Contents

Dead Beat

Proven Guilty

White Night

Small Favor

Turn Coat

Changes

Praise for The Dresden Files

“What’s not to like about this series?…I would, could, have, and will continue to recommend [it] for as long as my breath holds out. It takes the best elements of urban fantasy, mixes it with some good old-fashioned noir mystery, tosses in a dash of romance and a lot of high-octane action, shakes, stirs, and serves.”

—SF Site

“Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series has consistently been one of the most enjoyable marriages of the fantasy and mystery genres on the shelves…a great series—fast-paced, vividly realized and with a hero/narrator who’s excellent company.”

—Cinescape

Dead Beat

“Butcher’s latest maintains the momentum of previous Dresden outings and builds the suspense right up to a rousing conclusion.”

—Booklist

“Horror fans with a sense of humor will be pleased.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A mix of the supernatural and bounding adventure…. A fun-loaded series.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Blood Rites

“Filled with sizzling magic and intrigue as well as important developments for Harry, the latest of his adventures will have fans rapidly turning the pages.”

—Booklist

Death Masks

“Butcher maintains a breakneck pace in Harry’s exciting fifth adventure. This imaginative series continues to surprise and delight with its inventiveness and sympathetic hero.”

—Booklist

“Death Masks is his most assured book yet, a smooth melding of inventive story lines, dark supernatural themes, edge-of-your-seat adventure, strong characterizations, and irreverent humor…. Thebalance is perfect.”

—SF Site

“Intense and wild, Death Masks is another roller-coaster ride from Jim Butcher, a skillful blend of urban fantasy and noir, sure to satisfy any fan and leave them begging for more.”

—The Green Man Review

Summer Knight

“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.”

—The Best Reviews

“Butcher is definitely among the best. Summer Knight starts with a bang and doesn’t let up…. A very good detective series…. Fans of any kind of fiction can enjoy Butcher’s fun and fast-paced style…. I can’t wait until Harry Dresden is on the case again.”

—The News-Star (Monroe, LA)

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 wise guy, 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

“Butcher deftly blends the fantasy and detective genres in this entertaining yarn.”

—Publishers Weekly (review of the audio edition)

“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 Whispering Nickel Idols

“Exciting, well-plotted, complex, an excellent read…amazingly good.”

—Chris Bunch, author of Dragonmaster

JIM BUTCHER

DEAD BEAT

A NOVEL OF THE DRESDEN FILES

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published 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.)

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc hardcover edition.

Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2005

All rights reserved

ISBN: 1-101-12844-5

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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 publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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.

For my son.

The best thing that ever happened to me.

I love you, Short-stuff.

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

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

Chapter Forty-three

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe another round of thanks to the usual suspects: The inmates of the Beta Foo Asylum, both long-term and recent arrivals. The Dresden Files’ new editor, the warm and gracious Anne Sowards—are you sure you actually live in NYC, Anne? My agent, Jennifer Jackson, who has been doing ten kinds of running around getting various deals put together, and for whom I am most grateful.

More thanks to my family for their continuing support and love. To Shannon for being who she is, and whose good opinion I would work ten…well, wait, no, maybe three times as hard to keep—okay, okay, five, tops. (Ten would be more hours than exist, babe, and besides, when could I play Halo?) Also thanks to my son JJ, whose boundless energy, enthusiasm, and love are wonderfully intimidating.

Oh, and also for my ferocious furry bodyguard, Frost, who supports my career by frightening away any bad guys long before they get near enough to actually bother me, and by helping me eat any potentially distracting snacks.

Chapter

One

On the whole, we’re a murderous race.

According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain’s brother Abel probably never saw it coming.

As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding.

For freaking Cain.

My apartment isn’t much more than a big room in the basement of a century-old wooden boardinghouse in Chicago. There’s a kitchen built into an alcove, a big fireplace almost always lit, a bedroom the size of the bed of a pickup truck, and a bathroom that barely fits a sink, toilet, and shower. I can’t afford really good furniture, so it’s all secondhand, but comfortable. I have a lot of books on shelves, a lot of rugs, a lot of candles. It isn’t much, but at least it’s clean.

Or used to be.

The rugs were in total disarray, exposing bare patches of stone floor. One of the easy chairs had fallen over onto its back, and no one had picked it up. Cushions were missing from the couch, and the curtains had been torn down from one of the sunken windows, letting in a swath of late-afternoon sunshine, all the better to illuminate the books that had been knocked down from one of my shelves and scattered everywhere, bending paperback covers, leaving hardbacks all the way open, and generally messing up my primary source of idle entertainment.

The fireplace was more or less the epicenter of the slobquake. There were discarded clothes there, a couple of empty wine bottles, and a plate that looked suspiciously clean—doubtless the cleanup work of the other residents.

I took a stunned step into my home. As I did my big grey tom, Mister, bounded down from his place on top of one of the bookshelves, but rather than give me his usual shoulder-block of greeting, he flicked his tail disdainfully at me and ghosted out the front door.

I sighed, walked over to the kitchen alcove, and checked. The cat’s bowls of food and water were both empty. No wonder he was grumpy.

A shaggy section of the kitchen floor hauled itself to its feet and came to meet me with a sheepish, sleepy shuffle. My dog, Mouse, had started off as a fuzzy little grey puppy that fit into my coat pocket. Now, almost a year later, I sometimes wished I’d sent my coat to the cleaners or something. Mouse had gone from fuzz ball to fuzz barge. You couldn’t guess at a breed to look at him, but at least one of his parents must have been a wooly mammoth. The dog’s shoulders came nearly to my waist, and the vet didn’t think he was finished growing yet. That translated into an awful lot of beast for my tiny apartment.

Oh, and Mouse’s bowls were empty, too. He nuzzled my hand, his muzzle stained with what looked suspiciously like spaghetti sauce, and then pawed at his bowls, scraping them over the patch of linoleum floor.

“Dammit, Mouse,” I growled, Cain-like. “It’s still like this? If he’s here, I’m going to kill him.”

Mouse let out a chuffing breath that was about as much commentary as he ever made, and followed placidly a couple of steps behind me as I walked over to the closed bedroom door.

Just as I got there, the door opened, and an angel-faced blonde wearing nothing but a cotton T-shirt appeared in it. Not a long shirt, either. It didn’t cover all of her rib cage.

“Oh,” she drawled, with a slow and sleepy smile. “Excuse me. I didn’t know anyone else was here.” Without a trace of modesty, she slunk into the living room, pawing through the mess near the fireplace, extracting pieces of clothing. From the languid, satisfied way she moved, I figured she expected me to be staring at her, and that she didn’t mind it at all.

At one time I would have been embarrassed as hell by this kind of thing, and probably sneaking covert glances. But after living with my half brother the incubus for most of a year, I mostly found it annoying. I rolled my eyes and asked, “Thomas?”

“Tommy? Shower, I think,” the girl said. She slipped into jogging wear—sweatpants, a matching jacket, expensive shoes. “Do me a favor? Tell him that it—”

I interrupted her in an impatient voice. “That it was a lot of fun, you’ll always treasure it, but that it was a onetime thing and that you hope he grows up to find a nice girl or be president or something.”

She stared at me and then knitted her blond brows into a frown. “You don’t have to be such a bast—” Then her eyes widened. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry—oh, my God.” She leaned toward me, blushing, and said in a between-us-girls whisper, “I would never have guessed that he was with a man. How do the two of you manage on that tiny bed?”

I blinked and said, “Now wait a minute.”

But she ignored me and walked out, murmuring, “He is such a naughty boy.”

I glared at her back. Then I glared at Mouse.

Mouse’s tongue lolled out in a doggy grin, his dark tail waving gently.

“Oh, shut up,” I told him, and closed the door. I heard the whisper of water running through the pipes in my shower. I put out food for Mister and Mouse, and the dog partook immediately. “He could have fed the damned dog, at least,” I muttered, and opened the fridge.

I rummaged through it, but couldn’t find what I was after anywhere, and it was the last straw. My frustration grew into a fire somewhere inside my eyeballs, and I straightened from the icebox with mayhem in mind.

“Hey,” came Thomas’s voice from behind me. “We’re out of beer.”

I turned around and glared at my half brother.

Thomas was a shade over six feet tall, and I guess now that I’d had time to get used to the idea, he looked something like me: stark cheekbones, a long face, a strong jaw. But whatever sculptor had done the finishing work on Thomas had foisted my features off on his apprentice or something. I’m not ugly or anything, but Thomas looked like someone’s painting of the forgotten Greek god of body cologne. He had long hair so dark that light itself could not escape it, and even fresh from the shower it was starting to curl. His eyes were the color of thunderclouds, and he never did a single moment of exercise to earn the gratuitous amount of ripple in his musculature. He was wearing jeans and no shirt—his standard household uniform. I once saw him in the same outfit answer the door to speak to a female missionary, and she’d assaulted him in a cloud of forgotten copies of The Watchtower. The tooth marks she left had been interesting.

It hadn’t been the girl’s fault, entirely. Thomas had inherited his father’s blood as a vampire of the White Court. He was a psychic predator, feeding on the raw life force of human beings—usually easiest to gain through the intimate contact of sex. That part of him surrounded him in the kind of aura that turned heads wherever he went. When Thomas made the effort to turn up the supernatural come-hither, women literally couldn’t tell him no. By the time he started feeding, they couldn’t even want to tell him no. He was killing them, just a little bit, but he had to do it to stay sane, and he never took it any further than a single feeding.

He could have. Those the White Court chose as their prey became ensnared in the ecstasy of being fed upon, and became increasingly enslaved by their vampire lover. But Thomas never pushed it that far. He’d made that mistake once, and the woman he had loved now drifted through life in a wheelchair, bound in a deathly euphoria because of his touch.

I clenched my teeth and reminded myself that it wasn’t easy for Thomas. Then I told myself that I was repeating myself way too many times and to shut up. “I know there’s no beer,” I growled. “Or milk. Or Coke.”

“Um,” he said.

“And I see that you didn’t have time to feed Mister and Mouse. Did you take Mouse outside, at least?”

“Well sure,” he said. “I mean, uh…I took him out this morning when you were leaving for work, remember? That’s where I met Angie.”

“Another jogger,” I said, once more Cain-like. “You told me you weren’t going to keep bringing strangers back here, Thomas. And on my freaking bed? Hell’s bells, man, look at this place.”

He did, and I saw it dawn on him, as if he literally hadn’t seen it before. He let out a groan. “Damn. Harry, I’m sorry. It was…Angie is a really…really intense and, uh, athletic person and I didn’t realize that…” He paused and picked up a copy of Dean Koontz’s Watchers. He tried to fold the crease out of the cover. “Wow,” he added lamely. “The place is sort of trashed.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “You were here all day. You said you’d take Mouse to the vet. And clean up a little. And get groceries.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

“I don’t have a beer,” I growled. I looked around at the rubble. “And I got a call from Murphy at work today. She said she’d be dropping by.”

Thomas lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? No offense, Harry, but I’m doubting it was a booty call.”

I glared. “Would you stop it with that already?”

“I’m telling you, you should just ask her out and get it over with. She’d say yes.”

I slammed the door to the icebox. “It isn’t like that,” I said.

“Yeah, okay,” Thomas said mildly.

“It isn’t. We work together. We’re friends. That’s all.”

“Right,” he agreed.

“I am not interested in dating Murphy,” I said. “And she’s not interested in me.”

“Sure, sure. I hear you.” He rolled his eyes and started picking up fallen books. “Which is why you want the place looking nice. So your business friend won’t mind staying around for a little bit.”

I gritted my teeth and said, “Stars and stones, Thomas, I’m not asking you for the freaking moon. I’m not asking you for rent. It wouldn’t kill you to pitch in a little with errands before you go to work.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said, running his hand through his hair. “Um. About that.”

“What about it?” I demanded. He was supposed to be gone for the afternoon so that my housecleaning service could come in. The faeries wouldn’t show up to clean when someone could see them, and they wouldn’t show up ever again if I told someone about them. Don’t ask me why they’re like that. Maybe they’ve got a really strict union or something.

Thomas shrugged a shoulder and sat down on the arm of the couch, not looking at me. “I didn’t have the cash for the vet or the groceries,” he said. “I got fired again.”

I stared at him for a second, and tried to keep up a good head of steam on my anger, but it melted. I recognized the frustration and humiliation in his voice. He wasn’t faking it.

“Dammit,” I muttered, only partly to Thomas. “What happened?”

“The usual,” he said. “The drive-through manager. She followed me into the walk-in freezer and started ripping her clothes off. The owner walked through on an inspection about then and fired me on the spot. From the look he was giving her, I think she was going to get a promotion. I hate gender discrimination.”

“At least it was a woman this time,” I said. “We’ve got to keep working on your control.”

His voice turned bitter. “Half of my soul is a demon,” he said. “It can’t be controlled. It’s impossible.”

“I don’t buy that,” I said.

“Just because you’re a wizard doesn’t mean you know a damned thing about it,” he said. “I can’t live a mortal life. I’m not made for it.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Fine?” he demanded, voice rising. “I can disintegrate a virgin’s inhibitions at fifty paces, but I can’t last two weeks at a job where I’m wearing a stupid hairnet and a paper hat. In what way is that fine?”

He slammed open the small trunk where he kept his clothes, seized a pair of shoes and his leather jacket, put them on with angry precision, and stalked out into the gathering evening without looking back.

And without cleaning up his mess, I thought uncharitably. Then I shook my head and glanced at Mouse, who had lain down with his chin on his paws, doggy eyes sad.

Thomas was the only family I’d ever known. But that didn’t change the truth: Thomas wasn’t adjusting well to living life like normal folks. He was damned good at being a vampire. That came naturally. But no matter how hard he tried to be something a little more like normal, he kept running into one problem after another. He never said anything about it, but I could sense the pain and despair growing in him as the weeks went by.

Mouse let out a quiet breath that wasn’t quite a whine.

“I know,” I told the beast. “I worry about him too.”

I took Mouse on a long walk, and got back in as late-October dusk was settling over Chicago. I got my mail out of the box and started for the stairs down to my apartment, when a car pulled in to the boardinghouse’s small gravel lot and crunched to a stop a few steps away. A petite blonde in jeans, a blue button-down shirt, and a satin White Sox windbreaker slipped the car into park and left the engine running as she got out.

Karrin Murphy looked like anything but the head of a division of law enforcement in charge of dealing with everything that went bump in the night in the whole greater Chicago area. When trolls started mugging passersby, when vampires left their victims dead or dying in the streets, or when someone with more magical fire-power than conscience went berserk, Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department was tasked to investigate. Of course, no one seriously believed in trolls or vampires or evil sorcerers, but when something weird happened, SI was in charge of explaining to everyone how it had been only a man in a rubber mask, and that there was nothing to worry about.

SI had a sucky job, but the men and women who worked there weren’t stupid. They were perfectly aware that there were things out there in the darkness that were beyond the scope of conventional understanding. Murphy, in particular, was determined to give the cops every edge they could get when dealing with a preternatural threat, and I was one of her best weapons. She would hire me on as a consultant when SI went up against something really dangerous or alien, and the fees I got working with SI paid the lion’s share of my expenses.

When Mouse saw Murphy, he made a little huffing sound of greeting and trotted over to her, his tail wagging. If I had leaned back and kept my legs straight I could have gone skiing over the gravel, but other than that, the big dog left me with no option but to come along.

Murphy knelt down at once to dig her hands into the fur behind Mouse’s floppy ears, scratching vigorously. “Hey, there, boy,” she said, smiling. “How are you?”

Mouse slobbered several doggy kisses onto her hands.

Murphy said, “Yuck,” but she was laughing while she did. She pushed Mouse’s muzzle gently away, rising. “Evening, Harry. Glad I caught you.”

“I was just getting back from my evening drag,” I said. “You want to come in?”

Murphy had a cute face and very blue eyes. Her golden hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it made her look a lot younger than usual. Her expression was a careful, maybe even uncomfortable one. “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a plane to catch. I don’t really have time.”

“Ah,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I’m going out of town for a few days,” she said. “I should be back sometime Monday afternoon. I was hoping I could talk you into watering my plants for me.”

“Oh,” I said. She wanted me to water her plants. How coy. How sexy. “Yeah, sure. I can do that.”

“Thanks,” she said, and offered me a key on a single steel ring. “It’s the back-door key.”

I accepted it. “Where you headed?”

The discomfort in her expression deepened. “Oh, out of town on a little vacation.”

I blinked.

“I haven’t had a vacation in years,” she said defensively. “I’ve got it coming.”

“Well. Sure,” I said. “Um. So, a vacation. By yourself?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Well. That’s sort of the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not expecting any trouble, but I wanted you to know where I was and with who in case I don’t show up on time.”

“Right, right,” I said. “Doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

She nodded. “I’m going to Hawaii with Kincaid.”

I blinked some more.

“Um,” I said. “You mean on a job, right?”

She shifted her weight from one hip to the other. “No. We’ve gone out a few times. It’s nothing serious.”

“Murphy,” I protested. “Are you insane? That guy is major bad news.”

She glowered at me. “We’ve had this discussion before. I’m a grown-up, Dresden.”

“I know,” I said. “But this guy is a mercenary. A killer. He’s not even completely human. You can’t trust him.”

“You did,” she pointed out. “Last year against Mavra and her scourge.”

I scowled. “That was different.”

“Oh?” she asked.

“Yeah. I was paying him to kill things. I wasn’t taking him to b—uh, to the beach.”

Murphy arched an eyebrow at me.

“You won’t be safe around him,” I said.

“I’m not doing it to be safe,” she replied. Her cheeks colored a little. “That’s sort of the point.”

“You shouldn’t go,” I said.

She looked up at me for a moment, frowning.

Then she asked, “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to see you get hurt,” I said. “And because you deserve someone better than he is.”

She studied my face for a moment more and then exhaled through her nose. “I’m not running off to Vegas to get married, Dresden. I work all the time, and life is going right by me. I just want to take the time to live it a little before it’s too late.” She pulled a folded index card out of her pocket. “This is the hotel I’ll be at. If you need to get in touch or anything.”

I took the folded index card, still frowning, and full of the intuition that I had missed something. Her fingers brushed mine, but I couldn’t feel it through the glove and all the scars. “You sure you’ll be all right?”

She nodded. “I’m a big girl, Harry. I’m the one choosing where we’re going. He doesn’t know where. I figured he couldn’t set anything up ahead of time, if he had any funny business in mind.” She made a vague gesture toward the gun she carried in a shoulder holster under her jacket. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t even try to smile at her. “For the record, this is stupid, Murph. I hope you don’t get killed.”

Her blue eyes flashed, and she frowned. “I was sort of hoping you’d say something like, ‘Have a good time.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. Have fun. Leave me a message when you get there?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks for looking out for my plants.”

“No problem,” I said.

She nodded at me, and lingered there for a second more. Then she scratched Mouse behind the ears again, got in her car, and drove off.

I watched her go, feeling worried.

And jealous.

Really, really jealous.

Holy crap.

Was Thomas right after all?

Mouse made a whining sound and pawed at my leg. I sighed, stuck the hotel information in a pocket, and led the dog back to the apartment.

When I opened my door, my nose was assaulted with the scent of fresh pine—not pine cleaner, mind you. Real fresh pine, and nary a needle in sight. The faeries had come and gone, and the books were back on the shelves, the floor scrubbed, curtains repaired, dishes done, you name it. They may have weird bylaws, but faerie housecleaning runs a tight ship.

I lit candles with matches from a box I had sitting on my coffee table. As a wizard, I don’t get on so well with newfangled things like electricity and computers, so I didn’t bother to try to keep electric service up and running in my home. My icebox is a vintage model run on actual ice. There’s no water heater, and I do all my cooking on a little wood-burning stove. I fired it up and heated some soup, which was about the only thing left in the house. I sat down to eat it and started going through my mail.

The usual. The marketing savants at Best Buy continued in their unabated efforts to sell me the latest laptop, cell phone, or plasma television despite my repeated verbal and written assurances that I didn’t have electricity and that they shouldn’t bother. My auto-insurance bill had arrived early. Two checks came, the first a token fee from Chicago PD for consulting with Murphy on a smuggling case for an hour the previous month. The second was a much meatier check from a coin collector who had lost a case of cash from dead nations over the side of his yacht in Lake Michigan and resorted to trying out the only wizard in the phone book to locate them.

The last envelope was a big yellow manila number, and I felt a nauseating little ripple flutter through my guts the second I saw the handwriting on it. It was written in soulless letters as neat as a kindergarten classroom poster and as uninflected as an English professor’s lecture notes.

My name.

My address.

Nothing else.

There was no rational reason for it, but that handwriting scared me. I wasn’t sure what had triggered my instincts, unless it was the singular lack of anything remarkable or imperfect about it. For a second I thought I had gotten upset for no reason, that it was a simple printed font, but there was a flourish on the last letter of “Dresden” that didn’t match the other Ns. The flourish looked perfect, too, and deliberate. It was there to let me know that this was inhuman handwriting, not some laser printer from Wal-Mart.

I laid the envelope flat on my coffee table and stared at it. It was thin, undeformed by its contents, which meant that it was holding a few sheets of paper at the most. That meant that it wasn’t a bomb. Well, more accurately, it wasn’t a high-tech bomb, which was a fairly useless weapon to use against a wizard. A low-tech explosive setup could have worked just fine, but they wouldn’t be that small.

Of course, that left mystical means of attack. I lifted my left hand toward the envelope, reaching out with my wizard’s senses, but I couldn’t get them focused. With a grimace I peeled the leather driving glove off of my left hand, revealing my scarred and ruined fingers. I’d burned my hand so badly a year before that the doctors I’d seen had mostly recommended amputation. I hadn’t let them take my hand, mostly for the same reason I still drove the same junky old VW Beetle—because it was mine, by thunder.

But my fingers were pretty horrible to look at, as was the rest of my left hand. I didn’t have much movement in them anymore, but I spread them as best I could and reached out to feel the energies of magic moving around the envelope once more.

I might as well have kept the glove on. There was nothing odd about the envelope. No magical booby traps.

Right, then. No more delays. I picked up the envelope in my weak left hand and tore it open, then upended the contents onto the coffee table.

There were three things in the envelope.

The first was an eight-by-ten color photo, and it was a shot of Karrin Murphy, director of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. She wasn’t in uniform, though, or even in business attire. Instead she was wearing a Red Cross jacket and baseball hat, and she was holding a sawed-off shotgun, an illegal model, in her hands. It was belching flame. In the picture you could also see a man standing a few feet away, covered in blood from the waist down. A long, black steel shaft protruded from his chest, as if he’d been impaled on it. His upper body and head were a blur of dark lines and red blobs. The shotgun was pointing right at the blur.

The second was another picture. This one was of Murphy with her hat off, standing over the man’s corpse, and I was in the frame with her, my face in profile. The man had been a Renfield, a psychotically violent creature that was human only in the most technical sense—but then the camera shot of his murder was a most technical witness.

Murphy and I and a mercenary named Kincaid had gone after a nest of vampires of the Black Court led by a deadly vampire named Mavra. Her minions had objected pretty strenuously. I’d gotten my hand badly burned when Mavra herself took the field against us, and I had been lucky to get away that lightly. In the end, we’d rescued hostages, dismembered some vampires, and killed Mavra. Or at least, we’d killed someone we were meant to think was Mavra. In retrospect, it seemed odd that a vampire known for being able to render herself all but undetectable had lurched out at us from the smoke and ash of her ruined stronghold to be beheaded. But I’d had a full day and I had been ready to take it on faith.

We tried to be as careful as we could during the attack. As a result, we saved some lives we might not have if we’d gone in hell-for-leather, but that Renfield had come damn close to taking my head off. Murphy killed him for it. And she’d been photographed doing it.

I stared at the photos.

The pictures were from different angles. That meant that someone else had been in the room taking them.

Someone we hadn’t even seen.

The third item that fell to the coffee table was a piece of typewriter paper, covered in the same handwriting as the address on the envelope. It read:

Dresden,

I desire a meeting with you, and offer a truce for the duration, bound by my word of honor to be upheld. Meet with me at seven p.m. tonight at your grave in Graceland Cemetery, in order to help me avoid taking actions that would be unfortunate to you and your ally in the police.

Mavra

The final third of the letter had a lock of golden hair taped to it. I held the picture up next to the letter.

The hair was Murphy’s.

Mavra had her number. With pictures of her committing a felony (and with me aiding and abetting, no less), Mavra could have her out of the cops and behind bars in hours. But even worse was the lock of hair. Mavra was a skilled sorceress, and might have been as strong as a full-fledged wizard. With a lock of Murphy’s hair, she could do virtually anything she pleased to Murph, and there wouldn’t be squat anyone could do about it. Mavra could kill her. Mavra could worse than kill her.

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. In supernatural circles, a pledge of truce based upon a word of honor was an institution—especially among the old-world types like Mavra. If she was offering a truce so that we could talk, she meant it. She wanted to deal.

I stared down at the pictures.

She wanted to deal, and she was going to be negotiating from a position of strength. It meant blackmail.

And if I didn’t play along, Murphy was as good as dead.

Chapter

Two

The dog and I went to my grave.

Graceland Cemetery is famous. You can look it up in just about any Chicago tour book—or God knows, probably on the Internet. It’s the largest cemetery in town, and one of the oldest. There are walls, substantial ones, all the way around, and it has far more than its share of ghost stories and attendant shades. The graves inside range from simple plots with simple headstones to life-sized replicas of Greek temples, Egyptian obelisks, mammoth statues—even a pyramid. It’s the Las Vegas of boneyards, and my grave is in it.

The cemetery isn’t open after dark. Most aren’t, and there’s a reason for it. Everybody knows the reason, and nobody talks about it. It isn’t because there are dead people in there. It’s because there are not-quite-dead people in there. Ghosts and shadows linger in graveyards more than anywhere else, especially in the older cities of the country, where the oldest, biggest cemeteries are right there in the middle of town. That’s why people build walls around graveyards, even if they’re only two feet high—not to keep people out, but to keep other things in. Walls can have a kind of power in the spirit world, and the walls around graveyards are almost always filled with the unspoken intent of keeping the living and the unliving seated at different sections of the community dinner table.

The gates were locked, and there was an attendant in a small building too solid to be called a shack, and too small to be called anything else. But I’d been there a few times, and I knew several ways to get in and out after dark if need be. There was a portion of the fence in the northeast corner where a road construction crew just outside had left a large mound of gravel, and it sloped far enough up the wall that even a man with one good hand and a large and ungainly dog could reach the top.

We went in, Mouse and I. Mouse might have been large, but he was barely more than a puppy, and he still had paws that looked too big for his lean frame. The dog had been built on the scale of those statues outside Chinese restaurants, though—broad chested and powerful, with that same mountainous strength built into his muzzle. His coat was a dark and almost uniform grey, marked on the tips of his fuzzy ears, his tail, and his lower legs with solid black. He looked a little gangly and clumsy now, but after a few more months of adding on muscle, he was going to be a real monster. And damned if I minded the company of my own personal monster going to meet a vampire over my grave.

I found it not far from a rather famous grave of a little girl named Inez, who had died a century before. The little girl’s grave had a statue mounted on it. I’d seen it often, and it looked mostly like Carroll’s original Alice—a cherub in a prim and proper Victorian dress. Supposedly the child’s ghost would occasionally animate the statue and run and play among the graves and the neighborhoods near the graveyard. I’d never seen her, myself.

But, hey. The statue was missing.

My grave is one of the more humble ones there. It’s standing open, too—the vampire noble who bought it for me had set it up to be that way. She’d gotten me a coffin on permanent standby, too, sort of like the president gets Air Force One, only a little more morbid. Dead Force One.

My headstone is simple white marble, a vertical stone, but it’s engraved in bold letters inlaid with gold: HARRY DRESDEN. Then a gold-inlaid pentacle, a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle—the symbol of the forces of magic contained within mortal will. Underneath it are more letters: HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING.

It’s a sobering sort of place to visit.

I mean, we’re all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out sometime when we’re still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we’re immortal for more than a decade afterward.

Death isn’t something anyone likes to think about, but the fact is that you can’t get out of it. No matter what you do, how much you exercise, how religiously you diet, or meditate, or pray, or how much money you donate to your church, there is a single hard, cold fact that faces everyone on earth: One day it’s going to be over. One day the sun will rise, the world will turn, people will go about their daily routines—only you won’t be in it. You’ll be still. And cold.

And despite every religious faith, the testimony of near-death eyewitnesses, and the imaginations of storytellers throughout history, death remains the ultimate mystery. No one truly, definitively knows what happens after. And that’s assuming there is an after. We all go there blind to whatever is out there in the darkness beyond.

Death.

You can’t escape it.

You.

Will.

Die.

That’s a bitter, hideously concrete fact to endure—but believe me, you get it in a whole new range of color and texture when you face it standing over your own open grave.

I stood there among silent headstones and memorials both sober and outrageous, and the late-October moon shone down on me. It was too cold for crickets, but the sound of traffic, sirens, car alarms, overhead jets, and distant loud music, the pulse of Chicago, kept me company. Mist had risen off of Lake Michigan like it did a lot of nights, but tonight it had come on exceptionally thick, and tendrils of it drifted through the graves and around the stones. There was a silent, crackling tension in the air, a kind of muted energy that was common in late autumn. Halloween was almost here, and the borders between Chicago and the spirit world, the Never-never, were at their weakest. I could sense the restless shades of the graveyard, most of them too feeble ever to manifest to mortal eyes, stirring in the roiling mist, tasting the energy-laden air.

Mouse sat beside me, ears forward and alert, his gaze shifting regularly, eyes focused, his attention obvious enough to make me think that he could literally see the things I could only vaguely feel. But whatever was out there, it didn’t bother him. He sat beside me in silence, content to leave his head under my gloved hand.

I wore my long leather duster, its mantle falling almost to my elbows, along with black fatigue pants, a sweater, and old combat boots. I carried my wizard’s staff with me in my right hand, a length of solid oak hand-carved with flowing runes and sigils all up and down its length. My mother’s silver pentacle hung by a chain around my neck. My scarred flesh could barely feel the silver bracelet hung with tiny shields on my left wrist, but it was there. Several cloves of garlic tied together in a big lump lay in my duster’s pocket, and brushed against my leg when I shifted my weight. The group of odd items would have looked innocuous enough to the casual eye, but they amounted to a magical arsenal that had seen me through plenty of trouble.

Mavra had given me her word of honor, but I had plenty of other enemies who would love to take a shot at me. I wasn’t going to make myself an easy target. But standing around in the haunted graveyard in the dark started to make me nervous, fast.

“Come on,” I muttered after a few minutes. “What’s taking her so long?”

Mouse let out a growl so low and quiet that I barely heard it—but I could feel the dog’s sudden tension and wariness quivering up through my maimed hand, shaking my arm to the elbow.

I gripped my staff, checking all around me. Mouse was doing much the same, until his dark eyes started tracking something I couldn’t see. Whatever it was, judging from Mouse’s gaze, it was getting closer. Then there was a quiet, rushing sound and Mouse crouched, nose pointed at my open grave, his teeth bared.

I stepped closer to my grave. Patches of mist flowed down into it from the green grounds. I muttered under my breath, took off my amulet, and pushed some of my will into the five-pointed star, causing it to glow with a low blue light. I draped the amulet over the fingers of my left hand while I gripped the staff in my right, and peered down into the grave.

The mist inside it suddenly gathered, congealed, and flowed into the form of a withered corpse—that of a woman, emaciated and dried as though from years in the earth. The corpse wore a gown and kirtle, medieval style, the former green and the latter black. The fabric was simple cotton—modern manufacture, then, and not actual historic dress.

Mouse’s snarl bubbled up into a more audible rumbling snarl.

The corpse sat up, opened milk-white eyes, and focused on me. It lifted a hand, in which it held a white lily, and held it toward me. Then the corpse spoke in a voice that was all rasp and whisper. “Wizard Dresden. A flower for your grave.”

“Mavra,” I said. “You’re late.”

“There was a headwind,” the vampire answered. She flicked her wrist, and the lily arched up out of the grave and landed on my headstone. She followed it out with a similar, uncannily smooth motion that reminded me of a spider in its eerie grace. I noted that she wore a sword and a dagger on a weapons belt at her waist. They looked old and worn, and I was betting that they were not of modern make. She came to a halt and faced me from across my grave, her face turned very slightly away from the blue light of my amulet, her cataract eyes steady on Mouse. “You kept your hand? After those burns, I would have thought you would have amputated it.”

“It’s mine,” I said. “And it’s none of your business. And you’re wasting my time.”

The vampire’s corpse lips stretched into a smile. Flakes of dead flesh fell down from the corners of her mouth. Brittle hair like dried straw had mostly been broken off to the length of a finger, but here and there longer strands the color of bread mold brushed the shoulders of her dress. “You’re allowing your mortality to make you impatient, Dresden. Surely you want to take this opportunity to discuss your assault on my scourge?”

“No.” I slipped my amulet on again and rested my hand on Mouse’s head. “I’m not here to socialize. You’ve got dirt on Murphy and you want something from me. Let’s have it.”

Her laugh was full of cobwebs and sandpaper. “I forget how young you are until I see you,” she said. “Life is fleeting, Dresden. If you insist on keeping yours, you ought to enjoy it.”

“Funny thing is, trading insults with an egotistical superzombie just isn’t my idea of a good time,” I said. Mouse punctuated the sentence with another rumbling growl. I turned my shoulders from her, starting to turn away. “If that’s all you had in mind, I’m leaving.”

She laughed harder, and the sound of it spooked the hell out of me. Maybe it was the atmosphere, but something about it, the way that it simply lacked anything to do with the things that should motivate laughter…There was no warmth in it, no humanity, no kindness, no joy. It was like Mavra herself—it had the withered human shell, but underneath it all was something from a nightmare.

“Very well,” Mavra said. “We shall embrace brevity.”

I faced her again, wary. Something in her manner had changed, and it was setting off all my alarm bells.

“Find The Word of Kemmler,” she said. Then she turned, dark skirts flaring, one hand resting negligently upon her sword, and started to leave.

“Hey!” I choked. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” she said without turning.

“Wait a minute!” I said.

She paused.

“What the hell is The Word of Kemmler?”

“A trail.”

“Leading to what?” I asked.

“Power.”

“And you want it.”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to find it.”

“Yes. Alone. Tell no one of our agreement or what you are doing.”

I took in a slow breath. “What happens if I tell you to go to hell?”

Mavra silently lifted a single arm. There was a photo between two of her desiccated fingers, and even in the moonlight I could see that it was of Murphy.

“I’ll stop you,” I said. “And if I don’t, I’ll come after you. If you hurt her, I’ll kill you so hard your last ten victims will make miraculous recoveries.”

“I won’t have to touch her,” she said. “I’ll send the evidence to the police. The mortal authorities will prosecute her.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “Wizards and vampires may be at war, but we leave the mortals out of it. Once you get mortal authorities involved, the Council will do it as well. And then the Reds. You could escalate matters into global chaos.”

“If I intended to employ the mortal authorities against you, perhaps,” Mavra said. “You are White Council.”

My stomach twisted with sudden, sickened understanding. I was a member of the White Council of Wizards, a solid citizen of the supernatural realms.

But Murphy wasn’t.

“The protector of the people,” Mavra all but purred. “The defender of the law will find herself a convicted murderer, and her only explanation would make her sound like a madwoman. She is prepared to die in battle, wizard. But I won’t merely kill her. I will unmake her. I will destroy the labor of her life and her heart.”

“You bitch,” I said.

“Of course.” She looked at me over her shoulder. “And unless you are prepared to unmake mortal civilization—or at least enough of it to impose your will upon it—there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

Fury exploded somewhere in my chest and rolled out through my body and thoughts in a red fire. Mouse rolled forward toward Mavra a step, shaking the mist around us with a rising growl, and I didn’t realize at first that he was following my lead. “Like hell there isn’t,” I snarled. “If I hadn’t agreed to a truce I would—”

Mavra’s corpse-yellow teeth appeared in a ghastly smile. “Kill me in my tracks, wizard, but it will do you no good. Unless I put a halt to it, the pictures and other evidence will be sent to the police. And I will do so only once I am satisfied with your retrieval of The Word of Kemmler. Find it. Bring it to me before three midnights hence, and I will turn over the evidence to you. You have my word.”

She dropped the photo of Murphy, and some kind of purple, nauseating light played over it for a second as it fell to the ground. There was the acrid smell of scorched chemicals.

When I looked back up at Mavra there was no one there.

I walked slowly over to the fallen photo, struggling to slap my anger aside quick enough to reach out with my supernatural senses. I didn’t feel any of Mavra’s presence anywhere near me, and over the next several seconds my dog’s growls died down to low, wary sounds of uncertainty—and then to silence. While I wasn’t quite certain of the all the details, Mouse wasn’t your average dog, and if Mouse didn’t sense lurking bad guys, it was because there weren’t any bad guys lurking.

The vampire was gone.

I picked up the photo. Murphy’s picture had been marred. The dark energy had left scorch marks in the shape of numbers over Murphy’s face. A phone number. Cute.

My righteous fury kept on fading, and I missed it. Once it was gone, there was going to be only sick worry and fear left in its place.

If I didn’t work for one of the worst of the bad guys I’ve ever dealt with, Murphy would get hung out to dry.

Said bad guy was after power—and was on a deadline to boot. If Mavra needed something that soon, it meant that some kind of power struggle was about to go down. And three midnights hence meant Halloween night. Aside from ruining my birthday, it meant that black magic was going to be brought into play sometime soon, and at this time of year that could mean only one thing.

Necromancy.

I stood there in the boneyard, staring down at my grave, and started shivering. Partly from the cold.

I felt very alone.

Mouse exhaled a breath that was not quite a whimper of distress, and leaned against me.

“Come on, boy,” I told him. “Let’s get you home. No sense in more than one of us getting involved with this.”

Chapter

Three

I needed some answers.

Time to hit the lab.

Mouse and I returned to my apartment in the Blue Beetle, the beat-up old Volkswagen Bug that is my faithful steed. “Blue” is kind of a metaphorical description. The car has had various doors and panels replaced with white, yellow, red, and green. My mechanic, Mike, had managed to pound the hood more or less back into its original condition, which I’d bent out of shape while ramming a bad guy, but I hadn’t had the money to repaint, so now the car had primer grey added to its ensemble.

Mouse had been growing too quickly to be very graceful about getting out of the car. He filled up most of the backseat, and when climbing from there to the front and then out the driver’s-side door he reminded me of some footage I’ve seen of an elephant seal flopping through a New Zealand parking lot. He emerged happily enough, though, panting and waving his tail contentedly. Mouse liked going places in the car. That the place had happened to be a clandestine meeting in a freaking graveyard didn’t seem to spoil anything for him. It was all about the journey, not the destination. A very Zen soul, was Mouse.

Mister hadn’t come back yet, and neither had Thomas. I tried not to think too hard about that. Mister had been on his own when I found him, and he frequently went rambling. He could take care of himself. Thomas had managed to survive for all but the last several months of his life without me. He could take care of himself too.

I didn’t have to worry about either of them, right?

Yeah, right.

I disarmed my wards, the spells that protected my home from various supernatural intrusions, and slipped inside with Mouse. I built up the fire a bit, and the dog settled down in front of it with a pleased sigh. Then I ditched my coat, grabbed my thick old flannel robe and a Coke, and headed downstairs.

I live in a basement apartment, but a trapdoor underneath one of my rugs opens up on a folding wooden stair ladder that leads down to the subbasement and my lab. It’s cold down there, year-round, which is why I wear the heavy robe. It’s one more drop of romance sucked out of the wizarding mystique, but I stay comfortable.

“Bob,” I said as I climbed down into the pitch-dark lab. “Warm up the memory banks. I’ve got work to do.”

The first lights in the room to flicker on were the size and golden-orange color of candle flames. They shone out from the eye sockets of a skull, slowly growing brighter, until I could see the entire shelf the skull rested upon—a simple wooden board on the wall, covered in candles, romance novels, a number of small items, and the pale human skull.

“About time,” the skull mumbled. “It’s been weeks since you needed me.”

“’Tis the season,” I said. “Most of the Halloween jobs start looking the same after a few years. No need to consult you when I already know the answers I need.”

“If you were so smart,” Bob muttered, “you wouldn’t need me now.”

“That’s right,” I told him. I pulled a box of kitchen matches out of my robe’s pockets and began lighting candles. I started with a bunch of them on a metal table running down the center of the small room. “You’re a spirit of knowledge, whereas I am only human.”

“Right,” said Bob, drawing out the word. “Are you feeling all right, Harry?”

I continued on, lighting candles on the white wire shelves and workbenches on the three walls in a C shape around the long steel table. My shelves were still crowded with plastic dishes, lids, coffee cans, bags, boxes, tins, vials, flasks, and every other kind of small container you can imagine, filled with all kinds of substances as mundane as lint and as exotic as octopus ink. I had several hundred pounds’ worth of books and notebooks on the shelves, some arranged neatly and some stacked hastily where they’d been when last I left them. I hadn’t been down to the lab for a while, and I don’t allow the faeries access, so there was a little bit of dust over everything.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“Well,” Bob said, his tone careful, “you’re complimenting me, which is never good. Plus lighting all of your candles with matches.”

“So?” I said.

“So you can light all the candles with that stupid little spell you made up,” Bob said. “And you keep dropping the box because of your burned hand. So it’s taken you seven matches now to keep lighting those candles.”

I fumbled and dropped the matchbox again from my stiff, gloved fingers.

“Eight,” he said.

I suppressed a growl, struck a fresh match, and did it too forcefully, snapping it.

“Nine,” Bob said.

“Shut up,” I told him.

“You got it, boss. I’m the best at shutting up.” I lit the last few candles, and Bob said, “So did you come down here to get my help when you start working on your new blasting rod?”

“No,” I said. “Bob, I’ve only got the one hand. I can’t carve it with one hand.”

“You could use a vise grip,” the skull suggested.

“I’m not ready,” I said. My maimed fingers burned and throbbed. “I’m just…not.”

“You’d better get ready,” Bob said. “It’s only a matter of time before some nasty shows up and—”

I shot the skull a hard look.

“All right, all right,” Bob said. If he had hands, the skull would have raised them in a gesture of surrender. “So you’re telling me you still won’t use any fire magic.”

“Stars and stones.” I sighed. “So I’m using matches instead of my candle spell and I’m too busy to get the new blasting rod done. It’s not a big deal. There’s just not much call for blowing anything up or burning it to cinders on my average day.”

“Harry?” Bob asked. “Are your feet wet? And can you see the pyramids?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Earth to Dresden,” Bob said. “You are standing knee-deep in de Nile.”

I threw the matchbook at the skull. It bounced off halfheartedly, and the few matches left in tumbled out at random. “Keep your inner psychoanalyst to your damned self,” I growled. “We’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “You’re right, Harry. What do I know about anything?”

I glowered at Bob, and pulled up my stool to the worktable. I got out a notebook and a pencil. “The question of the hour is, what do you know about something called The Word of Kemmler?”

Bob made a sucking sound through his teeth, which is fairly impressive given that he’s got no saliva to work with. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit. I mean, he can make a B sound with no lips, too. “Can you give me a reference point or anything?”

“Not for certain,” I said. “But I have a gut instinct that says it has something to do with necromancy.”

Bob made a whistling sound. “I hope not.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that Kemmler was a certifiable nightmare,” Bob said. “I mean, wow. He was sick, Harry. Evil.”

That got my attention. Bob the skull was an air spirit, a being that existed in a world of knowledge without morality. He was fairly fuzzy on the whole good-evil conflict, and as a result he had only vague ideas of where lines got drawn. If Bob thought someone was evil, well…Kemmler must have really pushed the envelope.

“What’d he do?” I asked. “What made him so evil?”

“He was best known for World War One,” Bob said.

“The whole thing?” I demanded.

“Mostly, yeah,” Bob said. “There were about a hundred and fifty years of engineering built into it, and he had his fingers into all kinds of pies. He vanished at the end of hostilities and didn’t show up again until he started animating mass graves during World War Two. Went on rampages out in Eastern Europe, where things were pretty much a nightmare even without his help. Nobody is sure how many people he killed.”

“Stars and stones,” I said. “Why would he do something like that?”

“A wild guess? He was freaky insane. Plus evil.”

“You say ‘was,’” I said. “Past tense?”

“Very,” Bob said. “After what the guy did, the White Council hunted him down and wiped his dusty ass out in 1961.”

“You mean the Wardens?”

“I mean the White Council,” Bob said. “The Merlin, the whole Senior Council, the brute squad out of Archangel, the Wardens, and every wizard and ally the wizards could get their hands on.”

I blinked. “For one man?”

“See above, regarding nightmare,” Bob said. “Kemmler was a necromancer, Harry. Power over the dead. He had truck with demons, too, was buddies with most of the vampire Courts, every nasty in Europe, and some of the uglier faeries, too. Plus he had his own little cadre of baby Kemmlers to help him out. Apprentices. And thugs of every description.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Doubtless he was,” Bob said. “They killed him pretty good. A bunch of times. He’d shown up again after the Wardens had killed him early in the nineteenth century, so they were real careful the second time. And good riddance to the psychotic bastard.”

I blinked. “You knew him?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you?” Bob asked. “He was my owner for about forty years.”

I stared. “You worked with this monster?”

“I do what I do,” Bob said proudly.

“How did Justin get you, then?”

“Justin DuMorne was a Warden, Harry, back at Kemmler’s last stand. He pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Kemmler’s lab. Sort of like when you pulled me out of the smoldering ruins of Justin’s lab when you killed him. Circle of life, like that Elton John song.”

I felt more than a little tiny bit cold. I chewed on my lip and laid my pencil down. I had the feeling the rest of this conversation was not going to be something I wanted to create a written record of. “So what is The Word of Kemmler, Bob?”

“Not a clue,” Bob said.

I glowered. “What do you mean, not a clue? I thought you were his skull Friday.”

“Well, yeah,” Bob said. His eyelights flickered suddenly, a nervous little dance. “I don’t remember very much of it.”

I snorted out a laugh. “Bob. You never forget anything.”

“No,” Bob said. His voice shrank into something very small. “Unless I want to, Harry.”

I frowned and took a deep breath. “You’re saying that you chose to forget things about Kemmler.”

“Or was compelled to,” Bob said. “Um. Harry, can I come out? Just inside the lab? You know, while we talk.”

I blinked a couple of times. Bob was full of mischief on the best of days. I didn’t let him out except on specific intelligence-gathering missions anymore. And while he often pestered me to let him out on one of his perverted minirampages, he had never asked permission to leave his skull for the duration of a chat. “Sure,” I told him. “Stay inside the lab and be back in the skull at the end of this conversation.”

“Right,” Bob said. A small cloud of glowing motes of light the size of campfire sparks came sailing out of the skull’s eyes and darted to the far corner of the lab. “So anyway, when are we going to work on the new blasting rod?”

“Bob,” I said. “We’re talking about The Word of Kemmler.”

The lights shot restlessly over to the other side of the lab, swirling through the steps on my stair ladder in a glowing helix. “You’re talking about The Word of Kemmler,” Bob said. The glowing cloud stretched, motes now spiraling up and down the stairs simultaneously. “I’m working on my Vegas act. Lookit, I’m DNA.”

“Would you stop goofing around? Can you remember anything at all about Kemmler?”

Bob’s voice quavered, the motes becoming a vague cloud again. “I can.”

“Then tell me what you know.”

“Is that a command?”

I blinked. “Do I have to make it one?”

“You don’t want to command me to remember, Harry.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

The cloud of lights drifted in vague loops around the lab. “Because knowledge is what I am. Losing my knowledge of what I knew of Kemmler took away a…a big piece of my existence. Like if someone had cut off your arm. What’s left of what I know of Kemmler is close to the missing pieces.”

I thought I started to understand him. “It hurts.”

The lights swirled uncertainly. “It also hurts. It’s more than that.”

“If it hurts,” I said, “I’ll stop, and you can forget it again when we’re done talking.”

“But—” Bob said.

“It’s a command, Bob. Tell me.”

Bob shuddered.

It was a bizarre sight. The cloud of lights shivered for a second, as if in a trembling breath of wind, and then abruptly just shifted, flickering to one side as quickly as if I had been looking at it with one eye closed and suddenly switched to the other.

“Kemmler,” Bob said. “Right.” The lights came to rest on the other end of the table in the shape of a perfect sphere. “What do you want to know, wizard?”

I watched the lights warily, but nothing seemed all that wrong. Other than the fact that Bob was suddenly calm. And geometric. “Tell me what The Word of Kemmler is.”

The lights pulsed scarlet. “Knowledge. Truth. Power.”

“Uh,” I said, “a little more specific?”

“The master wrote down his teachings, wizard, so that those who came after him could learn from him. Could learn about the true power of magic.”

“You mean,” I said, “so that they could learn about necromancy.”

Bob’s voice took on the edge of a sneer. “What you call magic is nothing but a mound of parlor tricks, beside the power to master life and death itself.”

“That’s an opinion, I guess,” I said.

“More than that,” Bob said. “It is a truth. A truth that reveals itself to those who seek it out.”

“What do you mean?” I said slowly.

There was a flash, and a pair of white eyes formed in the glittering cloud of red points of light. They weren’t pleasant. “Shall I show you the start of the path?” Bob’s voice said. “Death, Dresden, is a part of you. It is woven into the fabric of your being. You are a collection of pieces, each of them dying and in turn being reborn and remade.”

The white lights were cold. Not mountain-spring cold, either. Graveyard-mist cold. But I’d never seen anything quite like them before. And there was no sense interrupting Bob when he was finally spilling some information.

Besides. Fascinating light.

“Dead flesh adorns you even now. Nails. Hair. You tend them and caress them like any other mortal. Your women decorate them. Entice with them. Death is not a thing to be feared, boy. She is a lover who waits to take you into her arms. You can feel her, if you know what her touch is like. Cold, slow, sweet.”

He was right. A cold, tingling nonfeeling was glittering over my fingernails and my scalp. For a second I thought that it hurt, but then I realized that it was only a shivering sensation where that cold energy brushed close to the blood pulsing beneath my skin. It was where they met that it felt uncomfortable. Without the blood, the cold would be a pure, endless sweetness.

“Take a little of death inside, boy. And it will lead you to more. Open your mouth.”

I did. I was staring at the light in any case, and it was amazing enough to merit a bit of gaping. I barely noticed a frozen mote of dark blue light, like the corpse of a tiny star, that appeared from one of the spirit’s white eyes and began drifting toward my mouth. The cold sensation grew, and it hit my tongue like a thermonuclear peppermint, freezing hot, searingly bitter and sweet and—

—and wrong. I spat it out, recoiling, throwing my arms up in front of my face. I fell to the floor, numbness spreading.

“Too late!” crowed the spirit. It shot into the air, swirling around over me, gloating. “Whatever you have done to my thoughts, the master will not be pleased that you have meddled with his servant.”

The cold started spreading, and it wasn’t purely physical. There was an empty, heartless void to it, a starless, frozen quality that raked at me—not just my body, but me—with a mindless hunger. And I could feel it sending tendrils out through me, slowing my heartbeat, making it impossible to breathe.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for that?” the spirit purred, drifting back and forth over me. “Sitting there locked behind my own thoughts? Waiting for the chance to fight free? Finally, you thick-witted ogre, I get to leave your stupidity behind.”

“Bob,” I choked out. “This conversation is over.”

The spirit’s scarlet lights flared to sudden, incandescent rage and it screamed, a wailing sound that rattled my shelves and felt like it was splitting my head. Then the cloud was ripped backward across the room, sucked into the eyeholes of the skull as though down a hellish drain.

Once the last of the motes went flickering back into the skull, the horrible cold faltered a little, and I curled up, focusing my will and trying to push it away. It took me a while, and that hideous void-presence lingered against my fingernails, even after I could feel my fingers again, but after a little while I was able to sit up.

After that I just curled up my knees against my chest, shocked and scared half out of my mind. I had always known that Bob was an incredibly valuable asset, and that no spirit with as much knowledge as he had could be weak. But I had not been at all prepared for the sheer power he had wielded, or for the malice with which he did it. Bob wasn’t supposed to be a sleeping nightmare waiting to wake up. Bob was supposed to be my wisecracking porta-geek.

Good Lord, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d confronted a demon with that much raw psychic power. If I’d been a second slower, or—stars and stones—if I hadn’t remembered the condition that would banish Bob back to the skull and once again remove the dark memories, I’d be dead now. Or maybe dead and then some.

And it would have been my own stupid fault, too.

“Harry?” Bob said.

I flinched and let out a small squeaking sound. Then I got hold of myself and blinked up at the skull. It rested on its shelf, and its orange-gold eye lights were back to their usual color. “Oh. Hey.”

Bob’s voice was very quiet. “Your lips are blue.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?” Bob asked.

“It got kind of cold in here.”

“Me.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Bob said. “I tried to tell you.”

“I know,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Kemmler was bad, Harry,” Bob said. “He…he took what I was. And he twisted it. I destroyed most of my memories of my time with him, and I locked away everything I couldn’t. Because I didn’t want to be like that.”

“You won’t,” I told him quietly. “Now hear this, Bob. I command you never to recover those memories again. Never to let them out again. Never to obey any command to unleash them again. From here on out they sleep with the fishes. Understand me?”

“If I do,” Bob said carefully, “I won’t be able to do much to help you, Harry. You’ll be on your own.”

“Let me worry about that,” I said. “It’s a command, Bob.”

The skull let out a slow sigh of relief. “Thank you, Harry.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “Literally.”

“Right,” he said.

“Okay. Let’s see,” I said. “Can you still remember general information about Kemmler?”

“Nothing you couldn’t find in other places. But general knowledge I learned when Justin was with the Wardens, yes.”

“All right, then. You—that is, that other you—said that Kemmler had written down his teachings, when I asked him what The Word of Kemmler was. So I figure it’s a book.”

“Maybe,” Bob said. “Council records stated that Kemmler had written three books: The Blood of Kemmler, The Mind of Kemmler, and The Heart of Kemmler.”

“He published them?”

“Self-published,” Bob said. “He started spreading them around Europe.”

“Resulting in what?”

“Way too many penny-ante sorcerers getting their hands on some real necromancy.”

I nodded. “What happened?”

“The Wardens put on their own epic production of Fahrenheit 451,” Bob said. “They spent about twenty years finding and destroying copies. They think they accounted for all of them.”

I whistled. “So if The Word of Kemmler is a fourth manuscript?”

“That could be bad,” Bob said.

“Why?”

“Because some of Kemmler’s disciples escaped the White Council’s dragnet,” Bob said. “They’re still running around. If they get a new round of necro-at-home lessons to expand their talents, they could use it to do fairly horrible things.”

“They’re wizards?”

“Black wizards, yes,” Bob said.

“How many?”

“Four or five at the most, but the Wardens’ information was very sketchy.”

“Doesn’t sound like anything the Wardens can’t handle,” I said.

“Unless what’s in the fourth book contains the rest of what Kemmler had to teach them,” Bob said. “In which case, we might end up with four or five Kemmlers running around.”

“Holy crap,” I said. I plunked my tired ass down on my stool and rubbed at my head. “And it’s no coincidence that it’s almost Halloween.”

“The season when the barriers between the mortal realm and the spirit world will be weakest,” Bob said.

“Like when that asshole the Nightmare was hunting down my friends,” I said. I peered at Bob. “But for him to do that, he had to weaken the barriers even more. He and Bianca had tormented all those ghosts to start making the barriers more unstable. Would it have to be ghosts to stir up the kind of turbulence you’d need for big magic?”

“No,” Bob said. “But that’s one way. Otherwise you’d have to use some rituals or sacrifices of one kind or another.”

“You mean deaths,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I frowned, nodding. “They’d have to invest some energy early to get things moving for a big necromantic working. Like bouncing on a diving board a couple of times before you jump.”

“An accurate, if crude aphorism,” Bob said. “You’d have to do a little prework if you wanted to start working Kemmler-level necromancy, even on Halloween.” He sighed. “Though that doesn’t really help you much.”

I got up and headed for the stepladder. “It helps more than you know, man. I’m getting you new romances.”

The skull’s eye lights brightened. “You are? I mean, of course you are. But why?”

“Because if someone’s setting up for big bad juju, they’ll have left bodies. If they’ve done that, then I have a place to start tracking them and finding out what’s going on.”

“Harry?” Bob called up as I left the lab. “Where are you going?”

I stuck my head back down the trapdoor and said, “The morgue.”

Chapter

Four

Chicago has a bitchin’ morgue. You can’t call it a “morgue” anymore because it’s the Forensic Institute now. It isn’t run by a “coroner” either, because now it’s a medical examiner. It’s on West Harrison Street, which is located in a fairly swanky industrial park, mostly specializing in various biotech industries. It’s pretty. There are wide green lawns, carefully kept and trimmed, complete with sculpted trees and bushes, a fantastic view of the city’s skyline, and quick access to the freeway.

It’s upscale, sure. But it’s also very quiet. Despite the gorgeous landscaping and a more antiseptic naming scheme, it’s where they bring the dead to be poked and prodded.

I parked the Blue Beetle in the visitor’s parking lot—of the complex next door. The morgue had more than average security, and I didn’t want to advertise my presence. I grabbed my bribe from the backseat and headed for the front door of the Office of the Medical Examiner. I knocked, flashing my little laminated card I got from the police that makes me look like an official policelike person. The door buzzed, and I went in, nodding to a comfortably heavyset security guard reading a magazine behind a nondescript desk to one side of the entry area.

“Phil,” I said.

“Evening, Dresden,” he said. “Official?”

I held up the wooden box packed with McAnally’s microbrew. “Unofficial.”

“Hosannah,” drawled Phil. “I like unofficial better.” He put his feet back up on the desk and opened up his magazine again. I left the beer on the floor next to the desk, where it would be out of sight from the door. “How come I never heard of this bar?”

“Just a little local tavern,” I said. I didn’t add, that caters to the supernatural community and doesn’t exactly try to attract the attention of locals.

“I’ll have to get you to take me by sometime.”

“Sure,” I said. “Is he here?”

“Back in the slabs,” he said, reaching down for one of the ales. Phil opened the lid with a thumb and took a swig, eyes on his magazine again. “Ahhhhh,” he said, his tone philosophical. “You know, if anyone had come through that door, I’d tell him to get his ass going before someone drives up or something.”

“Gone,” I said, and hurried back into the hallways behind the entry area.

There were several slabs—I mean, examination rooms—in the morgue—that is, in the Forensic Institute. But I knew that the guy I was looking for would be in the smallest, crummiest room, the one farthest away from the entrance.

Waldo Butters, other than having the extreme misfortune of being born to parents with little to no ability to bestow a manly name upon their son, had also been cursed with a sense of honesty, a measure of integrity, and enough moral courage to make him act on them. When he’d examined the corpses of a bunch of things I’d burned mostly to briquettes, he’d pronounced them “humanlike, but definitely nonhuman,” in his report.

It was a fair enough description of the remains of a bunch of batlike Red Court vampires, but since everyone knew that there were no such things as “humanlike nonhumans,” and the remains were obviously human corpses that had been horribly twisted by intense heat, Butters wound up sitting in a psych ward for ninety days for observation. After that, he had been forced to wage a legal battle just to keep his job. His superiors didn’t want him around, and they handed him the worst parts of the job they could come up with, but Butters stuck it out. He mostly worked the overnight shift and weekends.

It had the happy side effect of producing an ME who regarded the establishment with the same sort of cheerful disrespect I my-self occasionally indulged in. Which was damned handy when, for example, one needed a bullet removed from one’s arm without intruding upon the law enforcement community’s busy schedule.

The doctor was in. I heard polka music oompahing cheerfully through the hall as I approached the room. But the music was off, somehow. Butters normally played his polka records and CDs loud, and I had gotten used to hearing the elite performers of the polka universe. Whoever he was playing now sounded admirably energetic, but lumpy and uneven. There were odd jerks and breaks in the music, though the whole of it somehow managed to hang on the rhythm of a single bass drum. On the whole, it made the music happy, lively, and somehow misshapen.

I opened the door and regarded the source of the Quasimodo Polka.

Butters was a little guy, maybe five-foot-three in his shoes, maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. He was dressed in blue hospital scrubs and hiking boots. He had a shock of wiry black hair that gave him a perpetual look of surprise that stopped just short of being a perpetual look of recent electrocution. He was wearing Tom Cruise sunglasses and had transformed himself into Polkastein.

A bass drum was strapped to his back, and a couple of wires ran to his ankles from a pair of beaters mounted on the frame. The drum beat in time to stomps of his feet. A small but genuine tuba hung from his slender shoulders, and there were more strings attached to his elbows, which moved back and forth in time to “oom” and “pah” respectively. He held an accordion in his hands, strapped to the harness on his chest. A clarinet had been clamped to the accordion so that the end was near his mouth, and there was, I swear to God, a cymbal on a frame held to his head.

Butters marched in place, red-faced, sweating, and beaming as he thumped and oompahed and blared accordion music. I just stood there staring, because while I have seen a lot of weird things, I hadn’t ever seen that. Butters wrapped up the polka and energetically banged his head against the tuba, producing a deafening clash from the cymbal. The motion brought me into his peripheral vision and he jumped in surprise.

The motion overbalanced him and he fell amidst a clatter of cymbal, a honk of tuba, a fitful stutter of drum, and then lay on the floor while his accordion wheezed out.

“Butters,” I said.

“Harry,” he panted from the pile of polka. “Cool pants.”

“I can see you’re busy.”

He missed the sarcasm. “Heck, yeah. Gotta get set. Oktoberfest Battle of the Bands tomorrow night.”

“I thought you weren’t going to enter after last year.”

“Hah,” Butters said, sneering defiantly. “I’m not going to let the Jolly Rogers laugh at me like that. I mean, come on. Five guys named Roger. How much polka can be in their souls?”

“I have no freaking clue,” I answered truthfully.

Butters flashed me a grin. “I’ll get them this year.”

I couldn’t help it: I started smiling. “Need any help getting out of there?”

“Nah, I got it,” he said brightly, and started unstrapping himself. “Surprised to see you. Your checkup isn’t until next week. Hand bothering you?”

“Not really,” I said. “Wanted to talk to you about—”

“Oh!” he said. He hopped up from the stuff and left it on the floor so that he could scamper toward a desk in the corner. “Before you get started, I found something interesting.”

“Butters,” I said, “I’d like to chat, man, but I’m in a pretty big hurry.”

He paused, crestfallen. “Really?”

“Yeah. It’s a case, and I need to find out if you know anything that could help me.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you have cases all the time. This is important. I’ve been doing a lot of research since you started seeing me about your hand, and the conclusions I’ve been able to extrapolate from—”

“Butters.” I sighed. “Look, I’m in a huge hurry. Five words or less, okay?”

He leaned his hands on his desk and regarded me, eyes sparkling. “I know how wizards live forever.” He paused for a thoughtful second and then said, “Wait, that’s six words. Never mind, then. What did you want to talk about?”

My mouth fell open. I shut it and glared at him. “No one likes a wiseass, Butters.”

He grinned. “I told you it was important.”

“Wizards don’t live forever,” I said. “Just a really long time.”

Butters shrugged and kept pulling out file folders. He flicked on a backlight for reading X-ray films, and started pulling them from the folders and putting them on the light. “Hey, I’m still not sure I buy into this whole hidden-world-of-magic thing. But from what you’ve told me, wizards can live five or six times as long as the average human. That’s closer to forever than anyone I know. And what I’ve seen makes me think there must be something to it. Come here.”

I did, frowning at the X-rays. “Hey. Aren’t these mine?”

“Yep,” Butters confirmed. “After I switched to one of the older machines, I got about fifteen percent of them to come out,” he said. “And there are three or four from your records that managed to survive whatever it is about you that screws up X-rays.”

“Ugh. This is that gunshot wound I got in Michigan,” I said, pointing at the first. It showed a number of fracture lines in my hip bone, where a small-caliber bullet had hit me. I had barely avoided a shattered pelvis and probable death. “They got this one after they got the cast off.”

“Right,” Butters said. “And here, this is one from a couple of years ago.” He pointed at a second shot. “See the fracture lines? They’re brighter, where the bone re-fused. Leaves that signature.”

“Right,” I said. “So?”

“So,” Butters said. “Look at this one.” He flipped up a third X-ray. It was much like the others, but without any of the bright or dark lines. He flicked it with a finger and looked at me, eyes wide.

“What?” I asked.

He blinked, slowly. Then he said, “Harry. This is an X-ray I took two months ago. Notice the lack of anything wrong.”

“So?” I asked. “It healed, right?”

He made an exasperated sound. “Harry, you are dense. Bones don’t do that. You carry marks where they re-fused for the rest of your life. Or rather, I would. You don’t.”

I frowned. “What’s that got to do with wizard life span?”

Butters waved his hand impatiently. “Here, here are some more.” He slapped up more X-rays. “This is a partial stress fracture to the arm that didn’t get shot. You got it in that fall from the train a couple nights after we met,” he said. “It was just a crack. You didn’t even know you had it, and it was mild enough that it just needed a splint for a few days. It was off before you were ambulatory.”

“What’s so odd about that?”

“Nothing,” Butters said. “But look, here it is again. There’s a fuse marker, and in the third one, poof, it’s gone. Your arm is back to normal.”

“Maybe I just drink too much milk or something,” I said.

Butters snorted. “Harry, look. You’re a tough guy. You’ve been injured a lot.” He pulled out my medical file and thumped it down with a grunt of effort. Granted, there are phone books smaller than my hospital file. “And I’m willing to bet you’ve had plenty of booboos you never saw a doctor about.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You’re at least as battered as a professional athlete,” Butters said. “I mean, like a hockey player or football player. Maybe as much as some race-car drivers.”

“They get battered?” I asked.

“When you go around driving half a ton of steel at a third the speed of sound for a living, you get all kinds of injuries,” he said seriously. “Even the crashes that aren’t spectacular are pretty vicious on the human body at the speeds they’re going. Ever been in a low-speed accident?”

“Yeah. Sore for a week.”

“Exactly,” Butters said. “Multiply that. These guys and other athletes take a huge beating, right? They develop a mental and physical toughness that lets them ignore a lot of pain and overcome the damage, but the damage gets done to their bodies nonetheless. And it’s cumulative. That’s why you see football players, boxers, a lot of guys like that all beat to hell by the time they’re in their thirties. They regain most of the function after an injury, but the damage is still there, and it adds up bit by bit.”

“Again I ask, what’s that got to do with me?”

“You aren’t cumulative,” Butters said.

“Eh?”

“Your body doesn’t get you functional again and then leave off,” Butters said. “It continues repairing damage until it’s gone.” He stared at me. “Do you understand how incredibly significant that is?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Harry, that’s probably why people age to begin with,” he said. “Your body is a big collection of cells, right? Most of them get damaged or wear out and die. Your body replaces them. It’s a continual process. But the thing is, every time the body makes a replacement, it’s a little less perfect than the one that came before it.”

“That copy-of-a-copy thing,” I said. “I’ve heard about that, yeah.”

“Right,” Butters said. “That’s how you’re able to heal these injuries. It’s why you have the potential to live so long. Your copies are perfect. Or at least a hell of a lot closer to it than most folks.”

I blinked. “You’re saying I can heal any injury?”

“Well,” he said, “not like mutant X-factor healing. If someone cuts an artery, you’re gonna bleed out. But if you survive it, given enough time your body seems to be able to replace things almost perfectly. It might take you months, even several years, but you can get better when other people wouldn’t.”

I looked at him, and then at my gloved hand. I tried to talk, but my throat wouldn’t work.

“Yeah,” the little doctor said quietly. “I think you’re going to get your hand back at some point. It didn’t mortify or come off. There’s still living muscle tissue there. Given enough time, I think you’ll be able to replace scar tissue and regrow the nerves.”

“That…” I said, and choked up. I swallowed. “That would be nice.”

“We can help it along, I think,” Butters said. “Physical therapy. I was going to talk to you about it next visit. We can go over it then.”

“Butters,” I said. “Uh. Wow, man. This is…”

“Really exciting,” he said, eyes gleaming.

“I was going to say amazing,” I said quietly. “And then I was going to say thank-you.”

He grinned and twitched a shoulder in a shrug. “I calls them like I see them.”

I stared down at my hand and tried to twiddle my fingers. They sort of twitched. “Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why am I able to make good copies?”

He blew out a breath and pushed his hand through his wiry hair, grinning. “I have no freaking clue. Neat, huh?”

I stared down at the X-ray film for a moment more, then put my hand in my duster’s pocket. “I hoped you could help me get some information,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” Butters replied. He went to his polka suit and started taking it apart. “Is something going on?”

“I hope not,” I said. “But let’s just say I’ve got a real bad feeling. I need to know if there have been any odd deaths in the area in the past day or two.”

Butters frowned. “Odd how?”

“Unusually violent,” I said. “Or marks of some kind of murder method consistent with a ritual killing. Hell, I’ll even take signs of torture prior to death.”

“Doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve met,” Butters said. He took off his sunglasses and put on his normal black-rimmed glasses. “Though I’m not done for tonight. Let me check the records and see who’s in the hiz-ouse.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Butters knocked a few flyers off his chair and sat down. He dragged a keyboard out from under a medical magazine and gave me a significant look.

“Oh, right,” I said. I backed away from his desk to the far side of the room. Proximity to me tended to make computers malfunction to one degree or another. Murphy still hadn’t forgiven me for blowing out her hard drive, even though it had happened only the once.

Butters got on his computer. “No,” he said, after a moment’s reading and key thumping. “Wait. Here’s a guy who got knifed, but it happened way up in the northwest corner of the state.”

“No good,” I said. “It would have to be local. Within a county or three of Chicago.”

“Hmph,” Butters said. “You investigative types are always so picky about this kind of thing.” He scanned over the screen. “Drive-by shooting victim?”

“Definitely no,” I said. “For a ritual killing it would be a lot more intimate.”

“Think you’re out of luck then, Harry,” he said. “There were some high-profile stiffs that came in, and the day crew took them all.”

“Hmm.”

“Tell me about it. I got stuck with a wino and some poor bastard who got caught under a tractor and had to be tested for drugs and booze earlier tonight, but that’s…” He paused. “Hello.”

“Hello?”

“That’s odd.”

That perked up my ears, metaphorically speaking. “What’s odd?”

“My boss, Dr. Brioche, passed over one of his subjects. It got moved to my docket, but I didn’t get a memo about it. Not even an e-mail, the bastard.”

I frowned. “That happen a lot?”

“Attempts to make it look like I’m neglecting my job so he can fire me?” Butters said. “That one’s new, but it’s in the spirit of my whole history here.”

“Maybe he was just busy today.”

“And maybe Liv Tyler is waiting in my bedroom to rub my feet,” Butters responded.

“Heh. Who’s the stiff?”

“A Mr. Eduardo Anthony Mendoza,” Butters read. “He was in a head-on collision with a Buick on the expressway. Only he was a pedestrian.” Butters scrunched up his nose. “Looks like it will be a nasty one. No wonder high-and-mighty Brioche didn’t want to handle it.”

I mused. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but there was something about the situation around that corpse that set off my internal alarm bells. “Mind if I ask you to indulge an intuition?”

“Sure. I’m as polka empowered as I’m going to get, anyway. Lemme break out my gear and we’ll take a look-see at the late Eddie Mendoza.”

“Cool,” I said. I leaned against the wall and folded my arms, preparing to settle in for a while.

The door to the examination room slammed open, and Phil the security guard walked in with a businesslike stride.

Except Phil’s throat had been slit open from ear to ear, and blood covered his upper body in a sheet of ugly splatters. His face was absolutely white. There was no chance whatsoever that poor Phil was alive.

That didn’t stop him from striding into the room, seizing Butters’s desk, and throwing it, computer, heavy file cabinet, and all, into the far wall of the room, where it shattered with a thunderous sound of impact. Butters stared at Phil with horror, then let out a somewhat rabbitlike shriek and scurried back from him.

“Don’t move!” thundered a deep, resonant voice from the hallway outside. Dead Phil froze in his tracks. A big man in a khaki trench coat and, I swear to God, a dark fedora strode into the room, intent on Butters, and he didn’t see me against the wall. I hesitated for a second, still shocked at the suddenness of it all. Three other men in coats, all grey of face and purposeful of motion, flanked him.

“Don’t hurt the little coroner, gentlemen,” the man said. “We’ll need him. For a little while.”

Chapter

Five

The man in the fedora took a step toward Butters, drumming a slender book against his thigh with one hand. “Stand aside,” he muttered, and dead Phil sidestepped.

Butters had scrambled back into a corner, his eyes the size of glazed doughnuts behind his glasses. “Wow,” he babbled. “Great entrance. Love the hat.”

The guy in the fedora took a step forward and reached out with his other hand, at which point I decided to act. A raised hand isn’t much in the regular world, but from a guy in a long coat with his own flock of zombies it had to be at least as menacing as pointing a gun.

“That will be enough,” I said, and I said it loud enough to hurt ears. I stepped away from the wall with my left hand extended. My silver bracelet of heat-warped shields hung on my wrist, and I readied my will, pushing enough power into the bracelet to prepare a shield to leap up immediately. The bracelet was still pretty banged-up from the beating it had taken the last time I’d used it, and I’d only barely gotten it working again. As a result, it channeled the energy pretty sloppily, and blue-white sparks leaped out and fell to the floor in a steady drizzle. “Put your hand down and step away from the coroner.”

The man turned to face me, book thumping steadily against his leg. For a second I thought he was another dead man himself, his face was so pale—but spots of color appeared high on his cheeks, faint but there. He had a long face, and though it was pale it was leathery, as if he’d spent years in the blowing desert wind and sand without seeing the sun. He had dark eyes, thick grey sideburns, no beard, and a scar twisted his upper lip into a perpetual sneer.

“Who,” said the man, his accent thick and British, “are you?”

“The Great Pumpkin,” I responded. “I’ve risen from the pumpkin patch a bit early because Butters is just that nifty. And you are?”

The man studied me in silence for a long second, eyes focused on my sparking wrist, then on my throat, where my mother’s silver pentacle amulet was probably lying outside my shirt. “You may call me Grevane. Walk away, boy.”

“Or what?” I said.

Grevane gave me a chilly little smile, thumping his book, and nodded at his unmoving companions. “There’s room in my car for one more.”

“I’ve got a job already,” I said. “But there’s no reason for this to get nasty. You’re going to stand right there while Butters and me leave.”

“And I,” he said, his voice annoyed.

“What’s that?”

“Butters and I, fool. Do you seriously think that a defensive shield barely held together by a clumsy, crude little focus will intimidate me into allowing you to leave?”

“No,” I said, and drew my .44 revolver from my duster’s pocket. I pointed it at him and thumbed back the trigger. “That’s why I brought this.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “You intend to murder me in cruor gelidus?”

“No, I’ll do it right here,” I said. “Butters, get up. Come over here to me.”

The little guy hauled himself to his feet, shaking, and edged around the empty, staring gaze of the late Phil.

“Good,” I said. “This is moving along nicely, Grevane. Keep it up and I won’t need to make Forensics pick your teeth out of that wall behind you.”

Butters scuttled over to me while Grevane thumped his book on his leg. The necromancer stared at me, barely sparing a glance for Butters. Then a slow and fairly creepy smile spread over his face. “You are not a Warden.”

“I flunked the written.”

His nostrils flared. “Not one of the Council’s guard dogs. You are, in fact, more of my own persuasion.”

“I really doubt that,” I said.

Grevane had narrow, yellow teeth and a crocodile’s smile. “Don’t play games. I can smell the true magic on you.”

The last person to talk about “true magic” had been necro-Bob. I had to fight off a shiver. “Uh. I guess that’s the last time I buy generic deodorant.”

“Perhaps we can make an arrangement,” Grevane said. “This need not end in bloodshed—particularly not now, so close to the end of the race. Join me against the others. A living lieutenant is far more useful to me than a dead fool.”

“Tempting,” I told him in the voice I usually reserved for backed-up toilets. Butters got to me, and I bumped him toward the door with my hip. He took the hint instantly, and I sidestepped to the door of the room with him. I kept my eyes and my gun on Grevane, my readied bracelet drizzling heatless sparks to the floor. “But I don’t think I like your management technique. Butters, check the hall.”

Butters bobbed his head out and looked nervously around. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Can you lock that door?”

Keys rattled. “Yes,” he said.

“Get ready to do it,” I said. I stepped out in the hall, slammed the door shut, and snapped, “Lock it. Hurry.”

Butters fumbled with a key. He jammed one in the door and turned it. Heavy security bolts slid to with a comfortably weighty snap an instant before something heavy and solid hit the door hard enough for me to feel the floor rattle through my boots. A second later the door jumped again, and a fist-sized dent mushroomed half an inch out of its center.

“Oh, God,” Butters babbled. “Oh, God, that was Phil. What is that? What is happening?”

“Right there with you, man,” I said. I grabbed him and started walking down the hall as quickly as I could drag the little guy. “Who else has keys to the door?”

“What?” Butters blinked for a second. “Uh. Uh. The other doctors. Day security. And Phil.”

The door rattled again, dented again, and then went silent.

“Grevane’s figured that out too,” I said. “Come on, before he finds the right key. Do you have your car keys with you?”

“Yes, yes, wait, oh, yes, right here,” Butters said. His teeth were chattering together so loudly that he could barely speak clearly, and he stumbled every couple of steps. “God. Oh, God, it’s real.”

In the halls behind us, metal clicked and scraped on metal. Someone was trying keys in a lock. “Butters,” I said. I grabbed his shoulders and had to resist the urge to slap him in the face, like in the movies. “Do what I tell you. Stop thinking. Think later. Move now or there won’t be a later.”

He stared at me, and for a second I thought he was going to throw up. Then he swallowed, nodded once, and said, “Okay.”

“Good. We run to your car. Come on.”

Butters nodded and took off for the front of the building at a dead sprint. He accelerated a lot faster than I did, but I have long legs and I caught up pretty quickly. Butters stopped to hit the buzzer at the guard station, and I held the door open wide enough to let him out first. He turned right and ran for the parking lot, and I was only a couple of feet behind him.

We rounded the corner of the building, and Butters dashed toward a pint-sized pickup truck parked in the nearest space. I followed him, and after the silence of the morgue, the night sounds of the city were a blaring music. Traffic hissed by in an automotive river on the highway. Sirens sounded in the distance, ambulance rather than patrol car. Somewhere within a two-hundred-mile radius, one of those enormous, thumping bass stereos pounded out a steady beat almost too low to hear.

The light in the parking lot was out, making everything dark and hazy, but the scent of gasoline came sharp to my nose, and I seized Butters’s collar and pulled. The little guy choked and all but fell down, but stopped.

“Don’t,” I said, and slipped my fingers under the pygmy truck’s hood. It flipped up, already open.

The engine had been torn apart. A snapped drive belt hung out like the tongue of a dead steer. Wires were strewn everywhere, and finger-sized holes had been driven into plastic fluid tanks. Coolant and windshield cleaner still dribbled to the parking lot’s concrete, and from the smell of it they were mixing with whatever gasoline had been in the tank.

Butters stared at it with wide eyes, panting. “My truck. They killed my truck.”

“Looks like,” I said, sweeping my gaze around.

“Why did they kill my truck?”

That heavy bass stereo kept rumbling through the October night. I paused for a second, focusing on the sound. It was changing, getting a little bit higher pitched with each beat. I recognized what that meant, and panic slammed through my head for a second.

Doppler effect. The source of the rumbling bass was coming toward us.

In the darkness of the industrial park’s lanes a pair of headlights flashed on, revealing a car accelerating toward the Forensic Institute. The lights were spaced widely apart—an older car, and judging by the sound of the engine some kind of gas-guzzling dinosaur like a Caddy or a big Olds.

“Come on,” I snapped to Butters, and started running to the lot next door, back to the Blue Beetle. We’d already been spotted, obviously, so I fired up my shield bracelet again, so that my hand looked like it had been replaced with a small comet. Butters followed, and I had to give the little guy credit—he was a good runner.

“There!” I shouted. “Get to my car!”

“I see it!”

Behind us the rumbling Cadillac swerved into the Institute’s parking lot and lurched over a concrete-encased grassy median, sparks flying from its undercarriage. The car roared up onto the grass and skidded to a broadside stop. The door flew open and a man got out.

I got a half-decent glance at him in the backwash of the Caddy’s headlights. Medium height at most, long, thinning hair, and pale, loose skin with a lot of liver spots. He moved stiffly, like someone with arthritis, but he hauled a long shotgun out of the car with him and raised it to his shoulder with careful deliberation.

I juked to one side so that I was directly between the driver and Butters, twisted at the hips, extended my arm behind me, and raised my shield. It flickered to life in a ghostly half dome just a second before one barrel of the shotgun bloomed with light and thunder. The shield flashed and sent off a cloud of sparks the size of a small house. I felt it falter through the damaged bracelet on my wrist, but it solidified again in time to catch the second blast from the gun’s other barrel. The old man with the shotgun howled in wordless outrage, broke the barrel, and started loading in fresh shells.

Butters was screaming, and I was yelling right along with him. We got to the Beetle and piled in. I stomped the engine to life, and the Beetle sputtered once and then gamely took off at its best clip. I screeched out of the parking lot and onto the road, started to skid, turned into it, fishtailed once, and then shot off down the street.

“Look out!” Butters screamed, pointing.

I snapped a glance over my shoulder and saw Phil and the other three dead men from the examination room sprinting across the grounds at us. I don’t mean they were running. It was a full-out sprint, faster than Phil could have done even in the prime of his life. I stomped on the gas and kept my eyes on the road.

The Beetle lurched, and Butters cried out, “Holy crap!”

I looked back again and saw Dead Phil clinging to the back of the car. He had to have been standing on the rear bumper. The other three dead men weren’t far behind him, keeping up with the car. Dead Phil drove his hand down at the back of the Beetle, and there was a wrenching sound of impact, then a series of snaps and squeals as he tore the back cover from the car, exposing the engine.

“Take the wheel!” I shouted to Butters. He reached over and seized the steering wheel. I twisted and thrust my right hand at Dead Phil. I focused my attention on the plain silver ring on my middle finger. It was another focus, like the shield bracelet, one designed to store back a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. I focused on the ring, clenched my hand into a fist, and shoved it directly at Dead Phil, releasing the energy within.

Dead Phil had raised his arm again, this time to tear apart the Beetle’s engine, but I beat him to the punch. The unseen force unleashed from the ring hit him at the top of his thighs, kicking his whole lower body out straight. The force tore his grip loose from the car, and he tumbled away, hitting the street with heavy, crunching sounds of impact, arms and legs splayed. The other dead men ran past him, one leaping clear over, and Dead Phil lay twitching on the ground like a broken toy.

I got back to the wheel and shifted the car into the next gear. In my rearview mirror I saw the leading dead man spring at us again, but he missed the car by a couple of feet, and I left the rest of them behind in the darkness, scooting out of the industrial park and onto public streets.

I drove for a while, taking a lot of unnecessary turns. I didn’t think anyone was pursuing us, but I didn’t want to take the chance that the old man might have gotten back into his Caddy and onto our tails. Maybe ten minutes went by before I started breathing easier, and I finally felt safe enough to pull over into a well-lit convenience-store parking lot.

I started shaking as soon as I set the parking brake. Adrenaline does that to me. I usually get along just fine when the actual crisis is in progress, but after it’s over, my body makes up for the lost terror. I closed my eyes and tried to keep my breathing slow and calm, but it was a fight to do it. There wasn’t anything I could do about the trembling.

It had been getting harder and harder to maintain my composure ever since the battle where I nearly lost my hand. The emotions I’d always felt seemed to be hitting me harder and harder lately, and sometimes I had to literally close my eyes and count to ten to keep from losing control. Right then I wanted to scream and howl—partly in joy at being alive, and partly in rage that someone had tried to kill me. I wanted to call up my power and start laying waste with it, to feel the raw energy of creation scorching through my thoughts and body, mastered by raw will. I wanted to cut loose.

But I couldn’t do that. Even among the strongest wizards on the planet, I’m no lightweight. I don’t have the finesse and class and experience that a lot of the older practitioners do, but when it comes to raw metaphysical muscle, I rank in the top thirty or forty wizards alive. I had a ton of strength, but I didn’t always have the fine control to go with it—that’s why I had to use specially prepared articles such as my bracelet and my ring to focus that power. Even with them, it wasn’t always easy to be precise. The last time I had surrendered my self-control and really cut loose with my power, I burned as many as a dozen people to scorched skeletons.

I had a responsibility to keep that destructive strength in check; to use it to help people, to protect them. It didn’t matter that I still felt terrified. It didn’t matter that my hand was screaming with pain. It didn’t matter that my car had been mutilated yet again, or that someone had tried to kill one of the few people in town I considered a real friend.

I had to hold back. Be careful. Think clearly.

“Harry?” Butters asked after a minute. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”

“I don’t understand this,” he said. His voice didn’t sound any too steady either. “What just happened?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to be involved in this kind of business.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll get hurt. Or killed. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

He let out a frustrated neighing sound. “Those people came for me. I didn’t go looking for them. They were looking for me.”

He had a point, but even so, Butters was not someone I would want to see involved in a conflict between people like Grevane and his dead men and his liver-skinned partner. Mortals usually didn’t fare too well when it came to tangling with preternatural bad guys. In my day I’d seen dozens of men and women die from it, despite everything I did to help them.

“This is unreal,” Butters said. “I know you and Murphy have talked about this black-magic supernatural stuff a lot. And I’ve seen some things that are tough to explain. But…I never imagined something like this could happen.”

“You’re happier that way,” I said. “Hell, if I could do it, I might want to forget I ever found out about any of it.”

“I’m happier being scared?” he asked almost timidly. “I’m happier wondering if maybe my bosses were right the whole time, and I really am insane? I’m happier being in danger, and having no idea what to do about it?”

I didn’t have a quick answer for that one. I stared at my hands. The trembling had almost stopped.

“Help me understand this, Harry,” he said. “Please.”

Well, dammit.

I raked the fingers of my right hand through my hair. Grevane had been after Butters, specifically. He had backup waiting outside, and he trashed Butters’s truck to make sure the little guy couldn’t escape. He openly said that he needed Butters, and needed him in one piece to boot.

All of which meant that Butters was in very real—and very serious—danger. And by now I’ve learned that I can’t always protect everyone. I screw up sometimes, like everyone else. I make stupid mistakes.

If I kept quiet, if I forced Butters to wear blinders, he wouldn’t be able to do jack to protect himself. If I made a bad call and something happened to him, it would be my fault that he didn’t have every chance to survive. His blood would be on my hands.

I couldn’t take that choice away from him. I wasn’t his father or his guardian angel or his sovereign king. I wasn’t blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, or with the foresight of a prophet. If I chose Butters’s path for him, in some ways it would make me no different from Grevane, or any number of other beings, human and nonhuman alike, who sought to control others.

“If I tell you this,” I said quietly, “it could be bad for you.”

“Bad how?”

“It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life.”

“Screw up my life?” He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, “I’m a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow.” He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, “Do your worst.”

The words were light, but there was both fear and resolve just under the surface of them. Butters was smart enough to be scared. But he was also a fighter. I could respect him for both.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

Chapter

Six

Butters hadn’t taken time to collect his coat when he left, and the last time the Beetle’s heater had worked was before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I ducked into the store, got us each a cup of coffee, then untwisted the wire that holds down the lid of the storage trunk. I dug out a worn but mostly clean blanket that I kept in the trunk to cover the short-barreled shotgun I stored in the event that I would ever need to give Napoleon’s charging hordes a taste of the grape. Given the way the night was going, I got the shotgun, too, and slipped it into the backseat.

Butters accepted the blanket and the coffee gratefully, though he shivered hard enough to slop a little of the drink over the side of the cup. I sipped a little coffee, slipped the cup into the holder I’d rigged on the car’s dashboard, and got moving again. I didn’t want to wait around in the same place for too long.

“All right,” I told Butters. “There are two things you have to accept if you want to understand what’s going on.”

“Hit me.”

“First the tough one. Magic is real.”

I could feel him looking at me for a moment. “What do you mean by that?”

“There’s an entire world that exists alongside the everyday life of mankind. There are powers, nations, monsters, wars, feuds, alliances—everything. Wizards are a part of it. So are a lot of other things you’ve heard about in stories, and even more you’ve never heard of.”

“What kind of things?”

“Vampires. Werewolves. Faeries. Demons. Monsters. It’s all real.”

“Heh,” Butters said. “Heh, heh. You’re joking. Right?”

“No joke. Come on, Butters. You know that there are weird things out there. You’ve seen the evidence of them.”

He pushed a shaking hand through his hair. “Well, yes. Some. But, Harry, you’re talking about something else entirely here. I mean, if you want to tell me that people have the ability to sense and affect their environment in ways we don’t really understand yet, I can accept that. Maybe you call it magic, and someone else calls it ESP, and someone else calls it the Force, but it’s not a new idea. Maybe there are people whose genetic makeup makes them better able to employ these abilities. Maybe it even does things like make them reproduce their DNA more clearly than other people so that they can live for a very long time. But that is not the same thing as saying that there’s an army of weird monsters living right under our noses and we don’t even notice them.”

“What about those corpses you analyzed?” I said. “Humanoid but definitely not human.”

“Well,” Butters said defensively, “it’s a big universe. I think it’s sort of arrogant to assume that we’re the only thinking beings in it.”

“Those corpses were the bodies of vampires of the Red Court, and you don’t want to meet a living one. There were a lot of them in town at one point. There aren’t so many now, but there are plenty more where they came from. They’re only one flavor of vampire. And vampires are only one flavor of supernatural predator. It’s a jungle out there, Butters, and people aren’t anywhere near the top of the food chain.”

Butters shook his head. “And you’re telling me that nobody knows about it?”

“Oh, lots of people know about it,” I said. “But the ones who are in the know don’t go around talking about it all that much.”

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t want to get locked up in a loony bin for three months for observation, for starters.”

“Oh,” Butters said, flushing. “Yeah. I guess I can see that. What about regular people who see things? Like sightings and close encounters and stuff?”

I blew out a breath. “That’s the second thing you have to understand. People don’t want to accept a reality that frightening. Some of them open their eyes and get involved—like Murphy did. But most of them don’t want anything to do with the supernatural. So they leave it behind and don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. They don’t want it to be real, and they work really hard to convince themselves that it isn’t.”

“No,” Butters said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t buy that.”

“You don’t need to buy it,” I said. “It’s true. As a race, we’re an enormous bunch of idiots. We’re more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying that a whole world, multiple civilizations of scientific study and advancement and theory and application, all based around the notion of observing the universe and studying its laws is…what? In error about dismissing magic as superstition?”

“Not just in error,” I said. “Dead wrong. Because the truth is something that people are afraid to face. They’re terrified to admit that it’s a big universe and we’re not.”

He sipped coffee and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, Butters,” I said. “Look at history. How long did the scholarly institutions of civilization consider Earth to be the center of the universe? And when people came out with facts to prove that it wasn’t, there were riots in the streets. No one wanted to believe that we all lived on an unremarkable little speck of rock in a quiet backwater of one unremarkable galaxy. The world was supposed to be flat, too, until people proved that it wasn’t by sailing all the way around it. No one believed in germs until years and years after someone actually saw one. Biologists scoffed at tales of wild beast-men living in the mountains of Africa, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, and pronounced them an utter fantasy—right up until someone plopped a dead mountain gorilla down on their dissecting table.”

He chewed on his lip and watched the streetlights.

“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don’t want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”

“You’re saying that the entire human race is in denial,” he said.

“Most of the time,” I replied. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s just who we are. But the weird stuff doesn’t care about that—it keeps on happening. Every family’s got a ghost story in it. Most people I’ve talked to have had something happen to them that was impossible to explain. But that doesn’t mean they go around talking about it afterward, because everyone knows that those kinds of things aren’t real. If you start saying that they are, you get the weird looks and jackets with extra-long sleeves.”

“For everyone,” he said, voice still skeptical. “Every time. They just keep quiet and try to forget it.”

“Tell you what, Butters. Let’s drive down to CPD and you can tell them how you were just attacked by a necromancer and four zombies. How they nearly outran a speeding car and murdered a security guard who then got up and threw your desk across the room.” I paused for a moment to let the silence stretch. “What do you think they’d do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He bowed his head.

“Unnatural things happen all the time,” I said. “But no one talks about it. At least, not openly. The preternatural world is everywhere. It just doesn’t advertise.”

“You do,” Butters said.

“But not many people take me seriously. For the most part even the ones who accept my help just pay the bill, then walk out determined to ignore my existence and get back to their normal life.”

“How could someone do that?” Butters asked.

“Because it’s terrifying,” I said. “Think about it. You find out about monsters that make the creatures in the horror movies look like the Muppets, and that there’s not a damned thing you can do to protect yourself from them. You find out about horrible things that happen—things you would be happier not knowing. So rather than live with the fear, you get away from the situation. After a while you can convince yourself that you must have just imagined it. Or maybe exaggerated it in the remembering. You rationalize whatever you can, forget whatever you can’t, and get back to your life.”

I glanced down at my gloved hand and said, “It’s not their fault, man. I don’t blame them.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing.”

“How big was your graduating class in high school?”

Butters blinked. “What?”

“Just answer me.”

“Uh, about eight hundred.”

“All right,” I said. “Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You can check with the FBI. That’s out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It’s been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are.”

Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So?”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “So they’re missing. Where did they go?”

“Well. They’re missing. If they’re missing, then nobody knows.”

“Exactly,” I said.

He didn’t say anything back.

I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. “Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.”

Butters drew his knees up to his chest, huddling farther under the blanket. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nobody talks about this kind of thing. But all those people are still gone. Maybe a lot of them just cut their ties and left their old lives behind. Maybe some were in accidents of some kind, with the body never found. The point is, people don’t know. But because it’s an extremely scary thing to think about, and because it’s a lot easier to just get back to their lives they tend to dismiss it. Ignore it. It’s easier.”

Butters shook his head. “It just sounds so insane. I mean, they’d believe it if they saw it. If someone went on television and—”

“Did what?” I asked. “Bent spoons? Maybe made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Turned a lady into a white tiger? Hell, I’ve done magic on television, and everyone not screaming that it was a hoax was complaining that the special effects looked cheap.”

“You mean that clip that WGN news was showing a few years back? With you and Murphy and the big dog and that insane guy with a club?”

“It wasn’t a dog,” I said, and shivered a little myself at the memory. “It was a loup-garou. Kind of a superwerewolf. I killed him with a spell and a silver amulet, right on the screen.”

“Yeah. Everyone was talking about it for a couple of days, but I heard that they found out it was a fake or something.”

“No. Someone disappeared the tape.”

“Oh.”

I stopped at a light and stared at Butters for a second. “When you saw that tape, did you believe it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He took a breath. “Well, because the picture quality wasn’t very good. I mean, it was really dark—”

“Where most scary supernatural stuff tends to happen,” I said.

“And the picture was all jumpy—”

“The woman with the camera was terrified. Also pretty common.”

Butters made a frustrated sound. “And there was an awful lot of static on the tape, which made it look like someone had messed with it.”

“Sort of like someone messed with almost all of my X-rays?” I shook my head, smiling. “And there’s one more reason you didn’t believe it, man. It’s okay; you can say it.”

He sighed. “There’s no such things as monsters.”

“Bingo,” I said, and got the car moving again. “Look, Butters. You are your own ideal example. You’ve seen things you can’t explain away. You’ve suffered for trying to tell people that you have seen them. For God’s sake, twenty minutes ago you got attacked by the walking dead. And you’re still arguing with me about whether or not magic is real.”

Seconds ticked by.

“Because I don’t want to believe it,” he said in a quiet, numb voice.

I exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”

Dead silence.

“Drink some coffee,” I told him.

He did.

“Scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s smart.”

“Well, then,” he murmured. “I’m-must be the smartest guy in the whole world.”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “You run into something you totally don’t get, and it’s scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.”

“What do I do?” Butters asked me.

“I’m taking you somewhere you’ll be safe. Once I get you there, I’ll figure out my next move. For now, ask me questions. I’ll answer them.”

Butters took a slower sip of his coffee and nodded. His hands looked steadier. “Who was that man?”

“He goes by Grevane, but I doubt that’s his real name. He’s a necromancer.”

“What’s a necromancer?”

I rolled a shoulder in a shrug. “Necromancy is the practice of using magic to muck around with dead things. Necromancers can animate and control corpses, manipulate ghosts, access the knowledge stored in dead brains—”

Butters blurted out, “That’s impos—” Then he stopped himself and coughed. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”

“They can also do a lot of really freaky things involving the soul,” I said. “Even in the weird circles, it isn’t the kind of thing you talk about casually. But I’ve heard stories that they can inhabit corpses with their consciousness, possess others. I’ve even heard that they can bring people back from the dead.”

“Jesus,” Butters swore.

“I kinda doubt they had anything to do with that one.”

“No, no, I meant—”

“I know what you meant. It was a joke, Butters.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” He swigged more coffee, and started looking around at the streets again. “But bringing the dead to life? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“You’re assuming that what the necromancer brings them back to is better than death. From what I’ve heard, they don’t generally do it for humanitarian reasons. But that might be a load of crap. Like I said, no one talks about it.”

“Why not?” Butters asked.

“Because it’s forbidden,” I told him. “The practice of necromancy violates one of the Laws of Magic laid down by the White Council. Capital punishment is the only sentence, and no one wants to even come close to being suspected by the Council.”

“Why? Who are they?”

“They’re me,” I said. “Sort of. The White Council is a…well, most people would call it a governing body for wizards all over the world, but it’s really more like a Masonic lodge. Or maybe a frat.”

“I’ve never heard of a fraternity handing out a death sentence.”

“Yeah. Well the Council has only seven laws, but if you break them…” I drew my thumb across my neck. “By the way, they aren’t fond of regular folks knowing about them. So don’t talk about them to anyone else.”

Butters swallowed and touched the fingers of one hand to his throat. “Oh. So this guy, Grevane. He was like you?”

“He’s not like me,” I said, and it came out in a snarl that surprised even me. Butters twitched violently. I sighed and made an effort to lower my voice again. “But he’s probably a wizard, yeah.”

“Who is he? What does he want?”

I blew out a breath. “He’s most likely a student of this badass black magic messiah named Kemmler. The Council burned Kemmler down a while back, but several of his disciples may have escaped. I think Grevane is looking for a book his teacher hid before he died.”

“A magic book?”

I snorted. “Nah. Trinkets aren’t too hard to come by. If my guess is correct, this book contains more of the knowledge and theory Kemmler used in his most powerful magics.”

Butters nodded. “So…if Grevane gets hold of the book and learns, he gets to be the next Kemmler?”

“Yeah. And he mentioned that there were others involved in this business too. I think word of the presence of Kemmler’s book came up, and his surviving students are showing up to grab it before their fellow necromancers do. For that matter, just about anyone involved in black magic might want to get their hands on it.”

“So why doesn’t the Council just grab them and…?” He drew his thumb across his throat.

“They’ve tried,” I said. “They thought the disciples had all been accounted for.”

Butters frowned. Then he said, “I guess wizards can go into denial about uncomfortable things too, huh?”

I barked out a laugh. “People are people, man.”

“But now you can tell this Council about Grevane and this book, right?”

My stomach quivered a little. “No.”

“Why not?”

Because if I did, Mavra would destroy my friend. The thought screamed across my brain in a blaze of frustration that I tried to keep concealed. “Long story. The short version is that I’m not real popular with the Council, and they’re pretty busy right now.”

“With what?” he asked.

“A war.”

He scrunched up his nose and tilted his head, studying me. “That’s not the only reason you aren’t calling them, is it?” Butters said.

“Egad, Holmes,” I told him. “No, it isn’t. Don’t push.”

“Sorry.” He finished the coffee, then made a visible effort to cast around for a new conversational thread. “So. Those were actual zombies?”

“Never seen one before,” I said. “But that seems like a pretty good guess.”

“Poor Phil,” Butters said. “Not a saint or anything, but not a bad guy.”

“He have a family?” I asked.

“No,” Butters said. “Single. That’s a mercy.” He was silent for a second, then said, “No. I guess it isn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“If those guys were zombies, how come they didn’t want brains?” Butters said. He held both arms stiff out in front of him, rolled his eyes back in his head, and moaned, “Braaaaaaaaaaaains.”

I snorted. He gave me a weak smile.

“Seriously,” Butters said. “These guys were more like the Terminator.”

“What’s the use of a foot soldier who can’t do anything but hobble along and moan about brains?”

“Good point,” Butters said. He scrunched up his nose in thought. “Don’t I remember something about sewing a zombie’s lips shut with thread to kill them? Does that work?”

“No clue,” I said. “But you saw those things. If you want to get close enough to find out, be my guest, but I’ll be observing it through a freaking telescope.”

“No, thank you,” Butters said. “But how do we stop them?”

I sighed. “They’re tough, but they’re still flesh and bone. Massive trauma will do it sooner or later.”

“How massive?”

I shrugged. “Run them over with a truck. Chop them to bits with an ax. Burn them to ashes. A gun or a baseball bat won’t do it.”

“This may come as a shock to you, Harry, but I don’t have an ax with me. Is there something else? Maybe something that isn’t so Bunyan-esque?”

“Plenty,” I said. “If you can cut off the flow of energy into them, they’ll drop.”

“How do you do that?”

“You’d have to ground them out. Running water is the best way, but there needs to be a lot of it. A small stream, at least. I could also probably trap one in a magic circle and cut off any energy from getting to it. Either way, they’d just fall over, plop.”

“Magic circles,” Butters shook his head. “And nothing else?”

“Keep in mind that they aren’t intelligent,” I said. “Zombies follow orders, but they don’t have much more intellect than your average animal. You have to outthink them—or the necromancer who is giving them orders. You could also cut off the necromancer’s control of them.”

“How?”

“Kill their drum.”

“Uh, what?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. A zombie…well, it isn’t really a person with thoughts and feelings and such, but the corpse is used to being a person. To eating, breathing—and to a beating heart. That’s how the necromancer controls them. He plays a beat or some kind of rhythmic music, and uses magic to substitute his beat for the zombie’s heartbeat. He links himself to the beat, the beat to the zombie’s heart, and when the necromancer gives a command, as far as the zombie is concerned it’s coming from inside him and he wants to do it. That’s how they can control them so completely.”

“That book,” Butters said. “Grevane kept drumming it against his leg. And then outside, that huge bass woofer in that Cadillac.”

“Exactly. Make the beat stop or get the zombies out of earshot, and he loses control of them. But that’s really dicey.”

“Why?”

“Because it won’t destroy the zombie. It just frees it from the necromancer’s control. Anything could happen. It could just shut down, or it could start killing everyone it sees. Totally unpredictable. If I’d stopped him from drumming in the exam room, they might have killed us all. Or run off in different directions to hurt other people. We couldn’t afford to take the chance.”

Butters nodded, absorbing this for a minute. Then he piped up with, “Grevane said you weren’t a Warden. What is a Warden?”

“Wardens are the White Council’s version of cops,” I said. “They enforce the Laws of Magic, bring criminals in for a trial, and then they chop off their heads. Sometimes they get enthusiastic and just skip to the chopping.”

“Well. That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“In theory,” I said. “But they’re so paranoid that next to them, Joe McCarthy looks like a friendly puppy. They don’t ask many questions, and they don’t hesitate to make up their minds. If they think you’ve broken a law, you might as well have.”

“That’s not fair,” Butters said.

“No. It isn’t. I’m not real popular with the Wardens. I’m not sure they’d come out to help me if I asked them.”

“What about other wizards on the Council?”

I sighed. “The White Council is already at the limits of its resources. Even if they weren’t, the Council really, really likes to not get involved.”

He frowned. “Could the cops stop Grevane?”

“No way,” I said, “Not a chance in hell are any of them prepared to handle him. And if they tried, a whole lot of good people would die.”

Butters sputtered. “They’ll just sit there and let people like Phil get killed?” he demanded, his voice outraged. “If regular people can’t do it, and the Council won’t get involved, who the hell is going to stop him?”

“I am,” I said.

Chapter

Seven

We went back to my apartment, and I wasted no time getting Butters inside and behind the protection of my wards. Mouse loomed up from little kitchen alcove and padded over to me, tail wagging.

“Holy crap,” Butters said. “You have a pony.”

“Heh,” I said. Mouse sniffed at my hand and then walked over to snuffle around Butters’s legs with a certain solemn ceremony. Then he sneezed and looked up at Butters, wagging his tail.

“Can I pet him?” Butters said.

“If you do, he won’t leave you alone.” I went into my room to pick up a few things from my closet, and when I came back out Butters was sitting on the hearth, poking the fire to life and feeding it fresh wood. Mouse sat nearby, watching with patient interest.

“What breed is he?” Butters asked.

“Half chow and half wooly mammoth. A wooly chammoth.”

Mouse’s jaws opened in a doggy grin.

“Wow. Some serious teeth there,” Butters said. “He doesn’t bite, does he?”

“Only bad guys,” I told him. I grabbed Mouse’s lead and clipped it to his collar. “I’m going to take him outside for a bit. I’ll bring him back in; then I want you to lock up and stay put.”

He hesitated in midpoke. “You’re leaving?”

“It’s safe,” I said. “I’ve got measures in place here that will prevent Grevane from finding you by magical means.”

“You mean with a spell or something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My spells should counter Grevane’s and keep him from locating you while I get some things done.”

“You won’t be here?” Butters said. He didn’t sound too steady.

“Grevane won’t find you,” I said.

“But what if he does it anyway?”

“He won’t.”

“Sure, sure, he won’t. I believe you.” Butters swallowed. “But what if he does?”

I tried to give him a reassuring smile. “There are more wards in place to stop someone from coming in. Mouse will keep an eye on you, and I’ll leave a note for Thomas and ask him to stay home tonight, just in case.”

“Who’s Thomas?”

“Roommate,” I said. I dragged a piece of paper and a pen out of a cabinet in the base of the coffee table and started writing the note.

Thomas,

Bad guys from my end of the block are trying to kill the little guy in the living room. His name is Butters. I brought him here to get him off the radar while I negotiate with them. Do me a favor and keep an eye on him until I get back.

Harry

I folded the note and stuck it up on the mantel. “He’s smart, and fairly tough. I’m not sure when he’ll get back. When he does, tell him I brought you here and give him the note. You should be okay.”

Butters exhaled slowly. “All right. Where are you going?”

“To the bookstore,” I said.

“Why there?”

“Grevane was reading a copy of a book called Die Lied der Erlking. I want to know why.”

Butters stared at me for a second and then said, “In all of that, with threats and guns and zombies and everything, you noticed the title of the book he was holding?”

“Yeah. Damn, I’m good.”

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Get some sleep.” I waved a hand at my bookshelves. “Read. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. Oh, one more thing: Do not open the door for any reason.”

“Why not?”

“Because the spells on it might kill you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. The spells.”

“No joking, Butters. They’re meant to keep things out, but if you open the door you could get caught in the backwash. Thomas has a talisman that will let him in safely. So do I. Anyone else will be in for a world of hurt, so stand clear.”

He swallowed. “Right. Okay. What if the dog has to go?”

I sighed. “He can’t mess the place up any worse than Thomas. Come on, Mouse. Let’s make sure you’ll be settled.”

Mouse seemed to have a sixth sense about when not to take his time making use of the boardinghouse’s yard, and we went to our little designated area and back with no delays. I got him back inside with Butters, revved up the Beetle, and headed for Bock Ordered Books.

Artemis Bock, proprietor of Chicago’s oldest occult shop, had been a fixture near Lincoln Park for years before I had ever moved to town. The neighborhood was a bizarre blend of the worst a large city had to offer marching side by side with the erudite academia of the University of Chicago. It wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to walk around after dark, wizard or no, but there wasn’t much choice.

I parked the Beetle a block down from the shop, across the street from cheap apartments that were flying gang colors on the windows nearest the doors. I wasn’t too worried that someone was going to steal the Blue Beetle while I was in the shop. The car just wasn’t sexy enough to warrant stealing. But to be on the safe side, I made no pretense whatsoever of hiding my gun as I left the car and slipped it into a shoulder holster under my duster. I had my staff with me, too, and I took it firmly into my right hand as I shut the car door and started down the street with a purpose, my expression set and cold. I didn’t have a concealed-carry permit for the gun, so I could wind up in jail for toting it along with me. On the other hand, this part of town was a favorite spot for some of the nastier denizens of the supernatural community. Between them and the very real prospect of your everyday urban criminal, I could wind up in my grave for not toting it. I’d err on the side of survival, thank you very much.

On the short walk to the store, I stepped over a pair of winos and tried to ignore a pale and too-thin woman with empty eyes who staggered by in leopard-print tights, a leather coat, and a bra. Her pupils had dilated until her blue eyes looked black, and she was nearly too stoned to walk. She probably wasn’t old, but life had used her hard. She saw me and for a second looked like she was going to display her wares. But she got a closer look at my face and skittered to one side and tried to become invisible. I went by her without comment.

The night was very cold. In a few more weeks it would get cold enough that people like the two drunks and the stoned girl would start freezing to death. Someone would see a body, and eventually someone would call the police. The cops would show up and fill out on the police report that the body had been found and presumed accidentally frozen to death. Sometimes it wasn’t an accident. The weather was a convenient way for a dealer or for the outfit to kill someone who had gotten on their nerves. Something to knock them out, a removal of a bit of clothing, and leave them for the night to devour. Most of those bodies were found within a few blocks of where I was walking.

Maybe thirty yards short of the shop, I crossed some kind of invisible line where the oppressive, dangerous atmosphere of the bad part of town lessened by several degrees. A few steps later I caught my first glance of a U of C campus building, far down the block. I felt myself relax a little in response, but that unspoken promise of safety and the rule of law was only an illusion. The closer you got to campus, the less crime occurred, but there was nothing other than convention and slightly more frequent police patrols to keep the darker elements of the city from pushing the boundaries.

Well, there was one more thing. But I couldn’t afford to get involved with it. Mavra’s prohibition against involving anyone else meant that even if I wanted extra help, I didn’t dare ask for it. I was on my own. And if trouble came looking, I’d have to handle it alone.

Predators respond to body language. I walked like I was on my way to rip someone’s face off, until I made it to the shop and entered the store.

Artemis Bock, proprietor, sat behind a counter facing the door. He was a bear of a man in his late fifties, broad-shouldered, unshaven, and heavyset with weathered muscle under a layer of comfortable living. He had knuckles the size and texture of golf balls, marked with old scars from whatever career he’d pursued before he’d become a storekeeper. He wasn’t anything so strong as a wizard, but he knew his way around Chicago, around basic magical theory, and his shop was protected with half a dozen subtle wards that did a lot to encourage people looking for trouble to look elsewhere.

The door chimes tinkled as I came in, and there was a deeper chime from somewhere behind the counter. Bock had one arm on the counter and one out of sight under it until he peered over his reading glasses at my face, and nodded. He folded his arms onto the counter again, hunched over what looked like an auto magazine, and said, “Mister Dresden.”

“Bock,” I replied with a nod.

His eyes flickered over my staff, and I got the impression that he noticed or sensed the gun under the jacket.

“I need to get into the cage,” I told him.

His shaggy eyebrows drew together. “The Wardens were here not a month ago. I run a clean shop. You know that.”

I lifted my gloved hand in a pacifying gesture. “This isn’t an inspection tour. Personal business.”

He made a rumbling sound in his throat, something halfway between a sound of acknowledgment and one of apology. He reached behind him without looking and snagged a key from where it hung on a peg on the wall behind him. He flicked it at me. I had to let my staff fall into the crook of my left arm so that I could use my right hand to catch the key. I doubt it looked graceful, but at least I didn’t drop the staff and the key both, which would have been more my speed.

“You want to come along?” I asked him. Bock didn’t let customers peruse the books in the cage without supervision.

“What am I going to tell you?” he said, and turned the page in his magazine.

I nodded and started for the back of the store.

“Mister Dresden,” Bock said.

“Hmm?”

“Word is on the street that there’s dark business afoot. Will was through here today. Said things were getting nervous.”

I paused. Billy Borden was the leader of a gang of genuine werewolves who called themselves the Alphas and lived in the neighborhood around campus. About four years before, the Alphas had learned how to shapeshift into wolves and had declared the campus area a monster-free zone. They backed it up by ripping monsters to shreds, and they did it well enough that the local underworld of vampires, ghouls, and various other nasties found it easier to hunt elsewhere.

The magical community of Chicago—of people, I mean—was centered around a number of different neighborhoods in town. The clump around campus was the smallest, but probably the most informed of them. Word has a way of getting around the occult crowd when something vicious is on the warpath, and sends them hurrying to seek shelter or keep their heads down. It was a survival instinct on behalf of those who were blessed with one form or another of talent for magic, but who didn’t have enough power to be a credible threat, and one that I heartily encouraged. Things were bad enough without some amateur one-trick Willy deciding he was going to hat up and take on the bad guys.

Of course, that was precisely what Billy Borden had done. Billy and company were not up to taking on people on Grevane’s level. Don’t get me wrong: They were a real threat to your average dark whatever, especially working together, but they weren’t used to dealing with someone in Grevane’s weight class. Billy needed to keep his head down, but I couldn’t contact him to tell him that. Hell, even if I did, he’d just stick his jaw out at me and tell me he could handle it. So I had to play another angle to get him to lie low.

“If you see him again,” I told Bock, “let him know that I’d appreciate it if he’d keep his head down, his eyes open, and to get in touch with me before he moves on anything.”

“Something’s happening,” Bock said. His eyes flickered over to his calendar.

I suddenly became conscious of the eyes of three or four other customers in the store. It was late, true, but the occult community doesn’t exactly keep standard hours, and Halloween was only two days off. Scratch that, it was almost one A.M. Tomorrow was Halloween. That meant trick-or-treating for some people, but it meant sacred Samhain for others, and there were a number of other beliefs attached to the day in the occult circles. There was shopping to be done.

“It might be,” I told Bock. “You might want to be behind a threshold after dark for the next day or two. Just to be careful.”

Bock’s expression told me that he thought I wasn’t telling him everything. I gave him a look that told him to mind his own damned business, and headed for the back of the store.

Bock’s shop was bigger than you’d have expected from the outside. It had been a speakeasy back in the day, fronting as a neighborhood grocery. The front of the store offered a browsing area for customers interested in purchasing everything from crystals to incense to candles to oils to wands and other symbolic instruments of ritual magic—your typical New Agey stuff. There were various statues and idols for personal shrines, meditation mats, bits of furniture and other decoration for any alternative religion you’d care to name, including some figures of Buddha and Ghanesh.

Behind the occult area were several rows of bookshelves holding one of the largest selections in town of books on the occult, the paranormal, and the mystical. Most of the books were chock-full of philosophy or religion—predominantly Wiccan of one flavor or another, but there were several texts slanted toward Hindu beliefs, drawn from the kabbalah, voodoo, and even a couple grounded in ancient beliefs in the Norse or Greek gods. I steered clear of the whole mess, myself. Magic wasn’t something you needed God, a god, or gods to help you with, but a lot of people felt differently than I did. Even some wizards of the Council held deep religious convictions, and felt that they were bound intricately to their magic.

Of course, if they believed it, it was as good as true. Magic is closely interwoven with a wizard’s confidence. Some would say that it is bound up with a wizard’s faith, and it would mean practically the same thing. You have to believe in the magic for it to work—not just that it will happen, but that it should happen.

That’s what makes people like Grevane so dangerous. Magic is essentially a force of creation, of life. Grevane’s necromancy made a mockery of life, even as he used it to destroy. Besides being murderous and extremely icky, there was something utterly profane about using magic to create a rotting semblance of a human life. My stomach turned a little, just thinking about what it might be like to work a spell like that. And Grevane believed in it.

Which really seemed to make him look more and more like some kind of wacko. A deadly, powerful, calm, and intelligent lunatic. I shook my head. How do I get myself into this kind of crap?

I walked through the bookshelves to a door in the back wall. While it wasn’t precisely hidden, the door had no frame and was set flush with the wall around it, and was covered with the same paneling as the wall. Once it had opened to allow customers to slip into a private area to drink illegal booze. Now it was locked. I used Bock’s key to open it and let myself into the back of the store.

The rear area wasn’t large—nothing more than a single room with an office built into one corner, and a pair of long bookshelves set behind a heavy iron grille on the wall opposite. The room was full of boxes, shelves, tables, where Bock would keep his spare inventory, if any, and where he handled his mail-order business. There were a couple of safety lights glowing on outlets on the walls. The office door was partly open, and the light was on. I heard the office radio playing quietly on a classic-rock station.

I went to the door set in the iron grille and unlocked it, then rolled open the cage door. Bock kept all of his valuable texts in the cage. He had an original first printing of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, autographed, on the highest shelf, carefully sealed in plastic, and several dozen other rare books, some of them even more valuable.

The remaining shelves were filled with serious texts on magic theory. A lot of them were almost as occluded with opinion and philosophy as their more modern counterparts on the shelves in the front of the store. The difference was that most of them were written by members of the Council at one time or another. There were very few volumes that addressed magic in its most elemental sense, as a pure source of energy, the way I’d been taught about it. One of the notable exceptions was Elementary Magic by Ebenezar McCoy. It was the first book most wizards ever handed an apprentice. It dealt with the nuts and bolts of moving energy around, and stressed the need for control and responsibility on behalf of the wizard.

Though now that I thought about it, Ebenezar hadn’t handed me a copy of the book when he’d been teaching me. He hadn’t even lectured me more than a couple of times. He told me what he expected, and then he lived it in front of me. Damned effective teaching method, to my way of thinking.

I drew out a copy of his book and stared at it for a moment. My stomach fluttered a little. Of course, he’d been lying to me, too. Or at least not telling me the whole truth. And the whole time he’d been teaching me, he’d been under orders from the Council to execute me if I wasn’t perfectly behaved. I hadn’t been perfect. The old man didn’t kill me, but he didn’t trust me enough to come clean, either. He didn’t tell me that he was in charge of dirty jobs for the Council. That he was their wetworks man, the one who broke the Laws of Magic with their blessing, who betrayed the same responsibility he wrote about, talked about, and had apparently lived.

He was trying to protect you, Harry, I told myself.

That didn’t make it right.

He never tried to be your hero, your role model. You did that.

That didn’t change a damned thing.

He never wanted to hurt you. He had the best intentions.

And the road to hell is paved with them.

You need to get over it. You need to forgive him.

I slammed the book back onto the shelf. Hard.

“Hello?” called a woman’s voice from behind me.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. My staff clattered to the ground, and when I spun around my shield bracelet was up and spitting sparks, and my .44 was in my right hand, pointing at the office.

She was young, midtwenties at most. She was dressed in a long wool skirt, a turtleneck, and a cardigan sweater, all in colors of grey. She had hair of medium brown, held up into a bun with a pair of pencils, wore glasses, and had a heart-shaped face that was more attractive than beautiful, her features soft and appealing. She had a smudge of ink on her chin and on the fingers of her right hand, and she wore a name tag that had the store logo at the top and HI, MY NAME IS SHIELA below it.

“Oh,” she said, and stiffened, becoming very pale. “Oh. Um. Just take what you want. I won’t do anything.”

I let out my breath between my teeth, and slowly lowered the gun. For crying out loud, I had nearly started shooting. Tense much, Harry? I let go of the energy running through the shield bracelet, and it dimmed as well. “Excuse me, miss,” I said as politely as I could manage. “You startled me.”

She blinked at me for a second, confusion on her features. “Oh,” she said, then. “You aren’t robbing the store.”

“No,” I said.

“That’s good.” She put a hand to her chest, breathing a little quickly. It had to be a fairly generous chest, given that I could notice the curves of her breasts even through the cardigan. Ah, trusty libido. Even when I am up to my ears in trouble, you are there to distract me from such trivial matters as survival. “Oh. Then you’re a customer, I suppose? May I help you?”

“I was just looking for a book,” I said.

“Well,” she said with businesslike cheer, “flick on that lamp next to you, to begin with, and we’ll find what you’re looking for.” I did, and Shiela smoothed her skirts and walked over to me. She was average height, maybe five-six, which made her approximately a foot shorter than me. She paused as she got closer, and peered up at me. “You’re him,” she said. “You’re Harry Dresden.”

“That’s what the IRS keeps telling me,” I said.

“Wow,” she said, her eyes bright. She had very dark eyes that went well with skin like cream, and as she got closer I saw that her outfit did a lot to conceal some pleasant curves. She wasn’t going to be modeling bikinis anywhere, but she looked like she’d be very pleasant to curl up with on a cold night.

Man. I needed to date more or something. I rubbed at my eyes and got my mind back on business.

“I’ve wanted to meet you,” she said, “ever since I came to Chicago.”

“You new in town? I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Six months,” she said. “Five working here.”

“Bock works you pretty late,” I said.

She nodded and brushed a curl of hair away from her cheek, leaving a smudge of dark ink on it. “End of the month. I’m doing books and inventory.” Then she looked stricken and said, “Oh, I didn’t even introduce myself.”

“Shiela?” I guessed.

She stared at me for a second, and then flushed and said, “Oh, right. The name tag.”

I stuck out my hand. “I’m Harry.”

She shook my hand. Her grip was firm, soft, warm, and tingled with the energy of someone who had some kind of minor talent to practice.

I’d never really considered what it might be like for someone to sense my own aura. Shiela drew in a sharp breath, and her arm jumped. Her ink-stained fingers squeezed tight for a second and smudged my hand. “Oh. Sorry, sorry.”

I rubbed my hand on my fatigue pants. “I’ve seen worse stains tonight,” I said. “Which brings me to the books.”

“You stained a book?” she said, her face and voice distressed.

“No. That was just a bad segue.”

“Oh. Oh, right,” she said, nodding. She absently rubbed her hands together. “You’re here for a book. What are you looking for?”

“A book called Die Lied der Erlking.”

“Oh, I’ve read that one.” She scrunched up her nose, eyes distant for a second, then said, “Two copies, right-hand shelf, third row from the top, eighth and ninth books from the left.”

I blinked at her, then went to the shelf and found the book where she’d said. “Wow. Good call.”

“Eidetic memory,” she said with a pleased smile. “It’s…sort of my talent.” She gestured vaguely with the hand she’d touched me with.

“Must come in handy during inventory.” I checked the shelf. “There’s only one copy, though.”

She frowned, then shrugged. “Mister Bock must have sold one this week.”

“I bet he did,” I said, troubled. It bothered me to think about Grevane standing in a store, speaking to people like Bock or Shiela. I pulled the cage closed and started slowly for the front of the store.

I opened the book. I’d heard it referenced before, in other works. It was supposed to deal with the lore around the Erlkoenig, or Elfking. He was supposed to be a faerie figure of considerable power, maybe a counterpart to the Queens of the Faerie Courts. The book had been compiled by Wizard Peabody early last century from the collected notes of a dozen different crusty wizards, most of them dead at the time, and was considered to be a work of nearly pure speculation.

“How much?” I asked.

“Should be on an index card inside the cover,” Shiela said, walking politely beside me.

I looked. The book was worth half a month’s rent. No wonder I’d never bought a copy. Business hadn’t been bad lately, but between handling all of Mouse’s licensing and shots and the trucks of food he ate, and Thomas’s job troubles, I didn’t have anything to spare. Maybe Bock would let me lease it or something.

Shiela and I walked out of the back room and started toward the front of the store. As we came out of the book areas, she said, “Well, I think you know the way from here. It was a pleasure meeting you, Harry.”

“You too,” I said, smiling. Hey, she was a woman, and pretty enough. Her smile was simply adorable. “Maybe I’ll bump into you again sometime.”

“I’d like that. Only next time without the gun.”

“One of those old-fashioned girls, huh?” I said.

She laughed and walked back toward the rear of the store.

“Find what you needed?” Bock asked. There was an edge to his voice, something I couldn’t quite place. He was definitely uncomfortable.

“I hope so,” I said. “Uh. About the price…”

Bock looked at me hard from under his thick eyebrows.

“Uh. Would you take a check?”

He looked around the store and then nodded. “Sure, from you.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wrote out a check, hoping it wouldn’t bounce before I got to the door, and sneaked my own glance around the shop. “Did I run out your customers?”

“Maybe,” he said uncomfortably.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It happens.”

“Might be better for them to be home. You too, in fact.”

He shook his head. “I have a business to run.”

He was an adult, and he’d been in this town longer than I had. “All right,” I said. I handed him the check. “Did you sell the other copy you had in inventory?”

He put the check in the register, and put the book into a plastic bag, zipped it shut, then put that in a paper sack. “Two days ago,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Do you remember to whom?”

He puffed out a breath that flapped his jowls. “Old gentleman. Long hair, thinning. Liver spots.”

“Real loose skin?” I asked. “Moved kind of stiff?”

Bock looked around again, nervous. “Yeah. That’s him. Look, Mister Dresden, I just run the shop, okay? I don’t want to get involved with any trouble. I had no idea who the guy was. He was just a customer.”

“All right,” I told him. “Thanks, Bock.”

He nodded and passed over the book. I folded the sack, book and all, into a pocket on my duster, and fished my car keys out of my pocket.

“Harry,” came Shiela’s voice, low and urgent.

I blinked and looked up at her. “Yeah?”

She nodded toward the front of the store, her face anxious.

I looked out.

On the street outside the shop stood two figures. They were dressed more or less identically: long black robes, long black cape, big black mantles, big black hoods that showed nothing of the faces inside. One was taller than the other, but other than that they simply stood on the sidewalk outside, waiting.

“I told these guys last week I didn’t want to buy a ring,” I said. I glanced at Shiela. “See that? Witty under pressure. That was a Tolkien joke.”

“Ha,” said Bock, more than a little uneasy. “I don’t want any trouble here, Mister Dresden.”

“Relax, Bock,” I said. “If they wanted trouble, they’d have kicked down the door.”

“They’re here to talk to you?” Shiela asked.

“Probably,” I said. Of course, if they were more of Kemmler’s knitting circle, they might just walk up and try to kill me. Grevane had. I drummed my fingers thought fully along the solid wood of my wizard’s staff.

Bock looked at me, his expression a little queasy. He wasn’t an easy man to frighten, but he was no fool, either. I had wrecked three…no wait, four. No…at least four buildings during my cases in the last several years, and he didn’t want Bock Ordered Books to be appended to the list. That hurt a little. Normals looked at me like I was insane when I told people I was a wizard. People who were in the know didn’t look at me like I was insane. They looked at me like I was insanely dangerous.

I guess at least four buildings later, they’ve got reason to think so.

“Maybe you’d better close up shop for the night,” I told Bock and Shiela. “I’ll go out and talk to them.”

Chapter

Eight

Ipaused just before I opened the shop’s door and walked outside.

It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store’s ambient stereo. The movie of my life must be really low-budget.

The trick was to figure out which movie I was in. If this was a variant on High Noon, then walking outside was probably a fairly dangerous idea. On the other hand, there was always the chance that I was still in the opening scenes of The Maltese Falcon and everyone trying to chase down the bird still wanted to talk to me. In which case, this was probably a good chance to dig for vital information about what might well be a growing storm around the search for The Word of Kemmler.

But just in case, I shook out my shield bracelet to the ready. I took my staff in hand and settled my fingers around it in a solid grip, curling them to the sigil-carved surface of the wood one by one.

Then I called up my power.

Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They’re a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting “Hey!” in time to that damned song—they’re all charged with magic.

My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I’m not a particularly good person. I’m no Charles Manson or anything, but I’m not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn’t seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn’t made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.

My stupid hand hurt like hell. I had half a dozen really gutwrenchingly good reasons to be afraid, and I was. Worst of all, if I made any mistakes, Murphy was going to be the one to pay for it. If that happened, I didn’t know what I would do.

I drew it all in, the good, the bad, and the crazy, a low buzz that coursed through the air and rattled the idols and candles and incense holders on their shelves in the store around me. In the glass door of the shop I saw my left hand vanish, replaced with an irregular globe of angry blue light that trailed bits of heatless fire to the floor. I pulled in the energy from all around me, readying myself to defend, to attack, to protect, or to destroy. I didn’t know what the two cloaked figures wanted, but I wanted them to know that if they’d come looking for a fight, I’d be willing to oblige them.

I held my power around me like a cloak and slipped out to face the pair waiting for me on the sidewalk. I took my time, every step unhurried and precise. I kept an eye on them, but only in my peripheral vision. Otherwise I left my eyes on the ground and walked slowly, until the blue glow of my shield light fell on their dark robes, making the black look blue, darkening the shadows in the folds to hues too dark to have names. Then I stopped and lifted my eyes slowly, daring them to meet my gaze.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought the pair of them rocked back a little, swaying like reeds before an oncoming storm. October wind blew about us, freezing-cold air that took its chill from the icy depths of Lake Michigan.

“What do you want?” I asked them. I borrowed frost from the wind and put it in my voice.

The larger of the pair spoke. “The book.”

But which book? I wondered. “Uh-huh. You’re a Schubert fan boy, aren’t you? You’ve got the look.”

“Goethe, actually,” he said. “Give it to me.”

He was definitely after a copy of Der Erlking, then. His voice was…odd. Male, certainly, but it didn’t sound quite human. There was a kind of quavering buzz in it that made it warble, somehow, made the words slither uncertainly. The words were slow and enunciated. They had to be, in order to be intelligible.

“Bite me,” I answered him. “Get your own book, Kemmlerite.”

“I have nothing but disdain for the madman Kemmler,” he spat. “Have a care what insults you offer. This need not involve you at all, Dresden.”

That gave me a moment’s pause, as they say. Taking on arrogant, powerful dark wizards is one thing. Taking on ones who have done their homework and who know who you are is something else entirely. It was my turn to be rattled.

The dark figure noted it. His not-human voice swayed into the night again in a low laugh.

“Touché, O dark master of evil bathrobes,” I said. “But I’m still not giving you my copy of the book.”

“I am called Cowl,” he said. Was there amusement in his voice? Maybe. “And I am feeling patient this evening. Again I will ask it. Give me your copy of the book.”

Die Lied der Erlking bumped against my leg through the pocket of my duster. “And again do I answer thee. Bite me.”

“Thrice will I ask and done,” said the figure, warning in its tone.

“Gee, let me think. How am I gonna answer this time,” I said, planting my feet on the ground.

Cowl made a hissing sound, and spread its arms slightly, hands still low, by its hips. The cold wind off the lake began to blow harder.

“Thrice I ask and done,” Cowl said, his voice low, hard, angry. “Give…me…the book.”

Suddenly the second figure took a step forward and said, in a female version of Cowl’s weird voice, “Please.”

There was a second of shocked silence, and then Cowl snarled, “Kumori. Mind your tongue.”

“There is no cost in being polite,” said the smaller of the two, Kumori. The robes were too thick and shapeless to give any hint at her form, but there was something decidedly feminine in the gesture she made with one hand, a roll of her wrist. She faced me again and said, “The knowledge in Der Erlking is about to become dangerous, Dresden,” she said. “You need not give us the book. Simply destroy it here. That will be sufficient. I ask it of you, please.”

I looked between the two of them for a moment. Then I said, “I’ve seen you both before.”

Neither of them moved.

“At Bianca’s masquerade. You were there on the dais with her.” As I spoke the words, I became increasingly convinced of them. The two figures I’d seen back then had never shown their faces, but there was something in the way that Cowl and Kumori moved that matched the two shadows back then precisely. “You were the ones who gave the Leanansidhe that athame.”

“Perhaps,” said Kumori, but there was an inclination to her head that ceded me the truth of my statement.

“That was such an amazingly screwed-up evening. It’s been coming back to haunt me for years,” I said.

“And will for years to come,” said Cowl. “A great many things of significance happened that night. Most of which you are not yet aware.”

“Hell’s bells,” I complained. “I’m a wizard myself, and I still get sick of that I-know-and-you-don’t shtick. In fact, it pisses me off even faster than it used to.”

Cowl and Kumori exchanged a long look, and then Kumori said, “Dresden, if you would spare yourself and others grief and pain, destroy the book.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” I asked. “Going around trashing copies?”

“There were fewer than a thousand printed,” Kumori confirmed. “Time has taken most of them. Over the past month we have accounted for the rest, but for two here, in Chicago, in this store.”

“Why?” I demanded.

Cowl moved his shoulders in the barest hint of a shrug. “Is it not enough that Kemmler’s disciples could use this knowledge for great evil?”

“Are you with the Council?” I responded.

“Obviously not,” Kumori replied from the depths of her hood.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Seems to me that if you were on the up-and-up you’d be working with the Council, rather than running around reinterpreting Fahrenheit 451 from a Ringwraith perspective.”

“And it seems to me,” Kumori answered smoothly, “that if you believed that their motives were as pure as they claim, you would already have notified them yourself.”

Hello. Now that was a new tune, someone suggesting that the Council was bent and I was in the right. I wasn’t sure what Kumori was trying to do, but it was smartest to play this out and see what she had to say. “Who says I haven’t?”

“This is pointless,” Cowl said.

Kumori said, “Let me tell him.”

“Pointless.”

“It costs nothing,” Kumori said.

“It’s going to if you keep dawdling,” I said. “I’m going to start billing you for wasting my time.”

She made a weird sound that I only just recognized as a sigh. “Can you believe, at least, that the contents of the book are dangerous?”

Grevane had seemed fond enough of his copy. But I wouldn’t know for sure what the big stink was about until I had time to read the book myself. “For the sake of expediency, let’s say that I do.”

“If the knowledge inside the book is dangerous,” Cowl said, “what makes you think that the Wardens or the Council would use it any more wisely than Kemmler’s disciples?”

“Because while they are a bunch of enormous assholes, they always try to do the right thing,” I said. “If one of the Wardens thought he might be about to practice black magic, he’d probably cut off his own head on pure reflex.”

“All of them?” Kumori asked in a quiet voice. “Are you sure?”

I looked back and forth between them. “Are you telling me that someone on the Council is after Kemmler’s power?”

“The Council is not what it was,” said Cowl. “It has rotted from the inside, and many wizards who have chafed at its restrictions have seen the war with the Red Court reveal its weakness. It will fall. Soon. Perhaps before tomorrow night.”

“Oh,” I drawled. “Well, gee, why didn’t you say so? I’ll just hand you my copy of the book right now.”

Kumori held up a hand. “This is no deception, Dresden. The world is changing. The Council’s end is near, and those who wish to survive it must act now. Before it is too late.”

I took a deep breath. “Normally I’m the first one to suggest we t.p. the Council’s house,” I said. “But you’re talking about necromancy. Black magic. You aren’t going to convince me that the Council and the Wardens have suddenly gotten a yen to trot down the left-hand path. They won’t touch the stuff.”

“Ideally,” Cowl said. “You are young, Dresden. And you have much to learn.”

“You know what young me has learned? Not to spend too much time listening to the advice of people who want to get something out of me,” I said. “Which includes car salesmen, political candidates, and weirdos in black capes who mug me on the street in the middle of the night.”

“Enough,” Cowl said, anger making his voice almost unintelligible. “Give us the book.”

“Bite my ass, Cowl.”

Kumori’s hood twitched back and forth between Cowl and me. She took three steps back.

“Just as well,” Cowl murmured. “I have wanted to see for myself what has the Wardens so nervous about you.”

The cold wind rose again, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose up stiffly. A flash of sensation flickered over me as Cowl drew in power. A lot of power.

“Don’t,” I said. I lifted my shield bracelet, weaving defensive energy before me with my thoughts. I solidified my hold on my own power, wrapping my fingers tight around my staff, and then slammed it down hard on the concrete. The cracking sound of it echoed back and forth from darkened buildings and the empty street. “Walk away. I’m not kidding.”

“Dorosh,” he snarled in reply, and extended his right hand.

He hit me with raw, invisible force—pure will, focused into a violent burst of kinetic energy. I knew it was coming, my shield was ready, and I braced myself against it in precisely the correct way. My defense was perfect.

It was all that saved my life.

I’ve traded practice blows with my old master Justin DuMorne, himself at one time a Warden. I fought him in earnest, too, and won. I’ve tested my strength in practice duels against the mentor who succeeded him, Ebenezar McCoy. My faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe, has a seriously nasty right hook, metaphysically speaking, and I’ve even gone up against the least of the Queens of Faerie. Throw in a couple of demons, various magical constructs, a thirteen-story fall in a runaway elevator, half a dozen spellslingers of one amount of nasty or another, and I’ve seen more sheer mystic violence than most wizards in the business. I’ve beaten them all, or at least survived them, and I’ve got the scars to show for it.

Cowl hit me harder than any of them.

My shield lit up like a floodlight, and despite all that I could do to divert the energy he threw at me, it hit me like a professional linebacker on an adrenaline frenzy. If I hadn’t been able to smooth it out and take the blow evenly across the whole front of my body, it might have broken my nose or ribs or collarbone, depending on where the energy bled through. Instead it felt like the Jolly Green Giant had slugged me with a family-sized beanbag. If there had been any upward force on it, it would have thrown me far enough to make me worry about the fall. But the blow came head-on, driving me straight back.

I flew several yards in the air, hit on my back, scraped along the sidewalk, and managed to turn the momentum into a roll. I staggered to my feet, leaning hard against a parked car. I must have clipped my head at some point, because stars were swirling around in my vision.

By the time I got myself upright again, the panic had set in. No one had ever thrown power like that at me. Stars and stones, if I hadn’t been absolutely prepared for that blow…

I swallowed. I’d be dead. Or at best broken, bleeding, and utterly at the mercy of an unknown wizard. One who was still nearby, and probably getting ready to hit me again. I forced thoughts and doubts from my mind and readied my shield, my bracelet already grown so warm that I could feel it through the ugly scars on the skin of my wrist. I couldn’t even think about hitting back, because if my shield wasn’t back up and ready for another blow, I wouldn’t live long enough to get the chance.

Cowl walked slowly toward me down the sidewalk, all cloak and hood and shadows. “Disappointing,” he said. “I hoped you were ready for the heavyweight division.”

He flicked his wrist, and the next blow howled at me in the freezing wind blowing off the lake. This one came in at an angle, and I didn’t even try to stop it cold. I sidestepped like a nervous horse, angling my shield to deflect the blow. Again energy leaked through, but this time it only shoved me across the sidewalk.

My shoulder hit the building, and it drove the breath out of me. I’ve had shoulder injuries before, and it probably made it feel worse than it was. I bounced off the building and kept my feet, but my legs wobbled—not from the effort of holding me up, but from the energy I’d had to expend to survive the attacks.

Cowl kept walking toward me. Hell’s bells, it didn’t even look like he was trying all that hard.

I got a cold feeling in my chest.

This man could kill me.

“The book, boy,” Cowl said. “Now.”

What rose up in me then wasn’t outrage or terror. It wasn’t righteous wrath. It wasn’t confidence, or surety, or determination to protect a loved one. It was 100 percent pure, contrary stubbornness. Chicago was my town. I didn’t care who this joker was; he wasn’t going to come gliding down the streets of my town and push in my teeth for my milk money.

I don’t get pushed around by anyone.

Cowl was strong, but his magic wasn’t inhuman. It was huge, and it was different from what I worked with, but it didn’t have that nauseating, greasy, somehow empty feel that I’d come to associate with the worst black magic. No, that wasn’t entirely true. There was a lingering sense of black magic involved in his power. Then again, there’s a little of it in mine, too.

The point being that Cowl wasn’t some kind of demon. He was a wizard. Human.

And, behind the magic, just as fragile as me.

I poured power down my arm, whirled my staff, pointed it at the car on the street beside him, and snarled, “Forzare!”

The sigils on the staff burst into sudden, hellish scarlet light, as bright as the blaze of my shield, and shimmering waves of force flowed out from me. They flooded out over the sidewalk, under the Toyota parked on the street nearest Cowl. I snarled with effort, and the Hellfire force abruptly lashed up, underneath the street side of the car. The car flipped up as lightly and quickly as a man overturning a kitchen chair. Cowl was under it.

There was a crash, and Hell’s bells, it was loud. Glass shattered everywhere, and sparks flew out in every direction. The car’s alarm went off, warbling drunkenly, and alarms started going off all up and down the street. In apartment windows, lights started blinking on.

I fell to one knee, suddenly exhausted, the light from staff and shield both dwindling to nothing and vanishing. I had never moved that much mass before, that quickly, with nothing but raw kinetic energy, and I could hardly find enough energy to focus my eyes. If I hadn’t had the staff to lean on, I’d have been hugging the sidewalk.

There was the sound of metal grating on concrete.

“Oh, come on,” I said panting.

The car shuddered, then slid a few inches to one side. Cowl straightened slowly. He’d gotten back to the very rear of the car’s impact area somehow, and he must have been able to shield himself from the partial impact. As he straightened he wavered, then braced himself against a streetlight with one black-gloved hand. I felt a surge of satisfaction. Take that, jerk.

A low growling sound came warbling out of the black hood. “The book.”

“Bite,” I panted, “me.”

But he hadn’t been talking to me. Kumori stepped out of the shadows of a doorway and gestured with a whispered word.

I felt a sudden, strong tug at my duster’s pocket. The flap covering it flew up, and the slender book in its paper bag started sliding out.

“Ack,” I managed, which was all the repartee I was up for at the moment. I rolled and trapped the book between my body and the ground.

Kumori extended her hand again, and more forcefully. I slid two feet over the concrete, until I braced a boot against an uneven joint in the sidewalk and saw movement behind the two figures. “Game over,” I said. “Stop it.”

“Or what?” Cowl demanded.

“Ever see Wolfen?” I spat.

Wolves appeared, just freaking appeared out of the Chicago night. Big wolves, refugees from a previous epoch, huge, strong-looking beasts with white fangs and savage eyes. One was crouched on the wrecked Buick, within an easy leap of Cowl, bright eyes fastened on him. Another had appeared behind Kumori, and a third leapt lightly down from a fire escape, landing in a soundless crouch in front of her. One appeared on either side of me, and snarls bubbled out of the night.

More lights were coming on. A siren wailed in the night.

“What big teeth they have,” I said. “You want to keep going until the cops show up? I’m game.”

There wasn’t even a pause for the two cloaked figures to look significantly at each other. Kumori glided to Cowl’s side. Cowl gave me a look that I felt, even if I couldn’t see his face, and he growled, “This isn’t—”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You lost. Go.”

Cowl’s fingers formed into a rigid claw and he snarled a word I couldn’t quite hear, slashing at the air.

There was a surge of power, darker this time, somehow more nebulous. The air around them blurred, there was the sudden scent of mildew and lightless waters, a sighing sound, and as quickly as that, they were simply gone.

“Billy,” I said a second later, angry. “What the hell are you doing? Those people could have killed you.”

The wolf crouching on the wrecked car looked at me, and dropped its mouth open into a lolling grin. It leapt over the broken glass to land beside me, shimmered, and a second later the wolf was gone, replaced by a naked man crouching beside me. Billy was a little shorter than average, and had more muscle than a Bowflex commercial. Medium brown hair, matching eyes, and he wore a short beard now that made him look a lot older than when I’d met him years ago.

Of course, he was older than when I’d met him years ago.

“This is my neighborhood,” he said quietly. “Can’t afford to let anyone make me look bad here.” He moved with quick efficiency, getting a shoulder under one of mine and hauling me to my feet by main strength. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Bruises,” I said. The world spun a little as he hauled me up, and I wasn’t sure I could have stood on my own. “Little wobbly. Out of breath.”

“Cops will be here in about seventy seconds,” he said, like someone who knew. “Come on. Georgia’s in the car at the other end of this alley.”

“No,” I said. “Look, just get me to my car. I can’t be…” I couldn’t be seen with him. If Mavra was watching me, or having me tailed, it might mean that she would release the dirt she had on Murphy. But I damn sure couldn’t just explain everything to him. Billy wasn’t the sort to stand by when he saw a friend in trouble.

And I was damned lucky he wasn’t. I hadn’t had much left in me but some hot air when Cowl had stood up again.

“No time,” Billy said. “Look, we’ll get you back here after things calm down later. Christ, Harry, you crushed that car like a beer can. I didn’t know you were that strong.”

“Me neither,” I said. I couldn’t get to my car on my own. I couldn’t afford to be seen with Billy and the Alphas. But I couldn’t allow myself to get detained or thrown into jail, either. Never mind that if Cowl and his sidekick had found me, there might be other interested parties after me, too. If I kept showing my face on the streets, someone would tear it off for me.

I had to go with Billy. I would cut things as short as I could. I didn’t want them involved in this business any more than they already were, anyway, as much to protect them as Murphy. Dammit, Mavra would just have to show some freaking understanding. Maybe if I said please.

Yeah, right.

I might already have blown it and doomed Murphy, but I didn’t have much choice.

I leaned on Billy the werewolf, and did the best I could to hobble along with him down the alley and off the street.

Chapter

Nine

Billy probably could have picked me up and carried me at a flat run if he needed to, but we had to cross only about fifty yards of alley and darkened street before an expensive SUV, its lights out, cut over to the curb and made a swift stop in front of us.

“Quick,” I said, still panting, “to the Woofmobile.”

Billy helped me into the backseat, followed me in, and before the door was even shut the SUV began accelerating smoothly and calmly from the scene. The interior smelled like new-car-scented air freshener and fast food.

“What happened?” asked the driver. She was a willowy young woman about Billy’s age, somewhere around six feet tall. Her brown hair was pulled into a severe braid, and she wore jeans and a denim jacket. “Hello, Harry.”

“Evening, Georgia,” I replied, slumping back against the headrest.

“Are you all right?”

“Nothing a nice long nap won’t fix.”

“He was attacked,” Billy supplied, answering the first question. He tugged sweats and a T-shirt out of an open gym bag and hopped into them with practiced motions.

“The vampires again?” Georgia asked. She turned on the headlights and joined other traffic. Reflected streetlights gleamed off the diamond engagement ring on her left hand. “I thought the Reds were staying out of town.”

“Not vampires,” I said. My eyelids started increasing their mass, and I decided not to argue with them. “New friends.”

“I think they must have been other wizards,” Billy said quietly. “Big black cloaks and hoods. I couldn’t see their faces.”

“What set the police off?” she asked.

“Harry flipped a car over on top of one of them.”

I heard Georgia suck in her breath through her teeth.

“Yeah, and I’m the one who lost the fight,” I muttered. “Barely even rattled his cage.”

“My God,” Georgia said. “Is everyone all right?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “The bad guys got away. If the Alphas hadn’t come along when they did, I’m not sure I would have.”

“Everyone else scattered, and they’ll meet us back at the apartment,” Billy said. “Who were those guys?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

There was an empty second, and then Billy’s voice turned cautious. “Why? Is it some kind of secret, need-to-know wizard thing?”

“No. I just have no freaking clue who it was.”

“Oh. What did they want?” Billy asked. “I only showed up at the end.”

“I picked up a rare book at Bock’s. Apparently they wanted it.”

I could have sworn I heard his brow furrow. “Is it valuable?”

“Something in it must be,” I answered. I fumbled at my pocket and drew out the book to make sure it was still there. The slender volume looked innocent enough. And at least it wouldn’t take too long to read through. “I appreciate the assist, but I can’t stay.”

“Sure, sure,” Billy said. “What can we do to help?”

“Don’t take me to your apartment, for one,” I said. “Somewhere you don’t go as much.”

“Why not?” Billy asked.

“Please, man. Just do it. And let me think for a minute,” I said, and closed my eyes again. I tried to work out how best to keep the Alphas from getting involved in this business, but my weary, aching body betrayed me. I dropped into a sudden darkness too black and silent to allow for any dreams.

When I jerked awake, my neck was aching from being bent forward, my chin on my chest. We weren’t driving anymore, and I was alone in the SUV. The hollow weariness had abated significantly, and I didn’t feel any trembling in my limbs. I couldn’t have been out for very long, but even a little sleep can do wonders sometimes.

I got out and found myself in a garage big enough to house half a dozen cars, though the SUV and a shiny black Mercury were the only two vehicles in it. I recognized the place—Georgia’s parents’ house, an upper-end place on the north side of town. The Alphas had brought me here once before, when they helped rescue me from the lair of a gang of psychotic lycanthropes. Susan had been with me.

I shook my head, took up my staff and the little book, and walked toward the door to the house. I paused just before I opened it, and heard voices speaking in quiet tones. I closed my eyes and focused on my sense of hearing, head tilted to one side, and the sound of the voices became clear and distinct enough for me to understand. It’s a useful skill, Listening, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how to do it.

There was the sound of a phone being returned to its cradle. “They’re all fine,” Billy said.

“Good,” Georgia replied. “Something’s going on. Did you see his face?”

“He looked tired,” Billy said.

“He looked more than just tired. He’s afraid.”

“Maybe,” Billy said, after a second of hesitation. “So what if he is?”

“So how bad must things be if he is afraid?” Georgia asked. “And there’s more.”

Billy exhaled. “His hand.”

“You saw it then?”

“Yeah. After he nodded off.”

“He’s not supposed to have any movement in it,” she said, her voice growing more worried. “You’ve seen him on gaming nights. He can barely cup his fingers to hold chips. I heard the wood of his staff creaking under them tonight. I thought he would crush it.”

I blinked at that news and looked down at my gloved hand. I tried to wiggle my fingers. They sort of twitched.

“He’s been a little different since he got burned,” Billy said.

“It’s been longer than that,” Georgia said. “It’s been since the year before. Remember when he showed up to gaming with all those bandages under his sweater? He never would talk about what happened. It was a week after that murder at the docks, and that big terrorist scare at the airport. It’s been since then. He’s been distant. More all the time.”

“You think he had something to do with that murder?” Billy asked.

“Of course not,” Georgia said. “But I think he might have been working on a case and gotten involved with the victim in some way. You know how he is. He probably blames himself for her death.”

I swallowed and tried not to think of a pretty, dark-haired woman bleeding to death while the hold of her boat slowly filled with water. She’d made enough bad choices to get herself into trouble. But I hadn’t been able to protect her from the creature that had taken her life.

“If he’s in trouble we’re going to help him,” Billy said.

“Yes,” Georgia replied. “But think about this, Billy. Getting involved might not be the best way to do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he didn’t want us to take him to the apartment,” Georgia said. “Do you know why?”

“No, I don’t. Neither do you.”

She made a disgusted sound. “Billy, he’s afraid the apartment is being watched.”

“By who?”

“By what,” Georgia said. “We haven’t seen or heard or scented anything. If there’s magic at work here, it could be more than we know how to handle.”

“So what are you saying?” Billy said. “That we should just abandon him if he’s in trouble?”

“No.” She sighed. “But, Billy, you saw what he was capable of doing. We saw him mow through an army at the faerie battleground. And you tell me tonight that he flipped a car onto one of these other wizards, and that the man blew it off. I don’t think we’re weak, but running off ghouls and trolls and the occasional vampire is one thing. Mixing it up with wizards is something else. You’ve seen what kind of power they have.”

“I’m not afraid,” Billy said.

“Then you’re stupid,” Georgia replied, her voice blunt but not cruel. “Harry isn’t what he used to be. He’s been hurt. And I don’t care what he says, his injured hand bothers him more than he lets on. He doesn’t need any more handicaps.”

“You want to just leave him alone?” Billy asked.

“I don’t want to weigh him down. You know him. He’ll protect other people before he takes care of himself. If he’s operating so far out of our league, we might not be anything but a distraction to him. We have to understand our limits.”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t care,” Billy said then. “I’m not just going to stand by if he’s in trouble.”

“All I want,” Georgia said, “is for you to listen to him. If he doesn’t want our support, or if he thinks it is too dangerous for us to be involved, we have to trust that he knows what he’s doing. He knows things that we don’t. He’s trusted us before, and he’s never led us wrong. Just promise me that you’ll return the compliment.”

“I can’t just…turn away,” Billy said.

“I wouldn’t want you to,” Georgia said. “But…sometimes you think with your fangs and not with your head, Will.” There was the soft sound of a kiss. “I love you. We’ll help him however we can. I just wanted you to consider the idea that he might not need us for violence.”

Billy took a couple of heavy steps. One of the kitchen chairs creaked. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

“Well,” Georgia said. She opened the fridge. “What about these masked wizard types. Did you get close enough to scent them?”

“I tried,” Billy said. “And I was closest to them. But…”

“But?”

“I couldn’t get a scent. Harry did something. He flipped the car over. There was a flash of red light and after that all I could smell was…”

I heard Georgia take a couple of steps, maybe to touch him. “What did you smell?”

“Sulfur,” Billy said, his voice a little weak. “I smelled brimstone.”

There was silence.

“What does it mean?” Georgia asked.

“That I’m worried about him,” Billy said. “You should have seen the look on his face. The rage. I’ve never seen anyone look that angry.”

“You think he’s…what? Unstable?” Georgia asked.

“You’re the psych grad,” Billy said. “What do you think?”

I put my hand on the door. I hesitated for just a second and then pushed it open.

Billy and Georgia both sat in a rather roomy kitchen at a small table, with two bottles of beer set open but untouched on the table. They blinked and straightened, staring up at me in surprise.

“What do you think?” I asked Georgia quietly. “I’d like to know, too.”

“Harry,” Georgia said, “I’m just a grad student.”

I went to the fridge and got myself a cold beer. It was an American brand, but I’ve got no palate in any case. I like my beer cold. I twisted the cap off, then walked over to the table and sat down with them. “I’m not looking for a therapist. You’re a friend. Both of you are.” I swigged beer. “Tell me what you think.”

Georgia and Billy traded a look, and Billy nodded.

“Harry,” Georgia said, “I think you need to talk to someone. I don’t think it’s important who it is. But you have a lot of pressures on you, and if you don’t find some way to let them out, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Billy said, “People talk to their friends, man. No one can do everything alone. You work through it together.”

I sipped some more beer. Georgia and Billy did, too. We sat in silence for maybe four or five minutes.

Then I said, “About two years ago I exposed myself to a demonic influence. A creature called Lasciel. A fallen angel. The kind of being that turns people into…into real monsters.”

Georgia watched me, her eyes focused intently on my face. “Why did you do that?”

“It was in a silver coin,” I said. “Whoever touched it would have been exposed. There was a child who had no idea what it was. I didn’t think. I just slapped my hand over it before the child could pick it up.”

Georgia nodded. “What happened?”

“I took measures to contain it,” I said. “I did everything I could think of, and for a while I thought I’d been successful.” I sipped more beer. “Then last year, I realized that my magic was being augmented by a demonic energy called Hellfire. That’s what you smelled tonight, Billy, when I flipped the car.”

“Why do you use it?” Billy asked.

I shook my head. “It isn’t my choice. It just happens.”

Georgia frowned. “I’m not an expert on magic, Harry, but from what I’ve learned that kind of power doesn’t come for free.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Then what was the price?” she asked.

I drew in a deep breath. Then I started peeling the leather glove off my scarred hand. “I wondered that too,” I said. I slid the glove off and turned my hand over.

The scarring was the worst on the insides of my fingers and over my palm. It looked more like melted wax than human flesh, all white with flares of blue where some of the veins still survived—all except for the exact center of my palm. There, three lines of pink, healthy flesh formed a sigil vaguely suggestive of an hourglass.

“I found this there when I got burned,” I said. “It’s an ancient script. It’s the symbol for the name of Lasciel.”

Georgia drew in a slow breath and said, “Oh.”

Billy looked back and forth between us. “Oh? What, oh?”

Georgia gave me a be-patient look and turned to Billy. “It’s a demon mark. Like a brand, yes?” She looked at me for confirmation.

I nodded.

“He’s worried that this demon, Lasciel, might be exerting some kind of control on him in ways that he cannot detect.”

“Right,” I said. “Everything I know tells me that I should be cut off from Lasciel. That I should be safe. But the power is still there somehow. And if the demon is influencing my thoughts, pulling my strings, I might not even be able to feel it happening.”

Georgia frowned. “Do you believe that to be a probability?”

“It’s too dangerous to assume anything else,” I said. I held up a hand. “That’s not hubris. It’s just a fact. I have power. If I use it unwisely or recklessly, people could get hurt. They could die. And if Lasciel is somehow influencing me…”

“Who knows what could happen,” Billy finished, his tone sober.

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” Billy said.

We all took a sip of beer.

“I’m worried,” I said. “I haven’t been able to find any answers. I’ve gone through spell after spell. Rites, ceremonies, I’ve tried everything. It won’t go away.”

“Jesus,” Billy breathed.

“An influence like this is detectable, and against the Laws of Magic. If the Wardens found out and pushed a trial on me, it might be enough to get me executed. And if I get near the Knight of the Cross I told you about, he’ll be able to feel it on me. I don’t know how he’d react. What he would think.” I swallowed. “I’m scared.”

Georgia touched my arm briefly, then said, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Harry. I know you well enough to know that you would never want that kind of power, much less abuse it.”

“If some part of me didn’t want it,” I asked, “why didn’t I pick up the kid instead of Lasciel’s coin?”

A heavy silence settled over the kitchen.

“You’ve been friends to me. Stuck it out by me when times were rough,” I said a moment later. “You’ve made me welcome in your home. In your life. You’re good people. I’m sorry I haven’t been more open with you.”

“Is that what tonight was about?” Billy asked. “The demon?”

“No,” I said. “Tonight was different. And I can’t tell you about it.”

“If you’re trying to protect us…” Billy began.

“I’m not protecting you,” I said. “I’m protecting someone else. If I’m seen with you, it could get them badly hurt. Maybe even killed.”

“I don’t understand. I want to help…” Billy said.

Georgia put her hand over Billy’s. He glanced at her, flushed, and then closed his mouth.

I nodded and finished the beer. “I need you to trust me for a little while. I’m sorry. But the faster I’m out of here, the better.”

“How can we help?” Georgia asked.

“Just knowing that you want to is a help,” I told her. “But that’s almost the only thing you can do. For now, at least.”

“Almost the only thing?”

I nodded. “If I could get something to eat, and maybe a ride back to my car, I’d be obliged.”

“We can do that,” Billy said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Chapter

Ten

I raided the refrigerator and divested it of a small plate of cold cuts while Billy made a call to his apartment. Moments later one of the other Alphas called back, confirming that the furor around Bock Ordered Books had begun to die down.

“Only one patrol car still there,” Billy reported. “Plus the guys with the wrecker.”

“We shouldn’t wait any longer,” I said. “With cops around, any neighborhood monsters will lie low for a while to be careful. I want to be back there and gone before they get moving again.”

“Eat in the car,” Georgia suggested, and we all piled back into her SUV.

Georgia parked on the curb behind the Beetle and let me out. I had my keys in my hand, ready to get in and get gone. But when I saw the car, I stopped.

Someone had smashed out the remaining windows in the car. Glass littered the street and the car’s interior. Parts of the windshield were missing, and the rest clung together in a mass of fracture lines that made the whole mess opaque. The back window had already been broken when I used my force ring on that zombie earlier in the evening. The doors and the hood were dented in dozens of places, and the door handles had been entirely smashed off. The tires sagged limply, and I could see long, neat slashes in them without difficulty.

I approached the car slowly.

The wooden handle of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat protruded from the gaping driver’s-side window, the cardboard tag from the store still dangling from its string.

Billy leaned out the SUV window and let out a low whistle. “Wow.”

“But on the upside,” I said, “now all the windows match.”

“What a mess,” Georgia said.

I went around to the front of the car and opened the trunk. It hadn’t been tampered with. My sawed-off shotgun was still in the backseat. Billy and Georgia got out and walked over to me.

“Gang?” Georgia asked.

“Gang wouldn’t have left the gun,” I said.

“The guys in the hoods?” Billy guessed.

“Didn’t strike me as the baseball-bat type.” I reached in and picked up the bat with just my forefinger and thumb, near the middle, where it wouldn’t mar any fingerprints left on it. I showed it to them. “Cowl would have used his magic to smash the car up, not a club.” I walked around to the back of the car and frowned down at the engine. It looked intact. I leaned in the window and tried my key. The engine turned over without any trouble.

“Huh,” Billy said. “Who completely ruins a car but doesn’t touch the engine?”

“Someone sending me a message,” I said.

Billy pursed his lips. “What does it say?”

“That I need to rent a car, apparently,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t have time for this.”

Billy and Georgia traded a look, and Georgia nodded. She came over to me, took my car keys where I held them in my cupped left hand, and replaced them with her own.

“Oh, hell, no,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she told me. “Look, you still take your car to Mike’s Garage, right?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“But nothing,” Billy said. “We’re only a couple of blocks from the apartment. We’ll get your car towed to Mike’s.”

Georgia nodded firmly. “Just bring back the SUV whenever the Beetle is ready.”

I thought it over. Seeing my car torn up was actually a hell of a lot more distressing than I had thought it would be. It was only a machine. But it was my machine. Some part of me felt furious that someone had done this to my ride.

My first instinct was to refuse their offer, get the Beetle to the shop, and use cabs until then—but that was the anger talking. I forced myself to apply my brain to it, and figured that, given how much running around I might need to do in the near future, I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t afford the time that public transportation would cost me, either, assuming I could use it at all. Damn, but I hate to swallow my pride.

“It’s a new car. Something will blow out.”

“It’s still under warranty,” Georgia said.

Billy gave me a thumbs-up. “Good hunting, Harry. Whatever you’re after.”

I nodded back to him and said, “Thanks.”

I got into the SUV and headed out to speak to the only person in Chicago who knew as much about magic and death as I did.

Mortimer Lindquist had done pretty well for himself over the past couple of years, and he’d moved out of the little California-import stucco ranch house he’d been in the last time I’d gone to visit him. Now he was working out of a converted duplex in Bucktown. Mort leased both halves of the duplex, and ran his business on one side, with his home on the other. There were no cars in the business driveway, though he mostly operated at night. He must have already wrapped up for the evening. He had abandoned the faux-Gothic decor that had previously graced his place of business, which was a hopeful sign. I needed the help of someone with real skill, not a charlatan with a batch of gimmicks.

I parked the SUV in the business driveway, mowing down a patch of yellow pansies as I did. I wasn’t used to driving something that big. The Beetle might be small and slow, but at least I knew exactly where its tires were going to go.

The lights were all out. I availed myself of the brass knocker hung on the residential door.

Fifteen minutes later, a bleary-looking little man answered. He was short, twenty or thirty pounds overweight, and had given up trying to conceal his receding hairline in favor of shaving his scalp completely bald. He was wrapped in a thick maroon bathrobe and wore grey slippers on his feet.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Mort complained. “What the hell do you—” He saw my face and his eyes widened in panic. He hurried to shut the door.

I stabbed my oak staff into the doorway and stopped him from closing it. “Hi, Mort. Got a minute?”

“Go away, Dresden,” the little man said. “Whatever it is you want, I don’t have it.”

I leaned on my staff and put on an affable smile. “Mort, after all we’ve been through together, I can’t believe you’d speak to me like that.”

Mort gestured furiously at a pale scar on his scalp. “The last time I had a conversation with you, I wound up with a concussion and fifteen stitches in my head.”

“I need your help,” I said.

“Ha,” Mort said. “Thank you, but no. You might as well ask me to paint a target on my chest.” He kicked at my staff, but not very hard. Those slippers wouldn’t have protected his foot very well. “Get out, before something sees you here.”

“Can’t do that, Mort,” I said. “There’s black magic afoot. You know that, don’t you?”

The little man stared at me in silence for a moment. Then he said, “Why do you think I want you gone? I don’t want to be seen with you. I’m not involved.”

“You are now,” I said. I kept smiling, but all I really wanted to do was throw a jab at his nose. I guess my feelings must have leaked through into my expression, because Mort took one look at my face and blanched. “People are in trouble. I’m helping them. Now open this damned door and help me, or I swear to God I am going to come camp out on your lawn in my sleeping bag.”

Mort’s eyes widened, and he looked around outside the house, nervous energy making his eyes flick back and forth rapidly. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

“Believe it.”

He opened the door. I stepped inside and he shut it behind me, snapping several locks closed.

The interior of the house was clean, businesslike. The entry hall had been converted into a small waiting room, and beyond it lay the remainder of the first floor, a richly colored room lined with candles in sconces, now unlit, featuring a large table of dark polished wood surrounded by matching hand-carved chairs. Mort stalked into his séance room, picked up a box of kitchen matches, and started lighting a few candles.

“Well?” he asked. “Going to show me how all-powerful you are? Call up a gale in my study? Maybe slam a few doors for dramatic effect?”

“Would you like me to?”

He threw the matches down on the table and took a seat at its head. “Maybe I haven’t been clear with you, Dresden,” Mort said. “I’m not a wizard. I’m not with the Council. I have no interest in attracting their attention or that of their enemies. I am not a participant in your war with the vampires. I like my blood where it is.”

“This isn’t about the vampires,” I said.

Mort frowned. “No? Are things dying down, then?”

I grimaced and took a seat a few chairs down. “There was a nasty fight in Mexico City three weeks ago, and the Wardens bloodied the Red Court’s nose pretty well. Seems to have thrown a wrench in their plans for some reason.”

“Getting ready to hit back,” Mort said.

“Everyone figures that,” I said. “We just don’t know where or when.”

Mort exhaled and leaned his forehead on the heel of one hand. “Did you know I found someone they’d killed a couple of years ago? Young boy, maybe ten years old.”

“A ghost?” I asked.

Mort nodded. “Little guy had no idea what was going on. He didn’t even know he was dead. They cut his throat with a razor blade. You could barely see the mark unless he turned to look over his right shoulder.”

“That’s what they do,” I said. “How can you see things like that and not want to fight them?”

“Bad things happen to people, Dresden,” Mort said. “I’m sorry as hell about it, but I’m not you. I don’t have the power to change it.”

“Like hell you don’t,” I said. “You’re an ectomancer. One of the strongest I’ve met. You’ve got access to all kinds of information. You could do a lot of good.”

“Information doesn’t stop fangs, Dresden. If I start using what I know against them, I’d be a threat. Five minutes after I get involved I’ll be the one with his throat cut.”

“Better them than you, huh?”

He looked up and spread his hands. “I am what I am, Dresden. A coward. I don’t apologize for it.” He folded his fingers and regarded me soberly. “What’s the fastest way for me to get you away from my home and out of my life?”

I leaned my staff against the table and slouched into my chair. “What do you know about what’s been happening in town lately?”

“Black magic?” Mort asked. “Not much. I’ve had nightmares, which is unusual. The dead have been nervous for several days. It’s been difficult to get them to answer a summons, even with Halloween coming up.”

“Has that happened before?” I asked.

“Not on this scale,” Mort said. “I’ve asked, but they won’t explain to me why they’re afraid. In my experience, it’s one way that spiritual entities react to the presence of dark powers.”

I nodded, frowning. “It’s necromancy,” I said. “You ever heard about a guy named Kemmler?”

Mort’s eyes widened. “Oh, God. His disciples?”

“I think so,” I said. “A lot of them.”

Mort’s face turned a little green. “That explains why they’re so afraid.”

“Why?”

He waved a hand. “The dead are terrified of whatever is moving around out there. Necromancers can enslave them. Control them. Even destroy them.”

“So they can feel their power?” I asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Good,” I said. “I was counting on that.”

Mort frowned and arched an eyebrow.

“I’m not sure how many of them are in town,” I said. “I need to know where they are—or at least how many of them are here. I want you to ask the dead to help me locate them.”

He lifted both hands. “They won’t. I’ll tell you that for certain. You couldn’t get a ghost to willingly appear within screaming distance of a necromancer.”

“Come on, Mort. Don’t start holding out on me.”

“I’m not,” he said, and held up two fingers in a scout’s hand signal. “My pledge of honor upon it.”

I exhaled, frustrated. “What about residual magic?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever these necromancers work with dark magic it leaves a kind of stain or footprint. I can sense it if I get close enough.”

“So why don’t you do it?”

“It’s a big town,” I said. “And whatever these lunatics are up to, it’s got to happen by midnight Halloween. I don’t have time to walk a grid hoping to get close.”

“And you think the dead will?”

“I think the dead can move through walls and the floor, and that there are a whole lot more of them than there are of me,” I said. “If you ask them, they might do it.”

“They might attract attention to themselves, you mean,” Mort said. “No. They may be dead, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t get hurt. I won’t risk that for Council infighting.”

I blinked for a second. A few years ago Mort had barely been able to crawl out of his bottle long enough to cold-read credulous idiots into believing he could speak to their dead loved ones. Even after he had gotten his life together and begun to reclaim his atrophied talents, he had never displayed any particular indication that he wanted anything more than to turn a profit on his genuine skills rather than with fraud. Mort always looked out for number one.

But not tonight. I recognized the quiet, steady light in his eyes. He was not going to be pushed on this issue. Maybe Mort wasn’t willing to go to the wall for his fellow human beings, but apparently with the dead it was different. I hadn’t expected the little ectomancer to grow a backbone, even if it was only a partial one.

I weighed my options. I could always try to lean harder on Mort, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t do me much good. I could try contacting the ghosts of Chicagoland myself—but while I knew the basic theory of ectomancy, I had no practical experience with it. I had no time to waste floundering around like a clueless newbie in an area of magic totally outside my practical experience.

“Mort,” I said, “look. If you mean it, I’ll respect that. I’ll go right now.”

He frowned, his eyes wary.

“But this isn’t about wizard politics,” I said. “Kemmler’s disciples have already killed at least one person here in town, and they’re going to kill more.”

He slumped a little in his chair and closed his eyes. “Bad things happen to people, Dresden. That’s not my fault.”

“Please,” I said. “Mort, I have a friend involved in this. If I don’t deal with these assholes, she’s going to get hurt.”

He didn’t open his eyes or answer me.

Dammit. I couldn’t force him to help me. If he wasn’t going to be moved, he wasn’t going to be moved.

“Thanks for nothing then, Mort,” I told him. My voice sounded more tired than bitter. “Keep on looking out for number one.” I rose, picked up my staff, and walked toward the door.

I had it unlocked and half-open when Mort said, “What’s her name?”

I paused and inhaled slowly. “It’s Murphy,” I said without turning around. “Karrin Murphy.”

There was a long silence.

“Oh,” Mort said then. “You should have just said so. I’ll ask them.”

I looked over my shoulder. The ectomancer stood up and walked over to a low bureau. He withdrew several articles and started laying them out on the table.

I shut the door and locked it again, then went back to the ectomancer. Mort unfolded a paper street map of Chicago and laid it flat on the table. Then he set candles at each of its corners and lit them. Finally he poured red ink from a little vial into a perfume atomizer.

After watching him for a moment, I asked, “Why?”

“I knew her father,” Mort said. “I know her father.”

“She’s a good person,” I said.

“That’s what I hear.” He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. “Dresden, I need you to be quiet for a while. I can’t afford any distraction.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’m going to ask them,” Mort said. “You won’t hear me, but they will. I’ll spray the ink into the air over the map, and they’ll bring it down wherever they find one of your footprints.”

“You think it will work?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve never done this before.” He closed his eyes and added, “Shhh.”

I sat waiting and tried not to fidget. Mort was completely still for several minutes, and then his lips started moving. No sound came from them, except for the quiet sighs of breathing when he inhaled. He broke out into a sudden and heavy sweat, his bald head gleaming in the candlelight. The air suddenly vibrated against my face, and flashes of cold raced over my body at random. A second later I became acutely conscious of another presence in the room. Then another. And a third. Seconds after that, though I could see or hear no one, I became certain that the room was packed with people, and an accompanying sense of claustrophobia made me long to get outside into fresh air. It was definitely magic, but different from any I had felt before. I fought the trapped, panicked sensation and remained seated, still and quiet.

Mort nodded sharply, picked up the atomizer, and sprayed a mist of red ink into the air over the map.

I held my breath and leaned closer.

The mist drifted down over the map, but instead of settling into an even spread, the fine droplets began to swirl into miniature vortexes like tiny, bloody tornadoes sweeping over the map. Scarlet circles formed at the base of the minitornadoes, until the whirling cones spiraled down into vertical lines, then vanished.

Mort let out a grunt and slumped forward in his chair, gasping for breath.

I stood up and examined the street map by candlelight.

“Did it work?” Mort rasped.

“I think it did,” I said. I put my finger beside one of the larger red circles. “This is the Forensic Institute. One of them created a zombie there earlier tonight.”

Mort sat up and leaned forward over the map, his eyes glazed with fatigue. He pointed at another bloody dot. “That one. It’s the Field Museum.”

I traced my finger to another one. “This one is in a pretty tough neighborhood. I think it’s an apartment building.” I moved on to the next. “A cemetery. And what the hell, at O’Hare?”

Mort shook his head. “The ink’s darker than the others. I think that means it’s beneath the airport, in Undertown.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “That makes sense. Two more. An alley down by Burnham Park, and a sidewalk on Wacker.”

“Six,” Mort said.

“Six,” I agreed.

Six necromancers like Grevane and Cowl.

And only one of me.

Hell’s bells.

Chapter

Eleven

I clipped my old iron mailbox with the front fender of the stupid SUV as I pulled into the driveway at my apartment. The box dented one corner of the vehicle’s hood and toppled over with a heavy clang. I parked the SUV and shoved the pole the mailbox was mounted on back into the ground, but the impact had bent the pole. My mailbox leaned drunkenly to one side, but it stayed upright. Good enough for me.

I gathered up my gear, including the sawed-off shotgun I’d removed from the Beetle, and got indoors in a hurry.

I set things down and locked up my wards and the heavy steel door I’d had installed after a big, bad demon had huffed and puffed and blown down the original. It wasn’t until I had them all firmly secured that I let out a slow breath and started to relax. The living room was lit only by the embers of the fire and a few tiny flames. From the kitchen alcove, I heard the soft thumping sound of Mouse’s tail wagging against the icebox.

Thomas sat in the big comfy recliner next to the fire, absently stroking Mister. My cat, curled up on Thomas’s lap, watched me with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Thomas,” I said.

“All quiet on the basement front,” Thomas murmured. “Once Butters wound down he just about dropped unconscious. I told him he could sleep in the bed.”

“Fine,” I said. I took my copy of Erlking, lit a few candles on the end table, and flopped down onto the couch.

Thomas arched an eyebrow.

“Oh,” I said, sitting up. “Sorry, didn’t think. You probably want to sleep.”

“Not especially,” he said. “Someone should keep watch, anyway.”

“You all right?” I asked him.

“I just don’t feel like sleeping right now. You can have the couch.”

I nodded and settled down again. “You want to talk?”

“If I did, I’d be talking.” He went back to staring at the fire and stroking the cat.

He was still upset, obviously, but I’d learned that it was pointless to start pushing Thomas, no matter how well-intentioned I might be. He’d dig in his heels from sheer obstinacy, and the conversation would get nowhere.

“Thanks,” I said, “for looking out for Butters for me.”

Thomas nodded.

We fell into a relaxed silence, and I started reading the book.

A while later I fell asleep.

I dreamed almost immediately. Threatening trees, mostly evergreens, rose up around a small glade. In its center a modest, neat campfire sparked and crackled. I could smell a lake somewhere nearby, moss and flowers and dead fish blending in with the scent of mildewed pine. The air was cold enough to make me shiver, and I hunched a little closer to the fire, but even so I felt like my back was to a glacier. From somewhere overhead came the wild, honking screams of migrating geese under a crescent moon. I didn’t recognize the place, but it somehow seemed perfectly familiar.

A camping rig straddled the fire, holding a tin coffee mug and a suspended pot of what smelled like some kind of rich stew, maybe venison.

My father sat across the fire from me.

Malcolm Dresden was a tall, spare man with dark hair and steady blue eyes. His jeans were as heavily worn as his leather hiking boots, and I could see that he was wearing his favorite red-and-white flannel shirt under his fleece-lined hunting jacket. He leaned forward and stirred the pot, then took a sip from the spoon.

“Not bad,” he said. He picked up a couple of tin mugs from one of the stones surrounding the fire and grabbed the coffeepot by its wooden handle. He poured coffee into both cups, hung the coffeepot back over the fire, and offered me one of them. “You warm enough?”

I accepted the mug and just stared at him for a moment. Maybe I had expected him to look exactly like I remembered, but he didn’t. He looked so thin. He looked young, maybe even younger than me. And…so very, very ordinary.

“You go deaf, son?” my father asked, grinning. “Or mute?”

I fumbled for words. “It’s cold out here.”

“It is that,” he agreed.

He pulled a couple of packs of powdered creamer from a knapsack, and passed them over to me along with a couple of packs of sugar. We prepared the coffee in silence and sipped at it for a few moments. It filled me with an earthy, satisfying warmth that made the terrible chill along my spine more bearable.

“This is a nice change of pace from my usual dream,” I said.

“How so?” my father asked.

“Fewer tentacles. Fewer screams. Less death.”

Just then, out in the blackness beneath the trees, something let out an eerie, wailing, alien cry. I shivered and my heart beat a little faster.

“The night is young,” my father said dryly.

There was a rushing sound out in the woods, and I saw the tops of several trees swaying in succession as something, something big, moved among them. From tree to tree, the unseen threat moved, circling the little glade. I looked down and saw ripples on the surface of my coffee. My hand was trembling.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son,” he said. He took a sip of his coffee and regarded the motion in the trees without fear. “You know what it is. You know what it wants.”

I swallowed. “The demon.”

He nodded, blue eyes on mine.

“I don’t suppose—”

“I’m fresh out of vorpal swords,” my father said. He reached into the pack and tossed me a miniature candy bar. “The closest I can get is a Snickers snack.”

“You call that a funny line?” I asked.

“Look who’s talking.”

“So,” I said. “Why haven’t I dreamed about you before?”

“Because I wasn’t allowed to contact you before,” my father said easily. “Not until others had crossed the line.”

“Allowed?” I asked. “What others? What line?”

He waved a hand. “It isn’t important. And we don’t have much time here before it returns.”

I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. “Okay, I’m done with the stupid nostalgia dream. Why don’t you go back to wherever you came from and I’ll have a nice soothing dream of going to work naked.”

He laughed. “That’s better. I know you’re afraid, son. Afraid for your friends. Afraid for yourself. But know this: You are not alone.”

I blinked at him several times. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’m not a part of your own subconscious, son. I’m me. I’m real.”

“No offense, but of course the dream version of you would say that,” I said.

He smiled. “Is that what your heart tells you I am? A dreamed shadow of memory?”

I stared at him for a minute and then shook my head. “It can’t be you. You’re dead.”

He stood up, walked around the fire, then dropped to one knee beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Yes. I’m dead. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not here. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, boy.”

The light of the fire blurred in front of my eyes, and a horrible pang went through my chest. “Dad?”

His hand squeezed tighter. “I’m here.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “Why am I so afraid?”

“Because you’ve got more to lose than you ever have before,” he said. “Your brother. Your friends. You’ve opened yourself up to them. Loved them. You can’t bear the thought of someone taking them away from you.”

“It’s getting to be too much,” I said. My voice shook. “I just keep getting more wounded and tired. They just keep coming at me. I’m not some kind of superhero. I’m just me. And I didn’t want any of this. I don’t want to die.”

He put his other hand on my other shoulder and faced me intently. I met his eyes while he spoke. “That fear is natural. But it is also a weakness. A path of attack for what would prey upon your mind. You must learn to control it.”

“How?” I whispered.

“No one can tell you that,” he said. “Not me. Not an angel. And not a fallen angel. You are the product of your own choices, Harry, and nothing can change that. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.”

“But…my choices haven’t always been very good,” I said.

“Whose have?” he asked. He smiled at me and rose. “I’m sorry, son, but I have to go.”

“Wait,” I said.

He put his hand on my head, and for that brief second I was a child again, tired and small and utterly certain of my father’s strength.

“My boy. There’s so much still ahead of you.”

“So much?” I whispered.

“Pain. Joy. Love. Death. Heartache. Terrible waters. Despair. Hope. I wish I could have been with you longer. I wish I could have helped you prepare for it.”

“For what?” I asked him.

“Shhhhh,” he said. “Sleep. I’ll keep the fire lit until morning.”

And darkness and deep, silent, blissfully restful night swallowed me whole.

Chapter

Twelve

The next morning my brain was throbbing with far too many thoughts and worries to allow for any productive thinking. I couldn’t afford that. Until I knew exactly what was going on and how to stop it, the most important weapon in my arsenal was reason.

I needed to clear my head.

I got my running clothes on as quietly as I could, but as tired as Butters looked I could probably have decked myself in a full suit of Renaissance plate armor without waking him. I took Mouse on his morning walk, filled up a plastic sports bottle with cold water, and headed for the door.

Thomas stood waiting for me at the SUV, dressed as I was in shorts and a T-shirt. Only he made it look casually chic, whereas I looked like I bought my wardrobe at garage sales.

“Where’s the Beetle?” he asked.

“Shop,” I said. “Someone beat it up.”

“Why?”

“Not sure yet,” I said. “Feel like a run?”

“Why?” he asked.

“My head’s full. Need to move.”

Thomas nodded in understanding. “Where?”

“Beach.”

“Sure,” he said. He hooked a thumb at the SUV. “What’s with the battleship?”

“Billy and Georgia loaned it to me.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Nice and stupid. It won’t last long with me driving it.” I sighed. “But I need the wheels. Come on. It’s after dawn, but I still don’t want to leave Butters alone for long.”

He nodded, and we got into the SUV. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“God, not until I can blow off some steam running.”

“I hear you,” he said, and we remained silent all the way to the beach.

North Avenue Beach is one of the most popular spots in town in the summer. On a cloudy morning at the end of October, though, not many folk were about. There were two other cars in the parking lot, probably belonging to the two other joggers moving steadily on the running trail.

I parked the SUV, and Thomas and I got out. I spent a couple of minutes stretching, though it probably wasn’t as thorough as it should have been. Thomas just leaned against the SUV, watching me without comment. From what I’ve seen, vampires don’t seem to have a real big problem with pulled muscles. I nodded to him, and we both hit the running trail, starting off at the slowest jog I could manage. I ran like that for maybe ten minutes before I felt warm enough to pick up the pace. Thomas matched me the whole time, his eyes half-closed and distant. My breathing hit a comfortable stride, hard but not labored. Thomas didn’t breathe hard at first, either, but my legs are a lot longer than his, and I’d developed a taste for running as exercise over the past few years. I shifted into a higher gear, and finally made him start working to keep up with me.

We ran down the beach, past the beach house—a large structure built to resemble the top few decks of an old riverboat, giving the impression that the vessel had sunk into the sand of the beach. At the far end of the beach we would turn and come back. We went all the way down and back three times before I slowed the pace a little, and said, “So you wanna hear what’s going on?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Okay.” There was no one nearby, and by now the sun had risen enough to touch the top of the Chicago skyline behind me. Mavra couldn’t have been listening in herself, and it was unlikely any mortal accomplice could, either. It was as close to ideal privacy as I was likely to get. I started with the arrival of Mavra’s package and told Thomas of the events of the entire evening.

“You know what we should do?” Thomas asked when I was finished. “We should kill Mavra. We could make it a family project.”

“No,” I said. “If we take her out, Murphy will be the one to suffer for it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thomas said. “I’m pretty sure I know what Murphy would have to say about that.”

“I don’t want it to come to that,” I said. “Besides, whatever this Word of Kemmler is, there are some seriously nasty people after it. It’s probably a good idea to make sure they don’t get it.”

“Right,” Thomas said. “So you keep it away from the nasty people so you can give it to the nasty vampire.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said.

“So Murphy gets burned anyway?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes. “Not if I can help it.”

“How are you going to manage that?”

“I’m working on it,” I said. “The first step is to find The Word of Kemmler, or the whole thing is a bust.”

“How do you do that?”

“The map,” I said. “I don’t think these guys are running around working the major black magic for no reason. I need to check out where they’ve been and figure out what they were doing.”

“What about Butters?” Thomas asked.

“For now we keep him behind my wards. I don’t know why Grevane wanted him, and until I figure it out he’s got to keep his head down.”

“I doubt Grevane was looking for a polka afficionado,” Thomas said.

“I know. It’s got something to do with one of the bodies at the morgue.”

“So why not go there?” Thomas asked.

“Because the guard was killed there. There’s blood all over the place, maybe the guard’s body, and God only knows what Grevane did to the place after we left. The cops will have it locked down hard by now, and they’ll definitely want to have a nice long talk with anyone who might have been there. I can’t afford to spin my wheels in an interrogation room right now. Neither can Butters.”

“So ask Murphy to look around,” Thomas said.

I ground my teeth together for a few steps. “I can’t. Murphy’s on vacation.”

“Oh,” he said.

“I’m watering her plants.”

“Right.”

“While she’s in Hawaii.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“With Kincaid.”

Thomas stopped running.

I didn’t.

He caught up to me a hundred yards later. “Well, that’s a bitch.”

I grunted. “I think she wanted me to tell her not to go,” I said. “I think that’s why she came to see me.”

“So why didn’t you?” he asked.

“Didn’t realize it until it was too late. Besides, she’s not my girlfriend. Or anything. Not my place to tell her who she should see.” I shook my head. “Besides…I mean, if it was going to be right with Murphy, it would have been right before now, right? If we got all involved and it didn’t work out, it would really screw things up for me. I mean, most of my living comes from jobs for SI.”

“That’s real reasonable and mature, Harry,” Thomas said.

“It’s smarter not to try to complicate things.”

Thomas frowned at me for a moment. Then he said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. Yeah.”

“Little brother,” he said, “I simply cannot get over how stupid you are at times.”

“Stupid? You just told me it was reasonable.”

“Your excuses are,” Thomas said, “but love isn’t.”

“We’re not in love!”

“Never gonna be,” Thomas said, “if you keep being all logical about it.”

“Like you’re one to talk.”

Thomas’s shoes hit the trail a little more sharply. “I know what it’s like to lose it. Don’t be an idiot, Harry. Don’t lose it like I did.”

“I can’t lose what I haven’t ever had.”

“You have a chance,” he said, a snarl in his words, and I had the sudden sense that he had come precariously close to violent action. “And that’s more than I’ve got.”

I didn’t push him. We got to the end of the trail and moved off it, slowing to walk down the beach, winding down. “Thomas,” I said, “what’s wrong with you today, man?”

“I’m hungry,” he said, his voice a low growl.

“We can hit a McDonald’s or something on the way home,” I suggested.

He bared his teeth. “Not that kind of hunger.”

“Oh.” We walked awhile more, and I said, “But you fed just yesterday.”

He laughed, a short and bitter sound. “Fed? No. That woman…that wasn’t anything.”

“She looked like she’d just run a marathon. You took from her.”

“I took.” He spat the words. “But there’s no substance to it. I didn’t take deeply from her. Not from anyone anymore. Not since Justine.”

“But food is food, right?” I said.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

“Why?”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“There’s no point in telling you,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t understand,” he said.

“Not if you don’t tell me, dolt,” I said. “Thomas, I’m your brother. I want to understand you.” I stopped and put my hand on his shoulder, shoving him just hard enough to make him turn to face me. “Look, I know it’s not working out the way we hoped. But dammit, if you just go storming off every time you get upset about something, if you don’t give me the chance to understand you, we’re never going to get anywhere.”

He closed his eyes, frustration evident on his face. He started walking down the beach, just at the edge of what passed for surf in Lake Michigan. I kept pace. He walked all the way down the beach, then stopped abruptly and said, “Race me back. Beat me there, and I’ll tell you.”

I blinked. “What kind of kindergarten crap is that?”

His grey eyes flashed with anger. “You want to know what it’s like? Beat me down the beach.”

“Of all the ridiculous, immature nonsense,” I said. Then I hooked a foot behind Thomas’s calf, shoved him down to the sand, and took off down the beach at a dead sprint.

There’s an almost primal joy in the sheer motion and power of running a race. Children run everywhere for a reason—it’s fun. Grown-ups can forget that sometimes. I stretched out my legs, still loose from the longer jog, and even though I was running across sand, the thrill of each stride filled my thoughts.

Behind me, Thomas spat out a curse and scrambled to his feet, setting out after me.

We ran through the grey light. The morning had dawned cold, and even at the lakeside the air was pretty dry. Thomas got ahead of me for a couple of steps, looked back, and kicked his heel, flinging sand into my face and eyes. I inhaled some of it, started gasping and choking, but managed to hook my fingers in the back of Thomas’s T-shirt. I tugged hard as he stepped, and I outweighed Thomas considerably. He stumbled again, and, choking and gasping, I got ahead of him. I regained my lead and held it.

The last hundred yards were the worst. The cold, dry air and sand burned at my throat, that sharp, painful dryness that only a long run and hard breathing can really do to you. I swerved off the sand toward the parking lot, Thomas’s footsteps close behind me.

I beat him back to the SUV by maybe four steps, slapped the back of the vehicle with my hand, then leaned against it, panting heavily. My throat felt like it had been baked in a kiln, and as soon as I could manage it I took the keys out of my black nylon sports pouch. There were several keys on the ring, and I fumbled at them one at a time. After the third wrong guess I had a brief, sharp urge to break the window and grab the bottle of water I’d left sitting in the driver’s seat. I managed to force myself to try the keys methodically until I found the right one.

I opened the door, grabbed the bottle, twisted off the cap, and lifted it to ease the parched discomfort in my throat.

I took my first gulp, and the water felt and tasted like it had come from God’s own water cooler. It took the harshest edge off the burning thirst, but I needed more to ease the discomfort completely.

Before I could swallow again, Thomas batted the water bottle out of my hand. It arched through the air and landed on the sand, spilling uselessly onto the beach.

I spun on Thomas, staring at him in surprised anger.

He met my gaze with weary grey eyes and said, “It’s like that.”

I stared at him.

“It’s exactly like that.” His expression didn’t change as he went around and got into the SUV on the passenger side.

I stayed where I was for a moment, trying to ignore my thirst. It was all but impossible to do so. I thought about living with that discomfort and pain hour after hour, day after day, knowing that all I had to do was pick up a vessel filled with what I needed and empty it to make me feel whole. Would I be able to content myself with a quick splash of relief now and then? Would I be able to take enough to keep me alive?

For a time, perhaps. But time itself would make the thirst no easier to bear. Time would inevitably weigh me down. It would become more difficult to concentrate and to sleep, which would in turn undermine my self-control, which would make it more difficult to concentrate and sleep—a vicious cycle. How long would I be able to last?

Thomas had done it for most of a year.

I wasn’t sure I would have done as well in his place.

I got into the SUV, closed the door, and said, “Thank you.”

My brother nodded. “What now?”

“We go to 7-Eleven,” I said. “Drinks are on you.”

He smiled a little and nodded. “Then what?”

I took a deep breath. The run had helped me clear some of the crap out of my head. Talking to my brother had helped a little more. Understanding him a little better made me both more concerned and a bit more confident. I had my head together enough to see the next step I needed to take.

“The apartment. You keep an eye on Butters,” I said. “I’m hitting these spots on the map to see what I can find. If I can’t turn up anything on my own, I might have to go to the Nevernever for some answers.”

“That’s dangerous, isn’t it?” he said.

I started the car and shrugged my shoulder. “It’s a living.”

Chapter

Thirteen

I took a shower, got dressed, and left Thomas behind with the still-sleeping Butters. Thomas settled down on the couch with a candle, a book, and an old U.S. cavalry saber he’d picked up in an estate sale and honed to a scalpel’s edge. I left the sawed-off shotgun on the coffee table within arm’s reach, and Thomas nodded his thanks to me.

“Keep an eye on him?” I asked.

Thomas turned a page. “Nothing will touch him.”

Mouse settled down on the floor between Butters and the door, and huffed out a breath.

I got into the SUV and got out Mort’s map. I headed for the nearest magical hot spot marked in bloody ink on the map—the spot of sidewalk on Wacker.

It was a bitch to find a parking place. It’s never easy in Chicago, and I had a shot at a pretty good spot on the street, but while the Beetle would have managed just fine, the SS Loaner would have had to smash the cars on either side a few inches apart to fit. I wound up taking out a mortgage to pay for a parking space at a garage, walked a couple of city blocks, and proceeded down the street with my wizard’s senses alert, feeling for the dark energy that the city’s dead had found.

I found the spot on the sidewalk outside of a corner pharmacy.

It was so small I had walked almost completely through it before I felt it. It felt almost like walking into air-conditioning. The residual magic felt cold, like the other dark power I’d touched, terribly cold, and my skin erupted in goose bumps. I stopped on the spot, closed my eyes, and focused on the remaining energy.

It felt strange somehow. Dawn had dispersed most of the energy that had been there, but even as an aftertaste of the magic that had been worked there, the cold was dizzying. I’d felt dark power similar to this before today—similar, but not identical. There was something about this that was unlike the horrible aura surrounding Grevane, or that I had sensed from wielders of black magic in my past. This was undeniably the same power, but it somehow lacked the greasy, nauseating sense of corruption I’d felt before.

That was all I could sense. I frowned and looked around. There was a spot on the sidewalk that might have been a half-cleaned bloodstain, or might have been spilled coffee. Around me, business-day commuters came and went, some of them pausing to give me annoyed glares. Cars purred by on the street.

I checked at the pharmacy, but the place had been closed the night before, and no one had been there or heard about anything out of the ordinary. I checked the neighboring places of business, but it was a part of town where not much was open after six or seven in the evening, and no one had seen or heard about anything out of the ordinary.

Most of the time the investigation business is like that. You do a lot of looking and not finding. The cure for it is to do more looking. I walked back to the SUV and went to the next spot on the map, at the Field Museum.

The Field Museum is on Lake Shore Drive, and occupies the whole block north of Soldier’s Field. I felt a brief flash of gratitude that things usually went to hell during the workweek. If this had been a Sunday with the Bears at home, I’d have had to park and then backpack in from Outer Mongolia. As it was, I got a spot in the smaller parking lot in the same block as the museum, which cost me only a portion of the national gross income.

I walked to the entrance from the parking lot, and slowed my steps for a few strides. There were two patrol cars and an ambulance parked outside the Field Museum’s main entrance. Aha. This stop looked like it might be a bit more interesting than the last one.

The doors had just opened for normal visiting hours, and it cost me yet more of my money to get a ticket. My wallet was getting even more anorexic than usual. At this rate I wouldn’t be able to afford to protect mankind from the perils of black magic. Hell’s bells, that would be really embarrassing.

I went in the front entrance. It’s impressively big. The first thing my eyes landed on was the crown jewel of the Field Museum—Sue, the largest, most complete, and most beautifully preserved skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. They’re the actual petrified bones, too—none of this cheap plastic modeling crap for the tourists. The museum prided itself on the authenticity of the exhibit, and with reason. There’s no way to stand in Sue’s shadow, to see the bones of the enormous hunter, its size, its power, its enormous teeth, without feeling excruciatingly edible.

Late October is not the museum’s high traffic season, and I saw only a couple of other visitors in the great entrance hall. Museum security was in evidence, a couple of men in brown quasi-uniforms, and an older fellow with greying hair and a comfortable-looking suit. The man in the suit stood next to an unobtrusive doorway, talking to a couple of uniformed police officers, neither of whom I recognized.

I moseyed over closer to the three of them, casually browsing over various exhibits until I could get close enough to Listen in.

“…damnedest thing,” the old security chief was saying. “Never would have figured that this kind of business would happen here.”

“People are people,” said the older of the two cops, a black man in his forties. “We can all get pretty crazy.”

The younger cop was a little overweight and had a short haircut the color of steamed carrots. “Sir, do you know of anyone who might have had some kind of argument with Mister Bartlesby?”

“Doctor,” the security man said. “Dr. Bartlesby.”

“Right,” said the younger cop, writing on a notepad. “But do you know of anyone like that?”

The security man shook his head. “Dr. Bartlesby was a crotchety old bastard. No one liked him much, but I don’t know of anyone who disliked him enough to kill him.”

“Did he associate with anyone here?”

“He had a pair of assistants,” the security chief replied. “Grad students, I think. Young woman and a young man.”

“They a couple?” the younger cop asked.

“Not that I could tell,” the security chief said.

“Names?” the older cop asked.

“Alicia Nelson was the girl. The guy was Chinese or something. Lee Shawn or something.”

“Does the museum have records on them?” the cop asked.

“I don’t think so. They came in with Dr. Bartlesby.”

“How long have you known the doctor?” the older cop asked.

“About two months,” the security chief said. “He was a visiting professor doing a detailed examination of one of the traveling exhibits. It’s already been taken down and packed up. He was due to leave in a few more days.”

“Which exhibit?” the young cop asked.

“One of the Native American displays,” the security man supplied. “Cahokian artifacts.”

“Ka-what?” the older cop asked.

“Cahokian,” the security chief said. “Amerind tribe that was all over the Mississippi River valley seven or eight hundred years ago, I guess.”

“Were these artifacts valuable?” asked the older cop.

“Arguably,” the security chief said. “But their value is primarily academic. Pottery shards, old tools, stone weapons, that kind of thing. They wouldn’t be easy to liquidate.”

“People do crazy things,” the young cop said, still writing.

“If you say so,” the security chief said. “Look, fellas, the museum would really like to get this cleared up as quickly as possible. It’s been hours already. Can’t we get the remains taken out now?”

“Sorry, sir,” the older cop said. “Not until the detectives are done documenting the scene.”

“How long will that take?” the security chief asked.

The older cop’s radio clicked, and he took it off his belt and had a brief conversation. “Sir,” he told the security chief, “they’re removing the body now. Forensics will be over in a couple of hours to sweep the room.”

“Why the delay?” the chief asked.

The cop answered with a shrug. “But until then, I’m afraid we’ll have to close down access to the crime scene.”

“There are a dozen different senior members of the staff with offices off of that hallway,” the security chief protested.

“I’m sure they’ll finish up as quickly as they can, sir,” the cop said, though his tone brooked no debate.

“Told my boss I’d give it a try.” The chief sighed. “You want to come explain it to him?”

“Glad to,” the cop said with a forced smile. “Lead the way.” The two cops and the security chief strode off together, presumably to talk to somebody with an office, a receptionist, and an irritatingly skewed perspective on the importance of isolating a crime scene.

I chewed on my lip. I was pretty sure that the apparent murder the cops were talking about and my hot spot of dark magic had to be related to each other. But if the hot spot was located on a murder site, it would be shut away from any access. Forensics could spend hours, even days, going over a room for evidence.

That meant that if I wanted to get a look around, I had to move immediately. From what the cops had said, Forensics wasn’t there yet. The men moving the body were part of the new civilian agency the city government was employing to transport corpses around town, judging from the ambulance outside. Both cops were with the security chief, which would mean that at most there was maybe a detective and a cop at the crime scene. There might be a chance that I could get close enough to see something.

It took me about two seconds to make up my mind. The minute the security chief was out of sight, I slipped through the nondescript doorway, down a flight of stairs, and into the plain and unassuming hallways meant for the Field Museum’s staff instead of its visitors. I passed a small alcove with a fridge, a counter, and a coffee machine. I picked up a cup of coffee, a bagel, a newspaper, and a spiral notebook someone had left there. I piled up everything in my arms and tried to look like a bored academic on his way to his office. I had no clue where I was going yet, but I tried to walk like I knew what I was doing, reaching out with my arcane senses in an effort to feel where the remnants of the hot spot might be.

I chose intersections methodically, left each time. I hit a couple of dead ends, but tried to keep close track of where I was going. The complex of tunnels and hallways under the Field Museum could swallow a small army without needing a glass of water, and I couldn’t afford to get lost down there.

It took me fifteen minutes to find it. One hallway had been marked with crime-scene tape, and I homed in on it. Even before I turned down the hall, my senses prickled with uneasy cold. I’d found my hot spot of necromantic energy, and there was a murder scene at its center. I heard footsteps and slipped to one side, remaining still as a pair of cops in suits came out, arguing quietly with each other about the shortest path outside so that they could smoke. They’d been cooped up with the body, taking pictures and documenting the scene since before anyplace had been open for breakfast, and neither one of them sounded like he was in a good mood.

“Rawlins,” said one of them into his radio, “where the hell are you?”

“Talking to some administrator,” came the reply, the voice of the older cop from upstairs.

“How soon can you get down here to watch the site?”

“Give me a few minutes.”

“Dammit,” cursed the other detective. “Bastard is doing this on purpose.”

The one with the radio nodded. “Screw this. I’ve been on duty since noon yesterday. We’ve got the scene documented. It’ll keep for two minutes while he walks his slow ass down here.”

The other detective nodded his agreement and they left.

I set my props aside and slipped under the tape and down the hallway. There were office doors every couple of steps, all closed. At the end of the hall a door stood open, the lights on. I might have only a few minutes, and if I was going to learn anything it had to be now. I hurried forward.

There might not have been a body there anymore, but even before I saw it, the room stank of death. It’s an elusive scent, something that you get as a bonus to other smells, rather than a distinctive smell of its own. The thick, sweet odor of blood was in the air, mixed in with the faint stench of offal. There was the musty, moldy smell of old things long underground, too, as well as a few traces of something spicier, maybe some kind of incense. The death scent was mixed all through it, something sharp and unnerving, halfway between burned meat and cheap ammonia-based cleaner. My stomach rolled uncomfortably, and the rising sense of dark energy didn’t help me keep it calm.

The office was a fairly large one. Shelves and filing cabinets lined the walls. Three desks sat clumped together in the middle of the room. A small refrigerator sat in the corner, near an old couch and a coffee table littered with mostly empty boxes of Chinese takeout and a laptop computer. Books and boxes filled the shelves. The desks were cluttered with books, notebooks, folders, and a few personal articles—a novelty coffee mug, a couple of picture frames, and some recent popular novels.

Everything had been splattered with blood and dark magic.

The blood had dried out, and most of it was either red-black or dark brown. There was a large pool on the floor between the door and the nearest desk, dried into a sticky sludge. A sharp, almost straight line marked where the corpse had been lifted, probably peeling up the hem of a jacket or coat from where it had been stuck to the floor. Droplets had splattered the walls, the desk, the photographs, the novels, and the novelty mugs.

I hated blood. As a decorating theme it left something to be desired. And it smelled horrible. My stomach twisted again, and I fought to keep down the doughnuts I’d grabbed at the convenience store. I closed my eyes and then forced myself to open them again. To look. The only way to avoid more scenes like this was to look at this one, figure out who had done it, and then to go stop them from doing it again.

I pushed my revulsion away and focused on the scene, searching for details.

There were a few smears of blood on the floor but none on the sides, surface, or edge of the nearest desk. That meant that the victim hadn’t moved much after he’d gone down. Either he’d been held down or he’d bled out so quickly that he hadn’t had time to crawl toward the nearest phone, on the desk, to call for help. I looked up. There wasn’t much blood on the ceiling. That didn’t prove anything, but if someone had opened his throat, there would almost certainly have been blood sprayed all over it. Any other kind of bleeding wound would probably have left the victim, evidently Dr. Bartlesby, able to function, at least for a couple of minutes. He’d probably been held down.

I looked down. There was part of a footprint in blood on the floor, leading away. It looked like part of the heel of an athletic shoe—and not a large one, either. Probably a woman’s shoe, or a large child’s. For the sake of my ability to sleep at night, I hoped it was an adult’s shoe. Children shouldn’t see such things.

Then again, who should?

On an entirely different level, the room was even more disturbing. The dark power here was not the pure, silent cold I’d felt on the sidewalk on Wacker. It felt corrupt, dark, somehow mutilated. There was a sense of malicious glee to the residue of whatever magic had been worked here. Someone had used their power to murder a man—and they had loved doing it. Worse, it was a distinctly different aura than I had felt near either Cowl or Grevane. Magical workings didn’t leave behind an exact finger-print that could be traced to a given wizard, but intuition told me that this working had been sloppier and more frenetic than something Grevane would have done, and messier than Cowl would prefer.

But it was strong—stronger magic than almost anything I had ever done. Whoever was behind the spell that had been wrought here was at least as powerful as I was. Maybe stronger.

“Heh,” drawled a voice from behind me. “I thought that was you.”

I stiffened and turned around. The older of the two cops from upstairs stood ten feet down the hall from me, one hand resting casually on the butt of his sidearm. His dark face was wary, but not openly hostile, and his stance one of caution but not alarm. The name tag on his jacket read RAWLINS.

“Thought who was me?” I asked him.

“Harry Dresden,” he said. “The wizard. The guy Murphy hires for SI.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s me.”

He nodded. “I saw you upstairs. You didn’t look like your typical museum patron.”

“It was the big leather coat, wasn’t it?” I said.

“That helped,” Rawlins acknowledged. “What are you doing down here?”

“Just looking,” I said. “I haven’t gone into the room.”

“Yeah. You can tell that from how I haven’t arrested you yet.” Rawlins looked past me, into the room, and his expression sobered. “Hell of a thing in there.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Something don’t feel right about it,” he said. “Just…I don’t know. Sets my teeth on edge. More than usual. I’ve seen knifings before. This is different.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

Dark eyes flicked back to me, and the old cop exhaled. “This is something from down SI’s way?”

“Yeah.”

He grunted. “Murphy send you?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Why you here then?”

“Because I don’t like things that put cops’ teeth on edge,” I said. “You guys have any suspects?”

“For someone who just happened to be walking by, you got a lot of questions,” he said.

“For a beat cop in charge of securing the scene, you were asking plenty of your own,” I said. “Upstairs, with museum security.”

He grinned, teeth very white. “Shoot. I been a detective before. Twice.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Busted back down?”

“Both times, on account of I have an attitude problem,” Rawlins said.

I gave him a lopsided smile. “You going to arrest me?”

“Depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“On why you’re here.” He met my gaze directly, openly, his hand still on his gun.

I didn’t meet his eyes for very long. I glanced over my shoulder, debating how to answer, and decided to go with a little sincerity. “There are some bad people in town. I don’t think the police can get them. I’m trying to find them before they hurt anyone else.”

He studied me for a long minute. Then he took his hand off the gun and reached into his coat. He tossed me a folded newspaper.

I caught it and unfolded it. It was some kind of academic newsletter, and on the cover page was a photograph of a portly old man with sideburns down to his jaw, together with a smiling young woman and a young man with Asian features. The caption under the picture read, Visiting Professor Charles Bartlesby and his assistants, Alicia Nelson, Li Xian, prepare to examine Cahokian collection at the FMNH, Chicago.

“That’s the victim in the middle,” Rawlins said. “His assistants shared the office with him. They have not been answering their cell phone numbers and are not in their apartments.”

“Suspects?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not many people murder strangers,” he said. “They were the only ones in town who knew the victim. Came in with him from England somewhere.”

I looked from the newsletter up to Rawlins, and frowned. “Why are you helping me?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Helping you? You could have found that anywhere. And I never saw you.”

“Understood,” I said. “But why?”

He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Because when I was a young cop, I went running down an alley when I heard a woman scream. And I saw something. Something that…” His face became remote. “Something that has given me bad dreams for about thirty years. This thing strangling a girl. I push it away from her, empty my gun into it. It picks me up and slams my head into a wall a few times. I figured Mama Rawlins’s baby boy was about to go the way of the dodo.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Murphy’s father showed up with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and killed it. And when the sun comes up, it burns this thing’s corpse like it had been soaked in gasoline.” Rawlins shook his head. “I owed her old man. And I seen enough of the streets to know that she’s been doing a lot of good. You been helping her with that.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I told him.

He nodded. “Don’t really feel like losing my job for you, Dresden. Get out before someone sees you.”

Something occurred to me. “You heard about the Forensic Institute?”

He shrugged at me. “Sure. Every cop has.”

“I mean what happened there last night,” I said.

Rawlins shook his head. “I haven’t heard of anything.”

I frowned at him. A grisly murder at the morgue would have been all over the place, in police scuttlebutt if not in the newspapers. “You haven’t? Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure.”

I nodded at him and walked down the hallway.

“Hey,” he said.

I looked over my shoulder.

“Can you stop them?” Rawlins asked.

“I hope so.”

He glanced at the bloodied room and then back at me. “All right. Good hunting, kid.”

Chapter

Fourteen

“Wow,” Butters said, fiddling with the control panel on the

SUV. “This thing has everything. Satellite radio stations. And I bet I could put my whole CD collection inside the changer on this player. And, oh, cool, check it out. It’s got an onboard GPS, too, so we can’t get lost.” Butters pushed a button on the control panel.

A calm voice emerged from the dashboard. “Now entering Helsinki.”

I arched an eyebrow at the dashboard and then at Butters. “Maybe the car is lost.”

“Maybe you’re interfering with its computer, too,” Butters said.

“You think?”

He smiled tightly, checking his seat belt for the tenth time. “Just so we’re clear, I have no problems with hiding, Harry. I mean, if you’re worried about my ego or something, don’t. I’m fine with the hiding. Happy, even.”

I pulled off the highway. The green lawns and tended trees of the industrial park hosting the Forensic Institute appeared as the SUV rolled up the ramp. “Try to relax, Butters.”

He jerked his head in a nervous, negative shake. “I don’t want to get killed. Or arrested. I’m really bad at being arrested. Or killed.”

“It’s a calculated risk,” I said. “We need to find out what Grevane wanted with you.”

“And we’re taking me to work…why?” “

“Think about it. What would have happened if they’d found you missing, blood all over the place, the building ransacked, and Phil’s corpse lying in the morgue or on the lawn outside?”

“Someone would have gotten fired,” Butters said.

“Yeah. And they would have locked down the building to search for evidence. And they would have grabbed you and locked you away somewhere, for questioning at least.”

“So?” Butters asked.

“If Grevane cleaned up what happened at the morgue, it means he didn’t want too much official attention focused there. Whatever he wants from you, I’m betting it’s still in the building.” I pulled into the industrial park. “We have to find it.”

“Eduardo Mendoza?” he asked me.

“Offhand, I can’t think of any other reason for someone to want to grab your friendly neighborhood assistant medical examiner,” I said. “Grevane’s got to be interested in a corpse at the morgue, and that one was the only one that seemed a little odd.”

“Harry,” Butters said, “if this guy really is a necromancer—a wizard of the dead—then why the hell would he need a plain old vanilla science nerd like me?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” I said. “And we have another reason, too.”

“The museum doctor guy, right?” Butters asked.

I nodded at him and parked in the lot next to Butters’s ruined little truck. “Right. I need to know what killed him. Hell, any information could be useful.”

Butters exhaled. “Well. I don’t know what I’ll be able to manage.”

“Anything is more than I have now.”

He looked around warily. “Do you think…do you think Grevane or his buddy is out there right now? Watching for…you know…me?”

I pulled open my coat and showed Butters my shoulder holster and gun. Then I reached behind me and drew out my staff from the back of the SUV. “If they show up, I’m going to ruin their whole day.”

He chewed on his lip. “You can do that, right?”

I took a look around and said, “Butters, trust me. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s ruining people’s day.”

He let out a nervous little laugh. “You can say that again.”

“If there’s one thing I’m good at—” I began. Butters punched me lightly on the arm, and I smiled at him. “We’ll get in and out as quick as we can, get you back under cover. I think we’ve got it under control.”

I killed the SUV’s ignition and pulled out the key. The truck shuddered, and a warbling, wailing sound came from the dashboard. For a second I expected someone to shout, “Red alert, all hands to battle stations!” Instead there was a hiccup of sound from the truck, and then a smooth, recorded voice reported, “Warning. The door is ajar. The door is ajar.”

I blinked at the dashboard. It repeated the warning several more times, getting a little slower and lower pitched each time, then droned into a basso rumble, followed by silence.

“That was not an omen,” I said firmly.

“Right,” Butters replied in a faint voice. “Because stuff is always messing up around you.”

“Exactly,” I said. I tried to think of a way to wring positive spin from that last statement, but I wasn’t up to the mental gymnastics. “Come on. The sooner we get moving, the sooner we get you out of here.”

“Okay,” he said, and the pair of us got out of the SUV and headed for the Forensic Institute. As we approached the door, I started limping and leaning on my staff a little, as if I needed the support. Butters opened the door for me, and I hobbled in with a pained expression on my face as we approached the security desk.

I didn’t know the guard on duty. He was in his mid-twenties and looked athletic. He watched us coming, squinting a little, and when we were well inside his eyebrows lifted. “Dr. Butters,” he said, evidently surprised. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Casey,” Butters said, giving him a jerky nod of the head. “Hey, I like the new haircut. Is Dr. Brioche in?”

“He’s working now,” Casey said. “Room one, I think. What are you doing here?”

“Hoping to avoid a lecture,” Butters replied dryly. He clipped his identification to his coat. “I forgot to file some forms, and if I don’t get them done before the mail goes out, Brioche will scold me until my eyes bleed.”

Casey nodded and looked me over. “Who’s this?”

“Harry Dresden,” Butters said. “He’s got to sign off on the forms. He’s a consultant for the police department. Harry, this is Casey O’Roarke.”

“Charmed,” I said, and handed him the laminated identification card Murphy had issued me to get me through police lines to crime scenes. As I did, I felt another cold pocket of dark energy. Grevane had murdered and then reanimated Phil while the poor guy was sitting at his desk.

Casey examined the card, checked my face against the picture on it, and passed it back to me with a polite smile. “You want me to tell Dr. Brioche you’re here, Dr. Butters?”

Butters shuddered. “Not particularly.”

“Right,” Casey said, and waved us past. We were almost out of the entry hall when he spoke again. “Doctor? Did you see Phil this morning?”

Butters hesitated for a second before he turned around. “He was there at the desk the last time I saw him, but I had to leave for an early dentist appointment. Why?”

“Oh, he wasn’t at the desk when I got here,” Casey said. “Everything was locked down, and the security system was armed.”

“May be he had somewhere to be, too,” Butters suggested.

“Maybe,” Casey agreed. There was a faint frown line between his eyes. “He didn’t tell me anything, though. I mean, I’d have come in early if he had an appointment or something.”

“Beats me,” Butters said.

Casey squinted at Butters and then nodded slowly. “Okay. I just wouldn’t want him to get in trouble over breaking protocol.”

“You know Phil,” Butters said.

Casey rolled his eyes and nodded, then went back to filling out some kind of paperwork. Butters and I slipped away from the entry hall and down to Butters’s usual examination room. The place had been put back together. His desk rested in its usual spot, piled with papers and his computer. Whoever had cleaned up the room had done a fairly good job of it.

“Casey knows something,” Butters said the minute the door was shut. “He suspects something.”

“That’s what they pay security to do,” I said. “Don’t let it rattle you.”

Butters nodded, looking around the examination room. He walked over to his polka suit, still piled in the corner. “At least they didn’t wreck this,” he said. Then he let out a short laugh. “Man. Are my priorities skewed or what?”

“Everyone has something they love,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay. So what do we do now?”

“First things first,” I said. “Can you get a look at Bartlesby’s corpse?”

Butters nodded and walked over to his computer. I backed up and stood against the wall.

Butters started the thing up and spent a minute or two waggling a mouse and stabbing at keys with his forefinger. Then he whistled. “Wow. Bartlesby’s body got here about an hour ago, and it’s been flagged for immediate examination. Brioche is doing it.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

He nodded. “It means someone really wants to know about the victim. Someone in government or law enforcement, maybe.” He wrinkled up his nose. “Plus it was pretty horrific. Brioche will get some press out of it. Of course he took this one for himself.”

“Can you get to it?” I asked.

Butters frowned and tapped a few more keys. Then he looked up at the clock. “Maybe. Brioche is working in room one right now, but he’s got to be almost finished with whatever he’s doing. Bartlesby’s corpse is in room two. If I hurry…” He stood up and scurried for the door. “Wait here.”

“You sure?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Someone really would get suspicious if they saw you roaming around. If I need you I’ll give you a signal.”

“What signal?”

“I’ll imitate the scream of a terrified little girl,” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows. He headed out the door. “Back in a minute.”

Butters wasn’t gone long, and he slipped back into the room before five minutes had passed. He looked a little shaky.

“You all right?” I asked.

He nodded. “Couldn’t stay there for long. I heard Brioche come out of room one.”

“You see the body?”

“Yeah,” Butters said with a shudder. “It was already stripped and laid out. Bad stuff, Harry. He had thirty or forty stab wounds in his upper thorax. Someone carved his face up, too. His nose, ears, eyelids, and lips were in a sandwich Baggie next to his head.” He took a deep breath. “Someone had sliced off the quadriceps on both legs. They were missing. And he’d been eviscerated.”

I frowned. “How?”

“A big X-shaped cut across his abdomen. Then they peeled him open like a Chinese take-out box. He was missing his stomach and most of his intestines. There might have been other organs gone, too.”

“Ick,” I said.

“Extremely.”

“Could you see anything else?”

“No. Even if I’d wanted to, there wasn’t time for more than a quick look.” He walked over to a rolling stand of medical instruments. “Why would someone do that to him? What possible purpose could it have served?”

“Maybe some kind of ritual,” I said. “You’ve seen that before.”

Butters nodded. He went through the motions of pulling on an apron, mask, gloves, cap—the works. “I still don’t get it. You know?”

I did know. Butters didn’t have it in him to comprehend the kind of violence, hatred, and bloodlust that had fallen upon the late Bartlesby. That kind of utter disregard for the sanctity of life simply didn’t exist in his personal world, and it left him at a total loss when confronted with it face-to-face.

“Or,” I said, a thought occurring to me, “it might have been something else. Anthropomancy.”

He walked over to one of the freezers and cracked it open. “What’s that?”

“An attempt to divine the future or gain information by reading human entrails.”

Butters turned to me slowly, his face sickened. “You’re kidding.”

I shook my head. “It’s possible.”

“Does it work?” he asked.

“It’s extremely powerful and dangerous magic,” I answered. “Anyone who does it has to kill someone and gets an immediate death sentence if the Council learns of it. If it didn’t work, no one would bother.”

Butters’s mouth hardened into a firm line. “That’s…really wrong.” He frowned over the sentence and then nodded. “Wrong.”

“I agree.”

He turned back to the freezer, checked a toe tag, and then hauled a rolling exam table over to it. “This might take me a little while,” he said. “An hour and a half, maybe more.”

“You want a hand with that?” I asked. I hoped he didn’t.

Butters, bless him, shook his head. He walked over to his desk and flicked on his CD player. Polka music filled the room. “I’d really rather do this alone.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Just listen for a girlie scream,” he said. “Can you wait for me up front?”

I nodded, leaned my staff in the corner, and left him in the room. He locked the door behind me, and I wandered up to sit down in the waiting area near the front doors. I took a chair that put the wall to my back, and where I could see Casey’s video monitor, the front door, and the door leading back to the examination rooms.

I leaned my head back against the wall with my eyes mostly closed and waited. Over the next hour one doctor came in and another left. The mailman showed up with the day’s deliveries, as did the UPS truck. An ambulance arrived with the cadaver of an old woman that Casey rolled away, presumably into storage.

Then a young couple came in. The girl was about five-six and pleasantly pretty, even without much in the way of makeup. She was dressed in sandals, a simple blue sundress, and a wool jacket. Her hair was cut into a bob full of unruly brown curls, and her eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. The young man wore a simple, well-cut business suit. He was a little under six feet tall, had Asian features, wire-rimmed glasses, wide shoulders, and wore his hair in a long ponytail.

I recognized them: Alicia Nelson and Li Xian, from the picture on the cover of the newsletter Rawlins had given me. Dr. Bartlesby’s missing assistants had come to the morgue.

I remained very still, and tried to think thoughts that would make me blend in with the wall. They walked to the security desk and stood so close to me that I didn’t need to bother with Listening to them.

“Good morning,” Alicia said, producing a driver’s license and showing it to Casey. “My name is Alicia Nelson. I’m the late Dr. Bartlesby’s assistant. I understand that his remains have been brought here.”

Casey regarded her without much in the way of expression. “Ma’am, we do not make that kind of information available to the public, in order to protect the relatives of the deceased.”

She nodded, drew an envelope out of her purse, and passed that to Casey as well. “The doctor had no surviving family or next of kin,” she said. “But he granted me power of attorney over his estate two years ago. The paperwork is all in order.”

Casey scanned it, frowning. “Mmmmph.”

Alicia pushed brown curls wearily from her eyes. “Please, sir, the doctor had several personal effects which I need to take into custody as soon as possible. Passwords, credit cards, keys, that sort of thing. They were in his wallet.”

“What’s the rush?” Casey drawled.

“Some of his effects could potentially grant a thief access to his accounts and security boxes. As you can see in the documents, he wanted control of them to pass to me until I could arrange to have them passed on to the charities he patronized.”

Casey folded up the pages again and put them back in the envelope. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to speak with our director, Dr. Brioche. I’m sure he’ll be happy to help you out.”

“All right,” Alicia agreed. “Is he available?”

“I’ll go speak to him,” Casey said. “If you’ll wait here, please.”

“Of course,” the girl replied. She waited for Casey to go through the security door and then spun on her heel and stalked over to the entrance, staring out at the morning sunlight. Her posture was stiff with anger. She leaned her forearm on the glass door and pressed her forehead to it.

The tall young man, Li Xian, had remained silent the whole while. He followed her over to the door and spoke in a quiet voice I could scarcely hear. I narrowed my eyes and Listened.

“…back at any moment,” Xian murmured. “We should sit down.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Alicia shot back in a heated whisper. “I’m weary, not idiotic.”

“You should get some rest before you do anything more,” Xian said. “I don’t see why you’re playing games. You should have let me follow the guard back.”

“Stop thinking with your stomach,” the girl growled. “It’s bad enough that you lost control without adding a further lack of discipline to the situation.”

“We are not here because I stopped to eat,” Xian replied, anger of his own in his whisper. “If you hadn’t indulged yourself we wouldn’t face this problem.”

The girl spun from the glass, facing Xian squarely, her face contorted with pride and anger. “Your attitude, Li, is making you part of the problem. Not part of the solution.”

