."
Kyle rippled, beneath his skin, and it was enough to make my stomach turn. Something like that just ain't right, even when you know what's underneath. "This affair is none of yours, wizard."
"The girl is under my protection," I said. "You two clear out, now, and I won't have to get rough with you."
"That will not happen," Kyle said, his voice deadly quiet.
"Kyle," the female moaned again. More drool slithered out of her mouth, dripping to the floor. She started shaking, quivering, as if she were about to fly apart. Or at me. My mouth went dry, and I got ready to blast her.
I saw Kyle move out of the corner of my eye. I lifted the shield bracelet toward him, transferred my will to it, but in time only to partially deflect the broken chip of concrete that he threw at my head. It slammed against my temple and sent me spinning. I saw Kelly blur toward me, white cape flying, and I lifted the blasting rod toward her, shouting, "Fuego!"
Fire slammed out the end of the rod, missing Kelly by at least a foot, but still hot enough to set the hem of her cloak ablaze. The flame slewed in an arch across the ceiling and down the wall as I started falling, cutting through wood and brick and stone like an enormous arc-welder.
She flung herself atop me, straddling my hips with her thighs, moaning in excitement. I thrust the blasting rod toward her, but she batted it aside, laughing in a wild, hysterical tone, throwing her smoldering cloak off with the other hand. She plunged toward my throat, but I lifted my hands to catch at her mane of hair. I knew it was a futile gesture---she was just too damned strong. I wouldn't be able to hold her off of me for long, a few seconds at most. My heart pounded in my burning chest, and I struggled, gasping in air.
And then droplets of her spittle fell onto my throat, my cheek, into my mouth. And none of it mattered any more.
It was a glorious sensation, that spread over me---warmth, security, peace. Ecstasy began at my skin and spread through me, easing all the horrid tension from my muscles. My fingers slackened in Kelly's lovely hair, and she purred, her hips writhing against mine. She lowered her mouth toward me, and I felt her breath on my skin, her breasts press against me through the thin material of her bodysuit.
Something, some nagging thought, bothered me for a moment. Perhaps it was something about the perfect, lightless depths of her eyes, or the way her fangs rubbed against my throat---no matter how good it felt. But then I felt her lips on my skin, felt her draw in her breath in shivering anticipation, and it stopped mattering. I just wanted more.
Then there was a roaring sound, and I dimly perceived the west wall of the building collapsing, falling away in great, flaming sections of wood and brick. The blast I had sent spewing at Kelly had sliced through the ceiling, walls, and support beams. It must have weakened the structure of the entire building as it had.
Oops.
Sunlight flooded in, through the falling bricks and clouds of dust, the last rays of daylight, warm and golden on my face, painfully bright in my eyes.
Kelly screamed and, wherever her skin wasn't covered by cloth, from her chin up, mostly---she burst into flame. The light hit her like a physical blow, hurling her away from me. I became aware of a dull pain, uncomfortable heat on my cheek, my throat, where her saliva had coated my skin.
Everything was light and heat and pain for a few moments, and someone was screaming. I struggled up a moment later, peering around the inside of the building. Fire spread, a dull chewing sound on the floors above me, and through the missing section of wall I could hear sirens in the distance. There were smears of something black and greasy on the concrete floor, leading to the white van. The sunlight barely touched the back window of the vehicle. The side door stood wide open, and Kyle, his face still hanging in ragged strips, hauled something grotesque---his sister, her true form no longer shrouded by its mask of flesh. The vampire girl made keening sounds of agony while her brother pitched her into the back of the van. He slammed the door shut, a snarl rippling his split lips. He took a step toward me, then clenched his jaws in frustration, stopping just short of the sunlight.
"Wizard," he hissed. "You'll pay. I'll make you pay for this." Then he spun back to the van, with its dark-tinted windows, and leapt in. A moment later, the engine roared to life, and the van sped toward the garage doors, plowed through one of them, sending shards of wood flying, jounced into the street, and vanished from sight, engine racing.
I remained in place, stunned, burnt, hurting, my brain clouded. Then I stumbled to my feet, and staggered toward the hole in the wall, and out into the fading daylight. Sirens got closer.
"Damn," I mumbled, looking back at the spreading fires. "I'm kinda hard on buildings."
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. Dark. It was getting dark. Had to get home. Vampires could come out after dark. Home, I thought. Home.
I started stumbling back toward the Beetle.
Behind me, as I did, the sun sank beneath the horizon---freeing all the things that go bump in the night to come out and play.
I don't remember how I managed to get home again. I have a vague image of all the cars around me going way too fast, and then of Mister's rumbling purr greeting me as I got into my apartment and locked the door behind me.
The vampire's narcotic saliva had soaked in through my skin in a matter of a second or three, spreading into my system in short order after that. I felt numb, light, all over. The room wasn't quite whirling, but when I moved my eyes, things almost seemed to blur a little, then to settle when I focused on something. I throbbed. Every time my heart beat, my entire body pulsed with a slow, gentle pang of pleasant sensation.
Something inside me couldn't help but love every second of it. Even counting the times I'd been juiced up in a hospital, it was the best drug I'd ever had.
I stumbled to my narrow bed and dropped onto it. Mister came and prowled around my face, waiting for me to get up and feed him. "Go away," I heard myself mumble. "Stupid furball. Go on." He put one paw on my throat, and touched the area of burned skin where the sunlight had struck the smear of Kelly Hamilton's saliva. Pain flared through me, and I groaned, forcing myself into the kitchen. I got some cold cuts out of the icebox and dropped them onto Mister's plate. Then I stumbled into the bathroom and flicked on the light.
It hurt.
I shielded my eyes and studied myself in the mirror. My pupils had dilated out nice and big. The skin on my throat, my cheek, was red and glowing, as though from falling asleep outside on a summer afternoon---painful, but not dangerous. I couldn't find any marks on my throat, so the vampire hadn't bitten me. I was pretty sure that was a good thing. Something about a bite being a link to a victim. If she'd bitten me, she could have gotten into my head. Usual mind-control enchantment. Breaking one of the Laws of Magic.
I stumbled back to my bed and sank down onto it, trying to sort out my thoughts. My lovely, throbbing body made this fairly difficult. Mister came nosing around again, but I shoved him away with one hand and forced myself to ignore him.
"Focus, Harry," I mumbled to myself. "Got to have focus."
I'd learned to block out pain, when necessary. Studying under Justin, it had been a practical necessity. My teacher hadn't believed in sparing the rod and spoiling the potential wizard. You learn very quickly not to make mistakes given the correct incentive to avoid them.
Blocking out pleasure was a more difficult exercise, but I somehow managed. The first thing I had to do was separate my sense of enjoyment. It took me a while, but I slowly marked out the boundaries of the parts of me that liked all the wonderful, warm sensations, and walled them away. Then the actual pounding happiness itself. I found my heart rate and slowed it a bit, though it was already going too slowly, then started shutting down perception of my limbs, pushing them behind the walls with the rest of me that wasn't doing any good. Giddy delight went next, leaving only a dull fuzz across my thinking, chemically unavoidable.
I closed my eyes and breathed, and tried to sort through things.
Lydia had fled the shelter of the church, and Father Forthill's protection. Why? I thought back, over the details of everything I knew about her. Her sunken eyes. The tingle of touching her aura. Had her hands been shaking, just a little? I think they had, in retrospect. I thought of what I had seen of her in the van, of the bracelet on her wrist. Her beating pulse. Had it been slow? I'd thought so, at the time---but then my own had been racing. I focused on the moment I'd been touching her.
Sixty, I thought. She'd been around sixty beats per minute. My own heart rate was about a sixth of that at the moment. Had been half that, before I'd slowed it down to quiet the song of the drug in my blood.
(Song, pretty song, why the hell did I have it shut away, when I could just lower the walls, listen to the music, lay here all happy and quiet and just feel, just be . . .)
I took a moment to prop the walls up again. Lydia's heart rate had been at human normal, nominally. But she'd been lying limp and still, much as I was, now. Kyle and Kelly had poisoned her, as they had me, I was sure of it. Then why had her heart been beating so quickly, in comparison?
She left the church and had been taken, perhaps, by the Nightmare. Then gone to Malone's house under its guidance, and gotten an invitation in. But why go to Malone's house? What did he have to do with anything?
Malone and Lydia. They'd both been attacked by the Nightmare. What was the connection? What linked them together?
More questions. What did the vampires want with her? If Kyle and his sister had been after Lydia, that meant that Bianca wanted her. Why? Was Bianca in league with the Nightmare? If she was, why the hell would she need to use her most powerful goons to kidnap the girl, if she was possessed by Bianca's ally?
And how the hell had the Nightmare gone through the threshold? An even better question, how had it gotten through the protection offered to Lydia by my Dead Man's talisman? No ghost should have been able to offer her any direct harm or contact through that thing. It didn't make any sense.
(Why should it? Why should anything need to mean anything at all? Just sit back, Harry. Lie back and feel good and relax and let your blood sing, let your heart beat, just ease down into the wonderful, warm, spinning dark and stop worrying, stop caring, drift and float and . . .)
The walls started to crumble.
I struggled, but sudden fear made my heartbeat quicken. I fought against the pull of the poison in my blood, but that struggle only made me more vulnerable, more susceptible. I couldn't fail, now. I couldn't. People were depending upon me. I had to fight---
The walls fell, and my blood surged up with a roar.
I drifted.
And it was nice.
Drifting turned into sleep. Gentle, dark sleep. And sleep, in time, turned into dreams.
In my dream, I found myself back at the warehouse down by Burnham Harbor. It was night, beneath a full moon. I was wearing my duster, my black shirt and jeans, my black sneakers, which were better for . . . well. Sneaking. Michael stood beside me, his breath steaming in the winter air, dressed in his cloak, his full mail, his bloodred surcoat. Amoracchius rode his hip, a source of quiet, constant power. Murphy and the other members of Special Investigations all wore dark, loose clothing and their flack vests, and everyone had a gun in one hand and something else---like vials of holy water or silver crucifixes---in the other.
Micky Malone glanced up at the moon and shifted the shotgun in both hands---he was the only person relying upon raw, shredding firepower. Hey, the guy had a point. "All right," he said. "We go in and then what?"
"Here's the plan," Murphy said. "Harry thinks that the killer's followers will be drugged out and dozing. We round them up, cuff them up, and move on." Murphy grimaced, her blue eyes sparkling in the silver light. "Tell them what's next, Harry."
I kept my voice quiet. "The guy we're after is a sorcerer. It's sort of like being a wizard, only he spends all his energy doing things that are mostly destructive. He isn't good at doing anything that doesn't fuck someone up."
"Which makes him a badass as far as we're concerned," Malone growled.
"Pretty much," I confirmed. "The guy's got power, but no class. I'm going to go in and lock down his magic. We think he might have a demon on a string---that's what the murders have been for. They're part of his payment to get the demon to work for him."
"Demon," breathed Rudolph. "Jesus, can you believe this shit?"
"Jesus did believe in demons," Michael said, his voice quiet. "If the creature is there, do not get close to it. Don't shoot at it. Leave it to me. If it gets past me, throw your holy water at the thing and run while it screams."
"That's pretty much the plan," I confirmed. "Keep any human flunkies with knives from giving them to me or Michael. I'll take Kravos's powers out, and you guys grab him as soon as we're sure the demon won't eat us. I deal with any other supernatural stuff. Questions?"
Murphy shook her head. "Let's go." She leaned out and pumped her arm in the air, signaling the rest of the S.I. team, and we headed into the warehouse.
Everything went according to plan. In the front of the warehouse, a dozen young people, all with that lost, lonely look to them, lay dozing amidst fumes that made me dizzy. The remnants of a serious party lay all over the place---beer cans, clothes, roaches, empty needles, you name it. The cops fell on the kids in a dark-clad swarm and had them cuffed and hauled out into a waiting wagon in under ninety seconds.
Michael and I moved forward, toward the back of the warehouse, through stacks of boxes and shipping crates. Murphy, Rudy, and Malone followed hard on our heels. I cracked the door at the back wall and peered through it.
I saw a circle of black, smoking candles, a red-lit figure dressed in feathers and blood kneeling beside it, and something dark and horrible crouching within.
"Bingo," I whispered. I turned to Michael. "He's got the demon in there with him."
The Knight simply nodded, and loosened his sword in its sheath.
I drew the doll out of my duster's pocket. It was a Ken doll, naked, and not anatomically correct, but it would work. The single hair that forensics had recovered from the last victim's crime scene had been carefully Scotch-taped to the doll's head, and I had attired Ken in the general garb of someone delving into black magic---reversed pentagrams, some feathers, and some blood (from a hapless mouse Mister had nabbed).
"Murphy," I hissed. "Are you absolutely sure about this hair? That it belongs to Kravos?" If it didn't, the doll wouldn't do diddly to the sorcerer, unless I managed to throw it into his eye.
"We're reasonably sure," she whispered, "yes."
"Reasonably sure. Great." But I knelt down, and marked out the circle around me, then another around the Ken doll, and wrought my spell.
The hair was Kravos's. He became aware of the spell taking effect a few seconds before it could close off his power altogether---and with those few seconds he had, he reached out and broke the circle around the demon with his will and his hand, then in a screaming rage compelled it to attack.
The demon leapt toward us, all writhing darkness and shadows and glowing red eyes. Michael stepped into the doorway and drew Amoracchius, the sudden blaze of light and magical fury like a gale in that darkness.
In real life, I had completed the spell and shut Kravos away from his powers. Michael had carved the demon into chutney. Kravos had made a run for it, but Malone, at fairly long range, had fired his shotgun at the ground and at Kravos's feet, and done it perfectly, sweeping the man's legs out from beneath him and leaving him writhing, bleeding, but alive. Murphy had wrestled the knife out of the sorcerer's hands, and the good guys had won the day.
In my dream, it didn't happen that way.
I felt the fabric of the spell closing around Kravos start to slip. One minute, he was there, in the weaving I was spinning around him---the next, he was simply gone, the spell collapsing of its own unsupported weight.
Michael screamed. I looked up, to see him lifted high in the air, his sword sweeping through the shadows and darkness before him in impotent futility. Dark hands, fingers nightmarishly long, grabbed Michael's head, covering his face. There was a twist, a wet, crackling sound, and the Knight's neck broke cleanly. His body jerked, then went limp. Amoracchius's light died out. The demon screamed, a tinny, high-pitched sound, and let the body fall to the ground.
Murphy shouted and hurled her jar of holy water at the demon. The liquid flared into silver light as it struck something in that writhing darkness that was the demon. The shape turned toward us. Claws flashed out, and Murphy stumbled back, her eyes wide with shock where the talons had carved through her kevlar jacket, her shirt, her skin, leaving her belly torn open. Blood and worse rushed out, and she let out a weak gasp, pressing both hands against her own ruined side.
Malone started pumping rounds out of the shotgun. The demon-darkness turned toward him, a red-fanged leer spreading over it, and waited until the gun clicked empty. Then it simply laughed, grabbed the end of the shotgun, and slammed Malone against a wall, shoving the hardwood stock against the man's belly until he screamed, until the flesh began to rip, until ribs started crackling, and then shoved harder, until I could clearly hear, even above the sound of Malone's retching, the bones in his spine start to splinter and break. Malone, too, fell to the ground, dying.
Rudolph screamed, pasty-faced and white, and ran away.
Leaving me alone with the demon.
My heart rushed with terror and I shook like a leaf before the creature. I was still inside of the circle. I still had the circle protecting me. I struggled to reach out for my power, to summon a strike that would annihilate this thing.
And found something in my way. A wall. The same spell I'd meant to lay on Kravos.
The demon stalked over to me and, as though my circle wasn't even there, reached out and backhanded me into the air. I landed with a thud upon the ground.
"No," I stammered, and tried to struggle back from the thing. "No, this isn't happening. This isn't the way it happened!"
The demon's red eyes glowed. I lifted my blasting rod toward it, pointed, and shouted, "Fuego!"
There was no stirring of heat. No fitful crackling of energy. Nothing.
The demon laughed again, reaching down toward me, and I felt myself lifted into the air.
"This is a dream!" I shouted. With that awareness, I started struggling to reach out to the fabric of the dream, to alter it---but I'd made no preparations before I'd slept, and was already too panicked, too distracted to focus. "This is a dream! This isn't the way it happened!"
"That was then," the demon purred, its voice silken. "This is now." Then its maw opened up and closed over my belly, horrible fangs sinking in, worrying me, stretching my guts. It shook its head, and I exploded, shreds of meat flying out of me, into it, my blood rushing out while I strained and struggled helplessly, screaming.
And then a grey tabby with a bobtail bounded out of nowhere and whipped one paw at me, lashing it across my nose, claws slashing like fire.
I screamed again and found myself in the far corner of my bedroom, back in my apartment, curled into a fetal ball. I had been puking my guts out. Mister hovered over me and then, almost judiciously, delivered another scratch to my cheek. I heard myself cry out and flinch from the blow.
Something rippled along my skin. Something cold and dark and nauseating. I sat up, blinking sleep from my eyes, struggling through the remnants of the vampire's poison and sleep to focus on the presence---but it was gone.
I shook, violently. I was terrified. Not frightened, not apprehensive---viciously and unremittingly terrified. Mindless, brain-stem terror, the kind that quite simply bypasses rational thought and heads straight for your soul. I felt horribly violated, somehow, used. Helpless. Weak.
I crawled down to my lab, fumbling in the dark. Dimly, I was aware of Mister coming along behind me. It was dark down here, dark and cold. I stumbled across the room, knocking things down left and right, to the summoning circle built into the floor. I threw myself into it, sobbing, fumbled with tingling fingers at the floor until I located the ring. Then I willed the circle closed. It struggled, resisted, and I pushed harder, forced myself on it harder, until finally I felt it snap shut around me in an invisible wall.
I curled on my side, keeping every part of myself within that circle, and wept.
Mister prowled around the circle, a rumbling, reassuring purr in his throat. Then I heard the big grey cat hop up onto the worktable, and over to one of the shelves. His dim shadow curled up by the pale bone of the skull. Orange light began to glide out of his mouth, into the skull's eye sockets, until Bob's candleflame eyes blinked, and the skull turned to focus on me.
"Harry," Bob said, his voice quiet, solemn. "Harry, can you hear me?"
Shaking, I looked up, desperately grateful to hear a familiar voice.
"Harry," Bob said gently. "I saw it, Harry. I think I know what went after Malone and the others. I think I know how it did it. I tried to help you, but you wouldn't wake up."
My mind whirled, confused. "What?" I asked. My voice came out a whimper. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm sorry, Harry." The skull paused, and though its expression couldn't really change, it somehow looked troubled. "I think I know what just tried to eat you."
"Eat me," I whispered. "I don't . . . I don't understand."
"This thing you've been chasing, I think. The Nightmare. I think it was here."
"Nightmare," I said. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. "Bob, I can't . . . I can't think straight. What's going on?"
"Well. You came in about five hours ago drugged to the gills on vampire spit, and muttering like a madman. I think you didn't realize that I was inside Mister. Do you remember that part?"
"Yeah. Sort of."
"What happened?"
I relayed my experience with Kyle and Kelly Hamilton to Bob. Speaking seemed to help things stop spinning, my guts to settle. My heartbeat slowly eased down to something less than that of a terrified rabbit.
"Sounds weird," Bob said. "Got to be something important to make them risk going out in daylight like that. Even in a specially equipped van."
"I realize that, Bob," I said, and mopped at my face with one hand.
"You any steadier?"
"I . . . I guess."
"I think you got torn up pretty good, spirit-wise. It's lucky you started screaming. I came as quick as I could, but you didn't want to wake up. The poison, I think."
I sat up, cross-legged, staying inside the circle. "I remember that I had a dream. God, it was a terrible dream." I felt my guts turn to water, and I started shaking again. "I tried to change it, but I wasn't ready. I couldn't."
"A dream," Bob said. "Yeah, that figures."
"Figures?" I asked.
"Sure," Bob said.
I shook my head, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. I did not want to be doing this. Someone else could do it. I should go, leave town. "It was a spirit that jumped me?"
"Yeah."
I shook my head. "That doesn't make any sense. How did it get past the threshold?"
"Your threshold isn't so hot to begin with, Bachelor Man."
I worked up enough courage to scowl at Bob. "The wards, then. I've got all the doors and windows warded. And I don't have any mirrors it could have used."
If Bob had any hands, he would have been rubbing them together. "Exactly," he said. "Yes, exactly."
My stomach quailed again, and a fresh burst of shuddering made me put my hands in my lap. I felt like sprawling somewhere, crying my eyes out, puking up whatever shreds of dignity remained in my stomach, and then crawling into a hole and pulling it in after me. I swallowed. "It . . . it never came in to me, then, is what you're saying. It never had to cross those boundaries."
Bob nodded, eyes burning brightly. "Exactly. You went out to it."
"When I was dreaming?"
"Yes, yes, yes," Bob bubbled. "It makes sense now---don't you see?"
"Not really."
"Dreams," the skull said. "When a mortal dreams, all kinds of strange things can happen. When a wizard dreams, it can be even weirder. Sometimes, dreams can be intense enough to create a little, temporary world of their own. Kind of a bubble in the Nevernever. Remember how you told me Agatha Hagglethorn was a strong enough ghost to have had her own demesne in the Nevernever?"
"Yeah. It looked kind of like old Chicago."
"Well, people can do the same, at times."
"But I'm not a ghost, Bob."
"No," he said. "You're not. But you've got everything it takes to make a ghost inside you except for the right set of circumstances. Ghosts are only frozen images of people, Harry, last impressions made by a personality." Bob paused, reflectively. "People are almost always more trouble than anything you run into on the Other Side."
"I hadn't noticed," I said. "All right. So you're saying that any time I dream, it creates my own little rent-by-the-hour demesne in the Nevernever."
"Not every time," Bob said. "In fact, not even most times. Only really intense dreams, I suspect, bring the necessary energy out of people. But, with the border being so turbulent and easy to get through . . ."
"More people's dreams are making bubbles on the other side. That must have been how it got to poor Micky Malone, then. While he was sleeping. His wife said he'd had insomnia that night. So the thing hangs around outside his house waiting for him to fall asleep and starts killing fuzzy animals to fill up the time."
"Could be," Bob said. "Do you remember your dream?"
I shuddered. "Yeah. I . . . I remember it."
"The Nightmare must have got inside with you."
"While my spirit was in the Nevernever?" I asked. "It should have ripped me to shreds."
"Not so," Bob beamed. "Your spirit's demesne, remember? Even if only a temporary one. Means you have the home field advantage. It didn't help, since it got the drop on you, but you had it."
"Oh."
"Do you remember anything in particular, any figure or character in the dream that wouldn't have been acting the way you thought it should have?"
"Yeah," I said. My shaking hands went to my belly, feeling for tooth marks. "Hell's bells, yeah. I was dreaming of that bust a couple of months back. When we nailed Kravos."
"That sorcerer," Bob mused. "Okay. This could be important. What happened?"
I swallowed, trying not to throw up. "Um. Everything went wrong. That demon he'd called. It was stronger than it had been in life."
"The demon was?"
I blinked. "Bob. Is it possible for something like a demon to leave a ghost?"
"Oh, uh," Bob said, "I don't think so---unless it had actually died there. Eternally perished, I mean, not just had its vessel dispersed."
"Michael killed it with Amoracchius," I said.
Bob's skull shuddered. "Ow," he said. "Amoracchius. I'm not sure, then. I don't know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical shell. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong."
"Okay, so. We could be dealing with the ghost of a demon, here," I said. "A demon that died while it was all fired up for a fight. Maybe that's what makes it so . . . so vicious."
"Could be," Bob agreed, cheerily.
I shook my head. "But that doesn't explain the barbed-wire spells we've been finding on those ghosts and people." I grabbed onto the problem, the tangled facts, with a silent kind of desperation, like a man about to drown who has no breath to waste on screaming. It helped to keep me moving.
"Maybe the spells are someone else's work," Bob offered.
"Bianca," I said, suddenly. "She and her lackeys are all messed up in this somehow---remember that they put the snatch on Lydia? And they were waiting for me, that first night, when I came back from being arrested."
"I didn't think she was that big time a practitioner," Bob said.
I shrugged. "She's not, horribly. But she just got promoted, too. Maybe she's been studying up. She's always had a little more than her share of freaky vampire tricks---and if she was over in the Nevernever when she did it, it would have made her stronger."
Bob whistled through his teeth. "Yeah, that could work. Bianca stirs things up by torturing a bunch of spirits, gets all the turbulence going so that she can prod this Nightmare toward you. Then she lets it loose, sits back, and enjoys the fun. She got a motive?"
"Regret," I said, remembering a note I'd read more than a year ago. "She blames me for the death of one of her people. Rachel. She wants to make me regret it."
"Neat," Bob said. "And she could have been everywhere in question?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, she could have been."
"Means, opportunity, motive."
"Damn shaky logic, though. Nothing I could justify to the Council in order to get their backup, either. I don't have any proof."
"So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved."
"Bob," I said. "You can't just go around killing people."
"I know. That's why you should do it."
"No, no. I can't go around killing people, either."
"Why not? You've done it before. And you've got a new gun and everything."
"I can't arbitrarily end someone's life because of something they may have done."
"Bianca's a vampire," Bob pointed out cheerfully. "She's not alive in the classic sense. I'll get Mister and go fetch the bullets and you---"
I sighed. "No, Bob. She's got lots of people around her, too. I'd probably have to kill some of them to get to her."
"Oh. Damn. This is one of those right and wrong issues again, isn't it."
"Yeah, one of those."
"I'm still confused about this whole morality thing, Harry."
"Join the club," I muttered. I took a shaking breath and leaned forward to put my hand over the circle, and will it broken. I almost cringed when its protective field faded from around me, but forced myself not to. I was as recovered as I was going to get. I needed to focus on work.
I stood up and walked to my worktable, my eyes by now adjusted to the dimness. I reached for the nearest candle, but there weren't any matches handy. So, I pointed my finger at it, frowned, and muttered the words, "Flickum bicus."
My spell, a tiny one I had used thousands of times, stuttered and coughed, the energy twitching instead of flowing. The candle's wick smoked, but did not flicker to life.
I frowned, then closed my eyes, made a little bit of an effort, and repeated the spell. This time, I felt a little surge of dizziness, and the candle flickered to life. I braced one hand on the edge of the table.
"Bob," I asked. "Were you watching that?"
"Yeah," Bob said, a frown in his voice.
"What happened?"
"Um. You didn't put enough magic into the spell, the first time around."
"I put as much as I always do," I protested. "Come on, I've done that spell a million times."
"Seventeen hundred and fifty-six, that I've seen."
I gave him a pale version of my usual glower. "You know what I mean."
"Not enough power," Bob said. "I call 'em like I see 'em."
I stared at the candle for a second. Then muttered, to myself, "Why did I have to work to make that thing light up?"
"Probably because the Nightmare took a big bite out of your powers, Harry."
I turned around, very slowly, to blink at Bob. "It . . . it did what?"
"When it attacked you, in your dream, did it go after a specific place on your body?"
I put my hand to the base of my stomach, pressing there, and felt my eyes go wide.
Bob winced. "Oooooo, chakra point. That isn't good. Got you right in the chi."
"Bob," I whispered.
"Good thing he didn't go after your mojo though, right? I mean, you have to look on the bright side of these---"
"Bob," I said, louder. "Are you saying it . . . it ate my magic?"
Bob got a defensive look on his face. "Not all of it. I woke you up as quick as I could. Harry, don't worry about it, you'll heal. Sure, you might be down for a couple of months. Or, um, years. Well, decades, possibly, but that's only a very outside chance---"
I cut him off with a slash of my hand. "He ate part of my power," I said. "Does that mean that the Nightmare is stronger?"
"Well, naturally, Harry. You are what you eat."
"Dammit," I snarled, pressing one hand against my forehead. "Okay, okay. We've really got to find this thing now." I started pacing back and forth. "If it's using my power, it makes me responsible for what it does with it."
Bob scoffed. "Harry, that's irrational."
I shot him a look. "That doesn't make it any less true," I snapped.
"Okay," Bob said, meekly. "We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville."
"Grrrr," I said, still pacing. "We have to figure out where this thing is going to hit next. It's got all night to move."
"Six hours, thirteen minutes," Bob corrected me. "Shouldn't be hard. I've been reading those journals you got from the ectomancer, while you were sleeping. The thing can show up in nightmares, but there's going to be commonality between all of it. Ghosts can only have the kind of power this Nightmare has while they are acting within the parameters of their specific bailiwick."
"Baili-what?"
"Look at it this way, Harry. A ghost can only affect something that relates directly to its death somehow. Agatha Hagglethorn couldn't have terrorized a Cubs game. That wasn't where her power was. She could mess with infants, with abusive husbands, maybe with abused wives---"
"And meddling wizards," I mumbled.
"You put yourself in the line of fire, sure," Bob said. "But Agatha couldn't just run somewhere willy-nilly and wreak havoc."
"The Nightmare's got to have a personal beef in this," I said. "That's what you're saying."
"Well. It has to be related to its demise, somehow. So, yeah. I guess that is what I'm saying. More specifically, it's what Mort Lindquist was saying, in his journals."
"Me," I said. "And Lydia. And Mickey Malone. How the hell do all of those relate? I never saw Lydia before in my life." I frowned. "At least, I don't think I have."
"She's kind of an oddball," Bob agreed. "Leave her out of the equation for a minute?"
I did, and it came to me as clearly as a beam of sunlight. "Dammit," I said. I turned and ran toward the stairs on my unsteady legs, started hauling myself up them and toward the phone.
"What?" Bob called after me. "Harry, what?"
"If that thing is the demon's ghost, I know what it wants. Payback. It's after the people that took it down." I yelled back down the stairs, "I've got to find Murphy."
There's a kind of mathematics that goes along with saving people's lives. You find yourself running the figures without even realizing it, like a medic on a battlefield. This patient has no chance of surviving. That one does, but only if you let a third die.
For me, the equation broke down into fairly simple elements. The demon, hungry for its revenge, would come after those who had struck it down. The ghost would only remember those who had been there, whom it had focused on in those last moments. That meant that Murphy and Michael would be its remaining targets. Michael had a chance of protecting himself against the thing---hell, maybe a better chance than me. Murphy didn't.
I got on the phone to Murphy's place. No answer. I called the office, and she answered with a fatigue-blurred, "Murphy."
"Murph," I said. "Look, I need you to trust me on this one. I'm coming down there and I'll be there in about twenty minutes. You could be in danger. Stay where you are and stay awake until I get to you."
"Harry?" Murphy asked. I could hear her starting to scowl. "You telling me you're going to be late?"
"Late? No, dammit. Look, just do what I said, all right?"
"I do not appreciate this crap, Dresden," Murphy growled. "I haven't slept in two days. You told me you'd be here in ten minutes, and I told you I'd wait."
"Twenty. I said twenty minutes, Murph."
I could feel her glare over the phone. "Don't be an asshole, Harry. That's not what you said five minutes ago. If this is some kind of joke, I am not amused."
I blinked, and a cold feeling settled into my gut, into the hollow place the Nightmare had torn out of me. The phone line snapped, crackled, and popped, and I struggled to calm down before the connection went out. "Wait, Murphy. Are you saying you talked to me five minutes ago?"
"I am about two seconds short of killing the next thing that pisses me off, Harry. And everything keeping me out of bed is pissing me off. Don't get added to the list." She hung up on me.
"Dammit!" I yelled. I hung up the phone and dialed Murphy's number again, but only got a busy signal.
Something had talked to Murphy and convinced her she was talking to me. The list of things that could put on someone else's face was awfully long, but the probabilities were limited: either another supernatural beastie had wandered onto the stage or, I gulped, the Nightmare had taken a big enough bite of me that it could put on a convincing charade.
Ghosts could take material form, after all---if they had the power to form a new shape out of material from the Nevernever, and if they were familiar enough with the shape. The Nightmare had eaten a bunch of my magic. It had the power it needed. And it had the familiarity it needed.
Hell's bells, it was pretending to be me.
I hung up the phone and tore around the house frantically, collecting car keys and putting together an improvised exorcism kit from stuff in my kitchen: Salt, a wooden spoon, a table knife, a couple of storm candles and matches, and a coffee cup. I stuffed them all into an old Scooby-Doo lunch box, then, as an afterthought, reached into a bag of sand that I keep in the kitchen closet for Mister's litter box, and tossed a handful into a plastic bag. I added the scorched staff and blasting rod to the accumulating pile of junk in my arms. Then I ran for the door.
I hesitated, though. Then went to the phone and dialed Michael's number, fingers dancing over the rotary. It was also busy. I let out a shriek of purest frustration, slammed down the phone, and ran out the door to the Blue Beetle.
It was late. Traffic could have been worse. I got there in less than the twenty minutes I'd promised Murphy and parked the car in one of the visitor's parking spaces.
The district station Murphy worked in crouched down amongst taller buildings that surrounded it, solid and square and a bit battered, like a tough old sergeant amongst a forest of tall, young recruits. I ran up the stairs, taking my blasting rod with me, with my Scooby-Doo lunch box in my right hand.
The grizzled old sergeant behind the desk blinked at me as I came panting through the doorway. "Dresden?"
"Hi," I panted. "Which way did I go?"
He blinked. "What?"
"Did I come through here a minute ago?"
His thick, grey moustache twitched in nervous little motions. He took a look at his clipboard. "Yeah. You went up to see Lieutenant Murphy just a minute ago."
"Great," I said. "I need to see her again. Buzz me through?"
He peered at me, a little closer, then reached forward to buzz me through. "What's going on here, Mr. Dresden?"
"Believe me," I said. "As soon as I work that out, I'll be sure to tell you." I opened the door and headed through, up the stairs, and toward the S.I. offices on the fourth floor. I pounded through the doors and sprinted down the rows of desks toward Murphy's office. Stallings and Rudolph both started up from their chairs, blinking as I went past.
"What the hell?" Rudy blurted, his eyes widening.
"Where's Murphy?" I shouted.
"In her office," Stallings stammered, "with you."
Murphy's office stood at the back of the room, with cheap walls and a cheap door that finally bore a genuine metallic nameplate with her name and title on it. I leaned back and drove my heel at the doorknob. The cheap door splintered, but I had to kick it again to send it swinging open.
Murphy sat at her desk, still wearing the clothes I'd last seen her in. She'd taken her hat off, and her short blonde hair was mussed. The circles beneath her eyes were almost as dark as bruises. She sat perfectly still, staring forward with her blue eyes set in an expression of horror.
I stood behind her, all in black---the same outfit I'd worn the night we'd stopped Kravos and his demon. The Nightmare looked like me. Its hands rested on either side of her face, fingertips on her temples---except that they had, somehow, pressed into her head, reaching down through skin and bone as though gently massaging her brain. The Nightmare was smiling, leaning down a bit toward her, head canted as though listening to music. I didn't know my face was capable of making an expression like that---serene and malicious and frightening.
I stared for a second in sheer horror at the weirdness of the sight. Then blurted, "Get the hell off of her!"
The Nightmare's dark eyes snapped up, sparkling with a cold, calm intelligence. It lifted its lips away from its teeth in an abrupt snarl. "Be thou silent, wizard," it murmured, steel and razor blades in its words. "Else I will tear thee apart, as I already have this night."
A little gibbering shriek of terror started somewhere down in my quivering belly, but I refused to give it a voice. I heard Rudy and Stallings coming behind me. I lifted the blasting rod and leveled it at the Nightmare's head. "I said to get off of her."
The Nightmare's mouth twisted into a smile. It lifted its hands away from Murphy, fingers just sliding out of her skin as though from water, and showed me its palms. "There is something thou hast forgotten, wizard."
"Yeah?" I asked. "What's that?"
"I have partaken of thee. I am what thou art," the Nightmare whispered. He flicked his wrists toward me. "Ventas servitas."
Wind roared up in a sudden fury and hurled me from my feet, back into the air. I collided with Rudolph and Stallings as they ran forward. We all went down in a heap upon the ground.
I lay there stunned for a moment. I heard the Nightmare walk out. It just walked past us, footsteps calm and quiet, and left the room. We gathered ourselves together slowly, sitting up.
"What the hell?" Rudolph said.
My head hurt, in back. I must have slammed it into something. I pressed a hand against my skull, and groaned. "Oh, stars," I muttered. "I should have known better than to give him a straight line like that."
Stallings had blood running out his nose and into his greying moustache. Flecks of red spotted his white dress shirt. "That . . . Good Lord, Dresden. What was that thing?"
I pushed myself to my feet. Everything wobbled for a moment. My whole body shook, and I felt like I might just fall over and start crying like a baby. It had used my magic. It had stolen my face and my magic and used them both to hurt people. It made me want to start screaming, to tear something apart with my bare hands.
Instead, I staggered toward Murphy's office. "It's what got Malone," I told Stallings. "It's kind of complicated."
Murphy still sat in her chair, her eyes wide and staring and horrified, her hands folded into her lap. "Murph?" I asked. "Karrin? Can you hear me?"
She didn't move. But her breath came out with a little edge to it, as though she had tried to speak. She breathed. Thank God. I knelt down and took her hands in mine. They felt ice cold.
"Murph," I whispered. I waved my hand in front of her eyes, and snapped my fingers sharply. She didn't so much as blink.
Rudolph's handsome face was pale. "I'll call downstairs. Tell them not to let him out." I heard him go to the nearest phone and start calling down to the desk. I didn't bother to tell him that it wouldn't do any good. The Nightmare could walk out through the walls if it needed to.
Stallings joined me in the room, looking shaken and a little grey. He stared at Murphy for a long moment, and then asked, "What is it? What's wrong with her?"
I peered at her eyes. They were dilated wide. I braced myself, and looked deeper into her eyes. When a wizard looks into your eyes, you cannot hide from him. He can see deep down into you, see the truest parts of your character, the dark places and the light---and you see him in return. Eyes are the windows to the soul. I searched for Murphy behind all of that terror, and waited for the soulgaze to begin.
Nothing happened.
Murphy just sat there, staring ahead. Another low breath rattled out, not quite making a sound---but I recognized the effort she was making for what it was.
Murphy was screaming.
I had no idea what she was seeing, what horrors the Nightmare had set before her eyes. What it had taken from her. I touched her throat with gentle fingertips, but I couldn't feel the bone-chilling cold of the torment-spell like the one upon Malone. At least there was that much. But if I couldn't see inside of her, then Murphy was in another place. The lights were on, but no one was home.
"She's . . . This thing has messed with her head. I think it's making her see things. Things that aren't here. I don't think she knows where she is, and she can't seem to move."
"Christ preserve," Stallings whispered. "What can we do?"
"John," I said, quietly. "I need you to pull the evidence files from the Kravos case. I need that big leather book that we found at his apartment."
Stallings started, and then stared at me. "You need what?"
I repeated my request.
He closed his eyes. "Jesus, Dresden. I don't know. I don't know if I could get it. There's been some stuff come up lately."
"I need that book," I said. "The thing that's doing this is a kind of demon. Kravos will have that demon's name written down in his spell book. If I can get that name, I can catch this thing and stop it. I can make it tell me how to help Murph."
"You don't understand. It isn't going to be that easy for me. This has gotten complicated, and I'm not going to be able to just walk into storage and get the damn thing for you, Dresden." He studied Murphy with worried eyes. "It could cost me my job."
I set my Scooby-Doo lunch box on the floor and opened it up. "Listen to me," I said. "I'm going to try to help Murphy. I need someone to stay with her until dawn and then to take her back to her house---or better yet, to Malone's house."
"Why?" Stallings asked. "What are you doing?"
"I think this thing is making her live through some messed up stuff---like in a nightmare. I'm pretty sure I can stop it, but she'll still be vulnerable. So I'm going to set up a protection around her so that she'll be safe until dawn." Once morning rolled around, the Nightmare would be trapped in whatever mortal body it possessed, or else would have to flee to the Nevernever. "Someone will need to watch her, in case she wakes up."
"Rudolph can do it," Stallings said, and rose to his feet. "I'll talk to him."
I looked up at him. "I need that book, John."
He frowned, studying the ground in front of me. "Are we going to be able to catch this thing, Dresden?" We meaning the police. I could hear that much in his voice.
I shook my head.
"If I get the book for you," he said, "can you help the lieutenant?"
I nodded at him.
He closed his eyes and let out a breath. "All right," he whispered. Then he walked out. I heard him talking to Rudolph a moment later.
I turned back to Murphy, taking the plastic sack of sand out of the lunch box. I got out a piece of chalk and pushed Murphy's chair back from the desk so that I could draw a circle around us both and will it closed. It took more effort than it usually did, leaving me dizzy for a second.
I swallowed and began to gather up energy, to focus it as carefully and precisely as I could. It built slowly, while Murphy continued to inhale, and to exhale whispered screams. I put my hand on her cold fingers, and thought about all the stuff we'd been through, the bond of friendship that had grown between us. Good times and bad, Murph's heart had always been in the right place. She didn't deserve this kind of torment.
A great fury began to stir in me---not some vaporous, swiftly dissipated flash of anger, but something deeper, darker, more calm and more dangerous. Rage. Rage that this sort of thing should happen to someone as selfless and caring as Murphy. Rage that the creature had used my power, my face, to trick its way close to her and to hurt her.
From that rage came the power I needed. I gathered it up carefully and shaped it with my thoughts into the softest-edged spell I could conceive. Gently, I sent the power coursing down my arm into the grains of sand I pinched between a single fingertip. Then I slowly lifted my arm, the spell holding in a precarious balance as I sprinkled a bit of sand over each of her eyes. "Dormius, dorme," I whispered. "Murphy, dormius."
Power coursed out of me, flowed down my arm like water. I felt it fall with the grains of sand. Murphy let out a long, shivering breath, and her staring eyes began to flutter closed. Her expression slackened, from horror to deep, silent sleep, and she slumped into her chair.
I let out my breath as the spell took hold, and bowed my head, trembling. I reached out and stroked my hand over Murphy's hair. Then I composed her into something that looked a little more comfortable. "Down where there's no dreams," I whispered to her. "Just rest, Murph. I'll nail this thing for you."
With an effort of will, I smudged the circle and broke it. Then I stepped outside it, used the chalk to close it again and willed it closed around Murphy. I had to strain, this time, more than I'd ever needed to since I was barely more than a child. But the circle closed around her, sealing her in. A small haze, only an inch or two high, danced around the chalk lines, like heat waves rising from summer roads. The circle would keep out anything from the Nevernever---and the enchanted sleep would hold until the dawn came, keep her from dreaming and giving the Nightmare a way to further harm her.
I shambled out of her office, to the nearest phone. Rudolph watched me. Stallings wasn't in evidence. I dialed Michael's number. It was still busy.
I wanted to crawl home and drop a sleep spell on myself. I wanted to hide somewhere warm and quiet and get some rest. But the Nightmare was still out there. It was still after its vengeance, after Michael. I had to get to it, find it, stop it. Or at least warn him.
I put the phone down and started gathering my stuff together. Someone touched my shoulder. I looked up at Rudolph. He looked uncertain, pale.
"You'd better not be a fake, Dresden," he said, quietly. "I'm not really sure what's going on here. But so help me God, if something happens to the lieutenant because of you . . ."
I studied his face numbly. And then nodded. "I'll call back for Stallings. I need that book."
Rudolph's expression was serious, earnest. He'd never much liked me, anyway. "I mean it, Dresden. If you let Murphy get hurt, I'll kill you."
"Kid, if anything happens to Murphy because of me . . ." I sighed. "I think I'll let you."
I wouldn't have thought you could find a peaceful, suburbanish neighborhood in the city of Chicago. Michael had managed, not too far west of Wrigley Field. Ancient old trees lined either side of the street in stately splendor. The homes were mostly old Victorian affairs, restored after a fluctuating economy and a century of wear and tear had reduced them to trembling firetraps. Michael's house looked like it was made of gingerbread. Fancy trim, elegant paint in ivory and burgundy---and, perhaps inevitably, a white picket fence around the house and its front yard. The porch light cast a circle of white radiance out onto the front lawn, almost to the edge of the property.
I slewed the Beetle up onto the curb in front of the house and pushed my way through the swinging gate, clomping up the stairs to rattle the knocker against the front door. I figured that it would take Michael a minute to stagger out of bed and come down the stairs, but instead I heard a thump, a pair of long steps, and then the curtains of the window beside the door stirred. A second later, the door opened, and Michael stood there, blinking sleep out of his eyes. He wore a pair of jeans and a T-shirt with JOHN 3:16 across his chest. He held one of his kids in his brawny arms, one I hadn't seen yet---maybe a year old, with a patch of curly, golden hair, her face pressed against her daddy's chest as she slept.
"Harry," Michael said. His eyes widened. "Merciful Father, what's happened to you?"
"It's been a long night," I said. "Have I been here yet?"
Michael peered at me. "I'm not sure what you mean, Harry."
"Good. Then I haven't. Michael, you've got to wake your family up, now. They could be in danger."
He blinked at me again. "Harry, it's late. What on earth---"
"Just listen." In terse terms, I outlined what I'd learned about the Nightmare, and how it was getting to its victims.
Michael stared at me for a minute. Then he said, "Let me get this straight. The ghost of a demon I killed two months ago is rampaging around Chicago, getting into people's dreams, and eating their minds from the inside."
"Yeah," I said.
"And now it's taken a part of you, manifested a body that looks like you, and you think it's coming here."
"Yes," I said. "Exactly."
Michael pursed his lips for a moment. "Then how do I know that you aren't this Nightmare, trying to get me to invite you in?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Then said, "Either way, it's better if I stay out here. Charity would probably gouge out my eyes for showing up at this hour."
Michael nodded. "Come on in, Harry. Let me put the baby to bed."
I stepped inside, into a small entry hall with a polished hardwood floor. Michael nodded toward his living room, to the right, and said, "Sit down. I'll be back in a second."
"Michael," I said. "You should wake your family up."
"You said this thing is in a solid body, right?"
"It was a few minutes ago."
"Then it's not in the Nevernever. It's here, in Chicago. It can't get into people's dreams from here."
"I don't think so, but---"
"And it's going to be after the people who were near it when it died. It's going to come after me."
I chewed on my lip for a second. Then I said, "It's got a part of me in it, too."
Michael frowned at me.
"If I was going to come after you, Michael," I said. "I wouldn't start with you."
He looked down at the child he carried. His face hardened, and he said, in a very soft voice, "Harry. Sit. I'll be down in a moment."
"But it might---"
"I'll see to it," he said in that same soft, gentle voice. It scared me. I sat down. He took the child, walking softly, and vanished up a stairway.
I sat for a moment in a big, comfortable easy chair, the kind that rocks back and forth. There was a towel and a half-emptied bottle off to my left, on the lamp table. Michael must have been rocking the little girl to sleep.
Beside the bottle was a note. I leaned forward and picked it up, reading:
Michael. Didn't want to wake you and the baby. The little one is demanding pizza and ice cream. I'll be back in a few minutes---probably before you wake up and read this. Love, Charity.
I stood up, and started toward the stairs. Michael appeared at the top of them, his face pale. "Charity," he said. "She's gone."
I held up the note. "She went to the store for pizza and ice cream. Pregnant cravings, I guess."
Michael came down the stairs and brushed past me. Then he reached into the entry hall closet and pulled out a blue Levi's jacket and Amoracchius in its black scabbard.
"What are you waiting for, Harry? Let's go find her."
"But your kids---"
Michael rolled his eyes, took a step to the door, and jerked it open without looking away from me. Father Forthill stood on the other side, his thinning hair windblown, his bright blue eyes surprised behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. "Oh. Michael. I didn't mean to stop by so late, but my car stalled only a block from here on the way back from taking Mrs. Hamish home, and I thought I might borrow---" He paused, looking from me to Michael and then back to me again. "You need a babysitter again, don't you."
Michael shrugged into his jacket and slung the sword belt over his shoulder. "They're already asleep. Do you mind?"
Father Forthill stepped in. "Never." He made the Cross over each of us again and murmured, "God go with you."
We started out of the house and to Michael's truck. "You see, Harry?"
I scowled. "Handy fringe benefit."
Michael drove, the big white truck rumbling down the local streets toward a corner grocery on Byron Street, within a long sprint of the famous Graceland Cemetery. The lowering clouds rumbled and started dumping a steady, heavy rain down onto the city, giving all the lights golden halos and casting ghostly reflections on the wet streets.
"This time of night," Michael said, "Walsham's is the only place open. She'll be there." Thunder rumbled again in growling punctuation to the statement. I drummed my fingers on my scorched staff, and made sure that my blasting rod was hanging loosely by its thong around my wrist.
"There's her van," Michael said. He pulled the truck up into the row of parking spots in front of the grocery, next to the white Suburban troop transport. He barely took the time to take his keys with him---instead just snatching out Amoracchius and loosening the great blade in its sheath as he strode toward the store's front doors, his eyes narrowed, his jaw set. The rain pasted his hair down to his head after a few steps, soaking his Levi's jacket dark blue. I followed him, wincing at the damage to my leather duster, and reflecting that the old canvas job would have fared better in this weather.
Michael slammed the heel of his hand into the door, and it swept open with a jangling of tinny bells. He strode into the store, swept his eyes around the visible displays and the cash registers, and then bellowed, "Charity! Where are you?"
A couple of teenage cashiers blinked at him, and an elderly woman perusing the vitamins turned to gawk at him through her spectacles. I sighed, then nodded to the nearest cashier, a too-skinny, too-blonde girl who looked as though she were impatient for her cigarette break. "Uh, hi," I said. "Did you see me come in here a minute ago?"
"Or a pregnant woman," Michael said. "About this high." He stuck his hand out flat about at the level of his own ear.
The female cashier traded a look with her counterpart. "Seen you, mister?"
I nodded. "Another guy, like me. Tall, skinny, all in black---jacket like mine, but all black clothes underneath."
The girl licked her lips and gave us a calculating look. "Maybe I have," she said. "What's in it for me?"
Michael rolled forward a step, a growl bubbling up out of his throat. I grabbed at his shoulder and leaned back. "Whoah, whoah, Michael," I yelped. "Slow down, man."
"There isn't time to slow down," Michael muttered. "You detect. I'm looking." With that, he turned and strode off deeper into the store, casually carrying the sword in his left hand, his right upon the weapon's grip. "Charity!"
I muttered something unflattering under my breath, then turned back to the cashier. I fumbled in my pockets for my billfold, and managed to produce a sorry trio of wrinkled fives. I held them up and said, "Okay. My evil twin or else a pregnant woman. You seen either one?"
The girl looked at the bills and then back at me and rolled her eyes. Then she leaned out from her counter and plucked them from my hands. "Yeah," she said. "She went down aisle five a few minutes ago. Back toward the freezer section."
"Yeah?" I asked. "Then what?"
She smiled. "What? Is this your brother or something, running around with your woman? Am I going to see this on Larry Fowler tomorrow?"
I narrowed my eyes. "It's complicated," I said. "What else did you see?"
She shrugged. "She paid for some stuff, and went to that van out there. It wouldn't start. I saw you---or the guy that looks like you, come up to her and start talking to her. She looked pretty pissed at him, but she walked off with him. I didn't think anything of it."
My stomach gave a little lurch. "Walked off?" I said. "Which way?"
The cashier shrugged. "Look, mister, she just looked like she was getting a ride somewhere. She wasn't fighting or nothing."
"Which way!" I thundered. The cashier blinked, and her jaded exterior wobbled for a moment. She pointed down the street---toward Graceland.
"Michael!" I shouted. "Come on!" Then I turned around and banged my way back outside and into the rain and the dark. I stopped at Charity's van for a second, and tapped at the hood. It wobbled up without resistance, to reveal a mess of torn wires and shredded belts and broken pieces of metal. I winced, and shielded my eyes from the rain, trying to scan down the street toward the cemetery.
In the far distance, just barely, I saw two figures---one ungainly, with long hair. The other stood tall over her, slender, walking toward the cemetery holding her firmly by the hair.
They vanished into the shadows at the base of the stone wall around Graceland. I gulped, and looked around. "Michael!" I shouted again. I peered through the grocery's windows, but I couldn't see him anywhere.
"Dammit!" I said, and kicked at the front bumper of the van. I was in no shape to go after the Nightmare on my own. It was full of power it had stolen from me. It had the booga booga factor going for it. And it had my friend's wife and unborn child as hostages.
Hell's bells, all I had was a headache, an hourglass quickly running out of sand, and a case of the shakes. Chicago's biggest cemetery, on a dark, rainy night, when the border between here and the spirit world was leaking like a sieve. It would be full of spooks and crawlies, and I would be alone.
"Yeah," I muttered. "That figures."
I sprinted for the darkness into which I had seen the Nightmare disappear with Charity.
Chapter Twenty-one
I've done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes single-handedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.
Which put me one step ahead of where I was, now. I had already killed the Nightmare---or helped to kill it, at least. Something about that just didn't seem fair. There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.
Rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sluicing down into my eyes. I had to keep on wiping my brow, sweeping water away, only to have it fill my vision again. I started to give serious thought to what it might be like to drown, right there on the sidewalk.
I cut across the street toward the cemetery fence. Seven feet of red brick, the fence rose in a jagged stair-step fashion every hundred feet or so, keeping up with the slow slope of the street along its southern perimeter as it moved west. At one point, a gaping slash of darkness marred the fence's exterior, and I slowed as I approached it. The bricks had been torn like paper, and lay in rubble two feet deep around the hole in the wall. I tried to peer beyond it, and saw only more rain, green grass, the shadows of trees cast over the carefully tended grounds.
I paused, outside the graveyard. A dull, restless energy pressed against me, like when weariness and caffeine mix around three-thirty in the morning. It rolled against my skin, and I heard, actually heard whispering voices, through the rain, dozens, hundreds of whispers, ghostly sussurance. I put my hand on the wall, and felt the tension there. There are always fences around cemeteries. Always, whether stone or brick or chain-link. It's one of those unwritten things that people don't really notice, they just do it by reflex. Any kind of wall is a barrier in more than merely a physical sense. Lots of things are more than what they seem in a purely physical sense.
Walls keep things out. Walls around cemeteries keep things in.
I looked back, hoping that Michael had followed me, but I didn't or couldn't see him in the rain. I still felt weak, shaken. The voices whispered, clustering around the weak point in the wall, where the Nightmare had torn its way in. Even if only one death in a thousand had produced a ghost (and more than that did) there might be dozens of restless spirits wandering the grounds, some even strong enough for nonpractitioners of the Art to experience.
Tonight, there weren't dozens. Dozens would have been a happy number. I closed my eyes and could feel the power they stirred up, the way the air wavered and shook with the presence of hundreds of spirits, easily crossed over from the turbulent Nevernever. It made my knees shake, my belly quiver---both from the wounds that had been inflicted on me by the Nightmare and from simple, primitive fear of darkness, the rain, and a place of the dead.
The inmates of Graceland felt my fear. They pressed close to the break in the wall, and I began to hear actual, physical moans.
"I should wait here," I muttered to myself, shaking in the rain. "I should wait for Michael. That would be the smart thing to do."
Somewhere, in the darkness of the cemetery, a woman screamed. Charity.
What I wouldn't have given to have my Dead Man's talisman back, now. Son of a bitch.
I gripped my staff, knuckles white, and got out my blasting rod. Then I clambered through the break in the wall and headed into the darkness.
I felt them the moment I crossed into the cemetery, the second my shoes hit the ground. Ghosts. Shades. Haunts. Whatever you want to call them, they were dead as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore. They were weak spirits, each of them, something that would barely have given me a passing shiver on a normal night---but tonight wasn't.
A chill fell over me, abrupt as winter's first wind. I took a step forward and felt a resistance, but not as though someone was trying to keep me out. It felt more like those movies I've seen with tourists struggling through crowds of beggars in dusty Middle Eastern cities. That's what I experienced, in a chilling and spectral kind of way---people pushing against me, struggling to get something from me, something that I wasn't sure I had and that I didn't think would do any good even if I gave it to them.
I gathered in my will and slipped my mother's amulet from around my neck. I held it aloft in the smothering, clammy darkness, and fed power into it.
The blue wizard light began to glow, to cast out a dim radiance, not so bright as usual. The silver pentagram within the circle was the symbol of my faith, if that's what you wanted to call it, in magic. In the concept of power being controlled, ordered, used for constructive purpose. I wondered, for a minute, if the dimness was a reflection of my injuries or if it said something about my faith. I tried to think of how often I'd had to set something on fire, the past few years, how many times I'd had to blow something up. Or smash a building. Or otherwise wreak havoc.
I ran out of fingers and shivered. Maybe I'd better start being a little more careful.
The spirits fell back from that light, but for a few who still clustered close, whispering things into my ears. I didn't pay them any attention, or stop to listen. That way lay madness. I shoved forward, more an effort of the heart than of the body, and started searching.
"Charity!" I shouted. "Charity, where are you?"
I heard a short sound, a call, off to my right, but it cut off swiftly. I turned toward it and began moving forward at a cautious lope, glowing pentacle held aloft like Diogenes's lamp. Thunder rumbled again. The rain had already soaked the grass, made the dirt beneath my feet soft and yielding. A brief, disturbing image of the dead tearing their way up through the softened earth brought me a brief chill and a dozen spirits clustering close as though to feed from it. I shoved both fear and clutching, unseen fingers aside, and pressed forward.
I found Charity lying upon a bier within a marble edifice that looked like nothing so much as a Greek temple, the roof open to the sky. Michael's wife lay upon her back, her hands clutched over her swollen belly, her teeth bared in a snarl.
The Nightmare stood over her, with my dark hair plastered to its head, my dark eyes reflecting the gleam of my pentacle. It held one hand in the air over Charity's belly, its other over her throat. It tilted its head and watched me approach. In the edges of my wizard's light, shapes moved, flitted, spirits swirling around like moths.
"Wizard," the Nightmare said.
"Demon," I responded. I wasn't feeling much like any snapper patter.
It smiled, teeth showing. "Is that what I am," it said. "Interesting. I wasn't sure." It lifted its hand from Charity's throat, pointed a finger toward me, and murmured, "Goodbye, wizard. Fuego."
I felt the surge of power before any fire rose up and swept toward me through the rain. I lifted my staff in my left hand in front of me, horizontally, and slammed power recklessly into a shield. "Riflettum!"
Fire and rain met in a furious hiss and a cloud of steam a foot in front of my outstretched staff. The rain helped, I think. I would never have been stupid enough to try for a gout of flame in a downpour like this. It was too easily defeated.
Charity moved, the instant the Nightmare's attention was distracted. She spun her feet toward it and, with a furious cry, planted both her heels high in the thing's chest with a vicious shove.
Charity wasn't a weak woman. The thing grunted and flew back, away from her, and at the same time the motion pushed Charity's body off the bier. She fell to the other side, crying out, curling her body around her unborn child to protect it.
I sprinted forward. "Charity," I shouted. "Get out! Run!"
She turned her head toward me and I saw how furious she was. She bared her teeth at me for a moment, but her face clouded with confusion. "Dresden?" she said.
"No time!" I shouted. On the other side of the bier, the Nightmare rose to its feet again, dark eyes gone now, instead blazing with scarlet fury. I didn't have time to think about it, running forward. "Run, Charity!"
I knew it would be suicide to wrestle with something that had torn down a brick wall a few minutes ago---but I had a sinking feeling that I was outclassed in the magic department. If he got another spell off, I didn't think I could counter it. I held my staff in both hands, planted it at the base of the bier and vaulted up, swinging my feet toward the Nightmare's face.
I had speed and surprise on my side. I hit it hard and it staggered back. My staff spun out of my hands and my hip struck painfully on the edge of the bier and scraped along my ribs as I continued forward, riding the thing into the marble flooring. My concentration gone, the blue wizard light died out and I fell in darkness.
I hit the ground with a wheeze, and scrambled back. If the Nightmare got hold of me, that would be it. I had just reached the edge of the bier when something seized my leg, right below the knee, a grip like an iron band around me. I struggled to draw myself back, but there was nothing to grab onto but rain-slicked marble.
The Nightmare stood up, and a flash of lightning somewhere overhead showed me its dark eyes, its face like mine. It was smiling. "And so it ends, wizard," it said. "I am rid of thee at last."
I tried to get away, but the Nightmare simply whirled me by one leg, whipping me into a circle in the air. Then I flew upwards and saw one of the columns coming toward me.
Then there was a flash of light and a sharp pain in the center of my forehead. The impact with the ground came as a secondary sensation, relatively pleasant compared with the first.
Unconsciousness would have been a mercy. Cold rain instead kept me awake enough to experience every agonizing second of expanding pain in my skull. I tried to move my limbs and couldn't, and for a second I thought that my neck must have broken. Then, in the corner of my vision, I saw my fingers twitch, and thought with a flash of depression that I wasn't out of the fight yet.
A major effort got my hand down onto the ground. Another major effort pushed me up and made my head spin, my stomach heave. I leaned back against the column, gasping for breath through the rain, and tried to gather my strength.
It didn't take long---there just wasn't all that much strength left to gather. I opened my eyes, slowly focused them. I felt a sharp tang in my mouth. I touched my hand to my mouth, my cheek, and my fingers came away stained with something warm and dark. Blood.
I tried to rise up and couldn't. Just couldn't. Everything spun too much. Water coursed down over me, chilling me, pooling at the base of the little hill the Greek temple-cum-mausoleum stood upon, running a stream down toward another creek.
"So much water," purred a female voice beside me. "So many things flowing down, away. I wonder if some of them are not being wasted."
I rolled my head enough to see my godmother standing beside me in her green dress. Lea's skin had evidently recovered from the ghost dust I'd dumped upon her in Agatha Hagglethorn's demesne. Her golden cat-eyes studied me with their old, familiar warmth, her hair spilling around her in a mane that seemed unaffected by the rain. She didn't seem to mind it soaking her dress, though. It clung to the curves of her body, showed the perfection of her breasts, their tips clearly showing through the silken fabric as she knelt down beside me.
"What are you doing here?" I muttered.
She smiled, reached out a finger, and ran it over my forehead, then drew it back to her mouth and slipped it between her lips and suckled, gently, upon it. Her eyes closed, and she let out a long and shivering sigh. "Such a sweet boy. You always were such a sweet boy."
I tried to push myself to my feet and couldn't. Something in my head seemed broken.
She watched me with that same, benign smile. "Thy strength is fading, my sweet. Here in the place of the dead, it may fail thee altogether."
"This isn't the Nevernever, godmother," I rasped. "You don't have any power here."
She pursed her lips in what would have been a seductive pout on a human. My blood had stained them even darker. "My sweet. You know it is not true. I simply only have what I am given, here. What I have fairly traded for."
I bared my teeth at her. "You're going to kill me, then."
She threw back her head in a rich laugh. "Kill you? I never intended to kill you, my sweet, barring moments of frustration. Our bargain was for your life---not your death." One of her hounds appeared out of the darkness, and crouched beside her, fastening its dark eyes upon me. She laid a fond hand upon its broad head, and it shivered in pleasure.
I felt myself grow colder, at that, staring at the hound. "You don't want me dead. You want me . . ." I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Tamed." Lea smiled. She scratched the dog's ears, fondly. "But not like this." Her mouth twisted into a contemptuous smirk. "Not as you are. Pathetic. Really, Harry, allowing yourself to be eaten, so. Justin and I taught you better than that."
Somewhere close, Charity shouted again. Thunder rolled overhead.
I groaned and struggled to push myself up. Lea watched me through golden, cat-slitted eyes, interested and uncaring. I managed to get to my feet, my back and most of my weight leaning against the column. In the rain, I could dimly see Charity on her knees. The Nightmare stood over her, one hand clutching her hair. It pushed the other toward her head. She fought it, uselessly, shuddering in the rain. Its fingers sunk into her skull, and Charity's struggles abruptly ceased.
I groaned and pushed myself forward, to get closer, to do something. Everything spun around and I fell to the earth again, hard.
"Sweet boy." Lea sighed. "Poor child." She knelt down beside me again, and stroked my hair. It felt nice, through my nausea and pain. I think the nausea and pain definitely cut down on the seductive potential of it, though. "Would you like me to help you?"
I managed to look up at her lovely face. "Help me?" I asked. "H-how?"
Her eyes sparkled. "I can give you what you need to save the White Knight's Lady."
I stared up at her. All the pain, the terror, the stupid, rainy cold made me ache horribly. I heard Charity whimper. I had tried. Dammit, I had done my best to help the woman. She didn't even like me. It wasn't my fault if she died, right? I had done everything in my power.
Hadn't I?
I swallowed down the sickly taste of bile and acid and asked, "What do you want, Godmother?"
She shivered and drew in a swift breath. "What I have always wanted, sweet boy. This bargain is no different than the one we made years ago. It is, in fact, a part of the same. I give you power. And in return, I get you." Her eyes flashed. "I want your promise, wizard. I want your promise that when the woman is safe, you will come to me. You will take my hand. Here, tonight."
"You want me to go back with you," I whispered. "But you don't want me like this, Godmother. All torn up. I'm empty inside."
She smiled, and stroked the hellhound's head. "Yes. In time, you will heal. And I will make that time pass swiftly, my sweet." She leaned closer to me, golden eyes burning. "Such pleasures I will teach you. No man could wish for a merrier passing." She looked up again, over the bier that hid my view of Charity and the Nightmare. "The White Knight's Lady sees such things, now. Soon, she will be trapped, as is the policewoman."
"How did you know about Murphy?" I demanded.
"I know many things. I know that you may die, if you do nothing, my sweet. You may die here cold and alone."
"I don't care about that," I said. "I . . ."
Charity let out a choking, sobbing sound nearby. Lea smiled, and murmured, "Time is fleeting, child. It waits for no one, not man nor sidhe nor wizard."
Lea already had me over a barrel. If I deepened our pact, re-confirmed it, I'd be letting her nail it closed with me inside. But I couldn't get up. I couldn't do a damned thing to save Charity without getting some help.
I closed my eyes, and saw Michael's little daughter. I thought of her growing up without a mother.
Damn it.
"I accept your bargain, Godmother." When I spoke the words, I felt something stir against me, something that sealed closed.
Lea gasped, eyes closing as she shuddered again, then opening with a feral glow. She leaned down and murmured, "The answer, my sweet, is all around you." Then she kissed my forehead and was gone in a flicker of shadows.
I found myself thinking clearly again. It still hurt to move---stars, did it hurt, but I managed it. I clambered to my feet, leaned against the bier, and looked up to let the rain wash the blood from my eyes.
The answer was all around me. What the hell kind of idiotic advice was that? I glared around, but saw nothing but rolling lawns, trees, and graves. Lots of graves. Plain tombstones and marble markers, graves with ponds beside them, graves with lights, graves with small fountains. Dead people. That's what was all around.
I focused my eyes on Charity and the Nightmare, and felt cold anger inside. I moved around the edge of the bier, gaining a little stability and balance as I went, and shouted, "Hey! You! Ugly!"
The Nightmare turned its head to blink in my direction, surprised. Then it smiled again and said, "Thou art not yet dead. How interesting." It released Charity, fingers gliding out of her as they had from Murphy, and she fell limply to her side. "I can finish that one at leisure. But thou, wizard, I will make an end to at once."
"Yadda yadda yadda," I muttered. I bent down and recovered my staff, standing again with it in both hands. "People don't talk like that anymore. All those thous and thees. Hell's bells, at least the faeries can keep up with the dialect."
The Nightmare frowned at me, and started walking toward me. "Dost thou not realize it, fool? This is thy death come upon thee."
A boot planted itself heavily on the marble beside me. Then another. Amoracchius cast a glowing white light upon my shoulder, and Michael said, "I think not."
I glanced aside at Michael. "You," I groaned, "have very good timing."
He bared his teeth in an unpleasant, fierce expression. "My wife?"
"She's alive," I said. "But we'd better get her out of here."
He nodded. "I'll kill it again," he said. He passed me something hard and cool---a crucifix. "You get her. Give her this."
The Nightmare came to a halt, its eyes narrowing upon the pair of us. "Thou," it said to Michael. "I knew it would come to this."
"Oh, shut up!" I shouted, exasperated. "Michael, killing this thing already!"
Michael started forward, the sword's white fire lighting the night like a halogen torch. The Nightmare screamed in fury and threw itself to one side, avoiding the blade, then rushed back in toward Michael, fingers raking like claws. Michael ducked under them, planted a shoulder in the thing's gut, and shoved it away, spun, and whipped the sword at it. Amoracchius cut into the Nightmare's midsection, and white fire erupted from the wound.
I hurried forward, around Michael's back to Charity. Already, she was stirring, trying to sit up. "Dresden," she whispered to me. "My husband?"
"He's busy kicking ass," I said, and pressed the crucifix into her fingers. "Here. Take this. Can you walk?"
"Mind your tongue, Mr. Dresden." She grasped the crucifix and bowed her head for a second. "I don't know," she said. "Oh, Lord help me. I think---" Her whole body tightened, and she let out a low gasp, pressing her hand against her belly.
"What?" I said. Had she been injured? Behind me, I could hear Michael grunting, see the sweep of Amoracchius's white fire making shadows dance. "Charity, what is it?"
She let out a low groan. "The baby," she said. "Oh, I think . . . I think my water broke earlier. When I fell." Her face twisted up, flushing bright red, and she groaned again.
"Oh," I said. "Oh. Oh, no. No, this is not happening." I put the heel of my hand to my forehead. "This is just wrong." I shot an accusing glance skywards. "Someone up there has a sick sense of humor."
"Nnngggrhhh!" Charity groaned. "Oh, Lord preserve. Mr. Dresden, I don't have much time."
"No." I sighed. "Naturally not." I bent down to pick her up and all but fell on my face. I managed to keep from sprawling onto her, but wobbled as I stood up again. Charity was not a dainty flower. There was no way I could carry her out of there.
"Michael!" I shouted. "Michael, we've got a problem!" Michael threw himself behind one of the biers as a stone whistled out of the darkness and shattered to powder against it. "What?"
"Charity!" I shouted. "Her baby's coming!"
"Harry!" Michael shouted. "Look out!"
I turned and the Nightmare appeared from the darkness behind me, moving almost more swiftly than I could see. It reached down and simply tore a marble headstone from the earth, lifting it high. I threw myself between it and Charity, but even as I did, I knew it would be a futile gesture---it was strong enough to crush her right through me. But I did it anyway.
"Now!" screamed the Nightmare. "Put down your sword, Knight! Put it down, or I crush them both!"
Michael started towards us, his face pale. "Not a step closer," the Nightmare snarled. "Not an inch."
Michael stopped. He stared at Charity, who groaned again, panting, eyes forced shut. "H-Harry?" he said.
I could get out of the thing's way. I could draw its fire, maybe. But if I moved, it could simply crush Charity. She'd have no chance at all.
"The sword," the Nightmare said, voice cool. "Drop it."
"Oh Lord," Michael whispered.
"Don't do it, Michael," I said. "It's only going to kill us anyway."
"Be thou silent," the Nightmare said. "My quarrel is with thee, wizard, and with the knight. The woman and her child are nothing to me, so long as I have both of you."
Rain sleeted down for a long and otherwise silent moment. Then Michael closed his eyes. "Harry," he said. He lowered the great sword. Then gave it a gentle toss to one side, letting it fall on the ground. "I'm sorry. I can't do it."
The Nightmare met my eyes with its own, glowing faint scarlet, and its lips curled up into a gleeful smile. "Wizard," it said, in a whisper. "Thy friend should have listened to thee." I saw the grave-stone start to come down toward me.
Charity's arm abruptly swept up, the crucifix I'd passed her held in it. The symbol flickered, and then kindled with white fire that threw harsh, horror-movie shadows up over the Nightmare's face. It twisted and recoiled from that light, screaming, and the tombstone crashed down to the earth, rending the damp, vulnerable soil.
Everything slowed down and came into crystalline focus. I could clearly see the grounds, the shadows of the trees. I could hear Charity beside me, uttering something in harsh Latin, and out of the corner of my eye, could see the restless shades moving about the cemetery. I could feel the cold sharpness of the rain, feel it coursing down over me, flowing down the gentle slopes to run in rivulets and streams to the nearby pond.
Running water. The answer was all around me.
I moved forward, toward the Nightmare. It swung at me with one flailing arm, and I felt it clip my shoulder as it swept down. Then I threw myself into the Nightmare's body, hit it hard. We tumbled together down the slope, toward the newly forming stream.
You ever hear the Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Remember the part with poor old Ichabod riding like blazes for the covered bridge and safety? Running water grounds magical energies. Creatures of the Nevernever, spirit bodies, cannot cross it without losing all the energy required to keep those bodies here. That was the answer.
I rolled down the slope with the Nightmare, and felt its hands tearing at me. We went down into the stream together, as one of its hands clenched my throat and shut off my breath.
And then it began to scream. It jerked and twisted atop me in eight or nine inches of running water, shrieking. The thing's body just started melting away, like sugar in water, starting at its feet and moving up. I watched it, watched myself dissolve with a morbid kind of fascination. It writhed, it bucked, it thrashed.
"Wizard," it said, voice bubbling. "This is not over. Not over. When the sun sets again, wizard, I will be back for thee!"
"Melt already," I mumbled. And, seconds later, the Nightmare vanished, leaving only sticky gook behind, on my coat, my throat.
I stood up out of the water, drenched and shivering, and slogged my way back up the little hill. Michael had gone to his wife and crouched down beside her. He got his arms underneath her and lifted her as though she were a basket of laundry. Like I said before, Michael's buff.
"Harry," he said. "The sword."
"I got it," I replied. I trudged up to where he'd let Amoracchius fall and picked it up. The great blade weighed less than I would have thought, and it fairly hummed with power, vibrating in my fingers. I didn't have a sheath for it, so I just slung it up on one shoulder and hoped I wouldn't fall and cut my head off or something. I recovered my other stuff, too, and turned to walk out with Michael.
That was when Lea arrived, appearing before me with a trio of her hellhounds around her. "My sweet," she said. "It is time to fulfill your bargain."
I yelped and jumped back from her. "No," I said. "No, wait. I beat this thing, but it's still loose. It will be able to come back from the Nevernever tomorrow night."
"That is of no concern to me," Lea said, and shrugged. "Our bargain was for you to save the woman with what I gave you."
"You didn't give me anything," I said. "You just blanked out some of the pain. It isn't as though you made the water, Godmother."
She shrugged, smiling. "Semantics. I pointed it out to you, did I not?"
"I would have realized it on my own," I said.
"Perhaps. But we have a bargain." She lowered her face, eyes gleaming gold and dangerous. "Are you going to attempt to escape it once more?"
I'd given my word. And broken promises add up to trouble. But the Nightmare hadn't been defeated. Driven back, sure, but it would only be back the next night.
"I'll go with you," I said. "When I've beaten the Nightmare."
"You'll go now." Lea smiled. "This instant. Or pay the price." The three hellhounds took a pace toward me, baring their teeth in a silent snarl.
I fumbled everything out of my grasp but the sword, and gripped it tightly. I don't know a thing about broadswords, but it was heavy and sharp, and even without its vast power, I was pretty sure I could stick the pointy part into one of those hounds. "I can't do that," I said. "Not yet."
"Harry!" Michael shouted. "Wait! It can't be used like that!"
One of the hounds leapt toward me, and I lifted the blade. Then there was a flash of light and a jolt of pain that lanced up through my hands and arms. The blade twisted in my grasp, fell out of it and spun to the ground. The hellhound snapped at me, and I stumbled back, my hands gone numb and useless.
Lea's laughter rang out through the graves like silver bells. "Yes!" she caroled, stepping forward. She bent and with a casual motion picked up the great sword. "I knew you would try to cheat me again, sweet boy." She smiled at me, a flash of dainty canines. "I must thank you, Harry. I would never have been able to touch this had not the one who held it betrayed its purpose."
I felt a flash of anger at my own stupidity. "No," I stammered. "Wait. Can't we talk about this, Godmother?"
"We'll talk again, sweet boy. I'll see you both very soon." Lea laughed again, eyes gleaming. And then she turned, her hellhounds gathering at her feet, and took a step forward, vanishing into the night. The sword went with her.
I stood there in the rain, feeling tired and cold and stupid. Michael stared at me for a second, his expression shocked, eyes wide. Charity curled against him, shuddering and moaning quietly.
"Harry," Michael whispered. I think he was crying, but I couldn't see the tears in the rain. "Oh my God. What have you done?"
Chapter Twenty-two
All hospital emergency rooms have the same feel to them. They're all decorated in the same dull, muted tones and softened edges, which are meant to be comforting and aren't. They all have the same smell too: one part tangy antiseptics, one part cool dispassion, one part anxiety, and one part naked fear.
They wheeled Charity away first, Michael at her side. Triage being what it is, I got bumped to the front of the line. I felt like apologizing to the five-year-old girl holding a broken arm. Sorry, honey. Head trauma before fractured limbs.
The doctor who examined me wore a nameplate that read SIMMONS. She was broadly built and tough-looking, hair going grey in sharp contrast to her rich, dark skin. She sat down on a stool in front of me and leaned over, putting her hands on either side of my head. They were large, warm, strong. I closed my eyes.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, releasing me after a moment, and reaching for some supplies on a table next to her.
"Like a supervillain just threw me into a wall."
She let out a soft chuckle. "More specifically. Are you in pain? Dizzy? Nauseous?"
"Yes, no, and a little."
"You hit your head?"
"Yeah." I felt her start to daub at my forehead with a cold cloth, cleaning off grime and dried blood, though there wasn't much left, thanks to the rain.
"Mmmm. Well. There's some blood here. Are you sure it's yours?"
I opened my eyes and blinked at her. "Mine? Whose else would it be?"
The doctor lifted an eyebrow at me, dark eyes glittering from behind her glasses. "You tell me, Mister . . ." she checked her charts. "Dresden." She frowned and then peered up at me. "Harry Dresden? The wizard?"
I blinked. I'm not really famous, despite being the only wizard in the phone book. I'm more infamous. People don't tend to spontaneously recognize my name. "Yeah. That's me."
She frowned. "I see. I've heard of you."
"Anything good?"
"Not really." She let out a cross sigh. "There's no cut here. I don't appreciate jokes, Mister Dresden. There are people in need to attend to."
I felt my mouth drop open. "No cut?" But there had been a nice, flowing gash in my head at some point, pouring blood into my eyes and mouth. I could still taste some of it, almost. How could it have vanished?"
I thought of the answer and shivered. Godmother.
"No cut," she said. "Something that might have been cut a few months ago."
"That's impossible," I said, more to myself than to her. "That just can't be."
She shone a light at my eyes. I winced. She peered at each eye (mechanically, professionally---without the intimacy that triggers a soulgaze) and shook her head. "If you've got a concussion, I'm Winona Ryder. Get off that bed and get out of here. Make sure to talk to the cashier on the way out." She pressed a moist towelette into my hand. "I'll let you clean up this mess, Mister Dresden. I have enough work to do."
"But---"
"You shouldn't come into the emergency room unless it's absolutely necessary."
"But I didn't---"
Dr. Simmons didn't stop to listen to me. She turned around and strode off, over to the next patient---the little girl with the broken arm.
I got up and made my bruised way into the bathroom. My face was a mess of faint, dried blood. It had settled mostly into the lines and creases, making me look older, a mask of blood and age. I shivered and started cleaning myself off, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
I felt scared. Really, honestly scared. I would have been much happier to have needed stitches and painkillers. I wiped away blood and peered at my forehead. There was a faint, pink line beginning about an inch below my hair and slashing up into it at an angle. It felt very tender, and when I accidentally touched it with the rag, it hurt so much that I almost shouted. But the wound was closed, healed.
Magic. My godmother's magic. That kiss on the forehead had closed the wound.
If you think I should have been happy about getting a nasty cut closed up, then you probably don't realize the implications. Working magic directly on a human body is difficult. It's very difficult. Conjuring up forces, like my shield, or elemental manifestations like the fire or wind is a snap compared to the complexity and power required to change someone's hair a different color---or to cause the cells on either side of an injury to fuse back together, closing it.
The healing cut was a message for me. My godmother had power over me on earth now, too, as well as in the Nevernever. I'd made a bargain with one of the Fae and broken it. That gave her power over me, which she demonstrated aptly by the way she'd wrought such a powerful and complex working on me---and I'd never even felt it happening.
That was the part that scared me. I'd always known that Lea had outclassed me---she was a creature with a thousand years or more of experience, knowledge, and she had been born to magic like I had been born to breathing. So long as I remained in the real world, though, she'd had no advantage over me. Our world was a foreign place to her, just as hers was to me. I'd had the home field advantage.
Had being the operative word. Had.
Hell's bells.
I gave up and let my hands shake while I wiped off my face. I had a good reason to be afraid. Besides, my clothes were soaked from the rain and I felt desperately cold. I finished washing the blood away, and went to stand in front of the electric hand dryer. I had to slam the button a dozen times before it started.
I had the nozzle of the thing turned up, directing the hot air up my shirt, when Stallings came in sans, for once, Rudolph. He looked as though he hadn't slept since I'd seen him last. His suit was rumpled, his grey hair a little greyer, and his moustache was almost the same color as the bags underneath his eyes. He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face without looking at me.
"Dresden," he said. "We got word you were in the hospital."
"Heya, John. How's Murphy?"
"She slept. We just brought her in."
I blinked at him. "Christ. Is it dawn already?"
"About twenty minutes ago." He moved over to the dryer next to mine. His started on the first slap of the button. "She's sleeping, still. The docs are arguing about whether she's in a coma or on some kind of drug."
"You tell them what happened?" I asked.
He snorted. "Yeah. I'll just tell them that a wizard put her under a spell, and she's sleepy." He glanced over at me. "So when's she going to wake up?"
I shook my head. "My spell won't hold her for long. Maybe a couple more days, at the most. Each time the sun comes up, it's going to degrade it a little more."
"What happens then?"
"She starts screaming. Unless I find the thing that got her and figure out how to undo what it did."
"That's what you want Kravos's book for," Stallings said.
I nodded. "Yeah."
He reached into his pocket and produced the book---a little journal, thick but not broad, bound in dark leather. It was sealed in a plastic evidence bag. I reached for it, but Stallings pulled it away.
"Dresden. If you touch this, if you open it up, you're going to be leaving your prints on it. Skin cells. All sorts of things. Unless it disappears."
I frowned at him. "What's the big deal? Kravos is all but put away, right? Hell, we caught him with the murder weapon, with a body at the scene. There isn't anything in the journal to beat that, is there?"
He grimaced. "If it was just his trial, it wouldn't be a problem." "What do you mean?"
He shook his head. "Inside shit. I can't talk about it. But if you take this book, Dresden, it's got to vanish."
"Fine," I said, reaching for it. "It's gone."
He pulled it away again. "I mean it," he said. "Promise."
Something about the quiet intensity of his words touched me. "All right," I said. "I promise."
He stared at the book for a second, then slapped it into my palm. "Hell with it," he said. "If you can help Murph, do it."
"John," I said. "Hey, man. If I didn't think I needed it . . . What's going on here?"
"Internal Affairs," Stallings said.
"Looking at S.I.? Again? Don't they have anything better to do? What set them off this time?"
"Nothing," Stallings lied. He turned to go.
"John," I said. "What aren't you telling me here?"
He paused at the door and grimaced. "They're interested in the Kravos case. That's all I can say. You should hear word in the next day or so. You'll know it when you hear it."
"Wait," I said. "Something happened to Kravos?"
"I've got to go, Harry. Good luck."
"Wait, Stallings---"
He headed out the door. I cursed and started after him, but he lost me. I wound up standing in the hallway, shivering like a wet puppy.
Dammit. Cops were tight, a special kind of brotherhood. They'd work with you, but if you weren't a cop, you were on the outside in a billion subtle ways---one of which was that they didn't let you in on the department's secrets. What could have happened to Kravos? Something serious. Hell, maybe the Nightmare had taken out a little vengeance on him, as well, as long as it was out and about. Served him right, though, if it had happened.
I stood there for a minute, trying to work out what to do. I had no money on me, no car, no way to get either.
I needed Michael.
I asked someone for directions and headed for Maternity. I took a long route around, staying away from anything that looked technical or expensive. The last thing I wanted was to blow up Grandpa's iron lung.
I found Michael standing in a hallway. His hair had dried, all curled and mussed. There seemed to be more grey in it, this way, than usual. His beard had a rough, untrimmed look to it. His eyes were sunken. Mud spattered his boots and his jeans to the knee. Amoracchius's black scabbard hung over his shoulder, empty.
Michael stood in front of a big picture window. Rows of little people in rolling cradles faced the window, heat lamps making sure that they didn't get chills. I stood there quietly with him, looking at the babies for a time. A nurse looked up, and then did a double take, staring at us, before hurrying out of the room.
"Aha," I said. "That nurse recognizes us. I didn't realize we were back down at Cook County. Didn't recognize the place without something being on fire."
"Charity's doctor is here."
"Uh-huh," I said. "So. Which one is the newest little Carpenter?"
Michael remained silent.
I got a sick little feeling, and glanced aside at him. "Michael?"
When he spoke, his voice was exhausted, numb. "The labor was complicated. She was cold, and might have been getting sick with something. Her water did break, back at the graveyard. I guess it makes it a lot harder on the baby."
I just listened to him, feeling sicker.
"They had to go ahead and do a C-section. But . . . they think there might be damage. She got hit in the stomach at one point, they think. They don't know if she'll be able to have children again."
"The baby?"
Silence.
"Michael?"
He stared at the infants and said, "The doctor says that if he lasts thirty-six hours, he might have a chance. But he's weakening. They're doing everything they can." Tears started at his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. "There were complications. Complications."
I tried to find something to say, and couldn't. Dammit. Tired frustration stirred my already unsteady belly. This shouldn't have happened. If I'd been faster, or smarter, or made a better decision, maybe I could have stopped Charity from getting hurt. Or the baby. I put my hand on Michael's shoulder and squeezed tight. Just trying to let him know that I was there. For all the good I'd done.
He took in a breath. "The doctor thinks I beat her. That's how she got the bruises. He never said anything, but . . ."
"That's ridiculous," I said, at once. "Stars and stones, Michael, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
His voice came out hard, bitter. He stared at his faint reflection in the glass. "It might as well have been me, Harry. If I hadn't gotten myself involved, this demon wouldn't have gone after her." I heard his knuckles pop as he clenched his fists. "It should have come after me."
"You're right," I said. "Holy hell, Michael, you're right."
He shot me a look. "What are you talking about?"
I rubbed my hands together, trying to sort through the ideas flashing across my brain in neon lights. "It's a demon, this thing we're after, right? It's a demon's ghost." An orderly, walking by pushing a tray, gave me an odd look. I smiled at him, feeling rather manic. He hurried along.
"Yes," Michael said.
"Demons are tough, Michael. They're dangerous and they're scary, but they're really kind of clueless in a lot of ways."
"How so?"
"They just don't get it, about people. They understand things like lust and greed and the desire for power, but they just don't get things like sacrifice and love. It's alien to most of them---doesn't make any sense at all."
"I don't understand what you're driving at."
"Remember what I said, about how I knew the worst way to get to you would be through your family?"
His frown darkened, but he nodded.
"I know that because I'm human. I know what it's like to care about someone other than myself. Demons don't---especially the thug-type demons who make pacts with two-bit sorcerers like Kravos. Even knowing that I thought the best way to get to you would be through someone close to you, I don't think a demon would have understood the context of that information."
"So what you're saying is that this demon would have had no reason to go after my wife and child."
"I'm saying it's inconsistent. If it was just a question of a demon's ghost going after the people who had killed it, then it should have just hammered on us all until we died and been done with it. I don't think it ever would have occurred to it to take a shot at someone that we care about---even if it did have my knowledge about you. There's got to be something else going on here."
Michael's eyes widened a bit. "The Nightmare is a cat's-paw," he said. "Someone else is using it to hit at us."
"Someone who can cast those barbed-wire torment spells," I said. "And we've been chasing around after the tool instead of going after the hand that's wielding it."
"Blood of God," Michael swore. It was about the secondmost powerful oath he used. "Who could it be?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. Someone who has us both in common, I guess. How many enemies do we share?"
He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, expression intent. "I'm not sure. I've made enemies with pretty much every creature in the country."
"Ditto," I said, morosely. "Even some of the other wizards wouldn't mind seeing me fall down a few flights of stairs. Not knowing our attacker's identity doesn't bother me as much as something else, though."
"What's that?"
"Why he hasn't taken us out already."
"They want to hurt us, first. Vengeance." His brow beetled. "Could your godmother be behind this?"
I shook my head. "I don't think so. She's a faerie. They aren't usually this methodical or organized. And they aren't impatient, either. This thing's been active every night, like it couldn't wait to get going."
Michael looked at me for a moment. Then he said, "Harry, you know that I don't think it's my place to judge another person."
"I hear a 'but' coming."
He nodded. "But how did you get mixed up with the likes of that faerie? She's bad, Harry. Some of them are merely alien, but that one is . . . malevolent. She enjoys causing pain."
"Yeah," I said. "I didn't exactly pick her."
"Who did?"
I shrugged. "My mother, I think. She was the one with power. My father wasn't a wizard. Wasn't into their world."
"I don't understand why she would do that to her child."
Something inside me broke with a little snapping sensation, and I felt tears at my eyes. I scowled. They were a child's tears, to go with a child's old pain. "I don't know," I said. "I know that she was mixed up with some bad people. Bad beings. Whatever. Maybe Lea was one of her allies."
"Lea. It's short for Leanandsidhe, isn't it?"
"Yeah. I don't know her real name. She takes blood from mortals and gives them inspiration in return. Artists and poets and things. That's how she amassed most of her power."
Michael nodded. "I've heard of her. This bargain you have with her. What is it?"
I shook my head. "It isn't important."
Something shifted in Michael, became harder, more resolute. "It is important to me, Harry. Tell me."
I stared at the babies for a minute, before I said, "I was a kid. Things fell out with my old teacher, Justin. He sent a demon to kill me, and I went on the run. I made a bargain with Lea. Enough power to defeat Justin in exchange for my service to her. My loyalty."
"And you broke faith with her."
"More or less." I shook my head. "She's never pushed it before now, and I've been careful to stay out of her way. She doesn't usually get this involved with mortal business."
Michael moved his hand to Amoracchius's empty scabbard. "She did take the sword though."
I winced. "Yeah. I guess that was my fault. If I hadn't have tried to use it to weasel out of the deal . . ."
"You couldn't have known," Michael said.
"I should have," I said. "It isn't as though it as a tough one to figure out."
Michael shrugged, though his expression was less casual than the gesture. "What's done is done. But I don't know how much help to you I can be without the sword."
"We'll get it back," I said. "Leah can't help herself. She makes deals. We'll figure out a way to get it back from her."
"But will we do it in time," Michael said. He shook his head, grim. "The sword won't stay in her hands forever. The Lord won't allow that. But it may be that my time to wield it has passed."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps that I am no longer worthy to serve Him in this way. Or that the burden of it has passed on to someone else." He grimaced, staring at the glass, the infants. "My family, Harry. Perhaps it's time they had a full-time father."
Oh, great. All I needed, now, was a crisis of faith and bad case of career doubt from the Fist of God. I needed Michael. I needed someone to watch my back, someone who was used to dealing with the supernatural. Sword or no sword, he had a steady head, and his faith had a subtle power of its own. He could be the difference between me getting killed and defeating whoever was out there.
Besides, he had wheels.
"Let's get going. Time's a-wasting."
He frowned. "I can't. I'm needed here."
"Michael, look. Is someone with your kids at home?"
"Yes. I called Charity's sister last night. She went over. Father Forthill was going to get some sleep, and then stay on."
"Is there anything more you can do for Charity here?"
He shook his head. "Only pray. She's resting, now. And her mother is on the way here."
"Okay, then. We've got work to do."
"You expect me to leave them again?"
"No, not leave them. But we need to find the person behind the Nightmare and take care of them."
"Harry. What are we going to do? Kill someone?"
"If we have to. Hell's bells, Michael, they might have murdered your son."
His face hardened, and I knew then that I had him, that he'd followed me into Hell to get at whoever had hurt his wife and child. I had him all right---and I hated myself for it. Way to go, Harry. Jerk those heartstrings like a fucking puppeteer.
I held up the book. "I think I've got a line on the Nightmare's name. I'll bet you anything that Kravos recorded it in his book of shadows, here. If I'm right, I might be able to use it to make contact with the Nightmare and then trace his leash back to whoever's holding it."
Michael stared at the glass, at the kids beyond it.
"I need you to drive me home. From my lab, I might be able to sort out what's going on before things get any more out of hand. Then we go handle it."
He didn't say anything.
"Michael."
"All right," he said, voice quiet. "Let's go."
Chapter Twenty-three
Back in my lab, it felt a little creepy to be working by candlelight. Intellectually, I knew that it was still full daylight outside, but last night had brought out the instinctive fear of the dark that is a part of being human. I had been wounded. Everything, every shadow, every small sound made me twitch and jerk and look aside.
"Steady, Harry," I told myself. "You have time before sundown. Just relax and get it over with."
Good advice. Michael and I had driven around most of the morning, collecting what I would need for the spell. I'd read through Kravos's journal while Michael drove. Sick stuff. He'd been careful about listing out every step of his rituals, complete with notes on the physical ecstasy he'd experienced during the killings---nine in all. Most of them had been women or children he'd killed with a cruelly curved knife. He'd roped a bunch of young people into his fold with drugs and blackmail, and then thrown orgies where he'd either participate or else channel the energy raised by all that lust into his magic. That seemed to be standard operating procedure for guys like Kravos. Win-win situation.
A thorough man. Thorough in his efforts to kill and corrupt lives to acquire more power, thorough in the documentation of his sick pleasures---and thorough in the listing of his efforts to secure a familiar demon by the name of Azorthragal.
The name had been carefully written, each syllable marked for specific emphasis.
Magic is a lot like language: it's all about stringing things together, linking one thing with another, one idea with another. After you establish links, then you pour power into them and make something happen. That's what we call thaumaturgy in the business---creating links between small things and big things. Then, you make something happen on the small scale and it happens on the large scale, too. Voodoo dolls are the typical example for that one.
But simulacra, like a voodoo doll, aren't the only way to create links. A wizard can use fingernail clippings, or hair, or blood, if it's fresh enough, or just about any other body part to create a link back to the original being.
Or you can use its name. Or maybe I should say, its Name.
Names have power. Everyone's Name says something about them, whether they're aware of it or not. A wizard can use that Name to forge a link to someone. It's difficult with people. People's self-concepts are always changing, evolving, so even if you get someone to tell you their full name, if you try to establish the link when they're in a radically different mood, or after some life-changing event that alters the way they see themselves, it might not work. A wizard can get a person's name only from their own lips, but if he doesn't use it fairly quickly, it's likely to get stale.
Demons, however, are a different matter. Demons aren't people. They don't have the problem of having a soul, and they don't worry about silly things like good and evil, or right and wrong. Demons are. If a demon is going to be inclined to eat your face, it's going to eat your face then, and now, and a thousand years from now.
It's almost comforting, in a way---and it makes them vulnerable. Once you know a demon's Name, you can get to it whenever you want to. I had Azorthragal's Name. Even though it was a ghost now, instead of a demon, it ought to respond to the memory of its Name, if nothing else.
Time to get to it.
Five white candles surrounded my summoning circle, the points of an invisible pentacle. White for protection. And because they're the cheapest color at Wal-Mart. Hey, being a wizard doesn't make money grow on trees.
Between each candle was an object from someone the Nightmare had touched. My shield bracelet was there. Michael had given me his wedding ring, and Charity's. I'd gone by the station, and grabbed the hand-lettered nameplate Murphy had kept stubbornly on her office door until the publicity last year had driven the municipal politicians into getting her a real one. It lay on the floor beside them. A visit to a grateful Malone household had turned up Micky's retirement watch. It completed the circle, between the last pair of candles.
I drew in a breath, and checked my props. You don't need all the candles and knives and whatnot to work magic. But they help. They make it easier to focus. In my weakened condition, I needed all the help I could get.
So I lit the incense and paced around the outside of the summoning circle, leaving myself enough room to work with inside the circle of incense and outside the circle of copper. I put out a little willpower as I did, just enough to close the circle, and felt the energy levels rise as random magic coalesced.
"Harry," Michael called down from the room above. "Are you finished?"
I suppressed a flash of irritation. "Just getting started."
"Forty-five minutes until sundown," he said.
I couldn't keep the annoyance out of my voice. "Gee, thanks. No pressure, Michael."
"Can you do it or not, Harry? Father Forthill is staying at my house with the children. If you can't stop this thing now, I've got to go back to Charity."
"I sure as hell can't do it with you breathing down my neck. Hell's bells, Michael, get out of the way and let me work."
He growled something to himself about patience or turning the other cheek or something. I heard his feet on the floor above as he retreated from the door leading down to my lab.
Michael didn't come down into the lab with me because the whole concept of using magic without the Almighty behind it didn't sit well with him, regardless of what we'd been through together. He could tolerate it, but not approve of it.
I got back to work, closing my eyes and forcing myself to clear my thoughts, to focus on the task at hand. I started to draw my concentration toward the copper circle. The incense smoke tickled at my senses, and swirled about inside the perimeter of the outer circle, not leaving it. The energy grew slowly, as I concentrated, and then I picked up the knife in my right hand, and a handful of water from a bowl on my left.
Now for the three steps. "Enemy, mine enemy," I spoke, slipping power into the words, "I seek you." I passed the knife over the copper circle, straight down. I couldn't see it, without opening my Sight, but could feel the silent tension as I cut a slit between the mortal world and the Nevernever.
"Enemy, mine enemy," I spoke again. "I search for you. Show me your face." I cast the water up, over the circle, where the energy of the spell atomized it into a fine, drifting mist, filled with rainbows from the surrounding candles, shifting shapes and colors.
Now for the hard part. "Azorthragal!" I shouted, "Azorthragal, Azorthragal! Appare!" I used the knife to cut my finger, and smeared the blood onto the edge of the copper circle.
Power surged out of me, into the circle, through the rent in the fabric of reality, and as it did, the circle sprang up like a wall around the band of copper in the floor. I felt the cut as an acute, vicious pain, enough to make me blink tears out of my eyes as the power quested out, fueled by the energy of the circle, guided by the articles spread around it.
The spell quested about in the Nevernever, like the blind tentacle of the Kraken scouring the deck, looking for some hapless soul to grab. It shouldn't have happened like that. It should have zipped to the Nightmare like a lariat and brought it reeling in. I reached out and put more power into the spell, picturing the thing that I had been fighting, the results of its work, trying to give the spell more guidance. It wasn't until I hit upon the sense of the Nightmare, for lack of a better word, the terror it had inspired that the spell latched onto something. There was a moment of startled stillness, and then a wild, bucking energy, a resistance, that made my heart pound in my chest, the cut in my finger burn as though someone had poured salt over it.
"Appare!" I shouted, forcing will into my voice, reeling back in on the spell. "I command thee to appear!" I slip into the archaic at dramatically appropriate moments. So sue me.
The swirling mist of rainbows swayed and wavered, as though some kind of half-solid thing were stirring the air within the summoning circle. It struggled like a maddened bull, trying to tear away from my spell. "Appare!"
Upstairs, the telephone rang. I heard Michael walk across the floor while I struggled through several silent, furious seconds, the Nightmare trying to escape the web of my concentration.
"Hello," Michael said. He'd left the door open and I heard him clearly.
"Appare!" I grated again. I felt the thing slip, and I jerked it closer in vicious triumph. The mists and lights swirled, began to take on shape, vaguely humanoid.
"Oh. Yes, but he's . . . a little busy," Michael said. "Uh-huh. No, not exactly. I think---Yes, but---" Michael sighed. "Just a minute." I heard his feet cross to the trapdoor again.
"Harry," Michael called. "Susan's on the phone. She says she needs to talk to you."
I all but screamed, struggling to hold onto the Nightmare. "I'll call her back," I managed to gasp.
"She says it's really important."
"Michael!" I half-screamed. "I'm a little busy here!"
"Harry," Michael said, his voice serious. "I don't know what you're doing down there, but she sounds very upset. Says she's been trying to get in touch with you for a while without any luck."
The Nightmare started slipping away from me. I gritted my teeth and hung on. "Not now!"
"All right," Michael said. He retreated from the door down to the lab, and I heard him speaking quietly on the phone again.
I blocked it out, blocked out everything but my spell, the circle, and the thing on the other end of it. I was tiring, but so was it. I had all the props, the power and focus of the circle---it was strong, but I had the leverage on it, and after another minute, minute and a half, I shouted, "Appare!" for the last time.
The mist in the circle swirled and trembled, taking on a vaguely humanoid shape. The shape screamed, a faint and bubbly sound, still trying to escape.
"You can't get away!" I shouted at it. "Who brought you over! Who sent you!"
"Wizard," the thing screamed. "Release me!"
"Yeah, right. Who sent you!" I forced more energy into my voice, compulsion.
It screamed, a distorted sound, like a radio getting interference. The shape refused to clarify or solidify anymore. "No one!"
"Who sent you!" I said, hammering on the spell and the Nightmare, with my will. "Who has compelled you to harm these people? Hell's bells, you will answer me!"
"No one," the Nightmare snarled. Its struggling redoubled, but I grabbed on tightly.
And then I felt it---a third party, intruding from the other side. I felt that cold, horrible power that had been behind the torment-spell on Micky Malone and on Agatha Hagglethorn's ghost. It poured into the Nightmare like nitrous into an engine, supercharging it. The Nightmare went from raging bull to frenzied elephant, and I felt it begin to tear free of my spell, to get loose.
"Wizard!" it howled in triumph. "Wizard, the sun is sinking! I will tear out thy heart! I will hunt thy friends and their children! I will slay them all!"
"It's thine heart," I muttered. "And no you won't." I lifted my left hand and slashed it at the sparkling mist, sprinkling droplets of blood at it. "Bound, thou art," I snarled. I reached out toward the thing, and found the part of me that was still inside of it, a warm sensation, like coming home again after a long trip. I could only barely brush it, but it was enough for what I wanted to do. "No other souls wilt thou harm, no other blood wilt thou spill. Thy quarrel is now with me. Bound, I make thee! Bound!" And with the third repetition of the word, I felt the spell lock, felt it settle around the Nightmare like steel coils. I couldn't keep it from getting away, I couldn't forbid it from the mortal world altogether, but I could damn well make sure that the only person it could mess with would be me. "Now let's see how you do in a fair fight, asshole."
It screamed, all but bursting the bonds of my spell, the sound reverberating through the room. I lifted the knife in my other hand and ripped it at the air over the circle, releasing the holding spell, pouring everything I had left into the strike. I saw the magic lance out into the circle, even as the Nightmare faded. It split the rainbow mist like the sweep of some invisible woodsman's axe, and once more, the Nightmare screamed.
Then the mist gathered together in a horrible rush, an implosion of space, and the creature was gone. A handful of water splattered the ground, and the candles went out.
I collapsed forward, to my forearms, wheezing and gasping for breath, my muscles shaking. I'd hurt the bastard. It wasn't invincible. I'd hurt it. Maybe nothing much more inconvenient than the cut on my finger, or a slap in the face, but it hadn't expected that.
I hadn't been able to get to the person behind it, but I'd felt something---I'd sensed their presence, gotten a clear whiff of their perfume, in a metaphysical sense. Maybe I could use that.
"Take that, jerk," I mumbled. I lay there gasping for several minutes, my head spinning from the effort of the spell. Then I put my things away and shambled up out of my lab, into the room above.
Michael helped me to a seat. He'd built up the fire, and I soaked in its warmth gratefully. He went to the kitchen and brought me a Coke, a sandwich. I drank and ate greedily. Only after I'd finished the last of the drink did he ask, "What happened?"
"I called it up. The Nightmare. Someone helped it get away, but not before I laid a binding on it."
He frowned at me, grey eyes studying my face. "What kind of binding?"
"I kept it from going after you. Or Murphy. Or your family. I couldn't keep it out, but I could limit its targets."
Michael blinked at me for a moment. Then said, slowly, "By making it come after you."
I grinned at him, a fierce show of teeth, and nodded. A touch of pride filled my voice. "I had to do it at the last second, on the fly. I hadn't really planned it, but it worked. So long as I'm alive, it can't mess with anyone else."
"So long as you're alive," Michael said. He frowned, and leaned his thick forearms on his knees, pressing his palms together. "Harry?"
"Yeah?"
"Doesn't that mean it's certainly going to try to kill you? No torment, no sadistic tortures---just flat-out mayhem and death."
I nodded, sobering. "Yeah."
"And . . . whatever person is behind the Nightmare, whoever helped it escape---that means that you've just put yourself in their way. They can't use their weapon until they've removed you."
"Yeah."
"So . . . if they didn't need you dead before, they're going to stop at nothing else now."
I was quiet for a moment, thinking about that. "I made my choice, man," I said, finally. "But hell, I'm already in water so deep, it doesn't matter if it gets any deeper. Let the Nightmare and my godmother duke it out for who gets to be first in line."
His eyes flickered up at mine. "Oh, Harry. You shouldn't have done that."
I scowled at him. "Hey. It's better than anything else we've managed, so far. You'd have done the same thing, if you could."
"Yes," Michael said. "But my family is well provided for." He paused, and then added, in a gentle voice, "And I'm sure of my soul's destination, when it's time for me to go."
"I'll worry about Hell later. Besides, I think I have a plan."
He grimaced. "You aren't concerned about your soul, but you have a plan."
"I don't intend to get killed just yet. We've got to take the offensive, Michael. If we just sit back and wait, it's going to be able to take us apart."
"Take you apart, you mean," he said. His expression grew more troubled. "Harry, without Amoracchius . . . I'm not sure how much help I'll be to you."
"You know what you're doing, Michael. And I don't think the Almighty is going to quit the team just because we fumbled the ball, right?"
"Of course not, Harry. He is ever faithful."
I leaned toward him, put a hand on his shoulder, and looked him right in the eyes. I don't do that to people very often. There aren't many I can. "Michael. This thing is big, and it's bad, and it scares the hell out of me. But I might be the only one who can stop it, now. I need you. I need your help. Hell, man. I need to know that you're at my back, that you believe in what I'm doing here. Are you with me or not?"
He studied my face. "You've lost much of your power, you say. And I don't have the sword anymore. Our enemies know it. We could both be killed. Or worse."
"If we stay here doing nothing, we're going to get killed anyway. And maybe Murphy and Charity and your kids with us."
He bowed his head, and nodded. "You're right. There's not really any choice." His hand covered mine for a moment, big and calloused and strong, and then he stood up again, his back straight and his shoulders squared. "We just have to have faith. The good Lord wouldn't give us more than we could bear."
"I hope you're right," I said.
"So what's the plan, Harry? What are we going to do?"
I got up and went to the mantel over the fire, but what I needed wasn't there. I frowned, looking around the room, and spied it on the coffee table. I bent down and plucked up the white envelope, taking the gold-lettered invitation Kyle and Kelly Hamilton had delivered.
"We're going to a party."
Chapter Twenty-four
Michael parked his truck on the street outside Bianca's mansion. He put the keys in his leather belt pouch, and buttoned it with the silver cross button. Then he straightened the collar of his doublet, which showed through the neck of the mail, and reached behind the seat for the steel helmet that slipped on over his head. "Tell me again, Harry, why this is a good idea. Why are we going to a masquerade ball with a bunch of monsters?"
"Everything points us this way," I said.
"How?"
I took a breath, trying to be patient, and passed him the white cloak. "Look. We know that someone's been stirring up the spirit world. We know that they did it in order to create this Nightmare that's been after us. We know that the girl, Lydia, was connected to the Nightmare somehow."
"Yes," Michael said. "All right."
"Bianca," I said, "sent out her thugs to take Lydia. And Bianca's hosting a party for the nastiest bad guys in the region. Stallings told me that people have been going missing off the streets. They've probably been taken for food or something. Even if Bianca isn't behind it, and I'm not saying she isn't, chances are that anyone who could be is going to be at the party tonight."
"And you think you'll be able to spot them?" Michael asked.
"Pretty sure," I responded. "All I'll have to do is get close enough to touch them, to feel their aura. I felt whoever was backing the Nightmare when they helped it get away from me. I should be able to tell when I feel them again."
"I don't like it," Michael said. "Why didn't the Nightmare come after you the minute the sun went down?"
"Maybe I scared it. I cut it up a little."
Michael frowned. "I still don't like it. There are going to be dozens of things in there that have no right to exist in this world. It will be like walking into a roomful of wolves."
"All you have to do," I said, "is keep your mouth shut and watch my back. The bad guys have to play by the rules tonight. We've been given the protection of the old laws of hospitality. If Bianca doesn't respect that, it's going to kill her reputation in front of her guests and the Vampire Court."
"I will protect you, Harry," Michael said. "As I will protect anyone who these . . . things threaten."
"We don't need any fights, Michael. That's not why we're here."
He looked out the truck window and set his jaw.
"I mean it, Michael. It's their turf. There's probably going to be bad stuff inside, but we have to keep the big picture in focus here."
"The big picture," he said. "Harry, if there's someone in there that needs my help, they're getting it."
"Michael! If we break the truce first, we're open game. You could get us both killed."
He turned to look at me, and his eyes were granite. "I am what I am, Harry."
I threw my arms up in the air, and banged my hands on the roof of the truck. "There are people who could get killed if we mess this up. It isn't only our own lives we're talking about, here."
"I know," he said. "My family are some of them. But that doesn't change anything."
"Michael," I said. "I'm not asking you to smile and chat and get cozy. Just keep quiet and stay out of the way. Don't shove a crucifix down anyone's throat. That's all I'm asking."
"I won't stand by, Harry," he said. "I can't." He frowned and said, "I don't think you can, either."
I glared at him. "Hell's bells, Michael. I don't want to die, here."
"Nor do I. We must have faith."
"Great," I said. "That's just great."
"Harry, will you join me in prayer?"
I blinked at him. "What?"
"A prayer," Michael said. "I'd like to talk to Him for a moment." He half smiled at me. "You don't have to say anything. Just be quiet and stay out of the way." He bowed his head.
I squinted out the window of the truck, silent. I don't have anything against God. Far from it. But I don't understand Him. And I don't trust a lot of the people that go around claiming that they're working in His best interests. Faeries and vampires and whatnot---those I can fathom. Even demons. Sometimes, even the Fallen. I can understand why they do what they do.
But I don't understand God. I don't understand how He could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.
I guess He's just bigger about it than I would be.
"Lord," Michael said. "We walk into darkness now. Our enemies will surround us. Please help to make us strong enough to do what needs to be done. Amen."
Just that. No fancy language, no flashy beseeching the Almighty for aid. Just quiet words about what he wanted to get done, and a request that God would be on his side---on our side. Simple words, and yet power surrounded him like a cloud of fine mist, prickling along my arms and my neck. Faith. I calmed down a little. We had a lot going for us. We could do this.
Michael looked up at me and nodded. "All right," he said. "I'm ready."
"How do I look?" I asked him.
He smiled, white teeth showing. "You're going to turn heads. That's for sure."
I had to smile back at him. "Okay," I said. "Let's party."
We got out of the truck, and started walking toward the gates around Bianca's estate. Michael buckled on the white cloak with its red cross as he went. He had a matching surcoat, boots, and armored guards on his shoulders. He had a pair of heavy gauntlets tucked through his boots, and wore a pair of knives on his belt, one on either side. He smelled like steel and he clanked a little bit when he walked. It sounded comforting, in a friendly, dreadnought kind of way.
It would have been more stylish to drive up through the gates and have a valet park the truck, but Michael didn't want to hand over his truck to vampires. I didn't blame him. I wouldn't trust a bloodsucking, night stalking, fiend of the shadows valet, either.
The gate had an honest-to-goodness guardhouse, with a pair of guards. Neither one of them looked like they were carrying guns, but they held themselves with an armed arrogance that neither myself nor Michael missed. I held up the invitation. They let us in.
We walked up the drive to the house. A black limo pulled up along the drive as we did, and we had to step off to the side to let it past. When we got to the front of the house, the occupants were just getting out of the car.
The driver came around to the rear door of the limo and opened it. Music washed out, something loud and hard. There was a moment's pause, and then a man glided out of the limo.
He was tall, pale as a statue. Sable hair fell in tousled curls to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of opalescent butterfly wings that rose from his shoulders, fastened to him by some mysterious mechanism. He wore white leather gloves, their gauntlet cuffs decorated in winding silver designs, and similar designs were set around his calves, down to his sandals. At his side hung a sword, delicately made, the handle wrought as though out of glass. The only other thing he had on was a loincloth of some soft, white cloth. He had the body for it. Muscle, but not too much of it, good set of shoulders, and the pale skin wasn't darkened anywhere by hair. Hell's bells, I noticed how good he looked.
The man smiled, bright enough for a toothpaste commercial, and then reached a hand back down to the car. A pair of gorgeous legs in pink high heels slid out of the car, followed by a slender and scrumptious girl barely covered in flower petals. She had a short, tight skirt made out of them, and more petals cupped her breasts like delicate hands. Other than that, and the baby's breath woven into the tumbled mass of her black hair, she wore nothing. And she wore it well. In heels, she might have been five-seven, and she had a face that made me think that she was both lovely and sweet. Her cheeks were flushed in a delicate pink blush, vibrant and alive, her lips parted, and she had a look to her eyes that told me she was on something.
"Harry," Michael said. "You're drooling."
"I'm not drooling," I said.
"That girl can't be nineteen years old."
"I'm not drooling!" I scowled, gripped my cane in hand, and stalked on up the driveway to the house. And wiped at my mouth with my sleeve. Just in case.
The man turned toward me, and both his eyebrows lifted. He looked me and my costume up and down, and burst out into a rich, rolling laugh. "Oh, my," he said. "You must be Harry Dresden."
That got my hackles up. It always bugs me when someone knows me and I don't know them. "Yeah," I said. "That's me. Who the hell are you?"
If the hostility bothered him, it didn't bother his smile. The girl with him slipped beneath his left arm and nestled against him, watching me with stoned eyes. "Oh, of course," he said. "I forget that you probably know very little of the intricacies of the Court. My name is Thomas, of House Raith, of the White Court."
"White Court," I said.
"Three Vampire Courts," Michael supplied. "Black, Red, and White."
"I knew that."
Michael shrugged one shoulder. "Sorry."
Thomas smiled. "Well. Only two, for all practical purposes. The Black Court has fallen on hard times of late, the poor darlings." His tone of voice suggested muted glee rather than pity. "Mister Dresden, allow me to introduce Justine."
Justine, the girl beneath his arm, gave me a sweet smile. I half-expected her to extend her hand to me to be kissed, but she didn't. She just molded her body to Thomas's in what looked like a most pleasant fashion.
"Charmed," I said. "This is Michael."
"Michael," Thomas mused, and studied the man up and down. "Dressed as a Knight Templar."
"Something like that," Michael said.
"How ironic," Thomas said. His eyes returned to me, and that smile widened. "And you, Mister Dresden. Your costume is . . . going to make quite a stir."
"Why, thank you."
"Shall we go inside?"
"Oh, let's." We all trouped up the front stairs, affording me an uncomfortably proximate view of Justine's legs along the way, lean and lovely and made for doing things that had nothing to do with locomotion. A pair of tuxedo-clad doormen who looked human swung open the mansion's doors for us.
The entry hall to Bianca's mansion had been redecorated since the last time I'd been there. The old-style decor had been lavishly restored. She'd had marble laid out instead of gleaming hardwood. All the doorways stood in graceful arches rather than stolid rectangles. Alcoves every ten feet or so sported small statuary and other pieces of art. It was lit only by the spots on each alcove, creating deep pools of shadow in between.
"Rather tacky," Thomas sniffed, his butterfly wings quivering. "Have you been to any Court functions before, Mister Dresden? Are you aware of the etiquette?"
"Not really," I said. "But it had better not involve anyone drinking anyone's bodily fluids. Particularly mine."
Thomas laughed, richly. "No, no. Well," he admitted, "not formally, in any case, though there will be ample opportunity to indulge, if you wish." His fingers caressed the girl's waist again, and she focused her eyes on me in a disconcertingly intent fashion.
"I don't think so. What do I need to know?"
"Well, we're all outsiders, not being members of the Red Court, and this is a Red function. First, we'll be presented to the company and they'll have the chance to come meet us."
"Mingle, eh?"
"Just so. Afterwards, we'll be presented to Bianca herself, and she, in turn, will give us a gift."
"A gift?" I asked.
"She's the hosting party. Of course she'll be giving gifts." He smiled at me. "It's only civilized."
I eyed him. I wasn't used to vampires being so chatty. "Why are you being so helpful?"
He laid his fingers upon his chest, lifting his eyebrows in a perfectly executed "who me?" expression. "Why, Mister Dresden. Why should I not help you?"
"You're a vampire."
"So I am," he said. "But, I'm afraid, I'm not a terribly good one." He gave me a sunny smile and said, "Of course, I could also be lying."
I snorted.
"So, Mister Dresden. Rumor had it you had refused Bianca's invitation."
"I had."
"What changed your mind?"
"Business."
"Business?" Thomas asked. "You're here on business?"
I shrugged. "Something like that." I stripped off my gloves, trying to look casual, and offered him my hand. "Thanks again."
His head tilted to one side and he narrowed his eyes. He looked down at my hand and then back up at me, his gaze calculating, before trading grips with me.
There was a faint, flickering aura about him. I felt it dance and glide over my skin like a soft, cool wind. It felt odd, different than the energy that surrounded a human practitioner---and nothing like the sense of whatever had been pumping up the Nightmare.
Thomas wasn't my man. I must have relaxed visibly, because he smiled and said, "I pass the test, eh?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Whatever you say. You're an odd duck, Harry Dresden. But I like you." And with that, he and his escort turned and glided together down the length of the entry hall, and through the curtained doors at the far end.
I glowered after them.
"Anything?" Michael asked.
"He's clean," I said. "Relatively speaking. Must be someone else here."
"You'll get the chance to do some handshaking, it sounds like," Michael said.
"Yeah. You ready?"
"Lord willing," Michael said.
We started together down the hall, and through the curtained doorway, and emerged into Vampire Party Central.
We stood on a concrete deck, elevated ten feet off the rest of a vast, outdoor courtyard. Music flowed up from below. People crowded the courtyard in a blur of color and motion, talk and costume, like some kind of Impressionist painting. Glowing globes rested on wire stands, here and there, giving the place a sort of torch-lit mystique. A dais, opposite the entryway we stood in, rose up several feet higher in the air, a suspiciously throne-like chair upon it.
I had just started to take in details when a brilliant white light flooded my eyes, and I had to lift a hand against it. The music died down a bit, and the chatter of people quieted some. Evidently, Michael and I had just become the center of attention.
A servant stepped forward and asked, calmly, "May I have your invitation, sir?" I passed it over, and a moment later heard the same voice, over a modest public address system.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Court. I am pleased to present Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, and guest."
I lowered my hands, and the voices fell completely silent. From either side of the throne opposite, a pair of spotlights glared at me.
I shrugged my shoulders to get my cape to fall into place correctly, tattered red lining flashing against the black cotton exterior. The collar of the thing came up high on either side of my face. The spot glared off of the painted gold plastic medallion I wore at my throat. The worn powder-blue tux beneath it could have made an appearance at someone's prom, in the seventies. The servants at the party had better tuxes than I did.
I made sure to smile, so that they could see the cheap plastic fangs. I suppose the spotlight must have bleached my face out to ghostly whiteness, especially with the white clown makeup I had on. The fake blood drooling out the corners of my mouth would be standing out bright red against it.
I lifted a white-gloved hand and said, slurring a little through the fangs. "Hi! How are you all doing?"
My words rang out on deathly silence, from below.
"I still can't believe," Michael said, sotto voce, "that you came to the Vampires' Masquerade Ball dressed as a vampire."
"Not just a vampire," I said, "a cheesy vampire. Do you think they got the point?" I managed to peer past the spotlights enough to make out Thomas and Justine at the foot of the stairs. Thomas was staring around at the courtyard with undisguised glee, then flashed me a smile and a thumbs-up.
"I think," Michael said, "that you've just insulted everyone here."
"I'm here to find a monster, not make nice with them. Besides, I never wanted to come to this stupid party in the first place."
"All the same. I think you've peeved them off."
"Peeved? Come on. How bad could that be? Peeved."
From the courtyard below came several distinctive sounds: A few hisses. The rasp of steel as several someones drew knives. Or maybe swords. The nervous click-clack of someone with a semiautomatic working the slide.
Michael shrugged in his cloak, and I sensed, more than saw him put his hand on the hilt of one of his knives. "I think we're about to find out."
Chapter Twenty-five
Silence lay heavy over the courtyard. I gripped my cane and waited for the first gunshot, or whistle of a thrown knife, or bloodcurdling scream of fury. Michael was a steel-smelling presence beside me, silent and confident in the face of the hostility. Hell's bells. I'd meant to give the vamps a little thumb of the nose with the costume, but wow. I didn't think I'd net this much of a reaction.
"Steady, Harry," Michael murmured. "They're like mean dogs. Don't flinch or run. It will only set them off."
"Your average mean dog doesn't have a gun," I murmured back. "Or a knife. Or a sword." But I remained where I stood, my expression bland.
The first sound to ring out was neither gunshot nor battle cry, but rich, silvery laughter. It drifted up, masculine, somehow merry and mocking, bubbling and scornful all at once. I squinted down through the lights, to see Thomas, posed like some bizarre post-chrysalis incarnation of Errol Flynn, one foot up on the stairs, hand braced, his other hand on the crystalline hilt of his sword. His head was thrown back, every lean line of muscle on him displayed with the casual disregard of skilled effort. The butterfly wings caught the light at the edges of the spots and threw them back in dazzling colors.
"I've always heard," Thomas drawled, his voice loud enough to be heard by all, artfully projected, "that the Red Court gave its guests a warm welcome. I hadn't thought I'd get such a picturesque demonstration, though." He turned toward the dais and bowed. "Lady Bianca, I'll be sure to tell my father all about this dizzying display of hospitality."
I felt my smile harden, and I peered past the spotlights to the dais. "Bianca, dear, there you are. This was a costume party, was it not? A masquerade? And we were all supposed to come dressed as something we weren't? If I misread the invitation, I apologize."
I heard a woman's voice murmur something, and the spotlights flicked off. I was left in the dark for a minute, until my eyes could adjust, and I could regard the woman standing across from me, upon the dais.
Bianca wasn't tall, but she was statuesque in a way you only find in erotic magazines and embarrassing dreams. Pale of skin, dark of hair and eye, full of sensuous curves, from her mouth to her hips, everything possessed of luscious ripeness coupled with slender strength that would have caught the eye of any man. She wore a gown of flickering flame. I don't mean that she wore a red dress---she wore flame, gathered about her in the shape of an evening gown, blue at its base fading through the colors of a candle to red as it cupped her full, gorgeous breasts. More flame danced and played through the elegant piles of her dark hair, flickering over her like a tiara. She had on a pair of real heels at least, adding several inches to her rather unimpressive height. The shoes did interesting things to the shape of her legs. The curve of her smile promised things that were probably illegal, and bad for you, and would carry warnings from the Surgeon General, but that you'd still want to do over and over again.
I wasn't interested. I had seen what was underneath her mask, once before. I couldn't forget what was there.
"Well," she purred, her voice carrying over the whole of the courtyard. "I suppose I shouldn't have expected any more taste from you, Mister Dresden. Though perhaps we will see about your taste, later in the evening." Her tongue played over her teeth, and she gave me a dazzling smile.
I watched her, watched behind her. A pair of figures in black cloaks, hardly more than vague shapes behind her stood quietly, as though ready to attack if she snapped a finger. I suppose every decent flame casts shadows. "I think you'd better not try it."
Bianca laughed again. Several in the courtyard joined in with her, though it was a nervous thing. "Mister Dresden," she said. "Many things can change a man's mind." She crossed her legs, slowly, flashing naked skin up to her taut, silky thigh as she did. "Perhaps we'll find something that changes yours." She waved her hand, lazy and arrogant. "Music. We are here to celebrate. Let us do so."
The music began again while I sorted out the meaning behind what Bianca had just said. She had given her tacit permission for her people to try to get to me. They couldn't just walk up and bite me, maybe, but yeesh. I'd have to be on my guard. I thought of Kelly Hamilton's narcotic kisses on my throat, the glowing warmth that had surrounded me, infused me, and shivered. Some part of me wondered what it might be like to let the vamps catch me, and if it would be all that bad. Another chewed furiously over everything I'd seen so far that evening---Bianca clearly had something in mind.
I shook my head and glanced back at Michael. He nodded to me, a slight motion beneath the great helm, and we both descended the stairs. My legs were shaking, making the trip down unsteady. I prayed that none of the vamps noticed it. Wouldn't do to let them see weakness. Even if I was as nervous as a bird in a coal mine.
"Do what you need to do, Harry," Michael said, low. "I'll be a couple steps behind you, to your right. I'll watch your back."
Michael's words steadied me, calmed me, and I felt profoundly grateful for them.
I expected the vamps to descend on me in a charming and dangerous cloud when I reached the courtyard, but they didn't. Instead, Thomas was waiting for me with one hand on the hilt of his sword, his pale body on shameless display. Justine stood a bit behind him. His face practically glowed with glee.
"Oh, my, that was marvelous, Harry. May I call you Harry?"
"No," I said. I caught myself, though, and tried to soften the answer. "But thanks. For what you said, when you did. Things might have gotten ugly."
Thomas's eyes danced. "They still might, Mister Dresden. But we couldn't have it descending into a general brawl, now could we?"
"We couldn't?"
"No, of course not. There would be far fewer opportunities to seduce and deceive and backstab."
I snorted. "I suppose you've got a point."
The tip of his tongue touched his teeth when he smiled. "I usually do."
"Um, thanks, Thomas."
He glanced aside, and frowned. I followed his gaze. Justine had drifted away from him, and now stood with a bright smile on her sweet face as she spoke to a lean, smiling man dressed in a scarlet tux and a domino mask. While I watched, the man reached out and stroked his fingers over her shoulder. He made some comment that made the lovely girl laugh.
"Excuse me," Thomas said with distaste. "I can't abide poachers. Do enjoy the party, Mister Dresden."
He drifted off toward them, and Michael stepped up to me. I half-turned my head toward him, to hear him murmur, "They're surrounding us."
I looked around. The courtyard was full of people. Many of them were young, pretty folk, dressed in all manner of black, poster children for the Goth subculture. Leather, plastic, and fishnet seemed to be the major themes in display, complete with black domino masks, heavy hoods upon cloaks, and a variety of different kinds of face paint. They talked and laughed, drank and danced to the music. Some of them wore a band of scarlet cloth about their arm, or a bloodred choker around their throats.
While I watched, I saw a too-lean young man bend over a table to inhale something through one nostril. A trio of giggling girls, two blondes and a brunette, all dressed up like Dracula's cheerleading squad, complete with black-and-red pom-poms, counted to three together and washed down a pair of pills with glasses of dark wine. Other young people pressed together in sensual motion, or simply sat or stood kissing, touching. A few, already partied out, lay upon the courtyard, smiling dreamily, their eyes closed.
I scanned the crowd with my eyes, and picked out the differences at once. Drifting among the young people clad in black were lean figures in scarlet---perhaps two or three dozen, in all. Male and female, of a variety of appearances and costumes, all shared the scarlet clothes, beauty, and a confident, stalking kind of motion that marked them as predators.
"The Red Court," I said. I licked my lips, and looked around some more. The vampires were being casual about it, but they had wandered into a ring around us. If we remained there any longer, we wouldn't be able to walk out of the courtyard without coming within a few feet of one of them. "The kids with the red bands are what? Junior vampires?"
"Marked cattle, I'd say," Michael rumbled. There was anger in it, steady and slow anger.
"Easy, Michael. We need to move around a little. Make it harder for them to hem us in."
"Agreed." Michael nodded toward the drink table, and we headed that way, our pace brisk. The vamps tried to adjust to follow us, but they couldn't make it look casual.
A couple in red moved to intercept us, meeting Michael and me just before we reached the table. Kyle Hamilton wore a harlequin's outfit, all in shades of scarlet. Kelly followed along with him, dressed in a scarlet body stocking that left nothing to the imagination, but with a long cloak covering her shoulders and collarbones, the hood up high around her face. A scarlet mask hid her features, except for her chin and luscious mouth. I thought I could see a puckering of the skin at one side of her mouth---perhaps the burns she'd suffered.
"Harry Dresden." Kyle greeted me in a too-loud voice, with a too-wide smile. "How pleasant to see you again."
I chucked him boisterously on the shoulder, making his balance waver. "I wish it was mutual."
The smile became brittle. "And of course you remember my sister, Kelly."
"Sure, sure," I said. "Hit that tanning bed a little too long, did we?"
I expected her to snarl or hiss or go for my throat. But instead she turned to the table, collected a silver goblet and a crystal wineglass from the attendant there, and offered them to us with a smile that mirrored her brother's. "It's so pleasant to see you, Harry. I'm sorry that we didn't get to see the lovely Miss Rodriguez tonight."
I accepted the goblet. "She had to wash her hair."
Kelly turned to Michael and offered him the glass. He accepted it with an inclination of his head, stiffly polite. "I see," she purred. "I had no idea you were into men, Mister Dresden."
"What can I say? They're just so big and strong."
"Of course," Kyle said. "If I was surrounded by people who wanted to kill me as badly as I want to kill you, I'd want a bodyguard about, too."
Kelly sidled up to Michael, her breasts thrust forward, straining the sheer fabric of the body stocking. She walked in a slow circle around him, while Michael remained standing just as he was. "He's gorgeous," she purred. "May I give him a kiss, Mister Dresden?"
"Harry," Michael said.
"He's married, Kelly. Sorry."
She laughed, pressing close to Michael, and tried to catch his eyes. Michael frowned, and stared at nothing, avoiding her. "No?" she asked. "Well. Don't worry, pretty man. You'll love it. Everyone wants to party like it's their last night on earth." She flashed a wicked smile up at him. "Now you get to."
"The young lady is too kind," Michael said.
"So stiff. I admire that in a man." She shot me a glance from behind her mask. "You really shouldn't drag poor defenseless mortals into these things, Mister Dresden." She looked Michael up and down again, admiring. "This one will be delicious, later."
"Don't bite off more than you can chew," I advised her.
She laughed, as though delighted. "Well, Mister Dresden. I see his crosses, but we all know the value of them to most of the world." She reached her hand toward Michael's arm, possessively. "For a moment, you almost had me thinking that he might be a true Knight Templar."
"No," I said judiciously. "Not a Knight Templar."
Kelly's hand touched Michael's steel-clad arm---and erupted into sudden, white flame, as brief and violent as a stroke of lightning. She screamed, a piercing wail, and fell back from him to the ground. She lay there, curled helplessly around her blackened hand, struggling to get enough breath back to scream. Kyle flew to her side.
I looked at Michael and blinked. "Wow," I said. "Color me impressed."
Michael looked vaguely embarrassed. "It happens like that sometimes," he said, apologetically.
I nodded and took that in stride. I turned my gaze back to the vampire twins. "Let that be a lesson to you. Hands off the Fist of God."
Kyle shot me a murderous look, his face rippling.
My heart sped up, but I couldn't let the fear show. "Go ahead, Kyle," I dared him. "Start something. Break the truce your own leader set up. Violate the laws of hospitality. The White Council will burn this place down so fast, people will call it Little Pompeii."
He snarled at me, and picked Kelly up. "This isn't over," he promised. "One way or another, Dresden. I'll kill you."
"Uh-huh." I flicked my wrist at him, my hand right in his face. "Shoo, shoo. I have to mingle."
Kyle snarled. But the pair withdrew, and I turned my gaze slowly around the courtyard. Everything in the immediate vicinity had stopped while people, black-and red-clad alike, stared at us. Some of the vampires in scarlet looked at Michael, swallowed, and took a couple of steps back.
I grinned, as cocky and as confident as I could appear, and lifted my glass. "A toast," I said. "To hospitality."
They were quiet for a moment, then hurriedly mumbled an echo to my toast and sipped from their drinks. I drained my goblet in a single gulp, hardly noticing the delightful flavor of it, and turned to Michael. He lifted his glass to the mouth of his helm in a token sip, but didn't take any.
"All right," I said. "I got to touch Kyle. He's out, too, though I didn't expect him to be our man. Or woman. Or monster."
Michael looked slowly around as the scarlet-clad vampires continued to withdraw. "It looks like we've cowed them for now."
I nodded, still uneasy. The crowd parted at one side, and Thomas and Justine came to us, blazes of pale skin and brilliant color amidst the scarlet and black. "There you are," Thomas said. He glanced down at my goblet and let out a sigh. "I'm glad I found you in time."
"In time for what?" I asked.
"To warn you," he said. He flicked a hand at the refreshments table. "The wine is poisoned."
Chapter Twenty-six
"Poisoned?" I said, witlessly.
Thomas peered at my face and then down at my goblet. He leaned over it enough to see that it was empty and said, "Ah. Oops."
"Harry." Michael stepped up beside me, and set his own glass aside. "I thought you said that they couldn't try anything so overt."
My stomach kept churning. My heart beat more quickly, though whether this was from the poison or the simple, cold fear that Thomas's words had brought to me, I couldn't say. "They can't," I said. "If I pitch over dead, the Council would know what happened. I sent word in today that I was coming here tonight."
Michael shot Thomas a hard look. "What was in the wine?"
The pale man shrugged, slipping his arm around Justine once more. The girl leaned against him and closed her eyes. "I don't know what they put in it," he said. "But look at these people." He nodded to those black-clad folk who were already stretched out blissfully upon the ground. "They all have wineglasses."
I looked a bit closer and it was true. The servants moved about the courtyard, plucking up glasses from the fallen. As I watched, another young couple, dancing slowly together, sank down to the ground in a long, deep kiss that faded away into simple stillness.
"Hell's bells," I swore. "That's what they're doing."
"What?" Michael asked.
"They don't want me dead," I said. "Not from this." I didn't have much time. I stalked past the refreshments table to a potted fern and bent over it. I heard Michael take up a position behind me, guarding my back. I shoved a finger down my throat. Simple, quick, nasty. The wine burned my throat coming back up, and the fern's fronds tickled the back of my neck as I spat it back out into the base of the plant. My head spun as I sat back up again, and when I looked back toward Michael, everything blurred for a moment before it snapped back into focus. A slow, delicious numbness spread over my fingers.
"Everyone," I mumbled.
"What?" Michael knelt down in front of me and gripped my shoulder with one arm. "Harry, are you all right?"
"I'm fuzzy," I said. Vampire venom. Naturally. It felt good to have it in me again, and I wondered, for a moment, what I was so worried about. It was just that nice. "It's for everyone. They're drugging everyone's wine. Vamp venom. That way they can say they weren't just targeting me." I wobbled, and then stood up. "Recreational poisoning. Put everyone in the party mood."
Thomas mused. "Rather hamhanded, I suppose, but effective." He looked around at the growing numbers of young people joining the first few upon the ground in ecstatic stupor. His fingers stroked Justine's flank absently, and she shivered, pressing closer to him. "I suppose I'm prejudiced. I prefer my prey a little more lively."
"We've got to get you out of here," Michael said.
I gritted my teeth, and tried to push the pleasant sensations aside. The venom had to have an enormously quick absorption rate. Even if I'd brought the wine back up, I must have gotten a fairly good dose. "No," I managed after a moment. "That's what they want me to do."
"Harry, you can barely stand up," Michael objected.
"You are looking a bit peaked," Thomas said.
"Bah. If they want me incapacitated, it means they've got something to hide."
"Or just that they want you to get killed," Michael said. "Or drugged enough to agree to let one of them feed on you."
"No," I disagreed. "If they wanted to seduce me, they'd have tried something else. They're trying to scare me off. Or keep me from finding something out."
"I hate to point out the obvious," Thomas said, "but why on earth would Bianca invite you if she didn't want you to be here?"
"She's obligated to invite the Council to witness. That means me, in this town. And she didn't expect me to actually show---pretty much everyone was surprised to see me at all."
"They didn't think you'd come," Michael murmured.
"Yeah. Ain't I a stinker." I took a couple of deep breaths and said, "I think the one we're after is here, Michael. We've got to stick this out for a little while. See if I can find out exactly who it is."
"Exactly who is what?" Thomas asked.
"None of your beeswax, Thomas," I said.
"Has anyone ever told you, Mister Dresden, that you are a thoroughly annoying man?" That made me grin, to which he rolled his eyes. "Well," he said, "I'll not intrude on your business any further. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you." He and Justine sauntered off into the crowd.
I watched Justine's legs go, leaning on my cane a bit to help me balance. "Nice guy," I commented.
"For a vampire," Michael said. "Don't trust him, Harry. There's something about him I don't like."
"Oh, I like him," I said. "But I sure as hell don't trust him."
"What do we do now?"
"Look around. So far we've got food in black, the vampires in red, and then there's you and me, and a handful of other people in different costumes."
"The Roman centurion," Michael said.
"Yeah. And some Hamlet-looking guy. Let's go see what they are."
"Harry," Michael asked. "Are you going to be okay?"
I swallowed. I felt dizzy, a little sickened. I had to fight to get clear thoughts through, bulldogging them against the pull of the venom. I was surrounded by things that looked at people like we look at cows, and felt fairly sure that I was going to get myself killed if I stayed.
Of course, if I didn't stay, other people could get killed. If I didn't stay, the people who had already been hurt remained in danger: Charity. Michael's infant son. Murphy. If I didn't stay, the Nightmare would have time to recuperate, and then it and its corporate sponsor, who I thought was here at this party, would feel free to keep taking potshots at me.
The thought of remaining in that place scared me. The thought of what could happen if I gave up now scared me a lot more.
"Come on," I said. "Let's get this over with."
Michael nodded, looking around, his grey eyes dark, hard. "This is an abomination before the Lord, Harry. These people. They're barely more than children . . . what they're doing. Consorting with these things."
"Michael. Chill out. We're here to get information, not bring the house down on a bunch of nasties."
"Samson did," Michael said.
"Yeah, and look how well things turned out for him. You ready?"
He muttered something, and fell in behind me again. I looked around and oriented on the man dressed as a Roman centurion, then headed toward him. A man of indefinite years, he stood alone and slightly detached from the rest of the crowd. His eyes were an odd color of green, deep and intense. He held a cigarette between his lips. His gear, right down to the Roman short sword and sandals, looked awfully authentic. I slowed a little as I approached him, staring.
"Michael," I murmured, over my shoulder. "Look at his costume. It looks like the real thing."
"It is the real thing," said the man in a bored tone of voice, not looking at me. He exhaled a plume of smoke, then put the cigarette back between his lips. Michael would have barely been able to hear my question. This guy had picked it right out. Gulp.
"Interesting," I said. "Must have cost you a fortune to put together."
He glanced at me. Smoke curled from the corners of his mouth as he gave me a very slight, very smug smirk. And said nothing.
"So," I said, and cleared my throat. "I'm Harry Dresden."
The man pursed his lips and said, thoughtfully and precisely, "Harry. Dresden."
When someone, anyone, says your name, it touches you. You almost feel it, that sound that stands out from a crowd of others and demands your attention. When a wizard says your Name, when he says it and means it, it has the same effect, amplified a thousandfold. The man in the centurion gear said my part of my Name and said it exactly right. It felt like someone had just rung a tuning fork and pressed it against my teeth.
I staggered, and Michael caught my shoulder, keeping me upright. Dear God. He had just used one part of my full name, my true Name, to reach out to me and casually backhand me off my feet.
"Hell's bells," I whispered. Michael propped me back up. I planted my cane, so that I would have an extra support, and just stared at the man. "How the hell did you do that?"
He rolled his eyes, took the cigarette in his fingers and blew more smoke. "You wouldn't understand."
"You're not White Council," I said.
He looked at me as though I had just stated that objects fall toward the ground; a withering, scathing glance. "How very fortunate for me."
"Harry," Michael said, his voice tense.
"Just a minute."
"Harry. Look at his cigarette."
I blinked at Michael. "What?"
"Look at his cigarette," Michael repeated. He was staring at the man with wide, intent eyes, and one hand had fallen to the hilt of a knife.
I looked. It took me a minute to realize what Michael was talking about.
The man blew more smoke out of the corner of his mouth, and smirked at me.
The cigarette wasn't lit.
"He's," I said. "He's, uh."
"He's a dragon," Michael said.
"A what?"
The man's eyes flickered with interest for the first time, and he narrowed his focus---not upon me, but upon Michael. "Just so," he said. "You may call me Mister Ferro."
"Why don't I just call you Ferrovax," Michael said.
Mister Ferro narrowed his eyes, and regarded Michael with a dispassionate gaze. "You know something of the lore, at least, mortal."
"Wait a minute," I said. "Dragons . . . dragons are supposed to be big. Scales, claws, wings. This guy isn't big."
Ferro rolled his eyes and said, impatiently, "We are what we wish to be, Master Drafton."
"Dresden," I snapped.
He waved a hand. "Don't tempt me to show you what I can do by speaking your name and making an effort, mortal. Suffice to say that you could not comprehend the kind of power I have at my command. That my true form here would shatter this pathetic gathering of monkey houses and crack the earth upon which I stand. If you gazed upon me with your wizard's sight, you would see something that would awe you, humble you, and quite probably destroy your reason. I am the eldest of my kind, and the strongest. Your life is a flickering candle to me, and your civilizations rise and fall like grass in the summer."
"Well," I said. "I don't know about your true form, but the weight of your ego sure is pushing the crust of the earth toward the breaking point."
His green eyes blazed. "What did you say?"
"I don't like bullies," I said. "You think I'm going to stand here and offer you my firstborn and sacrifice virgins to you or something? I'm not that impressed."
"Well," Ferro said. "Let's see if we can't make an impression."
I clutched my cane and gathered up my will, but I was way, way too slow. Ferro just waved a hand vaguely in my direction, and something crushed me down to the earth, as though I suddenly had gained about five thousand pounds. I felt my lungs strain to haul in a breath, and my vision clouded over with stars and went black. I tried to gather up my magic, to thrust the force away from me, but I couldn't focus, couldn't speak.
Michael looked down at me dispassionately, then said, to Ferro, "Siriothrax should have learned that trick. It might have kept me from killing him."
Ferro's cold regard swept back to Michael, bringing with it a tiny lessening in the pressure---not much, but enough that I could gasp out, "Riflettum," and focus my will against it. Ferro's spell cracked and began to flake apart. I saw him look at me, sensed that he could have renewed the effort without difficulty. He didn't. I climbed back to my feet, gasping quietly.
"So," Ferro said. "You are the one." He looked Michael up and down. "I thought you'd be taller."
Michael shrugged. "It wasn't anything personal. I'm not proud of what I did."
Ferro tapped a finger against the hilt of his sword. Then said, quietly, "Sir Knight. I would advise you to be more humble in the face of your betters." He cast a disdainful glance at me. "And you might consider a gag for this one, until he can learn better manners."
I tried for a comeback, but I still couldn't breathe. I just leaned against my cane and wheezed. Ferro and Michael exchanged a short nod, one where neither of them looked away from the other's eyes. Then Ferro turned and . . . well, just vanished. No flicker of light, no puff of flame. Just gone.
"Harry," Michael chided. "You're not the biggest kid on the block. You've got to learn to be a little more polite."
"Good advice," I wheezed. "Next time, you handle any dragons."
"I will." He looked around and said, "People are thinning out, Harry." He was right. As I watched, a vampire in a tight red dress tapped the arm of a young man in black. He glanced over to her and met her eyes. They stared at one another for a while, the woman smiling, the man's expression going slowly slack. Then she murmured something and took his hand, leading him out into the darkness beyond the globes of light. Other vamps were drawing more young people along with them. There were fewer scarlet costumes around, and more people blissed out on the ground.
"I don't like the direction this is going," I said.
"Nor do I." His voice was hard as stone. "Lord willing, we can put a stop to this."
"Later. First, we talk to the Hamlet guy. Then there's just Bianca herself to check."
"Not one of the other vampires?" Michael asked.
"No way. They're all subordinate to Bianca. If they were that strong, they'd have knocked her off by now, unless they were in her inner circle. That's Kyle and Kelly. She doesn't have the presence of mind for it, and he's already out. So if it's not a guest, it's probably Bianca."
"And if it's not her?"
"Let's not go there. I'm floundering enough as it is." I squinted around. "Do you see Hamlet anywhere?"
Michael squinted around, taking a few paces to peer around another set of ferns.
I saw the flash of red out of the corner of my eye, saw a form in a red cloak heading for Michael's back, from around the ferns. I turned toward Michael and threw myself at his attacker.
"Look out!" I shouted. Michael spun, a knife appearing in his hand as though conjured. I grabbed the red cloaked-figure and whirled it around to face me.
The hood fell back from Susan's face, revealing her startled dark eyes. She'd pulled her hair into a ponytail. She wore a low-cut white blouse and a little pleated skirt, complete with white knee socks and buckle-down shoes. White gloves covered her hands. A wicker basket dangled in the crook of her elbow, and round, mirror-toned spectacles perched upon the bridge of her slender nose.
"Susan?" I stammered. "What are you doing here?"
She let out a breath, and drew her arm out of my hand. "God, Harry. You scared me."
"What are you doing here?" I demanded.
"You know why I'm here," she said. "I came to get a story. I tried to call you and talk you into it, but no, you were way too busy doing whatever you were doing to even spare five minutes to talk to me."
"I don't believe this," I muttered. "How did you get in here?"
She looked at me coolly and flicked open her basket. She reached inside and came out with a neat white invitation, like my own. "I got myself an invitation."
"You what?"
"Well. I had it made, in any case. I didn't think you'd mind me borrowing yours for a few minutes."
Which explained why the invitation hadn't been on the mantel, back at my apartment. "Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get out of here."
She snorted. "Like hell."
"I mean it," I said. "You're in danger."
"Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York." She tapped her specs with a gloved finger. "Things have gone all right so far."
"You don't get it," I said. "You don't understand."
"Don't understand what?" she demanded.
"You don't understand," purred a dulcet voice, behind me. My blood ran cold. "By coming uninvited, you have waived any right you had to the protection of the laws of hospitality." There came a soft chuckle. "It means, Little Red Riding Hood, that the Big, Bad Wolf gets to eat you all up."
Chapter Twenty-seven
I turned to find Lea facing me, her hands on her hips. She wore a slender, strapless dress of pale blue, which flowed over her curves like water, crashing into white foamy lace at its hem. She wore a cape of some material so light and sheer that it seemed almost unreal, and it drifted around her, catching the light in an opalescent sheen that trapped little rainbows and set them to dancing against her pale skin. When people talk about models or movie stars being glamorous, they take it from the old word, from glamour, from the beauty of the high sidhe, faerie magic. Supermodels wish they had it so good as Lea.
"Why, Godmother," I said, "what big eyes you have. Are we straining the metaphor or what?"
She drifted closer to me. "I don't make metaphors, Harry. I'm too busy being one. Are you enjoying the party?"
I snorted. "Oh, sure. Watching them drug and poison children and getting roughed up by every weird and nasty thing in Chicagoland is a real treat." I turned to Susan and said, "We have to get you out of here."
Susan frowned at me and said, "I didn't come here so that you could hustle me home, Harry."
"This isn't a game, Susan. These things are dangerous." I glanced over at Lea. She kept drawing closer. "I don't know if I can protect you."
"Then I'll protect myself," Susan said. She laid her hand over the picnic basket. "I came prepared."
"Michael," I said. "Would you get her out of here?"
Michael stepped up beside us, and said, to Susan, "It's dangerous. Maybe you should let me take you home."
Susan narrowed her dark eyes at me. "If it's so dangerous, then I don't want to leave Harry here alone."
"She has a point, Harry."
"Dammit. We came here to find out who's behind the Nightmare. If I leave before I do that, we might as well never have come. Just go, and I'll catch up with you."
"Yes," Lea said. "Do go. I'll be sure to take good care of my godson."
"No," Susan said, her tone flat. "Absolutely not. I'm not some kind of child for you to tote around and make decisions for, Harry."
Lea's smile sharpened, and she reached a hand toward Susan, touching her chin. "Let me see those pretty eyes, little one," she purred.
I shot my hand toward my godmother's wrist, jerking it away from Susan before the faerie could touch her. Her skin was silk-smooth, cool. Lea smiled at me, the expression stunning. Literally. My head swam, images of the faerie sorceress flooding my thoughts: those berry-sweet lips pressing to my naked chest, smeared with my blood, rose-tipped breasts bared by the light of fire and full moon, her hair a sheet of silken flame on my skin.
Another flash of image came then, accompanied by intense emotion: myself, looking up at her as I lay at her feet. She stretched out her hand and lightly touched my head, an absently fond gesture. An overwhelming sense of well-being filled me like shining, liquid light, poured into me and filled every empty place within me, calmed every fear, soothed every pain. I almost wept at the simple relief, at the abrupt release from worry, from hurt. My whole body trembled.
I was just so damned tired. So tired of hurting. Of being afraid.
"So it will be when you are with me, poor little one, poor lonely child." Lea's voice coursed over me, as sweet as the drug already within me. I knew she spoke the truth. I knew it on a level so deep and simple that a part of me screamed at myself for struggling to avoid her.
So easy. It would be so easy to lay down at my lady's feet, now. So easy to let her make all the bad things go away. She would care for me. She would comfort me. My place would be there, in the warmth at her feet, staring up at her beauty---
Like a good dog.
It's tough to say no to peace, to the comfort of it. All through history, people have traded wealth, children, land, and lives to buy it.
But peace can't be bought, can it, chief, prime minister? The only ones offering to sell it always want something more. They lie.
I shoved the feelings away from me, the subtle glamour my godmother had cast. I could have taken a cheese grater to my own skin with less pain. But my pain, my weariness, my worries and fear---they were at least my own. They were honest. I gathered them back to me like a pack of mud-spattered children and stared at Lea, hardening my jaw, my heart. "No," I said. "No, Lea."
Surprise touched those delicate features. Dainty copper brows lifted. "Harry," she said, her voice gentle, perplexed, "the bargain is already made. So mote it be. There is no reason for you to go on hurting."
"There are people who need me," I said. My balance wavered. "I still have a job to do."
"Broken faiths weaken you. They bind you tighter, lessen you every time you go against your given oath." She sounded concerned, genuinely compassionate. "Godson, I beg of you---do not do this to yourself."
I said, struggling to be calm, "Because if I do that, there will be less for you to eat, yes? Less power for you to take."
"It would be a terrible waste," she assured me. "No one wants that."
"We're under truce here, Godmother. You're not allowed to work magic on me without violating hospitality."
"But I didn't," Lea said. "I've not worked any magic on you this night."
"Bullshit."
She laughed, silver and merry. "Such language, and in front of your lover too."
I stumbled. Michael was there at once, supporting my weight with his shoulder, drawing my arm across it. "Harry," he said. "What is it? What's wrong?"
My head kept on spinning and my limbs started to shake. The drug already coursing through me, plus this new weakness, almost took me out. Blackness swam in front of my eyes and it was only with an effort of will that I kept myself from drowning in that darkness or giving in to the mad desire to throw myself down at Lea's feet. "I'm okay," I stammered. "I'm fine."
Susan moved to my other side, her anger pouring off of her like heat from a desert highway. "What have you done to him?" she snapped at Lea.
"Nothing," Lea replied in a cool voice. "He has done this to himself, the poor little one. One always risks dire consequences should one not keep a bargain with the sidhe."
"What?" Susan said.
Michael grimaced, and said, "Aye. She's telling the truth. Harry made a bargain last night, when we fought the Nightmare and drove it away from Charity."
I struggled to speak, to warn them not to let Lea trick them, but I was too busy trying to sort out where my mouth was, and why my tongue wasn't working.
"That doesn't give her the right to put a spell on him," Susan snapped.
Michael rumbled, "I don't think she has. I can usually feel it, when someone's done something harmful."
"Of course I haven't," Lea said. "I have no need to do so. He's already done it himself."
What? I thought. What was she talking about?
"What?" Susan said. "What are you talking about?"
Lea's voice took on a patient, faux-sympathetic tone. "Poor little poppet. All of your efforts to learn and you still know so little. Harry made a bargain with me long ago---and broke it, once then, and once a few nights past. He swore to uphold it again, last night, and broke it thrice. Now he reaps the consequences of his actions. His own powers turn against him, the poor dear, to encourage him to fulfill his word, to keep his promise."
"They weren't doing it a minute ago," Susan said. "Only when you came up to him."
Lea laughed, warmly. "It's a party, dear poppet. We're here to mingle, after all. And I have lifted no weapon or spell against him. This is of his own doing."
"So back off," Susan said. "Leave him alone."
"Oh, this won't ever leave hm alone, poppet. It's a small thing now, but it will grow, in time. And destroy him, the poor, dear boy. I'd hate so much for that to happen."
"So stop it!"
Lea focused her eyes on Susan. "Do you offer to purchase his debt away from me? I don't think you could afford it, dear poppet . . . though I think surcease could be arranged."
Susan shot a quick glance at me, and then Michael. "Surcease? Purchase?"
Michael watched Lea, grimly. "She's a faerie---"
Lea's voice crackled with irritation. "A sidhe."
Michael looked at my godmother and continued, "A faerie, Miss Rodriguez, and they're prone to making bargains. And to getting the better of mortals when they do."
Susan's mouth hardened. She was silent for a moment, and then said, "How much, witch? How much for you to make this stop hurting Harry?"
I struggled to say something, but my mouth didn't work. Things spun faster instead of slowing down. I sagged more, and Michael labored to keep me on my feet.
"Why, poppet," Lea purred. "What do you offer?"
"I don't have much money," Susan began.
"Money. What is money?" Lea shook her head. "No, child. Such things mean nothing to me. But let me see." She walked in a slow circle around Susan, frowning at her, looking her up and down. "Such pretty eyes, even though they are dark. They will do."
"My eyes?" Susan stammered.
"No?" Lea asked. "Very well. Your Name, perhaps? Your whole Name?"
"Don't," Michael said at once.
"I know," Susan answered him. She looked at Lea and said, "I know better than that. If you had my Name, you could do anything you wanted."
Lea thrust out her lip. "Her eyes and her Name are too precious to allow her beloved to escape his trap. Very well, then. Let us ask of her a different price." Her eyes gleamed and she leaned toward Susan. "Your love," she murmured. "Give me that."
Susan arched her brows and peered over her spectacles. "Honey, you want me to love you? You've got a lot of surprises coming, if you think it works like that."
"I didn't ask you to love me," Lea said, her tone offended. "I asked for your love. But well enough, if that is also too steep a price, perhaps memory will do instead."
"My memory?"
"Not all of it," Lea said. She tilted her head to one side and purred, "Indeed. Only some. Perhaps the worth of one year. Yes, I think that would suffice."
Susan looked uncertain. "I don't know . . ."
"Then let him suffer. He won't live the night, with those arrayed against him. Such a loss." Lea turned to leave.
"Wait," Susan said, and clutched at Lea's arm. "I . . . I'll make the trade. For Harry's sake. One year of my memory, and you make whatever is happening stop."
"Memory for relief. Done," Lea purred. She leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss upon Susan's forehead, then shivered, drawing in her breath in a swift inhalation, the tips of her breasts hardening against the silky fabric of her dress. "Oh. Oh, sweet poppet. What a dear thing you are." Then she turned and slapped me across the face with a sharp sound of impact, and I tumbled down to the ground despite Michael's best efforts.
My head abruptly cleared. The narcotic throb of the vampire venom lessened a bit, and I found my thoughts running again, slowly, like a train gathering momentum.
"Witch," Michael hissed up at Lea. "If you hurt either of them again---"
"For shame, Sir Knight," Lea said, her voice dreamy. " 'Tis no fault of mine that Harry made the agreement he did, nor fault of mine that the girl loves him and would give anything for him. Nor was it my doing that the Sword fell ownerless to the ground before me and that I picked it up." She fixed Michael with that dazzling smile. "Should you wish to bargain to have it returned to you, you have only to ask."
"Myself, for the Sword," Michael said. "Done."
She let her head fall back and laughed. "Oh, oh my, dear Knight, no. For once the Redeemer's blade was in your hands again, you would find the shattering of our pact a simple enough matter." Her eyes glittered again. "And you are, in any case, far too . . . restricted, for my tastes. You are set in your ways. Unbendable."
Michael stiffened. "I serve the Lord as I may."
Lea made a face. "Faugh. Just so. Holy." Her smile turned sly again. "But there are others whose lives you hold and can bargain with. You have children, do you not?" She shivered again and said, "Mortal children are so sweet. And can be bent and shaped in so many, many ways. Your eldest daughter, I think, would---"
Michael didn't snarl, didn't roar, didn't make any sounds at all. He simply seized the front of Lea's dress and lifted her clear off the ground by it. His voice came out in a vicious growl. "Stay away from my family, faerie. Or I will set such things in motion against you as will destroy you for all time."
Lea laughed, delighted. " 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,' is how the phrase runs, is it not?" There was a liquid shimmering in the air, and she abruptly stood upon the ground again, facing Michael, out of his grasp. "Your power weakens with rage, dear man. You will not bargain---but I suppose I had plans for the Sword in any case. Until then, good Knight, adieu." She gave me one last smile and a mocking laugh. Then she vanished into the shadows and the darkness.
I gathered myself back to my feet, and mumbled, "That could have gone better."
Michael's eyes glittered with anger beneath his helmet. "Are you all right, Harry?"
"I'm better," I said. "Stars and stones, if this is some kind of self-inflicted spell . . . I'll have to talk to Bob about this one, later." I rubbed at my eyes and asked, "What about you, Michael? Are you all right?"
"Well enough," Michael said. "But we still don't have a culprit, and it's getting late. I've got a bad feeling that we're going to run into trouble if we don't get out of this place soon."
"I've got a feeling you're right," I said. "Susan? Are you okay? You ready to get out of here?"
Susan brushed her hair idly back from her face with one hand, and turned to stare at me, frowning slightly.
"What?" I asked. "Look, you didn't have to do what you did, but we can work on getting it taken care of. Let's just get out of here. Okay?"
"Okay," she said. Then her frown deepened and she peered at me. "This is going to sound odd, but---do I know you?"
Chapter Twenty-eight
I stared at Susan in mute disbelief.
She looked apologetic. "Oh, I'm sorry. I mean. I didn't mean to upset you, Mister . . ."
"Dresden," I supplied in a whisper.
"Mister Dresden, then." She frowned down at herself, and smoothed a hand uncomfortably over the skirt, then looked around her. "Dresden. Aren't you the guy who just opened a business as a wizard?"
Anger made me clench my teeth. "Son of a---"
"Harry," Michael said. "I think we need to leave, rather than stand about cursing."
My knuckles whitened as I tightened my fingers on my cane. No time for anger. Not now. Michael was right. We had to move, and quickly. "Agreed," I said. "Susan, did you drive here?"
"Hey," she said, squaring off against me. "I don't know you, okay? My name is Miss Rodriguez."
"Look, Su---Miss Rodriguez. My faerie godmother just stole a year's worth of your memory."
"Actually," Michael put in, "you traded it away to her to keep some kind of spell from leaving Harry helpless."
I shot him a glare and he subsided. "And now you don't remember me, or I guess, Michael."
"Or this faerie godmother, either," Susan said, her face and stance still wary.
I shot Lea a look. She glanced over at me and her lips curved up into a smirk, before she turned back to her conversation with Thomas. "Oh, damn. She's such a bitch."
Susan rolled her eyes a little. "Look, guys. It's been nice chatting with you, but this has got to be the lamest excuse for a pickup line I've ever heard."
I reached a hand toward her again. Her own flashed down into the picnic basket and produced a knife, a G.I.-issue weapon from the last century, its edge gleaming. "I told you," she said calmly, "I don't know you. Don't touch me."
I drew my hand back. "Look. I just want to make sure you're all right."
Susan's breathing was a little fast, but other than that she concealed her tension almost completely. "I'm perfectly fine," she said. "Don't worry about me."
"At least get out of here. You're not safe here. You came in on an invitation you had made up. Do you remember that?"
She screwed up her face into a frown. "How did you know that?" she asked.
"You told me so about five minutes ago," I said, and sighed.
"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You've had a bunch of your memories taken."
"I remember coming here," Susan said. "I remember having the counterfeit invitation made."
"I know," I said. "You got it off of my living room table. Do you remember that?"
She frowned. "I got it . . ." Her expression flickered, and she swallowed, glancing around. "I don't remember where I got it."
"There," I said. "Do you see? Do you remember driving out to bail me out of jail a couple of nights ago?"
She'd lowered the knife by now. "I . . . I remember that I went down to the jail. And paid the bail money, but . . . I can't think . . ."
"Okay, okay," I said. My head hurt, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. "It looks like she took all of your memories that had me directly in them. Or her. What about Michael, do you remember him?"
She looked at Michael and shook her head.
I nodded. "Okay. Then I need to ask you to trust me, Miss Rodriguez. You've been affected by magic and I don't know how we can get it fixed yet. But you're in danger here and I think you should leave."
"Not with you," she said at once. "I have no idea who you are. Other than some kind of psychic consultant for Special Investigations."
"Okay, okay," I said. "Not with me. But at least let us walk you out of here, so that we can make sure you get out okay. You can't swing a cat without hitting a vampire in here. So let us get you out to your car and then you can go wherever you like."
"I didn't get my interview," she said. "But . . . I feel so strange." She shook her head, and replaced her knife in her picnic basket. I heard the click of a tape recorder being switched off. "Okay," she said. "I guess we can go."
I nodded, relieved. "Wonderful. Michael, shall we?"
He chewed on his lip. "Maybe I should stay, Harry. If your godmother's here, the Sword might be here too. I might get the chance to take it back."
"Yeah. And you might get the chance to get taken from behind without someone here to cover for you. There's too much messed up stuff here, man. Even for me. Let's go."
Michael fell in behind me, to my right. Susan walked beside him, on my left, keeping us both in careful view, and one hand still inside her picnic basket. I briefly wondered what kind of goodies she'd been bringing in case the big, bad wolf tried to head her off from grandma's house.
We reached the foot of the stairs that led back up into the house. Something prickled the hairs at the back of my neck, and I stopped.
"Harry?" Michael asked. "What is it?"
"There's someone . . ." I said, and closed my eyes. I brought up my Sight, just for a moment, and felt the pressure just a little above the spot between my eyebrows. I looked up again. The Sight cut through the enchantment in front of me like sunlight through a wispy cloud. Behind me, Michael and Susan both took in sharp breaths of surprise.
The Hamlet lookalike stood three stairs up, half smiling. I realized only then that the figure was a woman rather than a man, the slender shape of her slim hips and breasts obscured by the sable doublet she wore, giving her an odd, androgynous appearance. Her skin was pallid---not pale, not creamy. Pallid. Translucent. Almost greyish. Her lips were tinged very faintly blue, as though she'd been recently chilled. Or dead. I shivered, and lowered the Sight before it showed me something that I didn't want to keep with me.
It didn't change her appearance one bit. She wore a cap, which hid her hair completely, one of those puffy ones that fell over to one side, and stood with one hip cocked out, a rapier hanging from her belt. She held a skull in her other hand---it was a real one. And the bloodstains on it couldn't have been more than a few hours old.
"Well done, wizard," she said. Her voice sounded raspy, a quiet, hissing whisper, the kind that comes from throats and mouths which are perfectly dry. "Very few can see me when I do not wish to be seen."
"Thank you. And excuse me," I said. "We were just leaving."
Bluish lips curved into a chill little smile. Other than that, she didn't move. Not an inch. "Oh, but this is the hour for all to mingle and meet. I have a right to introduce myself to you and to hear your names and exhange pleasantries in return." Her eyes fastened calmly on my face, evidently not fearing to meet my gaze. I figured that whatever she was, she probably had an advantage on me in the devastating gaze department. So I kept my own eyes firmly planted on the tip of her nose, and tried very hard not to notice that her eyes had no color at all, just a kind of flaccid blue-grey tinge to them, a filmy coating like cataracts.
"And what if I don't have time for the pleasantries?" I said.
"Oh," she whispered. "Then I might be insulted. I might even be tempted to call for satisfaction."
"A duel?" I asked, incredulous. "Are you kidding me?"
Her eyes drifted to my right. "Of course, if you would rather a champion fought in your place, I would gladly accept."
I glanced back at Michael, who had his eyes narrowed, focused on the woman's doublet or upon her belt, perhaps. "You know this lady?"
"She's no lady," Michael said, his voice quiet. He had a hand on his knife. "Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, this is Mavra, of the Black Court of Vampires."
"A real vampire," Susan said. I heard the click of her tape recorder coming on again.
"A pleasure," Mavra whispered. "To meet you, at last, wizard. We should talk. I suspect we have much in common."
"I'm failing to see anything we might possibly have in common, ma'am. Do you two know each other?"
"Yes," Michael said.
Mavra's whisper became chill. "The good Knight here murdered my children and grandchildren, some small time ago."
"Twenty years ago," Michael said. "Three dozen people killed in the space of a month. Yes, I put a stop to it."
Mavra's lips curved a little more, and showed yellowed teeth. "Yes. Just a little time ago. I haven't forgotten, Knight."
"Well," I said. "It's been nice chatting, Mavra, but we're on our way out."
"No you're not," Mavra said, calmly. But for her lips and her eyes, she still hadn't moved. It was an eerie stillness, not real. Real things move, stir, breathe. Mavra didn't.
"Yes, we are."
"No. Two of you are on your way out." Her smile turned chilly. "I know that the invitations said only one person could be brought with you. Therefore, one of your companions is not under the protection of the old laws, wizard. If the Knight is unprotected, then he and I will have words. A pity you do not have Amoracchius with you, Sir Knight. It would have made things interesting, at least."
I got a sinking feeling in my gut. "And if it isn't Michael?"
"Then you keep offensive company, wizard, and I am displeased with you. I will demonstrate my displeasure decisively." Her gaze swept to Susan. "By all means. Choose which two are leaving. Then I will have a brief conversation with the third."
"You mean you'll kill them."
Mavra shrugged, finally breaking her stillness. I thought I heard a faint crackling of tendons, as though they'd protested moving again. "One must eat, after all. And these little, dazzled morsels the Reds brought tonight are too sweet and insubstantial for my taste."
I took a step back, and turned to Michael, speaking in a whisper. "If I get Susan out of here, can you take this bitch?"
"You might as well not whisper, Harry," Michael said. "It can hear you."
"Yes," Mavra said. "It can."
Way to go, Harry. Endear yourself to the monsters, why don't you? "Well," I asked Michael. "Can you?"
Michael looked at me for a moment, his lips pressed together. Then he said, "Take Susan and go. I'll manage here."
Mavra laughed, a dry and raspy sound. "So very noble. So pure. So self-sacrificing."
Susan stepped around me, to close a triangle with Michael and me. As she did, I noticed that Mavra leaned back from her, just slightly. "Now just a minute," Susan said. "I'm a big girl. I knew the risks when I came here."
"I'm sorry, Miss Rodriguez," Michael said, his tone apologetic. "But this is what I do."
"Save me from chauvinist pigs," Susan muttered. She turned her head around to me. "Excuse me. What do you think you're doing?"
"Looking in your pick-a-nick basket," I responded, as I flipped open one cover. I whistled. "You came armed for bear, Miss Rodriguez. Holy water. Garlic. Two crosses. Is that a thirty-eight?"
Susan sniffed. "A forty-five."
"Garlic," Michael mused.
Above us on the stairs, Mavra hissed.
I glanced up at her. "The Black Court was nearly wiped out, Thomas said. I wonder if that's because they got a little too much publicity. Do you mind, Miss Rodriguez?" I reached into the basket and produced a nice, smelly clove of garlic, then idly flicked it through the air, toward Mavra.
The vampire didn't retreat---she simply blurred, and then stood several steps higher than she had been a moment before. The garlic clove bounced against the stairs where she'd been, and tumbled back down toward us. I bent down and picked it up.
"I'd say that's a big yes." I looked up at Mavra. "Is that what happened, hmm? Stoker published the Big Book of Black Court Vampire Slaying?"
Those drowned-blue lips peeled back from her yellowed teeth. No fangs. "It matters little. You are beings of paper and cotton. I could tear apart a dozen score of your kind."
"Unless they'd had an extra spicy pizza, I guess. Let's get out of here, guys." I started up the stairs.
Mavra spread her hands out to either side, and gathered darkness into her palms. That's the only way I can explain it. She spread out her hands, and blackness rushed in to fill them, gathering there in a writhing mass that shrouded her hands to the wrists. "Try to force your way past me with that weapon, wizard, and I will take it as an attack upon my person. And defend myself appropriately."
Cold washed over me. I extended my senses toward that darkness, warily. And it felt familiar. It felt like frozen chains and cruel twists of thorny wire. It felt empty and black, and like everything that magic isn't.
Mavra was our girl.
"Michael," I said, my voice strangled. Steel rasped as he drew one of his knives.
"Um," Susan said. "Why are her hands doing that? Can vampires do that?"
"Wizards can," I said. "Get behind me."
They both did. I lifted my hand, my face creasing in concentration. I reached out and tried to call in my will, my power. It felt shaky, uncertain, like a pump that has lost its prime. It came to me in dribs and drabs, bit by bit, stuttering like a nervous yokel. But I gathered it around my upraised hand, in a crystalline azure glow, beautiful and fragile, casting harsh shadows over Mavra's face.
Her dead man's eyes looked down at me, and I had an abrupt understanding of why Michael had called her "it." Mavra wasn't a woman anymore. Whatever she was, she wasn't a person. Not like I understood people, in any case. Those eyes pulled at mine, pulled at me with a kind of horrid fascination, the same sickly attraction that makes you want to see what's under the blanket in the morgue, to turn over the dead animal and see the corruption beneath. I fought and kept my eyes away from hers.
"Come, wizard," Mavra whispered, her face utterly without expression. "Let us test one another, thou and I."
I hardened the energy I held. I wouldn't have enough juice to take two shots at her. I'd have to take her out the first time or not at all. Cold radiated off of her, little wisps of steam curling up as ice crystals formed on the steps at her feet.
"But you won't take the first shot, will you." I didn't realize I'd spoken my thoughts aloud until after I had. "Because then you'd be breaking the truce."
I saw an emotion in that face, finally. Anger. "Strike, wizard. Or do not strike. And I will take the mortal of your choice from you. You cannot claim the protection of hospitality to them both."
"Get out of the way, Mavra. Or don't get out of the way. If you try to stop us from leaving, if you try to hurt anyone under my protection, you'll be dealing with a Wizard of the Council, a Knight of the Sword and a girl with a basket full of garlic and holy water. I don't care how big, bad, and ugly you are, there won't be anything left of you but a greasy spot on the floor."
"You dare," she whispered. She blurred and came at me. I took a breath, but she'd caught me on the exhale, and I had no time to unleash the crystalline blast I'd prepared.
Michael and Susan moved at the same time, hands thrusting past me. She held a wooden cross, simple and dark, while he clutched his dagger by its blade, the crusader-style hilt turned up into a cross as well. Both wood and steel flared with a cold white light as Mavra closed, and she slammed into that light as if it were a solid wall, the shadows in her hand scattering and falling away like sand between her fingers. We stood facing her, my azure power and two blazing crosses, which burned with a kind of purity and quiet power I had never seen before.
"Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent," Michael said, quietly. "You and yours have no power here. Your threats are hollow, your words are empty of truth, just as your heart is empty of love, your body of life. Cease this now, before you tempt the wrath of the Almighty." He glanced aside at me and added, probably for my benefit, "Or before my friend Harry turns you into a greasy spot on the floor."
Mavra walked slowly back up the steps, tendons creaking. She bent and gathered up the skull she'd dropped at some point during the discussion. Then turned back to us, looking down with a quiet smile. "No matter," she said. "The hour is up."
"Hour?" Susan asked me, in a tight whisper. "What hour is she talking about, Dresden?"
"The hour of socialization," Mavra whispered back. She continued up to the top of the stairs, and gently shut the doors leading out. They closed with an ominous boom.
All the lights went out. All but the blue nimbus around my hand, and the faded glory of the two crosses.
"Great," I muttered.
Susan looked frightened, her expression hard and tightly controlled. "What happens now?" she whispered, her eyes sweeping around in the dark.
Laughter, gentle and mocking, quiet, hissing, thick with something wet and bubbling, came from all around us. When it comes to spooky laughter, it's tough to beat vampires. You're going to have to trust me on this one. They know it well.
Something glimmered in the dark, and Thomas and Justine appeared in the glow of the power gathered in my hand. He lifted both hands at once, and said, "Would you mind terribly if I stood with you?"
I glanced at Michael, who frowned. Then at Susan, who was looking at Thomas in all his next-to-naked glory . . . somewhat intently. I nudged her with my hip and she blinked and looked at me. "Oh. No, not at all. I guess."
Thomas took Justine's hand, and the two of them stood off to my right, where Michael kept a wary eye on them. "Thank you, wizard. I'm afraid I'm not well loved here."
I glanced over at him. There was a mark on his neck, black and angry red, like a brand, in the shape of lovely, feminine lips. I would have thought it lipstick, but I sensed a faint odor of burnt meat in the air.
"What happened to your neck?"
His face paled a few shades. "Your godmother gave me a kiss."
"Damn," I said.
"Well put. Are you ready?"
"Ready for what?"
"For Court to be held. To be given our gifts."
The tenuous hold I had on the power faltered, and I lowered my trembling hand, let go of the tension gently, before I lost control of it. The last light flickered and went out, leaving us in a darkness I wouldn't have believed possible.
And then the darkness was shattered by light---the spotlights again, shining up on the dais, upon the throne there, and Bianca in her flaming dress upon it. Her mouth and throat and the rounded slopes of her breasts were smeared in streaks of fresh blood, her lips stained scarlet as she smiled, down at the darkness, at the dozens of pairs of glowing eyes in it, gazing up at the dais in adoration, or terror, or lust, or all three.
"All rise," I whispered, as soft whispers and moans, rustled up out of the darkness around us, not at all human. "Vampire Court is now in session."
Chapter Twenty-nine
Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There's a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There's heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse.
And there is coppery fear, drawn tight as the strings of a violin, quavering on one single note that cannot possibly be sustained for a single second longer---but goes on and on and on, the tension before the crash of cymbals, the brassy challenge of the horns, the threatening rumble of the kettledrums.
That's the kind of fear I felt. Horrible, clutching tension that left the coppery flavor of blood on my tongue. Fear of the creatures in the darkness around me, of my own weakness, the stolen power the Nightmare had torn from me. And fear for those around me, for the folk who didn't have the power I had. For Susan. For Michael. For all the young people now lying in the darkness, drugged and dying, or dead already, too stupid or too reckless to have avoided this night.
I knew what these things could do to them. They were predators, vicious destroyers. And they scared the living hell out of me.
Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it. I waited for the anger to harden my resolve, put steel into my spine. I waited for the rush of outrage and strength, to feel the power of it coalesce around me like a cloud.
It never came. Just a hollow, fluttering sensation, beneath my belt buckle. For a moment, I felt the fangs of the shadow demon from my dream once again. I started shaking.
I looked around me. All around, the large courtyard was surrounded by high hedges, cut with crenelated squares, in imitation of castle walls. Trees rose up at the corners, trimmed to form the shapes of the guard towers. Small openings in the hedge led out into the darkness of the house's grounds, but were closed with iron-barred doors. The only other way out that I saw was at the head of the stairs, where Mavra leaned against the doors leading back into the manor and out front. She looked at me with those corpse-milk eyes and her lips cracked as she gave me a small, chill smile.
I gripped my cane with both hands. A sword cane, of course---one made in merry old Jack the Ripper England, not a knockoff from one of those men's magazines that sells lava lamps and laser pointers. Real steel. Clutching it didn't do much to make me feel better. I still shook.
Reason. Reason was my next line of defense. Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge. I turned back to the front as Bianca started speaking to the crowd, some vainglorious bullshit I didn't pay any attention to. Reason. Facts.
Fact one: Someone had engineered the uprising of the dead, the torment of the restless souls. Most likely Mavra had been the one to actually work the magic. The spiritual turbulence had allowed the Nightmare, the ghost of a demon Michael and I had slain, to cross over and come after me.
Fact two: The Nightmare was out to get me and Michael, personally, by taking shots at us and all of our friends. Mavra might even have been directing it, controlling it, using it as a cat's-paw. Optionally, Bianca could have been learning from Mavra, and used it herself. Either way, the results had been the same.
Fact three: It hadn't come after us at sundown, the way we'd half expected.
Fact four: I was surrounded by monsters, with only the strength of a centuries-old tradition keeping them from tearing my throat out. Still, it seemed to be holding. For now.
Unless . . .
"Hell's bells," I swore. "I hate it when I don't figure out the mystery that it's too late."
Dozens of gleaming red eyes turned toward me. Susan jabbed her elbow into my ribs. "Shut up, Dresden," she hissed. "You're making them look at us."
"Harry?" Michael whispered.
"That's their game," I said, quietly. "We've been set up."
Michael grunted. "What?"
"This whole thing," I said. The facts started falling into place, about two hours too late. "It's been a setup from the very beginning. The ghosts. The Nightmare demon. The attacks on our family and friends. All of it."
"For what?" Michael whispered. "What's it a setup for?"
"She meant to force us to show here from the very beginning. She's getting set to take a lesson from history," I said. "We have to get out of here."
"A lesson from history?" Michael said.
"Yeah. Remember what Vlad Tepesh did at his inauguration?"
"Oh Lord," Michael breathed. "Lord preserve us."
"I don't get it," Susan said, voice quiet. "What did this guy do?"
"He invited all of his political and personal enemies to a feast. Then he locked them in and burned them all alive. He wanted to start off his administration on a high note."
"I see," Susan said "And you think this is what Bianca's doing?"
"Lord preserve us," Michael murmured again.
"I'm told that He helps those who help themselves," I said. "We've got to get out of here."
Michael's armor clinked as he looked around. "They've blocked the exits."
"I know. How many of them can you handle without the Sword?"
"If it was only a question of holding them off . . ."
"But it isn't. We may have to punch a hole through them."
Michael shook his head. "I'm not sure. Maybe two or three, Lord willing."
I grimaced. Only one vampire guarded each way out, but there were another two or three dozen in the courtyard---not to mention my godmother or any of the other guests, like Mavra.
"We'll head for that gate," Michael said, nodding toward one of the gates in the hedges.
I shook my head. "We'd never make it."
"You will," he said. "I think I can manage that much."
"Ixnay on that upidstay anplay," I said. "We need an idea that gets us all out alive."
"No, Harry. I'm supposed to stand between people and the harm things like these offer. Even if it kills me. It's my job."
"You're supposed to have the Sword to help. It's my fault that it's gone, so until I get it back for you, ease off on the martyr throttle. I don't need anyone else on my conscience." Or, I thought, a vengeful Charity coming after me for getting her children's father killed. "There's got to be a way out of this."
"Let me get this straight," Susan said, quietly, as Bianca's speech went on. "We can't leave now because it would be an insult to the vampires."
"And all the excuse they would need to call for instant satisfaction."
"Instant satisfaction," Susan said. "What's that?"
"A duel to the death. Which means that one of them would tear my arms off and watch me bleed to death," I said. "If I'm lucky."
Susan swallowed. "I see. And what happens if we just wait around?"
"Bianca or one of the others finds a way to make us cross the line and throw the first punch. Then they kill us."
"And if we don't throw the first punch?" Susan asked.
"I figure she'll have a backup plan to wipe us out with, just in case."
"Us?" Susan asked.
"I'm afraid so." I looked at Michael. "We need a distraction. Something that will get them all looking the other way."
He nodded and said, "You might be better for that than me, Harry."
I took a breath and looked around to see what I had to work with. We didn't have much time. Bianca was bringing her speech to a close.
"And so," Bianca said, her voice carrying ably, "we stand at the dawn of a new age for our kind, the first acknowledged Court this far into the United States. No longer need we fear the wrath of our enemies. No longer shall we meekly bow our heads and offer our throats to those who claim power over us." At this point, her dark eyes fastened directly upon me. "Finally, with the strength of the entire Court behind us, with the Lords of the Outer Night to empower us, we will face our enemies. And bring them to their knees." Her smile widened, curving fangs, bloodred.
She trailed a fingertip across her throat, then lifted the blood to her mouth to suckle it from her finger. She shivered. "My dear subjects. Tonight, we have guests among us. Guests brought here to witness our ascension to real power. Please, my friends. Help me welcome them."
The spotlights swiveled around. One of them splashed onto my little group; me, Michael, Susan, with Thomas and Justine just a little apart. A second illuminated Mavra, at the head of the stairs, in all her stark and unearthly pallor. A third settled upon my godmother, who glowed with beauty in its light, casually tossing her hair back and casting a glittering smile around the courtyard. At my godmother's side was Mister Ferro, unlit cigarette still between his lips, smoke dribbling out his nostrils, looking martial and bland in his centurion gear, and utterly unconcerned with everything that was going on.
Applause, listless and somehow sinister, came out of the dark around us. There should be some kind of law. Anything that is so bad that its applause is sinister should be universally banned or something. Or maybe I was just that nervous. I coughed, and waved my hand politely.
"The Red Court would like to take this opportunity to present our guests with gifts at this time," Bianca said, "so that they may know how very, very deeply we regard their goodwill. So, without further ado, Mister Ferro, would you honor me by stepping forward and accepting this token of the goodwill of myself and my Court."
The spotlight followed Ferro as he walked forward. He reached the foot of the dais, inclined his head in a shallow but deliberate nod, then ascended to stand before Bianca. The vampire bowed to him in return, and made a gesture with one hand. One of the hooded figures behind her stepped forward, holding a small cask, about as big as a breadbox. The figure opened it, and the lights gleamed on something that sparkled and shone.
Ferro's eyes glittered, and he stretched his hand down into the cask, sinking it to the wrist. A small smile stretched his lips, and he withdrew his hand with slow reluctance. "A fine offering," he murmured. "Especially in this age of paupers. I thank you."
He and Bianca exchanged bows where she dipped her head just a fraction lower than his own. Ferro closed the cask and took it beneath one arm, withdrawing a polite step before turning and descending the stairs.
Bianca smiled and faced the courtyard again. "Thomas, of House Raith, of our brothers and sisters in the White Court. Please step forward, that I may give you a token of our regard."
I glanced over at Thomas. He took a slow breath and then said, to me, "Would you stand with Justine for me, while I'm up there."
I glanced at the girl. She stood looking up at Thomas, one hand on his arm, her eyes worried, one sweet little lip between her teeth. She looked small, and young, and frightened. "Sure," I said.
I held out a rather stiff arm. The girl's hands clutched at my forearm, as Thomas turned with a brilliant smile, and swaggered into the spotlight and up the steps. She smelled delicious, like flowers or strawberries, with a low, heady musky smell underneath, sensual and distracting.
"She hates him," Justine whispered. Her fingers tightened on my arm, through my sleeve. "They all hate him."
I frowned and glanced down at the girl. Even worried, she was terribly beautiful, though her proximity to me lessened the impact of her outfit. Or lack thereof. I focused on her face and said, "Why do they hate him?"
She swallowed, then whispered, "Lord Raith is the highest Lord of the White Court. Bianca extended her invitation to him. The Lord sent Thomas in his stead. Thomas is his bastard son. Of the White Court, he is the lowest, the least regarded. His presence here is an insult to Bianca."
I got over my surprise that the girl had spoken that many words all together. "Is there some kind of grudge between them?"
Justine nodded, as on the dais, Thomas and Bianca exchanged bows. She presented him with an envelope, speaking too quietly for the crowd to hear. He responded in kind. Justine said, "It's me. It's my fault. Bianca wanted me to come be hers. But Thomas found me first. She hasn't forgiven him for it. She calls him a poacher."
Which made sense, in a way. Bianca had risen to where she was by being Chicago's most infamous Madame. Her Velvet Room provided the services of girls most men only got to daydream about, for a hefty price. She had enough dirt and political connections that she could protect herself from legal persecution, even without counting any of her vampire tricks, and she'd always had more than her share of those. Bianca would want someone like Justine---sweet looking, gorgeous, unconsciously sexy. Probably dress her up in a plaid skirt and a starched white shirt with---
Down, Harry. Hell's bells. "Is that why you stay with him?" I asked her. "Because you feel that it's your fault he has enemies?"
She looked up at me, for a moment, and then away, her expression more sad than anything. "You wouldn't understand."
"Look. He's a vampire. I know that they can affect people, but you could be in danger---"
"I don't need rescuing, Mr. Dresden," she said. Her lovely eyes sparkled with something hard, determined. "But there is something you can do for me."
I got an edgy feeling and watched the girl warily. "Yeah? Like what?"
"You can take Thomas and me with you when you leave."
"You guys showed up in a limo, and you want a ride home with me?"
"Don't be coy, Mister Dresden," she said. "I know what you and your friends were talking about."
I felt my shoulders creak with tension. "You heard us. You aren't human, either."
"I'm very human, Mister Dresden. But I read lips. Will you help him or not?"
"It isn't my business to protect him."
Her soft mouth compressed into a hard line. "I'm making it your business."
"Are you threatening me?"
Her face flushed as pink as the dress she was almost wearing, but she stood her ground. "We need friends, Mister Dresden. If you won't help us, then I'll try to buy Bianca's favor by exposing your plans to escape and claiming that I heard you talking about killing her."
"That's a lie," I hissed.
"It's an exaggeration," she said, her voice gentle. She lowered her eyes. "But it will be enough for her to call a duel. Or to force you to shed blood. And if that happens, you will die." She took a breath. "I don't want it to be like that. But if we don't do something to protect ourselves, she'll kill him. And make me into one of her pet whores."
"I wouldn't let that happen to you," I said. The words poured out of my mouth before I'd had time to run them past the thinking part of my brain, but they had that solid, certain ring of truth. Oh, hell.
She looked up at me, uncertain again, catching one of those soft lips between her teeth. "Really?" she whispered. "You really mean that, don't you."
I grimaced. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do."
"Then you'll help me? You'll help us?"
Michael, Susan, Justine, Thomas. Before long, I was going to need a secretary just to keep track of everyone I was supposed to be looking out for. "You. But Thomas can look out for himself."
Justine's eyes filled with tears. "Mister Dresden, please. If there's anything I can do or say to convince you, I---"
"Dammit," I swore, earning a glare from Michael. "Dammit, dammit, dammit, woman. All women, for that matter." That earned me a glare from Susan. "He's a vampire, Justine. He's eating you. Why should you care if something happens to him?"
"He's also a person, Mister Dresden," Justine said. "A person who's never done you any harm. Why shouldn't you care what happens to him?"
I hate it when a woman asks me for help and I witlessly decide to go ahead and give it, regardless of dozens of perfectly good reasons not to. I hate it when I get threatened and strong-armed into doing something stupid and risky. And I hate it when someone takes the moral high ground on me and wins.
Justine had just done all three, but I couldn't hold it against her. She just looked too sweet and helpless.
"All right," I said, against my better judgment. "All right, just stay close. You want my protection, then you do what I say, when I say, and maybe we can all get out of this alive."
She let out a little shudder that ran through her most attractively, and then she pressed herself against me. "Thank you," she murmured, nuzzling her face into the hollow of my throat so that little lightning-streaks of sensation flickered down my spine. "Thank you, Mister Dresden."
I coughed, uncomfortably, and firmly shoved back any ideas of extracting a more thorough thanks from her later, despite the clamoring of my sex drive. Probably the vampire venom, I reasoned, making me notice things like that even more. Sure. I pushed Justine gently away, and looked up to see Thomas returning from his visit to the dais, holding an envelope in his hand.
"Well," I greeted him quietly, as he returned. "That looks like it went well enough."
He gave me a rather pallid smile. "It . . . she can be rather frightening, when she wishes, can't she."
"Don't let her get to you," I advised him. "What did she give you?"
Thomas accepted Justine into the circle of his arm, and she pressed her body to his as though she wanted to wallow in him and leave one of those angel shapes. He lifted the envelope and said, "A condo in Hawaii. And a ticket there, on a late flight tonight. She suggested that I might want to leave Chicago. Permanently."
"One ticket," I said, and glanced at Justine.
"Mmmm."
"Friendly of her," I commented. "Look, Thomas. We both want to get out of here tonight. Just stay close to me and follow my lead. All right?"
He frowned a bit, and then shot Justine a reproachful look. "Justine. I asked you not to---"
"I had to," she said, her face earnest, frightened. "I had to do something to help you."
He coughed. "I apologize, Mister Dresden. I didn't want to involve anyone else in my problems."
I rubbed at the back of my neck. "It's okay. We can help each other, I guess."
Thomas closed his eyes for a moment. Then he said, very simply and very openly, "Thank you."
"Sheesh," I said. I glanced up at Bianca, who was in converse with one of the robed and hooded shadows. The pair of them vanished to the back of the dais while Bianca watched, and then returned, lugging something that evidently weighed a good deal. They settled the fairly large object, hidden beneath a dark red cloth, on the dais beside Bianca.
"Harry Dresden," Bianca purred. "Old and esteemed acquaintance, and wizard of the White Council. Please come forward so that I can give you some of what I've been longing to for so long."
I gulped, and shot a glance back at Michael and Susan. "Look sharp," I said. "If she's going to do something, I guess it will be now, when we're separated."
He put his hand on her shoulder, and said, "God go with you, Harry." Energy thrummed along my skin, and the nearest vampires shifted about uneasily and took a few steps away. He saw me notice, and gave me a small, sheepish smile.
"Be careful, Mister Dresden," Susan said.
I bobbed my eyebrows at them, nodded to Thomas and Justine, and then walked forward, my cane in one hand, my cheesy cape flowing in the night air as I mounted the stairs to the dais. A bit of sweat stung in the corner of my eye, smearing my makeup, probably. I ignored it, meeting Bianca's gaze as I came level with her.
Vampires don't have souls. She didn't have to fear my gaze. And she wasn't good enough to sucker me into her eyes. Or at least, she hadn't been, a couple years ago. She met my gaze, steady, her eyes dark and lovely and so very, very deep.
I took the better course of valor, and focused upon the tip of her perfectly upturned nose. I saw her breasts rise and fall in pleasure beneath the flames that gowned her, and she let out a small, purring sound of satisfaction. "Oh, Harry Dresden. I had looked forward to seeing you tonight. You are a very handsome man, after all. But you look utterly ridiculous."
"Thanks," I said. No one, except maybe the pair of robed attendants at the back of the dais, could hear us. "How did you plan on killing me?"
She fell quiet for a moment, thoughtful. Then she asked me, as she formally inclined her head, for the benefit of the crowd below, "Do you remember Paula, Mister Dresden?"
I returned the gesture, only more shallowly, just to throw the little zing of insult into it. "I remember. She was pretty. Polite. I didn't really get to meet her much."
"No. She was dead within an hour of you setting foot in my house."
"I thought she might have gone that way," I said.
"That you might have killed her, you mean?"
"Isn't my fault if you lost control and ate her, Bianca."
She smiled, teeth blinding white. "Oh, but it was your fault, Mister Dresden. You'd come to my house. Provoked me to near madness. Forced me to go along with you under threat of my destruction." She leaned forward, giving me a glimpse down the flame-dress. She was naked beneath. "Now I get to return the favor. I'm not someone you can simply walk over, slap around, whenever you have a need. Not anymore." She paused and then said, "In a way, I'm grateful to you, Dresden. If I hadn't wanted so very badly to kill you, I would never have amassed the power and the contacts that I have. I never would have been elevated to the Court." She gestured to the crowd of vampires below, the courtyard, the darkness. "In a way, all of this is your doing."
"That's a lie," I said, quiet. "I didn't make you rope Mavra into working for you. I didn't make you order her to torture those poor ghosts, stir up the Nevernever and bring Kravos's pet demon back across to send after a bunch of innocents while you tried to get to me."
Her smile widened. "Is that what you think happened? Oh, my, Mister Dresden. You have an unpleasant surprise awaiting you."
Anger made me lift my eyes to meet her gaze, gave me the strength not to get pulled in by it---no mistaking. She had grown stronger in the past couple of years. "Can we just get this over with."
"Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly," she murmured, but she reached out a hand and tugged on the dark red cloth, uncovering the object there. "For you, Mister Dresden. With all of my most fervent sincerities."
The cloth slid away from a white marble tombstone, set with a pentacle of gold in its center. Block letters carved into it read HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN, above the pentacle. Below it, they read HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING. An envelope had been taped to the side of the tombstone.
"Do you like it?" Bianca purred. "It comes complete with your own plot at Graceland, near to dear little Inez. I'm sure you'll have ever so much to talk about. When your time comes, of course."
I looked from the tombstone back up to her. "Go ahead," I said. "Make your move."
She laughed, a rich sound that spilled back down into the crowd below. "Oh, Mister Dresden," she said, lowering her voice. "You really don't understand, do you. I can't openly strike you down. Regardless of what you may have done to me. But I can defend myself. I can stand by while my guests defend themselves. I can watch you die. And if things are hectic and confusing enough, and a few others die along with you, well. That's hardly to be blamed upon me."
"Thomas," I said.
"And his little whore. And the Knight, and your reporter friend. I'm going to enjoy the rest of the evening, Harry."
"My friends call me Harry," I said. "Not you."
She smiled, and said, "Revenge is like sex, Mister Dresden. It's best when it comes on slow, quiet, until it all seems inexorable."
"You know what they say about revenge. I hope you got a second tombstone, Bianca. For the other grave."
My words stung her, and she stiffened. Then she beckoned the attendants forward, to lift my tombstone in their gloved hands and carry it back. "I'll have it delivered to Graceland, Mister Dresden. They'll have your bed all ready for you, before the sun rises." She flicked her wrist at me, curt dismissal.
I bowed my head, a bare, stark motion, cold. "We'll see." How's that for a comeback? Then I turned and descended the stairs, my legs shaking a little, my back rigid and straight.
"Harry," Michael said, as I drew close. "What happened?"
I held up my hand and shook my head, trying to think. The trap was already closing around me. I could feel that much. But if I could figure out Bianca's plan, see it coming, maybe I could think my way out ahead of her.
I trusted Michael and the others to keep an eye out for trouble while I furiously pondered, tried to work through Bianca's logic. My godmother glided forward at Bianca's bidding, and I paused for a moment, to glance up to the dais.
Bianca presented her with a small black case. Lea opened it, and a slow tremble ran down her body, made her flame-red hair shift and glisten. My godmother closed it again and said, "A princely gift. Happily, as is the custom of my people, I have brought a matter of equal worth, to exchange with you."
Lea beckoned the attendant forward, and was given a long, dark case. She opened it, displaying it for a moment to Bianca, and then turned, showing it to the gathered Court.
Amoracchius. Michael's sword. It lay gleaming in the dark box, casting back the ruddy light with a pure, argent radiance. Michael went stiff beside me, stifling a shout.
A murmur went up from the assembled vampires and sundry creatures. They recognized the sword as well. Lea basked in it for a moment, until she folded the case closed and passed it over to Bianca. Bianca settled it across her lap, and smiled down at me and, I thought, at Michael.
"A worthy reply to my gift," Bianca said. "I thank you, Lady Leanandsidhe. Let Mavra of the Black Court come forward."
My godmother retreated. Mavra glided out of the night and onto the dais.
"Mavra, you have been a most gracious and honorable guest in my house," Bianca said. "And I trust that you have found your treatment here fair and equitable."
Mavra bowed to Bianca, silent, her rheumy eyes gleaming, glancing down towards Michael.
"Oh, Jesus," I whispered. "Son of a bitch."
"He didn't mean it, Lord," Michael said. "Harry? What did you mean?"
I clenched my teeth, eyes flickering around. Everyone was watching me, all the vampires, Mister Ferro, everyone. They all knew what was coming. "The tombstone. It was written on my damned tombstone."
Bianca watched the realization come over me, still smiling. "Then please, Mavra, accept these minor tokens of my goodwill, and with them my hopes that vengeance and prosperity will belong to you and yours." She offered forth the case, containing the sword, which Mavra accepted. Bianca then beckoned to the background, and the attendants brought out another covered bundle.
The attendants jerked the cover off of the bundle---Lydia. Her dark, tousled hair had been trimmed into an elegant cut, and she wore a halter and shorts of black Lycra that emphasized her hips, the beauty of her pale limbs. Her eyes stared into the lights, glazed, drugged, and she sagged helplessly between the attendants.
"My God," Susan said. "What are they going to do with that girl?"
Mavra turned to Lydia, reaching into the case as she did. "Sweet," her hissing voice rasped. Her eyes went to Michael again. "Now to open my gift. It may tarnish the steel a bit, but I'm sure I'll get over it."
Michael drew in a sudden breath.
"What's going on?" Susan blurted.
"The blood of innocents," he snarled. "The Sword is vulnerable. She means to unmake it. Harry, we cannot allow it."
All around me, vampires dropped their wineglasses, slid out of their jackets, bared their scarlet-smeared fangs in slow smiles to me. Bianca started laughing, up above me, as Mavra opened the case and withdrew Amoracchius. The sword seemed to almost chime with an angry sound as the vampire touched it, but Mavra only sneered down at the blade as she lifted the sword.
Thomas moved closer to us, pushing Justine behind him as he drew his sword. "Dresden," he hissed. "Dresden, don't be a fool. It's only one life---one girl's life and a sword balanced against all of us. If you act now, you condemn us all."
"Harry?" Susan asked, her voice shaking.
Michael too turned to look at me, his expression grim. "Faith, Dresden. Not all is lost."
All looked pretty damned lost to me. But I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to lift a finger. All I had to do, to get out of here alive, was to sit still. To do nothing. All I had to do was stand here and watch while they murdered a girl who had come to me a few days before, begging me for protection. All I had to do was ignore her screams as Mavra gutted her. All I had to do was let the monsters destroy one of the major bastions standing against them. All I had to do was let Michael go to his death, claim the protection of the laws of hospitality upon Susan, and I could walk away.
Michael nodded at me, then drew both knives and turned toward the dais.
I closed my eyes. God forgive me for what I'm about to do.
I grabbed Michael's shoulder before he could start walking. Then I drew the sword blade forth from the cane, holding the cane in my left hand, reversing it in my grip as I drew in my will, sent it coursing down the haft of the cane, caused blue-white light to flare in the runes etched there.
Michael flashed me a fighting grin and took position at my right. Thomas took one look at me and whispered, "We're dead." But he fell in at my left, crystalline sword glittering in his hand. A howl went up from the vampires, a sudden wave of deafening sound. Mavra turned her eyes to us, gathering night into the fingers of her free hand again. Bianca slowly rose, dark eyes glowing in triumph. Over to one side, Lea laid her hand on Mister Ferro's arm, frowning faintly, standing well out of the way.
Mavra hissed, lifting Amoracchius up high.
"Harry?" Susan asked. Her shaking hand touched my shoulder. "What are we going to do?"
"Stay behind me, Susan." I clenched my teeth. "I guess I'm going to do the right thing."
Even if it kills me, I thought. And all of you, too.
In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand-up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke.
But that's an illusion. A real struggle between combatants, whether they number dozens or thousands, is something inherently messy, fluid, difficult to follow. The illusion can show you the outcome, but it doesn't impress upon you the surge and press of bodies, the screams, the fear, the faltering rushes forward or away. Within the battle, everything is wild motion and sound and a blur of impressions that flash by almost before they have time to register. Instinct and reflex rule everything---there isn't time to think, and if there's a spare second or two, the only thought in your head is "How do I stay alive?" You're intensely aware of what is happening around you. It's an obscure kind of torture, an acute and temporary hell---because one way or another, it doesn't last long.
A tide of vampires came toward us. They rushed in, animal-swift, a blur of twisted, bulging faces and staring black eyes. Their jaws hung too far open, fangs bared, hissing and howling. One of them held a long spear and shoved it toward Thomas's pale belly. Justine screamed. Thomas swept the crystalline sword he bore down in an arc, parrying the spear's tip aside and cutting through the haft.
Undeterred, the spear-wielding vampire came on, and sank its fangs into Thomas's forearm. Thomas shoved the vamp back, but it held firm. Thomas switched tactics, abruptly lifting the vampire up and clear of the ground, and then rolled the sword's blade around its belly, splitting it open in a welter of gore. The vampire fell to the ground, a sound bubbling up from his throat that was one part fury and one part agony.
"Their bellies!" Thomas shouted. "Without the blood they're too weak to fight!"
Michael caught a descending machete's blade on the metal guard around his forearm, and whipped one of his knives across the belly of the vamp who held it. Blood splattered out of the vamp, and it went down in convulsions. "I know," Michael snapped back, flashing Thomas an irritated look.
And then he was buried in a swarm of red-clad bodies.
"Michael!" I shouted. I tried to push toward him, but found myself jostled aside. I saw him struggle and drop to one knee, saw the vampires shoving knives at him, and fangs, teeth tearing and worrying, and if any of them were burning, like before, I couldn't see it.
Kyle Hamilton appeared, across the dogpile over the fallen knight. He bared his fangs at me, and lifted a semiautomatic, one of the expensive models. Gold-plated. "Fare thee well, Dresden."
I lifted the cane, its runes shimmering blue and white, and snapped. "Venteferro!"
The magic whispered silently out through the runes on the cane. Earth magic isn't really my forte, but I like to keep my hand in. The runes and the power I willed into the staff reached out and caught the gun in invisible waves of magnetism. I had been worried that the spells I'd laid on the cane might have gone stale, but they were still hanging in there. The gun flew from Kyle's hands.
I whipped it through the air, into the face of another vamp coming toward Justine. It hit at something just this side of the speed of sound, and sent the thing flying back into the darkness. Justine whirled, as a second vampire came at her, only to have its legs literally scythed out from beneath it by Thomas's blade.
"Iesu domine!" Michael's voice rang out from beneath the vampires like a brass army bugle, and with a sudden explosion of pressure and unseen force, bodies flew back and up, away from him, flesh ripped and torn from them, hanging in ragged, bloodless strips like cloth, showing gleaming, oily black flesh beneath. "Domine!" Michael shouted, rising, slewing gutted vamps off of him like a dog shakes off water. "Lava quod est sordium!"
"Come on!" I called, and strode forward, toward the stairs leading up to the dais. Michael had parted the scarlet sea, as it were---stunned vampires gathered themselves from the ground or slowed their attack, hovering several feet away, hissing. Susan and Justine caught one of them starting to creep in closer, and discouraged the others from following its example by splattering it with holy water from Susan's basket. The thing howled and fell back, clawing at its eyes, flopping and wriggling like a half-crushed bug.
"Bianca!" Thomas shouted. "Our only chance is to take out their leader!" A knife flew out of the dark, too fast for me to see. But Thomas did. He reached out and flicked the blade of his sword across its path with a contemptuous swat, deflecting it out.
We reached the foot of the stairs. "Thomas, hold them here. Michael, we go up." I didn't wait to see who was listening---I just turned and headed up the stairs, sword and cane out and ready, my stomach sinking. There was no way we would be in time to save Lydia.
But we were. The carnage had evidently drawn Mavra's attention, and she stared at the blood, withered lips pulled back from yellow teeth. She looked at me, and her expression twisted in malice. She spun back to Lydia, sword held high.
"Michael," I snapped, and stretched out my cane. "Venteferro!"
Amoracchius burst into conflicting shades of blue and golden light, as my power wrapped around it, a coruscation of sparks that made Mavra howl in surprise and pain. The vampire retreated, but kept her pale hands clenched on the blade.
"Suit yourself, sparky," I muttered. I gritted my teeth as the cane smoked and shook in my hand. "Vente! Venteferro!" I whipped the cane in a wide arc, and with a hiss the vampire found herself lifted clear of the ground by her grip on the sword, and flung like a beach ball toward the courtyard below. She smacked into the stones of the courtyard hard, brittle popping sounds a gruesome accompaniment. The sword exploded in another cloud of vengeful argent sparks and went spinning away from Mavra, the blade flashing where it hit the ground.
A wave of exhaustion and dizziness swept over me, and I nearly fell. Even using a focus, the rune-etched cane, that effort had nearly been more than I could manage. I had to clench my teeth and hope I wouldn't simply pitch to one side. I was getting down to the bottom of the barrel, as far as magic went.
"Harry!" Michael shouted. "Look out!"
I looked up to see Mavra bound up onto the dais again, not bothering to take the stairs, landing a few feet from me. Michael strode forward, one hand holding a dagger up reversed, point down, a cross extended toward Mavra. The vampire flung her hands at Michael, and darkness spilled out of them like oil, splattering toward the knight. It sizzled and spat against him, going up in puffs of steam, and Michael came on forward through it, white fire gathering around the upheld cross. Mavra let out a dusty, hissing scream and fell back from him, forced away from me.
"Harry," Thomas shouted up the stairs, "hurry up! We can't last much longer!"
My eyes swept the dais, but I could see no sign of Bianca or her attendants in the shadows cast by the halogen-brightness of Michael's blazing cross. I hurried to Lydia, sheathing my slender blade before scooping her up. "Longer? I'm amazed we're still alive now!"
"Light shines brightest in the deepest dark!" Michael shouted, a fierce joy on his face, his eyes alight with a passion and a vengeance I had never seen in him. He kept forcing Mavra back before the paralyzing fire of the cross, until with a scream she fell from the dais. "Let come the forces of night! We will stand!"
"We will get the hell out of here is what we will do," I muttered, but louder I said, "back down the stairs. Let's go!"
I turned to see Thomas, Susan, and Justine holding off a ring of vampires, at the base of the stairs to the dais, between the pair of spotlights. Only scraps of skin and cloth clung to the vampires. Some of the Red Court still had partially human faces, but most stood naked, now, free of the flesh masks they wore. Black, flabby creatures, twisted, horrible faces, bellies bulging, mostly, tight with fresh blood. Black eyes, empty of anything but hunger, glittered in the light. Long, skinny fingers ended in black claws, as did the grasping toes of their feet. Membranes stretched between their arms and flanks, horribly slime-covered, the beautiful bodies and shapes of before given way to the horror beneath.
A vampire lurched toward Thomas, while another reached out to grasp Susan. She thrust her cross in its face, but unlike with Mavra, the wood did not blaze to light. Faith magic isn't always easy to work, even on vampires, and the Red Court, creatures with a more solid hold on reality than the more magical denizens of the Black, were not so easily repelled. The vampire howled, mouth yawning open, foaming slaver spattering Susan's red hood.
She twisted and fought, and with her other hand swept up another baby food jar of holy water---not at the vampire, but at the spotlight beside them. With a screaming hiss, the water vaporized against the heat of the light, bursting out in a sudden cloud of steam that enfolded the vampire completely. It let out a screech that swept upward through the range of human hearing, vanishing above it, and fell away from Susan, its skin sloughing off, the black, stringy muscles and bones beneath showing through.
Susan fumbled her basket open and drew her gun. She fired for the vampire's belly, the rapid thump-thump-thump of panic fire, and the vampire's abdomen ruptured, blood spraying out in a cloud. The vamp fell to the ground, and I remember thinking that she'd just killed the thing---really and truly taken one of them out. A fierce pride shot through me, and I headed down the stairs.
And then our streak of luck ended.
Justine took a step too far to one side, and Bianca appeared out of nowhere, seizing the girl by the hair and dragging her away from Thomas. Thomas whirled, but too late. Bianca held the girl's back against her front, her fingers wound with deceptive gentleness around Justine's throat. With the other hand, Bianca, still quite human-seeming and calm, caressed the girl's belly. Justine struggled, but Bianca simply turned her head to one side and drew her tongue slowly, sensuously over Justine's throat. The girl's eyes widened, panicked. Then they grew heavy. She shuddered, her body relaxing toward Bianca, arching slowly. Bianca's rich mouth quirked, and she murmured something into Justine's ear that made the girl whimper.
"Enough," Bianca said. And as quickly as that, the courtyard grew silent. Michael and I stood on the stairs a bit above Thomas and Susan. The vampires ringed them in, just out of reach of Thomas's sword. I held Lydia unmoving in my arms. Bianca looked up at me and said, "The game has ended, wizard."
"You haven't taken us down yet," I shot back. "Smart for you and your people to get out of my way, before I get cranky."
Bianca laughed, idly plucking some of the petals from Justine's top, baring a bit more of her breasts. "Surely you don't think me so stupid as to be bluffed now, Dresden. You have already had a measure of your strength taken. What remains barely keeps you standing. If you could force your way out, you'd have done it already." Her eyes moved to Michael. "And you, Sir Knight. You will die gloriously and take many of the horrid creatures of the night with you. But you are outnumbered and alone, and without the sword. You will die."
I glanced at Thomas and Susan and said, "Well, then. I guess it's a good thing we brought help. Your whole Court, Bianca, and you couldn't take us down." I swept my eyes back and forth over the vampires below, and said, "All of your little minions here have eternity laid out before them. Eternity is a bad thing to lose. And maybe you would get us, eventually. But whichever one of you would like to lose eternity first, please. Just go ahead and step on up."
Silence reigned over the courtyard for a moment. I allowed a bit of hope to seep into my pounding heart. Kenny Rogers, eat your heart out. If this bluff worked, I'd be more of a gambler than he'd ever dreamed.
Bianca only smiled, and said, to Thomas, "She's so beautiful, my cousin of the White Court. I've wanted her ever since the moment I saw her." Bianca licked her lips. "What would you say to a bargain?"
I sneered. "You think we would do business with you?"
Thomas glanced back up at me. Incredibly, he was clean---but for a sprinkling of scarlet droplets on his pale flesh, unmarred, loincloth, wings, and all. "Go ahead," he said. "I'm listening."
"Give them to us, Thomas Raith," Bianca said. "Give us these three, and take the girl as your own, uncontested. I will have as many little pets as I wish, now. What is one over another?"
"Thomas," I said. "I know we just met, but don't listen to her. She set you up to get killed already."
Thomas glanced back and forth between us. He met my eyes for a moment---almost long enough to let me see inside him. Then looked away. I had the impression that he was trying to tell me something. I don't know what. His expression seemed apologetic, maybe. "I know, Mister Dresden," he said. "But . . . I'm afraid the situation has changed." He didn't kick Susan, so much as he simply planted his sandaled foot against her and shoved her into the crowd of vampires. She let out a short, startled scream, and then they took her, and dragged her into the darkness.
Thomas lowered his sword and turned toward me, his back to the vampires. Leering, hissing, they crept closer to Michael and me, around Thomas, one of them rubbing up against his legs. His mouth twisted in distaste, and he sidestepped. "I'm sorry, Mister Dresden. Harry. I do like you quite a bit. But I'm afraid that I like myself a whole lot more."
Thomas faded back, while the vampires crowded around the bottom of the stairs. Somewhere, in the dark, Susan let out a short, terrified scream. And then it faded to a moan. And then silence.
Bianca smiled sweetly at me, over Justine's lolling head. "And so, wizard, it ends. The pair of you will die. But don't worry. No one will ever find the bodies." She glanced back, toward where Thomas had faded into the background and said, aside, "Kyle, Mavra. Kill the white-bellied little bastard, too."
Thomas's head whipped around toward Bianca and he snarled, "You bitch!"
My mouth worked and twisted, but no words came out. How could they? Words couldn't possibly contain the frustration, the rage, the fear that poured through me. It cut through my weariness, sharp as thorns and barbed wire. It wasn't fair. We'd done everything we could. We'd risked everything.
Not we. The choices had been mine.
I'd risked everything.
And I'd lost.
Michael and I couldn't possibly fight them all alone. They'd taken Susan. The help we thought we'd found had turned against us.
They had Susan.
And it was my fault. I hadn't listened to her, when I should have. I hadn't protected her. And now she was going to die, because of me.
I don't know how that realization would make someone else feel. I don't know if the despair, and the self-loathing and the helpless fury would crumble them like too-brittle concrete, or melt them like dirty lead, or shatter them like cheap glass.
I only know what it did to me.
It set me on fire.
Fire in my heart, in my thoughts, in my eyes. I burned, burned down deep in my gut, burned in places I hadn't known I could hurt.
I don't remember the spell, or the words I said. But I remember reaching for that pain. I remember reaching for it, and thinking that if we had to go, then so help me God, weakened or not, hopeless or not, I was going to take these murdering, bloodsucking sons of bitches with me. I would show them that they couldn't play lightly with the powers of creation, of life itself. That it wasn't smart to cross a wizard of the White Council when someone has stolen his girlfriend.
I think Michael must have sensed something and taken the girl from my arms, because the next thing I remember is thrusting my hands toward the night sky and screaming, "Fuego! Pyrofuego! Burn, you greasy bat-faced bastards! Burn!"
I reached for fire---and fire answered me.
The tree-towers of the topiary castle exploded into blazes of light, and the hedge-walls, complete with their crenelated tops, went up with them. Fire leapt up into the air, forty, fifty feet, and the sudden explosion of it lifted everyone but me up and off the ground, sent wind roaring around us in a gale.
I stood amidst it, my mind brilliantly lit by the power coursing through me. It burned me, and some part of me screamed out in joy that it did. My cloak flapped and danced in the gale, spreading out around me in a scarlet and sable cloud. The abrupt glare fell on the scene of the vampires' revelry, lighting it harshly. The young people of earlier lay about, out in the darkness near the hedges, near the fires, pathetic little lumps. Some of them twitched. Some of them breathed. A few whimpered and tried to crawl away from the heat---but most lay dreadfully, perfectly still.
Pale. Pretty.
Dead.
The fury in me grew. It swelled and burned and I reached out to the fires again. Flames flew out, caught one of the more cowardly of the vampires, huddled at the back, scrabbling to slip his flesh mask back over his squashed bat face. The fire touched him and then twined about him, searing and blackening his skin, then dragging him back, winding and rolling him toward the blaze.
The magic danced in my eyes, my head, my chest, flying wild and out of control. I couldn't follow everything that happened. More vampires got too close to the flames, and began screaming. Tendrils of fire rose up from the ground and began to slither over the courtyard like serpents. Everything exploded into motion, shadows flashing through the brightness, seeking escape, screaming.
I felt my heart clench in my chest and stop beating. I swayed on my feet, gasping. Michael got to me, Lydia slung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. He'd torn his cloak off, and it lay to one side, burning. He dragged my arm across his shoulder, and half carried me down the stairs.
Smoke gathered on us, thick and choking. I coughed and retched, helpless. The magic coursed through me, slower now, a trickle---not because the floodgates had closed, but because I had nothing left to pour out. I hurt. Fire spread out from my heart, my arms and legs clenching and twitching. I couldn't get a breath, couldn't think, and I knew, somewhere amidst all that pain, that I was about to die.
"Lord!" Michael coughed. "Lord, I know that Harry hasn't always done what You would have done!" He staggered forward, carrying me, and the girl. "But he's a good man! He's fought against Your foes! He deserves better than to die here, Lord! So if you could be kind enough to show me how to get us out of here, I'd really appreciate it."
And then, abruptly, the smoke parted, and sweet, untainted air hit us in the face like a bucket of ice water.
I fell to the ground. Michael dropped the girl somewhere near me and tore the cheap tuxedo open. He laid his hand over my heart and let out a short cry. After that, I don't remember much more than pain, and a series of dull, hard thumps on my chest.
And then my heart lurched and began to beat again. The red haze of agony receded.
I looked up.
The smoke had parted in a tunnel, as though someone had shoved a glass tube of clean air through it and around us. At the far end of the tunnel stood a slender, willowy figure, tall, feminine. Something like wings spread out behind the figure, though that might have been an illusion, light falling on it from many angles, so that it was all shadow and color.
"I thought He wasn't so literal," I choked.
Michael drew back from me, his soot-stained face breaking into a brief smile. "Are you complaining?"
"H-heck, no. Where's Susan?"
"I'll come back in for her. Come on." Too tired to argue, I let him haul me back to my feet. He picked up Lydia, and we staggered forward and out, to the figure at the tunnel's far end.
Lea. My faerie godmother.
We both drew up short. Michael fumbled for his knife, but it was gone.
Lea quirked one delicate brow at us. Her dress, still blue, un-soiled, flowed around her, and her silken mane matched the bloody fires consuming the courtyard. She looked almost good enough to drink, and she still held the black box Bianca had given her beneath one slender arm.
"Godmother," I said, startled.
"Well, fool? What are you waiting for. I took the trouble to show you a way to escape. Do it."
"You saved us?" I coughed.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Though it pains me in ways I could not explain, yes, child. How am I supposed to have you if I let this Red Court hussy kill you? Stars above, wizard, I thought you had better sense than this."
"You saved me. So you could get me."
"Not like this," Lea said, holding a silken cloth to her nose, delicately. "You're a husk, and I want the whole fruit. Go rest, child. We will speak again soon enough."
And then she withdrew and was gone.
Michael got me out of the house. I remember the smell of his old truck, sawdust and sweat and leather. I felt its worn seat creak beneath me.
"Susan," I said. "Where's Susan?"
"I'll try."
Then I drifted in darkness for a while, dimly conscious of a lingering pain in my chest, of Lydia's warm skin pressed against my hand. I tried to move, to make sure the girl was all right, but it was too much effort.
The truck door opened and slammed closed. Then came the rumble of its engine.
And then everything went mercifully black.
Chapter Thirty-one
The darkness swallowed me and kept me for a long time. There was nothing but silence where I drifted, nothing but endless night. I wasn't cold. I wasn't warm. I wasn't anything. No thought, no dreams, no anything.
It was too good to last.
The pain of the burns came to me first. Burns are the worst injuries in the world. I'd been scorched on my right arm and shoulder, and it throbbed with a dull persistence that dragged me out of the peace. All the other assorted scrapes and bruises and cuts came back to me. I felt like a collection of complaints and malfunctions. I ached everywhere.
Memory came through the haze next. I started remembering what had happened. The Nightmare. The vampire ball. The kids who had been seduced into being there.
And the fire.
Oh, God. What had I done?
I thought of the fire, towering up in walls of solid flame, reaching out with hungry arms to drag the vampires screaming back into the pyre I had made of the hedges and the trees.
Stars and stones. Those children had been helpless in that. In the fire and the smoke that I'd needed a major sidhe sorceress's assistance to escape. I had never stopped to think about that. I had never even considered the consequences of unleashing my power that way.
I opened my eyes. I lay in my bed in my room. I stumbled out of the bed and into my bathroom. Someone must have fed me soup at some point, because when I started throwing up, there was something left to come out.
Killed them. I killed those kids. My magic, the magic that was the energy of creation and life itself had reached out and burned them to death.
I threw up until my belly ached with the violence of it, wild grief running rampant over me. I struggled, but I couldn't force the images out of my head. Children burning. Justin burning. Magic defines a man. It comes from down deep inside you. You can't accomplish anything with magic that isn't in you, somewhere, to do.
And I had burned those children alive.
My power. My choice. My fault.
I sobbed.
I didn't come to myself until Michael came into the bathroom. By the time he did, I lay on my side, curled up tight, the water of the shower pouring down over me, the cold making me shiver. Everything hurt, inside and out. My face ached, from being twisted up so tightly. My throat had closed almost completely as I wept.
Michael picked me up as though I weighed no more than one of his children. He dried me with a towel and shoved me into my heavy robe. He had on clean clothes, a bandage on his wrist and another on his forehead. His eyes looked a little more sunken, as though short on sleep. But his hands were steady, his expression calm, confident.
I gathered myself again, very slowly. By the time he was finished, I lifted my eyes to his.
"How many?" I asked. "How many of them died?"
He understood. I saw the pain in his eyes. "After I got the pair of you out, I called the fire department and let them know that people needed a rescue. They got there pretty quickly, but---"
"How many, Michael?"
He drew in a slow breath. "Eleven bodies."
"Susan?" My voice shook.
He hesitated. "We don't know. Eleven was all they found. They're checking dental records. They said the heat was so intense that the bones hardly look human."
I let out a bitter laugh. "Hardly human. There were more kids than that there---"
"I know. But that's all they found. And they rescued a dozen more, alive."
"It's something, at least. What about the ones unaccounted for?"
"They were gone. Missing. They're . . . they're presumed dead."
I closed my eyes. Fire had to burn hot to reduce bones to ash. Had my spell been that powerful? Had it hidden most of the dead?
"I can't believe it," I said. "I can't believe I was so stupid."
"Harry," Michael said. He put his hand on my shoulder. "We've no way to know. We just don't. They could have been dead before the fires came. The vampires were feeding from them indiscriminately, where we couldn't see."
"I know," I said. "I know. God, I was so arrogant. Such an idiot to go walking in there like that."
"Harry---"
"And those poor, stupid kids paid the price. Dammit, Michael."
"A lot of the vampires didn't make it out, either, Harry."
"It isn't worth it. Not if it wiped out all the vamps in Chicago."
Michael fell quiet. We sat that way for a long time.
Finally, I asked him, "How long have I been out?"
"More than a day. You slept through last night and yesterday and most of tonight. The sun will rise soon."
"God," I said. I rubbed at my face.
I could hear Michael's frown. "I thought we'd lost you for a while. You wouldn't wake up. I was afraid to take you to the hospital. Any place where there'd be a record of you. The vampires could trace it."
"We need to call Murphy and tell her---"
"Murphy's still sleeping, Harry. I called Sergeant Stallings, last night, when I called the fire department. S.I. tried to take over the investigation, but someone up the line called the police department off of it altogether. Bianca has contacts in City Hall, I guess."
"They can't stop the missing persons investigations that are going to start cropping up as soon as people start missing those kids. But they can stick a bunch of things in the way of it. Crap."
"I know," Michael said. "I tried to find Susan, the girl Justine, and the sword, after. Nothing."
"We almost pulled it off. Sword and captives and all."
"I know."
I shook my head. "How's Charity? The baby?"
He looked down. "The baby---they still don't know about him. They can't find out what's wrong. They don't have any idea why he is getting weaker."
"I'm sorry. Is Charity---?"
"She's stuck in bed for a while, but she'll be fine. I called her yesterday."
"Called. You didn't go see her?"
"I guarded you," Michael said. "Father Forthill was with my family. And there are others who can watch them, when I'm away."
I winced. "She didn't like that, did she. That you stayed with me."
"She's not speaking to me."
"I'm sorry."
He nodded. "So am I."
"Help me up. I'm thirsty."
He did, and I only swayed a little as I stood. I tottered out into the living area of my apartment. "What about Lydia?" I asked.
Michael remained silent, and my eyes answered my own question a few seconds later. Lydia lay on the couch in my living room, under a ton and a half of blankets, curled up, her eyes closed and her mouth a little open.
"I recognize her," Michael said.
I frowned. "From where?"
"Kravos's lair. She was one of the kids they hauled away, early on."
I whistled. "She must have known him. Known what he was going to do, somehow."
"Try not to wake her up," Michael said, his voice soft. "She wouldn't sleep. I think they'd drugged her. She was panicky, gabbling. I just got her quieted down half an hour ago."
I frowned a little and went into the tiny kitchen. Michael followed. I got a Coke out of the icebox, thought better of it with my stomach the way it was, and fetched a glass of water instead. I drank unsteadily. "I've got hell to pay now, Michael."
He frowned at me. "How do you mean?"
"What you do comes back to you, Michael. You know that much. Roll a stone and it rolls back upon you. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."
Michael lifted his eyebrows. "I didn't realize you'd read much of the Bible."
"Proverbs always made a lot of sense to me," I said. "But with magic, things like that come a lot sharper and cleaner than with other things. I killed people. I burned them. It's going to come back to haunt me."
Michael frowned, and looked out at Lydia. "The Law of Three, eh?"
I shrugged.
"I thought you told me once that you didn't believe in that."
I drank more water. "I didn't. I don't. It's too much like justice. To believe that what you do with magic comes back to you threefold."
"You've changed your mind?"
"I don't know. All I know is that there's going to be justice, Michael. For those kids, for Susan, for what's happened to Charity and your son. If no one else is going to arrange it, I'll damn well do it myself." I grimaced. "I just hope that if I'm wrong, I can dodge karmic paybacks long enough to finish this."
"Harry, the ball was the whole point. It was Bianca's chance to put you down while staying within the terms of the Accords. She laid her trap and missed. Do you think she's going to keep pushing it?"
I gave him a look. "Of course. And so do you. Or you wouldn't have played watchdog here for the past day."
"Good point."
I raked my fingers through my hair, and reached for the Coke, my stomach be damned. "We just have to decide what our next move is going to be."
Michael shook his head. "I don't know. I need to be with Charity. And my son. If he's . . . if he's sick. He needs me near him."
I opened my mouth to object, but I couldn't. Michael had already risked his neck for me more than once. He'd given me a lot of good advice that I hadn't listened to. Especially about Susan. If I'd only paid more attention, told her what I felt, maybe . . .
I cut off that line of thought before the hysterical sob that rose in my throat became more than a blur of tears in my eyes. "All right," I said. "I . . . thank you. For your help."
He nodded, and looked down, as though ashamed. "Harry. I'm sorry. I've done all that I could. But I'm not as young as I used to be. And . . . I lost the sword. Maybe I'm not the one to hold it anymore after all. Maybe this is how He is telling me that I need to be at home now. Be there for my wife, my children."
"I know," I said. "It's all right. Do what you think is best."
He touched the bandage on his forehead, lightly. "If I had the sword, maybe I'd feel differently." He fell quiet.
"Go on," I said. "Look, I'll be all right, here. The Council will probably give me some help." If they didn't hear about the people who'd died in the fire, that is. If they heard about that, that I'd broken the First Law of Magic, they'd take my head off my neck faster than you could say "capital offense." "Just go, Michael. I'll take care of Lydia."
"All right," he said. "I'll . . ."
A thought occurred to me, and I didn't hear what Michael said next.
"Harry?" he asked. "Harry, are you all right?"
"I'm having a thought," I said. "I . . . something feels off about this to me. Doesn't it to you?"
He just blinked at me.
I shook my head. "I'll think about it. Make some notes. Try to sort this mess out." I started toward the door. "Come on. I'll let you out."
Michael followed me to the door, and I had my hand on the knob when the door abruptly rattled under several rapid blows that could only loosely be construed as knocking. I shot him a glance over my shoulder, and without a word, he retreated to the fireplace and picked up the poker that had been lying against some of the logs. The tip glowed orange-red.
When a fresh barrage hammered against my door, I jerked it open, slipping to one side.
A slender figure of medium height stumbled into the room. He wore a leather jacket, jeans, tennis shoes, and a Cubs ball cap. He carried a rifle case made of black plastic, and he smelled of sweat and feminine perfume.
"You," I snarled. I grabbed the man's shoulder before he could get his balance and spun his shoulders hard, sending him back against the wall. I drove my fist hard at his mouth, felt the bright smack-thud of impact on my knuckles. I grabbed the front of his jacket in both hands, and with a snarl hurled him away from the wall, to the floor of my living room.
Michael stepped forward, put his work boot on the back of the intruder's neck, and pressed the glowing tip of the poker close to his eyes.
Thomas released the rifle case and jerked his hands up, pale fingers spread. "Jesus!" he gasped. His full lower lip had split, and was smeared with something pale and pinkish, not much like human blood. I glanced down at my knuckles, and they were smeared with the same substance. It caught the light of the fire and refracted in an opalescent sheen. "Dresden," Thomas stammered. "Don't do anything hasty."
I reached down and plucked the hat off of his head, letting his dark hair spill out and down in an unkempt mane. "Hasty? Like, maybe, turn traitor on you all of a sudden and let a bunch of monsters eat your girlfriend?"
His eyes rolled back to Michael and then over to me. "God, wait. It wasn't like that. You didn't see all that happened afterwards. At least shut the door and listen to me."
I glanced over at the open doorway, and after a hesitation shut it. No sense in leaving my back open just to be contrary. "I don't want to listen to him, Michael."
"He's a vampire," Michael said. "And he betrayed us. He's probably come here to try to trick us again."
"You think we should kill him?"
"Before he hurts someone," Michael said. His tone was flat, disinterested. Scary, actually. I shivered a little, and drew my robe closed around me a little more tightly.
"Look, Thomas," I said. "I've had a really bad day, and I only woke up half an hour ago. You're adding to it."
"We're all having a bad day, Dresden," Thomas said. "Bianca's people were after me all day and all night, too. I just barely got here without getting myself torn to pieces."
"The night is young," I said. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you like the lying, treacherous vampire sleaze you are?"
"Because you can trust me," he said. "I want to help you."
I snorted. "Why the hell should I believe you?"
"You shouldn't," he said. "Don't. I'm a good liar. One of the best. I'm not asking you to believe me. Believe the circumstances. We have a common interest."
I scowled. "You're kidding me."
He shook his head, and offered me a wry smile. "I wish I was. I thought I would get the chance to help you out once Bianca had taken her eyes off me, but she double-crossed me."
"Well, Thomas. I don't know how new you are to all of this, but Bianca is what we colloquially refer to as a 'bad guy.' They do that. That's one way you can tell they're bad guys."
"God save me from idealists," Thomas muttered. Michael growled, and Thomas shot him a hopeful, puppy-like smile. "Look, both of you. They have Dresden's woman."
I took a step forward, my heart fluttering. "She's alive?"
"For now," Thomas said. "They've got Justine, too. I want her back. You want Susan back. I think we can make a deal. Work together. What do you say?"
Michael shook his head. "He's a liar, Harry. I can tell just by being this close to him."
"Yes, yes, yes," Thomas said. "I confess to it. But at the moment, it isn't a part of my agenda to lie to anyone. I just want her back."
"Justine?"
Thomas nodded.
"So he can keep on draining the life out of her," Michael said. "Harry, if we aren't going to kill him, let's at least put him out."
"If you do," Thomas said. "You'll be making a huge mistake. And I swear to you, by my own stunning good looks and towering ego, that I'm not lying to you."
"Okay," I said to Michael. "Kill him."
"Wait!" Thomas shouted. "Dresden, please. What do you want me to pay you? What do you want me to do? I don't have anywhere else to go."
I studied Thomas's expression. He looked weary, desperate, beneath the cool facade he was barely holding onto. And beneath the fear, he looked resigned. Determined.
"Okay," I said. "It's all right, Michael. Let him up."
Michael frowned. "You sure?"
I nodded. Michael fell back from Thomas, but he kept the poker gripped loosely in one hand.
Thomas sat up, running his fingers lightly over his throat, where Michael's boot had left a dark mark, and then touched his split lip, and winced. "Thank you," he said, quietly. "Look in the case."
I glanced at the black rifle case. "What's in it?"
"A deposit," he said. "A down payment, for your help."
I quirked an eyebrow and leaned over the case. I ran my fingertips lightly over it. There was no spiny buzz of energy around it to herald a sorcerous booby trap, but a good one would be hard to notice. There was something inside, though. Something that hummed quietly, a silent vibration of power that ran through the plastic and into my hand. A vibration I recognized.
I flicked open the latches on the rifle case, fumbling in my hurry, and swung it open.
Amoracchius lay gleaming against the grey foam inside the case, unmarked from the inferno at Bianca's town house.
"Michael," I said, quietly. I reached out and touched the blade's hilt, again. Still, it buzzed with that quiet, deep power, at once reassuring and intimidating. I withdrew my fingers.
Michael paced over to the case and leaned down, staring at the sword. His expression wavered and became difficult to read. His eyes filled with tears, and he reached a broad, scarred hand down to the weapon's hilt. He took it in hand and closed his eyes.
"It's all right," he said. "They didn't hurt it." He blinked his eyes open, and looked upwards. "I hear you."
I glanced up toward my ceiling and said, "I hope you meant that in a figurative sense. Because I didn't hear anything."
Michael smiled and shook his head. "I was weak for a while. The swords are a burden. A power, yes, but at a price. I thought that perhaps the loss of the sword was His way of telling me it was time to retire." He ran his other hand over the twisted metal nail set into the blade at the weapon's cross guard. "But there's still work to be done."
I glanced up, at Thomas. "You say they've got Susan and Justine, huh? Where?"
He licked his lips. "The town house," he said. "The fire ruined the back of the house, but only the exterior. The inside was fine, and the basement was untouched."
"All right," I said. "Talk."
Thomas did, laying out facts in rapid order. After the havoc of the fire, Bianca and the Court had retreated into the mansion. Bianca had ordered the other vampires to each carry one of the helpless mortals out. One of them had brought Susan. When the police and fire crews had arrived, most of the action was over, and the fire marshal had been worked up into a lather over the deaths. He'd gone inside to speak to Bianca, and come out calm and collected, and ordered everyone to pack up and leave, that he was satisfied that it had been a terrible accident and that everything was over.
After that, the vampires had been able to relax and enjoy their "guests."
"I think they're turning some of them," Thomas said. "Bianca has the authority to allow it, now. And they lost too many in the fight and the fire. I know Mavra took a couple and took them with her when she left."
"Left?" I asked.
Thomas nodded. "She skipped town just after sunset, word is. Couple of hungry new mouths to feed, you know?"
"And how do you know all of this, Thomas? The last I heard, Bianca's people were trying to kill you."
He shrugged. "There's more to a good liar than meets the eye, Dresden. I was able to keep an eye on things for a while."
"Okay," I said. "So they've got our people at the manor house. We just need to get inside, get them, and get out again."
Thomas shook his head. "We need something else. She's brought in mortal security. Guards with machine guns. It would be a slaughter."
"That's the spirit," I said, with a grim smile. "Where in the house are they keeping the captives?"
Thomas looked at me rather blankly for a moment. Then he shook his head. "I don't know."
"You've known everything so far," Michael said. "Why are you drying up on us now?"
Thomas gave the Knight a wary look. "I'm serious. I haven't seen any more of that house than you two."
Michael frowned. "Even if we do get in, we can't go blundering around checking every broom closet. We need to know about the inside of the house."
Thomas shrugged. "I'm sorry. I'm tapped."
I waved a hand. "Don't worry. We just need to talk to someone who has seen the inside of the house."
"Capture a prisoner?" Michael asked. "I don't know how much luck we'd have with that."
I shook my head, and glanced over at the sleeping figure of Lydia, who hadn't stirred in all that time. "We just need to talk to her. She was inside. She might have some useful insights for us, in any case. She's got a gift for it."
"Gift?"
"Cassandra's Tears. She can see bits of the future."
I got dressed, and we gave Lydia another hour or so. Thomas went into the bathroom to shower, while I sat out in the living room with Michael. "What I can't figure," I said, "is how we managed to get out of there so easily."
"You call that easy?" Michael said.
I grimaced. "Maybe. I would have expected them to come after us by now. Or to have sent the Nightmare to get us."
Michael frowned, rolling the hilt of the sword between his two hands as though it were a golf club. "I see what you mean." He was quiet for a minute, and then said, "You really think the girl will be of help?"
"I hope so."
At that moment, Lydia started coughing. I moved to her side, and helped her drink some water. She seemed groggy, though she started to stir. "Poor kid," I commented to Michael.
"At least she got a little sleep. I don't think she'd had any for days."
Michael's words froze me solid.
I started to push myself away from Lydia, but her fingers reached out and dug into the sweater I was wearing. I jerked against them, but she held me, easily, not at all moved. The pale girl opened her sunken eyes, and they were flooded with blood, all through the whites, scarlet. She smiled, slow and malicious. She spoke, and her voice came out in a low, harsh sound totally unlike her natural tones, alien and malevolent. "You should have kept her from sleeping. Or killed her before she woke."
Michael started to his feet. Lydia rose, and with one arm she lifted me clear off the ground, bloody eyes glaring up at me with wicked exultation. "I've waited long enough for this," the alien voice, that of the Nightmare, purred. "Goodbye, wizard." And the slender girl flung me like a baseball at the stone of my fireplace.
Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.
Chapter Thirty-two
I flailed my arms and legs and watched the fireplace get closer to breaking open my head. At the last second, I saw a blur of white and pink, and then I slammed into Thomas, driving him into the stones of the fireplace. He let out a grunt, and I bounced off of him, and back to the floor, momentarily breathless. I shoved myself up to my hands and knees and looked at him. He'd wrapped a pink bath towel around his hips, but either the sheer speed of his movement or else the impact had knocked it mostly askew. His ribs jutted out on one side, oddly misshapen.
Thomas looked up at me, his face twisted into a grimace. "I'll be all right," he said. "Look out."
I looked up to find Lydia stalking toward me. "Idiot," she seethed at Thomas. "What did you think you could accomplish? So be it. You just got added to the list."
Michael slipped in between the possessed girl and me, the sword glittering in the low light of the room. "That's far enough," he said. "Get back."
I struggled back to my feet, and wheezed, "Michael, be careful."
Lydia let out another twisted laugh, and leaned forward, pressing her sternum against Amoracchius's tip. "Oh yes, Sir Knight. Get back or what? You'll murder this poor child? I don't think so. I seem to remember, there was something about this sword not being able to draw innocent blood, wasn't there?"
Michael blinked, and darted a glance back at me. "What?"
I got to my feet. "This is really Lydia. It isn't a magical construct, like we saw before. The Nightmare is possessing her. Anything we do to Lydia's body, she's going to have to live with, later."
The girl ran a hand over her breasts, beneath the taut Lycra, licking her lips and staring at Michael with bloody eyes. "Yes. Just a sweet little innocent lamb, wandered astray. You wouldn't want to hurt her, would you, Knight?"
"Harry," Michael said, "how do we handle this?"
"You die," Lydia purred. She rushed Michael, one hand reaching out to strike the sword's blade aside.
When she rushed me, I just got grabbed. But Michael had training, experience. He let the sword fall to the floor and rolled back with Lydia's rush. He grabbed her forearms as she reached for his throat, whirled, and sent her tumbling into the couch, knocking it over backwards and sending her into a sprawl on the far side.
"Keep her busy!" I shouted to him. "I can get it out of her!" And then I rushed back into my bedroom, searching for the ingredients for an exorcism. My room was a mess. I scrambled through it, while out in the living room, Lydia screamed again. There was another thump, this one rattling the wall beside the bedroom door, and then the sounds of panting, scuffling.
"Hurry up, Harry!" Michael gasped. "She's strong!"
"I know, I know!" I jerked open the door to my closet and started knocking things off the shelves, rather than hunt through them.
Behind the spare cans of shaving cream, I located five trick birthday candles, the kind that you can't blow out, and a five-pound bag of salt. "Okay!" I called. "I'm coming!"
Michael and Lydia lay on the floor, his legs wrapped around hers, while his arms pinned hers back behind her in some kind of modified full Nelson hold.