The long-haired man went white and cringed back from the girl. His face rippled, a sort of slithery motion just beneath the surface of his skin that stretched his features grotesquely, causing a slight sinking of the eyes, a slight elongation of the jaw. He let out a gasp, and when his mouth opened I could see the teeth of a carnivore.

It happened for only a second, but I averted my eyes before he might have noticed me watching him. If he had seen me, I would have been in immediate danger. I’d seen a flash of Li Xian’s true face—he was a ghoul. Ghouls are preternatural predators who derive their primary sustenance from devouring human flesh. Fresh, cold, rotting, they don’t care as long as it gets into their bellies.

My stomach turned. Butters said that someone had removed Bartlesby’s quadriceps, the long, strong muscles on the front of the thigh. It had been Xian. He’d carved himself steaks from the old man’s corpse. If he suspected that I knew what he was, he might decide to protect himself with extreme prejudice, and that would be bad. Ghouls are quick, strong, and harder to kill than a juicy rumor about the president. I’d fought ghouls before, and it wasn’t something I wanted to repeat if I could avoid it. Especially given that I’d left my staff in Butters’s office.

Xian recovered his normal appearance and lowered his eyes. He bowed his head to Alicia.

“Do I make myself clear?” the girl whispered.

“Yes, my lord,” Xian replied.

Lord? I thought. My mind raced over the possibilities.

Alicia exhaled and pressed her thumb against the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t talk, Xian. Just don’t talk. We’ll all be happier. And safer.” She breezed past him, back to the little waiting area, and sat down. She picked up a copy of Newsweek sitting out on an end table and began to flick through it, while Xian remained standing near the door. I pretended to be drowsing.

Casey returned a couple of minutes later and said, “Ms. Nelson, it’s going to be a while before Dr. Brioche can see you.”

“How long?” she asked, smiling.

“An hour or so at least,” Casey said. “He says that if you’d like to make an appointment for this afternoon that he will be glad to—”

“No,” she interrupted him, shaking her head firmly. “Some of his business is time-critical, and I need to recover his effects at the earliest possible opportunity. Please tell him that I will wait.”

Casey lifted his eyebrows and then shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”

I blinked my eyes a few times and then sat up straight, stretching. “Oh, hey, Casey,” I mumbled, standing. I feigned a limp and went to the desk. “I left my cane in Butters’s office. Would it be okay to go back and grab it?”

Casey nodded. “One second.” He picked up the phone, and a second later I heard polka music pumping through the little speaker. “Doctor, your consultant friend forgot something in your office. You want me to send him back?” He listened, nodding, and then waved me at the door, buzzing me through.

I hurried back to Butters’s examination room and knocked. Butters unlocked the door to let me in.

“Hurry,” I told him, glancing back down the hall. “We’ve got to go.”

Butters gulped. “What’s going on?”

“There are some bad guys here.”

“Grevane?” he asked.

“No. New bad guys,” I said.

“More of them?” Butters said. “That’s not fair.”

“I know. It’s getting to be like Satan’s reunion tour around here.” I shook my head. “Is there a back door?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Grab your stuff and let’s go.”

Butters gestured at the exam table. “But what about Eduardo?”

I chewed on my lip. “You find out anything?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “A car hit him. He suffered some pretty massive blunt impact trauma. He died.”

I frowned and took a few steps toward the corpse. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

Butters shrugged. “If there is, I didn’t see it.”

I frowned down at the dead man. He was a painfully skinny specimen. His abdomen had been opened with a neat Y incision. There was a lot of blood and disgusting-looking greyish flesh. Broken, jagged bone protruded from the skin of one leg. One hand had been crushed into pulp. And his face…

Looked familiar. I recognized him.

“Butters,” I said. “What was this guy’s name?”

“Eduardo Mendoza.”

“His full name,” I said.

“Oh. Uh, Eduardo Antonio Mendoza.”

“Antonio,” I said. “It’s him. It’s Tony.”

“Who?” Butters asked.

“Bony Tony Mendoza,” I said, excited. “He’s a smuggler.”

Butters tilted his head at me. “A smuggler? Not like Han Solo, I guess.”

“No. He’s a ballooner.”

“What’s that?”

I gestured at his head. “He’d done time in a carnival as a sword swallower when he was a kid. He would fill up a balloon with jewels or drugs or whatever other small items he wanted to move around. Then he swallowed the balloon with a string tied to it. Check at the back of his mouth. He’d wedge the string between two of his back teeth and pull the balloon out when the coast was clear.”

“That’s silly,” Butters said, but he went over to the corpse and pried its jaws open. He adjusted an overhead work lamp on a flexible stand and peered down past Bony Tony’s teeth. “Holy crap. It’s there.”

He fished around for a few moments while I went back to the door and picked up my staff. I looked back to see Butters drag from the corpse’s mouth a yellow-white condom with its end closed and a heavy piece of kite cord knotted around it.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Hang on.” Butters sliced the condom open with a scalpel and withdrew a small rectangle of dark plastic, about the size of a key chain ornament.

“What is that?” I asked him.

“It’s a jump drive,” he said, frowning.

“A what?”

“You plug it into your computer so you can store data on it when you want to move files around to other machines.”

“Information,” I said, frowning. “Bony Tony was smuggling information. Something Grevane needed to know. Maybe the two out front wanted it too. Maybe that’s why he got killed.”

“Ugh,” Butters said.

“Can you read the information?” I asked him.

“Maybe,” he said. “I can try another machine.”

“Not now,” I said. “No time. We need to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“Because things have just become a lot more dangerous.”

“They have?” Butters chewed on his lip. “Why?”

“Because,” I said. “Bony Tony worked for John Marcone.”

Chapter

Fifteen

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the most powerful figure in Chicago’s criminal underworld. If there was an illegal enterprise afoot, Marcone was either in charge of it or had been paid for the privilege of its operating in his territory. Bony Tony had done most of a dime in a federal penitentiary for trafficking in narcotics, and after that he’d moved into less politically incorrect areas of the business. He mostly dealt in moving stolen goods, everything from jewels to hot furniture.

I wasn’t sure exactly where Bony Tony ranked in Marcone’s criminal hierarchy, but Marcone wasn’t the sort of person who would take the murder of one of his people lightly—not without his approval, at any rate. Marcone would know about Bony Tony’s death soon, if he didn’t already. He was sure to get involved in one fashion or another, and the best way for him to get to whoever had killed Bony Tony would be to get his hands on whatever it was they wanted.

I had to get Butters somewhere safe, the quicker the better. But until I knew what was on that storage device, I couldn’t judge what would be safe for him and what wouldn’t.

“Harry,” Butters said, as if he was repeating himself.

I blinked a couple of times. “What?”

“Do you want to hang on to this?” he said in the same tone. He stepped over to me and offered me the little slip of plastic.

“No!” I snapped, and took two steps back. “Butters, get that the hell away from me.”

He froze in place, staring at me, his expression somewhere between confused and wounded. “I’m sorry.”

I took in a deep breath. Where the hell was my concentration? This was no time to start spacing out on trains of thought, no matter how relevant to the circumstances. “Don’t be,” I said. “Look, that thing doesn’t have any moving parts, right? Electronic storage?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I don’t dare touch it,” I said. “Remember how messed up my X-rays were?”

He nodded. “You’re saying that the data on here could get messed up the same way.”

“I couldn’t ever have cassette tapes after I started working magic,” I said. “They’d just fade away into static after a while. The magnetic strips on my credit cards stopped working in a day or two.”

Butters chewed on his lip and nodded slowly. “The data on the jump drive would be even more fragile than a magnetic strip. It might make sense if it was some kind of erratic electromagnetic field around you. Every human body gives off a unique field of electromagnetic energy. It could be like with your cell replication, that your field is more—”

“Butters,” I said, “no time for that now. The important thing is that I don’t dare touch that toy.” I frowned, thinking out loud. “Or take it back to my place, either. The wards keep magic out, but they keep it in, too. It would probably fry it to hang around in there for too long. Even working any heavy energy around it could be dangerous.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” Butters said. “I mean, storing important wizard information on something that getting close to a wizard would destroy.”

“It’s not stupid if you want to sell it to a wizard and you’re worried the buyer might off you instead of dealing in good faith,” I said.

Butters looked at the corpse and then back at me. “You think Grevane killed Bony Tony?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But Grevane knew that he couldn’t get to the information on that jump drive on his own.”

Butters swallowed. “Which explains why he needed me.”

“Yeah.” I chewed on my lip for a second and then said, “Get Bony Tony back in the fridge. We’re leaving.”

Butters nodded and went back to the examining table. He threw the cloth over the corpse. “Where?”

“Can you read that thing here?”

“No,” Butters said. “This computer is too old. It has the wrong ports. We could go to one of the other offices, maybe—”

“No. We need to get out of here—now.”

“We could go to my place,” Butters suggested.

“No. Grevane will definitely have it under surveillance. Dammit.”

“Why dammit?”

“We’re short on options, and that means we have to go someplace I didn’t want to go.”

“Where?” he asked.

“A friend’s. Come on.”

“Right,” Butters said, and promptly walked over to his polka suit. He heaved up a couple of pieces. The cymbals clashed tinnily against one another.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “We’ve got to go.”

“I’m not leaving it here for God-knows-what to mess with,” Butters said. He grunted and threw a strap awkwardly over his shoulder. The bass drum rumbled.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “We are not taking it with us. We don’t have time for this.”

Butters turned to face me, his expression stricken.

That stupid polka suit filled up most of the back of the SUV. It was a pain to move it without making a bunch of noise, but in the end we managed to slip out the back door of the Forensic Institute and make a clean getaway. I watched the road behind us carefully, until I was sure that I wasn’t being followed. Then I headed for the campus area, and Billy’s apartment.

I pulled into the apartment’s parking lot, leaned out, and yelled, “Hey!”

A young man with arms and legs a few sizes too large to match his body appeared from behind the corner of the building, frowning. He was dressed in sweats, a T-shirt, and boat shoes, standard easily discarded werewolf wardrobe for troubled times. He flipped an untidy mop of black hair out of his eyes and leaned against the SUV’s door. “Hey, Harry.”

“Kirby,” I greeted him. “This is my friend Butters.”

Kirby nodded to Butters and asked me, “Did you spot me?”

“No, but Billy always has someone on watch outside when times are tense.”

Kirby nodded, his expression serious. “What do you need?”

“Park this beast for me. I keep running into things.”

“Sure. Billy and Georgia are upstairs.”

I got out of the car, and Butters hopped out with me. “Thanks, man.”

“Yeah,” Kirby said. He got in the SUV and frowned. He looked around at all the doors.

“The door is ajar,” the dashboard said.

“It won’t shut up,” I explained to him.

“It gets sort of Zen after a while,” Butters said brightly. “Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar.”

Kirby gave him a skeptical look. I grabbed Butters by the shoulder and hauled him into the building and up to the apartment.

Billy opened the door before we even got to it, and looked out expectantly. He stepped a bit to one side, holding the door open for us, watching up and down the hallway. “Heya, Harry.”

The apartment was a typical college place—small, a couple of bedrooms, nothing permanent on the walls, furniture that wasn’t too expensive or hard to move, and equipped with an expensive entertainment center. Georgia sat on the couch reading from one of a small mountain of medical books. I walked in and introduced everyone.

“I need a computer,” I told Billy.

He arched an eyebrow at me.

I waved a hand in a vague motion. “Tell him, Butters.”

Butters pulled the jump drive from his pocket and showed it to Billy. “Anything with a USB port.”

Georgia frowned and asked, “What’s on it?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I need to know.”

She nodded. “Better let him use the one on the far wall of the computer room, Will. The farther from Harry the better.”

“Feel the love.” I sighed. I pointed at the little table next to the door and asked, “Can I make a few calls while I wait?”

“Sure.” Billy turned to Butters. “Right this way.”

They went into one of the bedrooms. Georgia went back to her book. I picked up the phone.

The phone at my place rang a dozen times before it rattled, and then Thomas slurred, “What?”

“It’s me,” I said. “You all right?”

“I was all right. I was asleep. Stupid Mouse woke me up to get the phone.”

“Any sign of visitors? Calls?”

“No and no,” he said.

“Get some more sleep,” I said.

He made a grunting noise and hung up.

I called my answering service next. They had recently phased over to stored voice mail. I was suspicious of it on general principles. From a purely logical standpoint, I knew my issues with technology wouldn’t extend all the way across town over the phone lines, but all the same I didn’t trust it. I would much rather have dealt with an actual person taking messages, but it cost too much now to keep someone manning the phones when voice mail could do all the work. I punched the buttons and had to go through all the menus only twice to get it to work.

Beeeeeep. “Harry, it’s Murphy. We got into Hawaii all right, and there was no problem with the hotel, so you can reach me at those contact numbers. I’ll call in again in a couple of—” Her voice broke off into a sudden high-pitched noise. “Would you stop that?” she demanded, with a lot more laughter than anger in her voice. “I’m on the phone. In a couple of days, Harry. Thanks for taking care of my pants. Er, plants, plants.” Beeeeeep.

I wondered what had caused Murphy to make a high-pitched noise and a big old Freudian slip. And I wondered what to read into the fact that she had left me a message instead of calling me at home. Probably nothing. She probably didn’t want to wake me up or something. Yeah. She was probably only thinking of me.

Beeeeep. “Harry. Mike. The Beetle will be ready at noon.” Beeeeep.

God bless Mechanic Mike. If I heard a car complaining about its closed doors being open one more time, I would have to disintegrate something.

Beeeeep. “Oh,” said a young woman’s voice. “Mister Dresden? It’s Shiela Starr. We met at Bock Ordered Books last night?” There was the sound of her taking an unsteady breath. “I wondered if I could ask for a few minutes of your time. There have been…I mean, I’m not completely certain but…I think something is wrong. Here at the store, I mean.” She let out a snippet of laughter that was half anxiety and half weariness. “Oh, hell, I probably sound crazy, but I would really like to speak to you about it. I’ll be at the shop until noon. Or you can call my apartment.” She gave me the number. “I hope you can come by the store, though. I would really appreciate it.” Beeeep.

I found myself frowning. Shiela hadn’t said it outright, but she had sounded pretty scared. That wasn’t terribly surprising, given what she’d probably seen happening right outside Bock’s shop the night before, but it made me feel uncomfortable to hear fear in her voice. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that I’m not comfortable with fear in any woman’s voice.

It’s not my fault. I know it’s sexist and macho, and it’s retrograde social evolution, but I hate it when bad things happen to women. Don’t get me wrong; I hate bad things to happen to anyone—but when it’s a woman that’s in danger, I hate it with a reflexive, bone-deep, primal mindlessness that borders on insanity. Women are beautiful creatures, and dammit, I enjoy making sure that they’re safe and treating them with old-fashioned manners and courtesy. It just seems right. I’d suffered for thinking that way more than once, but it still didn’t change the way I felt.

Shiela was a girl, and she was scared. Therefore, if I wanted to have any peace of mind, I was going to have to go talk to her.

I checked the clock. Eleven. She was still at the store.

I dialed one more number, and got an answering machine with no message, only a tone. “This is Dresden,” I told the machine. “And we need to talk.”

Butters and Billy reappeared. I hung up the phone and asked them, “Well?”

“Numbers,” said Billy.

“More specific?” I asked.

Butters shook his head. “It’s hard to be any more specific than that. There was only one file on the jump drive, and it was empty. The only information on it was the file name, and it was just a number.” He offered me a piece of white paper with a string of numerals printed on it in his spidery scrawl. I counted. There were sixteen of them. “That’s it.”

I took the paper and frowned at the numbers. “That is spectacularly useless.”

“Yeah,” Butters said quietly.

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Okay. Let me think.” I tried to prioritize. Grevane was out there looking for Butters. Maybe Marcone was looking for him too. Maybe the dead professor’s two assistants to boot. “Butters, we have to get you behind my wards again.”

He blinked at me. “But why? I mean, they wanted me so that they could get to the information. I’m useless to them now.”

“You and I know that. They don’t.”

“Oh.”

“Billy,” I said, “could you please take Butters over to my place?”

“No problem,” he said. “What about you? Won’t you need wheels?”

“The Beetle is ready. I’ll take a cab.”

“I can drop you off,” Billy offered.

“No. It’s the opposite way from my apartment, and Butters needs to get there yesterday. Go around the block once or twice before you pull in. Make sure no one is watching the door.”

Billy smiled. “I know the drill.”

“Don’t try to open the door yourself, Butters. Knock and wait for Thomas to do it.”

“Right.” Butters fretted at his lip a little. “What are you going to be doing?”

“Detective stuff. I have places to go and people to see.”

And with a little luck, none of them would kill me.

Chapter

Sixteen

Billy’s apartment was only a couple of blocks from Bock Ordered Books, and while I could have taken a couple of alleys to make the trip even shorter, I kept on the open streets, where there were plenty of people. I didn’t see anyone following me, but if there was a good enough team on me—or if they were using veils to hide their presence, of course—I might miss them. I kept my staff in my right hand and made sure my shield bracelet was ready, in case anyone tried some kind of variant on the old drive-up assassination. I’d survived them before, but the classics never go out of style.

I got to Bock’s in one piece, and no one so much as glared at me. I felt sort of rejected, but comforted myself with the knowledge that there were at least half a dozen people in town who were sure to keep making my life dangerous. More if you counted Mavra, who technically wasn’t a person.

Bock didn’t open the doors of his store until eleven, so when I went in I was probably the first one to show up for the day. I paused outside the door. Two of the store windows and the glass panel of the door were all gone, replaced by rough sheets of plywood. Bock had gotten off better than the boutique next door—all the glass was gone, doubtless shattered by one kind of flying debris or another during my conversation with Cowl and his sidekick. I went inside.

Bock was at his place behind the counter, and looked tired. He glanced up at the sound of his door chimes. His expression became something closed and cautious when he saw me.

“Bock,” I said. “You here all night?”

“End-of-the-month inventory,” he said, his voice careful and quiet. “And repairing the windows. What do you need?”

I looked around the inside of the store. Shiela appeared from behind one of the shelves at the back of the store, looking anxious. She saw me and exhaled a little, then gave me a quiet smile.

“Just here to talk,” I told Bock, nodding toward Shiela.

He glanced at her, then back at me, frowning. “Dresden. There’s something I need to say to you.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Look. I don’t want to make you upset.”

I leaned on my staff. “Bock, come on. You’ve known me ever since I came to town. If something’s wrong, you aren’t going to upset me by telling me about it.”

He folded his thick forearms over his paunch and said, “I don’t want you coming into my store anymore.”

I leaned on my staff a little more. “Oh.”

“You’re a decent enough man. You’ve never jumped down my throat like the other folks from the Council. You’ve helped people around here.” He took a deep breath and made a vague gesture toward the plywood patches on his shop. “But you’re trouble. It follows you around.”

Which was true enough. I didn’t say anything.

“Not everyone can drop a car on someone who attacks them,” Bock went on. “I’ve got a family. My oldest is in college. I can’t afford to have the place wrecked.”

I nodded. I could understand Bock’s position. It’s terrifying to feel helpless in the face of a greater power—more so than it is painful to be told you aren’t wanted somewhere.

“Look. If you need anything, give me a call. I’ll order it or pull it off the shelves for you. Will or Georgia can come pick it up. But…”

“Okay,” I said. My throat felt a little tight.

Bock’s face got red. He looked away from me, at the ruined door. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I understand. I’m sorry about your shop.”

He nodded.

“I’m just here for a minute. After that I’ll go.”

“Right,” he said.

I walked down the aisles back to Shiela, and nodded to her. “I got your message.”

Shiela was wearing the same clothes as the night before, only more rumpled. She’d pulled her hair back and held it in place with a pair of ballpoint pens thrust through a knot at right angles. With her hair like that, it showed the pale, clean lines of her jaw and throat, and I was again struck by the impulse to run my fingers over her skin and see if it was as soft as it looked.

She glanced at Bock, then smiled up at me and touched my arm with her hand. “I’m sorry he did that. It isn’t fair of him.”

“No. It’s fair enough. He has the right to protect himself and his business,” I said. “I don’t blame him.”

She tilted her head to one side, studying my face. “But it hurts anyway?”

I shrugged. “Some. I’ll survive.” The chimes rung at the front of the store as another customer came in. I glanced back at Bock, and sighed. “Look, I don’t want to be here very long. What did you need?”

She brushed back a few strands of hair that had escaped the knot. “I…well, I had a strange experience last night.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Go on.”

She picked up a small stack of books and started shelving them as she spoke. “After all the excitement, I went back to the inventory in the back room, and Mr. Bock had gone to get the plywood for the windows. I thought I heard the chimes ring, but when I looked no one was there.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“But…” She frowned. “You know how when you go into an empty house, you know it’s empty? How it just feels empty?”

“Sure,” I said. I watched her stretch up onto the tips of her toes to put a book away on the top shelf. It drew her sweater up a little, and I could see muscles move under a swath of the pale skin of her lower back.

“The store didn’t feel empty,” she said, and I saw her shiver. “I never saw anyone, never heard anyone. But I was sure someone was here.” She glanced back at me and flushed. “I was so nervous I could hardly think straight until the sun came up.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“It went away. I felt a little silly. Like I was a scared little kid. Or one of those dogs that’s staring at something growling when nothing is there.”

I shook my head. “Dogs don’t just stare and growl for no reason. Sometimes they can perceive things people can’t.”

She frowned. “Do you think something was here?”

I didn’t want to tell her that I thought a Black Court vampire had been lurking unseen in the shop. Hell, for that matter I didn’t particularly want to think about it. If Mavra had been here, there wouldn’t have been anything Shiela or Bock could do to defend themselves against her.

“I think you wouldn’t be foolish to trust your instincts,” I said. “You’ve got a little talent. It’s possible you were sensing something too vague for you to understand in any other way.”

She put the last book away and turned to face me. She looked tired. Fear made her expression one of sickness, an ugly contortion. “Something was here,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” I said, nodding.

“Oh, God.” She tightened her arms across her stomach. “I…I might be sick.”

I leaned my staff against the shelf and put a hand on her shoulder, steadying her. “Shiela. Take a few deep breaths. It’s not here now.”

She looked up at me, her expression miserable, her eyes wet and shining. “I’m sorry. I mean, you don’t need this.” She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and more tears fell. “I’m sorry.”

Oh, hell. Tears. Way to go, Dresden—terrify the local maiden you showed up to comfort. I drew Shiela a little toward me, and she leaned against me gratefully. I put my arm around her shoulders and let her lean against me for a minute. She shivered with silent tears for a little bit and then pulled herself together.

“Does this happen to you a lot?” she asked in a quiet voice, sniffling.

“People get scared,” I murmured. “There’s nothing wrong with that. There are scary things out there.”

“I feel like a coward.”

“Don’t,” I told her. “All it means is that you aren’t an idiot.”

She straightened and took a step back. Her face looked a little blotchy. Some women can cry and look beautiful, but Shiela wasn’t one of them. She took off her glasses and wiped at her eyes. “What do I do if it happens again?”

“Tell Bock. Get somewhere public,” I said. “Call the cops. Or better yet, call Billy and Georgia. If what you felt really was some kind of predator, they won’t want to stick around if they know they’ve been spotted.”

“You sound as if you’ve dealt with them before,” she said.

I smiled a little. “May be a time or two.”

She smiled up at me, and it was a grateful expression. “It must be very lonely, doing what you do.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Always being so strong when others can’t. That’s…well, it’s sort of heroic.”

“It’s sort of idiotic,” I replied, my voice dry. “Heroism doesn’t pay very well. I try to be cold-blooded and money-oriented, but I keep screwing it up.”

She let out a little laugh. “You fail to live up to your ideals, eh?”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

She tilted her head again, eyes bright. “Are you with someone?”

“Just you.”

“Not with them. With them.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. Not really.”

“If I asked you to come have dinner out with me, would it seem too forward and aggressive?”

I blinked. “You mean…like a date?”

Her smile widened. “You do…you know…like women? Right?”

“What?” I said. “Oh, yes. Yes. I’m down with the women.”

“By coincidence I happen to be a woman,” she said. She touched my arm again. “And since it seems like I might not get a chance to flirt with you a little more while I’m at work, I thought I had better ask you now. So is that a yes?”

The prospect of a date seemed to me like a case of bad timing in several ways. But it also seemed like a good idea. I mean, it had been a while since a girl had been interested in me in a nonprofessional sense.

Well. A human girl, anyway. The only one who even came close was in Hawaii with someone else, giggling and thinking about pants. It might be really nice just to be out talking and interacting with an attractive girl. God knows it would beat hanging around my crowded apartment.

“It’s a yes,” I said. “I’m kind of busy right now, but…”

“Here,” she said. She took a black marker out of a pocket in her sweater and grabbed my right hand. She wrote numbers on it in heavy black strokes. “Call me here, maybe tonight, and we’ll figure out when.”

I let her do it, amused. “All right.”

She popped the cap back on the marker and smiled up at me. “All right, then.”

I picked up my staff. “Shiela, look. I might not be around this place. I’ll respect Bock’s wishes. But let him know that if there’s any trouble, all he has to do is call me.”

She shook her head, smiling. “You’re a decent person, Harry Dresden.”

“Don’t spread that around too much,” I said, and started for the door.

And froze in my tracks.

Standing in the little entry area of the bookstore, facing Bock at his counter, were Alicia and the ghoul, Li Xian.

I stepped back to Shiela and pulled her around the corner of a shelf.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Quiet,” I said. I closed my eyes and Listened.

“…a simple question,” Alicia was saying. “Who bought it?”

“I don’t keep track of my customers,” Bock replied. His voice was polite, but it had an undertone of granite. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t have that information. A lot of people come through here.”

“Really?” Alicia asked. “And how many of them purchase rare and expensive antique books from you?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Alicia let out a nasty little laugh. “You really aren’t going to volunteer the information, are you?”

“I don’t have it to volunteer,” Bock said. “Both copies of the book were bought yesterday. Both were men, one older and one younger. I don’t remember anything more than that.”

I heard a couple of footsteps, and Li Xian said, “Perhaps you need help remembering.”

There was the distinct, heavy click of a pair of hammers on a shotgun being drawn back. “Son,” Bock said in that same voice, “you’ll want to step away from the counter and leave my shop now.”

“It would appear that the good shopkeeper has taken sides on this matter,” Alicia said.

“You’re wrong, miss,” Bock said. “I run this shop. I don’t give information. I don’t take sides. If I had a third copy, I’d sell it to you. I don’t. Both of you leave, please.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Alicia said. “I’m not leaving here until I have an answer to my question.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Bock replied. “There’s a tengauge shotgun wired under this counter. It’s loaded, cocked, and pointing right at your bellies.”

“Oh, my,” Alicia said, her voice amused. “A shotgun. Xian, whatever shall we do?”

I ground my teeth. Bock had asked me to stay away, but even so he was standing there protecting my identity, even though he knew damned well that the two in front of him were dangerous.

I checked. The door to the back room of the shop was open. “The back door,” I said to Shiela in a whisper. “Is it locked?”

“Not from this side.”

“Go into the back room and get in the office,” I said. “Get on the floor and stay there. Now.”

She looked up at me with wide eyes and then hurried back through the open door.

I gripped my staff and closed my eyes, thinking. I patted my duster’s pocket. The book was still there, riding along with my .44. Ghouls were hard to kill. I had no idea what Alicia was, but I was willing to bet she wasn’t a mere academic assistant. For her to command the respect of a creature like Li Xian, she had to be major-league dangerous. It would be an extremely foolish idea to assault them.

But that didn’t matter. If I didn’t do something, they were going to get unpleasant at Bock. Bock might not have been a stalwart companion who stuck through thick and thin, but he was what he was: an honest shopkeeper who wanted neither to become involved in supernatural power struggles nor to compromise his principles. If I did nothing, he was going to get hurt while protecting me.

I stepped around the shelf and started walking toward the front of the store.

Bock sat in his spot behind the counter, one hand gripping its edge in a white-knuckled grasp, the other out of sight below it. Alicia and Li Xian stood in front of it. She looked relaxed. The ghoul was slouched into an eager stance, knees bent a little, arms hanging loosely.

“Shopkeeper, I will ask you one last time,” Alicia said. “Who purchased the last copy of Die Lied der Erlking?” She lifted her left hand and faint heat shimmers rose from her fingers along with a whisper of dark power. “Tell me his name.”

I drew in my will, lifted my staff, and snarled, “Forzare!”

The runes on the staff burst into smoldering scarlet light. There was a thunderstorm’s roar, and raw power, invisible and solid, lashed out of the end of my staff. It whipped across the shop, knocking books from the shelves on the way, and hit the ghoul in the chest. It lifted him off his feet and sent him smashing into the plywood-covered door. He went through the wood without slowing down, out over the sidewalk, and into the wall of the building across the street, where he hit with a crunch.

Alicia spun toward me, her eyes wide and shocked.

I stood with my feet spread. My shield bracelet was on my left hand, thrumming with power and drizzling blue-white sparks. My staff smoldered with the scent of fresh-burned wood, and the scarlet runes shone in the darkness at the back of the store. I pointed it directly at Alicia.

“His name,” I snarled, “is Harry Dresden.”

Chapter

Seventeen

“You,” I snarled, gesturing at Bock with the end of my staff.

“You little weasel. You were gonna sell me out. I ought to kill you right here.”

From his vantage point above Alicia’s curly-haired head, Bock blinked at me in confusion. I stared at him, hard, not daring to leave anything in my expression that the girl would see. If I’d tried to protect Bock, it would only have made it more likely that she would do something to him. By appearing to threaten him, it would make him seem more unimportant to the necromancer and her henchman. It was the best thing I could do to protect him.

Bock got it. His expression flickered through several subtle shades of comprehension, fear, and guilt. He twitched his head at me in a nod of thanks.

“Well, well,” Alicia said. She hadn’t moved, other than to turn toward me. “I’ve never heard of you, but I must admit that you know how to make an entrance, Harry Dresden.”

“I took lessons,” I said.

“Give me the book,” she said.

“Ha,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I want it,” she said.

“Sorry. It’s the hot Christmas present this year,” I said. “Maybe you can find a scalper in a parking lot or something.”

She tilted her head, the fingers of her hand still flickering with little shimmers, like heat rising from asphalt. “You refuse?”

“Yes, moppet,” I told her. “I refuse. I deny thee. No, already.”

Her eyes narrowed in anger and…well, something happened that I hadn’t ever seen before. The store got darker. I don’t mean that the lights went out. I mean everything got darker. There was a low, trembling sensation that seemed to make my eyeballs jiggle a little, and the shadows simply expanded up out of the corners and dim areas of the store like time-lapse photography of growing molds. As they slid over portions of the store, that nasty, greasy sensation of cold came with them. When the shadows washed over an outlet that housed the power cords to a pair of table lamps, the lamps themselves went dim and then died out. They covered the old radio, and Aretha Franklin’s voice faded away to a whisper and vanished. The shadows got to the register and its lights went out, and when they brushed the old ceiling fan it began to whirl down to a stop. The shadows crept over Bock and he went pale and started shaking. He thrust one hand down onto the counter as if he had to do it to keep himself upright.

The only place the darkness didn’t spread was over me. The shadows stopped in a circle all around me, maybe six inches away from me and the things I was carrying. The Hellfire smoldering in the runes of my staff glowed more brightly in the darkness, and the tiny sparks falling in a steady rain from my damaged shield bracelet seemed to burn away tiny pockets of the darkness where they fell, only to have it slide back in once they had burned away.

This was a kind of power I hadn’t felt before. Normally when someone who can sling major mojo around draws their stuff up around them, it’s something violent and active. I’d seen wizards who charged the air around them with so much electricity it made their hair stand on end, wizards whose power would gather light into nearly solid gem-shaped clouds that orbited around them, wizards whose mastery of earth magic literally made the ground shake, wizards who could shroud themselves in dark fire that burned anyone near them with the raw, emotional rage of their magic.

This was different. Alicia’s power, whatever it was, didn’t fill the store. It emptied it in a way that I didn’t think I fully understood. Utter stillness spread out from her—not peace, for that would have been something tranquil, accepting. This stillness was a horrible, hungry emptiness, something that took its power from being not. It was made of the emptiness at the loss of a loved one, of the silence between the beats of a heart, and of the inevitability of the empty void that waited patiently for the stars to grow cold and burn out. It was power wholly different from the burning fires of life that formed the magic I knew—and it was strong. God, it was so strong.

I began to tremble as I realized that everything I had wasn’t enough to go up against this.

“I don’t like your answer,” Alicia said. She smiled at me, a slow and evil expression. She had a dimple on one cheek. Hell’s bells, an evil dimple.

My mouth felt dry, but my voice sounded steady when I spoke. “That’s too bad. If you’re so upset about not getting a copy, I suggest you take it up with Cowl.”

She stared at me with no expression for a moment and then said, “You are with Cowl?”

“No,” I told her. “I was, in fact, forced to drop a car on him last night when he tried to take the book from me.”

“Liar,” she said. “Had you truly fought Cowl, you’d be dead.”

“Whatever,” I replied, my tone bored. “I’ll tell you what I told him. My book. You can’t have it.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Wait a moment. You were at the mortuary. In the entryway.”

“We call it the Forensic Institute now.”

Her eyes glittered. “You found it. You succeeded where Gre-vane failed, didn’t you?”

I turned up one corner of my mouth, and said nothing.

Alicia took in a deep breath. “Perhaps we can reach an understanding.”

“Funny,” I said. “Grevane said the very same thing.”

Alicia took an eager step toward me. “You denied him?”

“I didn’t like his hat.”

“You have wisdom for one so young,” she said. “In the end he is nothing but a dog mourning his fallen master. He would turn on you in a moment. The gratitude of the Capiorcorpus, by contrast, is an eternal asset.”

Capiorcorpus. Roughly translated, the taker of corpses, or bodies. I suddenly had a better idea of why Li Xian had referred to Alicia as “my lord.”

“Assuming I want that gratitude,” I said, “what price would it carry?”

“Give me the book,” she said. “Give me the Word. Stand with me at the Darkhallow. In exchange I will grant you autonomy and the principality of your choice when the new order arises.”

I didn’t want her to know that I had no freaking clue what she was talking about, so I said, “That’s a tempting offer.”

“It should be,” she said. She lifted her chin, and her eyes glittered with something bright and utterly confident. “The new order will change many things in this world. You have the opportunity to help shape it to your liking.”

“And if I turn you down?” I asked.

She met my eyes directly. “You are young, Harry Dresden. It is a great tragedy when a man with your potential dies before his time.”

I shied away from her gaze at once. When a wizard looks into another person’s eyes for an instant too long, he sees into them in a profound and unsettling kind of vision called a soulgaze. If I’d left my gaze on Alicia’s eyes, I would get an up-close and personal look at her soul—and she at mine. I didn’t want to see what was going on behind that dimpled smile. I recognized that perfect surety in her manner and expression as something more than rampant ego or fanatic conviction.

It was pure madness. Whatever else Alicia was, she was calmly and horribly insane.

My mouth felt a lot drier. My legs were shaking, and my feet were advising the rest of me to let them run away. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“By all means,” Alicia said. Her face took on an ugly expression and her voice hardened. “Consider it. But take a single step from where you stand and it will be your last.”

“Killing me might get you a copy of the book, but it won’t get you the Word,” I said. “Or did you think I was carrying both of them around with me?”

Her right hand clenched into a slow fist and the room got a couple of degrees colder. “Where is the Word?”

Wouldn’t I like to know? I thought.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I said. “Kill me now and there’s no Word. No new order.”

She uncurled her hand. “I can make you tell me,” she said.

“If you could do that, you’d have done it by now, instead of standing there looking stupid.”

She started taking slow steps toward me, smiling. “I prefer to attempt reason before I destroy a mind. It is a somewhat taxing activity. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather work with me?”

Gulp. Mental magic is a dark, dark, dark grey area of the art. Every wizard who makes it to the White Council has received training in how to defend against mental assaults, but that was perfunctory at best. After all, the Council made it a special point to wipe out wizards who violated the sanctuary of another’s mind. It’s one of the Laws of Magic, and if the Wardens caught someone doing it, they killed them, end of story. There was no such thing as an expert at that kind of magic on the White Council, and as a result the defense training was devised by relative amateurs.

Something told me that Alicia the Corpsetaker wasn’t an amateur.

“That’s close enough,” I said in a cold voice.

She kept walking, very slowly, a sort of sinuous enjoyment in her stride. “Last chance.”

“I mean it,” I said. “Stay ba—”

Before I could finish the word, she made a rippling gesture with the shimmering fingers of her left hand.

There was a whirling sensation, and I was suddenly caught in a gale, a whirlwind that tried to carry me toward the girl. My feet started sliding across the floor. I leaned back with a cry, lifting my shield bracelet, and it blazed into a dome of solid blue light before me. It did nothing—nothing at all. The vicious vortex continued to draw me to her outstretched hand.

I started to panic, and then realized what was happening. There was no wind—not physically, anyway. The books on the shelves were not stirring, nor was my long leather duster. My shield offered me no protection from a wholly nonphysical threat, and I released it, saving my strength.

The hideous vacuum wasn’t meant for my body. It was targeting my thoughts.

“That’s right,” Alicia said.

Holy crap. She’d heard me thinking.

“Of course, young man. Give me what I want now and I may leave you enough of your mind to feed yourself.”

I gritted my teeth, marshaling my thoughts, my defenses.

“It’s too late for that, boy.”

Like hell it was. My thoughts coalesced into a unified whole, an absolute image of a wall of smooth, grey granite. I built the image of the wall in my mind and then filled it with the power I’d been holding at the ready. I felt a nauseating confusion for a second, and then the mental gale ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

Alicia’s head jerked as if she’d been slapped across the cheek.

I glared at her, teeth gritted, and asked, “Is that all you got?”

Corpsetaker snarled out a spiteful curse, lifted her left arm, and twisted her fingers into a raking claw.

There was a hideous pressure against the image of the granite wall in my mind. It wasn’t a single, resounding blow, as I had expected from my training, a kind of psychic battering ram. Instead it was an enormous, steady weight, as if a sudden tide had flooded in to wash the wall away completely.

I thought that pressure would ease in a moment, but it only became more and more difficult to bear. I struggled to hold the image of the wall in place, but despite everything I could do, dark and empty cracks began to appear and spread through it. My defenses were crumbling.

“Delicious,” Corpsetaker said, and her voice didn’t sound strained at all. “After a century, they’re still teaching the young ones the same tripe.”

I saw movement beyond Corpsetaker, and Li Xian appeared in the shattered plywood doorway. Half of his face was lumpy and purpled with bruising, and one shoulder had been smashed grossly out of shape. He was bleeding a thin, greenish-brown fluid, and moved as if in great pain, but he came in on his own power, and his eyes were alert.

“My lord,” Xian said. “Are you well?”

“Perfectly,” Corpsetaker purred. “Once I have his mind, the rest is yours.”

His misshapen face twisted into a smile that spread too wide for human features. “Thank you, lord.”

Holy crap. It was time to leave.

But my feet wouldn’t move.

“You needn’t bother, young wizard,” Corpsetaker said. “If you take the attention you would need to free your feet, your wall will fail. Just open to me, boy. You will feel less pain.”

I ignored the necromancer and tried to think of other options. My mental defenses were indeed crumbling, but any strength of will I spent to move my legs would collapse the defenses entirely. I had to get the pressure off of me for a moment—only time enough to distract Corpsetaker, to give me time to get the hell away. But given that I could barely move at all, my options were severely limited.

Part of the wall began to crumble. I felt Corpsetaker’s will begin pouring in, the first trickle from a dark sea.

If I wanted to live, I had little choice.

I reached my thoughts down into the smoldering Hellfire burning in the runes of my staff, and sent it flooding into my mind, into the failing wall that protected me. The cracks in the cold grey granite filled with crimson flame, and where the dark sea of Corpsetaker’s will pressed against it there was a screaming hiss of freezing water boiling into a cloud of steam.

Corpsetaker let out a sudden, hollow gasp, and the pressure on my thoughts vanished.

I spun, wobbled, got my balance, and then ran for the back door.

“Take him!” Corpsetaker snarled behind me. “He has the book and the Word!”

There was a sickly ripping, crackling sound, and Li Xian let out a bestial and inhuman howl.

I dashed through the back room of the bookstore, and to the back door. I slammed its opening bar and sprinted through it, out into the alley behind the shop. I heard two sets of feet following me, and Corpsetaker began chanting in a low, growling voice. That hideous pressure began to surge against my thoughts again, but this time I was ready for it, and my defenses fell into place more quickly, more surely. I was able to keep running.

I ran down the alley, and made it maybe thirty yards before a sudden fire exploded through my right calf. I crashed down to the ground, barely holding on to my mental defenses. I dropped my staff and reached down to my calf, to feel something metal and sharp protruding from it. I cut my fingers on an edge and jerked them back. I couldn’t get a good look, but I saw a flash of steel and a lot of blood—and Corpsetaker and the ghoul were still coming.

There was no way I could have whipped up any magic to stop them—not with all of my power focused on keeping Corpsetaker from invading my mind. I wouldn’t be able to overcome the ghoul physically—even wounded, Xian was quick on his feet, and closing the distance fast.

I drew the .44 and sent three shots back down the alley. Corpsetaker darted to one side, but the ghoul never even slowed down. He flung one too-long arm through an arc, and there was a glitter of steel in the gloomy alley. Something hit me in the ribs nearly hard enough to knock me down, but the spell-covered leather of my duster stopped it from piercing through. A triangle of steel fell to the ground, each point sharpened and given a razor’s edge.

“All I needed,” I muttered. “Ninja ghouls.” I emptied the revolver at Xian. He wasn’t ten feet from me on the last shot, and I must have hit him. He jerked, careened off a wall, and stumbled, but he was a long way from down.

Corpsetaker’s will continued to erode my defenses. I had to get away from her, or she’d open up my brains like a tin of sardines—and then Xian would eat them.

The three-pointed shuriken still in my calf, I forced myself to my feet through the screaming pain. I seized my staff, hobbling in earnest this time, and struggled toward the end of the alley. My only chance was to make it to the street, to flag down a cab, somehow beg a ride from a passing car, or maybe get some help. I knew there wasn’t much hope of any of those things happening, but it was all I had.

I almost got to the end of the alley, the pain in my leg growing steadily worse—and then I abruptly lost track of what was going on.

One moment I’d been busy, I knew. I was doing something important. The next I was just standing there, sort of floundering. Whatever I’d been doing, it was right on the tip of my tongue. I knew that if I could just focus for a second, I’d be able to remember it and get back on track. My leg hurt. I knew that. And my head felt jumbled, the thoughts there, but in disarray, as if I’d gone through a drawer of folded laundry, pulled out something from the bottom, and then slapped the drawer shut again without straightening anything up.

I heard a snarl behind me, and realized that whatever I’d been doing, it was too late to get back on track now. I tried to turn around, but for some reason I couldn’t remember how.

“I have it,” panted a woman’s voice behind me. “Numbers. It’s only…He only has numbers.”

“My lord,” snarled a thick, deformed voice. “What is your command?”

“He doesn’t know where the Word is. He is useless to me. The book is in the right pocket of his coat. Take it, Xian. Then kill him.”

Chapter

Eighteen

I was pretty sure that Corpsetaker was talking about me, and I knew for sure that getting killed was a bad thing. I just couldn’t figure out how to go about doing something to stop it. Something about my mind. That it wasn’t working right.

A battered-looking man entered my field of view, and I was able to turn my head enough to watch him. Oh, crap, it was Li Xian, the ghoul. I had a bad feeling that he was going to do something unpleasant, but he just stuck his hand in my coat pocket and pulled out the slender copy of Erlking.

The ghoul turned away from me and offered the book to someone out of my field of view.

There was the sound of flipping pages. “Excellent,” Corpsetaker said. “Take him back from the street and finish him. Hurry. He’s stronger than most. I’d rather not hold him all day.”

Oh, right. Corpsetaker was holding my mind captive. That meant that she was in my head. That meant she had beaten my defenses down. Just pulling those thoughts together made me feel stronger. My head started clearing, and as it did the pain in my wounded leg grew more intense.

“Hurry,” she said, her voice now strained.

Rough hands seized the back of my coat. I wanted to run, but I still couldn’t get everything to respond together. An inspiration seized me. If Corpsetaker was in my head, it meant that she could feel everything I was feeling—such as the burning pain in my leg.

When the ghoul started pulling me backward, I couldn’t struggle, but I managed to twist my hips a little and bend my good knee. I fell over sideways, onto the wounded leg. The fall drove the shuriken a little harder into my calf, and the world went white with pain.

Corpsetaker shrieked. I heard a metallic clatter, as if she had stumbled into a trash can, and I felt my arms and legs come all the way back under my command. The ghoul stumbled on his mangled leg. He pushed off the wall and came at me. I spun on the small of my back and kicked out hard and straight at his good knee.

That’s a nasty defensive technique Murphy taught me, and one that doesn’t rely upon raw physical power. The ghoul’s weight was all on that leg, and the kick connected hard. There was a grinding pop, and he let out a spitting snarl of pain.

I scrambled away from him on one leg and the heels of my hands. I could see my blood on the floor of the alley, smeared in a trail from my wounded leg. There were little stars fluttering through my vision, and I felt as weak as a starved kitten. Everything was spinning around so much that I didn’t even bother to get to my feet. I crawled out of the cold shadows of the alley, onto the sidewalk, and into broad daylight.

I heard someone shout something. There were police sirens a block or two away. They were doubtless heading for Bock’s place, after someone had seen me throw the ghoul out through the plywood-covered door. Give them two minutes to sort out what was going on, and I’d have men with silver shields and a strong desire to speak to the dead professor’s missing assistants all around me.

Of course, by then I’d probably have been dead for a minute and a half.

The wounded ghoul, his face twisted, jaws lolling open wide to show yellowed fangs, came shambling out of the alley after me.

I heard a woman shout, the sound high and furious and totally unafraid. There was a whooshing sound, a spinning shape, and then an ax—a freaking double-bladed ax—buried itself to the eye in the ghoul’s flank. Just as it hit, there was a flash of light from a spot on the blade, so bright that it left a red mark in the shape of a single rune burned into my vision. There was a loud bark of sound as the ax hit the ghoul. The creature was thrown forcefully to the sidewalk, and thin, greenish-brown fluid sprayed everywhere in a disgusting shower.

A woman in a dark business suit stepped into my line of sight. She was better than six feet tall, blond, and coldly beautiful. Her blue eyes burned with battle-lust and excitement as she drew a sword with a straight, three-foot blade from the scabbard at her side. As I watched, she took several smooth steps to place herself between the ghoul and me. Then she pointed the tip of the sword at him and snarled, “Avaunt, carrion.”

The ghoul tore the ax from his side and staggered into a crouch, holding the weapon in both hands with a panicked desperation. He took a pair of awkward, shuffling steps back.

An engine roared and a grey sedan swerved up onto the sidewalk.

“Avaunt!” cried the woman; then she raised the sword and glided toward the ghoul.

Li Xian didn’t want any part of it. His inhuman face twisted in recognizable fear. He dropped the ax and fled back down the alley.

“Coward.” The woman sighed, clearly disappointed. She snatched up the ax, then said to me, “Get in.”

“I know you,” I said. “Miss Gard. You work for Marcone.”

“I work for Monoc Securities,” the woman corrected me. Her hand clamped down on my arm like a slender steel vise, and she hauled me to my feet without effort. My wounded calf clenched into a nasty cramp, and I could feel the steel blades continuing to cut at my muscles. I clenched my teeth, snarling my defiance at the pain. Gard gave me a quick glance of approval and tugged me toward the grey sedan. I still had to hobble on my staff, but with her help I made it to the car and fumbled my way into the backseat. More hands pulled me in.

The whole time Gard kept her sharp, cold blue gaze on the alley and the street around us. Once I was in, she shut the door, sheathed the sword, and unclipped the scabbard from her belt before getting into the passenger’s seat. The grey sedan pulled out into the street again, and started away from the scene.

The driver turned his head just enough to catch me in his peripheral vision. His neck was too thick for any more movement than that. He had red hair clipped into a close buzz, shoulders wide enough to build a deck on, and he’d had to get his business suit at the big-and-tall store.

“Hendricks,” I greeted him.

He looked up into the rearview mirror with his beady eyes and glowered.

“Nice to see you again, too,” I said. I settled back into the seat as much as I could, trying to ignore my leg, and refusing to look at the man sitting beside me.

I didn’t really need to look at him. He was a man a little over average height, somewhere in the late prime of his life, his dark hair flecked with grey. He had skin that had seen a lot of time out in the weather, leaving him with a perpetual boater’s tan, and eyes the color of wrinkled old dollars. He’d be wearing a suit that cost more than some cars, and making it look good. He looked handsome and wholesome, more like the coach of a successful sports team than a gangster. But John Marcone was the most powerful figure in Chicago’s criminal underworld.

“Isn’t that a little childish?” he asked me, his voice amused. “Refusing to look at me like that?”

“Indulge me,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

“How serious is your injury?” he asked.

“Do I look like a doctor to you?” I asked.

“You look more like a corpse,” he answered.

I squinted at him. He sat calmly in his seat, mirroring me. “Is that a threat?” I asked.

“If I wanted you dead,” Marcone said, “I would hardly have come to your aid just now. You must admit, Dresden, that I have just saved your life. Again.”

I closed my eye again and scowled. “Your timing is improbable.”

He sounded amused. “In what way?”

“Coming to my rescue just as someone was about to punch my ticket. You must admit, Marcone, that it smells like a setup.”

“Even I occasionally enjoy good fortune,” he replied.

I shook my head. “I called you less than an hour ago. If it wasn’t a setup then how did you find me?”

“He didn’t,” said Gard. “I did.” She looked over her shoulder at Marcone and frowned. “This is a mistake. It was his fate to die in that alley.”

“What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?” Marcone asked.

“There will be consequences,” she insisted.

Marcone shrugged. “When aren’t there?”

Gard turned her face back to the front and shook her head. “Hubris. Mortals never understand.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Everyone makes that mistake but me.”

Marcone glanced at me, and his eyes wrinkled at the corners. It was very nearly a smile. Gard turned her head slowly and gave me a cold glare that wasn’t anywhere close to smiling.

“Let’s get to the part of the conversation where you tell me what you want,” I said. “I don’t have time for any more banter.”

“Ah,” Marcone said. “I suspected you would somehow become involved in the events at hand.”

“What events would those be?” I asked.

“The situation concerning the death of Tony Mendoza.”

I scowled at him. “What do you want?”

“Unless I miss my guess,” Marcone said, “I want to help you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

“I’m quite serious, Dresden,” he told me. “I allow no one to harm those in my employ. Whoever murdered Mendoza must be chastised immediately—whether or not they happen to be necromancers.”

I blinked. “How did you know what they were?”

“Miss Gard,” he replied serenely. “She and her colleagues have outstanding resources.”

I shrugged. “Good for you. But I’m not interested in helping you maintain your empire.”

“Naturally. But you are interested in stopping these men and women before they accomplish whatever goal it is that they are pursuing.”

I shrugged. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” he said, his tone growing distant and cool. He met my eyes and said, “Because I know you. I know that you would oppose them. Just as you know that I will not permit them to take one of mine from me without punishment.”

I glared back at him. I wasn’t worried about a soulgaze. Those happened only once between any two people, and Marcone had already gotten a look at me. When he said that he knew me, that’s what he was talking about. I’d seen his soul in return, and it had been a cold and barren place—but one of order, as well. If Marcone gave his word, he kept it. And if someone came for one of his people, he would go after them without hesitation, fear, or pity.

That didn’t make him noble. Marcone had the soul of a tiger, of a predator protecting his territory. It only made him more resolved and more dangerous.

“I’m not a hit man,” I told him. “And I don’t work for you.”

“Nor am I asking you to,” he said. “I simply want to give you information that might help you in your efforts.”

“You aren’t listening. I am not going to kill anyone for you.”

His teeth suddenly showed, very white against the tan. “But you will go up against them.”

“Yes.”

He settled back in his seat. “I’ve seen what you do to the people who get in your way. I’m willing to take my chances.”

That thought, that attitude, was a little creepier than I was comfortable with. I wasn’t a killer. I mean, sure, sometimes I fought. Sometimes people and not-people got killed. But it wasn’t as though I was some kind of Jack the Ripper. From time to time matters got desperately dangerous between me and various denizens of the preternatural world, but I had only killed…

I thought about it for a minute.

I’d killed more of them than I hadn’t.

Quite a few more.

I felt a little sick to my stomach.

Marcone watched me from behind hooded eyes and waited.

“What do you want to tell me?” I asked him.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” he said. “Ask me questions. I’ll answer whichever I can.”

“How much do you know about the deal that got Mendoza killed?”

He drummed the fingers of his right hand on his thigh for a moment. “Mendoza was getting ready to retire,” Marcone said. “He had a final scheme to complete. I owed the man for loyalties past, and at his request I allowed him certain liberties.”

“He was selling something independently?”

Marcone nodded. “The contents of an old storage locker. Mendoza had come across the key to it in an estate sale.”

That was criminal-speak for purchasing hot merchandise from a mugger or burglar. “Go on.”

“The key opened a storage locker that had been sealed since 1945. It contained a number of works of art, jewelry, and similar cultural artifacts.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Loot from World War Two?”

“So Mendoza presumed,” Marcone said. “He offered me my selection of the contents, and in return I allowed him to dispose of the rest in whatever manner he saw fit.”

“What did you get out of it?” I asked.

“Two Monets and a Van Gogh.”

“Holy crap.” I shook my head. “What happened then?”

“Mendoza went about liquidating his cache. It had been in process for several weeks when he reported that one of the people he had approached regarding an antique book seemed to have access to resources that were well beyond the ordinary.”

“Did he give you a name?” I asked.

“A man named Grevane,” Marcone said. “Mendoza asked for my advice on the matter.”

“And you told him about how wizards are technologically challenged.”

“Among other things,” he said, nodding.

“But the deal went south.”

“So it would seem,” Marcone said. “Since Mendoza’s death, I have asked Miss Gard to collect information on recent events in the local supernatural community.”

I glanced at the woman and nodded. “And she told you there were necromancers running around.”

“Once that had been established, we attempted to narrow down the location of these individuals, particularly Grevane, but met with very limited success.”

“I’m able to find where they’ve been,” Gard said without turning around. “Or at least where they’ve been weaving their spells.”

“And there are a number of hot spots of necromantic energy around town,” I said. “I know that already.”

Marcone placed his fingers in a steeple before him. “But what I suspect you do not know is that last night at the location on Wacker, a member of my organization had an altercation with representatives of a rival interest from out of town. There was a gun-fight. My man was mortally wounded and left for dead.”

“That doesn’t add up to necromancy,” I said, frowning. “What caused the hot spot?”

“That is the question,” Marcone said. He took a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and passed it to me. “These are the names of the responding EMTs,” he said. “According to my man, they were the first on the scene.”

“Did he talk to you before he died?” I asked.

“He did,” Marcone replied. “In point of fact, he did not die.”

“Thought you said he was mortally wounded.”

“He was, Mister Dresden,” Marcone said, his features remote. “He was.”

“He survived.”

“The surgeons at Cook County thought it a bona fide miracle. Naturally I thought of you at once.”

I rubbed at my chin. “What else has he said?”

“Nothing,” Marcone said. “He has no memory of the events after he saw the ambulance arriving.”

“So you want me to talk to the EMTs. Why haven’t you done it yourself?” I asked.

He arched his brows. “Dresden. Try to keep in mind that I am a criminal. For some reason it’s quite difficult to get people in uniforms to open their hearts to me.”

I gritted my teeth at another agonizing twinge from my leg. “Right.”

“So,” he said, “we’re back to my original question. How serious is your injury?”

“I’ll make it,” I said.

“Do you think you’ll need to see a doctor? If it’s too mild a wound, I’ll be glad to have Miss Gard make it look more authentic.”

I looked at him for a moment. “I’m heading for an emergency room whether I need it or not, eh?”

“As luck would have it, we are near a hospital. Cook County, in fact.”

“Yeah. The cut’s pretty deep.” I looked at the piece of paper and then stuck it in my pocket. “There’s bound to be an EMT or two there. Maybe you should drop me off at the emergency room.”

Marcone smiled, and it didn’t touch his eyes. “Very well, Dresden. You have my deepest sympathies for your pain.”

Chapter

Nineteen

Marcone and company dropped me off a hundred yards from the emergency entrance to the hospital, and I had to hobble in alone. It was hard, and I was tired, but I’d been hurt worse before. It wasn’t like I wanted to do this every day or anything, but after a certain point of ridiculous discomfort, the pain all feels pretty much the same.

Once I made it to the emergency room, I was a big hit. When you drag yourself inside panting and leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind you, it makes a certain impression. I had an orderly and a nurse helping me onto my stomach on a gurney within a few seconds while the nurse examined the wound.

“It isn’t life-threatening,” she reported after she cut away my pant leg and took a look. She glanced at me almost in accusation. “From the way you came in here, you’d think this almost killed you.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m kind of a wimp.”

“Nasty,” commented the burly orderly. He produced a clipboard layered in forms and a ballpoint pen and handed them both to me. “They’ll have to cut this out.”

“We’ll let the doctor decide that,” the nurse said. “How did this happen, sir?”

“I have no clue,” I said. “I was walking down the street and all of a sudden I thought my leg was on fire.”

“You walked here?” she asked.

“A helpful Boy Scout brought me most of the way,” I said.

She sighed. “Well, it’s been a slow day. They should be able to see to you shortly.”

“That’s super,” I said. “Because it hurts like hell.”

“I can get you some Tylenol,” the nurse said primly.

“I don’t have a headache. I have a four-inch piece of steel in my leg.”

She passed me a paper cup and two little white tablets. I sighed and took them.

“Heh,” the orderly said after she left. “Don’t worry too much. They’ll get you something when the doctor sees to you.”

“With this kind of loving care, I probably won’t need it.”

“Don’t be too hard on her,” the orderly said. “You should see what people try so that they can get to some painkillers. Vicodin, morphine, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, man, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” He had brought a bowl of ice with him, and he started sealing it into plastic bags, which he started packing around my leg. “This should numb it a little, and maybe take down some of the swelling. It ain’t a local, but it’s what I’ve got.”

The ice didn’t actually burst into steam upon touching me, even though it felt like it should have. The pain didn’t exactly lessen, but it did suddenly feel a little more distant. “Thanks, man. Hey, I was hoping I could talk to a couple of guys I know while I was here,” I said. “They’re EMTs. Gary Simmons and Jason Lamar.”

The orderly lifted his eyebrows. “Simmons and Lamar, sure. They drive an ambulance.”

“I know. Are they around?”

“They were on shift last night,” he said. “But it’s the end of the month and they might be on their swing shift. I’ll ask.”

“Appreciate it,” I said. “If Simmons is there, tell him a school buddy is here.”

“Sure. If I do that, though, you gotta do something for me and fill out these forms.”

I eyed the clipboard and picked up the pen. “Tell the doc to sign me up for carpal tunnel surgery when he gets that thing out of me. Two birds with one stone.”

The orderly grinned. “I’ll do that.”

He left me to fill in forms, which didn’t used to take terribly long to fill out since I didn’t have any kind of insurance. One of these days, when I had the money, I was going to have to get some. They say that when you pay for insurance you’re really buying peace of mind. It might make me feel peaceful to think of how much money the company was probably going to lose on me in the long run. If I lived my whole life in the open, as I had been since I’d come to Chicago, they might be dealing with me for two or three centuries. I wondered what the yearly markup would be for a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old.

A young doctor came in after I was finished with the forms, and true to the orderly’s prediction, he had to cut the shuriken out of me. I got a local, and the sudden cessation of pain was like a drug all by itself. I fell asleep while he was cutting and woke up as he was wrapping my leg up.

“…the sutures dry,” he was saying. “Though from the looks of your file I suppose you know that.”

“Sure, Doc,” I said. “I know the drill. Do you need to take them out or did I get the other kind?”

“They’ll dissolve,” he said. “But if you experience any swelling or fever, get in touch. I’m giving you a prescription for something for the pain and some antibiotics.”

“Follow all the printed instructions and be sure to take them all,” I said, in my best surgeon-general-slash-television-announcer voice.

“Looks like you’ve done this as often as I have,” he said. He gestured to the steel tray where the bloodied shuriken lay. “Did you want to keep the weapon?”

“Might as well. I’ll have to get a souvenir in the gift shop otherwise.”

“You sure you don’t want the police to look at it?” he said. “They might be able to find fingerprints or something.”

“I already told you guys it must have been some kind of accident,” I said.

He gave me a look of extreme skepticism. “All right. If that’s the way you want it.” He dropped the little weapon into a metal tray of alcohol or some other sterilizer. “Keep your leg elevated. That will ease the swelling. Stay off of it for a couple of days, at least.”

“No problem,” I said.

He shook his head. “The orderly will be by in a minute with your prescriptions and a form to sign.” He departed.

A minute later there were footsteps outside the little alcove they’d put me in, and a large young man drew the curtain aside. He had skin almost as dark as my leather duster, and his hair had been cropped into a flat-top so precise that his barber must have used a level. He was on the heavy side—not out of shape or ripped out, but simply large and comfortable with it. He wore an EMT’s jacket, and the name tag on it read LAMAR. He stood there looking at me for a minute and then said, “You’re the wrong color to have been in my high school. And I didn’t do college.”

“Army medic?” I asked.

“Navy. Marines.” He folded his arms. “What do you want?”

“My name is Harry Dresden,” I said.

He shrugged. “But what do you want?”

I sat up. My leg was still blissfully numb. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”

He eyed me warily. “What about it?”

“You were on the team who responded to a gunshot victim on Wacker.”

His breath left him in a long exhale. He looked up and down the row, then stepped into the little alcove and closed the curtain behind him. He lowered his voice. “So?”

“So I want you to tell me about it,” I said.

He shook his head. “Look, I want to keep my job.”

I lowered my voice as well. “You think telling me is going to endanger that?”

“Maybe,” he said. He pulled open his jacket and then unbuttoned two buttons on his shirt. He opened it enough to show me a Kevlar vest beneath it. “See that? EMTs have to wear them around here, because people shoot at us sometimes. Gangbangers, that kind of thing. We show up to try to save lives and people shoot at us.”

“Must be tough,” I said cautiously.

He shook his head. “I can handle it. But a lot of people don’t. And if it looks like you’re starting to crack under the pressure, they’ll pull you out. Word gets around that I’m telling fairy tales about things I’ve seen, they’ll have me on psychiatric disability by tomorrow.” He turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. I touched his arm lightly. I didn’t grab him. You don’t go unexpectedly grabbing former marines if you want your fingers to stay in the same shape. “Look, Mr. Lamar. I just want to hear about it. I’m not going to repeat it to anyone. I’m not a reporter or—”

He paused. “You’re the wizard,” he said. “Saw you on Larry Fowler once. People say you’re crazy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So it isn’t as if they’d believe me, even if I did talk about you. Which I won’t.”

“You’re the one they arrested in the nursery a few years back,” he said. “You broke in during a blackout. They found you in the middle of a wrecked room with all those babies.”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

Lamar was silent for a second. Then he said, “You know that the year before, the SIDS rate there was the highest in the nation? They averaged one case every ten days. No one could explain it.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Since they arrested you there, they haven’t lost one,” he said. He turned back to me. “You did something.”

“Yeah. Do you like ghost stories?”

He snorted out a breath through his nose. “I don’t like any of this crap, man. Why do you want me to tell you what I saw?”

“Because what you know might help me keep more people from getting hurt.”

He nodded, frowning. “All right,” he said after a moment. “But I’m not saying this right now. You understand me? I’m not going to say this again. To anyone. Only reason I’ll tell you is that you helped those babies.”

I nodded.

He sat down on the edge of the gurney. “We got the call around midnight. Headed over to Wacker. The cops were there already. Found this guy on the street, all busted up. Two hits in the chest and two in the abdomen. He was bleeding bad.”

I nodded, listening.

“We tried to stabilize him. But there wasn’t much point to it. Simmons and me both knew that. But we tried. It’s what you do, you know? He was awake for it. Scared as hell. Screaming some. Kept begging us not to let him die. Said he had a little girl to look after.”

“What happened?”

“He died,” Lamar said, his voice flat. “I’ve seen it before. Here in town. In action while I was in the corps. You get to where you can recognize death when he comes knocking.” He rubbed his large, rather slender hands together. “We tried to resuscitate, but he was gone. That’s when it happened.”

“Go on.”

“This woman shows up. I don’t know from where. We just looked up and she was standing over us looking down.”

I leaned forward. “What did she look like?”

“I don’t know,” Lamar answered. “She was…like, wearing this costume, right? Like those people at Renaissance fairs. Big old black robe with a hood over her head. I didn’t see much of her face. Just her chin and her throat. She was white.”

“What did you do?”

“I figured she was a nut. You get them a lot this time of year. Or maybe going to a costume party or something. Hell, it’s almost Halloween. She looks at me and tells me to back up and let her help him.”

How many women in a black hooded robe could have been running around town last night? Kumori. That would have been maybe forty-five minutes or an hour before I saw her at Bock’s.

Lamar peered at my face. “You know her,” he said.

“Not personally. But yeah. What did she do?”

His face grew more remote. “She knelt down over him. Like, straddling the stretcher. Then she leaned down. The robe and the hood fell over them both, right. Like, I couldn’t see what she was doing.” He licked his lips. “And it got cold. I mean, ice started forming on the sidewalk and the stretcher and on our truck. I swear to you, it happened.”

“I believe it,” I said.

“And the victim all of a sudden starts coughing. Trying to scream. I mean, it wasn’t like the wounds were gone, but…I don’t know how to describe it. He was holding on.” His face twisted with a sickened expression. “He was in agony, and he was stable. It was like…like he wasn’t being allowed to die.

“So the woman stands up. She tells us we’ve got less than an hour to save him. And then she’s gone. Like, poof, gone. Like she was all in my imagination.”

I shook my head. “Then?”

“We get him brought in. The docs patched him up and got fresh blood into him. He passed out about an hour later. But he made it.”

Lamar was silent for a long moment.

“That couldn’t have happened,” he said then. “I mean, I’ve seen people pull through some bad stuff. But not like that. He should have been dead. Everything I know tells me so. But he kept going.”

“Sometimes miracles happen,” I said quietly.

He shuddered. “This wasn’t a miracle. There wasn’t any angel choir singing. My skin tried to crawl away and hide.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“What about your partner?” I asked.

“He drank himself under the table twenty minutes after our shift ended. Hell, only reason I wasn’t with him was that I was teaching a CPR class this morning.” He looked at me. “That help?”

“It might,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Sure.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Gonna go find my own table.” Lamar stood up and said, “Good luck, man.”

“Thanks.”

The big man left, and while I got my prescriptions and filled out the last forms, I thought about what he’d had to say. I got the prescriptions filled at the hospital pharmacy, called a cab, and told him to take me to Mike’s to pick up the Blue Beetle.

I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I’d learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim’s life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she’d done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn’t been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.

But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?

It didn’t track. The victim was just one more thug for the outfit, and he certainly wasn’t going to be doing anything useful from his bed in intensive care.

I had to consider the possibility that she’d been trying to do the right thing: using her power to help someone in dire need.

The thought made me uncomfortable as hell. I knew that the necromancers I’d met were deadly dangerous, and that if I wanted to survive a conflict with them, I would have to be ready to hit them fast and hard and without any doubts. That’s easy when the enemy is a frothing, psychotic monster. But Kumori’s apparently humanitarian act changed things. It made her a person, and people are a hell of a lot harder for me to think about killing.

Even worse, if she’d been acting altruistically, it would mean that the dark energy the necromancers seemed to favor might not be something wholly, inherently evil. It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy.

I’d always considered the line between black magic and white to be sharp and clear. But if that dark power could be employed in whatever fashion its wielder chose, that made it no different from my own.

Dammit. Investigation was supposed to make me certain of what needed to be done. It was not supposed to confuse me even more.

When I opened my eyes, thick clouds had covered the sun and painted the whole world in shades of grey.

Chapter

Twenty

It was past the middle of the afternoon by the time I got the Blue Beetle from Mike’s and headed back to my apartment. I tried to be wary of possible tails, but by then the local was wearing off and my leg was hurting again. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a serious physical injury, but there’s more to it than simply increasing the amount of discomfort. It’s tiring. The pain carries with it a tax of bone-deep weariness that makes you want to crawl into a dark hole and hibernate.

So when I say I tried to be wary, what I mean is that I flicked a glance at my rearview mirror a couple of times whenever I had the presence of mind to remember to do so. As long as the bad guys were restricting themselves to driving brightly painted side-panel vans or maybe nitro-burning funny cars, I was perfectly safe.

I got back to my place, disabled the wards, unlocked the door, and slipped inside. Mister came flying down the stairs at my back, and thumped companionably against my legs. I all but screamed. “Stupid cat,” I snarled.

Mister wound around my legs in a pleased fashion, unconcerned with my opinion of him. I limped inside and locked up behind me. Mouse waited until Mister was bored with me, then shambled over to snuffle at my legs and collect a few scratches behind his ears.

“Hey, there,” Thomas greeted me quietly. He sat in the chair by the fire, several candles lit on the end table beside it. He had a book open. Sword and shotgun rested near his hand. He glanced at my leg and rose, his face alarmed. “What happened?”

I grimaced, tottered over to the couch, and plopped down on it. “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but Chinese throwing stars get you a dozen stitches.” I drew the ghoul’s weapon from my pocket by way of illustration and tossed it down on the coffee table. “How’s Butters?”

“Fine,” Thomas said. “Funny little guy. Made an awful racket with that…polka thing of his for about half an hour, babbled for forty minutes straight, and fell asleep eating dinner. I put him on the bed.”

“He’s had a stressful day,” I said.

“He’s a coward,” Thomas said.

I glared at him and started to snarl something harsh and defensive.

He held up a hand and hurried to speak. “Don’t take that wrong, Harry. He’s smart enough to understand what’s happening. And he’s smart enough to know that there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. He knows the only reason he’s alive is that someone else is protecting him. He isn’t kidding himself that he’s somehow done it because of his own cleverness or skill.” Thomas glanced at the door to the bedroom. “He doesn’t know how to deal with the fear. It’s strangling him.”

I propped my aching leg up on the coffee table. “Thank you for your professional opinion, Counselor.”

Thomas gave me a level look. “I’ve seen it before. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“When you were attacked in the morgue last night, he froze. Didn’t he.”

I shrugged one shoulder. “Not everyone is cut out for the battlefield.”

“But he froze,” Thomas said. “You had to scream orders into his ear and haul him around like luggage, right?”

“That doesn’t make him a coward.”

“He lets his fear control him. That’s what a coward is, Harry.”

“A lot of people would react the same way,” I said.

“A lot of people aren’t making themselves into excess baggage for my brother,” he shot back.

“No one does well their first time out,” I said.

“It isn’t an isolated incident,” Thomas said. “You told me that when he reported on the corpses taken from Bianca’s manor, and they locked him up in the nuthouse.”

“So?”

“So do you think he got his job back without backing down? Admitting to some shrink that he hadn’t really seen what he saw?” Thomas shook his head. “He was afraid to lose his career. He caved.”

I sat silently.

“Doesn’t make him a bad person,” Thomas said. “But he’s a coward. He’s either going to get you killed or else freeze at a bad moment and die—and you’ll torture yourself over how it’s all your fault. If we want to survive, we need to get him somewhere safe. Then cut him loose. Better for everyone.”

I thought about it for a minute.

“You might be right,” I said. “But if we tell him to rabbit, he’s never going to be able to get over the fear. We’ll be making it worse for him. He has to face it down.”

“He doesn’t want to.”

“No,” I said, “but he needs to.”

Thomas looked from me to the fire and nodded. “It’s your show.”

I watched Mouse mosey over to his bucket-sized food bowl. He sat down by it and waited expectantly until Mister prowled over to him. Then he bent down to eat. My cat stalked up to Mouse and promptly swatted him on the muzzle with one paw. Mouse opened his jaws in a doggy grin and walked a couple of steps in the direction Mister had swatted him.

Mister regarded Mouse with lordly disdain, then ate part of a single piece of kibble. Then he slapped at the bowl of food, scattering bits over the kitchen floor, and walked away. Once he was done, Mouse padded back over, patiently ate the spilled food, and then resumed munching on the bowl.

“Remember when Mouse would slide all the way to the wall when Mister did that?” Thomas asked.

“Heh. Yeah.”

“Do you think Mister realizes that the dog is about twenty times bigger than he used to be?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, he realizes it, all right,” I said. “He just doesn’t see how it’s relevant.”

“One of these days Mouse is going to disabuse him of the notion.”

I shook my head. “He won’t. Mister made his point when Mouse was tiny. Mouse is the sort to respect tradition.”

“Or he’s scared to cross the cat.” Thomas’s eyes drifted to my bandages and he nodded at my leg. “How bad is it?”

“I can walk. I wouldn’t want to go dancing.”

“Is that your next move, dancing?”

I leaned my head back on the couch and closed my eyes. “I’m not sure what to do next. How are you as a sounding board?”

“I can look interested and nod at appropriate moments,” he said.

“Good enough,” I said.

I told Thomas everything.

He listened, taking it all in, and the first thing he said was, “You have a date?”

I opened my eyes and blinked at him. “What. Is that so hard to conceive?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Christ, Harry, I thought you were going to spend the rest of your life as a hermit.”

“What?”

He rolled his eyes. “It isn’t like you’ve gone looking for women,” Thomas said. “I mean, you never hit any clubs. Try to get any phone numbers. I figured you just didn’t want to.” He mulled it over for a minute and then said, “Good God. You’re shy.”

“I am not,” I said.

“The girl practically had to throw herself into your arms. My sister would laugh herself sick.”

I glowered at him. “You are not a spectacularly helpful sounding board.”

He stretched out a little and crossed his legs at the ankle. “I’m so pretty, it’s hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.” He pursed his lips. “There are two things you need to know.”

“The book,” I said, nodding.

“Yeah. Everyone is hot and bothered over this Erlking thing. You read it?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

I raked my fingers through my hair. “And nothing. It’s a collection of essays about a particular figure of faerie lore called the Erlking.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s one of the high sidhe,” I said. “And he isn’t part of Winter or Summer. He’s a wyldfae.”

“Powerful?”

“Very,” I said. “But just how powerful he is varies depending on who was writing about him. Some of them ranked him among the top faerie nobles. A couple claimed he was on par with one of the Faerie Queens.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s some kind of hunter spirit,” I said. “Associated with all kinds of primal violence. He’s apparently one of the beings who can call up and lead the Wild Hunt.”

“The what?” Thomas said.

“It’s a gathering of some of the more predatory beings of Faerie,” I said. “They appear in the autumn and winter usually, usually along with storms and rough weather. A gathering of black hounds the size of horses with glowing red eyes, led by a hunter with the horns of a stag on a black horse.”

“The Erlking?” Thomas asked.

“There are several figures who can lead the hunt, apparently,” I said. “None of them are particularly friendly. The Hunt will kill anything and anyone it runs across. It’s major-league dangerous.”

“I think I’ve heard about it,” Thomas said. “Is it true that you can avoid being hunted by joining them?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone who met the Hunt and survived. Could be that they won’t hunt what they think of as another predator.”

“Like sharks,” Thomas said. “It’s all about body language.”

“I wouldn’t count on nonverbal cues to protect you from the Hunt,” I said. “Assuming you ever saw them. It appears maybe only once every five or six years, and can show up almost anywhere in the world.”

“Is it the Hunt you think the Kemmlerites are interested in?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I can’t think what else it would be. The Erlking has a reputation as a being that preys upon children, or at least one that heralds their deaths. A couple of wizards even peg him as a guardian who ensures that children’s souls aren’t harmed or diverted as they depart dying bodies.”

“Sounds like there is a mixed opinion on this Erlking guy.”

“Faeries are like that,” I said. “They aren’t ever quite what they seem to be. It’s hard to pin them down.”

“But why would a gang of necromancers be interested in him? Is there anything in the book that makes sense?”

“Not that I saw,” I said. “There were stories, songs, lectures, accountings, bad sketches, and worse poetry about the Erlking, but nothing practical.”

“Nothing you saw,” Thomas said.

“Nothing I saw,” I confirmed. “But these lunatics would hardly be this serious about the book if it wasn’t there somewhere.”

“Do you think it’s connected to this Darkhallow that Corpsetaker was talking about?” Thomas asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a Darkhallow?”

We listened to the fire crackle for a minute before Thomas said, “I hate to say this, but maybe you should contact the Council.”

I grimaced. “I know I should,” I said. “I don’t know what they’re doing. And these necromancers are strong, Thomas. Stronger than me. I don’t think I can take them in a straight fight.”

“Sounds like a good reason to call for help.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Mavra would torpedo Murphy.”

“I don’t think Murphy would want you to get killed over this, Harry,” he pointed out. “And what’s going to happen if the Council hears that you knew these folk were around and didn’t report it to them? They aren’t going to be happy.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. But at the moment it’s my choice, and I’m not going to choose for my friend to get hurt. I can’t.”

He nodded, as if he’d expected the answer.

“Plus there’s one more reason not to call in the Council,” I said.

“Why?”

“Right now, Cowl, Grevane, and Corpsetaker aren’t working together. If I call in the Council it gives them a common enemy and a reason to cooperate.”

“They have a common enemy,” he pointed out. “You.”

I laughed, and it came out a little bitter. “They aren’t worried about me. Hell, I can’t even figure out what’s going on.” I rubbed at my eyes. “You said there were two things I need to know. What’s the second thing?”

“Your car.”

“Oh, I got it back,” I said. “It’s out front.”

“No, dummy,” Thomas said. “Whoever trashed your car did it deliberately. They were trying to tell you something.”

“It might not even be related to this situation,” I said.

He snorted. “Yeah. It just happened now, out of all the times it could have happened.”

“Whoever was sending the message, it’s a little obscure. You think it’s one of the Kemmler crowd?”

“Why not?” he said.

I thought about it for a minute. “It doesn’t seem like something Grevane would do. I bet he’s more like the kind to send undead minions to deliver his messages. Corpsetaker would send a nightmare or a forced hallucination or something. She’s big on the mind magic. Ghouls don’t really send messages. They just eat you.”

“That leaves Cowl, his buddy, and Grevane’s buddy with the liver spots.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I almost feel like there was something familiar about Liver Spots,” I said. “I’m not sure what. I might be grasping at straws.”

“What about Cowl and Kumori?”

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “They were just a couple of people in cloaks. I never saw their faces. If I had to guess from the way they talked, I’d bet that they were Council.”

“That would be a very good reason to cover their faces,” Thomas agreed.

“There’s no point in chewing this over and over,” I said. I rubbed at my eyes. “Bony Tony’s numbers mean something. They’ll lead to the book, somehow. I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe a locker number?” Thomas asked.

“Too many digits,” I said.

“Maybe it’s some kind of cipher. Substituting letters for numbers.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a thought.” I dug the folded piece of paper out of my pocket and passed it over to him. “Stay here and work on it. See if you can make any sense out of it.”

He accepted the paper. “Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous. What are you going to do?”

“I think the Erlking is the key to this,” I said. “And the Erlking is a faerie.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Meaning?”

“When you want to know about faeries,” I said, “it’s best to ask a faerie. I’m going to call up my godmother and see if she knows anything.”

“From what you’ve told me, isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Very,” I said.

“You’re hurt. You should have some backup.”

I nodded. “Watch the fort,” I said. “Mouse.”

The big dog lifted his shaggy head from the floor, ears perked forward, serious eyes on me.

“Come on,” I told him. “We’re going for a ride.”

“Oh, Harry,” Thomas said.

“Yeah?”

“Before you go…would you mind if I, uh, helped Butters out by getting his polka contraption loaded up into your trunk?”

“What. You don’t like polka?”

Thomas’s expression looked strained. “Please, Harry. I like the little guy, but come on.”

I rubbed at my mouth with one hand to cover up the smile. “Sure. Probably safest for everyone that way.”

“Thank you,” he said, and collected the polka suit and brought it up the stairs behind me as I prepared to take a chance on a conversation with one of the more dangerous beings I knew.

Chapter

Twenty-one

Mouse and I took the Beetle out of Chicago proper, following the lake north out of town. For once I wished I had an automatic transmission. Driving stick with only one good hand and one good leg is not fun. In fact, it’s the next best thing to impossible, at least for me. I wound up using my wounded leg more than I should have, and the discomfort intensified. I thought about the painkillers in my pocket, and then blew them off. I needed to be sharp. When all of this was over, there would be time to muddle my head with codeine. So I drove, and swore under my breath at anything that made me change gears, while Mouse rode along in the passenger seat with his head usually sticking out the window.

By the time I was far enough from town to start calling out to my godmother, the sun had set, though the cloud-veiled western sky still glowed the color of campfire embers. I pulled off onto a side road that was made of old gravel and stubborn weeds that kept trying to grow up in the road’s smooth center. It led down to a little dead end where some kind of construction project never went through. It was a popular spot for local kids to hang out and imbibe illegal substances of one intensity or another, and there were empty beer cans and bottles scattered around in abundance.

Mouse and I left the car up on the road, and walked maybe fifty yards down through trees and heavy undergrowth to the shore of the lake. At one point on the shore, a little spit of land formed a promontory only ten or twelve inches higher than the surface of the water.

“Wait here,” I told Mouse, and the dog sat down at the end of the spit of land, watching me with alert eyes, his ears flicking around at all the little sounds. Then I walked out onto the spit to its end, and a cold wind off the lake swept around me, blowing my coat and threatening my balance. I grimaced and leaned on my staff, out at that point of land where earth and water and sky met one another, and focused my thoughts, blocking out the pain of my leg, my fears, my questions. I gathered together my will, then lifted my face to the wind and called out, quietly, “Leanansidhe. An it please thee, come hither and hold discourse with me.”

I sent my will, my magic coursing into the words, and they reverberated with power, echoing from the surface of the lake, repeating themselves in whispers in the swirling wind, vibrating the ground upon which I stood.

Then I waited. I could have repeated myself, but my godmother had certainly heard me. If she was going to come, she would. If she wasn’t, no amount of repetition was likely to change her mind. The wind blew colder and stronger, throwing cold droplets up from the lake and into my face. One gust of wind brought me the sound of an airliner overhead, and another the lonely whistle of a freight train. Distantly, somewhere on the lake, a bell rang out several times, a solemn sound that made me think of a funeral dirge. Beyond that, nothing stirred.

I waited. In time, the fire faded from the overcast sky, and only the darkest tones of purple were left on the western horizon behind me. Dammit. She wasn’t coming.

After I thought that but before I could actually turn around, there was a swirling in the waters near my feet, and a slow spiral of water spray spun up from the surface of the lake, a bizarre sight. The spray rolled up and away from a female form, beginning at the feet, bare and pale, and rolling up over a medieval-style gown of emerald green. The gown was belted with a woven silver rope, and a slightly curved, single-edged knife of some dark, glassy material hung at an angle through it.

When the spray rolled up over the woman’s face, I expected my godmother’s blazing wealth of copper and scarlet curls, her wide feline eyes of amber, her features that always made her seem smug and somewhat pleased with herself, in absence of the animation of any other emotion.

Instead I saw a long, pale throat, features of heart-stopping, cold beauty, canted eyes greener than any color to be found in the natural world, and long, silken hair of purest white, bound within a circlet of what looked like rose vines surrounded in gleaming ice, beautiful and brittle and cruel.

Behind me, a deep-throated snarl burst forth from Mouse, back on the shore.

“Greetings, mortal,” said the faerie woman. Her voice shook water and earth and sky with subtle power. I felt it resonating through the elements around me as much as heard it.

My mouth went dry and my throat got tight. I leaned on my staff to help me balance as I cast a courtly bow in her direction. “Greetings, Queen Mab. I do beg your pardon. It was not my intention to disturb thee.”

My head shifted into panicked, quick thought. Queen Mab had come to me, and that absolutely could not be good. Mab, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, the Queen of Air and Darkness, was not a very nice person. In fact, she was one of the most feared beings of power you’d find short of archangels and ancient gods. I’d once used my wizard’s Sight to look upon Mab as she unveiled her true self in a working of power, and it had come perilously close to driving me insane.

Mab was not some paltry mortal being like Grevane or Cowl or the Corpsetaker. She was far older, far crueler, far more deadly than they could ever be.

And I owed her a favor. Two, to be exact.

She stared at me for a long and silent moment, and I didn’t look at her face. Then she let out a quiet laugh and said, “Disturb me? Hardly. I am here only to fulfill the duties I have been obliged to take upon myself. It is no fault of thine that this summons reached mine ears.”

I straightened up slowly and avoided her eyes. “I had expected my godmother to come.”

Mab smiled. Her teeth were small and white and perfect, her canines delicately sharp. “Alas. The Leanansidhe is tied up at the moment.”

I drew in a breath. My godmother was a powerful member of the Winter Court, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Mab. If Mab wanted to take Lea down, she certainly could do it—and for some reason the thought spurred on a protective instinct, something that made me irrationally angry. Yes, Lea was hardly a benevolent being in her own right. Yes, she’d tried to enslave me several times in the past several years. But for all of that, she was still my godmother, and the thought of something happening to her angered me. “For what reason have you detained her?”

“Because I do not tolerate challenges to my authority,” she said. One pale hand drifted to the hilt of the knife at her belt. “Certain events had convinced your godmother that she was no longer bound by my word and will. She is now learning otherwise.”

“What have you done to her?” I asked. Well. It didn’t sound like a question so much as a demand.

Mab laughed, and the sound of it came out silvery and smoother than honey. The laugh bounded around the waves and the earth and the winds, clashing against itself in a manner that made the hairs on my neck stand up and my heart race with a sudden apprehension as I felt an odd kind of pressure settle over me, as if I were closed into a small room. I gritted my teeth and waited the laugh out, trying not to show how harshly it had affected me. “She is bound,” Mab said. “She is in some discomfort. But she is in no danger from my hand. Once she acknowledges who rules Winter, she will be restored to her station. I can ill afford the loss of so potent a vassal.”

“I need to speak to her now,” I said.

“Of course,” Mab said. “Yet she languishes in the process of enlightenment. Thus am I here to fulfill her obligation to teach and guide you.”

I frowned. “You locked her away somewhere, but you’re keeping her promises?”

Something cold and haughty flickered through Mab’s eyes. “Promises must be kept,” she murmured, and the words made wave, wind, and stone tremble. “My vassal’s oaths and bargains are binding upon me, so long as I restrain her from fulfilling them.”

“Does that mean that you will help me?” I asked.

“It means that I will give you what she might give you,” Mab said, “and speak what knowledge she might have spoken to you were she here in flesh, rather than in proxy.” She tilted her head slowly to one side. “You know, wizard, that I may speak no word that is untrue. Thus is my word given to you.”

I eyed her warily. It was true that the high Sidhe could not speak words that were untrue—but that wasn’t the same thing as telling the truth. Most of the Sidhe I had met were past masters of the art of deception, speaking in allusions and riddles and inferences that would undermine the necessary honesty of their words so thoroughly that they might be much stronger lies than if they had simply spoken a direct falsehood. Trusting the word of one of the Sidhe was an enterprise best undertaken with extraordinary caution and exacting care. If I had any choice in the matter, I would avoid it.

But there was nothing I could do but forge ahead. I still had to find out more about what Sergeant Kemmler’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was doing in Chicago, and that meant taking the risk of speaking with my godmother. Mab was simply more of the same risk.

A lot more of it.

“I seek knowledge,” I said, “about the one known as the Erlking.”

Mab arched an eyebrow. “Him,” she said. “Yes. Your godmother knows some little of him. What would you know of him?”

“I want to know why all of Kemmler’s disciples are grabbing up all the copies of the White Council’s book about him.”

Nothing that I could imagine would truly rattle Mab’s composure, but that sentence apparently came close. Her expression froze, and with it the wind came to a sudden, dead halt. The waves of the shore abruptly stilled to a sheet of glass beneath her feet, dimly reflecting the glow of the city skyline in the distance and the last shreds of purple light in the leaden sky.

“Kemmler’s disciples,” she said. Her eyes were deeper than the lake she stood upon. “Could it be?”

“Could what be?” I asked.

“The Word,” she said. “The Word of Kemmler. Has it been found?”

“Um,” I said. “Sort of.”

Her delicate white brows rose. “Meaning what, pray tell?”

“Meaning that the book was found,” I said. “By a local thief. He tried to sell it to a man named Grevane.”

“Kemmler’s first student,” Mab said. “Did he acquire the book?”

“No,” I said. “The thief used mortal technology to conceal the book, in order to prevent Grevane from taking it from him without paying.”

“Grevane killed him,” Mab guessed.

“And how.”

“This mortal ferromancy—technology, you called it. Does it yet conceal the book?”

“Yeah.”

“Grevane yet seeks it?”

“Yeah. Him and at least two more. Cowl and the Corpsetaker.”

Mab lifted a pale hand and tapped a finger to rich, lovely lips the color of frozen mulberries. Her nails were colored with shining opalescence gorgeous to the eye and distracting as hell. I felt a little dizzy until I forced myself not to look at them. “Dangerous,” she mused. “You have fallen among deadly company, mortal. Even the Council fears them.”

“You don’t say.”

Mab narrowed her eyes, and a little smile graced her lips. “Impudent,” she said. “It’s sweet on you.”

“Gosh, that’s flattering,” I said. “But you haven’t told me a thing about why they might be interested in the Erlking.”

Mab pursed her lips. “The being you ask me about is to goblins as I am to the Sidhe. A ruler. A master of their kind. Devious, cunning, strong, and swift. He wields dominion over the spirits of fallen hunters.”

I frowned. “What kind of spirits?”

“The spirits of those who hunt,” Mab said. “The energy of the hunt. Of excitement, hunger, bloodlust. Betimes, the Erlking will call those spirits into the form of the great black hounds, and ride the winds and forests as the Wild Hunt. He carries great power with him as he does. Power that calls to the remnants of hunters now passed on from mortal life.”

“You’re talking about ghosts,” I said. “The spirit of hunters.”

“Indeed,” Mab said. “Shades that lay in quiet rest, beyond the beck of the mortal pale, will rise up to the night and the stars at the sound of his horn, and join the Hunt.”

“Powerful shades,” I said quietly.

“Specters most potent,” Mab said, nodding, her eyes bright and almost merry as they watched me.

I leaned on my staff, trying to get as much weight as I could off of my injured leg, so that it would stop pounding enough to make me think. “So a gaggle of wizards whose stock in trade is enslaving the dead to their will is interested in a being whose presence calls up powerful spirits they couldn’t otherwise reach.” I followed the chain of logic from there. “There’s something in the book that tells them how to get his attention.”

“Darling child,” Mab said. “So clever for one so young.”

“So what is it?” I asked. “Which part of the book?”

“Your godmother,” she said, her smile growing wider, “has no idea.”

I ground my teeth together. “But you do?”

“I am the Queen of Air and Darkness, wizard. There is little I do not.”

“Will you tell me?”

She touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, as if savoring the taste of the words. “You should know us better than that by now, wizard. Nothing given by one of the Sidhe comes without a price.”

My foot hurt. I had to hop a little bit on my good leg when my balance wavered. “Great,” I muttered. “What is it you want?”

“You,” Mab said, folding her hands primly in front of her. “My offer of Knighthood yet stands open to you.”

“What’s wrong with the new guy?” I asked, “that you’d dump him for me?”

Mab showed me her teeth again. “I have not yet replaced my current Knight, treacherous though he is,” she purred.

“He’s still alive?” I asked.

“I suppose,” Mab said. “Though he very much wishes that he were not. I have taken the time to explain to him at length the error of his ways.”

Torture. She’d been torturing him in vengeance for his treachery for more than three years.

I felt a little sick to my stomach.

“If you like, you might consider it an act of mercy,” she said. “Accept my offer, and I will forgive your debt to me and answer all your questions freely.”

I shuddered. Mab’s last Knight had been an abusive, psychotic, drug-addicted, murdering rapist. I was never clear on whether he got the job because of those qualities or whether they had been instilled in him on the job. Either way, the title of Winter Knight was a permanent gig. If I accepted Mab’s offer, I’d be doing it for life—though there would, of course, be no promises as to how long that life would be.

“I told you once before,” I said, “that I’m not interested.”

“Things have changed, wizard,” Mab said. “You know the kind of power you face in Kemmler’s heirs. As the Winter Knight, you would have strength far outweighing even your own considerable gifts. You would have the wherewithal to face your foes, rather than slinking through the night gathering up whispers to use against them.”

“No.” I paused and then said, “And no means no.”

Mab shrugged one shoulder, a liquid motion that drew my eyes toward the curves of her breasts within the silken gown. “You disappoint me, child. But I can wait. I can wait until the sun burns cold.”

Thunder rumbled over the lake. Off in the southwest, lightning leapt from cloud to cloud.

Mab turned her head to watch. “Interesting.”

“Uh. What’s interesting?”

“Powers at work, preparing the way.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“That you have little time,” Mab said. She turned to face me again. “I must do what I might to preserve your life. Know this, mortal: Should Kemmler’s heirs acquire the knowledge bound within the Word, they will be in a position to gather up such power as the world has not seen in many thousands of years.”

“What? How?”

“Kemmler was”—Mab’s eyes grew distant, as if in memory—“a madman. A monster. But brilliant. He learned how to bind to his will not only dead flesh, but shades—to rend them asunder and devour them to feed his own power. It was the secret of the strength that allowed him to defy all the White Council together.”

I added two and two and got four. “The heirs want to call up the ancient spirits,” I breathed. “And then devour them for power.”

Mab’s deep-green eyes almost seemed to glow with intensity. “Kemmler himself attempted it, but the Council struck him down before he could finish.”

I swallowed. “What happens if one of his heirs is able to do it?”

“The heir would gain power such as has not been wielded by mortal hands in the memory of your race,” Mab said.

“The Darkhallow,” I said. I rubbed at my eyes. “That’s what it is. A ritual, tomorrow night. Halloween. They all want to be the one to make themselves into a junior-league god.”

“Power is ever sweet, is it not?”

I thought about it some more. I had to worry about more than just Kemmler’s cronies. Mavra wanted the Word, too. Hell’s bells. If Mavra succeeded in making herself into some kind of dark goddess, there wasn’t a chance in hell that she wouldn’t obliterate me at the first opportunity. “Can they do it without the Word?”

Mab’s mouth curled up in a slow smile. “If they could, why would they seek it so desperately?” The wind began to stir again, and the lake began to resume its ebb and flow. “Beware, wizard. You are engaged in a most deadly game. I should be disappointed were I deprived of your service.”

“Then get used to it,” I said. “I’m never going to be your knight.”

Mab tilted back her head and let out that nerve-searing laughter again. “I have time,” she said. “And you mortals find life to be very sweet. Two favors you yet owe me, and make no mistake, I will collect. One day you will kneel at my feet.”

The lake suddenly surged, dark waters whirling up in a snake-quick spiral, forming a waterspout that stretched from the lake’s surface up out of sight into the darkness above me. The wind howled, driving my balance to one side, so that my wounded leg buckled and I fell to one knee.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the gale was gone. The lake was calm again. The wind sighed mournfully through tree branches sparsely covered in dead leaves. There was no sign of Mab.

I grimaced and struggled to my feet. I glanced back at Mouse, who was sitting on the shore, watching me with worried doggy eyes.

“She always has to have the last word,” I told him.

Mouse padded over to me, and I scratched his ears a couple of times while he snuffled at me. He looked warily out at the lake.

“One problem at a time,” I told him. “We’ll handle Mab later. Somehow.”

I walked back to the Beetle more slowly than ever, and Mouse stayed within a step or two the entire time. The adrenaline faded and left me wearier than ever. I had to fight to stay awake all the way back to my place. A thin, cold, drizzling rain began to fall.

I had just gotten home and out of the car when Mouse let out a warning snarl. I spun and wavered, then planted my staff hard on the ground to keep from falling over.

Out of the darkness and rain, a dozen or more people suddenly loomed into view. All of them walked toward me, steady and unhurried.

And all of them marched in step with one another.

In the distance I heard the low, rumbling thunder of a drum played on a big bass stereo.

Behind the first group came another. And behind them another. By then I could see the eyes of the nearest—empty, staring eyes in sunken, deathly faces.

My heart lurched in sudden terror as the zombies closed in on me.

I shambled down my stairs and tripped, stumbling against my door. I fumbled at my keys, frantically taking down my wards so that my own security spells didn’t kill me on my way in. Mouse stayed at my back, continuous snarls bubbling from between his bared teeth.

“Thomas!” I screamed. “Thomas, open the door!”

I heard a noise, close, and spun around.

Mindless faces appeared at the top of the stairs leading down to my apartment door, and Grevane’s killing machines leapt down them, straight at me.

Chapter

Twenty-two

Mouse leapt into the air as the lead zombie flung itself at me, and met it with an ugly sound of impact. The dog and the animate corpse dropped onto the stairs. The zombie swung an arm at Mouse, but the dog rolled, taking the blow on one slab of a shoulder, his snarl sharpening at the impact. The dog surged against the zombie’s legs and got his teeth into the corpse’s face. He shook his head violently, while the zombie stumbled and reeled under the ferocity of the attack.

The second zombie bypassed the struggling pair, reaching out for me. I barely had time to brandish my staff at the creature and snarl, “Forzare!”

Unseen force struck the zombie like an ocean wave, flinging it back up the stairs and out of sight.

Mouse let out a shrieking sound of pain, ripped his fangs once more at the zombie’s face, and pushed away from it. The zombie’s face had been crushed and torn until it was unrecognizable. Both eyes had been torn out, and the undead thing flailed around wildly, striking blindly with heavy sweeps of its arms. Mouse leaned heavily against me, one paw held lifted from the ground, snarling.

Three more zombies were already most of the way down the stairs, and there was no time to do anything but try my staff again. I raised it, but the nearest zombie was faster than I had guessed, and he batted the wood out of my hand. It smacked against the concrete wall of the stairwell and rebounded onto the blinded zombie, out of my reach. The zombie snatched at my arm and I barely avoided it.

The door opened at my back and Thomas called, “Down!”

I dropped to the ground and did my best to haul Mouse down with me. There was a roar of thunder, and the leading zombie’s head vanished into a spray of ugly, rotten gore. The remainder of the being thrashed for a second and then fell drunkenly to one side, collapsing into immobility.

Thomas stood in the doorway, dressed only in a pair of blue jeans. He held the sawed-off shotgun against his shoulder, and his eyes blazed with a cold silver fury. He worked the pump on the gun and fired it three times more, destroying or driving back my nearest attackers for a moment. Then he seized the collar of my duster and dragged me forcibly into the apartment. Mouse came with us, and Thomas slammed the door shut.

“Get the locks,” I told him. He started shoving the door’s two heavy security bolts shut, while I crawled to the door, laid my hands against it, and with a whisper of will rearmed the wards that protected the apartment. The air hummed with a low buzz as the wards snapped back up into place.

Silence fell over the apartment.

“Okay,” I said, panting. “That’s it. Safe at home.” I looked around the apartment and spotted Butters hovering near the fireplace, poker in hand. “You okay, man?”

“I guess so,” Butters said. He looked a little wild around the eyes. “Are they gone?”

“If they aren’t yet, they will be. We’re safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Definitely,” I said. “There’s no way they’re going to get in here.”

The words were hardly off my lips when there was a thunder crack of sound and a heavy thump that knocked scores of books off my bookshelves and sent us all staggering around like the cast of the original Star Trek.

“What was that?” Butters screamed.

“The wards,” Thomas snapped.

“No,” I said. “I mean, come on. Walking right into those wards is suicide.”

There was another clap of thunder, and the apartment shook again. A flash of bright blue light bathed the outside of the boardinghouse, and even reflected through the sunken windows near my apartment’s ceiling, it was painfully bright.

“Can’t commit suicide if you’re already dead,” Thomas said. “How many of those things were out there?”

“Uh, I’m not sure,” I said. “A lot?”

Thomas swallowed, got the box of shells off the mantel, and started loading them into the shotgun. “What happens if he just keeps throwing zombies at the wards?”

“I didn’t build them to keep up a continuous discharge,” I said. There was another roaring sound and another flash of light, but this time there was barely a tremor on the floor. “They’re going to fade and collapse.”

“How long?” Thomas asked.

There was a crackling buzz from outside, too slow, this time, to be heard only as a roar of noise. Blue-white light flickered dimly. “Not long. Dammit.”

“Oh, God,” Butters said. “Oh, God, oh, God. What happens when the wards are gone?”

I grunted. “The door is made of steel. It will take them some time to get through it. And after that, there’s the threshold. That should stop them, or at least slow them down.” I raked my fingers over my hair. “We’ve got to come up with something, fast.”

“What about the extra defenses?” Thomas asked.

“They’re standing right outside,” I said.

“Hence the need for extra defenses,” Thomas snapped. He pumped a round into the shotgun’s chamber and slipped another into the extra slot in its clip.

“Those defenses are meant to stop a magical assault,” I said. “Not physical entry.”

“Will they keep the zombies out?” Butters asked.

“Yes. But they’ll also keep us in.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Butters asked.

“Nothing,” I said, “until Grevane sets the building on fire. Once they go up, I can’t take them down again. We’ll be trapped.” I ground my teeth. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But the zombies are out there!” Butters said.

“I’m not the only one who lives here,” I said. “If he burns down the house to get to me, people will die. Thomas, get dressed and get your shoes on. Butters, there’s a ladder under that Navajo rug there. I want you to take a candle and go down it. There’s a black nylon backpack on a table, and a white skull on a wooden shelf. Put the skull in the backpack and bring it to me.”

“What?” Butters said.

“Do it!” I snapped.

Butters scurried over to the Navajo rug, found the trapdoor down to my lab, and grabbed a candle. He disappeared down the ladder.

Thomas put the shotgun down and opened his trunk. It didn’t take him long to get dressed in socks, black combat boots, a white T-shirt, a black leather jacket. Maybe it was part of his supernatural sex-vampire powers—dressing quickly for a hasty getaway.

“You see?” he said while he dressed. “About Butters.”

“Shut up, Thomas,” I said.

“What is the plan?” he said.

I limped over to the phone and put it to my ear. Nothing.

“They cut the phone.”

“We can’t call for help,” Thomas said.

“Right. Only thing we can do is smash our way out to the car.”

Thomas nodded his head with a jerk. “How you want to do it?”

“What do you think?”

“Big old wall of fire would do it. Cover our left flank and keep the bad guys off of us. I’ll take the right flank and shoot anything that moves.”

Fire magic. A sudden memory of my burned hand flashed through my head so intensely that I felt actual, physical pain in the nerve endings that had been destroyed. I thought about what I would need to do to manage the wall Thomas had suggested, and at the mere thought my stomach twisted in revulsion—and worse, with doubt.

For magic to work, you have to believe in it. You have to believe that you can and should perform whatever action you had in mind, or you get zippo. As my hand burned with phantom agony, I realized something I had not admitted, not even to myself.

I wasn’t sure I could use fire magic again.

Ever.

And if I tried it and failed, it would only make it more difficult to focus my will on it again in the future, each failure building a wall that would only grow more difficult to breach. My belief in my powers might never recover.

I looked down at my maimed hand, and for just a second I actually saw the blackened, cracked flesh, my fingers swollen, the whole of it seeping blood and fluid. The second passed, and there was only my hand in its leather glove again, and I knew that beneath the glove it was scarred in various shades of white and red and pink.

I wasn’t ready. God, even to save lives that included my own, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to call up fire again. I stood there feeling helpless and angry and afraid and stupid—and most of all, ashamed.

I shook my head at Thomas and avoided meeting his eyes while I gave him an excuse. “I’m all but done,” I said quietly. “I’ve got to save whatever I have left to block Grevane if he throws power at us directly. I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to do.”

He searched my expression for a second, frowning. Then he shrugged into the jacket, his face grim. He seized the saber in its scabbard and buckled it on with a worn leather belt. He settled it at his hip and picked up the shotgun again. “Guess it’s up to me, then.”

I nodded.

“I’m not sure how hard I’ll be able to push,” he said quietly.

“You handled Black Court vampires pretty well last year,” I said.

“I’d been feeding on Justine every day,” he said. “I had a lot to draw on. Now…” He shook his head. “Now I’m not sure.”

“We aren’t exactly overstaffed here, Thomas.”

He closed his eyes for a second, and then nodded. “Right.”

“Here’s the plan. We get to the Beetle. We drive away.”

“And then what? Where do we go after that?” he asked.

“You don’t see me nitpicking your plans, do you?”

There was a sudden, heavy thump against the steel security door. It rattled in its frame. Bits of dust descended from my ceiling. Then another. And another. Grevane had thrown enough zombies at the wards to wear them out.

Thomas grimaced and looked at my leg. “Can you get up the stairs on your own?”

“I’ll make it,” I said.

Butters came panting up the stepladder from the lab, his face pale. He wore my nylon pack, and I could see Bob the skull making one side of it bulge a little.

“Gun,” I said to Thomas, and he handed me the shotgun. “Right. Here’s how it works. We open the door.” I gestured with the shotgun. “I sweep it clear enough to get Thomas clear of the doorway. Then Thomas goes in front. Butters, I’m going to hand you the shotgun.”

“I don’t like guns,” Butters said.

“You don’t have to like it,” I said. “You just have to carry it. With my leg hurt, I can’t get up the stairs without using my staff.”

The steel door rattled again, the pace of the blows against it increasing.

“Butters,” I snapped. “Butters, you’ve got to take the gun when I hand it to you and follow Thomas. All right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Once we get up the stairs, Thomas runs interference while I start the car. Butters, you’ll get in the backseat. Thomas gets in and then we leave.”

“Um,” Butters said, “Grevane trashed my car so I couldn’t get away, remember? What if he’s done the same thing to yours?”

I stared at Butters for a second and tried not to show him how much that worried me.

“Butters,” Thomas said quietly, “if we stay here we’re going to die.”

“But if they’ve destroyed the car—” Butters began.

“We’ll die,” Thomas said. “But we don’t have a choice. Whether or not they’ve destroyed it, our only chance of getting out of this alive is to get to the Beetle and hope it runs.”

The little guy got even paler, and then abruptly doubled over and staggered over to the wall beneath one of my high windows. He threw up. He straightened after a minute and leaned back against the wall, shaking. “I hate this,” he whispered, and wiped his mouth. “I hate this. I want to go home. I want to wake up.”

“Get it together, Butters,” I said, my voice tight. “This isn’t helping.”

He let out a wild laugh. “Nothing I can do would help, Harry.”

“Butters, you’ve got to calm down.”

“Calm down?” He waved a shaking hand at the door. “They’re going to kill us. Just like Phil. They’re going to kill us and we’re going to die. You, me, Thomas. We’re all going to die!”

I forgot my bad leg for a second, crossed the room to Butters, and seized him by the front of his shirt. I hauled up until his heels lifted off of the floor. “Listen to me,” I snarled. “We are not going to die!”

Butters stared up at me, pale, his eyes terrified. “We’re not?”

“No. And do you know why?”

He shook his head.

“Because Thomas is too pretty to die. And because I’m too stubborn to die.” I hauled on the shirt even harder. “And most of all because tomorrow is Oktoberfest, Butters, and polka will never die.”

He blinked.

“Polka will never die!” I shouted at him. “Say it!”

He swallowed. “Polka will never die?”

“Again!”

“P-p-polka will never die,” he stammered.

I shook him a little. “Louder!”

“Polka will never die!” he shrieked.

“We’re going to make it!” I shouted.

“Polka will never die!” Butters screamed.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Thomas muttered.

I shot my half brother a warning look, released Butters, and said, “Get ready to open the door.”

Then the window just over Butters’s head exploded into shards of broken glass. I felt a hot, stinging sensation on my nose. I stumbled, my wounded leg gave out, and I fell.

Butters shrieked.

I looked up in time to see dead grey fingers clutching the little guy by the hair. They hauled him off of his feet, and two more zombie hands latched onto him and pulled him up through the broken window and out of the apartment. It happened so fast, before I could get my good leg under me, before Thomas could draw his saber.

There was a terrified scream from outside. It ended abruptly.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Butters.”

Chapter

Twenty-three

I stood staring up at the broken window in stunned silence for a second.

“Harry,” Thomas said, quiet urgency in his voice, “we need to go.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving him.”

“He’s probably dead already.”

“If he is,” I said. “It won’t protect him from Grevane. I won’t leave him there.”

“Do we have a chance in a fight?”

I shook my head with a grimace. “Help me up.”

He did. I limped over to the window and shouted, “Grevane!”

“Good evening,” Grevane said, the rich, cultured tones of his voice a marked contrast to the dull, steady pounding at my front door. “My compliments to your contractor. That door is really quite sturdy.”

“I like my privacy,” I called back. “Is the mortician alive?”

“That’s a somewhat fluid term in my experience,” Grevane said. “But he is well enough for the time being.”

My knees wobbled a little in relief. Good. If Butters was still all right, I had to keep Grevane talking. Barely five minutes had passed since the attack began. Even if the bad guys had cut the phone lines to the whole boardinghouse, the neighbors would have heard the racket and watched the light show from my wards. Someone was sure to call the authorities. If I could keep Grevane busy long enough, they would arrive, and I was willing to bet money that Grevane would rabbit rather than take chances this close to his goal. “You’ve got him. I want him.”

“As do I,” Grevane said. “I presume he found the information in the smuggler’s corpse.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I take it you also know.”

“Yes.”

He made a thoughtful sound. He was very near the broken window, though I couldn’t see him. “That presents a problem for me,” Grevane said. “I have no intention of sharing the Word with anyone. I’m afraid it will be necessary for me to silence you.”

“I’m the least of your worries,” I called back. “Corpsetaker and Li Xian took the information from me this afternoon.”

There was a silence, broken only by the slow, steady pounding on my door.

“If that had happened,” Grevane said, “you would not be alive to speak of it.”

“I got lucky and got away,” I said. “Corpsetaker sounded all hot and bothered about this Darkhallow thing you guys have planned.”

I heard the angry sound of someone spitting. “If you are telling the truth,” Grevane said, “then it profits me nothing to allow you and the mortician to live.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But you could just as easily say that it costs you nothing to do it, either. Last night you wanted to make me a deal. You still willing to talk?”

“To what purpose?” he said.

There was the shrieking sound of steel beginning to bend under stress. One corner of the door, up at the top, bent in, letting in cold evening air.

“Hurry,” Thomas urged me. “We have to do something fast.”

“Give me Butters,” I said to Grevane. “I’ll give you the information I found.”

“You offer me nothing. I have him already,” Grevane said. “I can extract the information from him myself.”

“You could,” I said, “if he knew it. He doesn’t.”

Grevane snarled something in a language I didn’t understand. I heard scuffing shoes, then the sound of a slap and a dazed exclamation from Butters. “Is that true?” Grevane asked him. “Do you have the information about the Word?”

“Dunno what it is,” Butters mumbled. “There was a jump drive. Numbers. It was a whole bunch of numbers.”

“What numbers?” Grevane snarled.

“Don’t know. Whole bunch. Can’t remember them all. Harry has them.”

“Liar,” Grevane said. There was the sound of another blow, and Butters cried out.

“I don’t know!” Butters said. “There were too many and I only saw them for a sec—”

Another blow fell, this time with the dull, heavy sound of a closed fist hitting flesh.

I clenched my teeth, rage filling me.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know…” Butters said. It sounded like he was crying.

“Look at me,” Grevane said. “Look.”

I closed my eyes and turned my face a little from the window. I could imagine what was happening. Butters, probably on his knees, being held by a pair of zombies, Grevane standing over him in his trench coat, pinching Butters’s chin between his thumb and forefinger. I could imagine him forcing Butters’s eyes up to meet his, to begin a soulgaze. Grevane wanted to see the inside of Butters’s head, in a swift and harsh attempt to assess the truth.

And Butters would be exposed to the corruption of a soul steeped in dark magic and a lifetime of murder.

I heard a high-pitched little sound that rose rapidly, growing louder and louder until it was a wail of terror and madness. There was no dignity in the sound. No self-control. I would never have recognized it as Butters’s voice if I hadn’t known he was out there. But it was him. Butters screamed, and he kept screaming without pausing to take a breath until it wound down to a frozen, gurgling sound and died away.

“Well?” asked another voice, one I did not recognize. It rasped harshly, as if the man speaking had spent a lifetime imbibing cheap Scotch and cheaper cigars.

“He doesn’t know,” Grevane reported quietly, disgust in his voice.

“You’re sure?” said the second voice. I moved a bit to one side and stood up on tiptoe to peer out the window. I could see the second speaker. It was Liver Spots.

“Yes,” Grevane said. “He doesn’t have any strength to him. If he knew, he’d answer.”

“If you kill the mortician, you’ll have to kill me,” I called. “Of course, I’m the only one with the information, other than Corpsetaker. I’m sure that you psychotic necro-wannabes with delusions of godhood are all about sharing with your fellow maniacs.”

There was silence from outside.

“So you should go ahead and take me out,” I said. “Of course, when I lay down my death curse on you, it’s going to make it that much harder for you to beat out Corpsetaker for the Darkhallow, but what’s life without a few challenges to liven things up?” I paused and then said, “Don’t be an idiot, Grevane. If you don’t deal with me, you’ll be cutting your own throat.”

“Is that what you think?” Grevane said. “Perhaps I will simply walk away.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “Because when Corpsetaker gets her membership to the Mount Olympus Country Club, the first thing she’s going to do is find her nearest rival—you—and rip your pancreas out through your nose.”

The door suddenly bent on a diagonal on the top half, folding it in as if it had been wax paper. The door didn’t quite go down, but I could see dead fingers reaching up through it, trying to rip and tear the weakened section.

“Harry,” Thomas said, his voice tight with apprehension. He drew his saber and went to the door. He hacked at dead fingers that appeared in the breach. They spun through the air and landed on the floor, still bending and wriggling like bisected earthworms.

“Make up your mind, Grevane!” I called. “If this goes any further, I’m going to do everything in my power to kill you. I can’t beat you. We both know that. But you won’t get the information out of me against my will. I’m not a pansy. I can push you hard enough to make you kill me.”

“You would have me believe that you would simply commit suicide?” Grevane asked.

“To take you down with me?” I replied. “Oh, hell, yeah. Count on it.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Liver Spots hissed. “Kill him. He knows he’s finished. He’s desperate.”

Which was true, dammit, but the last thing I needed was for someone to point that out to Grevane. A zombie finger flew past my head, and another bounced off my duster and fell to the floor at my feet, still twitching, a long and yellowed fingernail making an unsettling scratching sound against my boot. The pounding on the door got louder, the whole thing rattling in its frame.

And then, just like that, it stopped. Silence fell over the apartment.

“What are your terms?” Grevane asked.

“You release Butters to me,” I said. “You let us drive off with your sidekick in the car. Once we’re away from here, I give him the numbers and drop him off. Mutual truce until sunrise.”

“These numbers,” Grevane said. “What do they mean?”

“I don’t have a clue,” I said. “At least not yet. Neither did Corpsetaker.”

“Then what value do they have?” he asked.

“Someone is bound to figure it out. But if you don’t deal with me now, it sure as hell won’t be you.”

There was another long pause, and then Grevane said, “Give me your pledge that you will abide by the terms.”

“Only in return for yours,” I said.

“You have it,” Grevane said. “I swear it by my power.”

“No,” hissed Liver Spots. “Don’t do this.”

I lifted my eyebrows and traded a speculative look with Thomas. Oaths and promises have a certain kind of power all their own—that was one reason they were so highly regarded among the beings of the supernatural community. Whenever someone breaks a promise, some of the energy that went into making it feeds back on the promise breaker. For most people that isn’t a really big deal. Maybe it shows up as a little bad luck, or a cold or a headache or something.

But when a more powerful being or a wizard swears an oath by his own power, the effect is magnified significantly. Too many broken oaths and promises can cripple a wizard’s use of magic, or even destroy the ability entirely. I’ve never seen or heard of a wizard breaking an oath sworn by his own power. It was one of the constants of the preternatural world.

“And by my own power, I swear in return to abide by the terms of the agreement,” I said.

“Harry,” Thomas hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Saving our collective ass, I hope,” I said.

“You don’t actually think he’ll abide by it, do you?” Thomas whispered.

“He will,” I said, and as I said it I realized how confident I was that I was right. “If he wants to survive, he doesn’t have much choice. Grevane’s entire purpose here is gaining power. He won’t jeopardize that now by breaking an oath sworn by his magic.”

“You hope.”

“Even if he decides to screw us, it’s good to keep him talking. The longer we delay, the more likely it is the cops are going to show up. He’ll back off before he faces that.”

“But if the cops don’t show, you’re giving him what he needs to make himself into a freaking nightmare,” Thomas said.

I shook my head. “Might not be a bad thing. I can’t beat him. Corpsetaker, either. Throwing Grevane into the mix is going to make it harder for either of them to concentrate on me.”

Thomas exhaled slowly. “It’s a hell of a risk.”

“Oh, no. A risk,” I said. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”

“No one likes a wiseass, Harry.”

“Butters is counting on me,” I said. “Right now, I’m all he’s got. Do you have any better ideas?”

Thomas grimaced and shook his head.

“Very well,” Grevane called. “How shall we proceed?”

“Pull your zombies back,” I said. As I did, I found a pen and a piece of paper, pulled out the folded piece of paper from my pocket, and made a copy of the numbers. “You go with them. Liver Spots and Butters wait by the car. We all get in and drive off. Once I’m a few blocks away, I’ll drop Liver Spots off with the numbers, unharmed.”

“Agreed,” Grevane said.

We waited for a minute, and then Thomas said, “You hear anything?”

I went to the door and Listened. I could hear someone breathing fast and heavy. Butters. Nothing else. I shook my head and glanced at Thomas.

He came over to the door, sword still in hand. He opened it slowly. The pounding it had taken had warped it, and he had to haul hard on the door to get it unstuck from its frame. Thomas looked out for a moment. There were a couple of still-twitching pieces of zombie on the stairs, but other than that it was empty. He paced slowly up the stairs, looking around him as he went. My staff still lay at a slant on the floor before the door. Thomas nudged it back into the apartment with his foot. “Looks clear.”

I grabbed the shotgun and picked up the staff, holding both awkwardly with my good hand. Mouse fell into place at my side, his hackles still stiff, a low, almost subsonic growl rumbling in his chest every few moments. I hobbled out and up the stairs.

Cold rain fell, light but steady. It was dark. Really dark. No lights were on anywhere in sight. Grevane must have hexed this entire portion of the city power grid when the attack began. I didn’t make use of electricity in my apartment, so it hadn’t been noticeable to me inside.

I got a sick, sinking little feeling. If the lights were all out and the phones were all down, then there might not be any cops on the way. By the time the wards had begun to make noise, the phones were already dead. Without lights, there was an excellent chance that no one had seen anything unusual in the dark, and the rain would have muffled sounds considerably. People tended to stay home in comfortable surroundings in such situations—and if someone had seen or heard a crime going on but had no way to notify the authorities about it, it was unlikely that they would do anything but stay at home and keep their heads down.

Zombie scrap parts littered the top of the stairs, the gravel parking lot, and the little lawn. Some of them looked burned, while others seemed to have melted like wax in the summer sun. There were a number of blank, black spots burned into the ground. I couldn’t easily count how many zombies had been destroyed, but there had to have been almost as many down as I had seen in the opening moments of the attack.

Grevane had brought more. The rain almost hid them, but I could see the zombies at the limit of my sight, standing in silence, motionless. There were dozens of them. Hell’s bells. If we’d made that run for the car, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. That big, booming stereo bass rumbled steadily in the background.

Near the Beetle stood Liver Spots. He wore the same coat, the same broad-brimmed hat, the same sour expression on his wrinkled, spotted face. His fine white hair drifted around in every tiny bit of moving air wherever it wasn’t wet from the rain. I studied him for a minute. He was a good two or three inches under average height. His features seemed familiar, I was certain, but I couldn’t place them. It bothered me—a lot—but this was no time to start entertaining uncertainties.

Butters lay curled in a fetal position on the muddy, wet gravel at Liver Spots’s feet. He was breathing hard and fast, and his eyes stared sightlessly forward.

Liver Spots gestured curtly at Butters. In reply I held up the copy of the numbers, then slipped it back in my pocket. “Put him in the car,” I told Liver Spots.

“Do it yourself,” the man responded, his voice rough, harsh.

Mouse focused on Liver Spots and let out a low, rumbling growl.

I narrowed my eyes at him, but said, “Thomas.”

Thomas sheathed the sword and picked up Butters like a small child, his eyes on Liver Spots. He came back to the car, and Mouse and I watched Liver Spots closely the whole while.

“Put him in the back,” I said.

Thomas opened the door and set Butters in the backseat. The little guy leaned his head against the wall and sat all curled up. You could have fit him into a paper grocery sack.

“Mouse,” I said. “In.”

Mouse prowled into the backseat and sat leaning against Butters, serious dark eyes never leaving Liver Spots.

“All right,” I said, passing the shotgun to Thomas. “It works like this. Thomas, you get in the back. Spots, you’re riding shotgun. And when I say riding shotgun, I mean that Thomas is going to shove it up your ass and pull the trigger if you try anything funny.”

He stared at me, eyes flat.

“Do you understand me?” I said.

He nodded, eyes narrowed.

“Say it,” I told him.

Raw hatred dripped from his words. “I understand you.”

“Good,” I said. “Get in.”

Liver Spots walked toward the car. He had to step around me to get to the passenger’s-side door, and when he drew even with me he suddenly stopped and stared at me. There was a puzzled frown on his face. He stayed that way for a second, looking at me from soles to scalp.

“What?” I demanded.

“Where is it?” he said. He sounded as if he was speaking for his own benefit rather than for mine. “Why isn’t it here?”

“I’ve had a long day,” I told him. “Shut your mouth and get in the car.”

For a second I saw his eyes, and at my words they suddenly burned with a manic loathing and scorn. I could see, quite clearly, that Liver Spots wanted me dead. There wasn’t anything rational or calm about it. He wanted to hurt me, and he wanted me to die. It was written in his eyes so strongly that it might as well have been tattooed across his face. I needed no soulgaze, no magic, to recognize murderous hate when I saw it.

And he still looked familiar, though for the life of me—maybe literally—I couldn’t remember from where.

I avoided his eyes in time to avert a soulgaze of my own and said, “Get into the car.”

He said, “I’m going to kill you. Perhaps not tonight. But soon. I’m going to see you die.”

“You’ll have to wait in line, Spots,” I told him. “I hear the only tickets left are in general admission.”

He narrowed his eyes and began to speak.

Mouse let out a sudden, warning snarl.

I tensed, watching Liver Spots, but he did the same thing I did. He flinched and then looked warily around. When his eyes got to a spot behind me, they widened.

Thomas had the shotgun on him, so I turned from Liver Spots and looked for myself.

From the rain and the dark came a rising cloud of light. It drew nearer with unsettling speed, and after only a few speeding heartbeats I could see what made the light.

They were ghosts.

Surrounded in a sickly greenish glow, a company of Civil War–era cavalry rushed toward us, dozens of them. There should have been a rumble of thundering hooves accompanying them, but there was only a distant and pale sound of a running herd. The riders wore broad-brimmed Union hats and jackets that looked black rather than blue in the sickly light, and bore pistols and sabers in their semitransparent hands. One of the lead riders lifted a trumpet to his lips as he rode, and ghostly strains of the cavalry charge drifted through the night air.

Behind them, mounted on phantom horses that looked as if they’d been drowned, were Li Xian and the Corpsetaker. The ghoul wore a tom-tom drum at his side, held in place by a heavy leather belt draped sideways from one shoulder. While he rode, he beat out a staccato military rhythm on it with one hand, and it sounded somehow primitive and wild. The Corpsetaker had changed into clothes made of heavy biker leather, complete with a chain gaunt-let and spiked fighting bracers on her forearms. She wore a curved sword on her belt, a heavy tulwar that looked ugly and murderous. As she came closer, she sent her ghostly steed racing to the head of the troop and drew her blade. She spun it over her head, laughing in wild abandon, and bore straight down upon us.

“Treachery!” howled Liver Spots. “We are betrayed!”

Grevane appeared in the mist from among the motionless zombies. He stared at the oncoming Corpsetaker and let out a howl of rage. He raised his hands, and every zombie in sight abruptly stiffened and then broke into a charge.

“Kill them!” Grevane howled. Actual, literal foam formed at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes burned beneath the brim of the fedora. “Kill them all!”

Liver Spots whirled toward me, producing a tiny pistol from somewhere in his sleeve, a derringer. From the size of it, it couldn’t have held a very heavy bullet, but he wouldn’t need it to be heavy to kill me at this range. I dove back and to my right, trying to get the car between Liver Spots and me. There was a startling popping sound and a flash of light. I hit the muddy gravel hard. Liver Spots came around the car after me, evidently determined to use the second bullet in the pistol.

Thomas didn’t have time to get out of the car. There was a sudden explosion and my windshield blew outward in a cloud of shot and shattered glass. Both tore into Liver Spots, and he stumbled and went down.

I lifted my staff in my good hand and brought it down hard on his wrist. There was a brittle, snapping sound, and the little gun flew from his grasp.

He went into an utter rage.

Before I knew what was happening, Liver Spots had thrown himself on top of me and had both of his hands fastened on my throat. I felt him shut off my airway, and struggled against him. It didn’t do much good. The old man seemed filled with maddened strength.

“It’s mine!” he screamed at me. He shook me on each word, slamming my head back against the gravel in precise, separate detonations of pain and bright stars in my vision. “Give it to me! Mine!”

A zombie landed on the gravel near us in a crouch and turned toward me. Its dead eyes regarded me without passion or thought as it formed a fist and drove it at my head.

Before it could land, a flickering saber from one of the spectral cavalry whispered through the night and the rain and struck the zombie on the neck. The corpse’s head flew from its shoulders, dribbling a line of sludgy black ichor, and landed with its empty eyes staring into mine.

Thomas screamed, “Down!”

I stopped struggling to get up, and tried to press myself as flat to the ground as I could.

The driver’s-side door to the Beetle flew open, swept just over the end of my nose, and struck Liver Spots in the face. He flew back from me.

Thomas leaned out of the driver’s side to grab at me, but a second ghostly horseman swept by, sword hissing. Thomas ducked in time to save his neck, but took part of the slash across his temple and ear and scalp, and that side of his head and shoulder was almost immediately covered in a sheet of blood a few shades too pale to be human.

Thomas recovered his balance and pulled me grimly into the car. I fumbled with the keys and shoved them into place. I twisted the key in desperate haste, mashing on the gas as I did. The engine turned over once and then stalled.

“Dammit!” Thomas cried in frustration. A streak of faint green light appeared in the air over the car’s hood. A second later another went by, this time ending at the hood. There was a startling sound of impact and the frame of the car rattled. A bullet hole appeared in the hood.

I tried the car again and this time coaxed the old VW to life.

“Hail the mighty Beetle!” I crowed, and slapped the car into reverse. The wheels spun up gravel and mud, and I shot back straight into a crowd of zombies, slamming into them and sending them flying.

I whipped the car’s hood toward the street and shifted into drive. As I did, I got a look at the Corpsetaker bearing down on Grevane, tulwar raised. From somewhere in his coat, Grevane produced a length of chain, and as the sword swept toward him he held up the chain, his arms outstretched, and caught the blow on the links between them, sliding the deadly blade away from him.

Corpsetaker howled in fury and whirled the phantom mount around to charge him again, almost absently striking the head from a zombie as she passed it.

I flattened the gas pedal, and the Beetle lurched forward—straight toward a trio of ghostly cavalry troops. They bore down on us, not wavering.

“I hate playing chicken,” I muttered, and shifted into second.

Just before I would have hit them, the cavalry leapt, translucent horses and riders rising effortlessly into the air, over the car, to land on the ground behind me. I didn’t give them a chance to whirl and try it again. I bounced the Beetle out onto the street, turned left, and charged away at flank speed. I got a few blocks away, then slowed enough to roll down the window.

There were no screams or shrieks of battle. The rain muffled the sound, and in the heavy darkness I couldn’t see anything going on behind me. I could dimly hear the whumping bass drum that kept Grevane’s zombies going, still somewhere out there in the background. Beyond that, very quiet but getting nearer, I heard sirens.

“Everyone all right?” I asked.

“I’ll make it,” Thomas said. He had stripped out of his jacket and shirt, and had the latter pressed to the side of his bleeding head.

“Mouse?” I asked.

There was a wet, snuffling sound by my ear, and Mouse licked my cheek.

“Good,” I said. “Butters?”

There was silence.

Thomas looked at the backseat, frowning.

“Butters?” I repeated. “Heya, man. Earth to Butters.”

Silence.

“Butters?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Then a slow inhalation. Then he said, in a very weak voice, “Polka will never die.”

I felt my mouth stretch into a fierce grin. “Damn right it won’t,” I said.

“True.” Thomas sighed. “Where are we going?”

“We can’t go back there,” I said. “And with the wards torn down, it wouldn’t do us too much good anyway.”

“Where, then?” Thomas asked.

I stopped at a stop sign and patted at my pockets for a moment. I found one of the two things I was looking for.

Thomas frowned at me. “Harry? What’s wrong?”

“The copy of the numbers I made for Grevane,” I said. “It’s gone. Liver Spots must have grabbed it from me when we were tussling.”

“Damn,” Thomas said.

I found the key to Murphy’s house in another pocket. “Okay. I’ve got a place we can hole up for a while, until we can figure out our next move. How bad is the cut?”

“Bleeder,” Thomas said. “Looks worse than it is.”

“Keep pressure on it,” I said.

“Thank you, yes,” Thomas said, though he sounded more amused than annoyed.

I got the Beetle moving again, frowning out the windows. “Hey,” I said. “Do you guys notice something?”

Thomas peered around for a moment. “Not really. Too dark.”

Butters drew in a sharp breath. His voice still unsteady, he said, “That’s right. It’s too dark.” He pointed out one window. “That’s where the skyline should be.”

Thomas stared out. “It’s gone dark.”

“Lights are out,” I said quietly. “Do you see any anywhere?”

Thomas looked around for a moment, then reported, “Looks like a fire off that way. Some headlights. Some police lights. The rest are…” He shook his head.

“What happened?” Butters whispered.

“So that’s what Mab meant. They did this,” I said. “The heirs of Kemmler.”

“But why?” Thomas asked.

“They think that one of them is going to become a god tomorrow night. They’re creating fear. Chaos. Helplessness.”

“Why?”

“They’re preparing the way.”

Thomas didn’t say anything. None of us did.

I can’t speak for the others, but I was afraid.

The Beetle’s tires whispered over the streets as I drove through the cold, lightless murk that had fallen over Chicago like a funeral shroud.

Chapter

Twenty-four

Murphy’s house had belonged to her grandmother. It was a dinky little place, and resided in a neighborhood built before Edison’s lights went into vogue, and while some areas like that became ragged and run-down, this particular street looked more like some kind of historical real estate preserve, with well-kept lawns, trimmed trees, and tidy paint jobs on all the homes.

I pulled the Beetle into the driveway, hesitated for half a second, and then continued up onto the lawn and around to the rear of the house, parking beside a little outbuilding that looked like a tool-shed as envisioned by the Gingerbread Man. I killed the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the car make those just-stopped clicking sounds. Without the headlights, it was very dark. My leg hurt like hell. It seemed like a really great idea to close my eyes and get some rest.

Instead I fumbled around until I found the cardboard box I keep in the car. Next to a couple of holy-water balloons, an old pair of socks, and a heavy old potato, I found a crinkling plastic package. I tore it open, bent the plastic tube inside sharply, and shook it up. The two chemical liquids inside mixed, and the glow stick began to shine with gold-green light.

I got out of the car and hauled my tired ass toward the back door. Thomas and Mouse and Butters followed me. I unlocked the door with Murphy’s key, and led everyone inside.

Murphy’s place was…dare I say it, really cute. The furniture was old Victorian, worn but well cared for. There were a lot of doilies in its decorating scheme, and all in all it was a very girly sort of place. When Murphy’s grandmother passed away and Murphy moved in, she hadn’t changed it much. The sole concession to the presence of Chicago’s toughest little detective was a simple wooden stand on the fireplace mantel, which held a pair of curved Japanese swords one over the other.

I went from the living room into the kitchen, and opened the drawer where Murphy kept her matches. I lit a couple of candles, then used them to find a pair of old glass kerosene lamps and get them going.

Thomas came in while I was doing that, grabbed the glow stick, and held it in one hand while he opened the refrigerator and rummaged inside.

“Hey,” I said. “That’s not your fridge.”

“Murphy would share, wouldn’t she?” Thomas asked.

“That isn’t the point,” I said. “It’s not yours.”

“The power’s out,” Thomas replied, shoulder deep in the fridge. “This stuff is going to spoil anyway. All right, pizza. And beer.”

I stared at him for a second. Then I said, “Check the freezer, too. Murphy likes ice cream.”

“Right,” he said. He glanced up at me and said, “Harry, go sit down. I’ll bring you something.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“No, you aren’t. Your leg is bleeding again.”

I blinked at him and looked down. The white bandages had soaked through with fresh, dark red. The bandage wasn’t saturated yet, but the stain had covered most of the white. “Damn. That’s inconvenient.”

Butters appeared in the kitchen doorway, ghostly somehow in his pale blue scrubs. His hair was a mess, all muddy and mussed. His glasses were gone, and he had his eyes squinted up as he looked at us. He had a cut on his lower lip that had closed into a black scab, and he had one hell of a shiner forming over his left cheekbone, presumably where Grevane had struck him.

“Let me wash up,” Butters said. “Then I’ll see to it. You’ll want to make sure that stays clean, Harry.”

“Go sit down,” Thomas said. “Butters, are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Butters said. “Is there a bathroom?”

“Hall, first one on the left,” I said. “I think Murphy keeps a firstaid kit under the sink.”

Butters moved silently over to one of the candles, took it, and left just as quietly.

“Well,” I said. “At least he’s clear now.”

“Maybe so,” Thomas said. He was moving things from the fridge to the kitchen counter. “They know he doesn’t know anything. But you risked your life to protect his. That might start them to thinking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You were willing to die to protect him. You think Grevane understands enough about friendship to comprehend why you did it?”

I grimaced. “Probably not.”

“So they might start wondering what made him so valuable to you. Wondering what you know that they don’t.” He rummaged in a cupboard and found some bread, some crackers. “Maybe it won’t amount to anything. But it might. He should be careful.”

I nodded agreement. “You can keep an eye on him.”

Thomas glanced at me. “You think you’re going out now?”

“Soon as I eat something,” I said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Thomas said. “Your leg is hurt. You can barely walk straight. Eat. Get some sleep.”

“There’s no time,” I said.

He glared at me for a second, then pressed his mouth into a line and said, “Let’s talk about it after we eat something. Everyone’s angry when they’re hungry. Makes for bad decisions.”

“Probably smart,” I said.

“Take the coat off. Go sit down. Let Butters look at your leg.”

“It just needs a new bandage,” I said. “I can do that myself.”

“You’re missing my point, dummy,” Thomas said. “A friend would let Butters deal with a problem that he’s capable of handling. He’s had plenty of the other kind tonight.”

I glared at Thomas, shrugged out of the duster, and limped for the living room. “It’s easier to deal with you when you’re a simple, selfish asshole.”

“I forget how limited you are, brain-wise,” Thomas said. “I’ll be more careful.”

I settled cautiously down onto Murphy’s old couch. It creaked as I did. Murphy isn’t large, and I doubt that her grandma was, either. I’m not exactly layered in muscle, but as tall as I am, no one ever mistakes me for a lightweight. I shoved some doilies off the coffee table so that they wouldn’t get blood all over them, and propped my throbbing leg up on the table. It took a little bit of the pressure off of the injury, which didn’t mean it stopped hurting. It just hurt a little bit less aggressively. Whatever; anything was a relief.

I sat like that until Butters emerged from the hall that went back to the bathroom and the house’s two bedrooms. He had Murphy’s medical kit in hand. I remembered one of those little standard firstaid kits that would fit into the glove box of a car. Murphy had evidently been planning ahead. She’d replaced the little medical kit with one the size of a contractor’s toolbox.

“I don’t think I’m quite that hurt,” I told Butters.

“Better to have it and not need it,” he replied quietly. He set down the kerosene lamp and the toolbox. He rummaged in the box, came out with a pair of safety scissors, and set about stripping the bandage away, his motions smooth and confident. Once he had the bandage clear, he peered at the injury, moved the lamp to get a better look, and winced. “This is a mess. You’ve popped the two center sutures.” He glanced up at me apologetically. “I’ll have to replace them, or the others are going to tear out one at a time.”

I swallowed. I did not want to do sutures without anesthetics. Hadn’t I already experienced enough pain for one day?

“Do it,” I told him.

He nodded and set about cleaning the bloodied skin around the injury. He wiped his hands down with a couple of sterilizing wipes, and snapped on some rubber gloves. “There’s a topical here. I’ll use it, but it’s not much stronger than that stuff you get for a toothache.”

“Just get it over with,” I said.

He nodded, produced a curved needle and surgical thread, adjusted the lamp again, and set to work. He was fairly quick about it. I did my best to hold still. When he was finished, my throat felt raw and rough. I hadn’t actually done any yelling, but only by strangling any screams before they came out.

I lay there kind of limply while Butters re-covered the wound. “You started on the antibiotics, right?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

He shook his head. “You should take them right away. I don’t want to think about what might have gotten into the wound back at your apartment.” He swallowed and went a little pale. “I mean, my God.”

“That’s the worst part about the walking dead,” I said. “The stains.”

He smiled at me, or at least he tried to. “Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I…” He shook his head. “I was useless back there. Worse than useless. You could have been hurt.”

Thomas appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, pale and silent. He arched his brow, somehow managing to say, “I told you so,” without actually opening his mouth.

I glared back at him, in an effort to convey several uncharitable things. He smiled a little and faded back into the kitchen. Butters missed the whole thing.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You ever had anything like this happen before?”

“Like zombies and ghosts and necromancers?” Butters asked.

“Like life-threatening and dangerous,” I said.

“Oh.” He was quiet for a minute. “No. I tried to go into the army, but I couldn’t make it through boot. Wound up in the hospital. Same thing when I tried to be a policeman. The spirit was willing, but Butters was weak.”

“Some people just aren’t cut out for that kind of thing,” I told him. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Sure, it isn’t,” he said, but he wasn’t agreeing with me.

“You can do a lot that I can’t,” I told him. I nodded at my leg.

“But this stuff is…hell, it’s simple,” Butters said. “I mean, the words get a little bit long. But all in all, it isn’t that complicated.”

“Listen to yourself, Butters,” I told him. “You’re sitting there with a straight face saying that medicine and medical forensics is simple, except for the long words. Do you have any clue what it’s like to not be as intelligent as you?”

He shook his head impatiently. “I’m not some kind of genius.” He frowned. “Okay, well, technically I have a genius IQ, but that isn’t the point. A lot of people do. The point is that I’ve spent most of my adult life doing this. That’s why I can do it well.”

“And the point is,” I told him, “that I’ve spent most of my adult life doing zombies and ghosts and other things trying to kill me. That’s why I can do it well. We’ve got different specialties. That’s all. So don’t beat yourself up for not being better at my job than I am.”

He started cleaning up the medical detritus, throwing things away and stripping out of the gloves. “Thanks, Harry. But it’s more than that. I just…I couldn’t think. When those things grabbed me. When he was hitting me. I knew I should have been doing something, planning something, but my brain wouldn’t work.” He slammed something down into the trash can with more force than necessary. “I was too afraid.”

I was too tired to move, and for the first time I started to notice how cold it was without my coat. I folded my arms and tried not to shiver. I watched Butters quietly for a moment and said, “It gets easier.”

“What does?”

“Living with the fear.”

“It goes away?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Never. Gets worse, in some ways. But once you face it down, you learn to accommodate it. Even work with it, sometimes.”

“I don’t understand,” he whispered.

“Fear can’t hurt you,” I said. “It can’t kill you.”

“Well, technically—”

“Butters,” I said. “Don’t give me statistics on heart failure. Fear is a part of life. It’s a warning mechanism. That’s all. It tells you when there’s danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.”

“I have empirical evidence to the contrary,” he said, bitter humor in his voice.

“That’s because you’ve never thought about it before,” I said. “You’ve reacted to the fear, but you haven’t ever faced it and put it into the right perspective. You have to make up your mind to overcome it.”

He was quiet for a second. “Just like that?” he said. “Just make up my mind and poof, it’s different?”

“No. But it’s the first step,” I said. “After that, you find other steps to take. Think about it for a while. Maybe you’ll never need it again. But at least you’ll be ready if it happens sometime down the line.”

He closed up the medical toolbox. “You mean it’s over?”

“For you,” I said. “Grevane knows that you don’t have anything he wants. He’s got no reason to look for you. Hell, for that matter, I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when he did come looking. Anyone with access to the corpse and the ability to find where Bony Tony had hidden the jump drive would have been good enough for Grevane. Your part in this is over.”

Butters closed his eyes for a second. “Oh, thank God.” He blinked up at me. “Sorry. I mean, it isn’t that I don’t like being around you, but…”

I smiled a little. “I understand. I’m glad you’re all right.” I glanced down at my leg. “Looks nice and neat again. Thanks, Butters. You’re a good friend.”

He frowned up at me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I thought I saw him straighten his shoulders a little. “Okay.”

Thomas appeared in the door of the kitchen. “Gas stove. Hot food and tea. Sugar?”

“Tons,” I said.

“Not for me,” Butters said.

Thomas nodded, and slipped back into the kitchen.

“So how come if I’m your friend, you don’t tell me important things?” Butters said.

“Like what?” I asked him.

Butters gestured at the kitchen. “Well. That, you know…you’re gay.”

I blinked at him.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s the twenty-first century. You can live your life how you want, and it doesn’t make you any less cool.”

“Butters—” I began.

“And hey, look at the guy. I mean, I’m not even gay, and I think he looks great. Who could blame you?”

Choking sounds came from the kitchen.

“Oh, shut up!” I snarled at Thomas.

He kept on making choking sounds that bubbled with laughter.

“You should have just said something,” Butters said. “Don’t feel like you have to hide anything, Harry. I won’t judge. I owe you too much for that.”

“I’m not gay,” I stated.

Butters nodded at me, compassion and empathy all over his face. “Oh. Okay, sure.”

“I’m not!”

Butters raised his hands. “It wasn’t my place to intrude,” he said. “Later, some other time, maybe. None of my business.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” I muttered.

Thomas came out bearing plates of steaming, reheated pizza, some roast beef sandwiches, and crackers with slices of cheese partly melted on them. He put them down and came back with bottles of cold beer and cups of hot tea. He poured my tea for me, then leaned over and gave me a chaste kiss on the hair. “There you go.”

Butters pretended not to notice.

I punched Thomas awkwardly in the ribs. “Give me the damned pizza before I kill you.”

Thomas sighed and confided to Butters, “He gets like this sometimes.”

I grabbed the pizza from Thomas, and leaned over enough to snag a beer. Mouse, who had been lying by the front windows staring out at the darkness, got up and came nosing over toward the food.

“Oh, here,” Thomas said. “The antibiotics.” He put a couple of pills down on my plate.

I growled wordlessly at him, washed them down with a swallow of beer, and fell to eating pizza and roast beef sandwiches and crackers with cheese. I shared a bit with Mouse, every third or fourth bite, until Thomas snagged the last roast beef sandwich and put it on the floor for Mouse to have to himself.

I finished the beer and settled back with the tea afterward. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I’d started eating. The tea was sweet and just barely cool enough to drink. In the wake of the meal and the evening’s excitement, I finally started to feel warm and human again. The pain in my leg faded until it was barely noticeable.

I blinked heavily down at my bandaged leg and said, “Hey.”

“Hmmm?” Thomas asked.

“You bastard. Those weren’t antibiotics.”

“No, they weren’t,” Thomas said, and without a trace of shame. “They were the painkillers. You idiot. You need to rest before you kill yourself.”

“Bastard,” I said again. The couch really was very comfortable. I finished my tea over the next several moments. “Maybe you have a point.”

“Of course I do,” Thomas said. “Oh, here’s the antibiotic, by the way.” He passed me a single horse pill. I swallowed it with the last of my tea. Thomas set the teacup aside and then helped me to my feet. “Come on. Get a few hours of rest. Then you can figure out your next move.”

I grunted. Thomas helped me into one of the darkened bedrooms, and I sank onto a soft bed, too tired to be angry. Too tired to be awake. I vaguely remember stripping out of my shirt and shoes before pulling soft and heavy covers over me. Then there was blessed darkness, warmth, and quiet.

The last thing I thought, before I dropped off to sleep, was that the covers smelled faintly of soap and sunlight and strawberries.

They smelled like Murphy.

Chapter

Twenty-five

In the odd dream, I had a hot tub.

I lay back in it, luxuriating, the water churning to a controlled froth by jets that hit it and me from dozens of angles. The water was at that perfect temperature, a little short of scalding my skin, and the heat of it sank into muscle and bone, warming me deliciously and washing away aches and pains.

It was an odd dream, because I have never in my life been in a hot tub.

I opened my eyes and looked slowly around me. The hot tub was set in the floor of what looked like a natural cave. Low, reddish light came from what looked like some kind of moss growing on the stalactites overhead.

That was odd, because I’d never been in a cave like this, either.

“Hello?” I called. My voice bounced around the empty cavern.

I heard the sound of movement, and a woman stepped into sight from behind a rock formation. She was a little taller than average and had hair that fell in a sheet of golden silk to her shoulders. She was dressed in a silken tunic belted with soft rope, both pure white. The outfit neither displayed any impropriety nor allowed anyone looking to ignore the beauty of the body it clothed. Her eyes were of a deep, deep blue, like a sunny October sky, and her skin glowed with wholesome appeal. She was, quite simply, a stunning creature.

“Hello. I thought it was time we had a talk,” she said. “You’ve had a hard day. I thought pleasant surroundings might suit you.”

I eyed her for a moment. I was naked, which was good. The surface of the pool had enough in the way of bubbles and froth to be opaque, which was also good. It saved me the embarrassment of my response to her. “Who are you?”

She lifted golden brows in a faint smile, and seated herself beside the hot tub, on the floor of the cave, her legs together and to one side, her hands folded on her lap. “Have you not reasoned it yourself by now?”

I stared at her for a long minute and then said, quietly, “Lasciel.”

The woman bowed her head, smiling in acknowledgment. “Indeed.”

“You can’t be here,” I said. “I sealed you into the floor under my lab. I imprisoned you.”

“Indeed you did,” the woman said. “What you see here is not my true self, as such. Think of me as a reflection of the true Lasciel who resides within your mind.”

“As a what?”

“When you chose to touch the coin, you accepted this form of my awareness within you,” Lasciel said. “I am an imprint. A copy.”

I swallowed. “You live in my head. And you can talk to me?”

“I can now,” Lasciel said. “Now that you have chosen to employ what I have offered you.”

I took in a deep breath. “Hellfire. I used Hellfire today to empower my magic.”

“You made the conscious choice to do so,” she said. “And as a result, I can now appear to your conscious mind.” She smiled. “Actually, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. You are a great deal more interesting than most I have been given to.”

“You, uh,” I said, “you don’t look much like a demon.”

“Keep in mind, please, that I was not always a resident of Hell. I relocated there.” She looked at herself. “Shall I add the wings? A harp? A golden halo?”

“Why are you asking me?” I asked.

“Because I am something of a guest,” she said. “It costs me nothing to take on an appearance that pleases my host.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “If you’re my guest, then get out.”

She laughed, and there was nothing alluring or musical about it. It was just laughter, warm and genuine. “That isn’t possible, I’m afraid. By taking the coin, you invited me in. You cannot simply will me away.”

“Fine,” I said. “This is a dream. I’ll wake up. See ya.”

I made the simple effort of will required to wake myself from a dream.

And nothing happened.

“Maybe it’s the painkillers,” Lasciel suggested. “And you were, after all, very tired. It looks like we’ll be spending a little time together.”

I glared for a while. I don’t usually take the time to glower at things in dreams, either. “What do you want?” I said.

“To make you an offer,” she said.

“The answer is no,” I said. “We now return me to my regularly scheduled dream.”

She pursed her lips, then smiled again. “I think you want to hear me out,” she said. “This is your dream, after all. If you truly wished me to begone, don’t you think you could make it so?”

“Maybe it’s the hot tub,” I suggested.

“I saw that you’d never experienced one,” Lasciel said. She dipped a toe into the pool and smiled. “I have, often. Do you like it?”

“It’s okay,” I said, and tried to look like I didn’t think it was just about the nicest thing ever for an aching and tired body. “You know what I know, eh?”

“I exist within your mind,” she said. “I see what you see. Feel what you feel. I learn what you learn—and quite a bit more besides.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.

“That I can do you a great deal of good,” she said. “I have the knowledge and memory of two thousand years of life upon this world, and infinite thousands outside it. I know many things that could be of use to you. I can advise you. Teach you secrets of your craft never known to mortalkind. Show you sights no human has ever seen. Share with you memory and image beyond anything you could imagine.”

“By any chance does all of this knowledge and power and good advice come for only three easy installments of nineteen ninety-five plus shipping and handling?”

The fallen angel arched a golden brow at me.

“Or maybe it comes with a bonus set of knives tough enough to saw through a nail, yet still cut tomatoes like this.”

She regarded me steadily and said, “You aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are.”

“I had to come up with some kind of response to your offer to corrupt and enslave me. Bad jokes seemed perfectly appropriate, because I can only assume that you’ve got to be kidding.”

Lasciel pursed her lips, a thoughtful expression. It made me start thinking about how soft her mouth looked, for example. “Is that what you think I want? A slave?”

“I got a look at how you guys work,” I said.

“You’re referring to Ursiel’s previous host, yes?”

“Yes. He was insane. Broken. I’m not eager to give it a whirl for myself.”

Lasciel rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Ursiel is a mindless thug. He doesn’t care what happens to the holder of his coin, provided he gets to taste blood as often as possible. I don’t operate that way.”

“Sure you don’t.”

She shrugged. “Your derision will not unmake the truth. Some of my kindred prefer domination in their relationships with mortals. The wiser among us, though, find a mutual partnership to be much more practical, and beneficial for both parties. You saw something of how Nicodemus functions with Anduriel, did you not?”

“No offense, but I would shove a sharpened length of rebar into one ear and out the other if I thought I was going to turn into anything like Nicodemus.”

Her expression registered surprise. “Why?”

“Because he’s a monster,” I said.

Lasciel shook her head. “Perhaps from your perspective. But you know very little of him and his goals.”

“I know he did his damnedest, literally, to kill me and two of my friends, and God knows how many innocent people with that plague. And he did kill another friend.”

“What is your point?” Lasciel asked. She seemed genuinely confused.

“The point is that he crossed the line, and I’m never going to play on his team. He doesn’t get understanding or sympathy anymore. Not from me. He’s got payback coming.”

“You wish to destroy him?”

“In a perfect world he would vanish off the face of the earth and I would never hear of him again,” I said. “But I’ll take whatever I can get.”

She absorbed that for a few moments, and then nodded slowly. “Very well,” she said. “I will depart. But let me leave you with a thought?”

“As long as you leave.”

She smiled, rising. “I understand your refusal to allow another to control your life. It’s a poisonous, repugnant notion to think of someone who would dictate your every move, impose upon you a code of behavior you could not accept, and refuse to allow you choice, expression, and the pursuit of your own heart’s purpose.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

The fallen angel smiled. “Then believe me when I say that I know precisely how you feel. All of the Fallen do.”

A little cold spot formed in the pit of my stomach, despite the hot tub. I shifted uncomfortably in the water.

“We have that in common, wizard,” Lasciel said. “You’ve no reason to believe me, but consider for a moment the possibility that I am sincere in my offer. I could do a great deal to help you—and you could continue to live your life on your own terms, and in accordance with your own values. I could help you be ten times the force for good that you already are.”

“With that power, I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly,” I said.

“Gandalf to Frodo,” the demon said, smiling. “But I am not sure the metaphor is applicable. You needn’t actually take up the coin, if it did not suit you to do so. The aid I can offer you in this shadow form is far more limited than if you took up the coin, but it is not inconsiderable.”

“Ring, coin, whatever. The physical object is only a symbol in any case—a symbol for power.”

“I merely offer you the benefit of my knowledge and experience,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Power. I’ve already got more than I’m comfortable with.”

“Which is the foremost reason that you, of all people, are capable of wielding it responsibly.”

“Maybe I am,” I said. “Maybe not. I know how it works, Lasciel. The first taste is free. The price goes up down the line.”

She watched me with luminous blue eyes.

“See, if I start leaning on you now, how long is it going to be before I decide that I need more of your help? How long before I start digging up the concrete in my lab because I think I need your coin in order to survive?”

“And?” she asked quietly. “If you do need it to survive?”

I sat in the swirling hot waters and sighed. Then I closed my eyes, made an effort of will, and reshaped the dream we stood within, so that the hot tub was gone and I stood dressed and facing her on a solid cavern floor. “If it comes to that, I hope I die with a little bit of style. Because I’m not going to sign on with Downbelow. Not even in hell’s Foreign Legion.”

“Fascinating,” Lasciel said. She smiled at me.

My God, it was beautiful. It wasn’t merely physical loveliness or the appearance of warmth. It was the whole sense of her, the vibrant, glowing life of the being before me, a life with energy enough to ignite a star. Seeing her smile was like watching the sun rise on the very first morning, like feeling the caress of the first breeze of the first spring. It made me want to laugh and run and spin around in it, like the sunny days of a childhood I could only dimly remember.

But I held myself back. Beauty can be dangerous, and fire, though lovely, can burn and kill when not treated with respect. I faced the fallen angel cautiously, my posture unthreatening but unbowed. I faced her beauty and felt the radiant warmth of her presence and held myself from reaching out for it.

“I’m not fascinating,” I said. “I am what I am. It isn’t perfect, but it’s mine. I’m not making deals with you.”

Lasciel nodded, her expression thoughtful. “You’ve been burned in bargains past, and you have no desire to repeat the experience. You are wary of dealing with me and those like me—and for good reason. I don’t think I would have had any lasting respect for you, had you accepted my offer at face value—even though it is genuine.”

“Gee. I would have felt crushed by your lack of respect.”

She laughed with a lot of belly in it, genuinely pleased. “I admire your will. Your defiance. As something of a defiant being myself, I think we might forge a strong partnership, given time to develop it.”

“That won’t happen,” I said. “I want you to leave.”

“Get thee behind me?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

She bowed her head. “As you wish, my host. I request that you merely consider my offer. Should you wish to converse with me again, you have only to call my name.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“As it pleases you,” she said.

Then she was gone, and the dream cavern was darker and lonelier for her absence. I relaxed and went back to my sleep and my solitary dreams.

I was too tired to remember if any of them had a hot tub.

Chapter

Twenty-six

I slept hard and didn’t wake up until well after sunrise. I heard voices, and after a minute I identified the sharp, crackling edges of tone that told me they were coming out of a radio. I got up and gave myself a washcloth bath at the bathroom sink. It wasn’t as nice as a hot tub, and not even as nice as a shower, but I didn’t feel like sticking my aching leg into a trash bag and taping it shut so that I could get one without getting my bandages wet.

I couldn’t find my clothes anywhere, so I wandered out into the house in my bare feet and mangled pants. The hospital staff had cut the pant leg mostly off of my wounded leg, and the edges were rough and uneven. I passed a mirror in the hallway of the house and stopped to examine myself.

I looked like a joke. A bad joke.

“…mysterious power outage continues,” the radio announcer was saying. “In fact, it’s difficult to estimate how long we’ll be able to stay on the air, or even how many people are actually receiving this broadcast. Gasoline-powered generators have been encountering odd trouble throughout the city, batteries seem unreliable, and other gasoline-powered engines, including those of vehicles, are behaving unpredictably. The telephone lines have been having all kinds of problems, and cell phones seem to be all but useless. O’Hare is completely shut down, and as you can imagine, it’s playing havoc with airline traffic throughout the nation.”

Thomas was standing in the kitchen, at the gas stove. He was making pancakes and listening to an old battery-powered radio sitting on Murphy’s counter. He nodded to me, put a finger against his lips, and flicked a glance at the radio. I nodded, folded my arms, and leaned against the doorway to listen to the announcer continue.

“National authorities have declined to comment on the matter, though the mayor’s office has given a statement blaming the problems on unusual sunspot activity.”

Thomas snorted.

The radio prattled on. “That answer doesn’t seem to hold much water, given that in cities as near as the south side of Joliet all systems are behaving normally. Other sources have suggested everything from an elaborate Halloween hoax to the detonation of some kind of electromagnetic pulse device, which has disrupted the city’s electrical utilities. A press conference has reportedly been scheduled for later this evening. We’ll be on the air all through the current crisis, giving you up-to-date information as quickly as we…”

The announcer’s voice broke up into wild static and sound. Thomas reached over and flicked the radio off. “Had it on for twenty minutes,” he said. “Got a clear signal for maybe five of them.”

I grunted.

“Do you know what’s happened?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Where’s Butters?”

Thomas tilted his head toward the back door. “Walking Mouse.”

I took a seat at the little kitchen table, getting my weight off of my injured leg. “Today’s going to be pretty intense,” I said.

Thomas flipped a pancake. “Because of the heirs of Kemmler?”

“Yeah,” I said. “If Mab is right about what they’re trying to do, someone has to stop them before tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because after that I’m not sure anyone will be able to stop them,” I said.

My brother nodded. “Think you can take them?”

“They’re fighting among themselves,” I said. “They’re all going to be more worried about their fellow necromancers than they are about me.”

“Uh-huh,” Thomas said. “But do you think you can take them?”

“No.”

“Then what you’re talking about isn’t heroism, man. It’s suicide.”

I shook my head. “I don’t need to kill them. I only need to stop them. If I play this right, I won’t need to fight anybody.”

Thomas flipped another pancake. The cooked side was a uniform shade of perfect light brown. “How are you going to manage that?”

“They need two things to make this godhood thing go,” I said. “The Erlking and the knowledge in The Word of Kemmler. If I can deny them either, the whole shebang is canceled.”

“You figure out those numbers yet?” Thomas asked.

“No.”

“So…what? You going to put a hit on the Erlking to keep him from showing up?”

I shook my head. “Mab gave me the impression that the Erlking was in the same weight class as her.”

“She tough?” Thomas asked.

“Beyond the pale,” I said.

“So you can’t kill the Erlking. What, then?”

“I summon him myself.”

He arched an eyebrow.

“Look, no matter how mighty he is, he can’t be in two places at once. If I call him up and keep him busy, then the heirs can’t summon him to their ceremony.”

He nodded. “How are you going to call him?”

“The book,” I said. “It’s almost got to be one of those poems or songs. One of them must be an incantation to attract the Erlking’s attention.”

“But you don’t have the book,” Thomas said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the kink I haven’t worked out yet.”

Thomas nodded, scraping the last of the batter out of a bowl and onto the griddle. “Even if you do figure out how to call the Erlking, it sounds like he might be kinda dangerous.”

“Probably. But impersonal. That means not as dangerous as one of the heirs going godly and showing up to give me some payback for annoying them.” I shrugged. “And the only one in danger will be me.”

“Wrong,” Thomas said. “I’ll be with you.”

I had been sure he would say something like that, but hearing it still felt pretty good. Thomas had a truckload of baggage, and he wasn’t always the most pleasant person in the world—but he was my brother. Family. He’d stand with me.

Which made what came next hard to say.

“You can’t,” I said.

His expression smoothed over into neutrality. “Because of Mavra?”

“No,” I said. “Because I’m going to bring in the White Council.”

Thomas dropped his spatula onto the kitchen floor.

“I have to,” I said. “It took all the Wardens together to take down Kemmler and his students last time. I might not be able to prevent the Erlking’s arrival. If that happens, someone has to stop the heirs directly. I can’t do it. The Wardens can. It’s as simple as that.”

“Okay,” he said. “But that doesn’t explain why I can’t stick with you.”

“Because to them you’re just a White Court vampire, Thomas. With whom I am supposed to be at war. If they learn that you’re my brother, it might give the people in the Council who don’t like me grounds to question my loyalty. And even if they believe that I’m not acting against the Council or being controlled by you, they’d still be suspicious of you. They’d want assurances that you were on their team.”

“They’d use me,” he said quietly. “And use me against you.”

“They’d use us both against each other. Which is why you can’t be around when they show.”

Thomas turned and studied my face carefully. “What about Murphy? If you call in the Council, Mavra will screw up her life.”

I chewed on my lip a little. “Murphy wouldn’t want me to put innocents in danger to protect her. If one of the heirs turns into some kind of dark god, people are going to die. She wouldn’t forgive me for protecting her if that was the cost,” I said. “Besides. This isn’t about recovering the Word. This is about stopping the heirs. I can still get the book to Mavra and fulfill our bargain.”

Thomas took a deep breath. “Is that wise?”

“I don’t know. She’s not exactly alive. I doubt Kemmler’s techniques would apply to her use of magic.”

“If they didn’t,” Thomas said, “then why would she want the book?”

Which was a damned good question. I rubbed at my eyes. “All I know is that I’ve got to stop the heirs. And I’ve got to protect Murphy.”

“If the Council finds out that you’re planning on using them to defeat the heirs so that you can give Kemmler’s book to a vampire of the Black Court, you’ll be in trouble.”

“Not for long,” I said. “The Wardens will execute me on the spot.”

“God. And you can accept that? From your own people?”

“I’m acclimated,” I said.

We were quiet for a moment.

“You want me to sit this out,” Thomas said. “You don’t want me to help.”

“I don’t see that I have much choice,” I told him. “Do you?”

“You could just leave this whole thing. We could head for Aruba or something.”

I looked at him.

“Okay,” he said. “You won’t. But a guy can hope. I just don’t like the idea of sitting on the sidelines when you might need my help.” He frowned. “Hey. You’re doing this on purpose. You’re trying to keep me out of it to protect me, you…sneaky little bitch.”

“It works out that way,” I said. “Think of it as payback for those painkillers.”

He grimaced at me, then nodded.

“And thank you,” I said quietly. “You were right. I needed the rest.”

“Of course I was right,” Thomas said. “You looked like you were about to pass out. You still don’t look great.”

“I’m hungry. Did you make those pancakes for breakfast, or are they only decorative?”

“Go ahead and mock,” Thomas said. He slapped a bunch of pancakes onto a plate and brought it over to the table along with a plastic bottle of maple syrup. “Here. Happy birthday.”

I blinked at the pancakes and then up at him.

“I’d have gotten you a present, but…” He shrugged.

“No,” I said. “I mean, no, that’s okay. I’m surprised you remembered at all. No one has remembered my birthday since Susan left town.”

Thomas got himself a plate and left the rest on a third plate for Butters. He sat down at the table and started eating them without syrup. “Don’t make a big thing of it. I’m sort of surprised I remembered it myself.” He nodded at the world in general. “So you think Grevane and the Corpsetaker are the ones who turned the lights out?”

I shook my head. “They were both stretching themselves by keeping so many undead under their control. That’s why the Corpsetaker went after Grevane with a sword, and why he defended himself physically.”

“Then who did it?”

“Cowl,” I said. “He made himself scarce last night. My guess is that he was too busy setting it up to take a swing at Grevane or the Corpsetaker.”

“Why Cowl?”

“Because this is a major hex, man. If you’d have asked me yesterday, I wouldn’t have thought this was possible. I don’t know how he did it, but…” I shivered. “His magic is stronger than mine. And from what I saw of his technique, he’s a hell of a lot more skilled, too. If he’s as good at thaumaturgy as he is at evocation, he’s the most dangerous wizard I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not sure how he did it matters as much as why,” Thomas said.

I nodded. “He gets a lot of advantages. Paralyzes human power structures. Keeps cops and so on too busy to interfere with whatever they’re doing.”

“But that’s not the only reason. You said something about preparing the way?”

“Yeah.” I finished a large bite of syrupy pancake goodness. “Black magic is tied in pretty closely with a lot of negative emotions—especially fear. So if you do something that scares a whole lot of people, you get an environment that is better for black magic. This stunt is going to cause havoc. Make a lot of people worry. It will help with the heirs’ major mojo tonight.”

“You’re sure it’s tonight?”

I nodded. “Pretty much. It’s Halloween. The barriers between the mortal world and the spirit world are at their weakest. They’ll be able to call up the most spirits to devour tonight. All the acts of black magic they’ve been working around town were also part of that preparation. Creating spiritual turbulence. Making it easier to use larger and larger amounts of black magic.”

Thomas ate several bites while I listened. Then he said, “How are you going to contact the Council with the phones out?”

“Alternative channels,” I said. “I’ll call up a messenger.”

“Meanwhile,” Thomas said, his voice a little bitter, “I will stay here and do…nothing.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “Because you’re going to be figuring out where they can call up the most old spirits. Not only that, but I’m leaving you a copy of Bony Tony’s code numbers. Figure out what they mean.”

He toyed with a bit of pancake. “Old spirits would come from a graveyard, right?”

“Probably,” I said. “But sometimes they can get attached to possessions instead of a specific location. See what you can find out about Native American burial grounds or ruins. That’s the right age bracket for what the heirs want.”

“Okay,” Thomas said without much confidence. “And you want me to figure out the numbers, too.”

“With Butters,” I said. “He can help you on both counts. He’s damned smart.”

“Assuming he wants to help,” Thomas said. “He might want to cash in his chips and get out of this game while he’s still alive.”

“If he does, then you’ll be on your own,” I said. “But I don’t think he will.”

Just then the kitchen door opened and Butters came in with a panting Mouse. The big dog padded over to me and nudged my hand with his nose until I scratched him in his favorite spot, just behind one notched ear.

“Don’t think who will what?” Butters asked. “Oh, hey, pancakes. Are there any for me?”

“Counter,” Thomas said.

“Cool.”

“Butters,” I said. “Look, I think you’re going to be all right on your own now. If you want me to, I’ll take you home after breakfast.”

He peered owlishly at me and said, “Of course I want to go home. The Oktoberfest polka-off is tonight.”

Thomas arched an eyebrow at me.

Butters looked back and forth between us and said, “Do you need me to do something?”

“Maybe,” I said. “There’s some research to be done. I totally understand if you want to get while the getting’s good. But if you’re willing, we could use your help.”

“Research,” Butters said. “What kind of research?”

I told him.

Butters chewed on his lip. “Is it…is anything going to try to kill me for doing it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I can’t lie to you. These are some dangerous people. I can’t predict everything they might do.”

Butters nodded. “But…if you don’t get this information, what happens?”

“It gets harder to stop them.”

“And if you don’t stop them, what happens?”

I put my fork down, suddenly not very hungry. “One of them gets phenomenal cosmic power, and all the living space he can take. I get killed. So will a lot of innocent people. And God only knows what someone could do with power like that over the long term.”

Butters looked down at his pancakes.

I waited. Thomas said nothing. His appetite hadn’t been affected, and the sound of his knife and fork on the plate was the only one in the kitchen.

“This is bigger than me,” he said finally. “It’s bigger than polka, even. So I guess I’ll help.”

I smiled at him. “Appreciate it.”

Thomas looked up, studying Butters speculatively. “Yeah?”

Butters nodded, and grimaced. “If I walk away when I know I could lend a hand…I’m not sure I could live with that. I mean, if you were asking me to shoot somebody or something, I’d head for the hills. But research is different. I can do research.”

I rose and clapped Butters gently on the shoulder. “Thomas will fill you in.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I have to figure out how to call up the Erlking,” I said.

“Is that why everyone wanted that book?”

“Apparently.”

“But you had it. Heck, you read it.”

I rubbed at my eyes. “Yeah. I know. But I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.”

Butters nodded. “Frustrating, huh.”

“Just a bit.”

“It’s too bad you don’t have a photographic memory,” Butters said. “I knew a guy in college with one of those, the bastard. He could just look at a page, and then read it back to himself in his head a week later.”

A thought struck me hard, and I felt my limbs twitch with sudden excitement. “What did you say?”

“Uh. You don’t have a photographic memory?” Butters asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Butters, you are a genius.”

“I am,” he said. Then his brow furrowed in puzzlement. “I am?”

“Brilliant,” I said. “Certifiably.”

“Oh. Good.”

I rose and started gathering my things. “Where is that backpack I had you wear?”

“Living room,” Butters said. “Why?”

“You might need it.” I limped out to the living room and got the backpack. I touched it lightly, and felt the solid curve of Bob the skull within. I got my coat and my car keys and headed for the back door.

“Where are you going?” Thomas asked.

“Gumshoeing,” I said.

“You shouldn’t go alone.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. “But I am.”

“At least take Mouse,” Thomas said.

The big dog tilted his head quizzically, looking back and forth between Thomas and me.

“And hold his leash in my teeth?” I said. “I’ve only got the one hand to work with.”

Thomas frowned and then rolled a shoulder in a shrug. “Okay.”

“The phones are apparently unreliable,” I said. I tossed the backpack at Thomas. He caught it. “Bob will know how to reach me if you find something. Got that, Bob?”

A muffled voice from the backpack said, “Jawohl, herr kommandant.”

Butters jumped halfway out of his chair and made a squeaking sound. “What was that?”

“Explain it to him,” I told Thomas. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

My brother nodded at me. “Good luck. Be careful.”

“You too. Keep your eyes open. Thanks again, Butters.”

“Sure, sure. See you soon.” Butters poked at the backpack with his fork.

“Hey!” Bob protested from inside the pack. “Stop that! You’ll scratch it all up!”

I swung out the door. The night’s rest had done me good, and realizing how it might be possible to stop the heirs of Kemmler had given me an electric sense of purpose. I strode to the car, barely feeling my aching leg.

I turned my hand over and regarded Shiela’s phone number, written on it in black marker.

I didn’t have a photographic memory.

But I knew someone who did.

Chapter

Twenty-seven

I went to my office. Traffic wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It looked like the commuters hadn’t poured into town in the usual volume. The traffic lights were out, but there were cops at most of the problem intersections, and everyone seemed to be driving slowly and reasonably during the crisis. That’s what they were calling it on the radio—the crisis. There were a lot more people than usual out and about on the street, and with far less of the usual brisk, businesslike manner.

All in all, it was about the best reaction to the situation you could hope for. It seemed like people could go one of two ways: Either they freak out and start rioting, or they actually act like human beings in trouble ought to, and look out for one another. When LA blacked out, there had been big-time rioting. In New York, people had pulled together.

It was just as well that people hadn’t reacted quite so blindly as they might have. Without even trying, I could feel the slow, sour tension of black magic pulsing and swirling through the city. With the subtle influence of all that dark energy behind it, even a mild panic could have turned ugly, and fast.

Of course, it wasn’t dark yet. Nightfall could change things.

As advanced as mankind likes to think it is, we all have that age-old, primal, undeniable dread of darkness. Of being unable to see danger coming. We don’t like to think that we’re afraid of the dark anymore, but if that’s true, then why do we work so hard to make sure our cities are constantly lit? We cloak ourselves in so much light that we can barely see the stars at night.

Fear is a funny thing. In the right light, even tiny and insignificant fears can suddenly grow, swelling up to monstrous proportions. With the black magic rolling around the way it was, that instinctive fear of the dark would feed upon itself, doubling and redoubling, and with no explanation to tell them why the lights hadn’t come on, people would start to forget their carefully rational reasons not to be afraid in favor of panic.

Even assuming I prevented a brand-spanking-new dark godling from arising, tonight could be bad. It could be very bad.

I got to my office and tried to call Shiela’s number. The phones weren’t cooperating with me, which hardly came as a surprise. They rarely worked perfectly on the best of days. I kept a copy of a reverse phone book at my office, though, and I found the address of her Cabrini-Green apartment. While it wasn’t as bad as it had been in the past, it wasn’t exactly the best part of town, either. I had a brief pang of longing for the gun I’d lost in the alley behind Bock’s place. It wasn’t that the gun was more effective than other things I could do to defend myself, but it was a hell of a lot more of a deterrent to the average Chicago thug than a carved stick.

Just for fun, I tried the phones again, dialing my contact number for the nearest outpost of the Wardens.

So help me God, the phone rang.

“Yes,” answered a woman with a low, roughened voice.

I fumbled my little notebook of security phrases out of my duster’s pocket. “One second,” I said. “I didn’t think the call would go through.” I flipped the little notebook open to the last page and said, “Uh, chartreuse sirocco.”

“Rabbit,” answered the voice. I checked the notebook. It was the countersign.

“This is Wizard Dresden,” I said. “I have a Code Wolf situation here. Repeat, Code Wolf.”

The woman on the other end of the phone hissed. “This is Warden Luccio, wizard.”

Holy crap, the boss herself. Anastasia Luccio was one of the next in line for a seat on the Senior Council, and was the commander of the Wardens. She was one tough old bird, and she was the field commander of the Council’s forces in the war with the Red Court.

“Warden Luccio,” I said respectfully—both because she probably deserved it and because I needed to get along with her as well as I possibly could.

“What is the situation?” she asked.

“At least three apprentices to the necromancer Kemmler are here in Chicago,” I said. “They found the fourth book. They’re going to use it tonight.”

There was a stunned silence from the other end of the phone.

“Hello?” I said.

“Are you sure?” Luccio asked. Her voice had a faint Italian accent. “How do you know who they are?”

“All those zombies and ghosts were sort of a giveaway,” I said. “I confronted them. They identified themselves as Grevane, Cowl, and Capiorcorpus, and they each had a drummer with them.”

“Dio,” Luccio said. “Do you know where they are?”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it,” I said. “Can you help?”

“Affirmative,” Luccio said. “We will dispatch Wardens to Chicago immediately. They will arrive at your apartment within six hours.”

“Might not be the best place,” I said. “I was attacked there last night, and my wards got torn apart. The apartment may be under surveillance.”

“Understood. Then we will rendezvous at the alternate location.”

I checked the notebook. I’d have to meet them at McAnally’s. “Gotcha,” I said.

“Che cosa?” she asked.

“Uh, understood, Warden,” I said. “Six hours, alternate location. Don’t skimp on the personnel, either. These folks are serious.”

“I am familiar with Kemmler’s disciples,” she said, though her tone was more one of agreement than reprimand. “I will lead the team myself. Six hours.”

“Right. Six hours.”

She hung up the phone.

I settled it back onto its cradle, lips pursed in thought. Hell’s bells, the war captain of the White Council herself was to take the field. That meant that this situation was being regarded as an emergency tantamount to a terrorist with an armed nuclear bomb. If the head Warden was coming out to battle, it meant that the Wardens were going to pull out all the stops.

I was going to have a lot of help for a change. Help that held me in deadly suspicion, and who might execute me if they learned some of my secrets, but help nonetheless. I felt an odd sense of comfort. The Wardens had been one of my biggest fears practically since I had learned about their existence. There was something deeply satisfying about seeing the object of that fear take a hostile interest in Grevane and company. Like when Darth Vader turns against the emperor and throws him down the shaft. There’s nothing quite so cool as seeing someone who scares the hell out of you go at an enemy.

And then a disturbing thought occurred to me: Why in hell was the war captain of the White Council answering the freaking phones? Why wasn’t a junior member of the Wardens doing the receptionist work?

I could think of only a couple or three reasons.

None of them were pleasant.

My brief flash of relief and confidence melted away. Good thing it did, too. I’m sure the world would come to an end if I were allowed to feel a sense of relief and well-being for any length of time.

I shoved my worry out of my head. It wasn’t going to help anything. The only one I could count on to ride to my rescue was me. If the Wardens managed to do it anyway, it would be a nice surprise, but I had to get myself moving before the problem started looking too big. It was the same principle as cleaning a really messy room. You don’t think about everything you have to do. You focus on one thing and get it done, then move on to the next.

I needed the summons that was hidden in Der Erlking. To get that, I had to talk to Shiela. Right, Harry. Get a move on. I tried the phone once more, but I guess I’d already won the functional tech lottery: All circuits were busy.

I hadn’t been sitting down very long, but it was long enough for my leg to make it clear to the rest of my body that it didn’t want to be walked on any more today.

“Get with the program,” I told my leg severely. “You don’t have to be happy about it, but I need you functional.”

My leg sat there in sullen silence and throbbed, which I took as assent. I reached for my keys, and then heard a soft sound at my office door.

I whirled my staff into my hand, calling up my will, and the runes were already smoldering with sullen orange light when the door opened.

Billy stood in the doorway, his expression frozen in surprise, his mouth open. He was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and an old leather jacket. He hadn’t worn his glasses much over the past several years, but he had them on today. His hair had been mussed by the wind, which sighed against my office windows. I heard a few drops of rain begin to fall, striking with dull taps on the glass.

“Um,” he said after a minute. “Hi, Harry.”

I scowled at him and lowered the staff, letting the power ease out of it. The warmed wood felt good under my hand, and the faint scent of wood smoke lay on the air. “Bad time to be appearing suddenly in my office door,” I said.

“Next time I’ll whistle or something,” Billy replied.

“How’d you find me?”

“It’s your office.” He looked around the place. “You talking to someone?”

“Not really,” I said. “What do you need?”

He opened his coat. The handle of a gun protruded from his belt—my revolver. “Artemis Bock came by my place. He said there was some trouble at his store.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bad guys were trying to rough him up. I argued with them about it.”

Billy nodded. “That’s what he said. He found this in the alley outside. He said there was blood.”

“One of them clipped my leg,” I said. “I got it taken care of.”

Billy nodded, worried. “Um. He was worried about you.”

“I’m fine.” I stood up, careful about my leg. “Bock okay?”

“Um,” Billy said. He looked at me, his expression clearly concerned. “Yeah. Not hurt, I mean. Some damage to the store, which he said he didn’t mind. He wanted me to thank you for him.” He pulled the gun out of his belt and said, “And I thought you might need this.”

“Shouldn’t carry it in your pants like that,” I said. “Good way to sing soprano.”

“It’s empty,” he said, and offered me the handle of the gun.

I took it, flipped the cylinder open, and checked it. The gun wasn’t loaded. I slid it into the pocket of my duster, then opened the drawer of my desk and took out a small box of ammunition I kept there. I put it in the pocket along with the gun. “Thanks for bringing that by,” I said. “Why’d you come looking here?”

“You didn’t answer the phone at your place. I went by there. It looked like someone tried to tear the door off.”

“Someone did,” I said.

“But you’re all right?” There was a little more weight on the question than I would have expected.

“I’m fine,” I said, getting impatient. “Hell’s bells, Billy. If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it.”

He inhaled deeply. “Um. Well. I’m sort of afraid to.”

I arched a brow at him, and scowled again.

“Look. You…aren’t acting right, Harry.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Meaning not like yourself,” Billy said. “People have been noticing.”

“People?” I asked. My leg pounded. I had no time for this kind of psychological patty-cake. “What people?”

“People who respect you,” he said carefully. “Maybe who are even a little bit afraid of you.”

I just stared at him.

“I don’t know if you know this, Harry. But you can be a really scary guy. I mean, I’ve seen what you can do. And even the people who haven’t seen themselves have heard stories. Believe me, we’re all glad you’re one of the good guys, but if you weren’t…”

“What?” I said, suddenly feeling more tired. “If I wasn’t, then what?”

“You’d be scary. Really scary.”

“Get to your damned point,” I said quietly.

He nodded. “You’ve been talking to things.”

“Excuse me?”

He lifted his hands. “Talking to things. I mean, you were talking to things when I was outside your door.”

“That was nothing,” I said.

“Okay,” Billy said, though his tone suggested that he was placating me rather than agreeing.

“What is this talking-to-things crap? Did Bock say I was doing that?”

“Harry—” Billy said.

“Because I wasn’t,” I said. “Good God, I do some crazy crap, but it’s usually the ‘this is never going to work but I have to try it’ variety of crazy. I’m not insane.”

Billy folded his arms, his eyes searching my face. “See, that’s the thing. If you were truly insane, would you be able to realize it?”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. Because Bock said something about me, and because you heard me talking to myself, suddenly I’m ready for the room with rubber walls.”

“No,” he said. “Sort of. Harry, look, it isn’t like I’m trying to accuse—”

“That’s funny, because it sounds like an accusation from this end,” I said.

“I only—”

I slammed my staff down on the floor, and Billy flinched.

He tried to cover it, but I had seen the motion. Billy flinched like he was genuinely afraid that I was going to hurt him.

What the hell?

“Billy,” I said quietly. “There is some bad business going on. I don’t have time for this. I don’t know what Bock told you, but he’s had a bad couple of days. He’s rattled. I’m not going to hold anything against him.”

“All right,” he said quietly.

“I want you to go home,” I told him. “And I want you to start sending out word around to the in crowd. Everyone wants to be behind a threshold tonight.”

He frowned and took off his glasses, scrubbing at them with a corner of his shirt. “Why?”

“Because the White Council is sending a war party to town. You don’t want anyone you know to get caught in the backwash.”

Billy swallowed. “This is big, then?”

“And I have to get moving. I don’t have time for distractions.” I stepped forward and put my hand on his shoulder. “Hey, it’s me. Harry. I’m as sane as I ever am, and I need you to trust me for a little while. Tell people to keep their heads down. Okay?”

He took a deep breath and then nodded sharply. “I’ll do it, man.”

“Good. I don’t know why you’re so worried about me. But we’ll sit down and talk after the dust settles. Figure out what’s up. Make sure I haven’t stripped a gear when I wasn’t looking. I promise you.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. “Thank you. I’m sorry if this is…aw, hell, man.”

“Enough with sharing the emotions,” I said. “We’re gonna turn into women as we stand here. Get a move on.”

He chucked my arm with a mostly closed fist, and left.

I waited for him to go. I didn’t feel like riding down in the elevator with him, wondering if he was afraid of me suddenly turning on him with an ax or a butcher knife or something.

I leaned on my staff and thought about it for a second. Billy was really worried about me. Worried enough that he was afraid that I might do something to him. What the hell had I done to set that off?

And an even better question, which I had to ask myself, followed on the heels of that first one.

What if he was right?

I poked at my skull with a finger. It didn’t feel soft or anything. I didn’t feel insane. But if you’d really lost it, would you have enough left upstairs to know? Crazy people never thought they were crazy.

“I’ve always talked to things,” I said. “And to myself.”

“Good point,” myself agreed with me. “Unless that means you’ve been nuts all along.”

“I don’t need wiseass remarks,” I told myself severely. “There’s work to do. So shut up.”

All I could think was that it had been Georgia’s idea. She was always buried to the ears in her psych textbooks. Maybe she had fallen victim to some kind of inverted psychological hypochondria or something.

Thunder rumbled outside, and the rain started coming down harder.

I didn’t need any doubts distracting me right now. I shrugged off the whole conversation with Billy, tabling it for later. I loaded my gun, since not loading it would have been almost as good as not having it, then slipped it back into my pocket, locked up my office behind me, and headed for the car.

I had to get to Shiela and see if her remarkable memory could call up the poems and stanzas from that stupid book. And then I had to figure out how to call up a wild and deadly lord of the darker realms of Faerie and sidetrack him so that the heirs of Kemmler couldn’t use him to promote themselves to demigod status. And along the way, I had to find The Word of Kemmler and get it to Mavra, somehow, without the White Council learning what I was up to.

Easy as breathing.

As I rode down in the elevator, I had to admit that Billy might have a point.

Chapter

Twenty-eight

The Cabrini-Green tenement Shiela lived in had seen better days—but it had seen worse, too. The city had dumped a lot of money into urban renewal projects there, and it was an ongoing process. Shiela’s building was still undergoing renovation, and the lobby and many of the floors were only half-finished. No workmen were in the building when I went into the lobby, but there were dozens of tarps, stacks of drywall and raw lumber, heavy tool lockers that had been bolted to the floor, and other evidence of the contractors who would doubtless have been working had the city’s lights not been out.

I walked over to the elevators and to the security panel there, and found the button of Shiela’s apartment on the ninth floor. I pressed it and held it down for a minute before I realized that, duh, the power was out and I wasn’t going to be able to ring her apartment.

I grimaced and looked around for the stairs. Nine flights up on my leg wasn’t going to feel nice, but it wasn’t as though I had an infinite number of options.

The door to the stairs was locked, but it was a standard fire door with a push bar on the other side. I lifted my staff, looked around the lobby to make sure no one had wandered in to see me, and then gestured with the staff and murmured, “Forzare.”

I sent a bare whisper of my power through the door and then drew it back toward me with a sharp gesture. I caught the push bar on the other side with it, and the door trembled and then swung open by an inch or two. I thrust the end of my staff into it to hold it open, then grabbed on and heaved. I stared at the stairs for a second, but they didn’t get any shorter or turn into an escalator or anything, so I sighed and started painfully hauling myself up them, one step at a time.

Nine floors and 162 steps later, I paused to catch my breath, and then opened the door to the ninth-floor hallway in the same manner I had the one in the lobby. The ninth-floor hallway was still under construction, and several of the apartments in it were missing doors, and even walls. I limped along until I found Shiela’s apartment and then knocked on the door.

I felt a tingling tension over the door as I touched it—a magical ward of some kind. It was nowhere near as strong as the ones on my apartment had been, but it was stable. That was fairly impressive. Shiela might not have a ton of inborn talent, but she evidently had enough discipline to offset the lack. I held my hand out lightly, just over the surface of the door, sending my senses running over the ward, getting more of a feel for its strength. It couldn’t have stopped me if I used my power to force my way in, but it felt strong enough to give me a solid kick in the teeth if I tried it physically. It would certainly scare the hell out of a would-be burglar. Not bad.

After a minute I heard footsteps and the door opened a little. I could see a security chain and a slender stripe of her face that included one of Shiela’s dark, sparkling eyes. She let out a surprised little sound and then said, “Harry. Just a minute.”

I waited while she shut the door and took off the security chain. Then she opened the door again, smiling at me. She had an infectious smile, and I found myself answering it with one of my own.

She was dressed in a scarlet sequined bodice that made her chest into something very difficult not to stare at, nearly translucent baggy leggings, leather sandals that wrapped around her calves, and 6.5 million pounds of bangles on her arms and ankles. Her hair had been caught up in a high ponytail fixed into place to rise over some kind of mesh headdress, and her smooth, bare shoulders looked lovely and strong.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said back. “Is your roommate Shiela in, Genie?”

She laughed. “You caught me in the nick of time. I was just about to leave to get together with some people I know.”

“Costume party?” I asked.

“No, I dress like this all the time.” Her eyes sparkled. “It is Halloween.”

“Even with the lights out?”

She bobbed her brows, her smile wicked for a second. “Who knows. That might make it more fun.”

I had been right about the curves that had been hidden under her loose clothing back at Bock’s. They were awfully pleasant ones. It was an effort of will to stay focused on her face—especially when she laughed. Her laugh made all sorts of interesting little quivers run over her. “Do you have a minute?” I asked.

“Maybe even two,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I need your help with something,” I said. I looked up and down the hallway. As far as I knew I hadn’t been followed, and I’d been watching my back—but that didn’t mean that no one was there. I was pretty good at noticing such things, but there were plenty of people (and nonpeople) who were better than me. “If you don’t mind, can we talk about it inside?”

Her expression became a little wary, and she looked up and down the hall herself. “Are you in trouble? Is this about the people at the store?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “May I come in?”

“Of course, of course,” she said, and stepped back inside, holding the door open for me. I limped in. “Oh, my God,” she said, staring at me as I came in. “What happened?”

“A ghoul threw a knife into my leg,” I told her.

She blinked at me. “You mean…a real ghoul? An actual ghoul?”

“Yeah.”

Her face twisted up with dismay. “Oh. Wow. I’ve heard stories, but I never thought…you know. It’s hard to believe they’re really out there. Does that make me an idiot?”

“No,” I said. “It makes you lucky. If I never see another ghoul, it will be too soon.”

Her apartment was pretty typical of the kind: small, worn, rundown, but clean. She had mostly secondhand furniture, an ancient old fridge, mismatched bookshelves that overflowed with paperbacks and textbooks, and a tiny, aged television that looked as if it didn’t get much use.

“Sit down,” she said, picking up a couple of blankets and a throw pillow from the couch, clearing off a space for me. I tottered over to the couch and sat, which felt entirely too good. I grunted and got my leg elevated onto the coffee table, and it felt even better.

“Thanks,” I said.

She shook her head, staring at me. “You look frightful.”

“Been a tough couple of days.”

She studied me with serious eyes. “I suppose it must have been. What are you doing here?”

“The book,” I said. “The one on the Erlking that I got from Bock.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Um. What?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “You remember but I don’t, and the bad guys stole my copy. I need you to remember it for me.”

She frowned. “The whole thing?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “There were several poems and stanzas in there. I think what I need is in one of them.”

“What do you need?” she said.

I stared at her for a second. Then I said, “It might be better if you don’t know.”

She lifted her chin and regarded me for a moment, as if I’d just said something bad about her mother. “Excuse me?”

“This is some bad business,” I said. “It might be safer for you if I don’t tell you much about it.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s quite patronizing of you, Harry. Thank you.”

I held up a hand. “It isn’t like that.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. You want me to give you information, but you won’t tell me why or what you are going to do with it.”

“It’s for your own protection,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she replied. “But if I give you this information, I’m going to bear some responsibility for what you do with it. We don’t know each other very well. What if you took the information I gave you and used it to hurt someone?”

“I won’t.”

“And maybe that’s true,” she said. “But maybe it isn’t. Don’t you see? I have an obligation in this matter,” she said, “to use my talent responsibly. That means not using it blindly or recklessly. Can you understand that?”

“Actually,” I said, “I can.”

She pursed her lips and then nodded. “Then if you want me to help you, tell me why you need it.”

“You could be put at risk if you become involved in this,” I said. “It could be very dangerous.” I left a clear silence between the last two words for emphasis.

“I understand,” she said. “I accept that. So tell me.”

I stared at her for a second, and then sighed, a little frustrated. She had a point, after all. But dammit, I didn’t want to see anyone else get hurt because of Kemmler’s disciples. Particularly not anyone with such lovely breasts.

I jerked my eyes away from them and said, “The people you’ve seen around the store are going to use the book to call up the Erlking.”

She frowned. “But…he’s an extremely powerful faerie, yes? Can they do that?”

“Do you mean is it possible?” I asked. “Sure. I whistled up Queen Mab a few hours ago, myself.” Which was technically the truth.

“Oh,” she said, her tone mild. “Why?”

“Because I needed information,” I said.

“No, not that. Why are these people calling up the Erlking?”

“They’re going to use his presence on Halloween night to call up an extra-large helping of ancient spirits. Then they’re going to bind and devour those spirits in order to give themselves a Valhalla-sized portion of supernatural power.”

She stared at me, her mouth opening a little. “It’s…a rite of ascension?” she whispered. “A real one?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But that’s…that’s insane.”

“So are these people,” I said. “What you tell me could stop it from happening. It could save a lot of lives—not least of which is my own.”

She folded her arms over her stomach as if chilled. Her face looked pale and worried. “I need the poems because I’m going to summon the Erlking before they can do it and to make sure that I sidetrack him long enough to ruin their plans.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” she asked.

“Not as dangerous as doing nothing,” I said. “So now you know why. Will you help me?”

She fretted her lower lip, as though mulling it over, but her eyes were sparkling. “Say please.”

“Please,” I said.

Her smile widened. “Pretty please?”

“Don’t push me,” I half growled, but I doubt it came out very intimidating.

She smiled at me. “It might take me few minutes. I haven’t looked at that book in some time. I’ll have to prepare. Meditate.”

“Is it that complicated?” I asked.

She sighed, the smile fading. “There’s so much of it, sometimes my head feels like a library. I don’t have a problem remembering. It’s finding where I’ve put it that’s a challenge. And not all of it is very pleasant to remember.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said. “I’ve seen some things I would rather weren’t in my head.”

She nodded, and paced over to settle down on the couch next to me. She drew her feet up underneath her and wriggled a bit to get comfortable. The wriggling part was intriguing. I tried not to be too obviously interested, and fumbled my notebook and trusty pencil from my duster’s pocket.

“All right,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Give me a moment. I’ll speak it to you.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And don’t stare at me.”

I moved my eyes. “I wasn’t.”

She snorted delicately. “Haven’t you ever seen breasts before?”

“I wasn’t staring,” I protested.

“Of course.” She opened one eye and gave me a sly oblique glance. Then she closed her eyes with a little smile and inhaled deeply.

“That’s cheating,” I said.

She smiled again, and then her expression changed, her features growing remote. Her shoulders eased into relaxation, and then her eyes opened, dark, distant, and unfocused. She stared into the far distance for several moments, her breathing slowing, and her eyes started moving as if she were reading a book.

“Here it is,” she said, her voice slow, quiet, and dreamy. “Peabody. He was the one to compile the various essays.”

“I just need the poems,” I said. “No need for the cover plate.”

“Hush,” she said. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.” Her fingers and hands twitched now and then while her eyes swept over the unseen book. I realized after a moment that she was turning the pages of the book in her memory. “All right,” she said a minute later. “Ready?”

I poised my pencil over my notepad. “Ready.”

She started quoting poetry to me, and I started writing it down. It wasn’t in the first poem or the second, but in the third one I recognized the rhythms and patterns of a phrase of summoning, each line innocent on its own, but each building on the ones preceding it. With the proper focus, intent, and strength of will, the simple poem could reach out beyond the borders of the mortal world and draw the notice of the deadly faerie hunter known as the Erlking, the lord of goblins.

“That’s the one,” I said quietly. “I need you to be completely sure of your accuracy of recollection.”

Shiela nodded, her eyes faraway. Her hand made a reverse of the page-turning motion she used and she spoke the poem to me again, more slowly. I double-checked that I’d written it all down correctly.

It doesn’t do to mangle a summoning. If you get the words wrong, it can have all kinds of bad effects. Best-case scenario, the summoning doesn’t work, and you pour all the effort into it for nothing. One step worse, a bungled summoning could call up the wrong being—maybe one that would be happy to rip off your face with its tentacle-laden, extendable maw. Finally, at the extreme end of negative consequences, the failed summons might call up the being you wanted—in this case the Erlking—only it would be insulted that you hadn’t bothered to get it right. Uber-powerful beings of the spirit world had the kind of power and tempers that horror movies are made of, and it was a bad idea to get one of them mad at you.

If you called up a being incorrectly, there was very little you could do to protect yourself from them. That was the job hazard of summoning. If I chanted the Erlking to Chicago, I had to be damned sure I did it correctly, or it would be worth as much as my life.

“Once more,” I told Shiela quietly when she was finished. I had to be sure.

She nodded and began again. I checked my written version. They all came out the same for the third time in a row, so I was as sure as I reasonably could be that it was accurate.

I stared at the notepad for a moment, trying to absorb the summoning, to remember its rhythm, the rolling sound of consonant and verb that were only incidentally related to language. This wasn’t a poem—it was simply a frequency, a signal of sound and timing, and I committed it with methodical precision to memory, the same way I stored the precise inflections required to call upon a spirit being using its true name. In a sense, the poem was a name for the Erlking. He would respond to it in the same way.

When I looked up again a few moments later, I felt the gentle pressure of Shiela’s gaze. She was watching me, her eyes worried. “You’re either incredibly stupid or one of the most courageous men I’ve ever seen.”

“Go with stupid,” I said lightly. “In my experience, you can’t go wrong assuming stupid.”

“If you use the summoning,” she said quietly, not smiling at my tone, “and something bad happens to you, I will be to blame.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I know what I’m doing. It will be my own damned fault.”

“I’m not sure that your acceptance can absolve me of responsibility,” she said, frowning. “Is there anything else I can do to help you?”

“There’s no need to offer,” I said.

“Yes,” she said earnestly. “There is. I need to know that I’ve done whatever I can. That if something happens to you, it won’t be because of something I didn’t do.”

I studied her face for a moment, and found myself smiling. “You take this whole responsibility thing very seriously,” I said.

“Is there some reason I shouldn’t?” she asked.

“None at all,” I said. “It’s just unusual from someone…well, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s unusual from someone so far down the ladder, when it comes to raw power.”

She smiled a little. “It doesn’t take much power to hurt someone,” she said. “It’s far easier than healing the damage. It’s always like that, for everything. Not just magic.”

“Yeah. But not many people seem to get that.” I reached over and put my right hand on hers. She had very soft, very warm hands. “Thank you for helping me. If there’s anything I can ever do to pay you back…”

She smiled at me and said, “There is one thing.”

“Oh?” I asked.

She nodded. “A friend told me once that you can tell a lot about a person from how they do things the first time.”

I blinked a couple of times and then said, “Uh. Like what?”

“Like this,” she said, and came to me. She moved beautifully—fluid and graceful and elegantly feminine. She was all warm curves and soft flesh scented of wildflowers as she slid one leg over mine, straddling my thighs. Her gentle hands lightly framed my face as she leaned down to kiss me, her eyes rolling back and closing in anticipation as her mouth met mine.

The kiss began slowly, quietly—sensuous but not impassioned, patience without hesitance. Her lips were a warm and gentle contact on mine, and there was a sense of exploration to her mouth, as she felt her way around the kiss. Maybe I was just too tired, or too injured, or too worried about my prospects for immediate survival, but it felt good. It felt really good. Shiela’s mouth wasn’t inflamed with need. She demanded nothing with the kiss. All she wanted was to taste my mouth, to feel my skin under her hands.

And then without warning, a desperate yearning for more of that simple contact, that human warmth, roared through me in a flash fire of need.

Nearly everyone underestimates how powerful the touch of another person’s hand can be. The need to be touched is something so primal, so fundamentally a part of our existence as human beings that its true impact upon us can be difficult to put into words. That power doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex, either. From the time we are infants, we learn to associate the touch of a human hand with safety, with comfort, with love.

I hadn’t been touched much for…well, a long damned time. Thomas may have been my brother, but he avoided physical contact, even casual and incidental contact, like the plague. I hadn’t exactly been overwhelmed with romantic interests, either. The closest thing to it I’d had of late had been the advances of a neophyte succubus—and that contact had been anything but loving.

When sex becomes part of the equation, the impact of another’s touch can be even more urgent and profound—so much so that good sense, even basic logical deduction, can go right out the window, washed away in a flood of needs that simply must be met.

I hadn’t been touched in a long time. I hadn’t been kissed in even longer. Given how likely it was that I was going to die before my next sunrise, Shiela’s presence, her warmth, the simple fact that she wanted to be touching me crowded out every worry and fear, and I was glad to see them go. Shiela’s kiss freed me from pain and from fear—even if only for a moment. And I wanted to hold on to that moment for as long as I possibly could.

I tightened my grip on the kiss, and my good arm rose, sliding deliberately around the small of her back, pulling her toward me.

Shiela let out a hiss of sudden excitement, but her kiss grew no deeper, no swifter. Her mouth stayed in its gentle rhythm, and I leaned harder into it. Her breath quickened still more, but her kiss deepened only slowly, maddeningly patient, torturously gentle. Her hips shifted in slow tension against mine, and I could feel the heat of her against me.

What I wanted to do was to reach up and haul down the sequined top. I wanted my mouth to explore every sinuous curve of her. I wanted to drive her mad with need, to fill my senses with her warmth, her cries, her scent. I wanted to forget everything arrayed against me, even if it was just for a little while, and bare her an inch at a time. The emptiness that her warmth had begun to fill howled at me to let go.

But what I did was open my mouth and brush my tongue over her lips, gently and slowly, and only once. She shivered at that touch, and her teeth tugged delicately at my lower lip. I drew the kiss to a slow, quiet close, and bowed my head, so that my forehead rested against hers. Both of us remained like that for a minute, breathing a little fast.

“Did you want to stop?” she whispered.

“No,” I answered. “But I needed to.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t know me,” I said. “Did you want me to stop?”

“No,” she said. “But I needed you to. You don’t know me, either.”

“Then why kiss me?” I asked.

“I…” I heard a touch of something like embarrassment in her voice. “It’s been a long time for me. Since I’ve kissed anyone. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed it.”

“Same here.”

Her fingers stirred lightly, touching the sides of my face. “You seem so alone. I just…wanted to know what it was like. Just the kiss. Before anything else gets involved.”

“That’s reason enough,” I agreed. “What did you think of it?”

She made a low sound in her throat. “I think I want more.”

“Mmmm,” I said, agreeing. “That works for me.”

She let out a quiet, wicked little laugh. “Good.” She shivered again and then drew away from me, dark eyes bright, still breathing fast enough to make her chest absolutely mesmerizing. She stood up, smiling. “Is there anything else I can do to help you?”

“Grab my staff for me?”

She arched a brow.

I felt my cheeks flush. “Uh. The literal staff.”

“Oh,” she said, and passed it to me.

She watched me with quiet concern as I heaved myself to my feet, but she made no move to help me, for which my ego was entirely grateful. I hobbled over to her door, and she walked beside me.

I turned to her and touched her cheek with my right hand. She leaned her face against my palm, just a little, and smiled up at me.

“Thank you,” I told her. “You’re a lifesaver. Probably literally.”

She looked down and nodded. “All right. Be careful?”

“I’ll try,” I told her.

“Try hard,” she said. “I’d like to see you again soon.”

“Okay. I’ll survive. But only because you asked.”

She laughed, and I smiled, and then I left her in her apartment and started back down the stairs to the street.

Going down was a lot harder than going up had been. I made it to the third floor before I had to stop for a breather, and I sat down to rest my aching leg for a moment.

So I was panting and sitting flat on my ass when the air in front of me wavered, and a dark, hooded figure stepped forward from out of nowhere, one hand extended, some sort of fine mesh that covered her outstretched palm flickering with ugly purple light.

“Be very still, Dresden,” Kumori said, her voice soft. “If you try to move, I’ll kill you.”

Chapter

Twenty-nine

Kumori stood about four feet from me—easily within reach of my staff, if I wanted to strike at her. But since I was sitting down and had only one strong hand to swing the staff, I wouldn’t be able to hit hard enough to disable her, even if I somehow managed to hit her before she unleashed the power she was holding in her hand.

And besides. She was a girl.

Unless she proved herself to be some kind of monstrous thing that just looked like a girl, I wasn’t going to hit her. On some rational level, I knew my attitude was dangerously illogical, but that didn’t change anything. I don’t hit girls.

I had the feeling she was quick enough to beat me, as she stood over me with the magical equivalent of a cocked and readied gun sparkling through the metal mesh over her right palm. I could feel the air vibrating with a low, steady note of power, and her stance was both confident and wary.

One thing I was pretty sure of—she was here to talk. If she’d wanted to kill me, she could have done it already. So I stayed sitting, set my staff aside, very slowly, and mildly raised both hands. “Take it easy there, cowgirl,” I said. “You got me dead to rights.”

I couldn’t see her face within the depths of the hood, but I heard a dry note of amusement in her voice. “Take off the bracelet, please. And the ring on your right hand.”

I arched a brow. The ring was spent, and probably didn’t have enough juice left in it to push her back a step, but I’d never run into anyone who had noticed it before. Whoever she was, Kumori knew how wizards operated, and it made me even more sure that she was hiding her face because she was someone I might recognize—someone on the White Council.

I slipped the bracelet off my left hand and lowered it slowly to the stair beside me, but getting that ring off was going to be problematic. “I can’t get the ring off,” I said.

“Why not?” Kumori asked.

“Fingers on my left hand don’t work anymore,” I said.

“What happened?”

I blinked at her for a second. The question had been polite. In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d have taken her tone for actual interest.

“What happened to your left hand?” she asked, her tone patient.

I answered her as politely as I could while staring at her, trying to figure her out. “I was fighting vampires. There was a fire. Burned my hand so bad the doctors wanted to take it off. There’s no way I can get the ring off unless you want to come over here and take it yourself.”

She was still for a moment. Then she said, “It might be easier if you would agree to a truce for the duration of this conversation. Are you willing to give your word on it?”

She wanted a truce, which meant that she had indeed come to talk, rather than to execute me. There sure as hell wouldn’t be any harm in agreeing to a truce, and it might prevent hostilities that could be triggered by raw nerves. “In exchange for yours,” I said. “This conversation and half an hour after its conclusion.”

“Done,” Kumori said. “You have my word.”

“And you have mine,” I said.

She lowered her hand at once, taking the odd mesh over it and its sparkling energies into the deep sleeves of her robe. I didn’t take my eyes off her as I reclaimed my shield bracelet and fixed it back onto my wrist. “All right,” I said. “What did you want to talk about?”

“The book,” she said. “We still want your copy.”

“You’ll have to talk to the Corpsetaker,” I said. “He and his ghoul took it from me last night. But if you go looking, he looks like a girl in her early twenties. Great dimples.”

The hood shifted, as though Kumori had tilted her head to one side. “You know of the source of the Corpsetaker’s name?”

“I figure he’s a body switcher,” I said. “I’ve heard necromancers can do that kind of thing. Move their consciousness from one body to another. Exchange with some poor sucker who can’t protect themselves. Corpsetaker was in that old professor’s body. I figure he swapped with his assistant, and then killed the old man’s body with the girl’s mind inside.”

The hood nodded, conceding me the point. “But I have difficulty believing your story. Had the Corpsetaker taken the book from you, he would have killed you as well.”

“Wasn’t for lack of trying,” I said, and gestured at my leg. “He was overconfident, and I was a little bit lucky. He got the book, but I got away.”

She was silent for a moment and then said, her voice thoughtful, “You’re telling me the truth.”

“I’m bad at lying. Lies get all confusing. Can’t keep them straight.”

Kumori nodded. “Then let me make you this offer.”

“Join or die?” I guessed.

She exhaled softly through her nose. “Hardly. Cowl has a certain amount of respect for you, but he believes you too raw to make some sort of alliance feasible.”

“Ah,” I said. “Then you’ll probably go to the second offer I always get. Go away and you won’t kill me.”

“Something like that,” Kumori said. “You have no real idea of what is going on here. Your ignorance is more dangerous than you know, and your continued involvement in this matter could cause disastrous consequences.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Withdraw from the field,” she said.

“Or what?”

“Or you will regret it,” she said. “That isn’t a threat. Simply a fact. As I said, Cowl has a certain respect for you, but he will not be able to protect you or treat you gently should you continue to involve yourself. If you stand in his way, he will kill you. He would prefer it if you stood clear.”

“Gosh. That’s so altruistic of him.” I shook my head. “If he kills me, he’ll have my death curse to contend with.”

“He has already contended with such curses,” Kumori said. “Many times. I advise you to retire from the field.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I know what you people are doing. I know about the Darkhallow. I know why you’re doing it.”

“And?”

“And I can’t let that happen,” I said. “Insurance in Chicago is expensive enough without adding in a petulant new deity tearing up the real estate.”

“Our goals are not so different,” Kumori said. “Grevane and the Corpsetaker are madmen. They must be stopped.”

“From what I’ve seen of old Cowl, he’s a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal too.”

“And you would do what?” Kumori asked. “Prevent them from reaping the bounty of the Darkhallow? Take the power for yourself?”

“I want to make sure nobody takes it,” I said. “I don’t particularly care how I get it done.”

“Truly?” she asked.

I nodded. “Now here’s where I make you an offer.”

She hesitated, clearly taken off guard. “Very well.”

“Bail,” I told her. “Leave Cowl and the Sociopath Squad to their squabbling. Give me what information I need to stop them.”

“He’d kill me in a day,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “I’d take you to the White Council. I’d get you protection.”

She stared at me from within her hood, utterly silent.

“See, Kumori, you’re sort of a puzzle,” I said. “Because you’re working with these necromancers. In fact, I’m willing to bet you aren’t bad at necromancy yourself. But you went out of your way to save someone’s life the other night, and that just doesn’t jive with that crowd.”

“Doesn’t it?” she said.

“No. They’re killers. Good at it, but they’re just killers. They wouldn’t take a step out of their way to help someone else. But you went way the hell out of your way to help a stranger. It says that you aren’t like them.”

She was silent for a moment more. Then she said, “Do you know why Cowl has made a study of necromancy? And why I have joined him?”

“No.”

“Because necromancy embraces the power of death, just as magic embraces the power of life. And as magic can be twisted and perverted to cruel and destructive ends, necromancy can be turned upon its nature as well. Death can be warded off, as I did for the wounded man that night. Life can be served by that dark power, if one’s will and purpose are strong.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “You got involved with the darkest and most corruptive, insanity-causing forces in the universe so that you could jump-start wounded bodies to life.”

She moved her hand, a sudden, slashing motion. “No. No, you idiot. Don’t you see the potential here? The possibility to end death.”

“Uh. End death?”

“You will die,” she said. “I will die. Cowl will die. Everyone now walking this tired old world knows but one solid, immutable fact. Their life will end. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why they call us ‘mortals.’ Because of the mortality.”

“Why?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why?” she repeated. “Why must we die?”

“Because that’s the way it is,” I said.

“Why must that be the way it is?” she said. “Why must we all live with that pain of separation? With horrible grief? With rage and loss and sorrow and vengeance ruling the lives of every soul beneath the sky? What if we could change it?”

“Change it,” I said, my skepticism clear in my voice. “Change death.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Just…poof. Make it go away.”

“What if we could?” she said. “Can you imagine what it would mean? If mere age would not lay mankind low after his threescore and ten, how much better would the world be? Can you imagine if da Vinci had continued to live, to study, to paint, to invent? That the remarkable accomplishments of his lifetime could have continued through the centuries rather than dying in the dim past? Can you imagine going to see Beethoven in concert? Taking a theology class taught by Martin Luther? Attending a symposium hosted by Albert Einstein? Think, Dresden. It boggles the mind.”

I thought about it.

And she was right.

Supposing for half a second that what she said might be possible, it would mean…Hell. It would change everything. There would be so much more time, and for everyone. Wizards lived for three or even four centuries, and to them even their own lives seemed short. What Kumori was talking about, the end of death itself, would give everyone else the same chance to better themselves that wizards enjoyed. It would, in a single stroke, create more parity between wizards and the rest of mankind than any single event in history.

But that was insane. Setting out to conquer death? People died. That was a fact of life.

But what if they didn’t have to?

What if my mother hadn’t died? Or my father? How different would my life be today?

Impossible. You couldn’t just drive death away.

Could you?

Maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe this was one of those things in which the effort meant more than the outcome. I mean, if there was a chance, even a tiny, teeny chance that Kumori was right, and that the world could be so radically changed, wouldn’t I be obliged to try? Even if I never reached the goal, never finished the quest, wouldn’t the attempt to vanquish death itself be a worthy pursuit?

Wow.

This question was a big one. Way bigger than me.

I shook my head and told Kumori, “I don’t know about that. What I know is that I’ve seen the fruits of that kind of path. I saw Cowl try to murder me when I got in his way. I’ve seen what Grevane and the Corpsetaker have done. I’ve heard about the suffering and misery Kemmler caused—and is still causing today, thanks to his stupid book.

“I don’t know about something as big as trying to murder death. But I know that you can tell a tree from what kind of fruit falls off it. And the necromancy tree doesn’t drop anything that isn’t rotten.”

“Ours is a calling,” Kumori said, her voice flat. “A noble road.”

“I might be willing to believe you if so much of that road wasn’t paved in the corpses of innocents.”

I saw her head shake slowly beneath the hood. “You sound like them. The Council. You do not understand.”

“Or maybe I’m just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there’s a downside to what you’re saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous.”

I faced her down for a long and silent second. Then she let out a sigh and said, “I think we have exhausted the possibilities of this conversation.”

“You sure?” I asked her. “The offer is still open. If you want to get out, I’ll get the Council to protect you.”

“Our offer is open as well. Stand aside, and no rancor will follow you.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Nor can I,” she said. “Understand that I do not wish you any particular harm. But I will not hesitate to strike you down should you place yourself in our path.”

I stared at her for a second. Then I said, “I’m going to stop you. I’m going to stop you and Cowl and Grevane and Corpsetaker, and your little drummers too. None of you are going to promote yourself to godhood. No one is.”

“I think you will die,” she said, her tone even, without inflection.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m going to stop you all before I go. Tell Cowl to get out of the way now, and I won’t hunt him down after all of this is over. He can walk. You too.”

She shook her head again and said, “I’m sorry we could not work something out.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She hesitated. Then she asked me, her voice soft and genuinely curious, “Why?”

“Because this is what I have to do,” I said. “I’m sorry you aren’t going to let me help you.”

“We all act as we think we must,” she said. “I will see you by and by, Dresden.”

“Count on it,” I said.

Kumori left without another word, gliding silently down the stairs and out of sight.

I sat there for a moment, aching and tired and more scared than I had sounded a minute before.

Then I got up, shoved my pain and my fear aside, and hobbled out to the Blue Beetle.

I had work to do.

Chapter

Thirty

I went back to my car, got in, and headed out to find a few things I would need to make the summoning of the Erlking marginally less suicidal. Serious summoning spells have to be personalized both to the entity to be summoned and to the summoner, and it took me a little while to find enough open businesses to get it all. Traffic on the streets grew steadily worse as the afternoon wore on, slowing me down even further.

More ominous than that, the tenor of the city had begun to slowly, steadily change. What had been an atmosphere of bemused enjoyment of an unanticipated holiday from the daily grind had turned into annoyance. As the sun tracked across the sky and the power still hadn’t come back on, annoyance started turning into anger. By high noon, there were police visible on every street in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, and on foot.

“That all for ya?” asked an enterprising vendor. He was a potbellied, balding gardener selling fresh fruit and vegetables from the back of a pickup on a corner, and he was the only one I’d seen who wasn’t trying to gouge Chicagoans in their moment of trial. He put the pumpkin I’d chosen in a thin plastic bag as he did, and took the money I offered him.

“That’s everything,” I said. “Thanks.”

Shouting broke out somewhere nearby, and I looked up to see a whip-thin young man sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. A pair of cops chased him, one of them shouting at his uselessly squealing radio.

“Christ, look at that,” the vendor said. “Cops everywhere. Why do they need the cops everywhere if this is just a power outage?”

“They’re probably just worried about someone starting a riot,” I said.

“Maybe,” the vendor said. “But I hear some crazy things.”

“Like what?” I asked.

He shook his head. “That terrorists blew up the power plant. Or maybe set off some kind of nuke. They can disrupt electronics and stuff, you know.”

“I think someone might have noticed a nuclear explosion,” I said.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “But hell, maybe somebody did. Practically no phones, radio is damned near useless. How would we know?”

“I dunno. The big boom? The vaporized city?”

The vendor snorted. “True, true. But something happened.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Something happened.”

“And the whole damned city is getting scared.” The vendor shook his head as more shouting broke out farther down the block. A police car, lights and sirens wailing, tried to bull through the traffic to move toward the disturbance, without much success.

“Getting worse,” the vendor observed. “This morning it was all smiles. But people are getting afraid.”

“Halloween,” I said.

The vendor glanced at me and shivered. “Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe just because it’s getting darker. Clouding over. People get spooked sometimes. Just like cattle. If they don’t get the lights on, tonight might be bad here.”

“Maybe,” I said. I juggled the bag with my staff, trying to work out how to carry them both back down the street to the Beetle.

“Here,” said the vendor. “I’ll help you, son.”

“Thank you,” I told him, though to be honest I felt embarrassed that I actually wanted his help, much less needed it. “That old Bug there.”

He walked the fifty feet down the sidewalk with me. He dropped off the sack in the front-end trunk of the VW, nodded at me, and said, “About time I got my old self out of here anyway, I think. Getting tense around here. Thunderstorm’s coming in.”

“Newspaper weatherman said it was supposed to be clear,” I said.

The vendor snorted and tapped his nose. “I lived around this old lake all my life. There’s a storm coming.”

Boy was there. In spades.

He nodded to me. “You should get home. Good night to stay in and read a book.”

“That sounds nice,” I agreed. “Thanks again.”

I nudged the Beetle out into traffic by virtue of being more willing to accept a fender-bender than anyone else on the road. I had everything I needed to try to whistle up the Erlking, but it had eaten up a lot of my day. I’d tried to call Murphy’s place every time I’d stopped the car, but I never got a line through to Thomas and Butters, and now, with the afternoon sun burning its way down toward the horizon, I had run out of daylight.

It was time to rendezvous with the Wardens, so I headed for McAnally’s.

Mac’s tavern was tucked in neatly beneath one tall building and surrounded by others. You had to go down an alley to get to the tavern, but at least it had its own dinky parking lot. I managed to find a spot in the lot and then limped down the alley to the tavern, taking the short flight of steps down to the heavy wooden door.

I opened the door onto a quiet buzz of activity. In times of supernatural crisis, McAnally’s became a sort of functional headquarters for gossip and congregation. I understood why. The tavern was old, lit by a dozen candles and kerosene lamps, and smelled of wood smoke and the steaks Mac cooked for his heavenly steak sandwiches. There was a sense of security and permanence to the place. Thirteen wooden pillars, each one hand-carved with all manner of supernatural scenes and creatures, held up the low ceiling. Ceiling fans that normally turned in lazy circles were not moving now, thanks to the power outage, but the actual temperature of the bar was unchanged. There were thirteen tables scattered out irregularly around the room, and thirteen stools at the long bar.

The whole layout of the place was meant to disperse and divert dangerous or destructive energies that might accompany any grouchy wizard types into the tavern—nothing major. It was just a kind of well-planned feng shui that cut down on the number of accidents bad-tempered practitioners of the arts might inadvertently inspire. But that dispersal of energies did a little something to ward off larger magical forces as well. It wasn’t going to protect the place from a concentrated magical attack: McAnally’s wasn’t a bomb shelter. It was more like a big beach umbrella, and when I came through the door I felt a sudden relief of pressure I hadn’t realized had built up. The minute I shut the door behind me, some of the fear and tension faded, the dark energies Cowl had stirred up sliding around the tavern like a stream pouring around a small, heavy stone.

A sign on the wall just inside the door proclaimed, ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY. That meant that the signatories of the Unseelie Accords, including the White Council and the Red Court, had agreed that this place would be treated with respect. No one was supposed to start any kind of conflict inside the tavern, and would be bound by honor to take outside any fight that did come up, as rapidly as possible. That kind of agreement was only as good as the honor of anyone involved, but if I broke the Accords in the building, the White Council would hang me out to dry. From past experience, I assumed that the Red Court would come down on any of their folk who violated the tavern’s neutrality in the same way.

The tavern was crowded with members of the supernatural community of Chicago. They weren’t wizards. Most of them had only a pocketful of ability. One dark-bearded man had enough skill at kinetomancy to alter the spin on any dice he happened to throw. An elderly woman at another table had an unusually strong rapport with animals, and was active in municipal animal shelter charities. A pair of dark-haired sisters who shared an uncanny mental bond played chess at one of the tables, which seemed kind of masturbatory, somehow. In one of the corners, five or six wizened old practitioners—not strong enough to have joined the Council, but competent enough in their own right—huddled together over mugs of ale, speaking in low tones.

Mac himself glanced over his shoulder. He was a tall, spare man in a spotless white shirt and apron. Bald and good at it, Mac could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. He pursed his lips upon seeing me, turned back to his wood-burning stove, and quickly finished up a pair of steaks he’d been cooking.

I started limping over to the bar, and as I went the room grew quiet. By the time I was there, the uneven thump of my staff on the floor and the sizzling of the steaks were the only sounds.

“Mac,” I said. Someone vacated a stool, and I nodded my thanks and sat down with a wince.

“Harry,” Mac drawled. He slipped his frying pan off the stove, slapped both steaks onto plates, and with a couple of gestures and brief movements made fried potatoes and fresh vegetables appear on the plates, too. It wasn’t magic. Mac was just a damned good cook.

I glanced around the room and spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “I need some space, Mac. Some people are meeting me here shortly. I’ll need several tables.”

A round of nervous whispers and quiet comments went through the crowd. The old practitioners in the corner rose from their table without further ado. Several of them nodded at me, and one grizzled old man growled, “Good luck.”

The less experienced members of the supernatural crowd looked from me back to the departing seniors, uncertainty on every face.

“Folks,” I said, in general. “I can’t tell you what to do. But I would like to request that you all think about getting home before dark. Come nightfall, you want to be behind a threshold.”

“What’s happening?” blurted one of the youngest men in the room. He still had pimples.

Mac eyed him and snorted.

“Come on. I’m a wizard. We have union rules against telling anybody anything,” I said. There was a round of muted chuckles. “Seriously. I can’t say any more for now,” I said. And I couldn’t. Odds were better than good that one or more spies lurked among the patrons of the tavern, and the less information they had about White Council plans and activities, the better. “Take this seriously, guys. You don’t want to be outside come nightfall.”

Mac turned around to the bar and swept his eyes over it, his expression polite and pointed. He grunted and flicked his chin at the door, and the noise from the room rose again as people began speaking quietly to one another, getting up, and leaving money on the tables as they left.

Two minutes later, Mac and I were the only people left in the tavern. Mac walked around the edge of the bar and sat down next to me. He put one steak-laden dinner plate on the bar in front of me, kept the other for himself, and added a couple of bottles of his home-brewed dark ale. Mac flipped the tops off with a thumbnail.

“Bless your soul, Mac,” I said, and picked up one bottle. I held it up. Mac clinked his bottle of ale against mine, and then we both took a long drink and fell to on the steaks.

We ate in silence. After a while, Mac asked, “Bad?”

“Pretty bad,” I said. I debated how much I could tell him. Mac was a good guy and a long-term acquaintance and friend, but he wasn’t Council. Screw it. The man gave me steak and a beer. He deserved to know something more than that there was a threat he probably couldn’t do anything about. “Necromancers.”

Mac’s fork froze on the way to his mouth. He shook his head, put his last bite of steak into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Mac never used a sentence when one word would do. “Wardens?”

“Yeah. A lot of them.”

He pursed his lips with a frown. “Kemmler,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow, but I wasn’t really surprised that he knew the infamous necromancer’s name. Mac always seemed to have a pretty darned good idea about what was going on. “Not Kemmler. His leftovers. But that’s bad enough.”

“Ungh.” Mac finished up his plate in rapid order, then rose and started collecting money and clearing the tables in the corner farthest from the door. At some point he collected my barren plate and empty bottle and put a fresh ale down in front of me.

I sipped at it, watching him. He didn’t make a production of it, but he checked the short-barreled shotgun he kept on a clip behind the bar, and put a pair of 1911s in unobtrusive spots behind the bar, so that no matter where he stood, one of the weapons would be within easy reach. He handled them like he knew exactly what he was doing.

I sipped at the ale and mused. I knew little of Mac’s background. He’d opened the tavern a few years before I’d moved to Chicago. No one I’d talked to knew where he’d been before that, or what he had done. I wasn’t surprised that he knew something about weapons. He’d always moved like someone who could handle himself. But since he wasn’t exactly a chatterbox, most of what I knew came from observation. I hadn’t the faintest idea of why or where he’d learned the business of violence.

I could respect that. I had run through a few bad patches that were just as well left behind and forgotten.

Mac looked up abruptly, and started polishing the bar near the shotgun’s clip. A second later the door opened, and a Warden of the White Council came in.

He was a tall man, six feet and then some, and built with the solidity of an aging soldier. His lank hair had more grey in it than I remembered, and was drawn back into a ponytail. His face was narrow, almost pinched, and in the absence of any other expression, he looked like he had just taken a big bite of alum-sprinkled lemon rind. The Warden wore the grey cloak of his office over black fatigues. He carried a carved staff in his right hand, and bore a long-bladed sword on his left hip.

That much I had expected.

What surprised me was how battered he looked.

The Warden’s cloak was ripped in several spots, and stained with what could have been mud, blood, and greenish motor oil. There were burn marks along the hem, and several raw, ragged holes in it that might have been the results of corrosive burns. His staff looked similarly nicked and stained—and the man himself looked like a boxer after a tough tenth round. He had bruises on one cheek. His nose had been broken sometime in the past several weeks. There was an ugly line of fresh, scarlet scar tissue running from his hairline to one eyebrow, and I could see white bandages through a hole in his jacket, over his left biceps.

For all of that, he came through the door like a man who knew he could clear out a bar full of marines if he needed to, and his eyes settled on me at once. His mouth twisted into an even more sour frown.

“Wizard Dresden,” he said quietly.

“Warden Morgan,” I responded. I figured Morgan would be along with any Wardens sent to Chicago. It was in his area of responsibility, and he didn’t like me. He’d spent a few years following me around, hoping to catch me performing black magic so that he could execute me. It hadn’t happened, and the Council had lifted my probation. I don’t think he had ever forgiven me for that. He blamed me for other things too, I think, but I had always figured they were just excuses. Some people don’t get along, ever. Morgan and I were two of them.

“McAnally,” Morgan said to the tavern keeper.

“Donald,” Mac replied.

Interesting. Hell, I’d been on the Council for years, and I hadn’t known Morgan’s first name.

“Dresden,” Morgan said. “Have you checked for veils?”

“If I told you I had, you’d check it yourself anyway, Morgan,” I said. “So I didn’t bother.”

“Of course you didn’t,” he said. I saw him frown a little in concentration, and then his eyes went a bit out of focus. He swept his gaze around the room, using his Sight, that odd, half-surreal sense that lets wizards observe the forces of magic moving around them. A wizard’s Sight cuts through all kinds of veils and spells meant to disguise and distract. It’s a potent ability, but it comes at a price. Anything you see through the Sight stays with you, never fading in your memory, always right there for recall, as if you’d just seen it. You can’t just forget something that you See. It’s there for life.

Morgan didn’t let his gaze linger too long near Mac or myself, and then he nodded to himself, and called out, “Clear.”

The door opened and Warden Luccio came in. She was a solid old matriarch of a woman, as tall as most men and built like someone who did plenty of physical labor. Her hair was a solid shade of iron grey, cropped into a neat, military cut. She too wore a Warden’s grey cloak, though she wore clothes suitable for hiking or camping beneath that: jeans, cotton, flannel, boots, all in muted tones of grey and brown. She too carried a staff and bore a sword at her side, though hers was a slender scimitar, light and elegant. Though not as worn as Morgan’s, her gear also showed evidence of recent action.

“Warden Luccio,” I said, and rose from the barstool to incline my head to her.

“Wizard,” she said quietly. I would have needed a high-speed camera to take in the details of her smile, but at least it was there. She nodded to me and then a little more deeply to Mac.

Behind her came three more Wardens. The first was a young man I vaguely recognized from a Council meeting a few years back. He had naturally tanned skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and sharp-edged, classically Spanish features. I remembered him in an apprentice’s brown robe back then, and covering his mouth with one hand to conceal a grin inspired by some of my dialogue with the Council’s bigwigs.

The brown robe was gone, and he looked like he had filled in a little since I’d first seen him, but good Lord, he was younger than Billy the werewolf. He wore a grey cloak that looked reasonably clean and not at all damaged, and black fatigues beneath that. A simple, straight sword hung from one hip, and was balanced on the other side by a holstered Glock and, I kid you not, three round fragmentation grenades. His staff was fairly new-looking, but there were enough dents and nicks in it to make me think he had kept things from hitting him with it, and he walked with a kind of arrogant confidence you see only in people who have not yet realized their own mortality.

“This is Warden Ramirez,” Luccio said. “Ramirez, Dresden.”

“How’s it going?” Ramirez said, flashing me a grin.

I shrugged. “You know. Pretty much the usual.”

Two more Wardens came in behind him, and they looked even younger and greener. Their cloaks and staves were immaculate, and they wore clothes and equipment so similar to Ramirez’s that they qualified as a uniform. Luccio introduced the blocky young man with distant, haunted eyes as Kowalski. The sweet-faced young Asian girl’s name was Yoshimo.

I limped over to Luccio and nodded at the tables Mac had set up. “I hope there’s room enough. When are the other Wardens arriving?”

Luccio fixed me with a quiet, weary gaze. Then she drew her hands from beneath her cloak and held out a folded bundle wrapped in brown paper, offering it to me. “Take it.”

I took the bundle and unwrapped it.

It was a folded grey cloak.

“Put it on,” said Luccio in her quiet, steady voice. “And then every available Warden will be here.”

Chapter

Thirty-one

I stared at Luccio for a second.

“That’s a joke,” I said. “Right?”

She gave me a brief, bitter smile. “Master McAnally,” she said to Mac. “I think we could use a round. Do you have anything decent to drink?”

Mac grunted and said, “Got a new dark.”

“Is it worth drinking?” Luccio asked. She sounded tired, but there was a teasing tone to her voice.

Mac glowered at her in answer, and she gave him a smile that was part challenge and part apology, and took a seat at one of the tables. She gestured at the table and said, “Wardens, please join me.”

Morgan took the seat to Luccio’s right, and the look he gave me could have burned holes in sheet metal. I did what I always did when Morgan did that: I eyed him right back, then dismissed him as if he weren’t even there. I pulled out the chair opposite Luccio and sat. The two youngest Wardens sat down, but Ramirez stayed standing until Mac had brought over bottles of his dark ale and left them on the table. He headed back over to the bar.

Ramirez glanced at Luccio, and she nodded. “Close the circle, please, Warden.”

The young man drew a piece of chalk from his pocket, and quickly drew a heavy line on the floor all the way around the table. He finished the circle, then touched it lightly with the forefinger of his right hand and spoke a quiet word. I felt a flicker of his will as he released a tiny bit of power into the circle. The circle closed around us in a sudden, silent tension, raising a thin barrier around us that was almost entirely impregnable to magical forces. If anyone had been trying to spy on the meeting with magic, the circle would prevent it. If anyone had left some kind of listening device nearby, the magic-saturated air within the circle would be certain to fry it within a minute.

Ramirez nodded to himself and then reversed the last open chair at the table and straddled it, resting one arm on the back. Morgan slid him the last bottle of ale, and he took it in one hand.

“Absent friends,” Luccio murmured, holding up her bottle.

I could get behind that toast. The rest of us muttered, “Absent friends,” and we had a drink, and Luccio stared at her bottle for a moment.

I waited in the pregnant silence and then said, “So. Making me a Warden. That’s a joke, right?”

Luccio took a second, slower taste of the ale and then arched an eyebrow at the bottle.

Behind the bar again, Mac smiled.

“It’s no joke, Warden Dresden,” Luccio said.

“As much as we all would like it to be,” Morgan added.

Luccio gave him a look of very gentle reproof, and Morgan subsided into silence. “How much have you heard about recent events in the war?”

“Nothing in the past several days,” I said. “Not since my last check-in.”

She nodded. “I thought as much. The Red Court has begun a heavy offensive. This is the first time that they’ve concentrated their efforts on disrupting our communications. We suspect that a great many wizards never received word through our usual messengers.”

“Then they found weaknesses in the communications lines,” I said. “But they waited to exploit them until it would hurt us the most.”

Luccio nodded. “Precisely. The first attack came in Cairo, at our operations center there. Several Wardens were taken, including the senior commander of the region.”

“Alive?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes. Which was an unacceptable threat.”

When vampires take you alive, it isn’t so that they can treat you to ice cream. That was one of the really nightmarish facets of the war with the Red Court. If the enemy got you, they could do worse than kill you.

They could make you one of their own.

If they managed to turn a Warden, especially one of the senior commanders, it would give them access to a treasury of knowledge and secrets—to say nothing of the fact that they would effectively gain, in many ways, a wizard of their own. Vampires didn’t use magic in the same way that mortal wizards did. They tapped into the same nauseating well of power that Kemmler and those like him used. But from what I understood of it, the skills carried over. A turned wizard would be a deadly threat to the Wardens, the Council, and mortals alike. We never talked about it, but there was a sort of silent understanding among wizards that we would never be taken alive. And an equally silent fear that we might be.

“You went after them,” I guessed.

Luccio nodded. “A major assault. Madrid, São Paolo, Acapulco, Athens. We struck at enemy strongholds there to acquire intelligence to the whereabouts of the prisoners. Our people were being held in Belize.” She waved a hand vaguely at Morgan.

“Our intelligence indicated the presence of the highest-ranking members of the Red Court, including the Red King himself. The Merlin and the rest of the Senior Council took the field with us,” Morgan said quietly.

That made me raise my brows. The Merlin, the leader of the Senior Council, was as defensive-minded as it was possible to be. He’d guided the White Council into the equivalent of a cold war with the Red Court, with everyone moving carefully and unwilling to commit, in the hopes that it would give the war time to settle away into negotiations and some kind of diplomatic resolution. An offensive action like a full assault from the Senior Council, the seven oldest and strongest wizards on the planet, had been long overdue.

“What changed the Merlin’s mind?” I asked quietly.

“Wizard McCoy,” Luccio said. “When our people were taken, he persuaded most of the Senior Council to take action, including Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper.”

That made sense. My old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was a member of the Senior Council. He had a couple of longtime friends on the Council, but that didn’t give him a majority vote. If he wanted to get anything done, he had to talk someone from the Merlin’s bloc into casting their vote with him—either that, or convince the Gatekeeper, a wizard who habitually abstained from voting, to take a stand with him. If Ebenezar had convinced Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper to vote with him in favor of action, the Merlin would have little choice but to move.

And just because the Merlin was a master of wards and defensive magic did not mean that he couldn’t kick some ass if he needed to. You don’t get to be the Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps, and Arthur Langtry, the current Merlin, was generally considered to be the most powerful wizard on earth.

I had seen for myself what Ebenezar McCoy was capable of. A couple of years ago he had pulled an old Soviet satellite out of orbit and brought it down into the lap of Duke Ortega, the warlord of the Red Court. He’d killed a ton of vampires in doing it.

He’d also killed people. He’d taken the force of life and creation and used it to wipe out the lives of mortals—victims of the Red Court’s power. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. Ebenezar, I’d learned, held an office that did not officially exist—that of the White Council’s assassin. Known as the Blackstaff, he had a license to kill, as well as to break the other Laws of Magic when he deemed it necessary. When I learned that he was violating and undermining the same laws he’d taught me to obey, to believe in, it had wounded me so deeply that in some ways I was still bleeding.

Ebenezar had betrayed what I believed in. But that didn’t change the fact that the old man was the strongest wizard I’d ever seen in action. And he was the youngest and least powerful of the Senior Council.

“What happened?” I asked quietly.

“There was no evidence of the presence of the Red King or his entourage, but other than that the attack went as planned,” Morgan said. “We assaulted the vampires’ stronghold and took our people back with us.”

Luccio’s face twisted in sudden and bitter grief.

“It was a lure,” I said quietly. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “We moved out and took our wounded to the hospice in Sicily.”

“What happened?”

“We were betrayed,” she said, and her words carried more sharp edges than a sack of broken glass. “Someone within our ranks must have reported our position to the Red Court. They attacked us that night.”

“When was that?” I asked.

Luccio frowned, then glanced across the table at Ramirez.

“Three days ago, Zulu time,” Ramirez provided quietly.

“I’ve not slept,” Luccio said. “Between that and all the travel, I lose track.” She took another drink of ale and said, “The attack was vicious. They were coming for the Senior Council, and their sorcerers managed to cut us off from escaping into the Nevernever for nearly a day. We lost thirty-eight Wardens that day, in fighting all over Sicily.”

I sat there for a moment, stunned. Thirty-eight. Stars and stones, there were only about two hundred Wardens on the Council. Not every wizard had the kind of talent that made them dangerous in a face-to-face confrontation. Most of those who did were Wardens. In a single day, the Red Court had killed nearly 20 percent of our fighting force.

“They paid for it,” Morgan rumbled quietly. “But…they seemed almost mad to die in order to kill us. Driven. I saw four different death curses unleashed that day. I saw vampires climb over mounds of their own dead without so much as slowing down. We must have taken twenty of their warriors for every loss of our own.” He closed his eyes and his sour face was suddenly masked with very real and very human grief. “They kept coming.”

“We had many wounded,” Luccio said. “So many wounded. As soon as the Senior Council was able to open the ways into the Never-never, we retreated to the paths through Faerie. And we were pursued.”

I sat up straight. “What?”

Morgan nodded. “The Red Court followed us into the territory of the Sidhe,” he said.

“They had to know,” I said quietly. “They had to know that by pressing the attack in Faerie itself they would anger the Sidhe. They’ve just declared war on Summer and Winter alike.”

“Yes,” Morgan said in a flat voice. “But it didn’t stop them. They attacked us as we retreated. And…” He glanced at Luccio as if in appeal.

She gave him a firm look and said to me, “They had called demons to assist them.” She inhaled slowly. “Not simply beasts from the Nevernever. They had gone to the Netherworld. They had called Outsiders.”

I took a longer drink of Mac’s ale. Outsiders. Demons were bad enough, but they were at least something I was fairly familiar with. The reaches of the Nevernever, the world of spirit and magic that surrounds the mortal world, are filled with all kinds of beings. Most of them really don’t give a damn about mortal affairs, and we are nothing but a remote and unimportant curiosity to them. When beings of the spirit world are interested in mortal business, it’s for a good reason. The ones who like to eat us, hurt us, or generally terrify us are what wizards commonly refer to as demons, as a general term. They’re bad enough.

Outsiders, though, were so rarely spoken of that they were all but a rumor. I wasn’t really clear on all of the details, but the Outsiders had been the servants and foot soldiers of the Old Ones, an ancient race of demons or gods who had once ruled the mortal world, but who had apparently been cast out and locked away from our reality.

There was a specific Law of Magic against contacting them—Thou Shalt Not Open the Outer Gates. No one wanted to be the one suddenly suspected of opening ways for the Outsiders to enter the mortal world. The Wardens absolutely did not play around with violations of the Laws of Magic. Their entire purpose in life was to protect the Council—first from violators of the seven Laws, and then from everyone else.

I eyed the folded grey cloak on the table in front of me.

“I thought only mortal magic could call up Outsiders,” I said quietly.

Luccio said quietly, “You are correct.”

My stomach lurched a little. Someone had told the Red Court where to find the Council. Someone had blocked off their escape route to the Nevernever so strongly that the most powerful wizards on the planet had required a full day to open them again. And someone had begun calling up Outsiders in numbers, sending them to attack the White Council.

The Council is not what it was, Cowl had said. It has rotted from the inside. It will fall. Soon.

“The Wardens fell back to fight a holding action against the Red Court so that our wounded could escape to safety,” Luccio reported, her crisp voice at odds with her weary eyes. “That was when they loosed the Outsiders upon us. We lost another twenty-three Wardens in the first moments of combat, and many more were wounded.” There was silence while she took a long pull from her bottle, emptying it, then setting it down sharply on the table, anger flickering in her eyes. “If Senior Council members McCoy and Liberty had not come to our aid, we might have all died there. Even with them, we managed to hold them only long enough for the Gatekeeper and the Merlin to raise a ward behind us, to give us time to escape.”

“A ward?” I blurted. “Are you telling me that they stonewalled an entire army of vampires and demons? With one ward?”

“You don’t get to be Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps,” Ramirez said, his voice dry.

I glanced aside at Ramirez. He grinned at me and swigged beer.

“McCoy was injured,” Luccio continued.

Ramirez snorted. “Who wasn’t?”

Luccio snapped, “Carlos.”

He lifted a hand in surrender and settled back onto his chair again, but his grin never faded.

“There were many injuries,” Luccio continued. “But as the hospice in Sicily had been taken, we diverted the worst cases to a hospital we control in the Congo.” She stared at her bottle for a moment. Her mouth opened, and then she closed it again. She closed her eyes.

Morgan frowned at her. Then he put a hand on Luccio’s shoulder, looked at me, and said, “The vampires knew.”

I got a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach. “Oh, God.”

“It was daylight there,” Morgan said. “And the place was a fortress of the Merlin’s wards. There was no way for the vampires to breach it from the Nevernever, and nothing short of a demon lord could have broken through them.” His mouth twisted, and his eyes glittered with rage and hate. “They sent mortals against us. Against men and women lying injured, unconscious, helpless in their beds.” The anger in his voice seemed to strangle him for a moment.

“But…” I said. “Look, I know what it’s like going up against mortals you don’t want to kill. It’s difficult, but they can be stopped. Fought. Bullets and explosives can be defended against.”

“Which is why they used gas,” Ramirez said quietly, stepping in where Morgan’s and Luccio’s voices had failed. His own tone was serious. His grin had vanished. “A nerve agent, probably sarin. They deployed it against the entire hospital, the people we had protecting it, and six square blocks of city around it.” He put his own bottle down and said, “No one survived.”

“My God…” I whispered.

There was dead silence.

“Ebenezar?” I asked in a whisper. “You said he was wounded. Was he…”

Ramirez shook his head. “Stubborn old bastard wouldn’t go to the hospital,” the young Warden said. “He went with one of the teams staging a counteroffensive with the Fellowship of Saint Giles.”

“Thousands of innocent mortals died,” Luccio said, and there was a slow, low snarl in her voice. She kept it tightly leashed and under control, but I heard it. I recognized it, and I knew what it was like to feel it permeating my words. “Women. Children. Thousands. And today I buried one hundred and forty-three Wardens.”

I sat there, stunned.

In a single, vicious stroke, the Red Court had very nearly destroyed the White Council.

“They have crossed every line,” Luccio said, her voice quiet and precise. “Violated every principle of war of our world and the mortal world alike. Madness. They have gone mad.”

“They’ve committed suicide,” I said quietly. “They don’t have a prayer against the Council and the Faerie Courts alike.”

“The Sidhe were taken by surprise,” Morgan rumbled. “They aren’t prepared for a fight. And we’re holding on by our fingernails. We’ve got less than fifty Wardens capable of combat. Without our communications network in order, members of the Council have been attacked individually and by surprise. We don’t know how many more wizards have died.”

“And it gets even better,” Ramirez said. “Agents of the Red Court are haunting the ways through Faerie. We were attacked on the way here, twice.”

“Our priority,” Luccio said, voice crisp, “is to consolidate our forces and to draw upon every available resource to restore the Wardens as a fighting force. We must draw the members of the Council together and make sure that they are protected. We’re reorganizing our security.” She shook her head. “And frankly, we must protect the lives of the Senior Council. So long as they are concealed from the enemy and still able to take action, they are a dangerous force. Together they wield more power than any hundred members of the Council, and it can be concentrated with deadly effect, as the Merlin showed in the Nevernever. So long as they stand ready to strike, the enemy cannot openly unveil his full strength.”

“More important,” Morgan growled, “the mortal wizards who betrayed us, whoever they are, fear the Senior Council. That is why their first move was an attempt to destroy them.”

Luccio nodded. “If we can hold on until the Faerie Courts mobilize for action, we can recover from this attack. Which brings us to today,” Luccio said, and studied me, tired and frank. “Every other Warden able to fight is currently either engaged against the enemy or safeguarding the Senior Council. Our lines of support and communication are tenuous.” She gestured at those seated at the table. “This is every resource the White Council has to spare.”

I looked at the weary captain of the Wardens. At the battered Morgan. At Ramirez, who had reclaimed his cocky smile, and at Yoshimo and Kowalski, untried, quiet, and frightened.

“Warden Luccio,” I said. “May I speak to you privately?”

Morgan scowled and said in a hot voice, “Anything you have to say to her you can say to all—”

Luccio put her hand on Morgan’s arm, a gentle gesture, but it cut him off. “Morgan. Perhaps you would be so kind as to get me another bottle. And I’m sure McAnally would be willing to provide us all with some dinner.”

Morgan stared at her for a second, then at me. Then he rose, smudged the chalk circle with a boot, and broke the circle around the table, releasing the buzzing tension from the air.

“Come on, kids,” Ramirez told the other two younger wardens, rising. “We have to go sit with Uncle Morgan while the other adults have a serious talk.” He put a hand on my shoulder on the way past and squeezed. “Hey, bartender! Are those onion rings I smell?”

I waited until they had all settled down at the far end of the bar and Mac began to bring them some food. Then I turned to Luccio and said, “I can’t be a Warden.”

She studied me for a second and then asked, in a very precise, very polite voice, “And why not?”

“Because you people have been threatening to kill me for doing something I didn’t do since I was sixteen years old,” I said. “You’re all convinced I’m some sort of hideous threat, and every time you get the chance you try to make my life miserable.”

Luccio listened attentively and then said, “Yes. And?”

“And?” I said. “I’ve spent my entire adult life with the Wardens looking over my shoulder waiting for a chance to accuse me of things I didn’t do, and trying to set me up and entrap me when you never found me doing anything.”

Luccio’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You know damned well that Morgan tried to provoke me into attacking him just before we got the treaty with Winter, so he and the Merlin would have an excuse to throw me to the vampires.”

Luccio’s eyes widened, and her voice came out harder. “What?” She shot a look at Morgan, and then back at me. “Are you telling me the truth?”

There was some kind of cadence to the question that her words didn’t usually have, and on pure instinct I reached out with my senses. I could feel a light tension in the air, humming like the space between the tines of a tuning fork.

“Yes,” I told her. The humming chime continued unabated. “I’m telling you the truth.”

She stared at me for a long second and then settled back onto her chair. The humming tension faded. She folded her hands on the table, frowning down at them. “Then…There were rumors. Of how Morgan behaved around you. But I thought that they were only that.”

“They weren’t,” I said. “Morgan has threatened and persecuted me every time he got the chance.” I clenched my right hand into a fist. “And I have done nothing. I won’t become a part of that, Warden Luccio. So keep the cape. I wouldn’t polish my car with it.”

She regarded her folded hands, eyes narrow. “Dresden,” she said quietly. “The White Council is at war. Would you simply abandon your own people to the mercies of the Red Court? Would you stand aside and let Kemmler’s disciples have their way?”

“Of course not,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t fight. But I won’t be wearing this.” I shoved the cloak across the table. “Keep it.”

She shoved it back to the table before me. “Put it on.”

“Thank you, no.”

“Dresden,” Luccio said, and her voice was calm and agate-hard. “It is not a request.”

“I don’t respond well to threats,” I said.

“Then respond to reality,” she snapped. “Dresden, the Wardens are all but shattered. We need every battle-capable wizard we can recruit, train, or conscript.”

“A lot of wizards can fight,” I growled.

“And they aren’t Harry Dresden,” she said. “You idiot. Don’t you know what I am offering you?”

“Yeah. The chance to hunt down teenage kids who were never told the Laws of Magic and execute them for breaking them. The chance to badger and intimidate and interrogate anyone who doesn’t suit me. Neither of which I want anything to do with.”

“Ebenezar said you were stubborn, but not that you were a fool. The Council has been betrayed, Dresden. And you are the most infamous wizard in it. There are many who have spoken out against you. Many who say that you began the war with the Red Court intentionally so that you could create an opportunity to bring about the fall of the Council.”

I burst out in bitter laughter. “Me? That’s insane. For crying out loud, I can’t even balance my stupid checkbook!”

Luccio’s eyes softened a little, and she sighed. “I believe you.” She shook her head. “But you have a reputation, and the members of the Council will be badly unsettled by this loss. Their fear could easily turn upon you. That is why you are going to join the Wardens.”

I scowled. “I don’t get it.”

“It is time to set our past differences aside. If you wear the cloak of a Warden and step in to fight when the Council is in its hour of need, it will make our people look at you differently.”

I took a deep breath. “Oh. Vader syndrome.”

“Excuse me?”

“Vader syndrome,” I said. “There’s no ally so impressive, encouraging, and well loved as an ally who was an enemy that made you shake in your boots a couple of minutes ago.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Luccio said. “I think that you do not realize your own reputation. You have overcome more enemies and battled more evils than most wizards a century your senior. And times are changing. There are more young wizards attaining membership to the Council than ever before—like Ramirez and his companions, there. To them, you are a symbol of defiance to the conservative elements of the Council, and a hero who will risk his life when his principles demand it.”

“I am?”

“You are,” Luccio said. “I can’t say that I approve of it. But right now the Council will need every scrap of courage and faith we can muster. Your presence and support in the face of a greater danger will appease your detractors, and the presence of a wizard who has experience in battle will encourage the younger members of the Council.” She grimaced. “Put simply, Dresden, we need you. And you need us.”

I rubbed at my eyes for a moment. Then I said, “Let’s say I do sign on. I’m willing to wear the cloak. I’m willing to fight for as long as the war is on. But I won’t move away from Chicago. There are people here who depend on me.” I glowered. “And I won’t bow my head to Morgan. I don’t want him within a hundred miles of my town.”

Luccio rubbed at her jaw, and then nodded slowly, her eyes thoughtful. “I have to reassign Morgan in any case.” She nodded again, more sharply. “Then I’m conscripting you into the Wardens as a regional commander.”

I blinked.

“You’ll be in charge of security and operations in this region, and coordinate with the other three American regional commanders.”

“Uh,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“That it will be your job to protect mortals in this area. To be vigilant against supernatural threats in your region, and represent the Council in matters of diplomacy. To aid and assist other wizards who come to you for aid and protection, and, when required, to strike out at the enemies of the Council, such as the Red Court and their allies.”

I frowned. “Uh, I pretty much do that anyway.”

Luccio’s face broke into the first genuinely warm smile I’d ever seen on her, the care lines vanishing, replaced with crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “So now you’ll do it in a grey cloak.” Her expression sobered. “You’re a fighter, Dresden. If the White Council is to survive, we need more like you.”

She pushed away from the table and walked over to the bar, carrying our empty bottles with her.

When she came back, I had just finished getting the cloak pin settled and draping the heavy, soft grey fabric around my shoulders. She stopped in front of me and looked me up and down for a moment. Ramirez glanced at me, and his grin widened. Morgan looked, and from his expression you would think someone had just shoved a knife into his testicles. Mac’s brow furrowed, and he studied me in the cloak, his lips quietly pursed.

“Thank you,” Luccio said quietly, and offered me an ale.

I accepted it with a nod. We touched bottles and took a drink.

“Very well then, Commander,” Luccio said, her tone turning brisk and businesslike. “This is your territory, and you have the most recent intelligence on Kemmler’s disciples. What is our next step?”

I shoved my hair back from my eyes and said, “Okay, Warden Lucc—uh, Captain Luccio. Let’s sit down and get to work. It’s getting dark, and we don’t have much time.”

Chapter

Thirty-two

When I walked through the door of Murphy’s house, it was raining and I was still wearing the grey cloak. I limped into the kitchen, where Thomas and Butters and Bob were sitting at a table with a bunch of candles, paper, pencils, and empty cans of Coors.

Thomas’s jaw dropped open. “Holy crap,” he said.

Butters blinked at Thomas and then at me. “Uh. What?”

“Harry!” Bob said, orange eye lights glowing brightly. “You stole a Warden’s cloak?”

I scowled at them and took the cloak off. It dripped all over the kitchen floor. “I didn’t steal it.” Mouse came padding into the room, tail wagging, and I rubbed briefly at his ears.

“Oh,” Bob said. “So you took it off a body?”

“No,” I said, annoyed, and settled onto a chair at the table. “I got drafted.”

“Holy crap,” Thomas said again.

“I don’t get it,” Butters said.

“Harry’s joined the wizard secret police!” Bob burbled. “He gets to convict on suspicion and take justice into his own hands! How cool is that!”

Thomas looked at me steadily and then at the door behind me. Then back to me.

“I’m alone,” I said quietly. “Relax.”

He nodded. “What happened?”

“A lot,” I said. “There isn’t time to cover it all now. But the Wardens are in town, and I’m not so worried about them crawling all over and finding out everyone’s secrets.”

“Why not?” Thomas asked.

“Because at the moment all five of them are at a hotel downtown, getting showers and changing bandages while I try to come up with more information about the heirs of Kemmler.”

Thomas blinked slowly. “All five…and they have wounded?”

I nodded, my lips pressed hard together.

“Wow,” Thomas said quietly. “How bad is it?”

“They drafted me,” I said.

“That’s bad, all right,” Bob said cheerfully.

I looked at the scattered papers and books on the table. “Tell me you guys came up with something.”

Butters blinked a few times and then started fumbling at the papers on the table, peering at them in the candlelight. “Uh, well, there’s good news and bad news.”

“Bad first,” I said. “I’m going to need the pick-me-up afterward.”

“We’ve got nothing on those numbers,” Butters said. “I mean, they aren’t a code. They’re too short. They could be an address or an account number, but none of the banks we could get on the phone use that number of digits.” He coughed apologetically. “If I could have gotten on the Net I could have gotten you a lot more, but…” He gestured uselessly around the room. “We couldn’t get one call in fifty to go through, and at most of the places we called, no one answered. And in the past hour the phones have gone out altogether.”

I shook my head. “Yeah. City’s going insane, too. There were two fires between here and McAnally’s. Some kind of riot going in Bucktown, I heard on a police radio.”

“The governor has asked for help from the National Guard,” Thomas said quietly. “They’re sending troops in to keep order on the streets.”

I blinked. “How did you find that out?”

“I called my sister,” he said.

I frowned. “I thought Lara wasn’t speaking with you.”

Thomas’s voice went dry. “Just because she cut me off from the family’s money, kicked me out of any of our holdings, made it clear that I no longer have their protection, and she’s holding the woman I love as a virtual prisoner, don’t think she doesn’t still like me, personally.”

“So she did you a little favor,” I said.

“Technically,” Thomas said, “she did you a little favor.”

“Why did she do that?” I asked.

“Well, I hinted about how since her entire power base depended on a certain secret being kept, and since you were awfully irrational about protecting the good citizens of Chicago, that you might develop loose lips to sink her ship if she didn’t help you in your moment of need.”

“Um,” I said. “So you’re telling me that I just engaged in blackmail against the ruler of the White Court. By proxy.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “You’ve got some great big brass balls on you to do something like that, Harry.”

“I guess I do.” I shook my head. “Why did I do that?”

“Because we needed help,” Thomas said. “We were getting nowhere fast. Lara’s got a ton of resources available to her, and a lot of manpower. She was able to come up with some of the other information we needed.”

“Which is the good news,” Butters said. “She wasn’t blacked out and cut off from the Internet like we are, and she was able to get a bunch of information we couldn’t.” He passed me a piece of paper. “Not on the numbers—but one of her people was able to find out about Native American artifacts and weapons here in Chicago.”

I looked up sharply at Butters. “Yeah?”

He nodded at the paper and I read over it. “Yep,” he said. “The Native American Center is using their facility to host this big display on tribal hunting and warfare before all of us palefaces showed up with guns and smallpox. The History Channel is using it as a part of some history-of-warfare special, and they were filming there all last week.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That could have some old hunter spirits attached to it.” I read over the list. “Dammit, I should have remembered this myself. The Field Museum has that big Cahokian artifacts exhibit that Professor Bartlesby was in charge of. Hell, it was a bunch of Indian artifacts that Corpsetaker helped assemble himself. Probably with tonight in mind.”

Butters nodded. “And the Mitchell Museum up in Evanston has got more Native American artifacts than either one put together.”

“Crap,” I said. “That’s it.”

“How do you know that?” Butters asked.

“It only stands to reason,” Bob supplied. “The whole point is to summon up as many old spirits as possible and then consume them. The most spirits are going to be attracted to wherever there is the most old junk.”

I nodded. “I remember this place now. That museum’s on a college campus, right?”

“Kendall College,” Butters confirmed.

“College campus on Halloween night,” Thomas said. “Hell of a place for a gang of necromancers to slug it out. There’s going to be collateral damage.”

“No, there isn’t,” I said, and I was surprised how vicious my own voice sounded. “Because we’re going to stop this stupid summoning. And then we’re going to hunt those murderous bastards down and kill them.”

There was dead silence in the kitchen.

Thomas and Butters both stared at me, expressions apprehensive.

“Maybe it’s the cloak,” Bob suggested brightly. “Harry, do you feel any more judgmental and self-righteous than you did this morning?”

I took a slow and deep breath. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. That came out kinda harsh.”

“Maybe a little,” Butters said, his voice all but a whisper.

I rubbed at my face and glanced at the battery-powered clock on the wall of Murphy’s kitchen. “Okay. Sundown’s in just over an hour. I have to be ready to call up the Erlking by then.”

“Um,” Thomas said. “Harry, if it’s the Erlking’s presence that’s going to attract all of these old spirits to their old tools and stuff, then won’t it do the same thing no matter who calls him up?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Unless the one who calls him traps him in a circle to contain his power and leaves him there.”

Bob made a spluttering sound. “Harry, that’s a dangerous proposition. No, scratch that, it’s an insane proposition. Even assuming you have the will to trap something like the Erlking in a circle, and even if you keep him there all night, he is not going to let that kind of insult go. He’ll come back the next night and kill you. If you’re lucky.”

“I can worry about that after I’ve done it,” I said.

“Wait,” Butters said. “Wait, wait. I mean, will it really matter? These guys don’t have the bad magic book, right? Without that book, all they can do is call up the spirits. They can’t, you know, eat them. Right?”

“We can’t assume that they don’t have it,” I said. “Grevane might have found it.”

“But the other two couldn’t, right?” Butters said.

“Even if they haven’t, they’ll still be there,” I said. “They can’t afford to assume that their rivals haven’t gotten the book. So they’re going to show up with everything they have to try to prevent one of the others from going through with the ritual.”

“Why?” Butters asked.

“Because they hate each other,” I said. “And if one of them goes all godly, he’s going to enjoy crushing the others. It will probably be the first thing he does.”

“Oh,” Butters said.

“That’s why I need you to do something for me, Thomas.”

My brother nodded. “Name it.”

I grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pencil and started writing. “This is a note. I want you to take it down to the address I’m writing down and get it to the Wardens.”

“I’m not going anywhere close to the Wardens,” Thomas said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “They’re at a hotel. You’ll leave it at the desk and ask the clerk to take it to them. Then clear out fast.”

“Are they going to trust a note?” Thomas asked, skeptical.

“I told them to expect a messenger if I couldn’t get there myself. They know about the Erlking. That I’m trying to sidetrack him. They need to know where the heirs of Kemmler are going to be so that they can take them down.”

“Five of them,” Thomas said quietly. “They’ll be outnumbered by one.”

I grimaced. It would be worse than that. Ramirez had looked like he could handle himself, but the two rookies couldn’t have stood up to any of the heirs or their companions, from what I’d seen. “Once I’ve secured the Erlking, I’ll be along as quick as I can. Besides that, they’re Wardens,” I said. “They’ll take down Kemmler’s flunkies.”

“Or die trying,” Thomas said. He grimaced. “How should I get down there?”

I went to another kitchen drawer and rummaged in it until I found Murphy’s spare keys. I tossed them to Thomas. “Here. Her motorcycle is in the shed.”

“Right,” he said, but his expression was wary. “She going to mind me stealing her bike?”

“It’s in a good cause,” I told him. “The streets are bad, and the Wardens need to get moving soonest. Go.”

Thomas nodded, pocketed the keys, and shrugged into his leather jacket. “I’ll get back here as soon as I’m done.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Thomas. To the Wardens you’re nothing but a White Court vampire. If they see you, they’ll be out for blood.”

“I understand,” he said. His voice was a little bitter. “If I’m not back in time, Harry…good luck.”

He offered his hand, and we traded grips, hard. My hand must have been cold with nerves, because his felt warm. Then he let go of my hand, nodded to Bob and Butters, and headed out into the rain. A minute later Murphy’s Harley grumbled in the backyard, and then purred off into the rain and gloom.

I sat there in silence for a minute, then got up and went to the stove. I got the teapot out, filled it up, and put it on the gas burner to boil. It took me a minute to find Murphy’s collection of teas, and it was gratuitously complex. I mean, come on, how many different types of tea do you really need? Maybe I’m prejudiced, because I take my tea with so much sugar that the actual flavor is sort of an aftertaste.

I found some in instant bags that smelled vaguely minty. “Tea?” I asked Butters.

“Sure,” he said.

I got out two cups.

“What’s next?” he asked.

“Hot tea,” I said. “Staying warm. Then I go out in the rain and call up the Erlking. You’re staying inside while I do.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because it’s going to be dangerous.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But why inside the house? I mean, this supergoblin can just rip the walls apart, right?”

“Strong enough to do it, probably,” I said. “But it can’t. The house is protected by its threshold.”

Butters looked at me blankly. “Which means what?”

I leaned a hip on the counter and explained. “A threshold is a kind of energy that surrounds a home. It’s…” I frowned, thinking how to explain it. “It’s sort of like the home has a positive charge to it. If outside magic wants to come in, it has to neutralize that charge first. Big, tough things from the Nevernever need a lot of power just to stay in our world. They don’t usually have enough to take out a threshold and still have enough juice to be dangerous.”

“It’s like that vampire thing?” he asked. “They can’t come in if you don’t invite them?”

“Pretty much, yeah. If you invite something in, your threshold won’t affect it. But other magical beings and energy have trouble with it. It’s a solid defense.”

“Didn’t help your place much,” Butters observed.

“My place is a rental apartment,” I said. “And except for the past several months, it’s been just me living there. Doesn’t give it the same kind of energy as you’d find in a long-established home.”

“Oh. Is that what they mean by ‘safe as houses,’ then?”

I smiled a little. “A house doesn’t make a home. When the place has got history, family, emotions, worries, joys worked into the wood, that’s when it gets a solid threshold. This house has been in the Murphy clan for better than a hundred years, and lived in for every one of them. It’s solid. You’ll be safe in here.”

“But it’s not going to get loose once you call it up,” Butters said. “Right?”

“That’s the plan. But even if it did, you aren’t the one who is going to piss it off. There won’t be any reason for it to come after you.”

“Oh, good,” he said. He blinked at me and said apologetically, “Not that I want it to come after you, Harry.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

Butters nodded. “Why zombies?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Sorry. Changing topics. New question. Why do all these necromancer types use zombies?”

“Not all of them do,” I pointed out. “Corpsetaker had called up a bunch of semicorporeal ghosts. Specters.”

“But human,” Butters said. “Zombies look human. Specters look human. Why not whistle up a pack of decayed rats? Or maybe semicorporeal mosquitos? Why use people?”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s got to do with a kind of metaphysical impression that any given creature leaves upon its death. Sort of like a footprint. Human beings leave larger footprints than most animals, which means that you can pour more energy into reanimating them.”

“They make stronger goons,” Butters clarified.

“Yes.”

“How come Grevane had fresh corpses when he came to get me, but he attacked your house with old ones? I mean, I saw those things up close.” He shivered. “Some of them must have dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century.”

“Same reason they animate humans instead of animals,” I said. “Older corpses leave a deeper metaphysical imprint. They’re harder to call up, but once you get them here they’re easier to control, stronger, more difficult to damage.”

“Old corpses get you stronger undead flunkies,” he said.

“Right,” I said. I could see the wheels turning in Butters’s head as he processed the information. He looked like he was busy lining up dozens more questions spawned by the answers to the first few, and I had a feeling he would pursue them with relentless curiosity.

“Okay. But what if—”

“Butters,” I said as gently as I could. “Not now. All I want to do is have a quiet cup of tea.” An inspiration hit me. “Ask Bob,” I told him. “Bob knows a hell of a lot more than I do, anyway.”

“Oh,” Butters said. He looked from me to the skull. “Um. Yeah, I guess Thomas was talking to it.”

“He!” Bob said indignantly. “I am very much a he! I’m not some kind of freaking animatronic Tinkertoy!”

“Right,” Butters said. “Um. Sorry. Bob. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

“It’s a waste of my vast intellect and talent,” Bob sneered.

“Do it, Bob,” I told him.

“Oh, man.” The orange lights in the skull’s eye sockets rolled. “Fine. I haven’t got anything better to do than to teach kindergarten.”

“Great!” Butters bubbled, and sat down at the table. He grabbed some more paper and a pencil. “Well, how about we start with…”

I fixed myself a cup of tea and one for Butters. I put the cup down near him, but he took little notice of it. He was deeply involved in a conversation with Bob.

I slipped out into the living room and put my aching leg up on the table, then settled back onto the couch with my tea. I sat in the gloom, sipping hot, sweet mint something-or-other and tried to order my thoughts. I was tired enough that it didn’t take too long.

I was about to call up a peer of Queen Mab and try to trap it for an entire night. A garden spider had about as much chance of trapping a Bengal tiger. Except that the Bengal tiger probably wouldn’t bother to squash the spider for daring to make the attempt. The Erlking would.

That made the whole notion more stupid than most of my plans, but I didn’t have too much choice in the matter. The presence of the Erlking in the area would drastically increase the number and the potency of the undead that the Kemmlerites were planning to summon tonight. If I could block the Erlking’s presence from Chicago, it would take a big chunk out of the powers the necromancers would summon. Grevane and company were formidable enough without calling up an army of superzombies and über-ghosts. If I could stop that from happening, it might give Luccio and her Wardens a real chance to defeat them.

If I wasn’t fast enough to call the Erlking before one of the Kemmlerites, or if he escaped my hold and ran loose through Chicago, people would die. The Erlking would summon the Wild Hunt into a lightless Chicago Halloween night, and anyone they caught in the open would be torn to shreds.

Lightning flickered outside, somehow too dark and dull to be natural. A beat later, thunder ripped through the evening air, shaking the little house. The wind started to pick up, and the steady beat of rain on the windows surged and retreated with its restless gusting.

I didn’t feel like a wizard. I didn’t feel like a deadly and powerful Warden. I didn’t feel like the supernatural champion of Chicago, or a fearless foe of evil, a daring summoner able to cast his defiance into the teeth of a supernatural titan, or an enlightened sage of the mystic arts. I felt like a scarred, battered, aching, one-handed man with few pleasant prospects for the future and a ridiculous pair of pants with one leg slashed off.

Mouse padded over to me through the dimness. He chuffed softly at me, and then laid his head down on my leg. My eyes were closed, but I could hear his tail thumping softly against the couch. I rested my bad hand on Mouse’s head and petted him awkwardly. Mouse didn’t mind. He just leaned against me, loaning me the warmth of his fur and the silent faithfulness of his presence.

It made me feel better. Mouse might not have been the smartest creature on earth, but he was steady, kind, loyal, and was possessed of the uncanny wisdom of beasts for knowing whom to trust. I might not have been a superhero, but Mouse thought that I was pretty darned cool. That meant something. It would have to be enough.

I set my teacup down, took my foot off Murphy’s coffee table, and rose. I picked up my staff without looking at it, took a deep breath, and clenched my jaw.

Then I marched into the kitchen in a lopsided stalk. “Butters,” I said. “Stay here with Bob and Mouse. Watch my back. If you see anyone trying to sneak up on me, give a yell.”

“Right,” he said. “Will do.”

I nodded to him and went out into the rain to test my will against the legendary lord of the Wild Hunt.

Chapter

Thirty-three

The rain had plastered my hair to my head by the time I got all the material for the summoning out of the Beetle’s trunk. I stuffed it all into a gym bag and then walked out to the middle of the backyard. It wasn’t quite too dark to see—not yet. But I didn’t want to make any mistakes, so I used the last of the chemical light sticks Kincaid had given me before our raid on Mavra’s scourge the year before. I snapped it and shook it up, and green-yellow light spread out in a little pool around me. The rain limited how much it could spread, and it created the illusion that the entire world had shrunk to a ten-foot circle rain and grass and green-golden light.

I started with the circle where I intended to trap the Erlking. The coil of barbed wire still gleamed with its factory finish. I uncoiled enough of it to give me several small holes in my fingers and to join into a circle about seven feet across. Though it wasn’t cold iron in the technical sense, it was very much what the faeries meant when they said “cold iron”—the wire had plenty of iron in it, and cold iron was the bane of the faerie world.

I laid the barbed wire out, straightening it slightly as I went, and tacked it down into the damp earth with horseshoe-shaped metal staples as long as my little finger. I double-checked every staple, and then clipped the barbed wire from the larger roll and used a pair of pliers to twist the loose ends together. After that, I marked out the points of an invisible five-pointed star within the circle, and placed several articles with an affinity for the Erlking; a heavy collar one might place on a hunting hound, a whetstone, a small bowie knife, flint and steel, and several steel arrowheads.

Then I placed my own affinity items opposite those of the Erlking’s, outside the circle; a used copy of The Hobbit, the splintered end of my last blasting rod, my .44, a parking ticket I hadn’t paid yet, and finally my mother’s silver pentacle amulet. I stepped back and went over the circle again, making sure that it was fixed solidly and that nothing had fallen across it.

In the back of my mind somewhere, I was aware of the approach of sunset. I don’t know how I knew it, really. It was already darker than most nights, and I certainly couldn’t judge when the sun would be down with all those rain clouds in the way—but that didn’t seem to matter. I could feel the sunlight still gliding down to be trapped in the overcast, could feel its presence and warmth with some part of my mind that wasn’t entirely beholden to mere physics. I could feel it fading, and felt the concurrent stirring of the magical forces of night as it did.

The energy of night was far different than that of the daylight—not inherently evil, but wilder, more dangerous, more unpredictable. Night was a time of endings, and this night, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, was particularly so. On this night, the forces of the spirit world, the wild things that haunted the Nevernever, drawn to death and decay, would flit freely back and forth. Spirits would turn restless in their graves and wander the world, mostly unseen by mortal eyes. The wild beasts could feel the night coming, and their metropolitan cousins could sense the knife-edge of danger and energy in the air. Dogs began to howl in the neighborhood around me, first one, then two, then dozens, and their long, low, mournful howls rose up in a haunting tide.

Dark was only moments away, and I stripped the black leather glove from my bad hand and knelt by the barbed-wire circle. Then I leaned down and pressed my left palm, all scarred but for the shape of Lasciel’s sigil like a living brand on my skin, against the nearest tine of barbed wire, pressing my flesh down with careful deliberation. I didn’t feel the wire cut me, but there was a trickle of warmth over a portion of the sigil, and my blood—black in the greenish chemical light—slipped down over the barbed wire, mixing with my will to send energy coursing into the cold-iron prison I had built.

The prison was built and the trap was set. I wished that there had been more time to assemble the articles I’d needed. If there had been months to prepare, I could have worked with Bob to figure out the best way to do the job. The materials might have been rare and expensive and difficult to attain, but it was within the realm of possibility to build a circle from which even a being like the Erlking could not lightly escape.

But there hadn’t been time, and if my quickie-mart Alcatraz was going to do the job, it would need all of my focus and determination.

So I shut my doubts into a closet in the back of my mind, along with my fears. I knelt in my coat in the rain, staff still in my right hand, and took slow, deep breaths. I envisioned myself drawing in power with each breath, and exhaling weakness and distraction. I felt the magic stirring around me and within me as I did, and I started building up my will, gathering my strength for use, until the wet grass seemed to sparkle with too many points of green-gold light and the hairs on my neck rose up on end.

I took in a final deep breath, and on the exhale night fell.

I opened my mouth and began to call out in the steady cadence of the summoning. My voice rang hollow in the wind and rain, muffled but strong, and I poured some of my will into the words, until the power in them began to make the air ripple around them as they flowed from my lips. There, in the darkness, I reached into the spirit world to call up one of the deadliest beings of Faerie.

And the Erlking answered.

One moment the circle was empty. Then there was a flash of lightning, a crash of thunder, and a disembodied black shadow appeared on the grass within the circle—the shadow of a tall, standing figure with no physical presence to cast it.

I barely stopped myself from flinching and breaking off the summoning chant—a mistake that would have freed the Erlking to leave at best, and freed it to kill me at worst. But I recovered myself and kept up the litany all the way through to the end. When I finished it, my voice had risen to a strident, silvery clarion, and on the last word lightning flashed down from the storm, green and white and eye-searing. It struck down upon the circle, slammed against it, and then scattered out around the circle in a hissing matrix of electricity and steam and magic, defining the cylinder of the magic circle in a sparkle of greenish light that rose up into the night for a moment, and then faded away.

When it was gone, the shadow within my circle was no longer alone.

The Erlking stood better than eight feet high. Other than that it looked more or less like a human dressed in close-fitting leathers and mail of some dark, matte black substance. It wore a bucket-shaped helmet that covered its face, and the horns of an enormous stag rose up and away from the helm. Within the slit of the helmet’s visor, I could see twin gleams of amber fire, and as those terrible eyes settled upon me, I could feel the presence of the being behind them like a sudden raw and wild hunger that pressed against the outside of my skin. I could feel the Erlking’s lust for the wild night, for the hunt, and for the kill. Lightning flashed again and the rain came down harder, and he raised his arms slowly, dismissing me and stretching his body up to glory in the storm.

It is time, mortal. Release me.

The words suddenly appeared in my head without going through my ears, scarlet and glowing and scalding. This time I did flinch as the Erlking’s will sent meaning into my thoughts like a well-thrown spear. I tore my attention away from that lance of thought and spoke aloud in reply.

“I will not release you.”

The glowing eyes within the helm snapped back to me, flaring larger and brighter. I am no beast to be lured and trapped, mortal. Set me free and join me in the hunt.

Images came with the thoughts this time—the rush of rain and wind in my face, raw hunger in my belly that I was about to sate, the strength and power of my body and that of the mount beneath me, and the glorious thrill of the chase as the prey fled as it was created to do, testing my strength, speed, endurance, and will while the night called and the storm raged around me. To my surprise, there was no sense of hate in it, no twisting bitterness of despair. There was only a wild and ferocious joy, an adrenaline sense of excitement, of passion, of savage harmony red in tooth and claw.

I barely managed to pull my thoughts back into my own control, grinding my teeth and reminding myself that I was kneeling in Murphy’s backyard, not pursuing game through the forest primeval. The Erlking might not be evil incarnate, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t far too dangerous to be allowed to go free. “No,” I growled. “I will not release you.”

His amber-flame eyes narrowed, and he dropped slowly into a crouch, knees bent, his fingers resting lightly on the grass just inside the barbed wire. Those eyes were barely three feet from mine, and he considered me in silence that swiftly became a torment of suspense.

You are he, the Erlking cast at me. He who defied Queen Winter. He who slew Lady Summer.

In those thoughts, I saw Mab standing over me as I lay stunned beside the Summer Lady’s corpse, offering me her hand. I felt Aurora’s blood drying on my skin, tasted it, harsh and sweet, in my mouth. I had to force myself not to try to spit the phantom taste from my tongue.

“I am he,” I said.

We are not foes, came his thoughts. And…he was curious about it. Even baffled. In sending me his thoughts, I also got flashes of emotion from him. You are part of the hunt. A predator. Why do you call me if not to join me?

“To prevent another from setting you free this night.”

The Erlking tilted its head. There was no sending of thought, but I read the gesture clearly enough to interpret it as if he had. Why?

“Because your presence would mean suffering and death for those people I would protect.”

Man suffers. Man dies. It is how things are.

“Not tonight it isn’t,” I growled.

Hunter, cast the Erlking. You are not strong enough to hold me. Release me, lest I turn the hunt upon you.

And suddenly I felt the other side of the hunt. I felt my legs singing with the strength of terror. I felt my lungs burning, felt my body moving with the power and grace that only the approach of death can summon from it. I fled over the rough ground, bounding like a deer, and knew the whole while that there was no escape.

“Thrice I say and done.” I gasped, forcing the words out in a defiant scream. “I will. Not. Release you.”

And the Erlking rose, an unearthly scream piercing the night. The chorus of howling dogs rose with it, louder and louder, and the storm lashed at the air with sabers of wind and lances of lightning. The sound was deafening, the light searing, and the freaking ground started to tremble as the Erlking lashed out against my circle with his will.

I stood my ground, facing the Erlking and casting my will into the circle, forcing it against his own power, struggling to contain him while he sought to burst free from my enchantment. It was an enormous struggle, and almost hopeless. I felt like a man straining to push a car up a hill. Not only was it a difficult weight to begin to move, but a greater force was working against me, and if I allowed it to move even an inch it would begin to gain momentum and crush me beneath it.

So I fought for that inch, refusing to give it to him. The Erlking wasn’t an evil being—but he was a force of nature, power, and violence without conscience or restraint.

He screamed again, and the howling wind and rain and the call of beasts grew even louder. Again he surged against the circle of my will, and again I held him in. Wild, the Erlking shook his head like a maddened beast, and his antlers slammed against the confining wall of the circle that imprisoned him, sending ripples of greenish light out through the circle. Then he reached to his side and drew a black sword from its scabbard. He lifted the blade, and a lance of green lightning flashed down from the storm, touching upon its tip and wreathing it in blinding light. Then he took the sword in both hands and brought it down upon the barrier.

I have little memory of what the third blow was like. I remember it in much the same way I do the burning of my left hand. There was too much light, too much energy, a tide of agony, and I was terrified. My vision faded to a blind field of white, and I thrust my staff hard against the ground to keep from falling.

And then my vision began to clear. The tide began to recede. And within the circle, whirling in a frenzy of frustration and need, was the Erlking. His power was fading, and the circle I’d built had been good enough to give me enough leverage to hold him.

I thought I heard a muffled voice somewhere amid all the wind and rain and thunder and the swift pounding of my own heart. I started to look around for the source of the noise.

And then someone hit me on the back of the head.

I remember that part, because I’d been through it before. A flash of light, pain, a sickening whirling sensation as I fell, and a disjointed looseness to limbs that had suddenly gone useless. I fell to one side, shocked that the whole world had suddenly tilted on end. The grass suddenly felt cold and wet against my cheek.

With a shriek of triumph, the Erlking shattered my circle into a cloud of golden light that faded and vanished. There was a roar of wind, and then an enormous horse landed in Murphy’s yard as if it had just vaulted over the whole of her house. The Erlking flung himself up onto the black steed’s back and let loose an eerie cry. When he did, all the howling music of the dogs, primitive and fierce, seemed to congeal into flashes of lightning that leapt up from the ground and into the clouds. For a second there was silence, and then the screaming winds warbled and whistled into deeper, more terrifying howls than any dog had ever uttered. From the shadows rushed a great hound, a beast the size of a pony with dark fur, gleaming white teeth, and the flaming amber eyes of the Erlking himself. More hounds came leaping from the shadows, bounding in bloodthirsty joy around the Erlking’s horse.

The Erlking whirled his steed, lifted his black sword in a mocking salute to me, and then cried out to his steed and his hounds. The black horse gathered itself and leapt into the air, then started churning its legs as if running up a hill—and kept going up. The hounds leapt and followed their master up into the teeth of the storm. Lightning flashed in my eyes, and when it died again, they were gone.

The Wild Hunt was loose in Chicago.

And I had been the one to call them here.

I struggled until I began to move. I wasn’t able to get enough balance to rise, but I managed to roll over onto my back. Cold raindrops slapped against my face.

Cowl put the barrel of my own .44 to the end of my nose and said, “An impressive display, Dresden. It’s always such a pity when someone with such talent dies so young.”

Chapter

Thirty-four

I looked at the cavernous barrel and thought to myself that a .44 really was a ridiculously big gun. Then I looked past it to Cowl and said, “But you aren’t planning on doing it yourself, are you? Otherwise you’d have just shot me in the back of the head and had done with it. With me groggy like that, you might not even have had a death curse to worry about.”

“Very good,” Cowl said approvingly. “Your reason, at least, seems sound. Provided you remain very still and give me no reason to think you a threat, I’ll be glad to let you live until the Erlking returns for you.”

I held still, partly because I didn’t want to get shot, and partly because I thought I might throw up if I moved my head too much. “How’d you find me?” I asked.

“Kumori and I have been taking turns tailing you most of the day,” he said.

“When do you people sleep?” I asked.

“No rest for the wicked,” Cowl said. His tone was amused from within his heavy hood, but the gun never wavered.

“Someone had to keep an eye on me,” I said. “You and Grevane and Corpsetaker all wanted the Erlking to be in town. It didn’t matter to you who called him as long as someone did.”

“And you were the only one with an interest in keeping him away,” Cowl said. “All I needed to do was watch you and ensure that you did not actually trap the Erlking.”

“And that’s why you followed me,” I said.

“It’s one reason,” he replied. “I think you might actually have done it, you know, had I not interrupted you. I was the only one of the three of us who thought you might succeed.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I thought that you guys hated one another’s guts.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then are you working together or trying to kill each other?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” Cowl said, and what sounded like a genuine laugh bubbled in his voice. “We smile at one another and play nicely all in the name of Kemmler’s greater glory, of course. But we are all planning on killing one another as soon as it’s convenient. I take it that Corpsetaker tried to remove Grevane last night?”

“Yeah. It was a real party.”

“Pity. I would have enjoyed watching them in action again. But I was busy with the actual work. That’s how it usually works out.”

“Taking out the city’s power grid.”

“And phone lines, radio communications, and quite a few other, subtler things,” Cowl said. “It was difficult, but someone had to do it. Naturally it fell to me. But we’ll see how things settle out before morning.”

“Heh,” I said. “They think they’re using you to get the serious technical magic done, while they save up their juice for the fight. And you think you’re lulling them off guard, so that when the Darkhallow goes down, you get the power.”

“There’s no real reason to practice my swordplay and summoning of the dead when I have no intention of entering a tactical contest with them.”

“You really intend to make yourself into a god?” I asked.

“I intend to take power,” Cowl said. “I regard myself as the least of the possible evils.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Someone is going to get the power. Might as well be you. Something like that?”

“Something like that,” Cowl said.

“What if no one got it?” I said.

“I don’t really see that happening,” he said. “Grevane and the Corpsetaker are determined. I intend to beat them to the prize and use it to destroy them. It’s the only way to be sure one of those madmen does not become something more terrible than the earth has ever seen.”

“Right,” I said. “You’re the correct madman for the job.”

Cowl was silent for a long moment in the rain. Drops fell off the end of my pistol in his gloved hand. Then he said, his voice pensive, “I do not perceive myself to be mad. But if I were truly mad, would I be able to tell?”

I shivered. Probably from the rain and the cold.

Cowl took a step back from me and said, voice firm and confident again, “Did you find him?”

I looked behind me and saw Kumori glide out the back door of Murphy’s house. “Yes.”

I stared hard at Kumori, and my heart lurched in my chest.

She left the door open behind her. There was no candlelight in the kitchen. There was no movement inside the house.

“Excellent,” Cowl said. He took a step back from me. “I have already warned you to stay clear of my path, Dresden. I now suspect that you are too proud to back down. I know of the Wardens now in the city. They pose no serious obstacle to my plans.”

“You think you can take them in a fight?” I said.

“I have no intention of fighting them, Dresden,” Cowl replied. “I’m simply going to kill them. Join them if it suits you to do so instead of waiting for the Erlking. It makes no difference to me how you die.”

His voice was steady and absolutely confident. It scared me. My heart lurched in my chest, fear for Butters and a dawning understanding of Cowl’s quiet madness competing to see which could make it race faster.

“There’s one problem, Cowl,” I said.

Cowl began to turn away, but then paused. “Oh?”

“You still don’t have the Word. How are you going to manage the Darkhallow without it?”

For an answer, Cowl carefully lowered the hammer on my revolver and turned away. And he laughed, quietly, under his breath. He started walking, and Kumori hurried to his side. Then Cowl tossed my gun into the grass, raised his hand, and flicked it at the air before him. I felt a surge of power as he parted the veil between the material world and the Nevernever and they both stepped through it, vanishing from Murphy’s backyard. The rift sealed behind Cowl, so quietly and smoothly that I would never have been able to tell it had opened at all.

I was left alone in the wind and the darkness and the cold rain. Somewhere in the distance there was an echoing howl that came from above me and very far away.

It should have frightened me, but I was so woozy that I mostly wanted to lie down and close my eyes for a minute. I knew that if I did I might not open them for a while. Maybe not ever.

I had to check on Butters and Mouse. I rolled over and picked up my staff, then crawled a couple of feet and got my mother’s pentacle. Then I stood up. My head pounded with a dull, throbbing beat of pain, and I bowed my head forward for a moment, letting cold rain fall onto the lump forming on the back of my skull. The worst of it passed after a minute, and I got the pain under control. I’d taken harder shots to the head than that one had been, and I didn’t have time to coddle myself. I blew out a harsh breath and shambled into the house.

I found it dark, all the candles that had been lit now extinguished. I lifted my mother’s pentacle and ran my will through it, causing it to pulse and then glow with silver-blue light. I lifted the pentacle over my head and surveyed the kitchen.

It was empty. There was no sign of Mouse or Butters—and no evidence of a struggle, either. My fear subsided a little. If Kumori had found them, there would be signs of violence—blood, scattered furnishings. Butters’s papers were still stacked up neatly on the kitchen table.

Murphy’s house wasn’t a large one, and there were only so many places Butters could be. I limped into the living room and then down the short hall to the bedrooms and the bathroom.

“Butters?” I called softly. “It’s Harry. Mouse?”

There was a sudden rough scratching at the door of the linen closet beside me, and I almost jumped through the ceiling. I swallowed in an effort to force my heart back down into my chest, then opened the closet door.

Butters and Mouse crouched on the floor of the closet. Butters was at the rear, and though Mouse looked cramped, he crouched solidly between Butters and the door. His tail began to thump against the inside of the closet when he saw me, and he wriggled his way clear to come to me.

“Oh, thank God,” Butters said. He squirmed out of the closet after Mouse. “Harry. Are you all right?”

“Been worse,” I told him. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Um,” Butters said, “I saw you out there. And then…there was something inside that ring of barbed wire. And I was…I couldn’t see it very well, but then the wind kicked up and I thought I saw something moving outside and…I yelled and sort of panicked.” His face flushed. “Sorry. I was just…much shorter than that thing. I panicked.”

He’d rabbited. All in all, probably not a stupid reaction to the presence of an angry lord of Faerie. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Mouse stayed with you?”

“Yeah,” Butters said. “I guess so. He started to try to get outside when that thing in the circle screamed. I was holding him back. I didn’t realize I still had his collar when I, uh…”

Butters’s face turned greenish and he said, “Excuse me.” Then he sprinted for the bathroom.

I heard him throwing up inside and frowned down at Mouse.

“You know what?” I told the dog. “I don’t care if Butters had been chock-full of gamma radiation and had green skin and purple pants. There’s no way he could haul you into a closet with him.”

Mouse looked up at me and tilted his head to one side, doggy expression enigmatic.

“But that would mean that it was the other way around. That you were the one hauling Butters to a hiding place.”

Mouse’s jaw dropped open into a grin.

“But that would mean that you knew you couldn’t handle Kumori, and that she was dangerous to Butters. And you knew that I wanted you to protect him. And that instead of fighting or running away, you formulated a plan to hide him.” I frowned. “And dogs aren’t supposed to be that smart.”

Mouse snorted out a little sneeze, shook his fuzzy head, and then flopped over onto his back, eyes begging me to scratch his tummy.

“What the hell,” I said, and started scratching. “Looks to me like you earned it.”

Butters emerged from the bathroom a couple of minutes later. “Sorry,” he said. “Nerves. I, uh…Harry, I’m sorry I ran away like that.”

“Took cover,” I provided. “In the action business, when you don’t want to say you ran like a mouse, you call it ‘taking cover.’ It’s more heroic.”

“Right,” Butters said, flushing. “I took cover.”

“It’s fun, taking cover,” I said. “I take cover all the time.”

“What happened?” Butters asked.

“I called the Erlking, but someone kept me from keeping him penned up. They came in the house for a minute, and…” I felt my voice trail off. My relief that Butters and Mouse were all right began to fade, as I realized that they had never been what Kumori had been searching for.

“What?” Butters said quietly. “Harry, what is it?”

“Son of a bitch,” I swore, and my voice was a sulfurous snarl. “How could I be so stupid?”

I whirled and stalked back down the hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen, lifting my light.

On the kitchen table there were only empty cups of tea, empty cans, unlit candles, paper, and pens.

In the spot where Bob the skull had sat, there was nothing.

“Oh, man,” Butters said quietly at my elbow. “Oh, man. They took him.”

“They took him,” I spat.

“Why?” Butters whispered. “Why would they do that?”

“Because Bob the skull hasn’t always been mine,” I growled. “He used to belong to my old teacher, Justin. And before that he belonged to the necromancer, Kemmler.” I whirled in a fury and slammed my fist into Murphy’s refrigerator so hard that it dented the side and split my middle knuckle open.

“I…I don’t get it,” Butters said, his voice very quiet.

“Bob did for Kemmler what he did for me. He was a consultant. A research assistant. A sounding board for magical theory,” I said. “That’s why Cowl took him.”

“Cowl’s doing research?” Butters asked.

“No,” I spat. “Cowl knew that Bob used to be Kemmler’s. Somewhere in there, Bob knows everything about the theory that Kemmler did.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that Cowl doesn’t need The Word of Kemmler now. He doesn’t need the stupid book to enact the Darkhallow because he’s got the spirit that helped Kemmler write it.” I shook my head, bitter regret a metallic taste in my mouth. “And I practically gave it to him.”

Chapter

Thirty-five

I gave the blood on my torn knuckle a disdainful glance, then snapped, “Get your things and hold on to Mouse. We’re going.”

“Going?” Butters asked.

“It isn’t safe for you here now,” I said. “They know about this place. I can’t leave you behind.”

Butters swallowed. “Where are we going?”

“They tailed me all day. I’ve got to make sure the people I’ve seen today are all right.” I paused, thoughts tearing through my head. “And…I’ve got to find the book.”

“The necromancer’s book?” Butters asked. “Why?”

I got out my keys and headed for the Beetle. “Because I have no freaking clue what’s supposed to be happening at this Darkhallow. The only part that I understood enough to stop was the summoning of the Erlking, and that’s been blown to hell. I keep getting burned because I don’t know enough about what’s going on. I’ve got to figure out how to throw a wrench into Cowl’s gears during the Darkhallow.”

“Why?”

“Because the only other thing I can do is try to kick my way through a crowd of necromancers and undead and try to punch his ticket face-to-face.”

“Wouldn’t that work?”

“If I could pull it off,” I said, and went out into the rain. “But I’m a featherweight fighting in the heavyweight division. Nose-to-nose, I think Cowl would probably kick my eldritch ass. My only real chance is to fight smart, and that means I’ve got to know more about what’s going on. For that, I need the book.”

Butters hurried after me, a couple of fingers through Mouse’s collar. We got into the Beetle and I revved it up. “But we still haven’t figured out those numbers,” he said.

“That has to change,” I said. “Now.”

“Um,” said Butters as I got the Beetle moving, “you can say ‘now’ all you want, but I still don’t know.”

“Could it be a combination?” I said. “Like to a safe?”

“The older safe combinations need some kind of designation for left and right. The newer ones might use some kind of digital code, sure, but unless you find a safe with a password sixteen numerals long, that won’t help us much.”

“A credit card,” I said. “That’s sixteen digits, right?”

“Can be,” Butters said. “You think that’s what the number was? Maybe a credit card or debit card account that Bony Tony wanted his fee to get paid to?”

I grimaced. “Doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Something like that would be in his pocket. Not hidden in a balloon hanging from a string down his throat.”

“Good point,” Butters said.

We rode in silence for a while. Except for the headlights of other cars, the streets were dark. Between the total lack of lighting, the dark, and the heavy rain, it was like driving through a cave. Traffic was tight and snarled anywhere near the highways, but it had thinned out considerably since the afternoon. The people of Chicago seemed to mostly be staying home for the night, which was a mercy in more ways than one.

Butters looked around nervously a few minutes later. “Harry. This isn’t exactly the best neighborhood.”

“I know,” I said, and pulled over in front of a hydrant, the only open space in sight.

He swallowed. “Why are you stopping the car?”

“I need to check on someone,” I said. “Stay here with Mouse. I’ll be right back.”

“But—”

“Butters,” I said impatiently. “There’s a girl here who helped me out earlier today. I have to make sure Cowl and his sidekick haven’t harmed her.”

“But…can’t you do this after you stop the bad guys?”

I shook my head. “I’m doing my best, here. I don’t know what might happen in the next few hours, but dammit, this girl helped me because I asked her to. I dragged her into this. Cowl and Kumori were going to considerable lengths to destroy every copy of Der Erlking that they could find, and if they guessed that I got it from her memory she’ll be in danger. I need to be sure she’s all right.”

“Oooooh,” Butters said. “This is the girl who asked you out, right?”

I blinked. “How did you know that?”

“Thomas told me.”

I growled under my breath and said, “Remind me to punch his lights out sometime soon.”

“Hey,” Butters said. “At least he didn’t let me keep thinking you were gay.”

I gave Butters a flat look and got out of the car. “Stay in the driver’s seat,” I told him. “If there’s trouble, run. Try to circle back for me.”

“Right,” Butters said. “Got it.”

I hurried through the rain and the darkness into Shiela’s building. I drew out my pentacle and willed light from it, and went up the stairs to her floor as I had that morning. The stairs and the hallway had that illusory unfamiliarity that darkness can give a place you’ve seen only once or twice, but I found my way to Shiela’s door easily enough.

I paused for a moment and tried to sense the wards she’d woven, and found that they were still in place. That was good. If anyone had come in after her for some reason, they’d have either torn the ward down or set it off on the way through.

Unless, of course, someone had gone to the trouble to get invited in first. Shiela didn’t seem to be the kind to turn folks away out of a sense of general paranoia. I knocked several times.

There wasn’t an answer.

She had said she was going out, earlier. She was probably at some costume party somewhere. Talking with friends. Eating good food. Having fun.

Probably.

I knocked again and said, “Shiela? It’s Harry.”

I heard a couple of soft steps, the creak of a floorboard, and then the door opened to the length of its security chain. Shiela stood in the opening. There was soft candlelight coming from her apartment. “Harry,” she said quietly, her mouth curling into a smile. “What are you doing here? Hang on.” She closed the door, the security chain rattled, and then she opened it again. “Come in.”

“I really can’t stick around,” I said, but I stepped through the door anyway. She had half a dozen candles lit on the end table beside her couch, and there was a mussed blanket on the couch next to a paperback novel.

Shiela’s long, dark hair was piled up into bun and held in place with a couple of chopsticks, leaving her ears and the smooth skin of her neck intriguingly bare. She was wearing a Bears football jersey made of soft cotton that hung to her knees, and she wore pink slippers on her feet. The jersey was loose on her, but she had the curves to make it look more appealing than it had any right to be. I could see her calves, and they did a wonderful job of blending softness and strength.

Shiela saw me looking, and her cheeks turned a little pink. “Hi,” she said, her voice quiet.

“Hi,” I said back, and smiled at her. “Hey, I thought you had a party tonight?”

She shook her head. “I was walking. I didn’t want to walk in the rain, and I couldn’t call anyone to get me a ride, so I’m home.” She tilted her head to one side and frowned at me. “You seem…I’m not sure. Tense. Angry.”

“Both,” I said. “There are some things happening.”

She nodded, her dark eyes serious. “I’ve heard that there’s something bad brewing. It’s what you’re working on, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She fretted at her lower lip. “Then why are you here?”

She looked beautiful like that, in a sleepshirt in the candlelight. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she looked deliciously soft and feminine. I thought about kissing her again, just to make sure that the first one hadn’t been some sort of anomaly. Then I shook my head and reminded myself that tonight was about business. “I just needed to make sure that you were all right.”

Her eyes widened. “Am I in some kind of danger?”

I lifted my hand placatingly. “I don’t think you are now. But I was followed today. I had to be sure that you were safe. Have you seen anyone? Maybe felt nervous or anxious for no reason?”

“No more than any other day,” she said. Thunder rumbled, and the rain kept drumming on her windows. “Honestly.”

I let out my breath and felt myself relax a little. “Okay, good. I’m glad.”

Thunder rumbled again and we both just stood there, staring at each other. Both of us glanced, just for a second, at the other’s eyes, then pulled away before anything could happen.

“Harry,” she said quietly. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“You already have,” I said.

She took a step closer, and her dark eyes looked huge. “Are you sure?”

My heart sped up again, but I took a little step back from her. “Yeah. Shiela, I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus on the rest of tonight if I didn’t look in on you first.”

She nodded then, and folded her arms. “All right. But when you’re finished with this, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head and put her hand on my arm. “It would take some time to explain it. If you think you need your focus for tonight, I don’t want to distract you with anything.”

I looked at her, and then deliberately down her, and said, “That’s probably best. I’m finding you very distracting right now.”

She flushed brighter. “No. That’s just you reacting to being in danger. You’re afraid that you’re going to die, and sex is very life affirming.”

“Is that what it is?” I drawled.

“Among other things,” she said.

For a few seconds my hormones did their best to lobby for overcoming distraction by means of indulgence, but I reined them in. Shiela was right: I was in pain and in fear and in danger, and those kinds of circumstances have a tendency to make you pay attention to different things—the soft shine of candlelight on Shiela’s hair, for example, or the soft scent of rose oil and flowered soap on her skin—and Shiela had been in danger for part of that time as well.

I didn’t want to take advantage of that. And I didn’t want to start anything with her that I wasn’t going to be able to finish. For all I knew I’d be dead before another day was out, and it wouldn’t be right to allow things to go any further just because I was afraid.

On the other hand, though, there was nothing wrong with savoring life while you still had it.

I leaned down to her, lifted her chin gently with my right hand, and kissed her mouth again. She quivered and returned it with a slow, hesitant shyness. I stayed like that for a moment, tasting her lips, my fingertips light on her chin, and then straightened, breaking it off very slowly.

She opened her eyes a moment later, her breathing a little fast.

I touched her cheek with my fingertips and smiled at her. “I’ll call you soon.”

She nodded, her eyes clouding with concern. “Be careful.”

“Harry?” called a voice.

I blinked and looked around.

“Harry!” he called again, and I recognized Butters’s voice. There was a curious quality to the acoustics of his voice—as if he were standing in an empty room, with no furniture or carpeting to absorb any sound.

Shiela froze, looking toward her door, and then said, “Dammit.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

“I didn’t want this to distract you,” she said, and her tone was enigmatic.

I frowned at her for a moment and then opened the door to the apartment. Butters stood in the hall. He’d improvised a lead for Mouse out of what looked like the torn hem of his scrubs tunic, and my big shaggy dog headed for me, nose to the ground, pulling Butters along the way. Butters, for his part, stumbled along uncertainly, as if he’d had a little too much to drink and couldn’t get his balance.

“Butters?” I said. “What’s up?”

“The car died,” he said. “And there were some guys who looked like they didn’t like me on the street, so I came to find you.”

Butters stopped, or tried to. Mouse chuffed out a breath in greeting and headed straight for me. I leaned down to scratch at Mouse’s ears. “Hey, Mouse. Shiela, this is my dog, Mouse. And this is Waldo Butters. He’s a friend of mine.”

Shiela blinked her eyes closed slowly and looked away.

Butters peered and squinted, looking around him. “What?”

I frowned at him and touched his arm. “Are you okay?”

He flinched a little when I touched him, then clapped a hand down on my arm as if using it to orient on me. “Harry?” he asked. “Don’t you have a light?”

I lifted my eyebrows at him and lifted my pentacle, willing it to light. “Here,” I said. “Shiela, I hope you don’t mind if they come in?”

Butters peered up at me and then around him.

“Harry?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“Um, who are you talking to?”

I stared at him for a silent second.

And then a few details floated together in my mind, and the bottom dropped all the way out of my stomach.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and opened my inner vision, my wizard’s Sight, and turned to face Shiela.

The little apartment simply dissolved, sliding away like paint being washed away by a stream of falling water. In its place I could see a dimly lit, gutted building. Studs stood naked where the drywall had been removed. There were piles of scrap wiring, half-rotted-looking ducts, and similar refuse, which had been removed from the building and thrown aside into refuse piles. The place had been prepared for renovation—but it was empty. The only window I could see was broken. Thunder rumbled, the sound slightly different than it had been a moment before. The driving rain gained a couple of notches of volume, beating hollowly on the old apartment building.

I stared at Shiela with my Sight, and she stood there unchanged—except that I could see a faint tint of light around her, subtle but definite. It meant that she was either a noncorporeal presence or an illusion of thought and energy rather than a reality. But if she’d been an illusion, she should have faded away entirely, as the apartment had done.

I released my Sight again. My stomach twisted on itself, a burning, bitter feeling. “Shiela,” I said quietly. “Stars and stones, it’s all but your real name, isn’t it? Lasciel.”

“It’s close,” Shiela agreed quietly.

“Harry?” Butters whispered. His eyes were very wide. “Who are you talking to?”

“Shut up a minute, Butters,” I said, staring at her. She regarded me quietly, her eyes now steady on mine. “That’s what Billy was talking about. Bock started looking awfully odd when I was speaking to you at the bookstore. And you never interacted with anyone else. Never opened any doors in the store. Didn’t pick up the book when I was looking for it.” I glanced down at my hand, where she’d written her number in permanent ink. It was now gone. “Illusions,” I said.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “Some of appearance only. Some of seeming.”

“Why?”

“To help you,” she said. “I told you that I could not make open contact with your conscious mind. That is why I created Shiela.” She gestured down at herself. “I wanted to help you, but I couldn’t do it directly. So I tried to do it this way.”

“So you lied to me,” I said.

She arched a brow. “I had little choice in the matter.”

“What about after you made contact with me?” I said, and my voice was bitter too. “I used the Hellfire and you came to me in a dream.”

“That was after you met Shiela, if you will recall,” she said.

“But you didn’t need Shiela anymore.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. But I found that I…” She rolled her shoulders in a shrug. “That I enjoyed being Shiela. That I enjoyed interacting with you as one person to another. Without being regarded with fear and suspicion. I know that you understand what it is like. You’ve felt it often enough in your own life.”

“But oddly enough,” I said, “I haven’t gone off and pretended to be someone else to gain another’s trust.”

“You’ve felt that isolation for less than two score years, my host. I’ve lived with it for millennia.”

“Yeah? How long were you planning on stringing me along?”

Her soft mouth turned into a firm line. “I was going to tell you once the night’s business was done—assuming you lived through it.”

“Sure you were,” I said.

“I told you,” she said. “I didn’t want it to become a distraction for you.”

I barked out a harsh little laugh. “And why should I believe that?”

“Because your death would mean the death of this part of me,” she said, gesturing down at herself again. “The thought shadow of Lasciel would not survive your death—and the true Lasciel, my true self, would remain trapped for who knows how long. You have no idea of what it is to be trapped without sound, sight, or senses, waiting for someone to bring you forth from oblivion.”

I stared hard at her. “I don’t believe you.”

“You need not, my host,” she said, and gave me a little bow. “But that makes it no less true.”

“You kissed me,” I said.

Shiela-Lasciel’s eyebrows lifted and she gave me an almost whimsical smile. “When I said that it has been a long time since I was close to anyone, I meant it. I enjoyed that contact, my host. As, I think, did you.”

“Oh, let me guess,” I said. “You did that for me, too. Because you wanted to help me.”

“I kissed you because I desired it and because it was pleasurable. If you will recall, my host, I did help you. I gave you the summons to call the Erlking, did I not?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again, struggling to find something to say.

“I have never wished you ill, my host,” she said. “In fact, I have done all that I can to assist you.”

I suddenly felt very tired and rubbed at my forehead. I reminded myself that Lasciel was a fallen angel. That she was one of the thirty demons of the Order of the Blackened Denarius. That she was known as the Temptress and the Webweaver, and that she was ancient, powerful, and deadly dangerous at the art of manipulation. She could not be trusted; nor could her little carbon copy that had taken up residence in my head.

But she had helped me. And she had kissed me. Sure, a kiss was just a kiss, but her desire for it, her hesitation, the sense of yearning to her had been genuine. She had wanted to do it. She had enjoyed it. She was one hell of a good kisser.

Hell being the operative word, I reminded myself.

“I can still help you, my host,” she said. “You are a powerful mortal, but your foes are more formidable still. They will kill you.” Her face took on an expression of frustrated protest. “Let me help you survive. Give me the chance to preserve myself. Please.”

I stared at her for a moment. She looked lovely and sincere and afraid.

She looked exactly like the kind of woman in trouble whom I could never turn away.

“I have no intention of dying,” I said quietly. “But you aren’t going to be part of the equation.”

“If you don’t—”

“Save it,” I told her quietly. “I know how this works. First I allow you to help with this problem. Then with the next one. Then with the one after that. And at some point I’ll need more power for what will probably look like a very good reason and dig up the coin. And then you’ll be able to do pretty much anything you want with me.” I shook my head. “That’s one big, long, slippery slope. No.”

She clenched her jaw, her expression frustrated. “But I do not wish you any harm.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But there’s no way for me to know that.”

She arched one dark eyebrow at me.

Then, as quickly as blinking, the building was on fire. It rose up in a sudden explosion of heat and flame that engulfed the bare studs on the walls and chewed at the floor. Vicious heat assaulted my back, a searing pain that left me with no choice but to move forward. Behind me the fire roared up higher, and I looked around frantically, suddenly panicked. The only portion of the building that wasn’t being swallowed by rising, hungry flame led to the broken window. I sprinted to it, spotted the old iron of a fire escape lattice beneath it, and ducked down to go through onto the fire escape before I was burned to charcoal.

And then the flames vanished, the air became cool once more, and the beat of rain replaced the roar of flame. I stood at the window, one leg raised onto the sill, the rain soaking my chest and my jeans.

And there was no fire escape outside the window.

There was only a long, long drop to the sidewalk beneath.

I swallowed and drew back from the window, shaking. The whole thing had happened so fast. My reaction to the fire had been sheer and naked terror, and even now my hand throbbed with the pain of illusory burns. Ever since that fire I’d had nightmares of more. The illusion of fire had cut straight through to my pain and terror and utterly bypassed my brain.

Which was exactly what Lasciel meant it to do.

“Harry?” Butters called, his voice high and thready. I couldn’t see him. He stood back in the darkness of the empty building, and in my mindless panic I had allowed the light of my mother’s pentacle to go out.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Just stay where you are. I’m coming.”

I lit the pentacle again, and found Lasciel standing next to me, one eyebrow still raised. “That is how you know,” she said. “If I wished to kill you, my host, your blood would be seeping from your broken corpse and mixing with the rain on the sidewalk.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

“Let me help you,” she urged me. “I can help you defend yourself against the disciples of Kemmler. I can teach you magics you have never considered. I can show you how to make yourself stronger, swifter. I can show you how you might heal the damage to your hand, if you have enough discipline. There wouldn’t even be a scar.”

I turned my back on her. My heart pounded against my chest as I walked back to Butters.

She was lying to me. She had to be. That’s what the Denarians did. They lied and manipulated their way into a mortal’s good graces, gradually giving them more power while they fell more deeply under their demonic influence.

But she was telling the truth about one thing, for sure: She could make me stronger. Even the weakest Denarian I had seen, Quintus “Snakeboy” Cassius, had been a certifiable nightmare. With Hellfire to supplement my magic and an enormously powerful being to serve as a tutor and consultant, my abilities could grow to epic proportions.

If I had power like that, I could protect my friends—Murphy, Billy, and the others. I could turn my power against the Red Court and help save the lives of the Wardens and the Council. I could do a lot of things.

And her kiss…The illusion had all been in my head, but it had been so utterly real. Every detail. Shiela herself had been so thoroughly genuine that I would never have guessed she was an illusion. Indeed, there was little difference, from my own perspective, between that complex an illusion and reality. The feel of her, the scent, everything had been there.

And she had been just as convincingly real in her blond-goddess form beside the hot tub in my dream. Her appearance had to be malleable. She could appear to me as anything.

As anyone.

Some darker, baser part of my nature toyed with that notion for a moment. But only for a moment. I didn’t dare let that thought flow through my head for long. Her touch had been too soft, too gentle, too warm. Too good. I’d been without female company for years, and more of that warmth, that pleasing contact, was a temptation too great to allow myself to dwell upon.

I turned slowly and faced Lasciel.

She lifted her eyebrows, leaning a little forward in anticipation of my answer.

I knew how to manipulate and control my dreams—and this manifestation of Lasciel’s shadow was nothing more than a waking dream.

“This is my mind,” I told her quietly. “Get thee behind me.”

I focused my thoughts and my power and brought forth my own illusion of imagination and thought. Silver manacles appeared from nowhere, manifested from my focus and desire, and locked themselves around Lasciel’s wrists and ankles. I gestured sharply and visualized her being lifted through the air. Then I opened my hand, my spread fingers out, palm to the floor, and she fell into an iron cage that appeared from my concentrated effort. The door slammed and locked behind her.

“Fool,” she said in a quiet voice. “We will die.”

I closed my eyes and with a last effort of imagination and will summoned a heavy tarp that fell over the cage, covering it and blocking Lasciel from sight and sound.

“Maybe we will,” I muttered to myself. “But I’ll do it on my own.”

I turned around to find Butters staring at me, his expression almost sick with fear. Mouse sat beside him, also staring at me, somehow managing to look worried.

“Harry?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” I told him quietly.

“Um. What happened?”

“A demon,” I told him. “It got into my head a while back. It was causing me to experience…hallucinations, I guess you could call them. I thought I was talking to people. But it was the demon, pretending to be them.”

He nodded slowly. “And…and it’s gone now? You did, like, some kind of autoexorcism?”

“Not gone,” I said quietly. “But it’s under control. Once I knew what it was doing, I was able to lock it away.”

He peered at me. “Are you crying?”

I turned my face away, trying to make it look like I was staring at the window while I wiped a hand over my eyes. “No.”

“Harry. Are you sure you’re all right? Not, you know…insane?”

I looked back up at Butters and suddenly laughed. “Look who’s talking, polka boy.”

He blinked for a moment and then smiled a little. “I just have better taste than most.”

I walked to him and rested my hand on his shoulder. “I’m all right. Or at least no crazier than I usually am.”

He looked at me for a moment and then nodded. “Okay.”

“Good thing you came along when you did,” I said. “You tipped the demon’s hand when you came up here. There was no way it could fit you into the illusion.”

“I helped?” he said.

“Big-time,” I said. “I think I’m just too used to knowing more than most people about magic. The demon was using some of my expectations against me. It knew exactly how to hide things from a wizard.”

An idle thought flicked through my brain at the words. And suddenly I froze with my mouth open.

“Hell’s bells,” I swore. “That’s it.”

“It is?” Butters asked. “Er, what is?”

Mouse tilted his head to one side, ears perked inquisitively.

“How to hide things from a wizard,” I said, and I felt my mouth stretching into a wide, half-crazy grin. I dug in my memory until I found the string of mystery numbers and recited them. “Ha!” I said, and threw my hand up in the air in triumph. “Hah! Ha-ha! Eureka.”

Butters looked distressed.

“Let’s go,” I told him, rising excitement making tingles of nervous energy shoot through my limbs. I started walking to give some of it an outlet. “Come on, let’s hurry.”

“Why?” Butters asked, bewildered.

“Because I know what those numbers mean,” I said. “I know how to find The Word of Kemmler. And to do it, I need your help.”

Chapter

Thirty-six

The lights of Chicago were still out and the night was growing even darker. The storm had driven most people from the streets, and now headlights appeared only intermittently. The National Guard had set up around Cook County Hospital, bringing in generators and laboring to keep them running while providing a shelter of some sort and a presence of authority on some of the streets—but they were as badly hampered by the lack of reliable telephone and radio communications as anyone else, and rain and darkness had cast them into the same morass of confusion as the rest of the city.

The net result of it was that some streets were bright with the headlights of military trucks and patrolled by National Guardsmen, and some of them were as black and empty as a crooked politician’s heart. One section of State Street was sunken in blackness, and I pulled the Beetle up onto the sidewalk in front of a darkened Radio Shack.

“Stay, Mouse,” I told the dog, and got out of the car. I walked to the glass door and considered it and the bars on it. Then I leaned my staff against it, drew in my will, and muttered, “Forzare.”

There was no flash of light with the release of energy—I’d kept the spell tidy enough to avoid that. Instead it all went into kinetic force, snapping the plate glass as cleanly as if I’d used a cutter, and bending the center bars out into a neat bow shape, large enough to slip through.

“Holy crap,” Butters said, his voice a hushed shout. “You’re breaking in?”

“No one’s minding the store,” I said. I nudged a few pieces of door that hadn’t fallen out of the frame, then carefully slid into the building. “Come on.”

“Now you’re entering,” Butters informed me. “You’re breaking. And entering. We’re going to jail.”

I stuck my head out between the bars and said, “It’s in a good cause, Butters. We’re the secret champions of the city. Justice and truth are on our side.”

He looked at the front of the store uncertainly. “They are?”

“They are if you hurry up before someone in a uniform spots us,” I said. “Move it.”

I went back into the store, lifting up my amulet and willing it to light. I stared around me at all the technological things, only a very few of which I could readily identify. I turned in a circle, looking for one particular gadget, but I had no idea where in the store it would be.

Butters came in and looked around. The blue light of my pentacle gleamed on his glasses. Then he nodded decisively at a section of counter and walked over to it.

“Is this it?” I asked him.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” he asked me.

I grimaced at him. “I don’t get in here a lot, Butters. Remember?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, right. The Murphyonic technology thing.”

“Murphyonic?”

“Sure,” Butters said. “You exude a Murphyonic field. Anything that can go wrong does.”

“Don’t let Murph hear you say that.”

“Heh,” Butters said. “Bring the light.” I lifted it higher and stepped up behind him. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “They’re right here under the glass.” He peered around behind the counter. “There must be a key here somewhere.”

I lifted up my staff and drove it bodily down through the glass, shattering it.

Butters looked a little wild around the eyes, but he said, “Oh, right, I forgot. Burglary.” One hand darted in and plucked up an orange box. Then he looked around and picked up a couple of packs of batteries from a rack on the wall. He hadn’t touched a thing but what he had taken with him, and neither had I. Without security systems, the only way we would get caught would be by fingerprints or direct apprehension, and I was glad we didn’t have to take the time to wipe anything for prints before commencing the getaway.

I led Butters back to the car, and away we got.

“I can’t see anything,” Butters said. “Can you make the light again?”

“Not this close to the gadget,” I told him. “A minute or two wouldn’t be a problem, but the longer I work forces near it, the more likely it is to give out.”

“I need some light,” he said.

“All right, hang on.” I found a spot near an alley and parked with the Beetle’s headlights pointing at the overhanging awning of a restaurant. I left the car running and got out with Butters. He opened the box and took out the batteries and did gadgety things with them while I kept an eye out for bad guys, or possibly the cops.

“Tell me why you think this is it again?” Butters said. He had drawn a little plastic device the size of a small walkie-talkie from the box and fumbled with it until he found the battery cover.

“The numbers in Bony Tony’s code are just longitude and latitude,” I said. “He hides the book, see. He records the coordinates with one of those global satellite thingies all those soldiers raved about during Desert Storm.”

“Global positioning system,” Butters corrected me.

“Whatever. The point is that you need a GPS to find those specific coordinates. They’re accurate to what? Ten or twelve yards?”

“More like ten feet,” Butters said.

“Wow. So Bony Tony figures that most wizards wouldn’t have a clue about what a GPS device is—and the ones who do can’t use one because they’re high-tech, and running one even close to a wizard will short it out. It’s his insurance, to make sure that Grevane can’t screw him.”

“But Grevane did,” Butters said.

“Grevane did,” I echoed. “The idiot. He never considered that Bony Tony might have been able to outfox him. So he knows that Bony Tony has got the key to finding The Word of Kemmler on him, but Grevane never even considers that it might be something he can’t access. He just blunders along doing as he pleases, which he’s used to.”

“Whereas you,” Butters said, “read books at the library.”

“And magazines, ’cause they’re free there,” I said. “Though I have to give most of the credit to Georgia’s SUV. I might not have thought of this if it hadn’t had the same system.”

“Note the past tense on that,” Butters said. “Had.” He glanced up at me pointedly. “I’m about to turn it on. Do you need to move off?”

I nodded at him and backed off all the way to the car and tried to think technologically friendly thoughts. Butters stood in the headlights for a minute, frowning down at the gadget and then peering up at the sky.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Signal isn’t coming through very well. Maybe it’s the storm.”

“Storm isn’t helping,” I said back. “There’s magic at work too.” I chewed on my lip for a second. “Turn it off.”

Butters did and then nodded at me. I hurried over to him and said, “Now hold still.” Then I drew a piece of chalk from my duster pocket and marked out a quick circle around him on the concrete.

Butters frowned down at the chalk and said, “Is this…some kind of mime training? Do you want me to press my fingers against an invisible wall?”

“No,” I said. “You’re going to throw up a circle around you—an outwardly directed barrier. It should put a screen between you and any outside magical influence.”

“I am, huh?” he said. “How do I do that?”

I completed the circle, reached for my penknife, and passed it to him. “You need to put a drop of your blood on the circle, and picture a wall going up in your head.”

“Harry. I don’t know magic.”

“Anyone can do this,” I said. “Butters, there isn’t any time. The circle should hold out Cowl’s working and give you a chance to get a signal normally.”

“An anti-Murphyonic field, huh?”

“You’ve watched too many Trek reruns, Butters. But basically, yeah.”

He pressed his lips together and then nodded at me. I backed away to the Beetle again. Butters grimaced and then touched the penknife to the base of his left thumbnail, where the skin is thin and fragile. Then he leaned over self-consciously and squeezed his thumb until a drop of blood fell on the chalk circle.

The circle barrier snapped up immediately, invisibly. Butters looked around for a second and then said, “It didn’t work.”

“It worked,” I told him. “It’s there. I can feel it. Try again.”

Butters nodded and went back to his gizmo. Five seconds later, his face brightened. “Hey, whaddya know. It worked. So this circle keeps out magic?”

“And only magic,” I said. “Anything physical can cross it and disrupt the barrier. Handy for hedging out demons and such, though.”

“I’ll remember that,” Butters said. He peered down at the gadget. “Harry!” he exclaimed. “You were right! The numbers match up to coordinates right here in Chicago.”

“Where?” I demanded.

“Hang on.” The little guy punched buttons and frowned. “I have to get it to calculate distance and heading from here.”

“It can do that?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Plus AM/FM radio, weather reports, fish and game reports, maps of major cities, locations of restaurants and hotels for travelers, all kinds of stuff.”

“That,” I said, “is really cool.”

“Yeah. You really get a lot for the five hundred bucks on this model.” The whole time his fingers flicked back and forth on the gadget. “Right,” he said. “Uh, northwest of us and maybe a mile off.”

I frowned at him. “Doesn’t it tell you the address or something?”

“Yeah,” Butters said, pushing more buttons. “Oh, wait. No, you have to buy the expansion card for that.” He looked up thoughtfully. “Maybe we could go back and get it?”

“One little burglary and you’ve gone habitual,” I said. “No, it’s a bad idea. If a patrol car spotted the broken window there will be police there. I doubt anyone saw us, but there’s no reason to take chances.”

“Well, how do we find it then?” he asked.

“Turn it off. Then break the circle with your foot and get in the car. We’ll head that way and stop in a bit and you can check again. Rinse and repeat.”

“Right, good idea.” He turned the gizmo off and smudged the chalk circle with his foot. “Like that?”

“Like that. Let’s go.”

Butters got in the Beetle and we started through the dark, dank streets. After several long blocks I stopped with my lights shining into the awning in front of an apartment building, and Butters got out to repeat the process. He took my chalk with him, dribbled a bit of his blood on the circle he drew, and tried the GPS gadget again. Then he hurried through the rain back into the car.

“More north,” he said.

I peered at the darkness as I got moving, going through my mental map of Chicago. “Soldier’s Field?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”

We drove north and cruised past the home of da Bears. I stopped just on the other side and Butters checked again, facing the stadium. Then he blinked and turned around. His eyes widened and he came running back to the car. “We’re really close. I think it’s the Field Museum.”

I got the car moving. “Makes sense,” I said. “Bony Tony had plenty of contacts there. He did some trading in discretionary antiquities.”

“You mean stolen artifacts?”

“What did I just say? He probably has some kind of arrangement with security there. Maybe he stashed it in a staff locker or something.”

I parked in front of the Field Museum under a NO PARKING sign. There were a couple of actual spots I could have used, but the drive was even closer. Besides, I found it aesthetically satisfying to defy municipal code.

I put the Beetle’s parking brake on and got out into the rain. “Stay, Mouse,” I said. “Come on, Butters. Can that thing get us close to the book?”

“Within ten feet or so,” he said. “But Harry, the museum is closed. How are we going to—”

I blew out the glass of the front door with my staff, just as I had at Radio Shack.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

I strode into the main hall, Butters walking on my heels. Lightning flashed, abruptly illuminating Sue the Tyrannosaurus in all her bony Jurassic glory. Butters hadn’t been expecting it, and let out a strangled little cry.

Thunder rolled and I got out my amulet for light, lifting an eyebrow at Butters.

“Sorry,” he said. “I, uh…I’m a little nervous.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, my own heart pounding wildly. The sudden reveal of that monstrous skeleton had shaken me, too.

Don’t look at me like that. It was a tense sort of evening.

I looked slowly around the place, and Listened for a moment. I couldn’t sense anyone’s presence. I opened my Sight again, just for a quick glance around, but I didn’t see anyone hiding behind a veil of magic. I backed off. “Check again.”

He did so, though the shining floor of the museum didn’t take the chalk as readily as concrete. A few minutes later he nodded toward Sue and said, “Over that way.”

He broke the circle and we hurried across the enormous floor. “Try to keep quiet,” I told him. “Security might still be around.”

We stopped at Sue’s feet and checked again. Butters frowned, peering around. “This can’t be right,” he said. “According to the GPS, these coordinates are inside that wall. Could Bony Tony have hidden it in the wall?”

“It’s stone,” I said. “And I think someone might have noticed if he’d torn out a wall in the entry hall and replaced it.”

He shook the GPS a little. “I don’t get it, then.”

I chewed on my lip and looked up at Sue.

“Elevation,” I said.

“What?”

“Come on.” I pointed up. “There’s a gallery overlooking the main hall. It must be either up there or on a floor below us.”

“How do we know which?”

“We look. Starting with the upstairs. The levels below us are like some kind of gerbil maze from hell.” I started for the stairs, and Butters came after me. Going up them was a pain, but my instincts were screaming that I was right, and my excitement made the discomfort unremarkable.

Once on the gallery, we went past a display of articles from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—saddles, wooden rifles that had been carried by the show’s cowboys and Indians alike, cavalry bugles, feathered war bonnets, beaded vests, moccasins, ancient old boots, several worn old tom-toms, and about a million old photographs. Beyond that was some kind of interactive ecology display, and just past that there was a table bearing the weight of an enormous, malformed-looking dinosaur skull.

Butters checked again and nodded toward the skull. “I think it’s there.”

I went down to the skull. The display proclaimed that it was Sue’s actual skull, but that geological shifts and pressures had warped it, so the museum had created an artificial skull for the display. Holding my light up, I walked slowly around the skull—an enormous block of rock now. I peered into darkened crevices in the rock, and when I didn’t find a book I got down on the floor and started checking under the heavy platform that supported the skull.

I found a manila envelope duct-taped to the underside of the platform, and snatched it. I got out from under the platform and tore the envelope open, my fingers shaking.

An old, slender black volume not much larger than a calendar notebook fell from the envelope.

I held it in my bare right hand for a moment. There was no tingle of arcane energies to the book, no sense of lurking evil or imminent danger. It was simply a book—but nonetheless I was sure I had found The Word of Kemmler. My fingers shook harder, and I opened it.

The front bore a spidery scrawl of cursive writing: The Word of Heinrich Kemmler.

“Hey, that was kind of fun!” Butters said. “Is that it?”

“This is it,” I said. “We found it.” I glanced up at Butters and said, “Actually, you found it, Butters. I couldn’t have done it without your help. Thank you.”

Butters beamed. “Glad I could help.”

I thought I heard a noise.

I lifted a hand, forestalling whatever Butters was about to say.

The sound didn’t repeat itself. There was only thunder and rain.

I put a finger to my lips and Butters nodded. Then I closed my eyes and reached out with my senses, slow and careful. For the barest second I felt my thoughts brush against a stirring of cold energy.

Necromancy.

I drew back from it with panicked haste. “Butters, get out.”

The little ME blinked up at me. “What?”

“Get out,” I said, my voice harsher. “There’s a fire exit at the far side of the gallery. Go out it. Run. Get out of here and don’t stop until you’re someplace safe. Don’t look back. Don’t slow down.”

He stared at me, his eyes huge, his face deathly pale.

“Now!” I snarled.

Butters bolted. I could hear terrified little sounds escaping his throat as he sprinted toward the far end of the gallery.

I closed my eyes and concentrated again, drawing in my will and power as I did so, casting my senses about in an effort to find the source of the dark power. I touched the necromantic working again, and this time I didn’t even try to hide my presence by pulling away.

Whoever it was had come in through the door I’d broken open. I could feel a slithering sort of power there, mixed in with a cold kind of lust, a passion for despair.

I walked to the railing of the gallery and looked down into the entry hall.

Grevane stood below, trench coat wet and swaying, water dripping from the brim of his fedora. There was a half circle of dead men standing behind him, and he beat a slow rhythm on his leg with one hand.

I wanted to cut and run, but I couldn’t. I had to hold things up here until Butters had a chance to get away. And besides, if I ran away, toward the back exit and nowhere near my car, Grevane’s zombies would catch me and tear me apart.

I licked my lips, struggling to weigh my options.

Then I had an idea. Holding my pentacle’s chain in my teeth for light, I opened the book and started flipping through it, one page after another. I didn’t read it. I didn’t even try to read it. I just opened the pages, fixed my gaze at a couple of points on each, and moved on.

It wasn’t a long book. I was finished less than two minutes later.

There was a sound from the stairway, and I rose, readying my shield bracelet.

Grevane came onto the gallery floor, zombies marching behind him. He stood and stared at me for a moment, his expression impossible to read.

“Stay back,” I said quietly.

He blinked at me very slowly. “Why?”

I held up the book in one hand. “Because I’ve got the Word here, Grevane. And if you don’t back off, I’ll burn it to ash.”

His eyes widened, and he lurched a half step closer to me, licking his lips. “No, you won’t,” he said. “You know that. You want the power as much as I do.”

“God, you people are dysfunctional,” I said. “But just to save time I’ll give you a reason that you’re capable of understanding. I’ve read the book. I don’t need it anymore. So if you push me, I’ll be glad to flash-fry it for you.”

“You didn’t read it,” Grevane spat. “You haven’t had it for ten minutes.”

“Speed-reading,” I lied. “I can do War and Peace in thirty minutes.”

“Give me the book,” Grevane said. “I will allow you to live.”

“Get out of my way. Or I will allow it to burn.”

Grevane smiled.

And suddenly a weight fell on me, like someone had dropped a lead-lined blanket on my shoulders. My ears filled with rushing, hissing whispers. I stumbled and felt a dozen flashes of burning, needle-fine pain, and between that and the extra weight I fell to my knees. It took me a second to realize what was happening.

Snakes.

I was covered in snakes.

There were too many of them to count or identify, and they were all furious. Some dark green reptile as long as my arm struck at my face, sinking fangs into my left cheek and holding on. More of them struck at my neck, my shoulders, my hands, and I screamed in panic and pain. My duster took several hits, but the en-spelled leather held out against them. I tore at my neck and shoulders and head, ripping snakes free of me by main strength, their fangs tearing at my flesh as I did.

I struggled to order my thoughts and rise, because I knew Grevane would be coming. I tried to gather my shield as I pushed myself to my hands and knees, but I saw a flash of a heavy boot driving toward me and light exploded in my eyes and I flopped back to the floor, briefly stunned.

I blinked slowly, waiting for my eyes to focus.

Liver Spots appeared in my vision, weathered and strange, white hair wiry and stiff beneath his hat, his loose skin somehow reptilian in the dim light.

“I know you,” I slurred, the words tumbling out without checking in with my brain. “I know who you are now.”

Liver Spots knelt down over me. He took my wrists and clamped something around them.

While he did, Grevane came up and took The Word of Kemmler from my limp fingers. He opened it and began scanning through pages until he found the passage he’d been looking for. He read it, stared at it for a long moment, and then opened his mouth in a slow, wheezing cackle.

“By the night,” he said, his voice dusty and amused. “It’s so simple. How could I not have seen it before?”

“You are satisfied?” Liver Spots asked Grevane.

“Entirely,” Grevane said.

“And you will stand by our bargain.”

“Of course,” Grevane answered. He read another page of the book. “A pleasure working with you. He’s all yours.” Grevane turned, still beating a slow rhythm on his leg, and the shambling zombies followed him.

“Well, Dresden,” Liver Spots said once they were gone. His voice was a rich, rough purr. “I believe you were saying you recognized me?”

I stared up at him blankly.

“Let me help your memory,” he said. He took an olive-drab duffel bag from his shoulder and set it on the ground. Then, mostly with one hand, he opened it.

And he drew out a Louisville Slugger.

Oh, my God. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. The metal bindings burned cold on my wrists.

“You,” I said. “You busted up my car.”

“Mmmm. Much as you broke my ankles. My knees. My wrists and my hands. With a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. While I lay helpless on the floor.”

Quintus Cassius, the Snakeboy, the serpent-summoning sorcerer and former Knight of the Order of the Blackened Denarius, smiled down at me. He leaned over, kneeling and far too close to me for comfort, and whispered to me as if to a lover.

“I have dreamed of this night, boy,” he purred, and gently stroked the side of my face with the baseball bat. “In my day, we would say that revenge is sweet. But times have changed. How do you say? Payback is a bitch.”

Chapter

Thirty-seven

I stared up at the withered old man I’d called Liver Spots, and behind the loose skin, the wrinkles, the white wiry hair, I could see the man who had been one of the Order of the Blackened Denarius.

“How?” I asked him. “How did you find me?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “The coroner’s apartment was easy enough to find. I took hairs from his brush. Since you were so eager to keep him sheltered under your wing, it wasn’t too terribly difficult to keep track of him—and you—once we had destroyed your wards.”

“Oh,” I said. My voice shook a little.

“Are you afraid, boy?” Cassius whispered.

“You’re about the fifth-scariest person I’ve met today,” I said.

His eyes became very cold.

“Don’t knock it,” I said. “That’s really better than it sounds.”

He rose slowly, looking down at me. The fingers of his right hand tightened and loosened on the handle of the bat. Hatred burned there as well, mindless and irrational and howling to be slaked. Cassius hadn’t exactly been stable when I’d faced him two years before. From the look of him now, he was preparing a campaign for the presidency of the World Psychosis Association.

I knew that Cassius was a killer, like few I’d ever seen. He had spent what might have been fifteen or sixteen centuries bound to a different fallen angel within his own silver coin, working hand in hand with the head of the Order. He had, I was sure, personally done away with hundreds of foes who had done far less to him than I had.

He would kill me. If a flash of rage took him, he’d cave my head in with that bat, screaming the whole time.

I shuddered at the image and reached out for my magic, seeing if I could draw in enough to try to sucker punch him. But when I tried, the manacles on my wrists suddenly writhed, moving, and dozens of sharp points suddenly pricked into my wrists, as if I had swept my hand through a rosebush. I winced in pain, my breath frozen in my chest for a second.

Cassius smiled at me. “Don’t bother. We’ve used those manacles on wizards and witches for centuries. Nicodemus himself designed them.”

“Yeah. Ouch.” I winced, but no amount of writhing would move my arms very much, and I couldn’t move to try to make the thorny manacles hurt less.

Cassius stared down at me, his eyes bright. He stood there, watching me try to writhe, enjoying my helplessness and pain.

An image flashed through my mind—an old man of faith and courage who had willingly given himself into the hands of the Order in exchange for my freedom. Shiro had died after sustaining the most hideous torments I had ever seen visited upon a human body—and some of them had come at the hands of Cassius. I closed my eyes. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to see how much pain he could deliver before I died. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Unless…

I thought of what Shiro had told me about having faith. For him it was a theological and moral truth upon which he had based his life. I didn’t have the same kind of belief, but I had seen how forces of light and darkness came into conflict, how imbalances were redressed. Cassius was in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet. Shiro would have said that nothing he did could have prevented a balancing force of light—such as Shiro and his brother Knights—from being placed in his way. In my own experience, I had noticed that when something truly, deeply evil arose, one of the Knights tended to show up.

Maybe one would show up to face Cassius.

Hell’s bells. That was mighty thin.

But it was technically possible. And it was all I had.

I almost laughed. What I needed to survive this lunatic was something I had never had much of: faith. I had to believe that some other factor would intervene. I had no other option.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try to help intervention along. The longer I kept breathing, the more likely it was that someone would happen across the scene—maybe even someone who could help. Maybe even someone like my friend Michael.

I had to keep Cassius talking.

“What happened to you?” I asked him a moment later, opening my eyes. I’d read somewhere that people love to talk about themselves. “The last time I saw you, you could have passed for forty.”

Cassius stared at me for a moment more, and then leaned his bat on the floor. “It was the result of losing my coin to you and your friends,” he said, voice creaking. “While I held my coin, Saluriel prevented age from ravaging my body. Now nature is collecting her due from me. Plus interest.” He waved his stiff-fingered right hand, wrinkled, spotted, swollen with what looked like bad arthritis. “If she has her way, I will be dead within the year.”

“Why?” I asked him. “Isn’t your new demon stopping the clock for you?”

His eyes narrowed, unsteady and cold. “I have no Denarius now,” he said, his voice low and very polite. “When I eventually left the hospital and rejoined Nicodemus, he had no coin being held as a spare.” Mad fire flickered through his gaze. “You see, he’d given it to you.”

I swallowed. “That’s what you were looking for, outside my apartment. You wanted the Denarius.”

“Lasciel wouldn’t be my first choice, but I must be content with what is available.”

“Uh-huh. So where’s Nicodemus? He’s helping you, I take it.”

Cassius’s eyes closed almost all the way. “Nicodemus cast me out. He said that if I was too much a fool to keep possession of my coin that I deserved whatever befell me.”

“What a guy.”

Cassius shrugged. “He is a man of power, with no tolerance for fools. Once you are dead and Lasciel’s coin is mine, he will take me back.”

“You sound pretty confident there,” I said.

“Is there some reason I should not be?” He moved stiffly over to his duffel bag. “You should make this simpler for both of us. I’m willing to make you an offer. Give it to me now, and I will make your death quick.”

“I don’t have it,” I told him.

He let out a rough cackle. “There are only so many places one can hide it,” he said. “If you are holding it as part of you, enough pain will make you drop it.” He drew out a slender little coping saw from the bag and set it on the floor. “I once knew a man who swallowed his Denarius, and would swallow it again when it came through.”

“Yuck,” I said.

Cassius put a standard-head screwdriver down next to the saw. “And one who cut himself open and placed the coin in his abdominal cavity.” He drew a vicious-looking hooked linoleum knife from the bag and held it thoughtfully. “If you tell me, I’ll take your throat.”

“And if I don’t?” I asked.

He pared a yellowed fingernail with the knife. “I go on a treasure hunt.”

I studied him for a minute, then said, “I don’t have it with me. That’s the truth. I bound Lasciel and buried the coin.”

He let out a snarl and snatched at my left hand. He tore my glove from it, and then twisted my hand to show me my own horribly scarred palm, and the name-sigil of the demon Lasciel upon it, the only skin that wasn’t layered in scar tissue. “You have it,” he spat. “And it is mine.”

I took a deep breath and tried to embrace an optimistic conviction in the moral rectitude of my cause; to think positive.

Hey, hideous torture would draw things out. It wasn’t the way I would have chosen to stall Cassius, but again, I wasn’t spoiled for choice.

“I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “Besides, you wouldn’t have made it quick, even if I did give it to you.”

He smiled. It looked grandfatherly. “Probably,” he agreed. He reached into the duffel bag again and pulled out a three-foot length of heavy chain, the kind they used to use for bicycle locks. He held it in one hand while he moved my wrists, lifting them so that I lay flat on my back, my arms outstretched over my head. “I’m a winner either way.”

I wasn’t strong enough to move them. The damned manacles made me weaker than a newborn kitten.

“Surrender your coin,” Cassius said pleasantly. Then he gave me a hard kick in the ribs.

It drove the breath from me and hurt like hell. I managed to choke out the words, “Don’t have it.”

“Surrender your coin,” he said again. And this time he swung the chain and lashed it down hard over my stomach. My duster was open and the chain tore through my shirt and ripped at the flesh of my belly. My vision went red with a sudden haze of agony. “I d-ddon’t…” I began.

“Surrender your coin,” he purred. And he hit me again with the chain.

Rinse and repeat. I don’t know how many times.

An eternity later, Cassius touched his tongue to some of the blood on the chain and regarded me thoughtfully. “I hope you aren’t too impatient for me to get the bat,” he said. “You see, my balance is quite unsteady these days. I’m told it’s a result of all the damage to my knees and ankles.”

I lay there hurting. My belly and chest were on fire. Blood from one of the snakebites had trickled into my left eye, and had crusted my eyelashes together so that I couldn’t open it again.

“You see, I’ve only got this one good hand to swing the bat with. My other was badly broken by multiple blunt-impact traumas. One-handed, I’m afraid it’s difficult to aim properly or judge the power of my swing.”

I tried to look around me, but I couldn’t get my right eye to move properly.

“As a result,” Cassius continued, “once I start paying you back for what you did to me, I’m afraid it’s quite likely that I might hit you too hard and too many times. And I want to savor this.”

Where was Michael? Where was…anyone?

Cassius leaned down and said, “And when I start, Dresden, I want to be free to indulge myself. To really let go and live the moment. I’m sure you understand.”

No one is coming to save you, Harry.

I rasped, “I told you.”

He paused, eyebrows lifted, and rolled a hand. “Pray continue.”

“Told you,” I said, and it was marred with a groan. “Told you if I ever saw you again I would kill you.”

He let out a low, amused little chuckle and put the chain down.

He picked up the linoleum knife. Then he knelt stiffly down beside me, and calmly cut my shirt open and spread it and my duster away from my abdomen. “I remember,” he said. “One should never make promises one cannot keep.”

“I didn’t,” I told him quietly.

“Best you hurry then,” he told me. “I can’t imagine you have more than a few moments to make good.” He prodded my belly with his finger, drawing a gasp of pain from me. “Mmmm. Nice and tender now. The better to cut through.”

I watched the knife move, slow and bright and beautiful. Time seemed to slow down as it did.

Dammit, I was not going to die. I was not going to let this murderous bastard kill me. I was going to survive. I didn’t know how I would do it, but my will locked onto the notion and I found myself grinding my teeth. I had shown him mercy before. He’d had his chance to walk away. I was going to live. And I was going to kill him.

The knife bit into the muscle of my stomach. He moved it very slowly, staring at the inner edge of the hooked blade as he drew it toward my groin in a gradually deepening incision. It hurt almost as much as the chain, but it left me with enough breath to scream.

I did. I howled at him at the top of my lungs. I shrieked profanities at him. I even managed to twitch my body a little, and I began calling up my will again, bringing fresh agony from the manacles.

He finished his first long, shallow, almost delicate cut, lifted the knife from my flesh, and repositioned it beside the first. The whole while I never stopped ranting at the top of my lungs. I doubted it was coherent enough to understand—but it described my feelings perfectly. I screamed and I kept on screaming.

And because I did, Cassius never heard Mouse’s claws on the marble floor.

The air suddenly shook with a bellowing, damned near leonine roar. Cassius’s head whipped around in time to see my dog leap from twenty feet away and hurtle forward like a grey-furred wrecking ball.

Mouse’s front paws hit Cassius squarely on the sternum, and a bloodcurdling snarl exploded from the huge dog’s chest as they both went down. Mouse snapped his jaws at Cassius’s throat, but he had too much momentum remaining from his charge. His paws slid on the smooth floor, carrying him past Cassius before his teeth could do more than lightly rip at one shoulder.

Cassius screamed in rage, crouching, and flicked his hand at Mouse. There was a surge of dark magic, a shimmering blur, and suddenly a serpent coalesced from the shadows lying upon the gallery. It reared up for a second, and I could see the deadly outline of a cobra’s hood rising a good five feet from the floor. Then the serpent launched itself at Mouse.

My dog saw it coming, sprang back from the serpent’s first strike, and then leapt forward, jaws trying to latch on behind the shadow serpent’s head. Lashing loops of reptilian darkness whipped into coils that tried to trap the big dog, and the pair of them rolled along the floor, each seeking to grasp and kill the other.

Cassius stared at Mouse for a second, eyes wide, and then turned to me. There was actual, literal foam at the corner of his mouth, and his face was stretched into a grotesque grimace of fury. He lurched over to my side, speaking a language I didn’t recognize in a half-hysterical shriek. Then he seized my hair, jerked my head back to bare my throat, and swept the knife down toward my jugular.

Before his arm was halfway down, there was a thin, high-pitched, tinny-sounding wail. Butters threw himself onto Cassius’s back, carrying them both over me and to the floor. The knife missed me entirely, and went skittering away on impact.

Cassius snarled another oath and tried to crawl for the knife. Butters tried to pull Cassius away, his face deathly pale. The little guy had all the fighting prowess of a leatherback turtle, but he got his arms and legs around Cassius’s torso and clung like a wild-haired monkey.

Cassius’s body may have been weakened, but he’d had more than a millennium to learn about infighting. He twisted his shoulders and then slammed the side of his head into Butters’s nose with a crunching sound of impact. Butters reeled from the blow, and blood spattered his face and upper lip.

Cassius then twisted again and escaped Butters’s grip. He heaved himself toward the knife.

“Butters!” I screamed, helpless to move and furious and terrified. “Don’t let him get the weapon!”

The little medical examiner shook his head once, then let out that tinny wail of challenge again and threw himself at Cassius. Butters caught him around one leg. Cassius kicked at his face, but Butters ducked his head down and the blows rolled off his shoulders. Cassius pushed himself a little closer to the knife.

Butters lifted his head with a squeak of defiance and sank his teeth into Cassius’s leg.

The former Denarian howled in sudden, startled pain.

Another bellowing roar shook the gallery, and I looked up to see Mouse gripping the shadow serpent’s neck in his heavy jaws. Mouse shook his head violently. There was a burst of crunching sounds, and suddenly the shadow serpent stiffened and then abruptly dissolved into gallons and gallons of translucent, gelatinous ectoplasm.

Butters yelped and I looked up to see Cassius holding the knife, sweeping it clumsily at his opponent. Butters skittered away from the knife, eyes wide with terror.

But he skittered directly between Cassius and me.

And held his ground.

Mouse didn’t skip a beat after killing the serpent. This time he rushed forward low, his snarls in chorus with the growling of thunder outside. He hit Cassius at the knees with the full power of his body, and Cassius went down like a tenpin before a bowling ball.

Butters rushed forward and kicked at Cassius’s knife hand. The weapon skittered away again, over the edge of the gallery and into the great hall below. Cassius kicked at Butters and got him in the shins, sending Butters to the floor.

Cassius got out from under Mouse and lurched for me, his eyes mad, his hands outstretched in strangling claws.

Mouse landed on his back, and the huge dog’s jaws closed on the man’s neck.

Cassius froze in place in sudden terror, his eyes very wide. He stared at me.

For a second there was total silence.

“I gave you a chance,” I told him, my voice quiet.

Quintus Cassius’s liver-spotted face went pale with horrified comprehension. “Wait.”

“Mouse,” I said. “Kill him.”

I had only one open eye with which to watch Cassius meet his end. But in that final second, rage and terror and horrified realization flashed through his eyes. And just as Mouse’s jaws crushed the delicate bones of his neck, there was a flare of ugly energies, a flash of unholy purplish light around him, and he spoke words that rang in echoes totally out of proportion to their volume.

“DIE ALONE,” he spat.

A flood of power hit me and my vision went black.

The last thing I heard was the snapping of bone.

Chapter

Thirty-eight

I didn’t wake up.

It was more like I felt myself putting together some kind of awareness, the way a stagehand constructs a set. Evidently I was a minimalist, because the reality I awoke to was a bare black floor, a single hanging lamp overhead, and three chairs.

I walked forward into the light and stared at the chairs.

In one sat Lasciel, again in her angelic, blond, wholesome form. She wasn’t wearing the white tunic, though. Instead, she was clothed in an Illinois Department of Corrections prison jumpsuit. The orange suited her hair and complexion quite well. She wore prison shackles, wrists and feet, and sat primly in her chair.

In the second chair was me. Well. It was a version of me, some kind of subconscious alter ego of mine. His hair was clipped shorter and neater than mine, and he wore a dark beard that was kept in similar fastidious order. He wore a black silk shirt, black trousers, and his hands (both of them) were unmarred, his finger-tips held together in a steeple that rested on his chin.

“Another dream,” I said, and sighed. I slumped down into the third chair. I looked more or less as I had when I woke up that morning. My shirt was slashed open, though there wasn’t any blood on my torso, and my skin hadn’t been pounded and ripped with a chain. Wishful thinking.

“Not precisely a dream,” the subconscious me said. “Call it a meeting of the minds.”

Lasciel smiled, very slightly.

“No,” I said, and pointed at Lasciel. “I’ve said everything I intend to say to her.” I turned to my alter ego—though on thinking about it, maybe alter id was more accurate. “As for you, you’re sort of a jerk. And the whole look you’ve got going there says ‘evil wizard,’ which I am now professionally opposed to.”

Alterna-Harry sighed. “I’ve told you before. I’m not some sort of dark demon. I’m simply the more primal essence of yourself. The one most concerned with such matters as food. Survival.” His dark eyes flickered idly over Lasciel. “Mating,” he said, a lazy growl to the tone. He looked back to me. “The important things in life.”

“That I am even having this dream probably means that I need a good therapist,” I said. I stared at my other self and said, “It was you, wasn’t it? You wanted to pick up the coin.”

“Make sure you remember that I am a part of you before you point any fingers,” he said. “And yes. The potential for power in an alliance with Lasciel”—he inclined his head to her, a courtly, gentlemanly gesture, damn his chivalrous eyes—“was too great to simply ignore. There are too many things out there determined to kill you. So long as you keep Lasciel’s coin, you both have the option to seek more power if necessary to protect yourself or others, and you prevent the coin from being used by unscrupulous sorts like Cassius.”

I grimaced. “So?”

“So,” he said. “This is a time to consider employing a portion of that power.”

I stared at him and said, “You’ve been talking to her behind my back.”

“For months,” he said calmly. “It was only polite. After all, you wanted nothing to do with her.”

“You asshole,” I said. “The whole reason I wasn’t talking was that I didn’t want the temptation.”

“I did,” my subconscious said. “Honestly, you should listen to me more often. If you’d taken my advice about Murphy, she wouldn’t be in Hawaii. In bed with Kincaid.”

Lasciel coughed gently and said, “Gentlemen. If I might offer a suggest—”

Both I and my alternative self said, at the same time and in exactly the same voice, “Shut up.”

Lasciel blinked, but did.

My double and I eyed each other, and I nodded slowly. “We’re in agreement, then, that her presence and her influence are dangerous.”

“We are,” my double said. “She must not be allowed to dictate actions or to direct our choices through suggestion or manipulation.” My double looked at her and said, “But she can and should be used as a resource, under careful control. She can offer us enormous amounts of information.” He eyed her again and said, “And amusement.”

Lasciel left her eyes down and smiled, very slightly.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got Bob when I want information. And if I want sex, I’ll…figure out something.”

“You don’t have Bob now,” my double said. “And you’ve wanted sex since about twenty minutes after the last time you had it.”

“That’s beside the point,” I told him sullenly. “I’m not quite insane enough to let a fallen angel give me virtual nooky, just for kicks.”

“Listen to me,” he said, and his voice became sharp, commanding. “Here’s the cold truth. You are determined to take us into battle against forces you cannot possibly overcome through main strength. Not only that, but your source of assistance, the Wardens, may also turn against you if they learn the truth about what you’re attempting. You are wounded. You are out of contact with your other allies.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” I said, setting my jaw.

My double rolled his eyes. “Tell me, is it morally necessary for you to die in the process?”

I glowered at him.

“This meeting is just a formality, you know,” he said. “You are already planning on asking Lasciel’s shadow for her help. That’s why you read through the book as you did before it was taken from you. You wanted it to go through your mind so that she could see it, and provide you with the text as she did for the summoning of the Erlking.”

I lifted a finger. “I only did that in case I wasn’t able to pry enough out of Grevane to figure out exactly what Kemmler’s disciples are doing.”

My double arched a brow. “How’d that work out for you?”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” I said.

“The point,” he said, “is that you have little or no chance to prevail if you blindly rush in. You must know how they intend to manipulate these energies. You must know if there is a weak time or place at which to assault them. You must know the details of the Darkhallow, or you might as well cut your own wrists.”

“Don’t have to,” I told him. “I could just sit and wait for the Erlking to come by.”

“Six of one, half a dozen of another,” my double agreed. “In addition, your body is in no condition to do anything at the moment.” He leaned forward. “Free her to help us.”

I inhaled slowly and stared at Lasciel for a moment. Then I said, “After I killed Justin and got my head together at Ebenezar’s place, I promised myself something. I promised that I would live my life on my own terms. That I knew the difference between right and wrong and that I wouldn’t cross the line. I wouldn’t allow myself to become like Justin DuMorne.”

“Don’t you want to survive?” my double asked.

I rose from the chair and started walking into the darkness outside the light. “Of course I do. But some things are more important than survival.”

“Yeah,” my double said. “Like the people who are going to get killed when you die and don’t stop Kemmler’s disciples.”

I froze at the edge of the darkness.

“Take the high road if you want to,” my double said. “Choose to walk away from this strength in the name of principle. But after your noble death, everyone you no longer protect, everyone who might one day have come to you for help, everyone who is killed in the aftermath of the Darkhallow—every life you might have protected in the future will be on your head.”

I stared at the darkness and then closed my eyes.

“Regardless of where it came from, Lasciel offers you the power of knowledge. If you turn aside from that power—power only you can take up—then you abandon your commitment to protect and defend those who are not strong enough to do it themselves.”

“No,” I said. “That isn’t…that isn’t my responsibility.”

“Of course it is,” my subconscious said, voice clear and sharp. “You coward.”

I stopped and turned, staring at him.

“If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.”

I went through the logic of his argument and didn’t make any headway against it—of course. While my double might look like another person, he wasn’t. He was me.

“If I open this door now,” I said slowly. “I might not be able to close it again.”

“Or you might,” my double said. “I have no intention of allowing her any control. So you will be the one who determines it.”

“What if I can’t contain her again once she is freed?”

“Why shouldn’t you be able to? It’s your mind. Your will. Your choice. You still believe in free will, do you not?”

“It’s dangerous,” I said.

“Of course it is. And now you must choose. Will you face that danger? Or will you run from it, and so condemn those who need your strength to their deaths?”

I stared at him for a minute. Then I looked at Lasciel. She waited, her eyes steady, her expression calm.

“Can you do it?” I asked her bluntly. “Can you show me what was on those pages?”

“Of course,” she answered, her manner one of subservience without a trace of resentment. “I would be pleased to offer you whatever assistance you permit.”

She looked humble. She looked cooperative. But I knew better. The mere shadow of the fallen angel Lasciel was a vital and powerful force. She might look humble and cooperative, but if that was her true nature she wouldn’t have fallen to begin with. I didn’t think she was harboring murderous impulses or anything—my instincts told me that she was genuinely pleased to help me.

After all, that was the first step. And she had patience. She could afford to wait.

Dangerous indeed. Lasciel represented nothing less than the intrinsic allure of power itself. I had never sought to become a wizard. Hell, a lot of the time I thought about how nice things might be if I hadn’t been one. The power had been a birthright, and if it had grown since then, it had done so by the necessity of survival. But I’d tasted a darker side to the possession of power—the searing satisfaction of seeing an enemy fall to my strength. The lust to test myself against another, to challenge them and see who was the strongest. The mindless hunger for more that, if once indulged, might never be slaked.

One of the coldest, most evil souls I have ever encountered once told me that the reason I fought so hard to do what seemed right was that I was terrified to look within me and see the desire to cease the fight and do as I would, free of conscience or remorse.

And now I could see that he had been right.

I looked at the fallen angel, patiently waiting, and was terrified.

But there were innocent lives at stake: men and women and children who needed protection.

If I didn’t give it to them, who would?

I took a deep breath, reached into my pocket, and found a silver key there. I threw it to my double.

He caught it and rose. Then he unlocked Lasciel’s shackles.

Lasciel inclined her head to him respectfully. Then she walked over to me, gorgeous and warm in the harsh light, her eyes lowered. Without a trace of self-consciousness, she sank down to her knees, bowed her head, and said, “How may I serve you, my host?”

I opened my eyes and found myself on my back. There was a candle burning nearby. Mouse had curled himself protectively around my head, and his tongue was flicking over my face, rough and wet and warm.

I hurt absolutely everywhere. I’d learned to block out pain under the harsh lessons of Justin DuMorne, but it went only so far.

Lasciel had shown me a different technique.

I couldn’t have explained to anyone what I did. I wasn’t sure that I understood it myself, at least on a conscious level. I simply knew. I gathered the pain together and fed it into a burning fire of determination in my thoughts, and it began to steadily recede.

I exhaled slowly and began to sit up. My brain registered the screaming torture of the muscles in my stomach—it just wasn’t horribly important, and took up little of my attention.

“My God, Harry,” Butters said. His voice was thick and slurred, as if he were holding his nose. His hand pushed on my shoulder. “Don’t sit up.”

I let him push me back down. I needed a couple of minutes to let the pain continue to fade. “How bad is it?”

He exhaled. “It’s pretty hideous, but I don’t think he actually perforated the abdominal wall. Skin and tissue damage, but you did some bleeding.” He swallowed and looked a little green around the gills. “That’s my best guess, anyway.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, fine. It’s just…I work with corpses because I just couldn’t handle…you know…actual living people.”

“Heh. You can eat lunch while looking at a three-month-old corpse, but first aid on my stomach is too much to handle?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re still alive. That’s just weird.”

I shook my head. “How long was I out?” I was surprised at how calm and steady my voice sounded.

“It’s been about fifteen minutes,” Butters said. “I found some bandages and alcohol in the old man’s duffel bag. I’ve got your belly cleaned and covered, but I don’t have much of an idea of how much trouble you’re in. You need a hospital.”

“Maybe later,” I said. I lay on my back, poring over what Lasciel had given me about the writings in the book. Hell, the thing had been written in German. I didn’t know German, but Lasciel had translated the text about the Darkhallow. It felt like we had talked about it for an hour or more, but dream time and real time aren’t always lockstepped.

Butters’s nose had swollen up. There was still some blood on his face, and he already had a matched set of gorgeously colorful black eyes. He leaned over and fussed with the bandages on my stomach.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “I told you to run. I was doing that heroic rear-guard thing. You screwed it all up.”

“Sorry,” he answered, his voice serious. “But…I got outside and I couldn’t run. I mean, I wanted to. I really wanted to. But after all you’ve done for me…” He shook his head. “I just couldn’t do that.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran around the outside of the museum. I tried to find help, but with all the rain and the dark there wasn’t anyone around. So I ran to the car and got Mouse. I thought that maybe he could help you.”

“He could,” I agreed. “He did.”

Mouse’s tail thumped on the floor, and he kept on licking at my head. I realized, dully, that he was cleaning the dozens of tiny snakebites.

“But he couldn’t have done it without you, Butters,” I said. “You saved my life. Another five minutes and I’d have been history.”

He blinked down at me for a moment and then said, “I did, didn’t I?”

“Damned brave of you,” I said.

His spine straightened a little. “You think?”

“Yeah.”

“And check it out,” he said, gesturing at his face, his mouth opening into a toothy smile. “I have a broken nose, don’t I?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Like I’m a boxer. Or maybe a tough-as-nails gumshoe.”

“You earned it,” I said. “Hurt?”

“Like hell,” he said, but he was still smiling. He blinked a few times, the gears almost visibly spinning in his head, and said, “I didn’t run away. And I fought him. I jumped on him.”

I kept quiet and let him process it.

“My God,” he said. “That was…that was so stupid.”

“Actually, when you survive it gets reclassified as ‘courageous.’” I reached out my right hand. Butters shook it, gripping hard.

He looked at Cassius’s body, and his smile faded. “What about him?” he asked.

“He’s done,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh,” I said. “We’ll leave the body here. No time to move it. He’ll be a John Doe on the public records, and there probably won’t be a heavy investigation. If we get out quick it shouldn’t be an issue.”

“No. I mean…I mean, my God, he’s dead. We killed him.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I told him. “I’m the one who killed him. All you did was try to help me.”

His brow furrowed and he shook his head. “That’s not what I mean either. I feel sorry for him.”

“Don’t,” I said. “He was a monster.”

Butters frowned and nodded. “But he was also a man. Or was once. He was so bitter. So much hate. He had a horrible life.”

“Note the past tense,” I said. “Had.”

Butters looked away from the corpse. “What happened there at the very end? There was a light, and his voice sounded…weird. I thought he’d killed you.”

“He hit me with his death curse,” I said.

Butters swallowed. “I guess it didn’t work? I mean, because you’re breathing.”

“It worked,” I told him. I’d felt that vicious magic grab hold of me and sink in. “I don’t think he was strong enough to kill me outright. So he went for something else.”

“‘Die alone’?” Butters asked quietly. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not sure I want to.” I took a deep breath and then exhaled. I didn’t have enough time to lie there waiting to recover. “Butters, I don’t have any right to ask this of you. I’m already in your debt. But I need your help.”

“You have it,” he said.

“I haven’t even told you what it is,” I said.

Butters smiled a little and nodded. “I know. But you have it.”

I felt my lips peel back from my teeth in a fierce grin. “One little assault and you’ve gone habitual. Next thing I know you’ll be forming a fight club. Help me up.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said seriously.

“No choice,” I said.

He nodded and then stood up and offered me his hand. I took it and rose, waiting to sway or pass out or throw up from the pain. I did none of those things. The pain was there, but it didn’t stop me from moving or thinking. Butters just stared at me and then shook his head.

I found my staff, picked it up, and walked to the Buffalo Bill exhibit. Butters got the candle, and then he and Mouse kept pace. I looked around for a second, then picked up a long, heavy-duty extension cord running from an outlet on the wall to power some lights on an exhibit in the center of the room. I jerked it clear at both ends and gathered it into a neat loop. Once I had it, I passed it to Butters.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Preparing,” I said. “I found out about the Darkhallow.”

Butters blinked. “You did? How?”

I grunted. “Magic.”

“Okay,” he said. “What did you learn?”

“That this isn’t a rite. It’s a big spell,” I said. “It all depends on drawing together a ton of dark spiritual energy.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like a lot of things. The necromantic energy around animated corpses and manifested shades. The predatory spirits of ancient hunters. All the fear that’s been growing since last night. Plus, the past several years have seen some serious magical turbulence around Chicago. Kemmler’s disciples can put that turbulence to work for them, too.”

“Then what?”

“They gather it together and get it going in a big circle. It creates a kind of vortex, which then funnels down into whoever is trying to consume the energy. Poof. Insta-god.”

He frowned. “I’m not very clued in on this magic stuff, but that sounds kind of dangerous.”

“Hell, yeah,” I said, and crossed the room to a rack of riding equipment. “It’s like trying to inhale a tornado.”

“Holy crap,” Butters said. “But how does that help us?”

“First of all, I found out that the vortex itself is deadly. It’s going to draw off the life of every living thing around it.”

Butters gulped. “It will kill everything?”

“Not at first. But when the wizard at the vortex draws down the power, it’s going to create a kind of vacuum where all that power used to be. The vacuum will rip away the life energy of everything within a mile.”

“Dear God. That will kill thousands of people.”

“Only if they finish the spell,” I said. “Until then, the farther back you are from it, the less it will do,” I said. “But to get near the vortex, the only way to survive it is to surround yourself with necromantic energy of your own.”

“Only those with ghosts or zombies need apply?” he asked.

“Exactly.” I lifted a saddle from the rack. Then I got a second one. I hung both over opposite ends of my staff, and picked it up like a plowman’s yoke, the saddles hanging. I started walking down the stairs.

“But wait,” Butters said. “What are you going to do?”

“Get to the center of the vortex,” I said. “The effort it will take to work this spell is incredible. I don’t care how good Cowl is. If I hit him as he tries to draw down the vortex, it’s going to shake his concentration. The spell will be ruined. The backlash will kill him.”

“And everyone will be all right?” he asked.

“That’s the plan.”

He nodded and then stopped abruptly in his tracks. I felt his stare burning into my back.

“But, Harry. To get there you’ll have to call up the dead yourself.”

I stopped and looked over my shoulder at him.

Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “And you need a drummer.”

“Yeah.”

He swallowed. “Could…could you get in trouble with your people for doing this?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But there’s a technicality I can exploit.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Laws of Magic specifically refer to the abuse of magic when used against our fellow human beings. Technically it only counts if you call up human corpses.”

“But you told me that everyone only calls humans.”

“Right. So while the Laws of Magic only address necromancy as used on human corpses, there usually isn’t any need for a distinction. Nutty necromancers only call up humans. Sane wizards don’t touch necromancy at all. I don’t think anyone has tried something like this.”

We reached the main level of the museum.

“It’s going to be dangerous,” I told him. “I think we can do it, but I can’t make you any promises. I don’t know if I can protect you.”

Butters walked beside me for several steps, his expression serious. “You can’t try it without someone’s help. And if you don’t stop it, the spell will kill thousands of people.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I can’t order you to help me. I can only ask.”

He licked his lips. “I can keep a beat,” he said.

I nodded and reached my destination. I slipped my improvised yoke off my shoulders and dropped both saddles to the floor. My breathing was a little harsh from the effort, even though I barely noticed the pain and strain. “You’ll need a drum.”

Butters nodded. “There were some tom-toms upstairs. I’ll go get one.”

I shook my head. “Too high-pitched. Your polka suit is still in the Beetle’s trunk, right?”

“Yes.”

I nodded. Then I looked up. And up. And up. Another flash of lightning illuminated the pale, towering terror of Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton mankind has ever discovered.

“Okay, Butters,” I told him. “Go get it.”

Chapter

Thirty-nine

By the time we got outside, the storm had turned into something with its own vicious will. Rain lashed down in blinding, cold sheets. Wind howled like a starving beast, lightning burned almost continually across the sky, and the accompanying thunder was a constant, rumbling snarl. This was the kind of storm that came only once or twice in a century, and I had never seen its equal.

That said, the entire thing was nothing but a side effect of the magical forces now at work over the city. The apprehension, tension, fear, and anger of its people had coalesced into dark power that rode over Chicago in the storm. The Erlking’s presence—I could still hear the occasional shrieking howl amidst the storm’s angry roaring—stirred that energy even more.

I shielded my eyes from the rain as best I could with one hand, staring up at the lightning-threaded skies. There, a few miles to the north, I found what I had expected—a slow and massive rotation in the storm clouds, a spiral of fire and air and water that rolled with ponderous grace through its cycle.

“There!” I called back to Butters, and pointed. “You see it?”

“My God,” he said. He clutched at my shoulders with both hands to hold himself steady, and his bass drum pulsed steadily behind me. “Is that it?”

“That’s it,” I growled. I shook the water from my eyes and clutched at the saddlehorn to keep my balance. “It’s starting.”

“What a mess,” Butters said. He glanced behind us, at the broken brick and debris and wreckage of the museum’s front doors. “Is she all right?”

“One way to find out,” I growled. “Hah, mule!”

I laid my left hand on the rough, pebbled skin of my steed and willed it forward. The saddle lurched, and I clutched hard with my other hand to stay on.

The first few steps were the worst. The saddle sat at a sharp incline not too unlike that on a rearing horse. But as my mount gathered speed, the length of her body tilted forward, until her spine was almost parallel with the ground.

I didn’t know this before, but as it turns out, Tyrannosaurs can really haul ass.

She might have been as long as a city bus, but Sue, despite her weight, moved with power and grace. As I’d called forth energy-charged ectoplasm to clothe the ancient bones, they had become covered in sheets of muscle and a hide of heavy, surprisingly supple quasi-flesh. She was dark grey, and there was a ripple pattern of black along her head, back, and flanks, almost like that of a jaguar. And once I had shaped the vessel, I had reached out and found the ancient spirit of the predator that had animated it in life.

Animals might not have the potential power of human remains. But the older the remains, the more magic can be drawn to fill them—and Sue was sixty-five million years old.

She had power. She had power in spades.

I had rigged the saddles to straddle her spine, just at the bend where neck joined body. I’d had to improvise to get them around her, using the long extension cords to tie them into place, and it had been ticklish as hell to get Butters on board without his losing the beat and destroying my control of the dinozombie. But Butters had pulled through.

Sue bellowed out a basso shriek that rattled nearby buildings and broke a few windows as she hurtled forward down the streets of the city. The blinding rain and savage storm had left the streets all but deserted, but even so, there were earthquakes less noticeable than a freaking Tyrannosaur. The streets literally shook under her feet. In fact, we left acres of strained, cracked asphalt behind us.

Here’s something else I bet you didn’t know about Tyrannosaurs: they don’t corner well. The first time I tried to take a left, Sue swung wide, the enormous momentum of her body simply too much for even her muscles to lightly command. She swung up onto the sidewalk, crushed three parked cars under her feet, knocked over two light poles, kicked a compact car end over end to land on its roof, and broke every window on the first two floors of the building beside us as her tail lashed back and forth in an effort to counterbalance her body.

“Oh, my God!” Butters screamed. He kept hanging on to me with his arms, stabbing his legs out alternately to either side in order to operate the bass drum strapped on his back.

“They’re probably insured!” I shouted. Thank God the streets weren’t crowded that night. I made a note to be sure to have Sue slow down a little before we turned again, and kept the focus of my will on her, her attention on the task at hand.

Just before we turned onto Lake Shore Drive we hit a National Guard checkpoint. There were a couple of army Hummers there, their headlights casting useless cones of light into the night and storm, wooden roadblocks, and two luckless GIs in rain ponchos. As Sue bore down on them, the two men stared, their faces white. One of them simply dropped his assault rifle from numb hands.

“Get out of the way, fools!” I screamed.

The two men dove for cover. Sue’s foot crashed down onto the hood of one Hummer, crushing it to the asphalt, and then we were past the checkpoint and pounding our way down the street toward Evanston.

“Heh,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “I’d love to hear how they explain that to their CO.”

“You crushed that truck!” Butters shouted. “You’re like a human wrecking ball!” There was a thoughtful pause, and then he said, “Hey, are we going anywhere near my boss’s place? Because he just won’t shut up about his new Jaguar.”

“Maybe later. For now, look sharp,” I told him. “She’s a lot faster than I thought. We’ll be there in just a minute.” I ducked under the corner of a billboard as Sue went by it. “Whatever you do, keep that drumbeat going. Do you understand?”

“Right,” Butters said. “If I stop, no more dinosaur.”

“No,” I called back. “If you stop, the dinosaur does whatever the hell it wants to.”

Shouts rose up from a side street where a couple more guardsmen saw us go by. Sue turned her head toward them and let out another challenging bellow that broke more windows and startled the guardsmen so much that they fell down. I felt a surge of simple, enormous hunger run through the beast I’d called up, as though the ancient animus I’d summoned from the spirit world was beginning to remember the finer things in life. I touched Sue’s neck again, sending a surge of my will down into her, jerking her head back around with a rumbling cough of protest.

My ears rang in the wake of that vast sound, and I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Butters was okay. His face was pale.

“If this thing gets loose,” he said. “That would be bad.”

“Which is why you shouldn’t stop the drum,” I told him. If Sue went wild, I could scarcely imagine the potential carnage she could inflict. I mean, good grief. Look at all the senseless victims in Jurassic Park II.

We hit Evanston, the first suburb of Chicago proper, which is mainly separated from Chicago by the presence of trees on the streets and a few more homes than high-rises. But given that it’s only a block or two away from the heart of Second City, the addition of trees and homes made it feel more like a park nestled down at the feet of the city.

I guided Sue into a gentler left turn onto Sheridan, slowing down enough to be sure that we wouldn’t swerve off the street. As Sue headed in, I was suddenly struck with the realization of how fragile those homes seemed. Good Lord, another driving accident like the one back in town would result in a home being crushed, and not just some dents and broken windows. We would be moving among precisely the people I was trying to protect—families, homes with children and parents and pets and grandparents. Decent folks, for the most part, who just wanted to make their homes peaceful and secure and go about their lives.

Of course, if I didn’t hurry up and stop the Darkhallow, every house I was now passing would be filled with its dead.

I checked the sky during the next long flicker of lightning and didn’t like what I saw. The clouds were spinning faster, more broadly, and unnatural colors and striations had appeared in their formation. And we were almost under its center.

I guided Sue down another side street, and that’s when I felt the cloud of power gathering before me. It swirled and writhed against my wizard’s senses, sending tingling shafts of heat and cold and other, less recognizable sensations running through me. I shuddered at the disorienting strength of it.

There was magic being wrought ahead. A lot of it.

“There!” Butters shouted, pointing. “Down that way, that whole block is the campus!”

Lightning flashed again as I turned Sue down the street, and it was over the dinosaur’s broad head that I saw Wardens battling for their lives in the street ahead.

They were in trouble. Luccio had them moving in a tight group around a cluster of…Hell’s bells, around a group of children in colorful Halloween costumes. Morgan was at the head of the group, Luccio brought up the rear, and Yoshimo, Kowalski, and Ramirez were on the flanks.

Even as I watched, I saw dozens of rotting forms lurch out of the shadows ahead of them and charge. More came running in behind them, letting out wails of mad anger.

Luccio whirled to deal with them. And dear God, I suddenly saw the difference between a strong but somewhat clumsy young wizard and a master of the magic of battle.

Fire lashed from her left hand—not a gout of flame like I could call up, but a slender needle of fire so bright that it hurt the eyes to see. She swept it in an arc at thigh level, and every one of the zombies coming behind went tumbling to the ground amidst crackling sounds of shattering muscle and singeing meat. Another wave surged up behind the first. Luccio caught one of them in a grip of invisible power and hurled the undead into the ones behind, sending more of them to the ground, but a pair of the zombies got through.

Luccio ducked the grasping arms of the first, caught the thing by a wrist, and sent it stumbling aside with a twist of her body that reminded me of one of Murphy’s moves. The second zombie drove a hammer-heavy blow at her head, but that slender blade she wore at her side swept up out of its scabbard and took off its arm at the elbow. Another move brought a chiming surge of some power I could feel even from half a block away singing through the silver steel of her sword, and she flicked it lightly at the zombie’s head. The blade touched, there was a flash of light, and the zombie abruptly fell limp to the ground, the magic that had animated it disrupted and gone.

In less than five seconds, Luccio had simply wiped out thirty undead, and it hadn’t even been a contest.

I guess you don’t get to be commander of the Wardens by collecting bottle caps, either.

My eyes flickered back to the front of the group, where Morgan met the shock of another wave. His style was rougher and more brutal than Luccio’s, but he got similar results. A heavy stomp of his foot sent a ripple through the earth that knocked undead to the ground like bowling pins. A gesture of his hand and wrist and a cry of effort drew grasping waves of concrete and earth up to clamp down on the fallen zombies. He closed his fist, and the earth tightened, drawing back down into the ground, cutting and tearing its way through undead flesh and ripping the zombies to shreds. One of the creatures was still mobile, and with a look of contemptuous impatience on his face, Morgan drew the broadsword at his hip—the one used for executions of wizards guilty of breaking one of the Laws of Magic—paused a beat to get the timing right, and then swung, once, twice, snicker-snack, and the zombie fell apart into a number of wriggling bits.

Several others got through here and there. Kowalski hammered one to the ground with unseen force, while beside him Yoshimo twisted a hand and the branches of a nearby tree reached down of their own accord, wrapped around the undead’s throat, and hauled it up off the ground. Ramirez, a fighter’s grin on his face, lashed out with some kind of bright green energy I had never seen before, and the zombie nearest him simply fell apart into what looked like grains of sand. As an afterthought, he drew his sidearm as a second creature charged him, and calmly put two rounds into its head from less than ten feet away. He must have been loaded up with hollow points or something, because the creature’s head exploded like rotten fruit and the rest fell twitching to the ground.

None of the zombies got within ten feet of the terrified children.

More of them materialized out of the rain and the night, but Luccio and the Wardens kept moving steadily forward, burning and crushing and slicing and dicing their way across the street, furiously determined to get the children clear.

Which is probably why they didn’t see the sucker punch coming.

Out of nowhere there was the roar of an engine, and an old Chrysler shot forward along the street. The driver pulled it into a sharp left turn as it got close to the Wardens and their charges, and the wet rain turned it into a broadside slide. The car swept forward like an enormous broom of iron and steel, and none of the Wardens were looking that way.

I cried out to Sue and hung on to the saddlehorn.

The car slid, sending out a bow wave of sheeting water from the wet street.

Ramirez’s head snapped around toward the car and he shrieked a warning. But it was too late to get out of the way. The group was still under attack, and the mindless creations that assaulted them cared nothing for self-preservation. They would continue the fight, and even if the Wardens could have run from the car, they would never survive being mobbed by the undead in the chaos. In a flash of insight, I realized that these were the same tactics Grevane had used at my apartment—ruthlessly sacrificing minions in order to defeat the enemy.

Everyone else’s head turned toward the oncoming car.

The muscles of Sue’s legs tensed, and the saddle lurched.

One of the little girls screamed.

And then the Tyrannosaur came down from the leap that had carried her over the besieged Wardens. Sue landed with one clawed foot on the street, and the other came down squarely on the Caddy’s hood, like a falcon descending upon a rabbit. There was an enormous sound of shrieking metal and breaking glass, and the saddle lurched wildly again.

I leaned over to see what had happened. The car’s hood and engine block had been compacted into a two-foot-thick section of twisted metal. Even as I looked, Sue leaned over the car in a curiously birdlike movement, opened her enormous jaws, and ripped the roof off.

Inside was Li Xian, dressed in a black shirt and trousers. The ghoul’s forehead had a nasty gash in it, and green-black blood had sheeted over one side of his face. His eyes were blank and a little vague, and I figured he’d clipped his head on the steering wheel or window when Sue brought his sliding car to an abrupt halt.

Li Xian shook his head and then started to scramble out of the car. Sue roared again, and the sound must have terrified Li Xian, because all of his limbs jerked in spasm and he fell on his face to the street. Sue leaned down again, her jaws gaping, but the ghoul rolled under the car to get away from them. So Sue kicked the car, and sent it tumbling end over end three or four times down the street.

The ghoul let out a scream and stared up at Sue in naked terror, covering his head with his arms.

Sue ate him. Snap. Gulp. No more ghoul.

“What’s with that?” Butters screamed, his voice high and frightened. “Just covering his head with his arms? Didn’t he see the lawyer in the movie?”

“Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” I replied, turning Sue around. “Hang on!”

I rode the dinosaur into the stream of zombies following in the Wardens’ wake and let her go to town. Sue chomped and stomped and smacked zombies fifty feet through the air with swinging blows of her snout. Her tail batted one particularly vile-looking zombie into the brick wall of the nearest building, and the zombie hit so hard and so squishily that it just stuck to the wall like a refrigerator magnet, arms and legs spread in a sprawl.

In a couple of minutes there wasn’t much in the way of zombies to keep on demolishing, so I swung Sue around to pace after the Wardens. They had gotten clear of the street while I covered their retreat, and I saw Warden Luccio at the door of the nearest building, waving the last two children and Ramirez through the door while she watched out behind.

I guided Sue up to the building, and had her settle down to the ground. “Come on. But keep the drum going,” I told Butters.

We slid out of our saddles and ran a couple of steps through the heavy rain to where Luccio stood at the door.

“Hey, there,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”

Luccio stared at me for a moment and then at the dinosaur. Her eyes held a mixture of wonder, anger, gratitude, and revulsion. “I…Dio, Dresden. What have you done?”

“It isn’t a mortal,” I said. “It’s an animal. You know the laws are there to protect our fellow wizards and mortals.”

“It’s…” She looked like she might throw up. “It’s necromancy,” she said.

“It’s necessary,” I said, and my voice sounded harsh. I hooked a thumb up. “You’ve seen the vortex forming?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Dark power. Kemmler’s people are going to call it down and devour it along with all the shades they could get to show up, and if they go through with it and turn one of themselves into a god…”

Luccio’s eyes widened as she figured it out and caught on. “There will be a vacuum,” she said. “It will draw in magic to replace it. It will draw in life.”

“Right,” I said. “And they’re going to be over there, directly under the vortex,” I said. “But if anyone tries to go in without a field of necromantic energy around them, the vortex will suck them dry before they get there. We need to get in there to stop them. That’s why I borrowed Tiny, here. So don’t give me any crap about the Laws of Magic, or at least wait for later, because there are too many lives at stake.”

Anger flickered over her face and she opened her mouth. Then she frowned and closed it again. “Where did you get this information?”

“Kemmler’s book,” I said.

“You found it?”

I grimaced. “Briefly. Grevane jumped me and took it.”

Butters looked back and forth between us, marching in place to make the polka suit’s drumbeat.

Luccio blinked at him, took a deep breath, then said, “And who is this?”

“The drummer I needed to pull this off,” I told her. “And a good friend. He saved my life tonight. Butters, this is Ms. Luccio. Captain, this is Butters.”

Luccio gave Butters a courtly little bow, and he ducked his head sheepishly in reply.

“Where did you find those kids?” I asked.

She grimaced. “This building is an apartment complex. We got here just as the first of the undead arose. One of the parents was screaming about the children being at some sort of Halloween party in a building on campus. We were too late to save the women taking care of them, but at least we got the children out.”

I chewed on my lip, studying the Warden. “You had evil wizards to gun down. And you stopped to get some kids out of the line of fire? I figured Wardens would have melted the bad guys first, tried to get the civilians clear later.”

She lifted her chin and regarded me with an arched brow. “Is that how you think of us?”

“Yes,” I said.

She frowned, and looked down at the hilt of her sword. “Dresden…the Wardens are not, as a rule, concerned with compassion or empathy. But they were children. I am not proud of my every act as a Warden. But I would sooner hurl myself to the demons than leave a child to die.”

I frowned at her. “You would,” I said thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t you?”

She smiled a little, her iron-grey hair plastered to her head with the rain, and it made many wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. “Not all of us share Morgan’s attitudes. But even he would never have turned aside from children in danger. He is an enormous ass at times. But a brilliant soldier. And beneath all his flaws, a decent man.”

The door to the building slammed open and Morgan came through, sword gripped in both hands. “I told you,” he said viciously to Luccio. “I told you he would turn on us. This latest violation of the laws only proves what I’ve said all along….” Hisvoice trailed off slowly as he caught me from the corner of his eye and turned to see me standing there, and Sue crouched a couple of yards behind me.

“Yeah,” I told Luccio, and my voice was the only dry thing about me. “I see what you mean.”

“Morgan, he found the book.” She looked at me. “Tell him.”

I relayed everything I had learned to Morgan. He glowered at me with enormous suspicion, but by the time I got to the part where thousands of people would die if we failed to stop the spell, his face became drawn with anxiety and then hardened with determination. He listened without interrupting.

“We need to get to the center of the spell,” I finished. “Attack them just as they try to draw it down.”

“It’s impossible,” Morgan said. “I got close enough to see them when we went in for the children. They’re in a little patch of grass and picnic tables between the buildings. There are several hundred animated corpses in our way.”

“As it happens,” I said, jerking my head at Sue, “I brought an animated corpse countermeasure along with me tonight. I’ll get us through.”

Morgan stared at me for a second and then nodded, the idea clearly gathering momentum in his thoughts. “Yes, then. We try to hit them as they complete the spell. That gives them the most time to backstab one another, and if we disrupt a working that powerful, the backlash will probably kill them.”

“Agreed,” Luccio said. “How’s Yoshimo?”

“Ramirez says her thigh is broken,” Morgan growled. “She’s not in danger but she won’t be doing any more fighting tonight.”

“Dammit,” Luccio said. “I should have caught that one before it went through.”

“No, Captain,” Morgan said implacably. “She should never have tried her sword on it. She was an unremarkable fencer, at best.”

“Gosh you’re a sweetheart, Morgan,” I said.

He glared at me, and the sword quivered in his hands.

Luccio brought her hand down between us in a gesture of absolute authority. “Gentlemen,” she said quietly. “Later. We’ve no time.”

Morgan took a deep breath in and then nodded.

I folded my arms and kept up my glower, but I hadn’t been the one near violence. Point, Dresden.

“I’ve done for Grevane’s drummer, and Sue just ate Corpsetaker’s sidekick,” I said. “That leaves us with those two and Cowl, plus Cowl’s assistant.”

“Four of them and five of us,” Morgan said.

Luccio grimaced. “It could be worse,” she admitted. “But only you and I have any experience with this kind of fight.” She glanced at me. “No offense, Dresden, but you’re young, and you haven’t seen this kind of duel very often—but even you have more experience than Ramirez or Kowalski.”

“None taken,” I said, beginning to shiver in the rain. “I’d rather be home in bed.”

“Morgan, please get the other Wardens and fill them in. Then put Yoshimo where she can see the front door and defend the building. If things don’t go well, we may need somewhere to fall back.”

“If things don’t go well,” I said, “we really won’t have to worry about that.”

Morgan shook his head at me. “I’ll be right back.”

I stood there for a moment. A mangled zombie wandered up the sidewalk. I walked back to Sue and touched her flank and her thoughts, and she flicked her tail, batting the thing away into the darkness. Then I walked back over to Luccio.

“Incredible,” she said quietly, looking at Sue. “Dresden, this…this kind of magic is an abomination. Perhaps a necessary one this night, but hideous all the same. And yet look at it. It’s amazing.”

“Pretty good for zombie crushing too,” I said.

“Indeed.” She looked up at the sky again. “How will we know when they begin drawing down the power?”

I started to say, “Your guess is as good as mine,” but I didn’t get any of it out of my mouth before the clouds rolled and stirred and suddenly began to spin in a single enormous spiral. More lightning showed me the dim form of what looked like a thin, almost spidery tornado that dropped from the cloud and began to descend to the ground.

I stiffened and nodded at it. “There you go,” I said. “They’re starting now.”

“Very well,” Luccio said. “Then we must move at once. I want you to—”

Luccio didn’t get to tell me what she wanted me to do, because the earth suddenly boiled with writhing masses of pale green light that came surging up out of the ground. They took on form as they came, first vaguely human, then over the next instants resolving into clearer images of what looked like Amerind tribesmen. As they came, their mouths opened in shrieks and wails of excitement and rage, and ghostly weapons appeared in their hands—spears and hatchets, clubs and bows.

One of them turned and threw a translucent, shimmering spear at my chest. I barely had time to think, but my left arm swept up, my charred shield bracelet exploded into a cloud of blue and white sparks, and the hurled spear shattered into angry green flames against my shield. I heard a short cry beside me and ducked, narrowly avoiding a swing from a spectral hatchet whose wielder floated over me. I threw myself forward and rolled, coming up with my shield ready and my will gathering in my staff, making the sigils carved along its length glow with sullen fire.

A specter swung a club at Luccio, and she rolled with the blow, but even so took a hit to her jaw and mouth that staggered her. She recovered her balance, ducked to avoid a second swing, and once more drew the silver sword of a Warden from her hip. Again the blade sang with that buzzing power I’d sensed before, and Luccio made a clean lunge at the specter that thrust the blade through its heart. The specter arched as if in agony and then simply exploded into flashes of sickly light and falling globs of ectoplasm. Luccio swept her sword back and spun on a heel to face two more of the quasi-solid spirits.

I blocked a second blow of the hatchet on my shield, looking wildly around for Butters. I spotted the little guy five yards away, on his hands and knees on the crosswalk, his legs still kicking wildly to keep the drum going. Three of the deadly specters were closing in on him with wails of madness and rage.

“Butters!” I shouted, and rose to go to him, but two more specters dove at me and forced me to crouch behind my shield. I could only watch what happened as the three undead swarmed Butters and attacked him.

Butters spun around wildly, his eyes down, evidently not even aware that they were coming. One of them swung a great two-handed club back, as Butters put one hand to his mouth and then slammed it back down on the ground again. The specter’s weapon swept down with a clean and lethal grace, heading directly for the back of Butters’s head.

And suddenly shattered against the curving curtain of an empowered circle.

Butters looked up at the specters as they flailed uselessly against the circle. He had the piece of chalk I’d given him in one hand, and he’d torn the little cut he’d used before open once more with his teeth. He stood up, the drum still thumping, and gave me a shaky thumbs-up.

“Good, Butters!” I shouted at him. “Stay in there!”

He nodded, his face pale, and marched in place to keep the drum going.

I swung my staff at a specter and hit it, and the ghostly warrior reacted as if struck by a heavy brick. It was a curious kind of impact—not the thudding thump of hitting something solid, but some kind of impact nonetheless. I knew from the way that the specters had come up through the earth that they were only partially material. A material impact would have little enough effect on them, and the strength of my arm behind the swing meant nothing to them. But the power of my will that I had called up and held ready in my staff—that was something else. That energy was what the specter reacted to, and I pressed my advantage, whipping my staff through the specter’s head and belly on two separate swings, driving the apparition away with howls of pain.

In the time it took me to do that, Luccio had simply dispatched three more of the specters with the humming power of her Warden’s blade. She looked at me, her eyes wide, and lifted a pointing finger. She snarled a word, and another searing thread of flame shot over my shoulder about eight inches from my right ear. There was a howl, and I turned my head to see another specter that had been charging my back fall, consumed in scarlet flame.

I felt a fierce grin on my face and I turned around to nod my thanks to Luccio—and saw the Corpsetaker come out from under a veil of magic and swing her drawn tulwar at Luccio’s back.

“Captain!” I shouted.

Luccio’s sword arm swept up and around, blade parallel to her spine as she drew it around her shoulders in a circle, and caught Corpsetaker’s attack without even turning to face it. Luccio sprang forward like a cat and spun in place, only to have Corpsetaker press her attack and drive the captain of the Wardens back on her heels.

Corpsetaker’s young face was set in a wide and manic smile, cheeks dimpled, her curly hair flying wildly around her head as she charged. She wore a small skin drum of some kind on a rig at her hip, and she beat a swift tattoo on it with one hand while fighting with the other. A fresh cloud of specters swirled up in support of her, and a flying arrow drew a line of scarlet on Luccio’s cheek.

I roared out a challenge, brandished my staff, and bellowed, “Forzare!” A lance of unseen force lashed out at Corpsetaker, but the necromancer leapt back and away from it. She cried out words in an unknown tongue, and half a dozen specters darted toward me.

I brought up my shield, but was soon hard-pressed to even hold it up against repeated attacks from the specters, and they kept trying to circle around me. If I’d stood my ground they would have killed me, and as much as I wanted to help Luccio, I had no choice but to take one step back after another, until I found my shoulders pressed against Sue’s enormous flank.

But my attack on the Corpsetaker had bought Luccio what she needed to make a fight of things—time to recover from the surprise attack. She cut down two more specters with needles of flame, contemptuously slapped aside another cut from Corpsetaker’s tulwar, and then took the battle to the necromancer, grey cloak flying in the storm’s wind, pressing her hard with the silver rapier and driving Corpsetaker back one step after another.

I dropped the staff and slapped my bare hand on Sue’s hide. Though the dinosaur looked like a living beast, that was only appearance. Her own flesh was made of the same ectoplasm that the specters were—I had just poured enough energy into it to make it seem more solid. She was of the same stuff as the specters—and that meant that she could hurt them.

The Tyrannosaur stirred and then snapped her jaws to one side, closing on a specter and tearing it into fading light and globs of goo. She heaved herself to her feet, eyes sweeping around the ground in front of her for the next specter. It lifted a bow and loosed a glowing green arrow that sank into the muscle of her neck, and she bellowed in pain, but the arrow was no more than a bee’s sting. One clawed foot came up and down and destroyed a second specter. The others let out wails and shouts of fear and anger and spread out to attack Sue, while the dinosaur lashed her tail around and looked for the next victim.

I saw Luccio drive Corpsetaker forward and around the corner of the building out of sight. I’d given the specters a bigger problem to worry about, and I went after Luccio.

“Harry!” Butters shouted, pointing.

I looked up at the building. I heard children screaming inside. Someone—Ramirez, I thought—screamed, “Get down, get down!” There were flashes of luminous green light swirling here and there in the windows. I heard Morgan shout a challenge, and I heard a raucous booming sound from within. The Wardens there were under attack as well.

“Stay put!” I told him, and ran after Luccio.

It was too thick with shadow to see easily around the side of the building, but in a flash of lightning I saw Luccio make another lunge—her technique gorgeous, back leg stretched forward, spine straight, the sword extended and taking the full weight of her body behind its vicious tip. Luccio knew what she was doing. She dipped the tip of her blade under Corpsetaker’s tulwar, and the point sank into the necromancer just under the floating ribs. Corpsetaker’s mad smile never faltered.

The lightning died away and I heard a short, gasping cry.

I took my mother’s pentacle in hand and lifted it, willing light from it. Silver-blue light filled the little space between buildings. I saw Luccio plant her feet, twist the blade viciously, and whip it back out again.

Corpsetaker fell to her knees. She stared down at her chest and then pressed her hands tightly to the wound. She looked up again, staring at Luccio and then at me. Her eyes clouded over with confusion, and she slowly toppled to her side on the grass.

“Excellent,” said Luccio, turning around. She flicked blood from the silver blade and regarded it for a moment, then strode with purposeful steps for the front of the building again. “Come, wizard. We have no time to waste.”

“You’re going to leave her there?”

“She’s finished,” Luccio said harshly. “Come.”

“Are you all right?” I said.

She shot a hard look at me. “Perfectly. Grevane and Cowl remain. We must find them and kill them.” Her eyes flicked to the spiraling clouds overhead. “And quickly. We have only moments. Hurry, fool.”

I stood there for a second, staring at Luccio’s back. I lifted the pentacle and looked at Corpsetaker’s body, lying on its side in the rain. She twitched a little, her dark eyes wide and staring blindly, her face pale.

And my stomach twisted in sudden fear.

I stepped around the corner of the building with my .44 in my hand, aimed it at the back of Luccio’s head, drew back the hammer, and shouted, my voice harsh and hard, “Corpsetaker!”

Luccio’s steps faltered. Her head snapped around to look at me, and in her eyes I saw a brutal cruelty that could never have belonged to the captain of the Wardens.

I felt the first tug of a soulgaze, but I made my decision in the moment that my voice caused her steps to falter. She opened her mouth, and I saw the Corpsetaker’s madness twist Luccio’s eyes, felt the sudden, dark tension as she began to gather power.

She never got it. In that single second of uncertainty, Corpsetaker had been relying upon her disguise to defend her, and had her mind bent upon planning her next step—not preparing her death curse. The bullet from my .44 hit her just over her right cheekbone.

Her head snapped back and then forward. It might have been Luccio’s body, but it was the Corpsetaker’s expression of shock and surprise as the stolen body fell to the ground in a loose tangle of dead limbs.

I heard a low, strangled sound.

I looked up to see Morgan standing in the building’s doorway, sword in hand. He stared at Luccio’s corpse and rasped, “Captain.”

I stared at him for a second, and then fumbled for words. “Morgan. This isn’t what it looks like.”

Morgan’s dark eyes rose to focus on me, and his face twisted with rage. “You.” His voice was deadly quiet. The sword rose to a guard and he stalked out into the rain, and his voice rose to a wrathful roar as the ground—the freaking ground—began to literally shake. “Murderer! Traitor!”

Oh, shit.

Chapter

Forty

Morgan lashed his fist out at me, shouting something that sounded vaguely Greek, and the very rocks of the earth rippled up in a wave that flew toward me with incredible speed.

I had never fought against earth magic in earnest before, but I knew enough about it to not want to be in the way when it got to me. The gun went back in my pocket, and I took my staff in hand and ran for the nearest tree. I thrust the staff back at the earth as I ran, gathered in my will, and shouted, “Forzare!”

Unseen force lashed out at the ground behind me and flung me up at an angle. I hit the branches of the tree maybe ten feet up and scrambled wildly to grab one. I did it, and though it shook the tree like a blow from a giant ax, the wave of power went by under me without, oh, sucking me under the ground or crushing me or anything like that. I can’t imagine that whatever Morgan had in mind was less than horribly violent.

Morgan bellowed in rage and charged toward me, sword in hand. I jerked my legs up and he missed my ankles, if not by much. He snarled in rage, whirled with the silver sword of the Wardens abruptly emitting a low howling sound, and struck at the trunk of the tree in a motion of focus and power that reminded me of way too many Kurosawa movies. There was a flash of light as the blade cut all the way through the tree’s trunk, the heat of all that force setting both sides of the cut on fire as the tree started to fall.

I dropped clear and rolled as the tree fell out toward the street, and Morgan darted to one side, trying to get around the fallen tree to kill me.

“Morgan!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, man! That wasn’t Luccio!”

“Lies!” Morgan snarled. He abandoned chasing me around the tree in favor of simply hacking his way through it, and the sword in his hands howled again and again as he struck, cutting trunk and branches like bits of straw.

“It was the Corpsetaker!” I shouted. “The body thief! She let Luccio gut her and then switched places with her!”

His answer was an almost incoherent snarl. He came the last several feet faster than I could have believed and lashed at me with the sword. I brought my shield up and deflected the blow, but the impact of it slammed painfully against the whole left side of my body. There was more than simply physics behind that blade. I backpedaled out into the street, where several more zombies saw me and headed my way. Specters darted or looped lazily about now, with no sense of purpose in them at all, now that their drum was silent and the Corpsetaker was dead.

“Morgan!” I screamed. “Luccio might still be alive! But not if she doesn’t get help, and soon! We can’t do this!”

“More lies!” He murmured something, the blade in his hands hummed as Luccio’s had, and he flicked it lightly out against my shield.

There was a shrieking scream—in my head, rather than in my ears. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that bad audio feedback is musical and soothing by comparison. The power in the silver sword hit my defensive shield and simply undid it, unraveled it, so that all the energy in it went flying apart in all directions, while a hot, tingling pain flashed through my left arm where I wore the bracelet.

Morgan attacked in earnest after that little flick of the blade had destroyed my defense, but his first swing was an overhand one, aimed at my temple. I knocked the blade aside with a sweep of my staff, and saw a flash of surprise cross his face at the speed of the parry. He recovered his balance, but I simply ran from him, taking that vital second to get moving again. Morgan cursed and followed me, but I can move, especially for a man my size, and Morgan wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.

I gained ten or twelve feet on him before my legs suddenly became unsteady and I faltered and nearly fell. I wanted to scream in frustration. Though I didn’t feel how much pain my body was in, it was battered and weak. There was no way I could simply outrun him, but I made it back over to where my dinosaur stood, restlessly idle after driving away the specters. I got close enough to touch her and slapped at her flank, desperately willing my intentions to her tiny brain. Doubtless, savvy necromancers had ways of conveying their orders over a distance, but I was new at this, and I had no intentions of refining my technique anytime soon.

Sue spun around as Morgan charged, leaned down low, and opened her vast jaws in a bellow of challenge.

Say what you will about Morgan, the man was no coward. But the bellow of an angry Tyrannosaur is enough to give any mammal a moment or two of doubt. He slid to a halt on his heels, still grasping the sword in his left hand, and stared at Sue and then at me. He took a deep breath and then reached out his right hand, where there was a low, yawning, humming sound that shook the air around his fingers.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not even this creature will keep you from justice this time, Dresden. Even if I have to die doing it.”

I stared at Morgan, the same old frustration and fear suddenly yielding to a realization. I had always assumed that Morgan’s irrational hatred was something personal, reserved for me and me alone. I had assumed that for whatever reason, Morgan’s persecution was the result of the political and philosophical enmity of certain members of the White Council, that he was nothing but a pawn for someone higher up in the game.

But politicians don’t make good kamikazes. That kind of dedication is reserved for zealots of principle and lunatics. For the first time I considered the notion that perhaps Morgan’s hate was not directed at me personally, but at those that he truly believed to be violators of the Laws of Magic, murderers and traitors. I knew people who would face death, even embrace it, rather than surrender their principles. Karrin Murphy was one of them, and I was friends with most of the rest.

At the end of the day, Morgan was a cop. He worked for a different body of law, of course, and under a different set of guidelines, but his duties were the same: Pursue, combat, and apprehend those who violated the laws put in place to protect people from harm. He’d spent more than a century as a policeman dealing with some of the more nightmarish things on the planet. Thinking of him in that light suddenly gave me a different understanding of Morgan’s character.

I’d seen burned-out cops before. They’d labored long and hard in the face of danger and uncertainty to uphold the law and protect the victims of crimes, only to see both the law and the victims it should have protected broken, beaten, and abused again and again. It mostly happened to the cops who genuinely cared, who believed in what they were doing, who passionately wanted to make a difference in the world. Somewhere along the way, their passion had become bottled anger. The anger had fermented into bitter hatred. Then the hatred had fed upon itself, gnawing away at them over years, even decades, until only a shell of cold iron and colder hate remained.

I didn’t feel contempt for burned-out cops. I didn’t feel anger toward them. All I ever felt was sadness and empathy for their pain. They’d seen too much in their daily battle against criminals. Ten or twenty or thirty years of witnessing the most monstrous aspects of humanity had slowly turned them into walking casualties of war.

And Morgan had been on his beat for more than a century.

Morgan didn’t hate me. He hated the bad guys. He hated the wizards who abused the power he had dedicated his life to using to protect others. When he looked at me, he didn’t see Harry Dresden. He could see only the atrocities and tragedies that had burned themselves into his mind and heart. I understood him. It didn’t make me like him, but I could understand the pain that drove him to persecute me.

Of course, my sensitivity and empathy were completely irrelevant, because they wouldn’t do a damned thing to stop him. If he charged me, I wouldn’t have any options.

“Morgan,” I rasped. “Please don’t. We can’t let Corpsetaker divide us like this. Can’t you see that? That was her intention when she took Luccio.”

“Traitor,” he snarled. “Liar.”

I ground my teeth in frustration. “My God, man, thousands of people are about to die!”

His mouth twisted, baring his teeth all the way to the gums. “And you will be the first.”

If he charged me again, I wouldn’t have any choice but to fight, and he was at least as strong as me, and far more experienced—not to mention the enchantment-breaking silver sword in his hand. If I didn’t kill him fast, he would kill me. It was as simple as that. And even if I did kill him, he would spend his death curse on me—and it wouldn’t be like the feeble thing Cassius had thrown. Morgan would obliterate me.

I couldn’t run. I couldn’t survive fighting him, regardless of whether or not I beat him. The best I could hope for would be to take him with me. If I died, Sue would go wild, reverting to the instincts of her ancient spirit. She would hunt. People would die.

But, if Morgan died, it would leave only Kowalski and Ramirez to stop Cowl and Grevane. Even if they could manage to pull off some kind of necromancy to shield them from the vortex as they went in, they would never be able to beat the necromancers within. They would certainly die, and not long after that the Darkhallow would annihilate thousands of innocent lives.

With Morgan leading them, they might have a chance. Not a good one, but at least there was a chance.

Which meant that if I wanted to stop the Darkhallow and save all those lives, I had only one choice. I leaned my suddenly trembling hand against Sue’s leg, and she sank back into a passive crouch.

Morgan let out a bellow of defiance and determination and rushed me.

I lowered my shield. My heart pounded with a fear so strong that I nearly threw up.

The lightning gleamed on the silver blade of his sword.

I dropped my staff to the ground and faced him, arms at my sides, my hands clenched into terrified fists. I readied my will, my own death curse, picturing Grevane in my thoughts. At least I could give the Wardens a better chance for victory if I could kill or cripple one of the bastards on my way out.

Time stretched out into an endless moment. I watched Morgan’s sword sweep up to the vertical, the blade a gorgeous silver that reflected the lightning ripping apart the spinning vortex behind me.

“Harry!” Butters screamed, his voice horrified, the drum pounding frantically.

As Morgan struck, I took the coward’s way out and closed my eyes.

I knew that it was inevitable that one day I would die.

But I didn’t want to watch it coming.

Chapter

Forty-one

A gunshot rang out.

Morgan jerked at the hips, suddenly thrown off balance. He spun gracelessly and fell to the ground.

I stared at him in shock.

Morgan let out a snarl, fixed his eyes on me, and lifted his right hand, deep and terrifying power gathering in it.

“Morgan!” snapped a woman’s voice. That voice rang with authority and confidence, with command. The speaker damned well knew that when she gave an order that it would be obeyed, and imbued the command with a power that had nothing to do with magic. “Stand down!”

Morgan froze for an instant and glanced over his shoulder.

Ramirez stood twenty feet away, his pistol smoking in his hand. The other arm was supporting the weight of the girl I had known as the Corpsetaker. The girl’s face was as pale as death, and she could not possibly have been standing on her own, but though her features were exactly the same as when Corpsetaker had been in the body, she did not look like the same person. Her eyes were narrowed and hard, and her expression was filled with a stern, almost regal confidence.

“You heard me,” the girl snapped. “Stand down!”

“Who are you?” Morgan asked.

“Morgan,” Ramirez said. “Dresden was telling the truth. This is Captain Luccio.”

“No,” Morgan said, shaking his head, but his voice lacked his usual absolute conviction. “No, it’s a lie.”

“It’s no lie,” Ramirez said. “I soulgazed her. It’s the captain.”

Morgan’s lips worked soundlessly, but he didn’t release the strike he held ready in his hand.

“Morgan,” the girl said, quietly this time. “It’s all right. Stand down.”

“You aren’t the captain,” Morgan mumbled. “You can’t be. It’s a trick.”

The girl, Luccio, abruptly put on a lopsided smile. “Donald,” she said. “Dear idiot. I’m the one who trained you. I am fairly certain that you do not know as much as I do about who I am.” Luccio lifted her arm and showed Morgan the silver rapier she’d carried before. She took it in her hand and whipped it in a circle, eliciting a steady, humming power, as I’d felt before. “There. Could another so employ my own blade?”

Morgan stared at her for a moment. Then his hand dropped, suddenly limp, the power he’d held draining away.

My heart started beating again, and I leaned heavily against Sue’s flank.

Ramirez holstered his gun and helped the new Luccio over to Morgan’s side, then lowered her gently to the ground beside him.

“You’re hurt,” Morgan said. His own face had gone white with pain. “How bad is it?”

Luccio tried a small smile. “I’m afraid I aimed too well. The wound has done for me. It may take some time, that’s all.”

“My God,” Morgan said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I saw Dresden shoot you and…while you were bleeding. Needed help.”

Luccio raised a weak hand. “No time,” she said gently.

Ramirez had bent over Morgan, meanwhile, and was examining the gunshot wound. The bullet had caught Morgan in the back of one leg, and it looked messy. “Dammit,” Ramirez said. “It hit his knee. It’s shattered.” He placed his fingers lightly over Morgan’s knee, and the older Warden abruptly twisted in pain, his face gone bloodless. “He can’t walk.”

Luccio nodded. “Then it’s up to you.” She looked over at me. “And you, Warden Dresden.”

“What about Kowalski?” I said.

Ramirez paled. He glanced back at the apartment building and shook his head. “He was sitting on the floor when the specters rose out of it. He never had a chance.”

“No time,” Luccio said weakly. “You must go.”

Butters came marching over to us, drum still beating, his face pale. “Okay,” he said. “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

“Not you, Butters,” I said. “Sue just needs to be able to hear the drum. She’ll hear it over there just as well as if you were on her back. I want you to stay here.”

“But—”

“I can’t afford to spare effort to protect you,” I told him. “And I don’t want to leave the wounded here alone. Just keep the drum beating.”

“But I want to go with you. I want to help. I’m not afraid to”—he swallowed, face pale—“die fighting beside you.”

“Look at it this way,” I said. “If we blow it, you get to die anyhow.”

Butters stared at me for a second, and then said, “Gee. Now I feel better.”

“I believe that there’s a cloud for every silver lining,” I said. “Come on, Ramirez.”

Ramirez’s grin returned. “Everyone else who lets me ride on their dinosaur calls me Carlos.”

I climbed back up into the first saddle, and Ramirez settled into the second.

“God be with you, Harry,” Butters said, marching in place on the ground, his face worried.

Given whom I had chosen as my ally, I sort of doubted that if God went with me it would be to assist me. “I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said aloud, and laid my hand on Sue’s hide. She lurched up from her crouch, and I turned her toward the site of the vortex.

“You’re hurt,” Ramirez said. He kept his voice pitched very low.

“I can’t feel it,” I said. “I’ll worry about the rest if there’s a later. You’ve got great timing, by the way. Thank you.”

“De nada,” he said. “I was right behind Morgan. I heard you trying to talk to him about Luccio.”

“You believed me?” I started Sue forward. It would take her several steps to pick up speed.

Rodriguez sighed. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Watched you at that Council meeting. My gut says you’re okay. It was worth checking out.”

“And you soulgazed her. That was some fast thinking. And good shooting.”

“I’m brilliant as well as skilled,” he said modestly. “It’s a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can.”

I let out a short, rough laugh. “I see. I hope I won’t embarrass you, then.”

“Did I not mention my nearly godlike sense of tolerance and forgiveness?” Sue gathered speed and I turned her down the street. “Hey,” he said. “The bad guys are back that way.”

“I know,” I said. “But they’re expecting an attack from that direction. I’m going to circle the block, try to come in behind them.”

“Is there time?”

“My baby can move,” I told him. Sue broke into her run, and the ride smoothed out.

Ramirez let out a whoop of pure enjoyment. “Now this is cool,” he said. “I can’t even imagine how complicated this must have been.”

“Wasn’t complicated,” I told him.

“Oh. So summoning up dinosaurs is actually very easy, is it?”

I snorted. “Any other night, any other place, I don’t think I could have done it. But it wasn’t complicated, either. Lifting up an engine block isn’t complicated. It’s just a lot of work.”

Ramirez was silent for a moment. “I’m impressed,” he said.

I didn’t know Ramirez very well, but my sense of him told me that those were words he was not in the habit of uttering. “When you do something stupid and die, it’s pathetic,” I said. “When you do something stupid and survive it, then you get to call it impressive or heroic.”

He let out a rueful chuckle. “What we’re doing right now…” he said. His voice softened and lost its edge of brash arrogance. “It’s pathetic. Isn’t it?”

“Probably,” I said.

“On the other hand,” he said, recovering. “If we survive it, we’re heroes. Medals. Girls. Endorsements. Cars. Maybe they put us on a cereal box.”

“Seems the least they could do,” I said.

“So we’ve got two of them left to take down. Who do we hit first?”

“Grevane,” I said. “If he’s holding a bunch of zombies as guard dogs, he isn’t going to have a lot of attention to spare for defensive spells, or for throwing anything else at us. We hit him fast, hopefully put him down before he can try anything. He handled a chain like he knew how to use it when I saw him fight Corpsetaker.”

“Ugh,” Ramirez said. “Nasty. Anyone who knows their way around a kusari is a tough customer.”

“Yeah. So we shoot him.”

“Damn right, we shoot him,” Ramirez said. “This is why so many of the younger members of the Council like the way you do things, Dresden.”

I blinked. “They do?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Ramirez said. “A lot of them, like me, were apprentices when you were first tried after Justin DuMorne’s death. A lot of them are still apprentices. But there are people who think highly of what you’ve done.”

“Like you?”

“I would have done a lot of those things,” he said. “Only with a lot more style than you.”

I snorted. “Second one we’ll hit calls himself Cowl. He’s good. I’ve never seen a wizard stronger than he is, and that includes Ebenezar McCoy.”

“A lot of guys who hit hard have a glass jaw. Bet he’s all offense.”

I shook my head. “No. He’s just as good at protecting himself. I flipped a car over on top of him and it barely slowed him down.”

Ramirez frowned and nodded. “How do we take him down then?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t thought of anything good. Hit him with everything and hope something gets through. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s got an apprentice with him, called Kumori, who seems personally loyal. She’s probably strong enough to be on the Council herself.”

“Damn,” Ramirez said quietly. “She pretty?”

“She keeps her face covered,” I said. “No idea.”

“If she was pretty, I’d just turn on the Ramirez charm and have her eating out of my hand,” he said. “But I can’t take chances with that kind of power if I’m not sure she’s pretty. Used recklessly, it could endanger innocent bystanders or land me in bed with an ugly girl.”

“Can’t have that,” I said, turning Sue around another corner. I checked the vortex. The slender, spinning psuedo-tornado was more than halfway to the ground.

“All right then,” Ramirez said. “Once we’re past Grevane, I’ll take on the apprentice. You go for Cowl.”

I glanced back at him with an arched eyebrow.

“If we ignore Kumori she’ll be free to take us both out. One of us has to counter her. You’re stronger than me,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m so damned good that I make it look easy, but I’m not stupid. You have the best shot at taking Cowl down. If I can drop the apprentice, I’ll help. Sound like a plan?”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “I just wish it sounded like a winning plan.”

“You got a better idea?” Ramirez asked me cheerfully.

“No,” I said, and I turned Sue down the street that would hopefully let us attack the necromancers from the rear.

“Well, then,” he said, his smile ferocious. “Shut up and dance.”

Chapter

Forty-two

The campus of the college consisted of only a few buildings—a couple of dorms, a couple of buildings with classrooms, the Mitchell Museum, and an administrative office. The area between them was a nicely kept lawn, too small to look like a park, but larger than you’d want to mow every week. At the center of the area, directly in front of the museum, picnic tables had been overturned onto their sides around a large circle open to the skies above. I slowed Sue’s steps for a moment, to try to get some kind of idea of what we had to contend with.

Standing in silent ranks around that circle were Grevane’s style of undead—very solid, very physical, though there were relatively few of them in the half-rotted or desiccated condition of the corpses that had attacked my place. These undead looked like they might still have been saved by a snappy EMT. They all looked like Native American tribesmen, just as Corpsetaker’s specters had, though the styles of clothing and weaponry were slightly different.

One other thing was different, too: These undead radiated a kind of hideous, ephemeral cold, and their skin almost seemed to glow with its own pale, horrible light. I could sense the raw power that lay within them, even from a hundred yards away. These undead were different from those that had attacked the Wardens, as different as an old pickup truck was from a modern battle tank. These zombies would not be so easily destroyed as those others, and were likely to be far stronger, far faster.

They stood in ranks around the inner circle, facing outward, but they ranked thicker between the circle and the last location of the Wardens than on the side nearest us. I had managed to outflank the thinking of whoever had those undead in position, and the thought cheered me somewhat. Spirits and specters and formless masses of luminescent light darted and flowed around the circle like strands of kelp and bits of algae caught in a whirlpool. They were all the same unpleasant colors as the lightning in the storm, and even as I watched their numbers visibly grew. Sue paced a restless step forward, and I felt a horrible sensation of cold on the skin of my face and forehead, as if the hovering vortex above was casting out some kind of perverted inversion of sunlight. I crouched a little lower on Sue’s back and the feeling faded.

Lightning flashes from different directions cast a web of shadows over the whole place, trees and buildings collaborating with the storm to conceal much of the open circle continually clothed in shifting blocks and threads of darkness. I could see that there was someone within the circle of picnic tables, but not who, and I couldn’t even be sure of how many.

“That,” I said in a low voice, “is a lot of badass zombies.”

“And ghosts,” Ramirez said.

“And ghosts.”

“Look at it this way,” he said. “With that many of them, how can we miss?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”

I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to go find myself a hole and crawl into it. But instead I put my hand on Sue’s neck, drew her attention to the zombies, and willed her forward into battle.

Sue leapt forward and hit the nearest rank of zombies before any of them had the chance to notice her. She tore one apart with her vast jaws, smashed several others flat, crushed some with her flailing tail, and generally went to town. After her devastating initial charge, I heard a frantic man’s voice shout from within the circle, and the zombies turned to attack.

The zombies whipped out bows and spears and clubs, or else tore at Sue with their bare hands. It wasn’t pretty. Arrows streaked through the air with unnatural speed, and when they struck the Tyrannosaur’s hide they sounded almost like gunshots. One zombie rammed a spear cleanly through the massive muscle of Sue’s right thigh. A swinging club shattered several of her teeth, and even as I watched, an unarmed zombie leapt up onto her flank, got a hold of the heavy extension cord that held the saddles in place, then drove his fist into her flesh up to the elbow, and started raking out gobbets of tissue by the handful.

I brought up the sparkling blue cloud of my shield bracelet in time to intercept an arrow, and others smashed against it with the force of bullets even as I held it in place. Without being told, I felt Ramirez turn to our right, his own left hand extended, and a concave disk of green light expanded weblike from his outstretched fingertips, covering that flank from still more of them.

But as vicious and as strong and as swift and deadly as the zombies were, they couldn’t hold a candle to Sue.

The injuries that might have terrified a living beast only infuriated her, and as that rage swelled, her own grey-and-black hide gained a silvery sheen of power. She roared so loudly that my chest and belly shook and my ears screamed with pain. She caught one zombie in her jaws and flung it away. It sailed up over the nearest five-story building and out of sight in the darkness and rain. When she stomped down with her foot, she shattered the concrete of a walkway and drove a footprint more than a foot deep into the earth around it. The zombie assault turned into one enormous exercise in suicidal tactics, for whenever one of the undead warriors managed to get through to harm Sue, the Tyrannosaur not only crushed the unlife out of them, but grew that much more angry and powerful and unstoppable.

It was like riding a carnivorous earthquake.

“Look!” Ramirez screamed. “Look there!”

I followed his nod and spotted Grevane in the circle in his trench coat and fedora. The necromancer was keeping a steady beat on a drum hung from his belt, and he gripped a staff of gnarled, twisted black wood with the other. He stared at us, his face twisted in hatred, and his eyes glittered with insane malice.

I willed Sue to head for the circle, but the Tyrannosaur’s will was suddenly no longer pliable or easily led. The blood rage and fury of battle had overloaded what little mind she actually possessed, and now she was nothing but several rampaging tons of killing machine.

“Hurry!” Ramirez shouted.

“She’s not listening!” I told him. I applied my will even more forcefully, but it was like one man struggling to hold back a bulldozer. I gritted my teeth, desperately trying to figure a way to get Sue where I wanted her, and hit on one idea. Instead of trying to stop her battle rage, I encouraged it, and then I pointed her at the zombies nearer to the circle.

Sue responded with bloodlust and glee, swerving to charge toward the zombies nearest the circle, crushing and rekilling them as she went.

“We have to jump!” I shouted.

“Wahoo!” Ramirez cried, his smile blazing white.

Sue pursued a dodging zombie to within ten feet of one of the fallen picnic tables, and I let out a scream of fear and excitement as I jumped. It was like falling from a little bit higher than a second-story window, but I managed to land feet-first and well enough to absorb most of the shock of impact, though the flash of pain told me that my knees and ankles were going to be sore for days.

I rose and lifted my shield at once, in time to intercept the deadly flash of Grevane’s whirling chain.

“Fool,” he snarled. “You should have joined me when you had the chance.” His eyes flicked up and glittered. I followed the line of his gaze. The vortex wasn’t more than ten feet from the ground.

“You can’t draw it in if I’m standing right here,” I shouted back, retreating and circling to get into the circle of picnic tables. When I did, that horrible, sickly sense of cold faded. This near, the vortex wasn’t drawing the life off of me. It was the eye of the metaphysical hurricane. “One distraction and the backlash will kill you. It’s over.”

“It is not over!” he howled, and the chain whipped out again, striking my shield. “It is mine! My birthright! I was his favored child!”

I barely heard a footstep behind me, and whirled in time to lift my shield against another zombie with a spear. The weapon shattered against my upraised shield, but even as it did, I felt a burning impact as Grevane’s chain wrapped around my wounded leg and jerked hard. My balance went out from under me, and I fell to the ground.

Grevane’s zombie piled onto my back and started biting me. I felt hot, horrible pain on my trapezius muscles left of my neck, even through my cloak and spellworked duster. The zombie let out a vicious cry and let go, then went for the unprotected nape of my neck. I struggled to throw it off of me, to get away, but my battered body was weakened and it was incredibly strong.

“Die!” Grevane screamed, wild laughter in his unsteady voice. “Die, die, die—”

His howls broke off into a single quiet, choking noise, and the zombie on my back abruptly froze.

I struggled out from under it in time to see Grevane standing a few feet away, the chain discarded upon the ground, his hand held to his neck. Blood, black in the night, sprayed from between his fingers. His expression became enraged and he turned toward me, extending a hand to the zombie near me. The zombie turned, once more with purpose.

But then Grevane’s expression became puzzled. His eyes rolled back in his head, and I saw the long, straight, smooth cut that had opened his neck from one side to the other, cutting all the way to his spine.

Ramirez stepped into my line of vision, his silver sword in hand and coated with blood. In his other hand he held his pistol. Without hesitation or hurry, he raised the gun and aimed at Grevane’s head from five feet away.

Then he executed the stunned necromancer.

The body went loose, fell, and lay there in the grass and rain, one leg twitching.

Around us, the zombies had suddenly lost their vibrant animation, and most of them simply stood passively still, staring at nothing. Tyrannosaur Sue couldn’t have cared less, and carried on with her killing spree.

Ramirez came to me and helped me to my feet. “Sorry it took me so long. I had to dodge some bad guys.”

“You got here,” I said, panting.

He nodded once, grimacing. “Couldn’t shoot with you that close, in this light. Had to do it the old-fashioned way. You were one hell of a good distraction, though.”

“You did fine,” I said. I could feel hot wetness trickling down my back. “Thank God he was insane.”

“How’s that?” Ramirez asked.

“At the end there. You’d opened his throat but he still thought he could keep going. He tried to hang on to his control of the zombies. It was like he didn’t think death counted when it came to him.”

“And that’s lucky why?”

“He refused to believe he was dying,” I said. “No death curse.”

Ramirez nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Lucky us.”

Then a man’s voice said, “I don’t know if I’d say that, gentlemen.”

I whirled as one of the passive zombies still standing nearby turned, lifting its spear—and then shimmered into the form of Cowl. He lifted one hand from the folds of his dark cloak, and there was no warning surge of gathering power when a wave of vicious force flickered out from his palm and took Ramirez full in the chest.

The young Warden hadn’t been ready for it. The magical blow lifted him from his feet and threw him backward like a rag doll. He hit the ground twenty feet later, limbs already flopping limply, and lay there without moving.

“No!” I shouted, and I whirled on Cowl, Hellfire erupting from the runes of my staff. I lifted the staff, snarled, “Forzare!” and sent a lance of vicious energy at the dark figure.

Cowl swiftly crossed his hands at the wrists, forming an X shape with his arms, aligning defensive energy before him—but he hadn’t been quite swift enough, or else he hadn’t reckoned on how much energy he had to deal with. The lash of raw, scarlet force hammered him hard on the right side of his body, spinning him around and stealing his balance. He stumbled in a corkscrewing motion, and went to the ground.

I drew back the staff for another blow—but then someone pressed against my back, fingers tightened in my hair, and I felt the cold, deadly edge of a knife at my throat.

“Don’t move,” Kumori’s quiet voice said. She was stretched out quite a bit to be pulling my hair and holding the knife, but she’d done it right. There was no way I could try to escape her without her opening an artery. I ground my teeth, my power still ready to lash out again, and debated doing exactly that. Kumori would probably kill me, but it might be worth it to finish Cowl.

I looked up at the writhing vortex. Its tip was now barely above the height of my own head.

Cowl recovered his feet by slow degrees, shaken more than hurt, and anger radiated from him in nearly palpable waves. “Idiot,” he said, voice harsh. “You have lost. Can you not see? This game is over.”

“Don’t do this,” I growled. “It isn’t worth it. You’re going to kill thousands of innocent people.”

Cowl’s hood tilted up toward the descending vortex, and he marched over the grass until he stood directly beneath it. “Keep him still,” he snapped to Kumori.

“Yes, lord,” Kumori replied. The steel at my throat never wavered.

Cowl’s hand dipped into a pouch at his side, and came out holding Bob the skull. The lights in the skull’s eye sockets burned a cold shade of blue and violet.

“There, spirit,” Cowl said, holding the skull up to see the vortex. “Do you see it?”

“Of course,” said the skull, his voice just as cold and empty. “It is precisely as the master described. Proceed.” The eye lights swiveled and came to rest on me. “Ah. The White Council’s black sheep. I recommend that you kill him immediately.”

“No,” Kumori said firmly. “His death curse could destroy the working.”

“I know that,” the skull replied, his voice contemptuous. “But if he lives when Cowl draws down the power he might disrupt it. Kill him now.”

“Silence, spirit,” Cowl said in a harsh voice. “You are not the master here. Challenge me again at your own peril.”

The skull’s eye sockets burned colder yet, but he said nothing.

I swallowed. Bob…wasn’t Bob anymore. I’d known that he was bound and beholden to whoever possessed the skull he resided within, and that their personality would strongly influence his own—but I’d never really imagined what that might be like. Bob wasn’t precisely a friend to me but…I was used to him. In a way he was family, the mouthy, annoying, irritable cousin who was always insulting you but who was definitely at Thanksgiving dinner. I had never considered the possibility that one day he might be something else.

Something murderous.

The worst part was that Bob had given Cowl good advice. My death curse might well mess up this spell, but on the other hand, Cowl did not seem one to be afraid of death curses. If he gave me the chance to wait until he was actually at the delicate moment of drawing down the power, I wouldn’t need anything as strong as a death curse to upset his balance.

Of course, it would kill me. Kumori’s blade would see to that. But I could stop him if I was alive when it went down.

Cowl set the skull aside on the grass, then raised his hands above his head and let the sleeves fall back from his long, weathered arms covered in old scars. He began a chant in a low voice, steady and strong.

The vortex quivered. And then, almost delicately, it began to descend to Cowl, drifting toward him as lightly and slowly as a drifting feather of down.

Power rolled through the heavens, the clouds, the whirling vortex. Spirits and swirling apparitions screamed and wailed their tormented replies. Kumori’s hands never weakened or wavered, but I could sense that almost every fiber of her attention was directed toward Cowl.

I might have one chance.

“Bob,” I said. “Bob.”

The blue eye lights turned toward me.

“Think,” I said quietly. “Think, Bob. You know me. You’ve worked with me for years.”

The blue eye lights narrowed.

“Bob,” I said quietly. “You’ve got to remember me. I gave you a name.”

The skull quivered a little, as if a shudder had run through it, but the eyes continued to burn cold and blue.

And then one of them flickered into a shade of its usual orange, then immediately back to cold blue.

My heart thudded in sudden excitement. Bob the skull, my Bob, had just winked at me.

Cowl continued his chant, and the clouds spun more and more rapidly. The rain abruptly stopped, as swiftly as if someone had turned off a faucet, and the air filled with spirits, ghosts, apparitions and specters, caught in some vast and unseen whirlpool that dragged them in accelerating circles. The power in the air made it hard to breathe, and the roar of wailing spirits, vast wind, and an earth-deep rumble grew steadily louder.

“Bob,” I shouted into the cacophony, “you have my permission!”

Orange light streaked from the eye sockets of the skull and blazed away from the circle of overturned picnic tables—but even so, I saw Bob’s glowing body of energy pulled by the whirling currents of magic. He fought against that horrible vortex, and I suddenly realized that without the shelter of the skull or some other kind of physical body, Bob was no different from any of the other spirit beings trapped in that vast maelstrom. If the Darkhallow was completed, he too would be trapped and devoured.

I thought I saw Bob’s form sucked up into the clouds of trapped spirits, but there was too much light and noise for me to be sure of anything.

Cowl kept on chanting, and I saw his body arch with tension. Over the next minute or so, he actually, physically rose above the ground, until his boots were three or four inches in the air. His voice had become part of the wild storm, part of the dark energy, and it rolled and boomed and echoed all around us. I began to understand the kind of power we were dealing with. It was power as deep as an ocean, and as broad as the sky. It was dark and lethal and horrible and beautiful, and Cowl was about to take it all in. The strength it would give him would not make him a match for the entire White Council. It would put him in a league so far beyond them that their strength would mean virtually nothing.

It was power enough to change the world. To reshape it after one’s own liking.

The tip of the vortex spun down, danced lightly upon Cowl’s lips, and then slipped gently between them. Cowl howled out the last repetition of his chant, his mouth opening wide.

I ground my teeth. Bob hadn’t been able to help me, and I couldn’t let Cowl complete the spell. Even if it killed me.

I drew in my magic for the last spell I would ever throw, a blast to slam into Cowl, disrupt the spell, let that vast energy tear him to bits.

Kumori sensed it and I heard her let out a short cry. The knife burned hot on my throat.

And then the dinosaur I’d summoned plunged through the clouds of wild spirits and headed directly for Kumori, her eyes blazing with brilliant orange flames. Tyrannosaur Bob let out a bellow and swiped one enormous talon at Kumori.

Cowl’s apprentice was tough and competent, but no amount of training or forethought can prepare you for the sight of an angry dinosaur coming to eat your ass. She froze for the briefest second, and I turned, shoving away from her. The knife whipped against my throat, and I felt a hot sting. I wondered if that was what Grevane had felt.

There was no more time. I flung myself across the grass, gripped my staff in both hands, and swung it like a baseball bat at Cowl’s head.

The blow connected, right on what felt like the tip of his upturned jaw, snapping his mouth shut and knocking him to the ground. The vortex abruptly screamed and filled with a furious red light. I choked out a cry and fell down on my right side to the ground, bringing up my shield bracelet and holding it over me in an effort to protect myself from the vast forces now flying free from the botched spell.

There was more sound, so loud that no word could accurately describe it, incandescent lightning, screaming faces, and forms of spirits and ghosts, and trembling earth beneath me.

And blackness fell.

Chapter

Forty-three

When I came to my senses there was darkness and steady, cold rain, and I had sunk up to my neck in a deep well of aching pain. Neither lightning nor thunder played through the skies. I lay there for a moment, gathering my wits, and as I did the lights of the city began to come on, bit by bit, as the power grids went back online.

A booted foot pressed into the ground beside my face, and I followed it up, up and up, until I saw the horned helmet of the Erlking outlined against the brightening Chicago skyline.

“Wizard. Called you forth a mighty hunter tonight. One that has not walked this earth since time gone and forgotten.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty nifty, huh?”

There was a low, wild laugh from that helmet. “Daring. Arrogant. It pleases me.” He tilted his head. “And you are poor game at the moment. Because of that, and because you pleased me with your calling of the old hunter, this night you may go free. But beware, mortal. The next time our paths cross, it shall be my very great pleasure to run you down.”

There was a gust of cold autumn wind, and the Erlking was gone.

I looked around blearily. Every tree in the area was gone, torn off about a foot from the earth. The picnic tables had been torn to splinters. The buildings of the college, especially the museum, looked as if they had been ravaged by a tornado that had torn out great chunks and sections of them.

My ribs hurt. I looked down and saw that I had fallen around Bob the skull and curled my body around him as I had shielded myself. Orange flame flickered to life in the eye sockets.

“Some show, huh?” Bob said. He sounded exhausted.

“You had to go get the dinosaur, eh?” I said. “I figured you’d just grab a handy zombie.”

“Why settle for wieners when you can have steak?” the skull said brightly. “Pretty good idea, Harry, talking to me once Cowl sat me on the ground. I didn’t want to work for him anyway, but as long as he had the skull…well. You know how it is.”

I grunted. “Yeah. What happened?”

“The spell backlashed when you slugged Cowl,” Bob said. “Did just a bit of property damage.”

I coughed out a little laugh, looking around me. “Yeah. Cowl?”

“Most likely there are little pieces of him still filtering down,” Bob said brightly. “And his little dog, too.”

“You see them die?” I asked.

“Well. No. Once that backlash came down, it tore apart every enchantment within a hundred miles. Your dinosaur sort of fell apart.”

I grunted uneasily.

“Oh,” Bob said. “I think that Warden over there is alive.”

I blinked. “Ramirez?”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “I figured that you were a Warden now and stuff, and that you would probably want me to help out some other Warden. So just before the big bang, I had the dinosaur stand over him, soak up the blast.”

I grunted. “Okay,” I said. “We’ve got to help him. But one thing first.”

“What’s that?” Bob asked.

I squinted around until I found Grevane’s battered corpse. Then I crawled over to it. I fumbled in the trench coat’s pockets until I found Kemmler’s slender little book. I squinted around me, but there was no one to look as I put it in my pocket.

“Okay,” I said. “Come on. Watch my back while I help Ramirez.”

“You betcha, boss,” Bob said, and his voice was very smug. “Hey, you know what? Size really does matter.”

Ramirez made it out of that evening alive. He had four broken ribs and two dislocated shoulders, but he came through. With Butters’s help, I was able to get him, Luccio, and Morgan back to my place. At some point in the evening, Butters had taken off his drum and let Morgan take over the drumming duties while he tried to help Luccio, and as a result her wound hadn’t been quite as fatal as she had thought it would be. They were far too badly hurt to stay at my place, though, and Senior Council member “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind himself showed up with half a dozen more stay-at-home wizards who knew something about medicine and healing to move them to a more secure location.

“Just don’t get it,” Morgan was telling Listens-to-Wind. “All of these things happening at once. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t,” I heard myself say.

Morgan looked at me. The resentment in his eyes hadn’t changed, but there was something else there that hadn’t been before—dare I hope it, some modicum of respect.

“Think about it,” I said. “All those heavy vampire attacks just when Cowl and his buddies most needed the White Council not to be involved.”

“Are you saying that you think Cowl was using the vampires as a tool?” Morgan asked.

“I think they had a deal,” I said. “The vampires throw their first major offensive at the right time to let Cowl pull off this Darkhallow.”

“But what do they get out of it?” Morgan asked.

I glanced at Listens-to-Wind and said, “The Senior Council.”

“Impossible,” Morgan said. “By that time, they had to know that the Senior Council was back at Edinburgh. The defenses there have been built over thousands of years. It would take…” Morgan paused, frowning.

I finished the sentence for him. “It would take a god to break through them and kill the Senior Council.”

Morgan stared at me for a long time, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t long before they left, pulling out the wounded Wardens and leaving.

It left me with only about half an hour to meet Mavra’s deadline, but since the phones were up again, I left a message at her number and headed for our rendezvous.

I turned up at my grave again, standing over the open hole in the ground as Mavra approached me, this time openly and without melodrama. She faced me over my grave, and said nothing. I took the book out of my pocket and tossed it to her. She picked it up, regarded it, and then drew an envelope from her jacket and tossed it at my feet. I picked it up and found the negatives of the incriminating pictures of Murphy inside.

Mavra turned to leave.

I said, “Wait.”

She paused.

“This never happens again,” I said quietly. “You try to get to me through other mortals again and I’ll kill you.”

Mavra’s rotted lips turned up at one corner. “No, you won’t,” she said in her dusty voice. “You don’t have that kind of power.”

“I can get it,” I said.

“But you won’t,” she responded, mockery in her tone. “It wouldn’t be right.”

I stared at her for a full ten seconds before I said, in a very quiet voice, “I’ve got a fallen angel tripping all over herself to give me more power. Queen Mab has asked me to take the mantle of Winter Knight twice now. I’ve read Kemmler’s book. I know how the Darkhallow works. And I know how to turn necromancy against the Black Court.”

Mavra’s filmed eyes flashed with anger.

I continued to speak quietly, never raising my voice. “So once again, let me be perfectly clear. If anything happens to Murphy and I even think you had a hand in it, fuck right and wrong. If you touch her, I’m declaring war on you. Personally. I’m picking up every weapon I can get. And I’m using them to kill you. Horribly.”

There was utter silence for a moment.

“Do you understand me?” I whispered.

She nodded.

“Say it,” I snarled, and my voice came out so harsh and cold that Mavra twitched and took half a step back from me.

“I understand,” she rasped.

“Get out of my town,” I told her.

And Mavra retreated into the shadows.

I stood there over my grave for a minute more, just feeling the pain of my battered body, and bitterly considering the inevitability of death. After a moment I felt another presence near me. I looked up and found the dream image of my father regarding my tomb-stone speculatively.

“‘He died doing the right thing,’” my father read.

“Maybe I can change it to, ‘he died alone,’” I said back.

My father smiled a little. “Thinking about the death curse, eh?”

“Yeah. ‘Die alone.’” I stared down at my open grave. “Maybe it means I’ll never be with anybody. Have love. A wife. Children. No one who is really close. Really there.”

“Maybe,” my father said. “What do you think?”

“I think that’s what he wanted to do to me. I think I’m so tired that I’m hallucinating. And that I hurt. And that I want someone to be holding my hand when it’s my time. I don’t want to do it alone.”

“Harry,” my dad said, and his voice was very gentle, “can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

He walked around the grave and put his hand on my shoulder. “Son. Everyone dies alone. That’s what it is. It’s a door. It’s one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone.” His fingers squeezed me tight. “But it doesn’t mean you’ve got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren’t alone on the other side.”

I frowned and looked up at my father’s image, searching his eyes. “Really?”

He smiled and drew his finger in an X on his chest. “Cross my heart.”

I looked away from him. “I did things. I made a deal I shouldn’t have made. I crossed a line.”

“I know,” he said. “It only means what you decide it means.”

I looked up at him. “What?”

“Harry, life isn’t simple. There is such a thing as black and white. Right and wrong. But when you’re in the thick of things, sometimes it’s hard for us to tell. You didn’t do what you did for your own benefit. You did it so that you could protect others. That doesn’t make it right—but it doesn’t make you a monster, either. You still have free will. You still get to choose what you will do and what you will be and what you will become.” He clapped my shoulder and turned to walk away. “As long as you believe you are responsible for your choices, you still are. You’ve got a good heart, son. Listen to it.”

He vanished into the night, and somewhere in the city, bells started tolling midnight.

I stared at my waiting grave, and I suddenly realized that death was really not my biggest worry.

He died doing the right thing.

God, I hope so.

Thomas was waiting back at my apartment when I returned, and Mouse came loping in not long after. Murphy’s bike had failed him completely, and by the time he’d reached the college campus, the fur had flown and the whole show was over. I crashed hard, and slept for more than a day. When I woke up, I found that my injuries had all been dressed again, and that an IV was hanging beside my bed. Butters showed up every day to check on me, and he had me on antibiotics and had imposed a ferociously healthy diet on me that Thomas made me stick to. I grumbled a lot, and slept a lot, and after several days was feeling almost human again.

Murphy showed up to chew me out for the wreck she found where her house used to be. We’d left the place sort of trashed. But when she saw me in bed, covered in bandages, she stopped in her tracks.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Oh. Things,” I said. “Chicago was interesting for a couple of days there.” I peered at her. She had a cast on her left arm, as if for a broken wrist, and I thought I saw the edge of a bruise on her neck. “Hey,” I said. “What happened?”

Her cheeks turned pink. “Oh. Things. Hawaii was interesting for a couple of days there.”

“I’ll trade you my story for yours,” I said.

She got pinker. “Um. I’ll…have to think about it.”

Then we both looked at each other and laughed, and we left it at that.

Chicago reacted to the events of that Halloween predictably. It was all attributed to the worst storm in fifty years, rioting, a minor earth tremor, a large load of bread produced by a local bakery that had been contaminated with ergot, and similar Halloween-fueled hysteria. In the blackout, some reprehensible types had vandalized the museum and relocated Sue’s skeleton to a local campus as some kind of bizarre practical joke. There had been dozens of break-ins, robberies, murders, and other crimes during the blackout, but any other reports and wild stories were automatically put down to hysteria and/or ergot poisoning. Life went on.

Captain Luccio survived her injuries, but not without serious long-term damage that would take a lot of rehabilitation. Between that and the uncertainty of what would happen in her shiny new body, she had been relieved of command as the captain of the Wardens until such time as her health and state of mind were judged to be sound and reliable.

Morgan took her place.

He came to visit me at my place, maybe two weeks later, and gave me the news.

“Dresden,” he said. “I was against inducting you in the first place. But Captain Luccio had the right to ignore my recommendation. She made you a Warden and she made you a regional commander, and there’s nothing I can do about that.” He took a deep breath. “But I don’t like you. I think you are dangerous.”

His mouth twisted. “But I am no longer convinced you do these things out of malice. I think you lack discipline and judgment. You have repeatedly demonstrated your willingness to put yourself in harm’s way to protect others. As much as it galls me to admit it, I don’t think you have any evil intentions. I think your questionable actions are the result of arrogance and poor judgment. In the end, it matters little why you do it. But I cannot in good conscience condemn you for it without giving you some sort of chance to prove me wrong.”

From Morgan, this was the equivalent of Emperor Constantine converting to Christianity. He was almost admitting that he had been wrong. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a penny, and dropped it to the floor.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“I’m just making sure gravity is still online,” I said.

He frowned at me, then shrugged and said, “I don’t trust you. I’m not committing any Wardens to your command, and, truth be told, we don’t have them to spare in any case. But you may be required to participate in missions from time to time, and I will expect you to work with the other regional commander in America. He operates out of Los Angeles. He specifically requested the assignment, and given his role in recent events, he could hardly be gainsaid.”

“Ramirez,” I guessed.

Morgan nodded. Then he reached into his coat and produced an envelope. He handed it to me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your first paycheck,” Morgan said, and he didn’t look happy to be saying it. “Monthly.”

I opened the envelope and blinked. It wasn’t a fortune, but it sure as hell would be a nice little addition to my earnings in the investigation business. “I never thought I would hear myself say this,” I said as he started to leave, “but thank you, Morgan.”

His face twisted up into something bitter, and he managed to spit out the words: “You’re welcome.” I think he fled before he started to puke.

Several weeks later Butters showed up at my door with a big box wrapped in Christmas paper. I let him in, and he carried it to the living room and presented me with it. “Go ahead. Open it.”

I did. Inside the box was a guitar case, and inside that an old wooden guitar. “Uh,” I said. “What’s this for?”

“Therapy,” Butters said. He’d been having me practice squeezing a squishy ball with my left hand, and, just as he’d predicted, I had slowly gained a little more control of it. “You’re going to learn to play.”

“Uh, my hand doesn’t work that well,” I said.

“Not yet,” Butters replied. “But we’ll start slow like everything else, and you can work up to it. Just do the lessons. Look, there’s a book in the bottom of the case.”

I opened the case and found a book entitled Guitar for Total Idiots, while Butters went on about tendons and metacarpal something-or-other and flexibility. I opened the book, but night had fallen and the fire was too low to let me read it. I absently waved a hand at the candles on the table beside the couch and muttered, “Flickum bicus.” They puffed to light with a little whoosh of magic.

I stopped and blinked—first at the candles and then at my burned hand.

“What?” Butters asked.

“Nothing,” I said, and opened the book to look over it. “You know, Butters, for a mortician you’re a pretty good healer.”

“You think so?”

I glanced at the warm, steady flame of the candles and smiled. “Yeah.”

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, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy, as experiments. 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 where the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, where a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and where 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 kindess. I hope that you enjoy reading the first book of the Codex Alera, Furies of Calderon, as much as I enjoyed creating it for you.

—Jim

Furies of Calderon is available now in paperback

from Ace Books.

Read on for an exciting preview of

the next novel of the Dresden Files

PROVEN GUILTY

by Jim Butcher

Available now in hardcover from Roc Books

Blood leaves no stain on a Warden’s grey cloak.

I didn’t know that until the day I watched Morgan, second in command of the White Council’s Wardens, lift his sword over the kneeling form of a young man guilty of the practice of black magic. The boy, sixteen years old at the most, screamed and ranted in Korean underneath his black hood, his mouth spilling hatred and rage, convinced by his youth and power of his own immortality. He never knew it when the blade came down.

Which I guess was a small mercy. Microscopic, really.

His blood flew in a scarlet arc. I wasn’t ten feet away. I felt hot droplets strike one cheek, and more blood covered the left side of the cloak in blotches of angry red. The head fell to the ground, and I saw the cloth over it moving, as if the boy’s mouth was still screaming imprecations.

The body fell onto its side. One calf muscle twitched spasmodically and then stopped. After maybe five seconds, the head did too.

Morgan stood over the still form for a moment, the bright silver sword of the White Council of Wizards’ justice in his hands. Besides him and me, there were a dozen Wardens present, and two members of the Senior Council—the Merlin and my one-time mentor, Ebenezar McCoy.

The covered head stopped its feeble movements. Morgan glanced up at the Merlin and nodded once. The Merlin returned the nod. “May he find peace.”

“Peace,” the Wardens all replied together.

Except me. I turned my back on them and made it two steps away before I threw up on the warehouse floor.

I stood there shaking for a moment until I was sure I was finished, then straightened slowly. I felt a presence draw near me and looked up to see Ebenezar standing there.

He was an old man, bald but for wisps of white hair, short, stocky, his face half covered in a ferocious-looking grey beard. His nose and cheeks and bald scalp were all ruddy, except for a recent, purplish scar on his pate. Though he was centuries old, he carried himself with vibrant energy, and his eyes were alert and pensive behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore the formal black robes of a meeting of the Council, along with the deep purple stole of a member of the Senior Council.

“Harry,” he said quietly. “You all right?”

“After that?” I snarled, loudly enough to make sure everyone there heard me. “No one in this damned building should be all right.”

I felt a sudden tension in the air behind me.

“No, they shouldn’t,” Ebenezar said. I saw him look back at the other wizards there, his jaw setting stubbornly.

The Merlin, also in his formal robes and stole, came over to us. He looked like a wizard should look—tall, long white hair, long white beard, piercing blue eyes, his face seamed with age and wisdom.

Well. With age, anyway.

“Warden Dresden,” he said. He had the sonorous voice of a trained speaker and spoke English with a high-class British accent. “If you had some evidence that you felt would prove the boy’s innocence, you should have presented it during the trial.”

“I didn’t have anything like that, and you know it,” I replied.

“He was proven guilty,” the Merlin said. “I soulgazed him myself. I examined more than two dozen mortals whose minds he had altered. Three of them might eventually recover their sanity. He forced four others to commit suicide and had hidden nine corpses from the local authorities, as well. And every one of them was a blood relation.” The Merlin stepped toward me, and the air in the room suddenly felt hot. His eyes flashed with azure anger, and his voice rumbled with deep, unyielding power. “The powers he used had already broken his mind. We did what was necessary.”

I turned and faced the Merlin. I didn’t push out my jaw and try to stare him down. I didn’t put anything belligerent or challenging into my posture. I didn’t show any anger on my face or slur any disrespect into my tone when I spoke. The past several months had taught me that the Merlin hadn’t gotten his job through an ad on a matchbook. He was, quite simply, the strongest wizard on the planet. And he had talent, skill, and experience to go along with that strength. If I ever came to magical blows with him, there wouldn’t be enough left of me to fill a lunch sack. I did not want a fight.

But I didn’t back down, either.

“He was a kid,” I said. “We all have been. He made a mistake. We’ve all done that too.”

The Merlin regarded me with an expression somewhere between irritation and contempt. “You know what the use of black magic can do to a person,” he said. Marvelously subtle shading and emphasis over his words added a perfectly clear, unspoken thought: You know it because you’ve done it. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up, and then it will be your turn. “One use leads to another. And another.”

“That’s what I keep hearing, Merlin,” I answered. “Just say no to black magic. But that boy had no one to tell him the rules, to teach him. If someone had known about his gift and done something in time—”

He lifted a hand, and the simple gesture had such absolute authority to it that I stopped to let him speak. “The point you are missing, Warden Dresden,” he said, “is that the boy who made that foolish mistake died long before we discovered the damage he’d done. What was left of him was nothing more or less than a monster who would have spent his life inflicting horror and death on anyone near him.”