"Hold her there!" I shouted. I rushed in a circle around them, shoving back a chair and a footrest, kicking rugs and carpets aside, finally jerking the last one out from beneath Michael. Lydia fought him, twisting like an eel and screaming at the top of her lungs.
I tore open the salt and ran about the pair of them, dumping it out into a white mound in a circle. Then I ran about again, setting the candles down, piling up enough salt around them to keep them from being turned over. Lydia saw what I was doing and screamed again, redoubling her efforts.
"Flickum bicus!" I shouted, shoving a hurried effort of will into the little spell. The effort made me dizzy for a moment, but the candles burst to light, the circle of candles and salt gathering power.
I rose, reaching out my right hand and feeding more energy into the circle, setting it up in a spinning vortex winding about the three beings inside it---Lydia, Michael, and the Nightmare. Energy gathered in the circle, spinning around, whirling magic down into the earth, grounding and dispersing it. I could almost see the Nightmare clutching tighter to Lydia, holding on. All I needed was the right move to stun the Nightmare, to lock it up for a second, so that the exorcism could sweep it away.
"Azorthragal!" I shouted, bellowing out the demon's name. "Azorthragal! Azorthragal!" I stretched out my right hand again, concentrating fiercely. "Begone!"
Energy rushed out of my body as I completed the spell, swept toward the Nightmare within Lydia like a wave lifting a sleeping seal off a rock---
---and passed over, leaving it untouched.
Lydia began to laugh wildly, and managed to catch one of Michael's hands in hers. She gave a twist, and bones snapped with sharp pops and crackles. Michael let out an agonized scream, twisting and jerking. He knocked the circle of salt askew, and Lydia escaped him, rising to face me.
"Such a fool, wizard," she said. I didn't banter. I didn't even stand there, stunned that my spell had failed so miserably. I wound back a hand and threw a punch at her as hard as I could, hoping to stun the body the demon was riding in, to keep it from reacting.
The possessed Lydia glided from the path of my punch, caught my wrist, and dumped me onto my back. I started to push myself up, but she threw herself astride me, and slammed my head back against the floor, twice. I saw stars.
Lydia stretched above me, purring, and thrusting her hips down against mine. I tried to escape during the moment of gloating, but my arms and legs just didn't respond. She reached down, laying both of her hands almost delicately on my throat, and murmured, "Such a shame. All this time, and you didn't even know who it was after you. You didn't even know who else wanted revenge."
"I guess sometimes you find out the hard way," I slurred.
"Sometimes," Lydia agreed, smiling And then her hands closed over my throat, and I didn't have any more air.
Sometimes, when you're facing death, it feels like everything slows down. Everything stands out sharply in detail, almost freezes. You can see it all, feel it all, as though your brain has decided, in sheer defiance, to seize the last few moments of life and to squeeze them for every bit of living left.
My brain did that, but instead of showing me my trashed apartment and how I really needed a new coat of paint on the ceiling, it started frantically shoving puzzle pieces together. Lydia. The shadow demon. Mavra. The torment spells. Bianca.
One thing stood out in my mind, a piece that didn't fit anywhere. Susan had been gone for a day or two, where I had barely been able to talk to her. She'd said she was working on something. That something was happening. It fit, somehow, somewhere.
Stars swam in my vision and fire started to spread through my lungs. I struggled to pry her arms off of me, but it was no use---possessed, she was simply too strong to deal with.
Susan had been asking me about something, some insignificant part of the phone conversation we had, between sexual innuendos. What had it been?
I heard myself making a very slight sound, something like, "Gaghk. Aghk." I tried to lever Lydia's weight up and off of me, but she simply rolled with me, taking my weight onto her and then continuing the motion, slamming me to the floor again. My vision began to darken, though I opened my eyes wide. It was like staring down a dark tunnel, looking up at Lydia's blood-filled eyes.
I saw Michael struggle to his knees, his face white as a fresh dusting of snow. He moved toward Lydia, but she turned her head slightly and kicked him, lashing out with one heel. I heard something else snap as the force of the kick drove Michael back.
Murphy had been distracted about something, too. Something she'd hurriedly changed subjects on. Intuition drew a line between them. And then an equal sign.
And then I had it: the last piece of the puzzle. I knew what had happened, where the Nightmare had come from, why it was after me, in particular. I knew how to stop it, knew what its limits were, how Bianca had enlisted it, and why my spells had been so hard-pressed to affect it.
Almost a pity, really. I'd figured things out just in time to die.
Vision faded altogether.
And a moment later, so did the pain in my throat.
Instead of drifting off into whatever lay beyond, though, I sucked in a breath of air, choking and gasping. My vision became red for a moment, as blood rushed back through my head, and then started to clear.
Lydia still crouched over me, up on her knees, straddling me---but she'd released my throat. Instead, she had arched her arms up and back, over her head, to caress Thomas's naked shoulders.
The vampire had pressed up against Lydia's back. His mouth nuzzled her throat, slow kisses, strokes of his tongue that made the girl shudder and quiver. His hands roamed slowly over her body, always touching skin, fingers roaming up beneath the brief Lycra top to caress her breasts. Lydia gasped, blood-filled eyes distant, unfocused, body responding with a slow, sensual grace.
Thomas looked past her, through the dark fall of his hair, to me. His eyes weren't blue-grey anymore. They were empty, white, no color to them at all. I felt cold coming off of him, something I sensed more than felt on my skin, a horrible and seductive cold. He continued, spreading a line of kisses up Lydia's neck, to her ear, making her whimper and shake.
I swallowed, and crawled back on my elbows, dragging my hips and legs out from beneath the pair of them.
Thomas murmured, so softly that I wasn't sure I'd heard him. "I don't know how long I can distract her, Dresden. Quit gawking and do something. I'll put on afternoon theater for you later, if you want to watch that bad." Then his mouth covered the girl's, and she stiffened, eyes flying open wide before they languidly closed, deepening the kiss.
I flushed at Thomas's words, which made my head pound painfully. I rooted around the floor and recovered the candles, still lit, and the bag of salt. I spread the salt in a circle around Lydia and Thomas, as Lydia drew the Lycra shorts down and reached back to grasp at Thomas, to urge him toward her.
Thomas let out a groan of pure anguish and said, "Dresden. Hurry."
I settled the candles into place and gathered up whatever power I had left to close the circle and to begin the vortex again. If I was right, I would free Lydia, maybe permanently. If I was wrong, this was the last of my energy, and I'd dump it into the earth for nothing. The Nightmare would presumably kill us---and I didn't think any of us were in shape to do anything about it.
Energy gathered in the circle, rising in a growing whirl of invisible, tingling power. I stretched out my hand and willed more energy into it, feeling dizzy.
The Nightmare finally seemed to take notice of what was around it again. Lydia shivered and leaned a little away from Thomas, breaking some of the contact between them---then the bloodred eyes snapped open, and focused on me. Lydia began to rise, but Thomas clutched onto her hard, holding her.
The power rose again, a second vortex whirling around the pair of them, tugging at spiritual energies within. Lydia screamed.
"Leonid Kravos!" I thundered. I repeated the name, and saw Lydia's eyes fly open wide in shock. "Begone, Kravos! You second-rate firecaller! Begone! Begone!" And with the last word, I stamped my foot down, releasing the power of the exorcism down, into the earth.
Lydia screamed, her body arching, her mouth dropping open wide. Within the whirling vortex, glittering motes of silver and gold light gathered into a funnel, centered on Lydia's gaping mouth. Scarlet energy flooded out of her screaming mouth, and for a moment there was an unnerving overlap of screams---one high-pitched, young, feminine, terrified, while the other was inhuman, otherworldly. More scarlet light lashed forth from Lydia's eyes, stolen away by the vortex's power.
And then with a rush and an implosion of suddenly empty air, the vortex swirled into an infinitely thin line and vanished, dropping down into the floor, lower, deep into the earth.
Lydia let out a low, exhausted cry, and dropped limply to the floor. Thomas, still clutching her, tumbled down with her. Silence fell on the room, but for the four of us, gasping for breath.
Finally, I managed to sit up. "Michael," I called, my voice hoarse. "Michael. Are you okay?"
"Did you stop it?" he asked. "Is the girl all right?"
"I think so."
"Thank God," he said. "It kicked me, got one of my ribs. I'm not sure I can sit up."
"Don't," I said, and mopped sweat from my brow. "Broken ribs could be bad. Thomas? Are you---Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Thomas lay with his arms around Lydia, his pale, naked body pressed against hers, his lips nuzzling her ear. Lydia's eyes were open, colored naturally again, but not focused on anything. She didn't look conscious, but she was making tiny, aroused motions of her body, her hips, leaning back to him. Thomas blinked up at me when I spoke, eyes still empty and white.
"What?" he asked. "She's not unwilling. She's probably just grateful to me, for my help."
"Get away from her," I snapped.
"I'm hungry," he said. "It won't kill her, Dresden. Not the first time. You'd be dead right now without me. Just let me---"
"No," I said.
"But---"
"No. Get off of her, or you and I are going to have words."
A snarl split the air between us, Thomas's full lips peeling back from his teeth. They looked like human teeth, not vampire fangs. Whiter and more perfect than human teeth, but other than that, normal.
I returned his stare coolly.
Thomas looked away first. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, there were pale rings of color in them once more, slowly darkening. He released Lydia and rolled away from her. His ribs still looked dented, but not as much as before. He got to his feet and wrapped the towel around his hips again, then stalked back toward the bathroom without another word.
I checked Lydia's pulse, blushed, and tugged her shorts back into place. Then I righted the couch and put her back onto it, beneath the blankets. After that, I went to Michael.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
I told him what had happened, in terms as PG rated as possible. He scowled, flicking a glance back toward the bathroom. "They're like that. The White Court. Seducers. They feed on lust, fear, hatred. Emotions. But they always use lust to seduce their victims. They can force them to feel it, indulge in sex. It's how they feed."
"Sex vampires, I know," I muttered. "Still. It's interesting."
"Interesting?" Michael sounded skeptical. "Harry, I wouldn't call it interesting."
"Why not?" I said. I squinted after Thomas, thoughtfully. "Whatever he used, it worked on the Nightmare. Caught it up. That means that it's either some kind of ambient magic, maybe that cold I felt, that works on everything around, or else it's something chemical---like Red Court venom. Something that got to Lydia's body and bypassed the Nightmare's control of her mind, altogether. Pheromones, maybe."
"Harry," Michael said, "I really don't mean to discourage your scholarly pursuits, but would you mind, very much, helping me with these broken ribs."
We took inventory. I had some nasty bruises on my throat, but nothing more. Michael had one rib that was definitely broken, and one more that might have been cracked, tender as it was. I got him wrapped up pretty well. Thomas came out of my room, dressed in some of my spare jogging clothes. They hung off of him, and he had to roll the sleeves and legs of the sweatpants up. He slouched into a chair, his gaze settling on Lydia's sleeping form with a rather disconcerting intensity.
"It all fits now," I told them. "I know what's going on, so I can finally do something about it. I'm going to go to the town house, and get everyone out."
Michael frowned at me. "What fits?"
"It wasn't the demon that crossed over, Michael. We were never fighting the demon. It was Kravos himself. Kravos is the Nightmare."
Michael blinked at me. "But we didn't kill Kravos. He's still alive."
"Dollars to donuts he isn't. I figure the night before the Nightmare's attacks started, he puts together a ritual and takes himself out."
"Why would he do that?"
"To come back as a ghost. To get revenge. Think about it---that's all the Nightmare has been doing. It's been rampaging around, avenging Kravos."
"Could he do that?" Michael asked.
I shrugged. "I don't see why he couldn't, if he had raised a bunch of power, and if he was focused on getting his vengeance and turning himself into a ghost. Especially . . ."
". . . with the border to the Nevernever as turbulent as it was," Michael finished.
"Exactly. Which means that Mavra and Bianca helped him out, specifically. Hell, they probably put together the ritual that he used. And if someone in federal custody here in Chicago suddenly turned up suicided in his cell, it would cause a big stir in local police---and would be serious news for the media. Which is why Murphy was being so hush-hush, and Susan was so distracted. She was working on a story, finding out what happened. Following up a rumor, maybe."
Thomas frowned. "Let me get this straight. This Nightmare is the ghost of the sorcerer Kravos. The cult murderer in the news several months ago."
"Yeah. The turbulence in the Nevernever let him get made into a badass ghost."
"Turbulence?" Thomas said.
I nodded. "Someone began binding the local spooks with torment spells. They went wild and started stirring the border between the real world and the Nevernever. I figure it was Mavra, working with Bianca. That same turbulence let Kravos hit everyone he could in their dreams. It's how he got to me, and how he got to poor Malone, and how he got to Lydia just now. Lydia knew what he was doing. That's why she never wanted to go to sleep. I didn't see it coming, when he hit me in my dreams. I wasn't ready for a fight, and he kicked my ass."
"But now you can defeat him?" Michael asked.
"I'm ready for him now. I beat this punk when he was alive. Now that I know what I'm dealing with, I can do it to his shade, too. I'll go to the house, take out the Nightmare, Bianca if I have to, and get everyone out."
"Did you get hit on the head when I wasn't looking?" Thomas asked. "Dresden, I told you about the guards. The machine guns. I did mention the machine guns, didn't I?"
I waved a hand. "I'm already past the point where a sane man would be afraid. Guards and machine guns, whatever. Look, Bianca has Susan, plus Justine, and maybe twenty or thirty kids being held captive, or getting set to get turned into fresh vampires. The police's hands are tied on this. Someone has to do something, and I'm the only one in a position to---"
"Get riddled with bullets," Thomas interjected, his tone dry. "My, how very helpful that will be toward attaining our mutual goals."
"Oh ye of little faith," Michael said, from his place in my easychair. He swung his head back toward me. "Go ahead, Harry. What do you have in mind?"
I nodded. "All right. I figure Bianca will have security all over the outside of the house. She'll cover all the approaches to it, any cars that go in are going to get searched, and so on."
"Exactly," Thomas said. "Dresden, I thought maybe we could pool our resources. Work something out with our contacts and spies. Perhaps disguise ourselves as caterers and sneak in." He paused. "Well. You could pass for a caterer, in any case. But if we simply assault her house, we'll all be killed."
"If we walk up where they can see us."
Thomas frowned. "You have something else in mind? I doubt we could veil ourselves with magic. In familiar surroundings, she's going to be difficult to fool with those kinds of glamour."
I lifted an eyebrow at the vampire. "You're right. I had something else in mind."
I came through the rift between the mortal world and the Nevernever last. I bore my staff and rod, and wore my leather duster, my shield bracelet and a copper ring upon my left hand matched by another upon my right.
The Nevernever, near my apartment, looked like . . . my apartment. Only a bit cleaner and brighter. Deep philosophical statement about the spirituality of my little basement? Maybe. Shapes moved in the shadows, scurrying like rats, or gliding over the floor like snakes---spirit-beings that fed on the crumbs of energy that spilled over from my place in the real world.
Michael bore Amoracchius in his hand, its blade glowing with a pearly luminescence. As soon as he had picked up the blade, his face had regained color, and he had moved as though his bandaged ribs no longer pained him. He wore denim and flannel and his steel-toed work boots.
Thomas, dressed in my castoffs and carrying an aluminum baseball bat from my closet, looked about the place, amused, his dark hair still damp and curling wetly over his shoulders.
In a sack made of fishnet, Bob's skull hung from my fist, the orange skull-lights glowing dimly, like candles. "Harry," Bob asked. "Are you sure about this? I mean, I don't really want to get caught in the Nevernever if I can avoid it. A few old misunderstandings, you see."
"You aren't any more worried about it than I am. If my godmother catches me here, I've had it. Take it easy, Bob," I said. "Just guide us through the shortest path to Bianca's place. Then I tear a hole back over to our side, into her basement, we get everyone and get them out again, and bring them home."
"There is no shortest path, Harry," Bob said. "This is the spirit world. Things are linked together by concepts and ideas and don't necessarily adhere to physical distance like---"
"I know the basics, Bob," I told him. "But the bottom line is that you know your way around here a lot better than I do. Get us there."
Bob sighed. "All right. But I can't guarantee we'll be in and out before sundown. You might not even be able to make a hole through, while the sun's still up. It tends to diffuse magical energies that---"
"Bob. Save the lecture for later. Leave the wizarding to me."
The skull swung around to Michael and Thomas. "Excuse me. Have either of you told Harry what a brainless plan this is?"
Thomas raised his hand. "I did. It didn't do much good."
Bob rolled his eyelights. "It never does. So help me, Dresden, if you die I'm going to be very annoyed. You'll probably roll me under a rock at the last minute, and I'll be stuck there for ten thousand years until someone finds me."
"Don't tempt me. Less talk, more guide."
"Sí, memsahib," Bob said, seriously. Thomas snickered. Bob turned his eyelights toward the stairs leading out of the Nevernever version of my apartment. "That way," he said.
We passed out of the apartment, and into a sort of vague representation of Chicago, which looked like a stage set---flat building faces with no real substance to them, vague light that could have come from sun or moon or streetlights, plus a haze of grey-brown fog. From there, Bob guided us down a sidewalk, then turned into an alley, and opened a garage door, which led to a stone-carved staircase, winding down into the earth.
We followed his lead, into the darkness. At times, the only light we had was the orange glow of the skull's eyelights. Bob turned his head in the direction required, and we passed through a subterranean region that was mostly blackness and low ceilings, eventually rising up a slope that emerged in the center of a ring of standing dolmens atop a long hill. Stars shone overhead in a fierce blaze, and lights danced in the woods at the base of the hill, skittering around like manic fireflies.
I stiffened in my boots. "Bob," I said. "Bob. You blew it, man. This is Faerie."
"Of course it is," Bob said. "It's the biggest place in the Nevernever. You can't get to anywhere without crossing through Faerie at one place or another."
"Well hurry up and cross us out," I said. "We can't stay here."
"Believe me, I don't want to hang here, either. Either we get the Disney version of Faerie, with elves and tinkerbell pixies and who knows what sugary cuteness, or we get the wicked witch version, which is considerably more entertaining, but less healthy."
"Even the Summer Court isn't all sweetness and light. Bob, shut up. Which way?"
The skull turned mutely toward what seemed to be the western-most side of the hill, and we descended down it.
"It's like a park," Thomas commented. "I mean, the grass should be over our knees. Or no, maybe like a good golf course."
"Harry," Michael said, quietly. "I'm getting a bad feeling."
The skin on my neck started to crawl, and I looked back to Michael, nodding. "Bob, which way out?"
Bob nodded ahead, as we rounded a stand of trees. An old, colonial-style covered bridge arched up over a ridiculously deep chasm. "There," Bob said. "That's the border. Where you're wanting isn't too far past that."
In the distance, came the notes of a hunting horn, dark and clear---and the baying of hounds.
"Run for the bridge," I snapped. Thomas sprinted beside me without apparent effort. I glanced at Michael, who had reversed his grip on the sword and held it pommel-first, the blade lying against his forearm as he ran. His face was twisted up in effort and pain, but he kept pace.
"Harry," Bob commented. "If it's all the same, you might want to run a bit faster. There's a hunt coming."
The horn belled again, backed up by the dolmens, and the cries of the pack rang out sharp and clear. Thomas whirled to look, running a few paces backward, before turning again. "I could have sworn they were miles away a moment ago."
"It's the Nevernever," I panted. "Distance, time. It's all fucked up here."
"Wow," Bob commented. "I hadn't realized that they grew hellhounds that big. And look, Harry, it's your godmother! Hi, Lea!"
If Bob had a body, he'd have been jumping up and down and waving his fingers at her. "Don't be so enthusiastic, Bob. If she catches me, I get to join the pack."
Bob's eyelights swung toward me and he gulped. "Oh," he said. "There's been a falling out, then. Or a falling further out, at any rate, since you weren't on such great terms to begin with."
"Something like that," I panted.
"Um. Run," Bob said. "Run faster. You really need to run faster, Harry."
My feet flew over the grass.
Thomas reached the bridge first, his feet thumping out onto it. Michael got there a pace later. With a broken rib and twenty years on me, he still outran me to that damn bridge. I've got to work out more.
"Made it!" I shouted, taking a last long step toward the bridge.
The lariat hit me about the throat before my feet had quite touched down, and jerked me back through the air with a snap. I lay on the ground, stunned, choking for the second time in two hours.
"Uh-oh," Bob said. "Harry. Whatever you do, don't drop me. Especially under a rock."
"Thanks a lot," I gasped, reaching up to jerk the rope from its constricting hold on my throat.
Heavy hooves sank into the turf on either side of my head. I gulped, and looked up at a night-black steed with black and silver tack. Its hooves were shod with bladed shoes of some silvery metal. It wasn't iron or steel. There was blood on those shoes, as though the horse had trampled some poor, trapped thing to death. Or else sliced it apart.
My gaze slid on up past the horse, to its rider. Lea rode the beast sidesaddle, perfectly relaxed and confident, wearing a dress of sable and midnight blue, her hair caught back in a loose braid of flame. Her eyes gleamed in the starlight, the other end of the lariat held in one lovely hand. The hellhounds crowded around her steed, all of them focused on yours truly. Call it a wild impression of the moment, but they looked hungry.
"Feeling better, are we?" Lea asked, with a slow smile. "That's wonderful. We can finally conclude our bargain."
Chapter Thirty-three
It only takes a couple of these rough little episodes of life to teach a man a certain amount of cynicism. Once a rogue wizard or three has tried to end your life, or some berserk hexenwolves have worked really hard to have your throat torn out, you start to expect the worst. In fact, if the worst doesn't happen, you find yourself somewhat disappointed.
So really, it was just as well that Godmother had caught up to me, in spite of my best efforts to avoid her. I'd hate to find out that the universe really wasn't conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.
Therefore, working on the assumption that some sadistic higher power would make sure my evening got as complicated as it possibly could, I had formed a plan.
I jerked the lariat from about my throat and croaked, "Thomas, Michael. Now."
The pair of them produced small cardboard boxes from their pockets, palm-sized and almost square. With a shake, Michael cast the contents of the first box forward, slewing the box left and right, like a man scattering seeds. Thomas followed his lead, on the other side of my body, so that objects began to rain down atop and nearby me.
The faerie hounds let out startled yelps and leapt away. My godmother's horse let out a scream and pranced back several steps, putting distance between us.
I scrunched up my face and did my best to shield my eyes from the scattering nails. They fell over me in a sharp-toothed shower, prickling as they struck, and settled around me. Godmother had to let out on the rope that had looped about my throat as her horse backed away, giving me a bit of slack.
"Iron," hissed my godmother. Her lovely face turned livid, furious. "You dare defile the Awnsidhe soil with iron! The Queen will rip your eyes from your skull!"
"No," Thomas said. "They're aluminum. No iron content. That's a lovely horse you have. What's its name?"
Lea's eyes flashed to Thomas, and then at the nails all over the ground. While she did, I dipped a hand into my pocket, palmed my contingency plan, and popped it into my mouth. Two or three chews and a swallow and I was finished.
I tried not to let the abrupt surge of terror show.
"Not steel?" Lea said. She beckoned sharply at the ground, and one of the nails leapt up to her hand. She gripped it, frowning, her expression abruptly wary. "What is the meaning of this?"
"It's meant to be a distraction, Godmother," I said. I coughed, and patted my chest. "I just had to eat something."
Lea laid a hand on her horse's neck, and the savage beast calmed. One of the shadowy hounds nosed forward, nudging one of the nails with its snout. Lea gave the rope a little jerk, taking up the slack again, and said, "It will do you no good, wizard. You cannot escape this rope. It is bound to hold you. You cannot escape my power. Not here, not in Faerie. I am too strong for you."
"All true," I agreed, and got to my feet. "So let's get cracking. Turn me into a doggie and show me which trees I can pee on."
Lea stared at me as though I'd gone mad, her expression wary.
I took hold of the rope and shook it impatiently. "Come on, Godmother. Make with the magic already. Do I get to pick my color? I don't think I want to be that charcoal grey. Maybe you could do a nice sandy pelt for me. Or oh, I know, winter white. With blue eyes, I always wanted blue eyes, and---"
"Be silent!" Lea snarled, and shook the rope. There was a sharp, stinging sensation, and my tongue literally stuck to the roof of my mouth. I tried to keep talking, but it made my throat buzz as though bees were in it, angry, stinging. I kept silent.
"Well," Thomas said. "I'd like to see this. I've never seen an external transformation before. Do proceed, madame." He waved his hand impatiently. "Dog him, already!"
"This is a trick," Lea hissed. "It will avail you naught, wizard. No matter what hidden powers your friends are preparing to cast at me---"
"We're not," Michael put in. "I swear it on the Blood of Christ."
Lea sucked in a breath, as though the words had brought a sudden chill over her. She rode the horse up to me, close, so that the animal's shoulder pressed against mine. She reeled in on the braided leather of the lariat as she did, until she held it by a length of no more than six inches, jerking hard against my throat, hauling me almost off balance. She leaned down close to me and whispered, "Tell me, wizard. What are you hiding from me?"
My tongue loosened again, and I cleared my throat. "Oh. Nothing much. I just wanted a bite to eat before we left."
"A bite," Lea murmured. Then she jerked me over toward her and leaned down close, dainty nostrils flaring. She inhaled, slow, the silken mass of her hair brushing against my cheek, her mouth almost nuzzling mine.
I watched her face, her expression changing to slow surprise. I spoke to her in a quiet voice. "You recognize the smell, yes?"
The whites showed around her emerald eyes as they opened wider. "Destroying Angel," she whispered. "You have taken death, Harry Dresden."
"Yep," I agreed. "Toadstool. Amanita virosa. Whatever. The amantin toxin is going to show up in my blood in about two minutes. After that, it will start tearing apart my kidneys and liver. A few hours from now, I'll collapse, and if I don't die then, then I'll apparently recover for a few days while my innards fall apart, and then drop into arrest and die." I smiled. "There's no specific antidote for it. And I kind of doubt even you could use magic to put me back together again. Stitching closed a wound is a lot different from major internal transmutation. So, shall we?" I started walking in the direction Lea had come from. "You should be able to enjoy tormenting me for a few hours before I start vomiting blood and die."
She jerked the lariat tight, halting me. "This is a trick," she hissed. "You are lying to me."
I looked up at her with a lopsided grin. "Now, Godmother," I said. "You know I'm a terrible liar. Do you think I could really lie to you? Do you not smell it yourself?"
She stared at me, her face twisting slowly into an expression of horror. "Merciless winds," she breathed. "You have gone mad."
"Not mad," I assured her. "I know precisely what I'm doing." I turned to glance back at the bridge. "Goodbye, Michael. Goodbye, Thomas."
"Harry," Michael said. "Are you sure we shouldn't---"
"Shhh," I said, shooting him a look. "Ixnay."
Lea's eyes flickered back and forth between us. "What?" she demanded. "What is it?"
I rolled my eyes, and gestured at Michael.
"Well," Michael said. "As it happens, I have something here that might help."
"Something?" Lea demanded. "What?"
Michael reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a small vial, capped at one end. "It's extract of St. Mary's Thistle," he said. "They use it in a lot of hospitals in Europe, for mushroom poisoning. Theoretically, it should do quite a bit to help a poisoning victim survive. Provided it's taken in time, of course."
Lea's eyes narrowed. "Give it to me. Now."
I tsked. "Godmother. As your faithful pet and companion, I feel I should warn you about how dangerous it is for one of the high sidhe to accept gifts. It could bind you to the giver if you don't return a gift in kind."
Lea's face slowly flushed scarlet, sweeping up from the creamy skin of her collarbones and throat over her chin and cheeks and up into her hair. "So," she said. "You would drive a bargain with me. You would take deadly toadstool to force me to release you."
I lifted my eyebrows and nodded, with a smile. "Essentially, yes. You see, I figure it's like this. You want me alive. I'm not of any use to you dead. And you won't be able to undo the poisoning with magic."
"I own you," she snarled. "You are mine now."
"Beg to differ," I said. "I'm yours for the next couple of days. After that, I'm dead, and I won't be doing you any more good."
"No," she said. "I will not set you free in exchange for this potion. I too can find the thistle."
"Maybe," I admitted. "Maybe you can even do it in time. Maybe not. Either way, without a trip to the hospital, there's not much chance of me living, even with the extract. And none at all, really, if I don't get it soon."
"I will not trade you away! You have given yourself to me!"
Michael shrugged one shoulder. "I believe that you wrought a bargain with a foolish young man caught in the heat of the moment. But we aren't asking you to undo it altogether."
Lea frowned. "No?"
"Naturally not," Thomas said. "The extract only offers Harry a chance at life. That's all we'd ask from you. You'd be obliged to let him go---and bound for a year and a day to do no harm to him or his freedom so long as he remains in the mortal world."
"That's the deal," I said. "As a faithful pet, I should point something out: If I die, you never get me, Godmother. If you let me go now, you can always give it a shot another night. It isn't as though you have a limited number of them, is it. You can afford to be patient."
Lea fell silent, staring at me. The night fell silent as well. We all waited, saying nothing. The quiet panic I already felt, after eating the toadstool, danced about my belly, making it twitch and jerk.
"Why?" she said, finally, her voice very quiet, pitched only for me. "Why would you do this to yourself, Harry? I don't understand."
"I didn't think you would," I said. "There are people who need me. People who are in danger because of me. I have to help them."
"You cannot help them if you are dead."
"Nor if I am taken by you."
"You would give your own life in place of theirs?" she asked, her tone incredulous.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because no one else can do this. They need me. I owe it to them."
"Owe them your life," Lea mused. "You are mad, Harry Dresden. Perhaps it comes of your mother."
I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Lea shrugged. "She spoke as you do. Near the end." She lifted her eyes to Michael and straightened on the horse. "A dangerous play, you made tonight, wizard. A bold play. You cut the traditions of my people very close to the bone. I accept your bargain."
And then, with a casual flick, she removed the lariat from me. I stumbled back, away from her, gathered up my fallen staff and rod, and Bob in his net sack, and made my way to the bridge. Once there, Michael gave me the vial. I unstoppered it and drank. The liquid within tasted gritty, a little bitter. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, after swallowing it down.
"Harry," Michael said, watching Lea. "Are you sure you'll be all right?"
"If I get to the hospital soon," I said. "I've got somewhere between six and eighteen hours. Maybe a little longer. I drank all that pink stuff before we left to line my stomach. It might slow down the rate of digestion on the mushroom, give the extract a chance to beat it to my guts."
"I don't like this," Michael muttered.
"Hey. I'm the one who ate the deadly poison, man. I don't much care for it myself."
Thomas blinked at me. "You mean, you were telling her the truth?"
I glanced at him, nodding. "Yeah. Look, I figure we'll be in there and out again in an hour, tops. Or else we'll be dead. Either way, it will happen in plenty of time before the first round of symptoms sets in."
Thomas just stared at me for a moment. "I thought you were lying," he said. "Bluffing."
"I don't bluff if I can help it. I'm not too good at it."
"So you really could die. Your godmother is right, you know. You are mad as a hatter. Nutty as a fruitcake."
"Crazy like a fox," I said. "All right. Bob, wake up." I shook the skull, and its empty eye sockets kindled with orange-red lights, somehow too far back inside them.
"Harry?" Bob said, surprised. "You're alive."
"For a while," I said. I explained to him how we'd gotten me away from my godmother.
"Wow," Bob said. "You're dying. What a great plan."
I grimaced. "The hospital should be able to take care of it."
"Sure, sure. In some places, the survival rate is as high as fifty percent, in the case of amantin poisoning."
"I took extract of milk thistle," I said, a little defensive.
Bob coughed, delicately. "I hope you got the dosage right, or it could do more harm than good. Now, if you'd come to me about this to begin with---"
"Harry," Michael said, sharply. "Look."
I turned to look at my godmother, who had ridden a little way off and sat still upon her dark steed. She raised in her hand something dark and gleaming, maybe a knife. She waved it to the four corners, north, west, south, east. She said something in a twisting, slippery tongue, and the trees began to moan as the wind rose, washing through them. Power washed out from the sidhe sorceress, from the dark knife in her hand, and raised the hairs on my arms, the nape of my neck.
"Wizard!" she called to me. "You have made bargain with me tonight. I will not seek you. But you have made no such bargain with others." She threw back her head in a long, loud cry, somehow terrifying and beautiful at once. It echoed over the rolling land, and then was answered. More sounds came drifting back, high-pitched howls, whistling shrieks, and deep, throaty coughing roars.
"Many there are who owe me," Lea sneered. "I will not be cheated of you. You have had the potion. You would not have placed your life in such jeopardy without a cure to hand. I will raise no hand against you---but they will bring you to me. One way or another, Harry Dresden, you will be mine this night."
The wind continued to rise, and overhead sudden clouds began to blot out the stars. The howls and calls came closer, carried on the rising wind.
"Shit," I said. "Bob, we have to get out of here. Now."
"It's still a pretty good walk to the spot you showed me on the map," Bob said. "A mile, maybe two, in subjective terms."
"Two miles," Michael noted, clinically. "I can't run that far. Not with my ribs like they are."
"And I can't carry you," Thomas said. "I'm amazing and studly, but I have limits. Let's go, Harry. It's just me and you."
My mind raced, and I struggled to put together a plan. Michael couldn't keep up. He had managed the sprint before, but his face looked a little greyish, now, and he carried himself stiffly, as though in pain. I trusted Michael. I trusted him at my side, and at my back. I trusted him to be able to take care of himself.
But alone, against a wrathful faerie posse, how would he do? I couldn't be sure---even with the sword, he was still a man. He could still lose his life. And I didn't want another life on my conscience.
I glanced over at Thomas. The handsome vampire managed to wear my castoff clothes and make them look like some kind of fashion statement. Slouch nouveau. He returned my glance with a perfect, shining smile, and I thought about what he had said, about what a good liar he was. Thomas had sided with me. Mostly. He'd been friendly enough. He even, apparently, had every reason to want to help me and work with me to get Justine back.
Unless he was lying to me. Unless she hadn't been taken at all.
I couldn't trust him.
"The two of you are staying here," I said. "Hold the bridge. You won't have to do it for long. Just slow them down. Make them go around."
"Oooo," Bob said. "Good plan. That should make it a real pain for them, Harry. I mean, until they kill Michael and Thomas and come after you. But that could take minutes! Hours, even!"
I glanced at the skull, and then at Michael. He shot Thomas a look, and then nodded to me.
"If there's trouble, you'll need me to protect you," Thomas objected.
"I can watch out for myself," I told him. "Look, this whole plan is based on surprise and speed and quiet. I can be quiet better alone. If it turns out that fighting has to be done, one or two people wouldn't make a difference. If we have to fight, this whole thing is over."
Thomas grimaced. "So you want us to stay here and die for you, is that it?"
I glared. "Hold the bridge until I can make it out of the Nevernever. After that, they shouldn't have any reason to come after you."
The wind rose to a howl, and shapes began to crest the top of the hill with the dolmens, dark things, moving swift and close to the ground.
"Harry, go," Michael said. He took Amoracchius into his hands. "Don't worry. We'll keep them off of your back."
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I come with you?" Thomas asked, and took a step toward me. The shining steel of Michael's sword abruptly dropped in front of Thomas, the sharp edge of it pressing against his belly.
"I'm sure I'd rather not leave him alone with you, vampire," Michael said, his tone polite. "Do I make myself clear?"
"As water," Thomas said, sourly. He glanced at me and said, "You'd better not leave her there, Dresden. Or get killed."
"I won't," I said. "Especially that second part."
And then the first monstrous thing, like a mountain lion made all of shadows, bounded past Lea, and a set of dark talons flashed toward me. Thomas shoved me out of the way of the strike, crying out as the thing tore into his arm. Michael shouted in Latin, and his sword flared into argent light, cutting the vaguely catlike beast and dropping it into two squirming, struggling halves to the floor of the bridge.
"Go!" Michael roared. "God go with you!"
I ran.
The sounds of fighting died behind me, until I could only hear my own laboring breaths. The Nevernever changed, from sculpted, faerie-tale wilderness to dark, close forest, with cobwebs hanging down across a narrow trail through glowering trees. Eyes flashed in the shadows, things that never quite could be clearly seen, and I stumbled on.
"There!" Bob called. His orange eyelights swung to shine upon the split trunk of a dead, hollow tree. "Open a way there, and it will take us through!"
I grunted, and came to a halt, gasping. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, yes!" Bob said. "Hurry! Some of the Awnsidhe will be here at any moment!"
I cast a fearful glance behind me, and then started gathering in my will. It hurt to do. I felt so weak. The poison in my belly hadn't started tearing my body apart yet, but I almost thought that I could feel it stirring, moving, licking its chops and eyeing my organs with malevolent glee. I shoved all of that out of my thoughts, and forced myself to breathe steadily, to gather in my strength and reach out to part the curtain between worlds.
"Uh, Harry," Bob said suddenly. "Wait a minute."
Behind me, something broke a branch. There was a swift, rushing sound, of something moving toward me. I ignored it and reached out a hand, sinking my fingers into the friable border substance of the Nevernever.
"Harry!" Bob said. "I really think you should hear this!"
"Not now," I muttered.
The rushing noise grew closer, the rattle of undergrowth shunted aside by something large. Behind me, a warbling bellow shook the ground. Holy brillig and slithy toves, Batman.
"Aparturum!" I shouted, thrusting out with my will and opening a way. The rent in reality shone with dim light.
I threw myself forward into it, willing the way closed behind me. Something snagged at one corner of my leather duster, but with a jerk I was free of it and through.
I tumbled forward, onto the floor, the smell of autumn air and damp stone all around me. My heart thudded painfully with the effort of both the running and the spell. I lifted my head to look around me and get my bearings.
Bob had been good to his word. He had brought me out of the Nevernever right into Bianca's mansion. I found myself on the floor at the head of a staircase down, away from the front doors and the main hall.
I also found myself surrounded by a ring of vampires, all of them in their inhuman forms, the flesh masks gone. There had to be a dozen of them there, dark eyes glittering, their noses snuffling, drool spattering out and dripping from their bared fangs to the floor while their talons clawed at the air or ran lightly over their flabby black bodies. Some of them showed burns on their rubbery hide, patches of shrunken, wrinkled, scar-like tissue.
I didn't move. Anything, I sensed, would have set them off. Any motion, any move to flee or fight or escape would have ignited a frenzy, with myself on the receiving end.
While I watched, frozen, Bianca came up the stairs dressed in a white silk nightgown that whispered around her shapely calves. She carried a single candle that bathed her in soft radiance. She smiled at me, very slowly, very sweetly, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
"Well," she purred. "Harry Dresden. Such a pleasant surprise to have you visit."
"I tried to tell you," Bob said, his voice miserable. "The curtain felt weak there. Like someone had just gone through it. Like they had been watching this side."
"Of course," Bianca murmured. "A guard for every door. Did you think me a fool, Mister Dresden?"
I glowered at her, despairing. There wasn't anything I could say. I saved my breath, and began to draw in my will, to throw everything I had left into taking that smug smile off of her pretty, false face.
"Dears," Bianca purred, watching me. "Bring him down."
They hit me so fast that I never saw them move. There simply came a hideous, rushing force. I have memories of being passed from claw to claw, thrown, carried into the air, toyed with. Snuffling, squashed snouts, and staring black eyes, and hissing, terrible laughter.
I was driven down, carried, tossed about, everything torn from me, Bob disappearing without a sound. They pressed me down while I struggled and screamed, all useless, my mind too full of terror to focus, to defend myself.
And there, in the dark, they tore my clothes from me. I felt Bianca press her naked flesh to me, a heated, sinuous dream-body that unraveled into a nightmare. I felt the skin split and burst apart around her true form. The sweetness of her perfume gave way to a rotten-fruit reek. Her purring voice became a whining hiss.
And their tongues. Soft, intimate, warm, moist. Pleasure that struck me like hammers while I tried to scream against it. Chemical pleasure, animal sensation, heartless and cold, uncaring of my horror, revulsion, despair.
Darkness. Horrible, thick, sensual darkness.
Then pain.
Then nothing.
Chapter Thirty-four
I have very few memories of my father. I was about six years old when he died. What I do remember is a careworn, slightly stoop-shouldered man with kind eyes and strong hands. He was a magician---not a wizard, a stage magician. A good one. He never made it big, though. He spent too much time performing for children's hospitals and orphanages to pull down much money. He and I and his little show roamed around the country. The memories of the first several years of my life are of my bed in the backseat of the station wagon, going to sleep to the whisper of asphalt beneath the tires, secure in the knowledge that my father was awake, driving the car, and there to take care of me.
The nightmares hadn't started until just before his death. I don't remember them, specifically---but I remember waking up, screaming in a child's high-pitched shriek of terror. I'd scream in the darkness, scrambling to squeeze into the smallest space I could find. My father would come looking for me, and find me, and pull me into his lap. He would hold me, and make me warm, and soon I would fall asleep again, safe, secure.
"The monsters can't get you here, Harry," he used to say. "They can't get you."
He'd been right.
Until now. Until tonight.
The monsters got me.
I don't know where real life left off and the nightmares began, but I thrashed myself awake, screaming a scratchy, hollow scream that made little more noise than a whimper. I screamed until I ran out of breath, and then all I could do was sob.
I lay there, naked, undone. No one came to hold me. No one came to make it all better. No one had, really, since my dad died.
Breathing first, then. I forced myself to control it, to stop the racking sobs and to draw in slow, steady breaths. Next came the terror. The pain. Humiliation. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. I wanted to be not.
But I wasn't not. I hurt too much. I was very painfully, very acutely, very much alive.
The burn still hurt the most, but the sweeping nausea running through me came in a photo finish second. My hands told me that I was lying upon a floor, but the rest of me thought I had been strapped into a giant gyroscope. I ached. My throat felt tight, and burned, as though seared by some hot liquid or chemical. I didn't want to dwell too long on that.
I tested my limbs, and found them all present and functional. My belly twisted and roiled, and for a moment locked up tight, jerking me into a tight curl around it.
The sweat on my naked body went cold. The mushroom. The poison. Six to eighteen hours. Maybe a little more.
I felt thick, dry mouthed, fuzzy with the same aftereffects of the vampire venom that I'd felt before.
For a minute, I stopped fighting. I just lay there, weak and thirsty and hurting and sick, curled up into a ball. I would have started crying again if I'd had that much feeling left in me. I would have wept and waited to die.
Instead, some merciless, steady voice in my head drove me to open my eyes. I hesitated, afraid. I didn't want to open my eyes and see nothing. I didn't want to find myself in that same darkness. That darkness, with hissing things all around me. Maybe there, still, just waiting for me to awaken so that they---
Panic swept me for a moment, and gave me enough strength to shiver and push myself up into a sitting position. I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.
I could see. Light seared at my eyes, a thin line of it surrounding a tall rectangle---a doorway. I had to squint for a moment, so used were my eyes to the darkness.
I looked around the room, wary. It wasn't big. Maybe twelve by twelve, or a little more. I lay in a corner. The smell was violently rotten. My jailors, apparently, had no problems with letting me lie in my own filth. Some of it had crusted onto me, onto my legs and arms. Vomit, I guessed. There was blood in it. An early symptom of the mushroom poisoning.
There were other shapes in the dimness. A lump of cloth in one corner, like a pile of dirty laundry. Several laundry baskets, as well. A washer and dryer, on the far wall from the door.
And Justine, dressed in as little as I, curled up and sitting with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped loosely around her drawn-up knees, watching me with dark, feverish eyes.
"You're awake," Justine said. "I didn't think you'd ever wake up."
Gone was the glamorous girl I'd seen at the ball. Her hair hung lank and greasy. Her pale body looked lean, almost gaunt, and her limbs, what I could see of them, were stained and dirty, as was her face.
Her eyes disturbed me. There was something feral in them, something unsettling. I didn't look at her for too long. Even as bad off as I was, I had enough presence of mind to not want to look into her eyes.
"I'm not crazy," she said, her voice sharp, edged. "I know what you're thinking."
I had to cough before I could talk, and it made pains shoot through my belly again. "That wasn't what I was thinking."
"Of course it wasn't," the girl snarled. She rose, all lean grace and tension, and stalked toward me. "I know what you were thinking. That they'd shut you in here with that stupid little whore."
"No," I said. "I . . . that isn't what---"
She hissed like a cat, and raked her nails across my face, scoring my cheek in three lines of fire. I cried out and fell back, the wall interrupting my retreat.
"I can always tell, when I'm like this," Justine said. She gave me an abruptly careless look, turned on the balls of her feet and walked several feet away before stretching and dropping to all fours, watching me with an absent, disinterested gaze.
I stared at her for a moment, feeling the heat of the blood welling in the scratches. I touched a finger to them, and it came away sprinkled with scarlet. I lifted my gaze to the girl and shook my head. "I'm sorry," I said. "God. What did they do to you?"
"This," she said, carelessly, thrusting out one hand. Round, bruised punctures marked her wrist. "And this." She held out the other wrist, showing another set of marks. "And this." She stretched out her thigh to one side of her body, parallel to the floor, to show more marks, along it. "They all wanted a little taste. So they got it."
"I don't understand," I said.
She smiled with too many teeth, and it made me uneasy. "They didn't do anything. I'm like this. This is the way I always am."
"Um," I said. "You weren't that way last night."
"Last night," she snapped. "Two nights ago. At least. That was because he was there."
"Thomas?"
Her lower lip abruptly trembled, and she looked as though she might cry. "Yes. Yes, Thomas. He makes it quieter. Inside me, there's so much trying to get out, like at the hospital. Control, they said. I don't have the kind of control other people have. It's hormones, but the drugs only made me sick. He doesn't, though. Only a little tired."
"But---"
Her face darkened again. "Shut up," she snapped. "But, but, but. Idiot, asking idiot questions. Fool who did not want me when I was willing to give. Nothing does that. None of them, because they all want to take, take, take."
I nodded, and didn't say anything, as she became more agitated. It might have been politically incorrect of me, but the word LOONY all but appeared in a giant neon sign over Justine's head. "Okay," I said. "Just . . . let's just take it easy, all right?"
She glowered at me, falling silent. Then she slunk back to the space between the wall and the washing machine and sank into it. She started playing with her hair, and took no apparent notice of me.
I got up. It was hard. Everything spun around. On the floor, I found a dusty towel. I used it to sweep some of the grime off of my skin.
I went to the door and tried it. It stood firmly locked. I tested my weight against it, but the effort made a sudden fire of scarlet flash through my belly and I dropped to the floor, convulsing again. I threw up in the middle of it, and tasted blood on my mouth.
I lay exhausted for a while after that, and might have dropped off to sleep again. I looked up to find Justine holding the towel, and pushing it fitfully at my skin, the fresh mess.
"How long," I managed to ask her. "How long have I been here?"
She shrugged, without looking up. "They had you for a while. Just outside this door. I heard them taking you. Playing with you, for two hours, maybe. And then they put you in here. I slept. I woke. Maybe another ten hours. Or less. Or more. I don't know."
I kept an arm wrapped around my belly, grimacing, and nodded. "All right," I said. "We have to get out of here."
She brayed out a sharp laugh. "There is no out of here. This is the larder. The Christmas turkey doesn't get up and walk away."
I shook my head. "I . . . I was poisoned. If I don't get to a hospital, I'm going to die."
She smiled again, and played with her hair, dropping the towel. "Almost everyone dies in a hospital. You'd get to be someplace different. Isn't that better?"
"It's one of those things I could live without," I said.
Justine's expression went slack, her eyes distant, and she became still.
I stared at her, waved my hand in front of her eyes. Snapped my fingers. She didn't respond.
I sighed and stood up, then tested the door again. It was firmly bolted shut from the other side. I couldn't move it.
"Super." I sighed. "That's great. I'm never going to get out of here."
Behind me, something whispered. I spun, putting the door at my back, searching for the source of the sound.
A low mist crept out of the wall, a smoky, slithery mass that whirled itself down onto the floor like ethereal lace. The mist touched lightly at my blood on the floor where I'd thrown up, and then began to swirl and shape itself into something vaguely human.
"Great," I muttered. "More ghosts. If I get out of this alive, I've got to get a new job."
The ghost took shape before me, very slowly, very translucently. It resolved itself into the form of a young woman, attractive, dressed like an efficient secretary. Her hair was pulled up into a bun, but for a few appealing tendrils that fell down to frame her cheeks. Her ghostly wrist was crusted with congealed blood, spread around a pair of fang-punctures. Abruptly, I recognized her, the girl Bianca had fed upon until she died.
"Rachel," I whispered. "Rachel, is that you?"
As I spoke her name, she turned to me, her eyes slowly focusing on me, as though beholding me through a misty veil. Her expression turned, no pun intended, grave. She nodded to me in recognition.
"Hell's bells," I whispered. "No wonder Bianca got stuck on a vengeance kick. She literally was haunted by your death."
The spirit's face twisted in distress. She said something, but I could hear it only as a distant, muffled sound accompanying the movement of her lips.
"I can't understand you," I said. "Rachel, I can't hear you."
She almost wept, it seemed. She pressed her hand to her ghostly breast, and grimaced at me.
"You're hurt?" I guessed. "You hurt?"
She shook her head. Then touched her temple and drew her fingers slowly down over her eyes, closing them. "Ah," I said. "You're tired."
She nodded. She made a supplicating motion, holding out her hands as though asking for help.
"I don't know what I can do for you. I don't know if I can help you rest or not."
She shook her head again. Then she nodded, toward the door, and made a bottle-shaped curving gesture of her hands.
"Bianca?" I asked. When she nodded, I went on. "You think Bianca can lay you to rest." She shook her head. "She's keeping you here?"
Rachel nodded, her ghostly, pretty face agonized.
"Makes sense," I muttered. "Bianca fixates on you as you die tragically. Binds your ghost here. The ghost appears to her and drives her into a vengeance, and she blames it all on me."
Rachel's ghost nodded.
"I didn't kill you," I said. "You know that."
She nodded again.
"But I'm sorry. I'm sorry that me being in the wrong place at the wrong time set you up to die."
She gave me a gentle smile---which transformed into a sudden expression of horror. She looked past me, at Justine, and then her image began to fade, to withdraw into the wall.
"Hey!" I said. "Hey, wait a minute!"
The mist vanished, and Justine started to move. She rose, casually, and stretched. Then glanced down at herself and ran her hands appreciatively down over her breasts, her stomach. "Very nice," she said, voice subtly altered, different. "Rather like Lydia, in a lot of ways, isn't she, Mister Dresden."
I tensed up. "Kravos," I whispered.
Justine's eyes flooded with blood through the whites. "Oh yes," she said. "Yes indeed."
"Man, you need to get a life in the worst way. That was you, wasn't it. The telephone call the night Agatha Hagglethorn went nuts."
"My last call," Kravos said through Justine's lips, nodding. "I wanted to savor what was about to happen. Like now. Bianca has ordered that you should receive no visitors, but I just couldn't resist the chance to take a look at you."
"You want to look at me?" I asked. I tapped my head. "Come on in. There's a few things in here I'd like to show you."
Justine smiled, and shook her head. "It would be too much effort for too little return. Even without the shelter of a threshold, possessing even a mind so weak as this child's requires a considerable amount of effort. Effort," she added, "which was made possible by a grant from the Harry Dresden Soul Foundation."
I bared my teeth. "Leave the girl alone."
"Oh, but she's fine," Kravos said, through Justine's lips. "She's really happier like this. She can't hurt anyone, you see. Or herself. Her ranting emotions can't compel her to act. That's why the Whites love her so much. They feed on emotion, and this little darling is positively mad with it." Justine's body shivered, and arched sensuously. "It's rather exciting, actually. Madness."
"I wouldn't know," I said. "Look, if we're going to fight, let's fight. Otherwise, blow. I've got things to do."
"I know," Justine said. "You're busy dying of some kind of poisoning. The vampires tried to drink from you, but you made some of them very sick, and so they left you more or less untapped. Highly miffed, Bianca was. She wanted you to die as food for her and her new children."
"What a shame."
"Come now, Dresden. You and I are among the Wise. We both know you wouldn't want to die at the hands of a lesser being."
"I might rank among the wise," I said. "You, Kravos, are nothing but a two-bit troublemaker. You're the stupid thug of wizard land, and that you managed to live as long as you did without killing yourself is some kind of miracle in itself."
Justine snarled and lunged for me. She pinned me to the door with one hand and a casual, supernatural strength that told me she could have pushed her hand through me just as easily. "So self-righteous," she snarled. "Always sure that you're right. That you're in command. That you have all the power and all the answers."
I grimaced. Pain flared through my belly again, and it was suddenly all I could do not to scream.
"Well, Dresden. You're dead. You've been slated to die. You'll be gone in the next few hours. And even if you aren't, if you live through what they have planned, the poison will kill you slowly. And before you go you'll sleep. Bianca won't stop me, this time. You'll sleep and I'll be there. I'll come into your dreams and I will make your last moments on earth a nightmare that lasts for years." She leaned up close, standing on tiptoe, and spat into my face. Then the blood rushed from Justine's eyes and her head fell loosely forward, as though she'd been a horse struggling against the reins, to find their pressure gone. Justine let out a whimper, and sank against me.
I did my best to hold her. We sort of wound up on the floor together, neither one of us in much shape to move. Justine wept. She cried piteously, like a small child, mostly quiet.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I want to help. But there's too much in the way. I can't think---"
"Shhhhh," I said. I tried to stroke her hair, to soothe her before she could become agitated again. "It's going to be all right."
"We'll die," she whispered. "I'll never see him again."
She wept for some time, as the nausea and pain in my belly grew. The light outside the door never wavered. It didn't know if it was dark or light outside. Or if Thomas and Michael were still alive to come after me. If they were gone, and it was my fault, I'd never be able to live with myself in any case.
I decided that it must be night. It must be fullest, darkest night. No other time of day could possibly suit my predicament.
I rested my head on Justine's, after she fell quiet, and relaxed, as though she were falling asleep after her weeping. I closed my eyes and struggled to come up with a plan. But I didn't have anything. Nothing. It was all but over.
Something stirred, in the shadows where the laundry was piled.
Both of us looked up. I started to push Justine away, but she said, "Don't. Don't go over there."
"Why not?" I asked.
"You won't like it."
I glanced at the girl. And then got up, unsteadily, and made my way over to the piled laundry. I clutched the towel in my hand, for lack of any other weapon.
Someone lay in the piled clothing. Someone in a white shirt, a dark skirt, and a red cloak.
"Stars above," I swore. "Susan."
She groaned, faintly, as though very much asleep or drugged. I hunkered down and moved clothing off of her. "Hell's bells. Susan, don't try to sit up. Don't move. Let me see if you're hurt, okay?"
I ran my hands over her in the dimness. She seemed to be whole, not bleeding, but her skin was blazing with fever.
"I'm dizzy. Thirsty," she said.
"You've got a fever. Can you roll over here toward me?"
"The light. It hurts my eyes."
"It did mine too, when I woke up. It will pass."
"Don't," Justine whispered. She sat on her heels and rocked slowly back and forth. "You won't like it. You won't like it."
I glanced back at Justine as Susan turned toward me, and then looked down at my girlfriend. She looked back up to me, her features exhausted, confused. She blinked her eyes against the light, and lifted a slim, brown hand to shield her face.
I caught her hand halfway, and stared down at her.
Her eyes were black. All black. Black and staring, glittering, darker than pitch, with no white to them at all to distinguish them as human. My heart leapt up into my throat, and things began to spin faster around me.
"You won't like it," Justine intoned. "They changed her. The Red Court changed her. Bianca changed her."
"Dresden?" Susan whispered.
Dear God, I thought. This can't be happening.
"Mister Dresden? I'm so thirsty."
Chapter Thirty-five
Susan let out a whimper and a groan, moving fitfully. By chance, her mouth brushed against my forearm, still stained with drying blood. She froze, completely, her whole body shuddering. She looked up at me with those dark, huge eyes, her face twisting with need. She moved toward my arm again, and I jerked it back from her mouth.
"Susan," I said. "Wait."
"What was that?" she whispered. "That was good." She shivered again and rolled to all fours, eyes slowly focusing on me.
I shot a glance toward Justine, but only saw her feet as she pulled them back to her, slipping back into the tiny space between the washing machine and the wall. I turned back to Susan, who was coming toward me, staring as though blind, on all fours.
I backed away from her, and fumbled out to my side with one hand. I found the bloodstained towel I'd been using before, and threw it at her. She stopped for a moment, staring, and then lowered her face with a groan, beginning to lick at the towel.
I scooted back on all fours, getting away from her, still dizzy. "Justine," I hissed. "What do we do?"
"There's nothing to do," Justine whispered. "We can't get out. She isn't herself. Once she kills, she'll be gone."
I flashed a glance at her over my shoulder. "Once she kills? What do you mean?"
Justine watched me with solemn eyes. "Once she kills. She's different. But she isn't quite like them until it's complete. Until she's killed someone feeding on them. That's the way the Reds work."
"So she's still Susan?"
Justine shrugged again, her expression disinterested. "Sort of."
"If I could talk to her, though. Get through to her. We could maybe snap her out of it?"
"I've never heard of it happening," Justine said. She shivered. "They stay like that. It gets worse and worse. Then they lose control and kill. And it's over."
I bit my lip. "There's got to be something."
"Kill her. She's still weak. Maybe we could, together. If we wait until she's further gone, until the hunger gives her strength, she'll take us both. That's why we're in here."
"No," I said. "I can't hurt her."
Something flickered in Justine's face when I spoke, though I couldn't decide whether it was something warm or something heated, angry. She closed her eyes and said, "Then maybe when she drinks you she'll die of the poison in you."
"Dammit. There's got to be something. Something else you can tell me."
Justine shrugged and shook her head, wearily. "We're already dead, Mister Dresden."
I clenched my teeth together and turned back to Susan. She kept licking at the towel, making frustrated, whimpering noises. She lifted her face to me and stared at me. I could have sworn I saw the bones of her cheeks and jaw stand out more harshly against her skin. Her eyes became drowning deep and pulled at me, beckoned to me to look deeper into that spinning, feverish darkness.
I jerked my eyes away before that gaze could trap me, my heart pounding, but it had already begun to fall away. Susan furrowed her brow in confusion for a moment, blinking her eyes, whatever dark power that had touched them fading, slipping unsteadily.
But even if that gaze hadn't trapped me, hadn't gone all the way over into hypnosis, it made something occur to me: Susan's memories of the soulgaze hadn't been removed. My godmother couldn't have touched those. I was such an idiot. When a mortal looks on something with the Sight, really looks, as a wizard may, the memories of what he sees are indelibly imprinted on him. And when a wizard looks into a person's eyes, it's just another way of using the Sight. A two-way use of it, because the person you look at gets to peer back at you, too.
Susan and I had soulgazed more than two years before. She'd tricked me into it. It was just after that she began pursuing me for stories more closely.
Lea couldn't have taken memories around a soulgaze. But she could have covered them up, somehow, misted them over. No practical difference, for the average person.
But, hell, I'm a wizard. I ain't average.
Susan and I had always been close, since we'd started dating. Intimate time together. The sharing of words, ideas, time, bodies. And that kind of intimacy creates a bond. A bond that I could perhaps use, to uncover fogged memories. To help bring Susan back to herself.
"Susan," I said, forcing my voice out sharp and clear. "Susan Rodriguez."
She shivered as I Named her, at least in part.
I licked my lips and moved towards her. "Susan. I want to help you. All right? I want to help you if I can."
She swallowed another whimper. "But. I'm so thirsty. I can't."
I reached out as I approached her, and plucked a hair from her head. She didn't react to it, though she leaned closer to me, inhaling through her nose, letting out a slow moan on the exhale. She could smell my blood. I wasn't clear on how much of the toxin would be in my bloodstream, but I didn't want her to be hurt. No time to dawdle, Harry.
I took the hair and wound it about my right hand. It went around twice. I closed my fist over it, then grimaced, reaching out to grab Susan's left hand. I spat on my fingers and smoothed them over her palm, then pressed her hand to my fist. The bond, already something tenuously felt in any case, thrummed to life like a bass cello string, amplified by my spit upon her, by the hair in my own hands, the joining of our bodies where our flesh pressed together.
I closed my eyes. It hurt to try to draw in the magic. My weakened body shook. I reached for it, tried to piece together my will. I thought of all the times I'd had with Susan, all the things I'd never had the guts to tell her. I thought of her laugh, her smile, the way her mouth felt on mine, the smell of her shampoo in the shower, the press of her warmth against my back as we slept. I summoned up every memory I had of us together, and started trying to push it through the link between us.
The memories flowed down my arm, to her hand---and stopped, pressing against some misty and elastic barrier. Godmother's spell. I shoved harder at it, but its resistance only grew greater, more intense, the harder I pushed.
Susan whimpered, the sound lost, confused, hungry. She rose up onto her knees and pressed against me, leaning on me. She snuggled her mouth down against the hollow of my throat. I felt her tongue touch my skin, sending an electric jolt of lust flashing through me. Even close to death, hormones will out, I guess.
I kept struggling against Godmother's spell, but it held in place, powerful, subtle. I felt like a child shoving fruitlessly at a heavy glass door.
Susan shivered, and kept licking at my throat.
My skin tingled pleasantly and then started to go numb. Some of my pain faded. Then I felt her teeth against my throat, sharp as she bit at me.
I let out a startled cry. It wasn't a hard bite. She'd bitten me harder than that for fun. But she hadn't had eyes like that then. Her kisses hadn't made my skin go narcotic-numb then. She hadn't been halfway to membership in Club Vampire then.
I pushed harder at the spell, but my best efforts grew weaker and weaker. Susan bit harder, and I felt her body tensing, growing stronger. No longer did she lean against me. I felt one of her hands settle on the back of my neck. It wasn't an affectionate gesture. It was to keep me from moving. She took a deep, shuddering breath.
"In here," she whispered. "It's in here. It's good."
"Susan," I said, keeping the feeble pressure on my godmother's spell. "Susan. Please don't. Don't go. I need you here. You could hurt yourself. Please." I felt her jaws begin to close. Her teeth didn't feel like fangs, but human teeth can rip open skin just fine. She was vanishing. I could feel the link between us fading, growing weaker and weaker.
"I'm so sorry. I never meant to let you down," I said. I sagged against her. There wasn't much reason to keep fighting. But I did anyway. For her, if not for me. I held on to that link, to the pressure I had forced against the spell, to the memories of Susan and me, together.
"I love you."
Why it worked right then, why the webbing of my godmother's spell frayed as though the words had been an open flame, I don't know. I haven't found any explanation for it. There aren't any magical words, really. The words just hold the magic. They give it a shape and a form, they make it useful, describe the images within.
I'll say this, though: Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real.
Those three words are good ones.
I flooded into her, through the link, into the darkness and the confusion that bound her, and I saw, through her thoughts, that my coming was a flame in the endless cold, a beacon flashing out against that night. The light came, our memories, the warmth of us, she and I, and battered down the walls inside her, crushed away Lea's lingering spell, tore those memories away from my godmother, wherever she was, and brought them back home.
I heard her cry out at the sudden flush of memory, as awareness washed over her. She changed, right there against me---the hard, alien tension changed. It didn't vanish, but it changed. It became Susan's tension, Susan's confusion, Susan's pain, aware, alert, and very much herself again.
The power of the spell faded away, leaving only the blurred impression of it, like lightning that crackles through the night, leaving dazzling colors in the darkness behind.
I found myself kneeling against her, holding her hand. She still held my head. Her teeth still pressed against my throat, sharp and hard.
I reached up with my other shaking hand, and stroked at her hair. "Susan," I said, gentle. "Susan. Stay with me."
The pressure lessened. I felt hot tears fall against my shoulder.
"Harry," she whispered. "Oh, God. I'm so thirsty. I want it so much."
I closed my eyes. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."
"I could take you. I could take it," she whispered.
"Yes."
"You couldn't stop me. You're weak, sick."
"I couldn't stop you," I agreed.
"Say it again."
I frowned. "What?"
"Say it again. It helps. Please. It's so hard not to . . ."
I swallowed. "I love you," I said.
She jerked, as though I'd punched her in the pit of the stomach. "I love you," I said again. "Susan."
She lifted her mouth from my skin, and looked up, into my eyes. They were her eyes again---dark, rich, warm brown, bloodshot, filled with tears. "The vampires," she said. "They---"
"I know."
She closed her eyes, more tears falling. "I tr-tried to stop them. I tried."
Pain hit me again, pain that didn't have anything to do with poison or injuries. It hit me sharp and low, just beneath my heart, as though someone had just shoved an icicle through me. "I know you did," I told her. "I know you did."
She fell against me, weeping. I held her.
After a long time, she whispered, "It's still there. It isn't going away."
"I know."
"What am I going to do?"
"We'll work on that," I said. "I promise. We have other problems right now." I filled her in on what had happened, holding her in the dimness.
"Is anyone coming for us?" she asked.
"I . . . I don't think so. Even if Thomas and Michael got away, they couldn't storm this place. If they ever even got out of the Nevernever. Michael could go to Murphy, but she couldn't just smash her way in here without a warrant. And Bianca's contacts could probably stall that for a while."
"We have to get you out of here," she said. "You've got to get to a hospital."
"Works in theory. Now we just have to work out the details."
She licked her lips. "I . . . can you even walk?"
"I don't know. That last spell. If there was much left in me, that spell took it out."
"What if you slept?" she asked.
"Kravos would have his chance to torture me." I paused, and stared at the far wall.
"God," Susan whispered. She hugged me, gently. "I love you, Harry. You should get to hear it t---" She stopped, and looked up at me. "What?"
"That's it," I said. "That's what needs to happen."
"What needs to happen? I don't understand."
The more I thought about it, the crazier it sounded. But it might work. If I could time it just right . . .
I looked down, taking Susan's shoulders in my hands, staring at her eyes. "Can you hold on? Can you keep it together for another few hours?"
She shivered. "I think so. I'll try."
"Good," I said. I took a deep breath. "Because I need to be asleep long enough to start dreaming."
"But Kravos," Susan said. "Kravos will get inside of you. He'll kill you."
"Yeah," I said. I took a slow breath. "I'm pretty much counting on it."
Chapter Thirty-six
My nightmares came quickly, dull cloud of poisonous confusion blurring my senses, distorting my perceptions. For a moment, I was hanging by one wrist over an inferno of fire, smoke, and horrible creatures, the steel of the handcuffs suspending me cutting into my flesh, drawing blood. Smoke smothered me, forced me to cough, and my vision blurred as I started to fade out.
Then I was in a new place. In the dark. Cold stone chilled me where I lay upon it. All around me were the whispers of things moving in the shadows. Scaly rasps. Soft, hungry hisses, together with the gleam of malevolent eyes. My heart pounded in my throat.
"There you are," whispered one of the voices. "I watched them have you, you know."
I sat up, shivering violently. "Yeah, well. That's why they call them monsters. It's what they do."
"They enjoyed it," came the whispering voice. "If only I could have videotaped it for you."
"TV will rot your brain, Kravos," I said.
Something blurred out of the darkness and struck me across the face. The blow drove me back and down. My vision blurred over with scarlet and my perceptions sharpened through a burst of pain, but I didn't drop unconscious. You don't, as a rule, in dreams.
"Jokes," the voice hissed. "Jokes will not save you now."
"Hell's bells, Kravos," I muttered, sitting up again. "Do they produce a Cliched Lines Textbook for Villains or something? Go for broke. Tell me that since you're going to kill me anyway, you might as well reveal your secret plan."
The dark blurred toward me again. I didn't bother trying to defend myself. It drove me to the ground, and sat on my chest.
I stared up at Kravos. Forms and shapes hung about him like misty clothes. I could see the shape of the shadow demon, around him. I could see my own face, drifting among the layers. I saw Justine there, and Lydia. And there, at the center of that distorted, drifting mass, I saw Kravos.
He didn't look much different. He had a thin, pinched face, and brown hair faded with grey. He wore a full, untrimmed beard, but it only made his head seem misshapen. He had wide, leathery shoulders, and symbols painted in blood, ritual things whose meanings I could vaguely piece together, covered his chest. He lifted his hands and delivered two more blows to my face, explosions of pain.
"Where are your gibes now, wizard?" Kravos snarled. "Where are your jokes? Weak, petty, self-righteous fool. We are going to have a very good time together, until Bianca comes to finish you."
"You think so?" I asked. "I'm not sure. It's our first date. Maybe we should take this one step at a time."
Kravos hit me again, across the bridge of my nose, and my vision blurred with tears. "You aren't funny!" he shouted. "You are going to die! You can't treat this as a joke!"
"Why not?" I shot back. "Kravos, I took you out with a piece of chalk and a Ken doll. You're the biggest joke of a spellslinger I've ever seen. Even I didn't expect you to drop like that; maybe the link with that doll worked so well because it was anatomically corr---"
I didn't get the chance to finish the sentence. Kravos screamed and took my dream self by the throat. It felt real. It felt completely as though he had me, his weight pinning my weakened body down, his fingers crushing into my windpipe. My head pounded. I struggled against him, futile and reflexive motions---but to no avail. He kept on choking me, the pressure increasing. Blackness covered my dream vision, and I knew that he would hold it until he was sure I was dead.
People who have near-death experiences often talk about moving toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Or ascending toward the light, or flying or floating, or falling. I didn't get that. I'm not sure what that says about the state of my soul. There was no light, no kindly beckoning voice, no lake of fire to fall into. There was only silence, deep and timeless, where not even the beating of my heart thudded in my ears. I felt an odd pressure against my skin, my face, as though I had pressed into and through a wall of plastic wrap.
I felt a dull thud on top of my chest, and a sudden lessening of the burning in my lungs. Then another thud. More easing on my lungs. Then more blows to my chest.
My heart lurched back into motion with a hesitant thunder, and I felt myself take a wheezing breath. The plastic-wrap sensation tugged at me for a moment, then lifted away.
I shuddered, and struggled to open my eyes again. When I did, Kravos, still holding my throat, blinked his eyes in shock. "No!" he snarled. "You're dead! You're dead!"
"Susan's giving his real body CPR," someone said, behind him. Kravos whipped his head around to look, just in time to catch a stiff cross to the tip of his chin. He cried out in startled fear, and fell off of me.
I sucked in another labored breath and sat up. "Hell's bells," I gasped. "It worked."
Kravos struggled to his feet and backed away, staring, his eyes flying open wide as they looked back and forth between me and my savior.
My savior was me, too. Or rather, something that looked a very great deal like me. It was my shape and coloring, and had bruises and scratches, mixed with a few burns, all over it. Its hair was a wild mess, its eyes sunken over circles of black in a pale, sickly face.
My double peered at me and said, "You know. We really look like hell."
"What's this?" hissed Kravos. "What trick is this?"
I offered myself a hand up, so I took it. It took me a moment to balance, but I said, "Hell, Kravos. As flexible as the boundaries between here and the spirit world have been, I would have expected you to figure it out by now."
Kravos looked at the two of us, and bared his teeth. "Your ghost," he hissed.
"Technically," my ghost said. "Harry actually died for a minute. Don't you remember how ghosts are made? Normally, there wouldn't be enough latent energy to create an impression like me, but with him being a wizard---a real wizard, not a petty fake like you---and with the border to the Nevernever in such a state of flux, it was pretty much inevitable."
"That was very well said," I told my ghost.
"Just be glad your theory worked. I wouldn't be very good at this, solo."
"Well, thank Kravos here. It was him and Bianca and Mavra who stirred things up enough to make this possible." We looked at Kravos. "You aren't getting to sneak attack me while I'm doped unconscious, bub. It isn't going to be like last time. Any questions?"
Kravos hurled himself at me in a fury. He overpowered me, and bore down on me, far too strong for me to overcome directly. I thrust a thumb into his eye. He screamed and bit at my hand.
And then my ghost came in. He wrapped his arms around Kravos's neck and leaned back, hard, tugging the man's body into a bow. Kravos strained and struggled, his arms flailing, strong as any maddened beast. My ghost was a little stronger than I, but he wouldn't be able to hold Kravos for long.
"Harry!" my ghost shouted. "Now!"
I gripped Kravos by the throat, letting all the frustration and fury inside well up. I held up my left hand, and my dream self's nails lengthened into glittering claws. Kravos stared at me in shock.
"You think you're the only one who can play in dreams, Kravos? If I'd been ready for you the last time, you'd have never been able to do to me what you did." My face twisted, mouth extending into a muzzle. "This time I'm ready. You're in my dream, now. And I'm taking back what's mine."
I tore into his guts. I ripped him open with my claws and wolfed into his vitals, just as he had to me. Bits of him flew free, dream-blood splashing, dream-vitals steaming.
I tore and worried and gulped down bloody meat. He screamed and fought, but he couldn't get away. I tore him to pieces and devoured him, the blood a hot, sweet rush on my tongue, his ghost-flesh hot and good, easing the ache of emptiness inside of me.
I ate him all up.
As I did, I felt power, surety, confidence, all rushing back into me. My stolen magic came raging back into me, filling me like silver lightning, a tingling, almost painful rush as I took back what was mine.
But I didn't stop there. My ghost fell away as I kept going. Kept tearing Kravos apart and gulping down the pieces. I got to his own power when I ate his heart---red, livid power, vital and primitive and dangerous. Kravos's magic had been for nothing but causing harm.
I took it. I had plenty of harm to start causing.
By the time I'd finished tearing him to shreds, the pieces were vanishing like the remnants of any foul dream. I crouched on the dream-floor as they did, shaking with the rushing energy inside of me. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and looked up.
I must have looked feral. My ghost took a step back and lifted both hands. "Easy, easy," he said. "I think you got him."
"I got him," I said quietly.
"He was a ghost," my ghost said. "He wasn't really a person any more. And even as ghosts go, he was a bad egg. You don't have anything to regret."
"Easy for you to say," I said. "You don't have to live with me."
"True," my ghost answered. He glanced down at himself. His bruised limbs grew slowly translucent, and he began vanishing. "That's the only bad thing about this gig as a ghost. Once you accomplish whatever it was that caused you to get created, you're done. Kravos---the real Kravos---is already gone. Just his shell stayed behind. And this would have happened to him, too, if he'd killed you."
"Do unto others before they do unto you," I said. "Thanks."
"It was your plan," my ghost said. "I feel like hell anyway."
"I know."
"I guess you do. Try not to get killed again, okay?"
"Working on it."
He waved one hand, and faded away.
I blinked open my eyes. Susan knelt over me, striking my face with her hand. I felt wretched---but that wasn't all. My body almost buzzed with the energy I held, my skin tingling as though I hadn't used a whit of magic in weeks. She struck me twice more before I let out a strangled groan and lifted a hand to intercept hers.
"Harry?" she demanded. "Harry, are you awake?"
I blinked my eyes. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah. I'm up."
"Kravos?" she hissed.
"I pushed his buttons and he lost control. He got me," I said. "Then I got him. You did it just right."
Susan sat back on her heels, trembling. "God. When you stopped breathing, I almost screamed. If you hadn't told me to expect it, I don't know what I would have done."
"You did fine," I said. I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet, though my body groaned in protest. The pain felt like something happening very far away, to someone else. It wasn't relevant to me. The energy coursing through me---that was relevant. I had to release some of it soon or I'd explode.
Susan started to help me, and then sat back, staring at me. "Harry? What happened?"
"I got something back," I said. "It's a high. I still hurt, but that doesn't seem to be important." I stretched my arms out over my head. Then I stalked over to the dirty laundry and found a pair of boxers that fit me, more or less. I gave Susan a self-conscious glance, and slipped into them. "Get something on Justine, and we're out of here."
"I tried. She won't come out from behind the washing machine."
I clenched my jaw, irritated, and snapped my fingers while saying, "Ventas servitas."
There was an abrupt surge of moving air and Justine came tumbling out from behind the washing machine with a yelp. She lay there for a moment, naked and stunned, staring up at me with wide, dark eyes.
"Justine," I said. "We're leaving. I don't care how crazy you are. You're coming with me."
"Leaving?" Justine stammered. Susan helped her sit up, and wrapped the red cloak around her shoulders. It fell to midthigh on the girl, who rose, trembling like a deer before headlights. "But. We're going to die."
"Were," I said. "Past tense." I turned back to the door and reached into all that energy glittering through me, pointed my finger and shouted, "Ventas servitas!" With another roar of wind, the door exploded outwards, into a large, empty room, splinters flying everywhere and shattering one of the two lightbulbs illuminating the room beyond.
I said, voice crackling with tension and anger, "Get behind me. Both of you. Don't get in front of me unless you want to get hurt."
I took a step toward the doorway.
An arm shot around the edge of the door, followed swiftly by Kyle Hamilton's body in its masquerade costume, his flesh mask back in place. He got me by the throat, whirling me in a half circle to slam me against the wall.
"Harry!" Susan shouted.
"Got you," Kyle purred, pinning me in place with supernatural force. Behind him, Kelly followed him in, her once-pretty face twisting and bulging beneath her flesh mask, as though she could barely contain the creature inside her. Her face was warped, twisted, distorted, as though whatever was beneath it had been so horribly mangled that not even a vampire's powers of masquerade could wholly conceal its hideousness.
"Come along, sister," Kyle said. "Tainted or not, we shall tear open his heart and see what a wizard's blood tastes like."
Chapter Thirty-seven
Fury surged through me, before fear or anxiety, a fury so scarlet and bright that I could scarcely believe it was mine. Maybe it wasn't. After all, you are what you eat---even if you're a wizard.
"Let go, Kyle," I grated. "You've got one chance to live through this. Walk away, right now."
Kyle laughed, letting his fangs extend. "No more bluffs, wizard," he purred. "No more illusions. Take him, sister."
Kelly came at me in a rush, but I had been waiting for that. I lifted my right hand and snarled, "Ventas servitas!" A furious column of wind slammed into her like a bag of sand, catching her in midair and driving her across the room, into the wall.
Kyle screamed in fury, drawing his hand back off of my throat and then driving it at me. I dodged the first blow by jerking my head to one side, and heard his hand crunch into the stone. The dodge cost me my balance, and as I teetered, he lashed out again, aiming for my neck. All I could do was watch it come.
And then Susan came between us. I didn't see her move toward us, but I saw her catch the blow in both of her hands. She spun, twisting her hips and body and shoulders, letting out a furious scream. She threw Kyle across the room, in the air the whole way, and with no noticeable trajectory. He slammed into his sister, driving them both into the wall once more. I heard Kelly scream, incoherent and bestial. The black, slime-covered bat-thing beneath the pleasant flesh mask tore its way out, shredding damply flapping skin with its talons as it started raking at Kyle. He struggled against her, shouting something that became lost in his creature-form's scream as he too tore his way free. The two of them started clawing at one another in a frenzy, fangs and tongues and talons flashing.
I snarled, and rolled my wrist, flipping my hand toward them in a gesture wholly unfamiliar to me. Words spilled from my lips in thundering syllables, "Satharak, na-kadum!" That scarlet, furious power I had stolen from Kravos flashed over me, following the gesture of my right hand, lashing out in a blaze of scarlet light that spun around the maddened vampires. The scarlet blaze whirled about them, winding too swiftly to be seen, a ribbon of flame that cocooned them both, burned brighter and hotter, the spell enfolding them in fire.
They screamed as they died, sounds like metal sheets tearing, and somehow also like terrified children. Heat thrummed back against us, almost singeing the exposed hairs on my legs, my chest. Greasy black smoke started to spread over the floor, and it stank.
I watched as they burned, though I could see nothing beneath the blazing flame-cocoon. Part of me wanted to dance in malicious glee, to throw my arms up in the air and crow my defiance and scorn to my enemies while they died, and to roll through their ashes when they'd cooled.
More of me grew sickened. I stared at the spell I had wrought and couldn't believe it had come from me---whether or not I'd taken the power, maybe even some primal knowledge of this spell, from Kravos's devoured spirit, the magic had come from me. I had killed them, as swiftly and as efficiently as with as little forethought as one gives to crushing an ant.
They were vampires, some part of me said. They had it coming. They were monsters.
I glanced aside, at Susan, who stood panting, her white shirt stained dark brown with blood. She stared at the fire, her eyes dark and wide, the whites filled in with black. I watched her shudder and close her eyes. When she opened them again, they were normal once more, blurred with tears.
Within the confines of my spell, the screams stopped. Now there were only cracklings. Poppings. The sound of overheated marrow boiling, bursting out of bone.
I turned away, toward the door, and said, "Let's go."
Susan and Justine followed me.
I led them through the basement. It was large and unfinished and damp. The room outside the washroom had a large drain in the center of the floor. There were corpses, there. Children from the masquerade. Others, dressed in rags and castoff clothes. The missing street people.
I stopped long enough to send my senses questing out over them, but there was no stirring of breath, no faint pulse of heartbeat. The corpses showed no lividity at all. The floor lay damp beneath our feet, and a hose still ran out a trickle of water, to one side.
Dinner had already been served.
"I hate them," I said. My voice rang out too loud, in that room. "I hate them, Susan."
She said nothing, in answer.
"I'm not going to let them keep this up. I've tried to stay out of their way before. I can't, now. Not after what I've seen."
"You can't fight them," Justine whispered. "They're too strong. There are too many of them."
I held up a hand, and Justine fell silent. I tilted my head to one side, and heard a faint thrumming, at the very edges of my magical perception. I stalked across the room, around the bodies, to an alcove in the wall.
Cheap shelving had been installed in the alcove, and on the shelves sat my shield bracelet, my blasting rod, and Bob's skull, still in its fishnet sack. Even as I approached, the skull's eyes flared to life.
"Harry," Bob said. "Stars and skies, you're all right!" He hesitated for a second, and then said, "And looking grim. Even dressed in boxers with yellow duckies on them."
I glanced down, and did my best to picture a vampire wearing boxers with yellow duckies. Or a wizard wearing yellow duckies, for that matter. "Bob," I said.
Bob whistled. "Wow. Your aura is different. You look a lot like---"
"Shut up, Bob," I said, my voice very quiet.
He did.
I put on my bracelet, and took up my rod. I scanned around and found my staff wedged into a corner, and took it out as well. "Bob," I asked. "What is all my stuff doing here?"
"Oh," Bob said. "That. Well. Bianca got the idea, somewhere, that your stuff might explode if anyone messed around with it."
I heard the wryness in my voice, though I didn't feel it. "She did, did she."
"I can't imagine how."
"I'm doubling your pay." I took Bob's skull and handed it back to Justine. "Carry this. Don't drop it."
Bob whistled. "Hey, cutie. That's a real nice red cloak you got there. Will you let me see the lining?"
I swatted the skull on the way past, drawing an outraged, "Ow!" from Bob.
"Stop goofing around. We're still inside Bianca's, and we still have to get out." I frowned, and glanced at Justine, then swiftly, left and right. "Where's Susan?"
Justine blinked. "She was right here behind---" She turned, staring.
Water dripped.
Silence reigned.
Justine started trembling like a leaf. "Here," she whispered. "They're here. We can't see them."
"What's this 'we' stuff, kimosabe," Bob muttered. The skull spun about in its fishnet sack. "I don't see any veils, Harry."
I swept my eyes left and right, gripping my blasting rod. "Did you see her leave? Or anyone take her?"
Bob coughed. "Well. Truth be told, I was looking at Justine's luscious little---"
"I get the point, Bob."
"Sorry."
I shook my head, irritated. "They snuck in, under a veil maybe. Grabbed Susan and went. Why the hell didn't they stick around? Just put a knife in my back? Why didn't they take Justine, too?"
"Good questions," Bob said.
"I'll tell you why. Because they weren't here. They couldn't have just carried Susan off that easy. Not now."
"Why not?" Bob asked.
"Trust me. She'd be a handful. They couldn't do it without making a fuss, which we'd notice."
"Assuming you're right," Bob said, "why would she just walk away?"
Justine glanced back at me, and licked her lips. "Bianca could make her. I've seen her do it. She made Susan walk into the laundry room on her own."
I grunted. "Looks like Bianca's been hitting the books, Bob."
"Vampire wizard," Bob said. "Black magic. Could be very tough."
"So can I. Justine, stay behind me. Keep your eyes open."
"Yes, sir," she said, her voice quiet. I strode past her, toward the stairs. Some of the energy I'd felt before had faded away. My pain and weakness grew closer to me, more noticeable. I did everything I could to shove it to the back of my mind. A swift little thrill of panic gabbled in my throat and tried to make me start screaming. I shoved that away, too. I just walked to the bottom of the stairs, and looked up them.
The doors at the top were elegant wood, and standing open. A soft breeze and the smell of night air flowed down the stairs. Late night, faint with the traces of dusty dawn. I glanced back at Justine, and she all but flinched away from me.
"Stay down here," I told her. "Bob, some things are going to start flying. Give her whatever help you can."
"All right, Harry," Bob said. "You know that door's been opened for you. They're going to be waiting for you to walk up there."
"Yeah," I said. "I'm not getting any stronger. Might as well do it now."
"You could wait until dawn. Then they'd---"
I cut him off, short. "Then they'd force their way down here to escape the sunlight. And it would still be a fight." I glanced at Justine and said, "I'll get you out, if I can."
She chanced a swift glance at my face, and back down. "Thank you, Mister Dresden. For trying."
"Sure, kid." I flexed my left hand, feeling the cool silver of the shield bracelet there. I gripped my staff tight. Then rolled the blasting rod through my fingers, feeling the runes carved into the wood, formulae of power, fire, force.
I put one foot on the stairs. My bare foot made little sound, but the board creaked beneath my weight. I squared my shoulders, and went up the next stair, and the next. Resolute, I guess. Terrified, certainly. Seething with power, with a simmering anger ready to boil over again.
I tried to clear my mind, to hang onto the anger and to dismiss the fear. I had limited success, but I made it up the stairs.
At the top, Bianca stood at one end of the great hall through the open doors. She wore the white gown I'd seen her in before, the soft fabric draping and stretching in alluring curves, creating shadows upon her with an artist's conviction. Susan knelt beside her, shaking, her head bowed. Bianca kept one hand on her hair.
Spread out around and behind Bianca were a dozen vampires; skinny limbs, flabby black bodies and drooling fangs, the flaps of skin between arm and flank and thigh stretched out, here and there, like half-functional wings. Some of the vampires had climbed up the walls and perched there, like gangly black spiders. All of them, even Susan, had huge, dark eyes. All of them stood looking at me.
In front of Bianca knelt a half-dozen men in plain suits that bulged in odd places. They held guns in their hands. Great big guns. Some kind of assault weapons, I thought. Their eyes looked a little vague, like they'd only been allowed to see some of what was in the room. Just as well.
I looked back at them and leaned on my staff. And I laughed. It came out a wheezing cackle, that echoed around the great hall, and caused the vampires to stir restlessly.
Bianca let her lips curve into a slow smile. "And what do you find so amusing, my pet?"
I smiled back. There was nothing friendly in it. "All of this. For a guy with two sticks and a pair of yellow ducky boxer shorts, you must think I'm a real dangerous man."
"As a matter of fact, I do," Bianca said. "Were I you, I would consider it flattery."
"Would you?" I asked.
Bianca let her smile widen. "Oh. Oh, yes. Gentlemen," she said, to the men with guns. "Fire."
Chapter Thirty-eight
I lifted my left hand before me, pouring energy into the shield bracelet, and shouted, "Riflettum!"
The guns roared with fire and thunder. Sparks showered off of a barrier less than six inches away from my hand. The bracelet grew warm as the security men poured a hail of gunfire at me. It stopped, just short, and bullets shot aside, chewing through the expensive woodwork and bouncing wildly around the room. One of the vampires let out a yowl and dropped from the wall to splat on the ground like a fat bug. One of the security men's guns suddenly jumped and twisted, and he cried out in pain, reeling back, blood streaming from his hands and the ruins of his face.
Technology doesn't tend to work too well around magic. Including the feeding mechanisms of automatic weapons.
Two of the guns jammed before dumping their full clips, and the others fell silent, spent. I still stood, one hand extended. Bullets lay all over the floor in front of me, misshapen slugs of lead. The security men stared, and stumbled away from me, behind Bianca and the vampires, and out the door. I don't blame them. If all I had was a gun, and it had just been that useless, I would run, too.
I took a step forward, scattering bullets with my bare feet. "Get out of my way," I said. "Let us out. No one else has to get hurt."
"Kyle," Bianca said, stroking Susan's hair. "Kelly. She was quite mad in any case. Not all of them make the transition well." Her gaze traveled down to Susan.
The smile I wore sharpened. "Last chance, Bianca. Let us out peacefully, and you walk away alive."
"And if I say no?" she asked, very mild.
I snarled, my temper snapping. I lifted the blasting rod, whirled it around my head as I drew in my will, and snarled, "Fuego!" Power exploded from the rod, circular coruscations following a solid scarlet column of energy that lanced forward, toward the vampire's head.
Bianca kept smiling. She lifted her left hand, mumbled some gibberish, and I saw cold darkness gather before her, a concave disk that met my energy lance and absorbed it, scattered it, sent smaller bolts of fire darting here and there, splashing on the floor in small, blazing puddles.
I just stared at her for a moment. I knew that she'd known some tricks, maybe a veil or two, a glamour or two, maybe how to whip up a fascination. But that kind of straightforward deflection wasn't something just anyone could do. Some of the people on the White Council couldn't have stopped that shot without help.
Bianca smiled at me, and lowered her hand. The vampires laughed, hissing, inhuman laughter. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and a cold shudder glided gleefully up and down my spine.
"Well, Mister Dresden," she purred. "It would appear that Mavra was an able instructor, and my lessons well learned. We seem to be at something of a standoff. But there's one more piece I'd like to put on the board." She clapped her hands, and gestured to one side.
One of the vampires opened a door. Standing behind it, both hands on a stylish cane, stood a medium-sized man, dark of hair and coloring, brawny through the chest and shoulders. He wore a tailored suit of dark grey in an immaculate cut. He made me think of native South Americans, with a sturdy jaw and broad, strong features.
"Nice suit," I told him.
He looked me up and down. "Nice . . . ducks."
"Okay," I said, "I'll bite. Who's that?"
"My name," the man said, "is Ortega. Don Paolo Ortega, of the Red Court."
"Hiya, Don," I said. "I'd like to lodge a complaint."
He smiled, a show of broad, white teeth. "I'm sure you would, Mister Dresden. But I have been monitoring the situation here. And the Baroness," he nodded to Bianca, "has broken none of the Accords. Nor has she violated the laws of hospitality, nor her own given word."
"Oh come on," I said. "She's broken the spirit of all of them!"
Ortega tsked. "Alas, that in the Accords it was agreed that there is no spirit of the law, between our kinds, Mister Dresden. Only its letter. And Baroness Bianca has strictly adhered to its letter. You have instigated multiple combats in her home, murdered her sworn bondsman, inflicted damage to her property and her reputation. And now you stand here prepared to continue your grievance with her, in a most unlawful and cavalier fashion. I believe that what you do is sometimes referred to as 'cowboy justice.' "
"If there's a point in here, somewhere," I said, "get to it."
Ortega's eyes glittered. "I am present as a witness to the Red King, and the Vampire Courts at large. That is all. I am merely a witness."
Bianca turned her eyes back to me. "A witness who will carry word of your treacherous attack and intrusion back to the Courts," she said. "It will mean war between our kindred and the White Council."
War.
Between the vampires and the White Council.
Son of a bitch. It was unthinkable. Such a conflict hadn't happened in millennia. Not in living memory---and some wizards live a damned long time.
I had to swallow, and hide the fact that I had just gulped. "Well. Since he isn't running off to tattle right this second, I can only assume that you're about to offer me a deal."
"I never thought you were slow on the uptake, Mister Dresden," Bianca said. "Will you hear my offer?"
I ached more with every moment that went by. My body was failing. I had ridden the rush of magic through the last several moments, but I had spent a lot of that power. It would come back, but I was running the batteries down---and the more I did it, the more I couldn't ignore my weakness, my dizziness.
Legally speaking, the vampires had me over a barrel. I needed a plan. I needed a plan in the worst way. I needed time.
"Sure," I said. "I'll hear you out."
Bianca curled her fingers through Susan's hair. "First. You shall be forgiven your . . . excesses of bad taste of the last few days. But for the two deaths, none of it is unworkable---and those two would have died shortly, in any case. I will forgive you, Mister Dresden."
"That's so kind."
"It gets better. You may take your equipment, your skull, and the White bastard's whore with you when you leave. Unharmed and free of future malice. All accounts will be called even."
I let the dry show in my tone. "How could I possibly say no."
She smiled. "You killed someone very dear to me, Mister Dresden---not directly, true, but your actions mandated her death. For that, too, I will forgive you."
I narrowed my eyes.
Bianca ran her hands over Susan's hair. "This one will stay with me. You stole away someone dear to me, Mister Dresden. And I am going to take away someone dear to you. After that, all will be equal." She gave Ortega a very small smile and then glanced at me and asked, "Well? What say you? If you prefer to remain with her, I'm sure a place could be made for you here. After suitable assurances of your loyalty, of course."
I remained silent for a moment, stunned.
"Well, wizard?" she snapped, harsher. "How do you answer? Accept my bargain. My compromise. Or it is war. And you will become its first casualty."
I looked at Susan. She stared blankly, her mouth partially open, caught in a trance of some kind. I could probably snap her out of it, provided a bunch of vampires didn't tear me limb from limb while I tried. I looked up at Bianca. At Ortega. At the hissing vampire cronies. They were drooling on the polished floor.
I hurt all over, and I felt so very damned tired.
"I love her," I said. I didn't say it very loud.
"What?" Bianca stared at me. "What did you say?"
"I said, I love her."
"She is already half mine."
"So? I still love her."
"She isn't even fully human any longer, Dresden. It won't be long before she is as a sister to me."
"Maybe. Maybe not," I said. "Get your hands off my girlfriend."
Bianca's eyes widened. "You are mad," she said. "You would flirt with chaos, destruction---with war. For the sake of this one wounded soul?"
I smote my staff on the floor, reaching deep for power. Deeper than I've ever reached before. Outside, in the gathering morning, the air crackled with thunder.
Bianca, even Ortega, looked abruptly uncertain, looking up and around, before focusing on me again.
"For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life." I called power into my blasting rod, and its tip glowed incandescent white. "The way I see it, there's nothing else worth fighting a war for."
Bianca's face distorted with fury. She lost it. She split apart her skin like some gruesome caterpillar, the black beast clawing its way out of her flesh mask, jaws gaping, black eyes burning with feral fury. "Kill him!" she shouted. "Kill him, kill him, kill him!"
The vampires came for me, across the floor, along the walls, scuttling like roaches or spiders---too fast for easy belief. Bianca gathered shadow into her hands and hurled it at me.
I fell back a pace, caught Bianca's strike with my staff, and parried it into one of her flunkies. The darkness enfolded the vampire, and it screamed from within. When the fog around it vanished, nothing remained but dust. I responded with another gout of fire from the rod, sweeping it like a scythe through the oncoming vampires, setting them aflame. They writhed and screamed.
Spittle sliced toward me from above and to one side, and I barely ducked away in time. The vampire clinging to the ceiling followed its venom down, but it met the end of my staff in its belly, the other end solidly planted against the floor. The vampire rebounded with a burping sound and landed hard on the floor. I lifted the staff and smote down on the thing's head, to the sound of more thunder outside. Power lashed down through the staff, and crushed the vampire's skull like an egg. Dust rained down from the ceiling, and the vampire's claws scratched a frantic staccato on the floor as it died.
I had done well for the moment---the vamps nearest me were falling back, teeth bared. But more were coming, from behind them. Bianca hurled another strike at me, and though I interposed both staff and shield, the deathly cold of it numbed my fingers.
I was running out of strength, panting, my weariness and weakness struggling to claim me. I fought off the dizziness, enough to send another flash of fire at an oncoming vampire, but it skittered aside, and all I did was plow a blazing furrow in the floorboards.
They fell back for a moment, separated from me by an expanse of flame, and I struggled to catch my breath.
They were coming. The vampires would be coming for me. My brain kept chattering at me, frantic, panicked. They're coming. Justine, Susan, and I might as well be dead. Dead like all the others. Dead like all their victims.
I leaned against the wall by the stairs, panting, fighting to hold on to some sense of clarity. Dead. Victims. The victims below. The dead.
I dropped the blasting rod. I fell to my knees.
With my staff, I scratched a circle around me, in the dust. It was enough. The circle closed with a thrum of power. Magic ran rampant in that house, the sea of supernatural energy stirred to froth.
I had no guide for this kind of spell. I had no focus, nothing to target, but that wasn't the kind of magic I was working with. I shoved my senses down, into the earth, like reaching fingers. I blanked out the burning hall, my enemies, Bianca's howling. I shut away the fire, the smoke, the pain, the nausea. I focused, and reached beneath me.
And I found them. I found the dead, the victims, the ones who had been taken. Not just the few piled below, like so much trash to be discarded. I found others. Dozens of others. Scores. Hundreds. Bones hidden away, never marked, never remembered. Restless shades, trapped in the earth, too weak to act, to take vengeance, to seek peace. Maybe on another night, or in another place, I couldn't have done it. But the way had been prepared for me, by Bianca and her people. They'd thought to weaken the border between life and death, to use the dead as a weapon against me.
But that blade can cut both ways.
I found those spirits, reached out and touched them, one by one.
"Memorium," I whispered. "Memoratum. Memortius."
Energy rushed out of me. I shoved it out as fast as it would go, and I gave it to them. To the lost ones. The seduced, the betrayed, the homeless, the helpless. All the people the vampires had preyed on, through the years, all the dead I could reach. I reached out into the turmoil Bianca and her allies had created, and I gave those wandering shades power.
The house began to shake.
From below, in the basement, there came a rumbling sound. It began as a moan. It rose to a wail. And then it became a screaming mob, a roar of sound that shattered the senses, that made my heart and my belly shiver with the sheer force of it.
The dead came. They erupted through the floor, and took forms of smoke and flame and cinder. I saw them as I swayed, weakened, finished by the effort of the spell. I saw their faces. I saw newsboys from the roaring twenties, and greaser street punks from the fifties. I saw delivery people and homeless transients and lost children rise up, deadly in their fury. The ghosts reached out with flaming hands to burn and sear; they shoved their smoky bodies into noses and throats. They howled their names and the names of their murderers, the names of their loved ones, and their vengeance shook that grand old house like a thunderstorm, like an earthquake.
The ceiling began to fall in. I saw vampires being dragged into the flames, down into the basement as burning sections of floor gave way. Some tried to flee, but the spirits of the dead knew no more pity than they had rest. They hammered at the vampires, raked at them, ghostly hands and bodies made nearly tangible by the power I'd channeled into them.
Vampires died. Ghosts swarmed and screamed everywhere, terrible and beautiful, heartbreaking and ridiculous as humanity itself. The sound banished any thought of speech, hammered upon my skin like physical blows.
I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. I struggled to my feet and beckoned down the stairs. Justine stumbled up them, Bob's eyelights blazing bright orange, a beacon in the smoke. I grabbed her wrist and tried to make my way around the trembling house, the gaping hole in the floor that led down to an inferno.
I saw a spirit leap for Bianca with blazing hands reached out, and she smote it from the air with a blast of frozen black air. She seized Susan by the wrist and started dragging her toward the front door.
More spirits hurtled toward her, the eldest of the murderers of this house, fire and smoke and splinter---even one that had forged a body for itself out of the spent bullets lying upon the floor.
She fought them off. Talon and magic, she thrust her way through them, and toward the front door. Susan began to wake up, to look around her, her expression terrified.
"Susan!" I shouted. "Susan!"
She began to struggle against Bianca, who hissed, turning toward Susan. She fought to drag my girlfriend closer to the front door, but one of the ghosts clawed at the vampire's leg, setting it aflame.
Bianca screamed, berserk, out of control. She lifted one hand high, her claws glittering, dark, and swept it down at Susan's throat.
I sent my spell hurtling out along with Susan's name, the last strength of my body and mind.
I saw her rise. Rachel's ghost. She appeared, simple and translucent and pretty, and put herself between Bianca's claws and Susan's throat. Blood gouted from the ghost, scarlet and horrible. Susan tumbled limply to one side. Bianca started screaming, high enough to shatter glass, as the bloody ghost simply pressed against her, wrapping her arms around the monstrous black form.
My spell followed on the heels of Rachel's ghost, and took Bianca full in the face, a near-solid column of wind, which seized her, hurtled her up, and then smashed her down into the floor. The overstrained boards gave way beneath her with a creak and a roar, and flame washed up toward me in a wave of reeking black smoke. I felt my balance spin and I struggled to make it to the exit, but fell to the ground.
Spirits flooded after Bianca, fire and smoke, following the vampire sorceress down the hole. The house itself screamed, a sound of tortured wood and twisted beam, and began to fall.
I couldn't get my balance. I felt small, strong hands under one of my arms. And then I felt Susan beneath the other, powerful and terrified. She lifted me to my feet. Justine stayed by my other side, and together, we stumbled out of the old house.
We had gone no more than a dozen paces when it collapsed with a roar. We turned, and I saw the house drawing in upon itself, sucked down into the earth, into an inferno of flame. The fire department, later, called it some kind of inverted backblast, but I know what I saw. I saw the ghosts the dead had left behind settle the score.
"I love you," I said, or tried to say, to Susan. "I love you."
She pressed her mouth to mine. I think she was crying. "Hush," she said. "Harry. Hush. I love you, too."
It was done.
There was no more reason to hold on.
Chapter Thirty-nine
I regard it as one last sadistic gibe of whatever power had decided to make my life a living hell that the burn ward was full, and I was given a room to share with Charity Carpenter. She had recovered in spirit, if not in body, and she started in on me the moment I awoke. The woman's tongue was sharper than any sword. Even Amoracchius. I smiled through most of it. Michael would have been proud.
The baby, I learned, had taken an abrupt turn for the better in the hours before dawn the morning Bianca's house had burned. I thought that maybe Kravos had taken a bite of the little guy, and I had gotten it back for him. Michael thought God had simply decreed the morning to be a day of good things. Whatever. The results were what counted.
"We've decided," Michael said, stretching a strong arm around Charity, "to name him Harry."
Charity glowered at me, but remained silent.
"Harry?" I asked. "Harry Carpenter? Michael, what did that poor kid ever do to you?"
But it made me feel good. And they kept the name.
Charity got out of the hospital three days before me. Michael or Father Forthill remained with me for the rest of my stay. No one ever said anything, but Michael had the sword with him, and Forthill kept a crucifix handy. Just in case I had some nasty visitors.
One night when I couldn't sleep, I mentioned to Michael that I was worried about the repercussions of my workings, the harmful magic I had dished out. I worried that it was going to come back to haunt me.
"I'm not a philosopher, Harry," he said. "But here's something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what's coming around." He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. "And sometimes you are what's coming around. You see what I mean?"
I did. I was able to get back to sleep.
Michael explained that he and Thomas had escaped the fight at the bridge only a few moments after it had begun. But time had stretched oddly, between the Nevernever and Chicago, and they hadn't emerged until two o'clock the following afternoon.
"Thomas brought us out into this flesh pit," Michael said.
"I'm not a wizard," Thomas pointed out. "I can only get in and out of the Nevernever at points close to my heart."
"A house of sin!" Michael said, his expression stern.
"A gentlemen's club," Thomas protested. "And one of the nicest ones in town."
I kept my mouth shut. Who says I never grow any wiser?
Murphy came out of the sleeping spell a couple days later. I had to go in a wheelchair, but I went to Kravos's funeral with her. She pushed me through a drizzling rain to the grave site. There was a city official there, who signed off on some papers and left. Then it was just us and the grave diggers, shovels whispering on earth.
Murphy watched the proceedings in complete silence, her eyes sunken, the blue faded out until they seemed almost grey. I didn't push, and she didn't talk until the hole was half filled in.
"I couldn't stop him," she said, then. "I tried."
"But we beat him. That's why we're here and he's there."
"You beat him," Murphy said. "A lot of good I did you."
"He sucker punched you. Even if you'd been a wizard, he'd have gotten to you---like he damn near did me." I shivered, remembered agony making the muscles of my belly tight. "Karrin, you can't blame yourself for that."
"I know," she said, but she didn't sound like she meant it. She was quiet for a long time, and I finally figured out that she wasn't talking because I'd hear the tears in her voice, the ones the rain hid from me. She didn't bow her head though, and she didn't look away from the grave.
I reached out and found her hand with mine. I squeezed. She squeezed back, silent and tight. We stayed there, in the rain, until the last bit of earth had been thrown over Kravos's coffin.
On the way out, Murphy stopped my wheelchair, frowning at a white headstone next to a waiting plot. "He died doing the right thing," she read. She looked down at me.
I shrugged, and felt my mouth curl up on one side. "Not yet. Not today."
Michael and Forthill took care of Lydia for me. Her real name was Barbara something. They got her packed up and moved out of town. Apparently, the Church has some kind of equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, for getting people out of the reach of supernatural baddies. Forthill told me how the girl had fled the church because she'd been terrified that she would fall asleep, and gone out to find some uppers. The vampires had grabbed her while she was out, which was when I'd found them in that old building. She sent me a note that read, simply, "I'm sorry. Thank you for everything."
When I got out of the hospital, Thomas sent me a thank-you letter, for saving Justine. He sent it on a little note card attached to a bow, which was all Justine was wearing. I'll let you guess where the bow was. I took the note, but not the girl. There was too much of an ick factor in sharing girls with a sex vampire. Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn't walking the razor's edge of an organic emotional instability---but I couldn't really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires---whatever works, I guess.
I had woman problems of my own.
Susan sent me flowers and called me every day, in the hospital. But she didn't ever talk to me for long. And she didn't come to visit. When I got out, I went to her apartment. She didn't live there anymore. I tried to call her at work, and never managed to catch her. Finally, I had to resort to magic. I used some hair of hers left on a brush at my apartment, and tracked her down on a beach along Lake Michigan, on one of the last warm days of the year.
I found her lying in the sun wearing a white bikini that left maximum surface area bared to it. I sat down next to her, and her manner changed, subtly, a quiet tension that I didn't miss, though I couldn't see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore.
"The sun helps," she said. "Sometimes it almost goes away for a while."
"I've been trying to find you," I said. "I wanted to talk to you."
"I know," she said. "Harry. Things have changed for me. In the daylight, it's not too bad. But at night." She shivered. "I have to lock myself inside. I don't trust myself around people, Harry."
"I know," I said. "You know what's happening?"
"I talked to Thomas," she said. "And Justine. They were nice enough, I guess. They explained things to me."
I grimaced. "Look," I said. "I'm going to help you. I'll find some way to get you out of this. We can find a cure." I reached out and took her hand. "Oh, Hell's bells, Susan. I'm no good at this." I just fumbled the ring onto it, clumsy as you please. "I don't want you far away. Marry me."
She sat up, and stared at her hand, at the dinky ring I'd been able to afford. Then she leaned close to me and gave me a slow, heated kiss, her mouth melting-warm. Our tongues touched. Mine went numb. I got a little dizzy, as the slow throb of pleasure that I'd felt before coursed through me, a drug I'd craved without realizing it.
She drew away from me slowly, her face expressionless behind the sunglasses. She said, "I can't. You already made me ache for you, Harry. I couldn't control myself, with you. I couldn't sort out the hungers." She pressed the ring into my hand and stood up, gathering her towel and a purse with her. "Don't come to me again. I'll call you."
And she left.
I'd bragged to Kravos, at the end, that I'd been trained to demolish nightmares when I was younger. And to a certain extent it was true. If something came into my head for a fight, I could put up a good one. But now I had nightmares that were all my own. A part of me. And they were always the same: darkness, trapped, with the vampires all around me, laughing their hissing laughter.
I'd wake up, screaming and crying. Mister, curled against my legs, would raise his head and rumble at me. But he wouldn't pad away. He'd just settle down again, purring like a snowmobile's engine. I found it a comfort. And I slept with a light always close.
"Harry," Bob said one night. "You haven't been working. You've barely left your apartment. The rent was due last week. And this vampire research is going nowhere fast."
"Shut up, Bob," I told him. "This unguent isn't right. If we can find a way to convert it to a liquid, maybe we can work it into a supplement of some kind---"
"Harry," Bob said.
I looked up at the skull.
"Harry. The Council sent a notice to you today."
I stood up, slowly.
"The vampires. The Council's at war. I guess Paris and Berlin went into chaos almost a week ago. The Council is calling a meeting. Here."
"The White Council is coming to Chicago," I mused.
"Yeah. They're going to want to know what the hell happened."
I shrugged. "I sent them my report. I only did what was right," I said. "Or as close to it as I could manage. I couldn't let them have her, Bob. I couldn't."
The skull sighed. "I don't know if that will hold up with them, Harry."
"It has to," I said.
There was a knock at my door. I climbed up from the lab. Murphy and Michael had shown up at my door with a care package: soup and charcoal and kerosene for me, as the weather got colder. Groceries. Fruit. Michael had, rather pointedly, included a razor.
"How are you doing, Dresden?" Murphy asked me, her blue eyes serious.
I stared at her for a moment. Then at Michael.
"I could be worse," I said. "Come in."
Friends. They make it easier.
So, the vampires are out to get me, and every other wizard on the block. The little wizardlings of the city, the have-nots of magic, are making it a point not to go outside after dark. I don't order pizza for delivery anymore. Not after the first guy almost got me with a bomb.
The Council is going to be furious at me, but what else is new.
Susan doesn't call. Doesn't visit. But I got a card from her, on my birthday, Halloween. She only wrote three words.
I'll let you guess what three.
Author's Note
When I was seven years old, I got a bad case of strep throat and was out of school for a whole week. During that time, my sisters bought me my first fantasy and sci-fi novels: the boxed set of Lord of the Rings and the boxed set of the Han Solo adventure novels by Brian Daley. I devoured them all during that week.
From that point on, I was pretty much doomed to join SF&F fandom. From there, it was only one more step to decide I wanted to be a writer of my favorite fiction material, and here we are.
I blame my sisters.
My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C. S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber---you get the picture.
When I set out to become a writer, I spent years writing swords-and-horses fantasy novels---and seemed to have little innate talent for it. But I worked at my writing, branching out into other areas as experiments, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy. That's how the Dresden Files initially came about---as a happy accident while trying to accomplish something else. Sort of like penicillin.
But I never forgot my first love, and to my immense delight and excitement, one day I got a call from my agent and found out that I was going to get to share my newest swords-and-horses fantasy novel with other fans.
The Codex Alera is a fantasy series set within the savage world of Carna, where spirits of the elements, known as furies, lurk in every facet of life, and where many intelligent races vie for security and survival. The realm of Alera is the monolithic civilization of humanity, and its unique ability to harness and command the furies is all that enables its survival in the face of the enormous, sometimes hostile elemental powers of Carna, and against savage creatures who would lay Alera in waste and ruin.
Yet even a realm as powerful as Alera is not immune to destruction from within, and the death of the heir apparent to the Crown has triggered a frenzy of ambitious political maneuvering and infighting amongst the High Lords, those who wield the most powerful furies known to man. Plots are afoot, traitors and spies abound, and a civil war seems inevitable---all while the enemies of the realm watch, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.
Tavi is a young man living on the frontier of Aleran civilization---because, let's face it, swords-and-horses fantasies start there. Born a freak, unable to utilize any powers of furycrafting whatsoever, Tavi has grown up relying upon his own wits, speed, and courage to survive. When an ambitious plot to discredit the Crown lays Tavi's home, the Calderon Valley, naked and defenseless before a horde of the barbarian Marat, the boy and his family find themselves directly in harm's way.
There are no titanic High Lords to protect them, no Legions, no Knights with their mighty furies to take the field, Tavi and the free frontiersmen of the Calderon Valley must find some way to uncover the plot and to defend their homes against a merciless horde of Marat and their beasts.
It is a desperate hour, when the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, when a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and when the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the Realm---or destroy it.
Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the books of the Codex Alera as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.
---Jim
Furies of Calderon, Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, and Captain's Fury are available from Ace Books.
Step into the magical world of Harry Dresden . . .
STORM FRONTFOOL MOONGRAVE PERILAvailable from Roc Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
SUMMER KNIGHT: BOOK FOUR OF THE DRESDEN FILES
ARoc Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2002 byJim Butcher
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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ISBN: 1-101-13394-5
AROC BOOK®
RocBooks first published by The Roc Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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This book is for big sisters everywhere who have enough patience not to strangle their little brothers---and particularly for my own sisters, who had more than most. I owe you both so much.
And for Mom, for reasons that are so obvious that they really don't need to be said---but I thought I would make special mention of candy cane cookies and that rocking chair that creaked me to sleep.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author (that's me) wishes to thank all the people who should have been thanked in other books---Ricia and A.J., obviously, and the mighty Jen. Thank you to all the folks who have been so supportive of my work all along, including (but not limited to) Wil and Erin (who fed me great Chicago information and who I missed the first time around), Fred and Chris, Martina and Caroline and Debra and Cam and Jess and Monica and April.
Thank you also to you mighty librarians who have tricked people into reading these books, and to the bookstore personnel (and lurkers) who have gone out of their way to help me get noticed. I admit to being somewhat baffled, but I'm very grateful to you all.
I owe thanks to so many people that I probably am incapable of remembering everyone. If I missed someone, let Shannon know. She will club me on the head with a baseball bat and point out the mistake.
(P.S. Shannon and J.J., as always, thank you. I'd promise to be less of a weirdo, but we all know how longthat one would last.)
It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.
I got out of the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen bug, and squinted against the midsummer sunlight. Lake Meadow Park lies a bit south of Chicago's Loop, a long sprint from Lake Michigan's shores. Even in heat like we'd had lately, the park would normally be crowded with people. Today it was deserted but for an old lady with a shopping cart and a long coat, tottering around the park. It wasn't yet noon, and my sweats and T-shirt were too hot for the weather.
I squinted around the park for a moment, took a couple of steps onto the grass, and got hit on the head by something damp and squishy.
I flinched and slapped at my hair. Something small fell past my face and onto the ground at my feet. A toad. Not a big one, as toads go---it could easily have sat in the palm of my hand. It wobbled for a few moments upon hitting the ground, then let out a bleary croak and started hopping drunkenly away.
I looked around me and saw other toads on the ground. A lot of them. The sound of their croaking grew louder as I walked further into the park. Even as I watched, several more amphibians plopped out of the sky, as though the Almighty had dropped them down a laundry chute. Toads hopped around everywhere. They didn't carpet the ground, but you couldn't possibly miss them. Every moment or so, you would hear the thump of another one landing. Their croaking sounded vaguely like the speech-chatter of a crowded room.
"Weird, huh?" said an eager voice. I looked up to see a short young man with broad shoulders and a confident walk coming toward me. Billy the Werewolf wore sweatpants and a plain dark T-shirt. A year or two ago the outfit would have concealed the forty or fifty extra pounds he'd been carrying. Now they concealed all the muscle he'd traded it in for. He stuck out his hand, smiling. "What did I tell you, Harry?"
"Billy," I responded. He crunched down hard as I shook his hand. Or maybe he was just that much stronger. "How's the werewolf biz?"
"Getting interesting," he said. "We've run into a lot of odd things lately when we've been out patrolling. Like this." He gestured at the park. Another toad fell from the sky several feet away. "That's why we called the wizard."
Patrolling. Holy vigilantes, Batman. "Any of the normals been here?"
"No, except for some meteorological guys from the university. They said that they were having tornadoes in Louisiana or something, that the storms must have thrown the toads here."
I snorted. "You'd think 'it's magic' would be easier to swallow than that."
Billy grinned. "Don't worry. I'm sure someone will come along and declare it a hoax before long."
"Uh-huh." I turned back to the Beetle and popped the hood to rummage in the forward storage compartment. I came out with a nylon backpack and dragged a couple of small cloth sacks out of it. I threw one to Billy. "Grab a couple of toads and pitch them in there for me."
He caught the bag and frowned. "Why?"
"So I can make sure they're real."
Billy lifted his eyebrows. "You think they're not?"
I squinted at him. "Look, Billy, just do it. I haven't slept, I can't remember the last time I ate a hot meal, and I've got a lot to do before tonight."
"But why wouldn't they be real? They look real."
I blew out a breath and tried to keep my temper. It had been short lately. "They could look real and feel real, but it's possible that they're just constructs. Made out of the material of the Nevernever and animated by magic. I hope they are."
"Why?"
"Because all that would mean is that some faerie got bored and played a trick. They do that sometimes."
"Okay. But if they're real?"
"If they're real, then it means something is out of whack."
"What kind of out of whack?"
"The serious kind. Holes in the fabric of reality."
"And that would be bad?"
I eyed him. "Yeah, Billy. That would be bad. It would mean something big was going down."
"But what if---"
My temper flared. "I don't have the time or inclination to teach a class today. Shut the hell up."
He lifted a hand in a pacifying gesture. "Okay, man. Whatever." He fell into step beside me and started picking up toads as we walked across the park. "So, uh, it's good to see you, Harry. Me and the gang were wondering if you wanted to come by this weekend, do some socializing."
I scooped up a toad of my own and eyed him dubiously. "Doing what?"
He grinned at me. "Playing Arcanos, man. The campaign is getting really fun."
Role-playing games. I made a monosyllabic sound. The old lady with the shopping cart wandered past us, the wheels of the cart squeaking and wobbling.
"Seriously, it's great," he insisted. "We're storming the fortress of Lord Malocchio, except we have to do it in disguise in the dead of night, so that the Council of Truth won't know who the vigilantes who brought him down were. There's spells and demons and dragons and everything. Interested?"
"Sounds too much like work."
Billy let out a snort. "Harry, look, I know this whole vampire war thing has you jumpy. And grouchy. But you've been lurking in your basement way too much lately."
"What vampire war?"
Billy rolled his eyes. "Word gets around, Harry. I know that the Red Court of the vampires declared war on the wizards after you burned down Bianca's place last fall. I know that they've tried to kill you a couple of times since then. I even know that the wizards' White Council is coming to town sometime soon to figure out what to do."
I glowered at him. "What White Council?"
He sighed. "It's not a good time for you to be turning into a hermit, Harry. I mean, look at you. When was the last time you shaved? Had a shower? A haircut? Got out to do your laundry?"
I lifted a hand and scratched at the wiry growth of beard on my face. "I've been out. I've been out plenty of times."
Billy snagged another toad. "Like when?"
"I went to that football game with you and the Alphas."
He snorted. "Yeah. In January, Dresden. It's June." Billy glanced up at my face and frowned. "People are worried about you. I mean, I know you've been working on some project or something. But this whole unwashed wild man look just isn't you."
I stooped and grabbed a toad. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know better than you think," he said. "It's about Susan, right? Something happened to her last fall. Something you're trying to undo. Maybe something the vampires did. That's why she left town."
I closed my eyes and tried not to crush the toad in my hand. "Drop the subject."
Billy planted his feet and thrust his chin out at me. "No, Harry. Dammit, you vanish from the face of the earth, you're hardly showing up at your office, won't answer your phone, don't often answer your door. We're your friends, and we're worried about you."
"I'm fine," I said.
"You're a lousy liar. Word is that the Reds are bringing more muscle into town. That they're offering their groupies full vampirehood if one of them brings you down."
"Hell's bells," I muttered. My head started to ache.
"It isn't a good time for you to be outside by yourself. Even during daylight."
"I don't need a babysitter, Billy."
"Harry, I know you better than most. I know you can do stuff that other people can't---but that doesn't make you Superman. Everyone needs help sometimes."
"Not me. Not now." I stuffed the toad into my sack and picked up another. "I don't have time for it."
"Oh, that reminds me." Billy drew a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of his sweats and read it. "You've got an appointment with a client at three."
I blinked at him. "What?"
"I dropped by your office and checked your messages. A Ms. Sommerset was trying to reach you, so I called her and set up the appointment for you."
I felt my temper rising again. "You did what?"
His expression turned annoyed. "I checked your mail, too. The landlord for the office dropped off your eviction notice. If you don't have him paid off in a week, he's booting you out."
"What the hell gives you the right to go poking around in my office, Billy? Or calling my clients?"
He took a step in front of me, glaring. I had to focus on his nose to avoid the risk of looking at his eyes. "Get off the high horse, Harry. I'm your freaking friend. You've been spending all your time hiding in your apartment. You should be happy I'm helping you save your business."
"You're damned right it's my business," I spat. The shopping cart lady circled past in my peripheral vision, cart wheels squeaking as she walked behind me. "Mine. As in none of yours."
He thrust out his jaw. "Fine. How about you just crawl back into your cave until they evict you from that, too?" He spread his hands. "Good God, man. I don't need to be a wizard to see when someone's in a downward spiral. You're hurting. You need help."
I jabbed a finger into his chest. "No, Billy. I don't need morehelp . I don't need to be babysitting a bunch of kids who think that because they've learned one trick they're ready to be the Lone Ranger with fangs and a tail. I don't need to be worrying about the vamps targeting the people around me when they can't get to me. I don't need to be second-guessing myself, wondering whoelse is going to get hurt because I dropped the ball." I reached down and snatched up a toad, jerking the cloth bag from Billy's hands on the way back up. "I don't needyou ."
Naturally, the hit went down right then.
It wasn't subtle, as attempted assassinations go. An engine roared and a black compact pickup truck jumped the curb into the park fifty yards away. It jounced and slewed to one side, tires digging up furrows in the sunbaked grass. A pair of men clung to a roll bar in the back of the truck. They were dressed all in black, complete with black sunglasses over black ski masks, and their guns matched---automatic weapons in the mini-Uzi tradition.
"Get back!" I shouted. With my right hand, I grabbed at Billy and shoved him behind me. With my left, I shook out the bracelet on my wrist, hung with a row of tiny, medieval-style shields. I lifted my left hand toward the truck and drew in my will, focusing it with the bracelet into a sudden, transparent, shimmering half-globe that spread out between me and the oncoming truck.
The truck ground to a halt. The two gunmen didn't wait for it to settle. With all the fire discipline of an action-movie extra, they pointed their guns more or less at me and emptied their clips in one roaring burst.
Sparks flew from the shield in front of me, and bullets whined and hissed in every direction as they ricocheted. My bracelet grew uncomfortably warm within a second or two, the energy of the shield taxing the focus to its limit. I tried to angle the shield to deflect the shots up into the air as much as possible. God only knew where all those bullets were going---I just hoped that they wouldn't bounce through a nearby car or some other passerby.
The guns clicked empty. With jerky, unprofessional motions, both gunmen began to reload.
"Harry!" Billy shouted.
"Not now!"
"But---"
I lowered the shield and lifted my right hand---the side that projects energy. The silver ring I wore on my index finger had been enchanted to save back a little kinetic energy whenever my arm moved. I hadn't used the ring in months, and it had a whale of a kick to it---one I hardly dared to use on the gunmen. That much force could kill one of them, and that would be basically the same as letting them fill me full of bullets. It would just take a little longer to set in. The White Council did not take kindly to anyone violating the First Law of Magic: Thou Shalt Not Kill. I'd slipped it once on a technicality, but it wouldn't happen again.
I gritted my teeth, focused my shot just to one side of the gunmen, and triggered the ring. Raw force, unseen but tangible, lashed through the air and caught the first gunman with a glancing blow across his upper body. His automatic slammed against his chest, and the impact tore the sunglasses off his head and shredded bits of his clothes even as it flung him back and out of the pickup, to land somewhere on the ground on the other side.
The second gunman got less of the blast. What did hit him struck against his shoulder and head. He held on to his gun but lost the sunglasses, and they took the ski mask with them, revealing him to be a plain-looking boy who couldn't have been old enough to vote. He blinked against the sudden light and then resumed his fumbling reload.
"Kids," I snarled, lifting my shield again. "They're sending kids after me. Hell's bells."
And then something made the hairs on the back of my neck try to lift me off the ground. As the kid with the gun started shooting again, I glanced back over my shoulder.
The old lady with her shopping basket had stopped maybe fifteen feet behind me. I saw now that she wasn't as old as I had thought. I caught a flicker of cool, dark eyes beneath age makeup. Her hands were young and smooth. From the depths of the shopping basket she pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and swung it toward me.
Bullets from the chattering automatic slammed against my shield, and it was all I could do to hold it in place. If I brought any magic to bear against the third attacker, I would lose my concentration and the shield with it---and inexpert or not, the gunman on the truck was spraying around enough lead that sooner or later he wouldn't miss.
On the other hand, if the disguised assassin got a chance to fire that shotgun from five yards away, no one would bother taking me to the hospital. I'd go straight to the morgue.
Bullets hammered into my shield, and I couldn't do anything but watch the third attacker bring the shotgun to bear. I was screwed, and probably Billy was along with me.
Billy moved. He had already gotten out of his T-shirt, and he had enough muscle to ripple---flat, hard muscle, athlete's muscle, not the carefully sculpted build of weight lifters. He dove forward, toward the woman with the shotgun, and stripped out of his sweatpants on the fly. He was naked beneath.
I felt the surge of magic that Billy used then---sharp, precise, focused. There was no sense of ritual in what he did, no slow gathering of power building to release. He blurred as he moved, and between one breath and the next, Billy-the-Naked was gone and Billy-the-Wolf slammed into the assailant, a dark-furred beast the size of a Great Dane, fangs slashing at the hand that gripped the forward stock of the shotgun.
The woman cried out, jerking her hand back, scarlet blood on her fingers, and swept the gun at Billy like a club. He twisted and caught the blow on his shoulders, a snarl exploding from him. He went after the woman's other hand, faster than I could easily see, and the shotgun tumbled to the ground.
The woman screamed again and drew back her hand.
She wasn't human.
Her hands distended, lengthening, as did her shoulders and her jaw. Her nails became ugly, ragged talons, and she raked them down at Billy, striking him across the jaw, this time eliciting a pained yelp mixed with a snarl. He rolled to one side and came up on his feet, circling in order to force the woman-thing's back to me.
The gunman in the truck clicked on empty again. I dropped the shield and hurled myself forward, diving to grip the shotgun. I came up with it and shouted, "Billy, move!"
The wolf darted to one side, and the woman whipped around to face me, her distorted features furious, mouth drooling around tusklike fangs.
I pointed the gun at her belly and pulled the trigger.
The gun roared and bucked, slamming hard against my shoulder. Ten-gauge, maybe, or slug rounds. The woman doubled over, letting out a shriek, and stumbled backward and to the ground. She wasn't down long. She almost bounced back to her feet, scarlet splashed all over her rag of a dress, her face wholly inhuman now. She sprinted past me to the truck and leapt up into the back. The gunman hauled his partner back into the truck with him, and the driver gunned the engine. The truck threw out some turf before it dug in, jounced back onto the street, and whipped away into traffic.
I stared after it for a second, panting. I lowered the shotgun, realizing as I did that I had somehow managed to keep hold of the toad I had picked up in my left hand. It wriggled and struggled in a fashion that suggested I had been close to crushing it, and I tried to ease up on my grip without losing it.
I turned to look for Billy. The wolf paced back over to his discarded sweatpants, shimmered for a second, and became once more the naked young man. There were two long cuts on his face, parallel with his jaw. Blood ran down over his throat in a fine sheet. He carried himself tensely, but it was the only indication he gave of the pain.
"You all right?" I asked him.
He nodded and jerked on his pants, his shirt. "Yeah. What the hell was that?"
"Ghoul," I told him. "Probably one of the LaChaise clan. They're working with the Red Court, and they don't much like me."
"Why don't they like you?"
"I've given them headaches a few times."
Billy lifted a corner of his shirt to hold against the cuts on his face. "I didn't expect the claws."
"They're sneaky that way."
"Ghoul, huh. Is it dead?"
I shook my head. "They're like cockroaches. They recover from just about anything. Can you walk?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Let's get out of here." We headed toward the Beetle. I picked up the cloth sack of toads on the way and started shaking them back out onto the ground. I put the toad I'd nearly squished down with them, then wiped my hand off on the grass.
Billy squinted at me. "Why are you letting them go?"
"Because they're real."
"How do you know?"
"The one I was holding crapped on my hand."
I let Billy into the Blue Beetle and got in the other side. I fetched the first aid kit from under my seat and passed it over to him. Billy pressed a cloth against his face, looking out at the toads. "So that means things are in a bad way?"
"Yeah," I confirmed, "things are in a bad way." I was silent for a minute, then said, "You saved my life."
He shrugged. He didn't look at me.
"So you set up the appointment for three o'clock, right? What was the name? Sommerset?"
He glanced at me and kept the smile from his mouth---but not from his eyes. "Yeah."
I scratched at my beard and nodded. "I've been distracted lately. Maybe I should clean up first."
"Might be good," Billy agreed.
I sighed. "I'm an ass sometimes."
Billy laughed. "Sometimes. You're human like the rest of us."
I started up the Beetle. It wheezed a little, but I coaxed it to life.
Just then something hit my hood with a hard, heavy thump. Then again. Another heavy blow, on the roof.
A feeling of dizziness swept over me, a nausea that came so suddenly and violently that I clutched the steering wheel in a simple effort not to collapse. Distantly, I could hear Billy asking me if I was all right. I wasn't. Power moved and stirred in the air outside---hectic disruption, the forces of magic, usually moving in smooth and quiet patterns, suddenly cast into tumult, disruptive, maddening chaos.
I tried to push the sensations away from me, and labored to open my eyes. Toads were raining down. Not occasionally plopping, but raining down so thick and hard that they darkened the sky. No gentle laundry-chute drop for these poor things, either. They fell like hailstones, splattering on concrete, on the hood of the Beetle. One of them fell hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks through my windshield, and I dropped into gear and scooted down the street. After a few hundred yards we got away from the otherworldly rain.
Both of us were breathing too fast. Billy had been right. The rain of toads meant something serious was going on, magically speaking. The White Council was coming to town tonight to discuss the war. I had a client to meet, and the vampires had evidently upped the stakes (no pun intended), striking at me more openly than they had dared to before.
I flipped on the windshield wipers. Amphibian blood left scarlet streaks on the cracked glass.
"Good Lord," Billy breathed.
"Yeah." I said. "It never rains, it pours."
I dropped Billy off at his apartment near campus. I didn't think the ghoul would be filing a police report, but I wiped down the shotgun anyway. Billy wrapped it in a towel I had in the backseat of the Beetle and took it with him, promising to dispose of the weapon. His girlfriend, Georgia, a willowy girl a foot taller than him, waited on the apartment's balcony in dark shorts and a scarlet bikini top, displaying a generous amount of impressively sun-bronzed skin in a manner far more confident and appealing than I would have guessed from her a year before. My, how the kids had grown.
The moment Billy got out of the car, Georgia looked up sharply from her book and her nostrils flared. She headed into the house and met him at the door with a first aid kit. She glanced at the car, her expression worried, and nodded to me. I waved back, trying to look friendly. From Georgia's expression, I hadn't managed better than surly. They went into the apartment, and I pulled away before anyone could come out to socialize with me.
After a minute I pulled over, killed the engine, and squinted up at myself in the rearview mirror of the Beetle.
It came as a shock to me. I know, that sounds stupid, but I don't keep mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows, even doors, and it was a risk I preferred to skip entirely. I hadn't glanced at a mirror in weeks.
I looked like a train wreck.
More so than usual, I mean.
My features are usually kind of long, lean, all sharp angles. I've got almost-black hair to go with the dark eyes. Now I had grey and purplish circles under them. Deep ones. The lines of my face, where they weren't covered by several months of untrimmed beard, looked as sharp as the edges of a business card.
My hair had grown out long and shaggy---not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way. It didn't even have the advantage of being symmetrical, since a big chunk had been burned short in one spot when a small incendiary had been smuggled to me in a pizza delivery box, back when I could still afford to order pizza. My skin was pale. Pasty, even. I looked like Death warmed over, provided someone had made Death run the Boston Marathon. I looked tired. Burned out. Used up.
I sat back in my seat.
I hate it when I'm wrong. But it looked like maybe Billy and the werewolves (stars and stones, they sounded like a bad rock band) had a point. I tried to think of the last time I'd gotten a haircut, a shave. I'd had a shower last week. Hadn't I?
I mopped at my face with my shaking hands. The days and nights had been blurring lately. I spent my time in the lab under my apartment, researching twenty-four seven. The lab was in the subbasement, all damp stone and no windows. Circadian rhythms, bah. I'd pretty much dispensed with day and night. There was too much to think about to pay attention to such trivial details.
About nine months before, I'd gotten my girlfriend nearly killed. Maybe more than killed.
Susan Rodriguez had been a reporter for a yellow journal called theMidwestern Arcane when we met. She was one of the few people around who were willing to accept the idea of the supernatural as a factual reality. She'd clawed for every detail, every story, every ounce of proof she could dig up so that she could try to raise the public consciousness on the matter. To that end, she'd followed me to a vampire shindig.
And the monsters got her.
Billy had been right about that, too. The vampires, the Red Court, had changed her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they infected her. Though she was still human, technically, she'd been given their macabre thirst. If she ever sated it, she would turn all the way into one of them. Some part of her would die, and she would be one of the monsters, body and soul.
That's why the research. I'd been looking for some way to help her. To create a vaccine, or to purge her body. Something. Anything.
I'd asked her to marry me. She told me no. Then she left town. I read her syndicated column in theArcane . She must have been mailing them in to her editor, so at least I knew she was alive. She'd asked me not to follow her and I hadn't. I wouldn't, until I could figure out a way to get her out of the mess I'd gotten her into. Therehad to be something I could do.
Had to be. There had to be.
I bowed my head, suddenly grimacing so hard that the muscles of my face cramped, ached, and smoldered. My chest felt tight, and my body seemed to burn with useless, impotent flame. I'm a wizard. I should have been able to protect Susan. Should have been able to save her. Should have been able to help her. Should have been smarter, should have been faster, should have been better.
Should have told her you loved her before it was too late. Right, Harry?
I tried not to cry. I willed myself not to with all of my years of training and experience and self-discipline. It would accomplish nothing. It wouldn't put me anywhere closer to finding a cure for Susan.
I was so damned tired.
I left my face in my hands. I didn't want someone walking by to see me bawling.
It took a long time to get myself back under control. I'm not sure how long it was, but the shadows had changed and I was baking in the car, even with the windows down.
It occurred to me that it was stupid to be sitting there on the street for more vampire thugs to come find, plain as day. I was tired and dirty and hungry, but I didn't have the cash to get anything to eat, and by the sun I didn't have the time to go back to the apartment for soup. Not if I was to keep my appointment with Ms. Sommerset.
And I needed that appointment. Billy had been right about that, too. If I didn't start earning my keep again, I would lose the office and the apartment. I wouldn't get much magical research done from a cardboard box in an alley.
Time to get moving, then. I raked my fingers uselessly through my mop of hair and headed for my office. A passing clock told me that I was already a couple of minutes late for the appointment. Between that and my appearance, boy, was I going to wow the client. This day just kept getting better.
My office is in a building in midtown. It isn't much of a building, but it still looked too good for me that day. I got a glare from the aging security guard downstairs and felt lucky that he recognized me from previous encounters. A new guy probably would have given me the bum's rush without blinking. I nodded at the guard and smiled and tried to look businesslike. Heh.
I walked past the elevator on my way to the stairs. There was a sign on it that said it was under repair. The elevator hadn't ever been quite the same since a giant scorpion had torn into one of the cars and someone had thrown the elevator up to the top of its chute with a torrent of wind in order to smash the big bug against the roof. The resulting fall sent the car plummeting all the way back to the ground floor and wreaked havoc with the building in general, raising everyone's rents.
Or that's what I heard, anyway. Don't look at me like that. It could have been someone else. Okay, maybe not the orthodontist on four, or the psychiatrist on six. Probably not the insurance office on seven, or the accountant on nine either. Maybe not the lawyers on the top floor. Maybe. But it isn't always me when something goes catastrophically wrong.
Anyway, no one can prove anything.
I opened the door to the stairwell and headed up the stairs to my office, on the fifth floor. I went down the hall, past the quiet buzz of the consulting firm that took up most of the space on the floor, to my office door.
The lettering on the frosted glass readHARRY DRESDEN---WIZARD. I reached out to open the door. A spark jumped to my finger when my hand got within an inch or three of the doorknob, popping against my skin with a sharp little snap of discomfort.
I paused. Even with the building's AC laboring and wheezing, it wasn'tthat cool and dry. Call me paranoid, but there's nothing like a murder attempt in broad daylight to make a man cautious. I focused on my bracelet again, drawing on my apprehension to ready a shield should I need it.
With the other hand I pushed open the door to my office.
My office is usually pretty tidy. Or in any case, I didn't remember it being quite as sloppy as it looked now. Given how little I'd been there lately, it seemed unfair that it should have gotten quite that bad. The table by the door, where I kept a bunch of flyers with titles like "Magic for Dummies" and "I'm a Wizard---Ask Me How" sat crookedly against the wall. The flyers were scattered carelessly over its surface and onto the floor. I could smell the faintest stink of long-burnt coffee. I must have left it on. Oops. My desk had a similar fungus coating of loose papers, and several drawers in my filing cabinets stood open, with files stacked on top of the cabinets or thrust sideways into their places, so that they stood up out of the drawers. My ceiling fan whirled woozily, clicking on every rotation.
Someone had evidently tried to straighten things up. My mail sat neatly stacked in three different piles. Both metal trash cans were suspiciously empty. Billy and company, then.
In the ruins of my office stood a woman with the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars.
She stood by my desk with her arms folded, facing the door, hips cocked to one side, her expression skeptical. She had white hair. Not white-blond, not platinum. White as snow, white as the finest marble, bound up like a captured cloud to bare the lines of her slender throat. I don't know how her skin managed to look pale beside that hair, but it did. Her lips were the color of frozen mulberries, almost shocking in a smooth and lovely face, and her oblique eyes were a deep green that tinted to blue when she tilted her head and looked me over. She wasn't old. Wasn't young. Wasn't anything but stunning.
I tried to keep my jaw from hitting the floor and forced my brain to start doing something by taking stock of her wardrobe. She wore a woman's suit of charcoal grey, the cut immaculate. The skirt showed exactly enough leg to make it hard not to look, and her dark pumps had heels just high enough to give you ideas. She wore a bone-white V-neck beneath her jacket, the neckline dipping just low enough to make me want to be watching if she took a deep breath. Opals set in silver flashed on her ears, at her throat, glittering through an array of colors I wouldn't have expected from opals---too many scarlets and violets and deep blues. Her nails had somehow been lacquered in the same opalescence.
I caught the scent of her perfume, something wild and rich, heavy and sweet, like orchids. My heart sped up, and the testosterone-oriented part of my brain wished that I'd been able to bathe. Or shave. Or at least that I hadn't worn sweatpants.
Her mouth quirked into a smile, and she arched one pale brow, saying nothing, letting me gawk.
One thing was certain---no woman like that would have anything less than money. Lots of money. Money I could use to pay the rent, buy groceries, maybe even splurge a little and get a wheelbarrow to help with cleaning my apartment. I only hesitated for a heartbeat, wondering if it was proper for a full-fledged wizard of the White Council to be that interested in cash. I made up my mind fast.
Phenomenal cosmic powers be damned. I have a lease.
"Uh, Ms. Sommerset, I presume," I managed finally. No one can do suave like me. If I was careful, I should be able to trip over something and complete the image. "I'm Harry Dresden."
"I believe you are late," she replied. Sommerset had a voice like her outfit---rich, suggestive, cultured. Her English had an accent I couldn't place. Maybe European. Definitely interesting. "Your assistant informed me when to arrive. I don't like to be kept waiting, so I let myself in." She glanced at my desk, then back at me. "I almost wish I hadn't."
"Yeah. I didn't hear you were coming until, uh . . ." I looked around at my office, dismayed, and shut the door behind me. "I know this looks pretty unprofessional."
"Quite correct."
I moved to one of the chairs I keep for clients, facing my desk, and hurriedly cleared it off. "Please, sit down. Would you like a cup of coffee or anything?"
"Sounds less than sanitary. Why should I take the risk?" She sat, her back straight, on the edge of the chair, following me with her eyes as I walked around the desk. They were a cool, noticeable weight on me as I moved, and I sat down at my desk, frowning.
"Are you the kind who takes chances?"
"I like to hedge my bets," she murmured. "You, for example, Mister Dresden. I have come here today to decide whether or not I shall gamble a great deal upon your abilities." She paused and then added, "Thus far, you have made less than a sterling impression."
I rested my elbows on my desk and steepled my fingers. "Yeah. I know that all this probably makes me look like---"
"A desperate man?" she suggested. "Someone who is clearly obsessed with other matters." She nodded toward the stacks of envelopes on my desk. "One who is shortly to lose his place of business if he does not pay his debts. I think you need the work." She began to rise. "And if you lack the ability to take care of such minor matters, I doubt you will be of any use to me."
"Wait," I said, rising. "Please. At least let me hear you out. If it turns out that I think I can help you---"
She lifted her chin and interrupted me effortlessly. "But that isn't the question, is it?" she asked. "The question is whether or notI think you can help me. You have shown me nothing to make me think that you could." She paused, sitting back down again. "And yet . . ."
I sat back down across from her. "Yet?"
"I have heard things, Mister Dresden, about people with your abilities. About the ability to look into their eyes."
I tilted my head. "I wouldn't call it an ability. It just happens."
"Yet you are able to see within them? You call it a soulgaze, do you not?"
I nodded warily and started adding together lots of small bits and pieces. "Yes."
"Revealing their true nature? Seeing the truth about the person upon whom you look?"
"And they see me back. Yes."
She smiled, cool and lovely. "Then let us look upon one another, Mister Dresden, you and I. Then I will know if you can be of any use to me. Surely it will cost me nothing."
"I wouldn't be so sure. It's the sort of thing that stays with you." Like an appendectomy scar, or baldness. When you look on someone's soul, you don't forget it. Not ever. I didn't like the direction this was going. "I don't think it would be a good idea."
"But why not?" she pressed. "It won't take long, will it, Mister Dresden?"
"That's really not the issue."
Her mouth firmed into a line. "I see. Then, if you will excuse me---"
This time I interrupted her. "Ms. Sommerset, I think you may have made a mistake in your estimations."
Her eyes glittered, anger showing for a moment, cool and far away. "Oh?"
I nodded. I opened the drawer to my desk and took out a pad of paper. "Yeah. I've had a rough time of things lately."
"You can't possibly know how little that matters to me."
I drew out a pen, took off the lid, and set it down beside the pad. "Uh-huh. Then you come in here. Rich, gorgeous---kind of too good to be true."
"And?" she inquired.
"Too good to be true," I repeated. I drew the .44-caliber revolver from the desk drawer, leveled it at her, and thumbed back the hammer. "Call me crazy, but lately I've been thinking that if something's too good to be true, then it probably isn't. Put your hands on the desk, please."
Her eyebrows arched. Those gorgeous eyes widened enough to show the whites all the way around them. She moved her hands, swallowing as she did, and laid her palms on the desk. "What do you think you are doing?" she demanded.
"I'm testing a theory," I said. I kept the gun and my eyes on her and opened another drawer. "See, lately, I've been getting nasty visitors. So it's made me do some thinking about what kind of trouble to expect. And I think I've got you pegged."
"I don't know what you are talking about, Mister Dresden, but I am certain---"
"Save it." I rummaged in a drawer and found what I needed. A moment later I lifted a plain old nail of simple metal out of the drawer and put it on the desk.
"What's that?" she all but whispered.
"Litmus test," I said.
Then I flicked the nail gently with one finger, and sent it rolling across the surface of my desk and toward her perfectly manicured hands.
She didn't move until a split second before the nail touched her---but then she did, a blur of motion that took her two long strides back from my desk and knocked over the chair she'd been sitting on. The nail rolled off the edge of the desk and fell to the floor with a clink.
"Iron," I said. "Cold iron. Faeries don't like it."
The expression drained from her face. One moment, there had been arrogant conceit, haughty superiority, blithe confidence. But that simply vanished, leaving her features cold and lovely and remote and empty of all emotion, of anything recognizably human.
"The bargain with my godmother has months yet to go," I said. "A year and a day, she had to leave me alone. That was the deal. If she's trying to weasel out of it, I'm going to be upset."
She regarded me in that empty silence for long moments more. It was unsettling to see a face so lovely look so wholly alien, as though something lurked behind those features that had little in common with me and did not care to make the effort to understand. That blank mask made my throat tighten, and I had to work not to let the gun in my hand shake. But then she did something that made her look even more alien, more frightening.
She smiled. A slow smile, cruel as a barbed knife. When she spoke, her voice sounded just as beautiful as it had before. But it was empty, quiet, haunting. She spoke, and it made me want to lean closer to her to hear her more clearly. "Clever," she murmured. "Yes. Not too distracted to think. Just what I need."
A cold shiver danced down my spine. "I don't want any trouble," I said. "Just go, and we can both pretend nothing happened."
"But it has," she murmured. Just the sound of her voice made the room feel colder. "You have seen through this veil. Proven your worth. How did you do it?"
"Static on the doorknob," I said. "It should have been locked. You shouldn't have been able to get in here, so you must have gone through it. And you danced around my questions rather than simply answering them."
Still smiling, she nodded. "Go on."
"You don't have a purse. Not many women go out in a three-thousand-dollar suit and no purse."
"Mmmm," she said. "Yes. You'll do perfectly, Mister Dresden."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I'm having nothing more to do with faeries."
"I don't like being called that, Mister Dresden."
"You'll get over it. Get out of my office."
"You should know, Mister Dresden, that my kind, from great to small, are bound to speak the truth."
"That hasn't slowed your ability to deceive."
Her eyes glittered, and I saw her pupils change, slipping from round mortal orbs to slow feline lengths. Cat-eyed, she regarded me, unblinking. "Yet have I spoken. I plan to gamble. And I will gamble upon you."
"Uh. What?"
"I require your service. Something precious has been stolen. I wish you to recover it."
"Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to recover stolen goods for you?"
"Not for me," she murmured. "For the rightful owners. I wish you to discover and catch the thief and to vindicate me."
"Do it yourself," I said.
"In this matter I cannot act wholly alone," she murmured. "That is why I have chosen you to be my emissary. My agent."
I laughed at her. That made something else come into those perfect, pale features---anger. Anger, cold and terrible, flashed in her eyes and all but froze the laugh in my throat. "I don't think so," I said. "I'm not making any more bargains with your folk. I don't even know who you are."
"Dear child," she murmured, a slow edge to her voice. "The bargain has already been made. You gave your life, your fortune, your future, in exchange for power."
"Yeah. With my godmother. And that's still being contested."
"No longer," she said. "Even in this world of mortals, the concept of debt passes from one hand to the next. Selling mortgages, yes?"
My belly went cold. "What are you saying?"
Her teeth showed, sharp and white. It wasn't a smile. "Your mortgage, mortal child, has been sold. I have purchased it. You are mine. And youwill assist me in this matter."
I set the gun down on my desk and opened the top drawer. I took out my letter opener, one of the standard machined jobs with a heavy, flat blade and a screw-grip handle. "You're wrong," I said, and the denial in my voice sounded patently obvious, even to me. "My godmother would never do that. For all I know, you're trying to trick me."
She smiled, watching me, her eyes bright. "Then by all means, let me reassure you of the truth."
My left palm slammed down onto the table. I watched, startled, as I gripped the letter opener in my right hand, slasher-movie style. In a panic, I tried to hold back my hand, to drop the opener, but my arms were running on automatic, like they were someone else's.
"Wait!" I shouted.
She regarded me, cold and distant and interested.
I slammed the letter opener down onto the back of my own hand, hard. My desk is a cheap one. The steel bit cleanly through the meat between my thumb and forefinger and sank into the desk, pinning me there. Pain washed up my arm even as blood started oozing out of the wound. I tried to fight it down, but I was panicked, in no condition to exert a lot of control. A whimper slipped out of me. I tried to pull the steel away, to get itout of my hand, but my arm simply twisted, wrenching the letter opener counterclockwise.
The pain flattened me. I wasn't even able to get enough breath to scream.
The woman, the faerie, reached down and took my fingers away from the letter opener. She withdrew it with a sharp, decisive gesture and laid it flat on the desk, my blood gleaming all over it. "Wizard, you know as well as I. Were you not bound to me, I would have no such power over you."
At that moment, most of what I knew was that my hand hurt, but some dim part of me realized she was telling the truth. Faeries don't just get to ride in and play puppet master. You have to let them in. I'd let my godmother, Lea, in years before, when I was younger, dumber. I'd given her the slip last year, forced an abeyance of her claim that should have protected me for a year and a day.
But now she'd passed the reins to someone else. Someone who hadn't been in on the second bargain.
I looked up at her, pain and sudden anger making my voice into a low, harsh growl. "Who are you?"
The woman ran an opalescent fingernail through the blood on my desk. She lifted it to her lips and idly touched it to her tongue. She smiled, slower, more sensual, and every bit as alien. "I have many names," she murmured. "But you may call me Mab. Queen of Air and Darkness. Monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe."
The bottom fell out of my stomach.
A Faerie Queen. A Faerie Queen was standing in my office. I was looking at a Faerie Queen. Talking to a Faerie Queen.
And she had me by the short hairs.
Boy, and I'd thought my life was on the critical list already.
Fear can literally feel like ice water. It can be a cold feeling that you swallow, that rolls down your throat and spreads into your chest. It steals your breath and makes your heart labor when it shouldn't, before expanding into your belly and hips, leaving quivers behind. Then it heads for the thighs, the knees (occasionally with an embarrassing stop on the way), stealing the strength from the long muscles that think you should be using them to run the hell away.
I swallowed a mouthful of fear, my eyes on the poisonously lovely faerie standing on the other side of my desk.
It made Mab smile.
"Yes," she murmured. "Wise enough to be afraid. To understand, at least in part. How does it feel, to know what you know, child?"
My voice came out unsteady, and more quiet than I would have liked. "Sort of like Tokyo when Godzilla comes up on the beach."
Mab tilted her head, watching me with that same smile. Maybe she didn't get the reference. Or maybe she didn't like being compared to a thirty-story lizard. Or maybe shedid like it. I mean, how should I know? I have enough trouble figuring out human women.
I didn't meet Mab's eyes. I wasn't worried about a soulgaze any longer. Both parties had to have a soul for that to happen. But plenty of things can get to you if you make eye contact too long. It carries all sorts of emotions and metaphors. I stared at Mab's chin, my hand burning with pain, and said nothing because I was afraid.
I hate being afraid. I hate it more than anything in the whole world. I hate being made to feel helpless. I hate being bullied, too, and Mab might as well have been ramming her fist down my throat and demanding my lunch money.
The Faerie Queens were bad news. Big bad news. Short of calling up some hoary old god or squaring off against the White Council itself, I wasn't likely to run into anything else with as much raw power as Mab. I could have thrown a magical sucker punch at her, could have tried to take her out, but even if we'd been on even footing I doubt I would have ruffled her hair. And she had a bond on me, a magical conduit. She could send just about anything right past my defenses, and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.
Bullies make me mad---and I've been known to do some foolish things when I'm angry.
"Forget it," I said, my voice hot. "No deal. Get it over with and blast me. Lock the door on your way out."
My response didn't seem to ruffle her. She folded her arms and murmured, "Such anger. Such fire. Yes. I watched you stalemate your godmother the Leanansidhe autumn last. Few mortals ever have done as much. Bold. Impertinent. I admire that kind of strength, wizard. I need that kind of strength."
I fumbled around on my desk until I found the tissue dispenser and started packing the wound with the flimsy fabric. "I don't really care what you need," I told her. "I'm not going to be your emissary or anything else unless you want to force me, and I doubt I'd be much good to you then. So do whatever you're going to do or get out of my office."
"You should care, Mister Dresden," Mab told me. "It concerns you explicitly. I purchased your debt in order to make you an offer. To give you the chance to win free of your obligations."
"Yeah, right. Save it. I'm not interested."
"You may serve, wizard, or you may be served. As a meal. Do you not wish to be free?"
I looked up at her, warily, visions of barbecued me on a table with an apple in my mouth dancing in my head. "What do you mean by 'free'?"
"Free," she said, wrapping those frozen-berry lips around the word so that I couldn't help but notice. "Free of Sidhe influence, of the bonds of your obligation first to the Leanansidhe and now to me."
"The whole thing a wash? We go our separate ways?"
"Precisely."
I looked down at my hurting hand and scowled. "I didn't think you were much into freedom as a concept, Mab."
"You should not presume, wizard. I adore freedom. Anyone who doesn't have it wants it."
I took a deep breath and tried to get my heart rate under control. I couldn't let either fear or anger do my thinking for me. My instincts screamed at me to go for the gun again and give it a shot, but I had to think. It was the only thing that could get you clear of the fae.
Mab was on the level about her offer. I could feel that, sense it in a way so primal, so visceral, that there was no room left for doubt. She would cut me loose if I agreed to her bargain. Of course, her price might be too high. She hadn't gotten to that yet. And the fae have a way of making sure that further bargains only get you in deeper, instead of into the clear. Just like credit card companies, or those student loan people. Now there's evil for you.
I could feel Mab watching me, Sylvester to my Tweetie Bird. That thought kind of cheered me up. Generally speaking, Tweetie kicks Sylvester's ass in the end.
"Okay," I told her. "I'm listening."
"Three tasks," Mab murmured, holding up three fingers by way of visual aid. "From time to time, I will make a request of you. When you have fulfilled three requests, your obligation to me ceases."
Silence lay on the room for a moment, and I blinked. "What. That'sit ?"
Mab nodded.
"Any three tasks? Any three requests?"
Mab nodded.
"Just as simple as that? I mean, you say it like that, and I could pass you the salt three times and that would be that."
Her eyes, green-blue like glacial ice, remained on my face, unblinking. "Do you accept?"
I rubbed at my mouth slowly, mulling it over in my head. It was a simple bargain, as these things went. They could get really complicated, with contracts and everything. Mab had offered me a great package, sweet, neat, and tidy as a Halloween candy.
Which meant that I'd be an idiot not to check for razor blades and cyanide.
"I decide which requests I fulfill and which I don't?"
"Even so."
"And if I refuse a request, there will be no reprisals or punishments from you."
She tilted her head and blinked her eyes, slowly. "Agreed. You, not I, will choose which requests you fulfill."
There was one land mine I'd found, at least. "And no more selling my mortgage, either. Or whistling up the lackeys to chastise or harass me by proxy. This remains between the two of us."
She laughed, and it sounded as merry, clear, and lovely as bells---if someone pressed them against my teeth while they were still ringing. "As your godmother did. Fool me twice, shame on me, wizard? Agreed."
I licked my lips, thinking hard. Had I left her any openings? Could she get to me any other way?
"Well, wizard?" Mab asked. "Have we a bargain?"
I gave myself a second to wish I'd been less tired. Or less in pain. The events of the day and the impending Council meeting this evening hadn't exactly left my head in world-class negotiating condition. But I knew one thing for certain. If I didn't get out from under Mab's bond, I would be dead, or worse than dead, in short order. Better to act and be mistaken than not to act and get casually crushed.
"All right," I said. "We have a bargain." When I said the words, a little frisson prickled over the nape of my neck, down the length of my spine. My wounded hand twitched in an aching, painful pang.
Mab closed her eyes, smiling a feline smile with those dark lips, and inclined her head. "Good. Yes."
You know that look on Wile E. Coyote's face, when he runs at full steam off the cliff and then realizes what he's done? He doesn't look down, but he feels around with one toe, and right then, right before he falls, his face becomes drawn with a primal dread.
That's what I must have looked like. I know it was pretty much what I felt like. But there was no help for it. Maybe if I didn't stop to check for the ground underneath my feet, I'd keep going indefinitely. I looked away from Mab and tried to tend to my hand as best I could. It still throbbed, and disinfecting the wound was going to hurt a lot more. I doubted it would need sutures. A small blessing, I guess.
A manila envelope hit my desk. I looked up to see Mab drawing a pair of gloves onto her hands.
"What's this?" I asked.
"My request," she replied. "Within are the details of a man's death. I wish you to vindicate me of it by discovering the identity of his killer and returning what was stolen from him."
I opened the envelope. Inside was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of a body. An old man lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his neck at a sharp angle to his shoulders. He had frizzy white hair, a tweed jacket. Accompanying the picture was an article from theTribune , headlinedLOCAL ARTIST DIES IN MIDNIGHT ACCIDENT.
"Ronald Reuel," I said, glancing over the article. "I've heard of him. Has a studio in Bucktown, I think."
Mab nodded. "Hailed as a visionary of the American artistic culture. Though I assume they use the term lightly."
"Creator of worlds of imagination, it says. I guess now that he's dead, they'll say all kinds of nice things." I read over the rest of the article. "The police called it an accident."
"It was not," Mab responded.
I looked up at her. "How do you know?"
She smiled.
"And why should you care?" I asked. "It isn't like the cops are after you."
"There are powers of judgement other than mortal law. It is enough for you to know that I wish to see justice done," she said. "Simply that."
"Uh-huh," I said, frowning. "You said something was stolen from him. What?"
"You'll know it."
I put the picture back in the envelope and left it on my desk. "I'll think about it."
Mab assured me, "You will accept this request, Wizard Dresden."
I scowled at her and set my jaw. "I said I'llthink about it."
Mab's cat-eyes glittered, and I saw a few white, white teeth in her smile. She took a pair of dark sunglasses from the pocket of her jacket. "Is it not polite to show a client to the door?"
I glowered. But I got up out of the chair and walked to the door, the Faerie Queen's heady perfume, the narcoticscent of her enough to make me a little dizzy. I fought it away and tried to keep my scowl in place, opening the door for her with a jerky motion.
"Your hand yet pains you?" she asked.
"What do you think?"
Mab placed her gloved hand on my wounded one, and a sudden spike of sheer, vicious cold shot up through the injury like a frozen scalpel before lancing up my arm, straight toward my heart. It took my breath, and I felt my heart skip a beat, two, before it labored into rhythm again. I gasped and swayed, and only leaning against the door kept me from falling down completely.
"Dammit," I muttered, trying to keep my voice down. "We had a deal."
"I agreed not to punish you for refusing me, wizard. I agreed not to punish or harass you by proxy." Mab smiled. "I did that just for spite."
I growled. "That isn't going to make it more likely that I take this case."
"You will take it, emissary," Mab said, her voice confident. "Expect to meet your counterpart this evening."
"What counterpart?"
"As you are Winter's emissary in this matter, Summer, too, has sought out one to represent her interests."
"I got plans tonight," I growled. "And I haven't taken the case."
Mab tilted her dark glasses down, cat eyes on mine. "Wizard. Do you know the story of the Fox and Scorpion?"
I shook my head, looking away.
"Fox and Scorpion came to a brook," Mab murmured, her voice low, sweet. "Wide was the water. Scorpion asked Fox for a ride on his back. Fox said, 'Scorpion, will you not sting me?' Scorpion said, 'If I did, it would mean the death of us both.' Fox agreed, and Scorpion climbed onto his back. Fox swam, but halfway over, Scorpion struck with his deadly sting. Fox gasped, 'Fool, you have doomed us both. Why?' 'I am a scorpion,' said Scorpion. 'It is my nature." '
"That's the story?" I said. "Don't quit your day job."
Mab laughed, velvet ice, and it sent another shiver through me. "You will accept this case, wizard. It is what you are. It is your nature." Then she turned and walked down the hall, aloof, reserved, cold. I glowered after her for a minute before I shut the door.
Maybe I'd been shut away in my lab too long, but Spenser never mentions that the Faerie Queen has a great ass.
So I notice these things. So sue me.
I leaned against my door with my eyes closed, trying to think. I was scared. Not in that half-pleasant adrenaline-charged way, but quietly scared. Wait-on-the-results-of-medical-tests scared. It's a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it.
I was working for the queen of wicked faeries---well, Queen of Winter, of the Unseelie faeries, at any rate. The Unseelie weren't universally vicious and evil, any more than the Seelie, the Summer fae, were all kind and wise. They were much like the season for which they had been named---cold, beautiful, pitiless, and entirely without remorse. Only a fool would willingly associate with them.
Not that Mab had given me much of a choice, but technically speaking there had been one. I could have turned her down flat and accepted whatever came.
I chewed on my lip. Given the kind of business I was in, I hadn't felt the need to spend too much time hunting for a good retirement plan. Wizards can live a long, long time, but most of the ones that do tend to be the kind that stick at home in their study. Not many tossed their gauntlets into as many faces as I had.
I'd been clever a couple of times, lucky a couple of times, and I'd come out ahead of the game so far---but sooner or later the dice were going to come up snake eyes. It was as simple as that, and I knew it.
Fear. Maybe that was why I'd agreed to Mab's bargain. Susan's life had been twisted horribly, and that was my fault. I wanted to help her before I went down swinging.
But some little voice in the back of my head told me that I was being awfully noble for someone who had flinched when push had come to shove. The little voice told me that I was making excuses. Some part of me that doesn't trust much and believes in even less whispered that I had simply been afraid to say no to a being who could probably make me long for death if I denied her.
Either way, it was too late for questions now. I'd made the bargain, for better or worse. If I didn't want it to end badly, I'd better start figuring out how to get out of it without getting swallowed up in faerie politics. I wouldn't do that by taking the case of Ronald Reuel, I was pretty damn sure. Mab wouldn't have offered it if she hadn't thought it would get me further entangled than I already was. Maybe she had me in a metaphysical armlock, but that didn't mean I was going to jump every time she said "frog." I could figure out something else. And besides, I had other problems on my mind.
There wasn't much time to spare before the Council meeting that evening, so I got my things together and got ready to leave. I paused at the door, with that nagging feeling I get when I'm forgetting something. My eyes settled on my stack of unpaid bills and I remembered.
Money. I'd come here to get a case. To make some cash. To pay my bills. Now I was hip-deep in trouble and heading straight out to sea, and I hadn't gotten a retainer or made one red cent.
I swore at myself and pulled the door shut behind me.
You'd think as long as I was gambling with my soul, I would have thought to get Mab to throw in fifty bucks an hour plus expenses.
I headed out to start taking care of business. Traffic in Chicago can be the usual nightmare of traffic in any large American city, but that afternoon's was particularly bad. Stuck behind a wreck up ahead, the Beetle turned into an oven, and I spent a while sweating and wishing that I wasn't too much of a wizard for a decent modern air conditioner to survive. That was one of the hazards of magical talent. Technology doesn't get along so well when there is a lot of magic flying around. Anything manufactured after World War II or so seemed prone to failure whenever a wizard was nearby. Stuff with microcircuits and electrical components and that kind of paraphernelia seemed to have the most trouble, but even simpler things, like the Beetle's air conditioner, usually couldn't last long.
Running late, I dropped by my apartment and waded through the wreckage looking for my gear for the meeting. I couldn't find everything, and I didn't have time to get a shower. The refrigerator was empty, and all I could find to eat was a half-wrapped candy bar I'd started and never finished. I stuffed it into my pocket, then headed for the meeting of the White Council of Wizardry.
Where I was sure to cut a devastating swath with my couth, hygiene, and natural grace.
I pulled into the parking lot across the street from McCormick Place Complex, one of the largest convention centers in the world. The White Council had rented one of the smaller buildings for the meeting. The sun hung low in the sky, growing larger and redder as it dropped toward the horizon.
I parked the Beetle in the relative cool of the lowest level of the parking garage, got out of the car, and walked around to the front to open the trunk. I was shrugging into my robe when I heard a car coming in, engine rumbling and rattling. A black '37 Ford pickup, complete with rounded fenders and wooden-slat sides on the bed, pulled into the empty space next to mine. There wasn't any rust on the old machine, and it gleamed with fresh wax. A weathered shotgun rode on top of a wooden rack against the rear wall of the passenger compartment, and in the slot beneath it sat a worn old wizard's staff. The Ford crunched to a halt with a kind of dinosaur solidity, and a moment later the engine died.
The driver, a short, stocky man in a white T-shirt and blue denim overalls, opened the door and hopped down from the truck with the brisk motions of a busy man. His head was bald except for a fringe of downy white tufts, and a bristling white beard covered his mouth and jowls. He slammed the door shut with thoughtless strength, grinned, and boomed, "Hoss! Good to see you again."
"Ebenezar," I responded, if without the same earringing volume. I felt myself answer his grin with my own, and stepped over to him to shake his offered hand. I squeezed hard, purely out of self-defense. He had a grip that could crush a can of spinach. "You'd better take the shotgun down. Chicago PD is picky about people with guns."
Ebenezar snorted and said, "I'm too old to go worrying about every fool thing."
"What are you doing out of Missouri, sir? I didn't think you came to Council meetings."
He let out a barking laugh. "The last time I didn't, they saddled me with this useless teenage apprentice. Now I don't hardly dare miss one. They might make him move in again."
I laughed. "I wasn't that bad, was I?"
He snorted. "You burned down my barn, Hoss. And I never did see that cat again. He just lit out and didn't come back after what you did with the laundry."
I grinned. Way back when, I'd been a stupid sixteen-year-old orphan who had killed his former teacher in what amounted to a magical duel. I'd gotten lucky, or it would have been me that had been burned to a briquette instead of old Justin. The Council has Seven Laws of Magic, and the first one is Thou Shalt Not Kill. When you break it, they execute you, no questions asked.
But some of the other wizards had thought I deserved lenience, and there was a precedent for using lethal magic in self-defense against the black arts. I'd been put on a kind of horrible probation instead, with any further infraction against the Laws punishable by immediate summary judgement. But I'd also been sixteen, and legally a minor, which meant I had to go someplace---preferably where the Council could keep an eye on me and where I could learn better control of my powers.
Ebenezar McCoy had lived in Hog Hollow, Missouri, for as long as anyone could remember---a couple of centuries at least. After my trial, the Council packed me off to his farm and put him in charge of the remainder of my education. Education, to Ebenezar, meant a lot of hard work on the farm during the day, studying in the evening, and getting a good night's sleep.
I didn't learn much magic from him, but I'd gotten some more important stuff. I'd learned more about patience. About creating something, making something worthwhile out of my labor. And I'd found as much peace as a teenager could expect. It had been a good place for me then, and he'd given me the kind of respect and distance I'd needed. I would always be grateful.
Ebenezar frowned past me, squinting at the Beetle. I followed his gaze and realized that my car looked like it had been pounded with bloody hailstones. The toad blood had dried to dark caramel brown, except where my windshield wipers had swept it away. Ebenezar looked back at me, lifting his eyebrows.
"Rain of toads," I explained.
"Ah." He rubbed his jaw and squinted at me and then at the cloth wrapped around my hand. "And that?"
"Accident in the office. It's been a long day."
"Uh-huh. You know, you don't look so good, Hoss." He looked up at me, his eyes steady, frowning. I didn't meet the look. We'd traded a soulgaze, years ago, so I wasn't afraid of it happening again. I just didn't want to look at the old man and see disappointment there. "I hear you been getting into some trouble up here."
"Some," I admitted.
"You all right?"
"I'll make it."
"Uh-huh. I'm told the senior Council is pretty upset," he said. "Could mean trouble for you, Hoss."
"Yeah. I figured."
He sighed and shook his head, looking me up and down, nose wrinkling. "You don't exactly look like a shining example of young wizardry. And you're not going to make much of an impression wearing that."
I scowled, defensive, and draped the stole of rich blue silk over my head. "Hey, I'm supposed to wear a robe. We all are."
Ebenezar gave me a wry look and turned to the pickup. He dragged a suit carrier out of the back and pulled out a robe of opulent dark fabric, folding it over one arm. "Somehow I don't think a plaid flannel bathrobe is what they had in mind."
I tied the belt of my old bathrobe and tried to make the stole look like it should go with it. "My cat used my good robe as a litter box. Like I said, it's been a long day, sir."
He grunted and took his stumpy old wizard's staff off the gun rack. Then he drew out his scarlet stole and draped it over the robe. "Too hot to wear this damn thing out here. I'll put it on inside." He looked up, pale blue eyes glittering as he swept his gaze around the parking garage.
I frowned at him and tilted my head. "We're late. Shouldn't we be getting to the meeting?"
"In a minute. Some people want to talk before we close the circle." He glanced aside at me and said more quietly, "Senior Council."
I drew in a sharp breath. "Why do they want to talk to us?"
"Not us. You. Because I asked them to, boy. People are scared. If the Senior Council allows things to come to an open vote of the entire Council, it could go badly for you. So I wanted some of them to get a chance to meet you for themselves before they started making choices that could get you hurt."
Ebenezar leaned back against his truck and folded his arms across his belly, bowing his head with his eyes squinted almost completely shut. He said nothing more. Nothing about him betrayed any tension, from the set of his bull neck and solid shoulders to the stillness of his gnarled, work-hardened hands. But I felt it in him, somewhere.
I said quietly, "You're going out on a limb for me, aren't you?"
He shrugged. "Some, maybe."
I felt the anger run hot in my belly, and I tightened the muscles of my jaw. But I made an effort to keep my voice even. Ebenezar had been more than my teacher. He'd been my mentor at a time when I hadn't had anything else left to me. He'd helped me when a lot of other people wanted to kick me while I was down---or, more accurately, decapitate me while I was down. I owed him my life in more than one sense.
It would be wrong for me to lose my temper, no matter how tired or hurt I was. Besides, the old man could probably kick my ass. So I managed to tone my answer down to, "What the hell do you think you're doing,sir ? I am not your apprentice anymore. I can look out for myself."
He didn't miss the anger. Guess I'm not much of a poker player. He looked up at me and said, "I'm trying to help you, boy."
"I've got all the help I can stand already," I told him. "I've got vampires breathing down my neck, toads falling from the sky, I'm about to get evicted from everywhere, I'm late to the Council meeting, and I amnot going to stand around out here and suck up to members of the Senior Council to lobby their vote."
Ebenezar thrust out his jaw, rapping his staff against the ground to emphasize his sentences. "Harry, this is not a game. The Wardens and the Merlin are dead set against you. Theywill move. Without support in the Senior Council you're in trouble, Hoss."
I shook my head and thought of Mab's glacial gaze. "It can't be much more than I'm in already."
"The hell it can't. They could make a sacrificial lamb of you."
"They will or they won't. Either way I'm not going to start brownnosing the Council now, Senior or otherwise."
"Harry, I'm not saying you need to get on your knees and beg, but if you would just---"
I rolled my eyes. "What? Offer a couple of favors? Sell my vote to one of the blocs? Fuck that. Pardon my French. I've got enough problems without---" I broke off abruptly, narrowing my eyes. "You're the last one I would expect to be telling me to get involved in Council politics."
Ebenezar scowled at me. "Oh?"
"Yeah. In fact, the last time I checked, you told me the whole swill-spouting pack of lollygagging skunkwallows could transform one another into clams, for all you cared."
"I did not say that."
"Did so."
Ebenezar's face turned red. "Boy. I ought to---"
"Save it," I told him. "Go ahead and punch me or whatever, but threats just aren't hitting me like they used to."
Ebenezar snorted at me and slammed his staff on the concrete once more before turning and stalking several paces away. He stood there for a minute, muttering to himself. Or I thought he was muttering. After a minute, the sound resolved itself into swallowed laughter.
I scowled at his back. "What?" I demanded. "Why are you laughing at me?"
Ebenezar turned out to an open parking space across the row and said, "There. Are you satisfied?"
I never felt a whisper of power, not a breath of magic stirring against me. Whatever veil had been used, it was beyond anything I could have even attempted. I'm not exactly a neurosurgeon when it comes to magic. I've had my moments, but mostly I muddle through by shoving a lot of energy into my spells until it doesn't matter if half of it is slopping out. Magically speaking, I'm a brawny thug, and noisy as hell.
This veil was good, almost perfect, completely silent. Way better than I would be able to do anytime in the next couple of decades. I stared in abrupt shock as it fell and two people I hadn't sensed at all simply flickered into existence in front of me.
The first was a woman better than six feet tall. She wore her grey hair coiled in a net at the base of her neck. She had already put on her robes of office, black silk nearly the same color as her skin, and her purple stole echoed the gems at her throat. Her eyebrows were still dark, and she had one of them arched as she regarded Ebenezar, then me, with a completely unamused expression. When she spoke, her voice was a low, rich alto. "Lollygagging skunkwallows?"
"Matty---" Ebenezar began, laughter still flavoring his words. "You know how I get when I'm talking about Council politics."
"Don't you 'Matty' me, Ebenezar McCoy," she snapped. She looked past my old mentor to focus on me. "Wizard Dresden, I am less than amused with your lack of respect toward the White Council."
I lifted my chin and glared down at the woman without meeting her eyes. It's a tough trick to learn, but if you're motivated enough you can do it. "That's a coincidence. I'm not terribly amused with you spying on me."
The black woman's eyes flashed, but Ebenezar cut in before either of us could gather any more steam. "Harry Dresden," he said dryly, "Meet Martha Liberty."
She shot him a look and said pointedly, "He's arrogant, Ebenezar. Dangerous."
I snorted. "That's every wizard ever."
Martha continued as if I hadn't spoken. "Bitter. Angry. Obsessive."
Ebenezar frowned. "Seems to me he has good reason to be. You and the rest of the Senior Council saw to that."
Martha shook her head. "You know what he was meant to be. He's too great a risk."
I snapped my fingers twice and hooked a thumb at my own chest. "Hey, lady. He's also right here."
Her eyes flashed at me. "Look at him, Ebenezar. He's a wreck. Look at the destruction he has caused."
Ebenezar took two quick, angry steps toward Martha. "By challenging the Red Court when they were going to kill that young woman? No, Matty. Hoss didn't cause what's happened since. They did. I've read his report. He stood up to them when they damn well needed standing up to."
Martha folded her arms, strong and brown against the front of her robes. "The Merlin says---"
"I know what he says," Ebenezar muttered. "By now I don't even need to hear him say it. And as usual, he's half right, half wrong, and all gutless."
Martha frowned at him for a long and silent moment. Then she looked at me and asked, "Do you remember me, Mister Dresden?"
I shook my head. "They had a hood on me all through the trial, and I missed the meeting Warden Morgan called a couple years back. They were taking a bullet out of my hip."
"I know. I never saw your face before today." She moved then, lifting a slender staff of some dark reddish wood, and walked toward me, the staff clicking with each step. I faced her, bracing myself, but she didn't try to meet my gaze. She studied my features for a long moment and then said, very quietly, "You have your mother's eyes."
An old pain rolled through me. I barely managed more than a whisper in response. "I never knew her."
"No. You didn't." She lifted one wide, heavy hand and passed it through the air on either side of my head, as though smoothing my hair without touching it. Then she raked her eyes over me, staring intently at my bandaged hand. "You hurt. You're in great pain."
"It isn't bad. It should heal in a few days."
"I'm not talking about your hand, boy." She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Her voice came heavily, slowly, as though her lips were reluctant to let the words pass them. "Very well, Ebenezar. I will support you."
She stepped back and away from me, back to the side of the second person who had appeared. I'd almost forgotten about him, and looking at him now I began to see why. He contained a quality of stillness I could all but feel around him---easy to sense but difficult to define. His features, his bearing, everything about him blended into his background, swallowed by that stillness, patient and quiet as a stone beneath moon and sun.
He was of innocuous height, five eight, maybe five nine. His dark hair was plaited in a long braid, despite age that seamed his features like bronzed leather under a scarlet sun, warm and worn. His eyes, beneath silver brows, were dark, inscrutable, intense. Eagle feathers adorned his braid, a necklace of bits of bone circled his throat, and he had a beaded bracelet wrapped around one forearm, which poked out from beneath his black robe. One weathered hand gripped a simple, uncarved staff.
"Hoss," Ebenezar said, "this here is Listens to Wind. But that's always been too much of a mouthful for me, even for a genuine Illinois medicine man. I just call him Injun Joe."
"How---" I began. Maybe some kind of irony could be found in the first part of asking how did he do, but something scratched at my foot and I left off the rest. I let out a yelp and jumped away from a flash of fur near my feet without stopping to see what it was. It had been that kind of day.
I tripped over my own staff and fell down. I scrambled over on my back to put my legs between my face and whatever snarling thing might be coming for me, drawing back one foot to kick.
I needn't have bothered. A raccoon, and a fairly young one at that, stood up on its hind legs and chittered at me in annoyance, soft grey fur bristling wildly as though it had been fit for an animal several sizes larger. The raccoon gave me what I swore was an irritated look, eyes glittering within the dark mask of fur around them, then ran over to Injun Joe's feet and neatly scaled the old man's wooden staff. It swarmed up Injun Joe's arm to perch on his shoulder, still chittering and squeaking.
"Uh," I managed, "how do you do."
The raccoon chirruped again, and Injun Joe tilted his head to one side, then nodded. "Good. But Little Brother is irritated with you. He thinks anyone with that much food should share it."
I frowned, then I remembered the half-eaten stale candy bar in my pocket. "Oh, right." I pulled it out, broke it in half, and held it out to the raccoon. "Peace?"
Little Brother let out a pleased squeak and darted back down Injun Joe's arm and staff to my hand. He snatched the candy and then retired a few feet away to eat it.
When I looked up, Injun Joe stood over me, offering his hand. "Little Brother thanks you. He likes you, too. How do you do, Wizard Dresden."
I took his hand and got to my feet. "Thanks, uh, Listens to Wind."
Ebenezar interjected, "Injun Joe."
Injun Joe winked one grave eye at me. "The redneck hillbilly doesn't read. Otherwise he'd know that he can't call me that anymore. Now I'm Native American Joe."
I wasn't sure I was supposed to laugh, but I did. Injun Joe nodded, dark eyes sparkling. Then he murmured, "The one you knew as Tera West sends her respects."
I blinked at him.
Injun Joe turned to Ebenezar and nodded, then walked slowly back to Martha's side.
Ebenezar let out a satisfied grunt. "Fine. Now where is the Russian? We haven't got all day."
Martha's expression became remote. Injun Joe's face didn't change, but he moved his eyes to the tall wizard beside him. No one spoke, and the silence grew thick enough to choke on.
Ebenezar's face went very pale, and he suddenly leaned hard on his staff. "Simon," he whispered. "Oh, no."
I stepped up beside Ebenezar. "What happened?"
Martha shook her head. "Simon Pietrovich. Senior Council member. Our vampire expert. He was killed less than two days ago. The whole compound in Archangel, Ebenezar. All of them. I'm sorry."
Ebenezar shook his head slowly. His voice was a pale shadow of its usual self. "I've been to his tower. It was a fortress. How did they do it?"
"The Wardens said that they couldn't be sure, but it looked like someone let the killers in past the defenses. They didn't get away unscathed. There were the remains of half a dozen nobles of the Red Court. Many of their warriors. But they killed Simon and the rest."
"Let them in?" Ebenezar breathed. "Treachery? But even if it was true, it would have to be someone who knew his defenses inside and out."
Martha glanced at me, then back at Ebenezar. Something passed between them in that look, but I couldn't tell what.
"No," Ebenezar said. "That's insane."
"Master to student. You know what the Wardens will say."
"It's buffalo chips. It wouldn't ever get past the Senior Council."
"Eben," Martha said gently, "Joseph and I are only two votes now. Simon is gone."
Ebenezar took a blue bandanna from the pocket of his overalls and rubbed it over his pate. "Damnation," he muttered. "Guts and damnation."
I looked at Ebenezar and then at Martha. "What?" I asked. "What does this mean?"
She said, "It means, Wizard Dresden, that the Merlin and others on the Council are preparing to bring allegations against you accusing you of precipitating the war with the Red Court and placing the responsibility for a number of deaths on your head. And because Joseph and I no longer have the support of Simon on the Senior Council, it means that we cannot block the Merlin from laying it to general vote."
Injun Joe nodded, fingers absently resting on Little Brother's fur. "Many of the Council are frightened, Hoss Dresden. Your enemies will use this opportunity to strike through them. Fear will drive them to vote against you."
I shot Ebenezar a glance. My old mentor traded a long look with me, and I saw his eyes stir with uncertainty.
"Hell's bells," I whispered. "I'm in trouble."
A heavy silence followed, until Ebenezar flexed the fingers of one hand and his knuckles popped. "Who is up for Simon's place?"
Martha shook her head. "I suspect the Merlin will want one of the Germans."
Ebenezar growled. "I've got fifty years' seniority on every mother's son of them."
"It won't matter," Martha said. "There are too many Americans on the Senior Council already for the Merlin's tastes."
Injun Joe scratched Little Brother's chest and said, "Typical. Only real American on the Senior Council is me. Not like the rest of you Johnny-come-latelies."
Ebenezar gave Injun Joe a tired smile.
Martha said, "The Merlin won't be happy if you decide to press a claim now."
Ebenezar snorted. "Aye. And I can't tell you how that breaks my heart."
Martha frowned, pressing her lips together. "We'd best get inside, Ebenezar. I'll tell them to wait for you."
"Fine," my old teacher said, his words clipped. "Go on in."
Without a further word, Martha and Injun Joe departed, black robes whispering. Ebenezar slipped into his robe and put on his scarlet stole. Then he took up his staff again and strode determinedly toward the convention center. I kept pace silently, and worried.
Ebenezar surprised me by speaking. "How's your Latin coming, Hoss? You need me to translate?"
I coughed. "No. I think I can manage."
"All right. When we get inside, hang on to your temper. You've got a reputation as a hothead for some reason."
I scowled at him. "I do not."
"And for being stubborn and contrary."
"I am not."
Ebenezar's worn smile appeared for a moment, but by then we had reached the building where the Council was to meet. I stopped walking, and Ebenezar paused, looking back at me.
"I don't want to go in with you," I said. "If this goes bad, maybe it's better if you have some distance from me."
Ebenezar frowned at me, and for a second I thought he was going to argue. Then he shook his head and went into the building. I gave him a couple of minutes, and then walked up the steps and went in.
The building had the look of an old-time theater---high, arched ceilings, floors of polished stone laid with strips of carpet, and several sets of double doors leading into the theater itself. The air conditioning had probably been running full blast earlier, but now there was no sound of fan or vent and the building inside felt warmer than it probably should have. None of the lights were on. You couldn't really expect even basic things like lights and air conditioning to keep running in a building full of wizards.
All the doors leading into what was apparently an actual theater were closed except for one pair, and two men wearing dark Council robes, scarlet stoles, and the grey cloak of the Wardens stood before them.
I didn't recognize one of the men, but the other was Morgan. Morgan stood nearly as tall as I did, only with maybe another hundred pounds of solid, working-man muscle. He had a short beard, patchy with brown and grey, and he wore his hair in a long ponytail. His face was still narrow, sour, and he had a voice to match it. "Finally," he muttered upon seeing me. "I've been waiting for this, Dresden. Finally, you're going to face justice."
"I see someone had a nice big bowl of Fanatic-Os this morning," I said. "I know you don't like it, Morgan, but I was cleared of all those charges. Thanks to you, actually."
His sour face screwed up even more. "I only reported your actions to the Council. I did not think they would be so"---he spat the word like a curse---"lenient."
I stopped in front of the two Wardens and held out my staff. Morgan's partner lifted a crystal pendant from around his neck and ran the crystal over the staff and then over my head, temples, and down the front of my body. The crystal pulsed with a gentle glow of light as it passed over each chakra point. The second Warden nodded to Morgan, and I started to step past him and into the theater.
He put out one broad hand to stop me. "No," he said. "Not yet. Get the dogs."
The other Warden frowned, but that was all the protest he made. He turned and slipped into the theater, and a moment later emerged, leading a pair of Wardhounds behind him.
In spite of myself, I swallowed and took a half step back from them. "Give me a break, Morgan. I'm not enspelled and I'm not toting in a bomb. I'm not the suicidal type."
"Then you won't mind a quick check," Morgan said. He gave me a humorless smile and stepped forward.
The Wardhounds came with him. They weren't actual dogs. I like dogs. They were statues made of some kind of dark grey-green stone, their shoulders as high as my own belt. They had the gaping mouth and too-big eyes of Chinese temple dogs, complete with curling beards and manes. Though they weren't flesh, they moved with a kind of ponderous liquid grace, stone "muscles" shifting beneath the surface of their skins as if they had been living beings. Morgan touched each on the head and muttered something too vague for me to make out. Upon hearing it, both Wardhounds focused upon me and began to prowl in a circle around me, heads down, the floor quivering beneath their weight.
I knew they'd been enchanted to detect any of countless threats that might attempt to approach a Council meeting. But they weren't thinking beings---only devices programmed with a simple set of responses to predetermined stimuli. Though Wardhounds had saved lives often before, there had also been accidents---and I didn't know if my run-in with Mab would leave a residual signature that might set the Wardhounds off.
The dogs stopped, and one of them let out a growl that sounded soothingly akin to bedrock being ripped apart by a backhoe. I tensed and looked down at the dog standing to my right. Its lips had peeled back from gleaming, dark fangs, and its empty eyes were focused on my left hand---the one Mab had wounded by way of demonstration.
I swallowed and held still and tried to think innocent thoughts.
"They don't like something about you, Dresden," Morgan said. I thought I heard an almost eager undertone to his voice. "Maybe I should turn you away, just to be careful."
The other Warden stepped forward, one hand on a short, heavy rod worn on his belt. He murmured, "Could be the injury, if he's hurt. Wizard blood can be pretty potent. Moody, too. Dog could be reacting to anger or fear, through the blood."
"Maybe," Morgan said testily. "Or it could be contraband he's trying to sneak in. Take off the bandage, Dresden."
"I don't want to start bleeding again," I said.
"Fine. I'm denying you entrance, then, in accordance with---"
"Dammit, Morgan," I muttered. I all but tossed my staff at him. He caught it, and held it while I tore at the makeshift bandages I'd put on my hand. It hurt like hell, but I pulled them off and showed him the swollen and oozing wound.
The Wardhound growled again and then appeared to lose interest, pacing back over to sit down beside its mate, suddenly inanimate again.
I turned my eyes to Morgan and stared at him, hard. "Satisfied?" I asked him.
For a second I thought he would meet my gaze. Then he shoved my staff back at me as he turned away. "You're a disgrace, Dresden. Look at yourself. Because of you, good men and women have died. Today you will be called to answer for it."
I tied the bandage back on as best I could and gritted my teeth to keep from telling Morgan to take a long walk off a short cliff. Then I brushed past the Wardens and stalked into the theater.
Morgan watched me go, then said to his partner, "Close the circle." He followed me into the theater, shutting the door behind him, even as I felt the sudden, silent tension of the Wardens closing the circle around the building, shutting it off from any supernatural access.
I hadn't ever actually seen a meeting of the Council---not like this. The sheer variety of it all was staggering, and I stood staring for several moments, taking it in.
The space was a dinner theater of only moderate size, lit by nothing more than a few candles on each table. The room wouldn't have been crowded for a matinee, but as a gathering place for wizards it was positively swamped. The tables on the floor of the theater were almost completely filled with black-robed wizards, variously sporting stoles of blue, gold, and scarlet. Apprentices in their muddy-brown robes lurked at the fringes of the crowd, standing along the walls or crouching on the floor beside their mentors' chairs.
The variety of humanity represented in the theater was startling. Canted Oriental eyes, dark, rich skins of Africa, pale Europeans, men and women, ancient and young, long and short hair, beards long enough to tuck into belts, beards wispy enough to be stirred by a passing breeze. The theater buzzed in dozens of languages, of which I could identify only a fraction. Wizards laughed and scowled, smiled and stared blankly, sipped from flasks and soda cans and cups or sat with eyes closed in meditation. The scents of spices and perfumes and chemicals all blended together into something pervasive, always changing, and the auras of so many practitioners of the Art seemed to be feeling just as social, reaching out around the room to touch upon other auras, to echo or strike dissonance with their energies, tangible enough to feel without even trying. It was like walking through drifting cobwebs that were constantly brushing against my cheeks and eyelashes---not dangerous but disconcerting, each one wildly unique, utterly different from the next.
The only thing the wizards had in common was that none of them looked as scruffy as me.
A roped-off section at the far right of the hall held the envoys of various organizations of allies and supernatural interests, most of whom I had only a vague idea about. Wardens stood here and there where they could overlook the crowd, grey cloaks conspicuous amid the black and scattered brown ones---but somehow I doubted they were as obtrusive as my own faded blue-and-white flannel. I garnered offended looks from nearly everyone I walked past---mostly white-haired old wizard folk. One or two apprentices nearer my own age covered their mouths as I went past, hiding grins. I looked around for an open chair, but I didn't spot one, until I saw Ebenezar wave at me from a table in the front row of the theater, nearest the stage. He nodded at the seat next to him. It was the only place available, and I joined him.
On the theater stage stood seven podiums, and at six of them stood members of the Senior Council, in dark robes with purple stoles. Injun Joe Listens to Wind and Martha Liberty stood at two.
At the center podium stood the Merlin of the White Council, a tall man, broad of shoulder and blue of eye, with hair falling past his shoulders in shining, pale waves and a flowing silver beard. The Merlin spoke in a rolling basso voice, Latin phrases gliding as smoothly from his mouth as from any Roman senator's.
". . . et, quae cum ita sint, censeo iam nos dimittere rees cottidianas et de magna re gravi deliberare---id est, illud bellum contra comitatum rubrum."And given the circumstances, I move to dispense with the usual formalities in order to discuss the most pertinent issue before us---the war with the Red Court. "Consensum habemus?"All in favor?
There was a general murmur of consent from the wizards in the room. I didn't feel any need to add to it. I tried to slip unnoticed into the seat beside Ebenezar, but the Merlin's bright blue eyes spotted me and grew shades colder.
The Merlin spoke, and though I knew he spoke perfectly intelligible English, he addressed me in Latin, quick and liquid---but his own perfect command of the speech worked against him. He was easy to understand. "Ahhh, Magus Dresdenus. Prudenter ades nobis dum de bello quod inceperis diceamus. Ex omni parte ratio tua pro hoc comitatu nobis placet."Ah, Wizard Dresden. How thoughtful of you to join us in discussions of the war you started. It is good to know that you have such respect for this Council.
He delivered that last while giving my battered old bathrobe a pointed look, making sure that anyone in the room who hadn't noticed would now. Jerk. He let silence fall afterward and it was left to me to answer him. Also in Latin. Big fat jerk.
Still, it was my first Council meeting as a full wizard, and hewas the Merlin, after all. And Idid look pretty bad. Plus, Ebenezar shot me a warning glance. I swallowed a hot answer and took a stab at diplomacy.
"Uh," I said, "ego sum miser, Magus Merlinus. Dolor diei longi me tenet. Opus es mihi altera, uh, vestiplicia."Sorry, Merlin. It's been a very long day. I meant to have my other robe.
Or that's what Itried to say. I must have conjugated something wrong, because when I finished, the Merlin blinked at me, expression mild. "Quod est?"
Ebenezar winced and asked me in a whisper, "Hoss? You sure you don't want me to translate for you?"
I waved a hand at him. "I can do it." I scowled as I tried to put together the right words, and spoke again. "Excusationem vobis pro vestitu meo atque etiam tarditate facio."Please excuse my lateness and appearance.
The Merlin regarded me with passionless, distant features, evidently well content to let my mouth run. Ebenezar put his hand over his eyes.
"What?" I demanded of him in a fierce whisper.
Ebenezar squinted up at me. "Well. First you said, 'I am a sorry excuse, Merlin, a sad long day held me. I need me a different laundress." '
I blinked. "What?"
"That's what the Merlin said. Then you said 'Excuses to you for my being dressed and I also make lately." '
I felt my face heat up. Most of the room was still staring at me as though I was some sort of raving lunatic, and it dawned on me that many of the wizards in the room probably did not speak English. As far as they were concerned, I probably sounded like one.
"Goddamned correspondence course. Maybe you should translate for me," I said.
Ebenezar's eyes sparkled, but he nodded with a grave expression. "Happy to."
I slipped into my seat while Ebenezar stood up and made an apology for me, his Latin terse and precise, his voice carrying easily throughout the hall. I saw the gathered wizards' expressions grow more or less mollified as he spoke.
The Merlin nodded and continued in his textbook-perfect Latin. "Thank you, Wizard McCoy, for your assistance. The first order of business in addressing the crisis before us is to restore the Senior Council to its full membership. As some of you have doubtless learned by now, Senior Council member Pietrovich was killed in an attack by the Red Court two days past."
A gasp and a low murmur ran through the theater.
The Merlin allowed a moment to pass. "Past conflicts with the Red Court have not moved with this kind of alacrity, and this may indicate a shift in their usual strategy. As a result, we need to be able to react quickly to further developments---which will require the leadership provided by a full membership on the Senior Council."
The Merlin continued speaking, but I leaned over to Ebenezar. "Let me guess," I whispered. "He wants to fill the opening on the Senior Council so that he'll be able to control the vote?"
Ebenezar nodded. "He'll have three votes for sure, then, and most times four."
"What are we going to do about it?"
"You aren't going to do anything. Not yet." He looked intently at me. "Keep your temper, Hoss. I mean it. The Merlin will have three plans to take you down."
I shook my head. "What? How do you know that?"
"He always does things that way," Ebenezar muttered. His eyes glittered with something ugly. "A plan, a backup plan, and an ace in the hole. I'll shoot down the first one, and I'll help you with the second. The third is all yours, though."
"What do you mean? What plan?"
"Hush, Hoss. I'm paying attention."
A balding wizard with bristling white eyebrows and a bushy blue beard, his scalp covered in flowing blue tattoos, leaned forward from the far side of the table and glared at me. "Shhhhh."
Ebenezar nodded at the man, and we both turned back to face the stage.
"And it is for this reason," the Merlin continued, "that I now ask Klaus Schneider, as a long-standing senior wizard of impeccable reputation, to take on the responsibility of membership in the Senior Council. All in favor?"
Martha glanced at Ebenezar and murmured, "A moment, honored Merlin. I believe protocol requires that we open the floor to debate."
The Merlin sighed. "Under normal circumstances, Wizard Liberty, of course. But we have little time for the niceties of our usual procedures. Time is of the essence. So, all in---"
Injun Joe interrupted. "Wizard Schneider is a fine enchanter, and he has a reputation for skill and honesty. But he is young for such a responsibility. There are wizards present who are his senior in experience and the Art. They deserve the consideration of the Council."
The Merlin shot Injun Joe a frown. "Thankyou for your perspective, Wizard Listens to Wind. But though your commentary is welcome, it was not asked for. There is no one present senior to Wizard Schneider who has not already declined a seat upon the Senior Council, and rather than run through meaningless nominations and repeated declinations, I had intended---"
Ebenezar cut in, sotto voce but loud enough for the Merlin to hear him, in English. "You had intended to shove your favorite down everyone's throats while they were too worried to notice."
The Merlin fell abruptly quiet, his eyes falling on Ebenezar in a sudden, pointed silence. He spoke in a low voice, his English carrying a rich British accent. "Go back to your mountain, Ebenezar. Back to your sheep. You are not welcome here, and never have been."
Ebenezar looked up at the Merlin with a toothy smile, Scots creeping back into his vowels. "Aye, Alfred, laddie, I know." He switched back to Latin and raised his voice again. "Every member of the Council has a right to speak his mind on these matters. You all know how important the appointment of one Senior Council member is. How many of you believe this matter too serious to leave to a consensus? Speak now."
The theater rumbled with a general "Aye," to which I added my own voice. Ebenezar looked around the room and then raised an eyebrow at the Merlin.
I could see frustration not quite hidden on the old man's face. I could almost taste his desire to slam his fist down on the podium, but he controlled himself and nodded. "Very well. Then, in accordance with procedure, we will offer the position to the seniormost wizards present." He looked to one side, where a slim-faced, prim-looking wizard sat with a quill, a bottle of ink, and pages and pages of parchment. "Wizard Peabody, will you consult the registry?"
Peabody reached under his table and came out with a bulging satchel. He muttered something to himself and rubbed some ink onto his nose with one finger, then he opened the satchel, which held what looked like a couple of reams of parchment. His eyes glazed over slightly, and he reached into the papers seemingly at random. He drew out a single page, put it on the desk before him, nodded in satisfaction, then read in a reedy voice, "Wizard Montjoy."
"Research trip in the Yucatán," Martha Liberty said.
Peabody nodded. "Wizard Gomez."
"Still sleeping off that potion," provided a grey-cloaked Warden standing by the wall.
Peabody nodded. "Wizard Luciozzi."
"Sabbatical," said the blue-bearded and tattooed wizard behind me. Ebenezar frowned, and one of his cheeks twitched in a nervous tic.
It went on like that for close to a quarter hour. Some of the more interesting reasons for absence included "He got real married," "Living under the polar ice cap," and "Pyramid sitting," whatever that was.
Peabody finally read, with a glance up at the Merlin, "Wizard McCoy." Ebenezar grunted and stood. Peabody read another half-dozen names before stating, "Wizard Schneider."
A small, round-cheeked man with a fringe of gauzy white down over his scalp and a round belly stretching his robes stood up and gave Ebenezar a brief nod. Then he looked up at the Merlin and said, in Latin with a heavy Germanic accent, "While I am grateful for the offer, honored Merlin, I must respectfully decline your nomination, in favor of Wizard McCoy. He will serve the Council more ably than I."
The Merlin looked as though someone had grated slices of lemon against his gums. "Very well," he said. "Do any other senior wizards here wish to present themselves for consideration over Wizard McCoy?"
I was betting no one would, especially given the looks on the faces of the wizards nearby. Ebenezar himself never moved his eyes from the Merlin. He just stood with his feet spread wide apart and planted, his eyes steady, confident. Silence fell over the hall.
The Merlin looked around the hall, his lips pressed tightly together. Finally, he gave his head a very slight shake. "All in favor?"
The room rumbled with a second, more affirmative "Aye."
"Very well," the Merlin said, his upper lip twisting and giving the words an acid edge. "Wizard McCoy, take your place upon the Senior Council."
There was a murmur of what sounded a bit like relief from those in the hall. Ebenezar glanced back and winked at me. "One down. Two to go," he murmured. "Stay sharp." Then he hitched up his robes and stumped onto the stage, to the empty podium between Martha Liberty and Injun Joe. "Less talking, more doing," he said, loudly enough to be heard by the whole hall. "There's a war on."
"Precisely what I was thinking," the Merlin said, and nodded to one side. "Let us address the war. Warden Morgan, would you please stand forward and give the Council the Wardens' tactical assessment of the Red Court?"
An oppressive silence settled over the room, so that I heard every sound of Morgan's boots as he stepped up onto the stage. The Merlin moved aside, and Morgan placed a glittering gem or crystal of some kind upon the podium. Behind that, he set a candle, which he lit with a muttered incantation. Then he framed the candle with his hands and murmured again.
Light streaked from the candle into the crystal in a glowing stream and sprang up out of the crystal again in a large cone stretching up above the stage, several yards across at the top. Within the cone of light appeared a spinning globe of the Earth, its continents vaguely misshapen, like something drawn from a couple of centuries past.
A murmur ran through the room, and Bluebeard, at my table, muttered in Latin, "Impressive."
"Bah," I said in English. "He stole that fromReturn of the Jedi. "
Bluebeard blinked at me, uncomprehending. I briefly debated trying to translateStar Wars into Latin and decided against it. See, I can have common sense, too.
Morgan's low voice rumbled out in Latin phrases, rough but understandable. Which meant he spoke it better than me. Jerk. "The flashing red spots on the map are the locations of known attacks of the Red Court and their allies. Most of them resulted in casualties of one form or another." As he spoke, widely scattered motes of red color began to form on the globe like the glowing lights of a Christmas tree. "As you can see, most of the activity has taken place in Western Europe."
A mutter went through the room. The Old World was the domain of the Old School of wizardry---the "maintain secrecy and don't attract attention" way of thinking. I guess they have a point, given the Inquisition and all. I don't belong to the Old School. I have an ad in the Yellow Pages, under "Wizards." Big shocker---I'm the only one there. I have to pay the bills somehow, don't I?
Morgan droned on dispassionately. "We have known for a long time that the main power center of the Red Court is somewhere in South America. Our sources there are under pressure, and it has become difficult to get any information out of the area. We have had advance warning of several attacks, and the Wardens have managed to intercede with minimal losses of life, with the exception of the attack at Archangel." The globe paused in its spinning, and my eyes fastened on the glowing point of light on the northwest coast of Russia. "Though it is presumed that Wizard Pietrovich's death curse took a heavy toll on his attackers, no one in his household survived the attack. We don't know how they got past his defenses. It would appear that the Red Court may have access to information or aspects of the Art that they have not before had."
The Merlin stepped back to the podium, and Morgan collected his crystal. The globe vanished. "Thank you, Warden," the Merlin said. "As we expected from Council records, our various retreats and Paths through the Nevernever are threatened. Frankly speaking, ladies and gentlemen, the Red Court holds us at a disadvantage within the mortal world. Modern technology so often disagrees with us that it makes travel difficult under the best of circumstances and unreliable in a time of conflict. We vitally need to secure safe Paths through the Nevernever or else risk being engaged and overwhelmed in detail by an opponent who can move more rapidly than we. To that end, we have dispatched missives to both Queens of the Sidhe. Ancient Mai."
My eyes flickered to the podium to the Merlin's left, where stood another of the Senior Council members, apparently the Ancient Mai. She was a tiny woman of Oriental extraction, her skin fine and pale, her granite-colored hair worn in a long braid curled up at the back of her head and held with a pair of jade combs. She had delicate features only lightly touched by the passage of years, though her dark eyes were rheumy. She unfolded a letter written upon parchment and addressed the Council in a creaky but firm voice. "From Summer, we received this answer. 'Queen Titania does not now, nor will she ever choose sides in the disputes of mortal and anthrophage. She bids both Council and Court alike to keep their war well away from the realms of Summer. She will remain neutral." '
Ebenezar frowned and leaned forward to ask, "And from Winter?"
I twitched.
The Ancient tilted her head and regarded Ebenezar in perfect silence for a moment, somehow implying her annoyance at his interruption. "Our courier did not return. Upon consulting records of former conflicts, we may confidently assume that Queen Mab will involve herself, if at all, in a time and manner of her own choosing."
I twitched more. There was a pitcher of water on the table, along with some glasses. I poured a drink. The pitcher only rattled against the cup a little. I glanced back at Bluebeard and saw him regarding me with a pensive gaze.
Ebenezar scowled. "Now what is that supposed to mean?"
The Merlin stepped in smoothly. "It means that we must continue whatever diplomacy we may with Winter. At all costs, we must secure the cooperation of one of the Sidhe Queens---or at least prevent the Red Court from accomplishing an alliance of its own until this conflict can be resolved."
Martha Liberty lifted both eyebrows. "Resolved?" she said, her tone pointed. "I would have chosen a word like 'finished' myself."
The Merlin shook his head. "Wizard Liberty, there is no need for this dispute to devolve into an even more destructive conflict. If there exists even a small chance that an armistice can be attained---"
The black woman's voice lashed out at the Merlin, harsh and cold. "Ask Simon Pietrovich how interested the vampires are in reaching a peaceable settlement."
"Contain your emotions, Wizard," the Merlin replied, his voice calm. "The loss of Pietrovich strikes each of us deeply, but we cannot allow that loss to blind us to potential solutions."
"Simon knew them, Merlin," Martha said, her tone flat. "He knew them better than any of us, and they killed him. Do you really think that they will be inclined to seek a reasonable peace with us, when they have already destroyed the wizard best able to protect himself against them? Why should they seek a peace, Merlin? They'rewinning ."
The Merlin waved a hand. "Your anger clouds your judgement. They will seek a peace because even in victory they would pay too high a cost."
"Don't be a fool," Martha said. "They will never sue for peace."
"In point of fact," said the Merlin, "they already have." He gestured to the second podium on his left. "Wizard LaFortier."
LaFortier was an emaciated man of medium height and build. His cheekbones stood out grotesquely from his sunken face, and his bulging eyes looked a couple of sizes too large. He had no hair at all, not even eyebrows, and on the whole it gave him a skeletal look. When he spoke, his voice came out in a resonant basso, deep and warm and smooth. "Thank you, Merlin." He held up an envelope in one thin-fingered hand. "I have here a missive from Duke Ortega, the war leader of the Red Court, received this morning. In it he details the Red Court's motivations in this matter and the terms they desire for peace. He also offers, by token of goodwill, a temporary cessation of hostilities in order to give the Council time to consider, effective this morning."
"Bullshit!" The word burst out of my mouth before my brain realized I had said it. A round of snickers, mostly from brown-robed apprentices, echoed through the theater, and I heard fabric rustle as every wizard in the place turned to look at me. I felt my face heat again, and cleared my throat. "Well, it is," I said to the room. Ebenezar translated for me. "I was attacked by a Red Court hit squad only a few hours ago."
LaFortier smiled at me. It stretched his lips out to show his teeth, like the dried face of a thousand-year-old mummy. "Even if you are not lying, Wizard Dresden, I would hardly expect perfect control of all Red Court forces given your role in precipitating this war."
"Precipitatingit?" I exclaimed. "Do you have any idea what theydid ?"
LaFortier shrugged. "They defended an assault upon their sovereignty, Wizard. You, acting in the role of representative of this Council, attacked a noble of their court, damaged her property, and killed members of said noble's household and her as well. In addition, the records of local newspapers and authorities reveal that during the altercation, several young men and women were also killed---burned up in a fire, I think. Does that sound familiar to you, Wizard Dresden?"
I clenched my jaw, the sudden rush of rage spilling through me in such a torrent that I could scarcely see, much less trust myself to speak. I'd been brought before the Council for the first time when I had been put on trial for violating the First Law of Magic: Thou Shalt Not Kill. I'd burned my old mentor, Justin, to death. When I'd clashed with Bianca, lately of the Red Court, the previous year, I'd called up a firestorm when it looked as if my companions and I were going to buy it anyway. A lot of vampires burned. The bodies of some people had been found afterward, too. There was no way to tell which of them had been victims of the vampires and already dead when the fire got to them and which, if any, had been alive before I came along. I still have nightmares about it. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a willing murderer.
To my shock, I felt myself gathering in power, getting ready to unleash it at LaFortier, with his skeletal smirk. Ebenezar caught my eye, his own a little wide, and shook his head quickly. I clenched my hands into tight fists instead of blasting anybody with magic and forced myself to sit down again before I spoke. Self-disciplined, that's me. "I have already detailed my recollection of the events in my report to the Council. I stand by them. Anyone who tells you differently than what you read there is lying."
LaFortier rolled his eyes. "How comfortable it must be to live in such a clear-cut world, Wizard Dresden. But we are not counting the cost of your actions in coins or hours wasted---we are counting it in blood. Wizards aredying because of whatyou did while acting in this Council's name." LaFortier swept his gaze to the rest of the theater, his expression stern, controlled. "Frankly, I think it may be wise for the Council to consider that we may indeed stand in the wrong in this matter and that it might be prudent to give careful considerations to the Red Court's terms for peace."
"What do they want?" I snarled at the man, Ebenezar providing the Latin for the rest of the Council. "A pint of blood a month from each of us? Rights to hunt freely wherever they choose? Amulets to shield them from the light of the sun?"
LaFortier smiled at me and folded his hands atop his podium. "Nothing so dramatic, Dresden. They simply want what any of us would want in this situation. They want justice." He leaned toward me, bulging eyes glittering. "They want you."
Gulp.
"Me?" I said.Et la, LaFortier. Feel the bite of my rapier wit.
"Yes. Duke Ortega writes that you, Wizard Dresden, are considered a criminal by the Red Court. In order to end this conflict they wish to extradite you to an area of their designation for trial. A resolution that is, perhaps, distasteful, but may also be only just."
He didn't get the last word out of his mouth before several dozen wizards around the auditorium rose to their feet with outraged shouts. Others stood up to cry out against them, and still more against them. The room descended into a cacophony of shouts, threats, and cussing (among wizards, cursing is a different matter altogether) in dozens of languages.
The Merlin let people shout for a moment before he called out in a ringing voice, "Order!" No one paid him any attention. He tried once more, then lifted his staff and slammmed it down hard on the stage beside him.
There was a flash of light, a roar of sound, and a concussion that slopped the water in my glass up over the brim, spilling it on my flannel bathrobe. A couple of the wispier wizards were knocked down by the force of it---but in any case, the shouting ceased.
"Order!" the Merlin demanded again, in exactly the same tone. "I am well aware of the implications of this situation. But lives are at stake. Your lives and my own. We must consider our options with the utmost gravity."
"What options?" Ebenezar demanded. "We are wizards, not a herd of frightened sheep. Will we give one of our own to the vampires now and pretend that none of this has happened?"
LaFortier snapped, "You read Dresden's report. By his own admission, what the Red Court accuses him of is true. They have a just grievance."
"The situation was clearly a manipulation, a scheme to force Dresden to those actions in hopes of killing him."
"Then he should have been smarter," LaFortier said, his tone flat. "Politics is not a game for children. Dresden played and was beaten. It is time for him to pay the price so that the rest of us may live in peace."
Injun Joe put a hand on Ebenezar's arm and spoke quietly. "Peace cannot be bought, Aleron," he murmured to LaFortier. "History teaches that lesson. I learned it. You should have, too."
LaFortier sneered at Injun Joe. "I don't know what you are babbling about, but---"
I rolled my eyes and stood up again. "He's talking about the American tribes losing their land to white settlers, dolt." I figured Ebenezar would leave the insult out of the translation, but there were more stifled snorts from brown robes around the room. "And about Europe's attempts to appease Hitler before the Second World War. Both attempted to purchase peace with compromise, and both got swallowed up bit by bit."
The Merlin glared at me. "I did not recognize you, Wizard Dresden. Until you have the floor, you will refrain from such outbursts or I will have you removed from this meeting."
I clenched my jaw and sat down. "Sorry. Here I was, figuring we had a responsibility to protect people. What was I thinking?"
"We will protect no one, Wizard Dresden, if we are dead," the Merlin snapped. "Be silent or be removed."
Martha Liberty shook her head. "Merlin, it seems clear that we cannot simply hand one of our own over to the Red Court because of their demands. Despite past differences with Council policy, Dresdenis a fully ranked wizard---and given his performance in recent years, he seems well deserving of the title."
"I do not question his ability with the Art," LaFortier put in. "I question his judgement, his choices. He has played loose and reckless with his status as a wizard since Justin's death." The bald man turned his bulging eyes to the wizards in the theater. "Wizard Harry Dresden. Apprentice to the Wizard Justin DuMorne. Apprentice to the Wizard Simon Pietrovich. I wonder how the Red Court learned enough of Pietrovich's defenses to bypass them so completely, Dresden."
I stared at LaFortier for a second, shocked. Did the man actually believe that I had learned about this Pietrovich's defenses through Justin? Then sold a Senior Council member of the White Council to the vampires? Justin hadn't exactly taken me around much. Before I'd been put on trial, I hadn't even known that therewas a White Council---or other wizards at all, for that matter. I gave him the only answer I could. I laughed at him. Wheezy, quiet laughter. I shook my head.
LaFortier's expression grew outraged. "You see?" he demanded to the room. "You see in what contempt he holds this Council? His position as a wizard? Dresden has constantly endangered us all with his obtuse indiscretion, his reckless disregard for secrecy and security. Even if it was someone else who betrayed Pietrovich and his students to the Red Court, Dresden is as guilty of their murder as if he himself had cut their throats. Let the consequences of his decisions fall upon him."
I rose and faced LaFortier, but glanced at the Merlin for permission to speak. He gave the floor to me with a grudging nod. "Impossible," I said. "Or at least impractical. I have violated none of the Laws of Magic in this matter, which rules out a summary trial. I am a full wizard. By Council law, I am therefore entitled to an in-depth investigation and trial---neither of which would provide any kind of workable solution anytime soon."
The room rumbled with agreement when Ebenezar finished translating for me. That was hardly a surprise. If the Council jammed a trial down my throat and then threw me to the wolves, it would set a deadly precedent---one that could haunt any wizard in the room, and they knew it.
LaFortier jabbed a forefinger at me and said, "Quite true. Provided that you are, in fact, a full wizard. I move that the Council vote, immediately, to determine whether or not Dresden's status as a wizard is valid. I remind the Council that his appointment to his stole was a de facto decision based upon circumstantial evidence. He has never stood Trial, never been judged worthy by his peers."
"Like hell I haven't," I answered him. "I beat Justin DuMorne in a duel to the death. Is that not Trial enough for you?"
"Wizard DuMorne died, yes," LaFortier said. "Whether he was defeated in an open duel or burned in his sleep is another matter entirely. Merlin, you have heard my motion. Let the Council vote upon the status of this madman. Let us end this foolishness and return to our lives."
Ouch. An angle I hadn't thought of. If I was stripped of my stole, it would be like a medieval noble having his title taken away. I would no longer be a wizard, politically speaking, and according to Council law and to the Accords between the various supernatural factions, the Council would be obligated to turn over a fugitive murderer to the Red Court. Which would mean, if I was fortunate, a horrible death. If I wasn't fortunate, it could be considerably worse.
Given the kind of day I'd been having, my heart started skittering in my chest.
The Merlin frowned and nodded. "Very well, then. We vote upon the issue of the status of one Harry Dresden. Let those who would have him keep his stole vote for, and those who favor that his status be restored to that of apprentice vote against. All those in fav---"
"Wait," Ebenezar interjected. "I invoke my right as a member of the Senior Council to reduce the vote to the Senior Council alone."
The Merlin glared at Ebenezar. "On what grounds?"
"On the grounds that there exists a great deal of information about this matter of which the Council at large is unaware. It would be impractical to attempt to explain it all."
"Seconded," Injun Joe murmured.
"Accord," Martha Liberty added. "Three votes yea, honored Merlin. Let the Senior Council make this decision."
My heart started beating again. Ebenezar had made the right call. In a room full of frightened men and women, I wouldn't have had a prayer of keeping my stole. With the vote reduced to the Senior Council, maybe I had a fighting chance.
I could almost see the Merlin trying to figure a way out of it, but Council law is pretty clear on that point. The Senior Council members can always take a matter to a closed vote with three supporters.
"Very well," the Merlin said. The room rustled with whispers. "My interests lie in preserving the health and safety of those upon this Council, and of the communities of mankind in general. I vote against Dresden's validity as an initiate wizard of this Council."
LaFortier jumped in, bulging eyes narrowed. "As do I, and for the same reasons."
Ebenezar spoke next. "I've lived with this young man. I know him. He's a wizard. I vote to preserve his status."
Little Brother chittered from his perch on Injun Joe's shoulder, and the old wizard stroked the raccoon's tail with one hand. "My instincts about this man tell me that he comports himself as a wizard should." He gave a very mild glance to LaFortier. "I vote in favor of his status."
"As do I," Martha Liberty added. "This is not a solution. It is merely an action."
Harry three, bad guys two. I turned my eyes to Ancient Mai.
The tiny woman stood with her eyes closed for a moment, her head bowed. Then she murmured, "No wizard should so blatantly misuse his status as a member of this Council. Nor should he be as irresponsible as Harry Dresden has been with his use of the Art. I vote against his retention of wizard status."
Three to three. I licked my lips, and realized at just that moment that I had been too nervous and involved with events to take note of the seventh member of the Senior Council. He was standing at the far left of the stage. Like the other wizards, he wore a black robe, but his dark purple, almost black stole had a deep cowl upon it as well, which covered his face entirely. The candlelit dimness masked in shadow whatever the cowl didn't cover. He was tall. Taller than me. Seven feet, and thin. His arms were folded, hands hidden inside the voluminous sleeves of his robe. Every eye in the place turned to the seventh member of the Council, and a silence deeper than that of the nearby Great Lake enveloped the room.
It lasted for long moments, then the Merlin prompted, quietly, "Gatekeeper. What say you?"
I leaned forward in my chair, my mouth dry. If he voted against me, I was betting a Warden would zap me unconscious before the sound of his voice died away.
After several of my frantic heartbeats, the Gatekeeper spoke in a resonant, gentle voice. "It rained toads this morning."
A baffled silence followed. It became, a moment later, a baffled mutter.
"Gatekeeper," the Merlin said, his voice more urgent, "how do you vote?"
"With deliberation," the Gatekeeper said. "It rained toads this morning. That bears consideration. And for that, I must hear what word returns with the messenger."
LaFortier eyed the Gatekeeper and said impatiently, "What messenger? What are you talking about?"
The back doors of the theater burst open, hard, and a pair of grey-cloaked Wardens entered the theater. They each had a shoulder under one of the arms of a brown-robed young man. His face was puffy and swollen, and his hands looked like rotten sausages about to burst. Frost clung to his hair in a thick coating, and his robe looked like it had been dipped in water and then dragged behind a sled team from Anchorage to Nome. His lips were blue, and his eyes fluttered and rolled semicoherently. The Wardens dragged him to the foot of the stage, and the Senior Council gathered at its edge, looking down.
"This is my courier to the Winter Queen," Ancient Mai stated.
"He insisted," one of the Wardens said. "We tried to take him for treatment, but he got so worked up about it I was afraid he would hurt himself, so we brought him to you, Ancient."
"Where did you find him?" the Merlin asked.
"Outside. Someone drove up in a car and pushed him out of it. We didn't see who it was."
"You get the license number?" I asked. Both Wardens turned to eye me. Then they both turned back to the Merlin. Neither of them had gotten it. Maybe license plates were too new a concept. They weren't yet a whole century old, after all. "Hell's bells," I muttered. "I would have gotten it."
Ancient Mai carefully descended from the stage and moved to the young man. She touched his forehead and spoke to him gently in what I presumed to be Chinese. The boy opened his eyes and babbled something broken and halting back at her.
Ancient Mai frowned. She asked something else, which the boy struggled to answer, but it was apparently too much for him. He sagged, his eyes rolling back, and went completely limp.
The Ancient touched his hair and said in Latin, "Take him. Care for him."
The Wardens laid the boy on a cloak, and then four of them carried him out, moving quickly.
"What did he say?" Ebenezar asked. He beat me to it.
"He said that Queen Mab bade him tell the Council she will permit them travel through her realm, provided one request is fulfilled."
The Merlin arched a brow, fingers touching his beard thoughtfully. "What does she request?"
Ancient Mai murmured, "She did not tell him. She said only that she had already made her desires known to one of the Council." The Senior Council withdrew together to one side, speaking in low voices.
I didn't pay them any mind. The Ancient's translation of the messenger's words shocked me enough to keep me from so much as breathing, much less speaking. When I could move, I turned back to my table, leaned forward, and banged my head gently on the wooden surface. Several times.
"Dammit," I muttered, in time with the thumps. "Dammit, dammit, dammit."
A hand touched my shoulder, and I looked up to see the shadowed cowl of the Gatekeeper, standing apart from the rest of the Senior Council. His hand was covered by a black leather glove. I couldn't see any skin showing on him, anywhere.
"You know what the rain of toads means," he said, his voice very quiet. His English had a gentle accent, something part British and part something else. Indian? Middle Eastern?
I nodded. "Trouble."
"Trouble." Though I could not see his face, I suspected a very slight smile had colored the word. The cowl turned toward the other Senior Council members, and he whispered, "There isn't much time. Will you answer me one question honestly, Dresden?"
I checked Bluebeard to see if he was listening in. He had leaned way over toward a round-faced grandma-looking wizardess at another table and appeared to be listening intently to her. I nodded to the Gatekeeper.
He waved his hand. No words, no pause to prepare, nothing. He waved his hand, and the sounds of the room suddenly seemed to blur together, robbed of any coherence at all. "I understand you know how to Listen, too. I would rather no one else heard us." The sound of his voice came to me warped, parts pitched high and others low, oddly reverberating.
I gave him a wary nod. "What is the question?"
He reached up to his cowl, black leather against twilight purple, and drew back the hood a little, enough that I could see the gleam of one dark eye and a rough, thin grey beard against bronzed skin. I couldn't see his other eye. His face seemed to ripple and contort in the shadows, and I had an idea that he was disfigured, maybe burned. In the socket of the missing eye, I saw something silver and reflective.
He leaned down closer and whispered near my ear, "Has Mab chosen an Emissary?"
I struggled not to let the surprise show in my face, but I'm not always good at hiding my feelings. I saw comprehension flicker in the Gatekeeper's shadowed eye.
Dammit. Now I understood why Mab had been so confident. She'd known all along that she had set me up for a deal I couldn't refuse. She'd done it without breaking our bargain, either. Mab wanted me to take up her case, and she seemed perfectly happy to meddle in a supernatural war to get what she wanted.
She'd just been toying with me in my office, and I'd fallen for it. I wanted to kick myself. Somewhere out there was a village I'd deprived of its idiot.
In any case, there was no sense lying to the guy whose vote would decide my fate. I nodded to him. "Yes."
He shook his head. "Precarious balance. The Council can afford neither to keep you nor to cast you out."
"I don't understand."
"You will." He drew the cowl back down and murmured, "I cannot prevent your fate, wizard. I can only give you a chance to avoid it on your own."
"What do you mean?"
"Cannot you see what is happening?"
I frowned at him. "A dangerous imbalance of forces. The White Council in town. Mab meddling in our affairs."
"Or perhaps we are meddling in hers. Why has she appointed a mortal Emissary, young wizard?"
"Because someone up there takes a malevolent amusement in my suffering?"
"Balance," the Gatekeeper corrected me. "It is all about balance. Redress the imbalance, young wizard. Resolve the situation. Prove your worth beyond doubt."
"Are you telling me Ishould work for Mab?" My voice sounded hollow, tinny, as though it was trapped in a coffee can.
"What is the date?" the Gatekeeper asked.
"June eighteenth," I said.
"Ah. Of course." The Gatekeeper turned away, and sounds returned to normal. The Gatekeeper joined the rest of the Senior Council, and they trooped back up to their podiums. Podii. Podia. Whatever. Goddamned correspondence course.
"Order," called the Merlin again, and the room grew quiet after a reluctant moment.
"Gatekeeper," the Merlin said, "what is your vote?"
The silent figure of the Gatekeeper silently lifted one hand. "We have set our feet upon a darkling path," he murmured. "A road that will only grow more dangerous. Our first steps are critical. We must make them with caution."
The cowl turned toward Ebenezar, and the Gatekeeper said, "You love the boy, Wizard McCoy. You would fight to defend him. Your own dedication to our cause is not inconsiderable. I respect your choice."
He turned toward LaFortier. "You question Dresden's loyalty and his ability. You imply that only a bad seed can grow from bad soil. Your concerns are understandable---and if correct, then Dresden poses a major threat to the Council."
He turned to Ancient Mai and inclined the cowl forward a few degrees. The Ancient responded with a slight bow of her own. "Ancient Mai," the Gatekeeper said. "You question his ability to use his power wisely. To judge between right and wrong. You fear that DuMorne's teaching may have twisted him in ways even he cannot yet see. Your fears, too, are justified."
He turned to the Merlin. "Honored Merlin. You know that Dresden has drawn death and danger down upon the Council. You believe that if he is removed, so will be that danger. Your fears are understandable, but not reasonable. Regardless of what happens to Dresden, the Red Court has struck a blow against the Council too deep to be ignored. A cessation of current hostilities would only be the calm before the storm."
"Enough, man," Ebenezar demanded. "Vote, for or against."
"I choose to base my vote upon a Trial. A test that will lay to rest the fears of one side of the issue, or prove falsely placed the faith of the other."
"What Trial?" the Merlin asked.
"Mab," the Gatekeeper said. "Let Dresden address Queen Mab's request. Let him secure the assistance of Winter. If he does, that should lay to rest your concerns regarding his ability, LaFortier."
LaFortier frowned, but then nodded at the Gatekeeper.
He turned next to Ancient Mai. "Should he accomplish this, it should show that he is willing to accept responsibility for his mistake and to work against his own best interests for the greater good of the Council. It should satisfy your concerns as to his judgement---to make the mistakes of youth is no crime, but not to learn from them is. Agreed?"
Ancient Mai narrowed her rheumy eyes, but gave the Gatekeeper a precise nod.
"And you, honored Merlin. Such a success may do much to alleviate the pressure of the coming war. If securing routes through the Nevernever places the Red Court at a severe enough disadvantage, it may even enable us to avoid it entirely. Surely it would prove Dresden's dedication to the Council beyond a doubt."
"That's all well and good," Ebenezar said. "But what happens if he fails?"
The Gatekeeper shrugged. "Then perhaps their fears are more justified than your affection, Wizard McCoy. We may indeed conclude that his appointment to full Wizard Initiate may have been premature."
"All or nothing?" Ebenezar demanded. "Is that it? You expect the youngest wizard in the Council to get the best of Queen Mab somehow?Mab? That's not a Trial. It's a goddamned execution. How is he even supposed to know what her request was to begin with?"
I stood up, my legs shaking a little. "Ebenezar," I said.
"How the hell is the boy supposed to know what she wants?"
"Ebenezar---"
"I'm not going to stand by while you---" He abruptly blinked and looked at me. So did everyone else.
"I know what Mab wants," I said. "She approached me earlier today, sir. She asked me to investigate something for her. I turned her down."
"Hell's bells," Ebenezar breathed. He took the blue bandanna from his pocket and mopped at his gleaming forehead. "Hoss, this is out of your depth."
"Looks like it's sink or swim, then," I said.
The Gatekeeper murmured to me in English, "Will you accept this, Wizard Dresden?"
I nodded my head. My throat had gone dry. I swallowed and tried to remind myself that there wasn't much choice. If I didn't play with the faeries and come out on top, the Council would serve me up to the vampires on a silver platter. The former might get me really, really killed. The latter would certainly kill me as well---and probably more than that.
As deals went, it blew. But some little part of me that hadn't let me forget all the destruction, maybe even the deaths I'd caused last year, danced gleefully at my apparent comeuppance. Besides, it was the only game in town. I tightened my grip on my staff and spoke as clearly as I could manage.
"Yeah. I accept."
The rest of the Council meeting was somewhat anticlimactic---for me, anyway.
The Merlin ordered the wizards to disperse immediately after the meeting via preplanned, secure routes. He also distributed a list to everyone, noting the Wardens near them to call upon if help was needed, and told them to check in with the Wardens every few days, as a safety precaution.
Next, a grizzled old dame Warden went over the theories to a couple of newly developed wards meant to work especially well against vampires. Representatives of the White Council's allies---secret occult brotherhoods, mostly---each gave a brief speech, declaring his or her group's support of the Council in the war.
Toward the end of the meeting, Wardens showed up in force to escort wizards to the beginnings of their routes home. The Senior Council, I presumed, would loiter around for a few days in order to see if I got killed trying to prove that I was one of the good guys. Sometimes I feel like no one appreciates me.
I stood up about three seconds before the Merlin said, "Meeting adjourned," and headed for the door. Ebenezar tried to catch my eye, but I didn't feel like talking to anyone. I slammed the doors open a little harder than I needed to, stalked out to the Blue Beetle, and drove away with all the raging power the ancient four-cylinder engine could muster. Behold the angry wizard puttputt-putting away.
My brain felt like something made out of stale cereal, coffee grounds, and cold pizza. Thoughts trudged around in aimless depression, mostly about how I was going to get myself killed playing private eye for Mab. If things got really bad, I might even drag down a few innocent bystanders with me.
I growled at myself. "Stop whining, Harry," I said in a firm, loud voice. "So what if you're tired? So what if you're hurt? So what if you smell like you're already dead? You're a wizard. You've got a job to do. This war is mostly your own fault, and if you don't stay on the ball, more people are going to get hurt. So stiff upper lip, chin up, whatever. Get your ass in gear."
I nodded at that advice, and glanced aside, to the envelope Mab had given me, which lay on the passenger seat. I had a name, an address, a crime. I needed to get on the trail of the killer. That meant I would need information---and the people who would have the most information, a couple of days after the fact, would be the Chicago PD.
I drove to Murphy's place.
Lieutenant Karrin Murphy was the head of Chicago PD's Special Investigations team. SI was the city's answer to weirdness in general. They got all of the unusual crimes, the ones that didn't fall neatly into the department's other categories. SI has handled everything from sightings of sewer alligators to grave robbing in one of the city's many cemeteries. What fun. They also got to take care of the genuine supernatural stuff, the things that no one talks about in official reports but that manage to happen anyway. Trolls, vampires, demon-summoning sorcerers---you name it. The city had appointed SI to make sure the paperwork stayed nice and neat, with no mention of preposterous fantasies that could not possibly exist. It was a thankless job, and the directors of SI typically blew it after about a month by refusing to believe that they were dealing with genuine weirdness. Then they got shuffled out of Chicago PD.
Murphy hadn't. She'd lasted. She'd taken things seriously and employed the services of Chicago's only professional wizard (guess who) as a consultant on the tougher jobs. Murphy and I have seen some very upsetting things together. We're friends. She would help.
Murphy lives in a house in Bucktown, near a lot of other cops. It's a tiny place, but she owns it. Grandma Murphy left it to her. The house is surrounded by a neat little lawn.
I pulled up in the Beetle sometime well after summertime dark but before midnight. I knew she'd be home, though I wasn't certain she'd be awake. I made sure that I didn't sound like I was trying to sneak up anywhere. I shut the door of the Beetle hard and walked with firm footsteps to her door, then knocked lightly.
A moment later the curtains on the barred windows beside the door twitched and then fell back into place. A lock disengaged, then another, then a door chain. I noted, as I waited, that Murphy had a steel-reinforced door just like I did. Though I doubted she'd had as many demons or assassins showing up at it.
Murphy opened the door partway and peered out at me. The woman didn't look like the chief of Chicago PD's monster hunters. Her bright blue eyes were heavy, weary, and underscored with dark bags. She stood five feet nothing in her bare feet. Her golden hair was longer on top than in back, with bangs hanging down to her eyes. She wore a pale peach terry-cloth bathrobe that fell most of the way to her feet.
In her right hand she held her automatic, and a small crucifix dangled on a chain wrapped around her wrist. She looked at me.
"Heya, Murph," I said. I looked at the gun and the holy symbol and kept my voice calm. "Sorry to drop in on you this late. I need your help."
Murphy regarded me in silence for more than a minute. Then she said, "Wait here." She shut the door, returned a minute later, and opened it again, all the way. Then, gun still in hand, she stepped back from the doorway and faced me.
"Uh," I said, "Murph, are you all right?"
She nodded.
"Okay," I said. "Can I come in?"
"We'll know in a minute," Murphy said.
I got it then. Murphy wasn't going to ask me in. There are plenty of monsters running around in the dark that can't violate the threshold of a home if they aren't invited in. One of them had caught up to Murphy last year, nearly killing her, and it had been wearing my face when it did it. No wonder she didn't look exactly overjoyed to see me.
"Murph," I said, "relax. It's me. Hell's bells, there isn't anything that I can think of that would mimic me looking like this. Even demonic fiends from the nether regions of hell havesome taste."
I stepped across her threshold. Something tugged at me as I did, an intangible, invisible energy. It slowed me down a little, and I had to make an effort to push through it. That's what a threshold is like. One like it surrounds every home, a field of energy that keeps out unwanted magical forces. Some places have more of a threshold than others. My apartment, for example, didn't have much of a threshold---it's a bachelor pad, and whatever domestic energy is responsible for such things doesn't seem to settle down as well in rental spaces and lone dwellings. Murphy's house had a heavy field surrounding it. It had a life of its own; it had history. It was a home, not just a place to live.
I crossed her threshold uninvited, and I left a lot of my power at the door as I did. I would have to really push to make even the simplest of spells work within. I stepped inside and spread my hands. "Do I pass inspection?"
Murphy didn't say anything. She crossed the room and put her gun back into its holster, setting it down on an end table.
Murphy's place was . . . dare I say it,cute . The room was done in soft yellows and greens. And there were ruffles. The curtains had ruffles, and the couch had more, plus those little knitted things (aren't they called doilies?) were draped over the arms of the two recliners, the couch, the coffee table, and just about every other surface that seemed capable of supporting lacy bits of froo-fra. They looked old and beautiful and well cared for. I was betting Murphy's grandma had picked them out.
Murphy's own decorating was limited to the gun-cleaning kit sitting on the end table beside the holster for her automatic and a wooden rack over the fireplace that bore a pair of Japanese swords, long and short, one over the other. That was the Murphy I knew and loved. Practical violence ready at hand. Next to the swords was a small row of photographs in holders---maybe her family. A thick picture album with what looked like a real leather cover sat open on the coffee table, next to a prescription bottle and a decanter of some kind of liquor---gin? The decanter was half empty. The glass next to it was completely empty.
I watched her settle down in the corner of the couch in her oversized bathrobe, her expression remote. She didn't look at me. I got more worried by the moment. Murphy wasn't acting like Murphy. She'd never passed up a chance to trade banter with me. I'd never seen her this silent and withdrawn.
Dammit, just when I needed some quick and decisive help. Something was wrong with Murphy, and I hardly had time to play dime-store psychologist, trying to help her. I needed whatever information she could get me. I also needed to help her with whatever it was that had hurt her so badly. I was fairly sure I wouldn't be able to do either if I didn't get her talking.
"Nice place, Murph," I told her. "I haven't seen it before."
She twitched one shoulder in what might have been a shrug.
I frowned. "You know, if conversation is too much for you we could play charades. I'll go first." I held up my hand with my fingers spread. Murphy didn't say anything, so I provided her end of the dialogue. "Five words." I tugged on my ear. "Sounds like . . . What Is Wrong with You?"
She shook her head. I saw her eyes flicker toward the album.
I leaned forward and turned the album toward me. It had been opened on a cluster of wedding pictures. The girl in them must have been Murphy, back when. She had longer, sunnier hair and a kind of adolescent slenderness that showed around her neck and wrists. She wore a white wedding gown, and stood next to a tuxedo-clad man who had to have been ten years older than she was. In other pictures she was shoving cake into his mouth, drinking through linked arms, the usual wedding fare. He had carried her to the getaway car, and the photo-Murphy's face had been caught in a moment of laughter and joy.
"First husband?" I asked.
That got through to her. She glanced up at me for just a second. Then nodded.
"You were a kid in this. Maybe eighteen?"
She shook her head.
"Seventeen?"
She nodded. At least I was getting some kind of response out of her.
"How long were you married to him?"
Silence.
I frowned. "Murph, I'm not like a genius about this stuff or anything. But if you're feeling guilty about something, maybe you're being a little hard on yourself."
Without a word, she leaned forward and picked up the album, moving it aside to reveal a copy of theTribune . It had been folded open to the obituaries page. She picked it up and handed it to me.
I read the first one out loud. "Gregory Taggart, age forty-three, died last night after a long bout with cancer . . ." I paused and looked at the photograph of the deceased and then at Murphy's album. It was the same man, give or take several years of wear and tear. I winced and lowered the paper. "Oh, God, Murph. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
She blinked her eyes several times. Her voice came out thready, quiet. "He didn't even tell me that he was sick."
Talk about your nasty surprises. "Murph, look. I'm sure that . . . that things will work out. I know how you're hurting, how you must feel, but---"
"Do you?" she said, still very quiet. "Do you know how I feel? Did you lose your first love?"
I sat quietly for a full minute before I said, "Yeah. I did."
"What was her name?"
It hurt to think the name, much less to say it. But if it helped me get through to Murphy, I couldn't afford to be touchy. "Elaine. We were . . . both of us were orphans. We got adopted by the same man when we were ten."
Murphy blinked and looked up at me. "She was your sister?"
"I don't have any relatives. We were both adopted by the same guy, that's all. We lived together, drove one another nuts, hit puberty together. Do the math."
She nodded. "How long were you together?"
"Oh. Until we were about sixteen."
"What happened? How did she . . ."
I shrugged. "My adoptive father tried to get me into black magic. Human sacrifice."
Murphy frowned. "He was a wizard?"
I nodded. "Strong one. So was she."
"Didn't he try to get Elaine, too?"
"Did get her," I said. "She was helping him."
"What happened?" she asked quietly.
I tried to keep my voice even and calm, but I wasn't sure how well I managed it. "I ran away. He sent a demon after me. I beat it, then went back to save Elaine. She hit me with a binding spell when I wasn't looking, and he tried a spell that would break into my head. Make me do what he wanted. I slipped out of the spell Elaine had on me and took on Justin. I got lucky. He lost. Everything burned."
Murphy swallowed. "What happened to Elaine?"
"Burned," I said quietly, my throat tightening. "She's dead."
"God, Harry." Murphy was quiet for a moment. "Greg left me. We tried to talk a few times, but it always ended in a fight." Her eyes welled up with tears. "Dammit, I should have at least gotten to tell him goodbye."
I put the paper back on the table and closed the album, studiously not looking at Murphy. I knew she wouldn't want me to see her crying. She inhaled sharply. "I'm sorry, Harry," she said. "I'm flaking out on you here. I shouldn't. I don't know why this is getting to me so hard."
I glanced at the booze and the pills on the table. "It's okay. Everyone has an off day sometimes."
"I can't afford it." She drew the bathrobe a little closer around herself and said, "Sorry, Harry. About the gun." Her words sounded heavy, maybe a little slurred. "I had to be sure it was really you."
"I understand," I said.
She looked at me and something like gratitude touched her eyes. She got up from the couch abruptly and walked down a hallway, out of the living room, and said over her shoulder, "Let me put something else on."
"Sure, okay," I said after her, frowning. I leaned over to the table and picked up the prescription bottle behind the booze, next to the empty tumbler. A medium-sized dose of Valium. No wonder Murphy had been slurring her words. Valium and gin. Hell's bells.
I was still holding the pills when she came back in, wearing baggy shorts and a T-shirt. She'd raked a brush through her hair and splashed water on her face, so that I could barely tell that she'd been crying. She stopped short and looked at me. I didn't say anything. She chewed on her lip.
"Murph," I said, finally, "Are you okay? Is there . . . I mean, do you need---"
"Relax, Dresden," she said, folding her arms. "I'm not suicidal."
"Funny you say that. Mixing drinks with drugs is a great way to get it done."
She walked over to me, jerked the pill bottle out of my hands, and picked up the bottle of booze. "It isn't any of your business," she said. She walked into the kitchen, dropped things off, and came back out again. "I'm fine. I'll be fine."
"Murph, I've never seen you with a drink in your life. And Valium? It makes me worry about you."
"Dresden, if you came over here to lecture me, you can leave right now."
I shoved my fingers through my shaggy hair. "Karrin, I swear I'm not lecturing. I'm just trying to understand."
She looked away from me for a minute, one foot rubbing at the opposite calf. It hit me how small she looked. How frail. Her eyes were not only weary, I saw now. They were haunted. I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was warm underneath the cotton of her T-shirt. "Talk to me, Murph. Please."
She pulled her shoulder out from under my hand. "It isn't a big deal. It's the only way I can get any sleep."
"What do you mean?"
She took a deep breath. "I mean, I can't sleep without help. The drinks didn't help. The drugs didn't, either. I have to use both or I won't get any rest."
"I still don't get it. Why can't you sleep? Is it because of Greg?"