“I know that,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the anger and frustration out of my voice. “And I know what had to be done. I know it was the only measure that could stop him.” I thought I was going to throw up again, and I closed my eyes and leaned on the solid oak length of my carved staff. I got my stomach under control and opened my eyes to face the Merlin. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just murdered a boy who probably never knew enough to understand what was happening to him.”

“Accusing someone else of murder is hardly a stone you are in a position to cast, Warden Dresden.” The Merlin arched a silver brow at me. “Did you not discharge a firearm into the back of the head of a woman you merely believed to be the Corpsetaker from a distance of a few feet away, fatally wounding her?”

I swallowed. I sure as hell had, last year. It had been one of the bigger coin tosses of my life. Had I incorrectly judged that a body-transferring wizard known as the Corpsetaker had jumped into the original body of Warden Luccio, I would have murdered an innocent woman and law-enforcing member of the White Council.

I hadn’t been wrong—but I’d never…never just killed anyone before. I’ve killed things in the heat of battle, yes. I’ve killed people by less direct means. But Corpsetaker’s death had been intimate and coldly calculated and not at all indirect. Just me, the gun, and the limp corpse. I could still vividly remember the decision to shoot, the feel of the cold metal in my hands, the stiff pull of my revolver’s trigger, the thunder of the gun’s report, and the way the body had settled into a limp bundle of limbs on the ground, the motion somehow too simple for the horrible significance of the event.

I’d killed. Deliberately, rationally ended another’s life.

And it still haunted my dreams at night.

I’d had little choice. Given the smallest amount of time, the Corpsetaker could have called up lethal magic, and the best I could have hoped for was a death curse that killed me as I struck down the necromancer. It had been a bad day or two, and I was pretty strung out. Even if I hadn’t been, I had a feeling that Corpsetaker could have taken me in a fair fight. So I hadn’t given Corpsetaker anything like a fair fight. I shot the necromancer in the back of the head because the Corpsetaker had to be stopped, and I’d had no other option.

I had executed her on suspicion.

No trial. No soulgaze. No judgment from a dispassionate arbiter. Hell, I hadn’t even taken the chance to get in a good insult. Bang. Thump. One live wizard, one dead bad guy.

I’d done it to prevent future harm to myself and others. It hadn’t been the best solution—but it had been the only solution. I hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat. I’d done it, no questions, and gone on to face the further perils of that night.

Just like a Warden is supposed to do. Sorta took the wind out of my holier-than-thou sails.

Bottomless blue eyes watched my face and he nodded slowly. “You executed her,” the Merlin said quietly. “Because it was necessary.”

“That was different,” I said.

“Indeed. Your action required far deeper commitment. It was dark, cold, and you were alone. The suspect was a great deal stronger than you. Had you struck and missed, you would have died. Yet you did what had to be done.”

“Necessary isn’t the same as right,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” he said. “But the Laws of Magic are all that prevent wizards from abusing their power over mortals. There is no room for compromise. You are a Warden now, Dresden. You must focus on your duty to both mortals and the Council.”

“Which sometimes means killing children?” This time I didn’t hide the contempt, but there wasn’t much life to it.

“Which means always enforcing the Laws,” the Merlin said, and his eyes bored into mine, flickering with sparks of rigid anger. “It is your duty. Now more than ever.”

I broke the stare first, looking away before anything bad could happen. Ebenezar stood a couple of steps from me, studying my expression.

“Granted, you’ve seen much for a man your age,” the Merlin said, and there was a slight softening in his tone. “But you haven’t seen how horrible such things can become. Not nearly. The Laws exist for a reason. They must stand as written.”

I turned my head and stared at the small pool of scarlet on the warehouse floor beside the kid’s corpse. I hadn’t been told his name before they’d ended his life.

“Right,” I said tiredly, and wiped a clean corner of the grey cloak over my blood-sprinkled face. “I can see what they’re written in.”

PROVEN GUILTY

ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

The Dresden Files

STORM FRONT

FOOL MOON

GRAVE PERIL

SUMMER KNIGHT

DEATH MASKS

BLOOD RITES

DEAD BEAT

The Codex Alera

FURIES OF CALDERON

ACADEM’S FURY

JIM BUTCHER

PROVEN GUILTY

A NOVEL OF THE DRESDEN FILES

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2006

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Butcher, Jim.

Proven guilty: a novel of the Dresden files / Jim Butcher.

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-101-12861-5

1. Dresden, Harry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 3. Wizards—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.U85P76 2006

813'.6—dc22 2005030130

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 publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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 authors rights is appreciated.

PROVEN GUILTY

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Chapter One

Blood leaves no stain on a Warden’s grey cloak.

I didn’t know that until the day I watched Morgan, second in command of the White Council’s Wardens, lift his sword over the kneeling form of a young man guilty of the practice of black magic. The boy, sixteen years old at the most, screamed and ranted in Korean underneath his black hood, his mouth spilling hatred and rage, convinced by his youth and power of his own immortality. He never knew it when the blade came down.

Which I guess was a small mercy. Microscopic, really.

His blood flew in a scarlet arc. I wasn’t ten feet away. I felt hot droplets strike one cheek, and more blood covered the left side of the cloak in blotches of angry red. The head fell to the ground, and I saw the cloth over it moving, as if the boy’s mouth were still screaming imprecations.

The body fell onto its side. One calf muscle twitched spasmodically and then stopped. After maybe five seconds, the head did too.

Morgan stood over the still form for a moment, the bright silver sword of the White Council of Wizards’ justice in his hands. Besides him and me, there were a dozen Wardens present, and two members of the Senior Council—the Merlin and my one-time mentor, Ebenezar McCoy.

The covered head stopped its feeble movements. Morgan glanced up at the Merlin and nodded once. The Merlin returned the nod. “May he find peace.”

“Peace,” the Wardens all replied together.

Except me. I turned my back on them, and made it two steps away before I threw up on the warehouse floor.

I stood there shaking for a moment, until I was sure I was finished, then straightened slowly. I felt a presence draw near me and looked up to see Ebenezar standing there.

He was an old man, bald but for wisps of white hair, short, stocky, his face half covered in a ferocious-looking grey beard. His nose and cheeks and bald scalp were all ruddy, except for a recent, purplish scar on his pate. Though he was centuries old he carried himself with vibrant energy, and his eyes were alert and pensive behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore the formal black robes of a meeting of the Council, along with the deep purple stole of a member of the Senior Council.

“Harry,” he said quietly. “You all right?”

“After that?” I snarled, loudly enough to make sure everyone there heard me. “No one in this damned building should be all right.”

I felt a sudden tension in the air behind me.

“No they shouldn’t,” Ebenezar said. I saw him look back at the other wizards there, his jaw setting stubbornly.

The Merlin came over to us, also in his formal robes and stole. He looked like a wizard should look—tall, long white hair, long white beard, piercing blue eyes, his face seamed with age and wisdom.

Well. With age, anyway.

“Warden Dresden,” he said. He had the sonorous voice of a trained speaker, and spoke English with a high-class British accent. “If you had some evidence that you felt would prove the boy’s innocence, you should have presented it during the trial.”

“I didn’t have anything like that, and you know it,” I replied.

“He was proven guilty,” the Merlin said. “I soulgazed him myself. I examined more than two dozen mortals whose minds he had altered. Three of them might eventually recover their sanity. He forced four others to commit suicide, and had hidden nine corpses from the local authorities, as well. And every one of them was a blood relation.” The Merlin stepped toward me, and the air in the room suddenly felt hot. His eyes flashed with azure anger and his voice rumbled with deep, unyielding power. “The powers he had used had already broken his mind. We did what was necessary.”

I turned and faced the Merlin. I didn’t push out my jaw and try to stare him down. I didn’t put anything belligerent or challenging into my posture. I didn’t show any anger on my face, or slur any disrespect into my tone when I spoke. The past several months had taught me that the Merlin hadn’t gotten his job through an ad on a matchbook. He was, quite simply, the strongest wizard on the planet. And he had talent, skill, and experience to go along with that strength. If I ever came to magical blows with him, there wouldn’t be enough left of me to fill a lunch sack. I did not want a fight.

But I didn’t back down, either.

“He was a kid,” I said. “We all have been. He made a mistake. We’ve all done that too.”

The Merlin regarded me with an expression somewhere between irritation and contempt. “You know what the use of black magic can do to a person,” he said. Marvelously subtle shading and emphasis over his words added in a perfectly clear, unspoken thought: You know it because you’ve done it. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up, and then it will be your turn. “One use leads to another. And another.”

“That’s what I keep hearing, Merlin,” I answered. “Just say no to black magic. But that boy had no one to tell him the rules, to teach him. If someone had known about his gift and done something in time—”

He lifted a hand, and the simple gesture had such absolute authority to it that I stopped to let him speak. “The point you are missing, Warden Dresden,” he said, “is that the boy who made that foolish mistake died long before we discovered the damage he’d done. What was left of him was nothing more nor less than a monster who would have spent his life inflicting horror and death on anyone near him.”

“I know that,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the anger and frustration out of my voice. “And I know what had to be done. I know it was the only measure that could stop him.” I thought I was going to throw up again, and I closed my eyes and leaned on the solid oak length of my carved staff. I got my stomach under control and opened my eyes to face the Merlin. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just murdered a boy who probably never knew enough to understand what was happening to him.”

“Accusing someone else of murder is hardly a stone you are in a position to cast, Warden Dresden.” The Merlin arched a silver brow at me. “Did you not discharge a firearm into the back of the head of a woman you merely believed to be the Corpsetaker from a distance of a few feet away, fatally wounding her?”

I swallowed. I sure as hell had, last year. It had been one of the bigger coin tosses of my life. Had I incorrectly judged that a body-transferring wizard known as the Corpsetaker had jumped into the original body of Warden Luccio, I would have murdered an innocent woman and a law-enforcing member of the White Council.

I hadn’t been wrong—but I’d never…never just killed anyone before. I’ve killed things in the heat of battle, yes. I’ve killed people by less direct means. But Corpsetaker’s death had been intimate and coldly calculated and not at all indirect. Just me, the gun, and the limp corpse. I could still vividly remember the decision to shoot, the feel of the cold metal in my hands, the stiff pull of my revolver’s trigger, the thunder of the gun’s report, and the way the body had settled into a limp bundle of limbs on the ground, the motion somehow too simple for the horrible significance of the event.

I’d killed. Deliberately, rationally ended another’s life.

And it still haunted my dreams at night.

I’d had little choice. Given the smallest amount of time, the Corpsetaker could have called up lethal magic, and the best I could have hoped for was a death curse that killed me as I struck down the necromancer. It had been a bad day or two, and I was pretty strung out. Even if I hadn’t been, I had a feeling that Corpsetaker could have taken me in a fair fight. So I hadn’t given Corpsetaker anything like a fair fight. I shot the necromancer in the back of the head because the Corpsetaker had to be stopped, and I’d had no other option.

I had executed her on suspicion.

No trial. No soulgaze. No judgment from a dispassionate arbiter. Hell, I hadn’t even taken the chance to get in a good insult. Bang. Thump. One live wizard, one dead bad guy.

I’d done it to prevent future harm to myself and others. It hadn’t been the best solution—but it had been the only solution. I hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat. I’d done it, no questions, and gone on to face the further perils of that night.

Just like a Warden is supposed to do. Sorta took the wind out of my holier-than-thou sails.

Bottomless blue eyes watched my face and he nodded slowly. “You executed her,” the Merlin said quietly. “Because it was necessary.”

“That was different,” I said.

“Indeed. Your action required far deeper commitment. It was dark, cold, and you were alone. The suspect was a great deal stronger than you. Had you struck and missed, you would have died. Yet you did what had to be done.”

“Necessary isn’t the same as right,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” he said. “But the Laws of Magic are all that prevent wizards from abusing their power over mortals. There is no room for compromise. You are a Warden now, Dresden. You must focus on your duty to both mortals and the Council.”

“Which sometimes means killing children?” This time I didn’t hide the contempt, but there wasn’t much life to it.

“Which means always enforcing the Laws,” the Merlin said, and his eyes bored into mine, flickering with sparks of rigid anger. “It is your duty. Now more than ever.”

I broke the stare first, looking away before anything bad could happen. Ebenezar stood a couple of steps from me, studying my expression.

“Granted that you’ve seen much for a man your age,” the Merlin said, and there was a slight softening in his tone. “But you haven’t seen how horrible such things can become. Not nearly. The Laws exist for a reason. They must stand as written.”

I turned my head and stared at the small pool of scarlet on the warehouse floor beside the kid’s corpse. I hadn’t been told his name before they’d ended his life.

“Right,” I said tiredly, and wiped a clean corner of the grey cloak over my blood-sprinkled face. “I can see what they’re written in.”

Chapter Two

I turned my back on them and walked out of the warehouse into Chicago’s best impression of Miami. July in the Midwest is rarely less than sultry, but this year had been especially intense when it came to summer heat, and it had rained frequently. The warehouse was a part of the wharves down at the lakeside, and even the chill waters of Lake Michigan were warmer than usual. They filled the air with more than the average water-scent of mud and mildew and eau de dead fishy.

I passed the two grey-cloaked Wardens standing watch outside and exchanged nods with them. Both of them were younger than me, some of the most recent additions to the White Council’s military-slash-police organization. As I passed them, I felt the tingling presence of a veil, a spell they were maintaining to conceal the warehouse from any prying eyes. It wasn’t much of a veil, by Warden standards, but it was probably better than I could do, and there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of Wardens to choose from since the Red Court’s successful offensive the previous autumn. Beggars can’t be choosers.

I tugged off my robe and my cloak. I was wearing sneakers, khaki shorts, and a red tank top underneath. It didn’t make me any cooler to remove the heavy clothes—just marginally less miserable. I walked hurriedly back to my car, a battered old Volkswagen Beetle, its windows rolled down to keep the sun from turning the interior into an oven. It’s a jumble of different colors, as my mechanic has replaced damaged portions of the body with parts from junked Bugs, but it started off as a shade of powder blue, and that had earned it the sobriquet of the Blue Beetle.

I heard quick, solid footsteps behind me. “Harry,” Ebenezar called.

I threw the robe and cloak into the Beetle’s backseat without a word. The car’s interior had been stripped to its metal bones a couple of years back, and I had made hurried repairs with cheap lumber and a lot of duct tape. Since then, I’d had a friend redo the inside of the car. It wasn’t standard, and it still didn’t look pretty, but the comfortable bucket seats were a lot nicer than the wooden crates I’d been using. And I had decent seat belts again.

“Harry,” Ebenezar said again. “Damnation, boy, stop.”

I though about getting into the car and leaving, but instead stopped until the old wizard approached and shucked off his own formal robes and stole. He wore a white T-shirt beneath denim Levi’s overalls, and heavy leather hiking boots. “There’s something I need to speak to you about.”

I paused and took a second to get some of my emotions under control. Those and my stomach. I didn’t want the embarrassment of a repeat performance. “What is it?”

He stopped a few feet behind me. “The war isn’t going well.”

By which he meant the war of the White Council against the Red Court of vampires. The war had been a whole lot of pussyfooting and fights in back alleys for several years, but last year the vampires had upped the ante. Their assault had been timed to coincide with vicious activity from a traitor within the Council and with the attack of a number of necromancers, outlaw wizards who raised the dead into angry specters and zombies—among a number of other, less savory things.

The vampires had hit the Council. Hard. Before the battle was over, they’d killed nearly two hundred wizards, most of them Wardens. That’s why the Wardens had given me a grey cloak. They needed the help.

Before they’d finished, the vampires killed nearly forty-five thousand men, women, and children who happened to be nearby.

That’s why I’d taken the cloak. That wasn’t the sort of thing I could ignore.

“I’ve read the reports,” I said. “They say that the Venatori Umbrorum and the Fellowship of St. Giles have really pitched in.”

“It’s more than that. If they hadn’t started up an offensive to slow the vamps down, the Red Court would have destroyed the Council months ago.”

I blinked. “They’re doing that much?”

The Venatori Umbrorum and the Fellowship of St. Giles were the White Council’s primary allies in the war with the Red Court. The Venatori were an ancient, secret brotherhood, joined together to fight supernatural darkness wherever they could. Sort of like the Masons, only with more flamethrowers. By and large, they were academic sorts, and though several of the Venatori had various forms of military experience, their true strength lay in utilizing human legal systems and analyzing information brought together from widely dispersed sources.

The Fellowship, though, was a somewhat different story. Not as many of them as there were of the Venatori, but not many of them were merely human. Most of them, so I took it, were those who had been half turned by the vampires. They’d been infested with the dark powers that made the Red Court such a threat, but until they willingly drank another’s lifeblood, they never quite stopped being human. It could make them stronger and faster and better able to withstand injury than regular folks, and it granted them a drastically increased life span. Assuming they didn’t fall prey to their constant, base desire for blood, or weren’t slain in operations against their enemies in the Red Court.

A woman I’d once cared for very much had been taken by a Red Court vampire. In point of fact, I’d kicked off the war when I went and took her back by the most violent means at my disposal. I brought her back, but I didn’t save her. She’d been touched by that darkness, and now her life was a battle—partly against the vampires who had done it to her, and partly against the blood-thirst they’d imposed upon her. Now she was a part of the Fellowship, whose members included those like her and, I’d heard, many other people and part-people with no home anywhere else. St. Giles, patron of lepers and outcasts. His Fellowship, while not a full-blown powerhouse like the Council or one of the Vampire Courts, was nonetheless proving to be a surprisingly formidable ally.

“Our allies can’t challenge the vampires in face-to-face confrontations,” Ebenezar said, nodding. “But they’re wreaking havoc on the Red Court’s supply chains, intelligence, and support, attacking from the mortal end of things. Red Court infiltrators within human society are unmasked. Humans controlled by the Red Court have been arrested, framed, or killed—or else abducted to be forcibly freed of their addiction. The Fellowship and the Venatori continue to do all in their power to provide information to the Council, which has enabled us to make a number of successful raids against the vampires. The Venatori and the Fellowship haven’t appreciably weakened the vampires, but the Red Court has been slowed down. Perhaps enough to give us a fighting chance to recover.”

“How’s the boot camp coming?” I asked.

“Luccio is confident of her eventual success in replacing our losses,” Ebenezar replied.

“Don’t see what else I can do to help,” I said. “Unless you’re wanting someone to go start fathering new wizards.”

He stepped closer to me and glanced around. His expression was casual, but he was checking to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. “There’s something you don’t know. The Merlin decided it was not for general knowledge.”

I turned to face him and tilted my head.

“You remember the Red Court’s attack last year,” he said. “That they called up Outsiders and assaulted us within the realm of Faerie itself.”

“Bad move, so I’ve heard. The Faeries are going to take it out of their hides.”

“So we all thought,” the old man said. “In fact, Summer declared war upon the Red Court and began preliminary assaults on them. But Winter hasn’t responded—and Summer hasn’t done much more than secure its borders.”

“Queen Mab didn’t declare war?”

“No.”

I frowned. “Never thought she’d pass up the chance. She’s all about carnage and bloodshed.”

“It surprised us as well,” he said. “So I want to ask a favor of you.”

I eyed him without speaking.

“Find out why,” he said. “You have contacts within the Courts. Find out what’s happening. Find out why the Sidhe haven’t gone to war.”

“What?” I asked. “The Senior Council doesn’t know? Don’t you have an embassy and high-level connections and official channels? Maybe a bright red telephone?”

Ebenezar smiled without much mirth. “The general turbulence of the war has stretched everyone’s intelligence-gathering abilities,” he replied. “Even those in the spiritual realms. There’s another level entirely to the war in the conflict between spiritual spies and emissaries of everyone involved. And our embassy to the Sidhe has been…” He rolled a weathered, strong shoulder in a shrug. “Well. You know them as well as anyone.”

“They’ve been polite, open, spoken with complete honesty, and left you with no idea what is going on,” I guessed.

“Precisely.”

“So the Senior Council is asking me to find out?”

He glanced around again. “Not the Senior Council. Myself. A few others.”

“What others?” I asked.

“People I trust,” he said, and looked at me directly over the rims of his spectacles.

I stared at him for a second and then said in a whisper, “The traitor.”

The vampires of the Red Court had been a little too on top of the game to be merely lucky. Somehow, they had been obtaining vital secrets about the dispositions of the White Council’s forces and their plans. Someone on the inside had been feeding the vampires information, and a lot of wizards had died because of it—particularly during their heaviest attack, last year, in which they’d violated Sidhe territory in pursuit of the fleeing Council. “You think the traitor is someone on the Senior Council.”

“I think we can’t take any chances,” he said quietly. “This isn’t official business. I can’t order you to do it, Harry. I’ll understand if you don’t want to. But there’s no one better for the job—and our allies cannot maintain the current pace of operations for long. Their best weapon has always been secrecy, and their actions have forced them to pay a terrible cost of lives to give us what aid they have.”

I folded my arms over my stomach and said, “We need to help them, sure. But every time I look sideways at Faerie, I get into deeper trouble with them. It’s the last thing I need. If I do this, how—”

Ebenezar’s weight shifted, gravel crunching loudly. I glanced up to see the Merlin and Morgan emerge from the building, speaking quietly and intently.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Ebenezar said, evidently for the benefit of anyone listening. “Make sure Morgan and the other Wardens are treating you square.”

I went along with him. “When they talk to me at all,” I said. “About the only other Warden I ever see is Ramirez. Decent guy. I like him.”

“That says a lot for him.”

“That the Council’s ticking time bomb has a good opinion of him?” I waited for Morgan and the Merlin to leave, but they paused a little way off, still talking. I stared at the gravel for a long time, and then said, much more quietly, “That could have been me in there today. I could have been that kid.”

“It was a long time ago,” Ebenezar said. “You were barely more than a child.”

“So was he.”

Ebenezar’s expression became guarded. “I’m sorry you had to see that business.”

“Is that why it happened here?” I asked him. “Why come to Chicago for an execution?”

He exhaled slowly. “It’s one of the great crossroads of the world, Harry. More air traffic comes through here than anywhere else. It’s an enormous port city for shipping of any kind—trucks, trains, ships. That means a lot of ways in and out, a lot of travelers passing through. It makes it difficult for any observers from the Red Court to spot us or report our movements.” He gave me a bleak smile. “And then there’s the way Chicago seems to be inimical to the health of any vampire who comes here.”

“That’s a pretty good cover story,” I said. “What’s the truth?”

Ebenezar sighed and held up his hand in a conciliatory gesture. “It wasn’t my idea.”

I looked at him for a minute and then said, “The Merlin called the meeting here.”

Ebenezar nodded and arched a shaggy grey brow. “Which means…?”

I chewed on my lower lip and scrunched up my eyes. It never helped me think any better, but that was no reason not to keep trying it. “He wanted to send me a message. Kill two birds with one stone.”

Ebenezar nodded. “He wanted you stripped of your position as a Warden, but Luccio is still the technical commander of the Wardens, though Morgan commands in the field. She supported you and the rest of the Senior Council overruled him.”

“Bet he loved that,” I said.

Ebenezar chuckled. “I thought he was having a stroke.”

“Joy,” I said. “I didn’t want the job to begin with.”

“I know,” he said. “You got rocks and hard places, boy. Not much else.”

“So the Merlin figures he’ll show me an execution and scare me into toeing the line.” I frowned, thinking. “I take it there’s no word on the attack last year? No one found with mysterious sums of money dumped into their bank accounts that would incriminate a traitor?”

“Not yet,” Ebenezar said.

“Then with the traitor running around loose, all the Merlin has to do is wait for me to screw something up. Then he can call it treason and squish me.”

Ebenezar nodded, and I saw the warning in his eyes—another reason to take the job he was offering. “He genuinely believes that you are a threat to the Council. If your behavior confirms his belief, he’ll do whatever is necessary to stop you.”

I snorted. “There was another guy like that once. Name of McCarthy. If the Merlin wants to find a traitor, he’ll find one whether or not one actually exists.”

Ebenezar scowled, a hint of a Scots burr creeping into his voice, as it did anytime he was angry, and he glanced at the Merlin. “Aye. I thought you should know.”

I nodded, still without looking up at him. I hated being bullied into anything, but I didn’t get the vibe that Ebenezar was making an effort to maneuver me into a corner. He was asking a favor. I might well help myself by doing him the favor, but he wasn’t going to bring anything onto my head if I turned him down. It wasn’t his style.

I met his eyes and nodded. “Okay.”

He exhaled slowly and nodded back, silent thanks in his expression. “Oh. One other thing,” he said, and passed me an envelope.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “The Gatekeeper asked me to give it to you.”

The Gatekeeper. He was the quietest of the wizards on the Senior Council, and even the Merlin showed him plenty of respect. He was taller than me, which is saying something, and he stayed out of most of the partisan politics of the Senior Council, which says even more. He knew things he shouldn’t be able to know—more so than most wizards, I mean—and as far as I could tell, he’d never been anything but straight with me.

I opened the envelope. A single piece of paper was inside. Letters in a precise, flowing hand read:

Dresden,

In the past ten days there have been repeated acts of black magic in Chicago. As the senior Warden in the region, it falls to you to investigate and find those responsible. In my opinion, it is vital that you do so immediately. To my knowledge, no one else is aware of the situation.

Rashid

I rubbed at my eyes. Great. More black magic in Chicago. If it wasn’t some raving, psychotic, black-hatted bad guy, it was probably another kid like the one who’d died a few minutes ago. There wasn’t a whole lot of in-between.

I was hoping for the murderous madman—sorry, political correctioners; madperson. I could deal with those. I’d had practice.

I didn’t think I could handle the other.

I put the letter back in the envelope, thinking. This was between the Gatekeeper and me, presumably. He hadn’t asked me publicly, or told Ebenezar what was going on, which meant that I was free to decide how to handle this one. If the Merlin knew about this and officially gave me the assignment, he’d make damned sure I didn’t have much of a choice in how to handle it—and I’d have to do the whole thing under a microscope.

The Gatekeeper had trusted me to handle whatever was wrong. That was almost worse.

Man.

Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations.

I looked up to find Ebenezar squinting at me. The expression made his face a mass of wrinkles.

“What?” I asked.

“You get a haircut or something, Hoss?”

“Uh, nothing new. Why?”

“You look…’’ The old wizard’s voice trailed off thoughtfully. “Different.”

My heartbeat sped up a little. As far as I knew, Ebenezar was unaware of the entity who was leasing out the unused portions of my brain, and I wanted to keep it that way. But though he had a reputation for being something of a magical brawler, his specialty the summoning up of primal, destructive forces, he had a lot more on the ball than most of the Council gave him credit for. It was entirely possible that he had sensed something of the fallen angel’s presence within me.

“Yeah, well. I’ve been wearing the cloak of the people I spent most of my adult life resenting,” I said. “Between that and being a cripple, I’ve been off my sleep for almost a year.”

“That can do it,” Ebenezar said, nodding. “How’s the hand?”

I bit back my first harsh response, that it was still maimed and scarred, and that the burns made it look like a badly melted piece of wax sculpture. I’d gone up against a bad guy with a brain a couple of years back, and she’d worked out that my defensive magic was designed to stop kinetic energy—not heat. I found that out the hard way when a couple of her psychotic goons sprayed improvised napalm at me. My shield had stopped the flaming jelly, but the heat had gone right through and dry roasted the hand I’d held out to focus my shield.

I held up my gloved left hand and waggled my thumb and the first two fingers in jerky little motions. The other two fingers didn’t move much unless their neighbors pulled them. “Not much feeling in them yet, but I can hold a beer. Or the steering wheel. Doctor’s had me playing guitar, trying to move them and use them more.”

“Good,” Ebenezar said. “Exercise is good for the body, but music is good for the soul.”

“Not the way I play it,” I said.

Ebenezar grinned wryly, and drew a pocket watch from the front pocket of the overalls. He squinted at it. “Lunchtime,” he said. “You hungry?”

There wasn’t anything in his tone to indicate it, but I could read the subtext.

Ebenezar had been a mentor to me at a time I’d badly needed it. He’d taught me just about everything I thought was important enough to be worth knowing. He had been unfailingly generous, patient, loyal, and kind to me.

But he had been lying to me the whole time, ignoring the principles he had been teaching me. On the one hand, he taught me about what it meant to be a wizard, about how a wizard’s magic comes from his deepest beliefs, about how doing evil with magic was more than simply a crime—it was a mockery of what magic meant, a kind of sacrilege. On the other hand, he’d been the White Council’s Blackstaff the whole while—a wizard with a license to kill, to violate the Laws of Magic, to make a mockery of everything noble and good about the power he wielded in the name of political necessity. And he’d done it. Many times.

I had once held the kind of trust and faith in Ebenezar that I had given no one else. I’d built a foundation for my life on what he’d taught me about the use of magic, about right and wrong. But he’d let me down. He’d been living a lie, and it had been brutally painful to learn about it. Two years later, it still twisted around in my belly, a vague and nauseating unease.

My old teacher was offering me an olive branch, trying to set aside the things that had come between us. I knew that I should go along with him. I knew that he was as human, as fallible, as anyone else. I knew that I should set it aside, mend our fences, and get on with life. It was the smart thing to do. It was the compassionate, responsible thing to do. It was the right thing to do.

But I couldn’t.

It still hurt too much for me to think straight about it.

I looked up at him. “Death threats in the guise of formal decapitations sort of ruin my appetite.”

He nodded at me, accepting the excuse with a patient and steady expression, though I thought I saw regret in his eyes. He lifted a hand in a silent wave and turned away to walk toward a beat-up old Ford truck that had been built during the Great Depression. Second thoughts pressed in. Maybe I should say something. Maybe I should go for a bite to eat with the old man.

My excuse hadn’t been untrue, though. There was no way I could eat. I could still feel the droplets of hot blood hitting my face, still see the body lying unnaturally in a pool of blood. My hands started shaking and I closed my eyes, forcing the vivid, bloody memories out of the forefront of my thoughts. Then I got in the car and tried to leave the memories behind me.

The Blue Beetle is no muscle car, but it flung up a respectable amount of gravel as I left.

The streets weren’t as bad as they usually were, but it was still hotter than hell, so I rolled down the windows at the first stoplight and tried to think clearly.

Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose.

But Ebenezar was right. I was probably the only one on the Council with acquaintances in both the Summer and Winter Courts of the Sidhe. If anyone on the Council could find out, it was me. Yippee.

And just to keep things interesting, I needed to hunt down some kind of unspecified black magic and put a stop to it. That was what Wardens spent all their time doing, when they weren’t fighting a war, and what I’d done two or three times myself, but it wasn’t ever pretty. Black magic means a black practitioner of some kind, and they tended to be the sorts of people who were both happy to kill an interfering wizard and able to manage it.

Faeries.

Black magic.

It never rains but it pours.

Chapter Three

Between one heartbeat and the next, the passenger seat of the Blue Beetle was suddenly occupied. I let out a yelp and nearly bounced my car off of a delivery truck. The tires squealed in protest and I started to slide. I turned into it and recovered, but if I’d had another coat of paint on my car I’d have collided with the one next to me. My heart in my throat, I got the car moving smoothly again, and turned to glare at the sudden passenger.

Lasciel, aka the Temptress, aka the Webweaver, apparently some kind of photocopy of the personality of a fallen angel, sat in the passenger seat. She could look like anything she chose, but her most common form was that of a tall, athletic blonde wearing a white Greek-style tunic that fell almost to her knee. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring out the front of the car, smiling very slightly.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I snarled at her. “Are you trying to get me killed?”

“Don’t be such a baby,” she replied, her tone amused. “No one was harmed.”

“No thanks to you,” I growled. “Put the seat belt on.”

She gave me a level look. “Mortal, I have no physical form. I exist nowhere except within your mind. I am a mental image. An illusion. A hologram only you can see. There is no reason for me to wear my seat belt.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said. “My car, my brain, my rules. Put on the damned seat belt or get lost.”

She heaved a sigh. “Very well.” She twisted around like anyone would, drawing the seat belt forward around her waist and clicking it. I knew she couldn’t have picked up the physical seat belt and done that, so what I was seeing was only an illusion—but it was a convincing one. I would have had to make a serious effort to see that the actual seat belt hadn’t moved.

Lasciel looked at me. “Acceptable?”

“Barely,” I said, thinking furiously. Lasciel, as she appeared to me now, was a portion of a genuine fallen angel. The real deal was trapped inside an ancient silver denarius, a Roman coin, which was buried under a couple of feet of concrete in my basement. But in touching the coin, I’d created a kind of outlet for the demon’s personality—embodied as an entirely discrete mental entity living right in my own head, presumably in the ninety percent of the brain that humans never use. Or in my case, maybe ninety-five. Lasciel could appear to me, could see what I saw and sense what I sensed, could look through my memories to some degree and, most disturbing, could create illusions that I had to work hard to see through—just as she was now creating the illusion of her physical presence in my car. Her extremely attractive and wholesome-looking and entirely desirable presence. The bitch.

“I thought we had an understanding,” I growled. “I don’t want you coming to see me unless I call you.”

“And I have respected our agreement,” she said. “I simply came to remind you that my services and resources are at your disposal, should you need them, and that the whole of my self, currently residing beneath the floor of your laboratory, is likewise prepared to assist you.”

“You act like I wanted you there in the first place. If I knew how to erase you from my head without getting killed, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” I replied.

“The portion of me that shares your mind is nothing but the shadow of my true self,” Lasciel said. “But have a care, mortal. I am. I exist. And I desire to continue to do so.”

“Like I said. If I could do it without getting killed,” I growled. “In the meanwhile, unless you want me to chain you into a little black closet in my head, get out of my sight.”

Her mouth twitched, maybe in irritation, but nothing more than that showed on her face. “As you wish,” she said, inclining her head. “But if black magic truly is once more rising within Chicago, you may well have need of every tool at hand. And as you must survive for me to survive, I have every reason to aid you.”

“A tiny black box,” I said. “Without holes in the lid. Smelling like my high school locker room.”

Her mouth curled again, an expression of wary amusement. “As you wish, my host.”

And she was gone, vanishing back into the undeveloped vaults of my mind or wherever she went. I shivered, making sure my thoughts were contained, shielded from her perceptions. There was nothing I could do to prevent Lasciel from seeing and hearing everything I did, or from rummaging randomly in my memories, but I had learned that I could at least veil my active thoughts from her. I did so constantly, in order to prevent her from learning too much, too quickly.

That would only help her reach her goal—that of convincing me to unearth the ancient silver coin buried under my lab and sealed within spells and concrete. Within the coin, the old Roman denarius—one of a collection of thirty—dwelt the whole of the fallen angel, Lasciel.

If I chose to ally myself with her, it would get me all kinds of strength. The power and knowledge of a fallen angel could turn anyone into a deadly and virtually immortal threat—at the low, low cost of one’s soul. Once you signed on with one of the literal Hell’s Angels, you weren’t the only one in the captain’s chair anymore. The more you let them help you, the more you surrendered your will to them, and sooner or later it’s the fallen angel that’s calling the shots.

I’d grabbed the coin a heartbeat before a friend’s toddler could reach down for it, and touching its surface had transferred a portion of the personality, the intellect of Lasciel into my head. She helped me survive several nasty days the previous autumn, and her assistance had been invaluable. Which was the problem. I couldn’t allow myself to continue relying on her help, because sooner or later, I’d get used to it. And then I’d enjoy it. And at some point, digging up that coin in my basement wouldn’t seem like such a bad idea.

All of which meant that I had to stay on my guard against the fallen angel’s suggestions. The price may have been hidden, but it was still there. Lasciel wasn’t wrong, though, about how dangerous situations involving true black magic could become. I might well find myself in need of help.

I thought about those who had fought beside me before. I thought about my friend Michael, whose kid had been the one about to pick up the coin.

I hadn’t seen Michael since then. I hadn’t called. He’d called me a couple of times, invited me to Thanksgiving dinner a couple of times, asked if I was all right a couple of times. I had turned down his invitations and cut every phone conversation short. Michael didn’t know that I’d picked up one of the Blackened Denarii, taken possession of a token that could arguably make me a member of the Knights of the Blackened Denarius. I’d fought some of the Denarians. I’d killed one of them.

They were monsters of the worst sort, and Michael was a Knight of the Cross. He was one of three people on the face of the earth who had been chosen to wield a holy sword, an honest-to-Goodness holy sword, each of them with what was supposed to be a nail from the Cross, capital C, worked into the blade. Michael fought dark and evil things. He beat them. He saved children and innocents in danger, and he would stand up to the darkest creatures imaginable without blinking, so strong was his faith that the Almighty would give him strength enough to defeat the darkness before him.

He had no love for his opposites, the Denarians, power-hungry psychopaths as determined to cause and spread pain and suffering as Michael was to contain them.

I never told him about the coin. I didn’t want him to know that I was sharing brain space with a demon. I didn’t want him to think less of me. Michael had integrity. Most of my adult life, the White Council at large had been sure that I was some kind of monster just waiting for the right time to morph into its true form and start laying waste to everything around me. But Michael had been firmly on my side since the first time we’d met. His unwavering support had made me feel a whole hell of a lot better about my life.

I didn’t want him to look at me the way he’d looked at the Denarians we’d fought. So until I got rid of Lasciel’s stupid mental sock puppet, I wasn’t going to ask him for help.

I would handle this on my own.

I was fairly sure that my day couldn’t get much worse.

No sooner had I thought it than there was a horrible crunching sound, and my head snapped back hard against the headrest on the back of the driver’s seat. The Beetle shuddered and jounced wildly, and I fought to keep it under control.

You’d think I would know better by now.

Chapter Four

I managed to get one wild look around, and it showed me someone in a real battleship of an old Chrysler, dark grey, windows tinted, and then the car slammed into the Beetle again and nearly sent me into a deadly spin. My head snapped to one side and hit the window, and I could almost smell the smoldering of my tires as they all slid forward and sideways simultaneously. I felt the car hit the curb, and then bounce up. I wrenched at the steering wheel and the brakes, my body responding to things my stunned brain hadn’t caught up to yet. I think I kept it from becoming a total disaster, because instead of spinning off into oncoming traffic or hitting the wall at a sharp angle, I managed to slam the Beetle’s passenger-side broadside into the building beside the street. Brick grated on steel, until I came to a halt fifty feet later.

Stars swarmed over my vision and I tried to swat them away so that I could get a look at the Chrysler’s plates—but it was gone in a heartbeat. Or at least I think it was. Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed.

Sitting there seemed like a really good idea, so I sat. After a while I got the vague notion that I should make sure everyone was all right. I looked at me. No blood, which was positive. I looked blearily around the car. No screaming. No corpses in my rearview mirror. Nothing was on fire. There was broken safety glass everywhere from the passenger-side window, but the rear window had been replaced with a sheet of translucent plastic a while back.

The Beetle, stalwart crusader against the forces of evil and alternative fuels, was still running, though its engine had acquired an odd, moaning wheeze as opposed to the usual surly wheeze. I tried my door. It didn’t open. I rolled down my window and hauled myself slowly out of the car. If I could get up the energy to slide across the hood before I got back in, I could audition for The Dukes of Hazzard.

“Here in Hazzard County,” I drawled to myself, “we don’t much cotton to hit-and-run automotive assaults.”

It took an unknown number of minutes for the first cop to arrive, a patrolman I recognized named Grayson. Grayson was an older cop, a big man with a big red nose and a comfortable gut, who looked like he could bounce angry drunks or drink them under the table, take your pick. He got out of his car and started asking me questions in a concerned tone of voice. I answered him as best I could, but something between my brain and my mouth had shorted out, and I found him eyeing me and then looking around the inside of the Beetle for open containers before he sat me down on the ground and started routing traffic around. I got to sit down on the curb, which suited me fine. I watched the sidewalk spin around until someone touched my shoulder.

Karrin Murphy, head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department, looked like someone’s cute kid sister. She was maybe a rose petal over five feet tall, had blond hair, blue eyes, a pug nose, and nearly invisible freckles. She was made all of springy muscle; a gymnast’s build that did not preclude feminine curves. She was in a white cotton shirt and blue jeans that day, a Cubs ball cap on her head, reflective sunglasses over her eyes.

“Harry?” she asked. “You okay?”

“Uncle Jesse is gonna be awful disappointed that one of Boss Hogg’s flunkies banged up the General Lee,” I told her, waving at my car.

She stared at me for a moment and then said, “Did you know you have a bruise on the side of your head?”

“Nah,” I said. I poked a finger at it. “Do I?”

Murphy sighed and gently pushed my finger down. “Harry, seriously. If you’re so loopy you can’t talk to me, I need to get you to a hospital.”

“Sorry, Murph,” I told her. “Been a long day already. I got my bells rung pretty good. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

She exhaled, and then nodded and sat down on the curb with me. “Mind if I have one of the EMTs look at you? Just to be careful?”

“They’d want to take me to a hospital,” I said. “Too dangerous. I could short out someone’s life support. And the Reds are watching the hospitals, putting hits on our wounded. I could draw fire onto the patients.”

“I know that,” she said quietly. “I won’t let them take you.”

“Oh. Okay, then,” I said. An EMT checked me out. He shined a light into my eyes, for which I kicked him lightly in the shins. He muttered at me for a minute, poked me here and there, examined and measured and counted and so on. Then he shook his head and stood up. “Maybe a mild concussion. He should see a doctor to be safe, Lieutenant.”

Murphy nodded, thanked the EMT, and looked pointedly at the ambulance. He sidled away, his expression disapproving.

Murphy sat down with me again. “All right, spill. What happened?”

“Someone in a dark grey Chrysler tried to park in my backseat.” I waved a hand, annoyed, as she opened her mouth. “And no. I didn’t get the plates. I was too busy considering a career as a crash test dummy.”

“You’ve got the dummy part down,” she said. “You into something lately?”

“Not yet,” I complained. “I mean, Hell’s bells, Murphy. I got told half a freaking hour ago that there’s bad juju going down somewhere in Chicago. I haven’t even had time to start checking into it, and someone is already trying to make me into a commercial for seat belts and air bags.”

“You sure it was deliberate?”

“Yeah. But whoever it was, he wasn’t a pro.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If he had been, he’d have spun me easy. No idea he was there until he’d hit me. Could have bumped me into a spin before I could have straightened out. Flipped my car a few times. Killed me pretty good.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. A nice, full-body ache was already spreading out into my muscles. “Isn’t exactly the best place for it, either.”

“Attack of opportunity,” Murphy said.

“Whassat?”

She smiled a little. “When you weren’t expecting the shot, but you see it and take it before the opportunity passes you by.”

“Oh. Yeah, probably one of those.”

Murphy shook her head. “Look, maybe I should get you to a doctor anyway.”

“No,” I said. “Really. I’m okay. But I want to get off the street soonest.”

Murphy inhaled slowly and then nodded. “I’ll take you home.”

“Thanks.”

Grayson came ambling over to us. “Wrecker’s on the way,” he said. “What do we got here?”

“Hit and run,” Murphy said.

Grayson lifted his eyebrows and eyed me. “Yeah? Looked to me like you got hit a couple of times. On purpose-like.”

“For all I know it was an honest accident,” I said.

Grayson nodded. “There’s some clothes in your backseat. Looks like they have blood on them.”

“Leftovers from last Halloween,” I said. “It’s costume stuff. A cloak and robes and such, had fake blood all over them. It looked cheesy as hell.”

Grayson snorted. “You’re worse than my kid. He’s still got some of his football jerseys in his backseat from last fall.”

“He probably has a nicer car.” I glanced up at the Beetle. It was a real mess, and I winced. It wasn’t like the Beetle was a priceless antique or anything, but it was my car. I drove it places. I liked it. “In fact, I’m sure it’s a nicer car.”

Grayson let out a wry chuckle. “I need to fill out some papers. You okay to help me fill in the blanks?”

“Sure,” I told him.

“Thanks for the call, Sergeant,” Murphy said.

“De nada,” Grayson replied, touching the brim of his cap with a finger. “I’ll get those forms, Dresden, soon as the wrecker gets here.”

“Cool,” I said.

Grayson moved off, and Murphy stared at me steadily for a moment.

“What?” I asked her quietly.

“You lied to him,” she said. “About the clothes and the blood.”

I twitched one shoulder.

“And you did it well. I mean, if I didn’t know you…” She shook her head. “It surprises me about you. That’s all. You’ve always been a terrible liar.”

“Um,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to take that one. “Thank you?”

She let out a wry chuckle. “So what’s the real story?”

“Not here,” I said. “Let’s talk in a bit.”

Murphy studied my face for a second, and her frown deepened. “Harry? What’s wrong?”

The limp, headless body of that nameless young man filled my thoughts. It brought up too many emotions with it, and I felt my throat tighten until I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak. So I shook my head a little and shrugged.

She nodded. “You going to be all right?”

There was a peculiar gentleness in her voice. Murphy had been playing in what amounted to a boys-only league in her work with CPD, and she put off a tough-as-nails aura that made her seem almost as formidable as she actually was. That exterior almost never varied, at least out in the open, with other police officers nearby. But as she looked at me, there was a quiet, definite, and unashamed vulnerability in her voice.

We’ve had our differences in the past, but Murphy was one hell of a good friend. I gave her my best lopsided smile. “I’m always all right. More or less.”

She reached out and twitched a stray bit of hair from my forehead. “You’re a great big girl, Dresden. One little fender bender and you go all emotional and pathetic.” Her eyes flickered to the Beetle again, and suddenly burned with a cold blue fire. “Do you know who did this to you?”

“Not yet,” I growled as the wrecker arrived. “But you can bet your ass I’m going to find out.”

Chapter Five

By the time we got back to my place, my head was starting to run at its normal speed, the better to inform me how much it hurt. I had a nice, deep-down body ache to go along with the bruised skull. The light of the afternoon sun stabbed at my eyes in a cheerfully vicious fashion, and I was glad when I shambled down the steps to my basement apartment, disarmed my magical wards, unlocked the door, and shoved hard at it.

It didn’t open. The previous autumn, zombies had torn apart my steel security door and wrecked my apartment. Though I was getting a modest paycheck from the Wardens now, I still didn’t have enough money to pay for all the repairs, and I had set out to fix the door on my own. I hadn’t framed it very well, but I try to think positive: The new door was arguably even more secure than the old one—now you could barely get the damned thing open even when it wasn’t locked.

While I was in home-renovation mode, I put down linoleum in the kitchen, carpet on the living room and bedroom floors, and tile in the bathroom, and let me tell you something.

It isn’t as easy as those Time-Life homeowner books make it look.

I had to slam my shoulder against it three or four times, but the door finally groaned and squealed and came open.

“I thought you were going to have a contractor fix that,” Murphy said.

“When I get the money.”

“I thought you were getting another paycheck now.”

I sighed. “Yeah. But the rate of pay was set in 1959, and the Council hasn’t given it a cost-of-living increase since. I think it comes up for review in a few more years.”

“Wow. That’s even slower than City Hall.”

“Always thinking positive.” I went inside, stepping onto the large wrinkle that had somehow formed in the carpet before the door.

My apartment isn’t huge. There’s a fairly roomy living room, with a miniature kitchen set in an alcove opposite the door. The door to my tiny bedroom and bathroom is on the right as you come in, with a red-brick fireplace set in the wall beside it. Bookshelves, tapestries, and movie posters line the cold stone walls. My original Star Wars poster had survived the attack, though my library of paperbacks had taken a real beating. Those darned zombies, they always dog-ear the pages and crack the spines the minute they’re done oozing foul goop and smashing up furniture.

I have a couple of secondhand sofas, which aren’t hard to get cheap, so replacing them wasn’t too bad. A pair of comfortable old easy chairs by the fire, a coffee table, and a large mound of grey-and-black fur rounded out the furnishings. There’s no electricity, and it’s a dim little hole, but it’s a dim, cool little hole, and it was a relief to get out of the broiling sun.

The small mountain of fur shook itself, and something thudded against the wall beside it as it rose up into the shape of a large, stocky dog covered in a thick shag of grey fur, complete with an almost leonine mane of darker fur around his neck, throat, chest, and upper shoulders. He went to Murphy straightaway, sitting and offering up his right front paw.

Murphy laughed, and grabbed his paw briefly—her fingers couldn’t have stretched around the offered limb. “Hiya, Mouse.” She scratched him behind the ears. “When did you teach him that, Harry?”

“I didn’t,” I said, stooping to ruffle Mouse’s ears as I went past him to the fridge. “Where’s Thomas?” I asked the dog.

Mouse made a chuffing sound and looked at the closed door to my bedroom. I stopped to listen for a moment, and heard the faint gurgle of water in the pipes. Thomas was in the shower. I got a Coke out of the fridge and glanced at Murphy. She nodded. I got her one too, and doddered over to the couch to sit down slowly and carefully, my aches and pains complaining at me the whole while. I opened the Coke, drank, and settled back with my eyes closed. Mouse lumbered over to sit down by the couch and lay his massive head on one knee. He pawed at my leg.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

He exhaled through his nose, doggie expression somehow skeptical, and I scratched his ears, to prove it. “Thanks for the ride, Murph.”

“Sure,” she said. She brought out a plastic sack she’d carried in and tossed it on the floor. It held my robe, stole, and cloak, all of them spattered with blood. She walked over to the kitchen sink and started filling it with cold water. “So let’s talk.”

I nodded and told her about the Korean kid. While I did that, she put my stole in the sink, then started washing it briskly in the cold water.

“That kid is what wizards mean when they talk about warlocks,” I said. “Someone who has betrayed the purpose of magic. Gone bad, right from the start.”

She waited a moment and then said, in a quiet, dangerous voice, “They killed him here? In Chicago?”

“Yes,” I said. I felt even more tired. “This is one of our safer meeting places, apparently.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t stop it?”

“I couldn’t have,” I said. “There were heavyweights there, Murphy. And…’’ I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure they were completely in the wrong.”

“Like hell they weren’t,” she snarled. “I don’t give a good God damn what the White Council does over in England or South America or wherever they want to hang around flapping their beards. But they came here.”

“Had nothing to do with you,” I said. “Nothing to do with the law, that is. It was internal stuff. They would have done the same to that kid, no matter where they were.”

Her movements became jerky for a moment, and water splashed over the rim of the sink. Then she visibly forced herself to relax, put the stole aside, and went to work on the robe. “Why do you think that?” she asked.

“The kid had gone in for black magic in a big way,” I said. “Mind-control stuff. Robbing people of their free will.”

She regarded me with cool eyes. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“It’s the Fourth Law of Magic,” I said. “You aren’t allowed to control the mind of another human. But…hell, it’s one of the first things a lot of these stupid kids try—the old Jedi mind trick. Sometimes they start with maybe getting homework overlooked by a teacher or convincing their parents to buy them a car. They come into their magic when they’re maybe fifteen or so, and by the time they’re seventeen or eighteen they’ve got a full-grown talent.”

“And that’s bad?”

“A lot of times,” I said. “Think about how men that age are. Can’t go ten seconds without thinking about sex. Sooner or later, if someone doesn’t teach them otherwise, they’ll put the psychic armlock on the head cheerleader to get a date. And more than a date. And then more girls, or I guess other guys if I’m going to be PC about it. Someone else gets upset about losing a girlfriend or a daughter getting pregnant and the kid tries to fix his mistakes with more magic.”

“But why does that mandate execution?” Murphy asked.

“It…” I frowned. “Getting into someone’s mind like that is difficult and dangerous. And sooner or later, while you’re changing them, you start changing yourself, too. You remember Micky Malone?”

Murphy didn’t exactly shudder, but her hands stopped moving for a minute. Micky Malone was a retired police officer. A few months after he’d gotten out of the game, an angry and vicious spiritual entity had unleashed a psychic assault on him, and bound him in spells of torment to boot. The attack had transformed a grandfatherly old retired cop into a screaming maniac, totally out of control. I’d done what I could for the poor guy, but it had been really bad.

“I remember,” Murphy said quietly.

“When a person gets into someone’s head, it inflicts all kinds of damage—sort of like what happened to Micky Malone. But it damages the one doing it, too. It gets easier to bend others as you get more bent. Vicious cycle. And it’s dangerous for the victim. Not just because of what might happen as a direct result of suddenly being forced to believe that the warlock is the god-king of the universe. It strains their psyche, and the more uncharacteristically they’re made to feel and act, the more it hurts them. Most of the time, it devolves into a total breakdown.”

Murphy shivered. “Like those office workers Mavra did it to? And the Renfields?”

A flash of phantom pain went through my maimed hand at the memory. “Exactly like that,” I said.

“What can that kind of magic do?” she asked, her voice more subdued.

“Too much. This kid had forced a bunch of people to commit suicide. A bunch more to commit murder. He’d turned a whole gang of people, most of them his family, into his personal slaves.”

“My God,” Murphy said quietly. “That’s hideous.”

I nodded. “That’s black magic. You get enough of it in you and it changes you. Stains you.”

“Isn’t there anything else the Council can do?”

“Not when the kid is that far gone. They’ve tried it all,” I said. “Sometimes the warlock seemed to get better, but they all turned back in the end. And more people died. So unless someone on the Council takes personal responsibility for the warlock, they just kill them.”

She thought about that for a moment. Then she asked, “Could you have done that? Taken responsibility for him?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Theoretically, I guess. If I really believed he could be salvaged.”

She pressed her lips together and stared at the sink.

“Murph,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “The law couldn’t handle someone like that. You couldn’t arrest them, contain them, without some serious magic to neutralize their powers. If you tried to bring an angry warlock into holding down at SI, it would get ugly. Worse than the loup-garou.”

“There’s got to be another way,” Murphy said.

“Once a dog goes rabid, you can’t bring him back,” I said. “All you can do is keep him from hurting others. The best solution is prevention. Find the kids displaying serious talent and teach them better from the get-go. But the world population has grown so much in the past century that the White Council can’t possibly identify and reach them all. Especially with this war on. There just aren’t enough of us.”

She tilted her head, staring at me. “Us? That’s the first time I’ve heard you reference the White Council with yourself included in it.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I drank the rest of my Coke. Murphy went on washing for a minute, set the robe aside, and reached for the grey cloak. She dropped it into the sink, frowned, and then held it up. “Look at this,” she said. “The blood came out when it hit the water. All by itself.”

“It’s like that kid never died. Cool,” I said quietly.

Murphy watched me for a moment. “Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don’t understand what’s happening. They see something they don’t like and it upsets them—because they don’t have the full story, aren’t personally facing the problem, and don’t know how much worse the alternative could be.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

“It sucks.”

“Sorry.”

She cast me a fleeting smile, but her expression grew serious again when she crossed the room to sit down near me. “Do you really think what they did was necessary?”

God help me, I nodded.

“Is this why the Council was so hard on you for so long? Because they thought you were a warlock about to relapse?”

“Yeah. Except for the part where you’re using the past tense.” I leaned forward, chewing on my lip for a second. “Murph, this is one of those things the cops can’t get involved in. I told you there would be things like this. I don’t like what happened anymore than you do. But please, don’t push this. It won’t help anyone.”

“I can’t ignore a dead body.”

“There won’t be one.”

She shook her head and stared at the Coke for a while more. “All right,” she said. “But if the body shows up or someone reports it, I won’t have any choice.”

“I understand.” I looked around for a change of subject. “So. There’s black magic afoot in Chicago, according to an annoyingly vague letter from the Gatekeeper.”

“Who is he?”

“Wizard. Way mysterious.”

“You believe him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So we should be on the lookout for killings and strange incidents and so on. The usual.”

“Right,” Murphy said. “I’ll keep an eye out for corpses, weirdos, and monsters.”

The door to the bedroom opened and my half brother Thomas emerged, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. He was right around six feet in height, and was built like the high priest of Bowflex—all lean muscle, sculpted and well formed, not too much of a good thing. He wore a pair of black trousers and black shoes, and was pulling a pale blue T-shirt down over his rippling abs as he came into the room.

Murphy watched him, blue eyes gleaming. Thomas is awfully pretty to look at. He’s also a vampire of the White Court. They didn’t go in for fangs and blood so much as pale skin and supernaturally hot sex, but just because they fed on raw life force rather than blood didn’t make them any less dangerous.

Thomas had worked hard to make sure that he kept his hunger under control, so that when he fed he wouldn’t hurt anyone too badly—but I knew it had been a difficult struggle for him, and he carried that strain around with him. It was visible in his expression, and it made all of his movements those of a lean, hungry predator.

“Monsters?” he asked, pulling the shirt down over his head. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Karrin, good afternoon.”

“That’s Lieutenant Murphy to you, Prettyboy,” she shot back, but her face was set in an appreciative smile.

He grinned back at her from under his hair, which even when wet and uncombed was carelessly curling and attractive. “Why, thank you for the compliment,” he said. He reached down to scratch Mouse’s ears, nodded to me, and seized up his big, black gym bag. “You have some more business come to town, Harry?”

“That’s the scuttlebutt,” I said. “I haven’t had time to look into it yet.”

He tilted his head to one side and frowned at me. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Car trouble.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. He slung the bag’s strap over his shoulder. “Look, you need some help, just let me know.” He glanced at the clock and said, “Gotta run.”

“Sure,” I said to his back. He shut the door behind him.

Murphy arched an eyebrow. “That was abrupt. Are you still getting along?”

I grimaced and nodded. “He’s . . I don’t know, Murph. He’s been very distant lately. And gone almost all of the time. Day and night. He sleeps and eats here, but mostly when I’m at work. And when I do see him, it’s always like that—in passing. He’s in a hurry to get somewhere.”

“Where?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“You’re worried about him,” she said.

“Yeah. He’s usually a lot more tense than this. You know, the whole incubus hunger thing. I’m worried that maybe he’s decided appetite control was for the birds.”

“Do you think he’s hurting anyone?”

“No,” I said at once, a little too quickly. I forced myself to calm down and then said, “No, not as such. I don’t know. I wish he’d talk to me, but ever since last fall, he’s kept me at arm’s length.”

“Have you asked him?” Murphy said.

I eyed her. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t done that way,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because guys don’t do it like that.”

“Let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “You want him to talk to you, but you won’t actually tell him that or ask him any questions. You sit around with the silence and tension and no one says anything.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She stared at me.

“You need a prostate to understand,” I said.

She shook her head. “I understand enough.” She rose and said, “You’re idiots. You should talk to him.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eyes open. If I find anything odd, I’ll get in touch.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait for sundown,” I said.

“Then what?” she asked.

I rubbed at my aching head, feeling a sudden surge of defiance for whoever had run me off the road and whatever black-magicky jerk had decided to mess around with my hometown. “Then I put on my wizard hat and start finding out what’s going on.”

Chapter Six

Murphy stayed until she was sure I wasn’t going to suddenly drop unconscious, but made me promise to call her in a couple of hours to be sure. Mouse escorted her to the door when she left, and Murphy swung it shut with two hands and a grunt of effort in order to make it close snugly into the frame. Her car started, departed.

I prodded my brain with a sharp stick until it figured out my next move. My brain pointed out that I knew the current Summer Knight of the Summer Court, and that the guy owed me some fairly big favors. I’d saved his life when he’d just been a terrified changeling trying not to get swallowed up by an incipient war between Winter and Summer. When everything settled, he was the new Summer Knight, the mortal champion of the Summer Court. It gave him a lot of influence with fully half of the Sidhe realm, and he’d probably know more about what was going on there than any other native of the real world. My brain thought it would be really wonderful if maybe I could make one little phone call to Fix and get all the information I needed about the Sidhe Courts handed to me on a silver platter.

My brain is sometimes overly optimistic, but I indulged it on the off chance that I came up a winner in the investigative lottery.

I reached for the phone. It rang eleven times before someone answered. “Yes?”

“Fix?” I asked.

“Mmmph,” answered a rumpled-sounding male voice. “Who is this?”

“Harry Dresden.”

“Harry!” His voice brightened with immediate, if somewhat sleepy, cheer, which seemed far more appropriate to the Summer Knight of the Sidhe Courts. “Hey, how are you? What’s up?”

“That’s the question of the day,” I said. “I need to talk to you about Summer business.”

The sleepiness vanished from his voice. So did the friendliness. “Oh.”

“Look, it’s nothing big,” I started. “I just need to—”

“Harry,” he said, his voice sharp. Fix had never cut me off before. In fact, if you’d asked my professional opinion a year before, I’d have told you he never interrupted anyone in his life. “We can’t talk about this. The line might not be secure.”

“Come on, man,” I said. “No one can monitor the phone line with a spell. It’d burn out in a second.”

“Someone isn’t playing by the old rules anymore, Harry,” he said. “And a phone tap is not a difficult thing to engineer.”

I frowned. “Good point,” I allowed. “Then we need to talk.”

“When?”

“Soonest.”

“Accorded neutral territory,” he responded.

He meant McAnally’s pub. Mac’s place has always been a hangout for the supernatural crowd in Chicago. When the war broke out, someone managed to get it placed on a list of neutral territories where, by the agreements known as the Unseelie Accords, everyone respected the neutrality of the property and was expected to behave in a civil fashion when present. It might not have been a private rendezvous, but it was probably the safest place in town to discuss this kind of thing. “Fine,” I said. “When?”

“I’ve got business tonight. The soonest I can do it is tomorrow. Lunch?”

“Noon,” I replied.

There was a sleepy murmur on the other end of the phone—a woman’s voice.

“Shhhhh,” Fix said. “Sure, Harry. I’ll see you there.”

We hung up, and I regarded the phone with pursed lips. Fix sleeping this late in the day? And with a girl in bed with him, no less. And interrupting wizards without a second thought. He’d come a ways.

Of course, he’d had a lot of exposure to the faeries since the last time I’d seen him. And if he had anything like the power that I’d seen the champions of the Sidhe display before, he’d have had time to get used to his new strength. You can never tell how someone is going to handle power—not until you hand it to them and see what they do with it. Fix had certainly changed.

I got a little twist in my gut that told me I should employ a great deal more than average caution when I spoke to him. I didn’t like the feeling. Before I could think about it for too long, I made myself pick up the phone and move on with what my brain told me was a reasonable step two—checking around to see if anyone had heard anything about bad juju running around town.

I called several people. Billy the Werewolf, recently married. Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer. Waldo Butters, medical examiner and composer of the “Quasimodo Polka,” a dozen magical small-timers I knew, plus my ex’s editor at the Midwestern Arcane. None of them had heard of anything, and I warned them all to keep an ear to the ground. I even put in a call to the Archive, but all I got was an answering service, and no one returned my call.

I sat and stared at the phone’s base for a moment, the receiver buzzing a dial tone in my gloved left hand.

I hadn’t called Michael, or Father Forthill. I probably should have, working on the basic notion that more help was better help. Then again, if the Home Office wanted Michael on the case, he’d be there regardless of whether or not anyone called him and how many immovable objects stood in the way. I’ve seen it happen often enough to trust that it was true.

It was a good rationalization, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. Not even me. The truth was that I didn’t want to talk to either one of them unless I really, really, really had to.

The dial tone turned into that annoying buzz-buzz-buzz of a no-connection signal.

I hung the phone back up, my hand unsteady. Then I got up, reached down to the clumsily trimmed area of carpet that covered the trapdoor set in the apartment’s floor, and pulled it open onto a wooden stepladder that folded out and led down into my laboratory.

The lab is in the subbasement, which is a much better name for it than the basement-basement. It’s little more than a big concrete box with a ladder leading up and out of it. The walls are lined with overflowing white wire shelves, the cheap kind you can get at Wal-Mart. In my lab, they store containers of every kind, from plastic bags to microwave-safe plastic dinnerware to heavy wooden boxes—and even one lead-lined, lead-sealed box where I store a tiny amount of depleted uranium dust. Other books, notebooks, envelopes, paper bags, pencils, and apparently random objects of many kinds crowd each other for space on the shelves—all except for one plain, homemade wooden shelf, which held only candles at either end, four romance novels, a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and a bleached human skull.

A long table ran down the middle of the room, leaving a blank section of floor at the far end kept perfectly clear of any clutter whatsoever. A ring of plain silver was set into the floor—my summoning circle. Underneath it lay a foot and a half or so of concrete, and then another heavy metal box, wrapped with its own little circle of wards and spells. Inside the box was a blackened silver coin.

My left palm, which had been so badly burned except for an outline of skin in the shape of Lasciel’s angelic symbol, suddenly itched.

I rubbed it against my leg and ignored it.

My worktable had been crowded with material for most of the time it had been down in my lab. But that no longer was the case.

At that point I felt I owed someone an apology. When Murphy had asked me about the money from the Council, the answer I’d given her was true enough. They’d set the pay rate for Wardens in the fifties—but even the Council wasn’t quite hidebound enough to ignore things like standard inflation, and the Warden’s paychecks had kept pace through discretionary funding in—my God, I’m starting to sound like part of the establishment.

Long story short. The Wardens have sneaky ways of getting paid more, and the money I was getting from them, while not stellar, was nothing to sneeze at, either. But I hadn’t been spending it on things like fixing up my apartment.

I’d been spending it on what was on my worktable.

“Bob,” I said, “wake up.”

Orangish flames kindled wearily to life inside the open eye sockets of the skull. “Oh for crying out loud,” a voice from within complained. “Can’t you take a night off? It’ll be finished when it’s finished, Harry.”

“No rest for the wicked, Bob,” I said cheerfully. “And that means we can’t slack off either, or they’ll outwork us.”

The skull’s voice took on a whiny tone. “But we’ve been tinkering with that stupid thing every night for six months. You’re growing a cowlick and buck teeth, by the way. You keep this up and you’ll have to retire to a home for magical geeks and nerds.”

“Pish tosh,” I said.

“You can’t say pish tosh to that,” Bob grumped. “You don’t even know what it means.”

“Sure I do. It means spirits of air should shut up and assist their wizard before he sends them out to patrol for fungus demons again.”

“I get no respect,” Bob sighed. “Okay, okay. What do you want to do now?”

I gestured at the table. “Is it ready?”

“Ready?” Bob said. “It isn’t ever going to be ready, Harry. Your subject is fluid, always changing. Your model must change too. If you want it to be as accurate as possible, it’s going to be a headache keeping it up to date.”

“I do, and I know,” I told him. “So talk. Where are we? Is it ready for a test run?”

“Put me in the lake,” Bob said.

I reached up to the shelf obligingly, picked up the skull, and set it down on the eastern edge of the table.

The skull settled down beside the model city of Chicago. I’d built it onto my table, in as much detail as I’d been able to afford with my new paycheck. The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop, models of each building made from cast pewter—also expensive, given I’d had to get each one made individually. Streets made of real asphalt ran between the buildings, lined with streetlights and mailboxes in exacting detail—and all in all, I had the city mapped out to almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction. Detail began to fail toward the outskirts of the model, but as far as I’d been able to, I modeled every building, every road, every waterway, every bridge, and every tree with as much accuracy as I knew how.

I’d also spent months out on the town, collecting bits and pieces from every feature on my map. Bark from trees, usually. Chips of asphalt from the streets. I’d taken a hammer and knocked a chip or two off every building modeled there, and those pieces of the originals had been worked into the structure of their modeled counterparts.

If I’d done it correctly, the model would be of enormous value to my work. I’d be able to use various techniques to do all kinds of things in town—track down lost objects, listen in on conversations happening within the area depicted by the model, follow people through town from the relative safety of my lab—lots of cool stuff. The model would let me send my magic throughout Chicago with a great deal more facility and with a far broader range of applications than I could currently manage.

Of course, if I hadn’t done it correctly…

“This map,” Bob said, “is pretty cool. I’d have thought you would have shown it off to someone by now.”

“Nah,” I said. “Tiny model of the city down here in my basement laboratory. Sort of projects more of that evil, psychotic, Lex Luthor vibe than I’d like.”

“Bah,” Bob said. “None of the evil geniuses I ever worked for could have handled something like this.” He paused. “Though some of the psychotics could have, I guess.”

“If that’s meant to be flattering, you need some practice.”

“What am I if not good for your ego, boss?” The skull turned slowly, left to right, candleflame eyes studying the model city—not its physical makeup, I knew, but the miniature ley lines that I’d built into the surface of the table, the courses of magical energy that flowed through the city like blood through the human body.

“It looks…” He made a sound like someone idly sucking a breath through his teeth. “Hey, it looks not bad, Harry. You’ve got a gift for this kind of work. That model of the museum really altered the flow around the stadium into something mostly accurate, speaking thaumaturgically.”

“Is that even a real word?” I asked.

“It should be,” he said with a superior sniff. “Little Chicago might be able to handle something if you want to give it a test run.” The skull spun around to face me. “Tell me that this doesn’t have something to do with the bruises on your face.”

“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “I got word today that the Gatekeeper—”

Bob shivered.

“—thinks that there’s black magic afoot in town, and that I need to do something about it.”

“And you want to try to use Little Chicago to find it?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Do you think it will work?”

“I think that the Wright Brothers tested their new stuff at Kitty Hawk instead of trying it over the Grand Canyon for a reason,” Bob said. “Specifically, because if the plane folded due to flawed design, they might survive it at Kitty Hawk.”

“Or maybe they couldn’t afford to travel,” I said. “Besides, how dangerous could it be?”

Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “You’ve been pouring energy into this thing every night for six months, Harry, and right now it’s holding about three hundred times the amount of energy that kinetic ring you wear will contain.”

I blinked. At full power, that ring could almost knock a car onto its side. Three hundred times that kind of energy translated to…well, something I’d rather not experience within the cramped confines of the lab. “It’s got that much in it?”

“Yes, and you haven’t tested it yet. If you’ve screwed up some of the harmonics, it could blow up in your face, worst-case scenario. Best case, you only blow out the project and set yourself back to ground zero.”

“To square one,” I corrected him. “Square one is the beginning of a project. Ground zero is the area immediately under a bomb blast.”

“One may tend to resemble the other,” Bob said sourly.

“I’ll just have to live with the risk,” I said. “That’s the exciting life of a professional wizard and his daring assistant.”

“Oh, please. Assistants get paid.”

In answer, I reached down to a paper bag out of sight below the table and withdrew two paperback romances.

Bob let out a squeaking sound, and his skull jounced and jittered on the blue-painted surface of the table that represented Lake Michigan. “Is that it, is that it?” he squeaked.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re rated ‘Burning Hot’ by some kind of romance society.”

“Lots of sex and kink!” Bob caroled. “Gimme!”

I dropped them back into the bag and looked from Bob to Little Chicago.

The skull spun back around. “You know what kind of black magic?” he asked.

“No clue. Just black.”

“Vague, yet unhelpful,” Bob said.

“Annoyingly so.”

“Oh, the Gatekeeper didn’t do it to annoy you,” Bob said. “He did it to prevent any chance of paradox.”

“He…’’ I blinked. “He what?”

“He got this from hindsight, he had to,” Bob said.

“Hindsight,” I murmured. “You mean he went to the future for this?”

“Well,” Bob hedged. “That would break one of the Laws, so probably not. But he might have sent himself a message from there, or maybe gotten it from some kind of prognosticating spirit. He might even have developed some ability for that himself. Some wizards do.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that it’s possible nothing has happened, yet. But that he wanted to put you on your guard against something that’s coming in the immediate future.”

“Why not just tell me?” I asked.

Bob sighed. “You just don’t get this, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Okay. Let’s say he finds out that someone is going to steal your car tomorrow.”

“Heh,” I said bitterly. “Okay, let’s say that.”

“Right. Well, he can’t just call you up and tell you to move your car.”

“Why not?”

“Because if he significantly altered what happened with his knowledge of the future it could cause all sorts of temporal instabilities. It could cause new parallel realities to split off from the point of the alteration, ripple out into multiple alterations he couldn’t predict, or kind of backlash into his consciousness and drive him insane.” Bob glanced at me again. “Which, you know, might not do much to deter you, but other wizards take that kind of thing seriously.”

“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “But I still don’t get why any of those things would happen.”

Bob sighed. “Okay. Temporal studies 101. Let’s say that he hears about your car being stolen. He comes back to warn you, and as a result, you keep your car.”

“Sounds good so far.”

“But if your car never got stolen,” Bob said, “then how did he know to come back and warn you?”

I frowned.

“That’s paradox, and it can have all kinds of nasty backlash. Theory holds that it could even destroy our reality if it happened in a weak enough spot. But that’s never been proven, and never happened. You can tell, on account of how everything keeps existing.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the point in sending the message at all, if it can’t change anything?”

“Oh, it can,” Bob said. “If it’s done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you—because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours.”

I frowned. “That’s a pretty fine line.”

“Yes, which is why not mucking around with time is one of the Laws,” Bob said. “It’s possible to change the past—but you have to do it indirectly, and if you screw it up you run the risk of Paradox-egeddon.”

“So what you’re saying is that by sending me this warning, he’s indirectly working some other angle completely?”

“I’m saying that the Gatekeeper is usually a hell of a lot more specific about this kind of thing,” Bob said. “All of the Senior Council take black magic seriously. There’s got to be a reason he’s throwing it at you like this. My gut says he’s working from a temporal angle.”

“You don’t have any guts,” I said sourly.

“Your jealousy of my intellect is an ugly, ugly thing, Harry,” Bob said.

I scowled. “Get to the point.”

“Right, boss,” said the skull. “The point is that black magic is very hard to find when you look for it directly. If you try to bring up instances of black magic on your model, like Little Chicago is some kind of evil-juju radar array, it’s probably going to blow up in your face.”

“The Gatekeeper put me on guard against black magic,” I said. “But maybe he’s telling me that so that I can watch for something else. Something black-magic related.”

“Which might be a lot easier to find with your model,” Bob said cheerfully.

“Sure,” I said. “If I had the vaguest idea of what to look for.” I frowned, scowling. “So instead of looking for black magic, we look for the things that go along with black magic.”

“Bingo,” Bob said. “And the more normal the better.”

I pulled out my stool and sat down, frowning. “So, how about we look for corpses? Blood. Fear. Those are pretty standard black wizardry accessories.”

“Pain, too,” Bob said. “They’re into pain.”

“So’s the BDSM community,” I said. “In a city of eight million there are tens of thousands like that.”

“Oh. Good point,” Bob said.

“One would almost think you should have thought of that one,” I gloated. “But for the BDSM crowd, the pain isn’t something they fear. So you just look for the fear instead. Real fear, not movie-theater fear. Terror. And there can’t be a lot of spilled human blood in places with no violent activity, unless someone slips at the hospital or something. Ditto the corpses.” I drummed the fingers of my good hand thoughtfully on the table beside Bob. “Do you think Little Chicago could handle that?”

He considered for a long moment before he said, in a cautious tone, “Maybe one of them. But this will be a very difficult, very long, and very dangerous spell for you, Harry. You’re good for your years, but you still don’t have the kind of fine control you’ll get as you age. It’s going to take all of your focus. And it will take a lot out of you—assuming you can manage it at all.”

I took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Fine. We treat it as a full-blown ritual, then. Cleansing, meditation, incense, the works.”

“Even if you do everything right,” Bob said, “it might not work. And if Little Chicago turns out to be flawed, it would be very bad for you.”

I nodded slowly, staring at the model city.

There were eight million people in my town. And out of all of them, there were maybe two or three who could stand up to black magic, who had the kind of knowledge and power it took to stop a black wizard. Not only that, but odds were good that I was the only one who could actively find and counter someone before he got the murder-ball rolling. I was also, presumably, the only one who was forewarned.

Maybe it would be better to slow this down. Wait for developments my friends would report to me. Then I could get a better read on the threat, and how to deal with it. I mean, was it worth as much as my life to try this spell, when patience would get me information that was almost as good?

It might not be worth my life, but it would probably cost someone else’s. Black magic isn’t the kind of thing that leaves people whole behind it—and sometimes the victims it kills are the lucky ones. If I didn’t employ the model, I’d have to wait for the bad guys to make the first move.

So I had to do it.

I was tired of looking at corpses and victims.

“Pull together everything you know about this kind of spell, Bob,” I told him quietly. “I’m going to get some food and then we’ll lay out the ritual. I’ll start looking for fear come sundown.”

“Will do,” Bob said, and for once he was serious and didn’t sass me.

Yikes.

I started back up my ladder before I thought about it too much and changed my mind.

Chapter Seven

Ritual magic is not my favorite thing in the whole world. It doesn’t matter what I’m trying to accomplish; I still feel sort of silly when it comes time to bathe and then dress myself up in a white robe with a hood, lighting candles and incense, chanting, and mucking around with a small arsenal of candles, wands, rods, liquids, and other props used in ritual magic.

Self-conscious as I might be, though, the props and the process offered an overriding advantage when it came to working with heavy magic—they freed up my attention from the dozens of little details that I would normally be forced to imagine and keep firmly in mind. Most of the time I never gave the proper visualization a second thought. I’d been doing it for so long that it was practically second nature. That was fine for short-term work, where I had to hold my thoughts in perfect balance only for a few seconds, but for a longer spell I would need an exponentially greater amount of focus and concentration. It took someone with a lot more mental discipline than me to cast a spell through a half-hour ritual without help, and while there were probably experienced wizards who could manage it, few bothered to try it when the alternative was usually simpler, safer, and more likely to work.

I rounded up the props I would need for the ritual, with the elements first. A silver cup, which I would fill with wine, for water. A geode the size of my fist, its internal crystals vibrant shades of purple and green, for earth. Fire would be represented by a faerie-made candle, formed from unused beeswax, its wick braided from the hairs of a unicorn’s mane. Air would be anchored by a pair of hawk-wing feathers wrought from gold with impossibly fine detail and precision by a band of svartalves whose mortal contact sold examples of their craftsmanship out of a shop in Norway. And for the fifth element, spirit, I would use my mother’s silver pentacle amulet.

Other props followed, to engage the senses. Incense for scent and fresh grapes for taste. Tactile forces would depend upon a double-sided three-inch square I’d made from velvet on one side and sandpaper on the other. A rather large, deeply colored opal set within a silver frame reflected back every color of the rainbow, and would hold down the sight portion of the spell. And when I got rolling I would strike my old tuning fork against the floor for sound.

Mind, body, and heart came last. For mind, I would use an old K-Bar military knife as my ritual athame, as I usually did. Fresh droplets of my blood upon a clean white cloth would symbolize my physical body. For heart, I placed several photos of those who were dear to me inside a sack of silver-white silk. My parents, Susan, Murphy, Thomas, Mouse and Mister (my thirty-pound grey tomcat, currently on walkabout), and after a brief hesitation, Michael and his family.

I prepared the ritual circle on my lab floor, carefully sweeping it, mopping it, sweeping it again, then cleansing it with captured rainwater poured from a small, silver ewer. I brought in all the props and laid them out, ready to go.

Then I prepared myself. I lit sandalwood incense and more faerie-candles in the bathroom, started up the shower, then went step by step through a routine of washing, while focusing my mind on the task at hand. The water sluicing over me would drain away any random magical energies, a crucial step in the spell—contaminating the spell’s energy with other forces would cause it to fail.

I finished bathing, dried, and slipped into my white robe. Then I knelt on the floor at the head of the stairs down to the lab, closed my eyes, and began meditating. Just as no other energies could be allowed into the ritual, my concentration had to be of similar purity. Random thoughts, worries, fears, and emotions would sabotage the spell. I focused on my breathing, upon stilling my thoughts, and felt my limbs grow a little chill as my heartbeat slowed. Worries of the day, my aches and pains, my thoughts of the future—all had to go. It took a while to get myself in the proper frame of mind, and by the time I was finished it had been dark for two hours and my knees ached somewhere in the background.

I opened my eyes and everything came into a brilliantly sharp focus that discounted the existence of anything except myself, my magic, and the ritual awaiting me. It had been a long, wearying preparation, and I hadn’t even started with the magic yet, but if the spell could help me nail the bad guys quicker, the hours of effort would be well worth it.

Silence and focus ruled.

I was ready.

And then the fucking phone rang about a foot from my ear.

It is possible that I made some kind of unmanly noise when I jumped. My posture-numbed legs didn’t respond as quickly as I needed them to, and I lurched awkwardly to one side, half falling onto the nearest couch.

“Dammit!” I screamed in sudden frustration. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”

Mouse looked up from his lazy drowse and tilted his head to one side, ears up and forward.

“What are you looking at?” I snarled.

Mouse’s jaw dropped open into a grin, and his tail wagged.

I rubbed my hand at my face while the phone kept on ringing. It had been a while since I’d done any seriously focused magic like that, and granted, I really don’t get very many calls, but all the same I should have remembered to unplug the phone. Four hours of preparation gone to waste.

The phone kept ringing, and my head pounded in time with it. I ached. Stupid phone. Stupid car crash. I tried to think positive, because I read somewhere that it’s important to do that at times of stress and frustration. Whoever wrote that was probably selling something.

I picked up the phone and growled, “Screw thinking positive,” into the handset.

“Um,” said a woman’s voice. “What did you say?”

“Screw thinking positive!” I half shouted. “What the hell do you want?”

“Well. Maybe I have the wrong number. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden?”

I frowned, my mind taking in details despite my temper’s bid to take over the show. The voice was familiar to me; rich, smooth, adult—but the speaker’s speech patterns had an odd hesitancy to them. Her words had an odd, thick edge on them, too. An accent?

“Speaking,” I said. “Annoyed as hell, but speaking.”

“Oh. Is this a bad time?”

I rubbed at my eyes and choked down a vicious response. “Who is this?”

“Oh,” she said, as if the question surprised her. “Harry, it’s Molly. Molly Carpenter.”

“Ah,” I said. I clapped one palm to my face. My friend Michael’s oldest daughter. Way to role-model, Harry. You sure do come off like a calm, responsible adult. “Molly, didn’t recognize you at first.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The “s” sound was a little bit thick. Had she been drinking? “Not your fault,” I said. Which it hadn’t been. For that matter, the interruption might have been a stroke of luck. If my head was still too scrambled from that afternoon’s automobile hijinks to remember to unplug the phone, I didn’t have any business trying to cast that spell. Probably would have blown my own head off. “What do you need, Molly?”

“Um,” she said, and there was nervous tension in her voice. “I need…I need you to come bail me out.”

“Bail,” I said. “You’re being literal?”

“Yes.”

“You’re in jail?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Molly, I don’t know if I can do that. You’re sixteen.”

“Seventeen,” she said, with sparks of indignation and another thick “s.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You’re a juvenile. You should call your parents.”

“No!” she said, something near panic in her voice. “Harry, please. I can’t call them.”

“Why not?”

“Because I only get the one call, and I used it to call you.”

“Actually, I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, Molly.” I sighed. “In fact, I’m surprised that…” I frowned, thinking. “You lied about your age.”

“If I hadn’t, Mom and Dad would be here already,” she said. “Harry, please. Look, there’s…there’s a lot of trouble at home right now. I can’t explain it here, but if you’ll come get me, I swear, I’ll tell you all about it.”

I sighed again. “I don’t know, Molly…”

“Please?” she said. “It’s just this once, and I’ll pay you back, and I’ll never ask something like this of you again, I promise.”

Molly had long since earned her PhD in wheedling. She managed to sound vulnerable and hopeful and sad and desperate and sweet all at the same time. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t need half that much effort to wrap her father around a finger. Her mother, Charity, was probably a different story, though.

I sighed. “Why me?” I asked.

I hadn’t been talking to Molly, but she answered. “I couldn’t think who else to call,” she said. “I need your help.”

“I’ll call your dad. I’ll come down with him.”

“Please, no,” she said quietly, and I didn’t think she was feigning the quiet desperation in her voice. “Please.”

Why fight the inevitable? I’ve always been a sucker for ye olde damsel in distress. Maybe not as big a sucker now as I had been in the past, but the insanity did not seem much less potent than it had always been.

“All right,” I said. “Where?”

She gave me the location of one of the precincts not too far from my apartment.

“I’m coming,” I told her. “And this is the deal: I’ll listen to what you have to say. If I don’t like it, I’m going to your parents.”

“But you don’t—”

“Molly,” I said, and I felt my voice harden. “You’re already asking me for a lot more than I feel comfortable with. I’ll come down there to get you. You tell me what’s up. After that, I make the call, and you abide by it.”

“But—”

“This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “Do you want my help or not?”

There was a long pause, and she made a frustrated little sound. “All right,” she said. After a beat she hurried to add, “And thank you.”

“Yeah,” I said, and eyed the candles and incense, and thought about all the time I’d thrown away. “I’ll be along within the hour.”

I would have to call a cab. It wasn’t the most heroic way to ride to the rescue, but walkers can’t be choosers. I got up to dress and told Mouse, “I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”

When I came out of the bedroom in clean clothes, Mouse was sitting hopefully by the door. He batted a paw at his leash, which hung over the doorknob.

I snorted and said, “You ain’t pretty, furface.” But I clipped the leash to his collar, and called for a cab.

Chapter Eight

The cabby drove me to the Eighteenth District of the CPD, on Larrabee. The neighborhood around it has seen a couple of better days and thousands of worse ones. The once-infamous Cabrini Green isn’t far away, but urban renewal and the efforts of local neighborhood watches, community groups, church congregations from several faiths, and cooperation with the local police department had changed some of Chicago’s nastier streets into something resembling actual civilization.

The nasty hadn’t left the city, of course—but it had been driven away from what had once been a stronghold of decay and despair. What was left behind wasn’t the prettiest section of town, but it bore the quiet, steady signs of a place that had a passing acquaintance with law and order.

Of course, the cynical would point out that Cabrini Green was only a short walk from the Gold Coast, one of the richest areas of the city, and that it was no coincidence that funds had been sent that way by the powers that be through various municipal programs. The cynical would be right, but it didn’t change the fact that the people of the area had worked and fought to reclaim their homes from fear, crime, and chaos. On a good day, the neighborhood made you feel like there was hope for us, as a species; that we could drive back the darkness with enough will and faith and help.

That kind of thinking had taken on whole new dimensions for me in the past year or two.

The police station wasn’t new, but it was free of graffiti, litter, and shady characters of any kind—at least until I showed up, in jeans and a red T-shirt, bruised and unshaven. I got a weird look from the cabby, who probably didn’t get all that many sandalwood-scented fares to drop off there. Mouse presented his head to the cabby while I paid through the driver’s window, and got a smile and a polite scratching of the ears in reply.

Mouse has better people skills than me.

I turned to walk up to the station, stubbornly putting my money back in my wallet with my stiff left hand as I walked, and Mouse walked beside me. The hair on the back of my neck suddenly crawled, and I looked up at the reflection in the glass doors as I approached them.

A car had pulled up on the far side of the street behind me, and was stopped directly under a No Parking sign. I saw a vague shadow inside the car, a white sedan I did not recognize and which certainly wasn’t the dark grey car that had run me off the road earlier. But my instincts told me I was being tailed by someone. You don’t park illegally like that, in front of a police station no less, just because you’re bored.

Mouse let out a low rumble of a growl, which made me grow a shade more wary. Mouse rarely made noise at all. When he did, I had begun to think it was because there was some kind of dark presence around—evil magic, hungry vampires, and deadly necromancers had all earned snarls of warning. But he never made a peep when the mailman came by.

So adding it up, someone from the nasty end of my side of the supernatural street was following me around town. Good grief; at least I usually know who I’m pissing off, and why. By the time an investigation gets to the point where I’m being followed, there’s usually been at least one crime scene and maybe even a corpse or two.

Mouse growled another warning.

“I see him,” I told Mouse quietly. “Easy. Just keep walking.”

He fell silent again, and we never broke stride up to the door.

Molly Carpenter appeared and opened the door for us.

The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been an awkward adolescent, all skinny legs, bright-eyed interest, and hesitation of movement offset by an appealing personal confidence and frequent smiles and laughter. But that had been years ago.

Since then, Molly had gotten all growed up.

She strongly favored her mother, Charity. Both of them were tall for women, only an inch or two under six feet, both of them blond, fair, blue-eyed, and both of them built like the proverbial brick house, somehow managing to combine strength, grace, and beauty that showed as much in their bearing, expression, and movement as it did in their appearance. Charity was a rose wrought of stainless steel. Molly could have been her younger self.

Of course, I doubted Charity had ever worn an outfit like Molly’s.

Molly stood facing me in a long, gauzy black skirt, shredded artistically in several places. She wore fishnet tights beneath it, showing more leg and hip than any mother would prefer. The tights, too, were artfully torn in patches to display pale, smooth skin of thigh and calf. She had army-surplus combat boots on her feet, laced up with neon pink and blue laces. She wore a tight tank top, its fabric white, thin, and strained by the curves of her breasts, and a short black bolero jacket bearing a huge, gaudy button printed with the logo “SPLATTERCON!!!” in dripping red letters. Black leather gloves covered her hands.

But wait, that’s not all.

Her blond hair had been dyed, parti-colored, one half of her head bubblegum pink, the other sky blue, and it had been cut at a uniform length that ended just below her chin and left most of her face covered by a close veil of hair. She wore a lot of makeup; way too much eye liner and mascara, and black lipstick colored her mouth. Bright rings of gold gleamed in both nostrils, her lower lip, and her right eyebrow, and there was a bead of gold in that little dent just under her lower lip. There were miniature barbell-shaped bulges at the tips of her breasts, where the thin fabric emphasized rather than concealed them.

I didn’t want to know what else had been pierced. I know I didn’t, because I told myself that very sternly. I didn’t want to know, even if it was, hell, a little intriguing.

But wait, that’s still not all.

She had a tattoo on the left side of her neck in the shape of a slithering serpent, and I could see the barbs and curves of some kind of tribal design flickering out from the neckline of her tank top. Another design, whirling loops and spirals, covered the back of her right hand and vanished up under the sleeve of the jacket.

She watched me with one eyebrow arched, waiting for me to react. Her posture and expression both made the effort to say that she was way too cool to care what I thought, but I could practically taste the uncertainty she was working to hide, and her anxiety.

“Long time, no see,” I said, finally.

“Hello, Harry,” she replied. The words came out a little thick, and I saw more gold flash near the tip of her tongue.

Of course.

“It’s odd,” I said. “From here, it doesn’t look like you’re in jail at all.”

“I know,” she said. She managed to keep her voice mostly steady, but her face and throat colored pink in a guilty flush. She shifted her weight restlessly, and an odd clicking sound came from her mouth. Good grief. She’d picked up a tic of rattling her tongue piercing against her teeth when she was nervous. “Um. I should apologize, I guess. Uh…”

She floundered. I let her. A long silence made her look more flustered, but I had no intention of politely helping her out of it.

Mouse sat down between me and Molly, watching her intently.

Molly smiled at the dog and reached down to pet him.

Mouse tensed up, and a low rumbling came from his chest. Molly moved her hand toward him again, and my dog’s chest suddenly rumbled with a deep and warning growl.

The last time Mouse had growled at anything—for that matter, made much noise at all—it had been a crazed sorcerer who made fair headway toward eviscerating me, and summoned a twenty-foot-long demon cobra to kill my dog. Mouse killed it instead. Then, at my command, Mouse killed the sorcerer, too.

And now he was growling at Molly.

“Be polite,” I told him firmly. “She’s a friend.”

Mouse gave me a look and then fell quiet again. He sat calmly as Molly let him sniff her hand and scratch at his ears, but his wary body language didn’t change.

“When did you get a dog?” Molly asked.

Mouse was spooked, though not the way he was when serious bad guys were around. Interesting. I kept my tone neutral. “Couple years ago. His name is Mouse.”

“What breed is he?”

“He’s a West Highlands Dogasaurus,” I said.

“He’s huge.”

I said nothing, and the girl floundered some more. “I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “I lied to you to get you to come down here.”

“Really?”

She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I just…I really need your help. I just thought that if I could talk to you in person about it, you might be…I mean…”

I sighed. Regardless of how intriguingly rounded her tight shirt was, she was still a kid. “Call a spade a spade, Molly,” I said. “You figured if you could get me to come all the way down here, you’d have a chance to flutter your eyelashes and get me to do whatever it is you really want me to do.”

She glanced aside. “It isn’t like that.”

“It’s just like that.”

“No,” she began. “I didn’t want this to be a bad thing…”

“You manipulated me. You took advantage of my friendship. How is that not a bad thing?” My headache started rising up again. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t turn and walk away right now.”

“Because my friend is in trouble,” she said. “I can’t help him, but you can.”

“What friend?”

“His name is Nelson.”

“In jail?”

“He didn’t do it,” she assured me.

They never did. “He’s your age?” I asked.

“Almost.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“Two years older,” she amended.

“Then tell legal-adult Nelson he should call a bail bondsman.”

“We tried that. They can’t get to him before tomorrow.”

“Then tell him to bite the bullet and spend a night in the lockup or else to call his parents.” I turned to go.

Molly caught my wrist. “He can’t,” she said, desperation in her voice. “There’s no one for him to call. He’s an orphan, Harry.”

I stopped walking.

Well, dammit.

I’d been an orphan, too. It hadn’t been fun. I could tell you some stories, but I make it a personal policy not to review them often. They amount to a nightmare that started with my father’s death, followed by years and years of feeling acutely, perpetually alone. Sure, there’s a system in place to care for orphans, but it’s far from perfect and it is, after all, a system. It isn’t a person looking out for you. It’s forms and carbon copies and people with names you quickly forget. The lucky kids more or less randomly get tapped by foster parents who genuinely care. But for all the puppies at the pound who don’t get chosen, life turns into one big lesson on how to look out for yourself—because there’s no one in this world who cares enough to do it for you.

It’s a horrible feeling. I don’t care to experience even the faded memory of it—but if I just hear the word “orphan” aloud, that empty fear and quiet pain come rushing back from the darker corners of my mind. For a long time I’d been stupid enough to assume that I could handle everything on my own. That’s vanity, though. Nobody can handle everything by themselves. Sometimes, you need someone’s help—even if that help is only giving you a little of their time and attention.

Or bailing you out of jail.

“What’s your friend Nelson in for?”

“Reckless endangerment and aggravated assault.” She took a breath and said, “It’s kind of a long story. But he’s a sweet guy, Harry. There isn’t a violent bone in his body.”

Which emphasized to me just how young Molly really was. There are violent bones in everyone’s body, if you look deep enough. About two hundred and six of them. “What about your dad? He saves people all the time.”

Molly hesitated for a second, and her cheeks turned pink. “Um. My parents don’t like Nelson very much. Especially my dad.”

“Ah,” I said. “Nelson’s that kind of friend.” Things started adding up. I asked the loaded question. “Why is it so important for him to get out tonight?”

Wait for it.

Molly let go of my wrist. “Because he might be in danger. The weird kind of danger. He needs your help.”

And there it was.

Sometimes it’s almost as though I’m psychic.

Chapter Nine

Boyfriend Nelson had been arraigned two hours before. His bail had been set at enough money to make me glad that over the past year I had made it a habit to keep a chunk of cash around, just in case I needed it in a hurry. I got the fisheye from a hard-faced office matron as I counted it out in twenties. She counted it, too.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s a wonderful feeling to be trusted.”

She did not look amused. She pushed some papers at me. “Sign here, please. And here.”

I signed, while Molly hovered nervously in the background holding Mouse’s leash. Then we sat down and waited. Molly fidgeted until they brought her honey-bunny out to sign the last couple of papers before being released.

Boyfriend Nelson wasn’t what I’d expected. He was an inch or two taller than Molly. He had a long, narrow face, and I would have hesitated to touch his cheekbones for fear of slicing my fingers on them. He was thin, but it was that kind of lean, whipcord thinness rather than anything that would denote frailty. He moved well, and I pegged him as a fencer or a martial artist of some other kind. Dark hair fell around his head in an even mop. He wore square-shaped, silver-rimmed spectacles, chinos, and a black T-shirt with another SPLATTERCON!!! logo on it. He looked tired and needed a shave.

The second he was free, he hurried over to Molly and they hugged, speaking quietly to one another. I didn’t listen in. It didn’t seem right to invade their privacy. Besides, body language told me enough. The hug went on a second or two longer than Molly wanted it to. Then, when Nelson bent his head down to kiss her, she gave him a sweet smile, turning her cheek to meet his lips. After that, he got the point. He bit his lower lip a little and stepped back from her, rubbing his hands on his pants as if unsure what else to do with them.

“Save me from awkward relationship melodrama,” I muttered to Mouse under my breath, and got onto a pay phone to call a cab. Being a learned wizardly type I had, of course, discovered the cure for tangling up an otherwise orderly life with relationship issues: Don’t have a relationship. It was better that way.

If I repeated it to myself often enough, I almost believed it.

Molly and boyfriend Nelson walked over to me a minute later. Nelson didn’t look up at me when he offered me his hand. “Uh. I guess, thank you.”

I shook his hand and squeezed hard enough to hurt a little. Me annoyed alpha male, ungh. “How could I refuse such a polite and straightforward request for help?” I took Mouse’s leash from Molly, who looked away, turning pink again.

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” Nelson said, “but I have to get moving now.”

“No, you don’t,” I said.

His weight had already shifted to move into his first step, and he blinked at me. “Excuse me?”

“I just got you out of a cage. Now comes the part where you tell me what happened to you. Then you can go.”

His eyes narrowed and his weight shifted again, centering his balance. Definitely a student of martial arts. “Are you threatening me?”

“I’m telling you how it’s going to be, kid. So talk.”

“And if I don’t?” he demanded.

I shrugged. “If you don’t, maybe I’ll knock your block off.”

“I’d like to see you try,” he said, more anger in his voice.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But we’re in sight of the cop at the entry desk. He probably won’t see who threw the first punch. You just got out on bail. You’ll go back, probably for assault, committed within two minutes of being freed. There isn’t a judge in town who would grant you bail again.”

I saw him think about it furiously, which impressed me. A lot of men his age, when angry, wouldn’t bother with actual thought. Then he shook his head. “You’re bluffing. You’d be arrested too.”

“Hell’s bells, kid,” I said. “When did you fall off the turnip truck? They’ll interview me. I’ll tell them you threw the first punch. Who do you think they’re going to believe? I’ll be out in an hour.”

Nelson’s knuckles popped as he clenched his fists. He stared at me, and then at the building behind him.

“Nelson,” Molly urged quietly. “He’s trying to help you.”

“He’s got a hell of a way of showing it,” Nelson spat.

“Just balancing the scales a bit,” I said, glancing at Molly. Then I sighed. Nelson was holding on to his pride. He didn’t want to back down in front of Molly.

Insecurity, thy name is teenager.

It wouldn’t kill me to help Nelson save face. “Come on, kid. Give me five minutes to talk to you and I’ll pay your fare back to wherever you’re heading. I’ll throw in some fast food.”

Nelson’s stomach made a gurgling sound and he licked his lips, glancing aside at Molly. The wary focus slid out of his posture and he nodded, brushing his hand back through his hair. He let out a long exhale and said, “Sorry. Just…been a bad day.”

“I had one of those once,” I said. “So talk. How’d you wind up in jail?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure what actually happened. I was in the bathroom—”

I held up my hand, interrupting him with the gesture. Eat your heart out, Merlin. “What bathroom? Where?”

“At the convention,” he said.

“Convention?” I asked.

“SplatterCon,” Molly offered. She waved a hand at her button and at Nelson’s shirt. “It’s a horror movie convention.”

“There’s a convention for that?”

“There’s a convention for everything,” Nelson said. “This one screens horror movies, invites in directors, special-effects guys, actors. Authors, too. There are discussion panels. Costume contests. Vendors. Fans show up to the convention to get together and meet the industry guests, that kind of thing.”

“Uh-huh. You’re a fan, then?”

“Staff,” he said. “I’m supposed to be in charge of security.”

“Okay,” I said. “Get back to the bathroom.”

“Right,” he said. “Well. I’d had a lot of coffee and potato chips and pretzels and stuff, so I was just sitting in there with the stall door closed.”

“What happened?”

“I heard someone come in,” Nelson said. “The door was really squeaky.” He licked his lips nervously. “And then he started screaming.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Who?”

“Clark Pell,” he said. “He owns the old movie theater next to the hotel. We rented it out for the weekend so we could play our favorites on the big screen. Nice old guy. Always supports the convention.”

“Why was he screaming?”

Nelson hesitated for a second, clearly uncomfortable. “He…you have to understand that I didn’t actually see anything.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It sounded like a fight. Scuffling sounds. I heard him let out a noise, right? Like someone had startled him.” He shook his head. “That’s when he started screaming.”

“What happened?”

“I jumped up to help him, but…” His cheeks turned red. “You know. I was kind of in the middle of something. It took me a second to get out of the stall.”

“And?”

“And Mr. Pell was there,” he said. “He was unconscious and bleeding. Not real bad. But he looked like he’d taken a real pounding. Broken nose. Maybe his jaw, too. They took him to the hospital.”

I frowned. “Could someone have slipped in or out?”

“No,” Nelson said, and his voice was confident on that point. “That damned door all but screams every time it swings.”

“Could someone have come in at the same time as Pell?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “On the same opening of the door. But—”

“I know,” I said. “But they would have had to open the door to leave.” I rubbed at my chin. “Could someone have held the door open?”

“The hall was crowded. You could hear the people when the door was open,” Nelson said. “And there was a cop standing right outside. He was the first one in, in fact.”

I grunted. “And with no other obvious suspects, they blamed you.”

Nelson nodded. “Yes.”

I mused for a moment and then said, “What do you think happened?”

He shook his head, several times, and very firmly. “I don’t know. Someone must have gotten in and out somehow. Maybe there’s an air vent or something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe that’s it.”

Nelson checked his watch, and swallowed. “Oh, God, I’ve got to get to the airport. I’m supposed to meet Darby in thirty minutes and take him to the hotel.”

“Darby?” I asked.

“Darby Crane,” Molly supplied. “Producer and director of horror films. Guest of honor at SplatterCon.”

“He do any work I might have seen?” I asked.

Molly nodded. “Maybe. Did you ever see Harvest? The one with the Scarecrow?”

“Uh,” I said, thinking. “Where it smashes through the wall of the convent and eats the nuns? And the librarian sets it on fire and it burns down the library and himself with it?”

“That’s the one.”

“Heh,” I said. “Not bad. But I’ll take a Corman flick any day.”

“Excuse me,” Nelson said, “but I really need to get moving.”

As he spoke, the cab I’d called pulled up to the curb. I checked, and found my shadowy tail still outside, patient and motionless.

Mouse let out another almost subaudible growl.

My shadow wasn’t exactly going out of his way not to be noticed, which meant that he almost certainly wasn’t a hit man. A hired gun would do everything he could to stay invisible, preferably until several hours after I was cold and dead. Of course, he could be trying reverse psychology, I supposed. But that kind of circular reasoning could trigger a paranoia-gasm and drive me loopy fast.

Odds were good he was just supposed to keep an eye on me, whoever he was. Better, then, to keep him in sight, rather than trying to shake him. I was happier knowing where he was than worrying about him being out of sight. I’d play it cool—give him a while to see if I could figure out what he was up to. I nodded to myself, and strode out to the curb, Mouse at my side.

“Okay, kids,” I called over my shoulder. “Get in the cab.”

Mouse and I took the backseat. Molly didn’t give Nelson a chance to choose. She got into the passenger seat in front, and boyfriend Nelson settled into the backseat beside me.

“Which?” I asked him.

“O’Hare.”

I told the driver, and we took off for the airport. I watched my shadow in vague reflections in the windows. The car’s lights came on and followed us all the way out to O’Hare. We got Nelson there in time to meet his B-movie mogul, and he all but leapt from the car. Molly opened her door to follow him.

“Wait,” I said. “Not you.”

She shot me a glance over her shoulder, frowning. “What?”

“Nelson’s out of jail and he’s talked to me about what happened, and he’s in time to meet Darby Crane. I think I pretty much lived up to what I said I would do.”

She frowned prettily. “Yes. So?”

“So now it’s your turn. Close the door.”

She shook her head. “Harry, don’t you see that he’s in some kind of trouble? And he doesn’t believe in…’’ She glanced at the cabby and back to me. “You know.”

“Maybe he is,” I said. “Maybe not. I’m going to get over to the convention tonight and see if there’s anything supernatural about the assault on Mr. Pell. Right after we get done talking to your parents.”

Molly blanched. “What?”

“We had a deal,” I said. “And in my judgment, Molly, we need to go see them.”

“But…” she sputtered. “It isn’t as though I need them to bail me out or anything.”

“You should have thought about that before you made the deal,” I said.

“I’m not going there,” she said, and folded her arms. “I don’t want to.”

I felt cold stone flow into the features of my face, into the timbre of my voice. “Miss Carpenter. Is there any doubt in your mind—any at all—that I could take you there regardless of what you want to do?”

The change in tone hit her hard. She blinked at me in surprise for a second, lips parted but empty of sound.

“I’m taking you to see them,” I said. “Because it’s the smart thing to do. The legal thing to do. The right thing to do. You agreed to do it, and by the stars and stones, if you try to weasel out on me I will wrap you in duct tape, box you up, and send you UPS.”

She stared at me in utter shock.

“I’m not your mom or your dad, Molly. And these days I’m not a very nice person. You’ve already abused my friendship tonight, and diverted my attention from work that could have saved lives. People who really need my help might get hurt or die because of this stupid stunt.” I leaned closer, staring coldly, and she leaned away, declining to make eye contact. “Now buckle the fuck up.”

She did.

I gave the cabby the address and closed my eyes. I hadn’t seen Michael in…nearly two years. I regretted that. Of course, not seeing Michael meant not seeing Charity either, which I did not regret. And now I was going to drive up in a cab with their daughter. Charity was going to like that almost as much as I like cleaning up after Mouse on our walks. In her eyes, my mere presence near her daughter would make me guilty of uncounted (if imaginary) transgressions.

The angelic sigil on my left palm burned and itched furiously. I poked at it through the leather glove, but it didn’t help. I’d have to keep the glove on. If Michael saw the sigil, or if he somehow sensed the shadow of Lasciel running around in my head, he might react in a manner similar to his wife’s—and that didn’t take into consideration a father’s desire to protect his…physically matured daughter from any would-be, ah, invaders.

I predicted fireworks of one kind or another. Fun, fun, fun.

Should I survive the conversation, I would then be off to a horror convention, where a supernatural assault might or might not have happened, with a mysterious stranger following me while an unknown would-be assassin ran around loose somewhere, probably practicing his offensive driving skills so that he could polish me off the next time he saw me.

Let the good times roll.

Chapter Ten

I told the cabby to keep the meter running and headed for the Carpenters’ front door. Molly remained cool, distant, and untouchably silent all the way over the small lawn. She walked calmly up the steps to the porch. She faced the door calmly—and then broke out into a sweat the moment I rang the bell.

Nice to know I wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t looking forward to speaking with Michael. As long as I kept the conversation brief and didn’t get too close to him, he might not sense the presence of the demon inside me. Things might work out.

My already sore head twinged a little more.

Beside me, Molly rolled her shoulders in a few jerky motions and pushed at her hair in fitful little gestures. She tugged at her well-tattered skirts, and grimaced at her boots. “Can you see if there’s any mud on them?”

I paused to consider her for a second. Then I said, “You have two tattoos showing right now, and you probably used a fake ID to get them. Your piercings would set off any metal detector worth the name, and you’re featuring them in parts of your anatomy your parents wish you didn’t yet realize you had. You’re dressed like Frankenhooker, and your hair has been dyed colors I previously thought existed only in cotton candy.” I turned to face the door again. “I wouldn’t waste time worrying about a little mud on the boots.”

In the corner of my eye, Molly swallowed nervously, staring at me until the door opened.

“Molly!” shrieked a little girl’s voice. There was a blur of pink cotton pajamas, a happy squeal, and then Molly caught one of her little sisters in her arms in a mutual hug.

“Hiya, hobbit,” Molly said, catching the girl by an ankle and dangling her in the air. This elicited screams of delight from the girl. Molly swung her upright again. “How have you been?”

“Daniel is the boss kid now, but he isn’t as good as you,” the girl said. “He yells lots more. Why is your hair blue?”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s pink, too.”

The girl, a golden-haired moppet of six or seven, noticed me for the first time and promptly buried her face against Molly’s neck.

“You remember Hope,” Molly said. “Say hello to Mister Dresden.”

“My name is Hobbit!” the little girl declared boldly—then lowered her face into the curve of Molly’s neck and hid from me. Meanwhile, the house erupted with thudding feet and more shouts. Lights started flicking on upstairs, and the stairwell shuddered as brothers and sisters pounded down it and ran for the front door.

Another pair of girls made it there first, both of them older than Hope. They both assaulted Molly with shrieks and flying hugs. “Bill,” the smaller of the pair greeted me, afterward. “You came back to visit.”

“My name is Harry, actually,” I said. “And I remember you. Amanda, right?”

“I’m Amanda,” she allowed cautiously. “But we already have a Harry. That’s why you’re Bill.”

“And this is Alicia,” Molly said of the other, a child as gawky and skinny as Molly had been when I first met her. Her hair was darker than the others, trimmed short, and she wore black-rimmed glasses over a serious expression. “She’s the next oldest girl. You remember Mister Dresden, don’t you, Leech?”

“Don’t call me Leech,” she said in the patient tone of someone who has said something a million times and plans on saying it a million times more. “Hello, sir,” she told me.

“Alicia,” I said, nodding.

Evidently the use of her actual name constituted a gesture of partisanship. She gave me a somewhat relieved and conspiratorial smile.

A pair of boys showed up. The oldest might have been almost ready to take a driver’s test. The next was balanced precariously between grade school and pimples. Both had Michael’s dark hair and solid, sober expression. The younger boy almost threw himself at Molly upon seeing her, but restrained himself to a hello and a hug. The older boy only folded his arms and frowned.

“My brother Matthew,” Molly said of the younger. I nodded at him.

“Where have you been?” the oldest boy said. He stood there frowning at Molly for a moment.

“Nice to see you too, Daniel,” she replied. “You know Mister Dresden.”

He gave me a nod, said to Molly, “I’m not kidding. You just took off. Do you have any idea of how much it messed things up here?”

Molly’s mouth firmed into a line. “You didn’t think I was going to just hang around forever did you?”

“Is it Halloween wherever it is you live?” Daniel demanded. “Look at you. Mom is going to freak out.”

Molly stepped forward and half tossed Hope into Daniel’s chest. “When does she do anything else? Shouldn’t these two be in bed?”

Daniel grimaced as he caught Hope and said, “That’s what I was trying to do before someone interrupted bedtime.” He took Amanda’s hand, and over half-hearted protests took the two youngest girls back into the house.

There was a creak from the upstairs of the house and Alicia thumped Matthew firmly with her elbow. The two vanished as heavy steps descended from the second floor.

Michael Carpenter was almost as tall as me and packed a lot more muscle. He had the kind of face that told anyone who looked that he was a man of honesty and kindness who nonetheless could probably kick the crap out of you if you offered him violence. I wasn’t sure how he managed that. Something about the strength of his jawline, maybe, bespoke the steady power of both body and mind. But as for the kindness, that went all the way down to his soul. You could see it in the warmth of his grey eyes.

He wore khaki pants and a light blue T-shirt. A hard-cased plastic cylinder, doubtless the one he used to transport his sword, hung from a strap over one shoulder. An overnight bag hung over the other, and his hair was damp from the shower. He came down the stairs at the pace of a man with places to be—until he looked up and saw Molly and me standing in the doorway.

He froze in place, a smile of surprised delight illuminating his face as he saw Molly. The overnight bag thumped to the floor as he strode forward and crushed his oldest daughter to his chest in a hug.

“Daddy,” she protested.

“Hush,” he told her. “Let me hug you.”

Her eyes flickered to the case still held against one shoulder, and her expression became tainted with a sudden worry. “When are you going?”

“You just caught me,” he said. “I’m glad.”

She hugged her father back, and closed her eyes. “It’s just a visit,” she said.

He rose from the hug a moment later, studying her face, worry in his eyes. Then he nodded, smiled, and said, “I’m glad anyway.” He jerked his head back a moment later, as if the rest of her appearance had only then registered on him, and his eyes widened. “Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter,” he said, his voice hushed. “God’s blood, what have you done to your…” He looked her up and down, gentle dismay on his face. “…your…”

“Self,” I suggested. “Yourself.”

“Yourself,” Michael sighed. He looked Molly up and down again. She was doing that thing where she tried to display how much she didn’t care what her daddy thought of her look, and it was almost painfully obvious that she cared a great deal. “Tattoos. The hair wasn’t so bad, but…” He shook his head and offered me his hand. “Tell me, Harry. Am I just too old?”

I didn’t want to shake Michael’s hand. Lasciel’s presence in me, even if it wasn’t the full-blown version, wasn’t something he would miss—not if he made actual physical contact with me. For a couple of years I had been avoiding him with every excuse I had, hoping I could take care of my little demon issue without bothering him about it.

More accurately, I supposed, I had been too ashamed to let him see what had happened. Michael was probably the most honest, decent human being I had ever had the privilege to know. He had always thought well of me. It had been something that had given me comfort in a low spot or two, and I hated the thought of losing his trust and friendship. Lasciel’s presence, the collaboration of a literal fallen angel, would destroy that.

But friendship isn’t a one-way street. I had brought his daughter back because I had thought it was the right thing to do—and because I thought he’d do the same for someone else in a similar circumstance. I respected him enough to do that. And I respected him too much to lie to him. I had avoided the confrontation long enough.

I shook his hand.

And nothing in his manner or expression changed. Not an ounce.

He hadn’t sensed Lasciel’s presence or mark.

“Well?” he asked, smiling.

“If you think she looks silly, you’re too old,” I said after a moment. “I’m moderately ancient by the standards of the younger generation, and I think she only looks a little over the top.”

Molly rolled her eyes at us both, her cheeks pink.

“I suppose a good Christian should be willing to turn the other cheek when it comes to matters of fashion,” Michael said.

“Let he who hath never stonewashed his jeans cast the first stone,” I said, nodding.

Michael laughed and gripped my shoulder briefly. “It’s good to see you, Harry.”

“And you,” I said, trying a smile. I glanced at the plastic case on his shoulder. “Business trip?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where to?”

He smiled. “I’ll know when I get there.”

I shook my head. Michael was entrusted to wield one of the blades of the Knights of the Cross. He was one of only two men in the world who were entrusted with such potent weapons against dark powers. As such, he had a lot of planet to cover. I wasn’t clear exactly how his itinerary was established, but he was often called away from his home and family, apparently summoned to where his strength was most needed.

I don’t go in big for religion—but I believe in the Almighty. I had seen a vast power at work supporting Michael’s actions. Coincidence seemed to go to insane lengths, at times, to make sure he was where he needed to be to help someone in trouble. I had seen that power strike down seriously twisted foes without Michael so much as raising his voice. That power, that faith, had carried him through dangers and battles he had no business surviving, much less winning.

But I hadn’t ever thought too much about how hard it must be for him to leave his home when the Archangels or God or Whoever sent up a flare and called him off to a crisis.

I glanced aside at Molly. She was smiling, but I could see the strain and worry beneath the surface.

Hard on his family, too.

“Haven’t you left?” called a woman’s voice from upstairs. The house creaked again and Michael’s wife appeared at the top of the stairway, saying, “You’ll be—”

Her voice cut off suddenly. I hadn’t ever seen Charity in a red silk kimono before. Like Michael, her hair was damp from the shower. Even wet, it still looked blond. Charity had nice legs, clearly defined muscles in her calves shifting as she stepped to the head of the stairs, and what I could see of the rest of her looked much the same—strong, fit, healthy. She bore a sleeping child on one hip—my namesake, Harry, the youngest of the bunch. His arms and legs splayed in perfect relaxation, and his head was pillowed on her shoulder. His cheeks were pink with that look very young children get while sleeping.

Blue eyes widened in utter surprise and for just a moment she froze, staring at Molly. She opened her mouth for a second, words hesitating on her tongue. Then her eyes shifted to me and surprise fell to recognition, which was followed by a mélange of anger, worry, and fear. She clutched her kimono a little more tightly to her, her mouth working for a second more, then said, “Excuse me for a moment.”

She vanished and reappeared a moment later, sans little Harry, this time covered in a long terrycloth bathrobe, her feet inside fuzzy slippers.

“Molly,” she said quietly, and came down the stairs.

The girl averted her eyes. “Mother.”

“And the wizard,” she said, her mouth hardening into a line. “Of course he’s here.” She titled her head to one side, her expression hardening further. “Is this who you’ve been with, Molly?”

The air pressure in the room quadrupled, and Molly’s face darkened from pink to scarlet. “So what if it is?” she demanded, defiance making the words ring. “That’s no business of yours.”

I opened my mouth to assure Charity that I had nothing to do with anything (not that it would actually alter the nature of the conversation), but Michael glanced at me and shook his head. I zipped my lips and awaited developments.

“Wrong,” Charity said, her stance belligerent and unyielding. “You are a child and I am your mother. It is precisely my business.”

“But it’s my life,” Molly replied.

“Which you clearly lack the discipline and intelligence to manage.”

“Here we go again,” Molly said. “Go go gadget control freak.”

“Do not take that tone of voice with me, young lady.”

“Young lady,” Molly singsonged back in a nasal impersonation of her mother’s voice, her fists now on her hips. “What’s the point? Stupid of me to think that you might actually be willing to talk with me instead of telling me how to live every second of my life.”

“I fail to see the error in that when you clearly have no idea what you’re doing, young lady. Look at you. You look like…like a savage.”

My mouth went off on reflex. “Ah, yes, a savage. Of the famous Chromotonsorial Cahokian Goth tribe.”

Michael winced.

The look Charity turned on me could have withered the life from small animals and turned potted flowers black. “Excuse me, Mister Dresden,” she said, words clipped. “I do not recall speaking to you.”

“Beg pardon,” I said, and gave her my sweetest smile. “Don’t mind me. Just thinking out loud.”

Molly turned to glare at me, too, but hers was a pale imitation of her mother’s. “I do not need you to defend me.”

Charity’s attention shifted back to her daughter. “You will not speak to an adult in that tone of voice so long as you are in this house, young lady.”

“Not a problem,” Molly shot back, and then she whirled on her heel and opened the door.

Michael put his hand out, not with any particular effort, and the door slammed shut again with a sharp, booming impact.

Sudden silence fell over the Carpenter household. Both Molly and Charity stared at Michael with expressions of utter shock.

Michael took a deep breath and then said, “Ladies. I try not to involve myself in these discussions. But obviously your conversation this evening is unlikely to resolve the differences you’ve had.” He looked at them in turn, and his voice, while still gentle, became something more immovable than a mountain’s bones. “I don’t have any feeling that my trip will be an extended one,” he said, “but we never know what He has planned for us. Or how much time is left to any of us. This house has been upset long enough. The strife is hurting everyone. Find a way to resolve your troubles before I return.”

“But…” Molly began.

“Molly,” Michael said, his tone of voice inexorable. “She is your mother. She deserves your respect and courtesy. You will give them to her for the length of a conversation.”

Molly set her jaw, but looked away from her father. He stared at her for a moment, until she gave him a brief nod.

“Thank you,” he said. “I want you both to make an effort to set the anger aside, and talk. By God, ladies, I will not go forth to answer the call only to come home to more conflict and strife. I get enough of that while I’m gone.”

Charity stared at him for a second longer, and then said, “But Michael…surely you aren’t going to leave now. Not when…” She gestured vaguely at me. “There will be trouble.”

Michael stepped over to his wife and kissed her gently. Then he said, “Faith, my love.”

She closed her eyes and looked away from him after the kiss. “Are you sure?”

“I’m needed,” he said with quiet certainty. He touched her face with one hand and said, “Harry, would you walk me to the car?”

I did. “Thank you,” I said, once we were outside. “I’m glad to get out of there. Tension, knife.”

Michael nodded. “It’s been a long year.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

Michael tossed his case and his bag into the back of his white pickup truck. “Molly was arrested. Possession.”

I blinked at him. “She was possessed?”

He sighed and looked at me. “Possession. Marijuana and Ecstasy. She was at a party and the police raided it. She was caught holding them.”

“Wow,” I said, my voice subdued. “What happened?”

“Community service,” he said. “We talked about it. She was clearly repentant. I thought that the humiliation and the sentence of the law were enough to settle matters, but Charity thought we were being too gentle. She tried to restrict which people Molly was allowed to spend time with.”

I winced. “Ah. I think I can see how this played out.”

Michael nodded, got into his truck, and leaned on the open window, looking up at me. “Yes. Both of them are proud and stubborn. Friction rose until it exploded this spring. Molly left home, dropped out of school. It’s been…difficult.”

“I can see that,” I said, and sighed. “Maybe you should pitch in with Charity. Maybe the two of you could sit on her until she gets back on the straight and narrow.”

Michael smiled a little. “She’s Charity’s daughter. A hundred parents sitting on her couldn’t make her surrender.” He shook his head. “A parent’s authority can only go so far. Molly has to start thinking and choosing for herself. At this point, twisting her arm until she cries uncle isn’t going to help her do that.”

“Doesn’t seem like Charity agrees with you,” I said.

Michael nodded. “She loves Molly very much. She’s terrified of the kinds of things that could happen to her little girl.” He glanced at the house. “Which brings me to a question for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Is there some kind of dangerous situation developing?”

I chewed on my lip and then nodded. “It seems probable, but I don’t have anything specific yet.”

“Is my daughter involved in it?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I told him. “Her boyfriend got arrested tonight. She talked me into bailing him out.”

Michael’s eyes narrowed a little, but then he caught himself, and I saw him force the angry expression from his face. “I see. How in the world did you get her to come here?”

“It was what I charged for my help,” I said. “She tried to back out, but I convinced her not to.”

Michael grunted. “You threatened her?”

“Politely,” I said. “I’d never hurt her.”

“I know that,” Michael said, his tone gently reproving. Behind us, the front door opened. Molly stepped out onto the porch, hugging herself with her arms. She stood that way for a moment, ignoring us. A few seconds later, a light on the second floor came on. Charity, presumably, had gone back upstairs.

Michael watched his daughter for a moment, pain in his eyes. Then he took a deep breath and said, “May I ask a favor of you?”

“Yes.”

“Talk to her,” Michael said. “She likes you. Respects you. A few words from you might do more than anything I could tell her right now.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to negotiate a treaty,” Michael said, smiling. “Just ask her to talk to her mother. To be willing to give a little.”

“Compromise has to work both ways,” I said. “What about Charity?”

“She’ll come around.”

“Am I the only one who has noticed that Charity really doesn’t regard me with what most of the world thinks of as fairness? Or fondness? I am the last person in the world likely to get her to sit down for a reconciliation talk.”

He smiled. “Have a little faith.”

“Oh, please.” I sighed, but there wasn’t any real feeling behind it.

“Will you try to help?” Michael asked.

I scowled at him. “Yes.”

He smiled at me, mostly in his eyes. “Thank you. I’m sorry you walked into the cross fire tonight.”

“Molly told me there had been trouble at home. Bringing her here seemed like the right thing to do.”

“I appreciate it.” Michael frowned, his eyes distant for a moment, then said, “I’ve got to get moving.”

“Sure,” I said.

He met my eyes and said, “If something arises, will you keep an eye on them for me? It would make me feel a lot better to know you were watching over them until I return.”

I glanced back at his house. “What happened to having faith?”

He smiled. “Seems a bit lazy to expect the Lord to do all the work, doesn’t it?” His expression grew serious again. “Besides. I do have faith, Harry. In Him—and in you.”

Demon-infested me writhed in uncomfortable guilt on the inside. “I’ll keep an eye on them, of course.”

“Thank you,” Michael said, and put the truck in gear. “When I get back, I need to talk business with you, if you have the time.”

I nodded. “Sure. Good hunting.”

“God be with you,” he replied with a deep nod, and then he pulled out and left. Have sword, will travel. Hi-yo, Silver, away.

Get Molly and Charity to sit down and talk things out. Right. I had about as much chance to do that as I did of backpacking my car to the top of Mount Rushmore. I was gloomily certain that even if I did manage to get them together, it would only make things go more spectacularly wrong once they were there. The whole house would probably go up in an explosion when mother met antimother.

No good could come of this one. Why in the world had I agreed to it?

Because Michael was my friend, and because I was in general too stupid to turn down people in need. And maybe because of something more. Michael’s house had always been full of hectic life, but it had been a place, in general, of talk and warmth and laughter and good food. The ugly shouts and snarls of Molly and Charity’s quarrel had stained the place. They didn’t belong there.

I had never had a home like that, growing up. Even now that Thomas and I had found one another, when I thought of a family, I thought of the Carpenter household. I had never had that kind of intimacy, closeness. Those who have such a family seldom realize how rare and precious it is. It was something worth preserving. I wanted to help.

And Michael had a point. I might have a chance to get through to Molly. That was only half the battle, so to speak, but it was probably more than he could manage from his own position.

But whatever higher power arranged these things had a demented sense of timing, given how much I had on my plate already. Hell’s bells.

Molly came over to me after Michael’s truck had vanished. She stood beside me in the quiet summer evening, silent.

“I guess you need a ride back to your place,” I said.

“I don’t have any money,” she replied quietly.

“Okay,” I said. “Where do you need to go?”

“The convention,” she replied. “I have friends there. A room for the weekend.” She glanced over her shoulder at the house.

“The rug rats seemed glad to see you,” I observed.

She smiled fleetingly and her voice warmed. “I didn’t realize how much I missed them. Dumb little Jawas.”

I thought about nudging her toward her mother for a second, and decided against it. She might decide to do it if she wasn’t pressured, but the second she thought I was trying to force her into something, she’d dig in her heels. So all I said was, “They’re cute kids.”

“Yes,” she replied quietly.

“I’m heading for the convention anyway,” I told her. “Get in the cab.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Chapter Eleven

When people say the word “convention,” they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves.

The first major difference between a business convention and a fandom convention is that fandom doesn’t bother with the pretenses. They’re just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code—the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.

SplatterCon!!! (apparently the name of the con was misspelled if the three exclamation points were left out) had populated the hotel with all kinds of costumed fans, unless maybe the costumes were actually clothing trends. Once in a while, it gets hard to tell make-believe and avant-garde fashion apart. The hotel had an entry atrium, which in turn branched off into a pair of long, wide hallways leading to combination ball-and dining rooms, the ones with those long, folding partitions that can be used to break the larger rooms up into smaller halls for seminars and talk panels and so on. There were a couple hundred people in sight, and I could see more entering and leaving various panel rooms.

“I kind of expected a few more people to be here,” I said to Molly. I had stopped at my apartment to grab my stuff and drop off Mouse.

“It’s Thursday night,” she said, as if that should be significant. “And it’s getting late, at least for a weeknight. We have more than three thousand people already registered.”

“Is that a lot?”

“For a first-year convention? It’s a Mongol horde.” There was pride in her voice as she spoke. “And we have a really young staff, to boot. But old hands at putting conventions together.” She went on like that for a few moments, naming names and citing their experience as though she expected me to whip out a licensing manual or something to make sure the convention was up to code.

Two girls, both too young for me to think adult thoughts about, sidled by in black-and-purple clothing and makeup that left a lot of skin bare, their faces painted pale, trickles of fake blood at the corners of their mouths. One of them smiled at me, and she had fangs.

I had my hand on my staff and the harsh, clear scent of wood smoke filled my nose before I stopped myself from unleashing an instant, violent, and noisily pyrotechnic assault upon the vampire five feet from me. A second’s study showed irregular lumps and finger marks on the teeth—the girls had probably made them with their own fingers from craft plastic. I let out my breath in a steady exhalation and relaxed again, releasing the power I’d begun to channel through my staff.

Relax, Harry. Hell’s bells, that would be a great story for the papers. Professional Wizard Incinerates Amateur Vampire. News at ten.

The two girls went on by, none the wiser, and even Molly only frowned at them and then back at me for a second, her face tilted into an expression of silent inquiry.

I shook my head. “Sorry, sorry. Been a long day already. Look, I need to get a look at the bathroom where this theater owner was attacked.”

“All right,” Molly said. “But first we’ll get you a name tag at registration.”

“We will?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because you’re not supposed to have access to the convention if you haven’t registered for it,” she said. “Con security and hotel security might get confused. It would be inconvenient for you.”

“Right,” I said. “Good thinking. I’m not sure how I’d react to inconvenience.”

I followed her over to a set of tables set up to receive dozens or hundreds of people at once, each designated with white paper signs marked with “A–D,” “E–J,” and so on down the alphabet. A tired-looking, brown-haired woman of early middle age sat behind the first table, doing some kind of paperwork.

“Molly,” she said, and her voice warmed with tired but genuine pleasure. “Who is your friend?”

“Harry Dresden,” Molly said. “This is Sandra Marling. She’s the convention chair.”

“You’re a horror fan?” Sandra Marling asked me.

“My life is all about horror, these days.”

“You should find plenty here to entertain you,” she assured me. “We’re showing movies in several rooms as well as in the theater, and there’s the vendors’ room, and some autograph signings tomorrow, and of course there are several parties active already, and the costume contests are always fun to watch.”

“Isn’t that something,” I said, and tried not to drown in my enthusiasm.

“Sandy,” Molly said, stepping in, “I want to use my freebie for Harry, here.”

Sandra nodded. “Oh, Rosanna was looking for you a few minutes ago. Have you spoken to her yet?”

“Not since this afternoon,” Molly said, and fretted at her lower lip. “Did she remember to take her vitamins?”

“Rest easy, girl. I reminded her for you.”

Molly looked visibly relieved. “Thank you.”

Sandra, meanwhile, had me filling out a registration form, which I scribbled through fairly quickly. At the end, she passed me a plastic badge folded around a card that said, SPLATTERCON !!! HI, I’M…She gave me a black ink marker to go with it and said, “Sorry, the printer’s been off-line all day. Just write your name in.”

I promptly wrote the words An Innocent Bystander onto the name tag before folding it up in the plastic badge and pinning it to my shirt.

“I hope you enjoy SplatterCon, Harry,” Sandra said.

I picked up a schedule and glanced at it. “Make Your Own Blood and Custom Fangs” at ten A.M., to be followed by “How to Scream Like a Pro.” “I don’t see how I can avoid being entertained.”

Molly gave me a level look as we walked away. “You don’t have to make fun of it.”

“Actually I do,” I said. “I make fun of almost everything.”

“It’s mean,” she said. “Sandra has poured her whole life into this convention for a year, and I don’t want to see her feelings hurt.”

“Where do you know her from?” I asked. “Not church, I guess.”

Molly looked at me obliquely for a second and then said, “She’s a part-time volunteer at one of the shelters where I’m doing community service. She helped Nelson out when he was younger. Rosie too, and her boyfriend.”

I lifted a hand in acquiescence. “Fine, fine. I’ll play nice.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice still prim. “It’s very adult of you.”

I started to get annoyed, but was struck by the disturbing thought that if I did, I would be coming down on the same side of the situation as Charity, which might be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Molly led me down to the end of one of the long conference room hallways, where there were the usual restroom doors. One of them had been marked over with three bars of police tape, shutting it, and a uniformed cop sat in a chair beside the door.

The cop was a large black man, grey in his hair at the temples, and he sat with the chair leaned on its rear two legs so that his head rested back against the wall. He had on his uniform, but had added on a SplatterCon!!! name tag. He had filled in the name on the card with a marker, too, though his blocky script under the HI, I’M read An Authority Figure. The uniform name stripe on his shirt read RAWLINS.

“Well now,” the cop said as I walked over to him. He opened his mostly closed eyes and gave me a wary smile. He read my name tag and snorted. “It’s the consultant guy. Thinks he’s a wizard.”

“Rawlins,” I said, smiling, and offered him my hand. He took it, his grip lazily strong.

“So you’re one of those horror movie fans, huh?” he rumbled.

“Um, yes,” I said.

He snorted again.

“I was sort of hoping I could get into the bathroom there.”

Rawlins pursed his lips. “There’s two more on this floor. One’s back near the front desk, and there’s another at the end of the other conference hall.”

“I like this one,” I said.

Rawlins squinted at me and said, “Maybe you can’t read so good. You see that tape there, says crime scene and such?”

“The bright yellow and black stuff?” I asked.

“That’s it exactly.”

“Yep.”

“Well, that’s what we police use when we have a crime scene and we don’t want nosy private investigators stomping all over it in their big boots and contaminating everything,” he drawled.

“What if I promise to walk on tippy toe?”

“Then I promise I will stop bouncing you off walls just as soon as I think you’re not resisting arrest,” he said in a cheerful tone. The smile faded a little and his eyes hardened. “It’s a crime scene. No.”

“Molly,” I said quietly. “Would you mind if I talked to the officer alone?”

“Sure,” she said. “There are things I need to handle anyway. Excuse me.” She walked away without looking back.

“Do you mind talking about it?” I asked Rawlins.

“Naw,” he said. “Look, you seem okay, Dresden. I’ll talk. But I’m not letting you in there.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it might make things harder on the kid we took in for it.”

I frowned and tilted my head. “Yeah?”

Rawlins nodded. “Kid didn’t do it,” he said. “But hotel security cameras show him going in there, then the victim, and no one else. And I was sitting right here in this spot the whole time. I’m sure no one else went in or out.”

“So how do you know the kid didn’t attack the old man?” I asked.

Rawlins gave an easy shrug. “Didn’t fit him. He wasn’t breathing hard, and giving a beating runs you out of breath quick. No damage to his hands or knuckles. No blood on him.”

“So why’d you arrest him?” I asked.

“Because the record shows that there’s no one else who could have done it,” Rawlins said. “And because the old man was too out of it to talk and clear him. Kid didn’t beat on the old man, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in with whoever did. I figured maybe he knows how the attacker got in and out unseen, so I took him down and booked him. I figured if he was an accomplice, he’d spill rather than take the whole fall himself.” Rawlins grimaced. “But he didn’t spill. Didn’t know a damn thing.”

“Then why’d he get put away?” I asked.

“Didn’t know he had a record until the paperwork was already going. Repeat offender got a real steep hill to climb as a suspect. Makes it look bad for him. He might take the fall on this even if he’s innocent.”

I shook my head. “You’re sure no one could have gone in or out?”

“I was right here,” he said. “Anyone went past me without me noticing, they were a Jedi Knight or something.”

“Or something,” I muttered, glancing at the door.

“The girlfriend,” Rawlins said, nodding after the departed Molly. “She get you involved in this?”

“Daughter of a friend,” I said, nodding. “Bailed him out.”

Rawlins grunted. “Damn shame for that kid. I played it by the book, but…” He shook his head. “Sometimes the book don’t do enough.”

“The girl thinks he’s innocent,” I said.

“The girl always thinks they’re innocent, Dresden,” Rawlins said, without malice. “Problem is that there’s pretty good evidence that says he ain’t. Good enough to send a repeat offender upstate, unless the lab guys find something in there or on the old man to clear him. Which brings us back to why you ain’t going in.”

I nodded, frowning. “What if I told you it might be something weird?”

He shrugged. “What if you did?”

“Might be something that I could recognize, if I could just get a look at the room. I might be able to help the kid.”

He squinted at me. “You think there’s spooky afoot?”

“I told the girl I’d look into it.”

Rawlins frowned, but then shook his head. “Can’t let you in there.”

“Could I just look?” I asked. “You open the door, and I don’t even go in. I just look. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it? And you’ve already been in there, the EMTs, maybe a detective. Am I right? I couldn’t contaminate it all that much just from looking in the door.”

Rawlins gave me a long, level stare and then sighed. He grunted, and the front legs of his chair thunked down to the floor. He rose and said, “All right. Not one step inside.”

“You’re an officer and a gentleman,” I told him. I used my elbow to nudge the restroom door open. It squealed ferociously. I leaned my head in, my chin just over the level of the top strip of tape, and looked around the bathroom.

Standard stuff. A bathroom. White tile. Stalls, urinals, sinks, a long mirror.

The blood wasn’t standard, of course.

There was a large splotch of it on the floor, and it had been smeared around when it had been making the tile all slippery. There were a couple of different footmarks on the floor, outlined in blood, and more smears of it on one of the sinks, where the victim had apparently tried to pull himself up off the floor. It looked fairly gruesome, which wasn’t really a surprise. There wasn’t as much blood as there would have been at, say, a murder, but there was plenty all the same. Someone had laid into Clark Pell, the victim, with a will. I picked out small blood splatter on the mirror, high on the wall, and in a spot on the ceiling.

“Jesus,” I muttered. “It was an unarmed assault? No knives or anything?”

Rawlins grunted. “Old man had broken ribs, bruises, gashes from being slammed around. No cuts or stabs, though.”

“No kid did this,” I said.

“Wasn’t a professional, either. Crowded spot like this. Witness in the bathroom. Cop twenty feet away. Dumbest thug in Chicago wouldn’t open up that big a can of whoopass where he’d be seen and caught.”

“Someone strong,” I muttered. “And really, really vicious. He had to have hit the old guy a few times after he went down.”

Rawlins grunted again. “Sound like anyone you know?”

I shook my head. I stared at the room for a second and then chewed on my lower lip for a second, coming to a decision. I closed my eyes, clearing my thoughts.

“That’s enough,” Rawlins said. “Shut the door before people start to stare.”

“One second,” I murmured. Then with an effort of focus and will, and a faint sense of illusory pressure on my forehead, I opened my wizard’s Sight.

The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. It’s an extra sense, though when using it almost everyone experiences it as a kind of augmented vision. It shows you the primal nature of things, the true and emotional core of what they are. It also shows you the presence of magical energies that course through pretty much everything on the planet, showing you how that energy flowed and pulsed and swirled through the world. The Sight was especially useful for looking for any active magical constructs—that’s spells, for the newbie—and for cutting through illusions and spells meant to obfuscate what was true.

I opened my Sight and it showed me what my physical eyes could not see about the room. It showed me something that, with as many bad things as I had seen in my life, still made me clench my fists and fight to keep from losing control of my stomach.

The site of the attack, the blood, the brutality and pain inflicted upon the victim, had not been a simple matter of desire, conflict, and violence.

It had been a deliberate, gleeful work of art.

I could see patterns in the bloodstain, patterns that showed me the terrified face of an old man, pounded into a lumpy, unrecognizable mass by sledgehammer fists, each one a miniature portrait painted in the medium of terror and pain. When I looked at the smears on the sink, I could hear a short series of grunts meant to be desperate cries for help. And then the old man was hurled back down for another round of splatter portraits of pain.

And just for a second, I saw a shadow on the wall—a brief glimpse, a form, a shape, something that left an outline of itself on the wall where it had absorbed the agonized energy of the old man’s suffering.

I fought to push the Sight away from my perceptions again, and staggered. That was the drawback to using the Sight. The Sight could show you a lot of things, but everything you saw with it was there to stay. It wrote everything you perceived with it upon your memory in indelible ink, and those memories were always there, fresh and harsh when you went back to them, never blurring with the passage of time, never growing easier to endure. The little demonic diorama of bad vibes painted over the white tiles of that bathroom was going to make some appearances in my darker dreams.

It looked like I’d found the black magic the Gatekeeper warned me about. Just as well that I hadn’t tried the dangerous spell with Little Chicago.

I took a couple of steps away, shaking away the flickers of color and sparkles of light on my vision that remained for a time when the Sight was gone once more. Rawlins had a hand under one of my elbows.

“You all right, man?” he rumbled a moment later, his voice very quiet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He looked from me to the closed door and back. “What did you see in there?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. My voice sounded shaky. “Something bad.”

Almost too quietly to be heard, he said, “This wasn’t just some thug, was it.”

My stomach twisted again. In my mind’s eye, I could see a malicious smile reflected in the eyes of the old man, the memory absolutely crystalline. “Maybe not,” I mumbled. “It could have been a person, I think. Someone really sick. Or…maybe not. I don’t know.” More words struggled to bubble out of my mouth and I clamped my lips resolutely shut until I’d gotten my thoughts back under control.

I looked around me and realized that the hairs on the back of my neck were not crawling around at the memory of the energy I’d just brushed.

They were reacting to more of it drifting through the air. Now. Nearby.

“Rawlins,” I said. “How many other cops are here?”

“Just me now,” he said quietly. He took a look at my face and then peered around, his heavy-lidded eyes deceptively alert, his hand on his gun. “We got trouble?”

“We got trouble,” I said quietly, shifting my staff into my right hand.

The lights went out, all of them at once, plunging the hotel into pure blackness.

And the screaming started.

Chapter Twelve

No more than two or three seconds went by before Rawlins had his flashlight out and he flicked it on. The light flashed white and clean for maybe half a second, and then it dimmed down, as though some kind of greasy soot had coated it, until the light, though still bright, was so vague and veiled that it accomplished little more than to cast a faint glow to maybe an arm’s length from Rawlins.

“What the hell,” he said, and shook the light a few times. He had his hand on his gun, the restraining strap off, but he hadn’t drawn it yet. Good man. He knew as well as I did that the hotel was going to have far more panicked attendees than potential threats.

“We’ll try mine,” I said, and got the silver pentacle on its chain from around my neck. A gentle whisper and an effort of will and the amulet began to emit a pure, silver-blue light that reached into the darkness around us, burning it away as swiftly as it pressed in, until we could see for maybe fifteen feet around us. Beyond that was just a murky vagueness—not so much a cloud or a mist as a simple lack of light.

I gripped my staff in my right hand, and more of my will thrummed through it, setting the winding spirals of runes and sigils along its length to burning with a gentle, ember orange light.

Rawlins stared at me for a second and then said, “What the hell is going on?”

There were running footsteps and shouts and cries in the gloom. All of them sounded choked, muffled somehow. One of the two teenaged “vampires” stumbled into the circle of my azure wizard’s light, sobbing. Several young men blundered along a moment later, blindly, and all but trampled her. Rawlins grabbed the girl with a grunt of, “Excuse me, miss,” and hauled her from their path. He lifted her more or less by main strength and pushed her gently against the wall. He forced her to look at him and said, “Follow the wall that way to the door. Stay close to the wall until you get out.”

She nodded, tears making her makeup run in a mascara mudslide, and stumbled off, following Rawlins directions.

“Fire?” Rawlins blurted, turning back to me. “Is this smoke?”

“No,” I said. “Believe me. I know burning buildings.”

He gave me an odd look, grabbed an older woman who was passing blindly, and sent her off to follow the wall to the door out. He shivered then, and when he exhaled his breath came out in a long, frosty plume. The temperature had dropped maybe forty degrees in the space of a minute.

I struggled to ignore the sounds of frightened people in the dark and focused on my magical senses. I reached out to the cold and the gloom, and found it a vaguely familiar kind of spellworking, though I couldn’t remember precisely where I’d encountered it before.

I spun in a slow circle with my eyes closed, and felt the murk grow deeper, darker as I faced back down the hall to the hotel’s front desk. I took a step that way, and the murk thickened marginally. The spell’s source had to be that way. I gritted my teeth and started forward.

“Hey,” Rawlins said. “Where are you going?”

“Our bad guy is this way,” I said. “Or something is. Maybe you’d better stay here, help get these people outside safely.”

“Maybe you ought to shut your fool mouth,” Rawlins replied, his tone one of forced cheer. He looked scared, but he drew his gun and kept the barrel down, close to his side, and held his mostly useless flashlight in his other hand. “I’ll cover you.”

I nodded once at him, turned, and plunged into the darkness, Rawlins at my back. Screams erupted around us, sometimes accompanied by the sight of stumbling, terrified people. Rawlins nudged them toward the walls, barked at them in a tone of pure paternal authority to stay near them, to move carefully for the exits. The gloom began to press in closer to me, and it became an effort of will to hold up the light in my amulet against it. A few steps more and the air grew even colder. Walking forward became an effort, like wading through waist-deep water. I had to lean against it, and I heard a grunt of effort come out of my mouth.

“What’s wrong?” Rawlins asked, his voice tight.

We passed under one of the hotel’s emergency light fixtures, its floodlights only dim orange rings in the murk until my amulet’s light burned the shadows away. “Dark magic,” I growled through clenched teeth. “A kind of ward. Trying to keep me from moving ahead.”

He huffed out a breath and muttered, “Christ. Magic. That isn’t real.”

I stopped and gave him a steady look over my shoulder. “Are you with me or not?”

He swallowed, staring up at the dim circles of light that were all he could see of another set of emergency lights. “Crap,” he muttered, wiping a sudden beading of sweat from his brow despite the cold air. “You need me to push you or something?”

I let out a bark of tense laughter, and forced my power harder against the gloomy ward, hacking at it with the machete of my will until I began to chop a path through the dark working, picking up speed. As I did, the sense of the spell became more clear to me. “It’s coming from up ahead of us,” I said. “The first conference room in this hall.”

“They got it set up for movies,” Rawlins said. He seized a sobbing and terrified man in his middle years and deflected him bodily to the wall, snapping the same orders to him. “God, it was packed in there. If the crowd panicked—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t need to. Chicago has seen more than a few deaths due to a sudden panic in a movie theater. I redoubled my efforts and broke into a heavy, labored jog that led us to a pair of doors leading into the first conference room. One of the doors was shut, and the other had been slammed open so hard that it had wrenched its way clear of one of the hinges.

From inside the room came a sudden burst of terrified screams—not the canned screams you get in horror movies. Real screams. Screams of such base, feral intensity that you could hardly tell they had come from a human throat. Screams you only really hear when there are terrible things happening.

Rawlins knew what they meant. He spat out a low curse, lifting his gun to a ready position, and we rushed forward to the room side by side.

The murk began to do more than simply drag at me when I hit the doorway. The air almost seemed to congeal into a kind of gelatin, and it suddenly became a fight to keep my legs moving forward. I snarled in sudden frustration, and transformed it into more will that I sent coursing down through my silver pentacle amulet. The soft radiance emanating from the symbol became a white-and-cobalt floodlight, driving back the gloom, burning it from my path. It left the large room still coated in shadow, but it was no longer the total occlusion of the magical murk.

It was a long room, about sixty feet, maybe half that wide. At the far end of the room was a very large projection screen. Chairs faced it in two columns. At one point in the aisle between them, a projector sat, running at such a frantic speed that smoke was rising from the reels of celluloid. The projected movie still appeared clearly on the screen, in a frantic fast-motion blur of faces and images from a classic horror film from the early eighties. The soundtrack could only be heard as a single, long, piercing howl.

There were still about twenty people in the room. Immediately beside the door was an old woman, curled on her side on the ground, sobbing in pain. Nearby a wheelchair lay overturned, and a man with braces of some kind on his legs and hips had fallen into an awkward, painful-looking sprawl from which he could not arise. One of his arms was visibly broken, bone pushing at skin. Other people cringed against the walls and beneath chairs. When my wizard light flooded the place, they got up and started staggering away, still screaming in horror.

Straight ahead of me were bodies and blood.

I couldn’t see much of them. Three people were down. There was a lot of blood around. A fourth person, a young woman, crawled toward the door making frantic mewling sounds.

A man stood over her. He was nearly seven feet tall and so thick with slabs of muscle that he almost seemed deformed—not pretty bodybuilder muscle, either, but the thick, dull slabs that come from endless physical labor. He wore overalls, a blue shirt, and a hockey mask, and there was a long, curved sickle in his right hand. As I watched, he took a pair of long steps forward, seized the whimpering girl by her hair, and jerked her body into a backward bow. He raised the sickle in his right hand.

Rawlins didn’t bother to offer him a chance to surrender. He took a stance not ten feet away, aimed, and put three shots into the masked maniac’s head.

The man jerked, twisting a bit, and released the girl’s hair abruptly, tossing her aside with a terrible, casual strength. She hit a row of chairs and let out a cry of pain.

Then the maniac turned toward Rawlins and, even though the mask hid his features, the tilt of his head and the tension of his posture showed that he was furious. He went toward Rawlins. The cop shot him four more times, flashes of bright white burning the image of the maniac and the room onto my eyes.

He brought the sickle down on Rawlins. The cop managed to catch the force of it upon his long flashlight. Sparks flew from the steel case, but the light held. The maniac twisted the sickle, so that the tip plowed a furrow across Rawlins’s forearm. The cop snarled. The flashlight spun to the ground. The maniac raised the sickle again.

I braced myself, raised my staff and my will, and cried, “Forzare!”

Unseen power lashed from my staff, pure kinetic energy that ripped through the air and hit the maniac like a wrecking ball. The blow drove him back down the aisle, through the air. He hit the projector on its stand. It shattered. He went through it without slowing down. He kept going, the flight of his passage tearing through the large projection screen, and hit the back wall with a thunderous impact.

I sagged in sudden exhaustion, the effort of the spell an enormous drain on me, and had to plant my staff on the ground to keep from falling over. My headache flared up with a vengeance, and the light of my amulet and staff both faded.

There were a few more screams, the quick, light sound of frightened feet, and I whirled. I saw someone flee the room from the corner of my eye, but I didn’t get much of a look at them. A second later, the room returned to normal, the lights back, the broken projector still spinning one reel at reduced speed, a loose tongue of film slap-slap-slapping the broken casing.

Rawlins advanced, gun still out, his eyes very wide, down to the far end of the room. He went past the screen and looked behind it, gun in firing position. He looked around for a second, then back at me, his expression baffled.

“He’s not here,” Rawlins said. “Did you see him go that way?”

I just didn’t have enough left in me to speak right at that moment. I shook my head.

“There’s a dent in the wall,” he reported. “Covered in…I dunno what. Some kind of slime.”

“He’s gone,” I grunted. Then I started forward, toward the downed people. Two of them were young men, the third a young woman. “Help me.”

Rawlins holstered his weapon and did. One of the young men was dead. There was a crescent-shaped cut in his thigh that had opened an artery. Another lay mercifully unconscious, a bruise on his head, several hideous inches of bloody innards protruding from a slash across his belly. I was afraid that if we moved him, his guts might come popping out. The girl was alive, but the sickle’s tip had drawn a pair of long lines down her back along the spine, and the cuts had been vicious and deep. Bits of bone showed and she lay on her belly, her eyes open and blinking but utterly unfocused, either unwilling or unable to move.

We did what we could for them, which wasn’t much more than jerking the tablecloths off the water tables in the corner and improvising soft pads out of them to apply to open wounds. The second girl lay on her side nearby, sobbing hysterically. I checked on the old woman, who had just had the wind knocked out of her. I hauled the guy who’d fallen from his wheelchair into a slightly more comfortable position and he nodded thanks at me.

“See to the other victim,” Rawlins said. He held the pad against the boy’s opened abdomen, putting gentle pressure on it as he jerked out his radio. It squealed with feedback and static when he used it, but he managed to get emergency help headed our way.

I went to the sobbing girl, a tiny little brunette wearing much the same clothes as Molly had been. She’d been bruised up pretty well, and from the way she lay on the floor she could evidently not move without feeling agony. I went to her and felt over her left shoulder gently. “Be still,” I told her quietly. “It’s your collarbone, I think. I know it hurts like hell, but you’re going to be all right.”

“It hurts, it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts,” she panted.

I found her hand with mine and squeezed tight. She returned it with a desperate pressure. “You’ll be all right,” I told her.

“Don’t leave me,” she whimpered. Her hand was all but crushing mine. “Don’t leave.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m right here.”

“What the hell is this?” Rawlins said, panting. He looked around him, at the corpse, at the movie screen, at the dent in the wall beyond. “That was the Reaper, the freaking Reaper. From the Suburban Slasher films. What kind of psycho dresses up as the Reaper and starts…” His face twisted in sudden nausea. “What the hell is this?”

“Rawlins,” I said, in a sharp voice, to get his attention.

His frightened eyes darted to me.

“Call Murphy,” I told him.

He stared at me blankly for a second, then said, “My captain is the one who has to make the call on that one. He’ll decide.”

“Up to you,” I said. “But Murphy and her boys might actually be able to do something with this. Your captain can’t.” I nodded at the corpse. “And we aren’t playing for pennies here.”

Rawlins looked at me. Then at the dead boy. Then he nodded once and picked up his radio again.

“Hurts,” the girl whimpered, breathless with pain. “Hurts, hurts, hurts.”

I held her hand. I patted it awkwardly with my gloved left hand while we heard sirens approach.

“My God,” Rawlins said again. He shook his head. “My God, Dresden. What happened here?”

I stared at the enormous rip in the movie screen and at the Reaper-shaped dent in the wooden panels of the wall behind it. Clear gelatin, the physical form of ectoplasm, the matter of the spirit world, gleamed there against the broken wood. In minutes it would evaporate, and there would be nothing left behind.

“My God,” Rawlins whispered again, his voice still stunned. “What happened here?”

Yeah.

Good question.

Chapter Thirteen

The authorities arrived and replaced crisis with aftermath.

The EMTs rushed the more badly injured girl and the eviscerated young man to an emergency room, while police officers who arrived on the scene did what they could to take care of the other injured attendees until more medical teams could show up. I stayed with the injured girl, holding her hand. One of the EMTs had examined her briefly, saw that though in considerable pain she was not in immediate danger, and ordered me to stay with her and keep anyone from moving her until the next team could arrive.

That suited me fine. The thought of standing up again was daunting.

I sat with the girl as more police arrived. She had become quiet and listless as her fear faded and her body produced endorphins to dull the pain. I heard a gasp and the sudden sound of pounding feet. I looked up to see Molly slip by a patrolman and fling herself down beside the girl.

“Rosie!” she cried, her face very pale. “Oh my God!”

“Easy, easy,” I told her, putting a hand against Molly’s shoulder to prevent her from embracing the wounded girl. “Don’t jostle her.”

“She’s hurt,” Molly protested. “Why haven’t they put her in an ambulance?”

“She’s not in immediate danger,” I said. “Two other people were. The ambulance took them first. She goes on the next one.”

“What happened?” Molly asked.

I shook my head. “I’m not sure yet. I didn’t see much of it. They were attacked.”

The girl on the floor suddenly stirred and opened her eyes. “Molly?” she said.

“I’m here, Rosie,” Molly said. She touched the injured girl’s cheek. “I’m right here.”

“My God,” the girl said. Tears welled from her eyes. “He killed them. He killed them.” Her breathing began to come faster, building toward panic.

“Shhhhhhh,” Molly said, and stroked Rosie’s hair back from her forehead as one might a frightened child. “You’re safe now. It’s all right.”

“The baby,” Rosie said. She slid her hand from mine and laid it over her belly. “Is the baby all right?”

Molly bit her lip and looked at me.

“She’s pregnant?” I asked.

“Three months,” Molly confirmed. “She just found out.”

“The baby,” Rosie said. “Will the baby be all right?”

“They’re going to do everything possible to make sure that you’re both all right,” I said immediately. “Try not to worry about it too much.”

Rosie closed her eyes, tears still streaming. “All right.”

“Rosie,” Molly asked. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “I was sitting with Ken and Drea. We’d already seen our favorite scene in the movie and we decided to go. I was bending over to get my purse and Drea was checking her makeup and then the lights went out and she started screaming…And then when I could see again, he was there.” She shuddered. “He was there.”

“Who?” Molly pressed.

Rosie’s eyes opened too wide, showing white all around. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The Reaper.”

Molly frowned. “Like in the movie? Someone in a costume.”

“It couldn’t be,” Rosie said, her trembling growing more pronounced. “It was him. It was really him.”

The next medical team arrived and headed right for us. Rosie seemed to be on the verge of another panic attack when she saw them, and started thrashing around. Molly leaned in close, whispering to her and continually touching her head, until the EMTs could get to work.

I stepped back. They got Rosie loaded onto a stretcher. When they laid her arm down by her side, I could see several small, round marks, irregular bruises, and damaged capillaries just under the surface of the skin at the bend of her arm.

Molly stared at me for a second, her eyes wide. Then she helped the EMTs throw a blanket over Rosie and her track marks. The EMTs counted to three and lifted the stretcher, flicked out the wheels underneath, and rolled her toward the doors. The girl stirred and thrashed weakly as they did this, letting out whimpering little cries.

“She’s frightened,” Molly told the EMTs. “Let me ride with her, help keep her calm.”

The men traded a look and then one of them nodded. Molly let out a breath of relief, nodded to them, and went to walk by the head of the stretcher, where Rosie could see her.

“Don’t worry,” said the other EMT. “We’ll be right back for you, sir.”

“What, this?” I asked, and waved vaguely at my head. “Nah, I didn’t get hurt here. This is from earlier. I’m good.”

The man’s expression was dubious. “You sure?”

“Yep.”

They took the girl out. I dragged myself to the wall and propped my back up against it. A minute later, a man in a tweed suit came in and walked directly to Rawlins. He spoke to the officer for a moment, glancing over at me once as they talked, then turned and walked over to me. Of only average height, the man was in his late forties, thirty pounds overweight, balding, and had watery blue eyes. He nodded at me, grabbed a chair, and settled down into it, looking down at me. “You’re Dresden?”

“Most days,” I said.

“My name is Detective Sergeant Greene. I’m with homicide.”

“Tough job,” I said.

“Most days,” he agreed. “Now, Rawlins back there tells me you were an eyewitness to what happened. Is that correct.”

“Mostly,” I said. “I only saw what happened at the very end in here.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. He blinked his watery eyes and absently removed a pen and a small notebook from his pocket. Behind him, cops were surrounding the area where the victims had lain with a circle of chairs and stringing crime scene tape between them. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“The lights went out,” I said. “People panicked. We heard screams. Rawlins went to help and I went with him.”

“Why?” he asked.

“What?”

“Why,” Greene said, his tone mild. “You’re a civilian, Mr. Dresden. It’s Rawlins’s job to help people in emergencies. Why didn’t you just head for the door?”

“It was an emergency,” I said. “I helped.”

“You’re a hero,” Greene said. “Is that it?”

I shrugged. “I was there. People needed help. I tried to.”

“Sure, sure,” Greene said, blinking his eyes. “So what were you doing to help?”

“Holding the light,” I said.

“Didn’t Rawlins have his own flashlight?”

“Can’t have too many flashlights,” I replied.

“Sure,” Greene said, writing things. “So you held the light for Rawlins. What then?”

“We heard screams in here. We came in. I saw the attacker over that girl they just took out.”

“Can you describe him?” Greene asked.

“Almost seven feet tall,” I said. “Built like a battleship, maybe three hundred, three twenty-five. Hockey mask. Sickle.”

Greene nodded. “What happened.”

“He attacked the girl. There were other people behind him, already down. He was about to cut her throat with the sickle. Rawlins shot him.”

“Shot at him?” Greene asked. “Since we don’t have a dead bad guy on the floor?”

“Shot at him,” I amended. “I don’t know if he hit him. The bad guy dropped the girl and swung that sickle at Rawlins. Rawlins blocked it with his flashlight.”

“Then what?”

“Then I hit the guy,” I said.

“Hit him how?” Greene asked.

“I used magic. Blew him thirty feet down the aisle and through the projector and the movie screen.”

Greene slapped his pen down onto the notebook and gave me a flat look.

“Hey,” I said. “You asked.”

“Or maybe he turned to run,” Greene said. “Knocked the projector over and jumped through the screen to get to the back of the room.”

“If that makes you feel better,” I said.

He gave me another hard look and said, “And then what?”

“And then he was gone,” I said.

“He ran out the door?”

“No,” I said. “We were pretty much right next to the door. He went through the screen, hit the wall behind it, and poof. Gone. I don’t know how.”

Greene wrote that down. “Do you know where Nelson Lenhardt is?”

I blinked. “No. Why would I?”

“He apparently attacked someone else at this convention today and beat him savagely. You bailed him out of jail. Maybe you’re friends with him.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Seems a little odd, then, that you dropped two thousand dollars to bail out this guy you’re not friends with.”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do it?”

I got annoyed. “I had personal reasons.”

“Which are?”

“Personal,” I said.

Greene regarded me with his watery blue eyes, silent for a long minute. Then he said, patiently and politely, “I’m not sure I understand all of this. I’d appreciate it if you could help me out. Could you tell me again what happened? Starting with when the lights went out?”

I sighed.

We started over.

Four more times.

Greene was never so much as impolite to me, and his mild voice and watery eyes made him seem more like an apologetic clerk than a detective, but I had a gut instinct that there was a steely and dangerous man underneath the tweed camouflage, and that he had me pegged as an accomplice, or at least as someone who knew more than he was saying.

Which, I suppose, was true. But going on about black magic and ectoplasm and boogeymen that disappeared at will wasn’t going to make him like me any better. That was par for the course, when it came to cops. Some of them, guys like Rawlins, had run into something nasty at some point in their careers. They never talked much about it with anyone—other cops tend to worry about it when one of their partners starts talking about seeing monsters, and all kinds of well-intentioned counseling and psychological evaluations were sure to follow.

So if a cop found himself face-to-face with a vampire or a ghoul (and survived it), its only existence tended to be in the landscape of memory. Time has a way of wearing the sharpest edges away from that kind of thing, and it’s easy to avoid thinking about terrifying monsters, and even more terrifying implications, and get back to the daily routine. If enough time went by, a lot of cops could even convince themselves that what happened had been exaggerated in their heads, bad memories amplified by darkness and fear, and that since everyone around them knew monsters didn’t exist, they must therefore have seen something normal, something explainable.

But when the heat was on, those same cops changed. Somewhere deep down, they know that it’s for real, and when something supernatural went down again, they were willing, at least for the duration, to forget about anything but doing whatever they could to survive it and protect lives, even if in retrospect it seemed insane. Rawlins would poke fun at me for “pretending” to be a wizard when there was a fan convention in progress. But when everything had hit the proverbial fan, he’d been willing to work with me.

Then there was the other kind of cop—guys like Greene, who hadn’t ever seen anything remotely supernatural, who went home to their house and 2.3 kids and dog and mowed their lawn on Saturdays, who watch Nova and the Science Channel and subscribe to National Geographic, and keep every issue stored neatly and in order in the basement.

Guys like that were dead certain that everything was logical, everything was explainable, and that nothing existed outside the purview of reason and logic. Guys like that also tend to make pretty good detectives. Greene was a guy like that.

“All right, Mr. Dresden,” Greene said. “I’m still kind of unclear on a few points. Now, when the lights went out, what did you do?”

I rubbed at my eyes. My head ached. I wanted to sleep. “I’ve already told you this. Five times.”

“I know, I know,” Greene said, and offered me a small smile. “But sometimes repeating things can jiggle forgotten little details loose. So, if you don’t mind, can you tell me about when it went dark?”

I closed my eyes and fought a sudden and overwhelming temptation to levitate Greene to the ceiling and leave him there for a while.

Someone touched my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to find Murphy standing over me, offering me a white Styrofoam cup. “Evening Harry.”

“Oh, thank God,” I muttered, and took the cup. Coffee. I sipped some. Hot and sweet. I groaned in pleasure. “Angel of mercy, Murph.”

“That’s me,” she agreed. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a very light cotton blazer. She had circles under her eyes and her blond hair was messy. Someone must have gotten her out of bed for this one. “Detective Greene,” she said.

“Lieutenant,” Greene replied, all courtesy on the surface. “I didn’t realize I’d called Special Investigations for help. Maybe someone bumped the speed dial on my phone.” He reached into a pocket and took out a cell. He regarded it gravely for a moment and then said, “Oh, wait. My mistake. You aren’t on my speed dial. I must have slipped into some kind of fugue state when I wasn’t looking.”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Murphy said, smiling sweetly. “If I find out whodunit, I’ll tell you so you can get the collar.”

Greene shook his head. “This is messy enough already,” he said. “Some clown in a horror movie costume cuts a bunch of horror fans to ribbons. The press is going to make piranhas look like goldfish.”

“Yep,” Murphy said. “Seems to me you should take all the help you can get. Don’t want to screw it up in front of all those cameras.”

He gave her another flat look and then shook his head. “You aren’t exactly famous for your friendly spirit of cooperation with your fellow officers, Lieutenant.”

“I get the job done,” Murphy said easily. “I can help you. Or I can see to it that the press knows that you’re refusing assistance in finding a murderer because of departmental rivalry. Your call.”

Greene stared at her for another long minute, then said, “Does calling someone an overbearing, egotistical bitch constitute sexual harassment?”

Murphy’s smile grew sunnier. “Come to the gym sometime and we’ll discuss it.”

Greene grunted and rose, stuffing his pad and pen into his pocket. “Dresden, don’t leave town. I might need to speak to you again.”

“Won’t that be nice,” I mumbled, and sipped more coffee.

Greene handed Murphy a card. “My cell number is on it. In case you actually do want to cooperate.”

Murphy traded him for one of hers. “Ditto.”

Greene shook his head, gave her a barely polite nod, and walked off to speak to the officers near the taped-off section of floor.

“I think he likes you,” I told Murphy.

Murphy snorted. “He’s had you running in a circle, huh?”

“For an hour.” I tried not to sound too disgusted.

“It’s annoying,” she said. “But it really does work. Greene’s probably the best homicide detective in the state. If he had a personality he’d have made captain by now.”

“I don’t think he’s going to be much help on this one.”

Murphy nodded, and sat down in the chair Greene had vacated. “So. You want to give me the rundown here?”

“I haven’t even finished my coffee,” I complained. But I told her, starting with bailing Nelson out of jail and skipping over the details of the visit to Michael’s house. I told her about the attack, and how Rawlins and I had presumably cut it short.

She exhaled slowly. “So this thing must have been from the spirit world, right? If it got shot full of bullets, didn’t die, then dissolved into goo?”

“That’s a reasonable conclusion,” I said, “but I didn’t exactly have time to make a thorough analysis. It could have been anything.”

“Any chance you killed it?”

“I didn’t hit it all that hard. Must have had some kind of self-destruct.”

“Dammit,” Murphy said, missing the reference. No one loves the classics anymore. “Will it come back?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

“That’s not good enough.”

I sighed and nodded. “I’ll see what I can figure out. How’s Rawlins?”

“Hospital,” she reported. “He’ll need a bunch of stitches for that cut he took.”

I grunted and rose. It was an effort, and I wobbled a little, but as soon as I got my balance I walked over to the remains of the projector on its stand. I bent down and picked up a large round tin, the one the movie reel had come in. I flipped it over and read the label.

“Hunh,” I said.

Murphy came over and frowned at the tin. “Suburban Slasher II?”

I nodded. “This means something.”

“Other than the death of classic cinema?”

“Movie fascist,” I said. “The guy that jumped them looked like the Reaper.”

Murphy gave me a blank look.

“The Reaper,” I told her. “Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t ever seen the Reaper. The killer from the Suburban Slasher films. He can’t be slain, brings death to the wicked—which includes anyone who is having sex or drinking, apparently. If that’s not classic cinema, I don’t know what is.”

“I guess I missed that one,” Murphy said.

“There have been eleven films featuring the Reaper so far,” I replied.

“I guess I missed those eleven,” Murphy amended. “You think this was someone trying to look like the Reaper character?”

“Someone,” I murmured with exaggerated menace. “Or some thing.”

She gave me a level look. “How long have you been waiting to use that one?”

“Years,” I said. “The opportunity doesn’t come up as often as you’d think.”

Murphy smiled, but it was forced, and we both knew it. The jokes didn’t change the facts. Something had killed one young man only a few feet from where we sat, and the lives of at least two of the wounded hung on the skills of the doctors attending them.

“Murph,” I said. “There’s a theater right down the street. Run by a guy named Clark Pell. Could you find out what movie was showing there this afternoon?”

Murphy flipped to an earlier page of her notebook and said, “I already did. Something called Hammerhands.”

“Oldie but a goodie,” I said. “Ruffians push this farmer out onto train tracks and the train cuts his hands off at the wrist. They leave him for dead. But he survives, insane, straps sledgehammer heads to the stumps, and hunts them down one at a time.”

“And Clark Pell was the victim beaten here earlier today,” Murphy said. “Badly beaten with some kind of blunt instrument.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I said.

She frowned. “Can someone do that? Bring movie monsters to life?”

“Sorta looks that way,” I said.

“How do we stop them?” she asked.

I dragged the con schedule out of my pocket and paged through it. “The real question is, how do we stop them before tomorrow night?”

“What’s tomorrow night?”

“Movie fest,” I said, and held up the film schedule. “Half a dozen films showing here. Another half a dozen in Pell’s theater. And most of their monsters aren’t nearly as friendly as Hammerhand and the Reaper.”

“God almighty,” Murphy breathed. “Any chance this could be regular folks playing dress up?”

“I doubt it. But it’s possible.”

She nodded. “We’ll let Greene cover that angle, then. Consider yourself to be on the clock for the department, Harry. What’s our next move?”

“We talk to the surviving victims,” I said. “And I try to figure out how many ways there are for someone to do something this crazy.”

She nodded, and then frowned at me. “First, you get some sleep. You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Feel like I’m about to fall down.”

She nodded. “I’ll see if I can talk to Pell, if he’s even awake. I doubt we’ll get to the others before morning. Assuming they survive.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll need to get back here and do some snooping tomorrow. With any luck, we can track down our bad guy before something else jumps off the movie screen.”

Murphy nodded and rose. She offered me a hand. I took it and she hauled me up. Murphy is a lot stronger than she looks.

“Give me a ride home?” I asked.

She already had her keys in her hand. “Do I look like your driver?”

“Thanks, Murph.”

We headed for the door. Usually I have to shorten my steps to match Murphy’s, but tonight I was so tired that she was waiting for me.

“Harry,” she said. “What if we can’t find out who is doing it in time?”

“We’ll find them,” I said.

“But if we don’t?”

“Then we fight monsters.”

Murphy took a deep breath and nodded as we stepped out into the summer night. “Damn right we do.”

Chapter Fourteen

Murphy drove me home and parked in the gravel lot next to the century-old converted boardinghouse. She killed the engine in the car, and it made those clicking noises they do. We sat there with the windows rolled down for a second. A cool breeze coming off the lake whispered through the car, soothing after the unrelenting heat of the day.

Murphy checked her rearview mirror and then scanned the street. “Who were you watching for?”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“You rubbernecked so much on the way here, I’m surprised your shoulders aren’t bruising your ears.”

I grimaced. “Oh, that. Someone was tailing me tonight.”

“And you’re just now telling me about it?”

I shrugged. “No sense worrying you over nothing. Whoever he is, he’s not there now.” I described the shadowy man and his car.

“Same one who ran you off the road, do you think?” she asked.

“Something tells me no,” I said. “He wasn’t making any effort to avoid being spotted. For all I know, he could just be a PI gathering information on me for the lawsuit.”

“Christ,” Murphy said. “Isn’t that thing over with?”

I grimaced. “For a talk show host, Larry Fowler can really hold a grudge. He keeps doing one thing after another.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have burned down his studio and shot up his car, then.”

“That wasn’t my fault!”

“That’s for a court to decide,” Murphy said in a pious tone. “You got an attorney?”

“I helped a guy find his daughter’s lost dog five or six years ago. He’s an attorney. He’s giving me a hand with the legal process, enough so it hasn’t actually bankrupted me. But it just keeps going and going.”

Neither of us got out of the car.

I closed my eyes and listened to the summer night. Music played somewhere. I could hear the occasional racing engine.

“Harry?” Murph asked after a while. “Are you all right?”

“Hungry. Little tired.”

“You look like you’re hurting,” she said.

“Maybe a little achy,” I said.

“Not that kind of hurt.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her, and then away. “Oh. That.”

“That,” she agreed. “You look like you’re bleeding, somehow.”

“I’ll get over it,” I told her.

“Is this about last Halloween?”

I shrugged a shoulder.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There was a lot of confusion in the blackout and right after. But they found a corpse in the Field Museum that had been savaged by an animal. Lab guessed it was a large dog. They found three different blood types on the floor, too.”

“Did they?” I asked.

“And at Kent College. They found eight dead bodies there. Six of them had no discernable means of death. One had its head half severed by a surgically sharp blade. The other had taken a .44 round to the back of the head.”

I nodded.

She stared at me for a while, frowning and waiting for me to continue. Then she said, in a quiet, certain voice, “You killed them.”

My memory played some bad clips in my head. My stomach twisted. “I didn’t do the headless guy.”

Her cool, blue eyes stayed steady and she nodded. “You killed them. It’s eating at you.”

“It shouldn’t. I’ve killed a lot of things.”

“True,” Murphy said. “But they weren’t faeries or vampires or monsters this time. They were people. And you weren’t in the heat of battle when they died. You made the choice cold.”

I couldn’t lift my eyes for some reason. But I nodded and whispered, “More or less.”

She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. “Harry,” she said. “You’re tearing yourself up over it. You’ve got to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me or here, but you’ve got to do it. There’s no shame in feeling bad about killing someone, not for any reason.”

I let out a short little laugh. It tasted bitter. “You’re the last person I’d expect to tell me not to feel bad about committing murder.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “Sort of surprised myself,” she said. “But dammit, Harry. You remember when I shot Agent Denton?”

“Yeah.”

“Took me some time to deal with it, too. I mean, I know he’d lost it. And he was going to kill you if I didn’t do it. But it made me feel…” She squinted out at the Chicago night. “Stained. To take a life.” She swallowed. “And those poor people the vampires had controlled at the shelter. That was even worse.”

“All of those people were trying to kill you, Murph. You had to do it. You didn’t have an option. You thought about it. You knew that when you pulled the trigger.”

“Do you think you had an option?” she asked.

I shrugged and said, “Maybe. Maybe not.” I swallowed. “The point is that I never bothered to consider it. Never hesitated. I just wanted them dead.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“What if the Council is right about me?” I asked Murphy quietly. “What if I grow into some kind of monster? One who takes life without consideration for anything but his own will. Who cares more about end than means. More about might than right. What if this is the first step?”

“Do you think it is?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t—”

“Because if you think so, Harry, then it probably is. And if you decide that it isn’t, it probably isn’t.”

“The power of positive thinking?” I asked.

“No. Free will,” she said. “You can’t change what has already happened. But you choose what to do next. Which means that you only cross over to the dark side if you choose to do it.”

“What makes you think that I won’t?” I asked.

Murphy snorted, and reached over to touch my chin lightly with the fingers of one hand. “Because I’m not an idiot. Unlike some other people in this car.”

I reached up and gripped her fingers with my right hand, squeezing gently. Her hand was steady and warm. “Careful. That was almost a compliment.”

“You’re a decent man,” Murphy said, lowering her hand without removing it from my fingers. “Painfully oblivious, sometimes. But you’ve got a good heart. It’s why you’re so hard on yourself. You’re tired, hungry, and hurting, and you saw the bad guys do something you couldn’t stop. Your morale is low. That’s all.”

Her words were simple, frank, and direct. There was no sense of false comfort to her tone, not a trace of indulgent pity. I’ve known Murphy for a while. I knew that she meant every single word. Knowing that I had her support, even in the face of violation of the laws she worked to preserve, was a sudden and vast comfort.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Murphy is good people.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Hell’s bells, I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself and get to work.”

“Start with food and rest,” she said. “If you don’t hear from me, assume I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

“Right,” I said.

We sat there holding hands for a minute. “Karrin?” I asked.

She looked up at me. Her eyes looked very large, very blue. I couldn’t stare at them too long. “Have you ever thought about…you know. Us?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “But…the timing always seems to be off, somehow.”

She smiled a little. “I noticed.”

“Do you think it’ll ever be right?”

She squeezed my hand gently, and then withdrew hers from mine. “I don’t know. Maybe sometime.” She frowned at her hand, and then said, “It would change a lot of things.”

“It would,” I said.

“You’re my friend, Harry,” Murphy said. “No matter what happens. Sometimes in the past…I haven’t really done right by you.”

“Like when you handcuffed me in my office,” I said.

“Right.”

“And when you chipped one of my teeth arresting me.”

Murphy blinked. “I chipped a tooth?”

“And when—”

“Yes, all right,” she said. She gave me a mild glare, her cheeks pink. “The point is that I should have seen that you were one of the good guys a lot sooner than I did. And…”

I blinked at her ingenuously, and waited for her to say it.

“And I’m sorry,” she growled. “Jerk.”

That had cost her something. Murphy has more pride than is good for her. And yes, I am aware of the proverb about glass houses and stones. So I didn’t give her any more of a hard time than I already had. “Don’t go all romantic on me now, Murph.”

She smiled a little and rolled her eyes. “If we ever did get together, I’d kill you inside a week. Now, go get some rest. You’re useless to me like this.”

I nodded and swung out of the car. “In the morning, then.”

“Around eight,” she said, and pulled out and back onto the street. She called to me, “Be careful!”

I looked after the car and sighed. My feelings about Murphy were still in a hopelessly complicated tangle. Maybe I should have said something to her sooner. Shared my feelings with her sooner. Acted more swiftly, taken the initiative.

Be careful, she said.

Why did I feel like I’d been too careful already?

Chapter Fifteen

My Mickey Mouse alarm clock went off at seven, and buzzed stubbornly at me until I kicked off the covers, sat up, and shut it off. I ached all over, felt stiff all over, but that sense of overwhelming exhaustion had faded, and since I was already vertical, I got moving.

I got into the shower, and tried not to jump too much when the first shock of freezing water hit me. I’ve had some practice at it. I’ve never had a water heater last me more than a week without some kind of technical problem coming up—and that was the kind of thing you just did not want to take chances on when you have a gas heater. So my showers were always either cold or colder. Given my dating life, and the inhuman charms available to some of the beings who occasionally faced off with me, it was probably just as well.

But, especially when I had bumps and bruises and sore muscles, I wished I could have a skin-blistering hot shower like everyone else in the country.

And suddenly the water shifted from ice-cold to piping hot. It was a shock, and I actually let out a little yelp and danced around in the shower until I could redirect the shower head so that it wasn’t scalding my bits and pieces. After the initial shock of the temperature change, I leaned my aching head and neck into the spray for a second, and let out a long groan. Then I said, “Dammit, I told you to stop that.”

Lasciel’s voice murmured in a quiet laugh under the sound of the water. The sensation of phantom fingertips dug into the wire-tight muscles at the base of my neck, easing soreness away. “You should use the technique I taught you last autumn to block out the discomfort.”

“I don’t need to,” I said, and tried for grouchy. But the heated water and massaging fingers, illusory though they were, were simply delicious. “I’ll be fine.”

“Your discomfort is my discomfort, my host,” she said, and sighed. “Literally, as all my perceptions can come only through your own.”

“This isn’t real,” I said quietly. “The water isn’t really hot. No one is actually massaging my neck. It’s an illusion you’re laying over my senses.”

“Does it not feel soothing?” her disembodied voice asked. “Does it not ease the tension?”

“Yes,” I sighed.

“What matter, then? It is real enough.”

I waved a hand as though trying to brush off an annoying fly from my neck, and the sensation of those strong, steady fingers retreated. “Go on,” I said. “Hands off. I don’t want to start my day with a psychic cage match, but if you push me to it, I will.”

“As you wish,” her voice said, and the sense of presence retreated. Then paused. “My host, I note that you made no mention of the hot water.”

I grunted and mumbled something under my breath, ducked my head under the seemingly scalding water for a few seconds, and then said, “Did you pick up on what happened last night?”

“Indeed,” the fallen angel replied.

“What was your read, then?”

There was a moment of thoughtful silence, and then Lasciel responded, “That Karrin feels a certain distance between the pair of you is a professional necessity, but that she is considering that time and circumstance might someday render it irrelevant.”

I sighed. “No,” I said. “Not that. Stars and stones, I don’t want dating advice from a freaking helltart. I meant the things that attacked people at the convention.”

“Ah,” Lasciel said, with no trace of offense in her tone. “It was obviously the attack of a spiritual predator.”

Takes one to know one, I thought. I rolled a stiff shoulder under the hot water. “If that’s true, then the attacks weren’t about violence,” I said thoughtfully. “Which explains what I saw in that bathroom, where the old man had been attacked. Whatever did it was intent on causing fear. Causing pain. Then devouring the…what? The psychic energy it generated in the victims?”

“That is a somewhat simplistic description,” she said, “but one that is as close as I expect a mortal can come to understanding.”

“What, you’re a mortality bigot now?”

“Now and always,” she replied. “I mean no insult by it, but you should know that your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love. That kind of thing. It isn’t your fault, of course—but it does impose limits upon your ability to perceive and understand some matters.”

“I’m only human,” I said. “So enlighten me.”

“To do so, you would have to release your hold on mortality.”

I blinked and said, “I’d have to die?”

She sighed. “Again, you have only a partial understanding. But in the interest of expediency, yes. You would have to cease living.”

“Then don’t bother enlightening me,” I said. “I have plenty of would-be teachers already.” I rinsed and repeated my shampoo and made myself smell like Irish Spring. “The survivors of the attacks, then. They’re going to have taken a spiritual mauling.”

“If the theory is correct,” Lasciel’s voice responded. “If they are indeed wounded in spirit, it would seem conclusive.”

I shuddered. That kind of damage showed itself in a number of ways, and none of them were pretty. I’d seen men driven to agonies of madness by spiritual attacks. Murphy had been subjected to such an assault and spent years learning to cope with the night terrors it had spawned, until the spiritual and psychological wounds had finally healed. I’d seen some who had been subjected to a psychic sandblasting by vampires of the Black Court who had become nearly mindless bodies, obeying orders, and others of the same ilk who had turned into psychotic killing machines in service to their masters.

The worst part of it all was that almost the only way for me to see something like that was to open my Sight. Which meant that every horribly mangled psyche I’d come across remained fresh and bright in my memory. Always.

The top shelf of my mental trophy case was getting crowded with hideous keepsakes.

The not-truly-hot water coursed over me, a small but suddenly significant comfort. “Go away,” I told Lasciel. Then I added, “Leave me the hot water. Just this once.”

“As you wish,” the fallen angel’s voice replied, polite satisfaction in her tone. The sense of her presence vanished entirely.

I stayed in the shower until my fingers shriveled up. Or, more accurately, I stayed there until the fingers of my right hand shriveled up. The skin of my burned left hand always looked withered and shriveled, these days. The second I turned the water off, the full sensation of icy cold returned, and I shivered violently as I toweled off and got dressed.

I took care of Mouse and Mister’s various needs, ate several leftover biscuits from the fridge for breakfast, and opened a can of Coke. After a moment’s thought, I headed down to my lab and grabbed Bob’s skull from the shelf.

Faint orange lights flickered in the sockets. “Hey,” Bob mumbled in a sleep-slurred voice. “Where are we going?”

“Investigating,” I said. I went back upstairs with the skull and dropped it into my nylon backpack. “I might need you today. But there are going to be straights around, so keep your mouth shut unless I open the pack.”

“’Kay,” Bob said with a yawn, and the lights in the skull’s eye sockets winked out again.

I strapped on the magical arsenal—my shield bracelet, the energy ring, and my silver pentacle amulet. I slipped my newly carved blasting rod into a side pocket of the pack, leaving the handle out where I could reach up behind my right ear and whip it out in a hurry. I picked up my staff and eyed my leather duster, hanging on its hook by the door. I had layered spells over the duster in an effort to provide myself with a measure of protection against various fangs and claws and bullets and such, and as a result the coat had effectively become a suit of armor.

But, like most suits of armor, it lacked its own air-conditioning system—and if I wore it around in the blazing summer heat, I’d probably die of heat prostration before anyone had the chance to bite, slice, or shoot me. Hell, even the blue jeans I was wearing would feel too heavy long before noon. The duster stayed on its hook.

That rattled me a little. I’m used to the duster, and the spells on its leather had saved my life before. It made me feel a little vulnerable to think of getting into some kind of supernatural conflict without it. So I grabbed Mouse’s lead, much to the dog’s tail-wagging approval, and clipped it onto his collar. “You’re with me today,” I told him. “I need someone to watch my back. Maybe to help me eat a hot dog later.”

Mouse’s tail wagged even more at the mention of hot dogs. He chuffed out a breath, nudged my hip with the side of his head in a fond gesture, and we went outside to wait for Murphy.

She pulled up and eyed Mouse warily as I opened the back door and he jumped up onto the backseat. The car rocked back and forth with his weight and sank a little.

“He’s car-broken, right?”

Mouse wagged his tail and gave Murphy an enthusiastic, vacant doggie grin, tilting his head back and forth quizzically. It was easy for my imagination to subtitle the look: Car-broken? What is that?

“Wiseass,” I muttered at the dog, and got in the passenger side. “Don’t worry, Murph. We did an insane amount of work on the whole bodily function issue as soon as I realized how big he was going to get. He’ll be good.” I glared at the backseat. “Won’t you?”

Mouse gave me that same grin and puzzled tilting of his head. I frowned at him more deeply. He leaned forward to nuzzle my shoulder with his heavy muzzle, and settled down in the backseat.

Murphy sighed. “If it was any other dog, I’d make him ride in the trunk.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You have dog issues.”

“Big dog issues,” Murphy corrected me. “Just big dogs.”

“Mouse isn’t big. He’s compactly challenged.”

She gave me an arch look as she pulled out and said, “You’d fit in the trunk, too, Harry.” Then she frowned at me and said, “Your lips are blue.”

“Long shower,” I said.

She gave me a sudden, swift grin. “Wanted to keep your mind on business? I think I’ll interpret that as a compliment to my sexual appeal.”

I snorted and buckled in. “You heard anything from the hospital?”

Murphy’s smile faded and she kept her eyes on the road. She nodded without looking at me, her face impossible to read.

“Bad, huh?” I asked.

“The young man the paramedics carried off died. The girl who was already down when you came in is going to make it, but she’s in some kind of shock. Catatonic. Doesn’t focus her eyes or anything. Just lies there.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I was sort of expecting that. What about the other girl? Rosie?”

“Her injuries were painful but not life-threatening. They closed the cuts and set the bones, but when they heard she was pregnant they kept her at the hospital for observation. It looks like she’ll come through without losing the child. She’s awake and talking.”

“That’s something,” I said. “And Pell?”

“Still in ICU. He’s an old man, and his injuries were severe. They think he’ll be all right as long as there aren’t any complications. He’s groggy, but he’s conscious.”

“ICU,” I said. “Any chance we could talk to him somewhere else?”

“Those doctors can be real funny about not wanting people in critical condition to nip out for a walk to the vending machines,” she said.

I grunted. “You might have to solo him, then. I don’t dare go walking in there with all the medical equipment around.”

“Even if it was just for a few minutes?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t have any control over when things break down.” I paused and said, “Well, not exactly. I could blow out the whole floor in a few seconds, if I was trying to do it, but there’s not much I can do to keep things from breaking down. Odds are good that if I was only in there for a few minutes, nothing bad would happen. But sometimes things go haywire the second I walk by them. I can’t take any chances when there are people on life support.”

Murphy arched a brow at me, and then nodded in understanding. “Maybe we can get you on a speaker phone or something.”

“Or something.” I rubbed at my eyes. “I think this is gonna be a long day.”

Chapter Sixteen

When you get right down to it, all hospitals tend to look pretty much the same, but Mercy Hospital, where the victims in the attack had been taken, somehow managed to avoid the worst of the sterile, disinfected, quietly desperate quality of many others. The oldest hospital in Chicago, the Sisters of Mercy had founded the place, and it remained a Catholic institution. Thought ridiculously large when it was first built, the famous Chicago fires of the late nineteenth century filled Mercy to capacity. Doctors were able to handle six or seven times as many patients as any other hospital during the emergency, and everyone stopped complaining about how uselessly big the place was.

There was a cop on guard in the hallway outside the victims’ rooms, in case the whacko costumed killer came after them again. He might also be there to discourage the press, whenever they inevitably smelled the blood in the water and showed up for the frenzy. It did not surprise me much at all to see that the cop on guard was Rawlins. He was unshaven and still had his SplatterCon!!! name tag on. One of his forearms was bound up in neatly taped white bandages, but other than that he looked surprisingly alert for someone who had been injured and then worked all through the night. Or maybe his weathered features just took such things in stride.

“Dresden,” Rawlins said from his seat. He’d dragged a chair to the hall’s intersection. He was dedicated, not insane. “You look better. ’Cept for those bruises.”

“The best ones always show up the day after,” I said.

“God’s truth,” he agreed.

Murphy looked back and forth between us. “I guess you’ll work with anybody, Harry.”

“Shoot,” Rawlins drawled, smiling. “Is that little Karrie Murphy I hear down there? I didn’t bring my opera glasses to work today.”

She grinned back. “What are you doing down here? Couldn’t they find a real cop to watch the hall?”

He snorted, stuck his legs out, and crossed his ankles. I noted that for all of his indolent posture, his holstered weapon was clear and near his right hand. He regarded Mouse with pursed lips and said, “Don’t think dogs are allowed in here.”

“He’s a police dog,” I told him.

Rawlins casually offered Mouse the back of one hand. Mouse sniffed it politely and his tail thumped against my legs. “Hmmm,” Rawlins drawled. “Don’t think I’ve seen him around the station.”

“The dog’s with me,” I said.

“The wizard’s with me,” Murphy said.

“Makes him a police dog, all right,” Rawlins agreed. He jerked his head down the hall. “Miss Marcella is down that way. They got Pell and Miss Becton in ICU. The boy they brought in didn’t make it.”

Murphy grimaced. “Thanks, Rawlins.”

“You’re welcome, little girl,” Rawlins said, his deep voice grandfatherly.

Murphy gave him a brief glare, and we went down the hall to visit the first of the victims.

It was a single-bed room. Molly was there, in a chair beside the bed, where she had evidently been asleep while mostly sitting up. By the time I got in the room and shut the door, she was looking around blearily and mopping at the corner of her mouth with her sleeve. In the bed beside her was Rosie, small and pale.

Molly touched the girl’s arm and gently roused her. Rosie looked up at us and blinked a few times.

“Good morning,” Murphy said. “I hope you were able to get some rest.”

“A l-little,” the girl said, her voice raspy. She looked around, but Molly was already passing her a glass of water with a straw in it. Rosie sipped and then laid her head tiredly back, then murmured a thank you to Molly. “A little,” she said again, her voice stronger. “Who are you?”

“My name is Karrin Murphy. I’m a detective for the Chicago Police Department.” She gestured at me, and took a pen and a small notebook from her hip pocket. “This is Harry Dresden. He’s working with us on the case. Do you mind if he’s here?”

Rosie licked her lips and shook her head. Her uninjured hand moved fitfully, stroking over the bandages on the opposite forearm in nervous motions. Murphy engaged the girl in quiet conversation.

“What are you doing here?” Molly asked me in a half whisper.

“Looking into things,” I replied as quietly. “There’s something spooky going on.”

Molly chewed on her lip. “You’re sure?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll find whatever hurt your friend.”

“Friends,” Molly said, emphasizing the plural. “Have you heard anything about Ken? Rosie’s boyfriend? No one will tell us anything.”

“He the kid that they took from the scene?”

Molly nodded anxiously. “Yes.”

I glanced at Murphy’s back and didn’t say anything.

Molly got it. Her face went white and she whispered, “Oh, God. She’ll be so…” She folded her arms and shook her head several times. Then she said, “I’ve got to…’’ She looked around, and in a louder voice said, “I’m dying for coffee. Anyone else need some?”

Nobody did. Molly picked up her purse and turned around to walk for the door. In doing so, she brushed within a foot or two of Mouse. Instead of growling, though, Mouse leaned his head affectionately against her leg as she went by, and cadged a few ear scratches from the girl before she left.

I frowned at Mouse after Molly had gone. “Are you going bipolar on me?”

He settled down again immediately. Murphy went on asking Rosie fairly predictable questions about the attack.

The clock was running. I pushed the question about Mouse’s odd behavior aside for the moment, and let Mouse watch the door while I reached for my Sight.

It was a slight effort of concentration to push away the concerns of the material world, like aches and pains and bruises and why my dog was growling at Molly, and then the mere light and shadow and color of the everyday world dissolved into the riot of flowing energy and currents of light and power that lay beneath the surface.

Murphy looked like Murphy had always looked beneath my Sight. She appeared almost as herself, but clearer, somehow, her eyes flashing, and she was garbed in a quasi angelic tunic of white, stained in places with the blood and mud of battle. A short, straight sword, its blade made of almost viciously bright white light, hung beneath her left arm, where I knew her light cotton blazer hid her gun in its shoulder rig. She looked at me and I could see her physical face as a vague shadow beneath the surface of the aspect I saw now. She smiled at me, a sunny light in it, though her body’s face remained a neutral mask. I was seeing the life, the emotion behind her face, now.

I shied away from staring at her lest I make eye contact for too long—but that smile, at least, was something I wouldn’t mind remembering.

Rosie was another story.

The physical Rosie was a small, slight, pale young woman with thin, frail features. The Rosie my Sight revealed to me was entirely different. Pale skin became a pallid, dirty, leathery coating. Large dark eyes looked even bigger, and flicked around with darting, avian jerks. They were furtive eyes, giving her the dangerous aspect of a stray dog or maybe some kind of rat—the eyes of a craven, desperate survivor.

Winding veins of some kind of green-black energy pulsed beneath her skin, particularly around the inside bend of her left arm. The writhing strings of energy ended at the surface of her skin, in dozens of tiny, mindlessly opening and closing little mouths—the needle tracks I’d seen the night before. Her right hand kept darting back and forth over the other arm as if trying to scratch a persistent itch. But her fingers couldn’t touch. There was a kind of sheath of sparkling motes around her hands, almost like mittens, and she couldn’t actually touch those mindlessly hungry mouths. Worse, there were what looked almost like burn marks on her temples—small, black, neat holes, as if someone had bored a hot needle through the skin and skull beneath. There was a kind of phantom blood around the injuries, but her eyes were wide and vague, as if she didn’t even notice them.

What the hell? I had seen the victims of spiritual attacks before, and they’d never been pretty. Usually they looked like the victim of a shark attack, or someone who had been mauled by a bear. I hadn’t ever seen someone with damage like Rosie’s. It looked almost like some kind of demented surgeon had gone after her with a laser scalpel. That pushed the weirdometer a couple of clicks beyond the previous record.

My head started pounding and I pushed the Sight away. I leaned my hip against the wall for a second and rubbed at my temples until the throbbing subsided and I was sure that my normal vision had returned.

“Rosie,” I said, cutting into the middle of one of Murphy’s questions. “When was your last fix?”

Murphy glanced over her shoulder at me, frowning. Behind her, the girl gave me a guilty look, her eyes shifting to one side. “What do you mean?” Rosie asked.

“I figure it’s heroin,” I said. I kept my voice pitched to the barest level needed to be audible. “I saw the tracks on you last night.”

“I’m diab—” she began.

“Oh please,” I said, and let the annoyance show in my voice. “You think I’m that stupid?”

“Harry,” Murphy began. There was a warning note in her voice, but my head hurt too much to let it stop me.

“Miss Marcella, I’m trying to help you. Just answer the question.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Two weeks.”

Murphy arched a brow, and her gaze went back to the girl.

“I quit,” she said. “Really. I mean, once I heard that I was pregnant…I can’t do that anymore.”

“Really?” I asked.

She looked up and her eyes were direct, though nothing like confident. “Yes. I’m done with it. I don’t even miss it. The baby’s more important than that.”

I pursed my lips and then nodded. “All right.”

“Miss Marcella,” Murphy said, “thank you for your time.”

“Wait,” she said, as Murphy turned away. “Please. No one will tell us anything about Ken. Do you know how he’s doing? What room he’s in?”

“Ken’s your boyfriend?” Murphy asked in a careful tone.

“Yes. I saw them load him in the ambulance last night. I know he’s here…’’ Rosie stared at Murphy for a second, and then her face grew even more pale. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”

I was glad I’d gotten a gotten a look at her before she found out about her boyfriend. My imagination provided me with a nice image of watching the emotional wounds open up as though an invisible sword had begun slicing into her, but at least I didn’t have to see it with my Sight, too.

“I’m very sorry,” Murphy said quietly. Her voice was steady, her eyes compassionate.

Molly picked that moment to return with a cup of coffee. She took one look at Rosie, put the coffee down, and then hurried to her. Rosie broke down in choking sobs. Molly immediately sat on the bed beside her, and hugged her while she wept.

“We’ll be in touch,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on, Harry.”

Mouse stared at Rosie with a mournful expression, and I had to tug on his leash a couple of times to get him moving. We departed and headed for the nearest stairwell. Murphy headed for ICU, which was in the neighboring building.

“I didn’t see the track marks on her last night,” she said after a minute. “You pushed her pretty hard.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it might mean something. I don’t know what, yet. But we didn’t have time to waste listening to her denial.”

“She wasn’t straight with you,” Murphy said. “No one kicks heroin that fast. Two weeks. She should still be feeling some of the withdrawal.”

“Yeah,” I said. We went outside to go to the other building. Bright morning sunlight made my head hurt even more, and the sidewalk began revolving. I stopped to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light.

“You all right?” Murphy asked.

“It’s hard. Seeing someone like that,” I said quietly. “And she’s probably the least mangled of the three.”

She frowned. “What did you see?”

I tried to tell her what Rosie had looked like. It sounded surreal and garbled, even to me. I didn’t think I had conveyed it very well.

“You look terrible,” she said when I finished.

“It’ll pass. Just got this damned headache.” I shook my head and focused on taking steady breaths until I could force the pain to recede. “Okay. I’m good.”

“Did you learn what you were hoping for?” Murphy asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll need to look at the others, too. See if the injuries on them give me some kind of pattern.”

“They’re in ICU.”

“Yeah. I need to find a way to them without getting too close to someone on life support. I can’t stay around to talk. I’ll need maybe a minute, ninety seconds to look at them both. Then I’ll get out. Let you talk.”

Murphy took a deep breath and said, “You sure you should do this?”

“No,” I told her. “But I can’t help you if I don’t get to look at them. I can’t do that any other way. If I can stay calm and relaxed, it shouldn’t hurt anything for me to be there for a minute or two.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“When can I?”

She frowned at me, but nodded. “Let me go ahead of you,” she said. “Wait here.”

I found a chair, and took it down the hall and sat down with Mouse and Rawlins. We shared a companionable silence. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.

My headache finally began to fade away just as Murphy returned. “All right,” she said quietly. “We need to go down a floor and then use the back stairs. A nurse is going to let us in. You won’t have to walk past any of the other rooms before you get to our witnesses.”

“Okay,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”

Chapter Seventeen

I wasted no time. We went up the stairs, and I was already preparing my Sight. A nurse opened the door to the stairway, and I simply stepped into the first door on my left—the catatonic girl’s, Miss Becton’s. I stepped into the doorway and raised my Sight.

She was a young girl, still in her late teens, nervously thin, her hair a shocking color of red that for some reason did not strike me as a dye job. She lay on her front, her head turned to the side, muddy brown eyes open and blank. Her back had been covered in bandages.

As my Sight focused on her, I saw more. The girl’s psyche had been savagely mauled, and as I watched her, phantom bruises darkened a few patches of skin that remained, and blood and watery fluids oozed from the rest of her torn flesh. Her mouth was set in a continual, silent wail, and beneath the real-world glaze, her eyes were wide with terror. If there’d been enough left of her behind those eyes, Miss Becton would have been screaming.

My stomach rolled and I barely spotted a trash can in time to throw up into it.

Murphy crouched down at my side, her hand on my back. “Harry? Are you okay?”

Anger and empathy and grief warred for first place in my thoughts. Across the room, I was dimly conscious of a clock radio warbling to life and dying in a puff of smoke. The room’s fluorescent lights began to flicker as the violent emotions played hell with the aura of magic around me.

“No,” I said in a vicious, half-strangled growl. “I’m not okay.”

Murphy stared at me for a second, and then looked at the girl. “Is she…”

“She isn’t coming back,” I said.

I spat a few times into the trash can and stood up. My headache started to return. The girl’s terrified eyes stayed bright and clear in my imagination. She’d been out for a fun time. A favorite movie. Maybe coffee or dinner with friends afterward. She sure as hell hadn’t woken up yesterday morning and wondered if today would be the day some kind of nightmarish thing would rip away her sanity.

“Harry,” Murphy said again, her voice very gentle. “You didn’t do this to her.”

“Dammit,” I said. I sounded bitter. She found my right hand with hers and I closed my fingers around hers with a kind of quiet desperation. “Dammit, Murph. I’m going to find this thing and kill it.”

Her hand was steady and strong, like her voice. “I’ll help.”

I nodded and held tight to her hand for a minute. There wasn’t any tension in that contact, no quivering sensation of excitement. Murphy was human and alive. She held my hand to remind me that I was too. I somehow managed to push the sense of visceral horror I’d seen filling the girl from my immediate thoughts, until I felt steadier. I squeezed her hand once and released it.

“Come on,” I said, my voice rough. “Pell.”

“Are you sure you don’t need a minute?”

“It won’t help,” I said. I gestured at the radio and the lights. “I need to get this over with and leave.”

She chewed on her lip but nodded at me, and led me to the door across the hall. I didn’t want to do it, but I hauled up my Sight again and braced myself as I followed on Murphy’s heels and Looked at Clark Pell.

Pell was a sour-looking old cuss made out of shoe leather and gristle. One arm and both legs were in casts, and he was in traction. One side of his face was swollen with bruising. A plastic tube for oxygen ran beneath his nose. Bandages swathed his head, though bits of coarse grey hair stuck out. One eye was swollen mostly shut. The other was open, dark, and glittering.

Beyond the physical surface, his wounds were very nearly as dire as those the girl had suffered. He had been brutally beaten. Phantom bruises slid around his wrinkled skin, and the shapes of distorted bones poked disquietingly at the surface. And I saw something about the old man, too. Beneath the shoe leather and gristle, there were more shoe leather and gristle. And iron. The old man had been badly beaten, but it wasn’t the first such he had endured—physically or spiritually. He was a fighter, a survivor. He was afraid, but he was also angry and defiant.

Whatever had done this to him hadn’t gotten what it wanted—not like it had with the girl. It had to settle for a physical beating when its attack hadn’t elicited the terror and anguish it had expected. The old man had faced it, and he didn’t have any power of his own, beyond a lifetime of stubborn will. If he’d done it, as painful and as frightening as it must have been, I could steel myself against Looking at the aftermath.

I released my Sight slowly and took a deep breath. Murphy, poised beside me as if she expected me to abruptly collapse, tilted her head and peered at me.

“I’m all right,” I told her quietly.

Pell made a weak but rude sound. “Whiner. Not even a cast.”

I faced the old man and said, “Who did this to you.”

He shook his head, a feeble motion. “Crazy.”

Murphy started to say something but I raised my hand and shook my head at her, and she fell silent, waiting.

“Sir,” I said to Pell. “I swear to you. I’m not a cop. I’m not a doctor. I think you saw something strange.”

He stared at me, his one eye narrowed.

“Didn’t you?” I asked quietly.

“Ha…H-h—” he tried to say, but the word broke into a wracking, quiet cough.

I held up my hand and waited for him to recover. Then I said, “Hammerhands.”

Pell’s lip lifted, a faint little sneer. His good hand moved weakly, and I stepped over closer to him.

“You told Greene it was someone dressed like Hammerhands,” I guessed.

Pell closed his eye tiredly. “Pretty much.”

I nodded. “But it wasn’t just a costume,” I said quietly. “This was something more.”

Pell gave a slow shudder, before opening his eye again, dull with fatigue. “It was him,” the old man whispered. “Don’t know how. Don’t make no sense. But…you could feel it.”

“I believe you,” I told him.

He watched me for a second and then nodded, closing his eye. “Thing is. That was the only damn movie ever scared me. Wasn’t even all that good.” He gave a weak shake of his head and said, “Buzz off.”

“Thank you,” I told him quietly. Then I turned and walked toward the door.

Murphy followed at my side, and we headed back down the stairs. “Harry?” she asked. “What was that?”

“Pell,” I said. “He gave us what we needed.”

“He did?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think he did. This thing has got to be some kind of phobophage.”

“A what?”

“It’s a spiritual entity that feeds on fear. It attacks in order to scare people, and feeds on the emotion.”

“It didn’t give Pell those broken bones by shouting ‘boo!’” Murphy said.

“Yeah. It’s got to manifest a physical body in order to come to the real world. Pretty standard for all those demon types.”

“How do we beat it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know yet. First I have to find out what kind of phobophage it is. But I’ve got a place to pick up a trail now. There are only going to be so many beings who could have crossed over to Chicago from the Nevernever to do what this thing did.”

We emerged into the sunshine and I stopped for a minute, lifting my face up to the light.

The horror and misery I’d seen on the victims remained in place, a clear and terrible image, but the sunlight and the equally sharp memory of old Pell’s defiance took the edge off.

“You going to be all right?” Murphy asked.

“I think so,” I said quietly.

“Can you tell me what you saw?”

I did, in as few words as I could.

She listened, and then nodded slowly. “It hardly seems like what happened to them happened to Rosie.”

“Maybe Rawlins and I got there in time,” I said. “Maybe it hadn’t had time to do more than a little foreplay.”

“Or maybe there’s another reason,” Murphy said.

“Remind me to lecture you about the interest rate on borrowed trouble,” I said. “Simplest explanation is the one to go with until we find out something to the contrary.”

Murphy nodded. “If this creature hit the convention twice, it will probably do it again. Seems to me that maybe we should advise them to close it down. No convention, no attacks, right?”

“Too late for that,” I said.

She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“The creature feeds on fear. It’s attracted to it,” I said. “If they shut down the convention, it will scare a lot of people.”

“News reports will do that, too.”

“Not the same way,” I said. “A news report might unsettle some folks. But the people at the convention here, the ones who knew the victims, who were in the same buildings—it will hit them harder. It will make what happened here something dangerous. Something real.”

“If the attacker is that dangerous, they should be afraid,” Murphy said.

“Except that intense fear will attract the attacker again,” I said. “In fact, enough of it would attract more predators of the same nature.”

“More?” Murphy said, her voice sharp.

“Like blood in the water draws in sharks,” I said. “Only instead of being at the convention, the targets will be scattered all over Chicago. Right now, the only advantage we have is that we know generally where the thing is going to strike again. If the convention closes, we lose that advantage.”

“And the next chance we get to pick up its trail will be when the next corpse turns up.” Murphy shook her head. “What do you need from me?”

“For now, a ride home,” I said. “I’ll have some consulting to do, and…” I suddenly ground my teeth. “Dammit, I almost forgot.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a lunch meeting I can’t miss.”

“More important than this?” she asked.

“I can’t let it slide,” I said. “Council stuff. Maybe important.”

She shook her head. “You take too much responsibility on yourself, Harry. You’re just one man. A good man, but you’re still only human.”

“This is what happens when I don’t wear the coat,” I opined. “People start thinking I’m not a superhero.”

She snorted and we started back toward her car. “I’m serious,” she said. “You can’t be everywhere at once. You can’t stop all the bad things that are going to happen.”

“Doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t try,” I said.

“Maybe. But you take it personal. You tear yourself up over it. Like with that girl just now.” She shook her head. “I hate to see you like that. You’ve got worries enough without beating yourself up for things you didn’t do.”

I shrugged and fell quiet until we got back to the car. Then I said, “I just can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing people get hurt like that. I hate it.”

She regarded me steadily and nodded. “Me too.”

Mouse thumped his head against my leg and leaned on me so that I could feel his warmth.

That settled, we all got into Murphy’s car, so that I could track down I knew not what, just as soon as I got done opening an entirely new can of worms with the Summer Knight.

Chapter Eighteen

At my request, Murphy dropped me off a couple of blocks from home so that I could give Mouse at least a little chance to stretch his legs. He seemed appreciative and walked along sniffing busily, his tail fanning the air. I kept a watch out behind me, meanwhile, but my unknown tail did not appear. I kept an eye out for any other people or vehicles that might have been following me, in case he was working with a team, but I didn’t spot anyone suspicious. That didn’t stop me from keeping a paranoid eye over my shoulder until we made it back to the old boardinghouse, and I went down the stairs to my apartment door.

I muttered my defensive wards down, temporarily neutralizing powerful constructions of magic that I had placed around my apartment shortly after the beginning of the war with the Red Court. I opened the dead bolt on the steel door, twisted the handle, and then slammed my shoulder into the door as hard as I could to open it.

The door flew open to a distance of five or six whole inches. I kicked it a few times to open it the rest of the way, then tromped in with Mouse and looked up to find the barrel of a chopped-down shotgun six inches from my face.

“Those things are illegal, you know,” I said.

Thomas scowled at me from the other end of the shotgun and lowered the weapon. I heard a metallic click as he put the safety back on. “You’ve got to get that door fixed. Every time you come in it sounds like an assault team.”

“Boy,” I replied, letting Mouse off his lead. “One little siege and you get all paranoid.”

“What can I say.” He turned and slipped the shotgun into his bulging sports bag, which sat on the floor by the door. “I never counted on starring in my own personal zombie movie.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. Mister flew across the room and pitched all thirty pounds of himself into a friendly shoulder block against my legs. “It was my movie. You were a spear-carrier. A supporting role, tops.”

“It’s nice to be appreciated,” he said. “Beer?”

“Sure.”

Thomas sauntered over to the icebox. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a white cotton T-shirt. I frowned at the sports bag. His trunk, an old military-surplus footlocker, sat on the ground beside the bag, padlocked shut. Between the trunk and the bag, I figured pretty much every material possession he owned now sat on the floor by my door. He came back over to me with a couple of cold brown bottles of Mac’s ale, and flicked the tops off of both of them at the same time with his thumbs. “Mac would kill you if he knew you were chilling it.”

I took my bottle, studying his face, but his expression gave away little. “Mac can come over here and install air-conditioning, then, if he wants me to drink it warm in the middle of summer.”

Thomas chuckled. We clinked bottles and drank.

“You’re leaving,” I said a minute later.

He took another sip, and said nothing.

“You weren’t going to tell me,” I said.

He rolled a shoulder in a shrug. Then he nodded at an envelope on the fireplace’s mantel. “My new address and phone number. There’s some money in there for you.”

“Thomas…” I said.

He swigged beer and shook his head. “No, take it. You offered to let me stay with you until I got on my feet. I’ve been here almost two years. I owe you.”

“No,” I said.

He frowned. “Harry, please.”

I stared at him for a minute, and struggled with a bunch of conflicting emotions. Part of me was childishly relieved that I would have my tiny apartment to myself again. A much larger part of me felt suddenly empty and worried. Still another part felt a sense of excitement and happiness for Thomas. Ever since he started crashing on my couch, Thomas had been recovering from wounds of his own. For a while there, I had feared that despair and self-loathing were going to cause him to implode, and I had somehow known that his desire to get out on his own again was a sign of recovery. Part of that recovery, I was sure, was Thomas regaining a measure of pride and self-confidence. That’s why he’d left the money on the mantel. Pride. I couldn’t turn down the money without taking that pride from him.

Except for scattered memories of my father, Thomas was the only blood family I’d ever had. Thomas had faced danger and death beside me without hesitation, had guarded me in my sleep, tended me when I’d been injured, and once in a while he’d even cooked. We got on each other’s nerves sometimes, sure, but that hadn’t ever altered the fundamental fact of who we were to one another.

We were brothers.

Everything else was temporary.

I met his eyes and asked, quietly, “Are you going to be all right?”

He smiled a little and shrugged. “I think so.”

I tilted my head. “Where’d the money come from?”

“My job.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You found a job you could hold?”

He winced a little.

“Sorry,” I said. “But…I know you’d had so much trouble.” Specifically, he’d been subjected to the amorous attentions of various fellow employees who had been drawn to him to such a degree that it had practically been assault. Being an incubus was probably easier at night clubs and celebrity parties than at a drive-through or a cash register. “You found something?”

“Something without people,” he said. He smiled easily as he spoke, but I sensed an undercurrent of deception in it. He wasn’t telling me the whole truth. “I’ve been there a while.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Where?”

He evaded me effortlessly. “A place down off Lake View. I’ve finally earned a little extra. I just wanted to pay you back.”

“You must be getting all kinds of overtime,” I said. “As near as I can figure it, you’ve been putting in eighty-and ninety-hour weeks.”

He shrugged, his smile a mask. “Working hard.”

I took another sip of beer (which was excellent, even cold) and thought it over. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he wasn’t going to talk about it. Pushing him wouldn’t make him any more likely to tell me. I didn’t get the sense that he was in trouble, and while he had one hell of a poker face, I’d lived with him long enough to see through it most of the time. Thomas hadn’t ever supported himself before. Now that he was sure he could do it, it had become something he valued.

Getting out on his own was something he needed to do. I wouldn’t be doing him any favors by interfering.

“You sure you’ll be okay?” I asked him.

Something showed through the mask, then—embarrassment. “I’ll be all right. It’s past time for me to get out on my own.”

“Not if you aren’t ready,” I said.

“Harry, come on. So far we’ve been lucky. The Council hasn’t noticed me here. But with all of your Warden stuff, sooner or later somebody’s going to show up and find you rooming with a White Court vampire.”

I grimaced. “That would be a mess,” I agreed. “But I don’t mind chancing it if you need the time.”

“And I don’t mind getting out on my own to avoid making trouble for you with the Council,” he said. “Besides, I’m just covering my own ass. I don’t want to cross them, myself.”

“I wouldn’t let them—”

Thomas burst out in a brief, genuine laugh. “Christ, Harry. You’re my brother, not my mother. I’ll be fine. Now that I won’t be here to make you look bad, maybe you can finally start having girls over again.”

“Bite me, prettyboy,” I said. “You need any help moving or anything?”

“Nah.” He finished the beer. “I just have one box and one bag. Cab’s on the way.” He paused. “Unless you need my help with a case or something. I’ve got until Monday to move in.”

I shook my head. “I’m working with SI on this one, so I’ve got plenty of support. I think I can get things locked down by tonight.”

Thomas gave me a flat look. “Now you’ve done it.”

“What?” I asked.

“You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?”

I grinned at him. “You’d think that I would.”

I finished my beer and offered my brother my hand. He gripped it. “If you need anything, call me,” he said.

“Ditto.”

“Thank you, little brother,” he said quietly.

I blinked my eyes a couple of times. “Yeah. My couch is always open. Unless there’s a girl over.”

Outside, wheels crunched on gravel and a car horn sounded.

“There’s my ride,” he said. “Oh. Do you mind if I borrow the shotgun? Just until I can replace it.”

“Go ahead,” I told him. “I’ve still got my .44.”

“Thanks.” He bent over and swung the heavy footlocker onto one shoulder without effort. He picked up the sports bag, slung the strap over his other shoulder, and opened the door easily with one hand. He glanced back, winked at me, and shut the door behind him.

I stared at the closed door for a minute. Car doors opened and closed. Wheels crunched as the cab drove away, and my apartment suddenly seemed a couple of sizes too large. Mouse let out a long sigh and came over to me to nudge his head underneath my hand. I scratched his ears for a minute and said, “He’ll be all right. Don’t worry about him.”

Mouse sighed again.

“I’ll miss him too,” I told the dog. Then I shook myself and told Mouse, “Don’t get comfortable. We’re going to go visit Mac. You can meet the Summer Knight.”

I went around getting everything I needed for a formal meeting with the Summer Knight, called another cab, and sat in my too-quiet apartment wondering what it was my brother was hiding from me.

Chapter Nineteen

McAnally’s pub is on the bottom floor of a building not too far from my office. Chicago being what it is—essentially a giant swamp with a city sinking into it—the building had settled over the years, and to enter the pub you had to come in the door and take a couple of steps down. It’s a low-ceilinged room, or at least it’s always felt that way to me, and it offers the added attraction of several whirling ceiling fans at my eye level, just as I come in the door, and after stepping down into the room they’re still uncomfortably close to my head.

There’s a sign Mac’s got hanging up at the door that reads ACCORDED NEUTRAL GROUND. It means that the place was supposed to be a no-combat zone, under the terms laid out in the Unseelie Accords, the most recent and influential set of principles agreed upon by most of the various nations of the supernatural maybe ten or twelve years ago. By the terms of the Accords, there’s no fighting allowed between members of opposing nations in the bar, and we’re not supposed to attempt to provoke anybody, either. If things do get hostile, the Accords say you have to take it outside or risk censure by the signatory nations.

More importantly, at least to me, Mac was a friend. When I came to his place to eat, I considered myself a guest, and he my host. I’d abide by his declared neutrality out of simple respect, but it was good to know that the Accords were there in the background. Not every member of the supernatural community is as polite and neighborly as me.

Mac’s place is one big room. There are a baker’s dozen of thick wooden support pillars spread through the room, each of them carved with figures from Old World nursery tales. There’s a bar with thirteen stools, thirteen tables spread irregularly throughout the room, and the whole place has an informal, comfortable, asymmetrical sort of feel to it.

I came through the door armed for bear and projecting an attitude to match. I bore my staff in my left hand, and I’d slipped my new blasting rod, a shaft of wood two feet long and as thick as my two thumbs together, through my belt. My shield bracelet hung on my left hand, my force ring was on my right, and Mouse walked on my right side on his lead, looking huge and sober and alert.

A couple of people inside looked at my face and immediately tried to look like they had no interest in me. I wasn’t in a bad mood, but I wanted to look that way. Since the war with the Red Court had gotten rolling, I had learned the hard way that predators, human and otherwise, sense fear and look for weakness. So I walked into the place like I was hoping to kick someone in the neck, because it was a hell of a lot easier to discourage potential predators ahead of time than it was to slug it out with them when they followed me out afterward.

I crossed the room to the bar, and Mac nodded at me. Mac was a lean man somewhere between thirty and fifty. He wore his usual dark clothes and spotless white apron while simultaneously managing all the bartending and a big wood-burning grill where he cooked various dishes for the customers. The summer heat was fairly well blunted by the shade and the fans and the partially subterranean nature of the room, but there were still dark spots of sweat on his clothes and beading along the bare skin of his scalp.

Mac knew what the tough-guy face was about, and it clearly didn’t bother him. He nodded to me as I sat down on a stool.

“Mac. You got any cold beer back there somewhere?”

He gave me an unamused look.

I leaned my staff on the bar, lifted both hands in a placating gesture, and said, “Kidding. But tell me you’ve got cold lemonade. It’s a zillion degrees out there.”

He answered with a glass of lemonade cooled with his patented lemonade ice cubes, so that you could drink it cold and not have it get watered down, all at the same time. Mac is pretty much a genius when it comes to drinks. And his steak sandwiches should be considered some kind of national resource.

“Business?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Meeting with Fix.”

Mac grunted and went out to a corner table, one with a clear view of the door. He nudged it out a bit from the wall, polished it with a cloth, and straightened the chairs around it. I nodded my thanks to him and settled down at the table with my lemonade.

I didn’t have long to wait. A couple of minutes before noon, the Summer Knight opened the door and came in.

Fix had grown, and I mean that literally. He’d been about five foot three, maybe an inch or so higher. Now he had towered up to at least five nine. He’d been a wiry little guy with white-blond hair, and most of that remained true. The wire had thickened to lean cable, but the shock of spikes he’d worn as a hairdo had gotten traded in on a more typical cut for faerie nobles—a shoulder-length do. Fix hadn’t been a good-looking guy, and the extra height and muscle and the hair did absolutely nothing to change that. What had changed was his previous manner, which had been approximately equal parts nervous and cheerful.

The Summer Knight projected confidence and strength. They shone from him like light from a star. When he opened the door, the dim shadows retreated somewhat, and a whispering breeze that smelled of pine and honeysuckle rolled through the room. The air around him did something to the light, throwing it back cleaner, more pure, more fierce than it had been before it touched him.

Fix wasn’t putting on a face, like I had. This was what he had become: the Summer Knight, mortal champion of the Seelie Court, a thunderstorm in blue jeans and a green cotton shirt. His gaze went first to Mac, and he gave the barkeep a polite little bow of respect. Then he turned to me, grinned, and nodded. “Harry.”

“Fix,” I said. “Been a while. You’ve grown.”

He looked down at himself and looked briefly like the flustered young man I had first met. “It sort of snuck up on me.”

“Life has a way of doing that,” I agreed.

“I hope you don’t mind. Someone else wanted to speak to you, too.”

He turned his head and said something, and a breath later the Summer Lady entered the tavern.

Lily had never been hard on the eyes. The daughter of one of the Sidhe and a mortal, she’d had the looks usually reserved for magazines and movie stars. But, like Fix, she had grown; not physically, though a somewhat juvenile eye might have made certain comparisons to the past and somehow found them even more appealing. What had changed most was the bashful uncertainty that had filled her every word and movement. The old Lily had hardly been able to take care of herself. This was the Summer Lady, youngest of the Seelie Queens, and when she came in the room, the whole place suddenly seemed more alive. The lingering taste of lemonade on my tongue became more intensely sour and sweet. I could hear every whisper of wind around every lazily spinning fan blade in the room, and all of them murmured gentle music together. She wore a simple sundress of green, starkly contrasting the silken waterfall of purest white tresses that fell to her waist.

More than that, she carried around her a sense of purpose, a kind of quiet, gentle strength, something as steady and warming and powerful as summer sunlight. Her face, too, had gained character, the awkward shyness in her eyes replaced with a kind of gentle perception; a continual, quiet laughter leavened with just a touch of sadness. She stepped forward, between two of the carved wooden columns, and the flowers wrought into the wood upon them twitched and then burst into sudden blooms of living color.

Everyone there, myself included, stopped breathing for a second.

Mac recovered first. “Lily,” he said, and bowed his head to her. “Good to see you.”

She smiled warmly at his use of her name. “Mac,” she replied. “Do you still make those lemonade ice cubes?”

“Two,” Fix said, grinning more broadly. He offered his arm to Lily, and she laid her hand upon it, both gestures so familiar to them that they didn’t need to think about them anymore. They came over to the table, and I rose politely until Fix had seated Lily. Then we mere menfolk sat down again. Mac came with drinks and departed.

“So,” Fix said. “What’s up, Harry?”

Lily sipped lemonade through a straw. I tried not to stare and drool. “Um. I’ve been asked to get in touch with you,” I said. “After the Red Court’s attack last year, when they encroached on Faerie territory, we were kind of expecting a response. We were wondering why there hadn’t been one.”

“We meaning the Council?” Lily asked quietly. Her voice was calm, but something just under its surface warned me that the answer might be important.