Murphy shook her head, then moved over to the couch, away from me, and curled up in the corner of it, clasping her hands over her knees. "I've been having nightmares. Night terrors, the doctors say. They say it's different from just bad dreams."
I felt my cheek twitch with tension. "And you can't stay asleep?"
She shook her head. "I wake myself up screaming." I saw her clench her fists. "God dammit, Dresden. There's no reason for it. I shouldn't get rattled by a few bad dreams. I shouldn't fall to pieces hearing about a man I haven't spoken to in years. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me."
I closed my eyes. "You're dreaming about last year, aren't you? About what Kravos did to you."
She shivered at the mention of the name and nodded. "I couldn't stop thinking about it for a long time. Trying to figure out what I did wrong. Why he was able to get to me."
I ached inside. "Murph, there wasn't anything you could have done."
"Don't you think I know that?" she said, her voice quiet. "I couldn't have known that it wasn't you. I couldn't have stopped him even if I had. I couldn't have done anything to defend myself. To stop wh-what he did to me, once he was inside my head." Her eyes clouded with tears, but she blinked them away, her jaw setting. "There wasn't anything I could have done. That's what scares me, Harry. That's why I'm afraid."
"Murph, he's dead. He's dead and gone. We watched them put him in the ground."
Murphy snarled, "Iknow that. I know it, Harry. I know he's gone, I know he can't hurt me anymore, I know he's never going to hurt anyone again." She looked up at me for a moment, chancing a look at my eyes. Hers were clouded with tears. "But I still have the dreams. I know it, but it doesn't make any difference."
God. Poor Murphy. She'd taken a spiritual mauling before I'd shown up to save her. The thing that attacked her had been a spirit being, and it had torn her apart on the inside without leaving a mark on her skin. In a way, she'd been raped. All of her power had been taken away, and she'd been used for the amusement of another. No wonder it had left her with scars. Adding an unpleasant shock of bad news had been like tossing a spark onto a pile of tinder soaked in jet fuel.
"Harry," she continued, her voice quiet, soft, "you know me. God, I'm not a whiner. I hate that. But what that thing did to me. The things it made me see. Made me feel." She looked up at me, pain in the lines at the corners of her eyes, which threatened tears. "It won't go away. I try to leave it behind me, but it won't go. And it's eating up every part of my life."
She turned away, grabbing irritably at a box of tissues. I walked over to the fireplace and studied the swords on the mantel, so she wouldn't feel my eyes on her.
After a moment she spoke, her tone changing, growing more focused. "What are you doing here so late?"
I turned back to face her. "I need a favor. Information." I passed over the envelope Mab had given me. Murphy opened it, looked at the pair of pictures, and frowned.
"These are shots from the report of Ronald Reuel's death. How did you get them?"
"I didn't," I said. "A client gave them to me. I don't know where she got them."
She rubbed her eyes and asked, "What did she want from you?"
"She wants me to find the person who killed him."
Murphy shook her head. "I thought this was an accidental death."
"I hear it isn't."
"Where'd you hear that?"
I sighed. "A magic faerie told me."
That got me a suspicious glare, which dissolved into a frown. "God, you're being literal, aren't you?"
"Yeah."
Murphy shook her head, a tired smile at the corners of her mouth. "How can I help?"
"I'd like to look at the file on Ronald Reuel's death. I can't look at the scene, but maybe CPD caught something they didn't know was a clue. It would give me a place to start, at least."
Murphy nodded without looking at me. "All right. One condition."
"Sure. What?"
"If this is a murder, you bring me in on it."
"Murph," I protested, "come on. I don't want to pull you into anything that---"
"Dammit, Harry," Murphy snapped, "if someone's killing people in Chicago, I'm going to deal with them. It's my job. What's been happening to me doesn't change that."
"It's your job to stop the bad guys," I said. "But this might not be a guy. Maybe not even human. I just think you'd be safer if---"
"Fuck safe," Murphy muttered. "My job, Harry. If you turn up a killing, you will bring me in."
I hesitated, trying not to let my frustration show. I didn't want Murphy involved with Mab and company. Murphy had earned too many scars already. The faeries had a way of insinuating themselves into your life. I didn't want Murphy exposed to that, especially as vulnerable as she was.
But at the same time, I couldn't lie to her. I owed her a lot more than that.
Bottom line, Murphy had been hurt. She was afraid, and if she didn't force herself to face that fear, it might swallow her whole. She knew it. As terrified as she was, she knew that she had to keep going or she would never recover.
As much as I wanted to keep her safe, especially now, it wouldn't help her. Not in the long run. In a sense, her life was at stake.
"Deal," I said quietly.
She nodded and rose. "Stay out here. I need to get on the computer, see what I can pull up for you."
"I can wait if it's better."
She shook her head. "I've already taken the Valium. If I wait any longer I'll be too zonked to think straight. Just sit down. Have a drink. Try not to blow up anything." She padded out of the room on silent feet.
I sat down in one of the armchairs, stretched out my legs, let my head fall forward, and dropped into a light doze. It had been a long day, and it looked like it was just going to get longer. I woke up when Murphy came back into the room, her eyes heavy. She had a manila folder with her. "Okay," she said, "this is everything I could print out. The pictures aren't as clear as they could be, but they aren't horrible."
I sat up, took the folder from her and opened it. Murphy sat down in an armchair, facing me, her legs tucked beneath her. I started going over the details in the folder, though my brain felt like some kind of gelatin dessert topped with mush.
"What happened to your hand?" she asked.
"Magic faerie," I said. "Magic faerie with a letter opener."
"It doesn't look good. The dressing isn't right either. You have anyone look at it?"
I shook my head. "No time."
"Harry, you idiot." She got up, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back out with a first aid kit. I decided not to argue with her. She pulled up a chair from the kitchen next to mine, and rested my arm in her lap.
"I'm trying to read here, Murph."
"You're still bleeding. Puncture wounds will ooze forever if you don't keep them covered."
"Yeah, I tried to explain that, but they made me take the bandage off anyway."
"Who did?"
"Long story. So the security guard on the building didn't see anyone come in?"
She peeled off the bandage with brisk motions. It hurt. She fished out some disinfectant. "Cameras didn't pick up anything, either, and there aren't any bursts of static to indicate someone using magic. I checked."
I whistled. "Not bad, Murph."
"Yeah, sometimes I use my head instead of my gun. This will hurt."
She sprayed disinfectant liberally on my hand. It stung.
"Ow!"
"Wimp."
"Any other ways in and out of the building?"
"Not unless they could fly and walk through walls. The other doors are all fire exits, with alarms that would trip if someone opened them."
I kept paging through the file. " 'Broken neck due to fall,' it says. They found him at the bottom of the stairs."
"Right." Murphy used a wipe to clean both sides of my hand, and then she put more disinfectant on. It hurt a bit less. "He had contusions consistent with a fall, and he was an old man. No one seen entering or leaving an apartment building with a high-security system, so naturally---"
"---no one looked for a killer," I finished. "Or reported anything that might have indicated one. Or, wait, did they? Says here that the first officer on the scene found 'slippery goo' on the landing above where Reuel fell."
"But none of the detectives on the scene later found any such thing," Murphy said. She pressed a gauze pad against the wound from either side and began wrapping medical tape around to hold the pads on. "The first officer was a rookie. They figured he was seeing a killing where there wasn't one so he could get in on a murder investigation."
I frowned, turning the printouts of the photographs around. "See here? The sleeves of Reuel's coat are wet. You can see the discoloration."
She looked and admitted, "Maybe. There's no mention of it, though."
"Slippery goo. It could have been ectoplasm."
"Is that too tight? Ecto-what?"
I flexed my fingers a little, testing the bandage. "It's fine. Ectoplasm. Matter from the Nevernever."
"That's the spirit world, right? Faerieland?"
"Among other things."
"And stuff from there is goo?"
"It turns into goo when there's not any magic animating it. As long as the magic is there, it's as good as real. Like when Kravos made a body that looked like mine and came gunning for you."
Murphy shivered and started putting things back into her kit. "So when whatever it is that has made this ecto goo into matter has gone, it turns back into . . . ?"
"Slime," I said. "It's clear and slippery, and it evaporates in a few minutes."
"So something from the Nevernever could have killed Reuel," Murphy said.
"Yeah," I said. "Or someone could have opened up a portal into the apartment building. There's usually some gunk left when you open a portal. Dust drifting out from the Nevernever. So they could have opened a portal, then gotten out the same way."
"Whoa! Hold it. I thought Faerieland was monsters only. People can go into the Nevernever?"
"If you know the right magic, yeah. It's full of things that are fairly dangerous, though. You don't just cruise through on a Sunday stroll."
"Jesus Christ," Murphy muttered. "So someone---"
"Or something," I interjected.
"---or something could have gotten into the building and out again. Just like that. Past all the locks and guards and cameras. How scary is that?"
"Could have, yeah. Stepped in, pitched grampa down the stairs, stepped out again."
"God. That poor old man."
"I don't think he was helpless, Murph. Reuel was mixed up with the faeries. I kind of doubt his hands were squeaky clean."
She nodded. "Okay. Had he made any supernatural enemies?"
I held up the picture of the body. "Looks like it."
Murpy shook her head. She swayed a little bit, and then sat down next to me, leaning her head against the corner of the couch. "So what's the next step?"
"I go digging. Pound the proverbial pavement."
"You don't look so good. Get some rest first. A shower. Some food. Maybe a haircut."
I rubbed my eyes with my good hand. "Yeah," I said.
"And you tell me, when you know something."
"Murph, if this was something from the Nevernever, it's going to be out of your"---I almost said "league,"---"jurisdiction."
She shrugged. "If it came into my town and hurt someone I'm responsible for protecting, I want to make it answer for that." She closed her eyes. "Same as you. Besides. You promised."
Well, she had me there. "Yeah. Okay, Murph. When I find something out, I'll call."
"All right," she said. She curled up in the corner of the couch again, heavy eyes closing. She leaned her head back, baring the lines of her throat. After a moment, she asked, "Have you heard from Susan?"
I shook my head. "No."
"But her articles are still coming into theArcane . She's all right."
I nodded. "I guess so."
"Have you found anything that will help her yet?"
I sighed and shook my head. "No, not yet. It's like pounding my head against a wall."
She halfway smiled. "With your head, the wall breaks first. You're the most stubborn man I've ever met."
"You say the sweetest things."
Murphy nodded. "You're a good man, Harry. If anyone can help her, it's you."
I looked down so she wouldn't see the tears that made my eyes swim a little, and started putting the file back together. "Thanks, Murph. That means a lot to me."
She didn't answer. I looked up and saw that her mouth had fallen slightly open and her body was totally relaxed, a cheek resting on the arm of the couch.
"Murph?" I asked. She didn't stir. I got up and left the file on the chair. I found a blanket and draped it lightly over her, tucking it in around her. She made a soft sound in the back of her throat and nuzzled her cheek closer to the couch.
"Sleep well, Murph," I said. Then I headed for the door. I locked what I could behind me, made my way back to the Beetle, and drove toward home.
I ached everywhere. Not from sore muscles, but from simple exhaustion. My wounded hand felt like a big throbbing knot of cramping muscle, doused in gasoline and set on fire.
I hurt even more on the inside. Poor Murph had been torn up badly. She was terrified of the things she might have to face, but that made her no less determined to face them. That was courage, and more than I had. I at least was sure that I could hit back if one of the monsters came after me. Murphy didn't have any such certainty.
Murphy was my friend. She'd saved my life before. We'd fought side by side. She needed my help again. She had to face her fear. I understood that. She needed me to help make it happen, but I didn't have to like it. In her condition, she would be extra vulnerable to any kind of attack like the one by Kravos the year before. And if she got hit again before she had a chance to piece herself back together, it might not simply wound her---it might break her entirely.
I wasn't sure I could live with myself if that happened.
"Dammit," I muttered. "So help me, Murph, I'm going to make sure you come out of this okay."
I shoved my worries about Murphy to the back of my mind. The best way to protect her would be to focus on this case, to get cracking. But my brain felt like something had crawled into it and died. The only cracking it was going to be doing was the kind that would land me in a rubber room and a sleeveless coat.
I wanted food. Sleep. A shower. If I didn't take some time to put myself back together, I might walk right into something that would kill me and not notice it until it was too late.
I drove back to my apartment, which is the basement of a rooming house more than a century old. I parked the Beetle outside and got my rod and staff out of the car to take with me. It wasn't much of a walk between my apartment and the car, but I'd been accosted before. Vampires can be really inconsiderate that way.
I thumped down the stairs to my apartment, unlocked the door, and murmured the phrase that would disarm my wards long enough to let me get inside. I slipped in, and my instincts screamed at me that I was not alone.
I lifted the blasting rod, gathering my power and sending it humming through the focus so that the tip burst into brilliant crimson light that flooded my apartment.
And then there she was, a slender woman standing by my cold fireplace, all graceful curves and poised reserve. She wore a pair of blue jeans over long, coltish legs, with a simple scarlet cotton T-shirt. A silver pentacle hung outside the shirt, resting on the curve of modest breasts, and it gleamed in the light from my readied blasting rod. Her skin was pale, like the inner bark of an oak, the living part of the tree, her hair the brown-gold of ripe wheat, her eyes the grey of storm clouds. Her fine mouth twitched, first into a smile and then into a frown, and she lifted elegant, long-fingered hands to show me empty palms.
"I let myself in," she murmured. "I hope you don't mind. You should change your wards more often."
I lowered the blasting rod, too stunned to speak, my heart lurching in my chest. She lowered her hands and closed the distance between us. She lifted herself onto her toes, but she was tall enough that it wasn't much of an effort for her to kiss my cheek. She smelled like wildflowers and sun-drenched summer afternoons. She drew back enough to focus on my face and my eyes, her own expression gentle and concerned. "Hello, Harry."
And I said, in a bare whisper, fighting through the shock, "Hello, Elaine."
Elaine walked past me, making a circuit around my apartment. It wasn't much of a tour. The place consists of a living room and a tiny bedroom. The kitchen is pretty much just an alcove with a sink and a fridge. The floor is smooth grey stone, but I'd covered a lot of it with a few dozen rugs. My furniture is all secondhand and comfortable. It doesn't even come close to matching. Bookshelves fill up most of the wall space, and where they don't, I have several tapestries, plus aStar Wars movie poster Billy gave me for Christmas. It's the old poster, the one with Princess Leia clinging to Luke's leg.
Anyway, that was my apartment on a normal day. Lately it had suffered from disrepair. It didn't smell so great, and pizza boxes and empty Coke cans had overflowed the trash can and spilled over a significant portion of the kitchen floor. You could barely walk without stepping on clothing that needed to be washed. My furniture was covered with scribbled-on papers and discarded pens and pencils.
Elaine walked through it all like a Red Cross worker through a war zone and shook her head. "I know you weren't expecting me, Harry, but I didn't think I'd be overdressed. You live in this?"
"Elaine," I choked out. "You're alive."
"A little less of a compliment than I would have hoped for, but I guess it could have been worse." She regarded me from near the kitchen. "I'm alive, Harry." Her face flickered with a trace of apprehension. "How are you feeling?"
I lowered myself onto the couch, papers crunching beneath me. I released the power held ready to strike, and the glowing tip of the blasting rod went out, leaving the apartment in darkness. I kept staring at her afterimage on my vision. "Shocked," I said finally. "This isn't happening. Hell's bells, this has got to be some sort of trick."
"No. It's me. If I was something out of the Nevernever, could I have crossed your threshold uninvited? Do you know anyone else who knows how you set up your wards?"
"Anyone could figure it out eventually," I said.
"All right. Does anyone else know that you failed your driver's test five times in one week? Or that you sprained your shoulder trying to impress me going out for football our freshman year? That we soulgazed on our first night together? I think I can still remember our locker combination, if you like."
"My God, Elaine." I shook my head. Elaine, alive. My brain could not wrap itself around the idea. "Why didn't you contact me?"
I saw her, dimly, lean against the wall. She was quiet for a while, as though she had to shape her words carefully. "At first because I didn't even know if you had survived. And after that . . ." She shook her head. "I wasn't sure I wanted to. Wasn't sure you'd want me to. So much happened."
My shock and disbelief faded before a sudden aching pain, and an old, old anger. "That's putting it mildly," I said. "You tried to destroy me."
"No," she said. "God, no, Harry. You don't understand. I never wanted that."
My voice gained a hard edge. "Which is why you hit me with that binding. Why you held me down while Justin tried to destroy me."
"He never wanted you dead---"
"No, he just wanted to break into my head. Wanted to control me. Make me into some kind of . . . of . . ." Words failed me in the face of my frustration.
"Thrall," Elaine said quietly. "He'd have wrapped you in enough spells to guarantee your loyalty. To make you his thrall."
"And that's worse than dead. And youhelped him."
Her voice crackled with anger of its own. "Yes, Harry. I helped him. That's what thrallsdo ."
My rising ire abruptly quieted. "What . . . what are you saying?"
I saw her dim shape bow its head. "Justin caught me about two weeks before he sent that demon to capture you. That day I stayed home sick, remember? By the time you got home from school, he had me. I tried to fight him, but I was a child. I didn't have enough experience to resist him. And after he had enthralled me, I didn't see why I should fight anymore."
I stared at her for a long minute. "So you're telling me that you didn't have any choice," I breathed. "He forced you to do it. He made you help him."
"Yes."
"Why the hell should I believe you?"
"I don't expect you to."
I rose and paced back and forth restlessly. "I can't believe you're trying to tell me that the devil made you do it. Do you have any idea how lame that excuse sounds?"
Elaine watched me carefully, her grey eyes pensive and sad. "It wasn't an excuse, Harry. Nothing can excuse the kind of pain I put you through."
I stopped and frowned at her. "Then why are you telling me?"
"Because it needs to be said," she murmured. "Because that's what happened. You deserve to know that."
It was quiet for a long time, then I asked, "He really had enthralled you?"
Elaine shivered and nodded.
"What was it like?"
She fretted at her lower lip. "I didn't know it was happening. Not at the time. I didn't have the ability to think clearly. Justin told me that you just needed to be shown what to do and that if I would hold you still long enough to let him explain things to you it would all work out. I believed him. Trusted him." She shook her head. "I never wanted to hurt you, Harry. Never. I'm sorry."
I sat down and rubbed my face with my hands, my emotions running high and out of control again. Without the anger to support me, all that was left inside was pain. I thought I had gotten over Elaine's loss, her betrayal. I thought I had forgotten it and moved on. I was wrong. The wounds burst open again, as painful as they had ever been. Maybe more so. I had to fight to control my breathing, my tone.
I had loved her. I wanted very badly to believe her.
"I . . . I looked for you," I said quietly. "In fire and water. I had spirits combing the Earth for any trace of you. Hoping that you'd survived."
She pushed away from the wall and walked to the fireplace. I heard her putting in wood, and then she murmured something soft and low. Flame licked up over the logs easily, smoothly, low and blue, then settled into a dark golden light. I watched her profile as she stared down at the fire. "I got out of the house before you and Justin were finished," she said finally. "His spells had begun to unravel, and I was struggling against them. Confused, terrified. I must have run. I don't even remember doing it."
"But where have you been?" I asked. "Elaine, I looked for you for years. Years."
"Where you couldn't have found me, Harry. You or anyone else. I found sanctuary. A place to hide. But there was a price, and that's why I'm here." She looked up at me, and though her features were calm and smooth, I could see the fear in her eyes, hear it coloring her voice. "I'm in trouble."
My answer came out at once. For me, chivalry isn't dead; it's an involuntary reflex. It could have been any woman asking for help, and I'd have said the same thing. It might have taken me a second or two longer, but I would have. For Elaine, there was no need to think about it for even that long. "I'll help."
Her shoulders sagged and she nodded, pressing her lips together and bowing her head. "Thank you. Thank you, Harry. I hate doing this, I hate bringing this to you after all this time. But I don't know where else to turn."
"No," I said, "it's all right. Really. What's going on? Why do you think you're in trouble? What do you mean, you're paying a price?"
"It's complicated," she said. "But the short version is that I was granted asylum by the Summer Court of the Sidhe."
My stomach dropped about twenty feet.
"I built up a debt to Titania, the Summer Queen, in exchange for her protection. And now it's time to pay it off." She took a deep breath. "There's been a murder within the realms of the Sidhe."
I rubbed at my eyes. "And Titania wants you to be her Emissary. She wants you to find the killer and prove that the Winter Court is to blame. She told you that you would be contacted tonight by Mab's Emissary, but she didn't tell you who it was going to be."
Elaine's eyes widened in shock, and she fell silent. We stared at one another for a long moment before she whispered, "Stars and stones." She pushed her hair back from her face with one hand, in what I knew to be a nervous gesture, even if it didn't look it. "Harry, if I don't succeed, if I don't fulfill my debt to her, I'm . . . it's going to be very bad for me."
"Hooboy," I muttered, "tell me about it. Mab's more or less got me over the same barrel."
Elaine swore quietly. "What are we going to do?"
"Uh," I said.
She looked at me expectantly.
I scowled. "I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Uh."
She rose and took a few long-legged strides across the living room and back, agitated. "There must be something . . . some way out of this. God, sometimes their sense of humor makes me sick. Mab and Titania are laughing right now."
If I'd had the energy, I'd have been pacing, too. I closed my eyes and tried to think. If I didn't succeed on Mab's behalf, she wouldn't grant rights of passage to the Council. The Council would judge that I had failed my trial, and they'd wrap me up and deliver me to the vampires. I didn't know the specifics of Elaine's situation, but I doubted she had a deal that was any less fatal. My head hurt.
Elaine continued pacing, exasperated. "Come on, Harry. What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking that if this dilemma grows any more horns I'm going to shoot it and put it up on the wall."
"I know this will never sink into your head, but this isn't a time for jokes. We need to come up with something."
"Okay. I've got it," I said. "Get your stuff and come with me."
Elaine reached back to the shadows beside the fireplace and withdrew a slender staff of pale wood, carved with swirling, abstract shapes. "Where are we going?"
I pushed myself up. "To talk to the Council and get their help."
Elaine lifted her eyebrows. "Don't take this the wrong way, Harry, but are you crazy?"
"Hear me out."
She pressed her lips together, but gave me a quick nod.
"It's simple. We're in way over our heads. We need help. You've got to come out to the Council in any case."
"Says who?"
"Oh, come on. You're human, Elaine, and a wizard. That's what is really important to them. They'll side with us against the faeries, help us figure a way out of this mess."
Elaine twitched at my use of the word, flicking a look around her as if by reflex. "That doesn't sound like the Council I've heard of."
"Could be that you've heard a skewed point of view," I said.
Elaine nodded. "Could be. The Council I've heard of nearly executed you for defending yourself against Justin."
"Well, yeah, but---"
"They put you on probation under threat of summary execution, and you all but had to kill yourself to get cleared."
"Well, I was all but killing myself anyway. I mean, I didn't do it so that the Council would---"
She shook her head. "God, Harry. You just can't see it, can you? The Council doesn'tcare about you. They don't want to protect you. They will only put up with you as long as you toe the line and don't become an inconvenience."
"I'm already inconvenient."
"A liability, then," Elaine said.
"Look, some of the Council have their heads up their rear ends, sure. But there are good people there, too."
Elaine folded her arms and shook her head. "And how many of those good people don't want a thing to do with the Council?"
"Elaine---"
"No, Harry. I mean it. I don't want anything to do with them. I've lived this long without the Council's so-called protection. I think I can muddle through a little longer."
"Elaine, when they find out about you, it needs to be from you. If you come forward, it's going to cut down on any uneasiness or suspicion they might feel."
"Suspicion?" Elaine exclaimed. "Harry, I am not a criminal."
"You're just asking for trouble, Elaine."
"And how are they going to find out about me? Hmmm? Were you planning on running off to tattle?"
"Of course not," I said. But I was thinking how much trouble I was going to be in if one of the Wardens heard I was associating with someone who might be a violator of the First Law, and one of Justin DuMorne's apprentices at that. With the cloud of disfavor I was already under, adding that kind of suspicion to it might be enough to sink me, regardless of how the investigation turned out. Do I have a great life or what?
"I won't say anything," I said finally. "It has to be your choice, Elaine. But please believe me. Trust me. I have friends in the Council, too. They'll help."
Elaine's expression softened and became less certain. "You're sure?"
"Yeah," I said. "Cross my heart."
She leaned on her oddly carved staff and frowned. She was opening her mouth to speak when my reinforced door rattled under the rapping of a heavy fist.
"Dresden," Morgan growled from the other side of the door. "Open up, traitor. There are questions I need you to answer."
Elaine shot me a wide-eyed look and mouthed the word "Council?"
I nodded and pointed to my staff, in the corner along with my sword cane. Elaine picked it up without a word and tossed it to me. Then she moved silently through the door of my darkened bedroom and vanished inside.
The door rattled again. "Dresden," Morgan growled, "I know you're in there. Open the door."
I swung it open before he could go on. "Or you'll huff and you'll puff and so on?"
Morgan glowered at me, tall, sour, and dour as ever. He'd traded his robes and cloak for dark slacks, a grey silk shirt, and a sport coat. He carried a golf bag on one shoulder, and most people wouldn't have noticed the hilt of a sword nestled among the golf clubs. He leaned forward, cool eyes looking past me and into my apartment. "Dresden. Am I interrupting anything?"
"Well, I was going to settle down with a porn video and a bottle of baby oil, but I really don't have enough for two."
Morgan's expression twisted in revulsion, and I felt an absurd little burst of vindictive satisfaction. "You disgust me, Dresden."
"Yeah, I'm bad. I'm a bad, bad, bad man. I'm glad we got that settled. Goodbye, Morgan."
I started to shut my door in his face. He slammed his palm against it. Morgan was a lot stronger than me. The door stayed open.
"I'm not finished, Dresden."
"I am. It's been one hell of a day. If you've got something to say, say it."
Morgan's mouth set in a hard smile. "Normally I appreciate that kind of directness. Not with you."
"Gee, you don't appreciate me. I'll cry myself to sleep."
Morgan stroked his thumb over the strap to the golf bag. "I want to know how it is, Dresden, that Mab just happened to come to you about this problem. The one thing that can preserve your status with the Council, and it just happened to fall to you."
"Clean living," I said. "Plus my mondo wheels and killer bachelor pad."
Morgan looked at me with flat eyes. "You think you're funny."
"Oh, Iknow I'm funny. Unappreciated, but funny."
Morgan shook his head. "Do you know what I think, Dresden?"
"You think?" Morgan didn't smile. Like I said, unappreciated.
"I think that you've planned all of this. I think you are in with the vampires and the Winter Court. I think this is part of a deeper scheme."
I just stared at him. I tried not to laugh. I really did.
Well. Maybe I didn't try all that hard.
The laughter must have gotten to Morgan. He balled up his fist and slammed a stiff jab into my belly that took the wind out of my sails and half dropped me to my knees.
"No," he said. "You aren't going to laugh this off, traitor." He stepped into my apartment. The threshold didn't make him blink. The wards I had up caught him six inches later, but they weren't designed to be too much of an impediment to human beings. Morgan grunted, spoke a harsh word in a guttural tongue, maybe Old German, and slashed his hand in front of him. The air hissed and popped with static electricity, sparks flashing from his fingertips. He shook his fingers briefly, then walked in.
He looked around the place and shook his head again. "Dresden, you might not be a bad person, all in all. But I think that you're compromised. If you aren't working with the Red Court, then I am certain that they are using you. Either way, the threat to the Council is the same. And it's best removed by removing you."
I tried to suck in a breath and finally managed to say, "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Susan Rodriguez," Morgan said. "Your lover, the vampire."
Anger made bright lights flash behind my eyes. "She'snot a vampire," I snarled.
"They turned her, Dresden. No one goes back. That's all there is to it."
"They haven't. She's not."
Morgan shrugged. "That's what you would say if she'd addicted you to the venom. You'd say or do just about anything for them by now."
I looked up at him, teeth bared. "Get the fuck out of my house."
He walked over to the fireplace and picked up a dust-covered gift card I'd left sitting on the mantel. He read it and snorted. Then he picked up a picture I had of Susan. "Pretty," he said. "But that's easy to come by. Odds are she was their pawn from the first day she met you."
I clenched my hands into fists. "You shut your mouth," I said. "You just shut your mouth about her. That's not how it was."
"You're a fool, Dresden. A young fool. Do you really think that a normal mortal woman would want anything to do with you or your life? You can't accept that she was just a tool. One of their whores."
I spun to the corner, letting go of my staff, and picked up my sword cane. I drew the blade free with a steely rasp and turned toward Morgan. He saw it coming and had already drawn the bright silver blade of the Wardens from the golf bag.
Every tired, aching, angry bone in my body wanted to lunge at him. I'm not heavy with muscle, but I'm not slow, and I've got arms and legs miles long. My lunge is quick, and I can do it from a long way back. Morgan was a seasoned soldier, but in such close quarters it would be a question of reflexes. Advantage to the guy with the sword weighed in ounces instead of stones.
In that moment, I was sure that I could have killed him. He might have taken me with him, but I could have done it. And I wanted to, badly. Not in any sort of intellectual sense, but in the part of the brain that does all of its thinking after the fact. My temper had frayed to bloody tatters, and I wanted to vent it on Morgan.
But a thought snuck in past the testosterone and spoiled my rage. I stopped myself. Shaking, and with my knuckles white on my sword cane, I drew myself up straight. And I said, very quietly, "That's number three."
Morgan's brow furrowed, and he stared at me, his own weapon steadily extended toward me. "What are you talking about, Dresden?"
"The third plan. The Merlin's ace in the hole. He sent you here to pick a fight with me. With my door still standing open. There's another Warden outside, listening, isn't there? A witness, so that you have a clean kill. Hand the body over to the vampires. End of problem, right?"
Morgan's eyes widened. He stammered over the first word. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I picked up the sheath half of the sword cane and slipped the blade back into it. "Sure, you don't. Get out, Morgan. Unless you'd prefer to stab an unarmed man who isn't offering you violence."
Morgan stared at me for a moment more. Then he shoved the sword back into the golf bag, swung it onto his shoulder, and headed for the door.
He was almost out when there was a clunk from my bedroom. I shot a look at the doorway.
Morgan stopped. He looked at me and then at my bedroom. Something ugly sparkled in his gaze. "Who is in the bedroom, Dresden? The vampire girl, perhaps?"
"No one," I said. "Get out."
"We'll see," Morgan said. He turned and walked to my bedroom door, one hand still on the sword. "You and those who consort with your like will be brought to task very soon. I'm looking forward to it."
My heart started pounding again. If Morgan found Elaine, there were about a million things that might happen, and none of them were good. There seemed little I could do, though. I couldn't warn her, and I couldn't think of a way to get Morgan out of my apartment any faster.
Morgan peered through the doorway and looked around, then abruptly let out a hoarse cry and jumped back. At the same time, there was a harsh feline yowl, and Mister, my bobtailed grey cat, came zooming out of the bedroom. He darted between Morgan's legs and then streaked past him, out of the apartment and up the stairs into the summer evening.
"Gosh, Morgan," I said, "my cat might be a dangerous subversive. Maybe you'd better interrogate him."
Morgan straightened, his face slightly red. He coughed and then stalked to the door. "The Senior Council members wish me to tell you that they will be nearby but that they will not interfere in this Trial or aid you in any way." He took a business card out of his shirt pocket and let it fall to the floor. "That's the contact number for the Senior Council. Use it when you have failed the Trial."
"Don't let the door hit you on the brain on the way out," I responded.
Morgan glared at me as he left. He slammed the door behind him and stomped up the stairs.
I started trembling maybe half a minute after he left---reaction to the stress. At least I hadn't done it in front of him. I turned around, leaned back against the door with my eyes closed, and folded my arms over my chest. It was easier not to feel myself shaking that way.
Another minute or two passed before I heard Elaine move quietly out of my bedroom. The fire popped and crackled.
"Are they gone?" Elaine asked. Her voice was very carefully steady.
"Yeah. Though I wouldn't put it past them to watch my place."
I felt her fingers touch my shoulder. "You're shaking, Harry."
"I'll be all right."
"You could have killed him," Elaine said. "When you first drew."
"Yeah."
"Was he really setting you up like you said?"
I looked at her. Her expression was worried. "Yeah," I said.
"God, Harry." She shook her head. "That's way past paranoia. And you want me to give myself to those people?"
I covered her hand with mine. "Not to them," I said. "Not everyone on the Council is like that."
She looked at my eyes for a moment. Then, carefully, she drew her hand out from under mine. "No. I'm not going to make myself vulnerable to men like that. Not again."
"Elaine," I protested.
She shook her head. "I'm leaving, Harry." She brushed her hair back from her face. "Are you going to tell them?"
I took a deep breath. If the Wardens found out that Elaine was still alive and avoiding them, there would be a literal witch-hunt. The Wardens weren't exactly known for their tolerance and understanding. Morgan was walking, talking proof of that. Anyone who helped shield her from the Wardens would get the same treatment. Didn't I already have enough problems?
"No," I said. "Of course not."
Elaine gave me a strained smile. "Thank you, Harry." She lifted her staff closer to her, holding it with both hands. "Can you get the door for me?"
"They're going to be out there watching."
"I'll veil. They won't see me."
"They're good."
She shrugged and said without emphasis, "I'm better. I've had practice."
I shook my head. "What are we going to do about the faeries?"
"I don't know," she said. "I'll be in touch."
"How can I contact you?"
She nodded toward the door. I opened it. She stepped up beside me and kissed my cheek again, her lips warm. "You're the one with the office and the answering service. I'll contact you." Then she stepped to the door, murmuring quietly under her breath. There was a glitter of sudden silver light around her that made me blink. When I opened my eyes again, she was gone.
I left the door open for a moment, and it was just as well that I did. Mister came padding back down the stairs a moment later and looked up at me with a plaintive meow. He prowled back into the apartment, curling around my legs and purring like a diesel engine. Mister is thirty pounds or so of tomcat. I figure one of his parents must have been a saber-toothed tiger. "Good timing, by the way," I told him, and shut the door, locking it.
I stood in the dim, warm firelight of the room. My cheek still tingled where Elaine had kissed it. I could smell her lingering perfume, and it brought with it a pang of almost tangible memories, a flood of things I thought I had forgotten. It made me feel old, and tired, and very alone.
I walked to the mantel and straightened the card Susan had sent me the previous Christmas. I looked at her picture, next to the card. She'd been in a park that weekend, wearing a blue tank top and cutoff shorts. Her teeth were impossibly white against her darkly tanned skin and coal-black hair. I'd taken the picture while she was laughing, and her dark eyes shone.
I shook my head. "I am tired, Mister," I said. "I am ridiculously tired."
Mister meowed at me.
"Well, resting would be the sane thing to do, but who am I to throw stones, right? I mean, I'm talking to my cat." I scratched at my beard and nodded to myself. "Just a minute on the couch. Then to work."
I remember sitting down on the couch, and after that everything went blissfully black.
Which was just as well. The next day things got complicated.
I wasn't too tired to dream. Evidently, my subconscious---we've met, and he's kind of a jerk---had something on his mind, because the dream was a variation on the theme that had taken up most of my sleeping hours since I'd last seen Susan.
The dream began with a kiss.
Susan has a gorgeous mouth. Not too thin and not too full. Always soft, always warm. When she kissed me, it was like the world went away. Nothing mattered but the touch of her lips on mine. I kissed the dream-Susan, and she melted against me with a soft sound, the length of her body pliant, eager. Her fingers reached up and trailed over my chest, nails lightly raking.
I leaned back from the kiss after a long moment, and my eyes felt almost too heavy to open. My lips quivered and tingled with sensation, a feeling that begged for more kisses to make it cease. She looked up at me, dark eyes smoldering. Her hair had been pulled back into a long, silken tail that fell between her shoulder blades. It had grown longer, in the dreams. Her lovely aquiline face tilted up toward mine.
"Are you all right?" I asked her. I always did. And, as always, she gave me a small, sad smile and did not answer. I bit my lip. "I'm still looking. I haven't given up."
She shook her head and drew back from me. I had the presence of mind to look around. A dark alley this time, with the heavy, pounding music of a dance club making the nearest wall vibrate. Susan wore dark tights and a sleeveless blouse, and my black-leather duster had been draped over her shoulders and fell to brush her feet. She looked at me intently and then turned toward the entrance to the club.
"Wait," I said.
She walked to the door and turned back to me, extending her hand. The door opened, and dim, reddish light flooded out over her, doing odd things to the shadows over her face. Her dark eyes grew larger.
No, that wasn't right. The black of her pupils simply expanded, until the whites were gone, until there was nothing but darkness where her eyes should have been. They were vampire eyes, huge and inhuman.
"I can't," I said. "We can't go in there, Susan."
Her features grew frustrated, angry. She extended her hand to me again, more forcefully.
Hands came out of the darkness in the doorway, slim, pale, androgynous. They slipped over Susan, slowly, caressingly. Tugging at her clothing, her hair. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment, her body growing stiff, before her weight shifted slowly toward the doorway.
Longing shot through me, sudden, mindless, and sharp as a scalpel's blade. Hunger, a simple and nearly violent need to touch, to be touched, followed it into me, and I suddenly could not think. "Don't," I said, and stepped toward her.
I felt her hand take mine. I felt her press herself to me with another moan, and her lips, her mouth, devoured mine with ravenous kisses, kisses I answered with my own, harder and more demanding as my doubts faded. I felt it when her kiss turned poisonous, when the sudden narcotic numbness swept through my mouth and began to spread through my body. It didn't make any difference. I kissed her, tore at her clothes, and she tore at mine. The hands helped, but I didn't pay any attention to them anymore. They were an unimportant background sensation in comparison to Susan's mouth, her hands, her skin velvet and warm beneath my fingers.
There was no romance, nothing but need, animal, carnal. I pushed her against a wall in the dim scarlet light, and she wrapped herself around me, frantic, her body urging me on. I pressed into her, sudden sensation of silk and honey, and had to fight for control, throwing my head back.
She quivered then, and as always, she struck. Her mouth closed on my throat, a flash of heat and agony that melted into a narcotic bliss like that of her kiss---but more complete. Languid delight spread through me, and I felt my body reacting, all traces of control gone, thrusting against her, into her. The motion slowly died as sheer, shivering ecstasy spread through me. I began to lose control of my limbs, muscles turning to gelatin. I sank slowly to the floor. Susan rode me down, her mouth hot and eager on my throat, her body, her hips moving now, taking over the rhythm.
The pleasure of the venom melted my thoughts, and they slid free of my flesh, floating over the ground. I looked down on my body, beneath Susan, pale and still on the floor, eyes empty. I saw the change take her. I saw her body twist and buck, saw her skin split and rip open. I saw something dark and horrible tear its way out, all gaping dark eyes and slippery black hide. Blood, my blood, smeared its mouth.
The creature froze in shock, staring down at my corpse. And as I began to drift away, the creature threw back its head, its body rubbery and sinuous as a snake's, and let out an inhuman, screeching yowl full of rage, pain, and need.
I bolted up out of sleep with a short cry, my skin sheathed in a cold sweat, my muscles aching and stiff.
I panted for a moment, looking around my apartment. My lips tingled with remembered kisses, my skin with dreamed caresses.
I forced myself to my feet with a groan and staggered toward my shower. There were times when it was just as well that I had disconnected the water heater to head off magically inspired mishaps. It made bathing sheer torture in the winter, but sometimes there's no substitute for a cold shower.
I stripped and stood under chilly water for a while, shaking. Not necessarily from cold, either. I shook with a lot of things. First with raw and mindless lust. The shower took the edge off of that in a few moments. Don't get me wrong. I didn't have any particular deathsex fixation. But I had been used to a certain amount of friendly tension relieving with Susan. Her absence had killed that for me, completely---except for rare moments during the damned dreams when my hormones came raging back to the front of my thoughts again as though making up for lost time.
Second, I trembled with fear. My nightmares might be one part lusty dream, but they were also a warning. Susan's curse could kill me and destroy her. I couldn't forget that.
And finally, I shook with guilt. If I hadn't let her down, maybe she wouldn't be in this mess. She was gone, and I didn't have the vaguest idea where she was. I should have been doing more.
I stuck my head in the water, and shoved those thoughts away, washing myself off with a ton of soap and the last shampoo in the bottle. I scrubbed at my beard and finally reached out and got my straight razor, then spent a few minutes and a lot of care removing it. Dark, wiry black hair fell in clumps to the shower floor, and my face tingled as it breathed its first air for a couple of months. But it felt good, and as I went through the routine of grooming, my thoughts cleared.
I dug some clean clothes out of my closet, padded out into the living room, and pulled back the rug that covered the trapdoor leading to the subbasement. I swung the door open, lit a candle, and descended the stepladder staircase into my lab.
My lab, in contrast to the havoc upstairs, looked like something run by a particularly anal-retentive military clerk. A long table ran down the middle of the room, between a pair of other tables, one on either wall, leaving only narrow walkways. White steel wire shelves on the walls held the host of magical components I used in research. They resided in a variety of jars, bottles, boxes, and plastic containers, most with labels listing the contents, how much was left, and when I had acquired the item. The tables were clean except for stacks of notes, a jar of pens and pencils, and myriad candles. I lit a few of them and walked down to the other end of the lab, checking the copper summoning circle set into the floor and making sure that nothing lay across it. You never knew when a magic circle would come in handy.
One area of the lab had retained the casual chaos that had been its major theme before I'd taken up nearly full-time residence last year. One shelf, still battered old wood, hadn't been changed or updated. Candleholders, covered in multiple shades of melted wax that had spilled down over them, sat at either end of the shelf. Between them was a scattering of various articles---a number of battered paperback romances, several Victoria's Secret catalogs, a scarlet scrap of a silk ribbon that had been tied into a bow on a naked young woman named Justine, one bracelet from a broken set of handcuffs, and a bleached old human skull.
"Bob, wake up," I said, lighting candles. "I need to pick your brain."
Lights, orange and nebulous, kindled deep in the shadows of the skull's eye sockets. The skull quivered a little bit on its shelf and then stretched its toothy mouth open in an approximation of a yawn. "So was the kid right? Was there some portent-type action going on?"
"Rain of toads," I said.
"Real ones?"
"Yeah."
"Ouch," said Bob the Skull. Bob wasn't really a skull. The skull was just a vessel for the spirit of intellect that resided inside and helped me keep track of the constantly evolving metaphysical laws that govern the use of magic. But "Bob the Skull" is a lot easier to say than "Bob the Spirit of Intellect and Lab Assistant."
I nodded, breaking out my Bunsen burners and beakers. "Tell me about it. Look, Bob, I've got kind of a difficult situation here and---"
"Harry, you aren't going to be able to do this. Thereis no cure for vampirism. I like Susan too, but it can't be done. You think people haven't looked for a cure before now?"
"Ihaven't looked for one before now," I said. "And I've had a couple of ideas I want to look at."
"Aye, Cap'n Ahab, arr har har har! We'll get that white devil, sir!"
"Damn right we will. But we've got something else to do first."
Bob's eyelights brightened. "You mean something other than hopeless, pointless vampire research? I'm already interested. Does it have to do with the rain of toads?"
I frowned, got out a pad of paper and a pencil, and started scratching things down. Sometimes that helped me sort things out. "Maybe. It's a murder investigation."
"Gotcha. Who's the corpse?"
"Artist. Ronald Reuel."
Bob's eyelights burned down to twin points. "Ah. Who is asking you to find the killer?"
"We don't know he was killed. Cops say it was an accident."
"But you think differently."
I shook my head. "I don't know a thing about it, but Mab says he was killed. She wants me to find the killer and prove that it wasn't her."
Bob fell into a shocked silence nearly a minute long. My pen scratched on the paper until Bob blurted, "Mab?The Mab, Harry?"
"Yeah."
"Queen of Air and Darkness?That Mab?"
"Yeah," I said, impatient.
"And she's yourclient ?"
"Yes, Bob."
"Here's where I ask why don't you spend your time doing something safer and more boring. Like maybe administering suppositories to rabid gorillas."
"I live for challenge," I said.
"Or youdon't , as the case may be," Bob said brightly. "Harry, if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. You don't get tangled up with the Sidhe. It's always more complicated than you thought it would be."
"Thanks for the advice, skull boy. It wasn't like I had a choice. Lea sold her my debt."
"Then you should have traded her something for your freedom," Bob said. "You know, stolen an extra baby or something and given it to her---"
"Stolen ababy ? I'm in enough trouble already."
"Well, if you weren't such a Goody Two-shoes all the time . . ."
I pushed at the bridge of my nose with my thumb. This was going to be one of those conversations that gave me a headache, I could tell already. "Look, Bob, can we stick to the subject, please? Time is important, so let's get to work. I need to know why Reuel would have been knocked off."
"Gee whiz, Harry," Bob said. "Maybe because he was the Summer Knight?"
My pencil fell out of my fingers and rolled on the table. "Whoa," I said. "Are you sure?"
"What do you think?" Bob replied, somehow putting a sneer into the words.
"Uh," I said. "This means trouble. It means . . ."
"It means that things with the Sidhe are more complicated than you thought. Gee, if only someone had warned you at some point not to be an idiot and go making deals."
I gave the skull a sour look and recovered my pencil. "How much trouble am I in?"
"A lot," Bob said. "The Knights are entrusted with power by the Sidhe Courts. They're tough."
"I don't know much about them," I confessed. "They're some kind of representative of the faeries, right?"
"Don't call them that to their faces, Harry. They don't like it any more than you'd like being called an ape."
"Just tell me what I'm dealing with."
Bob's eyelights narrowed until they almost went out, then brightened again after a moment, as the skull began to speak. "A Sidhe Knight is mortal," Bob said. "A champion of one of the Sidhe Courts. He gets powers in line with his Court, and he's the only one who is allowed to act in affairs not directly related to the Sidhe."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that if one of the Queens wants an outsider dead, her Knight is the trigger man."
I frowned. "Hang on a minute. You mean that the Queens can't personally gun down anyone who isn't in their Court?"
"Not unless the target does something stupid like make an open-ended bargain without even trying to trade a baby for---"
"Off topic, Bob. Do I or don't I have to worry about getting killed this time around?"
"Of course you do," Bob said in a cheerful tone. "It just means that the Queen isn't allowed to actually, personally end your life. They could, however, trick you into walking into quicksand and watch you drown, turn you into a stag and set the hounds after you, bind you into an enchanted sleep for a few hundred years, that kind of thing."
"I guess it was too good to be true. But my point is that if Reuel was the Summer Knight, Mab couldn't have killed him. Right? So why should she be under suspicion?"
"Because she could have done it indirectly. And Harry, odds are the Sidhe don't really care about Reuel's murder. Knights come and go like paper cups. I'd guess that they were upset about something else. The only thing they really care about."
"Power," I guessed.
"See, you can use your brain when you want to."
I shook my head. "Mab said something had been taken, and that I'd know what it was," I muttered. "I guess that's it. How much power are we talking about?"
"A Knight of the Sidhe is no pushover, Harry," Bob said, his tone earnest.
"So we're talking about a lot of magic going AWOL. Grand theft mojo." I drummed my pen on the table. "Where does the power come from originally?"
"The Queens."
I frowned. "Tell me if I'm off track here. If it comes from the Queens, it's a part of them, right? If a Knight dies, the power should snap back to the Queen like it was on a rubber band."
"Exactly."
"But this time it didn't. So the Summer Queen is missing a load of power. She's been weakened."
"If everything you've told me is true, yes," Bob said.
"There's no more balance between Summer and Winter. Hell, that could explain the toads. That's a serious play of forces, isn't it?"
Bob rolled his eyelights. "The turning of the seasons? Duh, Harry. The Sidhe are closer to the mortal world than any other beings of the Nevernever. Summer's had a slight edge for a while now, but it looks like they've lost it."
"And here I thought global warming was due to cow farts." I shook my head. "So, Titania loses a bunch of juice, and naturally suspicion falls on her archenemy, Mab."
"Yeah. Itis kind of an archenemy-ish thing to do, you have to admit."
"I guess." I frowned down at my notes. "Bob, what happens if this imbalance between the Courts continues?"
"Bad things," Bob said. "It will mess around with weather patterns, cause aberrant behavior in plants and animals, and sooner or later the Sidhe Courts will go to war with one another."
"Why?"
"Because, Harry. When the balance is destroyed, the only thing the Queens can do is to blow everything to flinders and let it settle out into a natural distribution again."
"What does that mean to me?" I asked.
"Depends on who has the edge when everything is settled," Bob said. "A war could start the next ice age, or set off an era of rampant growth."
"That last one doesn't sound so bad."
"No. Not if you're an Ebola virus. You'll have lots of friends."
"Oh. Bad, then."
"Yeah," Bob said. "Keep in mind that this is theory, though. I've never seen it happen. I haven't existed that long. But it's something the Queens will want to avoid if they can."
"Which explains Mab's interest in this, if she didn't do it."
"Even if she did," Bob corrected me. "Did she ever actually tell you she was innocent?"
I mulled it over for a moment. "No," I said finally. "She twisted things around a lot."
"So it's possible that shedid do it. Or had it done, at any rate."
"Right," I said. "So to find out if it was one of the Queens, we'd need to find her hitter. How tough would it be to kill one of these Knights?"
"A flight of stairs wouldn't do it. A couple of flights of stairs wouldn't do it. Maybe if he went on an elevator ride with you---"
"Very funny." I frowned, drumming my pen on the table. "So it would have taken that little something extra to take out Reuel. Who could manage it?"
"Regular folks could do it. But they wouldn't be able to do it without burning buildings and smoking craters and so on. To kill him so that it looked like an accident? Maybe another Knight could. Among the Sidhe, it was either the Winter Knight or one of the Queens."
"Could a wizard do it?"
"That goes without saying. But you'd have to be a pretty brawny wizard, have plenty of preparation and a good channel to him. Even then, smoking craters would be easier than an accident."
"The wizards have all been in duck-and-cover mode lately. And there are too many of them to make a practical suspect pool. Let's assume that it was probably internal faerie stuff. That cuts it down to three suspects."
"Three?"
"The three people who could have managed it. Summer Queen, Winter Queen, Winter Knight. One, two, three."
"Harry, I said it could have been one of the Queens."
I blinked up at the skull. "There are more than two?"
"Yeah, technically there are three."
"Three?"
"In each Court."
"Three Queens in eachCourt ?Six ? That's just silly."
"Not if you think about it. Each Court has three Queens: The Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Is, and the Queen Who Is to Come."
"Great. Which one does the Knight work for?"
"All of them. It's kind of a group thing. He has different duties to each Queen."
I felt the headache start at the base of my neck and creep toward the crown of my head. "Okay, Bob. I need to know about these Queens."
"Which ones? The ones Who Are, Who Were, or Who Are to Come?"
I stared at the skull for a second, while the headache settled comfortably in. "There's got to be a simpler parlance than that."
"That's so typical You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate."
"Hey," I said, "my sex life has nothing to do with---"
"Conjugate, Harry. Conju---oh, why do I even bother? The Queen is just the Queen. Queen Titania, Queen Mab. The Queen Who Was is called the Mother. The Queen Who Is to Come is known as the Lady. Right now, the Winter Lady is Maeve. The Summer Lady is Aurora."
"Lady, Queen, Mother, gotcha." I got a pencil and wrote it down, just to help me keep it straight, including the names. "So six people who might have managed it?"
"Plus the Winter Knight," Bob said. "In theory."
"Right," I said. "Seven." I wrote down the titles and then tapped the notebook thoughtfully and said, "Eight."
"Eight?" Bob asked.
I took a deep breath and said, "Elaine's alive. She's on the investigation for Summer."
"Wow," Bob said. "Wow. And I told you so."
"I know, I know."
"You think she might have gacked Reuel?"
"No," I said. "But I never saw it coming when she and Justin came after me, either. I only need to think about if she had the means to do it. I mean, if you think it would have been tough for me, maybe she wasn't capable of taking down Reuel. I was always a lot stronger than her."
"Yeah," Bob said, "but she was better than you. She had a lot going for her that you didn't. Grace. Style. Elegance. Breasts."
I rolled my eyes. "So she's on the list, until I find some reason she shouldn't be."
"How jaded and logical of you, Harry. I'm almost proud."
I turned to the folder Mab had given me and went through the newspaper clippings inside. "Any idea who the Winter Knight is?"
"Nope. Sorry," Bob said. "My contacts on the Winter side are kinda sketchy."
"Okay, then," I sighed and picked up the notebook. "I know what I need to do."
"This should be good," Bob said dryly.
"Bite me. I have to find out more about Reuel. Who was close to him. Maybe someone saw something. If the police assumed an accident, I doubt there was an investigation."
Bob nodded, somehow managing to look thoughtful. "So are you going to take out an ad in the paper or what?"
I went around the lab and started snuffing candles. "I thought I'd try a little breaking and entering. Then I'll go to his funeral, see who shows."
"Gosh. Can I do fun things like you when I grow up?"
I snorted and turned to the stepladder, taking my last lit candle with me.
"Harry?" Bob said, just before I left.
I stopped and looked back at him.
"For what it's worth, be careful." If I hadn't known any better, I'd have said Bob the Skull was almost shaking. "You're an idiot about women. And you have no idea what Mab is capable of."
I looked at him for a moment, his orange eyes the only light in the dimness of my frenetically neat lab. It sent a little shiver through me.
Then I clomped back up the stepladder and went out to borrow trouble.
I made a couple of phone calls, slapped a few things into a nylon backpack, and sallied forth to break into Ronald Reuel's apartment.
Reuel had lived at the south edge of the Loop, in a building that looked like it had once been a theater. The lobby yawned up to a high ceiling and was spacious and pretty enough, but it left me looking for the velvet ropes and listening for the disorganized squawking of an orchestra warming up its instruments.
I walked in wearing a hat with an FTD logo and carrying a long white flower box under one arm. I nodded to an aging security guard at a desk and went on past him to the stairs, my steps purposeful. You'd be surprised how far a hat, a box, and a confident stride can get you.
I took the stairs up to Reuel's apartment, on the third floor. I went up them slowly, my wizard's senses open, on the lookout for any energies that might yet be lingering around the site of the old man's death. I paused for a moment, over the spot where Reuel's body had been found, to be sure, but there was nothing. If a lot of magic had been put to use in Reuel's murder, someone had covered its tracks impressively.
I went the rest of the way up to the third floor, but it wasn't until I opened the door to the third-floor hallway that my instincts warned me I was not alone. I froze with the door from the stairway only half open, and Listened.
Listening isn't particularly hard. I'm not even sure it's all that magical. I can't explain it well, other than to say that I'm able to block out everything but what I hear and to pick up things I would normally miss. It's a skill that not many people have these days, and one that has been useful to me more than once.
This time, I was able to Listen to a half-whispered basso curse and the rustle of papers from somewhere down the hall.
I opened the flower box and drew out my blasting rod, then checked my shield bracelet. All in all, in close quarters like this, I would have preferred a gun to my blasting rod, but I'd have a hell of a time explaining it to security or the police if they caught me snooping around a dead man's apartment. I tightened my grip on the rod and slid quietly down the hall, hoping I wouldn't need to use it. Believe it or not, my first instinct isn't always to set things on fire.
The door to Reuel's apartment stood half open, and its pale wood glared where it had been freshly splintered. My heart sped up. It looked like someone had beaten me to Reuel's place. It meant that I must have been on the right track.
It also meant that whoever it was would probably not be thrilled to see me.
I crept to the door and peered inside.
What I could see of the apartment could have been imported from 429-B Baker Street. Dark woods, fancy scrollwork, and patterns of cloth busier than the makeup girl at a Kiss concert filled every available inch of space with Victorian splendor. Or rather, it once had. Now the place looked wrecked. A sideboard stood denuded of its drawers, which lay upturned on the floor. An old steamer chest lay on its side, its lid torn off, its contents scattered onto the carpet. An open door showed me that the bedroom hadn't been spared the rough stuff either. Clothes and broken bits of finery lay strewn about everywhere.
The man inside Reuel's apartment looked like a catalog model for Thugs-R-Us. He stood a hand taller than me, and I couldn't tell where his shoulders left off and his neck began. He wore old frayed breeches, a sweater with worn elbows, and a hat that looked like an import from the Depression-era Bowery, a round bowler decorated with a dark grey band. He carried a worn leather satchel in one meat-slab hand, and with the other he scooped up pieces of paper, maybe index cards, from a shoe box on an old writing desk, depositing them in the bag. The satchel bulged, but he kept adding more to it with rapid, sharp motions. He muttered something else, emitted a low rumble, and snatched up a Rolodex from the desk, cramming it into the satchel.
I drew back from the door and put my back against the wall. There wasn't any time to waste, but I had to figure out what to do. If someone had shown up at Reuel's place to start swiping papers, it meant that Reuel had been hiding evidence of one kind or another. Therefore, I needed to see whatever it was Kong had in that satchel.
Somehow, I doubted he would show me if I asked him pretty please, but I didn't like my other option, either. In such tight quarters, and with other residents nearby, I didn't dare resort to any of my kaboom magic. Kaboom magic, or evocation, is difficult to master, and I'm not very good at it. Even with my blasting rod as a focus, I had accidentally dealt out structural damage to a number of buildings. So far, I'd been lucky enough not to kill myself. I didn't want to push it if I didn't have to.
Of course, I could always just jump the thug and try to take his bag away. I had a feeling I'd be introduced to whole new realms of physical discomfort, but I could try it.
I took another peek at the thug. With one hand, he casually lifted a sofa that had to weigh a couple of hundred pounds and peered under it. I drew back from the door again. Fisticuffs, bad idea. Definitely a bad idea.
I chewed on my lip a moment more. Then I slipped the blasting rod back into the flower box, squared up my FTD hat, stepped around the corner, and knocked on the half-open door.
The thug's head snapped around toward me, along with most of his shoulders. He bared his teeth, anger in his eyes.
"FTD," I said, trying to keep my voice bland. "I got a delivery here for a Mr. Reuel. You want to sign for it?"
The thug glowered at me from beneath the shelter of his overhanging brow. "Flowers?" he rumbled a minute later.
"Yeah, buddy," I said. "Flowers." I came into the apartment and thrust the clipboard at him, idly wishing I had some gum to chomp. "Sign there at the bottom."
He glowered at me for a moment longer before accepting the clipboard. "Reuel ain't here."
"Like I care." I pushed a pen at him with the other hand. "Just sign it and I'll get going."
This time he glared at the pen, then at me. Then he set the satchel on the coffee table. "Whatever."
"Great." I stepped past him and put the flower box down on the table. He clutched the pen in his fist and scrawled on the bottom of the paper. I reached down with one hand as he did, plucked a piece of paper a little bigger than a playing card from the satchel, and palmed it. I got my hand back to my side just before he finished, growled, and shoved the clipboard at me.
"Now," he said, "leave."
"You bet," I told him. "Thanks."
I turned to go, but his hand shot out and his fingers clamped on to my arm like a steel band. I looked back. He narrowed his eyes, nostrils flared, and then growled, "I don't smell flowers."
The bottom fell out of my stomach, but I tried to keep the bluff going. "What are you talking about, Mr., uh"---I glanced down at the clipboard---"Grum."
Mr. Grum?
He leaned down closer to me, and his nostrils flared again, this time with a low snuffling sound. "I smell magic. Smell wizard."
My smile must have turned green to go with my face. "Uh."
Grum took my throat in one hand and lifted me straight up off the ground with a strength no human could duplicate. My vision reduced itself to a hazy tunnel, and the clipboard fell from my fingers. I struggled against him uselessly. His eyes narrowed, and he bared more teeth in a slow smile. "Should have minded your own business. Whoever you are." His fingers started tightening, and I thought I heard something crackle and pop. I had to hope it was his knuckles instead of my trachea. "Whoever you were."
It was too late by far to use my shield bracelet, and my blasting rod lay out of reach on the coffee table. I fumbled in my pocket, as my vision started to go black, for the only weapon I had left. I had to pray that I was right in my guess.
I found the old iron nail, gripped it as best I could, and shoved it hard at Grum's beefy forearm. The nail bit into his flesh.
He screamed, a throaty, basso bellow that shook the walls. He flinched and spun, hurling me away from him. I hit the door to Reuel's bedroom, slamming it all the way open, and got lucky. I landed on the bed rather than on one of the wooden pillars at its corners. If I'd hit one of those, I'd have broken my back. Instead, I hit the bed, bounced, fetched up hard against the wall, then tumbled back to the bed again.
I glanced up to see that Grum looked very different than he had a moment before.
Rather than the film noir tough-guy getup, he wore a loincloth of some kind of pale leather---and nothing more. His skin was a dark russet, layered with muscle and curling dark hair. His ears stood out from the sides of his head like satellite dishes, and his features had flattened, becoming more bestial, nearly like those of a gorilla. He was also better than twelve feet tall. He had to hunch over to stand, and even so his shoulders pressed against the ten-foot ceiling.
With another roar, Grum tore the nail from his arm and flung it to one side. It went completely through the wall, leaving a hole the size of my thumb. Then he spun back to me, baring teeth now huge and jagged, and took a stalking step toward me, the floor creaking beneath his feet.
"Ogre," I wheezed. "Crap!" I extended my hand toward the blasting rod and focused my will."Ventas servitas!"
A sharp and sudden torrent of air caught up the flower box and hurled it straight toward me. It hit me in the chest hard enough to hurt, but I snatched it, brought out my blasting rod, and trained it on Grum as he closed on me. I slammed more will through the rod, its tip bursting into scarlet incandescence.
"Fuego!"I barked as I released the energy. Fire in a column the size of my clenched fist flashed out at Grum and splashed against his chest.
It didn't slow him down, not by a second. His skin didn't burn---his hair didn't even singe. The fire of my magic spilled over him and did absolutely nothing.
Grum shouldered his way through the bedroom door, cracking the frame as he did, and raised his fist. He slammed it down at the bed, but I didn't wait around to meet it. I flopped over to the far side of the bed and tumbled down to the space between the bed and the wall. He reached for me, but I rolled underneath the bed, bumped against his feet, and scrambled toward the door.
I almost made it. But something heavy and hard slammed against my legs, taking them out from under me and knocking me down. I only had time to realize, dimly, that Grum had picked up an antique Victorian chair that resembled, more than anything else, a throne, and hurled it at me.
The pain kicked in a second later, but I crawled toward the door. The ogre's feet pounded in rapid succession, and the floor shook as he grew closer and closer to me.
From the hall, a querulous female voice demanded, "What's all that racket? I have already called the police, I have! You fruits get out of our hall, or they'll lock you away!"
Grum stopped. I saw frustration and rage flicker over his apelike features. Then he snarled, stepped over me, and picked up the satchel. When he headed for the door, I rolled out of his way. He was big enough to simply crush my chest if he stepped on me, and I didn't want to make it easy for him.
"You got lucky," the ogre growled. "But this is not over." Then his form blurred and shifted, growing smaller, until he wore the same appearance he had a few moments before. He settled his bowler with one hand, then stalked out the door, aiming a kick at me in passing. I cringed away from it, and he was gone.
"Well?" demanded that same voice. "What's it going to be, you fruit? Get out!"
Police sirens wailed somewhere outside. I got up, wobbled for a moment, and put my hand against the wall to help myself stay up. I turned the other hand over to look at the piece of paper I'd stolen from Grum's satchel.
It wasn't paper. It was a photograph. Nothing fancy---just an instant-camera shot. It showed old white-haired Reuel, standing in front of the Magic Castle at one of the Disney parks.
Several young people stood beside him and around him, smiling, sunburned, and apparently happy. One was a tall, bull-necked young woman in faded jeans, with her hair dyed a shade of muddy green. She had a wide smile and a blunt, ugly face. Standing beside her was a girl who should have been in a lingerie catalog, all curves and long limbs in her brief shorts and bikini top, her hair also green, but the color of summer grass rather than that of pond scum. On the other side of Reuel was a pair of young men. One of them, a short, stocky fellow with a goatee and sunglasses, had his fingers lifted into aV behind the head of his companion, a small, slender man with his skin sunburned to the color of copper and his blond hair bleached out to nearly white.
Who were they? Why had Reuel been with them? And why had Grum seemed so intent on removing their picture from Reuel's apartment?
The sirens grew closer, and if I didn't want to get locked up by some well-meaning member of Chicago's finest, I needed to leave. I rubbed at my aching throat, winced at the wrenching, cramping pain in my back, wondered about the photograph, and stumbled out of the building.
I got out of the old apartment building and back to the Blue Beetle without being mugged by any attackers, inhuman or otherwise. As I pulled out, a patrol car rolled up, blue bubbles flashing. I drove away at a sedate pace and tried to keep my shaking hands from making the car bob or swerve. No one pulled me over, so I must have done all right. Score one for the good guys.
I had time to think, though I wasn't sure I wanted to. I'd gone to Reuel's apartment on a simple snoop, not really expecting to find much, if anything. But I'd gotten lucky. Not only had I shown up at the right place, I'd done it at the right time. Someone obviously wanted to hide something there---either more pictures like the one I'd found or other papers from somewhere in the place. What I needed to determine now was what Grum had been trying to collect or---nearly as good---why he was trying to make some kind of evidence vanish. Failing that, knowing who he was working for would do almost as well---ogres aren't exactly known for their independent initiative. And given what was going on, it would be ludicrous to assume that one of the heavyweight thugs of the lands of Faerie just happened to be doing an independent contract in the home of the recently deceased.
Ogres were wyldfae---they could work for either Winter or Summer, and they could have a range of personalities and temperaments running the gamut from jovially violent to maliciously violent. Grum hadn't seemed to be on the cheerful end of that particular scale, but hehad been both decisive and restrained. The average walking mountain of muscle from Faerie wouldn't have held back from beating me to a pulp, regardless of what the neighbors shouted. That meant that Grum had more savvy than the average bear, that he was dangerous---even if I didn't take into account how easily he had ignored the spells I'd hurled at him.
All ogres have an innate capacity for neutralizing magical forces to one degree or another. Grum had grounded out my spells like I'd been scuffing my feet on the carpet to give him a little static electricity zap. That meant that he was an old faerie, and a strong one. The quick and thorough shapeshifting supported that assessment as well. Your average club-swinging thewmonger couldn't have taken human form, complete with clothing, so ably.
Smart plus strong plus quick equals badass. Most likely he was a trusted personal guard or a highly placed enforcer.
But for whom?
At a stop light I stared at the photograph I'd taken from Grum.
"Damn," I muttered, "who are these people?"
I added it to the list of questions still growing like fungus in a locker room.
Ronald Reuel's funeral had already begun by the time I arrived. Flannery's Funeral Home in the River North area had been a family-run business until a few years before. It was an old place, but had always been well kept. Now the carefully landscaped shrubbery had been replaced with big rocks, which were no doubt easier to maintain. The parking lot had a lot of cracks in it, and only about half of the outdoor lights were burning. The sign, an illuminated glass-and-plastic number that readQUIET ACRES FUNERAL HOME, glared in garish green and blue above the front door.
I parked the Beetle, tucked the photo into my pocket, and got out of the car. I couldn't casually take my staff or my blasting rod into the funeral home. People who don't believe in magic look at you oddly when you walk in toting a big stick covered with carvings of runes and sigils. The people who know what I am would react in much the same way as if I had walked in draped in belts of ammo and carrying a heavy-caliber machine gun in each hand, John Wayne--style. There could be plenty of each sort inside, so I carried only the low-profile stuff: my ring, mostly depleted, my shield bracelet, and my mother's silver pentacle amulet. My reflection in the glass door reminded me that I had underdressed for the evening, but I wasn't there to make the social column. I slipped into the building and headed for the room where they'd laid out Ronald Reuel.
The old man had been dressed up in a grey silk suit with a metallic sheen to it. It was a younger man's suit, and it looked too big for him. He would have looked more comfortable in tweed. The mortician had done only a so-so job of fixing Reuel up. His cheeks were too red and his lips too blue. You could see the dimples on his lips where thin lines of thread had been stitched through them to hold his mouth closed. No one would have mistaken this for an old man in the midst of his nap---it was a corpse, plain and simple. The room was about half full, people standing in little knots talking and passing back and forth in front of the casket.
No one was standing in the shadows smoking a cigarette or looking about with a shifty-eyed gaze. I couldn't see anyone quickly hiding a bloody knife behind his back or twirling a moustache, either. That ruled out the Dudley Do-Right approach to finding the killer. Maybe he, she, or they weren't here.
Of course, I supposed it would be possible for faeries to throw a veil or a glamour over themselves before they came in, but even experienced faeries have trouble passing for mortal. Mab had looked good, sure, but she hadn't really lookednormal . Grum had been much the same. I mean, he'd looked human, sure, but also like an extra on the set ofThe Untouchables . Faeries can do a lot of things really well, but blending in with a crowd generally isn't one of them.
In any case, the crowd struck me as mostly relatives and business associates. No one matched the pictures, no one seemed to be a faerie in a bad mortal costume, and either my instincts had the night off or no one was using any kind of veil or glamour. Bad guys one, Harry zero.
I slipped out of the viewing room and back into the hallway in time to hear a low whisper somewhere down the hall. That grabbed my attention. I made the effort to move quietly and crept a bit closer, Listening as I went.
"I don'tknow ," hissed a male voice. "I looked for her all day. She's never been gone this long."
"Just my point," growled a female voice. "She doesn't stay gone this long. You know how she gets by herself."
"God," said a third voice, the light tenor of a young man. "He did it. He really did it this time."
"We don't know that," the first man said. "Maybe she finally used her head and got out of town."
The woman's voice sounded tired. "No, Ace. She wouldn't just leave. Not on her own. We have to do something."
"What can we do?" the second male said.
"Something," the woman said. "Anything."
"Wow, that's specific," the first male, apparently Ace, said with his voice dry and edgy. "Whatever you're going to do, you'd better do it fast. The wizard is here."
I felt the muscles in my neck grow tense. There was a short, perhaps shocked silence in the room down the hall.
"Here?" the second male echoed in a panicky tone. "Now? Why didn't you tell us?"
"I just did, dimwit," Ace said.
"What do we do?" the second male asked. "What do we do, what do we do?"
"Shut up," snapped the female voice. "Shutup , Fix."
"He's in Mab's pocket," said Ace. "You know he is. She crossed over from Faerie today."
"No way," said the second voice, presumably Fix. "He's supposed to be a decent sort, right?"
"Depends on who you hear it from," said Ace. "People who get in his way have had a habit of getting real dead."
"God," said Fix, panting. "Oh God, oh God."
"Look," said the woman, "if he's here, we shouldn't be. Not until we know what it means." Furniture, maybe a wooden chair, creaked. "Come on."
I slipped back down the hall and around the corner into the lobby as I heard footsteps leaving the small side room. They didn't come toward me. Instead, they moved further down the hall, away from the lobby. They had to be heading for a back door. I chewed on my lip and weighed my options. Three very apprehensive folks, maybe human, maybe not, heading down a darkened hall toward a back door that doubtless led into an equally dark alley. It sounded like a recipe for more trouble.
But I didn't think I had any options. I counted to five and then followed the footsteps.
I saw only a retreating shadow at the far end of the hall. I looked into the room the three had been in as I went past it and found a small lounge with several upholstered chairs. I hesitated for a moment at the corner and heard the soft click of a metal door opening, then closing again. As I rounded the corner, I saw a door with a faded sticker spellingEXIT .
I went to the door and opened it as quietly as I could, then poked my head out into the alley it opened into and rubbernecked around.
They were standing not five feet away---three of the young people from Reuel's photo. The small, skinny man with the blond-white hair and dark tan was facing me. He was dressed in what looked like a secondhand brown suit and a yellow polyester clip-on tie. His eyes widened almost comically, and his mouth dropped open in shock. He squeaked, and it was enough to let me identify him as Fix.
Beside him was the other young man, Ace. He was the one with the dark curly hair and goatee, wearing a grey sport coat with a white shirt and dark slacks. He still had his sunglasses on when he turned to look at me, and he clawed at the pocket of his jacket upon seeing me.
The third was the brawny, homely young woman with the muddy green hair and heavy brow. She had on a pair of jeans tight enough to show the muscles in her thighs and a khaki blouse. She didn't hesitate. She didn't even look. She just turned, her arm sweeping out as she did, and fetched me a blow to my cheek with the back of one shovel-size hand. I managed to move with it a bit at the last second, but even so the impact threw me out of the doorway and into the alley. Stars and cartoon birdies danced in my vision, and I rolled, trying to get clear before she could hit me again.
Ace pulled a small-caliber semiautomatic from his jacket pocket, but the woman growled at him, "Don't be stupid! They'd kill us all."
"Hebbity bedda," I said, by way of attempting a greeting. My mouth had gone rather numb, and my tongue felt like a lead weight. "Jussa hangonna sayke hee."
Fix jumped up and down, pointing at me, his voice shrill. "He's casting on us!"
The woman kicked me in the ribs hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Then she picked me up by the back of my pants, grunting with the effort, and threw me into the air. I came down ten feet away in an open Dumpster and crunched down amid cardboard boxes and stinking refuse.
"Go," the woman barked. "Go, go, go!"
I lay in the garbage for a minute, trying to catch my breath. The sound of three sets of running feet receded down the alley.
I had just sat up when a head popped into view over me, vague in the shadows. I flinched and threw up my left arm, willing power through the shield bracelet. I accidentally made the shield too big, and sparks kicked up where the shield intersected the metal of the Dumpster, but by their light I saw whose head it was.
"Harry?" Billy the Werewolf asked. "What are you doing in there?"
I let the shield drop and extended a hand to him. "Looking for suspects."
He frowned and hauled me out of the trash. I wobbled for a second or two, until my head stopped spinning quite so quickly. Billy steadied me with one hand. "You find any?"
"I'd say so, yeah."
Billy nodded and peered up at me. "Did you decide that before or after they hit you in the face and threw you in the garbage?"
I brushed coffee grounds off my jeans. "Do I tell you how to do your job?"
"Actually, yeah. All the time."
"Okay, okay," I muttered. "Did you bring the pizza?"
"Yeah," Billy said. "Got it back in the car. Why?"
I brushed at my shaggy hair. What I hoped were more coffee grounds fell out. I started walking down the alley toward the front of the building. "Because I need to make a few bribes," I said, looking back over my shoulder at Billy. "Do you believe in faeries?"
Billy held the pizza while I drew the chalk circle on the ground, back in the alley. "Harry," he said, "how is this supposed to work exactly?"
"Hang on," I said. I didn't quite complete the circle, but took the pizza box from him. I opened it, took out one piece, and put it down in the middle of the circle on a napkin. Then I dabbed a bit of blood from the corner of my mouth where the girl had slugged me onto the bottom of the piece of pizza, stepped back, and completed the circle without willing it closed.
"Pretty simple," I said. "I'll call the faerie in close to the pizza there. He'll smell it, jump on it, eat it. When he does, he'll get the bit of my blood, and it will be enough energy to close the circle around him."
"Uh-huh," Billy said, his expression skeptical. He took out a second piece and started to take a bite. "And then you beat the information out of him?"
I took the piece out of his hand, put it back in the box, and closed it. "And then I bribe the information out of him. Save the pizza."
Billy scowled at me, but he left the pizza alone. "So what do I do?"
"Sit tight and make sure no one else tries to pop me while I'm talking to Toot-toot."
"Toot-toot?" Billy asked, lifting an eyebrow.
"Hell's bells, Billy, I didn't pick the name. Just be quiet. If he thinks there are mortals around he'll get nervous and leave before I can snare him."
"If you say so," Billy said. "I was just hoping to do more good than to deliver pizza."
I raked my fingers through my hair. "I don't know what you could do yet."
"I could track those three in the picture you showed me."
I shook my head. "Odds are they just got into a car and left."
"Yeah," he said, some forced patience in his voice. "But if I get their scent now, it might help me find them later on."
"Oh," I said, feeling a bit stupid. Okay, so I hadn't considered the whole shapeshifting angle. "Fine, if you want to. Just be careful, all right? I don't know what all might be prowling around."
"Okay, Mom," Billy said. He set the pizza box on top of a closed trash can, fell back down the alley, and vanished.
I waited until Billy had gone to find a nice patch of shadows to step into. Then I closed my eyes for a moment, drawing up my concentration, and began to whisper the faerie's Name.
Every intelligent being has a Name, a specific series of spoken sounds linked to its very being. If a practitioner knows the Name of something, knows it in every nuance and detail of pronunciation, then he can use that Name to open a magical conduit to that being. That's how demons get summoned to the mortal world. Call something's Name and you make contact with it---and if you're a wizard, that means that you can then exercise power over it, no matter where in the world it is.
Controlling an inhuman being via its Name is a shady area of magic, only one step removed from taking over the will of another mortal. According to the White Council's Seven Laws of Magic, that's a capital crime---and they make zero-tolerance policies look positively lenient.
Given how much the Council loves me, I'm a tad paranoid about breaking any of the Laws of Magic, so while I was calling the faerie's Name, I put only the tiniest trickle of compulsion into it, just enough to attract his unconscious attention, to make him curious about what might be down this particular alley. I whispered the faerie's Name and stood in the shadows, waiting.
Maybe ten minutes later, something made from a hummingbird and a falling star spiraled down from overhead, a flickering ball of blue-white light. It alighted on the ground, the light dimming to a luminous sheen over the form of a tiny faerie, Toot-toot.
Toot stood about six inches tall. He had a mane of dandelion-fluff hair the color of lilacs and a pair of translucent dragonfly wings rising from his shoulders. Otherwise he looked almost human, his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe. On his head he wore what looked like a plastic Coke bottle cap. It was tied into place with a piece of string that ran under his chin, and his lilac hair squeezed out from beneath it all the way around, all but hiding his eyes. In one hand he carried a spear fashioned from a battered old yellow Number 2 pencil, some twine, and what must have been a straight pin, and he wore a little blue plastic cocktail sword through another piece of twine on his belt.
Toot landed in a cautious crouch near the pizza, as though streaking in like an errant shot from a Roman candle might not have alerted anyone watching to his presence. He tiptoed in a big circle around the piece of pizza, and made a show of looking all around, one hand lifted to shade his eyes. Then he raised his arm into the air, balled up a tiny fist, and pumped it up and down a few times.
Immediately, half a dozen similar streaks of glowing color darted down out of the air, each one a different color, each one containing a tiny faerie at its center. They alighted more or less together, and every one of them was armed with a weapon that might have been cobbled together from the contents of a child's school box.
"Caption!" Toot-toot piped in a shrill, voice. "Report!"
A green-lit faerie beside Toot snapped to attention and slapped herself on the forehead with one hand, then turned sharply to her left and barked, "Loo Tender, report!"
A purple-hued faerie came to attention as well and smacked himself in the head with one hand, then turned to the next faerie beside him and snapped, "Star Jump, report!"
And so it went down the line, through the "Corpse Oral," the "First Class Privy," and finally to the "Second Class Privy," who marched up to Toot-toot and said, "Everyone's here, Generous, and we're hungry!"
"All right," Toot-toot barked. "Everyone fall apart for messy!"
And with that, the faeries let out shrill hoots of glee, tossed aside their weapons and armaments, and threw themselves upon the piece of pizza.
As soon as the little faeries started eating, the magic circle snapped closed around them with a hardly audiblepop as it sprang into place. The effect was immediate. The faeries let out half a dozen piercing shrieks of alarm and buzzed into the air, smacking into the invisible wall of the circle here and there, sending out puffs of glowing dust motes when they did. They fell into a panicked spiral, around the inside of the circle, until Toot-toot landed on the ground, looked up at the other faeries, and started shouting, "Ten Huts! Ten Huts!"
The other faeries abruptly came to a complete stop in the air, standing rigidly straight. Evidently, they couldn't do that and keep their little wings going at the same time, because they promptly fell to the alley floor, landing with a half-dozen separate "ouches" and as many puffs of glowing faerie dust.
Toot-toot recovered his pencil spear and stood at the very edge of the closed circle, peering out at the alley. "Harry Dresden? Is that you?"
I stepped out from my hiding spot and nodded. "It's me. How you doing, Toot?"
I expected a torrent of outraged but empty threats. That was Toot-toot's usual procedure. Instead, he let out a hiss and crouched down in the circle, spear at the ready. The other tiny faeries took up their own weapons and rushed to Toot-toot's side. "You can't make us," Toot said. "We haven't been Called and until we are, we belong to ourselves."
I blinked down at them. "Called? Toot, what are you talking about?"
"We're not stupid, Emissary," Toot-toot said. "I know what you are. I can smell the Cold Queen all over you."
I wondered if they made a deodorant for that. I lifted my hand in a placating gesture. "Toot, I'm working for Mab right now, but it's just another client, okay? I'm not here to take you anywhere or make you do anything."
Toot planted the eraser end of his spear on the ground, scowling suspiciously up at me. "Really?" he demanded.
"Really," I said.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"Super duper double dog promise spit swear?"
I nodded. "Super duper double dog promise spit swear," I repeated gravely.
"Spit!" Toot demanded.
I spat on the ground.
"Oh. Well, then," Toot said. He dropped his spear and darted over to the pizza, much to the consternation of the other little faeries, who let out piping shrills of protest and then followed him. The piece of pizza didn't last long. It was like watching one of those nature shows, where the piranha devour some luckless thing that falls in the water---except here there were glittering wings and motes and puffs of glowing, colorful dust everywhere.
I watched, frowning, until Toot-toot flopped onto his back, his tummy slightly distended. He let out a contented sigh, and the other faeries followed suit.
"So, Harry," Toot said, "who do you think is going to win the war?"
"The White Council," I said. "The Red Court's got no depth on the bench and nothing in the bullpen."
Toot snorted and flipped his plastic bottle-cap helm off his head. His hair waved around in the breeze. "Just because they don't have any cows doesn't mean that they won't win. But I don't meanthat war."
I frowned. "You mean between the Courts."
Toot nodded. "Yeah."
"Okay. What's with the armor and weapons, Toot?"
The faerie beamed. "Neat, huh?"
"Highly scary," I said gravely. "But why do you have them?"
Toot folded his arms and said, with all the gravity that six inches of fluff and pixie dust can muster, "Trouble's coming."
"Uh-huh. I hear the Courts are upset."
"More than just upset, Harry Dresden. The drawing of the wyldfae is beginning. I saw some dryads walking with a Sidhe Knight from Summer, and a canal nereid climbed up out of the water a couple of blocks over and went into a Winter building."
"Drawing of the wyldfae. Like you guys?"
Toot nodded and propped his feet up on the legs of the Star Jump, who let out a surprisingly basso belch. "Not everyone plays with the Courts. We mostly just do our jobs and don't pay much attention. But when there's a war on, the wyldfae get Called to one side or another."
"Who picks which way you go?"
Toot shrugged. "Mostly the nice wyldfae go to the Warm Queen and the mean ones go to Cold. I think it's got something to do with what you've been doing."
"Uh-huh. So have you been doing Warm or Cold things?"
Toot let out a sparkling laugh. "How should I remember all those things?" He patted his stomach and then rose to his feet again, eyes calculating. "Is that a pizza box you have there, Harry?"
I held the box out and opened it, showing the rest of the pizza. There was a collective "Ooooo" from the faeries, and they all pressed to the very edge of the circle, until it flattened their little noses, staring at the pizza in fascinated lust.
"You've sure given us a lot of pizza the past couple of years, Harry," Toot said, with a swallow. He didn't look away from the box in my hands.
"Hey, you gave me a hand when I needed it," I said. "It's only fair, right?"
"Only fair?" Toot spat, outraged. "It's . . . it's . . . it'spizza , Harry."
"I'm wanting some more work done," I said. "I need information."
"And you're paying in pizza?" Toot asked, his tone hopeful.
"Yes," I said.
"Wah-hoo!" Toot shouted and buzzed into the air in an excited spiral. The other faeries followed him with similar carols of happiness, and the blur of colors was dizzying.
"Give us the pizza!" Toot shouted.
"Pizza, pizza, pizza!" the other faeries shrilled.
"First," I said, "I want some questions answered."
"Right, right, right!" Toot screamed. "Ask already!"
"I need to talk to the Winter Lady," I said. "Where can I find her, Toot?"
Toot tore at his lavender hair. "Isthat all you need to know? Down in the city! Down where the shops are underground, and the sidewalks."
I frowned. "In the commuter tunnels?"
"Yes, yes, yes. Back in the part the mortals can't see, you can find your way into Undertown. The Cold Lady came to Undertown. Her court is in Undertown."
"What?" I sputtered. "Since when?"
Toot whirled around in impatient loops in the air. "Since the last autumn!"
I scratched at my hair. It made sense, I supposed. Last autumn, a vengeful vampire and her allies had stirred up all sorts of supernatural mischief, creating turbulence in the border between the real world and the Nevernever, the world of spirit. Shortly after, the war between the wizards and the vampires had begun.
Those events had probably attracted the attention of all sorts of things.
I shook my head. "And what about the Summer Lady? Is she in town?"
Toot put his fists on his hips. "Well,obviously , Harry. If Winter came here, Summer had to come too, didn't it?"
"Obviously," I said, feeling a little slow on the uptake. Man, was I off my game. "Where can I find her?"
"She's on top of one of those big buildings."
I sighed. "Toot, this is Chicago. There are a lot of big buildings."
Toot blinked at me, then frowned for a minute before brightening. "It's the one with the pizza shop right by it."
My head hurt some more. "Tell you what. How about you guide me to it?"
Toot thrust out his little chin and scowled. "And miss pizza? No way."
I gritted my teeth. "Then get me someone else to guide me. You've got to know someone."
Toot scrunched up his face. He tugged at one earlobe, but it evidently didn't help him remember, because he had to rub one foot against the opposite calf and spin around in vacant circles for ten whole seconds before he whirled back to face me, the nimbus of light around him brightening. "Aha!" he sang. "Yes! I can give you a guide!" He jabbed a finger at me. "But only if that's all the questions, Harry. Pizza, pizza, pizza!"
"Guide first," I insisted. "Then pizza."
Toot shook his arms and legs as though he would fly apart. "Yes, yes, yes!"
"Done," I said. I opened the pizza box and set it on top of a discarded crate nearby. Then I stepped over to the circle, leaned down, and with a smudge of my hand and an effort of will broke it, freeing the energies inside.
The faeries chorused several pitches and variants of "Yahoo!" and streaked past me so quickly that they left a cone of wild air behind them, tossing my unruly hair and scattering lighter pieces of garbage around the alley. They tore into the pizza with much the same gusto they'd used on the one piece earlier, but there was enough of it now to keep them from mangling it in mere seconds.
Toot zipped over to hover in front of my face and held out his little palm. A moment later, something that looked like an errant spark from a campfire whirled down and lighted on his palm. Toot said something in a language I couldn't understand, and the tiny light pulsed and flickered as though in response.
"Right," Toot said, nodding to the light. I peered more closely at it, and could just barely make out a tiny, tiny form inside, no larger than an ant. Another faerie. The light pulsed and flickered, and Toot nodded to it before turning to me.
"Harry Dresden," Toot-toot said, holding out his palm, "this is Elidee. She's going to pay me back a favor and guide you to the Winter Lady and then to the Summer Lady. Good enough?"
I frowned at the tiny faerie. "Does she understand me?"
I barely saw Elidee stamp a tiny foot. The scarlet light around her flickered sharply, twice.
"Yes," Toot-toot translated. "Two lights for yes, and one light for no."
"Two for yes, one for no," I muttered.
Toot frowned. "Or is that one for yes and two for no? I can never keep it straight." And with that, the little faerie blurred and zipped past me and away to join the swarm of softly flashing lights demolishing the pizza.
Elidee, for her part, recovered from the miniature cyclone that Toot-toot left in his wake, whirled around dizzily for a few moments, then spiraled down to me and settled on the bridge of my nose. My eyes crossed trying to look at her. "Hey," I said, "do I look like a couch to you?"
Two flashes.
I sighed. "Okay, Elidee. Do you want any pizza before we go?"
Two flashes again, brighter. The tiny faerie leapt up into the air again and zoomed over to the cloud around the pizza.
Footsteps came down the alley, then Billy stepped out of the shadows, pulling his sweatshirt down over his muscular stomach. I felt a brief and irrational surge of jealousy. I don't have a muscular stomach. I'm not overlapping my belt or anything, but I don't have abs of steel. I don't even have abs of bronze. Maybe abs of plastic.
Billy blinked at the pizza for a moment and said, "Wow. That's sort of pretty. In aJaws kind of way."
"Yeah," I said. "Don't look at it for too long. Faerie lights can be disorienting to mortals."
"Gotcha," Billy said. He glanced back at me. "How'd it go? You get what you needed?"
"Yeah," I said. "You?"
He shrugged. "Alley isn't the best place to pick up scents, but I should be able to recognize them again if I'm in my other suit. They didn't smell quite normal."
"Gee, what are the odds."
Billy's teeth showed in the dark. "Heh. So what are we waiting for?"
Elidee picked just then to glide back over to me and settle once more on the bridge of my nose. Billy blinked at her and said, "What the hell?"
"This is our guide," I said. "Elidee, this is Billy."
Elidee flashed twice.
Billy blinked again. "Uh, charmed." He shook his head. "So? What's the plan?"
"We go confront the Winter Lady in her underground lair. I do the talking. You stay alert and watch my back."
He nodded. "Okay. You got it."
I looked over to see the last piece of pizza lifted up into the air by greedy faerie hands. They clustered around it, tearing and ripping, and it was gone in seconds. With that, the faeries swarmed away like a squadron of potbellied comets and vanished from view.
Elidee fluttered off my nose and started drifting down the alley in the other direction. I followed her.
"Harry?" Billy asked, his voice a touch hopeful. "Are you expecting trouble?"
I sighed and rubbed at the space between my eyebrows.
Definitely getting a headache. It was going to be a long night.
Elidee led Billy and me through alleys, up a fire escape to the roof of a building and then down on the other side, and through a junk-cluttered abandoned lot on the way to the Pedway. It took us better than half an hour of scrambling after the tiny faerie through the muggy heat, and by the end of it I wished I'd told Toot-toot that we wanted someone who could read a street map and guide us there in a car.
Chicago's commuter tunnels are fairly recent construction, compared to much of the rest of the city. The tunnels are a maze if you don't know them---long stretches of identical overhead lights, drab, clean walls dotted with advertising posters, and intersections bearing plain and not always helpful directional signs. The tunnels closed after the workday and wouldn't open up again until around six the next morning, but Elidee led us to an unfinished building at Randolph and Wabash. She flitted around in front of a service access door that proved to be unlocked and that led down to a similar door that opened onto a darkened section of the Pedway that looked as though it had been under construction but was abandoned when the building had shut down.
It was completely dark, so I slipped the silver pentacle off my neck, lifting it in my hand and focusing a quiet effort of will upon it. The five-pointed star has been a symbol of magic for centuries, representing the four elements and the power of spirit bound within the circle of will---primal power under the control of human thought. I held the pentacle before me, and as I concentrated it began to glow with a gentle blue light, illuminating enough of our surroundings that we could navigate through the dark, silent tunnels. The little faerie drifted in front of us down the tunnel, and we followed her without speaking. She took us to the intersection with the main tunnels of the Pedway and on a brief walk down another tunnel, to a section shut behind a rusting metal gate with a sign that read,DANGER KEEP OUT. The gate proved to be unlocked, and we went down the tunnel, into a damper section of tunnels, rife with the smell of mold, that was clearly not a part of the Pedway proper.
After another fifty or sixty feet we reached a place where the walls became rough and uneven and shadows lay thick and heavy, despite the glow of my wizard's light.
Elidee drifted over to an especially dark section of wall and flew in a little circle in front of it.
"Okay," I said. "I guess this is where we get in."
"What is where we get in?" Billy asked, his voice skeptical. "Get into where?"
"Undertown," I said. I ran my hands over the wall. To the casual touch it appeared to be bare, unfinished concrete, but I felt a slight unsteadiness when I pressed against it. It couldn't have been solid stone. "Must be a panel here somewhere. Trigger of some kind."
"What do you mean, 'Undertown'? I've never heard of it before."
"I was probably working here for five or six years before I did," I said. "You have to understand the history of Chicago. How they did things here."
Billy folded his arms. "I'm listening."
"The city is a swamp," I said, still searching for a means of opening the door with my fingertips. "We're darn near level with Lake Michigan. When they first built the place, the town kept sinking into the muck. I mean, every year it sank lower. They used to build streets, then build a latticework of wood over them, and thenanother street on top of that, planning on them slowly sinking. They planned houses the same way. Built the front door on the second floor and called it a 'Chicago entry,' so when the house sank, the front door would be at ground level."
"What about when the street sank?"
"Built another one on top of it. So you wound up with a whole city existing under the street level. They used to have a huge problem with rats and criminals holing up under the streets."
"But not anymore?" Billy asked.
"The rats and thugs mostly got crowded out by other things. Became a whole miniature civilization down here. And it was out of sight of the sun, which made it friendly space for all the night-crawling critters around."
"Hence, Undertown," Billy said.
I nodded. "Undertown. There are a lot of tunnels around Chicago. The Manhattan Project was housed in them for a while during World War Two. Did all that atomic bomb research."
"That's cheerful. You come down here a lot?"
I shook my head. "Hell, no. All kinds of nastiness lives down here."
Billy frowned at me. "Like what?"
"Lots of things. Stuff you don't often see on the surface. Things even wizards know almost nothing about. Goblins, spirits of the earth, wyrms, things that have no name. Plus the usual riffraff. Vampires sometimes find lairs down here during the day. Trolls can hide here too. Molds and fungi you don't get in most of the natural world. You name it."
Billy pursed his lips thoughtfully. "So you're taking us into a maze of lightless, rotting, precarious tunnels full of evil faeries and monsters."
I nodded. "Maybe leftover radiation, too."
"God, you're a fun guy, Harry."
"You're the one who wanted in on the action." My fingers found a tiny groove in the wall, and when I pressed against it a small, flat section of stone clicked and retracted. The switch had to have triggered some kind of release, because the section of wall pivoted in the center, turning outward, and forming a door that led into still more dank darkness. "Hah," I said with some satisfaction. "There we go."
Billy pressed forward and tried to step through the door, but I put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him. "Hang on. There are some things you need to know."
Billy frowned, but he stopped, listening.
"These are faeries. We'll probably run into a lot of the Sidhe, their nobles, hanging out with the Winter Lady. That means that they're going to be dangerous and will probably try to entrap you."
"What do you mean, entrap me?" Billy said.
"Bargains," I said. "Deals. They'll try to offer you things, get you to trade one thing for another."
"Why?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. It's in their nature. The concept of debt and obligation is a huge factor in how they behave."
Billy lifted his eyebrows. "That's why that little guy worked for you, right? Because he owed you for the pizza and he had a debt to you."
"Right," I said. "But it can work both ways. If you owethem something, they have a conduit to you and can use magic against you. The basic rule is not to accept any gifts from them---and for God's sake, don'toffer them any gifts. They find anything other than an equal exchange to be either enticing or insulting. It isn't a big deal with little guys like Toot, but if you get into it with a Sidhe Lord you might not live through it."
Billy shrugged. "Okay. No gifts. Dangerous faeries. Got it."
"I'm not finished. They aren't going to be offering you wrapped packages, man. These are the Sidhe. They're some of the most beautiful creatures there are. And they'll try to put you off balance and tempt you."
"Tempt me? Like with sex, is that what you're saying?"
"Like any kind of sensual indulgence. Sex, food, beauty, music, perfume. When they offer, don't accept it, or you'll be opening yourself up to a world of hurt."
Billy nodded. "Okay, got it. Let's go already."
I eyed the younger man, and he gave me an impatient look. I shook my head. I don't think I could have adequately conveyed the kind of danger we might be walking into with mere words in any case. I took a deep breath and then nodded to Elidee. "All right, Tinkerbell. Let's go."
The tiny scarlet light gave an irritated bob and then darted through the concealed doorway and into the darkness beyond. Billy narrowed his eyes and followed it, and I went after him. We found ourselves in a tunnel where one wall seemed to be made of ancient, moldering brick and the other of a mixture of rotting wooden beams, loose earth, and winding roots. The tunnel ran on out of the circle of light from my amulet. Our guide drifted forward, and we set out to follow her, walking close together.
The tunnel gave way to a sort of low-roofed cavern, supported here and there by pillars, mounds of collapsed earth, and beams that looked like they'd been added in afterward by the dwellers in Undertown. Elidee circled in place a bit uncertainly, then started floating to the right.
I hadn't been following the little faerie for five seconds before the skin on the back of my neck tried to crawl up over my head and hide in my mouth. I drew up short, and I must have made some kind of noise, because Billy shot a look back at me and asked, "Harry? What is it?"
I lifted a hand to silence him and peered at the darkness around me. "Keep your eyes open," I said. "I don't think we are alone."
From the shadows outside the light came a low hissing sound. The rest of my skin erupted in gooseflesh, and I shook my shield bracelet clear. I lifted my voice and said clearly, "I am the Wizard Dresden, Emissary of the Winter Court, bound to pay a call upon the Winter Lady. I've no time or desire for a fight. Stand clear and let me pass."
A voice---a voice that sounded like a tortured cat might, if some demented being gave it the gift of speech---mewled out of the shadows, grating on my ears. "We know who you are, wizard," the voice said. Its inflections were all wrong, and the tone seemed to come from not far above the ground, somewhere off to my right. Elidee let out a high-pitched shriek of terror and zipped back to me, diving into my hair. I felt the warmth of the light around the tiny faerie like a patch of sunlight on my scalp.
I traded a look with Billy and turned toward the source of the voice. "Who are you?"
"A servant of the Winter Lady," the voice replied from directly behind me. "Sent here to guide you safely through this realm and to her court."
I turned in the other direction and peered more closely toward the sound of the voice. The werelight from my amulet suddenly gleamed off a pair of animal eyes, twenty feet away and a few inches from the floor. I looked back at Billy. He'd already noted the eyes and turned to put his back to mine, watching the darkness behind us.
I turned back to the speaker and said, "I ask again. Who are you?"
The eyes shifted in place, the voice letting out an angry, growling sound. "Many names am I called, and many paths have I trod. Hunter I have been, and watcher, and guide. My Lady sent me to bring you thither, safe and whole and well."
"Don't get mad at me, Charlie," I snapped. "You know the drill as well as I do. Thrice I ask and done. Who are you?"
The voice came out harsh and sullen, barely intelligible. "Grimalkin am I called by the Cold Lady, who bids me guide her mother's Emissary with safe conduct to her court and her throne."
I let out a breath. "All right," I said. "So lead us."
The eyes bobbed in place, as though in a small bow, and Grimalkin mewled again. There was a faint motion in the shadows outside my light, and then a dull greenish glow appeared upon the ground. I stepped toward it and found a faint, luminous footprint upon the ground, a vague paw, feline but too spread out and too thin to be an actual cat's. Just as I reached it, another light appeared on the floor several feet away.
"Make haste, wizard," mewled Grimalkin's voice. "Make haste. The Lady waits. The season passes. Time is short."
I moved toward the second footprint, and as I reached it a third appeared before us, in the dark, and so on.
"What was that all about?" Billy murmured. "Asking it the same thing three times, I mean."
"It's a binding," I murmured in reply. "Faeries aren't allowed to speak a lie, and if a faerie says something three times, it has to make sure that it is true. It's bound to fulfill a promise spoken thrice."
"Ah," Billy said. "So even if this thing hadn't actually been sent to guide us safely, you made him say so three times would mean that he'd be obligated to do it. Got it."
I shook my head. "I wanted to make sure Grimalkin was on the level. But they hate being bound like that."
From ahead of us, the faintly glowing eyes appeared briefly, accompanied by another mewling growl that sent a chill down my spine.
"Oh," Billy said. He didn't look any too calm himself. His face had gone a little pale, and he walked with his hands clenched into fists. "So if Grimalkin had good intentions to begin with, wouldn't that make him angry that you needlessly bound him?"
I shrugged. "I'm not here to make friends, Billy. I'm here to find a killer."
"You've never even heard of diplomacy, have you?"
We followed the trail of footprints on the ground for another twenty minutes or so, through damp tunnels, sometimes only a few feet high. More sections of the tunnel showed evidence of recent construction---if you could call swirling layers of stone that seemed to have been smoothed into place like soft-serve ice cream "construction." We passed several tunnels that seemed entirely new. Whatever beings lived down here, they didn't seem too shy about expanding. "How much further?" I asked.
Grimalkin let out amrowl ing sound from somewhere nearby---not in the direction of the next footprint, either. "Very near, noble Emissary. Very near now."
The unseen faerie guide was good to its word. At the next glowing footprint, no other appeared. Instead, we came to a large, elaborately carved double doorway. Made of some black wood I could not identify, the doors were eight or nine feet high, and carved in rich bas-reief. At first I thought the carvings were of a garden theme---leaves, vines, flowers, fruit, that kind of thing. But as I walked closer to the door, I could see more detail in the light of my glowing amulet. The forms of people lay among the vines. Some sprawled amorously together, while others were nothing more than skeletons wrapped in creeping roses or corpses staring with sightless eyes from within a bed of poppies. Here and there in the garden one could see evidence of the Sidhe---a pair of eyes, a veiled figure, and their hangers-on, little faeries like Toot-toot, leaf-clad dryads, pipe-wielding satyrs, and many, many others hiding from the mortals' views, dancing.
"Nice digs," Billy commented. "Is this the place?"
I glanced around for our guide, but I didn't see any more footprints or any feline eyes. "I guess it must be."
"They aren't exactly subtle, are they?"
"Summer's better at it than Winter. But they all can be when it suits them."
"Uh-huh. You know what bothers me, Harry?"
"What?"
"Grimalkin never said he'd guide us out again."
I glanced back at Billy. Quiet, hissing laughter came out of the darkness, directionless. I took a deep breath. Steady, Harry. Don't let the kid see you get nervous. Then I turned to the door and struck it solidly with my fist, three times.
The blows rang out, hollow and booming. Silence fell on the tunnels for a long moment, until the doors split down the middle, and let out from behind them a flood of light and sound and color.
I don't know what I'd expected from the Winter Court, but it wasn't big-band music. A large brass section blared from somewhere behind the doors, and drums rattled and pounded with the rough, genuine sound of actual skins. The lights were colored and muted, as if the whole place was lit by Christmas strands, and I could see shadows whirling and moving inside---dancers.
"Careful," I muttered. "Don't let the music get to you." I stepped up to the great doors and passed through them.
The room could have come from a Roaring Twenties hotel. Hell, it might have been, if the hotel had sunk into the earth, turned slightly upon its side, and been decorated by things with no concept of human values. Whatever it had once been, it had always been meant for dancing. The dance floor was made of blocks of rose-colored marble, and even though the floor was tilted, the blocks had been slipped to the level, here and there, creating something that looked almost like a flight of low, shallow stairs. Over the treacherous blocks danced the Winter Sidhe.
Beautiful didn't come close. It didn't start to come close. Men and women danced together, dressed in regalia of the 1940s. Stockings, knee-length skirts, dress uniforms of both the army and the navy that looked authentic to the month and year. The hairstyles in evidence corresponded as well, though the color didn't always match the setting. One Sidhe girl I saw wore hers dyed sapphire-blue, and others wore braids of silver and gold, or of other colors. Here and there, light gleamed from metal or gems set into ears, brows, or lips, and the riot of subtle colors gathered around each and every dancer in its own distinct, fascinating nimbus, a corona of energy, of power manifesting itself as the Sidhe danced.
Even without the whirling auras, the way they moved was something hypnotic in itself, and I had to force my eyes away from it after only a few seconds of lovely legs being displayed as a woman spun, body arched back underneath a strong man's hands, throats bared and breasts offered out, as hair caught the gleam of the colored lights and threw it back in waves of color. I couldn't look anywhere on the dance floor without seeing someone who should have been making fun of people on the covers of magazines for being too ugly.
Billy hadn't been as paranoid as me, and he stood staring at the dance floor, his eyes wide. I nudged him with my hip, hard enough to make his teeth clack together, and he jerked and gave me a guilty look.
I forced my eyes away from the dancers, maybe twenty couples all told, to check out the rest of the ballroom.
To one side of the room stood a bandstand, and the musicians on it all wore tuxes. They were mortals, human. They looked normal, which was to say almost deformed in comparison to the dancers they performed for. Both men and women played, and none of them looked well rested or well fed. Their tuxes were stained with sweat, their hair hung lank and unwashed, and a closer look showed a silver manacle bound around the ankle of each of them, attached to a chain that ran through the bandstand, winding back and forth among them. They didn't look upset, though---far from it. Every one of them was bent to the music, faces locked in intensity and concentration. And they weregood , playing with the unity of tone and timing that you only see from bands who have really honed their art.
That didn't change the fact that they were prisoners of the fae. But they evidently had no particular problems with the notion. The music rattled the great stone room, shaking dust from the ceiling hidden in the darkness overhead while the Sidhe danced.
Opposite the bandstand, the dance floor descended directly into a pool of water---or what I presumed was water, at any rate. It looked black and unnaturally still. Even as I watched, the waters stirred, moved by something out of sight beneath the surface. Color rolled and rippled over the dark surface, and I got the distinct impression that the pool wasn't water. Or not just water. I fought down another shiver.
Beyond the dance floor, on the side of the room opposite me, stood raised tiers of platforms, each one set with a separate little table, one that could sit three or four at the most, each one with its own dim, green-shaded lamp. The tables all stood at different relative heights to one another, staggered back and forth---until the tiers reached a pinnacle, a single chair made out of what looked like silver, its flaring back carved into a sigil, a snowflake the size of a dinner table. The great chair stood empty.
The drummer on the bandstand went into a brief solo, and then the instruments cut off altogether---but for one. The other band members sagged into their seats, a couple of them simply collapsing onto the floor, but the lead trumpet stayed standing, belting out a solo while the Winter Lords danced. He was a middle-aged man, a little overweight, and his face flushed scarlet, then purple as his trumpet rang out through the solo.
Then, all at once, the Sidhe stopped dancing. Dozens of beautiful faces turned to watch the soloist, eyes glittering in the muted light.
The man continued to play, but I could see that something was wrong. The flush of his face deepened even more, and veins began to throb in his forehead and throat. His eyes widened and began to bulge, and he started shaking. A moment later the music began to falter. The man tore his face away from the trumpet, and I could see him gasping for breath. He couldn't get it. A second later he jerked, then stiffened, and his eyes rolled up in his head. The trumpet slipped from his fingers, and he fell, first to his knees and then limply over onto his side, to the floor of the bandstand. He hit with finality, his eyes open but not focused. He twitched once more, and then his throat rattled and he was still.
A murmur went through the Sidhe, and I looked back to see them parting, stepping aside with deep bows and curtseys for someone emerging from their midst. A tall girl walked slowly toward the fallen musician. Her features were pale, radiant, perfect---and looked like an adolescent copy of Mab's. That was where the resemblance ended.
She looked young. Young enough to make a man feel guilty for thinking the wrong thoughts, but old enough to make it difficult not to. Her hair had been bound into long dreadlocks, each of them dyed a different shade, ranging from a deep lavender to pale blues and greens to pure white, so that it almost seemed that her hair had been formed from glacial ice. She wore leather pants of dark, dark blue, laced and open up the outside seams from calf to hip. Her boots matched the pants. She wore a white T-shirt tight enough to show the tips of her breasts straining against the fabric, framing the wordsOFF WITH HIS HEAD. She had hacked the shirt off at the top of her rib cage, leaving pale flesh exposed, along with a glitter of silver flashing at her navel.
She moved to the downed musician with a liquid grace, a thoughtless, casual sensuality that made a quiver of arousal slip down my spine. She settled down over him, throwing a leg over his hips, straddling him, and idly raked long, opalescent fingernails over his chest. He didn't move. Didn't breathe.
The girl licked her lips, her mouth spreading into a lazy smile, before she leaned down and kissed the corpse's dead lips. I saw her shiver with what was unmistakably pleasure. "There," she murmured. "There, you see? Never let it be said the Lady Maeve does not fulfill her promises. You said you'd die to play that well, poor creature. And now you have."
A collective sigh went up from the assembled Sidhe, and then they began applauding enthusiastically. Maeve looked back over her shoulder at them all with a lifted chin and a lazy smile before she stood up and bowed, left and right, to the sound of applause. The applause died off when Maeve stalked away from the corpse and to the rising tiers of dinner seats, stepping lithely up them until she reached the great silver throne at the top. She dropped into it, turned sideways, and idly threw her legs over one arm, arching her back and stretching with that same lazy smile. "My lords and ladies, let us give our poor musical brutes a little time to recover their strength. We have a visitor."
The Sidhe began drifting toward the tables on the tiers, stepping into place one by one. I stood where I was and said nothing, though as they settled down I became increasingly conscious of their attention, of the glittering intensity of immortal eyes upon me.
Once they were all settled in, I stepped forward and walked across the dance floor until I stood at the foot of the tier. I looked up at Maeve and inclined my head to her. "Lady Winter, I presume."
Maeve smiled at me, showing a dimple, and gave one foot a girlish bounce. "Indeed."
"You know in what capacity I am here, Lady?"
"Naturally."
I nodded. Nothing like a frontal assault, then. "Did you arrange the murder of the Summer Knight?"
Silence fell on the room. The regard of the Winter Sidhe grew more intent, more uncomfortable.
Maeve's mouth spread into a slow smile, which in turn became a quiet, rolling laugh. She let her head fall back with it, and the Sidhe joined in with her. They sat there laughing at me for a good thirty seconds, and I felt my face begin to heat up with irrational embarrassment before Meave waved one hand in a negligent gesture and the laughter obediently died away.
"Stars," she murmured, "I adore mortals."
I clenched my jaw. "That's swell," I said. "Did you arrange the murder of the Summer Knight?"
"If I had, do you really think I would tell you?"
"You're evading," I growled. "Answer the question."
Maeve lifted a fingertip to her lips as though she needed it to hold in more laughter. Then she smiled and said, "I can't just give you that kind of information, Wizard Dresden. It's too powerful."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
She sat up, crossing her legs with a squeak of leather, and settled back on the throne. "It means that if you want me to answer that question, you're going to have to pay for it. What is the answer worth to you?"
I folded my arms. "I assume you have something in mind. That's why you sent someone to give us safe passage here."
"Quick," she murmured. "I like that. Yes, I do, wizard." She extended a hand to me and gestured to an open seat at the table to the right and a little beneath the level of her throne. "Please sit down," she said. Her teeth shone white. "Let's make a deal."
"You want me to cut another deal with the Sidhe," I said. I didn't bother to hide my disbelief. "When I burst out laughing at you, do you think you'll be offended?"
"And why should you find the notion amusing?"
I rolled my eyes. "Christ, lady, that's what got me into this crap to begin with."
Maeve's lips slithered into a quiet smile, and she left her hand extended, toward the seat beside her. "Remember, wizard, that you came to seek something from me. Surely it would not harm you to listen to my offer."
"I've heard that before. Usually right before I get screwed."
Maeve touched the tip of her tongue to her lips. "One thing at a time, Mister Dresden."
I snorted. "Suppose I don't want to listen."
Something in her eyes suddenly made her face cold and unpleasant. "I think it might be wise for you to indulge me. I simply go mad when someone ruins a good party mood."
"Harry," Billy muttered, "these people are giving me the creeps. If she's playing games with you, maybe we should go."
I grimaced. "Yeah, that would be the smart thing. But it wouldn't get me any answers. Come on."
I stepped forward and started climbing up to the table Maeve had indicated. Billy followed closely. Maeve watched me the whole time, her eyes sparkling.
"There," she said, once I'd been seated. "Not so untamable as he claimed."
I felt my jaw get a little tighter as Billy took a seat beside me. A trio of brightly colored lights zipped in, bearing a silver tray holding a crystalline ewer of water and two glasses. "As who said?"
Maeve waved a hand airily. "No matter."
I glared at her, but she didn't seem bothered. "All right, Lady," I said. "Talk."
Maeve idly stretched out a hand. A goblet of some golden liquid appeared in her fingers and rimed over with frost as I watched. She took a sip of the drink, whatever it was, and then said, "First, I will name my price."
"There'd better be a blue light special. I don't have much to trade, all things considered."
"True. I cannot ask for a claim over you, because Queen Mab has that already. But let me see." She tapped a fingernail to her lips again and then said, "Your issue."
"Eh?" I said, glibly.
"Your issue, wizard," she said, toying with a violet dreadlock. "Your offspring. Your firstborn. And in exchange I will give you the knowledge you seek."
"News flash, Coldilocks. I don't have any children."
Maeve laughed. "Naturally not. But the details could be arranged."
Evidently that was a cue. The dark pool of maybe-water stirred, drawing my eye. Ripples whispered as they lapped at the edges of the pool.
"What's that?" Billy whispered to me.
The waters parted, and a Sidhe girl rose out of the pool. She was tall, slender, water sliding down over pale, naked, supple curves. Her hair was a deep shade of emerald green, and as she kept on coming up out of the water, walking up what were apparently submerged stairs, I could tell that it wasn't dyed. Her face was sweetly angelic, sort of girl-next-door pretty. Her hair clung to her head, her throat, her shoulders, as did beads of water that glistened and threw back the fae-lights in dozens of colors. She extended her arms, and immediately half a dozen little lights, pixies, zipped out of nowhere, bearing a swath of emerald silk. They draped it over her extended arms, but the cloth served to emphasize, rather than conceal, her nakedness. She looked up at the tables with her feline fae-eyes and inclined her head to Maeve. Then she focused upon me.
There was an abrupt pulling sensation, something as simple and as difficult to resist as gravity. I felt a sudden urge to get up and go down to her, to remove the silk cloth and to carry her into the water. I wanted to see her hair fan out beneath the surface, feel her naked limbs sliding around me. I wanted to feel that slender waist beneath my hands, twist and writhe with her in the warm, weightless darkness of the pool.
Beside me, Billy gulped. "Is it just me, or is it getting a little warm in here?"
"She's pushing it on you," I said quietly. My lips felt a little numb. "It's glamour. It isn't real."
"Okay," Billy said without conviction. "It isn't real."
He reached for a glass and the ewer of water, but I grabbed his hand. "No. No food. No drink. It's dangerous."
Billy cleared his throat and settled back in his seat. "Oh. Right. Sorry."
The girl glided up the tiers of tables, glittering pixies in darting attendance around her, gathering her hair back with ornate combs, fastening gleaming jewels to her ears, lacing more about her throat, wrist, ankle. I couldn't help but follow the motion of the lights, which took my eyes on a thorough tour of her body. The urge to go to her became even stronger as she neared, as I smelled her perfume, a scent like that of the mist hovering over a still lake beneath a harvest moon.
The green-haired woman smiled, lips closed, then drew up in a deep curtsey to Maeve, and murmured, "My Lady."
Maeve reached out and took her hand, warmly. "Jen," she murmured. "Are you acquainted with the infamous Harry Dresden?"
Jen smiled, and her teeth gleamed between her lips. They were as green as seaweed, spinach, and fresh-steamed broccoli. "Only by reputation." She turned to me and extended her hand, arching one verdant brow.
I gave Billy a self-conscious glance and rose to take the Sidhe-lady's hand. I nudged Billy's foot with mine, and he stood up too.
I bowed politely over Jen's hand. Her fingers were cool, damp. I got the impression that her flawless skin should have been prune-wrinkled, but it wasn't. I had to fight an urge to kiss the back of her hand, to taste her cool flesh. I managed to keep a neutral tone to my voice and said, "Good evening."
The Sidhe-lady smiled at me, showing her green teeth again, and said, "Something of a gentleman. I wouldn't have expected it." She withdrew her hand and said, "And tall." Her eyes roamed over me in idle speculation. "I like tall men."
I felt my cheeks flush and grow warmer. Other parts suffered from similar inflammation.
Maeve asked, "Is she lovely enough to suit you, wizard? You've no idea how many mortal men have longed for her. And how few have known her embrace."
Jen let out a quiet laugh. "For more than about three minutes, at any rate."
Maeve drew Jen down until the nearly nude Sidhe lady knelt beside the throne. Maeve toyed with a strand of her curling, leaf-green hair with one hand. "Why not agree to my offer, wizard? Spend a night in the company of my maiden. Is it not a pleasant price?"
My voice came out more quietly than I'd intended. "You want me to get a child on her. A child you would keep."
Maeve's eyes glittered. She leaned toward me and said, very quietly, "Do not let that concern you. I can feel your hunger, mortal man. The needs in you. Hot as a fever. Let go for a time. No mortal could sate you as she will."
I felt my eyes drawn to the Sidhe woman, trailing down the length of pale flesh left bared between the idle drapes of emerald silk, following the length of her legs. That hunger rose again in me, a raw and unthinking need. Scent flooded over me---a perfume of wind and mist, of heated flesh. Scent evoked more phantom sensations of the silken caress of delicate fae-hands, sweetly hot rake of nails, winding strength of limbs tangled with mine.
Maeve's eyes brightened. "Perhaps she is not enough for you? Perhaps you would wish another. Even myself." As I watched, Jen leaned her cheek against Maeve's thigh and placed a soft kiss upon the tight leather. Maeve shifted, a slow, sensual motion of her hips and back, and murmured, "Mmmm. Or more, if your thirst runs deep enough. Drive a hard bargain, wizard. All of us would enjoy that."
The longing, an aching force of naked need, redoubled. The two faeries were lovely. More than lovely. Sensuous. Willing. Perfectly unrestrained, perfectly passionate. I could feel that in them, radiating from them. If I made the bargain, theywould make the evening one of nothing but indulgence, sensation, satiation, delight. Maeve and her handmaiden would do things to me that you only read about in magazines.
"DearPenthouse ," I muttered, "I never thought something like this would happen to me . . ."
"Wizard," Maeve murmured, "I see you weighing the consequences in your eyes. You think too much. It weakens you. Stop thinking. Come down into the earth with us."
Some mathematical and uncaring part of my brain way the hell in the back of my head reminded me that Idid need that information. A simple statement from Maeve would tell me if she was the killer or not.Go ahead , it told me.It isn't as though it's going to be painful for you to pay her price. Don't you deserve to have something pleasant happen to you for a change? Make the bargain. Get the information. Get wasted on kisses and pleasure and soft skin. Live a little---before that borrowed time you're on runs out.
I reached out with a shaking hand to the crystal ewer on the table. I clenched it. It clinked and rattled against the glass as I poured cool, sparkling water into it.
Maeve's smile grew sharper.
"Harry," Billy said, his voice uncertain. "Didn't you just say something bad about---you know, taking food or drink from fa---uh, from these people?"
I put the pitcher down and picked up the glass of water.
Jen rubbed her cheek against Maeve's thigh and murmured, "They never really change, do they?"
"No," Maeve said. "The males all fall to the same thing. Isn't it delicious?"
I unbuttoned the fly in my jeans, undid the zipper a little, and dumped the cold water directly down my pants.
Some shocks of sensation are pleasant. This one wasn't. The water was so cold that tiny chips of ice had formed in it, as though it was trying to freeze itself from the inside out. That cold went right down where I had intended it to go, and everything in my jeans tried to contract into my abdomen in sheer, hypothermic horror. I let out a little yelp, and my skin promptly crawled with gooseflesh.
The gesture had its intended effect. That overwhelming, almost feral hunger withered and vanished. I was able to take my eyes off the Winter Lady and her handmaiden, to clear my thoughts into something resembling a sane line of reason. I shook my head a bit to be sure and then looked up at Maeve. Anger surged through me, and my jaw clenched tight, but I made an effort to keep my words at least marginally polite. "Sorry, sweetie, but I have a couple problems with that offer."
Maeve's lips tightened. "And those would be?"
"One. I'm not handing over a child to you. Not mine, not anyone's, not now, and not ever. If you had a brain in your head, you'd have known that."
Maeve's already pale face blanched even more, and she sat bolt upright on her throne. "Youdare ---"
"Shut up," I snarled, and it came out loud enough to ring off the walls of the ballroom. "I'm not finished."
Maeve jerked as though I'd slapped her. Her mouth dropped open, and she blinked at me.
"I came here under your invitation and protection. I am yourguest . But in spite of that you've thrown glamour at me anyway." I stood up, my hands spread on the table, leaning toward her for emphasis. "I don't have time for this crap. You don't scare me, lady," I said. "I only came here for answers---but if you keep pushing me, I'm going to push back. Hard."
Maeve's evident anger evaporated. She leaned back on her throne, lips pursed, her expression placid and enigmatic. "Well, well, well. Not so easily captured, it would seem."
A new voice, a relaxed, masculine drawl, slid into the silence. "I told you, Maeve. You should have been polite. Anyone who declares war on the Red Court isn't going to be the sort to take kindly to pressure." The speaker stepped into the ballroom through the double doors and walked casually to the banquet tables and toward Maeve's throne.
It was a man, maybe in his early thirties, medium build, maybe half an inch shy of six feet tall. He wore dark jeans, a white tee, and a leather jacket. Droplets of dark reddish brown stained the shirt and one side of his face. His scalp was bald but for a stubble of dark hair.
As he approached, I picked out more details. He had a brand on his throat. A snowflake made of white scar tissue stood out sharply against his skin. The skin on one side of his face was red and a little swollen, and he was missing half of the eyebrow and a crescent of the stubble on his scalp on that side---he'd been burned, and recently. He reached the throne and dropped to one knee before it, somehow conveying a certain relaxed insolence with the gesture, and extended the box to Maeve.
"It is done?" Maeve asked, an almost childlike eagerness in her voice. "What took you so long?"
"It wasn't as easy as you said it would be. But I did it."
The Winter Lady all but snatched the carved box from his hands, avarice lighting her eyes. "Wizard, this is my Knight, Lloyd of the family Slate."
Slate nodded to me. "How are you?"
"Impatient," I responded, but I nodded back to him warily. "You're the Winter Knight?"
"So far, yeah. I guess you're the Winter Emissary. Asking questions and investigating and so on."
"Yep. Did you kill Ronald Reuel?"
Slate burst out laughing. "Christ, Dresden. You don't waste time, do you?"
"I've filled my insincere courtesy quota for the day," I said. "Did you kill him?"
Slate shrugged and said, "No. To be honest with you, I'm not sure Icould have killed him. He's been at this a lot longer than me."
"He was an old man," I said.
"So are a lot of wizards," Slate pointed out. "I could have bench-pressed him, sure. Killing him is something else altogether."
Maeve let out a sudden hiss of anger, the sound eerily loud. She lifted her foot and kicked Slate in the shoulder. Something popped when she did, and the force of the kick drove the Winter Knight down a tier, into the table and the Sidhe seated there. The table toppled, and Sidhe, chairs, and Knight went sprawling.
Maeve rose to her feet, sending the green-toothed Jen scooting away from her. She drew what looked like a military-issue combat knife from the carved box. It was crusted with some kind of black gelatinous substance, like burned barbecue sauce. "You stupid animal," she snarled. "Useless. This is useless to me."
She hurled the knife at Slate. The handle hit him in the biceps of his left arm just as he sat up again. His face twisted in sudden fury. He took up the knife, rose to his feet, and stalked toward Maeve with murder in his eye.
Maeve drew herself up, her face shining with a sudden terrible beauty. She lifted her right hand, ring finger and thumb both bent, and murmured something in a liquid, alien tongue. Sudden blue light gathered around her fingers, and the temperature in the room dropped by about forty degrees. She spoke again, and flicked her wrist, sending glowing motes of azure flickering toward Slate.
The snowflake brand flared into sudden light, and Slate's advance halted, his body going rigid. The skin around the brand turned blue, then purple, then black, spreading like a stop-motion enhanced film of gangrene. A quiet snarl slipped from Slate's lips, and I could see his body trembling with the effort to continue toward Maeve. He shuddered and took another step forward.
Maeve lifted her other hand, her index finger extended while the others curled, and a sudden wind whipped past me, cold enough that it stole the breath from my lungs. The wind whipped madly around Slate, making his leather coat flap. Bits of white frost started forming on his eyelashes and eyebrows. His expression, now anguished as well as full of rage, faltered, and his advance halted again.
"Calm him," Maeve murmured.
Jen slipped behind Slate, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her mouth down close to his ear. Slate's eyes flickered with hot, violent hate for a moment, and then began to grow heavier. Jen ran her hand slowly down the sleeve of his jacket, fingers caressing his wrist. His arm lowered as I watched. A moment later, Jen slid the jacket from his shoulders. The tee was sleeveless, and Slate's arms were hard with muscle---and tracked with needle marks. Jen held out a hand, and another darting pixie handed her a hypodermic needle. Jen slipped it into the bend of his arm, still whispering to him, sliding the plunger slowly down.
Slate's eyes rolled back in his head, and he sank to his knees. Jen went down with him, wrapped around him like kelp on a swimmer, her mouth next to his ear.
Maeve lowered her hands, and the wind and the cold died away. She lifted a shaking hand to her face and stepped back to the throne, settling stiffly onto it, narrowed eyes locked on Slate's increasingly malleable form. Her cheekbones stood out more sharply than before, her eyes looked more sunken. She gripped the arms of the throne, her fingers twitching.
"What the hell was that?" Billy whispered.
"Probably what passes for a polite disagreement," I muttered. "Get up. We're leaving."
I stood up. Maeve's eyes darted to me. Her voice came out dry, harsh. "Our bargain is not complete, wizard."
"This talk is."
"But I have not answered your question."
"Keep your answer. I don't need it anymore."
"You don't?" Maeve asked.
"We don't?" Billy said.
I nodded toward Slate and Jen. "You had to push yourself to make him stand still. Look at you. You're just about out of gas right now from going up against your own Knight." I started down the tiers, Billy coming with me. "Besides that, you're sloppy, sweetheart. Reckless. A clean killing like Reuel's takes a plan, and that isn't you."
I could feel her eyes pressing against my back like frozen thorns. I ignored her.
"I did not give you leave to go, wizard," she said, her voice chilly.
"I didn't ask."
"I won't forget this insolence."
"I probably will," I said. "It's nothing special. Come on, Billy."
I walked to the double doors and out. As soon as we were both outside, the doors swung shut with a huge, hollow boom that made me jump. Darkness fell, sudden and complete, and I fumbled for my amulet as my heart lurched in panic.
The spectral light from my amulet showed me Billy's strained face first, and then the area immediately around us. The double doors were gone. Only a blank stone wall remained where they had been.
"Gulp," Billy said. He shook his head for a moment, dazed. "Where did they go?"
I rested my fingers against the stone wall, reaching out for it with my wizard's senses. Nothing. It was rock, not illusion. "Beats the hell out of me. The doors here must have been a way to some other location."
"Like some kind of teleport?"
"More like a temporary entrance into the Nevernever," I said. "Or a shortcut through the Nevernever to another place on Earth."
"Kind of intense in there. When she made it get all cold. I've never seen anything like that before."
"Sloppy," I said. "She was laying a binding on Slate. Her power was sloshing over into changing the temperature. A child could do better."
Billy let out a short, quiet laugh. "After what we just saw, anyone else would still be shaking. You're giving her the rating from the Russian judge."
"So sue me." I shrugged. "She's strong. Strong isn't everything."
Billy glanced up at me. "Could you do what she did?"
"I'd probably use fire."
His eyebrows went up, his expression impressed. "Do you really think Maeve's not the killer?"
"I do," I said. "This murder was clean enough to look like an accident. Maeve's obviously got impulse-control issues. Doesn't make for much of a methodical murderer."
"What about Slate?"
I shook my head, my brow tightening. "Not sure about him. He's mortal. There's nothing that says he couldn't lie to us. But I got what I was looking for, and I found out a couple of things on top of that."
"So why are you frowning?"
"Because all I got was more questions. Everyone's been telling me to hurry. Faeries don't do that. They're practically immortal and they're not in a rush. But Mab and Grimalkin both have tried to rush me now. Maeve went for the high-pressure sales tactic too, like she didn't have time for anything more subtle."
"Why would they do that?"
I sighed. "Something's in motion. If I don't run down the killer, the Courts could go to war with one another."
"That would explain the whole World War Two dress motif back there."
"Yeah, but not why time would be so pressing." I shook my head. "If we could have stayed longer, I might have been able to work out more, but it was getting too nervous in there."
"Discretion, valor," Billy said by way of agreement. "We leave now, right?"
"Elidee?" I asked. I felt a stirring in my hair, and then the tiny pixie popped out to hover in the air in front of me. "Can you lead us back to my car?"
The pixie flashed in the affirmative and zipped away. I lifted my amulet and followed.
Billy and I didn't speak until our guide had led us out of the underground complex not far from where I'd parked the Blue Beetle. We cut through an alley.
About halfway down it, Billy grabbed my arm and jerked me bodily behind him, snapping, "Harry, get back!"
In the same motion he swung out one foot and kicked a metal trash can. It went flying, crashing into something I hadn't seen behind it. Someone let out a short, harsh gasp of pain. Billy stepped forward and picked up the metal lid that had fallen to the ground. He swung it down at the shape. It struck with a noisy crash.
I took a couple of steps back to make sure I was clear of the action, and reached for my amulet again. "Billy," I said, "what the hell?"
I felt the sudden presence at my back half a second too late to get out of the way. A hand the size of a dinner plate closed on the back of my neck like a vice and lifted. I felt my heels rise until my toes were just barely touching the ground.
A voice, a feminine contralto, growled, "Let go of the amulet and call him off, wizard. Call him off before I break your neck."
Being held up by your neck hurts. Trust me on this one. I lifted my hands by way of attempting to convey compliance and said, "Billy, get off him."
Billy took a step back from the pale-haired young man he'd knocked down. Fix whimpered and scuttled away on his hands and butt. His borrowed brown suit was soiled and torn, and his yellow polyester tie hung from his collar by only one of its clips. He put his back against the alley wall, eyes wide beneath his shock of white dandelion hair.
Billy's eyes flicked from my assailant to Fix and back. He squinted at her for a moment, then set his jaw in an expression of casual determination. "Harry? You want me to take her?"
"Wait a minute," I managed to say. "Okay, he's off. Put me down."
The grip on the back of my neck relaxed, and as I touched ground again I took a step toward Billy, turning to face the woman who had held me.
As I expected, it was the tall, muscular young woman from the funeral home, her muddy green hair hanging lankly over her eyes and one cheek. She folded her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Fix? Are you okay?"
The smaller man panted, "My lip is cut. It isn't bad."
The woman nodded and faced me again.
"All right," I said. "Who the hell are you?"
"My name's Meryl," she said. Her voice was surprisingly quiet, contrasting with her size. "I wanted to apologize to you, Mr. Dresden. For hitting you and throwing you into the Dumpster."
I raised my eyebrows. "Are you sure you got the right guy, Meryl? No one ever apologizes to me for anything."
She pushed at her hair with one hand. It fell right back over her face. "I'm sorry. I was scared earlier, and I acted without thinking."
I traded a glance with Billy. "Uh, okay. I'm pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn't the usual way to go about saying you're sorry. But I didn't read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows."
Her mouth twitched, and she relaxed her stance by a tiny degree. "I didn't know how else to find you, so I was just waiting near your car."
"Okay," I said. My neck still throbbed where her fingers had clamped on. Five to one I would have wonderful stripy bruises the next day. I nodded and turned away. "Apology accepted. Now if you'll excuse me, I have things I need to do."
A note of panic crept into her voice. "Wait. Please."
I stopped and looked back at her.
"I need to talk to you. Just for a minute." She took a deep breath. "I need your help."
Of course she did.
"It's very important."
Of course it was.
The headache started coming back. "Look, Meryl, I've got a lot on my plate already."
"I know," she said. "Investigating Ron's death. I think I can help you."
I pursed my lips. "You were close to Reuel?"
She nodded. "Me. Fix. Ace. And Lily."
I flashed back on the photo of Reuel and the four young people. "Green-haired girl? Very cute?"
"Yes."
"Where's Ace?"
"He had to go to work right after the funeral. But Lily's why I need to talk to you. She's missing. I think she's in trouble."
I started filling in context on the conversation I'd overheard between them. "Who are you?"
"I told you. My name is Meryl."
"Okay, fine.What are you, Meryl?"
She flinched at the question. "Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't know what you meant." She raked at her hair again. "I'm a changeling. We all are."
"A what?" Billy asked.
I nodded, getting it. "Changeling," I said to Billy. "She's half mortal and half fae."
"Aha," Billy said. "Which means what?"
I shrugged. "It means that she has to choose whether to remain a mortal or become wholly fae."
"Yes," she said. "And until then I'm under the rule of the Court of my fae father. Winter. The others too. That's why the four of us stuck together. It was safer."
Billy nodded. "Oh."
"Meryl," I said, "what makes you think your friend is in trouble?"
"She's not very independent, Mister Dresden. We share an apartment. She doesn't have a very good idea of how to take care of herself, and she gets nervous if she's out of the apartment for too long."
"And what do you think happened to her?"
"The Winter Knight."
Billy frowned. "Why would he hurt people in his own Court?"
Meryl let out a brief, hard laugh. "Because he can. He had a thing for Lily. He would hurt her, frighten her. He got off on it. He was furious when Maeve told him to back off. And once Ron was gone . . ." Her voice trailed off and she turned her head to one side.
"How does Reuel fit into this?" I asked.
"He was protecting us. Maeve had been torturing us for fun, and we didn't know where to turn. Ron took us in. He put us under his protection, and no one in Winter was willing to cross him."
"What about your fae dad?" Billy asked. "Didn't he do anything to look out for you?"
Meryl gave Billy a flat look. "My mother was raped by a troll. Even if he'd been strong enough to do anything about Maeve hurting us, he wouldn't have. He thinks he's already done enough by not devouring my mom on the spot."
"Oh," Billy said. "Sorry."
I frowned. "And with the Summer Knight gone, you think Slate grabbed the girl."
Meryl said, "Someone broke into the apartment. It looked like there had been a struggle."
I let out a sigh. "Have you contacted the police?"
She eyed me. "Oh, yeah, of course. I called them and told them that a mortal champion of the fae came and spirited away a half-mortal, half-nixie professional nude model to Faerieland. They were all over it."
I had to admire the well-placed sarcasm. "It doesn't take a supernatural studmuffin to cause something very bad to happen to a cute girl in this town. Your plain old mortal kidnappers and murderers can manage just fine."
She shook her head. "Either way, she's still in trouble."
I lifted a hand. "What do you want from me?"
"Help me find her. Please, Mister Dresden."
I closed my eyes. I didn't have time, energy, or brainpower to spare for this. The smart thing would be to blow her off entirely, or to promise her I'd do it and promptly forget about it. "This just isn't a good time." I felt like crap the second I said it. I didn't look at the changeling's face. I couldn't. "There's too much trouble already, and I don't even know if I can help myself, much less your friend. I'm sorry."
I turned to go, but Meryl stepped in front of me. "Wait."
"I told you," I said. "There's nothing I can---"
"I'll pay you," Meryl said.
Oh, right. Money.
I was about to lose the office and the apartment, and this faerie work only paid in misery. I needed to pay some bills. Go to the grocery store. My mouth didn't actually water, but it was close.
I shook my head again. "Look, Meryl, I wish I could---"
"Double your fee," she said, her voice urgent.
Double. My. Fee. I hesitated some more.
"Triple," she said. She reached for her back pocket and produced an envelope. "Plus one thousand cash, up front, right now."
I looked back at Fix, still trembling and leaning against the alley wall, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. Meryl continued to rock from one foot to the other, her eyes on the ground, waiting.
I tried to look at things objectively. A thousand bucks wouldn't spend if I got myself killed while distracted by the additional workload. On the other hand, if I lived through this thing the money would be necessary. My stomach growled, and a sharp pang of hunger made me clench the muscles of my belly.
I needed the work---but more to the point, I needed to be able to live with myself. I wasn't sure I was comfortable with the idea of looking back on this particular patch of memory and seeing myself leave some helpless girl, changeling or not, to the metaphoric wolves. People don't ask me for help if they're anything less than desperate. The changelings had been terrified of me only a few hours before. If they had turned to me for help now, it was because they were out of options.
And they also had money.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit," I muttered. I snatched the envelope. "All right. I'll look into it and do what I can---but I can't make you any promises."
Meryl let out a shuddering breath. "Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dresden."
"Yeah," I sighed. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a slightly crumpled business card. "Here's my office number. Call and leave a message to let me know how I can reach you."
She took the card and nodded. "I don't know if I can pay your fees all at once. But I'll be good for it, even if it takes a while."
"We can worry about that later, when we're all safe and sound," I said. I nodded to her, then to Fix, and started walking down the alley again. Billy kept an eye on the pair of them and followed me.
We reached the parking lot of the funeral home a few minutes later. The lights were all out, and the Blue Beetle was the only car left in the lot. No one had bothered to steal it. What a shock.
"So what's next?" Billy asked.
"I'll call Murphy. See what she can tell me about Lloyd Slate."
Billy nodded. "Anything I can do to help?"
"Actually, yeah," I said. "Get out the phone book and call the hospitals. See if the morgues have a green-haired Jane Doe."
"You think she's dead, then?"
"I think it would be a lot simpler if she was."
He grimaced. "Calling morgues? There must be about a million of them in Chicagoland. Isn't there anything else I could do?"
"Welcome to the glamorous world of private investigation. You want to help or not?"
"Okay, okay," Billy said. "My car's a block over. I'll get back to you as soon as I'm done making calls."
"All right. I'll probably be at my place, but if not you know the drill."
Billy nodded. "Be careful." Then he walked quickly down the street without looking back.
I fumbled my keys out and walked to the Beetle.
I didn't smell the blood until I was close enough to touch the car. Through the window I saw a form, more or less human-shaped, curled up on my passenger seat. I circled cautiously to the other side of the car, then abruptly opened the door.
Elaine fell out of the car onto the pavement of the parking lot. She was drenched in blood that had soaked through her T-shirt, matted her golden-brown hair on one side, and run down her flanks to saturate her jeans to mid thigh. Her silver pentacle shone with liquid scarlet. The bare skin of her forearms was covered with long slashes and blood, and her face looked white. Dead.
My heart hammered in my chest, and I leaned down to her, fumbling at her throat. She still had a very slow pulse, but her skin felt cool and waxy. She started shuddering and whispered, "Harry?"
"I'm here. I'm here, Elaine."
"Please," she whispered. "Oh, God, please help me."
I laid Elaine out, first thing, and tried to determine the extent of her injuries. Her forearms had been laced open in several places, but the worst injury was on her back, just inside of her left clavicle---a nasty puncture wound. The edges of it had puckered closed, but it hadn't stopped the bleeding completely, and if she was bleeding internally she could be done for.
I would need both hands to put pressure on the wound. No help was on the way. There was little I could do for her, so I picked her up and put her back into the Beetle, then jumped in myself and started the ignition.
"Hang in there, Elaine," I said. "I'm getting you to a hospital. You're going to be all right."
She shook her head. "No. No, too dangerous."
"You're hurt too badly for me to take care of it," I said. "Relax. I'll be with you."
She opened her eyes and said with sudden, surprising insistence, "No hospitals. They'll find me there."
I started up the car. "Dammit, Elaine. What else am I supposed to do?"
She closed her eyes again. Her voice grew fainter by the word. "Aurora. Summer. Rothchild Hotel. There's an elevator in back. She'll help."
"The Summer Lady?" I demanded. "You're joking, right?"
She didn't answer me. I looked over at her, and my heart all but stopped as I saw her head lolling, her body slumped. I jammed the Beetle into gear and jounced out onto the road.
"Rothchild Hotel," I muttered. "More faeries. Keen."
I got us to the hotel, one of the nice places along the shores of Lake Michigan. I skipped the huge valet-littered front drive and zipped the Beetle into the back parking lot, looking for some kind of service drive, or freight elevator, or maybe just a door with a sign on it that said,SUMMER COURT OF THE FAERIES THIS WAY.
I felt a slight warmth on my ear, and then Elidee zoomed out in front of my face and bumped up against the window. I rolled the window down a bit, and the tiny faerie streaked out ahead of my car, guiding me to the back of the lot. She stopped, circling an unobtrusive, unlit breezeway. Then she sped away, her task evidently completed.
I quickly parked the car and set the brake. Elaine may have been slender, but she had too much muscle to be light. She'd always had the build of a long-distance runner, long and lean and strong. She was only just conscious enough to make it a little easier for me to carry her, wrapping her arms around my neck and leaning her head on my shoulder. She trembled and felt cold. Doubt gnawed at me as I took her down the breezeway. Maybe I should have ignored her and gone to the hospital.
I kept going until it became too dark to see, and I started to put Elaine down so that I could take out my amulet to make some light. Just as I did, a pair of elevator doors swept open, spilling light and canned music onto the breezeway.
A girl stood in the doors. She was five nothing, a hundred and nothing, her sunny hair pulled back into a braid. She wore a blue T-shirt with white painter's overalls, and she was liberally splattered with flecks of what looked like clay. Her rosy mouth opened in dismay as she saw me standing there with Elaine.
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed. She beckoned me urgently. "Come on, get her inside. The Lady can see to her."
My arms and shoulders had begun to burn with the effort of supporting Elaine, so I didn't waste time talking. I shuffled forward into the elevator and leaned against the back wall with a wheeze. The girl closed the elevator doors, took a key from her overalls pocket, and inserted it into a solitary keyhole where you would expect a bunch of buttons to be. The elevator gave a little lurch and started up.
"What happened to Ela?" the girl asked me. She looked from me to Elaine and chewed on one lip.
Ela? "Beats me. I found her like this in my car. She told me to bring her here."
"Oh. Oh, God," the girl said. She looked at me again. "You're with Winter, aren't you?"
I frowned. "How did you know?"
She shrugged. "It shows."
"I'm with Winter for now. But it's a one-shot deal. Think of me as a free agent."
"Perhaps. But an agent of Winter all the same. Are you sure you want to be here?"
"No," I said. "But I'm sure I'm not leaving Elaine until I'm convinced she's in good hands."
The girl frowned. "Oh."
"Can't this thing go any faster?" My shoulders burned, my back ached, my bruises were complaining, and I could feel Elaine's breathing growing weaker. I had to fight not to scream in sheer frustration. I wished there had been a bank of buttons to push, just so that I could have slammed the right button a bunch of times in a senseless effort to speed up the elevator.
The doors opened a geological epoch later, onto a scene as incongruous as a gorilla in a garter belt.
The elevator had taken us to what could only have been the roof of the hotel, assuming the roof opened up onto a section of rain forest in Borneo. Trees and greenery grew so thick that I couldn't see the edge of the roof, and though I could hear the nighttime noises of Chicago, the sounds were vague in the distance and could almost not be heard over the buzz of locusts and the chittering of some kind of animal I did not recognize. Wind rustled the forest around me, and silver moonlight, brighter than I would have thought possible, gave everything an eerie, surreal beauty.
"I'm so glad I was going out for more clay just then. This way," the girl said, and started off on a trail through the forest. I followed as quickly as I could, puffing hard to keep holding Elaine. It wasn't a long walk. The trail wound back and forth and then opened onto a grassy glade.
I stopped and looked around. No, not a glade. More like a garden. A pool rested at its center, still water reflecting the moon overhead. Benches and stones of a good size for sitting on were strewn around the landscape. Statuary, most of it marble and of human subjects, stood here and there, often framed by flowers or placed between young trees. On the far side of the pool stood what at first glance I took to be a gnarled tree. It wasn't. It was a throne, a throne of living wood, its trunk grown into the correct shape, branches and leaves spreading above it in stately elegance, roots spreading and anchoring it in the earth.
People stood here and there. A paint-spattered young man worked furiously on some sort of portrait, his face set in concentration. A tall man, his ageless beauty and pale hair marking him as one of the Sidhe, stood in the posture of a teacher beside a slender girl, who was drawing back a bow, aiming at a target of bundled branches. On the far side of the glade, smoke rose from stones piled into the shape of an oven or a forge, and a broad-chested man, shirtless, bearded, heavy-browed and fierce-looking, stood on the other side of it, wielding a smith's hammer in regular rhythm. He stepped away from the forge, a glowing-hot blade gripped in a set of tongs, and dunked it into a trough of silvery water.
When I got a better look at him, I understood what he was. Steam rose in a cloud over his heavy, equine forelegs, then over his human belly and broad chest, and the centaur stamped a rear hoof impatiently, muttering under his breath, while colored lights played back and forth in the water of the trough. Haunting pipe music, sad and lovely, drifted through the glade from a young woman, mortal, sitting with a set of reed pipes, playing with her eyes closed.
"Where is she?" I demanded. "Where is the Lady?"
The centaur's head snapped around, and he snarled in a sudden, harsh basso. He took up his hammer again, whipped it in a quick circle, and started toward me at a slow canter, Clydesdale-sized hooves striking the ground with dull thumps. "Winterbound? Here? It cannot be borne."
I tensed, holding Elaine a little closer, and my heart lurched into a higher gear. The centaur was huge and looked ready to kill. "Whoa, there, big fella. I'm not looking for trouble."
The centaur bared his teeth at me and spoke, his deep voice filled with outrage. "There you stand with our Emissary's blood on your hands and expect us to believe you?"
The tall Sidhe man barked, "Korrick, hold."
The centaur drew up short, rearing onto his hind legs and kicking at the air with heavy hooves. "My lord Talos," he growled in frustration. "This arrogance cannot be tolerated."
"Peace," the Sidhe lord said.
"But mylord ---"
The Sidhe lord stepped between me and the centaur, his back to me. He wore close-fit trousers of dark green and a loose shirt of white linen. The Sidhe lord said nothing, and I couldn't see his expression, but the centaur's face reddened, then blanched. He bowed his head, a stiff gesture, and then walked back over to his forge, hooves striking the ground in sharp, angry motions.
The Sidhe---Talos, I presumed---turned back to me and regarded me with calm, feline eyes the color of a summer sky. He had the pale hair of the Sidhe, hanging in a straight, fine sheet to brush his shoulders. There was a quality of quiet confidence in his features, of relaxed strength, and the sense of him was somehow less alien than that of most of the Sidhe I had encountered. "I hope you will not judge Korrick too harshly, sir. You are, I take it, Harry Dresden?"
"If I'm not, he's going to be upset with me when he catches me running around in his underpants."
Talos smiled. The expression came easily to his features. "Then I grant you passport and license in agreement with the Accords. I am Talos, Lord Marshal of the Summer Court."
"Yeah, that's great, nice to meet you," I said. "Hey, do you think you could help me save this woman'slife now?"
The Sidhe's smile faded. "I will do what I can." He glanced to the side and gestured with a roll of his wrist.
The garden flew into activity. A cloud of pixies darted through the air, bearing stalks of green plants and broad, soft leaves. They piled them into a soft-looking mound near the side of the pool. Talos looked at me for permission and then gently took Elaine's weight into his arms. My shoulders and biceps all but screamed in relief. The Sidhe lord carried Elaine to the bed of leaves and laid her down upon it. He touched her throat and then her brow with one hand, his eyes closing.
"Weak," he said quietly. "And cold. But she has strength left in her. She will be all right for a little while."
"No offense, but your people have some odd notions about time. Go get your Lady. She needs to see to Elaine now."
Talos regarded me with that same quiet, opaque expression. "She will be here when she will be here. I cannot hurry the sunrise, nor the Lady."
I started to tell him where he could stick his sunrise, but I bit back the words and tried to take out some frustration by clenching my fists. My knuckles popped.
A hand touched my arm, and the girl, the sculptor from the elevator, said, "Please, sir. Let me get you something to drink, or some food. Mortal food, I mean. I wouldn't offer the other kind."
"Like hell," I said. "Not until Elaine is taken care of."
From where he knelt beside Elaine, Talos lifted both eyebrows, but he shrugged his shoulders. "As you wish." He rested his fingertips lightly on either side of her face and bowed his head. "My skills are rather limited. I can at least assure that she loses no ground."
There was a quiet surge of energy, something as gentle and strong as the weight of a wave lifting you off your feet. Elaine suddenly took a deep breath, and color came back into her cheeks. She blinked her eyes open for a moment, then sighed and closed them again.
"Talos can sustain her for a time," the girl said. "Until the Lady decides. He has been Ela's guardian and friend for several years." She tugged at my arm. "Please, take something to eat. You'll make us poor hosts if you do not."
My stomach growled again, and my throat started to complain after all the hard breathing I'd been doing. I exhaled through my nose and nodded to the girl, who led me to one of the benches not far away and pulled a plastic Coleman cooler from underneath it. She rummaged inside, then tossed me a cold can of Coke, a small bag of potato chips, and a long hoagie. None of them held any of the subtle, quivering lure of faerie fare.
"Best I can do for now," she said. "Turkey sub sound all right?"
"Marry me," I responded, tore into the food with fervor, and spent a couple of minutes indulging in one of the purest primal pleasures. Eating. Food never tastes so good as when you are starving, and Talos had granted me safe passport under the Accords, so I wasn't worried about any drugs in it.
While I ate, the girl drew a short stand over to her, on which was a clay bust of a young woman, parts of it still rough, still marked with the tracks of her fingers. She dipped them into a bowl of water attached to the stand and started working on the bust.
"What happened to her?" she asked.
"Hell if I know," I said between bites. "She was in my car like that. Wanted me to bring her here."
"Why did you?" She flushed. "I mean, you're working for Summer's enemies. Right?"
"Yeah. But it doesn't mean I'm friendly with them." I shook my head, washed down a half-chewed bite with a long drink of Coke. Heaven. I ate for a moment more and then frowned at the bust she was working on. The face seemed familiar. I studied it a bit, then asked, "Is that Lily?"
The girl blinked at me. "You know her?"
"Of her," I said. "She's a changeling, isn't she?"
The girl nodded. "Winter, but she hasn't chosen to go over to them. She was under Ronald's protection, and she models for us sometimes." She gestured vaguely toward the young man who was painting intently. "See, there are a few other pieces she modeled for around here."
I looked around the garden and picked out a pair of statues among all the rest. Both were nudes of white marble. One of them depicted the girl in a tiptoe stretch, arms over her head, body arched prettily. The other showed her kneeling, looking at something cupped in her hands, her expression one of quiet sadness. "Seems like she's well liked."
The girl nodded. "She's very gentle, very sweet."
"Very missing," I said.
She frowned. "Missing?"
"Yeah. Her roommate asked me to see if I could find her. Have you seen her in the past couple of days?"
"She hasn't been here to model, and I've never seen her anywhere but here. I'm sorry."
"Worth a shot," I said.
"Why are you looking for her?"
"I told you. Her roommate asked for my help. I gave it." Which was mostly true. Technically, I suppose, I'd sold it. I got the uneasy feeling that I might start feeling too guilty over the cash Meryl had given me to spend it. "I'm a tad busy this week, but I'll do what I can."
The girl's brow furrowed as she worked at the bust. "You're not like anyone else I've ever met who was working for Winter. Mab usually likes her agents . . . colder, I think. Hungrier. More cruel."
I shrugged. "She wanted someone to find a killer. I've had some experience."
She nodded. "Still, you seem like a decent enough person. It makes me sad to think that you've gotten entangled in Winter's snares."
I stopped chewing and looked up at her, hard. "Oh, Hell's bells."
She looked at me and lifted an eyebrow. "Hmm?"
I put the sandwich down and said, "You're her. You're the Summer Lady."
The shadow of a smile touched the girl's lips, and she bowed her head toward me. Her blond hair cleared out to Sidhe white, her fingers and limbs suddenly seemed slightly longer, and her features became almost identical to Maeve's, eyes vertically slitted and almost violently green. She still wore the coveralls and blue T-shirt, and was still liberally covered in flecks of clay, though. They stood out in sharp contrast to her fair skin and pale hair.
"Call me Aurora," she said. "It's a little easier for everyone."
"Uh, right," I said. I finished the bite I was on and said, "So are you going to stop playing games with me and help Elaine, Aurora?"
She glanced over at Elaine, lying on the ground, and her expression grew troubled. "That depends."
My teeth clenched, and I said in a falsely pleasant voice, "On what?"
She turned her calm, inhuman eyes to me. "On you."
"Don't go getting specific on me, now," I said. "I wouldn't know how to handle it."
"Do you think this is a joke, Mr. Dresden? A game?"
"I know damn well it isn't a game."
She shook her head. "And that is where you are wrong. It is a game, but unlike the ones you know. You aren't allowed to know the rules to this game, and it was never intended to be fair. Do you know why Mab choseyou , wizard?"
I glared at her. "No."
"Neither do I," she said. "And that is my part of the game. Why choose you? It must be because she expects something of you that she would get from no one else. Perhaps bringing Ela here is what she expected."
"What's the difference?" I demanded. "Elaine is hurt. Your Emissary has been wounded in the line of duty. Don't you think you should get her moving again?"
"But if that is what Winter expects, it could be used against me. I am the least Queen of Summer, but even so I must be cautious in the use of my power."
I snorted. "Maeve sure as hell doesn't think that way."
"Of course not," she said. "She's Winter. She's violent, vicious, merciless."
"And your centaur is just the soul of gentleness and understanding."
Aurora sighed and lowered her clay-crusted fingers. "I hope you will forgive Korrick's temper. He is usually a merrier sort. Everyone's been edgy because of matters here."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Just so we're clear, that was really mortal food, wasn't it?"
"Yes," she said. "I have no desire to threaten your freedom, Mister Dresden, or to bind you in any way."
"Good." I knew she couldn't lie to me, so I took another bite of the sandwich and some more chips. "Look, I'm not here to try to undermine your power or sabotage Summer, Aurora. I just want you to help Elaine."
"I know," she said. "I believe you. But I don't trust you."
"What reason do you have not to trust me?"
"I've watched you," she responded. "You're a mercenary. You work for hire."
"Yeah. To pay the bills and---"
She lifted a hand. "You've made bargains with demons."
"Nickel-and-dime stuff, nothing huge or---"
"You traded yourself to the Leanansidhe for power."
"When I was younger, and a hell of a lot stupider, and in trouble---"
Her inhuman eyes met mine, penetrating. "You'vekilled ."
I looked away from her. There wasn't much to say to that. My stomach turned, and I pushed the food a bit away from me.
Aurora nodded, slowly. "From the beginning, you have been meant to be a destroyer. A killer. Do you know the original purpose of a godparent, Mr. Dresden?"
"Yeah," I said. I felt tired. "A godparent was chosen to ensure that a child had religious and moral guidance and teaching."
"Indeed," she said. "And your godmother, your teacher and guide, is the most vicious creature of Mab's Court, more than Maeve's equal, second in strength only to Mab herself."
I let out a harsh laugh. "Teacher? Guide? Is that what you think Lea is to me?"
"Isn't she?"
"Lea barely noticed me except when she thought she could get something from me," I spat. "The rest of the time she couldn't care less. The only thing she taught me was that if I didn't want to get walked on I had to be smarter than her, stronger than her, and willing to do something about it."
Aurora turned her lovely face fully toward me and regarded me with deep, quiet eyes. "Yes." Unease gnawed at my belly as she continued. "The strong conquer and the weak are conquered. That is Winter. That is what you have learned." She leaned closer and said, quietly emphatic, "That is what makes you dangerous. Do you see?"
I stood up and walked a few paces away. Aurora didn't say anything. I heard drips of water as she washed her hands in the little bowl.
"If you aren't going to help Elaine, tell me. I'll take her to the hospital."
"Do you think I should help her?"
"I don't give a damn if you do or not," I said. "But one way or another I'm going to make sure she's taken care of. Make up your mind."
"I already have. What remains is for you to make up yours."
I took a wary breath before asking, "Meaning?"
"Of the two people who entered this garden, Mister Dresden, Elaine is not the most grievously wounded. You are."
"Like hell. I've just got some cuts and bruises."
She rose and walked toward me. "Those aren't the wounds I mean." She reached out and laid a slender hand over my heart. Her skin was warm, even through my shirt, and the simple fact of her touch brought me a small but noticeable sense of comfort. Susan had been gone for months, and with the exception of the occasional assault, no one had actually touched me.
She looked up at me and nodded. "You see. You've been badly wounded, Mister Dresden, and you have found neither rest nor respite from your pains."
"I'll live."
"True," she said. "But this is where it always begins. Monsters are born of pain and grief and loss and anger. Your heart is full of them."
I shrugged. "And?"
"And it makes you vulnerable. Vulnerable to Mab's influence, to temptations that would normally be unthinkable."
"I'm handling temptation pretty damned well, thank you."
"But for how long? You need toheal , wizard. Let me help you."
I frowned at her, and at her hand. "How?"
Aurora gave me a small, sad smile. "I'll show you. Here."
Her palm pressed a bit closer to me, and somewhere inside me a dam broke open. Emotions welled up like a riotous rainbow. Scarlet rage, indigo fear, pale blue sadness, aching yellow loneliness, putrid green guilt. The tide flooded through me, coursed over me like a bolt of lightning, searing and painful and beautiful all at once.
And after the tide receded, a deep, quiet stillness followed. A sensation of warmth suffused me, gently easing away my aches and bruises. It spread over my skin, like sunlight on a lazy afternoon outside, and with the warmth my cares began to evaporate. My fear vanished, and I began to relax muscles I hadn't realized were stretched tight as the warmth spread. I floated in warmth for a time, the release from pain an ecstasy in itself.
When I came back to my senses, I was lying on my back on the grass, staring up at leaves and silver-starred sky. My head lay in Aurora's lap. She knelt behind me, and her hands rested lightly, warm and soft, along the sides of my face. The pain began to return to my body, thoughts, and heart, like some quiet and odious tide washing in garbage from a polluted sea. I heard myself make a small sound of protest.
Aurora looked down at me, her eyes concerned. "Worse even than I suspected. You didn't even realize how much pain you were in, did you?"
My chest heaved and I let out a quiet sob. The warmth faded entirely, and the sheer weight of the difficulties I had to face pressed down on me, suffocating me.
Aurora said, "Please, let me help you. We'll make it a bargain, Mr. Dresden. Desist. Relax your efforts to help Winter. Stay here for a time and let me grant you a measure of peace."
Real tears formed, making my vision blur. I mopped at my face with my hands, struggling to think clearly. If I took the deal, it would probably mean my ass. Backing off from Mab's offer would mean that I didn't get a good outcome for the White Council, which meant that they would buy peace with the Red Court of Vampires for the low, low price of one Harry Dresden, slightly damaged.
"Forget it," I said, my voice weak. "I've got a job to do."
Aurora closed her eyes for a moment and nodded. "At least you are true to your word, Mister Dresden. Your honor is admirable. Even if it is misguided."
I forced myself to sit up, away from Aurora. "Go on," I said. "Help Elaine."
"I will," she assured me. "But she is in no danger for the moment, and it will take me some time. There is something I wish to say to you first."
"Okay. Talk."
"How much did Mab tell you about Ronald's death?"
I shook my head. "That he was dead. That the mantle of power he wore went missing. That the killer had to be found."
"Did she tell you why?"
I frowned. "Not exactly."
Aurora nodded and folded her hands in her lap. "Summer readies to go to war against Winter."
I frowned. "You mean it's not just a theoretical possibility anymore. It's real."
"I know no other kind of war. The loss of the Summer Knight has forced Summer's hand."
"I'm not sure I follow."
Her pale brow knit into a soft frown. "The power of our Knights is considerable. It carries a sort of weight that only a free mortal will can possess. That power, that influence, is a critical element of the balance between our Courts."
"Except now yours is gone."
"Exactly."
"Which makes Summer weaker."
"Yes."
I nodded. "Then why the hell are you planning an attack?"
"The seasons are changing," Aurora said. "In two days' time, Midsummer will be upon us. The height of Summer's strength."
She said nothing more, letting me do the math. "You think Winter has taken away your Knight," I said. "And if you wait, you're only going to grow more and more weak, while Winter gets stronger. Right?"
"Correct. If we are to have any chance of victory, we must strike while at the peak of our strength. It will be the only time when our Court might be near equal to Winter's strength. Otherwise, the seasons will change, and at Midwinter Mab and her creatures will come for us. And theywill destroy us, and with us the balances of the mortal world." She lifted her green eyes from her hands to my face. "Winter, Mister Dresden. Endless Winter. Unending and vicious cycles of predator and prey. Such a world would not be kind to mortals."
I shook my head. "Why would Winter pull this now? I mean, if they had waited another couple of days, they could have held all the cards. Why leave you enough space to wriggle out?"
"I cannot even pretend to know the mind of Winter," Aurora said. "But I know that they must not be allowed to destroy us. For your sake as well as ours."
"Boy, everybody's looking out for my best interests."
"Wizard, please. Promise me that you will do what you can to stop them."
"I'm finished making promises." I stood up and started for the path that led back to the elevator and out, but part of me wanted to do nothing but return to the comfort Aurora had offered. I paused and squeezed my eyes shut, focusing my resolve. "But I will say this. I'm going to find the killer and straighten this out, and I'm going to do it before Midsummer."
I didn't bother to add, "Because I'm as good as dead if I don't."
No need to belabor the obvious.
I got the hell away from the Rothchild and found a pay phone. Murphy picked up on the first ring. "Dresden?"
"Yeah."
"Finally. You all right?"
"I need to talk to you."
There was a short pause, then her voice softened. "Where?"
I rubbed at my head with the heel of one hand, trying to nudge my brain into gear. My thoughts stumbled around sluggishly and in no particular order. "Dunno. Someplace public, bunch of people, quiet enough to talk."
"In Chicago. At this time of night."
"Yeah."
"Okay," Murph said. "I guess I know a place." She told me, we agreed to meet in twenty minutes, and hung up.
As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the balance of power in the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatuu Nebula. I know I wouldn't have looked for them there.
After midnight the Wal-Mart wasn't crowded, but it wasn't the usual deserted parking lot you'd expect after hours around Wrigleyville, either. The store was open all night, and there were plenty of people in a town like Chicago who would do their shopping late. I had to park about halfway down a row and walk through the cool of the evening before stepping into the refrigerator-cold of the enormous store, whose massive air conditioners had too much momentum to slow down for a few paltry hours of darkness.
A greeter nodded sleepily to me as I came in, and I passed up his offer of a shopping cart. Before I'd gotten all the way into the store, Murphy fell into step beside me. She was wearing a Cubs jacket, jeans, and sneakers, and she had her blond hair tucked up underneath an undecorated black ball cap. She walked with her hands in her pockets, and her expression, one of belligerent annoyance, didn't seem to fit on someone that short. Wordlessly, we walked past all the little hole-in-the-wall franchise businesses, closed and locked up behind their grills, and settled down at the generic cafe near the deli section of the grocery store.
Murphy chose a booth where she could watch the door, and I sat across from her, where I could watch her back. She picked up a couple of cups of coffee, bless her noble heart. I dumped sugar and creamer into mine until bits floated on the surface, stirred it up, and took a slow sip that nearly scalded my tongue.
"You don't look so good," Murphy said.
I nodded.
"You want to talk about it?"
To my own surprise, I did. I set the coffee down and said without preamble, "I'm furious, Murph. I can't think straight, I'm so mad."
"Why?"
"Because I'm screwed. That's why. No matter what I do, I'm going to take it up the ass."
Lines appeared between her eyebrows. "What do you mean?"
"It's this job," I said. "Investigating Reuel's death. There's a lot of resistance and I don't know if I can beat it. And if I don't beat it before tomorrow night, things are really going to go to hell."
"The client isn't being helpful?"
I let out a bitter laugh. "Hell, for all I know the client is doing this to me just so I can get myself horribly killed."
"You don't trust them, then."
"Not as far as I could kick her. And the people who are supposed to be working with me are driving me nuts." I shook my head. "I feel like some guy in a magician's box, just before he starts pushing all those swords through it. Only it's not a trick, and the swords are real, and they're going to start skewering me any second. The bad guys are doing their best to get me wiped out or screwed up. The good guys think I'm some kind of ticking psycho, just waiting to go off, and it's like pulling teeth to try to get a straight answer out of any of them."
"You think you're in danger."
"I know it," I said. "And it's just too damned big." I fell quiet for a moment, and sipped my coffee.
"So," Murph said. "Why did you want to see me?"
"Because the people who should be backing me up are about to throw me to the wolves. And because the only person actually helping me is green enough to get himself killed without a babysitter." I set the empty cup down. "And because when I asked myself who I could trust, I came up with a damned short list. You're it."
She settled back in her seat with a slow, long exhalation. "You're going to tell me what's going on?"
"If you're willing," I said. "I know I've kept things from you. But I've done it because I thought it was how I could protect you best. Because I didn't want you to get hurt."
"Yeah," she said. "I know. It's annoying as hell."
I tried to smile. "In this case, ignorance is bliss. If I tell you this stuff, it's going to be serious. Just knowing it could be dangerous for you. And you aren't going to be able to get away from it, Murph. Not ever."
She regarded me soberly. "Then why tell me now?"
"Because you deserve to know, long since. Because you've risked your life for me, and to protect people from all the supernatural crud that's out there. Because being around me has bought you trouble, and knowing more about it might help you if it comes your way again." My cheeks flushed, and I admitted, "And because I need your help. This is a bad one. I'm afraid."
"I'm not going anywhere, Harry."
I gave her a tired smile. "One last thing. If you come in on this, you have to understand something. You have to promise me that you won't haul SI and the rest of the police in on everything. You can dig up information, use them discretely, but you can't round up a posse and go gunning for demons."
Her eyes narrowed. "Why the hell not?"
"Because bringing mortal authorities into a conflict is the nuclear assault of the supernatural world. No one wants to see it happen, and if they thought you might do it, they'd kill you. Or they'd pull strings higher up and get you fired, or framed for something. They would never allow it to pass. You'd get yourself ruined or hurt or killed and it's likely a lot of people would go down with you." I paused to let the words sink in, then asked, "Still want me to tell you?"
She closed her eyes for a moment and then nodded, once. "Hit me."
"You're sure?"
"Yeah."
"All right," I said. And I told Murphy all of it. It took a while. I told her about Justin and about Elaine. I told her about the supernatural forces and politics at play in and around the city. I told her about the war I'd started because of what the Red Court had done to Susan. I told her about the faeries and Reuel's murder.
And most of all, I told her about the White Council.
"Those spineless, arrogant, egomaniacal sons of bitches," Murphy growled. "Who the hell do they think they are, selling out their own people like that?"
Some silent, delighted part of me let out a mental cheer at her reaction.
She made a disgusted noise and shook her head. "So let me get this straight," she said. "You started a war between the Council and the Red Court. The Council needs the support of the faeries in order to have a chance at victory. But they can't get that support unless you find this killer and restore the stolen magical power thingie---"
"Mantle," I interjected.
"Whatever," Murphy said. "And if you don't get the magic whatsit, the Council fixes you up in a carryout box for the vampires."
"Yeah," I said.
"And if you don't find the killer before Midsummer, the faeries slug it out with each other."
"Which could be bad no matter who won. It would make El Niño look as mild as an early spring thaw."
"And you want my help."
"You've worked homicide before. You're better at it than me."
"That goes without saying," she said, a trace of a smile on her mouth. "Look, Harry. If you want to find out who did the killing, the best way to start is to figure out why."
"Why what?"
"Why the murder. Why Reuel got bumped off."
"Oh, right," I said.
"And why would someone try to take you out in the park yesterday?"
"It could have been almost anyone," I said. "It wasn't like it was a brilliant attempt, as far as they go."
"Wrong," Murphy said. "Not neat, but not stupid either. After you called earlier tonight, I snooped around."
I frowned at her. "You found something?"
"Yeah. Turns out that there have been two armed robberies in the past three days, first outside of Cleveland and then at a gas station just this side of Indianapolis, coming toward Chicago."
"That doesn't sound out of the ordinary."
"No," Murphy said. "Not unless you throw in that in both cases, someone was grabbed at the scene and abducted, and both times the video security broke down just as the robbery started. Eyewitnesses in Indiana identified the perpetrator as a woman."
I whistled. "Sounds like our ghoul, then."
Murph nodded, her lips pressed together. "Any chance those people she grabbed are alive?"
I shook my head. "Not likely. She probably ate them. A ghoul can go through forty or fifty pounds of meat a day. She'll put whatever's left someplace where animals can get to it, cover her tracks."
She nodded. "I figured. The pattern matches several incidents over the past twenty years. It took me a while to piece it together, but something similar has happened three times in connection with the operations of a contract killer who calls herself the Tigress. A friend at the FBI told me that they suspect her of a number of killings in the New Orleans area and that Interpol thinks she's pulled jobs in Europe and Africa, too."
"Hired gun," I said. "So who did the hiring?"
"From what you've said, my money's on the vampires. They're the ones who benefit most from you being dead. If they punch your ticket, the Council will probably sue for peace, right?"
"Maybe," I said, but I doubted it. "If that's what they had in mind, it's stupid timing. They Pearl-Harbored a bunch of wizards somewhere in Russia two nights ago, and the Council was pretty angry about it."
"Okay. So maybe they figure that if your investigation finds Reuel's killer and gets the Council brownie points with the faeries, they're in for a real fight. Killing you before that happens makes sense."
"Except that when it went down, I wasn't involved in the investigation yet."
Murphy shook her head. "I wish we could get you together with a sketch artist, describe her."
"Doubt it would help much. She was in makeup at first, and I didn't give her a second look. By the time I was paying attention, she mostly looked like something out of a Japanese horror cartoon."
She glanced down at her now cold coffee. "Not much we can do but wait, then. I've got a couple of sources trying to turn up more, but I wouldn't bet anything on them. I'll let you know."
I nodded. "Even if we find her, it might not help with the faerie stuff."
"Right," she said. "Mind if I ask you a few questions? Maybe I'll see something you don't."
"Okay."
"This dreadlock chick. Maeve, you said her name was?"
"Yeah."
"How sure are you in your instinct about her? That she couldn't have done the murder, I mean."
"Pretty close to certain."
"But not completely."
I frowned thoughtfully. "No. Faeries are tricky that way. Not completely."
Murphy nodded. "What about Mab?"
I rubbed at my chin, feeling the beginnings of stubble. "She never out and out denied responsibility for Reuel's death, but I don't think she's the killer."
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know."
"I do. She could have picked anyone she wanted to represent her interests, and she chose you. If she wanted to cover her tracks, it would make more sense for her to choose someone less capable and with less experience. She wouldn't have picked someone as stupidly stubborn as you."
I scowled. "Not stupidly," I said. "I just don't like to leave things undone."
Murphy snorted. "You don't know the meaning of 'give up,' dolt. You see my point."
"Yeah. I guess it's reasonable."
"So what about this Summer girl?"
I blew out a breath. "It doesn't seem to hang on her very well. She was kinder than any faerie I ever met. She could have been pretty darned unpleasant to me, but she wasn't."
"How about the other mortal, then? The Winter Knight."
"He's a violent, vicious heroin addict. I could see him tossing Reuel down those stairs, sure. But I'm not sure he's savvy enough to have worked enough magic to steal the mantle. He was more of a plunder-now-and-think-later sort of guy." I shook my head. "I've got three more faeries to talk to, though."
"Summer Queen and both Mothers," Murphy nodded. "When will you see them?"
"As soon as I can work out how. The Ladies are the closest to the mortal world. They aren't hard to find. The Queens and the Mothers, though, will live in Faerie proper. I'll have to go there to find a guide."
Murphy lifted her eyebrows. "A guide?"
I grimaced. "Yeah. I don't want to, but it's looking like I'm going to have to pay my godmother a visit."
Murphy quirked an eyebrow. "Seriously? You have a faerie godmother?"
"Long story," I said. "Okay, I want to get moving. If you could---"
The store lights went out, all at once.
My heart all but stopped. A second later, battery-powered emergency lights came up and revealed a roiling cloud of silver-grey mist spreading into the store from the doors. The mist rolled over a startled cashier, and the woman slumped, her mouth slightly open and her eyes unfocused, staring.
"Good Lord," Murphy said softly. "Harry, what's happening?"
I had already gotten out of the booth and grabbed the salt shaker from our table, and the one next to it. "Trouble. Come with me."
At first I tried to circle around to the exit doors, but the mist proved to be flowing in through them as well. "Curse it! We can't get out that way."
Murphy's face went more pale as a young man flung himself at the exit doors. The moment he hit the mist, his running steps faltered. He came to a halt, a puzzled expression on his face, and stared around him blankly, as his shoulders slumped.
"Dear God," she whispered. "Harry, what is that?"
"Come on, to the back of the store," I said, and started running that way. "I think it's a mind fog."
"Youthink ?"
I scowled over my shoulder at Murphy. "I've never seen one before, just heard about them. They shut down your head, flatline your ability to remember things, scramble your thoughts. They're illegal."
"Illegal?" Murphy yelled. "Says who?"
"Says the Laws of Magic," I muttered.
"You didn't say anything about any Laws of Magic," Murphy said.
"If we get out of here alive, I'll explain it to you sometime." We ran down a long aisle toward the back of the store, passing housewares, then seasonal goods on our left, while grocery aisles stretched out on our right. Murphy stopped abruptly, broke open the covering over a fire alarm, and jerked it down.
I looked around hopefully, but nothing happened.
"Damn," Murphy muttered.
"Worth a try. Look, the people in the fog should be all right once it's gone, and whoever this is, they won't have any reason to hurt them once we're not around. We'll get out the back door and get away from here."
"Where are we going to go?"
"I don't know," I confessed, as I started moving again. "But anywhere is better than where the bad guys chose to attack and have their pick of a hundred hostages, right?"
"Okay," Murphy said. "Getting out of here is good."
"I bet the bad guys are counting on that, trying to flush us out into a dark alley. You carrying?"
Murphy was already drawing her gun from under her jacket, a well-used military-issue Colt 1911. "Are you kidding?"
I noticed that her hands were shaking. "New gun?"
"Old reliable," she said. "You told me magic can jam a flaky gun."
"Revolver would be even better."
"Why don't I just throw rocks and sharp sticks while I'm at it, Tex?"
"Auto bigot." I spotted anEMPLOYEES ONLY sign. "There," I said, and went that way. "Out the back."
We headed for the swinging doors under the sign. I hit them first, shoving them open. A grey wall of mist lay in front of me and I leaned back, trying to stumble to a halt. If I let myself touch the mist, I might not have enough of my wits left to regret it. I stumbled a foot short of it and almost fell forward, but Murphy grabbed my shirt and jerked me sharply back.
We both backed out into the store. "Can't get out that way," Murphy said. "Maybe they don't want to herd you anywhere. Maybe they just want to gas you and kill you while you're down."
I swept my gaze around the store. Cold grey mist rolled forward, slow and steady, in every direction. "Looks like," I said. I nodded down a tall, narrow aisle containing auto parts. "Down there, quick."
"What's down here?" Murphy asked.
"Cover. I have to get us a defense against that mist." We reached the open space at the end of the aisle, and I nodded to Murphy. "Here, stop here and stand close to me."
She did it, but I could still see her shaking as she asked, "Why?"
I looked up. The mist had reached the far end of the aisle and was gliding slowly down it. "I'm going to put up a circle that should keep it off us. Don't step out of it or let any part of you cross outside."
Murphy's voice took on a higher, more tense pitch. "Harry, it's coming."
I twisted open both salt shakers and started pouring them out in a circle around us, maybe three feet across. As I finished the circle, I invested it with the slightest effort of will, of intent, and it closed with a sudden snap of silent, invisible energies. I stood up again, holding my breath, until the mist touched it a moment later.
It roiled up against the circle and stopped, as though a cylinder of Plexiglas stood between it and us. Murphy and I both let out our breath in slow exhalations. "Wow," she said quietly. "Is that like a force field or something?"
"Only against magical energies," I said, squinting around us. "If someone comes along with a gun, we're in trouble."
"What do we do?"
"I think I can protect myself if I'm ready to do it," I said. "But I need to set up a charm on you."
"A what?"
"Charm, short-term magic." I fumbled at my shirt until I found a frayed thread and started pulling it out. "I need a hair."
Murphy gave me a suspicious frown, but she reached under her hat and unceremoniously jerked out several dark gold hairs. I plucked them up and twisted them together with the strand of thread. "Give me your left hand."
She did. Her fingers shook so hard that I could feel it when I put my own around them. "Murph," I said. She kept looking up and down the aisle, her eyes a little wild. "Karrin."
She looked up at me. She looked very young, somehow.
"Remember what I said yesterday," I said. "You're hurt. But you'll get through it. You'll be okay."
She closed her eyes tightly. "I'm scared. So scared I'm sick."
"You'll get through it."
"What if I don't?"
I squeezed her fingers. "Then I will personally make fun of you every day for the rest of your life," I said. "I will call you a sissy girl in front of everyone you know, tie frilly aprons on your car, and lurk in the parking lot at CPD and whistle and tell you to shake it, baby. Every. Single. Day."
Murphy's breath escaped in something like a hiccup. She opened her eyes, a mix of anger and wary amusement easing into them in place of the fear. "You do realize I'm holding a gun, right?"
"You're fine. Hold your hand still." Though her fingers still trembled a little, the wild, panicked spasms had ceased. I wrapped the twist of hair and thread around her finger.
Murphy kept on peering through the mist, her gun steady. "What are you doing?"
"Enchantment like that mist is invasive," I said. "It touches you, gets inside you. So I'm setting you up with a defense. Left side is the side that takes in energy. I'm going to block that mist's spell from going into you. Tie a string around your finger so you won't forget."
I tied the string in an almost complete knot, so that it would need only a single tug to finish. Then I fumbled my penknife out of my pocket and pricked the pad of my right thumb. I looked up at Murphy, trying to clear my thoughts for the spell.
She regarded me, her face pale and uncertain. "I've never really seen you, you know. Do it. Before."
"It's okay," I told her. I met her eyes for a dangerous second. "I won't hurt you. I know what I'm doing."
She lifted the corner of her mouth in a quick smile that made her eyes sparkle. She nodded and returned to peering out through the mist.
I closed my eyes for a moment and then began gathering my focus for the spell. We were already within a circle, so it happened fast. The air tightened on my skin, and I felt the hairs along my arms rise as the power grew."Memoratum," I murmured. I tied off the improvised string and touched the bead of blood on my thumb to the knot."Defendre memorarius."
The energy rushed out of me and into the spell, wrapping tight around the string and pressing against Murphy. A wave of goose bumps rippled up her arm, and she drew in a sudden sharp breath. "Whoa."
I looked at her sharply. "Murph? You okay?"
She blinked down at her hand, and then up at me. "Wow. Yeah."
I nodded, and took my pentacle out of my shirt. I wrapped it around my left hand, leaving the five-pointed star lying against my knuckles. "Okay, we're pushing our luck enough. Let's hope this works and get the hell out of here."
"Wait, you don't know if it will work?"
"It should work. It ought to. In theory."
"Great. Would it be better to stay here?"
"Heh, that's a joke, right?"
Murphy nodded. "Okay. How will we know if it works?"
"We step outside the circle and if we don't drift into Lala Land," I said, "we'll know it worked."
She braced her charmed hand on the butt of her gun. "That's what I love about working with you, Dresden. The certainty."
I broke the circle with a shuffle of my foot and an effort of will. It scattered with a pressured sigh, and the grey mist slid forward and over us.
It glided over my skin like a cold and greasy oil, something foul and cloying and vaguely familiar that made me want to start brushing it off. It writhed up over my arms, prickles of distraction and disorientation crawling over my limbs. I focused on the pentacle on my left hand, the solid, cool weight of it, the years of discipline and practice that it represented. I pushed the clinging mist away from my sensations, deliberately excluded it from my perception by sheer determination. A ripple of azure static flickered along the chain of my amulet, flashed around the pentacle, then faded, taking with it the distraction of the mind fog.
Murphy glanced back at me and said, voice low, "You okay? You looked shaky for a second."
I nodded. "I got it now. You okay?"
"Yeah. Doesn't feel like anything."
Damn, I'm good---sometimes. "Go. Out through the garden center."
Murphy had the gun---she walked in front. I kept my eyes open on our flanks as she headed down an aisle. We passed a customer and an employee, down a side aisle, pressed against a wall where they'd apparently tried to avoid the mist. Now they stood with faintly puzzled expressions on their faces, eyes not focused. Another shopper, an old man, stood in an aisle, swaying precariously on his feet. I stopped beside him and said quietly, "Sir, here, sit down for a minute," and helped him sit down before he fell.
We went past another slackly staring employee, her blue smock marked with dirt stains and smelling of fertilizer, and headed for the doors leading out to the garden center.
My memory screamed a sudden alarm at me, and I lurched forward, diving past Murphy and out into the mist-shrouded evening within the chain-link boundaries of the garden center. A hard, sudden weight hit me, driving my thighs and hips down to the floor. My head whiplashed against it a moment later, complete with a burst of phantom light and very real pain.
I rolled, as the employee we'd just passed reversed her grip on a wickedly sharp set of pruners and stabbed them down at me. I oozed to one side in a sluggish dodge. The steel tips of the tool tore through my shirt and some of my skin before biting into the concrete. I kept rolling and kicked at the woman's ankles. She avoided me with a kind of liquid agility, and I looked up into the human face of the ghoul assassin from the rain of toads. The Tigress.
She didn't look particularly pretty, or particularly exotic, or particularly anything. She looked like no one in particular---medium height, medium build, no flattering curves, no outrageous flaws, no nothing. Medium-brown hair, of unremarkable cut and length. She wore jeans, a polo top, the Wal-Mart smock, all very normal.
The gun she started drawing from under the smock commanded attention, though---a revolver, snub-nosed, but it moved with the kind of weight that made me think high-caliber. I started trying to pull a shield together, but the defense I'd been holding against the mist and the blow to my head tangled up the process, slowed me down---not much, but enough to get me really dead.
Murphy saved me. As the Tigress brought the gun to bear on me, Murphy closed with her, trapping the ghoul's gun arm with her own and doing something with her left hand as she twisted her body at the hips, her strong legs spread wide.
Murphy was a faithful practitioner of Aikido, and she knew about grappling. The Tigress let out a shriek. Not a girly wow-does-that-hurt shriek, but the kind of furious, almost whistling sound you expect from a bird of prey. There was a snapping, popping sound, then a clap of thunder, the roar of a discharged gun at close quarters, the sudden sharp smell of burnt powder, and the revolver went skittering free.
The ghoul stabbed the pruners at Murphy, but she was already on the way out, grunting with effort, her entire attack one circle that sent the Tigress stumbling away into a stand of large potted ferns.
Murphy spun to face the ghoul. She took a shooting stance and snarled, "Get on your face on the floor. You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent."
The ghoul changed. Skin tore at the corners of her mouth as it dropped open and gaped nightmarishly wide, canines lengthening as her lips peeled away from her teeth. Her shoulders jerked and twisted, hunching up and growing wider at the same time, her clothes stretching out while her body grew more hunched. Her fingers lengthened, talons extending from the tips until her hands were spread as wide as the lawn rakes on a display behind her, and a fetid smell of decay and worse flooded out.
Murphy's face went bloodless as she stared at the transformation. If she'd been dealing with an armed thug, I think she would have been fine. But the ghoul wasn't and she wasn't. I saw the fear come surging up through her, winding its way into her through the scars a maddened ghost had left on her spirit the year before. Panic hit her, and her breath came in strangled gasps as a demon from a madman's nightmare clawed its way free of the bushes, spread its talons, and let out a rasping, quivering hiss. Murphy's gun started quivering, the barrel jerking erratically left and right. I struggled to get on my feet and back into the game, but my ears still rang and the constant pressure of the mist slowed me down.
The Tigress must have seen the terror that held Murphy. "A cop, eh?" the ghoul rasped, drool foaming between its teeth, dribbling down its chin. It started slowly toward Murphy, claw tips dragging along the floor. "Aren't you going to tell me that I have the right to an attorney?"
Murphy let out a small, terrified sound, frozen in place, her eyes wide.
It laughed at her. "Such a big gun for a sweet girl. You smell sweet. It makes me hungry." It continued forward, laughter still kissing every word, its distorted, inhuman voice continuing in a steady murmur, "Maybe I should let you arrest me. Wait until we're in the car. If you smell that good, I wonder how good you taste."
I guess the ghoul shouldn't have laughed. Murphy's eyes cleared and hardened. The gun steadied, and she said, "Taste this, bitch."
Murphy started shooting.
The ghoul let out another shriek, this one full of surprise and pain. The bullets didn't drive her back. That's for comic books and TV. Real bullets just rip through you like lead weights through cheesecloth. No gaping, bloody holes appeared in the ghoul's chest, but sudden flowers of scarlet sprayed out from her back, covering the potted ferns with bloody dewdrops.
The ghoul threw her arms up and recoiled, turning, screaming, and threw herself at the ferns.
Murphy kept shooting.
The ghoul stumbled and dropped down amid the ferns, still kicking and struggling wildly, knocking pots over, breaking others, scattering vegetable matter and dirt all over the floor.
Murphy kept shooting.
The gun clicked empty, and the ghoul half-rolled onto her ruined back, the stolen blue smock now ripped with huge holes and soaked through with blood. The ghoul choked and gagged, scarlet trickling out of her mouth. She let out another hiss, this one bubbling, and held up her hands in supplication. "Wait," she rasped. "Wait, please. You win, I give up."
Murphy ejected the clip, put in a fresh one, and worked the slide on the gun. Then she took a shooting stance again and sighted down the barrel, her blue eyes calculating, passionless, merciless.
She didn't see the sudden shadow against the mist to her right, huge and hulking, backlit by emergency lights at the other end of the garden center. I did, and finally shoved my dazed self back to my feet. "Murph!" I shouted. "To your right!"
Murphy's head snapped around, and she darted to her left, even as a garden hoe swept down and shattered against the concrete where she'd been standing. The ghoul scrambled back through the ferns and vanished into the mist, leaving blood smeared everywhere. Murphy backpedaled and shot at the form in the mist, then ducked as another arm swept a shovel in a scything arc that just missed her head.
Grum the Ogre rolled forward out of the mist, in his scarlet-skinned, twelve-foot-tall hulking form, a shovel clenched in one fist. Without slowing a step, he scooped up a twenty-gallon ceramic pot and threw it at Murphy like a snowball. She scooted behind a stack of empty loading palettes, and the pot exploded against them.
Magic would be useless against the ogre. I looked wildly around me, then seized a jumbo-sized plastic bag of round, tinted-glass potting marbles. "Hey!" I shouted. "Tall, red, and ugly!"
Grum's head spun around further than I would have thought possible with a neck that thick, and his already beady eyes narrowed even more. He let out a bellowing roar and turned toward me, his huge feet slamming down on the concrete.
I tore open the bag and dumped it out toward him. Blue-green marbles spread over the floor in a wave. Grum's foot slammed down on several as he advanced, and I hoped for the best. Grum continued toward me unslowed, and when his great foot lifted, I saw small circles of powdered glass on the ground.
I snarled a curse and ran deeper into the garden center, Grum's footsteps heavy behind me. I heard Murphy shoot again, a pair of shots, and tried to keep a mental count of her rounds. Four, in the new clip? Did she have another reload? And how many rounds did that Colt hold anyway?
A sharper, more piercing report cracked through the area---rifle fire. Murphy's Colt barked twice more, and she called, "Harry, someone's covering the exit with gunfire!"
"Kinda busy here, Murph!" I shouted.
"What the hell is that thing?"
"Faerie!" I shouted. Grum was already trying to kill me, so there was no point in being diplomatic. "It's a big, ugly faerie!" I started swiping things off of shelves to crash in the aisle behind me. I'd gained some distance on Grum, but it could be that he just needed time to gather momentum. I heard him snarl again, and he took a swing with the shovel in his hand. He was short of me, but it whooshed loudly enough to make me flinch.
I looked wildly for something made of steel to throw at the ogre or to defend myself with. The mist kept me from seeing more than a couple of yards ahead of me, and from what I could see, I was just heading deeper and deeper into the plant-vending area. The smell of summer-heated greenery, of fertilizer and mild rot, filled my nose and mouth. I rounded the end of the aisle and ducked through a narrow gate and out from under the canopy top that gave shade to this part of the garden center, into a roofless area bounded by a high chain-link fence and filled with young trees and greenery standing in silent rows.
I looked around wildly for a way out into the parking lot at large, and checked how close the ogre was, flicking a glance back over my shoulder.
Grum stopped at the gate to the fenced area and, with a small smile on his lips, swung the gate shut. As I watched, he covered his hand with a plastic trash bag, and bent the latch like soft clay. Metal squealed and the gate fastened shut with no more effort than I would need to close a twist-tie.
My heart fell down through my stomach, and I looked around me.
The chain-link fence was at least nine feet high, with a strand of barbed wire at the top, meant to stop incursions of baby-tree nappers, I guessed. A second gate, much bigger, stood closed---and the latch had been twisted exactly like the other, warped closed. It was a neat little trap, and I'd been chased right into it.
"Dammit," I said.
Grum let out a grating laugh, though I could barely see anything but his outline, several yards away in the mist. "You lose, wizard."
"Why are you doing this?" I demanded. "Who the hell are you working for?"
"You got no guess?" Grum said. There was a note of casual arrogance to his voice. "Gee. That's too bad. Guess you go to your grave not knowing."
"If I had a nickel for every time I'd heard that," I muttered, looking around me. I had a few options. None of them were good. I could open a way into the Nevernever and try to find my way through the spirit realm and back into the real world somewhere else---but if I did that, not only might I run into something even worse than I already had in front of me, but if I got unlucky I might hit a patch of slower time and not emerge back into my Chicago for hours, even days. I might also be able to melt myself a hole in the fence with conjured flame, providing I didn't burn myself to a cinder doing it. I didn't have my blasting rod with me, and without it my control could be shaky enough to manage just that.
I could probably pile a bunch of baby trees, loading palettes, sacks of potting soil, and so on against the outer wall of chain-link fence and climb out. I might get cut up on the barbed wire, but hell, that would be better than staying here. Either way, there was no time to waste standing around deciding. I turned toward the nearest set of young trees, picked up a couple, and tossed them against the fence. "Murphy! I'm stuck, but I think I can get clear! Get out of here now!"
Murphy's voice floated to me, directionless in the fog. "Where are you?"
"Hell's bells, Murph! Get out!"
Her gun barked twice more. "Not without you!"
I threw more stuff on the pile. "I'm a big boy! I can take care of myself!" I took a long step up onto the pile, and tested my grip. It was enough to let me reach the top. I figured I could pull myself up and worry about the barbed wire when I got there. I started climbing out.
I was looking at a faceful of barbed wire and pushing at the fence with my toes when I felt something wrap around my ankles. I looked down and saw a branch wrapped around my legs. I kicked at it irritably.
And then as I watched, another branch lifted from the pile and joined the first. Then a third. And a fourth. The branches beneath my feet heaved and I suddenly found myself hauled up into the air, swinging upside down from my heels.
It was an awkward vantage point, but I watched as the trees and plants and soil I'd thrown into a pile surged and writhed together. The young trees tangled their limbs together, growing before my eyes as they did, lengthening and growing thicker to become part of a larger whole. Other bits of greenery, clumps of dirt, and writhing vines and leaves joined the trees, whipping through the air apparently of their own volition and adding to the mass of the thing that held me.
It took shape and stood up, an enormous creature of vaguely human shape made all of earth and root and bough, twin points of brilliant emerald-green light burning in its vine-writhing, leaf-strewn head. It had to have been nine or ten feet tall, and nearly that far across. Its legs were thicker than me, and branches spread out above its head like vast horns against the background of luminous mind fog. The creature lifted its head and screamed, a sound of tortured wood and creaking limb and howling wind.
"Stars and stones, Harry," I muttered, my heart pounding, "when will you learn to keep your mouth shut?"
"Murphy!" I screamed. "Get clear!"
The plant monster--- No, wait. I couldn't possibly refer to that thing as a "plant monster." I'd be a laughingstock. It's hard to give a monster a cool name on the spur of the moment, but I used a name I'd heard Bob throw out before.
The chlorofiend lifted me up and shook me like a set of maracas. I focused on my shield bracelet, running my will, bolstered by sudden fear, through the focus. My skin tingled as the shield formed around me, and I shaped it into a full sphere. I was barely in time. The chlorofiend threw me at a post in the chain-link fence. Without the shield, it would have broken my back. I slammed into it, feeling the energy of the shield tighten around me, spreading the impact over the whole of my body instead of solely at the point of impact. The shield transferred a portion of the kinetic energy of impact into heat and light, while the rest came through as an abrupt pressure. The result was like a sudden suit of oven-warmed elastic closing on me, and it felt about three sizes too small. It knocked the wind out of my lungs. Azure and argent light flashed in a vague sphere around me.
I didn't bounce much, just fell to the concrete. The shield gave out a more feeble flash when I hit. I got up off the ground and dodged away from the chlorofiend, but it followed me, slapping aside a stand of wooden tomato stakes with one leafy arm. Its glowing green eyes blazed as it came. I ran up against the fence at the back end of the lot, and the chlorofiend's huge fist smashed down at me again.
I lifted my shield bracelet against it, but the blow tossed me a dozen feet, down the length of fence and into a set of huge steel partitioned shelves holding hundreds of fifty-pound bags of mulch, potting soil, and fertilizer. I lay there dazed for a second, staring at an empty aisle display proclaiming in huge scarlet lettersWEED-B-GONE ONLY 2.99!!! I clutched at the display and got to my feet again in time to duck under the chlorofiend's fist as it punched at my head.
It hit one of the metal shelves instead of me, and there was a shriek of warping metal, a creaking yowl of pain from the fiend, and a burst of sizzling smoke. The creature drew its smoking fist back and screeched again, eyes blazing even brighter, angrier.
"Steel," I muttered. "So you're a faerie somethingorother too." I looked up at the enormous shelves as I ran down the length of them, and a second later I heard the chlorofiend turn and begin pacing after me. I started gathering in my will as I ran, and I allowed the physical shield to fall, leaving me only enough defense to keep the mist from blitzing my head. I would need every bit of strength I could muster to pull off my sudden and desperate plan---and if it didn't work, my shield wouldn't protect me for long in any case. Sooner or later, the chlorofiend would batter its way through my defenses and pound me into plant food.
I pulled ahead of it, but it started gaining momentum, catching up to me. As I reached the end of the row, the end of the steel shelves, I turned to face it.
Hell's bells, that thing was big. Bigger than Grum. I could see through it in places, where twists of branches and leaves were not too closely clumped with earth, but that didn't make it seem any less massive or dangerous.
If this didn't work, I wasn't going to last long enough to regret it.
Most magic is pretty time-consuming, what with drawing circles and gathering energies and aligning forces. Quick and dirty magic, evocation, is drawn directly from a wizard's will and turned loose without benefit of guide or limit. It's difficult and it's dangerous. I suck at evocation. I only knew a couple that I could do reliably, and even they required a focus, such as my shield bracelet or blasting rod, to be properly controlled.
But for doing big dumb things that require a lot of energy and not much finesse, I'm usually fine.
I lifted my arms, and the mist was stirred by a sudden rush of moving air. The chlorofiend pounded closer, and I closed my eyes, pouring more energy out, reaching for the wind."Vento," I muttered, feeling more power stir. The chlorofiend bellowed again, sending a jolt of fear through me, and the winds rose even more."Vento! Vento, ventas servitas!"
Power, magic, coursed through my outstretched arms and lashed out at the night. The wind rose in a sudden roar, a screaming cyclone that whirled into being just in front of me and then whirled out toward the heavy metal shelving.
The chlorofiend screamed again, nearly drowned out by the windstorm I'd called, only a few yards away.
The enormous, heavy shelves, loaded with tons of materials, let out a groan of protest and then fell, toppled over onto the chlorofiend with a deafening din that ripped at my ears and shook the concrete floor.
The chlorofiend was strong, but it wasn't that strong. It went down like a bush under a bulldozer, shrieking again as the steel shelves crushed it and burned into its substance. A foul greyish smoke rose from the wreckage, and the chlorofiend continued to scream and thrash, the shelves jerking and moving.
Exhaustion swept over me with the effort of the spell, and I glowered down at the fallen shelves. "Down," I panted, "but not out. Dammit." I watched the shelves for a moment and decided that the chlorofiend probably wouldn't shrug it off for a few minutes. I shook my head and headed for the gate into the enclosure. Hopefully, Grum hadn't twisted things up so badly that I couldn't get out.
He had. The metal latch on the gate had been pinched into a mess by his talons. They had scored the metal in sharp notches, like an industrial cutter. Note to self: Don't think steel can stop Grum's fingernails. I checked above and decided to risk climbing the fence and getting through the barbed wire.
I had gotten maybe halfway up the chain-link fence when Murphy limped out of the mist on the other side, her gun pointed right at me.
"Whoa, whoa, Murph," I said. I showed her my hands and promptly fell off the fence. "It's me."
She lowered the gun and let out her breath. "Christ, Harry. What are you doing?"
"Texas cage match. I won." From behind me, the chlorofiend let out another shriek and the shelving groaned as it shifted. I gulped and looked back. "Rematch doesn't look promising, though. Where have you been?"
She rolled her eyes. "Shopping."
"Where's Grum and the ghoul?"
"Don't know. The ghoul's blood trail went out, but someone shot at me when I followed it. Haven't seen the ogre." She blinked at the gate's latch. "Damn. Guess he shut you in here, huh?"
"Pretty much. You get shot?"
"No, why?"
"You're limping."
Murphy grimaced. "Yeah. One of those bastards must have thrown a bunch of marbles on the floor. I slipped on one. It's my knee."
"Oh," I said. "Uh."
Murphy blinked at me. "Youdid that?"
"Well, it was a plan at the time."
"Harry, that's not a plan, it's a Looney Tune."
"Kill me later. Help me out of here now." I squinted up at the barbed wire. "Maybe if you get a rake, you can push it up for me so that I can slide between it and the fence."
"We're twenty feet from the hardware department, genius," Murphy said. She limped back into the mist, and returned half a minute later carrying a pair of bolt cutters. She cut a slit in the chain link fence and I squeezed through it while the chlorofiend thrashed, still pinned.
"I could kiss you," I said.
Murphy grinned. "You smell like manure, Harry." The smile faded. "What now?"
The trapped monster's thrashing sent several smaller shelves toppling over, and I rubbernecked nervously. "Getting out is still first priority. That thing is down, but it'll be coming before long."
"What is it?"
"Chlorofiend," I said.
"A what?"
"Plant monster."
"Oh, right."
"We need to get out."
Murphy shook her head. "Whoever was covering the exit out front can probably see the other doors too. A silhouette in a doorway is a great target. It's just like a shooting range."
"How the blazes did they see you through the mist?"
"Is that really important right now? They can, and it means we can't go out the front."
"Yeah," I said. "You're right. The main exits are covered, that thing is in the garden center, and ten to one Ogre Grum is watching the back."
"Ogre, check. What's his deal?"
"Bullets bounce off him, and he shakes off magic like a duck does water. He's strong and pretty quick and smarter than he looks."
Murphy let out a soft curse. "You can't blast him like you did the loup-garou?"
I shook my head. "I gave him a hard shot once already. I may as well have been spitting on him."
"Doesn't look like we have much choice for getting out."
"And even if we do, Grum or that plant thing could run us down, so we'll need wheels."
"We have to go through one of them."
"I know," I said, and headed back into the store.
"Where are you going?" Murphy demanded.
"I have a plan."
She limped after me. "Better than the Looney Tune one, I hope."
I grunted in reply. No need to agree with her.
We both realized that if this plan wasn't better than the last one, then, as Porky Pig would say, That's all, folks.
Three minutes later Murphy and I went out the back door, and Grum was waiting for us.
He rose up out of the shadows by the large trash bins with a bull elephant's bellow and stomped toward us. Murphy, dragging a leg and wrapped somewhat desperately in a plaid auto blanket, let out a shrill cry and turned to run, but tripped and fell to the ground before the ogre.
I kept my left hand behind my back and lifted my right. Flame danced up from my cupped fingers, and I thundered, "Grum!"
The ogre's beady eyes turned to me, glittering. He let out another rumbling snarl.
"Stand thee from my path!" I called in that same overdramatic voice, "lest I grow weary of thee and bereft thee of thy life!"
The ogre focused wholly on me now, striding forward, past the whimpering form of Murphy. "I do not fear thy power, mortal," he snarled.
I lifted my chin and waved my fire-holding hand around a bit. "This is thy last warning, faerie dog!"
Grum's beady eyes grew angrier. He let out a harsh laugh and did not slow down. "Feeble mortal trickster. Thy spellfire means nothing to me. Do thy worst."
Behind Grum, Murphy threw the auto blanket off of her shoulders, and with one rip of the starting cord fired up her shiny new Coleman chain saw. She engaged the blade with a hissing whirr of air and without preamble swung it in an arc that ended precisely at the back of Grum's thick, hairy knee. The steel blade chewed through the ogre's hide as if it was made of Styrofoam. Blood and bits of meat flew up in a gruesome cloud.
The ogre screamed, his body contorting in agony. The scarlet skin around the injury immediately swelled, darkening to black, and tendrils of infectious-looking darkness spread from the wound up over the ogre's leg and hip within the space of a breath. He swept one huge fist at Murphy, but she was already getting out of his reach. The ogre's weight came down on the injured leg, and Grum fell to earth with a heavy thud.
I started forward to help, but everything was happening fast, and my movements felt nightmarishly slow. The ogre rolled to his belly at once, maddened at the touch of the iron in the chain saw's blade, and started dragging himself toward Murphy faster than I would have believed with just his arms, talons gouging into the concrete. She hurried away from him, limping, but Grum slammed one fist down on the concrete so hard that half a dozen feet away, she was jarred off balance and fell.
Grum got hold of Murphy's foot and started dragging her back toward him. She let out a hollow gasp, then twisted and wriggled. She slipped out of her sneaker and hauled herself away from the ogre, her face gone white and drawn.
I ran up behind Grum, pulling my left hand out from behind my back, the fingers of my right hand still curled around the flickering flame I'd shown the ogre. A large yellow-and-green pump-pressure water gun sloshed a little in my left fist. I lowered it and squeezed the trigger. A stream of gasoline sprayed out all over Grum's back, soaking the ogre's skin. Grum whirled toward me halfway through, and I shot the gasoline into his eyes and nose, eliciting another scream. He bared his fangs and glared at me through eyes swollen almost shut.
"Wizard," he said, hardly understandable through the fangs and the drool, "your spellflame will not stop me."
I turned my right hand slowly, and showed Grum the burning can of Sterno I'd been palming. "Good thing I've got this plain old vanilla fire, then, huh?"
And I tossed the lit can of Sterno onto the gasoline-soaked ogre.
Hamstrung and blazing like a birthday candle, Grum screamed and thrashed. I skipped back and around him, helping Murphy up to her feet as the ogre slammed himself against the ground and then against the back wall of the Wal-Mart. He did that in a frenzy for maybe twenty seconds, before uttering an odd, ululating cry and hurling himself at a deep shadow behind a trash bin---and vanished, the light from the flames simply disappearing.
Murphy got up only with my help, her face pale with pain. She could put no weight at all on her wounded leg. "What happened?"
"We whipped him," I said. "He packed up and headed back to Faerie."
"For good?"
I shook my head. "For now. How's your leg?"
"Hurts. Think I broke something. I can hop on the other one."
"Lean on me," I said. We went a few paces, and she swayed dangerously. I caught her before she toppled. "Murph?"
"Sorry, sorry," she gasped. "Hopping, bad idea."
I helped her back down to the ground. "Look, stay here, against the wall. I'll get the Beetle and pull it around here to you."
Murphy was in enough pain to keep her from arguing. She did draw her gun, switch the safety on, and offer it to me. I shook my head. "Keep it. You might need it."
"Dresden," Murphy said, "my gun has been about as useful as fabric softener in a steel mill tonight. But someone out there has a rifle. If they're using one, it's because they're a human, and you don't have most of your magic stuff with you. Take the gun."
She was right, but I argued anyway. "I can't leave you defenseless, Murph."
Murphy hauled up the leg of her jeans and pulled a tiny automatic from an ankle holster. She worked the slide, checked the safety, and said, "I'm covered."
I took the Colt, checked the chamber and the safety, more or less by reflex. "That's acute little gun there, Murph."
She scowled at me. "I have small ankles. It's the only one I can hide there."
I chanted, teasing, "Murphy's got a girl gun, Murphy's got a girl gun."
Murphy glowered at me and hauled the chain saw to within easy reach. "Come a little closer and say that."
I snorted at her. "Give me a couple minutes," I said. "I'll tell you it's me. Some of these bad guys can play dress up---so if you aren't sure who it is . . ."
Murphy nodded, pale and resolved, and rested her hand on the gun.
I drew a deep breath and walked through the mist around the side of the building and toward the front parking lot. I kept close to the wall and moved as quietly as I could, Listening as I went. I gathered up energy for the shield bracelet and held my left hand ready. I held the gun in my right. Holding a pair of defenses focused around my left hand, I would have to do all my shooting with my right. I'm not a very good shot even when I can use both hands, so I just had to hope that no sharpshooting would be required.
I got to the front of the building before I heard something click in the fenced area of the garden center. I swallowed and pointed the Colt at it, noting that I wasn't sure how many rounds the gun had left.
As I came closer, through the mist, I saw the chain fence around the ruined area where I'd been trapped with the chlorofiend. It had been torn down in a swath ten feet wide, and from what I could see of the inside, the tree-thing wasn't there anymore. Great. I took a few steps closer to the break in the fence to stare at the ruined chain link. I'd expected bent and stretched wire, still hot enough to burn where it had torn. Instead, I found edges cut off as neatly as with a set of clippers and coated with frost.
I checked around on the ground and found sections of wire, none of them longer than two or three inches. Steam curled up from them, and the cold in the air near the fence made me shiver. The fence had been frozen, chilled until the steel had become brittle and then shattered.
"Winter," I muttered. "I guess that wasn't much of a stretch."
I swept my eyes around through the mist, left my ears open, and paced as quietly as I could toward the dim, flickering lights that lay somewhere ahead in the parking lot. I'd parked the Beetle in an aisle almost even with the front doors, but I didn't have a reference point through the mist. I just headed out, picked the first row of cars, and started prowling silently along them, looking for the Beetle.
My car wasn't in the first row, but a thin stream of some kind of yellowish fluid was. I traced it to the next row, and found the Beetle sitting there in its motley colors. Another leak. They weren't exactly unheard of in a wizard's car, but this would be a hell of a time for the Beetle to get hospitalized.
I got in and set the gun down long enough to shove my keys in the ignition. My trusty steed wheezed and groaned a few times, but the engine turned over with an apologetic cough and the car rattled to life. I put it in gear, pulled through the empty space in front of me, and headed for the back of the building to get Murphy.
I had just passed the garden center with its ruined fence when my windows abruptly frosted over. It happened in the space of a breath, ice crystals forming and growing like plants on a stop-motion film until my view was completely cut off. The temperature dropped maybe fifty degrees, and the car sputtered. If I hadn't given it a bunch of gas, it would have stalled. The Beetle lurched forward, and I rolled down the window, sticking my head out the side in an effort to see what was going on.
The chlorofiend loomed up out of the mist and brought one huge, knobby fist down on the Beetle like an organic wrecking ball. The force of it crumpled the hood like tin foil and drove the shocks down so that the frame smushed up against the tires. The impact threw me forward against the steering wheel and drove the breath out of me with a shock of pain.
The impact would have rolled any car with an engine under the hood. Most of the mass of the car would have been driven down, the lighter rear end would have flipped up, and me without my seat belt would have been bounced around like a piece of popcorn.
The old Volkswagens, though, have their engine in the back. Most of the weight of the car got bounced up a little in the air, then came back down to the ground with a jolt.
I slammed my foot on the gas harder, and the Beetle's engine sputtered gamely in response. As big and strong as the chlorofiend might be, it wasn't solid and it wasn't as heavy as a living mass of the same size. The Beetle bounced up from the blow that had crumpled the empty storage compartment under the hood and slammed into the chlorofiend without losing much of its momentum.
The beast let out a shriek of what might have been surprise, and was definitely pain. My car hammered into it with a flickering of scarlet static and a cloud of smoke from the substance of the faerie creature, swept under its legs, and drove the cholorofiend atop its hood.
I kept my foot on the gas, held the wheel as steadily as I could with one hand, and stuck my head out the window so I could see. The chlorofiend screamed again, the magic around it gathering in a cloud that made the hairs on my neck stand up, but the Beetle rattled through the attempt to hex it down, carrying the chlorofiend the length of the Wal-Mart garden center and to the back of the building.
"Think of it as payback for all those telephone poles," I muttered to the Beetle, and slammed on the brakes.
The chlorofiend rolled off of my car, skidded on the asphalt, and slammed into the side of a metal trash bin with a yowl of pain and an exploding cloud of dirt clods. Only one of my headlights appeared to have survived the attack, and even it flickered woozily through the mist and the cloud of dust and dirt rising from the chlorofiend.
I slammed the car into reverse, backed up a few more feet, then put it back into neutral. I raced the engine, then popped the clutch and sent the Beetle hurtling at the monster. I braced myself for the impact this time, and pulled my head in before I hit. The impact felt violent, shockingly loud, and viscerally satisfying. The chlorofiend let out a broken-sounding creak, but until I backed the car up and whipped the wheel around so that I could see out the side window, I couldn't tell what had happened.
I'd torn the thing in half at about the middle, pinching it between the battered, frost-coated Beetle and the metal trash bin. Thank the stars it hadn't been a Fiberglas job. The legs lay against the trash bin, now only a pile of twisted saplings and earth, while the arms flailed toward me, a dozen long paces away, uselessly pounding the asphalt.
I spat out my window, put the car into gear again, and went to get Murphy.
I jumped out of the car and had to wrench the passenger door hard to get it to open. Murphy pushed herself up, using the wall for support, and stared at the frost-covered Beetle with wide eyes. "What the hell happened?"
"The plant monster."
"A plant monster and Frosty the Snowman?"
I got on her wounded side to support her. "I took care of it. Let's go."
Murphy let out another small sound of pain, but she didn't let it stop her from hobbling along toward the car. I was just about to help her in when she shouted, "Harry!" and threw her weight against me.
The chlorofiend, the upper half, had somehow clawed its way out of the mist, and one long, viny limb was reaching for me. I fell back, away from it, and tried to shield Murphy with my body.
It got me. I felt fingers the size of young tree trunks wrap around my throat and jerk me away from Murphy like I was a puppy. More branch-fingers got one of my thighs, and I felt myself suspended in the air and pulled slowly apart.
"Meddler," hissed an alien voice from somewhere near the chlorofiend's glowing green eyes. "You should never have involved yourself in these affairs. You have no concept of what is at stake. Die for your arrogance."
I tried for a witty riposte, but my vision blacked out and my head felt like it was trapped in a slowly tightening vise. I tried gathering forces, attempting to push them through my shield bracelet, but the moment I did there was a rustle of wood and leaves, and the bracelet snapped off of my wrist, broken. I tried to gather another spell---and realized as I did that my concentration had wavered too much and that my defense against the insidious enchantment of the mist had begun to fail. My thoughts broke apart into irregular pieces, and I struggled to reach for them and put them together again as the pressure on my body increased, became a red-hot agony.
I only dimly heard the chain saw start up again, and Murphy's scream of challenge. The charm she wore wasn't relying on my concentration. It wouldn't last long, but it would keep the mist away from her for a few more minutes. The chlorofiend let out a shriek, and I heard the saw biting into wood, felt wood chips hitting my face.
I tumbled free, sapling branches tangled all around my head and shoulders, leaves and dirt scratching my face. My leg was still in the chlorofiend's grip, but I could breathe again.
The mist pressed close to me, giving me a sense of detachment and disinterest. It was hard to make any sense of what happened next. Murphy hopped closer, her weight on the one leg, and swept the chain saw through the chlorofiend's other arm. I fell to the ground, more inert tree parts around me.
The chlorofiend waved its arms at Murphy, but they didn't have the crippling force I'd seen it use before. They merely jostled her and knocked her down. Murphy snarled, crawling on her hands and knees, dragging the chain saw with her. She lifted it again and drove it at the creature's head, engine racing, blade singing through the air. The chlorofiend screamed in protest and frustration, lifting the stumps (hah hah, get it, stumps?) of its arms in feeble defense. Murphy tore through them with the chain saw, snickersnack, and then drove the blade directly between the chlorofiend's glowing green eyes.
The monster shrieked again, writhing, but its arms never managed to do more than shove Murphy around a bit. Then it let out a final groan, and the eyes winked out. Murphy suddenly sat atop a mound of dirt and leaves and gnarled branches.
I lay there, staring stupidly at her, then heard a gunshot, the sharp, cracking report of a rifle. Murphy threw herself down and rolled toward me. A second shot rang out, and a puff of leaves a foot to Murphy's right leapt into the air.
Another sound cut through the night---police sirens, getting closer. Murphy dragged me and herself over the ground toward the car. I heard a harsh curse somewhere in the mist, and then a pair of footsteps retreating. A moment later, I thought the mist was starting to thin out.
"Harry," Murphy said, shaking me. I blinked at her, and the relief showed in her worried expression. "Harry, can you hear me?"
I nodded. My mouth felt dry and my body ached. I fought to clear my head.
"Get us in the car," she said, enunciating the words. "Get us in the car and get us out of here."
The car. Right. I hauled Murphy into the Beetle, got in myself, and stared at the frosted windshield. The heat of the summer night was already melting the frost away, and I could see through it in spots.
"Harry," Murphy said, exasperated, her voice thin and shaky. "Drive!"
Oh, right. Drive. Get out. I put the Beetle in gear, more or less, and we lurched out of the parking lot and out of the mist.
"You'rekidding ," Billy said, his voice touched with disbelief. "A chain saw? Where did you get the gasoline?"
Murphy looked up from her wounded leg and the willowy Georgia, who had cut her jeans away and was cleaning out the long gashes she'd acquired from ankle to mid calf. "Gas generator, backup power supply for all the food freezers. They had a ten-gallon plastic jug of it."
Billy's apartment was not a large one, and with a dozen people in it, even with the air-conditioning running full blast, it was too hot and too crowded. The Alphas, Billy's werewolf accomplices, were out in force. We'd been challenged by a tall, thin young man in the parking lot and shadowed to the door by a pair of wolves who kept just far enough away to make it difficult to see them in the shadows.
When I'd first seen them, the Alphas had been a collection of misfits with bad hair, acne, and wannabe tough guy leather outfits. In the year and a half since, they'd changed. None of them had that pale look anymore, none of them looked wheezy, and like Billy, the kids who'd been carrying baby fat had swapped it for lean, fit muscle. They hadn't become a gang of Hollywood soap opera stars or anything, but they looked more relaxed, more confident, more happy---and I saw some scars, some of them quite vicious, showing on bare limbs. Most of the kids wore sweats, or those pullover knit dresses, garments that could be gotten out of in a hurry.
Pizza boxes were stacked three deep on the table, and a cooler of soft drinks sat on the floor nearby. I piled a plate with half-warm pizza, picked up a Coke, and found a comparatively empty stretch of wall to lean against.
Billy shook his head and said, "Look, Harry, some of this doesn't make sense. I mean, if they could really run around doing this mind fog thing, shouldn't we have heard about it by now?"
I snorted and said around a mouthful of pizza, "It's pretty rare, even in my circles. No one who got hit with it will remember it. Check the paper tomorrow. Ten to one, emergency services showed up after we left, put out the fires, pulled a bunch of confused people out of the building, and the official explanation is a leaky gas line."
Billy snorted. "That doesn't make any sense. There's not going to be evidence of an exploding line, no leak is going to show up at the gas company, no continuing fire of leaking gas---"
I kept eating. "Get real, Billy," I said. "You think people are going to be taken seriously by City Hall if they tell them, 'We really don't know what messed up all these people, we don't know what caused all the damage, we don't know why no one heard or saw anything, and we don't know what the reports of gunshots at the scene were about?' Hell, no. People would be accused of incompetence, publicly embarrassed, fired. No one wants that. So, gas leak."
"But it's stupid!"
"It's life. The last thing the twenty-first century wants to admit is that it might not know everything." I popped open the Coke and guzzled some. "How's the leg, Murph?"
"It hurts," Murphy reported, considerately leaving out the implied "you idiot."
Georgia stood up from attending Murphy's leg and shook her head. She was nearly a foot taller than Billy, and had bound her blond hair back into a tight braid. It emphasized the gauntness of her features. "The cuts and bruises are nothing major, but your knee could be seriously damaged. You should have it checked out by a real doctor, Lieutenant Murphy."
"Karrin," Murphy said. "Anyone who mops up my blood can call me Karrin." I tossed Murphy a Coke. She caught it and said, "Except you, Dresden. Any diet?"
I put several slices of pizza on a paper plate and passed them over. "Live a little."
"All right, Karrin," Georgia said, folding her arms. "If you don't want a twenty-five-thousand-dollar surgery along with seven or eight months of rehab, we need to get you to the hospital."
Murphy frowned, then nodded and said, "Let me eat something first. I'm starving."
"I'll get the car," Georgia said. She turned to Billy. "Make sure she doesn't put any weight on her leg when you bring her down. Keep it straight if you can."
"Got it," Billy said. "Phil, Greg. Get that blanket. We'll make a litter out of it."
"I'm not an infant," Murphy said.
I put my hand on her shoulder. "Easy," I said in a quiet voice. "They can handle themselves."
"So can I."
"You're hurt, Murph," I said. "If you were one of your people, you'd be telling you to shut up and stop being part of the problem."
Murphy shot me a glower, but its edge was blunted by the big mouthful of pizza she took. "Yeah. I know. I just hate being sidelined."
I grunted.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
I shook my head. "Finish this Coke. I haven't planned much past that."
She sighed. "All right, Harry. Look, I'll be home in a few hours. I'll keep digging, see if I can turn up anything about Lloyd Slate. If you need information on anything else, get in touch."
"You should rest," I told her.
She grimaced at her leg. Her knee was swollen to a couple of times its normal size. "Looks like I'm going to have plenty of time for that."
I grunted again and looked away.
"Hey, Harry," Murphy said. When I didn't look at her, she continued, "What happened to me wasn't your fault. I knew the risks and I took them."
"You shouldn't have had to."
"No one should. We live in an imperfect world, Dresden. In case that hasn't yet become obvious enough for you." She nudged my leg with her elbow. "Besides. You were lucky I was there. The way I count it, I'm the one who put on the boots."
A smile threatened my expression. "You did what?"
"Put on the boots," Murphy said. "I put on the boots and kicked some monster ass. I dropped the ghoul, and I'm the one who rammed a chain saw through the head of that plant monster thing. Crippled the ogre, too. What did you do? You threw a can of Sterno at him. That's barely an assist."
"Yeah, but I soaked him in gasoline first."
She snorted at me, around more pizza. "Shutout."
"Whatever."
"Murphy three, Dresden zero."
"You didn't do all of it."
"I put on the boots."
I raised my hands. "Okay, okay. You've . . . got boots, Murph."
She sniffed and took an almost dainty sip of Coke. "Lucky I was there."
I squeezed her shoulder and said, with no particular inflection, "Yes. Thank you."
Murphy smiled up at me. From the window, one of the Alphas reported, "Car's ready."
Billy and a couple more laid out a blanket and then carefully lifted Murphy onto it. She tolerated them with a roll of her eyes, but hissed with discomfort even at the gentle motion.
"Call," she said.
"Will."
"Watch your back, Harry." Then they carried her out.
I picked up some more pizza, exchanged some more or less polite chitchat with some of the Alphas, and made my escape from the crowded living room of the apartment to the balcony. I shut the sliding glass door behind me. Only one light in the parking lot provided any illumination, so the balcony was mostly covered in sheltering shadows. The night was a close one, humidity cooking along at a lazy summer broil, but even so it felt less claustrophobic than the crowded apartment.
I watched Billy and the Alphas load Murphy into a minivan and drive off. Then there was as much silence as you ever get in Chicago. The hiss of tires on asphalt was a constant, liquid background, punctuated with occasional sirens, horns, mechanical squeaks and squeals, and the buzzing of one lost locust that must have been perched on a building nearby.
I put my paper plate on the wooden balcony railing, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath, trying to clear my head.
"Penny for your thoughts," said a quiet female voice.
I nearly jumped off the balcony in sheer reaction. My hand brushed the paper plate, and the pizza fell to the parking lot below. I whirled around and found Meryl sitting in a chair at the other side of the balcony, deep in shadows, her large form nothing more than a more solid piece of darkness---but her eyes gleamed in the half-light, reflecting traces of red. She watched the plate fall and then said, "Sorry."
"S'okay," I said. "Just a little nervous tonight."
She nodded. "I was listening."
I nodded back to her and returned to looking at nothing, listening to night sounds. After a while, she asked me, "Does it hurt?"
I waved my bandaged hand idly. "Sort of."
"Not that," she said. "I meant watching your friend get hurt."
Some of my racing thoughts coalesced into irritated anger. "What kind of question is that?"
"A simple one."
I took an angry hit from my can of Coke. "Of course it hurts."
"You're different than I thought you'd be."
I squinted over my shoulder at her.
"They tell stories about you, Mister Dresden."
"It's all a lie."
Her teeth gleamed. "Not all of them are bad."
"Mostly good or mostly bad?"
"Depends on who's talking. The Sidhe crowd thinks you're an interesting mortal pet of Mab's. The vampire wannabe crowd thinks you're some kind of psychotic vigilante with a penchant for vengeance and mayhem. Sort of a one-man Spanish Inquisition. Most of the magical crowd thinks you're distant, dangerous, but smart and honorable. Crooks think you're a hit man for the outfit, or maybe one of the families back East. Straights think you're a fraud trying to bilk people out of their hard-won cash, except for Larry Fowler, who probably wants you on the show again."
I regarded her, frowning. "And what do you think?"
"I think you need a haircut." She lifted a can to her mouth and I caught a whiff of beer. "Bill called all the morgues and hospitals. No Jane Doe with green hair."
"Didn't figure there would be. I talked to Aurora. She seemed concerned."
"She would. She's everyone's big sister. Thinks she needs to take care of the whole world."
"She didn't know anything."
Meryl shook her head and was quiet for a while before she asked, "What's it like being a wizard?"
I shrugged. "Mostly it's like being a watch fob repairman. It's both difficult and not in demand. The rest of the time . . ."
More emotion rose in me, threatening my self-control. Meryl waited.
"The rest of the time," I picked up, "it's scary as hell. You start learning the kinds of things that go bump in the night and you figure out that 'ignorance is bliss' is more than just a quotable quote. And it's---" I clenched my hands. "It's so damnedfrustrating . You see people getting hurt. Innocents. Friends. I try to make a difference, but I usually don't know what the hell is going on until someone is already dead. Doesn't matter what kind of job I do---I can't help those folks."
"Sounds hard," Meryl said.
I shrugged. "I guess it isn't any different than what anyone else goes through. The names just get changed." I finished off the Coke and stomped the dead soldier flat. "What about you? What's it like being a changeling?"
Meryl rolled the beer can between her broad hands. "About like anyone, until you hit puberty. Then you start feeling things."
"What kinds of things?"
"Different, depending on your Sidhe half. For me it was anger, hunger. I gained a lot of weight. I kept losing my temper over the most idiotic things." She took a drink. "And strength. I grew up on a farm. My older brother rolled a tractor and it pinned him, broke his hip, and caught on fire. I picked it up and threw it off him, then dragged him back to the house. More than a mile. I was twelve. My hair had turned this color by the next morning."
"Troll," I said quietly.
She nodded. "Yeah. I don't know the details about what happened, but yeah. And every time I let those feelings get loose, the more I lost my temper and used my strength, the bigger and stronger I got. And the worse I felt about what I did." She shook her head. "Sometimes I think it would be easier to just choose the Sidhe half. To stop being human, stop hurting. If it wasn't for the others needing me . . ."
"It would turn you into a monster."
"But a happy monster." She finished her beer. "I should go check on Fix---he's sleeping now---and try to call Ace. What are you going to do?"
"Try to add up some facts. Meet some contacts. Interview more Queens. Maybe get a haircut."
Her teeth showed again in a smile, and she rose. "Good luck." She went back into the noisy apartment and shut the door.
I closed my eyes and tried to think. Whoever had sent the Tigress, Grum, the chlorofiend, and the lone gunman after me had been trying to kill me. It was a reasonable assumption, then, that I was on the right track. Generally speaking, the bad guys don't try to bump off an investigator unless they're worried he's actually about to find something.
But if that was true, then why had the Tigress taken a shot at me the day before I'd gotten the case? She could have been working for the Red Court and taken a new contract that just happened to be me, but it didn't sound likely. If the ghoul had been on the same contract, it meant that I'd been judged a threat to the killer's plans from day one, if not sooner.
The frost on my car's windows had probably been the doing of someone from Winter. I mean, a wizard could do the same thing, but as devastating spells go, that one seemed to be kinda limited. The ghoul, presumably, would work for anyone who paid. The chlorofiend, though . . . I hadn't expected it to talk, or to be intelligent.
The more I thought about the plant monster, the more things didn't add up. It had picked a spot and had its allies herd me to it. That wasn't the behavior of your average thug, even of the magical variety. It had a sense of personal conflict about it, as if the chlorofiend had a particular bone to pick with me.
And how the hell had Murphy killed it? It was stronger than your average bulldozer, for crying out loud. It had socked me once when I had my full shield going, and it still hurt. It had clipped me a couple of times and nearly broken bones.
The chlorofiend should have flattened Murphy into a puddle of slurry. It had hit her at least a dozen times, yet it seemed like it had only tapped her, as though unable to risk doing more damage. Then a lightbulb flashed on somewhere in my musty brain. The chlorofiend hadn't been a being, as such. It had been a construct---a magical vessel for an outside awareness. An awareness both intelligent and commanding, but one who could not, for some reason, kill Murphy when she attacked it. Why?
"Because, Harry, you idiot, Murphy isn't attached to either of the Faerie Courts," I told myself. Out loud.
"What's that got to do with it?" I asked myself. Again out loud. And people think I'm crazy.
"Remember. The Queens can't kill anyone who isn't attached to the Courts through birthright or bargain. She couldn't kill Murphy. Neither could the construct she was guiding."
"Damn," I muttered. "You're right."
A Queen seemed reasonable, then---probably from Winter. Or, more realistically, the frosted windshield could have been a decoy. Either way, I couldn't figure who would have had a reason to come after me with something as elaborate as a mind fog and a veritable army of assassins.
Which reminded me. The mind fog had to have come from somewhere. I wasn't sure if the Queens could have managed something like that outside of Faerie. If they couldn't, it meant that the killer had a hired gun, someone who could pull off a delicate and dangerous spell like that.
I started running down that line of thought, but only a moment later the wind picked up into a stiff, whistling breeze that roared through the air and swept down through the city. I frowned at the sudden shift in the weather and looked around.
I didn't find anything obvious, but when I glanced up, I saw the lights going out. A vast cloud bank was racing north, fast enough that I could see it eating the stars. A second wall of clouds was sailing south, toward the first bank. They met in only moments, and as they did, light flashed from cloud to cloud, brighter than daylight, and thunder shook the balcony beneath my feet. Not long after that, a drop of freezing-cold water landed on my head, quickly followed by a mounting torrent of chilly rain. The still-rising wind whipped it into a miserable downpour.
I turned and pulled open the door into the apartment with a frown. The Alphas were peering out windows, speaking quietly with one another. Across the room, Billy finished messing around with a television, and a rather rumpled-looking weatherman appeared, the image flickering with interference lines and bursts of snow.
"Guys, guys," Billy said. "Hush, let me listen." He turned up the volume.
". . . a truly unprecedented event, an enormous Arctic blast that came charging like a freight train through Canada and across Lake Michigan to Chicagoland. And if that wasn't enough, a tropical front, settled quietly in the Gulf of Mexico, has responded in kind, rushing up the Mississippi River in a sudden heat wave. They've met right over Lake Michigan, and we have received several reports of rain and bursts of hail. Thunderstorm warnings have been issued all through the Lake Michigan area, and a tornado watch is in progress for the next hour in Cook Country. National Weather Service has also issued a flash flood warning and a travel advisory for the eastern half of Illinois. This is some beautiful but very violent weather, ladies and gentlemen, and we urge you to remain in shelter until this storm has time to . . ."
Billy turned the volume down. I looked around the room and found nearly a dozen sets of eyes focused on me, patient and trusting. Bah.
"Harry," Billy said at last, "that isn't a natural storm, is it?"
I shook my head, got another Coke out of the cooler, and headed tiredly for the door. "Side effect. Like the toads."
"What does it mean?"
I opened the door and said, without looking back, "It means we're running out of time."
I took the Beetle a ways north of town, keeping to the lake shore. Rain sheeted down, and lightning made the clouds dance with shadow and flame. Maybe ten miles from the center of town, the downpour eased up, and the air became noticeably colder---enough so that in jeans and a tee, I was shivering. I pulled the car off Sheridan Road a couple miles north of Northwestern University, out toward Winnetka, set the parking brake and locked it up, and trudged toward the shore of the lake.
It was a dark night, but I called no lights to guide me, and I didn't carry a flashlight. It took my eyes a while, but I finally managed to start making out shapes in the darkness and found my way through the light woods around this part of the lake shore to a long, naked promontory of rock thrusting itself a dozen yards into the water. I walked to the end of the stone and stood there for a moment, listening to the thunder rolling over the lake, the wind stirring the water into waves nearly like those of the sea. The air itself felt restless, charged with violence, and the light rain that still fell was uncomfortably cold.
I closed my eyes, pulling together energy from the elements around me, where water met stone, air met water, stone met air, and drawing as well from my own determination. The power coursed into me, dancing and seething with a quivering life of its own. I focused it with my thoughts, shaped it, and then opened my eyes and lifted my arms, wrists out so that the old pale round scars on either side of the big blue veins there felt the rain falling on them.
I pushed out the power I'd gathered and called into the thunder and rain, "Godmother!Vente , Leanansidhe!"
A sudden presence appeared beside me, and a woman's voice said, "Honestly, child, it isn't as though I'm far away. There's no reason to shout."
I jerked in surprise and nearly fell into the lake. I turned to my left to face my faerie godmother, who stood calmly upon the surface of the water, bobbing up and down a bit as waves passed under her feet.
Lea stood nearly my own height, but instead of dark contrasts and harsh angles, she was a creature of gliding curves and gentle shades. Hair the color of flame coursed in curls and ringlets to below her hips, and tonight she wore with it a gown of flowing emerald silk, laced through with veins of ochre and aquamarine. A belt made from a twisted braid of silken threads of gold wound around her waist, and a dark-handled knife rested on a slant at her hip through a loop in the belt.
She was one of the high Sidhe, and her beauty went without saying. The perfection of her form was complemented by features of feminine loveliness, a full mouth, skin like cream, and oblong, feline eyes of gold, cat-slitted like those of most fae. She took in my surprise with a certain reserved mirth, her mouth set with a tiny smile.
"Good evening, Godmother," I said, trying for a proper degree of politeness. "You look lovely as the stars tonight."
She let out a pleased sigh. "Such a flatterer. I'm already enjoying this conversation so much more than the last."
"I'm not dying this time," I said.
The smile faded. "That is a matter of opinion," she responded. "You are in great danger, child."
"Thinking about it, I realize I generally have been whenever you were around."
She clucked reprovingly. "Nonsense. I've never had anything but your best interests at heart."
I barked out a harsh laugh. "My best interests. That's rich."
Lea arched a brow. "What reason have you to think otherwise?"
"For starters, because you tricked me out of a big evil slaying magic sword and sold me to Mab."
"Tut," Lea said. "The sword was just business, child. And as for selling your debt to Mab . . . I had no choice in the matter."
"Yeah, right."
She arched her brows. "You should know better, dear godchild. You know I cannot speak what is untrue. During our last encounter I returned to Faerie with great power and upset vital balances. Those balances had to be redressed, and your debt was the mechanism that the Queen chose to employ."
I frowned at her for a minute. "Returned with great power." My eyes fell to the knife at her waist. "That thing the vampires gave you?"
She rested her fingers lightly on the knife's hilt. "Don't cheapen it. This athame was no creation of theirs. And it was less a gift than a trade."
"Amoracchiusand that thing are in the same league? Is that what you're saying?" Gulp. My faerie godmother was dangerous enough without a big-time artifact of magic. "What is it?"
"Not what, but whose," Lea corrected me. "And in any case, you may be assured that surrendering my claim on you to Mab was in no way an attempt to do you harm. I have never meant you lasting ill."
I scowled at her. "You tried to turn me into one of your hounds and keep me in a kennel, Godmother."
"You'd have been perfectly safe there," she pointed out. "And very happy. I only wanted what was best for you because I care for you, child."
My stomach did a neat little rollover, and I swallowed. "Yeah. Uh. It's very . . . you. I guess. In a demented, insane way, I can understand that."
Lea smiled. "I knew you would. To business, then. Why have you called to me this night?"
I took a deep breath and braced myself a little. "Look, I know we haven't gotten along really well lately. Or ever. And I don't have a lot to trade with, but I had hoped you'd be willing to work out a bargain with me."
She arched a red-gold brow. "To what ends?"
"I need to speak to them," I said. "To Mab and Titania."
Her expression grew distant, pensive. "You must understand that I cannot protect you from them, should they strike at you. My power has grown, poppet, but not to those heights."
"I understand. But if I don't get to the bottom of this and find the killer, I'm as good as dead."
"So I have heard," my godmother said. She lifted her right hand and extended it to me. "Then give me your hand."
"Ineed my hand, Godmother. Both of them."
She let out a peal of laughter. "No, silly child. Simply put your hand in mine. I will convey you."
I gave her a sidelong look and asked warily, "At what price?"
"None."
"None?You never do anything without a price."
She rolled her eyes and clarified, "None to you, child."
"Who, then?"
"No one you know, or knew," Lea said.
An intuition hit me. "My mother. That's who you're talking about."
Lea left her hand extended. She smiled, but only said, "Perhaps."
I regarded her hand quietly for a moment, then said, "I'm not sure I can believe that you're really going to protect me."
"But I already have."
I folded my arms. "When?"
"If you will remember that night in the boneyard, I healed a wound to your head that may well have killed you."
"You only did it to sucker me into getting you the sword!"
Lea's tone became wounded. "Notonly for that. And if you consider further, I also freed you of a crippling binding and rescued you from a blazing inferno not twenty-four hours later."
"You charged my girlfriend all her memories of me to do it! And you only saved me from the fire so that you could put me in a doghouse."
"That does not change the fact that I was, after all, protecting you."
I stared at her in frustration for a minute and then scowled. "What have you done for me lately?"
Lea closed her eyes for a moment, then opened her mouth and spoke. Her voice came out aged and querulous. "What's all that racket! I have already called the police, I have! You fruits get out of our hall or they'll lock you away!"
I blinked. "Reuel's apartment. That was you?"
"Obviously, child. And at the market, earlier this eve." She lifted her hand in the air, made an intricate motion with long, pale fingers, and opened her mouth again, as if singing a note of music. Instead, the sound of police sirens emerged, somewhat muted and indistinguishable from the real thing.
I shook my head. "I don't get it."
She moved her fingers again, and the sirens blended into another silver-sweet laugh, her expression amused, almost fond. "I am sure you do not, poppet." She offered her hand again. "Come. Time is pressing."
She had that part right at least. And I knew she was telling me the truth. Her words had left her little room for evasion. I'd never gotten anything but burned when making deals with the faeries, and if Lea was offering to help me for free, there had to be a catch somewhere.
Lea's expression told me that she either knew what I'd been thinking or knew me well enough to guess, and she laughed again. "Harry, Harry," she said. "If it is of any consequence to you, remember that our bargain is still in effect. I am bound to do you no harm for several weeks more."
I'd forgotten about that. Of course, I couldn't fully trust to that, either. Even if she had sworn to do me no harm, if I asked her to take me somewhere she could drop me off in a forest full of Unseelie nasties without breaking her word. She'd done something very similar to me last year.
Thunder rumbled again, and the light flared even more brightly in the clouds. Tick, tick, tick, the clock was running, and I wasn't going to get anything done standing here waffling. Either I trusted myself to my godmother or I went back home and waited for something to come along and squash me.
Going with Lea wasn't the best way to get what I wanted---it was just the only way. I took a breath and took her hand. Her skin felt like cool silk, untouched by the rain. "All right. And after them, I need to see the Mothers."
Lea gave me an oblique glance and said, "Survive the flood before hurling yourself into the fire, child. Close your eyes."
"Why?"
Annoyance flickered over her eyebrows. "Child, stop wasting time with questions. You have given me your hand. Close your eyes."
I muttered a curse to myself and did it. My godmother spoke something, a string of liquid syllables in a tongue I could not understand---but it made my knees turn rubbery and my fingers suddenly feel weak. A wave of disorientation, dizzying but not unpleasantly so, scrambled my sense of direction. I felt a breeze on my face, a sense of movement, but I couldn't have said whether I was falling or rising or moving forward.
The movement stopped, and the whirling sensations passed. Thunder rumbled again, very loudly, and the surface I stood on shook with it. Light played against my closed eyelids.
"We are here," Lea said, her voice hushed.
I opened my eyes.
I stood on a solid surface among grey and drifting mist. The mist covered whatever ground I was on, and though I poked at it with my foot, I couldn't tell if it was earth, wood, or concrete. The landscape around me rolled in hills and shallow valleys, all of it covered in ground fog. I frowned up at the skies. They were clear. Stars glittered impossibly bright against the velvet curtain of night, sparkling in dozens of colors, instead of in the usual pale silver, jewels against the blackness of the void. Thunder rumbled again, and the ground shook beneath the mist. Lightning flashed along with it, and the ground all around us lit with a sudden angry blue fire that slowly faded away.
The truth dawned on me slowly. I pushed my foot at the ground again, and then in a circle around me. "We're . . ." I choked. "We're on . . . we're on . . ."
"The clouds," my godmother said, nodding. "Or so it would seem to you. We are no longer in the mortal world."
"The Nevernever, then. Faerie?"
She shook her head and spoke, her voice still hushed, almost reverent. "No. This is the world between, the sometimes place. Where Chicago and Faerie meet, overlap. Chicago-Over-Chicago, if you will. This is the place the Queens call forth when the Sidhe desire to spill blood."
"They call it forth?" I asked in a quiet voice. "They create it?"
"Even so," Lea said, her voice similarly low. "They prepare for war."
I turned slowly, taking it in. We stood on a rise of ground in a broad, shallow valley. I could make out what looked like a mist-shrouded lake shore not far away. A river cut through the cloudscape.
"Wait a minute," I said. "This is . . . familiar." Chicago-Over-Chicago, she had said. I started adding in mental images of buildings, streets, lights, cars, people. "Thisis Chicago. The land."