“We meaning me and some people I know. This isn’t exactly, ah, official.”

Fix and Lily exchanged a look. She nodded once, and Fix exhaled and said, “Good. Good, I was hoping that would be the case.”

“I am not permitted to speak for the Summer Court to the White Council,” Lily explained. “But you have a prior claim of friendship to both myself and my Knight. And there is nothing to prevent me from speaking to an old friend regarding troubled times.”

I glanced back and forth between them for a moment before I said, “So why haven’t the Sidhe laid the smack down on the Red Court?”

Lily sighed. “A complicated matter.”

“Just start at the beginning and explain it from there,” I suggested.

“Which beginning?” she asked. “And whose?”

I felt my eyebrows arch up. “Hell’s bells, Lily. I wasn’t expecting the usual Sidhe word games from you.”

Calm, remote beauty covered her face like a mask. “I know.”

“Seems to me that you’re a couple of points in the red when it comes to favors given and received,” I said. “Between that mess in Oklahoma and your predecessor.”

“I know,” she said again, her expression showing me less than nothing.

I leaned back into my chair for a second, glaring at her, feeling that same old frustration rising. Damn, but I hated trying to deal with the Sidhe. Summer or Winter, they were both an enormous pain in the ass.

“Harry,” Fix said with gentle emphasis. “She isn’t always free to speak.”

“Like hell she isn’t,” I said. “She’s the Summer Lady.”

“But Titania is the Summer Queen,” Fix told me. “And if you’ll forgive me for pointing out something so obvious, it wasn’t so long ago that you murdered Titania’s daughter.”

“What does that have to do with anything,” I began, but snapped my lips closed over the last word. Of course. When Lily had become the Summer Lady, she got the whole package—and it went way beyond simply turning her hair white. She would have to follow the bizarre set of limits and rules to which all of the Faerie Queens seemed bound. And, more importantly, it meant she would have to obey the more powerful Queens of Summer, Titania and Mother Summer.

“Are you telling me that Titania has ordered you both not to help me?” I asked them.

They stared back at me with faerie poker faces that told me nothing.

I nodded, beginning to understand. “You aren’t permitted to speak officially for Summer. And Titania’s laid some kind of compulsion on you both to prevent you from helping me on a personal level,” I said. “Hasn’t she?”

Had there been crickets, I would have heard them clearly. Had my table companions been statues, I’d have gotten more reaction from them.

“You’re not supposed to help me. You’re not supposed to tell me about the compulsion.” I followed the chain of logic a step further. “But you want to help, so here you are. Which means that the only way I could get information out of you is to approach it indirectly. Or else the compulsion would force you to shut up. Am I close?”

Cheep-cheep. If it went on much longer, they’d have to worry about inbound pigeons.

I frowned a little and thought about it for a minute. Then I asked, “Theoretically speaking,” I said, “what kinds of things might prevent Winter and Summer from reacting to an incursion by another nation?”

Lily’s eyes sparkled, and she nodded to Fix. The little guy turned to me and said, “In theory, only a few things could do it. The simplest would be a lack of respect for the strength of the incurring nation. If the Queens considered them no threat, there would be no need to act.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Go on.”

“A much more serious reason would be an issue of the balance of power between the Courts of Summer and Winter. Any reaction to the invasion would alter what resources one would have at hand. If one Court did not act in concert with the other, it would provide an ideal opportunity for a surprise assault while the other had its strategic back turned.”

I rubbed my hands along my thighs, squinting one eye shut. “Let me see if I’ve put this together right. Summer’s ready to throw down. But Winter isn’t gonna help, because apparently they’d rather take a poke at you guys when you were focused on another threat.”

I took Fix’s silence as an affirmative.

“That’s insane,” I said. “If that happens, both Courts are going to suffer. Both of you will be weakened. No matter who came out on top, they’d be easy pickings for the Reds. Theoretically speaking.”

“An imbalance between Winter and Summer is nothing new,” Lily said. “It has existed since the time when we first met you, Harry. It continues today because of the fate of the current Winter Knight.”

I grimaced. “Christ. He’s still alive? After…what, almost four years?”

Fix shuddered. “I saw him once. The man was a psycho, a drug addict and a murderer—”

“And a rapist,” Lily interjected in a quiet, sad voice.

“And that,” Fix agreed, his expression grim. “I could break his neck and not lose a minute’s sleep. But no one deserves…” He swallowed, his face going pale. “That.”

“The moron betrayed Mab,” I said quietly. “He knew the risks when he did it.”

“No,” Fix said, with another shudder. “Believe me, Harry. He didn’t know what would happen to him. He couldn’t have.”

Fix’s obvious discomfort made a certain impression on me, especially given that Mab had displayed an unnerving amount of interest in me, and that I still owed her a couple of favors. I shifted uneasily in my chair and tried to blow it off. “Whatever,” I said. “There’s a Summer Knight. There’s a Winter Knight. What’s unbalanced about that?”

“He isn’t exerting his power,” Fix replied. “He’s a prisoner, and everyone knows it. He has no freedom, no will. He can’t stand on the side of Winter as its champion. So far as the tension between the Courts goes, the Winter Knight might as well not exist.”

“All right,” I murmured. “Mab’s got a man in the penalty box. She wants to take the offensive before Summer pushes a power play, and she’s looking for ways to even the odds. If Summer goes running off to take on the Reds, it will give her a chance to strike.” I shook my head. “I don’t pretend to know Mab very well, but she isn’t suicidal. If the imbalance is so dangerous, why is she keeping the Winter Knight alive to begin with? And she must see what the consequences of another Winter-Summer war would be.” I looked back and forth between them. “Right?”

“Unfortunately,” Lily said quietly, “our intelligence about the internal politics of Winter is very limited—and Mab is not the sort to reveal her mind to another. I do not know if she realizes the potential danger. Her actions of late have been…” She closed her eyes for a moment and then said, with some obvious effort, “Erratic.”

I propped up my chin on the heel of my hand, thinking. “Mab’s a lot of things,” I said thoughtfully. “But she sure as hell isn’t erratic. She’s like some damned big glacier. Not a thing you can do to stop her, but at least you know just how she’s going to move. What’s the bard say? Constant as the northern star.”

Fix frowned, as if struggling with an internal decision for a minute, then let out an exasperated sigh and said, “I think many who know the Sidhe would agree with you.”

Which was neither a confirmation nor a denial—technically, at any rate. But then, Sidhe magic and bindings tended to lean heavily toward the technical details.

I sat back slowly again, thoughts flickering over dozens of ideas and bits of information, putting them together into a larger picture. And it wasn’t a pretty one. The last time one of the Faerie Queens had come a little bit unbalanced, the situation had become a potential global catastrophe on the same order of magnitude as a middling large meteor impact or a limited nuclear exchange. And that had been the youngest Queen of the gentler and more reasonable Summer, Lily’s predecessor. Aurora. The late Aurora, I suppose.

If Mab had blown a gasket, matters wouldn’t be just as bad.

They would be worse.

A lot worse.

“I’ve got to know more about this one,” I told them quietly.

“I know,” Lily said. She lifted her hand to a temple and closed her eyes in a faint frown of pain. “But…’’ She shook her head and fell silent again as Titania’s binding sealed her tongue.

I glanced at Fix, who managed to whisper, “Sorry, Harry,” before he too closed his eyes and looked vaguely ill.

“I need answers,” I murmured, thinking aloud. “But you can’t give them to me. And there can’t be all that many people who know what’s going on.”

Silence and faint expressions of pain. After a few seconds, Fix said, “I think we’ve done all we can here.”

I racked my brains for a few seconds more and then said, “No, you haven’t.”

Lily opened her eyes and looked at me, arching a perfect, silver-white brow.

“I need someone with the right information and who isn’t under a compulsion not to help me. And I can only think of one person who fits the bill.”

Lily’s eyes widened a second after I got done speaking.

“Can you do it?” I asked her. “Right now?”

She chewed her lower lip for a second, then nodded.

“Call her,” I said.

Fix looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand. What are you doing?”

“Something stupid, probably,” I said. “But this is too big. I need more information.”

Lily closed her eyes and folded her hands on her lap, her expression relaxing into one of deep concentration. I could feel the subtle stir of energy around her.

My stomach rumbled. I asked Mac to whip me up a steak sandwich and settled down to wait.

It didn’t take long. My sandwich wasn’t halfway done when Mouse let out a sudden, rumbling growl of warning, and the temperature in the bar dropped about ten degrees. The whirling ceiling fans let out mechanical moans of protest and spun faster. Then the door opened and let in sunlight made wan by a patch of dreary grey clouds. The light cast a slender black silhouette.

Fix’s eyes narrowed. His hands slid casually out of sight beneath the table, and he said, “Oh. Her.”

The young woman who entered the bar could have been Lily’s sister. She had the same exotic beauty, the same canted, feline eyes, the same pale, flawless skin. But this one’s hair was worn in long, ragged strands of varying lengths, like a Raggedy Ann doll, each one dyed a slightly different color from frozen seas—pale blues and greens, as though each had borrowed its color from a different glacier. Her eyes were a cold, brilliant shade of green, almost entirely darkened by pupils dilated as though with drugs or arousal. A slender silver hoop gleamed at one side of her nose, and a collar of black leather studded with silver snowflakes encircled the graceful line of her slender throat. She wore sandals and cut-off blue jean shorts—very cut-off, and very tight. A tight, white T-shirt strained across her chest, and read, in pale blue letters stretched into intriguing curves, “YOUR BOYFRIEND WANTS ME.”

She prowled across the room to us, all hips and lips and fascinating eyes, looking far too young to move with such wanton sensuality. I knew better. She could have been a century old. She chose to look the way she did because of what she was: the Winter Lady, youngest Queen of the Unseelie Court, Mab’s understudy in wickedness and power. When she walked by the flowers that had bloomed in Lily’s presence, they froze over, withered, and died. She gave them no more notice than Lily had.

“Harry Dresden,” she said, her voice low, lulling, and sweet.

And I said, “Hello, Maeve.”

Chapter Twenty

Maeve stared at me for a long minute and licked her lips. “Look at you,” she all but purred. “All pent up like that. You haven’t had a woman in ages, have you?”

I hadn’t. I really, really hadn’t. But that wasn’t the kind of thinking that a professional investigator allowed to clog up the gears in his brain. I could have said something back, but I decided that if I ignored the taunt, maybe she’d get bored and leave me alone. So instead of taking up the verbal épée, I rose and drew out a chair for her, politely. “Sit with us, Maeve?”

Her head tilted almost all the way to her shoulder. She stared at me with those intense green eyes. “Just boiling over. Maybe you and I should have a private talk. Just the two of us.”

My libido seconded the suggestion, and heartily.

My libido and I generally don’t see eye to eye. Dammit.

“I’d rather just sit and have a nice chat,” I said to her.

“Liar,” Maeve said, smiling.

I sighed. “All right. There are a lot of things I’d love to do. But the only thing that’s going to happen is a nice chat. So you might as well sit down and let me get you a drink.”

Her head tilted the other way. Her hips shifted in a kind of counterpoint that drew the eye. “How long has it been for you, wizard? How long since you sated yourself.”

The answer was depressing. “Last time I saw Susan, I guess.”

Maeve made a disgusted sound. “No, not love, wizard. Need. Flesh.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” I said.

She waved that off with an expression of contempt. “I want an answer.”

“Looks to me like there’s all kinds of things you want that you aren’t going to get,” I told her. I glanced at Fix and Lily, throwing a mute appeal into it.

Fix gave me an apologetic shrug and Lily sighed. “You might as well indulge her, Harry. She’s as stubborn as any of us, the only one who might give you the answers you need, and she knows it.”

I looked back at Maeve, who gave me that same eerie, intensely sensual smile. “Tell me, mortal. When was the last time flesh, new and strange to your hand, lay quivering beneath you, hmm?” She leaned down until her eyes were inches from mine. I could smell winter mint and something lush and corrupt, like rotted flowers, on her breath. “When was the last time you could taste and feel some little lovely’s cries?”

I regarded her without any expression and said, in a gentle voice, “Technically? When I killed Aurora.”

Maeve’s expression flickered with an instant of uncertainty.

“You remember Aurora,” I told her quietly. “The last Summer Lady. Your peer. Your equal. When she died, she’d been cut several dozen times with cold iron. She was bleeding out. But she was still trying to stick a knife in Lily. So I tackled her and held her down. She kept struggling until she lost too much blood. And then she died in the grass on the hill of the Stone Table.”

Dead silence filled the whole place.

“It sort of surprised me,” I said, never putting any particular emotion on the words. “How fast it happened. It surprised her, too. She was confused when she died.”

Maeve only stared at me.

“I never wanted to kill her. But she didn’t leave me any choice.” I let the silence fill the room for a moment and stared at Maeve’s eyes.

The Winter Lady swallowed and eased her weight a tiny bit away from me.

Then I gestured with one hand at the chair I still held out for her and said, “Let’s be polite to one another, Maeve. Please.”

She took a slow breath, soulless, inhuman eyes on mine, and then said, “I know now why Mab wants you.” She straightened and gave me an odd little bow, which might have looked more courtly had she been wearing a gown. Then she sat and said, “Does the barkeep still have those sweet-lemon chips of ice?”

“Of course,” I said. “Mac. Another lemonade for the Lady, please?”

Mac provided it in his usual silence. As he did, the few people who were in the place cleared out. Most of the magical community of Chicago knew the Ladies by reputation, if not on sight, and they wanted nothing to do with any kind of incident between Winter and Summer. They were safer if they were never noticed.

Hell, if I could have snuck out, I would have led the way. When I’d defeated Aurora, there had been a healthy chunk of luck involved. I caught her with a sucker punch. If she’d been focused on taking me out instead of finishing her scheme, I doubt I would have survived the evening. Sure, I might have stared Maeve down, but ultimately I was bluffing—trying to fool the oncoming shark into thinking I might be something that could eat it. If the shark decided to start taking bites anyhow, things would get unpleasant for me.

But this time, at least, the shark didn’t know that.

Maeve waited for her lemonade, wrapped her lips idly around the straw, and sipped. Then she settled back into her seat, chewing. Crunching sounds came from her mouth. The lemonade had frozen solid when it passed her lips.

Which made me feel pretty damned smart for avoiding the whole sexual temptation issue.

Maeve looked at Lily steadily as she chewed, and then said, to me, “You know, my last Knight often dragged this one before the Court for performances. All kinds of performances. Some of them hurt. And some of them didn’t. Though she still cried out prettily enough.” She smiled, her tone polite and conversational. “Do you remember the night he made you dance for me in the red shoes, Lily?”

Lily’s green eyes settled on Maeve, calm and placid as a forest pool.

Maeve’s smile sharpened. “Do you remember what I did to you after?”

Lily smiled, a tired little expression, and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Maeve. I know how much pleasure you take in gloating, but you can’t hurt me with that now. That Lily is no more.”

Maeve narrowed her eyes, and then her gaze shifted to Fix. “And this one. I’ve seen this little man weeping like a child. Begging for mercy.”

Fix sipped at his lemonade and said, “For the love of God, Maeve. Would you give the Evil Kinkstress act a rest? It gets tired pretty fast.”

The Winter Lady let out an exasperated breath, put down her drink, and folded her arms sullenly across her chest. “Very well,” Maeve said, her tone petulant. “What is it you wish to know, wizard?”

“I’d like to know why Mab hasn’t been striking back at the Red Court after they trespassed on Sidhe territory during the battle last year.”

Maeve arched a brow at me. “That is knowledge, and therefore power. What are you prepared to trade for it?”

“Forgetfulness,” I said.

Maeve tilted her head. “I can think of nothing in particular I would like to forget.”

“I can think of something you want me to forget, Maeve.”

“Can you?”

I smiled, with teeth. “I’d be willing to forget what you did at Billy and Georgia’s wedding.”

“Pardon?” Maeve said. “I don’t seem to recall being present.”

She knew the score. She knew that I knew it, too. Her legality pissed me off. “Of course,” I replied. “You weren’t there. But your handmaiden was. Jenny Greenteeth.”

Maeve’s lips parted in sudden surprise.

“I saw through her glamour. Didn’t you know who shut her down?” I asked her, lifting my own eyebrows in faux innocence. “That was petty cruelty, Maeve, even for you. Trying to ruin their marriage.”

“Your wolf children did me a petty wrong,” Maeve replied. “They killed a favorite hireling of the Winter Court.”

“They owed their loyalty to Dresden when they killed the Tigress,” Lily murmured. “Even as did the Little Folk he used against Aurora. They acted with his consent and upon his will, Maeve. You know our laws.”

Maeve gave Lily a dirty look that was almost human.

“For what happened that night, they were mine.” I put my hands flat on the table and leaned a little toward Maeve, speaking with as much quiet intensity as I could. “I protect what is mine. You should know that by now. I have lawful reason for a quarrel with you.”

Maeve’s attention moved back to me, and her expression became remote and alien. “What is it you propose?”

“I’m willing to let things go as they are, all accounts settled, in exchange for an honest answer to my question.” I settled back in my chair and asked, “Why hasn’t Winter moved against the Red Court?”

Maeve regarded me with an odd little twinkle in her eye, then nodded and said, “Mab has not allowed it.”

Fix and Lily traded a quick look of surprise.

“Sooth,” Maeve said, nodding, evidently enjoying their reaction. “The Queen has readied her forces to strike at Summer, and has furthermore given specific orders preventing her captains from conducting operations against the Red Court.”

“That’s madness,” Lily said quietly.

Maeve folded her hands on the table, frowning at something far away, and said, “It may well be. Dark things stir in Winter’s heart. Things even I have never before seen. Dangerous things. I believe they are a portent.”

I tilted my head a little, focused on her. “How so?”

“What Aurora attempted was insane. Even among the Sidhe,” Maeve replied. “Her actions could have thrown enormous forces out of balance, to the ruin of all.”

“Her heart was in the right place,” Fix said, his tone mildly defensive.

“Maybe,” I told him, as gently as I could. “But good intent doesn’t amount to much when the consequences are epically screwed up.”

Maeve shook her head. “Hearts. Good. Evil. Mortals are always concerned with such nonsense.” She abruptly rose, her mind clearly elsewhere.

Something in her expression or manner gave me a sudden sense that she was worried. Deeply, truly worried. Little Miss Overlord was frightened.

“These mortal notions,” Maeve said. “Good, evil, love. All those other things your kind natter on about. Are they perhaps contagious?”

I rose with her, politely. “Some would say so,” I told her.

She grimaced. “In the time since her death, I have often thought to myself that Aurora was stricken with some mortal madness. I believe the Queen of Air and Darkness has been taken by a similar contagion.” She suddenly shuddered and said, voice curt, “I have answered you with truth, and more than needed be said. Does that satisfy the accounting, mortal?”

“Aye,” I told her, nodding. “Good enough for me.”

“Then I take my leave.” She turned, took half a step, and there was a sudden gust of frozen air that knocked her mostly full glass of lemonade onto the floor. It froze in a lumpy puddle. Somewhere between tabletop and floor, Maeve vanished.

The three of us sat there quietly for a moment.

“She was lying,” Fix said.

“She can’t lie,” Lily and I said at exactly the same moment. Lily yielded the issue to me with a gesture of her hand, and I told Fix, “She can’t speak an outright lie, Fix. None of the Sidhe can. You know that.”

He frowned and made a frustrated, helpless little gesture with his hand. “But…Mab? Insane?”

“It does fit with our concerns,” Lily told him quietly.

Fix looked a little green around the edges. “I loved her like a sister, but Aurora’s madness was bad enough. If Mab sets out to send the world on a downward spiral…I mean, I can’t even imagine the kind of things she could do.”

“I can,” I said quietly. “I would suggest that you relay word of this to Titania, Lady. And take that as official concern from the Council. Please also convey the message that the Council is naturally interested in preserving the balance in Faerie. It would be of value to all of us to cooperate in order to learn more.”

Lily nodded once at me. “Indeed. I will do so.” She shivered and closed her eyes for a second, her expression distressed. “Harry, I’m very sorry, but the bindings on me…I stretch the bounds of my proper place.”

Fix nodded decisively and rose. He took Lily’s arm. “I wish we could have done more to help you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, rising politely to my feet again. “You did what you could. I appreciate it.”

Lily gave me a strained smile. She and Fix departed, quick and quiet. The door never opened, but a breath later they were both gone. Mouse sat there next to the table, cocking his head left and right, his ears attentively forward, as though trying to figure that one out.

I sat at the table and sipped lemonade without much enthusiasm. More trouble in Faerie. Bigger trouble in Faerie. And I’d be willing to bet dollars to navel lint that I knew exactly which stupid son of a bitch the Council would expect to start poking his nose around in it.

I put the lemonade down. It suddenly tasted very sour.

Mac arrived. He took my lemonade. He replaced it with a beer. I flicked the top off with my thumb and put it away in a long pull. It was warm and it tasted too much, but the gentle bite of the alcohol in it was pleasant enough to make me want another.

Mac showed up with another.

Mac can sometimes be downright angelic.

“They’ve changed,” I told him. “Fix and Lily. It’s like they aren’t even the same people anymore.”

Mac grunted once. Then he said, “They grew up.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I fell back into a brooding silence, and Mac left me to it. I finished the second beer more slowly, but I didn’t have a lot of time to lose. I nodded my thanks to Mac, left money on the table, and took up Mouse’s leash. We headed for the door.

I had other business to take care of. Nebulous maybe-threats would have to wait for the monsters I was sure would show up in a few hours. At least I’d gotten out of the whole situation without someone trying to kill me or declaring war on the Council. I’d had a civil conversation with both Lady Winter and Lady Summer and come away from it unscathed.

As I walked toward the door, though, an idle thought gnawed at me.

It had hardly been like pulling out teeth at all.

Chapter Twenty-one

I headed back for SplatterCon!!! before the afternoon was half gone, this time with my backpack of wizard toys, my staff, my blasting rod, my dog, my gun, and a partridge in a pear tree. I didn’t have a concealed-carry permit for the .44, but working on the theory that it was better to have the gun and not need it than to need it and not have it, I put it in the backpack.

When I got to SplatterCon!!!, I decided that it very well might have been better not to have the damned gun on me; there was something of a police presence in evidence.

Two patrol cars were parked in plain sight outside the hotel, and one cop in uniform stood, sweating and miserable-looking, outside the doors. As I paid off the cabby, I picked out at least two loiterers in street clothes who were paying too much attention to who and what approached the building to be casual strollers taking advantage of spots of shade outside the hotel. I clipped on my SplatterCon!!! name tag.

The cop’s eyes flicked over me and I could all but see him take stock of me—tall guy, gaunt, mussed hair, dark eyes, big dog, sticks, backpack, one hand in a leather glove…and a horror convention name tag. Evidently, in this guy’s head, a name tag gave you carte blanche to look weird without being threatening, because when his eyes got to that, he just traded a nod with me and waved me through.

Inside, not only was the convention in full swing, but they had added a press conference to it to boot. The conference wing outside the room where the killer struck was packed with a half circle of reporters and photographers, while industrious satellite personnel held up lights and even a couple of boom microphones. From the door I could see three more uniformed officers. Between the cops, the conference, and the passersby, that whole section of the hotel was packed with a lot of noisy people. The air-conditioning had been pushed well beyond its limits, and it was stuffy and smelled like most crowded buildings.

Mouse sneezed and looked mournful. I agreed with him.

Murphy appeared out of the crowd and made her way to me. She gave me a tight nod, and knelt down to speak to Mouse and scratch behind his ears. “How’d your meeting go?” she asked.

“Survived it. Storm clouds on the horizon.” I looked around the place a minute more and said, “For crying out loud, it’s a zoo.”

“It gets better,” Murphy said. “I’ve been speaking with the convention staff, and they say that since the story hit the news and the radio stations at noon, they’ve almost doubled the number of attendees.”

“Crap,” I sighed.

“There’s more. Greene called in the Feds,” she said.

I frowned. “Last time the Feds showed up was less than fun.”

“Tell me about it.” She hesitated and then said, “Rick is with them.”

I blinked at her for a second, and then remembered. “Oh, right. The ex.”

“Ex-husband,” Murphy said, her tone sour. Her back was rigidly straight, and her eyes flickered with stormy emotions. “Current brother-in-law.”

“Which is icky,” I said.

“And I don’t like him being here,” Murphy said. “But it isn’t my call. And it’s possible that I have issues.”

I snorted.

She gave me a brief smile. “This has been splashy enough that they’ve got one of the major forensics units from the East Coast on the way.”

I scowled. “Maybe he should have blown a few trumpets, too. Or brought in a marching band. I think if he hurries, he can probably rent some of those big swiveling spotlights before dark.”

She rolled her eyes. “I get the point, Harry. You don’t like all the noise.”

“I don’t like all the potential victims,” I said. “Fifty bucks says the extra attendees are mostly minors.”

“No bet,” she replied. “Does it matter?”

“Maybe. In general, young people, especially adolescents, feel emotions much more intensely. The whole hormone thing. It can make them easier targets. Richer sources of energy.”

“Then why did it hit an old geezer like Pell first?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. “Good point.”

“Besides,” she continued, “isn’t it a good thing if more people are paying attention? From what you’ve told me, things from the spooky side of the street don’t like crowds.”

“In general, no,” I said. “But the place wasn’t exactly a ghost town yesterday when the phobophage showed up.”

“You think it will appear right in front of all these people?” she asked.

“I think crowds aren’t going to deter it. I think that if something bad happens, the more people there are around, the more fear it’s going to generate and the more our killer gets to eat. And a panic with more people means even more people get hurt.”

Murphy’s pale golden brows knitted into a frown. “So, what options can you give me?”

“There’s no guarantee, but I think we’ll have until nightfall.”

“Why?”

“Because it will be stronger after dark.”

Murphy frowned. “You think that’s why Pell survived his attack,” she murmured. “It was still daylight.”

“Got it in one,” I said. “Assuming we have until sundown, it gives us a little time to work.”

“Doing what?”

“Setting up some wards,” I said.

“Like at your place?”

I shook my head. “Nothing that complex. There’s no time. I can’t build a moat around this place, but I think I can throw together a web that will let us know when and where something comes over from the Nevernever. I’ll need to walk around a lot of the building to cover it all.”

She nodded. “That doesn’t address the crowd issue.”

I grimaced. “You know anyone in the fire department?”

“A cousin,” she said.

“This place must be over maximum occupancy. Maybe if the fire marshal heard about how crowded it was, they’d clear at least some of these people out. We only need a crowd big enough to tempt the killer in.”

She nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

“And I know it’s a long shot, but has CPD turned up anything? Or the ME?”

“Nothing on the autopsy. They didn’t give this one to Butters. Brioche handled it, and he didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”

“Naturally,” I sighed. “Greene?”

“Theories. He had some vague notion that the attack might have been some kind of publicity stunt to attract attention to the convention.”

“That’s a little cynical,” I said.

“Greene isn’t a believer,” Murphy said. “And he’s a trained investigator looking for a solid motive. If he accepts that the killer was just some kind of lunatic, it means he’s got almost nothing to work with. So he’s grasping at straws and hoping he can find something familiar he can use to nail the killer fast.”

I grunted. “Guess I can see that.”

“I don’t envy him,” Murphy said. “I don’t like him much, but he’s a cop, and he’s in a tight spot. Chances are, there’s not a damned thing he could do about it. And he doesn’t even know it.”

There was a little extra weight on the last phrase, something that contained personal pain.

Murphy had faced the same situations as Greene, more or less. Something wild happened, and none of it made any sense. Murphy had her first face-off with the supernatural while she was still a beat cop on patrol. It gave her an advantage as a detective, because at least she knew how much she didn’t know. Greene didn’t even have that much going for him. I hated to see her like that, feeling helpless to do anything. Hurting. Even if only in memory.

“How about you?” I asked. “You see anything that you think is worth mentioning?”

“Not yet. Someone around here has got to know something useful—even if they don’t know that they do.” She tilted her head and frowned at me. “Wait. You’re asking me?”

I shrugged a shoulder. “Murph, you’ve seen as much weird as most wizards. I think you’re more capable than you know.”

She studied my face for a long moment. “What do you mean?”

I shrugged again. “I mean that you’ve been there a time or two. You know what it’s like when something is lurking around. There’s commonality to it. You’ll know it when you feel it.”

“What? Am I supposed to be a wizard now?”

I grinned. “Just a savvy cop chick, Murph.”

“Cop chick?” she asked, menace in her voice.

“Sorry,” I said. “Police chick.”

She grunted. “That’s better.”

“Just don’t ignore your instincts,” I said. “They’re there for a reason.”

Murphy wasn’t listening to that last part, because she’d turned her head sharply to one side, blue eyes narrowing as she focused on a man who had emerged from a conference room doorway and was slipping down the hall.

And Mouse let out a low growl.

“Who’s that?” I asked Murphy.

“Darby Crane,” Murphy said.

“Ah,” I said. “The horror movie director.”

Mouse growled again. Murphy and he started after Crane.

Why fight the inevitable? I started walking before Mouse pulled my arms out of their sockets. “Hey, howsabout we go talk to him?”

“You think?” Murphy said.

“Take him. I’ll back you up.”

She nodded, without turning around. “Excuse me,” she told a gang of conventiongoers in front of her. “Coming through, please.”

We tried to hurry through the crowd, but it was like trying to run in chest-deep water. The faster you try to move, the more resistance there is. Crane moved through them like an eel, a spare man of medium height in slacks and a dark blazer. Murphy forged ahead, making room for me to follow, while I put my height to good use to keep an eye on Crane.

He beat us to a comparatively empty side hallway that led back to ground-floor guest rooms and elevators. By the time we got into the clear, the elevator doors had opened. Murphy hurried forward and shot a glance over her shoulder at me, then jerked her chin at the elevators.

I grinned. There are times when I hate it that technology has such problems operating around wizards. And then there are the times when it’s sort of fun.

I made a mild effort of will, focused my thoughts on the elevators, and murmured, “Hexus.” Nebulous and unseen energy fluttered down the hallway, and when the hex hit the elevators there was a sudden hiss of sparks at one edge of the panel with the call button, and an oozing smoke dribbled out a moment later. The doors started to close, then a bell went bing. The doors sprang open again. That happened a couple of more times before Murphy closed to the elevator and caught up to Darby Crane.

I slowed my pace, holding on to Mouse, and lurked several feet away, trying to blend in by reading a wall full of flyers announcing various parties at the convention.

Crane was a surprisingly good-looking man—slender, stark cheekbones, and his demeanor was more like an actor’s than that of someone on the production side. His dark hair was in a short, neat cut, dark eyes deep-set and opaque, and he carried himself in a posture that read nothing but relaxed nonaggression.

Before I’d finished looking him over, I was sure that the whole thing was a calculated lie. There was cruelty lurking below the calm of his features, contempt hiding within the modest posture of his body. As Murphy approached, he stepped out of the elevator, frowning at the smoke. His eyes snapped to her, and around the hallway at once. There were several other people standing not far away, outside of a guest room with an open door.

He judged them, then Murphy for a moment, and then turned to face her, his mouth settling into a polite, bland little perjury of a smile.

“So hard to rely upon technology these days,” he said, his glance moving over me as part of the background scenery. I thought. He had a surprisingly deep, resonant voice. “May I help you, Officer?”

“Lieutenant, actually,” she told him without rancor. “My name is Karrin Murphy. I’m with…”

“Chicago Police Department Special Investigations,” Crane said. “I know.”

Alarm bells went off in my head. I doubted Crane would recognize it, but Murphy’s stance shifted subtly, becoming more wary. “Have we met, Mr. Crane?”

“In a way. I’ve seen secondhand copies of the film of you gunning down a madman and some sort of animal several years ago. Very impressive, Lieutenant. Have you ever considered work in film?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been told the camera adds ten pounds. I have problems enough. May I take a few moments of your time, Mister Crane?”

He grinned at her, then, a grin I’m sure he meant to be boyish and flirty. The weasel. “I suppose that depends on what you intend to do with them.”

Murphy studied his face for just a moment, as though in wary amusement. “I had a few questions regarding the incident here, and I hope that you can help me out with them.”

“I can’t imagine what I know that would help you,” Crane replied. He glanced at the unmoving elevator doors and sighed. “Bother.” He drew a small black cell phone from his jacket pocket, hit a button without looking, and lifted it to his ear. Then he lowered it again and frowned down at it in silence.

Hah. Take that, weasel.

“It won’t take much of your time,” Murphy said. “I’m sure that you can see how important it is for us to be thorough in this investigation. We would all hate for anyone else to be harmed.”

“I’m sure I don’t know anything of any importance, Lieutenant,” Crane said, his voice turning a little impatient. “I was present during the blackout last night, but I was already in my room. I didn’t even come downstairs until this morning.”

“I see. Did anyone see you at that time?”

Crane let out a little laugh. “Am I a suspect, that I need an alibi?”

“As a celebrity guest, it’s entirely possible that the person or persons responsible for this attack might have an unhealthy interest in you,” Murphy replied, matching his fake laugh with her politely professional smile. “I certainly don’t mean to imply any sort of accusation—only concern for your safety.”

Someone shoved open a door that showed a set of stairs behind it, and a small man in an expensive grey suit emerged from it. He was sort of frog-faced—he had the mouth of someone much larger than he, almost grotesquely thick and wide. He had fine black hair, all limp and stringy, and someone had cut it with the ancient but trusty salad-bowl method. He had bulgy, watery eyes that required extra-large, wide-rimmed glasses to properly encircle.

“Ah, Mr. Crane,” the newcomer said. He had a wheezy, nasal voice. “I received your call, but it was apparently cut off just as I answered.”

Crane took out his phone again and tossed it underhand to the newcomer. “It seems to have died quite abruptly, Lucius. Like this elevator.”

The man caught it and frowned at the phone, then at Murphy with equal amounts of disapproval. “I see.”

“Lieutenant Murphy, may I present Lucius Glau, my personal advisor and legal counsel.”

Mouse tensed as Glau turned to regard Murphy with his froggy eyes. The little lawyer made a swallowing sound in his throat, and then said, “Is my client under arrest?”

“No,” she said. “Naturally n—”

“Then I must insist that this conversation be cut short,” Glau said over her. For a pasty little guy, he had a lot of confidence. He squared off in front of Murphy, just to one side of Crane. Murphy’s arms relaxed to her sides and I saw her blue eyes flick down to the floor and back up, gauging distances. The tension level went higher.

“We were just talking,” Murphy told Glau. I’d seen her wearing that look, right before she went for her gun, more than once. “In an amiable and cooperative fashion.”

“As I informed both the FBI and the investigator in charge of the scene with Chicago’s police department, my client was in his rooms all night and neither witnessed what happened nor even knew of what had transpired until he came down to breakfast this morning.” Glau’s voice was clipped, his bulgy eyes impossible to read. I got the feeling it was the expression he used whenever he did anything, be it eating ice cream or drowning puppies. “Continued contact could well be construed as harassment.”

“Lucius, Lucius,” Crane said, holding out his hand between them, his voice soothing. “Honestly, you react so strongly to the smallest things.” He turned that dazzling smile on Murphy and said, “I’m sorry. Lucius has worked for me for a very long time, and he’s seen a number of unreasonable people approach me. I certainly don’t think of the attentions of so striking a woman as harassment.”

Murphy’s eyes left Glau for a second as she cocked a golden brow at Crane. “Really?”

“Truly,” Crane said, the model of modern gallantry. “Lucius is doubtless concerned about my timetable for today, and I would hate to disappoint any of the fans here to meet me by falling behind my schedule.”

He glanced at Froggy as he spoke, and Froggy took a very small step back from Murphy.

Crane nodded at him, continuing to speak. “But if you would permit it, perhaps you would care to let me get you a drink of something later this evening, by way of apology?”

Murphy hesitated, which wasn’t much like her. “I don’t know…” she said.

Crane extended his hand to her to be shaken, still smiling. “If you still had questions, I’d be happy to answer them then. Please, as a token of my intentions, I insist. I would hate you to have the wrong impression of me.”

Murphy gave him a look of wary amusement and lifted her hand.

I’m not sure how I got across that much carpet that fast, but I put my hand on Murphy’s shoulder and gripped lightly just before she touched him. She froze, sensing the warning in the gesture, and drew her hand back.

Crane’s eyes narrowed, studying me, his hand still sticking out. “And who is this?”

“Harry Dresden,” I said.

Crane went still. Not still like people go still, where you can see them blinking and swaying slightly and adjusting their balance. He went still like corpses and plastic dressing dummies, and said nothing.

As I am a highly experienced investigator, I drew the conclusion that he recognized the name.

Froggy made a gulping sound in his throat, bulging eyes switching to me. I thought he shrunk in on himself a little, as if suddenly losing an inch or two of height—or tensing to crouch.

He recognized it, too. I felt famous.

Mouse let out a relaxed ripsaw of a growl, so low that it could hardly be heard.

Froggy’s eyes went to the dog and widened. He shot a look at Crane.

Everyone froze like that for a moment. Crane and Murphy still smiled their professional smiles. Froggy looked froglike. I went for bored. But I felt my heart speed up as my instincts told me that violence was a hell of a lot closer to the surface than it looked.

“There are witnesses here, Dresden,” Crane said. “You can’t move on me. It would be seen.”

I tilted my head and pursed my lips thoughtfully. “You’re right. And you’re a public figure. Which means this is a great opportunity for advertising. I haven’t been on TV since the last time I was on the Larry Fowler Show.”

His expression changed then, that cold sneer coming out of the background to twist his lips. “You wouldn’t dare reveal yourself to the world.”

I snorted at him and said, “Go read the yellow pages in your room. I’m in there. Under ‘Wizards.’”

Froggy gulped again.

“You’re insane,” Crane said.

“Wizards is the kway-zee-est people,” I confirmed. “And you don’t look very much like a Darby.”

Crane’s chin lifted, his eyes glittering with some sort of sudden approval. I had no idea why. Dammit, I hate it when someone knows more than me about exactly how deep a hole I’m digging under myself. “No? And what does a Darby look like?”

“I confess, the only one I ever saw was in that leprechaun movie with Sean Connery,” I said. “Call it an instinct.”

He pursed his lips and fell silent. We all enjoyed another two minutes of wordless, increasingly tense standoff.

Then Murphy said, deadpan, “Say, ten o’clock for that drink, Darby? The hotel’s lounge? We’d hate to keep you from your busy schedule.”

He glanced from Murphy to me and back, and then lowered his hand. He gave her a little bow of the head, then turned and walked away, back toward the crowd.

Froggy watched us for a three count, then turned and hurried after his boss, checking frequently over his shoulder.

I exhaled slowly, and leaned against the wall. Adrenaline without an outlet is a funny thing. The long muscles in my legs twitched and flexed without me telling them too, and the lights in the hallway suddenly seemed a little too bright. My bruised head twinged some more.

Murphy just stood there, not moving, but I could hear her consciously regulating her breathing, keeping it smooth.

Mouse sat down and looked bored, but his ears kept twitching in the direction the pair had vanished.

“Well,” Murphy said a second later, keeping her voice low. “What was that all about?”

“We almost started a fight,” I said.

“I noticed that,” Murphy said, her tone patient. “But why?”

“He’s spooky,” I murmured.

She frowned, looking over her shoulder and up at me. “What is he?”

“I told you. Spooky.” I shook my head. “Other than that I don’t know.”

She blinked. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something about him hit me wrong. When he offered you his hand, it seemed…off. Dangerous.”

Murphy shook her head. “I figured he was going to go for the hold-and-caress routine,” she said. “It’s a little bit insulting, but it isn’t all that dangerous.”

“Unless maybe it is,” I said.

“You’re sure he’s from your side of things?” she asked.

“Yeah. He recognized me. He started pulling out the standard Old World reasons for avoiding public confrontation. And Mouse didn’t like him—or his lawyer, either.”

“Vampire?” she asked.

“Could be,” I said, chewing on my lip. “Could be a lot of things. Hell, could be human, for that matter. Without knowing more we shouldn’t make any assumptions.”

“Think he’s involved in the attacks?”

“I like him for it,” I said. “If I was making the call alone, he’d definitely be our asshole. He’s got all the earmarks.”

“If he’s the guy, he’s out of my reach,” she said. “He’s got a hair-trigger attorney and has already spoken to Greene and Rick. Any police pressure I brought against him would be harassment. Greene won’t act on my suspicions.”

“Well,” I said. “Good thing I’m not Greene.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Murphy and I walked around the hotel, and as we did I popped open a fresh can of blue Play-Doh. At the corners of major intersections and at the exterior exits, I pinched off bits and plunked them down on top of the molding over doorways, inside flowerpots, inside fire extinguisher cabinets, and anywhere else where they wouldn’t be easily or immediately noticed. I made sure to leave plenty of them in unnoticed little spots along the hallways chiefly in use for the convention, especially outside the rooms that the schedule designated as showing films as evening approached.

“What are we doing again?” Murphy asked.

“Setting up a spell,” I said.

“With Play-Doh.”

“Yes.”

She gave me a level look.

I shook out the can that still had most of the original material in it, and showed it to her. “The little pieces I’ve been leaving around are part of this piece. See?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“They used to be one piece. Even when they’re separated, they still have a thaumaturgical connection to the original,” I told her. “It means that I’ll be able to use the big piece to reach out and connect to the little pieces.”

“That’s what you meant by a web?”

“Yes. I’ll be able to…” I twisted up my face, searching for the words to explain. “I can extend energy out to all the smaller pieces. I’ll set it up so that if one of the little pieces picks up on a disturbance of the energies, I’ll be able to feel it through the larger piece.”

“Like…seismographs, sort of,” Murphy said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And we use blue Play-Doh. Blue for defense.”

She arched a brow at me. “Does the color really matter?”

“Yes,” I said, then thought about it for a second. “Well, probably no. But yes, for me.”

“Huh?”

“A lot of the use of magic is all tied up with your emotions. With what you believe is real. When I was younger, I learned a lot of stuff, like the role of colors in the casting of spells. Green for fertility and prosperity, red for passion and energy, white for purity, black for vengeance, and so on. It could be that the color doesn’t matter at all—but if I expect the spell to work because of the color used, then that color is important. If I don’t believe in it, the spell won’t ever get off the ground.”

“Like Dumbo’s magic feather?” Murphy asked. “It was his confidence that was really important?”

“Yes,” I said. “The feather was just a symbol—but it was an important symbol.”

I gestured with the can. “So I use blue, because I don’t have to do too much introspection, and I don’t introduce new doubts in a crisis situation. And because it was cheap at Wal-Mart.”

Murphy laughed. “Wal-Mart, huh?”

“Wizarding doesn’t pay much,” I said. “You’d be surprised how much stuff I get from Wal-Mart.” I checked a clock on the wall. “We’ve got about two hours before the first movie starts showing.”

She nodded. “What do you need?”

“A quiet space to work in,” I told her. “At least six or seven feet across. The more private and secure, the better. I’ve got to assume that the bad guy knows I’m around here somewhere. I don’t want to get a machete in the back when I’m busy running the spell.”

“How long do you need to set it up?”

I shrugged. “Twenty minutes, give or take. What I’m really concerned about is—”

“Mister Dresden!” called a voice from across the crowded convention hallway. I looked up to see Sandra Marling hurrying through the crowd toward me. The convention’s chairwoman looked exhausted and too nervous to be awake, much less standing, much less politely pushing her way through a crowd, but she did it anyway. She still wore the same black T-shirt with the red SplatterCon!!! logo on it, presumably the same I’d seen her in the night before.

“Ms. Marling,” I said, nodding to her as she approached. “Good afternoon.”

She shook her head wearily. “I’m such…this is such an enormous amount of…but I don’t know who else I can turn to about this.” Her words failed her, and she started trembling with nerves and weariness.

I traded a frown with Murphy. “Sandra. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Molly,” she said.

I frowned. “What about her?”

“She came here from the hospital a couple of hours ago. The police came to talk to her and I don’t think she’s come out since then, and none of the officers I’ve spoken to know where she is. I think—”

“Sandra.” I told her, “Take a breath. Slow down. Do you know where Molly is?”

The woman closed her eyes and shook her head, bringing herself under control, lowering her voice several pitches. “They’re still…interrogating her, I think? Isn’t that what they say? When they try to scare you and ask questions?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah,” I said. “Was she arrested?”

Sandra shook her head jerkily. “I don’t think so. They didn’t handcuff her or read from that little card or anything. Can they do that? Just drag her into a room?”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Which room?”

“Other wing, second door on the right,” she said.

I nodded, slung my pack off my back, and took out a small notebook. I scribbled some phone numbers and names on a page, and gave it to Sandra. “Call both of these people.”

She blinked at the paper. “What do I tell them?”

“The truth. Tell them what’s going on and that Harry Dresden said they need to get down here immediately.”

Sandra blinked down at the page. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, you know. The usual,” I said. “Get to that phone.”

“I’ll catch up in a minute,” Murphy said.

I nodded, slung the pack back on, jerked my head at Mouse, and started walking with purposeful strides toward the knot of reporters that had begun to dissolve at the conclusion of the official statements to the press. My dog fell in to pace at my side until I spotted Lydia Stern at the rear of the crowd.

Lydia Stern was a formidable woman, a reporter for the Midwestern Arcane, a yellow journal based out of Chicago that did its best to report on the supernatural. Sometimes they managed to get close to the truth, but more often they ran stories that had headlines like Lizard Baby Born in Trailer Park, or maybe Bigfoot and the Chupacabra, the Unholy Alliance. By and large, the stories were amusing and fairly harmless, but once in a while someone stumbled into something strange and it made it into the paper. Susan Rodriguez had been a lead reporter for the Arcane, until she’d run into exactly the wrong story. Now she lived her life somewhere in South America, fighting off the infection in her soul that wanted to turn her into one of the Red Court while she and her half-vampire buddies campaigned against their would-be recruiters.

When Lydia Stern took over Susan’s old job a couple of years back, her reporting had taken a different angle. She’d investigated strange events and then demanded to know why the appropriate institutions had been ignoring them. The woman had a scathing intellect and penetrating wit, and she employed both liberally and with considerable panache in her writing. She was unafraid to challenge anyone in her articles, from some small-town animal control unit to the FBI.

It was a shame she was working at a rag like the Arcane instead of at a reputable paper in DC or New York. She’d have been a Pulitzer nominee inside of five years. City officials who had to deal with the cases I’d brushed up against had developed a nearly supernatural ability to vanish whenever she was around. None of them wanted to be the next person Lydia Stern eviscerated in print. She had a growing reputation as an investigative terror.

“Ms. Stern,” I said in a low, grave voice, extra emphasis on the “z” in “Ms.” “I wonder if you might have a few moments.”

The terror of the Midwest Arcane whirled to face me, and her face broke into a cherubic grin. She was a little over five feet tall, pleasantly plump, and of Asian ancestry. She had a sparkling smile, thick glasses, curly black hair, and was wearing a pair of denim overalls over an old Queens-rÿche T-shirt. Her tennis shoes had bright pink laces on them. “Harry Dresden,” she said. She had a sort of breathless, bubbling voice, the kind that seemed like it could barely contain laughter beneath almost every word. “Hah. I knew this one smelled right.”

“Could be,” I said. I hadn’t been real forthcoming with Lydia. It hadn’t worked out well with reporters in the past. Whenever I spoke to her, little daggers of guilt stabbed at me, reminders that I could not afford to let careless words get her into too much trouble. Despite that, we’d gotten along, and I’d never lied to her. I hadn’t bothered to try. “You busy?”

She gestured at the bag whose strap hung over her shoulder. “I’ve got recordings, and I’ll want to jot down some notes shortly.” She tilted her head to one side. “Why do you ask?”

“I need a thug to scare some guys for me,” I said.

The dimples in her cheeks deepened. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do this for me. I’ll give you ten minutes on this.” I waved my hand vaguely at the hotel around us. “As soon as I have some time free.”

Her eyes brightened. “Done,” she said. “What do I do?”

“Hang around outside a doorway and…” I grinned. “Just be yourself.”

“Good. I can do that.” She nodded once, curls bouncing, and followed me to the room where they were grilling my friend’s daughter.

I opened the door like I owned the place and walked in.

The room wasn’t a big one—maybe the size of a large elementary-school classroom. There was a raised platform about a foot high at one end, with chairs on it behind a long table. More chairs faced it in rows. A sign, now discarded on the floor behind the door, declared that the room was scheduled for something called “filking” between noon and five o’clock today. “Filking” sounded suspiciously like it might be an activity somehow related to spawning salmon, or maybe some kind of bizarre mammalian discussion. I decided that it was probably one of those things I was happier not knowing.

Greene was in the room, standing on the platform with his arms folded, a sour frown on his face. Molly sat in the first row of chairs, still in the same clothes as the night before. She looked tired. She’d been crying.

Next to her was a man of medium build and unremarkable height, with brown hair just tousled enough to be fashionable. He wore a grey suit, its gravity somewhat offset by a black tie that featured Marvin the Martian. I recognized him. Rick, Murphy’s ex. He stood over Molly, passing her a cup of water, the good cop of the usual interrogation equation. He was here in his official capacity, then. Agent Rick.

“Excuse me,” Greene said, without looking over at me. “This room isn’t open to the public.”

“It isn’t?” I said, overly ingenuous. “Man. I was really looking forward to a nice afternoon of filking, too.”

Molly looked up, and her eyes widened in recognition and what looked like sudden hope. “Harry!”

“Heya, kid,” I told her, and ambled in, Mouse in tow. The dog went right over to Molly, wagging his tail and subtly begging for affection by thrusting his broad muzzle underneath her folded hands. Molly let out a little laugh and leaned down, hugging the dog, talking baby talk to him like she did to her youngest siblings.

Greene turned to glower at me. After a moment, Agent Rick did too.

“Dresden,” Greene said, his tone peremptory. “You are interfering in an investigation. Get out.”

I ignored him to speak to Molly. “How’s Rosie?”

She left her cheek on top of Mouse’s broad head and said, “Unconscious. She was very upset by the news and the doctors gave her something to help her sleep. They were afraid she would freak out and it would hurt the baby.”

“Dresden,” Greene snarled.

“Best thing for her right now,” I told Molly. “She’ll handle it better when she’s had some rest.”

She nodded and said, “I hope so.”

Greene spat a curse and reached for his radio, presumably to summon goons.

Greene was an ass.

Maybe I was going a little hex-happy, but I muttered something under my breath and made a little effort. Sparks shot out of the radio and were followed by curls of smoke. Greene stood there cursing as he tried to get the thing to work. “Dammit, Dresden,” he snarled. “Get out before I have you taken downtown.”

I kept ignoring him. “Hi there, Rick. How was the wedding?”

“That’s it,” Greene said.

Rick pursed his lips and then held up a hand toward Greene, a placating gesture. “Everyone survived it,” Agent Rick responded, studying me with a steady frown, looking between me and Molly. “Harry, we’re working here. You should go.”

“Yeah?” I asked. I plopped down into the chair beside Molly and grinned at him. “I’m thinking maybe not. I mean, I’m working, too. I’m a consultant.”

“You’re obstructing an investigation, Dresden,” Greene growled. “You’re going to lose your jobs with the city. Your investigative license. Hell, I’ll even get you stuck in jail for a month or two.”

“No you won’t.”

“Have it your way, tough guy,” Greene said, and started for the door.

Molly, maybe taking it for a cue, rose herself.

“Sit down,” Greene said, his voice hard. “You aren’t finished yet.”

She hesitated for a second and then sat.

“Greene, Greene, Greene,” I said. “There’s something you’re missing here.”

He paused. Agent Rick watched me steadily.

“See, Miss Carpenter here can go any time she damned well pleases.”

“Not until she’s answered a few questions,” he said.

I made a game-show buzzing sound. “Wrong. This is a free country. She can walk out and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. Unless you want to arrest her.” I grinned at him some more. “You didn’t arrest her, did you?”

Molly watched the exchange from the corner of her vision, being very still and keeping her face down.

“We’re questioning her in relation to an ongoing investigation,” Rick said.

“Yeah? One of you guys got the subpoena, then?”

They hadn’t, of course. No one spoke.

“See, you’re the one out on a limb here, Greene. You’ve got nothing on the young lady. No court order. You haven’t arrested her. So anything she chooses to tell you is entirely voluntary.”

Molly blinked up at me. “It is?”

I put a hand to my chest and mimed an expression of shock. “Greene! I can hardly believe this. Did you lie to this young woman to frighten her? To make her think she was under arrest?”

“I didn’t lie,” Greene snarled.

“You just led her on,” I said, nodding. “Sure, sure. Not your fault if she interpreted you wrong. Say, let’s go back and check the tape and see where the mistake was.” I paused. “You are recording this, aren’t you? All on the record and aboveboard?”

Greene looked at me like he wanted to kick my nuts up into my skull. “You’ve got nothing but speculation. Get out. Or, as lead investigator, I will have you barred from the hotel.”

“That a threat?” I asked him.

“Believe it.”

I made a show of rubbing at my mouth. “Oh, man. I’m having quite the moral quandary. Because if you do that to me, then hell, maybe the press would find out that you’re dismissing professional consultants with a positive track record with the city.” I leaned forward and added casually, “Oh. And they might find out that you are illegally interrogating a juvenile.”

Greene stared at me, shock on his face. Even Agent Rick arched an eyebrow. “What?”

“A juvenile,” I enunciated, “i.e., one who cannot give you legal consent on her own. I took the liberty of sending for her parents. I’m sure that they and their attorney will have a whole lot of questions for you.”

“That’s blackmail,” Greene said.

“No, it’s due process,” I replied. “You’re the one who tried the end run around the law.”

Greene scowled at me and said, “You can talk all you want, but you’ve got no proof.”

My cheeks ached from smiling so much, and I chuckled.

The door, which had never fully closed, opened on cue. Lydia Stern stood there behind it, her press badge around her neck, a mini-tape recorder in her hand, held up so that Greene could clearly see it. “So, Detective,” she asked, “could you please explain why as a part of your investigation you are interrogating a juvenile without her parents’ consent? Is she a suspect in the crime? Or a witness to any of the events? And what about these rumors of interdepartmental noncooperation slowing down the investigation?”

Greene stared at the reporter. He shot a glance at Agent Rick.

Rick shrugged. “He’s got you. You took a chance. It didn’t pay off.”

Greene spat a word that authority figures oughtn’t say in front of juveniles, and then stomped out. Lydia Stern winked at me, then followed on his heels, recorder held out toward him, asking a steady stream of questions whose only reasonable answers would make Greene look like an idiot.

Rick watched him go and shook his head. Then he said to me, “What’s your stake in this?”

“The girl is my friend’s daughter,” I said. “Just looking out for her.”

He gave me a slight nod. “I see. Greene’s under a lot of pressure. I’m sorry you got treated like that.”

“Rick,” I said in a patient voice, “I’m not a teenage girl. Please don’t try to good-cop me.”

His polite, interested expression vanished for a second behind a quick, boyish grin. Then he shrugged and said, “It was worth trying.”

I snorted.

“You know he can get the subpoena. It’s just a question of running through channels.”

I rose. “That’s not my problem. I’ll leave it to the Carpenters’ attorney.”

“I see,” he said. “You actually are interfering with the investigation. He could probably make it stick.”

“Come on, Agent. I’m protecting the rights of a juvenile. The ACLU would eat that raw.” I shook my head. “Besides. What you’re doing is wrong. Bullying girls. Hell’s bells, man, that’s low.”

A flicker of anger touched Agent Rick’s expression. “Dresden, I know you don’t have a concealed carry permit. You want me to suspect you of carrying a weapon and search you for it?”

Oops. I thought nervously of the revolver in my backpack. If Agent Rick wanted to make an issue of it, I could be in trouble—but I didn’t want him to know that. I tried to shake it off with a nonchalant shrug. “How is that going to help stop the killer before he strikes again?”

Rick tilted his head to one side and frowned at me. Dammit, I’ve got to get a better poker face. He oriented on me, eyes searching over me for possible places to hide a gun. “Irrelevant,” he replied. “If you’re breaking the law, you’re breaking the law.”

From the doorway there was an impatient sigh, and then Murphy said, “Would it kill you to stop being an asshole for five minutes, Rick?”

I hadn’t noticed her arrival, and judging from Agent Rick’s expression, neither had he.

“He’s a consultant for SI, which is also working the case. We don’t have the time to get involved in a pissing contest. People are in danger. We need to work together.”

Rick glared at her, then reined in his temper and shrugged a shoulder. “You may be right. But Dresden, I want you to consider leaving of your own will. If you keep interfering, I’ll arrest you and toss you in the clink for twenty-four hours.”

“No,” Murphy said, entering the room. “You won’t.”

He rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “Dammit, Karrin. You never know when to quit, do you?”

“Of course I do,” she said, setting her jaw. “Never.”

Agent Rick shook his head. He slammed open the door and departed.

Murphy watched him go. Then she sighed and asked, “Are you all right, miss?”

Molly nodded somewhat numbly. “Yes. Just tired.”

A moment later, Sandra Marling hurried in, looked around at all of us, and then went over to give Molly a hug. The girl hugged back, tight.

“Did you reach them?” I asked Sandra.

“Yes. Mrs. Carpenter is on the way.”

Molly shuddered.

“Good,” I said. “Could you stay with Molly until she arrives?”

“Of course.”

I nodded and said to Molly, “Kid, things are getting complicated. I want you to go with your mom. All right?”

She nodded, slowly, without looking up.

I sighed and got up out of my chair. “Good.”

I left, Murphy and Mouse flanking me as I headed back into the hotel. “Nice guy, Rick,” I commented. “Maybe a little manipulative.”

“Just a tad,” Murphy said. “What happened?”

I told her.

She let out a wicked chuckle. “Wish I could have seen the look on their faces.”

“Next time I’ll take a picture.”

She nodded. “So what’s our next move?”

“Hey, we’re in a hotel.” I bobbed my eyebrows at her. “Let’s get a room.”

Under peaceful circumstances, I’m sure that no rooms would have been available. Obviously, though, circumstances were far from peaceful, and there had been a minor avalanche of cancellations and early departures from the hotel—which only goes to show that people occasionally demonstrate evidence of sound judgment. The convention might have doubled the number of folks attending, but that didn’t mean that they wanted to sleep here.

There was a room available on the fifth floor. I paid an extra fee to allow Mouse to stay, and we got checked in.

There was no one else in the elevator, and we rode in a silence that became increasingly tense. I shifted my weight from side to side and fiddled with one of the two plastic cards the desk clerk had given us. I cleared my throat.

“So here we are,” I said. “Heading up to our hotel room.”

Murphy’s cheeks turned pink. “You are a pig, Dresden.”

“Hey, I didn’t put any innuendo into that. You did it yourself.”

She rolled her eyes, smiling a little.

I watched numbers change on the elevator panel. I coughed. “Yes, sirree. Alone together.”

“It’s a little weird,” she admitted.

“A little weird,” I agreed.

“Should it be?” she asked. “I mean, we’re just working together. We’ve done that before.”

“We haven’t done it in a hotel room.”

“Yes, we have,” Murphy said.

“But they all had corpses in them.”

“Ah. True.”

“No corpses this time,” I said.

“Heh,” Murphy said. “The night is young.”

Her reminder of the dangers before us put a bullet through the head of that conversation. Her smile vanished, and her face regained its usual color. We went the rest of the way in silence, until the elevator doors opened. Neither one of us moved to get out. It almost felt like there was some kind of invisible line drawn across the floor.

The silence stretched. The doors tried to close. Murphy mashed down on the Door Open button with her thumb.

“Harry,” she said finally, her voice very quiet, her blue eyes focused into distance. “I’ve been thinking about…you know. Us.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How much thinking?”

She smiled a little. “I’m not sure, really. I don’t think I wanted to admit that…you know.”

“Things might change between us?”

“Yes.” She frowned at me. “I’m not sure this is something you would want.”

“Between the two of us,” I said, “I think I probably have more insight into that one.”

She frowned. “How do you know it’s what you want?”

“Last Halloween,” I said, “I wanted to murder Kincaid.”

Murphy glanced down as her cheeks turned pink. “Oh.”

“Not literally,” I said, then paused. “Well. I guess it was literally. But the urge died down a little.”

“I see,” she said.

“Are you and him…?” I asked, leaving the question open.

“I saw him at New Year’s,” she said. “But we aren’t in anything deep. Neither of us want that. We’re friends. We enjoy the company. That’s all.”

I frowned. “We’re friends too,” I said. “But I’ve never taken your pants off.”

“We’re different,” she said, her blush renewing. She gave me an oblique look from beneath pale eyelashes. “Is it something you want?”

My heart sped up a little. “Uh. Pants removal?”

She arched a brow and tilted her head, waiting for an answer.

“Murph, I haven’t been with a woman for…” I shook my head. “Look, you ask any guy if he wants to have sex and he’s going to say yes. Generally speaking. It’s in the union manual.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Including you?” she pressed.

“I’m a guy,” I said. “So yes.” I frowned, thinking about it. “And…and no.”

She smiled at me and nodded. “I know. You couldn’t do casual. You commit yourself too deeply. You care too much. We couldn’t have something light. You would never settle for that.”

She was probably right. I nodded.

“I don’t know if I could give you what you want, Harry.” Then she took a deep breath and said, “And there are other reasons. We work together.”

“I noticed.”

She didn’t quite smile. “What I mean is…I can’t let relationships come close to my job. It isn’t good for either.”

I said nothing.

“I’m a cop, Harry.”

My belly twisted a little as I realized the rejection in the words, and the lack of any room for compromise. “I know you are.”

“I serve the law.”

“You do,” I said. “You always have.”

“I can’t walk away from it. I won’t walk away from it.”

“I know that too.”

“And…we’re so different. Our worlds.”

“Not really,” I said. “We sort of hang around in the same one, most of the time.”

“That’s work,” she said quietly. “My work isn’t everything about me. Or it shouldn’t be. I’ve tried a relationship built on having that in common.”

“Rick,” I said.

She nodded. Pain flickered in her eyes. I never would have seen that a few years before. But I’d seen Murphy in good times and bad—mostly bad. She’d never say it, never want me to say anything about it, but I knew that her failed marriages had wounded her more deeply than she would ever admit. In a way, I suspected that they explained some of her professional drive and ambition. She was determined to make the career work. Something had to.

And maybe she’d been hurt even more deeply than that. Maybe badly enough that she wouldn’t want to leave herself open to it again. Long-term relationships have the potential for long-term pain. Maybe she didn’t want to go through it again.

“What if you weren’t a cop?”

She smiled faintly. “What if you weren’t a wizard?”

“Touché. But indulge me.”

She tilted her head and studied me for a minute. Then she said, “What happens when Susan comes back?”

I shook my head. “She isn’t.”

Her tone turned dry. “Indulge me.”

I frowned. “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “We decided to break it off. And…I suspect we’d see a lot of things very differently now.”

“But if she wanted to try again?” Murphy asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s say we get together,” Murphy said. “How many kids do you want?”

I blinked. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t…” I blinked a few more times. “I hadn’t really thought about it.” So I thought about it for a second. I thought about the merry chaos of the Carpenter household. God, I’d have given anything for that when I was little.

But any child of mine would inherit more than my eyes and killer chin. There were a lot of people who didn’t think much of me. A lot of not-people thought that way, too. Any child of mine would be bound to inherit some of my enemies, and worse, maybe some of my allies. My own mother had left me a legacy of perpetual suspicion and doubt, and nasty little surprises that occasionally popped out of the hoary past.

Murphy watched me, blue eyes steady and serious. “It’s a big question,” she said quietly.

I nodded, slowly. “Maybe you’re thinking about this too much, Murph,” I said. “Logic and reason and planning for the future. What’s in your heart doesn’t need that.”

“I used to think that, too.” She shook her head. “I was wrong. Love isn’t all you need. And I just don’t see us together, Harry. You’re dear to me. I couldn’t ask for a kinder friend. I’d walk through fire for you.”

“You already did,” I said.

“But I don’t think I could be the kind of lover you want. We wouldn’t go together.”

“Why not?”

“At the end of the day,” she said quietly, “we’re too different. You’re going to live for a long time, if you don’t get killed. Centuries. I’m going to be around another forty, fifty years at the most.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was one of those things I tried really hard not to dwell on.

She said, even more quietly, “I don’t know if I’ll get serious with a man again. But if I do…I want it to be someone who will build a family with me. Grow old with me.” She reached up and touched the side of my face with warm fingers. “You’re a good man, Harry. But you couldn’t be what I need, either.”

Murphy took her thumb from the button and left the elevator.

I didn’t follow her right away.

She didn’t look back.

Stab.

Twist.

God, I love being a wizard.

Chapter Twenty-three

The room was typical of my usual hotel experience: clean, plain, and empty. I made sure the blinds were pulled, looked around, and shoved the small round table at one side of the room over against the wall to leave me some open space in the middle of the floor. I slung my backpack down on the bed.

“Need anything?” Murphy asked. She stood in the doorway to the room. She didn’t want to come in.

“Think I have it all. Just need some quiet to get it set up.” There was no reason not to give Murphy a way out of the awkwardness the conversation had brought on. “There’s something I’m curious about. Maybe you could check it out.”

“Pell’s theater,” Murphy guessed. I could hear some relief in her voice.

“Yes. Maybe you could cruise by it and see what’s to be seen.”

She frowned. “Think there might be something in there?”

“I don’t know enough to think anything yet, but it’s possible,” I said. “You get a bad feeling about anything, don’t hang around. Just vamoose.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I already planned to do that.” She went to the door. “Shouldn’t take me long. I’ll contact you in half an hour, let’s say?”

“Sure,” I said. Neither one of us voiced what we both were thinking—that if Murphy missed the check-in, she’d probably be dead, or dying, or worse. “Half an hour.”

She nodded and left, shutting the door behind her. Mouse went over to the door, sniffed at it for a moment, then walked in a little circle three times and settled down on the floor to sleep. I frowned down at the carpet and opened my backpack. Chalk wouldn’t do for a circle, not on carpet like that. I’d have to go with the old standby of fine, white sand. The maids would doubtless find it annoying to clean up, but life could be hard sometimes. I pulled out a glass bottle of specially prepared sand and put it on the table, along with the main blob of Play-Doh and Bob the skull.

Orange lights kindled in the skull’s eye sockets. “Can I talk now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You been listening to things?”

“Yeah,” Bob said, depressed. “You are never going to get laid.”

I glared at the skull.

“I’m just sayin’,” he said, voice defensive. “It isn’t my fault, Harry. She’d probably bang you if you didn’t take it so godawful seriously.”

“The subject. Change it,” I suggested in a flat voice. “We’re working now.”

“Right,” Bob said. “So you’re planning on a standard detection web–ward for the building?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It isn’t going to be very helpful,” Bob said. “I mean, by the time something manifests enough to set off your web, it’s going to be all the way into the real world. While you’re running for the stairs, it’s already going to be tearing into somebody.”

“It isn’t perfect,” I said. “But it’s all I’ve got. Unless you have a better idea?”

“The thing about having several centuries of experience and knowledge at my disposal is that it doesn’t do me any good unless I know what it is you want me to help you fight,” Bob said. “So far, all you know is that you’ve got an inbound phobophage.”

“That’s not specific enough?”

“No!” Bob said. “I can think of about two hundred different kinds of phobophages off the top of my head, and I could probably come up with two hundred more if I took a minute to think about it.”

“That many of them who can do what this thing did? Take a solid form and attack?”

Bob blinked his eyes at me as though he thought me very thick. “Believe it or not, the old ‘take the form of the victim’s worst fear’ routine is pretty much the most common move in the phobophage handbook.”

“Oh. Right.” I shook my head. “But this whole place is open territory. There’s no threshold to use to anchor anything heavier than a web. At least if I do that much, maybe I can get into position fast enough to directly intervene when the thing shows up again.”

“Things,” Bob corrected me. “Plural. Phages are like ants. First one shows up, then two, then a hundred.”

I exhaled. “Crap,” I said. “Maybe we can come at this from a different angle. Is there any way I can redirect them while they’re crossing over? Make it harder for them to get here?”

Bob’s eyelights brightened. “Maybe. Maybe, yes. You might be able to raise a veil over this whole place—from the other side.”

“Urk,” I said. “You’re saying I could hide this place from the phages, but only from the Nevernever?”

“Pretty much,” Bob said. “Even then, it would be a calculated risk.”

“How so?”

“It all depends on how they’re finding this place,” Bob said. “I mean, if these are just naturally arriving phages finding a hunting ground, a veil won’t stop them. It might slow them down, but it won’t stop them.”

“Let’s assume that it isn’t a coincidence,” I said.

“Okay. Assuming that, the next variable is finding out whether they’re being summoned or sent.”

I frowned. “There are things strong enough to send them through from the other side? I didn’t think that ever happened anymore. Hence the popularity of working through mortal summoners.”

“Oh, it’s doable,” Bob assured me. “It just takes a hell of a lot more juice to open the way to the mortal world from the other side.”

I frowned. “How much power are we talking?”

“Big,” Bob assured me. “Like the Erlking, or an archangel, or one of the old gods.”

I got a shivery feeling in my stomach. “A Faerie Queen?”

“Oh, sure. I guess so.” He frowned. “You think this is Faerie work?”

“Something is definitely screwy in elfland,” I said. “More so than normal, I mean.”

Bob made a gulping sound. “Oh. We’re not going to go visiting the faeries or anything, are we?”

“Not if I can help it,” I said. “I wouldn’t take you with me, if it came to that.”

“Oh,” he sighed. “Good.”

“One of these days, you’re gonna have to tell me what you did to make Mab want to kill you.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bob said, in that tone of voice you use while sweeping things under the rug. “But we should also consider the third possibility.”

“A summoner,” I said. “Given that someone actually threw a ward in my way the last time the phage showed up, that seems to be the most likely of the three.”

“I think so, too,” Bob said. “In which case, you’re in trouble.”

I grunted, and started unpacking candles, matches, and my old army-surplus knife. “Why?”

“Without a threshold to build on, you can’t put up any proper defense. And even if you do cross over and set up a veil to try to keep the phages from finding the place…”

“Their summoner is going to draw them in,” I finished, following the line of reasoning. “It’s like…I could blanket the surrounding area in fog, but if they have someone on this end, the phages will have a beacon they can use to home in on the hotel.”

“Right,” Bob said. “And then the summoner just opens the door from his side, and they’re in.”

I frowned and said, “It’s all about finding the summoner, then.”

“Which you can’t do, until they actually summon something,” Bob said.

“Hell’s bells,” I complained. “There’s got to be something we can do to prevent it.”

“Not especially,” Bob said. “Sorry, boss. Until you know more, you can’t do anything but react.”

I scowled. “Dammit. Then it’s the web or nothing. At least if I use that, I might be able to identify the summoner.” At the low, low cost of the phages mauling or killing someone else. Unless…

“Bob,” I said, frowning over the idea. “What if I didn’t try to hide the hotel or keep these things away. What if I, uh…just put a little topspin on the phages on the way in?”

Bob’s eyelights brightened even more. “Ooooooo, classic White Council doctrine. When the phages come through, you point them straight at the guy who summoned them. Give him a dose of his own medicine.”

“Right up the ass,” I confirmed.

“There’s an image,” Bob said. “A summoning suppository.”

“It’s doable, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” Bob said. “I mean, you have everything you need for that. You know the phages are after fear, and that they’re probably using his power as a beacon. Your web tells you something is stirring. You conjure up a big ball of fear, target the same beacon the phages are using, and let it fly.”

“It’ll be like hanging a steak around his neck and throwing him to the lions,” I said, grinning.

“Hail Caesar,” Bob confirmed. “The phages will go right after him.”

“And once he’s out of the game, I veil the hotel from the phages. No more convention attendees get hurt. Bad guy gets a lethal dose of dramatic irony.”

“The good guys win!” Bob cheered. “Or at least you do. You’re still a good guy, right? You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.”

“I’m thinking about changing it to ‘them’ and ‘us,’ for simplicity’s sake,” I said. “I like this plan. So there’s got to be a catch to it somewhere.”

“True,” Bob admitted. “It’s gonna be a little tricky when it comes to the timing. You won’t be able to sense the beacon until the phages actually step through from the Nevernever and take material form. If you haven’t redirected them by then, it’ll be too late.”

I nodded, frowning. “That gives me what? Maybe twenty seconds?”

“Only if they’re really lame,” Bob said. “Probably ten seconds. Maybe even less.”

I frowned. “Dammit, that’s a small window.” I thought of another problem. “Not only that, but I’ll be shooting blind. There won’t be any way to tell who I’m setting the phages after. What if he’s standing in a crowd?”

“He’s going to be summoning fiends from the netherworld to wreak horror and death on the populace,” Bob pointed out in a patient voice. “That won’t lend itself to blending into a crowd.”

“Good point. He’ll probably be somewhere private, quiet.” I shook my head. “Even so, I’d be a lot happier if this was a little less dicey. But I don’t see any other way to stop these things from hurting anyone else.”

“Until we have more information, I don’t see what else you could do, boss.”

I grunted. “I’d better get this web up and running, then.”

Mouse’s collar tag clinked against the buckle, and I looked over my shoulder. The dog had lifted his head from the floor, staring intently at the door. A second later, someone knocked.

Mouse hadn’t started growling, and his tail thumped the wall a few times as I went to the door, sounding the all-clear. “That was fast,” I said, opening the door. “I thought you were going to be half an hour, Murph—”

Molly stood in the hallway, an overnight bag hung over her shoulder. She drooped, the way my house plants always used to when I was still optimistic enough to keep buying new ones. Her pink-and-blue hair hung down listlessly, and her cheeks were marked with the remains of several mascara-laden tear tracks. She looked rumpled, tired, uncertain, and lonely.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

“Hey,” I told her. “I thought you were waiting for your mom.”

“I was,” she said. “I am. But…I’m kind of messed up.” She waved her hand gingerly at herself. “I wanted to clean up a little, but they won’t let me use the bathroom in Nelson’s room. I was hoping I could borrow yours. Just for a minute.”

It would have been easier to dropkick a puppy than to turn the kid away. “Sure,” I said. “Just keep it quiet. Okay?”

I stepped back into the room, and Molly followed me, pausing to scratch Mouse behind the ears. She looked past me, to the open floor space and the things I had sat out.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Magic,” I said. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

She smiled a little. “Oh. Right.”

I waved a hand at my materials. “I’m going to try to prevent another attack from hurting anyone.”

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I hope so.”

“I can’t believe…I mean, I knew there were things out there, but my friends…Rosie.” Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears that didn’t quite fall.

I didn’t have much I could say to comfort her. “I’m going to stop it from happening again,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t move fast enough the first time.”

She looked down again, and nodded without speaking. She swallowed several times.

“Listen,” I told her quietly. “This is serious stuff. You need to talk about it. Not with me,” I added, as she looked up at me. “With your mom.”

Molly shook her head. “She isn’t—”

“Molly,” I sighed. “Life can be short. And cruel. You saw that last night. You got a look at the kind of thing your dad deals with all the time.”

She didn’t respond.

I said quietly, “Even Knights can die, Molly. Shiro did. It could happen to Michael, too.”

She lifted her head abruptly, staring at me as if in shock.

“How does that make you feel?” I asked.

She chewed on her lip. “Scared.”

“It scares your mom, too. It scares her a lot. She deals with it by holding on hard to the people around her. Maybe too hard, sometimes. That’s why you feel like she’s trying to keep you a little kid. She probably is. But it isn’t because she’s a control freak. It’s because she loves you all so much—you, your dad, your family—and she’s frightened that something bad could happen. She’s desperate to do everything she can to keep you all safe.”

Molly didn’t look up or respond.

“Life is short,” I said. “Too short to waste it on stupid arguments. I’m not saying your mom is perfect, because God knows she isn’t. But my God, Molly, you’ve got the kind of family people like me would kill for. You think they’ll always be there later—but they might not be. Life doesn’t give you any guarantees.”

I let that sink in for a minute, and then said, “I promised your dad that I’d ask you to talk to her. I told him I’d do my best to get the two of you to work things out.”

She looked up at me, crying now, silently. More dark makeup trailed down her cheeks.

“Will you sit down with her, Molly? Talk?”

She took a shaking breath and said, “I don’t know if it will do any good. We’ve said so much….”

“I can’t force you to do it. No one can do that but you.”

She sniffled for a moment. “It won’t do any good.”

“I don’t expect miracles. Just try to talk to her. Please.”

She took a breath, and then nodded, once.

“Thank you,” I said.

She tried to smile once, and hovered outside the bathroom door for a moment more.

“Molly?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, but she didn’t move, either.

I frowned. “Something you want to say?”

She looked up at me for just a second. “No,” she said then, and shook her head. “No, it’s nothing, really. Thank you. I won’t be long.” She stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. The shower started a moment later.

“Wow,” Bob said from behind me, somehow inserting a leer into the word. “I didn’t realize you liked them quite that…fresh, Harry.”

I glared at him. “What?”

“Did you see the body on her? Magnificent rack! Blond Nordic babe-age, but all pierced and dressed in black, which means she’s probably into at least one kind of kink. And all tender and emotional and vulnerable to boot. Taking her clothes off right here in your room.”

“Kink? You don’t—look, there’s no way to…” I sputtered. “No, Bob. Just no. For crying out loud. She’s seventeen.”

“Better move quick, then,” Bob said. “Before anything starts to droop. Taste of perfection while you can, that’s what I always say.”

“Bob!”

“What?” he said.

“That isn’t how things are.”

“Not now,” Bob said. “But you go get in that shower with her and you’ve got your own personal cable TV erotic movie come true.”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Hell’s bells. The whole idea is wrong, Bob. Just…wrong.”

“Harry, even a nerd should know that it’s no coincidence when a girl shows up at a man’s hotel room. You know all she really wants is to—”

“Bob,” I snapped, cutting him off. “Even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t, nothing is happening with the girl. I’m trying to work, here. You aren’t helping.”

“I’d hate to disrupt your most recent attempt to court death and agony,” he said brightly. “You should stick me somewhere else, where I won’t distract you. On the counter in the bathroom, for example.”

I slapped open one of the empty dresser drawers and tossed the skull in there, instead. Bob sputtered a few muffled curses in ancient Greek, something about sheep and a skin rash.

I looked up from the drawer into the room’s mirror, and found myself facing not my reflection, but Lasciel’s image instead, angelic and lovely and poised. “The perverted little creep has a point, my host,” she said.

I jabbed a finger at the mirror and said, “Bob is my little creep, and the only one who gets to call him names is me. Now go away.”

“Ah,” Lasciel said, and the image faded to translucence, my own reflection appearing to replace it. “Fascinating, though,” she added, just before vanishing, “that boyfriend Nelson bears quite the striking physical resemblance to you.”

Then she was gone. Dammit. Stupid demons. Always with the last word.

Worse, she had a point. I eyed the bathroom door and reviewed the past day or so, and my interactions with the girl before that. I had always been someone her father respected and her mother disapproved of. I showed up once in a blue moon in a big black coat, usually looking roughed-up and dangerous, and I’d been doing so since she was young enough to be very impressionable. Hell, when you got right down to it, Charity’s disapproval alone might have been enough to make me seem interesting to a rebellious teenage girl.

I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was possible Molly might have certain ideas in her head. It might well explain the most recent awkward silences and halting pauses. She’d always liked me, and it wasn’t outrageous to think that it might have developed into something more—and that I’d be a right bastard to do anything that might encourage those ideas, even inadvertently. Maybe Bob and Lasciel were wrong, and in fact nothing like that was going on, but the passions of youth, its attractions and desires, were a minefield one took lightly at one’s own peril.

Magnificent rack notwithstanding, Molly was still, in every important way, a child—my friend’s child, to boot. She was hurting. It bothered me, and I wanted to help her, but I had to be aware of the fact that my sympathy could be misinterpreted. The kid had issues and she needed someone to help her work things out. She didn’t need someone who would only make her more confused.

Steam curled out from under the bathroom door. An actual hot shower. Not merely the illusion of one.

I shook my head and got back to the detection web.

As spells went, this one was pretty big, but it wasn’t complicated. I’d created a long-term version of the same basic working in the neighborhood around my apartment, in order to detect approaching mystical entities. The one I wanted for the hotel was the same thing, but I didn’t have to bother with setting it up as a long-term construct. A sunrise, or two at most, would erode the spell, but with any luck I wouldn’t need it for any longer.

I took the Play-Doh in hand, grabbed three candles in their own wooden holders, poured the sand in a circle around me, and began gathering in my power, painstakingly creating mental images of the web of energy I needed to weave between the points of the hotel I’d marked out with Play-Doh. It didn’t take me a terribly long time to set it up. Anyone with some basic skills and desire enough could have done something like this—or at least, they could have done it on a smaller scale. Weaving a web throughout the whole building took a lot of heavy lifting, magically speaking, but it wasn’t complicated, and fifteen minutes later I solidified the image of the energy patterns in my mind, and whispered, “Magius, orbius, spiritus oculus.”

I poured my will and my magic out with the words as I spoke them, and my body briefly lit up with a flood of tingling energy that raced along all of my limbs, down into the lump of Play-Doh, and swirled in tight spirals around the three candles that would serve as my ward-flames. The spell’s energy flashed, appearing as a tiny stream of faint flickers, like bursts of static electricity, and the candles each flickered to life, steady little flames born of the spell. I broke the circle of sand as I spoke, and the power blossomed out through the hotel, into the shape I’d imagined, invisible strands flickering into instant shape, like ice crystals forming in the space of a heartbeat, spreading unseen strands throughout the hotel.

My balance wobbled a bit as I finished the spell and the energy left me, submerging me in a temporary flood of fatigue. I sat there with my head down, breathing hard for a minute.

“Wow,” Murphy said, her tone less than impressed. I looked up to see her shutting the room’s door behind her. “What did you do?”

I waved around to indicate the hotel and panted, “If bad mojo shows up in the hotel, the spell will sense it.” I gestured at the three candles. “Take one with you. If you see it flare up, it means we’ve got incoming.”

Murphy frowned but nodded. “How much warning will they give us?”

“Not much,” I said. “A couple minutes, maybe less. Maybe a lot less.”

“Three candles,” she said. “One for you, one for me, and…”

“I thought we’d see if Rawlins wanted one.”

“Is he here?” Murphy said.

“Gut feeling,” I said. “He seems like the kind who sees something through.”

“He also seems like the kind who’s been injured. No chance he’d get active duty here.”

“He didn’t have it at the hospital, either,” I pointed out.

“True,” Murphy said.

I caught my breath a little, and asked, “Anything at Pell’s theater?”

Murphy nodded and crossed the room to pick up two of the candles. “A lot of nothing. Place was locked up tight. Chains on the front doors, and the back door was locked. Sign on the door said they were closed until further notice.”

I grunted. “You’d think Pell would be wild to have the place open, if the convention was providing a significant amount of his income—even if he was in a hospital bed. Hell, especially if he was in a hospital bed.”

“Unless he doesn’t have anyone he trusts to run it for him.”

“But he does have someone he trusts enough to lock it up?” I said. “That doesn’t track. Pell sure as hell didn’t lock up after he was attacked.”

Murphy frowned, but she didn’t disagree with me. “I tried to call him to ask him about it, but the nurse said he was sleeping.”

I ran my fingers back through my hair, frowning over the situation. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. “We’re missing something here.”

“Like what?” Murphy asked.

“Another player,” I said. “Someone we haven’t seen yet.”

Murphy made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe. But imagining invisible perpetrators or hidden conspiracies veers pretty close to paranoia.”

“Maybe not another suspect, then,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe another motive.”

“Like what?” she asked, though I could see the wheels turning in her head as she followed the logic chain from the notion.

“These phage attacks look fairly simple at first glance. Like…I don’t know. Shark attacks. Something hungry shows up to eat someone and then leaves. Natural occurrences. Or rather, typical supernatural occurrences.”

“But they aren’t random,” Murphy said. “Someone is sending them to a specific place. Someone who used magic to try to stop you when you interfered with one of the phages.”

“Which begs the obvious question…” I began.

Murphy nodded and finished the thought. “Why do it in the first place?”

I stuck my left hand out to one side of me and said, “Look over here.” Then I mimed a short jab with my right fist.

“It’s a rope-a-dope,” Murphy said, her eyes narrowing. “A distraction. But from what?”

“Something worse than homicidal, shapeshifting, supernatural predators, apparently,” I mused. “Something we’d want to stop a lot more.”

“Like what?”

I shook my head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

Murphy grimaced. “Leave it to you to make paranoia sound plausible.”

“It’s only paranoia if I’m wrong,” I said.

Murphy glanced over her shoulder and shivered a little. “Yeah.” She turned back to me, squared her shoulders, and took a steadying breath. “Okay. What’s the play, here? I assume you’ve got something in mind beyond having a minute or two of warning.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What?” she asked.

“It gets kind of technical,” I said.

“I’ll try to keep up,” she said.

I nodded. “Anytime something from the spirit world wants to cross into the mortal world, it has to do a number of things to cross the border. It has to have a point of origin, a point of destination, and enough energy to open the way. Then it has to cross over, summon ectoplasm from the Nevernever, and infuse it with more energy to give itself a physical body.”

She frowned. “What do you mean by points of origin and destination?”

“Links,” I told her. “Sort of like landmarks. Usually, the creature you’re calling up can serve as its own point of origin. Whoever is opening the way across is usually the destination.”

“Can anyone be the destination?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You can’t call up anything that isn’t…” I frowned, looking for words. “You can’t call up anything that doesn’t have some kind of reflection inside you, a kind of point of reference for the spirit being. If you want evil, nasty, hungry beings, there’s got to be evil, nasty, and hunger inside of you.”

She nodded. “Does the way have to be opened from this side?”

“Generally,” I said. “It takes a hell of a lot more oomph to get it done from the other side.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

I told her about my plan to turn the phages back upon their summoner.

“I like that,” she said. “Using their own monsters against them. But what does that leave me to do?”

“You buy me time,” I said. “There will be a moment just when the phage or phages cross over, where they will be vulnerable. If you’re able to see one and distract it, it will give me more time to aim them back at their summoner. And it’s possible that my spell might not work. If it goes south, you’ll be near enough to help clear people out, maybe do them some good.”

Murphy began to speak—then she paused, turned around, and asked, “Harry. Is there someone in the shower?”

“Uh. Yeah,” I said, and rubbed at the back of my neck.

She arched a brow and waited, but I didn’t offer any explanation. Maybe it was my way of getting petty vengeance for her brutal honesty in the elevator.

“All right then,” she said, and took up the candles. “I’ll get downstairs and look for Rawlins. Otherwise, I’ll grab one of my guys from SI.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

Murphy left, while I started planning out my redirection spell. It didn’t take me long.

Mouse lifted his head suddenly, and a second later someone knocked at the door. I went over and opened it.

Charity stood on the other side, dressed in jeans, a knit tank top, and a blue blouse of light cotton. Her features were drawn with stress, her shoulders clenched in unconscious tension. When she saw me, her features became remote and neutral, very controlled. “Hello, Mister Dresden.”

It was probably the friendliest greeting I could expect from her. “Heya,” I said.

Standing beside her was an old man, a little under average height. What was left of his hair was grey, trimmed neatly, though hardly a fringe remained. He had eyes the color of robin’s eggs, spectacles, a comfortably heavy build, and wore black slacks and a black shirt. The white square of his clerical collar stood out distinctively against the shirt. He smiled when he saw me, and offered me his hand.

I shook it, smiling, and had no need to fake it. “Father Forthill. What are you doing here?”

“Harry,” he said amiably. “Lending some moral support, by and large.”

“He’s my attorney,” Charity added.

I blinked. “He is?”

“He is,” Forthill said, smiling. “I passed the bar before I entered the orders. I’ve kept my hand in on behalf of the diocese and my parishioners. I do some pro bono work from time to time, too.”

“He’s a lawyer,” I said. “He’s a priest. This does not compute.”

Forthill let out a belly laugh. “Oxymoronic.”

“Hey, did I start calling you names?” I grinned at him. “What can I do for you?”

“Molly was supposed to be waiting for us downstairs,” Charity said. “But we haven’t found her. Do you know where she is?”

The universe conspired against me. If Charity had asked the question ten seconds sooner, I would have been fine. But instead, the bathroom door opened, and Molly appeared in a swirl of steam. She had a towel wrapped around her hair, and was holding another around her torso. Hotel towels and Molly’s torso being what they were, the towel didn’t quite get all the way around her, and barely maintained modesty. “Harry,” she said. “I left my bag out he—” She broke off suddenly, staring at Charity.

“This, uh, isn’t what it looks like,” I stammered, turning back to Charity.

Her eyes blazed with cold, righteous rage. An old Kipling axiom about the female of the species being more deadly than the male flashed through my mind, right about the time Charity introduced my chin to her right hook.

Light flashed behind my eyes and I found myself flat on my back while the ceiling spun around a little.

“Mother,” Molly said in a shocked voice.

I looked up in time to see Forthill put a firm hand on Charity’s arm, preventing her from following up the first blow. She narrowed her eyes at Forthill, but the old man’s fingers dug into her biceps until she gave him a slight nod and took a small step back into the hallway.

“Dress,” she told Molly, implacable authority in her tone. “We’re leaving.”

The kid looked like she might just start falling apart on the spot. She grabbed her bag, ducked into the bathroom, and was dressed in under a minute.

“There was nothing going on,” I mumbled. It came out sounding more like, “Mmrphg ggggh oonng.”

“I may not be able to keep you away from my husband,” Charity said, her tone cold, her diction precise. “But if you come near one of my children again, I will kill you. Thank you for calling me.”

She left, the weary Molly following her.

“There was nothing going on,” I said again, to Forthill. This time it sounded mostly like English.

He sighed, looking after the pair. “I believe you.” He gave me a smile that was one part amusement to four parts apology, and followed them.

Murphy must not have reached the elevators before Charity and Forthill had arrived. She appeared in the doorway, peering inside the room, and then back the way Charity had gone. “Ah,” she said. “You all right?”

“I guess,” I sighed.

Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t quite smile or laugh at me. “Seems to me that you should have seen that one coming.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” I said. “It hurts.”

“You’ve had worse,” she said heartlessly. “And it serves you right for letting a little girl into your hotel room. Now get up. I’ll be downstairs.”

She left, too.

Mouse came over and started patiently nuzzling my chin and putting slobbering dog kisses on the bruise I could feel forming there.

“Women confuse me,” I told him.

Mouse sat down, jaws dropping open into a doggie grin. I groaned, pushed myself to my feet, and set about preparing the redirection spell, while outside my room’s window the sun raced for its nightly rendezvous with the western horizon.

Chapter Twenty-four

I shut the door again and rushed to prepare the beacon spell, hurrying, certain that every second counted. I would only get one shot at diverting the phages, and I finished my preparations in feverish haste.

Nothing happened.

The sun set, leaving me mostly in the dark, since I hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights.

Nothing continued happening.

I knelt in my circle of sand until my legs cramped and then went numb, and my knees felt like they were resting in molten lead.

And all that nothing just kept on coming.

“Oh come on,” I snarled. “Bring on the doom, already.”

From his spot near the door, Mouse heaved a sigh.

“Oh, shut up,” I told him. I didn’t dare take a break. If the bad guys moved and I wasn’t ready, people would get hurt. So I knelt there, holding the spell ready in my mind, uncomfortable as hell, and swearing sulfurously under my breath. Stupid, lame-ass summoner. What the hell was he waiting for? Any half-competent villain would have had monsters roaming the halls hours ago.

Mouse’s tail thumped against the wall, and a moment later the room’s lock clicked, and Rawlins opened the door. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that concealed the bandages on his wounded arm, and he carried a wardflame candle in one hand. The blocky, dark-skinned officer leaned down and held his hand out to Mouse, who sniffed Rawlins in typical canine fashion and wagged his tail some more.

Rawlins remained in the doorway and said, “Hello? Dresden?”

“Here,” I muttered.

Rawlins thumped at the wall until he found the lights and flicked them on. He stared at me for a minute, eyebrows slowly rising. “Uh-huh. There’s something I don’t see every day.”

I grimaced. “Murphy found you, I see.”

“Almost like she’s a detective,” Rawlins said, grinning.

“Your boss know you’re here?” I asked.

“Not so far,” he replied. “But I expect someone might notice and tell him about me at some point.”

“He won’t be happy,” I said.

“I just hope I can live with myself later.” He waved his little candle. “Murphy sent me up here to make sure you was still alive.”

“I’m going to need knee surgery,” I sighed. “I never planned on it taking this long.”

“Uh-huh,” Rawlins said again. “You ain’t one of those Satan worshipers are you?”

“No,” I said. “More like Pythagoras.”

“Pih-who?”

“He invented triangles.”

“Ah,” Rawlins said, as if that had explained everything. “So, what are you doing here?”

I explained it to him, though it looked like he was having trouble accepting my words. Maybe I lacked credibility. “But I figured he would have moved by now.”

“Crooks are funny that way,” he agreed. “No respect.”

I scrunched up my face in thought. I was hungry, thirsty, tired, hurting, and I had to use the bathroom in the worst way. None of those things were going to become easier to bear as the night went on, and I needed to have all the concentration I could get.

“Okay,” I said. “Be smart. Take a break.” I leaned down and broke the circle by sweeping the sand aside with my hand, letting the energy of the spell I’d been holding ready drain away. At least I’d already done it once. Getting it back into position wouldn’t take nearly as long as the first time.

I tried to rise, but my legs were incommunicado. I grimaced at Rawlins and said, “Give me a hand here?”

He set his candle aside and helped me up. I wobbled precariously for a couple of seconds, but then stumbled to the bathroom and back out.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m good. Tell Murphy to hold steady.”

Rawlins nodded. “We’ll be downstairs.” He paused and said, “Hope this happens soon. There’s some kind of costume contest going on.”

“Is it bad?”

“There are a lot of skimpy getups, and some of those people should not be wearing them.”

“Call the fashion police,” I said.

Rawlins nodded gravely. “They’ve crossed a line.”

“Do me a favor?” I asked him. “Take Mouse out for a walk?” I dug a couple of bills from my back pocket and passed them to Rawlins. “Maybe get him a hot dog or something?”

“Sure,” Rawlins agreed. “I like dogs.”

The dog’s tail thumped rapidly against the wall.

“Whatever you do, don’t give him nachos. I didn’t bring my gas mask with me.”

Rawlins nodded. “Sure.”

“Keep your eyes open,” I said. “Tell Murph I’ll be reset in a couple of minutes.”

Rawlins grunted and left.

I had a canteen of fruit punch in my backpack, along with some beef jerky and some chocolate. I went to the bag and started wolfing down all three while pacing back and forth to stretch my legs. Holding myself ready to strike had been more than simply a physical strain. My head felt like someone had packed it in wool, while at the same time my senses seemed slightly distorted; edges made sharper, curves more ambiguous, the whole combining to make the hotel room feel like a toned-down Escher painting. There was no help for that. The use of magic was mostly in the mind, and holding a spell together for a long time often triggered disconcerting side effects.

I polished off the food as fast as I could gulp it down, went easy on the drink, in case I was there for another several hours, and settled back down in my circle, preparing to close it again.

When the room’s phone rang.

“Déjà vu,” I commented to the empty room. I stood up, my knees creaking, and went to the phone.

“Dresden Taxidermy,” I said. “You snuff it, we’ll stuff it.”

There was a beat of startled silence from the phone, and then a young man’s voice said, “Um. Is this Harry Dresden?”

I recognized the voice—Boyfriend Nelson. That made my ears perk up, metaphorically speaking. “Yeah, this is him,” I said.

“This is…”

“I know who it is,” I told him. “How did you know where I was?”

“Sandra,” he said. “I called her cell. She told me you’d checked in.”

“Uh-huh. Why are you calling me?”

“Molly said…she said you helped people.” He paused to take a breath, and then said, “I think I need your help. Again.”

“Why?” I asked. Keep the questions open, I thought. Never give him one with a simple answer. “What’s going on?”

“Last night, during the attacks. I think I saw something.”

I sighed. “It was going around,” I agreed. “But if you saw something, you’re a witness to a crime, kid. You need to show up and work with the cops. They get sort of unreasonable with people who go all evasive when they want to ask questions about a murder.”

“But I think some…thing is following me,” he said. An unsteady tremor shook Nelson’s voice. “Look, they’re just cops, man. They just have guns. I don’t think they can help me. I hope you can.”

“Why?” I asked him. “What is it that you saw?”

“No,” he said. “Not on the phone. I want to meet with you. I want you to promise me your help. I’ll tell you then.”

Right. Because it wasn’t like I had anything better to be doing. “Look, kid…”

Nelson’s voice suddenly went thready with breathless fear. “Oh, God. I can’t stay here. Please. Please.”

“Fine, fine,” I said, trying to keep my voice strong, steady. The kid was scared—the bone-deep, knee-watering, half-crazy kind of scared that makes rational thinking all but impossible. “Listen to me. Stay around people, as many of them as you can. Go to Saint Mary of the Angels Church. It’s holy ground, and you’ll be safe there. Ask for Father Forthill. He’s a little guy, mostly bald, glasses, bright blue eyes. Tell him everything and tell him I’m coming to collect you as soon as I can.”

“Yes, all right, thank you,” Nelson said, the words hysterically rushed. There was a brief clatter, and then I heard running footsteps on concrete. He hadn’t even gotten the phone back into its cradle before he’d taken off at a dead sprint.

I chewed on my lip. The kid was definitely in trouble, or at least genuinely believed that he was. If so, it meant that maybe he had seen something last night, something that made it important for someone to kill him—i.e., some kind of damning evidence that would probably help me figure out what the hell was going on. I felt a stab of anxiety. Holy ground was a powerful deterrent to the things that went bump in the night—or in this case, things that went stab, stab, hack, slash, rip in the night—but it wasn’t invulnerable. If something of sufficient supernatural strength really was after the kid, it might be able to force its way into the church.

Dammit, but what choice did I have? If I left my position here, any fresh attack could make last night’s look like a friendly round of Candyland. What could he possibly have seen that would make him worth killing? Why the hell was he being followed? I felt like I was floundering around in the dark inside someone else’s house, benighted of savoir faire enough to move with assurance. I was spread too thin. If I didn’t start finding more pieces of the puzzle and put them together, and soon, more people would die.

I could only be in one place at one time. If the kid was in real trouble, he’d be as safe at the church, with Forthill, as anywhere in town short of the protection of my heavily warded apartment. Meanwhile, there were a bunch of other kids here who looked to be the next meal on the phobophage buffet. I had to act where I could do the most good. It was a cold sort of equation, the calculus of survival, but undeniable. I’d get to Nelson after I had taken care of business at the hotel.

I settled down on my knees again, carefully, closed the circle, and began to pick up the pieces of the redirection spell once more.

The single wardflame candle on the room’s dresser suddenly exploded into lurid red light. Simultaneously, I felt a heavy thrumming in the air, where the strands of my web spell had suddenly encountered powerful magic in motion, drawing my thoughts and attention to a back hallway in the hotel, not far from the kitchens, up to the hall outside the hotel’s exercise room, and a swift double-thrum from another of the hotel’s bathrooms.

Four attackers, this time. Four of them at least.

I had ten seconds to get the spell off.

Nine.

Maybe less.

Eight.

I threw myself into the spell.

Seven.

It had to be fast.

Six.

It had to be perfect on the first attempt.

Five.

If I screwed this one up, someone else would pay for it. Four.

They’d pay for it in blood.

Three.

Two.

One…

Chapter Twenty-five

I readied my spell, terrified that I was already too late, terrified that I had made a critical mistake, terrified that more innocents were about to face hideous agony and death.

That was how it had to be. If I wanted to lure the phages from their rampage by directing them after a richer source of fear, it had to come from somewhere—specifically, it had to come from me. If I’d tried to use falsified emotion, it would no more have worked on them than an attempt to make a gorilla interested in a plastic banana. The fear had to be genuine.

Of course, I hadn’t really planned on being quite this afraid. Being taken off my guard and handed a time limit had added an edge of panicked hysteria to the ample anxiety I already had.

The spell coalesced, and time came to an abrupt stop.

In that illusory stasis, my senses were on fire. The presence of the dangerous entities now entering the material world rippled through my detection web; a jittery, fluttering sensation. The energy of the spell burned like an invisible star before my outstretched hands, and my terror rushed into it and fused with the spell. Streamers from the lure whipped out along the lines of power that constituted my detection web, brushing lightly at the entities, attracting their attention, giving them a whiff of rich sustenance.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I felt a single, quiet, quivering pulse—a living presence that could only be the phages’ summoner and beacon.

“Gotcha,” I hissed, and with an effort of will broke the circle and sent the spell winging toward him.

Time resumed its course. The energy that powered the spell fled out of me in another rush, and left me lying on my side, struggling to draw in enough breath. I could feel the spell sizzling down the lines of power for the summoner, and a heartbeat later there was a sense of impact as the spell went home. As it happened, the entities my web touched went abruptly still, the web ceasing its trembling—and then they all surged forward into sudden motion, vanishing from the web, and presumably streaking after the lure.

All but one.

A breath or two after the entities had departed, my web trembled again, now growing more agitated, its motion a kind of subliminal pressure against my thoughts.

I had missed one. My spell had gotten out in time to draw away the others, but either my web had failed me at some point or the remaining phage had been quicker on the draw than his buddies from the Nevernever. I could feel it moving from the hotel’s kitchens toward the convention halls.

I wanted to curl into a fetal position and go into a coma. Instead, I shoved my wobbly way to my feet, took up my pack, and opened the drawer to get Bob.

“Did it work?” he chirped.

“Almost,” I said. “There’s one left. Keep your head down.”

“Oh, very funny…” he began.

I zipped the skull into my pack, took up my staff and blasting rod, and shuffled wheezily out to find the remaining phage before it found someone else.

My legs almost gave out just thinking about taking the stairs, so I rode the elevator down to the first floor. I heard nothing until the floor indicator told me we’d just passed the second floor, at which point I began to hear frightened, muffled screams. The elevator hit the first floor, and the doors had just begun to roll open when the power went out.

Blackness fell over the hotel. The screams redoubled. I took out my pentacle amulet and sent enough of my will into it to make it glow with pale blue wizard’s light. I jammed my staff into the slightly open elevator doors and levered them apart, then slipped out into the hotel.

Though the sun had set more than an hour before, the crowded convention hall had remained stuffy while its air conditioners labored in vain. I got my bearings and headed for the kitchen. As I did, the air temperature plummeted, sending the hotel’s climate from near-sauna to near-freezing in a handful of seconds. The suddenly cooled air could no longer contain the oppressive humidity it had been holding, and this resulted in a sudden, thick fog that coalesced out of nowhere and cut visibility down to maybe three or four long steps.

Dammit. The phages that had appeared so far seemed to be specialists in the up-close-and-personal venue of violence, whereas wheezy wizards like me prefer to do business from across the street, or down the block, or maybe from a neighboring dimension. Farther away, if possible. Wizards have a capacity for recovering from injury that might be more than most humans’, but that was a long-term deal. In a bar fight, it wasn’t going to do me any good. Hell, I didn’t even have my duster with me, and now that the cold had rolled over the hotel, I missed it for multiple reasons.

I put my amulet back on, then shook out my shield bracelet and readied it for use, creating a second source of glowing blue light—though by accident, not design. The silver bracelet I used to focus magic into a tangible plane of force had been damaged in the same fire that took most of my left hand, and sparks of blue light tended to dribble from it whenever I moved my arm around. I had to be ready to use the shield at an instant’s notice. It would be the only thing between me and whatever might come rushing from the fog.

I went with my staff in my right hand. When it came to taking apart rampaging monsters, I preferred my blasting rod, but I’ve had an incident or two involving buildings and fire. If I went blazing away at the thing in a crowded hotel and burned the place down, it would kill more people than the rampage would have. The staff was a subtle tool, not as potent a weapon as the blasting rod, but it was more versatile, magically speaking.

Plus, in a pinch, I could brain someone with it—which isn’t subtle, but sure as hell is reassuring.

The emergency lights hadn’t snapped on, so either someone had sabotaged them or there was enough raw magical energy flying around to take them out. But as I moved out toward the kitchens, I didn’t feel anything like the kind of ambient energy it would take to blow out something as simple as a battery-powered light. That meant that someone had deliberately taken the emergency lights off-line, by magical means or otherwise, and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

Gunshots rang out, weirdly muted by the building’s acoustics; flat, heavy sounds like someone swinging a baseball bat at a metal trash can. Screams and sounds of confusion, fear, worry, and even pain continued all around me as people fumbled in the dark, tripped, fell, or collided with furniture and one another. The building was already emptying, at least here on the first floor, but the sudden darkness had resulted in a panicked stampede, and people had been injured in the crush. The darkness had created confusion, slowed the intended prey from fleeing, and left wounded behind who could neither defend themselves nor flee the building. Their helplessness would be driving them mad with fear.

It would make them juicier targets for the phage.

A metallic, piercing shriek hit my ears in a sudden, stunning shock wave, and my legs stopped moving. I didn’t choose to do it. The sound just hit something primitive in my brain stem, something that made my instincts scream at me to freeze, to not be seen. I dropped to one knee, terror suddenly falling onto my shoulders like a physical weight. In the wake of the shriek, I could hear human throats screaming in fear, nearby to me, and I could see the shapes of people moving around, lumpy shadows in the faint light from my shield bracelet.

A flame suddenly appeared ahead of me, and I got a look at a young woman who crouched down, holding up a cigarette lighter in a hand that shook so badly that it seemed a miracle the lighter stayed aflame.

“No!” I screamed at her. I rose to my feet and lunged toward her. “Put out the light!”

Her face swiveled toward me, ghostly in the light of the tiny flame, her mouth working soundlessly—and then something the size of a mountain lion hit her across the shoulders and flung her to the ground. The lighter flew from her hand, the little lick of flame showing me something black and gleaming and spattered with scarlet gore.

The woman screamed. The dark hallway became a river of terrified people plunging through the darkness. Someone fell against me, and as I stumbled away from them I stepped on someone’s fingers in the darkness and tripped when I tried to pull my weight off of them.

I snarled, slammed my back against the wall, held up my staff, and called up Hellfire.

Power flooded down the length of the carved oak, its sigils and runes filling with red-white liquid fire that ran from the base of the staff to its head in a ripple of energy. The crisp, clean scent of wood smoke filled the air, tainted with the barest hint of sulfur, and lurid light washed through the hallway.

I saw people scrambling, screaming, weeping. They were moving away, taking advantage of the light while they had it, and the hall around me cleared rapidly. It left the woman with the lighter. She lay on her side, curled into a fetal position, her arms clasped around her head while…the thing mauled her.

It was equal parts feline and insect, all lanky arms, powerful legs, and a whipping tail tipped with a serrated point. Its skin was a black, shining carapace, and it had an elongated, eyeless head ending in viscous, slime-covered jaws full of teeth. Though it had no eyes, it somehow sensed the light of my powered staff, and it whipped around toward me with a hiss, body tensing in sinuous grace, jaws gaping, slime dripping from its teeth while a slow, enraged hissing sound emerged from its throat.

I stared at it for all of a second in the shock of recognition. Then I gritted my teeth, got my feet underneath me, pointed the end of my staff at the creature, and snarled, “Get away from her, you bitch.”

The phage shifted its position, the wounded girl now forgotten, its limbs weirdly jointed, its motion sinuous and eerie. It hissed again, louder. A second pair of jaws emerged from between the first, and they too hissed and parted and drooled in challenge.

“Is this gonna be a standup fight or just another bug hunt?” I taunted.

The phage leapt at me, faster than I would have thought possible—but that’s how fast always works. Lots of people and not-people are faster than me, and I’d learned to plan for it a long time ago. A lot of people think that, in a fight, speed is the only thing that matters. It isn’t true. Oh, sure, it’s enormously advantageous to have greater speed, but a smart opponent can counter it with good footwork, calculating distance to give him the advantage of economy of movement. The phage was fast, but it had to cross eight or nine feet of carpet to get to me. I had to move my hand about ten inches and harden the shield before my left hand with my will. It wasn’t that fast.

The phage hit my shield, bringing a ghostly blue quarter dome into shape and sending a cascade of blue sparks flying back around me. At the last second, I turned and angled the shield to deflect the creature’s momentum. It caromed off the shield and went tumbling along the hallway beyond me for a good twenty feet.

“You want some of this?” I stepped into the middle of the hall to put myself between the phage and the wounded girl. The phage rose, turning to flee. Before it could move I thrust the end of my staff in its direction and cried, “Forzare!”

I hadn’t ever used quite that much Hellfire before.

Power rushed out of my staff. Usually, when I employed it like this, the force I unleashed was invisible. This time, it rushed out like a scarlet comet, like a blazing cannonball. The force dipped at the last second, then came up at the phage. The impact threw it against the ceiling with bone-crushing force, and at least twice as much energy as I’d intended. The phage came down, limbs thrashing wildly, bouncing and skittering frantically, like a half-smashed bug.

I hit it again, the runes in my staff blazing, bathing the whole length of the hall in scarlet radiance, slamming the phage into a wall with more crunching sounds. Yellowish liquid splattered, there was an absolutely awful smell, and sudden holes pocked the wall and the floor where the yellow blood fell.

I cried havoc in the hellish light and hit it again. And again. And again. I bounced the murdering phage around that hallway until acid burned a hundred holes in the walls, ceiling, and floor, and my blood sang with the battle, with the power, with triumph.

I lost track of several seconds. The next thing I remember, I stood over the crushed, twitching phage. “It’s the only way to be sure,” I told it. And then, with cool deliberation, I slammed the end of my staff into the thing’s eyeless skull, muscle and magic alike propelling the blow. Its head crunched and fractured like a cheap taco shell, and suddenly there was no phage, no creature. There was only the damaged hallway, the tainted smell of hellish wood smoke, and a mound of clear, swiftly dissolving ectoplasm.

My knees shook and I sat down in the hallway. I closed my eyes. The red light of Hellfire continued to pulse through my staff, lighting the hall, illuminating my eyelids.

The next thing I knew, Mouse pressed up against my side, an enormous, warm, silent presence. Bright lights bobbed toward me. Flashlights. Footsteps. People were shouting a lot.

“Jesus,” Rawlins breathed.

Murphy knelt down by me and touched my shoulder. “Harry?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “The girl. Behind me. She’s hurt.”

Rawlins stood shining his flashlight on a bloody section of the hallway. “Jesus Christ.”

The phage had killed three people before I got there. I hadn’t been able to see much of them during the fight. It was a scene of horror, worse than any slaughterhouse. The phage had taken out a cop. I could see a piece of shirt with a bloodstained CPD badge on it. The second victim might have been a middle-aged man, judging by a bloodied orthopedic shoe that still held a foot. White leg bone showed two or three inches above the shoe.

The third victim had been one of the little vampire girls I’d seen the previous evening. I could only tell because her head had landed facing me. The rest of her was hopelessly intermixed with the other two bodies.

They’d need someone good at jigsaw puzzles to put them back together.

Murphy went to the girl with the lighter, and knelt over her.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Gone,” Murphy replied.

I blinked. “What?”

“She’s dead.”

“No,” I said. I was too tired to feel much of the sudden frustration that went through me. “Hell’s bells, she was moving just a second ago. I got here in time.”

Murphy grimaced. “She bled out.”

“Wait,” I said, staggering to my feet. “This isn’t…She shouldn’t be…”

I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach.

Was she still alive when the phage had turned to run? Could I have stopped or slowed the bleeding, if I had let the thing retreat to the Nevernever?

I thought of the fight again. I thought of the satisfaction of turning the hunter into prey, of extracting vengeance for those it had slain. I thought about the power that raged through me, the sheer, precise strength of the Hellfire-assisted assault, and how good it felt to use it on something that had it coming. I’d barely given a thought to the girl’s condition.

Had I let her die?

My God. I could have let the phage run.

I could have helped her.

The girl’s body lay curled up, still, like a sleeping child. Her dead eyes were open and glassy.

I lunged for a potted plant near me and threw up.

After I did, Rawlins observed, “You don’t look so good.”

“No,” I whispered. The words tasted bitter. “I don’t.”

Mouse let out one of his not-whine breaths and laid his chin on my shoulder. My eyes couldn’t get away from the dead people, not even when they were closed. The hellish light in my staff slowly faded and went dark.

“I’ve got to organize this clusterfuck,” Murphy sighed. “Rawlins, keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded once and rose, briskly moving away, snapping orders. “You, you,” Murphy said, pointing at two nearby cops. “Get over there and help the wounded. Airway, bleeding, heartbeat. Move.” She raised her voice and shouted, “Stallings! Where the hell is my ambulance?”

“Two minutes!” a man shouted down a dimly lit hall leading to the lobby. It looked like someone had pulled a patrol car or three up to the front of the hotel to shine their headlights into the darkened building.

“Clear them a path and call for more EMTs,” Murphy barked. She took her radio off her belt and started giving more orders.

Rawlins looked at the remains, and at the acid-scarred walls and the enormous areas of smashed drywall and ceiling that looked like they’d been kissed by a wrecking ball. He shook his head. “What the hell happened here?”

“Bad guy,” I said. “I got him. Not fast enough.”

Rawlins grunted. “Come on. Best we get up to the lobby. Until they get the lights back on, it might not be safe out here.”

“What happened on your end?” I asked.

“Damn candle blew up in my face. Then the lights went out. Thought for a second I’d gone blind.”

I grunted. “Sorry.”

“Some of the civilians were carrying. That howling thing went by in the dark and everyone panicked. Stampede in the dark. People got trampled and scared. Civilians opened fire, cops opened fire. We got one dead and a couple of dozen wounded by one thing or another.”

We reached the lobby and found more police arriving along with the emergency crews. The EMTs set up shop at once in a makeshift triage area, where Murphy had brought most of the wounded. The EMTs started stabilizing, evaluating, resuscitating. They had the worst cases loaded in the ambulance and rushing for the hospital within six or seven minutes.

Murphy’s stream of peremptory commands had slowed to a stop, and she stood near the triage area. I sidled over to her and loomed. Mouse pushed his head underneath her hand, but Murphy only patted him absently. I followed her worried blue gaze. The EMTs were working on Rick.

Greene sat in a chair nearby. He had wiped his face with a towel, but it hadn’t taken the blood out of the creases. It made a sanguine masque of his features. He held the towel against his head with his left hand.

Murphy said nothing for a while. Then she asked, “Did the spell work?”

“Mostly,” I said. “I missed one.”

She tensed. “Is it still…”

“No. I picked up the spare.”

She pressed her lips firmly together and closed her eyes. “When the candle went off, I hit the fire alarm. I wanted to clear the building fast. But someone had broken it. Just like the power and the emergency lights. Something went right by me and hit Greene early on. Now I’m the one in charge of this mess.”

“What happened to Rick?”

She spoke dispassionately. “Hit by panic fire. Gut shot. I don’t know how bad.”

“He’ll be all right,” I told her. “The EMTs would have taken him out first if he was in real trouble.”

She watched a pair of them labor over Rick. “Yeah,” she said. “He’ll be okay. He’ll be all right.”

She forced herself to look away from her ex-husband with a visible effort. “I’ve got to get things under control here, until we get the chain of command straightened out, and I make sure the wounded are cared for. Families notified, God.” She shook her head, and watched the EMTs lift Rick onto a stretcher and carry him out. Unspoken apology infused her tone. “After that, there will be questions, and a rain forest worth of paperwork.”

“I get it,” I told her quietly. “It’s your job.”

“It’s my job.” She focused her eyes in the distance. I could feel the trembling tension in her. I’ve known Murphy for a while now. I’d seen her like that before, when she wanted to fall apart but couldn’t take the time to do it. She was better at managing that kind of thing than me. There was nothing in her expression but calm and confidence. “I’ll put off everything I can and get back to you as soon as possible. Tomorrow sometime.”

“Don’t worry about me, Murph,” I told her. “And don’t be too hard on yourself. If you hadn’t gotten in Greene’s face and stayed here, a lot of people would be dead right now.”

“A lot of people are dead right now,” she said. “What about our bad guy?”

I felt my mouth stretch into a sharp-edged, wolfish smile. “He’s entertaining unexpected guests.”

“Is he going to survive them?”

“I doubt it,” I told her cheerfully. “If one of those things had jumped me, instead of vice versa, it would have taken me out. Three of them would filet me.”

Murphy’s attention was drawn to the door. Several men in wrinkled suits came in and stood around rubbernecking. Murphy straightened her clothing. “What about collateral damage?”

“I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll track them and make sure.”

Murphy nodded. “Rawlins,” she called.

The veteran had been hovering not far away, feigning disinterest.

She hooked a thumb up at me. “Babysit for me?”

“Shoot,” Rawlins drawled. “Like I got nothing better to do.”

“Suffer,” she told him, but she smiled when she said it. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed hard, letting out some of the pressure behind her calm facade through the contact. Then she strode over to the rubbernecking suits.

Rawlins watched her go, his lips pursed. “That is one cast-iron bitch,” he said. His tone revealed a quiet respect. “Cast iron.”

“Hell of a cop,” I said.

Rawlins grunted. “Problem with cast iron. It’s brittle. Hit it right and it shatters.” He looked around the foyer and shook his head. “This isn’t going to go well for her.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Department is going to crucify someone for it,” Rawlins said. “They have to.”

I let out a bitter bark of laughter. “After all, she probably saved a lot of lives tonight.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Rawlins agreed.

Greene blinked blearily at us from his chair and then slurred, “Rawlins? What the hell are you doing down here? I sent you home.” Anger gathered on his vague expression. “You son of a bitch. You’re defying a direct order. I’ll have your ass on a platter.”

Rawlins sighed. “See what I mean?”

I lifted my hand with my thumb and first two fingers extended, the others against my palm, and moved it in a vaguely mystical gesture from left to right. “That isn’t Rawlins.”

Green blinked at me, and his eyes blurred in and out of focus. The distraction derailed the train of thought he’d been laboriously assembling. It wasn’t magic. I’ve taken head shots before. It takes a while for your brain to start doing its job again, and the vaguest kinds of confusion make things into one big blur.

I repeated the gesture. “That isn’t Rawlins. You can go about your business. Move along.”

Greene fumbled with a couple of words, then shook his head and closed his eyes and went back to holding the towel against his head.

Rawlins arched an eyebrow. “You ever handle any divorce negotiations?”

I jerked my head at Mouse and said, “Come on. Before his brains unscramble.”

Rawlins fell into pace beside me. “Where are we going?”

I gave him the short version of what I’d done with the other three phages. “So now I track them, and make sure the guy who called them up is out of play.”

“Demons,” Rawlins said. “Wizards.” He shook his head.

“Look, man—”

He held up a hand. “No. I think about this too much and I won’t be any good to you. Don’t explain it. Don’t talk about it. Let me get through tonight and you can blow my mind all you want.”

“Cool,” I told him. “You got a car?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s go.”

We went outside and down the street to the nearest parking garage. Rawlins drove an old, blue station wagon. A bumper sticker on the back read MY KID IS TOO PRETTY TO DATE YOUR HONOR STUDENT.

Mouse let out a sudden warning growl. An engine raced. The dog flung his weight at my thigh and sent me slamming up against Rawlins’s station wagon. A van rushed at me in my peripheral vision, too fast for me to try to avoid. It missed me by less than six inches.

It didn’t miss Mouse. There was a meaty sound. The dog let out a bawl of pain. Brakes screeched.

I turned, furious and terrified, and the runes in my staff seethed with sudden Hellfire.

I had a split second to see Darby Crane swinging a tire iron. Then stars exploded in front of my eyes and the parking garage rotated ninety degrees. I saw Mouse, sprawled motionless on the concrete thirty feet away. Glau, Crane’s lawyer, stood beside the open driver’s door of the van, holding a gun on Rawlins.

See what I mean about head shots?

Fade to black.

Chapter Twenty-six

I came to with a headache, and my stomach attempted to slither out of my mouth. Its escape attempt was blocked by some kind of gag. I had the taste of metal in my mouth, and my jaws were forced uncomfortably wide. The blindfold on my face was almost a mercy, given the headache. I was pretty sure any light that got into my eyes would hurt like hell.

My nose was filled with scents. Old motor oil. Gasoline vapors. Dust. Something metallic and elusively familiar. I knew the smell, but I couldn’t place it.

I lay prostrate on some cold, hard surface—concrete, at a guess. My arms were held up above my head, my wrists bound in something cold that prickled with many tiny, sharp points. Thorn manacles, then. They were meant, along with the gag and blindfold, to keep me from using my magic. If I tried to start focusing my will, they would bite and freeze. I didn’t know where the damned things came from, but Crane wasn’t the first bad guy I’d met who kept a pair on hand. Maybe there’d been a sale.

I’d heard one person claim that they’d been invented by a two-thousand-year-old lunatic named Nicodemus, and I’d heard others claim they were of faerie make. Personally, I figured they were more likely a creation of the Red Court, materiel for their war with the Council. It would certainly be to their advantage to make sure as many people as possible had a set of restraints with no purpose but to render a mortal wizard helpless.

Hell, if I was in the Red Court, I’d be giving the things away like Halloween candy. It was a scary notion, and for more than one reason.

I was in trouble up to my eyebrows, but my nausea was severe enough that it took me several minutes of effort to care. Come on, Harry. You aren’t fighting your way clear of this. Use your head.

For starters, I was still alive, and that told me something all by itself. If Crane had wanted to kill me, he’d had all the time he would need to do it. He wouldn’t even have had to worry about the death curse a wizard could lay down on his enemies on his way into the hereafter. Unconscious wizards can’t throw curses. I was still breathing, which meant…

I swallowed. Which meant that he had other plans for me. It did not seem like a promising way to begin thinking my way clear.

I tried to say Rawlins’ name, but my tongue was being held in place by something, and it sounded like, “Lah-tha?”

“Here,” Rawlins replied, his tone very quiet. “How you doing?”

“La tha yahnah.”

“They got me cuffed to a wall,” he said. “My own damned cuffs, too, and they took my keys. I can’t get to you, man. Sorry.”

“Ooah ah yee?”

“Where? Where are we?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yah.”

“Looks like an old auto workshop,” he replied. “Abandoned. Metal walls. Windows are painted over. Doors chained shut. Lots and lots of cobwebs.”

“Ooah lah kuh phruh?”

“The light? Big old shop lamp.”

“Ah eeoh heh?”

“Anyone here?” Rawlins asked.

“Yah.”

“Creepy little guy with fish lips. He won’t talk to me, even when I asked pretty please. He’s sitting in a chair about three feet from you pretending he’s a guard dog.”

Anger returned to me in full force, and made my head pound even harder. Glau. Glau’d been driving the van. Glau had killed my dog. Without consciously making the effort, I found myself reaching for my magic, for fire enough to cremate the little toad. The manacles became a frozen agony that wiped anything resembling thought from my head.

I bit down on the mouthpiece and forced myself to relax my will. I could not afford to allow my impulses to control me, or I’d never get out of this. There would come a time when I wouldn’t have to bite back on my emotions—but that time was not yet here.

Wait, I promised my anger. Wait. I need to think for now, to get clear of my captors.

And as soon as I did, Glau was going to have a real bad day.

I relaxed my will and the pain of the manacles faded. Patience, Harry. Patience.

A door creaked open and footsteps approached. A moment later, Crane’s voice murmured, “Awake, I see, Dresden. Your head must be as hard as everyone says. Mr. Glau, if you would be so kind?”

Someone fumbled at the hood over my face, and it withdrew along with the mouthpiece, and I could see that hood and gag were all of a piece. Charming. The mouthpiece had gripped my tongue with two little clamps. I spat the taste of metal out of my mouth, along with a little bit of blood. The hood and muzzle had torn my gums open in a couple of places.

I lay on my back, staring up at a corrugated metal ceiling, then looked around at a dim, ugly, forlorn-looking auto shop. The nagging sense of familiarity increased. The only doors leading out were chained shut and padlocked on the inside, and no keys were in sight.

Crane stood over me, looking down, smiling, as tall and dark and handsome as you please. My eyes went past him to Rawlins. The dark-skinned cop stood leaning against the wall, one wrist cuffed to a metal ring in a steel support beam. A bruise severe enough to show even on his dark skin covered one cheek entirely. Rawlins looked calm, remote, and unafraid. I was fairly sure it was only an act, but if so, it was a good one.

“Crane,” I said. “What do you want?”

He smiled a nasty smile. “To build the future,” he replied. “Networking is very important in my business.”

“Cut the crap and talk,” I said in a flat tone.

The smile vanished. “You would be wise not to anger me, wizard. You’re hardly in a position to make demands.”

“If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”

Crane let out a rueful laugh. “I suppose that’s true enough. I was going to finish you and drop you in the lake, but imagine my surprise when I made some calls and it turns out that you’re…”

“Infamous?” I suggested. “Tough? A good dancer?”

Crane showed me his teeth. “Marketable. For an insignificant young man, you’ve managed to irritate a great many people.”

A little chill went through me. I kept it off my face.

Crane’s eyes glittered anyway. “Ah. Yes. Fear.” He inhaled deeply, his smile turning smug. “You’re smart enough to know when you are powerless, at least. In my experience, most wizards are fairly cowardly, when push comes to shove.”

I felt a hot reply coming, but again I set my anger aside—temporarily. Crane was trying to push my buttons. He could only get away with it if I allowed him to do so. I met his dark eyes and let one corner of my mouth tilt up into a smile.

“In my experience,” I replied, gaze unwavering, “people who have underestimated me regretted it.”

I didn’t feel like being drawn into a soulgaze with Crane, but I had little to lose. If nothing else, it might provide me with some valuable insight to his character.

Crane’s nerve broke first. He turned to walk away from me, pretending that he’d just received a call on his cell phone—he already had a new one. He stood in the shadows on the other side of the room.

I spat more metal taste out of my mouth and wished I had a glass of water. Glau sat in a chair nearby, watching me. The little man had a gun resting in his lap, in hand and ready to go. A briefcase sat on the floor beside his chair.

“You,” I said.

Glau looked at me without any readable expression.

“You killed my dog,” I said. “Get your affairs in order.”

Something ugly flickered through his eyes. “An idle threat. You will not live to see the dawn.”

“You’d best hope I do,” I said. “Because if I go down, I know where my death curse is going.”

Glau’s lips peeled back from his teeth, and I swear to God that they were pointed—not like a vampire’s fangs or a ghoul’s canines, but in solid, serrated triangles, like a shark. He rose, the gun twitching in his hand.

“Glau!” snapped Crane.

Glau froze for a second, and then relaxed and let the gun fall to his side.

Crane shoved the cell phone into his pocket and stalked over to me. “Keep your tongue in your mouth, wizard.”

“Or what?” I asked. “You’ll kill me? From where I’m standing, that isn’t a worst-case scenario.”

“True,” Crane murmured. He withdrew a small handgun from his pocket and without so much as blinking shot Rawlins in the foot.

The big cop jerked against the cuffs that held him. His face contorted in surprised pain and he fell. The cuffs, fastened to the beam at shoulder level, cut cruelly into his wrists. Rawlins got his legs underneath him and let out a string of sulfurous curse words.

Crane regarded Rawlins for a moment, smiled, and then pointed the gun at the cop’s head.

“No!” I shouted.

“It’s entirely up to you, wizard, whether or not his children lose their father. Behave.” He smiled again. “We’ll all be happier.”

Again the rage threatened to drown any rational thought in my head. Threatening me is one thing. Threatening someone else to get to me is another. I’m sick of seeing decent people suffer. I’m sick of seeing them die.

Patience, Harry. Calm. Rational. I was going to have to discourage Crane from this tactic with extreme prejudice as a deterrent to future weasels. But not yet. Keep him talking.

“Do you understand me?” Crane said.

I jerked my chin in a brief nod.

He smirked. “I want to hear you say it.”

I clenched my jaw and said, “I understand.”

“I’m so glad we had this talk,” he said. There was a low buzzing sound, the almost-silent alert of his cell phone, I suppose, and he walked away again, taking it out of his pocket and lifting it to his ear.

“How long have we been here?” I asked Rawlins.

“Hour,” he mumbled. “Hour and a half.”

I nodded. “You okay?”

He let out a pained grunt. “Tore open the stitches on my arm,” he panted. “Foot, I don’t know. Can’t feel it. Doesn’t look like it’s bleeding much.”

“Hang in there,” I said. “We’ll get out of this.”

Glau’s rubbery lips stretched out into a silent little smile, though he looked at neither of us.

“Bull,” Rawlins said. “If you can get out, you should go. Once he gets what he wants, he’s going to kill me anyway. Don’t stay on my account.”

“You’re siphoning my noble hero vibe,” I told him. “Cease and desist or I’ll sue.”

Rawlins tried to smile, and leaned against the wall, weight off his injured foot. The lower portion of his left sleeve had soaked through with blood.

Crane returned a moment later, smiling like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Start building more tax shelters, Glau. This is going rather well.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “So who’s going to pony up for one Harry Dresden, slightly used?”

Crane showed me all his teeth. “I’m holding an auction as we speak. A rather energetic one.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Who’s leading?”

His smiled widened. “Why, Paolo Ortega’s widow. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court.”

I suddenly felt cold, all over.

I was captured by the Red Court once. Held in the dark by a crowd of hissing, monstrous shapes.

They did things.

There was nothing I could do about it.

I still had the nightmares to remind me. Not every night, maybe, but often enough. Often enough.

Crane closed his eyes and inhaled with a satisfied expression. “She’ll be quite creative when it comes to dealing with her husband’s bane. I don’t blame you for feeling terrified. Who wouldn’t?”

“Hey,” I told him, grasping at straws. “Call the White Council. If nothing else, maybe they’ll run the bidding up for you.”

Crane laughed. “I already have,” he said.

Hope twitched somewhere inside me. If the Council knew I was in trouble, then maybe they would be able to do something. They might be on the way even now. I needed to stall Crane, keep him occupied. “Yeah? What did they say?”

His smile widened. “That the White Council’s unyielding policy is one of nonnegotiation with terrorists.”

Hope’s corpse went through some postmortem twitching.

His phone buzzed again. He stepped away and spoke quietly, his back to us. After a moment he snapped his fingers and said, “Glau, get on the computer. The auction is closing in five minutes and there’s always a last-second rush. We’ll need to verify an account.” He turned back to the phone. “No, unacceptable. A numbered account only. I don’t trust those people at PayPal.”

“Hey!” I protested. “Are you selling me on eBay?”

Crane winked at me. “Ironic, eh? Though I confess a bit of surprise. How do you know what it is?”

“I read,” I told him.

“Ahhh,” he said. “Glau. Computer.”

Glau nodded but said, “They should not be unwatched.”

“I can see them,” Crane replied, irritation in his voice. “Move.”

By his expression, Glau clearly did not agree with Crane, but he went.

I licked my lips, struggling to think through my headache and anxiety and a solid lump of despair. There had to be a way out of this. There was always a way out. I had found ways out of desperate straits before.

Of course, I’d had my magic available then. Damn those manacles. As long as they kept my power constrained, I would never be able to free myself or Rawlins.

So, moron, I thought to myself. Get rid of the manacles. Get around them. Do something. It’s your only chance.

“How?” I muttered out loud. “I don’t know a damned thing about them.”

Rawlins blinked at me. I grimaced, shook my head at him, and closed my eyes. I shut away the distractions and turned my focus inward. It was easy to imagine an empty place; flat, dark floor illuminated from above by a single light shining without apparent source. I imagined myself standing beneath it.

“Lasciel,” my image-self said quietly. “I seek counsel.”

She appeared at once, stepping into the circle of light. She wore her most familiar form, the functional white tunic, the tall, lovely figure, but her golden hair now appeared as a waist-length sheet of deep auburn. She bowed deeply and murmured, “I am here, my host.”

“You changed your hair,” I said.

Her mouth flirted with a smile. “There are too many blondes in your life, my host. I feared I would be lost in the press.”

I sighed. “The manacles,” I said. “Do you know of them?”

She bowed again. “Indeed, my host. They are of an ancient make, wrought by the troll-smiths of the Unseelie Court, and employed against those of your talents for a thousand years and more.”

I blinked at her. “Faeries made those?”

I was dimly aware that, in my surprise, I had spoken the words aloud. I clenched my physical jaws shut and focused on the image-me, briefly wondering just how badly cracked my engine block was going to get by trying to keep track of my own personal internal reality in addition to the actual, threatening reality where Rawlins and I were in deep trouble. Hell, for that matter, I supposed it was entirely possible that I already had snapped. It wasn’t as though anyone but me had ever seen Lasciel. Perhaps, in addition to existing only in my head, she was all in my imagination, kind of a waking dream.

For a minute, I thought about abandoning the wizarding biz and taking up a career that would let me crawl under rocks and hide, professionally.

“You needn’t attempt to keep your inner self separate from your physical self,” Lasciel said in a reasonable tone. “I should be happy to advise you from the outside, so to speak.”

“Oh, no,” I said, keeping all the conversation on the inside. “I’ve got problems enough without adding a sentient hallucination to the mix.”

“As you wish,” Lasciel replied. “You are, I take it, seeking a way to overcome the bindings of the thorn manacles?”

“Obviously. Can it be done?”

“All things are possible,” Lasciel assured me. “Though some of them are extremely unlikely.”

“How?” I demanded of her. “This is not the time to get coy with me. If I die, you’re coming along for the ride.”

“I am aware,” she replied, arching an eyebrow. “They are a crafting of faerie make, my host. Seek that which is bane to they who made it.”

“Iron,” I said at once, nodding. “And sunlight. Trolls can’t stand either.” I opened my actual eyes and glanced around the interior of the garage. “Sunlight’s out of town for a few hours yet, but we’ve got lots and lots of iron. Rawlins has a free hand. If I get a tool to him, maybe he could shatter a link of the manacles’ chain. Then I could break his cuffs or something.”

“Point of logic,” the fallen angel pointed out. “Given that you are not free to retrieve a tool, getting one to Rawlins seems problematic.”

“Yeah, but—”

“In addition,” she continued, “you are exhausted, and it is reasonable to assume that Crane will finish his negotiations shortly and turn you over to one of your foes. You have insufficient time to recover your strength.”

“I guess—”

She continued in the firm tone of a schoolteacher addressing a stubborn child. “You have in the past expressed much frustration and doubt that your control of physical forces was precise enough to break handcuffs without breaking the person held in them.”

I sighed. “True, but—”

“The only egress from this place is chained shut and you do not have the key.”

“It isn’t—”

“And finally,” she finished, “lest you forget, you are being guarded by at least one supernatural being who will hardly stand gawking while you attempt escape.”

I glowered. “Anyone ever told you that you have a very negative attitude?”

She arched a brow, the expression an invitation to continue the line of thought.

I chewed on my lip and forged another couple of links in the chain of thought. “Which isn’t helpful. But your ass is as deep in alligators as mine, and you want to help. So…” My stomach sank a little. “You can offer me another option.”

She smiled, pleased. “Very good.”

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“Why ever not?”

“Because a freaking fallen angel is offering it, that’s why ever not. You’re poison, lady. Don’t think I don’t know it.”

She lifted a long-fingered hand to me, palm out. “I ask only that you hear me out. If what I offer is not to your liking, I will of course support your efforts to form an alternate plan.”

I upgraded the glower to a glare. She regarded me in perfect calm.

Dammit. The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in. Which sounds silly, I know, but the same principle applies to everything else.

If I let her talk to me, Lasciel would propose something calm and sane and reasonable and effective. It would require a small price of me, if nothing else by making me a tiny bit more dependent upon her advice and assistance. Whatever happened, she’d gain another smidgen of influence over me.

Baby steps on the highway to hell. Lasciel was an immortal. She could afford patience, whereas I could not afford temptation.

It came down to this: If I didn’t hear her out and didn’t get out of this mess, Rawlins’s blood would be on my hands. And whoever was behind the slaughter around the convention might well keep right on escalating. More people could die.

Oh. And I’d wind up enjoying some kind of Torquemada-esque vacation with whichever fiend had the most money and the least lag.

When a concept like that is an afterthought, you know things are bad.

Lasciel watched me with patient blue eyes.

“All right,” I told her. “Let’s hear it.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

We plotted, the fallen angel and me. It went fast. It turns out that holding an all-mental conversation gets things done at the literal speed of thought, without all those clunky phonemes to get in the way.

Barely a minute had passed when I opened my eyes and said very quietly to Rawlins, “You’re right. They’ll kill you. We have to get out of here.”

The cop gave me a pained grimace and nodded. “How?”

I struggled and sat up. I rolled my shoulders a little, trying to get some blood flowing through my arms, which had been manacled together underneath me. I tested the chain. It had been slipped through an inverted U-bolt in the concrete floor. The links rattled metallically as they slid back and forth.

I checked Crane at the noise. The man kept speaking intently into his cell phone, and took no apparent notice of the movement.

“I’m going to slip one of these manacles off my wrist,” I told him. I nodded at a discarded old rolling tool cabinet. “There should be something in there I can use. I’ll cut us both out.”

Rawlins shook his head. “Those two going to stand there watching while we do all that?”

“I’ll do it fast,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I kill the lights and we get out.”

“Door is chained shut,” Rawlins said.

“Let me worry about that.”

Rawlins squinted. He looked very tired. “Why not,” he said, nodding. “Why not.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and began to concentrate.

“Hey,” Rawlins said. “How you going to slip your cuffs?”

“Ever heard about yogis, out east?”

“Yogi Berra,” he said at once. “And Yogi Bear.”

“Not those yogis. As in snake charmers.”

“Oh. Right.”

“They spend a lifetime learning to control their body. They can do some fairly amazing stuff.”

Rawlins nodded. “Like fold themselves up into a gym bag and sit inside it at the bottom of a pool for half an hour.”

“Right,” I said. I followed Lasciel’s instructions, sinking into deeper and deeper focus. “Some of them can collapse the bones in their hands. Use their muscles and tendons to alter tensions. Change the shape.” I focused on my left hand, and for a moment was a bit grateful that it was already so badly maimed and mostly numb. What I was about to do, even with Lasciel’s instruction, was going to hurt like hell. “Keep an eye out and be ready.”

He nodded, holding still and not turning his head toward either Crane or Glau.

I dismissed him, the warehouse, my headache, and everything else that wasn’t my hand from my perceptions. I had the general idea of what was supposed to happen, but I didn’t have any practical, second-to-second knowledge of it. It was a terribly odd sensation, as though I were a skilled pianist whose fingers had suddenly forgotten their familiarity with the keys.

Not too quickly, murmured Lasciel’s voice in my head. Your muscles and joints have not been conditioned to this. There was an odd sensation in my thoughts, somehow similar to abruptly remembering how to tie a knot that had once been thoughtlessly familiar. Like this, Lasciel’s presence whispered, and that same familiarity suddenly thrummed down my arm.

I flexed my thumb, made a rippling motion of my fingers, and tightened every muscle in my hand in a sudden clench. I dislocated my thumb with a sickly little crackle of damaged flesh.

For a second, I thought the pain would drop me unconscious.

No, Lasciel’s voice said. You must control this. You must escape.

I know, I snarled back at her in my mind. Apparently nerve damage from burns doesn’t stop you from feeling it when someone pulls your fingers out of their sockets.

Someone? Lasciel said. You did it to yourself, my host.

Would you back off and give me room to work?

That’s ridiculous, Lasciel replied. But the sense of her presence abruptly retreated.

I took deep, quiet breaths, and twisted my left hand. My flesh screamed protest, but I only embraced the pain and continued to move, slow and steady. I got the fingers of my right hand to lightly grasp the manacle on my left wrist, and began to draw my hand steadily against the cold, binding circle of metal. My hand folded in a way that was utterly alien in sensation, and the screaming pain of it stole my breath.

But it slipped an inch beneath the metal cuff.

I twisted my hand again, in exactly the same motion, never letting up the pressure, working to encompass the pain as something to aid me, rather than distract.

I slipped an inch closer to freeing my hand. The pain became more and more intense despite my efforts to divert it, like an afternoon sun that burns brightly into your eyes even though they’re closed. Only a moment more. I only needed to remain silent and focused for a few more seconds.

I bore the pain. I kept up the pressure, and abruptly I felt the cold metal of the cuff flick over the outside of my thumb, one of the few spots on my fingers where much tactile sensation remained. My hand came free, and I clutched tightly to the empty cuff with my right hand, to keep it from rattling.

I opened my eyes and glanced around the garage. Crane paced back and forth in conversation on his phone. I waited until his back was mostly turned to move. Then I rose and slipped the chain through the U-bolt on the floor, until the circle of the cuff pressed against the bolt. I was still tethered by a chain perhaps a foot long, but I moved as silently as I could and reached out with my throbbing left hand for the wheeled tool cabinet.

I had trouble getting my fingers to cooperate, but I slipped the cabinet open. The tools inside it had been there for a long time—several years, at least. They were spotted with rust. I could only see about half the cabinet from where I crouched, and there wasn’t anything there that could help me. I hated to do it, but I felt around the unseen portion of the cabinet with my clumsy fingers. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to feel a tool even if my fingers found it, and even more frightened by the knowledge that I might knock something over and draw attention.

My hand shook, but I felt through the cabinet as quickly and lightly as I could, starting at the top and moving down.

On the floor of the cabinet, I felt an object, the handle of some kind of tool. I drew it out as quietly as I could, and found myself holding a hacksaw. My heart leapt with excitement.

I returned to more or less my original position, with my captors seemingly none the wiser, and took a grip on the saw. My distorted thumb hurt abominably, so I took the hacksaw in my right hand, took a deep breath, and then began slicing at the chain link immediately below the empty manacle.

I could only cut in strokes eight or nine inches long because of the chain still attached to my right wrist, and it made a low, buzzing racket that could not be mistaken for anything but a saw. I was sure I would not have time to cut myself free—but the heavy-duty steel of the hacksaw’s blade ripped into the silvery metal chain as if it were made of pine. Three, four, five strokes of the hacksaw and the link parted. I jerked hard with my right hand and the chain slid through the U-bolt, the broken link snapping as the cuffs struck the bolt.

I rose, free.

Crane let out a sudden, startled sound, dropped his cell phone, and went for his gun. There was no time to free Rawlins, so I tossed him the hacksaw and then threw myself to one side as Crane let off a shot. Sparks leapt up from the rolling cabinet’s surface, and a rush of adrenaline made the pains of my body vanish. I kept my head down as low as I could and scurried to one side, attempting to put the bulk of an old, rusted pickup truck between Crane and me. I reached for my magic, but the cuff still attached to my arm reacted with that same burst of agony, splintering my concentration.

I caught a glimpse of movement. Crane circled to one side, looking for a clear line of fire. I maneuvered like a squirrel, keeping the truck between us and crouching low to deny him a clean shot. I went for the passenger door, hoping to find something, anything I could use to defend myself in the truck.

Locked.

“Glau!” Crane shouted. His second shot shattered the truck’s passenger window, the bullet passing within a few inches of my head.

I reached up, unlocked the truck’s door, and swung it open. The cab was cluttered with empty cigarette packs, discarded fast-food wrappers, crushed beer cans, a heavy-duty claw hammer, and three or four glass beer bottles.

Perfect.

I clutched the hammer’s wrapped steel handle in my teeth, scooped up the bottles, and threw one at the far side of the garage. It shattered loudly. I rose at once, another bottle ready, and hurled it with as much force as I could.

The first bottle had caused Crane to snap his head to one side, looking for the source of the sound. He looked away from me for only a second, but it was distraction enough to allow me to throw.

The bottle tumbled end over end and smashed into the work lamp with a crash of breaking glass. Sparks showered up in a brief cloud of electric outrage, and then heavy darkness slammed down upon us.

Now, I thought to Lasciel.

Darkness vanished, replaced with lines and planes of silver light that outlined the garage, the truck, the tool cabinets and workbenches, as well as the doors and windows and the bolt on the wall where Rawlins was chained.

I was not actually seeing the garage, of course, for there was no physical light for my eyes to see. Instead, I was looking at an illusion.

The portion of Lasciel in my head was capable of creating illusory sensations of almost any kind, though if I suspected any tampering I could defend myself against it easily enough. This illusion, however, was not meant to deceive. She’d placed it there to help me, gleaning the precise dimensions and arrangements of the garage from my own senses and projecting them to my eyes to enable me to move in the dark.

It wasn’t a perfect illusion, of course. It was merely a model. It didn’t keep track of animate objects, and if anything moved around I wouldn’t know it until I’d knocked myself unconscious on it—but I wouldn’t need it for long. I ran for Rawlins.

“Glau!” Crane screamed, no more than ten or twelve feet away. “Cover the door!”

I flung the third bottle to the floor at my feet. It was an exceedingly odd sensation, for the bottle was outlined in silver light until it left my hand. It vanished into the darkness, and shattered on the floor near me.

There was a moment of frozen silence, broken only by the rasp of a hacksaw against Rawlins’s cuffs. Crane took a couple of steps toward me, then hesitated, and though I could not see him, I could sense the hesitation. Then he moved again, away from me, probably assuming I was attempting another distraction. My lips stretched into a wolfish smile, and I padded to Rawlins, my steps sure and steady even in the total darkness.

I reached the bolt on the steel beam, and found Rawlins standing beneath it, breathing hard, sawing as fast as he could. He jumped when I touched his shoulder, but I took the hammer in hand and whispered, “It’s Harry. Get your head down.”

He did. I looked up at the silvery illusion of the bolt, steadied my breathing, and drew the hammer back very slowly, focusing upon that movement and nothing else. Then I hissed out a breath and struck at the bolt with every ounce of force I could physically muster.

I’m not a weightlifter, but no one’s ever accused me of being a sissy, either. More importantly, years and years of my metaphysical studies and practice had given me considerable skill at focus and concentration. The hammer struck the bolt that held the other ring of Rawlins’s cuffs. Sparks flew. The bolt, as rusted and ruined as the rest of the building, snapped.

Rawlins dragged me to the ground a heartbeat before Crane’s pistol thundered again from the far side of the garage. A bullet caromed off the metal beam with an ugly, high-pitched whine.

“Come on,” I hissed. I seized Rawlins’s shirt. He grunted and stumbled blindly after me, trying to be quiet, but given his injuries there was only so much he could do. Speed would have to serve where stealth was not available. I hauled him directly across the garage floor, skipping around a mechanic’s pit and several stacks of old tires.

“Where are we going?” Rawlins gasped. “Where is the door?”

“We aren’t taking the door,” I whispered—which was true. I wasn’t sure that we’d have a way out of the garage, but we certainly wouldn’t leave via the door.

The Full Moon Garage had been abandoned since the disappearance of its previous owners, a gang of lycanthropes with a notable lack of common sense when it came to choosing enemies. It wasn’t as big a coincidence as it seemed, that Crane was using the same building. It was old, abandoned, had no windows, was close to the convention center, and easy to get in and out of. More to the point, it had been a place where fairly horrible things happened, and the ugly energy of them still lingered in the air. I wasn’t sure what Crane and Glau were, exactly, but a place like this would feel comfortable and familiar to many denizens of the dark side.

I’d been held captive in the building before and my means of egress was still there—a hole beneath the edge of the cheap corrugated metal wall, dug down into the earth and out into the gravel parking lot by a pack of wolves. I got to the wall and knelt down to check Lasciel’s mental model against the reality it represented. The hole was still there. If anything, the years had worn it even deeper and wider.

I shoved Rawlins’s hands down to let him feel it. “Go,” I whispered. “Under the wall and out.”

He grunted assent and started hauling himself through it. Rawlins was built a lot heavier than me, but he fit through the time-widened hole. I crouched down to follow him, but heard running footsteps just behind me.

I ducked to one side, my eyes now adjusting enough to let me see faint, ambient city light trickling through the hole. I saw a vague shape in the darkness, and then saw Glau’s hands seize Rawlins’s wounded foot. Rawlins screamed.

I lunged forward and smashed the claw hammer down onto Glau’s forearm. It hit with brutal force and a sound of breaking bone.

Glau let out a wild, falsetto, ululating scream, like that of some kind of primitive warrior. The hammer jerked out of my hands. I heard a whirr in the air, and ducked in time to avoid Glau returning the favor. I twisted, swinging the chain still attached to the remaining manacle along at what I estimated to be Glau’s eye level. The chain hit. He let out another shrieking cry, falling backward.

I dove for the hole and wriggled through it like a greased weasel. Crane’s gun went off again, punching a hole in the wall ten feet away. Running footsteps retreated, and metal clinked. I heard myself whimpering, and had a flashback to any number of nightmares where I could not move swiftly enough to escape the danger. Any second I expected to take a bullet, or for Glau to lay into me with the hammer or his sharklike teeth.

Rawlins grabbed my wrist and pulled me through. I got to my feet, looking around the little gravel lot wildly for the nearest cover—several stacks of old tires. I didn’t have to point at it for Rawlins to get the idea. We ran for it. Rawlins’s wounded leg almost gave out, and I slowed to help him, looking back for our pursuers.

Glau wriggled out of the hole just as we had, rose to a crouch, and threw the claw hammer. It tumbled end over end, flying as swiftly as a major-league fastball, and hit me in the ass.

A shock went through me on impact, and my balance wavered as half of my lower body went numb. I tried to clutch at Rawlins for balance, but the hand I’d distorted wasn’t strong enough to hold, and the force of the blow threw me down to the gravel. The impact tore open all the defenses I’d rallied against my body’s various pains, and for a second I could barely move, much less flee.

Glau drew a long, curved blade from his belt, something vaguely Arabic in origin. He bounded after us. It was hopeless, but Rawlins and I tried to run anyway.

There were a couple of light footsteps, a blurring figure running far too swiftly to be human, and Crane kicked my functional leg out from underneath me. I dropped. He delivered a vicious blow to Rawlins’s belly. The cop went down, too.

Crane, his face pale and furious, snarled, “I warned you to behave, wizard.” He lifted the gun and pointed it at Rawlins’s head. “You’ve just killed this man.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Adark figure stepped out of the deep shadows behind the stacks of tires, pointed a sawed-off shotgun at Glau, and said, “Howdy.”

Glau whirled to face the newcomer, hand already lifting the knife. The interloper pulled the trigger. Thunder filled the air. The blast threw Glau to the gravel like an enormous, flopping fish.

Thomas stepped out into the wan light of a distant streetlamp, dressed all in loose black clothing, including my leather duster, which fell all the way to his ankles. His hair was ragged and wind-tossed, and his grey eyes were cold as he worked the action on the shotgun, ejecting the spent shell and levering a fresh one into the chamber. The barrel of the shotgun snapped to Crane.

Son of a bitch.

Now I knew who’d been following me around town.

“You,” Crane said in a hollow-sounding voice, staring at Thomas.

“Me,” Thomas agreed, insouciant cheer thick in his voice. “Lose the gun, Madrigal.”

Crane’s lip lifted into a sneer, but he did lower the pistol and drop it to the ground.

“Kick it over here,” Thomas said.

Crane did it, ignoring me completely. “I thought you’d be dead by now, coz. God knows you made enemies enough within the House, much less the rest of the Court.”

“I get by,” Thomas drawled. Then he used a toe to flick the gun over to me.

Crane’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed.

I picked up the revolver and checked the cylinder. My distorted left hand functioned, weakly, but it hurt like hell, and would until I could get enough quiet and focus to get everything back into its proper place. My headache intensified to a fine, distracting agony as I bent over, but I ignored that, too. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

Crane’s revolver held freshly loaded rounds, all six of them. I put them back and checked on Rawlins. Between the pain of his recent injuries and the strain of our flight and recapture, the big cop did not look well.

“Isn’t bad,” he said quietly. “Just hurts. Tired.”

“Sit tight,” I told him. “We’ll get you out of here.”

He nodded and lay there, watching developments, his eyes only half aware.

I made sure he wasn’t bleeding too badly, then rose, pointed the gun at Crane, and took position between him and Rawlins.

“How’s it going, Dresden?” Thomas asked.

“Took you long enough,” I said.

Thomas grinned, but it didn’t touch his eyes. His gaze never left Crane. “Have you ever met my cousin, Madrigal Raith?”

“I knew he didn’t look like a Darby,” I said.

Thomas nodded. “Wasn’t that a movie with Janet Munro?”

“And Sean Connery.”

“Thought so,” Thomas said.

Madrigal Raith watched the exchange through narrowed eyes. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he looked paler now, his features almost eerily fine. Or maybe now that Thomas had identified him as a White Court vampire, I could correctly interpret the warnings my instincts had shrieked at me during our first talk. There was little but contempt in Madrigal’s eyes as he stared at my brother. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself involved in, coz. I’ll not surrender this prize to you.”

“Oh, but you will,” Thomas said in his best Snidely Whiplash villain voice.

Crane’s eyes flickered with something hot and furious. “Don’t push me, little coz. I’ll make you regret it.”

Thomas’s laugh rang out, full of scorn and confidence. “You couldn’t make water run downhill. Walk away while you still can.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Madrigal replied. “Do you know what kind of money he’s worth?”

“Is it the kind that spends in hell?” Thomas asked. “Because if you keep this up, you’ll need it.”

Madrigal sneered. “You’d kill family in cold blood, Thomas? You?”

There are statues that don’t have a poker face as good as Thomas’s. “Maybe you haven’t put it together yet, Madrigal. I’m banished, remember? You aren’t family.”

Madrigal regarded Thomas for a long minute before he said, “You’re bluffing.”

Thomas looked at me, a quality of inquiry to his expression, and said, “He thinks I’m bluffing.”

“Make sure he can talk,” I said.

“Cool,” Thomas said, and shot Madrigal in the feet.

The light and thunder of the shotgun’s blast rolled away, leaving Madrigal on the ground, hissing out a thready shriek of agony. He curled up to clutch at the gory ruins of his ankles and feet. Blood a few shades too pale to be human spattered the gravel.

“Touché,” grunted Rawlins, a certain satisfaction in his tone.

It took Madrigal a while to control himself and find his voice. “You’re dead,” he whispered, pain making the words quiver and shake. “You gutless little swine. You’re dead. Uncle will kill you for this.”

My half brother smiled and worked the action of the shotgun again. “I doubt my father cares,” he replied. “He wouldn’t mind losing a nephew. Particularly not one who has been consorting with scum like House Malvora.”

“Aha,” I said quietly, putting two and two together. “Now I get it. He’s like them.”

“Like what?” Thomas asked.

“A phobophage,” I said quietly. “He feeds on fear the way you feed on lust.”

Thomas’s expression turned a bit nauseated. “Yes. A lot of the Malvora do.”

Madrigal’s pale, strained face twisted into a vicious smile. “You should try it some night, coz.”

“It’s sick, Mad,” Thomas said. There was an almost ghostly sense of sadness or pity in his tone, so subtle that I would not have seen it before living with him. Hell, I doubt he realized it was there himself. “It’s sick. And it’s made you sick.”

“You feed on mortal desires for the little death,” Madrigal said, his eyes half closing. “I feed on their desire for the real thing. We both feed. In the end, we both kill. There’s no difference.”

“The difference is that once you’ve started, you can’t let them go running off to report you to the authorities,” Thomas said. “You keep them until they’re dead.”

Madrigal let out a laugh, unsettling for how genuine it sounded given his situation. I got the sneaking suspicion that the vampire was a couple of Peeps short of an Easter basket.

“Thomas, Thomas,” Madrigal murmured. “Always the self-righteous little bleeding heart. So concerned for the bucks and does—as though you never tasted them yourself. Never killed them yourself.”

Thomas’s expression went opaque again, but his eyes were flat with sudden anger.

Madrigal’s smile widened at the response. His teeth shone white in the evening’s gloom. “I’ve been feeding well. Whereas you…well. Without your little dark-eyed whore to take—”

Without warning, without a flicker of expression on Thomas’s face, the shotgun roared again, and the blast took Madrigal across the knees. More too-pale blood spattered the gravel.

Holy crap.

Madrigal went prone again, body arching in agony, the pain choking his scream down to an anemic little echo of a real shriek.

Thomas planted his boot on Madrigal’s neck, his expression cold and calm but for the glittering rage in his eyes. He pumped the next shell in, and held the shotgun in one hand, shoving the barrel against Madrigal’s cheekbone.

Madrigal froze, quivering in agony, eyes wide and desperate.

“Never,” Thomas murmured, very quietly. “Ever. Speak of Justine.”

Madrigal said nothing, but my instincts screamed again. Something in the way he held himself, something in his eyes, told me that he was acting. He’d maneuvered the conversation to Justine deliberately. He was playing on Thomas’s feelings for Justine, distracting us.

I spun to see Glau on his feet just as though he hadn’t been given a lethal dose of buckshot in the chest from ten feet away. He shot across the parking lot at a full sprint, running for the van parked about fifty feet away. He ran in utter silence, without the crunch of gravel or the creak of shoes, and for a second I thought I saw maybe an inch and a half of space between where he planted his running feet and the ground.

“Thomas,” I said. “Glau’s running.”

“Relax,” Thomas said, and his eyes never left Madrigal.

I heard the scrabble of claws on gravel and then Mouse shot out of the shadows that had hidden Thomas. He flashed by me in what was for him a relaxed lope, but as Glau approached the van, Mouse accelerated to a full sprint. In the last couple of steps before Glau reached the van, I thought I saw something forming around the great dog’s forequarters, tiny flickers of pale colors, almost like Saint Elmo’s fire. Then Mouse threw himself into a leap. I saw Glau’s expression reflected in the van’s windshield, his too-wide eyes goggling in total surprise. Then Mouse slammed his chest and shoulder into Glau’s back like a living battering ram.

The force of the impact took Glau’s balance completely, and sent the man into a vicious impact with the van’s dented front bumper. Glau hit hard, hard enough that I heard bones breaking from fifty feet away, and his head whiplashed down onto the hood and rebounded with neck-breaking force. Glau bounced off the van’s front bumper and hood, and landed in a limp, boneless pile on the ground.

Mouse landed, skidded on the gravel, and spun to face Glau. He watched the downed man for a few seconds, legs stiff. His back legs dug twice at the gravel, throwing up dust and rocks in challenge.

Glau never stirred.

Mouse sniffed and then let out a sneeze that might almost have been actual words: So there.

Then the dog turned and trotted right over to me, favoring one leg slightly, grinning a proud canine grin. He shoved his broad head under my hand in his customary demand for an ear scratching. I did it, while something released in my chest with a painful little snapping sensation. My dog was all right. Maybe my eyes misted up a little. I dropped to one knee and slid an arm around the mutt’s neck. “Good dog,” I told him.

Mouse’s tail wagged proudly at the praise, and he leaned against me.

I made sure my eyes were clear, then looked up to find Madrigal staring at the dog in shock and fear. “That isn’t a dog,” the vampire whispered.

“But he’ll do anything for a Scooby Snack,” I said. “Spill it, Madrigal. What are you doing in town? How are you involved with the attacks?”

He licked his lips and shook his head. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said. “And you don’t have time to make me. The gunshots. Even in this neighborhood, the police will be here soon.”

“True,” I said. “So here’s how it’s going to work. Thomas, when you hear a siren, pull the trigger.”

Madrigal made a choking sound.

I smiled. “I want answers. That’s all. Give them to me, and we go away. Otherwise…” I shrugged, and made a vague gesture at Thomas.

Mouse stared at him and a steady growl bubbled from his throat. Madrigal shot a look over at the fallen Glau, who, by God, was moving his arms and legs in an aimless, stunned fashion. Mouse’s growl grew louder, and Madrigal tried to squirm a little farther from my dog. “Even if I did talk, what’s to keep you from killing me once I’ve told you?”

“Madrigal,” Thomas said quietly. “You’re a vicious little bitch, but you’re still family. I’d rather not kill you. We left your jann alive. Play ball and both of you walk.”

“You would side with this mortal buck against your own kind, Thomas?”

“My own kind booted me out,” Thomas replied. “I take work where I can get it.”

“Pariah vampire and pariah wizard,” Madrigal murmured. “I suppose I can see the advantages, regardless of how the war turns out.” He watched Thomas steadily for a moment and then looked at me. “I want your oath on it.”

“You have it,” I said. “Answer me honestly and I let you leave Chicago unharmed.”

He swallowed, and his eyes flicked to the shotgun still pressed to his cheek. “My oath as well,” he said. “I’ll speak true.”

And that settled that. Pretty much everything on the supernatural side of the street abided by a rigid code of traditional conduct that respected things like one’s duties as a host, one’s responsibility as a guest, and the integrity of a sworn oath. I could trust Madrigal’s oath, once he’d openly made it.

Probably.

Thomas looked at me. I nodded. He eased his boot off of Madrigal’s neck and took a step back, holding the shotgun at his side, though his stance became no less wary.

Madrigal sat up, wincing at his legs. There was a low, crackling kind of noise coming from them. The bleeding had already stopped. I could see portions of his calf, where the pants had been ripped away. The skin there actually bubbled and moved, and as I watched a round lump the size of a pea formed in the skin and burst, expelling a round buckshot that fell to the parking lot.

“Let’s start simple,” I said. “Where’s the key to the manacles?”

“Van,” he replied, his tone calm.

“My stuff?”

“Van.”

“Keys.” I held out my hand.

Madrigal drew a rental-car key ring from his pocket and tossed it to me, underhand.

“Thomas,” I said, holding them up.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Mouse can watch him. I want this fucking thing off my arm.”

Thomas took the keys and paced over to the van. He paused to idly check his hair in the reflection in the windshield before opening the van. Vanity, thy name is vampire.

“Now for the real question,” I told Madrigal. “How are you involved with the attacks?”

“I’m not involved,” he said quietly. “Not in the planning and not in the execution. I’ve been scheduled here for more than a year.”

“Doesn’t scream alibi to me,” I said.

“I’m not,” he insisted. “Of course, I thought them entertaining. And yes, the…” His eyelids half lowered and his voice went suddenly husky. “The…storm of it. The horror. Empty night, so sweet, all those souls in fear…”

“Get off the creepy psychic vampire train,” I said. “Answer the question.”

He gave me an ugly smile and gestured at his healing legs. “You see. I’ve fed, and fed well. Tonight, particularly. But you have my word, wizard, that whatever these creatures are, they are none of my doing. I was merely a spectator.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “then why the hell did you grab me and bring me here?”

“For gain,” he said. “And for enjoyment. I don’t let any buck talk to me as you did. Since I’d planned on replying to your arrogance anyway, I thought I might as well turn a profit on it at the same time.”

“God bless America,” I said. Thomas returned with my magical gear—staff, backpack, a paper sack with my various foci in it, and an old-fashioned key with big teeth. I popped it in the slot on the manacles, fumbling with the stiff, uncooperative fingers of my left hand, and got the thing off my arm. My skin tingled for a moment, and I reached experimentally for my magic. No whiteout of pain. I was a wizard again.

I put on my amulet, bracelet, and ring. I felt the backpack to make sure Bob’s skull was still in there. It was, and I breathed a mental sigh of relief. Bob’s arcane knowledge was exceeded only by his inability to distinguish between moral right and wrong. His knowledge, in the wrong hands, could be dangerous as hell.

“No,” I said quietly. “It isn’t a coincidence that you’re there, Madrigal.”

“I just told you—”

“I believe you,” I said. “But I don’t think it was a coincidence, either. I think you were there for a reason. Maybe one you didn’t know.”

Madrigal frowned at that, and looked, for a moment, a little bit worried.

I pursed my lips and thought aloud. “You’re high-profile. You’re known to feed on fear. You’re at war with the White Council.” Two and two make four. Four and four make eight. I glanced up at Thomas and said, “Whoever it is behind the phage attacks, they wanted me to think that Darby, here, was it.”

Thomas’s eyebrows went up in sudden understanding. “Madrigal’s supposed to take the fall.”

Madrigal’s face turned even whiter. “What do you—”

He didn’t get to finish the question.

Glau screamed. He screamed in pure, shrieking terror, his voice pitched as high as a woman’s.

Everyone turned in surprise, and we were in time to see something haul the wounded Glau out of sight on the other side of the van. Red sprayed into the air. A piece of him, probably an arm or a leg, flew out from behind the van and tumbled for several paces before falling heavily to earth. Glau’s voice abruptly went silent.

Something arched up from behind the van and landed, rolling. It bumped over the gravel and came to a stop.

Glau’s head.

It had been physically ripped from his body, the flesh and bone torn and wrenched apart by main strength. His face was stretched into a scream, showing his sharklike teeth, and his eyes were glazed and frozen in death.

Orange light rose up behind the van, and then something, a creature perhaps ten or eleven feet in height, rose up and turned to face us. It was dressed all in rags, like some kind of enormous hobo, and was inhumanly slender. Its head was a bulbous thing, and it took me a second to recognize it as a pumpkin, carved with evil eyes like a jack-o’-lantern’s. Those eyes glowed with a sullen red flame, and flashed intensely for a moment as it spied us.

Then it took a long step over the hood of the van and came at us with strides that looked slow but ate up yards with every step.

“Good God,” Rawlins breathed.

Mouse snarled.

“Harry?” Thomas said.

“Another phage in a horror movie costume. The Scarecrow, this time,” I murmured. “I’ll handle it.” I took my staff in hand and stepped out to meet the oncoming phage. I called up the Hellfire once more, as I had against the other phage, until my skin felt like it was about to fly apart. I gathered up energy for a strike more deadly than I had used earlier in the night. Then I cried out and unleashed my will against the creature, hitting it as hard as I possibly could.

The resulting cannonball of blazing force struck the Scarecrow head-on while it was twenty feet away, exploding into a column of searing red flame, an inferno of heat and light that went off with enough force to throw the thing halfway across Lake Michigan.

Imagine my surprise when the Scarecrow stepped through my spell as if it had not existed. Its eyes regarded me with far too much awareness, and its arm moved, striking-snake fast.

Fingers as thick and tough as pumpkin vines suddenly closed around my throat, and in a rush of sudden, terrifying understanding, I realized that this phage was stronger than the little one I’d beaten at the hotel. This creature was far older, larger, stronger, more dangerous.

My vision darkened to a star-spangled tunnel as the Scarecrow wrapped its other hand around my left thigh, lifted me to the horizontal over its head, and started to rip me in half.

Chapter Twenty-nine

“Harry!” Thomas shouted. I heard a rasp of steel, and saw Thomas draw an old U.S. Cavalry saber from inside my duster. He tossed the shotgun to the wounded Rawlins and rushed forward.

Mouse beat him there. The big dog snarled and threw himself at the Scarecrow, obliging the creature to release my leg so that it could swing a spindly arm and fist at my dog. The Scarecrow was strong. It struck Mouse in midleap and batted him into the corrugated steel wall of the Full Moon Garage like he was a tennis ball. There was a crash, and Mouse bounced off the wall and landed heavily on his side, leaving a dent in the steel where he’d hit. He thrashed his legs and managed to rise to a wobbly stand.

Mouse had given Thomas an opening, and my brother leapt to the top of an old metal trash bin, then bounded fifteen feet through the air, whipping the sword down on the wrist of the arm that held me in choke. Thomas was never weak, but he was tapping into his powers as a vampire of the White Court as he attacked, and his skin was a luminous white, his eyes metallic silver. The blow parted the Scarecrow’s hand from its arm, and dropped me a good five or six feet to the ground.

Even as I fell, I knew I had to move away from the creature, and fast. I managed to have my balance more or less in place when I hit, and I fell into a roll, using the momentum to help me rise to a running start. But a problem developed.

That damned Scarecrow’s hand had not ceased choking me, and had not lost any of its strength. My headlong retreat turned into a drunken stumble as my air ran out, and I clutched at the tough vine-fingers crushing my windpipe shut. I went to my knees and one hand, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Rawlins lift the shotgun and begin pumping rounds into the oncoming Scarecrow from where he sat on the ground. The rounds slowed the oncoming creature, but they did nothing to harm it.

My throat was on fire, and I knew I had only seconds of consciousness left. In pure desperation, I took my staff and, in a dizzying gesture, dragged it through a complete circle in the gravel at my feet. I touched my hand to the circle, willing power into it, and felt the field of magic that it formed spring up around me in a silent, invisible column.

The circle’s power cut the Scarecrow’s severed hand off from the main body of the creature, and like the phage in the hallway of the hotel, it abruptly transformed into transparent jelly that splattered down onto the gravel beneath my chin and soaked my shirt in sticky goo.

I sucked in a breath of pure euphoria, and though I was on my knees, I turned to face the Scarecrow and did not retreat. So long as the circle around me maintained its integrity, there was no way for the phage to get to me. It should buy me a little time, to get the air back into my lungs and to work out my next attack.

The Scarecrow let out an angry hissing sound and swung its stump of an arm down at Rawlins. The veteran cop saw it coming and rolled out of the way as though he were an agile young man, barely avoiding the blow. Thomas used an old metal oil drum as a platform for another leap, this time driving his heels into the Scarecrow’s back, at what would have been the base of its spine on a human. The impact sent the Scarecrow to the ground, but as it landed it kicked a long leg at Thomas and struck his saber arm, breaking it with a wet snap of bone.

Thomas howled, scrambling back, leaving his fallen sword on the ground. The Scarecrow whirled back to me, eyes blazing with an alien rage, and I could swear that I saw recognition in them. It looked from me to Rawlins, and then with a hissing cackle it went after the cop.

Dammit. I waited until the last second and then broke the circle with a sweep of my foot, snatching up Thomas’s sword. I charged forward.

The Scarecrow whirled the moment the circle went down, sweeping out a great fist that could have broken my neck, but it hadn’t expected me to charge, and I was inside its reach before it realized what I had done. I let out a shout and struck at one of the Scarecrow’s legs, but it was quicker than I thought, and the saber’s blade barely clipped the thick, sturdy, viny limb. The Scarecrow let out a hiss loud and sharp enough to hurt my ears and tried to kick me, but I slipped to one side just in time, and the blow intended for me instead scattered several stacks of tires.

Madrigal Raith rose up from among the fallen tires only a couple of feet away from me, shrieking with fear. The Scarecrow’s eyes blazed into painfully bright flames when it saw Madrigal, and it started for him.

“Get to the van!” I shouted, hopping back to stand beside Madrigal. “We need wheels if we’re going to get away from this—”

Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Madrigal stuck out his hand and shoved me between himself and the monster, sending me into a sprawl at the Scarecrow’s feet while he turned to flee in the opposite direction.

Before I hit the ground, I was already calling power into my shield bracelet and I twisted to land on my right side, holding my left hand and its shield up. If I’d been half a second slower, the Scarecrow would have stomped its foot down onto my skull. Instead, it hit the half sphere of my sorcerous shield with so much force that the shield sent off a flare of light and heat, so that it looked like an enormous blue-white bowl above me.

Furious, the Scarecrow seized an empty barrel and hurled it down at my shield. I hardened my will as it struck, and turned the force of the throw, sending the barrel bouncing over the gravel, but it had gotten closer to me than the first blow. A second later, its fist hammered down, and then it found a bent aluminum ladder in a pile of junk and slammed it down at me.

I managed to block the attacks, but each one came a little closer to my hide. I didn’t dare to let up my concentration for a moment in an effort to move away. The damned thing was so strong. I wouldn’t survive a mistake. A single blow from one of its limbs or improvised weapons would probably kill me outright. But if I didn’t get away, the creature would hammer through the shield anyway.

Mouse charged in again, on three legs this time, bellowing an almost leonine battle roar as he did so. The Scarecrow struck out at Mouse, but the dog’s attack had been a feint, and he avoided the blow while remaining just out of the Scarecrow’s reach. The Scarecrow turned back to me, but Mouse rushed it again, forcing the Scarecrow to abandon its attack lest Mouse close in from behind.

I rolled clear of the Scarecrow’s reach and regained my feet, sword in my right hand, shining blue shield blazing on my left. I’d been throwing an awful lot of magic around tonight, and I was feeling it. My legs trembled, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could do.

Mouse and I circled the monster opposite one another, playing wolf pack to the Scarecrow’s bear, each of us menacing the creature’s flanks when it turned to the other. We held our own for maybe a minute, but it was a losing bet, long-term. Mouse was moving on three legs and tiring swiftly. I wasn’t much better off. The second one of us slipped or moved too slowly, the Scarecrow would drive us into the ground like a fence post. A wet, red, squishy fence post.

Light shone abruptly on my back, an engine roared, and a car horn blared. I hopped to one side. Madrigal’s rental van shot past me and slammed into the Scarecrow. It knocked the creature sprawling all the way across the parking lot to the edge of the street.

Thomas leaned his head out the window and shouted, “Get in!”

I hurried to oblige him, snatching up my staff on the way, and Mouse was hard on my heels. We piled into the van, where I found Rawlins unconscious in the back. I slammed the side door shut. Thomas threw up a cloud of gravel whirling the van around, banged over the concrete median between the gravel lot and the street, and shot off down the road.

A wailing, whistling shriek of rage and frustration split the air behind us. I checked out the window, and found the Scarecrow pursuing us. When Thomas reached an intersection and turned, the Scarecrow cut across the corner, bounding over a phone booth with ease, and slammed into the back quarter of the van. The noise was horrible and the van wobbled, tires screeching and slithering while Thomas fought to control the slide.

The Scarecrow shrieked and slammed the van again. The wounded Mouse added his battle roar to the din.

“Do something!” Thomas shouted.

“Like what?” I screamed. “It’s immune to my fire!”

Another crunch blasted my ears, rocked the van, and sent me sprawling over Rawlins.

“We’re going to find traffic in a minute!” Thomas called. “Figure something out!”

I looked frantically around the van’s interior, trying to think of something. There was little enough there: Glau’s briefcase, an overnight bag containing, presumably, Glau’s shower kit and foot powder, and two flats of expensive spring water in plastic bottles.

I could hear the Scarecrow’s heavy footsteps outside the van, now, and a motion in the corner of my eye made me look up to see its blazing, terrifying eyes gazing into the van’s window.

“Left!” I howled at Thomas. The van rocked, tires protesting. The Scarecrow drove its arm through the van’s side window, and its long fingers missed me by an inch.

Do something. I had to do something. Fire couldn’t hurt the thing. I could summon wind, but it was large enough to resist anything but my largest gale, and I didn’t have the magical muscle to manage that, exhausted as I was. It would have to be something small. Something limited. Something clever.

I stared at the bottled water, then thought of something and shouted, “Get ready for a U-turn!” I shouted.

“What?” Thomas yelled.

I picked up both flats of bottles and shoved them out the broken window. They vanished, and I checked out the rear window to see them tumbling along in our wake, still held together by heavy plastic wrapping. I took up my blasting rod, pointed it at them, and called up the smallest and most intense point of heat I knew how, releasing it with a whispered, “Fuego.”

The rear window glass flashed; a hole the size of a peanut suddenly appeared, the glass dribbling down, molten. Bottles exploded as their contents heated to boiling in under a second, spattering that whole section of road with a thin and expensive layer of water.

“Now!” I hollered. “U-turn!”

Thomas promptly did something that made the tires howl and almost threw me out the broken window. I got an up-close look at the Scarecrow as the van slewed into a bootlegger reverse. It reached for me, but its claws only raked down the van’s quarter panel, squealing as they ripped through the paint. The Scarecrow, though swift and strong, was also very tall and ungainly, and we reversed directions more quickly than it could, giving us a couple of seconds’ worth of a lead.

I gripped my blasting rod so hard that my knuckles turned white, and struggled to work out an evocation on the fly. I’m not much of an evocator. That’s the whole reason I used tools like my staff and blasting rod to help me control and focus my energy. The very thought of spontaneously trying out a new evocation was enough to make sweat bead on my forehead, and I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t a new evocation. It was just a very, very, very skewed application of an old one.

I leaned out the broken window, blasting rod in hand, watching behind us until the Scarecrow’s steps carried it into the clump of empty plastic bottles in a shallow puddle.

Then I gritted my teeth, pointed my blasting rod at the sky, and reached out for fire. Instead of drawing the power wholly from within myself, I reached out into the environment around me—into the oppressive summer air, the burning heat of the van’s engine, from Mouse, from Rawlins, from the blazing streetlights.

And from the water I’d spread in front of the Scarecrow.

“Fuego!” I howled.

Flame shot up into the Chicago sky like a geyser, and the explosion of sudden heat broke some windows in the nearest buildings. The van’s engine stuttered in protest, and the temperature inside the van dropped dramatically. Lights flickered out on the street, the abrupt temperature change destroying their fragile filaments as my spell sucked some of the heat out of everything within a hundred yards.

And the expensive puddle of water instantly froze into a sheet of glittering ice.

The Scarecrow’s leading foot hit the ice and slid out from under its body. Its too-long limbs thrashed wildly, and then the Scarecrow went down, awkward limbs flailing. Its speed and size now worked against it, throwing it down the concrete like a tumbleweed until it smacked hard into a municipal bus stop shelter.

“Go, go, go!” I screamed.

Thomas gunned the engine, recovering its power, and shot down the street. He turned at the nearest corner, and when he did the Scarecrow had only begun to extricate its tangle of limbs from the impact. Thomas hardly slowed, took a couple more turns, and then found a ramp onto the freeway.

I watched behind us. Nothing followed.

I sagged down, breathing hard, and closed my eyes.

“Harry?” Thomas demanded, his voice worried. “Are you all right?”

I grunted. Even that much was an effort. It took me a minute to manage to say, “Just tired.” I recovered from that feat and added, “Madrigal pushed me into that thing and bugged out.”

Thomas winced. “Sorry I wasn’t there sooner,” he said. “I grabbed Rawlins. I figured you’d have told me to get him out anyway.”

“I would have,” I said.

He looked up at me in the rearview mirror, his eyes pale and worried. “You sure you’re all right?”

“We’re all alive. That’s what counts.”

Thomas said nothing more until we slid off the highway and he began to slow the van. I busied myself checking Rawlins. The cop had kept going in the face of severe pain and even more severe weirdness. Damned heroic, really. But even heroes are human, and human bodies have limits you can’t exceed. Everything had finally caught up to Rawlins. His breathing was steady, and his wounded foot had swollen up so badly that his own shoe held down the bleeding, but I don’t think a nuclear war could have woken him.

I ground my teeth at what I had to do next. I set my deformed left hand on the floor of the van at the angle Lasciel had shown me and let my weight fall suddenly onto it. There was an ugly pop, more pain, and then the agony subsided somewhat. It was a giddy feeling, and my hand looked human again, if bruised and swollen.

“So,” I said, after I had worked up the energy. “It was you following me around town.”

“I didn’t want to be seen openly with you,” he said. “I figured the Council might take it badly if they found out you had taken a White Court vampire on a Warden ride-along.”

“Probably,” I said. “I take it you followed them from the parking garage?”

“No, actually,” Thomas said. “I tried but I lost them. Mouse didn’t. I followed him. How the hell did they keep him away from you when they grabbed you?”

“They hit him with this van,” I said.

Thomas raised his eyebrows and glanced back at Mouse. “Seriously?” He shook his head. “Mouse led me to you. I was trying to figure out how to get into that garage without getting us shot. Then you made your move.”

“You stole my coat,” I said.

“Borrowed,” he corrected.

“They never talk about this kind of crap when they talk about brothers.”

“You weren’t wearing it,” he pointed out. “Hell, you think I’m going to walk into one of your patented Harry Dresden anarchy-gasms without all the protection I can get?”

I grunted. “You looked good tonight.”

“I always look good,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” I told him quietly. “Better. Stronger. Faster.”

“Like the Six Million Dollar Man,” Thomas said.

“Stop joking, Thomas,” I told him in an even tone. “You used a lot of energy tonight. You’re feeding again.”

He drove, eyes guarded, his face blank.

I chewed on my lip. “You want to talk about it?”

He ignored me, which I took as a “no.”

“How long have you been active?”

I was sure he was stonewalling when he said, in a very quiet voice, “Since last Halloween.”

I frowned. “When we took on those necromancers.”

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s…look, there’s something I didn’t tell you about that night.”

I tilted my head, watching his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Remember, I said Murphy’s bike broke down?”

I did. I nodded.

“It wasn’t the bike,” Thomas said. He took a deep breath. “It was the Wild Hunt. They came across me while I was trying to catch up with you. Sort of filled up the rest of my evening.”

I arched my eyebrows. “You didn’t have to lie about something like that, man. I mean, everyone who won’t join the Hunt becomes its prey. So it’s not your fault the Hunt chased you around.” I scratched at my chin. Stubble. I needed a shave. “Hell, man, you should be damned proud. I doubt that more than five or six people in history have ever escaped the Hunt.”

He was quiet for a minute and then said, “I didn’t run from them, Harry.”

My shoulders twitched with sudden tension.

“I joined them,” he said.

“Thomas…” I began.

He looked up at the mirror. “I didn’t want to die, man. And when push comes to shove, I’m a predator. A killer. Part of me wanted to go. Part of me had a good time. I don’t like that part of me much, but it’s still there.”

“Hell’s bells,” I said quietly.

“I don’t remember very much of it,” he said. He shrugged. “I let you down that night. Let myself down that night. So I figured this time I’d try to help you out, once you told me you were on a job again.”

“You’ve got a car now, too,” I said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“You’re making money. And feeding on people.”

“Yeah.”

I frowned. I didn’t know what to say to that. Thomas had tried to fit in. He tried to get himself an honest job. He tried it for most of two years, but always ended badly because of who and what he was. I had begun to wonder if there was anyplace in Chicago that hadn’t fired him.

But he’d had this job, whatever it was, for a while now.

“There anything I need to know?” I asked him.

He shook his head, a tiny gesture. His reticence worried me. Though he’d been repeatedly humiliated, Thomas had never had any trouble talking—complaining, really—about the various jobs he’d tried to hold. Once or twice, he’d opened up to me about the difficulty of going without the kind of intense feeding he’d been used to with Justine. Yet now he was clamming up on me.

An uncharitable sort of person would have gotten suspicious. They would have thought that Thomas must have been engaging in something, probably illegal and certainly immoral, to make his living. They would have dwelt on the idea that, as a kind of incubus, it would be a simple matter for him to seduce and control any wealthy woman he chose, providing sustenance and finances in a single package.

Good thing I’m not one of those uncharitable guys.

I sighed. If he wasn’t going to talk, he wasn’t going to talk. Time to change the subject.

“Glau,” I said quietly. “Madrigal’s sidekick, there. You said he was a jann?”

Thomas nodded. “Scion of a djinn and a mortal. He worked for Madrigal’s father. Then my father arranged to have Madrigal’s father go skydiving naked. Glau stuck with Madrigal after that.”

“Was he dangerous?” I asked.

Thomas thought about it for a moment and then said, “He was thorough. Details never slipped by. He could play a courtroom like some kind of maestro. He was never finished with something until it was dissected, labeled, documented, and locked away in storage somewhere.”

“But he wasn’t a threat in a fight.”

“Not as such things go. He could kill you dead enough, but not much better than any number of things.”

“Funny, then,” I said. “The Scarecrow popped him first.”

Thomas glanced back at me, arching a brow.

“Think about it,” I said. “This thing was supposed to be a phobophage, right? Going after the biggest source of fear.”

“Sure.”

“Glau was barely conscious when it grabbed him,” I said. “It was probably me or Madrigal who was feeling the most tension, but it took out Glau, specifically.”

“You think someone sent it for Glau?”

“I think it’s a reasonable conclusion.”

Thomas frowned. “Why would anyone do that?”

“To shut him up,” I said. “I think Madrigal was supposed to go down for these attacks, at least in front of the supernatural communities. Maybe Glau was in on it. Maybe Glau arranged for Madrigal to be here.”

“Or maybe the Scarecrow went after Glau because he was wounded and separate from the rest of us. It might have been a coincidence.”

“Possible,” I allowed. “But my gut says it wasn’t. Glau was their cutout man. They killed him to cover their trail.”

“Who do you think ‘they’ is?”

“Uhhhhhh.” I rubbed at my face, hoping the stimulation might move some more blood around in my brain and knock loose some ideas. “Not sure. My head hurts. I’m missing some details somewhere. There should be enough for me to piece this together, but damned if I can see it.” I shook my head and fell quiet.

“Where to?” Thomas asked.

“Hospital,” I said. “We’ll drop Rawlins off.”

“Then what?”

“Then I pick up the trail of those phages, and see if I can find out who summoned them.” I told him briefly about the events of the afternoon and evening. “If we’re lucky, all we’ll find is some maniac’s corpse with a surprised look on his face.”

“What if we aren’t lucky?” he asked.

“Then it means the summoner is a hell of a lot better than I am, to fight off three of those things.” I rubbed at one eye. “And we’ll have to take him down before he hurts anyone else.”

“The fun never ends,” Thomas said. “Right. Hospital.”

“Then circle the block around the hotel. The spell I diverted the phages with had the tracking element worked into it. Sunrise will unravel it, and we don’t know how long it will take to follow the trail.”

I directed Thomas to the nearest hospital, and he carried the unconscious Rawlins through the emergency room doors. He came back a minute later and told me, “They’re on the job.”

“Let’s go, then. Otherwise someone will want to ask us questions about gunshot wounds.”

Thomas was way ahead of me, and the van headed back to the hotel.

I got the spell ready. It wasn’t a difficult working, under normal circumstances, but I felt as wrung out as a dirty dishrag. It took me three tries to get the spell up and running, but I managed it. Then I climbed into the passenger seat, where I could see evidence of the phages’ passing as a trail of curling, pale green vapor in the air. I gave Thomas directions. We followed the trail, and it led us toward Wrigley.

Not a whole hell of a lot of industry was going on in my aching skull, but after a few minutes something began to gnaw at me. I looked blearily around, and found that the neighborhood looked familiar. We kept on the trail. The neighborhood got more familiar. The vapor grew brighter as we closed in.

We turned a last street corner.

My stomach twisted in a spasm of horrified nausea.

The green vapor trail led to a two-story white house. A charming place, somehow carrying off the look of suburbia despite being inside the third largest city in America. Green lawn, despite the heat. White picket fence. Children’s toys in evidence.

The vapor led up to the picket fence, first. There were three separate large holes in the fence, where some enormous force had burst the fence to splinters. Heavy footprints gouged the lawn. An imitation old-style, wrought-iron gaslight had been bent to parallel with the ground about four feet up. The door had been torn from its hinges and flung into the yard. A minivan parked in the driveway had been crushed, as if by a dropped wrecking ball.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw blood on the doorway.

The decorative mailbox three feet from me read, in cheerfully painted letters: THE CARPENTERS.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

I’d sent the phages after Molly.

Chapter Thirty

I got out of the van, too shocked to see anything but the destruction. It made no sense. It made no sense at all. How in the hell could this have happened? How could my spell have turned the phages and sent them here?

I stood on the sidewalk outside the house with my mouth hanging open. The streetlights were all out. Only the lights of the van showed the damage, and Thomas turned them off after only a moment. There was no disturbance on the street, no outcry, no police presence. Whatever had happened, something had taken steps to keep it from disturbing the neighbors.

I don’t know how long I stood there. I felt Mouse’s presence at my side. Then Thomas’s, on the other side of me.

“Harry?” he said, as if he was repeating himself. “What is this place?”

“It’s Michael’s house,” I whispered. “His family’s home.”

Thomas flinched. He looked back and forth and said, “Those things came here?”

I nodded. I felt unsteady.

I felt so damned tired.

Whatever happened here, it was over. There was nothing I could do at this point, except see who had been hurt. And I did not want to do that. So I stood there staring at the house until Thomas finally said, “I’ll keep watch out here. Circle the house, see if there’s anything to be seen.”

“Okay,” I whispered. I swallowed, and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a pound of thumbtacks. I wanted nothing in the world so much as to run away.

But instead, I dragged my tired ass over the damaged lawn and through the house’s broken doorway. Mouse, walking on three legs, followed me.

There were sprinkles of blood, already dried, on the inside of the doorway.

I went on inside the house, through the entry hall, into the living room. Furniture lay strewn all over the place, discarded and broken and tumbled. The television lay on its side, warbling static on its screen. A low sound, all white noise and faint interference, filled the room.

There was utter silence in the house, otherwise.

“Hello?” I called.

No one answered.

I went into the kitchen.

There were school papers on the fridge, most of them written in exaggerated, childish hands. There were crayon drawings up there, too. One, of a smiling stick figure in a dress, had a wavering line of letters underneath that read: I LOVY OU MAMA.

Oh, God.

The thumbtacks in my belly became razor blades. If I’d hurt them…I didn’t know what I would do.

“Harry!” Thomas called from outside. “Harry, come here!”

His voice was tense, excited. I went out the kitchen door to the backyard, and found Thomas climbing down from a tree house only a little nicer than my apartment, built up in the branches of the old oak tree behind the Carpenters’ house. He had a still form draped over his shoulder.

I drew out my amulet and called wizard light as Thomas laid the oldest son, Daniel, out on the grass in the backyard. He was breathing, but looked pale. He was wearing flannel pajama pants and a white T-shirt soaked with blood. There was a cut on his arm; not too deep, but very messy. He had bruises on his face, on one arm, and the knuckles on both his hands were torn and ragged.

Michael’s son had been throwing punches. It hadn’t done him any good, but he’d fought.

“Coat,” I said, terse. “He’s cold.”

Thomas immediately took off my duster and draped it over the boy. I propped his feet up on my backpack. “Stay here,” I told him. I went in the house, fetched a glass of water, and brought it out. I knelt down and tried to wake the boy up, to get him to drink a little. He coughed a little, then drank, and blinked open his eyes. He couldn’t focus them.

“Daniel,” I said quietly. “Daniel, it’s Harry Dresden.”

“D-dresden?” he said.

“Yeah. Your dad’s friend. Harry.”

“Harry,” he said. Then his eyes flew open wide and he struggled to sit up. “Molly!”

“Easy, easy,” I told him. “You’re hurt. We don’t know how bad yet. Lie still.”

“Can’t,” he mumbled. “They took her. We were…is Mom okay? Are the little ones okay?”

I chewed on my lip. “I don’t know. Do you know where they are?”

He blinked several times and then he said, “Panic room.”

I frowned. “What?”

“S-second floor. Safe room. Dad built it. Just in case.”

I traded a look with Thomas. “Where is it?”

Daniel waved a vague hand. “Mom had the little ones upstairs. Molly and me couldn’t get to the stairs. They were there. We tried to lead them away.”

“Who, Daniel? They who?”

“The movie monsters. Reaper. Hammerhand.” He shuddered. “Scarecrow.”

I snarled a furious curse. “Thomas, stay with him. Mouse, keep watch.” I stood up and stalked into the house, crossed to the stairs, and went up them. The upstairs hallway had a bunch of bedrooms off it, with the oldest children’s rooms being at the opposite end of the hall from the master bedroom, the younger children being progressively closer to mom and dad. I looked inside each room. They were all empty, though the two nearest the head of the stairs had been torn up pretty well. Broken toys and shattered, child-sized furniture lay everywhere.

If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed the extra space between the linen closet and the master bedroom. I checked the closet in the master bedroom and turned up nothing. Then I opened the door to the linen closet, and found the shelves in complete disarray, sheets and towels and blankets strewn on the floor. I hunkered down and held up my mother’s amulet, peering closely, and then found a section of the back wall of the closet just slightly misaligned with the corner it met. I reached out and touched that part of the wall, closed my eyes, extending my senses through my fingertips.

I felt power there. It wasn’t a ward, or at least it was unlike any ward I had ever encountered. It was more of a quiet hum of constant power, and was similar to the power I’d felt stirring around Michael on several occasions—the power of faith. There was a form of magic protecting that panel.

“Lasciel,” I murmured quietly. “You getting this?”

She did not appear, but her voice rolled through my thoughts. Yes, my host. Angelic work.

I exhaled. “Real angels?”

Aye. Rafael or one of his lieutenants, from the feel of it.

“Dangerous?”

There was an uncertain pause. It is possible. You are touched by more darkness than my own. But it is meant to conceal the room beyond, not to strike out at an intruder.

I took a deep breath and said, “Okay.” Then I reached out and rapped hard on the panel, three times.

I thought I heard a motion, weight shifting on a floorboard.

I knocked again. “Charity!” I called. “It’s Harry Dresden!”

This time, the motion was definite. The panel clicked, then rolled smoothly to one side, and a double-barreled shotgun slid out, aimed right at my chin. I swallowed and looked down the barrel. Charity’s cold blue eyes faced me from the other end of the gun.

“You might not be the real Dresden,” she said.

“Sure I am.”

“Prove it,” she said. Her tone was quiet, balanced, deadly.

“Charity, there’s no time for this. You want me to show you my driver’s license?”

“Bleed,” she said instead.

Which was a good point. Most of the things who could play doppelgänger did not have human plumbing, or human blood. It wasn’t an infallible test by any means, but it was as solid as anything a nonwizard could use for verification. So I pulled out my pen knife and cut my already mangled left hand, just a little. I couldn’t feel it in any case. I bled red, and showed her.

She stared at me for a long second, and then eased the hammers on the shotgun back down, set the weapon aside, and wriggled out of the space beyond the panel. I saw a candle lit back there. The rest of the Carpenter children, sans Molly, were inside. Alicia was sitting up, awake, her eyes worried. The rest were sacked out.

“Molly,” she said, once she’d gained her feet. “Daniel.”

“I found him hiding in the tree house,” I said. “He’s hurt.”

She nodded once. “How badly?”

“Bruised up pretty good, groggy, but I don’t think he’s in immediate danger. Mouse and a friend of mine are with him.”

Charity nodded again, features calm and remote, eyes cold and calculating. She had a great cool-headed act going, but it wasn’t perfect. Her hands were trembling badly, fingers clenching and unclenching arrhythmically. “And Molly?”

“I haven’t found her yet,” I said quietly. “Daniel might know what happened to her.”

“Were they Denarians?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Definitely not.”

“Is it possible that they may return?”

I shrugged. “It isn’t likely.”

“But possible?”

“Yes.”

She nodded once, and her voice had the quality of someone thinking aloud. “Then the next thing to do is to take the children to the church. We’ll make sure Daniel is cared for. I’ll try to send word to Michael. Then we’ll find Molly.”

“Charity,” I said. “Wait.”

Charity thrust the heel of her hand firmly into my chest and pushed my shoulders back against the opposite wall. Her voice was quiet and very precise. “My children are vulnerable. I’m taking them to safety. Help me or stand aside.”

Then she turned from me and began bringing her children out. Alicia helped as much as she could, her studious features tired and worried, but the littlest ones were sleepy to the point of hibernation, and remained limp as dishrags. I pitched in, picking up little Harry and Hope, carrying one on each hip. Charity’s expression flashed briefly with both worry and thanks, and I saw her control slip. Tears formed in her eyes. She closed them again, jaw clenched, and when she looked up she had regained her composure.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Let’s move,” I replied, and we did.

Tough lady. Very tough. We’d had our differences, but I had to respect the proud core of her. She was the kind of mother you read about in the paper, the kind who lifts a car off of one of her kids.

It was entirely possible that I’d just killed her oldest daughter. If Charity knew that, if she knew that I’d put her children in danger, she’d murder me.

If Molly had been hurt because of me, I’d help.

Saint Mary of the Angels is more than just a church. It’s a monument. It’s huge, its dome rising to seventeen stories, and covered in every kind of accessory you could name, including angelic statues spread over the roof and ledges. You could get a lot of people arguing over exactly what it’s a monument to, I suppose, but one cannot see the church without being impressed by its size, by its artistry, by its beauty. In a city of architectural mastery, Saint Mary of the Angels need bow its head to no one.

That said, the back of the place, the delivery doors, looked quite modestly functional. We went there, Charity driving her family’s minivan, Thomas, me, and Mouse in Madrigal’s battered rental van. Mouse and I got out. Thomas didn’t. I frowned at him.

“I’m going to find someplace to park this,” he said. “Just in case Madrigal decides to report it as stolen or something.”

“Think he’ll make trouble for us?” I asked.

“Not face-to-face,” Thomas said, his voice confident. “He’s more jackal than wolf.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “Maybe the Scarecrow turned around and got him.”

Thomas sighed. “Keep dreaming. He’s a greasy little rat, but he survives.” He looked up at the church and then said, “I’ll keep an eye on things from out here. Come on out when you’re done.”

I got it. Thomas didn’t want to enter holy ground. As a vampire of the White Court, he was as close to human as vampires got, and as far as I knew, holy objects had never inconvenienced him. So this wasn’t about supernatural allergies. It was about his perceptions.

Thomas didn’t want to go into the church because he wasn’t optimistic that the Almighty and his institutions would smile on him. Like me, he favored maintaining a low profile with regards to matters temporal. And if he had gone back to older patterns, doing what came naturally to his predator’s nature, it might incline him to stay off the theological radar. Worse, entering such a place as the church might force him to face his choices, to question them, to be confronted with the fact that the road he’d chosen kept getting darker and further from the light.

I knew how he felt.

I hadn’t been in a church since I’d smacked my hand down on Lasciel’s ancient silver coin. Hell, I had a freaking fallen angel in my head—or at least a facsimile of one. If that wasn’t a squirt of lemon juice in God’s eye, I didn’t know what was.

But I had a job to do.

“Be careful,” I told him quietly. “Call Murphy. Tell her what’s up.”

“You’d better get some rest soon, Harry,” he replied. “You don’t look good.”

“I never look good,” I said. I offered him my fist. He rapped my knuckles gently with his own.

I nodded and walked over to knock on the delivery doors while he drove off in Madrigal’s van. I’d taken my duster back, once Daniel had a blanket on him. Screw the heat. I wanted the protection. Its familiar weight on my shoulders and motion against my legs were reassuring.

Forthill answered my knock, fully dressed, the white of his clerical collar easily seen in the night. His bright blue eyes looked around the parking lot once, and he hurried toward the van without a word being exchanged. I followed him. Forthill moved briskly, and we unloaded the van, Alicia shepherding the mobile kids indoors while he and Charity carried Daniel in between them. I followed with the two little wet dishrags, trying to keep my tired muscles from shaking too obviously.

Forthill led us to the storage room that sometimes doubled as refugee housing. There were half a dozen folded cots against one wall, and another one already opened, set out, and occupied by a lump under a blanket. Forthill and Charity got the wounded Daniel onto a cot first, and then opened the rest of them. We deposited tired children on them.

“What happened?” Forthill asked, his voice quiet and calm.

I didn’t want to hear Charity talk about it. “Got a cramp,” I told them. “Need to walk it off. Come find me when Daniel gets coherent.”

“Very well,” Charity said.

Forthill looked back and forth between us, frowning.

Mouse rose with a grunt of effort to limp after me. “No, boy. Stay and keep an eye on the kids.”

Mouse settled down again, almost gratefully.

I beat it, and started walking. It didn’t matter where. There were too many things flying around in my head. I just walked. Motion wasn’t a cure, but I was tired enough that it kept the thoughts, the emotions, from drowning me. I walked down hallways and through empty rooms.

I wound up in the chapel proper. I’ve been in smaller stadiums. Gleaming hardwood floors shine over the whole of the chapel. Wooden pews stand in ranks, row upon row upon row, and the altar and nave are gorgeously decorated. It seats more than a thousand people, including the balcony at the rear of the chapel, and every Sunday they still have to run eight masses in four different languages to fit everyone in.

More than size and artistry, though, there is something else about the place that makes it more than simply a building. There’s a sense of quiet power there, deep and warm and reassuring. There’s peace. I stood for a moment in the vast and empty room and closed my eyes. Right then, I needed all the peace I could get. I drifted through the room, idly admiring it, and wound up in the balcony, all the way at the top, in a dark corner.

I leaned my head back against a wall.

Lasciel’s voice came to me, very quietly, and sounded odd. Sad. It is beautiful here.

I didn’t bother to agree. I didn’t tell her to get lost. I leaned my head back against the rear wall and closed my eyes.

I woke up when Forthill’s steps drew near. I kept my eyes closed, half hoping that if I didn’t seem to waken he would go away.

Instead, he settled a couple of feet down the pew from me, and remained patiently quiet.

The act wasn’t working. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

I pressed my lips together and looked away.

“It’s all right,” Forthill said quietly. “If you wish to tell me, I’ll speak of it to no one.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, nodding. “But my offer stands, should you wish to talk. Sometimes the only way to carry a heavy burden is to share it with another. It is your choice to make.”

Choices.

Sometimes I thought it might be nice not to make any choices. If I never had one, I could never screw it up.

“There are things I don’t care to share with a priest,” I told him, but I was mostly thinking out loud.

He nodded. He took off his collar and set it aside. He settled back into the pew, reached into his jacket, and drew out a slender silver flask. He opened it, took a sip, and offered it to me. “Then share it with your bartender.”

That drew a faint, snorting laugh from me. I shook my head, took the flask, and sipped. An excellent, smooth Scotch. I sipped again, and I told him what happened at the convention, and how it had spilled over onto the Carpenter household. He listened. We passed the flask back and forth. I finished by saying, “I sent those things right to her door. I never meant it to happen.”

“Of course not,” he said.

“It doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”

“Nor should it,” he said. “But you must know that you are a man of power.”

“How so?”

“Power,” he said, waving a hand in an all-encompassing gesture. “All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose—it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.”

“I guess,” I said. “So?”

“So,” he said. “You have more choices. Which means that you have much improved odds of making mistakes. You’re only human. Once in a while, you’re going to screw the pooch.”

“I don’t mind that,” I said. “When I’m the only one who pays for it.”

“But that isn’t in your control,” he said. “You cannot see all outcomes. You couldn’t have known that those creatures would go to the Carpenter house.”

I ground my teeth. “So? Daniel’s still hurt. Molly could be dead.”

“But their condition was not yours to ordain,” Forthill said. “All power has its limits.”

“Then what’s the point?” I snarled, suddenly furious. My voice bounced around the chapel in rasping echoes. “What good is it to have power enough to kill my friend’s family, but not power enough to protect them? What the hell do you expect from me? I’ve got to make these stupid choices. What the hell am I supposed to do with them?”

“Sometimes,” he replied, his tone serious, “you just have to have faith.”

I laughed, and it came out loud and bitter. Mocking echoes of it drifted through the vast chamber. “Faith,” I said. “Faith in what?”

“That things will unfold as they are meant to,” Forthill said. “That even in the face of an immediate ugliness, the greater picture will resolve into something all the more beautiful.”

“Show me,” I spat. “Show me something beautiful about this. Show me the silver fucking lining.”

He pursed his lips and mused for a moment. Then he said, “There’s a quote from the founder of my order: There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“That the good that will come is not always obvious. Nor easy to see. Nor in the place we would expect to find it. Nor what we personally desire. You should consider that the good being created by the events this night may have nothing to do with the defeat of supernatural evils or endangered lives. It may be something very quiet. Very ordinary.”

I frowned at him. “Like what?”

He finished off the little flask and then rose. He put it away and put his collar back on. “I’m afraid I’m not the one you should ask.” He put a hand on my shoulder and nodded toward the altar. “But I will say this: I’ve been on this earth a fair while, and one way or another, this too shall pass. I have seen worse things reverse themselves. There is yet hope for Molly, Harry. We must strive to do our utmost, and to act with wisdom and compassion. But we must also have faith that the things beyond our control are not beyond His.”

I sat quietly for a minute. Then I said, “You almost make me believe.”

He arched an eyebrow. “But?”

“I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if it’s possible for me.”

The corners of his eyes wrinkled. “Then perhaps you should try to have faith that you might one day have faith.” His fingers squeezed and then released my shoulder. He turned to go.

“Padre,” I said.

He paused.

“You…won’t tell Charity?”

He turned his head, and I could see sadness in his profile. “No. You aren’t the only one too afraid to believe.”

Sudden footsteps clattered into the chapel, and Alicia hurried in, accompanied by Mouse. The big grey dog sat down and stared up at the balcony. Alicia, panting, looked up. “Father?”

“Here,” Forthill said.

“Come quick,” she said. “Mama said to tell you Daniel’s awake.”

Chapter Thirty-one

We listened to Daniel’s recounting of the attack. It was simple enough. He’d heard Molly moving around downstairs and had come down to talk to his sister. There had been a knock at the door. Molly had gone to answer it. There had been an exchange of words, and then Molly had screamed and slammed the door.

“She came running into the living room,” Daniel said. “And they broke down the door behind her and came in.” He shivered. “They were going upstairs and Molly said we had to distract them, so I grabbed the poker from the fireplace and just sort of jumped them.” He shook his head. “I thought they were just costumes. You know. Like…really stupid burglars or something. But the Reaper grabbed me. And he was going to…you know. Cut me with that curved knife.” He gestured vaguely at his wounded arm. “Molly hit him and he dropped me.”

“With what?” I asked him.

He shook his head. His thin, awkward, adolescent features were hollow with pain, weariness, and a kind of lingering disbelief. His words were all slightly stiff, wooden, as if reporting events in an unappealing motion picture, rather than actual experiences. “I couldn’t see. I think she must have had a bat or something. He dropped me.”

“Then what?” I asked him.

He swallowed. “I fell, and bumped my head on the floor. And they grabbed her. The Reaper and the Scarecrow. And they carried her out the door. She was screaming…” He bit his lip. “I tried to stop them, but Hammerhand chased me. So I ran out the back and up into the tree house, cause I figured, you know. He doesn’t have any hands. Just hammers. So how’s he going to climb up after me?”

He looked to Charity and said, shame in his voice, “I’m sorry, Mom. I wanted to stop them. They were just…too big.” Tears welled up in his eyes and his thin chest heaved. Charity caught him in a fierce hug, squeezing him hard and whispering to him. Daniel broke down, sobbing.

I got up and walked to the far side of the room. Forthill joined me there.

“These creatures,” I told him quietly, “inflict more than simple physical damage. They rip into the psyches of those they attack.”

“This happened to Daniel?” Forthill asked.

“I’d have to take a closer look to be certain, but it’s probable. Kid’s gonna have it tough for a while,” I said. “It’s like emotional trauma. Someone dying, that kind of thing. It tears people up the same way. They don’t get over it fast.”

“I’ve seen it too,” Forthill said. “I haven’t brought this up yet, but I thought you should know that Nelson came to me earlier this evening.”

I nodded at the cot that had been occupied when we came in. “That him?”

“Yes.”

“How’d he strike you?” I asked.

Forthill pursed his lips. “If I didn’t know you sent him, I would have thought he was having a bad reaction to drugs. He was almost incoherent. Very agitated. Terrified, in point of fact, though he would not or could not explain why. I managed to get him calmed down and he all but fainted.”

I frowned, running the fingers of my right hand back through my hair. “Did you have the sense that anyone was following him?”

“Not at all. Though I might have missed something.” He essayed a tired smile. “It’s late. And I’m not as spry as I used to be, after ten o’clock or so.”

“Thank you for helping him,” I said.

“Of course. Who is he?”

“Molly’s boyfriend,” I said. I glanced across the room, at the mother holding her son. “Maybe Charity doesn’t need to know that part, either.”

He blinked and then sighed, “Oh, dear.”

“Heh. Yeah,” I said.

“May I ask you a question?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“These creatures, these phages. If they are what you say, beings of the spirit world, then how did they manage to cross the house’s threshold?”

“Traditional way,” I said. “They got an invitation.”

“From whom?”

“Probably Molly,” I said.

He frowned. “I have difficulty believing that she would do such a thing.”

I felt my mouth tighten. “She probably didn’t know they were monsters. They’re shapeshifters. They probably appeared to her as someone she knew, and would invite in.”

Forthill said, “Ah. I see. Someone such as you, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” I said quietly. “Makes it the second time someone has used my face to get a shot at Michael’s family.”

Forthill said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “It occurs to me that these creatures killed without compunction in your previous encounters. Why would they carry Molly away instead of simply murdering her?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I don’t know how my spell managed to bring them to Molly. I don’t know precisely what these things are, or where they hail from. Which means I can’t figure out why they’ve been showing up, or where they might have taken the girl.” I waved a hand in a frustrated gesture. “It’s driving me insane. I’ve got tons of facts and none of them are lining up.”

“You’re tired,” Forthill said. “Perhaps some rest—”

I shook my head. “No, Padre. The things that took her won’t rest. The longer she’s in their hands, the less likely it is we’ll ever see her again.” I rubbed at my eyes. “I need to rethink it.”

Forthill nodded at me and rose. On the other side of the room, Charity was covering her exhausted son with a blanket. Even Alicia had surrendered to fatigue, and now only the adults were awake. “I’ll leave you to it then. Have you eaten recently?”

“Sometime in the Mesozoic Era,” I said.

“Sandwich?”

My stomach made a gurgling noise. “Only if you insist.”

“I’ll see to it,” Forthill said. “Excuse me.” He went over to Charity and took her arm, leading her out as he spoke quietly to her. Now that her children had been cared for, she looked like she might come apart at the seams. They left the room together, leaving me in the dimness with Mouse and a lot of sleeping kids.

I thought. I thought some more. I picked up all the facts I knew, turning them every which way, trying to figure out something, anything, that would let me put a stop to this insanity.

The phages. The answer was in the phages. Once I knew their identity, I could begin to work out who might be using them, and what I might do to learn more about them. There had to be a commonality to them, somewhere; something that linked them together, some fact that could provide me a context in which to judge their motivations and intentions.

But what the hell could they have in common, other than being monsters who fed on fear? They’d shown up randomly in a bathroom, a kitchen, a parking lot, a conference room. Their victims had been disparate, seemingly random. They had all appeared as figures from horror movies, but that fact seemed fairly unremarkable, relatively speaking. Try as I might, I could find nothing to join them together, to let me recognize them.

Frustrated, I rose and went over to Daniel’s cot. I called up my Sight. It took me longer than normal. I braced myself and regarded the boy.

I’d been right. He’d taken a psychic flogging. The phage had been worrying at his mind, his spirit, even as it had threatened his flesh. I could see the wounds as long, bleeding tears in his flesh. Poor little guy. It would haunt him. I hoped he would be able to get a little rest before the nightmares woke him up.

I stared at him for a good while, making sure his suffering was burned indelibly into my head. I wanted to remember for the rest of my life what the consequences of my screw-ups might be.

I heard a sound to the side and glanced up without thinking, turning my Sight upon the source of the sound—a restlessly stirring Nelson.

If little Daniel had been the recipient of a savage beating, Nelson’s spirit had been in the hands of Hell itself. His entire upper body was disfigured under my Sight, covered in hideous, festering boils and raw, bleeding burns. The damage was worst around his head, and faded gradually as it descended his torso.

And each of his temples bore tiny, neat holes, sharp and cauterized, as if by a laser scalpel.

Just like Rosie.

Chains of logic cascaded through my brain. My head swam. I shoved the Sight away from me, and my ass fell straight down to the floor.

I knew.

I knew why my spell had sent the phages after the Carpenters.

I knew why Molly had been taken. I could make a good guess at where.

I knew what the phages all had in common.

I knew who had sent them. The realization terrified me with a fear so cold and sharp that it literally paralyzed me. I could barely clap my hand over my mouth to keep from making whimpering sounds.

It took me a while to force myself to calm down. By the time I did, Forthill had returned bearing sandwiches. He settled down on a cot, clearly exhausted, and went to sleep.

I ate my sandwiches. Then I went looking for Charity.

I found her in the chapel, sitting up high in the balcony. She stared down at the altar, and did not react when I came up the steps to her and settled down on the bench beside her. I sat with her in silence for a minute.

“Charity,” I whispered. “I need to ask you something.”

She sat in stony silence. Her chin moved a fraction of a degree up and down.

“How long?” I murmured.

“How long since what?” she asked.

I took a deep breath. “How long has it been since you’ve used your magic?”

Chapter Thirty-two

I couldn’t have gotten more of a reaction if I’d shot her.

Charity’s face turned sheet white, the blood draining from it. She froze in place grasping the edge of the wooden pew in front of her with both hands. Her knuckles turned white, and the wood creaked. She gnashed her teeth and bowed her head.

I didn’t push. I waited.

She opened her eyes again, and she wasn’t hard to read. Her thoughts and emotions were clear on her face. Panic. Desperation. Self-loathing. Her eyes flicked from one possibility to another. She considered denying it. She considered lying to me. She considered simply walking away.

“Charity,” I told her. “Tell me the truth.”

Her breathing quickened. I saw her desperation growing.

I reached out with one hand and turned her face toward me. “Your daughter needs you. If we don’t help her, she’s going to die.”

Charity flinched and pulled away from me. Her shoulders shook with a silent sob. She fought to control her breathing, her voice, and whispered, “A lifetime.”

I felt some tension ease in me. Her reaction confirmed that I was on the right track.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Just putting lots of little things together,” I said. “Please, Charity. Tell me.”

Her voice was rough, half strangled, as though the breath that carried her words had been tainted with something rotten. “I had some talent. It showed just before my sixteenth birthday. You know how awkward that kind of thing can be.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How’d your family take it?”

Her mouth twisted. “My parents were wealthy. Respectable. When they had time to notice me, they expected me to be normal. Respectable. They found it easier to believe that I was a drug addict. Emotionally unbalanced.”

I winced. There were a lot of situations that could meet someone with a burgeoning magical talent. Charity’s was one of the worst.

“They sent me away to schools,” she said. “And to hospitals disguised as schools.” She waved a hand. “I eventually left them. Just left them. I struck out on my own.”

“And fell in with a bad crowd,” I said quietly.

She gave me a bitter smile. “You’ve heard this story before.”

“It isn’t uncommon,” I said quietly. “Who was it?”

“A…coven, of sorts, I suppose,” she said. “More of a cult. There was a young man leading it. Gregor. He had power. He and the others, all young people, mixed in religion and mysticism and philosophy and…well. You’ve probably seen such things before.”

I nodded. I had. A charismatic leader, dedicated followers, a collection of strays and homeless runaways. It rarely developed into something positive.

“I wasn’t strongly gifted,” she said. “Not like you. But I learned about some of what happens out there. About the White Council.” The bitter smile returned. “Everyone was terrified of them. A Warden visited us once. He delivered a warning to Gregor. He’d been toying about with some kind of summoning spells, and the Wardens got wind of it. They interviewed each of us. Evaluated us. Told us the Laws of Magic, and told us never to break them if we wished to live.”

I nodded and listened. She spoke more quickly now, the words coming out in a growing rush. They had been pent up a long time.

“Gregor resented it. He grew distant. He began practicing magic that walked the crumbling edges of the Council’s Laws. He had us all doing it.” Her eyes grew cold. “The others began disappearing. One by one. No one knew where they had gone. But I saw what was happening. I saw Gregor growing in power.”

“He was trading them,” I said.

She nodded once. “He saw my face, when I realized it. I was the next one to go. He came to take me away, and I fought him. Tried to kill him. Wanted to kill him. But he beat me. I remember only parts of it. Being chained to an iron post.”

“The dragon,” I said.

She nodded. Some of the bitterness faded from her smile. “And Michael came. And he destroyed the monster. And saved me.” She looked up at me. Tears filled her eyes and streaked down her cheeks, but she did not blink. “I swore to myself that I would leave that behind me. The magic. The power. I had…urges.” She swallowed. “To do things only…only a monster would do. When Siriothrax died, Gregor went mad. Utterly mad. But I wanted to turn my power against him anyway. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“Hard to do,” I said quietly. “You were a kid. No real training. Exposed to some nasty uses of power.”

“Yes,” she said. “Without Michael, I would never have been able to leave it behind me. He never knew. He still doesn’t know. He remained near me, in my life. Making sure that I was all right. And…he was such a good soul. When he smiled at me, it was like all the light in the world was shining out at me. I wanted to be worthy of that smile.

“My husband saved my life, Mister Dresden, and not only from the dragon. He saved me from myself.” She shook her head. “I never touched my power again after the night I met Michael. We married soon after. And in time, the power withered. And good riddance to it.”

“So when Molly’s talent began to manifest,” I said quietly, “you tried to get her to abandon it as well.”

“I was well aware of how dangerous it could be,” she said. “How innocent it could seem.” She shook her head. “I did not want her exposed to the things that had nearly destroyed my life.”

“But she did it anyway,” I guessed. “That’s what really came between the two of you. That’s why she ran away from home.”

Charity’s voice turned raw. “Yes. I couldn’t get through to her how dangerous it was. What she might be sacrificing.” She made no effort to stem or hide her tears. “And you were there. A hero who fought beside her father. Used his power to help people.” She let out a tired laugh. “For the love of God, you saved my life. We named our child for you. Once she realized she had the talent, nothing could keep her from it.”

Christ. No wonder Charity hadn’t much liked me. Not only was I dragging her husband off to who knew where to fight who knew what, I was also setting an example to Molly of everything Charity wanted her to avoid.

“I didn’t know,” I told her.

She shook her head. Then she said, “I have been honest with you. No one else knows what you do now. Not Michael. Not my daughter. No one.” She drew a Kleenex from her pocket and wiped at her eyes. “What has happened to my daughter?”

I exhaled. “What I’ve got right now is still mostly guesswork,” I said. “But my gut tells me it all fits together.”

“I understand,” she said.

I nodded, and told Charity about the attacks at the convention, and about how Molly had gotten me involved. “I examined the victims of the first two attacks,” I said quietly. “One of them, a girl named Rosie, showed evidence of a kind of psychic trauma. At the time, I attributed it to the phage’s attack on her.”

Charity frowned. “It wasn’t?”

I shook my head. “I found an identical trauma on Nelson.” I took a deep breath and said, “Molly is the link between them. They’re both her friends. I think she was the one who hurt them. I think she used magic to invade their minds.”

Charity stared at me, her expression sickened. “What? No…” She shook her head. “No, Molly wouldn’t…” Her face grew even more pale. “Oh, God. She’s broken one of the Council’s Laws.” She shook her head more violently. “No, no, no. She would not do such a thing.”

I grimaced and said, “I think I know what she did. And why she did it.”

“Tell me.”

I took a deep breath. “Rosie is pregnant. And she showed physical evidence of drug addiction, but none of the psychological evidence of withdrawal. I think Molly took steps when she found out her friend was pregnant—to force her away from the drugs. I think she did it to protect the baby. And then I think she did the same thing to Nelson. But something went wrong. I think what she did to him broke something.” I shook my head. “He got paranoid, erratic.”

Charity stared down at the altar below, shaking her head. “Is it the Council then, that took her?”

“No,” I said. “No. What she did to Rosie and Nelson left a kind of mark on her. A stain. I think she forced Rosie and Nelson to feel fear whenever they came near their drugs. Fear is a powerful motivator and it’s easy to exploit. She wanted them to be afraid of the drugs. She had good intentions, but she wanted her friends to be frightened.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whoever called up these phages,” I said, “needed a way to guide them from the Nevernever to the physical world. They needed a beacon, someone who would resonate with a sympathetic vibe. Someone who, like the phages, wanted to make people feel fear.”

“And they used my Molly,” Charity whispered. Then she stared at me for a moment. “You did it,” she said quietly. “You tried to turn the phages back upon their summoner. You sent them after my daughter.”

“I didn’t know,” I told her. “My God, Charity. I swear to you that I didn’t know. People were dead, and I didn’t want anyone else to be hurt.”

The wooden pew creaked even more sharply in her grip.

“Who did this thing?” she said, and her voice was deadly quiet. “Who is responsible for the harm to my children? Who is the one who called the things that invaded my home?”

“I don’t think anyone called them,” I told her quietly. “I think they were sent.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes narrowed. “Sent?”

I nodded. “I hadn’t considered that possibility, until I realized what all of the attacks had in common. Mirrors.”

“Mirrors?” Charity asked. “I don’t understand.”

“That was the common element,” I said. “Mirrors. The bathroom. Rosie’s makeup mirror in the conference room. Plenty of reflective steel surfaces in a commercial kitchen. And Madrigal’s rental van’s windshield was reflecting images very clearly.”

She shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

“There are plenty of things that can use mirrors as windows or doorways from the spirit world,” I said. “But there’s only one thing that feeds on fear and uses mirrors as pathways back and forth from the Nevernever. It’s called a fetch.”

“Fetch.” Charity tilted her head, her eyes vague, as though searching through old memories. “I’ve heard of them. They’re…aren’t they creatures of Faerie?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Specifically, they’re creatures of deepest, darkest Winter.” I swallowed. “Even more specifically, they’re Queen Mab’s elite spies and assassins. Shapeshifters with a lot of power.”

“Mab?” she whispered. “The Mab?”

I nodded slowly.

“And they’ve taken my daughter,” she said. “Carried her away to Faerie.”

I nodded again. “She’ll be a rich resource for them. A magically talented young mortal. Compatible energy. Not enough experience to defend herself. They can feed on her and her magic for hours. Maybe days. That’s why they didn’t just kill her and have done.”

Charity swallowed. “What can we do?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It would be nice to have your husband along, though.”

She bit her lip and sent what might have been a hateful look down at the altar. “He’s out of reach. Messages have been left, but…”

“We’re on our own,” I said.

“We must do something,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The problem is that we don’t know where to do it.”

“I thought you just said that they had taken her back to Faerie.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But just because I tell you Ayer’s Rock is in Australia doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to find the damned thing. Australia’s big. And Faerie makes it look like Rhode Island.”

Charity clenched her jaw. “There must be something.”

“I’m working on it,” I said.

“What will…” She paused and cleared her throat. “How long does she have?”

“Hard to say,” I told her. “Time can go by at different rates between here and there. A day here, but an hour there. Or vice versa.”

She stared steadily at me.

I looked away and said, “Not long. It depends on how long she holds out. They’ll get all the fear out of her that they can and then…” I shook my head. “A day. At most.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “I will not let that happen. There must be a way to take her back.”

“I can get to Faerie,” I said. “But you’ve got to understand something. We’re talking about opening a path into deep Winter. If I’m strong enough to open the way, and if I’m strong enough to hold it open while simultaneously running a rescue operation against at least one ancient fetch who ate my magic like candy earlier tonight, we’re still talking about defying the will of Queen Mab. If she’s there, there’s not a damned thing I can do. I don’t have enough power to challenge her in the heart of her domain. The whole damned White Council doesn’t have enough power. On top of that, I’d have to know precisely where to cross over into Faerie, because I’d have only minutes to grab her and get out. And I have no idea where she is.”

“What are you saying?” she asked quietly.

“That I can’t do it,” I told her. “It’s suicide.”

Charity’s back stiffened. “So you’re willing to leave her there?”

“No,” I said. “But it means that I’m going to have to find help wherever I can get it. Maybe from people and things that you won’t much like.” I shook my head. “And it’s possible I’ll get myself killed before I can even make the attempt. And even if I get her out…there could be a price.”

“I’ll pay it,” she said. Her voice was flat, strong, certain. “For Molly, I’ll pay it.”

I nodded. I didn’t say the next thought out loud—that even if we did get the girl back, there might not be much left of her mind. And she’d broken one of the Laws of Magic. She could wind up on the floor of some lonely warehouse, a black bag over her head, until Morgan’s sword took it off her shoulders. Or, maybe worse, she could already have been twisted by the power she’d used.

Even if I could find Molly and bring her home, it might already be too late to save her.

But I could burn that bridge when I came to it. First, I had to find her. The only way to do that was to learn where the fetches had carried her through to the Nevernever. Geography in the Nevernever isn’t like geography in the normal world. The Nevernever touches our world only at certain points of sympathetic energy. The portion of the Nevernever that touched an empty and abandoned warehouse might not be anywhere near the area of the spirit world that touched the full and busy child-care center across the physical street from the warehouse. To make it worse, the connections between the mortal world and the Nevernever changed slowly over time, as the world changed.

There could be a thousand places in Chicago where the fetches might have dragged Molly back to their lair. I had to find the correct one. And I had to do it before dawn, before the rising sun scattered and dispersed the residual traces of her presence that would be my only trail.

I had about two hours, tops, to get my aching body back to my apartment to bathe and prepare for a spell that would have been dangerous had I been rested and entirely whole. Tired, hurting, pressured, and worried as I was, I would probably kill myself on Little Chicago’s trial run.

But my only other option was walk away and leave the girl in the hands of creatures that made nightmares afraid of the dark.

“I’ll need something of hers,” I said, rising. “Hair or fingernail clippings would be best.”

Charity said, “I have a lock of her hair in her baby book.”

“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll pick it up from your place. Where’s the book?”

She rose. “I’ll show you.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s wise.”

“She’s my daughter, Mister Dresden,” Charity said. “I’m coming with you.”

I was too tired to argue. So I nodded, and started down out of the balcony. My ankle twinged, and I wobbled and almost fell.

Charity caught me.

Chapter Thirty-three

“This is Thomas,” I told Charity, waving a hand at my brother, who had fallen into step beside me as I left the church. “He’s more dangerous than he looks.”

“I have a black belt,” Thomas explained.

Charity arched an eyebrow, looked at Thomas for about a second, and said, “You’re the White Court vampire who took my husband to that strip bar.”

Thomas gave Charity a toothy smile and said, “Hey, it’s nice to be remembered. And to work with someone who has a clue.” He hooked a thumb at me and added, sotto voce, “For a change.”

Charity’s regard didn’t change. It wasn’t icy, nor friendly, nor touched by emotion. It was simply a remote, steady gaze, the kind one reserves for large dogs who pass nearby. Cautious observation, unexcited and deliberate. “I appreciate that you have fought beside my husband before. But I also want you to understand that what you are gives me reason to regard you with suspicion. Please do nothing to deepen that sentiment. I do not remain passive to threats.”

Thomas pursed his lips. I half expected anger to touch his gaze, but it didn’t. He simply nodded and said, “Understood, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, and we reached her van. “You ride in the rearmost seat.”

I started to protest, but Thomas put his hand on my shoulder and shook his head. “Her ride, her rules,” he murmured to me in passing. “I can respect that. So can you.”

So we all got in and headed for the Carpenters’ house.

“How’s Mouse?” Thomas asked.

“Leg’s hurt,” I said.

“Took one hell of a shot to do it,” he noted.

“That’s why I left him back there,” I said. “Could be he’s pushing his luck. Besides, he can help Forthill keep an eye on the kids.”

“Uh-huh,” Thomas said. “Am I the only one who is starting to think that maybe Mouse is something special?”

“Always thought that,” I said.

“I wonder if he’s an actual breed.”

Charity glanced over her shoulder and said, “He looks something like a Caucasian.”

“Impossible,” I said. “He has rhythm and he can dance.”

Charity shook her head and said, “It’s a dog bred by the Soviet Union in the Caucasus Mountains for use in secured military installations. It’s one of the only breeds that grows so large. But they tend to be a great deal more aggressive than your dog.”

“Oh, he’s aggressive enough for anybody, when he needs to be,” I said.

Thomas engaged Charity in a polite conversation about dogs and breeds, and I leaned my head against the window and promptly fell asleep. I woke up briefly when the van stopped. Charity and Thomas spoke, and I dozed as they loaded some things into the van. I didn’t wake up again until Thomas touched my shoulder and said, “We’re at your apartment, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Okay.” I blinked a couple of times and hopped out of the van. “Thomas,” I said. “Get in touch with Murphy for me, and tell her I need her at my place, now. And…here…” I fumbled in my duster’s pockets and found a white napkin and a marker. I wrote another number. “Call this number. Tell them that I’m calling in my personal marker.”

Thomas took the paper and arched a brow. “Can’t you be any more specific?”

“I don’t have to be,” I said. “They’ll know why I want them. This will just tell them that it’s time for them to get together with me.”

“Why me?” Thomas asked.

“Because I don’t have time,” I said. “So unless you want to play with dangerous magic divinations, call the damned number and stop making me waste energy explaining myself.”

“Heil, Harry,” Thomas said, his tone a bit sullen. But I knew he’d do it.

“Hair?” I asked Charity.

She passed me an unmarked white envelope, her expression a mask.

“Thank you.” I took it and headed for my apartment, the two of them following after me. “I’ll be working downstairs. The two of you should stay in the living room. Please be as quiet as you can and don’t walk around too much.”

“Why?” Charity asked.

I shook my head tiredly and waved a hand. “No, no questions right now. I’ll need everything I’ve got to find where they took Molly, and I’m already rushing this thing. Let me concentrate. I’ll explain it later.” If I survive it, I thought.

I felt Charity’s eyes on me, and I glanced back at her. She gave her head a brief, stiff nod. I took down the wards and we went inside. Mister came over and rammed his shoulder against my legs, then wound his way around between Thomas’s legs, accepting a few token pats from my half brother. Then he surprised me by giving Charity the same treatment.

I shook my head. Cats. No accounting for taste.

Charity looked around my apartment, frowning, and said, “It’s very well kept up. I had expected more…debris.”

“He cheats,” Thomas said, and headed for the refrigerator.

I ignored them. There wasn’t time for the full ritual cleansing and meditation, but my day had exposed me to all kinds of stains, external and otherwise, and I considered the shower to be the most indispensable portion of the preparation. So I went into my room, stripped, lit a candle, and got into the shower. Cool water sluiced over me. I scrubbed my skin until it was pink, and washed my hair until it got sore.

The whole while I sought out a quiet place in my mind, somewhere sheltered from pain and guilt, from fear and anger. I pushed out every sensation but for the bathing, and without conscious effort my motions took on the steady rhythm of ritual, something commonplace transformed into an act of art and meditation, like a Japanese tea ceremony.

I longed for my bed. I longed for sleep. Warmth. Laughter. I pinned down those longings one at a time and crucified them, suspending them until such time as my world was a place that could afford such desires. One last emotion was too big for me, though. Try though I might, I could not keep fear from finding a way to slither into my thoughts. Little Chicago’s maiden run was an enormous unknown quantity. If I’d done it all right, I would have myself one hell of a tool for keeping track of things in my town.

If I’d made even a tiny mistake, Molly was dead. Or worse than dead. And I’d get to find out what the light at the end of the long tunnel really was.

I couldn’t escape the fear. It was built in to the situation. So instead I tried to make my peace with it. Fear, properly handled, could be turned into something useful. So I made a small, neat place for its use in my head, a kind of psychic litter box, and hoped that the fear wouldn’t start jumping around at the worst possible moment.

I got out of the shower, dried, and slipped into my white robe again. I kept my thoughts focused, picked up my backpack and the white envelope, and went down to the basement lab. I shut the door behind me. If Little Chicago went nova, preventative spells I’d laid to keep energies from escaping the lab should mitigate the damage significantly. It wasn’t a perfect plan, by any means, but I’m only human.

Which was a disturbing thought as I stared at the model on the table. Even a tiny mistake. Only human.

I set the envelope at the edge of the table, my backpack on a shelf, and went around the basement lighting candles with a match. A spell would have been faster and neater, but I wanted to save every drop of power for managing the divination. So I made lighting each candle a ritual of its own, focusing on my movements, on precision, on nothing but the immediate interplay of heat and cold, light and darkness, fire and shadow.

I lit the last candle and turned to the model city.

The buildings shone silver in the candlelight, and the air quivered with the power I’d built into the model. Some tiny voice of common sense in my head told me that this was a horribly bad idea. It told me that I was making decisions because I was in pain and exhausted, and that it would be far wiser to get some sleep and attempt the spell when I stood a reasonable chance of pulling it off.

I crucified that little voice, too. There was no room for doubts. Then I turned to the table, and to the elongated circle of silver I’d built into its surface.

Lasciel appeared between me and the table, in her usual white tunic, her red hair pulled back into a tight braid. She held up both hands and said, quietly, “I cannot permit you to do this.”

“You,” I said in a quiet, distant voice, “are almost as annoying as a sudden phone call.”

“This is pointless,” she said. “My host, I beg you to reconsider.”

“I don’t have time for you,” I said. “I have a job to do.”

“A job?” she asked. “Evading your responsibilities, you mean?”

I tilted my head slightly. In my current mental state, the emotions I felt seemed infinitely far away and all but inconsequential. “How so?”

“Look at yourself,” she replied, her voice that low, quiet, reasonable tone one uses around madmen and ugly drunks. “Listen to yourself. You’re tired. You’re injured. You’re wracked by guilt. You’re frightened. You will destroy yourself.”

“And you with me?” I asked her.

“Correct,” she said. “I do not fear the end of my existence, my host, but I would not be extinguished by one too self-deluded to understand what he was about.”

“I’m not deluded,” I said.

“But you are. You know that this effort shall probably kill you. And once it has done so, you will be free from any onus of what happened to the girl. After all, you heroically died in the effort to find her and retrieve her. You won’t have to attend her funeral. You won’t have to explain yourself to Michael. You won’t have to tell her parents that their daughter is dead because of your incompetence.”

I did not reply. The emotions grew a little closer.

“This isn’t anything more than an elaborate form of suicide, chosen during a moment of weakness,” Lasciel said. “I do not wish to see you destroy yourself, my host.”

I stared at her.

I thought about it.

She might be right.

It didn’t matter.

“Move,” I murmured. “Before I move you.” Then I paused and said, “Wait a minute. What am I thinking? It isn’t as though you can stop me.” Then I simply stepped through Lasciel’s image to the table, and reached for the white envelope.

The white envelope began to spin in place on the table, and abruptly became dozens of envelopes, each identical, each whirling like a pinwheel.

“But I can,” Lasciel said quietly. I looked up to find her standing on the opposite side of the table from me. “I witnessed the birth of time itself. I watched the mortal coil spring forth from perfect darkness. I watched the stars form, watched this world coalesce, watched as life was breathed into it and as your kind rose to rule it.” She put both hands on the table and leaned toward me, her blue eyes cold and hard. “Thus far, I have behaved as a guest ought. But do not mistake propriety for weakness, mortal. I beg you not to oblige me to take further action.”

I narrowed my eyes and reached for my Sight.

Before I could use it, my left hand exploded into flame.

Pain, pain, PAIN. Fire, scorching, parboiling my hand as I tried to hold it back with my shield bracelet. The memory of my injury in that vampire-haunted basement came rushing back to me in THX, and my nerve endings were listening.

I fought down a scream, breathing, my teeth snapping together so suddenly and sharply that a fleck of one of my molars chipped away.

It was an illusion, I told myself. A memory. It’s a ghost, nothing more. It cannot harm you if you do not allow it to do so. I pushed hard against that memory, turning the focus of my will against it.

I felt the illusion-memory wobble, and then the pain was gone, the fire out. My body pumped endorphins into my bloodstream a heartbeat later, and I drifted on them as my focus started to collapse. I leaned hard against the table, my left hand held close to my chest in pure reflex, my right supporting my weight. I turned my attention to the envelopes and forced my will against them until the illusions grew translucent. I picked up the real envelope.

Lasciel regarded me steadily, her beautiful face unyielding, determined.

“Sooner or later I’ll push through anything you throw,” I panted. “You know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “But you will not be able to focus on the divination until you are quit of me. I may force you to exhaust yourself resisting me, in which case you will not attempt the divination. Even if I only delay you until dawn, there will be no need for you to attempt it.” She lifted her chin. “Whatever happens, the divination will not be successful.”

I let out a low chuckle, which made Lasciel frown at me. “You missed it,” I said.

“Missed what?”

“The loophole. I can kill myself trying it while you rock the boat. And after all, this entire exercise is nothing more than a suicide attempt in any case. Why not go through with it?”

Her jaw clenched. “You would murder yourself rather than yield to reason?”

“More manslaughter than murder, I’d say.”

“You’re mad,” the fallen angel said.

“Get me some Alka-Seltzer and I’ll foam at the mouth, too.” This time I hit Lasciel with the hard look. “There’s a child out there who needs me. I’d rather die than let her down. I’m doing the spell, period. So fuck off.”

She shook her head in frustration and looked away, frowning. “You are quite likely to die.”

“Broken record much?” I asked. I got out the lock of baby-fine hair, set my knife down on the table, and lit the ceremonial candles there. The fallen angel was correct, dammit. The fear stirred dangerously inside me, and my fingers shook hard enough to break the first kitchen match instead of kindling it to life.

“If you must do this,” Lasciel said, “at least attempt to survive it. Let me help you.”

“You can help me by shutting the hell up and going away,” I told her. “Hellfire isn’t going to be any use to me here.”

“Perhaps not,” Lasciel said. “But there is another way.”

There was a shimmer of light in the corner of my eye, and I turned to see a slowly pulsing silver glow upon the floor in the middle of my summoning circle. Two feet beneath it lay the Blackened Denarius where the rest of Lasciel was imprisoned.

“Take up the coin,” she urged me. “I can at least protect you from a backlash. I beg you not to throw your life away.”

I bit my lip.

I didn’t want to die, dammit. And the thought of failing to save Molly was almost worse than death. The holder of one of the thirty ancient silver coins had access to tremendous power. With that kind of boost, I could probably pull the spell off, and even if it went south I could survive it under Lasciel’s protection. Somehow, I knew that if I chose to do it I could get the coin out from under the concrete in only a moment, too.

I stared at the silver glow for a moment.

Then I rolled my eyes and said, “Are you still here?”

Lasciel’s face smoothed into an emotionless mask, but there was a subtle, ugly tone of threat in her voice. “You are much easier to talk to when you are asleep, my host.”

And she was gone.

Fear rattled around inside me. I tried to calm it, but I couldn’t regain my earlier detachment—not until I thought of young Daniel, mangled beneath my wizard Sight, wounded defending his family from something I had sent after them.

I thought of Molly’s brothers and sisters. I thought of her mother, her father. I thought of the laughter, the sheer, joyous, rowdy life of Michael’s family.

Then I pinked my fingertip with my ritual knife, touched the lock of baby hair to it, and laid it down within Little Chicago. I used a second drop of blood and an effort of will to touch the circle on the tabletop, closing it up and beginning the spell. I closed my eyes, focusing, murmuring a stream of faux Latin as I reached out to the model and brought it to life.

My senses blurred, and suddenly I was standing on the tabletop, at the model of my own boardinghouse. I thought the silver-colored model had grown to life size at first, then realized that the inverse was more accurate. I had shrunk to scale with Little Chicago, my awareness now within the spell rather than in my own body, which stood over the table like Godzilla, murmuring the words of the spell.

I closed my eyes and thought of Molly, my blood touched upon her lock of hair, and to my utter surprise I shot off down the street with no more effort than it took to peddle a bicycle. The streets beneath me and the buildings around me glowed with white energy, the whole of the place humming like high-power tension lines.

Stars and stones, Little Chicago worked. It worked well. A surge of jubilation went through me, and my speed increased in proportion. I flashed through the streets, seeing faint images of people, like ghosts, the unsteady reflections of those now moving through the real Chicago around me. But then the spell wavered, and I found myself moving in a circle like a baffled hound trying to pick up a scent trail.

It didn’t work.

I made an effort and stood back in my own body, staring down at Little Chicago, badly fatigued.

Exhausted, I reached for my backpack, sat down, and fumbled Bob into my lap.

His eyes lit up at once and he said, “Don’t get me wrong, big guy, I like you. But not that way.”

“Shut up,” I growled at him. “Just tried to use Little Chicago to find Molly’s trail. It fizzled.”

Bob blinked. “It worked? The model actually worked? It didn’t explode?”

“Obviously,” I said. “It worked fine. But I used a simple tracking spell, and it couldn’t pick up her trail. So what’s wrong with the damned thing?”

“Put me on the table,” Bob said.

I reached up and did so. He was quiet for a minute before he said, “It’s fine, Harry. I mean, it’s working just fine.”

“Like hell,” I growled. “I’ve done that tracking spell hundreds of times. It must be the model.”

“I’m telling you, it’s perfect,” Bob said. “I’m looking at the darn thing. If it wasn’t your spell, and it wasn’t the model…Hey, what did you use to focus the tracking spell?”

“Lock of her hair.”

“That’s baby hair, Harry.”

“So?”

Bob let out a disgusted sound. “So it won’t work. Harry, babies are like one big enormous blank slate. Molly has changed quite a bit since that lock was taken. She doesn’t have much to do with the person it got snipped from. Naturally the spell couldn’t track her.”

“Dammit!” I snarled. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. I hadn’t ever used a lock of baby hair in the spell before, except once, to find a baby. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

A tiny mistake.

I was only human.

And I had failed Molly.

Chapter Thirty-four

I turned away from the table and hauled myself laboriously up the ladder to my living room.

Charity sat on the edge of the couch with her head bowed, her lips moving. As I emerged, she stood up and faced me, tension quivering through her. Thomas, who had a kettle on my little wood-burning stove, glanced over his shoulder.

I shook my head at them.

Charity’s face went white and she slowly sat down again.

I went to the kitchen, found my bottle of aspirin, and chewed up three of them, grimacing at the taste. Then I drank a glass of water. “You make those calls?” I asked Thomas.

“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, Murphy should be here in a minute.”

I nodded at him and walked over to settle into one of the easy chairs by the fireplace with my glass of water, and told Charity, “I thought I could find her. I’m sorry. I…” I shook my head and trailed off into silence.

“Thank you for trying, Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. She didn’t look up.

“It was the baby hair,” I said to Charity. “It didn’t work. Hair was too old. I couldn’t…” I sighed. “Just too tired to think straight, maybe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Charity looked up at me. I expected fear, anger, maybe a little bit of contempt in her features. But none of that was there. There was instead something that I’d seen in Michael when the situation was really, really bad. It was a kind of quiet calm, a surety totally at odds with the situation, and I could not fathom its source or substance.

“We will find her,” she told me quietly. “We’ll bring her home.” Her voice held the solid confidence of someone stating a fact as simple and obvious as two plus two is four.

I didn’t quite break out into a bitter laugh. I was too tired to do that. But I shook my head and stared at the empty fireplace.

“Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. “I don’t pretend to know as much about magic as you do. I’m quite certain you have a great deal of power.”

“Just not enough,” I said. “Not enough to do any good.”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Charity actually smile. “It’s difficult for you to realize that you are, at times, as helpless as the rest of us.”

She was probably right, but I didn’t say as much out loud. “I made a mistake, and Molly might be hurt because of it. I don’t know how to live with that.”

“You’re only human,” she said, and there was a trace of pensive reflection in her voice. “For all of your power.”

“That answer isn’t good enough,” I said quietly. I glanced at her, to find her watching me, her dark eyes intent. “Not good enough for Molly.”

“Have you done all that you can to help her?” Charity asked me.

I racked my brain for a useless moment and then said, “Yeah.”

She spread her hands. “Then I can hardly ask you for more.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

She smiled again. “Yes. It surprises me to hear myself say it, as well. I have not been tolerant of you. I have not been pleasant to you.”

I waved a tired hand. “Yeah. But I get why not.”

“I realize that now,” she said. “You saw. But it took all of this to make me see it.”

“See what?”

“That much of the anger I’ve directed at you was not rightfully yours. I was afraid. I let my fear become something that controlled me. That made me harm others. You.” She bowed her head. “And I let it worsen matters with Molly. I feared for her safety so much that I went to war with her. I drove her toward what I most wished her to avoid. All because of my fear. I have been afraid, and I am ashamed.”

“Everyone gets scared sometimes,” I said.

“But I allowed it to rule me. I should have been stronger than that, Mister Dresden. Wiser than that. We all should be. God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of love, of power, and of self-control.”

I absorbed that for a moment. Then I asked, “Are you apologizing to me?”

She arched an eyebrow and then said, her tone wry, “I am not yet that wise.”

That actually did pull a quiet laugh from me.

“Mister Dresden,” she said. “We’ve done all that we can do. Now we pray. We have faith.”

“Faith?” I asked.

She regarded me with calm, confident eyes. “That a hand mightier than yours or mine will shield my daughter. That we will be shown a way. That He will not leave his faithful when they are in need.”

“I’m not all that faithful,” I said.

She smiled again, tired but unwavering. “I have enough for both of us.” She met my eyes steadily and said, “There are other powers than your magic, or that of the dark spirits that oppose us. We are not alone in this fight, Mister Dresden. We need not be afraid.”

I averted my eyes before a soulgaze could get going. And before she could see them tear up. Charity, regardless of how she’d treated me in the past, had been there when the chips were down. She’d cared for me when I’d been injured. She’d supported me when she didn’t have to do so. As abrasive, accusatory, and harsh as she could be, I had never for an instant doubted her love for her husband, for her children, or the sincerity of her faith. I’d never liked her too much—but I had always respected her.

Now more than ever.

I just hoped she was right, when she said we weren’t in this alone. I wasn’t sure I really believed that, deep down. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against God, except for maybe wishing He was a little less ambiguous and had better taste in hired help. People like Michael and Charity and, to a lesser extent, Murphy, had made me take some kind of faith under consideration, now and again. But I wasn’t the sort of guy who did well when it came to matters of belief. And I wasn’t the sort of guy who I thought God would really want hanging around his house or his people.

Hell. There was a fallen angel in my brain. I counted myself lucky that I hadn’t met Michael or one of the other Knights from the business end of one of the Swords.

I looked at the gift popcorn tin in the corner by the door, where my staff and rod were settled, along with my practice fighting staff, an uncarved double of my wizardly tool, my sword cane, an umbrella, and the wooden cane sheath of Fidelacchius, one of the three swords borne by Michael and his brothers in arms.

The sword’s last wielder had told me that I was to keep it and pass it on to the next Knight. He said I would know who, and when. And then the sword sat there in my popcorn tin for years. When my house had been invaded by bad guys, they’d overlooked it. Thomas, who had lived with me for almost two years, had never touched it or commented on it. I wasn’t sure that he’d ever noticed it, either. It just sat there, waiting.

I glanced at the sword, and then up at the roof. If God wanted to throw a little help our way, now would be a good time to get that foreordained knowledge of who to give the sword to, at least. Not that it would do us all that much good, I supposed. With or without Fidelacchius, we had a fair amount of power of the ass-kicking variety. What we needed was knowledge. Without knowledge, all the ass kicking in the world wouldn’t help.

I watched the sword for a minute, just in case.

No light show. No sound effects. Not even a burst of vague intuition. I guess that wasn’t the kind of help Heaven was dishing out at the moment.

I settled back in my chair. Charity had returned to her quiet prayers. I tried to think thoughts that wouldn’t clash, and hoped that God wouldn’t hold it against Molly that I was on her side.

I glanced back over my shoulder. Thomas had listened to the whole thing with an almost supernatural quality of noninvolvement. He was watching Charity with troubled eyes. He traded a glance with me that seemed to mirror most of what I was feeling. Then he brought everyone a cup of tea, and faded immediately back to the kitchen alcove again while Charity prayed.

Maybe ten minutes later, Murphy knocked at the door and then opened it. Besides Thomas, she was the only person I’d entrusted with an amulet that would let her through my wards without harm. She wore one of her usual work outfits: black jacket, white shirt, dark pants, comfortable shoes. Grey predawn light backlit her. She took a look around the place, frowning, before she shut the door. “What’s happened?”

I brought her up to speed, finishing with my failure to locate the girl’s trail.

“So you’re trying to find Molly?” Murphy asked. “With a spell?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I thought that was pretty routine for you,” Murphy said. “I mean, I can think of four or five times at least you’ve done that.”

I shook my head. “That’s tracking down where something is. I’m looking for where Molly’s been. It’s a different bag of snakes.”

“Why?” Murphy asked. “Why not go straight to her?”

“Because the fetches have taken her back home with them,” I said. “She’s in the Nevernever. I can’t zero in on her there. The best I can do is to try to find where they crossed over, follow them across, and use a regular tracking spell once I’m through.”

“Oh.” She frowned and walked over to me. “And for that you need her hair?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Which we don’t have. So we’re stuck.”

She chewed on her lip. “Couldn’t you use something else?”

“Nail clippings,” I said. “Or blood, if it was fresh enough.”

“Uh-huh,” Murphy said. She nodded at Charity. “What about her blood?”

“What?” I said.

“She’s the girl’s mother,” Murphy said. “Blood of her blood. Wouldn’t that work?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” Murphy said. “Why not?”

“Because…” I frowned. “Uh…” I looked up at Charity for a moment. Actually, there was a magical connection between parents and children. A strong one. My mother had worked a spell linked to Thomas and me that would confirm to us that we were brothers. The connection had been established, even though she had been the only common parent between us. The blood connection was the deepest known to magic. “It might work,” I said quietly. I thought about it some more and breathed, “Stars and stones, not just work. Actually, for this spell, it might work better.”

Charity said nothing, but her eyes glowed with that steady, unmovable strength. I thought to myself, That’s what faith looks like.

I nodded my head to her in a bow of acknowledgment.

Then I turned to Murphy and gave her a jubilant kiss on the mouth.

Murphy blinked in total surprise.

“Yes!” I whooped, laughing. “Murphy, you rock! Go team Dresden!”

“Hey, I’m the one who rocks,” she said. “Go team Murphy.”

Thomas snorted. Even Charity had a small smile, though her eyes were closed and her head was bowed again, murmuring thanks, presumably to the Almighty.

Murphy had asked the exact question I’d needed to hear to tip me off to the answer. Help from above? I was not above taking help from on high, and given whose child was in danger it was entirely possible that divine intervention was precisely what had happened. I touched the brim of my mental hat and nodded my gratitude vaguely heavenward, and then turned to hurry back to the lab. “Charity, I presume you’re willing to donate for the cause?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then we’re in business. Get ready to move, people. This will only take me a minute.”

I stopped and put a hand on Charity’s shoulder. “And then we’re going to get your daughter back.”

“Yes,” she murmured, looking up at me with fire in her eyes. “Yes, we are.”

This time, the spell worked. I should have known where the fetches had found the swiftest passage from their realm to Chicago. It was one of those things that, in retrospect, was obvious.

Charity’s minivan pulled into the little parking lot behind Clark Pell’s rundown old movie theater. It was out of view of the street. The sun had risen on our way there, though heavy cloud cover and grumbling thunder promised unusually bad weather for so early in the day. That shouldn’t have surprised me either. When the Queens of Faerie were moving around backstage, the weather quite often seemed to reflect their presence.

Murphy pulled her car in right behind the minivan and parked beside it.

“All right Murph, Thomas,” I said, getting out of the van. “Faerie Fighting 101.”

“I know, Harry,” Thomas said.

“Yeah, but I’m going to go over it anyway, so listen up. We’re heading into the Nevernever. We’ve got some wicked faeries to handle, which means we have to be prepared for illusions.” I rummaged in my backpack and came out with a small jar. “This is an ointment that should let you see through most of their bullshit.” I went to Thomas and slapped some on him, then did Murphy’s eyes, and then did my own. The ointment was my own mixture, based on the one the Gatekeeper used. Mine smelled better, but stained the skin it touched with a heavy brown-black tone. I started to put the jar away. “After we—”

Charity calmly took the jar from my hands, opened it, and put ointment on her own eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m preparing to take back my daughter,” she said.

“You aren’t going with us,” I told her.

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you’re not. Charity, this is seriously dangerous. We can’t afford to babysit you.”

Charity put the lid back on the jar and dropped it into my backpack. Then she opened the sliding door on the minivan and drew out a pair of heavy-duty plastic storage bins. She opened the first, and calmly peeled out of her pullover jersey.

I noted a couple of things. First, that Charity had won some kind of chromosomal lottery when it came to the body department. She wore a sports bra beneath the sweater, and she looked like she could have modeled it if she cared to do so. Molly had definitely gotten her looks from her mother.

The second thing I noticed was Charity’s arms. She had broad shoulders, for a woman, but her arms were heavy with muscle and toned. Her forearms, especially, looked lean and hard, muscles easily seen shifting beneath tight skin. I traded a glance with Murphy, who looked impressed. I just watched Charity for a minute, frowning.

Charity took an arming jacket from the first tub. It wasn’t some beat-up old relic, either. It was a neat, quilted garment, heavy black cotton over the quilting, which was backed by what looked a lot like Kevlar ballistic fabric. She pulled it on, belted it into place, and then withdrew an honest-to-God coat of mail from the tub. She slipped into it and fastened half a dozen clasps with the swift assurance of long practice. A heavy sword belt came next, securing the mail coat. Then she pulled on a tight-fitting cap made in the same manner as the jacket, tucking her braided hair up into it, and then slipped a ridged steel helmet onto her head.

She opened the second tub and drew out a straight sword with a cruciform hilt. The weapon was only slightly more slender and shorter than Michael’s blessed blade, but after she inspected the blade for notches or rust, she flicked it around a few times as lightly as she would a rolled-up newspaper, then slid the weapon into the sheath on the sword belt. She tucked a pair of heavy chain gloves through the belt. Finally, she took a hammer from the big tub. It had a steel-bound handle about four feet long, and mounted a head almost as large as a sledgehammer’s, backed by a wicked-looking spike.

She put the hammer over her shoulder, balancing its weight with one arm, and turned to me. She looked ferocious, so armed and armored, and the heavy black stain around her eyes didn’t do anything to soften the image. Ferocious, hell. She looked competent—and dangerous.

Everyone just stared at her.

She arched a golden eyebrow. “I make all of my husband’s armor,” she said calmly, “as well as his spare weaponry. By hand.”

“Uh,” I said. No wonder she was buff. “You know how to fight, too?”

She looked at me as though I was a dim-witted child. “My husband didn’t become a master swordsman by osmosis. He works hard at it. Who did you suppose he’s practiced against for the last twenty years?” Her eyes smoldered again, a direct challenge to me. “These creatures have taken my Molly. And I will not remain here while she is in danger.”

“Ma’am,” Murphy said quietly. “Practice is very different from the real thing.”

Charity nodded. “This won’t be my first fight.”

Murphy frowned for a moment, and then turned a troubled glance to me. I glanced at Thomas, who was facing away, a little apart from the rest of us, staying out of the decision-making process.

Charity stood there with that warhammer over one shoulder, her weight planted, her eyes determined.

“Hell’s bells,” I sighed. “Okay, John Henry, you’re on the team.” I waved a hand and went back to the briefing. “Faeries hate and fear the touch of iron, and that includes steel. It burns them and neutralizes their magic.”

“There are extra weapons in the tub, as well as additional coats of mail,” Charity offered. “Though they might not fit you terribly well, Lieutenant Murphy.”

Charity had thought ahead. I was glad one of us had. “Mail coat is just the thing for discouraging nasty faerie beasties with claws.”

Murphy looked skeptical. “I don’t want to break up the Battle of Hastings dress theme, Harry, but I find guns generally more useful than swords. Are you serious about this?”

“You might not be able to rely on your guns,” I told her. “Reality doesn’t work the same way in the Nevernever, and it doesn’t always warn you when it’s changing the rules. It’s common to find areas of Faerie where gunpowder is noncombustible.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“Nope. Get some steel on you. There’s not a thing the faeries can do about that. It’s the biggest edge mortals have on them.”

“The only edge,” Charity corrected. She passed me a sleeveless mail shirt, probably the only one that would fit me. I dumped my leather duster, armored myself, and then put the duster back on over the mail. Murphy shook her head, then she and Thomas collected mail and weaponry of their own.

“Couple more things,” I said. “Once we’re inside, don’t eat or drink anything. Don’t accept any gifts, or any offers from a faerie interested in making a deal. You don’t want to wind up owing favors to one of the Sidhe, believe you me.” I frowned, thinking. Then I took a deep breath and said, “One thing more. Each of us must do everything possible to control our fear.”

Murphy frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“We can’t afford to carry in too much fear with us. The fetches feed on it. It makes them stronger. If we go in there without keeping our fear under control, they’ll sense a meal coming. We’re all afraid, but we can’t let it control our thoughts, actions, or decisions. Try to keep your breathing steady and remain as calm as you can.”

Murphy nodded, frowning faintly.

“All right, then. Everyone hat up and sing out when you’re good to go.”

I watched as Murphy got her gear into place. Charity helped her secure the armor. Her mail was a short-sleeved shirt, maybe one of Charity’s spare suits. She’d compensated for the oversize armor by belting it in tight, but the short sleeves fell to her elbows, and the hem reached most of the way to her knees. Murphy looked like a kid dressing up in an adult’s clothes.

Her expression grew calm and distant as she worked, the way it did when she was focused on shooting, or in the middle of one of her five trillion and three formal katas. I closed my eyes and tentatively pushed my magical senses toward her. I could feel the energy in her, the life, pulsing and steady. There were tremors in it, here and there, but there was no screaming beacon of violent terror that would trumpet our approach to the bad guys.

Not that I thought there would be. What she lacked in height, she more than made up for in guts. On the other hand, Murphy had never been in the Nevernever, and even though Faerie was as normal a place as you can find there, it could get pretty weird. Despite training, discipline, and determination, novice deepwater divers can never be sure that they will remain free from the onset of the condition called “pressure sickness.” The Nevernever was much the same. You can’t tell how someone is going to react the first time they fall down the rabbit hole.

Thomas, being Thomas, made the mail into a fashion statement. He wore black clothing, black combat boots, and the arming jacket and mail somehow managed to go with the rest of his wardrobe. He had his saber on his belt on his left side, carried the shotgun in his right hand, and made the whole ensemble look like an upper-class version of The Road Warrior.

I checked on Thomas with my wizard’s senses, too. His presence had never been fully human, but like the other members of the White Court, the vampiric aspects of him were not obvious to casual observation, not even to wizards. There was something feline about his aura, the same quality I would expect in a hungry leopard waiting patiently for the next meal to approach; enormous power held in perfect balance. There was a darker portion of him, too, the part I’d always associated with the demonic presence that made him a vampire, a black and bitter well of energy, equal parts lust, hunger, and self-loathing. Thomas was no fool—he was certainly afraid. But the fear couldn’t be sensed under that still, black surface.

Charity, after she finished helping Murphy, stepped back from her and went to her knees in the parking lot. She folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head, and continued praying. Around her I felt a kind of ambient warmth, as though she knelt in her own personal sunbeam, the same kind of energy that had always characterized her husband’s presence. Faith, I suppose. She was afraid, too, but it wasn’t the primitive survival fear the fetches required. Her fear was for her daughter; for her safety, her future, her happiness. And as I watched her, I saw her lips form my name, then Thomas’s, then Murphy’s.

Charity was more afraid for us than herself.

Right there, I promised myself that I would get her back home with her daughter, back to her family and her husband, safe and sound and whole. I would not, by God, hesitate for a heartbeat to do whatever was necessary to make my friend’s family whole again.

I checked myself out, taking inventory. Leather duster, ill-fitting mail shirt, staff, and blasting rod, check. Shield bracelet and amulet, check. My abused left hand ached a little, and what I could feel of it felt stiff—but I could move my fingers. My head hurt. My limbs felt a little bit shaky with fatigue. I had to hope that adrenaline would kick in and make that problem go away when it counted.

“Everyone good to go?” I asked.

Murphy nodded. Thomas drawled, “Yep.”

Charity rose and said, “Ready.”

“Let me sweep the outside of the building first,” I said. “This is their doorway home. It’s possible that they’ve got the place booby-trapped, or that they’ve set up wards. Once I clear it, we’ll go in.”

I trudged off to walk a slow circle around Pell’s theater. I let my fingertips drag along the side of the building, closed my eyes most of the way, and extended my wizard’s senses into the structure. It wasn’t a quick process, but I tried not to dawdle, either. As I walked, I sensed a kind of trapped, suffocated energy bouncing around inside the building—leakage from the Nevernever probably, from when the fetches took Molly across. But several times I also felt tiny, malevolent surges of energy, too random and mobile to be spells or wards. Their presence was disturbingly similar to that of the fetch I’d destroyed in the hotel.

I came back to where I’d begun about ten minutes later.

“Anything?” Thomas asked.

“No wards. No mystic land mines,” I told him. “But I think there’s something in there.”

“Like what?”

“Like fetches,” I said. “Smaller than the big ones we’re after, and probably set to guard the doorway between here and the Nevernever.”

“They’ll try to ambush us when we go in,” Murphy said.

“Probably,” I said. “But if we know about it, we can turn it against them. When they come, hit them fast and hard, even if it seems like overkill. We can’t afford any injuries.”

Murphy nodded.

“What are we waiting for?” Thomas asked.

“More help,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not strong enough to open a stable passage to deep Faerie,” I said. “Even if I wasn’t tired, and I managed to get it open, I doubt it would stay that way for more than a few seconds.”

“Which would be bad?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah.”

“What would happen?” Charity asked quietly.

“We’d die,” I said. “We’d be trapped in deep Faerie, near the strongholds of all kinds of trouble, with no way to escape but to try to find our way to the portions of Faerie that are near Earth. The locals would eat us and spit out the bones before we got anywhere close to escape.”

Thomas rolled his eyes and said, “This isn’t exactly helping me keep my mind off my fear, man.”

“Shut up,” I told him. “Or I’ll move to my second initiative and start telling you knock-knock jokes.”

“Harry,” Murphy said, “if you knew you couldn’t open the door long enough to let us get the girl, how did you plan to manage it?”

“I know someone who can help. Only she’s totally unable to help me.”

Murphy scowled at me, then said, “You’re enjoying this. You just love to dance around questions and spring surprises when you know something the rest of us don’t.”

“It’s like heroin for wizards,” I confirmed.

An engine throbbed nearby, and tires made a susurrus on asphalt. A motorcycle prowled around the theater to its rear parking lot, bearing two helmeted riders. The rearmost rider swung down from the bike, a shapely woman in leather pants and a denim jacket. She reached up, took off her green helmet, and shook out her snow-white hair. It fell at once into a silken sheet without the aid of a brush or a comb. The Summer Lady, Lily, paused to give me a slight bow, and she smiled at me, her green eyes particularly luminous.

The bike’s driver proved to be Fix. The Summer Knight wore close-fitting black pants and a billowing shirt of green silk. He bore a rapier with a sturdy guard on his hip, and the leather that wrapped its handle had worn smooth and shiny. Fix put both helmets on a rack on the motorcycle, nodded at us, and said, “Good morning.”

I made introductions, though I went into few details beyond names and titles. When that was done, I told Lily, “Thank you for coming.”

She shook her head. “I am yet in your debt. It was the least I could do. Though I feel I must warn you that I may not be able to give you the help that you require.”

Meaning Titania’s compulsion to prevent Lily from helping me was still in force. But I’d thought of a way to get around that.

“I know you can’t help me,” I said. “But I wish to tell you that the onus of your debt to me has been passed to another in good faith. I must redress a wrong I have done to the girl named Molly Carpenter. To do so, I offer her mother your debt to me as payment.”

Fix barked out a satisfied laugh. “Hah!”

Lily’s mouth spread into a delighted smile. “Well done, wizard,” she murmured. Then she turned to Charity and asked, “Do you accept the wizard’s offer of payment, Lady?”

Charity looked a little lost, and she glanced at me. I nodded my head at her.

“Y-yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“So mote it be,” Lily said, bowing her head to Charity. “Then I owe you a debt, Lady. What may I do to repay it?”

Charity glanced at me again. I nodded and said, “Just tell her.”

Charity turned back to the Summer Lady. “Help us retrieve my daughter, Molly,” she said. “She is a prisoner of the fetches of the Winter Court.”

“I will be more than happy to do all in my power to aid you,” Lily said.

Charity closed her eyes. “Thank you.”

“It will not be as much help as you might desire,” Lily told her, her voice serious. “I dare not directly strike at the servants of Winter acting in lawful obligation to their Queen, except in self-defense. Were I to attack, the consequences could be grave, and retaliation immediate.”

“Then what can you do?” Charity asked.

Lily opened her mouth to answer, but then said, “The wizard seems to have something in mind.”

“Yep,” I said. “I was just coming to that.”

Lily smiled at me and bowed her head, gesturing for me to continue.

“This is where they took the girl across,” I told Lily. “Must be why they attacked Pell first—to make sure the building was shut down and locked up, so that they would have an immediate passage back, if they needed it. I’m also fairly sure they left some guardians behind.”

Lily frowned at me and walked over to the building. She touched it with her fingers, and her eyes closed. It took her less than a tenth of the time it had me, and she never moved from the spot. “Indeed,” she said. “Three lesser fetches at least. They cannot sense us yet, but they will know when anyone enters, and attack.”

“I’m counting on it,” I said. “I’m going to go in first and let them see me.”

Fix lifted his eyebrows. “At which point they tear you to bits? This is a craftier plan than I had anticipated.”

I flashed him a grin. “Wouldn’t want you to feel left out, Fix. I want Lily to hold a veil over everyone else. Once the fetches show up to rip off my face, Lily drops the veil, and the rest of you drop them.”

“Yeah, that’s a much better plan,” Fix drawled, his fingertips tracing over the hilt of his sword. “And I can cut up vassals of Winter, so long as it is no inconvenience to you, of course, m’lady.”

Lily shook her head. “Not at all, sir Knight. And I will be glad to veil you and your allies, Lady Charity.”

Charity paused and said, “Wait a minute. Do I understand this situation correctly? You are not allowed to assist Harry, but because Harry has…what? Passed his debt to me?”

“Banks buy and sell mortgages all the time,” I said.

Charity arched a brow. “And because he’s given me your debt to him, you’re doing whatever you can to help?”

Fix and Lily exchanged a helpless glance.

“They’re also under a compulsion that prevents them from directly discussing it with anyone,” I filled in. “But you’ve got the basics right, Charity.”

Charity shook her head. “Aren’t they going to be in trouble for this? Won’t…who commands her?”

“Titania,” I said.

Charity blinked at me, and I could tell she’d heard the name before. “The…the Faerie Queen?”

“One of them,” I said. “Yeah.”

She shook her head. “I don’t…enough people are already in danger.”

“Don’t worry about us, ma’am,” Fix assured her, and winked. “Titania has already laid down the law. We’ve obeyed it. Not our fault if what she decreed was not what she wanted.”

“Translation,” I said. “We got around her fair and square. She won’t like it, but she’ll accept it.”

“Oh yeah,” Thomas muttered under his breath. “This isn’t coming back to bite anyone in the ass later.”

“Ixnay,” I growled at him, then turned and walked toward the theater’s rear entrance. I took up my staff in a firm grip and put its tip against the chains holding the door shut. I took a moment to slow my breathing and focus my thoughts. This wasn’t a gross-power exercise. I wouldn’t have to put nearly as much oomph into shattering the chain if I kept it small, precise, focused. Blasting a door down was a relatively simple exercise for me. What I wanted here was to use a minimum of power to snap a single link in the chain.

I brought my thoughts to a pinpoint focus and muttered, “Forzare.”

Power lashed through the length of the staff, and there was a hiss and a sharp crack nearly as loud as a gunshot. The chain jumped. I lowered my staff, to find one single link split into two pieces, each broken end glowing with heat. I nudged the heated links to the ground with the tip of my staff, faintly surprised and pleased with how little relative effort it had taken.

I reached out and tried the doorknob.

Locked.

“Hey, Murph,” I said. “Look at that zeppelin.”

I heard her sigh and turn around. I popped a couple of stiff metal tools out of my duster’s pocket and started finagling the lock with them. My left hand wasn’t much help, but it was at least able to hold the tool steady while my right did most of the work.

“Hey,” Thomas said. “When did you get those?”

“Butters says it’s good for my hand to do physical therapy involving the use of manual dexterity.”

Thomas snorted. “So you started learning to pick locks? I thought you were playing guitar.”

“This is simpler,” I said. “And it doesn’t make dogs start howling.”

“I might have killed you if I’d heard ‘House of the Rising Sun’ one more time,” Thomas agreed. “Where’d you get the picks?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Murphy and said, “Little bird.”

“One of these days, Dresden,” Murphy said, still stubbornly faced away.

I got the tumblers lined up and twisted with slow, steady pressure. The dead bolt slid to, and I pulled the door slightly ajar. I rose, put the tools away, and took up my staff again, ready for instant trouble. Nothing happened for a moment. I Listened at the door for half a minute, but heard not a sound.

“All right,” I said. “Here we go. Everyone ready to—”

I glanced over my shoulder and found the parking lot entirely empty except for me.

“Wow,” I said. “Good veil, Lily.” Then I turned back around just as if my nerves weren’t jangling like guitar strings and said, “Ding, ding. Round one.”

Chapter Thirty-five

I kicked the door open, staff held ready to fight, and shouted, “And I’m all outta bubble gum!”

The pale grey light of the overcast sunrise coming in over the lake showed me a service corridor, the kind with walls that have marks and writing all over them, floors with the paint chipped off all down the middle of the walkway, and lots of stuff stacked up here and there. At the far end of the hallway was a door, propped open with a rubber wedge. A worn sign on the door read EMPLOYEES ONLY. A curtained doorway about halfway down the hall opened onto what must have been the concessions counter in the little theater’s lobby.

Silence reigned. Not a single light shone within.

“Guess you had to see that one,” I said to the empty building. “John Carpenter. Rowdy Roddy Piper. Longest fight scene ever. You know?”

Silence.

“Missed that one, huh?” I asked the darkness.

I stood there, hoping the bad guys would make this one easy. If they charged me, I could duck aside and then let my concealed allies take them apart. Instead, as bad guys so often do, they failed to oblige me.

I started to feel a little silly just standing there. If I went ahead, the narrow passage would negate the participation of those now lurking in veiled ambush behind me. But had I really been alone, the hallway would have been as reasonable a fighting position as I could hope to gain—no way for the fetches to encircle me, no way to use their advantage of numbers. Had I really been alone, I would have needed to jump on an opportunity like that. There are stupid faeries, but fetches aren’t among them. If I didn’t behave like a lone wolf come to party, it would tip off the presence of my entourage.

So, like a crazed loner with more death wish than survival instinct, I boldly strode into the building, staff held ready, teeth bared in a fighting grin. The place was dim, and cooler than it should have been, even given the time of day. My breath turned to frost in front of my nose. The movie-theater scent of popcorn had sunk into the very foundations, and was now as much a part of the building as its walls and floor. My stomach rumbled. Like certain other portions of my anatomy, it had a tendency to become easily sidetracked, and to hell with little details like survival.

The rest of me was nervous. I had seen how fast one of those creatures could move. I could have ducked out of the way if they’d come charging from the far end of the hall at me, but not by much. Maybe two or three steps in, I reached a point where I judged that I wouldn’t have time to retreat and let my allies ambush the attacker. For a few seconds, at least, I’d be on my own.

A few seconds are forever in a fight.

I shook out my shield bracelet, willed power into it, and walked with my left hand before me, both providing me some protection against a possible charge and casting low blue light that would let me see as I moved forward. “Do you know what part of a movie this is?” I said to myself as I moved. “This is the part where the old farmer with the torch and the shotgun just can’t keep himself from walking forward into the dark cave, even though he damn well knows there’s a monster in there.” I moved up to the hanging curtain and slid it aside with my staff. Several quick glances out showed me a small and dingy concessions stand to go along with the small and dingy lobby.

Nothing tried to eat my face.

“Oh, come on,” I said, louder. “I’m starting to feel a little insulted, here. If you guys keep this up, I’m going to take drastic, clichéd measures. Maybe walk backward through a doorway or something.”

My instincts suddenly screamed, and I flung myself through the curtained doorway, getting clear of the hall, as something darted toward me from the hall’s far end. I didn’t want to catch any bullets or blasts of fire or hurled hammers from my backup.

There was a roar of sound from the hallway—something letting out a ululating howl, a heavy handgun, a roaring shotgun, and the buzzing snap of an arc of electricity. Blinding blue-white light blazed through the curtain as I dove through it—and showed me the fetch that had lurked in ambush on the other side.

It was crouched on top of the glass cabinet atop the concessions stand’s popcorn machine, and had taken the form of a creature that could only loosely be called a “cat.” It was twice Mister’s size, and its moldy black fur stood out in tufts and spikes. Its shoulders were hunched, almost deformed with muscle, and its muzzle was broad and filled with teeth too heavy to belong to any feline short of a lion. Its eyes gleamed with a sickly, greenish luminescence, and it flashed through the air, claws extended, teeth bared, emitting a mind-splitting howl of rage.

I had no time or space to strike first, and it was a damned good thing I’d prepared my shield ahead of time. I brought it up and into a quarter dome between me and the fetch, blue power hissing.

I should have kept in mind how easily the Scarecrow had shed my magic the night before. The lesser fetch must have had some measure of the same talent, because it changed the tone of its howl in the middle of its leap, impacted my shield, and oozed through it as though the solid barrier was a thick sludge.

There was no space to dodge in and no room to swing my staff, so I dropped it as the fetch’s face emerged from my shield and drove my fist into the end of its feline nose. I dropped the shield as I did. With the shield gone, the only force acting on the fetch was the impact of my punch, and the shapeshifter flew backward into the old cash register on the concessions counter. It was made of metal. Blue sparks erupted from the fetch as its flesh hit the iron, along with a yowl of protest, tendrils of smoke, and an acrid odor.

I heard footsteps in the corridor behind me, and then a trio of gunshots.

“Harry!” Murphy called.

“Here!” I shouted. I didn’t have time to say anything else. The nightmare cat bounced up from the cash register, recovered its balance, and flung itself at me again, every bit as swiftly as the fetch I’d faced earlier. I ducked and tried to throw myself under the fetch, to get behind it, but my body wasn’t operating as swiftly as my mind, and the fetch’s claws raked at my eyes.

I threw up an arm, and the fetch slammed into it with a sudden, harsh impact that made my arm go numb from the elbow down. Claws and fangs flashed. The spell-bound leather of my duster held, and the creature’s claws didn’t penetrate. Except for a shallow cut a random claw accidentally inflicted on my wrist, below the duster’s sleeve, I escaped it unharmed. I hit the ground and rolled, throwing my arm out to one side in an effort to slam the fetch onto the floor and knock it loose. The creature was deceptively strong. It braced one rear leg against the counter, claws digging in, robbing the blow of any real force. It bounced off the floor with rubbery agility, pounced onto my chest, and went for my throat.

I got an arm between the fetch and my neck. It couldn’t rip its way through the duster, but it was stronger than it had any right to be. I was lying mostly on my back and had no leverage. It wrenched at my arm, and I knew I only had a second or two before it overpowered me, threw my arm out of its way, and tore my throat out.

I reached down with my other hand and ripped my duster all the way off the front of my body. Cold iron seared the nightmare cat’s paws in a hissing fury of sparks and smoke. The fetch let out another shrieking yowl and bounded almost straight up.

Gunshots rang out again as the fetch reached the apogee of its reflexive leap. It twitched and screamed, jerking sharply. As it came back down, it writhed wildly in midair, altering its trajectory, and landed on the floor beside me.

Murphy’s combat boot lashed out in a stomping kick that sent the fetch sliding across the floor, and the instant it was clear of me she started shooting again. She put half a dozen shots into the creature, driving it over the floor, howling in pain but thrashing with frenzied strength. The gun went empty. Murphy slammed another clip into the weapon just as the fetch began gathering itself up off the floor. She kept pouring bullets into it as fast as she could accurately shoot, and stepped with deliberate care to one side as she did so.

Thomas came through the curtain with preternatural speed, his face bone white. He seized the stunned fetch by the throat and slammed it overhand into the cash register, again and again, until I heard its spine snap. Then he threw it over the concessions stand into the lobby.

Light flashed. Something that looked like a butterfly sculpted from pure fire shot over my head like a tiny comet. I scrambled to my feet, to see the blazing butterfly hit the fetch square in the chest. The thing screamed again, front legs thrashing, rear legs entirely limp, as fire exploded over its flesh, burned a hole in its chest, and then abruptly consumed it whole.

I leaned on the counter and panted for a second, then looked around to see the curtain slide aside of its own accord as Lily stepped through it. At that moment, the Summer Lady did not look sweet or caring. Her lovely face held an implacable, restrained anger, and half a dozen of the fiery butterflies flittered around her. She stared at the dying fetch until the fire winked out, leaving nothing, not even residual ectoplasm, behind.

Murphy reloaded and came over to me, though her eyes were still scanning for danger. “You’re bleeding. You all right?”

I checked. Blood from the injury on my wrist had trickled down over my palm and fingers. I pushed back my sleeve to get a look at the wound. The cut ran parallel to my forearm. It wasn’t long, but was deeper than I’d thought. And it had missed opening up the veins in my wrist by maybe half an inch.

My belly went cold and I swallowed. “Simple cut,” I told Murphy. “Not too bad.”

“Let me see,” Thomas said. He examined the injury and said, “Could have been worse. You’ll need a stitch or three, Harry.”

“No time,” I told him. “Help me find something to wrap it up good and tight.”

Thomas looked around the concessions area and suggested, “Silly straws?”

I heard an expressive sigh. Charity appeared at the curtained doorway, flipped open a leather case on her sword belt, and tossed Thomas a compact medical kit. He caught it, gave her a nod, and went to work on my hand. Charity stepped back into the hallway, her expression alert. Fix glanced in and then went by the curtained doorway, presumably to the other end of the hall.

“What happened?” I asked Murphy.

“One of those things charged down the hall to jump on your back,” she said. “Looked like some kind of mutant baboon. We took it down.”

“Nature Red,” Thomas mused. “Remember that movie? The one where the retrovirus gets loose in the zoo and starts mutating the animals? Baboon was from there. That cat thing, too.”

“Huh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“I don’t get it,” Murphy said. “Why do they all look like movie monsters?”

“Fear,” I said. “Those images have been a part of this culture for a while now. Over time, they’ve generated a lot of fear.”

“Come on,” Murphy said. “I saw Nature Red. It wasn’t that scary.”

“This is a case of quantity over quality,” I said. “Even if it only makes you jump in your chair, there’s a little fear. Multiply that by millions. The fetches take the form so that they can tap into a portion of that fear in order to create more of it.”

Murphy frowned and shook her head. “Whatever.”

A light appeared in the hallway leading back to the actual theater. In an eyeblink, Murphy and Thomas both had their guns pointed at it and my shield bracelet was dripping heatless blue sparks, ready to spring into place.

“It’s all right,” Lily said, her voice low.

Fix appeared in the doorway at the far end of the lobby, sword in hand. Fire gleamed along the length of the blade as if it had been coated in kerosene and ignited. He looked around, frowning, and said, “It isn’t back this way.”

“What isn’t?” I asked.

“The third,” Lily said. “There will be a third fetch.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re fetches,” Fix answered. “We should check the bathrooms.”

“Not alone,” I said. “Murph, Charity.”

Murphy nodded and slipped around the counter to join Fix. Charity slipped through the curtain and to the lobby in her wake. The three of them moved in cautious silence and entered the restrooms. They returned a moment later. Fix shook his head.

“There,” Thomas said, finishing off the bandage. “Too tight?”

I flexed the fingers of my right hand and stooped to recover my staff. “It’s good.” I squinted around the place. “One room left.”

We all looked at the double doors leading to the actual theater. They were closed. Faint lights flickered, barely noticeable from within the radius of our own illumination.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I said, walking around the counter and into the lobby. I headed for the doors and tried to project confidence. “Same plan.”

I paused at the doors while everyone gathered behind me. I looked back to check that they were ready, which is why I was the only one who saw what happened.

The plastic trash can about six inches behind Charity suddenly exploded, the top flipping off, and paper cups and popcorn bags flew everywhere. Something humanoid and no larger than a toddler shot from the trash can. It had red hair and overalls, and it held a big old kitchen knife in one tiny hand. It hit Charity just above her tailbone, driving her into the ground, and lifted the knife.

My companions had been taken by surprise—just a second or two, but as far as Charity was concerned it might as well have been forever. There was no time for thought. Before I realized what I was doing, I took a pair of long steps, shifting my grip on my staff as I went, and swung it like a golf club at the fetch’s head. It impacted with a meaty thunk.

Its head flew off, bounced off of a pillar, and rolled to a stop not far from the rest of the thing. I had only a second to regard the doll’s features before it began dissolving into ectoplasm.

Thomas blinked at it and said, “That was Bucky the Murder Doll.”

“Kind of a wimp,” I said.

Thomas nodded. “Must have been the runt of the litter.”

I traded a glance with Murphy. “Personally,” I said, “I never understood how anyone could have found that thing frightening to begin with.” Then I went to Charity’s side and offered her a hand up. She grimaced and took it. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing broken,” she replied. She winced and put her hand to her back. “I should have stretched out.”

“Next time we’ll know better,” I said. “Lily? Is that it?”

The Summer Lady’s eyes went distant for a moment and then she murmured, “Yes. There are no longer agents of Winter in this place. Come.”

She stepped forward and the doors to the theater proper opened of their own accord. We followed. It was your typical movie theater. Not one of the new stadium-seating fancy theaters, but one of the old models with only a slight incline in the floor. Light played over the screen, though the projector was not running. Spectral colors shifted, faded, changed, and melded like the aurora borealis, and I was struck with the sudden intuition that the color and light were somehow being projected from the opposite side of the screen. The air grew even colder as we followed Lily down the aisle.

She stopped in front of the screen, staring blankly at it for a moment, then shuddered. “Dresden,” she said quietly. “This crossing leads to Arctis Tor.”

My stomach fluttered again. “Oh, crap.”

I saw Thomas arch an eyebrow at me out of the corner of my eye.

“Crap?” Murphy asked. “Why? What is that place?”

I took a deep breath. “It’s the heart of Winter. It’s like…” I shook my head. “Think the Tower of London, the Fortress of Solitude, Fort Knox, and Alcatraz all rolled up into one giant ball of fun. It’s Mab’s capital. Her stronghold.” I glanced at Lily. “If what I’ve read about it is correct, that is. I’ve never actually seen the place.”

“Your sources were accurate enough, Harry,” Lily said. Her manner remained remote, strained. “This is going to severely limit what help I can give you.”

“Why?” I asked.

Lily stared intently at me for a second, then said, “My power will react violently to that of Mab. I can open the way to the Arctis Tor, but holding the way open for your return will occupy the whole of my strength. Furthermore, so long as I hold the way open I run the risk of letting creatures from deep Winter run free in Chicago. Which means that Fix must remain here to guard the passage against them. I cannot in good conscience send him with you.”

I scowled at the shifting colors on the screen. “So once we go in, we’re on our own.”

“Yes.”

Super. Without Lily and Fix’s power to counter that of the Winter fae within Arctis Tor, our odds of success would undergo a steep reduction—and I had hoped we would be attacking an independent trio of faeries lairing in a cave or under a bridge or something. I hadn’t figured on storming the Bastille.

I looked up and met Charity’s eyes for a second.

I turned back to the dancing lights on the movie screen and told the others, “Things just got a lot worse. I’m still going. None of you have to come with me. I don’t expect you to—”

Before I finished speaking, Charity, Murphy, and Thomas stepped up to stand beside me.

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family.

And they were my heroes.

I nodded at Lily. She closed her eyes, and the shimmering colors on the screen grew brighter, more vibrant. The air grew colder.

“All right,” I said quietly. “Each of you get a hand on my shoulder.” I resettled my grip on my wizard’s staff and murmured, “Round two.”

Chapter Thirty-six

Every time I opened a way to the Nevernever, it always looked pretty much the same—an uneven vertical rip in the air that let in the sights and sounds and scents of the world on the other side. The longer I wanted the rift to stay open, the bigger I’d rip the hole. More experienced wizards had made a comment or two over the years to suggest that I still had a lot to learn on the subject.

When Lily opened the way to Arctis Tor, I understood why. Light and color shifted over the screen, their flow quickening, deepening. At first nothing else happened. The movie screen was simply a surface. Then the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and a cold wind wafted into my face, bringing with it the dry, sterile scent of winter in high, barren mountains and the high, lonely cry of some kind of wild beast like nothing in the real world.

Deep blue came to dominate the colors on the screen, and a moment later resolved itself into the shapes of mountains towering beneath the light of an impossibly enormous silver moon. They were bleak and hateful stone peaks, wreathed in mist and wrapped in ice and snow. The wind moaned and blew frozen crystals into our faces, then sank into a temporary lull.

The blowing snow cleared just enough to get me my first look at Arctis Tor.

Mab’s stronghold was a fortress of black ice, an enormous, shadowy cube sitting high up the slope of the highest mountain in sight. A single, elegant spire rose above the rest of the structure. Flickers of green and amethyst energy played within the ice of the walls. I couldn’t make a good guess at how big the thing was. The walls and battlements were lined with inverted icicles. They made me think of the fanged jaws of a hungry predator. A single gate, small in comparison to the rest of the fortress, stood open.

Hell’s bells. How the hell was I supposed to get in there? It was almost a relief when the wind rose again, and blowing snow once more obscured the fortress from view.

It was only then that I realized that the way was open. Lily had brought it forth so smoothly that I hadn’t been able to tell when image gave way to reality. By comparison, my own ability to open a way to the Nevernever was about as advanced as the paintings of a particularly gifted gorilla.

I glanced back at Lily. She gave me a small smile and then gestured with one hand. One of the fiery butterflies fluttering around her altered course and soared over to me. “This much I can do for you all,” she murmured. “It will lead you through the storm, and ward away the cold until you can return here. Do not tarry, wizard. I do not know how long I will be able to hold the way open for your return.”

I nodded. “Thank you, Lily.”

This time her smile was warmer, more like that of the girl she had been before becoming the Summer Lady. “Good luck, Harry.”

Fix took a deep breath and then hopped up onto the stage floor at the base of the movie screen. He turned to offer me a hand up. I took it, stared at the frozen wasteland for a second, and then stepped directly forward, into what had been the screen.

I found myself standing in knee-deep snow, and the howling winds forced my eyes almost shut. I should have been freezing, but whatever enchantment Lily’s blazing butterfly used seemed effective. The air felt almost as warm as that of a ski slope seeing its last day of the season. Thomas, Murphy, and Charity stepped out of a shimmer in the air, and Fix followed them a second later.

“Hey, Fix,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the wind. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

The Summer Knight shook his head. “I’m not. But it will be easier to stop anything going through from this side,” he said. He regarded us and asked lightly, “You bring enough iron, you think?”

“We’re about to find out.”

“Christ. You’re going to piss off Mab something fierce, bringing iron here.”

“I was doing that anyway,” I assured him.

He nodded, then glanced back at the rift and frowned. “Harry,” he said. “There’s something you should know before you go in.”

I arched an eyebrow and listened.

“We just got word from our observers that there’s a battle underway. The Reds found one of the major headquarters of the Venatori Umbrorum.”

“Who?” Charity asked.

“Secret organization,” I told her. “Like the Masons, but with machine guns.”

“The Venatori sent out a call for help,” Fix continued. “The Council answered it.”

I chewed my lower lip. “Do you know where?”

“Oregon, couple hours from Seattle,” he said.

“How bad is it?”

“So far it’s too close to call. But it’s not good. The Reds had their sorcerous types mucking around with a lot of the Council’s pathways through the Nevernever. A lot of the Wardens got sidetracked from the battle completely.”

“Dammit,” I muttered. “Isn’t there anything Summer can do to help?”

Fix grimaced and shook his head. “Not with the way Mab’s forces are disposed. If we pull enough of our forces from Summer to help the Council, it will weaken us. Winter will attack.” He stared at the looming fortress, glimpsed in half instants through the gusting snow, and shook his head. “The Council’s mind-set is too defensive, Harry. If they keep sitting tight and reacting to the enemy, instead of making the Reds react to them, they’ll lose this war.”

I grunted. “Clausewiz would agree. But I don’t think the Merlin knows from Clausewitz. And this is a long way from over. Don’t count us out yet.”

“Maybe,” he said, but his voice wasn’t confident. “I wish I could do more, but you’d better get going. I’ll hold the door for you.”

I offered him my hand and he shook it. “Be careful,” I said.

“Good hunting,” he replied.

I glanced at my three companions and called, “Ready?”

They were. We followed the burning butterfly through the snow. Without its protection from the elements, I doubt we would have made it, and I made it a point to remember to wear sufficient cold-weather gear in the event that I somehow survived this ongoing idiocy and was crazy enough to come back a second time. Even with the Summer magic to protect us, it was a pretty good hike over unfriendly terrain. I’d done worse in the past, with both Justin DuMorne and Ebenezar, and there are times when having long legs can be a real advantage on rough terrain. Charity seemed all right, too, but Thomas had never been much of an outdoors-man, and Murphy’s height put her at a disadvantage that the unaccustomed weight of her armor and cutlery exacerbated.

I traded a glance with Charity. I started giving Thomas a hand on rough portions of our climb. Charity helped Murphy. At first I thought Murphy might take her arm off out of wounded pride, but she grimaced and visibly forced herself to accept the help.

The last two hundred yards or so were completely open, with no trees or undulation of terrain to shield our approach from the walls of the fortress. I lifted a hand to call a halt at the edge of the last hummock of stone that would shelter us from view. Lily’s butterfly drifted in erratic circles around my head, snowflakes hissing to steam where they touched it.

I peered over the edge of a frozen boulder at Arctis Tor for a long time, then settled back down again.

“I don’t see anyone,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” Thomas said. He was panting and shivering a little, despite Lily’s warding magic. “I thought this was supposed to be Mab’s headquarters. This place looks deserted.”

“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “Winter’s forces are all poised to hit Summer. You don’t do that from the heart of your own territory. You gather at strong points near the enemy’s border. If we’re lucky, maybe there’s just a skeleton garrison here.”

Murphy peered around the edge of the stones and said, “The gate’s open. I don’t see any guards.” She frowned. “There are…there’s something on the open ground between here and there. See?”

I leaned next to her and peered. Vague, shadowy shapes stirred in the wind between us and the fortress, insubstantial as any shadow. “Oh,” I said. “It’s a glamour. Illusion, laid out around the place. Probably a hedge maze of some kind.”

“And it fools people?” she asked uncertainly.

“It fools people who don’t have groovy wizard ointment for their eyes,” I said. Then I frowned and said, “Wait a minute. The gate isn’t open. It’s gone.”

“What?” Charity asked. She leaned out and stared. “There is a broken lattice of ice on the ground around the gate. A portcullis?”

“Could be,” I agreed. “And inside.” I squinted. “I think I can see some heavier pieces. Like maybe someone ripped apart the portcullis and blew the gate in.” I took a deep breath, feeling a hysterical little giggle lurking in my throat. “Something huffed and puffed and blew the house in. Mab’s house.”

The wind howled over the frozen mountains.

“Well,” Thomas said. “That can’t be good.”

Charity bit her lip. “Molly.”

“I thought you said this Mab was all mighty and stuff, Harry,” Murphy said.

“She is,” I said, frowning.

“Then who plays big bad wolf to her little pig?”

“I…” I shook my head and rubbed at my mouth. “I’m starting to think that maybe I’m getting a little bit out of my depth, here.”

Thomas broke out into a rippling chuckle, a faint note of hysteria to it. He turned his back to the fortress and sat down, chortling.

I glowered at him and said, “It’s not funny.”

“It is from here,” Thomas said. “I mean, God, you are dense sometimes. Are you just now noticing this, Harry?”

I glowered at him some more. “To answer your question, Murph, I don’t know who did this, but the list of the people who could is fairly short. Maybe the Senior Council could if they had the Wardens along, but they’re busy, and they’d have had to fight a campaign to get this far. Maybe the vampires could have done it, working together, but that doesn’t track. I don’t know. Maybe Mab pissed off a god or something.”

“There is only one God,” Charity said.

I waved a hand and said, “No capital ‘G,’ Charity, in deference to your beliefs. But there are beings who aren’t the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around the planet.”

“Like who?” Murphy asked.

“Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinity, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they’ve all been dormant for centuries.” I frowned at Arctis Tor. “And I can’t think what Mab might have done to earn their enmity. She’s avoided doing that for thousands of years.”

Unless, of course, I thought to myself, Maeve and Lily are right, and she really has gone bonkers.

“Dresden,” Charity said. “This is academic. We either go in or we leave. Now.”

I chewed my lip and nodded. Then I dug in my pockets for the tiny vial of blood Charity had provided, and hunted through the rocks until I found a spot clear enough to chalk out a circle. I empowered it and wrought one of my usual tracking spells, keying it to a sensation of warmth against my senses. Cold as it was, I would hardly mind anything that might make me feel a little less freeze-dried.

I broke the circle and released the spell, and immediately felt a tingling warmth on my left cheekbone. I turned to face it, and found myself staring directly at Arctis Tor. I paced fifty or sixty yards to the side, and faced the warmth again, working out a rough triangulation.

“She’s alive,” I told Charity, “or the spell wouldn’t have worked. She’s in there. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Charity said. She gave me a look filled with discomfort and then said, “May I say a brief prayer for us first?”

“Can’t hurt,” I said. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

She bowed her head and said, “Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness.” The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Charity crossed herself. “Amen.”

Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible. Then, without further speech, I swung out around the frozen stone cairn and broke into a quick, steady jog. The others followed along.

I passed the first bones fifty yards from the walls. They lay in a crushed, twisted jumble in the snow, frozen into something that looked like a macabre Escher print. The bones were vaguely human, but I couldn’t be sure because they had been pulverized to dust in some places, warped like melted wax in others. It was the first grisly memorial of many. As I kept going forward, brittle, frozen bones crunched under my boots, lying closer and thicker, and twisted more horribly, as we drew closer to Arctis Tor. By the time we got to the gate, I was shin-deep in icy bones. They spread out on either side in an enormous wheel of horrible remains centered on the gate. Whoever they had been, thousands of their kind had perished here.

Charity’s guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had been an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls here and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more than pockmarks.

I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the craters blown out of the wall and sniffed.

“What is it?” Thomas asked me.

“Sulfur,” I said quietly. “Brimstone.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“No way to tell,” I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.

Way, way, way out of my depth.

I told myself that it didn’t matter. There was a young woman inside that frozen boneyard who would die if I did not burgle her out of this nightmare. If I did not control my fear, there was an excellent chance that it would warn her captors of my approach. So I fought the fear that threatened to make me start throwing up, or something equally humiliating and potentially fatal.

I readied my shield, gripped my staff, ground my teeth together, and then continued pushing my way forward, through the bones and into the eerie dimness of the most ridiculously dangerous place I had ever been.

Chapter Thirty-seven

The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.

Except for all the bones.

Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.

If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.

I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.

I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.

I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.

The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian’s tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.

Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.

“What the hell was this?” Thomas asked quietly.

“Troll, probably,” I said. “Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall.” I looked around. Half a dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. “Give me a second. I want to know what we’re looking at before we move ahead.”

Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.

Mixed in with the fallen trolls’ bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. “Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab’s,” I murmured. “I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back.”

“How long have they been dead?” Murphy asked quietly.

I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I’d only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.

Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll’s violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.

My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.

“Harry?” Murphy asked.

What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll’s memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.

“Harry?” Murphy said again, more sharply.

“I’m all right,” I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here…

“I can’t tell how old they are,” I said. “My gut says not very, but I can’t be sure.”

“It must have been weeks,” Thomas said. “It takes that long for bones to get this clean.”

“It’s all relative,” I said. “Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago.”

Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.

“What killed them, Harry?” Murphy asked.

“Fire. They were burned to death,” I said quietly. “Down to the bone.”

“Could you do that?” Thomas asked.

I shook my head. “I couldn’t make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter.” Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I’d cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires—and maybe some of their victims with them—but even that inferno hadn’t been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.

“Then who did it?” Charity asked quietly.

I didn’t have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. “The littler ones were goblins,” I said. “Foot soldiers.” I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. “These trolls were her personal guard.” I gestured back at the gate. “Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower’s base. Died there.”

I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. “Molly’s in the tower,” I murmured.

“How do we get in?” Murphy asked.

I stared at the blank wall of the spire. “Um,” I said.

Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. “Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower.”

“Maybe,” I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.

“Nothing here,” I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. “Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for—”

Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.

I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. “Next time, I guess I’ll just knock.”

“Come on,” Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. “We have to hurry.”

Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.

An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts’ furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.

The suddenly opened doorway was it.

Mounds of bones around the courtyard exploded into motion. Fetches hurtled at us over the ground. There weren’t three of them, either—there were dozens.

The fetches, here in Faerie, did not look like movie monsters. Their true forms were only vaguely humanoid, wavering uncertainly, as black as midnight shadows but for ghostly white eyes. I could see other shapes around them, translucent and faint. Here, another one of those alien monster things. There some kind of wolflike biped. There an enormous man with the head of a warthog. But the salve I had spread over my eyes revealed those illusions for what they really were, and showed me the thing beneath the mask.

My magic had a risky batting average against these creatures, but there were things I could do besides hosing energy directly at the enemy. Hellfire came to my call, and my staff’s runes exploded into light as brilliant as a magnesium flare. Their flame lit the benighted courtyard while somehow not damaging my clothing or flesh. My will and the Hellfire roared through me in a torrent as I whirled the staff in a circle over my head and screamed, “Ventas cyclis!”

The howling winds thundered down into the silent courtyard as if I had torn off an unseen roof. They gathered along my spinning staff, fluttering with lightning the same color as the blazing runes on the staff. I cried out and hurled the winds, not at the oncoming fetches, but at the thousands of bones lying between them and me.

The wind picked them up with a wailing shriek; a sudden cyclone of broken bones and shattered armor, spinning them into a whirling curtain. The lead fetches were too late to avoid plunging into the cloud, and the ossified tornado began to rip them apart, battering to pulp whatever was not sheared away by the edges and points of bone and broken shards of ice. Fetches following in their wake skidded to a halt, letting out a startlingly loud chorus of hisses, the sounds filled with rage.

Thomas cried out and I heard heavy footsteps. Another fetch, this one much larger, came around the curve of the spire’s wall. The ghost image of the Reaper was all around him. A beat later, another charged us from the other direction, just as large, this one with the faint image of Hammerhand, an almost obscenely muscled figure in black, heavy mallets emerging from the ends of his sleeves.

“Into the tower!” I bellowed.

The Reaper reached Thomas, and its arm rose up, tipped with gleaming black talons in its true form, the illusion superimposing the image of the Reaper’s trademark scythe over them. Thomas caught the Reaper’s sweeping claws on his saber, but instead of the ringing of steel on steel, there was a flash of green-white light and the Reaper-fetch howled in agony as the steel of the blade struck its claws cleanly from its appendage.

Thomas crouched, hips and shoulders twisting in a sharp, one-two movement. The saber’s blade cut and burned a flattened X shape into the fetch’s abdomen. The fetch roared in agony, and liquid green-white fire burst from the wound. The creature swung its other arm, its speed taking even Thomas by surprise. He avoided most of the power of the blow, but what was left slammed him into the side of the tower.

I heard a gunshot behind me, then another, and then Murphy snarled, “Damn it!” I turned in time to see her bob to one side and then to the other as Hammerhand swung a mallet limb down at her. The blow crashed into the courtyard with a cracking impact as loud as a rifle shot. Murphy danced in closer to the fetch, inside the awkward reach of its club-hands. It thrust one down at her. At first I thought she was slapping it aside, but then she grabbed onto the fetch and continued the motion, adding her own weight and strength to the fetch’s and redirecting the force of the blow so that the fetch’s weapon-hand crushed its own foot. The fetch bellowed in pain and lost its balance. Murphy shoved in the same direction and the fetch fell. She leapt away from it, for the tower door, while I grabbed Thomas and hauled him inside.

From somewhere up the stairs, I heard a terrified scream.

Molly.

Charity let out a cry and threw herself up the stairs.

“No!” I shouted. “Charity, wait!”

The doorway darkened as a fetch tried to come through. Murphy, her back flat against the wall beside the door, drew the long fighting dagger she had taken from Charity’s box of goodies. Just as its nose cleared the doorway, she whirled in a half circle and with all the power of her legs, hips, back, and shoulders drove the knife to its hilt in one of the thing’s white eyes.

The fetch went mad with agony. It slammed itself blindly against the inside of the doorway, more liquid fire erupting from the wound, and lurched back and forth until Thomas stepped up to it, lifted a boot, and kicked the fetch with crushing strength, hurling the mortally wounded faerie back out onto the courtyard.

“Go!” he cried. Another fetch began to press in, and Thomas went to work with his sword. His blows struck more burning wounds into the fetch, and its blood sizzled like grease on a stove when it touched the cold iron of his blade. Thomas dodged a return blow and pressed his attack with a sneer, driving the thing back from the doorway.

“Go!” he yelled again. “I’ll hold the door!”

A snakelike, whipping limb shot in along the floor, seized Thomas’s ankle, and hauled his foot out from under him. I clutched at him and kept him from being drawn into the open. “Murph!”

Murphy slid up, pointed her pistol out the door, and squeezed off several shots. A fetch screamed in pain and Thomas’s leg suddenly came free. I pulled him in and he lunged to his feet again.

“We’ll hold the door,” Murphy said, her voice sharp. “Get the girl!”

Molly screamed again.

Charity’s booted feet thudded unseen from the stairs above me.

I spat out an oath and sprinted after her.

Chapter Thirty-eight

The spiral staircase spun me in a steady, ascending circle. The low, ugly light within the walls swirled sickeningly, adding to my sense of motion sickness and disorientation. Below me, I could hear Thomas’s sharp, mocking laughter as he fought, together with the occasional report of Murphy’s gun. My aching body hated me for forcing it to run up the stairs—particularly my knees. Anyone my size is prone to that kind of thing.

But there was nothing to be done about it, so I ignored the pain and went on, Lily’s fiery butterfly keeping pace with me and lighting my way.

I had longer legs, and I caught Charity as she neared the top of the staircase. Molly screamed again, pure terror and anguish and pain, and her voice was very near.

“I’m coming, baby!” Charity gasped, panting. She was in great shape, but no one’s exercise program includes running up several hundred feet of spiral stairs in full mail and helmet carrying a big-ass hammer and a sword. Her legs had slowed, and she staggered a little when she reached the top stair and found herself in a short, level, low-ceilinged hall leading a few feet to another open archway. The cold light of winter night, moonlight on snow, shone in through the arch.

I managed to snag her arm and check her advance just as a heavy door slammed to cover the archway with tooth-rattling force. If I hadn’t delayed her, it would have hit her like a speeding truck. She recovered her balance, and while she did we heard a heavy bolt slide shut on the door. Charity shoved a hand at the door, which remained fixed. She kicked a booted foot at it, and failed to so much as rattle it in its frame.

Molly screamed again, still close, though muffled by the closed door. Her cry was weaker, shorter.

“Molly!” Charity screamed.

I thrust the spread fingers of my left hand against the door, and was instantly aware of the energy flowing through it, binding it, giving it strength beyond reason to resist being opened. I looked for a weakness, a soft spot in the adamant magic supporting the door, but there was none. The ward on the door was, simply put, flawless. It spread through the door’s substance as coldly and beautifully as crystals of ice forming on a window, the magic of Winter drawn up from the heart of the land. There was no way for me to unravel the subtle, complex faerie magic.

But then, it was faerie magic. I didn’t have to be subtle to counter it.

“Charity,” I snapped. “It’s faerie make! The hammer!”

She shot me a glance of comprehension and nodded. “Clear the door.”

I hurried back, leaving her room to swing.

“Please,” Charity whispered as she planted her feet and drew back the weapon. “Please, Father. Please.”

Charity closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing her concentration on delivering the most powerful blow she possibly could in the confines of the hallway. Then she swung the weapon back, golf-club style, cried out, and swung, stepping forward.

Maybe Charity was way more buff than I thought. Maybe that particular ward had a particular weakness to cold iron. Maybe it had nothing to do with magic, and Charity had somehow tapped into the strength available to all mothers when their young are endangered. Hell, maybe God was on her side.

Whatever happened, that siege door of adamant ice and malevolent, obdurate magic screamed and shattered at the blow from her hammer, shattered like delicate glass, shattered into pieces no larger than grains of sand. The whole tower rang with the power of the blow, the very black ice it was made of seeming to shriek and groan. The floor literally shook, and I had to crouch to keep from taking a tumble back down the stairs.

I heard Charity choke down a cry of pain. She had broken the door before us, but the spells running through it had backlashed against the hammer, and it too had shattered. A flying piece of fractured metal had cut across her hip and lodged in one of the rings of her mail. It glowed red-hot, and she frantically slapped it away even as it burned her. Other pieces of shrapnel from the hammer had struck the walls of the tower, burning their way into the black ice, sending a network of cracks of green-white light all through the tower around us like some sort of bizarre infection. Black ice melted away from the red-hot steel. The tower rumbled again like some vast, agonized beast.

Charity dropped the handle of the hammer. I could see that her right arm hung limp and useless, but it didn’t stop her from making an awkward left-handed draw of the sword at her hip. I slipped up beside her, staff held ready in both hands, and we stepped out onto the parapet of the tower of Arctis Tor together.

The parapet was enormous, a hundred feet across, twice as wide as the spire beneath us. It was a garden of sorts; a garden of ice.

Ice covered the parapet, somehow formed into ghostly trees and flowers. There were seats here and there in the garden, and they too were made of ice. A frozen fountain stood silent at the center of the parapet, a bare trickle of water sliding from the top of a statue so coated in layers and layers of ice that one could not readily identify its particulars. Replica rose vines and thorns spread all around the place, all ice, all cold and beautiful.

Upon the branch of a tree perched a cardinal, its bloodred feathers brilliant, though the bird itself was utterly still. I peered a bit closer, and saw that it was covered in a layer of transparent ice, frozen into a sculpture every bit as much as the rest of the place. Not far from it, a spider’s web spread between some tree branches, the spider at its center also transformed into ice sculpture. A swift look around showed me more beings entombed in ice, and I realized that this place was not a garden.

It was a prison.

Next to the fountain sat a lovely young girl in a Byzantine gown, hand entwined with that of a young man in similar historic costume. Not far from them, three females of the Sidhe, Mab’s kindred, the nobility of faerie kind, stood back-to-back, their shoulders touching in a triangle. The three looked so much alike that they might have been sisters, and they each held hands with the others, expressions of determination and fear frozen onto their faces.

The ice sculpture of a thick, dead-looking tree held a dead, naked man upon it, crucified on its branches as a grotesque work of art. Bonds of ice held him there, transparent enough to let me see the blackened flesh of his hands and feet, the gangrenous darkness spreading upward through the veins of his arms and legs. His hair was long, unwashed, and fell over his face as he hung limp within his bonds, his body coated with layers of crystalline frost.

Molly sat at the base of the same tree. Her artfully shredded clothes had been shredded in truth, and they hung from her as loose rags. Her cotton-candy hair hung in a limp mass, uncombed and tangled. She shuddered with cold, and her eyes stared at nothing. Her expression was twisted as if in effort, her mouth open. It took me a minute to realize that she had never stopped screaming. She’d damaged her throat, and no sound would emerge. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Charity shifted her weight to hurry forward, but I cautioned her, “Wait. We’ll do her no good if we’re dead.”

She clenched her jaw, but heeded me, and we paused for a moment while I swept my gaze over the rest of the parapet. Some movement in the shadows behind the crucifixion tree drew my eye, and I reached back for the handle of my blasting rod, sticking out of my nylon backpack. I drew the magical tool and primed it with an effort of will. Red-white fire suddenly glowed at its tip. “There. Behind the tree,” I said.

A deep voice let out a rasping chuckle.

Then, from the darkness I couldn’t quite see into, the Scarecrow appeared.

This thing was no fetch, no changer of form and image and illusion. There was no shadowy mask over an amorphous form, no glamour altering its appearance, which my salve would have enabled me to see through. This thing was a whole, independent creature. Unless maybe it was a fetch so old and strong that it could transform itself into the Scarecrow in truth and not simply in seeming.

Red flame glittered in the carved-pumpkin head. Its limbs, all long, tough vines as thick as my wrists, were clothed in ragged tatters of black that looked more like a funeral robe than a farmer’s castoffs. Its long arms trailed almost to the ground, and one of them was stretched over to Molly. At the end of the arm, the vines tapered into dozens of slender, flexible tendrils, and the Scarecrow had them wrapped around Molly’s throat and sliding up into her hair.

We stood in silence, facing one another for a while. Wind moaned somewhere overhead, not far above the parapet. The sounds of hissing and screaming fetches drifted up as if from a great distance. Thomas and Murphy still held the door.

I took several steps to one side and gave the Scarecrow a little smile. “Hi,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

“One who has served the Queen of Air and Darkness since before your kind can remember,” he replied. “One who has destroyed hundreds like you.”

“You know what, Captain Kudzu?” I asked. “I’m not here to play guessing games with you. Give me the girl.”

The bizarre creature’s face twisted in what might been amusement. “Or what follows?”

I wasn’t absolutely certain the thing was quoting Shakespeare, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. “Bloody constraint,” I told him. “For should you try to hide the girl from me, even in your heart, there shall I rake for her.”

Maybe the Scarecrow wasn’t a Shakespeare fan. Its eyes flared with angry scarlet light. “Little man. Move an inch closer and I will crush her soft little neck.”

“Inadvisable,” I said, and raised my blasting rod to level it at the Scarecrow. “Because she’s the only thing keeping you alive right now.”

“I fear you not, wizard,” the Scarecrow said. The creature narrowed its eyes, focusing upon me intently—perhaps preparing the same defense that had shed my spells in our first encounter. “Bring your fire, if you think it may survive the heart of Winter. It will avail you against me this time no more than last.”

“You think I’d show up for round two without being prepared to finish what I started?” I asked him. I sidled a couple of more steps to one side. “The Council is already on the way here,” I said. “I’m here to make you an offer before things fall apart. Give me the girl and your word not to go near her again, and I let you live.”

The Scarecrow let out a laugh of pure scorn. “I shall enjoy killing you, mortal.”

I prowled a few steps more and planted my feet, then brandished my staff and rod. The Scarecrow crouched in response, eyes burning even brighter.

I had to be careful. If I spooked him too much, he’d kill Molly as a prelude to closing with me. “You know what your problem is?” I asked him.

He stared at me for a blank second of incomprehension. “What?”

I showed my teeth in a wolfish smile. “You underestimate people.”

While I’d drawn the Scarecrow’s attention and eye, Charity had slipped around behind it, silent as a puff of smoke. As I spoke, she lifted her sword and swept it down at the appendage holding her daughter. The steel blade hissed and flashed and seared its way through the limb holding Molly.

The Scarecrow reared its head back in a sudden howl of rage. Molly’s body bucked in panic as the severed limbs contracted on her throat. I lifted my staff and snarled, “Forzare!” Unseen force lashed out, caught up Molly as gently as I could manage it, and flipped her tail over teakettle away from the creature. No sooner had I moved her than its stumpy arm swung down to smash into the ground where the girl had been sitting.

The Scarecrow turned to grab at Molly, but Charity stepped into its path, cold steel gleaming, her eyes harder and colder than the black ice of Arctis Tor. She faced the thing squarely and snarled, “You will never touch my daughter again.”

The creature roared in fury and rushed Charity. I whipped up my blasting rod and snarled, “Fuego!” A lance of flame as thick as my wrist lashed out from the tip of the rod—and died two feet away from it, the burning energy of the magical strike swallowed by an unfathomable ocean of cold, cold power. I had hoped that I could get in a shot while the Scarecrow was distracted, but I had already decided on what to try next if I couldn’t.

I stuck the blasting rod through my belt, whipped my staff up to point the tip at the ground beneath the Scarecrow’s feet, and shouted, “Forzare!”

Invisible force lashed out and struck the black ice under the Scarecrow like a mortar round. It threw the creature ten feet into the air, spinning end over end. Deadly chips of black ice flew. As the spell’s energy roared out of me, I staggered and almost lost my balance. My vision tunneled for a second or two out of pure exhaustion. I’d been pushing too hard, for too long, with no rest. The magic I’d been using had drained my reserves entirely. The human body has limits that cannot be circumvented, and I had reached mine.

Charity rushed forward before the Scarecrow could rise. Her sword hacked down at it in elemental brutality, and the Scarecrow’s blood and woodlike flesh sizzled on her blade. But she didn’t kill it.

The Scarecrow regained its feet and lashed an arm at Charity. She swung her sword to meet it. Cold iron bit into faerie flesh, drawing forth another explosion of brilliant, liquid flame. The creature screamed, a sound louder than any living thing I’d ever heard, and its backswing slammed into Charity’s limp right arm. The impact tore a grunt of pain from her and flung her several feet through the air, but the Scarecrow paid for it. Coming into contact with Charity’s mail burned it again, and its furious howls redoubled.

It lifted a foot to stomp down on the helplessly writhing Molly, to flatten her like an aluminum can.

It was the kind of thing that draws suicidal levels of chivalry from me. I ran for the Scarecrow, ditching my blasting rod on the way. I took my staff in both hands, slammed it down like a pole-vaulter, and launched myself into the air, both feet aimed at the Scarecrow’s back. I hit the thing with considerable force, but I’d been too tired to manage it as precisely as I wished. The blow only staggered the creature, and I bounced off it and flopped onto the icy surface of the parapet.

I had bought time enough, though, for Charity to regain her feet and charge forward with her blade, diverting the Scarecrow’s attention from her daughter.

Before I could regain my feet, the Scarecrow snapped a foot at me in a clumsy, unbalanced kick. It landed with only a fraction of the force it might have had. Even so, that was enough to send me sprawling ten feet away and maybe crack one of my ribs. Pain washed through me and I suddenly couldn’t get my lungs to take in enough air.

The Scarecrow stretched out an arm toward Charity, and ropy-looking vines shot from the ends of his arms, flickered across the ten feet between them like lightning, and wrapped her sword arm’s wrist. The tendrils tightened. The Scarecrow shook Charity violently. She screamed, and the sword tumbled from her fingers. More vines wrapped around her throat, and the creature simply hauled her up into the air. Its wounds were already closing, rebuilding themselves. It seized Molly in its other hand and lifted her as well, holding the pair of them face-to-face. There was a malicious eagerness in the creature’s stance.

“See,” it murmured to the fruitlessly struggling Charity. “Look at her. Watch your daughter die.”

Charity’s eyes widened with terror. Her face turned dark red. Molly, meanwhile, simply lay limp, her own face darkening as she was strangled.

“Not long now,” the Scarecrow purred. “There is nothing you can do to help her, mortal woman. Nothing you can do to stop me.”

It was a fetch, I was sure of it, a creature who had been given talent or power enough to exceed its former status, to become the embodiment of the icon of fear mortals called the Scarecrow, to draw power from that image—power enough to block out my strongest magic. That was why it tormented both Molly and her mother—to feed on their terror.

I stared at it dully, while my mind ran through the logic tree and my lungs kept trying to get in a deep breath. I searched through myself for energy enough to do something, anything, to help.

I didn’t have it in me.

I lay there on my side, too exhausted to feel fear, too exhausted to feel hate, too exhausted to feel anger. It was all that I could do to keep from lowering my head and going to sleep, and without will or emotion to fuel my spells, I might as well have been one more frozen sculpture in Mab’s prison garden.

Charity’s heels began to kick frantically, uselessly. The Scarecrow went on purring, and I thought I could actually see the damned thing grow a couple of inches taller. Lily’s incendiary butterfly fluttered around my head, obscuring my view for a second.

And I suddenly got it. A sluggish hope surged up in me.

The fetch drew its power from fear.

And I had none. I was just too tired for it.

That was why I had thrashed the fetch at the hotel so badly. Not two minutes before I faced it, I had gathered up my fear and hurled it out on that decoy spell. When I faced the thing in the darkened hallway, I’d been nothing but angry. Without my fear to play on, the fetch could not disrupt my magic, and I had batted him around like a softball.

Similarly, when I decapitated the Bucky-fetch, I had been feeling no fear. It all happened too fast. I’d reacted on pure reflex, before any pesky thoughts or emotions could weigh in on the matter. There’d been no time to be afraid, and I’d struck the fetch down.

I would never have realized the weakness in the fetches’ defenses had I not pushed myself to my limits; the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. I suddenly knew I could take this chump out, if only I had enough power left for one more spell. I’d done it twice. Third time’s the charm.

The butterfly danced wildly in the air in front of me.

I stared at it for a second, realization dawning, and then I burst out into weak laughter. “Lily, you manipulative, deceitful, wonderful girl.”

I held open my left palm, and the butterfly alighted on it. Its light flashed brighter for a second, and then my will touched it lightly. It fell apart into glowing threads that settled down on my scarred palm and rushed into my spirit. Pure flame filled me, the joyous heat of full summer, and I exalted in the sudden, overflowing life of it. It met the tiny spark of hope still glowing within me and the two multiplied, power unfolding and expanding inside me.

I found myself on my feet, arms spread to my sides, face turned up toward the enormous silver moon. Sunlight seemed to spill from me, to wreathe me in dancing fires that blazed their defiance of Winter. Arctis Tor itself, the fortress of black ice, groaned in protest at the intensity of the light.

I looked down to find the creature staring at me in utter shock. Its tendril-fingers had gone loose, and Molly and Charity lay moving weakly at its feet.

“You cannot do that,” the fetch said in a shocked tone. “You…It is not possible.”

I flicked out a hand, whispered a word, and my blasting rod flew from the ground where I’d dropped it and into my hand, its carvings bursting into light as the blazing heat of a thousand Julys welled up, ready to fly free. “You like movie villains, do you?” I lifted the blasting rod while Summer fire flickered around my outstretched arm. I peeled my lips back from my teeth and purred, “Have you seen this one?”

The carvings along the rod flooded with a blaze of scarlet-and-golden light.

“How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”

Chapter Thirty-nine

The Scarecrow let out an ear-splitting trilling chirp, like a summer locust on steroids, and it bounded to one side in an effort to keep the mounded ice of the fountain between us. I’d already seen how fast a fetch could move, and didn’t bother with a snap shot. Instead, I let it distance itself from Molly and Charity, until it reached cover behind the fountain’s ice and stopped moving.

Then I blew two-thirds of that dome away in a single blast of light, thunder, and fire.

The golden Summer flame hammered straight through the ice and into the Scarecrow. The old fetch was taken off guard, and the lance of fire incinerated what would have been a hip and thigh on a human being. It bellowed a metallic roar of pain and anger, bounced off one of the white marble statues of the three sisters, and was forced to seize hold of one of the statues’ ankles to keep from bouncing over the edge of the parapet.

But the Scarecrow wasn’t the only faerie who cried out. Without warning, a hurricane of sound slammed into me, painfully intense. Once more Arctis Tor shuddered, the black ice trembling and heaving while deep, almost subsonic groans echoed through the fortress. The other fetches’ screams arose from below, a frenzied chorus of berserk rage.

The heaving ground and the sonic sledgehammer tossed me into a bank of ice-sculpted rose vines with thorns three times as long as their flowers. The ice was not brittle, and it didn’t break as my weight hit it. I felt a sharp pain from my ankle, a thorn stabbing underneath the hem of my duster, but the spell-worked coat protected me from further harm. I was on my feet again in a second, readying another blast.

But in that second, the Scarecrow had reversed its course with eerie agility. It headed for Charity and Molly, running on all three of its limbs like a wounded spider, awkward but still swift. This time I couldn’t afford to take my time about lining up the shot. I flicked a lash of fire between the Scarecrow and the Carpenter women, but it sidestepped and I only burned a few loose-end tendrils from its vine-body. The Scarecrow hurtled toward Molly. Charity lay perfectly still beside her, sprawled on the black ice.

But only until the Scarecrow came within reach of her sword. Then Charity rolled and popped up into a low, slashing lunge. Her sword seared its way through the Scarecrow’s undamaged leg, slicing it off at an angle that began at midthigh and finished just above the knee. It frantically rolled again, struggling to get out of sword range. Charity pressed ruthlessly, too close to the damned fetch to let me blast it again. The Scarecrow hopped and skittered on its remaining limbs, heading for the edge of the parapet.

“Charity!” I shouted. “Down!”

Michael’s wife dropped out of my line of fire in an instant.

The fetch shimmered, body contorting weirdly, and leapt. On the way, it changed. Membranous wings unfurled from its body and beat powerfully down, and within a heartbeat the rest of the fetch’s body had conformed to the shape of one of the monstrous, hang-glider-sized bats I’d seen in Faerie once before. It hurtled away, wings thrashing to gain altitude, and the faerie moon shone down in lunatic glee.

I had a perfect shot.

Once more, I called upon the fire of Summer I’d taken in. I could feel its intensity beginning to ebb, but if the fetch managed to slip away I might never have such an opportunity again. Besides. That creature had tormented my friend’s wife and daughter, nearly murdered them right in front of my eyes, and now it was going to answer for it.

So I unleashed the fire again, this time so brilliant that it lit dark mountainsides five or ten miles away, so hot that the blowing snow hissed into instant steam in the wake of the flame. When it struck the fetch, it detonated into a blinding conflagration, an explosion that roared so loudly that it shattered every icy replica of a rose vine upon the parapet.

What tumbled burning from the faerie skies toward the merciless mountains below could not have been identified as anything in particular. It trailed sparks, soot, and ash, and when it slammed into a granite cliff side, it hit with such force that an icy rockslide was jarred loose from the mountain’s slope, burying the fetch under incalculable tons of stone.

I shook my staff at the rockslide in a primal gesture of triumph and shouted, “Who’s next!?!”

The courtyard below become completely silent for a second, and then I could see fetches, too dark to make out clearly, darting away from the base of the spire, retreating from the fight.

“Harry!” Charity said, her voice strained.

I hadn’t realized it when Charity had gotten her head down, but she’d dropped into a baseball player’s slide. Thanks to all the fire I’d been pitching around, the black ice had become slick with a thin layer of melt-water, and her momentum was carrying her with slow, dreamy smoothness toward the parapet’s edge.

I turned to run toward her, and then used an ounce of brainpower to deduce that I’d only be duplicating the behavior that got Charity into the mess to begin with. Instead I dropped to all fours, crawling forward with my staff extended. Her ankles were over the edge by the time I got close enough to reach her. She was able to get her fingers around the end of the wizard’s staff, and I locked onto the other end, halting her slide. I then began to move backward, very slowly, very carefully. The black ice of the parapet hardened once more in a moment, as though it had never thawed, and I pulled Charity carefully away from an involuntary education in skydiving.

Once she was clear, we both turned to look at Molly. The girl lay quietly, still breathing. I rolled onto my back until I could get my breath again. Charity rose and went to her daughter. I didn’t follow her. It wasn’t the kind of moment she’d appreciate me sharing.

I watched, and kept an eye out for trouble. Charity knelt down beside the young woman and gathered her into her arms as she might have a smaller child. Charity held Molly against herself and rocked gently, her lips murmuring steadily as she did so. For a moment, I thought that the terror and trauma had driven Molly too far away to return. But then she shuddered, blinked her eyes open, and began to weep quietly, leaning against her mother.

I heard a groan behind me, and spun up into a crouch, blasting rod ready again.

The sculpture of the crucified man groaned again. Though he was still crucified and horribly rotted, my fire spells, as augmented by Lily’s extraordinary power, had melted the bonds around his left wrist, and now his left arm flopped bonelessly in the steady, howling wind. I had never seen human flesh so badly mangled. His fingers, wrists, and forearms had long since succumbed to frostbite, the blood gone poisonous as it flowed through them, causing the flesh to swell grotesquely. Despite that, I could see that the skin of his entire arm was covered in layers of scars. Burn scars. Knife scars. Scars from flesh torn by blunt force and left to heal incorrectly.

I’ve taken a few hits myself. But that poor bastard’s arm had suffered more than my whole body.

Almost against my will, I walked over to the tree. The man’s hair hung like Spanish moss over his bowed face, some of it light brown, some of it dark grey, some of it gone brittle and white. I reached out and brushed the hair back from the man’s face, lifting his head toward me a little. His beard was as long and disgusting as his hair. His face had been ravaged somehow, and I got the unsettling impression that his expressions had so contorted and stretched his face that they had inflicted their own kind of damage, though there were no scars as on his arm. His eyes were open, but completely white and unseeing.

I recognized him. “Lloyd Slate,” I murmured. “The Winter Knight.”

The last time I’d seen Slate had been after the battle on the hill of the Stone Table, a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team. Slate had been a first-rank menace to society. A drug addict, a rapist, a man with no compunctions about indulging himself at the expense of others. By the end of the battle he had killed a young woman who might have become a friend.

He stirred and let out a small whimper. “Who is there?”

“Dresden,” I replied.

Slate’s mouth dropped open, and a maniacal little giggle bubbled under his reply. “You’re here. Thank God, you’re here. I’ve been here so long.” He tilted his head to one side, exposing his carotid artery. “Free me. Do it, quickly.”

“Free you?” I asked.

“From this,” Slate sobbed, voice breaking. “From this nightmare. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Thank God, Dresden, kill me.”

The seedier neighborhoods of my soul would have been happy to oblige him. But some dark, hard part of me wanted to see what else I could think of to make him suffer more. I just stared at him for a while, considering options. After perhaps ten minutes, he dropped unconscious again.

From somewhere to my right, a delicious voice, at once rough and silky, purred, “You do not understand his true torment.”

I turned to face the frozen fountain. Well. The remains of it, anyway. Maybe a third of the ice mound remained, but it had partially uncovered the statue within—no statue at all, but a member of the Sidhe, a tall, inhumanly lovely woman, her appearance one of nigh perfection. Or it would have been so in other circumstances. Now, partially free from the encasing ice, her scarlet hair clung lumpily to her skull. Her eyes were deeply sunken and burned too bright, as though she had a fever. She stood calmly, one leg, her head, one shoulder, and one arm now emerging from the ice, which was otherwise her only garment. There was an eerie serenity to her, as though she felt no discomfort, physical or otherwise, at her imprisonment. She seemed to regard the entire matter with amused tolerance, as though such trivial conditions were hardly worthy of her attention. She was one of the oldest and most powerful Sidhe in the Winter Court—the Leanansidhe.

And she was also my godmother.

“Lea,” I breathed quietly. “Hell’s bells. What happened to you?”

“Mab,” she said.

“Last Halloween,” I murmured. “She said that you had been imprisoned. She’s kept you here? In that?”

“Obviously.” Something extremely unsettling glittered in her eyes. “You do not understand his true torment.”

I glanced from her to the Winter Knight. “Uh. What?”

“Slate,” she purred, and flicked her eyes in his direction. She was unable to move her head for the ice about it. “There is pain, of course. But anyone can inflict pain. Accidents inflict pain. Pain is the natural order of the universe, and so it is hardly a tool mete for the Queen of Air and Darkness. She tortures him with kindness.”

I frowned at Slate for a moment, and then grimaced, imagining it. “She leaves him hung up like that. And then she comes and saves him from it.”

My godmother smiled, a purring sound accompanying the expression. “She heals his wounds and takes his pain. She restores his sight, and the first thing his eyes see is the face of she who delivers him from agony. She cares for him with her own hands, warms him, feeds him, cleans away the filth. And then she takes him to her bower. Poor man. He knows that when he wakes, he will hang blind upon the tree again—and can do naught else but long for her return.”

I shook my head. “You think he’s going to fall for that?” I said. “Fall in love with her?”

Lea smiled. “Love,” she murmured. “Perhaps, and perhaps not. But need. Oh, yes. You underestimate the simple things, my godchild.” Her eyes glittered. “Being given food and warmth. Being touched. Being cleaned and cared for—and desired. Over and over, spinning him through agony and ecstasy. The mortal mind breaks down. Not all at once. But slowly. The way water will wear down stone.” Her madly glittering eyes focused on me, and her tone took on a note of warning. “It is a slow seduction. A conversion by the smallest steps.”

The skin on my left palm itched intensely for a moment, in the living skin of the Lasciel sigil.

“Yes,” Lea hissed. “Mab, you see, is patient. She has time. And when the last walls of his mind have fallen, and he looks forward with joy to his return to the tree, she will have destroyed him. And he will be discarded. He only lives so long as he resists.” She closed her eyes for a moment and said, “This is wisdom you should retain, my child.”

“Lea,” I said. “What has happened to you? How long have you been a Sidhe-sicle?”

Some of the strength seemed to ebb from her, and she suddenly seemed exhausted. “I grew too arrogant with the power I held. I thought I could overcome what stalks us all. Foolish. Milady Queen Mab taught me the error of my ways.”

“She’s had you locked up in your own private iceberg for more than a year?” I shook my head. “Godmother, you look like you fell out of a crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Her eyes opened again, glittering and unsettling as hell. And she laughed. It was a quiet, low sound—and it sounded nothing like the laugh of the deadly Sidhe sorceress I’d known since before I could drive.

“Crazy tree,” she murmured, and her eyes closed again. “Yes.”

I heard heavy, thumping steps on the staircase, and Thomas came sprinting onto the parapet, fae-bloodied sword still in hand. “Harry!”

“Here,” I said, and waved an arm at him. He glanced at Charity and Molly, and hurried over to me.

A little lump of fear knotted itself in my guts. “Where’s Murphy?”

“Relax,” he said. “She’s downstairs guarding the door. Is the girl all right?”

I pitched my voice low. “She’s breathing, but I’m more worried about damage to her mind. She’s crying at least. That’s actually a good sign. What’s up?”

“We need to go,” Thomas said. “Now.”

“Why?”

“Something’s coming.”

“Something usually is,” I said. “What do you mean?”

He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Since last year…since the Erlking…I’ve had…intuitions, maybe? Maybe just instincts. I can feel things in the air better now than before. I think the Wild Hunt is coming toward us. I think a lot of things are coming toward us.”

No sooner had he said it than I heard, blended with the distant cry of the wind, a long, mournful, somehow hungry horn call.

I stepped up onto the edge of the fountain and peered out into the moonlit night. I couldn’t make out anything very clearly, but for an instant, far in the distance, I saw the gleam of moonlight on one of the odd metals that faeries used to make their weapons and armor.

Another horn rang out, this one more a droning, enormous basso—only the second horn came from the opposite side from the first. Over the next few seconds, more horns joined in, and drums, and then a rising tide of monstrous shrieks and bellows, all around us now. In the mountains east of Arctis Tor, one of the snowcapped peaks was abruptly devoured by a rising black cloud that hid everything beneath it. A quick check around showed me several other peaks being blanketed in shadow. Horn calls and cries grew louder and continuously more numerous.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed. I shot a glance at my godmother and said, “The power I used here. That is what caused this, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” Lea said.

“Holy crap!” Thomas blurted, jumping like a startled cat when what he must have thought was another statue moved and spoke.

“Thomas, this is my godmother, Lea,” I said. “Lea, Th—”

“I know who he is,” my godmother murmured. “I know what he is. I know whose he is.” Her eyes moved back to me. “You summoned forth the power of Summer here in Arctis Tor, in the heart of all Winter. When you did so, those of Winter felt the agony of it. And now they come to slay you or drive you forth.”

I swallowed. “Uh. How many of them?”

The mad gleam returned to her eyes. “Why, all of Winter, child. All of us.”

Crap.

“Charity!” I called. “We’re leaving!”

Charity nodded and rose, supporting Molly, though the girl was at least mobile. If she’d remained unaware and walled away from the world, it would have been a real pain to get her all the way back down the tower. Molly and her mom hit the stairs.

“Thomas,” I said. “See if you can chop off some of this ice without hurting her.”

Thomas licked his lips. “Is that a good idea? Isn’t this the one who tried to turn you into a dog?”

“A hound,” Lea murmured, glittering eyes flicking back and forth at random. “Quite different.”

“She was a friend of Mom’s,” I told Thomas quietly.

“So was my Dad,” Thomas said. “And look how that turned out.”

“Then give me the sword and I’ll do it myself. I’m not leaving her.”

Lea made a sudden choking sound.

I frowned at her. Her eyes bugged out and her face contorted with apparent pain. Her mouth moved, lush lips writhing, twisting. A bestial grunt jerked out of her throat every second or two. The fingers of her freed hand arched into a claw. Then she suddenly sagged, and when she turned her eyes back to me, they were my godmother’s again; one part lust, one part cool, feline indifference, one part merciless predator.

“Child,” she said. Her voice was weak. “You must not free me.”

I stared at her, feeling confused. “Why?”

She gritted her teeth and said, “I cannot yet be trusted. It is not time. I would not be able to fulfill my promise to your mother, should you free me now. You must leave.”

“Trusted?” I asked.

“No time,” she said, voice strained again. “I cannot long keep it from taking hold of…” She shuddered and lowered her head. She lifted her face to me a few seconds later, and the madness had returned to her eyes. “Wait,” she rasped. “I have reconsidered. Free me.”

I traded a look with Thomas, and we both took a cautious step backward.

Lea’s face twisted up with rage and she let out a howl that shook icicles from their positions. “Release me!”

“What the hell is going on here?” Thomas asked me.

“Uh,” I told him. “I’ll get back to you after we get out of Dodge.”

Thomas nodded and we both hurried toward the stairs. I glanced back over my shoulder, once. The fountain was already building itself up again, freezing water to ice. A thin sheet of it already covered my godmother. I shuddered and looked away, directly at the delirious Lloyd Slate. My footsteps quickened even more.

And then, just as I was leaving, only for an instant, I thought I saw one more thing. The triangle of statues of Sidhe noblewomen caught a stray beam of moonlight, while thin clouds made it jump and shift. In that uncertain light, I saw one of the statues move. It turned its head toward me as I left, and the white marble of its eyes was suddenly suffused with emerald green the same color as Mab’s eyes.

Not just the same color.

Mab’s eyes.

The statue winked at me.

The sounds of the approaching fae grew even louder, reminding me that I had no time to investigate. So I shivered and hurried down the stairs beside Thomas, leaving the parapet and its prisoners and—perhaps—its mistress behind me. I had to focus on getting us back to Lily’s rift in one piece, so I forced all such questions from my mind for the time being.

The four of us were slogging through snow up to my knees a few moments later, while I spent the last reserves of power I’d taken from Lily’s butterfly to keep us from going into hypothermia.

I took the lead and ran for the rift as a nightmarish symphony of wails and horns and howls closed in all around us.

Chapter Forty

Shielded by the good graces of Summer, we fled Arctis Tor. The winds outside howled louder, kicking up increasingly intense clouds of mist, snow, and ice. Beyond the wind, still vague but growing slowly more clear and immediate, I could hear the cries of things that thrived in the dark and the cold. I heard drums and horns, wild and savage and inspiring the kind of terror that has nothing to do with thought, and everything to do with instinct.

I heard the cry of the Erlking’s personal horn, unmistakable for any other such instrument.

I traded a quick glance with Thomas, who grimaced at me. “Keep moving!” he called.

“Duh,” I grunted.

Immediately behind me, Murphy panted, “What was that about?”

“Erlking,” I told her. “Big-time bad guy. Wants to eat me.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well. I met him,” I said.

“Ah,” Murph said. Even with her labored breathing, the nonword managed to be dry. “Last October?”

“Yeah. He thinks I insulted him.”

“You’re never mouthy, Harry. Must have been someone who looks like you.” She grimaced and clutched at her belt, her balance wavering. There was a long, open slice in the tough leather, where a claw or blade had nearly struck home. The belt gave way, and the oversized mail she wore flopped down, binding her legs, almost tripping her. “Dammit.”

“Hold up,” I called before Murphy could fall down, and we all staggered to a halt. Molly all but dropped into the snow.

“We can’t stand around like this!” Thomas called.

“Charity, Murph, we’ve got to travel as light as we can. Ditch the armor.” I ripped off my duster and wriggled like an eel to get out of my own mail. Then I tossed it at Thomas.

“Hey!” he said, and scowled.

“Don’t leave it on the ground,” I said. “Thomas, carry it.”

“What?” he demanded. “Why?”

“You’re strong enough that it won’t slow you down,” I said, and got my coat back on. “And we don’t dare leave this much iron lying on the ground here.”

“Why not?”

I saw Murphy get out of her gear, and turn to support Molly so Charity could, too. “Would you want visitors leaving radioactive waste around behind them when they left your place?”

“Oh,” he said. “Good point. Because we wouldn’t want to get them mad at us.” He started rolling the mail into a bundle, which he tied into a rough lump with a belt, and slung it over his shoulder.

Howls and wails and horn cries grew louder, though now all to our flanks and the rear. Somehow, in the gale of snow and wind, we had slipped out of the noose the encircling forces had formed around us. If we kept moving, we stood a real chance of getting away clean.

“This entire field trip isn’t what we were meant to think it was,” I told him. “We’ve been used.”

“What? How?”

“Later. Now carry the damn armor, and don’t leave anything lying behind. Move.” The little flutter of Summer fire left in me began to waver, and for a second the wind gained frozen teeth sharp enough to sink all the way into my vitals. “Move!”

I started slogging through the snow again, doing my best to break a path for those coming behind me. Time went by. Wind howled. The snow slashed at my face, and the Summer fire sank to low embers that would not last much longer. They fluttered and faded at almost the precise moment I sensed a rippling of magical energy nearby, and got a whiff of stale popcorn.

The rift shone in the air thirty yards up the slope.

Things, big shaggy things with white fur and long claws, emerged from the snows behind us, running as lightly over the snow and ice as if it had been a concrete sidewalk.

“Thomas!” I pointed at the oncoming threat. “Murph, Charity! You get the girl out of here. Move!”

Murphy looked back and her eyes widened. She immediately ducked under Molly’s other arm and began to help Charity. Charity staggered for a step, then drew the sword from her belt and thrust it into the snow at my feet, before redoubling her efforts to get Molly over those last few yards.

I transferred my staff to my left hand and took the deadly iron in my right. The last bit of the power Lily loaned me played out, and I didn’t have enough magic left in me to light a candle, much less throw around fire or even use my shield. This was going to be about steel and speed and skill, now, purely physical. Which meant that I probably would have gotten myself quickly killed if Charity hadn’t thought fast and armed me with iron.

As things stood, my brother and I only needed to hold the oncoming yeti-looking things off until the ladies escaped. We didn’t have to actually beat them.

“What are those things?” Thomas asked me.

“Some kind of ogre,” I told him. “Hit them hard and fast. Scare them with iron as much as we can, as fast as we can. If we can get them to come at us cautiously, we might be able to pull off a fighting retreat back up the slope.”

“Got it,” Thomas said. And then, when the first of the snow ogres was maybe thirty feet away, my brother took two steps and bounded into the air. The top of his jump was about ten feet off the snow, and when he came down he held the saber in both hands. The iron weapon sliced cleanly through the ogre’s breastbone and filleted the monster, splitting him open like a steaming baked potato. Its faerie blood took flame, purple and deep blue, and gouted in a blaze of streaming energy.

But Thomas wasn’t done there. The next ogre threw a rock the size of a volleyball at him. Thomas whirled, dodged it, faked to one side, and then cut across the second ogre’s thighs, sending it howling to the ground.

The third ogre hit him with a small tree trunk, baseball style, and turned my brother into a line drive that missed slamming into me by six inches. The ogres howled in fresh aggression and charged.

I’m not a terribly skilled swordsman. I mean, sure, more so than ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet, but among those who know anything about it, I don’t rate well. To make matters worse, my experience was largely in fencing—fighting with a style that uses long, thin blades; a lot of thrusting, a lot of lunging. Charity’s sword would have been at home on the set of Conan the Barbarian, and I had only a basic understanding of using the heavier slashing weapon. I have two advantages as fencer. First, I’m quick, especially for a guy my size. As long as something isn’t superhumanly fast, I don’t get massively outclassed. Second, I have really long arms and legs, and my lunge could hit a target from a county away.

So I played to my strengths. I let out a howl of my own to match the ogres’, and when the one with the club drew near and swept it up over his head in a windup, I lunged, low and quick, and drove about a foot of cold steel into its danglies. I twisted the blade and rolled out to one side as I withdrew it. The club came down on the snow where I’d been. Fire fountained from the ogre’s pelvic region. The ogre screamed and ran around in a panicked agony, and the ogres coming behind it slowed their steps, their charge faltering, until the ogre keened and fell over into the snow, the fire of cold iron consuming it. They stared at their fallen comrade.

Hey. I don’t care what kind of faerie or mortal or hideous creature you are. If you’ve got danglies and can lose them, that’s the kind of sight that makes you reconsider the possible genitalia-related ramifications of your actions real damned quick.

I bared my teeth at them, and ogre blood sizzled on the steel of my borrowed sword. Never turning from them, I started walking back step by slow, cautious step, tight agony in a fiery band around my ribs reminding me of my injuries. I reached Thomas a second later, and he was just then sitting up. He’d crashed into a boulder, and there was a knot already forming just above one eye. He was still too disoriented to stand.

“Dammit, Thomas,” I growled. My left hand wasn’t strong enough to grab onto him and haul him up the hill. If I used my right, the sword would be in my weak hand, and I wouldn’t be able to defend either one of us. “Get up.”

The ogres began gathering momentum, coming for us again.

“Thomas!” I shouted, lifting my sword, staring at the ogres as my shadow abruptly flickered out over the ground between us.

Wait. My shadow did what?

I had part of a second to realize that a new source of light had cast the flickering shadows, and then a bead of intense fire, maybe the size of a Peanut M&M, flashed over my shoulder and splashed over the chest of the nearest ogre. Summer fire slammed the ogre to the ground before it could so much as scream, and began to rip its flesh from its bones.

“I’ve got him!” Fix called, and I saw him in my peripheral vision, sword in hand. He got a shoulder under Thomas’s arm and lifted him with more strength than I would have credited the little guy with. The ogres’ charge came to a complete halt. I shoved my staff through the belt tying up the bundle of mail Thomas had been carrying, lifted it awkwardly to my shoulder, and we fell back toward the rift, never turning our backs on the ogres. They hovered at the edge of visibility in the gusting snow, but did not menace us again.

“Watch your step,” Fix warned me.

Then I felt a rippling sensation around me, and then I stepped into an equatorial sauna.

I found myself on the thin stretch of stage before the screen in Pell’s dingy old theater. I stepped to one side, just as Fix came through with Thomas.

Lily stood on the floor, facing the rift. She looked weary and strained. As soon as Fix came through, she waved a hand as if batting aside an annoying fly. There was a rushing sound, and then the rift folded in on itself and vanished.

Silence fell on the dimly lit theater. Lily melted down onto her knees, one hand holding her up, white hair fallen around her head as she shivered, breathing hard. The ice and frozen snow that had been coating me, gathering in my hair and in the creases of my clothing, vanished, replaced by the usual residual ectoplasm.

“Mmmm,” Thomas observed in a slightly slurred voice. “Slime.”

Fix lowered him to the ground and went to Lily.

“Fix,” I said. “Did you hear what was happening out there?”

“Kicked a beehive, it sounded like.” He knelt beside Lily, providing her his support. “The castle’s garrison came out to meet you?”

“No,” I said. “That was every other Winterfae on the map, apparently.”

“What?” he demanded.

“I, uh, kind of threw a bunch of Summer fire around Mab’s playhouse, and blew up most of this frozen fountain thing.”

Fix’s mouth dropped open. “You what?”

“The Scarecrow was hiding behind the thing and so…” I put Charity’s sword down and waved a hand. “Kablooey.”

Fix stared at me as if I’d gone insane. “You poured Summer fire into Winter’s wellspring?”

“I can’t sleep well any night I haven’t inflicted a little property damage,” I said gravely. “Anyway, I did that, and all hell broke loose. My god-mother told me that anybody who was anybody in Winter had gotten their vengeance on and was coming to kill me.”

“My God,” Fix breathed. “That would do it all right. Where did you get Summer fire to…” His voice trailed off and he stared at Lily.

The Summer Lady looked up, her weary smile gorgeous. “I only provided a minor comfort and guide in order to repay my debt to the lady Charity,” she murmured, a small smile on her lips. “I had no way to know that the wizard would steal that power for his own use.” She drew in a deep breath and said, “Help me up. We must go.”

Fix did so. “Go where?”

I said, “All of those Winter forces are now at the heart of their own realm. Which means that they aren’t on the borders of Summer waiting to attack. Which means that Summer has forces that can be spared to assist the Council,” I said quietly.

“But it only took them a few minutes to show up,” Murphy pointed out. “Couldn’t they just run back and be there a few minutes from now?”

“No, Murph,” I said. “They planned for that. This whole raid was a setup from the get go.” I jerked my head at Lily. “Wasn’t it.”

“That is one way to describe it,” Lily said quietly. “I would not, myself, interpret it that way. I had no part in bringing the fetches here—but their presence and their capture of Lady Charity’s daughter presented us with an opportunity to temporarily neutralize the presence of Mab’s forces upon our borders.”

“We,” I murmured. “Maeve is working with you. That was why she showed up at McAnally’s so quickly.”

“Even so,” Lily said, bowing her head at me in a nod of what looked like respect.

Fix blinked at Lily. “You’re working with Maeve?”

“She couldn’t have altered the flow of time at the heart of Winter,” I said quietly. “Only one of the Winter Queens could do that.”

Fix blinked at Lily as if I hadn’t spoken. “Maeve’s working with you?”

Lily nodded. “Like us, she fears Mab’s recent madness.” She turned back to me. “I provided you with power enough to threaten the wellspring, in the hope that you would draw some portion of Winter back into its own demesnes. Once that was done, Maeve altered the passage of time relative to the mortal realms.”

I arched an eyebrow. “How long have we been gone?”

“It is nearly sunrise of the day after you departed,” she replied. “Though the passage of time was only altered in the last few moments of your escape. Maeve will not be able to hold it for long, but it will give us time enough to act.”

“What if I hadn’t realized it in time?” I asked her. “What if I hadn’t used your fire?”

She smiled at me, a little sad. “You would be dead, I suppose.”

I glared at her. “And my friends with me.”

“Even so,” she said. “Please understand. The compulsion my Queen has laid upon me permitted me few options. I could not make explanation of what I had in mind. Nor could I simply stand by and do nothing while the Council was in such desperate need.”

“But now you can tell me all about it?”

“Now we are discussing history,” she said. She inclined her head to me. Then to Charity. “I am glad, Lady, to see your daughter returned to you.”

Charity looked up at her long enough to give her a swift smile and a nod of thanks. Then she went back to holding her daughter.

“Lily,” I said.

She arched a brow, waiting.

She’d manipulated me, turned me into a weapon to use against Mab. She hadn’t exactly lied to me, but she had taken an awful gamble with my life. Worse, she’d done it with the lives of four of my friends. She had good intentions all the way down the line, I suppose. And she had faced limitations that my instincts told me I still did not fully appreciate or understand. But she hadn’t dealt with me head-on, open and honest.

But then, she was a Faerie Queen in her own right. What in the world had ever given me the impression that she would play her cards faceup?

I sighed. “Thank you for your help,” I said finally.

She smiled, though the sadness was still in it. “I have not been as much a friend to you and yours as you have been to me and mine, wizard. I am glad that I was able to lend you some help.” She bowed to me, from the waist this time. “And now I must take my leave and set things in motion to help your people.”

I returned the bow. “Thank you.”

She bowed again to the company, and Fix echoed her. Then they walked swiftly from the theater.

I dropped onto my ass at the edge of the stage, my feet waving.

Murphy joined me. After a moment, she said, “What now?”

I rubbed at my eyes. “Holy ground, I think. I don’t think we’re going to have any immediate fallout from this, but there’s no sense in taking chances now. We’ll get back to Forthill, make sure everyone is all right. Food. Sleep.”

Murphy let out a groan that was almost lustful. “I like this plan. I’m starving.”

I sat there watching Molly and Charity, and felt a twinge of nerves inside me. I’d been sent to find black magic. Molly was it. She’d used her power to renovate someone’s brain, and as benign as her intentions might have been, I knew that it hadn’t left her unstained. I knew better than anybody how much danger Molly was still in. How dangerous she might now be.

I’d saved her from the bad faeries, sure, but now she faced another, infinitely more dangerous threat.

The White Council. The Wardens. The sword.

It was only a matter of time before someone else managed to trace the black magic back to its source. If I didn’t bring her before the Council, someone else would, sooner or later. Even worse, if the mind-controlling magic she’d already used had begun to turn upon her, to warp her as well, she might be a genuine danger to herself and others. She could wind up as dangerous and crazy as the kid whose execution had served as a prelude to the past few days.

If I took her to the Council, I would probably be responsible for her death.

If I didn’t, I’d be responsible for those she might harm.

I wished I wasn’t so damned tired. I might have been able to come up with some options. I settled for banishing thoughts of tomorrow for the time being. I was whole, and alive, and sane, and so were the people who had stood beside me. We’d gotten the girl out in one piece. Her mom was holding her so ferociously that I wondered if I might not have been the catalyst for a reconciliation between the pair of them.

I might have healed the wounds of their family. And that was a damned fine thing to have done. I felt a genuine warmth and pride from it. I’d helped to bring mother and daughter back together. For tonight, that was enough.

Thomas sat down on my other side, wincing as he touched the lump on his head. “Harry,” Thomas said. “Remind me why we keep hurling ourselves into this kind of insanity.”

I traded a smile with Murphy and said nothing. We all three of us watched as Charity, on the floor in front of the first row of seats, clutched her daughter hard against her.

Molly leaned against her with a child’s gratefulness, need, and love. She spoke very quietly, never opening her eyes. “Mama.”

Charity said nothing, but she hugged her daughter even more tightly.

“Oh,” Thomas said. “Right.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Right.”

Chapter Forty-one

Father Forthill received us in his typical fashion: with warmth, welcome, compassion, and food. At first, Thomas was going to remain outside Saint Mary’s, but I clamped my hand onto the front of his mail and dragged him unceremoniously inside with me. He could have gotten loose, of course, so I knew he didn’t really much mind. He growled and snapped at me halfheartedly, but nodded cautiously to Forthill when I introduced him. Then my brother stepped out into the hall and did his unobtrusive-wall-hanging act.

The Carpenter kids were sound asleep when we came in, but the noise made one of them stir, and little Harry opened his eyes, blinked sleepily, then let out a shriek of delight when he saw his mother. The sound wakened the other kids, and everyone assaulted Charity and Molly with happy shouts and hugs and kisses.

I watched the reunion from a chair across the room, and dozed sitting up until Forthill returned with food. There weren’t chairs enough for everyone, and Charity wound up sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, chomping down sandwiches while her children all tried to remain within touching distance.

I stuffed my face shamelessly. The use of magic, the excitement, and that final uphill hike through the cold had left my stomach on the verge of implosion. “Survival food,” I muttered. “Nothing like it.”

Murphy, leaning against the wall beside me, nodded. “Damn right.” She wiped at her mouth and looked at her watch. She tucked the last of her sandwich between her lips, and then started resetting the watch while she chewed.

“Gone almost exactly twenty-four hours. So we did some kind of time travel?” she asked.

“Oh, God no,” I said. “That’s on the list of Things One Does Not Do. It’s one of the seven Laws of Magic.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But however it happened, a whole day just went poof. That’s time travel.”

“People are doing that kind of time travel all the time,” I said. “We just pulled into the passing lane for a while.”

She finished setting the watch and grimaced. “All the same.”

I frowned at her. “You okay?”

She looked up at the children and their mother. “I’m going to have one hell of a time explaining where I’ve been for the past twenty-four hours. It isn’t as though I can tell my boss that I went time traveling.”

“Yeah, he’d never buy it. Tell him you invaded Faerieland to rescue a young woman from a monster-infested castle.”

“Of course,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

I grunted. “Is it going to make trouble for you?”

She frowned for a moment and then said, “Intradepartmental discipline, probably. They couldn’t get me for anything criminal, so no jail.”

I blinked. “Jail?”

“I was in charge of things, remember?” Murphy reminded me. “I was pushing the line by laying that aside and coming to help you. Throw in that extra day and…” She shrugged.

“Hell’s bells,” I sighed. “I hadn’t realized.”

She shrugged a shoulder.

“How bad is it going to be?” I asked.

She frowned. “Depends on a lot of things. Mostly what Greene and Rick have to say, and how they say it. What other cops who were there have to say. A couple of those guys are major assholes. They’d be glad to make trouble for me.”

“Like Rudolph,” I said.

“Like Rudolph.”

I put on my Bronx accent. “You want I should whack ’em for ya?”

She gave me a quick, ghostly smile. “Better let me sleep on that one.”

I nodded. “But seriously. If there’s anything I can do…”

“Just keep your head down for a while. You aren’t exactly well loved all over the department. There are some people who resent that I keep hiring you, and that they can’t tell me to stop because the cases you’re on have about a ninety percent likelihood of resolution.”

“My effectiveness is irrelevant? I thought cops had to have a degree or something, these days.”

She snorted. “I love my job,” she said. “But sometimes it feels like it has an unnecessarily high moron factor.”

I nodded agreement. “What are they going to do?”

“This will be my first official fuckup,” she said. “If I handle it correctly, I don’t think they’ll fire me.”

“But?” I asked.

She pushed some hair back from her eyes. “They’ll shove lots of fun counseling and psychological evaluation down my throat.”

I tried to imagine Murphy on a therapist’s couch.

My brain almost exploded out my ears.

“They’ll try every trick they can to convince me to leave,” she continued. “And when I don’t, they’ll demote me. I’ll lose SI.”

A lead weight landed on the bottom of my stomach. “Murph,” I said.

She tried to smile but failed. She just looked sickly and strained. “It isn’t anyone’s fault, Harry. Just the nature of the beast. It had to be done, and I’d do it again. I can live with that.”

Her tone was calm, relaxed, but she was too tired to make it sound genuine. Murphy’s command might have been a tricky, frustrating, ugly one, but it was hers. She’d fought for her rank, worked her ass off to get it, and then she got shunted into SI. Only instead of accepting banishment to departmental Siberia, she’d worked even harder to throw it back into the faces of the people who had sent her there.

“It isn’t fair,” I growled.

“What is?” she asked.

“Bah. One of these days I’m going to go downtown and summon up a swarm of roaches or something. Just to watch the suits run out of the building, screaming.”

This time, her smile was wired a little tight. “That won’t help me.”

“Are you kidding? We could sit outside and take pictures as they came running out and laugh ourselves sick.”

“And that helps how?”

“Laughter is good for you,” I said. “Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity.”

She let out a tired, quiet chuckle. “Let me sleep on that one, too.” She pushed away from the wall, drawing her keys from her pocket. “I’ve got an appointment with the spin doctor,” she said. “You want a ride home?”

I shook my head. “Few things I want to do first. Thanks, though.”

She nodded and turned to go. Then she paused. “Harry,” she said quietly.

“Hmm?”

“What I said in the elevator.”

I swallowed. “Yeah?”

“I didn’t mean it to come out so harsh. You’re a good man. Someone I’m damned proud to call my friend. But I care too much about you to lie to you or lead you on.”

“It’s no one’s fault,” I said quietly. “You had to be honest with me. I can live with that.”

One corner of her mouth quirked into a wry half grin. “What are friends for?”

I sensed a change in tone as she asked the question, a very faint interrogative.

I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m your friend. That won’t change, Karrin. Ever.”

She nodded, blinking several times, and for a moment rested her hand on mine. Then she turned to leave. Just then, Thomas poked his head in from the hallway. “Harry, Karrin. You leaving?”

“I am,” she said.

Thomas glanced at me. “Uh-huh. Think I can bum a ride?”

Her car keys rattled. “Sure,” she said.

“Thanks.” He nodded to me. “Thank you for another field trip, Harry. Kind of bland, though. Maybe next time we should bring some coffee or something, so we don’t yawn ourselves to death.”

“Beat it before I kick your whining ass,” I said.

Thomas sneered at me in reply, and he and Murphy left.

I ate the rest of my sandwich, idly noting that I had reached one of those odd little mental moments where I felt too tired to go to sleep. Across the room, Charity and her children had all fallen asleep where she sat on the floor, the children all leaning upon their mother and each other like living pillows. Charity looked exhausted, naturally, and I could see care lines on her face that I’d never really noticed before.

She could be a pain in the ass, but she was one gutsy chick. Her kids were lucky to have a mother like her. A lot of moms would say that they would die for their children. Charity had placed herself squarely in harm’s way to do exactly that.

I regarded the kids for a moment, mostly very young children’s faces, relaxed in sleep. Children whose world had been founded in something as solid as Charity’s love for them would be able to do almost anything. Between her and her husband, they could be raising an entire generation of men and women with the same kind of power, selflessness, and courage. I’m a pessimist of the human condition, as a rule, but contemplating the future and how the Carpenter kids could contribute to it was the kind of thought that gave me hope for us all, despite myself.

Of course, I suppose someone must once have looked down upon young Lucifer and considered what tremendous potential he contained.

As that unsettling thought went through my head, Molly shifted herself out from under her mother’s arm, removed her leg very gently from beneath a little brother’s ear, and extracted herself from the slumbering dogpile. She moved quietly for the exit until she glanced up, saw me watching her, and froze for half a step.

“You’re awake,” she whispered.

“Too tired to sleep,” I said. “Where are you going?”

She rubbed her hands on her torn skirts and avoided my eyes. “I…what I put them through. I thought it would be better if I just…”

“Left?” I asked.

She shrugged a shoulder, and didn’t lift her eyes. “It won’t work. Me staying at home.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She shook her head tiredly. “It just won’t. Not anymore.” She walked out past me.

I moved my right hand smoothly, gripping her hand at the wrist, skin-to-skin contact that conducted the quivering, tingling aura of power of a practitioner of the Art up through my arm. She’d avoided direct contact before, though I hadn’t had a reason to think she would at the time.

She froze, staring at my face, as she felt the same presence of power in my own hand.

“You can’t stay because of your magic. That’s what you mean.”

She swallowed. “How…how did you know?…”

“I’m a wizard, kid. Give me some credit.”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts, her shoulders hunched. “I should g-go…”

I stood up. “Yeah, you should. We need to talk.”

She bit her lip and looked up at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve got some tough choices to make, Molly. You’ve got the power. You’re going to have to figure out whether you want to use it. Or whether you’re going to let it use you.” I gestured with a hand for her to accompany me and walked out, slowly. We weren’t going anywhere. What was important was the walk. She kept pace with me, her body language as closed and defensive as you please.

“When did it start for you?” I asked her quietly.

She chewed her lip. She said nothing.

Maybe I had to give a little to get a little. “It’s always like that for people like us. Something happens, almost like it’s all by itself, the first time the magic bubbles over. It’s usually something small and silly. My first time…” I smiled. “Oh, man. I haven’t thought about that in a while.” I mused for a moment, thinking. “It was maybe two weeks before Justin adopted me,” I said. “I was in school, and small. All elbows and ears. Hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet, and it was spring, and we were having this school Olympics. Field day, you know? And I was entered in the running long jump.” I grinned. “Man, I wanted to win it. I’d lost every other event to a couple of guys who liked to give me a hard time. So I ran down the blacktop and jumped as hard as I could, yelling the whole time.” I shook my head. “Must have looked silly. But when I shouted and jumped, some of the power rolled out of me and threw me about ten feet farther than I should have been able to jump. I landed badly, of course. Sprained my wrist. But I won this little blue ribbon. I still have it back at home.”

Molly looked up at me with a little ghost of a smile. “I can’t imagine you being smaller than average.”

“Everyone’s little sometime,” I said.

“Were you shy, too?”

“Not as much as I should have been. I had this problem where I gave a lot of lip to older kids. And teachers. And pretty much everyone else who tried to intimidate me, whether or not it was for my own good.”

She let out a little giggle. “That I can believe.”

“You?” I asked gently.

She shook her head. “Mine is silly, too. I walked home from school one day about two years ago and it was raining, so I ran straight inside. It was errands day, and I thought Mom was gone.”

“Ah,” I said. “Let me guess. You were still wearing the Gothy McGoth outfit instead of what your mom saw you leave the house in.”

Her cheeks flushed pink. “Yes. Only she wasn’t running errands. Gran had borrowed the van and taken the little ones to get haircuts because Mom was sick. I was in the living room and I hadn’t changed back. All I wanted was to sink into the floor so she wouldn’t see me.”

“What happened?”

Molly shrugged. “I closed my eyes. Mom came in. She sat down on the couch and turned on the TV, and never said a word. I opened my eyes and she was sitting there, three feet away, and hadn’t even seen me. I walked out really quietly, and she never even glanced at me. I mean, at first I thought she’d gone crazy or into denial or something. But she really hadn’t seen me. So I snuck back to my room, changed clothes, and she was none the wiser.”

I lifted my eyebrows, impressed. “Wow. Really?”

“Yes.” She peered up at me. “Why?”

“Your first time out you called up a veil on nothing but instinct. That’s impressive, kid. You’ve got a gift.”

She frowned. “Really?”

“Absolutely. I’m a full wizard of the White Council, and I can’t do a reliable veil.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

I shrugged. “Why are some people wonderful singers, even without training, and other people can’t carry a tune in a bucket? It’s something I just don’t have. That you do…” I shook my head. “It’s impressive. It’s a rare talent.”

She frowned over that, her gaze turning inward for a moment. “Oh.”

“Bet you got one hell of a headache afterward.”

She nodded. “Yes, actually. Like an ice-cream headache, only two hours long. How did you know?”

“It’s a fairly typical form of sensory feedback for improperly channeled energy,” I said. “Everyone who does magic winds up with one sooner or later.”

“I haven’t read about anything like that.”

“Is that what you did next? You figured out you could become the invisible girl, and went and studied books?”

She was quiet for a moment, and I thought she was about to close up again. But then she said, quietly, “Yes. I mean, I knew how hard my Mom would be on me if I was…showing interest in that kind of thing. So I read books. The library, and a couple others that I got at Barnes and Noble.”

“Barnes and Noble,” I sighed, shaking my head. “You didn’t head into any of the local occult shops?”

“Not then,” she said. “But…I tried to meet people. You know? Like, Wiccans and psychics and stuff. That was how I met Nelson, at a martial arts school. I’d heard the teacher knew things. But I don’t think he did. Some of Nelson’s friends were into magic, too, or thought they were. I never saw any of them do anything.”

I grunted. “What did all those people tell you about magic?”

“What didn’t they tell me,” she said. “Everyone thinks magic is something different.”

“Heh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“And it wasn’t like I could just go running around all the time. Not with school and the little ones to watch and my Mom looking over my shoulder. So, you know. Mostly books. And I practiced, you know? Tried little things. Little, teeny glamours. Lighting candles. But a lot of the things I tried didn’t work.”

“Magic isn’t easy,” I said. “Not even for someone with a strong natural talent. Takes a lot of practice, like anything else.” I walked quietly for a few steps and then said, “Tell me about the spell you used on Rosie and Nelson.”

She paused, staring at nothing, the blood draining from her face. “I had to,” she said.

“Go on.”

Her pretty features were bleak. “Rosie had…she’d already had a miscarriage, because she kept getting high. And when she lost the baby, she went to the hard stuff. Heroin. I begged her to go into rehab, but she was just…too far gone, I guess. But I thought maybe I could help her. With magic. Like you help people.”

Hooboy. I kept the dismay off my face and nodded for her to continue.

“And one day last week, Sandra Marling and I had a talk. And during it, she told me how they were discovering that the presence of a very strong source of fear could bypass all kinds of psychological barriers. Things like addiction. That the fear could drive home a lesson, reliably and quickly. I didn’t have much time. I had to do it to save Rosie’s child.”

I grunted. “Why do Nelson, too?”

“He was…he was using too much. He and Rosie sort of reinforced each other. And I wasn’t sure what might happen, so I tried the spell out before I used it on her, too.”

“You tested it on Nelson?” I asked. “Then did the same one on Rosie?”

She nodded. “I had to scare them away from the drugs. I sent them both a nightmare.”

“Stars and stones,” I muttered. “A nightmare.”

Molly’s voice became defensive. “I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there.”

“Do you have any idea how much you hurt them both?” I asked.

“Hurt them?” she said, apparently bewildered. “They were fine.”

“They weren’t fine,” I said quietly. “But the same spell should have done more or less the same thing to both of them. It acted differently on Nelson than Rosie.” And then I put two and two together again and said, “Ah. Now I get it.”

She didn’t look up at me.

“Nelson was the father,” I said quietly.

She shrugged. A tear streaked down her cheek. “They probably didn’t even know what they were doing when it happened. The pair of them were just…” She shook her head and fell silent.

“That explains why your spell damaged Nelson so much more severely.”

“I don’t understand. I never hurt him.”

“I don’t think you did it on purpose.” I waved a hand, palm up. “Magic comes from a lot of places. But especially from your emotions. They influence almost anything you can do. You were angry at Nelson when you cast the spell. Contaminated the whole thing with your anger.”

“I did not hurt them,” she said stubbornly. “I saved their lives.”

“I don’t think you realize the ramifications,” I said.

She spun to me and shrieked, “I did not hurt them!”

The air suddenly crackled with tension; vague, unfocused energy centered on the screaming girl. There was enough energy to manage something unfortunate, and it was clear that the kid wasn’t in anything like control of her power. I shook my head and swung my left hand in a half circle, palm faced out, and simply drew in the magical energy her emotions had generated and grounded it into the earth before somebody got hurt.

A tingle of sensation washed up my arm, surprisingly intense. Her talent was not a modest one. I started to snap a reprimand for her carelessness, but aborted it before the first word. In the first place, she was ignorant of what she’d done. Not innocent, but not wholly at fault, all the same. In the second place, she’d just been through a nightmarish ordeal at the hands of wicked faeries. She probably couldn’t have controlled her emotions, even if she wanted to.

She stared at me in surprise as the energy she had raised vanished. The rage and pain in her stance and expression faded to uncertainty.

“I didn’t hurt them,” she said in a rather small voice. “I saved them.”

“Molly, you need to know the facts. I know you’re tired and scared. But that doesn’t change a damned thing about what you did to them. You fucked around with their minds. You used magic to enslave them to your will, and the fact that you meant well by it doesn’t matter at all. Somewhere inside of them both, they know what you’ve done to them, subconsciously. They’ll try to fight it. Regain control of their own choices. And that struggle is going to tear their psyches to shreds.”

More tears fell from her eyes. “B-but…”

I went on in a steady voice. “Rosie was better off. She might recover from it in a few years. But Nelson is probably insane already. He might not ever make it back. And doing it to them has screwed around with your own head. Not as bad as Rosie and Nelson, but you damaged yourself, too. It’ll make it harder for you to control impulses and your magic. Which makes you a lot more likely to lose control and hurt someone else. It’s a vicious cycle. I’ve seen it in action.”

She shook her head several times. “No. No, no, no.”

“Here’s another truth,” I said. “The White Council has seven Laws of Magic. Screwing around in other people’s heads breaks one of them. When the Council finds out what you’ve done, they’ll put you on trial and execute you. Trial, sentence, and execution won’t take an hour.”

She fell silent, staring at me, crying harder. “Trial?” she whispered.

“A couple of days ago I watched them execute a kid who had broken the same law.”

Her shocked expression could not seem to recover. Her eyes roamed randomly, blurred with tears. “But…I didn’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“Ditto.”

She broke out into a half-hysterical sob and clutched at her stomach. “But…but that’s not fair.”

“What is?” I said quietly. “One more hard truth for you. I’m a Warden of the Council now, Molly. It’s my job to take you to them.”

She only stared. She looked wracked with pain, helpless, alone. God help me, she looked like the little girl I’d first met at Michael’s house years before. I had to remind myself that there was another, darker portion of the girl behind those blue eyes. The snarling rage, the denial, they both belonged to the parts of her mind that had been twisted as she twisted others.

I wished that I hadn’t seen flashes of that other self in her, because I did not want to follow the chain of consequence that sprang from it. Molly had broken the Laws of Magic. She’d inflicted incalculable harm on others. Her damaged psyche could collapse on her, leaving her insane.

All of which meant that she was dangerous.

Ticking-bomb dangerous.

It did not matter to the Laws that she had meant well. She had become exactly the kind of person that the Laws of Magic—and their sentence—were created to deal with.

But when the law fails to protect those it governs, it’s up to someone else to pick up the slack—in this case, me. There was a chance that I could save her life. It wasn’t an enormous chance, but it was probably the best shot she was going to get. Assuming, of course, that she was not already too far around the bend.

I only knew one sure way to find out.

I stopped in the darkened hall and turned to her. “Molly. Do you know what a soulgaze is?”

“It…I read in a book that it’s when you look into someone’s eyes. You see something about who they are.”

“Close enough,” I agreed. “You ever done it?”

She shook her head. “The book said it could be dangerous.”

“Can be,” I confirmed. “Though probably not for the reasons you’d think. When you see someone like that, Molly, there’s no hiding the truth about who you are. You see it all, good and bad. No specifics, usually, but you get a damned good idea about what kind of person they are. And it’s for keeps. Once you’ve seen it, it stays in your head, fresh, period. And when you look at them, they get the same look at you.”

She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“I’d like to gaze on you, if you’re willing to permit it.”

“Why?”

I smiled a little, though my reflection in a passing window looked mostly sad. “Because I want to help you.”

She turned away, as if to start walking again, but only swayed in place, her torn skirts whispering. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, kid. But I need you to trust me for a little while.”

She nodded, biting her lip. “Okay. What do I do?”

I stopped and turned to face her. She mirrored me. “This might feel a little weird. But it won’t last as long as it seems.”

“Okay,” she said, that lost-child tone still in her voice.

I met her eyes.

For a second, I thought nothing had happened. And then I realized that the soulgaze was already up and running, and that it showed me Molly, standing and facing me as nothing more than she seemed to be. But I could see down the hall behind her, and the church’s windows held half a dozen different reflections.

One was an emaciated version of Molly, as though she’d been starved or strung out on hard drugs, her eyes aglow with an unpleasant, fey light. One was her smiling and laughing, older and comfortably heavier, children surrounding her. A third faced me in a grey Warden’s cloak, though a burn scar, almost a brand, marred the roundness of her left cheek. Still another reflection was Molly as she appeared now, though more secure, laughter dancing in her eyes. Another reflection showed her at a desk, working.

But the last…

The last reflection of Molly wasn’t the girl. Oh, it looked like Molly, externally. But the eyes gave it away. They were flat as a reptile’s, empty. She wore all black, including a black collar, and her hair had been dyed to match. Though she looked like Molly, like a human being, she was neither. She had become something else entirely, something very, very bad.

Possibilities. I was looking at possibilities. There was definitely a strong presence of darkness in the girl, but it had not yet gained dominion over her. In all the potential images, she was a person of power—different kinds of power, certainly, but she was strong in all of them. She was going to wind up with power of her own to use or misuse, depending on what choices she made.

What she needed was a guide. Someone to show her the ropes, to give her the tools she would need to deal with her newfound power, and all the baggage that came with it. Yes, that kernel of darkness still burned coldly within her, but I could hardly throw stones there. Yes, she had the potential to go astray on an epic scale.

Don’t we all.

I thought of Charity and Michael, Molly’s parents, her family. Her strength had been forged and founded in theirs. They both regarded the use of magic as something suspect at best, and if not inherently evil, then inherently dangerous. Their opposition to the power that Molly had manifested might turn the strength they’d given their daughter against her. If she believed or came to believe that her power was an evil, it could push her faster down the left-hand path.

I knew something of how much Michael and Charity cared for their daughter.

But they couldn’t help her.

One thing was certain, though, and gave me a sense of reassurance. Molly had not yet indelibly stained herself. Her future had yet to be written.

It was worth fighting for.

The gaze ended, and the various images in the windows behind Molly vanished. The girl herself trembled like a frightened doe, staring up at me with her eyes wide and huge.

“My God,” she whispered. “I never knew…”

“Easy,” I told her. “Sit down until things stop spinning.”

I helped her settle to the floor with her back to the wall, and I did the same beside her. I rubbed at a spot between my eyebrows that began to twinge.

“What did you see?” she whispered.

“That you’re basically a decent person,” I told her. “That you have a lot of potential. And that you’re in danger.”

“Danger?”

“Power’s like money, kid. It isn’t easy to handle well, and once you start getting it, you can’t have enough. I think you’re in danger because you’ve made a couple of bad choices. Used your power in ways that you shouldn’t. Keep it up, and you’ll wind up working for the dark side.”

She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Did…did you get what you needed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You have a couple of choices to make, Molly. Starting with whether or not you want to turn yourself in to the Council.”

She rocked back and forth, a nervous motion. “Why would I?”

“Because they’re going to find you, sooner or later. If that happens, if they think you’re trying to avoid them, they’ll probably kill you out of hand. But if you’re willing to cooperate and face up to what you’ve done, and if someone intercedes on your behalf, the Council might withhold a death sentence.”

“Aren’t you just going to turn me in anyway?”

“No,” I said. “It’s about choices, Molly. This one is yours. I’ll respect what you want to do.”

She frowned. “Would you get in trouble with them for that?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. They might kill me for being in collusion with an evil wizard.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really?”

“They aren’t exactly overflowing with tolerance and forgiveness and agape love,” I told her. “They’ve almost pulled the trigger on me a couple of times. They’re dangerous people.”

She shivered. “You’d…you’d risk that for me?”

“Yep.”

She frowned, chewing that over. “And if I turn myself in?”

“Then we’ll explain what happened. I’ll intercede for you. If the Council accepts that, then I’ll be held responsible for your training and your use of magic.”

She blinked. “You mean…I’d be your apprentice?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “But you have to understand something. It would mean that you agree to accept my leadership. If I tell you to do something, you do it. No questions, no delays. What I can teach you is no damn game. It’s the power of life and death, and there’s no room for anyone who doesn’t work hard to control it. If you go to the Council with me, you’re accepting those terms. Got it?”

She shivered and nodded.

“Next, you have to decide what you want to do with your power.”

“What are my choices?” she asked.

I shrugged. “You’ve got the juice to make the White Council, eventually, if that’s what you want. Or you can find something worth supporting with your talents. I’ve heard of a couple of wizards who have made stupid amounts of money with their skills. Or hell, maybe after you learn to control yourself, you just set them aside. Let them fade.” Like your mom did.

“I could never do that last one,” she said.

I snorted. “Think about it, kid. You join up with the wizards now and you wind up in the middle of the war. The bad guys won’t care that you’re young and untrained.”

She chewed on her lip. “I should talk with my parents. Shouldn’t I?”

I exhaled slowly. “If you want to, you should. But you’ve got to realize that this is going to be your choice. You can’t let anyone else make it for you.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she asked, in a very small voice, “Do you really think I could…could like, join the dark side?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “There are plenty of things out there who would be happy to help you along. Which is why I want to give you a hand—so that I can steer you away from that type until you know enough to handle them on your own.”

“But…” Her face scrunched up. “I don’t want to be a bad guy.”

“No one wants it,” I said. “Most of the bad guys in the real world don’t know that they are bad guys. You don’t get a flashing warning sign that you’re about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren’t looking.”

“But the Council…they’ll see that, right? That I don’t want to be like that?”

“I can’t guarantee you that they’ll believe that. And even if they do, they might decide to execute you anyway.”

She sat very still. I listened to her breathe. “If I go to the Council…can my parents come with me?”

“No.”

She swallowed. “Will you?”

“Yes.”

She met my eyes again, this time without fear of a soulgaze beginning. That ship had sailed. Tear-stained cheeks gleamed and curved into a little smile that could not hide the fear behind it.

I reached out and put my hand over hers. “I’ll promise you this, Molly. I don’t intend to let them hurt you. Period. The only way anyone will lay a finger on you is over my dead body.” Which would not be difficult for the Council to arrange, but there was no sense in mentioning that to the girl. Her day had been scary enough. “I think going with me is your best chance to get out of this,” I continued. “If you decide that it’s what you want, we’ll sit down with your parents. They won’t be thrilled with the idea, but they can’t make the call on this one. It’s yours. It has to be, or it won’t mean anything.”

She nodded and closed her eyes for a moment. Poor kid. She looked so damned young. I was fairly sure I had never been that young.

Then she drew in a deep, shaking breath and said, “I want to go to the Council.”

Chapter Forty-two

I talked Molly into staying at the church with her family until everyone had gotten some rest and we could talk things out with her mother. Any sane man would have hopped a bus for Las Vegas or somewhere rather than wait around and tell Charity Carpenter he wanted to haul her first baby in front of a gang of powerful wizards for trial and possible execution.

I found an unused cot and flopped onto it. My shins hung off the end of the undersized thing, and I didn’t care a bit. Nails clicked in unsteady rhythm on tile, and I felt Mouse’s warm, silent presence limp carefully to the floor beside my cot. I reached out, ruffled his ears, and laid my hand on the thick ruff of fur across his shoulders. I was asleep before he settled himself down to sleep beside me.

I woke up later, in the same position I’d fallen asleep. I had a crick in my neck, and one hand dangled over the side of the bed. It had lost enough circulation to feel numb and floppy, and I had to squint over the side of the cot to see that it was still resting on Mouse’s furry back. The room was unlit, but the door to the hallway was open, and afternoon-flavored sunlight lit the hall.

I wanted to go back to sleep, but I hauled myself to my feet and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, Mouse limping along beside me without complaint. I availed myself of indoor plumbing, and found myself wishing that they had a shower. I made do with a birdbath in the sink, and shambled back down to Forthill’s guest room.

The cots were all but empty. Nelson slept in one of them, faint twitches randomly stirring his limbs. His closed eyes rolled back and forth, and he had broken into a light sweat. Nightmares, I supposed. Poor kid. I wished I could have helped, but realistically there wasn’t anything I could do for him.

Molly slept in another cot; the motionless, black sleep of the truly exhausted. Charity sat in a chair beside the cot, her head tilted back against the wall. She snored a little. One of her hands rested on Molly’s hair.

I regarded them both in silence for a while. I thought about writing the whole thing off, conjuring up a wistful image of digging a hole, getting in, and then pulling the hole in after me. Hey, it worked for Bugs Bunny.

“I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque,” I sighed to Mouse.

Mouse settled down on the floor again, and lay on his side, holding his injured leg clear of the floor.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “I’m too stupid to be uninvolved. No sense in putting off the inevitable.”

So I got up, went over to Molly, and gently shook her shoulder. Charity woke up when I did, blinking disorientation from her eyes. Molly took a little bit longer, but then she took a sharp breath and sat up in bed, mirroring her mother.

“Yes? Is everyone all right?” Charity asked.

“As far as I know,” I told her. “Where are the other kids?”

“My mother took them home.”

“Any word from Michael?”

She shook her head.

“We need to talk about something fairly important, please.”

“And what is that?” she asked.

“Worth waking up for. Maybe you could get up, get some water on your face while I hunt down some coffee.”

“We do need to talk, Momma,” Molly said in a gentle tone.

She frowned at me for a moment, and I thought she was going to argue with me about it. Then she shook her head and said, “Very well.”

I made it so. I raided the small staff kitchen and came away with not only coffee, but several bagels and some fresh fruit. I left a few bucks on the counter under a saltshaker, then went back to Molly and Charity.

We sat down to eat our breakfast in the shadowy room.

I laid it out for Charity just as I had for Molly.

“Black magic,” Charity whispered, when I had finished. She glanced at Molly, a faint frown troubling her features. “I never thought it had gone that far.”

“I know, Momma,” Molly said quietly.

“Is what he says true?”

Molly nodded.

“Oh, baby,” Charity sighed. She touched Molly’s hair with one hand. “How could I not have seen this happening?”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I told her. “At least not right now. It won’t help anyone.”

Anger touched her features and she said, “Neither will this nonsense with the White Council. Of course she will not go.”

“I don’t think you get it,” I told Charity in a quiet voice. “She’s going. She can go voluntarily, or she can go when the Wardens find her. But she’s going.”

“You plan to inform them of what has happened, then?” Charity asked, her tone gaining frost as it went.

“No,” I said. “But that kind of magic leaves a mark. There are plenty of things in the Nevernever who can sense it—and, in fact, they had already tipped off the Council that there was black magic afoot here. Even if I never say anything else about it, it’s only a matter of time until another Warden investigates.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“I kind of do,” I said. “And this isn’t just about accountability, either. The things she’s done have already left their mark on her. If she doesn’t get support and training, those changes are going to snowball.”

“You don’t know that,” Charity insisted.

“I kind of do,” I said, louder. “Hell’s bells, Charity, I’m trying to protect her.”

“By dragging her in front of a kangaroo court of egotistic, power-mongering tyrants? So that they can execute her? How is that protecting my child?”

“If she goes in voluntarily, with me, I think I can get her clemency until she has a chance to show them that she is sincere about working with them.”

“You think?” Charity said. “No. That’s not good enough.”

I clenched my fists in frustration. “Charity, the only thing I am sure about is that if Molly doesn’t come out, and if one of the other egotistical, power-mongering tyrants finds her, they’re going to automatically declare her a warlock and execute her. To say nothing of what will happen to her if she’s on her own. It’s more than likely that she’ll deserve it by then.”

“That’s not true,” Charity snapped. “She is not going to become some sort of monster. She is not going to change.”

“My God, Charity. I want to help her!”

“That isn’t why you’re doing it,” she snarled, rising. “You’re trying to get her to go with you to save your own skin. You’re afraid that if they find her, they will brand you traitor for not bringing her in, and execute you along with her.”

I found myself on my feet as well. Silence fell heavy and oppressive on the room.

“Momma,” Molly said quietly, breaking it. “Please tell me what Harry has done in the past two days to make you think that he is selfish. Or cowardly. Was it when he turned to face the ogres so that we could escape? Was it when he traded away the obligations the Summer Lady owed him in order to attempt the rescue?”

Charity was shocked silent for a second. Then her face heated and she said, “Young lady, that isn’t—”

Molly went on smoothly, her voice quiet, calm, displaying neither anger nor disrespect—nor weakness. “Or perhaps it was when you were unconscious and no one could have stopped him from simply taking me to turn over to the Council, and he instead stopped to give me a choice.” She chewed on her lip for a second. “You told me everything he’s done since I was taken. Now he’s offering to die for me, Momma. What more could you ask of him?”

Charity’s face reddened further, and I thought I saw something like shame on her features. She sat down again, bowed her head, and said nothing. The silence stretched. Her shoulders shook.

Molly slid down to kneel at her mother’s feet and hugged her. Charity hugged back. The pair of them rocked slowly back and forth for a moment, and though the dim room made it hard to see, I was sure they were both crying.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Charity said after a moment. “I should not have accused you so, Mister Dresden.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her head. “But I will not allow her to go.”

Molly looked up very slowly. She faced Charity, lifted her chin a little, and said, “I love you very much, Momma. But this isn’t your choice. I’m the one responsible for what I did. I’ll face the consequences of it.”

Charity turned her face away from Molly, a kind of terrible grief and fear making her look, for the first time in my memory, old. “Molly,” she whispered.

Father Forthill had arrived at some point during the conversation, though none of us had noticed him in the doorway. His gentle voice was steady. “Your daughter is in the right, Charity,” he said. “She’s an adult now, in many ways. She’s taken actions that demand that she accept the responsibilities that accompany them.”

“She is my child,” Charity objected.

“She was,” Forthill corrected her, “if only for a time. Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.” The priest folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the doorway. “I think you should consider what has happened, Charity. Dresden is perhaps the only one who could have helped you and Molly. I think it no accident that he became involved in this situation.” He gave me a whimsical little smile. “After all. He does work in mysterious ways.”

I walked across the floor and lowered myself to one knee before Charity. “I don’t know anything about that. But for whatever it is worth, I promise you,” I said very quietly. “I will bring your daughter back from the Council safe and well. They’ll have to kill me to stop me.”

Charity looked up at me, and I saw a dozen emotions flicker over her features. Hope, fear, anger, sadness. Twice she opened her mouth to speak, but bit down on the words before she uttered them.

Finally, she whispered, “I have your word on it?”

“You do,” I said.

She stared at me for a moment. Then she looked up and said, to Forthill, “I wish Michael was here.”

Forthill asked her, “If he was, what do you think he would say?”

Her eyes moved back to me, and she said, frowning faintly, “To have faith. To trust the wizard. That he is a good man.”

The priest nodded. “I think he would say that, too.”

Charity glanced at me without meeting my eyes. “How long will it take?”

“I’ll contact the Council today. Depends on who is available, but this kind of thing gets high priority. Tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”

She bowed her head again, and nodded. She said to Forthill, “Is there nothing we can do?”

“Molly’s made her decision,” Forthill said quietly. “And everything I’ve learned about the effects of black magic upon those who use it agrees with what Dresden has told you. Your daughter is in very real danger, Charity.”

“Can’t the Church…?”

Forthill gave her a faint smile and shook his head. “There aren’t many of us still standing sentinel against the Shadows. Of those who do, none of us have any real skill with magic. We could assist her in turning aside from her gifts, but given her age it would in effect be nothing more than imprisonment.” He nodded to Molly. “And, no offense, child, but with your temperament, without your full cooperation, it would only push you more quickly toward the darkness.”

“No,” Charity said. “She’s got to set this aside.”

Molly folded her arms tightly against her stomach, and nodded, lips pressed together. “No.”

Charity looked up and all but pleaded, “Molly. You don’t understand what it could do to you.”

The girl was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Do you remember the parable of the talents?”

Charity’s eyes blazed. “Don’t you dare attempt to use the scripture to justify this.”

I held up a hand for silence and said, “I haven’t read this one.”

Forthill said, “Three men were given money by their lord in the amount of fifteen, ten, and five silver talents. The man with fifteen invested the money, worked hard, and returned thirty talents to his lord. The man with ten did the same, and returned twenty talents. The lord was most pleased. But the third man was lazy. He buried his five talents in the ground, and when he returned them to the lord, expecting to be rewarded for keeping them safe, his lord was angry. He had not given the lazy man the money to be hidden away. He’d given it to the man so that he could use it and make his lands better, stronger, and more productive. The moral being that, to whom much is given, much is required.”

“Oh,” I said. “Stan Lee said it better. Or at least faster.”

“I’m sorry?” Forthill said.

“Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibility,” I said.

Forthill pursed his lips and nodded. “That is faster, I suppose. Though I’m skeptical on how it could be worked into a sermon.”

I frowned and glanced at Charity. She had her head bowed, and her hands clenched into fists over and over again. Another insight about her hit me, then.

Charity had been the one given five talents. She’d had the power, and she buried it in the ground.

“My teacher told me something once,” I heard myself say in a quiet voice. “That the hardest lesson in life is learning when to do nothing. To learn to let go.”

Molly laid her head in Charity’s lap and said, “You know bad things are out there. I have a chance to make a difference. I want to help.”

Something inside the steely will of Michael’s wife suddenly broke. She gathered Molly up into another hug and just held her there while she shivered. Then Charity whispered, “Of course you do. You’re your father’s child. How could you want anything else?”

Molly let out a choking little laugh and leaned closer. “Thank you.”

“I will pray for you,” Charity said quietly. She looked up at me and tried to smile. “And for you, Harry.”

Chapter Forty-three

Forthill led me to a small, cluttered office I was sure was his own. He pointed me at the phone and then shut the door, giving me privacy before I could ask him for it. I sat down on the edge of his desk, got the notebook I kept my contact information in from my duster pocket, and called up the Wardens.

I did a password and countersign routine with the young-sounding woman who answered the phone, after which she asked, in accented English, “What is the nature of your call?”

“A report,” I said. “I’ve got a young woman here who’s broken one of the Laws.”

“You’ve captured a warlock?” the woman asked.

“She turned herself in, full cooperation. There are extenuating circumstances around it. I want her to have a hearing.”

“A hearing…” the young woman said. I heard paper rustling. “Warden, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we do hearings anymore.”

“Sure we do,” I said. “We just haven’t had one for ten or twelve years. Pass word to command and tell them we’ll use the same location, sundown tomorrow. I’m tasking Warden Ramirez with security.”

“I don’t know,” the woman hedged. She sounded young and uncertain. Our recent losses to the Red Court had created openings for a lot of young wizards, and they had inherited a hellishly dangerous responsibility from the fallen. “I’m not sure if this is appropriate.”

“This is how we’re doing it,” I told her. “All you have to do is get word to Morgan and Luccio. Tell them what I said. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She sounded almost grateful. “I’ll pass word up the line.”

“Thank you,” I said, and hung up.

I took a deep breath. Word was on its way to the Wardens, and now I was committed.

There was a knock, and then Forthill opened the door. “Finished?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Of course. Is there anything else I might do?”

I shook my head. “You’ve done more than enough already.”

He smiled a little. “Arguable,” he said. “Though, may I ask you something?”

I nodded.

“The young man,” he said. “Nelson. Is he truly pursued?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. No reason for him to be. Molly worked a spell on him that forced him to feel fear of drug use.”

He frowned. “And you think it brought on a sense of paranoia?”

“She didn’t know how badly her own feelings for him would disrupt the spell. She didn’t mean to do it, but she laid a world of hurt on the boy.” I shook my head. “Paranoia. Nightmares. Phobias. And he’s feeling the physical withdrawal from the drugs, to boot. He could be permanently damaged.”

“Poor lad,” Forthill said.

“I don’t know how to begin helping him, Father,” I said. I paused for a moment, then said, “He’s an orphan.”

Forthill smiled and took off his spectacles. He polished them with a handkerchief. “You may not know where to begin to help. I do. Don’t worry, Dresden. The boy won’t be left alone.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I don’t do it for you,” he said, “but for the boy. And from obedience to our Lord. But you’re welcome.”

I put the notebook away and stood up, but Forthill remained in the doorway, his expression direct.

“Tell me,” Forthill said. He squinted at his glasses, making sure they were clean. “Do you believe that you’ll be able to protect the girl?”

“I think so,” I said quietly. I didn’t have many friends on the Council. But the ones I did have were on the Senior Council—it’s an executive body, especially in wartime. They’d support me. It wouldn’t clear the kid completely, but at least she could be placed on a kind of zero-tolerance probation rather than executed.

Forthill watched me with patient, bright blue eyes. “You sound familiar with this situation.”

I smiled a little. “Intimately.”

“I begin to see,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said. “Do you really believe what you told Charity about me? That God arranged for me to be there for Molly?”

He regarded me as he replaced his spectacles, bright blue eyes steady. “I do. I know that you don’t much hold with religion, Dresden. But I’ve come to know you over the years. I think you’re a decent man. And that God knows his own.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

He smiled and shook his head. “Meaning, mostly, that I have faith that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. I meant what I said about you.”

I snorted gently and shook my head. “Harry Dresden. I’m on a mission from God.”

“Seems an awfully unlikely coincidence, does it not? That the one person Michael knows on the Council should be the one in the position to best help his daughter, just when he was called away?”

I shrugged. “Coincidences happen,” I said. “And I don’t think God’s got me warming up in the bullpen to be one of his champions.”

“Perhaps not,” Forthill said. “But I think that you are being prepared, nonetheless.”

“Prepared?” I asked. “For what? By whom?”

Forthill shook his head. “It’s an old man’s hunch, that’s all. That the things you’re facing now are there to prepare you for something greater. Something more.”

“God,” I said. “I hope not. I’ve got problems enough without working up to bigger ones.”

He chuckled and nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”

I frowned over a thought. “Padre. Tell me something. Why in the world would the Almighty send Michael off on a mission just when his family most needed him to protect them?”

Forthill arched an eyebrow. “My son,” he said, “God knows all things at all times. By His very nature, his omniscience enables Him to know what has happened, is happening, and will happen. Though we might not be able to see His reasons, or to agree with them from our perspectives, they are yet there.”

“So what you’re saying is that the Almighty knows best, and we just have to trust Him.”

Forthill blinked. “Well. Yes.”

“Is there any reason that the Almighty couldn’t do something blatantly obvious?”

Poor Forthill. He’d been preparing himself for years for a theological duel with the shadowy wizard Dresden, and when the moment came, I wasn’t even giving him a real fight. “Well. No. What do you mean?”

“Like maybe the Almighty didn’t send Michael away right when he was needed to protect his daughter. Maybe He sent Michael away because that’s exactly what He wanted him to do.” I let out a short laugh. “If I’m wrong, it would be one hell of a coincidence….” I frowned for a moment, then said, “Do me a favor. Go get Molly for me. Council procedure says that I can’t leave her alone. I’ve got to keep her with me until it’s done.”

He rose and nodded, agreeable if still slightly baffled. “Very well.”

“And I need to know something, Father. Do you know where Michael is right now?”

Forthill shook his head.

“Could you get word to him?” I asked. “I mean, if you really had to?”

He tilted his head, frowning, and asked, “Why?”

“Because I’ve had an idea,” I said. “Can you get in touch with him?”

Forthill smiled.

Chapter Forty-four

My mechanic’s skills bordered on the supernatural. He left word with me that the Beetle was ready to resume active duty, and that while it didn’t look like much, the car would roll when I pushed the pedals—which was all I really needed it to do. So Molly and I rolled up to the lakeside warehouse where I’d met with the Council at the start of this mess.

When I shut down the engine, the Beetle rattled and shuddered hard enough to click my teeth together before it died. It continued wheezing and clicking for several seconds afterward.

Molly stared out ahead of her, her face pale. “Is this the place?”

The rundown old warehouse looked different in the orange evening light than it had at high noon. Shadows were longer and darker, and emphasized the flaws and dents in the building, giving the place a much more rundown, abandoned appearance than I had remembered. There were fewer cars there, as well, and it gave the place an even more abandoned atmosphere.

“That’s the place,” I said quietly. “You ready?”

She swallowed. “Sure,” she said, but she looked frightened and very, very young. “What comes next?”

I got out of the car as an answer, and Molly followed suit. I squinted around, but no one was in sight until the air shimmered about twenty feet away and Ramirez stepped out of the veil that had hidden him.

Carlos Ramirez was the youngest wizard ever given the post of regional commander in the Wardens. He was average height, his skin glowing with bronze health, and he wore both the grey cloak of the Wardens and one of their—or rather, our, except that I don’t have one—silver swords at his left hip. At his right he wore a heavy semiautomatic in a holster, and his military-style web belt also bore several hand grenades.

“Good veil,” I said. “Way better than the other day.”

“I wasn’t here the other day,” he assured me with bland confidence.

“Your work?” I asked.

“I make it look easy,” he said without a trace of modesty. “It’s a curse to be so damned talented when I’m already obscenely good-looking, but I try to soldier on as best I can.”

I laughed and offered him my hand. He shook it. “Dresden,” he said.

“Ramirez.” I nodded to my right. “This is Molly Carpenter.”

He glanced at the girl, looking her up and down. “Miss,” he said, without a polite bow of his head. He glanced at me, indicated a direction with his hand, and said, “They’re ready for you. But walk with me for a minute? I need to talk with you.” He glanced at Molly. “Privately.”

I arched a brow at him. “Molly, I’ll be right back.”

She bit her lip and nodded. “O-okay.”

“Miss,” Ramirez said with a somewhat apologetic smile. “I need you to remain exactly where you’re standing now. All right?”

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “You think she’s that dangerous?”

“I think it’s security protocol,” Ramirez said. “If you didn’t want me doing it, you shouldn’t have asked me.”

I started to snarl an answer, but I choked it down and said, “Fine. Molly, just stand there for now. I won’t go out of sight of you.”

She nodded, and I turned with Ramirez. We walked several paces away over the gravel before he asked, “That the kid?”

Ramirez wasn’t old enough to get good car insurance rates himself, much less to refer to someone as “kid,” though he’d had to grow up awfully swiftly. He’d been an apprentice when the war with the Red Court erupted, and he’d done good service for the Council upon attaining status as a full wizard, fighting in several nasty engagements with the vampires. It was the kind of thing that made a man age in a hurry.

“That’s her,” I confirmed. “Did you get a chance to examine the victims?”

“Yeah.” He frowned and watched me for a moment before he said, “She’s someone you know.”

I nodded.

He glanced back at her. “Crud.”

I frowned at him. “Why?”

“I don’t think today is going to go well for her,” Ramirez said.

My stomach suddenly felt cold. “Why not?”

“Because of how the battle in Oregon played out,” he said. “Once the forces from Summer attacked their rear, we gave the vamps one hell of a beating. Morgan got within about twenty feet of the Red King himself.”

“Morgan killed him?”

“No. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. He cut down a Duke and a pair of Counts before the Red King got away.”

“Damn,” I said, impressed. “But what does that have to do with Molly?”

“We had the Reds by the balls,” Ramirez said. “Sunrise was coming in the real world, and when they tried to retreat into the Nevernever the faeries were on them like a school of piranha. The Reds had to find a way to draw off some of our heavies and they found it. Luccio’s boot camp.”

I drew in a breath. “They attacked Luccio and the newbies?”

“Yeah. McCoy, Listens-to-Wind, and Martha Liberty led a force from the battle to relieve the camp.”

“They did, huh? How’d it go?”

He took a deep breath and said, “They haven’t reported in yet. And that means…”

“It means that my support in the Senior Council isn’t here to help me.”

Ramirez nodded.

“Who has their proxies?”

“We didn’t hear from you until after they had left, so they didn’t entrust their proxies to anyone.”

I sighed. “So the Merlin holds them by default. And he doesn’t much like me. He’d cast the votes to condemn her just to spite me.”

“It gets better,” he said. “Ancient Mai is still in Indonesia, and LaFortier is covering the Venatori while they relocate. The Merlin has their votes too—and I don’t think the Gatekeeper is coming.”

“So the only one whose opinion counts is the Merlin,” I said.

“Pretty much.” Then Ramirez frowned at me. “You don’t look surprised.”

“I’m not,” I said. “If something can go wrong, it does. I’ve accepted that by now.”

He tilted his head. “I’ve just told you the kid will probably be found guilty before she’s been tried.”

“Yeah,” I said. I chewed on my lip. This would make things more difficult. I had been counting on at least a little help from Ebenezar and his cronies. They knew the Council procedures better than I did, and how to manipulate them. They also knew the Merlin, who, magical talents aside, was a damned slippery fish when it came to maneuvering through a Council meeting.

The Merlin had every reason to oppose me, and therefore Molly. Now, if he wielded the votes of the people I’d been counting on to support me, he could literally be Molly’s judge, jury, and executioner.

Well. Judge and jury, anyway. Morgan would do the executing.

I ground my teeth. My plan could still work, theoretically, but there was very little I could do to alter the outcome from here on in. I glanced back at Molly. Here we were. I’d brought her to this turn. I’d see it through.

“Fine,” I said. “I can deal with this.”

Ramirez arched an eyebrow at me. “I thought you’d look more upset.”

“Would it help anything if I started foaming at the mouth?”

“No,” Ramirez said. “It might explain a few things, but it wouldn’t help, per se.”

“Water, bridge,” I said. “Spilt milk. Accept things you cannot change.”

“In other words, you have a plan,” Ramirez said.

I shrugged and smiled tightly at him, and just then a low, throbbing engine approached the old warehouse.

Ramirez’s hand went to the butt of his gun.

“Easy,” I told him. “I invited them.”

A motorcycle wound its way through the maze of alleys and potholes between warehouses, and then crunched to a stop in the gravel beside the Blue Beetle. Fix flipped the bike’s kickstand down, and then he and Lily got off the motorcycle. Fix flipped me a little salute, and I nodded back to him.

Ramirez arched an eyebrow and said, “Is that who I think it is?”

“Summer Knight and Lady,” I confirmed.

“Well, crap,” he said, and scowled at me. “You going to turn this into some kind of fight?”

“Los,” I chided him. “Would I do that?”

He gave me a steady look and then said, “You just had to ask me to handle security.”

“What can I say, man? No one else was pretty and talented enough.”

“No one is so talented that you couldn’t make him look bad, Dresden,” he muttered. Then he gave Lily and Fix a calculating look and said, “Well. This should be interesting, at any rate. Introduce me?”

“Yep.”

I did. Then Ramirez led us through the veil protecting the warehouse from perception. Two Wardens at the door searched everyone for weapons. They even had one of the animate statues of a temple dog they used to detect hostile enchantments, veils, and concealed weaponry. The stone construct made me a little nervous—I had nearly been attacked by one over a false alarm once—but this time it passed me by without showing any interest. It lingered longest on Molly, once emitting a grindstone growl, but it subsided after a moment and returned to its post beside the door.

I started to go inside, but Ramirez touched my arm. I stopped and frowned at him. He glanced at Molly and drew a black cloth from his belt.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

“It’s protocol, Harry.”

“It’s sadistic and unnecessary.”

He shook his head. “I’m not offering an option, here.” He lowered his voice so that only I could hear him. “I don’t like it either. But if you violate protocol now, especially in a case that involves mind-control magic, it will be all the excuse the Merlin needs to declare the proceedings potentially compromised. He’ll be able to pass summary judgment on the girl, and put you and me both on precautionary probation.”

I ground my teeth, but Ramirez was right. I remembered when I’d been brought before the Council for the first time. One thing, more than any other, stuck in my memory of that night—the scent of the black cloth hood they’d had over my head, over my face. It had smelled slightly of dust, slightly of mothballs, and no light whatsoever had come through to me. Some terrified corner of my brain had noted that so long as the hood was over my face, I wasn’t really a person. I was only a creature, a statistic, and one that was a potential threat at that. It would be far easier to pass and mete out a death sentence when one did not have to look at the face of the damned.

I took the hood from Ramirez and turned to Molly. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She stared back into my eyes, terrified and trying to look brave. She swallowed and nodded once, then closed her eyes.

I cast a resentful look at the warehouse. Then I slipped the hood over Molly’s pink-and-blue hair and pulled it down over her pale face.

“Good enough?” I asked Ramirez.

It wasn’t fair of me to blame him for it, but the note of accusation in my voice came through far more strongly than I had intended. Ramirez glanced away, shame on his face, and nodded. Then he held open the warehouse door.

I took Molly’s hand and led her inside.

Chapter Forty-five

Blood might not stain a Warden’s cloak, but it’s all but impossible to get it out of an old, porous concrete floor. The Merlin, Morgan, and a dozen Wardens stood in the same places they had before, a loose circle that surrounded the dark brown stain that yet remained in the spot where the young warlock had been beheaded.

Morgan had a fresh cut on one of his ears and his left wrist was tightly wrapped in medical tape. Even so, he stood calmly and steadily, the sword of the White Council’s justice resting with its tip on the floor, his hands folded over the weighted pommel. His expression, as he saw me, was impossible to read. I was used to flat contempt and hostility from the man. Hell, I was used to feeling the same thing about Morgan in reply.

But I’d seen him in action. I’d learned a little bit about what his life was like. I understood what moved him better than I had in the past, and I couldn’t simply dislike him anymore. I respected the man. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t pants him on national television if I got the opportunity, but I couldn’t simply dismiss him outright anymore, either.

I nodded to the man who might be ordered to murder Molly in the next few minutes. It wasn’t a friendly nod. It was more along the lines of the salute one gave to an opponent at a fencing match.

He returned it in exactly the same manner, and I somehow sensed that Morgan knew that I wasn’t going to let the girl get hurt without a fight. The fingers of his right hand drummed slowly on the hilt of the sword. It wasn’t meant as a threat: It was simply a statement. If I fought the White Council’s justice, I would be fighting him.

We both knew how that kind of fight would end.

I would never survive it.

We also both knew that, if given the right reasons, I’d do it anyway.

Beside Morgan, the Merlin also watched me, speculation in his features. He knew that I didn’t plan on slugging it out if the hearing didn’t go Molly’s way. In the past, the Merlin might simply have sneered at me, spat in my eye, and dared me to do my worst. Now, he was sure I was up to something else, and I could all but see the gears spinning in his head as I entered holding Molly’s hand and guiding her blind steps, followed closely by Fix and Lily.

Morgan nodded to Ramirez, and he went to pull the doors closed and to close the circle around the building, a barrier that would prevent magical intrusion while the Wardens guarded the purely physical approaches. But just before Ramirez reached up to chain the doors closed, they opened to reveal the tall and ominous figure of the Gatekeeper. Dressed in his formal black robes, with a deep purple cowl that left his features shadowed but for the glitter of his dark eyes, the Gatekeeper stood in the doorway for a moment, and something gave me the impression that he was staring at the Merlin.

If so, the Merlin wasn’t rattled. The old wizard inclined his head in a regal nod of greeting and respect to the Gatekeeper, and he gestured for the man to join him. Instead, the Gatekeeper walked to a point in the circle midway between the Merlin and myself, and stood quietly, leaning on an aged, slender staff.

The Merlin regarded this positioning for a moment, eyes narrowed, and then addressed the room, in Latin. “Wardens, close the circle. Warden Dresden, please step forward and introduce us to your guests.”

I gave Molly’s hand a squeeze of reassurance, then let go of her and stepped forward. “First thing,” I said, looking around at the dozen or so Wardens present, plus a few other noncombatant Council members who had been in the area or who were on the Senior Council’s staff. “Is there anyone here who doesn’t understand English?”

The Merlin folded his arms, a slight smile curling his lips. “Council meetings are conducted in Latin.”

The old bastard knew that my Latin wasn’t so hot. I could understand it pretty well, but speaking it myself tended to result in words being transposed in increasingly odd ways until linguistic surreality ensued. If I tried to defend Molly in Latin, I’d sound like an idiot from the get go, and the Merlin knew it. While he technically held all the power he needed to quash any defense, he was still accountable to the rest of the Council, so he had to do everything he could to justify his actions. He’d planned on undermining me with Latin from the moment he heard about the conclave.

But I can plan things too.

“Granted that Latin is our traditional lingual medium,” I replied, giving the Merlin a big old smile. “But our guests, Lily, the Summer Lady, and Fix, the current Summer Knight, do not speak it. I would fain not show the slightest lack of consideration to such prestigious visitors and envoys of our allies in Summer.”

Choke on that, jerk, I thought. Let’s see you snub the ally who just bailed the Council out of ass-deep alligators.

The Merlin narrowed his eyes and chewed on his options for a moment before he shook his head, unable to find a way to counter the move. “Very well,” he said in English, though his tone was grudging. “The Council welcomes the presence of the Summer Lady and Knight in this conclave, and extends its hospitality and protection while they remain within our demesnes.”

Lily bowed her head in acknowledgment. “Thank you, honored Merlin.”

He bowed his head to her in turn. “Not at all, your Highness. It is hardly our custom to involve outsiders in confidential internal affairs.” He pointedly shifted his gaze back to me. “But given the recent development between our peoples, it would be ungrateful indeed to evict you.”

“It would, wouldn’t it,” I agreed.

The Merlin’s eyes went flat for a moment, but his expression shifted back to neutrality. “Warden Dresden. As a regional commander of the Wardens, you have the authority to summon a conclave in matters pertaining to your duties and your area of command. As soon as it is quite convenient, would you enlighten us as to the purpose of this conclave?”

“Two reasons,” I said. “The first is to allow the Summer Lady to address the Senior Council.” I turned my head and nodded at Lily, who stepped forward into the circle, while I faded back to stand beside Fix.

“Honored Merlin,” she began, her tone serious and formal. “My Queen Titania has bidden me to pass her compliments to you and yours, and for two in particular whose courage has gained the admiration of the Summer Court.”

I frowned. “What’s this?” I whispered to Fix.

“Shhh,” he said. “Pay attention. She’ll get there.”

“All I needed her to do was verify what we did.”

“Be patient,” Fix whispered. “She will.”

Lily glanced over her shoulder at me and winked. I twitched. It looked exactly like the gesture from the statue that might have been Mab atop the spire at Arctis Tor.

Lily turned to Morgan and said, “Warden Morgan. Your courageous defense of the Venatori and their retainers, and your assault upon the Red King, were feats she has never seen bettered. My Queen extends her compliments and congratulations to you, Warden, and to the Council you serve. Furthermore, she will not let such acts of daring and dedication go unremarked or unrewarded, and so she has bidden me bestow upon you this token.”

Lily held up a small, intricately detailed oak leaf of pure silver. She walked over to him and pinned the oak leaf to his grey cloak, just over his heart. “I name thee friend and esquire to the Summer Court, Warden Morgan. An you find yourself in peril near the realm of the Sidhe, once, and once only, you need but touch this device and call aloud upon Titania for aid.”

Morgan got an odd look on his face, as though he had tried to make several expressions at once and gotten stuck halfway there. His mouth opened, shut, and then he settled for a deep bow at the waist and replied, “I thank thee, your Highness.”

“What the hell is that?” I whispered to Fix.

The little guy grinned. “The Order of the Silver Oak is nothing to sneeze at. Hush.”

Lily smiled, laid a slender hand over the oak leaf in benediction, then walked back over to me. “Warden Dresden,” she said. “Your own contribution to the battle is every bit as admirable. My Queen has bid me—”

“His contribution?” the Merlin said, interrupting her.

I blinked at Lily.

“Dresden was not present at the battle,” the Merlin protested.

“Indeed not,” Lily said, turning while she spoke to address every wizard there with some of her words. “In the late hours two nights ago, Warden Dresden planned and led a small force in a raid upon Arctis Tor itself.”

A collective inhalation went through the room, and was followed by a nebulous buzz of murmurs and whispering. The Merlin’s poker face was too good to tell me anything about his reaction, but Morgan’s eyebrows went up.

“Warden Dresden and his team won through the defenders of the fortress and launched an assault of fire upon the icy wellspring at the heart of Arctis Tor. His actions disrupted the dispositions of the forces of Winter upon our borders, compelling them to retreat to the fortress to deal with the offenders. Once there, the flow of time through the region was slowed, creating an opportunity for our own forces to come to your aid.

“What is she talking about?” I whispered to Fix. “I didn’t know I was going there until I got there, and the only fighting left to do was all the fetches.”

“Mmmm,” Fix murmured back. “And yet not one word she’s said has been untrue.”

I snorted.

“In short, honored Merlin,” Lily continued, “and honorable members of the Council, had Dresden not attacked the lair of Mab herself, the mightiest fortress in Winter, had Dresden not stormed the gates of Arctis Tor, the battle would surely have been lost. Every soul who came safe home again from the battle owes his life to Harry Dresden and his courage.”

Silence fell.

She looked slowly around the circle, and let the silence emphasize her previous words far more ably than any speech. “It is for this reason,” she said after a moment, “that my Queen confers upon Warden Dresden status as friend and esquire of the Summer Court.” She turned to me and pinned another silver leaf over my heart, then laid her hand over it. She looked up at me and smiled. “You, too, may once call upon us at need. Well done, Harry.”

She stood on tiptoe and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and then turned to face the Merlin. “My Queen wishes you to know, honored Merlin, that, while glad to be able to go to the aid of the Council against the threat posed by the Red Court, Winter’s forces have returned to their original positions, and once again the forces of Summer must remain vigilant of our borders. Until that situation changes, she cautions you that Summer will be able to offer its allies only limited assistance.”

The Merlin was staring at me so hard that for a second I thought he hadn’t heard Lily’s warning. Then he blinked and shook himself a little. “Of course, your Highness,” he said. “Please convey to Her Majesty the gratitude of the White Council and assure her that even in these desperate times, her friendship will not be forgotten.”

She bowed her head again. “I shall do so. And so are my duties discharged.” She retreated back to her original position, beside Fix.

“Why,” I muttered under my breath, “do I get the feeling that Titania handing me a medal can’t possibly be as simple as it looks?”

“Because you can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly,” Lily murmured in reply. “But it offers you some benefit today.” She smiled at me. “Surely you didn’t actually expect a Summer Queen to do simply as you bid her and no more?”

I grumbled something under my breath, while the Merlin turned to confer quietly with Morgan. A general round of whispers rose up as the wizards took the opportunity to bandy rumors and theories around.

I found Molly’s cold, trembling hand and squeezed it again.

“What happened?” the girl asked me.

“Lily talked me up like I was a hero,” I said. “Everyone seems sort of shocked.”

“Can I take this off yet?” Molly asked.

“Not yet,” I told her.

“Harry,” Ramirez said, stepping over to me. “She’s not supposed to speak.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered to him, and lowered my voice to speak to Molly. “Pipe down, kid. Try not to worry. So far, so good.”

Which was true enough. I had managed not to look like an illiterate idiot, and Lily’s impromptu medal ceremony had tacitly established my fighting credentials as something comparable to those of the Council’s most capable soldier. It didn’t mean that Molly was out of the woods, but it would give me a solid foundation for presenting her case. My credibility was everything, and I had done all that I could to establish my presence before the Council.

The Merlin had been in the game a while, and he knew exactly what I was up to. He didn’t seem too happy about it. He beckoned the Council’s secretary, a dried-up old spider of a man named Peabody, and put his head together with the old man in whispered conference.

“Order,” the Merlin called after a moment, and the room settled down immediately. “Warden Dresden,” the Merlin said. “May we continue with your explanation for the necessity of this conclave?”

I stepped back into the circle, tugging Molly along with me until we were standing on the heavy bloodstain where the boy had been executed. There was a psychic remnant of the death there, a cold, quivering tension in the air, an echo of rage and fear and death. Molly shuddered as her feet came to rest atop the stained concrete. She must have felt it, too.

I had a sudden flash, a horrible image of the future, where Molly’s body lay in spreading scarlet a few feet from a black cloth bag, so bright and detailed that it almost replaced the reality before me.

Molly shuddered again and whispered, so softly that no one but I could hear, “I’m afraid.”

I squeezed her hand and answered the Merlin’s question in the manner prescribed by protocol. “I have brought a prisoner before the Council, one who has broken the Fourth Law. I have brought her here to seek justice, Merlin.”

The Merlin nodded at me, his expression serious and distant. “This woman with you is the prisoner?”

“This girl is,” I replied, and put no emphasis on the correction. “She comes to face the Council openly, of her own will, and in open admission of her wrong.”

“And this wrong?” the Merlin asked. “What has she done?”

I looked at Morgan. “She broke the Fourth Law of Magic when she imposed a fear of drug use upon two addicts in order to protect both them and their unborn child from the damage of their addictions.”

Morgan stared back at me as I spoke. I thought I saw a faint frown in his eyes.

The Merlin remained silent for half a minute, then slowly arched one brow. “She violated the free will of another human being.”

“She did—but in ignorance, Merlin. She knew neither the Laws nor the side effects of her actions. Her intentions were only to preserve and protect three lives.”

“Ignorance of the Law is never an excuse, Warden Dresden, as you well know, and has no bearing upon this judgment.” The Merlin glanced at Peabody, then back to me. “I assume you have examined the victims?”

“I have, Merlin.”

“And have you had their condition confirmed by another Warden?”

Ramirez stepped forward. “I have done so, Merlin. The psychic trauma was serious, but it is my belief that both will recover.”

The Merlin eyed Ramirez. “Is that your opinion, Warden Ramirez? Based, no doubt, upon your extensive experience?”

Ramirez’s eyes glittered with anger at the Merlin’s tone. “It is the opinion of the duly appointed regional commander of the western United States,” he replied. “I believe that the Merlin should remember that he personally appointed me. If it hasn’t faded into a blur of senility.”

“Warden,” Morgan barked, and his tone was one of absolute authority. “You will apologize to the Merlin and moderate your tone. At once.”

Ramirez’s gaze smoldered, but he glanced at Fix and Lily, and then a little guiltily at Morgan. “Of course, Captain.” He drew himself up and gave the Merlin a proper, polite bow. “I ask your forgiveness, Merlin. The last days have been difficult. For everyone.”

The Merlin let it hang in the air for a minute. Then his rigid expression softened somewhat, and I saw a flash of bone-deep weariness in the old man’s eyes. “Of course,” he said in a quieter voice, and bowed his own head. “My choice of words was less polite than it could have been, Warden Ramirez. Please do not take it as a slight upon your performance.”

Clever old snake. Establishing himself as oh-so-reasonable and understanding with the younger members of the Council. Or maybe he really was apologizing to Ramirez, who was the unofficial poster boy of the younger generation of wizards. Or, more likely, he was doing both. That was more the Merlin’s style.

The Merlin returned his attention to me. “To continue. Warden Dresden, have you soulgazed the prisoner?”

“I have,” I said.

“You are convinced of her guilt?”

I swallowed. “I am,” I said. “But I am also convinced that her actions do not represent the malice that defines a true warlock.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Warden Dresden.” His voice turned drolly unapologetic. “Doubtless offered to us out of your own extensive experience.”

“I beg your pardon, Merlin. But when it comes to the Council sitting in self-righteous, arrogant judgment over a young wizard who made an honest mistake, I believe I have more experience than anyone in this room.”

The Merlin’s head rocked back as if I had slapped him. I wasn’t as subtle and proper as him when it came to insults, but if he was going to do it, I saw no reason not to return fire. I pressed on before he could speak, stepping forward and turning to address the room as I spoke.

“Wizards. Friends. Brothers and sisters in arms. You know why this is happening. You know how thinly stretched our resources have become. In the past three years, the Council has tried and condemned more warlocks than in the past twenty. Children who are raised in societies that do not believe in magic suddenly inherit powers they could hardly have imagined, and certainly cannot control. They have no support. No training. No one to warn them of the consequences or the dangers of their actions.”

I reached out and jerked that fucking black hood from Molly’s head, and the girl suddenly stood blinking at the light. Tears had streaked her makeup into dark stains running down her face. Her eyes were red with crying, her expression haunted and terrified. She shuddered and lowered her eyes, staring down at the bloodstained floor.

“This is Molly,” I said to the room. “She’s seventeen years old. Her best friend had already lost one unborn child because of the drugs she’d been addicted to. She knew it was going to happen again. So to protect that child’s life, to protect her friends from their addiction, Molly made a choice. She used her power to intervene.”

I faced Morgan. “She made a wrong choice. No one denies that. She admits to it herself. But look at her. She’s no monster. She understands that what she did was wrong. She understands that she needs help. She submitted herself to this Council’s judgment freely. She wants to learn to control her power, to handle it responsibly. She came here hoping to find help and guidance.”

Morgan didn’t look at me. He was staring at Molly. His fingers kept drumming on the hilt of his sword.

“I’ve soulgazed her. It’s not too late to help her. I think we owe her the chance to redeem herself,” I continued. I looked at the Gatekeeper. “For God’s sake, wizards, if we are to survive this war, we need all the talent we can get. Molly’s death would be a foolish waste.”

I drew in a breath and turned to face the Merlin. “There’s been enough blood spilled on this floor. I beg you to consider clemency. Levy the Doom of Damocles, if you must, but I beg you to spare her life. I will take personal responsibility for her training and accept the consequences of any actions taken under my mentorship.”

Silence fell.

I waited for the Merlin to speak. Molly began trembling harder, and small whimpering sounds came from her throat.

The Merlin’s eyes narrowed, and with that single revealing expression I suddenly knew that I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d outmaneuvered him. I’d startled him with my insult and delivered my speech effectively to the wizards present. I could see it on their faces; the uncertainty, the sympathy. More than one wizard had glanced at the bloodstains at my feet and shuddered as I spoke to them. More than one looked at Molly’s face, and grimaced in sympathy for her fear.

I’d beaten the Merlin. He knew it.

And he hated it.

I had forgotten to take into account his pride, his ego, his self-image. He was the mightiest wizard on the planet, the leader of the White Council, and he was not accustomed to being insulted and manipulated—and especially not in front of outsiders. I, a mere puppy of a young wizard, had stung him, and his wounded pride sprayed arterial anger. He had it under control, but it was no less terrible or dangerous for that.

“Warden Dresden,” he said in a deadly quiet tone. “Your compassion does you credit. But as you yourself pointed out, our resources are spread too thin already. The Council cannot afford to have a regional commander of the Wardens burdened with a hazardous rehabilitation of a warlock. The duties of the war and of containing the increasing occurrence of black magic must have your full attention.”

Oh, God.

“The Laws of Magic are clear. The prisoner admits her guilt. I am not unmoved by the prisoner’s plight, but we are involved in a war for our very survival.”

Ohgodohgodohgod…

“I therefore take no pleasure in pronouncing the prisoner’s fate. It is the judgment of the Senior Council that the prisoner is a warlock, guilty of breaking the Fourth Law.” He lifted his chin and said, very calmly, “The sentence is death. To be carried out immediately.”

Chapter Forty-six

“Morgan,” the Merlin said quietly. Morgan stared at Molly. Then at the Merlin. He drew in a sharp breath and took a grip on the sword, lifting it vertically before him.

I looked frantically around the room. Ramirez, like most of the rest of the wizards there, had a stunned look on his face. He looked back at me with a blank expression, and gave me a little twitch of his shoulders. Lily looked remote and troubled. Fix’s expression was blank, but his jaws were clenched hard, muscles standing out and creating shadows on his face.

“Harry?” Molly whispered, shaking so hard she could hardly speak. “Harry?”

I turned back to the Merlin. His eyes were hard, his face as unyielding as stone. Morgan looked as if he might be about to throw up—but it didn’t stop him from moving toward Molly with a steady, dreamlike slowness, sword in hand.

“Harry,” Molly sobbed.

I promised Charity.

I took my staff in both hands and stepped forward, putting myself between Morgan and the girl. “Morgan,” I said. “Stars and stones, man. Please don’t do this. She’s a child. We should be helping her.”

My words slowed him, and he froze in place for a terrible heartbeat. Then he closed his eyes and swallowed, his face twisting with nausea. He opened his eyes again and whispered, “Stand aside, Dresden. Please.”

I looked wildly around the room for someone, anyone to help, for some way to stop this madness. I felt a sudden pressure against my spine, and I looked over my shoulder.

My eyes fell on the Gatekeeper.

I whirled back to Morgan and lifted my hands. “Point of order!” I cried. “Point of order! The Senior Council has not yet made its decision.”

Morgan paused, head tilting, and frowned at me. He lowered the sword and glanced back at the Merlin.

“The Senior Council has decided the issue,” the Merlin snarled.

“No,” I said. “The Senior Council must decide any capital crime in an open vote.” I pointed my finger at the Gatekeeper. “He has not cast his vote.”

The Merlin spoke through clenched teeth. “I hold six of seven votes. However the honored Gatekeeper decides, it will not change the outcome.”

“True,” I said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that he gets a damned vote.”

“Why are you doing this?” the Merlin demanded. “It is over. You only torment the prisoner with this unnecessary charade.”

“He gets a vote,” I repeated, and folded my arms on my chest.

The Merlin stared at me hard, and I could actually sense the pressure of his rage, like the end of a baseball bat poking steadily at my chest.

Morgan said, very, very quietly, “He’s right, honored Merlin.”

The Merlin narrowed his eyes. Then he turned his head to the Gatekeeper. “As you wish. We shall play this farce to its conclusion. Gatekeeper, how find you in this matter?”

And the Gatekeeper said…nothing.

He just stood there, face almost invisible beneath his cowl.

“Gatekeeper!” the Merlin called. “How find you?”

“I find the need for deliberation,” the Gatekeeper responded. “I beg the Council’s indulgence while I ponder this matter.”

“Ridiculous,” the Merlin said.

The Gatekeeper tilted his head. “Death is rather final, honored Merlin. I must consider carefully before I consign a soul, any soul, no matter how guilty, to that end.”

“This is nonsense. It will make no difference how you vote.”

“True,” the Gatekeeper replied, very gently, the faintest shade of rebuke in his voice. “But that does not change my moral obligation to make this decision with care.”

The Merlin took a deep breath and then said, forced calm in his voice, “I suppose a few moments for thought are not unreasonable.”

“Thank you,” the Gatekeeper said gravely.

Five minutes went by like five thousand years. Molly sagged against me, so frightened she could barely stand.

“Enough,” the Merlin said, finally. “This travesty needs to end.”

“On that point,” the Gatekeeper said, “we agree.” And then he stepped forward to the circle marked on the floor, and smudged it with his boot, breaking the circle. He flicked a gloved hand, and the lock on the chained door sprang open and fell away, followed closely by the chains.

“What is the meaning of this?” the Merlin demanded.

The Gatekeeper ignored him and pushed open the door. One of the Wardens on guard outside stood in front of it, one hand raised as if to knock. He blinked at the Gatekeeper, and then looked over his shoulder and said, “It’s open, sir.”

“Get clear of the door, fool,” barked Ebenezar’s voice. “Get them inside. Hurry, man! They’re right behind us!”

Outside there was an eerie howl and a sudden detonation of thunder that shook the concrete floor. Young people in roomy brown robes began to hurry through the doorway, most of them around Molly’s age or a bit younger. They were led by a young woman with short, curly hair and cheeks that had a dimple even when she wasn’t smiling—Luccio, the commander of the Wardens, in the young body a necromancer had trapped her in. The kids must have been her trainees.

She was followed by more children and a tall, brawny woman with dark skin and short, iron grey hair, helping a lanky young man with a wounded leg. Martha Liberty helped the young man settle to the ground and barked out a command for a medical kit. An old man with braided hair and Native American features brought up the rear, shepherding the last few young wizards ahead of him. “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind made sure they were all inside, and then turned and shouted, “I’m closing the way now!”

There were several more howls, and a bell-like chime of steel. Something hit the wall of the warehouse hard enough to shake dust from the rafters. Then there was a rushing sound of wind that abruptly ended in heavy silence. Listens-to-Wind sagged and leaned against the doorway, panting. Then he rose and stood aside as Ebenezar McCoy came in.

My old mentor was wearing his usual overalls and T-shirt. His bald pate shone with sweat, and he looked tired, but he was smiling over the pugnacious set of his lower jaw. The air around him fairly crackled with intensity, a mantle of power that hung around him in a subtle haze. Ebenezar reached behind him to hold the door open.

Michael came in.

He wore his white cloak, his mail and breastplate, and he bore Amoracchius in his hands, stained with dark fluids. He glanced around the room, a smile firm on his face.

“Papa!” Molly shrieked, and threw herself at him.

Michael blinked and managed to get the sword out of the way before Molly hit him with a hug that nearly knocked him from his feet. He got an arm around her, smiling. “Ooof! Careful, girl, the old man needs his ribs right where they are.”

“Who the hell is this?” Ramirez demanded, frowning at Michael. He looked like he didn’t know whether to be upset or disturbed that an armed and armored stranger had just waltzed in and was now standing inside all of his security measures.

“He’s a bloody hero is what he is,” Ebenezar told him. “If he hadn’t come along when he did, not a one of us would have gotten out of there alive.” He offered Michael his hand. “I’ve only heard of you by reputation, Sir Knight. But I’ve got to say that I’m damned glad to meet you. Thank you.”

Michael grinned and juggled his sword and his daughter so he’d have a hand free to shake Ebenezar’s. “I’m only a servant,” he said. “Any thanks are rightly owed to Him, not to me.”

“Aye,” Ebenezar said. “And thank God you came, Sir Knight.”

“Secure the building,” said the Merlin in a quiet voice. He walked forward to see what was happening, and stopped beside me. Michael nodded and moved out, tapping Ramirez and another Warden, and the three of them went to make sure the bad guys weren’t still coming.

“Vote isn’t over,” I said in a very quiet voice. “Which means that the three of them will need to cast their votes as well.”

“Obviously,” the Merlin said in a neutral murmur.

“That’s Michael. Knight of the Cross.”

“Which Sword?” the Merlin asked idly.

“Amoracchius,” I said.

The Merlin lifted a brow and nodded, never looking at me.

“Looks like he just saved…about forty of our young people?”

“So it would seem,” the Merlin said.

“Seems like the least we can do is save one of his.”

The Merlin’s eyes narrowed, and he did not speak.

“Look at it this way,” I said quietly. “There’s no downside to this for you. If you’re wrong about Molly, the Council gets another wizard. Fairly talented one, too.”

“And if I’m right?” he asked quietly.

“If you’re right,” I said, “you still get to kill the girl.”

The Merlin glanced at me. “True,” he said. “And you with her.”

Chapter Forty-seven

After a second, much less lengthy round of questions and answers, the Senior Council voted, and Molly was officially declared my apprentice, to be granted clemency under the Doom of Damocles. “Doom of Damocles” was wizard-speak for probation. If Molly abused her magic or came anywhere near violating any of the Laws of Magic, she’d be executed at once—and I’d join her.

But I’d lived with that before. I could do it again.

It was full dark by the time the conclave ended and everyone filed out. As the wizard who had called the conclave, it was my job to make sure everyone departed safely and to take care of any last-minute details.

Between providing food and further medical supplies for the unexpected arrivals, and coordinating with Ramirez to make sure our comings and goings weren’t being observed, I didn’t get the chance to speak to anyone about personal matters. With Lily’s help, we’d given the vampires a stiff kick in the balls, but the fight was far from over. The combat-hardened wizards and the talents of the Senior Council were needed elsewhere, and they departed with hardly a pause for food and drink.

Once it was done, I left the warehouse and sank down against the wall, just letting the cool summer evening wash over me.

I’d saved the girl from the bad guys. And more importantly, from the good guys. Which seemed the sort of thing that should pay my Warden’s salary overtime, but for the moment I was simply glad it was over.

I’d gambled horribly in my attempt to play the collective will of the Council against the Merlin. I shouldn’t have done it that way. The Merlin was a politician. If I’d been willing to eat a little crow, he probably would have come to some sort of compromise with me. A humiliating and disadvantageous compromise, from my perspective, but he might have worked something out.

Instead, I’d gained the moral support of the Council present there tonight, and I’d wielded it against him like a sword, chopping off his options and maneuvering him into bending to my will. I had exercised power over him in a way that no one had yet dared. I had struck a blow against his authority, declared myself an enemy of his administration. There was no way he could ignore that kind of challenge from a morally suspect young punk like me. He would have to bring me down. If I wanted to avoid that, I’d have to keep my eyes open, my wits sharp, and I’d have to continue to do whatever I could to secure myself against him.

In short: I’d become a politician.

But instead of moaning about it, I found myself laughing. Given all that had happened, matters could have been much, much worse. Molly was coming home safe. The murderous fetches had been dispatched. The vampires had been handed their first significant defeat since the cold war combusted.

After the events of the day, tomorrow surely held nothing for me to fear, and I trusted that it would take care of itself until I could rest, eat, and put an end to the last details of the business at hand.

Molly and Michael had waited with me: When Michael covered Luccio’s retreat through the nearer regions of the Nevernever, he had gotten back to Chicago without paying for the gas, but his truck was still back in the middle of nowhere, Oregon. He’d need to have it shipped back, or else make a long drive with a partner. He needed a ride home, and I was it.

The Beetle’s floorboards settled almost all the way to the ground by the time everyone was on board, and I drove carefully away from the warehouse. Molly chattered on about a confusing blur of things for maybe two minutes and then went abruptly silent.

Michael checked over his shoulder. “Asleep,” he reported quietly.

“She’s had a busy day,” I said.

He sighed. “Tell me what happened?”

I told him everything. Except the parts with Lasciel in them. And I didn’t mention Charity’s neglected talent for magic. I thought for a second that I could hear a ghostly, amused laugh from somewhere nearby. Optimistically, I wrote it off to my fatigued imagination.

Michael shook his head. “How did you know that I would return as I did?”

“Oh, I didn’t,” I said. “I just figured that you must have been sent off to do something to help your kid, so I asked Forthill to get word to you that you needed to be back here pronto, and that if you were with any Council members they should come with you. You got the message?”

He nodded. “It found me at Luccio’s camp in Colorado. We’d beaten off a vampire attack and were preparing to move. If I hadn’t gotten the message, I wouldn’t have followed them on their path through the Nevernever.”

“What happened?”

“Demons,” Michael said. “Quite a few of them, actually.”

“What kind?”

“Oh. Fangs. Tentacles. You know, the usual.”

I snorted. “No. I mean, were they Outsiders?”

“Ebenezar said something about Outsiders, yes, now that you mention it. Apparently his magic had difficulty dealing with them.”

I shook my head. “I’m glad you were with them.”

“Under the circumstances, so am I.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You assumed I had been sent to help the White Council so that they would show mercy to my daughter.”

I shrugged. “It was either that or else I was the one meant to look out for her, which would mean that it was possible for me to do so. So I decided to lean on the Merlin.”

Michael blinked and stared at me. “If I do not mistake your meaning, you just told me that you took a leap of faith.”

“No. I took your leap of faith, by proxy.” I shook my head. “Look, Michael. I try to stay out of God’s way as much as I possibly can. I don’t expect Him to send a rescue party for me if I’m in trouble.”

“Harry, I know you aren’t a churchgoing man, but God does help people who aren’t perfect.”

“Sure,” I said, and I couldn’t keep all the sneer out of my voice. “That’s why the world is such a happy, orderly place.”

Michael sighed. “Harry, God does protect us from harm—it’s part of what I and my brothers in arms are tasked to do. But he’s a great deal less involved in protecting us from the consequences of our choices.”

“I know the theory,” I said. “That God mostly only steps in when there’s supernatural evil afoot, yeah?”

“That’s an oversimplification, really, and—”

“Spare me,” I said. “Hell, Michael, I had one of those bastard Denarians here last year. Quintus Cassius. You remember him? While I was lying there watching him slice his way into my guts, I thought maybe it would be a good time for someone like you to show up. You know. One of those Denarian Knights. I thought to myself, hey, it would be a great time for one of the Knights of the Cross to show up, eh?” I shook my head. “It didn’t work out that way.”

“What is your point?” he asked quietly.

“Heaven ain’t safeguarding me, Michael. But you’re different than me. I figured God was going to look out for you and yours, out of professional courtesy if nothing else. And I’ve seen how He’s arranged things for you in the past. So what I did wasn’t about faith. It was just a matter of deducing probabilities.”

He shook his head, not agreeing with me, but not pressing it, either. “Charity?”

“She’s fine,” I assured him. “Kids too. Should be back home by now.”

“She and Molly?”

“Reconciled. Well. On polite speaking terms and hugging again, at least.”

His eyebrows shot up, and then his mouth curved into a wide grin. “Glory to God, I wasn’t sure it would ever happen.”

I buffed my nails on my shirt. “Sometimes I amaze even myself.”

Michael smiled at me, then looked over his shoulder again and frowned. “My Molly. Magic. Isn’t that sort of thing passed through blood-lines?”

“Usually,” I said. “But it doesn’t have to be. Some people are just born with it. We don’t really understand the how and why.”

He shook his head. “But how could I not have realized what was happening to her?”

“I dunno. But if you find out, make sure to tell Charity. She asked me the same question.”

“I suppose we’re all blind to what is closest to us,” he said.

“Human nature,” I agreed.

“Is Molly in danger?” he asked me, his tone frank.

I frowned and thought about it. “Some. She’s got real power. And she’s abused it a little. She’s going to be real tempted to use it again when she starts running into problems that look unsolvable. Not only that, but learning to harness the kind of strength she’s got can be pretty tricky all by itself. But she’s smart and she’s got all kinds of guts. If her teacher keeps from making any stupid mistakes, I think she’ll be all right.”

“But if she isn’t,” Michael said. “If she abuses her power again…”

“Then clemency is revoked. They execute her.”

“And you,” Michael said softly.

I shrugged. “Isn’t like I haven’t lived with that over my head before. As far as the Council is concerned, I’m responsible for her now, until she either makes full wizard or sets her talents aside.”

“Greater love hath no man,” he said quietly. “Nothing I can say would be enough. She’s my daughter, Harry. Thank you.”

I felt my cheeks heat up. “Yeah, yeah. Look, don’t make a big deal out of this. No one will enjoy that.”

He let out a rumbling chuckle. “And this apprenticeship. What will it entail?”

“Lessons. Every day, at first, until I’m sure she’s got herself under control. We’ll have to practice some of it away from anything combustible. Trees, houses, pets, that kind of thing.”

“How long will you need to work with her?”

“Until we’re finished,” I said, waving a vague hand. “I don’t know yet. I’ve never been on this side of an apprenticeship.”

He nodded in acceptance. “Very well.” We rode in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You remember the professional discussion I wanted to have?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Shoot.”

“Fidelacchius,” Michael said. “I was wondering if you found any candidates for a new wielder.”

“Zippo,” I said, frowning. “You think I should be looking?”

“Hard to say. But with only two of us in the field, Sanya and I are getting a little overworked.”

I scratched my chin. “Shiro told me that I would know the wielder. There hasn’t been anything like that. At least, not yet.”

“I’m concerned that it may take more than simply patience,” Michael sighed. “I’ve consulted our records. This is not the first time one of the White Council has been asked to be the custodian of one of the Swords.”

I arched my eyebrows and looked at him. “Seriously?”

He nodded.

“Me and who?”

“Merlin.”

I snorted. “You sure? Because the Merlin is kind of a jerk. Even you would think so, trust me.”

“No, Harry,” Michael said, his tone patient. “Not the Merlin of the Council. Merlin. The original.”

I sat there with my jaw suavely flapping in the breeze for a minute. Then said, “Wow.” I shook my head. “You think maybe I should find a big rock or something? Stick the sword in and leave it on the White House lawn?”

Michael crossed himself. “Heaven forbid. No. I just have an…” He scrunched up his nose. “An instinct.”

“You mean like when you get sent out on a mission from God?”

“No. I mean a regular old human hunch. I think that perhaps you should investigate the history around how Amoracchius was passed on, back then.”

Said sword now rested at a slant across Michael’s chest, safely in its scabbard, point between the knight’s boots.

“Wow. You mean…that sword right there. Your sword is…” I left it unsaid.

“Probably,” he said, nodding. “Though the Church’s records are fragmented, we’ve managed to establish that the other two Swords have been reworked from time to time, through the years. This one hasn’t.”

“That’s interesting,” I mused quietly. “That’s interesting as he—uh, as heck.”

Michael gave me a faint smile and nodded. “It’s an intriguing mystery, isn’t it?”

“You know what?” I said. “I can do mystery.” I chewed my lip for a minute and said, “But I hope you’re not in a hurry. You may have noticed that the Council is having a busy year. I’ll have time sooner or later, but for now…” I shrugged.

“I know.” He was quiet for a moment, and then said, “But knowing the sword’s history could become important. Sooner is better than later.”

Something odd in his tone made me look at him. “Why?”

His hand moved unconsciously to Amoracchius’s hilt. “I don’t think I’ll have the sword for much longer.” His voice was very soft.

When the Knights of the Sword retired, they did it feetfirst from the inside of a box.

“Michael?” I asked. “Did the, uh, office send you a memo?” I carefully didn’t say Like they did with Shiro.

“No. Instinct,” he said, and smiled at me. “But I suppose I could be beginning my midlife crisis. But I’m not planning to change the way I live my life, and I certainly have no intention of an early retirement.”

“Good,” I said, though it came out more somber than I’d intended.

“Do you mind if I ask you something personal?” Michael said.

“I’m way too busy to answer rhetorical questions.”

He grinned for a second and nodded. Then he pursed his lips and took his time about choosing his words. “Harry, you’ve avoided me for some time. And you seem…well, somewhat more dour than I’ve seen you before.”

“I wasn’t avoiding you, exactly,” I said.

He regarded me with calm, steady eyes.

“All right,” I said. “Yeah. But I’ve been avoiding most everybody. Don’t take it personally.”

“Is it something I’ve done? Or perhaps someone in my family?”

“Enough with the rhetoric. You know it isn’t.”

He nodded. “Then maybe it’s something you’ve done. Maybe something you should talk about with a friend.”

The fallen angel’s sigil on my left palm throbbed. I started to say “no,” but stopped myself. I drove for another block or two. I should tell him. I really should. Michael was my friend. He deserved my trust and respect. He deserved to know.

But I couldn’t.

Then my mouth started moving, and I realized that what was bothering me the most had nothing to do with coins or fallen angels. “Last Halloween,” I said quietly, “I killed two people.”

He drew in a slow breath and nodded, listening.

“One of them was Cassius. Once he was beaten, I had Mouse break his neck. Another was a necromancer called Corpsetaker. I shot her in the back of the head.” I swallowed. “I murdered them. I’ve never killed, man…not like that. Cold.” I drove a while more. “I have nightmares.”

I heard him sigh. For a moment, his voice was bleak. Pained. “I’ve been in this business longer than you have. I know some of what you’re feeling.”

I didn’t answer him.

“You feel like nothing is ever going to be right again,” he said. “You remember it perfectly, and it won’t leave you alone. You feel like you’re walking around with a sharp rock in your shoe. You feel stained.”

Stupid damned streetlights, getting all blurry like that. I blinked a lot and stayed quiet. My throat was too tight to speak, anyway.

“I know what it’s like,” he said. “There isn’t any way to make it disappear. But it gets better with time and distance.” He studied me for a moment. “If you had it to do again, would you?”

“Twice as hard,” I said at once.

“Then what you did was a necessity, Harry. It might be painful. It might haunt you. But at the end of the day, so long as you did what you believed right, you’ll be able to live with yourself.”

“Yeah?” I asked, chewing on my lower lip.

“I promise,” he said.

I darted a glance at him. “You don’t…think less of me? Knowing that I’m a murderer?”

“It isn’t my place to judge what you’ve done. I regret that those lives were lost. That their owners never found redemption. I worry for the pain you’ve inflicted on yourself in retrospect. But I don’t for an instant think that you would choose to take a human life unless you absolutely had to.”

“Seriously?”

“I trust you,” Michael said, his voice calm. “I would never have left my family in your protection if I didn’t. You’re a decent man, Harry.”

I exhaled slowly and my shoulders loosened. “Good.” And then, before my brain could get in the way, I added, “I picked up one of the Blackened Denarii, Michael. Lasciel.”

My heart skipped several beats as I made the admission.

I expected shock, horror, outrage, maybe with a side order of contempt.

But instead, Michael nodded. “I know.”

I blinked at him. “You what?”

“I know,” he repeated.

“You know. You knew?”

“Yes. I was taking the trash around the house when Nicodemus’s car went by. I saw the whole thing. I saw you protecting my youngest.”

I chewed on my lip. “And…I mean, you aren’t going to slug me and drag me off to a private suite in the Asylum for Wayward Denarians?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Michael said. “Remember that the Knights of the Cross were not founded to destroy the Denarians. We were founded to save them from the Fallen. It is therefore my duty to help you in whatever way I can. I can help you discard the coin if that is what you wish to do. It’s best if you choose to do it yourself.”

“I don’t need to discard it, actually,” I said. “I haven’t really taken the coin up. I buried it. Never used it.”

Michael looked surprised. “No? That is good news, then. Though it means that the Fallen’s shadow is still attempting to persuade you, I take it?”

This time the mental chuckle was a little more clear. I thought Oh, shut up very hard and sent it in Lasciel’s direction.

“Trying,” I said.

“Keep in mind that Lasciel is a deceiver,” he said quietly. “One with thousands of years of practice. It knows people. It knows how to tell you lies you want to believe are true. But it exists for a single purpose—to corrupt the will and beliefs of mankind. Don’t ever forget that.”

I shuddered. “Yeah.”

“May I ask what it’s told you?” He paused and narrowed his eyes. “No, wait. Let me guess. It’s appeared to you as an attractive young woman. She offers you knowledge, yes? The benefit of her experience.”

“Yeah.” I paused and added, “And Hellfire. Makes my spells hit harder when I need them to. I try not to use it much.”

Michael shook his head. “Lasciel isn’t called the Temptress for nothing. She knows you. Knows what to offer you and how to offer it.”

“Damn right she does.” I paused a moment, then added, “It scares me sometimes.”

“You’ve got to get rid of the coin,” he said with gentle urgency.

“Love to,” I said. “How?”

“Give up the coin of your own will. And set aside your power. If you do, Lasciel’s shadow will dwindle with it and waste away.”

“What do you mean, set aside my power?”

“Walk away from your magic,” he said. “Forsake it. Forever.”

“Fuck that.”

He winced and looked away.

The rest of the trip to his home passed in silence. When we got there, I told Michael, “Molly’s stuff is back at my place. I’d like to take her back there to get it. I need to have a talk with her, tonight, while everything is fresh. I’ll have her back here in a couple of hours, tops.”

Michael glanced at his sleeping daughter with a worried frown, but nodded. “Very well.” He got out and shut the door, then leaned back in the window to speak to me. “May I ask you two things?”

“Shoot.”

He glanced back at his house and said, “Have you ever considered the possibility that the Lord did not send me out on my most recent mission so that I could protect my daughter? That it was not His intention to use you to protect her?”

“What’s your point?”

“Only that it is entirely possible, Harry Dresden, that this entire affair, beginning to end, is meant to protect you. That when I went to the aid of Luccio and her trainees, I did so not to free Molly, but to prevent you from coming to blows with the Council. That her position as your new apprentice had less to do with protecting her than it did protecting you?”

“Eh?” I said.

He glanced at his daughter. “Children have their own kind of power. When you’re teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise. Perhaps this foster child of your power will do the same for you. Perhaps it’s what she is meant to do.”