"A model of it," Lea agreed. "Crafted from clouds and mist."
I kept turning and found behind me a stone, grey and ominous and enormous, startlingly solid amid all the drifting white. I took a step back from it and saw the shape of it---a table, made of a massive slab of rock, the legs made of more stones as thick as the pillars at Stonehenge. Writing writhed across the surface of the stone, runes that looked a little familiar. Norse, maybe? Some of them looked more like Egyptian. They seemed to take something from several different sources, leaving them unreadable. Lightning flashed again through the ground, and a wave of blue-white light flooded over the table, through the runes, lighting them like Las Vegas neon for a moment.
"I've heard of this," I said after a moment. "A long time ago. Ebenezar called it the Stone Table."
"Yes," my godmother whispered. "Blood is power, child. Blood spilled upon that stone forever becomes a part of who holds it."
"Who holds it?"
She nodded, her green eyes luminous. "For half of the year, the Table lies within Winter. For half, within Summer."
"It changes hands," I said, understanding. "Midsummer and Midwinter."
"Yes. Summer holds the Table now. But not for much longer."
I stepped toward the Table and extended a hand. The air around it literally shook, pressing against my fingers, making my skin ripple visibly as though against a strong wind---but I felt nothing. I touched the surface of the Table itself, and could feel the power in it, buzzing through the flowing runes like electricity through high-voltage cables. The sensation engulfed my hand with sudden heat and violence, and I jerked my fingers back. They were numb, and the nails of the two that had touched the table were blackened at the edges. Wisps of smoke rose from them.
I shook my fingers and looked at my godmother. "Let me get this straight. Blood spilled onto the Table turns into power for whoever holds it. Summer now. But Winter, after tomorrow night."
Lea inclined her head, silent.
"I don't understand what makes that so important."
She frowned at the Table, then began pacing around it, slowly, clockwise, her eyes never leaving me. "The Table is not merely a repository for energy, child. It is a conduit. Blood spilled upon its surface takes more than merely life with it."
"Power," I said. I frowned and folded my arms, watching her. "So if, for instance, a wizard's blood spilled there . . ."
She smiled. "Great power would come of it. Mortal life, mortal magic, drawn into the hands of whichever Queen ruled the Table."
I swallowed and took a step back. "Oh."
Lea completed her circuit of the table and stopped beside me. She glanced furtively around her, then looked me in the eyes and said, her voice barely audible, "Child. Should you survive this conflict, do not let Mab bring you here. Never."
A chill crawled down my spine. "Yeah. Okay." I shook my head. "Godmother, I still don't get what you're trying to tell me. Why is the Table so important?"
She gestured, left and right, toward a pair of hilltops facing one another across the broad valley. I looked at one, squinting at a sudden blur in my vision. I tried looking at the other, and the same thing happened. "I can't see," I said. "It's a veil or something."
"You must see if you are to understand."
I drew in a slow breath. Wizards can see things most people can't. It's called the Sight, the Third Eye, a lot of other names. If a wizard uses his Sight, he can see the forces of magic themselves at work, spells like braids of neon lights, veils pierced like projections on a screen. A wizard's Sight shows things as they truly are, and it's always an unsettling experience, one way or the other. What you see with the Sight stays with you. Good or bad, it's always just as fresh in your mind as if you'd just seen it. I'd looked on a little tree-spirit being with my Sight when I'd been about fourteen, the first time it had happened to me, and I still had a perfect picture of it in my head, as though I wasstill looking at it, a little cartoonish being that was part lawn gnome and part squirrel.
I'd seen worse since. Much worse. Demons. Mangled souls. Tormented spirits. All of that was still there too. But I'd also seen better. One or two glimpses of beings of such beauty and purity and light that it could make me weep. But each time it got a little harder to live with, a little harder to bear, a cumulative weight.
I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and with careful deliberation unlocked my Sight.
Opening my eyes again made me stagger as I was hit with a sudden rush of impressions. The cloudy landscape absolutely seethed with magical energies. From the southern hilltop, wild green and golden light spilled, falling over the landscape like a translucent garden, vines of green, golden flowers, flashes of other colors spread through them, clawing at the gentle ground, anchored here and there at points of light so vibrant and bright that I couldn't look directly at them.
From the other side, cold blue and purple and greenish power spread like crystals of ice, with the slow and relentless power of a glacier, pressing ahead in some places, melted back in others, especially strong around the valley's winding rivers.
The conflict of energies both wound back to the hilltops themselves, to points of light as bright as small suns. I could, just barely, see the shadow of solid beings within those lights, and even the shadow of each was an overwhelming presence upon my senses. One was a sense of warmth, choking heat, so much that I couldn't breathe, that it pressed into me and set me aflame. The other was of cold, horrible and absolute, winding cold limbs around me, stealing away my strength. Those presences flooded through me, sudden beauty, power so terrifying and exhilarating and awesome that I fell to my knees and sobbed.
Those powers played against one another---I could sense that, though not the exact nature of their conflict. Energies wound about one another, subtle pressures of darkness and light, leaving the landscape vaguely lit in squares of cold and warm color. Fields of red and gold and bright green stood against empty, dead blocks of blue, purple, pale white. A pattern had formed in them, a structure to the conflict that was not wholly complete. Most of a chessboard. Only at the center, at the Table, was the pattern broken, a solid area of Summer's power in green and gold around the Stone Table, while Winter's dark, crystalline ice slowly pressed closer, somehow in time with the almost undetectable motion of the stars overhead.
So I saw it. I got a look at what I was up against, at the naked strength of the two Queens of Faerie, and it was bigger than me. Every ounce of strength I could have summoned would have been no more than a flickering spark beside either of those blazing fountains of light and magic. It was power that had existed since the dawn of life, and would until its end. It was power that had cowed mortals into abject worship and terror before---and I finally understood why. I wasn't a pawn of that kind of strength. I was an insect beside giants, a blade of grass before towering trees.
And there was a dreadful attraction in seeing that power, something in it that called to the magic in me, like to like, made me want to hurl myself into those flames, into that endless, icy cold. Moths look at bug zappers like I looked at the Queens of Faerie.
I tore my eyes away by hiding my face in my arms. I fell to my side on the ground and curled up, trying to shut the Sight, to force those images to stop flooding over me. I shook and tried to say something. I'm not sure what. It came out as stuttering, gibbering sounds. After that, I don't remember much until cold rain started slapping me on the cheek.
I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the cold, wet ground on the shores of Lake Michigan, where I'd first called out to my godmother. My head was on something soft that turned out to be her lap. I sat up and away from her quickly. My head hurt, and the images the Sight had showed me made me feel particularly small and vulnerable. I sat shivering in the rain for a minute before I glanced back at my godmother.
"You should have warned me."
Her face showed no remorse, and little concern. "It would have changed nothing. You needed to see." She paused and then added, "I regret that it was the only way. Do you yet understand?"
"The war," I said. "They'll fight for control of the area around the Table. If Summer holds the space, it won't matter if it's Winter's time or not. Mab won't be able to reach the table, spill blood on it, and add the power of the Summer Knight to Winter." I took a breath. "There was a sense to what they were doing. As though it was a ritual. Something they'd done before."
"Of course," Lea said. "They exist in opposition. Each wields vast power, wizard---power to rival the archangels and lesser gods. But they cancel one another flawlessly. And in the end, the board will be evenly divided. The lesser pieces will emerge and do battle to decide the balance."
"The Ladies," I said. "The Knights."
"And," Lea added, lifting a finger, "the Emissaries."
"Like hell. I'm not fighting in some kind of fucked-up faerie battle in the clouds."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not."
I snorted. "But you didn't help me. I needed to speak to them. Find out if one of them was responsible."
"And so you did. More truly than if you'd exchanged words."
I frowned at her and thought through what I knew, and what I'd learned on my trip to the Stone Table. "Mab shouldn't be in any hurry. If Summer is missing her Knight, Winter has the edge if they wait. There's no need to take the Table."
"Yes."
"But Summer is moving to protect the Table. That means Titania thinks someone in Winter did it. But if Mab is responding instead of waiting, it means . . ." I frowned. "It means she isn't sure why Summer is moving. She's just checking Titania's advance. Andthat means that she isn't sure whodunit, either."
"Simplistic," Lea said. "But accurate enough reasoning, poppet. Such are the thoughts of the Queens of the Sidhe." She looked out across the lake. "Your sun will rise in some little time. When once again it sets, the war will begin. In a balanced Court, it would mean, perhaps, little of great consequence to the mortal world. But that balance is gone. If it is not restored, child, imagine what might happen."
I did. I mean, I'd had an idea what might go wrong before, but now Iknew the scale of the forces involved. The powers of Winter and Summer weren't simply a bunch of electricity in a battery. They were like vast coiled springs, pressing against one another. As long as that pressure was equal, the energies were held in control. But an imbalance in one side or the other could cause them to slip, and the release of energies from either side would be vast and violent, and sure to inflict horrible consequences on anything nearby---in this case, Chicago, North America, and probably a good chunk of the rest of the world with it.
"I need to see the Mothers. Get me to them."
Lea rose, all grace and opaque expression, impossible to read. "That, too, is beyond me, child."
"Ineed to speak to the Mothers."
"I agree," Lea said. "But I cannot take you to them. The power is not mine. Perhaps Mab or Titania could, but they are otherwise occupied now. Committed."
"Great," I muttered. "How do I get to them?"
"One does not get to the Mothers, child. One can only answer an invitation." She frowned faintly. "I can do no more to help you. The lesser powers must take their places with the Queens, and I am needed shortly."
"You're going?"
She nodded, stepped forward, and kissed my brow. It was just a kiss, a press of soft lips against my skin. Then she stepped back, one hand on the hilt of the knife at her belt. "Be careful, child. And be swift. Remember---sundown." She paused and looked at me askance. "And consider a haircut. You look like a dandelion."
And with that, she stepped out onto the lake, and her form melted into water that fell back into the storm-tossed waters with a splash.
"Great," I muttered. I kicked a rock into the water. "Just great. Sundown. I know nothing. And the people I need to talk to screen all of their calls." I picked up another rock and threw it as hard as I could over the lake. The sound of rain swallowed up the splash.
I turned and trudged back toward the Beetle through the thunder and the rain. I could see the shapes of the trees a bit better now. Dawn must be coming on, somewhere behind the clouds.
I sat down behind the wheel of the trusty Beetle, put the key in, and started the car.
The battered old Volkswagen wheezed once, lurched without being put into gear, and then started to fill with smoke. I choked and scrambled out of the car. I hit the release on the engine cover and opened it. Black smoke billowed out, and I could dimly see fire behind it, chewing up some part of the engine. I went back to the front storage compartment, got out the fire extinguisher, and put out the fire. Then I stood there in the rain, tired and aching and staring at my burnt engine.
Dawn. At Midsummer, that meant I had maybe fifteen hours to figure out how to get to the Mothers. Somehow, I doubted that their number was listed. Even if it had been, my visit to the battleground around the Stone Table had shown me that the Queens possessed far more power than I could have believed. Their sheer presence had nearly blown the top off my head from a mile away---and the Mothers were an order of magnitude above even Mab and Titania.
I had fifteen hours to find the killer and restore the Summer Knight's mantle to the Summer Court. Andthen to stop a war happening in some wild nether-place between here and the spirit world that I had no idea how to reach.
And my car had died. Again.
"Over your head," I muttered. "Harry, this is too big for you to handle alone."
The Council. I should contact Ebenezar, tell him what was happening. The situation was too big, too volatile, to risk screwing it up over a matter of Council protocol. Maybe I'd get lucky and the Council would A, believe me, and B, decide to help.
Yeah. And maybe if I glued enough feathers to my arms, I'd be able to fly.
I examined my car for a few minutes more, took a couple of things off it, and walked to the nearest gas station. I called a wrecker, then got a cab back to my apartment, paying for everything with Meryl's advance.
Once there, I got a Coke out of the icebox, put out fresh food and water for Mister, and changed his kitty litter. It wasn't until I had dug around under the kitchen sink, gotten out the bottle of dishwashing soap, and blown the dust off of it that I realized I was stalling.
I glowered at the phone and told myself, "Pride goeth before a fall, Harry. Pride can be bad. It can make you do stupid things."
I took a deep breath and shotgunned the Coke. Then I picked up the phone and dialed the number Morgan had left me.
It barely rang once before someone picked up and a male voice said, "Who is calling, please?"
"Dresden. I need to speak to Ebenezar McCoy."
"One moment." Sound cut off, and I figured whoever answered must have put their hand over the mouthpiece. Then there was a rustle as the phone changed hands.
"You've failed, then, Dresden," Morgan stated. His tone gave me a good mental picture of the smile on his smug face. "Stay where you are until the Wardens arrive to escort you to the Senior Council for judgement."
I bit down on a creative expletive. "I haven't failed, Morgan. But I've turned up some information that the Senior Council should have." Pride goeth, Harry. "And I need help. This is getting too hot for one person to handle. I need some information and some backup if I'm going to sort this out."
"It's always all about you, isn't it?" Morgan said, his voice bitter. "You're the exception to every rule. You can break the Laws and mock the Council, you can ignore the trial set for you because you are too important to abide by their authority."
"It's got nothing to do with that," I said. "Hell's bells, Morgan, pull your head out of your ass. The faeries' power structure has become unstable, and it looks like it might hit critical mass if something isn't done. That's bigger than me, and a hell of a lot more important than Council protocol."
Morgan screamed at me, his voice so vicious that it made me flinch. "Who areyou to judge that? You are no one, Dresden! You are nothing!" He took a seething breath. "For too long you have flouted the Council's rule. No more. No more exceptions, no more delays, no more second chances."
"Morgan," I began, "I just need to speak to Ebenezar. Let him decide if---"
"No," Morgan said.
"What?"
"No. You won't evade justice this time, snake. This is your Trial. You will see it through without attempting to influence the Senior Council's judgement."
"Morgan, this is insane---"
"No. The insanity was in letting you live when you were a boy. DuMorne's murderous apprentice. Insanity was pulling you from that burning house two years ago." His voice dropped to an even more quiet register, the contrast to his previous tone unsettling. "Someone I dearly cared for was at Archangel, Dresden. And this time your lies aren't going to get you out of what's coming to you."
Then he hung up the phone.
I stared at the receiver for a second before snarling with rage and slamming it down on the end table, over and over, until the plastic broke in my hands. It hurt. I picked up the phone and threw it against the stone of the fireplace. It shattered, its bell chiming drunkenly. I kicked at the heaped mess of my living room, scattering old boxes, empty cans of Coke, books, papers, and startled cockroaches. After a few minutes of that, I was panting, and some of the blind, frustrated anger had begun to recede.
"Bastard," I growled. "That pigheaded, bigoted, self-righteous bastard."
I needed to cool off, and the shower seemed as good a place as any. I got under the cold water and tried to wash off the sweat and fear of the past day. I half expected the water to burst into steam on contact with my skin, but instead I was able to let the anger slip away while focusing on the old shower routine---water, soap, rinse, shampoo, rinse. By the time I finished and stepped out shivering, I felt almost completely nonpsychotic.
I had no idea how to contact Ebenezar. If he was under Warden security, and I'm sure he and the rest of the Senior Council were, there would be no easy way. The best magical countermeasures in the world would create a maze of misleading results for any spell or supernatural being that tried to find him.
For a moment, I debated asking Murphy for help. The Council tended to overlook any method that didn't involve the use of one kind of spell or another. Murphy's contacts in the force might be able to find them by purely old-fashioned methods. I decided against it. Even if Murphy traced the phone number down, Ebenezar might not be at it, and if I showed up there trying to get past the Wardens to get to him, it would be just the excuse Morgan needed to chop my head off.
I mussed up my hair with the towel and threw it on my narrow bed. Fine. I would do it without the Council's help.
I dressed again, putting on a pair of jeans and a white dress shirt still hanging in my closet. I rolled the sleeves up over my elbows. My sneakers were covered in muck, so I dragged my cowboy boots out of the closet and put them on. What the hell. Putting on the boots. Maybe it would do some good.
I got out my big sports bag, the kind you haul hockey gear around in. Into it went my blasting rod, my staff, and my sword cane, along with a backpack stocked with some candles, matches, a cup, a knife, a cardboard cylinder of salt, a canteen of blessed water, and various other bits of magical equipment I could use as needed. I threw in a box of old iron nails and a solid-steel Craftsman claw hammer with a black rubber grip, and put a couple of pieces of chalk in my pocket.
Then I slid the bag over my shoulder, went into the living room, and wrought the spell that would lead me to one of the very few only people who might help.
Half an hour later, I paid the cabbie and walked into one of the hotels surrounding O'Hare International Airport. The subtle tug of the spell led me to the hotel's restaurant, open for breakfast and half full of mostly business types. I found Elaine at a corner table, a couple of buffet plates scattered with the remains of her breakfast. Her rich brown hair had been pulled back into a tight braid and coiled at the base of her neck. Her face looked pale, tired, with deep circles under her eyes. She was sipping coffee and reading a paperback novel. She wore a different pair of jeans, these a lot looser, and a billowy white shirt open over a dark tank top. She stiffened a beat after my eyes landed on her, and looked up warily.
I walked to her table, pulled out the chair next to her, and sat down. "Morning."
She watched me, her expression opaque. "Harry. How did you find me?"
"I got to thinking that same thing last night," I said. "How did you find me, that is. And I realized that you hadn't found me---you'd found my car. You were inside it and nearly unconscious when I got back to it. So I looked around the car." I pulled the cap to a tire's air valve out of my pocket and showed it to her. "And I found that one of these was missing. I figured you were probably the one who took it, and used it to home in on the Blue Beetle. So I took one of its mates from the other tires and used it to home in on the missing one."
"You named your car after a superhero on theElectric Company ?" Elaine reached into a brown leather purse on the chair beside her and drew out an identical valve cap. "Clever."
I looked at the purse. What looked like airline tickets was sticking out of it. "You're running."
"You are a veritable wizard of the obvious, Harry." She started to shrug, and her face became ashen, her expression twisting with pain. She took a slow breath and then resumed the motion with her unwounded shoulder. "I feel well motivated to run."
"Do you really think a plane ticket will get you away from the Queens?"
"It will get me away from ground zero. That's enough. There's no way to find out who did it in time---and I don't feel like running up against another assassin. I barely got away from the first one."
I shook my head. "We're close," I said. "We have to be. They took a shot at me last night too. And I think I know who did both."
She looked up at me, sharply. "You do?"
I picked up a crust of toast she'd discarded, mopped it through some leftover eggs, and ate it. "Yeah. But you probably have to catch a flight."
Elaine rolled her eyes. "Tell you what. You stay here and feel smug. I'll get another plate and be back when you're done." She got up, rather stiffly, and walked over to the buffet. She loaded her plate up with eggs and bacon and sausage mixed in with some French toast, and came back to the table. My mouth watered.
She pushed the plate at me. "Eat."
I did, but between bites I asked, "Can you tell me what happened to you?"
She shook her head. "Not much to tell. I spoke with Mab and then with Maeve. I was on my way back to my hotel and someone jumped me in the parking lot. I was able to slip most of his first strike and called up enough fire to drive him away. Then I found your car."
"Why did you come to me?" I asked.
"Because I didn't know who did it, Harry. And I don't trust anyone else in this town."
My throat got a little tight. I borrowed her coffee to wash down the bacon. "It was Lloyd Slate."
Elaine's eyes widened. "The Winter Knight. How do you know?"
"While I was with Maeve, he came in carrying a knife in a box, and he'd been burned. It was coated in dried blood. Maeve was pretty furious that it wasn't any good to her."
Lines appeared between her eyebrows. "Slate . . . he was fetching my blood for her so that she could work a spell on me." She tried to cover it, but I saw her shiver. "He probably tailed me out of that party. Thank the stars I used fire."
I nodded. "Yeah. Dried out the blood, made it useless for whatever she wanted." I shoveled down some more food. "Then last night I got jumped by a hired gun and a couple of faerie beasties." I gave her the summary of the attack at Wal-Mart, leaving Murphy out of it.
"Maeve," Elaine said.
"It's about all I've got," I said. "It doesn't fit her very well, but---"
"Of course it fits her," Elaine said absently. "Don't tell me you fell for that psychotic dilettante nymphomaniac act she put on."
I blinked and then said through a mouthful of French toast, "No. 'Course not."
"She's smart, Harry. She's playing on your expectations."
I chewed the next bite more slowly. "It's a good theory. But that's all it is. We need to know more."
Elaine frowned at me. "You mean you want to talk to the Mothers."
I nodded. "I figure they might let a few things slip about how things work. But I don't know how to get there. I thought you might be able to ask someone in Summer."
She closed her paperback. "No."
"No, they won't help?"
"No, I'm not going to see the Mothers. Harry, it's insane. They're too strong. They could kill you---worse than kill you---with a stray thought."
"At this point I'm already in over my head. It doesn't matter how deep the water gets from here." I grimaced. "Besides, I don't really have a choice."
"You're wrong," she said with quiet emphasis. "You don't have to stay here. You don't have to play their game. Leave."
"Like you are?"
"Like I am," Elaine said. "You can't stop what's been set in motion, Harry, but you can kill yourself trying. It's probably what Mab wanted to begin with."
"No. I can stop it."
She gave me a small smile. "Because you're in the right? Harry, it doesn't work like that."
"Don't I know it. But that's not why I think so."
"Then why?"
"You don't try to kill someone who isn't a threat to you. They took shots at both of us. They must think we can stop them."
"They, them," Elaine said. "Even if we are close, we don't know who 'they' is."
"That's why we talk to the Mothers," I told her. "They're the strongest of the Queens. They know the most. If we're smart, and lucky, we can get information from them."
Elaine reached up to tug at her braid, her expression uncertain. "Harry, look. I'm not . . . I don't want to . . ." She closed her eyes for a moment and then said in a voice, pained, "Please, don't ask me to do this."
"You don't have to go," I said. "Just find me the way to them. Just try."
"You don't understand the kind of trouble you're asking for," she said.
I looked down at my empty plate and said quietly, "Yeah. I do. I hate it, Elaine, and I'm afraid, and I must be half insane not to just dig myself a hole and pull it in after me. But I understand." I reached across the table and put my hand over hers. Her skin was soft, warm, and she shivered at the touch. "Please."
Her hand turned up, fingers curling briefly against mine. My turn to shiver. Elaine sighed. "You're an imbecile, Harry. You're such a fool."
"I guess some things don't change."
She let out a subdued laugh before withdrawing her hand and standing. "I've got a favor left to me. I'll call it in. Wait here."
Five minutes later, she was back. "All right. Outside."
I stood. "Thank you, Elaine. You going to make your plane?"
She opened her purse and tossed the airline tickets onto the table along with a pair of twenties. "I guess not." Then she took a couple of other items out of the purse: a slavering of ivory carved in the shape of a ring of oak leaves and attached to a similar bracelet by a silver chain. An earring fashioned of what might have been copper and a teardrop-shaped black stone. Then an anklet dangling with bangles shaped like bird wings. She put them all on, then looked at my gym bag. "Still going with the phallic foci, eh? Staff and rod?"
"They make me feel all manly."
Her mouth twitched, and she started for the exit. I followed her and found myself opening doors for her out of habit. She didn't seem to be too horribly upset by it.
Outside, cars pulled up into a circle drive at the front of the hotel, airport shuttles disgorging and swallowing travelers, taxis picking up men and women in business suits. Elaine slipped the strap of her purse over her good shoulder and stood there quietly.
Maybe thirty seconds later, I heard the clopping of hooves on blacktop. A carriage rolled into sight, drawn by a pair of horses. One of them was the blue-white color of a drowned corpse, and its breath steamed in the air. The other was grass-green, its mane sown with wildflowers. The carriage itself looked like something from Victorian London, all dark wood and brass filigree---and no one was driving it. The horses came to a halt directly before us and stood there, stamping their feet and tossing their manes. The door to the carriage swung open in silence. No one was inside.
I took a surreptitious look around me. None of the straights seemed to have noticed the carriage or the unworldly horses pulling it. A taxi heading for the space the carriage occupied abruptly veered to one side and found another spot. I made an effort and could sense the whisper of enchantment around the carriage, subtle and strong, probably encouraging the straights not to notice it.
"I guess this is our ride," I said.
"You think?" Elaine flipped her braid back over one shoulder and climbed in. "This will take us there, but we won't have any protection on the other side. Just remember, Harry, I told you this was a bad idea."
"Preemptive I-told-you-sos," I said. "Now I've seen everything."
The carriage took off so smoothly that I almost didn't feel it. I leaned over the window and twitched the shade aside. We pulled away from the hotel and into traffic with no one the wiser, cars giving us a wide berth even while not noting us. That was one hell of a veil. The carriage didn't jounce at all, and after about a minute wisps of mist began to brush up against the windows. Not long after, the mists blocked out the view of the city entirely. The street sounds faded, and all that was left was silver-grey mist and the clop of horse hooves.
The carriage stopped perhaps five minutes later, and the door swung open. I opened my gym bag and took out my rod and staff. I slipped the sword cane through my belt and drew out my amulet to lie openly on my chest. Elaine did the same with hers. Then we got out of the carriage.
I took a slow look at my surroundings. We stood on some kind of spongy grass, on a low, rolling hill surrounded by other low, rolling hills. The mist lay over the land like a crippled storm cloud, sluggish and thick in some places, thinner in others. The landscape was dotted with the occasional tree, boles thick and twisted, branches scrawny and long. A tattered-looking raven crouched on a nearby branch, its bead-black eyes gleaming.
"Cheery," Elaine said.
"Yeah. Very Baskerville." The carriage started up again, and I looked back to see it vanishing into the mist. "Okay. Where to now?"
At my words the raven let out a croaking caw. It shook itself, bits of moldy feather drifting down, and then beat its wings a few times and settled on another branch, almost out of sight.
"Harry," Elaine said.
"Yeah?"
"If you make any corny joke using the word 'nevermore,' I'm going to punch you. Do you understand me?"
"Never more," I confirmed. Elaine rolled her eyes. Then we both started off after the raven.
It led us through the cloudy landscape, flitting silently from tree to tree. We trudged behind it until more trees began to rise in the mist ahead of us, thickening. The ground grew softer, the air more wet, cloying. The raven let out another caw, then vanished into the trees and out of sight.
I peered after it and said, "Do you see a light back there in the trees?"
"Yes. This must be the place."
"Fine." I started forward. Elaine caught my wrist and said in a sharp and warning tone, "Harry."
She nodded toward a thick patch of shadows where two trees had fallen against one another. I had just begun to pick out a shape when it moved and came forward, close enough that I could make it out clearly.
The unicorn looked like a Budweiser horse, one of the huge draft beasts used for heavy labor. It had to have been eighteen hands high, maybe more. It had a broad chest, four heavy hooves, forward-pricked ears, and a long equine face.
That was where its resemblance to a Clydesdale ended.
It didn't have a coat. It just had a smooth and slick-looking carapace, all chitinous scales and plates, mixing colors of dark green and midnight black. Its hooves were cloven and stained with old blood. One spiraling horn rose from its forehead, at least three feet long and wickedly pointed. The spirals were serrated on the edges, some of them covered with rust-brown stains. A pair of curling horns, like those of a bighorn sheep, curved around the sides of its head from the base of the horn. It didn't have any eyes---just smooth, leathery chitin where they should have been. It tossed its head, and a mane of rotted cobwebs danced around its neck and forelegs, long and tattered as a burial shroud.
A large moth fluttered through the mist near the unicorn. The beast whirled, impossibly nimble, and lunged. Its spiral skewered the moth, and with a savage shake of its head, the unicorn threw the moth to the earth and pulverized the ground it landed on with sledgehammer blows of the blades of its hooves. It snorted after that, and then turned to pace silently back into the mist-covered trees.
Elaine's eyes widened and she looked at me.
I glanced at her. "Unicorns," I said. "Very dangerous. You go first."
She arched an eyebrow.
"Maybe not," I relented. "A guardian?"
"Obviously," Elaine said. "How do we get past it?"
"Blow it up?"
"Tempting," Elaine said. "But I don't think it will make much of an impression on the Mothers if we kill their watchdog. A veil?"
I shook my head. "I don't think unicorns rely on the normal senses. If I remember right, they sense thoughts."
"In that case it shouldn't notice you."
"Hah," I said in a monotone. "Hah-hah, ho-ho, oh my ribs. I have a better plan. I go through while you distract it."
"With what? I'm fresh out of virginity. And that thing doesn't look much like the unicorns I saw in Summer. It's a lot less . . . prancy."
"With thoughts," I said. "They sense thoughts, and they're attracted to purity. Your concentration was always better than mine. Theoretically, if you can keep an image in your head, it should focus on it and not you."
"Think of a wonderful thought. Great plan, Peter Pan."
"You have a better one?"
Elaine shook her head. "Okay. I'll try to lead him down there." She gestured down the line of trees. "Once I do, get moving."
I nodded, and Elaine closed her eyes for a moment before her features smoothed over into relaxation. She started forward and into the trees, walking at a slow and measured pace.
The unicorn appeared again, ten feet in front of Elaine. The beast snorted and pawed at the earth and reared up on its hind legs, tossing its mane. Then it started forward at a slow and cautious walk.
Elaine held out her hand to it. It let out a gurgling whicker and nuzzled her palm. Still moving with dreamlike slowness, Elaine turned and began walking down the length of the lines of trees. The unicorn followed a pace or two behind her, the tip of its horn bobbing several inches above Elaine's right shoulder.
They'd gone several paces before I saw that the plan wasn't working. The unicorn's body language changed. Its ears flattened back to its skull, and its feet shifted restlessly before it finally rose up on its hind hooves, preparing to lunge, with the deadly horn centered on Elaine's back.
There wasn't time to shout a warning. I lifted my blasting rod in my right hand, summoned the force of my will, and pushed it through the focus with a shout of"Fuego!"
Fire erupted from the tip of the rod, a scarlet ribbon of heat and flame and force that lanced out toward the unicorn. After having seen how spectacularly useful my magic wasn't on the Ogre Grum, I didn't want to chance another faerie beast shrugging it off. So I wasn't shooting for the unicorn itself---but for the ground at its feet.
The blast ripped a three-foot trench in the earth, and the unicorn screamed and thrashed its head, trying to keep its balance. A normal horse would have toppled, but the unicorn somehow managed to get a couple of feet onto solid ground and hurled itself away in a forty-foot standing leap. It landed on its feet, already running, body sweeping in a circle to bring it charging toward me.
I ran for the nearest tree. The unicorn was faster, but I didn't have far to go, and I put the trunk between us.
It didn't slow down. Its horn slammed into the trunk of the dead tree and came through it as though it hadn't been there. I flinched away, but not fast enough to avoid catching several flying splinters in the chest and belly, and not fast enough to avoid a nasty cut on my left arm where one of those serrated edges of the horn ripped through my shirt. The pain of the injuries registered, but only as background data. I stepped around the bole of the tree, taking my staff in both hands, and swung it as hard as I could at the delicate bones of the unicorn's rear ankle.
Well, on a horse they're delicate. Evidently on unicorns, they're just a bit tender. The faerie beast let out a furious scream and twisted its body, tearing through the tree, shredding it as it whipped its horn free and whirled to orient on me. It lunged, the horn spearing toward me. I swept my staff up, a simple parryquatre , and shoved the tip out past my body while darting a pair of steps to my right, avoiding the beast's oncoming weight. I kept going, ducking a beat before the unicorn planted its forequarters, lifted its hind, and twisted, lashing out toward my head with both rear hooves. I rolled, came up running, and ducked behind the next tree. The unicorn turned and began stalking toward me, circling the tree, foam pattering from its open mouth.
Elaine cried out, and I whipped my head around to see her lifting her right hand, the ring on it releasing a cloud of glowing motes that burst around her in a swarm. The little lights streaked toward the unicorn and gathered around it, swirling and flashing in a dazzling cloud. One of them brushed against me, and my senses abruptly went into whiteout, overwhelmed with a simple image of walking down a sidewalk in worn shoes, the sun bright overhead, a purse bumping on my hip, stomach twinging with pleasant hunger pangs, the scent of hot asphalt in my nose, children laughing and splashing somewhere nearby. A memory, something from Elaine. I staggered and pushed it away from me, regaining my senses.
The motes crowded around the unicorn, darting in to brush against it one at a time, and at each touch the faerie beast went wild. It spun and kicked and screamed and lashed out with its horn, lunging at insubstantial adversaries in wild frenzy, but all to no avail.
I looked past them to see Elaine standing in place, her hand extended, her face set in an expression of concentration and strain. "Harry," she shouted. "Go. I'll hold it."
I rose, heart pounding. "You got it?"
"For a little while. Just get to the Mothers," Elaine responded."Hurry!"
"I don't want to leave you alone."
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face. "You won't be. When it gets loose, I'm not waiting around for it to skewer me."
I gritted my teeth. I didn't want to leave Elaine, but to be fair, she'd done better than I had. She stood against the unicorn still, only a dozen long strides away, her hand extended, the creature as contained as if she'd wrapped it in a net. My slender and straight and beautiful Elaine.
Memories, images washed through me, dozens of little things I'd forgotten coming back to me all at once; her laugh, quiet and wicked in the darkness; the feeling of her slender fingers slipping through mine; her face, asleep on the pillow beside me, gentle and peaceful in the morning sun.
There were many more, but I pushed them away. That had been a long time ago, and they wouldn't mean a thing if neither of us survived the next few minutes and hours.
I turned my back on her, left her struggling against the strength of that nightmarish unicorn, and ran toward the lights in the mist.
The Nevernever is a big place. In fact, it's the biggest place. The Nevernever is what the wizards call the entirety of the realm of spirit. It isn't a physical place, with geography and weather patterns and so on. It's a shadow world, a magical realm, and its substance is as mutable as thought. It has a lot of names, like the Other Side and the Next World, and it contains within it just about any kind of spirit realm you can imagine, somewhere. Heaven, Hell, Olympus, Elysium, Tartarus, Gehenna---you name it, and it's in the Nevernever somewhere. In theory, at any rate.
The parts of the Nevernever closest to the mortal world are almost completely controlled by the Sidhe. This part of the spirit realm is called Faerie, and has close ties with our own natural world. As a result, Faerie resembles the real world in a lot of ways. It is fairly permanent and unchanging, for example, and has several versions of weather. But make no mistake---it isn't Earth. The rules of reality don't apply as tightly as they do in our world, so Faerie can be viciously treacherous. Most who go into it never come back.
And I had a gut feeling that I was running through the heart of Faerie.
The ground sloped down and grew wetter, softer. The mist swallowed sound quickly behind me, until all I could hear was my own labored breathing. The run made my heart pound, and my wounded hand throbbed painfully. There was a certain amount of exhilaration to the movement, my limbs and muscles stretching and feeling alive after several months of disuse. I couldn't have kept up the pace for long, but luckily I didn't have far to go.
The lights turned out to be a pair of lit windows in a cottage that stood by itself on a slight rise of ground. Stone obelisks the size of coffins, some fallen and cracked and others still upright, stood scattered in loose rings around the mound. The raven rested on one of them, its beady eyes gleaming. It let out another croaking sound and flew through an open window of the cottage.
I stood there panting for a minute, trying to get my breath, before I walked up to the door. My flesh began to crawl with a shivering sensation. I took a step back and looked at the house. Stone walls. A thatch roof. I could smell mildew beneath an odor of fresh-baked bread. The door was made of some kind of heavy, weathered wood, and the snowflake symbol I'd seen before had been carved into it. Mother Winter, then. If she was anything like Mab, she would have the kind of power that would give any wizard the creeps. It would just hang in the air around her, like body warmth. Except that it would take a lot of body to feel its warmth through stone walls and a heavy door. Gulp.
I lifted my hand to knock, and the door swung open of its own accord, complete with a melodramatic Hammer Films whimper of rusting hinges.
A voice, little more than a creaking whisper, said, "Come in, boy. We have been expecting you."
Double gulp. I wiped my palms on my jeans and made sure I had a good grip on both staff and rod before I stepped across the threshold and into the dim cottage.
The place was all one room. The floor was wooden, though the boards looked weathered and dry. Shelves stood against the stone walls. A loom rested in the far corner, near the fireplace, a spinning wheel beside it. Before the fireplace sat a rocking chair, occupied, squeaking as it moved. A figure sat in it, shrouded in a shawl, a hood, as though someone had animated a bundle of blankets and cloth. On the hearth above the fireplace sat several sets of teeth, more or less human-sized. One looked simple enough, all white and even. The next was rotted-looking, with chipped incisors and a broken molar. The next set had all pointed teeth, stained with bits of rusty brown and what looked like rotten bits of flesh stuck between them. The last was made out of some kind of silvery metal, shining like a sword.
"Interesting," came the creaking voice from the creaking chair. "Most interesting. Can you feel it?"
"Uh," I said.
From the other side of the cottage, a brisk voice tsked, and I spun to face the newcomer. Another woman, stooped with age, blew dust from a shelf and ran a cloth over it before replacing the bottles and jars. She turned and eyed me with glittering green eyes from within a weathered but rosy face. "Of course I do. The poor child. He's walked a thorny path." The elderly lady came to me and put her hands firmly on either side of my head, peering at either eye. "Scars here, some. Stick out your tongue, boy."
I blinked. "Uh?"
"Stick out your tongue," she repeated in a crisp tone. I did. She peered at my tongue and my throat and said, "Strength, though. And he can be clever, at times. It would seem your daughter chose ably."
I closed my mouth and she released my head. "Mother Summer, I presume?"
She beamed up at me. "Yes, dear. And this is Mother Winter." She gestured vaguely at the chair by the fire. "Don't be offended if she doesn't get up. It's the wrong season, you know. Hand me that broom."
I blinked, then reached over to pick up the ramshackle old broom with a gnarled handle and passed it to Mother Summer. The old lady took it and immediately began sweeping the dusty floor of the old cottage.
"Bah," whispered Mother Winter. "The dust is just going to come back."
"It's the principle of the thing," Summer said. "Isn't that right, boy?"
I sneezed and mumbled something noncommittal. "Uh, pardon me, ladies. But I wondered if you could answer a few questions for me."
Winter's head seemed to turn slightly toward me from within her hood. Mother Summer stopped and eyed me, her grass-green eyes sparkling. "You wish answers?"
"Yes," I said.
"How can you expect to get them," Winter wheezed, "when you do not yet know the proper questions?"
"Uh," I said again. Brilliance incarnate, that's me.
Summer shook her head and said, "An exchange, then," she said. "We will ask you a question. And for your answer, we will each give you an answer to what you seek."
"No offense, but I didn't come here so that you could ask me questions."
"Are you sure?" Mother Summer asked. She swept a pile of dust past me and out the door. "How do you know you didn't?"
Mother Winter's rasping whisper came to me, disgusted. "She'll prattle on all day. Answer us the questions, boy. Or get out."
I took a deep breath. "All right," I said. "Ask."
Mother Winter turned back to face the fire. "Simply tell us, boy. Which is more important. The body---"
"---or the soul," Mother Summer picked up. They both fell silent, and I felt their focus on me like the tip of a knife resting against my skin.
"I suppose that would depend on who was asking whom," I said, finally.
"We ask," Winter whispered.
Summer nodded. "And we askyou ."
I thought about my words for a moment before I spoke.
I know, it shocked me too.
"Then I would say that were I old, sick, and dying, I would believe that the soul is more important. And if I was a man about to be burned at the stake in order to preserve his soul, I would believe that the body is more important."
The words fell on a long moment of silence. I found myself shifting my feet restlessly.
"Fairly said," Mother Winter rasped at last.
"Wise enough," Summer agreed. "Why did you give that answer, boy?"
"Because it's a stupid question. The answer isn't as simple as one or the other."
"Precisely," Summer said. She walked to the fire and withdrew a baking sheet on a long handle. A roundish loaf of bread was on it. She set it on a rack to cool. "This child sees what she does not."
"It is not in her nature," Winter murmured. "She is what she is."
Mother Summer sighed and nodded. "These are strange times."
"Hold on," I said. "What she are you talking about, here? It's Maeve, isn't it?"
Mother Winter made a quiet wheezing sound that might have been a laugh.
"I answered your questions," I said. "So pay up."
"Patience, boy," Mother Summer said. She took a kettle from a hook by the fireplace and poured tea into a pair of cups. She dipped what looked like honey into each, then cream, and gave one to Mother Winter.
I waited until each of them had sipped before I said, "Right, patience expired. I can't afford to wait. Tonight is Midsummer. Tonight the balance begins to tilt back to Winter, and Maeve is going to try to use the Stone Table to steal the Summer Knight's mantle for keeps."
"Indeed. Something to be prevented at all costs." Mother Summer arched an eyebrow. "Then what is your question?"
"Who killed the Summer Knight? Who stole his mantle?"
Mother Summer gave me a disappointed glance and sipped her tea.
Mother Winter lifted her tea to her hood. I still couldn't see her face---but her hand looked withered, the fingers tinged with blue. She lowered her cup and said, "You ask a foolish question, boy. You are more clever than this."
I folded my arms. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Mother Summer frowned at Winter, but said, "It means that who is not as important aswhy ."
"Andhow ," Mother Winter added.
"Think, boy," Summer said. "What has the theft of the mantle accomplished?"
I frowned. War between the Courts, for one. Odd activity in the magical and natural world alike. But mostly the coming war, Winter and Summer gathering to battle at the Stone Table.
"Exactly," Winter whispered. The skin on the back of my neck rippled with a cold and unpleasant sensation. Hell's bells, she'd heard methinking . "But think, wizard. How was it done? Theft is theft, whether the prize is food, or riches, or beauty or power."
Since it didn't seem to matter either way, I did my thinking out loud. "When something is stolen a couple of things can happen to it. It can be carried away where it cannot be reached."
"Hoarded," Summer put in. "Such as the dragons do."
"Yeah, okay. Uh, it can be destroyed."
"No, it can't," Mother Winter said. "Your own sage tells you that. The German fellow with the wild hair."
"Einstein," I muttered. "Okay, then, but it can be rendered valueless. Or it can be sold to someone else."
Mother Summer nodded. "Both of which arechange ."
I held up a hand. "Hold it, hold it. Look, as I understand it, this power of the Summer Knight, his mantle, it can't just exist on its own. It has to be inside a vessel."
"Yes," Winter murmured. "Within one of the Queens, or within the Knight."
"And it isn't with one of the Queens."
"True," Summer said. "We would sense it, were it so."
"So it's already in another Knight," I said. "But if that was true, there'd be no imbalance." I scratched at my head, and as I did it slowly dawned on me. "Unless it had been changed. Unless the new Knight had been changed. Transformed into something else. Something that left the power trapped, inert, useless."
Both of them regarded me steadily, silently.
"All right," I said. "I have my question."
"Ask it," they said together.
"How does the mantle pass on from one Knight to the next?"
Mother Summer smiled, but the expression was a grim one. "It returns to the nearest reflection of itself. To the nearest vessel of Summer. She, in turn, chooses the next Knight."
That meant that only one of the Queens of Summer could be behind it. Titania was out already---she had begun the war against Mab because she didn't know where the mantle was. Mother Summer would not have been telling me this information if she'd been the one to do it. That left only one person.
"Stars and stones," I muttered. "Aurora."
The two Mothers set down their teacups together. "Time presses," Summer said.
"That which must not be may be," Winter continued.
"You, we judge, are the one who may set things aright once more---"
"---if you are strong enough."
"Brave enough."
"Whoa, hold your horses," I said. "Can't I just bring this out to Mab and Titania?"
"Beyond talk now," Mother Winter said. "They go to war."
"Stop them," I said. "You two have to be stronger than Mab and Titania. Make them shut up and listen to you."
"Not that simple," Winter said.
Summer nodded. "We have power, but bound within certain limits. We cannot interfere with the Queens or Ladies. Not even on a matter so dire as this."
"Whatcan you do?"
"I?" Summer said. "Nothing."
I frowned and looked from her to Mother Winter.
One aged, cracked hand lifted and beckoned me. "Come closer, boy."
I started to say no. But my feet moved without asking the rest of me, and I knelt in front of Mother Winter's rocking chair. I couldn't see her, even from here. Even her feet were covered by layers of dark cloth. But on her lap rested a pair of knitting needles, and a simple square of cloth, trailing thick threads of grey, undyed wool. Mother Winter reached down with her withered hands, and took up a pair of rusted shears. She cut the trailing threads and passed me the cloth.
I took it, again without thinking. It felt soft, cold as if it had been in a refrigerator, and it tingled with a subtle, dangerous energy.
"It isn't tied off," I said quietly.
"Nor should it be," Winter said. "It is an Unraveling."
"A what?"
"An unmaking, boy. I am the unmaker, the destroyer. It is what I am. Bound within those threads is the power to undo any enchantment done. Touch the cloth to that which must be undone. Unravel the threads. It will be so."
I stared at the square cloth for a moment, Then asked quietly, "Anyenchantment? Any transformation?"
"Any."
My hands started shaking. "You mean . . . I could use this to undo what the vampires did to Susan. Just wipe it away. Make her mortal again."
"You could, Emissary." Mother Winter's tone held a bone-dry amusement.
I swallowed and rose, folding up the cloth. I slipped it into my pocket, careful not to let any threads trail out. "Is this a gift?"
"No," Winter rasped. "But a necessity."
"What am I supposed to do with it?"
Mother Summer shook her head. "It is yours now, and yours to employ. We have reached the limits of how we may act. The rest is yours."
"Make haste," Winter whispered.
Mother Summer nodded. "No time remains. Be swift and wise, mortal child. Go with our blessings."
Winter withdrew her frail hands into the sleeves of her robe. "Do not fail, boy."
"Hell's bells, no pressure," I muttered. I gave each of them a short bow and turned for the door. I stepped over the threshold of the cottage and said, "Oh, by the way. I apologize if we did any harm to your unicorn on the way in."
I looked back to see Mother Summer arch a brow. Winter's head shifted, and I could see the gleam of light on yellow teeth. Her voice rasped, "What unicorn?"
The door shut, again of its own accord. I glowered at the wood for a moment and then muttered, "Freaking weirdo faerie biddies." I turned and started back the way I had come. The Unraveling was a cool weight in my pocket, and promised to get uncomfortably chilly if I left it there too long.
The thought of the Unraveling made me walk faster, excitement skipping through me. If what the Mothers said was true, I'd be able to use the cloth to help Susan, which was something just this side of divine intervention. All I had to do was to finish up this case, and then I could go find her.
Of course, I thought sourly, finishing up this case was likely to kill me. The Mothers may have given me some insight, and a magic doily, but they sure as hell hadn't given me a freaking clue as to how to resolve this---and, I realized, they hadn't reallysaid, "Aurora did it." I knew they had to speak the truth to me, and their statements had led me to that conclusion---but how much of it was this mysterious prohibition from direct involvement and how much of it had been another fistful of faerie trickery?
"Make haste," I rasped, trying to impersonate Winter's voice. "We have reached the limits," I said, mimicking Summer. I quickened my pace, and frowned over that last little comment Winter had made. She had taken an almost palpable glee in making it, as though it had given her an opening she wouldn't otherwise have had.
What unicorn?
I gnawed over the question. If it was indeed a statement of importance, not just a passing mutter, then it had to mean something.
I frowned. It meant that there hadn'tbeen a guardian around the little cottage. Or at least not one Mother Winter had put there.
So who had?
The answer hit me low in the gut, a sensation of physical sickness coming along with the realization. I stopped and clawed for my Sight.
I didn't get to it before Grum came out from under a veil, Elaine standing close behind him. He caught me flat-footed. The ogre drove a sledgehammer fist toward my face. There was a flash of impact, a sensation of falling, and cool earth beneath my cheek.
Then the scent of Elaine's subtle perfume.
Then blackness.
I came to on the ground of that dark Nevernever wood. Spirit realm or not, I felt cold and started shivering uncontrollably. That made playing possum pretty much impossible, so I sat up and tried to take stock.
I didn't feel any new bruises or breaks, so I hadn't been pounded while I was out. It probably hadn't been long. Mother Winter's Unraveling was no longer in my pocket. My bag was gone, as was my ring and my bracelet. My staff and rod, needless to say, had been taken as well. I could still feel my mother's pentacle amulet against my chest, though, which came as something of a surprise. My hand throbbed, where Mab had driven the freaking letter opener through it.
Other than that, I felt more or less whole. Huzzah.
I squinted at my surroundings next and found a ring of toadstools grown up around me. They weren't huge, tentacular, horribly fanged toadstools or anything, but it put a little chill in me all the same. I lifted my hand and reached out for them tentatively, extending my wizard's senses along with the gesture. I hit a wall. I couldn't think of another way to describe it. Where the ring began, my ability to reach, move, and perceive with my supernatural senses simply ended.
Trapped. Double huzzah.
Only after I'd gotten an idea of my predicament did I stand up and face my captors.
There were five of them, which seemed less than fair. I recognized the nearest right away---Aurora, the Summer Lady, now dressed in what I could only describe as a battle gown, made out of some kind of silver mail as fine and light as cloth. It clung closely to her, from the top of her throat down to her wrists and ankles, and shone with its own dim radiance in the forest's gloom. She wore a sword at her hip, and upon her pale hair rested a garland of living leaves. She turned green eyes to me, heartbreakingly lovely, and regarded me with an expression both sad and resolved.
"Wizard," Aurora said, "I regret that it has come to this. But you have come too close to interfering. Once you had served your purpose, I could not allow you to continue your involvement."
I grimaced and looked past her, at the ogre Grum, huge and scarlet-skinned and silent, and the horrific unicorn that had apparently been guarding the way to Mother Winter's cottage.
"What do you intend to do with me?"
"Kill you," Aurora said, her voice gentle. "I regret the necessity. But you're too dangerous to be allowed to live."
I squinted at her. "Then why haven't you?"
"Good question," said the fourth person present---Lloyd Slate, the Winter Knight. He still wore his biker leathers, but he'd added bits of mail and a few metal plates to the ensemble. He wore a sword at his hip, another on his back, and bore a heavy pistol on his belt. The gaunt, tense hunger of his expression hadn't changed. He looked nervous and angry. "If it had been up to me, I'd have cut your throat when Grum first dropped you."
"Why call him Grum?" I said, scowling at the ogre. "You might as well drop the glamour, Lord Marshal. There's not much point to it now."
The ogre's face twisted with surprise.
I glared spitefully at the dark unicorn and spat, "You too, Korrick."
Both ogre and unicorn glanced at Aurora. The Faerie Queen never took her eyes off me, but nodded. The ogre's form blurred and twisted, and resolved itself into the form of Talos, the Sidhe lord from Aurora's penthouse at the Rothchild. His pale hair had been drawn back into a fighting braid, and he wore close-fit mail of some glittering black metal that made him look rail-thin and deadly.
At the same time the unicorn shook itself and rose up into the hulking form of Korrick, the centaur, also dressed in mail and bearing weapons of faerie make. He stamped one huge hoof and said nothing.
Aurora walked in a circle around me, frowning. "How long have you known, wizard?"
I shrugged. "Not long. I started getting it on the way out of Mother Winter's cottage. Once I knew where to start, it wasn't hard to start adding up the numbers."
"We don't have time for this," Slate said and spat on the ground to one side.
"If he puzzled it out, others may have as well," Aurora said, her voice patient. "We should know if any other opposition is coming. Tell me, wizard. How did you piece it together?"
"Go to hell," I snapped.
Aurora turned to the last person there and asked, "Can he be reasoned with?"
Elaine stood a little apart from the others, her back to them. My bag rested on the ground near her feet, and my rod and staff lay there too. She'd added a cloak of emerald green to her outfit, somehow making it look natural. She glanced at Aurora and then at me. She averted her eyes quickly, "You've already told him you're going to kill him. He won't cooperate."
Aurora shook her head. "More sacrifices. I am sorry you pushed me to this, wizard."
Her hand moved. Some unseen force jerked my chin up, my eyes to hers. They flashed, a ripple of colors, and I felt the force of her mind, her will, glide past my defenses and into me. I lost my balance and staggered, leaning helplessly against the invisible solidity of the circle she'd imprisoned me in. I tried to fight it, but it was like trying to push water up a hill---nothing for me to strain against, nothing for me to focus upon. I was on her turf, trapped in a circle of her power. She flowed into me, down through my eyes, and all I could do was watch the pretty colors.
"Now," she said, and her voice was the gentlest, sweetest thing I'd ever heard. "What did you learn of the Summer Knight's death?"
"You were behind it," I heard myself saying, my voice slow and heavy. "You had him killed."
"How?"
"Lloyd Slate. He hates Maeve. You recruited him to help you. Elaine took him inside Reuel's building, through the Nevernever. He fought Reuel. That's why there was ooze on the stairs. The water on Reuel's arms and legs was where Summer fire met Winter ice. Slate threw him down the stairs and broke his neck."
"And his mantle of power?"
"Redirected," I mumbled. "You gathered it in and placed it into another person."
"Who?"
"The changeling girl," I said. "Lily. You gave her the mantle and then you turned her to stone. That statue in your garden. It was right in front of me."
"Very good," Aurora said, and the gentle praise rippled through me. I fought to regain my senses, to escape the glittering green prison of her eyes. "What else?"
"You hired the ghoul. The Tigress. You sent her after me before Mab even spoke to me."
"I do not know this ghoul. You are incorrect, wizard. I do not hire killers. Continue."
"You set me up before I came to interview you."
"In what way?" Aurora pressed.
"Maeve must have ordered Slate to take Elaine out. He made it look like he tried and missed, but Elaine played it for more. You helped her fake the injury."
"Why did I do that?"
"To keep me upset, worried, so that when I spoke to you I wouldn't have the presence of mind to corner you with a question. That's why you attacked me, too. Telling me what a monster I'd become. To keep me off balance, keep me from asking the right questions."
"Yes," Aurora said. "And after that?"
"You decided to take me out. You sent Talos, Elaine, and Slate to kill me. And you created that construct in the garden center."
Slate stepped closer. "Spooky," he said. "He doesn'tlook all that smart."
"Yet he used only reason. Plus knowledge doubtless gained from the Queens and Mothers. He put it together for himself, rather than being told." At that, her gaze slanted past me, to Elaine. I tried to pull away and couldn't.
"Great," Slate said. "No one squealed. Can we kill the great Kreskin now?"
Aurora held up a hand to Slate, and asked me, "Do you know my next objective?"
"You knew that if you bound up the Summer Knight's mantle, Mother Winter would provide an Unraveling to free it and restore the balance. You waited for her to give it to me. Now you're going to take it and the statue of Lily. You're going to take her to the Stone Table during the battle. You'll use the Unraveling, free Lily from being stone, and kill her on the table after midnight. The Summer Knight's power will go to Winter permanently. You want to destroy the balance of power in Faerie. I don't know why."
Aurora's eyes flashed dangerously. She removed her gaze from mine, and it was like suddenly falling backup a flight of stairs. I staggered back, tearing my eyes from her and focusing on the ground.
"Why?It should be obvious to you why, wizard. You of all people." She spun in a glitter of silvery mail, pacing restlessly back and forth. "The cycle must be broken. Summer and Winter, constantly chasing each other, wounding what the other heals and healing what the other wounds. Our war, our senseless contest, waged for no reason other than that it has always been so---and mortals trapped between us, crushed by the struggle, made pawns and toys." She took a shuddering, angry breath. "It must end. And I will end it."
I ground my teeth, shivering. "You'll end it by sending the natural world into chaos?"
"I did not set the price," Aurora hissed. I caught sight of her eyes out of the corner of my vision and started tracking up to her face. I forced my gaze down again, barely in time. She continued speaking, in a low, impassioned voice. "I hate it. I hate every moment of the things I've had to do to accomplish this---but it should have been done long since, wizard. Delay is just as deadly. How many have died or been tormented to madness by Maeve, and those like her? You yourself have been tortured, abused, nearly enslaved by them. I do whatmust be done."
I swallowed and said, "Harming and endangering mortal kind in order to help them. That's insane."
"Perhaps," Aurora said. "But it is the only way." She faced me again and asked, her voice cold, "Does the White Council know what you have discovered?"
"Bite me, faerie fruitcake."
Slate stifled a laugh, hiding it under a cough. I felt more than saw Aurora's sudden surge of rage, sparked by the Winter Knight but directed at me. A flare of light erupted from her, and I felt a sudden heat against the side of my body nearest her. The hairs on my arm rose straight up. Her voice rang out, hot and violent and strong. "What did you say, ape?"
"They don't," Elaine said, her voice tense. She put herself between me and Aurora, her back to me. "He told me before we left for the Mothers'. The Council doesn't realize the depth of what's happening. By the time they do, it will be too late for them to act."
"Fine," Slate said. "He's the last loose end, then. Kill him and let's get on with it."
"Dammit, Slate," I said. "Use your head, man. What do you think you're going to get out of helping her like this?"
Slate gave me a cold smile. "That old bastard Reuel's power, for one thing. I'll be twice the Knight I was before---and then I'm going to settle some accounts with that little bitch Maeve." He licked his lips. "After that, Aurora and I will decide what to do next."
I let out a harsh bray of laughter. "I hope you got that in writing, dimwit. Do you really think she would let a man, and a mortal at that, have that much power over her?" Slate's eyes became wary, and I pressed him. "Think about it. Has she ever given it to you straight, a statement, not a question or a dodge, or something she's led you to assume?"
Suspicion grew in his gaze, but Aurora laid a hand on his shoulder. Slate's eyes grew a little cloudy at her touch, and he closed them. "Peace, my Knight," the Summer Lady murmured. "The wizard is a trickster, and desperate. He would say anything he thought might save him. Nothing has changed between us."
I ground my teeth at the meaningless words, but Aurora had Slate's number, whatever it was. Maybe all that time in Maeve's company had softened him, the drugs and pleasures she fed him making him more open to suggestion. Maybe Aurora had just found a hole in his psychology. Either way, he wasn't going to listen to me.
I looked around, but Korrick and Talos ignored me. Aurora kept on whispering to Slate. That left only one person to talk to, and the thought of it felt like someone driving nails into my chest. "Elaine," I said. "This is crazy. Why are you doing this?"
She didn't look up at me. "Survival, Harry. I promised to help Aurora or to give up my own life as forfeit in payment for all the years she protected me. I didn't know when I made the promise that you were going to be involved." She fell quiet for a moment, then swallowed before she said, her voice forced a little louder, "I didn't know."
"If Aurora isn't stopped, someone is going to get hurt."
"Someone gets hurt every day," Elaine answered. "When you get right down to it, does it matter who? How? Or why?"
"People are going todie , Elaine."
That stung her, and she looked up at me, sharp anger warring with a sheen of tears in her grey eyes. "Better them than me."
I faced her, without looking away. "Better me than you, too, huh?"
She broke first, turning to regard Aurora and Slate. "Looks that way."
I folded my arms and leaned against the back of my toadstool cell. I went over my options, but they were awfully limited. If Aurora wanted me dead, she would be able to see to it quite handily, and unless the cavalry came riding over the hill, there wasn't diddly I could do about it.
Call me a pessimist, but my life has been marked with a notable lack of cavalry. Checkmate.
Which left me with one last spell to throw. I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching inside, gathering up the magic, the life force within me. Any wizard has a reservoir of power inherent in him, power drawn from the core of his self rather than from his surroundings. Aurora's circle could cut me off from drawing upon ambient magic to fuel a spell---but it couldn't stop me from using the energy within me.
Granted, once used, there wouldn't be anything left to keep me breathing, my heart pumping, and electricity going through my brain. But then, that's why they call it a death curse, isn't it?
It was only a moment later that I opened my eyes, to see Aurora draw back from Lloyd Slate. The Winter Knight focused his eyes on me, scary eyes empty of anything like reason, and drew the sword from his belt.
"A grim business," Aurora said. "Goodbye, Mister Dresden."
I faced Slate head-on. I figured as long as I was going to take one of those swords, it might as well have a shot of killing me pretty quick. No sense in dragging it out. But I left my eyes on Aurora and held whatever power I had gathered up and ready.
"I am sorry, wizard," Aurora said.
"You're about to be," I muttered.
Slate drew back his blade, an Oriental job without enough class to be an actual katana, and tensed, preparing to strike. The blade glittered and looked really, really sharp.
Elaine caught Slate's wrist and said, "Wait."
Aurora gave Elaine a sharp and angry look. "What are you doing?"
"Protecting you," Elaine said. "If you let Slate kill him, he'll break the circle around Dresden."
Aurora looked from Elaine to me and back. "And?"
"Elaine!" I snarled.
She regarded me with flat eyes. "And you'll leave yourself open to his death curse. He'll take you with him. Or make you wish he had."
Aurora lifted her chin. "He isn't that strong."
"Don't be so sure," Elaine said. "He's the strongest wizard I've ever met. Strong enough to make the White Council nervous. Why take a pointless risk so close to the end?"
"You treacherous bitch," I said. "God damn you, Elaine."
Aurora frowned at me and then gestured to Slate. He lowered the sword and put it away. "Yet he is too dangerous to leave alive."
"Yes," Elaine agreed.
"What would you suggest?"
"We're in the Nevernever," Elaine said. "Arrange his death and leave. Once you are back in mortal lands, he won't be able to reach you. Let him spend his curse on Mab if he wishes, or on his godmother. But it won't be on you."
"But when I leave, my power will go with me. He won't be held by the circle. What do you suggest?"
Elaine regarded me passionlessly. "Drown him," she said finally. "Call water and let the earth drink him. I'll lock him into place with a binding of my own. Mortal magic will last, even after I've left."
Aurora nodded. "Are you capable of holding him?"
"I know his defenses," Elaine responded. "I'll hold him as long as necessary."
Aurora regarded me in silence for a moment. "So much rage," she said. "Very well, Elaine. Hold him."
It didn't take her long. Elaine had always been smoother at magic than me, more graceful. She murmured something in the language she'd chosen for her magic, some variant on Old Egyptian, adding a roll of her wrist, a graceful ripple of her fingers, and I felt her spell lock around me like a full-body straitjacket, paralyzing me from chin to toes, wrapping me in silent, unseen force. It pressed against my clothes, flattening them, and made it hard to take a deep breath.
At the same time, Aurora closed her eyes, her hands spread at her side. Then she leveled her palms and slowly raised them. From within the circle, I couldn't sense what she was doing, but there wasn't anything wrong with my eyes and ears. The ground gurgled, and there was a sudden scent of rotten eggs. I felt the earth beneath me shift and sag, and then a slow "bloop bloop" of earth settling as water began rising up beneath me. It took maybe five seconds for the ground to become so soft that my feet sank into the warm mud, up to my ankles. Hell's bells.
"Mortal time is racing," Aurora said, and opened her eyes. "The day grows short. Come."
Without so much as glancing at me, she swept away into the mist. Slate fell into place at her heels, and Talos followed several paces behind, slim and dangerous in his dark armor. Korrick the centaur spared me a sneer and a satisfied snort before he gripped a short, heavy spear in his broad fist and turned to follow the Summer Lady, hooves striking down in decisive clops.
That left Elaine. She came forward until she stood almost close enough to touch me. Slender and pretty, she regarded me steadily while she took a band from her jeans pocket, and bound her hair back into a tail.
"Why, Elaine?" I asked. I struggled furiously against the spell, but it was stronger than me. "Why the hell did you stop her?"
"You're an idiot, Harry," she said. "A melodramatic fool. You always were."
I kept sinking into the earth and came level with her eyes. "I could have stopped her."
"I couldn't be sure you wouldn't have thrown the curse at me, too." She looked over her shoulder. Aurora had paused, a dim shape in the mist, and was waiting.
The watery earth kept drawing me down, and I looked up at her now, at the soft skin on the underside of her chin. She looked down at me and said, "Goodbye, Harry." She turned and walked after Aurora. Then she paused, one leg bent, and turned enough so that I could see her profile. She said in that same casually neutral tone, "It's just like old times."
After that, they left me there to die.
It's hard not to panic in that kind of situation. I mean, I've been in trouble before, but not in that kind of tick-tock-here-it-comes way. The problem in front of me was simple, steady, and inescapable. The ground kept getting softer and I kept on sliding down into it. The sensation of it was warm and not entirely unpleasant. I mean, people pay money for hot mud baths. But mine would be lethal if I didn't find a way out of it, and the mud was already creeping up over my thighs.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus. I reached out to feel the fabric of Elaine's spell around me, and pushed, trying to break through it. I didn't have enough strength. Once Aurora's circle dropped, I would be able to reach out for more power, but I'd be running short on time---and even so, brute strength wasn't the answer. If I just randomly hammered at the spell around me, it would be like trying to escape from a set of shackles using dynamite. I would tear myself apart along with the binding.
Still, that dangerous option seemed to be my only hope. I tried to hang on, to stay calm and focused, and to wait for Aurora's circle to give out. I got the giggles. Don't ask me why, but under the pressure of the moment, it seemed damned funny. I tried not to, but I cackled and chortled as the warm mud slid up over my hips, my belly, my chest.
"Just like old times," I wheezed. "Yeah, just like old times, Elaine. You backbiting, poisonous, treacherous . . ."
And then a thought hit me. Just like old times.
". . . deceitful, wicked,clever girl. If this works I'll buy you a pony."
I put the studied indifference of her words together with her whole bloodless attitude. That wasn't the Elaine I remembered. I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feelnothing .
The mud covered my chest, and still Aurora's circle hadn't faded. My heart pounded wildly, but I struggled to remain calm. I started hyperventilating. I might need every spare second I could get. The mud covered my throat and slid up over my chin. I wasn't fighting it any more. I got a good, deep breath just before my nose went under.
Then darkness pressed over my eyes, and I was left floating in thick, gooey warmth, the only sound the beating of my own heart thudding in my ears. I waited, and my lungs began to burn. I waited, not moving, fire spreading over my chest. I kept everything as relaxed as I could and counted the heartbeats.
Somewhere between seventy-four and seventy-five, Aurora's circle vanished. I reached out for power, gathering it in, shaping it in my mind. I didn't want to rush it, but it was hard not to. I took all the time I could without panicking, before I reached out again for the fabric of Elaine's spell.
I'd been right. It was the same binding she'd used when we were kids, when she'd been holding me down while my old master, Justin DuMorne, prepared to enthrall me. I'd found the way out as a kid, because Elaine and I had shared a certain impatience for our magical studies. Besides schoolwork, we'd been forced to pursue an entirely different regimen of spells and mental disciplines as well. Some nights, we would have homework until dinner, then head right for the magical stuff until well after midnight, working out spells and formulae until our eyes ached.
Toward the end, that got to be rough when all we really wanted was to be in bed, doing things much less scholarly and much more hormonal, until other parts ached. Ahem. To that end, we'd split the work. One of us would work out the spell while the other did the homework, then a quick round of copying and straight to . . . bed.
I'd been the one who worked out that binding. And it sucked.
It sucked because it had no flexibility to it, no subtlety, no class. It dropped a cocoon of hardened air around the target and locked it there, period. End of story. As teenagers, we had thought it impressively effective and simple. As a desperate man about to die, I realized that it was a brittle spell, like a diamond that was simultaneously the hardest substance on earth and easily fractured if struck at the correct angle.
Now that I knew what I was doing, I found the clumsy center of the spell, where I'd located it all those years ago, tying all the strands of energy together at the small of the back like a Christmas bow. There in the mud and darkness, I focused on the weak spot of the spell, gathered my will, and muttered, with my mouth clenched closed, "Tappitytaptap." It came out, "Mmphitymmphmph," but that didn't make any difference on the practical side. The spell was clear in my head. A spike of energy lashed into the binding, and I felt it loosen.
My heart pounded with excitement and I reached out with the spell again. The third time I tried it, the binding slipped, and I flexed my arms and legs, pulling them slowly free.
I'd done it. I'd escaped the binding.
Now I was merely drowning in what amounted to quicksand.
The clock was running against me as I started to feel dizzy, as my lungs struggled against my will, trying to force out what little air remained and suck in a deep breath of nice, cleansing muck. I reached for more power, gathered it in, and hoped I hadn't spun around without noticing. I pushed my palms toward my feet, just as my lungs forced me to exhale, and shouted with it,"Forzare!"
Naked force lashed out toward my feet, bruising one leg as it swept past. Even in magic, you can't totally ignore physics, and my action of exerting force down against the earth had the predictable equal and opposite reaction. The earth exerted force up toward me, and I flew out of the mud, muck and water flying up with me in a cloud of spray. I had a wild impression of mist and dreary ground and then a tree, and then it was replaced with a teeth-rattling impact.
By the time I'd coughed out a mouthful of mud and choked air back into my lungs, I had the presence of mind to wipe mud out of my eyes. I found myself twenty feet off the ground, dangling from the branches of one of the skeletal trees. My arms and legs hung loosely beneath me, and my jeans felt tight at the waist. I tried to see how I'd gotten hung up that way, but I couldn't. I could possibly get a hand and a foot on different branches, but I could barely wiggle, and I couldn't get loose.
"You foil a Faerie Queen," I panted to myself. "Survive your own execution. Get away from certain death. And get stuck up a freaking tree." I struggled some more, just as uselessly. One mud-covered boot fell off and hit the ground with a soggy plop. "God, I hope no one sees you like this."
The sound of footsteps drifted out of the mist, coming closer.
I pushed the heel of my hand against my right eyebrow. Some days you just can't win.
I folded my arms and had them sternly crossed over my chest when a tall, shrouded form emerged from the mist below. Dark robes swirled, a deep hood concealed, and a gloved hand gripped a wooden staff.
The Gatekeeper turned his head toward me and became still for a moment. Then he reached his other gloved hand into his hood. He made a strangled, muffled sound.
"Hi," I said. King of wit, that's me.
The Gatekeeper sounded as though he had to swallow half a gallon of laughter as he responded, "Greetings, Wizard Dresden. Am I interrupting anything?"
My other boot fell off and plopped to the ground. I regarded my dangling, muddy sock-feet with pursed lips. "Nothing all that important."
"That is good," he said. He paced around a bit, peering up at me, and then said, "There's a broken branch through your belt. Get your right foot on the branch below you, your left hand on the one above you, and loosen your belt. You should be able to climb down."
I did as he said and got my muddy self down from the tree and to earth. "Thank you," I said. I privately thought to myself that I'd have been a hell of a lot more grateful about five minutes earlier. "What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you," he said.
"You've been watching?"
He shook his head. "Call it listening. But I have had glimpses of you. And matters are worsening in Chicago."
"Stars and stones," I muttered and picked up my boots. "I don't have time to chat."
The Gatekeeper put a gloved hand on my arm. "But you do," he said. "My vision is limited, but I know that you have accomplished your mission for the Winter Queen. She will keep her end of the bargain, grant us safe passage through her realm. So far as the Council is concerned, that will be enough. You would be safe."
I hesitated.
"Wizard Dresden, you could end your involvement in the matter. You could choose to step clear of it, right now. It would end the trial."
My aching, weary, half-smothered, and dirty self liked that idea. End it. Go home. Get a hot shower. A bunch of hot food. Sleep.
It was impossible, anyway. I was only one tired, beat-up, strung-out guy, wizard or not. The faeries had way too many powers and tricks to deal with on a good day, let alone on this one. I knew what Aurora was up to now, but, hell, she was getting set to charge into the middle of a battlefield. A battlefield, furthermore, that I had no idea how to evenfind , much less survive. The Stone Table had been in some weird pocket of the Nevernever like nothing I'd ever felt before. I had no idea how to reach it.
Impossible. Painful. Way too dangerous. I could call it a day, get some sleep, and hope I did better the next time I came up to the plate.
Meryl's face came to mind, ugly and tired and resolute. I also saw the statue of Lily. And Elaine, trapped by her situation but fighting things in her own way despite the odds against her. I thought of taking the Unraveling from Mother Winter, able to think of nothing but using it for my own goals, for helping Susan. Now it would be used for something else entirely, and as much as I wanted to forget about it and go home, I would bear a measure of the responsibility for the consequences of its use if I did.
I shook my head and looked around until I spotted my bag, jewelry, staff, and rod on the ground several yards away from the muddy bog Aurora had created. I recovered all of them. "No," I said. "It isn't over."
"No?" the Gatekeeper said, surprise in the tone. "Why not?"
"Because I'm an idiot." I sighed. "And there are people in trouble."
"Wizard, no one expects you to stop a war between the Sidhe Courts. The Council would assign no such responsibility to any one person."
"To hell with the Sidhe Courts," I said. "And to hell with the Council too. There are people I know in trouble. And I'm the one who turned some of this loose. I'll clean it up."
"You're sure?" the Gatekeeper said. "You won't step out of the Trial now?"
My mud-crusted fingers fumbled with the clasp of my bracelet. "I won't."
The Gatekeeper regarded me in silence for a moment and said, "Then I will not vote against you."
A little chill went through me. "Oh. You would have?"
"Had you walked away, I would kill you myself."
I stared at him for a second and then asked, "Why?"
His voice came out soft and resolute, but not unkind. "Because voting against you would have been the same thing in any case. It seems meet to me that I should take full responsibility for that choice rather than hiding behind Council protocol."
I got the bracelet on, then shoved my feet back into my boots. "Well, thanks for not killing me, then. If you'll excuse me, I've got somewhere to be."
"Yes," the Gatekeeper said. He held out his hand, a small velvet bag in it. "Take these. You may find a use for them."
I frowned at him and took the bag. Inside, I found a little glass jar of some kind of brownish gel and a chip of greyish stone on a piece of fine, silvery thread. "What's this?"
"An ointment for the eyes," he said. His tone became somewhat dry. "Easier on the nerves than using the Sight to see through the veils and glamours of the Sidhe."
I lifted my eyebrows. Bits of drying mud fell into my eyes and made me blink. "Okay. And this rock?"
"A piece from the Stone Table," he said. "It will show you the way to get there."
I blinked some more, this time in surprise. "You're helping me?"
"That would constitute interfering in the Trial," he corrected me. "So far as anyone else is concerned, I am merely seeing to it that the Trial can reach its full conclusion."
I frowned at him. "If you'd just given me the rock, maybe," I said. "The ointment is something else. You're interfering. The Council would have a fit."
The Gatekeeper sighed. "Wizard Dresden, this is something I have never said before and do not anticipate saying again." He leaned closer to me, and I could see the shadows of his features, gaunt and vague, inside his hood. One dark eye sparkled with something like humor as he offered his hand and whispered, "Sometimes what the Council does not know does not hurt it."
I found myself grinning. I shook his hand.
He nodded. "Hurry. The Council dare not interfere with internal affairs of the Sidhe, but we will do what we can." He stretched out his staff and drew it in a circle in the air. With barely a whisper of disturbance, he opened the fabric between the Nevernever and the mortal world, as though his staff had simply drawn a circle of Chicago to step into---the street outside my basement apartment, specifically. "Allah and good fortune go with you."
I nodded to him, encouraged. Then I turned to the portal and stepped through it, from that dark moor in Faerie to my usual parking space at home. Hot summer air hit my face, steamy and crackling with tension. Rain sleeted down, and thunder shook the ground. The light was already fading and dark was coming on.
I ignored them all and headed for my apartment. The mud, substance of the Nevernever, melted into a viscous goo that began evaporating at once, assisted by the driving, cleansing rain.
I had calls to make, and I wanted to change into non-slimy clothes. My fashion sense is somewhat stunted, but I still had to wonder.
What do you wear to a war?
I went with basic black.
I made my calls, set an old doctor's valise outside the front door, got a quick shower, and dressed in black. A pair of old black military-style boots, black jeans (mostly clean), a black tee, black ball cap with a scarlet Coca-Cola emblem on it, and on top of everything my leather duster. Susan had given me the coat a while back, complete with a mantle that falls to my elbows and an extra large portion of billow. The weather was stormy enough, both figuratively and literally, to make me want the reassurance of the heavy coat.
I loaded up on the gear, too---everything I'd brought with me that morning plus the Gatekeeper's gifts and my home-defense cannon, a heavy-caliber, long-barreled, Dirty Harry Magnum. I debated carrying the gun on me and decided against it. I'd have to go through Chicago to get to whatever point would lead me to the Stone Table, and I didn't need to get arrested for a concealed carry. I popped the gun, case and all, into my bag, and hoped I wouldn't have to get to it in a hurry.
Billy and the werewolves arrived maybe ten minutes later, the minivan pulling up outside and beeping the horn. I checked the doctor bag, closed it, and went out to the van, my gym bag bumping against my side. The side door rolled open, and I stepped up to toss my gear in.
I hesitated upon seeing the van, packed shoulder to shoulder with young people. There were ten or eleven of them in there.
Billy leaned over from the driver's seat and asked, "Problem?"
"I said only volunteers," I said. "I don't know how much trouble we're going into."
"Right," Billy said. "I told them that."
The kids in the van murmured their agreement.
I blew out my breath. "Okay, people. Same rules as last time. I'm calling the shots, and if I give you an order, you take it, no arguments. Deal?"
There was a round of solemn nods. I nodded in reply and peered to the back of the dim van, at a head of dull green hair. "Meryl? Is that you?"
The changeling girl gave me a solemn nod. "I want to help. So does Fix."
I caught a flash of white hair and dark, nervous eyes from beside Meryl. The little man lifted a hand and gave me a twitching wave.
"If you go along," I said, "same rules as everyone else. Otherwise you stay here."
"All right," Meryl said with a laconic nod.
"Yeah," Fix said. "Okay."
I looked around at all of them and grimaced. They looked so damnedyoung . Or maybe it was just me feeling old. I reminded myself that Billy and the Alphas had already had their baptism by fire, and they'd had almost two years to hone their skills against some of the low-intensity riffraff of the Chicago underground scene. But I knew that they were getting in way over their heads on this one.
I needed them, and they'd volunteered. The trick was to make sure that I didn't lead them to a horrible death.
"Okay," I said. "Let's go."
Billy pushed open the passenger door, and Georgia moved back to the crowded rear seats. I got in beside Billy and asked, "Did you get them?"
Billy passed me a plastic bag from Wal-Mart. "Yeah, that's why it took so long to get here. There was police tape all over and cops standing around."
"Thanks," I said. I tore open a package of orange plastic box knives and put them into the doctor's valise, then snapped it closed again. Then I took the grey stone from my pocket, wrapped the thread it hung by around my hand, and held my hand out in front of me, palm down and level with my eyes. "Let's go."
"Okay," Billy said, giving me a skeptical look. "Go where?"
The grey stone quivered and twitched. Then it swung very definitely to the east, drawing the string with it, so that it hung at a slight angle rather than straight down.
I pointed the way the stone leaned and said, "Thata-way. Toward the lake."
"Got it," Billy said. He pulled the van onto the street. "So where are we heading?"
I grunted and stuck an index finger up.
"Up," Billy said, his voice skeptical. "We're going up."
I watched the stone. It wobbled, and I focused on it as I might on my own amulet. It stabilized and leaned toward the lake without wavering or swaying on its string. "Up there," I clarified.
"Where up there?"
Lightning flashed and I pointed toward it. "There up there."
Billy glanced at someone in the back and pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I hope you know a couple of streets I don't, then." He drove for a while more, with me telling him to bear right or left. At a stoplight, the rain still pounding on the windshield, wipers flicking steadily, he asked, "So what's the score?"
"Well-Intentioned But Dangerously Insane Bad Guys are ahead coming down the stretch," I said. "The Faerie Courts are duking it out up there, and it's probably going to be very hairy. The Summer Lady is our baddie, and the Winter Knight is her bitch. She has a magic hankie. She's going to use it to change a statue into a girl and kill her on a big Flintstones table at midnight."
There were a couple of grunts as Meryl pushed her way toward the front of the van. "A girl? Lily?"
I glanced from the stone back to her and nodded. "We have to find Aurora and stop her. Save the girl."
"Or what happens?" Billy asked.
"Badness."
"Kaboom badness?"
I shook my head. "Mostly longer term than that."
"Like what?"
"How do you feel about ice ages?"
Billy whistled. "Uh. Do you mind if I ask a few questions?"
I kept my eyes on the chip of stone. "Go ahead."
"Right," Billy said. "As I understand it, Aurora is trying to tear apartboth of the Faerie Courts, right?"
"Yeah."
"Why? I mean, why not shoot for just Winter so her side wins?"
"Because she can't," I said. "She's limited in her power. She knows she doesn't have the strength it would take to force things on her own. The Queens and the Mothers could stop her easily. So she's using the only method she has open to her."
"Screwing up the balance of power," Billy said. "But she's doing it by giving a bunch of mojo to Winter?"
"Limits," I said. "She can't move Winter's power around at all, the way she can Summer's. That's why she had to kill her own Knight. She knew she could pour his power out into a vessel of her choosing."
"Lily," growled Meryl.
I glanced over my shoulder at her and nodded. "Someone who would trust her. Who wouldn't be able to protect herself against Aurora's enchantment."
"So why'd she turn the girl to stone?" Billy asked.
"It was her cover," I said. "The Queens could have found an active Knight. But once Lily was turned to stone, the Knight's mantle was stuck in limbo. Aurora knew that everyone would suspect Mab of doing something clever and that Titania would be forced to prepare to fight. Mab would have to move in response, and the pair of them would create the battleground around the Stone Table."
"What's the Table for?"
"Pouring power into one of the Courts," I said. "It belongs to Summer until midnight tonight. After that, any power that gets poured in goes to Winter."
"Which is where we're going now," Billy said.
"Uh-huh," I said. "Turn left at that light."
Billy nodded. "So Aurora steals the power and hides it, which forces the Queens to bring out the battleground with the big table."
"Right. Now Aurora plans to take Lily there and use the Unraveling to free her of the stone curse she's under. Then she kills her and touches off Faerie-geddon. She's got to get to the table after midnight, but before Mab's forces actually take the ground around it. That means she's only got a small window of opportunity, and we need to stop her from using it."
"I still don't get it," Billy said. "What the hell is she hoping to accomplish?"
"Probably she thinks she can ride out the big war. Then she'll put it all together again from the ashes just the way she wants it."
"Thank God she's not too arrogant or anything," Billy muttered. "It seems to me that Mab is going to be handed a huge advantage in this. Why didn't Aurora just work together with Mab?"
"It probably never occurred to her to try it that way. She's Summer. Mab is Winter. The two don't work together."
"Small favors," Billy said. "So what do we do to help?"
"I'm going to have to move around through a battleground. I need muscle to do it. I don't want to stop to fight. We just keep moving until I can get to the Stone Table and stop Aurora. And I want all of you changed before we go up there. Faeries are vindictive as hell and you're going to piss some of them off. Better if they never get to see your faces."
"Right," Billy said. "How many faeries are we talking about?"
I squinted up at a particularly violent burst of lightning. "All of them."
The stone the Gatekeeper had given me led us to the waterfront along Burnham Harbor. Billy parked the van on the street outside the wharves that had once been the lifeblood of the city and that still received an enormous amount of shipping every year. Halogen floodlights every couple of hundred feet made the docks into a silent still life behind a grid of chain-link fence.
I turned to the Alphas and said, "All right, folks. Before we go up, I've got to put some ointment on your eyes. It stinks, but it will keep you from being taken in by most faerie glamours."
"Me first," Billy said at once. I opened the little jar and smeared the dark ointment on under his eyes, little half-moons of dark, greasy brown. He checked his eyes in the mirror and said, "And I used to sneer at the football team."
"Get your game face on," I said. Billy slipped out of the car and pitched his sweats and T-shirt back in. I got out of the van and opened the side door. Billy, in his wolf-shape, came trotting around the side of the van and sat nearby as I smeared the greasy ointment on the eyes of all the Alphas.
It was a little unnerving, to me anyway. They were all naked as I did it, shimmering into wolf-form as soon as I had finished, and joining Billy outside. One of the girls, a redhead who had been daintily plump, now looked like something from a men's magazine. She gave me a somewhat satisfied smile as I noticed, and the next, a petite girl with mousy brown hair and a long scar on her shoulder, held her dress against her front and confided, "She's been impossible this year," as I smeared ointment on her.
Half a dozen young men and another half a dozen young women, all told, made for a lot of wolf. They waited patiently as I slapped the ointment on Fix, then Meryl, and finally myself. I used the very last of it, and blew out a deep breath. I put on my gun, on a hip rig instead of a shoulder holster, and hoped that the rain and my duster would conceal it from any passing observation. Then I drew my pentacle out to lie on my shirt, gathered up my staff and rod, slipping the latter through the straps on the doctor's bag, and picked it up. I juggled things around for a moment, until I could get the grey stone on its thread out and into my hand, and thought that maybe Elaine had the right idea when it came to going with smaller magical foci.
I had just gotten out into the rain when the wolves all looked out into the night at once. One of them, I think Billy, let out a bark and they scattered, leaving me and Meryl and Fix standing there alone in the rain.
"W-what?" Fix stammered. "What happened? Where did they go?"
Meryl said, "They must have heard something." She reached back into the minivan and came out with a machete and a wood axe. Then she pulled out a heavy denim jacket that had been festooned in layers of what looked like silverware. It rattled as she put it on.
"No chain mail?" I asked.
Fix fussed with a fork that was sticking out too far and said in an apologetic tone, "Best I could do on short notice. It's steel, though. So, you know, it will be harder for anything to bite her." He hopped back into the minivan and came out with a bulky toolbox that looked heavy as hell. The little guy lifted it to his shoulder as though he did it all the time and licked his lips. "What do we do?"
I checked the stone, which still pointed at the lake. "We move forward. If there's something out there, Billy will let us know."
Fix gulped, his frizzy white hair slowly being plastered to his head by the rain. "Are you sure?"
"Stay close to me, Fix," Meryl said. "How are we going to go that way, Dresden? There's a fence. Harbor security, too."
I had no idea, but I didn't want to say that. I headed for the nearest gate instead. "Come on."
We got to the gate and found it open. A broken chain dangled from one edge. Part of the shattered link lay on the ground nearby. The ends had been twisted, not cut, and steam curled up from them in a little hissing cloud where raindrops touched.
"Broken," I said. "And not long ago. This rain would cool the metal down fast."
"Not by a faerie, either," Meryl said quietly. "They don't like to come close to a fence like this."
"Silly," Fix sniffed. "A cheap set of bolt cutters would have been better than just breaking a perfectly good chain."
"Yeah, nasties can be irrational that way," I said. The stone continued to lean out toward the end of one of the long wharves thrusting into the lake. "Out that way."
We went through the gate and had gone maybe twenty feet before the halogen floodlights went out, leaving us in storm-drenched blackness.
I fumbled for my amulet with cold fingers, but Fix and Meryl both beat me to it. Fix's toolbox thunked down, and a moment later he stood up with a heavy-duty flashlight. At almost the same time, there was a crackle of plastic, and Meryl shook the tube of a chemical light into eerie green luminescence.
A gunshot barked, sharp and loud, and Meryl jerked and staggered to one side. She looked down at blood spreading over her jeans, her expression one of startled shock.
"Down!" I said, and hit her at the waist, bearing her to the ground as the gun barked again. I grabbed at the glow stick and shoved it into my coat. "Put out those lights!"
Fix fumbled with the flashlight as another shot rang out, sending a sputter of sparks from his toolbox. Fix yelped and dropped the light. It rolled over to one side, slewing a cone of illumination out behind us.
The light spilled over the form of the Tigress, the ghoul assassin, not even bothering to try a human shape now. In her natural form, she was a hunch-shouldered, grey-skinned fiend, something blending the worst features of mankind, hyena, and baboon. Short, wiry red hairs prickled over her whole body. Her legs were stunted and strong, her arms too long, and her hands tipped in spurs of bone that replaced nails. Her hair hung about her head in a soggy, matted lump, and her eyes, furious as she came running forward, glared with malice. Pink and grey scars stood out against her skin, swollen areas where she'd healed all the damage Murphy had inflicted on her the night before. She flew toward us over the ground, running with all four limbs, mouth gaping wide.
She didn't see the Alphas closing in behind her.
The first wolf, black grease still in half-circles under its eyes, hit her right leg, a quick snapping, jerking motion of its jaws. The ghoul shrieked in surprise and fell, tumbling. She regained her feet quickly and struck out at the wolf who had bloodied her, but the big grey beast rolled aside as a taller, tawnier wolf leapt over him. The second wolf took the ghoul's other leg, bounding away when the ghoul turned on it, while a third wolf darted in at the Tigress's back.
The ghoul screamed and tried to run again. The wolves didn't let her. I watched as another wolf slammed into her, knocking her down. She rolled to her front, but she'd been hamstrung, and her legs were now useless weight. Claws flashed out and drew flecks of blood, but the wolf she'd hit scrambled onto her back, jaws closing in on the back of the ghoul's neck. She let out a last frantic, gurgling scream.
Then the werewolves buried her in a tide of fur and flashing fangs. When they drew away half a minute later, I couldn't have recognized the remains for what they were. My stomach curled up on itself, and I forced myself to look away before I started throwing up.
I grabbed Meryl underneath her arms and started tugging her toward the nearest warehouse. I snarled, "Help me," at Fix, and he pitched in, surprisingly strong.
"Oh, God," Fix whimpered. "Oh, God, Meryl, oh, God."
"It's not bad," Meryl panted, as we dragged her around a corner of the building. "It isn't too bad, Fix."
I got out the glow stick and checked. Her jeans were stained with blood, black in the green light, but not as badly as they should have been. I found a long tear along the fabric of one leg, and whistled. "Lucky," I said. "Grazed you. Doesn't look like it's bleeding too bad." I poked at her leg. "Can you feel that?"
She winced.
"Good," I said. "Stay here. Fix, stay with her."
I left my bag there and unlimbered my gun. I kept it pointed at the ground and made sure my shield bracelet was ready to go, gathering energy into it in order to shield myself from any more rifle shots. I didn't raise the gun to level. I didn't want it to go off accidentally and bounce a bullet off my own shield and into my head.
As I stepped around the corner, I heard a short scream and then a series of sharp barks. One of the wolves appeared in the cone of Fix's fallen light, picked it up in his mouth, and trotted toward me.
"All clear?" I asked.
The wolf ducked his head in a couple of quick nods and dropped the flashlight on my foot. I picked it up. The wolf barked again and started off toward the wharf. I frowned at him and said, "You want me to follow you?"
He rolled his eyes and nodded again.
I started off after him. "If it turns out that Timmy's stuck down the well, I'm going home."
The wolf led me to the wharf the stone had pointed to, and there I found a young man in dark slacks and a white jacket on the ground in a circle of wolves. He held one bleeding hand against his belly and was panting. A rifle lay on the ground nearby, next to a broken pair of sunglasses. He looked up at me and grimaced, his face pale behind his goatee.
"Ace," I said. I shook my head. "You were the one who hired the ghoul."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he lied. "Get these things away from me, Dresden. Let me go."
"I'm running late, Ace, or I'd have the patience for more chitchat." I nodded at the nearest wolf and said, "Tear his nose off."
Ace screamed and fell back, covering his face with both arms. I winked at the wolf and stepped forward to stand over the changeling. "Or maybe his ears. Or toes. What do you think, Ace? What's going to make you talk fastest? Or should I just try them all one at a time?"
"Go to hell," Ace gasped. "You can do whatever you want, but I'm not talking. Go to hell, Dresden."
Footsteps came up behind us. Meryl limped close enough to see Ace, and then just stood there for a minute, staring at him. Fix followed her, staring.
"Ace," Fix said. "You? You shot Meryl?"
The bearded changeling swallowed and lowered his arms, looking at Meryl and Fix. "I'm sorry. Meryl, it was an accident. I wasn't aiming at you."
The green-haired changeling stared at Ace and said, "You were trying to kill Dresden. The only one besides Ron who has ever taken a step out of his way to help us. The only one who can help Lily."
"I didn'twant to. But that was their price."
"Whose price?" Meryl asked in a monotone.
Ace licked his lips, eyes flicking around nervously. "I can't tell you. They'll kill me."
Meryl stepped forward and kicked him in the belly. Hard. Ace doubled over and threw up, gasping and twitching and sobbing. He couldn't get enough breath to cry out.
"Whose price?" Meryl asked again. When Ace didn't speak, she shifted her weight as though to repeat the kick and he cried out.
"Wait," he whimpered. "Wait."
"I'm done waiting," Meryl said.
"God, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, Meryl. It was the vampires. The Reds. I was trying to get protection from Slate, from that bitch Maeve. They said if I got rid of the wizard, they'd fix it."
"Bastards," I muttered. "So you hired the Tigress."
"I didn't have a choice," Ace whined. "If I hadn't done it, they'd have taken me themselves."
"You had a choice, Ace," Fix said quietly.
I shook my head. "How did you know we'd be coming here?"
"The Reds," Ace said. "They told me where you'd show up. They didn't say you wouldn't be alone. Meryl, please. I'm sorry."
She faced him without expression. "Shut up, Ace."
"Look," he said. "Look, let's get out of here. All right? The three of us, we can get clear of this. We need to before we can't help it anymore."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Meryl said.
"You do," Ace said, leaning up toward Meryl, his eyes intent. "You feel it. You hear her Calling us. You feel it just like I do. The Queen Calls us. All of Winter's blood."
"She Calls," Meryl said. "But I'm not answering."
"If you don't want to run, then we should think about what we're going to do. After this battle is over, Maeve and Slate are just going to come for us again. But if we declare a loyalty, if we Choose---"
Meryl kicked Ace in the stomach again. "You worthless trash. All you ever think of is yourself. Get out of my sight before I kill you."
Ace gagged and tried to protest. "But---"
Meryl snarled, "Now!"
The force of the word made Ace flinch away, and he turned it into a scramble before rising to run. The wolves all looked at me, but I shook my head. "Let him go."
Meryl shrugged her shoulders and lifted her face to the rain.
"You okay?" Fix asked her.
"Have to be," she said. Maybe it was just me, but her voice sounded a little lower, rougher. Trollier. Gulp. "Let's move, wizard."
"Yeah," I said. "Uh, yeah." I lifted the Gatekeeper's stone and followed it down the wharf to the last pier, then down to the end of the last pier, empty of any ships or boats. A dozen wolves and two changelings followed me. Nothing but the cold waters of Lake Michigan and a rolling thunderstorm surrounded me at the end of the pier, and the stone twitched, swinging almost to the horizontal on its pale thread.
"No kidding," I muttered. "I know it's up." I reached out a hand and felt something, a tingle of energy, dancing and swirling in front of me. I reached a bit further, and it became more tangible, solid. I drew up a little of my will and sent it out, toward that force, a gentle surge of energy.
Brilliant light flickering through opalescent shades rose up in front of me, as bright as the full moon and as solid as ice. The light resolved itself into the starry outline of stairs, stairs that began at the end of the pier and climbed into the storm above. I stepped forward and put one foot on the lowest step. It bore my weight, leaving me standing on a block of translucent moonlight over the wind-tossed waters of Lake Michigan.
"Wow," Fix breathed.
"We go up that?" Meryl asked.
"Woof," said Billy the Werewolf.
"While we're young," I said, and took the next step. "Come on."
Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.
Thedrinks , people.
That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of Lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces.
But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this anescalator ."
Long story short: we climbed about a mile of stairs and came out in the land my godmother had shown me before, standing on the storm clouds over Chicago.
But it didn't look like it had before the opening curtain.
What had once been rolling and silent terrain sculpted of cloud, smooth and naked as a dressing dummy, had now been filled with sound, color, and violence. The storm below that battlefield was a pale reflection of the one raging upon it.
We emerged on one of the hills looking down into the valley of the Stone Table, and the hillside around us, lit with flashes of lightning in the clouds beneath, was covered in faeries of all sizes and descriptions. Sounds rang through the air---the crackling snap of lightning and the roar of thunder following. Trumpets, high and sweet, deep and brassy. Drums beat to a dozen different cadences that both clashed and rumbled in time with one another. Shouts and cries rang out in time with those drums, shrieks that might have come from human throats, together with bellows and roars that couldn't have. Taken as a whole, it was its own wild storm of music, huge, teeth-rattling, overwhelming, and charged with adrenaline. Wagner wished he could have had it so good.
Not twenty feet away stood a crowd of short, brown-skinned, white-haired little guys, their hands and feet twice as large as they should have been, bulbous noses the size of lightbulbs behind helmets made out of what looked like some kind of bone. They wore bone armor, and bore shields and weaponry, and stood in rank and file. Their eyes widened as I came up out of the clouds in my billowing black duster, leather slick with rain. Billy and the werewolves surrounded me in a loose ring as they emerged, and Fix and Meryl pressed up close behind me.
On the other side of us stood a troll a good eight feet tall, its skin upholstered in knobby, hairy warts, lank hair hanging greasily past its massive shoulders, tiny red eyes glaring from beneath its single craggy brow. Its nostrils flared out and it turned toward me, drool dribbling from its lips, but the wolves crouched down around me, snarling. The troll blinked at them for a long moment while it processed a thought, and then turned away as though disinterested. More creatures stood within a long stone's throw, including a group of Sidhe knights, completely encased in faerie armor and mounted on long-legged warhorses of deep blue, violet, and black. A wounded sylph crouched nearby and would have looked like a lovely, winged girl from fifty yards away---but from there I could see her bloodied claws and the glittering razor edge of her wings.
I couldn't see the whole of the valley below. Some kind of mist or haze lay over it, and only gave me the occasional glimpse of whirling masses of troops and beings, ranks of somewhat human things massed together against one another, while other beings, some of which could only be called "monsters," rose up above the rest, slamming together in titanic conflicts that crushed those around them as mere circumstantial casualties.
More important, I couldn't see the Stone Table, and I couldn't even make a decent guess as to where I was standing in relation to where it should have been. The stone the Gatekeeper had given me leaned steadily in one direction, but that led straight down into the madness below us.
"What next?" Meryl yelled at me. She had to shout, though she was only a few feet away---and we were standing above the real fury of the battle below.
I shook my head and started to answer, but Fix tugged on my sleeve and piped something that got swallowed by the sounds of battle. I looked to where he was pointing, and saw one of the mounted Sidhe knights leave the others and come riding toward us.
He raised the visor of his helmet, an oddly decorated piece that somehow seemed insectoid. Pale faerie skin and golden cat-eyes regarded us from atop the steed for a moment, before he inclined his head to me and lifted a hand. The sounds of battle immediately cut off, boom, like someone had turned off a radio, and the silence threatened to put me off balance.
"Emissary," the Sidhe knight said. "I greet thee and thy companions."
"Greetings, warrior," I said in response. "I needs must speak with Queen Mab posthaste."
He nodded and said, "I will guide thee. Follow. And bid thy companions put away their weapons ere we approach her Majesty."
I nodded and said to those with me, "Put the teeth and cutlery away, folks. We need to play nice a while longer."
We followed the knight up the slope of the hill to its top, where the air grew cold enough to sting. I gathered my coat a little closer around me and could almost see the crystals of ice forming on my eyelashes. I just had to hope that my hair wouldn't freeze and break off.
Mab sat upon a white horse at the top of the hill, her hair down, rolling in silken waves to blend in with the mane and tail of her horse. She was clothed in a gown of white silk, the sleeves and trains falling in gentle sweeps to brush the cloudy ground at her steed's feet. Her lips and eyelashes were blue, her eyes as white as moonlight clouds. The sheer, cold, cruel beauty of her made my heart falter and my stomach flutter nervously. The air around her vibrated with power and shone with cold white and blue light.
"Oh, my God," Fix whispered.
I glanced back. The werewolves were simply staring at Mab, much as Fix was. Meryl regarded her from behind a forced mask of neutrality, but her eyes were alight with something wild and eager. "Steady, folks," I said, and stepped forward.
The Faerie Queen turned her regard to me and murmured, "My Emissary. You have found the thief?"
I inclined my head to her. "Yes, Queen Mab. The Summer Lady, Aurora."
Mab's eyes widened, enough that I got the impression that she understood the whole of the matter from that one fact. "Indeed. And can you bring proof of this to us?"
"If I move swiftly," I said. "I must reach the Stone Table before midnight."
Mab's empty eyes flickered to the stars above, and I thought I saw a hint of worry in them. "They move swiftly this night, wizard." She paused and then breathed out, almost to herself, "Time himself runs against thee."
"What can be done to get me there?"
Mab shook her head and regarded the field below us again. One entire swath of the battlefield flooded with a sudden golden radiance. Mab lifted her hand, and the aura around her flashed with a cerulean fire, the air thickening. That flame lashed out against the gold, and the two clashed in a shower of emerald energy, canceling one another out. Mab lowered her hand and turned to look at me again. Her eyes fell on the chip of stone on its pale thread and widened again. "Rashid. What is his interest in this matter?"
"Uh," I said. "Certainly he isn't, uh, you know, it isn't like he's representing the Council and they're interfering."
Mab took her eyes from the battle long enough to give me a look that said, quite clearly, that I was an idiot. "I know that. And your ointment. It's his recipe. I recognize the smell."
"He helped me find this place, yes."
Mab's lips twitched at the corners. "So. What does the old desert fox have in mind this time?" She shook her head and said, "No matter. The stone cannot lead you to the table. The direct route would place you in the path of battle enough to destroy any mortal. You must go another way."
"I'm listening."
She looked up and said, "Queen of the Air I may be, but these skies are still contested. Titania is at the height of her powers and I at the ebb of mine. Not that way." She pointed to the field, all weirdly lighted mist in gold and blue, green mist swirling with violence where they met. "And Summer gains ground despite all. Our Knight has not taken the field with us. He has been seduced, I presume."
"Yes," I said. "He's with Aurora."
Mab murmured, "That's the last time I let Maeve hire the help. I indulge her too much." She lifted her hand, evidently a signal, and scores of bats the size of hang gliders swarmed up from somewhere behind her, launching themselves in a web-winged cloud into the skies above. "We yet hold the river, wizard, though we lose ground on both sides now. Thy godmother and my daughter have concentrated upon it. But reach the river, and it will take thee through the battle to the hill of the Stone Table."
"Get to the river," I said. "Right. I can do that."
"Those who are mine know of thee, wizard," Mab said. "Give them no cause and they will not hamper thee." She turned away from me, her attention back upon the battle, and the sound of it came crashing back in like a pent-up tide.
I turned from her and went back to the werewolves and the changelings. "We get to the river," I shouted to them. "Try to stay in the blue mist, and don't start a fight with anything."
I started downhill, which as far as I know is the easiest way to find water. We passed through hundreds more troops, most of them units evidently recovering from the first shock of battle: scarlet-and blue-skinned ogres in faerie mail towered over me, their blood almost dull compared to their skin and armor. Another unit of brown-skinned gnomes tended to their wounded with bandages of some kind of moss. A group of sylphs crouched over a mound of bloody, stinking carrion, squabbling like vultures, blood all over their faces, breasts, and dragonfly wings. Another troop of battered, lantern-jawed, burly humanoids with wide, batlike ears, goblins, dragged their dead and some of their wounded over to the sylphs, tossing them onto the carrion pile with businesslike efficiency despite their fellows' feeble screeches and yowls.
My stomach heaved. I fought down both fear and revulsion, and struggled to block out the images of nightmarish carnage around me.
I kept moving ahead, driving my steps with a sense of purpose I didn't wholly feel, and kept the werewolves moving. I could only imagine that it all was worse for Billy and Georgia and the rest---whatever I saw and heard and smelled, they were getting it a lot worse, through their enhanced senses. I called encouragement to them, though I had no idea if they could hear me through the din, and no idea if it did them any good, but it seemed like something I should do, since I'd dragged them here with me. I tried to walk on one side of Fix, screen out some of the worst sights around me. Meryl gave me a grateful nod.
Ahead of us, the bluish mists began to give way to murky shades of green, faerie steel chimed and rasped on faerie steel, and the shrieks and cries of battle grew even louder. More important, amid the screams and shouts I could hear water splashing. We were near the river.
"Okay, folks!" I shouted. "We run forward and get to the river! Don't stop to slug it out with anyone! Don't stop until you're standing in the water!"
Or, I thought,until some faerie soldier rips your legs off .
And I ran forward into the proverbial fray.
An angry buzzing sound arose from the musical din of battle ahead of us, and grew louder as we moved forward. I saw another group of goblin soldiers crouched in a ragged square formation. The goblins on the outside of the square tried to hold up shields against whistling arrows that came flickering through the mist over the water, while those within wielded spears against the source of the buzzing sound---about fifty bumblebees as big as park benches, hovering and darting. I could see a dozen goblins on the ground, wracked with the spasms of poison or simply dead, white-and green-feathered arrows protruding from throats and eyes.
A dozen of the jumbo bees peeled off from the goblins and came toward us, wings singing like a shop class of band saws.
"Holy moly!" Fix shouted.
Billy the Werewolf let out a shocked "Woof?"
"Get behind me!" I shouted and dropped everything but my staff and rod. The bees oriented on me and came zipping toward me, the wind stirred up by their wings tearing at the misty ground like the downblast of a helicopter.
I held my staff out in front of me, gathering my will and pushing it into the focus. I hardened my will into a shield, sending it through the staff, focusing on building a wall of naked force to repel the oncoming bees. I held the strike until they were close enough to see the facets of their eyes, swept my staff from right to left, and cried,"Forzare!"
A curtain of blazing scarlet energy whirled into place in front of me, and it slammed into the oncoming bees like a giant windshield. They went bouncing off of it with heavy thuds of impact. Several of the bees crash-landed and lay on the ground stunned, but two or three veered off at the last second, circling for another attack.
I lifted my blasting rod, tracking the nearest. I gathered up more of my will and snarled,"Fuego!" A lance of crimson energy, white at the core, leapt out from the tip of the blasting rod and scythed across the giant bee's path. My fire caught it across the wings and burned them to vapor. The bee dropped, part of one wing making it spin in a fluttering spiral that slammed into the ground on the bank of the river. The other two retreated, and their fellows attacking the goblins followed suit. The green tones faded from the mist at the edge of the river, which deepened to blue. The goblins let out a rasping, snarling cheer.
I looked around me and found Fix and Meryl staring at me with wide eyes. Fix swallowed, and I saw his mouth form the word "Wow."
I all but tore my hair out in frustration. "Go!" I shouted and started running for the water, pushing and tugging at them to get them moving. "Go, go, go!"
We were ten feet from shore when I heard hoofbeats sweeping toward the river from the far side. I looked up to see horses sailing through the mist---not flying horses but long-legged faerie steeds, coats and manes shining golden and green, that had simply leapt from the far side of the river, bearing their riders with them.
On the lead horse, the first whose hooves touched the ground on our side of the river, was the Winter Knight. Lloyd Slate was spattered in liquids of various colors that could only be blood. He bore a sword in one hand, the reins to his mount in the other, and he was laughing. Even as he landed, the nearby goblins mounted a charge.
Slate turned toward them, sword whirling and gathering with it a howl of freezing winds, its blade riming with ice. He met the first goblin's sword with his own, and the squat faerie soldier's blade shattered. Slate shifted his shoulders and sent his horse leaping a few feet to one side. Behind him, the goblin's head toppled from its shoulders, which spouted greenish blood for a few seconds before the body fell beside the head on the misty ground. The remaining goblins retreated, and Slate whirled his steed around to face me.
"Wizard!" he shouted, laughing. "Still alive!"
More faerie steeds leapt the river, Summer Sidhe warriors touching down behind Slate in helmets and mail in a riot of wildflower colors. One of them was Talos, in his dark mail, also stained with blood and bearing a slender sword spattered in so many colors of liquid that it looked as if it had cut the throat of a baby rainbow. Aurora landed as well, her battlegown shining, and a moment later there was a thunder of bigger hooves and a grunt of effort, and Korrick landed on our side of the river, his hooves driving deep into the ground.
Strapped onto the centaur's shoulders, both human and equine, was the stone statue of the kneeling girl---Lily, now the Summer Knight.
Aurora drew up short and her eyes widened. Her horse must have sensed her disturbance, because it half-reared and danced nervously left and right. The Summer Lady lifted her hand, and once more the roar of battle abruptly ceased.
"You," she half whispered.
"Give me the Unraveling and let the girl go, Aurora. It's over."
The Summer Lady's eyes glittered, green and too bright. She looked up at the stars and then back to me, with that same, too-intense pressure to her gaze, and I began to understand. Bad enough that she was one of the Sidhe, already alien to mortal kind. Bad enough that she was a Faerie Queen, driven by goals I didn't fully understand, following rules I could only just begin to grasp.
She was also mad. Loopy as a crochet convention.
"The hour is here, wizard," she hissed. "Winter's rebirth---and the end of this pointless cycle. Over, indeed!"
"Mab knows, Aurora," I said. "Titania will soon know. There's no point to this anymore. They won't let you do it."
Aurora let her head fall back as she laughed, the sound piercingly sweet. It set my nerves to jangling, and I had to push it back from my thoughts with an effort of will. The werewolves and the changelings didn't do so well. The wolves flinched back with high-pitched whimpers and frightened growls, and Fix and Meryl actually fell to their knees, clutching at their ears.
"They cannot stop me, wizard," Aurora said, that mad laughter still bubbling through her words. "And neither can you." Her eyes blazed, and she pointed her finger at me. "Korrick, with me. The rest of you. Kill Harry Dresden. Kill them all."
She turned and started down the river, golden light burning through the blue mist in a twenty-foot circle around her, and the centaur followed, leaving the battle roar, the horns and the drums, the screams and the shrieks, the music and the terror to come thundering back over us. The Sidhe warriors, a score of them, focused on me and drew swords or lifted long spears in their hands. Talos, in his spell-repelling mail that had enabled him to impersonate an ogre, shook colors from his blade and focused on me with deadly feline intensity. Slate let out another laugh, spinning his sword arrogantly in his hand.
Around me, I heard the werewolves crouch down, growls bubbling up in their throats. Meryl gathered herself to her feet, blood running from her ears, and took her axe in one big hand, drawing her machete into the other. Fix, his ears bleeding, his face pale and resolved, opened his toolbox with shaking hands and drew out a great big old grease-stained monkey wrench.
I gripped my staff and blasting rod and planted my feet. I called my power to me, lifted my staff, and smote it against the ground. Power crackled along its length and rumbled like thunder through the ground, frightening the faerie mounts into restlessness.
Slate leveled his sword at me and let out a cry, taking the panicked animal from a frightened rear to a full frontal charge. Around him, the warriors of the Summer Court followed, the light of stars and moon glittering on their swords and armor, horses screaming, surging toward us like a deadly, bejeweled tide.
The werewolves let out a full-throated howl, eerie and savage. Meryl screamed, wild and loud, and even Fix let out a tinny battle shriek.
The noise was deafening, and no one could have heard me anyway as I let out my own battle cry, which I figured was worth a shot. What the hell.
"I don't believe in faeries!"
Cavalry charges are all about momentum. You get a ton of furious horse and warrior going in one direction and flatten everything in your way. As the Sidhe cavalry came thundering toward us along the banks of the river, and as my heart pounded in my chest and my legs started shaking in naked fear, I knew that if I wanted to survive the next few seconds, I had to find a way to steal that momentum and use it for myself.
I dropped my blasting rod to grip my staff in both hand, and extend it before me. The moment I did, Sidhe riders began making swift warding gestures, accompanied by staccato bursts of magical pressure, separate protective charms rising up before each of them to block whatever magic I was about to throw.
The horses, however, didn't do any such thing.
I raised a shield, but not in a wall in front of me. Such a warding would have brought the faerie nobles into contact with it, and no one wizard could hold a spell against the wills of a score of faerie lords. I brought up a shield only a couple of feet high, and stretched it in a ribbon across the ground at the feet of Slate's mount.
The Winter Knight's steed, a giant grey-green beast, never knew what hit it. The low wall I'd called up clipped it at the knees, and it came crashing down to the misty earth with a scream, dragging Slate down with it. Talos, on Slate's right, could not react in time to stop his mount or to avoid the wall, but he threw himself clear as his horse went down, dropped into a roll as nimble and precise as any martial arts movie aficionado could desire, and came up on his feet. He spun, a dance-like step somehow in time with the vast song of the battlefield, and his sword came whipping at my head.
Dimly, I heard other horses screaming, tripping not only on my wall but on one another now, but I had no idea how well the spell had worked on the rest of the Sidhe warriors. I was too busy ducking Talos's first swing and backing out of range of the next.
Meryl stepped between us and caught Talos's sword in theX formed by her axe and machete. She strained against Summer's Lord Marshal, leaning her whole body into the effort, muscles quivering. I'd felt exactly how strong the changeling girl was, but Talos simply pressed against that strength, his face composed, slowly overcoming her.
"Why do you do this, changeling child?" Talos called. "You who have struggled against Winter so long. It is useless. Stand aside. I wish no harm to thee."
"Like you wish no harm to Lily?" Meryl shouted. "How can you do that to her?"
"It does not please me, child, but it is not for me to decide," Talos answered. "She is my Queen."
"She's not mine," Meryl snarled, and drove her forehead forward, into Talos's nose. She struck him hard enough that I heard the impact, and it drove the faerie lord back several staggered paces.
She didn't see Slate come up from the ground a few feet away and make a quick, squatting lunge at her flank.
"Meryl!" I shouted into the tumult. "Look out!"
She didn't hear me. The Winter Knight's sword bit into her just below her lowest rib, and she took more than a foot of frost-covered steel, thrusting up and back. Slate's sword tore through her and came out through her jacket and the flatware coating it, emerging like some bloody blade of grass. She faltered, her mouth opening in a gasp. Both axe and machete fell from her hands.
"Meryl!" Fix screamed nearby.
Slate laughed and said something I couldn't hear. Then he twisted the blade with a wrenching pop and whipped it back out. Meryl stared at him and reached out a hand. Slate slapped it contemptuously aside and turned his back on her. She fell limply down.
I felt the rage rising and climbed back to my feet, gripping my staff in both hands. Slate reached down and dragged Talos up from the ground with one hand.
"Slate!" I shouted. "Slate, you murdering bastard!"
The Winter Knight's head whipped around toward me. His sword came up to guard. Talos's eyes widened, and his fingers made a series of swift warding gestures.
I gathered my rage together and reached down into the ground beneath me, found the fury of the storm within it that matched my own. I thrust the end of my staff down into the misty cloud-ground as if I'd been driving a hole through a frozen lake, then extended my right hand toward the Winter Knight."Ventas!" I shouted."Ventas fulmino!"
The fury of the storm beneath us reared up through the wood of my staff, electricity rising in a buzzing roar of light and energy coming up from the ground and spiraling around the staff and across my body. It whirled down my extended right arm, a serpent of blue-white lightning, hesitated for a second, and then lashed across the space between me and the tip of Lloyd Slate's sword, fastening onto the blade, and bathing Slate in a writhing coruscation of azure sparks.
Slate's body jerked, his back arching violently. Thunder tore the air apart as the bolt of lightning struck home, throwing Slate into the air and hurling him violently to the ground. The shock wave of the thunder knocked me down, together with everyone else in the immediate area.
Everyone except Talos.
The Lord Marshal of Summer braced himself against the concussion, lifting one hand before his eyes as if it had been a stiff breeze. Then, in the deafening silence that came after, he lifted his sword and came straight toward me.
I reached for my blasting rod, on the ground not far away, lifted it, and threw a quick lash of fire at Talos. The Sidhe lord didn't even bother to gesture it aside. It splashed against him and away, and with a sweep of his sword he sent my blasting rod spinning from my grasp. I lifted my staff as a feeble shield with my left hand, and he struck that away as well.
Some of my hearing returned, enough for me to hear him say, "And so it ends."
"You're damned right," I muttered. "Look down."
He did.
I'd drawn my .357 in my right hand while he'd knocked the staff out of my left. I braced my right elbow against the ground and pulled the trigger.
A second roar of thunder, sharper than the first, blossomed out from the end of the gun. I don't think the bullet penetrated the dark faerie mail, because it didn't tear through Talos like it should have. It hit him like a sledgehammer instead, driving him back and toppling him to the ground. He lay there for a moment, stunned.
It was cheap, but I was in a freaking war and I was more than a little angry. I kicked him in the face with the heel of my boot, and then I leaned down and clubbed him with the heavy barrel of the .357 until his stunned attempts to defend himself ceased and he lay still, the skin of his face burned and blistered where the steel of the gun's barrel stuck him.
I looked up in time to see Lloyd Slate, his right arm dangling uselessly, swing the broken haft of a spear at my head. There was a flash of light and pain, and I fell back on the ground, too stunned to know how badly I'd been hit. I tried to bring the gun to bear again, but Slate took it from my hand, spun it around a finger, and lowered the barrel toward my head, already thumbing the hammer back. I saw the gun coming down and saw as well that Slate wasn't going to pause for dramatic dialogue. The second I saw the dark circle of the barrel, I threw myself to one side, lifting my arms. The gun roared, and I waited for a light at the end of what I was pretty sure would be a downward sloping tunnel.
Slate missed. A ferocious, high-pitched shriek of fury made him whip his head to one side as a new attacker entered the fray.
Fix brought his monkey wrench down in a two-handed swing that ended at Lloyd Slate's wrist. There was a crunch of impact, of the delicate bones there snapping, and my gun went flying into the water. Slate let out a snarl and swung his broken arm at Fix, but the little guy was quick. He met the blow with the monkey wrench held in both hands, and it was Slate who screamed and reeled from the blow.
"You hurt her!" Fix screamed. His next swing hit Slate in the side of his left kneecap, and dropped the Winter Knight to the ground. "You hurt Meryl!"
Slate tried to roll away, but Fix rained two-handed blows of the monkey wrench down on his back. Evidently, whatever power it was that let Slate shrug off a bolt of lightning had been expended, or else it couldn't stand up to the cold steel of Fix's weapon. The little changeling pounded on Slate's back, screaming at him, until one of the blows landed on the back of his neck. The Winter Knight went limp and lay utterly still.
Fix came over to me and helped me up. As he did, wolves surrounded us, several of them bloodied, all of them with teeth bared. I looked blearily over them, to see the Sidhe warriors regrouping, dragging a couple of wounded. One horse lay on the ground screaming, the others had scattered, and only one warrior was still mounted, another slender Sidhe in green armor and a masked helm. Weapons still in hand, the Sidhe prepared to charge us again.
"Help me," Fix pleaded, hauling desperately at Meryl's shoulder. I stepped up on wobbly legs, but someone brushed past me. Billy, naked and stained with bright faerie blood, took Meryl under the shoulders, and dragged her back behind what protection the pack of werewolves offered.
"This is going to be bad," he said. "We had an edge---their horses were terrified of us. On foot, I don't know how well we'll do. Almost everyone's hurt. How's Harry?"
"Dammit," Meryl growled thickly. "Let me go. It isn't all that bad. See to the wizard. If he goes down none of us are going home."
"Meryl!" Fix said. "I thought you were hurt bad."
The changeling girl sat up, her face pale, her clothing drenched in blood. "Most of it isn't mine," she said, and I knew she was lying. "How is he?"
Billy had sat me down on the ground at some point, and I felt him poking at my head. I flinched when it got painful. Sitting down helped, and I started to put things together again.
"His skull isn't broken," Billy said. "Maybe a concussion, I don't know."
"Give me a minute," I said. "I'll make it."
Billy gripped my shoulder, relief in the gesture. "Right. We're going to have to run for it, Harry. There's more fight coming toward us."
Billy was right. I could hear the sounds of more horses, somewhere nearby in the mist, and the hammering of hundreds of goblin boots striking the ground in step.
"We can't run," Meryl said. "Aurora still has Lily."
Billy said, "Talk later. Here they come!" He blurred and dropped to all fours, taking his wolf-form again as we looked up and saw the Sidhe warriors coming toward us.
The waters behind them abruptly erupted, the still surface of the river boiling up, and cavalry, all dark blue, sea green, deep purple, rose up from under the waves. The riders were more Sidhe warriors, clad in warped-looking armor decorated in stylized snowflakes. There were only a dozen of them to the Summer warriors' score, but they were mounted and attacking from behind. They cut into the ranks of the Summer warriors, blades flickering, led by a warrior in mail of purest white, bearing a pale and cold-looking blade. The Summer warriors turned to fight, but they'd been taken off guard and they knew it.
The leader of the Winter attack cut down one warrior, then turned to another, hand spinning through a series of gestures. Cold power surged around that gesture, and one of the Summer warriors simply stopped moving, the crackling in the air around him growing louder as crystals of ice seemed simply to erupt from the surface of his body and armor, frozen from the inside out. In seconds, he was nothing but a slowly growing block of ice around a gold-and-green figure inside, and the pale rider almost negligently nudged the horse into a solid kick.
The ice shattered into pieces and fell to the ground in a jumbled pile.
The pale rider took off her helmet and flashed me a brilliant, girlish smile. It was Maeve, the Winter Lady, her green eyes bright with bloodlust, dreadlocks bound close to her head. She almost idly licked blood from her sword, as another Summer warrior fell to one knee, his back to the water, sword raised desperately against the riders confronting him.
The waters surged again, and pale, lovely arms reached out, wrapping around his throat from behind. I caught a glimpse of golden eyes and a green-toothed smile, and then the warrior's scream was cut off as he was dragged under the surface. The Summer warriors retreated, swift and in concert. The rest of the mounted Winter warriors set out in pursuit.
"Your godmother sends her greetings," Maeve called to me. "I'd have acted sooner, but it would have been a fair fight, and I avoid them."
"I need to get to the Table," I called to her.
"So I have been told," Maeve said. She rode her horse over to Lloyd Slate's unmoving form, and her lovely young face opened into another brilliant smile. "My riders are attacking further down the river, drawing Summer forces that way. You should be able to run upstream." She leaned down and purred, "Hello, Lloyd. We should have a talk."
"Come on, then," grunted Meryl. "Can you walk, wizard?"
In answer, I pushed myself to my feet. Meryl stood too, though I saw her face twist with pain as she did. Fix hefted his bloodied monkey wrench. I recovered my staff, but my blasting rod was nowhere to be seen. The black doctor bag lay nearby, and I recovered it, taking time to check its contents before closing it again. "All right, people, let's go."
We started along the stream at a jog. I didn't know how far we had to go. Everything around us was chaos and confusion. Once a cloud of pixies flew past us, and I found another stretch over the river where spiders as big as footballs had spun webs, trapping dozens of pixies in their strands. A group of faerie hounds, green and grey and savage, went past hot on the heels of a long panther like being headed for the water. Arrows whistled past, and everywhere lay the faerie dead and dying.
Finally, I felt the ground begin to rise, and looked up to see the hill of the Stone Table before us. I could even see Korrick's hulking form at the top, as the centaur backed away from the stone figure of Lily, evidently just set upon the table. Aurora, dismounted, was a slender, gleaming form, looking down upon us with anger.
"Lily!" Meryl called, though her voice had gone thready. Fix whirled to look at her, his eyes alarmed, and Meryl dropped to one knee, her ugly, honest face twisting in pain. "Get her, Fix. Save her and get her home." She looked around, focusing on me. "You'll help him?"
"You paid for it," I said. "Stay here. Stay down. You've done enough."
She shook her head and said, "One thing more." But she settled down on the ground, hand pressed to her wounded side, panting.
Aurora said something sharp to Korrick. The centaur bowed his head to her and, spear gripped in his hand, came down the hill toward us.
"Crap," I said. "Billy, this guy is a heavy hitter. Don't close with him. See if you can keep him distracted."
Billy barked in acknowledgment, and the werewolves shot forward as the centaur descended, fanning out around him and harrying his flanks and rear while their companions dodged his hooves and spear.
"Stay with Meryl," I told Fix, and scooted around the werewolves' flanks, heading up the hill toward the Stone Table.
I got close enough to the top to see Aurora standing over the statue of Lily. She held Mother Winter's Unraveling in her fingers, pressed against the statue, and she was tugging sharply at the strands, beginning to pull it to pieces. I felt something as she did, a kind of dark gravity that jerked at my wizard's senses with sharp, raking fingers. The Unraveling began to come apart, strand by strand and line by line, under Aurora's slender hands.
I stretched out my hand, adrenaline and pain giving me plenty of fuel for the magic, and called,"Ventas servitas!" Wind leapt out in a sudden spurt, seizing the Unraveling and tearing it from Aurora's fingers, sending it spinning through the air toward me. I caught it, stuck my tongue out at Aurora, yelled, "Meep, meep!" and ran like hell.
"Damn thee, wizard!" screamed Aurora, and the sound raked at me with jagged talons. She lifted her hands and shouted something else, and the ground itself shook, throwing me off my feet. I landed and rolled as best I could down the hill until I reached the bottom. It took me a second to drag in a breath, then I rolled to my back to sit up.
Sudden wind slashed at me, slamming me back down to the earth, and tore the Unraveling from my hands. I looked up to see Aurora take the bit of cloth from the air with casual contempt, and start back up the hill. I struggled to sit up and follow, but the wind kept me pinned there, unable to rise from the ground.
"No more interruptions," Aurora spat, and gestured with one hand.
The ground screamed. From it, writhing up with whipping, ferocious motion, came a thick hedge of thorns as long as my hand. It rose into place in a ring around the waist of the hill, so dense that I couldn't see Aurora behind it.
I fought against Aurora's spell, but couldn't overcome it physically, and I didn't even bother to try to rip it to shreds with sheer main magical strength. I stopped struggling and closed my eyes to begin to feel my way through it, to take it apart from the inside. But even as I did, Fix started screaming, "Harry? Harry! Help!"
One of the werewolves let loose a high-pitched scream of agony, and then another. My concentration wavered, and I struggled to regain it. Those people were here because of me, and I would be damned if I would let anything more happen to them. I tried to hang on to the focus, the detachment I would need to concentrate, to unravel Aurora's spell, but my fear and my anger and my worry made it all but impossible. They would have lent strength to a spell, but this was delicate work, and now my emotions, so often a source of strength, only got in the way.
Then hooves galloped up, striking the ground near me. I looked up to see the warrior in green armor, the only rider of those original Sidhe cavalry to stay mounted, standing over me, horse stamping, spear leveled at my head.
"Don't!" I said. "Wait!"
But the rider ignored me, lifted the spear, its tip gleaming in the silver light, and drove it down at my unprotected throat.
The spear drove into the earth beside my neck, and the rider hissed in an impatient female voice, "Hold still."
She swung down from the faerie steed, reached up, and took off the masked helm. Elaine's wheat-brown hair spilled down, escaping from the bun it had been tied in, and she jerked it all the way down irritably. "Hold still. I'll get that off you."
"Elaine," I said. I went through a bunch of heated emotions, and I didn't have time for any of them. "I'd say I was glad to see you, but I'm not sure."
"That's because you always were a little dense, Harry," she said, her voice tart. Then she smoothed her features over, her eyes falling half closed, and spread her gloved hands over my chest. She muttered something to herself and then said, "Here.Samanyana ."
There was a surge of gentle power, and the wind pinning me to the ground abruptly vanished. I pushed myself back to my feet.
"All right," she said. "Let's get out of here."
"No," I said. "I'm not done." I recovered my valise and my staff. "I need to get through those thorns."
"You can't," Elaine said. "Harry, I know this spell. Those thorns aren't just pointy, they're poisonous. If one of them scratches you, you'll be paralyzed in a couple of minutes. Two or three will kill you."
I scowled at the barrier and settled my grip on my staff.
"And they won't burn, either," Elaine added.
"Oh." I ground my teeth. "I'll just force them aside, then."
"That'll be like holding open a screen door, Harry. They'll just fall back into place when your concentration wavers."
"Then it won't waver."
"You can't do it, Harry," Elaine said. "If you start pushing through, Aurora will sense it and she'll tear you apart. If you're holding the thorns off you, you won't be able to defend yourself."
I lowered my staff and looked from the thorns back to Elaine. "All right," I said. "Then you'll have to hold them off me."
Elaine's eyes widened. "What?"
"You hold the thorns back. I'll go through."
"You're going to go up against Aurora?Alone? "
"And you're going to help me," I said.
Elaine bit her lip, looking away from me.
"Come on, Elaine," I said. "You've already betrayed her. And I am going through those thorns, with your help or without it."
"I don't know."
"Yeah, you do," I said. "If you were going to kill me, you've already had your chance. And if Aurora finishes what she's doing, I'm dead anyway."
"You don't understand---"
"I know I don't," I snapped. "I don't understand why you're helping her. I don't understand how you can stand by and let her do the things she's done. I don't understand how you can stand here and let that girl die." I let that sink in for a second before I added, quietly, "And I don't understand how you could betray me like that. Again."
"For all you know," Elaine said, "it will happen a third time. I'll let those thorns close on you halfway through and kill you for her."
"Maybe so," I said. "But I don't want to believe that, Elaine. We loved each other once upon a time. I know you aren't a coward and you aren't a killer. I want to believe that what we had really meant something, even now. That I can trust you with my life the way you can trust me with yours."
She let out a bitter little laugh and said, "You don't know what I am anymore, Harry." She looked at me. "But I believe you. I know I can trust you."
"Then help me."
She nodded and said, "You'll have to run. I'm not as strong as you, and this is brute work. I won't be able to lift it for long."
I nodded at her. Doubt nagged at me as I did. What if she did it again? Elaine hadn't exactly been sterling in the up-front-honesty department. I watched as she focused, her lovely face going blank, and felt her draw in her power, folding her arms over her chest, palms over either shoulder like an Egyptian sarcophagus.
Hell, I had ten million ways to die all around me. What was one over another? At least this way, if I went out, I'd go out doing something worthwhile. I turned and crouched, bag and staff in hand.
Elaine murmured something, and a wind stirred around her, lifting her hair around her head. She opened her eyes, though they remained distant, unfocused, and spread both hands to her sides.
Wind lashed out in a column five feet around and drove into the wall of thorns. The thorns shuddered and then began to give, bending away from Elaine's spell.
"Go!" she gasped. "Go, hurry!"
I ran.
The wind almost blinded me, and I had to run crouched down, hoping that none of my exposed skin would brush against any thorns. I felt one sharp tug along my jacket, but it didn't pierce the leather. Elaine didn't let me down. After a few seconds, I burst through the wall and came out in the clear on top of the hill of the Stone Table.
The Table stood where it had been before, but the runes and sigils scrawled over its surface now blazed with golden light. Aurora stood at the Table, fingers flying over the Unraveling, its threads pressed against the head of the statue of the kneeling girl, still upon the table. I circled a bit to one side to stay out of her peripheral vision and ran toward her.
When I was only a few feet away, the Unraveling suddenly exploded in a wash of cold white light. The light washed over the statue in a wave, and as it passed, cold white marble warmed into flesh, her stone waves of hair becoming emerald-green tresses. Lily opened her eyes and let out a gasp, looking around dazedly.
Aurora took Lily by the throat, drove the changeling down to the surface of the Stone Table with her hand, and drew the knife from her belt.
It wasn't all that gentlemanly, but I slugged the Summer Lady in the back with a two-handed swing of my staff.
As I did, the stars evidently reached the right position, and we reached midnight, the end of the height of summer, and the glowing runes on the Table flared from golden light to cold, cold blue.
The blow jarred the knife from Aurora's hand, and it fell to the surface of the table. Lily let out a scream and got out from under Aurora's hand, rolling across the table's surface and away from her.
Aurora turned to me, as fast as any of the other Sidhe, leaning back on the table and planting both feet against my chest. She kicked hard and drove me back, and before I was done rolling she had called a gout of fire and sent it roaring toward me. I got to my knees and lifted my staff, calling together my will in time to parry the strike, deflecting the flame into the misty sky.
The red light of it fell on a green faerie steed leaping in the air above the thorns. It didn't make it over the wall but fall twenty feet short, screaming horribly as it landed on the poisoned thorns. Its rider didn't go down with it, though. Talos, his face bloodied, leapt off the horse's back, did a neat flip in the air, and came down inside the circle of thorns unscathed.
Aurora let out a wild laugh and said, "Kill him, Lord Marshal!"
Talos drew his sword and came for me. I thought the first blow was a thrust for my belly, but he'd suckered me, and the sword darted to one side to send my staff spinning off into the thorns. As he stalked me, I gripped my valise and backed away, looking around me for a weapon, for something to buy me a few seconds, for options.
Then a basso bellow shook the hilltop and froze even Aurora for a second. The wall of thorns shook and quivered, and something massive bellowed again and tore through it, into the open. The troll was huge, and green, and hideous, and strong. It wielded an axe in one hand like a plastic picnic knife and was covered in swelling welts, poisoned wounds, and its own dark-green blood. It had a horrible wound in its side, ichor flowing openly from it. It was dragging itself along despite the wounds, but it was dying.
And it was Meryl. She'd Chosen.
I could only stare as I recognized her features, inside the insane fury of the troll's face. It reached for Talos, and the Lord Marshal of Summer whirled, his bright sword taking off one of the troll's hands. She got the other on his leg, though, and dragged him beneath her even as she fell, the weight of her pinning him down, crushing him to the ground with a choked, gurgling cry of rage and triumph.
I looked back, to see Aurora catch Lily by her green hair, and drag her back toward the Table. I ran to it, and beat her to the knife, a curved number of chipped stone, dragging it across the Table and to me.
"Fool," Aurora hissed. "I will tear out her throat with my bare hands."
I threw the knife away and said, "No, you won't."
Aurora laughed and asked, eyes mad and enticing, "And why not?"
I undid the clasp of the valise. "Because I know something you don't."
"What?" she laughed. "What could you possibly know that matters now?"
I gave her a cold smile and said, "The phone number to Pizza Spress." I opened the bag and snarled, "Get her, Toot!"
There was a shrill, piping blast from inside the valise and Toot-toot sailed up out of it, leaving a trail of crimson sparkles in his wake. The little faerie still wore his makeshift armor, but his weapons had been replaced with what I'd had Billy pick up from Wal-Mart---an orange plastic box knife, its slender blade extended from its handle.
Aurora let out another laugh, uglier, and said, "And what can this little thing do?"
Toot blew another little blast on his trumpet and shouted, voice shrill, "In the name of the Pizza Lord! Charge!"
And the valise exploded in a cloud of crimson sparkles as a swarm of pixies, all armed with cold steel blades sheathed in orange plastic, rose up and streaked toward Aurora in a cloud of red sparkles and glinting knives.
She met my eyes as the pixies came for her, and I saw the sudden fear, the recognition of what was coming for her. She lifted a hand, golden power gathering there, but one of the pixies reached her, box knife flashing, and ripped across her hand with its blade. She screamed, blood flowing, and the golden light dimmed.
"No!" she howled. "No! Not now!"
The pixies swarmed her, and it wasn't pretty. The bright faerie mail of her gown gave her no protection against the steel blades, and they sheared through it like cardboard. From all directions, in a whirling cloud around her, Toot-toot and his companions struck dozens of times in only a few seconds, the bright steel splashing scarlet blood into the air.
I saw her eyes open, burning brightly, even as zipping, darting death opened up more cuts, flaying her pale skin. She hauled herself toward the Table.
If she died there, bled to death on the table, she would accomplish her goal. She would hurl vast power to the Winter Courts and destroy the balance between the faerie Courts. I threw myself up onto the Table and into her, bearing her back down and to the ground.
She screamed in frustration and struggled against me---but she didn't have any strength. We rolled down the hill a few times, and then wound up on the ground, me pinning her down, holding her there.
Aurora looked up at me, green eyes faded of color, unfocused. "Wait," she said, her voice weak and somehow very young. She didn't look like a mad faerie sorceress now. She looked like a frightened girl. "Wait. You don't understand. I just wanted it to stop. Wanted the hurting to stop."
I smoothed a bloodied lock of hair from her eyes and felt very tired as I said, "The only people who never hurt are dead."
The light died out of her eyes, her breath slowing. She whispered, barely audible, "I don't understand."
I answered, "I don't either."
A tear slid from her eye and mixed with the blood.
Then she died.
I'd done it. I'd saved the girl, stopped the thief, proved Mab's innocence, and won her support for the White Council, thereby saving my own ass.
Huzzah.
I lay there with Aurora's empty body, too tired to move. The Queens found me maybe a quarter of an hour later. I was only dimly aware of them, of radiant light of gold and blue meeting over me. Gold light gathered over the body for a moment and then flowed away, taking the dead flesh with it. I was left cold and tired on the ground.
The gold light's departure left only cold blue. A moment later, I felt Mab's fingers touch my head, and she murmured, "Wizard. I am well pleased with thee."
"Go away, Mab," I said, my voice tired.
She laughed and said, "Nay, mortal. It is you who must now depart. You and your companions."
"What about Toot-toot?" I asked.
"It is unusual for a mortal to be able to Call any of Faerie, even the lowest, into service, but it has been done before. Fear not for your little warriors. They were your weapon, and the only one accountable for their actions will be you. Take their steel with you, and it will be enough."
I looked up at her and said, "You're going to live up to your side of the bargain?"
"Of course. The wizards will have safe passport."
"Not that bargain. Ours."
Mab's lovely, dangerous mouth curled up in a smile. "First, let me make you an offer."
She gestured, and the thorns parted. Maeve stood there in her white armor, and Mother Winter stood behind her, all shrouded in black cloth. Before them on the ground knelt Lloyd Slate, broken, obviously in pain, his hands manacled to a collar around his throat, the whole made of something that looked like cloudy ice.
"We have a traitor among us," Mab purred. "And he will be dealt with accordingly. After which there will be an opening for a new Knight." She watched me and said, "I would have someone worthy of more trust as his successor. Accept that power and all debts between us are canceled."
"Not just no," I muttered. "Hell, no."
Mab's smile widened. "Very well, then. I'm sure we can find some way to amuse ourselves with this one until time enough has passed to offer again."
Slate looked up, blearily, his voice slurred and panicky. "No. No, Dresden. Dresden, don't let them. Don't let them take me. Take it, please, don't let them keep me waiting."
Mab touched my head again and said, "Only twice more, then, and you will be free of me."
And they left.
Lloyd Slate's screams lingered behind them.
I sat there, too tired to move, until the lights began to dim. I vaguely remember feeling Ebenezar heft me off the ground and get my arm across his shoulders. The Gatekeeper murmured something, and Billy answered him.
I woke up back at my place, in bed.
Billy, who had been dozing in a chair next to the bed, woke up with a snort and said, "Hey, there you are. You thirsty?"
I nodded, throat too dry to speak, and he handed me a glass of cool water.
"What happened?" I asked, when I could speak.
He shook his head. "Meryl died. She told me to tell you that she'd made her Choice and didn't regret it. Then she just changed. We found her on the ground near you."
I closed my eyes and nodded.
"Ebenezar said to tell you that you'd made a lot of people see red, but that you shouldn't worry about them for a while."
"Heh," I said. "The Alphas?"
"Banged up," Billy said, a hint of pride in his voice. "One hundred and fifty-five stitches all together, but we all came out of it more or less in one piece. Pizza party and gaming at my place tonight."
My stomach growled at the word "pizza."
I took a shower, dried off, and dressed in clean clothes. That made me blink. I looked around the bathroom, then peeked out at my bedroom, and said to Billy, "You cleaned up? Did laundry?"
He shook his head. "Not me." There was a knock at the door and he said, "Just a minute." I heard him go out and say something through the door before he came back in. "Visitors."
I put some socks on, then my sneakers. "Who is it?"
"The new Summer Lady and Knight," Billy said.
"They looking for trouble?"
Billy grinned and said, "Just come talk to them."
I glowered at him and followed him out to the main room. It was spotless. My furniture is mostly secondhand, sturdy old stuff with a lot of wood and a lot of textured fabrics. It all looked clean too, and there were no stains in it. My rugs, everything from something that could have flown in the skies of mythic Araby to tourist-trap faux Navajo, had also been cleaned and aired out. I checked the floor underneath the rugs. Mopped and scoured clean. The hod had fresh wood in it, and the fireplace had been not only emptied out but swept clean to boot.
My staff and blasting rod were in the corner, gleaming as if they'd been polished, and my gun hung in its holster, freshly oiled. The gun had been polished too.
I went over to the alcove with the stove, sink, and icebox. The icebox was an old-fashioned one that stocked actual ice, given my problems with electricity. It had been cleaned, and new ice put in it. It was packed with neat rows of food---fresh fruits and veggies, juice, Cokes---and there was ice cream in the freezer. My pantry was full of dry foods, canned foods, pasta, sauces. And Mister had a new litterbox, made of wood, lined with plastic, and full of fresh litter. He had a carved wooden bowl as well, and a mate for water, and he had emptied it of food. Mister himself sprawled on the floor, batting idly at a cloth sack of catnip hanging from a string on the pantry door.
"I died," I said. "I died and someone made a clerical error and this is heaven."
I looked around to find Billy grinning at me like a fool. He hooked a thumb at the door. "Visiting dignitaries?"
I went to the door and opened it warily, peeking around it.
Fix stood there in a set of mechanic's coveralls. His frizzy white hair floated around his head and complemented his smile. He had grease on his hands and face, and his old toolbox sat on the ground next to him. Beside him stood Lily, shapely figure showing off simple dark slacks and a green blouse. Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail.
And it had turned snow white.
"Harry," Fix said. "How you doing?"
I blinked at them and said, "You? The new Summer Lady?"
Lily flushed prettily and nodded. "I know. I didn't want it, but when---when Aurora died, her power flowed into the nearest Summer vessel. Usually it would be one of the other Queens, but I had the Knight's power and it just sort of . . . plopped in there."
I lifted my eyebrows and said, "Are you okay?"
She frowned. "I'm not sure. It's a lot to think about. And it's the first time this kind of power has fallen to a mortal."
"You mean you're not, uh. You haven't?"
"Chosen?" Lily asked. She shook her head. "It's just me. I don't know what I'm going to do, but Titania said she'd teach me."
I glanced aside. "And you chose Fix as your Knight, huh."
She smiled at Fix. "I trust him."
"Suits me," I said. "Fix kicked the Winter Knight's ass once already."
Lily blinked and looked at Fix. The little guy flushed, and I swear to God, he dragged one foot over the ground.
Lily smiled and offered me her hand. "I wanted to meet you. And to thank you, Mister Dresden. I owe you my life."
I shook her hand but said, "You don't owe me anything. I'm apparently saving damsels on reflex now." My smile faded and I said, "Besides. I was just the hired help. Thank Meryl."
Lily frowned and said, "Don't blame yourself for what happened. You did what you did because you have a good heart, Mister Dresden. Just like Meryl. I can't repay a kindness like that, and it's going to be years before I can make much use of my . . . my . . ." she fumbled for a word.
"Power?"
"Okay, power. But if you need help, or a safe place, you can come to me. Whatever I can do, I will."
"She had some brownies come clean up your place for you, Harry," Fix said. "And I just finished up with your car, so it should run for you now. I hope you don't mind."
I had to blink my eyes a few times, before I said, "I don't mind. Come on in, I'll get you a drink."
We had a nice visit. They seemed like decent kids.
After everyone left, it was dark, and there was another knock at the door. I answered it, and Elaine stood there, in a T-shirt and jeans shorts that showed off her pretty legs. She had her hair up under a Cubs baseball hat, and she said without preamble, "I wanted to see you before I left."
I leaned against the doorway close to her. "You got out okay, I guess."
"So did you. Did Mab pay up?"
I nodded. "Yeah. What about you? Are you still beholden to Summer?"
Elaine shrugged. "I owed everything to Aurora. Even if she'd wanted to quibble about whether or not I'd paid her back in full, it's a moot point now."
"Where are you going?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. Somewhere with a lot of people. Maybe go to school for a while." She took a deep breath and then said, "Harry, I'm sorry things went like that. I was afraid to tell you about Aurora. I guess I should have known better. I'm glad you came through it all right. Really glad."
I had a lot of answers to that, but the one I picked was, "She thought she was doing something good. I guess I can see how you'd . . . Look, it's done."
She nodded. Then she said, "I saw the pictures on your mantel. Of Susan. Those letters. And that engagement ring."
I glanced back at the mantel and felt bad in all kinds of ways. "Yeah."
"You love her," Elaine said.
I nodded.
She let out a breath and looked down, so that the bill of her hat hid her eyes. "Then can I give you some advice?"
"Why not."
She looked up and said, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Harry."
I blinked and said, "What?"
She gestured at my apartment. "You were living in a sewer, Harry. I understand that there's something you're blaming yourself for. I'm just guessing at the details, but it's pretty clear you were driving yourself into the ground because of it. Get over it. You aren't going to do her any good as a living mildew collection. Stop thinking about how bad you feel---because if she cares about you at all, it would tear her up to see you like I saw you a few days ago."
I stared at her for a moment and then said, "Romantic advice. From you."
She flashed me half of a smile and said, "Yeah. The irony. I'll see you around."
I nodded and said, "Goodbye, Elaine."
She leaned up and kissed my cheek again, then turned and left. I watched her go. And illegal mind fog or not, I never mentioned her to the Council.
Later that night I showed up at Billy's apartment. Laughter drifted out under the door, along with music and the smell of delivered pizza. I knocked and Billy answered the door. Conversation ceased inside.
I came into the apartment. A dozen wounded, bruised, cut, and happy werewolves watched me from around a long table scattered with drinks, Pizza Spress boxes, dice, pencils, pads of paper, and little inch-tall models on a big sheet of graph paper.
"Billy," I said. "And the rest of you guys. I just wanted to say that you really handled yourselves up there. A lot better than I expected or hoped. I should have given you more credit. Thank you."
Billy nodded and said, "It was worth it. Right?"
There was a murmur of agreement from the room.
I nodded. "Okay, then. Someone get me a pizza and a Coke and some dice, but I want it understood that I'm going to need thews."
Billy blinked at me. "What?"
"Thews," I said. "I want big, bulging thews, and I don't want to have to think too much."
His face split in a grin. "Georgia, do we have a barbarian character sheet left?"
"Sure," Georgia said, and went to a file cabinet.
I took a seat at the table and got handed pizza and Coke, and listened to the voices and chatter start up again, and thought to myself that it was a whole hell of a lot better than spending another night crucifying myself in the lab.
"You know what disappoints me?" Billy asked me after a while.
"No, what?"
"All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once."
I stared at Billy for a minute and started to laugh. My own aches and bruises and cuts and wounds pained me, but it was an honest, stretchy pain, something that was healing. I got myself some dice and some paper and some pencils and settled down with friends to pretend to be Thorg the Barbarian, to eat, drink, and be merry.
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
Praise for The Dresden Files
Summer Knight
"There's no shortage of writers churning out supernatural detective stories these days, but Butcher is definitely among the best. Summer Knight starts with a bang and doesn't let up.... Fans of any kind of fiction can enjoy Butcher's fun and fast-paced style. Summer Knight also shows great development in both the character of Harry Dresden and Butcher's writing style. It's probably the most developed and satisfying story line of the series so far.... I can't wait until Harry Dresden is on the case again."
---The News-Star (Monroe, LA)
"As usual in Butcher's books, the action begins on page one and moves rapidly from there...an excellent, and in my opinion powerful, chapter in the Dresden case files."
---ParaNormal Romance Reviews
"Mr. Butcher has again merged fantasy and contemporary life, casting Harry as the likable and somewhat bumbling hero facing impossible and fantastic odds."
---The Plot Thickens
Grave Peril
"A haunting, fantastical novel that begins almost as innocently as those of another famous literary wizard named Harry."
---Publishers Weekly
"Harry is a likable protagonist with more than his share of troubles, and Grave Peril will keep readers turning the pages to find out how he overcomes them."
---Booklist
"A great supernatural who-done-it.... Few horror, fantasy, or mystery tales get any better than this wonderful plot that smoothly combines all three genres into one novel."
---BookBrowser
Fool Moon
"It's even more entertaining...than the first in the series, good fun for fans of dark fantasy mystery."
---Locus
"Storm Front was one of the most enjoyable books I read last year, and Fool Moon is even better. Butcher keeps the thrills coming, with plenty of mystery, suspense, and edge-of-your-seat action."
---SF Site
"A fast-paced fascinating noir thriller."
---BookBrowser
"A really enjoyable read.... Jim Butcher strikes just the right narrative balance between wizard and wiseguy, mystic and mobster."
---Lynn Flewelling, author of Traitor's Moon
Storm Front
"A very promising start to a new series, not to mention an unusually well-crafted first novel."
---Locus
"Interesting characters, tight plotting, and fresh, breezy writing...an auspicious start to an engaging new series."
---SF Site
"A fine debut novel full of suspense and special effects."
---Topica Tip World
"A strong contender for Best Sorcery Suspense Supernatural Paperback of 2000...required summer reading for anyone who likes a few laughs."
---The Reporter (Vacaville, CA)
"Wish I'd thought of this myself. Try it. You'll like it."
---Glen Cook, author of Faded Steel Heat
"Exciting, well-plotted, complex, an excellent read...amazingly good."
---Chris Bunch, author of The Warrior King
ROC Published by New American Library, a division ofPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,New York, New York 10014, USAPenguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandPenguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2,Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,New Delhi-110 017, IndiaPenguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2003All rights reserved
ISBN: 1-101-12845-3
REGISTERED TRADEMARK---MARCA REGISTRADA
PUBLISHER'S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
In memory ofPlumicon and Ersha,fallen heroes
Contents
Some things just aren't meant to go together. Things like oil and water. Orange juice and toothpaste.
Wizards and television.
Spotlights glared into my eyes. The heat of them threatened to make me sweat streaks through the pancake makeup some harried stagehand had slapped on me a few minutes before. Lights on top of cameras started winking on, the talk-show theme song began to play, and the studio audience began to chant, "Lah-REE, Lah-REE, Lah-REE!"
Larry Fowler, a short man in an immaculate suit, appeared from the doors at the rear of the studio and began walking to the stage, flashing his porcelain smile and shaking the hands of a dozen people seated at the ends of their rows as he passed them. The audience whistled and cheered as he did. The noise made me flinch in my seat up on the stage, and I felt a trickle of sweat slide down over my ribs, beneath my white dress shirt and my jacket. I briefly considered running away screaming.
It isn't like I have stage fright or anything, see. Because I don't. It was just really hot up there. I licked my lips and checked all the fire exits, just to be safe. No telling when you might need to make a speedy exit. The lights and noise made it a little difficult to keep up my concentration, and I felt the spell I'd woven around me wobble. I closed my eyes for a second, until I had stabilized it again.
In the chair beside me sat a dumpy, balding man in his late forties, dressed in a suit that looked a lot better than mine. Mortimer Lindquist waited calmly, a polite smile on his face, but muttered out of the corner of his mouth, "You okay?"
"I've been in house fires I liked better than this."
"You asked for this meeting, not me," Mortimer said. He frowned as Fowler lingered over shaking a young woman's hand. "Showboat."
"Think this will take long?" I asked Morty.
He glanced beside him at an empty chair, and at another beside me. "Two mystery guests. I guess this one could go for a while. They shoot extra material and edit it down to the best parts."
I sighed. I'd been on The Larry Fowler Show just after I'd gone into business as an investigator, and it had been a mistake. I'd had to fight my way uphill against the tide of infamy I'd received from association with the show. "What did you find out?" I asked.
Mort flicked a nervous glance at me and said, "Not much."
"Come on, Mort."
He opened his mouth to answer, then glanced up as Larry Fowler trotted up the stairs and onto the stage. "Not now. Wait for a commercial break."
Larry Fowler pranced up to us and pumped my hand, then Mort's with equally exaggerated enthusiasm. "Welcome to the show," he said into a handheld microphone, then turned to face the nearest camera. "Our topic for today is 'Witchcraft and Wizardry---Phony or Fabulous?' With us in order to share their views are local medium and psychic counselor Mortimer Lindquist."
The crowd applauded politely.
"And beside him, Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard."
There was a round of snickering laughter to go with the applause this time. I couldn't say I was shocked. People don't believe in the supernatural these days. Supernatural things are scary. It's much more comfortable to rest secure in the knowledge that no one can reach out with magic and quietly kill you, that vampires exist only in movies, and that demons are mere psychological dysfunctions.
Completely inaccurate but much more comfortable.
Despite the relative levels of denial, my face heated up. I hate it when people laugh at me. An old, quiet hurt mixed in with my nervousness and I struggled to maintain the suppression spell.
Yeah, I said spell. See, I really am a wizard. I do magic. I've run into vampires and demons and a lot of things in between, and I've got the scars to show for it. The problem was that technology doesn't seem to enjoy coexisting with magic. When I'm around, computers crash, lightbulbs burn out, and car alarms start screaming in warbling, drunken voices for no good reason. I'd worked out a spell to suppress the magic I carried with me, at least temporarily, so that I might at least have a chance to keep from blowing out the studio lights and cameras, or setting off the fire alarms.
It was delicate stuff by its very nature, and extremely difficult for me to hold in place. So far so good, but I saw the nearest cameraman wince and jerk his headset away from his ear. Whining feedback sounded tinnily from the headset.
I closed my eyes and reined in my discomfort and embarrassment, focusing on the spell. The feedback died away.
"Well, then," Larry said, after half a minute of happy talk. "Morty, you've been a guest on the show several times now. Would you care to tell us a little bit about what you do?"
Mortimer widened his eyes and whispered, "I see dead people."
The audience laughed.
"But seriously. Mostly I conduct séances, Larry," Mortimer said. "I do what I can to help those who have lost a loved one or who need to contact them in the beyond in order to resolve issues left undone back here on earth. I also offer a predictions service in order to help clients make decisions on upcoming issues, and to try to warn them against possible danger."
"Really," Larry said. "Could you give us a demonstration?"
Mortimer closed his eyes and rested the fingertips of his right hand on the spot between his eyes. Then in a hollow voice he said, "The spirits tell me...that two more guests will soon arrive."
The audience laughed, and Mortimer nodded at them with an easy grin. He knew how to play a crowd.
Larry gave Mortimer a tolerant smile. "And why are you here today?"
"Larry, I just want to try to raise public awareness about the realm of the psychic and paranormal. Nearly eighty percent of a recent survey of American adults stated that they believed in the existence of the spirits of the dead, in ghosts. I just want to help people understand that they do exist, and that there are other people out there who have had strange and inexplicable encounters with them."
"Thank you, Morty. And Harry---may I call you Harry?"
"Sure. It's your nickel," I responded.
Larry's smile got a shade brittle. "Can you tell us a little bit about what you do?"
"I'm a wizard," I said. "I find lost articles, investigate paranormal occurrences, and train people who find themselves struggling with a sudden development of their own abilities."
"Isn't it true that you also consult for the Special Investigations department at Chicago PD?"
"Occasionally," I said. I wanted to avoid talking about SI if I could. The last thing CPD would want was to be advertised on The Larry Fowler Show. "Many police departments across the country employ such consultants when all other leads have failed."
"And why are you here today?"
"Because I'm broke and your producer is paying double my standard fee."
The crowd laughed again, more warmly. Larry Fowler's eyes flashed with an impatient look behind his glasses, and his smile turned into a gnashing of teeth. "No, really, Harry. Why?"
"For the same reasons as Mort---uh, as Morty here," I answered. Which was true. I'd come here to meet Mort and get some information from him. He'd come here to meet me, because he refused to be seen near me on the street. I guess you could say I don't have the safest reputation in the world.
"And you claim to be able to do magic," Larry said.
"Yeah."
"Could you show us?" Larry prompted.
"I could, Larry, but I don't think it's practical."
Larry nodded, and gave the audience a wise look. "And why is that?"
"Because it would probably wreck your studio equipment."
"Of course," Larry said. He winked at the audience. "Well, we wouldn't want that, would we?"
There was more laughter and a few catcalls from the crowd. Passages from Carrie and Firestarter sprang to mind, but I restrained myself and maintained the suppression spell. Master of self-discipline, that's me. But I gave the fire door beside the stage another longing look.
Larry carried on the talk part of the talk show, discussing crystals and ESP and tarot cards. Mort did most of the talking. I chimed in with monosyllables from time to time.
After several minutes of this, Larry said, "We'll be right back after these announcements." Stagehands help up signs that read APPLAUSE, and cameras panned and zoomed over the audience as they whistled and hooted.
Larry gave me an annoyed look and strode offstage. In the wings, he started tearing into a makeup girl about his hair.
I leaned over to Mort and said, "Okay. What did you find out?"
The dumpy ectomancer shook his head. "Nothing concrete. I'm still getting back into the swing of things in contacting the dead."
"Even so, you've got more contacts in this area than I do," I said. "My sources don't keep close track of who has or hasn't died lately, so I'll take whatever I can get. Is she at least alive?"
He nodded. "She's alive. That much I know. She's in Peru."
"Peru?" It came as a vast relief to hear that she wasn't dead, but what the hell was Susan doing in Peru? "That's Red Court territory."
"Some," Mort agreed. "Though most of them are in Brazil and the Yucatán. I tried to find out exactly where she was, but I was blocked."
"By who?"
Mort shrugged. "No way for me to tell. I'm sorry."
I shook my head. "No, it's okay. Thanks, Mort."
I settled back in my seat, mulling over the news.
Susan Rodriguez was a reporter for a regional yellow paper called the Midwestern Arcane. She'd grown interested in me just after I opened up my practice, hounding me relentlessly to find out more about all the things that go bump in the night. We'd gotten involved, and on our first date she wound up lying naked on the ground in a thunderstorm while lightning cooked a toadlike demon to gooey bits. After that, she parlayed a couple of encounters with things from my cases into a widespread syndicated column.
A couple of years later, she wound up following me into a nest of vampires holding a big to-do, despite all my warnings to the contrary. A noble of the Red Court of Vampires had grabbed her and begun the transformation from mortal to vampire on her. It was payback for something I'd done. The vampire noble in question thought that her standing in the Red Court made her untouchable, that I wouldn't want to start trouble with the entire Court. She told me that if I fought to take Susan back, I would be starting a worldwide war between the White Council of wizards and the vampires' Red Court.
Which I did.
The vampires hadn't forgiven me for taking Susan back from them, probably because a bunch of them, including one of their nobility, had been incinerated in the process. That's why Mort didn't want to be seen with me. He wasn't involved in the war, and he intended to keep it that way.
In any case, Susan hadn't gone all the way through her transformation, but the vamps had given her their blood thirst, and if she ever gave in to it, she'd become one of the Red Court. I asked her to marry me, promising her that I'd find a way to restore her humanity. She turned me down and left town, trying to sort things out on her own, I guess. I still kept trying to find a way to remove her affliction, but I'd received only a card and a postcard or three from her since she'd left.
Two weeks ago, her editor had called to say that the columns she usually sent in for the Arcane were late, and asked if I knew how to get in touch with her. I hadn't, but I started looking. I got zip, and went to Mort Lindquist to see if his contacts in the spirit world would pay off better than mine.
I hadn't gotten much, but at least she was alive. Muscles in my back unclenched a little.
I looked up to see Larry come back onstage to his theme music. Speakers squealed and squelched when he started to talk, and I realized I'd let my control slip again. The suppression spell was a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be, and getting harder by the minute. I tried to focus, and the speakers quieted to the occasional fitful pop.
"Welcome back to the show," Larry told a camera. "Today we are speaking with practitioners of the paranormal, who are here to share their views with the studio audience and our viewers at home. In order to explore these issues further, I have asked a couple of experts with opposing viewpoints to join us today, and here they are."
The audience applauded as a pair of men emerged from either side of the stage.
The first man sat down in the chair by Morty. He was a little over average height and thin, his skin burned into tanned leather by the sun. He might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. His hair was greying and neatly cut, and he wore a black suit with a white clerical collar sharing space with a rosary and crucifix at his throat. He smiled and nodded to Mort and me and shook hands with Larry.
Larry said, "Allow me to introduce Father Vincent, who has come all the way from the Vatican to be with us today. He is a leading scholar and researcher within the Catholic Church on the subject of witchcraft and magic, both historically and from a psychological perspective. Father, welcome to the show."
Vincent's voice was a little rough, but he spoke English with the kind of cultured accent that seemed to indicate an expensive education. "Thank you, Larry. I'm very pleased to be here."
I looked from Father Vincent to the second man, who had settled in the chair beside me, just as Larry said, "And from the University of Brazil at Rio de Janeiro, please welcome Dr. Paolo Ortega, world-renowned researcher and debunker of the supernatural."
Larry started saying something else, but I didn't hear him. I just stared at the man beside me as recognition dawned. He was of average height and slightly heavy build, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He was dark-complected, his black hair neatly brushed, his grey-and-silver suit stylish and tasteful.
And he was a duke of the Red Court---an ancient and deadly vampire, smiling at me from less than an arm's length away. My heart rate went from sixty to a hundred and fifty million, fear sending silver lightning racing down my limbs.
Emotions have power. They fuel a lot of my magic. The fear hit me, and the pressure on the suppression spell redoubled. There was a flash of light and a puff of smoke from the nearest camera, and the operator staggered back from it, tearing off his headphones with one of the curses they have to edit out of daytime TV. Smoke began to rise steadily from the camera, along with the smell of burning rubber, and the studio monitors shrieked with feedback.
"Well," Ortega said, under his breath. "Nice to see you again, Mister Dresden."
I swallowed and fumbled at my pocket, where I had a couple of wizard gadgets I used for self-defense. Ortega put his hand on my arm. It didn't look as if he was exerting himself, but his fingers closed on my wrist like manacles, hard enough to send flashes of pain up through my elbow and shoulder. I looked around, but everyone was staring at the malfunctioning camera.
"Relax," Ortega said, his accent thick and vaguely Latinate. "I'm not going to kill you on television, wizard. I'm here to talk to you."
"Get off me," I said. My voice was thin, shaky. Goddamned stage fright.
He released me, and I jerked my arm away. The crew rolled the smoking camera back, and a director type with a set of headphones made a rolling motion with the fingers of one hand. Larry nodded to him, and turned to Ortega.
"Sorry about that. We'll edit that part out later."
"It's no trouble," Ortega assured him.
Jerry paused for a moment, and then said, "Dr. Ortega, welcome to the show. You have a reputation as one of the premier analysts of paranormal phenomena in the world. You have proven that a wide variety of so-called supernatural occurrences were actually clever hoaxes. Can you tell us a little about that?"
"Certainly. I have investigated these events for a number of years, and I have yet to find one that cannot be adequately explained. Alleged alien crop circles proved to be nothing more than a favorite pastime of a small group of British farmers, for example. Other odd events are certainly unusual, but by no means supernatural. Even here in Chicago, you had a rain of toads in one of your local parks witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people. And it turned out, later, that a freak windstorm had scooped them up from elsewhere and deposited them here."
Larry nodded, his expression serious. "Then you don't believe in these events."
Ortega gave Larry a patronizing smile. "I would love to believe that such things are true, Larry. There is little enough magic in the world. But I am afraid that even though we each have a part of us that wishes to believe in wondrous beings and fantastic powers, the fact of the matter is that it is simple, primitive superstition."
"Then in your opinion, practitioners of the supernatural---"
"Frauds," Ortega said with certainty. "With no offense meant to your guests, of course. All of these so-called mediums, presuming they aren't self-deluded, are simply skilled actors who have acquired a fundamental grasp of human psychology and know how to exploit it. They are easily able to deceive the gullible into believing that they can contact the dead or read thoughts or that they are in fact supernatural beings. Why, with a few minutes' effort and the right setting, I am certain that I could convince anyone in this room that I was a vampire myself."
People laughed again. I scowled at Ortega, frustration growing once more, putting more pressure on the suppression spell. The air around me started to feel warmer.
A second cameraman yelped and jerked off his squealing earphones, while his camera started spinning about slowly on its stand, winding power cables around the steel frame it rested on.
The on-air lights went out. Larry stepped to the edge of the stage, yelling at the poor cameraman. The apologetic-looking director appeared from the wings, and Larry turned his attention to him. The man bore the scolding with a kind of oxenlike patience, and then examined the camera. He muttered something into his headset, and he and the shaken cameraman began to wheel the dead camera away.
Larry folded his arms impatiently, then turned to the guests and said, "I'm sorry. Give us a couple of minutes to get a spare camera in. It won't take long."
"No problem, Larry," Ortega assured him. "We can just chat for a moment."
Larry peered at me. "Are you all right, Mister Dresden?" he asked. "You look a little pale. Could you use a drink or something?"
"I know I could," Ortega said, his eyes on me.
"I'll have someone bring them out," Larry said, and strode offstage toward his hairstylist.
Mort had engaged Father Vincent in quiet conversation, his back very firmly turned toward me. I turned back to Ortega, warily, my back stiff, and fought down the anger and fear. Usually being scared out of my mind is kind of useful. Magic comes from emotions, and terror is handy fuel. But this wasn't the place to start calling up gales of wind or flashes of fire. There were too many people around, and it would be too easy to get someone hurt, even killed.
Besides which, Ortega was right. This wasn't the place to fight. If he was here, he wanted to talk. Otherwise, he would have simply jumped me in the parking garage.
"Okay," I said, finally. "What do you want to say?"
He leaned a little closer so that he wouldn't have to raise his voice. I cringed inwardly, but I didn't flinch away. "I've come to Chicago to kill you, Mister Dresden. But I have a proposal for you that I want you to hear, first."
"You really need to work on your opening technique," I said. "I read a book about negotiations. I could loan it to you."
He gave me a humorless smile. "The war, Dresden. The war between your people and mine is too costly, for both of us."
"War's a pretty stupid option to take, generally speaking," I said. "I never wanted it."
"But you began it," Ortega said. "You began it over a point of principle."
"I began it over a human life."
"And how many more would you save by ending it now?" Ortega asked. "Not merely wizards suffer from this. Our attention to the war leaves us less able to control the wilder elements of our own Court. We frown upon reckless killings, but wounded or leaderless members of our Courts often kill when they do not truly need to. Ending the war now would save hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives."
"So would killing every vampire on the planet. What's your point?"
Ortega smiled, showing teeth. Just regular teeth, no long canines or anything. The vampires of the Red Court look human---right up until they turn into something out of a nightmare. "The point, Dresden, is that the war is unprofitable, undesirable. You are the symbolic cause of it to my people, and the point of contention between us and your own White Council. Once you are slain, the Council will accept peace overtures, as will the Court."
"So you're asking me to lay down and die? That's not much of an offer. You really need to read that book."
"I'm making you an offer. Face me in single combat, Dresden."
I didn't quite laugh at him. "Why the hell should I do that?"
His eyes were expressionless. "Because if you do it would mean that the warriors I have brought to town with me will not be forced to target your friends and allies. That the mortal assassins we have retained will not need to receive their final confirmations to kill a number of clients who have hired you in the past five years. I'm sure I need not mention names."
Fear and anger had been about to settle down, but they came surging back again. "There's no reason for that," I said. "If your war is with me, keep it with me."
"Gladly," Ortega said. "I do not approve of such tactics. Face me under the dueling laws in the Accords."
"And after I kill you, what?" I said. I didn't know if I could kill him, but there was no reason to let him think I wasn't confident about it. "The next hotshot Red Duke does the same thing?"
"Defeat me, and the Court has agreed that this city will become neutral territory. That those living in it, including yourself and your friends and associates, will be free of the threat of attack so long as they are in it."
I stared hard at him for a moment. "Chicago-blanca, eh?"
He quirked a puzzled eyebrow at me.
"Never mind. After your time." I looked away from him, and licked sweat from my upper lip. A stagehand came by with a couple of bottled waters, and passed them to Ortega and to me. I took a drink. The pressure of the spell made flickering colored dots float across my vision.
"You're stupid to fight me," I said. "Even if you kill me, my death curse would fall on you."
He shrugged. "I am not as important as the whole of the Court. I will take that risk."
Hell's bells. Dedicated, honorable, courageous, self-sacrificial loonies are absolutely the worst people in the world to go up against. I tried one last dodge, hoping it might pay off. "I'd have to have it in writing. The Council gets a copy too. I want this all recognized, official under the Accords."
"That done, you will agree to the duel?"
I took a deep breath. The last thing I wanted to do was square off against another supernatural nasty. Vampires scared me. They were strong and way too fast, and had an enormous yuck factor. Their saliva was an addictive narcotic, and I'd been exposed to it enough to make me twitch once in a while, wondering what it would be like to get another hit.
I barely went outside after dark these days, specifically because I didn't want to encounter any more vampires. A duel would mean a fair fight, and I hate fair fights. In the words of a murderous Faerie Queen, they're too easy to lose.
Of course, if I didn't agree to Ortega's offer, I'd be fighting him anyway, probably at a time and place of his choosing---and I had the feeling that Ortega wasn't going to show the arrogance and overconfidence I'd seen in other vampires. Something about him said that so long as I wasn't breathing, he wouldn't care much how it happened. Not only that, but I believed that he would start in on the people I cared about if he couldn't have me.
I mean, come on. It was clichéd villainy at its worst.
And an undeniably effective lever.
I'd like to say that I carefully weighed all the factors, reasoned my way to a levelheaded conclusion, and made a rational decision to take a calculated risk, but I didn't. The truth is, I thought of Ortega and company doing harm to some of the people I cared about, and suddenly felt angry enough to start in on him right there. I faced him, eyes narrowed, and didn't bother to hold the anger in check. The suppression spell began to crack, and I didn't bother to keep it going. The spell shattered, and the buildup of wild energy rushed silently and invisibly over the studio.
There was a cough of static from the speakers on the stage before they died with loud pops. The floodlights overhead suddenly burst with flashes of brilliance and clouds of sparks that fell down over everyone on the stage. One of the two surviving cameras exploded into fire, bluish flames rising up from out of the casing, and heavy power outlets along the walls started spitting orange and green sparks. Larry Fowler yelped and leapt up into the air, batting at his belt before pitching a smoldering cell phone to the floor. The lights died, and people started screaming in startled panic.
Ortega, lit only by the falling sparks, looked grim and somehow eager, shadows dancing over his features, his eyes huge and dark.
"Fine," I said. "Get it to me in writing and you've got a deal."
The emergency lights came up, fire alarms started whooping, and people started stumbling toward exits. Ortega smiled, all teeth, and glided off the stage, vanishing into the wings.
I stood up, shaking a little. A piece of something had apparently fallen and hit Mort's head. There was a small gash on his scalp, already brimming with blood, and he wobbled precariously when he tried to stand. I helped him up, and so did Father Vincent on the other side of him. We lugged the little ectomancer toward the fire doors.
We got Mort down some stairs and outside the building. Chicago PD was on the scene already, blue and white lights flashing. Fire crews and an ambulance or three were just then rolling up on the street. We settled Mort down among a row of people with minor injuries, and stood back. We were both panting a little as the emergency medtechs started triage on the wounded.
"Actually, Mister Dresden," Father Vincent said, "I must confess something to you."
"Heh," I said. "Don't think I missed the irony on that one, padre."
Vincent's leathery mouth creased into a strained smile. "I did not really come to Chicago merely to appear on the show."
"No?" I said.
"No. I really came here to---"
"To talk to me," I interjected.
He lifted his eyebrows. "How did you know?"
I sighed, and got my car keys out of my pocket. "It's just been that kind of day."
I started walking for my car, and beckoned Father Vincent to follow. He did, and I walked fast enough to make him work to keep up with me. "You must understand," he said, "that I must insist upon strict confidentiality if I am to divulge details of my problem to you."
I frowned at him and said, "You think I'm a crackpot at best, or a charlatan at worst. So why would you want me to take your case?"
Not that I would turn him down. I wanted to take his case. Well, more accurately, I wanted to take his money. I wasn't in the bad fiscal shape of the year before, but that meant only that I had to fend the creditors off with a baseball bat rather than a cattle prod.
"I am told you are the best investigator in the city for it," Father Vincent said.
I arched an eyebrow at him. "You've got something supernatural going on?"
He rolled his eyes. "No, naturally not. I am not naive, Mister Dresden. But I am told that you know more about the occult community than any private investigator in the city."
"Oh," I said. "That."
I thought about it for a minute, and figured it was probably true. The occult community he had in mind was the usual New Age, crystal-gazing, tarot-turning, palm-reading crowd you see in any large city. Most of them were harmless, and many had at least a little ability at magic. Add in a dash of feng-shui artists, season liberally with Wiccans of a variety of flavors and sincerities, blend in a few modestly gifted practitioners who liked mixing religion with their magic, some followers of voodoo, a few Santerians and a sprinkling of Satanists, all garnished with a crowd of young people who liked to wear a lot of black, and you get what most folks think of as the "occult community."
Of course, hiding in there you found the occasional sorcerer, necromancer, monster, or demon. The real players, the nasty ones, regarded that crowd the same way a ten-year-old would a gingerbread amusement park. My mental early-warning system set off an imaginary klaxon.
"Who referred you to me, padre?"
"Oh, a local priest," Vincent said. He took a small notebook from his pocket, opened it, and read, "Father Forthill, of Saint Mary of the Angels."
I blinked. Father Forthill didn't see eye-to-eye with me on the whole religion thing, but he was a decent guy. A little stuffy, maybe, but I liked him---and I owed him for favors past. "You should have said that in the first place."
"You'll take the case?" Father Vincent asked, as we headed into the parking garage.
"I want to hear the details first, but if Forthill thinks I can help, I will." I added, hastily, "My standard fees apply."
"Naturally," Father Vincent said. He toyed with the crucifix at his throat. "May I assume that you will spare me the magician rigmarole?"
"Wizard," I said.
"There's a difference?"
"Magicians do stage magic. Wizards do real magic."
He sighed. "I don't need an entertainer, Mister Dresden. Just an investigator."
"And I don't need you to believe me, padre. Just to pay me. We'll get along fine."
He gave me an uncertain look and said, "Ah."
We reached my car, a battered old Volkswagen Bug named the Blue Beetle. It has what some people would call "character" and what I would call lots of mismatched replacement parts. The original car may have been blue, but now it had pieces of green, white, and red VWs grafted onto it in place of the originals as they got damaged in one way or another. The hood had to be held down with a piece of hanger wire to keep it from flipping up when the car jounced, and the front bumper was still smashed out of shape from last summer's attempt at vehicular monsterslaughter. Maybe if Vincent's job paid well, I'd be able to get it fixed.
Father Vincent blinked at the Beetle and asked, "What happened?"
"I hit trees."
"You drove your car into a tree?"
"No. Trees, plural. And then a Dumpster." I glanced at him self-consciously and added, "They were little trees."
His uncertain look deepened to actual worry. "Ah."
I unlocked my door. Not that I was worried about anyone stealing my car. I once had a car thief offer to get me something better for a sweetheart rate. "I guess you want to give me the details somewhere a little more private?"
Father Vincent nodded. "Yes, of course. If you could take me to my hotel, I have some photographs and---"
I heard the scuff of shoes on concrete in time for me to catch the gunman in my peripheral vision as he rose from between a pair of parked cars one row over. Dim lights gleamed on the gun, and I threw myself across the hood of the Beetle, away from him. I crashed into Father Vincent, who let out a squeak of startled surprise, and the pair of us tumbled to the ground as the man started shooting.
The gun didn't split the air with thunder when it fired. Typically, guns do that. They're a hell of a lot louder than anything most folks run into on a day-today basis. This gun didn't roar, or bark, or even bang. It made a kind of loud noise. Maybe as loud as someone slamming an unabridged dictionary down on a table. The gunman was using a silencer.
One shot hit my car and caromed off the curve of the hood. Another went by my head as I struggled with Father Vincent, and a third shattered the safety glass of a ritzy sports car parked beside me.
"What's happening?" Father Vincent stammered.
"Shut up," I snarled. The gunman was moving, his feet scuffing on the concrete as he skirted around my car. I reached around the Beetle's headlight and fumbled at the wire holding the hood down while the man came closer. It gave way and the hood wobbled up as I reached into the storage compartment.
I looked up in time to see a man, medium height and build, mid thirties, dark pants and jacket, lift a small-caliber pistol, its end heavy with a manufactured silencer. He fired, but he hadn't taken time to aim at me. He wasn't twenty feet away, but he missed.
I drew the shotgun out of the car's trunk and flicked off the safety as I chambered a round. The gunman's eyes widened and he turned to run. He shot at me again on the way, shattering one of the Beetle's headlights, and he kept shooting toward me as he skittered back the way he came.
I jerked back behind the car and kept my head down, trying to count his shots. He got to eleven or twelve and the gun went silent. I stood up, the shotgun already at my shoulder, and sighted down the barrel. The gunman ducked behind a concrete column and kept running.
"Dammit," I hissed. "Get in the car."
"But---" Father Vincent stammered.
"Get in the car!" I shouted. I got up, twisted the hanger wire on the hood back into place, and got in. Vincent got in the passenger side and I shoved the shotgun at him. "Hold this."
He fumbled with it, his eyes wide, as I brought the Beetle to life with a roar. Well. Not really a roar. A Volkswagen Bug doesn't roar. But it sort of growled, and I mashed it into gear before the priest had managed to completely shut the door.
I headed for the parking garage's exit, whipping around the ramps and turns.
"What are you doing?" Father Vincent demanded.
"He's an outfit hitter," I spat. "They'll have the exit covered."
We screeched around the final corner and toward the parking garage's exit. I heard someone yelling in a breathless voice, and a couple of large and unfriendly-looking men in a car parked across the street were just getting out. One of them held a shotgun, and the other had a heavy-duty semiautomatic, maybe a Desert Eagle.
I didn't recognize the thug with the shotgun, but Thug Number Three was an enormous man with reddish hair, no neck, and a cheap suit---Cujo Hendricks, right hand enforcer to the crime lord of Chicago, Gentleman Johnny Marcone.
I had to bounce the Beetle up onto the sidewalk at the parking-garage exit to get around the security bar, and I mowed down some landscaped bushes on the way. I jounced over the curb and into the street, hauling the wheel to the right, and mashed the accelerator to the floor.
I glanced back and saw the original gunman standing at a fire-exit door, pointing the silenced pistol at us. He snapped off several more shots, though I only heard the last few, as the silencer started to give out. He didn't have a prayer of a clean shot, but he got lucky and my back window shattered inward. I gulped and took the first corner against the light, nearly colliding with a U-Haul moving truck, and kept accelerating away.
A couple of blocks later, my heart slowed down enough that I could think. I slowed the car down to something approaching the speed limit, thanked my lucky stars the suppression spell had fallen apart in the studio and not in the car, and rolled down my window. I stuck my head out for a second to see if Hendricks and his goons were following us, but I didn't see anyone coming along behind us, and took it on faith.
I pulled my head in and found the barrel of the shotgun pointed at my chin, while Father Vincent, his face pale, muttered to himself under his breath in Italian.
"Hey!" I said, and pushed the gun's barrel away. "Careful with that thing. You wanna kill me?" I reached down and flicked the safety on. "Put it down. A patrolman sees that and we're in trouble."
Father Vincent gulped, and tried to lower the gun below the level of the dash. "This weapon is illegal?"
"Illegal is such a strong word," I muttered.
"Oh, my," Father Vincent said with a gulp. "Those men," he said. "They tried to kill you."
"That's what hitters for the outfit do," I agreed.
"How do you know who they are?"
"First guy had a silenced weapon. A good silencer, metal and glass, not a cheapo plastic bottle." I checked out the window again. "He was using a small-caliber weapon, too, and he was trying to get real close before he started shooting."
"Why does that matter?"
It looked clear. My hands trembled and felt a little weak. "Because it means he was using light ammunition. Subsonic. If the bullet breaks the sound barrier, it sort of defeats the point of a silenced weapon. When he saw I was armed, he ran. Covered himself doing it, and went for help. He's a pro."
"Oh, my," Father Vincent said again. He looked a little pale.
"Plus I recognized one of the men waiting at the exit."
"Someone was at the exit?" Father Vincent said.
"Yeah. Some of Marcone's rent-a-thugs." I glanced back at the shattered window and sighed. "Dammit. So where are we going?"
Father Vincent gave me directions in a numb voice, and I concentrated on driving, trying to ignore the quivering in my stomach and the continued trembling of my hands. Getting shot at is not something I handle very well.
Hendricks. Why the hell was Marcone sending goons after me? Marcone was the lord of the mean streets of Second City, but generally he didn't like to use that kind of violence. He thought it was bad for business. I had believed Marcone and I had an understanding---or at least an agreement to stay out of each other's way. So why would he make a move like this?
Maybe I had already stepped over a line somewhere, that I didn't know existed.
I glanced at the shaken Father Vincent.
He hadn't told me yet what he wanted, but whatever it was, it was important enough to covertly drag one of the Vatican's staff all the way to Chicago. Maybe it was important enough to kill a nosy wizard over, too.
Hoo-boy.
It was turning into one hell of a day.
Father Vincent directed me to a motel a little ways north of O'Hare. It was a national chain, cheap but clean, with rows of doors facing the parking lot. I drove around to the back of the motel, away from the street, frowning. It didn't look like the kind of place someone like Vincent would stay in. The priest left my car almost before I'd set the parking break, hurried to the nearest door, and ducked inside as quickly as he could open the lock.
I followed him. Vincent shut the door behind us, locked it, and then fiddled with the blinds until they closed. He nodded at the room's little table and said, "Please, sit down."
I did, and stretched out my legs. Father Vincent pulled open a drawer on the plain dresser, and drew out a file folder, held closed with a wide rubber band. He sat down across from me, took off the rubber band, and said, "The Church is interested in recovering some stolen property."
I shrugged and said, "Sounds like a job for the police."
"An investigation is under way and I am giving your police department my full cooperation. But...How to phrase this politely." He frowned. "History is an able teacher."
"You don't trust the police," I said. "Gotcha."
He grimaced. "It is only that there have been a number of associations between Chicago police and various underworld figures in the past."
"That's mostly movies now, padre. You may not have heard, but the whole Al Capone thing has been over for a while."
"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not. I simply seek to do everything within my power to recover the stolen article. That includes involving an independent and discreet investigator."
Aha. So he didn't trust the police and wanted me to work for him on the sly. That's why we were meeting at a cheap motel rather than wherever he was really staying. "What do you want me to find for you?"
"A relic," he said.
"A what?"
"An artifact, Mister Dresden. An antique possessed by the Church for several centuries."
"Oh, that," I said.
"Yes. The article is fragile and of great age, and we believe that it is not being adequately preserved. It is imperative that we recover it as quickly as possible."
"What happened to it?"
"It was stolen three days ago."
"From?"
"The Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in northern Italy."
"Long ways off."
"We believe that the artifact was brought here, to Chicago, to be sold."
"Why?"
He took an eight-by-ten glossy black and white from the folder and passed it to me. It featured a fairly messy corpse lying on cobblestones. Blood had run into the spaces between the stones, as well as pooling a little on the ground around the body. I think it had been a man, but it was hard to tell for certain. Whoever it was had been slashed to almost literal ribbons across the face and neck---sharp, neat, straight cuts. Professional knife work. Yuck.
"This man is Gaston LaRouche. He is the ringleader of a group of organized thieves who call themselves the Churchmice. They specialize in robbing sanctuaries and cathedrals. He was found dead the morning after the robbery near a small airfield. His briefcase contained several falsified pieces of American identification and plane tickets that would carry him here."
"But no whatsit."
"Ah. Exactly." Father Vincent removed another pair of photos. These were also black-and-white, but they looked rougher, as if they had been magnified several times. Both were of women of average height and build, dark hair, dark sunglasses.
"Surveillance photos?" I asked.
He nodded. "Interpol. Anna Valmont and Francisca Garcia. We believe they helped LaRouche with the theft, then murdered him and left the country. Interpol received a tip that Valmont had been seen at the airport here."
"Do you know who the buyer is?"
Vincent shook his head. "No. But this is the case. I want you to find the remaining Churchmice and recover the artifact."
I frowned, looking at the photos. "Yeah. That's what they want you to do too."
Vincent blinked at me. "What do you mean?"
I shook my head impatiently. "Someone. Look at this photo. LaRouche wasn't murdered there."
Vincent frowned. "Why would you say that?"
"Not enough blood. I've seen men who were torn up and bled out. There's a hell of a lot more blood." I paused and then said, "Pardon my French."
Father Vincent crossed himself. "Why would his body be found there?"
I shrugged. "A professional did him. Look at the cuts. They're methodical. He was probably unconscious or drugged, because you can't hold a man still very easily when you're taking a knife to his face."
Father Vincent pressed one hand to his stomach. "Oh."
"So you've got a corpse found out in the middle of a street somewhere, basically wearing a sign around his neck that says, 'The goods are in Chicago.' Either someone was incredibly stupid, or someone was trying to lead you here. It's a professional killing. Someone meant his corpse to be a clue."
"But who would do such a thing?"
I shrugged. "Probably a good thing to find out. Do you have any better pictures of these two women?"
He shook his head. "No. And they've never been arrested. No criminal record."
"They're good at what they do then." I took the photos. There were little dossiers paper-clipped to the back of the pictures, listing known aliases, locations, but nothing terribly useful. "This one isn't going to be quick."
"Worthwhile goals rarely are. What do you need from me, Mister Dresden?"
"A retainer," I said. "A thousand will do. And I need a description of this artifact, the more detailed the better."
Father Vincent gave me a matter-of-fact nod, and drew a plain steel money clip from his pocket. He counted off ten portraits of Ben Franklin, and passed them to me. "The artifact is an oblong length of linen cloth, fourteen feet, three inches long by three feet, seven inches wide made of a handwoven three-to-one herringbone twill. There are a number of patches and stains on the cloth, and---"
I held up my hand, frowning. "Wait a minute. Where did you say this thing was stolen from?"
"The Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist," Father Vincent said.
"In northern Italy," I said.
He nodded.
"In Turin, to be exact," I said.
He nodded again, his expression reserved.
"Someone stole the freaking Shroud of Turin?" I demanded.
"Yes."
I settled back into the chair, looking down at the photos again. This changed things. This changed things a lot.
The Shroud. Supposedly the burial cloth used by Joseph of Aramithea to wrap the body of Christ after the Crucifixion. Capital Cs. The cloth supposedly wrapped around Christ when he was resurrected, with his image, his blood, imprinted upon it.
"Wow," I said.
"What do you know about the Shroud, Mister Dresden?"
"Not much. Christ's burial cloth. They did a bunch of tests in the seventies, and no one was able to conclusively disprove it. It almost got burned a few years back when the cathedral caught fire. There are stories that it has healing powers, or that a couple of angels still attend it. A bunch of others I can't remember right now."
Father Vincent rested his hands on the table and leaned toward me. "Mister Dresden. The Shroud is perhaps the single most vital artifact of the Church. It is a powerful symbol of the faith, and one in which many people believe. It is also politically significant. It is absolutely vital to Rome that it be restored to the Church's custody as expediently as possible."
I stared at him for a second, and tried to pick out my words carefully. "Are you going to be insulted if I suggest that it's very possible that the Shroud is, uh...significant, magically speaking?"
Vincent pressed his lips together. "I have no illusions about it, Mister Dresden. It is a piece of cloth, not a magic carpet. Its value derives solely from its historical and symbolic significance."
"Uh-huh," I said. Hell's bells, that's where plenty of magical power came from. The Shroud was old, and regarded as special, and people believed in it. That could be enough to give it a kind of power, all by itself.
"Some people might believe otherwise," I said.
"Of course," he agreed. "That is why your knowledge of the local occult may prove invaluable."
I nodded, thinking. This could be something completely mundane. Someone could have stolen a moldy old piece of cloth to sell it to a crackpot who believed it was a magic bedsheet. It could be that the Shroud was nothing more than a symbol, an antique, a historical Pop-Tart---nifty, but ultimately not very significant.
Of course, there was also the possibility that the Shroud was genuine. That it actually had been in contact with the Son of God when he had been brought back from the dead. I pushed that thought aside.
Regardless of why or how, if the Shroud was something special, magically speaking, then it could mean a whole new---and nastier---ball game. Of all the various weird, dark, or wicked powers who might abscond with the Shroud, I couldn't think of any who would do anything cheerful with it. All sorts of supernatural interests might be at play.
Even discounting that possibility, mortal pursuit of the Shroud seemed to be deadly enough. John Marcone might already be involved, as well as the Chicago police---probably Interpol and the FBI, too. Even sans supernatural powers, when it came to finding people the cops were damned good at what they did. Odds were good that they'd locate the thieves and haul in the Shroud within a few days.
I looked from the photos to the cash, and thought about how many of my bills I could pay off with a nice, fat fee courtesy of Father Vincent. If I got lucky, maybe I wouldn't have to put myself in harm's way to do it.
Sure.
I believed that.
I put the money in my pocket. Then I picked up the photos too. "How can I get in touch with you?"
Father Vincent wrote a phone number on the motel's stationary and passed it to me. "Here. It's my answering service while I'm in town."
"All right. I can't promise you anything concrete, but I'll see what I can do."
Father Vincent stood up and said, "Thank you, Mister Dresden. Father Forthill spoke most highly of you, you know."
"He's a sport," I agreed, rising.
"If you will excuse me, I have appointments to keep."
"I'll bet. Here's my card, if you need to get in touch."
I gave him a business card, shook hands, and left. At the Beetle, I stopped to open the trunk and put the shotgun back in it, after taking the shell from the chamber and making sure the safety was on. Then I pulled out a length of wood a little longer than my forearm, carved over with runes and sigils that helped me focus my magic a lot more precisely. I tossed my suit jacket in over the gun, and dug out a silver bracelet dangling a dozen tiny, medieval-style shields from my pocket. I fastened that to my left arm, slipped a silver ring onto my right hand, then took my blasting rod and set it beside me on the car seat as I got in.
Between the new case, the outfit hitter, and Duke Ortega's challenge, I wanted to make damn sure that I wasn't going to get caught with my eldritch britches down again.
I took the Beetle home, to my apartment. I rent the basement apartment of a huge, creaking old boardinghouse. By the time I got back, it was after midnight and the late-February air was speckled with occasional flakes of wet snow that wouldn't last once they hit the ground. The adrenaline rush of The Larry Fowler Show and then the hired-goon attack had faded, and left me aching, tired, and worried. I got out of the car, determined to head for bed, then get up early and start to work on Vincent's case.
A sudden sensation of cold, rippling energy and a pair of muffled thumps from the stairs leading down to my apartment changed my mind.
I drew out my blasting rod and readied the shield bracelet on my left wrist, but before I could step over to the stairs, a pair of figures flew up them and landed heavily on the half-frozen ground beside the gravel parking lot. They struggled, rolling, until one of the shadowy figures got a leg underneath the form on top of it, and pushed.
The second figure flew twenty feet through the air, landed on the gravel with a thump and a cough of expelled air, then got up and sprinted away.
Shield readied, I stepped forward before the remaining intruder could rise. I forced an effort of will through the blasting rod, setting the runes along its length alight with scarlet. Fire coalesced at the tip of the rod, bright as a road flare, but I held the strike as I stepped forward, shoving the tip of the blasting rod down at the intruder. "Make a move and I'll fry you."
Red light fell over a woman.
She was dressed in jeans, a black leather jacket, a white T-shirt, and gloves. She had her long, midnight hair tied back in a tail. Dark, oblique eyes smoldered up at me from beneath long lashes. Her beautiful face held an expression of wary amusement.
My heart thudded in sudden pain and excitement.
"Well," Susan said, looking from the sizzling blasting rod up to my face. "I've heard of running into an old flame, but this is ridiculous."
Susan.
My brain locked up for a good ten seconds as I stared down at my former lover. I could smell the scent of her hair, the subtle perfume she wore, mixing with the new-leather scent of her jacket and another, new smell---new soap, maybe. Her dark eyes regarded me, uncertain and nervous. She had a small cut on the side of her mouth, beading with drops of blood that looked black in the red light of the blasting rod's fire.
"Harry," Susan said, her voice quiet and steady. "Harry. You're scaring me."
I shook myself out of my surprise and lowered the blasting rod, stepping over to her. "Stars and stones, Susan. Are you all right?"
I offered her my hand and she took it, rising easily to her feet. Her fingers were feverishly warm, and wisps of winter steam curled from her skin. "Bruises," she said. "I'll be fine."
"Who was that?"
Susan glanced the way her attacker had run and shook her head. "Red Court. I couldn't see his face."
I blinked at her. "You ran off a vampire? By yourself?"
She flashed me a smile that mixed weariness with a sense of pleasure. She still hadn't taken her hand from mine. "I've been working out."
I looked around a bit more, and tried to reach out with my senses, to detect any trace of the unsettling energy that hovered around the Reds. Nothing. "Gone now," I reported. "But we shouldn't hang around out here."
"Inside then?"
I started to agree, and then paused. A horrible suspicion hit me. I let go of her hand and took a step back.
A line appeared between her eyebrows. "Harry?"
"It's been a rough year," I said. "I want to talk, but I'm not inviting you in."
Susan's expression flickered with comprehension and pain. She folded her arms over her stomach and nodded. "No. I understand. And you're right to be careful."
I took another step back and started walking toward my reinforced-steel door. She walked a few feet away, and at my side, where I could see her. I went down the stairs and unlocked the door. Then I pushed out an effort of will to temporarily disable the protective spells laid over my house that amounted to the magical equivalent of a land mine and burglar alarm all in one.
I went in, glanced at the candleholder on the wall by the door, and muttered, "Flickum bicus." I felt a tiny surge of energy flowing out of me, and the candle danced to life, lighting my apartment in dim, soft orange.
My place is basically a cave with two chambers. The larger one was my living area. Bookshelves lined most of the walls, and where they didn't I had hung a couple of tapestries and an original Star Wars movie poster. I'd scattered rugs all over my floor. I had laid down everything from handmade Navajo rugs to a black area rug with Elvis's face, fully two feet across, dominating the piece. Like the Beetle, I figured some people would call my ragtag assembly of floor coverings eclectic. I just thought of them as something to walk on besides freezing-cold stone floor.
My furniture is much the same. I got most of it secondhand. None of it matches, but it's all comfortable to sprawl on, and my lights are dim enough to let me ignore it. A small alcove held a sink, an icebox, and a pantry for food. A fireplace rested against one wall, the wood all burned down to black and grey, but I knew it would still be glowing under the ash. A door led to my tiny bedroom and the apartment's three-quarters bath. The whole place may have been ragged, but it was very tidy and clean.
I turned to face Susan, and didn't put down my blasting rod. Supernatural creatures cannot lightly step across the threshold of a home unless one of the rightful residents invites them in. Plenty of nasties can put on a false face, and it wasn't inconceivable that one of them had decided to try to get close to me by pretending to be Susan.
A supernatural being would have a hell of a time getting over a threshold without being invited in. If that was some kind of shapeshifter rather than Susan or, God help me, if Susan had gone all the way over to the vampires, she wouldn't be able to enter. If it was the real Susan, she'd be fine. Or at least, the threshold wouldn't hurt her. Getting paranoid suspicion from her ex-boyfriend might do its own kind of damage.
On the other hand, there was a war on, and Susan probably wouldn't be happy to hear I'd gotten myself killed. Better safe than exsanguinated.
Susan didn't pause at the door. She stepped inside, turned around to close and lock it, and asked, "Good enough?"
It was. Relief, coupled with a sudden explosion of naked emotion, roared through me. It was like waking up after days of anguish to find that the pain was gone. Where there had been only hurt, there was suddenly nothing, and other feelings rushed in to fill the sudden void. Excitement, for one, that quivering teenage nervousness that accompanies expectation. A surge of warm emotion, joy and happiness rolled together with a chittering glee.
And in the shadows of those, a few things darker but no less vibrant. Sheer, sensual pleasure in the scent of her, in looking at her face, her dark hair again. I needed to feel her skin under my hands, to feel her pressed to me.
It was more than mere need---it was hunger. Now that she was standing there in front of me, I needed her, all of her, as much as I needed food or water or air, and possibly more. I wanted to tell her, to let her know what it meant to me that she was there. But I'd never been very good at expressing myself verbally.
By the time Susan turned around again, I was already pressed up against her. She let out a quiet gasp of surprise, but I leaned gently into her, pressing her shoulders to the door.
I lowered my mouth to hers, and her lips were soft, sweet, fever-hot. She went rigid for a second, then let out a low sound and wound her arms around my neck and shoulders, kissing me back. I could feel her, the slender, too-warm strength and softness of her body. My hunger deepened, and so did the kiss, my tongue touching hers, lightly teasing. She responded as ardently as I did, her lips almost desperate, low whimpers vibrating through her mouth and into mine. I started to feel a little dizzy and disoriented, and though some part of me warned against it, I only pressed harder against her.
I slid one hand over her hip, beneath the jacket, and slipped up under the T-shirt she wore to curl around the naked sweetness of her waist. I pulled her hard against me, and she responded, her breath hot and quick, lifting one leg to press against mine, winding around my calf a little, pulling me nearer. I lowered my mouth to her throat, tongue tasting her skin, and she arched against me, baring more of her skin. I drew a line of kisses up to her ear, gently biting, sending quivering shock waves through her as she shook against me, her throat letting out quiet sounds of deepening need. I found her eager lips again, and her fingers tightened in my hair, drawing me hard against her.
My dizziness grew. Some kind of coherent thought did a quick flyby of my forebrain. I struggled to take notice of it, but the kiss made it impossible. Lust and need murdered my reason.
A sudden, shrieking hiss startled me, and I jerked back from Susan, looking wildly around.
Mister, my bobtailed, battle-scarred tomcat, had leapt up onto the stones before the fireplace, his luminous green eyes wide and fixed on Susan. Mister weighs about thirty pounds, and thirty pounds of cat can make an absolutely impossible amount of noise.
Susan shuddered and pressed her palm against my chest, turning her face away from me. She pushed, something gentle rather than insistent. My lips burned to touch hers again, but I closed my eyes and took slow, shuddering breaths. Then I backed away from her. I had meant to go stir up the fire---not that fire, the literal one---but the room tilted wildly and it was all I could do to stumble into an easy chair.
Mister leapt up into my lap, more daintily than he had any right to be able to do, and rubbed his face against my chest, rumbling out a purr. I fumbled up one hand to pet him, and after a couple of minutes the room stopped spinning.
"What the hell just happened?" I muttered.
Susan emerged from the shadows and crossed the candlelit room to take up the fireplace poker. She stirred through the ashes until she found some glowing orange-red, and then began adding wood to the fire from the old iron hod beside the fireplace. "I could feel you," she said, after a minute. "I could feel you going under. It..." She shivered. "It felt nice."
Boy, did it. And I bet it would feel even nicer if all those clothes hadn't been in the way. Aloud, all I said was, "Under?"
She looked over her shoulder at me, her expression hard to read. "The venom," she said quietly. "They call it their Kiss."
"I guess I can't blame them. It sounds a lot more romantic than 'narcotic drool.'" Some parts of me lobbied for a cessation of meaningless chat and an immediate resumption of any line of thought that would lead to discarded clothing upon the floor. I ignored them. "I remember. When...when we kissed before you left. I thought I'd imagined it."
Susan shook her head, and sat down on the stones before the fireplace, her back straight, her hands folded sedately in her lap. The fire began to grow, catching onto the new wood, and though the light of it curled around her with golden fingers, it left her face veiled in shadow. "No. What Bianca did to me has changed me already, in some ways. Physically. I'm stronger now. My senses are sharper. And there's..." She faltered.
"The Kiss," I mumbled. My lips didn't find the word to their liking. They liked the real thing a lot better. I ignored them, too.
"Yes," she said. "Not like one of them can do. Less. But still there."
I mopped at my face with my hand. "You know what I need?" Either a naked, writhing, eager Susan or else a liquid-nitrogen shower. "A beer. You want one?"
"Pass," she said. "I don't think lowering my inhibitions would be healthy right now."
I nodded, got up, and went to my icebox. It's an actual icebox, the kind that runs on honest-to-goodness ice rather than Freon. I got out a dark brown bottle of Mac's home-brewed ale and opened it, taking a long drink. Mac would be horrified that I drank his beer cold, since he prided himself on an old-world brew, but I always kept a couple in there, for when I wanted it cold. What can I say. I'm an unlettered, barbaric American wizard. I drank off maybe half of it and put the cold bottle against my forehead afterward.
"Well," I said. "I guess you didn't come over to, uh...."
"Tear your clothes off and use you shamelessly?" Susan suggested. Her voice sounded calm again, but I could sense the underlying tone of her own hunger. I wasn't sure whether I should be unsettled by it or encouraged. "No, Harry. It isn't...that isn't something I can afford to do with you. No matter how much either of us wants it."
"Why not?" I asked. I knew why not already, but the words jumped from my brain to my mouth before I could stop them. I peered suspiciously at the beer.
"I don't want to lose control," Susan said. "Not ever. Not with anyone. But especially not with you." There was a silence in which only the fire made any noise. "Harry, it would kill me to hurt you."
More to the point, I thought, it would probably kill me too. Think about her instead of yourself, Harry. Get a grip. It's just a kiss. Let it go.
I drank the rest of my beer, which wasn't anywhere near as nice as other things I'd done with my mouth that night. I checked the fridge and asked Susan, "Coke?"
She nodded, looking around. Her gaze hesitated on the fireplace mantel, where I kept the card and three postcards I'd received from her, along with the little grey jewelry box that held the dinky little ring she'd turned down. "Is someone else living here now?"
"No." I got out a couple of cans, and took one over to her. She took it from me without touching my fingers. "Why do you ask?"
"The place looks so nice," she said. "And your clothes smell like fabric softener. You've never used fabric softener in your life."
"Oh. That." You can't tell people about it when faeries are doing your housework, or they get ticked off and leave. "I sort of have a cleaning service."
"I hear you've been too busy to clean up," Susan said.
"Just making a living."
Susan smiled. "I heard you saved the world from some kind of doom. Is it true?"
I fiddled with my drink. "Sort of."
Susan laughed. "How do you sort of save the world?"
"I only saved it in a Greenpeace kind of way. If I'd blown it, there might have been a historically bad storm, but I don't think anyone would have noticed the real damage for thirty or forty years---climate change takes time."
"Sounds scary," Susan said.
I shrugged. "Mostly I was just trying to save my own ass. The world was a twofer. Maybe I'm getting cynical. I suspect the only thing I accomplished was to keep the faeries from screwing up the place so that we could screw it up ourselves."
I sat down on the chair again, and we opened the Cokes and drank in silence for a bit. My heart eventually stopped pounding quite so loudly.
"I miss you," I said finally. "So does your editor. She called me a couple of weeks ago. Said your articles had quit coming in."
Susan nodded. "That's one reason I'm here. I owe her more than a letter or a phone call."
"You're quitting?" I asked.
She nodded.
"You find something else?"
"Sort of," she said. She brushed her hair back from her face with one hand. "I can't tell you everything right now."
I frowned. For as long as I'd known her, Susan had been driven by a passion for discovering the truth and sharing it with other people. Her work at the Arcane had arisen from her stubborn refusal to deny things she saw as the truth, even if they had seemed insane. She was one of the rare people who stopped and thought about things, even weird and supernatural things, instead of dismissing them out of hand. That's how she'd begun work at the Arcane. That was how she had originally met me.
"Are you all right?" I asked. "Are you in trouble?"
"Relatively speaking, no," she said. "But you are. That's why I'm here, Harry."
"What do you mean?"
"I came to warn you. The Red Court---"
"Sent Paolo Ortega to call me out. I know."
She sighed. "But you don't know what you're getting into. Harry, Ortega is one of the most dangerous nobles of their Court. He's a warlord. He's killed half a dozen of the White Council's Wardens in South America since the war started, and he's the one who planned and executed the attack on Archangel last year."
I sat straight up at that, the blood draining from my face. "How do you know about that?"
"I'm an investigative reporter, Harry. I investigated."
I toyed with the Coke can, frowning down at it. "All the same. He came here asking for a duel. A fair fight. If he's serious, I'll take him on."
"There's more that you need to know," Susan said.
"Like what?"
"Ortega's opinion on the war is not the popular one within the Red Court. A few of the upper crust of the vampires support his way of thinking. But most of them like the idea of a lot of constant bloodshed. They also like the idea of a war to wipe out the White Council. They figure that if they get rid of the wizards once and for all, they won't have to worry about keeping a low profile in the future."
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Think about it," Susan said. "Harry, the White Council is fighting this war reluctantly. If they had a decent excuse, they'd end it. That's Ortega's whole plan. He fights you, kills you, and then the White Council sues for peace. They'll pay some kind of concession that doesn't involve the death of one of their members, and that will be that. War over."
I blinked. "How did you find out---"
"Hello, Earth to Harry. I told you, I investigated."
I frowned until the lines between my eyebrows ached. "Right, right. Well, as plans go, I guess it sounds good," I said. "Except for that middle part where I die."
She gave me a small smile. "Much of the rest of the Red Court would rather you kept on breathing. As long as you're alive, they have a reason to keep the war going."
"Swell," I said.
"They'll try to interfere with any duel. I just thought you should know."
I nodded. "Thanks," I said. "I'll---"
Just then, someone knocked firmly at my door. Susan stiffened and rose, poker in hand. I got up a lot more slowly, opened a drawer in the night table beside the chair, and drew out the gun I kept at home, a great big old Dirty Harry Callahan number that weighed about seventy-five thousand pounds. I also took out a length of silk rope about a yard long, and draped it over my neck so that I could get it off in a hurry if need be.
I took the gun in both hands, pointed it at the floor, drew back the hammer, and asked the door, "Who is it?"
There was a moment's silence and then a calm, male voice asked, "Is Susan Rodriguez there?"
I glanced at Susan. She straightened more, her eyes flashing with anger, but she put the poker back in its stand beside the fireplace. Then she motioned to me and said, "Put it away. I know him."
I uncocked the revolver, but I didn't put it away as Susan crossed to the door and opened it.
The most bland-looking human being I had ever seen stood on the other side. He was maybe five nine, maybe one seventy-five. He had hair of medium brown, and eyes of the same ambiguous shade. He wore jeans, a medium-weight brown jacket, and worn tennis shoes. His face was unmemorable, neither appealing nor ugly. He didn't look particularly strong, or craven, or smart, or particularly anything else.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Susan without preamble. His voice was like the rest of him---about as exciting as a W-2.
Susan said, "I told you I was going to talk to him."
"You could have used the phone," the man pointed out. "There's no point to this."
"Hi," I said in a loud voice, and stepped up to my door. I towered over Blandman. And I had a great big gun in my hand, even if I did keep it pointed down at the floor. "I'm Harry Dresden."
He looked me up and down and then looked at Susan.
Susan sighed. "Harry, this is Martin."
"Hi, Martin," I said. I switched my sidearm to my other hand and thrust mine at him. "Nice to meet you."
Martin regarded my hand and then said, "I don't shake hands." That was evidently all the verbal interaction I merited, because he looked back at Susan and said, "We have to be up early."
We? We?
I looked at Susan, who flushed with embarrassment. She glared at Martin and then said to me, "I need to go, Harry. I wish I could have stayed longer."
"Wait," I said.
"I wish I could," she said. "I'll try to call you before we go."
There was that we again. "Go? Susan---"
"I'm sorry." She stood up on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, her too-warm lips soft. Then she left, brushing past Martin just hard enough to jostle him into taking a little step to keep his balance.
Martin nodded to me and walked out too. After a minute I followed them, long enough to see them getting into a cab on the street outside.
We.
"Hell's bells," I muttered, and stalked back inside my house. I slammed the door behind me, lit a candle, stomped into my little bathroom, and turned on the shower. The water was only a couple degrees short of becoming sleet, but I stripped and got in anyway, simmering with several varieties of frustration.
We.
We, we, we. Which implied she and someone else together. Someone who was not me. Was she? Susan, with the Pedantic Avenger there? That didn't track. I mean, hell's bells, the guy was just so dull. Boring. Blasé.
And maybe stable.
Face it, Harry. Interesting you might be. Exciting you might be. Stable you ain't.
I pushed my head under the freezing water and left it there. Susan hadn't said they were together. Neither had he. I mean, that wouldn't be why she had broken off the kiss. She had a really good reason to do that, after all.
But then again, it wasn't like we were together. She'd been gone for better than a year.
A lot can change in a year.
Her mouth hadn't. Or her hands. Or the curve of her body. Or the smoldering sensuality of her eyes. Or the soft sounds she made as she arched against me, her body begging me to---
I looked down at myself, sighed, and turned the water to its coldest setting.
I came out of the shower shriveled and turning blue, dried off, and got into bed.
I had just managed to get the covers warm so that I could stop shivering when my phone rang.
I swore sulfurously, got out of bed into the freezing air, snatched up the phone, and growled, "What." Then, on the off chance it was Susan, I forced some calm into my voice and said, "I mean, hello?"
"Sorry to wake you, Harry," said Karrin Murphy, the head of Chicago PD's Special Investigations division. SI routinely handled any crime that fell between the cracks of the other departments, as well as being handed the really smelly cases no one else wanted. As a result, they wound up looking into all kinds of things that weren't easily explained. Their job was to make sure that things were taken care of, and that everything typed up neatly into the final report.
Murphy called me in as a consultant from time to time, when she had something weird that she didn't know how to handle. We'd been working together for a while, and Murphy had gotten to where she and SI could handle your average, everyday supernatural riffraff. But from time to time, she ran into something that stumped her. My phone number is on her quick dial.
"Murph," I said. "What's up?"
"Unofficial business," she said. "I'd like your take on something."
"Unofficial means not paid, I guess," I said.
"You up for any pro bono work?" She paused and then said, "This could be important to me."
What the hell. My night had pretty much been shot anyway. "Where do you want me?"
"Cook County Morgue," Murphy said. "I want to show you a corpse."
They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be easier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.
Maybe it says something about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Maybe it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives.
I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me?
Probably that I overanalyze things.
"You look pensive," Murphy said. We walked down an empty hospital corridor toward the Cook County Morgue. We'd had to go the long way around so that I could avoid any areas with important medical equipment. My leather duster whispered around my legs as I walked. My blasting rod thumped against my leg rhythmically, where I'd tied it to the inside of the duster. I'd traded in my slacks for blue jeans and my dress shoes for hiking boots.
Murphy didn't look like a monster-hunting Valkyrie. Murphy looked like someone's kid sister. She was five nothing, a hundred and nothing, and was built like an athlete, all springy muscle. Her blond hair hung down over her blue eyes, and was cut close in back. She wore nicer clothes than usual---a maroon blouse with a grey pantsuit---and she had on more makeup than was her habit. She looked every inch the professional businesswoman.
That said, Murphy was a monster-hunting Valkyrie. She was the only person I'd ever heard of who had killed one with a chainsaw.
"I said you look pensive, Harry," she repeated, a little louder.
I shook my head and told Murphy, "I don't like hospitals."
She nodded. "Morgues spook me. Morgues and dogs."
"Dogs?" I asked.
"Not like beagles or cocker spaniels or anything. Just big dogs."
I nodded. "I like dogs. They give Mister something to snack on."
Murphy gave me a smile. "I've seen you spooked. It doesn't make you look like that."
"What do I look like?" I asked.
Murphy pursed her lips, as though considering her words. "You look worried. And frustrated. And guilty. You know, romance things."
I gave her a wry glance, and then nodded. "Susan's in town."
Murphy whistled. "Wow. She's...okay?"
"Yeah. As much as she can be."
"Then why do you look like you just swallowed something that was still wriggling?"
I shrugged. "She's in town to quit her job. And she was with someone."
"A guy?" Murphy asked.
"Yeah."
She frowned. "With him, or with him?"
I shook my head. "Just with him, I think. I don't know."
"She's quitting her job?"
"Guess so. We're going to talk, I think."
"She said so?"
"Said she'd get in touch and we'd talk."
Murphy's eyes narrowed, and she said, "Ah. One of those."
"Eh?" I said, and eyed her.
She lifted her hands, palms out. "None of my business."
"Hell's bells, Murph."
She sighed and didn't look up at me, and didn't speak for a few steps. Finally she said, "You don't set up a guy for a good talk, Harry."
I stared at her profile, and then scowled down at my feet for a while. No one said anything.
We got to the morgue. Murphy pushed a button on the wall and said, "It's Murphy," at a speaker next to the door. A second later, the door buzzed and clicked. I swung open the door and held it for Murphy. She gave me an even look before she went through. Murphy does not respond well to chivalry.
The morgue was like others I'd seen, cold, clean, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Metal refrigerator doors lined one wall. An occupied autopsy table sat in the middle of the room, and a white sheet covered its subject. A rolling medical cart sat next to the autopsy table, another by a cheap office-furniture desk.
Polka music, heavy on accordion and clarinet, oompahed cheerfully through the room from a little stereo on the desk. At the desk sat a small man with a wild shock of black hair. He was dressed in medical scrubs and green bunny slippers, complete with floppy ears. He had a pen clenched in one hand, and scribbled furiously at a stack of forms.
When we came in, he held up a hand toward us, and finished his scribbling with a flourish, before hopping up with a broad smile. "Karrin!" he said. "Wow, you're looking nice tonight. What's the occasion?"
"Municipal brass are tromping around," Murphy said. "So we're all supposed to wear our Sunday clothes and smile a lot."
"Bastards," the little guy said cheerfully. He shot me a glance. "You aren't supposed to be spending money on psychic consultants, either, I bet. You must be Harry Dresden."
"That's what it says on my underwear," I agreed.
He grinned. "Great coat, love it."
"Harry," Murphy said, "this is Waldo Butters. Assistant medical examiner."
Butters shook my hand, then turned to walk to the autopsy table. He snapped on some rubber gloves and a surgical mask. "Pleased to meet you, Mister Dresden," he said over his shoulder. "Seems like every time you're working with SI my job gets really interesting."
Murphy chucked me on the arm with one fist, and followed Butters. I followed her.
"Masks on that tray to your left. Stay a couple of feet back from the table, and for God's sake, don't throw up on my floor." We put on masks and Butters threw back the sheet.
I'd seen corpses before. Hell's bells, I'd created some. I'd seen what was left of people who had been burned alive, savaged to death by animals, and who had died when their hearts exploded out of their chests, courtesy of black magic.
But I hadn't ever seen anything quite like this. I shoved the thought to the back of my head, and tried to focus purely upon taking in details. It wouldn't do to think too much, looking at this. Thinking too much would lead me to messing up Butters's floor.
The victim had been a man, maybe a little over six feet tall, thin build. His chest looked like twenty pounds of raw hamburger. Fine grid marks stretched vertically from his collarbones to his belly, and horizontally across the width of his body. The cuts were spaced maybe a sixteenth of an inch apart, and the grid pattern slashed into the flesh looked nearly flawless. The cuts were deep ones, and I had the unsettling impression that I could have brushed my hand across the surface of that ruined body and sent chunks of flesh pattering to the floor. The Y-incision of the autopsy had been closed, at least. Its lines marred the precision of the grid of incisions.
The next thing I noticed were the corpse's arms. Or rather, the missing bits of them. His left arm had been hacked off two or three inches above the wrist. The flesh around it gaped, and a shard of black-crusted bone poked out from it. His right arm had been severed just beneath the elbow, with similar hideous results.
My belly twitched and I felt myself taking one of those prevomit breaths. I closed my eyes for a second and forced the impending reaction down. Don't think, Harry. Look. See what there is to see. That isn't a man anymore. It's just a shell. Throwing up won't bring him back.
I opened my eyes again, tore my gaze from his mutilated chest and hands, and forced myself to study the corpse's features.
I couldn't.
His head had been hacked off, too.
I stared at the ragged stump of his neck. The head just wasn't there. Even though that's where heads go. Ditto his hands. A man should have a head. Should have hands. They shouldn't simply be gone.
The impression it left on me was unsettling---simply and profoundly wrong. Inside me, some little voice started screaming and running away. I stared down at the corpse, my stomach threatening insurrection again. I stared at his missing head, but aloud all I said was, "Gee. Wonder what killed him."
"What didn't kill him," Butters said. "I can tell you this much. It wasn't blood loss."
I frowned at Butters. "What do you mean?"
Butters lifted one of the corpse's arms and pointed down at dark mottling in the dead grey flesh, just where the corpse's back met the table. "See that?" he asked. "Lividity. If this guy had bled out, from his wrists or his neck either one, I don't think there'd be enough blood left in the body to show this much. His heart would have just kept on pumping it out of his body until he died."
I grunted. "If not one of the wounds, then what was it?"
"My guess?" Butters said. "Plague."
I blinked and looked at him.
"Plague," he said again. "Or more accurately plagues. His insides looked like models for a textbook on infection. Not all the tests have come back yet, but so far every one I've done has returned positive. Everything from bubonic plague to strep throat. And there are symptoms I've found in him that don't match any disease I've ever heard of."
"You're telling me he died of disease?" I asked.
"Diseases. Plural. And get this. I think one of them was smallpox."
"I thought smallpox was extinct," Murphy said.
"Pretty much. They have some in vaults, probably some in some bioweapon research facilities, but that's it."
I stared at Butters for a second. "And we're standing here next to his plague-ridden body why?"
"Relax," Butters said. "The really nasty stuff wasn't airborne. I disinfected the corpse pretty well. Wear your mask and don't touch it, you should be fine."
"What about the smallpox?" I said.
Butters's voice turned wry. "You're vaccinated."
"This is dangerous, though, isn't it? Having the body out like this?"
"Yeah," Butters said, his voice frank. "But County is full, and the only thing that's going to happen if I report an occurrence of free-range smallpox is another evaluation."
Murphy shot me a warning look and stepped a very little bit between me and Butters. "You got a time of death?"
Butters shrugged. "Maybe forty-eight hours ago, tops. All of those diseases seemed to sprout up at exactly the same time. I make cause of death as either shock or a massive failure and necrosis of several major organs, plus tissue damage from an outrageously high fever. It's anyone's guess as to which one gets the blue ribbon. Lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, spleen---"
"We get the point," Murphy said.
"Let me finish. It's like every disease the guy had ever had contact with all got together and planned when to hit him. It just isn't possible. He probably had more germs in him than blood cells."
I frowned. "And then someone Ginsued him after he died?"
Butters nodded. "Partly. Though the cuts on his chest weren't postmortem. They had filled with blood. Tortured before he died, maybe."
"Ugh," I said. "Why?"
Murphy regarded the corpse without any emotion showing in her cool blue eyes. "Whoever cut him up must have taken the arms and hands to make it hard to identify him after he died. That's the only logical reason I can think of."
"Same here," said Butters.
I frowned down at the table. "Why prevent identification of the corpse if it had died of disease?" Butters began to lower the arm slowly and I saw something as he did. "Wait, hold it."
He looked up at me. I pressed closer to the table and had Butters lift the arm again. I had almost missed it against the rotted tone of the dead man's flesh---a tattoo, maybe an inch square, located on the inside of the corpse's biceps. It wasn't fancy. Faded green ink in the shape of a symbolic open eye, not too different from the CBS network logo.
"See there?" I asked. Murphy and Butters peered at the tattoo.
"Do you recognize it, Harry?" Murphy asked.
I shook my head. "Almost looks old Egyptian, but with fewer lines. Hey, Butters, do you have a piece of paper?"
"Better," Butters said. He got an old instant camera off the bottom tray of one of the medical carts, and snapped several shots of the tattoo. He passed one of them over to Murphy, who waved it around a little while the image developed. I got another.
"Okay," I said, thinking out loud. "Guy dies of a zillion diseases he somehow contracted all at once. How long do you think it took?"
Butters shrugged. "No idea. I mean, the odds against him getting all of those at once like that are beyond astronomical."
"Days?" I asked.
"If I had to guess," Butters said, "I'd say more like hours. Maybe less."
"Okay," I said. "And during those hours, someone uses a knife on him and turns his chest into tuna cubes. Then when they're done, they take his hands and his head and dump the body. Where was it found?"
"Under an overpass on the expressway," Murphy said. "Like this, naked."
I shook my head. "SI got handed this one?"
Murphy's face flickered with annoyance. "Yeah. Homicide dumped it on us to take some high-profile case all the municipal folk are hot about."
I took a step back from the corpse, frowning, putting things together. I figured odds were pretty good that there weren't all that many people running around the world torturing victims by carving their skin into graph paper before murdering them. At least I hoped there weren't all that many.
Murphy peered at me, her expression serious. "What. Harry, do you know something?"
I glanced from Murphy to Butters and then back again.
Butters raised both his hands and headed for the doors, stripping his gloves and dumping them in a container splattered with red biohazard signs. "You guys stay here and Mulder it out. I have to go down the hall anyway. Back in five minutes."
I watched him go and said, after the door swung shut, "Bunny slippers and polka music."
"Don't knock it," Murphy said. "He's good at his job. Maybe too good."
"What's that mean?"
She walked away from the autopsy table, and I followed her. Murphy said, "Butters was the one who handled the bodies after the fire at the Velvet Room."
The one I'd started. "Oh?"
"Mmm-hmm. His original report stated that some of the remains recovered from the scene were humanoid, but definitely not human."
"Yeah," I said. "Red vampires."
Murphy nodded. "But you can't just stick that in a report without people getting their panties in a bunch. Butters wound up doing a three-month stint at a mental hospital for observation. When he came out, they tried to fire him, but his lawyer convinced them that they couldn't. So instead he lost all his seniority and got stuck on the night shift. But he knows there's weirdness out there. He calls me when he gets some of it."
"Seems nice enough. Except for the polka."
Murphy smiled again and said, "What do you know?"
"Nothing I can tell you," I said. "I agreed to keep the information confidential."
Murphy peered up at me for a moment. Once upon a time, that comment might have sent her into a fit of stubborn confrontation. But I guess times had changed. "All right," she said. "Are you holding back anything that might get someone hurt?"
I shook my head. "It's too early to tell."
Murphy nodded, her lips pressed together. She appeared to weigh things for a moment before saying, "You know what you're doing."
"Thanks."
She shrugged. "I expect you to tell me if it turns into something I should know."
"Okay," I said, staring at her profile. Murphy had done something I knew she didn't do very often. She'd extended her trust. I'd expected her to threaten and demand. I could have handled that. This was almost worse. Guilt gnawed on my insides. I'd agreed not to divulge anything, but I hated doing that to Murphy. She'd gone out on a limb for me too many times.
But what if I didn't tell her anything? What if I just pointed her toward information she'd find sooner or later in any case?
"Look, Murph. I specifically agreed to confidentiality for this client. But...if I were going to talk to you, I'd tell you to check out the murder of a Frenchman named LaRouche with Interpol."
Murphy blinked and then looked up at me. "Interpol?"
I nodded. "If I were going to talk."
"Right," she said. "If you'd said anything. You tight-lipped bastard."
One corner of my mouth tugged up into a grin. "Meanwhile, I'll see if I can't find out anything about that tattoo."
She nodded. "You figure we're dealing with another sorcerer type?"
I shrugged. "Maybe. But if you give someone a disease with magic, it's usually so that you make it look like they haven't been murdered. Natural causes. This kind of mishmash...I don't know. Maybe it's something a demon would do."
"A real demon? Like Exorcist demon?"
I shook my head. "Those are the Fallen. The former angels. Not the same thing."
"Why not?"
"Demons are just intelligent beings from somewhere in the Nevernever. Mostly they don't care about the mortal world, if they notice it at all. The ones who do are usually the hungry types, or the mean types that someone calls up to do thug work. Like that thing Leonid Kravos had called up."
Murphy shivered. "I remember. And the Fallen?"
"They're very interested in our world. But they aren't free to act, like demons are."
"Why not?"
I shrugged. "Depends on who you talk to. I've heard everything from advanced magical resonance theory to 'because God said so.' One of the Fallen couldn't do this unless it had permission to."
"Right. And how many people would give permission to be infected and then tortured to death," Murphy said.
"Yeah, exactly."
She shook her head. "Going to be a busy week. Half a dozen professional hitters for the outfit are in town. The county morgue is doing double business. City Hall is telling us to bend over backward for some bigwig from Europe or somewhere. And now some kind of plague monster is leaving unidentifiable, mutilated corpses on the side of the road."
"That's why they pay you the big bucks, Murph."
Murphy snorted. Butters came back in, and I made my goodbyes. My eyes were getting heavy and I had aches in places where I hadn't known I had places. Sleep sounded like a great idea, and with so many things going on, the smart option was to get lots of rest in order to be as capably paranoid as possible.
I walked the long route back out of the hospital, but found a hall blocked by a patient on some kind of life-support machinery being moved on a gurney from one room to another. I wound up heading out through the empty cafeteria, into an alley not far from the emergency room exit.
A cold chill started at the base of my spine and slithered up over my neck. I stopped and looked around me, reaching for my blasting rod. I extended my magical senses as best I could, tasting the air to see what had given me the shivers.
I found nothing, and the eerie sensation eased away. I started down the alley, toward a parking garage half a block from the hospital, and tried to look in every direction at once as I went. I passed a little old homeless man, hobbling along heavily on a thick wooden cane. A while farther on, I passed a tall young black man, dressed in an old overcoat and tattered and too-small suit, clutching an open bottle of vodka in one heavy-knuckled hand. He glowered at me, and I moved on past him. Chicago nightlife.
I kept on moving toward my car, and heard footsteps growing closer, behind me. I told myself not to be too jumpy. Maybe it was just some other frightened, endangered, paranoid, sleep-deprived consultant who had been called to the morgue in the middle of the night.
Okay. Maybe not.
The steady tread of the footsteps behind me shifted, becoming louder and unsteady. I spun to face the person following me, raising the blasting rod in my right hand as I did.
I turned around in time to see a bear, a freaking grizzly bear, fall to all four feet and charge. I had already begun preparing a magical strike with the rod, and the tip burst into incandescent light. Shadows fell harshly back from the scarlet fire of the rod, and I saw the details of the thing coming at me.
It wasn't a bear. Not unless a bear can have six legs and a pair of curling ram's horns wrapping around the sides of its head. Not unless bears can somehow get an extra pair of eyes, right over the first set, one pair glowing with faint orange light and one with green. Not unless bears have started getting luminous tattoos of swirling runes on their foreheads and started sprouting twin rows of serrated, slime-coated teeth.
It came charging toward me, several hundred pounds of angry-looking monster, and I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done.
I turned around and ran like hell.
I'd learned something in several years of professional wizarding. Never walk into a fight when the bad guys are the ones who set it up. Wizards can call down lightning from the heavens, rip apart the earth beneath their enemy's feet, blow them into a neighboring time zone with gale winds, and a million other things even less pleasant---but not if we don't plan things out in advance.
And we're not all that much tougher than regular folks. I mean, if some nasty creature tears my head off my shoulders, I'll die. I might be able to lay out some serious magical pounding when I need to, but I'd made the mistake of tangling with a few things that had prepared to go up against me, and it hadn't been pretty.
This bear-thing, whatever the hell it was, had followed me. Hence, it had probably picked its time and place. I could have stood and blasted away at it, but in the close quarters of the alley, if it was able to shrug off my blasts, it would tear me apart before I could try Plan B. So I ran.
One other thing I'd learned. Wheezy wizards aren't all that good at running. That's why I'd been practicing. I took off at a dead sprint and fairly flew down the alley, my duster flapping behind me.
The bear-thing snarled as it came after me, and I could hear it slowly gaining ground. The mouth of the alley loomed into sight and I ran as hard as I could for it. Once I was in the open with room to dodge and put obstacles between me and the creature, I might be able to take a shot at it.
The creature evidently realized that, because it let out a vicious, spitting growl and then leapt. I heard it gather itself for the leap, and turned my head enough to see it out of the corner of my eye. It flew at my back. I threw myself down, sliding and rolling over the asphalt. The creature soared over me, to land at the mouth of the alley, a good twenty feet ahead. I skidded to a stop and went running back down the alley, a growing sense of fear and desperation giving my feet a set of chicken-yellow wings.
I ran for maybe ten seconds, gritting my teeth as the creature took up the pursuit again. I couldn't keep up a full sprint forever. Unless I thought of something else, I was going to have to turn and take my chances.
I all but flattened the tall young black man I'd seen earlier when I leapt over a moldering pile of cardboard boxes. He let out a startled noise, and I answered it with a low curse. "Come on!" I said, grabbing his arm. "Move, move, move!"
He looked past me and his eyes widened. I looked back and saw the four glowing eyes of the bear-creature coming at us. I hauled him into motion, and he picked up speed and started running with me.
We ran for a few seconds more before the little old derelict I'd seen earlier came limping along on his cane. He looked up, and the dim light from the distant street glinted on a pair of spectacles.
"Augh," I shouted. I shoved my running partner past me, toward the old man, and snarled, "Get him out of here. Both of you run!"
I whirled to face the bear-creature, and swept my blasting rod to point right at it. I ran some force of will down into the energy channels in the rod and with a snarled, "Fuego!" sent a lance of raw fire whipping through the air.
The blast slammed into the bear-creature's chest, and it hunched its shoulders, turning its head to one side. Its forward charge faltered, and it slid to a stop, crashing against a weathered old metal trash can.
"What do you know," I muttered. "It worked." I stepped forward and unleashed another blast at the creature, hoping to either melt it to bits or drive it away. The bear-thing snarled and turned a hateful, murderous gaze at me with its four eyes.
The soulgaze began almost instantly.
When a wizard looks into someone's eyes, he sees more than just what color they are. Eyes are windows to the soul. When I make eye contact for too long, or too intently, I get to peek in through the windows. You can't hide what you are from a wizard's soulgaze. And he can't hide from you. You both see each other for what you are, within, and it's with a clarity so intense that it burns itself into your head.
Looking on someone's soul is something you never forget.
No matter how badly you might want to.
I felt a whirling, gyrating sensation and fell forward, into the bear-thing's eyes. The glowing sigil on its forehead became a blaze of silver light the size of a stadium scoreboard set against a roundish cliffside of dark green and black marble. I expected to see something hideous, but I guess you can't judge a monster by the slime on its scales. What I saw instead was a man of lean middle years dressed in rags. His hair was long and straight, wispy grey that fell down to his chest. He stood in a posture of agony, his wiry body stretched out in an arch, with his hands held up and apart, his legs stretched out. I followed the lines of his arms back and up and saw why he stood that way.
He'd been crucified.
The man's back rested against the cliff, the great glowing sigil stretching out above him. His arms were pulled back at an agonizing angle, and were sunk to the elbow in the green-black marble of the cliff. His knees were bent, his feet sunk into the stone as well. He hung there, the pressure of all his weight on his shoulders and legs. It must have been agonizing.
The crucified man laughed at me, his eyes glowing a shade of sickly green, and screamed, "As if it will help you! Nothing! You're nothing!"
Pain laced his voice, making it shrill. Agony contorted the lines of his body, veins standing out sharply against straining muscle.
"Stars and stones," I whispered. Creatures like this bear-thing did not have souls to gaze upon. That meant that regardless of appearances to the contrary, this thing was a mortal. It---no, he---was a human being. "What the hell is this?"
The man screamed again, this time all rage and anguish, void of words. I lifted a hand and stepped forward, my first instinct to help him.
Before I got close, the ground began to shake. The cliff face rumbled and slits of seething orange light appeared, and then widened, until I faced the second set of eyes, eyes the size of subway tunnels, opening on the great marble cliff. I stumbled several steps back, and that cliff face proved to be exactly that---a face, cold and beautiful and harsh around that fiery gaze.
The quaking in the earth increased, and a voice louder than a Metallica concert spoke, the raw sense of the words, the vicious anger and hate behind them hitting me far more heavily than mere volume.
GET OUT.
The sheer force of presence behind that voice seized me and threw me violently back, away from the tortured man at the cliffside and out of the soulgaze. The mental connection snapped like dry spaghetti, and the same force that had thrown my mind away from the soulgaze sent my physical body flying back through the air. I hit an old cardboard box filled with empty bottles and heard glass shattering beneath me. The heavy leather duster held, and no broken shards buried themselves in my back.
For a second or two, I just lay on my back, stunned. My thoughts were a hectic whirlpool I couldn't calm or control. I stared up at the city's light pollution against the low clouds, until some tiny voice in me started screaming that I was in danger. I shoved myself to my knees, just as the bear-creature smacked a trash can aside with one of its paws and started toward me.
My head was still ringing with the aftereffects of the soulgaze and the psychic assault that had broken the connection. I lifted my blasting rod, summoned up every bit of will I could scrape together out of the confusion, and spat a word that sent another lance of flame toward the bear-creature.
This time the blast didn't even slow it down. The set of orange eyes flared with a sudden luminance, and my fire splashed against an unseen barrier, dispersing around the creature in sheets of scarlet. It let out a screaming roar and lumbered toward me.
I tried to get up, stumbled, and fell at the feet of the little old homeless guy, who leaned on his cane and stared at the creature. I had a dim impression of his features---Asian, a short white beard around his chin, heavy white eyebrows, and corrective glasses that made his eyes look the size of an owl's.
"Run, dammit!" I shouted at him. I tried to lead by example, but my balance was still whirling and I couldn't get off the ground.
The old man did not turn to run. He took off his glasses and pushed them at me. "Hold, please."
Then he took a deliberate step forward with his cane, placing himself between me and the bear-creature.
The creature hurled itself at him with a bellow, rearing up on its hindmost legs. It plunged down at the white-haired man, jaws gaping, and I couldn't do anything but watch it happen.
The little man took two steps to one side, pirouetting like a dancer. The end of his wooden cane lashed out and struck the creature's jaws with a crunching impact. Bits of broken yellow teeth flew from the creature's mouth. The little man continued his turn and evaded its claws by maybe an inch. He wound up behind the creature, and it turned to follow him, huge jaws snapping in rage.
The man darted back, staying just ahead of the thing's jaws, and in a blur of sudden light on metal he drew from his cane a long blade, the classic single-edged, chisel-pointed katana. The steel flashed at the creature's eyes, but it ducked low enough that the scything blade only whipped the top couple of inches from one of its ears.
The creature screamed, entirely out of proportion with the injury, a yowl that almost sounded human. It lurched back, shaking its head, a fine spray of blood sprinkling from its wounded ear.
At this point, I noticed three things.
One. The creature was paying me no attention whatsoever. Yippee ki yay. My head still spun wildly, and if it had come for me, I didn't think I could have done anything about it.
Two. The old man's sword was not reflecting light. It was emitting it. The water-patterned steel of the blade glowed with a steady silver flame that slowly grew brighter.
Three. I could feel the humming power of the sword, even from several yards away. It throbbed with a steady, deep strength, as quiet and unshakable as the earth itself.
In my entire life, I'd seen only one sword imbued with that much power.
But I knew that there were a couple more.
"Oi!" shouted the little old man, his English heavily accented. "Ursiel! Let him go! You have no power here!"
The bear-creature---Ursiel, I presumed---focused its four-eyed gaze on the little man and did something unsettling. It spoke. Its voice came out quiet, smooth, melodious, words somehow slithering out through the bear's jaws and throat. "Shiro. Look at yourself, little fool. You are an old man. You were at the peak of your strength when last we met. You cannot defeat me now."
Shiro narrowed his eyes, his sword gripped in one hand, the length of wooden sheath held in the other. "Did you come here to talk?"
Ursiel's head tilted to one side, and then the smooth voice murmured, "No. Indeed I did not."
It whirled, whipping its head toward me, and lunged. As it did, there was a rustle of cloth and then an old overcoat spun through the air, spreading like a fisherman's net. It fell over Ursiel's face, and the demon drew up short with a frustrated howl. It reached up and tore the coat from its head.
While it did, the tall young black man stepped between Ursiel and me. As I watched, he drew a long, heavy saber from the scabbard at his hip. The sword hummed with the same power as Shiro's, though in a slight variation, a different note within the same chord. Silver light flared from the blade's steel, and behind the demon, Shiro's blade answered it with more of its own radiance. The young man looked back at me, and I caught a glimpse of dark, intense eyes before he faced the demon, and said in a rumbling basso, words flavored with a thick Russian accent, "Ursiel. Let him go. You have no power here."
Ursiel hissed, the orange eyes blazing brighter by the moment. "Sanya. Traitor. Do you really think any of us fears even one of the Three, in your pathetic hands? So be it. I will take you all."
Sanya spread his empty hand to one side of his body in mocking invitation, and said nothing.
Ursiel roared and flew at Sanya. The big man extended the saber, and the weapon took Ursiel high on one shoulder, plunging through muscle and sinew. Sanya braced himself as the demon's body hit him, and though the impact drove his feet back across six inches of concrete, he held it up and away from me.
Shiro let out a ringing cry I wouldn't have believed a little old man could make, and Ursiel screamed, thrashing and flailing. Sanya shouted something in what sounded like Russian, and drove forward with both hands on the hilt of the impaling saber, overbearing Ursiel and sending the demon sprawling onto his back. Sanya followed, staying close, and I saw him throw his weight onto the demon as he twisted the hilt of the saber thrust through it.
He'd been too aggressive. Ursiel's paw hit him squarely upon one shoulder, and I heard the snap of breaking bone. The blow threw the young man away from the demon, and he rolled across the ground and into a wall, an explosive breath of pain forced from him as he hit.
Ursiel recovered its feet, tore the saber from its shoulder with a jerk of its jaws, and went after Sanya, but the white-haired old man menaced its flank, forcing it away from the wounded man and, incidentally, from me. For a few seconds, the old man and the demon circled each other. Then the demon lashed out at Shiro, a flurry of slashes with its claws.
The old man ducked them, retreating, his sword flickering and cutting. Twice, he left cuts on the demon's paws, but though it screamed in rage, it only seemed to grow less intimidated, more angry. The old man's breathing grew visibly labored.
"Age," Ursiel's voice purred amidst its attack. "Death comes, old man. Its hand is on your heart now. And your life has been spent in vain."
"Let him go!" spat the old man between breaths.
Ursiel laughed again and the green pair of eyes glowed brighter. Another voice, this one not at all beautiful, the words twisted and snarling, said, "Stupid preacher. Time to die like the Egyptian did."
Shiro's expression changed, from stolid, controlled ferocity to something much sadder, much more resolved. He faced the demon for a moment, panting, and then nodded. "So be it."
The demon drove forward, and the old man gave ground, slowly forced into a corner of the alley. He seemed to be doing pretty well, until one close swipe of the demon's claws caught the glowing silver blade near its hilt, and sent it spinning away. The old man gasped and pressed back against the corner, panting, holding his right hand against the left side of his chest.
"So it ends, Knight," purred the smooth, demon-voice of Ursiel.
"Hai," the old man agreed quietly. He looked up above him, at a fire escape platform ten feet off the ground.
A shadowed figure dropped over the rail of the platform, steel rasping as it did. There was a low thrum of power, a flash of silver, and the hiss of a blade cutting the air. The shadowy figure landed in a crouch beside the creature.
The demon Ursiel jerked once, body stiffening. There was a thump.
Then its body toppled slowly over to one side, leaving its monstrous head lying on the alley floor. The light died from its four eyes.
The third Knight rose away from the demon's corpse. Tall and broad-shouldered, his close-cut hair dark and feathered with silver, Michael Carpenter snapped the blade of his broad sword, amoracchius, to one side, clearing droplets of blood from it. He put it back into its sheath, staring down at the fallen demon, and shook his head.
Shiro straightened, his breathing quick but controlled, and went to Michael's side. He gripped the larger man's shoulder and said, "It had to be done."