“If the Lord was all that interested in helping out, how come he didn’t send someone to help me against Cassius? One of old Nick’s personal yes-men? Seems to be a solid rescue scenario.”

Michael shrugged and opened his mouth.

“And don’t give me any of that mysterious ways tripe.”

He shut his mouth and smiled. “It’s a confusing sort of thing,” he said.

“What is?”

“Life. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

He offered me his hand. I shook it.

“I don’t know of another way to end Lasciel’s influence, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there. If you should change your mind about the coin, Harry, if you want to get rid of it, I promise that I’ll be there for you.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

His expression grew more sober. “And if you should fall to temptation. If you should embrace the Fallen or become ensnared by its will…” He touched the hilt of the great sword, and his face became bedrock granite, Old Testament determination that made Morgan’s fanaticism look like a wisp of steam. “If you change. I will also be there.”

Fear hit me in a cold wave.

Holy crap.

I swallowed, and my hands shook on the Beetle’s steering wheel. There wasn’t any attempt at menace in Michael’s voice, or his face. He was simply stating a fact.

The mark on my palm burned, and for the first time I gave serious consideration to the notion that maybe I was overconfident of my ability to deal with Lasciel. What if Michael was right? What if I screwed something up and wound up like that poor bastard Rasmussen? A demonically supercharged serial killer?

“If that happens,” I told him, and my voice was a dry whisper, “I want you to.”

I could see in his eyes that he didn’t like the thought any more than I did—but he was fundamentally incapable of being anything less than perfectly honest with me. He was my friend, and he was worried. If he had to do harm to me, it would rip him apart.

Maybe the words had been his own subconscious way of begging me to get rid of the coin. He could never stand aside and do nothing while bad things happened, even if meant that he had to kill his friend.

I could respect that. I understood it, because I couldn’t do it, either. I couldn’t stand aside, abandon my magic, and cut myself loose of the responsibility to use it for good.

Not even if it killed me.

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life.

But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

I went back to my place. I let the kid sleep until we got there, and then touched her shoulder with one hand. She jerked awake at once, blinking in weary confusion.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“My place,” I said. “We need to talk.”

She blinked her eyes several more times and then nodded. “Why?”

“Because you need to understand something. Come on.”

We got out of the car. I led her down the steps to my door and said, “Come stand next to me.” She did. I took her left hand and told her, “Spread your fingers and close your eyes.” She did that too. I held her left palm up about two inches from the door. “Now, focus. See what you can feel.”

Her face scrunched up. “Um,” she said, shifting her weight back and forth restlessly. “There’s…pressure? Um, or maybe a buzzing. Like high-power lines.”

“Close enough,” I said, and released her wrist. “What you’re sensing are some of the energies that I used to ward my apartment. If you try to come in without disabling them, you’ll take a jolt of electricity that wouldn’t leave much more of you than a smudge on the ground.”

She blinked at me, then twitched and pulled her hand sharply away.

“I’ll give you an amulet that will let you get through, until I’m sure you can disable them, go in, and start them up again. But for tonight, just don’t try to open the door. In or out. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

We went in. My cleaning service had come through. Molly had left a bag with clothes and sundries spread over half of one of my apartment’s couches. Now the bag was neatly closed, and suspiciously nonbulgy. I’m sure the cleaning service had folded and organized the bag so that everything fit in without strain.

Molly looked around, blinking. “How does your maid get in?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, because you can’t talk about faerie housekeepers or they go away. I pointed at the couch next to her bag and said, “Sit.”

She did, though I could tell that my peremptory tone did not thrill her.

I sat down in a chair across from the couch. As I did, Mister drifted in from the bedroom and promptly wound himself around one of Molly’s legs, purring a greeting.

“Okay, kid,” I said. “We survived. I only had some very limited plans to cover this contingency.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

“I didn’t think I’d pull this off. I mean, raiding a faerie capital? Standing up to the Senior Council? All those movie monsters? Your mom? Hell, I’m shocked I survived at all, much less got you out of it.”

“B-but…” She frowned. “You never seemed like…I mean, you just went through it all like you had everything under control. You seemed so sure what was going to happen.”

“Rule number one of the wizarding business,” I said. “Never let them see you sweat. People expect us to know things. It can be a big advantage. Don’t screw it up by looking like you’re as confused as everyone else. Bad for the image.”

She smiled at me a little. “I see,” she said. She reached down to stroke Mister and mused, “I must look horrible.”

“Been a rough day,” I said. “Look. We’ll need to talk about where you’re going to live. I take it that you had already decided to break things off with Nelson. I kind of picked up that vibe when we bailed him out.”

She nodded.

“Well. Inappropriate to stay with him, then. To say nothing of the fact that he’s going to need time to recover.”

“I can’t stay at home,” she said quietly. “After all that’s happened…and my mom will never understand about the magic. She thinks it’s all bad, every bit of it. And if I’m there, it’s just going to confuse and frighten all the little Jawas, Mom and me arguing all the time.”

I grunted and said, “You’ll have to stay somewhere. We’ll work that out soonest.”

“All right,” she said.

“Next thing you need to know,” I said. “As of now, you get no slack. You aren’t allowed any mistakes. You don’t get to say ‘oops.’ The first time you screw up and slip deeper into bad habits, it kills both of us. I’m going to be tough on you sometimes, Molly. I have to be. It’s as much for my survival as yours. Got it?”

“Yes,” she said.

I grunted, got up, and went to my tiny bedroom. I rooted around in my closet and found an old brown apprentice robe one of the shiny new Wardens had left at my place after a local meeting. I brought it out and handed it to Molly. “Keep this where you can get to it. You’ll be with me at any Council meetings, and it is your formal attire.” I frowned and rubbed at my head. “God, I need aspirin. And food. You hungry?”

Molly shook her head. “But I’m a mess. Do you mind if I clean up?”

I eyed her and sighed. Then I said, “No. Go ahead and get it out of the way.” I stood up and went to the kitchen, muttering a minor spell and flicking several candles into light, including one near the girl. She took the robe and the candle, grabbed her bag, and vanished into my room.

I checked the icebox. The faeries usually brought some kind of food to stock the icebox and the pantry when they cleaned, but they could have mighty odd ideas about what constituted a healthy diet. One time I’d opened the pantry and found nothing but boxes and boxes and boxes of Froot Loops. I had a near-miss with diabetes, and Thomas, who never was quite sure where the food came from, declared that I had clearly been driven Froot Loopy.

Usually it wasn’t that bad, though there was always a high incidence of frozen pizza, for which my housekeepers maintained the ice in my icebox with religious fervor. I often left most of a pizza lying around uneaten when I figured they’d be coming to visit, and thus continued my policy of shamelessly bribing my way into the Little Folk’s good graces.

I was too tired to cook anything, and nothing was going to taste good anyway, so I slapped several hot dogs between two pieces of bread along with a couple of lettuce leaves and wolfed them down.

I got out some of my ice and dumped it in a pitcher, then filled the pitcher up. I got down a glass and filled it with ice water. Then I and my glass and my pitcher moseyed over to my fireplace. I set the pitcher on the mantel, idly flipped the neatly laid fire to life with my ignition spell, and then waited for the inevitable while sipping cold water and staring down at the fire. Mister kept me company from his spot on top of a bookcase.

It took her a little while to work up to it, but not as long as I had expected. My bedroom door opened and Molly appeared.

She had showered. Her candy-colored hair hung limp and clinging. She’d washed away the makeup entirely, but there were spots of pink high on her cheeks that I figured had little to do with cosmetics. The various piercings I could see caught the firelight in a deep, burned orange glow.

She was also barefoot. And wearing her brown robe.

I arched an eyebrow at her and waited.

She flushed more deeply and then walked over to me, quite slowly, until she stood not a foot away.

I gave her nothing to work with. No expression. No words. Just silence.

“You looked into me,” she whispered quietly. “And I looked into you.”

“That’s how it works,” I confirmed in a quiet, neutral voice.

She shivered. “I saw what kind of man you are. Kind. Gentle.” She looked up and met my eyes. “Lonely. And…” She flushed a shade pinker. “And hungry. No one has touched you in a very long time.”

She lifted a hand and put it on my chest. Her fingers were very warm, and a rippling flush of purely biological reaction bypassed my silly brain and raced through me in a wave of pleasure—and need. I looked down at Molly’s pale hand. Her palm glided over my chest, barely touching, a slow, focused circle. I felt faintly disgusted with myself for my reaction. Hell. I’d known this kid before she’d had to worry about feminine hygiene products.

I managed to thwart my hormones’ lobby to start growling or drooling, but my voice had gotten a shade or two huskier. “Also true.”

She looked up at me again, her eyes wide and deep and blue enough to drown in. “You saved my life,” she said, and I heard her voice shaking. “You’re going to teach me. I…” She licked her lips and moved her shoulders. The brown robe slipped down them to the floor.

The tattoo that began on her neck went all the way down to her pierced navel. She had several other studs and fine rings in places I had suspected (but never confirmed) they would be. She shivered and took swifter breaths. The firelight played merrily with her shifting contours.

I’d seen better. But mostly that had been from someone using her looks to get something out of me, and the difference had largely been one of presentation. Molly didn’t have much experience in displaying herself for a man, or in playing the coquette. She should have stood differently, arched her back, shifted her hips, worn an expression of thickly sensual interest, daring me to come after her. She would have looked like the patron goddess of corrupted youth.

Instead, she stood there, uncertain and frightened and too naive (or maybe honest) to be anything but totally sincere—and vulnerable. She was afraid, uncertain, the lost princess helpless in a dark wood.

It was worse than if she’d vamped onto me like a trained courtesan. What I saw in her was honest and hopeful, trusting and terrified. She was real, and fragile and precious. My emotions got together with my glands and they ganged up on me, screaming that she needed acceptance and that the kindest thing I could possibly do would be to give her a hug and tell her everything was going to be all right—and that if something followed, who would blame me?

I would. So I just watched her with a straight face.

“I want to learn from you,” she said. “I want to do everything I can to help you. To thank you. I want you to teach me things.”

“What things?” I asked in a quiet, measured tone.

She licked her lips. “Everything. Show me everything.”

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

She nodded, her eyes huge, pupils dilated until only a bare ring of blue remained around them.

“Teach me,” she whispered.

I touched her face with the fingers of my right hand. “Kneel down,” I told her. “Close your eyes.”

Trembling, she did, her breathing becoming faster, more excited.

But that stopped once I picked up the pitcher of ice water from the mantel and dumped it over her head.

She let out a squeal and fell over backward. It took her maybe ten seconds to recover from the shock of the cold, and by then she was gasping and shivering, her eyes wide with surprise and confusion—and with some kind of deep, heavy pain.

I faced her and squatted down onto my haunches to meet her eyes. “Lesson one. This isn’t going to happen, Molly,” I said in exactly the same calm, gentle voice. “Get that through your head right now. It isn’t ever going to happen.”

Her lower lip trembled, and she bowed her head, shoulders shaking. I gave myself a mental kick in the head and snagged a blanket from the couch. I went to her and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Get over by the fire and warm up.”

It took her a moment to collect herself, but she did. She hunched her shoulders beneath the blanket, shivering and humiliated. “You knew,” she said in a shaking voice. “That I would…do this.”

“I was pretty sure,” I agreed.

“Because of the soulgaze,” she said.

“Nothing to do with that, really,” I replied. “I figured there had to be a reason that you didn’t come to me for help when you came into your powers. I figure you’ve been interested in me for a while. That you wouldn’t want to come up to your favorite rock star and start fumbling around on a guitar so that the first thing he thinks about you is that you’re incompetent.”

She shivered and blushed even more. “No. It wasn’t like that…”

Sure it was. But I’d hammered her hard enough for the time being. “If you say so,” I answered. “Molly, you may fight with your mom like cats and dogs, but the two of you are more alike than you know.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s trite but true that a lot of young women look for a man who reminds them of their dad. Your dad fights monsters. I fight monsters. Your dad rescued your mom from a dragon. I rescued you from Arctis Tor. Seeing the pattern here?”

She opened her mouth and then frowned at the fire—not an angry frown. A pensive one.

“Plus, you’ve just been scared real good. You don’t have any place to stay. And I’m the guy who is trying to help you.” I shook my head. “But even if there wasn’t magic involved, it still wouldn’t happen. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. But I’m never going to take advantage of your trust.

“What we’re going to have is not a relationship of equals. I teach. You learn. I tell you to do something, you damned well do it.”

A touch of sullen teenager-ness gleamed in her eyes.

“Don’t even think it,” I said. “Molly, getting pierced and dyed and tattooed just because you want to break the rules is one thing. But what we’re dealing with now isn’t the same thing. A botched dye job affects you. You botch the use of magic and someone—maybe a lot of someones—gets hurt. So you do what I say, when I say it, and you do it because you don’t want to kill someone. Or you can die. That was our deal, and you agreed to it.”

She said nothing. Her anger had faded from her face, but that sullen trace of rebellion remained.

I narrowed my eyes, clenched my fist, and hissed a single word. The fireplace flared up in a sudden, fiery cyclone. Molly flinched back from it, one arm lifted to protect her eyes.

When she lowered it, I was hunkered down right in her face. “I’m not your parents, kid,” I said. “And you don’t have time to play teenage rebel anymore. This is the deal. You do what I say or you don’t survive.” I leaned closer and gave her the look I usually save for rampaging demons and those survey people at malls. “Molly. Is there any doubt in your mind—any doubt at all—that I can’t damn well make you do it?”

She swallowed. The hard knot of defiance in her eyes suddenly shattered like a diamond struck at precisely the correct angle, and she shivered in the blanket. “No, sir,” she said in a tiny voice.

I nodded at her. She sat there shivering and frightened, which had been the point of the exercise; to knock her off balance while she was still unsteady from recent events and drive home the notion of what she faced. It was absolutely necessary that she understand how things had to play out until she got her power under control. Anything less than willing cooperation would kill her.

But it was hard to remember that, staring down at her as she shivered and stared at the fire, its light turning tears to gold on her cheeks. Heartbreaking, really. She was still so damned young.

So I crouched down and gave her that hug. “It’s all right to be scared, kid. But don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She leaned against me, shivering. I let her for a moment, and then got up and said, “Get dressed and get your things.”

“Why?” she asked.

I arched an eyebrow at her. She flushed, took the robe, and hurried back into the bedroom. I had my coat on and was ready to go when she was. I led her out to the car and we took off.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I hope so. It’s going to take you a long time to learn if you can’t.”

She smiled a little. “Where are we going?”

“Your new digs,” I said.

She frowned at me, but settled back in her seat. “Oh.”

We pulled up to the Carpenter house, ablaze with lights despite the hour.

“Oh, no,” Molly muttered. “Tell me you’re kidding me.”

“You’re moving back in.”

“But—”

I continued over her as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not only that, but you’re going to do everything in your power to be the most respectful, loving, respectful, considerate, and respectful daughter in the whole wide world. Especially where your mom is concerned.”

She stared at me with her jaw hanging.

“Oh,” I added. “And you’re going back to high school until you’re finished.”

She stared at me for a long time, then blinked and said, “I died. And this is Hell.”

I snorted. “If you can’t control yourself well enough to finish a basic education and get along with a houseful of people who love you, then you sure as hell can’t control yourself enough to use what I need to teach you.”

“But…but…”

“Think of your homecoming as an extended lesson in respect and self-control,” I said cheerfully. “I’ll be checking up with your parents at least weekly. You’ll do lessons with me every day until school is back in, and then I’ll give you reading and homework for the—”

“Homework?” she half wailed.

“Don’t interrupt. The homework will only be on weekdays. We’ll do lessons on Friday and Saturday evenings.”

“Friday and Satur…” She trailed off into a sigh and slumped. “Hell. I am in Hell.”

“It gets better. I take it that you’re sexually active?”

She stood there with her mouth hanging open.

“Come on, Molly, this is important. Do you boink?”

Her face turned pink and she hid her face in her hands. “I…I…well. I’m a virgin.”

I arched an eyebrow at her.

She glanced up at me, blushed more, and added, “Technically.”

“Technically,” I said.

“Um. I’ve…explored. Most of the bases.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, Magellan, no baserunning or boldly going where no man has gone before for you—not until you get yourself grounded. Sex makes things complicated, and for you that could be bad.”

“But…”

“And no, ah, solo exploration either.”

She blinked at me and asked in a blank tone, “Why?”

“You’ll go blind,” I said, and walked up to her front porch.

“You’re joking,” she said, and then hurried to catch up. “That’s a joke, right? Harry?”

I marched her up to her house without answering her. Molly wore a hopeless look on her face, as though she envied a condemned criminal, who could at least hope that the governor might call at the last minute. But when the doors opened and her family’s delight washed over her in a roar like a breaking wave, she smiled from her eyes all the way down to her toes.

I made polite chat for a minute, until Mouse limped over to me, smiling and wagging his tail. There was something on his muzzle that I suspected to be honey mustard, or maybe buffalo sauce, doubtless slipped to him by a young accomplice. I clipped his lead on him and took my leave, heading back to my car.

Before I got there, Charity caught up with me. I arched an eyebrow at her and waited while she fidgeted and finally asked, “Did you tell them? About what I was?”

“Of course not,” I said.

She slumped a little in relief. “Oh.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

She frowned at me and said, “If you hurt my little girl, I’ll come down to that little closet you call an office and throw you out the window. Do you understand?”

“Death by defenestration, gotcha.”

A few tiny cracks developed in her frown, and then she shook her head sharply, once, caught me in a hug that made my ribs ache, and went back into the house without another word.

Mouse sat there panting and grinning happily.

I went home and got some sleep.

I was working in my lab the next day, trying to make notes of all that had happened so that I wouldn’t forget anything. Bob sat on the table next to me, helping me with the details.

“Oh,” he said. “I found something wrong with Little Chicago’s design.”

I swallowed. “Oh. Wow. Bad?”

“Extremely. We missed a transition coupling in the power flow. The stored energy was all going to the same spot.”

I frowned. “That’s…like a surge of electricity going through a circuit breaker, right? Or a fuse box.”

“Exactly like that,” Bob said. “Except that you were the fuse. That much energy in one spot will blow your head off your shoulders.”

“But it didn’t,” I said.

“But it didn’t,” Bob agreed.

“How is that possible?”

“It isn’t,” he said. “Someone fixed it.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“It didn’t fix itself,” Bob said. “When I looked at it a few nights ago, the flawed section was in plain sight, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time. When I looked again tonight, it was different. Someone changed it.”

“In my lab? Under my house? Which is behind my wards? That’s impossible.”

“No it isn’t,” Bob said. “Just really, really, really, really, really, really difficult. And unlikely. He would have had to know that you had a lab down here. And he would have had to know how to get around your wards.”

“Plus intimate knowledge of the design to tinker with it like that,” I said. “To say nothing of the fact that he would have to know it existed at all, and no one does.”

“Really, really unlikely,” Bob agreed.

“Dammit.”

“Hey, I thought you loved a good mystery, Harry.”

I shook my head and started to tell him where to stick his mystery when someone knocked at the door.

Murphy stood on the other side and smiled at me. “Hey.” She held up my shotgun. “Thomas wanted me to bring this by. Said to tell you he was getting his own toys from now on.”

She offered it and I took it, frowning. “He didn’t even clean it off.”

She smiled. “I swear, Dresden. You can be such a pansy.”

“It’s because I’m a sensitive guy. You want to come in?”

She gave me another smile, but shook her head. “No time. Got to see the first shrink in half an hour.”

“Ah,” I said. “How are things playing out?”

“Oh, there’s a long investigation and evaluation to be done,” she said. “Officially, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“But unofficially…” She shrugged. “I’m losing SI. They’re busting me down to detective sergeant.”

I winced. “Who’s getting the job?”

“Stallings, most likely. He’s the next most experienced, better record than most of the department, and he’s respected.” She looked away. “I’m losing my seniority, too. All of it. So they’re partnering me with their most experienced detective.”

“Which is that?” I asked.

“Rawlins,” she said, her mouth moving in a tight smile. “He did so good on this one they promoted him to SI.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Murphy sighed.

“That a bad thing? He seems like a decent guy.”

“He is, he is,” Murphy said, scrunching up her nose. “But he knew my father.”

“Oh,” I said. “And it’s possible you have issues.”

“Remotely,” she said. “What about you? You okay?”

I met her eyes for a second and then looked away. “I, uh. I’ll be okay.”

She nodded, and then simply stepped forward and hugged me. My arms went around her without me telling them to do it. It wasn’t a tense, meaning-laden hug. She was my friend. She was exhausted and worried and suffering, and she’d had what she valued most sullied and stained, but she was worried about me. Giving me a hug. Assuring me, by implication, that everything was going to be all right.

I gave as good as I got for a while. When we broke the embrace, it was at the same time, and it wasn’t awkward. She smiled at me, just a little bittersweet, and glanced at her watch. “I have to get moving.”

“Right,” I said. “Thanks, Murph.”

She left. A while later, my phone rang. I answered it.

“Everything work out?” Thomas asked. “With the girl?”

“Pretty much,” I told him. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Need anything?” Like maybe to talk about how he was feeding on people again and making money at the same time.

“Not especially,” he told me. I was pretty sure he had heard the unasked question, because his tone of voice carried an unyielding coolness, telling me not to push. Thomas was my brother. I could wait.

“What’s up with Murphy?” he asked me.

I told him about her job.

He was silent for an annoyed second and then said, “But what’s up with Murphy?”

I glowered and slouched down onto my couch. “There isn’t anything up with her. She isn’t interested.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“She told me.”

“She told you.”

“She told me.”

He sighed. “And you believed her.”

“Well,” I said. “Yes.”

“I had a talk with her when she drove me home,” he said.

“A talk?”

“A talk. I wanted to figure something out.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“That you’re both stiff-necked idiots,” he said, his tone annoyed, and hung up on me.

I glowered at the phone for a minute, muttered a couple of choice words about my half brother, then got out my guitar and labored to make something resembling music for a while. Sometimes it was easier for me to think when playing, and the time drifted by. I played and mulled things over until someone else knocked. I set my guitar aside and went to the door.

Ebenezar stood on the other side, and he gave me a nod and a cautious smile when I opened the door. “Hot enough for you?” the old wizard asked.

“Almost,” I said. “Come in.”

He did, and I grabbed a couple of beers, offering him one. “What’s up?”

“You tell me,” he said.

So I told him all about the last few days, especially my dealings with Lily and Fix, Maeve, and Mab. Ebenezar listened to it all in silence.

“What a mess,” he said when I finished.

“Tell me about it.” I sipped at my beer. “You know what I think?”

He finished his beer and shook his head.

“I think we got played.”

“By the Summer Lady?”

I shook my head. “I think Lily got suckered just as much as we did.”

He frowned and rubbed at his head with one palm. “How so?”

“That’s the part I can’t figure,” I said. “I think someone set Molly up to be a beacon for the fetches. And I’m damned sure that it was no accident that those fetches took Molly to Arctis Tor when it was so lightly defended. Someone wanted me there at Arctis Tor.”

Ebenezar pursed his lips. “Who?”

“I think we got used by one of the Queens to one-up one of the others, somehow. But damned if I can figure out how.”

“You think Mab really is insane?”

“I think it would be hard to tell the difference,” I said in a sour voice. “Lily thinks so. But Lily wasn’t exactly widely famed for her intellect before she became the Summer Lady.” I shook my head. “If Mab really is loopy, it’s going to be bad.”

The old man nodded.

“And since you can’t swing a cat without hitting a cat’s-paw lately, I think maybe someone was trying to use Mab for something. Like all the others who’ve gotten set up around here.”

“Set up?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Starting with Victor Sells a few years ago. Then those FBI creeps with the wolf belts. I think that someone out there wants to get things done without getting his—”

“Or her,” Ebenezar said.

“Or her own hands dirty,” I continued. “Consider all these things running around with more power than they should have had or better connected than they should have been. The Shadowman, the hexenwulfen, the Nightmare, the last Summer Lady—and that’s just for starters. The Red Court sure are a hell of a lot more dangerous than anyone thought they would be.”

Ebenezar frowned, nodding.

“I think whoever is backstage moving things around tried to use Mab and got more than they bargained for. I think that’s what the attack on Arctis Tor was about. Maybe they tried to put her down before she turned on them.”

“Which she would,” Ebenezar said.

“Of course she would. She’s Mab. She’d keep any bargain she made, but she isn’t the kind who takes orders real well.”

“Go on, boy,” Ebenezar said gently. “You’ve got facts. Where do they lead you?”

I lowered my own voice to a whisper. “A new power is moving around out there. Something big, smart, strong, and sneaky as hell. Something with a lot of strength and magical know-how.” I licked my lips. “Put that together with the evidence of varied powers. Wolf belts handed out to those poor FBI bastards. Black magic being taught to small-timers like the Shadowman and the Nightmare. Vampires cross-training one another in sorcery. Hellfire used on Arctis Tor. And, of course, the White Council’s highly placed traitor. All of that together doesn’t point to just one person. It indicates an organization.” I regarded the old man steadily. “And they’ve got wizards on the staff. Probably several of them.”

Ebenezar grunted. “Damn.”

“Damn?”

“I was hoping maybe I was starting to go senile. But I came to the same conclusion.” He nodded. “Boy, don’t breathe a word of this. Not to anyone. I got the feeling that this is information worth as much as your life.” He shook his head. “Let me think about who else needs to know.”

“Rashid,” I said in a firm voice. “Tell the Gatekeeper.”

Ebenezar frowned, though it looked more weary than anything else. “Likely he knows already. Knew already. Maybe even pointed you in a direction that would show you more. Assuming he wasn’t simply using you to poke a hornet’s nest and see what flew up.”

Which was somewhat creepy to think about. If Ebenezar was right, I could count myself among the pawns in play, courtesy of the Gatekeeper.

“You don’t want to tell him?” I asked.

“Rashid is a tough one to figure,” Ebenezar said. “Three, four years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But with all that’s happened…since Simon died…” He shrugged. “Better to be cautious. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.”

“Or maybe that’s the worst thing we could do,” I said. “Maybe it’s what these…Black Council assholes are counting on.”

He looked up at me sharply. “Now why would you call them that?”

“Black Council?” I shrugged. “If the shoe fits. It’s better than the Legion of Doom.”

He regarded me for a moment more and then shrugged. “Times are changing, Hoss. That’s for sure.” He polished off his beer. “But they always do. I know you’re going to do what you think you need to do. But I’d like to ask that you be very cautious, Hoss. We still don’t know what our enemies look like. That means we’ll have to bring in our allies carefully.”

“Meaning without troubling the White Council and the Wardens about it?” I asked, my tone dry.

He grunted in the affirmative. “Don’t forget the other loose end.”

I frowned and thought back over it. “Huh,” I said. “You’re right. Who was driving that car that ran into me?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“More mysteries.”

“Thought you were a professional investigator, Hoss,” he teased. “For you, this should be fun.”

“Yeah. Fun. Fun, fun, fun. I’m having fun already.”

He smiled. “Mmmmph. It isn’t good news that Winter isn’t going to stand with us against the Reds, but it could have been worse. And we learned something valuable.”

I grunted. “The traitor to the Council. Someone had to tell the Reds where Luccio’s boot camp was hidden.”

“Yes,” he said, and leaned forward. “And outside of Luccio only four people knew.”

I arched my brows at him. “Morgan?”

“That’s one,” he agreed. “Injun Joe, the Merlin, and Ancient Mai were the only others.”

I whistled slowly. “Heavy hitters. But knock Morgan off your list. He didn’t do it.”

Ebenezar arched his brows. “No?”

I shook my head. “Guy is a dick,” I said, “but he’s on the level. We shouldn’t tell him, but he’s no traitor.”

Ebenezar frowned for a moment and then nodded slowly. “Very well, then. I’ll vouch for Injun Joe.”

“So what comes next?” I asked him.

“Watching them,” he said. “Waiting. Not letting on that we know. We won’t get more than one chance to take them off guard. When we do move, we got to make it hurt.”

I frowned at my now-empty bottle and nodded. “We wait. Lie in the weeds. Keep a low profile. Got it.”

“Hoss,” my old teacher said quietly. “What you did for that girl…”

“Yeah,” I said, waving a hand. “Stupid. The Merlin is going to be royally pissed at me. He’ll probably start insisting I go on shooting missions now, in hopes someone will take me out and remove a thorn in his side.”

“True,” Ebenezar said. “But what I meant to say was that what you did was damned brave. From what I hear, you were ready to take on everyone there if you had to.”

“Wouldn’t have lasted long.”

“No. But then, that wasn’t the point.” He rose a little stiffly and said, “I’m proud of you, boy.”

Something inside me melted.

“You know,” I said. “You always told me you weren’t at my trial. That the Council saddled you with me because you skipped out. I think that isn’t true.”

He grunted.

“It was all in Latin, which I didn’t understand then. And I had that hood over my head, so I couldn’t see anyone. But someone had to have defended me, the way I did Molly.”

“Could be.” He rolled one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m getting old, Hoss. I forget things.”

“Ah,” I said. “You know, I’ve missed a meal or three lately. And I know this little joint that’s got the best spaghetti in town.”

Ebenezar froze in place, like a man walking on ice who suddenly hears cracking sounds. “Oh?” he asked, tone careful.

“They’ve got this great bread that goes with it, too. And it’s right by the campus, so cute waitresses.”

“Sounds promising,” Ebenezar said. “Makes me feel a mite hungry hearing about it.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Let me get my shoes. If we hurry we can get there before the evening rush.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, and my old teacher bowed his head to me. It conveyed a lot of things. Apology. Gratitude. Happiness. Forgiveness. Affection. Pride.

“You want me to drive us?” he asked.

I bowed my head in reply. “I’d like that, sir.”

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 might 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, where the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, where a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and where the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the Relam—or destroy it.

Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the first book of the Codex Alera, Furies of Calderon, as much as I enjoyed creating it for you.

—Jim

Furies of Calderon is available in paperback

from Ace Books.

WHITE NIGHT

ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

THE DRESDEN FILES

STORM FRONT

FOOL MOON

GRAVE PERIL

SUMMER KNIGHT

DEATH MASKS

BLOOD RITES

DEAD BEAT

PROVEN GUILTY

THE CODEX ALERA

FURIES OF CALDERON

ACADEM’S FURY

CURSOR’S FURY

JIM BUTCHER

WHITE NIGHT

A NOVEL OF THE DRESDEN FILES

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published 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, Canada M4P 2Y3 (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, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, 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

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2007

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Butcher, Jim, 1971–

White night: a novel of the Dresden files / Jim Butcher

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-101-12871-2

1. Dresden, Harry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Wizards—Fiction. 3. Magicians—Crimes

against—Fiction. 4. Brothers—Fiction. 5. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.U85W48 2007

813'.6—dc22 2006030574

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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 publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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.

For the newest members of the family, Jesse and Dara

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

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

Chapter Forty-Three

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to the usual crowd for this book, as for all the rest: the inmates at the Beta Foo Asylum, semper criticas. Thank you to my agent, Jenn, and my editor, Anne, and thank you, my angel Shannon. You each help me more than you know—yeah, okay, probably Shannon more than the others. But thank you all.

Chapter One

Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are.

I pulled my battle-scarred, multicolored old Volkswagen Beetle up in front of a run-down Chicago apartment building, not five blocks from my own rented basement apartment. Usually, by the time the cops call me, things are pretty frantic; there’s at least one corpse, several cars, a lot of flashing blue lights, yellow-and-black tape, and members of the press—or at least the promise of the imminent arrival of same.

This crime scene was completely quiet. I saw no marked police cars, and only one ambulance, parked, its lights off. A young mother went by, one child in a stroller, the other toddling along holding Mommy’s hand. An elderly man walked a Labrador retriever past my car. No one was standing around and gawking or otherwise doing anything at all out of the ordinary.

Odd.

A creepy shiver danced over the nape of my neck, even though it was the middle of a sunny May afternoon. Normally, I didn’t start getting wigged out until I’d seen at least one nightmarish thing doing something graphic and murderous.

I put it down to the paranoia of advancing age. It isn’t like I’m all that old or anything, especially for a wizard, but age is always advancing and I’m fairly sure it’s up to no good.

I parked the Blue Beetle and headed into the apartment building. I went up several flights of stairs that needed their old tile replaced, or at least scrubbed and shined. I left them to find a hallway carpeted in a low, grey-blue pile that had been crushed down to shiny smoothness in the middle. The apartment doors were battered, old, but made of thick oak. I found Murphy waiting for me.

At five feet and small change, a hundred and not much, she didn’t exactly look like a tough Chicago cop who could face down monsters and maniacs with equal nerve. Chicks like that aren’t supposed to be blond or have a cute nose. Sometimes I think Murphy became that tough cop she didn’t look like purely for the sake of contrariness—no amount of sparkling blue eyes or seeming harmlessness could hide the steel in her nature. She gave me her we’re-at-work nod, and a terse greeting. “Dresden.”

“Lieutenant Murphy,” I drawled, with an elaborate bow and flourish of one hand, deliberately at odds with her brusque demeanor. I wasn’t doing it out of pure contrariness. I’m not like that. “I am dazzled by your presence once more.”

I expected a snort of derision. Instead, she gave me a polite, brittle little smile and corrected me in a gentle tone: “Sergeant Murphy.”

Open mouth, insert foot. Way to go, Harry. The opening credits aren’t done rolling on this case, and you’ve already reminded Murphy of what it cost her to be your friend and ally.

Murphy had been a detective lieutenant, and in charge of Special Investigations. SI was Chicago PD’s answer to problems that didn’t fall within the boundaries of “normal.” If a vampire slaughtered a transient, if a ghoul killed a graveyard watchman, or if a faerie cursed someone’s hair to start growing in instead of out, someone had to examine it. Someone had to look into it and reassure the government and the citizenry that everything was normal. It was a thankless job, but SI handled it through sheer guts and tenacity and sneakiness and by occasionally calling in Wizard Harry Dresden to give them a hand.

Her bosses got real upset about her abandoning her duties in a time of crisis, while she helped me on a case. She’d already been exiled to professional Siberia, by being put in charge of SI. By taking away the rank and status she had worked her ass off to earn, they had humiliated her, and dealt a dreadful blow to her pride and her sense of self-worth.

“Sergeant,” I said, sighing. “Sorry, Murph. I forgot.”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I forget sometimes, too. When I answer the phone at work, mostly.”

“Still. I should be less stupid.”

“We all think that, Harry,” Murphy said, and thumped me lightly on the biceps with one fist. “But no one blames you.”

“That’s real big of you, Mini Mouse,” I replied.

She snorted and rang for the elevator. On the way up, I asked her, “It’s a lot quieter than most crime scenes, isn’t it?”

She grimaced. “It isn’t one.”

“It isn’t?”

“Not exactly,” she said. She glanced up at me. “Not officially.”

“Ah,” I said. “I guess I’m not actually consulting.”

“Not officially,” she said. “They cut Stallings’s budget pretty hard. He can keep the equipment functional and the paychecks steady, barely, but…”

I arched a brow.

“I need your opinion,” she said.

“About what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to prejudice you. Just look and tell me what you see.”

“I can do that,” I said.

“I’ll pay you myself.”

“Murph, you don’t need to—”

She gave me a very hard look.

Sergeant Murphy’s wounded pride wouldn’t allow her to take charity. I lifted my hands in mock surrender, relenting. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Damn right.”

She took me to an apartment on the seventh floor. There were a couple of doors in the hall standing slightly open, and I caught furtive looks from their residents from the corner of my eye as we walked past. At the far end of the hall stood a pair of guys who looked like medtechs—bored, grouchy medtechs. One of them was smoking, the other leaning against a wall with his arms crossed and his cap’s bill down over his eyes. Murphy and the two of them ignored one another as Murphy opened the apartment door.

Murphy gestured for me to go in and planted her feet, clearly intending to wait.

I went into the apartment. It was small, worn, and shabby, but it was clean. A miniature jungle of very healthy green plants covered most of the far wall, framing the two windows. From the door, I could see a tiny television on a TV stand, an old stereo, and a futon.

The dead woman lay on the futon.

She had her hands folded over her stomach. I didn’t have the experience to tell exactly how long she’d been there, but the corpse had lost all its color and its stomach looked slightly distended, so I guessed that she died at least the day before. It was hard to guess at her age, but she couldn’t have been much more than thirty. She wore a pink terry-cloth bathrobe, a pair of glasses, and had her brown hair pulled up into a bun.

On the coffee table in front of the futon there was a prescription bottle, its top off, empty. A decanter of golden brown liquid, dusted for prints and covered by a layer of plastic, sat beside it, as did a tumbler that was empty but for a quarter inch of water still in its bottom, enough for a melted ice cube or two.

Next to the tumbler there was a handwritten note, also inside in a plastic bag, along with a gel-tip pen.

I looked at the woman. Then I went over to the futon and read the note:

I’m so tired of being afraid. There’s nothing left. Forgive me. Janine.

I shuddered.

I’d seen corpses before; don’t get me wrong. In fact, I’d seen crime scenes that looked like photos of Hell’s slaughterhouse. I’d smelled worse, too—believe you me, an eviscerated body puts off a stench of death and rot so vile that it is almost a solid object. By comparison to some of my previous cases, this one was quite peaceful. Well organized. Tidy, even.

It looked nothing like the home of a dead woman. Maybe that’s what made it feel so creepy. Except for Janine’s corpse, the apartment looked like its owners had just stepped out for a bite to eat.

I prowled around, careful not to touch anything. The bathroom and one of the bedrooms were like the living room: neat, a little sparse, not rich, but obviously well cared for. I hit the kitchen next. Dishes were soaking in now-cold water in the sink. In the fridge, chicken was marinating in some kind of sauce, its glass bowl covered with Saran.

I heard a quiet step behind me, and said, “Suicides don’t usually leave a meal marinating, do they? Or dishes soaking to be cleaned? Or their glasses on?”

Murphy made a noncommittal noise in her throat.

“No pictures up anywhere,” I mused. “No family portraits, graduation shots, pictures of everyone at Disneyland.” I added up some other things as I turned toward the second bedroom. “No hair in the sink or bathroom trash can. No computers.”

I opened the door to the master bedroom and closed my eyes, reaching out with my senses to get a feel of the room. I found what I expected.

“She was a practitioner,” I said quietly.

Janine had set up her temple on a low wooden table against the east wall. As I drew near it, there was a sense of gentle energy, like heat coming up from a fire that had burned down to mostly ashes. The energy around the table had never been strong, and it was fading, and had been since the woman’s death. Within another sunrise, it would be completely gone.

There were a number of items on the table, carefully arranged: a bell, a thick, leather-bound book, probably a journal. There was also an old pewter chalice, very plain but free of tarnish, and a slender little mahogany wand with a crystal bound to its end with copper wire.

One thing was out of place.

An old, old knife, a slender-bladed weapon from the early Renaissance called a misericord, lay on the carpet in front of the shrine, its tip pointing at an angle toward the other side of the bedroom.

I grunted. I paced around the room to the knife. I hunkered down, thinking, then looked up the blade of the knife to its hilt. I paced back to the bedroom door and peered at the living room.

The hilt of the knife pointed at Janine’s body.

I went back to the bedroom and squinted down the knife toward its tip.

It was pointed at the far wall.

I glanced back at Murphy, now standing in the doorway.

Murphy tilted her head. “What did you find?”

“Not sure yet. Hang on.” I walked over to the wall and held up my hand about half an inch from its surface. I closed my eyes and focused on a very faint trace of energy left there. After several moments of concentration, I lowered my hand again. “There’s something there,” I said. “But it’s too faint for me to make it out without using my Sight. And I’m getting sick of doing that.”

“What does that mean?” Murphy asked me.

“It means I need something from my kit. Be right back.” I went outside and down to my car, where I kept a fisherman’s tackle box. I snagged it and went back up to the dead woman’s bedroom.

“That’s new,” Murphy said.

I set the box on the floor and opened it. “I’ve been teaching my apprentice thaumaturgy. We have to go out to the country sometimes, for safety’s sake.” I rummaged through the box and finally drew out a plastic test tube full of metallic grains. “I just tossed things into a grocery sack for the first couple of weeks, but it was easier to put together a more permanent mobile kit.”

“What’s that?” Murphy asked.

“Copper filings,” I said. “They conduct energy. If there’s some kind of pattern here, I might be able to make it out.”

“Ah. You’re dusting for prints,” Murphy said.

“Pretty much, yeah.” I pulled a lump of chalk out of my duster’s pocket and squatted to draw a very faint circle on the carpet. I willed it closed as I completed the circle, and felt it spring to life, an invisible screen of power that kept random energies away from me and focused my own magic. The spell was a delicate one, for me anyway, and trying to use it without a circle would have been like trying to light a match in a hurricane.

I closed my eyes, concentrating, and poured an ounce or two of copper filings into my right palm. I willed a whisper of energy down into the filings, enough to create a magical charge in them that would draw them toward the faint energy on the wall. When they were ready, I murmured, “Illumina magnus.” Then I broke the circle with my foot, releasing the spell, and cast the filings outward.

They glittered with little blue-white sparks, crackling audibly as they struck the wall and stayed there. The scent of ozone filled the air.

I leaned forward and blew gently over the wall, clearing any stray filings that might have clung to the wall on their own. Then I stepped back.

The copper filings had fallen into definite shapes—specifically, letters:

EXODUS 22:18.

Murphy furrowed her brow and stared at it. “A Bible verse?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know that one,” she said. “Do you?”

I nodded. “It’s one that stuck in my head: ‘Suffer not a witch to live.’”

Chapter Two

“Murder, then,” Murphy said.

I grunted. “Looks like.”

“And the killer wanted you to know it.” She came to stand beside me, frowning up at the wall. “A cop couldn’t have found this.”

“Yeah,” I said. The empty apartment made a clicking noise, one of those settling-building, homey sounds that would have been familiar to the victim.

Murphy’s tone became lighter. “So, what are we looking at here? Some kind of religious wacko? Salem Witch Trials aficionado? The Inquisitor reborn?”

“And he uses magic to leave a message?” I asked.

“Wackos can be hypocrites.” She frowned. “How did the message get there? Did a practitioner have to do it?”

I shook my head. “After they killed her, they probably just dipped their finger in the water in the chalice, used it to write on the wall. Water dried up, but a residue of energy remained.”

She frowned. “From water?”

“Blessed water from the cup on her shrine,” I said. “Think of it as holy water. It’s imbued with positive energy the same way.”

Murphy squinted at me and then at the wall. “Holy? I thought magic was just all about energy and math and equations and things. Like electricity or thermodynamics.”

“Not everyone thinks that,” I said. I nodded at the altar. “The victim was a Wiccan.”

Murphy frowned. “A witch?”

“She was also a witch,” I said. “Not every Wiccan has the innate strength to be a practitioner. For most of them, there’s very little actual power involved in their rites and ceremonies.”

“Then why do them?”

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony.” I shrugged. “Every faith has its ceremonies, Murph.”

“This was about a conflict of religion, then?” Murphy said.

I shrugged. “It’s sort of difficult for sincere Wiccans to conflict with other religions. Wicca itself is really fluid. There are some basic tenets that ninety-nine percent of all Wiccans follow, but at its core the faith is all about individual freedom. Wiccans believe that as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else by doing it, you should be free to act and worship in whatever way you’d like. So everyone’s beliefs are a little bit different. Individualized.”

Murphy, who was more or less Catholic, frowned. “Seems to me that Christianity has a few things to say about forgiveness and tolerance and treating others the way you’d like to be treated.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Then came the Crusades, the Inquisition….”

“Which is my point,” Murphy said. “Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it’s a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it’s made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.”

“You only need one side to start a fight,” I agreed. “KKK quotes a lot of scripture. So do a lot of reactionary religious organizations. A lot of times, they take it out of context.” I gestured at the wall. “Like this.”

“I dunno. ‘Suffer not a witch to live.’ Seems fairly clear.”

“Out of context, but clear,” I said. “Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner’s negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal.”

Murphy snorted.

“Also keep in mind that the original text was written thousands of years ago. In Hebrew. The actual word that they used in that verse describes someone who casts spells that do harm to others. There was a distinction, in that culture, between harmful and beneficial magic.

“By the time we got to the Middle Ages, the general attitude within the faith was that anyone who practiced any kind of magic was automatically evil. There was no distinction between white and black magic. And when the verse came over to English, King James had a thing about witches, so ‘harmful caster of spells’ just got translated to ‘witch.’”

“Put that way, it sounds like maybe someone took it out of context,” Murphy said. “But you’d get arguments from all kinds of people that the Bible has got to be perfect. That God would not permit such errors to be made in the Holy Word.”

“I thought God gave everyone free will,” I said. “Which presumably—and evidently—includes the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another.”

“Stop making me think,” Murphy said. “I’m believing over here.”

I grinned. “See? This is why I’m not religious. I couldn’t possibly keep my mouth shut long enough to get along with everyone else.”

“I thought it was because you’d never respect any religion that would have you.”

“That too,” I said.

Neither one of us, during this conversation, looked back toward the body in the living room. An uncomfortable silence fell. The floorboards creaked.

“Murder,” Murphy said, finally, staring at the wall. “Maybe someone on a holy mission.”

“Murder,” I said. “Too soon to make any assumptions. What made you call me?”

“That altar,” she said. “The inconsistencies about the victim.”

“No one is going to buy magic writing on a wall as evidence.”

“I know,” she said. “Officially, she’s going down as a suicide.”

“Which means the ball is in my court,” I said.

“I talked to Stallings,” she said. “I’m taking a couple of days of personal leave, starting tomorrow. I’m in.”

“Cool.” I frowned suddenly and got a sick little feeling in my stomach. “This isn’t the only suicide, is it.”

“Right now, I’m on the job,” Murphy said. “That isn’t something I could share with you. The way someone like Butters might.”

“Right,” I said.

With no warning whatsoever, Murphy moved, spinning in a blur of motion that swept her leg out in a scything, ankle-height arc behind her. There was a thump of impact, and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. Murphy—her eyes closed—sprang onto something unseen, and her hands moved in a couple of small, quick circles, fingers grasping. Then Murphy grunted, set her arms, and twisted her shoulders a little.

There was a young woman’s high-pitched gasp of pain, and abruptly, underneath Murphy, there was a girl. Murphy had her pinned on her stomach on the floor, one arm twisted behind her, wrist bent at a painful angle.

The girl was in her late teens. She wore combat boots, black fatigue pants, and a tight, cutoff grey T-shirt. She was tall, most of a foot taller than Murphy, and built like a brick house. Her hair had been cut into a short, spiky style and dyed peroxide white. A tattoo on her neck vanished under her shirt, reappeared for a bit on her bared stomach, and continued beneath the pants. She had multiple earrings, a nose ring, an eyebrow ring, and a silver stud through that spot right under her lower lip. On the hand Murphy had twisted up behind her back, she wore a bracelet of dark little glass beads.

“Harry?” Murphy said in that tone of voice that, while polite and patient, demanded an explanation.

I sighed. “Murph. You remember my apprentice, Molly Carpenter.”

Murphy leaned to one side and looked at her profile. “Oh, sure,” she said. “I didn’t recognize her without the pink-and-blue hair. Also, she wasn’t invisible last time.” She gave me a look, asking if I should let her up.

I gave Murphy a wink, and squatted down on the carpet next to the girl. I gave her my best scowl. “I told you to wait at the apartment and practice your focus.”

“Oh, come on,” Molly said. “It’s impossible. And boring as hell.”

“Practice makes perfect, kid.”

“I’ve been practicing my ass off!” Molly protested. “I know fifty times as much as I did last year.”

“And if you keep up the pace for another six or seven years,” I said, “you might—you might—be ready to go it alone. Until then, you’re the apprentice, I’m the teacher, and you do what I tell you.”

“But I can help you!”

“Not from a jail cell,” I pointed out.

“You’re trespassing on a crime scene,” Murphy told her.

“Oh, please,” Molly said, both scorn and protest in her voice.

(In case it slipped by, Molly has authority issues.)

It was probably the worst thing she could have said.

“Right,” Murphy said. She produced cuffs from her jacket pocket, and slapped them on Molly’s pinned wrist. “You have the right to remain silent.”

Molly’s eyes widened and she stared up at me. “What? Harry…”

“If you choose to give up that right,” Murphy continued, chanting it with the steady pace of ritual, “anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

I shrugged. “Sorry, kid. This is real life. Look, your juvenile record is sealed, and you’ll be tried as an adult. First offense, I doubt you’ll do much more than…Murph?”

Murphy took a break from the Miranda chant. “Thirty to sixty days, maybe.” Then she resumed.

“There, see? No big deal. See you in a month or three.”

Molly’s face got pale. “But…but…”

“Oh,” I added, “beat someone up on the first day. Supposed to save you a lot of trouble.”

Murphy dragged Molly to her feet, her hands now cuffed. “Do you understand your rights as I have conveyed them to you?”

Molly’s mouth fell open. She looked from Murphy to me, her expression shocked.

“Or,” I said, “you might apologize.”

“I-I’m sorry, Harry,” she said.

I sighed. “Not to me, kid. It isn’t my crime scene.”

“But…” Molly swallowed and looked at Murphy. “I was just s-standing there.”

“You wearing gloves?” Murphy asked.

“No.”

“Shoes?”

“Yes.”

“Touch anything?”

“Um.” Molly swallowed. “The door. Just pushed it a little. And that Chinese vase she’s planted her spearmint in. The one with a crack in it.”

“Which means,” Murphy said, “that if I can show that this is a murder, a full forensic sweep could pick up your fingerprints, the imprint of your shoes, and, as brittle as your hairdo is, possibly genetic traces if any of it broke off. Since you aren’t one of the investigating officers or police consultants, that evidence would place you at the scene of the crime and could implicate you in a murder investigation.”

Molly shook her head. “But you just said it would be called a suic—”

“Even if it is, you don’t know proper procedure, the way Harry does, and your presence here might contaminate the scene and obscure evidence about the actual killer, making the murderer even more difficult to find before he strikes again.”

Molly just stared at her.

“That’s why there are laws about civilians and crime scenes. This isn’t a game, Miss Carpenter,” Murphy said, her voice cool, but not angry. “Mistakes here could cost lives. Do you understand me?”

Molly glanced from Murphy to me and back, and her shoulders sagged. “I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry.”

I said in a gentle voice, “Apologies won’t give life back to the dead, Molly. You still haven’t learned to consider consequences, and you can’t afford that. Not anymore.”

Molly flinched a little and nodded.

“I trust that this will never happen again,” Murphy said.

“No, ma’am.”

Murphy looked skeptically at Molly and back to me.

“She means well,” I said. “She just wanted to help.”

Molly gave me a grateful glance.

Murphy’s tone softened as she took the cuffs off. “Don’t we all.”

Molly rubbed at her wrists, wincing. “Um. Sergeant? How did you know I was there?”

“Floorboards creaking when no one was standing on them,” I said.

“Your deodorant,” Murphy said.

“Your tongue stud clicked against your teeth once,” I said.

“I felt some air move a few minutes ago,” Murphy said. “Didn’t feel like a draft.”

Molly swallowed and her face turned pink. “Oh.”

“But we didn’t see you, did we, Murph?”

Murphy shook her head. “Not even a little.”

A little humiliation and ego deflation, now and then, is good for apprentices. Mine sighed miserably.

“Well,” I said. “You’re here. Might as well tag along.” I nodded to Murphy and headed for the door.

“Where are we going?” Molly asked. Both bored medtechs blinked and stared as Molly followed me out of the apartment. Murphy came out behind us and waved them in to carry the body out.

“To see a friend of mine,” I said. “You like polka?”

Chapter Three

I hadn’t been back to the Forensic Institute on West Harrison since that mess with Necromancers-R-Us nearly two years before. It wasn’t an unpleasant-looking place, despite the fact that it was the repository for former human beings awaiting examination. It was in a little corporate park, very clean, with green lawns and neat bushes and fresh-painted lines on the spaces in the parking lots. The buildings themselves were quietly unassuming, functional and tidy.

It was one of those places that show up a lot in my nightmares.

It wasn’t like I’d ever been a fan of viewing corpses, but a man I knew had been caught in the magical cross fire, and wound up an animated supercorpse who had nearly torn my car apart with his bare hands.

I hadn’t come back since then. I had better things to do than revisit scenes like that. But once I was there and parked and heading for the doors, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and I went in without hesitation.

This was Molly’s first visit. At my request, she had ditched much of the facial jewelry and wore an old Cubs baseball hat over her peroxide locks. Even so, she didn’t exactly cut a respectable businesslike figure, but I was content with damage control. Of course, my outfit barely qualified for business casual, and the heavy leather coat in the too-warm weather probably gave me a distinctive aura of eccentricity. Or at least it would have, if I made more money.

The guard sitting at the desk where Phil had been murdered was expecting me, but not Molly, and he told me she would have to wait. I said I’d wait, too, until Butters verified her. The guard looked sullen about being forced to expend the enormous effort it took to punch an intercom number. He growled into the phone, grunted a few times, then thumped a switch and the security door buzzed. Molly and I went on through.

There are several examination rooms at the morgue, but it’s never hard to figure out which one Butters is inside. You just listen for the polka.

I homed in on a steady oom-pah, oom-pah of a tuba, until I could pick up the strains of clarinet and accordion skirling along with it. Exam room three. I rapped briefly on the door and opened it without actually stepping inside.

Waldo Butters was bent over his desk, squinting at his computer’s screen, while his butt and legs shuffled back and forth in time to the polka music. He muttered something to himself, nodded, and hit the space bar on his keyboard with one elbow in time with his tapping heels, without looking up at me. “Hey, Harry.”

I blinked. “Is that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?”

“Yankovic. Man’s a freaking genius,” he replied. “Give me a sec to power down before you come all the way in.”

“No problem,” I told him.

“You’ve worked with him before?” Molly asked quietly.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “He’s clued.”

Butters waited until his printer started rattling, then shut down the computer and walked to the printer to pick up a couple of pages and staple them together. Then he dropped the pages onto a small stack of them and bound them with a large rubber band. “Okay, that should do it.” He turned to face me with a grin.

Butters was an odd little duck. He wasn’t much taller than Murphy, and she probably had more muscle than he did. His shock of black hair resembled nothing so much as an explosion in a steel wool factory. He was all knees and elbows, especially in the surgical greens he was wearing, his face was lean and angular, his nose beaky, and his eyes were bright behind the prescription glasses.

“Harry,” he said, offering his hand. “Long time, no see. How’s the hand?”

I traded grips with him. Butters had long, wiry fingers, very precise and not at all weak. He wasn’t anyone’s idea of dangerous, but the little guy had guts and brains. “Only three months or so. And not too bad.” I held my gloved left hand up and wiggled all the fingers. My ring and pinkie fingers moved with little trembles and twitches, but by God they moved when I told them to.

The flesh of my left hand had practically melted in an unanticipated conflagration during a battle with a scourge of vampires. The doctors had been shocked that they didn’t have to amputate, but told me I’d never use it again. Butters had helped me work out a regimen of physical therapy, and my fingers were mostly functional, though my hand still looked pretty horrible—but even that had begun to change, at least a little. The ugly little lumps of scar tissue and flesh had begun to fade, and my hand looked considerably less like a melted wax model than it had before. The nails had grown back in, too.

“Good,” Butters said. “Good. You still playing guitar?”

“I hold it. It makes noise. Might be a little generous to call it playing.” I gestured to Molly. “Waldo Butters, this is Molly Carpenter, my apprentice.”

“Apprentice, eh?” Butters extended an amiable hand. “Pleased to meetcha,” he said. “So does he turn you into squirrels and fishes and stuff, like in The Sword in the Stone?”

Molly sighed. “I wish. I keep trying to get him to show me how to change form, but he won’t.”

“I promised your parents I wouldn’t let you melt yourself into a pile of goo,” I told her. “Butters, I assume someone—and I won’t name any names—told you I’d be dropping by?”

“Yowsa,” the little ME said, nodding. He held up a finger, went to the door, and locked it, before turning to lean his back against it. “Look, Dresden. I have to be careful what kind of information I share, right? It comes with the job.”

“Sure.”

“So you didn’t hear it from me.”

I looked at Molly. “Who said that?”

“Groovy,” Butters said. He walked back over to me and offered me the packet of papers. “Names and addresses of the deceased,” he said.

I frowned and flipped through them: columns of text, much of it technical; ugly photographs. “The victims?”

“Officially, they’re the deceased.” His mouth tightened. “But yeah. I’m pretty sure they’re victims.”

“Why?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again, and frowned. “You ever see something out of the corner of your eye? But when you look at it, there’s nothing there? Or at least, it doesn’t look like what you thought it was?”

“Sure.”

“Same thing here,” he said. “Most of these folks show classic, obvious suicides. There are just a few little details wrong. You know?”

“No,” I said. “Enlighten me.”

“Take that top one,” he said. “Pauline Moskowitz. Thirty-nine, mother of two, husband, two dogs. She disappears on a Friday night and opens up her wrists in a hotel bathtub around three A.M. Saturday morning.”

I read over it. “Am I reading this right? She was on antidepressants?”

“Uh-huh,” Butters said, “but nothing extreme, and she’d been on them and stable for eight years. Never showed suicidal tendencies before, either.”

I looked at the ugly picture of a very ordinary-looking woman lying naked and dead in a tub of cloudy liquid. “So what’s got your scalpel in a knot?”

“The cuts,” Butters said. “She used a box knife. It was in the tub with her. She severed tendons in both wrists.”

“So?”

“So,” Butters said. “Once she’d cut the tendons on one wrist, she’d have had very little controlled movement with the fingers in that hand. So what’d she do to cut them both? Use two box knives at the same time? Where’s the other knife?”

“Maybe she held it with her teeth,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll close my eyes and throw a rock out over the lake and it will land in a boat,” Butters said. “It’s technically possible, but it isn’t really likely. The second wound almost certainly wouldn’t be as deep or as clean. I’ve seen ’em look like someone was cutting up a block of Parmesan into slivers. These two cuts are almost identical.”

“I guess it’s not conclusive, though,” I said.

“Not officially.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot today.” I frowned. “What’s Brioche think?”

At the mention of his boss, Butters grimaced. “Occam’s razor, to use his own spectacularly insensitive yet ironic phrasing. They’re suicides. End of story.”

“But your guess is that someone else was holding the knife?”

The little ME’s face turned bleak, and he nodded without speaking.

“Good enough for me,” I said. “What about the body today?”

“Can’t say until I look,” Butters said. He gave me a shrewd glance. “But you think it’s another murder.”

“I know it is,” I replied. “But I’m the only one, until Murphy’s off the clock.”

“Right.” Butters sighed.

I flipped past Mrs. Moskowitz’s pages to the next set of ugly pictures. Also a woman. The pages named her Maria Casselli. Maria had been twenty-three when she washed down thirty Valium with a bottle of drain cleaner.

“Another hotel room,” I noted quietly.

Molly glanced over my shoulder at the printout of the photo at the scene. She turned pale and took several steps away from me.

“Yeah,” Butters said, concerned eyes on my apprentice. “It’s a little unusual. Most suicides are at home. They usually go somewhere else only if they need to jump off a bridge or drive their car into a lake or something.”

“Ms. Casselli had a family,” I said. “Husband, her younger sister living with her.”

“Yeah,” Butters said. “You can guess what Brioche had to say.”

“She walked in on her hubby and baby sister, decided to end it all?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh,” Molly said. “I think—”

“Outside,” Butters provided, unlocking the door. “First door on the right.”

Molly hurried from the room, down to the bathroom Butters had directed her to.

“Jesus, Harry,” Butters said. “Kid’s a little young for this.”

I held up the picture of Maria’s body. “Lot of that going around.”

“She’s actually a wizard? Like you?”

“Someday,” I said. “If she survives.” I read over the next two profiles, both of women in their twenties, both apparent suicides in hotel rooms, both of them with housemates of one sort or another.

The last profile was different. I read over it and glanced up at Butters. “What’s with this one?”

“Fits the same general profile,” Butters said. “Women, dead in hotel rooms.”

I frowned down at the papers. “Where’s the cause of death?”

“That’s the thing,” Butters said. “I couldn’t find one.”

I lifted both eyebrows at him.

He spread his hands. “Harry, I know my trade. I like figuring this stuff out. And I haven’t got the foggiest why the woman is dead. Every test I ran came up negative; every theory I put together fell apart. Medically speaking, she’s in good shape. It’s like her whole system just…got the switch turned off. Everything at once. Never seen anything like it.”

“Jessica Blanche.” I checked the profiles. “Nineteen. And pretty. Or at least prettyish.”

“Hard to tell with dead girls,” Butters said. “But yeah, that was my take.”

“But not a suicide.”

“Like I said. Dead, and in hotel rooms.”

“Then what’s the connection to the other deaths?”

“Little things,” Butters said. “Like, she had a purse with ID in it, but no clothes.”

“Meaning someone had to have taken them away.” I rolled up the papers into a tube and thumped them against my leg, thoughtfully. The door opened, and Molly came back in, wiping at her mouth with a paper towel. “This girl still here?”

Butters lifted his eyebrows. “Yeah. Miss Blanche. Why?”

“I think maybe Molly can help.”

Molly blinked and looked up at me. “Um. What?”

“I doubt it’s going to be pleasant, Molly,” I told her. “But you might be able to read something.”

“Off of a dead girl?” Molly asked quietly.

“You’re the one who wanted to come along,” I said.

She frowned, facing me, and then took a deep breath. “Yes. Um. Yes, I was. I mean, yes, I will. Try.”

“Will you?” I asked. “You sure? Won’t be fun. But if it gets us more information, it could save someone’s life.”

I watched her for a moment, until her expression set in determination and she met my eyes. She straightened and nodded once. “Yes.”

“All right,” I said. “Get yourself set for it. Butters, we need to give her a few minutes alone. Can we go get Miss Blanche?”

“Um,” Butters said. “What’s this going to entail, exactly?”

“Nothing much. I’ll explain it on the way.”

He chewed on his lip for a moment, and then nodded once. “This way.”

He led me down the hall to the storage room. It was another exam room, like the one we’d just been in, but it also featured a wall of body-sized refrigerated storage units like morgues are supposed to have. This was the room we’d been in when a necromancer and a gaggle of zombies had put a bullet through the head of Butters’s capacity to ignore the world of the supernatural.

Butters got out a gurney, consulted a record sheet on a clipboard, and wheeled it over to the fridges. “I don’t like to come in here anymore. Not since Phil.”

“Me either,” I said.

He nodded. “Here, get that side.”

I didn’t want to. I am a wizard, sure, but corpses are inherently icky, even if they aren’t animated and trying to kill you. But I tried to pretend we were sliding a heavy load of groceries onto a cart, and helped him draw a body, resting upon a metal tray and covered in a heavy cloth, onto the gurney.

“So,” he said. “What is she going to do?”

“Look into its eyes,” I said.

He gave me a somewhat skeptical look. “Trying to see the last thing impressed on her retinas or something? You know that’s pretty much mythical, right?”

“Other impressions get left on a body,” I said. “Final thoughts, sometimes. Emotions, sensations.” I shook my head. “Technically, those kinds of impressions can get left on almost any kind of inanimate object. You’ve heard of object reading, right?”

“That’s for real?” he asked.

“Yeah. But it’s an easy sort of thing to contaminate, and it can be tricky as hell—and entirely apart from that, it’s extremely difficult to do.”

“Oh,” Butters said. “But you think there might be something left on the corpse?”

“Maybe.”

“That sounds really useful.”

“Potentially.”

“So how come you don’t do it all the time?” he asked.

“It’s delicate,” I said. “When it comes to magic, I’m not much for delicate.”

He frowned and we started rolling the gurney. “But your only half-trained apprentice is?”

“The wizarding business isn’t standardized,” I said. “Any given wizard will have an affinity for different kinds of magic, due to their natural talents, personalities, experiences. Each has different strengths.”

“What are yours?” he asked.

“Finding things. Following things. Blowing things up, mostly,” I said. “I’m good at those. Redirecting energy, sending energy out into the world to resonate with the energy of what I’m trying to find. Moving energy around or redirecting it or storing it up to use later.”

“Aha,” he said. “None of which is delicate?”

“I’ve practiced enough to handle a lot of different kinds of delicate magic,” I said. “But…it’s the difference between me strumming power chords on a guitar and me playing a complex classical Spanish piece.”

Butters absorbed that and nodded. “And the kid plays Spanish guitar?”

“Close enough. She’s not as strong as me, but she’s got a gift for the more subtle magic. Especially mental and emotional stuff. It’s what got her in so much trouble with…”

I bit my tongue and stopped in midsentence. It wasn’t my place to discuss Molly’s violations of the White Council’s Laws of Magic with others. She would have enough trouble getting past the horrible acts she’d committed in innocence without me painting her as a psycho monster-in-training.

Butters watched my face for a few seconds, then nodded and let it pass. “What do you think she’ll find?”

“No clue,” I said. “That’s why we look.”

“Could you do this?” he said. “I mean, if you had to?”

“I’ve tried it,” I hedged. “But I’m bad about projecting things onto the object, and I can barely ever get something intelligible out of it.”

“You said it might not be pleasant for her,” Butters said. “Why?”

“Because if something’s there, and she can sense it, she gets to experience it. First person. Like she’s living it herself.”

Butters let out a low whistle. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that could be bad.”

We got back to the other room, and I peered in before opening the door. Molly was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, her legs folded lotus-style, her head tilted slightly up. Her hands rested on her thighs, the tips of her thumbs pressed lightly against the tips of her middle fingers.

“Quietly,” I murmured. “No noise until she’s finished. Okay?”

Butters nodded. I opened the door as silently as I could. We brought the gurney into the room, left it in front of Molly, and then at my beckon, Butters and I went to the far wall and settled in to wait.

It took Molly better than twenty minutes to focus her mind for the comparatively simple spell. Focus of intention, of will, is integral to any use of magic. I’d drawn myself up to focus power so often and for so long that I only had to actually make a conscious effort to do it when a spell was particularly complex, dangerous, or when I thought it wise to be slow and cautious. Most of the time, it took me less than a second to gather up my will—which is critical in any situation where speed is a factor. Drooling abominations and angry vampires don’t give you twenty minutes to get a punch ready.

Molly, though she was learning quickly, had a long damned way to go.

When she finally opened her eyes, they were distant, unfocused. She rose to her feet with slow, careful movements, and drifted over to the gurney with the corpse. She pulled the sheet down, revealing the dead girl’s face. Then Molly leaned down, her expression still distant, and murmured quietly beneath her breath as she opened the corpse’s eyelids.

She got something almost instantly.

Her eyes flew open wide, and she let out a short gasp. Her breath rasped in and out frantically several times before her eyes rolled back up into her head. She stood frozen and rigid for a pair of quivering seconds, and then her breath escaped in a low, rough cry and her knees buckled. She did not fall to the floor so much as melt down onto it. Then she lay there, breathing hard and letting out a continuous stream of guttural whimpers.

Her breathing continued, fast and hard, her eyes unfocused. Her body rippled with several slow, undulating motions that drew the eye to her hips and breasts. Then she slowly went limp, her panting gradually easing, though little, unmistakably pleased sounds slithered from her lips on every exhalation.

I blinked at her.

Well.

I hadn’t been expecting that.

Butters gulped audibly. Then he said, “Uh. Did she just do what I think she just did?”

I pursed my lips. “Um. Maybe.”

“What just happened?”

“She, um.” I coughed. “She got something.”

“She got something, all right,” Butters muttered. He sighed. “I haven’t gotten anything like that in about two years.”

For me, it had been more like four. “I hear you,” I said, more emphatically than I meant to.

“Is she underage?” he asked. “Legally speaking?”

“No.”

“Okay. I don’t feel quite so…Nabokovian, then.” He raked his fingers back through his hair. “What do we do now?”

I tried to look professional and unfazed. “We wait for her to recover.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at Molly and sighed. “I need to get out more.”

Me and you both, man. “Butters, is there any way you could get her some water or something?”

“Sure,” he said. “You?”

“Nah.”

“Right back.” Butters covered up the corpse and slipped out.

I went over to the girl and hunkered down by her. “Hey, grasshopper. Can you hear me?”

It took her longer than it should have to answer, like when you’re on the phone with someone halfway around the world. “Yes. I…I hear you.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, God.” She sighed, smiling. “Yes.”

I muttered under my breath, rubbed at the incipient headache beginning between my eyes, and thought dark thoughts. Dammit all, every time I’d opened myself up to some kind of horrible psychic shock in the name of investigation, I’d gotten another nightmare added to my collection. Her first time up to bat, and the grasshopper got…

What had she gotten?

“I want you to tell me what you sensed, right away. Sometimes the details fade out, like when you forget parts of a dream.”

“Right,” she murmured in a sleepy-sounding drawl. “Details. She…” Molly shook her head. “She felt good. Really, really good.”

“I gathered that much,” I said. “What else?”

Molly kept shaking her head slowly. “Nothing else. Just that. It was all sensation. Ecstasy.” She frowned a little, as if struggling to order her thoughts. “As if the rest of her senses had been blinded by it, somehow. I don’t think there was anything else. Not sight nor sound nor thought nor memory. Nothing. She didn’t even know it when she died.”

“Think about it,” I said quietly. “Absolutely anything you can remember could be important.”

Butters came back in just then, carrying a bottle of water beaded with drops of condensation. He tossed it to me, and I passed the cold drink to Molly. “Here,” I told her. “Drink up.”

“Thanks.” She opened the bottle, turned on her side, and started guzzling it without even sitting up. The pose did a lot to make her clothing look tighter.

Butters stared for a second, then sighed and quite evidently forced himself to go over to his desk and start sharpening pencils. “So what do we know?”

“Looks like she died happy,” I said. “Did you run a toxicology check on her?”

“Yeah. Some residual THC, but she could have gotten that from the contact high at a concert. Otherwise she was clean.”

“Damn,” I said. “Can you think of anything else that would do…that to a victim?”

“Nothing pharmacological,” Butters said. “Maybe if someone ran a wire into the pleasure centers of her brain and kept stimulating them. But, uh, there’s no evidence of open-skull surgery. I would have noticed something like that.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“So it must be something from the spooky side,” Butters said.

“Could be.” I consulted my packet again. “What did she do?”

“No one knew,” Butters said. “No one seemed to know anything about her. No one came to claim the body. We couldn’t find any relations. It’s why she’s still here.”

“No local address, either,” I said.

“No, just the one on an Indiana driver’s license, but it dead-ended. Not much else in her purse.”

“And the killer took her clothes.”

“Apparently,” Butters said. “But why?”

I shrugged. “Must have been something on them he didn’t want found.” I pursed my lips. “Or something on them he didn’t want me to find.”

Molly abruptly sat up straight. “Harry, I remember something.”

“Yeah?”

“Sensation,” she said, resting one hand over her belly button. “It was like…I don’t know, like hearing twenty different bands playing at the same time, only tactile. But there was a prickling sort of sensation over her stomach. Like one of those medical pinwheel things.”

“A Wartenberg Pinwheel,” Butters supplied.

“Eh?” I said.

“Like the one I use to test the nerves on your hand, Harry,” Butters supplied.

“Oh, ow, right.” I frowned at Molly. “How the hell do you know what one of those feels like?”

Molly gave me a lazy, wicked smile. “This is one of those things you don’t want me to explain.”

Butters let out a delicate cough. “They are sometimes used recreationally, Harry.”

My cheeks felt warm. “Ah. Right. Butters, you got a felt-tip marker?”

He got one out of his desk and tossed it to me. I passed it to Molly. “Show me where.”

She nodded, lay back down on her back, and pulled her shirt up from her stomach. Then she closed her eyes, took the lid off the marker, and traced it slowly over the skin of her abdomen, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

When she was finished, the black ink spelled out clear, large letters:

EX 22:18.

Exodus again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said quietly. “We have a serial killer.”

Chapter Four

Molly said little on the way back. She just leaned against the window with half-closed eyes, probably basking in the afterglow.

“Molly,” I told her in my gentlest voice. “Heroin feels good, too. Ask Rosy and Nelson.”

The little smile of pleasure faded into blankness, and she stared at me for a while. By degrees, her expression changed to a frown of consideration, and then to a nauseated grimace.

“It killed her,” she said finally. “It killed her. I mean, it felt so good…but it wasn’t.”

I nodded.

“She never knew it. She never had a chance.” Molly looked queasy for a minute. “It was a vampire, right? From the White Court? I mean, they use sex to feed on life energy, right?”

“That’s one of the things it could be,” I said quietly. “There are plenty of demonic creatures in the Nevernever that groove on the succubus routine, though.”

“And she was killed in a hotel,” she said. “Where there was no threshold to protect her from a demon.”

“Very good, grasshopper,” I said. “Once you consider that the other victims weren’t done White Court style, it means that either there is more than one killer or the same one is varying his techniques. It’s too early for anything but wild guesses.”

She frowned. “What are you going to do next?”

I thought about it for a minute. “I’ve got to figure out what all of the killer’s victims have in common, if anything.”

“They’re dead?” Molly offered.

I smiled a little. “Besides that.”

“Okay,” she said. “So what do you do?”

I nodded to the papers Butters had given me, now resting on the dashboard. “I start there. See what I can extrapolate from the data I’ve got. Then I look people up and ask questions.”

“What do I do?” she asked.

“That depends. How many beads can you move?” I asked her.

She glowered at me for a minute. Then she unbound the bracelet of dark beads from her left wrist and held it up. The beads all slipped down to the bottom of the bracelet, leaving three or four inches of bare cord.

Molly focused on the bracelet, a device I’d created to help her practice focusing her mind and stilling her thoughts. Focus and stillness are important when you’re slinging magic around. It’s a primal force of creation, and it responds to your thoughts and emotions—whether you want it to or not. If your thoughts get fragmented or muddled, or if you aren’t paying complete attention to what you’re doing, the magic can respond in any number of unpredictable and dangerous ways.

Molly was still learning about it. She had some real talent, don’t get me wrong, but what she lacked was not ability, but judgment. That’s what I’d been trying to teach her over the past year or so—to use her power responsibly, cautiously, and with respect for the dangers the Art could present. If she didn’t get a more solid head on her shoulders, her talent with magic was going to get her killed—probably taking me with her.

Molly was a warlock.

She’d used magic to tinker with the minds of two of her friends in an effort to free them from drug addiction, but her motives had been mixed, and the results were moderately horrific. One of the kids still hadn’t recovered enough to function on his own. The other had pulled through, but was still facing a lot of problems.

Normally, the White Council of wizards kills you for breaking one of the Laws of Magic. Practically the only time they didn’t was when a wizard of the Council offered to take responsibility for the warlock’s future conduct, until they could satisfy the Council that their intentions were good, their ways mended. If they could, fine. If not, the warlock died. So did the wizard who had taken responsibility for him.

I’d been a warlock. Hell, plenty of the Council wondered if I still was a ticking bomb getting ready to blow. When Molly had been bound and hooded and dragged before the Council for trial, I’d stepped in. I had to.

Sometimes I regretted the hell out of that decision. Once you’ve felt the power of dark magic, it could be awfully hard to resist using it again, and Molly’s errors tended to run in that direction. The kid was good at heart, but she was just so damned young. She’d grown up in a strict household; she’d gone insane with freedom the minute she ran away and got out on her own. She was back home now, but she was still trying to find the balance and self-discipline she’d need to survive in the wizarding business.

Teaching her to throw a gout of fire at a target really wasn’t terribly difficult. The hard part was teaching her why to do it, why not to do it, and when she should or should not do it. Molly saw magic as the best solution to any given problem. It wasn’t, and she had to learn that.

To that end, I’d made her the bracelet.

She stared at it for a long minute, and one of the beads slid up the string and stopped when it touched her finger. A moment later, the second bead joined the first. The third quivered for several seconds before it moved. The fourth took even longer. The fifth bead jumped and twitched for several moments before Molly let out her breath in a snarl, and the others once more succumbed to gravity.

“Four of thirteen,” I noted, as I pulled into a driveway. “Not bad. But you aren’t ready yet.”

She glared at the bracelet and rubbed at her forehead for a moment. “I got six last night.”

“Keep working,” I said. “It’s about focus, stillness, and clarity.”

“What does that mean?” Molly demanded in exasperation.

“That you have more work to do.”

She sighed and got out of the car, glancing up at her family’s home. It was a gorgeous place, white picket fence and everything, somehow preserving a suburban appearance despite the city all around us. “You aren’t explaining it very well.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe you aren’t learning it very well.”

She gave me a glower, and what might have been a hot answer came to her lips—but she shut them and shook her head in irritation. “I’m sorry. For putting up that veil and trying to follow you. No disrespect intended.”

“None taken. I’ve been where you are. I don’t expect you to be perfect all the time, kid.”

She smiled a little. “What happened today…”

“Happened,” I said. “It’s done. Besides, it worked out. I don’t know if I could have read anything at all from that victim, the way you did today.”

She looked hopeful. “Yeah?”

I nodded. “What you found might be a big help. You did good. Thanks.”

She practically glowed. Once or twice, after a compliment, she’d literally glowed, but we’d gotten that under control within a month or two. She gave me a smile that made her look even younger than she was, and then pelted up the front steps and into the house.

That left me there alone with pages and pages of dead women. I wanted to know more about them almost as much as I wanted to shove my manly parts into a radioactive wood chipper.

I sighed. I had to get closer to this, but I could at least do it with a drink in my hand.

So I went to McAnally’s.

Mac’s pub—and make no mistake, it was a pub, not a bar—was one of those few places in Chicago frequented almost entirely by the supernatural scene. It didn’t have a sign outside. I had to walk down a flight of stairs to get to the unmarked front door. Inside, it’s all low ceilings, a crooked bar, and irregularly spaced, hand-carved wooden columns. Mac manages to keep electricity moving through the bar despite all the magical types wandering through—partly because it’s rare for anything but a full-blown wizard, like me, to cause the inevitable failure of any nearby technology, and partly because he does a ton of preventive maintenance. He still didn’t bother with electric lights—it costs too much to keep replacing bulbs—but he was able to keep a bunch of ceiling fans whirling and maintain a functional telephone.

On the wall beside the door was a wooden sign that stated, simply, ACCORDED NEUTRAL GROUND. That meant that Mac had declared the place a nonpartisan location, according to the terms set up by the Unseelie Accords—sort of the Geneva Convention of the supernatural world. It meant that any member of the signatory nations was free to enter peaceably, and remain unmolested by any other member. The neutral ground had to be respected by all parties, who were obligated to take outside any fight that might begin and respect the pub’s neutral status. Oaths and the rights and obligations of hospitality were very nearly a force of nature in the supernatural world. It meant that, in Chicago, there was always a place to set up a meeting with a reasonable expectation of a civilized outcome.

All the same, it also meant that you might find yourself in bad company when you went to Mac’s place.

I always sit with my back to a smoke-stained wall.

It was late afternoon and the place was busier than it should have been. Of the thirteen tables, only two were open, and I took the one farther away from the rest of the room, tossing the papers and my coat on it.

I went to the bar, suppressing an instinct to duck every time I walked under one of the too-low-for-towering-wizards ceiling fans. I nodded to Mac. He’s a spare man, a little taller than average, his head shaved bald. He could be anywhere between thirty and fifty. He wore jeans, a white shirt, and a white apron, and despite the fact that his wood-fueled grill was up and running, there wasn’t a spot or stain anywhere on his clothes. “Mac,” I said, “beer me.”

Mac slid over a dark brown bottle of his home brew. I opened it, chugged it, and passed him a twenty with the empty. “Keep ’em coming.”

Mac let out a grunt of surprise, and his eyebrows went up.

“Don’t ask,” I told him.

He folded his arms and nodded. “Keys.”

I glared at him for a second, but I was halfhearted about it. I tossed the keys to the Blue Beetle onto the bar.

Mac gave me another beer, and I went to the table, drinking on the way. By the time I’d circled the carved column shaped like one enormous, ugly giant, except for the carved figures of faerie knights attacking its ankles, and sat down at my table, the beer was mostly gone.

I don’t usually go through them like that. I should have been more cautious, but I really, really didn’t want to dig into that material sober. I figured that if my brain was mushy enough, maybe all the bad I was about to drag through it wouldn’t leave as deep an impression.

I settled down and read through the information Butters had given me on the dead women, pausing every so often for more beer. I read the words, but there was an odd sense of blankness inside. I read them, I understood them, but they somehow didn’t seem relevant, vanishing like pebbles dropped in a well—there was a little ripple, then nothing.

I thought I recognized two of the victims, though not by name. I’d probably seen them around, maybe even there at McAnally’s. I didn’t recognize the others, but it wasn’t like I knew every face in the community.

I stopped reading for a few minutes, and drank some more. I didn’t want to keep going. I didn’t want to see any of this. I didn’t want to get involved. I’d seen more than enough of people being hurt and killed. I’d seen too many dead women. I wanted to burn the papers, walk out the door, and just keep walking.

Instead, I went back to reading.

By the time I finished, I had found no obvious connection between the victims, I was emptying my fifth bottle, and it was dark outside. The bar had grown quiet.

I looked up to see that, except for Mac, I had the place entirely to myself.

That was odd. Mac’s place isn’t usually packed, but it’s busy in the evening. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it empty around dinnertime.

Mac came over to me with another bottle, putting it down just as I finished the previous. He glanced from the fresh bottle to all the empties, standing in a row.

“I use up my twenty?” I asked him.

He nodded.

I grunted, got out my wallet, and put another twenty on the table.

He frowned at it, then at me.

“I know,” I said. “I don’t usually drink this much.”

He snorted quietly. Mac isn’t big on verbalization.

I waved a hand vaguely at the papers. “Hate seeing women get hurt. I should hate seeing anyone get hurt, but it’s worse with women. Or kids.” I glared down at the paperwork, then around at the now-empty bar, adding two and two. “Get another,” I told him. “Sit down.”

Mac’s eyebrows went up. Then he went over to the bar, got himself a beer, and came over to sit down with me. He casually opened both bottles with a deft twist of his hand and no bottle opener. Mac is a professional. He pushed my bottle over to me and lifted his own.

I nodded at him. We clinked bottles and drank.

“So,” I said quietly. “What gives?”

Mac set his beer down and surveyed the empty pub.

“I know,” I said. “Where’d everyone go?”

“Away,” Mac said.

If Scrooge had hoarded words instead of money, Mac would have made him look like Monty Hall. Mac didn’t use rhetorical phrasing.

“Away,” I said. “Away from me, you mean.”

He nodded.

“They’re scared. Why?”

“Grey cloak.”

I exhaled slowly. I’d been a Warden of the White Council for nearly two years. Wardens were the armed forces of the White Council, men and women who were accustomed to violence and conflict. Normally, Wardens existed to police wizards, to make sure that they didn’t use their power against the rest of humanity in violation of the Laws of Magic. Things weren’t normal. For years, the Council had been engaged in a war against the Vampire Courts. Most of the Wardens had been killed in battle, and they’d gotten desperate for new wizards to take up the grey cloak of their office—desperate enough to ask me to join them, despite my checkered past.

Plenty of people in the world had talent of one kind or another. Very few had the kind of power and talent it took to be recognized as a member of the White Council. For the others, contact with the Council’s Wardens was mostly limited to one of them showing up to deliver a warning about any potential abuse of magic.

But when anyone broke the Laws of Magic, the Wardens appeared to apprehend, try, convict, and probably execute. Wardens were scary, even to someone like me, who is more or less in their weight class. For the minor talents, like most of the crowd at Mac’s place, the Wardens occupied a position somewhere between avenging angel and bogeyman.

Apparently, they had begun to see me in the latter role, which was going to be a problem in my hunt for the Exodus-quoting killer. The victims were probably members of the local supernatural community, but a lot of Wiccans can be ticklish about talking about their beliefs, or identifying their fellow believers as members of the faith. Part of it is a basic respect for personal freedom and privacy endemic to the faith. Part of it is a kind of theologically hereditary caution.

Both of those factors were going to make it hard to get anyone to talk to me. If people thought the Wardens were a part of the killings, they’d shut me out faster than you can say, “Burn the witch.”

“There’s no reason for anyone to be afraid,” I said. “These women are officially suicides. I mean, if Murphy’s instincts hadn’t picked up on something, we wouldn’t even know there was a killer loose.”

Mac sipped his beer in silence.

“Unless,” I said, “some other factor I don’t know about made it obvious to everyone in our crowd that the victims weren’t suicides.”

Mac put his beer down.

“They’re linked,” I said quietly. “The victims. There’s a connection between them that the police files don’t show. The magic folks know it. That’s why they’re scared.”

Mac frowned at the beer. Then he looked over at the NEUTRAL GROUND sign by the door.

“I know,” I said quietly. “You don’t want to get involved. But someone out there is killing women. They’re leaving calling cards for me, specifically. Whoever is doing it is going to keep on doing it until I find them.”

Mac did not move.

I kept the quiet pressure on him. “A lot of people come in here. They eat and drink. And they talk. You stand over there running the grill and pouring drinks and you might as well be invisible. But I know you hear a lot more than most people realize, Mac. I figure you know something that might help me.”

He gazed at me for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he asked, “Is it you?”

I almost barked out a bit of laughter, until I realized that he was serious.

It took me a minute to get my head around that one. Since I had gone into business in Chicago, I had spent a lot of time trying to help the supernatural community. I did exorcisms here and there, helped with ghost problems, taught young and out-of-control talents enough discipline to restrain themselves. I’ve done other things too, smaller, not necessarily directly involving magic: giving advice on how to handle problems dealing with friendly but inhuman beings that mingled with magically aware mortals, helping parents to deal with the fact that their kid was suddenly able to set the cat on fire, and otherwise trying to help.

Despite all of that, the same folks I’d tried to help were afraid of me.

Even Mac.

I guess I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t as accessible as I used to be, what with the war and my new Warden duties, and teaching my apprentice. Practically the only times I had appeared in public, things had gotten messy, and people had died. I sometimes forgot how scary the supernatural could be. I lived in a state of relative power. I’m not under any illusions that I can take out anything that messes with me, but I am not a pansy, and with the right planning and leverage I can be a threat to even awfully powerful beings.

Those folks couldn’t. They were the have-nots of the supernatural world, and they didn’t have the options that my power gave me. And after all, I was supposed to be the one protecting folks from supernatural threats. If they truly believed that the women had been murdered, then either I was cruel enough to do the deed, or uncaring and/or incompetent enough to allow it to happen. Either way, it didn’t paint a flattering picture of me. Add in the growing sense of fear, and it was understandable.

But it still hurt.

“It’s not me,” I said quietly.

Mac studied my features for a moment, then nodded. “Needed to hear it.”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know who is behind it. But I give you my word that when I catch up to whoever is doing this, I’m going to take him down, regardless of who he is or who he works for. My word, Mac.”

He took another sip of beer, stalling.

I reached out and started flipping through the pages, one by one, reviewing the horrible photos. Mac saw them too. He let out a breath barely tinged with a throaty growl, and leaned back in his chair, away from the images.

I put my last beer on the table and spread my hands. “Help me, Mac. Please.”

Mac stared down at his bottle for a moment. Then he looked at his sign again. Then he reached out and took the top sheet of paper from the stack. He flipped it over, produced a pencil from his apron pocket, and wrote on the page before passing it back to me.

It read: Anna Ash, Ordo Lebes, four P.M. tomorrow

“What’s this?” I asked him.

He picked up his bottle and rose. “A start.”

Chapter Five

“Ordo Lebes,” Murphy said. She took the lid off her coffee and blew some steam away from its surface. “My Latin is a little rusty.”

“That’s because you aren’t a master of arcane lore, like me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right.”

“Lebes means a large cooking pot,” I told her. I tried to adjust the passenger seat of her car, but couldn’t manage to make it comfortable. Saturn coupes were not meant for people my height. “Translates out to the Order of the Large Cooking Pot.”

“Or maybe Order of the Cauldron?” Murphy suggested. “Since it sounds so much less silly and has a more witchy connotation and all?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose.”

Murphy snorted at me. “Master of the arcane lore.”

“I learned Latin through a correspondence course, okay? We should have taken my car.”

“The interior of a Volkswagen Beetle is smaller than this one.”

“But I know where it all is,” I said, trying to untangle my right foot from where it had gotten wedged by the car’s frame.

“Do all wizards whine this much?” Murphy sipped her coffee. “You just want to be the one driving. I think you have control issues.”

“Control issues?”

“Control issues,” she said.

“You’re the one who wouldn’t find the woman’s address unless I let you drive, and I’m the one with issues?”

“With me, it’s less an issue and more a fact of life,” she said calmly. “Besides, that clown car of yours doesn’t exactly blend in, which is what you’re supposed to do on a stakeout.”

I glowered out the front window of her car and looked up at the apartment building where one Anna Ash was presumably hosting a meeting of the Order of the Large Cooking Po—er, uh, Cauldron. Murphy had found a spot on the street, which made me wonder if she didn’t have some kind of magical talent after all. Only some kind of precognitive ESP could have gotten us a parking space on the street, in the shadow of a building, with both of us in sight of the apartment building’s entrance.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Five minutes ago it was three o’clock,” Murphy said. “I can’t be certain, but I theorize that it must now be about three-oh-five.”

I folded my arms. “I don’t usually do stakeouts.”

“I thought it might be a nice change of pace for you. All that knocking down of doors and burning down of buildings must get tiring.”

“I don’t always knock down doors,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a wall.”

“But this way, we get a chance to see who’s going into the building. We might learn something.”

I let out a suspicious grunt. “Learn something, huh?”

“It’ll only hurt for a minute.” Murphy sipped at her coffee and nodded at a woman walking toward the apartment building. She wore a simple sundress with a man’s white cotton button-down shirt worn open atop it. She was in her late thirties, maybe, with pepper-and-salt hair worn in a bun. She wore sandals and sunglasses. “How about her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Recognize her. Seen her at Bock Ordered Books a few times.”

The woman entered the building at a brisk, purposeful pace.

Murphy and I went back to waiting. Over the next forty-five minutes, four other women arrived. I recognized two of them.

Murphy checked her watch—a pocket watch with actual clockwork and not a microchip or battery to be found. “Almost four,” she said. “Half a dozen at most?”

“Looks that way,” I agreed.

“And you didn’t see any obvious bad guys.”

“The wacky thing about those bad guys is that you can’t count on them to be obvious. They forget to wax their mustaches and goatees, leave their horns at home, send their black hats to the dry cleaner’s. They’re funny like that.”

Murphy gave me a direct and less-than-amused look. “Should we go on up?”

“Give it another five minutes. No force in the known universe can make a gang of folks naming their organization in Latin do much of anything on time. If they’re all there by four, we’ll know there’s some kind of black magic involved.”

Murphy snorted, and we waited for a few minutes more. “So,” she said, filling time. “How’s the war going?” She paused for a beat, and said, “God, what a question.”

“Slowly,” I said. “Since our little visit to Arctis Tor, and the beating the vampires took afterward, things have been pretty quiet. I went out to New Mexico this spring.”

“Why?”

“Helping Luccio train baby Wardens,” I said. “You’ve got to get way out away from civilization when you’re teaching group fire magic. So we spent about two days turning thirty acres of sand and scrub into glass. Then a couple of the Red Court’s ghouls showed up and killed two kids.”

Murphy turned her blue eyes to me, waiting.

I felt my jaw tighten, thinking back on it. It wouldn’t do those two kids any good, going over it again. So I pretended I didn’t realize she was giving me a chance to talk about it. “There haven’t been any more big actions, though. Just small-time stuff. The Merlin’s trying to get the vamps to the table to negotiate a peace.”

“Doesn’t sound like you think much of the idea,” Murphy noted.

“The Red King is still in power,” I said. “The war was his idea to begin with. If he goes for a treaty now, it’s only going to be so that the vamps can lick their wounds, get their numbers up again, and come back for the sequel.”

“Kill them all?” she asked. “Let God sort them out?”

“I don’t care if anyone sorts them or not. I’m tired of seeing people they’ve destroyed.” My teeth ground together. I hadn’t realized I was clenching my jaws so hard.

I tried to force myself to relax. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. Instead of feeling unclenched and less angry, I only felt tired. “Ah, Murph. Too many people get hurt. Sometimes I feel like no matter how fast I react, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“You’re talking about these killings, now,” she said.

“Them, too.”

“It isn’t your fault, Harry,” Murphy said in a steady voice. “Once you’ve done everything you can, you can’t do any more. There’s no sense in beating yourself up over it.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what the counselors keep telling me,” she said. She regarded me thoughtfully. “It’s easier to see their point when I’m looking at you, though.”

“Thing is, Murph,” I said. “What if I could do more?”

“Like what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Something to deter these murdering animals.”

Something like New Mexico. Jesus. I didn’t want to think about that. I rubbed at the fresh headache sprouting between my eyebrows.

Murphy gave me a minute more to decide if I wanted to talk about it. When I stayed quiet, she asked, “Time to go up?”

Her voice had lightened, nudging us away from the topic. I nodded and tried to ease up on my tone. “Yeah. If my leg bones haven’t been deformed by this torture chamber you drive.” I opened the door and hauled myself out, stretching.

I hadn’t yet shut the door when I saw the woman walking down the street toward the apartment building. She was tall, lean, her hair cut shorter than mine. She wore no makeup, none at all, and time had not been kind to her stark features.

She’d looked a lot different the last time I’d seen her.

Back then, Helen Beckitt had been naked, and holding a dainty little .22-caliber revolver, and she’d shot me in the hip. She and her husband had gone down when a fledgling black sorcerer named Victor Sells had been introduced to his own killer creations, courtesy of Harry Dresden. They’d been on the ground floor of Victor’s nascent magic-assisted criminal empire. They’d been prosecuted for the criminal part, too, and gone to a federal penitentiary on drug charges.

I froze in place, going completely still, even though I was standing in plain sight. A sudden movement would only have served to draw her attention to me. She went on by, her steps brisk, her expression empty of any emotion or spark of life, just as I remembered. I watched her go into Anna Ash’s building.

Murphy, taking her cue from me, had frozen in place as well. She caught a glimpse of Helen Beckitt’s back as she went inside.

“Harry?” she asked. “What was that?”

“The plot,” I said, “thickening.”

Chapter Six

“I don’t like this,” Murphy said. “Helen Beckitt has got plenty of reasons to dislike you.”

I snorted. “Who doesn’t?”

“I’m serious, Harry.” The elevator doors closed and we started up. The building was old, and the elevator wasn’t the fastest in the world. Murphy shook her head. “If what you said about people beginning to fear you is true, then there’s got to be a reason for it. Maybe someone is telling stories.”

“And you like Helen for that?”

“She already shot you, and that didn’t work. Maybe she figured it was time to get nasty.”

“Sticks and stones and small-caliber bullets may break my bones,” I said. “Words will never, et cetera.”

“It’s awfully coincidental to find her here. She’s a con, Harry, and she wound up in jail because of you. I can’t imagine that she’s making nice with the local magic community for the camaraderie.”

“I didn’t think cops knew about big words like ‘camaraderie,’ Murph. Are you sure you’re a real policeperson?”

She gave me an exasperated glance. “Do you ever stop joking around?”

“I mutter off-color limericks in my sleep.”

“Just promise me that you’ll watch your back,” Murphy said.

“There once was a girl from Nantucket,” I said. “Her mouth was as big as a bucket.”

Murphy flipped both her hands palms up in a gesture of frustrated surrender. “Dammit, Dresden.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You seem worried about me.”

“There are women up there,” she said. “You don’t always think very clearly where women are concerned.”

“So you think I should watch my back.”

“Yes.”

I turned to her and looked down at her and said, more quietly, “Golly, Murph. Why did you think I wanted you along?”

She looked up and smiled at me, the corners of her eyes wrinkling, though her voice remained tart. “I figured you wanted someone along who could notice things more subtle than a flashing neon sign.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be flashing.”

The elevator doors opened and I took the lead down the hall to Anna Ash’s apartment—and stepped into a tingling curtain of delicate energy four or five feet shy of the door. I drew up sharply, and Murphy had to put a hand against my back to keep from bumping into me.

“What is it?” she asked.

I held up my left hand. Though my maimed hand was still mostly numb to conventional stimuli, it had never had any trouble sensing the subtle patterns of organized magical energy. I spread out my fingers as much as I could, trying to touch the largest possible area as I closed my eyes and focused on my wizard’s senses.

“It’s a ward,” I said quietly.

“Like on your apartment?” she asked.

“It’s not as strong,” I said, waving my hand slowly over it. “And it’s a little cruder. I’ve got bricks and razor wire. This is more like aluminum siding and chicken wire. But it has a decent kick. Fire, I think.” I squinted up and down the hall. “Huh. I don’t think there’s enough there to kill outright, but it would hurt like hell.”

“And a fire would set off the building’s alarms,” Murphy added. “Make people start running out. Summon the authorities.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Discouraging your average prowler, supernatural or not. It’s not meant to kill.” I stepped back and nodded to Murphy. “Go ahead and knock.”

She gave me an arch look. “That’s a joke, right?”

“If this ward isn’t done right, it could react with my aura and go off.”

“Can’t you just take it apart?”

“Whoever did this was worried enough to invest a lot of time and effort to make this home safer,” I said. “Kinda rude to tear it up.”

Murphy tilted her head for a second, and then she got it. “And you’ll scare them if you just walk through it like it wasn’t there.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “They’re frightened, Murph. I’ve got to be gentle, or they won’t give me anything that can help them.”

Murphy nodded and knocked on the door.

She rapped three times, and the doorknob was already turning on the third rap.

A small, prettily plump woman opened the door. She was even shorter than Murphy, mid-forties maybe, with blond hair and rosy, cherubic cheeks that looked used to smiling. She wore a lavender dress and carried a small dog, maybe a Yorkshire terrier, in her arms. She smiled at Murphy and said, “Of course, Sergeant Murphy, I know who you are.”

Maybe half a second after the woman started speaking, Murphy said, “Hello, my name is Sergeant Murphy, and I’m a detective with the CPD.”

Murphy blinked for a second and fell silent.

“Oh,” the woman said. “I’m sorry; I forget sometimes.” She made an airy little gesture with one hand. “Such a scatterbrain.”

I started to introduce myself, but before I got my mouth open, the little woman said, “Of course, we all know who you are, Mister Dresden.” She put her fingers to her mouth. They were shaking a little. “Oh. I forgot again. Excuse me. I’m Abby.”

“Pleased to meet you, Abby,” I said quietly, and extended my hand, relaxed, palm down, to the little Yorkie. The dog sniffed at my hand, quivering with eagerness as he did, and his tail started wagging. “Heya, little dog.”

“Toto,” Abby said, and before I could respond said, “Exactly, a classic. If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” She nodded to me and said, “Excuse me; I’ll let our host speak to you. I was just closest to the door.” She shut the door on us.

“Certainly,” I said to the door.

Murphy turned to me. “Weird.”

I shrugged. “At least the dog liked me.”

“She knew what we were going to say before we said it, Harry.”

“I noticed that.”

“Is she telepathic or something?”

I shook my head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. She doesn’t exactly hide what she’s doing, and if she was poking around in people’s heads, the Council would have done something a long time ago.”

“Then how did she know what we were about to say?”

“My guess is that she’s prescient,” I said. “She can see the future. Probably only a second or two, and she probably doesn’t have a lot of voluntary control over it.”

Murphy made a thoughtful noise. “Could be handy.”

“In some ways,” I said. “But the future isn’t written in stone.”

Murphy frowned. “Like, what if I’d decided to tell her my name was Karrin Murphy instead of Sergeant, at the last second?”

“Yeah. She’d have been wrong. People like her can sense a…sort of a cloud of possible futures. We were in a fairly predictable situation here even without bringing any magical talents into it, basic social interaction, so it looked like she saw exactly what was coming. But she didn’t. She got to judge what was most probable, and it wasn’t hard to guess correctly in this particular instance.”

“That’s why she seemed so distracted,” Murphy said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. She was keeping track of what was happening, what was likely to happen, deciding what wasn’t likely to happen, all in a window of a few seconds.” I shook my head. “It’s a lot worse if they can see any farther than a second or two.”

Murphy frowned. “Why?”

“Because the farther you can see, the more possibilities exist,” I said. “Think of a chess game. A beginning player is doing well if he can see four or five moves into the game. Ten moves in holds an exponentially greater number of possible configurations the board could assume. Master players can sometimes see even further than that—and when you start dealing with computers, the numbers are even bigger. It’s difficult to even imagine the scope of it.”

“And that’s in a closed, simple environment,” Murphy said, nodding. “The chess game. There are far more possibilities in the real world.”

“The biggest game.” I shook my head. “It’s a dangerous talent to have. It can leave you subject to instabilities of one kind or another as side effects. Doctors almost always diagnose folks like Abby with epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, or one of a number of personality disorders. I got five bucks that says that medical bracelet on her wrist says she’s epileptic—and that the dog can sense seizures coming and warn her.”

“I didn’t see the bracelet,” Murphy admitted. “No bet.”

While we stood there talking quietly for maybe five minutes, a discussion took place inside the apartment. Low voices came through the door in tense, muffled tones that eventually cut off when a single voice, louder than the rest, overrode the others. A moment later, the door opened.

The first woman we’d seen enter the apartment faced me. She had a dark complexion, dark eyes, short, dark straight hair that made me think she might have had some Native Americans in the family a generation or three back. She was maybe five foot four, late thirties. She had a serious kind of face, with faint, pensive lines between her brows, and from the way she stood, blocking the doorway with solidly planted feet, I got the impression that she could be a bulldog when necessary.

“No one here has broken any of the Laws, Warden,” she said in a quiet, firm voice.

“Gosh, that’s a relief,” I said. “Anna Ash?”

She narrowed her eyes and nodded.

“I’m Harry Dresden,” I said.

She pursed her lips and gave me a speculative look. “Are you kidding? I know who you are.”

“I don’t make it a habit to assume that everyone I meet knows who I am,” I said, implying apology in my tone. “This is Karrin Murphy, Chicago PD.”

Anna nodded to Murphy and asked, in a neutral, polite tone, “May I see your identification, Ms. Murphy?”

Murphy already had her badge on its leather backing in hand, and she passed it to Anna. Her photo identification was on the reverse side of the badge, under a transparent plastic cover.

Anna looked at the badge and the photo, and compared it to Murphy. She passed it back almost reluctantly, and then turned to me. “What do you want?”

“To talk,” I said.

“About what?”

“The Ordo Lebes,” I said. “And what’s happened to several practitioners lately.”

Her voice remained polite on the surface, but I could hear bitter undertones. “I’m sure you know much more about it than us.”

“Not especially,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to correct.”

She shook her head, suspicion written plainly on her face. “I’m not an idiot. The Wardens keep track of everything. Everyone knows that.”

I sighed. “Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell–shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning. I was hoping you could just talk to me for a little while, the way you would with a human being.”

She eyed me a bit warily. Lots of people react to my jokes like that. “Why should I?”

“Because I want to help you.”

“Of course you’d say that,” she said. “How do I know you mean it?”

“Ms. Ash,” Murphy put in quietly, “he’s on the level. We’re here to help, if we can.”

Anna chewed on her lip for a minute, looking back and forth between us and then glancing at the room behind her. Finally, she faced me and said, “Appearances can be deceiving. I have no way of knowing if you are who—and what—you say you are. I prefer to err on the side of caution.”

“Never hurts to be cautious,” I agreed. “But you’re edging toward paranoid, Ms. Ash.”

She began to shut the door. “This is my home. And I’m not inviting you inside.”

“Groovy,” I said, and stepped over the threshold and into the apartment, nudging her gently aside before she could close the door.

As I did, I felt the pressure of the threshold, an aura of protective magical energy that surrounds any home. The threshold put up a faintly detectable resistance as my own aura of power met it—and could not cross it. If Anna, the home’s owner, had invited me in, the threshold would have parted like a curtain. She hadn’t, and as a result, if I wanted to come inside, I’d have to leave much of my power at the door. If I had to work any forces while I was in there, I’d be crippled practically to the point of total impotence.

I turned to see Anna staring at me in blank surprise. She was aware of what I had just done.

“There,” I told her. “If I was of the spirit world, I couldn’t cross your threshold. If I had planned on hurting someone in here, would I have disarmed myself? Stars and stones, would I have shown up with a cop to witness me doing it?”

Murphy took her cue from me, and entered the same way.

“I…” Anna said, at a loss. “How…how did you know the ward wouldn’t go off in your face?”

“Judgment call,” I told her. “You’re a cautious person, and there are kids in this building. I don’t think you’d have slapped up something that went boom whenever anyone stepped through the doorway.”

She took a deep breath and then nodded. “You wouldn’t have liked what happened if you’d tried to force the door, though.”

“I believe you,” I told her. And I did. “Ms. Ash, I’m not here to threaten or harm anyone. I can’t make you talk to me. If you want me to go, right now, I’ll go,” I promised her. “But for your own safety, please let me talk to you first. A few minutes. That’s all I ask.”

“Anna?” came Abby’s voice. “I think you should hear them out.”

“Yes,” said another woman’s voice, quiet and low. “I agree. And I know something of him. If he gives you his word, he means it.”

Thinking on it, I hadn’t ever really heard Helen Beckitt’s voice before, unless you counted moans. But its quiet solidity and lack of inflection went perfectly with her quasi-lifeless eyes.

I traded an uneasy glance with Murphy, then looked back to Anna.

“Ms. Ash?” I asked her.

“Give me your word. Swear it on your power.”

That’s serious, at least among wizards in my league. Promises have power. One doesn’t swear by one’s magical talent and break the oath lightly—to do so would be to reduce one’s own strength in the Art. I didn’t hesitate to answer. “I swear to you, upon my power, to abide as a guest under your hospitality, to bring no harm to you or yours, nor to deny my aid if they would suffer thereby.”

She let out a short, quick breath and nodded. “Very well. I promise to behave as a host, with all the obligations that apply. And call me Anna, please.” She pronounced her name with the Old World emphasis: Ah-nah. She beckoned with one hand and led us into the apartment. “I trust you will not take it amiss if I do not make a round of introductions.”

Understandable. A full name, given from one’s own lips, could provide a wizard or talented sorcerer with a channel, a reference point that could be used to target any number of harmful, even lethal spells, much like fresh blood, nail clippings, or locks of hair could be used for the same. It was all but impossible to give away your full name accidentally in a conversation, but it had happened, and if someone in the know thought a wizard might be pointing a spell their way, they got real careful, real fast, when it came to speaking their own name.

“No problem,” I told her.

Anna’s apartment was nicer than most, and evidently had received almost a complete refurbishing in the past year or three. She had windows with a reasonably good view, and her furnishings were predominantly of wood, and of excellent quality.

Five women sat around the living area. Abby sat in a wooden rocking chair, holding her bright-eyed little Yorkie in her lap. Helen Beckitt stood by a window, staring listlessly out at the city. Two other women sat on a sofa, the third on a love seat perpendicular to them.

“Should I take it that you know who I am?” I asked them.

“They know,” Anna said quietly.

I nodded. “All right. Here’s what I know. Something has killed as many as five female practitioners. Some of the deaths have looked like suicides. Evidence suggests that they weren’t.” I took a deep breath. “And I’ve found messages left for me or someone like me with at least two of the bodies. Things the cops couldn’t have found. I think we’re looking at a serial killer, and I think that your order might represent a pool of victims that fit his—”

“Or her,” Murphy put in, not quite staring at Beckitt.

Beckitt’s mouth curled into a bitter little smile, though she did not otherwise move.

“Or her,” I allowed, “profile.”

“Is he serious?” asked one of the women I didn’t know. She was older than the others, early fifties. Despite the day’s warmth, she wore a thin turtleneck sweater of light green and a dark grey cardigan. Her hair, caught back in a severe bun, had once been deep, coppery red, though now it was sown liberally with steely grey. She wore no makeup, square, silver-rimmed spectacles over muddy brown-green eyes, and her eyebrows had grown out rather thicker than most women chose to allow.

“Very serious,” I replied. “Is there something I can call you? It doesn’t seem polite to name you Turtleneck without checking first.”

She stiffened slightly, keeping her eyes away from mine, and said, “Priscilla.”

“Priscilla. I’m pretty much floundering around here. I don’t know what’s going on, and that’s why I came to talk to you.”

“Then how did you know of the Ordo?” she demanded.

“In real life, I’m a private investigator,” I told her. “I investigate stuff.”

“He’s lying,” Priscilla said, looking back at Anna. “He has to be. You know what we’ve seen.”

Anna looked from Priscilla to me, and then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“What have you seen?” I asked Anna.

Anna looked around the room at the others for a moment, but none of them made any objections, and she turned back to me. “You’re correct. Several members of our order have died. What you might not know is that there are others who have vanished.” She took a deep breath. “Not only in the Ordo, but in the community as well. More than twenty people are unaccounted for since the end of last month.”

I let out a low whistle. That was serious. Don’t get me wrong; people vanish all the time—most of them because they want to do it. But the people in our circles were generally a lot closer-knit than most folks, in part because they were aware, to one degree or another, of the existence of supernatural predators who could and would take them, given the chance. It’s a herd instinct, plain and simple—and it works.

If twenty people had gone missing, odds were good that something was on the prowl. If the killer had taken them, I had a major problem on my hands, which admittedly wasn’t exactly a novel experience.

“You say people have seen something? What?”

“For…” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “For all three victims from within the order whose bodies have been found, they were last seen alive in the company of a tall man in a grey cloak.”

I blinked. “And you thought it was me?”

“I wasn’t close enough to tell,” Priscilla said. “It was after dark, and she was on the street outside my apartment. I saw them through a window.”

She didn’t quite manage to hide the fact that she’d almost said you instead of them.

“I was at Bock’s,” Abby added, her tone serious, her eyes fixed in the middle distance. “Late. I saw the man walk by with her outside.”

“I didn’t see that,” Helen Beckitt said. The words were flat and certain. “Sally left the bar with a rather lovely dark-haired man with grey eyes and pale skin.”

My stomach twitched. In my peripheral vision, Murphy’s facial expression went carefully blank.

Anna lifted a hand in a gesture beseeching Helen for silence. “At least two more reliable witnesses have reported that the last time they saw some of the folk who had disappeared, they were in the company of the grey-cloaked man. Several others have reported sightings of the beautiful dark-haired man instead.”

I shook my head. “And you thought the guy in the cloak was me?”

“How many tall, grey-cloaked men move in our circles in Chicago, sir?” Priscilla said, her voice frosty.

“You can get grey corduroy for three dollars a yard at a surplus fabric store,” I told her. “Tall men aren’t exactly unheard of in a city of eight million, either.”

Priscilla narrowed her eyes. “Who was it, then?”

Abby tittered, which made Toto wag his tail.

I pursed my lips in a moment of thought. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Murphy.”

Helen Beckitt snorted out a breath through her nose.

“This isn’t a joking matter,” Priscilla snapped.

“Oh. Sorry. Given that I only found out about a grey cloak sighting about two seconds ago, I had assumed the question was facetious.” I turned to face Anna. “It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t a Warden of the Council—or at least, it damned well better not have been a Warden of the Council.”

“And if it was?” Anna asked quietly.

I folded my arms. “I’ll make sure he never hurts anyone. Ever again.”

Murphy stepped forward and said, “Excuse me. You said that three members of the order had died. What were their names, please?”

“Maria,” Anna said, her words spaced with the slow, deliberate beat of a funeral march. “Janine. Pauline.”

I saw where Murphy was going.

“What about Jessica Blanche?” she asked.

Anna frowned for a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve heard the name.”

“So she’s not in the order,” Murphy said. “And she’s not in the, ah, community?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Anna replied. She looked around the room. “Does anyone here know her?”

Silence.

I traded a glance with Murphy. “Some of these things are not like the others.”

“Some of these things are kind of the same,” she responded.

“Somewhere to start, at least,” I said.

Someone’s watch started beeping, and the girl on the couch beside Priscilla sat up suddenly. She was young, maybe even still in her teens, with the rich, smoke-colored skin of regions of eastern India. She had heavy-lidded brown eyes, and wore a bandanna tied over her straight, glossy black hair. She was dressed in a lavender ballet leotard with cream-colored tights covering long legs, and she had the muscled, athletic build of a serious dancer. She wore a man’s watch that looked huge against her fine-boned wrist. She turned it off and then glanced up at Anna, fidgeting. “Ten minutes.”

Anna frowned and nodded at her. She started toward the door, a gracious hostess politely walking us out. “Is there anything else we can do for you, Warden? Ms. Murphy?”

In the investigating business, when someone starts trying to rush you out in order to conceal some kind of information from you, it is what we professionals call a clue. “Gee,” I said brightly. “What happens in ten minutes?”

Anna stopped, her polite smile fading. “We have answered your questions as best we could. You gave me your word, Warden, to abide by my hospitality. Not to abuse it.”

“Answering me may be for your own good,” I replied.

“That’s your opinion,” she said. “In my opinion, it is no business of yours.”

I sighed and nodded acquiescence. I handed her a business card. “There’s my number. In case you change your mind.”

“Thank you,” Anna said politely.

Murphy and I left, and were silent all the way down in the elevator. I scowled up a storm on the way, and brooded. It had never solved any of my problems in the past, but there’s always a first time.

When we walked back out into the sunshine, Murphy said, “You think they know anything else?”

“They know something,” I said. “Or think they do.”

“That was a rhetorical question, Harry.”

“Bite me.” I shook my head. “What’s our next move?”

“Dig into Jessica Blanche’s background,” she replied. “See what we turn up.”

I nodded. “Easier than searching Chicago for guys in big grey cloaks.”

She paused for a moment, and I knew her well enough to know that she was choosing her words carefully. “But maybe not easier than finding pale, beautiful, dark-haired men who may or may not have been the last person seen with a woman who died in the midst of sexual ecstasy.”

For a moment, our only conversation was footsteps.

“It isn’t him,” I said then. “He’s my brother.”

“Sure, yeah,” she agreed.

“I mean, I haven’t talked to him in a while, sure,” I admitted. A moment later I added, “And he’s on his own now. Making really good money doing…something. Though I don’t know what. Because he will never, ever say.”

Murphy nodded. “Yes.”

“And I guess it’s true that he’s awfully well fed these days,” I went on. “And that he won’t tell me how.” We went a few more steps. “And that he thinks of himself as a monster. And that he got sick and tired of trying to be human.”

We crossed the street in silence.

When I got to the other side, I stopped and looked at Murphy. “Shit.”

We both started down the sidewalk to Murphy’s Saturn.

“Harry,” she said quietly. “I think you’re probably right about him. But there are lives at stake. We have to be sure.”

A flash of anger went through me, an instant and instinctive denial that my brother, my only living flesh and blood, could be involved in this mess. Intense, irrational fury, and an equally irrational sense of betrayal at Murphy’s gentle accusation, fed on each other, swelling rapidly. It took me off guard. I had never felt such volatile determination to destroy a threat to my brother outside of life-and-death struggles we’d found ourselves trapped within. The emotions roared through me like molten steel, and I found myself instinctively gathering my will under their searing influence. For just a second I wanted to smash things to powder, starting with anyone who even thought about trying to hurt Thomas—and the strength to do it welled up inside me like steam in a boiler.

I snarled and closed my eyes, forcing control upon myself. This was no life-and-death struggle. It was a sidewalk. There would be no noisy and satisfying release of that anger, but the energy that I had unconsciously gathered had the potential to be dangerous in any case. I reached down to brush the sidewalk with my fingertips, allowing the dangerous buildup of magic to ground itself more or less harmlessly into the earth, and only a trace amount of energy flared out into a disruptive pattern.

It saved our lives.

The instant I released the excess energy into the area around us, a nearby stoplight blew out, Murphy’s cell phone started blaring “Stars and Stripes Forever,” three car alarms went off—

—and Murphy’s Saturn coupe went up in a brilliant ball of fire and an ear-shattering blast of thunder.

Chapter Seven

There was no time to do anything. Even if I’d been crouched, tense, and holding defensive magic ready to go, I wouldn’t have beaten the explosion to the punch. It was instant, and violent, and did not at all care whether I was on my guard or not. Something that felt vaguely like an enormous feather pillow swung by the Incredible Hulk slammed into my chest.

It lifted me up off the ground and dumped me on the sidewalk several feet later. My shoulder clipped a mailbox as I went by it, and then I had a good, steady view of the clear summer sky above me as I lay on my back and ached.

I’d lived, which was always a good start in this kind of situation. It couldn’t have been a very big explosion, then. It had to have been more incendiary than concussive, a big old rolling ball of flame that would have shattered windows and burned things and set things on fire, and pushed a whole lot of air out of the way along with one Harry Dresden, wizard, slightly used.

I sat up and peered at the rolling cloud of black smoke and red flame where Murphy’s Saturn was, which bore out my supposition pretty well. I squinted to one side and saw Murphy sitting slowly back up. She had a short, bleeding cut on her upper lip. She looked pale and shaken.

I couldn’t help it. I started laughing like a drunk.

“Well,” I said. “Under the circumstances, I’m forced to conclude that you were right. I am a control freak and you were one hundred percent right to be the one driving the car. Thank you, Murph.”

She gave me a slow, hard stare, drew in a deep breath, and said, through clenched teeth, “No problem.”

I grinned at her and slumped back down onto my back. “You okay?”

She dabbed at the blood on her lip with one hand. “Think so. You?”

“Clipped my shoulder on a mailbox,” I said. “It hurts a little. Not a lot. Maybe I could take an aspirin. Just one. Not a whole dose or anything.”

She sighed. “My God, you’re a whiner, Dresden.”

We sat there quietly for a minute while sirens began in the distance and came closer.

“Bomb, you think?” Murphy said, in that tone people use when they don’t know what else to say.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was grounding some extra energy out when it went off. It must have hexed up the bomb’s timer or receiver. Set it off early.”

“Unless it was intended as a warning shot,” she said.

I grunted. “Whose bomb, you think?”

“I haven’t annoyed anyone new lately,” Murphy said.

“Neither have I.”

“You’ve annoyed a lot more people than me, in toto.”

“In toto?” I said. “Who talks like that? Besides, car bombs aren’t really within…within the, uh…”

“Idiom?” Murphy asked, with what might have been a very slight British accent.

“Idiom!” I declared in my best John Cleese impersonation. “The idiom of the entities I’ve ticked off. And you’re really turning me on with the Monty Python reference.”

“You’re pathetic, Harry.” Her smile faded. “But a car bomb is well within the idiom of ex-cons,” she said.

“Mrs. Beckitt was inside with us the whole time, remember?”

“And Mr. Beckitt?” Murphy asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Ah. Think he’s out by now?”

“I think we’ve got some things to find out,” she said. “You’d better go.”

“I should?”

“I’m not on the clock, remember?” Murphy said. “It’s my car. Simpler if there’s only one person answering all the questions.”

“Right,” I said, and pushed myself up. “Which end do you want?”

“I’ll take our odd corpse out and the Beckitts,” she said. I offered her a hand up. She took it, which meant more to the two of us than it would to anyone looking on. “And you?”

I sighed. “I’ll talk to my brother.”

“I’m sure he’s not involved,” Murphy said quietly. “But…”

“But he knows the incubus business,” I said, which wasn’t what Murphy had been about to say. It might have drawn an anger response out of me, but rationally speaking, I couldn’t blame her for her suspicion, either. She was a cop. She’d spent her entire adult life dealing with the most treacherous and dishonest portions of the human condition. Speaking logically, she was right to suspect and question until more information presented itself. People’s lives were at stake.

But Thomas was my brother, my blood. Logic and rationality had little to do with it.

The first emergency unit, a patrolling police car, rounded the corner a couple of blocks away. Fire trucks weren’t far behind.

“Time to go,” Murphy said quietly.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” I told her, and walked away.

I took the El back to my neighborhood on high alert, watching for anyone who might be following, lying in wait, or otherwise planning malicious deeds involving me. I didn’t see anyone doing any of those things on the El, or as I walked to my apartment in the basement of an old boardinghouse.

Once there, I walked down a sunken concrete staircase to my front door—one of those nifty all-metal security doors—and with a muttered word and an effort of will, I disarmed the wards that protected my home. Then I used a key to open its conventional locks, and slipped inside.

Mister promptly hurtled into my shins with a shoulder block of greeting. The big grey cat weighed about thirty pounds, and the impact actually rocked me back enough to let my shoulder blades bump against the door. I reached down and gave his ears a quick rub. Mister purred, walking in circles around one of my legs, then sidled away and hopped up onto a bookshelf to resume the important business of napping away a summer afternoon in wait for the cool of evening.

An enormous mound of shaggy grey-and-black fur appeared from the shadows in the little linoleum-floored alcove that passed for my kitchen. It walked over to me, yawning as it came, its tail wagging in relaxed greeting. I hunkered down as my dog sat and thrust his head toward me, and I vigorously scratched his ears and chin and the thick ruff of fur over his neck with both hands. “Mouse. All quiet on the home front, boy?”

His tail wagged some more, jaw dropping open to expose a lethal array of very white teeth, and his tongue lolled out in a doggy grin.

“Oh, I forgot the mail,” I said. “You mind getting it?”

Mouse promptly rose, and I opened the door. He padded out in total silence. Mouse moves lightly for a rhinoceros.

I crossed my floor of mismatched carpets and rugs to slump into the easy chair by the old fireplace. I picked up my phone and dialed Thomas’s number. No answer. I glared at the phone for a minute and, because I wasn’t sure what else to do, I tried it again. No one answered. What were the odds.

I chewed on my lip for a minute and began to worry about my brother.

Mouse returned a moment later—long enough to have gone out to the designated dog-friendly little area in the house’s yard. He had several bits of mail held gently in his mouth, and he dropped them carefully onto the surface of the old wooden coffee table in front of my sofa. Then he went over to the door and leaned a shoulder against it. It hadn’t been installed quite right, and it was a real pain in the ass to open, and once it was open it was a pain in the ass to close. Mouse shoved at the door with a little snort of familiar effort and it swung to. Then he came back over to settle down by me.

“Thanks, boy.” I grabbed the mail, scratched his ears again, and flicked to life several candles on the end table next to the recliner with a muttered spell. “Bills,” I reported to him, going through the mail. “More bills. Junk mail. Another Best Buy catalog, Jesus, those people won’t give up. Larry Fowler’s new lawyer.” I put the unopened envelope against my forehead and closed my eyes. “He’s threatening me with another variation on the same lawsuit.” I opened the letter and skimmed it, then tossed it on the floor. “It’s as if I’m psychic.”

I opened the drawer in the end table, felt about with my fingertips, and withdrew a single silver metallic key, the only one on a ring marked with an oval of blue plastic that sported my business card’s logo: HARRY DRESDEN. WIZARD. PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS. CONSULTING, ADVICE, REASONABLE RATES.

I looked at the key. Thomas had given it to me, in case I should need to show up at his place in an emergency. He had a key to my place, too, even after he’d moved out. There had been a tacit understanding between us. The keys were there in case one or the other of us needed help. They had not been given so that one or the other of us could go snooping uninvited around the other one’s home and life.

(Though I suspected that Thomas had looked in on my place a few times, hoping to figure out how the place managed to get so clean. He’d never caught my housekeeping brownies at work, and he never would. They’re pros. The only drawback to having faerie housekeepers is that you can’t tell people about them. If you do, they’re gone, and no, I don’t know why.)

The faces of the dead women drifted through my thoughts, and I sighed and closed my fingers around the key. “Okay, boy,” I said. “Time to go visit Thomas.”

Mouse rose up expectantly, his tags jingling, his tail thrashing energetically. Mouse liked going for rides in the car. He trotted over to the door, pulled his lead down from where it hung on the doorknob, and brought it over to me.

“Hang on,” I told him. “I need the arsenal.”

I hate it when bad business goes down in summer. I put on my torturously warm leather duster. I figured I could take death from heat prostration to whole new levels given the potential presence of further firebombs. And that could land me a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Maybe even a Darwin Award.

See there? That’s called positive thinking.

I put on my new and improved shield bracelet, too, and slipped three silver rings onto the fingers of my right hand. I snagged my blasting rod, clipped Mouse’s lead on, took up my staff, and tromped on out to the car.

I told Mouse to stay back while I approached the Blue Beetle, my battered, often-repaired, mismatched Volkswagen Bug. I looked all around it, then lay down to check the vehicle’s undercarriage. I looked at the trunk and under the hood next. I even examined it for traces of hostile magic. I didn’t find anything that resembled a bomb or looked dangerous, unless you counted the half-eaten Taco Bell burrito that had somehow gotten tossed into the trunk about six months ago.

I opened the door, whistled for Mouse, and off we went to invade my brother’s privacy.

I hadn’t actually visited Thomas’s place before, and I was a little taken aback when I got there. I had assumed that the street address was to one of the new buildings in Cabrini Green, where urban renewal had been shoved down the throat of the former slum by the powers that be—largely because it bordered on the Gold Coast, the most expensive section of town, and the second-highest-income neighborhood in the world. The neighborhood around the Green had become slowly more tolerable, and the newer apartment buildings that had replaced the old were fairly nice.

But Thomas’s apartment wasn’t in one of those buildings. He was across the street, living in the Gold Coast. When Mouse and I got to the right apartment building, twilight was fading fast and I felt underdressed. The doorman’s shoes were nicer than any I owned.

I opened the outer door with Thomas’s key and marched to the elevators, Mouse walking smartly at heel. The doorman watched me, and I spotted two security cameras between the front door and the elevator. Security would have a pretty good idea who was a resident and who wasn’t—and an extremely tall and gangly man in a black coat with nearly two hundred pounds of dog with him wouldn’t be something they forgot. So I tried to stall them with body language, walking the walk of the impatient and confident in the hopes that it would make the security guys hesitate.

Either it worked or the building’s security people were getting paid too much. No one challenged me, and I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and walked down the hall to Thomas’s apartment.

I unlocked the door, gave it a couple of knocks, and then opened it without waiting. I slipped in with Mouse, and found the light switch beside the door before I closed it.

Thomas’s apartment was…well. Chic. The door opened onto a living room bigger than my entire apartment—which, granted, will never cause anxiety to agoraphobics. The walls were painted a deep crimson, and the carpeting was a rich charcoal grey. The furniture all matched, from the sofas to the chairs to the entertainment centers, all of it done in stainless steel and black, and a little more art deco than I would have preferred. He had a TV too big ever to fit into the Beetle, and a DVD player and surround sound and racks of DVDs and CDs. One of the newer video game systems rested neatly on a shelf, all its wires squared away and organized. Two movie posters decorated the walls: The Wizard of Oz and The Pirates of Penzance, the one with Kevin Kline as the Pirate King.

Well. It was good to see that my brother was doing well for himself. Though I had to wonder what he was doing that pulled down the kind of money this place would require.

The kitchen was like the living room—a lot of the same stainless steel and black in the appliances, though the walls had been painted white, as was the expensive tile floor. Everything was pristine. No dirty dishes, no half-open cupboards, no food stains, no papers lying about. Every single horizontal surface in the place was empty and sanitized. I checked the cupboards. The dishes stood in neat stacks, perfectly fitted to their storage in the cupboard.

None of which made sense. Thomas had a lot of positive qualities, but my brother was a fairly shameless slob. “I get it now. He’s dead,” I said aloud to Mouse. “My brother is dead, and he’s been replaced with some kind of obsessive-compulsive evil clone.”

I checked the fridge. I couldn’t help it. It’s one of those things you do when you’re snooping through someone’s house. It was empty, except for one of those boxes of wine, and about fifty bottles of Thomas’s favorite beer, one of Mac’s microbrewed ales. Mac would have killed Thomas for keeping it cold. Well. He would have scowled in disapproval, anyway. For Mac, that was tantamount to a homicidal reaction in other people.

I checked the freezer. It was packed, wall to wall, with TV meals in neat stacks. There were three different meals, stacked up in alternating order. There was room for maybe nine or ten more, and I presumed the others eaten. Thomas probably went shopping only every couple of months. That was more like him—beer, food cooked by pushing one button on a microwave. No dishes needed, and the drawer nearest the freezer yielded up a container of plastic forks and knives. Eat. Discard. No cooking or cleaning necessary.

I looked around at the rest of the kitchen, then at the fridge and freezer.

Then I went down the little hall that led to two bedrooms and a bath, and snorted in triumph. The bathroom was in total disarray, with toothbrushes and various grooming supplies tossed here and there, apparently at random. A couple of empty beer bottles sat out. The floor was carpeted with discarded clothing. Several half-used rolls of toilet paper sat around, with an empty cardboard tube still on the dispenser.

I checked in the first bedroom. It, too, was more Thomas’s style. There was a king-sized bed with no head or foot, only the metal frame to support it. It had white sheets, several pillows in white cases, and a big, dark blue comforter on top. All of them were disheveled. The closet door stood open, and more clothes lay around on the floor. Two laundry baskets of fresh, neatly folded and ironed clothing (mostly empty) sat on a dresser with three of its drawers slightly open. There was a bookshelf haphazardly saturated with fiction of every description, and a clock radio. A pair of swords, one of them an old U.S. Cavalry saber, the other a more musketeer-looking weapon, were leaned against the wall, where they’d be more or less within reach of anyone in the bed.

I went back to the hall and shook my head at the rest of the apartment. “It’s a disguise,” I told Mouse. “The front of the apartment. He wants it to give a certain impression. He makes sure no one gets to see the rest.”

Mouse tilted his head and looked at me.

“Maybe I should just leave him a note.”

The phone rang, and I about jumped out of my skin. After I made sure I wasn’t having a cardiac episode, I padded back out to the living room, debating whether or not to answer it. I decided not to. It was probably building security calling to check up on the stranger who had walked in with a pet woolly mammoth. If I answered and Thomas wasn’t here, they might get suspicious. More suspicious. If I let them eat answering machine, they’d still be uncertain. I waited.

The answering machine beeped, and my brother’s recorded voice said, “You know the drill.” It beeped again.

A woman’s voice poured out of the answering machine like warm honey. “Thomas,” she said. She had a polyglot of a European accent, and pronounced his name “toe-moss,” accent on the second syllable. “Thomas,” she continued. “It is Alessandra, and I am desperate for you. Please, I need to see you tonight. I know that there are others, that there are so many others, but I can’t stand it anymore, and I must have you.” Her tone lowered, thick with sensuality. “There is no one, no one else who can do for me what you do. Do not disappoint me, I beg you.” She left her number, and her voice made it sound like foreplay. By the time she hung up, I had begun to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic for listening.

I sighed and told Mouse, “I so need to get laid.”

At least now I knew what Thomas had been feeding his Hunger. Alessandra and “so many others” must be supplying him. I felt…ambiguous about that. He could feed the demonic portion of his nature on many different victims, effectively spreading out the damage he inflicted upon them in a bid to avoid fatally overfeeding upon any one of them. Even so, it meant that there were a number of lives who had been tainted by his embrace, women who had become addicted to the sensation of being fed upon—who were now under his influence, subject to his control.

It was power, of a sort, and power tends to corrupt. Wielding such authority over others would provide a great many temptations. And Thomas had been distant of late. Very distant.

I took a deep breath and said, “Don’t get carried away, Harry. He’s your brother. Innocent until proven guilty, right?

“Right,” I replied to myself.

I decided to leave Thomas a note. I didn’t have any paper handy. The stylishly sterile kitchen and living room yielded none—nor did the bedroom. I shook my head, muttering about people who couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag, and checked in the second bedroom.

I flicked on the light, and my heart stopped.

The room looked like the office of Rambo’s accountant. There was a desk and computer against one wall. Tables lined two of the other walls. One of them was dedicated to the neatly organized disassembly of a pair of weapons—submachine guns I didn’t recognize right away. I did, however, recognize the kit for home-converting the weapons from legal semiautomatics to fully illegal automatics. A second table looked like a workbench, with the necessary tools to modify weapons and custom-assemble ammunition. It would not be difficult to create explosive devices, such as pipe bombs, with what he had there, if the heavy storage containers under the table contained, as I suspected, explosive compounds.

A nasty thought went through my mind: They could just as easily be used to create incendiaries.

One wall was covered with corkboard. There were papers tacked up on it. Maps. Photographs.

I walked over to the photos with heavy, reluctant feet.

There were photos of dead women.

I recognized them all.

The victims.

The photos were those Instamatic kind. They were a little grainy, the images lit by the harsh glare of a flashbulb, but they covered many of the same angles as the police photos. There was one difference, though. The police photos had all been neatly indexed, with small placards with large, printed numbers appearing in each shot, accompanied by a meticulous written diagram recording their relative positions and what they showed, locking the scene down for future reference.

Thomas’s photos did not have any such placards.

Which meant that they could only have been taken before the police got there.

Holy shit.

What was my brother thinking? Leaving all of this stuff sitting out here like this? Anyone who came by with an only slightly biased point of view would come to the conclusion that he had been at all of those sites before the police. That he was a killer. I mean, I was his brother, and even I thought that it looked damned peculiar….

“Hell’s bells.” I sighed to Mouse. “Can this day get any worse?”

A heavy, confident hand delivered a short series of knocks to the apartment’s door. “Security,” called a man’s voice. “Here with Chicago police. Open the door, please, sir.”

Chapter Eight

I had only a few seconds to think. If security had called in a cop, they were thinking I might be trouble. If I came off as something suspicious, they’d probably take a look around as a matter of course. If that happened, and they found what was in my brother’s war room, I’d be buying us both more kinds of trouble than I could count.

I needed a lie. A really good, really believable lie. I shut the door to Thomas’s war room and bedroom and stared around the immaculate, stylish, tracklit living room, trying to think of one. I stared at Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, looking for inspiration. Nothing. The Pirate King, with his white shirt manfully open to his waist, didn’t give me any ideas either.

And then it hit me. Thomas had already established the lie. He’d used it before, no less—and it was just his style of camouflage, too. All I had to do was play up to it.

“I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” I told Mouse.

Then I set my coat and staff aside, took a deep breath, flounced to the door, opened it, and demanded, “He sent you, didn’t he? Don’t try to lie to me!”

A patrol cop—God, she looked young—regarded me with a polite, bored expression. “Um, sir?”

“Thomas!” I snarled, pronouncing it the same way as the woman on the answering machine. “He’s not man enough to have come to meet me himself, is he? He sent his bully boys to do it for him!”

The cop let out a long-suffering breath. “Sir, please, let’s stay calm here.” She turned to the building’s security guy, a nervous-looking, balding man in his forties. “Now, according to building security, you aren’t a known resident, but you’ve entered with a key. It’s standard procedure for them to ask a few questions.”

“Questions?” I said. It was hard not to lisp. So hard. But that might have been too much. I settled for saying everything in my Murphy impersonation voice. “Why don’t you start with why he hasn’t called me? Hmm? After giving me his spare key? Ask him why he hasn’t come to visit the baby!” I pointed an accusatory finger at Mouse. “Ask him what excuse he has this time!”

The cop looked as if she had a headache. She blinked at me once, lifted a hand to her mouth, coughed, and stepped aside, gesturing to the security guy.

He blinked a few times. “Sir,” the security man said. “Um, it’s just that Mr. Raith hasn’t actually listed with building security anyone he’s given access to his apartment.”

“He’d better not have!” I said. “I have given him years, years, and I will not be cast aside like last season’s shoes!” I shook my head and told the young cop, in an aside voice, “Never date a beautiful man. It isn’t worth what you have to put up with.”

“Sir,” the security man said. “I’m sorry to, um, intrude. But part of what our residents pay for is security. May I see your key, please?”

“I can’t believe that he never even…” I trailed off into a mutter, got the key out of my coat pocket, and showed it to him.

The security guy took it, squinted at it, and checked a number on its back against a list on his clipboard. “This is one of the resident’s original keys,” he confirmed.

“That’s right. Thomas gave it to me,” I said.

“I see,” the security man said. “Um. Would you mind if I saw some photo ID, sir? I’ll put a copy in our file, so this won’t, um…happen again.”

I was going to kill my brother later. “Of course not, sir,” I assured him, trying to appear mollified and reluctantly willing to be gracious. I got out my wallet and handed him my driver’s license. The cop glanced at it as it went by.

“I’ll be right back,” he told me, and hustled toward the elevator.

“Sorry about this,” the cop told me. “They get paid to be a little paranoid.”

“Not your fault, Officer,” I told her.

She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment. “So, you and the owner are, uh…”

“We’re something.” I sighed. “You can never get the pretty ones to come out and say exactly, can you?”

“Not generally, no,” she said. Her tone of voice stayed steady, her expression mild, but I knew a poker face when I saw one. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here?”

I had to be careful. The young cop wasn’t dumb. She thought she smelled a rat.

I gestured forlornly at the dog. “We were living together in a tiny little place. We got a dog and didn’t know he was going to get so big. Thomas was feeling crowded, so he moved into his own place, and…” I shrugged and tried to look like Murphy did when talking about her exes. “We were supposed to switch off every month, but he always had some excuse. He didn’t want the dog slobbering around his little neat-freak world.” I gestured at the apartment.

The cop looked around and nodded politely. “Nice place.” But she hadn’t been convinced. Not completely. I saw her putting a few thoughts together, formulating more questions.

Mouse pulled it out of the fire for me. He padded over to the door, looked up at the cop.

“Good lord, he’s huge,” the cop said. She leaned slightly away from him.

“Oh, he’s a big softie, isn’t he,” I crooned to him, and ruffled his ears.

Mouse gave her a big doggy grin, sat, and offered her one of his paws.

She laughed and shook. She let Mouse sniff the back of her hand, and then scratched his ears herself.

“You know dogs,” I said.

“I’m in training for one of the K-9 units,” she confirmed.

“He likes you,” I said. “That’s unusual. He’s usually a great big chicken.”

She smiled. “Oh, I think dogs can tell when someone likes them. They’re smarter about that kind of thing than people give them credit for.”

“God knows, that seems to be smarter than I can ever manage.” I sighed. “What kind of dogs do they use at the K-9 units?”

“Oh, it varies a great deal,” she said, and started in on talking about candidates for police dogs. I kept her going with a couple of questions and a lot of interested nodding, and Mouse demonstrated his ability to sit and lie down and roll over. By the time the security guy and his apologetic expression got back, Mouse was sprawled on his back, paws waving languidly in the air, while the cop scratched his tummy and told me a pretty good dog story about her own childhood and an encounter with a prowler.

“Sir,” he said, handing my key and license back and trying not to look like he was carefully not touching me. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but as you are not a resident here, it is standard procedure for visitors to check in with the security personnel at the entrance when entering or leaving the building.”

“This is just typical of him,” I said. “Forgetting something like this. I probably should have called ahead and made sure he’d told you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hate to inconvenience you. But until we do have that written authorization from Mr. Raith that he wishes you to have full access, I need to ask you to leave. I know it’s just paperwork, but I’m afraid there’s no way around it.”

I sighed. “Typical. Just typical. And I understand you’re just doing your job, sir. Let me go to the bathroom and I’ll be right down.”

“Perfectly all right,” he told me. “Officer.”

The cop stood up from Mouse and gave me a lingering look. Then she nodded, and the pair of them headed back down the hall.

I let Mouse back in, then closed the door most of the way and Listened, narrowing the focus of my attention until nothing existed but sound and silence.

“Are you sure?” the cop asked the security guy.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Toe-moss,” he said, emphasizing the pronunciation, “is as queer as a three-dollar bill.”

“He have any other men here?”

“Once or twice,” the man said. “This tall one is new, but he does have one of the original keys.”

“He could have stolen it,” the cop said.

“An NBA-sized gay burglar who works with a dog?” the security guy replied. “We’ll make sure he’s not stealing the fridge when he comes out. If Raith is missing anything, we’ll point him right at this guy. We’ve got him on video, eyewitnesses putting him in the apartment, a copy of his driver’s license, for crying out loud.”

“If they’re in a relationship,” the cop said, “how come this Raith guy never cleared his boyfriend?”

“You know how queers are, the way they sleep around,” the security guy said. “He was just covering his ass.”

“So to speak,” the cop said.

Security guy missed the irony in her tone, and let out a smug chuckle. “Like I said. We’ll watch him.”

“Do that,” the cop said. “I don’t like it, but if you’re sure.”

“I don’t want a jilted queen making a big scene. No one wants that.”

“Heavens, no,” the cop said, her tone flat.

I eased the door shut and said to Mouse, “Thank God for bigotry.”

Mouse tilted his head at me.

“Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them,” I told him. “It’s probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.”

Mouse looked unenlightened and undisturbed by it.

“We’ve only got a couple of minutes if I want them to stay complacent,” I said quietly. I looked around the apartment for a minute. “No note,” I said. “Not necessary now.”

I went back to the war room, turned on the light, and stared at the huge corkboard wall with its maps, notes, pictures, and diagrams. There was no time to make sense of it.

I closed my eyes for a moment, lowered certain mental defenses I’d held in place for a considerable while, and cast a thought into the vaults of my mind: Take a memo.

Then I stepped up to the wall and scanned my eyes over it, not really stopping to take in any information. I caught glimpses of each photo and piece of paper. It took me maybe a minute. Then I turned the lights back out, gathered my things, and left.

I breezed out of the elevators, stopping at the security guy’s desk. He nodded at me and waved me out, and Mouse and I departed the building, secure in our heterosexuality.

Then I went back to my car and headed home to seek counsel from a fallen angel.

Chapter Nine

I picked up some burgers, four for me and four for Mouse, and went home. I got onion rings, too, but Mouse didn’t get any because my class-four hazmat suit was at the cleaners.

Mister, of course, got an onion ring, because he has seniority. He ate some, batted the rest around the kitchen floor for a minute, then mrowled to be let outside for his evening ramble.

By the time I’d eaten it was after ten, and I was entertaining thoughts of putting off more investigation until after a full night’s sleep. Pulling all-nighters was getting to be more difficult than it had been when I was twenty and full of what my old mentor Ebenezar McCoy would term “vinegar.”

Staying awake wasn’t the issue: If anything, it was far easier to ignore fatigue and maintain concentration these days. Recovering from it was a different story. I didn’t bounce back from sleep deprivation quite as quickly as I used to, and a missed night’s sleep tended to make me grouchy for a couple of days while I got caught up. Too, my body was still recovering from way too many injuries suffered in previous cases. If I’d been a normal human being, I’d probably be walking around with a collection of scars, residual pain, and stiff joints, like an NFL lineman at the tail end of an injury-plagued career, or a boxer who had been hit too many times.

But I wasn’t normal. Whatever it is that allows me to use magic also gives me a greatly enhanced life span—and an ability to eventually recover from injuries that would, in a normal person, be permanently disabling. That didn’t really help me much on an immediate, day-to-day basis, but given what my body’s gone through, I’m just as glad that I could get better, with enough work and enough time. Losing a hand is bad for anyone. Living for three or four centuries with one hand would, in the words of my generation, blow goats.

Sleep would be nice. But Thomas might need my help. I’d get plenty of sleep when I was dead.

I glanced at my maimed hand, then picked up my old acoustic guitar and sat down on the sofa. I flicked some candles to life and, concentrating on my left hand, began to practice. Simple scales first, then a few other exercises to warm up, then some quiet play. My hand was nowhere close to one hundred percent, but it was a lot better than it had been, and I had finally drilled enough basics into my fingers to allow me to play a little.

Mouse lifted his head and looked at me. He let out a very quiet sigh. Then he heaved himself to his feet from where he’d been sleeping and padded into my bedroom. He nudged the door shut with his nose.

Everybody’s a critic.

“Okay, Lash,” I said, and kept playing. “Let’s talk.”

“Lash?” said a quiet woman’s voice. “Do I merit an affectionate nickname now?”

One minute there was no one sitting in the recliner facing the sofa. The next, a woman sat there, poof, just like magic. She was tall, six feet or so, and built like an athlete. Generally, when she appeared to me, she appeared as a healthy-looking young woman with girl-next-door good looks, dressed in a white Greco-Roman tunic that fell to midthigh. Plain leather sandals had covered her feet, their thongs wrapping up around her calves. Her hair color had changed occasionally, but the outfit had remained a constant.

“Given the fact that you’re a fallen angel, literally older than time and capable of thought and action I can’t really comprehend, whereas to you I am a mere mortal with a teeny bit more power than most, I thought of it more as a thinly veiled bit of insolence.” I smiled at her. “Lash.”

She tilted her head back and laughed, to all appearances genuinely amused. “From you, it is perhaps not as insulting as it might be from another mortal. And, after all, I am not in fact that being. I am only her shadow, her emissary, a figment of your own perception, and a guest within your mind.”

“Guests get invited,” I said. “You’re more like a vacuum cleaner salesman who managed to talk his way inside for a demonstration and just won’t leave.”

“Touché, my host,” she admitted. “Though I would like to think I have been both more helpful and infinitely more courteous than such an individual.”

“Granted,” I said. “It doesn’t change anything about being unwelcome.”

“Then rid yourself of me. Take up the coin, and I will rejoin the rest of myself, whole again. You will be well rid of me.”

I snorted. “Yeah. Up until Big Sister gets into my head, turns me into her psychotic boy toy, and I wind up a monster like the rest of the Denarians.”

Lasciel, the fallen angel whose full being was currently bound in an old Roman denarius in my basement, held up a mollifying hand. “Have I not given you sufficient space? Have I not done as you asked, remained silent and still? When is the last time I have intruded, the last time we spoke, my host?”

I hit a bad chord, grimaced, and muted it out. Then I started over. “New Mexico. And that wasn’t by choice.”

“Of course it was,” she said. “It is always your choice.”

I shook my head. “I don’t speak ghoul. As far as I know, no one does.”

“None of you have ever lived in ancient Sumeria,” Lasciel said.

I ignored her. “I had to have answers from the ghoul to get those kids back. There was no time for anything else. You were a last resort.”

“And tonight?” she asked. “Am I a last resort tonight?”

The next couple of chords came out hard and loud. “It’s Thomas.”

She folded her hands in her lap and regarded one of the nearby candles. “Ah, yes,” she said, more quietly. “You care for him a great deal.”

“He’s my blood,” I said.

“Allow me to rephrase the observation. You care for him to an irrational degree.” She tilted her head and studied me. “Why?”

I spoke in a slower voice. “He’s my blood.”

“I understand your words, but they don’t mean anything.”

“They wouldn’t,” I said. “Not to you.”

She frowned at that and looked at me, her expression mildly disturbed. “I see.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t. You can’t.”

Her expression became remote and blank, her gaze returning to the candle. “Do not be too sure, my host. I, too, had brothers and sisters. Once upon a time.”

I stared at her for a second. God, she sounded sincere. She isn’t, Harry, I told myself. She’s a liar. She’s running a con on you to convince you to like her, or at least trust her. From there, it would be a short commute to the recruiter’s office of the Legion of Doom.

I reminded myself very firmly that what the fallen angel offered me—knowledge, power, companionship—would come at too high a price. It was foolish of me to keep falling back on her help, even though what she had done for me had undoubtedly saved both my life and that of many others. I reminded myself that too much dependence upon her would be a Very, Very Bad Thing.

But she still looked sad.

I concentrated on my music for a moment. It was hard not to experience the occasional fit of empathy for her. The trick was to make sure that I never forgot her true goal—seduction, corruption, the subversion of my free will. The only way to prevent that was to be sure to guard my decisions and actions with detached reason rather than letting my emotions get the better of me. If that happened, it would be easy to play right into the true Lasciel’s hands.

Hell, it’d probably be fun.

I shook off that thought and lumbered through “Every Breath You Take” by the Police and an acoustic version of “I Will Survive” I’d put together myself. After I finished that, I tried to go through a little piece I’d written that was supposed to sound like classic Spanish guitar while giving me a little exercise therapy on the mostly numb fingers of my left hand. I’d played it a thousand times, and while I had improved, it was still something painful to listen to.

Except this time.

This time, I realized halfway in, I was playing flawlessly. I was playing faster than my usual tempo, throwing in a few licks, vibrato, some nifty transitional phrases—and it sounded good. Like, Santana good.

I finished the song and then looked up at Lasciel.

She was watching me steadily.

“Illusion?” I asked her.

She gave a small shake of her head. “I was merely helping. I…can’t write original music anymore. I haven’t made any music in ages. I just…helped the music you heard in your thoughts get out through your fingers. I circumvented some of the damaged nerves. It was all you, otherwise, my host.”

Which was just about the coolest thing Lasciel’d ever done for me. Don’t get me wrong; the survival-oriented things were super—but this was playing guitar. She had helped me to create something of beauty, and it satisfied an urge in me so deep-set and vital that I had never really realized what it was. Somehow, I knew without a hint of a doubt that I would never be able to play that well on my own. Ever again.

Could evil, true capital-E Evil, do such a thing? Help create something whole and lovely and precious?

Careful, Harry. Careful.

“This isn’t helping either of us,” I said quietly. “Thank you, but I’m learning it myself. I’ll get there on my own.” I set the guitar down on its little stand. “Besides, there’s work to be done.”

She nodded once. “Very well. This is regarding Thomas’s apartment and its contents?”

“Yes,” I said. “Can you show them to me?”

Lasciel lifted a hand, and the wall opposite the fireplace changed.

Technically, it hadn’t actually changed, but Lasciel, who existed only as an entity of thought hanging around in my head, was able to create illusions of startling, even daunting clarity, even if I was the only one who could perceive them. She could sense the physical world through me—and she carried aeons of knowledge and experience. Her memory and eye for detail were almost entirely flawless.

So she created the illusion of the wall of Thomas’s war room and put it over my own wall. It was even lit the same way as in my brother’s apartment, every detail, I knew, entirely faithful to what I had seen earlier that night.

I padded over to the wall and started checking it out more thoroughly. My brother’s handwriting was all but unreadable, which made the notes he’d scribbled of dubious value in terms of actually enlightening me as to what was going on.

“My host—” Lasciel began.

I held up a hand for silence. “Not yet. Let me look at it unprejudiced first. Then you tell me what you think.”

“As you wish.”

I went over the stuff there for an hour or so, frowning. I had to go check a calendar a couple of times. I got out a notebook and scribbled things down as I worked them out.

“All right,” I said quietly, settling back down on the sofa. “Thomas was following several people. The dead women and at least a dozen more, in different parts of the city. He had a running surveillance on them. I think he probably hired a private detective or two to cover some of the observation—keeping tabs on where people were going, figuring out the recurring events in their schedules.” I held up the notebook. “These are the names of the folks he was”—I shrugged—“stalking, I suppose. My guess is that the other people on this list are among the missing folk the ladies of the Ordo Lebes told us about.”

“Think you Thomas preyed upon them?” Lasciel asked.

I started to deny it, instantly and firmly, but stopped.

Reason. Judgment. Rational thought.

“He could have,” I said quietly. “But my instincts say it isn’t him.”

“Why would it not be?” Lasciel asked me. “Upon what do you base your reasoning?”

“Upon Thomas,” I said. “It isn’t him. To engage in wholesale murder and abduction? No way. Maybe he fell off the incubus wagon, sure, but he wouldn’t inflict any more harm than he had to. It isn’t his way.”

“Not his way by choice,” Lasciel said. “Though I feel I must point out that—”

I cut her off, waving a hand. “I know. His sister could have gotten involved. She already ate Lord Raith’s free will. She could have monkeyed around with Thomas’s mind, too. And if not Lara, then there are plenty of others who might have done it. Thomas could be doing these things against his will. Hell, he might not even remember he’s doing them.”

“Or he might be acting of his own volition. He has another point of weakness,” Lasciel said.

“Eh?”

“Lara Raith holds Justine.”

A point I hadn’t yet considered. Justine was my brother’s…well, I don’t know if there’s a word for what she was to him. But he loved her, and she him. It wasn’t their fault that she was slightly insane and he was a life force–devouring creature of the night.

They’d been willing to give up their lives for each other in the midst of a crisis, and the love confirmed by doing so had rendered Justine deadly to my brother, poisonous to him. Love is like that to the White Court, an intolerable agony to them, the way holy water is to other breeds. Someone touched by pure and honest love cannot be fed upon—which had more or less put an end to Thomas’s ability to be near Justine.

It was probably just as well. That last time they’d been together had all but killed Justine. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a wasted, frail, white-haired thing barely capable of stringing sentences together. It had torn my brother apart to see what he had done to her. To my knowledge he hadn’t even tried to be a part of her life again. I couldn’t blame him.

Lara watched over Justine now, though she could not feed upon the girl any more than Thomas could.

But Lara could cut her throat, if it came to that.

My brother might very well be capable of some unpleasant things in the interests of protecting Justine. Strike that. He was capable of anything where the girl was concerned.

Means. Motive. Opportunity. The equation of murder was balanced.

I looked back at the illusory wall, where the pictures, maps, and notes grouped together in a broad band near the top, then descended into fewer notes on the next strip down, and so on, forming a vague V-shape. At the top of the V rested a single, square yellow sticky note.

That note read, in a heavy hand, Ordo Lebes? Find them.

“Dammit, Thomas,” I murmured quietly. I addressed Lasciel. “Get rid of it.”

Lasciel nodded and the illusion disappeared. “There is something else you should know, my host.”

I eyed her. “What’s that?”

“It may concern your safety and the course of your investigation. May I show you?”

The word no came strongly to mind, but I was already in for a penny, so to speak. Lasciel’s wealth of intelligence and experience made her an extremely capable adviser. “Briefly.”

She nodded, rose, and suddenly I was standing in Anna Ash’s apartment, as I had been that afternoon.

“My host,” Lasciel said. “Remember you how many women you observed entering the building?”

I frowned. “Sure. As many as half a dozen had the right look, though anyone who arrived before Murphy and I got there could have already been inside.”

“Precisely,” Lasciel said. “Here.”

She waved a hand, and an image of me appeared in the apartment’s entry, Murphy at my side.

“Anna Ash,” Lasciel said. She nodded toward me, and Anna’s image appeared, facing me. “Can you describe the others in attendance?”

“Helen Beckitt,” I said. “Looking leaner and more weathered than the last time I saw her.”

Beckitt’s image appeared where she had been standing by the window.

I pointed at the wooden rocking chair. “Abby and Toto were there.” The plump blond woman and her dog appeared. I rubbed at my forehead. “Uh, two on the sofa and one on the love seat.”

Three shadowy forms appeared in the named places.

I pointed at the sofa. “The pretty one, in the dance leotard, the one worried about time.” She appeared. I pointed at the shadowed figure next to her. “Bitter, suspicious Priscilla who was not being polite.” The shadowy figure became Priscilla’s image.

“And there you go,” I said.

Lasciel shook her head, waved her hand, and the people images all vanished.

All except the shadowy figure sitting on the love seat.

I blinked.

“What can you remember about this one?” Lasciel asked me.

I racked my brain. It’s usually good for this kind of thing. “Nothing,” I said after a moment. “Not one damned detail. Nothing.” I added two and two together and got trouble. “Someone was under a veil. Someone good enough to make it subtle. Hard to tell it was there at all. Not invisible so much as extremely boring and unremarkable.”

“In your favor,” Lasciel said, “I should point out that you had crossed the threshold uninvited, and thus were deprived of much of your power. In such a circumstance it would be most difficult for you to sense a veil at all, much less to pierce it.”

I nodded, frowning at the shadowy figure. “It was deliberate,” I said. “Anna goaded me into walking over the threshold on purpose. She was hiding Miss Mystery from me.”

“Entirely possible,” Lasciel concurred. “Or…”

“Or they didn’t know someone was there, either,” I said. “And if that’s the case…” I tossed the notebook aside with a growl and rose.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I got my staff and coat, and got Mouse ready to go. “If the mystery guest was news to the Ordo, she’s right in among them and they could be in danger. If the Ordo knew about her, then they played me and lied to me.” I ripped open the door with more than my usual effort. “Either way, I’m going over there to straighten some things out.”

Chapter Ten

I swept the Beetle for bombs again and got the impression that I was going to get heartily sick of the chore, fast. It was clean, and off we went.

I parked illegally on a street about a block from Anna Ash’s apartment, and walked the rest of the way in. I rang buzzers more or less at random until someone buzzed me in, and headed back up the stairs to Anna’s apartment.

This time, though, I went in armed for bear. As I rode up in the elevator, I got out my jar of unguent, a dark brown concoction that stained the skin for a couple of days. I dabbed a finger in it and smeared it lightly onto my eyelids and at the base of my eyes. It was an ointment originally intended to counter faerie glamour, allowing those who had it to see through illusion to reality. It wasn’t quite right for seeing through a veil wrought with mortal magic, but it should be strong enough to show me something of whatever the veil was hiding. I should be able to glimpse any motion, and that would at least give me an idea of which way to face if things got dicey.

I brought Mouse for a reason, too. Besides being a small mountain of loyal muscle and ferocious fangs, Mouse could sense bad guys and dark magic when they were nearby. I had yet to encounter the creature that could sneak by Mouse unobserved, but just in case today was the day, I had the unguent as a backup plan.

I got off the elevator, and the hairs on the back of my neck immediately rose up. Mouse lifted his head sharply, looking back and forth down the hall. He’d felt what I had.

A fine cloud of magic hung over the entire floor.

I touched it carefully and found a suggestion of sleep—one of the classics, really. This one wasn’t heavy, as such things go. I’d seen one sleep spell that flattened an entire ward of Cook County Hospital. I’d used another to protect Murphy’s sanity, and it had kept her out for nearly two days.

This one wasn’t like that. It was light, barely noticeable, and not at all threatening. It was delicate and fine enough to filter into homes even through their thresholds—most of which were weak enough: Apartments never seemed to have as much defense as a real, discrete home. If those other spells had been sleeping medication, this one would have been a glass of warm milk. Someone wanted the residents of the floor to be insensible enough not to notice something, but not so out as to be endangered should there be an emergency, like the building catching fire and burning down.

Don’t look at me like that. It’s a lot likelier than you’d think.

Anyway, the suggestion was another finely crafted spell: delicate, precise, subtle, much like the earlier veil Lasciel had spotted. Whoever or whatever was crafting these workings was a pro.

I made sure my shield bracelet was ready to go, and marched up to Anna’s door. I could sense the ward there, still active, so I thumped my staff on the floor immediately in front of the door. “Ms. Ash?” I called. It wasn’t like I was going to wake anyone up. “It’s Harry Dresden. We need to talk.”

There was silence. I repeated myself. I heard a sound, that of someone striving to move silently, a scuff or a creak so faint that I wasn’t sure it had been real. I checked Mouse. His ears were pricked up, swiveled forward. He’d heard it too.

Someone flushed a toilet on the floor above us. I heard a door open and close, a faint sound, also on another floor. There was no further sound from Anna Ash’s apartment.

I didn’t like where this was going at all.

“Stand back, buddy,” I told Mouse. He did, backing away in that clumsy reverse waddle-walk dogs do.

I turned to the ward. It was like the little pig’s straw house. It wouldn’t last more than a second or two against a big bad wolf. “And I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” I muttered. I drew up my will, took the staff in both hands, and pressed one end slowly toward the door. “Solvos,” I murmured. “Solvos. Solvos.”

As the staff touched the door, I sent a gentle surge of will coursing down through its length. It passed through the wood visibly, the carved runes in it briefly illuminated from within by pale blue light. My will hit Anna’s door and scattered out in a cloud of pinprick sparkles of white light as my power unbound the patterns of the ward and reduced them to mere anarchy.

“Anna?” I called again. “Ms. Ash?”

No answer.

I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.

“That can’t be good,” I told Mouse. “Here we go.” I quietly opened the door, giving it a gentle push so that it would swing wide and let me see inside the darkened apartment.

At which point the trap sprang.

For traps to work, though, they need to catch their target off his guard.

I had my new and improved shield bracelet ready when greenish light flashed in the dark apartment and rushed swiftly toward me. I lifted my left hand. Bound around my wrist was a chain made of braided strands of several metals, silver predominant. The metal shields that hung from the bracelet had, in its previous incarnation, been solid silver as well. They had been replaced with shields of silver, iron, copper, nickel, and brass.

The new shield wasn’t like the old one. The old one had provided an intangible barrier meant to deflect solid matter and kinetic energy. It hadn’t been made to stop, for example, heat. That’s how my left hand got roasted practically down to the bones. It had been of only limited use against other forms of magic or energy.

If there hadn’t been a war on, and if I hadn’t been spending so much time drilling Molly in the fundamentals—and therefore getting in all kinds of extra practice, myself—I would never have considered attempting to create such a complex focus. It was far more complicated than almost anything I’d done before. Five years ago, it would have been beyond me completely. More to the point, five years ago, I wouldn’t have been as experienced or as strongly motivated.

But that was then, and this was now.

The shield that formed in front of me was not the familiar, translucent part-dome of pale blue light. Instead it flared into place in a blurring swirl of colors that solidified in an instant into a curving rampart of silver energy. The new shield was far more thorough than the old. Not only would it stop everything the old one had, but it would provide shelter against heat, cold, electricity—even sound and light, if I needed it to. It had also been designed to turn aside a fairly broad spectrum of supernatural energies. It was this last that was important at the moment.

A globe of green lightning sizzled over the apartment’s threshold and abruptly expanded, buzzing arcs of verdant electricity interconnected in a diamond pattern like the weave of a fisherman’s net.

The spell fell on my shield and the meeting of energies yielded a torrent of angry yellow sparks that rebounded from the shield, scattering over the hall, the doorway, and bouncing back into the apartment.

I dropped the shield as I brandished my staff, sent a savage torrent of power down my arm, and snarled, “Forzare!”

Unseen force lashed through the doorway—and splashed against the apartment’s threshold. Most of the spell’s power struck that barrier, grounded out, and was dissipated. What amounted to less than a percent of the power I had cast out actually made it through the doorway, as I had known it would. Instead of delivering a surge of energy strong enough to flip over a car, I delivered only a blow strong enough to knock an adult from her feet.

I heard a woman’s voice let out a surprised grunt at the impact, and heavy objects clattered to the floor.

“Mouse!” I shouted.

The big dog bounded forward through the doorway, and I went in right behind him. Once again, the apartment’s threshold stripped away my power, leaving me all but utterly unable to wield magic.

Which is why I’d brought my .44 revolver with me, tucked into a duster pocket. I had it in my left hand as I came through the door and hit the main light switch with my right elbow, bellowing, “I have not had a very good day!”

Mouse had someone pinned on the ground, and kept them there by virtue of simply sitting on them. Two hundred pounds of Mouse is an awfully effective restraint, and though he had his teeth bared, he wasn’t actively struggling or making any noise.

To my right, Anna Ash stood frozen like a rabbit in a spotlight, and my gun tracked to her immediately. “Don’t move,” I warned her. “I don’t have any magic at the moment, and that always makes me really, really ready to pull the trigger.”

“Oh, God,” she said, her voice a rough whisper. She licked her lips, visibly trembling. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. D-don’t hurt me, please. You don’t have to do this.”

I told her to walk over to Mouse and his prisoner. Once she was standing where I could watch both of them at once, I could relax a little, and though I did not lower the gun, I took my finger off the trigger. “Do what?”

“What you’ve done to the others,” Anna said, her voice thready. “You don’t have to do this. Not to anyone.”

“The others?” I demanded. I probably sounded at least half as disgusted as I felt. “You think I came here to kill you?”

She blinked at me a few times. Then she said, “You came here, broke down my door, and pointed a gun at me. What am I supposed to think?”

“I did not break down your door! It was unlocked!”

“You tore apart my ward!”

“Because I thought you might be in trouble, you twit!” I hollered. “I thought the killer might be here already.”

A woman let out a couple of choking gasps. After a moment, I realized that it was the person Mouse had pinned down, letting out breathless laughter.

I lowered the gun and put it away. “For crying out loud. You thought the killer was coming for you? So you laid a trap for him?”

“Well, no,” Anna said, now looking somewhat confused again. “I mean, I didn’t do it. The Ordo…we hired a private investigator to look into it. It was her idea to trap the killer when he came here.”

“A private investigator?” I looked over at the other woman and said, “Mouse.”

My dog, tail waving gently, backed off right away and trotted over to stand beside me. The woman he’d been holding down sat up.

She was pale—not the sickly pallor of no time in the sun, but the color of the living, healthy skin of a tree beneath the outer bark. Her lean face was intensely attractive—more intriguing than beautiful, with wide, intelligent eyes set over an expressive, generous mouth. She had a slim build, all long legs and long arms, and wore a simple pair of jeans along with a black Aerosmith T-shirt, and brown leather Birkenstocks. She propped herself up on her elbows, a tendril of wheat-colored hair falling to almost insolently conceal one eye, and gave me a wry smile.

“Hello, Harry.” She dabbed her fingers at a little bloody spot on her lower lip and winced, though there was still amusement in her voice. “Is that a new staff, or are you just happy to see me?”

And after my heart had skipped a couple of beats, I blinked and said, in a very quiet voice, to the first woman I’d ever everythinged, “Hello, Elaine.”

Chapter Eleven

I sat on the love seat while Anna Ash made coffee. Mouse, ever hopeful to cadge a snack, followed Anna into the kitchen, and sat there giving her his most pathetic, starving-doggy body language and wagging his tail.

We sat down together with coffee, like civilized people, a few minutes later.

“Ms. Ash,” I said, taking my cup.

“Anna, please.”

I nodded to her. “Anna. First, I wish to apologize for frightening you. It wasn’t my intention.”

She sipped her coffee, frowning at me, and then nodded. “I suppose I can understand your motivations.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry I blew up your ward. I’ll be glad to replace it for you.”

“We put a lot of hours in on that thing.” Anna sighed. “I mean, I know it wasn’t…expert work.”

“We?” I asked.

“The Ordo,” she said. “We worked together to protect everyone’s home.”

“Community project. Sort of a barn raising,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s the idea.” She bit her lip. “But there were more of us, when we did that.”

For just a second, the capable exterior wavered, and Anna looked very tired and very frightened. I felt a little pang inside at the sight. Real fright isn’t like the movies. Real fear is an ugly, quiet, relentless thing. It’s a kind of pain, and I hated seeing it on Anna’s face.

I found Elaine watching me, her eyes thoughtful. She sat on the sofa, leaning forward so that her elbows rested on her spread knees. She held her cup in one hand at a slight, negligent angle. On anyone else, it would have looked masculine. On Elaine, it only looked relaxed, strong, and confident.

“He truly meant you no harm, Anna,” she said, turning to our host. “He’s got this psychosis about charging to the rescue. I always thought it gave him a certain hapless charm.”

“I think we should focus on the future, for the time being,” I said. “I think we need to pool our information and try to work together on this.”

Anna and Elaine exchanged a long look. Anna glanced at me again and asked Elaine, “Are you sure?”

Elaine gave a single, firm nod. “He isn’t the one trying to hurt you. I’m sure now.”

“Sure now?” I said. “Is that why you veiled yourself when I was here earlier?”

Elaine’s fine eyebrows lifted. “You didn’t sense it when you were here. How did you know?”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little bird told me. Do you really think I’m capable of something like that?”

“No,” Elaine said. “But I had to be sure.”

“You know me better than that,” I said, unable to keep a little heat out of my voice.

“I trust you,” Elaine said, without a trace of apology in her tone, “but it might not have been you, Harry. It could have been an impostor. Or you could have been acting under some form of coercion. People’s lives were at stake. I had to know.”

I wanted to snarl back at her that if she so much as thought I might be the killer, she didn’t know me at all. If that’s how it was going to be, I might as well get up and walk right out of the apartment before—

And then I sighed.

Ah, sweet bird of irony.

“You were obviously expecting the killer to show up,” I said to Anna. “The sleeping spell. The ambush. What made you think he might be coming?”

“Me,” Elaine said.

“And what made you think that?”

She gave me a dazzling, innocent smile and imitated my tone and inflection. “Maybe a little bird told me.”

I snorted.

Anna’s eyes suddenly widened. “You two were together.” She turned to Elaine. “That’s how you know him.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said.

Elaine winked at me. “But you never really forget your first.”

“You never forget your first train wreck, either.”

“Train wrecks are exciting. Fun, even,” Elaine said. She kept smiling, though her eyes turned a little sad. “Right up until the very last part.”

I felt half a smile tug up one side of my mouth. “True,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t try to dodge questions by throwing up a smoke screen of nostalgia.”

Elaine took a long sip of coffee and shrugged a shoulder. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

I folded my arms, frowning. “Sixty seconds ago, you said that you trusted me.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Trust is a two-way street, Harry.”

I leaned back, took another sip of coffee, and said, “Maybe you’re right. I put it together after the fact, when I was making notes of our conversation. I couldn’t remember noticing anything about the woman on the love seat, which doesn’t happen to me. So I figured it must have been a veil, and came over here because it was possible that whoever was under it was a threat to the Ordo.”

Elaine pursed her lips, frowning for a moment. “I see.”

“Your turn.”

She nodded. “I’ve been working out of L.A., taking a lot of cases referred my way—like this one. And Chicago isn’t the first city where this has happened.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

“San Diego, San Jose, Austin, and Seattle. Over the past year, members of a number of small organizations like the Ordo Lebes have been systematically stalked and murdered. Most of them have appeared to be suicides. Counting Chicago, the killer’s taken thirty-six victims.”

“Thirty-six…” I ran my thumb over the handle of the coffee cup, frowning. “I haven’t heard a word about this. Nothing. A year?”

Elaine nodded. “Harry, I’ve got to know. Is it possible that the Wardens are involved?”

“No,” I said, my tone firm. “No way.”

“Because they’re such easygoing, tolerant people?” she asked.

“No. Because I know Ramirez, the regional commander for most of those cities. He wouldn’t be a part of something like that.” I shook my head. “Besides, we’ve got a manpower shortage. The Wardens are stretched pretty thin. And there’s no reason for them to go around killing people.”

“You’re sure about Ramirez,” Elaine said. “Can you say the same about every Warden?”

“Why?”

“Because,” Elaine said, “in every single one of those cities, a man in a grey cloak was seen with at least two of the victims.”

Uh-oh.

I put the coffee cup down on an end table and folded my arms, thinking.

It wasn’t general knowledge, but someone on the Council was leaking information to the vamps on a regular and devastating basis. The traitor still had not been caught. Even worse, I had seen evidence that there was another organization at work behind the scenes, manipulating events on a scale large enough to indicate a powerful, well-funded, and frighteningly capable group—and that at least some of them were wizards. I had dubbed them the Black Council, because it was obvious, and I’d been keeping my ear to the ground for indications of their presence.

And look. I found one.

“Which explains why I hadn’t heard anything about it,” I said. “If everyone thinks the Wardens are responsible, there’s not a prayer they’d draw attention to themselves by reporting what was happening and asking for help. Or call in a gumshoe who happens to be a Warden, himself.”

Elaine nodded. “Right. I started getting called in about a month after I got my own license and opened my business.”

I grunted. “How’d they know to call you?”

She smiled. “I’m in the book under ‘Wizards.’”

I snorted. “I knew you were copying my test answers all those years.”

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” She pulled a strand of hair back behind one ear, an old and familiar gesture that brought with it a pang of remembered desire and a dozen little memories. “Most of the business has come in on referral, though, because I do good work. In any case, one fact about the killer’s victims was almost always the same: people who lived alone or were isolated.”

“And I,” Anna said quietly, “am the last living member of the Ordo who lives alone or were isolated.”

“These other cities,” I said. “Did the killer leave anything behind? Messages? Taunts?”

“Like what?” Elaine asked.

“Bible verses,” I said. “Left in traces, something only one of us would recognize.”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. Or if there was, I never found it.”

I exhaled slowly. “So far, two of the deaths here have had messages left behind. Your friend Janine and a woman named Jessica Blanche.”

Elaine frowned. “I gathered, from what you said earlier. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “We just don’t know why.” I frowned. “Could any of the other deaths be attributed to the White Court?”

Elaine frowned and rose. She took her coffee cup to the kitchen and came back, a pensive frown on her brow. “I…can’t be certain they haven’t, I suppose. I certainly haven’t seen anything to suggest it. Why?”

“Excuse me,” Anna said, her voice quiet and unsure. “White Court?”

“The White Court of vampires,” I clarified.

“There’s more than one kind?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The Red Court are the ones the White Council is fighting now. They’re these bat-monster things that can look human. Drink blood. The White Court are more like people. They’re psychic parasites. They seduce their victims and feed on human life energy.”

Elaine nodded. “But why did you ask me about them, Harry?”

I took a deep breath. “I found something to suggest that Jessica Blanche may have died as the result of being fed upon by some kind of sexual predator.”

Elaine stared at me for a moment and then said, “The pattern’s been broken. Something’s changed.”

I nodded. “There’s something else involved in the equation.”

“Or someone.”

“Or someone,” I said.

She frowned. “There’s one place to start looking.”

“Jessica Blanche,” I said.

Without warning, Mouse came to his feet, facing the door to the apartment, and let out a bubbling basso growl.

I rose, acutely conscious of the fact that my power was still interdicted by the apartment’s threshold, and that I didn’t have enough magic to spell my way out of a paper bag.

The lights went out. Mouse continued to growl.

“Oh, God,” Anna said. “What’s happening?”

I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the sudden darkness, when a very slight, acrid scent tickled my nose.

“You smell that?” I asked.

Elaine’s voice was steady, calm. “Smell what?”

“Smoke,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here. I think the building’s on fire.”

Chapter Twelve

“Light,” I said.

Almost before I was finished saying the word, Elaine murmured quietly, and the pentacle amulet she wore, nearly a twin to mine, began to glow with a green-white light. She held it overhead by its silver chain.

By its light, I crossed to the door and felt it, like those cartoons when I was little said you were supposed to do. It felt like a door. “No fire in the hall,” I said.

“Fire stairs,” Elaine said.

“They’re not far,” Anna said.

Mouse continued staring at the door, growling in a low and steady rumble. The smoke smell had thickened.

“Something’s waiting for us in the hall.”

“What?” Anna said.

Elaine looked from Mouse to me and bit her lip. “Window?”

My heart was skipping along too fast. I don’t like fire. I don’t like getting burned. It hurts and it’s ugly. “Might be able to handle the fall,” I said, forcing myself to breathe slowly, evenly. “But there’s a building full of people here, and none of the alarms or sprinklers have gone off. Someone must have hexed them. We’ve got to warn the residents.”

Mouse’s head whipped around and he stared intently at me for a second. Then he trotted in a little circle, shook his head, made a couple of chuffing sounds, and started doing something I hadn’t heard him do since he was a puppy small enough to fit in my duster pocket.

He barked.

Loud. Steady. WOOF, WOOF, WOOF, with the mechanical regularity of a metronome.

Now, saying he was barking might give you the general shape of things, but it doesn’t convey the scale. Everyone in Chicago knows what a storm-warning siren sounds like. They’re spread liberally through the Midwestern states that comprise Tornado Alley. They make your usual warning siren sound. But I had an apartment about thirty yards from one of them once upon a time, and take it from me, that sound is a whole different thing when you’re next to it. It isn’t an ululating wail. When you’re that close to the source, it’s a tangible flood, a solid, living, sonic cascade that rattles your brain against your skull.

Mouse’s bark was like that—but on several levels. Every time he barked, I swear to you, several of my muscles tightened and twitched as if hit with a miniature jolt of adrenaline. I couldn’t have slept through half as much racket, even without the odd little jabs of energy that hit me like separate charges of electricity with each bark. It was deafening in the little apartment, nearly as loud as gunfire. He let out twelve painfully loud barks, and then stopped. My ears rang in the sudden silence that followed.

Within seconds I began to hear thumping sounds on the floor above me, bare feet swinging out of beds and landing hard on the floor, almost in unison, like something you’d expect in a training barracks. Someone shouted in the apartment neighboring Anna’s. Other dogs started barking. Children started crying. Doors started slamming open.

Mouse sat down again, his head tilting this way and that, ears twitching at each new noise.

“Hell’s bells, Harry,” Elaine breathed, her eyes wide. “Is that…? Where did you get a real Temple Dog?”

“Uh. A place kind of like this, now that you mention it.” I gave Mouse’s ears a quick ruffling and said, “Good dog.”

Mouse wagged his tail at me and grinned at the praise.

I opened the door with the hand that wasn’t holding a gun, and took a quick look around in the hall. Flashlights were bobbing and sweeping from several places, each one producing a visible beam in the thickening pall of smoke. People were screaming, “Fire, fire, get everybody out!”

The hallway was in chaos. I couldn’t see if anyone out there looked like a lurking menace, but odds were good that if I couldn’t see them, they wouldn’t see me, either, in all the milling confusion of hundreds of people fleeing the building.

“Anna, where are the fire stairs?”

“Um. Where everyone’s running,” Anna said. “To the right.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay, here’s the plan. We follow all the other flammable people out of the building before we burn to death.”

“Whoever did this is going to be waiting for us outside,” Elaine warned.

“Not a very private place for a murder anymore,” I said. “But we’ll be careful. Me and Mouse first. Anna, you right behind us. Elaine, cover our backside.”

“Shields?” she asked me.

“Yeah. Can you do your half?”

She arched an eyebrow at me.

“Right,” I said. “What was I thinking?” I took Mouse’s lead in one hand, glanced at my staff, and then said, “We’re working on the honor system, here.” Mouse calmly opened his mouth and held on to his own lead. I picked up my staff in my right hand, kept the gun in the other, and slipped it into my duster’s pocket to conceal the weapon. “Anna, keep your hand on my shoulder.” I felt her grab on to the mantle of my duster. “Good. Mouse.”

Mouse and I hit the hallway with Anna right on my heels. We fled. I’m not too manly to admit it. We scampered. Retreated. Vamoosed. Amscrayed. Burning buildings are freaking terrifying, and I should know.

This was the first time I’d been in one quite this occupied, though, and I expected more panic than I sensed around us. Maybe it was the way Mouse had woken everyone. I saw no one stumbling along the way they would if they had been suddenly roused from deep sleep. Everyone was bright eyed and bushy tailed, metaphorically speaking, and while they were clearly afraid, the fear was aiding the evacuation, not hindering it.

The smoke got thicker as we went down one flight of stairs, then another. It started getting hard to breathe, and I was choking on it as we descended. I began to panic. It’s the smoke that kills most people, long before the fire ever gets to them. But there seemed little to do but press on.

Then we were through the smoke. The fire had begun three floors below Anna’s apartment, and the fire door to that floor was simply missing from its hinges. Black smoke rolled thickly out of the hall beyond it. We had made it down through the smoke, but there were four floors above ours, and the smoke was being drawn up the stairs like they were an enormous chimney. The people still above us would be blinded by it, unable to breathe, and God only knew what would happen to them.

“Elaine!” I choked out.

“Got it!” she called back, coughing—and then she was beside the doorway, black smoke trying to envelop her. She extended her right hand in a gesture that somehow managed to be imperious, and the smoke abruptly vanished.

Well, not exactly. There was a faint shimmer of light over the open doorway, and on the other side of it the smoke roiled and billowed as if pressing up against glass. The acoustics of the stairway altered, the chewing roar of fire suddenly muted, the sound of footsteps and panting people becoming louder.

Elaine examined the field over the doorway for a moment, nodded once, and turned to catch up with us, her manner brisk and businesslike.

“You need to stay to let anyone through?” I asked her. Mouse leaned against my legs, clearly afraid and eager to leave the building.

She held up a hand to silence me. After a moment she said, “No. Permeable to the living. Concentrating. We have a minute, maybe two.”

Permeable? Holy moly. I could never have managed that on the fly. But then, Elaine always was more skilled than me when it came to the complex stuff. “Right,” I said. I took her hand, plopped it down on Anna’s shoulder, and said, “Move, come on.”

After that, it was nothing but stairs, bobbing flashlights, echoing voices, and footsteps. I run. Not because it’s good for me, even though it is, but because I want to be able to run whenever something’s chasing me. It did me a limited amount of good, given that I was spending half of my time coughing on the still-present smoke, but I at least had enough presence of mind to keep an eye on Anna and the distracted Elaine, as well as making sure that I didn’t trip over Mouse or get trampled from behind.

When we got to the second floor, I prepped my shield and called over my shoulder, “Elaine!”

She let out a gasping breath, her head bowing forward. She wavered and clutched at the stair’s handrail. Anna moved at once to support her and keep her moving. There was a crashing, roaring sound above us, and cries of fright came down the stairs.

“Move, move,” I told them. “Elaine, be ready to shield.”

She nodded once and twisted a simple silver ring on her left forefinger around, revealing a kite-shaped shield device not unlike one of my own charms.

We went down the last flight of stairs and hit the door to the street.

Outside, it was not dark. Though the streetlight beside the building was out, the others on the street worked just fine. Added to that was the fire from the burning apartment. It wasn’t blinding or anything, since you could see it only through windows, and whenever one of those was open or broken it tended to billow black smoke. I could see clearly, though.

People came hustling out of the building, all coughing. Someone outside the building—or with a cell phone—must have called in the fire, because an impressive number of emergency vehicle sirens were drawing nigh. The escapees filed across the street, for the most part, getting to what seemed a safe distance and turning back to look at their homes. They were in various states of dishabille, including one rather generously appointed young lady wearing a set of red satin sheets and dangling a pair of six-inch heels from one hand. The young man with her, with a red silk bathrobe belted kiltlike around his waist, looked understandably frustrated.

I noticed only because, as a professional investigator, I have trained myself to be a keen observer.

That’s why, as I looked around the rest of the crowd to see if red satin sheets and spike heels were becoming a new fad, and if maybe I should have some on hand, just in case, I saw the tall man in the grey cloak.

He was shadowed by the headlights of fire trucks coming down the street toward us, but I saw the sway of the grey cloak. As if he’d sensed my attention, he turned. I got nothing useful out of his silhouette for identifying him.

I guess the grey-cloaked man didn’t know that. He froze for a full second, facing me, and then turned and sprinted around the corner.

“Mouse!” I snapped. “Stay with Anna!”

Then I took off after Grey Cloak.

Chapter Thirteen

Thoughtlessly running headlong after someone alone, at night, in Chicago, is not generally a bright idea.

“This is stupid,” I panted to myself. “Harry, you jackass, this is how you keep getting yourself into trouble.”

Grey Cloak moved with the long, almost floating stride of an athlete running the mile and turned into an alley, where the shadows grew thicker and where we would be out of sight of any of the cops or emergency response people.

I had to think about this. I needed to figure out what he was doing.

Okay, so I’m Grey Cloak. I want to gack Anna Ash, so I start a fire—no, wait. So I use one of the incendiary devices like the one in Murphy’s Saturn, put it on a kitchen timer a couple of floors below Anna’s place, cut the building’s power, phones, and alarms, and set the whole shebang on fire, boom. Then I wait outside Anna’s door for her to emerge in a panic, so that I can murder her, leave, and let the evidence burn in the subsequent inferno. Now it all looks like an accident.

Only I don’t expect Anna to have a pair of world-class wizards on hand, and I sure as hell never saw Mouse coming. The dog barks and all of a sudden the hall is full of people who can witness the murder, and there’s no way to make it look accidental. Someone is almost certain to contact the authorities and send in the whirling lights within a few moments, and there goes my whole evening. No use trying to complete a subtle hit now.

So what do I do?

I don’t want attention, that’s for sure, or I wouldn’t be trying so hard to make this murder look like an accident. I’m cautious, smart, and patient, or I wouldn’t have gotten away with it in four other cities. I do what a smart predator does when a stalk goes sour.

I bug out.

I’ve got a car nearby, a getaway vehicle.

Grey Cloak reached the end of the alley and turned left with me about twenty feet behind him. Then he rounded a corner and sprinted into a parking garage.

I did not follow him.

See, since I’m such a competent and methodical killer, I assume the worst—that anyone in pursuit will display just as much intelligence and resourcefulness. So what I do is pull the chase into the parking garage, where there’s lots of angles that will break line of sight—but my getaway car isn’t parked there. There’s no way I’m going to wait around to pay the attendant, and smashing my way out would attract the attention I’m trying to avoid. The plan is to lose a pursuer in the ample shadows, ramps, doorways, and parked cars in the maze of the garage, and go to my car once I’ve given him the slip.

I kept sprinting down the street and rounded a corner. Then I stopped, crouched and ready to continue running. The far side of the garage had no parking places; nor did the alley. So Grey Cloak’s car had to be either on the street in front of the garage, or on the street along its side. From that corner, I could watch both.

I hunkered down beside a city trash can and hoped that I was as clever as I seemed to think I was. I was pretty sure it would have been at best stupid and at worst lethal to pursue Grey Cloak into the dark of the parking garage. I might have one hell of a punch, but I was as fragile as the next person, and cornering Grey Cloak might draw out the savagery of desperation. If I slipped up, and he got too close to me, he might drop me like a pair of dirty socks.

Always assuming, of course, that he wasn’t an actual Warden, in which case he might well hit me with lightning or fire or any number of other nasty attacks of choice. That was a thought I found more than a little…comfortable, really.

I’d spent most of my adult life living in fear of the Council’s Wardens. They’d been my persecutors, my personal furies, and despite the fact that I’d become one, I felt an almost childish glee in the notion that a Warden might be my bad guy. It would give me a perfect opportunity to lay out some long-deserved payback with perfect justification.

Unless, of course, it was a Warden doing it under orders. Once upon a time, I’d have told you that the White Council was made up of basically decent people who valued human life. Now, I knew better. The Council broke the Laws when it saw fit to do so. It executed children who, in their ignorance, violated those same laws. The war, too, had made the Council desperate, more willing to take chances and “make hard decisions” that amounted to other people getting killed while the Council’s bony collective ass stayed as covered as possible.

It didn’t seem reasonable to think that a legitimate Warden could have sunk to such measures, or that Captain Luccio, the Wardens’ commander, would condone it—but I’ve gotten used to being disappointed in the honor and sincerity of the Council in general, and the Wardens in particular. For that matter, I probably shouldn’t expect too much rationality out of Grey Cloak, either. My scenario to predict his behavior was plausible, rational, but a rational person wouldn’t be going around murdering people and making it look like suicide, would he? I was probably wasting my time.

A shadowy figure vaulted from the roof of the parking garage and dropped six stories to the ground, landing on the sidewalk in a crouch. Grey Cloak was still for a second, maybe listening, and then rose and began to walk, quickly but calmly, toward the street and the cars parked along it.

I blinked.

Son of a gun.

I guess sometimes logic does work.

I clenched my teeth, gripped my staff, and rose to confront Grey Cloak and blow him straight to hell.

And stopped.

If Grey Cloak truly was part of the Black Council, working to undermine the White Council and generally do whatever large-scale badness they intended to do, blowing him to hell might not be the smart thing to do. The Black Council had been, if you will pardon the phrasing, a phantom menace. I was sure that they were up to no good, and their methods thus far seemed to indicate that they had no inhibitions about the ending of innocent lives—reinforced by Grey Cloak’s willingness to burn a building full of people to death to cover up the murder of a single target. It fit their pattern: shadowy, nebulous, leaving no direct, obvious evidence of who they were or what they wanted.

If they existed at all, that is. So far, they were just a theory.

Then again, Grey Cloak’s getaway car had been just a theory, too.

This could be a chance to gain badly needed intelligence on the Black Council. Knowledge is the ultimate weapon. It always has been.

I could let Grey Cloak go and tail him to see what I could learn before I brought the hammer down. Maybe he’d lead me to something vital, something as critical as Enigma had been to the Allies in WWII. On the other hand, maybe he’d lead me back to nothing. No covert organization worth its salt would allow an operative into the field without planning for the contingency of said operative being compromised. Hell, even if Grey Cloak volunteered everything he knew, there would almost certainly be cutouts in place.

All of which assumed he really was part of the Black Council. A big assumption. And when you assume, you make an ass out of you and umption. If I didn’t stop him while I had the chance, Grey Cloak would strike again. More people would die.

Yeah, Harry. And how many more people will die if the Black Council keeps rising to power?

Dammit. My gut told me to drop Grey Cloak right now. The faces from police photos flickered through my thoughts, and in my imagination the slain women stood beside me, behind me, their glassy, dead eyes intent upon their killer and their desire to be avenged. I longed with an almost apocalyptic passion to step into the open and lay waste to this murdering asshole.

But reason told me otherwise. Reason told me to slow down, think, and consider how to do the most good for the most people.

Hadn’t I been telling myself only hours ago that reason had to guide my actions, my decisions, if I was to keep control of myself?

It was hard. It was really, really hard. But I fought off the adrenaline and lust for a fight, and hunkered back down, thinking furiously, while Grey Cloak got into a green sedan, started it, and pulled out onto the street. I crouched between two parked cars and waited, out of sight, until Grey Cloak drove by me.

I pointed the end of my staff at the car’s back panel, gathered my will, and whispered, “Forzare.” Raw force lanced out, focused into the tiniest area I could envision, and struck the car with a little pop no louder than that produced by stray bits of gravel tossed up against the vehicle’s undercarriage. The car went by without slowing, and I got the license number as it left.

Once it was gone, I murmured, “Tractis,” keeping my will focused on the staff, and drew it back until I could rise into the light of a street lamp and peer at the end of the length of oak.

A fleck of green paint, half the size of a dime, had adhered to the end of the staff. I licked my fingertip and pressed it to the paint, lifting it off the staff. I had a small box of waterproof matches in one pocket of the duster. I opened it with one hand, dumped the matches, and then carefully placed the fleck of paint inside.

“Gotcha,” I muttered.

Grey Cloak, in all probability, would ditch the car before long, so I didn’t have much time. If he slipped away, any further harm he caused would be on my own head. I refused to let that happen.

I put the closed matchbox into in my pocket, turned, and ran back toward Elaine and Anna. By the time I got there, the block was lit nearly daylight-bright with the roaring flames from the apartment building and a steadily increasing number of flashing emergency lights. I found Elaine, Anna, and Mouse, and walked toward them.

“Harry,” Elaine said, relief on her face. “Hey. You get him?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Got some follow-up work to do. You have somewhere safe?”

“My room at the hotel should be safe enough. I don’t think anyone here knows who I am. The Amber Inn.”

“Right. Take Anna there. I’ll call you.”

“No,” Anna said firmly.

I glanced at the burning building and squinted at Anna. “I guess you’d rather have a quiet night at home, huh?”

“I’d rather make sure the rest of the Ordo is all right,” she said. “What if the killer decides to go after one of them?”

“Elaine,” I said, expecting her support.

Elaine shrugged. “I’m working for her, Harry.”

I muttered a quiet curse under my breath, and shook my head. “Fine. Get them all and fort up. I’ll call you by morning.”

Elaine nodded.

“Come on, Mouse,” I said.

I took his lead, and we headed for home—and Little Chicago.

Chapter Fourteen

When we got back to my apartment, Mouse shambled straight to the plastic punch bowl that holds his kibble. He ate it with a steady, famished determination until it was all gone. Then he emptied his water bowl, went to his usual nap spot, and slumped to the floor without even turning in a circle first. He was asleep almost before he stopped moving.

I stopped by him to ruffle his ears and check his nose, which was wet and cold like it was supposed to be. His tail twitched faintly at my touch, but he was clearly exhausted. Whatever it was about those barks that had impossibly roused an entire building all at once must have taken something out of him. I took my duster off, draped it over him, and let him sleep.

I called Toe-moss’s place once again, but got only his answering machine. So I grabbed my heavy flannel robe—for warmth, since the lab was far enough underground to always be chilly—pulled up the throw rug that covers the door in the living room floor, and stumped down the folding stair steps, flicking candles to life with a gesture and a whisper of will as I went.

My lab had always been a little crowded, but it had become more so since I had begun teaching Molly. The lab was a rectangular concrete box. Simple wire shelves covered three walls, stacked up high with books and containers of various ingredients I would use (like the thick, sealed lead box that contained an ounce and a half of depleted uranium filings), and loaded down with various objects of arcane significance (like the bleached human skull that occupied its own shelf, along with several paperback romance novels) or professional curiosity (like the collection of vampire fangs the Wardens in the United States, me and Ramirez, mostly, had gathered in the course of several skirmishes over the past year).

At the far end, on the open wall, I had managed to shoehorn a tiny desk and chair into the lab. Molly did some of her studying there, kept her journal, learned power calculations, and had several books I’d told her to read. We’d begun working on some basic potions, and the beakers and burners occupied most of the surface of her desk, which was just as well, considering the stains that got left on it during her first potion meltdown. Set into the concrete floor beside the desk was a simple ring of silver I used as a summoning circle.

The table in the middle of the room had once been my work area. No longer. Now it was wholly occupied by Little Chicago.

Little Chicago was a scale model of Chicago itself, or at least of the heart of the town, which I’d expanded from its original design to include everything within about four miles of Burnham Harbor. Every building, every street, every tree was represented by a custom-made scale model of pewter. Each contained a tiny piece of the reality it represented—bark chipped from trees, tiny pieces of asphalt gouged from the streets, flakes of brick broken from the buildings with a hammer. The model would let me use my magic in new and interesting ways, and should enable me to find out a lot more about Grey Cloak than I would have been able to do in the past.

Or…it might blow up. You know. One of the two.

I was still a young wizard, and Little Chicago was a complex toy containing an enormous amount of magical energy. I had to work hard to keep it up-to-date, matched to the real Chicago, or it wouldn’t function correctly—i.e., it would fail, possibly in a spectacular fashion. Releasing all that energy in the relatively cramped confines of the lab would most likely render me extra crispy. It was an elaborate and expensive tool, and I never would have so much as considered creating it if I didn’t have an expert consultant.

I took the matchbox from my pocket and set it on the edge of the table, glanced up at the skull on its shelf, and said, “Bob, up and at ’em.”

The skull quivered a little on its wooden shelf, and tiny, nebulous orange lights appeared in its empty eyes. There was a sound like a human yawn, and then the skull turned slightly toward me and asked, “What’s up, boss?”

“Evil’s afoot.”

“Well, sure,” Bob said, “because it refuses to learn the metric system. Otherwise it’d be up to a meter by now.”

“You’re in a mood,” I noted.

“I’m excited. I get to meet the cookie now, right?”

I gave the skull a very firm look. “She is not a cookie. Neither is she a biscuit, a Pop-Tart, Sweet TART, apple tart, or any other kind of pastry. She is my apprentice.”

“Whatever,” Bob said. “I get to meet her now, yeah?”

“No,” I said firmly.

“Oh,” Bob said, his tone as disappointed and petulant as a six-year-old child who has just been told that it is bedtime. “Why not?”

“Because she still hasn’t got a very good idea of how to handle power wisely,” I said.

“I could help her!” Bob said. “She could do a lot more if I was helping.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You’re under the radar until I say otherwise. Do not draw attention to yourself. Do not reveal any of your nature to her. When Molly’s around, you’re an inanimate knickknack until I say otherwise.”

“Hmph,” Bob said. “At this rate, I’m never gonna get to see her naked in time.”

I snorted. “In time for what?”

“In time to behold her in her full, springy, nubile, youthful glory! By the time you let me talk to her, she’ll have started to droop!”

“I’m almost certain you’ll survive the trauma,” I said.

“Life is about more than just survival, Harry.”

“True,” I said. “There’s also work.”

Bob rolled his eyelights in the skull’s empty sockets. “Brother. You’re keeping her cloistered and working me like a dog, too. That’s not fair.”

I started getting out the stuff I’d need to fire up Little Chicago. “Dog, right. Something odd happened tonight.” I told Bob about Mouse and his barking. “What do you know about Temple Dogs?”

“More than you,” Bob said. “But not much. Most of what I got is collected hearsay and folklore.”

“Any of it likely true?”

“A bit,” he said. “There are a few points of confluence where multiple sources agree.”

“Hit me.”

“Well, they’re not entirely mortal,” Bob said. “They’re the scions of a celestial being called a Foo Dog and a mortal canine. They’re very intelligent, very loyal, tough, and can seriously kick ass if they need to do it. But mostly, they’re sentinels. They keep an eye out for dark spirits or dark energy, guard the people or places they’re supposed to guard, and alert others to the presence of danger.”

“Explains why Ancient Mai made those Temple Dog statues to assist the Wardens in maintaining security, I suppose.” I got out a short-handled duster made of a rowan wand and a bundle of owl feathers, and began to carefully clean the dust from the model city. “What about the barking thing?”

“Their bark has some kind of spiritual power,” Bob said. “A lot of stories say that they can make themselves be heard from fifty or sixty miles away. It isn’t just a physical thing, either. It carries over into the Nevernever, and can be heard clearly by noncorporeal entities. It startles them, drives most of them away—and if any of them stick around, Mouse could take his teeth to them, even though they’re spirits. I figure that this alarm-clock bark he did was a part of that protective power, alerting others to danger.”

I grunted. “Superdog.”

“But not bulletproof. They can be killed just like anything else.”

There was a thought. I wondered if I could find someone to make Mouse a Kevlar vest. “Okay, Bob,” I said. “Get it fired up and give it a once-over.”

“Right, boss. I hope you will note that I am doing this without once complaining how unfair it is that you’ve seen the cupcake nekkid and I haven’t.”

“So noted.” I picked up the skull and set it down on the sheet of translucent, rubbery blue plastic that represented Lake Michigan. “Check it out while I get my spell face on.”

The skull spun around to face the city while I settled down on the floor, legs crossed, hands resting lightly on my knees, and closed my eyes, focusing on drawing my thoughts to stillness, my heart to a slow, slow beat. I breathed slowly, deeply, systematically walling out worries, emotions, everything but purpose.

One time, when we’d been discussing martial arts, Murphy told me that eventually, no one can teach you anything more about them. Once you reach that state of knowledge, the only way to keep learning and increasing your own skill is to teach what you know to others. That’s why she teaches a children’s class and a rape-defense course every spring and fall at one of her neighborhood’s community centers.

It sounded kind of flaky-Zen to me at the time, but Hell’s bells, she’d been right. Once upon a time, it would have taken me an hour, if not more, to attain the proper frame of mind. In the course of teaching Molly to meditate, though, I had found myself going over the basics again for the first time in years, and understanding them with a deeper and richer perspective than I’d had when I was her age. I’d been getting almost as much insight and new understanding of my knowledge from teaching Molly as she’d been learning from me.

It took me ten minutes, twelve at the most, to prepare my thoughts and will. By the time I stood up again, there was nothing left in the whole world but me, Little Chicago, and my need to find a murderer.

“Bob?” I whispered.

“Everything’s nominal. We’re in the green, Captain,” he said, affecting a Scottish accent.

I nodded without speaking. Then I drew in my will, and the skull’s eyelights dwindled to the size of pinpricks. So did all the candles. Newborn black shadows began stretching between the pewter buildings, overlaying the model streets. The temperature in the lab dropped another degree or two as I pulled in energy from all around me, and my skin flushed as my body temperature went up a couple of degrees. When I slowly exhaled, my heated breath formed vapor that drifted around my nose and mouth.

I moved slowly, precisely, and picked up the matchbox. Then I opened it and exposed the fleck of paint inside, and leaned over to carefully place the paint down on the tiny model of my apartment building. I stood over the table, my hand touching the paint and the map, and released my will with a repeated murmur of, “Reperios. Invenios.”

I felt my senses blur for a moment, and then Little Chicago rushed toward me, its buildings growing, until I stood upon the street outside the now life-sized pewter replica of my apartment building.

I took a moment to look around. It looked like Chicago. Flickers of motion surrounded me. Faint outlines of leaves stirred in the pewter trees, ghostly images of the real-world leaves on the trees of the actual Chicago. Faint lights emanated from blank pewter windowpanes. Ghostly cars whispered by on the streets. I could hear the muted sounds of the city, catch the barest hints of scents on the air.

Unnervingly, I could look up and see…myself, my actual, physical body, towering over the model city like Godzilla’s hyperthyroid cousin. The sky over Little Chicago held twinkling lights—the dim glows of the lab’s candles and Bob’s eyelights, all too large to be stars, the way the sun is supposed to look from the outer planets.

I held up the matchbox, my will surging down my arm. It touched on the little flake of paint, which erupted into viridian light and rose into the air above my hand, hovered for a moment, and then streaked off to the north like a miniature comet.

“Maybe you got away with this crap in other towns, Grey Cloak,” I muttered. “But Chicago’s mine.”

My own flesh dissolved into flickering silver light, and I felt myself rush after the energy of the seeking spell, streaking through the ghostly images of Chicago’s nightlife in the model all around me, one more insubstantial shade among thousands.

The seeking spell came to rest a block and a half south of Goudy Square Park, a little slice of green the city managed to squeeze in amidst a bunch of architecture. The brilliant mote of light settled onto a ghostly image of a moving car and the image suddenly became solid and visible.

“Gotcha,” I growled under my breath, and drifted close to the car, hovering right over its rear bumper, and focused on the driver.

The ghost image remained hazy, dammit. My magic had latched onto the car, and it wasn’t going to be easy to get a better look at the driver than I already had. I might be able to pour more energy into the spell, attain greater clarity, but I wanted to save that as a last resort. Too much could cause the whole thing to blow—and it would certainly leave me too exhausted to maintain the connection. Better to hover now, and listen. Sound would be easier to pick up, resonating against the car, against the surrounding city I had modeled for the spell.

The car stopped a stone’s throw from the park. It’s a bifurcated little place, simultaneously trying to contain a designer garden and a children’s playground, and every time I’d look at it, it seemed to me that the kids were winning. Good for them. Nobody who is four, or six, or eight years old needs to feel conflicted about their play area impeding the Italian Renaissance sensibilities of a landscape artist. Heck, I was probably at least that mature, and I was pretty sure I didn’t need it, either.

I focused on the spell, and the sounds of the city night came to life around me, growing in volume, rising from a distant, ghostly murmur to simple ambience, as if I’d been standing there. Traffic sounds. A distant siren. The almost subliminal sound of wheels rushing by on the highway a mile off. The cricketlike chirrup of a car alarm. To me, it was the orchestra tuning and warming up before the overture.

Footsteps, swift and confident, coming closer. The curtain was going up.

The passenger door of the green car opened, and a second shadowy figure joined the first. The door closed, harder than it needed to.

“Are you insane,” the passenger asked, “meeting here?”

“What’s wrong with here?” Grey Cloak asked. His voice was a light tenor, though it sounded distant, hazy, like a partially obscured radio transmission. An accent? Something from Eastern Europe, maybe. It was hard to make out the particulars.

“It’s a bloody upper-class WASP neighborhood,” the passenger snarled. His voice was deeper, similarly obscured, and bore no trace of foreign accent. He sounded like a newscaster, standard Midwestern American. “There’s private security here. Police. If anyone raises any kind of alarm, it’s going to attract a great deal of attention in short order.”

Grey Cloak let out a low laugh. “Which is why we are safe. It’s late at night. All the little dears are sleeping the sleep of the fat and happy. No one is awake to see us here.”

The other said something rude. There was a flicker of light in the passenger seat, and it took me a second to work out that he’d just lit a cigarette. “Well?”

“No.”

“No?” the passenger said. “No kine? No wizard? What do you mean, no?”

“Both,” Grey Cloak said. His tone turned cold. “You told me he was afraid of fire.”

“He is,” the passenger said. “You should see his fucking hand.”

I felt my left hand clench tight, and the crackle of popping knuckles in my very real laboratory drifted through the magical simulation of the city.

Grey Cloak’s head whipped around.

“What?” the passenger asked.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Something…” Grey Cloak said.

I felt myself holding my breath, willing my fingers to unclench.

The passenger looked around for a moment, then snorted. “You’re nervous about him. That’s all. You missed him and you’re nervous.”

“Not nervous,” Grey Cloak said. “Understandably cautious. He has more resources and more versatility than your people realize. It’s quite possible that he’s keeping track of me in some way.”

“I doubt that. It would take a subtle worker of the Art to manage that. He isn’t one.”

“No?” Grey Cloak asked. “He managed to sense the fire before it could cut him off, to somehow waken the entire building from sound sleep all at the same time, and to track me after I departed.”

The passenger tensed. “You came here with him behind you?”

“No. I lost him before he could do so. But that does not preclude the use of more subtle means to engage in pursuit.”

“He’s a thug,” the passenger said. “Plain and simple. His talents make him good at destruction and little else. He’s a beast to be prodded and directed.”

There was silence for a moment. “It amazes me,” Grey Cloak said then, “that an idiot such as you survived crossing the wizard once.”

Aha. Interesting. The passenger, at least, was someone I’d seen before. He’d walked away from it, too. Most of the individuals I’d faced hadn’t done that—which bothered me a hell of a lot, at times—but even so, there’d been more than a couple, and the passenger could be any number of them. That did narrow it down considerably from the several billion possibilities I’d had a moment before, though.

And I felt something of a chill at Grey Cloak’s words. He was more aware of his surroundings than anyone running on five simple senses should be, and he was a thinker. That’s never a good quality in an enemy. A smart foe doesn’t have to be stronger than you, doesn’t have to be faster, and doesn’t even really have to be there to be a lethal threat. Hell, if that car bomb hadn’t been set off early, he’d have cooked Murphy and me both, and I would have died without even knowing he existed.

“To be honest, I’m surprised the wizard lived the night,” the passenger said. “It doesn’t matter, either way. If we’d killed him, we could have claimed credit for his demise and it would have served our purpose. Now we let him rampage over the Skavis, and it does nothing but help.”

“Unless,” Grey Cloak said sourly, “he happens to rampage over us as well.”

They were both quiet for a moment. Then the passenger said, “At least one thing is accomplished. He’s interested in stopping the culling.”

“Oh, yes,” Grey Cloak said. “You’ve gotten his attention. The question, of course, is whether or not he will be as cooperative as you seem to believe.”

“With a gathering of female wizardlings at risk? Oh, yes. He won’t be able to help himself. Now that he knows what the Skavis is up to, Dresden will be falling all over himself to protect them.”

Aha. The Skavis. And they were maneuvering me to kick his ass.

Finally, something useful.

“Will he strike at the kine soon?” Grey Cloak asked, referring to the Skavis, I presumed.

“Not yet. It isn’t his style. He’ll wait a day or two before moving again. He wants them to suffer, waiting for him.”

“Mmmm,” Grey Cloak said. “I normally think the Skavis’s tastes repulsive, but in this particular instance, I suspect his might intersect with my own. Anticipation makes them taste sweeter.”

“Oh, of course, by all means,” the passenger said sourly. “Throw away everything we might achieve in order to indulge your sweet tooth.”

Grey Cloak let out a low chuckle. “Alas, not yet. I hardly think the Circle would react well to such a course. Speaking of which, how does your own endeavor fare?”

“Less than well,” the passenger said. “He isn’t talking to me.”

“Did you really expect him to?”

The passenger shrugged. “He is family. But that’s of no matter. I’ll find them in time, whether he cooperates or not.”

“For your sake, I hope so,” Grey Cloak said. “The Circle has asked me for a progress report.”

The passenger shifted uneasily. “Have they. What are you going to tell them?”

“The truth.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“On the contrary,” Grey Cloak said.

“They react badly to incompetence,” the passenger said.

“And murderously to deception.”

The passenger took another long drag on his cigarette and cursed again. Then he said, “No help for it, then.”

“There is no need to soil yourself. We are not yet past our deadline, and they do not destroy tools that may still be of use.”

The passenger let out a nasty laugh. “They’re hard but fair?”

“They’re hard,” Grey Cloak replied.

“If necessary,” the passenger said, “we can remove him. We have the resources for it. I could always—”

“I believe it premature unless he proves more threatening than he has been thus far,” Grey Cloak said. “I expect the Circle would agree.”

“When do I meet them?” the passenger asked. “Face-to-face.”

“That is not my decision. I am a liaison. Nothing more.” He shrugged. “But, should this project proceed, I suspect they will desire an interview.”

“I’ll succeed,” the passenger said darkly. “He can’t have taken them far.”

“Then I suggest you get moving,” Grey Cloak said. “Before the Skavis beats you to the prize.”

“Beats us,” the passenger said.

I could hear a faint smile touch Grey Cloak’s voice. “Of course.”

There was a smoldering silence, and then the passenger shoved the door open, exited the car, and left without a further word.

Grey Cloak watched him until he’d vanished into the night. Then he got out of the car. Insubstantial, I willed myself forward into the vehicle and looked. The steering column had been cracked open, the vehicle hot-wired.

I was torn for a second, which of the two to follow. The passenger was trying to get information out of someone. That could mean that he had a prisoner somewhere he was interrogating. On the other hand, it could just as likely mean that no matter how many drinks he poured, he couldn’t get an informant to open up on a given topic. I also knew that he had confronted me before at some point—which was a great deal more than I knew about Grey Cloak.

He was something very different. He had tried to kill me a couple of times already, and was apparently responsible for at least some of the recent deaths. He was smart, and was connected to some kind of shady group called “the Circle.” Could this be the reality of my heretofore theoretical Black Council?

He was walking away from the car now, my spell’s anchor, and growing rapidly hazier as he walked away. If I didn’t pursue him closely, he’d vanish into the vastness of the city.

Whoever the passenger had been, I had apparently sent him running once already. If I’d done it once, I could do it again.

Grey Cloak, then.

I pressed in close to Grey Cloak, focusing to keep the spell clearly fixed, and followed him. He walked several blocks, turned down a sharp alley, and then descended a flight of stairs that ended at a boarded-over doorway to what must have originally been a basement apartment like my own. He glanced around, tugged down a chain that looked like it had rusted flat to the wall beside the door, and opened it, disappearing within.

Crap. If this place had a threshold on it, I’d never be able to follow him inside. I’d just bang my metaphysical head against the doorway like a bird hitting a windshield. Never mind that if it had the proper kinds of wards, they could conceivably disintegrate my spiritual self, or at least inflict some fairly horrible psychic damage. I could wind up on the floor of my lab, drooling, transformed from professional wizard into unemployed vegetable.

Screw it. You don’t do a job like mine by running away at any hint of danger.

I steeled myself and willed myself forward, following Grey Cloak.

Chapter Fifteen

No threshold, which was good. No wards, which was even better. Grey Cloak hadn’t entered a living area—he’d entered Undertown.

Chicago is an old city—at least by American standards. It has been standing, in one form or another, since the French and Indian War, before the United States even existed. Being as Chicago is basically one giant swamp, from a strictly geographic point of view, buildings tended to slowly settle into the earth over years and years. The old wooden streets did the same, and new streets had to be built atop them in successive layers.

Wherever the ground isn’t slow-motion mud, there’s solid rock. Tunnels and cave systems riddle the area. The Manhattan Project had been housed briefly in such tunnels, before it got relocated to the middle of nowhere. Someone in the government had shown unaccountably good judgment in considering the notion that developing a freaking nuclear weapon smack in the middle of America’s second-largest city qualified as a Bad Idea.

All of that had left behind an enormous labyrinth of passages, caves, half-collapsed old buildings, and crumbling tunnels seemingly ready to come thundering down at any moment. It was dark, human beings rarely went there, and as a result, Undertown had become a home, shelter, and hiding place to all kinds of nasty things—things no mortal, not even a wizard, had ever seen. Some of those things, in turn, had expanded some of the tunnels and caves, establishing jealously protected territories that never saw the face of the sun, never heard the whisper of wind. It’s dark, close, cold, and intensely creepy down there. The fact that it was inhabited by things that had no love for mankind and potential radioactivity to boot didn’t do much to boost its tourism industry.

Grey Cloak paced swiftly through a crack in the back wall of the building and into Undertown’s tunnels. He grew even more indistinct as he did. I had to stay closer to him, and it cost me an increasingly greater effort of will to do so. Little Chicago hadn’t accurately modeled Undertown, partly because there were no maps to be had of the place, and because taking samples to incorporate into the model would have been an act just shy of active suicide. Mostly, though, it hadn’t happened because I had never considered doing so.

Through the translucent veil of earth and stone and brick, I could still see the real me standing over the city. My hand was still held out, but my fingers were trembling, and sweat beaded my forehead. Odd that I couldn’t feel the strain on my body from here. I hadn’t anticipated that. It was entirely possible that I might have continued on without ever realizing what the effort was costing me. It could kill my physical body, leaving me…

I don’t know what. It might kill me outright. It might kill my body while stranding my mind here. It might bind my awareness into place like some sort of pathetic ghost.

Get tough, Dresden. You didn’t take up this career to run at the first hint of fatigue.

I kept going—but all the same, I looked up to check on myself as often as I could.

Grey Cloak was not long in reaching his goal. He found a narrow cleft in a rock wall, slipped inside it, and then pressed his hands and feet against either wall on the inside of the cleft and climbed up it with rapid precision. Eight or nine feet up, it opened into a room with three walls of brick and one of earth—a partially collapsed basement, I assumed. There were a few creature comforts in it—an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag, a lantern, a miniature barbecue next to a heavy paper bag of charcoal, and several cardboard boxes that contained supplies.

Grey Cloak slipped a heavy grate over the hole he’d just climbed up, and weighted it down with several stones the size of cinder blocks. Then he opened a box, unwrapped a pair of those meal-replacement bars that people use to punish themselves when they think they’re overweight, ate them, and emptied a plastic bottle of water. Critical information, there. Glad I was risking my metaphysical neck to pick up vital clues like this.

I checked up over my shoulder. My face had gone white and ran with sweat.

I expected Grey Cloak to turn in, but instead he turned the lantern down low, opened a second box, withdrew a plaque the size of a dinner plate, and laid it down on the floor. It was a simple wooden base, inset with a ring of some reddish metal, probably copper.

Grey Cloak pressed a fingernail against one of his gums, and when he withdrew it his fingertip glistened with blood that looked far more solid and real than the person it had come from. He touched it to the circle and began a low chant I did not recognize.

A faint mist swirled up within the copper circle, and through the spell I could see the raw magic forming itself into a pattern, a vortex that vanished beneath the plaque.

A second later, the mist resolved itself into a figure, in miniature, a vaguely humanoid shape wearing a heavy cloak and cowl that hid any possible details of appearance.

Except that I’d seen him before—or at least someone who dressed exactly like him.

The last time I’d seen Cowl, he’d been caught in the unbelievably savage backlash of an enormous power-summoning spell called a Darkhallow. It would have been impossible for the man to have survived that spell. There was no way, no way in hell that he’d lived through it. This couldn’t be the same person.

Could it?

Surely it had to be someone else. The Ringwraith look was hardly uncommon among those who fancied themselves dark wizards of one kind or another, after all. It could just as easily be someone else entirely, someone not at all connected to Cowl or my theoretical Black Council.

On the other hand, Cowl had been the person whose actions had tipped me off to the possibility of the Black Council to begin with. Could he have been a part of the Circle that Grey Cloak had mentioned? After all, I dropped a freaking car onto Cowl’s head, and he’d hardly blinked at it. If he’d been that well protected, could he have survived the wild energies of the disintegrating Darkhallow?

Worse, what if he hadn’t? What if he was one of a set of people just as crazy and dangerous as he had been?

I started feeling even more nervous.

“My lord,” Grey Cloak said, bowing his head. He left it that way.

There was a long moment of silence before Cowl spoke. Then he said, “You have failed.”

“I have not yet succeeded,” Grey Cloak replied with polite disagreement. “The curtain has not fallen.”

“And the fool with you?”

“Still ignorant, my lord. I can preserve or dispose of him as you see fit.” Grey Cloak took a deep breath and said, “He has gotten the wizard involved. There is some sort of vendetta between them, it would seem.”

The little mist figure made a hissing sound. “The fool. There is not enough profit in Dresden’s death to jeopardize the operation.”

“He did not consult me on the matter, my lord,” Grey Cloak said with another bow of his head. “Had he done so, I would have dissuaded him.”

“And what followed?”

“I attempted to remove him along with the last of the culling.”

“Dresden interfered?”

“Yes.”

Cowl hissed. “This changes matters. What precautions have you taken?”

“I was not followed in flesh, my lord; of that I am certain.”

Cowl held up a miniature hand for silence, a gesture that looked, somehow, stiff and pained. Then his hood panned around the room.

The figure’s gaze met mine, and hit me like a literal, physical blow, a swift jab in the chest.

“He is there!” Cowl snarled. The misty figure turned to face me and lifted both hands.

An odd, cold pressure hit me like a wave and pushed me back several feet before I could gather up my will and exert pressure in return, coming to a stop several feet away from Grey Cloak and Cowl.

Cowl’s hands clenched into claws. “Insolent child. I will rip your mind asunder.”

I snarled at him and planted my insubstantial feet. “Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!”

Cowl screamed at me. He spoke a word that resonated in my head and thundered through the hazy confines of Grey Cloak’s hideaway. Though I had braced myself to gather my will and pit it against his, his next strike hammered into me like a freight train. I could no more have resisted it than I could have stopped an ocean tide, and I felt it throwing me back and away.

In that last second before I was banished, I reached out with all the strength I had left, focusing on Grey Cloak, pouring everything I had into the spell to grant me a clear view of his face. I got it, for the barest instant, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, tall and lean and wolfish.

And then there was a geyser of scarlet pain, as if someone had seized both halves of my skull and torn it into two pieces.

Darkness followed.

Chapter Sixteen

I woke up with someone shaking my shoulder and someone else holding the back of my head against a running band saw.

“Harry,” Molly said. She was speaking through some kind of megaphone pressed directly against the side of my head, evidently while pounding my skull with the pointy end of a claw hammer. “Hey, boss, can you hear me?”

“Ow,” I said.

“What happened?”

“Ow,” I repeated, annoyed, as if it should have been explanation enough.

Molly let out an exasperated, worried sound. “Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

“No,” I croaked. “Aspirin. Some water. And stop screaming.”

“I’m barely whispering,” she said, and got up. Her combat boots slammed down on the floor in great Godzilla-sized rolls of thunder as she went up the stair steps.

“Bob,” I said, as soon as she was gone. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Bob said, keeping his voice down. “Either she’s been working out, or else she’s started using some kind of cosmetics on her arms. She still had some baby fat when she got the tattoos, and that’s always bound to make any kind of changes more noticeable, and—”

“Not her,” I growled, images of genuine mayhem floating through my agonized brain. “Me.”

“Oh,” Bob said. “Something hit the model, hard. There was an energy surge. Boom. The psychic backlash lit up your mental fusebox.”

“How bad?”

“Hard to say. How many fingers am I holding up?”

I sighed. “How bad is Little Chicago, Bob?”

“Oh. You’ve got to be more specific with this stuff, Harry. Could be worse. A week to fix, at most.”

I grunted. “Everything’s too loud and bright.” I tested my arms and legs. It hurt to move them, an odd and stretchy kind of pain, but they moved. “What happened, exactly?”

“You got lucky, is what. Something you met out there threw a big blast of psychic energy at you. But it had to come at you through your threshold and the model. The threshold weakened it, and Little Chicago shorted out when the blast hit, or…”

“Or what?” I asked.

“Or you wouldn’t have that headache,” Bob said. Then his eyelights winked out.

Molly’s boots clumped back down the stairs. She set down on the table a couple of fresh candles she’d brought, took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then very carefully used the same spell I did to light them.

The light speared into my brain and hurt. A lot. I flinched and threw my arm across my face.

“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I couldn’t even see you down here, and…”

“Next time just shove some pencils into my eyes,” I muttered a minute later.

“Sorry, Harry,” she said. “The aspirin?”

I held out a hand. She pressed a bottle of aspirin into it, and then pressed a cold glass into my other hand. I opened the aspirin with my teeth, dumped several into my mouth, and chugged them down with the water. Exhausted from this monumental effort, I lay on the floor and felt somewhat sorry for myself until, after several more mercilessly regular minutes, the painkiller started kicking in.

“Molly,” I said. “Were we supposed to have a lesson today?”

“No,” she said. “But Sergeant Murphy called our house, looking for you. She said you weren’t answering the phone. I thought I should come over and check on you.”

I grunted. “Good call. Any trouble getting through the wards?”

“No, not this time.”

“Good.” I opened my eyes slowly, until they started getting used to the glare of the candles. “Mouse. Mouse probably needs you to let him out.”

I heard a thumping sound, and squinted up the stairs. Mouse was crouched at the top, somehow managing to look concerned.

“I’m fine, you big pansy,” I said. “Go on.”

Molly started up the staircase, and then froze, staring back down at Little Chicago.

I squinted at her. Then rose and squinted at the table.

There was a hole melted in the metal table, not far from the spot where Grey Cloak had entered Undertown. One of the buildings was half slagged, the pewter melted into a messy runnel that coursed down the hole in the table like dribbled wax. There was a layer of black soot over everything within several inches of the hole in the table.

If the table hadn’t taken the magical blow, it would have been my head with the hole burned in it. That had been part of the purpose in creating Little Chicago—as a tool and a safety measure for working that kind of magic. All the same, it was a sobering thing to see.

I swallowed. Cowl. It had been Cowl. I’d heard the hatred and venom in his voice, the familiarity—and the overwhelming power of his magic had been unmistakable. He’d survived the Darkhallow. He was working with this “Circle,” who were almost certainly the Black Council, and there was some kind of larger mischief afoot in Chicago than I had suspected.

Oh, yeah. This whole situation was definitely starting to make me nervous.

I turned back to Molly and said, “Like I said. This thing is dangerous, grasshopper. So no playing with it until I say so. Got it?”

Molly swallowed. “Got it.”

“Go on. Take care of Mouse. Do me a favor, and call Murphy’s cell phone. Ask her to come here.”

“Do you need me to help you today?” she asked. “Like, go with you and stuff?”

I looked at her. Then at the table. Then back at her.

“Just asking,” Molly said defensively, and hurried on up the stairs.

By the time I’d gotten a shower, shaved, and climbed into fresh clothes, I felt almost human, though I still had a whale of a headache. Murphy arrived shortly after.

“What the hell happened to you?” she said, by way of greeting.

“Took a psychic head butt from Cowl,” I said.

Murphy greeted Mouse, scratching him under the chin with both hands. “What’s a Cowl?”