Michael nodded. The smaller Knight recovered the second sword, cleared the blade, and returned it to its wooden sheath.
Not far from me, the third Knight, the young Russian, pushed himself up from the ground. One of his arms dangled uselessly, but he offered the other to me. I took his hand and rose on wobbly legs.
"You are well?" he asked, his voice quiet.
"Peachy," I responded, wobbling. He arched an eyebrow at me, then shrugged and went to recover his blade from the alley floor.
The aftereffects of the soulgaze had finally begun to fade, and the simple shock and confusion began to give way to a redundant terror. I hadn't been careful enough. One of the bad guys had caught me off guard, and without intervention I would have been killed to death. It wouldn't have been anything quick and painless, either. Without Michael and his two companions, the demon Ursiel would have torn me limb from literal limb, and I wouldn't have been able to do a damned thing about it.
I had never encountered a psychic presence of such raw magnitude as upon the great stone cliff face. Not up close and personal like that, anyway. The first shot I'd taken at him had surprised and annoyed him, but he had been ready for the second blast and swatted aside my magical fire like an insect. Whatever Ursiel had been, he had been operating on a completely different order of magnitude than a mere punk of a mortal wizard like me. My psychic defenses aren't bad, but they had been crushed like a beer can under a bulldozer. That, more than anything, scared the snot out of me. I had tried my psychic strength against more than a few bad guys, and I had never felt so badly outclassed. Oh, I knew there were things out there stronger than me, sure.
But none of them had ever jumped me in a dark alley.
I shook, and found a wall to lean on until my head cleared a little, and then walked stiffly over to Michael. Bits of broken glass fell from folds in my duster.
Michael glanced up as I came over to him. "Harry," he said.
"It isn't that I'm not glad to see you," I said. "But you couldn't have jumped down and beheaded the monster about two minutes sooner?"
Michael was usually pretty good about taking a joke. This time he didn't even smile. "No. I'm sorry."
I frowned at him. "How did you find me? How did you know?"
"Good advice."
Which could have been anything from spotting my car nearby to being told by an angelic chorus. The Knights of the Cross always seemed to turn up in bad places when they were badly needed. Sometimes coincidence seemed to go to incredible lengths to see to it that they were in the right place at the right time. I didn't think I wanted to know. I nodded at the demon's fallen body and said, "What the hell was that thing?"
"He wasn't a thing, Harry," Michael said. He continued staring down at the remains of the demon, and just about then they started shimmering. It only took a few seconds for the demon to dissolve into the form of the man I'd seen in the soulgaze---thin, grey-haired, dressed in rags. Except that in the soulgaze, his head hadn't been lying three feet away like that. I didn't think a severed head should have held an expression, but it did, one of absolute terror, his mouth locked open in a silent scream. The sigil I'd seen on the cliff face stood out on his forehead like a fresh scab, dark and ugly.
There was a glitter of orange-red light, the sigil vanished, and something clinked on the asphalt. A silver coin a little smaller than a quarter rolled away from the man's head, bounced against my foot, and then settled onto the ground. A second later, the body let out a hissing, sighing sound, and began to run with streaks of green-black goo. The body just deflated in on itself, noxious fumes and a spreading puddle of disgusting slime the only things remaining.
"That's it," I said, staring down and trying to keep myself from visibly trembling. "The weirdness has just gone off the end of my meter. I'm going home and going to bed." I bent to recover the coin before the slime engulfed it.
The old man snapped his cane at my wrist, growling, "No."
It stung. I jerked my hand back, shaking my fingers, and scowled at him. "Stars and stones, Michael, who is this guy?"
Michael drew a square of white cloth from his pocket and unfolded it. "Shiro Yoshimo. He was my teacher when I became a Knight of the Cross."
The old man grunted at me. I nodded at the wounded man and asked, "How about him?"
The tall black man glanced up at me as the old Knight began examining his arm. He looked me up and down without any sign of approval, glowered, and said, "Sanya."
"The newest of our Order," Michael added. He shook out the cloth, revealing two pairs of crosses embroidered in silver thread upon it. Michael knelt down and picked up the coin through the cloth, turned it over, then folded the cloth completely around the silver.
I frowned down at the coin as he did. One side bore some ancient portrait, maybe of a man's profile. The opposite side had some other design that was hidden under a stain in the shape of a rune---the one I'd seen on the demon Ursiel's forehead.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Shiro was protecting you," Michael said, rather than answering the question. Michael looked over at Shiro, who stood with the towering Sanya, and asked, "How is he?"
"Broken arm," the old man reported. "We should get off the street."
"Agreed," rumbled Sanya. The older Knight fashioned a makeshift sling from the shredded overcoat, and the tall young man slipped his arm into it without a sound of complaint.
"You'd better come with us, Harry," Michael said. "Father Forthill can get you a cot."
"Whoa, whoa," I said. "You never answered my question. What was that?"
Michael frowned at me and said, "It's a long story, and there's little time."
I folded my arms. "Make time. I'm not going anywhere until I know what the hell is going on here."
The little old Knight snorted and said, "Hell. That is what is going on." He opened his hand to me and said, "Please give them back."
I stared at him for a second, until I remembered his spectacles. I handed them to him, and he put them on, making his eyes goggle out hugely again.
"Wait a minute," I said to Michael. "This thing was one of the Fallen?"
Michael nodded, and a chill went through me.
"That's impossible," I said. "The Fallen can't do...things like that." I gestured at the puddle of slime. "They aren't allowed."
"Some are," Michael said, his voice quiet. "Please believe me. You are in great danger. I know what you've been hired to find, and so do they."
Shiro stalked down to the end of the alley and swept his gaze around. "Oi. Michael, we must go."
"If he will not come, he will not come," Sanya said. He glared at me, then followed Shiro.
"Michael," I began.
"Listen to me," Michael said. He held up the folded white cloth. "There are more where this one came from, Harry. Twenty-nine of them. And we think they're after you."
I followed Michael's white pickup truck in the Blue Beetle to Saint Mary of the Angels Cathedral. It's a big, big church, a city landmark. If there's anything you like in the way of gothic architecture, you can find it somewhere on Saint Mary's. We parked near the back of the cathedral, and went to the delivery entrance, a plain oak door framed by lovingly tended rose vines.
Michael knocked at the door, and I heard the sound of multiple bolts being undone before the door opened.
Father Anthony Forthill opened the door. He was in his late fifties, balding, and carried a comfortable weight of years. He wore black slacks and a black shirt, the stark white square of his clerical collar sharply delineated. He was taller than Shiro, but a lot shorter than everyone else there, and beneath his glasses his eyes looked strained.
"Success?" he asked Michael.
"In part," Michael responded. He held up the folded cloth and said, "Put this in the cask, please. And we'll need to splint an arm."
Forthill winced, and accepted the folded cloth with the kind of ginger reverence paid only to explosives and samples of lethal viruses. "Right away. Good evening, Mister Dresden. Come in, all of you."
"Father," I answered. "You look like my day so far."
Forthill tried to smile at me, then padded away down a long hallway. Michael led us deeper into the church, up a flight of stairs to a storage room whose boxes had been stacked to the ceiling to make room for a number of folding cots, blocking the view of any windows. A mismatched pair of old lamps lit the room in soft gold.
"I'll get food, something to drink," Michael said quietly. He headed back out of the room. "And I need to call Charity. Sanya, you'd better sit down until we can see to your arm."
"I'll be fine," Sanya said. "I will help with food."
Shiro snorted and said, "Sit, boy." He headed for the door, catching up to Michael, and said, "Call your wife. I will do the rest." The two left together, their voices lowering to bare murmurs as they entered the hall.
Sanya glowered at the door for a moment and then settled down on one of the bunks. He looked around at the room for a moment, and then said, "You use the forces of magic, I take it."
I folded my arms and leaned against the wall. "What gave it away?"
He bared his teeth, white against his dark skin. "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."
The tall Russian regarded me for a moment and then nodded slowly. "I feel the same way."
I felt my eyebrow arch, Spock-like. "That's a joke, right?"
He shook his head. "It is not. I have been an atheist since childhood."
"You've got to be kidding me. You're a Knight of the Cross."
"Da," he said.
"So if you're not religious, you risk your life to help other people because...?"
"Because it must be done," he answered without hesitation. "For the good of the people, some must place themselves in harm's way. Some must pledge their courage and their lives to protect the community."
"Just a minute," I said. "You became a Knight of the Cross because you were a communist?"
Sanya's face twisted with revulsion. "Certainly not. Trotsky. Very different."
I stopped myself from bursting out in laughter. But it was a near thing. "How did you get your sword?"
He moved his good hand to rest on the hilt of the blade, where it lay beside him on the cot. "Esperacchius. Michael gave it to me."
"Since when has Michael gone running off to Russia?"
"Not that Michael," Sanya said. He pointed a finger up. "That Michael."
I stared at him for a minute and then said, "So. You get handed a holy sword by an archangel, told to go fight the forces of evil, and you somehow remain an atheist. Is that what you're saying?"
Sanya's scowl returned.
"Doesn't that strike you as monumentally stupid?"
His glare darkened for maybe a minute before he took a deep breath and nodded. "Perhaps some could argue that I am agnostic."
"Agnostic?"
"One who does not commit himself to the certain belief in a divine power," he said.
"I know what it means," I said. "What shocks me is that you think it applies to you. You've met more than one divine power. Hell, one of them broke your arm not half an hour ago."
"Many things can break an arm. You yourself said that you do not need a god or goddess to define your beliefs about the supernatural."
"Yeah, but I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me."
Sanya said, "Semantics. I do not understand your point."
I took a deep breath, still holding back the threat of giggles, and said, "Sanya. My point is that you have got to be more than a little thick to stand where you are, having seen what you've seen, and claim that you aren't sure whether or not there's a God."
He lifted his chin and said, "Not necessarily. It is possible that I am mad, and all of this is a hallucination."
That's when I started laughing. I just couldn't help it. I was too tired and too stressed to do anything else. I laughed and enjoyed it thoroughly while Sanya sat on his cot and scowled at me, careful not to move his wounded arm.
Shiro appeared at the door, bearing a platter of sandwiches and deli vegetables. He blinked through his owlish glasses at Sanya and then at me. He said something to Sanya in what I took to be Russian. The younger Knight transferred his scowl to Shiro, but nodded his head in a gesture deep enough to be part bow, before he rose, claimed two sandwiches in one large hand, and walked out.
Shiro waited until Sanya was gone before he set the platter down on a card table. My stomach went berserk at the sight of the sandwiches. Heavy exertion coupled with insane fear does that to me. Shiro gestured at the plate and pulled up a couple of folding chairs. I sat down, nabbed a sandwich of my own, and started eating. Turkey and cheese. Heaven.
The old Knight took a sandwich of his own, and ate with what appeared to be a similar appetite. We munched for a while in contented silence before he said, "Sanya told you about his beliefs."
I felt the corners of my mouth start to twinge as another smile threatened. "Yeah."
Shiro let out a pleased snort. "Sanya is a good man."
"I just don't get why he'd be recruited as a Knight of the Cross."
Shiro looked at me over the glasses, chewing. After a while, he said, "Man sees faces. Sees skin. Flags. Membership lists. Files." He took another large bite, ate it, and said, "God sees hearts."
"If you say so," I said.
He didn't answer. Right about the time I finished my sandwich, Shiro said, "You are looking for the Shroud."
"That's confidential," I said.
"If you say so," he said, using my own inflection on the words. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why are you looking for it?" he asked, chewing.
"If I am---and I'm not saying that I am---I'm doing it because I've been hired to look for it."
"Your job," he said.
"Yeah."
"You do it for money," he said.
"Yeah."
"Hmph," he said, and pushed his glasses up with his pinky. "Do you love money then, Mister Dresden?"
I picked up a napkin from one side of the platter, and wiped my mouth. "I used to think I loved it. But now I realize that it's just dependency."
Shiro let out an explosive bark of laughter, and rose, chortling. "Sandwich okay?"
"Super."
Michael came in a few minutes later, his face troubled. There wasn't a clock in the room, but it had to have been well after midnight. I supposed if I had called Charity Carpenter that late, I'd be troubled after the conversation, too. She was ferocious where her husband's safety was concerned---especially when she heard that I was around. Okay, admittedly Michael had gotten pretty thoroughly battered whenever he came along on a case with me, but all the same I didn't think it was fair of her. It wasn't like I did it on purpose.
"Charity wasn't happy?" I asked.
Michael shook his head. "She's worried. Is there a sandwich left?"
There were a couple. Michael took one and I took a second one, just to keep him company. While we ate, Shiro got out his sword and a cleaning kit, and started wiping down the blade with a soft cloth and some kind of oil.
"Harry," Michael said finally. "I have to ask you for something. It's very difficult. And it's something that under normal circumstances I wouldn't even consider doing."
"Name it," I said between chews. At the time, I meant it literally. Michael had risked his life for me more than once. His family had been endangered the last time around, and I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't ask something unreasonable. "Just name it. I owe you."
Michael nodded. Then looked at me steadily and said, "Get out of this business, Harry. Get out of town for a few days. Or stay home. But get out of it, please."
I blinked at him. "You mean, you don't want my help?"
"I want your safety," Michael said. "You are in great danger."
"You're kidding me," I said. "Michael, I know how to handle myself. You should know that by now."
"Handle yourself," Michael said. "Like you did tonight? Harry, if we hadn't been there---"
"What?" I snapped. "I'd have been dead. It isn't like it isn't going to happen sooner or later. There are enough bad guys after me that one of them is eventually going to get lucky. So what else is new."
"You don't understand," Michael said.
"I understand all right," I said. "One more wacky B-horror-movie reject tried to kill me. It's happened before. It'll probably happen again."
Shiro said, without looking up from his sword, "Ursiel did not come to kill you, Mister Dresden."
I considered that in another pregnant silence. The lamps buzzed a little. Shiro's cleaning cloth whispered over the steel of his sword.
I watched Michael's face and asked, "Why was he there then? I'd have put down money that it was a demon, but it was just a shapechange. There was a mortal inside it. Who was he?"
Michael's gaze never wavered. "His name was Rasmussen. Ursiel took him in eighteen forty-nine, on his way to California."
"I saw him, Michael. I looked in his eyes."
Michael winced. "I didn't know that."
"He was a prisoner in his own soul, Michael. Something was holding him. Something big. Ursiel, I guess. He's one of the Fallen, isn't he?"
Michael nodded.
"How the hell does that happen? I thought the Fallen aren't allowed to take away free will."
"They aren't," Michael said. "But they are allowed to tempt. And the Denarians have more to offer than most."
"Denarians?" I asked.
"The Order of the Blackened Denarius," Michael said. "They see an opportunity in this matter. A chance to do great harm."
"Silver coins." I took a deep breath. "Like the one you wrapped up in blessed cloth. Thirty pieces of silver, eh?"
He nodded. "Whoever touches the coins is tainted by the Fallen within. Tempted. Given power. The Fallen leads the mortal deeper and deeper into its influence. Never forcing them. Just offering. Until eventually they have surrendered enough of themselves and---"
"The thing gets control of them," I finished.
Michael nodded. "Like Rasmussen. We try to help them. Sometimes the person realizes what is happening. Wants to escape their influence. When we face them, we try to wear the demon down. Give the person taken the chance to escape."
"That's why you kept talking to it. Until its voice changed. But Rasmussen didn't want to be free, did he?"
Michael shook his head.
"Believe it or not, Michael, I've been tempted once or twice. I can handle it."
"No," Michael said. "You can't. Against the Denarians, few mortals can. The Fallen know our weaknesses. Our flaws. How to undermine. Even warned and aware of them, they have destroyed men and women for thousands of years."
"I said I'll be fine," I growled.
Shiro grunted. "Pride before fall."
I gave him a sour glance.
Michael leaned forward and said, "Harry, please. I know that your life has not been an easy one. You're a good man. But you are as vulnerable as anyone. These enemies don't want you dead." He looked down at his hands. "They want you."
Which scared me. Really scared me. Maybe because it seemed to disturb Michael so much, and very little disturbs him. Maybe because I had seen Rasmussen, and would always be able to see him there, trapped, wildly laughing.
Or maybe it was because part of me wondered if it would be so impossible to find a way to use the power the coin obviously offered. If it had made some random schmuck on the way to pan for gold into a killing machine that it took all three Knights of the Cross to handle, what could someone like me do with it?
Beat the living snot out of Duke Paolo Ortega. That's for sure.
I blinked, refocusing my eyes. Michael watched me, his expression pained, and I knew that he'd guessed at my thoughts. I closed my eyes, shame making my stomach uneasy.
"You're in danger, Harry," Michael said. "Leave the case alone."
"If I was in so much danger," I responded, "why did Father Vincent come and hire me?"
"Forthill asked him not to," Michael said. "Father Vincent...disagrees with Forthill on how supernatural matters are to be handled."
I stood up and said, "Michael, I'm tired. I'm really damned tired."
"Harry," Michael chided me.
"Darned," I mumbled. "Darned tired. Darn me unto heck." I headed for the door and said, "I'm heading home to get some sleep. I'll think about it."
Michael stood up, and Shiro with him, both of them facing me. "Harry," Michael said. "You are my friend. You've saved my life. I've named a child for you. But stay out of this business. For my sake, if not for your own."
"And if I don't?" I asked.
"Then I'll have protect you from yourself. In the name of God, Harry, please don't push this."
I turned and left without saying goodbye.
In this corner, one missing Shroud, one impossibly and thoroughly dead corpse, one dedicated and deadly vampire warlord, three holy knights, twenty-nine fallen angels, and a partridge in a pear tree.
And in the opposite corner, one tired, bruised, underpaid professional wizard, threatened by his allies and about to get dumped by his would-be girlfriend for John Q. Humdrum.
Oh, yeah.
Definitely bedtime.
I fumed and brooded all the way back to my apartment, the Beetle's engine sputtering nervously the whole time. Mister was sitting at the top of the steps, and let out a plaintive meow as I shut and locked up my car. Though I kept my blasting rod and shield bracelet ready in case any vanilla goons were waiting around with more silenced guns, I was fairly confident no preternasties were hanging around in ambush. Mister tended to make lots of noise and then leave whenever supernatural danger was around.
Which just goes to show that my cat has considerably more sense than me.
Mister slammed his shoulder against my legs, and didn't quite manage to trip me into falling down the stairs. I didn't waste any time getting inside and locked up behind me.
I lit a candle, got out some cat food and fresh water for Mister's bowls, and spent a couple minutes pacing back and forth. I glanced at my bed and wrote it off as a useless idea. I was too worked up to sleep, even tired as I was. I was already chin deep in alligators and sinking fast.
"Right, then, Harry," I mumbled. "Might as well do some work."
I grabbed a heavy, warm robe off its hook, shoved aside one of my rugs, and opened the trapdoor leading down to the subbasement. A folding ladder-staircase led down to the damp stone chamber beneath, where I kept my lab, and I padded down it, my robe's hem dragging against the wooden steps.
I started lighting candles. My lab, barring a brief bout of insanity, generally reflects the state of my own mind---cluttered, messy, unorganized, but basically functional. The room isn't large. Three worktables line three of the walls in a U shape, and a fourth table runs down the center of the U, leaving a narrow walkway around it. Wire utility shelves line the walls above the tables. Piled on the shelves and tables are a vast array of magical ingredients, plus that sort of miscellaneous domestic clutter that in households of more substance always winds up in a big drawer in the kitchen. Books, notebooks, journals, and papers line the shelves, together with containers and boxes and pouches full of all sorts of herbs, roots, and magical ingredients, from a bottle of snake hisses to a vial of milk-thistle extract.
At the far end of the room there was a patch of floor kept completely clear of all clutter. A copper ring set into the stone of the floor, my summoning circle, resided there. Experience had shown me that you never can tell when you might need a ritual circle to defend yourself from magical attack, or for its other most obvious use---keeping a denizen of the Nevernever a temporary prisoner.
One of the shelves had less on it than the others. At either end rested a candleholder, long since overrun with many colors of melted wax until they were nothing but mounds, like a honeybee Vesuvius. Books, mostly paperback romances, and various small and feminine articles took up the rest of the shelf, but for where a bleached human skull sat in the middle. I picked up a pencil and rapped it against the shelf. "Bob. Bob, wake up. Work to be done."
Twin points of orange and gold light kindled in the shadows of the skull's eye sockets, and grew brighter as I went about the room lighting half a dozen candles and a kerosene lamp. The skull rattled a little, and then said, "It's only a few hours from dawn, and you're just starting up? What gives?"
I started getting out beakers and vials and a small alcohol burner. "More trouble," I said. "It's been one hell of a day." I told Bob the Skull about the television studio, the vampire's challenge, the hit man, the missing Shroud, and the plague-filled corpse.
"Wow. You don't do things halfway, do you, Harry?"
"Advise now; critique later. I'm going to look into things and whip up a potion or two, and you're going to help."
"Right," Bob said. "Where do you want to start?"
"With Ortega. Where is my copy of the Accords?"
"Cardboard box." Bob said. "Third shelf, on the bottom row, behind the pickling jars."
I found the box and pawed through it until I had found a vellum scroll tied shut with a white ribbon. I opened it and peered down at the handwritten calligraphy. It started off with the word Insomuch, and the syntax got more opaque from there.
"I can't make heads or tails of this," I said. "Where's the section about duels?"
"Fifth paragraph from the end. You want the Cliff's Notes version?"
I rolled the scroll shut again. "Hit me."
"It's based on Code Duello," Bob said. "Well, technically it's based on much older rules that eventually inspired the Code Duello, but that's just chickens and eggs. Ortega is the challenger, and you're the challenged."
"I know that. I get to pick the weapons and the ground, right?"
"Wrong," Bob said. "You pick the weapons, but he gets to choose the time and location."
"Damn," I muttered. "I was going to take high noon out in a park somewhere. But I guess I can just say that we'll duel with magic."
"If it's one of the available choices. It almost always is."
"Who decides?"
"The vampires and the Council will pick from a list of neutral emissaries. The emissary decides."
I nodded. "So if I don't have it as an option I'm screwed, right? I mean, magic, wizard, kind of my bag."
Bob said. "Yeah, but be careful. It's got to be a weapon that he can use. If you pick one he can't, he can refuse it, and force you to take your second choice."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that regardless of what happens, if he doesn't want to fight you in magic, he won't have to. Ortega didn't get to be a warlord without thinking things through, Harry. Odds are that he has a good idea what you can do and has planned accordingly. What do you know about him?"
"Not much. Presumably he's tough."
Bob's eyelights stared at me for a minute. "Well, Napoléon, I'm sure he'll never overcome that kind of tactical genius."
I flicked my pencil at the skull in annoyance. It bounced off a nose hole. "Get to the point."
"The point is that you'd be better off taking something you can predict."
"I'm better off not fighting to begin with," I said. "Do I need to get a second?"
"You both do," Bob said. "The seconds will work out the terms of the duel. His should be getting in touch with yours at some point."
"Uh. I don't have one."
Bob's skull turned a bit on its shelf and banged its forehead gently into the brick wall a few times. "Then get one, dolt. Obviously."
I got another pencil and a pad of yellow lined paper and wrote To do across the top, and Ask Michael about duel underneath it. "Okay. And I want you to find out whatever you can about Ortega before dawn."
"Check," Bob said. "I have your permission to come out?"
"Not yet. There's more."
Bob's eyelights rolled. "Of course there's more. My job sucks."
I got out a jug of distilled water and a can of Coke. I opened the can, took a sip, and said, "That corpse Murphy showed me. Plague curse?"
"Probably," Bob agreed. "But if it was really that many diseases, it was a big one."
"How big?"
"Bigger than that spell the Shadowman was using to tear hearts out a few years ago."
I whistled. "And he was running it off of thunderstorms and ceremonial rites, too. What would it take to power a curse that strong?"
"Curses aren't really my thing," Bob hedged. "But a lot. Like maybe tapping into a sorcerous ley line, or a human sacrifice."
I sipped more Coke, and shook my head. "Someone is playing some serious hardball then."
Bob mused, "Maybe the Wardens used it to get nasty on a Red Court agent."
"They wouldn't," I said. "They wouldn't use magic like that. Even if technically it was the diseases that killed the guy, it's too damn close to breaking the First Law."
"Who else would have that kind of power?" Bob asked me.
I turned to a fresh page and sketched out a rough version of the tattoo on the corpse. I held it up to show it to Bob. "Someone who didn't like this, maybe."
"Eye of Thoth," Bob supplied. "That the tattoo on the corpse?"
"Yeah. Was this guy in someone's secret club?"
"Maybe. The eye is a pretty popular occult symbol though, so you can't rule out the possibility that he was an independent."
"Okay," I said. "So who uses it?"
"Plenty of groups. Brotherhoods connected to the White Council, historic societies, a couple of fringe groups of occult scholars, personality cults, television psychics, comic book heroes---"
"I get the point," I said. I turned to a fresh page and from razor-sharp memory sketched out the symbol I'd seen on the demon Ursiel's forehead. "Do you recognize this?"
Bob's eyelights widened. "Are you insane? Harry, tear that paper up. Burn it."
I frowned. "Bob, wait a minute---"
"Do it now!"
The skull's voice was frightened, and I get nervous when Bob gets frightened. Not much can scare Bob out of his usual wiseass-commentator state of mind. I tore up the paper. "I guess you recognize it."
"Yeah. And I'm not having anything to do with that bunch."
"I didn't hear that, Bob. I need information on them. They're in town, they've taken a shot at me, and I'm betting they're after the Shroud."
"Let them have it," Bob said. "Seriously. You've got no idea the kind of power this group has."
"Fallen, I know," I said. "Order of the Blackened Denarius. But they have to play by the rules, right?"
"Harry, it isn't just the Fallen. The people they've taken are nearly as bad. They're assassins, poisoners, warriors, sorcerers---"
"Sorcerers?"
"The coins make them effectively immortal. Some of the Order have had a thousand years to practice, and maybe more. That much time, even modest talents can grow teeth. Never mind everything experience would have taught them, everything they could have found to make themselves stronger over the years. Even without infernal superpowers, they'd be badass."
I frowned, and tore the bits of paper into smaller bits. "Badass enough to manage that curse?"
"There's no question that they'd have the skill. Maybe enough that they wouldn't need as big a power source."
"Great," I said, and rubbed at my eyes. "All right, then. Big-leaguers all around. I want you to track down the Shroud."
"No can do," Bob said.
"Give me a break. How many pieces of two-thousand-year-old linen are in town?"
"That's not the point, Harry. The Shroud is..." Bob seemed to struggle to find words. "It doesn't exist on the same wavelength as me. It's out of my jurisdiction."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm a spirit of intellect, Harry. Of reason, logic. The Shroud isn't about logic. It's an artifact of faith."
"What?" I demanded. "That doesn't make any sense."
"You don't know everything, Harry," Bob said. "You don't even know a lot. I can't touch this. I can't come anywhere near it. And if I even try, I'll be crossing boundaries I shouldn't. I'm not going up against angels, Dresden, Fallen, or otherwise."
I sighed, and lifted my hands. "Fine, fine. Is there someone I can talk to?"
Bob was quiet for a moment before he said, "Maybe. Ulsharavas."
"Ulsha-who?"
"Ulsharavas. She's an ally of the loa, an oracle spirit. There's details about halfway through your copy of Dumont's Guide to Divinationators."
"How are her prices?"
"Reasonable," Bob said. "You've got everything you need for the calling. She isn't usually malicious."
"Isn't usually?"
"The loa are basically good guys, but they all have their darker aspects, too. Ulsharavas is a pretty gentle guide, but she's been harsh before. Don't let your guard down."
"I won't," I said, and frowned. "One more thing. Swing by Marcone's place and see if there's anything interesting there. You don't have to go all David Niven; just take a look around."
"You think Marcone's involved in this one?"
"His thugs already took a poke at me. I might as well find out whatever I can. I give you permission to leave in pursuit of that information, Bob. Get back before dawn. Oh, do we still have that recipe for the antivenom to vampire spit?"
A cloud of orange lights flowed out of the skull, across the table, and then up the stairs. Bob's voice, oddly modulated, floated back to me. "Red notebook. Don't forget to light the wardflame while I'm gone."
"Yeah, yeah," I muttered. I gave Bob a minute to clear my wards, then got down a three-candle holder with green, yellow, and red candles on it. I lit the green one and set the candleholder aside. I got out Dumont's Guide and read over the entry for Ulsharavas. It looked pretty simple, though you couldn't be too careful whenever you called something in from the Nevernever.
I took a couple of minutes to gather what I'd need. The oracle spirit couldn't put together a body for herself, not even a nebulous cloud of light, like Bob could. She required a homunculus to manifest in the mortal world. Dumont recommended a newly dead corpse, but as the only one I was likely to find was my own, I needed a substitute. I found it in another box and plopped it down in the center of my summoning circle.
I added a cup of whiskey and a freshly opened tin of Prince Albert's chewing tobacco to the circle, the required down payment to convince Ulsharavas to show up. It was the last of my whiskey and the last of the tins of tobacco, so I added Get more scotch and Prince Albert in a can to my to-do list, and stuck it in my pocket.
I spent a couple of minutes sweeping the floor around the circle, so that I wouldn't kick a stray hair or bit of paper across the circle and flub it up. After a brief deliberation I chalked down another circle outside the copper one. Then I took a moment to go over the guide a last time, and to clear my head of distractions.
I took a deep breath and gathered in my strength. Then I focused, reached down, and touched the copper circle, willing a tiny jolt of power into it. The summoning circle closed. I felt it as a tingling prickle on the back of my neck and a faint warmth on the skin of my face. I repeated the process with the chalk circle, adding a second layer, and then knelt down by the circle, lifting both hands palms-up.
"Ulsharavas," I murmured, willing energy into the words. My voice shook oddly, skittering around tones in what seemed a random fashion. "Ulsharavas. Ulsharavas. One lost in ignorance seeks you. One darkened by the lack of knowledge seeks your light. Come, guardian of memory, sentinel of the yet to come. Accept this offering and join me here."
At the conclusion of the ritual words, I released the power I'd been holding, sending it coursing from me into the circle, and through it to seek out the oracle spirit in the Nevernever.
The response came immediately. A sudden swirl of light appeared within the copper circle, and briefly made the barrier around it visible as a curved plane of blue sparkles. The light drizzled down over the homunculus, and a moment later it twitched, then sat up.
"Welcome, oracle," I said. "Bob the Skull thought you might be of some help."
The homunculus sat up and stretched out pudgy arms. Then it blinked, looked at its arms, and rose to stare down at itself. It looked up at me with one eyebrow raised, and asked, in a tiny voice, "A Cabbage Patch doll? You expect me to help you while wearing this?"
It was a cute doll. Blond ringlets fell to her plush shoulders, and she wore a pink-and-blue calico dress, complete with matching ribbons and little black shoes. "Uh, yeah. Sorry," I said. "I didn't have anything else with two arms and two legs, and I'm pressed for time."
Ulsharavas the Cabbage Patch doll sighed and sat down in the circle, legs straight out like a teddy bear's. She struggled to pick up the comparatively large cup of whiskey, and drank it down. It looked like she was taking a pull from a rain barrel, but she downed the whiskey in one shot. I don't know where it went, given that the doll didn't actually have a mouth or a stomach, but none of it spilled onto the floor. That done, she thrust a tiny fist into the tobacco and stuffed a wad of it into her mouth.
"So," she said, between chews. "You want to know about the Shroud, and the people who stole it."
I lifted my eyebrows. "Uh. Yeah, actually. You're pretty good."
"There are two problems."
I frowned. "Okay. What are they?"
Ulsharavas peered at me and said, "First. I don't work for bokkor."
"I'm not a bokkor," I protested.
"You aren't a houngun. You aren't a mambo. That makes you a sorcerer."
"Wizard," I said. "I'm with the White Council."
The doll tilted her head. "You're stained," she said. "I can feel black magic on you."
"It's a long story," I said. "But mostly it isn't mine."
"Some of it is."
I frowned at the doll and then nodded. "Yeah. I've made a bad call or two."
"But honest," Ulsharavas noted. "Well enough. Second is my price."
"What did you have in mind?"
The doll spat to one side, flecks of tobacco landing on the floor. "An honest answer to one question. Answer me and I will tell you what you seek."
"Yeah, right," I said. "You could just ask me for my Name. I've heard that one before."
"I didn't say you'd have to answer in full," the doll said. "I certainly do not wish to threaten you. But what you would answer, you must answer honestly."
I thought about it for a minute before I said, "All right. Done."
Ulsharavas scooped up more tobacco and started chomping. "Answer only this. Why do you do what you do?"
I blinked at her. "You mean tonight?"
"I mean always," she answered. "Why are you a wizard? Why do you present yourself openly? Why do you help other mortals as you do?"
"Uh," I said. I stood up and paced over to my table. "What else would I do?"
"Precisely," the doll said, and spat. "You could be doing many other things. You could be seeking a purpose in life in other careers. You could be sequestered and studying. You could be using your skills for material gain and living in wealth. Even in your profession as an investigator, you could do more to avoid confrontation than you do. But instead you consign yourself to a poor home, a dingy office, and the danger of facing all manner of mortal and supernatural foe. Why?"
I leaned back against my table, folded my arms, and frowned at the doll. "What the hell kind of question is that?"
"An important one," she said. "And one that you agreed to answer honestly."
"Well," I said. "I guess I wanted to do something to help people. Something I was good at."
"Is that why?" she asked.
I chewed over the thought for a moment. Why had I started doing this stuff? I mean, it seemed like every few months I was running up against situations that had the potential to horribly kill me. Most wizards never had the kind of problems I did. They stayed at home, minded their own business, and generally speaking went on about their lives. They did not challenge other supernatural forces. They didn't declare themselves to the public at large. They didn't get into trouble for sticking their noses in other people's business, whether or not they'd been paid to do so. They didn't start wars, get challenged to duels with vampire patriots, or get the windows shot out of their cars.
So why did I do it? Was it some kind of masochistic death wish? Maybe a psychological dysfunction of some sort?
Why?
"I don't know," I said, finally. "I guess I never thought about it all that much."
The doll watched me with unnerving intensity for a full minute before nodding. "Don't you think you should?"
I scowled down at my shoes, and didn't answer.
Ulsharavas took one last fistful of tobacco, and sat back down in her original position, settling her calico dress primly about her. "The Shroud and the thieves you seek have rented a small vessel docked in the harbor. It is a pleasure craft called the Etranger."
I nodded and exhaled through my nose. "All right then. Thank you for your help."
She lifted a tiny hand. "One thing more, wizard. You must know why the Knights of the White God wish you to stay away from the Shroud."
I arched an eyebrow. "Why?"
"They received part of a prophecy. A prophecy that told them that should you seek the Shroud, you will most assuredly perish."
"Only part of a prophecy?" I asked.
"Yes. Their Adversary concealed some of it from them."
I shook my head. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because," Ulsharavas said. "You must hear the second half of the prophecy in order to restore the balance."
"Uh. Okay."
The doll nodded and fixed me with that unsettling, unblinking stare. "Should you seek the Shroud, Harry Dresden, you will most assuredly perish."
"All right," I said. "So what happens if I don't?"
The doll lay down on her back, and wisps of light began flowing back out of her, back from whence Ulsharavas had come. Her voice came to me quietly, as if from a great distance. "If you do not, they all die. And this city with them."
I hate cryptic warnings. I know, the whole cryptic-remark concept is part and parcel of the wizard gig, but it doesn't suit my style. I mean, what good is a warning like that? All three Knights and the population of Chicago would die if I didn't get involved---and my number would be up if I did. That sounded like the worst kind of self-fulfilling crap.
There's a case to be made for prophecy; don't get me wrong. Mortals, even wizards, all exist at a finite point in the flow of time. Or, to make it simple, if time is a river, then you and I are like pebbles in it. We exist in one spot at a time, occasionally jostled back and forth by the currents. Spirits don't always have the same kind of existence. Some of them are more like a long thread than a stone---their presence tenuous, but rippling upstream and down as a part of their existence, experiencing more of the stream than the pebble.
That's how oracle spirits know about the future and the past. They're living in them both at the same time they're delivering mysterious messages to you. That's why they only give brief warnings, or mysterious dreams or prophetic knock-knock jokes, or however they drop their clues. If they tell you too much, it will change the future that they're experiencing, so they have to give out the advice with a light touch.
I know. It makes my head hurt too.
I don't put much stock in prophecy. As extensive and aware as these spirits might be, they aren't all-knowing. And as nutty as people are, I don't buy that any spirit is going to be able to keep an absolute lock on every possible temporal outcome.
Maybe-genuine prophecies aside, I could hardly drop the case now. In the first place, I'd been paid up front, and I didn't have the kind of financial breathing space I would need to be able to turn down the money and pay my bills at the same time.
In the second place, the risk of imminent death just didn't hit me the same way it used to. It wasn't that it didn't scare me. It did, in that kind of horrible, uncertain way that left me with nothing to focus my fears upon. But I've beaten risks before. I could do it again.
You want to know another reason I didn't back off? I don't like getting pushed around. I don't like threats. As well-intentioned and polite and caring as Michael's threat had been, it still made me want to punch someone in the nose. The oracle's prophecy had been another threat, of sorts, and I don't let spirits from the Nevernever determine what I'm going to do, either.
Finally, if the prophecy was right, Michael and his brother Knights could be in danger, and they had saved my skinny wizard's ass not long ago. I could help them. They might be heaven-on-wheels when it came to taking on bad guys in a fight, but they weren't investigators. They couldn't run these thieves down the way I could. It was just a question of making them see reason. Once I'd convinced them that the prophecy they'd received wasn't wholly correct, everything would be fine.
Yeah, right.
I shoved those thoughts aside, and checked the clock. I wanted to move on Ulsharavas's tip as soon as possible, but I was beat and likely to make mistakes. With all the bad guys running around town, there was no sense in going out there into the dark, exhausted and unprepared. I'd wait for the potions to be ready and Bob to come back from his mission, at least. Sunlight would cut down on the risk as well, since Red Court vampires got incinerated by it---and I doubted these Denarian fruitcakes would get along with it either.
Thus prioritized, I checked my notes, and started putting together a couple of potions that would offer me a few hours of protection from the narcotic venom of the Red Court. The potions were simple ones. Brewing any kind of potion required a base liquid, and then several other ingredients meant to bind the magic put into the potion to the desired effect. One ingredient was linked to each of the five senses, then one to the mind and one to the spirit.
In this case, I wanted something that would offset the venomous saliva of the Red Court vampires, a narcotic that rendered those exposed to it passively euphoric. I needed a potion that would ruin the pleasurable sensations of the poison.
I used stale coffee as my base ingredient. To that I added hairs from a skunk, for scent. A small square of sandpaper for touch. I tossed in a small photo of Meat Loaf, cut from a magazine, for sight. A rooster's crow I'd stored in a small quartz crystal went in for hearing, and a powdered aspirin for taste. I cut the surgeon general's warning label from a pack of cigarettes and chopped it fine to add in for the mind, and then lit a stick of the incense I sometimes used while meditating and wafted some of the smoke into the two bottles for the spirit. Once the potions were bubbling over a burner, I drew in my wearied will and released power into the mixes, suffusing them with energy. They fizzed and frothed with gratifying enthusiasm.
I let them simmer for a while, then took them from the fire and emptied them into a pair of small sports-drink bottles. After that, I slumped on a stool and waited for Bob to come home.
I must have nodded off, because when my phone rang, I jerked myself up straight and nearly fell off my stool. I clambered up the ladder and picked up the phone.
"Dresden."
"Hoss," said a weather-beaten voice on the other end. Ebenezar McCoy, a sometime teacher of mine, sounded businesslike. "Did I wake you up?"
"No, sir," I said. "I was up anyway. Working on a case."
"You sound tired as a coal-mine mule."
"Been up all night."
"Uh-huh," Ebenezar said. "Hoss, I just called to let you know not to worry about this duel nonsense. We're going to slap it down."
By "we," Ebenezar meant the Senior Council members. Seven of the most experienced wizards on the White Council held positions of particular authority, especially during times of crisis, when quick decisions were needed. Ebenezar had turned down his chance at a seat on the Senior Council for nearly fifty years. He took it only recently to block a potentially fatal political attack directed against yours truly by some of the more conservative (read, fanatic) members of the White Council.
"Slap it down? No, don't do that."
"What?" Ebenezar said. "You want to fight this duel? Did you fall and hit your head, boy?"
I rubbed at my eyes. "Tell me about it. I'll work out something to give me a shot at winning."
"Sounds like your wagon's already pretty full to be letting this vampire push you."
"He knew where to push," I said. "Ortega brought a bunch of goons into town. Vampires and straight hit men, too. He says that if I don't face him he's going to have a bunch of people I know killed."
Ebenezar spat something in what I presumed was Gaelic. "You'd better tell me what happened, then."
I told Ebenezar all about my encounter with Ortega. "Oh, and a contact of mine says that the Red Court is divided over the issue. There are lots of them who don't want the war to end."
"Of course they don't," Ebenezar said. "That fool of a Merlin won't let us take the offensive. He thinks his fancy wards will make them give up."
"How are they working out?" I asked.
"Well enough for now," Ebenezar admitted. "One major attack has been pushed back by the wards. No more Council members have been killed in attacks on their homes, though the Red Court's allies are putting pressure on ours, and a few Wardens have died on intelligence-gathering missions. But it isn't going to last. You can't win a war sitting behind a wall and hoping the enemy decides to leave."
"What do you think we should do?"
"Officially," Ebenezar said, "we follow the Merlin's lead. More than anything, now, we need to stay together."
"What about unofficially?"
"Think about it," Ebenezar snorted. "If we just sit here, the vampires are going to take apart or drive away our allies and then we'll have to take them all on alone. Look, Hoss. Are you sure about this duel?"
"Hell no," I said. "I just didn't see much choice. I'll figure out something. If I win, it might be worth it to the Council. Neutral territory for meeting and negotiating could come in handy."
Ebenezar sighed. "Aye. The Merlin will think the same thing." He was quiet for a moment before he said, "Not much like the days on the farm, is it, Hoss?"
"Not much," I agreed.
"Do you remember that telescope we set up in the loft?"
Ebenezar had taught me what I knew of astronomy, on long, dark summer evenings in the Ozark hills, hay doors to the barn's loft open, stars overhead shining in the country darkness by the millions. "I remember. That asteroid we discovered that turned out to be an old Russian satellite."
"Asteroid Dresden was a better name than Kosmos Five." He chuckled and added, as an afterthought, "Do you remember whatever happened to that telescope and such? I kept meaning to ask you but I never got around to it."
"We packed it in that steamer trunk in the horse stall."
"With the observation logs?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Oh, that's right," Ebenezar said. "Obliged."
"Sure."
"Hoss, we'll agree to the duel if that's what you want. But be careful."
"I don't plan to roll over and die," I said. "But if something should happen to me..." I coughed. "Well, if it does, there are some papers in my lab. You'll know how to find them. Some people I'd like to make sure are protected."
"Of course," Ebenezar said. "But I'm likely to carry on cranky if I have to drive all the way up to Chicago twice in as many years."
"Hate for that to happen."
"Luck, Hoss."
"Thanks."
I hung up the phone, rubbed tiredly at my eyes, and stomped back down to the lab. Ebenezar hadn't come out and said it, but the offer had been there, behind the old man's talk of days gone by. He'd been offering me sanctuary at his farm. It wasn't that I didn't like Chicago, but the offer was a tempting one. After a couple of rough years slugging it out with various bad guys, a quiet year or two on the farm near Hog Hollow, Missouri, sounded tempting.
Of course, the safety offered in that image was an illusion. Ebenezar's place was going to be as well protected as any wizard's on earth, and the old man himself could be a terrible foe. But the Red Court of vampires had a big network supporting it and they didn't generally bother to play fair. They'd destroyed a wizard stronghold the previous summer, and if they'd cracked that place they could do it to Ebenezar's Ozark hideaway too. If I went there and they found out about it, it would make the old man's farm too tempting a target to pass by.
Ebenezar knew that as well as I did, but he and I shared a common trait---he doesn't like bullies either. He'd be glad to have me and he'd fight to the death against the Reds if they came. But I didn't want to draw that kind of thing down on him. I was grateful for the old man's support, but I owed him more than that.
Besides, I was almost as well protected here in Chicago. My own wards, defensive screens of magic to protect my apartment, had kept me safe and alive for a couple of years, and the presence of a large mortal population kept the vampires from trying anything completely overt. Wizards and vampires notwithstanding, everyone in the supernatural community knew damned well that plain old vanilla mortals were one of the most dangerous forces on the planet, and went out of their way not to become too noticeable to the population at large.
The population at large, meanwhile, did everything it possibly could to keep from noticing the supernatural, so that worked out. The vampires had taken a poke or two at me since the war began, but it hadn't been anything I couldn't handle, and they didn't want to risk being any more obvious.
Thus, Ortega and his challenge.
So how the hell was I supposed to fight a duel with him without using magic?
My bed called to me, but that thought was enough to keep me from answering. I paced around my living room for a while, trying to think of some kind of weapon that would give me the most advantage. Ortega was stronger, faster, more experienced, and more resistant to injury than me. How the hell was I supposed to pick a weapon to go up against that? I supposed if the duel could be worked into some kind of pizza-eating contest I might have a shot, but somehow I didn't think that the Pizza Spress Hungry Man Special was on the list of approved weaponry.
I checked the clock and frowned. Dawn was only minutes away, and Bob wasn't back yet. Bob was a spirit being, a spirit of intellect from one of the more surreal corners of the Nevernever. He wasn't evil as much as he was magnificently innocent of any kind of morality, but as a spirit, daylight was a threat to him as surely as it was to the vampires of the Red Court. If he got caught out in it, it could kill him.
Dawn was about two minutes off before Bob returned, flowing down the ladder and toward the skull.
Something was wrong.
Bob's manifestation of a candle flame--colored cloud of swirling lights bobbed drunkenly left and right on its way back to the shelf with the skull. Purple globs of glowing plasm dribbled from the cloud in a steady trail, striking the floor, where they winked out into blobs of transparent goo. The cloud flowed into the skull, and after a moment, faint violet flames appeared in the skull's empty eye sockets.
"Ow," Bob said, his voice tired.
"Hell's bells," I muttered. "Bob, you all right?"
"No."
Bob? Monosyllabic? Crap. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"No," Bob said, faintly. "Rest."
"But---"
"Report," Bob said. "Have to."
Right. He'd been sent out on a mission and he was feeling pressured to finish it. "What happened?"
"Wards," Bob said. "Marcone's."
I felt my mouth fall open. "What?"
"Wards," Bob repeated.
I sat down on my stool. "How the hell did Marcone get wards?"
Bob's tone became a shade contemptuous. "Magic?"
The insult relieved me a little. If he was able to be a wiseass he'd probably be okay. "Could you tell who did the wards?"
"No. Too good."
Damn. A spell had to get up pretty early in the morning to get around Bob. Maybe he'd been hurt worse than I thought. "What about Ortega?"
"Rothchild," Bob said. "Half a dozen vamps with him. Maybe a dozen mortals."
Bob's eyelights flickered and guttered. I couldn't risk losing Bob by pushing him too hard---and spirit or not, he wasn't immortal. He wasn't afraid of bullets or knives, but there were things that could kill him. "Good enough for now," I said. "Tell me the rest later. Get some sleep."
Bob's eyelights flickered out without another word.
I frowned at the skull for a while and then shook my head. I collected my potion bottles, cleaned up the work area, and turned to leave and let Bob get some rest.
I was leaning over the wardflames to blow them out when the green candle hissed and shrank to a pinpoint of light. The yellow candle beside it flared up without warning, brighter than an incandescent lightbulb.
My heart started pounding and nervous fear danced over the back of my neck.
Something was approaching my apartment. That's what it meant when the flame spread from the green to the yellow candle. Warning spells I had threaded out to a couple of blocks from my house had sensed the approach of supernatural hostility.
The yellow candle dimmed, and the red candle exploded into a flame the size of my head.
Stars and stones. The intruder that had triggered the warning system the wardflames were linked to was getting closer; and it was something big. Or else a lot of somethings. They were heading in fast to set off the red candle so quickly, only a few dozen yards from my house.
I dashed up the ladder from the lab and got ready to fight.
I got up the ladder in time to hear a car door shut outside my apartment. I'd lost my .357 during a battle between the Faerie Courts hosted on clouds over Lake Michigan the previous midsummer, so I'd moved my .44 from the office to home. It hung on a gun belt on a peg beside the door, just over a wire basket I'd attached to the wall. Holy water, a couple cloves of garlic, vials of salt, and iron filings filled the basket, intended to be door prizes for anything that showed up in an attempt to suck my blood, carry me off to faerieland, or sell me stale cookies.
The door itself was reinforced steel, and could stand up to punishment better than the wall around it. I'd had a demon come a-knocking before, and I didn't want an encore performance. I couldn't afford new furniture, even secondhand.
I belted on the gun, shook out my shield bracelet, and took up my staff and blasting rod. Anything that came through my door would have to contend with my threshold, the aura of protective energy around any home. Most supernatural things didn't do so well with thresholds. After that, they'd have to force their way past my wards---barriers of geometrically aligned energy that would block out physical or magical intrusion, turning that energy back upon its source. A small, gentle push at my wards would result in a similar push against whatever was trying to get in. A swift or heavy push would result in more energy feeding back onto the attacker. Within the wards were sigils of fire and ice, which were designed to deliver bursts of destructive energy about as powerful as your average land mine.
It was a solid and layered defense. With luck, it should be enough to stop a considerable amount of threat from even reaching my door.
And since I'm such a lucky guy, I took a deep breath, pointed my blasting rod at the door, and waited.
It didn't take long. I expected flashes of magical discharge, demon howls, maybe some kind of pyrotechnics as evil magic clashed against my own defensive spells. Instead I got seven polite knocks.
I peered at the door suspiciously and then asked, "Who's there?"
A low, rough man's voice growled, "The Archive."
What the hell. "The Archive who?"
Evidently the speaker didn't have a sense of humor. "The Archive," the voice repeated firmly. "The Archive has been appointed emissary in this dispute, and is here to speak to Wizard Dresden about the duel."
I frowned at the door. I vaguely remembered mention of an Archive of some sort during the last White Council meeting I'd attended, as a neutral party. At the time, I'd assumed it had been some sort of arcane library. I'd had other things on my mind at the time, and I hadn't been listening too closely. "How do I know who you are?"
There was a rasp of paper on stone, and an envelope slid under my door, one corner poking out. "Documentation, Wizard Dresden," the voice replied. "And a pledge to abide by the laws of hospitality during this visit."
Some of the tension left my shoulders, and I lowered the gun. That was one good thing about dealing with the supernatural community. If something gave you its word, you could trust it. Within reason.
Then again, maybe that was just me. Of all the things I'd encountered, I'd been more of a weasel about keeping my word than any of them. Maybe that's why I was leery about trusting someone else.
I picked up the envelope and unfolded a sheet of plain paper certifying that its bearer had been approved by the White Council to act as emissary in the matter of the duel. I passed my hand over it and muttered a quick charm with the last password I'd gotten from the Wardens, and in response a brief glowing pentacle appeared centered on the paper like a bioluminescent watermark. It was legit.
I folded the paper closed again, but I didn't set my rod and staff aside just yet. I undid the dead bolt, muttered my wards back, and opened the door enough to see outside.
A man stood on my doorstep. He was nearly as tall as me but looked a lot more solid, with shoulders wide enough to make the loose black jacket he wore fit tightly on his upper arms. He wore a navy blue shirt and stood so that I could see the wrinkles caused by the straps of a shoulder rig. A black ball cap reined in dark golden hair that might have fallen to his shoulders. He hadn't shaved in a few days, and had a short, white scar below his mouth that highlighted the cleft in his chin. His eyes were grey-blue and empty of any expression in a way I had seldom seen. Not like he was hiding what he felt. More like there was simply nothing there.
"Dresden?" he asked.
"Yeah." I eyed him up and down. "You don't look very Archive-esque."
He lifted his eyebrows, a mildly interested expression. "I'm Kincaid. You're wearing a gun."
"Only when company comes over."
"I haven't seen any of the Council's people carrying a gun. Good for you." He turned and waved his hand. "This shouldn't take long."
I glanced past him. "What do you mean?"
A second later, a little girl started down my stairs, one hand carefully on the guide rail. She was adorable, maybe seven years old, her blond hair still baby-fine and straight, clipped neatly at her shoulders and held back with a hairband. She wore a plain little corduroy dress with a white blouse and shiny black shoes, and her coat was a puffy down-filled jacket that seemed like a bit of overkill for the weather.
I looked from the kid to Kincaid and said, "You can't be bringing a child into this."
"Sure I can," Kincaid said.
"What, couldn't you find a babysitter?"
The child stopped a couple of steps up so that her face was even with my own and said, her voice serious and marked with a faint British accent, "He is my babysitter."
I felt my eyebrows shoot up.
"Or more accurately my driver," she said. "Are you going to let us in? I prefer not to remain outdoors."
I stared at the kid for a second. "Aren't you a little short for a librarian?"
"I am not a librarian," the child said. "I am the Archive."
"Hang on a minute," I said. "What do you---"
"I am the Archive," the child said, her voice steady and assured. "I assume that your wards detected my presence. They seemed functional."
"You?" I said. "You've got to be kidding." I extended my senses gingerly toward her. The air around her fairly hummed with power, different from what I would expect around another wizard, but strong all the same, a quiet and dangerous buzz like that around high-tension power lines.
I had to suppress a sudden rush of apprehension from showing on my face. The girl had power. She had a hell of a lot of power. Enough to make me wonder if my wards would be enough to stop her if she decided to come through them. Enough to make me think of little Billy Mumy as the omnipotent brat on that old episode of The Twilight Zone.
She regarded me with implacable blue eyes I suddenly did not want to take the chance of looking into. "I can explain it to you, wizard," she said. "But not out here. I have neither an interest nor an inclination to do you any harm. Perhaps the opposite."
I frowned at her. "Promise?"
"Promise," the child said solemnly.
"Cross your heart and hope to die?"
She drew an X over her puffy jacket with one index finger. "You don't know how much."
Kincaid took a couple of steps up and glanced warily around the street. "Make up your mind, Dresden. I'm not keeping her out here for long."
"What about him?" I asked the Archive, and nodded toward Kincaid. "Can he be trusted?"
"Kincaid?" the girl asked, her voice whimsical. "Can you be trusted?"
"You're paid up through April," the man replied, his eyes still scanning the street. "After that I might get a better offer."
"There," the girl said to me. "Kincaid can be trusted until April. He's an ethical man, in his way." She shivered and put her hands into the pockets of her puffy coat. She hunched up her shoulders and watched my face.
Generally speaking, my instincts about people (who weren't women who might potentially end up doing adult things with me) were pretty good. I trusted the Archive's promise. Besides, she was darling and looked like she was starting to get cold. "Fine," I said. "Come inside."
I stepped back and opened the door. The Archive came in and told Kincaid, "Wait with the car. Come fetch me in ten minutes."
Kincaid frowned at her, and then me. "You sure?"
"Quite." The Archive stepped in past me, and started taking off her coat. "Ten minutes. I want to head back before rush hour begins."
Kincaid fixed his empty eyes on me and said, "Be nice to the little girl, wizard. I've handled your kind before."
"I get more threats before nine a.m. than most people get all day," I responded, and shut the door on him. Purely for effect, I locked it too.
Me, petty? Surely not.
I lit a couple of candles in order to get a little more light into the living room and stirred up the fire, adding more wood to it as soon as the embers were glowing. While I did, the Archive took off her coat, folded it neatly over the arm of one of my lumpy comfy chairs, and sat down, back straight, hands folded in her lap. Her little black shoes waved back and forth above the floor.
I frowned at her. It's not like I don't like kids or anything, but I hadn't had much experience with them. Now I had one sitting there wanting to talk to me about a duel. How the hell did a child, no matter how large her vocabulary, manage to get appointed an emissary?
"So, uh. What's your name?"
She said, "The Archive."
"Yeah, I got that part. But I meant your name. What people call you."
"The Archive," she repeated. "I do not have a familiar name. I am the Archive, and have always been the Archive."
"You're not human," I said.
"Incorrect. I am a seven-year-old human child."
"With no name? Everybody has a name," I said. "I'm can't go around calling you the Archive."
The girl tilted her head to one side, arching a pale gold eyebrow. "Then what would you call me?"
"Ivy," I said at once.
"Why Ivy?" she asked.
"You're the Archive, right? Archive. Arch-ivy. Ivy."
The girl pursed her lips. "Ivy," she said, and then nodded slowly. "Ivy. Very well." She regarded me for a moment and then said, "Go ahead and ask the question, wizard. We might as well get it out of the way."
"Who are you?" I asked. "Why are you called the Archive?"
Ivy nodded. "The thorough explanation is too complex to convey to you here. But in short, I am the living memory of mankind."
"What do you mean, the living memory?"
"I am the sum of human knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, mother to daughter. Culture, science, philosophy, lore, tradition. I hold the accumulated memories of a thousand generations of mankind. I take in all that is written and spoken. I study. I learn. That is my purpose, to procure and preserve knowledge."
"So you're saying that if it's been written down, you know it?"
"I know it. I understand it."
I sat down slowly on the couch, and stared at her. Hell's bells. It was almost too much to comprehend. Knowledge is power, and if Ivy was telling me the truth, she knew more than anyone alive. "How did you get this gig?"
"My mother passed it on to me," she replied. "As I was born, just as she received it when she was born."
"And your mother lets a mercenary drive you around?"
"Certainly not. My mother is dead, wizard." She frowned. "Not dead, technically. But all that she knew and was came into me. She became an empty cup. A persistent vegetative state." Her eyes grew a little wistful, distant. "She's free of it. But she certainly isn't alive in the most vital sense."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I wouldn't know why. I know my mother. And all before her." She put a finger to her temple. "It's all in here."
"You know how to use magic?" I asked.
"I prefer calculus."
"But you can do it."
"Yes."
Yikes. If the reaction of my wards was any indication, it meant that she was at least as strong as any Wizard of the White Council. Probably stronger. But if that was true...
"If you know that much," I said, "if you are that powerful, why did you hire a bodyguard to bring you here?"
"My feet don't reach the pedals."
I felt like smacking myself on the forehead. "Oh, right."
Ivy nodded. "In preparation for the duel, I will need some information. Namely, where I might contact your second and what weapon you prefer for the duel."
"I don't have a second yet."
Ivy arched an eyebrow. "Then you have until sundown this evening to gain one. Otherwise the match, and your life, will be forfeit."
"Forfeit? Uh, how would the forfeit be collected?"
The little girl stared at me for a silent moment. Then she said, "I'll do it."
I swallowed, a cold chill rippling over me. I believed her. I believed that she could, and I believed that she would. "Um. Okay. Look, I haven't exactly chosen a weapon yet, either. If I---"
"Simply choose one, Mister Dresden. Will, skill, energy, or flesh."
"Wait," I said. "I thought I got to pick swords or guns or something."
Ivy shook her head. "Read your copy of the Accords. I choose what is available, and I choose the ancient ways. You may match wills with your opponent to gauge which of you is the most determined. You may match your skill at arms against his, each of you with weaponry of your individual choosing. You may wield energy forces against each other. Or you may challenge him to unarmed combat." She considered. "I would advise against the last."
"Thanks," I muttered. "I'll take magic. Energy."
"You realize, of course, that he will decline in that venue and you will be forced to choose another."
I sighed. "Yeah. But until he does, I don't have to pick another one, right?"
"Indeed," Ivy acknowledged.
There was a knock on the door, and I got up to open it. Kincaid nodded to me, then leaned in and said, "Ten minutes."
"Thank you, Kincaid," Ivy said. She rose, drew a business card from her pocket, and passed it to me. "Have your second call this number."
I took the card and nodded. "I will."
Just then, Mister emerged from my bedroom and lazily arched his back. Then he padded over to me and rubbed his shoulder against my shin by way of greeting.
Ivy blinked and looked down at Mister, and her child's face was suddenly suffused with a pure and uncomplicated joy. She said, "Kitty!" and immediately knelt down to pet Mister. Mister apparently liked her. He started purring louder, and walked around Ivy, rubbing up against her while she petted him and spoke to him quietly.
Hell's bells. It was adorable. She was just a kid.
A kid who knew more than any mortal alive. A kid with a scary amount of magical power. A kid who would kill me if I didn't show up to the duel. But still a kid.
I glanced up at Kincaid, who stood frowning down at Ivy fawning all over Mister. He shook his head and muttered, "Now, that's just creepy."
Ivy seemed reluctant to leave off petting Mister, but she and Kincaid left without further conversation. I shut the door after them and leaned on it, listening with my eyes closed until they'd gone. I didn't feel as tired as I should have. Probably because I had a wealth of experience that suggested I would get a lot more worn out before I got a real chance to rest.
Mister rubbed up against my legs until I'd leaned down to pet him, after which he promptly walked over to his food bowl, ignoring me altogether. I grabbed a Coke from the icebox while he ate, absently pouring a bit onto a saucer and leaving it on the floor by Mister. By the time I'd finished it, I'd made up my mind about what I had to do next.
Make phone calls.
I called the number Vincent had left for me first. I expected to reach an answering service, but to my surprise Vincent's voice, tense and anxious, said, "Yes?"
"It's Harry Dresden," I said. "I wanted to check in with you."
"Ah, yes, just a moment," Vincent said. I heard him say something, caught a bit of conversation in the background, and then heard him walking and a door shut behind him. "The police," he said. "I've been working with them throughout the evening."
"Any luck?" I asked.
"God only knows," Vincent said. "But from my perspective, it seems the only thing accomplished is deciding which department is going to handle the investigation."
"Homicide?" I guessed.
Vincent's tired voice became dry. "Yes. Though the mind boggles at the chain of logic that led to it."
"Election year. City management is politicking," I said. "But once you start dealing with the actual police personnel, you should be all right. There are good people in every department."
"One hopes. Have you found anything?"
"I've got a lead. I don't know how good. The thieves might be on a small craft in the harbor. I'm heading down there presently."
"Very well," Vincent said.
"If the lead is good, do you want me to call CPD?"
"I'd rather you contacted me first," Vincent said. "I am still uncertain of how much trust to place in the local police. I cannot help but think it must have been the reason the thieves fled here---that they possessed some contact or advantage with the local authorities. I'd like as much time as possible to decide whom to trust."
I frowned and thought about Marcone's flunkies taking a shot at me. Chicago PD had an unfair reputation for corruption, thanks in part to the widespread mob activity during Prohibition. It was inaccurate, but people were people, and people aren't immune to being bought. Marcone had attained police-only information with disturbing speed before. "Might be smart. I'll check it out and let you know. Shouldn't be more than an hour or two."
"Very good. Thank you, Mister Dresden. Is there anything else?"
"Yeah," I said. "I should have thought of this last night. Do you have any pieces of the Shroud?"
"Pieces?" Vincent asked.
"Scraps or threads. I know that many samples were analyzed back in the seventies. Do you have access to any of those pieces?"
"Very possibly. Why?"
I had to remind myself that Vincent seemed to be largely a nonbeliever in the supernatural, so I couldn't come out and say that I wanted to use thaumaturgy to track down the Shroud. "To confirm identification when I find it. I don't want to get foxed with a decoy."
"Of course. I'll make a call," Vincent said. "Get a sample FedExed here. Thank you, Mister Dresden."
I said goodbye, hung up, and stared at the phone for a minute. Then I took a deep breath and dialed Michael's number.
Even though the sky was barely light with morning, the phone rang only once before a woman's voice said, "Hello?"
This was my nightmare. "Oh. Uh, hello, Charity. It's Harry Dresden."
"Hi!" the voice said brightly. "This isn't Charity though."
So maybe it wasn't my nightmare. It was my nightmare's oldest daughter. "Molly?" I asked. "Wow, you sound all grown-up now."
She laughed. "Yeah, the breast fairy came to visit and everything. Did you want to talk to my mom?"
Some might find it significant that it took me a second to realize she wasn't being literal about the faerie. Sometimes I hate my life. "Well, um. Is your dad around?"
"So you don't want to talk to Mom, check," she said. "He's working on the addition. Let me get him."
She set the phone down and I heard footsteps walking away. In the background, I could hear recorded children's voices singing, the rattle of plates and forks, and people talking. Then there was a rustling sound, and a thump as the handset on the other end must have fallen to the floor. Then I heard the sound of heavy, squishy breathing.
"Harry," sighed another voice from what must have been the same room. She sounded much like Molly but less cheerful. "No, no, honey, don't play with the phone. Give that to me, please." The phone rattled some more, the woman said, "Thank you, sweetie," and then she picked up the phone and said, "Hello? Anyone there?"
For a second I was tempted to remain silent, or possibly try to imitate a recording of the operator, but I steeled myself against that. I didn't want to let myself get rattled. I was pretty sure that Charity could smell fear, even over the phone. It could trigger an attack. "Hello, Charity. It's Harry Dresden. I was calling to speak to Michael."
There was a second of silence during which I couldn't help but imagine the way Michael's wife's eyes must have narrowed. "I suppose it was inevitable," she said. "Naturally if there is a situation so dangerous as to require all three of the Knights, you come crawling out of whatever hole you live in."
"Actually, this is sort of unrelated."
"I assumed it was. Your idiocy tends to strike at the worst possible place and time."
"Oh, come on, Charity, that's not fair."
Growing anger made her voice clearer and sharper, if no louder. "No? At the one time in the last year that Michael most needs to be focused on his duty, to be alert and careful, you arrive to distract him."
Anger warred with guilt for dominance of my reaction. "I'm trying to help."
"He has scars from the last time you helped, Mister Dresden."
I felt like slamming the receiver against the wall until it broke, but I restrained myself again. I couldn't stop the anger from making my words bite, though. "You're never going to give me an inch, are you?"
"You don't deserve an inch."
I said, "Is that why you named your son after me?"
"That was Michael," Charity said. "I was still on drugs, and the paperwork was done when I woke up."
I kept my voice calm. Mostly. "Look, Charity. I'm real sorry you feel the way you do, but I need to talk to Michael. Is he there or not?"
The line clicked as someone else picked up another extension and Molly said, "Sorry, Harry, but my dad isn't here. Sanya says he went out to pick up some doughnuts."
"Molly," Charity said, her voice hard. "It's a school day. Don't dawdle."
"Uh-oh," Molly said. "I swear, it's like she's telepathic or something."
I could almost hear Charity grinding her teeth. "That isn't funny, Molly. Get off the line."
Molly sighed and said, "Surrender, Dorothy," before she hung up. I choked on a sudden laugh, and tried to turn it into a series of coughs for Charity's benefit.
From the tone of her voice, she hadn't been fooled. "I'll give him a message."
I hesitated. Maybe I should ask to wait for him to return. There wasn't any love lost between Charity and myself, and if she didn't pass word along to Michael, or if she delayed before telling him, it could mean my death. Michael and the other Knights were busy with their pursuit of the Shroud, and God only knew if I'd be able to get in touch with him again today. On the other hand, I had neither the time nor the attention to spare to sit there butting heads with Charity until Michael returned.
Charity had been unreservedly hostile to me for as long as I had known her. She loved her husband ferociously, and feared for his safety---especially when he worked with me. In my head, I knew that her antagonism wasn't wholly without basis. Michael had been busted up several times when teamed up with me. During the last such outing, a bad guy gunning for me had nearly killed Charity and her unborn child, little Harry. Now she worried about the consequences that might be visited on her other children as well.
I knew that. But it still hurt.
I had to make a decision---to trust her or not. I decided to do it. Charity might not like me, but she was no coward and no liar. She knew Michael would want her to tell him.
"Well, Mister Dresden?" Charity asked.
"Just let him know that I need to talk to him."
"Regarding?"
For a second, I debated passing Michael my tip on the Shroud. But Michael believed that I was going to get killed if I got involved. He took protecting his friends seriously, and if he knew that I was poking around he might be inclined to knock me unconscious and lock me in a closet now and apologize later. I decided against it.
"Tell him that I need a second by sundown tonight or bad things will happen."
"To who?" Charity asked.
"Me."
She paused, then said, "I'll give him your message."
And then she hung up on me.
I hung up the phone, frowning. "That pause wasn't significant," I told Mister. "It doesn't mean that she was chewing over the thought of intentionally getting me killed in order to protect her husband and children."
Mister regarded me with that mystic-distance focus in his feline eyes. Or maybe that was the look he got when his brain waves flatlined. Either way, it was neither helpful nor reassuring.
"I'm not worried," I said. "Not one bit."
Mister's tail twitched.
I shook my head, got my stuff together, and headed out to investigate the lead at the harbor.
When I first came to Chicago I thought of a harbor as a giant bowl of ocean with ships and boats in the foreground and the faded outline of the buildings on the far side in the background. I had always imagined political subversives dressed up as tribal natives and a huge hit in the profit margin of the East India Company.
Burnham Harbor looked like the parking lot of an oceangoing Wal-Mart. It might have been able to hold a football field or three. White wharves stretched out over the water with pleasure boats and small fishing vessels in rows within a placid oval of water. The scent of the lake was one part dead fish, one part algae-coated rock, and one part motor oil. I parked in the lot up the hill from the harbor, got out, and made sure I had my equipment with me. I wore my force ring on my right hand and my shield bracelet on my left wrist, and my blasting rod thumped against my leg where I had tied it to the inside of my leather duster. I'd added a can of self-defense spray to my arsenal, and I slipped it into my pants pocket. I would rather have had my gun, but toting it around in my pocket was a felony. The pepper spray wasn't.
I locked up the car and felt a sudden, slithering pressure on my back---my instincts' way of screaming that someone was watching me. I kept my head down, my hands in my pockets, and walked toward the harbor. I didn't rubberneck around, but I tried to get a look at everything while moving only my eyes.
I didn't see anyone, but I couldn't shake the impression that I was being observed. I doubted it was anyone from the Red Court. The morning hadn't reached full brightness yet, but it was still light enough to parboil a vampire. That didn't rule out any number of other flavors of assassin, though. And it was possible that if the thieves were here, they were keeping an eye on everyone coming and going.
All I could do was walk steadily and hope that whoever was watching me wasn't one of Marcone's thugs, a vampire groupie or a rent-a-gun aiming a rifle at my back from several hundred yards away.
I found the Etranger in a few minutes, moored at a slip not far from the entrance. It was a pretty little ship, a white pleasure boat roomy enough to house a comfortable cabin. The Etranger wasn't new, but she looked neat and well cared for. A Canadian flag hung from a little stand on the ship's afterdeck. I moved on past the ship at a steady pace and Listened as I did.
Listening is a trick I'd picked up when I was a kid. Not many people have worked out the trick of it, blocking out all other sound in order to better hear one sound in particular---such as distant voices. It isn't as much about magic, I think, as it is focus and discipline. But the magic helps.
"Unacceptable," said a quiet, female voice in the Etranger's cabin. It was marked with a gentle accent, both Spanish and British. "The job entailed a great deal more expense than was originally estimated. I'm raising the price to reflect this, nothing more." There was a short pause, and then the woman said, "Would you like an invoice for your tax return then? I told you the quote was only an estimate. It happens." Another pause, and then the woman said, "Excellent. As scheduled, then."
I stared out at the lake, just taking in the view, and strained to hear anything else. Evidently the conversation was over. I checked around, but there weren't any people in sight moving around the harbor on a February weekday morning. I took a breath to steady myself, and moved closer to the ship.
I caught a glimpse of motion through a window in the cabin, and heard a chirping sound. A cell phone rested on a counter beside a pad of hotel stationary. A woman appeared in the window dressed in a long gown of dark silk, and picked up the cell phone. She answered it without speaking and a moment later said, "I'm sorry. You've the wrong number."
I watched as she put the phone down and casually let the nightgown slide to the floor. I watched a little more. I wasn't being a peeping Tom. This was professional. I noted that she had some intriguing curves. See? Professionalism in action.
She opened a door, and a bit of steam wafted out, the sound of the water growing louder. She stepped in and closed the door again, leaving the cabin empty.
I had an opportunity. I'd seen only one woman, and not well enough to positively identify her as either Anna Valmont or Francisca Garcia, the two remaining Churchmice. I hadn't seen the Shroud hanging from a laundry line or anything. Even so, I had the feeling I'd come to the right place. My gut told me to trust my spiritual informer.
I made my decision and stepped up a short gangplank onto the Etranger.
I had to move fast. The woman on the ship might not be a fan of long showers. All I needed to do was get inside, see if I could find anything that might verify the presence of the Shroud, and get out again. If I moved quickly enough, I could get in and out without anyone the wiser.
I went down the stairs to the cabin with as much stealth as I could manage. The stairs didn't creak. I had to duck my head a bit when I stepped into the cabin. I stayed close to the door and checked around, listening to the patter of the water from the shower. The room wasn't large and didn't offer a bonanza of places to hide. A double bed took up nearly a quarter of the space in the room. A tiny washing machine and dryer were stacked one on another in a corner, a basket of laundry stowed atop them. A counter and kitchenette with a couple of small refrigerators used up most of the rest.
I frowned. Two fridges? I checked them out. The first was stocked with perishables and beer. The second was a fake, and opened onto a cabinet containing a heavy metal strongbox. Bingo.
The shower kept running. I reached out to pick up the strongbox, but a thought struck me. The Churchmice may have gotten themselves into a lot of trouble, but they'd evidently been good enough to avoid Interpol for a number of years. The hiding place for the strongbox was too clumsy, too obvious. I shut the fake fridge and looked around the room. I was starting to get nervous. I couldn't have much time left to find the Shroud and get out.
Of course. I took a couple of long steps to the washer and dryer and grabbed the laundry basket. I found it under several clean, fluffy towels, an opaque plastic package a little larger than a folded shirt. I touched it with my left hand. A tingling sensation pulsed against my palm, and the hairs along my arm rose up straight.
"Damn, I'm good," I muttered. I picked up the Shroud and turned to go.
A woman stood behind me, dressed in black fatigue pants, a heavy jacket, and battered combat boots. Her peroxide-blond hair was cut very short, but it did nothing to detract from the appeal of her features. She was elegantly pretty and pleasant to look at.
The gun she had pointed at my nose wasn't pretty, though. It was an ugly old .38 revolver, a cheap Saturday-night special.
I was careful not to move. Even a cheap gun can kill you, and I doubted I could raise a shield in time to do me any good. She'd taken me off guard. I'd never heard her coming, never sensed her presence.
"Damn, I'm good," the woman echoed, her accent high British, a touch of amusement in her voice. "Put the package down."
I held it out to her. "Here."
I wouldn't have tried for the gun, but if she stepped closer to me it might show that she was an amateur. She wasn't, and remained standing out of grab range. "On the counter, if you please."
"What if I don't?" I said.
She smiled without humor. "In that case, I'll have a dreary day of chores dismembering the body and cleaning up the blood. I'll leave it up to you."
I put the package on the counter. "Far be it from me to inconvenience a lady."
"What a dear boy you are," she said. "That's a very nice coat. Take it off. Slowly, if you please."
I slipped out of the coat and let it fall to the floor. "You tricked me onto the boat," I said. "That second phone call was you, telling your partner to draw me in."
"The shocking thing is that you fell for it," the woman said. She kept giving directions and she knew what she was doing. I leaned forward and put my hands against the wall while she patted me down. She found the pepper spray and took it, along with my wallet. She made me sit down on the floor on my hands while she took my coat and stepped back.
"A stick," she said, looking at my blasting rod. "How very preneolithic of you."
Aha. A professional she might be, but she was a straight. She didn't believe in the supernatural. I wasn't sure if that was going to help or hurt. It might mean that she would be a little less eager to shoot me. People who know what a wizard can do get really nervous if they think the wizard is about to try a spell. On the other hand, it meant that I didn't have either the support of the rest of the Council or the threat of my own retribution to use as leverage. I decided it was best to act like a normal for the time being.
The blonde laid my coat on the counter and said, "Clear."
The door to the bathroom opened, and the woman I'd heard before came out. She now wore a knit fabric dress the color of dark wine, and a couple of combs held her hair back from her face. She wouldn't stand out in a crowd but she wasn't unattractive. "He's not Gaston," she said, frowning at me.
"No," said the blonde. "He was here for the merchandise. He was just about to leave with it."
The dark-haired woman nodded and asked me, "Who are you?"
"Dresden," I said. "I'm a private investigator, Ms. Garcia."
Francisca Garcia's features froze, and she traded a look with the gun-wielding blond. "How did you know my name?"
"My client told me. You and Ms. Valmont could be in a lot of trouble."
Anna Valmont kicked the wall and spat, "Bollocks." She glared at me, gun steady on me despite her outburst. "Are you working with Interpol?"
"Rome."
Anna looked at Francisca and said, "We should scrub this sale. It's falling apart."
"Not yet," Francisca said.
"There's no point in waiting."
"I'm not leaving yet," the dark-haired woman said, her eyes hard. "Not until he gets here."
"He isn't coming," Anna said. "You know he isn't."
"Who?" I asked.
Francisca said, "Gaston."
I didn't say anything. Evidently Francisca could read faces well enough that I didn't have to. She stared at me for a moment and then closed her eyes, the blood draining from her face. "Oh. Oh, Dio."
"How?" Anna said. The gun never wavered. "How did it happen?"
"Murder," I said quietly. "And someone set it up to point the police at Chicago."
"Who would have done that?"
"Some bad people after the Shroud. Killers."
"Terrorists?"
"Not that playful," I said. "As long as you have the Shroud, your lives are in danger. If you come with me, I can get you to some people who will protect you."
Francisca shook her head and blinked her eyes a couple of times. "You mean the police."
I meant the Knights, but I knew darn well what their stance would be on what to do with the thieves once any supernatural peril was past. "Yeah."
Anna swallowed and looked at her partner. Something around her eyes softened with concern, with sympathy. The two of them weren't solely partners in crime. They were friends. Anna's voice softened as she said, "Cisca, we have to move. If this one found us, others may not be far behind."
The dark-haired woman nodded, her eyes not focused on anything. "Yes. I'll get ready." She rose and stepped across the cabin to the washing machine. She drew out a pair of gym bags and put them on the counter, over the package. Then she slipped into some shoes.
Anna watched for a moment and then said to me, "Now. We can't have you running to the police to tell them everything. I wonder what to do with you, Mister Dresden. It really does make a great deal of sense to kill you."
"Messy, remember? You'd have that dreary day," I pointed out.
That got a bit of a smile from her. "Ah, yes. I'd forgotten." She reached into her pocket and drew out a pair of steel handcuffs. They were police quality, not the naughty fun kind. She tossed them to me underhand. I caught them. "Put one on your wrist," she said. I did. "There's a ring on that bulkhead. Put the other through it and lock the cuffs."
I hesitated, watching Francisca slip into a coat, her expression still blank. I licked my lips and said, "You don't know how much danger you two are in, Ms. Valmont. You really don't. Please let me help you."
"I think not. We're professionals, Mister Dresden. Thieves we might be, but we do have a work ethic."
"You didn't see what they did to Gaston LaRouche," I said. "How bad it was."
"When isn't death bad? The bulkhead, Mister Dresden."
"But---"
Anna lifted the gun.
I grimaced and lifted the cuffs to a steel ring protruding from the wall beside the stairs.
As a result, I was looking up them to the ship's deck when the second Denarian in twelve hours came hurtling down the stairway straight toward me.
I only saw it coming out of the corner of my eye, and I barely had time to register the movement and lunge as far as I could to one side. The demon went by me in a blur of rustling, metallic whispers, carrying the scent of lake water and dried blood. Neither of the Churchmice screamed, though whether this was intention or a by-product of surprise I couldn't tell.
The demon was more or less human, generally speaking, and disturbingly female. The lines of curvy hips swept down to legs that were oddly hinged, back-jointed like a lion's. She had skin of metallic green scales, and her arms ended in four-fingered, metallic-clawed hands. Like the demon form of Ursiel, she had two sets of eyes, one luminescent green, one glowing cherry red, and a luminous sigil burned at the center of her forehead.
Her hair was long. I mean like fifteen feet long, and looked like the demented love child of Medusa and Doctor Octopus. It had seemingly been cut in one-inch strips from half a mile of sheet metal. It writhed around her like a cloud of living serpents, metallic strands thrusting into the walls and the floor of the ship, supporting her weight like a dozen additional limbs.
Anna recovered from the surprise first. She already had a gun out and ready, but she hadn't been trained in how to use it in real combat. She pointed the gun more or less at the Denarian and emptied it at her in the space of a panicked breath. Since I was a couple of feet behind the demon, I flopped to one side as best I could, stayed low, and prayed to avoid becoming collateral damage.
The demon flinched once, maybe taking a hit, before it shrieked and twisted its shoulders and neck. A dozen metallic ribbons of writhing hair lashed across the room. One of them hit the gun itself, and metal shrieked as the demon tendril slashed clean through the gun's barrel. Half a dozen more whipped toward Anna's face, but the blond thief had reflexes fast enough to get her mostly out of the way. A tendril wrapped around Anna's ankle, jerked, and sent the woman sprawling to the floor, while another lashed across her belly like a scalpel, cutting through her jacket and sprinkling the cabin with fine drops of blood.
Francisca stared at the thing for a second, her eyes huge and surrounded by white. Then she jerked open a drawer in the tiny galley, pulled out a heavy cutting knife, and lunged at the Denarian, blade flickering. It bit into the demon's arm and drew a furious shriek that did not sound at all human from her throat. The Denarian spun, silvery blood glistening on her scaly skin, and ripped one claw in a sweeping arch. The demon's claws sliced into Francisca's forearm, drawing blood. The knife tumbled to the ground. Francisca cried out and reeled back, into one of the walls.
The Denarian, eyes burning, whipped her head in a circle, the motion boneless, unnerving. Too many tendrils for me to count lanced across the room and slammed into Francisca Garcia's belly, thrusting like knives. She let out a choking gasp, and stared down at her wounds as several more tendrils thrust through her. They made a thunking sound as they hit the wooden wall of the cabin.
The demon laughed. It was a quick, breathless, excited laugh, the kind you expect from a nervous teenage girl. Her face twisted into a feral smile, showing a mouthful of metallic-seeming teeth, and both sets of eyes glowed brightly.
Francisca whispered, "Oh, my Gaston." Then her head bowed, dark hair falling about her face in a veil, and her body relaxed. The demon shivered and the tendril-blades whipped out of her, the last foot or so of each soaked in scarlet. The tendrils lashed about in a sort of mad excitement, and more droplets of blood appeared everywhere. Francisca slumped down to the floor, blood beginning to soak her dress, and fell limply onto her side.
Then the Denarian's two sets of eyes turned to me, and a swarm of razor-edged tendrils of her hair came whipping toward me.
I had already begun to ready my shield, but when I saw Francisca fall a surge of fury went coursing through me, filling me from toes to teeth with scarlet rage. The shield came together before me in a quarter-dome of blazing crimson energy, and the writhing tendrils slammed against it in a dozen flashes of white light. The Denarian shrieked, jerking back, and the attacking tendrils went sailing back across the cabin with their ends scorched and blackened.
I looked around wildly for my blasting rod, but it wasn't where Anna had left it when she took it from me. The pepper spray was, though. I grabbed it and faced the Denarian in time to see her raise her clawed hand. A shimmer in the air around her fingers threw off a prismatic flash of color, and with a flash of light from the upper set of eyes, the demoness drove her fist at my shield.
She hit the shield hard, and she was incredibly strong. The blow drove me back against a wall, and when the heat-shimmer of power touched my scarlet shield, it fractured into shards of light that went flying around the cabin like the sparks from a campfire. I tried to get to one side, away from the demon's vicious strength, but she snarled and strands of hair punched into the hull on either side of me, caging me. The Denarian reached for me with her claws.
I shouted a panicked battle cry and gave her the pepper spray full in the face, right into both sets of eyes.
The demoness screamed again, twisting her face away, ruining the tendril-cage, the human eyes squeezing shut over a sudden flood of tears. The glowing demon-eyes did not even blink, and a sweep of the Denarian's arm fetched me a backhanded blow that sent me sprawling and made me see stars.
I got back to my feet, terrified at the notion of being caught helpless on the ground. The Denarian seemed able to blow off my magic with a bit of effort, and she was deadly in these confined quarters. I didn't think I could get up the stairs without her tearing me apart. Which meant I had to find another way to get the demon away.
The Denarian swiped a clawed hand at her eyes and snarled in mangled, throaty English, "You will pay for that."
I looked up to see that Anna had dragged herself across the floor to the fallen Francisca, and knelt over her, shielding the other woman from the Denarian with her body. Her face was white with pain, or shock, or both---but she shot me a glance and then jerked her head toward the far side of the cabin.
I followed her gaze and got her drift. As the Denarian recovered and blinked watery, murderous eyes at me, I lunged toward the far side of the room and shouted, "Get it out of the fridge! They must not have it!"
The Denarian spat out what I took to be an oath, and I felt that lionlike foot land in the middle of my back, flattening me to the floor, claws digging into my skin. She stepped over me, past me, and her tendrils tore open the real fridge, taking the door from its hinges before slithering inside and knocking everything within to the floor. She hadn't quite finished with the first fridge before her hair had gone on to tear open the dummy fridge, and dragged out the steel strongbox.
While the Denarian did that, I looked wildly around the cabin, and spotted my blasting rod on the floor. I rolled, my back burning with pain, and grabbed the blasting rod. Calling up fire within the tiny cabin was a bad idea---but waiting around for the Denarian to murder me with her hairdo was even worse.
She stood up with the strongbox just as I began channeling energy into the blasting rod. Its carved runes began to burn with golden radiance and the tip of the rod suddenly gleamed with red light and wavered with hot-air shimmer.
The Denarian crouched, demonic limbs too long, feminine shape disturbingly attractive, red light gleaming on her metallic-green scales. Her hair writhed in a hissing mass, striking sparks as one edge rasped against another. Violent lust burned in both sets of eyes for a second, and then she turned away. Her hair tore the cabin's ceiling apart like papier-mâché, and using her hair, an arm, and one long leg, she swarmed out of the ship's cabin. I heard a splash as she hit the water, taking the strongbox with her.
"What was that?" stammered Anna Valmont, clutching Francisca's limp form to her. "What the bloody hell was that?"
I didn't drop the blasting rod or look away from the hole in the roof, because I didn't think the Denarian was the sort to leave a lot of people alive behind her. The end of the blasting rod was wavering drunkenly. "How is she?"
I watched the hole in the ceiling for several shaking breaths until Anna said, her voice barely audible, "She's gone."
A stabbing feeling went through my belly, sharp and hot. Maybe I'm some kind of Neanderthal for thinking so, but it hurt me. A minute ago, Francisca Garcia had been talking, planning, grieving, breathing. Living. She'd been killed by violence, and I couldn't stand the thought of things like that happening to a woman. It wouldn't have been any less wrong had it happened to a man, but in my gut it wasn't the same. "Dammit," I whispered. "How are you? Can you walk?"
Before she could answer, the ship lurched and leaned to one side. There was a wrenching, snapping roar and the rushing sound of water. Icy cold ran over my ankles and began to rise.
"The hull's breached," Anna said. "We're taking on water."
I headed for the stairway, blasting rod up, to make sure it was clear. "Can you get out?"
Light exploded behind my eyes and I dropped to my hands and knees at the bottom of the stairway. Anna had slugged me with something. A second burst of light and pain drove my head far enough down to splash some cold water against my forehead. I dimly saw Anna's foot kick my blasting rod away from me. Then she picked up the Shroud in its package from the counter, and tore off the top sheet of the hotel memo pad. I saw that she had blood on her jacket, soaked through, and staining her fatigue pants down to the top of her left leg. She grabbed my coat, wincing, and one of the duffel bags. She put my leather duster on, covering the blood. The water had filled the cabin almost to the tops of her combat boots.
I tried to get my wits together, but something was keeping me from doing much besides focusing my eyes. I knew that I needed to leave, but I couldn't get the message from my head to my arms and legs.
Anna Valmont stepped past me and went up the stairs. She stopped about halfway up, spat out another curse, and came back down them enough to reach down and splash cold water into my face. The shock jump-started something in my body, and I coughed, my head spinning, and started to move again. I'd been too drunk to stand up a time or two, but even then I'd been more capable than I was at that moment.
The blond thief grabbed my arm and half hauled me up a couple of stairs, her face twisted in pain. I desperately held on to that momentum, struggling up another stair even after she stopped pulling.
She kept going up the stairs and didn't look back as she said, "I'm only doing this because I like your coat, Dresden. Don't come near me again."
Then she padded up out of the cabin and disappeared with the Shroud.
My head had started to throb and swell, but it was clearing rapidly also. But evidently I wasn't all that bright even when fully conscious, because I staggered back down into the ship's cabin. Francisca Garcia's corpse had fallen onto its side, glassy eyes staring, mouth slightly open. One of her cheeks had been half-covered by water. There were still the tracks of tears on the other one. The water around her was a cloudy, brownish pink.
My stomach heaved and the anger that came with it nearly sent me to the floor again. Instead, I sloshed through the freezing water to the counter. I picked up the cell phone there, and the blank memo pad. I hesitated over Francisca. She didn't deserve to have her body swallowed by the lake like a discarded beer bottle.
My balance wobbled again. The water had begun to rise more quickly. It covered my shins already, and I couldn't feel my feet for the cold. I tried to lift her body, but the effort brought a surge of pain to my head and I almost threw up.
I settled the body back down, unable to even curse coherently, and made do with gently closing her eyes with one hand. It was all I could do for her. The police would find her, of course, probably within a few hours.
And if I didn't get moving, they'd find me too. I couldn't afford to spend a night in the pokey while I was interrogated, charged and awaiting bail, but what else was new. I'd get in touch with Murphy as soon as I could.
I folded my arms against the growing cold, hugging the memo pad and cell phone to my chest, and slogged out of the bloody water of the Etranger's cabin and onto the deck. I had to make a short jump up to the dock. A couple of people were on the sidewalk above the little harbor, staring down, and I saw a couple of folks out on the decks of their ships, also staring.
I ducked my head, thought inconspicuous thoughts, and hurried away before my morning could get any worse.
I've been clouted in the head a few times in my day. The bump Anna Valmont had given me was smaller than some, but my head pounded all the way home. At least my stomach settled down before I started throwing up all over myself. I shambled in, washed down a couple of Tylenol with a can of Coke, and folded some ice into a towel. I sat down by the phone, put the ice pack against the back of my head, and called Father Vincent.
The phone rang once. "Yes?"
"It's in town," I said. "The two Churchmice had it on a boat in Burnham Harbor."
Vincent's voice gained an edge of tension. "You have it?"
"Uh," I said. "Not strictly speaking, no. Something went wrong."
"What happened?" he demanded, his voice growing more frustrated, angrier. "Why didn't you call me?"
"A third party made a grab for it, and what do you think I'm doing right now? I had a shot to recover the thing. I took it. I missed."
"And the Shroud was taken from the thieves?"
"Thief, singular. Chicago PD is probably recovering the body of her partner right now."
"They turned on each other?"
"Not even. A new player killed Garcia. Valmont duped the third party into taking a decoy. Then she grabbed the real McCoy and ran."
"And you didn't see fit to follow her?"
My head pounded steadily. "She ran really fast."
Vincent was silent for a moment before he said, "So the Shroud is lost to us once more."
"For now," I said. "I might have another lead."
"You know where it has gone?"
I took in a deep breath and tried to sound patient. "Not yet. That's why it's called a lead and not a solution. I need that sample of the Shroud."
"To be frank, Mister Dresden, I did bring a few threads with me from the Vatican, but..."
"Great. Get one of them to my office and drop it off with security downstairs. They'll hold it for me until I can pick it up. I'll call you as soon as I have anything more definite."
"But---"
I hung up on Vincent, and felt a twinge of vindictive satisfaction. "'You didn't see fit to follow her,'" I muttered to Mister, doing my best to imitate Vincent's accent. "I gotcher didn't see fit to follow her. White-collar jerk. How about I ring your bell a few times, and then you can go say Mass or something."
Mister gave me a look as if to say that I shouldn't say such things about paying clients. I glared at him to let him know that I was well aware of it, got up, went into my bedroom, and rummaged in my closet until I found a stick of charcoal and a clipboard. Then I lit several candles on the end table next to my big comfy chair and settled down with the memo pad I'd taken from the Etranger. I brushed the stick of charcoal over it as carefully as I could, and hoped that Francisca Garcia hadn't been using a felt tip.
She hadn't. Faint white letters began to appear amidst the charcoal on the paper. It read Marriott on the first line and 2345 on the second.
I frowned down at the pad. Marriott. One of the hotels? It could have been someone's last name, too. Or maybe some kind of French word. No, don't make it more complicated than it has to be, Harry. It probably meant the hotel. The number appeared to be military time for a quarter to midnight. Maybe even a room number.
I glared at the note. It didn't tell me enough. Even though I may have had the time and place, I didn't know where and when.
I looked at the cell phone I'd taken. I knew as much about cell phones as I did about gastrointestinal surgery. There were no markings on the case, not even a brand name. The phone was off, but I didn't dare turn it on. It would probably stop working. Hell, it would probably explode. I would need to ask Murphy to see what she could find out when I talked to her.
My head kept pounding and my eyes itched with weariness. I needed rest. The lack of sleep was making me sloppy. I shouldn't have chanced going onto the ship in the first place, and I should have been more careful about watching my back. I'd had a gut instinct someone was watching me, but I had been too tired, too impatient, and I'd nearly gotten myself shot, impaled, concussed, and drowned as a result.
I headed into the bedroom, set my alarm clock for a couple hours after noon, and flopped down on my bed. It felt obscenely good.
Naturally it didn't last.
The phone rang and I gave serious thought to blasting it into orbit, where it could hang around with Asteroid Dresden. I stomped back into the living room, picked up the phone, and snarled, "What."
"Oh, uh," said a somewhat nervous voice on the other end. "This is Waldo Butters. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden."
I moderated my voice to a mere snarl. "Oh. Hey."
"I woke you up, huh?"
"Some."
"Yeah, late nights suck. Look, there's something odd going on and I thought maybe I could ask you something."
"Sure."
"Sullen monosyllabism, a sure sign of sleep deprivation."
"Eh."
"Now descending into formless vocalization. My time is short." Butters cleared his throat and said, "The germs are gone."
"Germs?" I asked.
"In the samples I took from that body. I ran all the checks again just to be sure, and better than half of them turned up negative. Nothing. Zip, zero."
"Ungh," I said.
"Okay, then, Caveman Og. Where germs go?"
"Sunrise," I said. "Poof."
Butter's voice sounded bewildered. "Vampire germs?"
"The tiny capes are a dead giveaway," I said. I started pulling my train of thought into motion at last. "Not vampire germs. Constructs. See, at sunrise it's like the whole magical world gets reset to zero. New beginnings. Most spells don't hold together through even one sunrise. And it takes a lot to make them last through two or three."
"Magic germs?" Butters asked. "Are you telling me I've got magic germs?"
"Magic germs," I confirmed. "Someone called them up with magic."
"Like an actual magic spell?"
"Usually you call nasty hurtful spells a curse. But by tomorrow or the next day, those other samples will probably have zeroed out too."
"Are they still infectious?"
"Assume they are. They're good as real until the energy that holds them together falls apart."
"Christ. You're serious. It's for real."
"Well, yeah."
"Is there a book or a Cliff's Notes or something on this stuff?"
I actually smiled that time. "Just me. Anything else?"
"Not much. I swept the body for genetic remains but got nothing. The cuts on the corpse were made with either a surgical scalpel or some other kind of small, fine blade. Maybe a utility knife."
"I've seen cuts like that before, yeah."
"Here's the best part. The same blade evidently took off the hands and head. The cuts are cleaner than a surgeon could manage on an operating table. Three single cuts. The heat from it half cauterized parts of the wounds. So what kind of tool can cut fine, precise lines and cleave through bones too?"
"Sword?"
"Have to be one hell of a sharp sword."
"There's a few around like that. Any luck identifying the victim?"
"None. Sorry."
"'S okay."
"You want to know if anything changes?"
"Yeah. Or if you see anyone else come in like that guy."
"God forbid, will do. You find anything on that tattoo?"
"Called the Eye of Thoth," I said. "Trying to narrow down exactly who uses it around here. Oh, give Murphy a call. Let her know about those samples."
"Already did. She's the one who told me to keep you in the loop. I think she was heading toward sleep too. Would she want me to wake her up to talk to you?"
I talked through a yawn. "Nah, it can wait. Thanks for the call, Butters."
"No trouble," he said. "Sleep is god. Go worship."
I grunted, hung up the phone, and didn't get to take the second step toward my bed when someone knocked at the door.
"I need one of those trapdoors," I muttered to Mister. "I could push a button and people would fall screaming down a wacky slide thing and land in mud somewhere."
Mister was far too mature to dignify that with a response, so I kept a hand near my gift rack as I opened the door a crack and peeked out.
Susan tilted her head sideways and gave me a small smile. She was wearing jeans, an old tee, a heavy grey fleece jacket, and sunglasses. "Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You know, it's hard to tell through the door, but your eyes look sunken and bloodshot. Did you sleep last night?"
"What is this thing you speak of, 'sleep'?"
Susan sighed and shook her head. "Mind if I come in?"
I stepped back and opened the door wider. "No scolding."
Susan came in and folded her arms. "Always so cold in here in the winter."
I had a couple suggestions on how to warm up, but I didn't say them out loud. Maybe I didn't want to see her response to them. I thought about what Murphy had said about setting up a talk. I got some more wood and stirred up the fireplace. "Want me to make some tea or something?"
She shook her head. "No."
Susan never turned down a cup of hot tea. I tried, but I couldn't keep a hard edge out of my voice. "Just going to dump me and run, then. Drive-by dumping."
"Harry, that isn't fair," Susan said. I could hear the hurt in her voice, but only barely. I raked harder at the fire, making sparks fly up, though flames were already licking the new wood. "This isn't easy for anyone."
My mouth kept running without checking in with my brain. My heart maybe, but not my brain. I shot her a look over my shoulder and said, "Except for Captain Mediocrity, I guess."
She raised both eyebrows. "Do you mean Martin?"
"Isn't that what this is about?" A spark flipped out of the fire and landed on my hand, stinging. I yelped and pulled my hand away. I closed the heavy mesh curtain over the fire and put the poker away. "And before you say anything, I know damn well I'm being insane. And possessive. I know that we were quits before you left town. It's been more than a year, and it's been hard on you. It's only natural for you to find someone. It's irrational and childish for me to be upset, and I don't care."
"Harry---" she began.
"And it's not as if you haven't been thinking about it," I continued. Somewhere I knew that I'd start choking on my foot if I kept shoving it in my mouth. "You kissed me. You kissed me, Susan. I know you. You meant it."
"This isn't---"
"I'll bet you don't kiss Snoozy Martin like that."
Susan rolled her eyes and walked to me. She sat down on the lintel of my little fireplace while I knelt before it. She cupped my cheek in one hand. She was warm. It felt good. I was too tired to control my reaction to the simple, gentle touch, and I looked back at the fire.
"Harry," she said. "You're right. I don't kiss Martin like that."
I pulled my cheek away, but she put her fingers on my chin and tugged my face back toward her. "I don't kiss him at all. I'm not involved with Martin."
I blinked. "You're not?"
She drew an invisible X over her heart with her index finger.
"Oh," I said. I felt my shoulders ease up a little.
Susan laughed. "Was that really worrying you, Harry? That I was leaving you for another man?"
"I don't know. I guess."
"God, you are a dolt sometimes." She smiled at me, but I could see the sadness in it. "It always shocked me how you could understand so many things and be such a complete idiot about so many others."
"Practice," I said. She looked down at me for a while, with that same sad smile, and I understood. "It doesn't change anything, does it?"
"Martin?"
"Yeah."
She nodded. "It doesn't change anything."
I swallowed a sudden frog in my throat. "You want it to be over."
"I don't want it," she said quickly. "But I think it's necessary. For both of us."
"You came back here to tell me that?"
Susan shook her head. "I don't have my mind set. I think it wouldn't be fair to do that without talking to you about it. We both have to make this decision."
I growled and looked back at the fire. "Would be a lot simpler if you just gave me the Dear John speech and left."
"Simpler," she said. "Easier. But not fair and not right."
I didn't say anything.
"I've changed," Susan said. "Not just the vampire thing. There's a lot that's been happening in my life. A lot of things that I didn't know."
"Like what?"
"How dangerous the world is, for one," she said. "I wound up in Peru, but I went all over South America, Central America. I couldn't have imagined what things are like there. Harry, the Red Court is everywhere. There are whole villages out in the country supporting groups of them. Like cattle bred for the lord of the manor. The vampires feed on everyone. Addict them all." Her voice hardened. "Even the children."
My stomach twitched unpleasantly. "I hadn't ever heard that."
"Not many know."
I mopped a hand over my face. "God. Kids."
"I want to help. To do something. I've found where I can help down there, Harry. A job. I'm going to take it."
Something in my chest hurt, a literal pain. "I thought this was our decision."
"I'm coming to that," she said.
I nodded. "Okay."
She slipped to the floor next to me and said, "You could come with me."
Go with her. Leave Chicago. Leave Murphy, the Alphas, Michael. Leave a horde of problems---many of them ones I'd created for myself. I thought of packing up and heading out. Maybe fighting the good fight. Being loved again, held again. God, I wanted that.
But people would get hurt. Friends. Others who might be in my kind of danger and have no one to turn to.
I looked into Susan's eyes and saw hope there for just a moment. Then understanding. She smiled, but it was somehow sadder than ever. "Susan---" I said.
She pressed a finger to my lips and blinked back tears. "I know."
And then I understood. She knew because she was feeling the same way.
There are things you can't walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward.
"Now do you understand?" she asked.
I nodded, but my voice came out rough. "Wouldn't be fair. Not to either of us," I said. "Not being together. Both of us hurting."
Susan leaned her shoulder against mine and nodded. I put my arm around her.
"Maybe someday things will change," I said.
"Maybe someday," she agreed. "I love you. I never stopped loving you, Harry."
"Yeah," I said. I choked on the end of the word, and the fire went blurry. "I love you too. Dammit." We sat there and warmed up in front of the fire for a couple of minutes before I said, "When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow," she said.
"With Martin?"
She nodded. "He's a coworker. He's helping me move, watching my back. I have to put everything in order here. Pack some things from the apartment."
"What kind of work?"
"Pretty much the same kind. Investigate and report. Only I report to a boss instead of to readers." She sighed and said, "I'm not supposed to tell you anything else about it."
"Hell's bells," I muttered. "Will I be able to reach you?"
She nodded. "I'll set up a drop. You can write. I'd like that."
"Yeah. Stay in touch."
Long minutes after that, Susan said, "You're on a case again, aren't you?"
"Does it show?"
She leaned a little away from me, and I drew my arm back. "I smelled it," she said, and stood up to add wood to the fire. "There's blood on you."
"Yeah," I said. "A woman was killed about five feet away from me."
"Vampires?" Susan asked.
I shook my head. "Some kind of demon."
"Are you okay?"
"Peachy."
"That's funny, because you look like hell," Susan said.
"I said no scolding."
She almost smiled. "You'd be smart to get some sleep."
"True, but I'm not all that bright," I said. Besides, I didn't have a prayer of falling asleep now, after talking to her.
"Ah," she said. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"Don't think so."
"You need rest."
I waved a hand at the stationery pad. "I will. I just have to run down a lead first."
Susan folded her arms, facing me directly. "So do it after you get some rest."
"There probably isn't time."
Susan frowned and picked up the pad. "Marriott. The hotel?"
"Dunno. Likely."
"What are you looking for?"
I sighed, too tired to stick to my confidentiality guns very closely. "Stolen artifact. I think the note is probably about a site for the sale."
"Who is the buyer?"
I shrugged.
"Lots of legwork, then."
"Yeah."
Susan nodded. "Let me look into this. You get some sleep."
"It's probably better if you don't---"
She waved a hand, cutting me off. "I want to help. Let me do this for you."
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I guess I could relate. I knew how much I'd wanted to help her. I couldn't. It had been tough to handle. It would have been a relief to me to have done her some good, no matter how small it was.
"All right," I said. "But just the phone work. Okay?"
"Okay." She copied down the word and the number on a sheet she tore from the bottom of the memo pad and turned toward the door.
"Susan?" I said.
She paused without turning to look back at me.
"Do you want to get dinner or something? Before you go, I mean. I want to, uh, you know."
"Say goodbye," she said quietly.
"Yeah."
"All right."
She left. I sat in my apartment, in front of the fire, and breathed in the scent of her perfume. I felt cold, lonely, and tired. I felt like a hollowed-out husk. I felt as if I had failed her. Failed to protect her to begin with, failed to cure her after the vampires had changed her.
Change. Maybe that's what this was really about. Susan had changed. She'd grown. She was more relaxed than I remembered, more confident. There had always been a sense of purpose to her, but now it seemed deeper, somehow. She'd found a place for herself, somewhere where she felt she could do some good.
Maybe I should have gone with her after all.
But no. Part of the change was that she felt hungrier now, too. More quietly sensual, as if every sight and sound and touch in the room was occupying most of her attention. She'd smelled drops of blood on my clothing and it had excited her enough to make her move away from me.
Another change. She had an instinctive hunger for my blood. And she could throw vampires twenty feet through the air. She sure as hell wouldn't have any trouble tearing my throat out in an intimate moment if her control slipped.
I washed my face mechanically, showered in my unheated shower, and went shivering to my bed. The routine hadn't helped me. It only delayed me from facing the harshest truth of my relationship with Susan.
She had left Chicago.
Probably for good.
That was going to hurt like hell in the morning.
I had bad dreams.
They were the usual fare. Flames devoured someone who screamed my name. A pretty girl spread her arms, eyes closed, and fell slowly backward as dozens of fine cuts opened all over her skin. The air became a fine pink spray. I turned from it, into a kiss with Susan, who drew me down and tore out my throat with her teeth.
A woman who seemed familiar but whom I did not recognize shook her head and drew her hand from left to right. The dream-scenery faded to black in the wake of her motion. She turned to me, dark eyes intent and said, "You need to rest."
Mickey Mouse woke me up, my alarm jangling noisily, his little hand on two and the big hand on twelve. I wanted to smack the clock for waking me up, but I reined in the impulse. I'm not against a little creative violence now and then, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I wouldn't sleep in the same room with a person who would smack Mickey Mouse.
I got up, got dressed, left a message for Murphy, another for Michael, fed Mister, and hit the road.
Michael's house did not blend in with most of the other homes in his neighborhood west of Wrigley Field. It had a white picket fence. It had elegant window dressings. It had a tidy front lawn that was always green, even in the midst of a blazing Chicago summer. It had a few shady trees, a lot of well-kept shrubberies, and if I had found a couple of deer grazing on the lawn or drinking from the birdbath, it wouldn't have surprised me.
I got out of the Beetle, holding my blasting rod loosely in my right hand. I opened the gate, and a few jingle bells hanging on a string tinkled happily. The gate swung shut on a lazy spring behind me. I knocked on the front door and waited, but no one answered. I frowned. Michael's house had never been empty before. Charity had at least a couple kids who weren't old enough to be in school yet, including the poor little guy they'd named after me. Harry Carpenter. How cruel is that?
I frowned at the cloud-hazed sun. Weren't the older kids getting out of school shortly? Charity had some kind of maternal obsession with never allowing her kids to come home to an empty house.
Someone should have been there.
I got a sick, twisty feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I knocked again, put my ear against the door, and Listened. I could hear the slow tick of the old grandfather clock in the front room. The heater cycled on for a moment, and the vents inside whispered. There were a few sounds when a bit of breeze touched the house, the creaks of old and comfortable wood.
Nothing else.
I tried the front door. It was locked. I stepped back off the porch, and followed the narrow driveway to the back of the property.
If the front of the Carpenter home would have qualified for Better Homes and Gardens, the back would have been fit for a Craftsman commercial. The large tree centered on the back lawn cast lots of shade in the summer, but with the leaves gone I could see the fortresslike tree house Michael had built for his kids in it. It had finished walls, an actual window, and guardrails anywhere anyone could possibly have thought about falling. The tree house had a porch that overlooked the yard. Hell, I didn't have a porch. It's an unfair world.
A big section of the yard had been bitten off by an addition connected to the back of the house. The foundation had been laid, and there were wooden beams framing what would eventually be walls. Heavy contractor's plastic had been stapled to the wooden studs to keep the wind off the addition. The separate garage was closed, and a peek in the window showed me that it was pretty well filled with lumber and other construction materials.
"No cars," I muttered. "Maybe they went to McDonald's. Or church. Do they have church at three in the afternoon?"
I turned around to go back to the Beetle. I'd leave a Michael a note. My stomach fluttered. If I didn't get a second for the duel, it was likely to be a bad evening. Maybe I should ask Bob to be my second. Or maybe Mister. No one dares to mess with Mister.
Something rattled against the metal gutters running the length of the back of the house.
I jumped like a spooked horse and scrambled away from the house, toward the garage at the back of the yard so that I could get a look at the roof. Given that in the past day or so no less than three different parties had taken a poke at me, I felt totally justified in being on edge.
I got to the back of the yard, but couldn't see the whole roof from there, so I clambered up into the branches, then took a six-foot ladder up to the main platform of the tree house. From there, I could see that the roof was empty.
I heard brisk, somewhat heavy footsteps below me, and beyond the fence at the back of the little yard. I froze in place in the tree house, Listening.
The heavy footsteps padded up to the fence at the back of the yard, and I heard the scrape of chain link dragging against dry leaves and other late-winter detritus. I heard a muted grunt of effort and a long exhalation. Then the footsteps came to the base of the tree.
Leather scraped against a wooden step, and the tree shivered almost imperceptibly. Someone was climbing up.
I looked around me but the ladder was the only way down, unless I felt like jumping. It couldn't have been more than nine or ten feet down. Odds were I could land more or less in one piece. But if I misjudged the jump I could sprain an ankle or break a leg, which would make running away both impractical and embarrassing. Jumping would have to be a last resort.
I gathered in my will and settled my grip on my blasting rod, pointing it directly at where the ladder met the platform. The tip of the blasting rod glowed with a pinpoint of bright red energy.
Blond hair and the top half of a girl's angelic young face appeared at the top of the ladder. There was a quiet gasp and her blue eyes widened. "Holy crap."
I jerked the tip of the blasting rod up and away from the girl, releasing the gathered energy. "Molly?"
The rest of the girl's face appeared as she climbed on up the ladder. "Wow, is that an acetylene torch or something?"
I blinked and peered more closely at Molly. "Is that an earring in your eyebrow?"
The girl clapped her fingers over her right eyebrow.
"And your nose?"
Molly shot a furtive look over her shoulder at the house, and scrambled the rest of the way up to the tree house. As tall as her mother, Molly was all coltish legs and long arms. She wore a typical private-school uniform of skirt, blouse, and sweater---but it looked like she'd been attacked by a lech with razor blades where fingers should have been.
The skirt was essentially slashed to ribbons, and underneath it she wore black tights, also torn to nigh indecency. Her shirt and sweater had apparently endured the Blitz, but the bright red satin bra that peeked out from beneath looked new. She had on too much makeup. Not as bad as most kids too old to play tag but too young to drive, but it was there. She wore a ring of fine gold wire through one pale gold eyebrow, and a golden stud protruded from one side of her nose.
I worked hard not to smile. Smiling would have implied that I found her outfit amusing. She was young enough to be hurt by that kind of opinion, and I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.
Molly clambered in and tossed a bulging backpack down on the wooden floor. "You lurk in tree houses a lot, Mister Dresden?"
"I'm looking for your dad."
Molly wrinkled up her nose, then started removing the stud from it. I didn't want to watch. "I don't want to tell you how to investigate stuff, but generally speaking you won't find him in tree houses."
"I came over, but no one answered the door when I knocked. Is that normal?"
Molly took out the eyebrow ring, dumped the backpack out onto the floorboards, and started sorting out a long skirt with a floral print, a T-shirt, and a sweater. "It is on errands day. Mom loads up the sandcrawler with all the little snot-nosed Jawas and goes all over town."
"Oh. Do you know when she's due back?"
"Anytime," Molly said. She hopped into the skirt, and wriggled out of the tattered skirt and tights in that mystifyingly modest way that girls always seem to manage to acquire sometime in their teens. The shirt and pink sweater went on next, and the ripped up sweater and, to my discomfort, the bright red bra came out from under the conservative clothes and got tucked back into the backpack.
I turned my back on the girl as well as I could in the limited space. The link of handcuff Anna Valmont had slapped onto my wrist chafed and pinched. I scratched at it irritably. You'd think I'd been cuffed enough times that I should have gotten myself a key by now.
Molly took a wet-wipe from somewhere and started peeling the makeup from her face. "Hey," she asked a minute later. "What's wrong?"
I grunted and waved my wrist vaguely, swinging the cuff around.
"Hey, neat," Molly said. "Are you on the lam? Is that why you're hiding in a tree house, so the cops won't find you?"
"No," I said. "It's kind of a long story."
"Ohhhh," Molly said wisely. "Those are fun-time handcuffs, not bad-time handcuffs. I gotcha."
"No!" I protested. "And how the hell would you know about fun-time handcuffs anyway? You're like ten."
She snorted. "Fourteen."
"Whatever, too young."
"Internet," she said sagely. "Expanding the frontiers of adolescent knowledge."
"God, I'm old."
Molly clucked and dipped into the backpack again. She grabbed my wrist firmly, shook out a ring of small keys, and started trying them in the lock of the cuffs. "So give me the juicy details," she said. "You can say 'bleep' instead of the fun words if you want."
I blinked. "Where the bleep did you get a bunch of cuff keys?"
She looked up at me and narrowed her eyes. "Think about this one. Do you really want to know?"
I sighed. "No. Probably not."
"Cool," she said, and turned her attention back to the handcuffs. "So stop dodging the issue. What's up with you and Susan?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I like romance. Plus I heard Mom say that you two were a pretty hot item."
"Your mom said that?"
Molly shrugged. "Sorta. As much as she ever would. She used words like 'fornication' and 'sin' and 'infantile depravity' and 'moral bankruptcy.' So are you?"
"Morally bankrupt?"
"A hot item with Susan."
I shrugged and said, "Not anymore."
"Don't move your wrist." Molly fiddled with one key for a moment before discarding it. "What happened?"
"A lot," I said. "It's complicated."
"Oh," Molly said. The cuffs clicked and loosened and she beamed up at me. "There."
"Thanks." I rubbed my sore wrist and put the cuffs in my coat pocket.
Molly bent over and picked up a piece of paper. She read it and said, "Ask Michael about duel? Whiskey and tobacco?"
"It's a shopping list."
Molly frowned. "Oh." She was quiet for a moment and then asked, "So was it the vampire thing?"
I blinked at the girl again. "Was there a PBS special or something? Is there some kind of unauthorized biography of my life?"
"I snuck downstairs so I could listen to Dad tell Mom what had happened."
"Do you eavesdrop on every private conversation you can?"
She rolled her eyes and sat down on the edge of the platform, her shoes waving in the air. "No one says anything interesting in a public conversation, do they? Why did you guys split up?"
I sat down next to her. "Like I said. It was complicated."
"Complicated how?"
I shrugged. "Her condition gives her...an impulse-control problem," I said. "She told me that strong emotions and uh, other feelings, are dangerous for her. She could lose control and hurt someone."
"Oh," Molly said, and scrunched up her nose again. "So you can't make a play for her or---"
"Bad things could happen. And then she'd be a full vampire."
"But you both want to be together?" Molly asked.
"Yeah."
She frowned. "God, that's sad. You want to be with her but the sex part---"
I shuddered. "Ewg. You are far too young to say that word."
The girl's eyes shone. "What word? Sex?"
I put my hands over my ears. "Gah."
Molly grinned and enunciated. "But the bleep part would make her lose control."
I coughed uncomfortably, lowering my hands. "Basically. Yeah."
"Why don't you tie her up?"
I stared at the kid for a second.
She lifted her eyebrows expectantly.
"What?" I stammered.
"It's only practical," Molly stated firmly. "And hey, you've already got the handcuffs. If she can't move while the two of you are bleeping, she can't drink your blood, right?"
I stood up and started climbing down the ladder. "This conversation has become way too bleeping disturbing."
Molly laughed at me and followed me back to the ground. She unlocked the back door with another key, presumably from the same ring, and that was when Charity's light blue minivan turned into the driveway. Molly opened the door, darted into the house, and returned without her backpack. The minivan ground to a halt and the engine died.
Charity got out of the van, frowning at me and at Molly in more or less equal proportions. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a heavy jacket. She was a tall woman, only an inch or so under six feet, and carried herself with an assurance that conveyed a sense of ready strength. Her face had the remote beauty of a marble statue, and her long blond hair was knotted behind her head.
Without being told, Molly went to the rolling side panel door, opened it, and reached inside, unloading children from safety seats, while Charity went to the rear of the van and opened the rear doors. "Mister Dresden," she said. "Lend a hand."
I frowned. "Uh. I'm sort of in a hurry. I was hoping to find Michael here."
Charity took a twenty-four-pack of Coke from the van in one arm and a couple of bulging paper grocery sacks in the other. She marched over to me and shoved them at my chest. I had to fumble to catch them, and my blasting rod clattered to the ground.
Charity waited until I had the sacks before heading for the van again. "Put them on the table in the kitchen."
"But---" I said.
She walked past me toward the house. "I have ice cream melting, meat thawing, and a baby about to wake up hungry. Put them on the table, and we'll talk."
I sighed and looked glumly at the groceries. They were heavy enough to make my arms burn a little. Which probably isn't saying much. I don't spend much time working out.
Molly appeared from the van, lowering a tiny, tow-headed girl to the driveway. She was wearing a pink dress with a clashing orange sweater and bright purple shoes and a red coat. She walked up to me and said, words edged with babyish syllables, "My name is Amanda. I'm five and a half and my daddy says I'm a princess."
"I'm Harry, Your Highness," I said.
She frowned and said, "There's already a Harry. You can be Bill." With that, she broke into a flouncing skip and followed her mother into the house.
"Well, I'm glad that's settled," I muttered. Molly lowered an even smaller blond girl to the driveway. This one was dressed in blue overalls with a pink shirt and a pink coat. She held a plush dolly in one arm and a battered-looking pink blanket in the other. Upon seeing me, she retreated a couple of steps and hid around the corner of the van. She leaned out to look at me once, and then hid again.
"I've got him," said an accented male voice.
Molly hopped out of the van, grabbed a grocery bag from the back, and said, "Come on, Hope." The little girl followed her big sister like a duckling while Molly went into the house, but Hope glanced back at me shyly three or four times on the way.
Shiro emerged from the van carrying a baby seat. The little old knight carried the walking stick that concealed his sword on a strap over one wide shoulder, and his scarred hands held the chair carefully. A boy, probably not yet two years old, slept in it.
"Little Harry?" I asked.
"Yes, Bill," Shiro said. His eyes sparkled behind his glasses
I frowned and said, "Good-looking kid."
"Dresden!" snapped Charity's voice from the house. "You're holding the ice cream."
I scowled and told Shiro, "Guess we'd better get in."
Shiro nodded wisely. I took the groceries into the Carpenters' big kitchen and put them on the table. For the next five minutes, Shiro and Molly helped me carry in enough groceries to feed a Mongol horde.
After all the perishables got put away, Charity fixed a bottle of formula and passed it off to Molly, who took it, the diaper bag, and the sleeping boy into another room. Charity waited until she had left, then shut the door. "Very well," she said, still putting groceries away. "I haven't spoken to Michael since you called this morning. I left a message with his cell phone voice mail."
"Where is he?" I asked.
Shiro laid his cane on the table and sat down. "Mister Dresden, we have asked you not to get involved in this business."
"That isn't why I'm here," I said. "I just need to talk to him."
"Why are you looking for him?" Shiro asked.
"I'm dueling a vampire under the Accords. I need a second before sundown or I get disqualified. Permanently."
Shiro frowned. "Red Court?"
"Yeah. Some guy named Ortega."
"Heard of him," Shiro said. "Some kind of war leader."
I nodded. "That's the rumor. That's why I'm here. I had hoped Michael would be willing to help."
Shiro stroked a thumb over the smooth old wood of his cane. "We received word of Denarian activity near St. Louis. He and Sanya went to investigate."
"When will they get back?"
Shiro shook his head. "I do not know."
I looked at the clock and bit my lip. "Christ."
Charity walked by with an armload of groceries and glared at me.
I lifted my hands. "Sorry. I'm a little tense."
Shiro studied me for a moment, and then asked, "Would Michael help him?"
Charity's voice drifted out of the cavernous walk-in pantry. "My husband is sometimes an idiot."
Shiro nodded and said, "Then I will assist you in his stead, Mister Dresden."
"You'll what?" I asked.
"I will be your second in the duel."
"You don't have to do that," I said. "I mean, I'll figure out something."
Shiro lifted an eyebrow. "Have the weapons been set for the duel?"
"Uh, not yet," I said.
"Then where is the meeting with the emissary and your opponent's second?"
I fished out the card I'd gotten from the Archive. "I don't know. I was told to have my second call this number."
Shiro took the card and rose without another word, heading for the phone in the next room.
I put my hand on his arm and said, "You don't need to take any chances. You don't really know me."
"Michael does. That is enough for me."
The old Knight's support was a relief, but I felt guilty, somehow, for accepting it. Too many people had been hurt on my behalf in the past. Michael and I had faced trouble together before, looked out for each other before. Somehow, it made it easier for me to go to him and ask for help. Accepting the same thing from a stranger, Knight of the Cross or not, grated on my conscience. Or maybe on my pride.
But what choice did I have?
I sighed and nodded. "I just don't want to drag someone else into more trouble with me."
Charity muttered, "Let me think. Where have I heard that before?"
Shiro smiled at her, the expression both paternal and amused, and said, "I'll make the call."
I waited while Shiro made a call from the room that served as the family study and the office for Michael's contracting business. Charity stayed in the kitchen and wrestled a huge Crock-Pot onto the counter. She got out a ton of vegetables, stew meat, and a spice rack and set to chopping things up without a word to me.
I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. 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 fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.
Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn't say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.
"I worry about him," she said.
I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.
"I don't even know when he'll be home tonight."
"Good thing you have a Crock-Pot," I said.
"I don't know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I'd feel so lost."
What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn't cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. "He'll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him."
"He's been hurt three times, you know."
"Three?" I asked.
"Three. With you. Every time."
"So it's my fault." My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. "I see."
I couldn't see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. "It isn't about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you're around, my husband, my children's father, gets hurt."
The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. "Ow," I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can't tell, with cuts like that, how bad they're going to be until you see how much you're leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn't bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, "Why didn't you get rid of me, then?"
I looked up to see Charity frowning at me. There were dark circles under her eyes that I hadn't noticed before. "What do you mean?"
"Just now," I said. "When Shiro asked you if Michael would help me. You could have said no."
"But he would have helped you in an instant. You know that."
"Shiro didn't."
Her expression became confused. "I don't understand."
"You could have lied."
Her face registered comprehension, and some fire came back into her eyes. "I don't like you, Mister Dresden. I certainly don't care enough for you to abandon beliefs I hold dear, to use you as an excuse to cheapen myself, or to betray what my husband stands for." She stepped to a cabinet and got out a small, neat medical kit. Without another word, she took my hand and the paper towel and opened the kit.
"So you're taking care of me?" I asked.
"I don't expect you to understand. Whether or not I can personally stand you, it has no bearing on what choices I make. Michael is your friend. He would risk his life for you. It would break his heart if you came to grief, and I will not allow that to happen."
She fell silent and doctored the cut with the same brisk, confident motions she'd used for cooking. I hear that they make disinfectants that don't hurt these days.
But Charity used iodine.
Shiro came out of the office and showed me an address written on a piece of paper. "We meet them tonight at eight."
"After sundown," I noted. "I know the place. I'll pick you up here?"
"Yes. I will need a little time to prepare."
"Me too. Around seven." I told them goodbye and headed for the door. Charity didn't answer me but Shiro did. I got into my car. More kids came pelting into the house as I did, two boys and a girl. The smaller of the two boys stopped to peer at my car, but Charity appeared in the door and chivied him inside. She frowned at me until I coaxed the Blue Beetle to life and pulled out.
Driving home left me with too much time to think. This duel with Ortega was something I had no way to prepare for. Ortega was a warlord of the Red Court. He'd probably fought duels before. Which meant that he'd killed people before. Hell, maybe even wizards. I'd squared off against various toughs but that had been free-for-all fighting. I had been able to find ways to cheat, by and large. In a one-on-one duel, I wasn't going to be able to fall back on cleverness, to take advantage of whatever I could find in my environment.
This was going to be a straight fight, and if Ortega was better than me, he'd kill me. Simple as that. The fear was simple, too. Simple and undeniable.
I swallowed, and my knuckles turned white. I tried to relax my fingers but they wouldn't. They were too afraid to let go of the wheel. Stupid fingers.
I got back to my apartment, pried my fingers off the steering wheel, and found my door halfway open. I ducked to one side, in case someone had a gun pointed up the narrow stairway down to my apartment door, and drew out my blasting rod.
"Harry?" called a quiet, female voice from my apartment. "Harry, is that you?"
I lowered the blasting rod. "Murph?"
"Get inside," Murphy said. I looked down the stairway and saw her appear in the doorway, her face pale. "Hurry."
I came down the stairs warily, feeling out my wards as I did. They were intact, and I relaxed a little. I had given Murphy a personalized talisman that would let her through my defenses, and it would only have worked for her.
I slipped into my apartment. Murphy shut the door behind me and locked it. She'd started a fire in the fireplace and had one of my old kerosene lamps lit. I went to the fireplace and warmed up my hands, watching Murphy in silence. She stood with her back and shoulders rigid for a moment, before she came over to stand beside me, facing the fire. Her lips were held into a tense, neutral line. "We should talk."
"People keep saying that to me," I muttered.
"You promised me you'd call me in when you had something."
"Whoa, there, hang on. Who said I had anything?"
"There is a corpse on a pleasure ship in Burnham Harbor and several eyewitnesses who describe a tall, dark-haired man leaving the scene and getting into a multicolored Volkswagen Beetle."
"Wait a second---"
"There's been a murder, Dresden. I don't care how sacred client confidentiality is to you. People are dying."
Frustration made me clench my teeth. "I was going to tell you about it. It's been a really busy day."
"Too busy to talk to the police about a murder you may have witnessed?" Murphy said. "That is considered aiding and abetting a first-degree murder in some places. Like courts of law."
"This again," I muttered. My fingers clenched into fists. "I remember how this one goes. You slug me in the jaw and arrest me."
"I damn well should."
"Hell's bells, Murph!"
"Relax." She sighed. "If that was what I had in mind you'd be in the car already."
My anger evaporated. "Oh." After a moment, I asked, "Then why are you here?"
Murphy scowled. "I'm on vacation."
"You're what?"
Murphy's jaw twitched. Her words sounded a little odd, since she kept her teeth ground together while she talked. "I've been taken off the case. And when I protested I was told that I could either be on vacation or collecting unemployment."
Holy crap. The muckety-mucks at CPD had ordered Murphy off a case? But why?
Murphy answered the question I hadn't asked yet. "Because when Butters looked at the victim from the harbor, he determined that the weapon used to kill her and the one used on that victim you saw last night were the same."
I blinked. "What?"
"Same weapon," Murphy said. "Butters seemed pretty confident about it."
I turned that over in my head a few times, trying to shake out the kinks in the chains of logic. "I need a beer. You?"
"Yeah."
I went over to the pantry and grabbed a couple of brown bottles. I used an old bottle opener to take off the lids and took the drinks back to Murphy. She took her bottle in hand and eyed it suspiciously. "It's warm."
"It's the new recipe. Mac would kill me if he heard I served his brown cold." I took a pull from my bottle. The ale had a rich, full flavor, a little nutty, and it left a pleasant aftertaste lingering in the mouth. Make what jokes you will about trendy microbrews. Mac knew his stuff.
Murphy made a face. "Ugh. Too much taste."
"Wimpy American," I said.
Murphy almost smiled. "Homicide got wind that there was a link between the killing in Italy, the one here by the airport, and the one this morning. So they pulled strings and hogged the whole thing."
"How did they find out?"
"Rudolph," Murphy spat. "There's no way to prove anything but I'll bet you the little weasel heard me on the phone with Butters and ran straight over there to tell them."
"Isn't there anything you can do?"
"Officially, yes. But in real life people are going to start accidentally losing reports and forms and requests if I try to file them. And when I tried to apply some pressure of my own, I got put down hard." She took another angry drink. "I could lose my job."
"That both sucks and blows, Murph."
"Tell me about it." She frowned and looked up at my eyes briefly. "Harry. I want you to back off on this case. For your own sake. That's why I came over here."
I frowned. "Wait a minute. You mean people are threatening you with me? That's a switch."
"Don't joke about it," Murphy said. "Harry, you've got a history with the department, and not everyone thinks well of you."
"You mean Rudolph."
"Not just Rudolph. There are plenty of people who don't want to believe you're for real. Besides that, you were near the scene of and may have witnessed a felony. They could put you away."
Obviously my life was too easy already. I swigged more beer. "Murph, cop, crook, or creature, it doesn't matter. I don't back off because some bully doesn't like what I do."
"I'm not a bully, Harry. I'm your friend."
I winced. "And you're asking me."
She nodded. "Pretty please. With sugar."
"With sugar. Hell, Murph." I took a drink and squinted at her. "How much do you know about what's going on?"
"I had some of the files taken away before I could read them." She glanced up at me. "But I can read between the lines."
"Okay," I said. "This might take a little explaining."
"You aren't backing off, are you?"
"It isn't an option."
"Stop there then," Murphy said. "The less you tell me, the less I can testify to."
Testify? Hell. There should be some kind of rule about being forced to dodge several kinds of legal land mines at the same time. "This isn't a friendly situation," I said. "If straight cops go into it like it's normal business, they're going to get killed. I'd be really worried even if it were SI."
"Okay," Murphy said. She didn't look happy. She drank her beer in a long pull and set the bottle on my mantel.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn't snap it off at the wrist. "Murph. This looks bad already. I have a hunch it could get worse, fast. I have to."
"I know," she said. "I wish I could help."
"Did you get the information on that cell phone?"
"No," she said. But as she said it, she passed me a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it with my fingers and read Murphy's printing: Quebec Nationale, Inc, owner. No phone number. Address a P.O. box. Dead end.
A dummy company, probably, I thought. The Churchmice could have it set up to do a lot of the buying and selling for them. Maybe dead Gaston had been from Quebec instead of France.
"Got it. Thanks, Murph."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Murphy said. She picked up her jacket from where she'd tossed it on my couch and shrugged into it. "There's no APB out for you yet, Harry, but I'd be discreet if I were you."
"Discreet. That's me."
"I'm serious."
"Serious, yep."
"Dammit, Harry." But she smiled when she said it.
"You probably don't want me to call you if I need help."
She nodded. "Hell, no. That would be illegal. Keep your nose clean, walk the straight and narrow."
"Okay."
Murphy paused and asked, "I don't think I've seen you without that coat outside of summer. Where's your duster?"
I grimaced. "Missing in action."
"Oh. You talk to Susan?"
I said, "Yeah."
I felt Murphy's eyes on my face. She got it without being told. "Oh," she said again. "Sorry, Harry."
"Thanks."
"See you." She opened my door, kept her hand near her gun, and then warily padded on out.
I shut my door after her and leaned against it. Murphy was worried. She wouldn't have come to me in person if she weren't. And she'd been extra careful with the legal stuff. Were things that dicey in the CPD?
Murphy was the first head of Special Investigations not to get her rear bounced onto the street after a token week or three of unsolvable cases. Generally speaking, when the administration wanted someone off the force, they'd get promoted to running SI. Or at least working in it. Every cop there had some kind of failing that had landed them what everyone else considered to be a cruddy assignment. It had, by and large, created a strong sense of camaraderie among the SI officers, a bond only made tighter by the way they occasionally faced off with one kind of nightmarish creature or another.
SI cops had taken down several half-assed dark spellslingers, half a dozen vampires, seven or eight ravening trolls, and a demon that had manifested itself out of a mound of compost-heated garbage behind a pawnshop in Chinatown. SI could handle itself pretty well because they played careful, they worked together, and they understood that there were unnatural beings that sometimes had to be dealt with in ways not strictly in accordance with police procedure. Oh, and because they had a hired wizard to advise them about bad guys, of course. I liked to think that I had contributed too.
But I guess every bucket of fruit has something go rotten sooner or later. In SI the stinker was Detective Rudolph. Rudy was young, good-looking, clean-cut, and had slept with the wrong councilman's daughter. He had applied some industrial-strength denial to his experiences with SI despite freak encounters with monsters, magic, and human kindness. He had clung to a steadfast belief that everything was normal, and the realm of the paranormal was all make-believe.
Rudy didn't like me. Rudy didn't like Murphy. If the kid had sabotaged Murphy's investigation in order to curry favor with the folks in Homicide, maybe he was angling to get out of SI.
And maybe he'd lose a bunch of teeth the next time he walked through a quiet parking garage. I doubted Murphy would take that kind of backstabbing with good grace. I spent a moment indulging myself in a pleasant fantasy in which Murphy pounded Rudy's head against the door of her office at SI's home building until the cheap wood had a Rudolph-shaped dent in it. I enjoyed the thought way too much.
I gathered up a few things from around my apartment, including the antivenom potions Bob had helped me with. I checked on Bob while I was in the lab, and got a sleepy and incoherent response that I understood to mean that he needed more rest. I let him, went back upstairs, and called my answering service.
I had a message from Susan, a phone number. I called it, and a second later she answered. "Harry?"
"You've become clairvoyant. If you can do a foreign accent you could get a hot line."
"Like, sure, as if," Susan drawled ditzily.
"California isn't foreign," I said.
"You'd be surprised. How did things go?"
"Okay, I guess," I said. "I got a second."
"Michael?" she asked.
"Shiro."
"Who?"
"He's like Michael but shorter and older."
"Oh, uh. Good. I did the legwork."
I thought of some work I'd seen Susan's legs do before. But I only said, "And?"
"And the downtown Marriott is hosting an art gala this very night, including a gallery sale and a fund-raiser auction for charity."
I whistled. "Wow. So lots of art and money moving around, changing hands, being shipped hither and yon."
"Hither maybe, but I don't think UPS does yon," Susan said. "Seems like a good place to sell a hot article or three. And it's all sponsored by the Chicago Historical and Art Society."
"Who?"
"A very small and very elite club for the upper crust. Gentleman Johnny Marcone is chairman of its board of directors."
"Sounds like smuggling country all right," I said. "How do I get in?"
"You put up a five-thousand-dollar-per-plate donation to charity."
"Five thousand," I said. "I don't think I've ever had that much all in one place at one time."
"Then you might try option two."
"Which is?"
Susan's voice took on a note of satisfaction. "You go with a reporter from the Midwest Arcane on her last assignment for her editor. I talked to Trish and got two tickets that had originally been given to a reporter on the Tribune."
"I'm impressed," I said.
"It gets better. I got us formal wear. The gala begins at nine."
"Us? Uh, Susan. I don't want to sound like an ass, but do you remember the last time you wanted to come on an investigation with me?"
"This time I'm the one with the tickets," she said. "Are you coming with me or not?"
I thought about it for a minute but didn't see any way around it. There wasn't time for a long argument, either. "I'm in. I have to meet the Reds at McAnnally's at eight."
"Meet you there with your tux. Eight-thirty?"
"Yeah. Thank you."
"Sure," she said quietly. "Glad I could help."
Silence stretched long enough to become painful for both of us. I finally broke it at the same time as Susan. "Well, I'd better---"
"Well, I'd better let you go," Susan said. "I have to hurry to get all of this done."
"All right," I said. "Be careful."
"Stones and glass houses, Harry. See you this evening."
We hung up, and I made sure I was ready to go.
Then I went to pick up my second, and work out the terms to a duel I was increasingly certain I had little chance of surviving.
I put on an old fleece-lined denim jacket and went by my office. The night security guy gave me a little trouble, but I eventually browbeat him into opening the safe in the office to retrieve my envelope from Father Vincent. I opened it and found a plastic case the size of a playing card, like the kind coin collectors use to frame paper money. In the exact center of the case was a single, dirty white thread about two inches long. The sample from the Shroud.
It wasn't much to work with. I could use the thread to create a channel to the rest of the Shroud, but nothing was certain. The thread had presumably been absent from the rest of the Shroud for going on thirty years. Not only that, but it had presumably been handled by various scientists or clergy, and it was possible that they had left enough of a psychic residue on the thread to cloud a seeking spell.
On top of all that, the thread was tiny. I would have to be extremely careful if I used a spell to go hunting the Shroud, or the forces in it would overload the thread in the same way that enough electrical current will overload the filament in a lightbulb. I'm not so great with delicate spell work. I've got plenty of power, but fine control of it could be a problem. By necessity, I would have to use a very gentle spell, and that would put severe limits on the range of it.
The spell would be a metal detector, rather than a radar dish, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. I hit the door.
Rather than inflicting another Charity encounter upon myself, I pulled the Beetle up to the curb in front of Michael's house and honked the horn. A moment later, Shiro appeared. The little old man had shaved the white down from his head, and where he didn't have liver spots, the skin shone. He wore some kind of loose-fitting black pants that looked a lot like the ones I'd seen Murphy wear at one of her aikido tournaments. He also wore a black shirt and a white gi jacket with a scarlet cross on either side of his chest. A belt of red silk held the jacket closed, and he wore his sword through it, still in its wooden cane-sheath. He opened the door, slipped into the Beetle, and held his sword across his lap.
I got going, and neither of us said anything for a while. My knuckles were getting white again, so I started talking. "So you've done one of these duels before?"
"Hai," he said, nodding. "Many times."
"Why?"
Shiro shrugged. "Many reasons. Protect someone. Force something to leave an area in peace. Fight without involving others."
"To the death?"
Shiro nodded. "Many times."
"Guess you're pretty good at it then," I said.
Shiro smiled a little, eyes wrinkling even more. "Always someone better."
"You ever dueled a vampire?"
"Hai. Jade Court. Black Court."
"Jade Court?" I said. "I've never heard that there was such a thing."
"Southeast Asia, China, Japan. Very secretive. But they respect the Accords."
"Have you dueled any of the Denarians?"
He frowned out the window. "Twice. But they do not honor agreements. Treachery both times."
I thought that over for a while before I said, "I'm going for energy. If he won't take it, we'll do will."
Shiro glanced aside at me and nodded. "But there is a better choice."
"What?"
"Don't fight. Can't lose a fight you don't have."
I felt a snort coming on but I held it back. "I'm sort of locked into it now."
"Both parties want to quit, duel over," Shiro said. "I will be talking to Ortega's second. Ortega will be there. Smart for you try to talk him out of it."
"I don't think he'll do it."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Not fighting always smarter."
"Says the militant Knight of the Cross and his holy blade?"
"I hate fighting."
I glanced at him for a second, then said, "You don't usually hear that from someone good at it."
Shiro smiled. "Fighting is never good. But sometimes necessary."
I blew out a deep breath. "Yeah. I guess I know what you mean."
The rest of the ride to McAnnally's was quiet. In the streetlights, my knuckles looked the same color as the rest of my hands.
McAnnally's is a tavern. Not a bar, not a pub, but an actual, Old World--style tavern. When I went in, I stepped down three steps to the hardwood floor and looked around the place. The bar has thirteen stools at it. There were thirteen columns of dark wood, each one hand-carved with swirling leaves and images of beings of tale and fantasy. Thirteen tables had been spaced out around the room in an irregular pattern, and like the columns and bar stools, they had been intentionally placed that way in order to deflect and scatter random magical energies. It cut down on the accidents from grumpy wizards and clueless kids just discovering their power. Several ceiling fans whirled lazily, and were low enough that I always felt a bit nervous about one of them whirling into my eyebrows. The place smells of wood smoke, old whiskey barrels, fresh bread, and roasting meat. I like it.
Mac stood behind the bar. I didn't know much about Mac. He was tall, medium build, bald, and somewhere between thirty and sixty. He had large and facile hands and thick wrists. All I've ever seen him wear is dark pants with a loose white shirt and an apron that somehow remained free of splatters of grease, spilled drinks, and the various other things he prepared for customers.
Mac caught my eye when I came in and nodded to my left. I looked. A sign on the wall said, ACCORDED NEUTRAL GROUND. I looked back at Mac. He drew a shotgun out from behind the bar so that I could see it and said, "Got it?"
"No problem," I answered.
"Good."
The room was otherwise empty, though normally there would be a couple of dozen members of the local magical scene. Not full-fledged wizards or anything, but there were plenty of people with a dab of magical talent. Then there were a couple of different Wiccan groups, the occasional changeling, scholars of the arcane, a gang of do-gooder werewolves, members of secret societies, and who knew what else. Mac must have put out the word that a meeting was happening here. No one sane wants to be anywhere close to what could be a fight between a White Council member and a Red Court warlord. I knew I was sane because I didn't want to be there, either.
I walked over to the bar and said, "Beer." Mac grunted and plopped down a bottle of brown. I pushed some bills at him but he shook his head.
Shiro stood at the bar next to me, facing the opposite way. Mac put a bottle down beside him. Shiro twisted off the cap with one hand, took a modest sip, and set the bottle back down. Then he glanced at it thoughtfully, picked it up, and took a slower sip. "Yosh."
Mac grunted, "Thanks."
Shiro said something in what I guessed was Japanese. Mac answered monosyllabically. A man of many talents and few syllables is Mac.
I killed time with a couple more sips and the door opened.
Kincaid walked in, in the same outfit I'd seen that morning, but without the baseball cap. His dark blond hair was instead pulled back into an unruly tail. He nodded at Mac and asked, "All set?"
"Ungh," said Mac.
Kincaid prowled the room, looking under tables and behind columns, and checked the rest rooms and behind the counter as well. Mac said nothing, but I had the impression that he felt the precaution to be useless. Kincaid went to a corner table, nudging other tables back from it a bit, and put three chairs around it. He drew a gun out of a shoulder rig and set it on the table, then took a seat.
"Hi," I said toward him. "Nice to see you, too. Where's Ivy?"
"Past her bedtime," Kincaid said without smiling. "I'm her proxy."
"Oh," I said. "She has a bedtime?"
Kincaid checked his watch. "She believes very strongly in an early bedtime for children."
"Heh, heh, eh-heh." I don't fake amused chuckles well. "So where's Ortega?"
"Saw him parking outside," Kincaid said.
The door opened and Ortega entered. He wore a casual black blazer with matching slacks and a shirt of scarlet silk. He hadn't worn a coat despite the cold. His skin was darker than I remembered it. Maybe he'd fed recently. He carried himself with a relaxed, patient quality as he entered and surveyed the room.
He bowed slightly at the waist toward Mac, who nodded back. The vampire's eyes landed on Shiro and narrowed. Shiro said nothing and did not move. Ortega then regarded me with an unreadable expression and gave me a very slight nod. It seemed polite to nod back to him, so I did. Ortega did the same to Kincaid, who returned it with a lazy wave of one hand.
"Where is your second?" Kincaid asked.
Ortega grimaced. "Primping."
He hadn't finished the word before a young man slapped the door open and stepped jauntily into the tavern. He was wearing tight, white leather pants, a black fishnet shirt, and a white leather jacket. His hair was dark and hung to his shoulders in an unruly mane. He had a male model's face, smoky grey eyes, and thick, dark eyelashes. I knew him. Thomas Raith, a White Court vampire.
"Thomas," I said by way of greeting.
"Evening, Harry," he answered. "What happened to your duster?"
"There was a woman."
"I see," Thomas said. "Pity. It was the only thing you owned that gave me hope that there might be a feeble flicker of style in you."
"You should talk. That outfit you're wearing is treading dangerously close to the Elvis zone."
"Young, sleek Elvis ain't bad," Thomas said.
"I meant old, fat Elvis. Possibly Michael Jackson."
The pale man put a hand to his heart. "That hurts, Harry."
"Yeah, I've had a rough day too."
"Gentlemen," Kincaid said, a note of impatience in his voice. "Shall we begin?"
I nodded. So did Ortega. Kincaid introduced everyone and produced a document that stated he was working for the Archive. It was written in crayon. I drank some more beer. After that, Kincaid invited Shiro and Thomas to join him at the corner table. I went back to the bar, and a moment later, Ortega followed me. He sat down with a couple of empty stools between us, while Kincaid, Thomas, and Shiro spoke quietly in the background.
I finished my bottle and set it down with a thump. Mac turned around to get me another. I shook my head. "Don't bother. I've got enough on my tab already."
Ortega put a twenty down on the bar and said, "I'll cover it. Another for me as well."
I started to make a wiseass remark about how buying me a beer would surely make up for threatening my life and the lives of those I cared about, but I bit it back. Shiro had been right about fighting. You can't lose a fight you don't show up to. So I took the beer Mac brought me and said, "Thanks, Ortega."
He nodded, and took a sip. His eyes lit up a bit, and he took a second, slower one. "It's good."
Mac grunted.
"I thought you guys drank blood," I said.
"It's all we really need," Ortega said.
"Then why do you have anything else?"
Ortega held up the bottle. "Life is more than mere survival. All you need is the water, after all. Why drink beer?"
"You ever tasted the water in this town?"
He almost smiled. "Touché."
I turned the plain brown bottle around in my fingers. "I don't want this," I said.
"The duel?"
I nodded.
Ortega leaned an elbow on the bar and considered me. "Neither do I. This isn't personal. It isn't something I want."
"So don't do it," I said. "We could both walk."
"And the war would go on."
"It's been going on for nearly two years," I said. "It's mostly been cat and mouse, a couple of raids, fights in back alleys. It's like the Cold War, only with fewer Republicans."
Ortega frowned, and watched Mac cleaning the grill behind the bar. "It can get worse, Mister Dresden. It can get a great deal worse. And if the conflict escalates, it will threaten the balance of power throughout the worlds of flesh and spirit alike. Imagine the destruction, the loss of life that could ensue."
"So why not contribute to the peace effort? Starting with this duel. Maybe we could get some beads and some fringe and make signs that say 'Make blood not war' or something."
This time, Ortega did smile. It was a weary expression on him. "It's too late for that," he said. "Your blood is all that will satisfy many of my peers."
"I can donate," I said. "Let's say once every two months. You provide cookies and orange juice."
Ortega leaned toward me, the smile fading. "Wizard. You murdered a noble of our Court."
I got angry. My voice gained heat. "The only reason---"
Ortega cut me off, lifting his hand. "I do not say that your reasons were not valid. But the fact of the matter is that you appeared in her home as a guest and representative of the Council. And you attacked and eventually killed both Bianca and those under her protection."
"Killing me won't bring her back," I said.
"But it will slake the thirst for vengeance that plagues many of my kinsmen. When you are no more, they will be willing to at least attempt a peaceful resolution."
"Dammit," I muttered, and fiddled with the bottle.
"Though..." Ortega murmured. His eyes became distant for a moment. "There might be another way."
"What other way?"
"Yield," Ortega said. "Yield to the duel and let me take you into custody. If you are willing to work with me, I could place you under my protection."
"Work with you," I said. My stomach flip-flopped. "You mean become like you."
"It is an alternative to death," Ortega said, his expression earnest. "My kinsmen may not like it, but they could not argue against it. For taking Bianca's life, you could replace it with your own."
"As one of you."
Ortega nodded. "As one of us." He was quiet for a moment, then said, "You could bring Miss Rodriguez with you. Be together. She would not be a threat to you, were you both my vassals." He put his beer down. "I think you will find that we are much alike, Dresden. We're just playing for different teams."
I rubbed at my mouth. My instinctive reaction to Ortega's offer was one of revulsion. The Red Court vampires don't look like most would think. They looked like giant, hairless bats with slick, rubbery skin. They could cover themselves with a flesh mask in order to look human, but I'd seen what was underneath the mask.
I'd been exposed to it. Thoroughly. I still had nightmares.
I opened my eyes. "Let me ask you a question."
"Very well."
"Do you live in a manor?"
"Casaverde," Ortega responded. "It's in Honduras. There is a village nearby."
"Uh-huh," I said. "So you feed on the villagers."
"Carefully. I provide them with supplies, medical attention, other necessities."
"Sounds reasonable," I said.
"It's beneficial to both of us. The villagers know that."
"Yeah, they probably do." I finished off the bottle. "Do you feed on children?"
Ortega frowned at me. "What do you mean?"
I didn't bother to hide the anger in my voice. "Do. You. Feed. On. Children."
"It's the safest way. The more the feeding is spread among many, the less dangerous it is for all of them."
"You're wrong. We're different." I stood up. "You hurt kids. We're done."
Ortega's voice sharpened. "Dresden. Do not lightly discard my offer."
"The offer to make me into a blood-drinking monster in eternal slavery to you? Why would I want to do that?"
"It is the only way to keep your life," Ortega said.
I felt the anger coalescing into rage. My upper lip curled away from my teeth, baring them in a snarl. "I thought life is more than mere survival."
Ortega's expression changed. It was only for a second, but in that moment I saw furious rage, arrogant pride, and violent bloodlust on his face. He regained his calm quickly, but traces of the hidden emotions thickened his accent.
"So be it. I will kill you, wizard."
He sounded convincing. It scared me. I turned and walked to the door. "I'll be outside," I said to no one in particular, and stepped out into the late-February cold.
That way, I'd have an excuse to be trembling.
I didn't have long to wait. The door opened behind me, and Kincaid emerged. He didn't say a word to me, just got into a rented sedan and left. Ortega came next. A car swung in off the street, and he opened the passenger door. He paused and looked back at me.
"I have a measure of respect for your principles and skills, Dresden. But this situation is of your own making, and I cannot allow it to continue. I'm sorry."
I watched him get in the car, and I didn't offer him any reply. Hell, he hadn't said a word that was untrue. Ortega had a genuine ax to grind and people---well, fellow monsters---to protect. And thus far, the Dresden-versus-vampires scoreboard read a whole bunch to zero.
If a vampire had done that to the White Council, I wonder if we would have reacted with as much reason and calm.
The taillights of Ortega's car hadn't yet gotten out of sight when Thomas emerged from the tavern and swaggered casually over to me. Thomas was a shade under six feet tall, which put him at half a head shorter than me. He was better-looking though, and despite my earlier comments about his outfit, he was one of those men who made anything look good. The fishnet shirt he wore cast patterns of shadow over the pale skin beneath it, adding to the lines of muscle on his stomach.
My stomach had muscles, but not so many that you could see them rippling. I'd have looked pathetic in a shirt like that.
"That was simple enough," Thomas said. He drew a pair of black leather driving gloves from his jacket pocket and started tugging them on. "Though I take it this duel isn't the only game in town at the moment."
"Why would you say that?" I asked.
"I've had a pro hitter following me ever since I landed yesterday. The itch between my shoulder blades got annoying."
I glanced around. "Is he here now?"
Thomas's eyes glittered. "No. I introduced him to my sisters."
The White Court were the most human of the vampires and in some ways the weakest. They fed on psychic energies, on pure life force rather than on blood. Most often, they would seduce those they fed upon, drawing life from them through physical contact during the act. If a couple of Thomas's sisters had met the hired gun tailing Thomas, the assassin probably wasn't going to be a problem to anyone. Ever. My eye twitched.
"The gunman was probably Ortega's," I said. "He hired some goons to take out people I knew if I didn't agree to this duel."
"That explains it, then," Thomas said. "Ortega really doesn't like me much. Must be the unsavory company I've kept in the past."
"Gee, thanks. How the hell did you end up his second?"
"It's my father's idea of a joke," Thomas said. "Ortega asked him to be his second. Show of solidarity between the Red and White Courts. Instead, Daddy dearest found the most annoying and insulting member of the family he possibly could to stand in."
"You," I said.
"C'est moi," Thomas confirmed with a little bow. "One would almost think Father was trying to get me killed."
I felt one side of my mouth tug up into a smile. "Nice father figure. Him and Bill Cosby. How's Justine?"
Thomas grimaced. "She's in Aruba is how she is. Which is where I was until one of pappa Raith's goons dragged me back up here."
"What did you two decide on for the duel?"
Thomas shook his head. "Can't tell you. Shiro is supposed to do that. I mean, technically I'm at war with you."
I grimaced and stared after Ortega's vanished car. "Yeah."
Thomas was quiet for a second, then said, "He means to kill you."
"I know."
"He's dangerous, Harry. Smart. My father is afraid of him."
"I could like him," I said. "It's sort of refreshing to have someone trying to kill me right to my face, instead of throwing me a bunch of curveballs and shooting me in the back. It's almost nice to have a fair fight."
"Sure. Theoretically."
"Theoretically?"
Thomas shrugged. "Ortega's been alive for about six hundred years. It isn't something you do by playing nice."
"From what I've heard, the Archive will object to any monkey business."
"It's only cheating if he gets caught."
I frowned at him and said, "Are you saying someone is planning to avoid getting caught?"
Thomas put his hands in his jacket pockets. "I'm not saying anything. I wouldn't mind seeing you kick his ass, but I'm sure as hell not going to do something that would attract attention to me."
"You intend to participate without being involved. That's clever."
Thomas rolled his eyes. "I won't throw a banana peel under you. But don't expect any help from me, either. I'm just making sure it's a fair fight and then I'm back at my beach house." He drew car keys from his pocket and headed for the parking lot. "Good luck."
"Thomas," I said to his back. "Thanks for the heads-up."
He paused.
I asked, "Why do it?"
The vampire glanced over his shoulder at me and smiled. "Life would be unbearably dull if we had answers to all our questions." He walked out to a white sports car and slipped into it. A second later, loud, screaming metal music started from the car's stereo, the engine roared, and Thomas drove off.
I checked my watch. Ten more minutes until Susan arrived. Shiro emerged from McAnnally's and put on his glasses. Once he spotted me, he walked over and took the glasses off again. "Ortega refused to cancel the duel?"
"He made me an offer I couldn't excuse," I said.
Shiro grunted. "Duel is wills. Tomorrow, just after sundown. Wrigley Field."
"A stadium? Why don't we put it on pay-per-view while we're at it." I glowered at the street and checked my watch again. "I'm meeting someone in a minute. I'll give you the keys to my car. I can pick it up from Michael's tomorrow."
"No need," Shiro said. "Mac called me a cab."
"Okay." I pocketed my keys.
Shiro stood quietly for a moment, lips pursed thoughtfully, before he said, "Ortega means to kill you."
"Yes. Yes, he does," I said. I managed not to grind my teeth as I said it. "Everyone is saying that like I didn't know it already."
"But you do not know how." I frowned and looked down at Shiro. His shaved head gleamed under a nearby streetlight. "The war is not your fault."
"I know that," I said, but my voice lacked conviction.
"No," Shiro said. "It truly is not your fault."
"What do you mean?"
"The Red Court has been quietly building its resources for years," he said. "How else were they ready to start their attacks in Europe only days after you defeated Bianca?"
I frowned at him.
Shiro drew a cigar from inside his jacket and bit off the end. He spat it to one side. "You were not the cause of the war. You were merely the excuse. The Reds would have attacked when they were ready."
"No," I said. "That's not how it is. I mean, damn near everyone I've spoken to on the Council---"
Shiro snorted. He struck a match and puffed on the cigar a few times while he lit it. "The Council. Arrogant. As if nothing significant could happen unless a wizard did it."
For someone who wasn't on the White Council, Shiro seemed to have its general attitude pretty well surrounded. "If the Red Court wanted a war, why is Ortega trying to stop it?"
"Premature," Shiro said. "Needed more time to be completely prepared. The advantage of surprise is gone. He wishes to strike once and be certain it is a lethal stroke."
I watched the little old man for a minute. "Everyone's got advice tonight. Why are you giving it?"
"Because in some ways you are every bit as arrogant as the Council, though you do not realize it. You blame yourself for what happened to Susan. You want to blame yourself for more."
"So what if I do?"
Shiro turned me and faced me squarely. I avoided meeting his eyes. "Duels are a test of fire. They are fought in the will. The heart. If you do not find your balance, Ortega will not need to kill you. You will do so for him."
"I guess you were a psychoanalyst before you were a sword-swinging vigilante against evil."
Shiro puffed on the cheroot. "Either way, been alive longer than you. See more than you."
"Like what?"
"Like this vampire warlord. How he manipulates you. He is not what he seems to be."
"Really? I've never seen that one before," I said. "Someone not what they appear to be. How ever will I adjust."
Shiro shrugged. "He is centuries old. He is not from the same world. The world Ortega lived in was savage. Brutal. Men like him destroyed entire civilizations for gold and glory. And for hundreds of years since then, he has fought rival vampires, demons, and enemies of his kind. If he approaches you through formal, civilized channels, it is because he thinks it is the best way to kill you. Regardless of what happens in the duel, he intends to see you dead by any means necessary. Maybe before. Maybe after. But dead."
Shiro didn't put any particular emphasis on the words. He didn't need to. They were enough to scare me without any added dramatics. 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. Do you know the story of the blind men and the elephant?"
"Have you heard the one about the bear that walks into a bar?" I responded.
"I think that is a no," Shiro said. "Three blind men were shown an elephant. They touched it with their hands to determine what the creature was. The first man felt the trunk, and claimed that an elephant was like a snake. The second man touched its leg and claimed that an elephant was like a tree. The third man touched its tail, and claimed that the elephant was like a slender rope."
I nodded. "Oh. I get it. All of them were right. All of them were wrong. They couldn't get the whole picture."
Shiro nodded. "Precisely. I am just another blind man. I do not get the whole picture of what transpires in all places. I am blind and limited. I would be a fool to think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart."
"Sometimes that isn't good enough," I said.
He tilted his head and looked up at me. "How do you know?"
A cab swerved in from the street and rattled to a stop. Shiro stepped over to it and nodded to me. "Will be at Michael's if you need me. Be watchful."
I nodded at him. "Thank you."
Shiro said, "Thank me after." Then he got into the cab and left.
Mac closed up shop a minute later, and put on a dark fedora on his way out. He nodded at me on the way to his Trans Am, and said nothing. I found a shadowy spot to linger in as Mac left, and kept an eye on the street. I'd hate for someone to drive by and shoot me with a plain old gun. Embarrassing.
A long, dark limo pulled into the parking lot. A uniformed driver got out and opened the door nearest to me. A pair of long, honey-brown legs slid out of the limo on top of black stiletto heels. Susan glided out of the car, managing grace despite the shoes, which probably qualified her for superhuman status all by itself. A sleeveless sheath of shimmering black cloth clung to her, an evening gown slit high on one side. Dark gloves covered her arms to the elbow, and her hair had been done up in a pile on top of her head, held in place with a couple of gleaming black chopsticks.
My tongue dropped out of my mouth and flopped onto my shoes. Well, not literally, but if I'd been a cartoon my eyeballs would have been about six feet long.
Susan had read my face and apparently enjoyed my reaction. "How much, good-looking?"
I looked down at my rumpled clothing. "I think I'm a tad underdressed."
"One tuxedo, coming up," Susan said.
The driver opened the trunk and drew out a hanger covered with a dry-cleaning bag. When he turned around with it, I realized that the driver was Martin. All he'd done to disguise himself was don an archetypical uniform and I hadn't even recognized him until second glance. I guess sometimes it's handy to be bland.
"Is it my size?" I asked, taking the tux when Martin passed it to me.
"I had to guess," Susan said, lowering her eyelids in a sultry expression. "But it wasn't like I didn't know my way around."
Martin's face might have flickered with disapproval. My heart sped up a bit. "All right then," I said. "Let's get moving. I'll dress on the way."
"Do I get to look?" Susan asked.
"It'll cost you extra," I said. Martin opened the door for Susan and I slid in after her. I filled her in on what I'd found out about the Shroud and those after it. "I should be able to find the thing if we get close."
"You think there will be any more of these Denarians there?"
"Probably," I said. "If anything gets ugly, we'll take the best part of valor, pronto. These guys play hardball."
Susan nodded agreement. "Sounds like the thieves aren't exactly shy about waving guns, either."
"And we'll have Marcone around too. Whither he goeth, there too goeth armed thugs and homicide investigations."
Susan smiled. It was a new expression to me---a small, quiet, fierce little smile that showed her teeth. It looked natural on her. "You're all about fun, aren't you, Harry?"
"I am the Bruce Lee of fun," I concurred. "Give me some space here."
Susan slid over as far as she could to give me room to climb into the tux. I tried not to mar it too badly in the limited space. Susan glanced at me with a faint frown.
"What?" I asked her.
"You're wrinkling it."
"This isn't as easy as I'm making it look," I responded.
"If you weren't staring at my legs, maybe it wouldn't be such a challenge."
"I wasn't staring," I lied.
Susan smiled at me as the car cruised through downtown and I did my best to dress like Roger Moore. Her expression became thoughtful after a moment, and she said, "Hey."
"What?"
"What happened to your leather coat?"
The downtown Marriott was huge, brilliantly lit, and busy as an anthill. Several blue-and-whites were parked nearby, and a couple of officers were helping to direct traffic in front of the hotel. I could see maybe twenty limos on the street and pulling through the archway in front of the hotel doors, and every one of them looked bigger and nicer than ours. Valets rushed around to park the cars of guests who had driven themselves. There were a dozen men in red jackets standing around with bored expressions that some might mistake for inattention. Hotel security.
Martin pulled up to the entryway and said, "I'll wait for you out here." He passed a palm-sized cell phone to Susan. She slipped it into a black clutch. "If you get into trouble, speed-dial one."
At that point, a valet opened the door on my side, and I slipped out of the car. My rental tux felt a little awkward. The shoes were long enough for me but they were an inch and a half too wide. I shrugged my jacket into place, straightened the cummerbund, and offered a hand to Susan. She slid out of the car with a brilliant smile, and straightened my tie.
"Smile," she said quietly. "Everyone here is worried about image. If you walk in scowling like that we won't blend in."
I smiled in what I thought was a camouflaging manner. Susan regarded the expression critically, nodded, and slipped her arm through mine. We walked in under the cover our smiles provided. One of the security guards stopped us inside the door, and Susan presented the tickets to him. He waved us through.
"First thing to do is find some stairs," I said from behind my smile. "The loading docks will be near the kitchens, and they're below us. That's where they'll be bringing in the art stuff."
Susan held her course toward the stairs. "Not yet," she said. "If we snoop around the second we get in the door someone is likely to notice. We should mingle until the auction is running. People will be distracted then."
"If we wait, the whole thing could go down while we hobnob."
"Maybe," Susan said. "But odds are that Anna Valmont and the buyer are both thinking the same thing."
"When does the auction start?"
"Eleven."
"Assuming the note means that the sale is at eleven forty-five, that doesn't give us much time to look around. This place is huge."
We got onto an escalator and Susan arched an eyebrow at me. "Do you have any better ideas?"
"Not yet," I said. I caught a glimpse of myself in a polished brass column. I didn't look half-bad. There's a reason the tux has weathered a century virtually unchanged. You don't fix what isn't broken. Tuxedos make anyone look good, and I was a living testament to it. "Think they will have anything to eat? I'm starving."
"Just keep the shirt clean," Susan muttered.
"No problem. I can wipe my fingers on the cummerbund."
"I can't take you anywhere," Susan said. She leaned a little against me, and it felt nice. I felt nice, generally speaking. I cleaned up pretty well, it would seem, and I had a lovely woman---no, I had Susan on my arm, looking lovely. It was a small silver lining compared to the troubled clouds I'd been floundering through, but it was something, and it lasted all the way up the escalator. I take the good moments wherever I can get them.
We followed the flow of formally dressed men and women up another escalator or three to a cavernous ballroom. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling and tables laden with expensive-looking snacks and ice sculptures all but overflowed onto the floor. A group of musicians played on the far side of the ballroom. They didn't seem to be stretching themselves with some relaxed and classy jazz. Couples who also weren't stretching themselves danced together on a floor the size of a basketball court.
The room wasn't crammed with people, but there were a couple of hundred there already, and more coming in behind us. Polite but insincere chatter filled the space, accompanied by equally insincere smiles and laughter. There were a number of city officials whom I recognized in the immediate area, plus a couple of professional musicians and at least one motion-picture actor.
A waiter in a white jacket offered us a tray of champagne glasses, and I promptly appropriated a pair of them, passing the first to Susan. She lifted the glass to her mouth but didn't drink. The champagne smelled good. I took a sip, and it tasted good. I'm not a terribly impressive drinker, so I stopped after the first sip. Chugging down champagne on an empty stomach would probably prove inconvenient if it turned out I needed to do any quick thinking. Or quick leaving. Or quick anything.
Susan said hello to an older couple, and stopped for introductions. I kept my duck blind of a smile in place, and mouthed appropriately polite phrases in the right spots. My cheeks had already started hurting. We repeated that for half an hour or so, while the band played a bunch of low-key dance music. Susan knew a lot of people. She'd been a reporter in Chicago for five or six years before she'd had to leave town, but she had evidently managed to ingratiate herself to more people than I would have guessed. You go, Susan.
"Food," I said, after a stooped older man kissed Susan's cheek and walked away. "Feed me, Seymour."
"It's always the brain stem with you," she murmured. But she guided us over to the refreshment tables so that I could pick up a tiny sandwich. I didn't wolf the thing down in one bite, which was just as well, since it had a toothpick through it to hold it together. But the sandwich didn't last long.
"At least chew with your mouth closed," Susan said.
I took a second sandwich. "Can't help it. I got all kinds of joie de vivre, baby."
"And smile."
"Chew and smile? At the same time? Do I look like Jackie Chan?"
She had a retort but it died after a syllable. I felt her hand tighten on my arm. I briefly debated wolfing the second sandwich, just to get it out of the way, but I took the more sophisticated option instead. I put it in my jacket pocket for later, and turned to follow Susan's gaze.
I looked just in time to meet the gaze of Gentleman Johnny Marcone. He was a man of slightly above average height and unassuming build. He had handsome but unremarkable features. Central casting would have placed him as the genial next-door neighbor. He didn't have the usual boater's tan, it being February and all, but the crow's-feet at the corners of his pale green eyes remained. He looked a lot like the fictional public image he projected---that of a normal, respectable businessman, an American tale of middle class made good.
That said, Marcone scared me more than any single human being I'd ever met. I'd seen him produce a knife from his sleeve faster than a hyperstrong psychotic could swing a tire iron at him. He'd thrown another knife through a rope while spinning in circles as he hung upside down in the dark, later the same night. Marcone may have been human, but he wasn't normal. He'd taken control of Chicago's organized crime during a free-for-all gang war, and he'd run it ever since despite the efforts of both everyday and supernatural threats. He'd done it by being deadlier than anything that came after him. Of all the people in the room, Marcone was the only one I could see who wasn't wearing a fake smile. It didn't look like he was particularly troubled by the fact, either.
"Mister Dresden," he said. "And Miss Rodriguez, I believe. I didn't realize you were an art collector."
"I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once.
"Elvii?" Marcone inquired.
"The plural could be Elvises, I guess," I said. "But if I say that too often, I start muttering to myself and calling things 'my precious,' so I usually go with the Latin plural."
Marcone did smile that time. It was a cool expression. Tigers with full stomachs wear smiles like Marcone's when they're watching baby deer play. "Ah. I hope you can find something to suit your tastes tonight."
"I'm easy," I said. "Any old rag will do."
Marcone narrowed his eyes. There was a short, pointed silence while he met my gaze. He could do that. I'd gotten into a soulgaze with him in the past. It was one of the reasons he scared me. "In that case, I would advise you to exercise caution in your acquisitions."
"Cautious, that's me," I said. "You sure you wouldn't rather make this simple?"
"In deference to your limitations, I almost would," Marcone said. "But I'm afraid I'm not quite sure what you're talking about."
I felt my eyes narrow and I took a step forward. Susan's hand pressed against my arm, silently urging restraint. I lowered my voice to something between Marcone and myself. "Tell you what. Let's start with one of your monkeys trying to punch my ticket in a parking garage. From there, we can move along to the part where I come up with a suitable reply."
I didn't expect what happened next.
Marcone blinked.
It wasn't a huge giveaway. At a card table, only a couple of the players would have seen it. But I was right in his face, and I knew him and I saw it. My words startled Marcone, and for half a second it showed. He covered it, bringing out a businessman's smile that was a lot better than my fake smile, and clapped a hand gently to my arm. "Don't try me in public, Dresden. You can't afford to do it. I can't afford to let you."
A shadow fell over Marcone, and I looked up to see Hendricks hulk into view behind him. Hendricks was still huge, still redheaded, still looked vaguely like a defensive lineman a little too awkward to make it from college to pro ball. His tux was nicer than mine. I wondered if he was wearing body armor under it again.
Cujo Hendricks had a date. He had a blond date. He had a gorgeous, leggy, blue-eyed, elegant, tall, Nordic angel of a date. She was wearing a white gown, and silver flashed at her throat, on each wrist, and on one ankle. I'd seen bikinis in issues of Sports Illustrated that might have felt too plain to be worn by Hendricks's date.
She spoke, and her voice was a throaty purr. "Mister Marcone. Is there a problem?"
Marcone arched an eyebrow. "Is there, Mister Dresden?"
I probably would have said something stupid, but Susan's nails dug into my forearm through my jacket. "No trouble," Susan said. "I don't believe we've met."
"No," said the blonde, with a faint roll of her eyes. "We haven't."
"Mister Dresden, Miss Rodriguez, I believe you both know Mister Hendricks. And this is Miss Gard."
"Ah," I said. "She's an employee, I take it?"
Miss Gard smiled. Professional smiles all around tonight, it would seem. "I'm from the Monoc Foundation," she said. "I'm a consultant."
"Regarding what, one wonders," said Susan. She definitely had the sharpest smile of those present.
"Security," Gard said, unruffled. She focused on me. "I help make sure that thieves, spies, and poor wandering spirits don't wind up all over the lawn."
And I got it. Whoever Miss Gard was, it seemed fairly likely that she was responsible for the wards that had torn Bob up so badly. My head of righteous fury died out, replaced by caution. Marcone had been concerned about my talents. He'd started taking steps to balance things, and Marcone wasn't one to show his hand early, which meant that he was already prepared for trouble of one kind or another with me. He was ready to fight me.
Marcone read my features and said, "Neither one of us wants any unpleasantness, Dresden." His eyes became flat and hard. "If you want to talk, call my office tomorrow. In the meantime, I suggest you search for your classic renditions of Elvis elsewhere."
"I'll take it under advisement," I answered. Marcone shook his head and walked away to do his own mingling, which seemed to consist mainly of shaking hands, and nodding in the appropriate spots. Hendricks and the Amazonian Gard shadowed Marcone, never far away.
"What a charmer you are," Susan murmured.
I grunted.
"Such diplomacy."
"Me and Kissinger." I scowled after Marcone and said, "I don't like this."
"Why not?"
"Because he's up to something. He set up magical defenses around his house."
"Like he was expecting trouble," Susan said.
"Yeah."
"You think he's the buyer for the Shroud?"
"Would make a lot of sense," I said. "He's got enough contacts and money to do it. The buy is apparently going down here at his gala." I scanned the room as I spoke. "He doesn't do anything without planning it out to his advantage. He's probably got friends in hotel security. It would give him all kinds of freedom to meet Valmont where no one was watching."
I spotted Marcone as he found a spot near a wall and lifted a tiny cell phone to his ear. He spoke into it, his eyes hard, and he had the look of a man who wasn't listening, only giving orders. I tried to Listen in on what he was saying, but between the band, the ballroom, and the chatter of voices I wasn't able to make anything out.
"But why?" Susan asked. "He's got the means and the resources but what reason would he have to buy the Shroud?"
"Hell if I know."
Susan nodded. "He certainly isn't happy to see you here."
"Yeah. Something unsettled him, gave him a nasty surprise. Did you see his face?"
Susan shook her head. "What do you mean?"
"A reaction, during the conversation. I'm sure I saw it. He got caught flat-footed when I was talking to him, and he didn't like it."
"You rattled him?"
"Maybe," I said.
"Enough to push him into moving early?" Susan's dark eyes had also picked out Marcone, who snapped the cell phone closed and headed for one of the service doors with Gard and Hendricks behind him. Marcone paused to speak to a red-jacketed security guard and glanced in our direction.
"Looks like we'd better get moving," I said. "I need a minute to use the spell on this thread sample and lead us to the Shroud."
"Why haven't you done that already?"
"Limited range," I said. "And the spell won't last long. We need to be close."
"How close?" Susan asked.
"Maybe a hundred feet."
Marcone left the room, and the security guard lifted his radio to his mouth.
"Crap," I said.
"Relax," Susan said, though her own voice sounded tight. "These are the upper crust of Chicago. The security guards won't want to make a scene."
"Right," I said, and started for the door.
"Slowly," Susan said, her smile in place again. "Don't rush."
I tried not to rush, despite the security guard closing in behind us. I saw red jackets moving in my peripheral vision as well. We kept up the slow, graceful walk of people wandering around a party, and Susan smiled enough for both of us. We got as far as the doors before another red jacket appeared in the doors in front of us, cutting us off.
I recognized the man---the gunman outside the television studio, the one who had nearly ventilated Father Vincent and me in the parking garage. His eyes widened in recognition and his hand moved toward his jacket, where a gun would be inside a shoulder holster. The body language was clear: Come along quietly or get shot.
I looked around us, but other than the partygoers, the dance floor, and the other security guards, nothing really seemed to present itself as an option. Then the band struck up something a little faster with a syncopated Latin beat, and several of the younger couples who hadn't been dancing previously moved out onto the floor.
"Come on," I said, and guided Susan with me.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Buying some time to get across the room to those other doors," I said. I turned to her, put one hand on her waist and took her other hand in mine, and led off onto the dance floor with an uncomplicated two-step. "Just follow."
I looked back to her to see her mouth open in shock. "You told me you couldn't dance."
"Not like in clubs and stuff," I said. She followed me well enough to let me do a little dip and step into a restrained hustle. "I don't do so well with rock and roll. Ballroom is something else."
Susan laughed, her dark eyes shining, even as she watched the crowd around us for more red jackets. "Between this and the tux, you're threatening to become classy. Where did you learn?"
I kept us moving down the dance floor, rolling Susan out to the length of our arms and then drawing her in again. "When I first came to Chicago, I had a bunch of jobs until I hooked up with Nick Christian at Ragged Angel Investigations. One of them was as a dance partner with a senior-citizen organization."
"You learned from little old ladies?"
"Tough to tango with someone with lumbago," I said. "It requires great skill." I spun Susan again, this time bringing her back to me with her back to my chest, one hand still on her hip with the other holding her arm out. There was a subtle electricity in touching her, her waist slender and supple under my hand. Her hair smelled of cinnamon, and her dress left quite a bit of her back naked to view. It was distracting as hell, and when she glanced over her shoulder at me, her eyes were growing heated. She felt it too.
I swallowed. Focus, Harry. "See those doors behind the food tables?"
Susan nodded.
I checked over my shoulder. The security guards had been slowed down by the press of the crowd, and we had beaten them to the other side of the room. "That's where we're going. We need to ditch these guys and find Valmont before Marcone gets to her."
"Won't security just follow us through the kitchen?"
"Not if Vanilla Martin diverts their attention before we leave the floor."
Susan's eyes glittered and she kept dancing with me, drawing the tiny cell phone from her clutch. "You have a devious mind."
"Call me crazy but I'd rather not have Marcone's goons walk us out." A little luck came our way, and the band moved to a somewhat slower number. Susan was able to stay closer to me, half concealing her cell phone. I heard the phone dialing numbers, and I tried to still my thoughts and feelings. It hadn't worked for long at the Larry Fowler studio, but if I could rein in my emotions, Susan should at least be able to make a call.
It worked. She spoke quietly into the phone for all of three or four seconds, then clicked it closed and put it away. "Two minutes," she said.
Damn. Martin was good. I could pick out a couple of security guards at the main doors. Marcone's dark-haired hitter was closer. He had trouble making his way politely through the crowd, and we had managed to gain a small lead on him as we danced.
"Do we have a signal or anything?"
"I think we wait for something distracting to happen," Susan said.
"Like what?"
The sudden shriek of braking tires cut through the band music. There was a loud crunch, and the sound of plate glass breaking, along with shrieks from the hotel lobby below. The band stopped in confusion, and people crowded toward the exit to see what was happening.
"Like that," Susan said. We had to swim upstream, so to speak, but it didn't look like anyone was bothering to look at us. I caught a glimpse of Marcone's hitter, heading out toward the ruckus. The ass had his gun in his hand, despite any possible field of fire he might have picked being filled with rich and influential socialites. At least he was holding the weapon low and against his leg.
The staff were just as interested in the disturbance as anyone else, and we were able to duck back into the service hallway without comment from anyone. Susan took a quick look around and said, "Elevator?"
"Stairs if they have them. If someone shoots at us on stairs, we can scream and flail around a lot more." I spotted a fire alarm diagram on the wall and traced my finger over it. "Here, down the hall and left."
Susan stepped out of her shoes while I did that. It left her a lot shorter, but her feet were silent on the utilitarian carpet. We went down the hall, found the stairs, and started down them. We went down three flights, which put us at ground level again, I guessed. I opened the door from the stairwell and took a look around. A dingy little elevator opened, and a couple of guys in the food-stained white of kitchen hands went walking down the hallway, peering ahead and chattering. I heard a siren or two wailing outside.
"I'll say this for Martin," I muttered. "When he distracts, he distracts."
"He has a strong work ethic," Susan agreed.
"Keep an eye out," I said, and stepped back from the door. Susan's gaze flicked around the stairwell and over the hallway while I stepped back to kneel on the ground, drawing out what I would need for my seeking spell.
I pulled out a black Magic Marker and drew a smooth circle on the tiled landing, all the way around me. The marker squealed as I did, and as I closed the circle I willed it shut. A gentle barrier, something I couldn't see but could easily feel closed around me, screening out disruptive forces so that I could work my spell.
"Is that a permanent marker?" Susan asked.
"Thus do I strike a blow for anarchy whenever the mood takes me," I muttered. "Just a minute." I took out the sample from Father Vincent and a windup plastic duck.
Which isn't as goofy as it sounds. Stay with me.
I touched the thread to the duck's bill, then wound the duck up. I muttered a low chant, mostly nonsense syllables, and focused on what I wanted. I set the duck down on the floor, but instead of beginning to waddle, it instead waited, completely still. I had to use a rubber band to attach the tiny thread to the duck's bill. It was too short to tie on. I focused, brushing aside any thoughts besides those I needed for the spell, and let the gathered magic go with a whispered, "Seek, seek, seek."
The power poured out of me, leaving me a bit short of breath. The little yellow duck quivered and then lurched into motion, spinning about in an aimless circle. I nodded once, reached out a hand, and with an effort of will to support the gesture, I broke the circle. The screen vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and the little yellow duck quacked and marched toward the door.
I glanced up at Susan. Her dark and lovely eyes watched the duck with what could charitably be termed extreme skepticism.
I scowled at her. "Don't say it."
"I didn't say anything."
"Well, don't."
She fought down a smile. "I won't."
I opened the door. The duck waddled out into the hallway, quacked, and turned to the left. I stepped out, picked the duck up, and said, "It's close. Let's move. We just check the duck at intersections."
"Does the duck know about stairs?"
"More or less. Come on; I don't know how long the spell will last."
I led the way. I'm not the world's mightiest athlete, but I exercise a bit, I have really long legs, and I can walk faster than some run. The duck led us down a pair of long hallways to a door with an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign on it.
I opened the door, peeked in, and reported in a whisper, "Big laundry room."
Footsteps sounded behind us, coming down another hallway. Susan looked at me with wide eyes. I pushed into the room, Susan close behind me. I closed the door almost all the way, holding it from closing completely so that the lock wouldn't click and give us away.
The footsteps came closer, a couple sets of them, and two shapes went quickly by, passing close to the cracked doorway.
"Hendricks and Gard," I murmured to Susan.
"How do you know?" she whispered back.
"Smelled the blonde's perfume." I counted silently to ten and opened the door, looking out. The hallway was clear. I closed the door and turned on the lights. The room was fairly large, with several commercial washing machines ranked against one wall. A bank of dryers faced them on the opposite side of the room, and in between were several long counters that held stacks and stacks of folded white sheets and towels. I put the duck on the floor, and it waddled off down the row of counters. "This is how they had it hidden on the yacht. Concealed among laundry."
"And those professional-thief types tend to be so predictable?" Susan asked.
I frowned and put the duck on the floor. "Watch the door."
The duck waddled at once over to the far side of the room, and bumped into some hanging laundry. I pulled the hanging sheets to one side, and found a large ventilation grate behind them. I knelt down, running my fingers and eyes over the edges of the grate, and found a pair of holes where screws had been. A quick tug on the grate had it off the wall, revealing a vent maybe three feet square. I stuck my head in and found a ventilation shaft running between the walls. The duck waddled in and took a determined right.
"Air duct," I said. I twisted out of the tuxedo jacket and absently ripped off the tie from around my neck. I stepped out of the clumsy shoes and rolled up my shirtsleeves, baring my shield bracelet to view. "Be right back."
"Harry," Susan began, her voice worried.
"I saw Alien. I'm not Tom Skerritt." I winked at Susan, picked up the duck, and entered the air duct, moving as quietly as I could.
Evidently, it was very quiet. The duct ran straight, grates opening into utility rooms every fifteen or twenty feet. I had gone past three of the grates when I heard voices.
"This isn't according to the deal," came Marcone's voice. It had the scratchy edges of a radio transmission to it.
Anna Valmont's smooth British accent answered it from the other side of the next grate. "Neither was an early rendezvous. I don't like it when a buyer changes the plan."
A radio clicked. Marcone's voice came through it, smooth and calm. "I assure you that I have no interest in breaking faith with your organization. It isn't good business."
"When I have confirmation of the transfer of funds, you'll get the article. Not a second before."
"My factor in Zurich---"
"Do you think I'm an idiot? This job has already cost us more than any of us bargained for. Clear off the bloody radio and contact me when you have something worth saying or I'll destroy the bloody thing and leave."
"Wait," Marcone said. There was tension in his voice. "You can't---"
"Can't I?" Valmont answered. "Don't fuck with me, Yank. And add another million to the bill for telling me my job. I'm calling off the deal if the money isn't there in ten minutes. Out."
I came up to the grate and found it sitting not quite squarely in its frame. Valmont must have entered the hotel and moved around through the air shafts. I peered out through the grate. Valmont had set up in a storage room of some kind. The only light in the room was a dim green shimmer that rose up from what must have been a palmtop computer. Valmont muttered something to herself beneath her breath, her eyes on the screen. She was wearing a lot of tight-fitting black clothing and a black baseball cap. She wasn't wearing my coat, dammit, but I guess I couldn't have expected to find everything wrapped up in a nice package.
I checked the duck, setting it down facing toward me. It immediately walked in a little circle and pointed toward Anna Valmont.
The thief paced the room like a restless cat, eyes on the palmtop. My eyes adjusted to the dimness over the course of a few minutes of waiting, and I saw that Valmont was pacing back and forth around a tube with a carrying strap. The tube wasn't more than five or six feet from me.
I watched Valmont pace until her expression and steps froze, eyes locking hard on the palmtop. "Great Jupiter's balls," she said quietly. "He paid it."
Now or never. I put my hands on the grate and pushed it as gently as I could. It slid soundlessly from the wall and I set it to one side. Valmont was focused entirely on her little computer. If the prospect of payment distracted Valmont for a moment more, I'd be able to slip away with the Shroud, which would be very James Bond of me. Hopefully the tuxedo would help out with that. I needed only a few seconds to creep out, nip the Shroud, and get back into the vents.
I almost died when Valmont's radio crackled again and Marcone's voice said, "There. As agreed, plus your additional fee. Will that be sufficient?"
"Quite. You will find your merchandise in a storage closet in the basement."
Marcone's voice gained an edge. "Please be more specific."
I slipped out of the vents, thinking silent thoughts. A long stretch put my fingertips on the tube's carrying strap.
"If you wish," Valmont replied. "The article is in a locked room, in a courier's tube. The tube itself is outfitted with an incendiary. A radio transmitter in my possession has the capacity to disarm or to trigger the device. Once I am safely on my way from the city, I will disarm the device and notify you via telephone. Until that time, I suggest you do not try to open it."
I jerked my fingers away from the tube.
"Again you have altered our agreement," Marcone said. He said it in a voice as smooth and cold as the inside wall of a refrigerator.
"It does seem to be a seller's market."
"There are very few people able to speak about taking advantage of me."
Valmont let out a quiet, bitter little laugh. "Come, now. This is nothing more than an entirely reasonable piece of insurance," Valmont said. "Be a good boy and your precious cloth is in no danger. Attempt to betray me, and you'll have nothing."
"And if the authorities find you on their own?" Marcone asked.
"You'll need a broom and a dustpan when you come for the article. I should think you would be wise to do whatever you can to clear the path for me." She turned the radio off.
I bit my lip, thinking furiously. Even if I took the Shroud now, Marcone would be upset when he didn't get his hands on it. If he didn't have Valmont killed, he'd at least tip off the police to her. Valmont, in turn, would destroy the Shroud. If I took it, I would have to move fast to get the Shroud away from the device. I couldn't count on simply blowing the device out with magic. It was as likely to malfunction and explode as it was to just go dead.
I would need the transmitter too, and there was only one way to get it.
I stepped up behind Valmont and pressed the bill of the plastic duck against her spine. "Don't move," I said. "I'll shoot."
She stiffened. "Dresden?"
"Let me see your hands," I said. She held them up, the green light of the palmtop showing columns of numbers. "Where's the transmitter?"
"What transmitter?"
I pushed the duck against her a little harder. "I've had a long day too, Miss Valmont. The one you just told Marcone about."
She let out a small sound of discomfort. "If you take it, Marcone will kill me."
"Yeah, he takes his image seriously. You'd be smart to come with me and get protection from the authorities. Now where is the transmitter?"
Her shoulders slumped and she bowed her head forward for a moment. I felt a twinge of guilt. She had planned on being here with friends. They'd been killed. She was a young woman, alone in a strange land, and regardless of what happened, she wasn't likely to come out of this situation ahead of the game. And here I was holding a duck to her back. I felt like a bully.
"My left jacket pocket," Valmont said, her tone quiet. I reminded myself that I was a professional and reached into her pocket to get the transmitter.
She clobbered me.
One second, I was holding the duck to her back and reaching into her pocket. The next, I was falling to the ground with a bruise shaped like one of her elbows forming on my jaw. The light from the palmtop clicked out. A small red-tinted flashlight came on, and Valmont kicked the duck out of my hand. The beam of the flashlight followed the duck for a silent second, and then she laughed.
"A duck," she said. She dipped a hand into her pocket and came out with a small silver semiautomatic. "I was fairly certain you wouldn't shoot, but that goes a step beyond ridiculous."
I've got to get a concealed-carry permit. "You won't shoot either," I said, and started to get up. "So you might as well put the gun d---"
She pointed the gun at my leg and pulled the trigger. Pain flashed through my leg and I let out an involuntary shout. I grabbed at my thigh as the red flashlight settled on me.
I pawed at my leg. I had a couple of smallish cuts, but I hadn't been shot. The bullet had hit the concrete floor next to me and gouged a bite out of the concrete. A flying chip or two must have cut my leg.
"Terribly sorry," Valmont said. "Were you saying something?"
"Nothing important," I responded.
"Ah," Valmont said. "Well, it would be bad etiquette to leave a corpse here for my buyer to clean up, so it seems as though I'll be hand-delivering to Marcone after all. We can't have you running off with what everyone is so excited over."
"Marcone is the least of your worries," I said.
"No, actually, he's quite prominent among them."
"Marcone isn't going to sprout horns and claws and start tearing you apart," I said. "Or at least, I don't think he is. There's another group after that Shroud. Like the thing from the ship this morning."
I couldn't see her face from the other end of the red flashlight, but her voice sounded a little shaky. "What was it?"
"A demon."
"A real demon?" There was a strained tone in her voice, as though she couldn't decide whether to laugh or sob. I'd heard it before. "You expect me to believe it was a literal demon?"
"Yeah."
"And you're some sort of angel, I suppose."
"Hell, no," I said. "I'm just working for them. Sort of. Look, I know people who can protect you from those things. People who won't hurt you. They'll help."
"I don't need help," Valmont said. "They're dead, they're both dead. Gaston, Francisca. My friends. Whoever these people, these things are, they can't hurt me any more."
The locked door of the storeroom screamed as something tore it off its hinges and out into the hall. The hallway lights poured in through the gap in a blinding flood, and I had to shield my eyes against them for a second.
I could see dim shapes, shadows in front of the light. One was lean and crouched, with shadowy tendrils of razor-edged hair slithering around it in a writhing cloud. One was sinuous and strong-looking, like a man who had traded its legs in on the scaled body of an enormous snake. Between them stood a shape that looked human, like a man in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets---but the shadows the shape cast writhed and boiled madly, making the lights flicker and swim in a nauseating fashion.
"Cannot hurt you any more," said the central shape in a quietly amused, male voice. "No matter how many times I hear that one, it's always a fresh challenge."
My eyes adjusted enough to make out some details. The demonic female with the Joan Jett hair, two sets of eyes, a glowing sigil, and vicious claws was the same Denarian who had attacked at the harbor that morning. The second demonic being was covered in dark grey scales flecked with bits of rust red. From shoulders to waist, he looked more or less human. From the neck up and the waist down, he looked like some kind of flattened serpent. No legs. Coils slithered out behind him, scales rasping over the floor. He too had the double pair of eyes, one set golden and serpentine, the other, inside the first, glowing faintly blue-green, matching the pulsing symbol of the same light that seemed to dance in the gleam of the scales of the snake's head.
One little, two little, three little Denarians, or so I judged the last of them. Of the three, he was the only one that looked human. He wore a tan trench coat, casually open. His clothes were tailor-fit to him and looked expensive. A slender grey tie hung loosely around his throat. He was a man of medium height and build, with short, dark hair streaked through with an off-center blaze of silver. His expression was mild, amused, and his dark eyes were half-closed and sleepy-looking. He spoke English with a faint British accent. "Well, well. What have we here? Our bold thief and her---"
I got the impression that he would have been glad to begin one of those trademark bantering conversations all the urbane bad guys seem to be such big fans of, but before he could finish the sentence Anna Valmont turned with her little pistol and shot him three times in the chest. I saw him jerk and twist. Blood abruptly stained his shirt and coat. She'd hit the heart or an artery.
The man blinked and stared at Valmont in shock, as more red spread over his shirt. He opened his coat a bit, and looked down at the spreading scarlet. I noted that the tie he wore wasn't a tie, as such. It looked like a piece of old grey rope, and though he wore it as apparent ornamentation, it was tied in a hangman's noose.
"I do not appreciate being interrupted," the man said in a sharp and ugly tone. "I hadn't even gotten around to the introductions. There are proprieties to observe, young woman."
A girl after my own heart, Anna Valmont had a quick reply. She shot him some more.
He wasn't five feet away. The blond thief aimed for the center of mass and didn't miss him once. The man folded his arms as bullets hit him, tearing new wounds that bled freely. He rolled his eyes after the fourth shot, and made a rolling "move this along" gesture with his left hand until Valmont's gun clicked empty, the slide open.
"Where was I," he said.
"Proprieties," purred the feminine demon with the wild hair. The word came out a little mangled, due to the heavy canines that dimpled her lips as she spoke. "Proprieties, Father."
"There seems little point," the man said. "Thief, you have stolen something I have an interest in. Give it to me at once and you are free to go your own way. Refuse me, and I will become annoyed with you."
Anna Valmont's upper lip had beaded with sweat, and she looked from her empty gun to the man in the trench coat with wide, wild eyes, frozen in confusion and obvious terror.
The gunshots would bring people running. I needed to buy a little time. I leaned up, fished a hand into Valmont's jacket pocket, and drew out a small box of black plastic that looked vaguely like a remote control to a VCR. I held up the transmitter, put my thumb on it as if I knew what I was doing, and said to the man in the trench coat, "Hey, Bogart. You and the wonder twins back off or the bedsheet gets it."
The man lifted his eyebrows. "Excuse me?"
I waggled the remote. "Click. Boom. No more Shroud."
The snakeman hissed, body twisting in restless, lithe motion, and the demon-girl parted her lips in a snarl. The man between them stared at me for a moment, his eyes flat and empty, before he said, "You're bluffing."
"Like the bedsheet matters to me," I said.
The man stared at me without moving. But his shadow did. It writhed and undulated, and the motion made me feel vaguely carsick. His eyes went from me to Valmont to the courier's message tube on the floor. "A remote detonator, I take it. You do realize you are standing next to the device?"
I realized it. I had no idea how big the incendiary was. But that was all right, since I had no idea which button to push to set it off, either. "Yup."
"You would kill yourself rather than surrender the Shroud?"
"Rather than letting you kill me."
"Who said I would kill anyone?"
I glared at him and at the demon-girl and said, "Francisca Garcia mentioned it."
The man's shadow boiled but he watched me with flat, calculating eyes. "Perhaps we can reach an arrangement."
"Which would be?"
He drew a heavy-caliber handgun from his pocket and pointed it at Anna Valmont. "Give me the remote and I won't kill this young woman."
"The demon groupie headman uses a gun? You've got to be kidding me," I said.
"Call me Nicodemus." He glanced at the revolver. "Trendy, I know, but one can only watch so many dismemberments before they become predictable." He pointed the gun at the terror-stricken Valmont and said, "Shall I count to three?"
I threw on a puppet's Transylvanian accent. "Count as high as you vant, but you von't get one, one detonator, ah, ah, ah."
"One," Nicodemus said.
"Do you expect me to hand it over on reflex or something?"
"You've done such things repeatedly when there was a woman in danger, Harry Dresden. Two."
This Nicodemus knew me. And he'd picked a pressure tactic that wasn't going to take long, however it turned out, so he knew I was stalling for time. Crap. I wasn't going to be able to bluff him. "Hold on," I said.
He thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and aimed at Valmont's head. "Thr---"
So much for cleverness. "All right," I snapped, and I tossed the remote to him underhand. "Here you go."
Nicodemus lowered the gun, turning to catch the remote in his left hand. I waited until his eyes flicked from Valmont to the remote.
And then I pulled up every bit of power I could muster in that instant, hurled my right hand forward, and snarled, "Fuego!"
Fire rose up from the floor in a wave as wide as the doorway and rolled forward in a surge of superheated air. It expanded as it lashed out, and slammed into Nicodemus's bloodied chest. The force of it threw him back across the hallway and into the wall on the opposite side. He didn't quite go through the wall, but only because there must have been a stud lined up with his spine. The drywall crumpled in from his shoulders to his hips, and his head snapped back in a whiplash of impact. It almost seemed that his shadow was thrown back with him, slapping wetly against the wall around him like blobs of tar.
The snakeman moved with blinding speed, slithering to one side of the blast. The demon-girl shrieked, and her bladed tresses gathered together in an effort to shield her as the fire and concussion threw her back and away from the door.
The heat was unbearable, an oven-hot flash that sucked the air from my lungs. Backwash from the explosion drove me back across the floor, rolling until I hit the wall myself. I cowered and shielded my face as the scarlet flames went out, replaced with a sudden cloud of ugly black smoke. My ears rang, and I couldn't hear anything but the hammering of my own heart.
The fire spell had been something I wouldn't have done if I'd had an option. That's why I had made a blasting rod. Down-and-dirty fast magic was difficult, dangerous, and likely to run out of control. The blasting rod helped me focus that kind of magic, contain it. It helped me avoid explosions that left heat burns on my lungs.
I fumbled around in the blinding smoke, unable to breathe and unable to see. I found a feminine wrist with one hand, followed it up to a shoulder, and found Anna Valmont. I hauled on her with one hand, found the courier's tube with the other, and crawled for the ventilation duct, hauling them both behind me.
There was air in the ventilation shaft, and Valmont coughed and stirred as I dragged her into it. Enough of the storage room had caught on fire that I had light enough to see. One of Valmont's eyebrows was gone, and one side of her face was red and blistered. I screamed, "Move!" at her as loudly as I could. Her eyes blinked with dull comprehension as I pushed her past me and toward the opening in the laundry room, and she started moving stiffly in front of me.
Valmont didn't crawl as quickly as I wanted her to, but then she wasn't the one closest to the fire and the monsters. My heart hammered in my ears and the shaft felt oppressively small. I knew that the demonic forms of the Denarians were tougher than either me or Anna Valmont. Unless I'd gotten lethally lucky, they'd recover from the blast, and it wouldn't be long before they came after us. If we couldn't shake them or get into a car, and fast, they'd catch us, plain and simple. I shoved at Valmont, growing more frantic as my imagination turned up images of whipping tendrils cutting my legs to shreds, or venomous serpent fangs sinking into my calves as scaled hands dragged me backward by my ankles.
Valmont tumbled out of the air shaft and into the laundry room. I followed her closely enough to make me think of a program I'd seen about howler monkey mating habits. My ears were starting to get their act together, and I heard the high, buzzing ring of a fire alarm in the hallway outside.
"Harry?" Susan said. She looked between Valmont and me and helped the woman to her feet. "What's happening?"
I got to my feet and choked out, "We need to be gone. Right now."
Susan nodded at me, and then shoved me. Hard. I went stumbling sideways and into the wall of drying machines, slamming my shoulder and head. I looked back to see the demon-girl's hair pureeing its way out of the vents, and then the rest of the Denarian came out, scales, claws and all, rolling to all fours with dizzying grace.
Fast as the Denarian was, Susan was faster. The demon-girl came up with those rich lips split into a snarl, and Susan drove her heel right into them. She kicked hard enough that something crunched, and the demon-girl screamed in surprise and pain.
"Susan!" I shouted. "Look---"
I was going to say "out" but there wasn't time. Half a dozen bunches of tendrils drove at Susan like spears.
Susan dodged them. All of them. She had to fling herself across the room to the washing machines to do it, and the Denarian regained her balance and pursued. More blades drove toward Susan, but she ducked to one side, one hand ripping open the door to one of the washing machines. Susan slammed the door down on the demon-girl's hair, and without missing a beat kicked the Denarian's reverse-jointed knee in sideways.
The demon-girl shrieked in pain, struggling. I knew she was strong enough to pull free of the washing machine before long, but for the moment she was trapped. Susan reached up and tore a fold-down ironing board from where it was mounted on a nearby wall. Then she spun around and slammed it edge-on into the Denarian. Susan hit her three times, in the wounded leg, the small of the back, and the back of the neck. The Denarian shrieked at the first two blows and then collapsed into a limp heap at the third.
Susan stared down at the demon-girl for a moment, dark eyes hard and hot. The ironing board's metal frame was now bent and twisted from the force of the blows Susan had dealt with it. Susan took a deep breath and then tossed the ironing board to one side, straightened her hair with one hand, and commented, "Bitch."
"Wow," I said.
"Are you all right, Harry?" Susan asked. She wasn't looking at me.
"Yeah," I said. "Wow."
Susan walked over to the counter, where she'd left her clutch. She opened it, got the phone, and said, "I'll have Martin pick us up at the exit."
I shook myself into motion and helped draw Anna Valmont to her feet. "What exit?"
Susan pointed wordlessly at a fire-escape diagram on the wall, still not looking at me. She spoke maybe a dozen quiet words into the phone and then folded it shut. "He's coming. They're evacuating the hotel. We'll need to---"
I felt a surge of magical energies. The air around Susan grew darker and then coalesced into a cloud of shadows. Within a heartbeat, the cloud deepened, then solidified into a writhing tangle of snakes of all sizes and colors wrapped all around Susan. The air suddenly filled with the sound of hissing and buzzing rattles. I saw the snakes begin to strike, fangs flashing. Susan let out a scream.
I turned to the doorway and saw the snakeman Denarian standing in it. One not-quite-human hand was held out toward Susan. His serpent mouth was rolling out hissing sounds, and I could feel the thrumming tension in the air between the Denarian's outstretched hand and Susan.
Rage flooded over me, and I barely stopped myself from throwing out another blast of raw spellfire at the snakeman. With that much rage behind it, I'd probably have killed everyone in the room. Instead, I reached out to the air in the hallway beyond the Denarian and pulled it all toward him, the words, "Ventas servitas!" thundering off my lips.
A column of wind hit the snakeman from behind, lifted him from the floor, and flung him across the room. He slammed into the wall of washing machines, driving a foot-and-a-half-deep dent in one of them, and let out a wailing, hissing whistle of what I hoped was surprise and pain.
Susan flung herself onto the ground, rolling, tearing at snakes, flinging them away. I could see flashes of her honey-brown skin and saw the black dress tearing. Droplets of red blood appeared on the floor near her, on her skin, and on the discarded snakes, but they were hanging on. She was tearing herself apart in her panic to remove the snakes.
I closed my eyes for a second that felt a year long, and gathered together enough will to attempt to disrupt the Denarian's spell. I formed the counterspell in my head, and hoped to God that I didn't misjudge how much power I'd need to undo it. Too little and the spell might actually get stronger, like steel forged in a flame. Too much, and the counterspell could unleash the power of both spells in a random, destructive flash of energies. I focused my will on the cloak of serpents over Susan and lashed out at them with my power, letting loose the counterspell with a snarled, "Entropus!"
The counterspell worked. The serpents writhed and thrashed around for a second, and then imploded, vanishing, leaving behind nothing but a coating of clear, glistening slime in their place.
Susan scrambled away, still gasping, still bleeding. Her skin shone, wet and slick with the residue of the conjured serpents. Rivulets of blood laced her arms and one leg, and thick black bruises banded the skin of one arm, one leg, her throat, and one side of her face.
I stared for a second. The darkness on her skin wasn't bruising. It gained shape, as I watched, resolving itself from vague discoloration to the dark, sharp lines of a tattoo. I watched the tattoo come into being over her skin, all curves and points, Maori-style. It began on her cheek under one eye and wound down around her face, around the back of her neck, and on down over one collarbone and into the neckline of her evening gown. It emerged again winding down along her left arm and left leg, finishing at the back of her hand and over the bridge of her left foot. She hauled herself to her feet, panting and shaking, the swirling designs lending a savage aspect to her appearance. She stared at me for a moment, her eyes dark and enlarged, the irises too big to be human. They filled with tears that didn't fall, and she looked away.
The snakeman recovered enough to slither his way vertical again, looking around. He focused yellow snake eyes on Susan and let out a surprised wheeze. "Fellowship," he rasped, the word a hiss. "Fellowship here." The Denarian looked around and spotted the courier's tube still hanging by its strap from my shoulder. Its tail lashed about and the Denarian darted toward me.
I slipped to one side, keeping a table between us, and shouted, "Susan!"
The snakeman struck the table with one arm and broke it in half. Then he came at me over the pieces---until Susan ripped a dryer out of the wall and threw it at his head.
The Denarian saw it coming and dodged at the last second, but the dryer clipped him and sent him sprawling. He hissed again, and slithered away from both of us, shooting into the air shaft and out of sight.
I panted and watched the vent for a second, but he didn't reappear. Then I hauled the still-stunned Valmont toward the door and asked Susan, "Fellowship?"
Her lips pressed together, and she averted her too-large eyes. "Not now."
I ground my teeth in frustration and worry, but she was right. The smoke was getting thicker, and we had no way of knowing if tall, green, and scaly would be reappearing. I pulled Valmont along with me, made sure I still had the Shroud, and followed Susan out the door. She ran along barefoot without breaking stride, and between the pain in my lungs and the blond thief's torpor, I could barely keep up with her.
We went up a flight of stairs and Susan opened a door on a pair of gorillas in red security blazers. They tried to stop us. Susan threw a right and a left cross, and we walked over them on our way out. I kind of felt bad for them. Getting punched out by a dame was not going to pad their goon résumés.
We left the building through a side door, and the dark limo was waiting, Martin standing beside it. I could hear sirens, people shouting, the blaring horns of fire vehicles trying to get to the hotel.
Martin took one look at Susan and stiffened. Then he hurried over to us.
"Take her," I rasped. Martin picked up Valmont and carried her to the limo like a sleepy child. I followed him. Martin put the blond thief in and got behind the wheel. Susan slipped in after her, and I slung the tube off my shoulder to get in behind her.
Something grabbed me from behind, wrapping around my waist like a soft, squishy rope. I slapped at the car door, but I managed only to slam it shut as I was hauled back off my feet. I landed on the ground near the fire door.
"Harry!" Susan shouted.
"Go!" I gasped. I looked at Martin, behind the wheel of the limo. I grabbed the Shroud and tried to throw it at the car, but something pinned my arm down before I could. "Get out! Get help!"
"No!" Susan screamed, and tried for the door.
Martin was faster. I heard locks click shut on the limo. Then the engine roared, and the car screamed into the street and away.
I tried to run. Something tangled my feet and I couldn't even get off the ground. I turned to find Nicodemus standing over me, the hangman's noose the only thing he wore that wasn't soaked with blood. His shadow, his freaking shadow was wrapped around my waist, my legs, my hands, and it moved and wriggled like something alive. I reached for my magic, but the grasping shadow-coils grew suddenly cold, colder than ice or frosted steel, and my power crumbled to frozen powder beneath it.
One of the shadow-coils took the courier's tube from my numbed hands, curling through the air to hand it to Nicodemus. "Excellent," he said. "I have the Shroud. And I have you, Harry Dresden."
"What do you want?" I rasped.
"Just to talk," Nicodemus assured me. "I want to have a polite conversation with you."
"Blow me."
His eyes darkened with cold anger, and he drew out the heavy revolver.
Great, Harry, I thought. That's what you get for trying to be a hero. You get to eat a six-pack of nine-millimeter bon-bons.
But Nicodemus didn't shoot me.
He clubbed me over the head with the butt of the gun.
Light flashed in my eyes, and I started to fall. I was out before my cheek hit the ground.
The cold woke me.
I came to my senses in complete darkness, under a stream of freezing water. My head hurt enough to make the wound on my leg feel pleasant by comparison. My wrists and shoulders hurt even more. My neck felt stiff, and it took me a second to realize that I was vertical, my hands bound together over my head. My feet were tied too. My muscles started jumping and twitching under the cold water and I tried to get out from under it. The ropes prevented me. The cold started cutting into me. It hurt a lot.
I tried to get loose, working my limbs methodically, testing the ropes, trying to free my hands. I couldn't tell if I was making any progress. Thanks to the cold, I couldn't even feel my wrists, and it was too dark to see.
I got more scared by the moment. If I couldn't work my hands free, I might have to risk using magic to scorch the ropes. Hell, I was cold enough that the thought of burning myself had a certain appeal. But when I started trying to reach out for the power to manage it, it slithered away from me. Then I understood. Running water. Running water grounds magical energies, and every time I tried to get something together the water washed it away.
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.
A door opened and firelight stabbed at my eyes. I would have flinched if I had been able to move that much. A couple of large, blocky men came through the door carrying actual flaming torches. The light let me see the room. The wall beside the door was finished stone, but the walls all around me were a mishmash of fallen rubble and ancient brick, and one was made of curved concrete---some kind of piping for the city's water system, I supposed. The ceiling was all rough earth, some stone, some roots. Water poured down from somewhere, over me, and vanished down a groove worn in the floor.
They had taken me to Undertown, a network of caves, ruined buildings, tunnels, and ancient construction that underlay the city of Chicago. Undertown was dark, damp, cold, full of various creatures that shunned sunlight and human company, and might have been radioactive. The tunnels where the Manhattan Project had been housed were just the start of Undertown. The people who knew of its existence didn't come down here---not even wizards like me---unless matters were desperate.
No one knew their way around down here. And no one would be coming to find me.
"Been working out pretty hard," I muttered to the two men, my voice a croak. "One of you guys got a cold beer? Maybe a freeze pop?"
They didn't so much as look at me. One man took up a position on the wall to my left. The other took the wall to my right.
"I should have cleaned up, I know," I told them. "If I'd realized I was having company I'd have taken a shower. Mopped the floor."
No answer. No expression on their faces. No nothing.
"Tough room," I said.
"You'll have to forgive them," said Nicodemus. He came through the door and into the torchlight, freshly dressed, shaved, and showered. He wore pajama pants, slippers, and a smoking jacket of Hugh Hefner vintage. The grey noose still circled his throat. "I like to encourage discretion in my employees, and I have very high standards. Sometimes it makes them seem standoffish."
"You don't let your goons talk?" I asked.
He removed a pipe from his pocket, along with a small tin of Prince Albert tobacco. "I remove their tongues."
"I guess your human resources department isn't exactly under siege, is it," I said.
He tamped tobacco into his pipe and smiled. "You'd be surprised. I offer an excellent dental plan."
"You're going to need it when the formal-wear police knock your teeth out. This is a rented tux."
His dark eyes glittered with something ugly. "Little Maggie's youngest. You've grown up to be a man of considerable strengths."
I stared at him for a long second, shivering and startled into silence. My mother's name was Margaret.
And I was her youngest? As far as I knew, I had been an only child. But I knew precious little of my parents. My mother died giving birth to me. My father had suffered an aneurism when I had been about six years old. I had a picture of my father on a piece of yellowed newspaper I kept in a photo album. It showed him performing at a children's benefit dinner in a small town in Ohio. I had a Polaroid instant picture showing my father and my mother, her stomach round with pregancy, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I wore my mother's pentacle amulet around my neck. It was scarred and dented, but that's to be expected when you run around using it to kill werewolves.
They were the only concrete things I had left of my parents. I'd heard stories before, that my mother hadn't run with a very pleasant crowd. Nothing of substance, just inferences made from passing comments. I'd had a demon tell me that my parents had been murdered, and the same creature had hinted that I might have relatives. I'd shied away from the whole concept, deciding that the demon had been a dirty liar.
And given that Nicodemus and Chauncy worked for the same organization, I probably couldn't trust the Denarian either. He was probably lying. Probably.
But what if he wasn't?
Keep him talking, I decided. Fish for information. It wasn't like I had a lot to lose, and knowledge was power. I might find out something that would give me some kind of edge.
Nicodemus lit the pipe with a match and puffed on it a few times, watching my face with a little smile on his lips. He read me, easily. I avoided looking at his eyes.
"Harry---may I call you Harry?"
"Would it matter if I told you no?"
"It would tell me something about you," he said. "I'd like to get to know you, and I would rather not make this a trip to the dentist if I can avoid it."
I glared at him, shivering under the freezing water, the bump on my head pounding, and my limbs aching beneath the ropes. "I've got to ask---just what kind of freaking dentist do you go to? Ortho de Sade? Smokin' Joe Mengele, DDS?"
Nicodemus puffed on the pipe and regarded my bonds. Another expressionless man came in, this one older, thin, with thick grey hair. He pushed a room-service cart. He unfolded a small table and set it up over to one side, where the water wouldn't splash on it. Nicodemus toyed with the bowl of his pipe. "Dresden, may I be frank with you?"
I figured the cart would open up to show an array of hardware intended to frighten me with its potential torture applications. "If it's okay with Frank, I guess I don't mind."
Nicodemus watched the valet set out three folding chairs and cover the table with a white cloth. "You have faced a great many dangerous beings. But by and large, they have been idiots. I try to avoid that whenever I am able, and that is why you are bound and held under running water."
"You're afraid of me," I said.
"Boy, you've destroyed three rival practitioners of the Arts, a noble of the vampire Courts, and even one of the Faerie Queens. They underestimated you as well as your allies. I don't. I suppose you could think of your current position as a compliment."
"Yeah," I muttered, shaking freezing water out of my eyes. "You're way too kind."
Nicodemus smiled. The valet opened the cart and something far more diabolical than torture hardware was there. It was breakfast. The old valet started setting out food on the table. Hash browns. Some cheese. Some biscuits, bacon, sausages, pancakes, toast, fruit. And coffee, dear God. Hot coffee. The smell hit my stomach, and even frozen as it was it started crawling around on the inside of my abdomen, trying to figure out how to get away and get some food.
Nicodemus sat down, and the valet poured him some coffee. I guess pouring his own was beneath him. "I did try to keep you out of this affair."
"Yeah. You seem like such a sweet guy. You're the one who edited the prophecy Ulsharavas told me about?"
"You've no idea how difficult it is to waylay an angelic messenger."
"Uh-huh," I said. "So why'd you do it?"
Nicodemus was not too important to add his own cream, no sugar. His spoon clinked on the cup. "I have a fond memory or two of your mother. It cost me little to attempt it. So why not?"
"That's the second time you've mentioned her," I said.
"Yes. I respected her. Which is quite unusual for me."
"You respected her so much you snatched me and brought me here. I see."
Nicodemus waved his hand. "It worked out that way. I needed someone of a certain metaphysical mass. You interfered in my business, you were convenient, and you fit the recipe."
Recipe? "What recipe?"
He sipped at his coffee and closed his eyes in enjoyment. The bastard. "I take it that this is the portion of the conversation where I reveal my plans to you?"
"What have you got to lose?"
"And apparently you expect me to tell you of any vulnerabilities I might have as well. I am wounded by the lack of professional respect this implies."
I ground my teeth. "Chicken."
He picked up a piece of bacon and nibbled at it. "It is enough for you to know that one of two things will happen."
"Oh, yeah?" Master of repartee, that's me.
"Indeed. Either you will be freed and sit down to enjoy a nice breakfast..." He picked up a slightly curved and sharp-looking knife from the table. "Or I will cut your throat as soon as I finish eating."
He said it scary---without any melodrama to it at all. Matter-of-fact. The way most people say that they need to take out the trash. "Ye olde 'join up or die' ultimatum," I said. "Gee, no matter how many times I get it, that one never goes out of style."
"Your history indicates that you are too dangerous to leave alive, I'm afraid---and I am on a schedule," Nicodemus said.
A schedule? He was working against a time limit, then. "I'm really inconvenient that way. Don't take it personal."
"I don't," he assured me. "This isn't easy for either of us. I'd use some sort of psychological technique on you, but I haven't gotten caught up on some of the more recent developments." He took a piece of toast and buttered it. "Then again, I suppose not many psychologists can drive chariots, so perhaps it balances out."
The door opened again, and a young woman came into the room. She had long, sleep-tousled dark hair, dark eyes, and a face a little too lean to be conventionally pretty. She wore a kimono of red silk belted loosely, so that gaps appeared as she moved. She evidently didn't have anything on underneath it. Like I said, Undertown is cold.
The girl yawned and stretched lazily, watching me as she did. She too spoke with an odd, vaguely British accent. "Good morning."
"And you, little one. Harry Dresden, I don't believe you've been introduced to my daughter, Deirdre."
I eyed the girl, who seemed vaguely familiar. "We haven't met."
"Yes, we have," Deirdre said, reaching out to pluck a strawberry from the breakfast table. She took a slow bite from it, lips sealed around the fruit. "At the harbor."
"Ah. Madame Medusa, I presume."
Deirdre sighed. "I've never heard that one before. It's so amusing. May I kill him, Father?"
"Not just yet," Nicodemus said. "But if it comes to that, he's mine."
Deirdre nodded sleepily. "Have I missed breakfast?"
Nicodemus smiled at her. "Not at all. Give us a kiss."
She slid onto his lap and did. With tongue. Yuck. After a moment she rose, and Nicodemus held one of the chairs out for her as she sat down. He reseated himself and said, "There are three chairs here, Dresden. Are you sure you wouldn't like to take breakfast with us?"
I started to tell him what he could do with his third chair, but the smell of food stopped me. I suddenly felt desperately, painfully hungry. The water got colder. "What did you have in mind?"
Nicodemus nodded to one of the goons. The man walked over to me, drawing a jewelry box out of his pocket. He opened it, offering it out to me.
I mimed a gasp. "But this is so sudden."
The goon glared. Nicodemus smiled. Inside the jewelry box was an ancient silver coin, like the one I'd seen in the alley behind the hospital. The tarnish on the coin was in the shape of another sigil.
"You like me. You really like me," I said without enthusiasm. "You want me to join up?"
"You needn't if you do not wish to," Nicodemus said. "I just want you to hear our side of things before you make up your mind to die needlessly. Accept the coin. Have some breakfast with us. We can talk. After that, if you don't want to have anything to do with me, you may leave."
"You'd just let me go. Sure."
"If you accept the coin, I doubt I'd be able to stop you."
"So what says I wouldn't turn around and use it against you?"
"Nothing," Nicodemus said. "But I am a great believer in the benevolence of human nature."
Like hell he was. "Do you actually think you could convince me to join up with you?"
"Yes," he said. "I know you."
"Do not."
"Do too," he replied. "I know more about you than you do yourself."
"Such as?"
"Such as why you chose this kind of life for yourself. To appoint yourself protector of mortal kind, and to make yourself the enemy of any who would do them harm. 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. "It is all you will allow yourself, and I know why."
"All right. Why?"
"Because you are ruled by fear. You are afraid, Dresden."
I said, "Of what?"
"Of what you could be if you ever let yourself stray from the right-hand path," Nicodemus said. "Of the power you could use. You've thought about what it might be like to bend the world to your will. The things you could have. The people. Some part of you has considered and found joy in the idea of using your abilities to take what you wish. And you are afraid of that joy. So you drive yourself toward martyrdom instead."
I started to deny his words. But I couldn't. He was right, or at least not wholly wrong. My voice came out subdued. "Everyone has thoughts like that sometimes."
"No," Nicodemus said, "they don't. Most people never consider such actions. It never crosses their minds. The average mortal would have no sure way of taking that kind of power. But for you, it's different. You may pretend you are like them. But you are not."
"That's not true," I replied.
"Of course it is," Nicodemus said. "You might not like to admit it, but that makes it no less true. It's denial. There are a number of ways you express it in your life. You don't want to see what you are, so you have very few pictures of yourself. No mirrors, either."
I ground my teeth. "I'm not different in any way that matters. I'm not any better than anyone else. We all put our pants on one leg at a time."
"Granted," Nicodemus said. "But a century from now, your mortal associates will be rotting in the earth, whereas, barring amputation or radical shifts in fashion, you will still be putting your pants on one leg at a time. All these allies and friends you have made will be withered and gone, while you are just beginning to come into your full strength. You look like a mortal, Dresden. But make no mistake. You aren't one."
"Oh, shut up."
"You are different. You are a freak. In a city of millions, you are all but alone."
"Which explains my dating life," I said, but I couldn't put much zing in the words. Something in my throat felt heavy.
Nicodemus had the valet pour coffee for Deirdre, but he spooned sugar into it himself. "You're afraid, but you don't have to be. You're above them, Dresden. There's an entire world waiting for you. Uncounted paths you could take. Allies who would stand with you over the years. Who would accept you instead of scorning you. You could discover what happened to your parents. Avenge them. Find your family. Find a place where you truly belonged."
He'd chosen to use words that struck hard on the oldest wound in me, a child's pain that had never fully healed. It hurt to hear those words. It stirred up a senseless old hope, a yearning. It made me feel lost. Empty.
Alone.
"Harry," Nicodemus said, his voice almost compassionate. "I used to be much as you are now. You are trapped. You are lying to yourself. You pretend to be like any other mortal because you are too terrified to admit that you aren't."
I didn't have an answer for that. The silver coin gleamed, still offered out to me.
Nicodemus laid one hand on the knife again. "I'm afraid I must ask you for an immediate decision."
Deirdre looked at the knife and then at me, eyes hot. She licked some spilled sugar off the rim of her coffee cup, and remained silent.
What if I did take the coin? If Nicodemus was on the level, I could at least live to fight another day. I had no doubts that Nicodemus would kill me, as he had Gaston LaRouche, Francisca Garcia, and that poor bastard Butters had cut into. There was nothing stopping him, and with the water still running over me, I doubted that even my death curse would be at one hundred percent.
I couldn't stop myself from imagining what it would feel like to bleed to death, there under the cold water. A hot, burning line on my throat. Dizziness and cold. Weakness fading into warmth that became perfect, endless darkness. Death.
God help me, I didn't want to die.
But I'd seen the poor bastard Ursiel had enslaved and driven mad. What he'd suffered was worse than death. And chances were that if I took the coin, the demon that came with it might coerce or corrupt me into the same thing. I'm not a saint. I'm not even particularly sterling, morally speaking. I've had dark urges before. I've been fascinated by them. Attracted to them. And more than once, I've given in to them.
It was a weakness that the demon in the ancient coin could exploit. I wasn't immune to temptation. The demon, the Fallen, would drown me in it. It's what the Fallen do.
I made my decision.
Nicodemus watched me, eyes steady, his knife hand perfectly still.
"Lead us not into temptation," I said. "But deliver us from evil. Isn't that how it goes?"
Deirdre licked her lips. The goon shut the box and stepped back.
"Are you certain, Dresden?" Nicodemus said in a quiet voice. "This is your very last chance."
I slumped weakly. There didn't seem to be much of a point to bravado anymore. I'd made the call, and that was that. "I'm certain. Fuck off, Nick."
Nicodemus stared at me impassively for a moment. Then he stood up with the knife and said, "I suppose I've had enough breakfast."
Nicodemus walked over to me, his expression somewhat distracted. I realized with a chill that he looked like a man planning his activities for the day. To Nicodemus, I wasn't a person anymore. I was an item on his checklist, a note in his appointment book. He would feel no differently about cutting my throat than he would about putting down a check mark.
When he got within arm's reach, I couldn't stop myself from trying to get away from him. I thrashed at the ropes, hanging on to the desperate hope that one of them might break and give me a chance to fight, to run, to live. The ropes didn't break. I didn't get loose. Nicodemus watched me until I'd exhausted myself again.
Then he took a handful of my hair and pulled my chin up and back, twisting my head to my right. I tried to stop him, but I was immobilized and exhausted.
"Be still," he said. "I'll make it clean."
"Do you want the bowl, Father?" Deirdre asked.
Nicodemus's expression flickered with annoyance. His voice came out tight and impatient. "Where is my mind today? Porter, bring it to me."
The grey-haired valet opened the door and left the room.
A heartbeat later there was a wheezing grunt, and Porter flew back through the doorway and landed on his back. He let out a pained croak and curled into a fetal position.
Nicodemus sighed, turning. "Bother. What now?"
Nicodemus had looked bored when Anna Valmont emptied her gun into him. When I'd blasted a Nicodemus-shaped dent in the drywall of the hotel, he'd come through it without a ruffled hair. But when he saw the valet laying on the ground before the open door, Nicodemus's face went pale, his eyes widened, and he took a pair of quick steps to stand behind me, his knife at my throat. Even his shadow recoiled, rolling back away from the open door.
"The Jap," Nicodemus snarled. "Kill him."
There was a second of startled silence, and then the goons went for their guns. The one nearest the door didn't get his weapon out of its holster. Shiro, still in the outfit he'd worn at McAnnally's, came through the opening in a flash of black and white and red, his cane in his hand. He drove the end of the cane into Goon A's neck, and the thug dropped to the ground.
Goon B got his gun out and pointed it at Shiro. The old man bobbed to his left and then smoothly rolled right. The gun went off, and sparks flew up from two of the walls as the bullet ricocheted. Shiro drew Fidelacchius clear of its wooden sheath as he spun closer to the goon, the movement so fast that the sword looked like a blurred sheet of shining steel. Goon B's gun went flying through the air, his shooting hand still gripping it. The man stared at the stump at the end of his arm as blood gouted from it, and Shiro spun again, one heel rising to chin level. The kick broke something in the wounded goon's jaw, and the man collapsed to the damp floor.
Shiro had taken out three men in half as many seconds, and he hadn't stopped moving. Fidelacchius flashed again, and the chair beneath Deirdre collapsed, spilling her onto the floor. The old man promptly stepped on her wealth of dark hair, whirled the sword, and brought its tip down to rest against the back of Deirdre's neck.
The room became almost completely silent. Shiro kept his blade to Deirdre's neck, and Nicodemus did the same to mine. The little old man didn't look like the same person I'd talked to. Not that he had physically changed, so much as that the sheer presence of him was different---his features hard as stone, weathering the years only to grow stronger. When he had moved, it had been with a dancer's grace, speed, and skill. His eyes flashed with a silent strength that had been concealed before, and his hands and forearms were corded with muscle. The sword's blade gleamed red with blood and torchlight.
Nicodemus's shadow edged a bit farther back from the old man.
I think the freezing water was blending in with my sudden surge of hope and making me a little loopy. I found myself drunkenly singing, "Speed of lightning! Roar of thunder! Fighting all who rob or plunder! Underdog!"
"Be quiet," Nicodemus said.
"You sure?" I asked. "'Cause I could do Mighty Mouse if you'd rather. Underdog had this whole substance-use issue anyway." Nicodemus pressed the knife a bit harder, but my mouth was on autopilot. "That looked fast. I mean, I'm not much of a fencer, but that old man looked amazingly quick to me. Did he look that quick to you? Bet that sword could go right through you and you wouldn't even realize it until your face fell on your feet."
I heard Nicodemus's teeth grind.
"Harry," Shiro said quietly. "Please."
I shut up, and stood there with a knife at my throat, shivering, aching, and hoping.
"The wizard is mine," Nicodemus said. "He's through. You know that. He chose to be a part of this."
"Yes," Shiro said.
"You cannot take him from me."
Shiro glanced pointedly at the goons lying on the floor, and then at the captive he held pinned down. "Maybe yes. Maybe no."
"Take your chances with it and the wizard dies. You've no claim of redemption here."
Shiro was quiet for a moment. "Then we trade."
Nicodemus laughed. "My daughter for the wizard? No. I've plans for him, and his death will serve me as well now as later. Harm her, and I kill him now."
Shiro regarded the Denarian steadily. "I did not mean your daughter."
I suddenly got a sick feeling in my stomach.
I almost heard Nicodemus's smile. "Very clever, old man. You knew I'd not pass the opportunity by."
"I know you," Shiro said.
"Then you should know that your offer isn't enough," Nicodemus said. "Not by half."
Shiro's face did not show any surprise. "Name it."
Nicodemus's voice dropped lower. "Swear to me that you will make no effort to escape. That you will summon no aid. That you will not release yourself quietly."
"And let you keep me for years? No. But I will give you this day. Twenty-four hours. It is enough."
I shook my head at Shiro. "Don't do this. I knew what I was doing. Michael will need your---"
Nicodemus delivered a swift jab to my right kidney and I lost my breath. "Be silent," he said. He focused his attention on Shiro and inclined his head slowly. "Twenty-four hours. Agreed."
Shiro mirrored the gesture. "Now. Let him go."
"Very well," Nicodemus said. "As soon as you release my daughter and lay down your sword, the wizard will go free. I swear it."
The old knight only smiled. "I know the value of your promises. And you know the value of mine."
I felt an eager tension in my captor. He leaned forward and said, "Swear it."
"I do," Shiro said. And as he did, he placed his palm lightly along the base of his sword's blade. He lifted it to show a straight cut on his hand, already dribbling blood. "Set him free. I will take his place as you demand."
Nicodemus's shadow writhed and boiled on the ground at my feet, bits of it lashing hungrily toward Shiro. The Denarian let out a harsh laugh, and the knife left my neck. He made a couple of quick movements, cutting the rope holding my wrists.
Without the support of my bonds, I fell. My body screamed in pain. It hurt so much that I didn't notice him cutting my feet free until it was done. I didn't make any noise. Partly because I was too proud to let Nicodemus know how bad I felt. Partly because I didn't have enough breath to whimper anyway.
"Harry," Shiro said. "Get up."
I tried. My legs and feet were numb.
Shiro's voice changed, carrying a quiet note of authority and command. "Get up."
I did it, barely. The wound on my leg felt hot and painful, and the muscle around it twitched and clenched involuntarily.
"Foolishness," Nicodemus commented.
"Courage," Shiro said. "Harry, come over here. Get behind me."
I managed to lurch to Shiro's side. The old man never looked away from Nicodemus. My head spun a bit and I almost lost my balance. My legs felt like dead wood from the knees down, and my back had started cramping. I ground my teeth and said, "I don't know how far I can walk."
"You must," Shiro said. He knelt down by Deirdre, rested his knee on her spine, and wrapped one arm around her throat. She began to move, but the old man applied pressure, and Deirdre went still again with a whimper of discomfort. That done, Shiro gave Fidelacchius a flick, and the beads of blood upon it sprinkled against one wall. He sheathed the blade in a liquid movement, drew the cane-sheath from his belt, and then passed the hilt of the sword back toward me. "Take it."
"Uh," I said. "I don't have a real good record with handling these things."
"Take it."
"Michael and Sanya might not be too happy with me if I do."
Shiro was quiet for a moment before he said, "They will understand. Take it now."
I swallowed and did. The wooden hilt of the sword felt too warm for the room, and I could sense a buzz of energy emanating from it in rippling waves. I made sure I had a good grip on it.
Shiro said quietly, "They will come for you. Go. Second right. Ladder up."
Nicodemus watched me as I fell back through the doorway into the dimness of the hall beyond it. I stared at Shiro for a moment. He knelt on the floor, still holding Deirdre's neck at the breaking point, his eyes on Nicodemus. From the back, I could see the wrinkled skin on the back of his neck, the age spots on his freshly shaved scalp. Nicodemus's shadow had grown to the size of a movie screen, and it covered the back wall and part of the floor, twitching and writhing slowly closer to Shiro.
I turned and headed down the tunnel as quickly as I could. Behind me, I heard Nicodemus say, "Keep your word, Japan. Release my daughter."
I looked back. Shiro released the girl and stood up. She flung herself away from him, and as she did Nicodemus's shadow rolled forward like an ocean wave and crashed over the old Knight. One moment, he was there. The next, the room where he stood went totally black, filled with the rasping, seething mass of Nicodemus's demon shadow.
"Kill the wizard," Nicodemus snarled. "Get the sword."
Deirdre let out wild, primal scream from somewhere inside the darkness. I heard ripping, tearing sounds. I heard popping noises that might have been bones breaking or joints being dislocated. Then I heard the steely, slithery rasp of Deirdre's hairdo, and half a dozen metallic strands whipped toward me from the darkness.
I shuffled back, and the blades fell short of me. I turned around and started hobbling away. I didn't want to leave Shiro there, but if I'd stayed, I only would have died with him. My shame dug at me like a knife.
More blades emerged from the dark, presumably while Deirdre was still transforming into her demonic aspect. It couldn't be long before she finished and came flashing down the hallway after me. If I couldn't get myself clear, I'd be done for.
So once again I ran like hell. And hated myself for doing it.
The shrieks died off more quickly than I would have thought, and I did my best to keep moving in a straight line. It was mostly dark. I was aware of a couple of doorways passing on my left, and I stumbled along until I found the second one on my right. I took it, and found a ladder that led up some kind of pipe or shaft, with a light shining down from about seven hundred miles above.
I got a couple of rungs off the floor when something hit me at knee level, grabbed my legs, and twisted. I fell off the ladder, the cane clattering onto the floor. I had a brief impression of a man's face, and then my attacker let out a wordless snarl and hit me hard on my left eye.
I ducked and rolled with the punch. The good news was that it didn't tear my face off or anything, which meant that the person throwing the punch was probably another mortal. The bad news was that he was built more heavily than me and probably had a lot more muscle. He piled atop me, trying to grasp my throat.
I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head as much as I could, and kept him from squeezing my head off. He threw another punch at me, but it's tough to throw a good punch when you're rolling around on the floor in the dark. He missed, and I started fighting dirty. I reached up and raked my nails across his eyes. I got one of them and he yelled, flinching away.
I managed to wriggle out from under him, giving him a hard shove that added to the momentum of the flinch. He fell, rolled, and started to rise.
I kicked him in the head with my rented formal shoes. My shoe went flying off, which I was pretty sure never happened to James Bond. The goon faltered, wobbling, so I kicked him with the other foot. He was tough. He started coming back from that one too. I bent over and slammed my fist down sledgehammer style at the back of his neck, several times. I was shouting as I did it, and the edges of my vision burned with a film of red.
The rabbit punches dropped him, and he fell limp to the ground.
"Son of a bitch." I panted, feeling around until I found Shiro's cane. "I didn't get my ass kicked."
"Good day to get that lottery ticket," Susan said. She came down the last several feet of ladder, dressed again in the black leather pants, the dark coat. She checked to make sure the goon wasn't faking it. Where's Shiro?"
I shook my head. "He isn't coming."
Susan took a breath and then nodded. "Can you climb?"
"Think so," I said, eyeing the ladder. I held out the cane. "Take this for me?"
Susan reached out to take the blade. There was a flicker of silver static and she hissed, jerking her fingers back. "What the hell is that?"
"Magic sword."
"Well, it sucks," Susan said. "Go ahead; I'll come up behind you."
I fumbled around with the cane, slipping it as best I could through the tux's cummerbund. I started up the ladder and once again Deirdre shrieked, this time her voice wholly demonic, echoing weirdly through the stone corridors.
"Wasn't that---" Susan asked, shaking her fingers.
"Yeah. Climb," I said. "Climb fast."
The action and adrenaline had done something to thaw me out, or at least it felt that way. My fingers tingled, but they were functional, and I gained speed as I climbed. "How'd you find me?"
"Shiro," Susan responded. "We went to Michael's house for help. He seemed to know where to go. Like instinct."
"I saw Michael do that once," I said, panting. "He told me he knew how to find where he was needed. How long is this freaking ladder?"
"Another twenty or thirty feet," Susan said. "Comes out in the basement of an empty building south of the Loop. Martin's waiting with the car."
"Why did that guy talk about a Fellowship when he saw you back at the auction?" I asked. "What Fellowship?"
"It's a long story."
"Condense it."
"Later."
"But---"
I didn't get to protest any further, because I slipped and nearly fell when I reached the top of the ladder. I recovered my balance and scrambled up into a completely dark room. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Susan outlined, a dim shadow against a faint green-gold light.
"What's that light?" I asked.
"Eyes," Susan said. Her voice was a little thready. "Coming up. Move over."
I did. Susan slid onto the floor as the green-gold light grew brighter, and I heard the steely rasping sound of Deirdre's hair moving below. Susan turned and drew something from her jacket pocket. There was a clinking, clicking sound. Then she whispered, "One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four, one thousand," and dropped something down the ladder.
She turned to me, and I felt her fingers cover my eyes, pushing me away from the ladder. I got it then, and leaned away from the shaft the ladder had come up just before there was a hellishly loud noise and a flash of light, scarlet through Susan's fingertips.
My ears rang and my balance wavered. Susan helped me to my feet and started moving out through the darkness, her steps swift and certain. From the shaft, I could dimly hear the demon-girl shrieking in fury. I asked, "Was that a grenade?"
"Just a stunner," Susan said. "Lots of light and noise."
"And you had it in your pocket," I said.
"No. Martin did. I borrowed it."
I tripped over something faintly yielding in the darkness, a limp form. "Whoa, what is that?"
"I don't know. Some kind of guard animal. Shiro killed it."
My next step squished in something damp and faintly warm that soaked through my sock. "Perfect."
Susan slammed a door open onto nighttime Chicago, and I could see again. We left the building behind us and went down a flight of concrete steps to the sidewalk. I didn't recognize the neighborhood offhand, but it wasn't a good one. It had that wary, hard-core feel that made The Jungle seem like Mary Poppins by comparison. There was dim light in the sky---evidently dawn was not far away.
Susan looked up and down the street and cursed quietly. "Where is he?"
I turned and looked at Susan. The dark swirls and spikes of her tattoo still stood out dark against her skin. Her face looked leaner than I remembered.
Another shrieking scream came from inside the building. "This is a really bad time for him to be late," I said.
"I know," she said, flexing her fingers. "Harry, I don't know if I can handle that demon bitch if she comes at us again." She looked down at her own hand, where the dark tattoos swirled and curved. "I'm almost out."
"Out?" I asked. "Of what?"
Her lip lifted into a quiet snarl and she swept dark eyes up and down the street. "Control."
"Ooooookay," I said. "We can't just stand here. We need to move."
Just then, an engine growled, and a dark green rental sedan came screeching around the corner of the block. It swerved across to the wrong side of the street and came up on the curb before sliding to a stop.
Martin threw open the back door. There was a cut on his left temple and a streak of blood had dried dark on his jaw. Tattoos like Susan's, but thicker, framed one eye and the left side of his face. "They're behind me," he said. "Hurry."
He didn't have to tell either of us twice. Susan shoved me into the back of the car and piled in after me. Martin had the car moving again before she'd shut the door, and I looked back to see another sedan after us. Before we'd gone a block, a second car slid in behind the first, and the two accelerated, coming after us.
"Dammit," Martin said, glaring at his rearview mirror. "What did you do to these people, Dresden?"
"I turned down their recruiting officer," I said.
Martin nodded, and snapped the car around a corner. "I'd say they don't handle rejection well. Where's the old man?"
"Gone."
He exhaled through his nose. "These idiots are going to land us all in jail if this keeps up. How bad do they want you?"
"More than most."
Martin nodded. "Do you have a safe house?"
"My place. I've got some emergency wards I can set off. They could keep out a mail-order record club." I bobbed my eyebrows at Susan. "For a while, anyway."
Martin juked the car around another corner. "It isn't far. You can jump out. We'll draw them off."
"He can't," Susan objected. "He can barely move. He's been hurt, and he could go into shock. He isn't like us, Martin."
Martin frowned. "What did you have in mind?"
"I'll go with him."
He stared up at the rearview mirror for a moment, at Susan. "It's a bad idea."
"I know."
"It's dangerous."
"I know," she said, voice tight. "There's no choice, and no time to argue."
Martin turned his eyes back to the road and said, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
"God be with you both, then. Sixty seconds."
"Wait a minute," I said. "What are you both---"
Martin screeched around another corner and roared ahead at top speed. I bounced off the door on my side and flattened my cheek against the window. I recognized my neighborhood as I did. I glanced at the speedometer of the car and wished I hadn't.
Susan reached across me to open the door and said, "We get out here."
I stared at her and then motioned vaguely at the door.
She met my eyes and that same hard, delighted smile spread over her lips. "Trust me. This is kid stuff."
"Cartoons are kid stuff. Petting zoos are kid stuff. Jumping out of a car is insane."
"You did it before," she accused me. "The lycanthropes."
"That was different."
"Yes. You left me in the car." Susan crawled across my lap, which appreciated her. Especially in the tight leather pants. My eyes agreed with my lap wholeheartedly. Especially about the tight leather pants. Susan then crouched, one foot on the floorboards, one hand on the door, and offered her other hand to me. "Come on."
Susan had changed in the last year. Or maybe she hadn't. She had always been good at what she did. She'd just altered her focus to something other than reporting. She could take on demonic murderers in hand-to-hand combat now, rip home appliances from the wall and throw them with one hand, and use grenades in the dark. 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.
As we went out the door, Susan pulled me hard against her. On general policy, I approved. She got one arm around the back of my head, shielding the base of my skull and the top of my neck. We hit the ground with Susan on the bottom, bounced up a bit, rolling, and hit the ground again. The impacts were jolting, but I was on the bottom only once. The rest of the time, the impact was something I felt only through my contact with Susan.
We wound up on the tiny patch of grass two doors down from my boardinghouse, in front of some cheap converted apartments. Several seconds later, the two pursuing cars went roaring by after Martin and his rented sedan. I kept my head down until they had passed, and then looked at Susan.
I was on top. Susan panted quietly beneath me. One of her legs was bent at the knee, half holding my thigh between hers. Her dark eyes glittered, and I felt her hips twitch in the kind of motion that brought a number of evenings (and mornings, and afternoons, and late nights) to mind.
I wanted to kiss her. A lot. I held off. "You all right?" I asked.
"You never complained," she answered. Her voice was a little breathless. "Nothing too bad. You? Anything hurt?"
"My ego," I said. "You're embarrassing me with the superstrength and whatnot." I rose, took her hand, and drew her to her feet. "How's a guy supposed to assert his masculinity?"
"You're a big boy. You'll think of something."
I looked around and nodded. "I think we'd better get off the street, pronto."
"Is running and hiding assertively masculine?" We started for my apartment. "The part where we don't die is."
She nodded. "That's practical, but I'm not sure it's masculine."
"Shut up."
"There you go," Susan said.
We went only a couple of steps before I felt the spell coming. It started as a low shiver on the back of my neck, and my eyes twitched almost of their own accord up to the roof of the apartment house we were walking by. I saw a couple of bricks from one of the chimneys fall free of their mortar. I grabbed Susan's collar and sidestepped, pulling her with me. The bricks shattered into shards and red powder on the sidewalk a step from Susan's feet.
Susan tensed and looked up. "What was that?"
"An entropy curse," I muttered.
"A what?"
I looked around, struggling to sense where the next surge of magic might come from. "Sort of a bad-luck spell. A really, really bad-luck spell. Preferred magic for getting rid of someone who annoys you."
"Who is doing it?"
"My guess? Snakeboy. He seems to have some talent, and he could have gotten some of my blood to target me with." I felt another gathering surge of energy to my right, and my eyes went to the power lines running overhead. "Oh, hell. Run."
Susan and I broke into a sprint. As we did, I heard one of the power lines snap, cables squealing. The longer end of loose cable flew toward us, trailing a cloud of blue and white sparks. It hit the ground somewhere behind us.
My clothes hadn't yet dried out from Nicodemus's guest accommodations. If it had been raining, the downed power line might have killed me. As it was, I felt a vibrating, clenching tingle wash over my legs. I almost fell, but managed to get a few more paces away from the sputtering line and regained control of my legs.
I felt another magical strike building, bringing a gust of wind with it, but before I could zero in on it Susan shouldered me to one side. I fell to the ground just as I heard a loud cracking sound. A branch as thick as my thigh slammed to the ground. I looked up to see a strip of bare white bark showing along the trunk of the old tree behind my boardinghouse.
Susan helped drag me to my feet and we ran the rest of the way to my apartment door. Even as we did, I felt another strike building, stronger than the last. I fumbled open the lock while thunder rumbled through the predawn grey, and we got inside.
I could still feel the curse growing and reaching for me. It was a strong one, and I wasn't sure that either my apartment's threshold or my standard wards would be able to keep it out. I slammed the door closed behind me, locked it. The room fell into darkness as I reached for the basket beside the door. There was a waxy lump the size of my fist in it, and I lifted it and slammed it hard against the door, across the crack between the door and the jamb. I found the wick standing out from the wax, focused on it, and drew in my will. I murmured, "Flickum bicus," and released the magic, and the wick suddenly glowed with a pure white flame.
Around the room at precisely the same moment, two dozen other candles of white and butter-colored wax also lit with a gentle flicker of white fire. As they did, I felt a sudden thrum of my own magic, prepared months before, raise into a rampart around my home. The curse pulsed again, somewhere outside, and hammered against the barrier, but my protection held. The malevolent energy shattered against it.
"Boo-ya, snakeboy," I muttered, letting out a tense breath. "Stick that in your scaly ass and smoke it."
"The action-hero oneliner doesn't count if you mix metaphors," Susan said, panting.
"Looks like no Harry Dresden action figures for me," I answered.
"Did you get him?"
"Slammed the door on his curse," I answered. "We should be safe for a while."
Susan looked around her at all the lit candles, getting her breath back. I saw her expression soften, and turn a little sad. We'd eaten a lot of dinners here, by candlelight. We'd done a lot of things that way. I studied her features while she stood lost in thought. The tattoos changed her, I decided. They changed the proportions and lines of her face. They lent her features a sort of exotic remoteness, an alien beauty.
"Thirsty?" I asked. She shot me a look with a hint of frustration in it. I lifted my hands. "Sorry. I didn't think."
She nodded, turning a little away from me. "I know. Sorry."
"Coke?"
"Yeah."
I limped to the icebox, which was going to need more ice before long. I didn't have the leftover energy to freeze the water again by magic. I grabbed two cans of Coca-Cola, opened them both, and took one to Susan. She took a long guzzle and I joined her.
"You're limping," she said when she was done.
I looked down at my feet. "Only one shoe. It makes me lopsided."
"You're hurt," she said. Her eyes were fastened on my leg. "Bleeding."
"It isn't too bad. I'll clean it up in a minute."
Susan's eyes never wavered, but they got darker. Her voice grew quieter. "Do you need help?"
I turned a bit warily so that she couldn't see the injured leg. She shivered and made an evident effort to look away. The tattoos on her face were lighter now---not fainter, but changing in colors. "I'm sorry. Harry, I'm sorry, but I'd better go."
"You can't," I said.
Her voice remained very quiet, very toneless. "You don't get it. I'll explain everything to you in a little while. I promise. But I have to leave."
I cleared my throat. "Um. No, you don't get it. You can't. Cannot. Literally."
"What?"
"The defenses I put up have two sides and they don't have an off switch. We literally, physically can't leave until they go down."
Susan looked up at me and then folded her arms, staring at her Coke can. "Crud," she said. "How long?"
I shook my head. "I built them to run for about eight hours. Sunrise is going to degrade it a little though. Maybe four hours, five at the most."
"Five hours," she said under her breath. "Oh, God."
"What's wrong?"
She waved a hand vaguely. "I've been...been using some of the power. To be faster. Stronger. If I'm calm, it doesn't get stirred up. But I haven't been calm. It's built up inside of me. Water on a dam. It wants to break free, to get loose."
I licked my lips. If Susan lost control of herself, there was no place to run. "What can I do to help?"
She shook her head, refusing to look up at me. "I don't know. Let me have some quiet. Try to relax." Something cold and hungry flickered in her eyes. "Get your leg cleaned up. I can smell it. It's...distracting."
"See if you can build the fire," I said, and slipped into my room, closing the door behind me. I went into the bathroom and closed that door too. My first-aid kit had its own spot on one of the shelves. I downed a couple of Tylenol, slipped out of the remains of my rented tux, and cleaned up the cut on my leg. It was a shallow cut, but a good four inches long, and it had bled messily. I used disinfectant soap with cold water to wash it out, then slathered it in an antibacterial gel before laying several plastic bandages over the injury, to hold it closed. It didn't hurt. Or at least I didn't pick it out from the background of aches and pains my body was telling me about.
Shivering again, I climbed into some sweats, a T-shirt, and a flannel bathrobe. I looked around in my closet, at a couple of the other things I'd made for a rainy day. I took one of the potions I'd brewed, the ones to counter the venom of the Red Court, and put it in my pocket. I missed my shield bracelet.
I opened the door to the living room and Susan was standing six inches away, her eyes black with no white to them, the designs on her skin flushed a dark maroon.
"I can still smell your blood," she whispered. "I think you need to find a way to hold me back, Harry. And you need to do it now."
I didn't have much left in me in the way of magic. I wouldn't until I got a chance to rest and recuperate from what Nicodemus had done to me. I might have been able to manage a spell that would hold a normal person, but not a hungry vampire. And that was what Susan was. She'd gained strength in more senses than the merely physical, and that never happened without granting a certain amount of magical defense, even if in nothing but the naked will to fight. Snakeboy's serpent-cloud had been one of the nastier spells I'd seen, and it had only slowed Susan down.
If she came at me, and it looked like she might, I wouldn't be able to stop her.
My motto, after the past couple of years, was to be prepared. I had something that I knew could restrain her---assuming I could get past her and to the drawer where I kept it.
"Susan," I said quietly. "Susan, I need you to stay with me. Talk to me."
"Don't want to talk," she said. Her eyelids lowered and she inhaled slowly. "I don't want it to smell so good. Your blood. Your fear. But it does."
"The Fellowship," I said. I struggled to rein in my emotions. For her sake, I couldn't afford to feel afraid. I edged a little toward her. "Let's sit down. You can tell me about the Fellowship."
For a second, I thought she wouldn't give way, but she did. "Fellowship," she said. "The Fellowship of Saint Giles."
"Saint Giles," I said. "The patron of lepers."
"And other outcasts. Like me. They're all like me."
"You mean infected?"
"Infected. Half-turned. Half-human. Half-dead. There are a lot of ways to say it."
"Uh-huh," I said. "So what's their deal?"
"The Fellowship tries to help people the Red Court has harmed. Work against the Red Court. Expose them whenever they can."
"Find a cure?"
"There is no cure."
I put my hand on her arm and guided her toward my couch. She moved with a dreamy deliberation. "So the tattoos are what? Your membership card?"
"A binding," she said. "A spell cut into my skin. To help me hold the darkness inside. To warn me when it is rising."
"What do you mean, warn you?"
She looked down at her design-covered hand, then showed it to me. The tattoos there and on her face were slowly growing brighter, and had turned a shade of medium scarlet. "To warn me when I'm about to lose control. Red, red, red. Danger, danger, danger."
The first night she'd arrived, when she'd been tussling with something outside, she'd stayed in the shadows for the first several moments inside, her face turned away. She'd been hiding the tattoos. "Here," I said quietly. "Sit down."
She sat on the couch and met my eyes. "Harry," she whispered. "It hurts. It hurts to fight it. I'm tired of holding on. I don't know how long I can."
I knelt down to be on eye level with her. "Do you trust me?"
"With my heart. With my life."
"Close your eyes," I said.
She did.
I got up and walked slowly to the kitchen drawer. I didn't move quickly. You don't move quickly away from something that is thinking about making you food. It sets them off. Whatever had been placed inside her was growing---I could feel that, see it, hear it in her voice.
I was in danger. But it didn't matter, because so was she.
I usually keep a gun in the kitchen drawer. At the time, I had a gun and a short length of silver-and-white rope in there. I picked up the rope and walked back over to her.
"Susan," I said quietly. "Give me your hands."
She opened her eyes and looked at the soft, fine rope. "That won't hold me."
"I made it in case an ogre I pissed off came visiting. Give me your hands."
She was silent for a moment. Then she shrugged out of her jacket, and held her hands out, wrists up.
I tossed the rope at her and whispered, "Manacus."
I'd enchanted the rope six months before, but I'd done it right. It took barely a whisper of power to set the rope into motion. It whipped into the air, silver threads flashing, and bound itself around her wrists in neat loops.
Susan reacted instantly, going completely tense. I saw her set herself and strain against the ropes. I waited, watching for a full half a minute before she started shaking and stopped trying to break them. She let out a shaking breath, her head bowed, hair fallen around her face. I started to move toward her, when she stood up, legs spread enough to brace herself firmly, and tried again, lifting her arms.
I licked my lips, watching. I didn't think she'd break the ropes, but I'd underestimated people before. Her face, her too-black eyes scared me. She strained against the ropes again, the movement drawing her shirt up, showing me her smooth brown stomach, the winding swirls and barbs of her tattoo red and stark against her skin. There were dark bruises over her ribs, and patches of skin that had been scraped raw. She hadn't come away from our tumble from Martin's car without being hurt, after all.
After a minute more, she hissed out a breath and sat down, hair a tumbled mess around her face. I could feel her eyes on me more than I could actually see them. They didn't feel like Susan's eyes anymore. The tattoos stood out against her skin, red as blood. I backed off, again deliberately, calmly, and got the first aid kit out of the bathroom.
When I came back out, she flung herself at me in blinding speed and utter silence. I'd been expecting as much, and snapped, "Forzare!"
The silver rope flashed with a glitter of blue light and darted toward the ceiling. Her wrists went with it and she was pulled completely from the floor. Her feet swung up, and she twisted, again in silence, fighting the bonds on her. She didn't get free, and I let her swing there until her legs had settled again, her toes barely touching the floor.
She let out a quiet sob and whispered, "I'm sorry. Harry, I can't stop it."
"It's okay. I've got you." I stepped closer to examine the injuries on her midsection and winced. "God. You got torn up."
"I hate this. I'm so sorry."
It hurt me to hear her voice. There was enough pain in it for both of us. "Shhhh," I said. "Let me take care of you."
She fell quiet then, though I could sense flashes of that feral hunger in her. I got a bowl of water, a cloth, and set to cleaning up the scrapes as best I could. She quivered once in a while. Once she let out a pained groan. The bruises went all the way up her back, and she had another patch of abraded skin on her neck. I put my hand on her head and pushed forward. She bowed her head and let it hang forward while I tended to the wound.
While I did, the quality of the tension changed. I could smell her hair, her skin, their scent like candle smoke and cinnamon. I became suddenly, intensely aware of the curve of her back, her hips. She leaned back a little toward me, bringing her body into contact with mine, the heat of her something that could have singed me. Her breathing changed, growing faster, heavier. She turned her head, enough to look at me over her shoulder. Her eyes burned, and her tongue flickered over her lips.
"Need you," she whispered.
I swallowed. "Susan. I think maybe that---"
"Don't think," she said. Her hips brushed against the front of my sweats, and I was abruptly so hard that it hurt. "Don't think. Touch me."
Somewhere, I knew it wasn't the best of ideas. But I laid the fingers of one hand on the curve of her waist, wrapping them slowly to her heated skin. Soft smoothness caressed my hand. There was a pleasure in it, a primal, possessive pleasure in touching her. I ran my palm and spread fingers over her flank, her belly, in slow and light circles. She arched at the caress, her eyes closing, and whispered, "Yes," over and over again. "Yes."
I let the washcloth fall from my other hand and reached up to touch her hair. More softness, rich texture, dark hairs gliding between my fingers. I felt a second of gathering tension in her and then she whipped her head around, teeth bared, reaching for my hand. I should have drawn my hand away. Instead, I tightened my fingers in her hair and pulled back, forcing her chin up and keeping her from reaching me.
I expected anger from her, but instead her body became pliant again, moving against me with a more willing abandon. A languid smile spread over her lips, and faded away to an openmouthed gasp as I slid my other hand up, beneath the cotton shirt, and ran my fingertips lightly over her breasts. She gasped, and at the sound all of my recent worry, fear, anger, pain---it all faded away, burned to ash by a sudden fire of raw need. To feel her under my hand again, to have the scent of her filling my head---I'd dreamed of it on too many cold and lonely nights.
It wasn't the smart thing to do. It was the only thing.
I slid both hands around her body, teasing her breasts, loving the way their tips hardened to rounded points beneath my fingers. She tried to turn on me again, but I jerked her back hard against me, my mouth pressing against the side of her throat, keeping her from turning her head. It only excited her more.
"Need," she whispered, panting. "Need you. Don't stop."
I wasn't sure I could have. I couldn't get enough of the taste of her onto my lips. Impatient, I shoved her shirt up, over her breasts, to the top of her back, and spent a slow and delicious moment following the line of her spine with my lips and tongue, tasting her skin, testing its texture with my teeth. Some part of me struggled to remember to be gentle. Another part didn't give a damn. Feel. Taste. Indulge.
My teeth left small marks here and there on her skin, and I remember thinking that they looked intriguing beside the curling scarlet designs that swept in a spiral around her body. The dark leather of her pants blocked my mouth, a sudden ugliness beneath my lips, and I straightened with a snarl to get it out of my way.
For the record, tight leather pants don't come off easily. Berserk lust is likely not the best frame of mind for removing them. I didn't let that stop me. She gasped when I started taking them off, started squirming and wriggling, trying to help me. Mostly, it just drove me insane as she brushed against me, as I watched her move in sinuous, delicious need. Her panting gasps all had a quiet vocalization to them now, a sound that both spoke of her need and urged me on.
I got the pants down over her hips. There wasn't anything else beneath them. I shivered and paused to spend another moment savoring her with my hands, my mouth, placing delicate kisses around the scrapes, biting at unmarred skin to elicit more desperate movements, louder moans. The scent of her was driving me insane.
"Now," she whispered, a frenzied edge to her voice. "Now."
But I didn't hurry. I don't know how long I stood there, kissing, touching, driving her cries into higher and more desperate pitches. All I knew was that something I'd wanted, needed, longed for had come to me again. At that moment there was nothing on earth, in heaven or hell, that meant more to me.
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes black and burning with hunger. She tried for my hand again, driven beyond words now. I had to control her head again, fingers knotted into her hair while my free hand got the interfering clothes out of the way. She let out mewling sounds of raw need, until I pulled her hips back against me, feeling my way, and in a rush of fire and silk felt my hardness press into her.
Her eyes flew open wide, out of focus, and she cried out, moving against me, meeting my motion with her own. I had a fleeting thought of slowing down. I didn't. Neither of us wanted that. I took her that way, my mouth on her ear, her throat, one hand in her hair, her hands stretched out over her, body straining back to meet mine.
God, she was beautiful.
She screamed and started shuddering, and it was all I could do not to explode. I fought away the inevitable for a little time more. 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. Susan lay on her stomach beneath me, her still-bound arms laid out above her head. Not much time had passed. Both of us were still short of breath. I shivered, and felt myself still inside her. I didn't remember releasing the spell that held the bonds up to the ceiling, but I must have done it. I moved my head to kiss her shoulder, her cheek, very softly.
Her eyes blinked slowly open, human again, though her pupils were dilated until they all but hid the dark brown of her irises. She didn't focus them. She smiled and made a soft sound, somewhere between a moan and a cat's purr. I stared at her for a moment, until I realized that the designs on her face had gone dark again, and had begun to fade away. As I watched over the next few moments, they vanished completely.
"I love you," she whispered.
"I love you."
"Wanted that."
"Me too," I said.
"Dangerous. Harry, you could have been hurt. I might have---"
I leaned down and kissed the corner of her mouth, silencing her. "You didn't. It's okay."
She shivered, but nodded. "So tired."
I felt like nothing more than dropping off to sleep, but instead I got to my feet. Susan let out a soft sound, half pleasure and half protest. I gathered her up and put her on the couch. I touched the rope, willing it to release her, and it slid away from her skin, coiling itself into neat loops in my hand. I pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and folded it over her. "Sleep," I said. "Get some rest."
"You should---"
"I will. Promise. But...I don't think it would be a good idea to go to sleep near you."
Susan nodded wearily. "You're right. I'm sorry."
"It's okay," I said.
"Should call Martin."
"The phone won't call out," I said. "Not until the defenses go down."
I didn't think her voice sounded particularly disappointed as she snuggled down a bit more onto my couch. "Oh," she said. "We'll have to wait it out then."
"Yeah," I said. I stroked her hair. "Susan---"
She touched my hand with hers, and closed her eyes. "It's all right. I told you, I'd never be able to separate the hungers with you. It...it was a release. Took some of the pressure off me. I wanted it. Needed it."
"Did I hurt you?"
She made a purring sound without opening her eyes. "Maybe a little. I didn't mind."
I shivered and said, "You're okay?"
She nodded slowly. "As I can be. Get some rest, Harry."
"Yeah," I said. I touched her hair again, and then shuffled into my bedroom. I didn't shut the door. I put my pillows at the foot of my bed, so that I could see the couch when I lay down. I watched her face, graced by pale candlelight, until my eyes closed.
She was so lovely.
I wished that she were with me.
I opened my eyes a while later, and saw Susan standing in the living room, her eyes closed. She was crouched, her hands held before her as if grasping an invisible basketball. As I watched, she moved, arms and legs gliding through gentle, circular motions. Tai chi. It was a meditative form of exercise that had originally come from martial arts. Lots of people who practiced tai chi didn't realize that the movements they followed were beautiful, slow-motion renditions of bone-breaking throws and joint locks.
I had a feeling Susan knew. She wore her T-shirt and a pair of my running shorts. She moved with the graceful simplicity of a natural talent honed by training.
A turn showed me her face, her expression set in peaceful concentration. I spent a minute watching her in silence, cataloging my own aches and pains.
She suddenly smiled, without opening her eyes, and said, "Don't start drooling, Harry."
"My house. I can drool as much as I want."
"What was that rope you used?" she asked, still going through her routine. "I've broken handcuffs before. Magic?"
Shoptalk. I had hoped for some other kind of discussion. Or maybe I'd been nervous about it. Work talk held a certain appeal for me, too. It was safe. "Faerie make," I said. "Has hair from a unicorn's mane woven through it."
"Really?"
I shrugged. "That's what Fix said. I imagine he knows."
"Would be handy to have around if the Denarians showed up again, don't you think?"
"Not unless they came here," I told her. "It's set to this place. Take it out of here and it wouldn't work."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not that good yet," I said. "It's easy to make something that works at home. Takes a lot more know-how than I have to take an enchantment on the road." I got out of bed and got moving. The clock said that it wasn't yet ten in the morning. I hopped in and out of the shower, dressed, slapped a comb through my hair, and decided that the rakish, unshaven look was in.
By the time I got back out into the living room, Susan was dressed in the leather pants again and only four or five candles were still lit. The defensive barriers were winding down. "What happened after Martin took off from the hotel?" I asked.
Susan slouched into a chair. "I tried to get him to stop. He wouldn't. We fought about it and he put a gun in my face."
I choked. "He what?"
"To be fair, I wasn't being very rational."
"Hell's bells."
"Martin didn't want to, but I convinced him to go to Michael's place. I figured if anyone could get you out of a mess with the Denarians it would be him."
"Seems reasonable to me," I said. I debated between coffee and cola. The Coke won by virtue of convenience. Susan nodded at me before I could get the question out of my mouth, and I got her one too. "What about Anna Valmont?"
"She was in shock. Charity put her to bed."
"Did you call the police?"
Susan shook her head. "I thought she might have known something that would help. We wouldn't be able to find out what it was if she was angry and locked away."
"What did Michael have to say about it?"
"He wasn't there," Susan said. "Shiro was. Charity said that Michael and someone named Sanya hadn't come back from St. Louis and hadn't called."
I frowned and passed over the second can to her. "That doesn't sound like him."
"I know. They were worried." She frowned. "Or Charity was. I don't think Shiro was worried at all. It was almost as though he'd been expecting all of it. He was still dressed in the samurai clothes and he opened the front door before I could knock."
"Michael's done that kind of thing before. Fringe benefit of his job, maybe."
Susan shook her head. "God works in mysterious ways?"
I shrugged. "Maybe so. Did Shiro say anything?"
"He just told Martin where to turn left or right and where to park. Then he told me to give him two minutes' lead and to get ready to get you back to the car. He just...smiled a little, the whole time. It would have been a little spooky on anyone else. He seemed content. Maybe he just had a good poker face."
I toyed with my can. "Has. He has a good poker face."
Susan arched an eyebrow. "I don't understand."
"I don't think he's dead. Not yet. He...he agreed to give himself over to the Denarians in exchange for them letting me go. The head Denarian guy, said his name was Nicodemus, made Shiro promise to not to fight back or escape for twenty-four hours."
"That doesn't sound good."
I shivered. "Yeah. I figure they're archenemies. When Shiro offered himself, Nicodemus looked like a kid on Christmas morning."
Susan sipped at her drink. "How bad are these people?"
I thought of Nicodemus and his knife. Of the sheer helplessness I'd felt as he drew my head back, baring my throat. I thought of sliced and diced corpses. "Bad."
Susan regarded me quietly for a moment, while I stared at my drink.
"Harry," she said finally. "You going to open that or just look at it?"
I shook my head and popped the tab on the can. My wrists felt sore, and the skin around them had been pretty thoroughly abraded. Evidently Nicodemus preferred regular old ropes to special unicorn-mane custom jobs. "Sorry. Got a lot to think about."
"Yeah," she said, her own voice softening. "What's our next move?"
I checked the candles. Three to go. "Barrier will go down in maybe twenty minutes. We'll call a cab, pick up the Beetle at McAnnally's, and head to Michael's place."
"What if the Denarians are waiting outside for us?"
I picked up my blasting rod from the stand in the corner by the door and twirled it around in my fingers. "They'll have to find their own cab."
"And then?"
I picked up my staff and leaned it against the wall by the door. "We tell Michael and Sanya what happened."
"Assuming they're back."
"Uh-huh." I opened the kitchen drawer and got out my gun and its holster. "After that, I ask the nice Denarians to let Shiro go."
Susan nodded. "We ask?"
I flipped open the cylinder on the gun and loaded it. "I'll say pretty please," I said, and snapped the cylinder shut again.
Susan's eyes flashed. "Count me in." She watched me while I put on a shoulder rig and slipped the gun into it. "Harry," she said. "I don't want to break up the righteous-vengeance vibe, but there are a couple of questions that are really bothering me."
"Why do the Denarians want the Shroud, and what are they going to do with it," I said.
"Yeah."
I got an old squall jacket out of my room and slid it on. It felt wrong. I hadn't worn anything but my old canvas duster or the newer leather one Susan had given me for the past several years. I checked the candles, and they had all gone out. I laid my hand on the wall, feeling for the defenses. There was a faint echo of them left, but nothing of substance, so I went back out into the living room and called for a cab. "We're good to go. I think I've got an idea of what they're doing, but I can't be sure."
She straightened my jacket collar absently. "Very sloppy of you. Didn't you get the meglomaniacal bragfest from this Nicodemus?"
"He must have read that Evil Overlord list."
"Sounds like someone who intends to get things done."
He sure as hell had. "He let a couple things slip. I think we can get ahead of him."
She shook her head. "Harry, when I went down there with Shiro, I didn't see much. But I heard their voies through the tunnels. There was..." She closed her eyes for a moment, her expression one of faint nausea. "It's hard for me to explain. Their voices gave me a strong impression. Shiro sounded like...I don't know. A trumpet. Clear and strong. The other one...his voice stank. It was rotted. Corrupt."
I didn't understand what would have made Susan say that. Maybe it was something that the vampires had done to her. Maybe it was something she'd learned between tai chi classes. Maybe it was just pure intuition. But I knew what she was talking about. There was a sense to Nicodemus, of something quiet and still and dangerous---of something patient and vile and malicious beyond the scope of mortal understanding. He scared the hell out of me.
"I know what you mean. Nicodemus isn't another misguided idealist, or some greedy bastard out to make money," I said. "He's different."
Susan nodded. "Evil."
"And he plays hardball." I wasn't sure if I was asking Susan or myself, but I said, "You ready?"
She got her jacket on. I went to the door and she followed.
"The one bad thing about the duster," she mused. "I could never see your butt."
"I never noticed."
"If you went around noticing your own ass I'd worry about you, Harry."
I looked over my shoulder at her, smiling. She smiled back.
It didn't last long. Both of our smiles turned a little sad.
"Susan," I said.
She put two fingertips to my lips. "Don't."
"Dammit, Susan. Last night---"
"Shouldn't have happened," she said. Her voice sounded tired, but her eyes stayed steady on mine. "It doesn't---"
"---change anything," I finished. I sounded bitter, even to me.
She took her hand away and buttoned up the dark leather jacket.
"Right," I said. I should have stuck to shoptalk. I opened the door and looked outside. "Cab's here. Let's get to work."
I grabbed my staff, blasting rod, and Shiro's cane, and made a note to get myself a freaking golf bag. We took the cab to McAnnally's. The Blue Beetle was still in the nearby lot, and it hadn't been stolen, vaporized, or otherwise mishandled.
"What happened to your back window?" Susan asked.
"One of Marcone's goons winged a few shots at me outside the Larry Fowler studio."
Susan's mouth twitched. "You went on Larry Fowler again?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Uh-huh. And what about the hood?"
"Little holes are from Marcone's thug. Big dent was a chlorofiend," I said.
"A what?"
"Plant monster."
"Oh. Why don't you just say 'plant monster'?"
"I have my pride."
"Your poor car."
I got out my keys, but Susan put her hand on mine, and walked a circle around the car. She crouched down and looked beneath it a couple of times, then said, "Okay."
I got in. "Thank you, double oh seven, but no one bombs a Volkswagen. They're too cute."
Susan got in the passenger door and said, "Cute confetti if you aren't careful, Harry."
I grunted, revved up the car, and puttered to Michael's place.
The morning was cold and clear. Winter hadn't yet given up its grip on the Great Lakes, and where Lake Michigan went, Chicago went too. Susan got out and looked around the front lawn, frowning from behind black sunglasses. "How does he manage to make this place so nice, run his own business, and fight demons on the side?"
"He probably watches a lot of those home-and-garden shows," I said.
She frowned. "The grass is green. It's February and his grass is green. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"
"Sod works in mysterious ways."
She made a disgusted sound, and then followed me up the walk to the door.
I knocked. A moment later Father Forthill said, "Who's there?"
"Donny and Marie," I responded. "Salt-N-Pepa asked us to fill in for them."
He opened the door, smiling from behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He was the same short, stocky, balding old Forthill, but he looked strained and tired. The lines of his face had grown deeper than I remembered. "Hello, Harry."
"Father," I said. "You know Susan?"
He looked at her thoughtfully. "By reputation," he said. "Come in, come in."
We did, and as I came in, Forthill set a Louisville Slugger baseball bat down in the corner. I raised my eyebrows, traded a look with Susan, and then put my staff and Shiro's cane beside the bat. We followed Forthill into the kitchen.
"Where's Charity?" I asked.
"Taking the children to her mother's house," Forthill said. "She should be back soon."
I let out a breath of relief. "Anna Valmont?"
"Guest room. Sleeping."
"I need to call Martin," Susan said. "Excuse me." She stepped aside into the small study.
"Coffee, doughnut?" Father Forthill asked.
I sat down at the table. "Father, you've never been closer to converting me."
He laughed. "The Fantastic Forthill, saving souls one Danish at a time." He produced the nectar of the gods themselves in Dunkin Donuts paper sacks and Styrofoam cups, taking some for himself as well. "I've always admired your ability to make jokes when faced with adversity. Matters are grave."
"I sort of noticed," I said through a mouthful of glazed doughnut. "Where's Michael?"
"He and Sanya went to St. Louis to investigate possible Denarian activity. They were both arrested by the local police."
"They what? What for?"
"No charges were filed," Forthill said. "They were arrested, held for twenty-four hours, and released."
"Sand trap," I said. "Someone wanted them out of the way."
Forthill nodded. "So it would seem. I spoke to them about two hours ago. They're on their way back now and should be here soon."
"Then as soon as they get here, we have to go get Shiro back."
Forthill frowned and nodded. "What happened to you last night?"
I told him the short version---all about the art auction and the Denarians, but I elided over the details afterward, which were none of his chaste business. And which would have embarrassed me to tell. I'm not particularly religious, but come on, the man was a priest.
When I finished, Forthill took off his glasses and stared hard at me. He had eyes the color of robin's eggs, and they could be disturbingly intense. "Nicodemus," he said quietly. "Are you sure that is what he called himself?"
"Yeah."
"Without a doubt?"
"Yeah. We had a nice chat."
Forthill folded his hands and exhaled slowly. "Mother of God. Harry, could you describe him for me?"
I did, while the old priest listened. "Oh, and he was always wearing a rope around his neck. Not like a ship's hawser, a thin rope, like clothesline. I thought it was a string tie at first."
Forthill's fingers reached up to touch the crucifix at his throat. "Tied in a noose?"
"Yeah."
"What did you think of him?" he asked.
I looked down at my half-eaten doughnut. "He scared the hell out of me. He's...bad, I guess. Wrong."
"The word you are looking for is 'evil,' Harry."
I shrugged, ate the rest of the doughut, and didn't argue.
"Nicodemus is an ancient foe of the Knights of the Cross," Forthill said quietly. "Our information about him is limited. He has made it a point to find and destroy our archives every other century or so, so we cannot be sure who he is or how long he has been alive. He may even have walked the earth when the Savior was crucified."
"Didn't look a day over five hundred," I mumbled. "How come some Knight hasn't gone and parted his hair for him?"
"They've tried," Forthill said.
"He's gotten away?"
Forthill's eyes and voice stayed steady. "He's killed them. He's killed all of them. More than a hundred Knights. More than a thousand priests, nuns, monks. Three thousand men, women, children. And those are only the ones listed in the pages recovered from the destroyed archives. Only two Knights have ever faced him and survived."
I had a flash of insight. "Shiro is one of them. That's why Nicodemus was willing to trade me for him."
Forthill nodded and closed his eyes for a moment. "Likely. Though the Denarians grow in power by inflicting pain and suffering on others. They become better able to use the strength the Fallen give them. And they gain the most from hurting those meant to counter them."
"He's torturing Shiro," I said.
Forthill put his hand on mine for a moment, his voice quiet, calming. "We must have faith. We may be in time to help him."
"I thought the whole point of the Knights was to deal out justice," I said. "The Fists of God and all that. So why is it that Nicodemus can slaughter them wholesale?"
"For much the same reason any man can kill another," Forthill said. "He is intelligent. Cautious. Skilled. Ruthless. Like his patron fallen angel."
I guessed at the name. "Badassiel?"
Forthill almost smiled. "Anduriel. He was a captain of Lucifer's, after the Fall. Anduriel leads the thirty Fallen who inhabit the coins. Nicodemus wasn't seduced into Anduriel's domination. It's a partnership. Nicodemus works with Fallen as a near-equal and of his free will. No one of the priesthood, of any of the Knightly Orders, of the Knights of the Cross, has so much as scratched him."
"The noose," I guessed. "The rope. It's like the Shroud, isn't it? It has power."
Forthill nodded. "We think so, yes. The same rope the betrayer used in Jerusalem."
"How many Denarians are working with him? I take it that they probably don't get along with each other."
"You are correct, thank God. Nicodemus rarely has more than five or six other Denarians working with him, according to our information. Usually, he keeps three others nearby."
"Snakeboy, demon-girl, and Ursiel."
"Yes."
"How many coins are running around the world?"
"Only nine are accounted for at this time. Ten, with Ursiel's coin."
"So Nicodemus could theoretically have nineteen other Fallen working with him. Plus a side order of goons."
"Goons?"
"Goons. Normal hired hands, they looked like."
"Ah. They aren't normal," Forthill said. "From what we have been able to tell, they are almost a small nation unto themselves. Fanatics. Their service is hereditary, passed on from father to son, mother to daughter."
"This gets better and better," I said.
"Harry," Forthill said. "I know of no tactful way to ask this, so I will simply ask. Did he give you one of the coins?"
"He tried," I said. "I turned him down."
Forthill's eyes stayed on my face for a moment before he let out a breath. "I see. Do you remember the sigil upon it?"
I grunted in affirmation, picked up a chocolate-covered jelly, and drew the symbol in the chocolate with a forefinger.
Forthill tilted his head, frowning. "Lasciel," he murmured.
"Lasciel?" I said. It came out muffled, since I was licking chocolate off my finger.
"The Seducer," Forthill murmured. He smeared his finger over the chocolate, erasing the sigil. "Lasciel is also called the Webweaver and the Temptress," he said, between licks. "Though it seems odd that Nicodemus would want to free her. Typically, she does not follow Anduriel's lead."
"A rebel angel among rebel angels?"
"Perhaps," Forthill said. "It is something better not discussed, for now."
Susan stepped out of the little office, a wireless phone to her ear. "All right," she said to the phone, and walked past us, jerking one hand at us to tell us to follow her. Father Forthill lifted his eyebrows, and we went out to the Carpenter family's living room.
It was a fairly huge room divided into several clumps of furniture. The television was in the smallest clump, and still looked about three sizes too small. Susan marched over to it, flicked it on, and flipped through stations.
She stopped on a local station, a news report, that showed a helicopter angle of a building being consumed by a raging fire. About a dozen yellow-and-red fire trucks circled around it, but it was obvious that they were only containing the fire. The building was lost.
"What's this?" Forthill asked.
"Dammit," I snarled, and turned away from the television, pacing.
"It's the building Shiro took us to last night," Susan said. "The Denarians were in some tunnels beneath it."
"Not anymore," I snapped. "They've left and covered their tracks. Hell, they've had what? Six hours? They could be a couple of states away by now."
"Nicodemus," Forthill said. "It's his style."
"We'll find them," Susan said quietly.
"How?" I asked.
She pressed her lips together and turned away from me. She spoke quietly into the phone. I couldn't hear what she said, but it had that end-of-conversation tone to it. She turned the handset off a moment later. "What can we do?"
"I can go to the underworld," I said. "Call up some answers from there. But I can't do it until the sun sets."
Forthill said quietly, "You mustn't do that. It's far too dangerous. None of the Knights would want---"
I slashed my hand through the air, cutting him off. "We need information or Shiro is going to die. Not only that, but if we don't run down Nicodemus, he gets to do whatever badness he's getting ready to do with the Shroud. If I have to go to Downbelow for answers, then that's where I go."
"What about Michael?" Susan asked. "Couldn't he find Shiro the way Shiro found Harry?"
Forthill shook his head. "Not necessarily. It isn't something he can control. At times, the Knights are given that kind of discernment, but they can't call it up at will."
I checked my watch, figuring up distances. "Michael and Sanya should be back here in what? An hour or so?"
"Barring further difficulties," Forthill said.
"Fine. We'll see if the side of the angels wants to pitch in. If they don't, I'm calling Chauncy up as soon as the sun goes down." I took the phone from Susan and walked out of the room.
"Where are you going?" Susan asked.
"To talk to Anna Valmont. And after that, I'm going to call my client. On the off chance I survive, I want to look like I at least tried to be professional."
Charity kept a guest room that had slowly been engulfed in a jungle of fabric. Clear boxes full of the stuff in every imaginable color stood stacked against one wall, and a small sewing machine sat on a table, barely visible among neatly folded stacks of more. More boxes of fabric had been stacked into a rampart around a single bed, which was occupied by a lump buried underneath several quilts.
I turned on a small lamp on the sewing table and hoped that the room wouldn't burst into flame. "Anna. Wake up."
The lump made a mumbling sound and stirred before settling again.
I turned the phone on and let the dial tone sound in the room's silence. "I know you're awake, Miss Valmont. And you know that I saved your ass back at the Marriott. So if you don't sit up and talk to me right now, I'm calling the cops to come pick you up."
She didn't move. I punched in a number and let the phone start to ring.
"Bastard," she muttered. With the British accent, it came out bah-stuhd. She sat up, her expression wary, holding the covers to her front. Her shoulders were bare. "Very well. What do you want?"
"My coat, for starters," I said. "But since I doubt you're palming it, I'll settle for the name of your buyer."
She stared at me for a moment before she said, "If I tell you that, it could kill me."
"If you don't, I'm turning you over to the police."
She shrugged. "Which, while unpleasant, won't kill me. Besides, you intend to turn me over in any case."
I scowled at her. "I saved your life. Twice."
"I am aware of that," she said. She stared through me for a moment before she said, "It's so hard to believe. Even though it happened to me. It seems...mad. Like a dream."
"You aren't crazy," I said. "Or at least, you aren't hallucinating or anything."
She half laughed. "I know. Cisca is dead. Gaston is dead. It happened to them. My friends." Her voice broke, and she started blinking very quickly. "I just wanted to finish it. So that they didn't die for nothing at all. I owed it to them."
I sighed. "Look, I'll make this easy for you. Was it Marcone?"
She shrugged without focusing her eyes. "We went through an intermediary, so I can't be sure."
"But was it Marcone?"
Valmont nodded. "If I had to guess, I would say it was. The buyer was someone with a great deal of money and local influence."
"Does he know that you know?"
"One doesn't mention to the buyer that you know who he is when he is taking precautions to prevent it. It's impolite."
"If you know anything about Marcone, you know that he isn't going to pay you off and let you walk away without delivering," I said.
She rubbed at her eyes. "I'll offer to return it."
"Good idea. Assuming he doesn't kill you before you finish offering."
She glared at me for a second, angry and crying. "What do you want from me?"
I picked up a box of tissues from behind a bunch of yellow cotton on the table and offered it to her. "Information. I want to know everything. It's possible you've heard or seen something that might help me recover the Shroud. Help me out, and I might be able to buy you some time to leave town."
She took the box and blotted her eyes on a tissue. "How do I know you will deliver on that promise?"
"Earth to Larceny Spice, come in Larceny Spice. I've saved your life twice. I think you can safely assume goodwill."
She looked down, biting her lip. "I...I don't know."
"This is a limited-time offer."
She drew in a shaking breath. "All right. All right, let me clean up a little. Get dressed. I'll tell you what I know."
"Fine," I said. "Come on. There's a shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall. I'll get you towels and stuff."
"Is this your house?"
"Friends'. But I've stayed here before."
She nodded and fished around until she came up with the black shirt she'd been wearing the night before. She slipped into it and rose. She had long, pretty, and bruised legs, and as she stepped onto her right leg she let out a pained cry and fell forward. I caught her before she could hit the ground, and she leaned into me, lifting her right foot from the floor.
"Bloody hell," she wheezed. "I must have twisted my ankle last night." She shot me a hard-eyed glance. "Hands."
I jerked my hand off something pleasantly smooth and firm. "Sorry. Accident. Can you manage?"
She shook her head, balanced on one leg. "I don't think so. Lend me your arm a moment."
I helped her hobble down the hall and into the bathroom. I dug some more towels out of the linen closet, then passed them into her through a mostly closed door. She locked it behind her and started the shower.
I shook my head and went back down the hall, dialing Father Vincent's phone number. On the fifth ring, he answered, his voice sounding tired and strained. "Vincent."
"It's Harry Dresden," I said. "I know where the Shroud came into Chicago and who was buying. It got intercepted by a third party and they have it now."
"You're certain?" Vincent demanded.
"Yeah."
"Do you know where it is?"
"Not exactly, but I'm going to find out. I should know by this evening, maybe sooner."
"Why will it take until this evening?" Vincent asked.
"Well, uh. It's a little hard to explain," I said.
"Perhaps the police should handle the rest of the investigation."
"I'd advise against it."
"Why?"
"I have some information that indicates your mistrust may not have been misplaced."
"Oh," Vincent said. His voice sounded worried. "I think we should meet and talk, Mister Dresden. I'd rather not discuss this over the phone. Two o'clock, at the room we spoke in last?"
"I can probably do that," I said.
"Until then," said Vincent, and hung up.
I paced back into the living room and found Susan sitting and reading the morning paper with coffee and a doughnut. One of the sliding glass doors that had previously led to the back patio was open, and on the other side was a lot of bare wood and plastic---the addition Michael was building. The rasping of a saw came through the open door.
I stepped out and found Father Forthill at work. He'd taken off his coat and collar. He had a short-sleeved black shirt underneath. He wore leather work gloves and safety glasses. He finished sawing a beam, and blew dust off the cut before rising. "How is Father Vincent?"
"Sounds tired," I said. "I'm going to talk to him later, assuming we don't have something going on first."
"I worry for him," Forthill said. He held up the beam to the top of what would eventually be a window. "Here, hold this for me."
I did. Forthill started driving in a few nails, clenching several in his teeth. "And Miss Valmont?"
"Taking a shower. She's going to cooperate with us."
Forthill frowned, taking a nail from his lips. "I really wouldn't have expected that from her, from the sense I had of her."
"It's my charming personality," I said. "The ladies can't resist."
"Mmmm," Forthill said, around the nails.
"It's the only decent thing to do. And her back is against a wall, right?"
Forthill drove the nail in and frowned. He looked at me.
I looked back at him for a moment and then said, "I'll just go check on her."
I got about halfway across the living room before I heard a car door shut, immediately followed by a car engine. I ran to the front door and threw it open just in time to see the shattered rear window of the Blue Beetle zipping down the street and out of sight.
I fumbled at my pockets and groaned. My keys were missing. "Son of a bitch," I snarled. I punched the door frame in sheer frustration. I didn't punch it very hard. I was angry, not looking to break my own knuckles. "The old stumble and bump and I fell for it."
Susan stepped up beside me and sighed. "Harry, you idiot. You're a good man. But an idiot where women are concerned."
"First my coat and now my car. That's freaking gratitude for you."
Susan nodded. "No good deed goes unpunished."
I stared at her. "Are you laughing at me?"
She faced me from behind a perfectly straight face. But her voice sounded a little choked. "No."
"You are."
Her face turned pink and she shook her head.
"Laughing at my pain."
She turned and walked back to the living room and picked up her paper. She sat down and held it up so that I couldn't see her face. Choked sounds came out from behind the paper.
I stalked back out to the addition, growling. Forthill looked back at me, his eyebrows raised.
"Give me something to break. Or hit really hard," I told him.
His eyes sparkled. "You'll hurt yourself. Here, hold this for me."
I lifted another cut board into place, while Forthill reached up to hammer it in. As he did, the sleeve of his shirt tugged up, and showed me a pair of green lines.
"Wait," I said, and snapped my hand over to his arm. The board slipped out of my other hand and bonked me on the head on the way down. I scowled at it, wincing, but tugged the sleeve up.
Forthill had a tattoo on the inside of his right arm.
An Eye of Thoth.
"What is this?" I demanded.
Forthill looked around and tugged his sleeve back down. "A tattoo."
"Duh, a tattoo. I know that. What does it mean?"
"It's something I had done when I was younger," he answered. "An organization I belonged to."
I tried to calm down but my voice still sounded harsh. "What organization?"
Forthill blinked mildly at me. "I don't understand why you are so upset, Harry---"
"What organization?"
He continued to look confused. "Just several of us who took our orders together. We were barely more than boys, really. And we'd...well. We'd happened on to some of the stranger events of our day. And records of others. A vampire had killed two people in town, and we stopped it together. No one believed us, of course."
"Of course," I said. "What about the tattoo?"
Forthill pursed his lips, thoughtful. "I haven't thought about it in so long. Well, the next morning we went out and got the tattoos. We swore an oath to be always watchful against the forces of darkness, to help one another whenever we could."
"Then what?"
"After the hangovers faded, we went a very good distance out of our way to make sure none of the senior clergy saw them," Forthill responded, smiling faintly. "We were young."
"And then?"
"And then no other supernatural events presented themselves over the next few years and the five of us drifted apart. Until I heard from Vittorio---from Father Vincent last week, I hadn't spoken to any of them in years."
"Wait. Vincent has a tattoo like this?"
"I suppose he could have had it removed. He might be the sort to do that."
"What about the others in the group?"
"Passed away over the last several years," Forthill said. He stripped off one of the work gloves and regarded his weathered hand. "Back then, I don't think any of us thought we would ever live to be so old."
The wheels spun in my head, and I got it. I understood what was happening, and why. On pure intuition I stalked to the front of the house, gathering up my things on the way. Father Forthill followed me. "Harry?"
I walked past Susan, who set her paper aside and stood up to follow me. "Harry?"
I got to the front door and jerked it open.
The engine of Michael's white pickup rattled to a halt as I did, and he and Sanya got out of the truck. They looked a little rumpled and unshaven, but fine. Michael blinked at me and asked, "Harry? I think I just saw a woman driving your car toward the highway. What's going on?"
"Get anything you need for a fight," I said. "We're going."
When Father Vincent answered my knock, I kicked the door into his face as hard as I could. He fell back with a grunt of surprise. I came into the room with Father Forthill's Louisville Slugger in my hands, and jabbed the broad end of the bat into Vincent's throat.
The old priest made a sick croaking sound and clutched at his neck on the way to the floor.
I didn't let it stop there. I kicked him in the ribs twice, and when he rolled over, trying to get away from me, I stomped down on the back of his neck, drew my gun, and shoved it against his skull.
"Dio," Vincent whimpered, panting. "Dio, wait! Please, don't hurt me!"
"I don't have time to play pretend," I said. "Drop the act."
"Please, Mister Dresden, I don't know what you mean." He coughed, panting, and I saw droplets of scarlet dripping onto the carpet. I'd bloodied his nose, or maybe his lip. He turned his head a tiny bit, eyes wide with panic. "Please, don't do anything to me. I don't know what you want, but I'm sure that we can talk about it."
I drew back the hammer on the revolver and said, "I'm sure that we can't."
His face went white. "No, wait!"
"I'm getting tired of playing pretend. Three."
"But I don't know---" He choked, and I heard him trying not to retch. "You have to tell me---"
"Two," I said. "I'm not going to elaborate about the other number."
"You can't! You can't!"
"One," I said, and pulled the trigger.
In the instant between the word and the deed, Vincent changed. A sheath of green scales appeared over his skin, and his legs twined together into a serpent's long and sinuous body. The eyes went last, changing to vertically slit yellow orbs while a second set of glowing green eyes opened above the first.
The trigger came down on an empty chamber. Click.
The snake twisted to bite me, but I was already getting out of the way. Michael came through the door, his unshaven face set in grim determination, Amoracchius blazing with its own white light. The snakeman whirled to face Michael with a hiss. Michael tried for a clean horizontal cut, but the snakeman ducked under it and went for the door in a streak of gleaming green scales.
When the snakeman went out the door, Sanya brought a four-foot length of two-by-six down on its head. The blow drove the snakeman's chin flat to the ground. It twitched a couple of times and then lay still.
"You were right," Michael noted. He slipped the sword away into its sheath.
"Better get him back inside before some maid sees him," I said.
Michael nodded, grabbed the snakeman's tail, and hauled him back into the hotel room.
Sanya looked in, nodded, and set the end of the length of heavy board down with a certain amount of satisfaction. I realized he'd used the thing with one arm. Good grief. I needed to get to the gym. "Good," the big Russian said. "Let me put this back in the truck, and I will join you."
A few minutes later, the snakeman woke up in the corner of the hotel room with me, Michael, and Sanya standing over him. His tongue flickered out and in a few times, and his two sets of eyes darted around the room.
"What did I miss?" it hissed. The last word came out with an extra large helping of S sounds.
"A tattoo," I said. "Father Vincent had a tattoo on the inside of his right arm."
"There was no tattoo," the snakeman insisted.
"Maybe it was covered with all the blood. You made a stupid mistake. It's understandable. Most criminals aren't all that bright, so you were working uphill from the get-go."
The snakeman hissed, shifting its scales restlessly, a cobralike hood flaring around its neck and shoulders.
Michael drew Amoracchius. Sanya did the same with Esperacchius. The two blades threw pure white light over the snakeman, and he subsided, flinching back from them. "What do you want?"
"To talk," I said. "See, the way it works is that I ask you questions. You answer them. And as long as you do we'll all be happy."
"And if I don't?" the snakeman hissed.
"I get a new pair of boots."
The snake's scales and coils twined around on one another, rasping. Its eyes remained on the two Knights. "Ask."
"Here's what I figure happened. Somehow, your glee club heard that the Churchmice were being hired to find and take the Shroud. You thought you'd just nip it from them on their way out of town, but you missed. You caught Gaston LaRouche, but he didn't have the Shroud. So you tortured him until he told you everything."
"And after he told us everything," the snakeman said. "Nicodemus was indulging his little bitch."
"I think it's sweet to see a father and daughter doing things together. So you found out what LaRouche knew, killed him, and left his body where it would be found, pointed at where the Shroud was going. You figured you'd let the mortal authorities do the work of finding them for you, and take the Shroud when they did."
"Drudge work. Unworthy of us."
"You're gonna hurt my feelings, snakeboy. You found out who the Church was sending over. Then you grabbed poor Father Vincent at the airport. You took his place."
"Any infant could reason as much," the Denarian hissed.
I pulled up a chair and sat. "Here's where it gets interesting. Because you decided to hire me on. Why?"
"Why do you think?"
"To keep tabs on the Knights," I said. "Or to distract them by making them try to keep me out of the search. Or maybe you thought I could really turn up the Shroud for you. Probably all three. No sense doing things for one reason when you can fit in a few ulterior motives for free. You even gave me a sample of the Shroud to make it more likely I'd find it." I leaned back in the chair. "That's where I started seeing something wrong. I talked to Marcone about his new thug gunning for me, and he blinked."
"I don't know what you are talking about," the snakeman said.
"Marcone was the buyer."
A cold laugh slithered out of the snakeman's mouth. "A mortal. Nothing more."
"Yeah, well, the mortal figured out that Father Vincent had been replaced, and he sent an assassin to kill you. The new guy wasn't shooting at me outside of Fowler's studio. He was after you."
"Impossible," the snakeman said.
"Pride goeth, legs. Marcone wasn't born yesterday."
"I am sure you have pleased yourself with your cleverness, wizard."
"It gets better," I said brightly. "See, Nicodemus didn't let much drop, other than that he was on a deadline and he needed someone savvy to the supernatural. His daughter did, though. She asked if he didn't want a silver bowl. That's a ceremonial bowl, and if I was guessing, I'd say it was meant to be used to catch lifeblood. Fuel a ritual."
The snakeman's tail lashed around restlessly.
"I think Father Vincent was a warm-up. A test for the ritual. I think he came over here with two samples from the Shroud, and you used one of them as the focus for the plague curse that killed him. Once you knew it would work, you went after the Shroud itself."
"You know nothing, wizard," said the snakeman. The glowing sigil on his forehead throbbed in time with the extra set of eyes. "You are pathetic."
"You're hurting my feelings. Don't make me get the baseball bat," I said. "Nicodemus covered his tracks this morning by burning down the building you'd been in. I suppose he sent you to cover everything up nice and neat with the cops and with me. I think he's got something in mind, and I think it's tonight. So why not make this a comparatively pleasant discussion and tell me all about it."
"Do you think that you frighten me, wizard?" said the Denarian. "I was destroying men more powerful than you before this pathetic nation was born."
"Where is Nicodemus and what is he doing with the Shroud? I'll give you a hint. It's got something to do with a plague curse."
"I have served Nicodemus since---"
"Since my last dental appointment, I get it," I said. "But let me point something out to you. Nicodemus isn't here." I held my palms out to either side of me, Vanna White--style. "These two gentlemen are very much here. And very much angry."
Sanya stared at the Denarian, the saber in his hand swishing back and forth a little. He growled. It was enough to make me want to edge away from him.
"Look," I told him. "We're going to find Nicodemus and push his face in. We're going to shut down whatever he's got in mind, and we're going to get Shiro back. And you're going to tell us what we need to know."
"Or?"
Michael said, in a very quiet voice, "I end you."
The snakeman stared at me for a very long time. Then he started to rasp and shake. It took me a minute to realize that he was laughing at me. Snakes weren't really meant for laughter. It didn't sit well on a serpentine body.
"You cannot threaten me," he said. "There is nothing you can do to me."
"I see a couple of holy swords here that make me think otherwise."
"No," the Denarian said. He reached up to his forehead and clawed at the sigil there, as if trying to peel off his own skin. The symbol flashed, and then faded, along with the second set of eyes. The whole of him rippled, scales abruptly melting away. For a second, the features of Father Vincent emerged from beneath the scales. Then they too faded away, replaced by a man's pinched and hardened features. He was dark of skin, maybe Moorish, and he wasn't big. Five feet and a little change, and not more than one-fifty. Average height, several centuries ago.
The man lowered his hand and let a slightly tarnished silver coin roll across the floor to Michael's feet. "My name is Quintus Cassius, and I have long been slave to the will of the demon Saluriel." His dark eyes glittered with malice, and his tone dripped with sarcasm. "I beg you for mercy and the chance to mend my ways. How ever can I thank you, Sir Knight, for saving me from that torment."
Shit. He was playing the morality card. I shot a glance at Michael.
The big man frowned at snakeboy Cassius, but didn't miss a beat in drawing out a white handkerchief embroidered with a silver cross, and folding the coin up in it. Michael and Sanya exchanged a long look, and then both of them put away their swords.
"Uh, guys. What the hell are you doing? Dangerous demon murderer here, remember?"
"Harry," Michael said. "We can't. Not if he's surrendered the coin and asked mercy."
"What?" I demanded. "That's stupid."
"Of course it is," Cassius said. Glee danced in his voice. "They know that I am not sincere. They know I will turn on them at the first opportunity. That I will obtain one of the other coins and return to what I have done for centuries."
I stood up, angry enough that the chair fell over. "Michael, if you turn the other cheek on this bastard he'll tear it off your face. You're supposed to be the freaking Fist of God."
"No, I'm not, Harry," Michael said. "The purpose of the Knights is not to destroy those who serve evil."
"Indeed not," Cassius said. Somehow, there was more of a hiss in his voice now than when he'd been a snake. "They're here to save us."
"To save them?" I stared at Michael. "Is he kidding?"
Michael shook his head. "No one else can face the Denarians, Harry. No one else can challenge the Fallen. This moment might be the only chance Cassius has to turn aside from what he has chosen. To change his path."
"Great. I'm all for changing his path. Let's change it to a direct line to the bottom of Lake Michigan."
Michael's expression was pained. "The Knights are here to protect freedom. To give those who are under the oppression of dark forces the chance to win free of them. I cannot sit in judgment on this man's soul, Harry Dresden. Not for you. Not for anyone. All I can do is remain faithful to my calling. Give him the chance to see hope for his future. To show him the love and compassion any human being should show another. The rest is out of my hands."
I watched Cassius's face while Michael spoke. His expression changed. It became harder. More brittle. And bitter. What Michael said had touched him. I didn't believe for a second that it had touched Cassius enough to change his mind. But it touched him enough to drive him toward fury.
I turned to Michael and said, "Do you really think that thing is going to start sipping of the milk of human kindness?"
"No," Michael said. "But that doesn't change my purpose. He has surrendered his coin, and the influence of it. The rest is not for Sanya or me to decide. It is Cassius's choice."
"You've seen these things," I snarled, stalking over to face Michael. "I've seen the corpses they've left. They would have killed me, Susan, you---hell, all of us---without blinking an eye. God only knows what they have in mind with that curse they're putting together."
"All power has its limits, Harry." He shook his head. "This is the limit of mine."
Without really thinking about it, I shoved his shoulder. "They might already have killed Shiro. And you're going to let this bastard walk?"
Michael caught my arm in one hand and twisted. Michael is strong. I had to rise up onto my toes to relieve the pressure he put on my elbow, and he shoved me back from him, his eyes hard and cold and angry as hell.
"I know that," he said in that same deadly quiet voice. "I know they've hurt him. That they're going to kill him. Just as Shiro knew that Nicodemus would betray his promise to set you free. It's one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs." He looked at Cassius, and the Denarian flinched away from the silent flame in Michael's expression. "It is not for me to judge his soul. No matter how much I might want to."
"Hell's bells," I muttered. "No wonder Nicodemus has killed so many Knights, if you're all as idiotic as this."
"Harry---" Michael began.
I interrupted him. "Look at him, Michael. He isn't a victim. He's a freaking collaborator. That poor bastard Rasmussen might have been dragooned into working with the Denarians, but Cassius does it because he wants to do it."
"There's no way for you to be sure of that, Harry," Sanya said.
"Why are you giving him a fair chance? Which of them has ever turned away from their coins?"
Sanya put his dark hand on my shoulder and said, "I did."
I looked back at him, frowning.
"I was of their number," Sanya said. "I was less experienced. Foolish. Proud. I did not set out to be a monster, but that much power corrupts. Shiro faced the Fallen I had allowed in. He exposed its lies. And I made a better choice."
"Traitor," said Cassius, his voice cold. "We handed you the world. Power. Glory. Everything you could have wanted."
Sanya faced the man and said, "What I wanted you could never give me. I had to find it for myself." He extended a hand. "Cassius, you can leave them just as I did. Help us, please. And let us help you."
Cassius leaned back, as though Sanya's hand might burn him, and hissed, "I will eat your eyes."
"We can't leave him here," I said. "He'll shoot us in the back. He'll try to kill us."
"Maybe," Michael said quietly, and didn't move.
I wanted to be angry with Sanya and Michael. But I couldn't. I'm only human. I'd flirted with dark powers before. Made stupid deals. Bad choices. I'd been given a chance to work free of them, or I'd have been dead long ago.
I understood what Michael and Sanya were saying and doing. I understood why. I didn't like it, but I couldn't really gainsay it without making a hypocrite of myself. There but for the lack of a demon-infested coin went I.
Cassius started wheezing and laughing his dry, contemptuous laugh. "Run along," he said. "Run along. I'll think over your words. Reexamine my life. Walk the straight and narrow."
"Let's go," Michael said quietly.
"We can't leave him," I insisted.
"The police aren't going to have anything on him, Harry. We're not going to kill him. We're finished here. Have faith. We'll find an answer somehow."
Cassius laughed at Michael's back as he walked out. Sanya followed him, lingering to look back over his shoulder at me.
"Fools," Cassius murmured, rising. "Weak fools."
I picked up the bat again and turned to the door. "You're wrong," I said to Cassius.
"Weak," Cassius repeated. "The old man was screaming after only an hour, you know. Nicodemus started with his back. Lashed him with chains. Then Deirdre played with him."
I gave Cassius a hard look over my shoulder.
He was sneering, lip lifted from his teeth. "Deirdre likes to break fingers and toes. I wish I'd been able to stay longer. I only got to pull out his toenails." His smile widened, eyes gleaming. "The woman, the Fellowship woman. She is yours?"
I felt my lip lift away from my teeth.
Cassius's eyes gleamed. "She bled prettily, didn't she? The next time I catch her, you won't be there to disrupt my conjuration. I'll let the snakes eat her. Bite by bite."
I stared at him.
Cassius smiled again. "But there is mercy for me, is there not? Forgiveness. Indeed, God is great."
I turned away from him again and said, very quietly, "People like you always mistake compassion for weakness. Michael and Sanya aren't weak. Fortunately for you, they're good men."
Cassius laughed at me.
"Unfortunately for you, I'm not."
I spun around, swinging the bat as hard as I could, and broke Cassius's right kneecap.
He screamed in shock and sudden surprise, and went down. Odd crackling sounds came from the joint.
I swung again and broke his right ankle.
Cassius screamed.
I broke his left knee for him too. And his left ankle. He was thrashing around and screaming a lot, so it took me maybe a dozen swings.
"Stop!" he managed to gasp. "Stop, stop, stop!"
I kicked him in the mouth to shut him up, stomped his right forearm to the floor, and crushed his hand with another half dozen swings.
I pinned his left arm down the same way, and put the bat on my shoulder. "Listen to me, you worthless piece of shit. You aren't a victim. You chose to be one of them. You've been serving dark forces your whole life. Freddie Mercury would say Beelzebub has a devil put aside for you."
"What do you think you're doing?" He gasped. "You can't...you won't..."
I leaned down and twisted his false priest's collar, half choking him. "The Knights are good men. I'm not. And I won't lose a second's sleep over killing you." I shook him with each word, hard enough to rattle his bloodied teeth. "Where. Is. Nicodemus."
Cassius broke, sobbing. His bladder had let go at some point, and the room smelled like urine. He choked and spat out blood and a broken tooth. "I'll tell." He gasped. "Please, don't."
I let his collar go and straightened. "Where?"
"I don't know," he said, cowering away from my eyes. "He didn't tell me. Meeting him tonight. Was going to meet him tonight. Eight."
"Meet him where?"
"Airport," Cassius said. He started throwing up. I kept his arm pinned, so it mostly went all over himself. "I don't know exactly where."
"What is he doing?"
"The curse. He's going to unleash the curse. Use the Shroud. The old man's blood. He has to be moving when he completes the ritual."
"Why?"
"Curse is a contagion. He has to spread it as far as he can. More exposure to it. Make himself stronger. A-apocalypse."
I took my foot off of his arm and smashed the motel's phone to pieces with the bat. I found his cell phone and crushed it, too. Then I reached into my pocket and dropped a quarter on the floor near him. "There's a pay phone on the other side of the parking lot, past a patch of broken glass. You'd better get yourself an ambulance." I turned and walked to the door without looking back. "If I see you again---ever---I'll kill you."
Michael and Sanya waited for me outside the door. Sanya's face held a certain amount of satisfaction. Michael's expression was grave, worried, his eyes on mine.
"It had to be done," I said to Michael. My voice sounded cold. "He's alive. It's more than he deserves."
"Perhaps," Michael said. "But what you did, Harry. It was wrong."
A part of me felt sick. Another part felt satisfied. I wasn't sure which of them was bigger. "You heard what he said about Shiro. About Susan."
Michael's eyes darkened, and he nodded. "It doesn't make it right."
"No. It doesn't." I met his eyes. "Think God'll forgive me?"
Michael was quiet for a moment, and then his expression softened. He clasped my shoulder and said, "God is always merciful."
"What you did for him was actually quite generous," Sanya said philosophically. "Relatively speaking. He might be hurt, but he is, after all, alive. He'll have a nice, long while to reconsider his choices."
"Uh-huh," I said. "I'm a giver. Did it for his own good."
Sanya nodded gravely. "Good intentions."
Michael nodded. "Who are we to judge you?" His eyes flashed, and he asked Sanya, "Did you see the snake's face, right when Harry turned with the bat?"
Sanya smiled and started whistling as we walked through the parking lot.
We piled into the truck. "Drop me off at my place," I said. "I need to pick up a couple things. Make some phone calls."
"The duel?" Michael asked. "Harry, are you sure you don't want me to---"
"Leave it to me," I said. "You've already got something on your plate. I can handle things. I'll meet you at the airport afterward and help you find Shiro."
"If you live," Sanya said.
"Yes. Thank you, Comrade Obvious."
The Russian grinned. "Was that a quarter you gave Cassius?"
"Yeah."
"For the phone?"
"Yeah."
Michael noted, "Phone calls cost more than that now."
I slouched back and allowed myself a small smile. "Yeah. I know."
Sanya and Michael burst out laughing. Michael pounded on the steering wheel.
I didn't join them, but I enjoyed their laughter while I could. The February sun was already sinking fast toward the horizon.
Back at my apartment, I called Murphy on her personal cell phone. I used simple sentences and told her everything.
"Dear God," Murphy said. Can I summarize or what? "They can infect the city with this curse thing?"
"Looks like," I said.
"How can I help?"
"We've got to keep them from getting it into the air. They won't be on public transportation. Find out if any chartered planes are taking off between seven and eight-thirty. Helicopters too."
"Hang on," Murphy said. I heard computer keys clicking, Murphy saying something to someone, a police radio. A moment later she said, voice tense, "There's trouble."
"Yeah?"
"There are a pair of detectives heading out to arrest you. Looks like Homicide wants you for questioning. There's no warrant listed."
"Crap." I took a deep breath. "Rudolph?"
"Brownnosing rat," Murphy muttered. "Harry, they're almost to your place. You've only got a few minutes."
"Can you decoy them? Get some manpower to the airport?"
"I don't know," Murphy said. "I'm supposed to be a mile from this case. And it isn't as though I can announce that terrorists are about to use a biological weapon on the city."
"Use Rudolph," I said. "Tell him off the record that I said the Shroud is leaving town on a chartered flight from the airport. Let him take the heat for it if they don't find anything."
Murphy let out a harsh little laugh. "There are times when you can be a clever man, Harry. It takes me by surprise."
"Why, thank you."
"What else can I do?"
I told her.
"You're kidding."
"No. We may need the manpower, and SI is out of this one."
"Just when I had hope for your intelligence, too."
"You'll do it?"
"Yeah. Can't promise anything, but I'll do it. Get moving. They're less than five minutes away."
"Gone. Thank you, Murph."
I hung up the phone, opened my closet, and dug into a couple of old cardboard boxes I kept at the back until I found my old canvas duster. It was battered and torn in a couple of places, but it was clean. It didn't have the same reassuring weight as the leather duster, but it did more to hide my gun than my jacket. And it made me look cool. Well, maybe cooler, anyway.
I grabbed my things, locked up my place behind me, and got into Martin's rental car. Martin wasn't in it. Susan sat behind the wheel. "Hurry," I said. She nodded and pulled out.
A few minutes later, no one had pulled us over. "I take it Martin isn't helping."
Susan shook her head. "No. He said he had other duties that took precedence. He said that I did, too."
"What did you say?"
"That he was a narrow-minded, hidebound, anachronistic, egotistical bastard."
"No wonder he likes you."
Susan smiled a little and said, "The Fellowship is his life. He serves a cause."
"What is it to you?" I asked.
Susan remained silent for a long time as we drove across town. "How did it go?"
"We caught the impostor. He told us where the bad guys would be later tonight."
"What did you do with him?"
I told her.
She looked at me for a while and then said, "Are you all right?"
"Fine."
"You don't look fine."
"It's done."
"But are you all right?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. I'm glad you didn't see it."
Susan asked, "Oh? Why?"
"You're a girl. Beating up bad guys is a boy thing."
"Chauvinist pig," Susan said.
"Yeah. I get it from Murphy. She's a bad influence."
We hit the first traffic sign directing us toward the stadium, and Susan asked, "Do you really think you can win?"
"Yeah. Hell, Ortega is only the third or fourth most disturbing thing I've tangled with today."
"But even if you do win, what does it change?"
"Me getting killed now. That way, I get to be killed later tonight instead."
Susan laughed. There was nothing happy in it. "You don't deserve a life like this."
I squinted my eyes and made my voice gravelly. "Deserve's got nothin'---"
"So help me God, if you quote Clint Eastwood at me, I'm wrapping this car around a telephone pole."
"Do you feel lucky, punk?" I smiled and turned my left hand palm up.
I felt her hand settle lightly on mine a moment later, and she said, "A girl's got to draw the line somewhere."
We rode the rest of the way to the stadium in silence, holding hands.
I hadn't ever been to Wrigley when it was empty. That wasn't really the point of a stadium. You went there to be among about a bajillion people and see something happen. This time, with acres and acres of unoccupied asphalt, the stadium at its center looked huge and somehow more skeletal than when it was filled with vehicles and cheering thousands. The wind sighed through the stadium, gusting, whistling, and moaning. Twilight had fallen, and the unlit street lamps cast spidery shadows over the lots. Darkness gaped in the arches and doorways of the stadium, empty as the eyes of a skull.
"Thank God that isn't too creepy or anything," I muttered.
"What now?" Susan asked.
Another car pulled in behind us. I recognized it from McAnnally's the night before. The car pulled up maybe fifty feet away and rolled to a stop. Ortega got out, and leaned down to say something to the driver, a man with a dark complexion and amber-tone glasses. There were two more men in the backseat, though I couldn't see much of them. I was betting they were all Red Court.
"Let's not look scared," I said, and got out of the car.
I didn't look at Ortega, but drew out my staff with me, planted it on the ground, and stared at the stadium. The wind caught my coat, and blew it back enough to show the gun on my hip now and again. I'd traded in my sweats for dark jeans and a black silk shirt. The Mongols or somebody wore silk shirts because they would catch arrows as they entered wounds, and enable them to pull barbed arrowheads out without ripping their innards apart. I wasn't planning on getting shot with barbed arrows, but weirder things have happened.
Susan got out and walked up to stand beside me. She stared at the stadium too, and the wind blew her hair back the same way it did my coat. "Very nice," she murmured, hardly moving her mouth. "That's a good look on you. Ortega's driver is about to wet his pants."
"You say the nicest things to me."
We just stood there for a couple of minutes, until I heard a deep, rhythmic rumbling---one of those annoyingly loud bass stereos in some moron's car. The rumbling got louder; then there was a squealing of tires taking a tight turn, and Thomas pulled into the lot in a different white sports car than I'd seen him in the night before. The music got louder as he sped across the lot and parked his car diagonally across the lines I'd unconsciously respected when I'd parked. He killed the stereo and got out, a small cloud of smoke emerging with him. It wasn't cigarette smoke.
"Paolo!" Thomas caroled. He wore tight blue jeans and a black T-shirt with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer logo. The laces to one of his combat boots were untied, and he carried a bottle of scotch in his hand. He pulled from it cheerfully and wove a drunken line to Ortega. Thomas offered out the bottle, his balance wobbling. "Have a swig?"
Ortega slapped the bottle from Thomas's hand. It shattered on the ground.
"Shpoilshport," Thomas slurred, wavering. "Hola, Harry! Hola, Susan!" He waved at us, and all but fell down. "I was going to offer you some too, but that plan's been blown all to hell now."
"Maybe another time," Susan said.
A blue light appeared in one of the tunnels from the stadium. A moment later, a vehicle somewhere between a compact car and a golf cart rolled into the parking lot, a whirling blue bubble light flashing on its roof. With the quiet hum of electric motors, it zipped over to us and stopped. Kincaid sat behind the steering wheel and nodded to the rear of the vehicle. "In. We're set up inside."
We walked over to the security cart. Ortega started to get on, but I held up my hand to him. "Ladies first," I said quietly, and gave Susan my hand as she got on. I followed her. Ortega and Thomas followed. Thomas had put on a pair of headphones and was bobbing his chin in a vague fashion that was probably supposed to be in rhythm.
Kincaid started up the cart and called over his shoulder, "Where is the old man?"
"Gone," I said. I jerked a thumb at Susan. "Had to go to the bench."
Kincaid looked from me to Susan and shrugged. "Nice bench."
He drove us through several passages in the stadium, somehow finding his way despite the fact that no lights were on, and I could barely see. Eventually we rolled out onto the field from one of the bullpens. The stadium was dark but for where three spotlights basted the pitcher's mound and first and third base in pools of light. Kincaid drove to the pitcher's mound, stopped, and said, "Everyone out."
We did. Kincaid parked the cart over home plate, then padded through the shadows to the visiting team's dugout. "They're here," he said quietly.
The Archive emerged from the dugout, carrying a small, carved wooden box before her. She wore a dark dress with no frills or ruffles, and a grey cape held closed with a silver brooch. She was still little, still adorable, but something in her bearing left no illusions about the difference in her apparent age and her knowledge and capability.
She walked to the pitcher's mound, not looking at anyone, her focus on the box she carried. She set it down, very carefully, and then lifted the lid from the top of the box and stepped back.
A wave of nauseating cold flooded out when she opened the box. It went past me, through me. I was the only one there to react to it. Susan put her hand on my arm, kept her eyes on Ortega and Thomas, and asked, "Harry?"
My last meal had been a drive-through taco on the way back from the meeting with Cassius, but it was trying to leave. I kept it down and forced the sickening cold away from me with an effort of will. The sensation lessened. "Fine," I said. "I'm fine."
The Archive looked up at me, child features solemn. "You know what is inside the box?"
"I think so. I've never actually seen it."
"Seen what?" Thomas asked.
Instead of answering, the Archive drew a small box out of her pocket. She opened the box and delicately plucked out an insect as long as her own fingers---a brown scorpion---by its tail. She looked around to make sure she had everyone's attention. She did. Then she dropped the scorpion into the box.
There was an instant, immediate sound, somewhere between a wildcat's scream and the sizzle of bacon hitting a hot skillet. Something that looked vaguely like a cloud of ink in clear water floated up out of the box. It was about the size of a baby's head. Dozens of shadowy tendrils held the scorpion, drawing it up into the air along with the inky cloud. Dark violet flickers of flame played over the insect's shell for all of two or three seconds---and then it simply crumbled, carapace falling away in flakes and dust.
The cloudy mass rose up to a height of about five feet, before the Archive murmured a word. It stopped in place, bobbing gently, holding there.
"Damn," Thomas said, he took the earphones out. Music with many electric guitars sounded tinnily from them. "And this is what?"
"Mordite," I said quietly. "Deathstone."
"Yes," the Archive said.
Ortega drew in a slow breath, and nodded in understanding.
"Deathstone, huh?" Thomas said. "It sort of looks like someone spray-painted a soap bubble. And gave it tentacles."
"It isn't a soap bubble," I said. "There's a solid piece inside. The energies it carries in it are what create that shroud effect around it."
Thomas poked a finger at it. "What does it do?"
I caught his wrist before he could touch it, and pushed his hand away. "It kills. Hence the name deathstone, you half-wit."
"Oh," Thomas said, nodding with drunken sagacity. "It looked cool when it gacked that little thing, but so what? It's a bug zapper."
"If you disrespect this thing it's going to get you killed," I said. "It would kill anything living exactly the same way. Anything. It's not from our world."
"It's extraterrestrial?" asked Susan.
"You do not understand, Miss Rodriguez," Ortega said quietly. "Mordite is not from this galaxy or this universe. It is not of our reality."
I had reservations about Ortega's presence on the home-team roster, but I nodded. "It's from Outside. It's...congealed antilife. A chip of this stuff makes nuclear waste look like secondhand smoke. Being near it draws the life off you bit by bit. If you touch it, it kills you. Period."
"Precisely," said the Archive. She stepped forward to look at both Ortega and me. "An enchantment binds the particle in place. It is also sensitive to applied will. The duelists will face each other, the mordite between them. Will it toward your opponent. He with the greatest force of will controls the mordite. The duel will end when it has devoured one of you."
Gulp.
The Archive continued. "Seconds will observe from first and third bases, facing their duelist's opponent. Mister Kincaid will ensure that no undue interference is perpetrated by either second. I have instructed him to do so with extreme prejudice."
Thomas wobbled a little and eyed the Archive. "Eh?"
The girl faced him and said, "He'll kill you if you interfere."
"Oh," Thomas said cheerfully. "Gotcha, punkin."
Ortega glared at Thomas and made a disgusted sound. Thomas found something else to look at and backed a prudent step away.
"I will monitor both duelists to ensure that no energies are employed on their behalf. I, too, will resolve any infractions with extreme prejudice. Do you understand?"
Ortega nodded. I said, "Yeah."
"Are there any questions, gentlemen?" the Archive asked.
I shook my head. Ortega did too.
"Each of you may make a brief statement," said the Archive.
Ortega drew a band of black and silver beads from his pocket. Without making an effort, I could feel the defensive energies bound up within them. He regarded me with casual mistrust as he bound the bracelet to his left side and said, "This can end in only one way."
In answer, I fished one of the antivenom potions from my pocket, popped the top, and slugged it down. I burped and said, "Excuse me."
"You've really got class, Dresden," Susan said.
"Class oozes out my every orifice," I agreed. I passed her my staff and rod. "Hold these for me."
"Seconds, please retire to your positions," said the Archive.
Susan put her hand on my arm, fingers clenching tight for a second. I reached up and touched her hand. She let go and backed away to third base.
Thomas offered to high-five Ortega. Ortega glared. Thomas smiled a Colgate smile and swaggered over to first base. He drew a silver flask of something from his hip pocket on the way, and took a sip.
The Archive looked back and forth between me and Ortega. She was standing on the pitcher's mound, next to the floating glob of chilling energy, so she was a shade taller than Ortega and a shade shorter than me. Her face was solemn, even grim. It didn't sit well on a child who should have been getting up for school in the morning.
"Are you both resolved to this duel?"
"I am," Ortega said.
"Uh-huh." I nodded.
The Archive nodded. "Gentlemen. Present your right hands, please."
Ortega lifted his right arm, palm faced toward me. I mirrored him. The Archive gestured, and the mordite sphere floated up until it hovered precisely halfway between Ortega and me. Tension gathered against my palm, an invisible and silent pressure. It felt vaguely like holding my hand against a recirculating outlet in a swimming pool---it was a tenuous thing, that felt like it might easily slide to one side.
If it did, I'd get to see the mordite up close and personal. My heart skittered over a couple of beats, and I took a deep breath, trying to focus and ready myself. If I was Ortega, I'd want to open up with everything I had in the first heartbeat of the contest and end it almost before it began. I took a couple of deep breaths and narrowed my focus, my thoughts, until the pressure against my hand and the deadly darkness a few feet away from it were all that existed.
"Begin," said the Archive. She backed quickly toward home plate.
Ortega let out a shout, a battle cry, his body dipping slightly, hips twisting, shoving his hand forward like a man trying to close a vault door with one arm. His will flooded toward me, wild and strong, and the pressure of it drove me back onto my heels. The mordite sphere zipped across three of the four feet between it and me.
Ortega's will was strong. Really, really strong. I tried to divert it, to overcome it and stop the sphere. For a panicked second I had nothing. The sphere kept drifting closer to me. A foot. Ten inches. Six inches. Small tendrils of inky darkness drifted out from the cloud around the mordite, reaching out blindly toward my fingers.
I gritted my teeth, hardened my will, and stopped the thing five inches from my hand. I tried to mount up some momentum of my own, but Ortega held strong against me.
"Don't draw this out, boy," Ortega said through clenched teeth. "Your death will save lives. Even if you kill me, my vassals at Casaverde are sworn to hunt you down. You and everyone you know and love."
The sphere came a bit closer. "You said you wouldn't harm them if I agreed to the duel," I growled.
"I lied," Ortega said. "I came here to kill you and end this war. Anything else is immaterial."
"You bastard."
"Stop fighting it, Dresden. Make it painless for yourself. If you kill me, they will be executed. By surrendering, you preserve them. Your Miss Rodriguez. The policewoman. The investigator you apprenticed under. The owner of that bar. The Knight and his family. The old man in the Ozarks. The wolf-children at the university. All of them."
I snarled, "Buddy, you just said the wrong thing."
I let the anger Ortega's words had ignited flood down through my arm. A cloud of scarlet sparks erupted against the mordite sphere, and it started creeping the other way.
Ortega's face became strained, his breathing heavier. He didn't waste any effort on words now. His eyes darkened until they were entirely black and inhuman. There were ripples, here and there, under the surface of his skin---the flesh mask that contained the vaguely batlike monster those of the Red Court really were. The monstrous Ortega, the true Ortega, stirred underneath the false human shell. And he was afraid.
The sphere crept closer. Ortega renewed his efforts with another war cry. But the sphere made it to the midway point, and got closer to him.
"Fool," Ortega said in a gasp.
"Murderer," I said, and shoved the sphere another foot closer to him.
His jaw clenched harder, the muscles in his face bulging. "You'll destroy us all."
"Starting with you." The sphere darted a little nearer.
"You are a selfish, self-righteous madman."
"You murder and enslave children," I said. I shoved the mordite sphere to within a foot of him. "You threaten the people I love." I shoved it closer still. "How does it feel, Ortega. Being too weak to protect yourself. How does it feel to know you are about to die?"
In answer, a slow smile crept over his face. His shoulders moved a little, and I saw that one of his arms hung limply at his side, like an empty sleeve. A small bulge appeared just to one side of his stomach, like a gun being held in an overcoat pocket.
I stared at it in shock. He'd pulled his real arm out of the flesh mask. He was holding a gun on me.
"How does it feel?" Ortega asked, voice very quiet. "Why don't you tell me?"
"You can't," I said. I shot a glance toward home plate, but the Archive apparently hadn't noticed anything amiss. My will wavered, and the mordite sphere bobbed back and forth. "They'll hear the shot. They'll kill you."
"Quite possibly," he agreed. "As I said, I am prepared to accept that."
His words chilled me, and the mordite sphere darted at my head. I caught it a couple of feet from me and held it, but just barely.
"I told you, Dresden. There's only one way this can end. I would have preferred an honorable demise for you, but any death will do."
I stared at the hidden gun.
A dot of bright scarlet light appeared on Ortega's chest, and tracked slowly up.
My expression must have changed, because Ortega glanced down too. The bright pinpoint of the laser sight settled over his heart and became still.
Ortega's eyes widened and his expression twisted into fury.
A lot of things happened at once.
There was a hissing sound, a thump, and a big section of Ortega's chest dented in. Scarlet sprayed out behind him. An instant later, a booming sound much deeper than the crack of a rifle echoed around the stadium.
Ortega let out a screech that went off the high end of the scale. Fire erupted from the hidden gun, burning through Ortega's flesh mask and shirt to reveal the muzzle of a small-caliber revolver clenched in an inhuman black hand. The bullet Ortega had taken had half twisted him, and he missed. I thought hanging around to let him try again was a bad idea, so I threw myself to one side and gave the mordite sphere another shove.
Ortega dodged the mordite, and even wounded, he was fast. A bright red dot appeared on his thigh for half a second, and with another hiss-thump-boom, the unseen gunman hit him again. I heard the bones of Ortega's leg break.
Susan threw my staff and rod to me and leapt for Ortega, grabbing his free arm and twisting as if to throw him. Instead, the vampire writhed weirdly, and she wound up tearing the flesh mask from him, peeling it away like a banana skin to reveal the slime-slick, flabby-bodied creature beneath it---the true Ortega. He still held the gun though, and he turned to shoot at me again.
I screamed, "Ventas servitas!" at the top of my lungs, throwing my will at dirt of the pitcher's mound. It whirled up into a miniature cyclone of fine brown soil, forcing the vampire to turn its head and shield its eyes. The second shot went wild as well, and I scrambled to get my blasting rod.
The flying dirt slowed her down, but Susan still went for Ortega's gun hand. It was a mistake. Even with only one leg to support him, Ortega screeched again, twisted, and flung Susan from the pitcher's mound into the third row of seats behind first base. She hit with bone-breaking force and dropped out of sight.
Sudden screeches filled the air, and I looked up to see as many as a dozen of the Red Court, revealed in their true forms, coming into the stadium. Some climbed over the walls, some jumped in from the upper levels, and some came bursting out of private boxes in showers of exploding glass.
I spun toward Ortega, lifting my blasting rod, rammed my will through it, and shouted, "Fuego!" A jet of flame as thick as my arm roared at him, but one of the incoming vampires hit him at the shoulder, dragging him out of the line of fire. The newcomer was set alight though, greasy skin going up like a bonfire, and it screamed hideously as it burned.
I sensed movement behind me, and turned to find Kincaid dashing across the ground. He scooped up the Archive and raced for one of the dugouts. One of the Red Court vamps got in his way. Kincaid's arm blurred, a semiautomatic appearing in it, and without missing a step he put two shots neatly between the vampire's eyes. The vampire started to fall, and as he went by it, Kincaid pumped another half dozen shots into its belly, which erupted in a messy shower of scarlet, and left the vampire screaming and thrashing weakly on the ground.
"Harry, look out!" Thomas screamed.
I didn't look out. I figured on the worst and leapt forward. I heard a vampire hiss as it missed me, and it came rushing up behind me. I turned and unleashed another gout of fire from my blasting rod, but missed. The vampire closed on me, spraying venomous saliva into my face.
I'd been hit with vampire venom before, and the stuff worked fast, particularly in large amounts. But I'd taken the potion to block it, and all this did was make me itch. I used the time while the vampire sprayed me to prepare another blast, and unleashed the strike with the rod pressed against the vamp's flabby body. It scorched a wound in the vampire's belly the size of my fist and blew a two-foot hole in the creature's back. The vampire went into weak spasms, and I kicked it off me, rising.
Seven or eight vampires were within fifty feet of me, and coming fast. Thomas sprinted toward me, a knife gleaming in his hand, and hit one of the vamps from behind. He cut open the vampire's belly with a single slice, and the creature collapsed to the ground. "Harry, get out!"
"No!" I shouted. "Get Susan out of here!"
Thomas gritted his teeth, but changed course. He leapt up onto the first-base dugout and hopped neatly over the rail into the stands.
No help there, and there wasn't time to look for options. I crouched and concentrated, chanting, "Defendre, defendre," in a steady litany. It was difficult to do without my shielf bracelet to focus it, but I brought up all the defensive energy I could manage in a dome around me.
The vampires hit it, slamming against it in mindless, shrieking rage. Any one of them could have flipped my car over lengthwise with only a little effort. Their blows against the shield could have crushed concrete. Within seconds, and I knew I was not going to be able to hold the defense in place for long. Once it went down, they were going to literally tear me limb from limb. I gave the shield my all, and felt them slowly breaking it down.
Then there was a roar, and a flash of brilliant light. A jet of fire streaked over me and took one of the vampires full-on in the head. It burst into flame, screaming and waving its too-thin arms, and went down onto the field, thrashing like a half-crushed bug. My shield collapsed, overloaded, and the bracelet began burning my wrist. I crouched lower.
Another jet of fire went by, incinerating the head of another vampire. All of them stopped, crouching, shrieking in confusion.
Kincaid stood outside the dugout and dropped a smoking shotgun to the ground. He reached into a golf bag next to him, smooth and professional, and drew out another double-barreled shotgun. One of the vampires leapt at him, but Kincaid was too fast. He pulled the trigger, and the shotgun roared. A jet of flame streaked out and went through the vampire, taking this one in the neck, and continuing to the right-field fence, where it blew a hole the size of my face in the wall. There was a sound behind him, and Kincaid spun to shoot the other barrel at a vampire bounding down through the stands above the third-base dugout. He put the shot right down the vampire's throat, literally, and the creature went up in flames. Kincaid discarded that shotgun as well, and reached for the stock of another in his golf bag.
The other vampires leapt at Kincaid when he turned his back.
They got to deal with the Archive instead.
The child stepped out from behind the golf bag, the tenebrous mordite sphere floating between her hands. She released the sphere and made a single gesture.
The little cloud of darkness blurred toward the vampires and streaked into each in turn at the pace of a busy workman's hammer, bang-bang-bang. When the mordite sphere struck them, there was a flash of cold purple light, a swell of darkness, and then the sphere passed on through. It left ash and black bones raining down behind it. I could barely follow the mordite sphere's path, it moved so fast. One second the vampires were all there, and then they were simply gone. Black bones and grey ash littered the ground around me.
Silence fell, and the only thing I could hear was my own ragged breathing and the roaring of my own pulse in my ears. I looked around wildly, but I didn't see Ortega anywhere. The two vampires who had been gutted writhed feebly on the ground. Kincaid drew the last shotgun from the golf bag, and with two more flaming blasts executed them both.
The mordite sphere glided gently back to rest between the Archive's tiny hands, and she stood regarding me for a long and silent moment. There was nothing in her expression. Nothing in her eyes. Nothing. I felt the beginnings of a soulgaze and pulled my face away, fast.
"Who broke the sanctity of the duel first, Kincaid?" asked the Archive.
"Couldn't tell," Kincaid answered. He wasn't so much as breathing hard. "But Dresden was winning."
The Archive stood there a moment more, and then said, "Thank you for letting me pet your kitty, Mister Dresden. And thank you for my name."
That sounded frighteningly like a goodbye, but it was only polite to answer, "You're welcome, Ivy."
The Archive nodded and said, "Kincaid. The box, please."
I looked up to watch Kincaid set the wooden box down on the ground. The Archive sent the mordite sphere gliding slowly down into it, and then closed the lid on the box. "These proceedings are concluded."
I looked around at the bones, dust, and smoldering vampire corpses. "You think?"
The Archive regarded me with neutral eyes and said, "Let's go. It's after my bedtime."
"I'm hungry," Kincaid said, shouldering his golf bag. "We'll hit a drive-through. You can have the cookies."
"Cookies aren't good for me," the Archive said, but she smiled.
Kincaid said, "Dresden, hand me that, will you?"
I looked numbly at the ground where he pointed. One of the shotguns was there. Its barrels were still smoking hot. I picked it up gingerly by the stock and passed it to Kincaid, who wrapped it with the other gun he'd used in some kind of silver-lined blanket. "What the hell are those things?" I asked.
"Incendiary rounds," he said. He passed my dropped staff over to me. "Work real well on the Reds, but they're so hot they warp gun barrels. If you get unlucky, the second shot can blow back into your face, so you have to use throwaway guns."
I nodded thanks and took my staff. "Where can I get some?"
Kincaid grinned. "I know a guy. I'll have him call you. See you, Dresden."
Kincaid and the Archive started out of the stadium. A thought finally made its way through the combat adrenaline and I broke into a sprint toward the first-base dugout. Thomas had simply hopped up onto it. I managed to flop and clamber my way up, then into the stands.
Thomas was already there, on the ground with Susan. He'd taken off her jacket and used it to elevate her feet slightly. It looked as if he'd tilted her head back a little to clear the airway. He looked up and said, "She's unconscious, but she's alive."
I crouched down too, and touched her throat, just to be certain. "How bad is she hurt?"
He shook his head. "No real way to tell."
"We have to get her to a hospital, then," I said, rising.
Thomas caught my arm. "You don't want her waking up, injured and dazed, in a place packed to the roof with weakened prey."
"Then what the hell do we do?"
"Look, if she's not dead, odds are she'll recover." Thomas held up his hand and fished out a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He twisted it and said, "Clear." Then he twisted it again and put it back.
A moment later, Martin came rapidly down the aisle. He somehow made even that look boring, as if he were simply a man wanting to take his seat again before the opening pitch. It was especially impressive since he carried a huge rifle, a military sniper weapon with a telescopic sight and a laser attachment. He set the rifle aside and went over Susan for a moment, feeling here and there, before he said, "She'll be sore."
"You?" I asked. "You were the gunman?"
"Obviously," Martin said. "Why do you think we were in Chicago to begin with?"
"Susan said she was getting her things."
He looked up at me skeptically. "You believed that? I would have thought you knew Susan well enough to know that material things don't hold a lot of interest for her."
"I knew that," I said. "But she said..." I trailed off and shook my head.
Martin looked up and said, "We knew Ortega was coming to kill you. We knew that if he succeeded, he might be able to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion, only to begin it again twenty years from now, from a much stronger position. I was sent to make sure Ortega did not kill you, and to eliminate him if I could."
"Did you?"
Martin shook his head. "He had planned for the contingency. Two of his vassals got to him during the fight. They pulled him out. I don't know how badly he was hurt, but it's likely he'll make it back to Casaverde."
"You want the war to keep going. You're hoping the White Council will destroy the Red Court for you."
Martin nodded.
"How did you find out about the duel?"
Martin didn't answer.
I narrowed my eyes and looked at Thomas.
Thomas put on an innocent expression. "Don't look at me. I'm a drunken, chemical-besotted playboy who does nothing but cavort, sleep, and feed. And even if I had the mind to take a bit of vengeance on the Red Court, I wouldn't have the backbone to actually stand up to anyone." He flashed me a radiant smile. "I'm totally harmless."
"I see," I said. I took a deep breath, and regarded Susan's face quietly for a moment. Then I bent down, got into her pockets, and got the keys to the rental car. "Are you leaving now, Martin?"
"Yes. I don't think our presence will be noticed here, but there's no sense in taking chances."
"Take care of her for me," I said.
Martin looked up at me for a second and then said, in a quiet voice, "Everything in my power. You have my word."
I nodded. "Thank you." I stood up and started for the exits, drawing the coat to cover my gun.
"Where are you going?" Thomas called.
"The airport," I answered. "I've got to meet some people about an old man and a bedsheet."
I parked at a rental lot outside O'Hare about five minutes after seven. I got out of the car with my staff and rod in hand. There was only one old light burning on the lot, but the moon had risen huge and bright, and I had no trouble seeing Michael coming. His white truck came crunching to a halt on the gravel in front of me. I walked around to the passenger door. Sanya swung it open for me, then slid over. He was wearing blue denim and a big black cowboy hat.
"Harry," Michael said as I got in. "I was getting worried. You won?"
"Not exactly."
"You lost?"
"Not exactly. I had Ortega on the ropes and he cheated. Both of us cleared the benches. I came out of it in one piece. He came out in a couple of pieces but he got away."
"Is Susan all right?"
"She got thrown about twenty-five yards through the air and hit steel and concrete. She'll be fine." Something tickled my nose, and I sniffed. The sharp odor of metal filled the cab of the truck. "Michael, are you wearing the armor?"
"I am wearing the armor," Michael said. "And the cloak."
"Hello, Michael. We're going to an airport. The kind with metal detectors."
"It's all right, Harry. Things will work out."
"Will it sound like alarms going off when they do?" I glanced at the younger Knight and said, "Sanya isn't wearing armor."
Sanya half turned toward me and pulled his denim jacket open, revealing a Kevlar vest beneath it. "I am," he said soberly. "Fifteen layers with ceramic plating over critical areas."
"Well, at least you don't look like a Renaissance festival," I said. "This thing might actually protect you, besides making a slightly less medieval fashion statement. Is this the new stuff or the old stuff?"
"New," Sanya said. "Will stop civilian munitions, even some military rounds."
"But not knives or claws," Michael murmured. "Or arrows."
Sanya buttoned his coat back up, frowning. "Yours will not stop bullets."
Michael said, "My faith protects me."
I exchanged a skeptical look with Sanya and said, "Okeydokey, Michael. Do we have any idea where the bad guys are?"
"The airport," Michael said.
I sat there silently for a second before I said, "Needle, haystack. Where, at the airport?"
Michael shrugged, smiling, and opened his mouth to speak.
I held up my hand. "We must have faith," I said, doing my best to imitate Michael's voice. "How did I guess. Did you bring Fidelacchius?"
"In the tool locker," Michael said.
I nodded. "Shiro's going to need it back."
Michael was quiet for a moment before he said, "Yes, of course."
"We're going to save him."
"I pray it is so, Harry."
"We will," I said. I stared out the window as Michael pulled into the airport proper. "It's not too late."
O'Hare is huge. We drove around in crowded parking lots and auto loading zones for nearly half an hour before Michael abruptly slowed the truck down outside the international concourse, his spine and neck straightening as if he'd heard a warning klaxon.
Sanya glanced aside at Michael and said, "What is it?"
"Do you feel that?" Michael asked him.
"Feel what?"
"Close your eyes," Michael said. "Try to still your thoughts."
I muttered, "I sense a great disturbance in the Force."
"You do?" Michael asked, blinking at me.
I sighed and rubbed at the bridge of my nose. Sanya closed his eyes, and a second later his expression twisted in distaste. "Rot," the Russian reported. "Sour milk. Mildew. The air smells greasy."
"There's a Pizza Hut kiosk about fifty feet away," I pointed out, looking through the windows of the concourse. "But maybe it's just a coincidence."
"No," Michael said. "It's Nicodemus. He leaves a kind of stain everywhere he goes. Arrogance. Ambition. Disregard."
"I only smell rotten things," Sanya said.
"You're sensing him too," Michael said. "Your mind is interpreting it differently. He's here." He started pulling forward, but a cab zipped in front of him and stopped. The cabby got out and began unloading an elderly couple's bags.
I muttered to myself and sniffed. I even reached out with my magical senses, trying to detect what Michael had. I felt nothing but the usual---patternless white noise of thousands of lives moving around us.
I opened my eyes, and found myself staring at the back of Detective Rudolph's head. He had on the usual expensive suit, and stood with a spare, well-coiffed man I recognized from the district attorney's office.
I froze for a second. Then I snatched Sanya's black Stetson and pulled it down over my head. I tugged the brim down over my eyes and slouched down as low as I could.
"What is it?" Michael asked.
"Police," I said. I took a more careful look around. I spotted seven uniformed officers and maybe ten other men who wore suits and casual clothes but walked and stood like cops. "I passed word to them that the Shroud might be on the way out of Chicago through here."
"Then why are you hiding?"
"A witness reported me leaving the scene of a murder. If someone identifies me, I'm going to spend the next day or so getting questioned, and that won't help Shiro."
Michael's brow knitted in concern. "True. Do the police know of the Denarians?"
"Probably not. SI isn't on the case. Probably they've been told they're some kind of terrorists and to be considered dangerous."
The cabby in front of us finally finished up, and Michael pulled away from the loading zone and toward the parking lot. "That isn't good enough. We can't have them there."
"As long as the police are around, it will restrict the Denarians' movements. Make them keep their heads down and play nice."
Michael shook his head. "Most supernatural creatures will hesitate before killing a mortal police officer. But Nicodemus won't. He has nothing but contempt for mortal authorities. If we confront him, he will kill anyone who attempts to stop him, as well as taking hostages to use against us."
Sanya nodded. "Not to mention that if this plague curse is as formidable as you say, it would be dangerous to those nearby."
"It's worse than that," I said.
Michael rolled the steering wheel toward a parking space. "How so?"
"Forthill told me that the Denarians get a power boost from hurting people, right? Causing mayhem and destruction?"
"Yes," Michael said.
"The curse is only going to last a few days, but while it does it's going to make the Black Death look like chicken pox. That's why he's here. It's one of the busiest international terminals on the planet."
"Mother of God," Michael swore.
Sanya whistled. "Flights from here go directly to every major nation in the world. If the Denarians' plague is easily communicable..."
"I think I pretty well summed that up with the Black Death comment, Sanya."
The Russian shrugged. "Sorry. What do we do?"
"We call in a bomb threat. Clear out the people and shut down the planes."
"We need to be inside immediately," Sanya said. "How long would it take the authorities to react?"
"It would only work if I knew who to call to get an immediate reaction."
"Do you?" Sanya asked.
I held out my hand out to Michael. He slapped his cell phone into it. "No," I said. "But I know someone who does."
I called Murphy, trying to remain calm and hoping that the phone didn't explode against my head. When I got the connection, it was cloudy with bursts of static, but I managed to tell her what was going on.
"You're insane, Dresden," Murphy said. "Do you know how incredibly irresponsible---and illegal---it is to falsify a bomb threat?"
"Yeah. Less irresponsible than letting cops and civilians get in these people's way."
Murphy was quiet for a second, and then asked, "How dangerous are they?"
"Worse than the loup-garou," I said.
"I'll make the call."
"Did you get in touch with him?" I asked.
"I think so, yes. Do you need any more muscle?"
"Got plenty," I said. "What I'm short on is time. Please hurry."
"Be careful, Harry."
I hung up the phone and got out of the truck. Michael and Sanya came with me. "Murphy's going to report a bomb threat. The cops will clear everyone out of the building. That will clear out the area for us."
"Leaving the Denarians without anyone to infect, or take hostage," Sanya said.
"That's the idea. After that, they'll call in the bomb squad and backup. We'll have twenty minutes, tops, to take advantage of the confusion."
Michael unlocked the tool locker in the back of the pickup, and drew out Shiro's cane. He tied a strap to it and slung it over his shoulder. While he did, Sanya buckled Esperacchius to his hip, then drew a freaking assault rifle out of the tool locker.
"Kalashnikov, isn't it?" I asked. "That's an extremely Chuck Heston look for the Knights of the Cross."
Sanya slapped a magazine into the weapon, chambered a round, and made sure the gun's safety was on. "I consider myself a progressive."
"Too random for my taste," Michael said. "Too easy to hurt the wrong person."
"Maybe," Sanya said. "But the only people inside should be the Denarians, yes?"
"And Shiro," I said.
"I will not shoot Shiro," Sanya assured me.
Michael buckled Amoracchius onto his hip. "How much longer will it take?"
The buzzing ring of a fire alarm blared from the concourse, and the police got together. A grizzled detective in a bad suit took charge and started directing suits and uniforms around. People started hurrying out of the concourse.
"Ask and ye shall receive," I said. "Let's circle around. Get in through one of the service entrances."
Sanya slipped the assault rifle into an over-the-shoulder sports bag, but kept one hand on the stock. Michael nodded to me, and I took the lead. We circled around the building until we could see some of the planes. Ground crews were rushing around in confusion, and several guys with orange flashlights were waving them at flight crews, directing the wallowing jets away from the ramps to the concourse.
We had to climb a fence and drop down a ten-foot retaining wall to get behind the concourse, but in the dark and the confusion no one noticed us. I led us through a ground-crew door and through a room that was part garage and part baggage storage. Emergency lights were on and fire alarms still jangled. I passed a section of wall covered with calendar pinup girls, pictures of trucks, and a map of the concourse.
"Whoa, stop," I said. Sanya bumped into my back. I glowered at him, and then peered at the map.
"Here," I said, pointing at a marked door. "We'll come out on this stairway."
"Midway through," Michael noted. "Which way do we go?"
"Split up," Sanya suggested.
Michael and I said, "Bad idea," at precisely the same time.
"Think," I muttered, mostly to myself. "If I were an arrogant psychotic demon--collaborating terrorist out to trigger an apocalypse, where would I be?"
Sanya leaned over to look at the map and said, "The chapel."
"The chapel," said Michael.
"The chapel," I echoed. "Down this hall, up the stairs, and to the left."
We ran down the hall and up the stairs. I pushed open the door and heard a recorded voice telling me to be calm and proceed to the nearest exit. I checked my right before I did my left, and it saved my life.
A man in nondescript business wear stood watching the door and holding a submachine gun. When he saw me, he lifted the weapon, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and started shooting.
The slight pause was enough to let me reverse my direction. A couple of bullets went right through the steel fire door, but I stumbled back into Sanya. The big man caught me and spun, putting his back between me and the incoming bullets. I felt him jerk and heard him grunt once, and then we hit a wall and sank down.
I knew the gunman would be coming. Right then, he was probably circling out to the far wall across from the door. Once he had a clear line of fire down the stairs, he'd move up and gun us down.
I saw his shadow in the crack under the door, and I struggled to regain my feet. Sanya was doing the same thing, and the two of us managed to do little but keep each other down. The gunman came closer, his shadow moving in the little space beneath the door's edge.
Michael stepped over me and Sanya, Amoracchius in hand, and shouted as he lunged forward, both hands driving the weight of the sword at the closed steel door. The sword went through the door, sinking almost to the hilt.
An erratic burst of gunfire sounded. Michael drew the sword back out of the door. Blood gleamed wet and scarlet along the length of the weapon's blade. Michael put his back against the wall of the stairwell. The gun barked a couple of times more and fell silent. After a minute, blood seeped under the door in a spreading red puddle.
Sanya and I got untangled and got up. "You're hit."
Michael had already moved and stood behind Sanya. He ran his hands over Sanya's back, grunted, and then held up a small, bright piece of metal, presumably the round. "It hit a strike plate. The vest caught it."
"Progressive." Sanya panted, wincing.
"You're lucky the bullet had to go through a steel door before it got to you," I muttered. I readied a shield and pressed the door slowly open.
The gunman lay on the floor. Michael's thrust had taken him just under the floating ribs, and had to have hit an artery to kill him so quickly. His gun lay in his hand, and his finger was limp on the trigger.
Sanya and Michael slipped out of the stairwell. Sanya had his rifle in hand. They stood lookout while I bent down and pried open the dead gunman's mouth. He didn't have a tongue. "One of Nicodemus's boys," I said quietly.
"Something is wrong," Michael said. Blood dripped from the tip of the sword to the floor. "I don't feel him anymore."
"If you can feel him, can he feel you? Could he know if you were getting close to him?"
Michael shrugged. "It seems likely."
"He's cautious," I said, remembering how Nicodemus had reacted when Shiro came through the door. "He doesn't take chances. He wouldn't wait around to start a fight he wasn't sure he could win. He's running." I stood up and headed for the chapel. "Come on."
Just as I got to the chapel's door, it swung open and two more men came out, both of them slapping clips into submachine guns. One of them didn't look up in time to see me, so I checked him in the forehead with a double-handed thrust of my staff, getting my whole weight behind the blow. His head snapped back and he dropped. The other gunman started to bring his weapon up, but I batted the barrel aside with a sweep of my staff, then snapped the end of it hard into his nose. Before he could recover, Sanya stepped into him and slammed the butt of the Kalashnikov against his head. He fell on top of the first guy, tongueless mouth lolled open.
I stepped over them and into the chapel.
It had been a small, modest room. There were two rows of three pews each, a pulpit, a table, and subdued lighting. There were no specific religious trappings to the place. It was simply a room set aside to accommodate the spiritual needs of worldwide travelers of every belief, creed, and faith.
Any one of them would have felt profaned by what had been done to the room.
The walls had been covered in sigils, somewhat similar to those I had seen on the Denarians so far. They were painted in blood, and still wet. The pulpit had been leaned against the back wall, and the heavy table laid along it, so that it lay at an angle to the floor. On either side of the table was a chair covered in bits of bone, a few candles. On one of the chairs was a carved silver bowl, almost entirely covered in fresh blood. The room smelled sickly sweet, and whatever was in those candles made the air thick, languid, and hazy. Maybe opium. It had probably accounted for the slowed reaction of the second two gunmen. The candles shed muted light over the table's surface.
What was left of Shiro lay on it.
He was on his back, and shirtless. Torn flesh and dark, savage bruises, some of them in the clear outline of chains, lapped around from his back. His hands and feet were grotesquely swollen. They'd been broken so badly and in so many places that they looked more like sausages than human limbs. His belly and chest had been sliced up as I'd seen before, on the real Father Vincent and on Gaston LaRouche's corpse as well.
"There's so much blood," I whispered.
I felt Michael enter the room behind me. He made a soft, choking sound.
I stepped closer to Shiro's remains, noting clinical details. His face had been left more or less untouched. There were several items scattered around him on the floor---ritual implements. Whatever they had intended him for, they'd already done it. There were sores on his skin, fever blisters, I thought, and his throat was swollen. The damage to his skin probably hid many other such marks of pestilence.
"We're too late," Michael said quietly. "Have they already worked the spell?"
"Yeah," I said. I sat down on the first pew.
"Harry?" Michael said.
"There's so much blood," I said. "He wasn't a very big person. You wouldn't think there could be so much blood."
"Harry, there's nothing else we can do here."
"I knew him, and he wasn't very big. You wouldn't think there would be enough for all the painting. The ritual."
"We should go," Michael said.
"And do what? The plague has already started. Odds are we have it. If we carry it out, we only spread it. Nicodemus has the Shroud and he's probably out looking for a full school bus or something. He's gone. We missed."
"Harry," Michael said quietly. "We must---"
Anger and frustration suddenly burned hot and bright behind my eyes. "If you talk to me about faith I'll kill you."
"You don't mean that," Michael said. "I know you too well."
"Shut up, Michael."
He stepped up next to me and leaned Shiro's cane against my knee. Then, without a word, he drew back to the wall and waited.
I picked up the cane and drew the wooden handle of the old man's sword out enough to see five or six inches of clean, gleaming metal. I slapped it shut again, stepped up to Shiro, and composed him as best I could. Then I rested the sword beside him.
When he coughed and wheezed, I almost screamed.
I wouldn't have thought that anyone could survive that much abuse. But Shiro drew in a ragged breath, and blinked open one eye. The other had been put out, and his eyelid looked sunken and strange.
"Hell's bells," I stammered. "Michael!"
Michael and I both rushed down beside him. It took him a moment to focus his eye on us. "Ah, good," he rasped. "Was getting tired waiting for you."
"We've got to get him to a hospital," I said.
The old man twitched his head in a negative gesture. "Too late. Would do no good. The noose. The Barabbus curse."
"What is he talking about?" I asked Michael.
"The noose Nicodemus wears. So long as he bears it, he apparently cannot die. We believe the noose is the one used by Judas," Michael said quietly.
"So what's this Barabbus curse?"
"Just as the Romans put it within the power of the Jews to choose one condemned prisoner each year to be pardoned and given life, the noose allows Nicodemus to mandate a death that cannot be avoided. Barabbus was the prisoner the Jews chose, though Pilate wanted to free the Savior. The curse is named for him."
"And Nicodemus used it on Shiro?"
Shiro twitched his head again, and a faint smile touched his mouth. "No, boy. On you. He was angry that you escaped him despite his treachery."
Hell's bells. The entropy curse that had nearly killed both me, and Susan with me. I stared at Shiro for a second, and then at Michael.
Michael nodded. "We cannot stop the curse," he said. "But we can take the place of its subject, if we choose to do it. That's why we wanted you to stay away, Harry. We were afraid Nicodemus would target you."
I stared at him and then at Shiro. My vision blurred. "It should be me lying there," I said. "Dammit."
"No," Shiro said. "There is much you do not yet understand." He coughed, and pain flashed over his face. "You will. You will." He twitched the arm nearest the sword. "Take it. Take it, boy."
"No," I said. "I'm not like you. Like any of you. I never will be."
"Remember. God sees hearts, boy. And now I see yours. Take it. Hold it in trust until you find the one it belongs to."
I reached out and picked up the cane. "How do I know who to give it to?"
"You will know," Shiro said, his voice becoming thinner. "Trust your heart."
Sanya entered the room and padded over to us. "The police heard the gunfire. There's an assault team getting ready to---" He froze, staring at Shiro.
"Sanya," Shiro said. "This is our parting, friend. I am proud of you."
Sanya swallowed and knelt down by the old man. He kissed Shiro's forehead. Blood stained his lips when he straightened.
"Michael," Shiro said. "The fight is yours now. Be wise."
Michael laid his hand on Shiro's bald head and nodded. The big man was crying, though his face was set in a quiet smile.
"Harry," Shiro whispered. "Nicodemus is afraid of you. Afraid that you saw something. I don't know what."
"He should be afraid," I said.
"No," the old man said. "Don't let him unmake you. You must find him. Take the Shroud from him. So long as he touches it, the plague grows. If he loses it, it ends."
"We don't know where he is," I said.
"Train," Shiro whispered. "His backup plan. A train to St. Louis."
"How do you know?" Michael asked.
"Told his daughter. They thought I was gone." Shiro focused on me and said, "Stop them."
My throat clenched. I nodded. I managed to half growl, "Thank you."
"You will understand," Shiro said. "Soon."
Then he sighed, like a man who has just laid down a heavy burden. His eye closed.
Shiro died. There was nothing pretty about it. There was no dignity to it. He'd been brutalized and savagely murdered---and he'd allowed it to happen to him in my place.
But when he died, there was a small, contented smile on his face. Maybe the smile of someone who had run his course without wavering from it. Someone who had served something greater than himself. Who had given up his life willingly, if not gladly.
Sanya said, his voice strained, "We cannot remain here."
I stood up and slung the cane on its strap over my shoulder. I felt cold, and shivered. I put a hand to my forehead, and found it clammy and damp. The plague.
"Yeah," I said, and strode out of the room and back toward the blood-spattered stairs. "Clock's running."
Michael and Sanya kept pace. "Where are we going?"
"The airfield," I said. "He's smart. He'll figure it out. He'll be there."
"Who?" Michael asked.
I didn't answer. I led them back down through the garage area and out onto the airfield tarmac. We hurried down along the concourse, and then out onto the open acres of asphalt that led from the concourses to the landing fields. Once we'd gotten out there, I took off my pentacle amulet and held it aloft, focusing on it in order to cause it to begin to shed a distinctive blue light.
"What are you doing?" Sanya asked.
"Signaling," I said.
"Who?"
"Our ride."
It took maybe forty-five seconds before the sound of a helicopter's blades whirled closer to us. The aircraft, a blue-and-white-painted commercial job, zipped down to hover over us before dropping down for a precise if hurried landing.
"Come on," I said, and headed for the craft. The side door opened, and I climbed in with Michael and Sanya close behind me.
Gentleman Johnny Marcone, dressed in dark fatigues, nodded to me and to the two Knights. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said. "Just tell me where to take you."
"Southwest," I said, yelling over the noise of the chopper. "They're going to be on a commercial train heading for St. Louis."
Michael stared at Marcone in shock. "This is the man who ordered the Shroud stolen to begin with," he said. "You don't think he's going to work with us?"
"Sure he will," I said. "If Nicodemus gets away with the Shroud and pulls off this big curse, Marcone's spent all that money for nothing."
"Not to mention that the plague would be bad for business," Marcone added. "I think we can agree to help one another against this Nicodemus. We can discuss the disposition of the Shroud afterward." He turned and thumped the pilot's shoulder a couple of times, and yelled directions. The pilot glanced back at us, and I saw Gard's profile against the flight instruments. Hendricks leaned in from the passenger seat, listening to Marcone, and nodded himself.
"Very well then," Marcone called, leaning back into the cabin. He took a large-caliber hunting rifle down from a rack and settled into a seat, buckling up. "Best strap in, gentlemen. Let's go recover the holy Shroud."
I settled in and told Michael, "Now, if only we had a bit of Wagner to send us on our way."
I saw Gard's reflection in the chopper's front windows look up at my words. Then she flicked a couple of switches, and "Ride of the Valkyries" started thrumming through the helicopter's cabin.
"Yee-haw," I said as my elbows and knees started a nagging ache. "As long as we're going, we might as well go out in style."
After a few minutes, the ride got bumpy. The chopper started jouncing at random, lurching several feet in any given direction. If I hadn't been strapped in, I probably would have slammed my head against the walls or ceiling.
Marcone put on a headset and spoke into a microphone. He listened to the answer and then shouted to the rest of us, "The ride may be a bit bumpier. The stabilizers are run by the onboard computer, which has failed." He gave me a direct look. "I can only speculate as to why."
I looked around, picked up another headset, put it on, and said, "Blow me."
"Excuse me?" came Gard's somewhat outraged voice over the intercom.
"Not you, blondie. I was talking to Marcone."
Marcone folded his arms in his seat, half smiling. "It's all right, Miss Gard. Compassion dictates that we must make allowances. Mister Dresden is a diplomatically challenged individual. He should be in a shelter for the tactless."
"I'll tell you what you can do with your shelter," I said. "Marcone, I need to speak to you."
Marcone frowned at me, and then nodded. "How much time before we reach the southbound tracks?"
"We're over the first one now," Gard replied. "Three minutes to catch the train."
"Inform me when we reach it. Mister Hendricks, please switch the cabin headphones to channel two."
Hendricks didn't say anything, and it made me wonder why he had bothered with a headset.
"There," came Marcone's voice after a moment. "We're speaking privately."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said.
"Tell you that I hadn't sent Mister Franklin for you?"
"Yeah."
"Would you have believed me?"
"No."
"Would you have thought I was playing some kind of game with you?"
"Yes."
"Then why waste the time and make you more suspicious? Generally speaking, you are quite perceptive---given enough time. And I know you well enough to know that I do not wish to have you as my enemy."
I glowered at him.
He arched an eyebrow, meeting my gaze without fear or hostility.
"Why do you want the Shroud?"
"That's none of your business."
I scowled. "Actually it is. Literally. Why do you want it?"
"Why do you?"
"Because the Denarians are going to kill a lot of people with it."
Marcone shrugged. "That's reason enough for me as well."
"Sure it is."
"It's simple business, Mister Dresden. I can't conduct business with a mound of corpses."
"Why don't I believe you?"
Marcone's teeth flashed. "Because given enough time, you are a perceptive individual."
There was a beep in the headphones, and Gard said, "Fifteen seconds, sir."
"Thank you," Marcone replied. "Dresden, why should these people take the Shroud and this plague of theirs to St. Louis?"
"It's another international airport," I said. "It's the central hub for TWA. And hell, as long as they're there, they could probably go for a swim in the Mississippi."
"Why not simply stay in Chicago?"
I nodded toward Michael and Sanya. "Them. Plus I figure they know that Murphy and SI would give them a hard time. Even the regular cops were out in force looking for them."
He looked speculatively at Michael and Sanya. "I assume you have a means to locate the Shroud if that is the correct train?"
"Yeah," I said. "And here's the deal. You drop us off, and we get the Shroud."
"I'm going with you," Marcone said.
"No, you aren't."
"I can always order Miss Gard to return to O'Hare."
"Where we'll all die of the plague, since we didn't stop the Denarians."
"That may be. Either way, I'm going with you."
I scowled at him, then shook my head and leaned back against the seat, shivering. "You suck. You suck diseased moose wang, Marcone."
Marcone smiled with just his mouth. "How colorful." He looked out the window and said, "My people tell me there are only three trains leaving Chicago for St. Louis this evening. Two freight trains and a passenger train."
"They won't be on the passenger train," I said. "They'd have to ditch weapons and goons, and they won't."
"Even odds that this is the one, then," Marcone said.
The chopper descended until the trees near the tracks were swaying in the downblast. That's the nice part about the Midwest. Go twenty miles from a town hall and there's nothing but lightly settled farm country. I looked out the window and saw a long train rumbling along the tracks.
Michael sat bolt upright and nodded to me.
"This is it," I said to Marcone. "Now what?"
"I bought this helicopter as Coast Guard surplus. It's fitted with a rescue winch. We climb down it onto the train."
"You're joking, right?"
"Nothing worth doing is ever easy, Dresden." Marcone took off the headphones and shouted to Sanya and Michael. Sanya's reaction was about like mine, but Michael only nodded and got unstrapped. Marcone opened a locker and drew out several nylon harnesses. He strapped one on himself and passed out another to each of us. Then he hauled the side door of the helicopter open. Wind filled the cabin. Marcone opened a cabinet, and started drawing a length of cable from it. I looked and saw the winch inside. Marcone looped the cable through a ring outside the door then said, "Who first?"
Michael stepped forward. "Me."
Marcone nodded and clipped the cable onto the harness. A minute later, Michael hopped out of the helicopter. Marcone flicked a switch near the electric winch, and cable began playing out. Marcone watched intently and then nodded. "He's down."
The winch reeled back in, and Sanya stepped up to the door. It took a couple of minutes, and it felt like the chopper was doing too much lurching around, but Marcone eventually nodded. "Dresden."
My mouth felt dry as Marcone checked my harness and clipped the cable to it. Then he shouted, "Go!"
I didn't want to go but I sure as hell wasn't going to chicken out in front of Marcone. I clutched my staff and rod to me, made sure Shiro's cane was strapped to my back, took a deep breath, and jumped. I swung around a little on the cable, and then felt myself going down.
The downdraft from the chopper all but blinded me, but when I did look around I could see the train beneath me. We were being lowered onto a car just forward of the end of the train, a large metal container with a flat lid. The helicopter had a searchlight pointed at the train, and I could see Michael and Sanya crouching and looking up at me.
I swayed and dangled like a kid's first yo-yo. My legs got clipped by an outgrown tree branch that hit me hard enough to leave bruises. When I got close, Michael and Sanya grabbed me and brought me down in one piece.
Marcone came down, his rifle hanging on his shoulder. I figured Hendricks was operating the winch. The Knights pulled Marcone safely in, and he detached the cable. It swung away and the chopper arched up and away, turning its searchlight out. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the brilliant moon, and I stayed crouched so that I could keep my balance.
"Harry," Michael called. "Where now?"
"Head for the engine and look for a boxcar," I told him. "Something it would be easy for them to hop into."
Michael nodded. "Sanya, rear guard."
The big Russian held his rifle like trained military and fell back to the rear of our group, watching behind us. Michael took the lead, one hand on his sword, and moved forward with a predatory grace and purpose.
I glowered at Marcone and said, "I'm not going anywhere with you behind me."
Marcone smiled again, and took his gun off his shoulder. He looked like trained military, too. He fell into line behind Michael.
I pulled my old duster back until it fell behind the handle of my pistol, leaving it clear for a draw. It probably didn't look military. It probably looked more like a spaghetti Western. I moved in behind Marcone, staff in my left hand, rod in my right.
We all moved forward over the rumbling freight cars, just like every Western movie you've ever seen. If I hadn't been feverish and nauseous, it might have been fun.
Michael abruptly crouched and held a closed fist beside his ear. Marcone stopped immediately, crouching, the rifle at his shoulder. Closed fist means stop, check. I crouched too.
Michael turned around to face us, poked a couple of fingers at his eyes, held three fingers up, and pointed at the car ahead of us. I took it to mean that he could see three bad guys up there. Michael beckoned Sanya, and the Russian slipped silently forward. Michael pointed at me and then at the back of the train. I nodded to him, and kept an eye out behind us.
I checked over my shoulder, and saw Michael and Sanya both swing down between the cars and out of sight.
When I faced the rear of the train again, I saw a nightmare running toward me over the cars.
Whatever creation process this thing had undergone, it hadn't been a kind one. Four-legged and lanky, it looked vaguely like a cat. But it didn't have fur. Its skin was leathery, wrinkled and mottled. Its head was somewhere between that of a jaguar and a wild boar. It had both tusks and fangs in its gaping, drooling mouth, and it moved with graceless speed.
I let out a strangled cry, lifting my blasting rod. I pushed power through it, yelled the word, and loosed a flashing bolt of fire at it. The bolt hit the thing in the face just as it gathered itself to leap at me. It let out an unnerving, wailing cry, then convulsed in pain as it jumped and sailed off the side of the car.
The fire blinded me for a moment, leaving a bright green dot over my vision. I heard the next one coming, but I couldn't see it. I dropped down to my stomach and yelled, "Marcone!"
The rifle cracked three times in deliberately spaced reports. I heard the thing squeal, and then saw it as my eyes started to adjust. It lay on top of the car maybe ten feet from me, hindquarters dragging, struggling to haul itself forward with one claw.
Marcone stepped closer, lifted the hunting rifle, and coolly put another shot right between its eyes. The creature twitched, fell, and slid bonelessly over the side of the train.
Marcone peered after it. "What was that?"
"Some kind of guard dog," I said.
"Interesting. Demon?"
I pushed myself to my feet. "Doubt it. Demons are usually a lot tougher."
"Then what was it?"
"How the hell should I know? Never seen anything like it before. Where are Michael and Sanya?"
We went to look. The next car was an empty one with spaced wooden slats and an open top. It looked like something used to haul cattle. There were three men in it, unconscious or dead. Michael climbed the far wall of the cattle car and onto the next car in line.
We climbed down into the car. "Dead?" Marcone asked.
"Napping," Sanya said.
Marcone nodded. "We should finish them. These men are fanatics. If they wake up, they'll attack us without hesitation, armed or not."
I eyed him. "We're not going to murder them in cold blood."
"Is there a particular reason why not?"
"Shut up, Marcone."
"They would show us no such mercy. And if they are allowed to live they will surely be used by the Denarians to cause pain and death. It's their purpose."
"We're not killing them."
Marcone's mouth curled into a bitter smile. "How did I guess." He snapped open a case on his belt and tossed two sets of handcuffs at Sanya. The Russian caught them and cuffed the downed men together, looping one of the sets around a metal strut of the car.
"There," Marcone said. "I suppose we'll just have to take the chance that none of them will chew off his own hand at the wrist and slip free."
"Sanya!" Michael's voice thundered over the noise of the train, and a sudden, brilliant glare of white light leapt up from the top of the next car. Steel chimed on steel.
Sanya shoved his assault rifle at me. I caught it, and he pushed past me to start climbing out of the car. He hauled himself up with his right arm, his injured arm dangling, and heaved himself to the lip of the cattle car. He stood, drew Esperacchius in a blaze of more white light, and threw himself to the next car with a rumbling shout.
I let my staff drop and fumbled with the assault rifle, trying to find the safety. Marcone set his hunting rifle aside and said, "You're going to hurt yourself." He took the assault rifle out of my hands, checked a couple of things without needing to look at the weapon, and then slung it over his shoulder as he climbed out of the car. I muttered to myself and went up the wooden slats beside him.
The next car was another metal box. Michael's and Sanya's swords shone like the sun, and I had to shield my eyes against them. They stood side by side with their backs to me, facing the front of the train.
Nicodemus stood against them.
The lord of the Denarians wore a grey silk shirt and black pants. The Shroud had been draped over his body, like a contestant in a beauty pageant. The noose around his neck blew out toward the rear of the train in the wind. He held a sword in his hands, a Japanese katana with a worn hilt. Droplets of blood stained the very tip of the sword. He held the sword at his side, a small smile on his lips, to all appearances relaxed.
Michael checked over his shoulder, and I saw a line of blood on his cheek. "Stay back, Harry."
Nicodemus attacked in the moment Michael's attention was elsewhere. The Denarian's weapon blurred, and Michael barely managed to get Amoracchius into a parry. He was thrown off balance and to one knee for a fatal second, but Sanya roared and attacked, whipping his saber through whistling arcs, and driving Nicodemus back. The Russian drove the Denarian toward the far side of the car.
I saw the trap coming and shouted, "Sanya, back off!"
The Russian couldn't stop his forward momentum entirely, but he pivoted and lunged to one side. As he did, steely blades erupted from within the car. The metal of the roof screamed as the blades pierced it, rising to a height of four or five feet in a line, a half breath behind Sanya. Nicodemus turned to pursue the Russian.
Michael got his feet, whipped the heavy blade of Amoracchius around, and slashed three times at the roof of the railcar. A triangular section three feet across fell down into the car, and the edges of the metal glowed dull orange with the heat of the parted steel. Michael dropped down through the hole and out of sight.
I lifted up my blasting rod and focused on Nicodemus. He shot a glance at me and flicked his wrist in my direction.
His shadow flashed across the top of the railcar and smashed into me. The shadow wrenched the blasting rod from my grip, dragged it through the air, and then crushed it to splinters.
Sanya let out a cry as a blade tore through the car's roof and one of his legs collapsed. He fell to one knee.
Then brilliant light flared up within the car beneath the combatants, spears of white lancing out through the holes the blades had cut into the metal. I heard Deirdre's demon form shriek in the car beneath us, and the blades harassing Sanya vanished.
Nicodemus snarled. He flung a hand toward me, and his shadow sent the splinters of my blasting rod shrieking toward my face. As they did, Nicodemus attacked Sanya, his sword flickering in the moonlight.
I got my arms up in time to deflect the splinters, but I was helpless to assist Sanya. Nicodemus knocked Sanya's saber out to one side. Sanya rolled, avoiding the stroke that would have taken his head. Doing it left Sanya's wounded arm on the ground, and Nicodemus crushed the heel of his boot down upon it.
Sanya screamed in pain.
Nicodemus raised his sword for the death blow.
Gentleman Johnny Marcone opened up with the Kalashnikov.
Marcone shot in three chattering bursts of fire. The first one tore through Nicodemus's chest and neck, just above the Shroud. The next hit on his arm and shoulder opposite the Shroud, all but tearing it off his torso. The last burst ripped apart his hip and thigh, on the hip opposite the Shroud's drape. Nicodemus's expression blackened with fury, but the bullets had torn half his body to shreds, and he toppled from the car and out of sight.
Below, there was another demonic shriek, and the sound of wrenching metal. The shrieks faded toward the front of the train, and a moment later Michael climbed up the ladder rungs on the side of the boxcar, his sword in its sheath.
I leapt forward and ran to Sanya. He was bleeding a lot from his leg. He had already taken off his belt, and I helped him wrap it around the leg in a makeshift tourniquet.
Marcone stepped up to where Nicodemus had fallen, frowned, and said, "Dammit. He should have dropped in place. Now we'll have to go back for the Shroud."
"No, we won't," I said. "You didn't kill him. You probably just pissed him off."
Michael stepped past Marcone to help Sanya, tearing off a section off his white cloak.
"Do you think so?" Marcone asked. "The damage seemed fairly thorough."
"I don't think he can be killed," I said.
"Interesting. Can he run faster than a train?"
"Probably," I said.
Marcone said to Sanya, "Do you have another clip?"
"Where is Deirdre?" I asked Michael.
He shook his head. "Wounded. She tore her way through the front wall of the car into the next one. Too risky to pursue her alone in close quarters."
I stood up and crawled back over to the cattle car. I clambered down in it to fetch my staff. After a moment of hesitation, I got Marcone's rifle, too, and started back up.
As it turned out, I was mistaken. Nicodemus could not run faster than a train.
He flew faster than a train.
He came sailing down out of the sky, his shadow spread like immense bat wings. His sword flashed toward Marcone. Marcone's reflexes could make a striking snake look sluggish, and he dodged and rolled out of the way of the Denarian's sword.
Nicodemus sailed to the next car on the train and landed in a crouch, facing us. A glowing sigil had appeared on his forehead, the sign itself something twisting, nauseating to look upon. His skin was marred and ugly where Marcone's shots had hit him, but it was whole, and getting better by the second. His face twisted in fury and a kind of ecstatic agony, and his shadow flooded forward, over the length of the railcar in front of him and dipping down between his car and ours.
There was a wrenching sound and our car shook. Then the sound of tearing metal, and our car started shuddering.
"He's uncoupled the cars!" I shouted. As I did, Nicodemus's car began drawing away from us, as our own slowed down, the gap between them growing.
"Go!" Sanya shouted. "I'll be all right!"
Michael stood and threw himself over the gap without hesitation. Marcone ditched the assault rifle and sprinted toward the gap. He threw himself over it, arms windmilling, and landed, barely, on the other car's roof.
I got to the top of the car and did the same thing. I imagined missing the other car and landing on the tracks in front of the uncoupled end of the train. Even without an engine, pure momentum would be more than enough to kill me. I dropped Marcone's rifle and gathered my will in my staff. As I leapt, I thrust the staff back behind me and screamed, "Forzare!"
The raw force I sent out behind me shoved me forward. Actually, it shoved me too far forward. I landed closer to Nicodemus than either Michael or Marcone, but at least I didn't wind up sprawled at his feet.
Michael stepped up to stand beside me, and a second later Marcone did as well. He had an automatic pistol in either hand.
"The boy isn't very fast, is he, Michael?" said Nicodemus. "You're an adequate opponent, I suppose. Not as experienced as you could be, but it's hard to find someone with more than thirty or forty years of practice, much less twenty centuries. Not as talented as the Japanese, but then not many are."
"Give up the Shroud, Nicodemus," Michael shouted. "It is not yours to take."
"Oh, yes, it is," Nicodemus answered. "You certainly will not be able to stop me. And when I've finished you and the wizard, I'll go back for the boy. Three Knights in a day, as it were."
"He can't make bad puns," I muttered. "That's my shtick."
"At least he didn't overlook you entirely," Marcone answered. "I feel somewhat insulted."
"Hey!" I shouted. "Old Nick, can I ask you a question?"
"Please do, wizard. Once we get to the fighting, there really isn't going to be much opportunity for it."
"Why?" I said.
"Beg pardon?"
"Why?" I asked again. "Why the hell are you doing this? I mean, I get why you stole the Shroud. You needed a big battery. But why a plague?"
"Have you read Revelations?"
"Not in a while," I admitted. "But I just can't buy that you really think you're touching off the Apocalypse."
Nicodemus shook his head. "Dresden, Dresden. The Apocalypse, as you refer to it, isn't an event. At least, it isn't any specific event. One day, I'm sure, there will be an apocalypse that really does bring on the end, but I doubt it will be this event that begins it."
"Then why do this?"
Nicodemus studied me for a moment before smiling. "Apocalypse is a frame of mind," he said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is despair for the future. It is the death of hope."
Michael said quietly, "And in that kind of environment, there is more suffering. More pain. More desperation. More power to the underworld and their servants."
"Exactly," Nicodemus said. "We have a terrorist group prepared to take credit for this plague. It will likely stir up reprisals, protests, hostilities. All sorts of things."
"One step closer," said Michael. "That's how he sees it. Progress."
"I like to think of it as simple entropy," Nicodemus said. "The real question, to my mind, is why do you stand against me? It is the way of the universe, Knight. Things fall apart. Your resistance to it is pointless."
In answer, Michael drew his sword.
"Ah," said Nicodemus. "Eloquence."
"Stay back," Michael said to me. "Don't distract me."
"Michael---"
"I mean it." He stepped forward to meet Nicodemus.
Nicodemus took his time, sauntering up to meet Michael. He crossed swords with him lightly, then lifted his blade in a salute. Michael did the same.
Nicodemus attacked, and Amoracchius flared into brilliant light. The two men met each other and traded a quick exchange of cuts and thrusts. They parted, and then clashed together again, steps carrying each past the other. Both of them emerged from it unscathed.
"Shooting him hardly seems to inconvenience him," Marcone said quietly to me. "I take it that the Knight's sword can harm him?"
"Michael doesn't think so," I said.
Marcone blinked and looked at me. "Then why is he fighting him?"
"Because it needs to be done," I said.
"Do you know what I think?" Marcone said.
"You think we should shoot Nicodemus in the back at the first opportunity and let Michael dismember him."
"Yes."
I drew my gun. "Okay."
Just then Demon-girl Deirdre's glowing eyes appeared several cars ahead of us and came forward at a sprint. I caught a glimpse of her before she jumped onto our car---still all supple scales and hairstyle by the Tasmanian Devil. But in addition she had a sword gripped in one hand.
"Michael!" I shouted. "Behind you!"
Michael turned and dodged to one side, avoiding Deirdre's first attack. Her hair followed him, lashing at him, tangling around the hilt of his sword.
I acted without thinking. I stripped Shiro's cane from my back, shouted, "Michael!" and threw the cane at him.
Michael didn't so much as turn his head. He reached out, caught the cane, and with a sweep of his arm threw the cane-sheath free of the sword so that Fidelacchius's blade shone with its own light. Without pausing, he swung the second sword and struck Deirdre's tangling hair from his arm, sending her stumbling back.
Nicodemus attacked him, and Michael met him squarely, shouting, "O Dei! Lava quod est sordium!" Cleanse what is unclean, O God. Michael managed to hold his ground against Nicodemus, their blades ringing. Michael drove Nicodemus to one side and I had a shot at his back. I took it. Beside me, Marcone did the same.
The shots took Nicodemus by surprise and stole his balance. Michael shouted and pressed forward on the offensive, seizing the advantage for the first time. Both shining blades dipped and circled through attack after attack, and Michael drove Nicodemus back step by step.
"Hell's bells, he's going to win," I muttered.
But Nicodemus drew a gun from the back of his belt.
He shoved it against Michael's breastplate and pulled the trigger. Repeatedly. Light and thunder made even the rushing train sound quiet.
Michael fell and did not move.
The light of the two swords went out.
I shouted, "No!" I raised my gun and started shooting again. Marcone joined me.
We didn't do too badly considering we were standing on a moving train and all. But Nicodemus didn't seem to care. He walked toward us through the bullets, jerking and twitching occasionally. He casually kicked the two swords over the side of the train.
I ran dry on bullets, and Nicodemus took the gun from my hand with a stroke of his sword. It hit the top of the boxcar once, then bounced off and into the night. The train thundered down a long, shallow grade toward a bridge. Demon-girl Deirdre leapt over to her father's side on all fours, her face distorted in glee. Tendrils of her hair ran lovingly over Michael's unmoving form.
I drew up my unfocused shield into a regular barrier before me, and said, "Don't even bother offering me a coin."
"I hadn't planned on it," Nicodemus said. "You don't seem like a team player to me." He looked past me and said. "But I've heard about you, Marcone. Are you interested in a job?"
"I was just going to ask you the same thing," Marcone said.
Nicodemus smiled and said, "Bravo, sir. I understand. I'm obliged to kill you, but I understand."
I traded a look with Marcone. I flicked my eyes at the upcoming bridge. He took a deep breath and nodded.
Nicodemus lifted the gun and aimed for my head. His shadow suddenly swept forward, under and around my shield, seizing my left hand. It ripped at my arm hard, pulling me off balance.
Marcone was ready. He let one of his empty guns fall and produced a knife from somewhere on his person. He flicked it at Nicodemus's face.
I went for his gun hand when he flinched. The gun went off. My senses exploded with a flash of light, and I lost the feeling in my left arm. But I trapped his gun arm between my body and my right arm and pried at his fingers.
Marcone went for him with another knife. It swept past my face, missing me. But it hit the Shroud. Marcone cut through it cleanly, seized it, and pulled it off Nicodemus entirely.
I felt the release of energy as the Shroud was removed, a wave of fever-hot magic that swept over me in a sudden, potent surge. When it was gone, my chills and my aching joints were gone with it. The curse had been broken.
"No!" Nicodemus shouted. "Kill him!"
Deirdre leapt at Marcone. Marcone turned and jumped off the train just as it rolled out over the river. He hit the water feet first, still clutching the Shroud, and was lost in the darkness.
I pried the gun from Nicodemus's fingers. He caught me by the hair, jerked my head back, and got his arm around my throat. He started choking me, hissing, "It's going to take days to kill you, Dresden."
He's afraid of you, said Shiro's voice in my mind.
In my memories, I watched Nicodemus edge away from Shiro as the old man entered the room.
The noose made him invulnerable to any lasting harm.
But in a flash of insight, I was willing to bet that the one thing the noose wouldn't protect him against was itself.
I reached back, fumbling until I felt the noose. I pulled on it as hard as I could, and then twisted it, pressing my knuckles hard into Nicodemus's throat.
Nicodemus reacted in sudden and obvious panic, releasing my throat and struggling to get away. I held on for dear life and dragged him off balance. I tried to throw him off the train, letting go of the noose at the last moment. He went over the edge but Deirdre let out a shriek and leapt forward, her tendrils writhing around one of his arms and holding him.
"Kill him," Nicodemus choked. "Kill him now!"
Coughing and wheezing, I picked up Michael's still form as best I could and leapt off the train.
We hit the water together. Michael sank. I wouldn't let go of him. I sank too. I tried to get us out, but I couldn't, and things started to become confusing and black.
I had almost given up trying when I felt something near me in the water. I thought it was a rope and I grabbed it. I was still holding on to Michael as whoever had thrown the rope started pulling me out.
I gasped for breath when my head broke water, and someone helped me drag Michael's body over to the shallows at the side of the river.
It was Marcone. And he hadn't thrown me a rope.
He'd hauled me out with the Shroud.
I woke up in the back of Michael's pickup staring up at the stars and the moon and in considerable pain. Sanya sat at the back of the truck, facing me. Michael lay still and unmoving beside me.
"He's awake," Sanya said when he saw me moving.
Murphy's voice came from the front of the truck. "Harry, be still, okay? We don't know how badly you've been shot."
"Okay," I said. "Hi, Murph. It should have torn."
"What?" Murphy asked.
"Shroud. It should have torn like wet tissue. That just makes sense, right?"
"Shhhhh, Harry. Be still and don't talk."
That sounded fine to me. The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.
This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.
I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.
"I'm not dead!" I sputtered. "I'm not dead!"
Murphy appeared in my field of vision, her hand on my chest. "We know that, Harry. Easy. We've got to get the bullet out of you. We can't take you to the emergency room. They have to report any gunshot wounds."
"I don't know," Butters said. "This X ray is all screwed up. I'm not sure it's showing me where the bullet is. If I don't do this right, I could make things worse."
"You can do it," Murphy said. "The technical stuff always messes up around him."
Things spun around.
Michael stood over me at one point, his hand on my head. "Easy, Harry. It's almost done."
And I thought, Great. I'm going to require an armed escort to make sure I get to hell.
When I woke up again, I was in a small bedroom. Stacks and boxes and shelves of fabric filled the place nearly to the ceiling, and I smiled, recognizing it. The Carpenters' guest room.
On the floor next to the bed was Michael's breastplate. There were four neat holes in it where the bullets had gone through. I sat up. My shoulder screamed at me, and I found it covered in bandaging.
There was a sound by the door. A small pair of eyes peeked around the corner, and little Harry Carpenter stared at me with big blue-grey eyes.
"Hi," I said to him.
He dutifully lifted his pudgy fingers and waved them at me.
"I'm Harry," I said.
He frowned thoughtfully and then said, "Hawwy."
"Good enough, kid."
He ran off. A minute later he came back, reaching way up over his head to hold on to his daddy's fingers. Michael came in the room and smiled at me. He was wearing jeans, a clean white T-shirt, and bandages over one arm. The cut on his face was healing, and he looked rested and relaxed. "Good afternoon," he said.
I smiled tiredly at him. "Your faith protects you, eh?"
Michael reached down and turned the breastplate around. There was a cream-colored material lining in the inside of the breastplate, with several deep dents in it. He peeled it back to show me layers and layers of bulletproof fabric backing ceramic strike plates set against the front of the breastplate. "My faith protects me. My Kevlar helps."
I laughed a little. "Charity made you put it in?"
Michael picked up little Harry and put him on his shoulders. "She did it herself. Said she wasn't going to spend all that trouble making the breastplate and then have me get killed with a gun."
"She made the breastplate?" I asked.
Michael nodded. "All of my armor. She used to work on motorcycles."
My shoulder throbbed hard enough to make me miss the next sentence. "Sorry. What did you say?"
"I said you'll need to take your medicine. Can you handle some food first?"
"I'll try."
I had soup. It was exhausting. I took a Vicodin and slept without dreaming.
Over the next couple of days, I managed to piece together what had happened from talking to Michael and, on the second day, to Sanya.
The big Russian had come out of things all right. Marcone, after getting me and Michael out of the water, had called Murphy and told her where to find us. She had already been on the way, and got there in only a couple of minutes.
The crew of the train, it turned out, had been killed. The three goons that had been trussed up on the train had bitten down on suicide pills and were dead when the cops found them. Murphy had taken us all to Butters instead of to the emergency room, since once my gunshot wound was reported, Rudolph and company could have made my life hell.
"I must be out of my mind," Murphy told me when she visited. "I swear, Dresden, if this comes back to bite me in the ass, I'm taking it out on your hide."
"We're fighting the good fight, Murph," I said.
She rolled her eyes at me, but said, "I saw the body at the airport concourse, Harry. Did you know him?"
I looked out the window, at Michael's three youngest playing in the yard, watched over by a tolerant Molly. "He was a friend. It could have been me instead."
Murphy shivered. "I'm sorry, Harry. The people who did it. Did they get away from you?"
I looked at her and said, "I got away from them. I don't think I did much more than annoy them."
"What happens when they come back?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Wrong," Murphy said. "The answer to that question is that you don't know exactly but that you will certainly call Murphy from the get-go. You get less busted up when I'm around."
"That's true." I covered her hand with mine and said, "Thanks, Murph."
"You're gonna make me puke, Dresden," she said. "Oh, so you know. Rudolph is out of SI. The assistant DA he was working for liked his toadying style."
"Rudolph the Brownnosed Reindeer," I said.
Murphy grinned. "At least he's not my problem anymore. Internal Affairs has to worry now."
"Rudolph in Internal Affairs. That can't be good."
"One monster at a time."
On the fourth day, Charity inspected my wound and told Michael that I could leave. She never actually spoke to me, which I considered an improvement over most visits. That afternoon, Michael and Sanya came in. Michael was carrying Shiro's battered old cane.
"We got the swords back," Michael said. "This is for you."
"You'll have a better idea what to do with that than me," I told him.
"Shiro wanted you to have it," Michael said. "Oh, and you got some mail."
"I what?"
Michael offered me an envelope and the cane as a unit. I took them both, and frowned at the envelope. The lettering was in black calligraphy, and flowed beautifully across the envelope.
"To Harry Dresden. And it's your address, Michael. Postmarked two weeks ago."
Michael shrugged.
I opened the envelope and found two pages inside. One was a copy of a medical report. The other was ornately handwritten, like the envelope. It read:
Dear Mr. Dresden,
By the time you read this letter, I will be dead. I have not been given the details, but I know a few things that will happen over the next few days. I write you now to say what I might not have the chance to in the flesh.
Your path is often a dark one. You do not always have the luxury that we do as Knights of the Cross. We struggle against powers of darkness. We live in black and white, while you must face a world of greys. It is never easy to know the path in such a place.
Trust your heart. You are a decent man. God lives in such hearts.
Enclosed is a medical report. My family is aware of it, though I have not shared it with Michael or Sanya. It is my hope that it will give you a measure of comfort in the face of my choice. Do not waste tears on me. I love my work. We all must die. There is no better way to do so than in the pursuit of something you love.
Walk in mercy and truth,
Shiro
I read over the medical report, blinking at several tears.
"What is it?" Sanya asked.
"It's from Shiro," I said. "He was dying."
Michael frowned at me.
I held up the medical report. "Cancer. Terminal. He knew it when he came here."
Michael took it and let out a long breath. "Now I understand."
"I don't."
Michael passed the report to Sanya and smiled. "Shiro must have known that we would need you to stop the Denarians. It's why he traded himself for your freedom. And why he accepted the curse in your place."
"Why?"
Michael shrugged. "You were the one we needed. You had all of the information. You were the one who realized Cassius was masquerading as Father Vincent. You had contacts within the local authorities to give you access to more information, to help us when we needed the concourse emptied. You were the one who could call in Marcone for his help."
"I'm not sure that says anything good about me," I said, glowering.
"It says that you were the right man in the right place and at the right time," Michael said. "What of the Shroud? Does Marcone have it?"
"I think so."
"How should we handle it?"
"We don't. I do."
Michael regarded me for a moment, then said, "All right." He stood up and then said, "Oh. The dry cleaners called. They said they're going to charge you a late fee if you don't swing by and pick up your laundry today. I'm running out for groceries. I can take you."
"I don't have anything that goes to a dry cleaners," I muttered. But I went with Michael.
The dry cleaners had my leather duster. It had been cleaned up and covered with a protective treatment. In the pockets were the keys to the Blue Beetle, along with a bill to a parking garage. On the back of the bill, written in flowing letters, were the words thank you.
So I guess Anna Valmont wasn't all that horrible a person after all.
But then, I've always been a sucker for a pretty face.
When I got back to my house, I found a postcard with a picture of Rio and no return address with my mail. There was a number on the back. I called the number, and after a few rings, Susan asked, "Harry?"
"Harry," I said.
"Are you all right?"
"Shot," I said. "It'll heal."
"Did you beat Nicodemus?"
"I got away from him," I said. "We stopped the plague. But he killed Shiro."
"Oh," she said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"I got my coat back. And my car. Not a total loss." I started opening mail as I spoke.
Susan asked, "What about the Shroud?"
"Jury's not out yet. Marcone got involved."
"What happened?" she said.
"He saved my life," I said. "Michael's too. He didn't have to do it."
"Wow."
"Yeah. Sometimes it feels like the older I get, the more confused everything is."
Susan coughed. "Harry. I'm sorry I wasn't around. By the time I was conscious, we were already over Central America."
"It's okay," I said.
"I didn't know what Martin had in mind," she said. "Honestly. I wanted to talk to you and to Trish and pick up a few of my things. I thought Martin was only coming along to help. I didn't know that he had come here to kill Ortega. He used me to cover his movements."
"It's okay."
"It isn't okay. And I'm sorry."
I opened an envelope, read it, and blurted, "Oh, you're kidding me."
"What?"
"I just opened a letter. It's from Larry Fowler's lawyer. The jerk is suing me for trashing his car and his studio."
"He can't prove that," Susan said. "Can he?"
"Whether or not he can, this is going to cost me a fortune in legal fees. Smarmy, mealymouthed jerk."
"Then I hate to add more bad news. Ortega is back in Casaverde, recovering. He's called in all his strongest knights and let it be widely known that he's coming to kill you personally."
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Did you see the subtle humor there? Vampires, cross? God, I'm funny."
Susan said something in Spanish, not into the phone, and sighed. "Damn. I have to go."
"Saving nuns and orphans?" I asked.
"Leaping tall buildings in a single bound. I should probably put on some underwear."
That brought a smile to my face. "You joke around a lot more than you used to," I said. "I like it."
I could picture the sad smile on her face as she spoke. "I'm dealing with a lot of scary things," she said. "I think you have to react to them. And you either laugh at them or you go insane. Or you become like Martin. Shut off from everything and everyone. Trying not to feel."
"So you joke," I said.
"I learned it from you."
"I should open a school."
"Maybe so," she said. "I love you, Harry. I wish things were different."
My throat got tight. "Me too."
"I'll get you a drop address. If you ever need my help, get in touch."
"Only if I need your help?" I asked.
She exhaled slowly and said, "Yeah."
I tried to say, "Okay," but my throat was too tight to speak.
"Goodbye, Harry," Susan said.
I whispered, "Goodbye."
And that was the end of that.
I woke up to a ringing telephone the next day. "Hoss," Ebenezar said. "You should watch the news today." He hung up on me.
I went down to a nearby diner for breakfast, and asked the waitress to turn on the news. She did.
"...extraordinary event reminiscent of the science-fiction horror stories around the turn of the millennium, what appeared to be an asteroid fell from space and impacted just outside the village of Casaverde in Honduras." The screen flickered to an aerial shot of an enormous, smoking hole in the ground, and a half-mile-wide circle of trees that had been blasted flat. Just past the circle of destruction stood a poor-looking village. "However, information coming in from agencies around the world indicates that the so-called meteor was in actuality a deactivated Soviet communications satellite which decayed in orbit and fell to earth. No estimates of the number of deaths or injuries in this tragic freak accident have yet reached authorities, but it seems unlikely that anyone in the manor house could possibly have survived the impact."
I sat slowly back, pursing my lips. I decided that maybe I wasn't sorry Asteroid Dresden turned out to be an old Soviet satellite after all. And I made a mental note to myself never to get on Ebenezar's bad side.
The next day I tracked down Marcone. It wasn't easy. I had to call in a couple of favors in the spirit world to get a beacon-spell going on him, and he knew all the tricks for losing a tail. I had to borrow Michael's truck so that I could have a prayer of following him inconspicuously. The Beetle may be way sexy, but subtle it ain't.
He changed cars twice and somehow called into effect the magical equivalent of a destructive electromagnetic pulse that scrambled my beacon-spell. Only quick thinking and some inspired thaumaturgy combined with my investigative skills let me stay with him.
He drove right on into the evening, to a private hospital in Wisconsin. It was a long-term-care and therapeutic facility. He pulled in, dressed in casual clothes and wearing a baseball cap, which alone generated enough cognitive dissonance to make me start drooling. He pulled a backpack out of the car and went inside. I gave him a little bit of a lead and then followed him with my beacon. I stayed outside, peering in windows at lit hallways, keeping pace and watching.
Marcone stopped at a room and went inside. I stood at the window, keeping track of him. The paper tag on the door from the hall read DOE, JANE in big, permanent marker letters that were faded with age. There was a single bed in the room, and there was a girl on it.
She wasn't old. I'd place her in her late teens or early twenties. She was so thin it was hard to tell. She wasn't on life support, but her bedcovers were flawlessly unwrinkled. Combined with her emaciated appearance, I was guessing she was in a coma, whoever she was.
Marcone drew up a chair beside the bed. He pulled out a teddy bear and slipped it into the crook of the girl's arm. He got out a book. Then he started reading to her, out loud. He sat there reading to her for an hour, before he slipped a bookmark into place and put the book back into the backpack.
Then he reached into the pack and pulled out the Shroud. He peeled down the outermost blanket on her bed, and carefully laid the Shroud over the girl, folding its ends in a bit to keep it from spilling out. Then he covered it up with the blanket and sat down in the chair again, his head bowed. I hadn't ever pictured John Marcone praying. But I saw him forming the word please, over and over.
He waited for another hour. Then, his face sunken and tired, he rose and kissed the girl on the head. He put the teddy bear back into the backpack, got up, and left the room.
I went to his car and sat down on the hood.
Marcone stopped in his tracks and stared at me when he saw me. I just sat there. He padded warily over to his car and said, voice quiet, "How did you find me?"
"Wasn't easy," I said.
"Is anyone else with you?"
"No."
I saw the wheels spinning in his head. I saw him panic a little. I saw him consider killing me. I saw him force himself to slow down and decide against any rash action. He nodded once, and said, "What do you want?"
"The Shroud."
"No," he said. There was a hint of frustration to his voice. "I just got it here."
"I saw," I said. "Who is the girl?"
His eyes went flat, and he said nothing.
"Okay, Marcone," I said. "You can give me the Shroud or you can explain it to the police when they come out here to search this place."
"You can't," he said, his voice quiet. "You can't do that to her. She'd be in danger."
My eyes widened. "She's yours?"
"I'll kill you," he said in that same soft voice. "If you so much as breathe in her direction, I'll kill you, Dresden. Myself."
I believed him.
"What's wrong with her?" I asked.
"Persistent vegetative state," he said. "Coma."
"You wanted it to heal her," I said quietly. "That's why you had it stolen."
"Yes."
"I don't think it works like that," I said. "It isn't as simple as plugging in a light."
"But it might work," he said.
I shrugged. "Maybe."
"I'll take it," he said. "It's all I have."
I looked back toward the window and was quiet for a minute. I made up my mind and said, "Three days."
He frowned. "What?"
"Three days," I said. "Three's a magic number. And supposedly that's how long Christ was wrapped in it. In three days, three sunrises, you should know whether it's going to help or not."
"And then?"
"Then the Shroud is returned in a plain brown wrapper to Father Forthill at Saint Mary of the Angels," I said. "No note. No nothing. Just returned."
"And if I don't, you'll expose her."
I shook my head and stood up. "No. I won't do that. I'll take it up with you."
He stared at me for a long moment before his expression softened. "All right."
I left him there.
When I'd first met Marcone, he'd tricked me into a soulgaze. Though I hadn't known the specifics, I knew then that he had a secret---one that gave him the incredible amount of will and inner strength needed to run one of the nation's largest criminal empires. He had something that drove him to be remorseless, practical, deadly.
Now I knew what that secret was.
Marcone was still a black hat. The pain and suffering of the criminal state he ruled accounted for an untold amount of human misery. Maybe he'd been doing it for a noble reason. I could understand that. But it didn't change anything. Marcone's good intentions could have paved a new lane on the road to hell.
But dammit, I couldn't hate him anymore. I couldn't hate him because I wasn't sure that I wouldn't have made the same choice in his place.
Hate was simpler, but the world ain't a simple place. It would have been easier to hate Marcone.
I just couldn't do it.
A few days later, Michael threw a cookout as a farewell celebration for Sanya, who was heading back to Europe now that the Shroud had been returned to Father Forthill. I was invited, so I showed up and ate about a hundred and fifty grilled hamburgers. When I was done with them, I went into the house, but stopped to glance into the sitting room by the front door.
Sanya sat in a recliner, his expression puzzled, blinking at the phone. "Again," he said.
Molly sat cross-legged on the couch near him with a phone book in her lap and my shopping list she'd picked up in the tree house laid flat over one half of it. Her expression was serious, but her eyes were sparkling as she drew a red line through another entry in the phone book. "How strange," she said, and read off another number.
Sanya started dialing. "Hello?" he said a moment later. "Hello, sir. Could you please tell me if you have Prince Albert in a can---" He blinked again, mystified, and reported to Molly, "They hung up again."
"Weird," Molly said, and winked at me.
I left before I started choking on the laugh I had to hold back, and went out into the front yard. Little Harry was there by himself, playing in the grass in sight of his sister, inside.
"Heya, kid," I said. "You shouldn't be out here all by yourself. People will accuse you of being a reclusive madman. Next thing you know, you'll be wandering around saying, 'Woahse-bud.'"
I heard a clinking sound. Something shining landed in the grass by little Harry, and he immediately pushed himself to his feet, wobbled, then headed for it.
I panicked abruptly and lunged out ahead of him, slapping my hand down over a polished silver coin before the child could squat down to pick it up. I felt a prickling jolt shoot up my arm, and had the sudden, intangible impression that someone nearby was waking up from a nap and stretching.
I looked up to see a car on the street, driver-side window rolled down.
Nicodemus sat at the wheel, relaxed and smiling. "Be seeing you, Dresden."
He drove away. I took my shaking hand from the coin.
Lasciel's blackened sigil lay before my eyes. I heard a door open, and on pure instinct palmed the coin and slipped it in my pocket. I looked back to find Sanya frowning and looking up and down the street. His nostrils flared a few times, and he paced over to stand near me. He sniffed a few more times and then peered down at the baby. "Aha," he rumbled. "Someone is stinky." He swooped the kid up in his arms, making him squeal and laugh. "You mind if I steal your playmate for a minute, Harry?"
"Go ahead," I said. "I need to get going anyway."
Sanya nodded and grinned at me, offering his hand. I shook it. "It has been a pleasure to work with you," Sanya said. "Perhaps we will see each other again."
The coin felt cool and heavy in my pocket. "Yeah. Maybe so."
I left the cookout without saying goodbye, and headed home. I heard something the whole time, something whispering almost inaudibly. I drowned it out with loud and off-key singing, and got to work.
Ten hours later, I put down the excavating pick and glowered at the two-foot hole I had chipped in my lab's concrete floor. The whispering in my head had segued into "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Stones.
"Harry," whispered a gentle voice.
I dropped the coin into the hole. I slipped a steel ring about three inches across around it. I muttered to myself and willed energy into the ring. The whispering abruptly cut off.
I dumped two buckets of cement into the hole and smoothed it until it was level with the rest of my floor. After that, I hurried out of the lab and shut the door behind me.
Mister came over to demand attention. I settled on the couch, and he jumped up to sprawl on his back over my legs. I petted him and stared at Shiro's cane, resting in the corner.
"He said that I must live in a world of greys. To trust my heart." I rubbed Mister's favorite spot, behind his right ear, and he purred in approval. Mister, at least for the moment, agreed that my heart was in the right place. But it's possible he wasn't being objective.
After a while, I picked up Shiro's cane and stared down at the smooth old wood. Fidelacchius's power whispered against my fingertips. There was a single Japanese character carved into the sheath. When I asked Bob, he told me that it read, simply, Faith.
It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be---even if it isn't what you expected.
I took Susan's picture down. I put the postcards in a brown envelope. I picked up the jewel box that held the dinky engagement ring I'd offered her, and that she'd turned down. Then I put them all away in my closet.
I laid the old man's cane on my fireplace mantel.
Maybe some things just aren't meant to go together. Things like oil and water. Orange juice and toothpaste.
Me and Susan.
But tomorrow was another day.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Blood Rites
A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Butcher
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 1-101-14666-4
A ROC BOOK®
ROC Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ROC and the "ROC" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: August, 2004
For my nieces and nephews: Craig, Emily, Danny, Ellie, Gabriel, Lori, Anna, Mikey, Kaitlyn, Greta, Foster, and Baby-to-Be-Named-Later. I hope you all grow up to find as much joy in reading as has your uncle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank a whole bunch of people for their continuing support, encouragement, and tolerance of me personally: June and Joy Williams at Buzzy Multimedia, Editor Jen, Agent Jen, Contracts Jen, and any other Jens out there whom I have missed, the members of the McAnally's e-mail list, the residents of the Beta-Foo Asylum, the artists (of every stripe) who have shared their work and creative inspiration with me and lots of other folks, and finally all the critics who have reviewed my work---even the most hostile reviews have provided valuable PR, and I'm much obliged to y'all for taking the time to do it.
I need to mention my family and their continued support (or at least patience). Now that I'm settled back at Independence, I have a whole ton of family doing too many things to mention here---but I wanted to thank you all for your love and enthusiasm. I'm a lucky guy.
Shannon and JJ get special mention, as always. They live here. They deserve it. So does our bichon, Frost, who makes sure that my feet are never cold while I'm writing.
Contents
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
My boots slipped and slid on the tile floor as I sprinted around a corner and toward the exit doors to the abandoned school building on the southwest edge of Chicagoland. Distant streetlights provided the only light in the dusty hall, and left huge swaths of blackness crouching in the old classroom doors.
I carried an elaborately carved wooden box about the size of a laundry basket in my arms, and its weight made my shoulders burn with effort. I'd been shot in both of them at one time or another, and the muscle burn quickly started changing into deep, aching stabs. The damned box was heavy, not even considering its contents.
Inside the box, a bunch of flop-eared grey-and-black puppies whimpered and whined, jostled back and forth as I ran. One of the puppies, his ear already notched where some kind of doggie misadventure had marked him, was either braver or more stupid than his littermates. He scrambled around until he got his paws onto the lip of the box, and set up a painfully high-pitched barking full of squeaky snarls, big dark eyes focused behind me.
I ran faster, my knee-length black leather duster swishing against my legs. I heard a rustling, hissing sound and juked left as best I could. A ball of some kind of noxious-smelling substance that looked like tar went zipping past me, engulfed in yellow-white flame. It hit the floor several yards beyond me, and promptly exploded into a little puddle of hungry fire.
I tried to avoid it, but my boots had evidently been made for walking, not sprinting on dusty tile. They slid out from under me and I fell. I controlled it as much as I could, and wound up sliding on my rear, my back to the fire. It got hot for a second, but the wards I'd woven over my duster kept it from burning me.
Another flaming glob crackled toward me, and I barely turned in time. The substance, whatever the hell it was, clung like napalm to what it hit and burned with a supernatural ferocity that had already burned a dozen metal lockers to slag in the dim halls behind me.
The goop hit my left shoulder blade and slid off the protective spells on my mantled coat, spattering the wall beside me. I flinched nonetheless, lost my balance, and fumbled the box. Fat little puppies tumbled onto the floor with a chorus of whimpers and cries for help.
I checked behind me.
The guardian demons looked like demented purple chimpanzees, except for the raven-black wings sprouting from their shoulders. There were three of them that had escaped my carefully crafted paralysis spell, and they were hot on my tail, bounding down the halls in long leaps assisted by their black feathered wings.
As I watched, one of them reached down between its crooked legs and . . . Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it gathered up the kind of ammunition primates in zoos traditionally rely upon. The monkey-demon hurled it with a chittering scream, and it combusted in midair. I had to duck before the noxious ball of incendiary goop smacked into my nose.
I grabbed puppies and scooped them into the box, then started running. The demon-monkeys burst into fresh howls.
Squeaky barks behind me made me look back. The little notch-eared puppy had planted his clumsy paws solidly on the floor, and was barking defiantly at the oncoming demon-chimps.
"Dammit," I cursed, and reversed course. The lead monkey swooped down at the puppy. I made like a ballplayer, slid in feetfirst, and planted the heel of my boot squarely on the end of the demon's nose. I'm not heavily built, but I'm most of a head taller than six feet, and no one ever thought I was a lightweight. I kicked the demon hard enough to make it screech and veer off. It slammed into a metal locker, and left an inches-deep dent.
"Stupid little fuzzbucket," I muttered, and recovered the puppy. "This is why I have a cat." The puppy kept up its tirade of ferocious, squeaking snarls. I pitched him into the box without ceremony, ducked two more flaming blobs, and started coughing on the smoke already filling the building as I resumed my retreat. Light was growing back where I'd come from, as the demons' flaming missiles chewed into the old walls and floor, spreading with a malicious glee.
I ran for the front doors of the old building, slamming the opening bar with my hip and barely slowing down.
A sudden weight hit my back and something pulled viciously at my hair. The chimp-demon started biting at my neck and ear. It hurt. I tried to spin and throw it off me, but it had a good hold. The effort, though, showed me a second demon heading for my face, and I had to duck to avoid a collision.
I let go of the box and reached for the demon on my back. It howled and bit my hand. Snarling and angry, I turned around and threw my back at the nearest wall. The monkey-demon evidently knew that tactic. It flipped off of my shoulders at the last second, and I slammed the base of my skull hard against a row of metal lockers.
A burst of stars blinded me for a second, and by the time my vision cleared, I saw two of the demons diving toward the box of puppies. They both hurled searing blobs at the wooden box, splattering it with flame.
There was an old fire extinguisher on the wall, and I grabbed it. My monkey attacker came swooping back at me. I rammed the end of the extinguisher into its nose, knocking it down, then reversed my grip on the extinguisher and sprayed a cloud of dusty white chemical at the carved box. I got the fire put out, but for good measure I unloaded the thing into the other two demons' faces, creating a thick cloud of dust.
I grabbed the box and hauled it out the door, and then slammed the school doors shut behind me.
There were a couple of thumps from the other side of the doors, and then silence.
Panting, I looked down at the box of whimpering puppies. A bunch of wet black noses and eyes looked back up at me from under a white dusting of extinguishing chemical.
"Hell's bells," I panted at them. "You guys are lucky Brother Wang wants you back so much. If he hadn't paid half up front, I'd be the one in the box and you'd be carrying me."
A bunch of little tails wagged hopefully.
"Stupid dogs," I growled. I hauled the box into my arms again and started schlepping it toward the old school's parking lot.
I was about halfway there when something ripped the steel doors of the school inward, against the swing of their hinges. A low, loud bellow erupted from inside the building, and then a Kong-size version of the chimp-demons came stomping out of the doorway.
It was purple. It had wings. And it looked really pissed off. At least eight feet tall, it had to weigh four or five times what I did. As I stared at it, two little monkey-demons flew directly at demon Kong---and were simply absorbed by the bigger demon's bulk upon impact. Kong gained another eighty pounds or so and got a bit bulkier. Not so much monkey Kong, then, as Monkey Voltron. The original crowd of guardian demons must have escaped my spell with that combining maneuver, pooling all of their energy into a single vessel and using the greater strength provided by density to power through my binding.
Kongtron spread wings as wide as a small airplane's and leapt at me with a completely unfair amount of grace. Being a professional investigator, as well as a professional wizard, I'd seen slobbering beasties before. Over the course of many encounters and many years, I have successfully developed a standard operating procedure for dealing with big, nasty monsters.
Run away. Me and Monty Python.
The parking lot and the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen, were only thirty or forty yards off, and I can really move when I'm feeling motivated.
Kong bellowed. It motivated me.
There was the sound of a small explosion, then a blaze of red light brighter than the nearby street lamps. Another fireball hit the ground a few feet wide of me and detonated like a Civil War cannonball, gouging out a coffin-sized crater in the pavement. The enormous demon roared and shot past me on black vulture wings, banking to come around for another pass.
"Thomas!" I screamed. "Start the car!"
The passenger door opened, and an unwholesomely good-looking young man with dark hair, tight jeans, and a leather jacket worn over a bare chest poked his head out and peered at me over the rims of round green-glassed spectacles. Then he looked up and behind me. His jaw dropped open.
"Start the freaking car!" I screamed.
Thomas nodded and dove back into the Beetle. It coughed and wheezed and shuddered to life. The surviving headlight flicked on, and Thomas gunned the engine and headed for the street.
For a second I thought he was going to leave me, but he slowed down enough that I caught up with him. Thomas leaned across the car and pushed the passenger door open. I grunted with effort and threw myself into the car. I almost lost the box, but managed to get it just before the notch-eared puppy pulled himself up to the rim, evidently determined to go back and do battle.
"What the hell is that?" Thomas screamed. His black hair, shoulder length, curling and glossy, whipped around his face as the car gathered speed and drew the cool autumn wind through the open windows. His grey eyes were wide with apprehension. "What is that, Harry?"
"Just drive!" I shouted. I stuffed the box of whimpering puppies into the backseat, grabbed my blasting rod, and climbed out the open window so that I was sitting on the door, chest to the car's roof. I twisted to bring the blasting rod in my right hand to bear on the demon. I drew in my will, my magic, and the end of the blasting rod began to glow with a cherry-red light.
I was about to loose a strike against the demon when it swooped down with another fireball in its hand and flung it at the car.
"Look out!" I screamed.
Thomas must have seen it coming in the mirror. The Beetle swerved wildly, and the fireball hit the asphalt, bursting into a roar of flame and concussion that broke windows on both sides of the street. Thomas dodged a car parked on the curb by roaring up onto the sidewalk, bounced gracelessly, and nearly went out of control. The bounce threw me from my perch on the closed door. I was wondering what the odds were against finding a soft place to land when I felt Thomas grab my ankle. He held on to me and drew me back into the car with a strength that would have been shocking to anyone who didn't know that he wasn't human.
He braced me with his hold on my leg, and as the huge demon dove down again, I pointed my blasting rod at it and snarled, "Fuego!"
A lance of white-hot fire streaked from the tip of my blasting rod into the late-night air, illuminating the street like a flash of lightning. Bouncing along on the car like that, I expected to miss. But I beat the odds and the burst of flame took Kongtron right in the belly. It screamed and faltered, plummeting to earth. Thomas swerved back out onto the street.
The demon started to get up. "Stop the car!" I screamed.
Thomas mashed down the brakes and I nearly got reduced to sidewalk pizza again. I hung on as hard as I could, but by the time I had my balance, the demon had hauled itself to its feet.
I growled in frustration, readied another blast, and aimed carefully.
"What are you doing?" Thomas shouted. "You lamed him; let's run!"
"No," I snapped back. "If we leave it here, it's going to take things out on whoever it can find."
"But it won't be us!"
I tuned Thomas out and readied another strike, pouring my will into the blasting rod until wisps of smoke began emerging from the length of its surface.
Then I let Kong have it right between its black beady eyes.
The fire hit it like a wrecking ball, right on the chin. The demon's head exploded into a cloud of luminous purple vapor and sparkles of scarlet light, which I have to admit looked really neat.
Demons who come into the mortal world don't have bodies as such. They create them, like a suit of clothes, and as long as the demon's awareness inhabits the construct-body, it's as good as real. Having its head blown up was too much damage for even the demon's life energy to support. The body flopped around on the ground for a few seconds, and then the Kong-demon's earthly form stopped moving and dissolved into a lumpy looking mass of translucent gelatin---ectoplasm, matter from the Nevernever.
A surge of relief made me feel a little dizzy, and I slid bonelessly back into the Beetle.
"Allow me to reiterate," Thomas panted a minute later. "What. The hell. Was that."
I settled down onto the seat, breathing hard. I buckled up, and checked that the puppies and their box were both intact. They were, and I closed my eyes with a sigh. "Shen," I said. "Chinese spirit creatures. Demons. Shapeshifters."
"Christ, Dresden! You almost got me killed!"
"Don't be a baby. You're fine."
Thomas frowned at me. "You at least could have told me!"
"I did tell you," I said. "I told you at Mac's that I'd give you a ride home, but that I had to run an errand first."
Thomas scowled. "An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo."
"Next time take the El."
He glared at me. "Where are we going?"
"O'Hare."
"Why?"
I waved vaguely at the backseat. "Returning stolen property to my client. He wants to get it back to Tibet, pronto."
"Anything else you're neglecting to tell me? Ninja wombats or something?"
"I wanted you to see how it feels," I said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Come on, Thomas. You never go to Mac's place to hang out and chum around. You're wealthy, you've got connections, and you're a freaking vampire. You didn't need me to give you a ride home. You could have taken a cab, called for a limo, or talked some woman into taking you."
Thomas's scowl faded away, replaced by a careful, expressionless mask. "Oh? Then why am I here?"
I shrugged. "Doesn't look like you showed up to bushwhack me. I guess you're here to talk."
"Razor intellect. You should be a private investigator or something."
"You going to sit there insulting me, or are you going to talk?"
"Yeah," Thomas said. "I need a favor."
I snorted. "What favor? You do remember that technically we're at war, right? Wizards versus vampires? Ring any bells?"
"If you like, you can pretend that I'm employing subversive tactics as part of a fiendishly elaborate ruse meant to manipulate you," Thomas said.
"Good," I said. " 'Cause if I went to all the trouble of starting a war and you didn't want to participate it would hurt my feelings."
He grinned. "I bet you're wondering whose side I'm on."
"No." I snorted. "You're on Thomas's side."
The grin widened. Thomas has the kind of whiter-than-white boyish grin that makes women's panties spontaneously evaporate. "Granted. But I've done you some favors over the past couple of years."
I frowned. He had, though I didn't know why. "Yeah. So?"
"So now it's my turn," he said. "I've helped you. Now I need payback."
"Ah. What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to take a case for an acquaintance of mine. He needs your help."
"I don't really have time," I said. "I have to make a living."
Thomas flicked a piece of monkey flambé off the back of his hand and out the window. "You call this living?"
"Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you've heard of the concept. It's called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory."
"Plebe. I'm not asking you to go pro bono. He'll pay your fee."
"Bah," I muttered. "What's he need help with?"
Thomas frowned. "He thinks someone is trying to kill him. I think he's right."
"Why?"
"There have been a couple of suspicious deaths around him."
"Like?"
"Two days ago he sent his driver, girl named Stacy Willis, out to the car with his golf clubs so he could get in a few holes before lunch. Willis opened the trunk and got stung to death by about twenty thousand bees who had somehow swarmed into the limo in the time it took her to walk up to the door and back."
I nodded. "Ugh. Can't argue there. Gruesomely suspicious."
"The next morning his personal assistant, a young woman named Sheila Barks, was hit by a runaway car. Killed instantly."
I pursed my lips. "That doesn't sound so odd."
"She was waterskiing at the time."
I blinked. "How the hell did that happen?"
"Bridge over the reservoir was the way I heard it. Car jumped the rail, landed right on her."
"Ugh," I said. "Any idea who is behind it?"
"None. Think it's an entropy curse?" Thomas asked.
"If so, it's a sloppy one. But strong as hell. Those are some pretty melodramatic deaths." I checked on the puppies. They had fallen together into one dusty lump and were sleeping. The notch-eared pup lay on top of the pile. He opened his eyes and gave me a sleepy little growl of warning. Then he went back to sleep.
Thomas glanced back at the box. "Cute little furballs. What's their story?"
"Guardian dogs for some monastery in the Himalayas. Someone snatched them and came here. A couple of monks hired me to get them back."
"What, they don't have dog pounds in Tibet?"
I shrugged. "They believe these dogs have a foo heritage."
"Is that like epilepsy or something?"
I snorted and put my hand palm-down out the window, waggling it back and forth to make an airfoil in the wind of the Beetle's passage. "The monks think their great-grandcestor was a divine spirit-animal. Celestial guardian spirit. Foo dog. They believe it makes the bloodline special."
"Is it?"
"How the hell should I know, man? I'm just the repo guy."
"Some wizard you are."
"It's a big universe," I said. "No one can know it all."
Thomas fell quiet for a while, and the road whispered by. "Uh, do you mind if I ask what happened to your car?"
I looked around at the Beetle's interior. It wasn't Volkswagen-standard anymore. The seat covers were gone. So was the padding underneath. So was the interior carpet, and big chunks of the dashboard that had been made out of wood. There was a little vinyl left, and some of the plastic, and anything made out of metal, but everything else had been stripped completely away.
I'd done some makeshift repairs with several one-by-sixes, some hanger wire, some cheap padding from the camping section at Wal-Mart, and a lot of duct tape. It gave the car a real postmodern look: By which I meant that it looked like something fashioned from the wreckage after a major nuclear exchange.
On the other hand, the Beetle's interior was very, very clean. My glasses are half-full, dammit.
"Mold demons," I said.
"Mold demons ate your car?"
"Sort of. They were called out of the decay in the car's interior, and used anything organic they could find to make bodies for themselves."
"You called them?"
"Oh, hell, no. They were a present from the guest villain a few months ago."
"I hadn't heard there was any action this summer."
"I have a life, man. And my life isn't all about feuding demigods and nations at war and solving a mystery before it kills me."
Thomas lifted an eyebrow. "It's also about mold demons and flaming monkey poo?"
"What can I say? I put the 'ick' in 'magic." '
"I see. Hey, Harry, can I ask you something?"
"I guess."
"Did you really save the world? I mean, like the last two years in a row?"
I shrugged. "Sort of."
"Word is you capped a faerie princess and headed off a war between Winter and Summer," Thomas said.
"Mostly I was saving my own ass. Just happened that the world was in the same spot."
"There's an image that will give me nightmares," Thomas said. "What about those demon Hell guys last year?"
I shook my head. "They'd have let loose a nasty plague, but it wouldn't have lasted very long. They were hoping it would escalate into a nice apocalypse. They knew there wasn't much chance of it, but they were doing it anyway."
"Like the Lotto," Thomas said.
"Yeah, I guess. The genocide Lotto."
"And you stopped them."
"I helped do it and lived to walk away. But there was an unhappy ending."
"What?"
"I didn't get paid. For either case. I make more money from flaming demon monkey crap. That's just wrong."
Thomas laughed a little and shook his head. "I don't get it."
"Don't get what?"
"Why you do it."
"Do what?"
He slouched down in the driver's seat. "The Lone Ranger impersonation. You get pounded to scrap every time you turn around and you barely get by on the gumshoe work. You live in that dank little cave of an apartment. Alone. You've got no woman, no friends, and you drive this piece of crap. Your life is kind of pathetic."
"Is that what you think?" I asked.
"Call them like I see them."
I laughed. "Why do you think I do it?"
He shrugged. "All I can figure is that either you're nursing a deep and sadistic self-hatred or else you're insane. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and left monumental stupidity off the list."
I kept on smiling. "Thomas, you don't really know me. Not at all."
"I think I do. I've seen you under pressure."
I shrugged. "Yeah, but you see me, what? Maybe a day or two each year? Usually when something's been warming up to kill me by beating the tar out of me."
"So?"
"So that doesn't cover what my life is like the other three hundred and sixty-three days," I said. "You don't know everything about me. My life isn't completely about magical mayhem and creative pyromania in Chicago."
"Oh, that's right. I heard you went to exotic Oklahoma a few months back. Something about a tornado and the National Severe Storms Lab."
"I was doing the new Summer Lady a favor, running down a rogue storm sylph. Got to go all over the place in those tornado-chaser geekmobiles. You should have seen the look on the driver's face when he realized that the tornado was chasing us."
"It's a nice story, Harry, but what's the point?" Thomas asked.
"My point is that there's a lot of my life you haven't seen. I have friends."
"Monster hunters, werewolves, and a talking skull."
I shook my head. "More than that. I like my apartment. Hell, for that matter I like my car."
"You like this piece of . . . junk?"
"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."
Thomas slouched down in his seat, his expression skeptical. "Now you've forced me to reconsider the monumentally stupid explanation."
I shrugged. "Me and the Blue Beetle kick ass. In a four-cylinder kind of way, but it still gets kicked."
Thomas's face lost all expression. "What about Susan?"
When I get angry, I'd like to be able to pull off a great stone face like that, but I don't do it so well. "What about her?"
"You cared about her. You got her involved in your life. She got torn up because of you. She got attention from all kinds of nasties and she nearly died." He kept staring ahead. "How do you live with that?"
I started to get angry, but I had a rare flash of insight and my ire evaporated before it could fully condense. I studied Thomas's profile at a stoplight and saw him working hard to look distant, like nothing was touching him. Which would mean that something was touching him. He was thinking of someone important to him. I had a pretty good idea who it was.
"How's Justine?" I asked.
His features grew colder. "It isn't important."
"Okay. But how is Justine?"
"I'm a vampire, Harry." The words were cold and distant, but not steady. "She's my girlfri---" His voice stumbled on the word, and he tried to cover it with a low cough. "She's my lover. She's food. That's how she is."
"Ah," I said. "I like her, you know. Ever since she blackmailed me into helping you at Bianca's masquerade. That took guts."
"Yeah," he said. "She's got that."
"How long have you been seeing her now?"
"Four years," Thomas said. "Almost five."
"Anyone else?"
"No."
"Burger King," I said.
Thomas blinked at me. "What?"
"Burger King," I said. "I like to eat at Burger King. But even if I could afford to do it, I wouldn't eat my meals there every day for almost five years."
"What's your point?" Thomas asked.
"My point is that it's pretty clear that Justine isn't just food to you, Thomas."
He turned his head and stared at me for a moment, his expression empty and his eyes inhumanly blank. "She is. She has to be."
"Why don't I believe you?" I said.
Thomas stared at me, his eyes growing even colder. "Drop the subject. Right now."
I decided not to push. He was working hard not to give anything away, so I knew he was full of crap. But if he didn't want to discuss it, I couldn't force him.
Hell, for that matter, I didn't want to. Thomas was an annoying wiseass who tended to make everyone he met want to kill him, and when I have that much in common with someone, I can't help but like him a little. It wouldn't hurt to give him some space.
On the other hand, it was easy for me to forget what he was, and I couldn't afford that. Thomas was a vampire of the White Court. They didn't drink blood. They fed on emotions, on feelings, drawing the life energy from their prey through them. The way I understood it, it was usually during sex, and rumor had it that their kind could seduce a saint. I'd seen Thomas start to feed once, and whatever it was that made him not quite human had completely taken control of him. It left him a cold, beautiful, marble-white being of naked hunger. It was an acutely uncomfortable memory.
The Whites weren't as physically formidable or aggressively organized as the Red Court, and they didn't have the raw, terrifying power of the Black Court, but they didn't have all the usual vampire weaknesses, either. Sunlight wasn't a problem for Thomas, and from what I'd seen, crosses and other holy articles didn't bother him either. But just because they weren't as inhuman as the other Courts didn't make the Whites less dangerous. In fact, the way I saw it, it made them more of a threat in some ways. I know how to handle it when some slime-covered horror from the pits of Hell jumps up in my face. But it would be easy to let down my guard for someone nearly human.
Speaking of which, I told myself, I was agreeing to help him and taking a job, just as though Thomas were any other client. It probably wasn't the smartest thing I'd ever done. It had the potential to lead to lethally unhealthy decisions.
He fell silent again. Now that I wasn't running and screaming and such, the car started to get uncomfortably cold. I rolled up the window, shutting out the early-autumn air.
"So," he said. "Will you help me out?"
I sighed. "I shouldn't even be in the same car with you. I've got enough problems with the White Council."
"Gee, your own people don't like you. Cry me a river."
"Bite me," I said. "What's his name?"
"Arturo Genosa. He's a motion-picture producer, starting up his own company."
"Is he at all clued in?"
"Sort of. He's a normal, but he's real superstitious."
"Why did you want him to come to me?"
"He needs your help, Harry. If he doesn't get it, I don't think he's going to live through the week."
I frowned at Thomas. "Entropy curses are a nasty business even when they're precise, much less when they're that sloppy. I'd be risking my ass trying to deflect them."
"I've done as much for you."
I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, "Yeah. You have."
"And I didn't ask for any money for it, either."
"All right," I said. "I'll talk to him. No guarantees. But if I do take the case, you're going to pay me to do it, on top of what this Arturo guy shells out."
"This is how you return favors, is it."
I shrugged. "So get out of the car."
He shook his head. "Fine. You'll get double."
"No," I said. "Not money."
He arched an eyebrow and glanced at me over the rims of his green fashion spectacles.
"I want to know why," I said. "I want to know why you've been helping me. If I take the case, you come clean with me."
"You wouldn't believe me if I did."
"That's the deal. Take it or leave it."
Thomas frowned, and we drove for several minutes in silence. "Okay," he said then. "Deal."
"Done," I responded. "Shake on it."
We did. His fingers felt very cold.
We went to O'Hare. I met Brother Wang in the chapel at the international concourse. He was a short, wiry Asian man in sweeping robes the color of sunset. His bald head gleamed, making his age tough to guess, though his features were wrinkled with the marks of someone who smiles often.
"Miss sir Dresden," he said, breaking into a wide smile as I came in with the box of sleeping puppies. "Our little one dogs you have given to us!"
Brother Wang's English was worse than my Latin, and that's saying something, but his body language was unmistakable. I returned his smile, and offered him the box with a bow of my head. "It was my pleasure."
Wang took the box and set it down carefully, then started gently sorting through its contents. I waited, looking around the little chapel, a plain room built to be a quiet space for meditation, so that those who believed in something would have a place to pay honor to their faith. The airport had redecorated the room with a blue carpet instead of a beige one. They'd repainted the walls. There was a new podium at the front of the room, and half a dozen replacement padded pews.
I guess that much blood leaves a permanent stain, no matter how much cleaner you dump on it.
I put my foot on the spot where a gentle old man had given up his life to save mine. It made me feel sad, but not bitter. If we had it to do again, he and I would make the same choices. I just wished I'd been able to know him longer than I had. It's not everyone who can teach you something about faith without saying a word to do it.
Brother Wang frowned at the white powder all over the puppies, and held up one dust-coated hand with an inquisitive expression.
"Oops," I said.
"Ah," Wang said, nodding. "Oops. Okay, oops." He frowned at the box.
"Something wrong?"
"Is it that all the little one dogs are boxed in?"
I shrugged. "I got all of them that were in the building. I don't know if anyone moved some of them before I did."
"Okay," Brother Wang said. "Less is more better than nothing." He straightened and offered me his hand. "Much thanks from my brothers."
I shook it. "Welcome."
"Plane leaving now for home." Wang reached into his robe and pulled out an envelope. He passed it to me, bowed once more, then took the box of puppies and swept out of the room.
I counted the priest's money, which probably says something about my level of cynicism. I'd racked up a fairly hefty fee on this one, first picking up the trail of the sorcerer who had stolen the pups, then tracking him down and snooping around long enough to know when he went out to get some dinner. It had taken me nearly a week of sixteen-hour days to find the concealed location of the room where the pups were held. They asked me to go get them, too, so I had to identify the demons guarding them, and work out a spell that would neutralize them without, for example, burning down the building. Oops.
All in all, my pay amounted to a couple of nice, solid stacks of Ben Franklins. I'd logged a ton of hours in tracking them down, and then added on a surcharge for playing repo. Of course, if I'd known about the flaming poo, I'd have added more. Some things demand overtime.
I went back to the car. Thomas was sitting on the hood of the Beetle. He hadn't bothered moving it to the actual parking lot, instead taking up a section of curb at the loading zone outside the concourse. A patrol cop had evidently come over to tell him to move it, but she was a fairly attractive woman, and Thomas was Thomas. He had taken off her hat and had it perched on his head at a rakish angle, and the cop looked relaxed and was laughing as I came walking up.
"Hey," I said. "Let's get moving. Things to do."
"Alas," he said, taking off the hat and offering it back to the officer with a little bow. "Unless you're about to arrest me, Elizabeth?"
"Not this time, I suppose," the cop said.
"Damn the luck," Thomas said.
She smiled at him, then frowned at me. "Aren't you Harry Dresden?"
"Yeah."
The cop nodded, putting on her hat. "Thought I recognized you. Lieutenant Murphy says you're good people."
"Thanks."
"It wasn't a compliment. A lot of people don't like Murphy."
"Aw, shucks," I said. "I blush when I feel all flattered like that."
The cop wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"
I kept a straight face. "Burned monkey poo."
She eyed me warily for a second to see if I was teasing her, then rolled her eyes. The cop stepped up onto the sidewalk and began moving on down it. Thomas swung his legs off the car and pitched my keys at me. I caught them and got in on the driver's side.
"Okay," I said when Thomas got in. "Where do I meet this guy?"
"He's holding a little soiree for his filming crew tonight in a condo on the Gold Coast. Drinks, deejay, snacks, that kind of thing."
"Snacks," I said. "I'm in."
"Just promise me you won't fill up your pockets with peanuts and cookies." Thomas gave me directions to a posh apartment building a few miles north of the Loop, and I got moving. Thomas was silent during the drive.
"Up here on the right," he said finally, then handed me a white envelope. "Give this to the security guys."
I pulled in where Thomas told me to and leaned out of my car to offer the envelope to the guard in the little kiosk at the entrance of the parking lot.
A squeaky, bubbling growl erupted from directly below my seat. I flinched.
"What the hell is that?" Thomas said.
I pulled up to the guard kiosk and stopped. I reached for my magical senses and extended them toward the source of the continuing growl. "Crap. I think it's one of the---"
A sort of greasy, nauseating cold flooded over my perceptions, stealing my breath. A ghostly charnel-house scent came with it, the smell of old blood and rotting meat. I froze, looking up at the source of the sensation.
The person I'd taken to be a security guard was a vampire of the Black Court.
It had been a young man. Its features looked familiar, but dessication had left its face too gaunt for me to be sure. The vampire wasn't tall. Death had withered it into an emaciated caricature of a human being. Its eyes were covered with a white, rheumy film, and flakes of dead flesh fell from its decay-drawn lips and clung to its yellowed teeth. Hair like brittle, dead grass stood out from its head, and there was some kind of moss or mold growing in it.
It snatched at me with inhuman speed, but my wizard's senses had given me enough warning to keep its skeletal fingers from closing on my wrist---just barely. The vampire caught a bit of my duster's leather sleeve with the tips of its fingers. I jerked my arm back, but the vampire had as much strength in its fingertips as I did in my whole upper body. I had to pull hard, twisting with my shoulders to break free. I choked out a shout, and the sudden rush of fear made it high and thready.
The vampire rushed me, slithering out through the guardhouse window like a freeze-dried snake. I had a panicked instant to realize that if the vampire closed to wrestling range with me inside the car, they'd be harvesting my organs out of a mound of scrap metal and spare parts.
And I wasn't strong enough to stop it from happening.
Thomas's senses evidently didn't compete with mine, because the Black Court vampire was up to its shoulders in the Beetle before he choked out a startled, "Holy crap!"
I threw my left elbow at the vampire's face. I couldn't hurt the creature, but it might buy me a second to act. I connected, snapping its head to one side, and with my other hand I reached into a box on the floor between the seats, right by the stick, and withdrew the weapon that might keep me from getting torn to shreds. The vampire tore at me with its near-skeletal hands, its nails digging like claws. If I hadn't laid those spells on my duster, it would have shoved its hand into my chest and torn out my heart, but the heavy, spell-reinforced leather held out for a second or two, buying me enough time to counterattack.
The vampires of the Black Court had been around since the dawn of human memory. They had acres of funky vampire powers, right out of Stoker's book. They had the weaknesses too---garlic, tokens of faith, sunlight, running water, fire, decapitation. Bram Stoker's book told everyone how to kill them, and the Blacks had been all but exterminated in the early twentieth century. The vampires who survived were the most intelligent, the swiftest, the most ruthless of their kind, with centuries of experience in matters of life and death. Mostly death.
But even with centuries of experience, I doubted any of them had ever been hit with a water balloon.
Or with a holy-water balloon, either.
I kept three of them in the box in my car, in easy reach. I snatched one up, palmed it, and slammed it hard against the vampire's face. The balloon broke, and the blessed water splattered over its head. Wherever it struck the vampire, there was a flash of silver light and the dead flesh burst into white, heatless flame as bright as a magnesium flare.
The vampire let out a dusty, rasping scream and convulsed in instant agony. It began thrashing around like a half-squashed bug. It slammed a flailing arm into my steering wheel and the metal bent with a groan.
"Thomas!" I snarled. "Help me!"
He was already moving. He tore his seat belt off, drew up his knees, and spun to his left. Thomas let out a shout and drove both feet hard into the vampire's face. Thomas couldn't have matched the Black Court vampire's physical power, but he was still damned strong. The double kick threw the vampire out of the car and through the flimsy wooden wall of the guard kiosk outside.
The squeaky growling turned into ferocious little barks while the vampire struggled weakly. It tried to rise, its white-filmed eyes wide. I could see the damage the holy water had inflicted. Maybe a quarter of its head was simply gone, starting above its left ear and running down to the corner of its mouth. The edges of the holy-water burns glowed with faint golden fire. Viscous globs of gelatinous black fluid oozed forth from the wounds.
I picked up another water balloon and lifted my arm to throw it.
The vampire let out a hissing shriek of rage and terror. Then it turned and darted away, smashing through the back wall of the kiosk without slowing down. It fled down the street.
"He's getting away," Thomas said, and started getting out of the car.
"Don't," I snapped over all the barking. "It's a setup."
Thomas hesitated. "How do you know?"
"I recognize that guy," I said. "He was at Bianca's masquerade. Only he was alive back then."
Thomas somehow grew even paler. "One of the people that creepy Black Court bitch turned? The one dressed like Hamlet's shrink?"
"Her name is Mavra. And yeah."
"Crap," he muttered. "You're right. It's a lure. She's probably hiding out there watching us right now, waiting for us to go running down a dark alley."
I tried the steering wheel. It felt a little stiff, but it still functioned. Hail the mighty Blue Beetle. I found a parking space and pulled into it. The puppy's barks became ferocious growls again. "Mavra wouldn't need a dark alley. She's got some serious talent for veils. She could be sitting on the hood and we might not see her."
Thomas licked his lips, keeping his eyes on the parking lot. "You think she's come to town for you?"
"Sure, why not. I cheated her out of destroying the sword Amoracchius, and she was an ally of Bianca's up until I killed her. Plus we're at war. I'm surprised she hasn't shown up before now."
"Christ on a crutch. She spooks the hell out of me."
"Me too." I bent over and reached beneath the driver's seat. I felt a fuzzy tail, grabbed it, and drew the puppy out as gently as I could. It was the insane little notched-eared pup. He ignored me, still growling, and started shaking his head back and forth violently. "Good thing we had a stowaway. Vamp might have gotten us both."
"What's that he's got in his mouth?" Thomas asked.
The puppy lost hold of whatever he was savaging, and it landed on the floor of the Beetle.
"Ugh," I said. "It's that vamp's ear. Holy water must have burned it right off."
Thomas glanced down at the ear and turned a bit green. "It's moving."
The puppy snarled and batted at the wriggling bit of rotted ear. I picked it up as lightly as I could and tossed it out. The grey-and-black puppy was evidently satisfied with that course of action. He sat down and opened his mouth in a doggie grin.
"Nice reflexes, Harry," Thomas said. "When that vamp came at you. Real nice. Faster than mine. How the hell did you manage that?"
"I didn't. I was trying to feel out this little nuisance after he started growling. I felt the vamp coming a couple seconds before it jumped me."
"Wow," Thomas said. "Talk about strokes of luck."
"Yeah. It's sort of a first for me."
The pup abruptly spun, facing the direction the vampire had fled. He growled again.
Thomas went rigid. "Hey, Harry, you know what?"
"No, what?"
"I'm thinking we should get indoors."
I picked up the puppy and scanned the darkness, but saw nothing. "Discretion is the better part of not getting exsanguinated," I said. "Let's go."
Thomas and I went into the apartment building, and found the guard who should have been in the booth outside drinking a cup of coffee with a second man behind a desk. We took the elevator to the top floor. There were only two doors in the hall, and Thomas knocked on the nearest. Music rolled and thumped inside while we waited, and the spotless carpet had been cleaned with something that smelled like snapdragons. Thomas had to knock twice more before the door finally opened.
A pretty woman somewhere around her mid-forties answered Thomas's knock, and a tide of loud music came with her. She was maybe five-foot-six and had her dark brown hair held up with a couple of chopsticks. She held a pile of discarded paper plates in one hand and a couple of empty plastic cups in the other and wore an emerald knee-length knit dress that showed off the curves of a WWII pinup girl.
Her face lit with an immediate smile. "Thomas, how wonderful to see you. Justine said you'd be coming by."
Thomas stepped forward with his own brilliant smile and kissed the woman on either cheek. "Madge," he said. "You look great. What are you doing here?"
"It's my apartment," Madge replied, her tone dry.
Thomas laughed. "You're kidding me. Why?"
"The old fool talked me into investing in his company. I need to make sure he doesn't throw the money away. I'm keeping an eye on him."
"I see," Thomas said.
"Did he finally talk you into acting?"
Thomas put a hand on his chest. "A modest schoolboy like me? I blush to think."
Madge laughed, a touch of wickedness to it, resting her hand lightly on Thomas's biceps as she did. Either she liked speaking with Thomas or the hallway was colder than I thought. "Who is your friend?"
"Madge Shelly, this is Harry Dresden. I brought him by to talk business with Arturo. Harry's a friend of mine."
"I wouldn't go that far." I smiled a bit and offered my hand.
She fumbled with plates and cups for a moment, and then laughed. "I'll have to give you a rain check. Are you an actor?" Madge asked, her expression speculative.
"To be or not to be," I said. "How now brown cow."
She smiled and nodded at the puppy, who was riding in the curl of my left arm. "And who is your friend?"
"He's the dog with no name. Like Clint Eastwood, but fuzzier."
She laughed again, and said to Thomas, "I see why you like him."
"He's mildly amusing," Thomas agreed.
"He's up past his bedtime," I said. "Don't mean to be rude, but I need to talk to Arturo before I fall asleep on my feet."
"I understand," Madge said. "The music's a little loud in the living room. Thomas, why don't I show you both to the study, and I'll bring Arturo to you."
"Is Justine here?" Thomas asked. His voice held a note of quiet tension to it that I doubted Madge noticed.
"Somewhere," she said vaguely. "I'll tell her you've arrived."
"Thank you."
We followed Madge inside the apartment suite. The living room was fairly dim, but I saw maybe twenty people there, men and women, some of them dancing, others standing and drinking or laughing or talking, like most parties. There was a haze of smoke, and only some of it was from cigarettes. Colored lights shifted and changed in time with the music.
I watched Thomas as we walked through the room. His manner changed subtly, something I could sense without being able to define. He didn't move any more quickly, but his steps became more fluid somehow. He looked around the room as we went through, his eyelids a little heavy, and he started drawing the eyes of every woman we walked past.
I drew no such looks, even with the grey puppy sleeping in the crook of my arm. It's not like I'm Quasimodo or anything, but with Thomas walking through the room like a predator angel, it was tough to compete.
Madge led us past the party room and into a small room with bookshelves and a desk with a computer. "Have a seat and I'll go find him," she said.
"Thank you," I said, and settled down onto the chair at the desk. She left, her eyes lingering on Thomas for a moment before she did. He perched on a corner of the desk, his expression pensive. "You look thoughtful," I said, "which seems wrong somehow. What is it?"
"I'm hungry," Thomas said. "And thinking. Madge is Arturo's first ex-wife."
"And she's hosting a party for him?" I asked.
"Yeah. I never thought she liked the guy much."
"What did she mean about investing?"
Thomas shrugged. "Arturo broke off from a larger studio on the West Coast to found his own. Madge is real practical. She's the kind of person who could despise someone while still being professional and working with him. Acknowledging his talents. If she thought it was a winning bet, she wouldn't be worried that she didn't like the person in charge. It wouldn't be out of character for her to have invested money in Arturo's new company."
"What kind of money are we talking about?"
"Not sure," Thomas said. "Seven figures, maybe more. I'd have to get someone to look."
I whistled. "Lot of money."
"I guess," Thomas said. Thomas was rich enough that he probably didn't have much perspective on the value of a buck.
I started to ask him more questions, but the door opened, and a tall and vigorous man in his fifties entered, wearing dark slacks and a grey silk shirt rolled up over his forearms. He had a head of magnificent silver locks framing a strong face with a dark, short beard. He had a boater's tan, pale smile lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and large, intelligent dark eyes.
"Tommy!" the man boomed, and strode to Thomas. "Hey, I was hoping I would see you tonight." His voice had a thick accent, definitely Greek. He clapped both hands on Thomas's shoulders and kissed him on either cheek. "You're looking good, Tommy boy, real good. You should come work with me, huh?"
"I don't look good on camera," Thomas said. "But it's good to see you, too. Arturo Genosa, this is Harry Dresden, the man I told you about."
Arturo looked me up and down. "Tall son of a bitch, huh?"
"I ate my Wheaties," I said.
"Hey, pooch," Arturo said. He scratched the grey puppy behind the ear. The little dog yawned, licked Arturo's hand once, and promptly went back to sleep. "Your dog?"
"Temporarily," I said. "Recovered him for a client."
Arturo nodded, his expression calculating. "You know what a strega is, Mr. Dresden?"
"Practitioner of Italian folk magic," I responded. "Divinations, love potions, fertility blessings, and protections. They also can manage a pretty vicious set of curses with a technique they call the malocchio. The Evil Eye."
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Guess you know a thing or two, huh."
"Just enough to get me into trouble," I said.
"But do you believe in it?"
"In the Evil Eye?"
"Yes."
"I've seen stranger things."
Arturo nodded. "Tommy boy tell you what I need?"
"He said you were worried about a curse. Said some people close to you died."
Arturo's expression flickered for a second, and I saw grief undermine his confidence. "Yes. Two women. Good souls, both."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Assuming there is a curse involved, what makes you think it was meant for you?"
"They had no other contact with each other," Arturo said. "Far as I know, I was the only thing they had in common." He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a couple of manila file folders. "Reports," he said. "Information about their deaths. Tommy says maybe you can help."
"Maybe," I agreed. "Why would someone curse you?"
"The studio," Arturo said. "Someone wants to stop the company from getting off the ground. Kill it before the first picture gets made."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Protection," Arturo said. "I want you to protect the people on my crew during the shoot. Don't want anything else to happen to anyone."
I frowned. "Can be a tough job. Do you know who would want to stop production?"
Arturo scowled at me and stalked across the room to a cabinet. He opened it and withdrew an already opened bottle of wine. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and took a swig. "If I knew that, I wouldn't need to hire an investigator."
I shrugged. "I'm a wizard, not a fortune-teller. Got any guesses? Anyone who might want to see you fail?"
"Lucille," Thomas said.
Arturo glanced at Thomas, scowling.
"Who is Lucille?" I asked.
"My second ex-wife," Arturo answered. "Lucille Delarossa. But she is not involved."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"She would not," he said. "I am certain."
"Why?"
He shook his head and stared down at his wine bottle. "Lucille . . . well. Let us say that I did not marry her for her mind."
"You don't have to be smart to be hostile," I said, though I couldn't really think of the last time someone stupid had pulled off powerful magic. "Anyone else? Is there another ex-wife around?"
Arturo waved a hand. "Tricia would not try to stop the picture."
"Why not?" I asked.
"She is the star."
Thomas made a choking sound. "Christ, Arturo."
The silver-maned man grimaced. "No choice. She had a standing contract. Could have killed me in court if I did not cast her."
"Is there an ex-wife number four?" I asked. "I can keep track of three. If there's four, I have to start writing things down."
"Not yet," Arturo muttered. "I am single. So far just the three."
"Well, that's something," I said. "Look, unless whoever is bringing this curse onto you does something right in front of me, there's not a lot I can do. We call a spell like the Evil Eye an entropy curse, and it's damned near impossible to trace any other way."
"My people must be protected from the malocchio," Arturo said. "Can you do that?"
"If I'm there when it goes down, yes."
"How much does that cost?" he asked.
"Seventy-five an hour, plus expenses. A thousand up-front."
Arturo didn't hesitate. "Done. We start shooting in the morning, nine o'clock."
"I'll have to be close. Within sight, if possible," I said. "And the less anyone knows about it, the better."
"Yeah," Thomas agreed. "He'll need a cover story. If he stands around in the open, the bad guy will just wait until he leaves or goes to the bathroom or something."
Arturo nodded. "He can boom for me."
"Boom?" I asked.
"Boom microphone," Thomas supplied.
"Oh. That isn't such a hot idea," I said. "My magic doesn't get on so well with machines and such."
Arturo's face clouded with annoyance. "Fine. Production assistant." Something in his pants made a chirping sound, and he drew a cell phone from his pocket. He held up a hand to me and stepped over to the other side of the room, speaking in low tones.
"Production assistant. What's that?" I asked.
"Gofer," Thomas said, "Errand boy." He stood up, his movements restless.
There was a knock at the door, and it opened to admit a girl who may not have reached drinking age. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and was a little taller than average. She wore a white sweater with a short black skirt that showed off a lot of leg, and even compared to the pretty people outside, she was a knockout. Of course, the last time I'd seen her she'd been naked except for a red, Christmas-present-type bow, so it was possible that I was biased.
"Justine," Thomas said, and there was the kind of relief in his voice that I would usually have associated with historical sailors shouting, "Land ho." He took a step over to the girl and pulled her to him in a kiss.
Justine's cheeks colored and she let out a breathless little laugh before her lips touched his, and then melted into the kiss like there wasn't anything else in the whole world.
The puppy in the curl of my arm vibrated, and I glanced down to see him staring at Thomas, an inaudible, disapproving growl shaking his fuzzy chest.
They didn't kiss for a long time, really, but when Thomas finally lifted his mouth from hers, she was flushed and I could see the pulse beating in her throat. Nothing remotely like thought or restraint touched her face. The heat in her eyes could have scorched me if I'd been a little closer, and for a second I thought she was about to drag Thomas to the carpet right there in front of me.
Instead Thomas turned her so that she stood with her back to his chest, and drew her against him, pinning her there with his arms. He looked paler, and his eyes had become an even fainter shade of grey. He rested his cheek on her hair for a moment, and then said, "You've met Harry."
Justine regarded me with heavy, sultry eyes and nodded. "Hello, Mister Dresden." She inhaled through her nose, and made a visible effort to draw her thoughts together. "You're cold," she said to Thomas. "What happened?"
"Nothing," Thomas said, his tone light.
Justine tilted her head and then took a tiny step away from him. Thomas blinked at her, but didn't try to keep her there. "Not nothing," she said. She touched his cheek with her fingers. "You're freezing."
"I don't want you to worry about it," Thomas told her.
Justine looked over her shoulder at me.
I checked on Arturo, who was still in his conversation on the phone, then said in a low voice, "Black Court. I think it was one of Mavra's goons."
Justine's eyes widened. "Oh, God. Was anyone hurt?"
"Only the vampire," I said. I gave the puppy, now silent, a vague wave. "The pup saw him coming."
"Thomas," Justine said, looking back at him. "You told me you didn't have to worry about Mavra."
"In the first place, we don't know it's Mavra," Thomas said. He gave me a look over Justine's head that warned me to shut the hell up. "And in the second place, they were after Dresden. He's here under my invitation, so I helped him out a little."
"Boot to the head," I agreed. "Ran him off."
"My God. I'm glad you are all right, Mister Dresden, but this shouldn't have happened. Thomas, we shouldn't even be in town. If you don't---"
Thomas put a finger under Justine's chin and drew her eyes up to his.
Justine shuddered, her lips faltering to a halt, her mouth partly open. Her pupils dilated until there was practically no color showing around them. She swayed a little on her feet.
"Relax," Thomas said. "I'll take care of things."
Her brow furrowed with a tiny line, and she stammered, "But . . . I don't want you to . . . get hurt."
Thomas's eyes glittered. Deliberately he raised one pale hand and touched a fingertip to the pulse in Justine's throat. Then he drew it down in a slow, lazy spiral that stopped half an inch under her collarbone. She shuddered again, and her eyes slipped entirely out of focus. Whatever thought had been in her head, it died a silent little death, and left her swaying on her feet making soft, mindless sounds between quick breaths.
And she loved it. From the looks of things she didn't have a choice.
The puppy's silent growl buzzed against the skin of my arm. Anger flashed through me in a wave of silent outrage.
"Stop it," I said in a quiet voice. "Get out of her head."
"This doesn't concern you," Thomas replied.
"Like hell it doesn't. Back off on the mind-mojo. Right now. Or you and I are going to have words."
Thomas's gaze moved to me. Something vicious in his eyes flashed with a cold fury and one of his hands closed into a fist. Then he shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment. He spoke before they opened.
"The less she knows about the details," he said in a rough, strained voice, "the safer she's going to be."
"From who?" I demanded.
"From anyone who might not like me or my House," Thomas said. The words were laced with a hint of a feral snarl. "If she doesn't know any more than any other doe, there's no reason to target her. It's one of the only things I can do to protect her. Back off, wizard, or I'll be happy to start the conversation myself."
Just then Arturo finished his call and turned back to us. He blinked and stopped short of conversation distance. "I'm sorry. Did I miss something?"
Thomas arched an eyebrow at me.
I took a deep breath and said, "No. We just stumbled onto an uncomfortable topic. But we can put a lid on it until later."
"Good," Arturo said. "Now where were we?"
"I need to take Justine home," Thomas said. "She's had a little too much tonight. Best of luck, Arturo."
Arturo nodded to him and managed to smile. "Thank you, Tommy boy, for your help."
"It's nothing." He slipped an arm around Justine, drawing her with him, and nodded to me as he left the room. "Later, Harry."
I rose too, and asked Arturo, "Where do you want me tomorrow?"
He sat down his bottle of wine, grabbed a memo pad off the desk, and scribbled down an address. Then he withdrew a roll of money, peeled off ten bills and slapped a thousand dollars cash down on top of the address. I collected all of it.
"I do not know if I believe in your sincerity, Mr. Dresden," Arturo said.
I waved the bills. "As long as you're paying, I don't really need you to believe in me. See you in the morning, Mr. Genosa."
I shambled back to my place around late o'clock. Mister, the bobtailed grey tomcat who shares my apartment, hurled himself at my legs in a shoulder-block of greeting. Mister weighs twenty-five or thirty pounds, and I had to brace myself against his ritual affection.
Mister tilted his head at me and sniffed at the air. Then he made a low, warning sound of his imperial displeasure. As I came in, he bounded up onto the nearest bit of furniture and peered at the puppy still sleeping in my arm.
"Temporary," I assured him. I sat down on the couch. "He isn't staying."
Mister narrowed his eyes, prowled over to me, and swatted at the puppy with an indignant paw.
"Take it easy. This little lunatic is a featherweight." I murmured a minor spell and lit a few candles around my apartment with my will. I dialed the number where I had been contacting Brother Wang while he was in town, but got only a recording telling me the number had been disconnected. The phones are occasionally wacky when it's me using them, so I tried again. No success. Bah. My bones ached and I wanted to rest, safe and cozy in my lair.
Said lair was in the basement of a creaky old boardinghouse built better than a hundred years ago. It had sunken windows high up on its walls, and largely consisted of a single living area around a fireplace. I had old, comfortable furniture---a sofa, a love seat, a couple of big recliner-type chairs. They didn't match, but they looked soft and inviting. The stone floor was covered with a variety of area rugs, and I'd softened the look of the concrete walls with a number of tapestries and framed pictures.
The whole place was sparkling clean, and the air smelled of pine boughs. Even the fireplace was scoured down to a clean stone surface. You can't beat the Fair Folk as housekeepers. You also can't tell people about them, because they'll pack up and clear out. Why? I have no idea. They're faeries, and that's just how it works.
On one side of the living room there was a shallow alcove with a wood-burning stove, an old-fashioned icebox, and some cabinets that held my cooking ware and groceries. On the other, a narrow doorway led to my bedroom and bath. There was barely enough room for my twin bed and a secondhand dresser.
I pulled up the rug that covered the entrance to the subbasement, a trapdoor set into the floor. It was deep enough underground to keep a subterranean chill the year-round, so I juggled the puppy while putting on a heavy flannel robe. Then I got a candle, opened the trapdoor, and descended the folding stepladder into my laboratory.
I had forbidden the cleaning service to move around my lab, and as a result it had been slowly losing the war against entropy for a couple of years. The walls were lined with wire racks, and I'd filled them with Tupperware, boxes, bags, tubs, bottles, cups, bowls, and urns. Most of the containers had a label listing their contents, ingredients for any number of potions, spells, summonings, and magical devices I had occasion to make from time to time. A worktable ran down the middle of the room, and at its far end was a comparatively recent concrete patch that did not match the rest of the floor. The patch was surrounded by the summoning circle set into the stone. I'd splurged on replacing the old ring with a new one made of silver and I'd moved everything in the room as far from it as I could.
The thing I'd locked up under the circle had been quiet since the night I had sealed it into a spirit-prison, but when it came to entombing a fallen angel, I was pretty sure that there was no such thing as too much caution.
"Bob," I said as I lit some more candles. "Get up."
One shelf didn't match the rest of the room. Two simple metal struts held up a plain wooden plank. Mounds of old candle wax spread in multicolored lumps at either end of the board, and in the middle rested a human skull.
The skull shivered a little, teeth rattling, and then a dim glow of orange light appeared in its empty eye sockets. Bob the Skull wasn't really a skull. He was an air spirit, a being with a great deal of knowledge and centuries of magical experience. Since I'd stolen him from Justin DuMorne, my own personal childhood Darth Vader, Bob's knowledge and skills had let me save lives. Mostly my own, maybe, but a lot of other lives, too.
"How did it go?" Bob asked.
I started rummaging through the various and sundry. "Three of the little bastards slipped through that paralysis charm you were so sure of," I said. "I barely got out in one piece."
"You're so cute when you whine," Bob said. "I'd almost think that---Holy cats, Harry!"
"Eh?"
"You stole one of the temple dogs?"
I petted the puppy's fur and felt a little offended. "It wasn't anything I meant to happen. He was a stowaway."
"Wow," Bob said. "What are you going to do with him?"
"Not sure yet," I said. "Brother Wang's already gone. I tried to call his contact number just now, but it was out of service. I can't call up a messenger and send it back to the temple, because that entire area of mountains is warded, and a letter might take months to get through. If it gets through at all." I finally found a big enough box, scrounged around a bit more, and dropped a couple of old flannel bathrobes into it, followed by the exhausted puppy. "Besides, I've got better things to worry about."
"Like what?"
"Like the Black Court. Mavra and her . . . her . . . Hey, what's the term for a group of Black Court vampires? A gaggle? A passel?"
"A scourge," Bob said.
"Right. Looks like Mavra and her scourge are in town. One of them came pretty close to punching my ticket tonight."
Bob's eyelights flickered with interest. "Neat. So the usual drill? Wait for them to try again so you can backtrack the attackers to Mavra?"
"Not this time. I'm going to find them first, kick down their door, and kill them all in their sleep."
"Wow. That's an atypically vicious plan, Harry."
"Yeah. I liked it too."
I put the puppy's box on the table. "I want you to take Mister out on the town in the morning. Find wherever it is Mavra is holing up during the day, and for the love of Pete, don't step on any more warding spells."
Bob somehow gave the impression that he shivered. "Yeah. I've been a lot more careful. But the vampires aren't stupid, Harry. They know they're helpless during daylight. They'll have taken some measures to protect their refuge. They always do."
"I'll take care of it," I said.
"It might be more than you can handle alone."
"That's why I'm going Justice League on them," I said, fighting a yawn. I put the cardboard box with the puppy on the worktable, picked up my candle, and went to the stepladder.
"Hey, where do you think you're going?" Bob asked.
"Bed. Early day tomorrow. New case."
"And the temple dog is staying here why?"
"Because I don't want to leave him all by his lonesome," I said. "If I take him with me I think Mister would eat him after I went to sleep."
"Dammit, Harry, I'm a voyeur, not a veterinarian."
I scowled. "I need shut-eye."
"And I get to babysit the dog?"
"Yeah."
"My job sucks."
"Form a union," I said heartlessly.
"What's the new case?" Bob asked.
I told him.
"Arturo Genosa?" Bob asked. "The Arturo Genosa? The movie producer?"
I lifted my eyebrows. "Yeah, I guess. You've heard of him?"
"Heard of him? Heck, yeah! He's the best there is!"
My intuition piped up again, and I felt something in my insides drop. "Uh. What kind of movies?"
"Critically acclaimed erotic features!" Bob said, fairly bubbling with enthusiasm.
I blinked. "There are erotic film critics?"
"Sure!" Bob bubbled. "All kinds of periodicals."
"Like what?"
"Juggs, Hooters, Funkybuns, Busting Out---"
I rubbed at my eyes. "Bob, those are porno magazines, not trade journals."
"Four stars, four boners, what's the difference?" Bob asked.
I wasn't going to touch that one.
The skull sighed. "Harry, I'm not trying to call you stupid or belabor the obvious, but you did get hired by a vampire of the White Court. An incubus. What kind of job did you think this was going to be?"
I glowered at Bob. He was right. I should have known it wasn't going to be simple.
"Speaking of," I said, "how much do you know about the White Court?"
"Oh, the usual," Bob said, which meant he knew plenty.
"I saw Thomas get real weird tonight," I said. "I don't know how to describe it, exactly. But Justine was there, and she said that he was freezing and that it worried her. Then he hit her with some kind of mind-magic hypnosis whammy, and zoned her out entirely."
"He was Hungry," Bob said. "I mean, capital H kind of Hungry. The Hunger is a kind of . . . I don't know. Symbiotic spirit, inside a White Court vamp. They're born with it."
"Ah," I said. "That's where they get the strength and powers and stuff."
"Among them nigh-immortality," Bob said. "But it don't happen for free. That's why they do the whole feeding thing. The Hunger needs it to survive."
"I got it, I got it," I said, through a yawn. "They use their powers and it makes the spirit hungry so they have to feed." I frowned. "What happens if they don't feed?"
"Short-term? Moodiness, anger, violent behavior, paranoia. In the long term, they'll use up whatever reservoir of life energy they have. Once that happens, the Hunger pretty much takes over and makes them hunt."
"If they can't hunt?"
"They go insane."
"What about the people they feed on?" I asked.
"What about them?" Bob said. "They get little pieces of their life nibbled away. It does a form of spiritual damage, like when the Nightmare mauled Mickey Malone. It leaves them vulnerable to the Whites' mental allure and control, so it's easy for the Whites to come by for another bite."
"What happens if they keep getting fed on?"
"It's fed upon, o Bard, and if it keeps up the mortal burns out early. Sort of fades away into a kind of mindless daze. Heart attack during an intense feeding usually kills them."
"Killer sex," I said. "Literally."
"To die for," Bob confirmed.
An eerie thought, and one that disturbed me a lot more than I thought it should. "What if the vamp doesn't want to feed on someone?"
"Want doesn't matter," Bob said. "They feed on pure reflex. It's what they are."
"So if they stay with someone," I said, "eventually they kill them."
"Sooner or later," Bob said. "Always."
I shook my head. "I'll remember that," I said. "Tough to keep up the paranoia around Thomas. He's . . . well, hell, if he was human I might not mind buying him a beer once in a while."
Bob's tone turned serious. "He might be a great guy, Harry, but it doesn't change the fact that he isn't always in control of his power, or his Hunger. I doubt he can stop himself from entrancing that pretty girl of his. Or from feeding upon her." Bob paused. "Not that he'd really want to. I mean, she's hot. Who wouldn't want a little nibble of Justine now and then? Am I right?"
"Focus," I growled. "Just find Mavra's hiding place. I'll be back from the job before sundown if I can."
Bob sighed dreamily. "Some guys get all the luck. Genosa always casts the prettiest girls. Lots and lots of pretty girls. I'm going to be prowling the mean streets, looking for hideous creatures of the night. And you're going to be standing right there next to the most beautiful women in erotica, getting to watch everything going on. Big as life."
I felt my face flood into a feverish blush. "Keep an eye on the dog. You have my permission to take Mister on the town after the sun rises. Be back by sundown."
"Will do," Bob said. "Harry, Harry, Harry. What I wouldn't give to be in your shoes this week."
Which in retrospect just goes to show that a pretty face can inspire even a bodiless spirit of intellect to dizzying heights of idiocy.
My cat walked on my face just after dawn. My body thought I should have been getting a couple more hours of shut-eye at the least. Instead I shambled to the door to let Mister outside. Before the cat left, he bobbed his head at me, and his eyes glittered with nearly invisible flickers of orange light. Bob had taken temporary possession of Mister's body. (Actually, I suspected that Mister tolerated Bob's control only because he got to go see new things when I sent Bob out on a mission.)
Bob was a being of spirit, and was too fragile to go drifting around in sunlight. It could burn his usual form to vapor in a few seconds. The spirit needed some form of protection during full daylight, and Mister was it. I had my usual flash of concern and mumbled, "Be careful with my cat."
The cat rolled his eyes and gave me a contemptuous-sounding feline mrowl. Then Mister hurled himself against my legs in a gesture that had nothing to do with Bob, before bounding up the steps and out of sight.
I showered, got dressed, and got enough of a fire going in my kitchen stove to scramble some eggs and toast some bread. There was a scratching sound from the open trapdoor to my lab. Then I heard a series of thumps. A moment later the scratching came again, and I peered down the stepladder.
The little grey puppy had escaped the box, and was attempting to climb the stepladder. He made it up five or six steps, slipped, and thumped back down to the stone floor at the bottom of the ladder---evidently for at least the second time. He didn't whimper when he fell. He just sprawled, wiggled to get his paws back under him, then started up the stepladder again full of, well, dogged determination.
"Hell's bells, dog. You're insane. Did you know that? Certifiable."
The puppy climbed to the next step and paused to look at me, mouth dropping open in a doggie grin. He wagged his tail so hard he nearly fell off again. I went down and scooped him up, put him on the love seat, and sat down with him to eat breakfast. I shared, and made sure he got a bit of water to drink. Just because I wasn't keeping him didn't excuse me from showing a guest some measure of hospitality. Even if the guest was fuzzy.
While I ate, I mapped out my plan for the day. I'd have to spend most of it at Genosa's studio, if I was going to be able to protect anyone from incoming curses. But ultimately that was a losing strategy. Sooner or later I would be in the wrong place, or else the curse might come in too hard or fast for me to stop. The smart plan was to find out where these curses were coming from. Someone had to be sending them. What I really had to do was find that person and push their face in a little. Problem solved.
What's more, I was pretty confident that whoever was behind these curses was close to Genosa's social circle. While not as invasive or vicious as magic that directly attacked a person's physical body, this curse was still plenty potent. For magic to work, you have to believe in it. Really believe, without any doubts or reservations. It isn't all that common for someone to have that much conviction directed toward murderous ends. It's even less common to have that kind of rancor for a complete stranger.
All of which meant that the killer was probably someone close to Genosa's crowd.
Or in it.
Which meant that there was at least a chance that I would come face-to-face with the killer at work today. Best pack for trouble.
Speaking of which, I wouldn't have to worry much about the Black Court making a move on me in daylight, but it didn't mean I could afford to let my guard down for long. Vampires had a general habit of recruiting surrogate thugs for wetwork in broad daylight, and a bullet between the eyes would kill me just as well as some vampire ripping my lower jaw off. In fact, it would be a lot better, because then the vamp could order the flunky to give himself up or suicide, and the mortal authorities who might otherwise cause trouble would become a nonissue.
I was better than most at maintaining a high alert, but even so I couldn't be sharp on my guard forever. I'd get tired, bored, make mistakes. To say nothing of how grumpy it would make me, generally speaking. The longer I waited to solve the vampire problem, the more likely I'd be to get dead. So I had to move fast. Which meant that I'd need to round up some help fast. It took me about ten seconds to figure out who I wanted to call. I even had time enough to go see one of them before work.
We finished breakfast, and I let the puppy handle the prewash. I got out my Rolodex, got on the phone, and left two messages with two answering machines. Then I pulled on my heavy black mantled duster, dropped the pup into one of its huge pockets, fetched my staff and rod along with a backpack full of various gadgets for on-the-fly spellwork, and went out to face the day.
My first destination, Dough Joe's Hurricane Gym, resided on the first floor of an old office building not far from the headquarters of Chicago PD. The place had once been a tragically if predictably short-lived country-and-western bar. When Joe moved in, he tore down every wall that wasn't a load-bearing section, ripped out the cheap ceiling tiles, peeled the floor down to smooth, naked concrete, and installed a lot of lights. To my right lay a couple of bathrooms large enough to do double duty as locker rooms. A large square of safety carpet boasted about thirty well-used pieces of weight-training equipment and several racks of weights and dumbbells that made my muscles ache just looking at them. In front of me was an honest-to-goodness boxing ring, though it wasn't raised. On the other side of the ring, a raised platform boasted a long row of boxing targets---heavy bags, speed bags, and a couple of flicker bags that I could rarely hit more than once in a row.
The last area was covered with a thick impact mat and was the largest in the gym. Several people in judo pajamas were already working through various grappling techniques. I recognized most of the pajama people on sight as members of Chicago's finest.
One of the men, a large and brawny rookie, let out a sharp shout, and then he and another man closed in to attack a single opponent. They were quick, and worked well together. If it had been anyone but Murphy up against them, they probably would have been successful.
Lt. Karrin Murphy, the woman in charge of the Special Investigations division of Chicago PD, stood an even five feet. Her blond hair had been tied back into a tail, and she wore white pajamas with a faded belt that was more grey than black. She was attractive in a pleasantly wholesome kind of way---crystal blue eyes, clear skin, an upturned nose.
And she'd been a student of aikido since she was eleven.
The brawny rookie underestimated her speed, and she had slipped aside from his kick before he realized his mistake. She caught him by an ankle, twisted with her whole frame, and sent him stumbling away for a second or two---time enough for her to handle the second attacker. He struck more cautiously, and Murphy let out an abrupt shout of her own, faked a jab, and drove a front kick into his belt. It wasn't at full strength, and he'd taken the blow correctly, but he fell back a couple of steps, hands lifted in acknowledgment. If Murphy had been in earnest, she'd have put him down, hard.
The rookie came back in, but he hadn't really gotten up to speed. Murphy blocked a jab and a slow reverse punch, got the rookie by the wrist, and sent him smashing down on the impact mat, one hand twisted to the breaking point and held firm at the small of his back. The rookie grimaced and slapped the mat three times. Murphy released him.
"Hey, Stallings," she said, loudly enough to be heard by the whole gym. "What just happened here?"
The older opponent grinned and said, "O'Toole just got beat up by a girl, Lieutenant."
There was a general round of applause and good-natured jeers from the other cops in the gym, including several calls of "Pay up!" and "Told you so!"
O'Toole shook his head ruefully. "What did I do wrong?"
"Telegraphed the kick," Murphy said. "You're a moose, O'Toole. Even a light kick from you will do the job. Don't sacrifice speed to get more power. Keep it quick and simple."
O'Toole nodded, and walked over to an open corner of the mat with his partner.
"Hey, Murphy," I called. "When are you gonna stop picking on little kids and fight someone your own size?"
Murphy flicked her tail over her shoulder, her eyes shining. "Come say that to my face, Dresden."
"Give me a minute to amputate my legs and I will," I responded. I took my shoes off and set them against the wall, along with my duster. Murphy got a smooth wooden staff about five feet long from a rack on the wall. I took my staff into a square marked in tape on the mat, and we bowed to each other.
We warmed up with a simple sequence, alternating strikes in a steady, working rhythm, wooden staves clacking solidly. Murphy didn't start pushing for more speed. "Haven't seen you for almost two weeks. You flaking out on this self-defense notion?"
"No," I said, keeping my voice down. "Been on a job. Finished it up last night." I lost focus, slipped up in the sequence, and Murphy's staff banged down hard on the fingers of my left hand. "Hell's bells, ow!"
"Concentrate, wimp." Murphy gave me a second to shake my fingers, and then she started again from the beginning. "You've got something on your mind."
"Something off the record," I said, lowering my voice.
She looked around. No one was close enough to listen in. "Okay."
"I need a thug. You available?"
Murphy arched a brow. "You need manpower?"
"Thugpower," I said.
Murphy frowned. "What do you have in mind?"
"Black Court," I said. "At least two in town, probably more."
"Hitters?"
I nodded. "One of them came pretty close to taking me last night."
"You okay?"
"Yeah. But we have to shut these guys down, and fast. They aren't gentle and fun-loving like the Reds."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that when they feed, their victims don't usually survive. They don't feed as often, but the longer they stay, the more people are going to get killed."
Murphy's eyes glittered with a sudden, angry fire. "What's the plan?"
"Find them. Kill them."
Her brows shot up. "Just like that? No formal balls, no masquerades, no clandestine meetings as preliminaries?"
"Nah. I thought it might be nice to get the drop on the bad guys for a change."
"I like that plan."
"It's simple," I agreed.
"Like you," Murphy said.
"Just like me."
"When?"
I shook my head. "As soon as I find where they're holed up during daylight. I can probably do it in a day or three."
"How's Saturday?"
"Uh. Why?"
She rolled her eyes. "Murphy annual family reunion is this weekend. I try to be working on reunion weekend."
"Oh," I said. "Why don't you just, you know . . . not show up."
"I need a good excuse not to show up, or my mother won't let me hear the end of it."
"So lie."
Murphy shook her head. "She'd know. She's psychic or something."
I felt my eyebrows go up. "Well, gee, Murph. I guess I'll just try to arrange things so that the deadly monster threat will be convenient to ducking your annual family fun-fest. Your sense of priorities once more astounds me."
She grimaced. "Sorry. I spend time dreading this every year. Things are sort of hard between me and my mother. Family skews your sanity. I don't expect you to under---"
She broke off abruptly, and a little pang of hurt went through me. She didn't expect me to understand. I didn't have a mother. I didn't have a family. I never had. Even my dim memories of my father had all but vanished. I'd been only six years old when he died.
"God, Harry," Murph said. "I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry."
I coughed and focused on the sequence. "It shouldn't be a long job. I find the vamps. We go in, pound in some stakes, cut some heads, toss some holy water, and we're gone."
She began to speed the pace, evidently as glad as I to leave that comment unremarked. The strength of her swings made my hands buzz when her staff hit mine. "You mean we get to live the cliché?" she asked. "Stakes and crosses and garlic?"
"Yeah. Cakewalk."
Murphy snorted. "Then why do you need thugs?"
"In case they have goons. I need thugpower with countergoon capability."
Murphy nodded. "A few extra hands wouldn't be a bad idea." She sped up again, her staff a blur. I had to struggle to keep up. "Why don't you ask the holy knight guy?"
"No," I said.
"What if we need him?"
"Michael would come in a hot second if I asked him. But I'm tired of seeing him get hurt because of me." I frowned, almost lost the rhythm, then found it again. "God or someone like Him does Michael's event scheduling, and I get the feeling that Michael's a lot less invincible when he isn't officially on the clock."
"But he's a big boy. I mean, he knows the risks. He has brains."
"He also has kids."
Murphy faltered this time, and I hit one of her thumbs. She winced and nodded toward the rookie cop she'd humbled. "O'Toole there is Mickey Malone's nephew. He'd jump through fire for you, if I asked him along."
"God, no. No newbies on this run. A stupid mistake could be fatal."
"I could talk to Stallings."
I shook my head. "Murph, the boys in SI are a lot better at handling supernatural weirdness than the average bear---but a lot of them still don't really believe what they're dealing with. I want someone smart and tough, and who won't freeze or freak out, and that's you."
"They're better than that."
"What happens to them if something goes wrong? If I make a mistake. Or you do. Even if they got out in one piece, how do you think they would handle the backlash when they got back to the real world? Where people don't believe in vampires, and there are bodies to explain?"
Murphy frowned. "The same thing that would happen to me, I guess."
"Yeah. But you're their leader. You want to be responsible for sending them into that kind of mess? Expose them to that?"
Murphy looked at several of the men around the gym and grimaced. "You know I don't want that. But my point is that I'm as vulnerable as they are."
"Maybe. But you know the score. They don't. Not really. You know enough to be careful and smart."
"What about the White Council?" Murphy asked. "Shouldn't they be willing to help you? I mean, you're one of their own."
I shrugged. "By and large they don't like me. I need their help like I need a sword in the neck."
"Gee. Someone actually resisted your charm and finesse."
"What can I say. They have no taste."
Murphy nodded. "So who else are you going to get?"
"You and one more will do for coffin patrol," I said. "I know a guy who is good with vampires. And I'm going to have a driver standing by when it goes down."
"How many laws are you planning on breaking?"
"None," I said. "If I can help it."
"What if these vampires have human goons?"
"We disable them. I'm only gunning for Black Court. But if you want to pull double duty as conscience officer, that's fine by me."
We finished the sequence, backed a step away, and bowed to each other. Murphy walked with me to the edge of the mat, frowning and mulling things over. "I don't want to sidestep any laws. Vampire hunting is one thing. Going vigilante is another."
"Done," I said.
She frowned. "And I'd really, really like it if we did it on Saturday."
I snorted. "If we go early, maybe you can get laid up in the hospital or something, at least."
"Ha-ha," Murphy said.
"Do me a favor and keep an eye on missing persons for a few days. It might help tip us off to their location. I want every bit of information I can get."
"Gotcha," Murphy said. "You want to work on some hand-to-hand?"
I picked up my duster. "Can't. Got to be on the new job in half an hour."
"Harry, aikido is a demanding discipline. If you don't practice every day, you're going to lose what you've learned."
"I know, I know. But it isn't like I can depend on a routine from day to day."
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," Murphy said. She held my staff for me while I put on my coat and abruptly frowned as she handed it back.
"What?" I asked her.
Her mouth twisted into the shape it got when she tried to hold back laughter. "Is that a puppy in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
I looked down. The puppy had woken from his nap and poked its head out of my duster's pocket, and was panting happily. "Oh. Right."
Murphy plucked the puppy out of my pocket, turned him belly up, and started rubbing his tummy. "What's his name?"
"No name. I'm not keeping him."
"Ah," Murphy said.
"Want a dog?"
She shook her head. "They take too much attention, and I'm gone at all hours."
"Tell me about it. Know anyone who does?"
"Not really."
"Do me a favor. Keep him for a day."
Murphy blinked. "Why me?"
"Because I have to go on a new job this morning and I haven't had time to get him settled with someone. Come on, Murph. He's friendly. He's quiet. You'll never know he's there. Just for the day."
Murphy glowered at me. "I'm not keeping him."
"I know, I know."
"I'm not keeping him."
"You just said that, Murph."
"Just so long as you understand that I'm not keeping him."
"I get it already."
She nodded. "Just this once, then. I'm doing paperwork at my desk today. But you'd better be there to pick him up by five."
"You're an angel, Murph. Thank you."
She rolled her eyes and settled the pup in the curl of her arm. "Yeah, yeah. What's the new job?"
I sighed and told her.
Murphy burst out laughing. "You're a pig, Dresden."
"I didn't know," I protested.
"Oink. Oink, oink."
I glowered at her. "Don't you have some paperwork to do?"
"Get there by five, pig."
"By five." I sighed. I grumbled to myself as I walked out to my car and left for my first day on the set.
Chicago is a business town. Entrepreneurs of every stripe duke it out ferociously in pursuit of the American dream, discarding the carcasses of fallen ventures along the way. The town is full of old business headquarters, most of them held by the long-term commercial giants. When a new business sets its sights on Second City, it's cheaper for them to settle in one of the newer industrial parks littered around the city's suburbs. They all look more or less alike---a grid of plain, blocky, readily adaptable buildings two or three stories high with no windows, no landscaping, and gravel parking lots. They look like enormous, ugly concrete bricks, but they're cheap.
Arturo had acquired a short-term lease on such a building in such an industrial complex twenty minutes west of town. There were three other cars parked in its lot by the time I got there. I had a nylon backpack full of various magical tools I might need to ward off malevolent energies: salt, a bunch of white candles, holy water, a ring of keys, a small silver bell, and chocolate.
Yeah, chocolate. Chocolate fends off all kinds of nasty stuff. And if you get hungry while warding off evil, you have a snack. It's multipurpose equipment.
One end of my carved wooden blasting rod protruded from the backpack in case I needed to make a fast draw. I was also wearing my shield bracelet, my mother's pentacle amulet, my force ring, and a new gizmo I'd been working with---a silver belt buckle carved into the shape of a standing bear. Better to have the magical arsenal and not need it, than to not have it and get killed to death.
I got out of the car. I had on a pair of slacks and a polo shirt, since I had no idea of what a production assistant on an adult film set was supposed to wear. The client would have to be happy with business casual. I slung the backpack over one shoulder and locked up the car. A second car pulled up as I did, a shiny green rental number, and parked next to the Blue Beetle.
Two men got out. The driver was a fit-looking man, maybe in his late thirties. He was a little taller than average and had the build of someone who works out in a nonfanatic kind of way. His medium-brown hair was long enough to look a little disheveled. He wore round-rimmed spectacles, a Nike T-shirt, and Levi's, and his cross-trainers probably cost him upwards of a hundred bucks. He nodded at me and said, "Good morning," in a tone of genuine cheer.
"Hi," I responded.
"New guy?" he asked.
"New guy."
"Cameraman?"
"Stunt double."
"Cool." He grinned, pulled a designer-label gym bag out of the back of the rental car, and slung it over his shoulder. He approached, offering his hand. "I'm Jake."
I traded grips with him. His hands had the calluses of someone who worked with them, and he had a confidence that conveyed strength without attempting to crush my fingers. I liked him. "Harry," I responded.
The second man who got out of the rental car looked like a weight-lifting commercial. He was tall and built like a statue of Hercules beneath tight leather pants and a sleeveless workout shirt. He had a high-tech tan, coal-black hair, and wasn't old enough to qualify for decent rates on his auto insurance. His face didn't match the Olympian body. His features rated on the western slope of the bell curve of physical appeal. Though to be fair he was staring at me with a murderous scowl, which probably biased my opinion.
"Who the hell are you?" he growled.
"I the hell am Harry," I said.
He pulled out his own gym bag and slammed the car door closed. "You always a wiseass?"
"No. Sometimes I'm asleep."
He took a pair of hard steps toward me and thrust the heel of one hand at my shoulder in a belligerent push. Classic macho-jitsu. I could have done a bunch of fairly violent things in response, but I try not to get into fights in a gravel parking lot if I can help it. I took the push without yielding and grunted.
"Wrist is a little limp," I said. "If you like I can show you an exercise or something, help you out."
His face twisted with abrupt heat. "Son of a bitch," the man swore, and dropped his bag so he could ball his huge hands into huge fists.
"Whoa," Jake said, and stepped between us, facing the big guy. "Hey, come on, Bobby. It's too early for this crap."
Bobby got a lot more aggressive once Jake was there to hold him back, snarling and cussing. I'd faced too many literal ogres to be too terribly impressed by a metaphorical one, but I was just as glad that it hadn't gone any farther. The kid was a hell of a lot stronger than me, and if he knew more than nothing about how to handle himself, he could ruin my whole day.
The kid subsided after a minute, picked up his stuff again, and scowled at me. "I know what you're thinking, and you can forget it."
I lifted my eyebrows. "So you're psychic too?"
"Wiseass stunt double," he snarled. "It happened once. You aren't going to make a name for yourself. You might as well just leave now."
Jake sighed. "Bobby, he's not a stunt double."
"But he said---"
"He was joking," Jake said. "Christ, he's newer at this than you. Look, just go inside. Get some coffee or springwater or something. You don't need this on a shooting day."
The kid glared at me again and jabbed his index finger at me. "I'm warning you, asshole. Stay out of my way if you don't want to get hurt."
I tried to keep all the panic and terror he'd inspired off of my face. "Okeydoke."
The kid snarled, spat on the ground in my direction, and then stormed inside.
"Someone woke up with his testosterone in a knot today," I said.
Jake watched Bobby go and nodded. "He's under pressure. Try not to take it personal, man."
"That's tough," I said. "What with the insults and violent posturing and such."
Jake grimaced. "Nothing to do with you personally, man. He's worried."
"About being replaced by a stunt double?"
"Yeah."
"Are you serious? What the hell does a stunt double do in a porno flick?"
Jake waved a hand vaguely toward his belt. "Extreme close-ups."
"Uh. What?"
"Historically speaking, it doesn't happen often. Especially what with Viagra now. But it isn't unknown for a director to bring in a double for the close of a scene, if the actor is having trouble finishing."
I blinked. "He thought I was a stunt penis?"
Jake laughed at my reaction. "Man. You are new."
"You been doing this work long?"
"Awhile," he said.
"Guess it's a dream job, eh? Gorgeous women and all."
He shrugged. "Not as much as you'd think. After a while anyway."
"Then why do you do it?"
"Habit?" he asked with an easy grin. "Plus lack of options. I thought about doing the family thing once, but it didn't work out." He fell silent for a second, his expression touched with faint grief. He shook his head to come out of it and said, "Look, don't worry about Bobby. He'll calm down once he figures out his stage name."
"Stage name?"
"Yeah. I think that's what has got him all nervous. This is only his second shoot. First one is in the can, but it'll be a bit before they do final edits and such. He's got until next week to figure out his performing name."
"Performing name, huh."
"Don't make fun of it," he said, expression serious. "Names have power, man."
"Do they. Really."
Jake nodded. "A good name inspires confidence. It's important for a young guy."
"Like Dumbo's magic feather," I said.
"Right, exactly."
"So what name do you go by?" I asked.
"Jack Rockhardt," Jake replied promptly. He eyed me for a moment, his expression assessing.
"What?" I asked.
"You mean you don't recognize the name? Or me?"
I shrugged. "I don't have a TV. Don't go to those theaters, either."
His eyebrows shot up. "Really? Are you Amish or something?"
"Yeah, that's it. I'm Amish."
He grinned. "Maybe you'd better come inside with me. I'll introduce you around."
"Thanks."
"No problem," Jake said.
We went on into the building, a place with sterile beige walls and invincible medium-brown carpeting. Jake led me to a door with a computer-printed sign that read, GREEN ROOM, and went inside.
A long conference table ran down the center of a comfortably sized room. Doughnuts, drinks, fruits, bagels, and other foods of every description were laid out on trays down its length. The room smelled like fresh coffee, and I promptly homed in on the coffee machine for a cup.
A plain-faced woman in her mid-forties entered, wearing jeans, a black tee, and a red-and-white flannel shirt. Her hair was tied back under a red bandanna. She seized a paper plate and dumped food on it at random. "Good morning, Guffie."
"Joan," Jake responded easily. "Have you met Harry?"
"Not yet." She glanced over her shoulder at me and nodded. "Wow. You are very tall."
"I'm actually a midget. The haircut makes me look taller."
Joan laughed and popped a doughnut hole in her mouth. "You're the production assistant, eh?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "So let's produce."
"I thought that was Arturo's bag."
"He's the director and executive producer. I'm the actual producer. Makeup, cameras, lighting, sets, you name it. I handle the crew and the details." She turned to me and offered her hand, shaking off sugary doughnut goodness as she did. "Joan Dallas."
"Pleasure," I said. "Harry Dresden."
Joan nodded. "Come on then. There's still a lot to do before we can shoot. Guffie, get to the dressing room and clean yourself up."
Jake nodded. "Are they here yet?"
Her tone of voice became annoyed. "Giselle and Emma are."
There was a moment of silent, pregnant tension. Jake winced and headed for the door. "Harry, nice to meet you. Joan's okay, but she'll work you to death."
Joan threw an apple at him. Jake caught it when it bounced off his chest, crunched into it with his teeth, and held it in his mouth so that he could wave as he left the room.
"Grab yourself some food, Stilts," Joan said. "You can help me put cameras together."
"I was hoping to talk to Arturo before we got going," I said.
She turned around with two plates loaded with breakfast pastries. She hadn't bothered getting any fruit. "You're a funny guy. He's probably not out of bed yet. Bring that box of cookies. If my blood sugar drops too low I might take your head off."
She led me down a short hallway to a cavernous room---a shooting studio. A slightly raised stage held an unlit set, which looked like a lavishly appointed bedroom. Arrayed in a line in front of it were several black plastic crates and a freestanding shop light. Joan flicked it on and started opening crates, popping a bit of food into her mouth every third or fourth movement.
"Nice place," I said.
"Been a bitch," Joan said between bites. "Last company here was supposed to be some kind of computer production deal, but they had to be lying. They redid all the wiring in here, routed in way heavier than they were supposed to have. Took me a week to get things working, and then I had to turn their old gym into something like a dressing room, but this place still isn't up to code."
"Ye canna change the laws of physics," I said.
She laughed. "Amen."
"Engineer then?" I asked.
"By way of necessity," she answered. "I've done sets, lighting, power. Even some plumbing. And," she said, opening boxes, "cameras. Gather 'round, gofer boy; you can help."
I settled down while she laid out parts from heavy plastic crates. She assembled them, several professional cameras and tripods, with the surety of long practice. She gave me instructions as she did, and I did my best to help her out.
There was a pleasant, quiet rhythm to the work, something that I hadn't really felt since the last time I'd been on a farm in Hog Hollow, Missouri. And it was interesting---technology was unfamiliar territory for me.
See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics. Electronic equipment in particular tends to behave unpredictably---right up until it shuts down and stops working altogether. Old technologies seemed more stable, which was one reason I drove around town in a Volkswagen Beetle that had been built before the end of the Vietnam War. But newer products---videocameras, televisions, cell phones, computers---would die a horrible fizzling death after any extended time in my presence.
There was a sense of order to what we were doing that appealed to me on some level. Putting parts together, locking them into place, lining up plugs into their corresponding sockets, taping groups of wires together so that they wouldn't get tangled. I did well enough that Joan sat back and watched me work on the last camera on my own.
"So how is this supposed to work?" I said. "What happens next?"
"The lights." She sighed. "The damned lights are the most annoying part. We have to set them up so that no one looks too shiny or too wrinkly. Once that's done, I'll let the technical manager handle sound, and go ride herd on the actors."
"Metaphorically, I hope."
She snorted. "Yes. Some of them are decent enough---like that blockhead Guffie. But if you don't push them into getting things done, they'll never be ready for the set on time. Makeup, costume, that sort of thing."
"Aha. And some of them are late?" I asked.
"Scrump will be," she said. It almost came out a growl.
I pushed. "Who?"
"Tricia Scrump. Actress."
"You don't like her?" I asked.
"I despise that self-absorbed, egotistical little bitch," Joan said cheerfully. "She'll play the princess and everyone else in the cast will know that they don't have to show up on time, or be ready to go on time, or be entirely sober, since Her Lascivious Highness Trixie Vixen will be showing up late to everything anyway, high as a kite and doing exactly as she pleases. I long to slap her silly."
"You shouldn't repress your emotions like that," I said.
She let out a belly laugh. "Sorry. No reason to drag a newbie into old politics. Guess I'm just upset to be working with her again. I didn't expect it."
Aha. Hostility for the porn starlet. That's what we in the business call "motive." Joan did not strike a creepy, murderous strega vibe with me, but I'd learned the hard way that a skilled liar can look innocent right up until she stabs you in the back. I dug for more information like a good investigator. "Why not?"
She shook her head. "When Arturo left Silverlight Studios to start his own company, he made a lot of people angry."
"What do you think about that? The move, I mean."
She sighed. "Arturo is an idiot. He's a kind man, and he means well. But he's an idiot. Anyone who works with him now risks getting blacklisted by Silverlight."
"Even Trixie? I mean, if she's a big star, won't the studio kind of kowtow to her?"
Joan leaned down to check a connection I'd made, shoving the plug in. "Are you on drugs or something? She's a big star with a limited shelf life. They'd replace her without blinking."
"She sounds gutsy."
Joan shook her head. "Don't confuse courage with stupidity. I think she's vapid enough to actually believe she's too important to lose."
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you don't like her much."
"Doesn't matter whether or not I like her," Joan said. "It's my job to work with her."
I watched her set her mouth in a firm line as she started closing cases and stacking them up. I was willing to bet that Tricia Scrump, a/k/a Trixie Vixen, didn't have the same kind of professional resolve.
I helped Joan pick up the crates and tools and stack them against the far wall of the dim studio. She moved briskly, tension and distaste simmering under the surface of her determined expression. I studied her as covertly as I could. She clearly wasn't happy to be here. Could she be gunning for Arturo with some kind of heavy-duty entropy curse?
It didn't track. There hadn't been any hostility when she spoke about Arturo. And if she were a strong enough practitioner to throw out deadly spells, she wouldn't be able to keep up a career amidst so much technology. If she was harboring vengeful feelings toward Arturo, she was the best actress I'd ever seen.
I suppose that could have been possible. But my instincts were sending me mixed messages. On the one hand, they told me that Joan was on the level. On the other, they also told me there was more to the woman than met the eye. Something told me that things were more serious than they appeared---that this situation was even more dangerous than I had originally believed.
It bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
Joan shut the last case and interrupted my train of thought. "Okay then," she said. "Let's get the studio powered up."
"Um," I said. "Maybe I shouldn't be here when you do."
She lifted her eyebrows, evidently waiting for an explanation.
"Uh," I said. "I have a plate in my head. It's a little twitchy around electric fields. High-voltage equipment, that kind of thing. I'd rather come in when it was already up and running, so I can back off if there's a problem."
Joan stared at me with a lot of skepticism. "Is that so?"
"Yeah."
She frowned. "How did you get this job?"
Christ, I'm a terrible liar. I tried to think of an answer that didn't begin with, "Um."
But I was interrupted.
A surge of silent, invisible energy swept through the room, cold and foul. My stomach twisted with abrupt nausea, and my skin erupted in gooseflesh. Dark, dangerous magic swirled by, drawing my attention to the studio's exit. It was the kind of magic that destroys, warps, rots, and corrupts.
The kind of magic you'd need to feed a deadly entropy curse.
"What's wrong?" Joan shook me with one hand. "Harry? You're shaking. Are you all right?"
I managed to choke out, "Who else is in the building?"
"Jake, Bobby, Emma, and Giselle. No one else."
I stumbled to my pack and picked it up. If Joan hadn't helped me balance, I might have fallen down. "Show me where."
Joan blinked in confusion. "What?"
I shoved the sensation of the dark magic away as best I could and snarled, "They're in danger. Show me where! Now!"
My tone might have alarmed her, but her expression became more worried than frightened. Joan nodded and half ran out of the studio, leading me out a side door, up a flight of metal spiral stairs, and into another hallway. We sprinted down it to a room with a sign on it that said, DRESSING ROOM.
"Get back," I said, and stepped in front of her.
I hadn't yet touched the doorknob when a woman began to scream.
I tore the door open onto a room the size of my apartment, lined with freestanding mirrors, folding tables, and chairs. A cloud of foul energies slapped me in the face. Bobby stood off to my right, his expression registering surprise and confusion. To my left stood a woman in the corner of my vision, mostly naked. I didn't stop to goggle, but ran through the room to a second door. It was partly open and swinging closed again.
I slammed through it into a bathroom as big as my bedroom, which I suppose isn't all that unusual. The air was hot, humid, and smelled like fresh soap. The shower was running, its glass door broken into jagged teeth. The floor was covered in more broken glass, a little water, and a lot of blood. Two rigid, motionless bodies lay on the floor.
My instincts screamed a warning, and just before I stepped into the pool of bloodstained water, I threw myself into a jump. My shins hit heavily on the counter of the sink and I started to fall. I grabbed on to the faucet and hauled myself up. My shins hurt like hell, but I'd kept my feet off the floor. My brain caught up to my instincts, and I saw what was going on. The two people on the floor weren't motionless---they were locked into positions of rigid agony.
Sparks leapt up in the back corner of the room. A heavy, high-voltage light fixture had broken loose from the ceiling and fallen, hauling exposed wiring to lie in the thin sheet of scarlet liquid on the floor.
Like I said, I don't get along with technology when I'm trying to use it. But when I actually want to bust it up, I'm hell on wheels. I extended my right hand at the light fixture, snarled incoherently, and willed raw power over the electric menace like an invisible wrecking ball. The hex rippled through the air, and the live wires exploded into wild blue arcs of electricity for maybe two seconds.
And then the lights went out.
In the whole damn building.
Whoops.
I heard a pair of gasps from whoever was on the floor, presumably Jake and someone named Giselle. I got out my pentacle amulet.
"What's happening?" Bobby's voice sounded suspicious. Stars, what a dolt. "Hey, prick, what do you think you're doing?"
"Where are the damned emergency lights?" said an annoyed female voice. A light flicked on in the dressing room, and Joan appeared at the bathroom door holding a pocket flashlight on her key chain. "What's going on?"
"Call nine-one-one," I snapped. "Hurry, there's bleeding."
"You need a light," Joan said.
"Got one." I willed energy through the silver pentacle. It flickered and began to brighten with a steady blue glow that made the blood on the floor look black. "Hurry, and bring all the ice you can find with you when you come back."
Joan vanished from the door. She snarled, "Get out of the way, you blockhead," and her footsteps retreated back down the hall. I got off the sink, splashed into the water, and knelt beside the downed people.
Jake, naked from the waist up, stirred as I did. "Ow," he said in a rough voice. "Ow."
"Are you all right?" I asked.
He sat up, wobbling a little. "Never mind. Giselle, she must have slipped in the shower. I came in to help her."
I turned my attention to the girl. She was young and a little scrawny for my tastes, all long limbs and long hair. I rolled her onto her back. She had a cut running the length of her neck, curving from the base of her ear to above her collarbone. Blood shone on her skin, her mouth was partly open, and her dark eyes were glassy.
"Crap," I said. I seized a towel from a large shelf of them and pressed it down hard on the girl's wound. "Jake, I need you."
He looked up a little blearily. "Is she dead?"
"She will be if you don't help. Hold this down hard. Keep pressure on the wound."
"Okay." He didn't look steady, but he clenched his jaw and did as I instructed. While I elevated her feet with a rolled towel, Jake said, "I can't feel a pulse. She isn't breathing."
"Dammit." I tilted the girl's head back and made sure her mouth was clear. I sealed my mouth to hers and blew in hard. Then I drew back and put the heels of my hands near her sternum. I wasn't sure how hard to push. The practice dummy in the CPR class didn't have ribs to break. I guessed and hoped I got it right. Five pushes, then another breath. Five more, then another breath. The blue light from my amulet bobbed and waved about, making shadows lurch and shift.
For the record, CPR is hard to do for very long. I made it for maybe six or seven minutes, and was getting too dizzy to see when Jake told me to switch off with him. We swapped jobs. Joan returned with a big steel bowl of shaved ice, and I had her fold it into another towel, which I then pressed down over the wound.
"What are you doing?" Joan asked.
"She's cut bad. If we get her heart started, she'll bleed out," I panted. "The cold will make the blood vessels constrict, slow down the bleeding. It might buy her some time."
"Oh, God," Joan muttered. "Poor thing."
I leaned down to peer at her face. The skin on the left side of her features and on her throat was covered in blotches of dark, angry red. "Look. Burns."
"From the electricity?" Joan asked.
"Her face wasn't in the water," I said. I squinted between the girl and the shower. "The water," I said. "It turned hot on her. She got scalded and fell right through the damned glass."
Joan flinched as if she'd been stabbed with a knife, and her face turned grey. "Oh, my God. This is my fault. I hooked up the water heater myself."
"Jinxed," said Bobby from the dressing room. "This whole shoot is jinxed. We're screwed."
Joan was holding herself steady, but tears fell from off her chin onto the naked girl. I kept pressure on the injury. "I don't think this was your fault. I want you to get out front and show the paramedics in when they arrive."
Her face still ashen, she rose and took off without looking back. Jake kept up the mouth-to-mouth like he knew what he was doing. I was panting and holding the towel and ice against the wound when the paramedics finally showed up, carrying heavy-duty flashlights and rolling a wheeled stretcher between them.
I told them what had happened to the girl and got out of their way, taking a seat on the corner of a counter that ran along a wall of makeup mirrors. Jake joined me a minute later. "Thought I felt her breathe," he panted, his tone subdued. We watched the paramedics work. "God, this is really terrible. What are the odds of all that happening? You know?"
I frowned and closed my eyes, extending my senses into the room around me. Somewhere in the furor and panic, the choking cloud of destructive magic had dissipated. Barely a trace remained. With the crisis over and no action to occupy my mind, my hands started shaking and I saw a few stars in the corners of my vision. A phantom surge of panic sent my heart and breathing racing. I bowed my head and rubbed at the back of my neck, waiting for it to pass. The paramedics had some big old flashlights, so I put my amulet away, letting the blue light die out.
"You all right?" Jake asked.
"Will be in a minute. I hope she'll be okay."
Jake nodded, frowning. "Maybe Bobby's right."
"About a jinx?"
"Maybe." He studied me for a second, expression guarded. "How did you know?"
"Know what?"
"That we were in trouble. I mean, I thought you were in the studio. I ran in a couple of seconds after I heard her fall, and I was only a few feet away. You must have come through the door a couple of seconds after I did. How did you know?"
"Just lucky. We finished the cameras and Joan took me up there to introduce me or something."
"What was that light you had?"
I shrugged. "Present from a friend's kid. Some kind of fancy new thing the kids have. Light up jewelry for dance clubs and keggers."
"They call them raves now."
"Raves. Right."
Jake watched me for a moment and then slowly nodded his head. "Sorry. I'm being paranoid, I think."
"Been there. No problem."
He nodded and slumped down tiredly. "I thought I was a dead man in there. Thank you."
It seemed smart to keep the wizard thing as low-key as possible. Someone was flinging some nasty energy around. No sense in advertising my identity as a wizard of the White Council. "I didn't do much but run in," I said. "We're just lucky the power went out."
"Yeah."
The paramedics stood up, loaded Giselle onto the stretcher, and picked it up. Jake and I both came to our feet as they did. "Is she going be okay?" he asked.
The paramedics didn't slow down, but one of them said, "She's got a chance." The man nodded to me. "Without the ice she wouldn't have had that."
Jake frowned and chewed on his lip, clearly upset. "Take care of her."
The paramedics started moving out with quick, steady steps. "Sir, you'd better come along with us to the hospital so that the doctors can check you out."
"I feel fine," Jake said.
The paramedics went around the corner, but the second one called back, "Electricity can do some nasty damage you might not feel. Come on."
But Jake stayed where he was. The paramedics took their lights with them, leaving the dressing room in darkness for a moment, until Joan returned with her little flashlight. "Guffie, get your Bowflexed ass into that ambulance."
He looked up at his reflection in the mirrored wall. His hair was sticking up every which way. "Though I apparently see the same stylist as Einstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, and Don King, I feel fine. Don't worry about me."
"I thought you'd say that," she said. "Fine, I'll drive you there myself. Everyone else needs to leave until I can make sure the power lines aren't going to kill anyone. Bobby and Emma are already outside. Harry, be back here by three, all right?"
"Why?" I asked.
"To start shooting."
"Shooting," Jake blurted. "After that?"
She grimaced. "The show must go on. Everyone out so I can lock up. Guffie, get in my car and don't argue with me. Arturo is meeting us at the hospital."
"Okay," Jake said. He didn't sound like he minded agreeing. "What about Bobby and Emma? They have a car?"
"Don't think so."
Jake picked up his sports bag, dug in it, and tossed me a set of keys. "Here. Give those to Emma for me?"
I caught them, and we all started out of the building. "Gotcha."
Joan sighed. "Maybe we are jinxed. It's like someone said Macbeth."
"What are the odds," Jake agreed.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. I didn't say anything to them, but I was pretty sure things would get worse before they got better.
A whole lot worse.
We went outside. Joan and Jake spoke briefly with Bobby and the woman I presumed to be Emma. Then Joan chivvied Jake into a car and drove out in a hurry, leaving the stage open for me to do some more snooping. There wasn't any time to waste with lethal magic like that on the loose, and the keys gave me a good excuse to do some more sniffing around.
I didn't hold out much hope that anything in Bobby the Bully's head would be important, so I focused on the woman and walked over to them. "Heya. I'm Harry. Production assistant."
"Emma," the woman said. She was actually very pretty. She had the kind of beauty that seemed to convey a sense of personal warmth, of kindness---a face best suited to smiling. Her eyes were shamrock green, her skin pale, her hair long and red, highlighted with streaks of sunny gold. She wore jeans with a black sweater, and made both of them look inviting---but she wasn't smiling. She offered me her hand. "I'm pleased to meet you. I'm glad you were there to help them."
"Anyone would have," I said.
"Come on, Emma," Bobby said, his expression sullen. "Let's call a cab and go."
She ignored him. "I don't think I've seen you around before."
"No, I'm local. A friend introduced me to Arturo, told him I needed a job."
Emma pursed her lips and nodded. "He's a softie," she said. "In case no one's told you, this isn't an average day on the set."
"I'd hope not. I'm sorry about your friend."
Emma nodded. "Poor Giselle. I hope she'll be all right. She's from France---doesn't have any family. I couldn't see her from where I was standing. Was it her throat that was hurt?"
"Yeah."
"Where? I mean, where was she hurt?"
I drew a line on my own face, starting at the back corner of my jaw and curving around to beside my Adam's apple. "There. Back to front."
Emma shuddered visibly. "God, the scars."
"If she lives, I doubt she'll mind them."
"Like hell she won't," Emma said. "They'll show. No one will cast her."
"Could have been worse."
She eyed me. "You don't approve of her profession?"
"I didn't say that."
"What, are you a religious type or something?"
"No. I just---"
"Because if you are, I'd like to tell you right now that I'm not, and I don't appreciate it when people pass judgment on my line of work."
"I'm not religious. I, uh---"
"I get so tired of hypocritical bastards who . . ." She started to say something else, then made a visible effort and shut her mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm not usually oversensitive. Sometimes I just get sick of people telling me how bad my work is for me. How it corrupts my soul. That I should abandon it and give my life to God."
"You're not going to believe me," I said. "But I know exactly what you mean."
"You're right," she said. "I don't believe you."
Her belt chirped, and she drew a cell phone from its clip. "Yes?" She paused for a moment. "No. No, sweetheart. Mommy already told you before I left. If Gracie says you get one cookie, then you only get one cookie. She's the boss until Mommy comes home." She listened for a moment, and then sighed. "I know, sweetie. I'm sorry. I'll be home soon. Okay? I love you too, sweetie. Kisses. Bye-bye."
"Kid?" I asked.
She gave me half of a smile as she put the phone back onto her belt. "Two. Their grandmother is with them."
I frowned. "Wow. I never really thought about, uh, actresses with children."
"Not many do," she said.
"Does, uh . . . does their father mind your career?"
Her eyes flashed hotly. "He isn't involved with them. Or me."
"Oh," I said. I offered her the keys. "From Jake, for the car. Sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to."
She exhaled, and it seemed let out the pressure of her anger. She accepted them. "Not your fault. I'm tense."
"Everyone around here seems to be," I said.
"Yeah. It's this film. If it doesn't do well we're all going to be looking for work."
"Why?"
She shrugged a shoulder. "It's complicated. But we're all on contract with Silverlight. Arturo left them, but he had managed to slip something into his own contract with the studio that would let him continue hiring cast from Silverlight for three months after his departure."
"Oh," I said. "Jake said something about another movie."
She nodded. "Arturo wanted to do three of them. This is the second. If the movies go over well, Arturo will have a name for himself, and we'll have leverage to either quit contract with Silverlight or renegotiate better terms."
"I see," I said. "And if the movies crash, Silverlight will never pick up your contracts."
"Exactly." She frowned. "And we've had so many problems. Now this."
"Come on, Emma," Bobby called. "I'm starving. Let's go find something."
"You should start practicing some self-restraint for a change." The woman's green eyes flashed with irritated anger, but she smoothed it away from her face and said, "I'll see you here this afternoon then, Harry. Nice to meet you."
"Likewise."
She turned and glowered at Bobby as she walked to the car. They got in without speaking, Emma driving, and left the lot. I walked over to my car, pensive. Thomas and Arturo had been right. Someone had whipped out one hell of a nasty entropy curse---assuming that this wasn't a coincidental focus of destructive energy---the mystical equivalent of being struck with a bolt of lightning.
Sometimes energy can build up due to any number of causes---massive amounts of emotion, traumatic events, even simple geography. That energy influences the world around us. It's what gives the Cubbies the home-field advantage (though that whole billy goat thing sort of cancels it out), leaves an intangible aura of dread around sights of tragic and violent events, and causes places to get a bad reputation for strange occurrences.
I hadn't sensed any particular confluence of energies until just before the curse happened to Giselle and Jake, but that didn't entirely rule out coincidence. There is a whole spectrum of magical energies that are difficult to define or understand. There are thousands of names for them, in every culture---mana, psychic energy, totem, juju, chi, bioethereal power, the Force, the soul. It's an incredibly complex system of interweaving energy that influences good old Mother Earth around us, but it all boils down to a fairly simple concept: Shit happens.
But then again, other people around Arturo had been hurt. I could buy that lightning could strike once---but if I hadn't interfered, it would have hit four times. Not much chance for coincidence there.
No matter how much I might have wished it, the energy that had caused Giselle to slip into the glass door, the glass to break and cut her, and the lights to fall down and electrify the floor was not one of those natural hot spots of power. It had swirled past me like some vast and purposeful serpent, and it hadn't gone after the first person to cross its path. It had ignored me, Joan, Jake, Bobby, and Emma and gone into the shower after the girl.
So Arturo was wrong about at least one thing. He wasn't the target of the malocchio.
The women around him were.
And that pissed me off. Call me a Neanderthal if you like, but I get real irrational about bad things happening to women. Human violence was at its most hideous when a woman was on the receiving end, and supernatural predators were even worse. That was why seeing Thomas entrance Justine had set me off. I knew the girl was willing, sure. I was pretty sure Thomas didn't want any harm to come to her. But the more primitive instincts in me only saw that she was a woman and Thomas had been preying upon her.
No matter what the rational part of my head thinks, when I see someone hurt a woman my inner gigantopithicus wants to reach for the nearest bone and go Kubrickian on someone's head.
I got into the car, frowning more deeply, and forced myself to calm down and think. I took deep breaths until I relaxed enough to start analyzing what I knew. The attacks had the feeling of vendetta to it. Someone had a grudge against Arturo and was deliberately striking women near him. Who would hold a grudge that vicious?
A jealous woman, maybe. Especially since he was a man with three ex-wives.
Madge was in business with Arturo, though. She didn't seem to me the sort who would jeopardize her fortunes with something so primitive and intangible as vengeful hatred. The most recent wife, Tricia, was in the same situation, though I hadn't yet met her. The other ex-wife, Lucille maybe, was not supposed to be in the picture. Could she be using magic to get a little payback?
I shook my head and started my car. I'd been briefly exposed to an entropy curse once. It had been a lot more powerful than the malocchio that had nearly killed Jake and Giselle. I barely survived it---even with a hefty arsenal of magic and the sacrifice of a good man's life to divert the curse from me.
I'd saved Jake and Giselle, but I'd been lucky. It could as easily have been me getting electrocuted in a pool of my own blood. I'd managed to mitigate the malocchio, barely, but there was nothing to say that it couldn't happen again. And it was more than possible that next time the lance of vicious magic would be aimed right at me.
I started up the Blue Beetle and headed for my office, pondering on the road.
I didn't have enough information to make a solid guess on a perpetrator. Maybe it would make more sense to examine the murder weapon, as it were, and determine how it was being used.
Curses had the same sorts of limitation as any other spell, after all. Which meant that whoever was sending the Evil Eye had to have some sort of means of directing the magic at a target. Body parts worked best---a lock of hair, nail clippings, and fresh blood were the most common items used, but they weren't the only ones. A poppet, a little dolly dressed up like the intended victim, could also be used to aim a malevolent spell. I've heard you can even employ a good photo.
But targeting the spell was only one part of the process. Before the killer could send it anywhere, he had to gather up the energy to make it happen. A curse that strong would require a whole lot of work, gathering and focusing raw magic in one place. And after that, the energy would have to be molded, shaped into its desired result. Even among the magically gifted, that kind of discipline was rare. Sure, any of the White Council could do that as a matter of routine, but the White Council didn't include everyone with magical skill. Most weren't talented enough to apply for an apprenticeship. And there were plenty of people who washed out and never made it through their schooling.
Magic this powerful would be a dangerous business for someone new to the use of magic. Odds were good that this wasn't some petty, jealous whim of an arcane dabbler. Someone with a disturbing amount of ability was methodically committing murder.
But why? Why kill women working for Arturo? What effect would it have? The people involved in his films were clearly very nervous. Maybe someone was attempting to spread terror, to cause Arturo's business venture to implode.
Vengeance of some kind could be a motive, but after a moment's thought, I decided that greed opened up the field to more possibilities. Greed is a nice, sterile motivation. If the money's right, you don't need to know someone to take advantage of them. You don't have to hate them, or love them, or be related to them. You don't even have to know who they are. You just have to want money more than you want them to keep on breathing, and if history is any indicator, that isn't a terribly uncommon frame of mind.
I parked in my building's lot and stomped up the stairway to my office. Who would gain by Arturo's ruin? Silverlight Studios. I nodded. That line of thought fit a lot better than some sort of demented vengeance kick. It was a good place to get started, and I had a couple of hours to put to use. With luck, I could dig up the information I would need to support (or demolish) the idea of a bad guy with dollar signs where his conscience should be.
I opened my office door, but before I could go inside I felt something cold and hard press against the back of my neck: the barrel of a gun. My heart fluttered into sudden, startled panic.
"Go into the office," said a quiet, rough voice, relaxed and masculine. "Don't make this any louder than it has to be."
Apparently a gun held to the back of my head engenders a sense of fellowship and goodwill in the depths of my soul. I cooperated.
I unlocked the door to the office, and the gunman followed me in. My office isn't big, but it's on the corner, and has windows on two walls. There's a table, a counter with my old coffee machine on it, some metal filing cabinets, and a table holding a display of pamphlets meant to help public relations with the normals. My desk sat in the corner between the windows, two comfy chairs for clients facing it.
The gunman walked me to one of my comfy chairs and said, "Sit."
I sat. "Hey, man, look---"
The gun pressed harder. "Hush."
I hushed. A second later something slapped my shoulder.
"Take it," the gunman said. "Put it on."
I reached back and found a heavy cloth sleeping mask with an elastic head strap. "Why?"
The gunman must have thumbed back the hammer of his weapon, because it clicked. I put the stupid mask on. "You might not know this, but I don't function all that well as an investigator when blinded."
"That's the idea," the gunman drawled. The gun left my neck. "Try not to make me feel threatened," he said through a yawn. "I'm all spooked and jittery. If you make any noise or start to get up, I'll probably twitch, and this trigger is pretty sensitive. My gun is pointed at your nose. The ensuing cause-and-effect chain could be inconvenient for you."
"Maybe next time you could just say 'freeze," ' I said. "No need to walk me through it step by step."
His tone sounded like he'd colored it with a faint smile. "Just want to make sure you understand the situation. If I blew your head off over a stupid misunderstanding, gosh, would our faces be red." He paused, then added, "Well, mine, anyway."
He didn't sound jumpy to me. He sounded bored. I heard him moving around for a minute, and then there was a sudden vibration in the air. I felt as if the skin of my face had suddenly dried into leather and tightened over my cheekbones.
"Okay," he said. "That'll do. Take it off."
I took the mask off and found the gunman sitting on the edge of my desk, a compact semiautomatic in his hand. He had it pointed at me in a casual way. He was a big guy, almost my own height, with dark golden hair just long enough to look a little exotic. He had grey-blue eyes that stayed steady and missed nothing. He wore casual black pants and a black sports jacket over a grey T-shirt. He was built more like a swimmer than a weight lifter, all leonine power and lazy grace taken completely for granted.
I looked around and saw a circle of salt as wide as two of my fingers poured around the chair. A Morton's salt cylinder sat on the floor nearby. A bit of scarlet stained some of the salt circle; blood. He'd used it to power up the circle, and I could feel its energy trapping all the magic in it, including my own.
The circle had formed a barrier that would stop magical energy cold. I'd have to physically break the circle of salt and disrupt that barrier before I could send any magic at the gunman. Which was probably the point.
I eyed him and said, "Kincaid. I didn't expect to hear from you until tomorrow at least."
"Rolling stones and moss, baby," the mercenary responded. "I was going through Atlanta when I got your message. Wasn't hard to get a direct flight here."
"What's with the Gestapo treatment?"
He shrugged. "You're a pretty unpredictable guy, Dresden. I don't mind making a social call, but I needed assurance that you were really you."
"I assure you that I'm me."
"That's nice."
"Now what?"
He rolled one shoulder in a shrug. "Now we have a nice talk."
"While you point a gun at me?" I asked.
"I just want a friendly chat without either of us getting his brain redecorated with magic."
"I can't do that," I said.
He shook a finger at me in a negative gesture. "The Council will burn anyone who gets caught doing it. That's different." He nodded at the circle. "But from in there, you literally can't. I'm here to talk business, not to die of stupidity. If you like, think of the precautions as a compliment."
I folded my arms. "Because nothing says flattery like a gun to the head."
"Ain't that God's own truth," Kincaid said. He set the gun down on my desk, put left his hand on it. "Dresden, I'm just plain folks. I'm still alive because I don't take stupid chances or walk into things blindly."
I tried to ditch the stubborn anger and nodded. "Okay, then. No harm, no foul."
"Good." He checked a nylon-strap watch on his left wrist. "I haven't got all day. You wanted to talk to me. So talk."
I felt annoyed enough to start screaming, but forced myself to rein it in. "There's a scourge of vampires in town."
"Black Court?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Whose scourge?"
"Mavra."
Kincaid pursed his lips. "Cagey old hag. I hear she heads up a pretty big crew."
"Yeah. I'm going to downsize them."
Kincaid's index finger tapped on his gun. "Black Court are tough to take down."
"Unless you get them in their coffins," I said. "I can find them."
"You want me to bodyguard you until then?"
"No. I want you to go there with me and help me kill them all."
A smile parted his lips from white teeth. "Going on an offensive would be nice. I'm getting bored on defense. What's the play?"
"Find 'em. Kill 'em."
Kincaid nodded. "Simple enough."
"Yeah, that's the idea. What are you going to cost me?"
He told me.
I choked. "Do you offer coupons or anything?"
Kincaid rolled his eyes and stood up. "Christ. Why did you waste my time, Dresden?"
"Wait," I said. "Look, I'll figure out a way to pay you."
He arched an eyebrow.
"I'm good for it."
"Maybe," he said. "But it's funny how a spending a lifetime as a hired gun makes you a little cynical."
"Take a chance," I said. "I'll get the money to you. And I'll owe you one."
His eyes glittered, flickers of malice and amusement sharing space in them. "Owed a favor by the infamous Dresden. I guess it might be worth enough of my time to give you a chance."
"Great."
"Two conditions," he said.
"Like?"
"I want at least one more set of eyes along," he said. "Someone good in a fight."
"Why?"
"Because if someone gets hurt, it takes two people to get him out alive. One to carry him and one to lay down cover fire."
"I didn't think you cared."
"Of course I do," he said. "The wounded guy might be me."
"Fine," I said. "What's the second condition?"
"You need to understand that if you try to stiff me, I'll have to protect my interests." He lifted a hand. "Don't get me wrong. It's just business. Nothing personal."
"It won't be an issue," I said. "Besides, you wouldn't want to eat my death curse, would you?"
"No. So I'd use a rifle at a thousand yards. The bullet outruns its own sonic boom, and you'd never even hear the shot. You'd be dead before you realized what happened."
That scared me. I've faced more than a few gruesome or nightmarish creatures, but none of them had been that calm and practical. Kincaid believed that he could kill me, if it came to that.
And thinking about it, I believed him too.
He watched my face for a minute, and his smile turned a shade wolfish. "You sure you want me on board?"
There was a pregnant half second of silence. "Yeah."
"All right." Kincaid stepped forward and brushed the salt circle with his toe. The tension of the circle's barrier vanished. "But I'm on the clock. I've got to get back to Ivy's place before Sunday."
"Understood," I said. "How do I get in touch?"
He slipped his gun into his jacket pocket and drew out a grey business card. He put the card on my desk and said, "Pager."
He turned to leave. I stood up and said, "Hey, Kincaid."
He glanced back at me. I tossed the sleep mask to him. He caught it.
"Just plain folk?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"Not supernatural?"
"I wish," he said. "Vanilla mortal."
"You're a liar."
His features smoothed into a neutral mask. "Excuse me?"
"I said you're a liar. I saw you during the fight at Wrigley, Kincaid. You fired a dozen shots, on the move and dodging bad guys the whole time."
"What's so supernatural about that?"
"In a fight, just plain folks miss sometimes. Maybe most times. You didn't miss once."
"What's the point of shooting if you're just going to miss?" He smiled, made a mime-gun of his thumb and index finger, and aimed at me. His thumb fell forward and he said, "I'm as human as you are, Dresden. I'll see you later."
Then he left.
I didn't know whether to feel better or worse. On one hand, he was an experienced gunman, and absolutely deadly in a fight. Human or not, I might need someone like that with me when I confronted Mavra.
On the other hand, I had no idea how I would be able to pay him, and I believed him when he said he'd assassinate me. The entire concept was scary as hell. The threat of a death curse that could be levied against a wizard's slayer was a major asset. It meant that anyone or anything that tried to attack a member of the White Council would hesitate, unwilling to risk the burst of destructive power a wizard could release in the last instants of his life.
But those instants would be too slow against a high-powered sniper round fired from ambush. I could imagine it, a flash and a thump on the back of my head, a split second of surprise, and then blackness before I could even realize the need to pronounce my curse.
Kincaid was right: It could work. The tactical doctrine of the powers-that-be in the magical communities of the world tended to run along a couple of centuries behind the rest of the planet. It was entirely possible that the seniormost wizards of the White Council had never even considered the possibility. Ditto for the vampires. But it could work.
The future abruptly seemed like a fairly unpleasant place for professional wizards.
I set about cleaning up the salt and settled down at my little desk, putting my thoughts in order. I had to find out more about the circumstances around the victims of the malocchio. I had to go digging for more information on Arturo Genosa's venture into the world of erotic film.
And if that wasn't enough, while I did all of that, I also had to figure out how to get enough money to keep my own hired thug from putting holes in my skull.
For most people it would be a desperate situation. But most people hadn't been through them as many times as I had. My worry and tension slowly grew, and as they did I took a perverse comfort in the familiar emotions. It actually felt good to feel my survival instincts put me on guard against premature mortality.
Hell's bells. Is that insane or what?
I ran up a long-distance bill while I did my digging on Genosa. I called a dozen different organizations and business entities around Los Angeles, but computers answered almost every phone, and everyone I talked to referred me to their home page on the Internet. Evidently conversation with an actual human being had become passé. Stupid Internet.
I hit some walls, slammed my head against some closed doors, got a little information, and ran out of time. I wrote down Internet addresses, picked up some food, and went to see Murphy.
Special Investigations has its office in one of the clump of mismatched buildings comprising Chicago Police Headquarters. I checked in with the desk sergeant and showed him the consultant's ID card Murphy had given me. The man made me sign in and waved me through. I marched up the stairs and came out on the level housing holding cells and Special Investigations.
I opened the door to SI and stepped inside. The main room was maybe fifty feet long and twenty wide, and desks were packed into it like sardines. The only cubicle walls in the room were around a small waiting area with a couple of worn old couches and a table with some magazines for bored adults and some toys for bored children. One of them, a plush Snoopy doll spotted with old, dark stains, lay on the floor.
The puppy stood over it, tiny teeth sunk into one of the doll's ears. He shook his head, his own torn ear flapping, and dragged Snoopy in a little circle while letting out small, squeaky growls. The puppy looked up at me. His tail wagged furiously, and he savaged the doll with even more enthusiasm.
"Hey," I told him. "Murphy's supposed to be watching you. What are you doing?"
The puppy growled and shook Snoopy harder.
"I can see that." I sighed. "Some babysitter she is."
A tall man, going bald by degrees and dressed in a rumpled brown suit, looked up from his desk. "Hey, there, Harry."
"Sergeant Stallings," I responded. "Nice moves on Murphy today. The way you slammed her foot with your stomach was inspiring."
He grinned. "I was expecting her to go for a lock. Woman is a nasty infighter. Everyone tried to tell O'Toole, but he's still young enough to think he's invincible."
"I think she made her point," I said. "She around?"
Stallings glanced down the long room at the closed door to Murphy's cheap, tiny office. "Yeah, but you know how she is with paperwork. She's ready to tear someone's head off."
"Don't blame her," I said, and scooped up the puppy.
"You get a dog?"
"Nah, charity case. Murphy was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Buzz her for me?"
Stallings shook his head and turned his phone around to face me. "I plan to retire. You do it."
I grinned and went on down to Murphy's office, nodding to a couple other guys with SI along the way. I knocked on the door.
"God dammit!" Murphy swore from the other side. "I said not now!"
"It's Harry," I said. "Just stopping by to get the dog."
"Oh, God," she snarled. "Back away from the door."
I did.
A second later the door opened and Murphy glared up at me, blue eyes bright and cold. "Get more away. I've been fighting this computer all day long. I swear, if you blow out my hard drive again, I'm taking it out of your ass."
"Why would your hard drive be in my ass?" I said.
Murphy's eyes narrowed.
"Ah, hah, hah, heh. Yeah, okay. I'll be going, then."
"Whatever," she said, and shut her office door hard.
I frowned. Murphy wasn't really a "whatever" sort of person. I tried to remember the last time I had seen Murphy that short and abrupt. When she'd been in the midst of post-traumatic stress, she'd been remote but not angry. When she was keyed up for a fight or feeling threatened, she'd be furious but she didn't draw away from her friends.
The only thing that had come close to this was when she thought I was involved in a string of supernatural killings. From where she'd been standing, it looked like I had betrayed her trust, and she had expressed her anger with a right cross that had chipped one of my teeth.
Something was upsetting her. A lot.
"Murph?" I asked through the door. "Where did the aliens hide your pod?"
She opened the door enough to scowl at me. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"No pod, huh. Maybe you're an evil twin from another dimension or something."
The muscles along her jaw clenched, and her expression promised murder.
I sighed. "You don't seem to be your usual self. I'm not an analyst or anything, but you kinda look like something is bothering you. Just maybe."
She waved a hand. "It's this paperwork---"
"No, it isn't," I said. "Come on, Murphy. It's me."
"I don't want to talk about it."
I shrugged. "Maybe you need to. You're about two steps shy of psychotic right now."
She reached for her door again, but didn't close it. "Just a bad day."
I didn't believe her, but I said, "Sure, okay. I'm sorry if the dog added to it."
Her expression became tired. She leaned against the doorway. "No. No, he was great. Barely made a sound. Quiet as a mouse all day long. Even used the papers I put down."
I nodded. "You sure you don't want to talk?"
She grimaced and glanced around the office. "Maybe not here. Walk with me."
We left and headed down the hall to the vending machines. Murphy didn't say anything until she bought a Snickers bar. "My mom called," she said.
"Bad news?" I asked.
"Yeah." She closed her eyes and bit off a third of the candy bar. "Sort of. Not really."
"Oh," I said, as if her answer made some kind of sense. "What happened?"
She ate more chocolate and said, "My sister, Lisa, is engaged."
"Oh," I said. When in doubt, be noncommittal. "I didn't know you had a sister."
"She's my baby sister."
"Um. My condolences?" I guessed.
She glowered at me. "She did this on purpose. With the reunion this weekend. She knew exactly what she was doing."
"Well, it's a good thing someone knew, 'cause so far I have no freaking clue."
Murphy finished the candy bar. "My baby sister is engaged. She's going to be showing up this weekend with her fiancé, and I am going to be there without a fiancé or a husband. Or even a boyfriend. My mother will never let me hear the end of it."
"Well, uh, you had a husband, right? Two of them, even."
She glared. "The Murphys are Irish Catholic," she said. "My not one but two, count them, two divorces won't exactly wash clean the stigma."
"Oh. Well, I'm sure whoever you're dating would show up with you, right?"
She glanced back toward the SI offices. If looks could kill, hers would have blown that section of the building into Lake Michigan. "Are you kidding? I don't have time. I haven't been on a date in two years."
Maybe I should have gone for the ultimate inept remark, and started singing about how short people got nobody to love. I decided to sting her pride a little instead. She'd reacted well to it before. "The mighty Murphy. Slayer of various and sundry nasty monsters, vampires, and so on---"
"And trolls," Murphy said. "Two more when you were out of town last summer."
"Uh-huh. And you're letting a little family shindig get you down like this?"
She shook her head. "Look. It's a personal thing. Between me and my mom."
"And your mom is going to think less of you for being single? A career woman?" I regarded her skeptically. "Murphy, don't tell me you're a mama's girl under all the tough-chick persona."
She stared at me for a moment, exasperation and sadness sharing space on her features. "I'm the oldest daughter," she said. "And . . . well, the whole time I was growing up, I just assumed that I'd be . . . her successor, I guess. That I'd follow her example. We both did. It's one of the things that made us close. The whole family knew it."
"And if your baby sister is all of a sudden more like your mom than you are, what? It threatens your relationship with her?"
"No," she said, annoyance in her tone. "Not like that. Not really. And sort of. It's complicated."
"I can see that," I said.
She slumped against the vending machine. "My mom is pretty cool," Murphy said. "But it's been hard to stay close to her the past few years. I mean, the job keeps me busy. She doesn't think I should have divorced my second husband, and that's been between us a little. And I've changed. The past couple of years have been scary. I learned more than I wanted to know."
I winced. "Yeah. Well. I tried to warn you about that."
"You did," she said. "I made my choice. I can handle living with it. But I can't exactly sit down and chat with her about it. So it's one more thing that I can't talk about with my mother. Little things, you know? A lot of them. Pushing us apart."
"So talk to her," I said. "Tell her there's stuff you can't talk about. Doesn't mean you don't want to be around her."
"I can't do that."
I blinked. "Why not?"
"Because I can't," she said. "It just doesn't work like that."
Murphy had genuine worry on her face and actual tears in her eyes, and I started feeling out of my depth. Maybe because it was a family thing. It seemed like something completely alien, and I didn't get it.
Murphy was worried about being close to her mom. Murphy should just go talk to her mom, right? Bite the bullet and clear the air. With anyone else she'd have handled the problem exactly that way.
But I've noticed that people got the most irrational whenever family was around---while simultaneously losing their ability to distinguish reason from insanity. I call it familial dementia.
I may not have understood the problem, but Murphy was my friend. She was obviously hurting, and that's all I really needed to know. "Look, Murph, maybe you're making more of it than you need to. I mean, seems to me that if your mom cares about you, she'd be as willing as you are to talk."
"She doesn't approve of my career," Murphy said tiredly. "Or my decision to live alone, once I was divorced. We've already done all the talking on those subjects and neither one of us is going to budge."
Now that I could understand. I'd been on the receiving end of Murphy's stubborn streak before, and I had a chipped tooth to show for it. "So you haven't shown up at the reunion, where you'd see her and have to avoid all kinds of awkward topics, for the past two years."
"Something like that," Murphy said. "People are talking. And we're all Murphys, so sooner or later someone is going to start giving unasked-for advice, and then it will be a mess. But I don't know what to do. My sister getting engaged is going to get everyone talking about subjects I'd rather slash my wrists than discuss with my uncles and cousins."
"So don't go," I said.
"And hurt my mom's feelings a little more," she said. "Hell, probably make people talk even more than if I was there."
I shook my head. "Well. You're right about one thing. I don't understand it, Murph."
" 'S okay," she said.
"But I wish I did," I said. "I wish I worried about my uncle's opinions, and had problems to work out with my mom. Hell, I'd settle for knowing what her voice sounded like." I put a hand on her shoulder. "Trite but true---you don't know what you have until it's gone. People change. The world changes. And sooner or later you lose people you care about. If you don't mind some advice from someone who doesn't know much about families, I can tell you this: Don't take yours for granted. It might feel like all of them will always be there. But they won't."
She looked down, so that I wouldn't see a tear fall, I guess.
"Talk to her, Karrin."
"You're probably right," she said, nodding. "So I'm not going to kill you for shoving your well-intentioned opinion down my throat in a vulnerable moment. Just this once."
"That's decent of you," I said.
She took a deep breath, flicked a hand at her eyes, and looked up with a more businesslike face. "You're a good friend, putting up with this crap. I'll make it up to you sometime."
"Funny you should say that," I said.
"Why?"
"I'm scouting out a money trail, but the information I'm after is apparently on the Internet. Could you hit a few sites for me, help me get my hands on it?"
"Yes."
"Gracias." I passed her the addresses and gave her a brief rundown of what I was looking for. "I'm going to be out and about. I'll call you in an hour or two?"
She sighed and nodded. "Did you find the vampires?"
"Not yet, but I got some backup."
"Who?" she asked.
"Guy named Kincaid. He's tough."
"A wizard?"
"No. One of those soldier of fortune types. Pretty good vampire slayer."
Murphy arched a brow. "Is he clean?"
"As far as I know," I said. "I should hear from our wheelman tonight. With luck, I'll find the lair and we'll hit them."
"Hey, if it just so happens that we have to go after them on---"
"Saturday," I finished for her. "I know."
I left, and told the pup my theory about familial dementia on the way down the stairs. "It's just a theory, mind you. But it's got the support of a ton of empirical evidence." I felt a quiet pang of sadness as I spoke. Family troubles were something I hadn't ever had. Wouldn't ever have. Murphy's problems with family might have been complicated and unpleasant, but at least they existed.
Every time I thought I had gotten through my orphan baggage, something like this came up. Maybe I didn't want to admit how much it still hurt. Not even to myself.
I scratched the pup's notched ear as I walked out to the Beetle. "My theory is just theoretical," I told him. "Because how the hell should I know?"
I swung past my apartment to grab lunch, a shower, and some clothes without so much blood on them. A beaten-up old Rabbit had lost a game of bumper tag with a Suburban, and traffic was backed up for a mile. As a result, I got back to the set a few minutes late.
A vaguely familiar girl with a clipboard met me at the door. She wasn't old enough to drink, but made up for a lack of maturity with what I could only describe as a gratuitous amount of perkiness. She was pretty, more awkwardly skinny than sleek, and had skin the color of cream. Her dark hair was done up in Princess Leia cinnamon rolls, and she wore jeans, a peasant-style blouse, and clunky-looking sandals. "Hi!" she said.
"Hi, yourself."
She checked her clipboard. "You must be Harry, then. You're the only one left, and you're late."
"I was on time this morning."
"That makes you half as good as a broken watch. You should be proud." She smiled again to let me know she was teasing. "Didn't I see you talking to Justine at Arturo's party?"
"Yeah, I was there. Had to leave before I turned into a pumpkin."
She laughed and stuck out her hand. "I'm Inari. I'm an associate production assistant."
I shook her hand. She wore some light, sweet scent that I liked, something that reminded me of buzzing locusts and lazy summer nights. "Nice to meet you---unless you're stealing my job. You're not a scab, are you?"
Inari grinned, and it transformed her face from moderately attractive to lovely. She had great dimples. "No. As an associate gofer, I'm down the ladder from you. I think your job is safe." She checked a plastic wristwatch. "Oh, God, we need to get moving. Arturo asked me to take you to his office as soon as you got here. This way."
"What's he want?"
"Beats me," Inari said. She started a brisk walk, and I had to lengthen my steps to keep up with her as she led me deeper into the building. She flipped to a second page and took a pen from behind one hair-bun. "Oh, what would you like on your vegetarian pizza?"
"Dead pigs and cows," I said.
She glanced up at me and wrinkled her nose.
"They're vegetarians," I said defensively.
She looked skeptical. "With all the hormones and things they put in meats, you know that they're having a number of very bad effects on you. Right? Do you know the kind of long-term damage fatty meats can do to your intestinal tract?"
"I choose to exercise my status as an apex predator. And I laugh in the face of cholesterol."
"With an attitude like that, you're going to wind up with bulletproof arteries."
"Bring it."
Inari shook her head, her expression pleasant and unyielding. "Everyone decided they wanted to stick with veggies when I order. If someone has meat, the grease will get all over the rest of the pizza, so they settled on veggies."
"Then I guess I will too."
"But what do you want on yours? I mean, I'm supposed to make everyone happy here."
"Kill me some animals, then," I said. "It's a protein thing."
"Oh, you should have said," Inari replied, smiling at me. We stopped in front of a door and she scribbled on her clipboard. "Some extra cheese, maybe some beans and corn. Or wait. Tofu. Protein. I'll fix you up."
Bean-curd pizza, good grief. I should raise my rates. "You do that." The puppy stirred in my pocket and I stopped. "Here, there's something you could help me with."
She tilted her head at me. "Oh?"
I reached into my pocket and drew the pup out. He was sleeping, every inch of him completely limp. "Could you keep my friend company while I talk to Arturo?"
The girl melted with adoration the way only girls can, and took the pup, cradling him in the crook of her arm and crooning to him. "Oh, he's so sweet. What's his name?"
"No name," I said. "Just watching him for a day or three. He might be hungry or thirsty when he wakes up."
"I love dogs," she replied. "I'll take good care of him."
"Appreciate it."
She started to walk away. "Oh, Harry, I almost forgot. What do you want to drink? Is Coke okay?"
I eyed her suspiciously. "It isn't noncaffeinated, is it?"
She arched a brow. "I'm health-conscious, not insane."
"Dear child," I said. She gave me another sunny smile and jounced off down the hall, holding the pup as if he were made of glass. I went into the office.
Arturo Genosa was inside, sitting on the corner of a desk. His silver hair looked rumpled, and a half-smoked cigar smoldered in a thick ashtray beside him. He summoned up a tired smile for me as I came in. "Hey, Harry." He came over and gave me one of those manly Mediterranean hugs, the kind that leave bruises. "God bless you, Mister Dresden. Without you there, I think we would have lost them both. Thank you."
He kissed me on either cheek. I'm not a kissy-huggy type, really, but I figured it was another manly European affection thing. Either that or he'd just marked me for death. I stepped back and said, "The girl going to be all right?"
Arturo nodded. "Going to live. All right? That I don't know." He waved a hand at his neck. "The scars. They will be very bad."
"Tough on an actress."
He nodded. "In the phone book, your ad says you give advice."
"Technically I sell it," I said. "But that's really more for---"
"I need to know," he said. "Need to know whether I should stop the project."
I arched an eyebrow. "You think that's why these people have been attacked?"
He picked up his cigar, fiddling around with it. "I don't know what to think. But I was nowhere nearby. This could not have been an attack on me."
"I agree," I said. "And it was the Evil Eye. I'm sure of it."
"Mister Dresden, if a man threatens me, then it is nothing to face it. But this person, whoever he is, is hurting the people near me. I no longer choose only for myself."
"Why would someone want to stop your film, Mr. Genosa?" I asked. "I mean, pardon me if this insults you, but it's a skin flick. There are lots of them."
"I don't know. Maybe it is the business end," he said. "Small entrepreneur, maybe could be a threat to more entrenched businessmen. So they lean. Apply pressure. Quietly, you understand."
"If I didn't know better, I'd swear you just told me that you think you're being persecuted by a covert pornography syndicate."
Genosa put the cigar in his mouth, rolling it around. He drummed his fingers on the desk and lowered his voice. "You joke, but in the past few years someone has been buying the studios a little at a time."
"Who?"
He shook his head. "It is hard to say. I have investigated, but I am not a detective. Is there any way you could---"
"I'm already on it. I'll tell you if I turn up anything."
"Thank you," he said. "But what should I do today? I can't allow any of these people to be harmed."
"You're racing the clock, right? If you don't finish the film, your business is kaput."
"Yes."
"How long do you have?"
"Today and tomorrow," he said.
"Then you should ask yourself how willing you are to let ambition get someone killed. Then weigh it against how willing you are to let someone scare you out of living your life." I frowned. "Or maybe lives, plural. You're right when you say you aren't choosing only for yourself."
"How can I make that choice?" he asked.
I shrugged. "Look, Arturo. You need to decide if you are protecting these people or leading them. There's a difference."
He rolled the cigar back and forth between his fingers, and then nodded slowly. "They are adults. I am not their father. But I cannot ask them to risk themselves if they do not wish to. I will tell them they are free to leave should they choose, with no ill will."
"But you will stay?"
He nodded firmly.
"Leader, then," I said. "Next thing you know, Arturo, I'll be buying you a big round table."
It took him a second, but he laughed. "I see. Arthur and Merlin."
"Yeah," I said.
He regarded me thoughtfully "Your advice is good. For a young man, you have good judgment."
"You haven't seen my car."
Arturo laughed. He offered me a cigar, but I turned him down with a smile. "No, thank you."
"You look troubled."
"Yeah. Something about your situation doesn't sit right with me. This whole thing is hinky."
Genosa blinked. "It is what?"
"Hinky," I said. "Uh, it's sort of a Chicago word. I mean that there's something not right about what's going on."
"Yes," he agreed. "People are getting hurt."
"That's not it," I said. "The attacks have been brutal. That means that the intentions of whoever is behind them are equally brutal. You can't sling around magic that you don't really believe in. That isn't something a simple business competitor would come up with---even assuming some hardball corporate types decided to start trying a supernatural angle instead of hiring fifty-dollar bruisers to lean on you."
"You think it is personal?" he asked.
"I don't think anything yet," I said. "I need to do more digging."
He nodded, expression sober. "If you stay here, you can keep protecting my people?"
"I think so."
He pressed his lips together, expression resolved. "Then I will tell th---"
The door flew open and a living goddess of a woman stormed into the office. She was maybe five-foot-four and had brilliant, lush blond-highlighted red hair that fell to the small of her back. She wore only high-heeled pumps and a matching dark green two-piece set of expensive-looking designer lingerie, translucent enough to defeat the purpose of wearing clothing at all. It ably displayed all kinds of pleasant proportions of tanned, athletic female.
"Arturo, you Eurotrash pig," she snarled. "What do you think you are doing, bringing that woman here?"
Genosa flinched at the tone, and did not look at the woman. "Hello, Trish."
"Do not call me that, Arturo. I've told you over and over."
Genosa sighed. "Harry, this my newest ex-wife, Tricia Scrump."
And he let this gem slip out of his fingers? Shocking.
The woman's eyes narrowed. "Trixie. Vixen. It's been legally changed."
"Okay," Arturo said mildly. "Now what are you talking about?"
"You know full well what I'm talking about." She spat the words. "If you think you are going to split this feature between two stars, you are sadly mistaken."
"That isn't going to happen at all," he said. "But with Giselle hurt, I had to find someone else, and on such short notice . . ."
"Don't patronize me." Tricia ground her teeth. "Lara is retired. Re. Tie. Urd. This film is mine. I am not going to let you use my drawing power to fuel a comeback appearance for that . . . that bitch."
I thought about pots and kettles.
"It won't be an issue," Genosa said. "She has agreed to a mask and a pseudonym. You are the star, Tricia. That has not changed."
Trixie Vixen folded her arms, geometrically increasing her cleavage. "Fine, then," she snapped. "As long as we understand each other."
"We do," Arturo said.
She threw her hair back over her shoulder, a gesture filled with arrogance, and glared at me. "And who is this?"
"Harry," I provided. "Production assistant."
"Well then, Larry. Where the hell is my latte? I sent you for it an hour ago."
Evidently, reality did not often intrude on Tricia Scrump's life. It was probably shacked up with courtesy somewhere. I prepared to return verbal fire, but a panicked look from Arturo stopped the first reply that sprang to mind. "Sorry. I'll take care of it."
"See that you do," she said. She spun on one high heel, displaying her G-string and an ass that probably deserved its own billing in the credits, and stalked out.
At least she started to.
She abruptly stopped, frozen, her body tightening with tension.
A woman that made Trixie Vixen look like the ugly stepsister appeared in the door and blocked the starlet's exit. I had to force myself not to stare.
Tricia "Trixie" Scrump née Genosa née Vixen's beauty was up to code. You could run a checklist from it: lovely mouth, deep eyes, full breasts, slender waist, flared hips, long and shapely legs. Check, check, check. She looked like she'd been ordered from a catalog and assembled from a kit. She was a vision of a woman---but a prefabricated one, painted by numbers.
The newcomer was the real thing. She was grace. Beauty. Art. As such, she was not so easily quantified.
She would have been tall, even without the heeled faux-Victorian boots of Italian leather. Her hair was so dark that its highlights were nearly blue, a torrent of glossy curls held partially in check with a pair of milky ivory combs. She had eyes of dark grey with hints of violet twilight at their centers. Her clothes were all effortless style: natural fabrics, black skirt and jacket embroidered with abstract dark crimson roses with a white blouse.
Thinking back later, I couldn't clearly remember her facial features or her body, beyond a notion that they were superb. Her looks were almost extraneous. They weren't any more important to her appeal than a glass was to wine. It was at its best when invisible and showing the spirit contained within. Beyond mere physical presence, I could sense the nature of the woman---strength of will, intelligence, blended with a sardonic wit and edged with a lazy, sensuous hunger.
Or maybe the hunger was mine. In the space of five seconds, my attention to detail fractured, and I wanted her. I wanted her in the most primal sense, in every way I could conceive. Whatever gentle and chivalrous tendencies my soul harbored suddenly evaporated. Images swarmed over me---images of unleashing the fires burning in me upon willing flesh. Conscience withered a heartbeat later. Something hungry, confident, and unrepentant took its place.
I realized, on some distant level, that something was wrong, but there was no tangible, tactile sense of truth to the thought. Instincts ruled me, and only the most feral, vicious drives remained.
I liked it.
A lot.
While my inner Neanderthal was pounding his chest, Trixie Vixen took a step back from the dark-haired woman. I couldn't see her face, but her voice crackled with too much anger. She was afraid. "Hello, Lara."
"Trish," the woman said, with faint contemptuous emphasis on the name. Her voice smoldered, so low and delicious that my toes started to curl up. "You look lovely."
"I'm surprised to see you here," Tricia said. "There aren't any whips or chains on the set."
Lara shrugged, perfectly relaxed. "I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary." Lara stared down at Tricia for a moment and then asked, "Have you given any more thought to my offer?"
"I don't do bondage films," Tricia said. A sneer colored the words. "They're for wrinkled old has-beens." She started forward with a determined stride.
Lara didn't move. Tricia stopped a bare inch from her and they met gazes again. The redheaded film star started trembling.
"Perhaps you're right," Lara said. She smiled and stepped clear of the doorway. "Keep in touch. Trish."
Trixie Vixen fled---at least as much as someone wobbling away on six-inch heels can flee. The dark-haired woman watched her with a smug smile on her mouth and then said, "Exit scene. It must be difficult to be the center of the universe. Good afternoon, Arturo."
"Lara," Arturo said. His tone was that of an uncle chiding his favorite niece. He came around his desk and walked over to the woman, offering both hands. "You shouldn't tease her like that."
"Arturo," she said warmly. She took his hands, and they did more social cheek kissing. I shook my head while they did, and managed to shove my libido out of the driver's seat of my brain. Captain of my own soul (even if my pants were considering mutiny), I began focusing my thoughts, building up a barrier to shield them.
"You are an angel," Arturo said to her. His voice was steady and kind and not at all that of a man having most of his blood channeled south of his belly button. How the hell could he not have reacted to her presence? "An angel to come here so quickly. To help me."
She waved a hand in a lazy motion. Her fingernails weren't terribly long, and didn't have any polish. "I'm always glad to help a friend, Arturo. Are you all right?" she asked. "Joan said you'd forgotten to refill your prescription."
He sighed. "I'm fine. Lowering my blood pressure would not have helped Giselle."
Lara nodded. "It's horrible, what happened. I'm so sorry."
"Thank you," he said. "I am not sure I am comfortable to have Inari here. She's a child."
"That's arguable," Lara said. "After all, she's old enough to perform now, if she wishes."
Arturo looked startled and a little sick. "Lara."
She laughed. "I'm not saying she should, dear fool. Only that my baby sister makes her own choices now."
"They grow," Arturo said. His voice was a little sad.
"They do." Lara's eyes moved over to me. "And who is this? Tall, dark, and silent. I like him already."
"Harry," Arturo replied. He beckoned me over. "Lara Romany, meet Harry, our new production assistant. He just started today, so be kind to him."
"That shouldn't be too hard," she said, and slipped her arm through Genosa's. "Joan wanted me to tell you that your prescription came in, and that she needs your help on the set."
Arturo nodded with a strained but genuine smile. "And you are to escort me down to take my medicine, eh?"
"Via my feminine wiles," Lara confirmed.
"Harry," Arturo said.
"I need to make a quick call," I answered. "I'll be right behind you."
The two of them left. Lara threw another look at me over her shoulder, her expression speculative. And hot. I mean, wow. If she'd crooked her finger, I think I would have been in danger of floating off the floor and drifting along behind her on a cloud of her perfume. Me and Pepé le Pew.
It took me maybe half a minute after they walked away before I was able to reboot my brain. After that, I ran a quick review of what had just happened through the old grey matter.
Pretty, pale, supernaturally sexy, and just a little scary. I could do the math. And I was willing to bet that Romany wasn't Lara's last name.
She looked a hell of a lot more like a Raith.
Son of a bitch. The White Court was here.
A succubus on the set. Strike that, the health-conscious kid sister made it two . . . succubuses. Succubusees? Succubi? Stupid Latin correspondence course. Or maybe she wasn't one, because I hadn't felt a thing like the attraction Lara Romany exuded when I was near little Inari.
It really hit me, then, that I'd wandered into a mess that might get me killed, regardless of how silly and embarrassing it sounded. Now I had to contend not only with pornography-syndicate conspiracies, but also a succubus of the White Court. Or maybe more than one, which for grammatical reasons I hoped was not the case.
So in addition to a feisty new Black Court partner in the war dance between the Council and the Vampire Courts, I also got angry lust bunny movie stars, deadly curses, and a thoroughly embarrassing job as my investigative cover.
Oh, and bean-curd pizza, which is just wrong.
What a mess.
I made a mental note: The next time I saw Thomas, I was going to punch him right in the nose.
After two or three tries, I got Genosa's phone to dial out to Murphy. "It's me, Murph. You get that information off the Internet?"
"Yeah. And then I talked to some people I know out there. I dug up some goodies for you."
"Peachy. Like what?"
"Nothing that will stand up in a court, but it might help you figure out what's going on."
"Wow, Murph. It's as if you're a detective."
"Bite me, Dresden. Here's the deal on Genosa. He's a dual citizen of the States and Greece. He's the last son of a big money family that fell on hard times. Rumor has it he left Greece to avoid his parents' debts."
"Uh-huh," I said. I continued searching through Genosa's desk and found a big old leather-bound photo album. "I'm listening."
"He wound up making and directing sex films. Did well investing the money, and he's worth a little more than four million, personally."
"Sex sells." I frowned, flipping through the photo album. It was neatly packed with excerpts from newspapers, transcripts, and photos of Genosa on the set of a number of national talk shows. There was another of him standing beside Hugh Hefner and surrounded by a number of lovely young women. "That's a lot of money. Is that all?"
"No," Murphy said. "He's paying alimony to three ex-wives out of some kind of fund set up to provide it. He's got almost all of what's left tied up in starting his own studio."
I grunted. "Genosa's under some serious pressure, then."
"How so?"
"He's only got about thirty-six hours to finish his movie," I said. "He's got one project done, but if he doesn't get a pair of profitable films, he'll lose the studio."
"You figure someone is trying to run him out of business?"
"Occam thinks so." I turned another page and blinked at the article there. "Damn."
"What?"
"He's a revolutionary."
"He's what?" Murphy asked.
I repeated myself redundantly again. "Apparently Arturo Genosa is considered a revolutionary in his field."
I could almost hear Murphy lift a skeptical eyebrow. "A revolutionary boink czar?"
"So it would seem."
She snorted. "How exactly do you get to become a porn revolutionary?"
"Practice, practice, practice?" I guessed.
"Wiseass."
I kept flipping pages, skimming the album. "He's been interviewed in about thirty magazines."
"Yeah," Murphy said. "Probably with illustrious names like . . . like Jugs-A-Poppin and Barely Legal Lolita Schoolgirls."
I thumbed through pages. "And People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. He's also been on Larry King and Oprah."
"You're kidding," she said. "Oprah? Why?"
"Hang on; I'm reading. It looks like he's got this crazy notion that everyone should be able to enjoy themselves in bed without going insane trying to meet an impossible standard. He thinks that sex is natural."
"Sex is natural," Murphy said. "Sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should."
"I'm the wiseass. You're the cop. Respect my boundaries." I kept reading. "Genosa also casts people of a lot of different ages instead of using only twenty-year-old dancers. According to a transcript of Larry King, he avoids gynecological close-ups and picks people based on the genuine sensuality of their performance rather than purely on appearance. And he doesn't believe in using surgically altered . . . uh . . ."
My face heated up. Murphy was probably my best friend, but she was still a girl, and a gentleman just doesn't say some words in front of a lady. I held the phone with my shoulder and made a cupping motion in front of my chest with both hands. "You know."
"Boobs?" Murphy said brightly. "Jugs? Hooters? Ya-yas?"
"I guess."
She continued as if I hadn't said anything. "Melons? Torpedoes? Tits? Gazongas? Knockers? Ta-tas?"
"Hell's bells, Murph!"
She laughed at me. "You're cute when you're embarrassed. I thought breast implants were required industry equipment. Like hard hats and steel-toed boots for construction workers."
"Not according to Genosa," I said. "He's quoted here saying that natural beauty and genuine desire make for better sex than all the silicone in California."
"I'm not sure whether I should be impressed or a little nauseous," Murphy said.
"Six of one and half dozen of another," I said. "Bottom line is that he's not your average pornographic artist."
"I'm not sure that's saying much, Harry."
"If you'd said that before I met him, I'd probably have agreed. But I'm not so sure now. I don't get any nasty vibe off him. He seems like a decent guy. Taking some measure of responsibility. Challenging the status quo, even if it hurts his profits."
"I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography."
"My point is that he's applying some measure of integrity to it. And people are responding well to him."
"Except for the ones trying to kill him," Murphy said. "Harry, this is cynical, but people who choose a life like that draw problems down onto themselves sooner or later."
"You're right. That is cynical."
"You can't help everyone. You'll go insane if you try."
"Look, the guy is in trouble and he's a fellow human being. I don't have to love his lifestyle to want to keep bad things from happening to him."
"Yeah." Murphy sighed. "I guess I know this tune."
"Do you think I could convince you to---"
The skin on the back of my neck went cold and clammy, tingling. I turned to the office doorway in time to see the lights in the hall flick out. My heart pounded in sudden apprehension. A shadowy figure appeared in the office door.
I picked up the first thing my hand found, Genosa's heavy glass ashtray, and flung it hard at the figure. The ashtray rebounded off the inner edge of the door and struck whoever it was. I heard a voiceless gasp of air. At the same time something hissed past my ear. A sharp thumping sound came from the wall behind me.
I shouted at the top of my lungs and ran forward, but my foot tangled in the phone cord. It didn't tug me into a pratfall, but I stumbled, and it gave the shadowy figure time to run. By the time I'd recovered my balance and gotten to the hallway, I couldn't see or hear anyone.
The hall itself was dark, and I couldn't remember the locations of either light switches or doors, which made a headlong pursuit less than advisable. It occurred to me that I made a wonderful target, leaning out of the door of the dimly lit office, and I slipped back inside, shutting and locking the door behind me as I went.
I looked at whatever had thumped into the wall behind me, and found, of all the stupid things, a small dart fixed with exotic-looking yellow feathers fringed with a tinge of pink. I tugged the dart out of the wall. It was tipped with what appeared to be bone instead of metal, and the bone was stained with something dark red or dark brown. I had the feeling it wasn't Turtle Wax.
A poisoned blowgun dart. I'd been ambushed before, but that was pretty exotic, even for me. Almost silly, really. Who the hell got killed with poison blowgun darts these days?
A buzz of noise came from the dropped receiver of the phone. I picked up an empty plastic cigar tube from next to Genosa's humidor and slipped the dart into it, then capped it before I picked up the phone.
"Harry?" Murphy was demanding. "Harry, are you all right?"
"Fine," I said. "And it looks like I'm on the right track."
"What happened?"
I held up the cigar tube and peered at the dart. The poisoned tip gleamed with its semi-gelatinous stain. "It was pretty clumsy, but I think someone just tried to kill me."
"Get out of there, Harry."
"No, Murph," I said. "Look, I think it was just someone trying to scare me, or they'd have used a gun. Can you get to those records today?"
"If they're matters of public record," she said. "We've got the time difference on our side. What are you hoping to find?"
"More," I said. "This whole thing stinks. Hard to put a puzzle together when you're missing pieces."
"Get in touch if you learn something," Murphy said. "Magic or not, attempted murder is police business. It's my business."
"This time for sure," I said.
"Watch your ass, Bullwinkle."
"Always. Thanks again, Murph."
I hung up and flipped through the next several pages of Genosa's scrapbook, expecting nothing but more articles. I got lucky on the last few pages. He had big, glossy color photos there---three women, and I recognized two of them.
A subtitle beneath the first picture read, Elizabeth Guns. The photo was of Madge, Genosa's first wife. She looked like she'd been in her mid-twenties in the picture and she was more or less nude. Her hair was enormous and stiff-looking, an artificial shade of deep scarlet. She probably had to take off her makeup with a Zamboni machine.
The next photo read, Raven Velvet, beneath a picture of a nearly Amazonian brunette I didn't recognize. She had the kind of build that fairly serious female athletes can get, where the muscles are present, defined with obvious strength, but softened and rounded enough to look more pretty than formidable. Her hair was cut in a short pageboy, and at first I thought her features were really quite sweet, almost kind. But her expression was an unsmiling, haughty stare at the camera. Ex-Genosa two, I supposed. He'd called her Lucille.
The last picture was of the third former Mrs. Genosa. It was subtitled, Trixie Vixen, but someone had written across it in black permanent marker, ROT IN HELL, YOU PIG. There was no signature to tell who was responsible. Gee. I wonder.
I flipped through the album once more but didn't see anything new. At some point I realized that I was delaying going down to the set. I mean, yeah, there were probably going to be naked girls doing a variety of interesting things. And I hadn't gotten laid in a depressing number of months, which probably made it sound a little more interesting. But there's a time and a place to enjoy that kind of thing, and for me in front of a bunch of people and cameras was not it.
But I was a professional, dammit. And this was the job. I couldn't bodyguard anyone if I wasn't close enough to them to act. I couldn't figure out the source of the dark mojo without figuring out what was going on. And to do that, I needed to observe and ask questions---preferably without anyone knowing that's what I was doing. That was the smart thing, the professional thing. Conduct covert interviews while icons of sensual beauty got it on under stage lights.
Onward. I screwed up my courage, so to speak, and slipped warily out of the office and down the dimly lit hall to the studio.
There were a surprising number of people there. It was an enormous room, but it still looked busy. There were a couple of guys on each of four cameras, and there were a few more on hanging scaffolds that supported the stage lighting. A crew was working on the lighted set, which consisted of a bunch of panels made to look like an old brick wall, a couple of garbage cans, a trash bin, some loading pallets, and random bits of litter. Arturo and the beflanneled Joan were at the center of the activity, speaking to each other as they moved around placing cameras to their liking. Colt-legged Inari drifted along behind them marking positions on a chart. The notch-eared puppy followed her clumsily around, a piece of pink yarn tied around his neck and one of the loops of Inari's jeans. The puppy's tail wagged happily.
I was supposed to be doing the assistant thing after all, so I walked over to Genosa. The puppy saw me and galloped headlong into my shoe. I leaned down and scratched his ears. "What should I do to help, Arturo?"
He nodded at Joan. "Stick with her. She can show you the ropes as well as anyone. Watch, ask questions."
"Okeydoky," I said.
"You've met Inari?" Arturo asked.
"Bumped into her already," I said.
The girl smiled and nodded. "I like him. He's funny."
"Looks aren't everything," I said.
Inari's laugh was interrupted when her pants beeped. She reached into them and drew out an expensive cell phone the size of a couple of postage stamps. I scooped up the puppy and held him in the crook of one arm, and Inari untied his makeshift lead and handed it to me before walking a few steps away, phone to her ear.
A harried-looking woman in sweeping skirts and a peasant blouse came half running across the studio floor, straight to Joan and Arturo. "Mr. Genosa, I think you'd better come to the dressing room. Right now."
Genosa's eyes widened and his face went pale. He shot me a questioning glance. I shook my head at him and gave him a thumbs-up. He let out a slow breath, and then said, "What is happening?"
Joan, behind him, checked her watch, rolled her eyes, and said, "It's Trixie."
The woman nodded with a sigh. "She says she's leaving."
Arturo sighed. "Of course she'd say that. Shall we, Marion?"
They left, and Joan scowled. "There's no time for that prima donna."
"Is there ever?"
Her frown faded, replaced by simple weariness. "I suppose not. I just don't understand the woman. This project means as much to her future as to everyone else's."
"Being the center of the universe is a big job. Maybe it's weighing on her nerves."
Joan threw her head back and laughed. "That must be it. Let's get moving."
"What's first?"
We went to one of the other sets, this one dressed up like a cheap bar, and started going through boxes of random bottles and mugs for a more detailed appearance. I set the puppy down on the bar, and he waddled up and down the length of it, nose down to the surface and sniffing. After a few moments I asked, "How long have you known Arturo?"
Joan hesitated for a second, then continued dressing up the set. "Eighteen or nineteen years, I think."
"He seems like a nice man."
She smiled again. "He isn't," she said. "He's a nice boy."
I lifted my eyebrows. "How so?"
She rolled one shoulder in a shrug. "He lives on the outside of his skin. He's impulsive, more passionate than he can afford to be, and he'll fall in love at the drop of a hat."
"And that's bad?"
"Sometimes," she said. "But he makes up for it. He cares about people. Here, you get that top shelf. You don't need a stepladder."
I complied. "Soon I'll move up to putting stars and angels on the tops of Christmas trees. Me and that yeti in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."
Joan laughed again and answered me. Her words became indistinct and toneless, like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. My heart began to race, and a stab of both food hunger and lust went through my stomach on its way to the base of my spine. My head turned of its own volition, and I saw Lara Romany enter the studio.
She'd done her hair up in a style belonging to ancient Greece or Rome. She wore a short black silk robe with matching heels and stockings. She slid over the floor with a kind of fascinating, serpentine grace. I wanted to watch without moving. But some stubborn part of me shoved my brain into an intellectual cold shower. She was a life-draining vampire. I'd be stupid to let myself keep on reacting that way.
I tore my eyes off of her, and realized that the puppy had come to the edge of the bar near me. He was crouched, his eyes on Lara, and was growling his squeaky little growl again.
I looked around, and kept my eyes from moving back to her only by an effort of will. Every man in the room had become still, eyes locked onto Lara as she walked.
"The woman is Viagra with legs," Joan muttered. "Though I've got to admit, she knows how to make an entrance."
"Um. Yeah."
Lara took a seat in a folding chair, and Inari hurried over to kneel beside it in conversation. The electric sense of desire and compulsion faded a little, and people started moving about their tasks again. I helped Joan out, and kept the puppy near me, and in half an hour the first scene started shooting with Jake Guffie and a somewhat sullen-looking Trixie Vixen on the alley set.
Okay, let me tell you something. Porno sex is only loosely related to actual sex. The actors are constantly getting interrupted. They have to keep their faces turned in the right direction, and the body angling they have to do for the camera would make a contortionist beg for mercy. Every once in a while someone has to touch up their makeup, and it isn't only on their faces. You wouldn't believe where all it goes. There are lights shining in their eyes, people with cameras moving all around, and on top of all that, Arturo was giving them directions from behind the cameras.
Granted, my own sexual experience is somewhat limited, but I had never found any of that necessary. It was embarrassing for me to watch. Maybe in the editing room the scene would turn into something sensual and alluring, but on the set it mostly looked awkward and uncomfortable. I found excuses to look at other things, working hard to make sure one of them wasn't the lovely vampire. And I kept my eyes peeled for more deadly magic.
Maybe an hour into the shoot, I glanced aside and saw Inari pacing back and forth, a phone at her ear, speaking quietly. I closed my eyes, concentrated, and started Listening to her.
"Yes, Papa," she said. "Yes, I know. I will. I won't." She paused. "Yes, he's here." Her cheeks suddenly flushed pink. "What a terrible thing to say!" she protested. "I thought you were supposed to chase the boys off with a shotgun." She laughed, glanced across the studio and started walking away. "Bobby, Papa. His name is Bobby."
Aha. The plot thickens. I followed Inari's glance across the studio and saw Bobby the Sullen sitting in a folding chair near Lara, wearing a bathrobe. His impressive arms were folded over his chest, and he looked pensive and withdrawn. He paid no attention whatsoever to the shoot---or to Lara, for that matter. Inari, meanwhile, had moved a little beyond the range of my focused sense of hearing.
I frowned, pondered, and kept on the lookout for incoming black magic. Nothing untoward happened, beyond an audio monitor spitting sparks and dying when I walked too close to it. They shot three other scenes after that one, and I made sure not to notice much. They involved three, uh, performers I didn't recognize, two women and another man. They must have been the crew Joan said would follow Trixie's example by showing up late.
Of course, one of the people who had been on time was now in an ICU, and lucky to be there instead of the morgue. Punctuality was no protection against black magic.
Sometime a bit before midnight, the puppy was asleep in a bed I'd made him out of my duster. Most of the food (without meat, it seemed blasphemous to call it pizza) had been devoured. Trixie had flown into a tantrum an hour before, ranting at one of the cameramen and at Inari, and then stormed out of the studio wearing nothing but her shoes, and everyone was tired. The crew was setting up for a last scene---consisting of Emma, Bobby the Buff, and Lara Romany. I felt myself growing tense as Lara rose, and I withdrew to the back of the studio to get my thoughts together.
There was a movement from the darkness at the rear of the studio, only a few feet away, and I hopped back in a reflex born of surprise and fear. A shadowy figure darted out of a corner and headed for the nearest exit. My shock became a realization of a sudden opportunity, and I didn't stop to think before I went racing after the figure.
It hit the door and darted off into the Chicago night. I snatched my blasting rod from my backpack as I ran by and sprinted into pursuit, bolstered by anger and adrenaline, determined to catch the mysterious lurker before any more of the crew could be attacked.
Chases down dark Chicago alleys were getting to be old hat for me. Though technically, I suppose, we weren't in Chicago proper, and the broader, more generous spaces between the buildings of the industrial park could hardly qualify as alleys. Foot chases still happened often enough that I had taken up running for practice and exercise. Admittedly, I was usually on the other end of a foot chase, mostly due to my personal policies on hand-to-hand combat with anything that weighed more than a small car or could be described with the word
chitinous.
Whoever I was after was not overly large. But he was fast, someone who had also practiced running. The industrial park was lit only sporadically, and my quarry was running west, away from the front of the park and into, of course, totally unlit areas.
With each step I got farther from possible help, and stood a higher chance of running into something I couldn't handle alone. I had to balance that against the possibility that I could stop whoever had been attacking Genosa's people before they could hurt anyone else. Maybe if it hadn't been mostly women who were hurt, and maybe if I didn't harbor this buried streak of chivalry, and if I were a little smarter, it wouldn't have been such an easy choice.
The shadowy object of my pursuit reached the back of the industrial lot and sprinted across twenty feet of almost pitch-black blacktop toward a twelve-foot fence. I caught up to him about halfway across, just managing to kick at one heel. He was running all out, and the impact fouled his legs and threw him down. I dropped my weight onto his back and rode him down into the asphalt.
The impact nearly knocked the wind out of me, and I imagine it did worse to him. The grunt as he hit came out in a masculine baritone, much to my relief. I'd been thinking in terms of "him" because if I'd been thinking "her" I don't think I could have kept myself from holding back in the violence department, and that's the kind of thing that can get you hurt, fast.
The guy tried to get up, but I slammed my forearm into the back of his head a few times, bouncing his face against the asphalt. He was tough. The blows slowed him down, but he started moving again and suddenly twisted with the sinuous strength of a serpent. I went to one side; he got out from under me and immediately leapt for the fence.
He jumped four or five feet up and started climbing. I pointed my blasting rod at the top of the fence, drew in my will and snarled, "Fuego."
Fire lashed across the top of the fence, bright and hot enough that the suddenly expanding air roared like a crack of thunder. Metal near the top of the fence glowed red, running into liquid a few feet above the man's head. Droplets pattered down like Hell's own rain.
The man cried out in shock or pain and let go of the fence. I beat him about the head and shoulders with my blasting rod when he did, the heavy wood serving admirably as a baton. The second or third blow stunned him, and I got the blasting rod across his neck in a choke, locked one of his arms behind him with a move Murphy had taught me, and pinned his face against the fence with my full weight.
"Hold still," I snarled. Bits of molten wire slithered down the chain link fence toward the ground. "Hold still or I'll hold your face there until it melts off."
He tried to struggle free. He was strong, but I had all the leverage, so that didn't mean much. Thank you, Murphy. I wrenched his trapped arm up until he gasped with pain. I snarled, "Hold. Still."
"Jesus Christ," Thomas stammered, his voice pained. He ceased struggling and lifted his other hand in surrender. Recognizing the voice, I could place his profile too. "Harry, it's me."
I scowled at him and pulled harder on his arm.
"Ow," he gasped. "Dresden, what are you doing? Let go. It's me."
I growled at him and did, shoving him hard against the fence and standing up.
Thomas rose slowly, turning to me with his hands lifted. "Thanks, man. I didn't mean to surprise you like---"
I hit him solidly in the nose with my right fist.
I think it was the surprise as much as the blow that knocked him onto his ass. He sat there with his hands covering his face and stared up at me.
I drew up my blasting rod and readied another lash of flame. The tip of the rod glowed with a cinder-red glow of light barely a foot from Thomas's face. His normally pale face was ashen, his expression was startled, and his mouth was stained with blood. "Harry---" he began.
"Shut up," I said. I used a very quiet voice. Quiet voices are more frightening than screams. "You're using me, Thomas."
"I don't know what you're talking abou---"
I leaned forward, the blazing end of the blasting rod making him squirm backward. "I told you to shut up," I said in the same quiet voice. "There's someone I think you know on the set, and you didn't tell me about that. I think you've lied to me about other things too, and it's put me in mortal peril at least one and a half times today already. Now give me one good reason I shouldn't blast your lying mouth off your face right now."
The hair on the back of my neck suddenly tried to crawl away from my skin. I heard two distinct clicks behind me, the hammers being drawn back on a pair of guns, and Lara's maddeningly alluring voice murmured, "I'll give you two."
The first thought that went through my mind was something like, Wow her voice is hot. The second was, How the hell did she catch up to us so quickly?
Oh, and somewhere in there the practical side of me chimed in with, It would be bad to get shot.
What came out of my mouth was, "Is your last name really Romany?"
I didn't hear any footsteps, but her voice came from closer when she answered. "It was my married name. Briefly. Now please step away from my little brother."
Hell's bells, she was his sister? Familial dementia. She might not react rationally to a threat. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that under the circumstances, I'd be an idiot to push Lara Raith. "I assume that when I do, you'll lower the guns?"
"Assume instead that if you don't, I'll shoot you dead."
"Oh, for the love of God." Thomas sighed. "Lara, would you relax? We were just talking."
She clucked her teeth, a sound of almost maternal disapproval. "Tommy, Tommy. When you say ridiculous things like that, I have to keep reminding myself that my baby brother isn't as large an idiot as you would like us all to believe."
"Oh, come on," Thomas said. "This is a waste of time."
"Shut up," I said with an ungracious waggle of the blasting rod. I looked over my shoulder at Lara. She was wearing black lacy things with stockings and heels---
(How the hell had she caught up to us in the freaking heels? Even for a wizard, some things are simply beyond belief.)
---and she held a pair of pretty little guns in her hands. They probably weren't packing the high-caliber ammunition of heavier weapons, but even baby bullets could kill me just fine. She held them like she knew what she was doing, and sauntered closer through the heavy shadows, her skin luminous. And showing. And really gorgeous.
I gritted my teeth and beat back the sudden urge to taste-test the curvy dents in her stomach and thighs, and kept the blasting rod lit and pointing at Thomas. "Back off, toots. Put the guns down, stop with the come-hither whammy, and we can talk."
She stopped between one step and the next, a faintly troubled expression on her face. She narrowed her eyes, and her voice slid through the air like honey and heroin. "What did you say?"
I fought off the pressure of that voice and growled, "Back. Off." My inner Quixote was not to be entirely denied though, and I added, "Please."
She stared at me for a moment, and then blinked her eyes slowly, as if seeing me for the first time. "Empty night," she murmured, her tone one of someone speaking an oath. "You're Harry Dresden."
"Don't feel bad. I cleverly concealed my identity as Harry the Production Assistant."
She pursed her lips (which also looked delicious) and said, "Why are you threatening my brother?"
"It was a slow night and everyone else was busy."
There wasn't even the hint of a warning. One of the little guns barked, there was a flash of scarlet pain in my head, and I collapsed to one knee.
I kept the blasting rod trained on Thomas and lifted my hand to my ear. It came away wet with droplets of blood, but the pain had begun to recede. Lara arched a delicate eyebrow at me. Hell's bells. She'd grazed my ear with a bullet. With that kind of skill, between the eyes would be no trick at all.
"Normally I would admire that kind of piquant retort," she said in a silken, quiet voice. Probably because she thought it sounded scarier than if she'd said it loudly. "But where my little brother is concerned, I am in no mood to play games."
"Point taken," I said. My voice sounded shaky. I lowered the blasting rod until it wasn't pointing at Thomas, and eased away the power held ready in it. The sullen fire at the tip of the rod went out.
"Lovely," she said, but she didn't lower the twin pistols. The autumn's evening breeze blew her dark, glossy hair around her head, and her grey eyes shone silver in the half-light.
"Harry," Thomas said. "This is my oldest sister, Lara. Lara, Harry Dresden."
"A pleasure," she said. "Thomas, step out from behind the wizard. I don't want one of these rounds to take you if they go through."
My guts turned to water. I still had my blasting rod in hand, but Lara could pull the trigger quicker than I could aim and loose a strike at her.
"Wait," Thomas said. He pushed himself up to one knee and put himself between me and the other White vampire. "Don't kill him."
That earned Thomas an arched eyebrow, but a smile haunted her mouth. "And why not?"
"There's the chance that he'd be able to level his death curse, for one."
"True. And?"
Thomas shrugged. "And I have personal reasons. I'd take it as a favor if we could discuss the matter first."
"So would I," I added.
Lara let the ghostly smile remain. "I find myself liking you, wizard, but . . ." She sighed. "There is little room for negotiation, Thomas. Dresden's presence here is unacceptable. Arturo's independent streak is an internal matter of the White Court."
"I didn't come here to interfere with the White Court," I said. "It wasn't my intention at all."
She regarded me. "We all know what intentions are worth. Why then, wizard?"
"That's a good question," I said, turning my head deliberately to Thomas. "I'd love to hear the answer."
Thomas's expression become apprehensive. His gaze flicked to Lara, and I had the sudden impression that he was preparing to move against her.
Lara frowned and said, "Thomas? What is he talking about?"
"This is a tempest in a teapot, Lara," Thomas said. "It's nothing. Really."
Lara's eyes widened. "You brought him into this?"
"Um," Thomas began.
"You're damn right he did," I said. "You think I'd be here for the fun of it?"
Lara's mouth dropped open. "Thomas. You've entered the game now?"
Thomas pressed his lips together for a few seconds, then rose slowly to his feet. He winced and put one hand to the small of his back. "Looks that way."
"He'll kill you," Lara said. "He'll kill you and worse. You haven't got a fraction of the strength you'd need to threaten him."
"That all depends," Thomas said.
"On what?" she asked.
"On where the other members of the House decide to place their support."
She let out a short laugh of disbelief. "You think any of us would take your side over his?"
"Why not," Thomas said calmly. "Think about it. Father is strong, but he isn't invincible. If he's taken down by my influence, it leaves me in charge, and I'd be a hell of a lot easier to depose than he would. But if I lose, you can blame me for putting the psychic wristlock on you. Instant scapegoat. Life goes on and the only one to pay for it is me."
She narrowed her eyes. "You've been reading Machiavelli again."
"To Justine at bedtime."
Lara became quiet for a moment, her expression pensive. Then she said, "This is ill-advised, Thomas."
"But---"
"Your timing is horrible. Raith's position is already precarious among the Houses. Internal instability now could leave us vulnerable to Skavis or Malvora or those like them. If they sense weakness they won't hesitate to destroy us."
"Dad's losing it," Thomas countered. "He hasn't been right for years, and we all know it. He's getting old. It's only a matter of time before the other Lords decide to take him---and when that happens, all of us will go down with him."
She shook her head. "Do you know how many brothers and sisters have said such words to me over the years? He has destroyed them all."
"They went up against him alone. I'm talking about all of us working together. We can do it."
"Why now, of all times?"
"Why not now?"
She frowned at Thomas, and stared intently at him for better than sixty seconds. Then she shivered, took a deep breath, and pointed one gun at my head. And the other at Thomas.
"Lara," he protested.
"Take your hand out from your back. Now."
Thomas stiffened, but he moved his hand from his back slowly, fingers empty. I looked up and saw a bulge that brushed his shirt at the belt line.
Lara nodded. "I'm sorry, Tommy. I really am quite fond of you, but you do not know Father the way I do. You aren't the only Raith who takes advantage of being underestimated. He already suspects you have something afoot, and if he thinks for a moment I'm working with you, he'll kill me. Without hesitation."
Thomas's voice grew desperate. "Lara, if we act together---"
"We will die together. If not at his hands than at Malvora's and his like. I don't have a choice. It gives me no pleasure to kill you."
"Then don't do it!" he said.
"And leave you to Father's mercies? Even I have a few principles. I love you as much as anyone in the world, little brother, but I did not survive as long as I have by taking unnecessary risks."
Thomas swallowed. He didn't look at me, but his balance shifted a little, and his shirt rode up enough to show me the handle of a gun he had tucked into the back of his jeans. I didn't stare at it. I wouldn't have time to grab it and shoot before Lara could gun me down, but if Thomas could distract her for a beat or two, there might be a chance.
Thomas took a deep breath and said, "Lara."
Something in his voice had changed. The tone of it sounded the same, on the surface, but there was something beneath it that made the air sing with quiet, seductive power. It commanded attention. Hell, it commanded a lot of things, and it was creepy to hear it coming from him. I was glad that Thomas wasn't addressing me, because it would have been damned confusing.
"Lara," he said again. I saw her sway a little as he spoke. "Let me talk to you."
Evidently the sway was induced more by the evening breeze and those high heels than it was by Thomas's voice. "I'm afraid all you need say is goodbye, little brother." Lara thumbed back the hammer on both guns, her features calm and remote. "And you'd best say it for wizard as well."
I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this:
No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.
Case in point: our little standoff with Supertart.
Thomas shouted and darted to his left, across my view of Lara. As he went, I reached for the pistol tucked into the back of his jeans. Judging by the grip, it was a semiautomatic, maybe one of those fancy German models that are as tiny as they are deadly. I grabbed it, and felt pretty slick to be doing the teamwork thing---but Thomas's damned jeans were so tight that the gun didn't come loose. I leaned too far in the effort and wound up sprawling on my side. All I got for my oh-so-clever maneuver was scraped fingertips and a good view of Lara Raith in gunfighting mode.
I heard a shot go past, a kind of humming buzz in the air that provided an accent to the mild, barking report of the pistol. There were several shots in the space of a second or three. Two of them hit Thomas with ugly sounds of impact, one in the leg, and a second in the chest.
At the same time he hurled a small ring of keys at Lara, and it probably saved my life. She swatted them aside with the gun that had been trained on me. It gave me a precious second or two, and it was time enough to bring up my blasting rod and loose a panicked strike at her. It was sloppy as hell, even with the blasting rod to help me focus my will, and instead of a wrist-thick beam of semicoherent flame, it came out in a cone of fire maybe thirty feet across.
That made big noise---a thunderous thumping explosion as the heat displaced cool night air. Lara Raith had the reflexes that were depressingly common in all of those vampire types, and she darted out of the way of the flames. She leveled both guns at me as she did, blazing away like in those Hong Kong action movies. But evidently even Lara's superhuman skill wasn't enough to overcome surprise, lateral movement, a firestorm, and the spike heels. God bless the fashion industry and the blind luck that protects fools and wizards; she missed.
I shook out my shield bracelet and hardened my will into a wall of unseen but solid force in front of me. The last few shots from Lara's guns actually struck the shield, illuminating it in a flash of blue-and-white energy. I held the shield firmly in place and readied the blasting rod again, and faced Lara squarely.
The vampire slipped into the shadows between the nearest building and a pair of huge industrial tanks and vanished from sight.
I padded forward to Thomas, keeping the shield up and in the general direction of where Lara had disappeared. "Thomas," I hissed. "Thomas, are you all right?"
It was a long beat before he replied, his voice weak and shaking. "I don't know. It hurts."
"You've been shot. It's supposed to hurt." I kept my eyes on the shadows, warily extending my senses as much as I could. "Can you walk?"
"Don't know," he panted. "Can't get my breath. Can't feel my leg."
I flicked my eyes down to him and back out again. Thomas's black T-shirt, was plastered to his chest on one side. He'd taken a hit in the lung, at least. If a major blood vessel had been struck, he was in trouble, vampire or not. The White Court were a resilient bunch, but in some ways they were just as fragile as the human beings they fed upon. He could heal up fast---I'd seen Thomas recover from broken ribs in a matter of hours---but if he bled out from a severed artery, he'd die like anyone else.
"Just hold still," I said. "Don't try to move until we know where she is."
"That'll get her," Thomas panted. "The old sitting-duck ploy."
"Give me your gun," I said.
"Why?"
"So that the next time you start talking I can shoot your wise ass."
He started to laugh, but it broke into agonized, wet coughing.
"Dammit," I muttered, and crouched down beside him. I set my blasting rod aside and slipped my right arm and one knee behind his back, trying to hold him vertical from the waist up.
"You'd better get moving. I'll manage."
"Would you shut up?" I demanded. I tried to ascertain the extent of his injuries with my free hand, but I'm no doctor. I found the hole in his chest, felt the blood coming out. The edges of the wound puckered and gripped at my hand. "Well," I told him. "Your wound sucks. Here." I took his right hand and pressed it hard against the hole. "Keep your hand there, man. Keep the pressure on. I can't hold it and carry you out too."
"Forget carrying me," he rasped. "Don't be an idiot. She'll kill us both."
"I can hold the shield," I said.
"If you can't return fire, it won't do you much good. Get clear, call the cops, then come back for me."
"You're delirious," I said. If I left him there alone, Lara would finish him. I got my right shoulder under his left arm and hauled him to his feet. He wasn't as heavy as I would have expected, but dragging him up like that had to have hurt him. The pain locked the breath in his throat. "Come on," I growled. "You've got a good leg. Help me."
His voice had become hollow, somehow ghostly, barely more than a whisper. "Just go. I can't."
"You can. Shut up and help me."
I started walking as fast as I could back toward the street end of the industrial park. I kept my shield bracelet up, focusing my will into a barrier all around us. It wasn't as strong as a more limited directional shield, but my eyes couldn't be everywhere, and a smart opponent would shoot me in the back.
Thomas would have been screaming if he could have gotten his breath. Over the next minute or two, his face went white---I mean, even more so than usual. He'd always been pale, but his skin took on the grey tone of a corpse, sooty hollows forming under his eyes. Even so, he managed to help me. Not much, but enough that I could keep us both moving without stumbling.
I started to think that we were going to make it back safely, when I heard running footsteps and a woman rounded the corner ahead of us, her pale skin glowing in the dimness.
I cursed, pushing more will into the shield, and crouched down, letting Thomas collapse ungraciously onto the gravel parking lot. I fumbled for his gun, found it, and whipped the weapon up. I flicked off the safety with my thumb, took a half second to aim, and pulled the trigger.
"No," Thomas gasped at the last possible instant. He leaned hard against me just as the gun went off, the barrel wavered, and the shot kicked up sparks on a concrete retaining wall fifty feet away. Panicked, I lined up the weapon again, though I knew it would be a useless gesture. I might have taken her out with a surprise shot, but there was no chance at all that I could outshoot Lara Raith in a direct confrontation.
But it wasn't Lara. I couldn't see very far in the dimness, but Inari stumbled to a halt only a few feet shy of me, her eyes wide and her mouth open. "Oh, my God," she cried. "Thomas! What happened? What have you done to him?"
"Nothing!" I said. "He's been hurt. For the love of Pete, help me."
She hesitated for a second, her eyes wide, and then rushed forward to Thomas. "Oh, my God. There's blood! He's b-bleeding!"
I shoved my blasting rod at her. "Hold this," I snapped.
"What did you do to him?" she demanded. She had begun weeping. "Oh, Thomas."
I felt like screaming in frustration, and I tried to look at every possible place Lara might be, all at the same time. My instincts screamed that she was getting closer, and I wanted nothing more than to run away. "I told you, nothing! Just get moving and open the doors for me. We have to get back inside and call nine-one-one."
I bent down to pick up Thomas again.
Inari Raith screamed in grief and rage. Then she used my blasting rod with both hands to clout me on the back of the neck with so much force that it snapped in half. Stars exploded over my vision and I didn't even feel it when my face hit the gravel.
Everything got real confused for a minute or two, and when I finally started stirring I heard Inari crying. "Lara, I don't know what happened. He tried to shoot me, and Thomas isn't awake. He might be dead."
I heard footsteps on the gravel, and Lara said, "Give me the gun."
"What do we do?" Inari said. She was still crying.
Lara worked the slide on the gun with a couple of quiet clicks, checking the chamber. "Get inside," she said, her tone firm and confident. "Call emergency services and the police. Now."
Inari got up and started to run off, leaving Thomas and me alone with the woman who had already half killed him. I tried to get up, but it was difficult. Everything kept spinning around.
I managed to get to one knee just as a cold, slithery feeling washed down my spine.
The three vampires of the Black Court did not announce their presence. They simply appeared as though formed from the shadows.
One of them was the one-eared vamp I had smacked with the holy-water balloon. On either side of him stood two more Black Court vamps, both male, both dressed in funeral finery, and both of teenage proportions. They hadn't been living corpses for very long---there were lividity marks on the arms and fingers of the first, and their faces hardly looked skeletal at all. Like the maimed vampire, they had long, dirty fingernails. Dried blood stained their faces and throats. And their eyes were filmy, stagnant pools.
Inari screamed a horror-movie scream and stumbled back to Lara. Lara sucked in a sharp breath, bringing the gun into point-down firing stance, spinning in a slow circle to watch each of the Black Court vamps in turn.
"Well, well," rasped the maimed vampire. "What luck. The wizard and three Whites to boot. This will be entertaining."
At which point I felt another, stronger slither of vile and deadly magical energy.
The malocchio. It was forming again, more powerfully than before---and I sensed that the deadly spell was already near and gathering more vicious power as it headed my way. Still dazed, I couldn't do a damned thing about it.
"Kill them," the Black Court vampire whispered. "Kill them all."
See what I mean? It's just like I said.
Things can always get worse.
I'm not hopeless at hand-to-hand, but I'm not particularly talented, either. I've been beaten senseless once or twice. Well. A lot. It isn't as unlikely as it sounds---a lot of the things that started pummeling me could bench-press a professional basketball team, whereas I was only human. In my neck of the woods, that meant that I was slightly tougher than a ceramic teacup.
I'd managed to survive the beatings thanks to good luck, determined friends, and an evil faerie godmother, but I figured that sooner or later my luck would run out, and I'd find myself alone, in danger, and at the limits of my endurance. Tonight had proved me right.
So it was a good thing I'd planned ahead.
I reached for my new belt buckle, with its carved design of a bear. The buckle was cast from silver, and the bear design was my own hand-carved work. It took me months to make it, though it wasn't particularly beautiful or inspirational, but I hadn't been trying for artistic accomplishment when I'd been creating it.
I'd been trying to prepare myself for, in the words of Foghorn Leghorn, just such an emergency.
I touched my left hand to my belt buckle and whispered, "Fortius."
Power rushed into the pit of my stomach, a sudden tide of hot, living energy, nitrous for the body, mind, and soul. Raw life radiated out into my bones, running riot through my limbs. My confusion and weariness and pain vanished as swiftly as darkness before the sunrise.
This was no simple adrenaline boost, either, though that was a part of it. Call it chi or mana or one of thousand other names for it---it was pure magic, the very essence of life energy itself. It poured into me from the reservoir I'd created in the silver of the buckle. My heart suddenly overflowed with excitement, my thoughts with hope, confidence, and eager anticipation, and if I had a personal soundtrack to my life it would have been playing Ode to Joy while a stadium of Harry fans did the wave. It was all I could do to stop myself from bursting into laughter or song. The pain was still there, but I shrugged off the recent blows and exertions and suddenly felt ready to fight.
Even when magic is involved, there ain't no free lunch. I knew that the pain would catch up to me. But I had to focus. Survive now; worry about the backlash later.
"Lara," I said. "I realize that you're kind of invested in killing me, but from where I'm standing the situation has changed."
The succubus shot a glance at the vampires and then at Inari. "I concur, Dresden."
"Rearrange teams and get the girl out?"
"Can you move?"
I pushed myself up, feeling pretty peppy, all things considered. Lara had her back more or less to me, and was trying to keep her eyes on all three Black Courters. The vampires, in turn, simply stood there with only the flicker of something hungry stirring in their dead, eyes to proclaim them something other than lifeless corpses. "Yeah, I'm good to go."
Lara shot a glance over her shoulder, her expression flickering with disbelief. "Impressive. Pax, then?"
I jerked my chin in a nod. "Twenty-four hours?"
"Done."
"Groovy."
"Their faces," Inari wailed. "Their faces! My God, what are they?"
I blinked at the terrified girl and shot a glance at Lara. "She doesn't know? You don't tell her these things?"
The succubus shrugged a shoulder, keeping most of her attention on the nearest vampire and said, "It's my father's policy."
"Your family is twisted, Lara. It really is." I picked up the shattered halves of my blasting rod. The carvings and spells laid on the wood were difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to make. I'd had to replace maybe half a dozen rods over the years, and it was the labor of better than a fortnight to create a new one. The girl had broken mine, which annoyed the hell out of me, but the drought of positive energy still zinging through me pointed out the upside: I now had two handy shafts of wood with jagged, pointy ends. I stepped between Inari and the nearest vampire and passed her one broken half of the rod. "Here," I said. "If you get the chance, make like Buffy."
Inari blinked at me. "What? Is this a joke?"
"Do it," said Lara. Her voice was laced with iron. "No questions, Inari."
The steel in the succubus's voice galvanized the young woman. She took the shard of wood without further hesitation, though her expression grew no less terrified.
Overhead, the dark energy of the curse swirled around and around, a constant, intimidating pressure on my scalp. I tried to block out all the distractions, focusing on the curse and on where it was going. I needed to know who its target was---not only for the sake of my investigation, but for my immediate survival.
That curse was several kinds of nasty. And as it happened, I had a constructive, life-affirming purpose for a boatload of nasty juju. I drew my silver pentacle from my neck and spoke a troubling thought aloud. "Why are they just standing there?"
"They're communing with their master," Lara stated.
"I hate getting put on call waiting," I said, wrapping the chain of my pentacle around my fist. "Shouldn't we hit them now?"
"No," Lara said sharply. "They're aware of us. Don't move. It will only set them off, and time is our ally."
A sudden wash of almost physical cold set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. The curse was about to land, and I still wasn't sure who it was coming for. I glanced upward, hoping for a physical cue. "I wouldn't be so sure about that, Miss Raith."
One of the vampires, the smallest of the pair who had showed up with One-ear, suddenly shuddered. Its dead eyes flickered around until they landed on me, and then it spoke. You wouldn't think there would be a whole lot of difference between the rasp of one dry, leathery dead larynx and another, but there was. This voice flowed out and it wasn't the voice of the vampire whose lips were moving. It was an older voice. Older and colder and vicious, but somehow tinged with something feminine. "Dresden," that voice said. "And Raith's right hand. Raith's bastard son. And the darling of his eye. This is a fortunate night."
"Evening, Mavra," I said. "If it's all the same to you, can you stop playing sock puppet with the omega Nosferatu and move this along? I've got a big day tomorrow and I want to get to bed for it."
"Christ, Harry," came a choking voice. I looked back and saw Thomas on the ground, his eyes open. He looked like death, and he had trouble focusing on me, but at least he was lucid. "Are you drunk all of a sudden?"
I winked at him. "It's the power of positive thinking."
The puppet vampire hissed with Mavra's anger, and its voice took on a quavering, modulated, half-echoing quality. "Tonight will balance many scales. Take them, my children. Kill them all."
And a lot of things went down.
The vampires came for us. One-ear rushed at Lara. The sock puppet went for me, and the third one headed for Inari. It happened fast. My attacker may have been new to the game and clumsy, yet it moved at such a speed that it barely registered on my thoughts---but my body was still singing with the infusion of positive energy, and I reacted to the attack as if it had been the opening steps of a dance I already knew. I sidestepped the vampire's rush and drove my half of the former blasting rod down at its back, Buffy-like.
Maybe it works better on television. The wood gouged the vampire, but I don't think much of it got past its suit coat, much less pierced its heart. But the blow did manage to throw the thing off balance and send it stumbling past me. Maybe it actually hurt the vampire---the creature let out an earsplitting, creaking shriek of rage and surprise.
Inari screamed and swung her stake, but her Buffy impersonation wasn't any better than mine. The vampire caught her arm, twisted its wrist, and broke bones with a snap, crackle, pop. She gasped and fell to her knees. The vampire shoved her over and leaned down, baring its teeth (not fangs, I noticed, just yellow corpse-teeth) and spreading its jaws to tear out her throat and bathe in the flood of blood.
And as if that weren't enough, the curse suddenly coalesced and came shrieking out of the night to end Inari's life.
I had scant seconds to act. I charged the vampire, leaned back, pictured an invisible beer can beginning an inch above the vampire's teeth, and stomp-kicked the creature in the chin with my heel. It wasn't a question of Harry-strength versus undead superstrength. I'd gotten the chump shot in, and while the vampire might have been able to rip through a brick wall, it only weighed as much as a dried corpse and it didn't have enough experience to have anticipated the attack. I drove the kick home, hard. Physics took over from there, and the vampire fell back with a surprised hiss.
I seized Inari's right arm with my left. Energy flows out of the body from the right side. The left side absorbs energy. I stretched out my senses and felt the dark energy of the curse rushing down at Inari. It hit her a second later, but I was ready for it, and with an effort of will I caught the dark power coursing down into the girl before it could do her harm.
Pain erupted in my left palm. The power was cold---and not mountain-breeze cold, either. It was slimy and nauseating, like something that had come slinking out from the depths of some enormous subterranean sea. In that instant of contact, my head exploded with terror. This power, this black magic, was wrong. Fundamentally, nightmarishly, intensely wrong.
Since I'd begun my career as a wizard, I'd always believed that magic came from life, but that it was only potential energy, like electricity or natural gas or uranium. And while it may have come from positive origins, only its application would prove it good or evil. That there was no such thing as truly evil, malevolent, black magic.
I'd been wrong.
Maybe my own magic worked like that, but this power was something different. It had only one purpose---to destroy. To inflict horror, pain, and death. I felt that power writhe into me through my contact with the girl, and it hurt me on a level so deep that I could not find a specific word, even a specific thought to describe it. It ripped at me within, as though it had found a weakened place in my defenses, and started gouging out a larger opening, struggling to force itself inside me.
I fought it. The struggle happened all within an instant, and it hurt still more to tear that darkness loose, to force it to flow on through me and out of me again. I won the fight. But I felt a sudden terror that something had been torn away from me; that in simple contact with that dark energy, I had been scarred somehow, marked.
Or changed.
I heard myself scream, not in fear or challenge, but in agony. I extended my right hand and the black magic flowed out of it in an invisible torrent, fastening onto the vampire as it gained its feet again and reached out to grab me. The vampire's expression didn't even flicker, so I was sure it did not feel the curse coming.
Which made it a complete surprise when something slammed into the vampire from directly overhead, too quickly to be seen. There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard.
It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed.
By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder.
The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil.
The vampire gasped and writhed a little more.
The timer popped out of the turkey.
Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice.
"For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."
And then the fight was on again.
Inari screamed in pain from her knees on the ground. Lara Raith lifted Thomas's little gun, and tongues of flame licked from it as she shot at One-ear. She was aiming for his legs. I started to help her, but I'd been playing long odds, mixing it up in hand-to-hand with the Black Court, and they caught up to me.
The vampire I'd dodged in the opening seconds of the fight slammed its arm into my shoulders. The blow was broad and clumsy but viciously strong. I managed to roll with it a little, but it still sent me straight down onto the gravel and knocked the wind from my chest. I felt the edges of rock cut me in a dozen places at once, but the pain didn't bother me. Yet. Nonetheless, it took me a second to get my body moving again.
The vampire stepped right over me and closed in on the fallen girl. With a simple, brutal motion, it seized her hair and shoved her facedown onto the parking lot, baring the back of her neck. It bent forward.
Thomas snarled, "Get away from her!" He hauled himself forward using his unwounded leg and one arm, and he got the other around the vampire's leg. Thomas heaved, and the creature fell, then twisted like an arthritic serpent to grapple with him.
Thomas went mano a mano, no tricks, no subtlety. The living corpse got a hand on Thomas's throat and tried to tear his head off. Thomas writhed sinuously away from the full power of the creature, and then rolled over a couple of times. Thomas got hold of the thing's wrists and tried to force them away from his neck.
And then Thomas changed.
It wasn't anything so dramatic as the vampires of the Red Court, whose demonic forms lurked beneath a masquerade of seemingly normal human flesh. It was far subtler. A cold wind seemed to gather around him. His features stretched, changing, his cheekbones starker, his eyes more sunken, his face more gaunt. His skin took on a shining, almost luminescent luster, like a fine pearl under moonlight. And his eyes changed as well. His irises flickered to a shade of chrome-colored silver, then bleached out to white altogether.
He snarled a string of curses as he fought, and the sound of his voice changed as well---again, a subtle thing. It was more feral, more vicious, and its tone was not even remotely human. Thomas, despite his deathly injuries, went up against the Black Court killing machine in a contest of main strength and won. He forced the vampire's hands from his throat, rolled so that his good leg came up beneath the vampire, and, with the combined strength of his arms, Thomas threw the vampire into the brick wall of the nearest building.
Bricks shattered, and bits and pieces of them flew outward in a cloud of stinging shrapnel. The vampire collapsed to the ground for a moment, stunned. A heartbeat later, it stirred and began to rise again. Thomas's shoulders heaved, as though to push himself up and continue the fight, but whatever fuel had driven his transformation and sudden strength had been expended.
He fell limp and loose to the gravel, gaunt face empty of expression. His all-white eyes went out of focus, staring, and he did not move.
Lara Raith wasn't doing badly for herself. The wind was blowing the short little black silk robe back off of her, so it was all black lace and pale flesh that somehow did not present a contrast to the gun. One-ear had fallen on his side. Shards of brittle bone protruded from both thighs and both knees, where Lara Raith had exercised her marksmanship. One-ear pushed himself up, and Lara put a shot in the arm supporting the vampire's weight. One-ear's elbow exploded in a cloud of ruined cloth, moldy flesh, and bone splinters, and the creature fell back to the ground.
Lara put a bullet through One-ear's left eye. The smell was indescribably nauseating. Lara aimed at the vampire's other eye.
"This won't kill me," the creature snarled.
"I don't need to," Lara responded. "Just to slow you down."
"I'll be after you in hours," One-ear-one-eye said.
"Look somewhere sunny," she responded. "Au revoir, darling."
The gun's hammer clicked down and silence ensued.
Lara had time to blink in disbelief at the gun. Then the vampire Thomas had stunned rushed at Lara's back. The creature wasn't quite a blur, but it was fast as hell. I tried to shout a warning at her, but it came out more of a croak than anything.
Lara shot a glance over her shoulder and started to move, but my warning had come too late. The vampire seized her by her dark hair and spun her around. Then it hit her with a broad swing of its arm and literally knocked her out of her high-heeled shoes. She flew at the nearest wall, half spinning in the air, and hit hard. The gun tumbled from her fingers and she fell, her eyes wide and frightened, her expression stunned. Her face had been cut on the cheek, at the corner of her mouth, and on her forehead. She was bleeding odd, pale blood in thick, trickling lines.
The vampire shuddered and leapt after her, landing on all fours. It was graceful, but alien, far more arachnid than feline. The corpse prowled over to her, seized her throat, and shoved her shoulders against the wall. Then it thrust out a long, leathery tongue and started licking her blood, hissing in mounting pleasure.
One-ear slithered over to her as well, using his unwounded arm and a serpentine writhing of the rest of his body. "Raith's second in command," the vampire rasped. "As well as the White who betrayed us. Now you're both mine."
Lara tried to push the vampire licking her blood away, but she wasn't strong enough, and she still looked dazed. "Get away from me."
"Mine," One-ear repeated. It drew Lara's hair back away from her throat. The other vampire took her hands and pinned them against the wall above her head.
One-ear touched its tongue to Lara's mouth and shivered. "I'll show you what real vampires are like. You'll see things differently soon. And you'll be lovely, still. For a little while. I'll enjoy that."
Lara struggled, but the haze of confusion over her eyes did not clear, and her motions had a dreamlike lack of coordination. Her face took on an expression of horror as both vampires leaned into her, their withered teeth settling onto her flesh. They bit her, and she bucked in terror and agony. There were ugly, slurping sounds beneath Lara Raith's screams.
Which was what I'd been waiting for. Once they had bitten down, I gathered up momentum as quietly as I could, closed the last few yards in the springing strides I would have used on a fencing strip, and drove the six-inch heel of one of Lara's black pumps as hard as I could into the space between the unwounded vampire's shoulder blades. I had the heel of my hand and the full weight of my body behind the blow, and I hit square and hard, so that the heel drove into its back, just left of its spine, directly at the vampire's withered heart.
I didn't get the response I would have liked best. The vampire didn't disintegrate or explode into dust. But it did convulse with a sudden scream, its body going into almost the same kind of spastic seizure the other one had displayed on having a turkey rammed through its chest. It staggered and fell to the ground, its dead face locked into a grimace of surprise and helpless pain.
One-ear was slow to react. By the time it tore its mouth from the gnawed and bleeding slope of Lara Raith's left breast, I had my mother's pentacle out and had focused all of my attention on it.
Now I've heard that the power of faith is simply another aspect of the magic I used all the time. I've also heard that it is a completely different kind of energy, totally unrelated to the living power I felt all around me. Certainly it garnered a very different reaction from various supernatural entities than my everyday wizardry did, so maybe they weren't related at all.
But that didn't matter. I wasn't holding a crucifix in the thing's face. I was holding the symbol of what I believed in. The five-pointed star of the pentacle represented the five forces of the universe, those of air, fire, water, earth, and of spiritual energy, laid into patterns of order and life and bound within a circle of human thought, human will. I believed that magic was fundamentally a force of life, of good, something meant to protect and preserve. I believed that those who wielded it therefore had a responsibility to use that power in the way it was meant to be used---and that was belief enough to tap into the vast power of faith, and to direct it against One-ear.
The pentacle burst into silver and blue light, a blaze as bright as an airborne flare. One-ear's stretched facial skin began to peel away, and the thick fluids oozing from its ruined eye socket burst into silver flame. The vampire screamed and threw itself away from that silver fire. If he'd had a crony left, they could have come at me from opposite directions, so that the blazing light from the pentacle could sear only one. But he didn't, and I followed after One-ear, keeping the pentacle held before me, my concentration locked upon it.
One-ear scrambled over the writhing vampire with the turkey-crushed chest, and the creature, maybe younger or more vulnerable than its leader, simply burst into flame as the pentacle glared down upon it. I had to skip back a step from that sudden heat, and the fallen vampire was consumed by blinding fire until nothing was left of it.
By the time my eyes had adjusted to the comparative darkness of the parking lot again, One-ear was nowhere to be seen. I checked over my shoulder and saw the transformed Lara Raith straddle the staked vampire, her eyes blazing silver and bright, her skin shining as Thomas's had. She drove blows down at its face, crushing it with the first few, then driving into its skull with sickening squelching sounds during subsequent blows. She continued, screaming at the top of her lungs the whole while, until she'd crushed its face and moved onto its neck, beating it into shapeless pulp.
And then she tore the vampire's head off its shoulders, killing it.
She rose slowly, pale eyes distant and inhuman. Her white skin was streaked with ichor of black, brown, and dark green, mingling with the pale, pinkish blood around her cuts and the bite wounds. Her dark hair had fallen from its mostly up style, and hung around her in a wild tangle. She looked terrified and furious and sexy as hell.
The succubus turned hungry eyes on me, and began a slow stalk forward. I let the gathered light ease out of my pentacle. It wouldn't do me any good against Lara. "We have a truce," I said. My voice sounded harsh, cold, though I hadn't tried to make it that way. "Don't make me destroy you too."
She stopped in her stockinged tracks. Her expression flickered with uncertainty and fear, and she looked a hell of a lot shorter without the do-me pumps. She shuddered and folded her arms over her stomach, closing her eyes for a moment. The luminous, compelling glow faded from her skin, her features becoming less unreal, if no less lovely. When she opened her eyes again, they were almost human. "My family," she said. "I have to get them out of here. Our truce stands. Will you help me?"
I looked at Inari, on the ground and paralyzed with pain. Thomas wasn't moving. He might have been dead.
Lara took a deep breath and said, "Mister Dresden, I can't protect them. I need your help to get them to safety. Please."
The last word had cost her something. Somehow, I held back from agreeing to help her on pure reflex. That is a monumentally bad idea, Harry, I cautioned myself. I shoved the knee-jerk chivalry aside and scowled at Lara.
She stood facing me, her chin lifted proudly. Her injuries looked vicious, and she had to be in pain, but she refused to let it show on her face---except for one moment, when she glanced at Thomas and Inari, and her eyes suddenly glistened. The tears fell, but she did not allow herself to blink.
"Dammit." I let out my breath in disgust at myself and said, "I'll get my car."
I debated talking to Arturo before I left but decided against it. Thomas and Inari were hurt, and the sooner they got medical care, the better. Additionally, One-ear the vampire had consciously gotten his own flunky immolated in order to escape. If he had some mystical method of communicating with Mama Mavra---or a cell phone---she might already be on the way with reinforcements.
One-ear was still pretty new to the vampire game, and his pair of followers had been virtual infants, and they had almost been more than all of us could handle. Mavra was in a different league entirely. She had been killing for centuries, and the near-extermination of the Black Court had meant that only the smartest, strongest, and most deadly of its members had survived. One-ear was dangerous enough, but if Mavra caught us in the open, she would take us apart.
So I ran to get the Blue Beetle from the row of parking spaces near the building Arturo was using. It was a quick run, a couple of plots up and one over from where Thomas and Inari lay. I slipped into the building. Only a couple of people saw me, and I ignored them as I ducked into the studio doors, seized my backpack, my coat, and the sleeping puppy, and fumbled in the coat until I found my car keys. I carried the whole kit and caboodle out to the car.
I coaxed the Beetle to life and tore down the gravel lanes with all the speed its little engine could manage. The Beetle's single headlight glared over Lara, who had Thomas in a fireman's carry. She'd taken off the short black robe and had tied it into an improvised sling for Inari, who stumbled along behind her older sister.
I opened the doors and helped her lower Thomas into the back of the Beetle. Lara stared for a second at my car's interior. It didn't look like she approved of the stripped and improvised quality of it. "There's no seat in back," she said.
"That's why there's a blanket," I answered her. "Get in. How is he?"
"Alive, for now," Lara said. "He's breathing, but he's emptied his reserves. He'll need to refresh them."
I paused and stared at her. "You mean he needs to feed on someone."
Her eyes slid aside to Inari, but the girl had her hands full simply staying vertical through the pain, and probably wouldn't have heard the space shuttle lifting off. Nonetheless, Lara lowered her voice. "Yes. Deeply."
"Hell's bells," I said. I got the door for Inari and helped her into the passenger-side seat, buckled her in, and dropped the puppy in her lap. She clutched at him with her unwounded arm, whimpering.
I got the Beetle the hell away from the little industrial park. After several moments of hurried driving, I started to relax. I kept checking, but I saw no one following me. I played a few trail-shaking tricks, just in case, and finally felt able to speak. "I'll get you to my place," I told Lara.
"You can't possibly think that the basement of a boardinghouse will be secure."
"How do you know where I live?" I demanded.
"I've read the Court's defensive assessment of your home," she said with an absent wave of her hand.
Which was scary as hell, that someone had assessed my freaking apartment. But I wasn't going to show her that. "It's kept me alive pretty well. Once we get there we can fort up under my heavy defenses. We'll be stuck inside, but safe until morning."
"If you wish. But if he does not feed, Thomas will be dead within the hour."
I spat an oath.
"Mavra knows where you live, in any case, Dresden. She will doubtless have some of her personnel waiting near your apartment."
"True," I said. "Where else could we go?"
"My family's house."
"You all live in Chicago?"
"Of course not," Lara said, her voice tired. "But we keep houses in several cities around the world. Thomas has been in and out of Chicago for the past two or three years, between resort vacations. Justine is at the house, waiting for him."
"Inari will need a doctor."
"I have one," she said. Then added, "On retainer."
I stared at her in my rearview mirror for a moment (in which she appeared like anyone else) and then shrugged. "Which way?"
"North along the lake," she said. "I'm sorry. I don't know the street names. Turn right at the light ahead."
She gave directions and I followed them, and I reminded myself that it would be a bad habit to form. It took us better than half an hour to get up to one of the wealthy lakeside developments that just about any large body of water makes inevitable. I'd seen several such developments during the course of my investigations, but the area Lara directed me to was as elaborate and expensive-looking as any I had ever seen.
The house we finally pulled up to had multiple wings, multiple stories, and a couple of faux-castle turrets. It had cost someone eight digits, and could have doubled as the headquarters of the villain in a James Bond movie. Old timber had grown up around it, and was manicured into an idyllic forest of rolling, grass-green hummocks and beautiful, shapely trees wreathed in ivy and autumn leaves. Small lit pools were dotted here and there, each shrouded with its own low cloud of evening mist.
The drive rolled through Little Sherwood for better than half a mile, and I started feeling nervous. If anything tried to kill me, I was too far away from the road to run for help. Or even to scream for it. I shook my wrist to hear the jangle of the little silver shields on my bracelet, and made sure it was ready to go at an instant's notice.
Lara's pale grey eyes regarded me in the rearview mirror for a moment, and then she said, "Dresden, you and my brother have nothing further to fear from me this night. I will respect our truce, and extend guest rights to you while you are in my family's home. And I do so swear it."
I frowned and didn't chance a look at her eyes, even in the mirror. I didn't have to. There was something in her voice that I recognized. Call it the ring of truth.
The one advantage to dealing with supernatural foes was that the code of honor of the Old World was accepted and expected when we negotiated with one another. A sworn oath and the obligations of hospitality were more binding in those circles than the threat of physical force. What Lara had offered me meant that not only would she not attempt to do me harm---she would be obligated to protect me should anyone else attempt to do so. If she failed in her duties as a host, it would represent a major loss of face, should word of it get around.
But from what I'd gathered, Lara wasn't the one making all the calls in the Raith household. If someone up the family food chain---for example, Daddy Raith---thought he could get away with it without word leaking out, he might decide to subtract me from the old equation of life. It was a real risk, and I didn't want to take it.
The last vampire who had offered me the hospitality of her home, Bianca, had drugged me, nearly killed me, manipulated me into starting a war (which incidentally forced me into a stupidly dangerous investigation with the Queens of Faerie), and tried to feed me to her most recent vampire "recruit," my former lover, Susan. There was no reason to think that Lara wasn't capable of the same treachery.
Unfortunately, my back wasn't exactly breaking under the weight of all my options. I had no idea of how to help Thomas, and my apartment was the only place in town I would be safe. If I cut and ran Thomas wouldn't survive it. I didn't have anything but a strong intuition that Lara would hold to the letter of our truce. Two seconds after it was over she'd finish what she started, sure, but in the meantime we might be okay.
A paranoid little voice inside reminded me that Lara seemed like she was more or less on the level, and that it should make me nervous. Their near-humanity was what made the White Court so dangerous. I'd never come close to thinking that maybe Bianca was an okay person underneath the blood-craving monster. I'd known that she wasn't human, and I'd been wary every single time I'd interacted with her.
I didn't get any more of a creature-feature vibe from Lara than I did from Thomas. But I had to figure they were cut from a similar mold. There would be lies under lies. I had to be paranoid, which in this instance was another word for smart. I couldn't afford to extend Lara much trust if I wanted to avoid a rerun of the Harry Nearly Dies Because of His Stupid Chivalry Show.
I promised myself that the second anything got dicey I would blast my way out of that house through the nearest wall, incinerating first and asking questions later. It wouldn't be the subtlest escape in the whole world, but I was pretty sure the Raiths could afford to repair the damages. I wondered if vampires had any trouble getting homeowner's insurance.
I pulled the Blue Beetle around the circular drive in front of Château Raith. Its engine shuddered, coughed, and finally died before I could shut it down. A sidewalk swept between a pair of vicious-looking stone gargoyles four feet high, and led through a rose garden bedded with pure white gravel.
The rose vines were old ones, some of them as thick as my thumb. Their spreading tendrils twined all around the entirety of the garden and over the feet of the crouching gargoyles. The lighting was all arranged in soft blues and greens, and it made the roses on the vines look black. Thick leaves grew all over the vines, but here and there I could see the wicked needle tips of larger-than-average thorns. The air was filled with their light, heady scent.
"Help Inari," Lara said. "I will carry Thomas."
"Considering that you're the one who shot him in the first place, I'll carry Thomas," I said. "You help Inari."
Her lips compressed slightly, but she nodded. "As you wish."
Damn straight, as I wish.
Lara leaned over to pull Inari from the car, but before she could touch the girl the notch-eared puppy sprang up out of his sleep, barking and snarling at Lara in squeaky fury. Lara jerked her hand back, brows lowering in consternation. "What's wrong with your animal?"
I sighed and slid into my leather duster, then came around to the passenger door. "I keep telling everyone he's not mine." I scooped up the little psychopath and deposited him in one of my coat pockets. He scrambled around in there for a minute, and then he managed to poke his head out. The puppy kept his eyes on Lara and kept growling. "There. Now the beast cannot harm you."
Lara gave me a cool look and coaxed Inari to her feet. Then she helped me draw Thomas out of the car as gently as possible. He was flaccid and cold, his eyes entirely white, but I could hear his labored breathing. Without knowing the extent of the injuries to his upper body, I didn't dare risk a fireman's carry, so I got an arm under his shoulder blades and hamstrings, and lifted him like a child. He was heavy. My shoulders screamed, and my ears started ringing with a quiet, shrill tone.
I felt dizzy for a second, and shrugged it off with an effort of will. I couldn't afford to show any weakness now.
I followed Lara and Inari up the sidewalk to the house. Lara pushed a button on a small plastic panel beside the door and said, "Lara Raith." There was a heavy metallic click-clack, and one of the doors drifted slowly in.
Just then the lights of another car swept across us. A white limo pulled in beside the Blue Beetle on the circular drive and came to a halt. A moment later a white sedan pulled in behind the limo.
The limo's driver was woman over six feet tall wearing a grey uniform. Her hair was pulled back in a severe braid, and she wore dark red lipstick. A tall, strong-looking man in a grey silk suit got out on the passenger side of the limo. I caught sight of a shoulder rig while he was settling his jacket. His eyes swept around, taking in everything, including us at the door, the drive, the grounds, the trees, and the roof of the house. He was checking possible lines of fire. A bodyguard.
Simultaneously, another man and woman got out of the white sedan. At first I thought that they were the same two people. I blinked. The man looked the same, but the second woman was wearing a grey suit a lot like the one of the man with her. Then I got it---two sets of identical twins. They all looked wary, competent, and dangerous. They fanned out around the limo in silent coordination, like they'd done it a jillion times.
Then the driver opened the back door of the limo.
The air grew suddenly colder, as if the Almighty had flicked on the air-conditioning. A man slid out of the car. He was about six feet tall, dark of hair and pale of flesh. He was dressed in a white linen suit with a silver-grey silk shirt and Italian leather shoes. There was a scarlet gem of some kind fixed to his left earlobe, though his fine, straight hair hid it until a breeze briefly tossed the dark strands to one side. He had long, spatulate fingers, broad shoulders, the eyes of a drowsy jaguar, and he was better-looking than Thomas.
Beside me, Lara shuddered, and I heard her whisper, "Dammit, no."
The newcomer walked over to us, very slowly and deliberately. The doubles fell into position to his sides and behind him, and I couldn't help but think they looked like toys---two matched sets of Bodyguard Barbie and Bodyguard Ken. The pale man paused beside one of the gargoyles and plucked a stem and a rose from one of the plants there. Then he approached again, in no hurry whatsoever, plucking off leaves and thorns from the flower one by one.
When he was about four feet away he stopped, finally looking up from the rose. "Ah, dearest Lara," he murmured. His voice was deep, quiet, and as smooth as warm honey. "What a pleasant surprise to find you here."
Lara's expression slipped into a neutral mask, veiling the anxiety I could feel in the tension of her body. She inclined her head in a courtly nod, and left her eyes on the sidewalk.
The man smiled. His eyes swept over the rest of us meanwhile, distant and alien. "Have you been well?"
"Yes, my Lord."
His lips pursed into a pout. "This is hardly a formal occasion, little Lara. I've missed you."
Lara sighed. She met my eyes for a second, her expression one of warning. Then she turned to step closer to the man. She kissed his cheek without lifting her eyes and whispered, "And I you, Father."
Oh, crap.
Lord Raith looked Lara up and down. "That's . . . quite a novel ensemble you're wearing."
"It's been a busy night."
Raith nodded and went to Inari, gently touching her shoulder, peering at her arm in the makeshift sling. "What happened to you, daughter mine?"
Inari lifted eyes dull with pain and fatigue and said, "We were mugged. Or something. I think it must have been a gang. That makes sense, doesn't it?"
Raith didn't hesitate a beat. "Of course it does, dearest." He fixed his eyes on Lara and said, "How could you let something like this happen to your baby sister?"
"Forgive me, Father," Lara said.
Raith waved a generous hand. "She needs medical attention, Lara. I believe hospitals provide such a thing."
"Bruce is here," Lara said. "I'm sure he can take care of it."
"Which is Bruce?"
I would have expected her tone to hold annoyance, but if so I didn't hear it. "The doctor."
"He came with you from California? How fortuitous."
I couldn't take it anymore. "Hey, people. Chat time is over. The girl's about to pass out on her feet. Thomas is dying. So both of you shut your mouth and help them."
Raith whipped his head around to stare daggers at me. His voice was cold enough to merit the use of a Kelvin scale. "I do not respond well to demands."
I ground my teeth and said, "Both of you shut your mouth and help them. Please."
And they say I can't be diplomatic.
Raith flicked an irritated hand at the bookend brigade. Bodyguard Kens and Barbies drew their guns in precise unison and raised them to shoot.
"No!" Lara said. She stepped in front of me and Thomas. "You can't."
"Can't?" Raith said. His voice was dangerously mild.
"They might hit Thomas."
"I am confident in their marksmanship. They will not hit him," Raith said, in a tone that suggested he wouldn't lose any sleep if they did.
"I've invited him," Lara said.
Raith stared at her for a moment, and then in that same soft voice asked, "Why?"
"Because we declared a twenty-four-hour truce while he assisted us," Lara answered. "If not for his help, we might all be dead."
Raith's head tilted to one side. He regarded me for a long moment, and then smiled. He didn't have Thomas beat when it came to smiles. Thomas's grin had so much life to it that it was practically sentient. Lord Raith's smile made me think of sharks and skulls. "I suppose it would be churlish to ignore my debt to you, young man. I will honor the truce and respect my daughter's invitation and hospitality. Thank you for your assistance."
"Whatever," I said. "Would you both shut your mouths and help them now. Pretty please. With sugar on top."
"I used to admire that kind of monolithic determination." Raith waved his hand again, though his eyes looked no less cold. The thugs put their guns away. One man and one woman went to Inari, supporting her and helping her into the house. "Lara, bring your physician to her quarters, if you would. Assuming he has mind enough left to treat her."
She bowed her head again, and something told me she resented doing it.
"I'll expect you and Thomas in my chambers at dawn so that we can discuss what happened. Oh, and if you would, Wizard Dresden---"
The King of the White Court knew me on sight. This just kept getting better and better.
"---Lara can show you where Thomas's chambers are. That girl of his is there, I think." Lord Raith drifted into the house, paced by his retainers.
By my count, there were still two whole goons available for Thomas toting, but I grunted like a big tough guy and set out to do it myself. We started walking into the house. "Nice guy," I commented to Lara. I was a little short of breath. "And I was all worried about meeting him."
"I know," Lara murmured. "He was really quite pleasant."
"Except for the eyes," I said.
She glanced at me again, something like approval in her features. "You saw that."
"That's what I do."
She nodded. "Then please believe me when I say that deception is what we do, wizard. My father does not like you. I suspect he wishes to kill you."
"I get that a lot."
She smiled at me, and I got hit with another surge of lust---maybe one that wasn't entirely inspired by her come-hither mojo. She was a smart, tough lady, and had plenty of courage. I had to respect that. And she was gliding along beside me dressed in skimpy black lingerie. Admittedly, the blood and ichor detracted from the overall look, but it gave me a good excuse to see the rest of her while making my assessment.
We went up a shallow, curving stairwell and down a long hall. I tried to stick mental landmarks into my memory so that I'd be able to leave in a hurry if I needed to. My vision blurred for a moment, and the high-pitched buzzing in my ears increased in volume. I took a breath and steadied myself against the wall.
"Here," Lara said. She turned to me and took Thomas. Either she was stronger than me or she was good at acting like it was no big deal. Probably both.
I rolled my aching shoulders in relief. "Thanks. How is he?"
"The bullets aren't going to kill him," she said. "He'd have died already. The Hunger may finish him, though."
I arched an eyebrow at her in question.
"The Hunger," she repeated. "Our need to feed. The angel of our darker natures. We can draw upon it to give us a kind of strength, but it's like fire. It can turn on you if you don't keep it under control. Right now Thomas is so hungry that he can't think. Can't move. He'll be all right once he feeds."
I felt an itch on the back of my neck and checked over my shoulder. "Your father's driver is tailing us."
Lara nodded. "She'll dispose of the body."
I blinked. "I thought you said he was going to be all right."
"He will be," Lara said, her tone carefully neutral. "Justine won't."
"What?"
"He's too hungry," Lara said. "He won't be able to control himself."
"Fuck that," I said. "That isn't going to happen."
"Then he'll die," Lara said tiredly. "This is the door to his suite."
She stopped at a door, and with my reflexes on automatic pilot I opened it for her. We went into a rather large room dominated by a sunken pit in the floor. The carpet was lush, a dark crimson, pillows were all over, and a smoking brazier rested in the center of the pit. The air was heavy with sweet incense. Quiet jazz drifted through the room from speakers I couldn't see.
On the opposite side of the room, a curtain twitched and then the girl appeared from what was evidently a room beyond. Justine's shoulder-length dark hair had been striped with trendy strands of dark blue and deep purple. She wore a white bathrobe several sizes too large for her and looked rumpled from sleep. She blinked dark, sleepy eyes and then gasped and rushed toward us. "Thomas? My God!"
I looked back over my shoulder. The driver stood just outside the doorway, speaking quietly into a cellular phone.
Lara carried Thomas down into the pit and carefully laid him upon the pillows and cushions, Justine at her side. The girl's face was twisted in anxiety. "Harry? What happened to him?"
Lara glanced up and me and said, "I need to make sure Inari is cared for. If you will excuse me." I didn't, but she left the room anyway.
Justine stared up at me, fear and confusion on her face. "I don't understand."
"Lara shot him," I said quietly. "And then some Black Court gorillas jumped us."
"Lara?"
"Didn't seem like she liked the idea, but she sure as hell gave it a whirl. Lara said he'd spent his reserves fighting, and that he would die if he didn't feed."
Justine's eyes flicked up to the doorway. She saw the driver standing outside. Justine's face blanched.
"Oh," she whispered.
Tears formed in her eyes.
"Oh, no. No, no," she said. "My poor Thomas."
I stepped forward. "You don't have to do this."
"But he'll die."
"Do you think he'd want it to be you instead?"
Her lips trembled and she closed her eyes for a moment. "I don't know. I've seen him. I know there's a part of him that wants to."
"And there's another part that doesn't," I said. "That would want you to be alive and happy."
She settled on her knees beside Thomas, staring down at him. She put her fingers on his cheek, and he moved for the first time since the fight with One-ear. He turned his head and placed a soft kiss on Justine's hand.
The girl shivered. "He might not take too much. He tries so hard not to take too much. Not to hurt me. He might stop himself."
"Do you really believe that?"
She was silent for a long moment, and then said, "It doesn't matter. I can't stand by and let him die when I can help him."
"Why not?"
She looked up at me, her eyes steady. "I love him."
"You're addicted to him," I said.
"That too," she agreed. "But it doesn't change anything. I love him."
"Even if it kills you?" I asked.
She bowed her head, gently stroking Thomas's cheek. "Of course."
I started to refute her, but just then the rush of energy from the silver belt buckle petered out. I started trembling violently. The pain of my injuries rushed back over me. Fatigue settled onto me like a backpack full of lead. My thoughts turned to exhausted sludge.
I vaguely remember Justine cajoling me to my feet and guiding me back through one of the curtains to a lavish bedroom. She helped me onto the bed and said, "You'll tell him for me, won't you?" She was crying through a small smile. "You'll tell him what I said? That I love him?"
The room was spinning, but I promised her that I would.
She kissed my forehead and gave me a sad smile. "Thank you, Harry. You've always helped us."
My vision narrowed to a grey tunnel. I tried to get back up again, but I could barely manage to turn my head.
So all I could do was watch Justine slide out of the bathrobe and leave the room to go to Thomas.
And to her death.
Sometimes you wake up and there's a little voice inside your head that tells you that today is a special day. For a lot of kids, it sometimes happens on their birthdays and always on Christmas morning. I remember exactly one of those Christmases, when I was little and my dad was still alive. I felt it again eight or nine years later, the morning that Justin DuMorne came to pick me up from the orphanage. I felt it one more time, the morning Justin brought Elaine home from whatever orphanage she had been in.
And now the little voice was telling me to wake up. That it was a special day.
My little voice is some kind of psycho.
I opened my eyes and found myself on a bed the size of a small aircraft carrier. There was light coming into the room from beneath a curtain, but it wasn't enough to see more than vague outlines. I ached from almost a dozen minor cuts and abrasions. My throat burned with thirst, and my belly with hunger. My clothes were spattered in blood (and worse), my face was rough with the shadow of a beard, my hair was so mussed that it was approaching trendy, and I can't even imagine what I would have smelled like to anyone walking in. I needed a shower.
I slipped out into the entrance room, around the passion pit and its pillows. There wasn't a corpse lying in the pit or anything, but then that's what the driver had been for. The pale light of predawn colored the sky deep blue through a nearby window. I'd been down for only a few hours. Time to get into the car and get gone.
I opened the door to leave Thomas's chambers, but it was locked. I checked, but it was using at least a pair of key-only padlocks and maybe some kind of emergency bolt as well. There was no way I could open it.
"Fine. We do this Hulk style." I took a few steps back, focused on the wall I thought closest to the outside, and began to draw in my will. I took it slow, concentrating, so that I would have the best chance of keeping the spell under control. "Mister McGee, don't make me angry," I muttered at the wall. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
I was about to huff and puff and blow the wall down when the door rattled, clicked, and opened. Thomas entered, looking as he always did, though this time he wore khakis and a white cotton turtleneck. He had a long coat of brown leather draped over his shoulders, and a gym bag in his hand. He froze when he saw me. His expression showed something I didn't think I'd ever seen in him before---shame. He looked down, avoiding my eyes.
"Harry," he said quietly. "Sorry about the door. Had to make sure you got left alone until you woke up."
I didn't say anything. But I remembered my last sight of Justine. Fury, pure and simple, flooded through me.
"I brought you some clothes, some towels." Thomas tossed the gym bag underhand. It landed on my foot. "There's a guest room two doors down on your left. You can use the shower in there."
"How's Justine?" I asked. My voice was flat and hard.
He stood there without lifting his eyes.
I felt my hands clench into angry fists. I realized that I was barely a breath away from attacking Thomas with my bare hands. "That's what I thought," I said. I walked past him to the door. "I'll clean up at home."
"Harry."
I stopped. His voice was raw with emotion, and sounded like he was trying to speak through a throat full of bitter mud. "I wanted you to know. Justine . . . I tried to stop in time. I didn't want to hurt her. Never."
"Yeah," I said. "You had good intentions. That makes it all right."
He folded his arms over his stomach, as if nauseous, and bowed his head. His long hair veiled his face. "I never pretended I wasn't . . . a predator, Harry. I never claimed she was anything but what she was. Food. You knew it. She knew it. I didn't lie to anyone."
I had a bunch of vicious answers I could have used, but I went with, "Before she went to you last night, Justine asked me to tell you that she loved you."
Short of shoving a running chain saw into Thomas's guts, I don't think I could have hurt him any more. He didn't look up when I spoke, and he started trembling with rapid breaths. "Don't go yet. I need to talk to you. Please. There are things happening that---"
I started walking out, and heard myself put every bit of caustic contempt I could into the words: "Make an appointment at my office."
He took a step after me. "Dresden, Mavra knows about this house. For your own sake, at least wait for sunrise."
He had a point. Dammit. Sunrise would send the Black Court back to their hidey holes, and if they had any mortal accomplices, it would at least mean that I would only be up against run of the mill weapons and tactics. Arturo probably wouldn't be awake at the moment, and Murphy would just now be getting dressed and heading for the gym. Bob would stay out until the last minute he possibly could, so I'd have to wait for sunrise to talk to him anyway. I had a little time to kill.
"All right," I said.
"Do you mind if tell you a few things?"
"Yes," I said. "I mind."
His voice broke. "Dammit, do you think I wanted this?"
"I think you hurt and used someone who loved you. A woman. As far as I'm concerned, you don't exist. You look like a person, but you aren't. I should have remembered that from the beginning."
"Harry---"
Anger flared up in me like a wall of red flame behind my eyes. I shot a look at Thomas over my shoulder that made him flinch. "Be satisfied with nonexistence, Thomas," I said. "You're lucky you have it. It's the only thing keeping you alive."
I slammed the door behind me as I left his chambers. I slammed open the door to the guest room he'd mentioned. And then slammed it behind me, which was starting to seem a little childish, even through a haze of bitter anger. I tried to take deep breaths and got the shower going.
Hot water. Ye gods. There are no words to describe how good a hot shower feels after several years of living with no water heater of your own. I broiled myself for a while, and found soap, shampoo, shaving cream, and a razor waiting on a shelf inside the shower. I availed myself of them and began to calm down. I figured that once I got some coffee I might be almost stable again.
I guess if Lord Raith could afford a house that size, he could afford a water heater to match it, because I ran the shower as hot as I could stand for almost half an hour and it never got cold. When I got out, the bathroom mirror was steamed up and the air was thick and wet enough to suffocate me. I slapped my towel over all the wet bits, tied it to my waist, and left the bathroom for the guest bedroom. The air was cooler and drier and it made it a pleasure to simply inhale.
I opened the sports bag Thomas had thrown me. It held a pair of blue jeans that looked more or less my size and a pair of plain grey athletic socks. Then I found what I thought at first was a circus tent, but it turned out to be an enormous Hawaiian shirt with lots of blue and orange in its flowered pattern.
I looked at the thing skeptically while I put on the jeans. They fit pretty well. Thomas hadn't included any clean underwear, which was likely just as well. I'd rather go commando than wear undies that may have outlived their previous owner. I zipped up the jeans with considerable caution. A nearby dresser had a mirror on it, and I went to it to comb my hair while working up the nerve to put on the shirt.
Inari's image stood in the mirror, staring at my back. My heart flew up into my throat, then past it into my brain and out the top of my skull. "Holy crap!" I sputtered.
I turned to face her. She was wearing a cute little pink sleep shirt with prints of Winnie the Pooh all over it. The shirt would have fallen to midthigh on a shorter or younger girl, but on Inari it barely managed to escape indecency. Her right arm was wrapped to the elbow in a black plaster cast. Her left was cradled against her body, and she held the notch-eared puppy in it. He looked restless and unhappy.
"Hello," Inari said. Her voice was very soft and her eyes were distant and unfocused. Alarm bells started going off in my head. "Your pet got out into the manor last night," she went on. "Father asked me to find him and bring him back to you."
"Oh," I said. "Uh. Thank you, I guess. Don't let me keep you waiting. Just put him on the bed."
Instead of doing so, she stared at me---specifically, at my chest. "You have more muscle than I would have thought. And scars." Her eyes flicked down to the puppy. When she looked back at me, they had turned a pale shade of grey, and over the next several seconds that color gained a metallic sheen. "I came to thank you. You saved my life last night."
"Welcome," I said. "Puppy on the bed, please?"
She slid forward and lowered the little dog to the bed. He looked tired, but he started a quiet little warning growl, his eyes on Inari. After she put the dog down, she kept taking slow, sinuous steps toward me. "I don't know what it is about you. You're fascinating. I've been wanting the chance to speak with you all night."
I did my best not to notice the almost serpentine grace of her movements. If I noticed them too hard, I'd start ignoring everything else.
"I've never felt this before," Inari continued, almost to herself. Her eyes stayed locked on my bare chest. "About anyone."
She got close enough that I could smell her perfume, a scent that made my knees wobble for a second. Her eyes had become a shade of brightest silver, inhumanly intense, and I shivered as a spasm of raw physical need shot through me---different from when Lara had hit me with the come-hither, but just as potent. I had a flash image of pressing Inari down onto the bed and tearing the sweet little nightshirt off of her, and I closed my eyes to shove it away.
It must have taken longer than it seemed, because the next thing I knew, Inari pressed herself to me. She shivered and ran her tongue over my collarbone. I nearly jumped out of my borrowed jeans. I blinked my eyes open, lifted a hand, and opened my mouth to protest, but Inari pressed her mouth to mine and guided my hand down to brush against something naked and smooth and delicious. There was a panicked second in which some part of me realized that my caution hadn't been enough---that I'd been compromised and taken. But that part quickly shut up, because Inari's mouth on mine was the sweetest thing I'd ever tasted. The puppy continued growling his little warning, but it didn't matter, either.
We'd gotten to some seriously heavy breathing when Inari tore her lips from my mouth, panting, her mouth swollen with the heated kisses. Her eyes flashed pure and empty white, and her skin began to grow luminous and pearlescent. I tried to fumble some words out of my mouth, to tell her to stop. They didn't get past my tingling lips. She hooked one long leg behind one of mine and pressed in with a sudden and inhuman strength to slather a line of licking, wet kisses across my throat. Cold started spreading through me---delicious, sweet cold that stole warmth and strength even as the pleasure began.
And then the damnedest thing happened.
Inari let out a panicked shriek and staggered back from me. She fell to the floor on the other side of the guest room, gasping. She lifted her head a moment later to look at me, her eyes hazed with confusion and their original color again.
Her mouth had been burned. I saw blisters rising around her lips. "What?" she stammered. "What happened? Harry? What are you doing here?"
"Leaving," I said. I still felt short of breath, as if I'd been sprinting rather than doing energetic kissing. I turned from her, stuffed the dirty clothes in my pack, and pulled my duster on. I plopped the puppy down in his usual pocket and said, "I've got to get out of here."
Just then Thomas slammed the door open, his eyes wild. He looked from Inari to me and back, and exhaled, evidently trying to relax. "Thank God. Are you both all right?"
"My mouth," Inari said, her tone still sleepy and bewildered. "It hurts. Thomas? What happened to me?" She started hyperventilating. "What's happening? Those things last night, and you were hurt, and your eyes were white, Thomas. I . . . what . . . ?"
Ow. It was painful to watch her. I'd seen people who had suddenly been shocked out of their innocence to the existence of the supernatural before, but it had rarely been something this sudden and terrifying. I mean, my God. The girl's family wasn't what she thought they were. They were also a part of this nightmarish new reality, and they had done nothing to prepare her for it.
"Inari," Thomas said gently. "You need to rest. You've barely slept and your arm needs time to heal. You should get to bed."
"How can I?" she said. Her voice started shaking and cracking, as if she were weeping, but no tears fell. "How can I? I don't know who you are. I don't know who I am. I've never felt anything like that. What's happening to me?"
Thomas sighed and kissed her forehead. "We'll talk, soon. All right? I'll give you some answers. But first you have to rest."
She leaned against him and closed her eyes. "I felt so empty, Thomas. And my mouth hurts."
He picked her up like a child and said, "Shhhh. We'll take care of it. You can sleep in my room for now. All right?"
"All right," she said. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against his shoulder.
Still damp from the shower, I grew cold enough to bite the bullet, take off my duster, and put on the Hawaiian shirt. The duster went on over it, which went a long way toward neutralizing the shirt's presence. I packed up everything to go and headed for the door. Thomas was just leaving his room again, locking it up behind him.
I stared at his profile. He cared for Inari. That much was obvious. And whether he wanted to admit it or not, he had cared for Justine as well. I felt cold, bitter anger run through me when I thought of Justine, who had risked her life for him on at least one other occasion. Who had given up her life for him last night. The sheer, vicious passion of my anger surprised me. And then I had another intuition.
He hadn't meant it to happen. Thomas may have hurt or killed the woman he loved, but the anger I felt wasn't solely a reaction to what he'd done. I was standing on the outside this time, but I'd seen this situation before, when the Red Court had destroyed Susan's life. I would never have wished harm on Susan, not in a thousand years, but the fact remained that if she hadn't been going out with me, she probably would still be in Chicago, writing her column for the Midwest Arcane. And she would still be human.
That's why I felt such anger and shame when I looked at Thomas. I was staring into a mirror, and I didn't like what I saw there.
I'd all but destroyed myself in the wake of Susan's transformation. For all I knew, right now Thomas was worse off than I'd been. At least I'd saved Susan's life. I'd lost her as a lover, but she was still a vital, strong-willed woman determined to forge a life for herself---just not with me. Thomas would not have even that much consolation. He'd been the one to pull the trigger, so to speak, and his remorse was tearing him apart.
I shouldn't have tried to hurt him more. I shouldn't have started chucking stones from within my own glass domicile.
"She knew what she was doing," I said into the silence. "She knew the risk. She wanted to help you."
Thomas's mouth twisted into a bitter smile. "Yeah."
"It wasn't your decision at that point, Thomas."
"I was the only one there. If it wasn't my call then whose was it?"
"Your dad and Lara knew Justine was important to you?"
He nodded.
"They set her up," I said. "They could have handed you anyone. But they knew Justine was here. Your father gave Lara specific instructions to take you to your room. And from what Lara said on the way here in the car, she knew what he was going to do."
Thomas lifted his eyes. He stared at his door for a moment and then said, "I see." He clenched a hand into a fist. "But it hardly matters now."
I couldn't refute that. "What I said was out of line."
He shook his head. "No. You were right."
"Right isn't the same thing as cruel. I'm sorry."
Thomas shrugged and we said nothing more on the matter.
"I've got places to go," I said, heading down the hall. "If you want to talk, walk me out."
"Not that way," Thomas said quietly. He stared at me for a minute and then nodded, some of the tension leaving him. "Come on. I'll take you around the guards and monitors. If my father sees you leaving, he might try to kill you again."
I turned around and fell into step beside Thomas. The puppy whimpered and I scratched him behind the ears. "What do you mean, again?"
He spoke quietly, his eyes flat. "Inari. He sent her to you when he saw that you left my chambers."
"If he wanted me dead, why didn't he just come and do it?"
"It isn't how the White Court fights, Harry. We use misdirection, seduction, manipulation. We use others as instruments."
"So your dad used Inari."
Thomas nodded. "He intended her to have you as her first."
"Um. First what?"
"First lover," Thomas said. "First kill."
I swallowed. "I don't think she knew what she was doing," I said.
"She didn't. In my family, we start off life like any other kid. Just . . . people. No Hunger. No feeding. No vampire stuff at all."
"I didn't know that."
"Not many do. But it comes on you eventually, and she's about the right age. The panic and the trauma must have acted like a catalyst on her Hunger." He stopped by a panel in the wall and nudged it with his hip. It slid open, revealing a dim corridor between interior walls. He went down it. "Between that, the painkillers, and the exhaustion, she didn't know what was going on."
"Let me guess," I said. "The first feeding is lethal."
"Always," Thomas said.
"But she's young and could be forgiven a loss of control under the circumstances. So I end up dead and it's a believable accident. Raith is clear of any blame."
"Yeah."
"Why the hell hasn't anyone told her, Thomas? What she is? What the world is really like?"
"We're not allowed," Thomas said quietly. "We have to keep it from her. It's my father's standard procedure. I didn't know when I was her age, either."
"That's insane," I said.
Thomas shrugged. "He'd kill us if we disobeyed."
"What happened to her mouth? I mean, uh, I wasn't exactly feeling observant when it happened. I'm not sure what I saw."
Thomas frowned. We left the concealed passage for a dimly lit room halfway between a den and a library, thick with books and comfortable leather chairs and the scent of pipe smoke. "I don't want to get too personal," Thomas said. "But who was the last person you were with?"
"Uh, you. During this walk."
He rolled his eyes. "Not like that. In the biblical sense."
"Oh." The question made me feel uncomfortable, but I said, "Susan."
"Ah," Thomas said. "No wonder."
"No wonder what?"
Thomas stopped. His eyes were haunted, but he was clearly making an effort to focus on the answer. "Look. When we feed . . . we mingle our lives with the prey. Blend them together. Transform a portion of their life into ours and then pull it away with us. Got it?"
"Okay."
"It isn't all that different between human beings," he said. "Sex is more than just sensation. It's a union of the energy of two lives. And it's explosive. It's the process for creating life. For creating a new soul. Think about that. Power doesn't get more dangerous and volatile than that."
I nodded, frowning.
"Love is another kind of power, which shouldn't surprise you. Magic comes from emotions, among other things. And when two people are together, in that intimacy, when they really, selflessly love each other it changes them both. It lingers on in the energy of their lives, even when they are apart."
"And?"
"And it's deadly to us. We can inspire lust, but it's just a shadow. An illusion. Love is a dangerous force." He shook his head. "Love killed the dinosaurs, man."
"I'm pretty sure a meteor killed the dinosaurs, Thomas."
He shrugged. "There's a theory making the rounds now that when the meteor hit it only killed off the big stuff. That there were plenty of smaller reptiles running around, about the same size as all the mammals at the time. The reptiles should have regained their position eventually, but they didn't, because the mammals could feel love. They could be utterly, even irrationally devoted to their mates and their offspring. It made them more likely to survive. The lizards couldn't do that. The meteor hit gave the mammals their shot, but it was love that turned the tide."
"What the hell does that have to do with Inari getting burned?"
"Aren't you listening? Love is a primal energy, Harry. To actually touch that kind of power hurts us. It burns. We can't take any energy that's been touched by love. It dampens our ability to cause lust, as well. Even the trappings of love between two people can be dangerous. Lara's got a circular scar on the palm of her left hand where she picked up the wrong wedding ring. My cousin Madeline picked up a rose that had been a gift between lovers, and the thorns poisoned her so badly she was in bed for a week.
"The last time you were with anyone, it was with Susan. You love each other. Her touch, her love is still upon you, and still protecting you."
"If that's true, then why I am still adjusting my pants every time Lara walks by?"
Thomas shrugged. "You're human. She's lovely and you haven't gotten any in a while. But trust me, Harry. None of the White Court could wholly control or feed from you now."
I frowned. "But it was a year ago."
Thomas shrugged. "If there hasn't been anyone else, then it's still the strongest touch of another life on your own."
"How are you defining love?"
"It isn't a simple formula, Harry. I'm not sure. I recognize it when I see it."
"So what's love look like?"
"You can have everything in the world, but if you don't have love, none of it means crap," he said promptly. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love."
"And the greatest of these is love," I finished. "That's from the Bible."
"First Corinthians, chapter thirteen," Thomas confirmed. "I paraphrased. Father makes all of us memorize that passage. Like when parents put those green yucky-face stickers on the poisonous cleaning products under the kitchen sink."
It made sense, I guess. "What do you want to talk to me about?"
Thomas opened a door on the far side of the library and slipped into a long, quiet room. He flipped on the lights. There was thick grey carpeting on the ground. The walls were grey as well, and track lighting overhead splashed warm light over a row of portraits hung across three walls of the room. "You're actually here. I mean, I never thought you would be in one of our homes---even this one, near Chicago. And I need you to see something," he said quietly.
I followed him in. "What?"
"Portraits," Thomas said. "Father always paints a portrait of the women who bear him children. Look at them."
"What am I looking for?"
"Just look."
I frowned at him but started on the left wall. Raith was no slouch as a painter. The first portrait was of a tall woman with Mediterranean coloring, dressed in clothes that suggested she had lived in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. A golden plate at the base of the portrait read, EMILIA ALEXANDRIA SALAZAR. I followed the paintings around the room. For someone who was supposedly feeding on people through sex, Raith had done comparatively little begetting. I was just guessing, but it didn't look like any two portraits happened within twenty or thirty years of each other. The costumes progressed through the history of fashion, steadily growing closer to the present day.
The next-to-last portrait was of a woman with dark hair, dark eyes, and sharp features. She wasn't precisely pretty, but she was definitely attractive in a striking, intriguing sense. She sat on a stone bench wearing a long, dark skirt and a deep crimson cotton blouse. Her head had an arrogant tilt to it, her mouth held a self-amused smile, and her arms rested on the back of the bench on either side of her, casually claiming the entire space as her own.
My heart started pounding. Hard. Stars went over my vision. I struggled to focus on the golden nameplate beneath the portrait.
It read, MARGARET GWENDOLYN LEFAY.
I recognized her. I had only one picture to remember her by, but I recognized her.
"My mother," I whispered.
Thomas shook his head. He slipped a few fingers under the turtleneck and drew out a silver chain. He passed it to me, and I saw that the chain held a silver pentacle much like my own.
In fact, precisely like my own.
"Not yours, Harry," Thomas said, his voice quiet and serious.
I stared at him.
"Our mother," he said.
I stared at him hard, my heart lurching with shock, and my view narrowed down to a grey tunnel centered on Thomas. Silence filled the room.
"You're lying," I said.
"I'm not."
"You must be."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because that's what you do, Thomas. You lie. You use people and you lie."
"I'm not lying this time."
"Yeah, you are. And I don't have time to put up with this crap." I started for the door.
Thomas got in my way. "You can't ignore this, Harry."
"Move."
"But we---"
My vision went red with rage and I hit him in the face for the second time in six hours. He fell to the floor, twisted his hips, and swept my legs out from under me. I hit the ground, and Thomas piled onto me, going for an armlock. I got a leg underneath me and sank my teeth into his arm as he tried to get it around my neck. I pushed up and slammed him against a wall with my body, and we both staggered apart. Thomas got to his feet, scowling at his arm where I bit him. I leaned against the wall, panting.
"It's the truth," he said. He wasn't as winded as I was from the brief scuffle. "I swear it."
A half-hysterical chuckle slipped out of my mouth. "Wait, I've seen this one before. This is where you say, 'Search your feelings; you know it to be true." '
Thomas shrugged. "You wanted to know why I'd been helping you. Why I risked myself for you. Now you know why."
"I don't believe you."
"Heh," Thomas said. "I told you that, too."
I shook my head. "You said it yourself: You use people. I think you're playing me against your father somehow."
"It might work out that way," he said. "But that's not why I asked you to help Arturo."
"Why then?"
"Because he's a decent man who doesn't deserve to get killed, and there's no way I could have done it on my own."
I thought that over for a moment and then said, "But that's not all of it."
"What do you mean?"
"Inari. You went nuts when that vamp was on her. Where does she fit in?"
Thomas leaned up against the wall beside my mother's portrait. He pushed his hair back from his face with one hand. "She hasn't been taken by her Hunger yet," he said. "Once she starts feeding it there's no going back. She'll be like the rest of us. My father is pushing her toward that point. I want to stop him."
"Why?"
"Because if . . . if she's in love, that first time, it could kill her Hunger. She'd be free. I think she's mature enough to be capable of that love now. There's a young man she's all twitterpated about."
"Bobby?" I blurted. "The macho violent kid?"
"Give him a break. How insecure would you be if you were planning on spending the day having sex on camera in front of the girl you'd like to ask to dinner?"
"This might shock you, but I've never really considered that question before."
Thomas pressed his lips together for a moment and then said, "If the kid loves her in return, then she could have a life. She could be free of the kinds of things that---" His voice broke. He had to cough before he continued. "Things like what happened to Justine. Like what my father has done to my other sisters."
"What do you mean, done to them?"
"He establishes that he is their superior. He overpowers them. Pits his Hunger against theirs."
My stomach twisted. "You mean he feeds on his own . . ." I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Do you need me to paint you a picture? It's the traditional way to settle family differences in all the Houses of the White Court."
I shuddered and looked up at my mother's portrait. "God. That's hideous."
Thomas nodded, his expression bleak and hard. "Lara is one of the most capable, intelligent people I've ever met. But around him, she turns into an obedient dog. He's broken her to his will. Forced her to crave what he does to her. I won't let that happen to Inari. Not when she could make her own life."
I frowned. "Won't that bring your dad down on you? Force him to try to make you like them?"
Thomas grimaced. "His tastes don't run that way."
"Small mercy, I guess."
"Not really. He doesn't want to keep me around. It's just a matter of time before he comes after me. His sons, every last one of them, died under suspicious circumstances that can't be traced back to him. I'm the first male to live as long as I have. Partly thanks to you." He closed his eyes. "And partly thanks to Justine."
"Hell's bells," I said quietly. The whole thing was almost ridiculous. "So let me get this straight. You want me to help save the girl, overthrow the dark lord, and defend the innocents terrorized by dark magic," I said. "And you want me to do it because you're my long-lost half brother, who needs someone noble to stand beside him in desperate battle for what's right."
He grimaced. "That phrasing has way more melodrama in it than I would have used."
"You've got to be kidding me. That's a really lame con."
"Give me some credit, Dresden." He sighed. "I know how to con. If you were really just another mark, I'd have come up with a better story."
"Forget it," I said. "If you'd been straight with me to begin with maybe I'd help. But this bullshit about my mother is over the line."
"She's my mother too," he said. "Harry, you knew she wasn't exactly white as the driven snow. I know you've learned a little over the years. She was one hell of a dangerous witch, and she kept some bad company. Some of it was with my father."
"You're lying," I growled. "What proof have you got?"
"Would anything satisfy you?" he demanded. "Proof is something you use with rational people, and right now you aren't."
The anger started fading a little. I hadn't gotten much rest, and was too tired to keep it up. I ached. I slid down the wall until I was sitting. I rubbed at my eyes. "It doesn't make any sense. What would she have been doing hanging around with your father?"
"God knows," Thomas said. "All I know is that there was some sort of business between them. It developed into something else. Father was trying to snare her permanently, but she wound up being too strong for him to completely enthrall. She escaped him when I was about five. From what I've been able to learn, she met your father the next year when she was on the run."
"Running from who?"
He shrugged. "Maybe my father. Maybe some people in the Courts or on the Council. I don't know. She'd gotten into some bad business and she wanted out. Whoever she was in it with didn't want her gone. They wanted her dead." He spread his hands, palm up. "That's almost everything I know, Harry. I tried to learn all I could about her. But no one would talk to me."
My eyelids felt gummy. My chest hurt. I looked up at the portrait of my mother. She was a woman of evident vitality, life flowing from her and around her, even in the painting. But I'd never gotten the chance to know her. She died in the delivery room.
Damn it all, what if Thomas was playing it straight with me? It would mean that I knew a little more about why the White Council all watched me like I was Lucifer, the Next Generation. It would mean being forced to accept that my mother was involved in bad business. Scary, big, bad business of one kind or another.
And it would mean that maybe I wasn't entirely alone in this world. There might be family for me. Blood of my blood.
The thought made my chest hurt worse. As a child, I'd fantasized for hours at a time about having a family. Brothers and sisters, parents who cared, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles---just like everyone else. A group of people who would stick together through everything, because that's what families do. Someone who would accept me, welcome me, maybe even be proud of me and desire my company.
I never celebrated Christmas as a kid, after my dad died. It hurt too much. Hell, it still hurt too much.
But if I had a real family, then maybe things could change.
I looked up. Thomas's face had always been difficult to read, but I saw another mirror of myself there. He was having some of the same thoughts as me. I wondered if he'd been lonely, like I had. Maybe he'd daydreamed about a family who wouldn't be trying to manipulate him, control him, or simply kill him.
But I stopped myself before I could follow that line of thought. Things were just too dangerous, and this issue too sensitive. I wanted, on some level, to believe Thomas. I wanted to believe him very much.
Which was why I couldn't afford to take any chances.
After a long moment, he said, "I'm not lying to you."
My voice came out soft, quiet, and calm. "Then prove it."
"How?" he asked. He sounded tired. "How the hell am I supposed to prove it to you?"
"Look at me."
He froze, his eyes still on the floor. "I don't . . . I don't think that would accomplish anything, Harry."
"Okay," I said. I started to rise. "Which way is my car?"
He lifted a hand. "Wait. All right," he said. He grimaced. "I was hoping to avoid this. I don't know what you're going to see if you look in there. I don't know if you'll still feel the same way about me."
"Ditto," I said. "We'd better sit down."
"How long will it take?" he asked.
"Seconds," I said. "Feels longer."
He nodded. We sat down about two feet from each other, cross-legged on the floor at the foot of my mother's portrait. Thomas took a deep breath and then lifted his grey eyes to mine.
The eyes are a window to the soul. Literally. Looking someone steadily in the eyes is an uncomfortable, intense experience for anyone. If you don't believe me, pick a stranger sometime, and just go up to them and stare them in the eye until that moment when there's a sudden acknowledgment of lowered barriers, that moment that inspires awkward silences and racing hearts. The eyes reveal a lot about a person. They express emotions and give clues to what thoughts are lurking behind them. One of the first things we all learn to recognize, as infants, are the eyes of whoever is taking care of us. We know from the cradle how important they are.
For wizards like me, that kind of eye contact is even more intense, and even more dangerous. Looking into someone's eyes shows me what they are. I see it in a light of elemental truth so clear and bright that it burns it into my head forever. I see the core of who and what they are during a soulgaze, and they see me in the same way. There's nothing hidden, no possibility of deception. I don't see absolutely every thought or memory that passes through their head---but I do get to see the naked, emotional heart of who and what they are. It isn't a precise research technique, but it would tell me if Thomas was playing it straight.
I met Thomas's grey eyes with my own dark gaze and the barriers between us fell.
I found myself standing in a stark chamber that looked like an abstract of Mount Olympus after its gods died. Everything was made of cold, beautiful marble, alternating between utter darkness and snowy light. The floor was laid out like a chessboard. Statuary stood here and there, all human figures carved in stone that matched the decor. Particolored marble pillars rose up into dimness overhead. There wasn't a ceiling. There weren't any walls. The light was silver and cold. Wind sighed mournfully through the columns. Thunder rumbled somewhere far away, and my nose filled with the sharp scent of ozone.
At the center of the forlorn ruin stood a mirror the size of a garage door. It was set in a silver frame that seemed to grow from the floor. A young man stood in front of it, one hand reaching out.
I walked a little closer. My steps echoed among the pillars. I drew closer to the young man and peered at him. It was Thomas. Not Thomas as I had seen him with my own eyes, but Thomas nonetheless. This version of him was not deadly-beautiful. His face seemed a little more plain. He looked like he might have been a little nearsighted. His expression was strained with pain, and his shoulders and back were thick with tension.
I looked past the young man into the mirror. There I saw one of those things that I would want to forget. But thanks to the Sight, I wouldn't. Ever.
The reflection room in the mirror looked like the one I stood in at first glance. But looking closer revealed that rather than black and white marble, the place was made from dark, dried blood and sun-bleached bone. A creature stood there at the mirror, directly in front of Thomas. It was humanoid, more or less Thomas's size, and its hide shone with a luminous silver glow. It crouched, hunched and grotesque, though at the same time there was an eerie beauty about the thing. Its shining white eyes burned with silent flame. Its bestial face stared eagerly at Thomas, burning with what seemed to be unsatiated appetite.
The creature's arm also extended to the mirror, and then with a shiver I realized that its limb was reaching a good foot past the mirror's surface. Its gleaming claws were sunk into Thomas's shaking forearm, and drops of dark blood had run from the punctures. Thomas's arm, meanwhile, had sunk into the mirror, and I saw his fingers digging in hard upon the flesh of the creature's forearm. Locked together, I sensed that the two were straining against each other. Thomas was trying to pull himself away from the thing. The creature was trying to drag him into the mirror, there among the dried blood and dead bones.
"He's tired," said a woman's voice.
My mother appeared in the mirror wearing a flowing dress of rich, royal blue. She watched the silent struggle while she drew closer. The portrait had not done her credit. She was a creature of life and vitality, and was more beautiful in motion than she could be in any frozen image. She was a tall woman, nearly six feet, and that was in flat sandals.
My throat tightened. I felt tears on my face. "Are you real?"
"Why should I not be?" she asked.
"You could just be a part of Thomas's mental landscape. No offense."
She smiled. "No, child. It's really me. In some measure, at least. I prepared you both for this day. I laid this working within each of you. A little portion of who and what I am. I wanted you to know who you were to each other."
I drew a shaking breath. "Is he really your son?"
My mother smiled, a sparkle in her dark eyes. "You have a perfectly serviceable sense of intuition, little one. What does it tell you?"
My vision blurred with tears. "That he is."
She nodded. "You must listen to me. I cannot be there to protect you, Harry. The two of you must take care of each other. Your brother will need your help, just as you will need his."
"I don't understand this," I said, gesturing at the mirror. "What do you mean, he's tired?"
My mother nodded at Thomas. "The girl he loved. She's gone. She was his strength. It knows that."
"It?" I asked.
She nodded at the mirror. "The Hunger. His demon."
I followed her nod with my gaze. The image-Thomas snarled something under his breath. The Hunger in the mirror answered in a slow, slithering tongue I did not understand. "Why didn't you help him?"
"I did what I could," my mother said. Her eyes flickered with something dark, an ancient spark of hatred. "I made sure that his father would endure a fitting punishment for what he did to us."
"You and Thomas?"
"And you, Harry. Raith yet lives. But he is weakened. Together you and your brother may have a chance against him. You will understand."
The Hunger hissed more words at Thomas. "What is it saying?" I asked.
"It's telling him to give up. That there's no point in fighting anymore. That it will never leave him in peace."
"Is it true?"
"Perhaps," she said.
"But he's fighting anyway," I said.
"Yes." Her eyes focused on mine, sad and proud. "It may destroy him, but he will not surrender himself to it. He is of my blood." She drifted to the very edge of the mirror and reached out a hand. It emerged from the mirror's surface as if from a motionless pool.
I stepped closer myself, reaching out to touch her hand. Her fingers were soft and warm. She wrapped them around mine, and squeezed. Then she lifted her hand and touched my cheek. "As are you, Harry. So tall, like your father. And I think you have his heart as well."
I couldn't answer her. I just stood there, silently crying.
"I have something for you," she said. "If you are willing."
I opened my eyes. My mother stood before me holding what I thought was a small gem or a jewel between long fingers. It pulsed with a low, gentle light.
"What is it?" I asked her.
"Insight," she said.
"It's knowledge?" I asked.
"And the power that goes with it," she said. She gave me a half smile, touched with irony. It looked familiar. "Think of it as a mother's advice, if you like. It doesn't make up for my absence, child. But it's all that I have to give."
"I accept it," I whispered. Because it was the only thing I could give her in return.
She passed me the gem. There was a flash, a tingling pain in my head, and then a lingering, dull ache. For some reason that didn't surprise me. You don't gain knowledge without a little pain.
She touched my face again and said, "I was so arrogant. I laid too great a burden upon you to bear alone. I hope that one day you will forgive me my mistake. But know that I am proud of what you have become. I love you, child."
"I love you," I whispered.
"Give my love to Thomas," she said. She touched my face again, her smile loving and sad. Tears slid from her eyes as well. "Be well, my son."
Then she drew her arm back into the mirror and the soulgaze was over. I sat on the floor facing Thomas. There were tears on his face. Both of us looked at each other, and then up at my mother's portrait.
After a moment I offered Thomas his pentacle on its chain. He took it and put it on.
"Did you see her?" he asked. His voice was shaking.
"Yeah," I said. The aching, lonely old hurt was overflowing me. But I suddenly found myself laughing. I had seen my mother with my Sight. I had seen her smile, heard her voice, and it was something I could never lose. Something no one could ever take away from me. It couldn't wholly make up for a lifetime of loneliness and silent grief, but it was more than I ever thought I would have.
Thomas met my eyes, and then he started laughing too. The puppy wriggled his way from my duster's pocket and started bounding back and forth and in circles in sheer, joyous excitement. The little nut had no clue at all what we were happy about, but evidently he didn't feel he needed one to join in.
I scooped up the puppy and rose. "I'd never really seen her face," I said. "I'd never heard her voice."
"Maybe she knew you wouldn't have," Thomas replied. "Maybe she did it like that so you could."
"She told me to tell you that she loved you."
He smiled, though it was sad and bitter. "She told me the same thing."
"Well," I said. "This changes things some."
"Does it?" he asked. He looked uncertain as he said it, frail.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm not saying that we're going to start from a fresh slate. But things are different now."
"They aren't for me, Harry," Thomas said. He grimaced. "I mean . . . I knew this already. It's why I tried to help you wherever I could."
"I guess you did," I said quietly. "I thought you were just saving up for a favor. But you weren't. Thank you."
He shrugged. "What are you going to do about Arturo?"
I frowned. "Protect him and his people, of course. If I can. What did Lara mean when she said that Arturo's independent streak was a matter for the White Court?"
"Damned if I know." Thomas sighed. "I thought he was just someone Lara knew from the industry."
"Does your dad have any connection to him?"
"Dad doesn't advertise what he's doing, Harry. And I haven't spoken more than twenty words to him in the last ten years. I don't know."
"Would Lara?"
"Probably. But ever since Lara worked out that I wasn't just a dim-witted ambulatory penis, she's been on her guard when we've talked. I haven't been able to get much out of her. So now I mostly sit there and nod and look wise and make vague remarks. She assumes that I know something she doesn't, and then she thinks the vague remark is actually a cryptic remark. She wouldn't want to move on me until she's figured out what it is I'm hiding from her."
"That's a good tactic if people are paranoid enough."
"In the Raith household? Paranoia comes bottled, on tap and in hot and cold running neuroses."
"What about your dad? He know any magic?"
"Like maybe entropy curses?" Thomas shrugged. "I hear stories about things he's done in the past. Some of them must be close to true. Plus he's got a huge library he keeps locked up most of the time. But even without magic, he can just rip the life out of anyone who pisses him off."
"How?"
"It's like when we feed. It's usually slow, gradual. But he doesn't need that kind of time or intimacy. Just a touch, a kiss, and wham, they're dead. That whole kiss-of-death thing in The Godfather? He was where that phrase originated, only for him it was literal."
"Really?"
"Supposedly. I've never seen him do it myself, but Lara has, plenty of times. Madeline once told me once that he liked to open conversations that way, because it made sure he had the complete attention of everyone still breathing."
"Stories. Supposedly. For someone on the inside, your information isn't real helpful."
"I know," he said. "I'm not thinking clearly right now. I'm sorry."
I shook my head. "Can't throw stones."
"What do we do?" he asked. "I'm . . . I feel lost. I don't know what to do."
"I think I do," I said.
"What?"
Instead of answering him, I offered him my hand.
He took it, and I drew my brother to his feet.
I waited until the predawn gloom had become full, dismal, rainy morning to leave Château Raith. Thomas helped me pull a few things together while I waited, and I borrowed a phone to make some calls.
After that, the puppy and I got back in the Beetle, hit the drive-through at McDonald's, and puttered back home to my apartment. I got out of the car and noticed a couple of blackened spots on the ground. I frowned and looked closer, discovering that they were in a methodical pattern. Someone had been trying to force their way past my wards, the magical protections I'd set up around the boardinghouse. They hadn't broken through them, but the fact that someone or something had tried made me more than a little uncomfortable. I got the shield bracelet ready to go as I went down the stairs, just in case, but nothing frustrated from fruitless attempts to break in was waiting for me. Mister appeared from under my landlady's car and followed me down the stairs.
I got into my apartment fast and shut the door behind me. I muttered a spell that lit half a dozen candles around the room, and braced myself for Mister's greeting. He made his usual attempt to bulldoze my legs out from under me with his shoulders. I put the puppy on the floor, where he panted happily at Mister, wagging his tail by way of friendly greeting. Mister did not look impressed.
I kept moving, trying to stay focused. I didn't think I had any time to waste. I shoved aside the rugs over the stepladder down to the lab, hauled the door open, and slid down into the lab. "Bob," I said. "What'd you find out?"
Mister padded over to the top of the stairs. A cloud of flickering orange lights arose from the cat and flowed down the stepladder to the lab. The lights streamed over to the skull on its shelf, and Bob's eye sockets flickered to life. "It was a long, cold night," he said. "Saw a place where a couple of ghouls set up shop, out by the airport."
"Did you find Mavra?"
"You know, Harry, the Black Court has become awfully cagey about picking a base of operations of late."
"Did you find Mavra?"
"They've had centuries of experience," Bob said. "And Chicago is huge. It's like trying to find a needle in a cliché."
I gave the skull a flat look and said in a flat voice, "Bob, you're the only one in a thousand miles who could have found them. You are an invaluable asset and ally whose knowledge is matched only by your willingness to give of yourself to others. There, ego stroked. Did you find Mavra?"
Bob scowled. "You take all the fun out of getting complimented. Did you know that?" He muttered something under his breath, mainly in Chinese, I think. "Not yet."
"What?" I demanded.
"I've narrowed it down," Bob said.
"How narrow?"
"Uh," the skull said. "It isn't in any of the strip clubs."
"Bob!" I demanded. "You were running around strip joints all day!?"
"I was only thinking of you, Harry," Bob said.
"What?"
"Well, a lot of the people on the set of that movie do some erotic dancing as a sideline, and I wanted to make sure that, you know, your bad guy wasn't going to take a night off to kill some locals as a warm-up." Bob coughed. "See?"
I narrowed my eyes and took deep breaths. It didn't really stop my anger from rising but it made it happen a little more smoothly.
"A-and you will be glad to know that every exotic dancer in Chicago is alive and well. Safeguarded by your friendly neighborhood air spirit," Bob said. "Um. Say, Harry, that is quite the homicidal gleam in your eye."
I took off my coat and looked around the lab until I located my clawhammer. I picked it up.
Bob's voice gained a hurried, stammering edge. "And while I know that wasn't exactly the mission you sent me out on, you have to admit that it was really quite a noble purpose that totally supported your quest to preserve life."
I took a practice swing with the hammer. I took my duster off, folded it, laid it over the table, and tried again. Much better. I fixed a murderous gaze on the skull on the shelf.
"Gee, uh, Harry," Bob said. "I was just doing the breast job I co---best, best! The best job I could!"
"Bob," I said, in a very reasonable tone of voice, "I don't need to know about strippers. I need to know about Mavra."
"Well. Yes, of course, boss. Um, so I noticed that you're holding that hammer. And that your knuckles are turning kind of white there. And that you look sort of tense."
"Don't worry," I said. "I'm going to feel a lot better in a minute."
"Ha," Bob said in a nervous false laugh. "Ha-ha. Ha. That's funny, Harry."
I raised the hammer. "Bob," I said, "get your ethereal ass out of that skull. And back into Mister. And you get out on the street and find Mavra before high noon or I'm going to smash your skull into freaking powder!"
"But I'm tired and it's raining and I don't know if---"
I raised the hammer and took a step forward.
"Ack!" Bob choked. The cloud of orange lights spilled out of the skull in a hurried rush and zipped back up the stairs. I followed them, and saw the last few sparkles around Mister's ears as Bob took possession of the cat again. I opened the door and the big tom bounded out into the morning.
I slammed the door, scowling. My thoughts were in a boiling turmoil beneath a fairly calm surface. I felt something I hadn't before---a sort of bitter taste in my mouth that took occasional side trips down to my stomach.
Anger and fear were things I knew. They were emotions that had often saved my life. But this sensation was different---something like my concern for Mister when I sent him out with Bob, but quieter, more haunting, and it didn't fade from one minute to the next.
I think maybe it was about Thomas. Before that morning there'd been no one in my life except a few truly hard-core friends, some familiar professional associates, my cat, and one or two dedicated enemies who visited at least as often as my friends. But now I had a brother. Kinfolk, as old Ebenezar would say. And it changed things.
I was used to watching out for myself---not that my friends never did anything for me, but with respect to the day-to-day problems of life, I operated solo, except for a herd of depressing thoughts for company. I thought about how I already had a grave, complete with a white marble headstone, waiting for me at Graceland Cemetery, courtesy of an enemy now dead, but no less ready to receive me. I thought about how my utter ineptitude at romance was probably going to preserve my bachelor status for the next several decades. I thought about how many bad guys out there would be glad to take me out, and how it might take people weeks to realize I'd vanished.
And I thought about growing old. Alone. It was not unusual for a wizard to live more than three centuries, but that wouldn't stop time from taking its toll. Sooner or later I'd be old and frail, maybe even tired of living. And dying. I would have no one to share it with me, or hold my hand when I was afraid.
In some simple, unexplainable, and utterly irrational way, Thomas's presence had altered that. His blood was in common with my own, and knowing it had created a strong emotional bond like nothing I had felt before. My heart sped a little bit out of sheer happiness at the thought.
But no matter how happy discovering a brother made me, I would be a fool if I didn't realize another, darker side to the situation.
After a lifetime alone, I had a brother.
And I could lose him.
The bitter sensation intensified at the thought, and I knew what it felt like to worry for family.
I shut the door to the lab and covered it with its rug. I fumbled through my little pantry until I found my bottle of aspirin. The puppy followed me closely, and attacked my shoelaces when I stopped. I opened the bottle, chewed three aspirin up, and swallowed them, no drink. I hear that's a bad sign, when you can do medication like that.
I grimaced, rubbing at my head again, and tried to quiet the tide of emotion running around my nervous system. There were things I had to do, and I would need my mind to be ordered if I wanted to survive them. First things first. I checked my problem inventory:
Multiple injuries, including a vicious headache from where Inari had socked me.
On one side of me lurked a mysterious wielder of a sloppy but lethal curse.
On the other side, a homicidal vampire and her crew of killers.
And, lest I forget, somewhere behind me was a cold, distant mercenary who was going to kill me if I didn't pay his fee---and I had no idea where I would come up with the cash.
What a mess. And it wasn't yet midmorning. And I was only growing more tired and beat up as the day went by. That meant that my smartest option was to attack the problem with a frontal assault with no delay, while my head was relatively clear.
I had to get moving before the bad guys got organized and came at me again.
Damn. If only I knew where I needed to move.
And if only I didn't have a sinking feeling that it might already be too late.
I was waiting in the parking lot at Chicago PD headquarters when Murphy arrived from the gym. She was on her motorcycle, complete with heavy boots, a black helmet, and a dark leather jacket. She noted my car on the way in, and swung the bike into the parking space beside me. The bike's engine let out a relaxed, leonine growl, then died away.
Murphy swung off the bike and took off her helmet. She shook out her golden hair, which looked good when it was somewhat mussed. "Good morning, Harry."
At the sound of her voice, the puppy started thrashing around in my pocket until he managed to stick his head out, panting happily up at Murphy. "Morning," I said. "You sound pretty chipper."
"I am," she answered. She scratched the puppy's head. "Sometimes I forget how much I like riding the bike."
"Most chicks do," I said. "Roar of the engine and so on."
Murphy's blue eyes glittered with annoyance and anticipation. "Pig. You really enjoy dropping all women together in the same demographic, don't you?"
"It's not my fault all women like motorcycles, Murph. They're basically huge vibrators. With wheels."
She tried for an angry expression, but part of a laugh escaped her throat, and she let it turn into a wide smile. "You're bent, Dresden." She frowned then, and looked at me a little closer. "What's wrong?"
"Took a bit of a beating yesterday," I said.
"I've seen you beaten before. It doesn't look like this."
Murph had known me for too long. "It's personal stuff," I said. "I can't talk about it yet."
She nodded and was silent.
The silent stretched until I said, "I found out I might have family."
"Oh." She frowned, but it was her concerned-friend frown instead of her impatient-cop frown. "I won't push. But if you ever want to talk about it . . ."
"When I want to," I told her. "Just not this morning. Have you got time to grab some breakfast with me?"
She checked her watch, and her eyes flicked toward a security camera and then to me, a warning. "Is this about that case we were discussing?"
Aha. The walls had ears, which meant that it was time for euphemisms. "Yeah. We'd be meeting with one other problem solver to discuss the situation."
She nodded. "You got the data?"
"Sorta," I said.
"Well. You know how much I'm looking forward to the family picnic today, but I might have a few minutes. Where did you want to eat?"
"IHOP."
Murphy sighed. "My hips hate you, Dresden."
"Just wait until they get to sit in my ritzy car."
We got in the car and I dropped the pup into the box I'd put in the backseat and lined with some laundry I'd had in the Beetle's trunk. He started wrestling with a sock. I think the sock was winning. Murphy watched him with a smile while I drove.
It was a Saturday morning, and I expected the International House of Pancakes to be packed. It wasn't. In fact, an entire corner had been sectioned off with an accordion-folded screen as reserved seating, and there still weren't enough customers to fill the remaining tables. The usual radio station wasn't on. The people eating breakfast seemed to be doing so in almost total silence, and the only sound was the clink of silverware on plates.
Murphy glanced up at me and then around the room, frowning. She folded her arms over her stomach, which left her right hand near the gun she kept in a shoulder rig. "What's wrong with this picture?" she asked.
Motion in the reserved area drew my eye, and Kincaid appeared and beckoned us. The lean mercenary was dressed in greys and dull blues, very nondescript, and had his hair pulled into a ponytail under a black baseball cap.
I nodded and went over to Kincaid, Murphy at my side. We stepped into the screened-off area. "Morning," I said.
"Dresden," Kincaid replied. His cool eyes slid over Murphy. "I hope you don't mind me asking the manager for a quiet section to sit in."
"It's fine. Kincaid, this is Murphy. Murph, Kincaid."
Kincaid didn't so much as glance at her. He drew the accordion curtains closed. "You said this was business. Why did you bring a date?"
Murphy clenched her jaw.
"She's not a date," I said. "She's going with us."
Kincaid stared at me for a second, all ice and stone. Then he barked out a throaty laugh. "I always heard you were a funny guy, Dresden. Seriously, what is she doing here?"
Murphy's eyes went flat with anger. "I don't think I like your attitude."
"Not now, kitten," Kincaid said. "I'm talking business with your boyfriend."
"He is not my boyfriend," Murphy growled.
Kincaid looked from Murphy to me and back again. "You're kidding me, Dresden. This isn't amateur hour. If we're playing with the Black Court, I don't have time to babysit little Pollyanna here, and neither do you."
I started to speak, and thought better of it. Murphy would have my head if I tried to protect her when she didn't think she needed it. I took a small but prudent step back from them.
Murphy eyed Kincaid and said, "Now I'm sure of it. I don't like your attitude."
Kincaid's lips lifted away from his teeth, and he moved his left arm, showing Murphy the gun rig under his jacket. "I'd love to chat with you over breakfast, cupcake. Why don't you run and find a high chair so that we can."
Murphy's gaze didn't waver. She looked from Kincaid's eyes to his gun and back. "Why don't we sit down. This doesn't need to get ugly."
Kincaid's grin widened, and it wasn't a pleasant expression. He put a broad hand on her shoulder and said, "This is where the big boys play, princess. Why don't you be a good girl and go watch your Xena tapes or something."
Murphy eyed Kincaid's hand on her shoulder. Her voice became softer, but it sure as hell didn't sound weak. "That's assault. But I'll tell you this once. I won't repeat myself. Don't touch me."
Kincaid's face contorted with rage, and he gave her shoulder a shove. "Get out of here, whore."
Murphy didn't repeat herself. Her hands blurred as she caught Kincaid's wrist, broke his balance by half bending her knees, then twisted and threw him hard at a wall. Kincaid slammed over a table and into the wall, but rolled out of it almost instantly, his hand going for his gun.
Murphy trapped his gun arm between her arm and body as he drew, and her own gun appeared with nearly magical swiftness, pressed hard against the underside of Kincaid's chin. "Call me that again," she said in a quiet voice. "I dare you. I double-dog dare you."
Kincaid's angry expression vanished so swiftly that it could only have been artificial. Instead a faint grin made its way onto his mouth, even brushing at his eyes. "Oh, I like her," he said. "I'd heard about her but I wanted to see it myself. I like this one, Dresden."
I bet he always went for his gun when he liked a woman. "Maybe you should stop talking about her like she isn't standing there holding a gun under your chin."
"Maybe you're right," he said. Then he faced Murphy and lifted his empty hand, relaxing. She released his arm, lowered the gun, and stepped back, still scowling, but Kincaid put his gun down, then took a seat with his hands palm flat on the table beside the weapon. "Hope you won't remain offended, Lieutenant," he told her. "I needed to see if you measured up to your reputation before we went forward."
Murphy shot me her patented Harry-you-idiot glare and then focused an opaque expression on Kincaid. "Do you feel better now?"
"I feel satisfied," Kincaid replied. "It's a little easy to get you started, but at least you're competent. Is that a Beretta?"
"SIG," Murphy said. "Do you have a license and permit for your weapon?"
Kincaid smiled. "Naturally."
Murphy snorted. "Sure you do." She looked at Kincaid for a minute and then said, "Get this straight from the get-go. I'm still a cop. It means something to me."
He regarded her thoughtfully. "I heard that about you too."
"Murph," I said, sitting down at the table. "If you have something to say to him, say it to me. I'm his employer at the moment."
She arched an eyebrow. "And you can be sure that his actions are all going to be legal ones?"
"Kincaid," I said. "No felonies without checking with me first. Okay?"
"Yassuh," said Kincaid.
I spread out an open hand at Murphy. "See? Yassuh."
She regarded Kincaid without much in the way of approval but nodded and pulled out a chair. Kincaid rose as she started to sit down. Murphy glared at him. Kincaid sat down again. She pulled at the chair again and I rose. She put a hand on her hip and glared at me. "It doesn't count as chivalrous courtesy if you're only doing it to be a wiseass."
"She's right," Kincaid admitted. "Go ahead, Lieutenant. We won't be polite."
Murphy growled, and started to sit. I began to stand up again anyway, but she kicked me in the shins and plopped down. "All right," she said. "What do we know?"
"That I'm starving," I said. "Wait a second." I held off any business until after we'd ordered breakfast and the waitress brought it out to the reserved section. Once that was done and we were eating, we closed the screen again.
"All right," I said after a moment. It came out muffled by a mouthful of gastronomic nirvana. Say what you will about nutrition; IHOP knows good pancakes. "This meeting is to share some information I've gained in the last day and to go over our basic plan."
"Find them," said Murphy.
"Kill them," said Kincaid.
"Yeah, okay," I said. "But I thought we might flesh out that second one a little more."
"No need to," said Kincaid. "In my experience it's pretty much impossible to kill it if you don't know where it is." He lifted his brows, looking up from his food. "Do you know where it is?"
"Not yet," I said.
Kincaid glanced at his watch, and then went back to his food. "I'm on a schedule."
"I know that," I said. "I'll find them today."
"Before sundown," Kincaid said. "Suicide to go at them after dark."
Murphy scowled at Kincaid. "What kind of attitude is that?"
"A professional one. I have a midnight flight to my next contract."
"Let me get this straight," Murphy said. "You'd just walk away because these murdering creatures didn't fit into your schedule?"
"Yes." Kincaid kept eating.
"It doesn't bother you that innocent people might die because of them?"
"Not much," Kincaid said, and took a sip of coffee.
"How can you just say that?"
"Because it's the truth. Innocent people die all the time." Kincaid's fork and knife scraped on his plate as he sliced up some ham and eggs. "They're better at it than your average murdering monster."
"Jesus," Murphy said, and stared at me. "Harry, I don't want to work with this asshole."
"Easy, Murph," I said.
"I'm serious. You can't condone his attitude."
I rubbed at my eyebrow with a thumb. "Murph, the world is a cruel place. Kincaid didn't make it that way."
"He doesn't care," Murphy said. "Are you sure you want someone who doesn't care about what we're doing along when things go to hell?"
"He agreed to go and fight," Harry said. "I agreed to pay him. He's a professional. He'll fight."
Kincaid pointed a finger at me and nodded, chewing on another bite.
Murphy shook her head. "What about a driver?"
"He'll be here today," I said.
"Who is he?"
"You don't know him," I said. "I trust him."
Murphy looked at me for a second and then nodded. "What are we up against?"
"Black Court vampires," I said. "At least two, and maybe more."
"Plus any help they might have," Kincaid said.
"They can flip cars with one hand," I said. "They're fast. Like, Jackie Chan fast. We can't go toe-to-toe with them, so the plan is to hit them in daylight."
"They'll all be asleep," Murphy said.
"Maybe not," Kincaid said. "The old ones don't need to sometimes. Mavra could be functional."
"And what's more," I said, "she's a practitioner. A sorceress at least."
Kincaid inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. He finished the bite he was on, and then he said, "Shit," before taking another.
Murphy frowned. "What do you mean, a sorceress at least?"
"Kind of an industry term," I said. "Plenty of people can do a little magic. Small-time stuff. But sometimes the small-timers practice up, or tap into some kind of power source and get enough ability to be dangerous. A sorcerer is someone who can do some serious violence with magic."
"Like the Shadowman," Murphy said. "Or Kravos."
"Yeah."
"Good thing we got a wizard along then," Kincaid said.
Murphy looked at me.
"Wizard means that you can do sorcery if you need to," I said, "but it also means you can do a lot of other things too. A wizard's power isn't limited to blowing things up, or calling up demons. A good wizard can adapt his magic in almost any way he can imagine. Which is the problem."
"What do you mean?" Murphy said.
"Mavra is good at veils," I said, mostly to Kincaid. "Real good. She did some long range mental communications last night, too."
Kincaid stopped eating.
"You're saying that this vampire is a wizard?" Murphy asked.
Kincaid stared at me.
"It's possible," I said. "Maybe even likely. It would go a long way toward explaining how Mavra survived all this time."
"This mission is heading for downtown FUBAR," Kincaid said.
"You want out?" I asked.
He was silent for a minute and then shook his head. "But if Mavra is awake and active, and if she's able to start tossing heavy magic around in closed quarters, we might as well drink some Bacardi-and-strychnine and save ourselves some walking."
"You're afraid of her," Murphy said.
"Damn right," Kincaid said.
She frowned. "Harry, can you shut down her magic? Like you did with Kravos?"
"Depends how strong she is," I said. "But a wizard could handle her. Probably."
Kincaid shook his head. "Magical lockdown. I've seen that work before," he said. "One time I saw it fail. Everybody died."
"Except you?" I asked.
"I was in back, covering our spellslinger when his head exploded. Barely made it out the door." Kincaid pushed a piece of sausage around his plate. "Even if you can shut her down, Mavra's still going to be real tough."
"That's why you get to charge so much," I said.
"True."
"We go in Stoker-standard," I said. "Garlic, crosses, holy water, the works."
"Hey," Murphy said. "What about that pocketful-of-sunshine thing you told me about? With the white handkerchief you used on Bianca a few years back?"
I grimaced. "Can't," I said.
"Why not?"
"It's impossible, Murph. It isn't important why." I hauled the conversation back on course. "We should be able to keep Mavra back until we deal with any goons. Then we can take her down. Any questions?"
Kincaid coughed significantly, and nodded at the table, where the waitress had, at some point, left us a bill. I frowned and fumbled through my pockets. I had enough to cover it, but only because I managed to find a couple of quarters in the various pockets of my duster. I left the money on the table. There wasn't enough for a tip.
Kincaid regarded my lump of wrinkled small bills and change, then studied me with a distant, calculating gaze that would have made some people very nervous. Like people who had agreed to pay a lot of money but didn't have any.
"That's it for now then," I said, rising. "Get anything you need ready, and we'll go later today. I want to hit them as soon as I find them."
Kincaid nodded and turned back to his plate. I left. My shoulder blades felt itchy when I turned my back to Kincaid. Murphy kept pace with me and we headed back to the Beetle.
Murphy and I didn't talk while I drove her back to CPDHQ. Once we got there, and the car had stopped, she looked around the inside of my car, frowning. "What happened to the Beetle?"
"Mold demons."
"Oh."
"Murph?"
"Hmm?"
"You okay?"
She pressed her lips into a line. "I'm trying to adjust. In my head, I think what we're doing is just about the only thing we responsibly can. But I've been a peace officer since before I could drink, and this kind of cowboy thing feels . . . wrong. It isn't what a good cop does."
"Depends on the cop, I think," I said. "Mavra and her scourge are above the law, Murph, in every sense that matters. The only way they're going to get stopped is if someone steps up and takes them down."
"I know that here," she said, and touched her own forehead with her finger. Then she clasped her hand into a fist and put it over her heart. "But I don't feel it here." She was quiet for a moment more and said, "The vampires aren't the problem. I can fight that. Glad to. But there are going to be people around them, too. I don't know if I can pull the trigger when there are going to be people around who could get hurt. I signed on to protect them, not to trap them in a cross fire."
Not much I could say to that.
"Can I ask you something?" she said after a minute.
"Sure."
She studied me with a faint, concerned frown. "Why can't you do the sunshine thing? Seems like it would be really handy about now. It isn't like you to call something impossible."
I shrugged. "I tried it a couple years back," I said. "After the war started. Turns out that you've got to be genuinely happy to be able to fold sunshine into a hankie. Otherwise it just doesn't work."
"Oh," said Murphy.
I shrugged.
"I guess I'll be in Wolf Lake Park, at the picnic, for a few hours at lunchtime. But I'll have my pager with me," she said.
"Okay. Sorry I didn't drag you into some horrifying, morally questionable, bloodthirsty carnage in time."
She smiled, more with her eyes than her mouth. "See you in a while, Harry." Murphy got out of the car. She checked her watch and sighed. "T minus two hours and counting down."
I blinked at her. "Whoa."
Murphy gave me a skeptical glance. "What?"
"Whoa," I said again. Thoughts were congealing in my brain, and I raked through my memory to see if the facts fit the idea. "Countdown. Son of a bitch."
"What are you talking about?"
"Do you have the police reports on the two women who died in California?"
Murphy lifted an eyebrow, but said, "In my car. Hang on a second." She jogged a couple of spaces down to her car. I heard her pop open the trunk and slam it again. She reappeared with a thick manila folder and passed it to me.
I found the reports inside and scanned over them in rising excitement. "Here it is," I said, jabbing a finger at the report. "I know how they're doing it. Damn, I should have guessed this sooner."
"How they're doing what?" Murphy asked.
"The Evil Eye," I said, the words hurrying together as I grew more excited. "The malocchio. The curse that's hitting Genosa's people. It's on a timer."
She tilted her head. "It's automated?"
"No, no," I said, waving my hands. "It's on a schedule. Both women who died were killed in the morning, a little bit before ten o'clock." I closed my eyes, trying to picture the reports Genosa had given me. "Right . . . nine forty-seven and nine forty-eight. They died at the same time."
"That's not the same time, Harry."
I waved a hand, impatient. "They are. I'll bet you anything. The recorded time gets written down by officers on the scene in their report, and who would worry about a minute either way?"
"Why is it significant?" Murphy said.
"Because the two curses that have struck here in Chicago arrived at eleven forty-seven in the morning, and damned close to that last night. Add two hours to the deaths in California to account for the difference in time zones. The curse was sent at the same time. Thirteen minutes before noon or midnight." I followed the logic chain forward from that one fact. "Hell's bells," I breathed.
"I'm not going to ask you to explain every time you pause, Harry, because you know damned well I don't have a clue about what you're saying or what it means."
"It means that the killer isn't doing the curse on his own," I said. "I mean, there's no reason to do it that way, unless it's because you don't have a choice. The killer is using ritual magic. They've got a sponsor."
"You don't mean a corporation," Murphy said.
"No," I answered. "What time is it?"
"Ten-thirty," Murphy said.
"Yes," I hissed, and slammed the clutch into gear. "If I haul ass there's time."
"Time?"
"To protect Genosa and his people," I said. "That entropy curse is coming down on them in about an hour." I stomped on the gas and shouted out the window over my shoulder, "This time I'll be ready for it!"
I expected Genosa to look awful the next morning, but evidently I had a temporary monopoly on rough nights in Chicago. He was waiting for me at the door when I got to the studio, dressed in slacks and a tennis shirt, perfectly coiffed and genial. I got another European-type hug before I'd gotten all the way out of the Beetle.
"The malocchio, it happened again," he said. "Didn't it. Last night when you ran out."
"Yeah," I said.
He licked his lips. "Who?"
"Inari. She's all right."
Arturo blinked several times. "Inari? That's insane. What possible threat could she be to anyone?"
Incipient succubus. No threat at all there. "There's got to be some reason she was targeted. We just don't know what it is yet."
"She's only a child," Genosa said, and for the first time I heard something like real anger in his voice. That was something to be noted. When kind men grow angry, things are about to change. "Have you any idea who is behind it?"
"Not yet," I said, and opened the storage compartment under the Beetle's hood. "But this is definitely more than business for somebody. For them it's personal. I think they're going to take another swing this morning, and I'm going to have a surprise for them when they do."
"How may I help?"
"Get the set moving like everything's normal. I need to get a spell of my own ready."
Arturo frowned at that, and it crinkled all the creases at the corners of his face into unfamiliar lines. "And that is all I can do?"
"For now."
He sighed. "All right. May fortune smile on your efforts, Mister Dresden."
"Don't know why she'd start now," I said, but gave him a quick smile by way of encouragement.
Genosa returned the smile and went back into the building. I followed him a couple of minutes later with my pack loaded with a fifty-foot retractable chalk line, a mirror, a box of tinfoil, and half a dozen candles. I hurried inside, and checked the greenroom and the dressing room before I found Jake Guffie loitering around the shooting studio in dark grey boxers and a loose silk robe. He had a paperback and a bottle of Gatorade, and was draped over his chair in a pose meant to convey calm and confidence. I'm not sure what made me think he was faking, but I knew it even before I spoke to him.
"Jake," I said. "Just the guy I need to see."
He jumped like a nervous cat and gave me a reproachful glance. "Oh. Good morning, Harry. What can I do for you?"
"I need your help with something for about ten minutes."
He tilted his head at me. "Yeah? What?"
I hesitated for a moment and then shrugged. "I'm setting up a spell to protect everyone from evil magic."
"Uh," Jake said, narrowing his eyes. "I don't want to disrespect your religion, man. But did someone spike your breakfast cereal with LSD or something?"
"What can I say, Jake. I'm insane but harmless. Come with me and help me draw some lines on the floor with chalk, and after that I'll leave you alone." I drew an X over my chest with a fingertip. "Cross my heart."
He looked around, maybe for an excuse to leave, but then shook his head and stood up. "What the hell," he said. "Maybe I'll learn something."
He followed me up the stairs to the top floor of the building. I found the northmost hall, put down my backpack, and started rummaging through it. Jake watched me for a minute before he said, "Is this some kind of feng shui thing?"
"Uh. Actually, it is, now that I think about it," I said. "Feng shui is all about manipulating positive and negative energy around, right? Here, hold this. What I'm doing here is setting up a kind of . . . well, a lightning rod, for lack of a better analogy. I'm setting things up so that if that negative energy gathers again, it gets sent to the place I want it to go, rather than at a particular target. Like a person."
"Feng shui," he said. "Okay, I can buy that."
"Let me snap this," I said, and did, leaving a line of light blue chalk on the floor. "There. Come on." I started down the hall, and after a moment Jake came after me.
I really did need someone's help, and if I had to get someone to give me a hand on the set, I wanted either Jake or Joan, as the least disturbing---or at least the least threatening---folks I had met. And since Joan was a woman, and therefore more likely to become a target of the curse, I didn't want her running back and forth through this gathering spell. The point was to move the bad mojo away, after all. It would have been silly to leave her standing right there in the middle of it.
Even if Jake wasn't an overt believer in the supernatural scene, he was at least laid-back enough that he proved to be a capable helper. I had him follow me around the building with the end of the chalk line in hand. On each level of the building I tried to move around as much of the building's perimeter as I could, leaving chalk lines on the floors and walls. I would lay down the line, snapping it against the surface to leave a light dusting of blue chalk---and as I did I poured out a whisper of my will with it, leaving each of the chalk lines quivering with a small amount of energy. My goal was to lay enough of these spikes of directional energy to make sure that when the curse came in again, it would have to cross at least one of them.
If everything worked to plan, the curse would come flying toward its target, cross one or more of my spikes, and be redirected to follow the lines. Then, at the approximate center of the building, which turned out to be a darkened corner of the soundstage, I laid down my mirror, shiny side up, and set up my candles at the cardinal points of another circle centered around the it. The spikes of force led directly toward the mirror, and I took the time to mark out another circle and light the candles, leaving a subtle quiver of energy in the new circle, too.
"Oh, right," Jake said. "I read about this one. Mirror to pull the bad mojo away?"
"Sort of," I said, standing up and dusting off my hands. "If I've done it right, the curse comes flying in, hits the mirror, and bounces back at whoever threw it."
Jake lifted his eyebrows. "That's kind of hostile, man."
"No, it isn't," I said. "Someone tries to send good vibes at us, they'll get that bounced back at them. They go trying to pull off another killing . . . well. What goes around comes around."
"Hey, that's a fundamental core of many religions," Jake said. "Golden rule, man."
"Yeah, it is," I said. "Maybe a little more literal than usual, in this case."
"You really think this place is cursed?" Jake said. His expression was thoughtful.
"I think someone doesn't want Arturo's new company to succeed," I replied. "Among other things."
Jake frowned. "You think Silverlight Studios is behind it?"
"Possible," I said. "But things have been pretty nasty for someone with a money motivation."
"Materialism is not good for the soul," Jake said. "Those are the folks who can do the worst, when they're after money."
"Money's new," I answered. "Power's old. Power is the real deal. Money, voters, oil, SUVs---they're just standins for power."
"For a feng shui artist, you're sort of intense, man."
I shrugged. "That's the first time anyone's ever told me that."
"You got a woman?"
I rolled up the chalk line. "Had one. Didn't work out."
"That could explain it," Jake said. "Arturo gets like you between wives. Thank God that's over."
I blinked and looked Jake. "Over?"
"Yeah," Jake said. "I mean, he hasn't sent out invitations or anything, but I know the guy. He's had hearts floating around his head for a couple of months, and he's in his days-before-wedding phase now."
That was important. That was really freaking important. "Are you sure?" I asked.
Jake shrugged, his expression puzzled. "I'm not gonna testify to it in federal court or anything, man. I mean, city court, sure."
Footsteps came around the corner, and Bully Bobby appeared, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and carrying a little notebook with a golf pencil. "Jake," he said. "Finally, man. Arturo says I have to tell him today. What do you think of Rocko Stone? Or maybe Rack McGranite?"
"Rocko is way overdone already," Jake said. "And racks are more of a girl thing."
"Oh, right."
"Go with something nonstandard, man. How about Gowan?"
"Gowan?" Bobby asked.
"Sure, he was a knight."
"Like those Round Table guys?"
"Yeah, like that," Jake said.
"Sounds kinda . . . soft, don't you think?"
"Maybe," Jake said. "Stiffen it up with a heavier last name. Like Commando."
Bobby frowned. "Gowan Commando," he said, and from his tone the kid just didn't get it. "I guess that might work. Thanks, man." He paused and noticed me for the first time. "Oh, hey. Uh, Harry, right?"
"Like yesterday," I said. I didn't use my happy voice. "Morning."
"Yeah, morning." Bobby coughed and glanced at Jake, who clenched a fist in an encouraging be-strong sort of gesture. "Harry," Bobby said, "I was kind of an asshole to you yesterday, man. Sorry."
It probably says something about me that I didn't even consider the possibility that he might be sincere until he coughed and shuffled over to offer me his hand. "We okay?" he asked.
I blinked at him. People didn't apologize to me much, as a rule, but I'd seen enough after-school specials to understand the theory. "What the hell." I traded grips with the kid and said, "It's nothing. Forget it."
He smiled a little and said, "Cool. So what are you guys doing?"
"Feng shui," Jake said.
"You know martial arts?" Bobby asked me.
Now that he wasn't threatening violence, I could see that this kid was a jewel. He could potentially provide some lucky wiseass with straight lines for the rest of his natural life, and you can't put a price on that. "A little."
"Cool."
Jake shook his head, and managed to keep from smiling. "Need anything else then, Harry?"
"Not right now."
He nodded. "Come on, Gowan. Let's go see if Joan needs help with anything."
"Hey," I said. "Jake."
"Yeah?"
"Is Lara here today?"
He arched an eyebrow. "Yeah. Why?"
"No reason," I said. "I'll catch up to you later."
They left, and I sat down in my dim, magically booby-trapped corner to think.
It was important that Arturo was in love. My gut told me it was important, but I couldn't kick my tired brain into telling me why. I rubbed at my eyes. I needed more sleep to do any thinking, so I went looking for the next best thing---coffee and a backup brain.
Murphy answered the phone and I greeted her through the coffee and most of a doughnut.
"You're mumbling, Harry," Murphy said. "Speak up."
I slurped coffee, scalded my mouth on the stuff, and set it aside to cool off a little. "Sorry, burned my tongue. Did you get any more information about Arturo Genosa?" I asked.
"Some," Murphy said. "I got in touch with a guy I know in LA. He came up with municipal records and even some files from Genosa's lawyer, but there's not much in the way of admissible."
"That's okay. Just trying to get a picture."
I heard her digging out a file and opening it. "Okay. He's got a will on file, leaves everything to a couple of charities and his next of kin, looks like his mother in Greece---but she died a couple of years ago, so I guess the money all goes to charity."
"What about his wives?" I asked.
"Control of their fund would have gone to his mother, but since she's dead they get to keep drawing from it indefinitely. It's in the prenuptial agreement for all three of them."
"Three?" I asked. Hell's bells, if the man was in love . . . "Does it mention a fourth wife?"
"Nope."
"What about a fourth marriage license?"
I heard her rustling around the file, and tested the coffee while she did. Ah, perfection. "Stupid fax machine paper," she growled. "It's floppy and the pages all stick together." Then she stopped for a second and said, "Son of a bitch, there is one."
"When?"
"Dated for next Thursday."
"To who?"
"I can't tell. There's a big blurry spot," Murphy said. "Fax machine must have messed it up. But it's definitely marriage license number four."
"But with no prenuptial number four," I said.
"No prenup number four."
"Hello, new next of kin," I said.
"Hello, motive," Murphy agreed. "Hello, suspects."
The greenroom door opened and I looked up in time to see a woman with a lingerie-model body under a flimsy robe enter the room, holding a big revolver. She pointed the gun at me, found the extension of the phone I was on and pulled it out of the wall, then said into a cell phone, "I've got him."
I sat there holding the dead phone and the warm coffee and said, "Hello, Trixie."
Trixie Scrump-Genosa-Vixen-Expialidocius leaned against the door and said, "Don't get up, Barry. And don't move your hands." Her voice shook with nervous energy, and the barrel of the gun waved drunkenly back and forth. The knuckles of the hand holding the cell phone to her ear were white. "I don't want to shoot you."
"You know, people don't want to crash their cars either. But there is always some idiot who drives and talks on the cell phone at the same time, and crunch," I said. "Maybe you should put your phone down until we're done. Just to be safe."
"Don't give me orders," she snapped, pushing the gun at me like it was some sort of sexual aid. She wobbled on her high heels when she did, but managed not to fall over. "Don't you dare give me orders!"
I shut up. She was already wound pretty tight. I have a bad habit of turning into a real wiseass when someone makes me nervous. It's just a reflex. But if I pushed Trixie too hard, her precarious self-control might snap, accidentally setting off the gun. I'd die of shame if she unintentionally shot me, so I resolved to keep my mouth shut. Mostly. "Okay."
"Keep your hands right there, and don't move."
"Can I sip some of my coffee at least?" I asked. "It just got to the right temperature."
She scowled. "No. You never got me my latte."
"Right," I said. "Good point."
We sat there for a couple of minutes while my arms started getting tired, holding coffee and a useless phone in place like that. "So what happens now, Ms. Vixen?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, there's me and you here, and then there's that gun. Usually there's a specific purpose to using a gun as a negotiation tactic, but so far all you're doing is pointing it at me. I'm no expert, but as I understand it, you get to make demands or something."
"I know you're afraid," she spat. "That's why you're talking. You're nervous and talking because you're afraid of me."
"I am paralyzed at the thought of losing my senior division shuffleboard career," I said. "That's just how much you scare me. But I'm also curious about our next step."
"There is no next step," she said.
"Um. So we sit here for the rest of eternity?"
She sneered. "No. In a minute I'm going to leave."
I lifted my eyebrows. "Just like that?"
"Yeah."
"You . . . brilliant fiend," I said. "I wouldn't ever have guessed that your plan was to do nothing."
She smirked. "It's all I need to do."
"I thought you might be worried that I would tell the police about it afterward."
Trixie laughed and looked genuinely amused. "Oh? You're going to tell them what? That I held a gun on you for no reason, did nothing, and then left?"
"Well. Yeah."
"Which are they going to believe? That crappy story or that you confronted me when I was alone, made unwanted sexual advances, and that I had to pull the gun out of my purse to discourage you?"
I narrowed my eyes. Actually, that wasn't a stupid plan, which made me doubt Trixie had come up with it all on her own. But why hold me in place for only a few moments? I checked the room's clock. Eleven forty. Crap. "Oh," I said. "You want me sidelined for the next time you call up the curse."
Her eyes widened. "How did you know th---" She broke off abruptly, her head twitching, evidently listening to someone on the phone. "Oh. I know. I'm not telling him anything. I don't see why you . . ." She winced. "Oh. Oh. Yes, all right. Do you want to come down here to do this? Fine, then. Fine." Her face darkened into a vicious scowl, but most of her attention came back to me.
"Who's on the phone?" I asked her.
"None of your business."
"Actually it is. Literally. Since I'm being paid to find the identities of whoever is swinging that curse."
Trixie let out an ugly laugh. "What difference would it make if you did? It isn't as though the police are going to believe the use of a magic curse as a murder weapon."
"Maybe. But cops aren't the only authority in the universe. Anyone ever tell you about the White Council?"
She licked her lips, and her eyes flickered around the room. "Of course they did," she lied.
"So you know that employing magic to murder another human being carries the death penalty."
She stared at me. "What are you talking about?"
"The trial wouldn't be real long. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes, tops. And once they find you guilty, you'll be executed on the spot. Beheaded. With a sword."
Her mouth worked uselessly for a second. "You're lying."
"I'm an honest guy. Maybe you're in denial and projecting."
"I am not," she snapped. "You're just trying to scare me. It's a lie."
"I wish," I said. "My life would have been simpler. Look, Trixie, you and whoever you're working with might get away with it if you back off right now. Leave off the curses and get out of town."
She lifted her chin defiantly. "And if we don't?"
"Bad things happen. You're already beaten, Ms. Vixen. You just don't know it. If you roll out that curse again, you're going to get a taste of it for yourself."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Not a threat," I said. "Just a fact. You and your ritual are done."
"Oh," she said, regaining her composure. "You underestimate my powers."
I snorted. "You haven't got any powers."
"Yes, I do. I've killed with them."
"You've killed with a ritual," I said.
"What's the difference?"
"The difference," I said, "is that if you have any skill of your own at magic, you don't need a ritual."
"Whatever. They're the same thing anyway. Magic. Power."
"No," I said. "Look, a ritual spell like that doesn't have anything to do with you. It's like a cosmic vending machine. You put two quarters in, push the right button, and the curse comes flying out, courtesy of some psychotic otherworldly force that enjoys that kind of thing. It doesn't take skill. It doesn't take talent. You could be a freaking monkey and invoke that curse just as well."
"There's no practical difference," she maintained.
"Yes, there is."
"What?" she asked.
"You're about to find out."
Instead of looking uncertain, she smiled. "You're talking about that sacred circle you had set up on the soundstage."
She'd recognized the circle? Oh, crap.
"We knew that you'd try something," she went on. "All I had to do was follow you when you came in. I don't know what you thought you were going to accomplish, but I'm pretty sure all of your squiggles and candles aren't going to do whatever you wanted them to, given that I broke your circle and smeared all your chalk lines."
And she was right. Double crap.
"Trixie," I said. "You can't possibly think that this is all right. Why are you doing this?"
"I'm protecting what's mine, Larry," she said. "It's business."
"Business?" I demanded. "Two people are dead already. Giselle and Jake were at death's door, and I don't even want to think about what would have happened to Inari if I weren't there. What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"I don't feel any need to explain myself to you."
I blinked at her slowly and then said, "You don't know either. You don't know who he's marrying."
She didn't say anything, but her eyes blazed with scorn and fury.
I shook my head, continuing. "So you've just been eliminating all the women around Arturo Genosa. One at a time. You don't even know if you're killing the right person."
"There's only one little girl toy left pretty enough to suit his tastes," she said.
"Emma," I said.
"And once she's gone, I won't have to worry about her stealing what's mine."
I stared at her for a second. "Are you insane?" I said. "Do you think you'll get away with this?"
"I'd love to see some prosecutor try me for witchcraft," she responded.
Trixie was too stupid to believe me about the White Council and too self-absorbed to keep my name straight, but for crying out loud, she had to be human. "Hell's bells, Trixie. Emma's got kids."
"So did Hitler," Trixie snapped.
"No, he didn't," I said. "He had dogs."
"Whatever," Trixie said.
I checked the clock. Eleven-forty-three. In four minutes, give or take, Emma would die.
Trixie's attention snapped to the phone and she listened for a moment, throwing out a terse, "Yes." Then the phone abruptly squealed with feedback, and Trixie flinched hard enough to make me worry that she'd lost control of her weapon. "Dammit," she said. "I hate these stupid cell phones."
Cell phones are the caged canaries in the coal mines of the supernatural. When a little magic gets moving, cell phones are some of the first pieces of equipment to be disrupted. Odds were good that someone on the other end of that phone was starting to move energy around.
Which meant that the malocchio was coming to kill Emma.
And so long as Trixie kept me in the greenroom, there wasn't a damned thing I could do to prevent it.
If I didn't do something, another woman was going to die, and a couple of kids were going to become orphans. Of course, I also had a gun in my face. If I did do something, I would die. The smart thing would be to let Trixie finish delaying me and wait for her to leave. Emma would be dead, but I'd have at least twelve hours in which I could shut the Evil Eye franchise down. If I didn't cooperate, Emma and I would both die, and the bad guys would still be at large.
So the smart money was on staying put. Simple logic.
But there are things older than logic---like instinct. One of the most primal instincts in the human soul is the desire to protect children from harm. Even if the idea of Emma's death hadn't been motivation enough, the very thought of how savagely this stupid, venal, selfish harpy might scar Emma's children made me want to call down fire enough to roast Trixie Vixen and her sculpted ass to ash.
I found myself tensing to go after her, and damn the gun. It wasn't as brainless as you might think. Killing is not so easy as it seems. Most people are wired to be careful of their fellow human beings. Soldiers and cops both are specifically given training to overcome that instinct, and the criminals who fire at other people are usually driven to it by desperation.
And even trained soldiers and hardened criminals are often wildly inaccurate. Billy the Kid once emptied his Colt revolver at a bank teller from less than three feet away, and missed him six times. I'd seen a police reel of a cop who had been forced to draw and fire at a suspect, and he'd emptied a full clip at the man from less than twenty feet, missing him every time.
Trixie may have had the gun, but she didn't have experience, training, or much in the way of composure. If she hesitated, even for a fraction of a second, it would be possible for me to close on her. If she didn't hesitate, the odds against me were not unthinkably high. It was possible that she might miss me enough times to let me take the gun.
Of course, it was possible she'd put a bullet through my eye, too. Or through my throat. Or maybe my guts.
I felt a sudden, ethereal wind, cold and ugly. The curse was almost there, and it was deadlier, more potent than ever before. A bare second of concentration told me that I would have no prayer of blocking that much magic, and even redirecting so much raw power would be nearly impossible. I don't know what had happened to make the curse that much stronger, that much deadlier, and it scared me half out of my mind.
I had to do something, and I had to do it now.
I needed a distraction, but the best I could do was to abruptly whip my head toward the door, and to shift my weight as if I might stand up.
"Don't move," Trixie snarled.
I licked my lips, staring at the door.
I saw her expression become uncertain. She rubbernecked toward the door---only for a second, but it would have to do.
I threw my still-steaming coffee at her. It sloshed across her shoulder and neck. She screamed in surprise and sudden pain. I lunged at her, lifting the handset of the telephone to swing at her head.
She cried out and stared at me, her lovely face stunned, terrified.
The Quixote reflexes kicked in.
I hesitated.
The gun went off from two feet away.
I recovered before I could lose much momentum and slammed into her, a full-body impact that drove her shoulder blades up against the wall beside the door. The gun roared again, and the sharp, acrid tang of cordite and the syrupy smell of blood flooded over me. I got my fingers around the wrist of her gun hand and slammed it against the wall. The gun barked some more, but finally tumbled from her fingers to the floor.
I kicked it across the room. Trixie clawed at my eyes with the nails of her free hand. Pain jolted through me. I got an arm around her waist and threw her bodily away from me, opposite the way I had kicked the weapon. She hit the table and folded over it, scattering a box of doughnuts and a plate of various fruits.
Then she sank to the floor, sobbing. One of her stockings had been soaked in blood, from ankle to calf, and she curled up, clutching at her wounded leg. I recovered the gun without touching the handle, checked, and found it empty. I turned my eyes to Trixie Vixen.
She shrank away from me, weeping in pain and terror. She held up her other arm as a useless shield. "No. No, please. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it."
The adrenaline rushed through me, wild and mindless.
I wanted to kill her.
A lot.
I hadn't ever felt that before---a sudden surge of fury, contempt, and disdain mixed in with a physical excitement only a few degrees short of actual arousal. It wasn't an emotion. It was nothing that tame and limited. It was a force, a dark and vast tide that picked me up and swept me along like a Styrofoam packing peanut. And I liked it.
There was something in me that took a deep and gloating satisfaction in seeing my enemy on the floor and helpless. That part of me wanted to see her screaming. And then see her die screaming.
I'm not sure how I kept myself from acting on that flood of violence and lust. But instead of gut-shooting Trixie, I stared coldly at her for a second, studying her injuries. One of the shots must have either bounced into her calf or entered directly when the gun had gone off during the struggle. She bled, but not enough to kill her anytime soon, and the lines of her calf and foot seemed twisted, slightly misshapen. The bullet must have broken a bone.
"Please," she babbled, staring at the gun I now held. "I'll do whatever you want. Just say it. Oh, God, please don't kill me."
I stalked to the door. I noted a couple of bullet holes in it, and heard myself speak, my voice quiet and deadly cold. "Shut up."
She did, shuddering with sobs, hiding her face. The scent of urine joined the other smells in the room. I kept her revolver in hand and jerked the door open hard, to rush through it and back to the soundstage to deal with the curse.
I didn't have to bother.
Emma's corpse lay on its back in the hall outside. She had been wearing spandex biking shorts with a matching sports halter. There was blood forming a pool beneath her. A small, neat hole directly into her sternum accompanied the hole in her forehead, just over her right eyebrow. She lay with her knees bent beneath her, her arms spread a little. A prescription bottle lay on the ground, just barely touching one fingertip. She'd been dead before she fell, and her body had simply relaxed bonelessly to the ground.
The shots couldn't have been more perfect if they'd been delivered by a professional assassin. The odds against stray bullets randomly hitting where they had were inconceivably high. The malocchio had killed her. The stray bullets had simply been its instrument.
I heard Trixie gasp behind me, and turned to see her staring at the body. "No," she whispered, the timing of the words somehow disjointed and random. "That wasn't in the plan. This wasn't part of it. He never said that."
I heard running footsteps coming down the hall, and looked up in time to see a couple of the camera guys, Jake, and Arturo round the corner. They came to an abrupt stop, staring at the scene in shock. Someone---Jake, I thought---let out a high-pitched, squawking cry.
I suddenly realized that I was standing over a dead woman while another bled from a bullet wound ten feet away---and that I was holding the gun that did it to them both.
Trixie's eyes widened as if she recognized the opportunity. Her mouth twisted into a sudden, vindictive, mad-eyed rictus. She let out a scream, wailing, "Help me! Help me, oh, God, don't let him kill me too!"
I didn't have long to decide on a course of action, but I got the benefit of one of those crystallized moments, when nothing happens and it seems like you've got all the time in the world to think.
I'd been too slow and now Emma was dead. Worse yet, I looked guilty as hell, short-term. In the long term, forensics would show that Trixie had been holding the gun when it went off, but I had never been on good terms with the largest part of Chicago's legal system, either in the courts or law enforcement. At least one cop, now in Internal Affairs, would be glad to take this opportunity to crucify me, and if I took my chances with the law, the weapon plus the eyewitness testimony of a would-be victim could provide the state with a reasonable case. Even if they didn't win, I could still spend the duration in prison, months or possibly years, until the case was decided---but all it would really take was one or two days. By then Mavra and her scourge would find me and kill me. I knew from bloody experience that not even the strongest jail cell meant much to supernatural beings with murder in mind.
I still didn't know who was helping Trixie. If I didn't figure out who was behind this mess, they could keep going, keep on killing. If I was out of the picture, they'd get away with it, and the thought stirred up my rage once more. Emma's death had changed things. Before, there had been danger, but no one had died on my watch. Not for lack of trying, sure, but I'd been there in time to avert any deaths. But now Emma, whose worst crime probably had a lot to do with providing a decent living for her children, was lying there like so much meat, and her kids had no mommy.
I stared at Trixie for a hot, wild second, and the look choked her continued shrieks to whimpers. Trixie may have been female, but as of that moment she wasn't a woman anymore. She'd crossed a line. As far as I was concerned, she and her allies had forfeited their membership card to the humanity club when they killed Emma.
And I'd be damned if I was going to let them get away with it. But I couldn't do it from the inside of a cell.
I turned and hurried into an adjoining hall and toward the nearest door, but found it locked. I cursed and ran back, heading for the front door. Someone shouted but I ignored them. I sprinted the last twenty feet and was about to hit the door when it abruptly swung open.
Joan stepped in from the parking lot, panting. She wore old jeans and another flannel shirt over a tee. She had her keys in one hand, and a clawhammer in the other. She'd gone through the locked door and beaten me to the exit.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
I checked over my shoulder. I heard more shouts and running footsteps, heavy and fast. Bobby was running after me. If he tried to stop me here in the hall, I didn't think I could get away from him without hurting him, maybe badly. But when I took another step toward Joan she swallowed, her face pale with fright but her eyes determined, and lifted the clawhammer.
"Joan," I panted. "I have to go."
"No," she said. "I don't know what's going on, but I can't let you leave. I heard gunshots. Emma and Trish are hurt."
I didn't have time to discuss it. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, wrapped it around the handle of Trixie's gun to maybe preserve any prints, and lifted it, not quite pointing it at Joan. "There's not time to explain, but if you don't let me go it's going to keep happening. Someone else on the crew will get hurt tonight."
Her expression became angry. "Don't you dare threaten these people."
"It isn't a threat," I half screamed. I hated to do it, but I pointed the gun at her. "Move."
She started shaking but adjusted her grip on the hammer and shook her head.
"I mean it," I said, and took a step forward, radiating as much menace as I knew how.
Joan stared at the gun for a moment. Then an expression of resolution took the fear from her face. She lowered the hammer and took a step toward me, putting the barrel of the gun about six inches from her sternum. "I can't let you hurt anyone else. If you want to leave," she said quietly, "you'll have to kill me too."
I stared at her for a moment. Then I gripped the gun's barrel with my left hand, left the handkerchief around the handle, and offered it to her.
She stared at me. "What are you doing?"
"Take it," I said. "Trixie's fingerprints are on the handle, so don't touch it. She was the shooter. She's working with someone and they're responsible for all the deaths and injuries lately. But when the cops show, she'll lie to them, and it looks bad for me. If the police arrest and hold me, I won't be able to help you when they strike again tonight. I have to go."
She shivered and took the gun. She held it like it might bite her. "I don't understand."
"Joan. If I was the one who shot them, I'd have shot you too. Would I give you the gun if I'd done it? Just leave the murder weapon here for the cops?"
She hesitated, uncertain.
"Help me," I told her. There was a tense note of fear in my voice. "I need to get back to my place, get a few things, and go before the cops start watching it. Try to delay them. Just for five minutes, please. My God, it's going to happen again if I don't stop it."
She glanced over her shoulder at the door.
"Please, Joan," I said quietly. "God, please help me." Silence fell heavily, except for more footsteps, coming closer.
"I must be insane," she said. "I must be insane."
She stepped aside.
I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. It made me look guilty as hell, but if I wanted to keep breathing I didn't have much choice.
I ran.
I hit the parking lot at a run, piled into the Blue Beetle, and started it up. Behind me I heard the building's fire alarm go off, a deafening ringing of emergency bells. In addition to the police, and probably an ambulance, a bunch of fire trucks were about to show up as well. It was going to be one hell of a mess to sort through, at least for the CPD. By the time they made sure the building had been evacuated, seen to Trixie's wound, and taken statements from everyone in the building I could probably walk to Havana. She'd bought me at least ten minutes and probably more.
"Bless you, Joan," I muttered. I slapped the old car into reverse and cleared out, heading for my apartment. I was on the highway and gone before any sirens started converging. I drove carefully and under the limit, since getting pulled over for a citation could be fatal, and tried to think unobtrusive thoughts. But I found myself mulling over the details of the malocchio.
Trixie Vixen had been in the room with me when the last curse came down, and while she was clearly involved, it hadn't come from her. She'd known about it in great detail, though, and she'd known enough about magic to screw up the hurried wards I'd raised around the studio. Couple that with bragging about her power, and I figured she'd been involved in the actual magic at some point---she probably had handled part of the ritual that brought the curse down.
It made sense. Trixie was a jumbo-sized self-obsessed drama queen, complete with melodramatic dialogue, tantrums, and smug confidence that she was the center of the universe. The deaths and near-deaths from the malocchio had given new depths to the term freak accident. Swarms of bees, bridge-jumping cars, and electrocution in a puddle of one's own blood were some pretty ridiculous ways to kill someone. And that frozen turkey thing had come straight out of a cartoon.
They would have been funny if it hadn't been for the deaths.
But the curse had been different today. No winding, slow buildup, no murder weapons manufactured by the Acme Corporation, and no spillover onto other people nearby. Unlike the others, Emma's death had been the result of a surgical strike of focused, violent energy. The earlier editions of the curse had been more like a stone-headed hatchet than a scalpel. Today's curse had been far stronger than the ones I'd felt before, too.
And Trixie was the lowest common denominator.
Any kind of magic spell requires certain things to happen. You have to gather in the energy for whatever it is you're trying to do. Then you have to shape it with your thoughts and feelings into what you want it to do. And finally you have to release it in the direction you want it to go. To use a rough metaphor, you have to load the gun, aim it, and pull the trigger.
The problem was that with a curse that powerful, you were talking about a very big gun. Even with a ritual supplying the power for it, controlling that power was a task that not just anybody could do. Aiming and pulling the trigger were easier, but handling them all at once would be very difficult even for some wizards. That's why for the big projects you need three people working together, and it's the basis for the stereotype of three cackling witches casting spells in concert over a cauldron.
Trixie stormed off the set before the curse had come at Inari last night, and she hadn't been in the studio when it happened twelve hours prior to that. But she had been there with me today. Trixie the Drama Queen's personality was stamped all over the near-insane deaths, but I was damned sure that she wasn't a wizard.
Therefore, she'd had help. Someone would need to manage the energy, while Trixie shaped the curse into some kind of ludicrous death scenario. And someone else had to pull the trigger, channeling the spell to its intended recipient---also something that required a little more skill and focus than I was willing to believe Trixie had. So it would take three of them.
Three stregas.
Three former Mrs. Arturo Genosas.
The curse that killed Emma had been different. It had been a hell of a lot stronger, for one thing, and it had come at her a hell of a lot faster. And the death it had brought down on her had been efficient and quick. If Trixie wasn't with them, then it meant that either one of the others had some serious skill, or they'd been able to find a replacement witch who had been content with making the murder swift, clean, and simple.
Four killers working together. I was the only one around who could get in their way, and they knew I was getting closer to them. Under the circumstances, they had only one logical target for the next iteration of the spell, twelve hours from now.
Me.
That was assuming, of course, that Mavra and the vampire scourge---or possibly the man I'd hired to help me kill them---didn't take me out first. Maybe they wouldn't get their chance. See? That's the power of positive thinking.
I got back to my apartment and got out of the car just in time to see Mister flying down the sidewalk as fast as he could run. He looked both ways before crossing the street, and we entered the apartment together. I started gathering things and shoving them into a nylon gym bag, then opened the door down to the lab. Bob flowed out of Mister, who promptly shuffled over to the fire and collapsed into sleep.
"Well?" I called down as I finished packing the bag. "Did you find her?"
"Yeah, I found her," Bob called.
"About time," I said. I went down the ladder in a hurry, and flicked several candles alight with a muttered word. I got out a roll of parchment about a foot and a half square. Then I spread it onto the worktable in the lab's center and set a fountain pen beside it. "Where?"
"Not far from Cabrini Green," Bob said. "I got a good look around the place."
"Good. You've got permission to come out long enough to show me what you found."
He made a sighing sound but didn't complain. The usual cloud of glowing orange motes of light slid out of the skull's eye sockets, though perhaps it was a little less bright and swirly than usual. The cloud of light surrounded the pen, and it rose up of its own accord, then began scratching a drawing of the lair on the parchment. Bob's voice, a little indistinct now, said, "You aren't going to like this."
"Why not?"
"It's a shelter."
"A homeless shelter?"
"Yeah," Bob said. "Does some rehab work with drug addicts, too."
"Stars and stones," I murmured. "How could vampires take something that public?"
"There's no real threshold on a public building, so they didn't need an invitation. I think they probably came in from Undertown, right into the shelter's basement."
"How many people have they hurt?"
Bob's pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob's drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. "There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement," Bob said. "A few of the shelter's staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn't been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet."
"Any goons?"
"Big-time. Half a dozen Renfields, and each of them has a darkhound to boot."
"Renfields?" I asked.
"How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
"I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
"Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
"Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
"They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. "That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."
"Oh. Right." I rubbed at my eyes. "How do the vampires do their recruiting?"
"Mind-control magic," Bob said. "The usual."
"Always with the mental control," I muttered. "Let me make sure my facts are straight. Rough thralls just stand around looking blank until they get orders, right?"
"Yeah," Bob said, pen scratching. "Sort of like zombies, but they still have to go to the bathroom."
"So a Renfield is the fine version of thralldom?"
"No," Bob said. "A fine thrall is so controlled that they might not even know that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term."
"Like what DuMorne did to Elaine."
"Uh, I guess so, yeah. Like that. That kind of thing takes a subtle hand, though. Enthralling someone also requires a lot of time and a certain amount of empathy, neither of which has been readily available to Mavra."
"So?" I said, getting impatient. "A Renfield is a . . . ?"
Bob put the pen down. "It's the quick, dirty way for the Black Court to pick up some cheap muscle. Renfields have been crushed into total thralldom through brute psychic force."
"You're kidding," I said. "The kind of mental damage that would do to someone . . ."
"It destroys their sanity when it happens," Bob confirmed. "Makes them no good for anything but gibbering violence, but since that's pretty much what the vampires wanted to begin with it works out."
"How do you get them out of it?" I asked.
"You don't," Bob said. "The original Merlin couldn't undo it, and neither could any of the saints on record to have tried. A thrall can be freed, or recover over time. Renfields can't. From the moment their minds break they've got an expiration date."
"Ugh," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Renfields get more and more violent and deranged, and they self-destruct in a year or two. You can't fix them. For all practical purposes, they're already dead."
I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy. I glanced at Bob and said, "Are you sure about your facts?"
The cloud of orange light flowed tiredly back into the skull on its shelf. "Yes. DuMorne did quite a bit of research on the subject back in the day."
"Murphy isn't going to like this," I said. "Dismembering monsters with a chain saw is one thing. People are another."
"Yeah. People are easier."
"Bob," I growled. "They're people."
"Renfields aren't, Harry," Bob said. "They might still be moving around but they're pretty much gone."
"Boy, would it be fun to explain that to a courtroom," I said. I shuddered. "Or to the White Council, for that matter. If I take out the wrong person, I could wind up in jail---or in a White Council star chamber trial. Mavra's using the laws to protect herself against us. That's so backward."
"Screw the laws! Kill 'em all!" Bob said with weary cheer.
I sighed. "What about the dogs?"
"Your basic animal," Bob said. "But they've been infused with a portion of the same kind of dark power that the Black Court runs on. They're stronger, faster, and they don't feel pain. I once saw a darkhound rip its way through a brick wall."
"I bet they look like normal dogs afterward, huh?"
"And before-ward," Bob said.
"I guess if the cops are on my case when this is over, the SPCA can come along for the ride." I shook my head. "And on top of all that, Mavra is also keeping those hostages in the closet for food. She'll use them as human shields once fighting starts."
"Or as bait in a trap," Bob said.
"Yeah. Either way it makes things more complicated, even if we go in when Mavra and her scourge are sleeping." I looked at Bob's diagram of the lair. "Any security system?"
"Old electronic one," Bob said. "Nothing fancy. No problem for you to hex it down."
"Mavra will know that. She'll have sentries. We need to get past them."
"Forget it. Rough thralls and Renfields don't exactly make the most observant guardians in the world, but the darkhounds make up for them. If you want to sneak up, you'll have to be invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable. Don't count on a surprise attack."
"Dammit. What kind of weapons are they toting?"
"Uh, teeth. Mostly teeth, Harry."
I glared at him. "Not the dogs."
"Oh. The thralls have got some baseball bats. The Renfields have assault rifles, grenades, and body armor."
"Holy crap."
Bob leered at me from his shelf. "Awww.Izzums scared of the mean old machine guns?"
I glowered and flipped a pencil at the skull. "Maybe Murphy can figure out a way to do this without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, change of topic incoming. I need your opinion."
"Sure," Bob said. "Hit me."
I told him about the entropy curse and who I thought was behind it.
"Ritual magic," Bob confirmed. "More amateurs."
"Who sponsors ritual curses these days?" I asked.
"Well. In theory, a lot of Powers. In practice, though, the writings on most of them have been gathered up by the Council or the Venatori or someone else with some supernatural clout. Or else destroyed. It might take me some time to recall all the details."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I've got about six hundred years' worth of memories to sort through, and I'm exhausted," Bob said, his voice softer, as though coming from far away. "But you can be pretty sure that whoever is backing a death curse isn't real friendly."
"Tell me something I don't know," I said. "Hey, Bob."
"Hmm?"
"Is it possible to work some kind of spell that would last, I dunno, maybe twenty or thirty years?"
"Sure, if you spend enough money," Bob said. "Or if you're some kind of sentimental family sap."
"Sentimental? How's that?"
"Well, you can anchor magic to certain materials, right? Most of them are very expensive. Or you do the cheap kind like you use on your blasting rod and such, refresh them once in a while." The skull's eyes were growing rapidly dimmer. "But there are times when you can anchor it to a person."
"That isn't doable," I said.
"Not for you," Bob said. "Gotta be a blood relation. Blood in common, that kind of thing. Maybe if you had a kid. But I guess you'd need a girlfriend for that, huh."
I raked my hand through my hair, thinking. "And if you do it that way, the spell lasts? Even for that long?"
"Oh, sure," Bob said. "As long as the person you anchor it to is alive. Takes a tiny bit of energy off them to keep the spell from slowing down. That's why all the really nasty curses you hear about usually involve some family somewhere."
"So for instance," I said, "my mother could have laid out a curse on someone. And as long as I was alive, it would still be viable."
"Exactly. Or like that loup-garou guy. His own bloodline keeps the curse fueled." The skull's mouth opened in a yawn. "Anything else?"
I picked up the map and tucked it into a pocket. Bob was at the end of his resources, and I had no time to lose. I'd have to finish out this one on my own. "Get some rest and see what you can remember," I said. "I've got to clear out before the cops get here." I started to get up off my stool, and every muscle in my body complained to be moving again. I winced and said, "Painkillers. Definitely need painkillers too."
"Luck, Harry," Bob mumbled, and the glittering orange lights in the skull's eye sockets dimmed completely.
My body ached as I climbed back out of the lab. It was getting to be pretty good at aching, actually, by virtue of all the practice. I could ignore pain. I had a talent for ignoring it. That talent had been refined by the harsh lessons of life and the even harsher lessons of Justin DuMorne. But even so, the discomfort took its toll. My bed wasn't particularly luxurious, but it looked that way when I passed it on my way to the door.
I had my keys in my hand and my bag over one shoulder when the there was a rattling from the dim corner by the door. I paused, and a moment later my wizard's staff twitched, rattling again. It shuddered and twitched, thumping against the wall and the floor in staccato fits, too much rhythm to the sounds for them to be meaningless.
"Well," I muttered. "It's about damn time."
I picked up my staff, rapped one end hard on the floor, and focused my attention on the length of wood. I reached down through it, into the steady, heavy power of the earth beneath it, and then beat out my own short rhythm on the stone. My staff went still, then quivered sharply twice in my hand. I set out water and food for Mister, left, and locked my apartment behind me, then sealed the wards of protective energy around it.
By the time I was up the stairs, a heavy old Ford truck, a battered and tough-looking survivor of the Great Depression, pulled into the gravel parking lot at the side of the boardinghouse and crunched to a halt. It had Missouri plates. A gun rack at the back of the cab held an old double-barreled shotgun in its top slot, and a thick, stumpy old wizard's staff in the one beneath it.
The driver set the brake and swung open the door without letting the engine die. He was old but hale, a short, stocky man in overalls, heavy working boots, and a flannel shirt. He had broad hands with scarred knuckles, and wore a plain steel ring on each index finger. A few white hairs drifted around his sun-toughened scalp. He had dark eyes, a severely annoyed expression, and he snorted upon seeing me. "Hey, there, Hoss. You look like ten miles of bad---"
"Clichés," I interjected, smiling. The old man puffed out a breath of quiet laughter and offered me his hand. I shook it, and found myself newly appreciative of the calloused strength that belied the man's evident age. "Good to see you, sir. I was starting to feel a little swamped."
Ebenezar McCoy, senior member of the White Council, a sometime mentor of mine, and by all accounts I'd heard one hell of a strong wizard, clapped me on my biceps with his free hand. "You, in over your head? It's as if you're too stubborn to know when to run."
"We'd best get moving," I told him. "The police will be along shortly."
His frown knitted his shaggy white eyebrows together, but he nodded and said, "Hop in."
I got in the truck and slid my staff into the gun rack with Ebenezar's. The old man's staff was shorter and thicker than mine, but the carved sigils and formulae on it were noticeably similar, and the texture and color of the wood was identical. They'd both come from the same lightning-wounded tree, back on Ebenezar's land in the Ozarks. I shut the door and closed my eyes for a moment, while Ebenezar got the truck rolling.
"Your Morse is rusty," he said a few minutes later. "On my staff it sounded like you spelled it 'blampires." '
"I did," I said. "Black Court vampires. I just shortened it some."
Ebenezar tsked. "Blampires. That's the problem with you young people. Shortening all the words."
"Too many acronyms?" I asked.
"Ayuh."
"Well, then," I said. "I'm glad you took the time to RSVP me. I have a problem that needs to stay on the QT, but is rapidly going FUBAR. I'm sorry to call you LD through AT&T instead of using UPS, but I needed your help ASAP. I hope that's OK."
Ebenezar grunted, shot me a sidelong look, and said, "Don't make me kick your ass."
"No, sir," I said.
"Black Court," he said. "Who?"
"Mavra. You know her?"
"I know it," he said, the pronoun mildly emphasized. "Killed a friend of mine in the Venatori once. And she was in the Wardens' files. They suspect she's got a little skill at dark sorcery and consider her to be very dangerous."
"It's more than a little skill," I said.
The old man frowned. "Oh?"
"Yeah. I've seen her throw raw power around, and put up the best veil I've ever seen through. I also saw her using some long-range mental communications with her flunkies."
The old man frowned. "That's more than a little."
"Uh-huh. She's gunning for me. Only, you know, without the guns."
Ebenezar frowned, but nodded. "She holding that mess at the Velvet Room against you?"
"That's how it looks from here," I said. "She's taken two swings at me. But I found where she's laired, and I want to take her down before she gets to three."
"Makes sense," he said. "What's your plan?"
"I've got help. Murphy---"
"The police girl?" he interrupted.
"God, don't call her a girl," I said. "At least not to her face. Yeah, her, and a mercenary named Kincaid."
"Haven't heard of him," Ebenezar said.
"He works for the Archive," I said. "And he's good at killing vampires. I'm going in with those two, but we need someone standing by to get us out in a hurry."
"I'm your driver, eh?" he mused. "And I suppose you want someone to lock down Mavra's power, if she's got access to that much magic."
"It hadn't occurred to me, really," I lied. "But hey, if you are bored and want to do that to pass the time while you keep the car running, I don't mind."
The old man's teeth flashed in a wolfish smile. "I'll keep that in mind, Hoss."
"I don't have anything to use as a channel, though," I said. "Are you going to be able to target her without hair or blood or something?"
"Yes," Ebenezar said. He didn't elaborate how he'd do it. "Though I doubt I can get her down to nothing. I can prevent her from working anything big, but she might have enough left in her to be annoying."
"I'll take what I can get," I said. "But we need to move right now. She's already taken several people."
"Vampires are that way," Ebenezar agreed in a casual tone, but I saw the way his eyes narrowed. He didn't care for monsters like Mavra any more than I did. I could have kissed him.
"Thank you."
He shook his head. "What about her death curse?"
I blinked.
"You'd thought of that, right?" he asked.
"What death curse?" I stammered.
"Use your head, boy," Ebenezar said. "If she's got a wizard's power, she might well be able to level a death curse at you when she goes down."
"Oh, come on," I muttered. "That's no fair. She's already dead."
"Hadn't thought of that, eh?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Though I should have. Been a busy couple of days, what with dodging all the certain death coming at me from every direction. Not a second to spare for thinking. We have precious little time."
He grunted. "So where we going?"
I checked the time at a passing bank billboard. "A picnic."
What looked like a small army had invaded a portion of Wolf Lake Park and claimed it in the name of God and Clan Murphy. Cars filled the little parking lot nearby, and lined the nearest lane for a hundred yards in either direction. Summer had been generous with the rain for once, and all the trees in the park had put on glorious autumn colors so bright that if I scrunched up my eyes until my lashes blurred my vision they almost seemed to be afire.
In the park, a couple of gazebos had been stockpiled with tables and lots of food, and a pair of portable pavilions flanked them, giving shade to maybe a dozen people who had fired up their grills and were singeing meat. Music was playing from several different locations, the beats of the various songs stumbling into one another, and evidently someone had brought a generator, because there was an enormous TV set up out in the grass while a dozen men crowded around it, talking loudly, laughing, and arguing about what looked to be a college football game.
There were also a pair of volleyball nets and a badminton net, and enough Frisbees flying around to foul up radar at the local airports. A giant, inflatable castle wobbled dramatically as a dozen children bounced around on the inside of it, caroming off the walls and one another with equal amounts of enthusiasm. More kids ran in packs all over the place, and there must have been a dozen dogs gleefully racing one another and begging food from anyone who seemed to have some. The air smelled like charcoal, mesquite, and insect repellent, and buzzed with happy chatter.
I stood there for a minute, watching the festivities. Spotting Murphy in a crowd of a couple of hundred people wasn't easy. I tried to be methodical, sweeping the area with my gaze from left to right. I didn't spot Murphy, but as I stood there it occurred to me that a bruised and battered man better than six and a half feet tall in a black leather duster didn't exactly blend in with the crowd at the Murphy picnic. A couple of the men around the television had spotted me with the kind of attention that made me think that they were with the law.
Another man walking by with a white Styrofoam cooler on one shoulder noticed the men at the television and followed their gaze to me. He was in his mid-thirties and about an inch or two over average height. His brown hair was cut short, as was a neatly cropped goatee. He had the kind of build that dangerous men seem to develop---not enormous, pretty muscle, but the kind of lean sinew that indicated speed and endurance as well as strength. And he was a cop. Don't ask me how I could tell---it was just something about the way he held himself, the way he kept track of his surroundings.
He promptly changed course, walked up to me, and said, "Hey, there."
"Hey," I said.
His tone was overtly friendly, but I could taste the suspicion in it. "Mind if I ask what you're doing here?"
I didn't have time for this crap. "Yes."
He dropped the fake friendliness. "Listen, buddy. This is a family get-together. Maybe you could find another part of the park to stand around looking forboding."
"Free country," I said. "Public park."
"Which has been reserved by the Murphy family for the day," he said. "Look, buddy, you're scaring the kids. Walk."
"Or you'll call the cops?" I asked.
He set the cooler down and squared off facing me, just barely far enough away to avoid a sucker punch. He looked relaxed, too. He knew what he was doing. "I'll do you a favor and call the ambulance first."
By this time we were getting more attention from the football fans. I was frustrated enough to be tempted to push him a little bit more, but there was no sense in it. I assumed that the cops in the family were off today, but if I got beaten up someone might call in and find out about Emma's death. That was a good way to get bogged down in a holding cell and dead.
The guy faced me with confidence, even though I had a head and shoulders on him and outweighed him by forty or fifty pounds. He knew if anything happened, he'd have a ton of help.
Must be a nice feeling.
I lifted a hand by way of capitulation. "I'll go. I just need to speak to Karrin Murphy for a moment. Business."
His expression flickered with surprise that was quickly hidden. "Oh." He looked around. "Over there," he said. "She's reffing the soccer game."
"Thanks."
"Sure," the man said. "You know, it wouldn't kill you to be a little more polite."
"Why take chances," I muttered, turning my back on him and heading over to the makeshift soccer field. There were a bunch of rugrats too big for playground equipment and too young for pimples playing with what could kindly be construed as abundant enthusiasm while a few motherly types looked on. But I didn't see Murphy.
I began to turn around and start another sweep. At this rate I would have to ask someone for directions.
"Harry?" Murphy's voice called from behind me.
I turned around. My jaw dropped open. I was lucky none of the kids kicked their soccer ball into my exposed uvula. It took me a minute to stammer, "You're wearing a dress."
She glowered up at me. Murphy wasn't going to qualify under anyone's definition of willowy or svelte, but she had the build of a gymnast---tough, flexible, and strong. Generally speaking, being five-nothing, a hundred and nothing, and female had made her professional life less than pleasant, including getting her landed in charge of Special Investigations---a post that was the career equivalent to being exiled to the Bastille, or maybe left out for the ants.
Murphy had excelled at her new job, much to the distress of the folks who had gotten her put there. Partly, to be sure, because she had engaged the services of the only professional wizard in Chicago. But also because she was damned good at her job. She'd been able to inspire loyalty, to judge and employ her detectives' skills effectively, and to keep everyone together through some fairly terrifying times---both in my company and outside of it. She was smart, tough, dedicated, and everything else an ideal leader of a police division should be.
Except male. In a profession that was still very much a boys' club.
As a result, Murphy had made a number of accommodations to the male ego. She was an award-winning marksman, she had taken more than her share of martial-arts tournaments, and she continued to train ferociously, most of it with, among, and around cops. There was no one in the department who had any questions about whether or not Murphy could introduce the baddest bad guys to new vistas of physical pain in hand-to-hand, and no one who had survived the battle with the loup-garou would ever doubt her skill with firearms or her courage again. But being Murphy, she went the extra mile. She wore her hair shorter than she liked it, and she went almost entirely without makeup or adornments. She dressed functionally---never scruffy, mind you, but almost always very subdued and practical---and never, ever wore a dress.
This one was long, full, and yellow. And it had flowers. It looked quite lovely and utterly . . . wrong. Just wrong. Murphy in a dress. My world felt askew.
"I hate these things," she complained. She looked down, brushing at the skirt, and swished it back and forth a little. "I always did."
"Wow. Uh, why are you wearing it, then?"
"My mom made it for me." Murphy sighed. "So, I thought, you know, maybe it would make her happy to see me in it." She took a whistle from around her neck, promoted one of the kids to referee, and started walking. I fell into pace beside her.
"You found them," she said.
"Yeah. Our driver is here, and I called Kincaid about twenty minutes ago. He'll have the hardware nearby and waiting for us." I took a deep breath. "And we need to move in a hurry."
"Why?" she asked.
"I'm pretty sure your brothers and sisters in law enforcement are going to want to sit me down for a long talk. I'd rather they didn't until I've closed a couple of accounts." I gave her a brief rundown of Emma's murder.
"Christ," she said. After a few steps she added, "At least this time around I heard it from you first. I've got a change of clothes in the car. What else do I need to know?"
"Tell you on the way," I said.
"Right," she said. "Look, I promised my mom I'd come see her before I left. My sister wanted to talk to me about something. Two minutes."
"Sure," I said, and we veered toward one of the pavilions. "You have a big family. How many?"
"Couple of hundred the last time I looked," she said. "There, in the white blouse. That's mother. The girl in the tight . . . everything is my baby sister, Lisa."
"Baby sister has pretty legs," I noted. "But those shorts must be a little binding."
"The clothes keep the blood from reaching her brain," Murphy said. "At least that's my theory." She stepped under the pavilion, smiling, and said, "Hi, Mom!"
Murphy's mom was taller than her daughter, but she had that kind of matronly plumpness that comes with age, pasta, and a comfortable life. Her hair was dark blond, threaded through with grey that she had made no effort at all to conceal, and it was held back off her face with a jade comb. She was wearing a white blouse, a floral print skirt, and tinted sunglasses. She turned around to face Murphy as we walked up, and her face lit for a moment. "Karrin," she said, her tone warm and wary.
Murphy held out her hands as she walked over to her mom, and the two clasped hands and hugged. There was a sort of stiffness to the gesture that suggested ritual, formality, and less-than-pleasant emotional undercurrents. They batted a few chatty words back and forth, and while they did I noted something odd. There had been at least a dozen people under the pavilion when we came in, but most of them had wandered away. In fact, there was a widening circle of open space clearing out around the pavilion.
Murphy didn't miss it, either. She glanced back at me, and I quirked an eyebrow at her. She twitched one shoulder in a minimal shrug, and went back to talking with her mom.
A minute later only five people were within twenty or thirty feet: me, Murphy, her mom, little sister, Lisa, and the man whose lap she was draped across. The guy with the cooler. They were behind Murphy and me, and I turned my body halfway so that I could look at them without totally ignoring Murphy and her mom.
Lisa reminded me a lot of Murphy, had Murphy been an estrogen princess rather than a warrior princess. Blond hair, fair skin, a pert nose, and cornflower blue eyes. She wore a scarlet baby-doll T-shirt with the Chicago Bulls' team logo stretched out over her chest. Her shorts had been blue jeans at some point, but they had come down with a bad case of spandex envy. She wore flip-flops and dangled them from her painted toes as she sat across the lap of the man I presumed to be the fiancé Murphy had mentioned.
He made quite a contrast with Lisa. He was a bit older than her, for one. Not double her age or anything, but definitely older. He was being careful not to let any expression show on his face, and it made me think that he was worried about something.
"Mom," Murphy was saying. "This is my friend Harry. Harry, this is my mother, Marion."
I put on my best smile for Mother Murphy and stepped forward, offering her my hand. "Charmed, ma'am."
She shook my hand and gave me a calculating look. Her grip reminded me of Murphy's---her hands were small, strong, and had been hardened by work. "Thank you, Harry."
"And this is my baby sister, Lisa," Murphy said, turning to face her for the first time. "Lisa, this is---" Murphy froze, her words dying into a choking gasp. "Rich," she said after a second, her voice shaking with a tide of emotion. "What are you doing here?"
He murmured something to Lisa. The girl slipped off his lap, and he stood slowly up. "Hello, Karrin. You're looking well."
"You miserable son of a bitch," Murphy spat. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Karrin," Murphy's mom snapped. "There is no place for that kind of language here."
"Oh, please!" Lisa cried.
"I don't have to put up with that, Karrin," Rich growled.
Murphy clenched her hands into fists.
"Whoa, whoa, people," I said. I must have been feeling suicidal, because I took a step forward and placed myself in the middle of the circle of angry stares. "Come on, guys. At least let me get introduced to everyone before the fighting starts, so I'll know who to duck."
There was a second of heavy silence, and then Rich snorted out a quiet laugh and subsided back into his chair. Lisa folded her arms. Murphy tensed up a little, but with her it was a good sign. She always got that deadly relaxed look to her stance when she was about to kick someone's ass.
"Thank you, Harry," Mama Murphy said in a loud tone. She stepped forward with a paper plate laden with a hamburger and passed it to me. "It's nice to know there is another adult present. Why don't we get everyone introduced, Karrin."
I checked the burger. It had everything on it but cheese. Just the way I liked it. I was favorably impressed with Mama Murphy. And I was starving, too. More bonus points.
Murphy stepped up beside me. "Right. Introductions. Harry, this is my baby sister, Lisa." She glared daggers at the man. "And this is Rich. My second husband."
Oh, dear Lord.
Murphy stared from her mom to her sister to Rich. "I know we haven't talked in a while, Mother. So let's get caught up. Why don't we start with why Lisa is engaged to my ex-husband and none of you even bothered to tell me?"
Lisa lifted her chin. "It isn't my fault if you're too much of a bitch to get a man to stay with you. Rich wanted an actual woman, which is why you aren't involved with him anymore. And I didn't tell you because it was none of your damned business."
"Lisa," scolded Mama Murphy. "That is not the kind of language a lady uses."
"And those aren't the kind of clothes a lady wears," Murphy said, her voice tart. "She might as well talk like a whore, too."
"Karrin!" Mama Murphy protested, her voice shocked.
There wasn't time for this, either. I stepped up next to Murphy and gave Rich a half-desperate look.
"Ohhhhh-kay," Rich said. He stood up from his chair, slipping an arm around Lisa's shoulders. "This is no good. Come on, baby. Time for a walk until you cool off. Let's go find a beer."
"Murph," I said. I leaned down enough to mutter at her ear, "Remember. No time."
Murphy folded her arms, her expression unrepentant, but at least she turned away from her sister. Rich and Murphy Spice walked off toward the other pavilion.
Mother Murphy waited until they were gone before she faced us, her frown speaking volumes of disapproval. "For goodness' sake, Karrin. You aren't children anymore."
Explosion averted, at least for the moment. I seized the opportunity to eat the hamburger.
Oh. My. God. For food this good, I'd marry Murphy just for her mom's cooking on holidays.
"I can't believe it," Murphy said. "Rich. I thought he was working in New Orleans."
"He is," Mama Murphy said. "Lisa went down for Mardi Gras. Apparently he had to arrest her."
"Mother," Murphy protested. "You let her go to Mardi Gras? I had to sneak out of the house to go to the prom."
Mother Murphy sighed. "Karrin, you're the oldest child. She's the youngest. All parents get a little more relaxed along the way."
"Apparently," Murphy said, her voice bitter, "that includes tolerating felonies like providing alcohol to a minor. She's underage for beer until next month."
"It's always about work, isn't it," Mama Murphy said.
"This has nothing to do with work," Murphy shot back. "Mother, he's twice her age. How could you?"
I partook of near-divine hamburger and kept my head down, and felt wise for doing so.
"In the first place, dear, it isn't up to me. It's your sister's life. And he isn't twice her age. Worse things have happened." She sighed. "We all felt Lisa should be the one to talk to you, but you know how she hates confronting you."
"She's a gutless little harlot, you mean."
"That will be enough, young lady," Mama Murphy said, her voice crackling with heat and steel. "Your sister found a man who genuinely loves her. I might not be entirely confident about the notion, but she's old enough to make her own choices. And besides, you know how much I always liked Rich."
"Yes, I know," Murphy growled. "Can we talk about something else?"
"All right."
"Where are the boys?"
Mama Murphy rolled her eyes and nodded at the group around the big television out on the grass. "Somewhere in there. You can hear them yelling if you listen."
Murphy snorted. "I'm surprised Rich isn't watching the game, too."
"Karrin, I know you're still angry with him. But it's hardly the man's fault that he wanted to start a family."
"That was just a rationalization, Mother," Murphy said. "What he wanted was for me to stay home so that I wouldn't make him look bad at work."
"I'm sorry you still think that," Mama Murphy replied. "But you're cheapening him. It isn't as though he could start a family by himself. He wanted a woman willing to do that with him. You made it clear that you didn't."
"Because I didn't want to give up what I do."
"There are other people in the family who have taken up your father's duties," Mother Murphy said, her voice bitter. "There's no need for you to do it."
"That isn't why I became a cop."
Mother Murphy shook her head and sighed. "Karrin. Your brothers are all serving. They're taking their time in settling down. I don't want to tell you what to do with your life---"
Murphy snorted.
"---but I do want to have the chance to hold my grandchildren while I'm still young enough and strong enough to do it. Rich wants to settle down, and your sister wants to be the woman he does it with. Is that such a bad thing?"
"I just can't see you flying to New Orleans every month to visit them."
"Of course not, dear," Mama Murphy replied. "I don't have that kind of money. That's why they'll be settling down here."
Murphy's mouth dropped open.
"Rich has already put in for his transfer and had it approved. He'll be working for the FBI office here in Illinois."
"I don't believe this," Murphy grated. "My own sister. Here. With Rich. And you're just going to keep throwing this in my face."
"Not everything is about you, Karrin," her mother said, her voice prim. "I'm sure we can all be adults about this."
"But he's my ex-husband."
"Whom you divorced," Murphy's mother replied. But the harsh words were delivered in a gentle tone. "For goodness' sake, Karrin, you've already made it clear that you didn't want him. Why should you care if someone else does?"
"I don't," Murphy protested. She waved a vague hand. "But Lisa isn't just 'someone." '
"Ah," said Mama Murphy.
Just then Murphy's cell phone chirped. She checked it, frowned, and said, "Excuse me." Then she walked twenty or thirty feet away from me, out into the sunshine, head bent to the phone.
"That will be work, I assume," Mama Murphy said to me. "You're the private investigator, aren't you?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I saw you on Larry Fowler."
I sighed. "Yeah."
"Is it true that he's suing you for demolishing his studio?"
"Yeah. And his car. I had to get a lawyer and everything. The lawyer says that Fowler's guy won't have a case, even in civil court, but it's expensive and it's taking forever."
"The legal system can be that way," Mama Murphy agreed. "I'm sorry my daughter dragged you into our family squabble."
"I volunteered," I said.
"And now you regret it?"
I shook my head. "Hell---uh, heck, no. She's been there for me too many times, Mrs. Murphy. I don't know if you're aware of how dangerous her job can be. The kinds of things she faces in Special Investigations can be especially difficult. And disturbing. Your daughter saves lives. There are people who would be dead right now if she hadn't been there. I'm several of them."
Mama Murphy was quiet for a moment before she said, "Before they established Special Investigations, the department routinely handed all those cases to senior detectives in the Thirteenth Precinct. The cases were referred to as black cat investigations. The detectives as black cats."
"I didn't know that," I said.
She nodded. "My husband was a black cat for twelve years."
I frowned. "Murphy never told me that."
"I never told her. And Karrin never knew her father very well," Mama Murphy said. "He was away so much of the time. And he died when she was only eleven."
"Line of duty?"
Momma Murphy shook her head. "The work got to him. He . . . he grew distant and started to drink too much. And one night at his desk he took his own life." She faced me and said, her voice tired and sad, "You see, Harry, my Collin never spoke of it, but I can read between lines as well as anyone. I know what my daughter is facing."
That hung in the air between us for a moment.
"She's good," I said. "Not just skilled. She's got a good heart, Mrs. Murphy. I'd sooner trust her with my life than anyone else in the world. It isn't fair for you to give her a hard time about her job."
Mama Murphy's eyes sparkled, though they were also a little sad. "She thinks she's protecting me from the awful truth, Harry, when I complain about her work and she keeps things secret in reply. It makes her happy to know that her mother is not even aware of such dangerous things. I could never take that away from her."
I arched an eyebrow at Mama Murphy. Then smiled.
"What?" she asked.
"I see where she gets it," I said.
Murphy turned back to me, her expression hard, and beckoned me. I went over to her.
"It's Kincaid," she said, her voice held tight and quiet. "He says to tell you he's at the shelter and the Red Cross has shown up."
"What? Hell's bells."
She nodded. "They do a blood drive every three months out of the shelter's basement."
Where the Black Court was. Where the coffins and Renfields and darkhounds were. Mavra and her brood would never allow themselves to be seen. The Red Cross volunteers were as good as dead if they went in the basement. "Oh, crap."
"I'm calling it in," she said.
"No," I said, alarmed. "You can't do that."
"Like hell I can't," she said. "People are in danger."
"And they're going to be in more danger if this escalates," I said. "Tell Kincaid to try to delay the Red Cross people. We'll get down there and hit Mavra right now, before the volunteers can put themselves in the line of fire."
Murphy scowled up at me, her voice rising a little. People started to give us surreptitious looks. "Don't tell me how to do my job."
"This isn't your job, Murph," I said. "Do you remember when I told you that I'd tell you everything? Do you remember that you agreed to trust my judgment? That you wouldn't go calling in the cavalry on these things?"
Her expression became even more furious. "Do you think that I'm too stupid to know how to handle this?"
"I think that you're way too worked up already. And that you can't let this family thing get in the way of making the right decision. Getting the mortal authorities involved would be bad for everyone, Murph. Bad for you. Bad for SI. You might win the day, but when these things hit back, your people are going to suffer."
For a second I thought she was going to strangle me. "What do you expect me to do?"
I got in her face, and I didn't care if she avoided my eyes or not. "I expect you to listen to the person who knows what he's talking about. I expect you to trust me, Murph, the way I trusted you. Get on the damn phone and tell Kincaid what I said and ask where to meet him. Then we take care of business."
The eye contact got more intense, but Murphy shivered and broke it off before it could go any deeper. "Fine," she said. "I'll do it. But don't think I won't kick your ass over this later. Now back off before you blow up my phone."
I did, returning to the pavilion.
Mama Murphy regarded me speculatively. "Work?"
I nodded.
"That was quite an argument," she said.
I shrugged.
"It would seem that you won it."
I sighed and said wryly, "And I'll pay for it later."
"You'll both be leaving, then?"
"Yeah."
Mama Murphy looked back and forth between me and Murphy for a moment and then said, "Let me get you another burger before you go."
I blinked at her.
She assembled food, including a second burger for Murphy, and passed me the paper plates. She frowned at my hands, then up at my face, and asked, "Will you take care of my daughter?"
"Yes, ma'am. Of course I will."
Her blue eyes flashed fiercely, and she said, "Let me get you a piece of cake."
Murphy grabbed a gym bag out of her car and then followed me to Ebenezar's truck. She stopped about twenty feet short of it and said, "You're kidding me."
"Come on," I said. "You want to show up where there might be some trouble in your own car? That'd be nice for responding emergency units to see. So get in."
"What does it run on, coal?"
Ebenezar stuck his bald head out of the window, scowling. "No idea. Mostly I just turn it loose to hunt down dinner for itself."
"Murph," I said. "This is Ebenezar McCoy. Ebenezar, this is Karrin Murphy."
"You," Ebenezar said without approval. "I heard you've given the boy a hard time."
Murphy scowled. "Who the hell are you?"
"My teacher," I told her in a quieter voice. "A friend."
She glanced at me, then pursed her lips. She didn't miss the shotgun or the staff in the truck. "You're coming along to help?"
"As long as you don't think I'm too old, girlie," he drawled, heavy on the sarcasm.
"You got a driver's license? You driven Chicago streets lately?"
The old wizard scowled at her.
"Thought so," she said. "Move over."
He sputtered. "What?"
"I'm driving," she said. "So move."
I sighed. "Better move over, sir," I told Ebenezar. "We're in a hurry."
Murphy's gym bag thumped onto the ground and she stared at me with her mouth open.
"What?" I asked.
"Sir?" she said, her voice incredulous.
I scowled at her and ducked my head.
She picked up her bag, blinked a couple of times, and said, in her professionally politest tones, "If you don't mind, Mister McCoy, I know the streets better, and there are lives at stake."
Ebenezar's scowl had been half subverted by a small smile, but he said, "Bah. I'm too old to see the street signs anyway." He opened the door and started scooting. "Get in, get in. Come on, Hoss; we ain't got time to wait on you."
Murphy did not go so far as to slap her magnetic cop light on the top of the truck, but she got us to a parking garage near Mavra's lair in a big hurry. She knew the streets of the old town as well as anyone I'd ever seen, and she regarded niceties like red lights, one-way streets, and right-of-way with an almost magnificent lack of concern. Ebenezar's old truck kept up with her gamely enough, though I found my head bouncing off the roof a couple of times.
I told Murphy what I'd learned about the vampires' lair on the way.
Murphy shook her head. "Damn. This isn't what I expected. That they'd take something right in the middle of so many people."
"Me either," I said. "But that only means we need to move sooner instead of later. The longer the vamps are there, the more of those hostages they're going to bleed out, and the greater the risk of one of their Renfields snapping and opening up on pedestrians with an assault rifle."
"Assault rifles," Murphy said. "And hostages. Jesus, Harry, people could die."
"No could about it. They're already dying," I replied. "At least three bodies already. And the Renfields are just a matter of time."
"What if you're wrong?" Murphy said. "Do you really expect me to charge in guns blazing against people who might or might not already be dead? I have an obligation to protect citizens, not to sacrifice them."
My teeth clacked together as the truck went over a heavy bump. "These are the Black Court. They kill, and they do it frequently. Not only that, but they can propagate their kind more rapidly than any other vampire. If we let a nest of them go unmolested, we could potentially have dozens of them in a few days. In two weeks there could be hundreds. Something has to be done, and now."
Murphy shook her head. "But it doesn't mean it needs to be vigilante work. Harry, give me three hours to establish probable cause and I'll have every cop and every SWAT team in two hundred miles ready to take on that nest."
"And you'll tell them what, exactly?" I said. " ' Basement full of vampires' is not going to cut it, and you know it. And if they go in with blinders on, cops will get killed."
"And if it's us?" Murphy asked. "What then? We kick down the door, shoot anything standing, and then make like we're the Flying Van Helsings? A direct assault on a wary target is one of the best ways in the world to get killed."
"So we figure something out," I said. "We get a plan."
Murphy shot me a look past Ebenezar, who evidently had decided to stay out of it. "This isn't like the Wal-Mart plan with the marbles, is it?"
"I'll tell you when I know. Let's get there and see if we can find out first. Maybe Kincaid will have something."
"Yeah," Murphy said without much hope. "Maybe. Here, this is where Kincaid is meeting us."
It wasn't a pleasant neighborhood. The city had been working on urban renewal projects for decades, but the lion's share of the money had gone to restore higher-profile, more infamous neighborhoods, such as Cabrini Green. In that time, many neighborhoods that had been borderline steadily eroded, and had usurped the infamous-neighborhood crown. The slum is dead. Long live the slum.
I'd seen worse, but not many. Tall buildings and narrow alleys choked out a lot of the sunshine. Most windows below the third or fourth floor had been boarded up. Ground level commercial properties were largely vacant. The storm drains were clogged with litter and other urban detritus, most of the streetlights were out, and graffiti and gang signs had been spray-painted everywhere. The air smelled like mildew, garbage, and exhaust. The residents of the neighborhood moved with brisk purpose, confidence, and flat eyes as they walked, doing everything they could to indicate by body language that they were not good targets for assault or robbery.
I spotted a drug house in the first ten seconds of looking around. The burned-out hulk of an abandoned car had been stripped for parts before it had been set on fire, and I had a notion that Murphy was the first cop to visit in the past several weeks.
But there was something missing.
Bums. Transients. Homeless folk. Winos. Bag ladies. Even in broad daylight there should have been someone collecting cans, panhandling change, or shambling along drinking from a bottle still covered with a paper bag.
But there wasn't. Everyone moving was getting from one place to another, not eking out a living from the environment.
"Look kind of quiet to you here?" Murphy asked, voice tight.
"Yeah," I said.
"They've been killing," she said, almost spitting the words.
"Maybe. Maybe not," Ebenezar said.
I nodded. "There's dark power at work here. People sense that, even if they don't know what it is. You're feeling it now."
"What do you mean?"
I shrugged. "The presence of dark magic. It makes you feel nervous and angry. If you forced yourself to calm down and tried to sense it, you could feel it. It leaves a kind of stain around it."
"Stinks," rumbled Ebenezar.
"What does that have to do with missing street people?" Murphy asked.
"You've been here about three minutes, and the power bothers you already. Imagine living in it. Getting a little more afraid every day. Angrier. More demoralized. People get rattled enough to leave, even if they don't understand why. Over the long term this kind of power breeds its own wasteland."
"You mean that the vampires have been here for a while?" she asked.
"To have this much effect, it's been days at least," I said, nodding.
"More like two weeks." Ebenezar grunted with assurance. "Maybe three."
"God," Murphy said, shivering. "That's scary."
"Yeah. If they've been here that long, it means Mavra has something in mind."
She frowned. "You mean that this vampire came here and then chose when to make you aware of its presence? This could be a trap."
"It's possible. Paranoid, but possible."
Her mouth tightened into a line. "You didn't mention that at breakfast."
"We're doing battle with the living dead, Murph. Expect the occasional curveball."
"Are you patronizing me now?"
I shook my head. "No. Honest. Where's Kincaid?"
"Second level of this parking garage," Murphy said.
"Stop on the first level," I told her.
"Why?"
"He doesn't know about Ebenezar, and I don't want to spook him. We'll walk up and meet him."
Ebenezar nodded to us and said, "Good call, Hoss. Decent gunman can be twitchy. I'll give you a minute, then drive on up."
Murphy stopped the truck and we got out. I waited until we were several paces from the truck before I lowered my voice and said, "I know. You're afraid."
She glared at me, and started to deny it. But she knew better, and shrugged one shoulder instead. "Some."
"So am I. It's okay."
"I thought I was over this," she said. Her jaw tightened. "I mean, the night terrors are gone. I can sleep again. But it isn't like before, Harry. I used to get scared, but I'd be excited too. I would have wanted to do it. But I don't want this. I'm so afraid that I'm about to throw up. Which sucks."
"You're scared because you've learned things," I told her. "You know the kinds of things you're fighting," I said. "You know what could happen. You'd be an idiot if you weren't afraid. I wouldn't want someone with me who didn't have enough sense to be worried."
She nodded, but asked, "What if I freeze up on you again?"
"You won't."
"It could happen."
"It won't," I said.
"You sure?"
I winked at her and twirled my staff in one hand. "I wouldn't be betting my life on it otherwise. You've got my back, Murph. Shut up and dance."
She nodded, her expression remote. "There's nothing we can do to stop these things."
The we had changed. She meant the police. "No. Not without getting a lot of good cops killed."
"Those people with the vampires. These Renfields. We'll have to kill some of them. Won't we?"
"Probably," I said in a quiet voice.
"It isn't their fault they were taken."
"I know. We'll do whatever we can to avoid killing them. But from what I know about them, they're too far gone to leave us many options."
"Do you remember Agent Wilson?" Murphy asked.
"The Fed you shot off my back."
Murph's expression flickered, though it wasn't quite a flinch. "Yeah. He went outside the law to bring down the people he thought were beyond its reach, and now we're making that same choice."
"No, we aren't," I said.
"No? Why not?"
"Because they aren't people."
Murphy frowned.
I thought about it. "Even if they were, assuming they were still as dangerous and untouchable, would it change anything?"
"I don't know," she said. "That's what scares me."
For as long as I'd known her, Murphy had upheld the law. She had a good head on her shoulders when it came to the nature of good and evil and of right and wrong, but her first duty had been to the law. She'd believed in it, that it was the best way to help and protect her fellow man. She'd had faith that the power of the law, while imperfect, was absolute---almost holy. It was a rallying point in her soul, a foundation block of her strength.
But several years of staring out at the darkness had showed her that the law was both blind and deaf to some of the nastier parts of the world. She'd seen things that moved in the shadows, perverting the purpose of the law to use it as a weapon against the people she had sworn to defend. Her faith had taken a beating, or she wouldn't even have considered stepping outside the boundaries of her authority. And she knew it.
That knowledge cost her dearly. There weren't any tears in her eyes, but I knew that they were there, on the inside, while she mourned the death of her faith.
"I don't know the right thing to do," she said.
"Neither do I," I said. "But someone has to do something. And we're the only ones around. Either we choose to take a stand now or we choose to stand around at all the funerals regretting it later."
"Yeah," Murphy said. She took a deep, almost meditative breath. "I guess I needed to hear that said out loud." A small but violent light flared to life behind her eyes. "Let's go. I'm ready."
"Murph," I said.
She tilted her head and looked at me. My lips suddenly felt very dry.
"You look good in the dress."
Her eyes shone. "Really?"
"Oh, yeah."
The eye contact got dangerously intense and I shied off. Murphy let out a low, quiet laugh and touched the side of my face. Her fingers were warm, the touch light and delicate. "Thank you, Harry."
We came up to the second level of the garage together, walking with businesslike strides. The lights were out. In the depths of shadows I could see two vans parked side by side. The first one was a beat-up old fossil of a vehicle, born in an era when people would have thought it absurd to make a van "mini." A Red Cross decal on the driver's door proclaimed its identity.
The second was a white rental van. We approached, and Kincaid slid the side door open. I couldn't see him very well in the shadows. "Didn't take long," he commented. "You walk fast."
"Wheelman's here," I said. "He's coming up in an old Ford truck in a minute. Wanted to let you know first."
Kincaid glanced at the ramp and nodded. "Fine. What do we know?"
I told him. He took it all in without speaking, glanced once at the map Bob had drawn me, and said, "Suicide."
"Eh?" I said.
Kincaid shrugged. "We go in there guns blazing, we're going to get burned two feet from the door."
"I tried to tell him that," Murphy said.
"So we get a plan," I said. Any suggestions?"
"Blow up the building," Kincaid said without looking up. "That works good for vampires. Then soak what's left in gasoline. Set it on fire. Then blow it all up again."
"For future reference, I was sort of hoping for a suggestion that didn't sound like it came from that Bolshevik Muppet with all the dynamite."
"Check," Kincaid said.
I peered at the van. "Hey. Where are the Red Cross people?"
"I killed and dismembered them," Kincaid said.
I blinked.
Kincaid stared at me for a second. "That was a joke."
"Right," I said. "Sorry. Now where are they?"
"On their lunch break. They somehow got the idea that I was a cop and that they would interfere with a sting if they went into the shelter. I gave them a C-note and told them to go grab lunch."
"They believed you?" I asked.
"They somehow got the idea that I had a badge."
Murphy eyed Kincaid. "That's the kind of thing that's illegal to own."
Kincaid turned to dig in the white van. "Sorry if I came afoul of your sensibilities, Lieutenant. Next time I'll let them walk in and get killed. I added the hundred to your bill, Dresden." A dark jacket with the Red Cross logo on the shoulder flew out of the van and hit Murphy in the chest. She caught it, and a second later caught the matching baseball cap that followed. "Put them on," Kincaid said. "Our ticket to get close enough to get the drop on them. Maybe even get some walking targets out of the way."
"Where did you get those?" I asked.
Kincaid leaned out of the van enough to arch an eyebrow at me. "Found 'em."
"Kincaid," Murphy said, "Give me the keys to the Red Cross van."
"Why?"
"So I can change," Murphy said, her voice tight.
Kincaid shook his head. "You got nothing everyone here hasn't seen before, Lieutenant," he said. After a moment he glanced at me and said, "Unless . . ."
"Yes," I said through clenched teeth. "I've seen that sort of thing. It's been a while, but I dimly remember."
"Just checking," Kincaid said.
"Now give her the damned keys."
"Yassuh, Massah Dresden," he said laconically, and tossed a ring with only two keys at Murphy. She caught it, let out a growling sound, and stalked over to the Red Cross van. She opened it and climbed in.
"Not bad," Kincaid said, low enough that Murphy wouldn't have heard him. He kept rooting around in the minivan, evidently without feeling any need for a light. "Her in a dress, I mean. Makes you notice she's a woman."
"Shut up, Kincaid."
I could hear the wolfish smile, even if I couldn't see it. "Yassuh. Now don't look. I'm getting dressed and I blush easy."
"Blow me, Kincaid," I growled.
"Don't you owe me enough already?" I heard him moving around. "You give any more thought to shutting down Mavra's sorcery?"
"Yeah," I said. Ebenezar's truck growled as it changed gears. "Our wheelman is going to handle it."
"You sure he can?"
"Yeah," I said. "Here he comes."
Kincaid stepped out of the van with guns strapped all over attachment points on a suit of black ballistic body armor that looked a generation or two ahead of the latest police-issue. He had one set of big-ass revolvers, a couple of those tiny, deadly machine guns that shoot so fast they sound like a band saw, and a bunch of automatics. They all came in matching pairs, presumably because he had an audition for the lead in a John Woo movie later that day.
Kincaid donned a second Red Cross jacket to help hide all the weaponry, and added his own matching cap like Murphy's. He watched Ebenezar's truck coming, and said, "So who is this guy?"
Just then Ebenezar's truck rolled up, its headlights in our eyes until it had all but passed. "So, Hoss," Ebenezar was saying through the open window. "Who is this hired gun?"
The old man and the mercenary saw one another and stared at each other from maybe seven or eight feet apart. Time stopped for one of those frozen, crystallized instants.
And then both of them went for their guns.
Kincaid was faster. One of the guns he'd had on him got to his hand so quick it might have been teleported there from under his coat. But even as he raised the gun toward the old wizard, there was a flash of emerald light from a plain steel ring on Ebenezar's right hand. I felt a low, harsh hum in the air and a surge of dizziness, and Kincaid's pistol ripped its way out of his fingers and shot away into the shadows of the parking garage.
I swayed on my feet. Kincaid recovered before I did and a second gun came out from under the Red Cross jacket. I looked up to see Ebenezar settle the old shotgun's stock against his shoulder, both barrels squarely on Kincaid's head.
"What the hell!" I blurted, and threw myself between them. It put Kincaid's pistol in line with my spine and Ebenezar's shotgun in line with my head, which seemed like a positive at the moment. As long as I was in front of the weapons, the two couldn't get a clean shot at each other. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded.
"Hoss," snarled Ebenezar, "you don't know what you're dealing with. Get down."
"Put the shotgun down," I said. "Kincaid, put the pistol away."
Kincaid's voice, behind me, sounded no different than it had at breakfast. "That sounds like a fairly low-percentage move for me, Dresden. No offense."
"I told you," Ebenezar said, his voice different---cold and terrible and hard. I'd never heard the old man speak that way before. "I told you if I ever saw you again, I'd kill you."
"Which is one reason you haven't seen me," Kincaid answered. "There's no point to this. If we start shooting, the kid's going to get hit. Neither of us has an interest in that."
"I'm supposed to believe you give a damn about him?" Ebenezar snarled.
"Half a damn, maybe," Kincaid said. "I sort of like him. But what I meant was there's no profit for either of us in killing him."
"Put the damned guns down!" I choked. "And stop talking about me like I'm a kid who isn't here."
"Why are you here?" Ebenezar demanded, ignoring me.
"I'm a hired gun," Kincaid said. "Dresden hired me. Do the math, Blackstaff. Of all people you should know how it goes." The tone of Kincaid's voice changed to something thoughtful. "But the kid doesn't know what we do. Does he?"
"Harry, get down," Ebenezar said, speaking to me again.
"You want me down?" I said. I met Ebenezar's eyes and said, "Then I want your word you aren't going to open up on Kincaid until we've talked."
"Dammit, boy. I'm not giving my word to that---"
Anger made my voice lash out, hard and sharp. "Not him. Give me your word, sir. Now."
The old man's gaze wavered and he lifted his forward hand from the shotgun, fingers spread in a conciliatory gesture. He let the barrel ease down. "All right. My word to you, Hoss."
Kincaid exhaled slowly through his teeth. I felt his weight shift behind me.
I glanced back. His gun was half lowered. "Yours too, Kincaid."
"I'm working for you right now, Dresden," he said. "You already have it."
"Then put the gun away."
To my surprise, he did, though his empty eyes remained fastened on Ebenezar.
"What the hell was that about?" I demanded.
"Defending myself," Kincaid said.
"Don't give me that crap," I said.
Anger touched Kincaid's voice. It was a cold thing that lined his words with frost. "Self-defense. If I'd known your fucking wheelman was Blackstaff McCoy, I'd have been in another state by now, Dresden. I want nothing to do with him."
"It's a little late for that now," I told him. I glared at Ebenezar. "What are you doing?"
"Taking care of a problem," the old man said. He kept his eyes on Kincaid while he drew the gun back into the truck. "Harry, you don't know this"---his mouth twisted with bitter revulsion---"this thing. You don't know what it's done."
"You're one to talk," Kincaid replied. "Gorgeous work at Casaverde, by the way. Russian satellite for a measured response to Archangel. Very nice."
I whirled on Kincaid. "Stop it."
Kincaid met my eyes, calm and defiant. "Permission to engage in philosophical debate with the hypocrite, sir?"
Anger hit me in a red wave, and before I realized what I was doing I was up in Kincaid's face, shoving my nose at his. "Shut your mouth. Now. This man took me in when no one else would, and it probably saved my life. He taught me that magic, that life was more than killing and power. You might be a badass, Kincaid, but you aren't worth the mud that falls off his goddamned boots. If it came to it, I'd trade your life for his without a second thought. And if I see you trying to provoke him again I'll kill you myself. Do you understand me?"
There was a second where I felt the beginnings of the almost violent psychic pressure that accompanies a soulgaze. Kincaid must have felt it coming on, too. He let his eyes slip out of focus, turned away from me, and started unpacking a box in the van. "I understand you," he said.
I clenched my hands as hard as I could and closed my eyes. I tried not to move my lips while I counted to ten and got the blaze of my temper under control. After a few seconds I took a couple of steps back from Kincaid and shook my head. I leaned against the fender of Ebenezar's old Ford and got myself under control.
Blazing anger had gotten me into way too many bad situations, historically speaking. I knew better than to indulge it like that---but at the same time it felt good to let off a little steam. And dammit, I'd had a good reason to slap Kincaid down. I couldn't believe that he would have the temerity to compare himself to my old teacher. In any sense.
Hell, from what Ebenezar had said, Kincaid wasn't even human.
"I'm sorry," I said a minute later. "That he was trying to push your buttons, sir."
There was a significant beat before Ebenezar answered.
"It's nothing, Hoss," he said. His voice was rough. "No need to apologize."
I looked up and stared at the old man. He wouldn't meet my eyes. Not because he was afraid of a soulgaze beginning, either. He'd insisted on it within an hour of meeting me. I still remembered it as sharply as every other time I'd looked on someone's soul. I still remembered the old man's oak-tree strength, his calm, his dedication to doing what he felt was right. And more than simply looking like a decent person, Ebenezar had lived an example for an angry and confused young wizard.
Justin DuMorne had taught me how to do magic. But it was Ebenezar who had taught me why. That magic came from the heart, from the essence of what the wizard believed---from who and what he chose to be. That the power born into any wizard carried with it the responsibility to use it to help his fellow man. That there were things worth protecting, defending, and that the world could be more than a jungle where the strong thrived and the weak were devoured.
Ebenezar was the only man on the planet to whom I regularly applied an honorific. As far as I was concerned, he was the only one who truly deserved it.
But a soulgaze wasn't a lie-detector test. It shows you the core of another person, but it doesn't shine lights into every shadowy corner of the human soul. It doesn't mean that they can't lie to you.
Ebenezar avoided my eyes. And he looked ashamed.
"There's work to be done, Ebenezar," I said in a measured tone. "I don't know what you know about Kincaid, but he knows his business. I asked him here. I need his help."
"Yes," Ebenezar agreed.
"I need yours too," I said. "Are you in?"
"Yes," he said. I thought I heard something like pain in his voice. "Of course."
"Then we move now. We talk later."
"Fine."
I nodded. Murphy had appeared at some point, now dressed in jeans, a dark shirt, and the Red Cross hat and jacket Kincaid had given her. She had her gun belt on, and she held herself a little differently, so I figured she had strapped on her Kevlar vest.
"All right," I said, stepping over to the van. "Ebenezar is going to shut down Mavra, or at least throw a wet blanket over anything she can do. You got everything you need, sir?"
Ebenezar grunted in the affirmative and patted a pair of old leather saddlebags he had tossed over his shoulder.
"Right," I said. "That means that our main problems should be the Renfields and their darkhounds. Guns and teeth. We'll want to get inside and down to the basement if we can. Then if bullets start flying, it should keep them from killing people upstairs and next door."
"What's the rest of the plan?" Kincaid asked.
"Kill the vampires, save the hostages," I said.
"For the record," Kincaid said, "I was hoping for an answer that vaguely hinted at a specific tactical doctrine rather than spouting off general campaign objectives."
I started to snap at him but reined in my temper. This wasn't the time for it. "You've done this the most," I said. "What do you suggest?"
Kincaid looked at me for a moment and then nodded. He glanced at Murphy and said, "Something in a Mossberg. Can you handle a shotgun?"
"Yeah," Murphy said. "These are close quarters, though. We'd need something heavy like that to stop a charge, but the barrel would need to be cut short."
Kincaid gave her a look, and said, "That would be an illegal weapon." Then he reached into the van and handed her a shotgun with a barrel that had been cut down to end just above the forward grip. Murphy snorted and checked out the shotgun while Kincaid rattled around in the white minivan again.
Instead of a second shotgun, though, he drew a weapon made of plain, nonreflective steel from the van. It was modeled after a boar spear of the Middle Ages, a shaft about five feet long with a cross-brace thrusting out on two sides at the base of the spear tip---a foot and a half of deadly, matte-black blade as wide as my hand at the base, and tapering down to a fine point at the tip. There was enough mass to the spear to make me think that he could as easily chop and slash with the edges of the spearhead as thrust with the tip. The butt end of the spear ended at some kind of bulbous-looking cap of metal, maybe just a counterweight. A similar double protrusion bulged out from the spear shaft at the base of the blade.
"Spear and magic helmet," I said in my best Elmer Fudd voice. "Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting vampires."
Kincaid gave me the kind of smile that would make dogs break into nervous howls. "You got your stick ready there, Dresden?"
"You should go with a shotgun," Murphy told Kincaid.
Kincaid shook his head. "Can't shove the shotgun into a charging vampire or hellhound and hold them off with the cross-brace," he said. He settled the spear into his grip and did something to the handle. The beam of a flashlight clicked on from one side of the bulge at the base of the spearhead. He tapped the other one with a finger. "Besides, got incendiary rounds loaded zip-gun style in either end. If I need them, bang."
"In the butt end too?" I asked.
He reversed his grip on the spear and showed me the metal casing. "Pressure trigger on that one," he said. Kincaid dropped the spear's point down and held the haft close to his body, somehow managing to make the weapon look like a casual and appropriate accessory. "Shove it hard against the target and boom. Based it on the bang sticks those National Geographic guys made for diving with sharks."
I looked from the gadget-readied spear and body armor to my slender staff of plain old wood and leather duster.
"My dick is bigger than your dick," I said.
"Heh," Kincaid said. He draped a rope of garlic around his neck, then tossed another one to me, and a third to Murphy.
Murphy eyed the garlic. "I thought the vampires were going to be asleep. I mean, they staked Dracula in his coffin, right?"
"You're thinking of the movie," Kincaid said. He passed me a web belt with a canteen and a pouch on it. The pouch contained a medical kit, a roll of duct tape, a road flare, and a flashlight. The canteen had masking tape on the lid, and block letters in permanent marker identified it as holy water. "Read the book. Older or stronger members of the Black Court might not be totally incapacitated by sunlight."
"Might not even inconvenience Mavra," I said. "Stoker's Dracula ran around in broad daylight. But between daylight and Ebenezar, Mavra shouldn't have much in the way of powers. If there are any Black Court on their feet who want to come for us, they'll have to do it the dirty way."
"Which is why I got you a surprise, Dresden."
"Oh, good," I said. "A surprise. That's sure to be fun."
Kincaid reached into the van and presented me with a futuristic-looking weapon, a gun. It had a round tank the size of a gumball machine attached to its frame, and for a second I thought I'd been handed a pistol-sized flame thrower. Then I recognized it, cleared my throat, and said, "This is a paintball gun."
"It's a high-tech weapon," he said. "And it isn't loaded with paint. The ammunition is interspersed holy water and garlic loads. It'll hurt and frighten darkhounds and it will chew holes in any vamps that are moving around."
"While not putting any holes in us," Murphy chimed in. "Or in innocent bystanders."
"Okay," I said. "But this is a paintball gun."
"It's a weapon," Murphy said. "And a weapon that will do harm to the bad guys while not hurting your allies. That makes it a damned good one for you for such close quarters. You're good in a fight but you don't have close-quarters firearms or military training, Harry. Without ingrained fire discipline, you're as likely to kill one of us as the bad guys."
"She's right," Kincaid said. "Relax, Dresden. It's sound technology, and a good tool for teamwork. We do this simple. I'm on point. Then the shotgun. Then you, Dresden. I see a Renfield with a gun, and I'm going to drop flat. Murphy handles it from there. If we get a vampire or a darkhound, I'll crouch and hold it off with the spear. The two of you hit it with everything you can. Push it back until I can pin it on the spear. Then kill it."
"How?" Murphy asked. "Stakes?"
"Screw stakes," Kincaid said. He held out a heavy machete in an olive-drab sheath to Murphy. "Take off its head."
She clipped the machete onto her belt. "Gotcha."
"The three of us together should be able to take one vamp down the hard way if we're alert. But if one of them closes on us, we're probably going to die," Kincaid said. "The best way to stay alive is to hit them fast and stay on the offensive. Once we've put down any unfriendlies, you two can go save the hostages or take the Renfields to therapy or tap dance or whatever. If things go south, stay together and come straight back out. McCoy should have the truck out front and ready where he can see the door."
"I will," Ebenezar agreed.
"Okay," Kincaid said. "Anyone have any questions?"
"Why do they sell hot dogs in packages of ten but hot dog buns in packages of eight?" I said.
Everyone glared at me. I should probably leave off wizarding and chase my dream of becoming a stand-up comedian.
Instead, I put the toy gun in my right hand, my staff in my left, and said, "Let's go."
I drove the Red Cross van up to the shelter. I pulled in right in front, put it in park, and said, "You two go in first. I'm sure whoever the vamps have working for them will recognize me, at least by description. Outside chance they'll know Murph, too, but the uniform might make them play along until you can get any bystanders out of the building."
"How should I do that?" Kincaid asked.
"Hell's bells, you're the big time mercenary. What am I paying you for?" I said, annoyed. "What's unit response time down here, Murphy?"
"This is gang country. Officially about six minutes. Reality is more like ten or fifteen. Maybe more."
"So we call it six or seven minutes to get clear after someone calls CPD screaming about rabid dogs and gunfire," I said. "The longer before that happens the better. So get it done calmly and quietly, Kincaid. Talk them out if you can."
"No problem," Kincaid said, and leaned his spear against the dashboard. "Let's go."
Murphy held her weapon down and close to her side and followed Kincaid into the building. I waited, but I had already planned to go on in if I didn't hear anything in the next minute or so. I started counting to sixty.
On forty-four, the door opened and a couple of bedraggled men and three or four raggedly dressed women, all of them more beaten down than actually aged, came shambling out.
"Like I said, it shouldn't take long," Kincaid was saying in a bluff, heavy, cheerful voice marked with the harder, shorter vowels of a Chicago accent. He came along behind the street folk, shepherding them out. "It's probably just a faulty detector. As soon as the guys from the gas company check out the basement and make sure it's safe, we'll get set up and get everyone paid. An hour, tops."
"Where is Bill?" demanded one of the women in a querulous voice. "Bill is the man from the Red Cross. You aren't Bill."
"Vacation," Kincaid said. His good-natured smile did not touch his eyes. They remained cold and uncaring as he reached through the van's window and picked up his spear. The woman took one look at his expression, another at the weapon, then ducked her head and scurried away from the shelter. The others followed suit, scattering like a covey of quail alerted to sudden danger.
I went inside, and Kincaid backed in after me, shutting the door. The reception area looked more like a security checkpoint---a small room, a couple of chairs, a heavy-duty security door, and a guard station behind a window of heavy bars. But the security door had been propped open with one of the chairs, and I could see Murphy standing in the room on the other side, her riot gun held level, her stance alert and ready.
I walked over to her. The room beyond the reception area was the size of a small cafeteria. Cubicle walls sprouted in one corner like some kind of crystalline growth. Half a dozen people dressed in business casual stood passively against the nearest cubicle wall, and Murphy had her gun leveled at them.
They should have been afraid. They weren't. They just stood there, eyes dull, faces set in vacant, bovine expressions. "Harry," she said. "Kincaid said we shouldn't let them out until you made sure they weren't dangerous."
"Yeah," I said. I hated to think of leaving simple thralls staring stupidly at nothing, given all the violence on the immediate agenda, but that would have been better than setting some bloodthirsty Renfield loose somewhere behind me. I closed my eyes for a moment, concentrating. There were a thousand other things I would rather do than examine victims of the Black Court with my Sight, but we didn't have time for anything else.
I opened my eyes along with my Sight, and focused on the people standing in line.
I don't know if you've ever seen a sheep slaughtered for mutton. The process isn't fast, even if it isn't really cruel. They make the sheep lie down on its side and cover its eyes. The sheep lies there without struggling, and the shepherd takes a sharp knife and draws a single, neat line across its throat. The sheep jerks in a sharp twitch of surprise, while the shepherd holds it gently down. It smells blood and stirs more. Then the animal quiets again under the shepherd's hand. It bleeds.
It doesn't look real, the first time you see it, because the blood is too bright and thick, and the animal isn't struggling. There's a lot of blood. It spreads out on the ground, soaking into dirt or sand. It dyes the wool of the sheep's chest, throat, and legs a dark, rusty red. Sometimes the blood gets into a puddle around its nose, and the animal's breaths make scarlet ripples.
Before the end, the sheep might twitch and jerk another time or two, but it's silent, and it doesn't really make an effort to fight. It lies there, becoming more still, and after several minutes that stroll past in no great hurry, it dies.
That's what they looked like to my Sight, those people the vampires had enthralled. They stood calmly, relaxed, thinking of nothing. Like sheep, they had been blindfolded to the truth somehow. Like sheep, they did not struggle or flee. Like sheep, they were being kept for whatever benefit their lives would provide---and like sheep they would eventually be taken for food. I saw them, defenseless and beaten, blood soaking into their clothing while they lay still under the hand of a being more powerful than they.
They stood quietly, dying like sheep. Or rather, five of them did.
The sixth was a Renfield.
For the briefest second, I saw the sixth victim, a burly man of middle years and wearing a blue oxford shirt, as a sheep like the rest of them. Then that image vanished, replaced by something inhuman. His face looked twisted and deformed, and his muscles swelled hideously, bulging with blackened veins and quivering with unnatural power. There was a band of shimmering, vile energy wreathing his throat in an animal's collar---the reflection of the dark magic that had enslaved him.
But worst of all were his eyes.
The man's eyes looked as if they had been clawed out by something with tiny, scalpel-sharp talons. I met his blind gaze, and there was nothing there. Nothing. Just an empty darkness so vast and terrible that my lungs froze and my breath locked in my throat.
By the time I realized what I was seeing, the man had already let out a feral shriek and charged me. I shouted in surprise and tried to back up, but he was simply too fast. He backhanded me. The enchantments on my duster diverted much of the power in it, so it didn't crack any of my ribs, but it was still strong enough to throw me from my feet and into a wall. I dropped to the floor, stunned.
An angel, blazing with fury and savage strength, spun toward the Renfield, her eyes shining with azure flame, a shaft of fire in her hands. The angel was dressed in soiled robes smudged with smoke and blood and filth, no longer white. She bled from half a dozen wounds, and moved as if in terrible pain.
Murphy.
There was a peal of thunder, and flame leapt from the shaft of light in her hands. The Renfield, now deformed with muscle like some kind of madman's gargoyle, accepted the blow, and batted the shaft of light from the angel's hands. She dove for the weapon. The Renfield followed, reaching for her neck.
Something hit it hard, a second shaft, though this one was made not of light but of what looked like solidified smog of black and deep purple. The blow drove the Renfield from its feet, and the angel recovered the fallen weapon. Another shaft of light thundered into the Renfield's head, and it collapsed abruptly to the ground.
I shook my head, trying to tear away from painful clarity of my Sight. I heard a footstep nearby. Still stunned, I looked behind me.
For just a second I saw something standing there. Something enormous, malformed, something silent and merciless and deadly. It had to crouch to keep from brushing the ceiling with the horns curling away from its head, and batlike wings spread from its shoulders to fall around it and behind it, to drag along the floor, and I thought I saw some kind of hideous double image lurking behind it like the corpse-specter of Death himself.
Then the second was past, I pushed my Sight away, and Kincaid stood frowning down at me. "I said, are you all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, just clipped me."
Kincaid offered me his hand.
I didn't take it. I pushed myself to my feet instead.
His expression became opaque. It had an alien quality to it that made it more frightening than when it had been merely unreadable. He stepped over to the body of the middle-aged man in the blue oxford shirt, and jerked his spear out of the corpse. It was wet with blood all the way to the cross-brace.
I shuddered, but asked Murphy, "You okay?"
She still gripped the riot gun as she stood over the body, keeping her eyes on the five people remaining. There was a bloody, pulpy mess where the first shot had ripped open the man's leg, but it hadn't even slowed him down. It was messier where Murphy's second shot had torn into his head. Not that he would have been any better off if she'd hit him in the chest. People don't survive direct hits from shotguns delivered from a couple of steps away.
"Murph?" I asked.
"Fine," she said. Some of the Renfield's blood had sprayed onto her cheek, beading into red droplets below her distant eyes. "I'm fine. What now?"
Kincaid stepped up beside Murphy and put his hand on the end of the riot gun's barrel. He pushed gently, and she shot him a look before taking a steadying breath and lowering the weapon.
Kincaid nodded at the remaining thralls. "I'll get these five out and meet you at the stairs. Don't go down without me."
"Don't worry," I said. "We won't."
He prodded the five thralls into motion and herded them out of the building. I oriented myself on the room's doors, remembering Bob's handy-dandy map, and headed for the door that led down to the basement. Murphy walked beside me. She said nothing, but fed two more shells into the riot gun. She reached for the doorknob.
I put mine there first. "Hold it, Murph," I said. "Let me check it for surprises."
She looked at me for a second and then nodded.
I closed my eyes and laid my hand on the door, gently pushing my awareness through the door, feeling silently for patterns of energy that might indicate magical wards like the ones protecting my apartment. My magical awareness was akin to the Sight, just as my sense of touch was akin to my sense of sight. It cost me less than opening the Sight, and was infinitely more gentle to my psyche.
I felt nothing, no waiting wards or prereadied traps of Mavra's deadly black magic. Generally speaking, the bad guys weren't terribly interested in learning defensive magic when they could be out blowing things up instead, but I was determined not to get sucker punched on something that basic.
"He was already gone," I told Murphy.
She said nothing.
"I saw him, Murph. I Saw him. There wasn't anything left inside him. He was . . . less than an animal. There was nothing else you could have done."
She spoke very quietly. "Shut the fuck up, Harry."
I did. I finished my check, felt around for the presence of any supernatural entities that might be right on the other side of the door, and Listened, to boot. Nothing. When I opened my eyes again, Kincaid was standing there with Murphy. I hadn't heard his approach. "Clear?" he asked.
I nodded. "The door isn't warded. I don't think there's anything waiting on the other side, but I can't be sure."
Kincaid grunted, glanced at Murphy, then leaned back and kicked the door open.
Murphy blinked at me. Kincaid was a big guy, sure, but it's tough to kick doors down on the first try. I'd seen men batter one with those same vicious kicks for fifteen minutes before the door gave way. Maybe he'd just gotten lucky.
Yeah, I believed that. The image of that enormous, demonic thing that had crouched in the mercenary's place loomed with a terrible clarity in my head.
Kincaid landed on balance, lifted the spear, and pointed the head and its attached flashlight down the closed, narrow stairway.
There was only silence.
And then the sound of a soft, mocking laugh from somewhere in the darkness below us.
Hell's bells. The back of my neck crawled up my scalp and into one ear.
"Form up," I murmured, because it sounded more military and tougher than saying, "You guys go first." Kincaid nodded and took a step down. Murphy readied the riot gun again and pressed in behind him. I picked up my air-powered popgun and followed her.
"Where are they keeping the hostages again?" Murphy asked.
"In a closet at the bottom of the stairs, on the right."
"That was hours ago," Kincaid said quietly. "They could be anywhere now. Once we go down there, there's no room for playing around."
"The hostages are our first concern."
"Screw that. That's exactly why the vamps took hostages in the first place," Kincaid said. "If you let them dictate your tactics, they're going to use it to kill you."
"That isn't your concern," I said.
Kincaid's voice became quieter and harder. "It is when I'm standing this close to you. They might get me instead."
"That's why you get the big bucks."
He shook his head. "We don't even know if they're alive. Look, this is a basement. All we have to do is roll down the grenades and then go mop up whatever is left afterward. We're underground. The collateral damage will be minimal."
"That's not good enough," I said. "We save the hostages first. Once they're clear, then we take care of business with Mavra."
Kincaid glanced over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrow and cold. Defiance and contempt rang in every word. "It might be a little harder to rescue them if we're dead."
Murphy put the mouth of the riot gun against Kincaid's spine and said, "How good is that armor?"
Sometimes Murphy has a way with words.
We were all quiet for a couple of seconds. Then I said, "We might get killed trying to save the hostages. We will get killed if we don't stick together. Do the math, Kincaid. Or break your agreement and get out."
He stared at Murphy for a second and then relented, turning back to face the stairway. "Fine," he said. "We do it your way. It's amateur night."
We started down the first flight of stairs together, while whatever waited in the darkness below us laughed again.
The basement in the shelter was unusually deep, especially for Chicago. The stairs went down about ten feet, and were only about two and a half feet wide. My imagination treated me to a brief vision of some grinning Renfield with a machine gun popping around the corner already shooting, bullets tearing all three of us to shreds in the space of a heartbeat. My stomach writhed in pure nervous fear, and I forced myself to put it aside and focus on my surroundings.
The walls had been mortared and painted white, but cracks and mineral stains from damp spots all but concealed the original color. At the bottom of the stairs was a landing maybe three feet square, and then a second set of stairs led farther down, the air getting more cramped and colder as they went.
The stale air smelled like mildew and rot. Our breathing and our movements sounded incredibly loud in the otherwise oppressive silence that followed, and I found myself pointing the paintball gun forward, over Murphy's head and Kincaid's shoulder, so that I could start shooting as soon as something bounded into view. For all the good it was likely to do. Against any normal thug, the weapon would do little but make them damp. Or vaguely aromatic.
The stairway ended at a half-open old door.
Kincaid nudged it slowly open with his spear, already crouched.
Murphy aimed her gun at the black doorway.
Me too. The end of my stupid paintball gun quivered involuntarily.
Nothing happened.
Silence reigned.
"Dammit," I muttered. "I don't have the nerves for this crap."
"Want me to find you a Valium?" Kincaid asked.
"Kiss my ass," I said.
He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a couple of plastic tubes. He bent them sharply, shook them up, and they began to shine with chemical light. He edged up to the doorway and flicked one to the left, the other to the right, bouncing them off the walls so that he wouldn't expose himself to anyone in the hall beyond. Then he waited a beat and leaned out, peeking around. "Nothing moving," he reported. "No lights. But it looks like that map was pretty good. Hall on my right goes about ten feet, then ends at the door to that closet. Open hall on my left, twenty feet long, and opens into a room."
"Closet first," I said.
"Cover me."
Kincaid flowed down the last couple of stairs and through the door. Murphy kept within a foot of his back. Kincaid peeled off to the right. Murphy dropped into a crouch, shotgun aimed down the green-lit hall to the left. I wasn't as smooth, but I went after Kincaid, paintballs and staff ready.
The closet door was only five feet high and opened out, toward the hall. Kincaid listened at the door, then leaned aside to let me touch it first. I couldn't feel any enchantments on it, and nodded to him. He shifted his grip on the spear so that he'd be ready to drive the tip of it into anything that came at him from the closet, and drew the door open.
The light from his spear flickered around a dank little chamber that was too big to be a proper closet and too small to be a room. Patches of moisture and mildew blotted the damp stone walls, and the smell of unwashed bodies and waste rolled out of the door.
Half a dozen children, none of them older than nine or ten, huddled against the back wall of the closet. They were dressed in castoff clothing, most of it far too big, and they wore steel cuffs on their hands. The cuffs, in turn, were locked to a larger chain attached to a heavy steel ring bolted into the floor. The children reacted in silent terror, flinching away from the doorway and from the light.
Children.
Someone was going to regret this. If I had to take this building, hell, this block apart with nothing but raw will and my bare hands, someone was going to pay. Even the monsters should draw a line somewhere.
Then again, I guess that's why they call them monsters.
"Son of a bitch," I snarled, and ducked my head to step into the room.
Kincaid abruptly threw his weight against me, shoving me aside from the door. "No," he growled.
"Dammit, get out of my way," I said.
"It's a trap, Dresden," Kincaid said. "There's a trip wire. Go through that door and you'll kill all of us."
Murphy checked over her shoulder and returned to watching the darkness for trouble.
I frowned at Kincaid and picked up the plastic light stick, holding it out. "I don't see a wire."
"Not a literal wire," Kincaid. "It's a net of infrared beams."
"Infrared? How did you---"
"Dammit, Dresden, if you want to know about me, wait for the autobiography like everyone else."
He was right. It was a little late to be worrying about Kincaid's background now. "Hey, kids," I said. "Everybody stay really still and keep back, okay? We're going to get you out of here." I lowered my voice and said to Kincaid, "How do we get them out of there?"
"Not sure we can," Kincaid said. "The beam is rigged up to an antipersonnel mine."
"Well," I said. "Can't we just . . . can't you put a weight on a land mine and leave it there? So long as the weight holds the trigger down, it doesn't explode, right?"
"Right," Kincaid said. "But that's assuming we've gone back in time to World War Two." He shook his head. "Modern mines are pretty good at killing people, Dresden. This one's British, pretty recent."
"How can you tell?"
He tapped his nose. "The Brits use a different chemical priming charge than most. It's probably a bouncer, very nasty."
"Bouncer?"
"Yeah. If something interrupts the beam, the charge activates. Several individual submunitions get blown up into the air, or sideways, or however they want to set it up, in a pattern. Then they explode maybe five or six feet in the air. Sends a couple of thousand steel balls out in a big cloud. Kills everything in thirty, maybe forty meters if you're in the open, maybe a lot farther in a tight space like this. If it was me, I'd have set the charges up to get thrown straight down this hall. All these stone walls, the shrapnel would shred everything real good."
"I could hex down whatever is sending the beam," I said.
"Thus interrupting it," Kincaid said. "Thus kablowie. Thus death."
"Dammit." I swallowed and took a step back from the doorway, hoping the presence of my magic wouldn't screw up the device in a moment of monumentally bad timing. "I can shield us, if it's all coming in from one direction."
Kincaid arched an eyebrow. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Damn. But it won't help those kids much. They're over there."
I scowled ferociously. "How do we disarm the device?"
"You still don't want the Bolshevik Muppet solution, right?"
"Right."
"Then someone has to crawl in there without setting it off, find the explosive, disable it and unhook it from the sensors."
"Right," I said. "Do it."
Kincaid nodded. "Can't."
"What?"
"I can't."
"Why not?"
He nodded at the doorway. "There are three beams set up in an asymmetrical crisscross over the doorway. There isn't enough room for me to get through the open spaces."
"I'm thinner than you," I said.
"Yeah, but longer and a hell of a lot gawkier. And I know what happens to tech when nervous wizards get close."
"Someone has to do it," I said. "Someone small enough to . . ."
We both looked down the hall at Murphy.
Murphy didn't look away from her vigil, and said, "How do I disarm it?"
"I'll talk you through," Kincaid said. "Dresden, better take her gun and cover us."
"Hey," I said. "I'm in charge here. Kincaid, talk her through it. Murphy, give me your gun so I can cover you."
I tied the handle of the paintball gun into my coat where my blasting rod usually went. I winked at Murphy, who saw the gesture and did not respond to it. She just passed me the gun and turned her baseball cap around. Then she walked down the hall, slipping out of her coat and gun belt on the way.
"Better lose the Kevlar too," Kincaid said. "I can pass it to you. Bottom left corner looks like the best bet. Stay as flat as you can and as much to the left as you can. I think you can get in."
"You think?" I asked. "What if you're wrong?"
He gave me an annoyed look. "You don't see me telling you how to watch that goddamned doorway in case all the vampires show up at any second to kill us, do you?" Kincaid asked.
I was going to scowl at him, but he had a point. I scowled at the darkness instead, gripping Murphy's gun. I fumbled for a second, because the riot gun must have been some kind of military-issue, and it took me a second to find the safety. I flicked it to reveal the red dot. Or at least I was thought it was red. The green chemical light made it look black.
"Stop," Kincaid said in a calm voice. "Unclench."
"Unclench what?" Murphy demanded.
"Unclench your ass."
"Excuse me?"
"You're going to trip the beam. You need another quarter inch. Relax."
"I am relaxed," Murphy growled.
"Oh," Kincaid said. "Damn, great ass then. Take off your pants."
I winced and checked over my shoulder. Murphy was stretched out on the floor on her belly, her cheek on the cold floor, arms stretched above her. The small of her back was in the doorway. She managed to move her head just enough to eye Kincaid. "Once again?"
"Take off your pants," Kincaid said, smiling. "Think of the children."
She muttered something to herself and moved her arms, shifting slightly.
"No good," Kincaid said. "You're moving too far."
"Okay, genius," Murphy said. "What do I do?"
"Hold still," Kincaid said. "I'll do it."
There was silence for a second. Murphy hissed out a breath. Or maybe it was more of a gasp.
"I don't bite," he said. "Be still. I want to live through this."
"Okay," Murphy said in a small voice a moment later.
I scowled hard at the darkness and felt myself getting irrationally angry, and fast. I glanced back again. Murphy wriggled forward, all the way through the doorway. Her legs were pale, pretty, and strong. And I had to admit that Kincaid was completely correct about her posterior.
Kincaid was bracing her legs, hands on her calves and sliding down as she moved forward, helping her to keep them from accidentally moving too far. Or at least that damn well better have been what he was doing, because if it wasn't I would be forced to kill him.
I shook my head and returned to my vigil. Get a grip, Harry, I thought to myself. It isn't like you and Murphy are an item. She isn't something you own. She's her own person. She does what she wants with who she wants. You're not even involved with her. You've got no say in it.
I ran through those thoughts a couple of times, found them impeccably logical, morally unassailable, and still wanted to slug Kincaid. Which implied all kinds of things I didn't have time to think about.
I heard them speaking quietly to each other a moment later. Murphy was describing the explosive, and Kincaid was giving her instructions.
In the darkness beyond the last chemical light, I heard something move.
I shifted my weight, reaching into my belt pouch for my own chemical light sticks. I pressed them against the floor to break the layer separating the two chemicals and shook them until they started to emit their own soft green fire. I threw them down the hall, where they landed in the room beyond. The lights revealed little beyond more stone floor and some drywall. Bob had reported that the room was essentially a storage chamber, with several smaller chambers defined by recently installed drywall that could be used for storage, emergency shelters during the odd tornado warning, or additional rooms for those in need of a place to spend the night. But all I could see was half of a door, a couple of stacks of cardboard boxes, a dressmaker's dummy, and the glowing sticks of emerald light.
And then something large and four-legged moved in front of one of the lights for a second or two. The darkhound was a large and rangy animal, maybe a large Alsatian, and it deliberately stayed in place for a moment before vanishing into the shadows once more.
I kept the riot gun aimed down the hall and wished that Inari hadn't broken my damned blasting rod. I would far rather have had it than the gun. Without the blasting rod to help me focus and contain the destructive energies of flame I preferred, I didn't dare start blasting away at the bad guys with magic, especially in such tight quarters as the shelter. But then, maybe it was just as well. I had already met my quota for burning down public institutions this week.
I couldn't see anything else, but I knew there was something there. So I lowered my eyelids almost all the way and focused my attention, Listening. There was the faint sound of something breathing, but nothing more.
It wasn't enough. I lowered the gun a bit, relaxing my shoulders, and poured more of my focus into it, Listening more deeply than I ever had before. The sound of breathing became louder, and I picked out several other faint sources of it. A moment later I began to hear a dull throbbing, which I realized was a beating heart. More heartbeats joined it, a confused chorus of drumming beats, but I was able to identify individual rhythms into a pair of groups. One was a bit faster, lighter---smaller hearts, probably the darkhounds. There were four of them. The other group was human, and there were five hearts beating in an eager, savage cadence---pressed up against the walls on either side of the doorway, out of sight but less than twenty feet away.
And from the back of the room I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate. They slid quietly across the stone floor, and the wasted outline of an emaciated female form appeared in front of one of the glow sticks.
And no heartbeat accompanied it.
Mavra.
The darkhounds appeared, vague shapes, and paced restlessly through the shadows around the vampire. My heart lurched in sudden apprehension, and I released my attention from the Listening. I raised the gun, got to my feet, and backed away.
Again, that soft, mocking laugh drifted through the basement.
"Trouble," I said over my shoulder. "Five Renfields, four darkhounds at least, and Mavra's awake."
"Indeed," came Mavra's dry, dusty voice. "I've been waiting for you, Dresden. There's something I've been meaning to ask you."
"Oh?" I said. I looked over my shoulder at Kincaid and mouthed, How long?
Kincaid had crouched and taken up his spear again. He glanced back and said, "Thirty seconds."
"We take the kids and run," I whispered.
"I've been admiring you for some time now, Dresden," came Mavra's voice. "I've seen you stop bullets with your power. I've seen you stop knives and claws and fangs." She made a gesture with her hand. "And so I simply must know how well you will fare against your own weapon of choice."
And two Renfields stepped out into the doorway, blocking my view of Mavra. Each of them held a long metal device in their hands, and each of them wore something that bulged out above their shoulders, gleaming shapes of rounded metal. A blue starter flame flickered at the end of the devices they held, and it hit me all at once what was happening.
Both of the Renfields lifted their flamethrowers and filled the cramped little hallway with fire.
The riot gun went off, though I'm not sure if it was because I'd instinctively decided to use the weapon or if I'd just convulsed in surprise. The bad guys were twenty feet away, which was plenty of distance for the shot from the riot gun to spread. If I'd had it aimed well, it would almost certainly have put one of them down. As it was, the largest force of the blast went between them, though from the way they jerked and twisted, either the sheer roaring volume of the weapon was enough to intimidate them or they'd caught a little shot as it went past. Fire coughed uncertainly from the mouths of the flamethrowers, spattering the hall along the floors, walls, and ceiling, where it clung in globs of what had to be a mix of gasoline or some other accelerant, and petroleum jelly---homemade napalm. The air went from cold to roasting-hot, even from the aborted discharge of fire, sucking the wind from my lungs.
Both men, unassuming-looking types in ragged clothing, their eyes wide and fanatical, hesitated for a second before planting their feet again and taking aim once more. It was only a second, but it was enough to save my life. I dropped the gun, tossed my staff into my right hand, and shook out my shield bracelet. I rammed panicked will into the focus and spread it in a wall of energy before me.
The Renfields cut loose this time, flame as thick as spray from a breached hydrant roaring down the hall. I caught it on the shield, but I had never intended it to stop heat. It was primarily a defense against kinetic energy, and while I had used it to handle everything from bullets to runaway elevator cars in my career as a wizard, it just wasn't all that good at stopping the transfer of intense heat. The napalm-jelly splattered against the invisible shield, gallons of it, and the fire clung to it in white-hot glee. Its mindless fury seeped through the shield and flowed onto me.
It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
"Ten seconds!" Kincaid shouted.
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh. The shield grew weaker yet. The pain got worse. I stood now at the bottom of the stairs, and as the shield faltered, the empty space between me and the doorway behind me might as well have been a mile.
I didn't have ten seconds.
I reached into myself, into the horrible red pain, and drew forth more power yet. I focused it on my staff, and the sigils and runes carved along its surface became suddenly suffused with eye-searing scarlet light. My nose filled with the smell of charring wood, and as the shield wavered out of existence, I screamed, "Ventas servitas!"
The power I'd gathered in my staff shot out of it, an invisible serpent of energy. The shield fell just as a shrieking gale of wind shot down the stairs. The column of air howled against me, throwing my duster forward around me like a flag, and caught the blazing napalm like a tub of Jell-O, hurling the fire back the way it had come and providing it with air enough to treble its size.
The fire went mad. It seared mortar from rough stone, and chewed cracks into the rock floor, the damp stone coughing and popping as water within expanded.
For an instant I could see the two Renfields, still spraying fire toward me. They started screaming, but they obeyed Mavra's raspy howls to stand fast, and it killed them. The napalm molded itself to them and the flame embraced them.
What hit the ground as they fell could not have been easily identified as human remains.
I kept my will on the wind, the carved runes on my staff blazing ember-orange, and it spread the flames into the far room in a deadly river of searing light and charred black ash. For agonized seconds I held the winds and spread the flames, and then my will faltered, the runes on the staff dimming. Pain overcame me for a second, and it hurt so much that I literally could not see.
"Wizard!" howled Mavra's voice, the words sounding like dusty scales and cold, reptilian fury. "Wizard! The wizard! Kill, kill, kill everything!"
"Get him!" Kincaid snarled. I felt Murphy get her arms under mine, and she started hauling me back with surprising power. I started seeing through the blinding agony in time to see a charred, inhuman-looking man wielding an ax leap at Kincaid. The mercenary rammed his spear full into the man's chest, stopping him in his tracks. A second man appeared from the smoke behind the first, this one holding a shotgun. There was a roaring sound, and fire tore through the impaled Renfield, then struck the second one full in the face with hideous, searing results. Kincaid jerked the spear clean of the corpse of the first Renfield, even as the second flailed around wildly, then pointed the shotgun in more or less the right direction.
Kincaid whirled the spear into a reverse grip, slammed it into the second Reinfield's chest and the second incendiary round blasted out from the housing at the butt end of the spear, and drove the remaining life from the man. A burning corpse hit the floor a second later.
A gun roared from the smoke. Kincaid grunted and staggered. The spear fell from his hands, but he didn't fall. He drew a gun in either hand and backed unsteadily away, the semiautomatic barking out shots as swiftly as he could send them into the choking smoke down the hall.
More Renfields, roasted but functional, came through the smoke, shooting. Darkhounds bounded around them, the naked and bloody shells of dogs, but filled with horrible rage. Behind them I saw Mavra's slender, deadly form, lit for the first time. She was wearing the same clothing I'd seen her in the last time---a tattered number from the Renaissance, all of black. Hamlet would have been happy to wear it. I saw her filmy dead eyes focus on me, and she lifted an ax in one hand.
The first two darkhounds reached Kincaid, and he went down under them before I could even cry out. One of the Renfields brought a sledgehammer down on him, while the other simply emptied a handgun into the pile as two more darkhounds threw themselves into it.
"No!" I shouted.
Murphy hauled me into the closet and out of the line of fire, just as Mavra threw. Her ax came tumbling end over end down the hall, and struck the stone wall at the back of the closet with such force that the head buried itself to the eye in the rock and the wooden handle shattered into splinters. Two of the children, still chained underneath where the ax hit, let out wails of pain and terror as splinters tore at them.
"Oh, God," Murphy said. "Your hand, oh, God." But she never stopped moving. She shoved me by main force into the back corner of the closet, picked up her gun, leaned into the doorway, and sent eight or nine measured shots down the hall, her face set in grim concentration. Her pale legs were a startling contrast against the black of her Kevlar vest. "Harry?" she shouted. "There's smoke, I can't see anything, but they're at the foot of the stairs. What do we do?"
I stared at a black box up on the wall, near the ceiling. Presumably Kincaid's antipersonnel mine. He'd been right. It was set up to open and spew its deadly projectiles diagonally down, so that they would bounce and fill both closet and hall with death.
"Harry!" Murphy shouted.
I barely had breath enough to answer. "Can you hook up the mine again?"
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes wide. "You mean we can't get out?"
"Can you do it?" I barked.
She nodded, once.
"Wait for my signal, then arm it and get low."
She spun and leapt up onto a wooden chair near the mine, either something she had dragged there or something the bad guys had used too. She hooked up two alligator clips and held up a third, looking over her shoulder at me, her face pale. The children wept and screamed below her.
I dragged myself over to kneel in front of the children, facing down the hallway. I lifted my left hand, and stared at it in shock for a second. I always thought I looked good in red and black, but as a rule I preferred that to be my clothes. Not my limbs. My hand was a blackened, twisted claw of badly cooked meat, burned dark wherever it wasn't bloodred. My silver shield bracelet dangled beneath it, the charm-shields heat-warped, gleaming and bright.
I raised my other hand to signal Murphy, but then I heard a scream from down the hall, snarling and vicious and hardly human. The smoke swirled and cleared for a second, and I saw Kincaid, dragging one leg, his back against the wall. He had one hand clenched hard to his leg, and a gun in the other. He shot at a target I couldn't see until the gun started clicking.
"Now, Murphy!" I shouted. My voice thundered down the hall. "Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!"
The mercenary's head whipped around toward me. He moved like hamstrung lightning, swift and lurching and grotesque. He dropped the gun, released his leg, and threw himself straight at me with his three unwounded limbs.
Again I raised my shield, and prayed that the mine's infrared trip wire functioned.
Time slowed.
Kincaid flung himself through the doorway.
The mine beeped. There was a sharp, snapping click of metal.
Kincaid tumbled past me. I leaned aside to let him, and at the same instant brought every scrap of strength I had left to bear on the shield.
Lumpy metal spheres, maybe twenty or thirty of them, flew out into the air. I had angled my shield in a simple inclined plane, its base at the closet's doorway, its summit at the back wall of the closet, about four feet off the ground. Several of the spheres hit the shield, but the slope of it sent them rebounding out into the hall.
The submunitions exploded in a ripple of thunder and light. Steel balls flew in deadly sprays, rattling off stone walls and tearing into flesh with savage efficiency. The sloped shield flared into azure incandescence, energy from the shrapnel being absorbed and shed as flashbulb-bright bursts of light. The sound was indescribable, almost loud enough to kill all on its own.
And then it was over.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackling of flames. Nothing moved but drifting smoke.
Murphy, Kincaid, the captive children, and I were all huddled together in an unorganized pile of frightened humanity. We all sat there stunned for a moment. Then I said, "Come on. We have to get moving before the fire spreads." My voice sounded raw. "Let's get these kids out. I might be able to break these chains."
Kincaid reached up without speaking and took a key down from a high hook on the opposite wall. He settled back down to sit leaning against it, and tossed me the key.
"Or we could do that," I said, and passed the key to Murphy. She started unlocking them. I was too tired to move. My hand didn't hurt, which was a very bad sign, I knew. But I was too tired to care. I just sat there and stared at Kincaid.
He had his hand clamped down on his leg again. He was bleeding from it. There was more blood on his belly, on one hand, and his face was positively smothered with it, as if he'd been bobbing for apples in a slaughterhouse.
"You're hurt," I said.
"Yep," he replied. "Dog."
"I saw you go down."
"It got nasty," he confirmed.
"What happened?" I asked.
"I lived."
"Your chest is bleeding," I said. "And there's blood on your hand."
"I know that."
"And your face is drenched in it."
He lifted an eyebrow and touched his free hand to his chin, then looked at the blood. "Oh. That isn't mine." He started fumbling at his belt.
I got enough energy together to go to him and help. He pulled a roll of black duct tape from a pouch on his belt and with sharp, jerking motions we wound the tape tightly around his wounded leg several times, layering the wound in adhesive, literally taping it closed. He used about a third of the roll, then grunted and tore it off. Then he said, "You're going to lose that hand."
"I was sending it back to the kitchen anyway. I ordered it medium well."
Kincaid stared at me for a second and then started letting out soft, wobbly-sounding laughter, as if it were something he didn't have a lot of practice at. He stood up, wheezing soft laughter, drew another gun and his own machete from his belt, and said, "Get them out. I'm going to dismember whatever is left."
"Groovy," I said.
"All that trouble we went to, and you just blew the place up. We could have done this to begin with, Dresden."
Murphy got the kids loose and they started getting away from the wall. One of them, a girl no more than five years old, just collapsed against me crying. I held on to her for a moment, letting her cry, and said, "No, we couldn't have."
Kincaid regarded me, his expression unreadable. I thought I saw something wild and bloodthirsty and satisfied in his eyes for just a second. Then he said, "Maybe you're right."
He vanished into the smoke.
Murphy helped me to my feet. She had all the kids join hands, took the hand of the lead child herself, and led us all to the stairs. She bent and scooped up her jeans on the way. There wasn't enough denim left to avoid public indecency, and she dropped them with a sigh.
"Pink panties," I said, looking down. "With little white bows. I wouldn't have guessed that."
Murphy looked too tired to glare, but she tried.
"They really go with the Kevlar and the gun belt, Murph. Shows you're a woman with her priorities straight."
She stepped on my foot, smiling.
"Clear," said Kincaid's voice from the smoke. He appeared again, coughing a little. "Found four coffins occupied. One of them was that One-ear guy you told me about. Beheaded them. Vampires are history."
"Mavra?" I asked.
He shook his head. "That whole end of the hall looks like a chop shop for a black market organ bank. The vampire took that blast from the mine right in the kisser. You'd need her dental records and a jigsaw puzzle all-star to get a positive ID."
Kincaid didn't see Mavra flicker into sight. She rose out of the smoke behind him, horribly torn and mangled, badly burned, and angry as hell. She was missing her lower jaw, half of an arm, a basketball-sized section of lower abdomen, and one of her legs was attached by only a scrap of flesh and her black tights. For all of that, she moved no less swiftly, and her eyes burned with dead fire.
Kincaid saw the look on my face. He dropped flat.
I whipped the stupid little paintball gun out of my duster and emptied it at Mavra.
May lightning strike me dead if the damned thing didn't work like a charm. Hell, better than most charms, and I'm the guy who should know. The shots poured out almost as swiftly as from Kincaid's deadly little machine guns, and they splattered into Mavra, sizzling viciously. Silver fire immediately began chewing at her flesh wherever the paintballs struck and broke. It ripped into her and it happened fast, as if some hyperkinetic gourmet were taking a melon baller to her flesh.
Mavra let out a shocked and dusty shriek.
The holy water and garlic paintballs put a hole as wide as a three-liter bottle of Coke all the way through her. I could see the glow of fire in the pall of smoke behind her. She staggered and fell to her knees.
Murphy drew the machete from her belt and threw it underhand.
Kincaid caught it as he turned back to Mavra, and took her head off at the base of her neck. The head went one way. The body went straight down---there was no thrashing, no howling or spurting ichor, no gales of magical wind or sudden clouds of dust. Mavra's remains simply thumped to the ground, nothing but a withered cadaver once more.
I looked from Mavra's corpse to the paintball gun, impressed. "Kincaid. Can I keep this?"
"Sure," he said. "I'll add it to the bill." He stood up slowly, looking at the destruction. He shook his head. Then he joined us as we went up the stairs. "Even seeing it, it's tough to believe."
"What is?" I asked.
"Your shield. And that bit with all the wind and fire, especially with your hand like that." He glanced at me, something like caution in his expression. "I've never seen a wizard cut loose before."
What the hell. It wouldn't hurt to encourage the mercenary to be wary of me. I stopped and leaned on my staff. The runes still glowed with a sullen fire, though it was slowly fading. Tiny, white wisps of wood smoke curled up from it, sharp in my nose. It hadn't ever done that before, but there was no reason to mention that for the time being.
I looked straight at him until it was obvious that he was refusing to meet my eyes. Then I said in a quiet, gentle voice, "You still haven't."
I walked on out, leaving him to stare after me. I didn't think for a second that he would allow what he'd seen to scare him out of killing me if I didn't pay him. But it might scare him enough to make him more cautious about taking that option. Every little bit helps.
Before we got out of the shelter, I took off my duster and draped it onto Murphy's shoulders. It enveloped her entirely, its hem dragging the ground, covering her legs. She gave me a grateful look just as Ebenezar appeared in the doorway. The old man looked at the kids, then at my hand, and drew in a sharp breath.
"You all right to walk yourself out?" he asked.
"So far. We need to get these kids and ourselves the hell away from here."
"Fine," he said. "Where?"
"We'll take the kids to Father Forthill at Saint Mary of the Angels," I said. "He'll have a good idea of what can be done to help them."
Ebenezar nodded. "I know him by reputation. Good man."
We went outside and started loading kids into Ebenezar's old Ford truck. The old man had a gun rack at the back of the cab, his thick old staff in the bottom rack, his old Greener shotgun in the top one. He lifted the kids into the back one by one, where he had them lie down on a thick old thermal blanket and covered them with a second one.
Kincaid came out of the shelter carrying a contractor's heavy garbage bag, the smoke growing thicker behind him. The bag was half full. He threw it over one shoulder, then turned to me and said, "Taking care of details. As I see it, the contract is done. You satisfied with that?"
"Yeah," I said. "Nice working with you. Thank you."
Kincaid shook his head. "The money is how you thank me."
"Yeah, uh," I said, "about that. It's Saturday, and I'm going to have to talk to someone at the bank. . . ."
He stepped closer to me and handed me a white business card. It had a number printed on it in gold lettering. There was another number written in ink that made the balance currently in my checking account look extremely small. Nothing else.
"My Swiss account," he explained. "And I'm in no hurry. Have it there by Tuesday and we'll be square."
He got in the van and left.
Tuesday.
Crap.
Ebenezar watched the white van pull out, then helped Murphy get me into the truck. I sat in the middle, my legs over on Murphy's side of the cab. She had a first-aid kit in her hands, and as we rode along she covered my burned hand lightly with gauze, entirely silent. Ebenezar drove off cautiously. We heard sirens start up when we were a couple of blocks away. "The kids to the church," he said. "Then where?"
"My place," I said. "I'll get patched up for round two."
"Round two?" Ebenezar asked.
"Yeah," I said. "If I don't do something, a ritual entropy curse is gonna head my way before midnight."
"How can I help?" he asked.
I looked steadily at him. "We'll have to talk about it."
He squinted out ahead of us and kept his emotions off of his face. "Hoss. You're too involved. You do too much. You take on way too damned much."
"There's a bright side, though," I said.
"Oh?"
"Uh-huh. If I buy it tonight, at least I won't have to figure out how to pay Kincaid before he kills me."
Ebenezar drove, and I felt myself float off into a pensive haze. Well, that wasn't exactly true. It was more of a pense-less haze, but I didn't complain about it. My mouth didn't want to work, and on some level I knew that numb, floating shock was better than searing agony. Somewhere in the background, Murphy and Ebenezar talked enough to work out details, and we must have dropped the kids off with Father Forthill, because when I finally got out of the truck, the back was empty of children.
"Murphy," I said, frowning. "I had a thought. If there's an APB out for me, maybe we shouldn't go back to my place."
"Harry," she said, "we've been here for two hours. You're sitting on your couch."
I looked around. She was right. The fireplace was going, with Mister in his favorite spot by the mantel, and the notch-eared puppy was lying on the couch next to me, using my leg as a pillow. I tasted Scotch in my mouth, one of Ebenezar's own brews, but I didn't remember drinking it. Man, I must have been in worse shape than I thought. "So I am," I said. "But that doesn't make my concerns any less valid."
Murphy had hung my coat up on its hook by the door and was wearing a pair of my knee-length knit shorts. They fell to halfway down her calf, and she'd had to tie a big knot in the front to keep them on, but at least she wasn't walking around in her panties. Dammit.
"I don't think so," she said. "I've talked to Stallings. He said there's an APB for someone matching your description, but your name isn't attached to it. Only that the suspect is wanted for questioning and may be using the alias Larry or Barry. There were no prints on the weapon, but it was registered to the witness." She shook her head. "I don't know how that happened. I'd say you got lucky, but I know better. And you'd make some wiseass remark about it."
I let out a broken little laugh. "Yeah," I said. "Hell's bells. Trixie Vixen has got to be the most vacuous, conceited, small-minded, petty, and self-absorbed baddie I've ever snooped out. That's what happened."
"What?" Murphy asked.
"My name," I said, still wheezing laughter. "She never got it straight. The woman got my freaking name wrong. I don't think she bothers to keep very close track of other people's existence if it doesn't profit her."
Murphy arched an eyebrow. "But there were other people there, weren't there? Someone must have known your name."
I nodded. "Arturo for sure. Probably Joan. But everyone else only knew my first name."
"And someone had to wipe any of your prints from the gun. They're covering for you," Murphy said.
I pursed my lips, surprised. Not so much that Arturo and his people had done it, but because of my reaction to the news---it made a warm spot somewhere inside me that felt almost completely unfamiliar. "They are," I said. "God knows why, but they are."
"Harry, you saved the lives of some of their people." She shook her head. "In the business they're in, I doubt Chicago's finest are exactly making them feel like valued members of the community. That kind of isolation brings people together---and you helped them. Makes you one of them when trouble comes."
"Makes me family," I said.
She smiled a little and nodded. "So you know who dunnit?"
"Trixie," I said. "Probably two others. My sense is that it's the Ex-Mr.-Genosa club, but that's just a hunch. And I think they had help."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because Trixie was getting instructions from someone on the phone when she was holding a gun on me," I said. "And they've been invoking that curse with a ritual. Unless someone's actually got some talent, it takes two or three people to raise the energy that's needed. And let's face it, three witches cackling over a cauldron somewhere is pretty much stereotyped into the public awareness."
"Macbeth," Murphy said.
"Yeah. And that movie with Jack Nicholson as the devil."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"You told me about rituals once. The cosmic vending machine, right? An outside power offers to give you something if you fulfill a specific sequence of events."
"Yeah."
Murphy shook her head. "Scary. People can just do a dance and someone dies. Regular people, I mean. What happens if someone publishes a book?"
"Someone has," I said. "Plenty of times. The White Council has pushed it to happen a couple of times---like with the Necronomicon. It's a reasonably good way to make certain the ritual in question isn't going to work."
She frowned. "I don't get it. Why?"
"Supply and demand," I said. "There are limits to what outside forces can deliver to the mortal world. Think of the incoming power as water flowing through a pipeline. If a couple of people are using a rite once every couple of weeks, or every few years, there's no problem pumping in enough magic to make it work. But if fifty thousand people are trying to use the rite all at once, there isn't enough power in any one place to make it happen. It just comes out as a little dribble that tastes bad and smells funny."
Murphy nodded, following me. "So people who have access to rituals don't want to share them."
"Exactly."
"And a book of dark rituals is not something your average vacuous princess of porn picks up at the mall. So she had help."
"Yeah," I said, frowning. "And that last run on the curse had a professional behind it."
"Why do you say that?"
"It was a hell of a lot faster, for one thing, and deadlier. It hit so quick I didn't have time to redirect it away from the victim, even though I knew it was coming. It was stronger, too. A lot stronger, like someone who knew the business had taken the trouble to focus or amplify it somehow."
"What can do that?" Murphy asked.
"Coordination between talented wizards," I said. "Uh, sometimes you can use certain articles and materials to amplify magic. They're usually expensive as hell. Sometimes special locations can help, places like Stonehenge, or certain positions of stars on a given night of the year. Then there's the old standby."
"What's that?" Murphy asked.
"Blood," I said. "The destruction of life. The sacrifice of animals. Or people."
Murphy shivered. "And you think they're coming after you next?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm in the way. They have to if they want to get away clean."
"Get away with their big old fund intact?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Seems pretty extreme for a greed killing," Murphy said. "I've got nothing against greed as a motivator, but damn. It's like some people just never grasp the idea that other people actually exist."
"Yeah," I said with a sigh. "I guess this time there just happened to be three of them standing in the same place."
"Heh," Murphy said. "God only knows what kind of unholy bad luck got three ex-wives together. I mean, what are the odds, you know?"
I sat up straight. Murphy had put her finger on it. "Stars and stones, you're right. How could I have missed that?"
"You've been a little busy?" Murphy guessed.
I felt my heart speed up. It beat with a dull pressure on my hand. It wasn't pain yet, but it was coming. "Okay, let's think, here. Arturo didn't announce that he was getting married again. I mean, I only found out because someone who knows him made a sharp guess. And I doubt the ex-wives knew about it firsthand. In fact, I'd be willing to bet they were informed of the fact by a third party."
"Why?" Murphy asked.
"Because if you want to work magic on someone, you've got to believe in it. You've got to want it. Otherwise it just fizzles. That means that they want someone dead. Genuinely want it."
"Because when they found out it was a nasty surprise," Murphy said. "Maybe whoever told them tilted things even further before the ex-wives found out. Made it hit them really hard, make them really mad. I don't know, Harry. You'd need a fourth party to want Arturo's new squeeze nixed for that to hold water."
"Yeah," I agreed. Then I felt my eyes widen. "Unless that wasn't what they wanted at all. Murph, I don't think this is about money."
"I don't understand."
"Genosa's in love," I said. I felt myself rise to my feet. "Son of a bitch, it was right there in front of me the whole time."
Murphy frowned and rose with me, putting her hand on my good arm. "Harry, you need to sit back down. All right? You're hurt. You need to sit down until Ebenezar gets back."
"What?"
"Ebenezar. He thinks he can do something for your hand, but he had to pick up something first."
"Oh," I said. My head spun a little. She tugged at my arm and I sat back down. "But that's it."
"What's it?"
"Trixie and the other stregas are just weapons for someone else. Genosa is in love. That's why he didn't react to Lara like everyone else. They can't touch him. That's what this is all about."
Murphy frowned. "What do you mean? Who is using them as weapons?"
"The White Court," I said. "Lord Raith and the White Court. It's no coincidence that he and his second-in-command are in Chicago this weekend."
"What does Genosa's being in love have to do with anything?"
"The White Court can control people. I mean, they seduce them, get close, and before long they can sink in the psychic hooks. They can make slaves of the people they feed on, and make them like it to boot. That's the source of their power."
Murphy arched an eyebrow. "But not if someone is in love?"
I laughed weakly. "Yeah. They just said it out loud. It was an internal matter. Hell, it was practically the first thing she said about him. That Arturo was always falling in love."
"What who said?"
"Joan," I said. "Plain old practical, flannel-wearing, doughnut-scarfing Joan. And Lara the wonder slut. Not in that order. I'm sure of it."
Murphy scowled. "Egad, Holmes. You've got to provide me with some context if you want me to understand."
"Okay, okay," I said. "Here's the setup, all right? Raith is the leader of the White Court, but over the past several years he's been losing face. His personal power base is slowly eroding."
"Why?"
"Thomas, mainly," I said. "Raith apparently murders his sons before they start getting ideas of knocking him off and taking over the family business. He sent Thomas to get killed at the vampire masquerade ball, but Thomas hooked up with Michael and me and came out of it alive. Then Raith set Thomas up again last year, at the duel with Ortega, but Thomas got through that one, too. And from what I've deduced, Papa Raith isn't putting the fear of himself into his own children very well anymore."
"What's that got to do with Genosa?" she asked.
"Genosa publicly defied Raith's authority," I said. "Arturo told me that someone had been slowly buying up the adult-movie companies, manipulating things from behind the scenes. Trace the money trail back and I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that you'll find that it's Raith and that he owns Silverlight. By leaving Silverlight Studios and going off to break stereotypes by doing his own movies, Genosa was defying Raith's authority in a very public way."
"So you're saying that the White Court controls the erotica industry?"
"Or at least a bunch of it," I confirmed. "Think about it. They can influence people's opinions of all kinds of things---what physical beauty is, what sex is, how one should react to temptation, what is acceptable behavior in intimate relationships. My God, Murph, it's like training deer to come to a particular feeding point to make stalking and killing them easier."
Her mouth fell open for a moment. "God. That's . . . that's sort of terrifying. That's huge."
"And insidious," I said. "I never even thought about something like that happening. Or maybe it's fairer to say that it's been happening. Maybe Raith was just taking over the business from some other player in the White Court."
"So when Genosa thumbed his nose at Silverlight, it made Lord Raith look even weaker."
"Yeah," I said. "A mere human defying the White King. And Raith couldn't send Lara to control him, either, because Genosa is in love."
"Meaning?"
"The White Court can't touch someone who is in love," I said. "Real love. If they try to feed on them, it causes them physical agony. It's . . . their holy water, I guess you could say. Their silver bullet. They're terrified of it."
Murphy's eyes brightened and she nodded. "Raith wasn't able to control Genosa, so he had to find a way to torpedo the guy instead, or lose face."
"And be torn from his position of power. Exactly."
"Why not just kill Genosa?"
I shook my head. "The White Court seems to pride itself on elegance when it comes to power games. Thomas told me that when the Whites go to war with one another, they do it through indirect means. Cat's-paws. The more untraceable the better. They believe that intelligence and manipulation are more important than mere strength. If Raith just popped a cap in Arturo, it would have been still another loss of face. So . . ."
"So he finds someone he can control," Murphy said. "He sets them up to find out that the new wife is a danger to their positions, and he does it in the worst possible way, to make them readier to take action. He even hands them the murder weapon---a big, nasty dark ritual. He's not sure who it is, so he tells them to get rid of whoever Genosa is secretly engaged to. They've got a means, a motive, and an opportunity. Even in magical circles, I'll bet no one's going to be able to easily prove it was Raith who was responsible for the death of the woman Arturo was engaged to."
"And in love with," I said. "For Lord Raith it's a win-win situation. If they kill the fiancée, it will destabilize Genosa and hamper his ability to produce films. Hell, maybe Raith planned to wait until he fell into a depression afterward, and then send one of the ex-wives after a while to offer comfort, seduce him, and leave him vulnerable to Lara's control. If they don't manage to kill the fiancée, they might still create enough havoc and confusion to derail Genosa's work."
"And even if someone on the spooky end of the block figures out whodunit, Raith has it set it up so that they can't be traced back to him."
"Yeah," I said. "Meanwhile, Arturo is back in the fold and Raith has reconsolidated his power base. End of problem."
"But not if you interfere and stop him."
"Not if I interfere and stop him," I agreed. "So once Raith gets word that I'm sticking my nose into his business, he brings in Lara to keep an eye on me and take me out if she can."
"Or just take you," Murphy said. "If this guy is a schemer, maybe he thought it would be great to have this Lara get hooks into you."
The puppy stirred, disturbed. I shivered and petted him. "Ugh," I said. "But it didn't work, and I'm close to blowing the whole thing wide open. Now he'll have to take a swing at me and get me out of the picture."
Murphy made a growling sound. "Gutless bastard. Going through other people like that."
"It's smart," I said. "If he really has been weakened, he wouldn't want to take on anyone from the White Council directly. Only a fool goes toe to toe with a stronger enemy. That's why Thomas did the same thing as his father---recruiting me to go up against him."
Murphy whistled. "You're right. How the hell did you get this bag of snakes?"
"Clean living," I said.
"You should tell Thomas to get lost," Murphy said.
"Can't."
"Why not?"
I looked at her in silence.
Her eyes widened. She understood. "It's him. He's family."
"Half brother," I said. "Our mother used to hang around with Lord Raith."
She nodded. "So what are you going to do?"
"Survive."
"I mean about Thomas."
"I'll burn that bridge when I come to it."
"Fair enough," Murphy said. "But what is your next move?"
"Go to Thomas," I said. "Make him help." I looked down at my bandaged hand. "I need a car. And a driver."
"Done," said Murphy.
I frowned, thinking. "And I might need something else from you tonight. Something tough."
"What?"
I told her.
She stared silently past me for a moment and then said, "God, Harry."
"I know. I hate to ask it. But it's our only shot. I don't think we can win this one with simple firepower."
She shivered. "Okay."
"You sure? You don't have to do it."
"I'm with you," she said.
"Thank you, Karrin."
She gave me a small smile. "At least this way I feel like I get to do something to help."
"Don't be silly," I said. "The image of you gunfighting in your panties is going to boost my morale for years."
She kicked my leg gently with hers, but her smile was somewhat wooden. She looked down to focus on the puppy, who promptly rolled over on his back, chewing at her fingers.
"You okay?" I asked. "You got kinda quiet."
"I'm fine," she said. "Mostly. It's just . . ."
"Just?"
She shook her head. "It's been sort of a stressful day for me, relationship-wise."
I know what you mean, I thought.
"I mean, first that asshole Rich and Lisa. And . . ." She glanced at me, her cheeks pink. "And this thing with Kincaid."
"You mean him taking your pants off?"
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah. It's been . . . well, it's been a really, really long time since a good-looking man took my pants off. I sort of forgot how much I enjoyed it. I mean, I know this is just a reaction to the danger and adrenaline and so on, but still. I've never reacted that strongly to a simple touch."
"Oh," I said.
She sighed. "Well, you asked. It's got me a little distracted. That's all."
"Just so you know," I said, "I don't think he's human. I think he's pretty major bad news."
"Yeah," Murphy said, her voice annoyed. "It's never the nice guys who get a girl worked up."
Apparently not. "Oh," I said again.
"I'll call a cab," Murphy said. "Get some clothes and my bike. The car's still back at the park, and there might still be family there. Give me about an hour, and I'll be ready to take you where you need to go, if you're able."
"I have to be," I said.
Murphy called the cab, and just as it got there Ebenezar opened the door, carrying a brown paper grocery sack. I looked up at him, feeling a sudden blend of emotions---relief, affection, suspicion, disappointment, betrayal. It was a mess.
He saw the look. He stopped in the doorway and said, "Hoss. How's the hand?"
"Starting to feel things again," I said. "But I figure I'll pass out before it comes all the way back."
"I might be able to help a little, if you want me to."
"Let's talk about that."
Murphy had pretty obviously picked up on the tension between us back at the shelter. She kept her tone and expression neutral and said, "My cab's here, Harry. See you in an hour."
"Thanks, Murph," I said.
"Pleasure to meet you, Miss Murphy," Ebenezar said. He corrected himself almost instantly. "Lieutenant Murphy."
She almost smiled. Then she gave me a look, as if to ask me if it was all right to leave me with the old man. I nodded and she left.
"Close the door," I told Ebenezar.
He did, and turned to face me. "So. What do you want me to tell you?"
"The truth," I said. "I want the truth."
"No, you don't," Ebenezar said. "Or at least not now. Harry, you have to trust me on this one."
"No. I don't," I responded. My voice sounded rough and raw. "I've trusted you for years. Completely. I've built up some credit. You owe me."
Ebenezar looked away.
"I want answers. I want the truth."
"It will hurt," he said.
"The truth does that sometimes. I don't care."
"I do," he said. "Boy, there is no one, no one, I would hate to hurt as much as you. And this is too much to lay on your shoulders, especially right now. It could get you killed, Harry."
"That isn't your decision to make," I said quietly. It surprised me how calm I sounded. "I want the truth. Give it to me. Or get out of my home and never come back."
Frustration, even true anger flickered across the old man's face. He took a deep breath, then nodded. He put the grocery sack down on my coffee table and folded his arms, facing my fireplace. The lines on his face looked deeper. His eyes focused into the fire, or through it, and they were hard, somehow frightening.
"All right," he said. "Ask. I'll answer. But this could change things for you, Harry. It could change the way you think and feel."
"About what?"
"About yourself. About me. About the White Council. About everything."
"I can take it."
Ebenezar nodded. "All right, Hoss. Don't say I didn't warn you.
"Let's start simple," I said. "How do you know Kincaid?"
He blew out a breath, cheeks puffing out. "He's in the trade."
"The trade?"
"Yes." Ebenezar sat down on the other end of the couch. The puppy got up on wobbling legs and snuffled over to examine him. His tail started wagging. Ebenezar gave the little dog a brief smile and scratched his ears. "Most of the major supernatural powers have someone for that kind of work. Ortega was the Red Court's, for example. Kincaid and I are contemporaries, of a sort."
"You're assassins," I said.
He didn't deny it.
"Didn't look like you liked him much," I said.
"There are proprieties between us," Ebenezar said. "A measure of professional courtesy and respect. Boundaries. Kincaid crossed them about a century ago in Istanbul."
"He's not human?"
Ebenezar shook his head.
"Then what is he?"
"There are people walking around who carry the blood of the Nevernever in them," Ebenezar said. "Changelings, for one, those who are half-Sidhe. The faeries aren't the only ones who can breed with humanity, though, and the scions of such unions can have a lot of power. Their offspring are usually malformed. Freakish. Often insane. But sometimes the child looks human."
"Like Kincaid."
Ebenezar nodded. "He's older than I am. When I met him, I still had hair and he had been serving the creature for centuries."
"What creature?" I asked.
"The creature," Ebenezar said. "Another half mortal like Kincaid. Vlad Drakul."
I blinked. "Vlad Tepesh? Dracula?"
Ebenezar shook his head. "Dracula was the son of Drakul, and pretty pale and skinny by comparison. Went to the Black Court as a kind of teenage rebellion. The original creature is . . . well. Formidable. Dangerous. Cruel. And Kincaid was his right arm for centuries. He was known as the Hound of Hell. Or just the Hellhound."
"And he's afraid of you," I said, my voice bitter. "Blackstaff McCoy. I guess that's your working name."
"Something like that. The name . . . is a long story."
"Get started, then," I said.
He nodded, absently rubbing the puppy behind the ears. "Ever since the founding of the White Council, ever since the first wizards gathered to lay down the Laws of Magic, there has been someone interested in tearing it apart," he said. "The vampires, for one. The faeries have all been at odds with us at one time or another. And there have always been wizards who thought the world would be a nicer place without the Council in it."
"Gee," I said. "I just can't figure why any wizard would think that."
Ebenezar's voice lashed out, harsh and cold. "You don't know what you're talking about, boy. You don't know what you're saying. Within my own lifetime, there have been times and places where even speaking those words could have been worth your life."
"Gosh, I'd hate to for my life to be in jeopardy. Why did he call you Blackstaff?" I asked, my voice hardening. An intuition hit me. "It's not a nickname," I said. "Is it. It's a title."
"A title," he said. "A solution. At times, the White Council found itself bound by its own laws while its enemies had no such constraints. So an office was created. A position within the Council. A mark of status. One wizard, and only one, was given the freedom to choose when the Laws had been perverted, and turned as weapons against us."
I stared at him for a moment and then said, "After all that you taught me about magic. That it came from life. That it was a force that came from the deepest desires of the heart. That we have a responsibility to use it wisely---hell, to be wise, and kind, and honorable, to make sure that the power gets used wisely. You taught me all of that. And now you're telling me that it doesn't mean anything. That the whole time you were standing there with a license to kill."
The lines in the old man's face looked hard and bitter. He nodded. "To kill. To enthrall. To invade the thoughts of another mortal. To seek knowledge and power from beyond the Outer Gates. To transform others. To reach beyond the borders of life. To swim against the currents of time."
"You're the White Council's wetworks man," I said. "For all their prattle about the just and wise use of magic, when the wisdom and justice of the Laws of Magic get inconvenient, they have an assassin. You do that for them."
He said nothing.
"You kill people."
"Yes." Ebenezar's face looked like something carved in stone, and his voice was quietly harsh. "When there is no choice. When lives are at stake. When the lack of action would mean---" He cut himself off, jaw working. "I didn't want it. I still don't. But when I have to, I act."
"Like at Casaverde," I said. "You hit Ortega's stronghold when he escaped our duel."
"Yes," he said, still remote. "Ortega killed more of the White Council than any enemy in our history during the attack at Archangel." His voice faltered for a moment. "He killed Simon. My friend. Then he came here and tried to kill you, Hoss. And he was coming back here to finish the job as soon as he recovered. So I hit Casaverde. Killed him and almost two hundred of his personal retainers. And I killed nearly a hundred people there in the house with them. Servants. Followers. Food."
I felt sick. "You told me it would be on the news. I thought maybe it was the Council. Or that you'd done it without killing anyone but vampires. I had time to think about it later, but . . . I wanted to believe you'd done what was right."
"There's what's right," the old man said, "and then there's what's necessary. They ain't always the same."
"Casaverde wasn't the only necessary thing you did," I said. "Was it."
"Casaverde," Ebenezar said, his voice shaking. "Tunguska. New Madrid. Krakatoa. A dozen more. God help me, a dozen more at least."
I stared at him for a long moment. Then I said, "You told me the Council assigned me to live with you because they wanted to annoy you. But that wasn't it. Because you don't send a potentially dangerous criminal element to live with your hatchet man if you want to rehabilitate him."
He nodded. "My orders were to observe you. And kill you if you showed the least bit of rebelliousness."
"Kill me." I rubbed at my eyes. The pounding in my hand grew worse. "As I remember, I got rebellious with you more than once."
"You did," he said.
"Then why didn't you kill me?"
"Jehoshaphat, boy. What's the point of having a license to ignore the will of the Council if you aren't going to use it?" He shook his head, a tired smile briefly appearing on his mouth. "It wasn't your fault you got raised by that son of a bitch DuMorne. You were a dumb kid, you were angry, and afraid, and your magic was strong as hell. But that didn't mean you needed killing. They gave the judgment to me. I used it. They aren't happy with how I used it, but I did."
I stared at him. "There's something else you aren't telling me."
He was silent for a minute. Then two. And a while later he said, "The Council knew that you were the son of Margaret LeFay. They knew that she was one of the wizards who had turned the Council's own laws against it. She was guilty of violating the First Law, among others, and she had . . . unsavory associations with various entities of dubious reputation. The Wardens were under orders to arrest her on sight. She'd have been tried and executed in moments when she was brought before the Council."
"I was told she died in childbirth," I said.
"She did," Ebenezar confirmed. "I don't know why, but for some reason she turned away from her previous associates---including Justin DuMorne. After that, nowhere was safe for her. She ran from her former allies and from the Wardens for perhaps two years. And she ran from me. I had my orders regarding her as well."
I stared at him in pained fascination. "What happened?"
"She met your father. A man. A mortal, without powers, without influence, without resources. But a man with a good soul, like few I have ever seen. I believe that she fell in love with him. But on the night you were born, one of her former allies found her and exacted his vengeance for her desertion." He looked up at me directly and said, "He used an entropy curse. A ritual entropy curse."
Shock paralyzed me for a moment. Then I said, "Lord Raith."
"Yes."
"He killed my mother."
"He did," Ebenezar confirmed.
"God. You're . . . you're sure?"
"He's a snake," Ebenezar said. "But I'm as sure as I can be."
The pounding spread up my arm, and the room pulsed brighter and dimmer in time with it. "My mother. He was standing three feet from me. He killed my mother." A child's pain---the emptiness in my life the shape of my unknown mother, my unfortunate father---swelled and screamed in rage. The source of that pain, or part of it, had finally been revealed to me. And in that moment, had I known where to strike, I would have eagerly embraced murder. Nothing mattered but exacting retribution. Nothing mattered but taking righteous vengeance for the death of a child's mother. My mother. I started shaking, and I knew that my sanity was buckling under the pressure.
"Hoss," Ebenezar said. "Easy, boy."
"Kill him," I whispered. "I'll kill him."
"No," Ebenezar said. "You've got to breathe, boy. Think."
I started gathering power. "Kill him. Kill him. Everything. All of it. Nothing left."
"Harry," Ebenezar snapped. "Harry, let go. You can't handle that kind of power. You'll kill yourself if you try."
I didn't care about that, either. The power felt too good---too strong. I wanted it. I wanted Raith to pay. I wanted him to suffer, screaming, and then die for what he had done to me. And I was strong enough to make it happen. I had the power and the resolve to bring such a tide of magic against him that he would be utterly destroyed. I would lay him low and make him howl for mercy before I tore him apart. He deserved nothing less.
And then fire blossomed in my hand again, so sudden and sharp that my back convulsed into an agonized arch, and I fell to the floor. I couldn't scream. The pain washed my fury away like dandelions before a flash flood. I looked around wildly and saw the old man's broad, calloused hand clamped down over my burned, lightly bandaged flesh with bruising strength. When he saw my eyes he released my hand, his expression sickened.
I curled up for a minute while my pounding heart telegraphed consecutive tidal waves of agony through me. It was several minutes before I could master the pain and sit slowly up again.
"I'm sorry," Ebenezar whispered. "Harry, I can't let you indulge your rage. You'll kill yourself."
"I'll take him with me," I got out between gritted teeth.
Ebenezar let out a bitter laugh. "No, you won't, Hoss."
"How do you know?"
"I've tried," he said. "Three times. And I didn't even get close. And you think your mother went without spending her death curse on her murderer? The creature who had enslaved her? Might as well ask if a fish remembered to swim."
I blinked at him. "What do you mean?"
"He's protected," he said quietly. "Magic just slides off him."
"Even a death curse?"
"Useless," he said bitterly. "Raith is protected by something big. Maybe a big damned demon. Maybe even some old god. He can't be touched with magic."
"Is that even possible?" I asked.
"Aye," the old man said. "I don't know how. But it is. Does a lot to explain how he got to become the White King."
"I don't believe it," I said quietly. "She'd been close to him. She must have known he was protected. She was strong enough to make the White Council afraid of her. She wouldn't have spent her curse for nothing."
"She threw it. She wasted it."
"So now my mother is incompetent as well as evil," I said.
"I never said that---"
"What do you know about her?" I said. I had my right hand clamped around my left wrist, hoping to distract myself from the pain. "How would you know? Did she tell you? Were you there with her?"
He looked down at the floor, his face pale. "No."
"Then how the hell do you know?" I demanded.
His words came out in a harsh croak. "Because I knew her, Hoss. I knew her almost better than she knew herself."
The fire crackled.
"How?" I whispered.
He drew his hand back from the puppy. "She was my apprentice. I was her teacher. Her mentor. She was my responsibility."
"You taught her?"
"I failed her." He chewed on his lip. "Harry . . . when Maggie was coming into her power, I made her life a living hell. She was barely more than a child, but I rode herd on her night and day. I pushed her to learn. To excel. But I was too close. Too involved. And she resented it. She ran off as soon as she could get away with it. Started taking up with bad sorts out of sheer rebellion. She made a couple of bad decisions, and . . . and then it was too late for her to go back."
He sighed. "You're so much like her. I knew it when they sent you to me. I knew it the minute I saw you. I didn't want to repeat my mistakes with you. I wanted you to have breathing space. To make up your own mind about what kind of person you would be." He shook his head. "The hardest lesson a wizard has to learn is that even with so much power, there are some things you can't control. No matter how much you want to."
I just stared at him. "You're an assassin. A murderer. You knew about what happened to my mother. You knew her and you never told me. Good God, Ebenezar. How could you do that to me? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm only human, Hoss. I did what I thought was best for you at the time."
"I trusted you," I said. "Do you know how much that means to me?"
"Yes," he said. "I never did it with the intention of hurting you. But it's done. And I wouldn't choose to do it any differently if it happened again."
He moved, got the sack, and hunkered down by me so that he could rest my forearm over one knee and examine the burned hand. Then he reached into the bag and drew out a long strand of string hung with some kind of white stone. "Let's see to your hand. I think I can get the circulation restored, at least a little. Maybe enough to save the hand. And I can stop the pain for a day or two. You'll still have to get to a doctor, but this should tide you over if you're expecting trouble tonight."
It didn't take him long, and I tried to sort through my thoughts. They were buried under a storm of raw emotions, all of them ugly. I lost track of time again for a minute. When I looked up, my hand didn't hurt and it seemed a little less withered beneath the white bandages. A string of white stones had been tied around my wrist. Even as I watched, one of them yellowed and began to slowly darken.
"The stones will absorb the pain for a while. They'll crumble one at a time, so you'll know when they stop working." He looked up to my face. "Do you want my help tonight?"
An hour ago it wouldn't even have been a question. I'd have been more than glad to have Ebenezar next to me in a fight. But the old man had been right. The truth hurt. The truth burned. My thoughts and feelings boiled in a blistering, dangerous tumult in my chest. I didn't want to admit what was at the core of that turmoil, but denying it wouldn't make it any less true.
Ebenezar had lied to me. From day one.
And if he'd been lying to me, what else had he lied about?
I'd built my whole stupid life on a few simple beliefs. That I had a responsibility to use my power to help people. That it was worth risking my own life and safety to defend others. Beliefs I'd taken as my own primarily because of the old man's influence.
But he hadn't been what I thought he was. Ebenezar wasn't a paragon of wizardly virtue. If anything he was a precautionary tale. He had seemed to talk a good game, but underneath that surface, he'd been as cold and as vicious as any of the cowardly bastards in the Council whom I despised.
Maybe he'd never claimed to be a shining example. Maybe I'd just needed someone to admire. To believe in. Maybe I'd been the stupid one, putting my faith in the wrong place.
But none of that changed the fact that Ebenezar had hidden things from me. That he'd lied.
That made it simple.
"No," I whispered. "I don't want you there. I don't know you. I never did."
"But you'd fight beside someone like the Hellhound."
"Kincaid's a killer for hire. He never pretended he was anything else."
The old man exhaled slowly and said, "I reckon that ain't unfair."
"Thank you for your help. But I've got things to do. You should go."
He rose, picked up the paper bag, and said, "I'm still there for you, Hoss, if you change your---"
I felt my teeth clench. "I said get out."
He blinked his eyes a few times and whispered, "A hard lesson. The hardest."
Then he left.
I refused to watch him go.
I sat in the silence of the old man's departure and felt a lot of things. I felt tired. I felt afraid. And I felt alone. The puppy sat up and displayed some of the wisdom and compassion of his kind. He wobbled carefully over to me, scrambled up onto my lap, and started licking the bottom of my chin.
I petted his soft baby fur, and it gave me an unexpected sense of comfort. Sure, he was tiny, and sure, he was just a dog, but he was warm and loving and a brave little beast. And he liked me. He kept on giving me puppy kisses, tail wagging, until I finally smiled at him and roughed up his fur with one hand.
Mister wasn't about to let a mere dog outdo him. The hefty tom promptly descended from his perch on my bookshelf and started rubbing himself back and forth under my hand until I paid attention to him, too.
"I guess you aren't nothing but trouble," I told the dog. "But I already have a furry companion. Right, Mister?"
Mister blinked at me with an enigmatic cat expression, batted the puppy off the couch and onto the floor, and promptly lost interest in me. Mister flowed back down onto the floor, where the puppy rolled to his feet, tail wagging ferociously, and began to romp clumsily around the cat, thrilled with the game. Mister flicked his ears with disdain and went back up onto his bookshelf.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The world might be vicious and treacherous and deadly, but it couldn't kill laughter. Laughter, like love, has power to survive the worst things life has to offer. And to do it with style.
It got me moving. I dressed for trouble---black fatigue pants, a heavy wool shirt of deep red, black combat boots. I put on my gun belt with one hand, clipped my sword cane to the belt, and covered it with my duster. I made sure I had my mother's amulet and my shield bracelet, sat down, and called Thomas's cell phone.
The phone got about half of a ring out before someone picked it up and a girl's frightened voice asked, "Tommy?"
"Inari?" I asked. "Is that you?"
"It's me," she confirmed. "This is Harry, isn't it."
"For another few hours anyway," I said. "May I speak to Thomas, please?"
"No," Inari said. It sounded like she had been crying. "I was hoping this was him. I think he's in trouble."
I frowned. "What kind of trouble?"
"I saw one of my father's men," she said. "I think he had a gun. He made Thomas drop his phone in the parking lot and get into the car. I didn't know what I should do."
"Easy, easy," I said. "Where was he taken from?"
"The studio," she said, her voice miserable. "He gave me a ride here when we heard about the shooting. I'm here now."
"Is Lara there?" I asked.
"Yes. She's right here."
"Put her on, please."
"Okay," Inari said.
The phone rustled. A moment later Lara's voice glided out of the phone and into my ear. "Hello, Harry."
"Lara. I know your father is behind the curse on Arturo, along with Arturo's wives. I know they've been gunning for his fiancée so that Raith can get Arturo back under his control. And I have a question for you."
"Oh?" she said.
"Yeah. Where is Thomas?"
"It excites me when a man is so subtle," she said. "So debonaire."
"Better brace yourself, then," I said. "I want him in one piece. I'm willing to kill anyone who gets in the way. And I'm willing to pay you to help me."
"Really?" Lara said. I heard her murmur something, presumably to Inari. She waited a moment, I heard a door close, and the tone of her voice changed subtly, becoming businesslike. "I am willing to hear you out."
"And I'm willing to give you House Raith. And the White Court with it."
Shocked silence followed. Then she said, "And how would you manage such a thing?"
"I remove your father from power. You take over."
"How vague. The situation isn't a simple one," she said, but I could hear a throbbing note of excitement in her voice. "The other Houses of the White Court follow House Raith because they fear and respect my father. It seems unlikely that they would transfer that respect to me."
"Unlikely. Not impossible. I think it can be done."
She made a slow, low purring sound. "Do you? And what would you expect from me in return? If my father has decided to remove Thomas, I am hardly capable of stopping him."
"You won't need to. Just take me to him. I'll get Thomas myself."
"After which, my father will be so impressed with your diplomatic skills that he cedes the House to me?"
"Something like that," I said. "Get me there. Then all you have to do is watch from the sidelines while Cat's-paw Dresden handles your father."
"Mmm," she said. "That would certainly raise my status among the Lords of the Court. To arrange for a usurpation isn't so unusual, but very few manage to have good seats to it as well. A firsthand view of it would be a grace note few have attained."
"Plus if you were standing right there and things went badly for me, you'd be in a good spot to backstab me and keep your father's goodwill."
"Of course," she said, without a trace of shame. "You understand me rather well, wizard."
"Oh, there's one other thing I want."
"Yes?" she asked.
"Leave the kid alone. Don't push her. Don't pressure her. You come clean with Inari. You tell her the deal with her bloodline and you let her make up her own mind when it comes to her future."
She waited for a beat and then said, "That's all?"
"That's all."
She purred again. "My. I am not yet sure if you are truly that formidable or simply a vast and mighty fool, but for the time being I am finding you an extremely exciting man."
"All the girls tell me that."
She laughed. "Let us assume for a moment that I find your proposal agreeable. I would need to know how you intend to overthrow my father. He's somewhat invincible, you see."
"No, he isn't," I said. "I'm going to show you how weak he really is."
"And how do you know this?"
I closed my eyes and said, "Insight."
Lara lapsed into a thoughtful silence for a moment. Then she said, "There is something else I must know, wizard. Why? Why do this?"
"I owe Thomas for favors past," I said. "He's been an ally, and if I leave him hanging out to dry it's going to be bad for me in the long term, when I need other allies. If the plan comes off, I also get someone in charge of things at the White Court who is more reasonable to work with."
Lara made a soft sound that was probably mostly pensive but that would have been a lot more interesting in the dark. Uh. I mean, in person.
"No," she said then. "That's not all of it."
"Why not?"
"That would be sufficient reason if it were me," she said. "But you aren't like me, wizard. You aren't like most of your own kind. I have no doubt that you have reasonable skill at the calculus of power, but calculation is not at the heart of your nature. You prepare to take a terrible risk, and I would know why your heart is set to it."
I chewed on my lip for a second, weighing my options and the possible consequences. Then I said, "Do you know who Thomas's mother was?"
"Margaret LeFay," she said, puzzled. "But what does that---" She stopped abruptly. "Ah. Now I see. That explains a great deal about his involvement in political matters over the past few years." She let out a little laugh, but it was somehow sad. "You're much like him, you know. Thomas would sooner tear off his own arm than see one of his siblings hurt. He's quite irrational about it."
"Is that reason enough for you?" I asked.
"I am not yet entirely devoid of affection for my family, wizard. It satisfies me."
"Besides," I added, "I've just handed you a secret with the potential for some fairly good blackmail down the line."
She laughed. "Oh, you do understand me."
"Are you in?"
There was silence. When Lara finally spoke again, her voice was firmer, more eager. "I do not know precisely where my father would have had Thomas taken."
"Can you find out?"
Her voice took on a pensive tone. "In fact, I believe I can. Perhaps it was fate."
"What was fate?"
"You'll see," she said. "What sort of time frame did you have in mind?"
"An immediate one," I said. "The immediater the better."
"I'll need half an hour or a little more. Meet me at my family's home north of town."
"Half an hourish," I said. "Until then."
I hung up the phone just as a loud, low rumble approached my house. A moment later Murphy came back in. She was decked out in biker-grade denim and leather again. "I guess we're going somewhere."
"Rev up the Hog," I said. "You ready for another fight?"
Her teeth flashed. She tossed me a red motorcycle helmet and said, "Get on the bike, bitch."
Motorcycles aren't safe transport, as far as it goes. I mean, insurance statistics show that everyone in the country is going to wind up in a traffic accident of some kind and most of us are going to be involved in more than one. If you're driving around in a beat-up old Lincoln battleship and someone clips you at twenty miles an hour, it probably is going to frighten and annoy you. If you're sitting on a motorcycle when it happens, you'll be lucky to wind up in traction. Even if you aren't in an accident with another vehicle, it's way too easy to get yourself hurt or killed on a bike. Bikers don't wear all that leather around simply for the fashion value or possible felony assaults. It's handy for keeping the highway from ripping the skin from your flesh should you wind up losing control of the bike and sliding along the asphalt for a while.
All that said, riding a motorcyle is fun.
I put on the bulky, clunky red helmet, fairly certain that I had never before disguised myself as a kitchen matchstick. Murphy's black helmet, by comparison, looked like something imported from the twenty-fifth century. I sighed as the battered corpse of my dignity took yet another kick in the face and got on the bike behind Murphy. I gave her directions, and her old Harley growled as she unleashed it on the unsuspecting road.
I thought the bike was going to jump out from underneath me for a second, and my balance wobbled.
"Dresden!" Murphy shouted back to me, annoyed. "Hang on to my waist!"
"With what?" I shouted back. I waved my bandaged hand to one side of her field of vision and the hand holding the staff to the other.
In answer, Murphy took my staff and shoved the end of it down into some kind of storage rack placed so conveniently close to the rider's right hand that it couldn't have been mistaken for anything but a holster for a rifle or baseball bat. My staff stuck up like the plastic flagpole on a golf cart, but at least I had a free hand. I slipped my arm around Murphy's waist, and I could feel the muscles over her stomach tensing as she accelerated or leaned into turns, cuing me to match her. When we got onto some open road and zoomed out of the city, the wind took the ends of my leather duster, throwing them back up into the air of the bike's passage, and I had to hold tight to Murphy or risk having my coat turn into a short-term parasail.
We rolled through Little Sherwood and up to the entrance of Château Raith. Murphy brought the Harley to a halt. It might have taken me a few extra seconds to take my arm from around her waist, but she didn't seem to mind. She had her bored-cop face on as she took in the house, the roses, and the grotesque gargoyles, but I could sense that underneath it she was as intimidated as I had been, and for the same reasons. The enormous old house reeked of the kind of power and wealth that disdains laws and societies. It loomed in traditional scary fashion, and it was a long way from help.
I got off the bike and she passed me my staff. The place was silent, except for the sound of wind slithering through the trees. There was a small flickering light at the door, another at the end of the walk up to it, and a couple of splotches of landscape lighting, but other than that, nothing.
"What's the plan?" Murphy asked. She kept her voice low. "Fight?"
"Not yet," I said, and gave her the short version of events. "Watch my back. Don't start anything unless one of the Raiths tries to physically touch you. If they can do that, there's a chance they could influence you in one way or another."
Murphy shivered. "Not an issue. If I could help it they weren't going to be touching me anyway."
An engine roared and a white sports car shot through the last several hundred yards of Little Sherwood. It all but flew up the drive, narrowly missed Murphy's bike, spun, and screeched to a neat stop, parallel-parked in the opposite direction.
Murphy traded a glance with me. She looked impressed. I probably looked annoyed.
The door opened and Lara slid out, dressed in a long, loose red skirt and a white cotton blouse with embroidered scarlet roses. She walked purposefully toward us. Her feet were bare. Silver flashed on a toe and one ankle, and as she drew closer I heard the jingle of miniature bells. "Good evening, wizard."
"Lara," I said. "I like the skirt. Nice statement. Very Carmen."
She flashed me a pleased smile, then focused her pale grey gaze on Murphy and said, "And who is this?"
"Murphy," she said. "I'm a friend."
Lara smiled at Murphy. Very slowly. "I can never have too many friends."
Murph's cop face held, and she added a note of casual disdain to her voice. "I didn't say your friend," she said. "I'm with Dresden."
"What a shame," Lara said.
"I'm also with the police."
The succubus straightened her spine a little at the words, and studied Murphy again. Then she inclined her head with a little motion half suggesting a curtsy, a gesture of concession.
The other door of the white sports car opened and Reformed Bully Bobby got out, carsick and a little wobbly on his feet. Inari followed him a second later, slipping underneath one of his arms to help hold him steady despite her own broken arm and sling.
Lara raised her voice. "Inari? Be a darling and fetch her for me right away. Bobby, dear, if you could help her I would take it as a kindness."
"Yeah, sure," Bobby said. He looked a little green but was recovering as he hurried toward the house with Inari.
"We'll bring her right down," Inari said.
I waited until they had gone inside. "What the hell are they doing here?" I demanded of Lara.
She shrugged. "They insisted and there was little time for argument."
I scowled. "Next time you're practicing the sex appeal, maybe you should spend some time working up some 'go-thither' to go with all the 'come-hither."
"I'll take it under advisement," she said.
"Who are they bringing out?" I asked.
Lara arched a brow. "Don't you know?"
I gritted my teeth. "Obviously. Not."
"Patience then, darling," she said, and walked around to the back of the sports car, hips and dark hair swaying. She opened the trunk and drew out a sheathed rapier---a real one, not one of those skinny car-antenna swords most people think of when they hear the word. The blade alone was better than three feet long, as wide as a couple of my fingers at the base, tapering to a blade as wide as my pinkie nail and ending in a needle tip. It had a winding guard of silver and white-lacquered steel that covered most of the hand, adorned with single red rose made of tiny rubies. Lara drew out a scarlet sash, tied it on, and slipped the sheathed weapon through it. "There," she said, and sauntered over to me again. "Still Carmen?"
"Less Carmen. More Pirates of Penzance," I said.
She put the spread fingers of one hand over her heart. "Gilbert and Sullivan. I may never forgive you that."
"How will I find the will to go on?" I asked, and rolled my eyes at Murphy. "And hey, while we're on the subject of going on . . ."
Inari slammed the door of the house open and held it that way. Bobby came out a minute later, carrying an old woman in a white nightgown in his arms. The kid was big and strong, but he didn't look like he needed to be to carry her. There was an ephemeral quality to the woman. Her silver hair drifted on any wisp of air, her arms and legs hung weakly, and she was almost painfully thin.
The kid came to us, and I got a better look. It wasn't an old woman. Her skin was unwrinkled, even if it had the pallor of those near death, and her arms and legs weren't wasted, but were simply slender with youth. Her hair, though, was indeed silver, white, and grey. The evening breeze blew her hair away from her face, and I knew it had gone grey literally overnight.
Because the girl was Justine.
"Hell's bells," I said quietly. "I thought she was dead."
Lara stepped up beside me, staring at the girl, her features hard. "She should be," she said.
Anger flickered in my chest. "That's a hell of a thing to say."
"It's a matter of perspective. I don't bear the girl any malice, but given the choice I would rather she died than Thomas. It's the way of things."
I shot her a look. "What?"
Lara moved a shoulder in a shrug. "Thomas pulled himself away from her at the last possible instant," she said. "Truth be told, it was after that instant. I don't know how he managed it."
"And that bothers you?" I demanded.
"It was an unwarranted risk," she said. "It was foolish. It should have killed him to draw away."
I gave her a look that managed to be both blank and impatient.
"It's the intensity of it," she said. "It's . . . a unification. Thomas's store of life energy was all but gone. Forcibly breaking away from a vessel---"
"From Justine," I interrupted.
Lara looked impatient now. "Forcibly breaking away from Justine was an enormous psychic trauma, and he was at his weakest. Taking only lightly and breaking the contact isn't difficult. In fact, it's normally the way of things. But he'd been feeding regularly from the girl for several years. He could draw energy from her with a simple caress. To take her fully . . ." Lara's eyes grew a shade paler, and the tips of her breasts tightened against her blouse. "There's no thought involved in it. No judgment. No hesitation. Only need."
"That's horrible," Murphy said, her voice a whisper. "To force that on her."
Lara's pale eyes drifted to Murphy. "Oh, no. It isn't coerced, dear officer. She was more than willing to give. When prey has been taken so many times, they stop caring about death. There's only the pleasure of being fed upon. They're eager to give more, and they care nothing about the danger."
Murphy sounded sickened. "Maybe she broke it off instead."
Lara's mouth curled into a smirk. "No. By the time my brother took enough to restore him to his senses, the girl was little more than an animal in season."
Murphy's eyes narrowed as she stared at Lara. "And talking about it excites you. That's sick."
"Have you never made yourself hungry by talking about food, Officer Murphy?" Lara asked.
Murphy scowled, but didn't answer.
"In any case," Lara said, "what Thomas did was cruel. Justine cared for him as much as any of our prey ever can. There was little left when he drew away, of her body or her mind. Strictly speaking, she is survived, Officer. But I'm not sure one could say that she is alive."
"I get it," I said. "She and Thomas had . . . made an impression on each other. A sort of psychic bond. And you think Justine might be able to tell us where he is."
Lara nodded. "It happens when we keep someone too long. Though I'm surprised you know of it."
"I didn't," I said. "But when Bianca took Justine from him, Thomas knew that she was being held in Bianca's manor. He wouldn't say how."
Lara nodded. "If there is enough of her mind left, she might be able to lead us to my brother. I do not think he will be far from here. Father does not often travel far outside the property he controls."
Bobby reached us with the girl, and Inari ducked into the house and came out with a wheelchair. She rushed it over to Justine, and Bobby settled her into it.
I knelt down by the wheelchair. Justine lay almost bonelessly, barely holding her head up. Her dark eyes were heavy and unfocused. A small smile touched her mouth. Her eyes were sunken and her skin was almost translucent. She took slow, shallow breaths, and I heard her make a soft, pleased sound on each exhalation.
"Man," I breathed. "She looks out of it."
"Tick-tock," Murphy reminded me.
I nodded and waved my hand in front of Justine's eyes. No reaction. "Justine?" I said quietly. "Justine, it's Harry Dresden. Can you hear me?"
A faint line appeared on her forehead, though her expression did not quite become a frown. But it was something.
"Justine," I said. "Listen to me. Thomas is in trouble. Do you hear me? Thomas is in danger, and we need you to find him."
A slow shudder rolled through her. She blinked her eyes, and though they didn't quite focus, they stirred, looking around her.
"Thomas," I said again. "Come on, Justine. I need you to talk to me."
She took a deeper breath. The languid pleasure on her face faded, replaced with a portion of both sadness, and desire. "Thomas," she whispered.
"Yeah," I said. "Where is he? Can you tell me where he is?"
This time her eyes lost focus completely, then closed. Her lovely face smoothed into an almost meditative concentration. "Feel."
"Where?" Frustration threatened to overwhelm me. "What do you feel?"
She moved a hand and touched the opposite wrist. Then her knee. "Chains. Cold."
Lara leaned over her and asked, "Is he far away?"
Justine shivered. "Not far."
"Which direction?" I asked.
She made a feeble, vague motion with her hand, but frowned at the same time.
"I don't think she's strong enough to point," I said to Lara.
Lara nodded and told Inari, "Turn the chair around slowly, please."
"Justine," I said, "can you tell us when he's in front of you?"
The girl opened her eyes. They met mine for a heartbeat, and boy howdy did I chicken out and look away fast. No soulgaze, please. I'd had too many dying sheep tattooed into my memory for one day. But as Inari turned the chair, Justine suddenly lifted her head and her hand and pointed out into the darkness. The motion was weak, but in comparison to the others it was nearly forceful.
Lara stared out at the night for a moment and then said, "The Deeps. He's in the Deeps."
"What?" Murphy asked.
Lara frowned. "It's an old cave on the northern edge of the property. There's a shaft, a natural chasm, and no one is sure how far down it goes. We use it for . . ."
"Disposing of things," I said quietly. "Like corpses."
"Yes."
"How long will it take us to get there?"
"There's a service road to the groundskeeper's cottage," she said. "Go around the manor and head north. There's a white fence on the far side of the lawn. Look for the gate."
"I won't have to. You're coming with us," I said.
Lara didn't get to answer, because the night abruptly filled with deadly thunder, and a major-league pitcher planted a fastball directly between my shoulder blades. I went down hard, and concrete skinned my face. I heard Murphy grunt and hit the ground half of a heartbeat later.
I managed to move my head a second later, in time to see one of the Bodyguard Kens standing on the front porch of the manor. He worked the slide on a shotgun, the barrel tracking Lara. The succubus darted to her left, as swift and graceful as a deer, and the bodyguard followed her. The barrel of the gun found Inari before it caught up to Lara, and the girl stood frozen, her eyes as wide as teacups.
"Look out!" Bobby screamed. He hit Inari in a flying tackle that would have rattled the teeth of a professional fullback, and the gun went off. Blood scattered into the air in a heavy red mist.
Bodyguard Ken started pumping another round into the weapon, and the nearest target was Justine. The girl sat staring toward where she'd said Thomas was. I didn't think she could even hear the shots, much less move to avoid them, and I knew that she was going to die.
That is, until Murphy popped up into a kneeling firing stance, gun in hand. The gunman spun to aim at her and fired. He'd rushed himself, and the blast went wide of Murphy. It tore into the white sports car and shredded its left front tire.
Murphy didn't shoot back right away. She aimed her pistol for an endless half second while Bodyguard Ken ejected the previous shell and began to squeeze the trigger again. The spent shell hit the ground. Murphy's gun barked.
Bodyguard Ken's head jerked to one side, as if someone had just asked him a particularly startling question.
Murphy shot him three more times. The second shot made a fingertip-sized hole in the gunman's cheekbone. The third shattered against the brick of the house, and the fourth smacked into his chest. He must have been wearing armor, but the impact of the hit was enough to send him toppling limply backward. The shotgun went off as he fell, discharging into the air, but he was dead before the echoes faded away.
Murphy watched the gunman with flat, icy eyes for a second and then spun to me, setting her gun aside to reach under my coat.
"I'm okay," I wheezed. "I'm okay. The coat stopped it."
Murphy looked startled. "Since when has the duster been lined with Kevlar?"
"It isn't," I said. "It's magic. Hurts like hell but I'll be all right."
Murphy gripped my shoulder hard. "Thank God. I thought you were dead."
"Check the kid. I think he took a hit."
She went to over to Bobby and Inari, and was joined by Lara. I followed a moment later. Inari was whimpering with pain. Bobby was in shock, lying there quietly while he bled from his shredded shoulder and arm. He'd been lucky as hell. Only part of the blast had taken him, and while the wound would leave him with some nasty scars, it hadn't torn open any arteries. He'd live. Murphy grabbed a first-aid kit off of her bike and got the wound site covered up and taped down with a pressure bandage. Then she moved on to the girl.
"Is he all right?" Inari's voice was panicky. "He was so brave. Is he all right?"
"He should be," Murphy said. "Where's it hurt?"
"It's my shoulder," Inari said. "Oh, God, it hurts."
Murphy tore open the girl's T-shirt with ruthless practicality and examined the injury. "Not shot," she said. "Looks like she did it when the kid pulled her out of the line of fire." Murphy moved her hand and Inari went breathless and pale with pain. "Crap, it's her collarbone, Harry. Maybe a dislocated shoulder too. She can't move herself. Both of them need an ambulance, and now." She looked over at the bodyguard and shook her head. "And there's a fatality on the scene. This is getting bad, Dresden. We have to put this fire out before it goes wild."
"We don't have time to wait around while the cops sort things out," I said.
"And if we don't report the shooting along with the gunshot wounds, we're going to have police crawling through every inch of our lives."
"It was an accident," Lara said. "The boy and Inari were looking at my father's collection of guns. She slipped and fell. The shotgun went off."
"What about the body?" Murphy demanded.
Lara shrugged. "What body?"
Murphy glared at Lara and cast me a glance of appeal. "Harry?"
"Hey, telling the truth keeps getting me put in jail. And the last time I tried to engineer a cover-up, I wound up cleverly running off with the murder weapon and covering it with my prints before handing it over to someone who thought I was a murderer at the time. So don't look at me."
"There's no time to argue about this," Lara said. "If one of my father's guards saw you, he'll have reported you. The others will be on their way, and will be more heavily armed." She focused on Murphy. "Officer, let me handle this quietly. It will only protect the mortal officers who might get involved. And, after all, only the man who died committed any crime."
Murphy narrowed her eyes.
"I will owe you a favor," Lara said. "If matters go well tonight, it could be a considerable asset to you in the future. Dealing with the Raiths is a dark business. Let it stay in the dark."
Murphy hesitated. Then her mouth firmed into a line and she nodded once. She changed out the clip in her pistol to a fresh one. "Come on," she said. "Let's move before I start thinking about this."
"Moving before I think is my specialty," I said.
"The road," Lara said. "Through the gate behind the house I'll meet you at the groundskeeper's cottage."
"Why not squeeze onto the bike?" I said.
Murphy gave me an arch look.
"I'm just being practical," I said defensively.
"Someone has to call the ambulance and move the body," Lara said. "And I'd get there faster on my own in any case. I'll catch up to you when I can."
Which I figured was as much assurance as I'd get from her. It wasn't encouraging, but time was short, my options few, and standing around outdoors was likely to get everyone a bad case of deaditis.
So I strode to Murphy's bike. "Let's go."
Murphy came over to me, eyes on Lara. "She'll turn on us," she said quietly.
"She'll back the winning horse. So it had better be you and me. Can you handle the vigilante thing?"
She smiled at me, nervous but game. "Get on the bike, bitch."
She got on, I got on behind her, and, rebels that we were, neither of us put on a helmet.
What can I say? I like to live dangerously.
Murphy zipped around the house, tearing up the lawn with her Harley. We were doing better than sixty by the time she cleared the smooth turf surrounding the manor and zipped through an open gate onto a long, narrow gravel lane lined with high hedges.
Ahead of us, headlights on high-beam flashed into our eyes and an engine roared.
Lara had been right. Raith's bodyguards knew we were coming.
The car surged toward us.
Murphy's head whipped left and right, but the hedges were old growth, impassable and unbroken. "Crap! No time to turn!"
Ahead of us, I saw the silhouette of the remaining Bodyguard Ken climb out of the car window to sit on it, and lift a gun to his shoulder.
I leaned forward into Murphy, and took my staff from the holster. "Murphy!" I shouted. "We need more speed! Go faster!"
She looked over her shoulder, blue eyes wide, blond hair lashing around her cheeks.
"Go!" I screamed.
I felt her shoulders set as she turned back to the front and stomped on gears with one foot, and the old Harley roared as it dug into the road with ferocious power and shot ahead at terrifying speed. Flame spat from the shape ahead of us, and bullets hit the road, kicking up sparks and bits of gravel with a series of whistling whiplash sounds that beat the sound of exploding shots to us by almost a second.
I ignored the gunman, focusing on the staff. Of all my foci, the staff was the most versatile. Meant simply to assist with the redirection of forces I could use to call wind, to bend steel bars, and to channel lightning. I had used my staff to erect barriers of force, disrupt hostile magics, and in a pinch to beat bad guys about the head and shoulders.
I took the tool, the trademark and icon of a wizard, and couched it under my arm like a lance, the tip extending past Murphy's bike. I reached out for my will and gathered up power, feeding it into the rune-carved wood.
"What are you doing?" Murphy screamed.
"Faster!" I thundered. "Don't turn!"
Murphy had another gear, and that damned Harley had to have been built by demons, not engineers. No vehicle without a roll cage had any business going that fast.
But I needed it to have enough force to survive. Even wizards cannot escape the consequences of physics. You can call up a storm of fire, but it won't burn without fuel and air. Want to infuse yourself with superhuman strength? It's possible. But keep in mind that just because your muscles have gotten supercharged, it doesn't mean that your bones and joints can support the weight of a Volkswagen.
By the same line of reasoning, force still equals mass times acceleration no matter how big your magic wand might be. Me plus Murphy plus her Harley didn't mass anywhere near what the car and the people in it did. I could give us an advantage, but even with the staff I could stretch the rules only so far. Our mass wasn't going to change---and that meant that we needed all the acceleration we could get.
I started channeling our force into the staff, focusing it into a blunted wedge in front of us. All the extra power flooding ahead of us started heating the air, and flickers of blue and purple fire began streaking back around us in a corona, like one of the space shuttles on reentry.
"You have got to be kidding me!" Murphy screamed.
The oncoming car got closer. The bodyguard started shooting again, then dropped the gun and slid back into the car in a panic, strapping on his seat belt.
"This is insane!" Murphy yelled. But the Harley kept going faster.
The oncoming headlights loomed up in blinding brilliance. The other driver leaned on the horn.
Murphy screamed in terror and challenge in response.
I shouted, "Forzare!" and unleashed my will. It went rocketing down through the staff. Again its runes and sigils flared into hellish light, and the flickering corona of fire ahead of us blazed into an incandescent cloud.
Murphy's bike didn't waver.
Neither did the bodyguards' car.
There was a flash of light and thunder as the force lance struck the car, and between the reckless speed of Murphy's Hog and my will, physics landed firmly on our side. Our side of the equation was bigger than theirs.
The car's hood and front bumper crumpled as if they'd hit a telephone pole. The windows shattered inward as force I'd redirected lashed through the car. I screamed as glass and steel started flying, and with every scrap of strength that I had, I willed an angle into the lance, deflecting the car. Its front right wheel flew up off the ground, and the rest of the car followed, flipping up into the air and into a lateral roll.
I heard the bodyguards inside screaming.
There was an enormous crunch, totally drowning out Murphy's cry and my own howling, and then we were through it, continuing down the lane, shedding flames behind us like bits of wax melting from a candle, and we were suddenly screaming in triumph. We'd survived. The smoldering staff suddenly felt like it weighed a ton, and I almost dropped it. Exhaustion followed into the rest of my body a breath later, and I slumped against Murphy's back, looking behind us.
The car hadn't exploded, like they do on TV. But it had torn through ten or twelve feet of heavy hedge and slammed into a tree. The car lay on its side, steaming. Glass and broken bits of metal were spread on the ground around it in a field of debris at least fifty feet across. The air bags had deployed, and I could see a pair of crumpled forms inside. Neither of them was moving.
Murphy kept the Harley racing forward, and was casting laughter into the wind all the way down the road.
"What?" I called to her. "Why are you laughing?"
She half turned her head. Her face was flushed, her eyes sparkling. "I think you were right about the vibrator thing."
Half a mile later we rolled up to a house that could have handled a family of four without trouble. By the standards of the Raith estate, I guess that qualified it as a cottage. Murphy killed the bike's engine maybe two hundred yards out, and we coasted in the rest of the way, the only sound the crunching grind of gravel under the tires. She stopped the bike, and we both sat there in the silence for a minute.
"See a cave?" she asked me.
"Nope," I said. "But we can't wait for Lara to show up."
"Any ideas how to find it?" Murphy asked.
"Yeah," I said. "I've never heard of a ritual spell that didn't involve fire and some chanting and some smelly incense and stuff."
"Christ, Dresden. We don't have time to wander around the woods in the dark hoping to smell our way to the cave. Isn't there some way you could find it?"
"With magic? Iffy. I'm not sure what I would do to look for a cave."
Murphy frowned. "Then this is stupid," she said. "We'd be smarter to back off and come back with help and light. You could defend yourself against this curse, couldn't you?"
"Maybe," I said. "But that last one came in awfully strong and fast, and it changes everything. I can swing at a slow-pitch softball and hit it every time. Not even the best hitter can hit five hundred against major-league pitching."
"How did they do it?" she asked.
"Blood sacrifice," I said. "Has to be. Raith is involved with the ritual now." My voice twisted with bitter anger. "He's got experience using it. He's got Thomas now, which means he isn't going to target him with the curse. Raith's going to bleed him to help kill me. The only chance Thomas has is for me to stop the curse."
Murphy sucked in a breath. She hopped off the bike and drew her gun, holding it down by her leg. "Oh. You circle left and I'll circle right and we'll sniff for the cave, then."
"Argh, I'm an idiot," I said. I leaned my still-glowing staff against the bike and jerked the silver amulet off my neck. "My mother left this to me. Thomas has one like it. She had forged a link between them so that when one of us was touching both of them we got a . . . sort of a psychic voice mail."
"Meaning what?" Murphy asked.
I twisted the chain around the index finger of my burned hand, letting it dangle. "Meaning I can use that link to find the other amulet again."
"If he has it," Murphy said.
"He will," I said. "After last night, he won't take it off."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know it," I said. I held my right hand palm up and tried to focus upon it. I found the link, the channel through which my mother's latent enchantment had contacted Thomas and me, and I poured some of my will into it, trying to spread it out. "Because I believe it."
The amulet quivered on its string and then leaned out toward the night to our left.
"Stay close," I said, and turned in that direction. "Okay, Murph?"
There was no answer.
My instincts clamored in alarm. I dropped my concentration and looked around, but Murphy was nowhere in sight.
Directly behind me there was a muffled sound, and I turned to find Lord Raith standing there with an arm around Murphy's neck, covering her mouth and with a knife pressed up hard against her ribs. He was wearing all black this time, and in the autumn moonlight he looked like little more than a shadow, a pale and grinning skull, and a very large knife.
"Good evening, Mister Dresden."
"Raith," I said.
"Put the staff down. Amulet too. And the bracelet." He pressed the knife and Murphy sucked in a sharp breath through her nose. "Now."
Dammit. I dropped the bracelet, the staff, and my amulet to the grass.
"Excellent," Raith said. "You were right about Thomas keeping his amulet with him. I found it around his neck when I was cutting his shirt off to have him chained down. I was fairly certain that you would judge such an obviously linked item to be too hazardous to employ in any location magic, but on the off chance I was wrong, I kept my own location spell going. I've been watching you since you arrived."
"You must feel smug and self-satisfied. Are you getting to a point?" I asked.
"Absolutely," he said. "Kneel and place your hands behind your back."
The remaining Bodyguard Barbie appeared. She had a set of prisoner's shackles.
"What if I don't?" I asked.
Raith shrugged and shoved an inch of knife between Murphy's ribs. She bucked in sudden, startled pain.
"Wait!" I said. "Wait, wait! I'm doing it."
I knelt, put my hands behind my back, and Bodyguard Barbie hooked steel links to my wrists and ankles.
"That's better," Raith said. "To your feet, wizard. I'm going to show you the Deeps."
"Kill me with that entropy curse from point-blank range, eh?" I said.
"Precisely," Raith responded.
"Gaining you what?" I asked.
"Immense personal satisfaction," he said.
"Funny," I said. "For a guy warded against magic, you seemed to want to get rid of my gear pretty bad."
"This is a new shirt," he said with a smile. "And besides, can't have you killing the help---or Thomas---to spite me."
"Funny," I said. "You seem to be a lot of talk and not much do. I've heard about all kinds of things you are capable of. Enslaving women you feed on. Killing with a kiss. Superhuman badassedness. But you aren't doing any of it."
Raith's mouth set into a snarl.
"The White Council has taken a few shots at you, but when they quit you didn't go gunning for anyone," I continued. "And hey, what with you being invincible and all, there's got to be a reason for that. You must have been approached by others. I bet you got some pretty juicy offers. And I just can't square that with someone who allows a tart like Trixie Vixen to snap at him over the phone like she did to you today."
Raith's white face went whiter with rage. "I would not say such things were I in your position, wizard."
"You're going to kill me anyway," I said. "Hell, you've pretty much got to. I mean, we're at war, after all, and there you are all immune to magic. Must be a lot of pressure from the Reds for the White Court to get off its ass and do something. Makes you wonder why you didn't just wham, kiss-of-death me back there. Maybe get it on tape or something so you could show it off. Or hell, why you haven't socked the kiss of death on Murphy there just to shut me up."
"Is that what you want to see, wizard?" Raith said, his tone threatening.
I smiled at Raith's threat, and said, my tone a schoolyard singsong, "Lord Raith and Murphy, sitting in a tree, not K-I-S-S-I-N-G."
Raith clutched harder at Murphy's throat, and she arched her back, gasping, "Dresden."
I subsided with the chant, but I didn't let up. "See, immune to getting hurt is one thing," I said. "But I'm thinking my mother's death curse hit you where it hurt---a while later. There's a parasite called a tick. Lives in the Ozarks. And it is nigh invulnerable," I said. "But it isn't unkillable. Hard to squash, sure. But it can still be pierced with the right weapon. Or it can be smothered." I smiled at Raith. "And it can starve."
He stood as still as a statue, staring at me. His grip on Murphy's throat slackened.
"That's why you've been old news," I said quietly. "Mom said she arranged it so that you would suffer. And since the night you killed her, you haven't been able to feed. Have you. Haven't been able to top off the tank of vampire superpower gas. So no kisses of death. No assaults on wizards. No direct assaults on Thomas when a couple of deathplots failed. You even had to have willing help for this operation, 'cause there was no more enslaving women to your will. Though I take it from Inari being alive that the plumbing works. And after that, I take it from the fact that you haven't raped her into psychic slavery that you can't do that part. Must have made things hard for you, huh, Raith. Did you get the double entendre there, man? Made things hard?"
"Insolent," Raith said at last. "Utterly insolent. You are like her."
I let out a breath. It had been only a strong theory until his reaction had confirmed it. "Yeah. Thought so. You've been nothing but talk since my mom got finished with you. Living for years, talking a good game and hoping that no one noticed what you weren't doing. Hoping no one figured out that one of your broodmares gelded you. Bet that was terrifying. Living like that."
"Perhaps," he said in a low murmur.
"They're going to figure it out," I said quietly. "This is a pointless exercise. It will cost you to kill us, and you aren't getting any more. Ever. You'd be smarter to cut your losses and start running."
Raith's cold face again lifted into a smile. "No, boy. You aren't the only one who worked out what your mother did to me. And how. So instead, you and your brother are going to die tonight. Your deaths will end your mother's paltry little binding, along with her bloodline, of course." His eyes flashed to Murphy and he said with a slow smile, "And then perhaps something to eat. I am, after all, very hungry.
"You son of a bitch," I snarled.
Raith smiled at me again. Then told the Barbie, "Bring him."
And with that, Murphy still pinned on his knife---don't miss the symbolism there, Doc Freud---he led us through thirty yards of trees and down a rough slope into cold and darkness.
Lord Raith led us into the cave he called the Deeps, and the Bodyguard Barbie kept her gun on me while simultaneously remaining well out of easy reach. She wasn't any Trixie Vixen anyway. If I jumped her, she'd shoot me, and that would be that. Not that I could have done much jumping, what with the leg irons and all. I had trouble just shuffling along while ducking my head low enough to keep from bumping into rocky protrusions from the cave's roof.
"Murph?" I said. "How are you doing?"
"I'm feeling a little repressed," she responded. There was tight pain in her voice. "I'm fulfilling this hostage stereotype, and it's pissing me off."
"That's good," Raith said. He still had her by the neck, with the knife he held actually pressed a tiny bit into the wound he'd already given. "Defiance adds a great deal of enjoyment to feeding, Ms. Murphy." He put a contemptuous emphasis on the honorific. "It is, after all, a great deal more pleasurable to conquer than to rule. And defiant women can be conquered again and again before they break."
I ignored Raith. "How's your side?"
Murphy shot a glare over her shoulder at her captor. "A little prick like this? It's nothing."
In answer, Raith threw Murphy against the wall. She caught herself and turned, her hand blurring in a short, vicious strike.
Raith wasn't human. He caught her hand without so much as looking at it. He drove her hand and wrist back against the wall, and brought the bloodied tip of his knife sharply up under her chin. Her lip twisted into a defiant snarl and her knee lashed up as she kicked. Raith blocked it with a sweep of his thigh and pressed in close to her, all sinuous, serpentine speed and strength, until he was pressed to her front, his face to hers, raven-black hair mingling with her dark gold.
"Warrior women are all the same," Raith said, his eyes on Murphy's. His voice was low, slow, lilting. "You all know your way around struggling with other bodies. But you know little about the needs of your own."
Murphy stared at him, shoulders twitching, and her lips slowly parted.
"It's bound into you," Raith whispered. "Deeper than muscle and bone. The need. The only way to escape the blackness of death. You cannot deny it. Cannot escape it. In joy, in despair, in darkness, in pain, mortalkind still feels desire." His hand slid down from her wrist, his fingertips lightly brushing the thick veins. A soft sound escaped from Murphy's throat.
Raith smiled. "There. You already feel yourself weakening. I've taken thousands like you, lovely child. Taken them and broken them. There was nothing they could do. There is nothing you can do. You were made to feel desire. I was made to use it against you. It is the natural cycle. Life and death. Mating and death. Predator and prey."
Raith leaned closer with each word, and brushed his lips against Murphy's throat as he spoke. "Born mortal. Born weak. And easily taken."
Murphy's eyes went wide. Her body arched in shock. She let out a low, sobbing sound, as she tried and failed to hold back her voice.
Raith drew his head slowly back, smiling down at Murphy. "And that's only a taste, child. When you know what it is to be truly taken later this night, you will understand that your life ended the moment I wanted you." His hand moved, sudden and hard, digging his thumb against the wound in her ribs. Her face went white, and another, similar cry escaped her. She crumpled, and Raith let her fall to the ground. He stood over her for a moment, and then said, "We'll have days, little one. Weeks. You can spend them in agony or in bliss. The important thing to realize is that I'll be the one who decides which. You are no longer in command of your body. Nor your mind. You no longer have a choice in the matter."
Murphy gathered herself together and managed to lift her eyes again. They were defiant, and blurred with tears, but I could see the terror in them as well---and a sort of sickened, hideous desire. "You're a liar," she whispered. "I am my own."
Raith said, quietly, "I can always tell when a woman feels desire, Ms. Murphy. I can feel yours. Part of you is so tired of being disciplined. Tired of being afraid. Tired of denying yourself for the good of others." He knelt down, and Murphy's eyes shied away from his. "That part of you is what wanted to feel the pleasure I just gave. And it is that part of you that will grow as it feels more. The defiant young woman is already dead. She is simply too afraid to admit it."
He seized her hair and started dragging her, careless and hard. I saw her face for a second, confusion and fear and anger warring for control of her expression. But I knew she'd taken a wound far more grievous than any physical injury I'd seen her sustain. Raith had forced her to feel something, and there had been nothing she could do to stop him. She'd done her best to tear into him, and he had slapped her down like a child. It wasn't Murphy's fault that she'd lost that fight. It wasn't her fault that he'd forced sensation upon her. I mean, hell, he was the lord of the freaking nation of sexual predators, and even weakened and hampered by my mother's curse, he had been able to take apart Murphy's psychic and emotional defenses.
If he got the full measure of his powers back, what he would do to Murphy in retaliation for what my mother had done to him would be worse than death.
The damnedest thing was that there wasn't much I could do about it. Not because I was chained up, held at gunpoint, and probably going to die---though I had to admit, that might make things somewhat difficult---but because this wasn't a fight that someone else could win for Murphy. The real battle was inside of her---her strength of will against her own well-founded fears. Even if I did ride in on a white horse to save her, it would mean only that she would be forced to question her own strength and integrity thereafter, and that would be nothing more than a slow death of her self-reliance and strength of will.
It was something I could not save her from.
And I had asked her to face it.
Raith hauled on her hair as if it had been a dog's lead.
Murphy didn't fight back.
I clenched my hands into impotent fists. Murphy was in very real danger of dying that night, even if she kept on breathing and her heart kept on beating. But she would have to be the one to save herself.
The best thing I could do was nothing. The best thing I could say was nothing. I had some power, but it couldn't help Murphy now.
Hell's bells, irony blows.
I'd been in a few caves that were the headquarters for dark magic and those who trafficked in it. None of them had been warm. None of them had been pleasant. And none of them had been professionally decorated.
Until now.
After a long, precipitous slope into the earth, the Raith Deeps opened up into a cavern bigger than most Paris cathedrals. To a degree, it resembled one. Lights played in soft colors on the walls, mostly shifting rosy hues. The cave was of living rock, and the walls had all been shaped by water into nearly organic-looking curves and swirls. The floor sloped very slightly up, to where a shift in the rock gave rise to an enormous carved chair of pure, bone-white stone. The chair had been decorated with flares and flanges and every kind of carved frivolity you could imagine, so that it sat at the center of all the carving like a peacock poised in front of its tail. Water fell in a fine mist from overhead, and more lights played through it, broken by the droplets into myriad spectra. To the right hand of the throne was a smaller carved seat---almost a stool really, like the ones you'd imagine lions or seals perching on during circus performances. To the left was a jagged, broken gap in the rock, and behind the throne, where more of the mist fell, was simply darkness.
Though the stone was smooth, it undulated in regular, ripple-shaped rises toward the throne from where we entered the Deeps. Here and there along the rippled floor were groups of pillows and cushions, thick woven carpets, low, narrow tables set with wine and the kinds of finger foods that tended to get smeared about fairly easily.
"Well, it's subtle," I said to no one in particular. "But I like it. Sort of The King and I meets Harem Honeys and Seraglio Sluts II."
Raith strode past me and threw Murphy at a pile of pillows and cushions along one wall, the one farthest away from the entrance. She knew how to take a fall, and though the motion had been vicious and torn out some of her hair, she landed well, coming up to a shaky crouch. Bodyguard Barbie dragged my manacles and me over to the wall nearby and padlocked me to a steel ring in the wall. There was a whole row of such rings there. I tried to wiggle a little, testing the strength of the steel ring, but whoever built it knew what he was doing. No wiggle, no flexion of the ring where it joined the wall.
"Time?" Raith asked.
"Eleven-thirty-nine, my lord," the bodyguard reported.
"Ah, good. Still time." He walked over to a group of pillows in the far corner of the room, and I realized that they had been strewn around a little raised platform of stone. The platform was a circle perhaps ten feet across, and inside of it was a thaumaturgic triangle, an equilateral shape within the ring of the circle used in most ritual magic because it was easier for amateurs to draw a freaking triangle than a pentacle or a Star of Solomon. Thick incense wafted up from braziers around the circle, giving the cold air the sharp scent of cinnamon and some other, more acrid spice. "Wizard, I believe you have met my assistants."
Two women rose from the shadows within the circle and faced me. The first was Madge, Arturo's first wife, the disciplined businesswoman. She wore a white robe trimmed with scarlet cloth, and her hair was down. It made her look both younger and simultaneously lent her an overripe look, like fruit a day swollen and spoiled. Her eyes were no less calculating, but there was an edge of something there that I recognized---cruelty. The love of power, to the exclusion of the well-being of one's fellow beings.
The second woman, of course, was Trixie Vixen. She looked awful and she didn't get up. I could see the thick bandages over her wounded leg as she sat quietly on one hip, the silk of her own crimson-trimmed white robe spread out in such a way that it normally would have revealed enticing curves of calf and thigh. Her eyes had the heavy, flickering look of someone on far too many drugs, and used to it.
Thomas was chained to the floor in the center of the thaumaturgic triangle. He was naked, gagged, and his pale skin was covered with bruises and the stripes of being beaten with a slender cane. There was a low ridge of rock under his spine that arched his back off the floor, pinning his shoulders back and exposing his chest in such a fashion that he would be unable to move, even if someone should be leaning over him in order to cut out his heart.
"You're missing one," I said. "Where's wifey number two?"
"Dear Lucille." Raith sighed. "She was far too eager to please, and melodramatic about it to boot. I did not authorize her little attempt to poison you via blow dart, wizard, though I suppose I would not have been upset with her had she succeeded. But she was guiding the spell last night and had the incredibly bad taste to attempt to murder my daughter." Raith sighed. "I very nearly felt obligated to you for saving her, Dresden. Lucille assured me that she had only the best of intentions and wanted to do all that she could to continue helping me."
"So you sacrificed her for the curse this morning," I spat.
"No, he didn't," Madge said in a quiet, rather chillingly conversational tone. "I did. The little bitch. I'd been dreaming about something like that for years. They're wrong about revenge, you know. All the movies. I found it quite fulfilling and rewarding, from an emotional standpoint."
"I helped," Trixie protested. "I helped kill her."
"Bullshit," I said. "You were right there holding a gun on me when Lucille died, you . . . you self-deluded, half-witted schlong-jockey."
Trixie shrieked, lurched up, and started to throw herself at me. Madge and Raith caught her arms and let her thrash for a moment, until she was panting and drooping. They eased her back down. "Be still," Raith said. "That's quite enough from you."
Trixie hit him with a sullen scowl. "You don't tell me wh---"
Madge slapped her. Hard. One of her rings left a long line of fine red droplets on Trixie's cheek. "Idiot," she spat at Trixie. "If you'd told the police his name instead of forgetting it for your pills and needles, the wizard would be in a cell right now."
"What the fuck does it matter?" Trixie snarled, not looking up. "He's had it now. It didn't make any difference."
Madge tilted her head back and lifted her right hand, palm out and fingers spread, and said, "Orbius."
There was a surge of power that grated against my wizard's senses, and something wet and stinking that looked like a fusion of a fresh cow patty and a dew speckled cobweb came into being, slapping across Trixie's face. She fell back, clawing at it with her painted fingernails and screaming. Whatever the stuff was, it stuck like superglue, and it rendered her screams all but inaudible.
I shot a hard glance at Madge. She had power. Not necessarily a lot of it, but she had it. No wonder she'd made sure her hands were full when she first met me. The touch of one practitioner's hand against another's was electric and unmistakable. She'd dodged me neatly, which meant . . .
"You knew I was getting involved," I said.
"Of course," Raith confirmed. He added a pinch of something to one of the braziers and picked up a carved box. He drew black candles from it and placed them at each tip of the triangle. "Drawing you into a position of vulnerability was one of the points of the entire exercise. It was time to have flights of angels sing my dear son to his rest, and you and he had become entirely too friendly. I had assumed he was feeding from you and had you under his influence, but after I listened to the security tape from the portrait gallery I was delighted. Both of Margaret's sons. I finally will escape her ridiculous little binding, remove a troublesome thorn in my side---"
He kicked Thomas viciously in the ribs. Thomas jerked but made no sound, his eyes burning with impotent fury. Trixie Vixen fell over onto her side, back going into desperate arches.
"---slay the wizard that has a full quarter of the Red Court quaking in their fleshmasks, restore a rebellious employee to acceptable controls, and now, in addition to all of that, I have acquired someone with influence among the local authorities." His eyes lingered on the subdued Murphy for a moment, growing shades more pale.
Murphy didn't look up at him.
"Take off your shoes, little one," Raith said.
"What?" Murphy whispered.
"Take them off. Now."
She flinched at the harshness of his tone. She took her shoes off.
"Throw them over the edge. Socks too."
Murphy obeyed Raith without lifting her eyes.
The incubus made a pleased sound. "Good, little one. You please me." He walked in a circle around her as if she were a car he'd just purchased. "All in all, Dresden, a marked gain for the year. It bodes well for the future of House Raith, don't you think?"
Trixie Vixen's heels thumped on the floor.
Raith looked down at her and then at Madge. "Can you manage the ritual alone, dear?"
"Of course, my lord," Madge said calmly. She struck a match and lit one of the candles.
"Well, then," Raith said. He regarded Trixie with clinical detachment until her heels had stopped drumming on the stone floor. Then he seized her hair and dragged her to the left side of the enormous throne. She still moved weakly. He lifted her by the back of the neck and pitched her out into the darkness like a bag of garbage.
Trixie Vixen couldn't scream as she fell to her death. But she tried.
I couldn't stop myself from feeling protest and pain as I saw another human being killed. Even though I tried.
Raith dusted his hands against each another. "Where was I?"
"Taunting the wizard with how he has been manipulated from the beginning," Madge said. "But I would suggest that you let me begin the conjuring at this point. The timing should be just about right."
"Do it," Raith said. He walked around the circle, examining it carefully, and then walked over to me.
Madge picked up a curved ritual knife and a silver bowl and stepped into the circle. She pricked her finger with the knife and smeared blood upon the circle, closing it behind her. Then she knelt at Thomas's head, lifted her face with her eyes closed, and began a slow chant in a tongue whose words twisted and writhed through her lips.
Raith watched her for a long moment, and then his head abruptly snapped up toward the exit of the cave.
Bodyguard Barbie came to attention like a dog who has noticed its master taking a package of bacon out of the fridge.
"Sirens," Raith said, his voice harsh.
"Police?" asked Barbie.
"Ambulance. What happened? Who called them?"
Barbie shook her head. Maybe the questions were too complex for her to handle.
"Gee, Raith," I said. "I wonder why the EMTs have shown up. I wonder if the police are coming along, too. Don't you wonder that?"
The lord of the White Court glared at me, then turned to walk toward the ridiculously elaborate throne. "I suppose it doesn't matter one way or the other."
"Probably not," I agreed. "Unless Inari is involved."
He stopped, frozen in his tracks.
"But what are the chances?" I asked. "I mean, I'm sure the odds are way against her being hurt. Riding a long way in the back of the ambulance with some young med tech. I'm sure daddy's little girl is not going to vamp out for the very first time on an EMT or a doctor or a nurse or a cop, kill them in front of God and everybody, and start off her adult life with a trip to prison, where I'm sure lots of other unfortunate deaths would put her away for good."
Raith didn't turn. "What have you done to my child?"
"Did something happen to your child?" I asked. I probably said that in as insulting a fashion as I possibly could. "I hope everything is all right. But how will we know? You should just get on with the cursing, I guess."
Raith turned to Madge and said, "Continue. I'll be back in a moment." Then to the bodyguard he said, "Keep your gun aimed at Dresden. Shoot him if he tries to escape." The bodyguard drew her weapon. Raith turned and darted from the room, faster than humanly possible.
Madge continued her twisty chant.
"Heya, Thomas," I said.
"Mmmph," he said through the gag.
"I'm gonna get you out of here."
Thomas lifted his head from the ground and blinked at me.
"Don't space out on me, man. Stay with us here."
He stared at me for a second more and then groaned and dropped his head back onto the ground. I wasn't sure if that was an affirmative or not.
"Murph?" I called.
She looked up at me, then down again.
"Murph, don't fall apart on me. He's the bad guy and he's way sexy while he does it. That's his bag. He's supposed to be able to get to you."
"I couldn't stop him," she said in a numb voice.
"That's okay."
"I couldn't stop myself either." She met my eyes for a second and then slumped to the floor. "Leave me alone, Mister Dresden."
"Right," I muttered. I focused on the bodyguard. "Hey there. Look, uh. I don't know your name. . . ."
She just stared at me down the length of her gun.
"Yeah, okay, that's hostile," I said. "But look, you're a person. You're human. I'm human. We should be working together here against the vampires, right?"
Nothing. I get more conversation from Mister.
"Hey!" I shouted. "You! You demented U.S. Army surplus blow-up doll! I'm talking to you. So say something!"
She didn't, but her eyes glittered with annoyance, the first emotion I'd seen there. What can I say, inspiring anger is my gift. I have a responsibility to use it wisely.
"Excuse me!" I shouted as loudly as I could. "Did you hear me, bitch? At this rate I'm gonna have to blow you up too, just like I did the Bodyguard Kens and your twin."
Now real fury filled her eyes. She cocked her gun and opened her mouth as if she were going to actually speak to me, but I never got to hear what she was going to say.
Murphy made a soundless, barefooted run, leapt, and drove a flying side kick into the back of Bodyguard Barbie's neck. Whiplash was far too mild a word to describe what happened to the woman's head. Whiplash happens in friendly, healthy things like automobile accidents. Murphy meant the kick to be lethal, and that made it worse than just about any car wreck.
There was a crackling sound and Barbie dropped to the floor. The gun never went off.
Murphy knelt and searched the woman, taking her gun, a couple of extra clips, a knife, and a set of keys. She stood up and started trying keys on my manacles.
I looked up and watched Madge as she did. The sorceress remained on her knees in the circle, her chant flowing smoothly from her mouth in an unbroken stream. The ritual required it. Had she broken her chant, shouted a warning to the bodyguard, or moved outside the circle it would have disrupted the ritual---and that kind of thing can draw some awfully lethal feedback for showing disrespect to whatever power is behind the ritual. She was at least as trapped as I was.
"Took you long enough," I said to Murphy. "I was going to run out of actual sentences and just start screaming incoherently."
"That's what happens when your vocabulary count is lower than your bowling average."
"Me not like woman with smart mouth," I said. "Woman shut smart mouth and get me free or no wild monkey love for you." She found the right key and got the shackles off me. My wrists and ankles ached. "You had me scared," I said. "Until you called me Mister Dresden, I almost believed he'd gotten to you."
Murphy bit her lip. "Between you and me, I'm not sure he didn't." She shivered. "I wasn't doing much acting, Harry. You made a good call. He underestimated me. But it was too close. Let's leave."
"Steady. Just a little longer."
Murphy frowned, but she didn't run. "You want me to keep Madge covered? What if she does that magic-superglop thing on our faces too?"
I shook my head. "She can't. Not until the ritual is complete."
"Why not?"
"Because if she makes a mistake in the ritual there's going to be some backlash. Maybe it wouldn't touch us, or maybe it would---but it sure as hell would kill everyone in the circle."
"Thomas," Murphy breathed.
"Yeah."
"Can we mess up the rite?"
"Could. But to quote Kincaid, thus kablowie, thus death. If we interrupt the ritual or if she screws it up, things go south."
"But if we don't stop her, she kills Thomas."
"Well. Yeah."
"Then what do we do?" Murphy asked.
"We jump Raith," I said, and nodded back to the wall where she had crouched. "Get back to where he threw you. When he comes in again, we take him down and trade him for Thomas."
"Won't breaking the circle screw up the ritual?" Murphy asked.
"Not the outer circle," I said. "The circle is mostly there to help her have the juice for the ritual. Madge's got some talent. And a survival instinct. She can hold it together if we break it."
Murphy's eyes widened. "But breaking the triangle. That will screw up the ritual."
I regarded Madge steadily and said, loud enough to be sure she heard, "Yep. And kill her. But we aren't going to break the triangle yet."
"Why not?" Murphy demanded.
"Because we're going to offer Madge a chance to survive the evening. By letting her kill Raith in Thomas's place and let the curse go to waste. So long as someone dies on schedule, whatever is behind the ritual shouldn't mind." I walked over to stand directly outside the circle. "Otherwise, all I have to do is kick one of these candles over or smudge the lines of the triangle then back up to watch her die. And I think Madge is a survivor. She walks, Thomas is fine, and Raith isn't giving anyone any more trouble."
"She'll run," Murphy said.
"Let her. She can run from the Wardens, but she can't hide. The White Council is going to have some things to say to her about killing people with magic. Pointed things. Cutting things."
"Taunting the spellslinger must be a really fun game, since people like you and Raith keep playing it," Murphy said, "But don't you think he's going to notice that you aren't being held with a gun on you anymore?"
I looked down at the bodyguard's body and grimaced. "Yeah. The corpse is gonna be a giveaway, isn't it."
We looked at each other and then both bent down and grabbed an arm. We dragged the remains of the final Bodyguard Barbie over to the edge of the yawning chasm and dropped her in. After that I reached for my sword cane, still clipped to my belt, and loosened the blade in its sheath.
"Can't believe Raith let you keep that," Murphy said.
"The guard didn't seem to be very good at employing her initiative, and he didn't specifically mention my losing the cane. Don't think he noticed it. He was pretty busy gloating, and I was chained up and all."
"He's like a movie villain," Murphy said.
"No. Hollywood wouldn't allow that much cliché." I shook my head. "And I don't think he's thinking very clearly right now. He's pretty worked up about beating my mom's death curse."
"How tough is this guy?" Murphy asked.
"Very tough. Ebenezar says my magic can't touch him."
"How's about I shoot him?"
"Can't hurt," I said. "You might get lucky and solve our problem. But only a really critical shot will drop him, and even then it's iffy whether or not you'll get him. White Court vamps don't soak up gunshots as well as Red Court vampires do, or ignore them like the Black Court, but they can get over them in a hurry."
"How?"
"They have a kind of reserve of stolen life-energy. They tap into it to be stronger or faster, to recover from injuries, forcibly manipulate the sensations of police lieutenants, that kind of thing. They don't run around being as tough as the Black Court all the time, but they can rev the engine when they need to do it. It's probably safe to assume that Lord Raith has a great big honking tank of reserve energy."
"We'd have to run him out of gas in order to get to him long-term."
"Yep."
"Can we do that?"
"Don't think so," I said. "But we can force him to push himself pretty hard."
"So we almost beat him. That's the plan?"
"Yeah."
"That's not a very good plan, Harry," Murphy said.
"It's a wascally-wabbit plan," I said.
"Actually, it qualifies as a crazy plan."
"Crazy like a fox," I said. I put my hands on her shoulders. "There's no time to argue, Murph. Trust me?"
She flipped her hands up in a helpless little gesture (slightly mitigated by the fact that she had a gun in one and a knife in the other) and turned to stalk back to the cushions where Raith had initially thrown her. "We're going to die."
I grinned and stepped back to the ring where Raith had me chained up. I stood there in the same pose as when I'd been prisoner, and held the shackles behind my back as if they might still be attached.
I had barely settled into position when there was the sound of one, two, three gazelle-like bounds on the sloped tunnel floor, and Raith shot into the cavern, scowling. "What idiocy!" he snarled toward Madge. "That stupid buck from Arturo's studio nearly slaughtered my daughter by sheer incompetence. The medical teams are taking them now."
He stopped talking abruptly. "Guard?" he snapped. "Madge, where did she go?"
Madge widened her eyes, still continuing the twisting, slippery words of the chant, and gave Murphy a significant look.
Raith turned, back stiffening in apprehension, to face Murphy.
Madge should have warned Raith about me. If he'd blown off old Ebenezar's lethal magic, he had defenses out the wazoo. I didn't even try to blast away at him with power.
Instead I swung the shackles once over my head and brought the flying steel down on Raith's right ear with every ounce of strength in my body. The steel cuffs bit into his flesh with vicious strength and laid him out on the floor. He let out a snarl of shock and surprise. He turned to glare at me, his eyes burning a bright, metallic silver, his torn ear already knitting itself whole again.
I dropped the chains, drew my sword cane, and drove the blade straight at Raith's left eye. The White lord moved his hand in a blur of motion, batting the scalpel-slender blade aside. I drew a sharp cut across his hand, but it didn't keep him from kicking my ankles out from underneath me with a sweep of his leg. He rose almost before I was through falling, and picked up the bloodied shackles, his features set in wrath. I went flat and covered my neck with my hands.
Murphy shot Raith in the back. The first bullet came out the left side of his chest, and must have left a hole in his lung. The second exploded out from between two ribs on the other side of his body.
It had taken less than a second for the two shots to hit, but Raith reversed direction, flashing to one side like a darting bat, and two more shots seemed to miss him. The motion was odd to watch, and vaguely disturbing. Raith almost flowed across the room, looking as if he were being lazy, but moving with unnerving speed. He vanished behind an elaborate Oriental-style screen.
And the cave's lights went out.
The only source of light left in the cavern came from the three black candles at the points of the ritual's triangle, way the hell at the back of the chamber. Madge's voice continued its rippling, liquid chant, an edge of smug contempt somehow conveyed in it, her attention focused on the ritual. Thomas's bruised body twitched as he looked around, eyes wide behind the gag in his mouth. I saw his shoulders tighten as he tested the chains. They didn't seem to give way for him any more than mine had for me.
Murphy's voice slid through the darkness a moment later, sounding sharp against the steady, liquid chant of the entropy curse. "Harry? Where is he?"
"I have no idea," I said, keeping the point of the sword low.
"Can he see in the dark?"
"Um. Tell you in a minute."
"Oh," she said. "Crap."
Raith's voice drifted out of the darkness. "I can indeed see you, wizard," he said. "I must admit, a brute attack was not what I expected of you."
I tried to orient to the sound of Raith's voice, but the Deeps had the acoustics of, well, a cave. "You really don't have a very good idea about what kind of man I am, do you?"
"I had assumed that White Council training would mold you a bit more predictably," he admitted. "I was certain you'd have some kind of complex magical means of dealing with me without bloodshed."
I thought I heard something really close to me and swept my slender sword left and right. It whistled as it cut the air. "Blood washes out with enough soda water," I said. "I've got no trouble with the thought of spilling more of yours. It's sort of pink anyway."
Murphy was not talking, which meant that she was acting. Either she was using the sound of my voice to get close to me so that we could team up or she had gotten a better idea than I of Raith's location, and she was stalking close enough to drill him in the dark. Either way, it was to our advantage for the conversation to continue.
"Maybe we can make a deal, Raith," I said.
He laughed, low and lazy and confident. "Oh?"
"You don't want to push this all the way," I said. "You've already eaten one death curse. There's no reason for you to take another if you don't have to."
He laughed gently. "What do you propose?"
"I want Thomas," I said. "And I want Madge. You stop these attacks and leave Arturo alone."
"Tempting," he said. "You want me to allow one of my most dangerous foes to live, you want me to surrender a competent ally, and then you would like me to permit the erosion of my power base to continue. And in exchange, what do I receive?"
"You get to live," I said.
"My, such a generous offer," Raith said. "I can only assume this is some sort of clumsy ploy, Dresden, unless you are entirely deluded. I'll counter your offer. Run, wizard. Or I won't kill the pretty officer. I'll keep her. After I kill you, of course."
"Heh," I said. "You aren't in good enough shape for that to be so easy," I said. "Or you wouldn't have let me stall you while we batted bullshit back and forth."
In answer, Raith said absolutely nothing.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
And, better and better, the chant rolling from Madge's lips rose to a ringing crescendo. A wild, whirling wind rose within the center of the circle, catching her hair and spreading it in a cloud of dark-and-silver strands. As that happened, the tempo of her words shifted, and they shifted from that other tongue into English. "While here we wait, O hunter of the shadows! We who yearn for your shadow to fall upon our enemy! We who cry out in need for thy strength, O Lord of Slowest Terror! May your right arm come to us! Send unto us your captain of destruction! Mastercraftsman of death! Let now our need become the traveler's road, the vessel for He Who Walks Behind!"
The rest of my stomach promptly followed the bottom, and for a second I thought my sense of logic and reason had vanished with them.
He Who Walks Behind.
Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.
He Who Walks Behind was a demon. Well. Not really a demon. The Walker was to a demon what one of those hockey-masked movie serial killers was to the grade-school bully who had tried to shake me down once for lunch money. Justin DuMorne had sent the Walker after me when we'd had our falling-out, and I'd barely managed to survive the encounter. I'd torn apart He Who Walks Behind, but even so he'd left me with some unnerving scars.
And the ritual Madge was using was calling that thing back.
Madge picked up the sacrificial knife and the silver bowl. The whirling wind gathered into a miniature thunderstorm hovering slowly over the triangle where Thomas was bound. "See here our offering to flow into your strength! Flesh and blood, taken unwilling from one who yearns to live! Bless this plea for help! Accept this offering of power! Make known to us your hand that we might dispatch him against our mutual foe---Harry Dresden!"
"Murphy!" I screamed. "Get out of here! Right now! Run!"
But Murphy didn't run. As Madge raised the knife, Murphy appeared in the light of the black candles, darting into the circle, the knife in her teeth, the gun in one hand---and in her other, the keys she'd taken from the last bodyguard. She knelt down as Madge screamed out the last of the ritual in an ecstasy of power. Murphy had crossed the circle around the ritual, breaking it. That meant that whatever magic Madge was calling up would be able to zip right out of it without delay, the second Madge fed a life to the gathering presence of He Who Walks Behind. Murphy set the gun down and tried one key on Thomas's chains. Then another.
"Madge!" Raith's voice snapped in warning. I heard a flutter of movement that began five feet to my right and vanished toward the circle.
Madge opened her eyes and looked down.
Murphy found the key, and the steel bracelet on Thomas's right arm sprang open.
Madge kept screaming, reversed the knife, and drove it down at Thomas's chest.
Thomas caught Madge's knife hand by the wrist, and his skin suddenly shone pale and bright. She leaned on the knife, screaming, but Thomas held her there with one arm.
Murphy picked up the gun, but before she could aim it at Madge, there was a blur, her head snapped to one side, and she dropped to the ground in abrupt stillness. Raith stood over her unmoving form, and bent with businesslike haste to recover her knife, his eyes moving to Thomas.
Fumbling in haste, I seized the sheath of my cane-sword from my belt, grabbing hard at my will, struggling to pull together power through the cloud of raw terror that had descended over my thoughts. I managed it, and normally invisible runes along the length of the cane burst into blue and silver light. There was a deep hum, so low that it could be felt more than heard, as I reached into the power the cane was meant to focus---the enormous and dangerous forces of earth magic.
I reached out through the cane for Lord Raith---
And felt nothing. Not just empty air and drifting dust, but nothing. A cold and somehow hungry emptiness that filled the space where he should have been. I'd felt something like it before, when I'd been near a mote of one of the deadliest substances that any world of flesh or spirit had ever known. My power, my magic, the flowing spirit of life, just vanished into it without getting near Raith.
I couldn't touch him. The void around him was so absolute, I knew without needing to doubt that there was nothing in my arsenal of arcane skills that could affect him.
But Madge didn't have any such protection.
I redirected my power, easily found the knife in Madge's hand, and without the circle to protect her, there was nothing she could do to keep me from seizing the knife in invisible bands of earth force, magnetism, and sending it tumbling out of her grip and into the abyss of the chasm near them.
"No!" Madge screamed, staring up at the whirling cloud of dark energy in horror.
"Hold him!" Raith snarled.
Madge threw herself down on Thomas's arm, and as strong as he was, he had three limbs chained down, and not even supernatural strength is a substitute for proper leverage. Not only that, but Madge was desperate. She managed to force Thomas's arm down, and while she obviously couldn't have held him for long, it was long enough. Lord Raith drove his knife down at Thomas's chest.
Thomas howled in frustration and sudden pain.
I rammed more power through the cane and stopped the knife a bare instant after the tip hit Thomas, and pinkish blood welled up from the shallow stab wound. Raith cast a snarl at me and shoved down on the knife, his own skin luminous, and he had the power of a pile driver behind his arms. I didn't have a prayer of stopping him, even if that void around him hadn't been sapping my power into nothingness---so I redirected my own push instead, switching to a right-angle force instead of going directly against Raith, and the knife swept hard to one side as Raith pushed down. It dug a furrow through Thomas's flesh on the way, wetting a good three inches of the blade in his blood, but then Raith's own power drove it down into the stone of the cavern floor, and the steel shattered.
Thomas got his hand free and hit Madge, a backhanded blow that knocked her out of the light of the black candles.
"Harry!" he yelled. "Break the chains!"
Which I couldn't do. My little displays of earth magic were a long way from being of chain-shattering quality. But I did the next best thing.
Raith had to step back for a second, because a shard from the shattering knife had gone through his hand. He ripped it out of his flesh with a snarl, then turned back to Thomas, and as he did I got the bodyguard's keys in a magnetic grip and threw them hard at Lord Raith's face.
Keys are a nasty missile weapon, and any street fighter will tell you so. For fun, get yourself a milk carton and throw a ring of keys at it. You don't even have to throw it very hard. Odds are better than merely good that the milk carton is going to have holes in it and that milk is going to be dribbling out everywhere.
And eyelids are way thinner than milk cartons.
Raith got a bunch of keys in the face and they hit him hard enough to make him scream. I caught them again on the rebound and sent them zipping back at him, as if they'd been fastened to rubber bands tied to his nose. I don't care how superhumanly sexy you are, if you're a vertically symmetrical biped, you don't have much choice but to react when something tries to put out your eyes.
I pummeled Raith with the keys until he ducked out of the light of the black candles, and then I sent them darting over to Thomas. I shouted his name as I did, and he reached up and caught them with his free hand. He shook one out without delay, and started freeing himself of his chains.
It was just then that the swirling clouds over the empty triangle coalesced into the vague outline of an inhuman face---one that I recognized from the darkest hour of my past and the nightmares it had inhabited since. That demonic mouth split into an eerily soundless scream, as if it had created a sudden void of sound rather than the opposite. That hideous face oriented on the very edge of the remaining candlelight---upon Madge. The cloud surged forward and down, sprouting sudden rows of almost toothlike spines as it did. Madge sat up, raising her hands in a useless gesture of defense. The demonic cloud shot itself forward and into her mouth. The spines tore at her, and Madge struggled to keep it out of her, but it was all useless, and not particularly speedy. She had plenty of time to feel it as the demonic killer, the guiding mind who had been behind the entropy curse, flowed in its semigaseous form into her mouth and throat and lungs, then extruded savage spines and tore her apart from within.
Madge didn't manage to get out a scream as she died.
But it wasn't for lack of trying.
Thomas got his arms and legs free and got up, staring in horror at Madge---or more accurately, at the spined cloud still mangling Madge's corpse from within.
Raith hit Thomas from behind, a blur of motion. There was only a second to see what was happening, but I saw it clearly when Raith seized Thomas by the shoulder and chin, and with a single savage twist, broke his neck.
Thomas fell without so much as a twitch.
"No!" I screamed.
Raith turned toward me.
I dropped my sword, slashed at the air with the cane and my will, and the gun Murphy had taken from the bodyguard flew to my hand.
Raith's face was bruised and torn. Thick globules of pink blood had splattered over his battered features and his dark shirt. He smiled as he started toward me, and the shadows between the candles and my cane covered him.
I aimed more or less at Raith and shot. The flash showed him to me for an instant. I used that single image to redirect my fire and shot again. And again. And again. The last shot showed me Raith, only eight or ten feet away, a look of shock upon his face. The next shot showed him on his knees, clutching at his stomach, where a welter of pink fluid had soaked him.
Then the gun locked open, and empty.
For a minute it was all dark.
Then Raith's flesh began to glow. His shirt was in shreds, and he tore it from him with a negligent gesture. His skin became suffused with a pale light once more, and I saw his body rippling weirdly around an ungainly hole left of his navel. He was healing.
I stared at him tiredly for a minute, then bent over and picked up my sword.
He laughed at me. "Dresden. Wait there for a moment. I'll deal with you as I did Thomas."
"He was my blood," I said quietly. "He was my only family."
"Family," Raith spat. "Nothing but an accident of birth. Random consequence of desire and response. Family is meaningless. It is nothing but the drive of blood to further its own. Random combination of genes. It is utterly insignificant."
"Your children don't think that," I said. "They think family is important."
He laughed. "Of course they think that. I have trained them to do so. It is a simple and convenient way to control them."
"And nothing more?"
Raith rose, regarding me with casual confidence. "Nothing more. Put the sword down, Dresden. There's no reason this has to hurt you."
"I'll pass. You can't have much left in you," I said. "I've given you enough of a beating to kill three or four people. You'll stay down sooner or later."
"I have enough left in me to deal with you," he said, smiling. "And after that, things will change."
"Must have been hard," I said. "All those years. Playing it careful. Never pushing yourself or using your reserves. Not able to risk getting your hands dirty, for fear everyone would see that you couldn't do what your kind do. Couldn't feed."
"It was an annoyance," Raith said after a wary pause. He took a step toward me, testing my response. "And perhaps taught me a measure of humility, and of patience. But I never told anyone what Margaret's curse did to me, Dresden. How did you know?"
I kept the point of the sword pointed at his chest and said, "My mother told me about it."
"Your mother is dead, boy."
"You're immune to magic, too. Guess she just doesn't have a lot of respect for the rules."
His face darkened into an ugly, murderous mask. "She's dead."
I smirked at him, waving the tip of my sword in little circles.
The glow on his skin began to fade, and the darkness closed in with deadly deliberation. "It has been a pleasure speaking with you, but I am healed, wizard," Raith snarled. "I'm going to make you beg me for death. And my first meal in decades is going to be the little police girl."
At which point all the lights in the cavern came up at the same time, restoring the place to its slightly melodramatic but perfectly adequate lighting.
Lara stepped from behind the screen, her scarlet skirt swaying, sword on her hip, and murmured, "I think I'd like to see that, Father."
He stopped, staring at her, his face hardening. "Lara. What do you think you're doing?"
"Writhing in disillusionment," she said. "You don't love me, dearest Papa. Me, your little Lara, most dutiful daughter."
He let out a harsh laugh. "You know better. And have for a century."
Her beautiful face became remote. Then she said, "My head knew, Father. But my heart had hoped otherwise."
"Your heart," he said, scorn in his voice. "What is that? Take the wizard at once. Kill him."
"Yes, Papa," she said. "In a moment. What happened to Thomas?"
"The spell," he said. "Madge lost control of it when she unleashed it at Dresden. Your brother died trying to protect him. Subdue him, dearest. And kill him."
Lara smiled, and it was the coldest, most wintry expression I had ever seen. And I had seen some of the champs. She let out a mocking, scornful little laugh. "Did you stage that for my benefit, wizard?"
"It was a little rough," I said. "But I think I got my point across."
"How did you know I was watching?" she asked.
I shrugged. "Someone had to have told Raith that bullshit about the accident with the gun," I said. "You were the only one who could have done that. And since this confrontation was going to be pivotal to your future, regardless of how it turned out, you'd be an idiot not to watch."
"Clever," she said again. "Not only is my father drained of his reserves, he is unable to recover more." She lowered her eyelids, her eyes glittering like silver ice as she did. "Quite helpless, really."
"And now you know it," I said.
I gave Raith a very small smile.
Raith's expression twisted into something somewhere between rage and horror. He took a step back from Lara, looking from her to me and back.
Lara traced her fingers in light caresses over the sword at her hip. "You've made me the cat's-paw for you, Dresden. While making me think I had the advantage of you. You've played me at my own game, and ably. I thought you capable of nothing but overt action. Clearly I underestimated you."
"Don't feel bad," I said. "I mean, I look so stupid."
Lara smiled. "I have one question more," she said. "How did you know the curse left him unable to feed?"
"I didn't," I said. "Not for certain. I just thought of the worst thing I could possibly do to him. And it wasn't killing. It was stealing. It was taking all of his power away. Leaving him to face all the enemies he'd made---with nothing. And I figured my mother might have had similar thoughts."
Raith sneered at Lara. "You can't kill me," he said. "You know that the other Lords would never permit you to lead the Court. They follow me, little Lara. Not the office of the Lord of House Raith."
"That's true, Father," Lara said. "But they don't know that you have been weakened, do they? That you have been made impotent. Nor will they know, when you continue to lead them as if nothing had changed."
He lifted his chin in an arrogant sneer. "And why should I do that?"
Silver light from Lara's eyes spread over her. It flowed down the length of her hair. It poured over her skin, flickered over her clothing, and dazzled the very air around her. She let her sword belt fall to the ground, and silver, hungry eyes fell upon Lord Raith.
What she was doing was directed solely at him, but I was on the fringes of it. And I suddenly had pants five sizes too small. I felt the sudden, simple, delicious urge to go to her. Possibly on my knees. Possibly to stay that way.
I panicked and took a step back, making an effort to shield my thoughts from Lara's seductive power, and it let me think almost clearly again.
"Wizard," she said, "I suggest you take your friend from this place. And my brother, if he managed to survive the injury." Her skirt joined the belt, and I made damned sure I wasn't looking. "Father and I," Lara purred, "are going to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. It promises to be interesting. And you might not be able to tear yourselves away, once I begin."
Raith took a step back from Lara, his eyes racked with fear. And with need. He'd totally forgotten me.
I moved, and quickly. I was going to pick Murphy up, but I managed to get her moving again on her own, though she was still only half-conscious. The right side of her face was already purple with bruising. That gave me the chance to pick Thomas up. He wasn't as tall as me, but he had more muscle and was no featherweight. I huffed and puffed and got him into a fireman's carry, and heard him take a grating, rattling breath as I did.
My brother wasn't dead.
At least, not yet.
I remember three more things from that night in the Deeps.
First was Madge's body. As I turned to leave, it suddenly sat up. Spines protruded from its skin, along with rivulets of slow, dead blood. Its face was ravaged shapeless, but it formed up into the features of the demon called He Who Walks Behind, and its mouth spoke in a honey-smooth, honey-sweet, inhuman voice. "I am returned, mortal man," the demon said through Madge's dead lips. "And I remember thee. Thou and I, we have unfinished business between us."
Then there was a bubbling hiss, and the corpse deflated like an empty balloon.
The second thing I remember happened as I staggered toward the exit with Thomas and Murphy. Lara slid the white shirt from her shoulders to the floor and faced Raith, lovely as the daughter of Death himself, a literal irresistible force. Timeless. Pale. Implacable. I caught the faintest scent of her hair, the smell of wild jasmine, and nearly fell to my knees on the spot. I had to force myself to keep moving, to get Thomas and Murph out of the cave. I don't think any of us would have come out of it with our own minds if I hadn't.
The last thing I remember was dropping to the ground on the grass outside the cave, holding Thomas. I could see his face in the starlight. There were tears in his eyes. He took a breath, but it was a broken one. His head and his neck hung at an impossible angle to his shoulders.
"God," I whispered. "He should be dead already."
His mouth moved in a little fluttering quiver. I don't know how I did it, but I understood that he'd tried to say, "Better this way."
"Like hell it is," I said back. I felt incredibly tired.
"Hurt you," he almost-whispered. "Maybe kill you. Like Justine. Brother. Don't want that."
I blinked down at him.
He didn't know.
"Thomas," I said. "Justine is alive. She told us where you were tonight. She's still alive, you suicidal dolt."
His eyes widened, and the pale radiance flooded through his skin in a startled wave. A moment later he drew in a ragged breath and coughed, thrashing weakly. He looked sunken-eyed and terrible. "Wh-what? She's what?"
"Easy, easy, you're going to throw up or something," I said, holding him steady. "She's alive. Not . . . not good, really, but she's not dead. Not gone. You didn't kill her."
Thomas blinked several times, and then seemed to lose consciousness. He lay there, breathing quietly, and his cheeks were tracked with the trails of luminous silver tears.
My brother would be okay.
But then a thought occurred to me, and I said, "Well, crap."
"What?" asked Murphy, blearily. She blinked her eyes at me.
I peered owlishly up at the night sky and wondered, "When is it going to be Tuesday in Switzerland?"
I woke up the next morning. More specifically, I woke up the next morning when the last stone on Ebenezar's painkilling bracelet crumbled into black dust, and my hand began reporting that it was currently dipped in molten lead.
Which, as days go, was not one of my better starts. Then again, it wasn't the worst one, either.
Normally I'd give you some story about how manly I was to immediately attain a state of wizardly detachment and ignore the pain. But the truth was that the only reason I didn't wake up screaming was that I was too out of breath to do it. I clenched my hand, still in dirty wrappings, to my chest and tried to remember how to walk to the freezer. Or to the nearest chopping block, one of the two.
"Whoa, whoa," said a voice, and Thomas appeared, leaning over me. He looked rumpled and stylish, the bastard. "Sorry, Harry," he said. "It took me a while to get something for the pain. Thought I'd have gotten back hours ago." He pressed my shoulders to the bed and said, "Stay there. Think of . . . uh, pentangles or something, right? I'll get some water."
He reappeared a minute later with a glass of water and a couple of blue pills. "Here, take them and give them about ten minutes. You won't feel a thing."
He had to help me, but he was right. Ten minutes later I lay on my bed thinking that I should texture my ceiling with something. Something fuzzy and soft.
I got up, dressed in my dark fatigue pants, and shambled out into my living room, slash kitchen, slash study, slash den. Thomas was in the kitchen, humming something to himself. He hummed on-key. I guess we hadn't gotten the same genes for music.
I sat down on my couch and watched him bustle around---as much as you can bustle when you need to take only two steps to get clear from one side of the kitchen to the other. He was cooking eggs and bacon on my wood-burning stove. He knew jack about cooking over an actual fire, so the bacon was scorched and the eggs were runny, but it looked like he was amusing himself doing it, and he dumped burned bits, underdone bits, or bits he simply elected to discard on the floor at the foot of the stove. The puppy and the cat were both there, with Mister eating anything he chose to and the puppy dutifully cleaning up whatever Mister judged unworthy of his advanced palate.
"Heya, man," he said. "You aren't gonna feel hungry, but you should try to eat something, okay? Good for you and all that."
"Okay," I said agreeably.
He slapped the eggs and bacon more or less randomly onto a couple of plates, brought me one, and kept one for himself. We ate. It was awful, but my hand didn't hurt. You take what you can get in this life.
"Harry," Thomas said after a moment.
I looked up at him.
He said, "You came to get me."
"Yeah," I said.
"You saved my life."
I mused on it. "Yeah," I agreed a moment later. I kept eating.
"Thank you."
I shook my head. "Nothing."
"No, it isn't," he said. "You risked yourself. You risked your friend Murphy, too."
"Yeah," I said again. "Well. We're family, right?"
"Too right we are," he said, a lopsided smile on his mouth. "Which is why I want to ask you a favor."
"You want me to go back with you," I said. "Feel things out with Lara. Visit Justine. See which way the future lies."
He blinked at me. "How did you know?"
"I'd do it too."
He nodded quietly. Then said, "You'll go?"
"As long as we do it before Tuesday."
Murphy came by on Monday, to report that the investigation had determined that Emma's shooting was a tragic accident. Since no prints had been found, and the eyewitness (and owner of the weapon) had vanished, I wasn't in any danger of catching a murder rap. It still looked as fishy as a tuna boat, and it wouldn't win me any new friends among the authorities, but at least I wouldn't be going to the pokey this time around.
It was hard for me to concentrate on Murphy's words. Raith had partially dislocated her lower jaw, and the bruises looked like hell. Despite the happy blue pain pills, when I saw Murphy I actually heard myself growling in rage at her injury. Murphy didn't talk much more than business, but her look dared me to make some kind of chivalrous commentary. I didn't, and she didn't break my nose, by way of fair exchange.
She took me to an expensive specialist her family doctor referred her to, who examined my hand, took a bunch of pictures, and wound up shaking his head. "I can't believe it hasn't started to mortify," he said. "Mister Dresden, it looks like you may get to keep your hand. There's even a small portion on your palm that didn't burn at all, which I have no explanation for whatsoever. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"
"That's working just fine, Doc," I mumbled. "Not that it's had much use lately."
He gave me a brief smile. "More personal, I'm afraid. How good is your insurance?"
"Um," I said. "Not so hot."
"Then I'd like to give you a bit of advice, off the record. Your injury is almost miraculously fortunate, in terms of how unlikely it was that the limb would survive. But given the extent of the burns and the nerve damage, you might seriously consider amputation and the use of a prosthesis."
"What?" I said. "Why?"
The doctor shook his head. "We can prevent an infection from taking root and spreading until we can get you a graft to regenerate the epidermis---that's the main possible complication at this point. But in my professional judgment, you'll get more functionality out of an artificial hand than you ever again will from your own. Even with surgery and extensive therapy, which will cost you more than a pretty penny, and even if you continue to recover at the high end of the bell curve, it could be decades before you recover any use of the hand. In all probability, you will never recover any use of it at all."
I stared at him for a long minute.
"Mister Dresden?" he asked.
"My hand," I responded, with all the composure of a three-year-old. I tried to smile at the doctor. "Look. Maybe my hand is all screwed up. But it's mine. So no bone saws."
The doctor shook his head, but said, "I understand, son. Good luck to you." He gave me a prescription for an antibiotic ointment, a reference to a yet more expensive specialist just in case, and some pain medication. On the way back to my house, I asked Murphy to stop by the drugstore, where I got my prescriptions filled, and bought a bunch of clean bandages and a pair of leather gloves.
"Well?" Murphy said. "Are you going to tell me what the doctor said?"
I threw the right glove out the window, and Murphy arched an eyebrow at me.
"When I get done with my mummy impersonation," I said, waving my freshly bandaged hand, "I want to have a choice between looks. Michael Jackson or Johnny Tremaine."
She tried not to show it, but I saw her wince. I empathized. If I hadn't been on Thomas's groovy pain drugs, I may have started feeling bitter about the whole thing with my hand.
Monday afternoon I got the Blue Beetle back from my mechanic, Mike, who is the automotive repair equivalent of Jesus Christ himself. Either that or Dr. Frankenstein. I drove the Beetle out to a hotel near the airport to meet with Arturo Genosa and the new Mrs. Genosa.
"How's the married life, Joan?" I asked.
Joan, dumpy and plain and glowing with happiness, leaned against Arturo with a small smile.
Arturo grinned as well and confided, "I have never been married to a woman with such . . . creativity."
Joan blushed scarlet.
We had a nice breakfast, and Arturo presented me with my fee, in cash. "I hope that isn't inconvenient, Mr. Dresden," he said. "We didn't finish the film and the money is gone when I am forced to declare bankruptcy, but I wanted to be sure you received your pay."
I shook my head and pushed the envelope back to him. "I didn't save your film. I didn't save Emma."
"The film, bah. You risked your life to save Giselle's. And Jake as well. Emma . . ." His voice trailed off. He almost seemed to visibly age. "I understand that you may not be entirely free to speak, but I must know what happened to her."
Joan's expression froze, and she gave me a pleading look.
She didn't have to explain it to me. She knew or suspected the truth---that Tricia Scrump had been behind the killing. It would break Arturo's heart to hear it about a woman he had once, however ill-advisedly, loved.
"I'm not sure," I lied. "I found Emma and Trixie like that. I thought I saw someone and ran off trying to catch the guy. But either he was faster than me or I'd been seeing things. We might never know."
Arturo nodded at me. "You mustn't blame yourself. Nor must you refuse what you rightfully earned, Mister Dresden. I'm in your debt."
I wanted to turn the money down, but damn, it was Monday. And Kincaid was Tuesday. I took the envelope.
Jake Guffie appeared a moment later, dressed in a casual suit of pale cotton. He hadn't shaved, and there was a lot of grey in the scruff of his beard. He looked like he hadn't slept much, either, but he was trying to smile. "Arturo. Joan. Congratulations."
"Thank you," Joan said.
Jake joined us, and we had a nice breakfast. Then we walked with Joan and Arturo to their airport shuttle. Jake and I watched them go. He stared after them for a moment. He looked weary, but if it had bothered him to deceive Arturo about Trixie Vixen, he hadn't let it show.
Jake turned to me and said, "I guess you weren't the killer. The police said the shooting was accidental. They pulled up Trixie's record and saw all her trips to rehab. Said that she had probably done something stupid while she was stoned."
"Do you think that?" I asked.
"No way, man. She did everything stupid. Stoned was just a coincidence."
I shook my head. "I'm sorry I wasn't able to protect Emma."
He nodded. "So am I, man. She was going to take her medication. Allergy medication. She didn't want to take it with tap water so she was going to the greenroom for a bottle of Evian. She was just standing in the wrong place. Hell of a thing."
"I feel for her kids," I said. "I've done the orphan thing. It sucks."
Jake nodded. "I don't know how they'll get on without their mom," he said. "Not like I have much experience, either. But I can't be such a lousy father that they qualify as orphans."
I blinked for a second and then said, "You wanted to settle down once, you said."
"Yeah. But Emma decided she wouldn't have me."
I nodded. "You going to keep acting?"
"Oh, hell, no," he said. "Silverlight is gonna blacklist me like everyone else. And I can't do that and go to PTA and stuff. I got another job lined up."
"Yeah?" I asked. "What?"
"Dude, me and Bobby are gonna to start up a consulting business. Feng shui."
I had no problem with that.
Next I went with Thomas up to the Raith family homestead north of town. This time we went in the front doors. There were a new pair of bodyguards at the door. They weren't twins, and they didn't have that numb, mindlessly obedient glaze in their eyes. They had evidently been chosen for skill and experience. I was betting on former marines.
"Welcome, Mister Raith," one of the guards said. "Your sister requests that you join her for breakfast in the east garden."
They both stood there waiting to fall in around us, so it didn't exactly come off like an invitation, but from the attention, they might have been as concerned with protecting us as watching us. Thomas took the lead by half a step, and I fell in on his right. I was quite a bit taller than him, but his expression had taken on a confidence and sense of purpose I hadn't seen in him before, and our feet hit the floor in time with one another.
The guards accompanied us out into a truly gorgeous terraced garden, a number drawn straight from the Italian Renaissance, with faux ruins, ancient statues of the gods, and a design overgrown enough to prevent seeing much at a time, the better to spend more time exploring. At the top of the highest terrace was a table made of fine metal wire twisted into looping designs, with matching chairs spread around it. A light breakfast was laid out on the table, heavier on the fruits and juices than was my habit. But then, my habit was usually to eat any leftovers from dinner for breakfast first.
Lara sat at the table, wearing white clothing accented with embroidered red roses. Her hair was drawn back into a loose tail, and she rose to greet us both with outstretched hands.
"Thomas," she said. "And Harry."
"Sis," Thomas replied. "Should I assume from our greeting that there's been a change of management?"
She took her seat again, and Thomas joined her. I took a seat opposite him, so that I could watch his back, and I didn't spare any energy for false smiles. I didn't want Lara to think that we were going to be buddies now, and I suck at faking them anyway.
Lara took in my gaze, her own eyes calculating behind the smile. "Oh, it's just the usual little family spat," she said. "I'm sure Father is going to be angry with me for a while and will forget all about it."
"And if he doesn't?" Thomas asked.
Lara's smile grew a little sharper. "I'm sure he will." She took a sip of orange juice. "Unfortunately, Thomas, I don't know if he's going to be as forgiving to you."
Thomas inhaled sharply.
"I'm sorry," Lara said. She looked like she meant it.
"You're turning your back on him?" I asked. "On your brother."
Lara lifted a hand. "I do not want to, but my father's antagonism with Thomas is well known. If I am to maintain the fiction that my father is in control of his House, Thomas cannot remain. I'm not going to have you removed, of course, Thomas. But I do have to cut you off. You no longer enjoy the protection of House Raith---in any overt sense, in any case. And I am truly sorry for it."
"The twins," he said. "They put you up to this. They wanted me gone."
"Madrigal did," Lara confirmed. "Madeline didn't particularly care, but she has always indulged his tantrums. And simply put, I needed their support more than I did yours."
Thomas took another deep breath and nodded. "Things might change later."
"I hope so," Lara said. "But for now, there is nothing else I can do. Don't approach me openly again, Thomas. Don't visit. Don't claim Raith as your home. Lose the credit cards, and don't try to touch your accounts. You've got something tucked away?"
"A little," he said. "The money doesn't matter."
Lara set her orange juice down and leaned back in her seat. "But Justine does," she said.
"Yes. Madrigal would love to get his hands on her."
"He won't," she responded. "I swear it to you, Thomas, that I will keep her safe with me. I can do that much for you, at least."
Something eased out of Thomas's shoulders. "How is she?"
"Distant," Lara said. "Very vague and distracted. But happy, I think. She speaks of you at times."
"You'll . . ." His face twisted in distaste.
"Actually, no," Lara said.
Thomas frowned at her.
"Why don't you go see her," Lara suggested, and nodded toward a lower portion of the garden, where I could see Justine, in her wheelchair, sketching something on a pad across her lap.
Thomas rose like a shot, then visibly forced himself to slow down, and went down the winding path to the girl, leaving me alone with Lara.
"He really doesn't belong here, you know," she said. "Like Inari."
"How is she?"
"In traction," Lara said. "In a room with her boyfriend at the hospital. He isn't in much better shape. They're always talking, laughing." She sighed. "It's got all the signs of love. I spoke to her, as we agreed I would do. I don't think Inari will be one of us after all. She said something about doing feng shui in California."
"I didn't know she knew martial arts," I said.
Lara smiled a little, watching Thomas. He was kneeling beside Justine, looking at her sketches and talking. She looked weak but delighted, like when they take terminal kids to Disneyland on those talk shows. It warmed the heart at the same time it wrenched it. I didn't like the way it made me feel.
"Just to be up-front with you, Lara," I said, "I don't trust you."
She nodded. "Good."
"But we've got a hostage crisis on our hands."
"Of what sort?"
"Family secrets. You know mine about Thomas."
Her eyes were unreadable. "Yes. And you know about my father."
"If you spout off about Thomas, I spout off about your dad. We both lose. So I think it would be best if we agreed to truce of mutual honesty. You don't have to like me. Or agree with me. Or help me. But be honest and you'll get the same from me. If I'm about to go hostile, I'll tell you that our truce is over. You do the same. It's good for both of us."
She nodded slowly and then said, "Your word on it then?"
"My word. Yours?"
"Yes. You have my word."
We both tucked into breakfast then, in silence.
Half an hour later Thomas rose, leaned down, and brushed his lips against Justine's cheek. He stood up rather abruptly, then turned and hurried away with tense, pained motions. He didn't look back. As he approached, I got a good look at his face.
His lips were burned and blistered. He walked past us as if we weren't there, his eyes distant.
"He was always a romantic." Lara sighed. "She's protected. The little idiot should never have let himself feel so much for prey. It was that last time together that did it, I imagine."
"Had to go both ways."
"Greater love hath no man," Lara agreed.
We left. Thomas and I got into the Beetle and I asked him, "You okay?"
His head was bowed. He didn't say anything.
"I asked after Inari," I said.
His eyes moved toward me, though he didn't lift his head.
"She's in traction. And she's in love. Gonna be weeks before she and Bobby are going to get to do anything. No crimes of passion."
"She's free," Thomas said.
"Yeah."
"Good." After a minute he added, "No one should have to be like the Raiths. Destroying the people you care about the most."
"You didn't destroy her. And I think Lara really will protect her."
He shrugged, his expression dark.
"You slept much since Saturday?"
"No."
"You need to rest and I need a dog-sitter. I'll drop you at my place. I'll run errands. You drink Mac's beer until you crash on my couch. We'll figure out what you do next when you're rested. Okay?"
"Okay," he said. "Thank you."
I took him back to my apartment and spent the rest of the morning trying to collect on bills a few people still owed me. I didn't have much luck. I spent the rest of the day applying for loans, and had even less luck. Bank guys get so hung up about things like bad credit histories and people who fill in the "occupation" blank of the application with wizard. I guess it could have been worse. I could have been filling out the reason the loan was needed with pay off mercenary for services rendered.
By the end of the day, my hand hurt so badly that it had begun to cut through the painkillers, and I was exhausted. On the way out of the last bank, I forgot what my car looked like for a minute. I missed my street and had to drive around the block, but I missed it the second time, too. I managed to get home before I completely lost sentience, staggered past Thomas and Mister and the puppy asleep on the couch, and collapsed onto my bed.
When I woke up, it was Tuesday morning.
I found myself nervously looking around for the bright red dot of a laser sight to appear on my nose while I was in the shower with a plastic trash bag over my bandaged hand. I got dressed, got on the phone, and called Kincaid's number, then waited for him to return the call.
It took less than three minutes. "It's Dresden," I told the phone.
"I know. How's the hand?"
"I saw this great Swiss Army prosthesis with all these different attachments, but my hopes got crushed. I'm keeping the original."
"Damn shame," Kincaid said. "You need another contract?"
"Wanted to talk about the last one," I said. "Uh, I mean, I know you said Tuesday, but I'm still getting some assets turned into cash." I wasn't lying to him. I hadn't sold all my used paperbacks yet, or dipped into my comic collection. "I need a little more time."
"What are you talking about?"
"Time. I need more time."
"For what?"
"To get your money," I said, leaving out the word dolt. See? I can be diplomatic.
"The money got here hours ago."
I blinked.
"You can pay me twice if you like," Kincaid said. "I won't stop you. Anything else?"
"Uh. No. I don't think so."
"Don't call me again if it isn't business." He paused. "Though I want to give you a piece of advice."
"What's that?" I asked, cleverly hiding my confusion.
"She went down pretty easy," Kincaid said. "Mavra, I mean."
"Yeah. 'Cause of your groovy cutting-edge vampire-hunting weapon, I guess. Thanks."
"It's paid for," he said. "But I mostly gave it to you to make you feel better. And to make sure you didn't shoot me by accident."
"What about what you said about how cool a weapon it was?"
"Dresden. Come on. It's a paintball gun. Mavra's world-class bad news. I expected it to chew apart newbie vamps, sure. You think Mavra would have tottered on out of the smoke to let you kill her? Nice and dramatic like that? If you buy that one, I got a bridge to sell you."
I got a sick, sinking little feeling in my stomach. "It was her," I said.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Well. Because . . . she was wearing the same outfit," I said. "Son of a bitch. That sounds really lame, even to me. One corpse looks a lot like another. It could have been a decoy."
"Could," he said. "So my advice to you, Dresden. Watch your back."
"Gee. Thanks."
"No charge." He paused for a second as someone spoke in the background, then said, "Ivy says to tell your kitty hello for her." He hung up.
I put the phone down, thoughtful. When I turned around Thomas was sitting up on the couch. Silently he offered me the business card with Kincaid's account number and the amount of the bill on it.
"Found it in the laundry," he said.
"You didn't have to do that," I said.
"I know," he replied.
"You really have that much money?"
He shook his head. "Not anymore. That was pretty much everything I'd set aside. I hadn't made a lot of plans for independence. I figured I'd either be dead or running things. I've got about fifty bucks to my name now."
I sat down on the couch. The puppy snuffled me with his nose and wagged his tail in greeting.
"Where are you going to go?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Guess I can do what my cousin Madrigal does: find some rich girl." He grimaced. "I don't know what to do."
"Look," I said. "You really saved my ass. Crash here for a while."
"I don't want charity."
"It isn't," I said. "Think of that money transfer as a rent payment. You can have the couch until you get your feet under you again. It'll be crowded, maybe, but it isn't forever."
He nodded. "You sure?"
"Sure."
Later Thomas went to the grocery store and I went down to the lab to talk to Bob. I filled him in on events.
"You're sure?" Bob asked. "It was He Who Walks Behind?"
I shivered. "Yeah. Thought I'd killed him."
"Walkers aren't killable, Harry," Bob said. "When you tore him up before, it banished him from the mortal realm. Might have hurt him, made him take time to heal up. But he's still out there."
"That's comforting," I said. I unwrapped my burned hand.
"Yuck," said Bob.
"Can you see anything about the injury?" I asked.
"Burned meat and nerve damage, looks like," Bob said. "Hmm, I think it still has reflexes, though. I bet you could use it a little if you did it without thinking about it."
I frowned. "You're right. I think I did during the fight with Raith. But look at this." I opened my stiff fingers with my right hand.
There was unburned flesh there, just as the doctor had observed. What he didn't know was that the unharmed flesh was in the shape of a sigil in angelic script---the name of one of the Fallen angels. Specifically, the same entity imprisoned in an ancient silver coin, at that very moment trapped under two feet of concrete and half a dozen warding spells on the far side of the lab.
"Lasciel," Bob said. His voice was worried.
"I thought she was locked up. I thought she couldn't touch me from there, Bob."
"She can't," Bob said, bewildered. "I mean, that's impossible. There's no way she should be able to reach out from there."
"Sounds kind of familiar," I muttered. I wrapped up my hand again. "But that's what I thought too. And my staff is acting weird. When I start to run power through it, I'm getting excess heat. The runes start glowing like embers and there smoke curling up out of them. Seemed like my workings with the staff were coming out a lot bigger than I wanted, too. Did I blow something on the preparation?"
"Maybe," Bob said. "But, uh. Well, it sounds a lot like Hellfire. I hear that some of the Fallen really love it."
"What?"
"Hellfire," Bob said. "Uh, it's sort of an alternate power source. Not a pleasant one, but man, you could really turbocharge violent spells with it."
"I know what Hellfire is, Bob."
"Oh. Right. Why are you using it then, Harry?"
I said through clenched teeth, "I don't know. I didn't mean to. I don't know what the hell is going on."
"Hell," Bob said. "Heh. You made with the funny, boss."
I had involuntary access to Hellfire. How had that happened?
Lasciel's sigil on my left palm was the only cool spot on my burning hand.
Hell's bells. I shook my head and headed for the ladder back up.
As I left Bob said, "Hey, Harry?"
"Yeah?"
The orange lights in the skull glowed eagerly. "Tell me again about Murphy's ass."
Thomas came back from the store later that day. "Got the puppy a bowl and a collar and food and so on. Nice little guy. Real quiet. Don't think I've heard him whine at all." He tousled the puppy's ears. "You decide on a name?"
The puppy cocked his head to one side, ears tilted up with interest, dark little eyes on my face.
"I never said I was keeping him," I said.
Thomas snorted. "Yeah. Right."
I frowned down at the puppy. "He's tiny. He's grey. He doesn't make much noise," I said after a minute. I dropped to a knee and held my hand out to the little dog. "How about Mouse?"
Mouse bounced straight up in a fit of eager puppy joy and romped over to lick my hand and chew gently on one of my fingers.
Thomas smiled, though it was a little sad. "I like it," he said.
We started putting groceries away, and it was the strangest feeling. I was used to being alone. Now there was someone else in my personal space. Someone I didn't mind being there. Thomas was all but a stranger, but at the same time he wasn't. The bond I sensed between us was not made weaker by being inexplicable, no less absolute for being illogical.
I had a family. Hell, I had a dog.
This was a huge change. I was happy about it, but at the same time I realized that it was going to be a big adjustment. My place was going to be pretty crowded, pretty fast, but once Thomas got into his own apartment, it would be more normal. I don't think either one of us wanted to be tripping all over each other every time we turned around.
I felt myself smiling. It looked like life was looking up.
I had started feeling a little crowded already, sure. But I took a deep breath and brushed it back. Thomas wouldn't be here too long, and the dog was certainly a lot smaller than Mister. I could handle a little claustrophobia.
I frowned at a giant green bag and asked Thomas, "Hey. Why did you get large breed Puppy Chow?"
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Author's Note
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thrity-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Author's Note
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two