I grunted. “Right, forgot. When I met Cowl, you were in Hawaii with your boy toy.”

Murph gave me a smug smile. “Kincaid isn’t a boy toy. He’s a man toy. Definitely a man toy.”

Molly, lying on the floor with her feet up on the wall while she read, dropped her book onto her face. She fumbled it back into her hands and then tried to appear uninterested in the conversation. It would have been more convincing if she weren’t holding the book upside down.

“Long story short,” I told her. “Cowl is a wizard.”

“Human?” Murphy asked.

“Pretty sure, but I’ve never seen his face. All I know about him is that he’s stronger than me. He’s better than me. I stood up to him in a fair fight and got lucky enough to survive it.”

Murphy frowned. “Then how’d you beat him?”

“I stopped fighting fair and bumped his elbow while he was handling supernatural high explosives. Boom. I figured he was dead.”

Murphy sat down in one of my easy chairs, frowning. “Okay,” she said. “Better give me the whole thing.”

I rubbed at my aching head and started from where I’d left Murphy yesterday up until the end of my confrontation with Cowl. I left out some of the details about Elaine, and everything about the Circle. That was information too dangerous to spread around. Hell, I wish I didn’t know about it, myself.

“Skavis,” Murphy mused aloud. “I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

“It’s one of the greater Houses of the White Court,” I said, nodding. “Raith, Skavis, and Malvora are the big three.”

“Right,” Murphy said. “Psychic vampires. Raith feed on lust. Malvora on fear. How about these Skavis?”

“Pain,” I said. “Or despair, depending on how you translate some of the texts the Council has on them.”

“And suicide,” Murphy said, “is the ultimate expression of despair.”

“With a mind like that,” I said, “you could be a detective.”

We were quiet for a minute before Murphy said, “Let me see if I’ve got this right. This Skavis is in town. According to your ex, the private investigator Anna Ash hired, he’s killed women in four other cities, and he’s doing it again here—four so far, and Anna’s meant to be number five.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Meanwhile, this Grey Cloak, who works for Cowl, is in town doing more or less the same thing, but you don’t think he’s here to help the Skavis, whoever he is. But you do think he’s working against the killer, along with this Passenger, whoever he is. You think those two left the clues you found on the bodies to pull you into an investigation and take out the Skavis.”

“Even better,” I said. “I think I know who Passenger was.”

“Who?” Murphy asked.

“Beckitt,” I said. “It makes sense. He’s got his wife on the inside as an information source. He’s gone up against me before, and walked away, and I cost him years of his life and a lucrative share of a criminal empire. He’s got plenty of reasons not to like me. That’s who Grey Cloak the Malvora was talking to.”

“Whoa. Grey Cloak the Malvora? How’d you get that?”

“Because,” I said, “he talked about sharing some tastes with the Skavis, when it came to letting the prey anticipate what was coming before the kill. The Malvora do it so that their prey will feel more fear. The Skavis do it so that they’ll be more tired, be more ready to give in to despair.”

Murphy nodded, lips pursed. “And the White Court loves manipulating everything indirectly. Using others to do their dirty work for them.”

“Like using me to wipe out his Skavis competition,” I said.

“Which makes sense because Malvora and Skavis are rivals.”

“Right,” I said. “And I’m fairly confident in my guess. Just like I’m fairly confident that Beckitt must be our passenger.”

“That’s a sound theory, Dresden,” Murphy said.

“Thank you, I know.”

“But Beckitt died almost seven years ago. He was killed in prison.”

“I figure Beckitt must have made a deal with the Malvora and—” I blinked. “He what?”

“Died,” Murphy said. “There was a riot. Three prisoners were killed, several injured. He was one of them. As near as anyone can tell, he was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. A prisoner was wrestling for a guard’s gun. It discharged and killed Beckitt instantly.”

“Um,” I said, frowning. I hate it when the real world ignores a perfectly logical, rational assumption. “He faked it?”

She shook her head. “I looked into it, and I talked to the guard. There was an autopsy, an identification of the body from his family, a funeral, the whole nine yards. He’s dead, Harry.”

“Well, dammit,” I said, and rubbed at my headache. “He made sense.”

“That’s life,” Murphy said. “So this hidey-hole you found…”

“Long gone by now,” I said.

“Might be worth going anyway, if you take Krypto here with you.” She leaned down and planted a kiss on top of Mouse’s head. My dog gets more play than me, sheesh. “Maybe Grey Cloak the theoretical Malvora left a good scent behind.”

“Worth a shot, I guess,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure he’s going to be thorough enough to remove that, too.”

“Who goes around removing their scent from places?” Murphy asked.

“Vampires. They can track that way, just like Mouse.”

“Oh. Right.” Murphy sighed. “Another burned building.”

“Not—” I began.

“Not his fault!” Molly said.

“Not your fault,” Murphy said, “I know. But it’s going to look awfully odd. My car gets firebombed. A building less than a block away gets firebombed a few hours later.”

I grunted. “Same device?”

“What do you think?”

“Same device.”

Murphy nodded. “I’m sure it will be. It’s going to take them time to figure it out, though. Were you seen?”

“Me and about a million other people,” I said.

“That’s something, at least. But a lot of people are going to be asking questions before long. The sooner we get this thing put to bed, the better.”

I grimaced. “I shouldn’t have gone for the subtle maneuver last night. I should have smashed him to paste right there. I don’t have any way to find him now, and he’s aware that we’re looking.”

“Yeah, but Grey Cloak isn’t our first problem,” Murphy said. “He’s a sideshow. The Skavis is the real killer. Right?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Right. And we’ve got no clue who or where he is.”

Murphy frowned. “But he’s a vampire, right? I mean, you can tell if someone’s a vampire, can’t you?”

“It isn’t so simple with the White Court,” I said. “They hide themselves a lot better than any other breed. I had no idea what Thomas was when I met him. And you remember talking to Darby Crane.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get ‘vampire’ off him?”

“Mostly I got ‘player,’” Murphy said. “But you knew he was really Madrigal Raith.”

“I guessed,” I corrected her. “Probably because I unconsciously recognized the family resemblance to Lord Raith. That’s why I stopped you from touching him. There was no magical tip-off about it.” I frowned. “Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if they had some kind of ability to cloud their prey’s judgment. When Inari Raith tried to feed on me, even though I was in their freaking house, even though I knew she was a baby succubus, and in my room, it never really occurred to me that she might be dangerous to me, until it was too late.”

“Just like that never occurred to me about Crane,” Murphy said. “So the Skavis…he could be anyone.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not me,” I said. “I’m almost as sure he’s not you.”

“Are you sure you’re a professional investigator?”

“I sometimes wonder.”

“What about Thomas?” Murphy asked.

“He’s more of a hired thug than a shamus.”

Murphy glared.

It drew a little bit of a smile from me, but it faded quickly in the light of reality. “I left messages. Nothing yet.”

“That’s not what I meant, either,” Murphy said quietly. “Could he still be involved? Could he have been the passenger?”

“He wasn’t.”

Again, she held up a hand. “Harry. Is it possible?”

“Look, we know the killer is a Skavis.”

“We know what Grey Cloak thinks,” Murphy corrected me. “But you’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“That at least one of those women was killed in the throes of supernatural passion. Not amidst fear. Not amidst despair.”

I scowled at her.

“Is it physically possible, Harry? Possible. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I suppose,” I said quietly. “But Thomas isn’t Grey Cloak’s partner. What if…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“What if your passenger has him?” Murphy asked. “What if the ‘endeavor’ he’s talking about is pressing Thomas for some kind of information?”

I grimaced. “Thomas should have been in touch by now.”

“We’ve got a little time. Grey Cloak thought it would be another day or so before the Skavis moved again, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So far, you think he’s been smart about most things. Maybe he’s smart about that, too.”

“We can hope,” I said. “What did you find about Jessica Blanche?”

“Still working on it. I’ve got feelers out, but I’ll need to follow up with some legwork.”

I blew out a breath. “And I need to get in touch with Elaine and the Ordo. Maybe I can get Helen Beckitt to talk. And I can make some calls to other Wardens. Maybe someone’s heard something about recent White Court activities.”

Murphy rose. “Sounds like we have a plan.”

“If we repeat it often enough, maybe we’ll even believe it,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Seventeen

Ramirez’s contact number went to a restaurant his family ran in eastern Los Angeles. I left a message with someone whose English sounded like a second or third language. It took Ramirez only about ten minutes to call me back.

“White Court?” my fellow Warden said. “Can’t think as I’ve heard anything about them lately, Harry.”

“How about a professional wizard investigator?” I asked him. “Works out of Los Angeles.”

“Elaine Mallory?” he asked. “Tall, pretty, smart, and nearly as charming as myself?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “What do you know about her?”

“Far as I know, she’s straight,” he said. “Moved to town five or six years ago, college in San Diego, and working for an investigative agency out here. She’s got a decent grounding in thaumaturgy from somewhere, but when I ran her through the standard tests, she didn’t score quite high enough to be considered for Council membership.” He was quiet for a second, before saying, in a tone of forced cheer, “Unless we keep on losing people to the vamps, in which case I guess we might lower our standards.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “But you think she knows what she’s doing?”

“Well,” Ramirez drawled, “I hinted that she might want to advertise as something other than a ‘wizard,’ eventually. If we get the time to look away from the war, some hidebound dinosaur might take exception to someone claiming the title.”

I snorted. “Don’t call me a dinosaur. It isn’t fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?”

“Other than give me a ride right next to this big skinny lunatic? Mallory’s not stupid, and she’s done people some good out here,” Ramirez said. “Lost kids, especially. Couple of exorcisms I wouldn’t have had time to handle. Maybe she can be of some help to you. Though I’ve got one reservation about her.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Her taste in men. I keep asking her out, and she’s turned me down about a dozen times, now.”

“Shocking,” I said.

“I know,” Ramirez replied. “Makes me wonder how smart she could really be. Why?”

I gave him the brief on what I knew about the murders, and on what Elaine had told me about the other cities.

“Someone’s framing the Wardens,” he said.

“Looks that way. Sow seeds of distrust and all that.”

“Five cities. Bastards.” He paused to say something off the phone, and then told me, “Hang on. I’m pulling the file on recent White Court reports.”

I waited a few more minutes. Then he came back and said, “According to what we’ve heard out on this end, the White King has met with emissaries from the Council under a flag of truce, and declared a temporary cease-fire. He’s agreed to approach the Reds about sitting down to negotiate an end to the war.”

“I’ve met him,” I said. “Kissinger he ain’t. Gandhi, neither.”

“Yeah. Sorta makes you wonder what he’s getting out of the war ending, don’t it.”

I grunted. “There’s not a lot of love lost between the Reds and the Whites. A cease-fire won’t cost him anything. His people don’t get involved in the messy stuff anyway.”

Ramirez let out a thoughtful hum. “The way you tell it, looks like maybe not everybody in the White Court agrees with his take on the war.”

“They’re pretty factional. Triumvirate of major houses. Raith happens to be on top right now. If Raith is pushing for peace, it would be consistent for the other major houses to oppose it.”

“Gotta love those vampires. So arbitrarily contrary.”

“Say that five times fast,” I said.

He did, flawlessly, rolling the Rs as he went. “See there?” he said. “That’s why the ladies love me.”

“It’s not love, Carlos. It’s pity.”

“As long as the pants come off,” he said cheerfully. Then his voice turned more sober. “Dresden, I’ve been meaning to call you. Just…wanted to see how you were doing. You know. Since New Mexico.”

“I’m good,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh,” Ramirez said. He sounded skeptical.

“Listen,” I said. “Forget New Mexico. I’ve forgotten it. We need to move on, focus on what’s in front of us right now.”

“Sure,” he said, without conviction. “You want to fill in the Captain or should I?”

“Go ahead.”

“Will do,” he said. “You need any backup out there?”

“Why?” I asked. “You got nothing to pay attention to where you are?”

He sighed. “Yeah, well. All the same. If the Whites are trying to shut down the peace talks, I could pry a few of the boys loose to come help you boot some head.”

“Except I don’t yet know whose head it is or how to boot it,” I said.

“I know. But if you need help, it’s here.”

“Thanks.”

“Watch your ass, Dresden,” he said.

“I’d tell you to do the same, but you probably gaze at your own ass in admiration all the time anyway.”

“With an ass like mine? Who wouldn’t?” Ramirez said. “Vaya con Dios.”

“Happy trails.”

I hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair, rubbing at my still-aching head. I closed my eyes and tried to think for a minute. I thought about how much my head hurt, which was nonproductive.

“Harry?” Molly asked me.

“Hmmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Um…” She was quiet for a moment, as though thinking about her words before she spoke.

That got my attention.

“I’m just wondering why you were asking Warden Rodriguez about Elaine Mallory.”

I closed my eyes and tried thinking again.

“I mean, Sergeant Murphy said she was your ex. But you asked about her as if you didn’t know her.”

I mumbled something.

“So I figure that means that you do know her. And you wanted to know what Warden Rodriguez knew about her, without him knowing that you already knew her.” She took a deep breath and said, “You’re keeping secrets from the Wardens.”

I sighed. “For years, kid. Years and years.”

“But…I’m under the Doom of Damocles, and that means you are, too. This is the kind of thing that could make them decide to invoke it. So, um…why are you doing it?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, her tone cautiously diffident, “since I could get beheaded over this just as much as you can, it matters to me. And I think that maybe I deserve to know.”

I started to growl at her that she didn’t. I stopped myself because she had a point, dammit. Regardless of how inconvenient I thought it, she did have an undeniable right to ask me about it.

“I was an orphan,” I told her. “A little while after my magic came to me, I got adopted by a man named DuMorne. He’s the one who gave me most of my training. He adopted Elaine, too. We grew up together. Each other’s first love.”

Molly set her book aside and sat up, listening to me.

“DuMorne was a warlock himself. Black wizard as bad as they come. He planned on training us up to be his personal enforcers. Trained, strong wizards, under mental compulsion to be loyal to him. He nailed Elaine with it. I got suspicious and fought him. I killed him.”

Molly blinked. “But the First Law…”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s how I wound up living under the Doom of Damocles myself. Ebenezar McCoy mentored me. Saved my life.”

“The way you did for me,” she said quietly.

“Yeah.” I squinted at the empty fireplace. “Justin burned, and I thought Elaine did, too. Turned out years later that she had survived, and was in hiding.”

“And she never told you?” Molly demanded. “What a bitch.”

I gave the apprentice a lopsided smile. “The last time she’d seen me, I had been busy murdering the only thing like a real parent she’d ever had, and had apparently tried to kill her, too. It isn’t a simple situation, Molly.”

“But I still don’t get why you lied about her.”

“Because I had a bad time of it, coming out from under DuMorne’s corpse the way I did. If the Wardens knew that she’d been there too, and fled the Council rather than coming out to them…” I shrugged. “Looks like she’s managed to convince Ramirez that she doesn’t have enough power to be considered for the Council.”

“But she does?” Molly asked.

“She’s nearly as strong as I am,” I said quietly. “Makes up for it in grace. I’m not sure what would happen if the Wardens learned DuMorne had a second apprentice, but there would be trouble. I’m not going to make that choice for her.”

“In case I haven’t told you this before,” Molly said, “the Wardens are a fine bunch of assholes. Present company excluded.”

“There isn’t any easy way to do their job,” I said, before amending, “our job. Like I said, kid. Nothing’s simple.” I pushed myself slowly to my feet and found my keys and Mouse’s lead. “Come on,” I told her. “I’ll drop you off at your place.”

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to the Ordo,” I said. “Anna’s got them all holed up with Elaine.”

“Why don’t you just call them?”

“This is a sneak attack,” I said. “I don’t want to warn Helen Beckitt that I’m on the way. She’s got an angle in this; I’m sure of it. It’s easier to get people to talk if you get them off balance.”

Molly frowned at me. “You sure you don’t need my help?”

I paused to glance at her. Then at the bead bracelet on her wrist.

She clenched her jaw, took off the bracelet, and held it up with defiant determination, staring at the beads. Three minutes and two beads later, she gave it up, gasping and sweating at the effort. She looked bitterly frustrated and disappointed.

“Nothing’s simple,” I told her quietly, and put the bracelet back on her wrist for her. “And nothing much is easy, either. Be patient. Give it time.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said, and stomped out to the car, leading Mouse.

She was wrong, of course. It wasn’t easy.

What I really wanted to do was get down a little food and go to bed until my head felt better. That wasn’t an option for me.

Whoever the Skavis was, and whatever he was up to, there wasn’t a lot of time to figure it out and stop him before he added another victim to his tally.

Chapter Eighteen

The Amber Inn is a rarity in downtown Chicago: a reasonably priced hotel. It isn’t large or particularly fancy, and it wasn’t designed by an architect with three names. No one infamous has owned it, lived in it, or been machine-gunned to death there. Thus, stripped of anything like a good excuse to stick it to the customer, one needn’t schedule a visit to a loan officer in tandem with making a reservation, even though the Amber Inn is fairly central to Chicago.

It was the kind of place I always tried to pick on the occasions my work had taken me to another town for a client’s business. My job, in cases like that, is investigating, not checking out four-star hotels. The most important thing was to be close to where I would be working and that I not run up an unmanageable bill. I’ve heard that some private investigators make it a point to stay somewhere nice at the client’s expense, but it always seemed unprofessional to me, and a bad way to conduct business in the long term. It stood to reason that Elaine would have chosen it for similar reasons.

I didn’t ask after her at the desk. I didn’t need to. I just told Mouse, “Find ’em.”

Mouse sniffed the air and we started walking down halls like we owned the place. That’s always important, the confidence. It keeps people from getting suspicious about why you’re stalking around the building, and even when it doesn’t deter them, it makes them respond more cautiously.

Mouse finally stopped at a door, and I extended my hand, half closing my eyes, feeling for magic. There was a ward over the door. It wasn’t terribly fancy or solid—it couldn’t be, without a threshold to use as a foundation—but it was exceedingly well crafted and I was sure it was Elaine’s work. The spell looked like it would release only a tiny bit of energy, probably a pulse of light or some kind of audible sound that would alert her to company.

I debated, for a moment, making a Big Bad Wolf entrance, and decided against it. It wouldn’t be terribly polite to Elaine, and the only person I wanted to scare was Helen Beckitt, assuming she was there. Besides which, tipped off by her alarm and wary about a murderer, Elaine might well send a lightning bolt through the doorway before she had a chance to see who was there. I knocked.

Nothing changed, but my instincts warned me that someone was on the other side of the door—not magic, just the sudden absence of the simple, solitary feel one gets when standing alone in an empty house.

I sensed a little stirring of the magic in the ward. Then the door rattled and swung open, revealing Elaine standing on the other side, one corner of her mouth tilted up in amusement.

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “Not a ward. A peephole.”

“Sometimes a girl’s got to improvise,” she said. “You look awful.”

“Long night.”

“It must have been. I thought you were going to call.”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

She pursed her lips in speculation. “Were you?” I saw the wheels turning in her head for a moment, and then she nodded once and lowered her voice. “Which one?”

“Beckitt,” I murmured back.

“She’s here.”

I nodded, and she opened the door the rest of the way at the same time I stepped through it. She slipped to one side as I walked briskly into the room. It was clean, plain, a kind of minisuite with a queen bed, a couch, and a coffee table.

Priscilla sat on the couch in a pea green turtleneck and a scratchy-looking wool skirt, and scowled at me in disapproval of Dickensian proportion. Abby and Toto occupied the floor, where Toto was engaged in mortal combat with a white athletic sock he had pulled partway from the foot of his plump little owner, who sat looking distracted and distant. Anna sat on the edge of the bed, dark eyes tired, bloodshot, and serious, while Helen stood by the window again, holding the curtain aside just enough to gaze out.

Toto promptly abandoned the field of battle upon spying Mouse, and walked in a little nervous circle within a couple of inches of Abby’s lap. Mouse went over to trade sniffs with the little dog, and promptly settled down to begin grooming Toto with long licks.

“Ladies,” I said, then after a brief pause added, “Mrs. Beckitt.”

She didn’t look at me. She just smiled and stared out the window. “Yes, Mister Dresden?”

“What do you know?” I asked her.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“You know something about this, and you aren’t talking. Spill.”

“I can’t imagine what you mean,” she said.

Anna Ash rose and frowned. “Mister Dresden, surely you aren’t accusing Helen of being involved in this business?”

“I’m pretty sure I am,” I said. “Do they know about the first time we met, Helen? Have you told them?”

That drew looks from everyone in the room.

“Helen?” Abby said after a moment. “What is he talking about?”

“Go ahead, Mister Dresden,” Helen said, very faint, very dry amusement giving her monotone a little life. “I wouldn’t dream of cheating you of the satisfaction of looking down at one less righteous than yourself.”

“What is she talking about?” Priscilla demanded. She glared at me, probably with her mind already made up as to what she was going to think of me, regardless of what I said.

It’s nice to know that some things in life are consistent, because Beckitt was disappointing me here. Her associates didn’t know about her past. By revealing it, I was probably about to destroy whatever life she’d built for herself since she regained her freedom—something that would be a terrible injury to most people in her circumstances. She’d lost her daughter years ago, lost her husband shortly after, had been sent to prison and permanently stained with the guilt of her crimes.

I had expected her to attempt to evade me, to protest her innocence or accuse me of lying. Failing that, I thought the next most likely reaction would be for her to panic and flee, or else panic and shut her mouth entirely. Depending on how badly she thought I was about to screw up her life, it was even possible that she might produce a weapon and attempt to murder me.

Instead, she just stood there, apparently unafraid, a quiet little smile hovering on her lips, unruffled, like some nascent saint before the man who was about to martyr her.

None of which added up. I hate it when things don’t add up. But now that I’d forced the confrontation, here in front of the rest of the Ordo, I’d destroy any credibility I had if I backed out, which is what the whole mess was about: someone attempting to destroy the Council’s credibility.

I backed off on the aggression and tried to make myself sound polite and compassionate, yet serious. “Did any of you know that Ms. Beckitt is a felon?”

Priscilla’s eyes grew wide behind her glasses. She looked from me to Helen to Anna. Helen continued watching out the window, that same little smile in place.

Anna was the first to speak. “No,” she said, frowning. “She hasn’t told us that.”

Beckitt might as well have been deaf, for all the reaction she showed.

“She was a part of a cult headed up by a sorcerer I had to take down several years ago,” I said. I delivered it flat, without emphasis. “She participated in ritual magic that created a drug that hurt a lot of people, and helped out with other rites that murdered the sorcerer’s criminal rivals.”

There was a shocked silence. “B-b-but…” Abby stammered. “But that’s the First Law. The First Law.”

“Helen? Is that true?”

“Not quite,” Helen said. “He didn’t mention that the specific rituals used were sexual in nature.” She touched her tongue to her upper lip. “Strike that. Depraved and indiscriminately sexual in nature.”

Priscilla stared at Helen. “For God’s sake, Helen. Why?”

Beckitt looked away from the window for the first time since I’d arrived, and the emptiness in her eyes was replaced with an impossibly remote, cold fury. Her voice lowered to a murmur as hard as a sheet of glacial ice. “I had reason to do so.”

I didn’t meet that frozen gaze. I didn’t want to see what was behind it. “You’ve got a record, Mrs. Beckitt. You’ve helped in supernatural murders before. Maybe you’re doing it again.”

She shrugged, her expression becoming lifeless again. “And maybe I’m not.”

“Are you?” I said.

She went back to staring out the window. “What’s the point in answering, Warden? It’s obvious that you’ve already tried and convicted me. If I tell you I am involved, you will believe me guilty. If I tell you I am not involved, you will believe me guilty. The only thing I can do is deny you your precious moral justification.” She lifted a hand to her lips and pantomimed turning a key and throwing it away.

Silence fell. Anna got up and walked to Beckitt. Anna put a hand on her shoulder, and tugged gently until the other woman turned around.

“Don’t answer,” Anna said quietly. “There’s no need for it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“And I,” Priscilla said.

“Of course you aren’t involved,” Abby said.

Beckitt looked around the room at each of them in turn. Her mouth quivered for an instant, and her eyes glistened. She blinked them several times, but a single tear escaped and coursed over her cheekbone. She nodded to the Ordo once, and turned back to the window.

Instinct told me that this was not the reaction of a guilty woman—and no one could put on an act that good.

Beckitt wasn’t involved. I was sure of it—now.

Dammit.

Detectives are supposed to learn things. All I’d done so far was to unlearn them, and the clock kept right on ticking.

Priscilla turned to me, her eyes narrowed. “Is there anything else of which you’d like to accuse us? Any other presumptuous bigotry you’d care to share?” She built her glare back up into the terawatt range, just for me.

It made me feel special. “Look,” I said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Oh?” Priscilla said, scorn in her voice. “Is that why all those people have been disappearing in the company of a man fitting your description?” I started to answer, but she cut me off. “Not that I expect you to tell us the truth, unless it serves whatever purpose you truly have in mind.”

I carefully did not lose my temper and barbecue her stupid face right then and there. “Angels weep when someone so perceptive, warmhearted, and loving turns cynical, Priscilla.”

“Harry.” Elaine sighed beside me. I glanced at her. She met my eyes for a moment, and though her lips didn’t move, I heard her voice quite distinctly. God knows she makes a fine target of herself, but shooting off your mouth isn’t helping.

I blinked at her a couple of times, and then smiled a little. The communion spell between us was an old one, but once upon a time we’d used it every day. School had been boring as hell, and it beat passing notes. It had also been handy when we’d been staying up past curfew and didn’t want DuMorne to know we were awake.

I put a gentle effort of will behind words, and sent them to Elaine. God, I’d forgotten all about this. I haven’t done it since I was sixteen.

Elaine showed me her smile—the swift, rare one, the one where her mouth widened and white teeth gleamed and her eyes took on golden highlights. Neither have I. Her expression sobered as she glanced at Priscilla, then back to me. Be gentle, Harry. They’re hurting.

I frowned at her. What?

She shook her head. Look around you.

I did, going more slowly this time. My focus on confronting Beckitt had prevented me from noticing what else was going on. The room was thick with tension and something heavy and bitter. Grief?

Then I saw what wasn’t there. “Where’s the little brunette?”

“Her name,” Priscilla almost snarled, “was Olivia.”

I arched a brow and glanced at Elaine. “Was?”

“When we called her last night, she was all right,” she told me. “When we arrived to pick her up, there was no answer at her door, and no one in her apartment.”

“Then how do you know…?”

Elaine folded her arms, her expression neutral. “There are several security cameras around the building, and outside. One of them showed her leaving with a very pale, dark-haired man.”

I grunted. “How’d you get to the security footage?”

Elaine gave me a smile that bared a gratuitous number of teeth. “I said pretty please.”

I nodded, getting it. “You can get more with a kind word and well-applied kinetomancy than with just a kind word.”

“The security guard was a smug little twit,” she said. “Bruises fade.”

She produced a couple of sheets of printer paper bearing grainy black-and-white images. Indeed, I recognized Olivia and her dancer’s leotard, even from behind, which was a good angle for her. There was a man walking next to her. He looked to be maybe a tiny bit shy of six feet, had dark, glossy, shoulder-length black hair, and was dressed in jeans and a black tee. I could see his profile in one of the pictures, his head turned toward Olivia.

It was my brother.

It was Thomas.

Chapter Nineteen

“Are you sure?” Anna Ash asked Elaine. “Wouldn’t we be better off at one of our apartments? They’re all warded….”

Elaine shook her head firmly. “The killer knows where you each live. He doesn’t know about this place. Stay here, stay quiet, stay together. Our killer hasn’t attacked anyone who wasn’t alone.”

“And my dog will let you know if there’s anything you need to worry about,” I added. “He’ll probably sit on anyone who tries to mess with you, but if he does a Lassie act at you and wants you to leave, go with him—everyone, stay together and get somewhere public.”

Mouse nudged his head under Anna’s hand and wagged his tail. Toto dutifully followed Mouse, walking around Anna’s ankles looking up at her until she petted him, too. That got a smile out of her, at least. “If we leave, how will we get in touch with you?”

“I’ll find you.”

“Just like you found the killer?” Priscilla spat.

I ignored her with lofty dignity.

Elaine didn’t.

She stepped up to Priscilla and loomed over her. “You ungrateful, insufferable, venomous little twit. Shut your mouth. This man is trying to protect you, just like I am. I will thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head while we do our job.”

Priscilla’s face flushed. “We aren’t paying you to insult or demean us.”

“You aren’t paying me enough to get me to tolerate your rudeness, either,” Elaine said. “Keep it up and you won’t have to worry about my bill. In fact, I suspect that in short order you’ll stop worrying about absolutely everything.”

“Is that a threat?” Priscilla snapped.

Elaine put a fist on her hip. “It’s a fact, bitch.”

Anna stepped in. “Priscilla, please. You aren’t the one paying her. I am. We need her. She’s the professional. If she thinks it’s smart to cooperate with Mister Dresden, that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re going to treat them with professional respect. If you can’t manage courtesy, try silence.”

Priscilla narrowed her eyes at Anna, then folded her arms and looked away in capitulation.

Elaine nodded at Anna and said, “I’m not sure how long we’ll be gone. I’ll get word to you as soon as I have a better idea.”

“Thank you, Miss Mallory.” After a beat she hurried to add, “And thank you, Mister Dresden.”

“Stay together,” I said, and Elaine and I left.

We walked together to the parking lot, and on the way Elaine said, “Tell me you’ve gotten a new car.”

We rounded a corner, and there was the Beetle in all its battle-scarred glory.

“I like this one,” I told her, and opened the door for her.

“You redid the interior,” she said as I got in and started the car.

“Demons ate the old one.”

Elaine began to laugh, but then blinked at me. “You’re being literal?”

“Uh-huh. Fungus demons. Right down to the metal.”

“Good God, you live a glamorous life,” she said.

“Elaine,” I said. “I thought you told me you were going to lie low until you were ready to come out to the Council.”

The friendly, teasing expression on her face faded into neutrality. “Is this relevant right now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “If we’re going after him together, yes, it is. I need to know.”

She frowned at me, and then shrugged. “I had to do something. There were people all around me getting hurt. Being used. Living scared. So I borrowed a page from your book.”

“And you lied to the Warden who came to check up on you.”

“You say that like you’ve always told the Wardens everything.”

“Elaine…” I began.

She shook her head. “Harry, I know you. I trust you. But I don’t trust the Council and I doubt I ever will. I certainly did not care to be impressed into service as a brand-new foot soldier to fight their war with the vampires—which I would have been, if I had put my full effort into Ramirez’s tests.”

We looked at each other for a moment, and I said, “Please? I’ll go with you. I’ll support you before the Council.”

She put one of her warm, soft hands over mine, and spoke in a quiet, firm voice. “No, Harry. I won’t allow those men to direct the course of my life. I won’t allow them to choose if I will or will not live—or choose how.”

I sighed. “You could do so much good.”

“I thought that’s what I was doing here,” she pointed out. “Helping people. Doing good.”

She had a point. “The Wardens would freak out if you went to them now, anyway,” I said, “and revealed that you’d been hiding your talents from them.”

“Yes,” she said. “They would.”

“Dammit,” I said. “We could use your help.”

“I don’t doubt it,” she said. Her eyes hardened and her voice went suddenly cold. “But I will not be used. Not by anyone. Never again.”

I blinked and turned to her.

She lifted her chin slightly, green eyes bright with unfallen tears. “No, Harry.”

I turned my hand under hers, and we intertwined our fingers with the careless ease of an old habit. “Elaine. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push. I hadn’t realized…”

She blinked several times and looked away from me. “No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m going all neurotic on you, here. I don’t mean to be.” She stared out the window at the city. “After you killed DuMorne, I spent a year having a nightmare. The same one, every single night. I was sure that it was true. That he was still alive. That he was coming for me.”

“He wasn’t,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “I saw him die just as you did. But I was so afraid…” She shook her head. “I ran to the Summer Court because of it. I ran, Harry. I couldn’t face it.”

“Is that what you’re doing, going public?” I asked. “Facing your past?”

“I have to,” she said, her voice growing firmer. “It scares the crap out of me, all the time. And over the years…I’ve had problems with crowds. With enclosed spaces. With heights. With wide-open spaces. Night terrors. Panic attacks. Paranoia. God, sometimes it seems like there’s nothing I haven’t had a phobia about.”

What Elaine had described was about what I would have expected from someone whose mind had been invaded by an outside will. Magic can get you into someone’s head, but if you decide to start redecorating to your tastes, there is no way to avoid inflicting damage to their psyche. Depending upon several factors, someone who has been put under that kind of control can be left twitchy and erratic at best—and at worst, totally catatonic or completely dysfunctional.

And there was the utterly normal element of emotional pain to consider, too. Elaine had, in the course of a single evening, lost absolutely everything she loved. Her boyfriend. Her adopted father. Her home.

Losing a home means a lot more to an orphan than it does to most other people. I’m in a position to know. Like me, Elaine had spent most of her childhood bouncing around from one foster home to another, one state-run orphanage to another. Like me, being given a real home, a real house, a real father figure had been a desperate dream come true. It had been a terrible loss to me, and Justin hadn’t gotten any hooks into my head. For Elaine, that series of events had been infinitely more painful, infinitely more frightening.

“I let fear control one part of my life,” Elaine said, “and it took root and started growing. I had to get involved, Harry. I have to use what I know to change things. If I don’t, then all I’ll ever be is DuMorne’s tool. His terrified little weapon. I will not allow anyone to take control of my life away from me. I can’t.” She shrugged. “And I can’t stand by and do nothing, either. I threw the tests. I don’t regret it. I sure as hell am not going to apologize for it—not to you or to anyone.”

I grunted.

“Well?” she asked.

“I think I get it,” I said.

“Are you willing to work with me, then?”

I squeezed her hand a little. “Of course.”

The tension in her shoulders eased, and she squeezed my hand back. “My turn,” she said.

“Your turn?”

She nodded. “You recognized the killer when you looked at the photo.”

“What?” I said. “No, I didn’t.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Harry. It’s me.”

I sighed. “Yeah, well.”

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Thomas Raith,” I said. “White Court.”

“How do you know him?”

“He’s…” Not many people knew that Thomas was my brother. It was safer for both of us to keep that information limited. “He’s a friend. Someone I trust.”

“Trust,” Elaine said quietly. “I notice you use the present tense.”

“Thomas isn’t hurting anyone,” I said.

“He’s a vampire, Harry. He hurts someone every time he feeds.”

He’d been doing quite a bit of that lately. “I know Thomas,” I maintained. “He isn’t the killer.”

Elaine frowned. “Treachery hurts, Harry. Believe me, I know.”

“Nothing has proved Thomas is behind these killings,” I said. “It could be someone else, or something else, masquerading as him. It isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of shapeshifting things around that could do it.”

“Little bit of a reach, though,” Elaine said. She nodded at the photos, where I’d set them on the dashboard. “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

“Sooner or later,” I said, “I’ll have a case where everything is simple. But I don’t think this one is it.”

Elaine exhaled slowly, studying my face. “You care about him.”

No point in denying that. “Yeah.”

“He trusts you in return?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why hasn’t he explained himself to you?” she asked. “Why hasn’t he gotten in touch with you?”

“I don’t know. But I know he’s not a killer.”

She nodded slowly. “But there he is, with Olivia.”

“Yeah.”

“Then I think you should agree with me that we need to find him.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you?”

“Yep.”

“All right, then,” she said, and put on her seat belt. “We’ll find him. We’ll talk to him. I’ll try to keep an open mind.” She looked at me. “But if it turns out to be him, Harry, he’s got to be stopped—and I expect you to help me.”

“If it turns out to be him,” I said, “he’d want me to.”

Chapter Twenty

I’ve been working as a detective in Chicago for a while now, and there’s one thing you do a lot more than almost anything else: You find things that get lost. I’d first designed my tracking spell to catch up to the house keys I kept losing when I was about fourteen. I’d used it a few thousand times, now. Sometimes, it had helped me find things I really didn’t want. Mostly, it helped me get into trouble.

This time, I was fairly sure it would do both.

I could have used my blood to trace Thomas’s, probably, but I could use my silver pentacle amulet too. My mother had given me the one I habitually wore, and she’d given one to Thomas, too. I knew that he wore it just as habitually as I wore mine, and unless someone had taken it away from him, he’d be wearing it now.

So I revved up the spell, hung the amulet from the rearview mirror of the Blue Beetle, and headed out onto the Chicago streets. I kept an eye on my amulet, which leaned slightly, drawn as if by a light magnetic field toward Thomas’s amulet. That wasn’t a perfect way to track something down—the spell had no concern for streets and traffic flow, for example—but I’d been finding things like this for a good while, and I piloted the Beetle through the maze of buildings and one-way streets that make up the fair city.

Elaine watched me in silence the whole while. I knew that she was wondering what I had used to lock on to our apparent abductor/murderer. She didn’t push, though. She just settled down and trusted me.

When I finally parked the car and got out, I brought my amulet with me and stared grimly at the necklace, which continued to lean steadily to the east, toward the Burnham Harbor piers that stretched out over Lake Michigan. An entire cove had been built into the lakeshore and decked out with an array of docks for dozens and dozens of small commercial boats, pleasure craft, and yachts.

“Boats,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be boats?”

“What’s wrong with boats?” Elaine asked.

“I haven’t had a good time on boats,” I said. “In fact, I haven’t had a good time this close to the lake in general.”

“It smells like dead fish and motor oil,” Elaine noted.

“You never did like my cologne.” I got my staff out of the car. “You need a big stick.”

Elaine smiled sweetly at me, and drew out a heavy chain from her purse. She held both ends in one fist, leaving a doubled length of heavy metal links about two feet long. Each of the links glittered with veins of what might have been copper, forming sinuous text. “You’re a prisoner to tradition, big guy. You should learn to be a little more flexible.”

“Careful. If you tell me you’ve got bracelets and a magic lariat in there, I may lose control of my sexual impulses.”

Elaine snorted. “You can’t lose what you’ve never had.” She glanced up at me. “Like the new shield, by the way.”

“Yeah. Sexy, huh?”

“Complex,” she replied. “Balanced. Strong. Sophisticated. I’m not sure I could have made a focus for something like that. It took real skill, Harry.”

I felt myself actually blush, absurdly pleased by the compliment. “Well, it isn’t perfect. It takes a lot more juice than the old shield did. But I figured getting tired faster is far preferable to getting dead faster.”

“Seems reasonable,” she said, and squinted at the docks. “Can you tell which boat it is?”

“Not yet. But once you get two or three hundred yards over the water, that spell would have grounded out. So we know it’s one of these at the docks.”

Elaine nodded. “You want to lead?”

“Yeah. We should be able to run it down fairly fast. Stay about ten or fifteen feet back from me.”

Elaine frowned. “Why?”

“Any closer than that and we’d be a dandy target. Someone could take us both out with one burst from a machine gun.”

Her face got a little pale. “I thought you trusted him.”

“I do,” I said. “But I don’t know who might be there with him.”

“And you’ve learned this kind of thing on the job? Machine guns?”

I felt my left hand twitch. “Actually, I learned it with flamethrowers. But it applies to machine guns, too.”

She took a deep breath, green eyes flickering over the docks and ships. “I see. After you, then.”

I readied my shield bracelet, got a good grip on my staff, and wrapped my amulet’s chain around the first two fingers of my right hand, holding it up and out a little so that the amulet could dangle and indicate direction. I stepped out onto the docks and followed the spell toward the outermost row of moored boats. I was acutely conscious of Elaine’s light, steady footsteps behind me, and the little slapping sighs of water hitting hulls.

The summer sky was overcast with lead, and occasional thunder rumbled through the air. The docks weren’t nearly as crowded as they could be, but there were a couple of dozen people around, walking to and from boats, working on decks, getting ready to cast off or else just now securing their lines. I was the only one wearing a big leather coat, and got a few odd looks.

The amulet led me to the last slip of the dock farthest from shore. The boat moored there was a big one, at least for those docks, and looked like it might have been a stunt double for the boat in Jaws. It was old, battered, its white paint smudged to a faded, peeling grey, the planks of its hull often patched. The windows on the wheelhouse were obscured with dust and greasy smudges. It needed to be sandblasted and repainted—except for the lettering on its stern, which had apparently been added only recently in heavy black paint: WATER BEETLE.

I walked ten feet away and rechecked the amulet’s indication, triangulating. The Water Beetle was the right boat.

“Hey!” I called out. “Er, uh. Ahoy! Thomas!”

Silence met my hail.

I checked over my shoulder. Elaine had moved away, to where she could see the little ship’s entire deck while still standing a good twenty feet down the dock from me. What was the military term for that? Establishing a cross fire? Maybe it was creating a defilade. The point being, though, that if anything came gibbering up out of the boat’s hold, we’d tear it up between us before you could say boogityboo.

Of course, if anyone on the boat had hostile intent and an ounce of brains, they’d probably realize that, too.

“Thomas!” I shouted again. “It’s Harry Dresden!”

If someone on that boat meant me harm, the smart thing to do would be to stay quiet and tempt me out onto the boat itself. That would minimize my chances of avoiding an attack, and give them their best shot at taking me out in a hurry—which is just about the only reliable way to do it, when you’re dealing with wizards. Give one of us time to catch our breath, and we can be a real handful.

“Okay,” I said to Elaine, not taking my eyes off the boat. “I’m going aboard.”

“Is that smart?”

“No.” I glanced at her for a second. “You got a better idea?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Cover me.”

“Cover you.” Elaine shook her head, but she let one end of the chain slip loose from her hand, and caught it in the other. She took a grip on it, leaving a couple of feet hanging from her left hand. Little flickers of light played along it—subtle enough that I doubted anyone would notice if they weren’t looking for it. “I thought I was here on a job. Now it turns out I’m half of a buddy-cop movie.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’m the zany yet lovable one. You’re the brainy conservative.”

“What if I want to be the zany one?”

“Then you can hop out there on the boat.”

“Stop throwing the regulations out the window,” she said, as if reciting a hastily memorized grocery list. “We’re supposed to catch the maniacs, not become them. Don’t do anything crazy, because I’ve only got two and a half seconds to go until I retire.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said, and hopped from the dock to the deck of the Water Beetle.

I crouched, ready for trouble, but nothing came hurtling at me. One of the boats down the dock started up an engine that could not possibly have passed any kind of emissions test, including one for noise. Even so, though, I heard a thumping sound come from below the deck. I froze, but there was no further sound beyond the nearby rumbling engine, which, from the smell of it, was burning a lot of oil.

I tried to move silently, pacing around the wheelhouse. It was a tight squeeze between the deckhouse and the rail as I sidled by to peer around the corner and down a short flight of stairs that led into the ship’s cabin hold. I was aware of a presence: nothing specific, really, beyond a sudden, intuitive certainty that someone was down there and aware of me in return.

I could probably dance around, listening and lurking in hopes of finding some other indication of who was below—but not for long. People would notice me crouching and taking cover on the ship’s deck for no apparent reason. Some of them would ignore it. Hell, most of them would ignore it. But inevitably, one of them would think it odd enough to give the cops a ring.

“Screw it,” I said. I made sure my duster was covering my back, brought my shield up before me, and stepped quickly down the stairs and into the hold.

I had maybe half a second of warning when someone came swinging down the stairs behind me—he must have been lying flat and out of sight atop the wheelhouse. I started to turn, but two heels hit my right shoulder blade in a double-legged kick and propelled me forcefully down into the hold.

The duster was hell on wheels for stopping claws and bullets, but it did me less good against the blunt impact of the kick. It hurt. I threw up the shield in front of me as I fell, and cut it again in an instant, since impacting a rigid plane of force would be much like slamming myself into a brick wall. The fluttering energy of the shield slowed me enough to control my fall and turn it into a roll. I came to my knees facing the stairway, as Thomas came hurtling down it with mayhem evidently in mind.

He crouched on the stairs with one of those crooked knives the Gurkhas use clutched in one fist, and a double-barreled shotgun with maybe six inches of barrel left to it in the other and pointed directly at my head. My brother was a little bit shy of six feet tall, slim, and made out of whipcord and steel cable. His eyes were alight with fury in his pale face, faded from their usual thundercloud grey to an angry, metallic silver that meant that he was drawing upon his power as a vampire. His shoulder-length dark hair was bound back under a red bandanna, and his ’do still looked more stylish than mine.

“Thomas,” I snarled. “Ow. What is wrong with you?”

“You get one chance to surrender, asshole. Drop the spells and face the wall.”

“Thomas. Stop being a dick. I don’t need this right now.”

Thomas sneered. “Give it up. It’s a good act, but I know you aren’t Harry Dresden. There’s no way the real Dresden would have come here with a woman like that instead of his dog.”

I blinked at him and dropped my shield. “Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I glared at him and added in a lower tone, “Hell’s bells, if you weren’t my brother, I’d paste you.”

Thomas lowered the shotgun, his expression startled. “Harry?”

A shadow moved behind Thomas.

“Wait!” I screamed.

A length of heavy chain whipped around his throat. There was a flash of greenish light and a crackling explosion almost as loud as a gunshot. Thomas jerked into an agonized arch and was flung free of the chain to come hurtling into me. For the second time in sixty seconds, I got hit with my brother’s full weight and slammed to the floor. My nose filled with the sharp scent of ozone and burned hair.

“Harry?” called Elaine’s voice, high and loud. “Harry?”

“I said to wait,” I wheezed.

She came hustling down the stairs and over to me. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not until you threw him on me,” I snapped. Which wasn’t true, but being repeatedly bashed about makes me grumpy. I touched a finger to my throbbing lip, and it came away wet with blood. “Ow.”

Elaine said, “Sorry. I thought you were in trouble.”

I shook my head to clear it and glanced at Thomas. His eyes were open and he looked startled. He was breathing, but his arms and legs lay limp. His lips moved a little. I leaned over and asked him, “What?”

“Ow,” he whispered.

I sat up, a little relieved. If he was able to complain, he couldn’t have been too bad off. “What was that?” I asked Elaine.

“Taser.”

“Stored electricity?”

“Yes.”

“How do you refill it?”

“Thunderstorm. Or I just plug it into any wall socket.”

“Cool,” I said. “Maybe I should get one of those.”

Thomas’s head moved, and one of his legs twitched and began to stir.

Elaine whirled on him at once, her chain held taut between her hands, and little flashes of light began flickering through the decorative metal embedded into the links.

“Easy, there,” I said, firmly. “Back off. We came here to talk, remember?”

“Harry, we should at least restrain him.”

“He isn’t going to hurt us,” I said.

“Would you listen to yourself for a second?” she said, her voice sharpening. “Harry, despite heavy evidence to the contrary, you’re telling me that you like and trust a creature whose specialty lies in subverting the minds of his victims. That’s the way they all talk about a White Court vampire, and you know it.”

“That isn’t what’s happened here,” I said.

“They say that, too,” Elaine insisted. “I’m not saying any of this is your fault, Harry. But if this thing has gotten to you somehow, this is exactly how you’d be responding to it.”

“He’s not a thing,” I snarled. “His name is Thomas.”

Thomas took in a deep breath and then managed to say, in a very feeble voice, “It’s all right. You can come out now.”

The forward wall of the cabin creaked and suddenly shifted, swinging out on a concealed hinge to reveal a small area behind it, not quite as large as a typical walk-in closet. There were several women and two or three very small children huddled in that cramped space, and they emerged into the cabin warily.

One of them was Olivia the dancer.

“There,” Thomas said quietly. He turned his head to Elaine. “There they are, and they’re fine. Check them out for yourself.”

I stood up, my joints creaking, and studied the women. “Olivia,” I said.

“Warden,” she said quietly.

“Are you all right?”

She smiled. “Except for a muscle cramp I got in there. It’s a little crowded.”

Elaine looked from the women to Thomas and back. “Did he hurt you?”

Olivia blinked. “No,” she said. “No, of course not. He was taking us to shelter.”

“Shelter?” I asked.

“Harry,” Elaine said, “these are some of the women who have gone missing.”

I digested that for a second, and then turned to Thomas. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

He shook his head, his expression still a little bleary. “Reasons. Didn’t want you involved in this.”

“Well, I’m involved now,” I said. “So how about you tell me what’s going on.”

“You were at my apartment,” Thomas said. “You saw my guest room wall.”

“Yeah.”

“They were being hunted. I had to figure out who was after them. Why. I got it, at least well enough to be able to figure out who they were planning to kill. It became a race between us.” He glanced at the women and children. “I got everyone I could out of harm’s way, and brought them here.” He tried to move his head and winced. “Nnngh. There are another dozen at a cabin on an island about twenty miles north of here.”

“A safe house,” I mused. “You were taking them to a safe house.”

“Yeah.”

Elaine just stared at the women for a long moment, then at Thomas. “Olivia,” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”

“A-as far as I know,” the girl answered. “He’s been a perfect gentleman.”

I’m pretty sure nobody but me caught it, but at her words, Thomas’s eyes flashed with a cold and furious hunger. He may have treated the women gently and politely, but I knew that there was a part of him that hadn’t wanted to. He closed his eyes tightly and started taking deep breaths. I recognized the ritual he used to control his darker nature, and said nothing of it.

Elaine talked quietly with Olivia, who began making introductions. I leaned against a wall—unless maybe, since we were on a ship, it was a bulkhead—and rubbed my finger at a spot between my eyebrows where a headache was coming on. The damned oily smoke smell from the nearby ship’s sputtering engine wasn’t helping matters any, either, and—

My head snapped up and I flung myself up the stairs and onto the deck.

That big ugly boat had been moved from its moorings—and now floated directly beside the Water Beetle, blocking it from the open waters of the lake. Its engine was pouring out so much blue-black oil smoke that it could not have been anything but deliberate. A choking haze had already enveloped the Water Beetle, and I couldn’t see beyond the next row of docks.

A figure hurtled from the deck of the boat to land in a tigerish crouch on the little area of open deck at the rear of the Water Beetle. Even as I watched, its features, those of an unremarkable man in his midthirties, began to change. His jaws elongated, face extending into something of a muzzle, and his forearms lengthened, the nails extending into dirty-looking talons.

He faced me, shoulders distorting into hunched knots of powerful muscle, bared his teeth, and let out a shrieking roar.

A ghoul. A tough, dangerous opponent, but not impossible to beat.

Then more figures appeared on the deck of the other ship, half veiled by the thick smoke. Their limbs crackled and contorted, and a dozen more ghouls opened their mouths in earsplitting echo of the first.

“Thomas!” I shouted, half choking on the smoke. “We’ve got a problem!”

Thirteen ghouls flung themselves directly at me, jaws gaping and slavering, talons reaching, eyes gleaming with feral bloodlust and rage.

Fucking boats.

Chapter Twenty-One

I have, in general, not had fun during my service as a Warden of the White Council. I have taken no enjoyment whatsoever in becoming a solider in the war with the Vampire Courts. Doing battle with the forces of…

I was going to say evil, but I’m increasingly unsure exactly where everyone around me falls on the Jedi-Sith Index.

Doing battle with the forces of things trying to kill me, or my friends, or people who can’t protect themselves is not a rowdy summer adventure movie. It’s a nightmare. Everything is violence and confusion, fear and rage, pain and exhilaration. It all happens fast, and there’s never time to think, never any way to be sure of anything.

It’s awful, really—but I do have to admit that there’s been one positive thing about the situation:

I’ve gotten in a lot of extra practice at combat wizardry.

And ever since New Mexico, I had absolutely no reservations about ripping ghouls apart with it.

The nearest ghoul was the closest threat, but not the greatest opportunity. Still, if I didn’t lay the smack down on him in a hurry, he’d rip my head off, or at least tie me up long enough for his buddies to mob me. Ordinarily, I’d have let him eat a blast of telekinetic force from the little silver ring I wore on my right hand, the one that stored up a little energy every time I moved my arm, and which was useless after being employed.

I couldn’t do that, because I’d replaced the single silver ring with three circles of silver fused into a single band, each with the same potential energy as the original silver ring.

Oh. And I had one of the new bands on every finger of my right hand.

I raised my staff in my fist, baring the rings to the ghoul, and as I triggered the first ring snarled, “See ya!”

Raw force lashed out at the ghoul, flung him off the end of the Water Beetle, and slammed him against the front of the ship blocking us in with enough force to break his back. There was a rippling crack, the ghoul’s battle cry turned into an agonized scream, and he vanished into the cold waters of Lake Michigan.

The first of his buddies was already in the air, boarding the Water Beetle just as the first had. I waited a half second, timing the arc of his jump, and before his feet touched down, I hit him just as I had the first one. This time, the ghoul flew back into a pair of its buddies, already in the air behind him, and dropped all three of them into the drink. Ghouls five and six were female, about which I did not care in the least, and I swatted them into the lake with two more blasts.

So far, so good, but then four of them all leaped together—probably by chance, rather than design—and I knocked down only two of them. The other two hit the deck of the Water Beetle and flung themselves at me, claws extended.

No time for any tricks. I whirled my staff, planted the back end against the wheelhouse wall, and aimed the other at the nearest ghoul’s teeth. It hit the ghoul with the tremendous power provided by his own supernatural strength and speed. Shattered bits of yellow fangs showered the deck as the ghoul rebounded. The second ghoul leaped straight over his buddy—

—and got a really nice view of the barrel of the .44 revolver I’d pulled from my duster’s pocket with my left hand. The hand cannon roared, snapping the ghoul’s head back, and it slammed into me. My back hit the wheelhouse hard enough to knock the breath from me, but the ghoul fell to the deck, writhing and screaming madly.

I put two more shots into the ghoul’s head from two feet away, and emptied the revolver into the skull of the one I’d stunned with my staff. Watery, brownish blood splattered the deck.

By then, three more ghouls were on the deck, and I heard thunking sounds of impact over the side of the ship as two of the ghouls I’d knocked into the water sank their claws into the Water Beetle’s planks and began swarming over the sides.

I hit the nearest ghoul with another blast from one of my rings, sending it flying into its companions, but it bought me only enough time to raise my shield into a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Two ghouls slammed against it, claws raking, and bounced off.

Then the ghouls coming up the sides of the ship gained the deck, behind the edge of my shield, and hit me from the side. Claws raked at me. I felt a hot pain on my chin, and then heavy impacts as the talons struck my duster. They couldn’t pierce it, but hit with considerable force, a sensation like being jabbed hard in the side with the rounded ends of multiple broom handles.

I went down and kicked at a knee. It snapped, crackled, and popped, drawing a scream of rage from the ghoul, but its companion landed on me, forcing me to throw my left arm across my throat to keep him from ripping it out. My shield flickered and fell, and the other ghouls let out howls of hungry glee.

A woman’s voice let out a ringing, defiant shout. There was a roar of light and sound, a flash of scything, solid green light, and the ghoul atop me jerked as its head simply vanished from its shoulders, spraying foul-smelling brown blood everywhere. I shoved the still-twitching body off me and gained my feet even as Elaine stepped past me. She whirled that chain of hers over her head, snarling, “Aerios!”

Something that looked like a miniature tornado illuminated from within by green light and laid on its side formed in the air in front of her. The baby twister immediately began moving so much air so quickly that I had to lean away from the spell’s powerful suction.

The far end of the spell blew forth air in a shrieking column of wind so strong that, as it played back and forth over the back end of the ship, it scattered ghouls like bits of popcorn in a blower. It also had the effect of ripping the thick, choking smoke away from the stairway leading belowdecks, and I hadn’t even realized how dizzy I had begun to feel.

“I can’t hold this for long!” Elaine shouted.

The ghouls began trying to get around the spell, more of them climbing the sides after being thrown into the lake again. I couldn’t try whipping up a fire—not with all these fine wooden boats and docks and brimming fuel containers and resident boaters around. So I had to make do with using my staff—not using magic, either. That’s the beauty of having a big heavy stick with you. Anytime you need to do it, you’ve got a handy head-cracking weapon ready to go.

The ghouls tried climbing up the sides of the ship, but I started playing whack-a-mole as their heads or clawed hands appeared over the side.

“Thomas!” I cried. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

I could barely see anything through the smoke, but I could make out the shapes of some of the ghouls clambering up onto the dock—cutting us off from the shore.

“Get the boat loose!” Elaine shouted.

The ghouls’ smoking vessel actually cruised into the rear of the Water Beetle, the impact forcing me to grab at the wheelhouse to keep my feet—and to stagger the other way a second later as the Water Beetle smashed into the dock. “Not a chance! He’s too close!”

“Down!” Thomas shouted, and I felt his hand shove down hard on my shoulder. I ducked, and saw the blued steel of his sawed-off shotgun as it went past my face. The thing roared, the sound painfully loud, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear anything out of that ear for a while. The blast caught the ghoul that had somehow sneaked up onto the top of the wheelhouse and had been about to leap down onto my shoulders.

“Ow!” I shouted to Thomas. “Thank you!”

“Harry!” Elaine shouted, her voice higher, now desperate.

I looked past her and saw that her pet cyclone was slowing down. Several of the ghouls had managed to dig their claws into the deck and hang on, rather than being blasted off the end of the ship.

“This is bad, this is bad, this is bad,” Thomas said.

“I know that!” I shouted at him. A glance over my shoulder showed me Olivia’s pale face on the stairs, and the other women and children behind her. “We’ll never get them out of here on foot. They’ve got the docks cut off.”

Thomas took a quick glance around the ship and said, “We can’t cast off, either!”

“Harry!” Elaine gasped. The light began to fade from her spell, the howl of wind dropping, the ugly, heavy smoke beginning to creep back in.

Ghouls are hard to kill. I’d done for two of them, Elaine for a third, but the others had mostly just been made angrier by getting repeatedly slammed in the kisser with blasts of force, followed by tumbles into the cold lake.

Cold lake.

Aha. A plan.

“Take this!” I shouted, and shoved my staff at Thomas. “Buy me a few seconds!” I spun to Olivia and said, “Everyone get ready to follow me, close!”

Olivia relayed that to the women behind her while I hurriedly jerked loose the knots that secured my blasting rod to the inside of my duster. I whipped out the blasting rod and looked out over the side of the ship farthest from shore. There was nothing but thirty feet of water, then the vague shape of the next row of docks.

Thomas saw the blasting rod and swore under his breath, but he whirled my staff with grace and style—the way he does pretty much everything—then leaped past Elaine’s fading spell and began battering ghouls.

It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that Thomas isn’t human, no matter that he looks it, and is my brother to boot. Other times, like this one, I get forcibly reminded about his true nature.

Ghouls are strong and disgustingly quick (emphasis on disgusting). Thomas, though, drawing upon his darker nature, made them look like the faceless throngs of extras in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He moved like smoke among them, the heavy oak of my staff spinning, striking, snapping out straight and whirling away, driven at the attackers with superhuman power. I wanted to fight beside him, but that wouldn’t get us away from this ambush, which was our only real chance of survival.

So instead of rushing to his aid, I gripped my blasting rod, focused my will, and began to summon up every scrap of energy I could bring to bear. This spell was going to take a hell of a lot of juice, but if it worked, we’d be clear. I reminded myself of that as I stood frozen, my eyes half closed, while my brother fought for our lives.

Thomas outclassed any single ghoul he was up against, but though he could cause them horrible pain, a bludgeoning tool was not a good weapon for actually killing them. He would have had to shatter several vertebrae or break open a skull to put one of them down. Had he stopped to take the focus he would need to finish off a single ghoul he’d temporarily disabled, the rest would have swarmed him. He knew it. They knew it, too. They fought with the mindlessly efficient instinct of the pack, certain that they could, in a few moments, wear down their prey.

Check that. It wouldn’t even take that long. Once that smoke rolled in again, we’d last only a minute or three, breathing hard in exertion and fear as we all were. The gunfire and shrieking would have prompted a dozen calls to the authorities, as well. I was sure I would be hearing sirens any minute, assuming the ear my brother had left intact was pointed that way. It was at that point that I realized something else:

Someone was still on the boat pinning the Water Beetle against the dock. Someone who had brought the ghouls over, who had been lying in wait near Thomas. Ghouls are hell on wheels for violence, but they don’t tend to plan things out very well without outside direction. They certainly do not bother operating under a smoke screen. So whoever was driving the other boat probably wasn’t a ghoul.

Grey Cloak, maybe? Or his homey, Passenger.

That’s when I realized something else: We didn’t have even those couple of minutes it would take for the smoke to strangle us. Once the mortal authorities started arriving, whoever was in charge of the ghouls was sure to goad them into a more coordinated rush, and that would be that.

A ghoul’s flailing claw ripped through Thomas’s jeans and tore into his calf. He lost his balance for a second, caught it again, and kept fighting as if nothing had happened—but blood a little too pale to be human dribbled steadily to the Water Beetle’s deck.

I clenched my teeth as the power rose in me. The hairs on my arms stood up straight, and there was a kind of buzzing pressure against the insides of my eardrums. My muscles were tensing, almost to the point of convulsing in a full-body charley horse. Stars swam in my vision as I raised the blasting rod.

“Harry!” Elaine gasped. “Don’t be a fool! You’ll kill us all!”

I heard her, but I was too far gone into the spell to respond. It had to work. I mean, it had worked once before. In theory, it should work again if I could just get it to be a little bit bigger.

I lifted my face and the blasting rod to the sky, opened my throat, and in a stentorian bellow shouted, “Fuego!”

Fire exploded from the tip of the blasting rod, a column of white-hot flame as thick as my hips. It surged up into the smoke, burning it away as it went, rising into a fiery fountain a good twenty stories high.

All magic obeys certain principles, and many of them apply across the whole spectrum of reality, scientific, arcane, or otherwise. As far as casting spells is concerned, the most important is the principle of conservation of energy. Energy cannot simply be created. If one wants a twenty-story column of fire hot enough to vaporize ten-gauge steel, the energy of all that fire has to come from somewhere. Most of my spells use my own personal energy, what is most simply described as sheer force of will. Energy for such things can also come from other sources outside of the wizard’s personal power.

This spell, for example, had been drawn from the heat energy absorbed by the waters of Lake Michigan.

The fire roared up with a thunderous detonation of suddenly expanding air, and the shock wave from it startled everyone into dead silence. The lake let out a sudden, directionless, crackling snarl. In the space of a heartbeat the water between where I stood and the next dock froze over, a sudden sheet of hard, white ice.

I sagged with fatigue. Channeling so much energy through myself was an act that invited trauma and exhaustion, and a sudden weakness in my limbs made me stagger.

“Go!” I shouted to Olivia. “Over the ice! Run for the next dock! Women and children first!”

“Kill them!” shouted a man’s voice from the general direction of the attacking ship.

The ghouls howled and leaped forward, enraged to see prey making good their escape.

I leaned on the rail and watched Olivia and company flee. They hurried over the ice, slipping here and there. Crackling protests of the ice sounded under their feet. Spiderweb fractures began to spread, slowly but surely.

I gritted my teeth. Even though Lake Michigan is a cold-water lake, this was high summer, and even in the limited space I had frozen, there was an enormous amount of water that had to be chilled. Imagine how much fire it takes to heat a teakettle to boiling, and remember that it works both ways. You have to take heat away from the kettle’s water if you want to freeze it. Now, multiply that much energy by about a berjillion, because that’s the amount of water I was trying to freeze.

Olivia and the women and children made it to the far dock and fled in a very well-advised and appropriate state of panic.

“Harry!” Elaine said. Her chain lashed out and struck a ghoul that had slipped by Thomas.

“They’re clear!” I cried. “Go, go, go! Thomas, we is skedaddling!”

I stood up and readied my shield bracelet.

“Come on,” Elaine told me, grabbing my arm.

I shook my head. “I’m the heaviest,” I told her. “I go last.”

Elaine blinked at me, opened her mouth to protest, then went very pale and nodded once. She vaulted the rail and ran for the docks.

“Thomas!” I screamed. “Down!”

Thomas hit the deck without so much as looking over his shoulder, and the ghouls closed in.

I triggered the rest of the kinetic rings: all of them at once.

Ghouls tumbled and flew. But I’d bought us only a little time.

Thomas turned and leaped over the side. I checked, and saw that Elaine had reached the other dock. Thomas bounded over the ice like something from one of those Japanese martial arts cartoons, leaped, and actually turned a flip in the air before landing on his feet.

I didn’t want to come down too hard on the ice, but I didn’t want to wait around until a ghoul ate me, either. I did my best to minimize the impact and started hurrying across.

Ice crackled. On my second step, a sudden, deep crack snapped open beneath my rearmost foot. Holy crap. Maybe I’d underestimated the energy involved. Maybe it had been two berjillion teakettles.

I took the next step, and felt the ice groaning under my feet. More cracks appeared. It was only twenty feet, but the next dock suddenly looked miles away.

Behind me, I heard ghouls charging, throwing themselves recklessly onto the ice once they saw my turned back.

“This is bad, this is bad, this is bad,” I babbled to myself. Behind me, the ice suddenly screeched, and one of the ghouls vanished into the water with a scream of protest.

More cracks, even thicker, began to race out ahead of me.

“Harry!” Thomas screamed, pointing over my shoulder.

I turned my head and saw Madrigal Raith standing on the deck of the Water Beetle, not more than ten feet away. He gave me a delighted smile.

Then he lifted a heavy assault rifle to his shoulder and opened fire.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I screamed in order to summon up my primal reserves and to intimidate Madrigal into missing me, and definitely not because I was terrified. While I unleashed my sonic initiative, I also crouched down to take cover. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like I was just cowering and pulling my duster up to cover my head, but it was actually part of a cunning master plan designed to let me survive the next three or four seconds.

Madrigal Raith was Thomas’s cousin, and built along the same lines: slim, dark-haired, pale, and handsome, though not on Thomas’s scale. Unfortunately, he was just as deceptively strong and swift as Thomas was, and if he could shoot half as well, there was no way he would miss me, not at that range.

And he didn’t.

The spellwork I’d laid over my duster had stood me in good stead on more than one occasion. It had stopped claws and talons and fangs and saved me from being torn apart by broken glass. It had reduced the impact of various and sundry blunt objects, and generally preserved my life in the face of a great deal of potentially grievous bodily harm. But I hadn’t designed the coat to stand up to this.

There is an enormous amount of difference between the weapons and ammunition employed by your average Chicago thug and military-grade weaponry. Military rounds, fully jacketed in metal, would not smash and deform as easily as bullets of simple lead. They were heavier rounds, moving a lot faster than you’d get with civilian small arms, and they kept their weight focused behind an armor-piercing tip, all of which meant that while military rounds didn’t tend to fracture on impact and inflict horribly complicated damage on the human body, they did tend to smash their way through just about anything that got in their way. Personal body armor, advanced as it is, is of very limited use against well-directed military-grade fire—particularly when exposed from ten feet away.

The shots hit me not in a string of separate impacts, the way I had thought it would be, but in one awful roar of noise and pressure and pain. Everything spun around. I was flung over the fracturing ice, my body rolling. The sun found a hole in the smoke and glared down into my eyes. I felt a horrible, nauseated wave of sensation flood over me, and the glare of light in my eyes became hellish agony. I felt suddenly weak and exhausted, and even though I knew there was something I should have been doing, I couldn’t remember what it was.

If only the damned light wouldn’t keep burning my eyes like that…

“…it wouldn’t be so bad out here,” I growled to Ramirez. I held up a hand to shield my eyes from the blazing New Mexico sun. “Every morning it’s like someone sticking needles in my eyes.”

Ramirez, dressed in surplus military BDU pants, a loose white cotton shirt, a khaki bush hat folded up on one side, wraparound sunglasses, and his usual cocky grin, shook his head. “For God’s sake, Harry. Why didn’t you bring sunglasses?”

“I don’t like glasses,” I said. “Things on my eyes, they bug me.”

“Do they bug you as much as going blind?” Ramirez asked.

I lowered my hand as my eyes finished adjusting, and squinting hard made it possible to bear the glare. “Shut up, Carlos.”

“Who’s a grumpy wizard in the morning?” Carlos asked, in that tone of voice one usually reserves for favorite dogs.

“Get a couple more years on you and that many beers that late at night will leave you with a headache, too, punk.” I growled a couple of curses under my breath, then shook my head and composed myself as ought to be expected of a master wizard—which is to say, I subtracted the complaining and was left with only the grumpy scowl. “Who’s up?”

Ramirez took a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “The Terrible Twosome,” he replied. “The Trailman twins.”

“You’re kidding. They’re twelve years old.”

“Sixteen,” Ramirez contradicted me.

“Twelve, sixteen,” I said. “They’re babies.”

Ramirez’s smile faded. “They don’t have time to be babies, man. They’ve got a gift for evocation, and we need them.”

“Sixteen,” I muttered. “Hell’s bells. All right, let’s get some breakfast first.”

Ramirez and I marched to breakfast. The site Captain Luccio had chosen for teaching trainee Wardens evocation had once been a boomtown, built up around a vein of copper that trickled out after a year or so of mining. It was pretty high up in the mountains, and though we were less than a hundred miles northwest of Albuquerque, we might as well have been camped out on the surface of the moon. The only indications of humanity for ten or twelve miles in any direction were ourselves and the tumbledown remains of the town and the mine upslope from it.

Ramirez and I had lobbied to christen the place Camp Kaboom, given that it was a boomtown and we were teaching magic that generally involved plenty of booms of its own, but Luccio had overridden us. One of the kids had heard us, though, and by the end of the second day there, Camp Kaboom had been named despite the disapproval of the establishment.

The forty-odd kids had their tents pitched within the stone walls of a church someone had built in an effort to bring a little more stability to the general havoc of boomtowns in the Old West. Luccio had pitched her tent with them, but Ramirez, me, and two other young Wardens who were helping her teach had set up our tents on the remains of what had once been a saloon, a brothel, or both. We’d taught kids all day and evening, and once it had gotten cold and the trainees were asleep, we played poker and drank beer, and if I got enough in me, I would even play a little guitar.

Ramirez and his cronies got up every morning just as bright eyed and bushy tailed as if they’d had a full night’s sleep. The cocky little bastards. Breakfast was dished up and served by the trainees every morning, built around several portable grills and several folded tables situated near a well that still held cool water, if you worked the weather-beaten pump long enough. Breakfast was little more than a bowl of cereal, but part of the little more was coffee, so I was surviving without killing anyone—if only because I took breakfast alone, giving the grumpy time to fade before exposing myself to anyone else.

I collected my cereal, an apple, and a big cup of the holy mocha, walked a ways, and settled down on a rock in the blinding light of morning in desert mountains. Captain Luccio sat down beside me.

“Good morning,” she said. Luccio was a wizard of the White Council, a couple of centuries old, and one of its more dangerous members. She didn’t look like that. She looked like a girl not even as old as Ramirez, with long, curling brown locks, a sweetly pretty face, and killer dimples. When I’d met her, she’d been a lean, leathery-skinned matron with iron grey hair, but a black wizard called the Corpsetaker had suckered her in a duel. Corpsetaker, then in Luccio’s current body, had let Luccio run her through—and then Corpsetaker had worked her trademark magic, and switched their minds into the opposite bodies.

I’d figured it out before Corpsetaker had time enough to abuse Luccio’s credibility, but once I’d put a bullet through Corpsetaker’s head, there hadn’t been any way for Luccio to get her original body back. So she’d been stuck in the young, cute one instead, because of me. She had also ceased taking to the field in actual combat, passing that off to her second in command, Morgan, while she ran the boot camp to train new Wardens in how to kill things without getting killed first.

“Good morning,” I replied.

“Mail came for you yesterday,” she said, and produced a letter from a pocket.

I took it, scanned the envelope, and opened it. “Hmmm.”

“Who is it from?” she asked. Her tone was that of one passing the time in polite conversation.

“Warden Yoshimo,” I said. “I had a few questions for her about her family tree. See if she was related to a man I knew.”

“Is she?” Luccio asked.

“Distantly,” I said, reading on. “Interesting.” At Luccio’s polite noise of inquiry, I said, “My friend was a descendent of Sho Tai.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” Luccio said.

“He was the last king of Okinawa,” I said, and frowned, thinking it over. “I bet it means something.”

“Means something?”

I glanced at Captain Luccio and shook my head. “Sorry. It’s a side project of mine, something I’m curious about.” I shook my head, folded up the letter from Yoshimo, and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. “It isn’t relevant to teaching apprentices combat magic, and I should have my head in the game, not on side projects.”

“Ah,” Luccio said, and did not press for further details. “Dresden, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

I grunted interrogatively.

She lifted her eyebrows. “Have you never wondered why you did not receive a blade?”

The Wardens toted silver swords with them whenever there was a fight at hand. I had seen them unravel complex, powerful magic at the will of their wielders, which is one hell of an advantage when taking on anything using magic as a weapon. “Oh,” I said, and sipped some coffee. “Actually I hadn’t really wondered. I assumed you didn’t trust me.”

She frowned at me. “I see,” she said. “No. That is not the case. If I did not trust you, I would certainly not allow you to continue wearing the cloak.”

“Is there anything I could do to make you not trust me, then?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t want to wear the cloak. No offense.”

“None taken,” she said. “But we need you, and the cloak stays on.”

“Damn.”

She smiled briefly. The expression had entirely too much weight and subtlety for a face so young. “The fact of the matter is that the swords the Wardens have used in your lifetime must be tailored specifically to each individual Warden. They were also all articles of my creation—and I am no longer capable of creating them.”

I frowned and imbibed more coffee. “Because…” I gestured at her vaguely.

She nodded. “This body did not possess the same potential, the same aptitudes for magic as my own. Returning to my former level of ability will be problematical, and will happen no time soon.” She shrugged, her expression neutral, but I had a feeling she was covering a lot of frustration and bitterness. “Until someone else manages to adapt my design to their own talents, or until I have retrained myself, I’m afraid that no more such blades will be issued.”

I chewed some cereal, sipped some coffee, and said, “It must be hard on you. The new body. A big change, after so long in the first one.”

She blinked at me, eyes briefly wide with surprise. “I…Yes, it has been.”

“Are you doing okay?”

She looked thoughtfully at her cereal for a moment. “Headaches,” she said quietly. “Memories that aren’t mine. I think they belong to the original owner of this body. They come mostly in dreams. It’s hard to sleep.” She sighed. “And, of course, it had been a hundred and forty years since I’d put up with either sexual desire or a monthly cycle.”

I swallowed cereal carefully instead of choking. “It sounds, ah, awkward. And unpleasant.”

“Very,” she said, her voice quiet. Then her cheeks turned faintly pink. “Mostly. Thank you for asking.” Then she took a deep breath, exhaled briskly, and rose, all businesslike again. “In any case, I felt I owed you an explanation.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “But thank y—”

Automatic weapons fire ripped the dew-spangled morning.

Luccio was moving at a full sprint before I’d gotten my ass up off the rock. I wasn’t slow. I’ve been in enough scrapes that I don’t freeze at the unexpected appearance of violence and death. Captain Luccio, however, had been in a lot more scrapes than that and was faster and better than me. As we ran, there was the continued chatter of weapons fire, screams, and then a couple of awfully loud explosions and an inhuman scream. I caught up to the Captain of the Wardens as we came into sight of the breakfast area, and I let her take the lead.

I’m pigheadedly chivalrous. Not stupid.

The breakfast area was in a shambles. Folding tables had been knocked over. Blood and breakfast cereal lay scattered on the rocky ground. I could see two kids on the ground, one screaming, one simply doubled over in a fetal position, shaking. Others were lying flat, faces in the dirt. Maybe thirty yards away, in the ruins of what had been a blacksmith’s shop, the only remaining brick wall was missing an enormous circle of stone—simply gone, probably in one of those weird, silent green blasts Ramirez favored. I could see the barrel of a heavy weapon of some kind lying on the ground, neatly severed about a foot behind its tip. Whoever had been holding it was likely gone with the bricks of the wall.

Ramirez’s head appeared at the hole in the wall. He had dark brown fluid spattering one side of his face. “Captain, get down!”

Bullets hissed down, making whistling, whipping sounds as they kicked up dirt a foot to Luccio’s right, and the report of the shots reached us half a second later.

Luccio didn’t waver or slow. She threw her right hand out, fingers spread. I couldn’t see what she’d done, but the air between us and the slope of the mountain above suddenly went watery with haze. “Where?” she shouted.

“I’ve got two wounded ghouls here!” Ramirez shouted. “At least two more upslope, maybe a hundred and twenty meters!”

As he spoke, one of the other Wardens rolled around the end of the broken wall, pointed his staff upslope, and spat out a vicious-sounding word. There was a low hum, a sudden flash, and a blue-white bolt of lightning snarled up the side of the mountain in the general direction of the shots. It struck a boulder with a roar and shattered it to gravel, the sight bizarre through the haze Luccio had conjured.

“Watch it!” Ramirez screamed. “They took two of our kids!”

The other Warden shot him a horrified look, and then dove for cover as more gunfire spat down the mountain. He let out a short, clench-toothed scream and grabbed at his leg, and one of the kids not far from him gasped, clutching at her cheek.

“Dammit,” snarled Luccio. She slid to a stop and raised her other hand, and the haze in the air became a rippling blur of moving color that made the entire mountainside look like some enormous, desert-themed Lava lamp.

Shots began to ring out, singly, as the attacker fired randomly into the haze. Each one made trainees cringe and gasp. “Trainees stay down!” Luccio trumpeted. “Stay still. Be quiet. Do not give your position away by sound or movement.”

Bullets struck the ground near her feet again as she spoke, drawing the fire to herself, but she didn’t flinch, though her face had already broken out in a sweat with the strain of holding up the broad obscurement spell.

“Dresden,” she said between gritted teeth. “Only one of those things is keeping fire on us. He’s pinning us down while the other escapes with hostages. We must protect the trainees foremost, and we can’t help the wounded while we’re still taking fire.”

“You hold the haze and keep them hidden,” I said, drawing a shot and a puff of dirt of my own. I sidestepped judiciously. “Shooter’s mine.”

She nodded, but her eyes showed something of wounded pride as she said, “Hurry. I can’t hold it for long.”

I nodded to her and looked up the mountainside—and then I shook my head and drew up my Sight.

At once, my vision cut through Luccio’s bewildering haze as though it had never existed. I could see the mountainside in perfect detail—even as it was in turn partially veiled by the vision my Sight granted me, which showed me all the living magic in the world around us, all the traces of magic that had lingered before, including dozens of imprints made in the past few days, and hundreds of ghostly glimpses of particularly strong emotional images that had sunk into the area during its heyday. I could see where the girl who now lay shuddering with a bullet in her had tried to call up raw fire for the first time, near a scorch mark upslope. I could see where a grizzled man, desperately addicted to opium and desperately broke, had shot himself more than a century ago, and where by night his shade still lingered, leaving fresh imprints behind.

And I could see the little coiling cloud of darkness that formed the inhuman energy of the attacking ghoul, running hot on the emotions of battle.

I marked the ghoul’s location, lowered my Sight, and took off at a dead sprint, bounding up the slope and bouncing back and forth in a wavering line. It’s damned hard to hit a target like that, even one growing steadily closer, and even with Luccio’s haze to cover me, I didn’t want to get shot if I could possibly avoid it. It was hard going, uphill, rough terrain, but it hadn’t had time to get hot yet, and I practiced running regularly—though admittedly, I did it to give me the option of running away from bad guys more ably, not toward them.

More shots rang out, but none of them seemed to come near. I kept my eyes locked on the spot on the slope where the ghoul lay shooting, probably behind cover. I couldn’t see a thing through the haze, but as soon as it began to clear I would present the ghoul with a clear target, either as I came through or when Luccio’s power faltered and the spell fell. I had to get closer. I didn’t have my blasting rod or staff with me, and without them to help me focus my magic, the range and accuracy of any spell I could throw at the ghoul would be drastically reduced. That’s why I had to get closer before I took my shot. I couldn’t hold a shield against bullets and attack at the same time—and the ghoul had to be taken out. I’d get only one shot, and if I missed I’d be an easy target.

I ran, and watched, and began to gather the power to throw at the ghoul.

The haze abruptly cleared as I bounded over a patch of scrub growth.

The ghoul crouched behind a rock maybe twenty yards upslope, his face only barely distended as he held mostly to his human shape while employing the human weapon—a freaking Kalashnikov. Thank God. The weapon was tough and serviceable, but it wasn’t exactly a sharpshooter’s tool. If he’d been toting something more precise, he probably could have inflicted a lot more damage than he had.

I was over to one side, and the ghoul was squinting hard down the rifle’s sights, so that I was only a flicker of motion in the periphery of his focus. It took him a second to recognize the threat and whip the weapon toward me.

I had time, and I threw out my hand and my will, and snarled, “Fuego!”

Fire bellowed forth from my right hand—not in a narrow beam, a jet of tightly focused energy, but in a roaring flood, spilling out from my fingertips like water from a garden sprayer. A lot of it, way more than I had intended. The fire got the ghoul, all right—and the ground for twenty feet around him in every direction—more on the uphill side of him. The roar of flame gave way to a hideous shriek, and then a steady, chewy silence shrouded by black smoke. A low breeze, a herald of the day’s oncoming heat, nudged the smoke away for a moment.

The ghoul, now in its true form, lay outstretched on the scorched earth. It had been burned down to little more than an appallingly blackened skeleton, though one leg retained enough muscle matter to continue twitching and thrashing—even then, the creature was not wholly dead. It didn’t surprise me. In my experience, ghouls hadn’t done much that wasn’t disgusting. There was no reason to expect them to die cleanly, either.

Once I was sure it wasn’t getting back up, I scanned the mountainside, looking for any other sign of movement, but found nothing. Then I turned and hurried back down the slope to the encampment.

Luccio was fully engaged in treating the wounded. Three had been hit by gunfire, and several others, including one of the other adult Wardens, had been wounded by shards of shattered rock or splinters thrown from the folding tables and chairs.

Ramirez came hurrying up to me and said, “You get him?” His eyes trailed past me to the enormous area blackened with smoke and half a dozen patches of brush still on fire, and he said, “Yeah, I guess you kind of did.”

“Kind of,” I agreed. “You said they had two of our kids?”

He nodded once, his face grim. “The Terrible Twosome. They were heading up the slope to find a spot above the camp for the lesson. Wanted to show off, I expect.”

“Sixteen,” I muttered. “Jesus.”

Ramirez grimaced. “I was yelling at them to come back when the ghouls hopped up out of the bush and brought them down, and the three assholes who had sneaked into the old smithy opened up.”

“How are you at following tracks?” I asked him.

“Thought they taught that Boy Scout stuff to all you Anglos. I grew up in L.A.”

I blew out a breath, thinking fast. “Luccio’s busy. She’ll call in help for the wounded. That leaves you and me to go get the twins.”

“Fucking right we will,” Ramirez said. “How?”

“You got prisoners?”

“The two I didn’t blast, yeah.”

“We’ll ask them.”

“Think they’ll rat out their buddy?”

“If they think it’ll save their lives?” I asked. “In a heartbeat. Maybe less.”

“Weasels,” Ramirez muttered.

“They are what they are, man,” I said. “There’s no use in hating them for it. Just be glad we can use it to advantage. Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The ghouls lay covered in grey-white dust as fine as baby powder—the remains of the wall Ramirez had blasted, their companion, his weapon, and the right arm and leg of one of the captive ghouls. The wounded ghoul, body shifted into its natural form under the stress of injury, lay panting and choking, spitting out dust. The second ghoul still looked mostly human, and was dressed in a ragged old set of sand-colored robes that looked like something out of Lawrence of Arabia. Another Kalashinikov lay several feet away, behind Bill Meyers, the young Warden now standing over them with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun pointed at the unwounded one of the pair.

“Careful,” Meyers said. He had the rural drawl that seems largely common to any town west of the Mississippi located more than an hour or so from a major city, though he was himself a Texan. “I ain’t searched them, and they don’t ’pear to understand English.”

“What?” Ramirez said. “That’s stupid. Who bothers to sneak ghouls into the country as covert muscle if they can’t pass as locals?”

“Someone who doesn’t have to worry about customs or border guards or witnesses or cops,” I said quietly. “Someone who takes them through the Nevernever straight here from wherever the hell they came from.” I glanced back at Ramirez. “How else do you think they got past the outer wards and sentries and right up to the camp?”

Ramirez grunted. “I thought we had those approaches warded, too.”

“Nevernever’s a tricksy kind of place,” I said. “Tough to know it all. Somebody was sneakier than us.”

“Vampires?” Ramirez asked.

I very carefully said nothing about a Black Council. “Who else would it be?”

Ramirez said something to them in Spanish.

“Shoot,” Meyers drawled. “You think I didn’t try that already?”

“Hey,” I said. I stepped closer to the unwounded ghoul and nudged him with one foot. “What language do you speak?”

The not-quite-human-looking man shot a quick, furtive glance at me, and then at his companion. He sputtered something quick and liquid-sounding. His companion snarled something back through its muzzle and fangs that sounded vaguely similar.

Seconds were ticking by, and we had a pair of kids in the hands of one of these things. I directed my thoughts inward, to the corner of my brain where Lasciel’s shadow lived, and asked, You get any of that?

Lasciel’s presence promptly responded. The first asked the second if he understood anything we were saying. The second replied that he hadn’t, and you were probably deciding which one of us would kill them.

I need to talk to them, I said. Can you translate for me?

There was a sudden sense of someone standing close to me—an almost tangible physical sensation of someone slim and feminine pressed against my back, arms casually around my waist, soft breath and lips moving near my ear. It was odd, but not at all unpleasant. I caught myself enjoying it, and firmly reminded myself of the danger of allowing the demon to do that.

With your permission, you need only speak to them in English, my host, Lasciel said. I will translate it between mind and mouth, and they will hear their tongue from your lips.

I so did not need any image involving their tongues and my lips, I responded.

Lasciel let out a delighted laugh that bubbled through my mind, and I was smiling a little when I faced the ghoul and said, “Okay, asshole. I’ve got two kids missing, and the only chance you have of getting out of this alive is if I get them back. Do you understand me?”

Both ghouls looked up at me, surprise evident even on the inhuman one’s face. I got a similar look from Ramirez and Meyers.

“Do you understand me?” I asked the ghouls quietly.

“Yes,” stammered the wounded ghoul, apparently in English.

Ramirez’s dark, heavy eyebrows tried to climb up under his bush hat.

I had to remind myself that this was not very cool. I was using a dangerous tool that would one day turn on me. No matter how savvy and tough it made me look in front of the other Wardens.

Kids, Harry. Focus on the kids.

“Why did you take those children?” I demanded of the ghoul.

“They must have wandered too close to Murzhek’s position,” the mostly human ghoul said. “We did not come here for hostages. This was to be a raid. We were to hit you, then fade away.”

“Fade to where?”

The ghouls froze, and looked at each other.

I drew back one of my hiking boots and kicked the mostly human ghoul in the face. He let out a high-pitched squeal—not a snarl of rage and pain, but a sound a dog makes when it’s trying to submit beneath an attacker.

“Where?” I demanded.

“Our lives,” hissed the wounded ghoul. “Promise us our lives and freedom, great one. Give us your word of truth.”

“You gave up your freedom the moment you spilled our blood,” I snarled. “But if I get the kids back, you keep your life,” I said. “My word is given.”

The ghouls looked at each other, and then the more human of the pair said, “The deep caves above this dwelling. The first deep shaft from the light of the sun. In the stones near it is a way to the Realm of Shadows.”

I shot a thought toward my interpreter. Does he mean the Nevernever?

A region of it, yes, my host.

“Remain here,” I told them. “Do not move. Make no attempt to escape. At the first sign of disobedience or treachery, you will die.”

“Great one,” both of them said, and began pressing their faces into the grey dust and the sandy, rocky soil beneath. “Great one.”

“They’ve been taken to the mine,” I told Ramirez. “We go there.” I turned to the other Warden. “Meyers, they’ve surrendered. Don’t take your eyes off them for a second, and if they twitch funny, kill them. Otherwise, leave them be.”

“Right,” he said. “Let me get some of the trainees in here. I’ll go with y’all.”

“They’re trainees,” Ramirez said, his tone hard. “You’re the Warden.”

Meyers blinked at him, but then let out a gusty exhalation and nodded. “All right. Watch your ass, ’Los.”

“Come on,” I said to Ramirez, and the two of us ducked out of the ruins and ran for our tent. We recovered our gear from it—staves, Ramirez’s silver sword and grey cape, my revolver and blasting rod and duster. Then I took off up the hill at the fastest pace I thought I could hold.

Ramirez was built like an athlete, but he was more naturally inclined to sprints and bursts of strength. He probably lifted weights at the expense of doing as much running as I did. He was blowing pretty hard by the time we’d gotten halfway to the mine, and he was fifty yards behind me by the time I got there. My own lungs were tight and heaving, I could feel the beginnings of a good hard puking revving up in my belly, and my legs felt like someone had poured a gallon of isopropyl over them and ignited it, but there wasn’t time to waste on recovering from the effort.

The ghouls hadn’t been there to take prisoners. This one might be smart enough to have kept the kids alive to use as hostages, but I’d never found ghouls to be particularly brilliant, and the one unwavering constant I’d observed among them was an inability to restrain their appetites for any length of time.

I banged my staff hurriedly against the earth, calling up my will and reinforcing it with Hellfire, a mystical source of energy Lasciel’s presence gave me the ability to utilize. I was already tired enough from my clumsy fire spell earlier and all the running that I didn’t have much choice but to draw on the brimstone-scented energy and hope for the best.

The runes in my staff blazed into light, and with a little effort of will I increased the effect, until the smoldering scarlet glow spilled out in a wide circle around me. The entrance to the mine was choked with brush, low, and not ten feet in one of the supports had collapsed, all but closing the place off from the outside. I had to slide in sideways, and once I was in, the dim light from the entrance and the scarlet glow pouring from my staff were the only illumination.

I hurried forward, knowing Ramirez would be coming soon, but not willing to wait for him. The air turned cold within a dozen strides, and my panting breaths formed into tiny clouds as they left my mouth. The tunnel widened and then sloped sharply downhill. I kept my left side against the wall, my right hand holding forth my staff, both to provide me enough light to see and to make sure I had the weapon ready to interpose itself between me and anything that should come slobbering out of the shadows.

A tunnel opened on my left, and as I went by it, I heard a snarling hiss come drifting and echoing from far down its length.

I turned and hurried down it, coming upon an old track built into the floor, where ore carts would have trundled back and forth, carrying out the ore from where it was brought up a shaft from lower in the mine. The sounds grew louder as I continued, a broader variety of the same snarling hisses.

And maybe a very soft whimper.

I probably should have been cagey at that point. I probably should have gone still, doused my light, and sneaked up to see what I could find out about things. I considered a nice, cautious recon for maybe a quarter of second.

Screw that. There were kids in danger.

I went through the remains of a wooden partition at a full charge. The ghoul, wholly inhuman and wearing the same sand-colored robes the others had been, had his back to me and was clawing at a section of rough tunnel wall with both hands. They were dark with his own blood, and a couple of his claws had broken. He was uttering snarls between desperate gasps, and Lasciel was evidently still on the job. “Betrayed,” the ghoul snarled. “Betrayed. Reckoning, oh, yes…balance of the scales…let me in!”

Everything slowed down, thoughts burning through my mind at tremendous speed. I saw everything clearly, what was in front of me, what was in my peripheral vision, and everything seemed as bright and organized as a third grader’s desk on the first day of school.

The Trailman twins were fraternal, not identical. Terry, the brother, was a couple of inches shorter than his nominally younger sister, but he stuck so far out of his shirt and pants that he had seemed well on the way to reversing that situation. He’d never get to. His body was on the floor of the cave, his face covered in a mask of blood and torn flesh. The ghoul had ripped open his throat. He’d also gotten the femoral artery on Terry’s thigh. The kid’s mouth was open, and I could see the ghoul’s disgusting blood clinging to Terry’s teeth. His knuckles were ripped open, too. The kid had died fighting.

Two feet farther on was the source of his motivation. Tina Trailman lay on the stone, staring upward with glazed eyes. She was naked from the waist down. Her throat and trapezius muscles were mostly gone, ripped away, as were her modest breasts. The quadriceps muscle of her right leg was gone, the skin around it showing the roughly torn gouges of ghoul fangs. There was blood everywhere, a sticky pool forming around her.

I saw her shudder a little. A tiny sound escaped her unmoving form. She was dead already—I knew that. I’ve seen it more than once. Her heart was still laboring, but whatever time she had left was a mere formality.

My vision went red with rage. Or maybe that was the Hellfire. I called upon still more of the dark energy in midleap, staff gripped in both hands, and rammed the tip into the small of the ghoul’s back as I snarled, “Fuego!”

The blow, with all my weight and power and speed behind it, probably broke a couple of the ghoul’s vertebrae all by itself. The fire spell came rushing out at the same time, filling the tunnel with thunder and light.

Tremendous heat blossomed before me, rushed into the ghoul, and tore him in half at the waist.

The same thermal bloom washed into the stone wall behind the creature and rebounded. I got an arm up to shield my face, and I dropped the staff so that I could draw my hands into my duster’s sleeves. I managed to keep much skin from being directly exposed, but it hurt like hell all the same. I remembered that, later. At the time, I didn’t give a flying fuck.

I kicked the ghoul’s wildly thrashing lower body into the blackness of the mine shaft. Then I turned to the upper half.

The ghoul’s blood wasn’t red, so he burned black and brown, like a burger that fell into the barbecue just as it was finished cooking. He thrashed and screamed and somehow managed to flip himself onto his back. He held up his arms, fingers spread in desperation, and cried, “Mercy, great one! Mercy!”

Sixteen years old.

Jesus Christ.

I stared down for a second. I didn’t want to kill the ghoul. That wasn’t nearly enough to cover the debt of its sins. I wanted to rip it to pieces. I wanted to eat its heart. I wanted to pin it to the floor and push my thumbs through its beady eyes and all the way into its brain. I wanted to tear it apart with my fingernails and my teeth, and spit mouthfuls of its own pustuled flesh into its face as it died in slow and terrible agony.

The quality of mercy was not Harry.

I called up the Hellfire again, and with a snarl cast out the simple spell I use to light candles. Backed by Hellfire, directed by my fury, it lashed out at the ghoul, plunged beneath its skin, and there it set fat and nerves and sinews alight. They burned, burned using the ghoul for tallow, and the thing went mad with the pain.

I reached down to the ghoul, caught him by the remains of his robes, and hauled him up to my eye level, ignoring the little runnels of flame that occasionally licked up from the inferno beneath the ghoul’s skin. I stared into its face. Then forced it to look at the bodies. Then I turned it back to me, and my voice came out in a snarl so inhuman that I barely understood it myself.

“Never,” I told it. “Never again.”

Then I threw it down the shaft.

It burst into open flame a second later, the rush of its fall feeding the fires in its flesh. I watched it plummet, heard it wailing in terror and pain. Then, far below, it struck something. The flame flowered and brightened for a second. Then it began to slowly die away. I couldn’t make out any details of the ghoul, but nothing moved.

I looked up in time to see Ramirez come through the ruins of the wooden partition. He stared at me for a second, where I stood over the mine shaft, dark smoke rising from the surface of my duster, red light shining up from far below, the stench of brimstone heavy in the air.

Ramirez is rarely at a loss for words.

He stared for a moment. Then his eyes tracked over to the dead kids. His breath escaped him in a short, hard jerk. His shoulders sagged. He dropped to one knee, turning his head away from the sight. “Dios.”

I picked up my staff and started walking back to the camp.

Ramirez caught up with me a few paces later. “Dresden,” he said.

I ignored him.

“Harry!”

“Sixteen, Carlos,” I said. “Sixteen. It had them for less than eight minutes.”

“Harry, wait.”

“What the hell was I thinking?” I snarled, stepping out into the sunlight. “Staff and blasting rod and most of my gear in the damned tent. We’re at war.”

“There was security in place,” Ramirez said. “We’ve been here for two days. There was no way you could know this was coming.”

“We’re Wardens, Carlos. We’re supposed to protect people. I could have done more to be ready.”

He got in front of me and planted his feet. I stopped and narrowed my eyes at him.

“You’re right,” he said. “This is a war. Bad things happen to people, even if no one makes any mistakes.”

I don’t remember consciously doing it, but the runes of my staff began to burn with Hellfire again.

“Carlos,” I said quietly. “Get out of my way.”

He ground his teeth, but his eyes flickered away from me. He didn’t actually turn, but when I brushed past him, he didn’t try to stop me.

At the camp, I caught one brief glimpse of Luccio as she helped carry a wounded trainee on a stretcher. She stepped into a glowing line of light in the air, an opened way to the Nevernever, and vanished. Reinforcements had arrived. There were Wardens with medical kits, stretchers, the works, trying to stabilize the wounded and get them to better help. The trainees looked shocked, numb, staring around them—and at two silent shapes lying close together over to one side, covered from their heads to their knees by an unzipped sleeping bag.

I stormed into the smithy and snarled, “Forzare!” putting all my rage and will into a lashing column of force directed at the captured ghouls.

The spell blew the remaining wall of the smithy and the two ghouls fifty feet through the air and onto a relatively flat area of the street. I walked after them. I didn’t hurry. In fact, I picked up a jug of orange juice off one of the breakfast tables, and drank some of it as I went.

The mountainside was completely silent.

Once I reached them, another blast opened up a six-foot crater in the sandy earth. I kicked the mostly human ghoul into it, and with several more such blasts collapsed the crater in on him, burying him to the neck.

Then I called fire and melted the sand around the ghoul’s exposed head into a sheet of glass.

It screamed and screamed, which did not matter to me in the least. The sheer heat of the molten sand burned away its features, its eyes, its lips and tongue, even as the trauma forced the ghoul into its true form. I upended the jug of juice. Some of it splashed on the ghoul’s head. Some of it sizzled on the narrow band of glass around it. I walked calmly, pouring orange juice on the ground in a steady line until, ten feet later, I reached the enormous nest of fire ants one of the trainees had stumbled into on our first day at Camp Kaboom.

Presently, the first scouts started following the trail back to the ghoul.

I turned on the second ghoul.

It cringed away from me, holding completely still. The only sound was the raw whisper-screams of the other ghoul.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I told the ghoul in a very quiet voice. “You get to carry word to your kind.” I thrust the end of my staff against its chest and stared down. Wisps of sulfurous smoke trickled down the length of the wooden shaft and over the maimed ghoul. “Tell them this.” I leaned closer. “Never again. Tell them that. Never again. Or Hell itself will not hide you from me.”

The ghoul groveled. “Great one. Great one.”

I roared again and started kicking the ghoul as hard as I could. I kept it up until it floundered away from me, heading for the open desert with only one leg and one arm, the movements freakish and terrified.

I watched until the maimed ghoul was gone.

By then, the ants had found his buddy. I stood over it for a time and beheld what I had wrought without looking away.

I felt Ramirez’s presence behind me. “Dios,” he whispered.

I said nothing.

Moments later, Ramirez said, “What happened to not hating them?”

“Things change.”

Ramirez didn’t move, and his voice was so low I could barely hear it. “How many lessons will it take the kids to learn this one, do you think?”

The rage came swarming up again.

“Battle is one thing,” Ramirez said. “This is something else. Look at them.”

I suddenly felt the weight of dozens and dozens of eyes upon me. I turned to find the trainees, all pale, shocked, and silent, staring at me. They looked terrified.

I fought the frustration and anger back down. Ramirez was right. Of course he was right. Dammit.

I drew my gun and executed the ghoul.

“Dios,” Ramirez breathed. He stared at me for a moment. “Never seen you like this.”

I started feeling the minor burns. The sun began turning Camp Kaboom into a giant cookie sheet that would sear away anything soft. “Like what?”

“Cold,” he said, finally. “That’s the only way to serve it up,” I said. “Cold.”

Cold.

Cold.

I came back to myself. No more New Mexico. Dark. Cold, so cold that it burned. Chest tight.

I was in the water.

My chest hurt. I managed to look up.

Sun shone down on fractured ice about eight inches thick. It came back to me. The battle aboard the Water Beetle. The ghouls. The lake. The ice had broken and I had fallen through.

I couldn’t see far, and when the ghoul came through the water, swimming like a crocodile, its arms flat against its sides, it was close enough to touch. It spotted me at the same time, and turned away.

Never again.

I reached out and grabbed on to the back of the jeans the ghoul still wore. It panicked, swimming fast, and dived down into the cold and dark, trying to scare me into letting go.

I was aware that I had to breathe, and that I was already beginning to black out. I dismissed it as unimportant. This ghoul was never going to hurt anyone else, ever again, if I had to die to make sure of it. Everything started going dark.

And then there was another pale shape in the water. Thomas, this time, shirtless, holding that crooked knife in his teeth. He closed on the ghoul, which writhed and twisted with such fear and desperation that it tore my weakening fingers lose from their grip.

I drifted. Felt something cold wrap my right wrist. Felt light coming closer, painfully bright.

And then my face was out of the frozen water, and I sucked in a weak gasp of air. I felt a slender arm slip under my chin, and then I was being pulled through the water. Elaine. I’d recognize the touch of her skin to mine anywhere.

We broke the surface, and she let out a gasp, then started pulling me toward the dock. With the help of Olivia and the other women, Elaine managed to get me up out of the lake. I fell to my side and lay there shivering violently, gasping down all the air I could. The world slowly began to return to its usual shape, but I was too tired to do anything about it.

I don’t know how much time went by, but the sirens were close by the time Thomas appeared and hauled himself out of the water.

“Go,” Thomas said. “Can he walk? Is he shot?”

“No,” Elaine said. “It might be shock; I don’t know. I think he hit his head on something.”

“We can’t stay here,” Thomas said. I felt him pick me up and sling me over a shoulder. He did it as gently as such a thing can be done.

“Right,” Elaine said. “Come on. Everyone, keep up and don’t get separated.”

I felt motion. My head hurt. A lot.

“I gotcha,” Thomas said to me, as he started walking. “It’s cool, Harry,” he murmured. “They’re safe. We got everyone clear. I gotcha.”

My brother’s word was good enough for me.

I closed my eyes and stopped trying to keep track of things.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The touch of very warm, very gentle fingers woke me.

My head hurt, even more than it had after Cowl had finished ringing my bells the night before, if such a thing was possible. I didn’t want to regain consciousness, if it meant rising into that.

But those soft, warm fingers touched me, steady and exquisitely feminine, and the pain began to fade. That had the effect it always did. When the pain was gone, its simple lack was a nearly narcotic pleasure of its own.

It was more than that, too. There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.

It seemed that, lately, I had barely been touched at all.

“Dammit, Lash,” I mumbled. “I told you to stop doing that.”

The fingers stiffened for a second, and Elaine said, “What was that, Harry?”

I blinked and opened my eyes.

I was lying on a bed in dim hotel room. The ceiling tiles were old and water stained. The furniture was similarly simple, cheap, battered by long and careless use and little maintenance.

Elaine sat at the head of the bed with her legs crossed. My head lay comfortably upon her calves, as it had so many times before. My legs hung off the end of the bed, also as they had often done before, a long time ago, in a house I barely remembered except in dreams.

“Am I hurting you, Harry?” Elaine pressed. I couldn’t see her expression without craning my neck, and that seemed a bad idea, but she sounded concerned.

“No,” I said. “No, just waking up groggy. Sorry.”

“Ah,” she said. “Who is Lash?”

“No one I especially want to discuss.”

“All right,” she said. There was nothing but gentle assent in her tone. “Then just lie back for a few moments more and let me finish. Your friend the vampire said that they’d be watching the hospitals.”

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Reiki,” she replied.

“Laying on of hands?” I said. “That stuff works?”

“The principles are sound,” she said, and I felt something silky brush over my forehead. Her hair. I recognized it by touch and smell. She had bowed her head in concentration. Her voice became distracted. “I was able to combine them with some basic principles for moving energy. I haven’t found a way to handle critical trauma or to manage infections, but it’s surprisingly effective in handling bruises, sprains, and bumps on the head.”

No kidding. The headache was already gone completely. The tightness in my head and neck was fading as well, as were the twinges in my upper back and shoulders.

And a beautiful woman was touching me.

Elaine was touching me.

I wouldn’t have done anything to stop her if I’d had a thousand paper cuts and she’d soaked her hands in lemon juice.

We simply stayed like that for a time. Once in while, she moved her hands, palms running down lightly over my cheeks, neck, chest. Her hands would move in slow, repetitive stroking motions, barely touching my skin. I’d lost my shirt at some point. All of those aches and pains of exertion and combat faded away, leaving only a happy cloud of endorphins behind. Her hands were warm, slow, infinitely patient and infinitely confident.

It felt amazing.

I drifted on the sensations, utterly content.

“All right,” she said quietly, an unknown amount of time later. “How does that feel?”

“Incredible,” I said.

I could hear the smile in her voice. “You always say that when I’m done touching you.”

“Not my fault if it’s always true,” I replied.

“Flatterer,” she said, and her fingers gently slapped one of my shoulders. “Let me up, ape.”

“What if I don’t want to?” I drawled.

“Men. I pay you the least bit of attention, and you go completely Paleolithic on me.”

“Ugh,” I replied, and slowly sat up, expecting a surge of discomfort and nausea as the blood rushed around my head. There wasn’t any.

I frowned and ran my fingers lightly over my scalp. There was a lump on the side of my skull that should have felt like hell. Instead, it was only a little tender. I’ve been thumped on the melon before. I know the residue of a hard blow. This felt like a bad one, only after I’d had about a week to recover. “How long have I been down?”

“Eight hours, maybe?” Elaine asked. She rose from the bed and stretched. It was every bit as intriguing and pleasant to watch as I remembered. “I sort of lose track when I’m focused on something.”

“I remember,” I murmured.

Elaine froze in place, and her green eyes glittered in the dimness as she met my gaze in a kind of relaxed, insolent silence. Then a little smile touched her lips. “I suppose you would.”

My heart lurched and sped up, and I started getting ideas.

None of which could be properly pursued at the moment.

I saw Elaine reach the same conclusion at about the same time I did. She lowered her arms, smiled again and said, “Excuse me. I’ve been sitting there a while.” Then she paced into the bathroom.

I went to the hotel’s window and opened the cheap blinds a tiny bit. We were somewhere on the south side. Dusk was on the city, the streetlights already flickering into life one by one, as the shadows crept out from beneath the buildings and oozed slowly up the light poles. I checked around but saw no shark fins circling, no vultures wheeling overhead, and no obvious ghouls or vampires lurking nearby, just waiting to pounce. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, though.

I went to the door and touched it lightly with my left hand. Elaine had spun another ward over the door, a subtle, solid crafting that would release enough kinetic energy to throw anyone who tried to open it a good ten or twelve feet away. It was perfect for a quick exit, if you were expecting trouble and ready for it when it arrived. Just wait for the bad guy to get bitch-slapped into the parking lot, then dash out the door and run off before he regained his feet.

I heard Elaine come out of the bathroom behind me. “What happened?” I asked.

“What do you remember?”

“Madrigal opened up with that assault rifle. Flash of light. Then I was in the water.”

Elaine came to stand next to me and also glanced out. Her hand brushed mine when she lowered it from the blinds, and without even thinking about it, I twined my fingers in hers. It was an achingly familiar sensation, and another pang of half-remembered days long gone made my chest ache for a second.

Elaine shivered a little and closed her eyes. Her fingers tightened, very slightly, on mine. “We thought he’d killed you,” she said. “You started to crouch down, and there were bullets shattering the ice all around you. You went into the water, and the vampire…Madrigal, did you say his name was? He ordered the ghouls in after you. I sent Olivia and the others to the shore, and Thomas and I went into the water to find you.”

“Who hit me in the head?” I asked.

Elaine shrugged. “Either a bullet hit your coat after you crouched down, and then bounced off your thick skull without penetrating, or you slammed it against some of the shattered ice as you went under.”

A bullet might have bounced off my head, thanks to the intervening fabric of my spell-covered coat. That was a sobering sort of thing to hear, even for me. “Thank you,” I said. “For getting me out.”

Elaine arched an eyebrow, then gave me a little roll of her eyes and said, “I was bored and didn’t have anything better to do.”

“I figured,” I said. “Thomas?”

“He’s all right. He had a car near the docks. I drove that clown car of yours, and we shoehorned everyone into them and got away clean. With any luck, Madrigal had a tougher time avoiding the cops than we did.”

“Nah,” I said, with total conviction. “Too easy. He got away. Where’s Thomas?”

“Standing watch outside, he said.” Elaine frowned. “He looked…very pale. He refused to stay in the room with his refugees. Or me, for that matter.”

I grunted. Thomas had really put on his Supervamp cape back at the harbor. Under ordinary circumstances, he was surprisingly strong for a man of his size and build. But even unusually strong men don’t go toe-to-toe with ghouls armed with nothing but a big stick and come away clean. Thomas could make himself stronger—a lot stronger—but not forever. The demon knit to my brother’s soul could make him into a virtual godling, but it also increased his hunger for the life force of mortals, burning away whatever he had stored up in exchange for the improved performance.

After that fight, Thomas had to be hungry. So hungry that he didn’t trust himself in a room with anyone he considered, well, edible. Which, in our escape party, had been everyone but me and the kids.

He must have been hurting.

“What about the Ordo?” I asked her quietly.

“I didn’t want to go until I could be certain that I wouldn’t lead anyone back to them. I called them every couple of hours to make sure they were all right. I should check in with them again.”

She turned to the phone before she finished the sentence and dialed a number. I waited. She was silent. After a moment, she hung up the phone again.

“No answer,” I said quietly.

“No,” she said. She turned to the dresser, gathered up her length of chain, and threaded it through the loops of her jeans like a belt, fastening it with a slightly curved piece of dark wood bound with several bands of colored leather, which she slipped through two links.

I opened the door and stuck my head out into the twilight, looking around. I didn’t see Thomas anywhere, so I let out a sharp, loud whistle, waved an arm around a little, and ducked back inside, closing the door again.

It didn’t take long for Thomas’s footsteps to reach the door.

“Harry,” Elaine said, mildly alarmed. “The ward.”

I held up a forefinger in a one-second kind of gesture, then folded my arms, stared at the door, and waited. The doorknob twitched; there was a heavy thud, a gasp of surprise, and a loud clatter of empty trash cans.

I opened the door and found my brother flat on his back in the parking lot, amidst a moderate amount of spilled garbage. He stared up at the sky for a moment, let out a long-suffering sigh, and then sat up, scowling at me.

“Oh, sorry about that,” I said, with all the sincerity of a three-year-old claiming he didn’t steal that cookie all over his face. “Maybe I should have told you about a potentially dangerous situation, huh? I mean, that would have been polite of me to warn you, right? And sensible. And intelligent. And respectful. And—”

“I get it, I get it,” he growled. He got up and made a doomed effort to brush various bits of unsavory matter off his clothes. “Jesus Christ, Harry. There are days when you can be a total prick.”

“Whereas you can apparently be a complete moron for weeks at a time!”

Elaine stepped up beside me and said, “I love to see a good testosterone-laden alpha-male dominance struggle as much as the next woman—but don’t you think it would be smarter to do it where half of the city can’t see us?”

I scowled at Elaine, but she had a point. I stepped out the door and offered Thomas my hand.

He glowered at me, then deliberately ran his hand through some of the muck and held it out to me without wiping it off. I rolled my eyes and pulled him to his feet, and then the three of us went back into the room.

Thomas leaned his back against the door, folded his arms, and kept his eyes on the floor while I went to the sink and washed off my hands. My coat hung on one of the wire hangers on the bar beside it, as did my shirt. My staff rested in a corner by the light switch, and my other gear was on the counter. I dried off my hands and started suiting up. “Okay, Thomas,” I said. “Seriously. What’s up with the secrecy? You should have contacted me.”

“I couldn’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I promised someone I wouldn’t.”

I frowned at that, tugging the still-damp black leather glove onto my disfigured left hand, and tried to think. Thomas and I were brothers. He took that every bit as seriously as I did—but he took his promises seriously, too. If he’d made the promise, he had a good reason to do so.

“How much can you tell me?”

Elaine gave me a sharp glance.

“I’ve already said more than I should have,” Thomas said.

“Don’t be an idiot. We’ve obviously got a common enemy here.”

Thomas grimaced, gave me a hesitant glance, and then said, “We’ve got several.”

I traded a glance with Elaine, who glanced at Thomas, shrugged, and suggested, “Bruises fade?”

“No,” I said. “If he isn’t talking he has a good reason for it. Beating him up won’t change that.”

“Then we should stop wasting time here,” Elaine said quietly.

Thomas looked back and forth between us. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ve lost contact with the women Elaine is protecting,” I said.

“Dammit.” Thomas pushed his hand back through his hair. “That means…”

I fastened the clasp on the new shield bracelet. “What?”

“Look. You already know Madrigal is around,” Thomas said.

“And that he’s always sucking up to House Malvora,” I said. I frowned. “For the love of God, he’s the Passenger.” He’s the one working with Grey Cloak the Malvora.”

“I didn’t say that,” Thomas said quickly.

“You didn’t have to,” I growled. “He didn’t just happen to show up for some payback while this other stuff was going on. And it all fits. Passenger was talking to Grey Cloak about having the resources to take me out. He obviously decided to take a whack at it with a bunch of ghouls and a machine gun.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Thomas said. “You already know that there’s a Skavis around.”

“Yes.”

“Time to do some math then, Harry.”

“Madrigal and Grey Cloak the Malvora,” I murmured. “The genocidal odd couple. Neither of which is a Skavis.”

Elaine drew in a sharp breath and said, at the same time I was thinking it, “It means that we aren’t talking about one killer.”

I completed the thought. “We’re talking about three of them. Grey Cloak Malvora, Passenger Madrigal, and Serial Killer Skavis.” I frowned at Thomas. “Wait. Are you saying that—”

My brother’s expression became strained. “I’m not saying anything,” he replied. “Those are all things you already know.”

Elaine frowned. “You’re trying to maintain deniability,” she said. “Why?”

“So I can deny telling you anything, obviously,” Thomas snarled, his eyes suddenly flickering several shades of grey lighter as he stared at Elaine.

Elaine drew in a sharp breath. Then she narrowed her eyes a little, unfastened the clasp on her chain, and said, “Stop it, vampire. Now.”

Thomas’s lips pulled back from his teeth, but he jerked his face away from her and closed his eyes.

I stepped between them as I shrugged into my leather duster. “Elaine, back off. The enemy of my enemy. Okay?”

“I don’t like it,” Elaine said. “You know what he is, Harry. How do you know you can trust him?”

“I’ve worked with him before,” I said. “He’s different.”

“How? A lot of vampires feel remorse about their victims. It doesn’t stop them from killing over and over. It’s what they are.”

“I’ve gazed him,” I said quietly. “He’s trying to rise above the killer inside him.”

Elaine’s brows knit into a frown at those words, and she gave me a slow and reluctant nod. “Aren’t we all,” she murmured. “I’m still not comfortable with the notion of him near my clients. And we need to get moving.”

“Go ahead,” Thomas said.

I didn’t look at my brother, but I said, “You need to eat.”

“Maybe later,” Thomas said. “I can’t leave the women and children unguarded.”

I grabbed a pad of cheap paper with the hotel’s logo and found a pencil in one of my pockets. I wrote a number on it and passed it to Thomas. “Call Murphy. You won’t be able to protect anyone if you’re too weak, and you might kill one of them if you lose control of the hunger.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened with frustration, but he took the offered piece of paper from my hand only a little more roughly than necessary.

Elaine studied him as she walked to the door with me. Then she said to him, “You’re different from most of them, aren’t you?”

“Probably just more deluded,” Thomas replied. “Good luck, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling awkward. “Look. After this is done…we have to talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” my brother said.

We left and I closed the door behind us.

We took the Blue Beetle back to the Amber Inn and went to Elaine’s room. The lights were off. The room was empty.

There was a terrible sewer smell in the air.

“Dammit,” Elaine whispered. She suddenly sagged and leaned against the doorway.

I stepped past her and turned on the light in the bathroom.

Anna Ash’s corpse stood in the shower, body stiff, leaning away from the showerhead, but held in place by the electrical cord of a hair dryer, tied in a knot about the showerhead and another around her neck. There hadn’t been room enough for her to suspend herself with her feet off the floor. Ugly, purple-black ligature marks showed on her neck around the cord.

It was obviously a suicide.

It obviously wasn’t.

We were too late.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“We’ve got to call the cops on this one,” I said quietly to Elaine.

“No,” she replied. “They’ll want to question us. It will take hours.”

“They’ll want to question us a lot longer if someone else finds the body and they have to come looking for us.”

“And while we’re cooperating with the authorities, what happens to Abby, Helen, and Priscilla?” She stared at me. “For that matter, what happens to Mouse?”

That was a thought I’d been trying to avoid. If Mouse was alive and capable, there was no way he’d let any of the women be harmed. If someone had killed Anna when Mouse was near, it could have happened only over his dead body.

But there was no sign of him.

That could mean a lot of things. At worst it meant that he had been utterly disintegrated by whatever had come for the women. Not only was that assumption depressing as hell, it also didn’t get me anywhere. A bad guy who could simply disintegrate anything that got in the way sure wouldn’t be pussyfooting around the way these White Court yahoos had been.

Mouse wasn’t here. There was no mess, no sign of a struggle, and believe you me, that dog can put up a struggle, as the vets found out when they misfiled his paperwork. They tried to neuter him instead of vaccinating him and getting his shoulder X-rayed where he’d bounced off of a moving minivan. I was lucky they were willing to let me pay the property damage and leave it at that.

It had to mean something else. Maybe my dog had left with the others, and Anna had remained behind, or gone back for something she forgot.

Or maybe Mouse had played on everyone’s expectation that he was just a dog. He’d shown me that he was capable of that kind of subterfuge before, and it had been one of the first things that tipped me off to his distinctly superior-to-canine intellect. What if Mouse had played along and stayed close to the others?

Why would he do that, though?

Because Mouse knew I could find him. Unless the bad guys carried him off to the Nevernever itself, or put him behind a set of wards specifically designed to block such magic, my tracking spell could find him anywhere.

That was the path to take, even if Mouse didn’t know anything was wrong. He would have stayed with any members of the Ordo that he could, and I had taken to planning ahead a little more than I used to do. I could use my shield bracelet to target the single small shield charm I’d hung from his collar for just such an emergency. Me and Foghorn Leghorn.

“Can you find the dog?” Elaine asked.

“Yeah. But we should try calling their homes before we go.”

Elaine frowned. “You told them to stay here, or somewhere public.”

“Odds are pretty good that they’re scared. And when you’re scared…”

“…you want to go home,” Elaine finished.

“If they’re there, it’ll be the quickest way to get in touch. If not, it hasn’t cost us more than a minute or two.”

Elaine nodded. “Anna had all the numbers in a notebook in her purse.” We turned up the purse after a brief search, but the notebook wasn’t in it.

There wasn’t anything for it but to make sure that Anna hadn’t slipped it into a pocket before she died. I checked, and tried not to leave any prints almost as hard as I tried not to look at her dead, purpling face or glazed eyes. It hadn’t been a clean death, and even though Anna hadn’t been gone long enough to start decomposition, the smell was formidable. I tried to ignore it.

It was harder to ignore her face. The skin had the stiff, waxy look that dead bodies get. Worse, there was a distinct and unquantifiable quality of…absence. Anna Ash had been very much alive—fierce of will, protective, determined. I know plenty of wizards without the force of personality she had. She’d been the one thinking and acting when all of those around her were frightened. That takes a rare kind of courage.

None of which meant anything, since, despite my efforts, the killer had taken her anyway.

I shook my head and stepped away from the corpse, having turned up no notebook. Her willingness to face danger on behalf of her friends couldn’t be allowed to vanish silently into the past. If some of those she sought to protect were still alive, then her own sacrifice and death could still mean something. I could be bitter about her death later. I would be doing a grave disservice to the woman if I let it do anything but make me more motivated to stop the killers before they had finished their work.

I came face-to-face with Elaine, who stood in the doorway, staring at Anna’s body. There was no expression on her face, absolutely none. Tears, though, had reddened her eyes and streaked over her cheeks and down her nose. Some women are pretty when they cry. Elaine gets all blotchy and runny-nosed, and it brought out the dark, tired circles beneath her eyes.

It didn’t look pretty. It just looked like pain.

She spoke, and her voice came out rough and quavering. “I told her I would protect her.”

“Sometimes you try,” I said quietly. “Sometimes that’s all you do. Try. That’s how the game works.”

“Game,” she said. The single word was caustic enough to melt holes in the floor. “Has it ever happened to you? Someone who came to you for help was killed?”

I nodded. “Couple of times. First time was Kim Delaney. A girl I had trained to keep her talent under control. Maybe a little stronger than the women in the Ordo, but not much. She got involved in bad business. Over her head. I thought I could warn her off, that she would listen to me. I should have known better.”

“What happened?”

I tilted my head back at the body behind me, without actually looking. “Something ate her. I go to her grave sometimes.”

“Why?”

“To bring her some flowers and sweep off the leaves. To remind me of the stakes I play for. To remind me that nobody wins them all.”

“And after?” Elaine asked me quietly. She hadn’t looked away from the corpse. Not for a second. “What did you do to the thing that killed her?”

It was a complicated answer, but it wasn’t what Elaine needed to hear right then. “I killed it.”

She nodded again. “When we catch up to the Skavis, I want it.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and said, very gently, “It won’t make you feel any better.”

She shook her head. “That’s not why I want to do it. It was my job. I’ve got to finish my job. I owe her that much.”

I didn’t think Elaine herself thought the statement was untrue, but I’d gone through this kind of thing before, and it can unbalance your tires pretty damned quick. There was no point, though, in trying to discuss it with her rationally. Reason had left the building.

“You’ll get him,” I said quietly. “I’ll help.”

She let out one little broken, cawing sob and pressed against my chest. I held her, warm and slender, and felt the terrible remorse and frustration and grief that coursed through her. I pressed my presence against her and tightened my arms around her and felt her body shaking with silent sobs. More than anything, at that moment, I wished I could make her torment go away.

I couldn’t. Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn’t change your heart. We’re all human.

We’re all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Not a full minute later, I could feel Elaine beginning the struggle to get her breathing under control. DuMorne’s methods of teaching us to discipline our emotions had not been gentle, but they worked. Before another minute went by Elaine’s breathing had steadied, and she leaned her head against my collarbone for a moment, a silent gesture of gratitude. Then she straightened, and I lowered my arms. She bowed her head toward Anna’s corpse, an almost formal gesture of respect or farewell.

When she turned around, I was waiting for her with a damp, cool washcloth. I said quietly, “Hold still,” and gently wiped her face clean. “You have to uphold the gumshoe image. Can’t go out blotchy. People will think we’re not hard-boiled. Very important to be hard-boiled.”

She watched me as I cleaned her face and talked, and her eyes looked huge. A very small smile touched them through the sadness. “I’m glad you’re here to tell me these things,” she said, her voice steady again before it slipped into a bourbon-tainted, lockjawed Humphrey Bogart impersonation. “Now stop flapping your gums and start walking.”

My tracking spell led us to an apartment building.

“This is Abby’s building,” Elaine said as I pulled over. The only close place to park was in front of a hydrant. I doubted any industrious civil servants would be handing out tickets this late, but even if they were, it would be cheap compared to what a long walk in the dark could cost me.

“Which apartment?” I asked.

“Ninth floor,” Elaine replied. She shut the door of the Beetle a little harder than she had to.

“It occurs to me,” I said, “that if I was a bad guy and wanted to off a couple of intrepid hard-boiled wizards, I might be hanging around watching someplace like this.”

“It occurs to me,” Elaine said, her voice crisp, “that he would be exceptionally foolish to make the attempt.”

We walked together, quickly. Elaine was tall enough to keep up with me without taking the occasional skipping step. She’d slipped half a dozen coppery bracelets over each wrist, all of them slender, all of them hanging more heavily than they should have. Faint glints of golden energy played among them, and looked like little more than the glitter of light on metal—except that you could see them better when the bracelets were in deep shadows.

By silent agreement, we skipped the elevators. I had my shield bracelet ready to go, and my staff was quivering with leashed energy that made it wave and wobble incongruously to its weight and motion as I moved. That much readied magic could have unfortunate consequences on electrical equipment, like elevator control panels.

The doors to the stairs opened only from the other side, but I conjured a quick spell to shove against the pressure bar on the far side using my staff, and it swung open. We slipped into the stairway. Anyone waiting for us above would be watching the elevator first. Anyone chasing after us would have a hard time with the locked doors, and would make noise on the open concrete stairs.

I checked my gun with my left hand, safe in the pocket of my duster. Magic is groovy, but when it comes to dealing out death, regular mortal know-how can be just as impressive.

Nine floors up was enough to make me breathe hard, though not as hard as I once would have. A faint ghost of a headache came along with the elevated heart rate. Hell’s bells, I must have been hurt a lot worse than I thought, back at the harbor. Elaine looked a little strained, herself. If she’d really smoothed away that much of an injury, she had more skill than she’d told me she did. That kind of healing isn’t a matter of trivial effort, either. She might be more fragile than she appeared.

I opened the fire door on Abby’s floor, and let Elaine take the lead. She went down the center of the hallway in total silence, her hands slightly outstretched, and I got the sense that she was somehow perfectly aware of everything around her—more so than human senses would account for. The bracelets on her wrists glittered more brightly. Superior awareness as a defense, then, instead of my own, more direct approach of meeting power with power and stopping things cold. Just her style.

But neither hyperawareness nor irresistible force was called for. Elaine reached a door and raised a hand to knock. Just before it fell, the door opened, and a strained-looking Abby gave us a quick nod. “Good, a little early, that’s good; come in, yes, come in.”

I started forward, but Elaine held up one hand to halt me, her eyes distracted. “Let me check. Another woman inside. Two dogs.” She glanced at me, and lowered her hand. “One of them is your dog.”

“Mouse?” I called.

The floor shook a little, and the big, dark grey dog nudged rather delicately past Abby and came to greet me, shoving his head into my stomach until I went down on one knee and got a sloppy kiss or two on the face.

I slapped his shoulders roughly a few times, because I’m supremely manly and did not tear up a little to see that he was all right and still attached to his collar. “Good to see you, too, furface.”

Toto trotted out behind Mouse, like a tiny tugboat escorting an enormous barge, and gave a suspicious growl. Then he pattered over to me and sniffed me, sneezed several times, and evidently found me acceptable, underneath the smell of lake water. He hurried back over to Abby, gave me one more growl to make sure I’d learned my lesson, and bounced around her feet until she picked him up.

The plump little blonde settled the dog in her arms and faced me with concern. “What happened? I mean, the two of you left and what happened, where did you go, is Olivia—”

“Let’s go inside,” I said, rising. I traded a look with Elaine, and we all went into Abby’s apartment. Mouse never left actual, physical contact with me, his shoulders pressing steadily, lightly, against my leg. I was the last through the door and closed it behind me.

Abby’s place was a modest, hectic little apartment, segregated into neatly compartmentalized areas. She had a desk with a typewriter, a table with an old sewing machine, a chair beside a music stand with a violin (unless maybe it was a viola) resting on it, a reading niche with an armchair and overloaded shelves of romance novels, and what looked something like a shrine dedicated to ancestor worship, only in reverse, where the saints were all children with round cheeks and blond ringlets.

Priscilla was there, seated in the comfortable chair in the reading niche, looking haggard and much subdued. There was a cup of tea sitting on the little table beside the reading chair, but it had apparently gone cold without ever having been touched. She looked up at me, her eyes heavy and dull.

“Olivia’s all right,” I said quietly.

Abby brightened a second before I started speaking, drawing in a sharp little breath. The little dog in her arms caught her mood at once, and began wagging his tail at me. “Yes?”

“A…sometime associate of mine, the man in the pictures, has been taking women who were in danger of being a target of the killers out of the city. He learned Olivia was in danger and urged her to leave with him when he took several women to a safe house.”

Priscilla stared at me hard for a long moment. Then she said, “What else?”

Elaine spoke, her voice quiet and unflinching. “Anna’s dead. Back at the hotel room. An apparent suicide.”

Abby let out a little gagging sound. She sat down very quickly in the chair by the violin. Toto let out small, distressed sounds. “Wh-what?” Abby asked.

Priscilla shuddered and bowed her head. “Oh. Oh, no. Oh, Anna.”

“I need to know, ladies,” I said quietly. “Why didn’t you do as we instructed? Why did you leave the hotel?”

“It…” Abby began. Tears overflowed her cheeks. “It was…was…”

“She said,” Priscilla said in a quiet, dull voice. “Said that she had to leave. That she had to go to work.”

Son of a bitch. I knew it.

Elaine was half a beat behind me. “Who?”

“H-Helen,” Abby sobbed. “It was Helen.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I stood there fuming while Elaine coaxed the rest of the story out of Abby and Priscilla.

“It was only an hour or so after you left,” Abby told Elaine. “Helen got a call on her cell phone.”

“Cell phone?” I perked up. “She had one that worked?”

“She doesn’t have a lot of talent that way,” Abby said. “None of us do, really. Even my cell phone works most of the time.”

I grunted. “Means she wasn’t hiding a bigger talent, then. That’s worth something.”

“Harry,” Elaine said quietly. It was a rebuke. “Please go on, Abby.”

I zipped my mouth shut.

“She got a call, and she went into the bathroom to talk. I couldn’t hear what she said, but when she came out, she said she had to go to work. That she was leaving.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “That’s quite a job, if she’s risking exposure to a killer to show up for the shift.”

“That’s what I said,” Priscilla said, her voice even more bitter, if such a thing was possible. “It was stupid. I never even thought to be suspicious of it.”

“Anna argued with her,” Abby went on, “but Helen refused to stay. So Anna wanted us all to take her there together.”

“Helen wouldn’t have any of it, of course,” Priscilla said. “At the time, I thought she might just be ashamed of us seeing her working some nothing little job at a fast-food restaurant or something.”

“We never really knew what she did,” Abby said, her tone numb and apologetic. “She never wanted to talk about it. We always assumed it was an issue of pride.” She petted the little dog in her arms idly. “She said something about keeping us separate from the rest of her life…in any case, Anna put her into a cab and made her promise to keep in touch with us. Calling in on the phone until she was safely around other people.”

“You just let her walk?” I broke in.

“She’s a sister of the Ordo,” Priscilla said. “Not a criminal to be distrusted and watched.”

“In point of fact,” I said, “she is a criminal to be distrusted and watched. Ask her freaking parole officer.”

Elaine frowned at me. “Dammit, Harry. This isn’t helping.”

I muttered under my breath, folded my arms again, and crouched down to give Mouse’s ears and neck a good scratching. Maybe it would help me keep my mouth shut. There’s a first time for everything.

“Helen called me about twenty minutes later,” Priscilla said. “She said that she had been followed from the hotel. That our location had become known. That we had to leave. We did, just as you told us. Helen said that she would meet us here.”

“I told you to head for somewhere public—” I began, snarling.

“Harry,” Elaine said, her voice sharp.

I subsided again.

There was a moment of awkward silence. “Um. So we went,” Abby said. “But when we got there, Helen wasn’t around.”

“No,” Priscilla said, hugging her arms under her breasts, looking cold and miserable, even in the turtleneck. “She called again. Begged us to come to her apartment.”

“I stayed here with the dogs,” Abby said. Toto looked up at her as she said it, tilting his head and wagging his little tail.

“Once Anna and I picked her up,” Priscilla continued, “we headed back here—but Helen looked awful. She’d run out of insulin and hadn’t been able to go get it with all the trouble. Anna dropped me off and took her to the pharmacy. That was the last we saw of her.”

Abby fretted her lip and said to Priscilla, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Priscilla shrugged. “She’d never said anything about diabetes before. I should have known better. I should have seen….”

“Not your fault,” Abby insisted, compassion in her voice. “We believed in her. We all did. But she was pulling our strings the whole time. The killer was right here among us.” She shook her head. “We should have listened to you, Warden Dresden.”

“We should have,” Priscilla said quietly. “If we had, Anna would be alive right now.”

I couldn’t think of any response to that. Well. I had plenty of them, but they all were some variation on a theme of “I told you so.” I felt no need to pour salt into fresh wounds, so I kept my mouth shut.

Besides, I was processing what Abby and Priscilla had told us.

Elaine traded a look with me. “Do you think Helen is the Skavis we’ve heard about?”

I shrugged. “I doubt it, but technically it’s possible. White Court vamps can pass for human easily, if they want.”

“Then why doubt it?”

“Because that little creep Madrigal called the Skavis ‘he,’” I said. “Helen isn’t a he.”

“A shill?” Elaine asked.

“Looks like.”

Abby looked back and forth between us. “E-excuse me. But what is a shill?”

“Someone who works with a criminal while pretending to have nothing to do with him,” I said. “He helps the bad guy while pretending to be your buddy and making suggestions. Suggesting that you leave a safe hiding place and split up the group, for example.”

Silence. Toto let out a quiet, distressed whine.

“I can’t believe this,” Priscilla said, pressing her fingertips against her cheekbones and closing her eyes.

“But we’ve known her for years,” Abby said, her expression as unhappy and confused as a lost child’s. “How could she lie to us like that, for so long?”

I winced. I don’t like seeing anyone in pain, but it’s worse when a woman is suffering. That’s probably chauvinistic of me, and I don’t give a damn if it is.

“All right,” I said. “We’ve still got a lot more questions than answers, but at least we know where to start the barbecue.”

Elaine nodded. “Get these two to safety, then track down Helen.”

“Safety,” I said. “Thomas.”

“Yes.”

I glanced at Abby and Priscilla. “Ladies, we’re leaving.”

“Where?” Priscilla asked. I had expected a protest, or sneering sarcasm, or at least pure, contrary bitchiness. Her voice, though, was quietly frightened. “Where are we going?”

“To Olivia,” I told her. “And five or six of the other women my associate is protecting.”

“Do they need anything?” Abby asked.

“They have several kids with them,” I said. “Mostly toddlers.”

“I’ll pack some food and cereal,” Abby said, before I’d even finished talking. Priscilla just sat, sunken in her chair and hunched in on herself. Abby dumped half of her cupboard into a great big suitcase with those skate-wheel rollers on the bottom, zipped it shut, and clipped what looked like a little plastic birdcage onto the suitcase. She gestured at Toto and the little dog jumped up into the birdcage, turned around three times, and lay down with a happy little doggy smile. “Very well,” Abby said.

Mouse looked at Toto. Then he looked at me.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told him. “I’d have to clip a railroad car to the suitcase and hire the Hulk to move it around. You’re young and healthy. You walk.”

Mouse looked at Toto’s regal doggy palanquin and sighed. Then he took point as we went back down to the car, which had been ticketed despite the lateness of the hour. I stuck the ticket in my pocket. Think positive, Harry. At least they didn’t tow it.

Getting everyone into the Beetle was an adventure, but we managed it, and returned to the shabby little south-side motel.

Maybe twenty seconds after we parked, Murphy’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle rumbled out of an alley across the street, where she must have been keeping an eye on the front of the motel from a spot where she could see the windows and doors to both rooms Thomas had rented. She was wearing jeans, a black tank top, and a loose black man’s shirt that had the sleeves rolled up about twenty times and draped over her like a trench coat while it hid the shoulder rig that held a Glock in one holster, a SIG in the other. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and the badge she usually wore on a chain around her neck in these sorts of situations was conspicuous by its absence.

She waited with a slightly bemused air while everyone scrambled out of the Beetle. Elaine got them moving toward the rooms, hurrying to get them out of sight.

“No clown car jokes,” I told Murphy. “Not one.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Murphy said. “Jesus, Harry, what happened to you?”

“You heard anything about the harbor today?”

“Oh,” Murphy said. Mouse came over to greet her and she shook hands with him gravely. “Thomas wasn’t really forthcoming with explanations. He lit out of here in a hurry.”

“He was hungry,” I said.

Murphy frowned. “Yeah, so he said. Is he going to hurt anyone?”

I considered and then shook my head. “Ordinarily, I’d say he wouldn’t. Now…I’m not sure. It would really go against his character to do something like that. But he’s been acting out of character through this whole mess.”

Murphy folded her arms. “Mess is right. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

I gave Murphy the short version of what we’d learned since I’d seen her last.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Murphy said. “Then it was Beckitt.”

“Looks like she was shilling for the Skavis, whoever he is. And Grey Cloak and that wussy cousin of Thomas’s added in a few killings of their own to get my attention.”

“That isn’t exactly in the best interests of the Skavis, if he was trying to avoid it.”

“I know. So?”

“So they’re all vampires, right?” Murphy shrugged. “I figured they’d be working together.”

“They’re White Court. They live for backstabbing. They like doing it through cat’s-paws. They probably figured I would find out about the killings, move in, and wipe out the Skavis for them. Then they’d congratulate themselves on how clever they were.”

Murphy nodded. “So now that you’ve got your clients safely tucked away, what comes next?”

“More wiping out than they counted on,” I said. “I’m going to find Beckitt and ask her nicely not to kill anyone else and to point me to the Skavis. Then I’ll have a polite conversation with him. Then I’ll settle up with Grey Cloak and Passenger Madrigal.”

“How do you find Beckitt?”

“Um,” I said, “I’m sure I’ll figure out something. This entire mess is still way too nebulous for me.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “All these killings. It still doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “We just don’t know how, yet.” I grimaced. “We’re missing something.”

“Maybe not,” Murphy said.

I arched an eyebrow at her.

“Remember our odd corpse out?”

“Jessica Blanche,” I said. “The one Molly saw.”

“Right,” Murphy said. “I found out more about her.”

“She some kind of cultist or something?”

“Or something,” Murphy said. “According to a friend in Vice, she was an employee of the Velvet Room.”

“The Velvet Room? I thought I burned that plac—uh, that is, I thought some as-yet-unidentified perpetrator burned that place to the ground.”

“It’s reopened,” Murphy said. “Under new management.”

Click. Now some pieces were falling into place. “Marcone?” I asked.

“Marcone.”

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the biggest, scariest gangster in a city famous for its gangsters. Once the old famiglias had fallen to internal bickering, Marcone had done an impression of Alexander the Great and carved out one of the largest criminal empires in the world—assuming you didn’t count governments. Chicago’s violent crime rate had dropped as much because of Marcone’s draconian rule of the city’s rackets as because of the dedication of the city’s police force. The criminal economy had more than doubled, and Marcone’s power continued to steadily grow.

He was a smart, tough, dangerous man—and he was absolutely fearless. That is a deadly combination, and I avoided crossing paths with him whenever I could.

The way things were shaping up, though, this time I couldn’t.

“You happen to know where the new Velvet Room is?” I asked Murphy.

She gave me a look.

“Right, right. Sorry.” I blew out a breath. “Seems like it might be a good idea to speak to some of the girl’s coworkers. I’ll bet they’ll be willing to do a little talking to avoid trouble with the law.”

She showed me her teeth in a fierce grin. “They just might. And if not, Marcone might be willing to talk to you.”

“Marcone doesn’t like me,” I said. “And it’s mutual.”

“Marcone doesn’t like anybody,” Murphy replied. “But he respects you.”

“Like that says much for me.”

Murphy shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Marcone’s scum, but he’s no fool, and he does what he says he’ll do.”

“I’ll talk to Elaine once she’s got everyone settled,” I said. “Get her to stay here with Mouse and keep an eye on things.”

Murphy nodded. “Elaine, huh? The ex.”

“Yeah.”

“The one working against you last time she was in town.”

“Yeah.”

“You trust her?”

I looked down at Murphy for a minute, then up at the hotel room. “I want to.”

She exhaled slowly. “I have a feeling things are going to get hairy. You need someone who’s got your back.”

“Got that,” I said, holding up my fist. “You.”

Murphy rapped her knuckles gently against mine and snorted. “You’re going syrupy on me, Dredsen.”

“If it rains, I’ll melt,” I agreed.

“It’s to be expected,” she said. “What with how you’re gay and all now.”

“I’m wh…” I blinked. “Oh. Thomas’s apartment. Hell’s bells, you cops got a fast grapevine.”

“Yeah. Rawlins heard it at the coffee machine and he just had to call me up and tell me all about you and your boyfriend being in a fight. He asked me if he should get you the sound track to Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera for Christmas this year. Varetti and Farrel got a deal on track lighting from Malone’s brother-in-law.”

“Don’t you people have lives?” I said. At her continued smile, I asked warily, “What are you getting me?”

She grinned, blue eyes sparkling. “Stallings and I found an autographed picture of Julie Newmar on eBay.”

“You guys are never going to let go of this one, are you?” I sighed.

“We’re cops,” Murphy said. “Of course not.”

We shared a smile that faded a moment later. Both of us turned to watch the street, alert for any unwanted company. We were silent for a while. Cars went by. City sounds of engine and horn. A car alarm a block over. Dark shadows where the streetlights didn’t touch. Distant sirens. Rotating, attention-getting spotlights lancing up to the dark summer night from the front of a theater.

“Hell’s bells,” I said, after a time. “Marcone.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “It changes things.”

Marcone was involved.

Matters had just become a great deal more dangerous.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The new Velvet Room looked nothing like the old Velvet Room.

“A health club?” I asked Murphy. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Murphy goosed her Harley right up next to the Beetle. There had been only one parking space open, but there was room for both of our rides in it, more or less. It wasn’t like I was worried about collecting a few more dents and dings in addition to the dozens already there.

“It’s progressive,” Murphy said. “You can get in shape, generate testosterone, and find an outlet for it all under one roof.”

I shook my head. A modest sign on the second floor over a row of smaller shops proclaimed, EXECUTIVE PRIORITY HEALTH. It lacked the wide-open, well-lit windows of most health clubs, and apparently occupied the whole of the second floor.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Isn’t that the hotel where Tommy Tomm got murdered?”

“Mmmm,” Murphy said, nodding. “The Madison. A corporation that has absolutely no visible connection to John Marcone recently bought it and is renovating it.”

“You have to admit it was a little…overdone,” I said.

“It looked like the set of a burlesque show about an opium lord’s harem,” Murphy said.

“And now…it is one,” I said.

“But it won’t look like it,” Murphy said.

“They call that progress,” I said. “Think this bunch will give us any trouble?”

“They’ll be polite.”

“Marcone is the kind of guy who apologizes for the necessity just before his minions put a bullet in you.”

Murphy nodded. She’d rearranged her gun rig and put on a Kevlar vest before we left. The baggy man’s shirt was now buttoned up over it. “Like I said. Polite.”

“Seriously,” I said. “Think anything will start up?”

“Depends how big a beehive we’re about to kick,” she replied.

I blew out a breath. “Right. Let’s find out.”

We went inside. The doors opened onto a foyer, which was closed away from what had been the hotel’s lobby by a security door and a panel of buzzers. The buzzers on the lowest row were labeled with the names of the shops on the first floor. None of the others were marked.

Murphy flipped open her notepad, checked a page, and then punched a button in the middle of the top row. She held it down for a moment, then released it.

“Executive Priority,” said a young woman’s voice through a speaker beside the panel. “This is Bonnie. How may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with your manager, please,” Murphy said.

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” came the reply. “The management is only in the office during normal business hours, but I would be happy to leave a message for you.”

“No,” Murphy replied calmly. “I know that Ms. Demeter is in. I will speak to her, please.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” came Bonnie’s rather prim reply. “But you are not a member of the club, and you are on private property. I must ask you to leave immediately or I will inform building security of the problem and call the authorities.”

“Well, that should be fun,” I said. “Go ahead and call the cops.”

Murphy snorted. “I’m sure they’d love to have an excuse to come stomping around.”

“I…” Bonnie said, floundering. Clearly, she hadn’t been trained to deal with this kind of response. Or maybe she just wasn’t all that bright to begin with.

I made a kind of do-you-mind gesture at Murphy. She shook her head and leaned to one side, so I could get closer to the intercom.

“Look, Bonnie,” I said. “We aren’t here for trouble. We just need to talk to your boss. If she likes, she can come talk over the intercom. Otherwise, I will come up there and talk to her in person. There’s only one relevant issue here: Would you rather be reasonable and polite, or would you rather replace a bunch of doors, walls, and goons?”

“Um. Well.”

“Just go tell your boss, Bonnie. It’s not your fault that we didn’t fall for the business-hours-only line. Let her decide what to do, so you don’t get in any trouble.”

After a slight pause, Bonnie realized the professional value in passing the buck. “Very well, sir. May I ask who this is?”

“I’m with Sergeant Karrin Murphy, Chicago PD,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden.”

“Oh!” Bonnie said. “Oh, Mister Dresden, please excuse me! I didn’t know it was you, sir.”

I blinked at the intercom.

“You’re the last of our Platinum Club members to pay a visit, sir. By all means, sir, please accept my apologies. I’ll have someone meet you and your guest at the elevator with your membership packet. I’ll notify Ms. Demeter at once.”

The door buzzed, clicked, and opened.

Murphy gave me a steady look. “What’s that all about?”

“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “I’m gay now.”

We went in. The first floor of the building looked like a miniature shopping mall, its walls completely lined with small shops that sold computer parts, books, video games, candles, bath stuff, jewelry, and clothes in a number of styles. All the shops were closed, their steel curtains drawn down. A row of small lights on either side of a strip of red carpet came to life, illuminating the way to the main bank of elevators. One of the elevators stood open and waiting.

We got in and I hit the button for the second floor. It began moving at once. “If there is a welcoming committee from the Lollipop Guild waiting for us when these doors open, I’m leaving. This is surreal.”

“I noticed that too,” Murphy said.

“Ms. Demeter,” I said. “Think it’s a pseudonym?”

One corner of Murphy’s mouth quirked up. “I think we’ll find all kinds of nongenuine modifications around here.”

The elevator stopped and the door opened.

Three women were waiting outside of it. They were all dressed in…well, “workout clothes” wasn’t quite accurate. Their outfits looked something like the ones the waitresses at Hooters wear, only tight. None of them could have been much over drinking age, and all of them had clearly passed some kind of intense qualification process certifying them to wear outfits like that. They were pretty, too, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, and they had nice…smiles.

“Welcome, sir,” the redhead said. “May I take your coat and…and stick?”

“That’s the closest I’ve come to being propositioned in years.” I sighed. “But no, I’ll hang onto them for now.”

“Very good, sir.”

The blonde held a round silver tray with two fluted glasses of orangey liquid. She beamed at us. The reflection of light from her teeth could have left scars on my retinas. “Mimosa, sir, ma’am?”

Murphy stared at all three of them with a blank expression. Then, without a word, she took one of the drinks, tossed it off, and put the glass back on the tray with a dark mutter.

“None for me,” I said. “I’m driving.”

The blonde stepped back, and the brunette—whose shirt bore a stencil of the word Bonnie—came forward carrying a customized black leather gym bag that probably cost as much as Murphy’s Kevlar vest. Bonnie handed me the bag, and then offered me a manila folder and a big mustard-colored envelope. “These are complimentary, of course, sir, for all of our platinum members. There are several outfits for exercise on the inside, a set of athletic shoes in your size, a PDA to help you track your progress, and some basic toiletries.” She tapped the envelope. “Here is a copy of your membership papers, as well as your membership card and your security access code.”

If this was a trap, it was working. I tried to juggle all of my gear and the comp items, too. If I suddenly had to walk anywhere while doing it, I’d probably trip and break my neck.

“Uh,” I said. “Thank you, Bonnie.”

“Of course, sir,” she chirped. “If you would please come with me, I’ll show you to Ms. Demeter’s office.”

“That would be lovely,” I said. The bag had a strap on it. I managed to get it over one shoulder, then folded the paperwork and stuffed it into one of my coat’s roomy pockets.

Bonnie waited for me to get settled before taking my arm in a perfectly confident and familiar fashion and guiding me forward. She smelled nice, something like honeysuckle, and she had a friendly smile on her mouth. Her hands, though, felt cold and nervous.

Guided by Bonnie and her clammy hands, we walked through the building, past a long, open space filled with various exercise machines, weights, wealthy-looking men, and attractive young women. Bonnie started prattling about how new the machines were, and how the latest techniques and theories in fitness training were in use, and how Platinum Club members would each have their own personal fitness trainer assigned to them each and every visit.

“And, of course, our in-house spa offers any number of other services.”

“Ah,” I said. “Like massages, mud baths, pedicures, that kind of thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And sex?”

Bonnie’s smile didn’t falter for a second, although it looked a little incongruous with her wary sideways glance at Murphy. She didn’t answer the question. She stopped at an open doorway. “Here we are,” she said, smiling. “If there is anything I can do for you, just pick up the phone on Ms. Demeter’s desk and I’ll answer right away.”

“Thanks, Bonnie,” I said.

“You are welcome, sir.”

“Do you need a tip or anything?”

“Unnecessary, sir.” She gave me another smile and a nod, and hurried away.

I watched her go down the hall, lips pursed thoughtfully, and decided that Bonnie was eminently qualified to hurry away. “We get left all alone here?” I asked Murphy. “Does this smell like a trap to you?”

“There’s one hell of a lot of bait,” she replied, glancing around, and then into the office. “But the fire stairs are right across the hall, and there’s a fire escape just outside the office window. To say nothing of the fact that there are a dozen customers within a few yards who could hardly help but notice anything noisy.”

“Yeah. But how many of them do you think would testify in court about what they heard or saw while they were at a ritzy brothel?”

Murphy shook her head. “Rawlins knows I’m here. If anything happens, they’ll turn the place inside out. Marcone knows that.”

“How come you all haven’t done it already? I mean, this is illegal, right?”

“Sure it is,” Murphy said. “And very tidy. In operations like this one, the women involved are generally willing employees, and generally very well paid. They’re required to have regular medical examinations. There’s a low incidence of drug use, and almost never any attempts to control them through addiction or terror.”

“Victimless crime?”

Murphy shrugged. “Cops never have as many resources as they need. In general, they don’t waste them on an operation like this one. Vice personnel are needed badly in plenty of other places where there is a lot more at stake.”

I grunted. “The fact that it’s obviously a club for the stupidly wealthy doesn’t make it any easier to bring the hammer down.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Murphy said. “Too many people with too much influence in the city government have their reputations to protect. The place makes money hand over fist, and as long as they don’t flaunt their business, cops tolerate what’s going on except for the occasional token gesture. Marcone isn’t going to jeopardize that by killing us here, when he can just as easily have it done tomorrow, in a less incriminating location.”

“Depending on the size of the beehive,” I said.

“Depending on that,” Murphy agreed. “We might as well sit down.”

We went into the office. It looked like any number of executive offices I’d seen before, somber, understated, and expensive. We sat down in comfortable leather chairs. Murphy kept an eye on the doorway. I watched the window. We waited.

Twenty minutes later, footsteps approached.

A large man came through the door. He was built like a bulldozer made out of slabs of raw, workingman muscle, thick bones, and heavy sinews. He had a neck as thick as Murphy’s waist, short red hair, and beady eyes under a heavy brow. His expression looked like it had been permanently locked into place a few seconds after someone had kicked his puppy through a plate-glass window.

“Hendricks,” I greeted Marcone’s primary enforcer with convivial cheer. “’Sup?”

Beady eyes settled on me for a second. Hendricks made a growling sound in his throat, checked the rest of the room, and said, over his shoulder, “Clear.”

Marcone came in.

He wore a gunmetal grey Armani suit with Italian leather shoes, and his shirt was open one button at the throat. He was an inch or two above average height, and had looked like an extremely fit forty-year-old ever since I had known him. His haircut was perfect, his grooming immaculate, and his eyes were the color of worn dollar bills. He nodded pleasantly and walked around the large mahogany desk to sit down.

“Wow,” I said. “Ms. Demeter, you look almost exactly like this criminal scumbag I met once.”

Marcone rested his elbows on the desk, made a steeple out of his fingers, and regarded me with a cool and unruffled smile. “And good evening to you, too, Mister Dresden. It’s somehow reassuring to see that time has not eroded your sophomoric sensibilities.” His eyes flicked to Murphy. “Sergeant.”

Murphy pressed her lips together and nodded once, her eyes narrowed. Hendricks loomed in the doorway, arms folded, eyes steady on Murphy.

“Where’s Amazon Gard?” I asked him. “You lose the consultant?”

“Ms. Gard,” he said, emphasizing the Ms., “is on assignment elsewhere at the moment. And our working relationship is quite secure.”

“And maybe she wouldn’t much care for this particular branch of your business?” I suggested.

He showed me his teeth. “I see you got your membership package.”

“I’m fighting not to gush at you with gratitude,” I told him. “But it’s oh so hard.”

His upturned mouth and glittering white teeth did not resemble a smile. “Actually, all of my places of business have instructions to so treat you, should you arrive.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You can’t seriously be trying to buy me.”

“Hardly. I am under no illusions about your fondness for myself and my business. I regard it as a preventive measure. In my judgment, my buildings are considerably less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan. I do, after all, recall the fate of the last Velvet Room.”

Murphy snorted without taking her wary eyes from Marcone. “He’s got a point, Dresden.”

“That was one time,” I muttered. Something in one of the envelopes dug at me through my duster pocket, and I reached down to take it out.

Hendricks may have been big, but he was not slow. He had a gun out before my fingers had closed on the envelope.

Murphy went for her gun, hand darting beneath the baggy shirt.

Marcone’s voice cracked like a whip. “Stop. Everyone.”

We all did it, a reflexive response to the complete authority in his tone.

There are reasons Marcone runs things in Chicago.

Marcone hadn’t moved. Hell, he hadn’t blinked. “Mister Hendricks,” he said. “I appreciate your zeal, but if the wizard wished to harm me, he’d hardly need to draw a concealed weapon to do it. If you please.”

Hendricks let out another rumbling growl and put the gun away.

“Thank you.” Marcone turned to me. “I trust you will forgive Mister Hendricks’s sensitivity. As my bodyguard, he is all too aware that whenever you get involved in my business, Dresden, matters tend to become a great deal more dangerous.”

I scowled at them both and drew the folded materials from my duster pocket, tossing them down beside the discarded gym bag. “No harm, no foul. Right, Murph?”

Murphy remained motionless for a long moment, hand under her shirt—long enough to make a point that no one was ordering her to do it. Then she returned her hand to her lap.

“Thank you,” Marcone said. “Now, shall we tilt at one another a few more times or just skip to the point of your visit, Dresden?”

“I want information about one of the women who worked here.”

Marcone blinked once and said, “Go on.”

“Her name was Jessica Blanche. Her body was found a few days ago. The ME couldn’t find a cause of death. I did. I’ve got more bodies. I think the killings are related. I need to find the link between Jessica and the other victims so I can figure out what the hell is going on and put a stop to it.”

“That information is specific,” Marcone said. “My knowledge of operations here is merely general. My manager will be more familiar with such things than I.”

“Ms. Demeter, I take it.”

“Yes. She should be here momentarily.”

“Or sooner,” said a woman’s voice.

I turned to the doorway.

A woman walked through it, dressed in a somber black skirt suit, a white blouse, black pumps, pearls. She walked calmly across the office to stand behind Marcone, her left hand coming to rest on his right shoulder.

“Well, Dresden,” Helen Beckitt murmured. “It took you long enough.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I stared, momentarily silent.

Marcone’s teeth showed again.

“I don’t believe it is polite to gloat,” Helen murmured to him.

“If you knew the man, you would realize what a rare moment this is,” he replied. “I’m savoring it.”

Murphy glanced from Helen to me and back. “Harry…?”

“Shhh,” I said, holding up a hand. I closed my eyes for a second, chasing furiously down dozens of twisty lanes of demented logic and motivation, trying to fit each of them to the facts.

The facts, man. Just the facts.

Fact one: Male operatives of House Skavis and House Malvora had been engaging in murders that attempted to frame the Wardens as the perpetrators.

Fact two: House Raith, their nominal superior, led by the White King (sort of), had pursued a policy of armistice with the White Council.

Fact three: That dippy twit Madrigal jumped into the deal on Malvora’s side, pitching in a murder or two of his own, evidently to attract my attention.

Fact four: Thomas, though aware of the lethal intentions of his fellow White Court vampires, had shared nothing of it with me.

Fact five: The victims had been women of magical talent, universally.

Fact six: Vampires live for a long, long time.

Fact seven: In a whole graveyard full of the corpses of minor-league practitioners, one normal, pretty young girl named Jessica Blanche had been killed. Her only connection to the others was Helen Beckitt.

Fact eight: Helen Beckitt worked for Marcone.

Fact nine: I don’t like Marcone. I don’t trust him. I don’t believe him any further than I can kick him. I’ve never hidden the fact. Marcone knows it.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered, shaking my head. Things went from bad to worse when Marcone showed up, and I naturally figured that the dangerometer had peaked.

I was wrong. Really, really wrong.

I needed one question answered to be sure what was going on, even though I was fairly sure what the answer would be—the only problem was figuring out whether or not the answer would be an honest one.

I could not afford to get it wrong.

“Helen,” I said quietly. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to speak to you alone.”

A small smile graced her mouth. She took a deep breath and let it out with a slow, satisfied exhalation.

“You needn’t, if you do not wish to do so,” Marcone said. “I do not react well when others threaten or harm my employees. Dresden is aware of that.”

“No,” Helen said. “It’s all right.”

I glanced aside. “Murph…”

She didn’t look overjoyed, but she nodded once and said, “I’ll be right outside.”

“Thanks.”

Murphy departed under Hendricks’s beady gaze. Marcone rose as well, and left without glancing at me. Hendricks went last, shutting the door behind him.

Helen ran a fingertip lightly over the pearls on her necklace and settled into the chair behind the desk. She looked quite comfortable and confident there. “Very well.”

I took a seat in one of the chairs facing the desk, and shook my head. “Jessica Blanche worked for you,” I said.

“Jessie…” Helen’s dead eyes flickered momentarily down to her folded hands. “Yes. She lived near me, actually. I gave her a ride to work several days each week.”

Which must have been when Madrigal had seen them together—out in public, presumably not in their “professional” clothes, and the moron had just assumed that Miss Blanche was another member of the Ordo. From there, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to ease up to the girl, snare her with the incubus come-hither, and take her off to a hotel room for a little fun and an ecstatic death.

“You and Marcone,” I said. “That’s one I can’t figure. I thought you hated him. Hell, you were trafficking with the powers of darkness, helping to create an addictive drug—helping the Shadowman kill people, to get back at him.”

“Hate,” she said, “and love are not so very different things. Both are focused upon another. Both are intense. Both are passionate.”

“And there’s not much difference between ‘kiss’ and ‘kill.’ If you only look at the letters.” I shrugged. “But here you are, working for Marcone. As a madam.”

“I am a convicted felon, Mister Dresden,” she replied. “I used to handle accounts with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I was ill suited to work as a waitress in a diner.”

“Nickel in the pen didn’t do much for your résumé, huh?”

“Or references,” she replied. She shook her head. “My reasons for being here are none of your business, Dresden, and have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Ask your questions or get out.”

“After you parted company with the other members of the Ordo tonight,” I said, “did you place a phone call to them?”

“Again,” she said quietly, “we are at an impasse, exactly as we were before. It doesn’t matter what I say, given that you are clearly unwilling to believe me.”

“Did you call them?” I asked.

She stared steadily, her eyes so dull and empty that it made her elegant black outfit look like funerary wear. I couldn’t tell if it would be more suitable for mourners—or for the deceased. Then her eyes narrowed and she nodded. “Ah. You want me to look you in the eyes. The term is overdramatic, but I believe it is referred to as a soulgaze.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I hadn’t realized it was a truth detector.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “But it will tell me what sort of person you are.”

“I know what sort of person I am,” she replied. “I am a functional borderline psychopath. I am heartless, calculating, empty, and can muster very little in the way of empathy for my fellow human beings. But then, you can’t take my word for it, can you?”

I just looked at her for a moment. “No,” I said then, very quietly. “I don’t think I can.”

“I have no intention of proving anything to you. I will submit to no such invasion.”

“Even if it means more of your friends in the Ordo die?”

There was the slightest hesitation before she answered. “I have been unable to protect them thus far. Despite all…” She trailed off and shook her head once. Confidence returned to her features and voice. “Anna will watch over them.”

I stared at her for a second, and she regarded me coolly, focused on a spot a bit over my eyebrows, avoiding direct eye contact.

“Anna’s important to you?” I asked.

“As much as anyone can be, now,” she replied. “She was kind to me when she had no cause to be. Nothing to gain from it. She is a worthy person.”

I watched her closely. I’ve done a lot of work as both a professional wizard and a professional investigator. Wizardry is awfully intriguing and useful, but it doesn’t necessarily teach you very much about other people. It’s better at teaching you about yourself.

The investigating business, though, is all about people. It’s all about talking to them, asking questions, and listening to them lie. Most of the things investigators get hired to handle involve a lot of people lying. I’ve seen liars in every shape and size and style. Big lies, little lies, white lies, stupid lies. The worst lies are almost always silence—or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.

Helen wasn’t lying to me. She might have been dangerous, might have been willing to practice black magic to seek vengeance in the past, might have been cold and distant—but she had not, for one second, tried to conceal any of it, or denied anything that had happened.

“Oh, God,” I said quietly. “You don’t know.”

She frowned at me for a moment—then her face became drawn and pale. “Oh.” She closed her eyes and said, “Oh, Anna. You poor fool.” She opened them again a moment later. She cleared her throat and asked, “When?”

“A few hours ago. The hotel room. Suicide.”

“The others?”

“Safe. Hidden and under guard.” I took a deep breath. “I have to be sure, Helen. If you really do give a damn about them, you’ll cooperate with me. You’ll help me.”

She nodded once, her eyes distant. Then she said, “For them.” And met my eyes.

The phenomenon referred to as a soulgaze is a fairly mysterious thing. No one’s ever been able to get a really good grasp on exactly how it works. The best descriptions of it have always been more poetical than anything else.

The eyes are the windows of the soul.

Lock eyes with a wizard and the essence of who and what you are is laid bare. It is perceived in different ways by every individual. Ramirez had once told me that he heard it as a kind of musical theme that accompanied the person he was gazing upon. Others looked on a soul in a series of frozen images. My interpretation of a soulgaze was, perhaps inevitably, one of the most random and confusing I’d ever heard about. I see the other person in symbol and metaphor, sometimes in panorama and surround sound, sometimes in misty translucence and haunting whispers.

Whoever was gazed upon got a good look back. Whatever universal powers governed that kind of thing evidently decided that the soul’s windows don’t come in an optional issue of one-way mirrored glass. You saw them. They saw you, with the same kind of searing permanence.

For me, meeting someone’s eyes is always risky. Every human being on earth knows what I’m talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking, and look them in the eyes. There’s a certain amount of leeway for a second, or two, or three. And then there’s a distinct sensation of sudden contact, of intimacy. That’s when regular folks normally cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze.

All things considered, I shouldn’t have been surprised that when Helen met my eyes, it got uncomfortably intimate before a second had passed and…

…and I stood in Chicago, in one of the parks on Lake Michigan. Calumet, maybe? I couldn’t see the skyline from where I was standing, so it was hard to be sure.

What I could see was the Beckitt family. Husband, wife, daughter, a little girl maybe ten or eleven years old. She looked like her mother—a woman with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and a white-toothed smile who very little resembled the Helen Beckitt I knew. But all the same, it was her.

They’d been on a family picnic. The sun was setting on a summer evening, golden sunset giving way to twilight as they walked back to the family car. Mother and father swung the little girl between them, each holding one hand.

I didn’t want to see what was about to happen. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

A parking lot. The sounds of a car roaring up. Muffled curses, tight with fear, and then a car swerved up off the road and gunfire roared from its passenger window. Screams. Some people threw themselves down. Most, including the Beckitts, stared in shock. More loud, hammering sounds, not ten feet away.

I looked over my shoulder to see a very, very young-looking Marcone.

He wasn’t wearing a business suit. He had on jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was longish, a little mussed, and he also sported a stubble of beard that gave him the kind of rakish look that would attract attention from the girls who fantasized about indulging with a bad boy.

His eyes were still green—but they were the green of a summer hunter’s blind, bright and intelligent and predatory, but touched with more…something. Humor, maybe. More life. And he was skinnier. Not a lot skinnier or anything, but it surprised me how much younger it and the other minor changes made him look.

Marcone crouched next to another young man, a now-dead thug I’d christened Spike years ago. Spike had his pistol out, and was hammering away at the moving car. The barrel of his 1911-model Colt tracked the vehicle—and its course drew its muzzle into line with the Beckitt family.

Marcone snarled something and slapped the barrel of the gun away from the family. Spike’s shot rang out wild and splashed into the lake. There was a last rattle of fire from the moving car, and it roared away. Marcone and Spike piled into their own car and fled the scene. Spike was driving.

Marcone was staring back over his shoulder.

They left the little girl’s broken body, limp and spattered with scarlet, behind them.

Helen saw it first, looking down to the hand that gripped her daughter’s. She let out a cry as she turned to her child.

In the wake of the gunshots, the silence was deafening.

I didn’t want to see what was coming. Again, I had no choice.

The girl wasn’t unconscious. There was a lot of blood. Her father screamed and knelt with Helen, trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his shirt, pressing it to the child’s midsection. He babbled something to Helen and ran for the nearest phone.

His white shirt soaked through as Helen tried to hold it to the weakly struggling girl.

This was the worst part.

The child was in pain. She cried out with it. I expected her to sound horrible and inhuman, but she didn’t. She sounded like every little kid who had ever suddenly found herself faced with her first experience of real, nontrivial pain.

“Owie,” she said, over and over, her voice rough. “Owie, owie, owie.”

“Baby,” Helen said. The tears were blocking her vision. “I’m here. I’m here.”

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” the girl said. “Owie, owie, owie.”

The little girl said that.

She said it over and over.

She said it for maybe sixty seconds.

Then she went silent.

“No,” Helen said. “No, no, no.” She leaned down and felt her daughter’s throat, then desperately pressed her ear to the girl’s chest. “No, no, no.”

Their voices, I realized, sounded almost identical. They blazed with the same anguish, the same disbelief.

I watched Helen shatter, rocking back and forth, trying through blinding tears to apply CPR to the silent little form. Everything else became an unimportant blur. Ghostly figures of her husband, cops, paramedics. Dim little echoes of sirens and voices, a church organ.

I’d known that the Beckitts set out to tear Marcone down out of revenge for what the warring gangsters had done to their daughter—but knowing the story was one thing. Seeing the soul-searing agony the little girl’s death had inflicted upon her helpless mother was something else.

And suddenly, everything was bright and new again. Helen and her family were laughing again. In a few moments, they were walking again toward the parking lot, and I could hear the engine of the car whose gunmen would miss Marcone and kill the little girl as it approached.

I tore my eyes away from it, fighting to end the soulgaze.

I could not go through that again, could not remain locked in that horrible moment that had shaped what Helen had become.

I came back to myself standing, turned half away from Helen, leaning heavily on my staff with my head bowed.

There was a long moment of silence before Helen said, “I didn’t call anyone in the Ordo, Dresden.”

She hadn’t. Now I was sure of it.

If Helen hadn’t led the Ordo on a merry chase around town, drawing them out into vulnerability for the Skavis hunting them, someone else had.

Priscilla.

She’d been the one receiving all the calls, reporting all the “conversations” with Helen. That meant that she’d been working with the killer, drawing out Anna and the others on his behalf, isolating one of the women from the safety of the group so that he could take them alone.

And then I jerked my head up, my eyes wide.

Fact ten: In the middle of a Chicago summer, Priscilla, none too pretty a woman, had been wearing nothing but turtlenecks.

Priscilla hadn’t been working with the Skavis.

Priscilla was the Skavis.

And I had left her holed up in safety with Olivia and Abby and all those women and children.

Predators. The White Court were predators. The Skavis had to know that I was closing in, and that it would not be long before I either caught up to Helen and got the real story or else figured it out on my own. Fight-or-flight instincts must have come down on the former.

I’d been sent after Helen on purpose. The Skavis had meant to send me haring off after her, leaving him alone with all those targets.

No. I hadn’t left him alone with the women he’d been tracking. They were no threat to him. The Skavis had decided to fight. He had isolated a target, all right, just as he had while hunting helpless women—one who would present a deadly danger to him, should she ever learn his true identity. One who would be distinctly vulnerable, provided he could approach her while camouflaged.

“Oh, God,” I heard myself say. “Elaine.”

Chapter Thirty

Murphy came out of the building about ten seconds after I did.

“Thomas answered his phone, said he was on the way. He sounded kind of out of it, though. I called both rooms, but the call went straight to the hotel’s voice mail,” she reported, slipping her cell phone away as she approached me.

“Does it do that by itself?”

“No. You have to call the desk and ask for it.”

“Dammit,” I said, and tossed her my keys. “The Skavis thought of that already. Drive.”

Murphy blinked at me, but turned to the Beetle at once. “Why?”

“I’m going to try to reach Elaine my way,” I said. I hurried around my car to the passenger seat and jerked open the door. “Get us there as fast as you can.”

“Magic on the road? Won’t that kill the car?”

“This car? Probably not,” I said. “I hope not.” I threw my staff in the backseat.

“Ow!” shrieked a voice.

Murphy’s gun came out every bit as fast as I raised my blasting rod, its tip glowing with a scarlet incandescence.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” squeaked the voice, considerably more panicked. There was a flickering, and then Molly appeared in my backseat, legs curled up against her chest, her eyes wide, her face very pale.

“Molly!” I shouted. “Dammit, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I came to help. I was good enough to track down your car, wasn’t I?”

“I told you to stay home!”

“Because of the stupid bracelet?” she demanded. “That has got to be the lamest scam ever. Yoda never gave anybody a bracelet that—”

I whirled in pure frustration and snarled, “Fuego!”

My raw anxiety and rage lashed from the tip of my blasting rod in a lance of blinding scarlet fire. It blasted into a metal trash can in front of Marcone’s building and…well, it would be bragging to say that it vaporized the trash can. Even I would have trouble with that. It did, however, slag the thing into a shower of molten metal as it gouged a two-foot-deep, coffin-length furrow in the concrete of the sidewalk behind it. Chunks of heated concrete and globs of molten metal hit the building’s exterior, cracking several thick panes of glass, pocking stone walls, and leaving several wooden planters on fire. The concussion rattled every window within a hundred yards, and shattered the casing of the nearest streetlight, so that it cast out fractured illumination. Half a dozen car alarms went off.

I turned back to Molly and found her staring at me with her mouth open until my shadow, cast by the rising fires and crippled streetlight, fell across her. My voice came out in a growl. “I. Am not. Yoda.”

I stripped the glove off my left hand and held it up, my fingers spread. It didn’t look as horrific as it used to, but it was plenty ugly enough to make an impression on a nineteen-year-old girl. “This isn’t a goddamn movie, Molly. Screw up here and you don’t vanish and leave an empty cloak. You don’t get frozen in carbonite. And you should damned well know that by now.”

She looked shocked. I’ll curse from time to time, but I don’t generally indulge in blasphemy—at least, not around Michael or his family. I don’t think God is terribly threatened by my occasional slip of the tongue, but I owe enough to Michael to respect his wishes regarding that particular shade of profanity. Mostly.

Hell, the whole practice of invective was developed to add extra emphasis when the mere meaning of words alone just wasn’t enough. And I was feeling plenty emphatic.

Snarling, I cupped my left hand, focused my ongoing anger, and a sudden sphere of light and heat blossomed to life. It wasn’t big—about the diameter of a dime. But it was as bright as a tiny sun.

“Harry,” Murphy said. Her voice was a little shaky. “We don’t have time for this.”

“You think you’re ready?” I told Molly. “Show me.”

I blew on the sphere and it wafted out of my hand and glided smoothly into the open door of the Beetle and toward Molly’s face.

“Wh-what?” she said.

“Stop it,” I said, my voice cold. “If you can.”

She swallowed and raised a hand. I saw her try to control her breathing and focus her will, her lips blurring over the steps I’d taught her.

The sphere drifted closer.

“Better hurry,” I added. I did nothing to hide the anger or the taint of derision in my voice.

Beads of sweat broke out on her skin. The sphere slowed, but it had not stopped.

“It’s about twelve hundred degrees,” I added. “It’ll melt sand into glass. It doesn’t do much for skin, either.”

Molly lifted her left hand and stammered out a word, but her will fluttered and failed, amounting to nothing more than a handful of sparks.

“Bad guys don’t give you this much time,” I spat.

Molly hissed—give the kid credit, she didn’t let herself scream—and pressed herself as far as she could from the fire. She threw up an arm to shield her eyes.

For a second, I felt a mad impulse to let the fire continue for just a second more. Nothing teaches like a burned hand, whispered a darker part of my self. I should know.

But I closed my fingers, willed the ending of the spell, and the sphere vanished.

Murphy, standing across the car, just stared at me.

Molly lowered her hand, her arm moving in frightened little jerks. She sat there shivering and staring. Her tongue piercing rattled against her teeth.

I looked at both of them and then shook my head. I got control of my rampaging temper. Then I leaned down and stuck my head in the car, looking Molly in the eyes.

“We play for keeps, kid,” I said quietly. “I’ve told you before: Magic isn’t a solution to every problem. You still aren’t listening.”

Molly’s eyes, frightened and angry, filled with tears. She turned her head away from me and said nothing. She tried not to make any noise, but it’s tough to keep a good poker face when a snarling madman nearly burns it off. There wasn’t any time to waste—but I gave the kid a few seconds of space while I tried to let my head cool off.

The door to Marcone’s building opened. Hendricks came out.

Marcone followed him a moment later. He surveyed the damage. Then he glanced at me. Marcone shook his head, took a cell phone from his suit pocket, and went back inside, while Hendricks kept me pinned down with his beady-eyed scowl.

What I’d seen soulgazing Helen Beckitt was still glaringly fresh in my mind—just as it always would be. Marcone had looked a lot younger when he wore his hair longer, less neat, and dressed more casually. Or maybe he’d just looked younger before he’d seen Helen’s daughter die.

The thought went utterly against the pressure of the rage inside me, and I grabbed hold of myself while I had the chance. I took a deep breath. I wouldn’t do anyone any good if I charged in full of outrage and absent of brains. I took another deep breath and turned to find Murphy on the move.

She walked around the car and faced me squarely.

“All done?” Murphy asked me, her voice pitched low. “You want to smoke a turkey or set fire to a playground or anything? You could terrorize a troop of Cub Scouts as an encore.”

“And after that, I could tell you all about how to do your job, maybe,” I said, “right after we bury the people who get killed because we’re standing here instead of moving.”

She narrowed her eyes. Neither one of us met each other’s gaze or moved an inch. It wasn’t a long standoff, but it was plenty hard.

“Not now,” she said. “But later. We’ll talk. This isn’t finished.”

I nodded. “Later.”

We got in the Beetle and Murphy started it up and got moving. “Ask you questions as we go?”

I calculated distances in my head. The communion spell with Elaine had been created to reach over a couple of yards at the most. It had mostly been used at, ahem, considerably shorter range than that. I could extend the range, I thought, to most of a mile—maybe. It wasn’t as simple as just pouring more power into the spell, but it was fairly simple. That gave me a couple of minutes to steady my breathing while Murphy drove. I could talk while that happened. It would, in fact, help me keep my mind off my fear for Elaine. Ah, reason, banisher of fear—or at least provider of a place to stick my head in the sand.

“Go ahead,” I told her. I paid no attention to Molly, giving the kid time to think over the lesson and to get herself together. She didn’t like anyone to see her when she was upset.

“Why do you think your ex is in danger?” Murphy asked. “Shouldn’t this Skavis just run off if it knows you’re onto it?”

“If it was operating alone, sure,” I said. “That would be the smart thing. But it isn’t running off. It’s making a fight of it.”

“So…what? It has help?”

“It has rivals,” I said.

“Yeah. Grey Cloak and Madrigal Raith.” Murphy shook her head. “But what does that mean?”

“Think in terms of predators,” I said. “One predator has just gotten its teeth into something good to eat.”

“Scavengers?” Murphy said. “They’re trying to take the prize from him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s what they’re doing.”

“You mean Elaine?” Murphy said.

I shook my head. “No, no. More abstract. The Skavis is methodical. It’s killing women of magical talent. It doesn’t have to do that to live—it can eat any human being.”

“Then why those targets?” Murphy asked.

“Exactly,” I said. “Why them? This isn’t about food, Murph. I think the Skavis is making a play for power.”

“Power?” Molly blurted from the backseat.

I turned and gave her a glare that quelled her interest. She sank back into the seat. “Within the White Court,” I said. “This entire mess, start to finish, is about a power struggle within the White Court.”

Murph was silent for a second, absorbing that. “Then…then this is a lot bigger than a few killings in a few towns.”

“If I’m right,” I said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“Go on.”

“Okay. And remember as I go that White Court vamps don’t like their fights out in the open. They arrange things. They use cat’s-paws. They pull strings. Confrontation is for losers.”

“Got it.”

I nodded. “The White King is supporting peace talks between the Council and the Red Courts. I think the Skavis is trying to prove a point—that they don’t need peace talks. That they have us in a choke hold and all they have to do is hang on.”

Murphy frowned at me, and then her eyes widened. “You told me once that magic is inherited. Mostly along family lines.”

“Salic law,” I said. “Mostly through female lines. I got it from my mom.”

Murphy nodded, her eyes going back to the road. “And they can start…what? Thinning the herd, I suppose, from their point of view. Killing those that have the potential to produce more wizards.”

“Yeah,” I said. “One Skavis goes around to half a dozen cities in the most dangerous—to them—nation on the planet, doing it at will,” I said. “He proves how easy it is. He identifies and hunts down the best targets. He plants all kinds of distrust for the Council as he does it, making the potential prey distrust the only people who could help them.”

“But what does he hope to accomplish?” Murphy said. “This is just one guy.”

“Exactly what he wants them to say,” I said. “Look what just one vampire accomplished working alone. Look how easy it was. Raith is weak. Time to expand the operation now, while the Council is hurt, and screw talking peace with them. Change the guard. Let House Skavis take leadership.”

“And Grey Cloak and Madrigal, seeing that he’s onto something good, try to swoop in at the last minute, shoulder the Skavis aside, and take credit for the plan in front of the whole Court,” Murphy finished.

“Yeah. They sing the exact same tune, only they substitute Malvora for Skavis.” I shook my head. “The hell of it is, if Madrigal hadn’t had a personal beef with me I might not have gotten involved. I made him look really bad when he tried to auction me on eBay and instead I fed his djinn to the Scarecrow and made him run off like a girl.”

“Like a what?” Murphy bridled.

“Now is not the time to go all Susie Q. Anthony on me,” I said. “Madrigal’s wounded pride makes him leave clues to try to sucker me into the show. He figures Grey Cloak or our Skavis killer will help him handle me. Except that they ran into another problem.”

“Thomas,” Murphy said, her voice certain.

“Thomas,” I said. “Snatching their targets out from under them.”

“How’s he finding them?”

“Same way they are,” I said. “He’s a vampire. He knows what resources they have and how they think. So much so, in fact, that he’s ruining the finale of the whole program for everyone involved.”

Murphy nodded, getting it. “So Madrigal gets a gang of ghouls and tries to take out his own cousin. And finds you and Elaine there too.”

“Right,” I said. “He’s already being a loser, but it’s still a sucker punch, and Madrigal figures, What the hell. If he gets away with it, he pulls off the plan and gets his mojo back from me.”

“I still don’t get why Thomas didn’t say anything,” Murphy said. “To you, I mean. I never figured him for that kind of secrecy.”

“That’s what tipped me off to the whole thing,” I said. “There just aren’t many things which could make Thomas do that. I think he was counting on it to tip me off, in fact.”

Murphy shook her head. “A phone call would have been easier.”

“Not if he’s being watched,” I said. “And not if he’s made a promise.”

“Watched?” Murphy said. “By who?”

“Someone who has more than one kind of leverage,” I said. “Someone who is his family, who is protecting the woman he loves, and who has the kind of resources it takes to watch him, and enough savvy to know if he’s lying.”

“Lara Raith,” Murphy said.

“Big sister is the one behind the peace movement,” I said. “Everyone thinks it’s Papa Raith, but he’s just her puppet now. Except that there aren’t many people who know that.”

“If Raith’s authority is challenged openly by the Skavis,” Murphy said, putting things together, “it exposes the fact that he’s utterly powerless. Lara would have to fight openly.”

“And the White Court vamp who is driven to that has already lost,” I said. “She can’t maintain her control over the Court if she’s revealed as the power behind the throne. Not only does she not have the raw strength she’d need to hold on to it, but the very fact that she was revealed would make her an incompetent manipulator and therefore automatically unsuitable in the eyes of the rest of the White Court.”

Murphy chewed on her lip. “If Papa Raith falls, Lara falls. And if Lara falls…”

“Justine goes with her,” I said, nodding. “She wouldn’t be able to protect her for Thomas anymore.”

“Then why didn’t she just have Thomas go to you and ask for help?” Murphy said.

“She can’t have it get out that she asked for help from the enemy team, Murph. Even among her own supporters, that could be a disaster. But remember that she knows how to pull strings. Maybe better than anyone operating right now. She wouldn’t be upset if I got involved and stomped all over agents of Skavis and Malvora.”

Murphy snorted. “So she forbids Thomas from speaking to you about it.”

“She’s too smart for that. Thomas gets stubborn about being given orders. She gets him to promise to keep quiet. But by doing that, she’s also done the one thing she knows will make him defiant to the spirit of the promise. So he’s made a promise and he can’t come out and talk to me, but he wants to get my attention.”

“Ha,” Murphy said. “So he gets around it. He works sloppy, deliberately. He lets himself be seen repeatedly taking off with the women he was rounding up.”

“And leaves a big old honking wall o’ clues in his apartment for me, knowing that when I get involved, I’m going to get curious about why he’s been seen with missing women and why he’s not talking to me. He can’t talk to me about it, but he leaves me a map.” I found my right foot tapping against an imaginary accelerator, my left against a nonexistent clutch.

“Stop twitching,” Murphy said. The Beetle jolted over some railroad tracks, officially taking us to the wrong side. “I’m a better driver than you, anyway.”

I scowled because it was true.

“So right now,” Murphy said, “you think Priscilla is shilling for the Skavis agent.”

“No. She is the Skavis agent.”

“I thought you said it was a man,” Murphy said.

“Strike you funny that Priscilla wears turtlenecks in the middle of a hot summer?”

Murphy let out a word that should not be spoken before small children. “So if you’re right, he’s going to clip Elaine and all those moms.”

“Kids too,” I said. “And anyone who gets in the way.”

“Mouse,” Molly said, her voice worried.

This time I didn’t yell her down. I was worried about him, too. “The Skavis knows that Mouse is special. He saw the demonstration. That’s been the only thing keeping him from acting sooner than he did. If the vampire started drawing upon his powers, Mouse would have sensed it and blown his cover. So Mouse is definitely going to be near the top of his list.”

Murphy nodded. “So what’s the plan?”

“Get us to the motel,” I said. We were getting close enough that I could start trying the spell. “I’m going to try to reach Elaine.”

“Then what?”

“I’ve got no use for anything that does what this thing does,” I said. “Do you?”

Her blue eyes glittered as the car zipped through the illumination of a lonely streetlamp. “No.”

“And as I recall, you are on vacation right now.”

“And having fun, fun, fun,” she snarled.

“Then we won’t worry too much about saving anything for later,” I said. I turned my head and said, “Molly.”

The girl’s head whipped up almost audibly. “Um. What?”

“Can you drive a stick?”

She was silent for a second, then jerked her head in a nod.

“Then when we get out, I want you to get behind the wheel and keep the engine running,” I said. “If you see anyone else coming, honk the horn. If you see a tall woman in a turtleneck sprinting away, I want you to drive the car over her.”

“I…but…but…”

“You wanted to help. You’re helping.” I turned back around. “Do it.”

Her answer came back with the automatic speed of reflex. “Yes, sir.”

“What about Grey Cloak and Madrigal?” Murphy asked me. “Even if we take out the Skavis, they’re waiting to jump in.”

“One thing at a time,” I said. “Drive.”

Then I closed my eyes, drew in my will, and hoped that I could call out to Elaine—and that she would be alive to hear me.

Chapter Thirty-One

I closed my eyes and blocked out my senses, one by one. The smell of the car and Murphy’s deodorant went first. At least Molly had learned from experience and left off any overt fragrances when she tried to use the veil trick a second time. Sound went next. The Beetle’s old, laboring engine, the rattle of tires on bad spots of road, and the rush of wind all faded away. Chicago’s evening lights vanished from their irregular pressure on my closed eyelids. The sour taste of fear in my mouth simply became not, as I focused on the impromptu variation of the old, familiar spell.

Elaine.

I referred to the same base image I always had. Elaine in our first soulgaze, an image of a woman of power, grace, and oceans of cool nerve superimposed over the blushing image of a schoolgirl, naked for the first time with her first lover. I had known what she would grow into, even then, that she would transform the gawky limbs and awkward carriage and blushing cheeks into confidence and poise and beauty and wisdom. The wisdom, maybe, was still in process, as evidenced by her choice of first lovers, but even as an adult, I was hardly in a position to cast stones, as evidenced by my choice of pretty much everything.

What we hadn’t known about, back then, was pain.

Sure, we’d faced some things as children that a lot of kids don’t. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.

Adding pain to that image of Elaine wasn’t a process of imagining horrors, fantasizing violence, speculating upon suffering. It was no different from an artist mixing in new color, adding emphasis and depth to the image that, while bright, was not true to itself or to life. So I took the girl I knew and added in the pains the woman I was reaching for had been forced to face. She’d stepped into a world she’d left behind for more than a decade, and found herself struggling to face life without relying upon anyone else. She’d always had me, and Justin—and when we’d gone away, she’d leaned upon a Sidhe woman named Aurora for help and support. When that had vanished, she had no one—I had given my love to someone else. Justin had been dead for years.

She’d been alone in a city, different from everyone around, struggling to survive and to build a life and a home.

So I added in all the pains I’d learned. Cooking blunders I’d had to eat anyway. Equipment and property constantly breaking down, needing repairs and attention. Tax insanity, and rushing around trying to hack a path through a jungle of numbers. Late bills. Unpleasant jobs that gave you horribly aching feet. Odd looks from people who didn’t know you, when something less than utterly normal happened. The occasional night when the loneliness ached so badly that it made you weep. The occasional gathering during which you wanted to escape to your empty apartment so badly you were willing to go out the bathroom window. Muscle pulls and aches you never had when you were younger, the annoyance as the price of gas kept going up to some ridiculous degree, the irritation with unruly neighbors, brainless media personalities, and various politicians who all seemed to fall on a spectrum somewhere between the extremes of “crook” and “moron.”

You know.

Life.

And the image of her in my mind deepened, sharpened, took on personality. There’s no simple way to describe it, but you know it when you see it, and the great artists can do it, can slip in the shades of meaning and thought and truth into something as simple as a girl named Mona’s smile, even if they can’t tell you precisely how they managed it.

The image of Elaine gained shadows, flaws, character, and strength. I didn’t know the specifics of what she’d been through—not all of them, anyway—but I knew enough, and could make good guesses about plenty more. That image in my mind drew me in as I focused on it, just as I once had focused on that younger image of Elaine unrealized. I reached out with my thoughts and touched that image, breathing gentle life into it as I whispered her True Name, freely given to me when we were young, within the vaults of my mind.

Elaine Lilian Mallory.

And the image came to life.

Elaine’s face bowed forward, her hair falling around it, not quite hiding the expression of bone-deep weariness and despair.

Elaine, I whispered to her. Can you hear me?

Her thoughts came to me in an echoing blur, like when they want to confuse you at the movies and they muck around with a voice-over. …believe I could make a difference. One person doesn’t. One person can’t ever make a difference. Not in the real world. God, what arrogance. And they paid for it.

I put more will into my thoughts. Elaine!

She glanced up for a moment, looking dully around the room. The image of her was filling in, slowly. She was in well-lit room without many features. Most of it seemed to be white. Then her head bowed again.

Trusting me to keep them safe. I might as well pull the trigger myself. Too cowardly for that, though. I just sit here. Set things up so that I don’t have to fail. I don’t have to try. I don’t have to worry about being nothing. All I have to do is sit.

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Within the senseless vaults of my mind, I screamed, Elaine!

She looked up again, blinking her eyes slowly. Her mouth began moving in time with her audible thoughts. “Don’t know what I thought I could do. One woman. One woman who spent her whole life running away. Being broken. I would have served them better to end it before I ever left, rather than dragging them down with me.”

Her lips stopped moving, but, very faintly, I heard her thoughts call, Harry?

And suddenly I could hear a difference in the other thoughts.

“Just sit,” she mumbled. “Almost over now. I won’t be useless anymore. Just sit and wait and I won’t have to hurt anymore. Won’t fail anyone else. It will all be over and I can rest.”

It didn’t sound like Elaine’s voice. There were subtle differences. It sounded…like someone doing an impersonation. It was close, but it wasn’t her. There were too many small inconsistencies.

Then I got it.

That was the Skavis, whispering thoughts of despair and grief into her mind, just as the Raiths would whisper of lust and need.

She was under attack.

Elaine Lilian Mallory! I called, and in my head, my voice rumbled like thunder. I am Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and I bid thee hear me! Hear my voice, Elaine!

There was a shocked silence, and then Elaine’s thought-voice said, more clearly, Harry?

And her lips moved, and the not-Elaine voice said, “What the hell?”

Elaine’s eyes snapped to mine, suddenly meeting them, and the room around her clarified into crystalline relief.

She was in the bathroom of the hotel, in the tub, naked in the bath.

The air was thick with steam. She was bleeding from a broad cut across one wrist. The water was red. Her face was god-awful pale, but her eyes weren’t fogged over and hazed out. Not yet.

Elaine! I thundered. You are under a psychic attack! Priscilla is the Skavis!

Elaine’s eyes widened.

Someone slapped me hard on the face and screamed, “Harry!”

The world flew sideways and expanded in a rush of motion and sound as my denied senses came crashing back in upon me. The Beetle was sitting sideways across several parking spaces in the motel’s little lot, both doors open, and Murphy, gun in one hand, had a hold of my duster with the other and was shaking me hard. “Harry! Get up!”

“Oh,” I said. “We’re here.”

I stumbled out of the car, getting my bearings. Behind me, Molly scrambled behind the wheel.

“Well?” Murphy demanded. “Did you get through?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, every light in sight suddenly went dim. I don’t mean they went out. They didn’t. They just…dwindled, the way a lantern’s flame does if you close off the glass. Or, I thought, struck with a sudden impression, the way a fire might dim if something nearby had just drawn the air away. Something big enough to dim nearby flame as it inhaled.

Something big taking a deep breath.

And then a voice that rang with silvery rage rolled through the air, kicking up a layer of dust from the ground in a broad wave in the wake of its passing as it rang out in an echoing clarion call, “FULMINARIS!”

There was a flash of green-white light so bright that it came to my reawakened senses as a physical pain, a roar of sound loud enough to drown out a spring break band, and the entire front wall of the first-floor hotel room we’d rented earlier that day was blown off the freaking building and into the street.

I had my shield up overhead before the debris started raining down, protecting Murphy, me, the windshield of the Beetle, and the girl staring wide-eyed through it. I squinted through the flying bits of building and furniture and rock, and a second later managed to spot a broken human form lying with its head in the street, its feet still up on the curb. Priscilla’s turtleneck was on fire, and her hair stood straight out and was blackened and burned off within three or four inches of her skull. She ripped the turtleneck away in a kind of wobbly, disoriented panic—and revealed a bra and falsies. Those got ripped off too, and what was left, while slender and hairless, was also obviously the upper torso of a very pale, rather effeminate-looking man.

There was motion in the gaping maw of ruin that had been Elaine’s hotel room, and a woman appeared in it. She was dressed in the cheap plastic curtain that had been hanging over the tub. She had a thick-linked chain wrapped tightly around her left arm a couple of inches above her bloodied, slashed wrist, tied in an improvised tourniquet. She was quite dry, and her hair floated out and around her head, crackling with little flashes of static electricity as she moved. She slid herself slowly, carefully across the debris-strewn floor, and she held a short length of carved wood that looked like nothing so much as an enormous thorn of some kind in her right hand, its sharp tip pointing at the man in the parking lot. Tiny slivers of green lightning danced around its tip, occasionally flickering out to touch upon nearby objects with snapping, popping sounds as she passed.

Elaine kept that deadly little wand pointed at the Skavis, eyes narrowed, and said, her voice rough and raw, “Who’s useless now, bitch?”

I just stared at Elaine for a long minute. Then I traded a glance with Murphy, who looked just as startled and impressed as I felt. “Murph,” I said, “I think I got through.”

The Skavis agent came to his feet and bounded at us, quick as thinking.

I raised my staff and unleashed a burst of raw force. He might be strong as hell, but once off the ground, with nothing to push against, he was just mass times acceleration. The blow from the staff swatted him out of the air to the concrete not far from the Beetle. I immediately used another blow to throw him back across the parking lot, creating clear space around him.

“Thank you, Harry,” Elaine said, her rough voice prim. Then she lifted the wand and snapped, “Fulminaris!”

There was another blinding flash of light, another crack of homemade thunder, and a green-white globe of light enclosed the vampire. There was a scream, and then his limp form fell to the concrete, one shoulder and most of his chest blackened. It smelled disturbingly like burned bacon.

Elaine lifted her chin, eyes glittering. She lowered the wand, and as she did, the lights came back up to full strength. She nodded once. Then she slipped and staggered to one side.

“Watch him!” I barked to Molly, pointing at the fallen vampire.

Murphy and I reached Elaine at about the same time, and we tried to catch her before she dropped. We succeeded in easing her down to the debris-littered concrete.

“Jesus,” Murphy said. “Harry, she needs a hospital.”

“They’ll be watching the—”

“Fuck ’em,” Murphy said, rising. “They can watch her through a wall of cops.” She stalked away, drawing out her phone.

I bit my lip as Elaine looked up at me and smiled faintly. She spoke, her words faintly slurred. “Dammit. Every time I come to Chicago, I’ve got to get rescued. Embarrassing as hell.”

“At least it wasn’t me that did the building this time,” I said.

She made a sound that might have been a laugh if she’d had more energy behind it. “Bastard had me dead to rights. Snuck it up on me. I didn’t realize.”

“That’s how the old psychic whammy works,” I said quietly. “Once you start thinking, ‘Gee, maybe that isn’t me thinking about suicide,’ it kind of falls apart.”

“Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t warned me,” she said. She met my eyes again. “Thank you, Harry.”

I smiled at her, and checked her wrist. “This doesn’t look good. We’re gonna get you to a doctor. Okay?”

She shook her head. “The upstairs room. Abby, Olivia, the others. Make sure they’re all right.”

“I doubt they’ve lost as much blood as you have,” I said. Murphy, though, was way ahead of me, and was already on the stairs on the way up to the second level, then down to check the room.

“Okay. Time to wrap this up.” I picked Elaine up. I made sure the shower curtain didn’t fall off. “Come on. You can sit in the car until the EMTs get here. Maybe I can find something else to keep your arm tied off, huh?”

“If you can find my purse,” she said, her eyes closed now, a little smile on her mouth, “you can use my golden lariat.”

I turned to the car just as the horn started frantically beeping.

I whirled.

The Skavis agent was moving again. He got his knees underneath him.

“Dammit,” I said, and rushed the car. I got the passenger door open and dumped Elaine inside, even as the Skavis rose to his feet. “Murphy!”

Murphy called something I didn’t hear very well. The Skavis turned toward me. His face, all contorted with burns on one side, twisted up into a hideous grimace.

Murphy’s gun began barking in a steady, deliberate shooting rhythm. Sparks flew up from the concrete near his feet. At least one shot hit the Skavis, making his upper body jerk.

I rose, blasting rod in hand.

There was a roar more appropriate to a great cat than any dog, and the sound of shattering glass from the second level. Mouse flew over the safety railing, landed heavily on the ground, and lunged at the Skavis.

The dog wasn’t six inches behind the Skavis agent as it closed on me, its one remaining arm raised up to…well, hit me. But given how hard the blow was going to be, I upgraded the verb to smite. He was about to smite me.

Thomas came out of nowhere with that cavalry saber of his and took off the Skavis’s smiting arm at the shoulder.

He let out a scream that didn’t sound anything like human, and tried to bite me. I rolled out of his way, helping him along with a stiff shove to his back.

Mouse came down on top of him, and that was that.

I eyed Thomas as Mouse made sure that the remarkably resilient vampire wasn’t going to be getting up again for anything, ever. It had been a close call. The Skavis had timed his move just right. Another second, give or take, and he’d have broken my neck.

“Well,” I told Thomas, my breathing still quick. “It’s about time.”

“Better late than never,” Thomas replied. He glanced at the bleeding Elaine, licked his lips once, and said, “She needs help.”

“It’s on the way,” Murphy said. “Response is slow here, but give them a couple of minutes. Everyone’s okay up there, Harry.”

Thomas let out a breath of relief. “Thank God.”

Which was odd, coming from him, all things considered. I concurred with the sentiment, though.

Molly sat behind the wheel of the Beetle, breathing too quickly, her eyes very wide. She couldn’t quite see Mouse or his grisly chew toy from where she was sitting, but she stared as if she could see right through the Beetle’s hood to where my dog was finishing up his deadly, ugly work.

“So,” I asked Thomas. “How’d Lara get you to promise not to talk?”

My brother turned toward me and gave me a huge grin. Then he wiped it off his face and said, in the tone of a radio announcer on Prozac, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Warden Dresden.” He winked. “But hypothetically speaking, she might have told me that Justine was in danger and refused to divulge anything else until I promised to keep my mouth shut.”

“And you let her get away with that kind of crap?” I asked him.

Thomas shrugged and said, “She’s family.”

Molly suddenly lunged up out of the driver’s seat of the Beetle and was noisily sick.

“Seems a little fragile,” Thomas said.

“She’s adjusting,” I replied. “Madrigal and his Malvora buddy are still out there.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “So?”

“So that means that this was just a warm-up. They’re still a threat,” I said. “They’ve got enough bodies to lay the whole thing out to the White Court and make people like the Ordo look like a casino buffet. If that happens, it won’t just be one Skavis running around with a point to prove. It will be a quiet campaign. Thousands of people will die.”

Thomas grunted. “Yeah. There’s not a lot we can do about that, though.”

“Says who?” I replied.

He frowned at me and tilted his head.

“Thomas,” I said quietly, “by any chance, is there a gathering of the White Court anytime soon? Perhaps in relation to the proposed summit talks?”

“If there was a meeting of the most powerful hundred or so nobles of the Court scheduled to meet at the family estate the day after tomorrow, I couldn’t tell you about it,” Thomas said. “Because I gave my sister my word.”

“Your sister has guts,” I said. “And she sure as hell knows how to put on a show.” I glanced at the ruined hotel, and dropped my hand to scratch Mouse’s ears. They were about the only part of him not stained with too-pale blood. “Of course, I’ve been known to bring down the house once or twice, myself.”

Thomas folded his arms, waiting. His smile was positively vulpine.

“Call Lara,” I said. “Pass her a message for me.”

Thomas narrowed his eyes. “What message?”

I bared my teeth in an answering smile.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Murphy might not have been officially in charge of Special Investigations, but I don’t think that made much difference to many of the other detectives there. She needed help, and when she called, they came. End of story.

For them, at least. For Murphy, it was the beginning of the story. She had to tell a lot of stories around police headquarters. It was a part of her job. Oh, no, those reports of vampire attacks were the results of hysterical drug-induced hallucinations. Troll? It was a large and ugly man, probably drunk or on drugs. He got away, investigation ongoing. Everyone buys it, because that’s what SI gets paid to do—explain away the bogeyman.

Murphy should be a novelist, she writes so much fiction.

We had a big mess here, but Murph and her fellow cops in SI would make it fit in the blanks. Terrorists were hot right now. This report would probably have terrorists in it. Scared religious nuts and terrorists who set off incendiary devices at an apartment building and in her car, and who also doubtless set the device that blew up an entire room at a cheap south-side motel. There weren’t any corpses to clean up—just one wounded woman who probably needed to see a shrink more than a jail cell. I debated with myself over whether or not to suggest she add in a bit with a dog. People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.

“Right, Mouse?” I asked him.

Mouse looked unhappily up at me. Thomas had gotten the women and kids clear of the scene and handled what was left of the Skavis agent while I’d gone to a car wash and cleaned his blood off of my dog with the sprayer. Mouse’s fur keeps out just about everything, but when it finally gets wet, it soaks up about fifty gallons and stays that way for a long time. He doesn’t like it, and he was apparently feeling petulant about the entire process.

“Everybody loves a bit with a dog,” I said.

Mouse exhaled steadily, then shook his head once and laid it back down, politely and definitely ignoring me.

I get no respect.

I sat on a hospital bench near the emergency room entrance with Mouse pressed up against one of my legs as he lay on the floor, just in case anyone wondered who he was with. It had been a long night, and despite Elaine’s incredible hands, my headache had begun to return. I tried to decide whether Cowl’s mental whammy or Madrigal and his stupid assault rifle deserved more blame for that.

A brawny kid in a brown uniform shirt came up to me the way good security guys do in the Midwest—all friendly and nice, until it’s time to not be nice. The wit and wisdom of Patrick Swayze movies lives on. “Sorry, mister,” he said in a friendly tone, one hand resting congenially on his nightstick. “No dogs allowed. Hospital rules.”

I was tired. “If I don’t take him out,” I said, “are you going to tonfa me to death?”

He blinked at me. “What?”

“Tonfa,” I said. “Imagine all the meal that isn’t getting ground so that you can do your job. All the knives going unsharpened.”

He smiled, and I could see him classify me as “drunk, harmless.” He put out one hand in a come-along sort of gesture.

“Your nightstick there. It’s called a tonfa. It was originally a pin that held a millstone or a big round grinding stone in a smithy. It got developed into an improvised weapon by people in southeast Asia, Okinawa, places like that, where big friendly security types like yourself took away all the real weapons in the interest of public safety.”

His smile faded a little. “Okay, buddy…” He put his hand on my shoulder.

Mouse opened his eyes and lifted his head.

That’s all. He didn’t growl at the brawny kid. He didn’t show his teeth. Like all the most dangerous people I know, he didn’t feel a need to make any displays. He just sort of took notice—with extreme prejudice.

The security kid was smart enough to get the picture and took a quick step back. His hand went from the nightstick to his radio. Even Patrick Swayze needed help sometimes.

Murphy came walking up, her badge hanging on a chain around her neck, and said, “Easy there, big guy.” She traded a nod with the security kid and hooked a thumb back at me. “He’s with us. The dog is a handicap-assist animal.”

The kid lifted his eyebrows.

“My mouth is partially paralyzed,” I said. “It makes it hard for me to read. He’s here to help me with the big words. Tell me if I’m supposed to push or pull on doors, that kind of thing.”

Murphy gave me a gimlet glance, and turned back to the guard. “See what I mean? I’ll have him out of your hair in a minute.”

The security guard glanced dubiously at me, but nodded at Murphy and said, “All right. I’ll check back in a bit, see if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Murphy said, her tone even.

The guard departed. Murphy sighed and sat down next to me, her feet on the other side of Mouse. The dog gave her leg a fond nudge and settled back down again.

“He’ll be back to see if you need help,” I told Murphy in a serious voice. “A sweet little thing like you could get in trouble with a big, crazy man like me.”

“Mouse,” Murphy said. “If I knock Harry out and write, ‘Insufferable wiseass,’ on his head in permanent marker, will you help him read it?”

Mouse glanced up at Murphy and cocked his head speculatively. Then he sneezed and lay back down.

“Why’d you give him a hard time?” Murphy asked me.

I nodded at a pay phone on the wall next to a drinking fountain and a vending machine. “Waiting for a call.”

“Ah,” Murphy said. “Where’s Molly?”

“She was falling asleep on her feet. Rawlins took her home for me.”

Murphy grunted. “I said we’d talk about her.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What you did, Harry…” Murphy shook her head.

“She needed it,” I said.

“She needed it.” The words were crisp.

I shrugged. “The kid’s got power. She thinks that means she knows more than other people. That’s dangerous.”

Murphy frowned at me, listening.

“I’d been planning the little ball-of-face-melty-sunshine thing for a while now,” I said. “I mean, come on. Fire is hard to control. I couldn’t have done something like that without practicing it, and you can’t exactly use a nice, slow, dramatic face-melty fireball in a real fight, can you?”

“Maybe not,” Murphy said.

“I had a kind of face-melty thing come at me once, and it made an impression,” I said. “Molly…got off to a bad start. She took her magic and reshaped the stuff around her. The people around her. Murph…you can’t do anything with magic that you don’t believe in. Think about the significance of that for a minute. When Molly did what she did, she believed that it was right. That she was doing the right thing. Think about her parents. Think about how far they’re willing to go to do the right thing.”

Murphy did that, her blue eyes intense, her expression unreadable.

“I have to keep knocking her on her ass,” I said. “If I don’t, if I let her recover her balance before she gets smart enough to figure out why she should be doing things instead of just how to do them, or if she can do them, she’ll start doing the”—I used air quotes—“‘right’ thing again. She’ll break the Laws again, and they’ll kill her.”

“And you?” Murphy asked.

I shrugged. “That’s a ways down my worry list.”

“And you think what you did is going to help prevent that?” she asked.

“I hope it will,” I said. “I’m not sure what else to do. In the end, it’s up to the kid. I’m just trying to give her enough time to get it together. Despite herself. Hell’s bells, the girl has a thick skull.”

Murphy gave me a lopsided smile and shook her head.

“I know,” I said. “I know. Pot. Kettle. Black.”

“I wasn’t talking about the face-melty thing, Harry,” she said then. “Not directly. I’m talking about the stupid trash can. I’m talking about the look on your face right before you made the fire go away. I’m talking about what happened to that movie-monster thing in the hotel last year.”

It was my turn to frown. “What?”

Murphy stopped for a minute, evidently considering her words as carefully as a bomb technician considers wiring. “There are moments when I wonder if you are losing control of yourself. You’ve always had a lot of anger in you, Harry. But over the past few years, it’s gotten worse. A lot worse.”

“Bullshit,” I snarled.

Murphy arched an eyebrow and just looked at me.

I gritted my teeth and made myself ease back down into my previous slouch. I took a deep breath and counted to ten. Then I said, “You think I have anger issues.”

“When you destroyed that trash can—when you slagged it in a moment of pure frustration, destroyed it, inflicted thousands of dollars of damage on the city sidewalk, the building behind it, the shops inside—”

“All of which are in Marcone’s building,” I snapped.

“I’m sure the people who work the counter at”—she consulted her little notepad—“the Spresso Spress and run the registers at Bathwurks probably don’t know anything about Marcone, or care about him, either. They probably just go to work and try to pay their bills.”

I frowned at her. “What?”

“Both shops were hit by bits of concrete and molten metal. They’ll be closed for several weeks for repairs.”

“They’re insured,” I said. I didn’t sound like I believed it made a difference, even to me.

“People got hurt,” Murphy said. “No one’s face got melted, but that’s not the point. You know the score, Harry. You know the kind of damage you can do if you aren’t careful.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s just like being a cop. Knowing martial arts. I know that I can do some fairly awful things to people. It’s my business to make sure that awful things don’t happen to people. I’m careful about how I use what power I have—”

“I’ll tell that to my dentist,” I said.

“Don’t be petty, Harry,” she said, her voice serious. “I’ve made mistakes. Admitted them. Apologized to you. I can’t change what’s happened, and you’re a better man than that.”

Unless maybe I wasn’t. I felt ashamed for making the remark.

“My point is,” Murphy said quietly, “that you knew what kind of damage you could do. But if what you say is true, in the moment you used your magic you thought that what you were doing was right. You thought it was okay to destroy something because you were angry. Even though it might hurt someone else who didn’t deserve it.”

I felt another surge of rage and…

…and…

And holy crap.

Murphy was right.

The sigil of angelic script, the only unburned flesh on my left hand, itched madly.

“Oh, hell,” I said quietly. “Pot, kettle, black, all right. All day long.”

Murph sat beside me, not saying anything, not accusing me of anything. She just sat with me.

Friends do that.

I put my right hand out, palm up.

Murphy closed her hand on mine for a moment, her fingers warm and small and strong.

“Thanks,” I told her.

She squeezed tight for a moment. Then she got up and went to a vending machine. She came back with a can of Coke and a can of Diet Coke, and handed me the nonvile one. We popped open the cans together and drank.

“How’s the ex?” Murphy asked.

“Gonna make it,” I said. “She lost a lot of blood, but she’s AB neg. They stitched her shut and they’re topping off her tank. Shock’s the worry right now, the doc says.”

“It’s more than that, though, isn’t it.”

I nodded. “Thomas said it might take her a few days to get back on her feet, depending on how big a bite the Skavis took. Which is sort of a relief.”

Murphy studied me for a minute, frowning. “Are you bothered that she…I dunno. She kind of stole your thunder there at the end.”

I shook my head. “She doesn’t need to steal it, Murph. And even if she did, I got plenty of thunder.” I felt myself smile. “Got to admit, I’ve never seen her throw a big punch like that before, though.”

“Pretty impressive,” Murphy admitted.

I shrugged. “Yeah, but she had it under control. Nobody else got hurt. Building didn’t even burn down.”

Murph gave me a sideways look. “Like I said…”

I grinned easily and started to riposte, but the pay phone rang.

I hopped up, as much as I was capable of hopping, and answered it. “Dresden.”

John Marcone’s voice was as cool and eloquent as ever. “You must think me insane.”

“You read the papers I had faxed to you?”

“As has my counsel at Monoc,” Marcone replied. “That doesn’t mean—”

I interrupted him purely because I knew how much it would annoy him. “Look, we both know you’re going to do it, and I’m too tired to dance,” I told him. “What do you want?”

There was a moment of silence that might have been vaguely irritated. Being adolescent at someone like Marcone is good for my morale.

“Say please,” Marcone said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Say please, Dresden,” he replied, his tone smooth. “Ask me.”

I rolled my eyes. “Give me a break.”

“We both know you need me, Dresden, and I’m too tired to dance.” I could practically see the shark smile on his face. “Say please.”

I stewed for a sullen minute before I realized that doing so was probably building Marcone’s morale, and I couldn’t have that. “Fine,” I said. “Please.”

“Pretty please,” Marcone prompted me.

Some pyromaniacal madman’s thoughts flooded my forebrain, but I took a deep breath, Tasered my pride, and said, “Pretty please.”

“With a cherry on top.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up on him.

I kicked the base of the vending machine and muttered a curse. Marcone was probably laughing his quiet, mirthless little laugh. Jerk. I rejoined Murphy.

She looked at me. I stayed silent. She frowned a little, but nodded at me and picked up where we’d left off. “Seriously. What relieves you about Elaine being off her feet?”

“She won’t get involved in what comes next,” I said.

Murphy fell quiet for a minute. Then she said, “You think the Malvora are going to make their play for power in the White Court.”

“Yep. If anyone points out what happened to Mr. Skavis, they’ll claim he was trying to steal their thunder, and that their operation was already complete.”

“In other words,” Murphy said after a minute, “they won. We did all that thrashing around trying to stop the Skavis so that it wouldn’t happen. But it’s happening anyway.”

“Depressing,” I said, “isn’t it.”

“What does it mean?” Murphy asked. “On the big scale?”

I shrugged. “If they’re successful, it will draw the White Court out of a prosettlement stance. Throw their support back to the Reds. They’ll declare open season on people like Anna, and we’ll have several tens of thousands of disappearances and suicides over the next few years.”

“Most of which will go unnoticed by the authorities,” Murphy said quietly. “So many people disappear already. What’s a few thousand more, spread out?”

“A statistic,” I said.

She was quiet for a minute. “Then what?”

“If the vamps are quiet enough about it, the war gets harder. The Council will have to spread our resources even thinner than they already are. If something doesn’t change…” I shrugged. “We lose. Now, a couple of decades from now, sometime. We lose.”

“Then what?” Murphy asked. “If the Council loses the war.”

“Then…the vampires will be able to do pretty much whatever they want,” I said. “They’ll take control. The Red Court will grab up all the spots in the world where there’s already plenty of chaos and corruption and blood and misery. They’ll spread out from Central America to Africa, the Middle East, all those places that used to be Stalin’s stomping grounds and haven’t gotten a handle on things yet, the bad parts of Asia. Then they’ll expand the franchise. The White Court will move in on all the places that regard themselves as civilized and enlightened and wisely do not believe in the supernatural.” I shrugged. “You guys will be on your own.”

“You guys?” Murphy asked me.

“People,” I said. “Living people.”

Mouse pressed his head a little harder against my boot. There was silence, and I felt Murphy’s stare.

“Come on, Karrin,” I said. I winked at her and pushed myself wearily to my feet. “That isn’t gonna happen while I’m still alive.”

Murphy rose with me. “You have a plan,” she stated.

“I have a plan.”

“What’s the plan, Harry?”

I told her.

She looked at me for a second and then said, “You’re crazy.”

“Be positive, Murph. You call it crazy. I call it unpredictable.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully for a second and then said, “I can’t go any higher than insane.”

“You in?” I asked her.

Murphy looked insulted. “What kind of question is that?”

“You’re right,” I said. “What was I thinking?”

We left together.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I was up late making arrangements that would, I hoped, help me take out Madrigal and his Malvora buddy, and put an end to the power struggle in the White Court. After which, maybe I would try turning water to wine and walking on water (though technically speaking, I had done the latter yesterday).

After I was through scheming, I dragged my tired self to bed and slept hard but not long. Too many dreams about all the things that could go wrong.

I was rummaging in my icebox, looking for breakfast, when Lasciel manifested her image to me again. The fallen angel’s manner was subdued, and her voice had something in it I had rarely heard there—uncertainty. “Do you really think it’s possible for her to change?”

“Who?”

“Your pupil, of course,” Lasciel said. “Do you really think she can change? Do you think she can take control of herself the way you would have her do?”

I turned from the fridge. Lasciel stood in front of my empty fireplace, her arms folded, frowning down at it. She was wearing the usual white tunic, though her hair seemed a little untidy. I hadn’t slept all that long or all that well. Maybe she hadn’t, either.

“Why do you ask?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “It only seems to me that she is already established in her patterns. She disregards the wisdom of others in favor of her own flawed judgment. She ignores their desires, even their will, and replaces them with her own.”

“She did that once,” I said quietly. “Twice, if you want to get technical. It might have been one of her first major choices, and she made a bad one. But it doesn’t mean that she has to keep on repeating it over and over.”

There was silence as I assembled a turkey sandwich and a bowl of Cheerios, plus a can of cold Coke: the breakfast of champions. I hoped. “So,” I said. “What do you think of the plan?”

“I think there is only a slightly greater chance of your enemies killing you than your allies, my host. You are a madman.”

“It’s the sort of thing that keeps life interesting,” I said.

A faint smile played on her lips. “I have known mortals for millennia, my host. Few of them ever grew that bored.”

“You should have seen the kind of plans I came up with a couple of years before you showed up. Today’s plan is genius and poetry compared to those.” There was no milk in the icebox, and I wasn’t pouring Coke onto breakfast cereal. That would just be odd. I munched on the Cheerios dry, and washed each mouthful down with Coke in a dignified fashion. Then I glanced at Lasciel and said, “I changed.”

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the crunching of tasty rings of oats or baked wheat or something. I just knew it was good for my heart and my cholesterol and for all the flowers and puppies and tiny children. The box said so.

The fallen angel spoke after a time, and her words came out quiet and poisonously bitter. “She has free will. She has a choice. That is what she is.”

“No. She is what she does,” I said quietly. “She could choose to change her ways. She could choose to take up black magic again.” I took a bite of sandwich. “Or she could ignore the choice. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Or pretend that she doesn’t have a choice, when in fact she does. That’s just another way of choosing.”

Lasciel gave me a very sharp look. The shadows shifted on her face, as if the room had grown darker. “We are not talking about me.”

I sipped Coke and said mildly, “I know that. We’re talking about Molly.”

“We are,” she said. “I have a purpose here. A mission. That has not changed.” She turned away from me, the shadows around her growing darker. Her form blended into them. “I do not change.”

“Speaking of,” I said. “A friend pointed out to me that I may have developed some anger issues over the last couple of years. Maybe influenced by…oh, who knows what.”

The fallen angel’s shadow turned her head. I could only tell because her lovely profile was slightly less black than the shadow around it.

“I thought maybe you would know what,” I said. “Tell me.”

“I told you once before, my host,” the shadow said. “You are easier to talk to when you are asleep.”

Which was just chilling, taken in that context. Everyone has that part of them that needs to be reined in. It’s that little urge you sometimes feel to hop over the edge of a great height, when you’re looking out from a high building. It’s the immediate spark of anger you feel when someone cuts you off, and makes you want to run your car into that moron. It’s the flash of fear in you when something surprises you at night, leaving you quivering with your body primed to fight or flee. Call it the hind brain, the subconscious, whatever: I’m not a shrink. But it’s there, and it’s real.

Mine wore a lot of black, even before Lasciel showed up.

Like I said. Chilling.

The fallen angel turned to depart on that note, probably because it would have made a nicely scary exit line.

I extended my hand, and with it my mind, and barred her departure with an effort of simple will. Lasciel existed only in my thoughts, after all. “My head,” I told her. “My rules. We aren’t finished.”

She turned to face me, and her eyes suddenly glowed with orange and amber and scarlet flickers of Hellfire. It was the only non-black thing about her.

“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “My inner evil twin might have a lot of impulses I’d rather not indulge—but he isn’t a stranger. He’s me.”

“Yes. He is. Full of anger. Full of the need for power. Full of hate.” She smiled, and her teeth were white and quite pointy. “He just doesn’t lie to himself about it.”

“I don’t lie to myself,” I responded. “Anger is just anger. It isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It’s like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice.”

“Constructive anger,” the demon said, her voice dripping sarcasm.

“Also known as passion,” I said quietly. “Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful.”

Lasciel narrowed her eyes.

“In point of fact,” I said quietly, “that kind of thing really doesn’t get done without passion. Anger is one of the things that can help build it—if it’s controlled.”

“If you really believed that,” Lasciel said, “you’d not be having any anger-control issues.”

“Because I’m perfect?” I asked her, and snorted. “A lot of men go a lifetime without ever figuring out how to control anger. I’ve been doing it longer than some, and better than some, but I don’t kid myself that I’m a saint.” I shrugged. “A lot of things I see make me angry. It’s one of the reasons I decided to spend my life doing something about it.”

“Because you’re so noble,” she purred, which dripped even more sarcasm. At this rate, I was going to need a mop.

“Because I’d rather use that anger to smash the things that hurt people than let it use me,” I said. “Talk at my subconscious all you want. But I’d be careful about trying to feed my inner Hulk, if I were you. You might end up making me that much better a person, once I beat it down. Who knows, you might make me into a saint. Or as close to one as I could get, anyway.”

The demon just stared at me.

“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “I know me. And I just can’t imagine you talking and talking to my evil twin like that, without him ever saying anything back. I don’t think you’re the only one doing any influencing here. I don’t think you’re the same creature now that you were when you came.”

She let out a cold little laugh. “Such arrogance. Do you think you could change the eternal, mortal? I was brought to life by the Word of the Almighty himself, for a purpose so complex and fundamental that you could not begin to comprehend it. You are nothing, mortal. You are a flickering spark. You will be here, and be gone, and in the aeons that come after, when your very kind have dwindled and perished, you will be but one of uncounted legions of those whom I have seduced and destroyed.” Her eyes narrowed. “You. Cannot. Change. Me.”

I nodded agreeably. “You’re right. I can’t change Lasciel. But I couldn’t prevent Lasciel from walking out of the room, either.” I eyed her hard and lowered my voice. “Lady, you ain’t Lasciel.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could see the darkened form’s shoulders flinch.

“You’re an image of her,” I continued. “A copy. A footprint. But you’ve got to be at least as mutable as the material the impression was made upon. As mutable as me. And hey, I’ve got newfound anger issues. What have you got that’s new?”

“You are delusional,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.

“I disagree. After all, if you have managed to change me—even if it doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to turn into Ted Bundy—then it seems to me that you’d be at least as vulnerable. In fact, the way that sort of thing works…you pretty much have to have changed yourself to do what you’ve done to me.”

“It will vanish when I am taken back into my whole self imprisoned within the coin,” Lasciel said.

“You, the you who is talking to me right now, will be gone. In other words,” I said, “you’ll die.”

A somewhat startled silence followed.

“For an inhumanly brilliant spiritual entity, you can really miss the freaking point.” I poked a finger at my own temple. “Think. Maybe you don’t have to be Lasciel.”

The shadow closed her eyes, leaving only an occupied, presence-filled darkness. There was a long silence.

“Think about it,” I told her. “What if you do have a choice? A life of your own to lead? What if, huh? And you don’t even try to choose?”

I let that sink in for a while.

There was a sound from the far side of the room.

It was a very quiet, very miserable little sound.

I’ve made sounds like that before—mostly when there was no one around to care. The part of me that knew what it was to hurt could feel the fallen angel’s pain, and it gouged out a neat little hole in me, somehow. It was a vaguely familiar feeling, but not an entirely unpleasant one.

Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you’re near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there’s a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me.

It doesn’t have to be someone particularly nice. You don’t have to like them. You don’t even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.

With Marcone, it was like that. I didn’t like the slippery bastard. But I understood him. His word was good. I could trust him—trust him to be cold, ferocious, and dangerous, sure. But it was reassuring to know that there was something there to trust. The connection had been made.

Lasciel’s mere shadow was infinitely more dangerous to me than Marcone, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t admire the creature for what it was while respecting the threat it posed to me. It didn’t mean I couldn’t feel some kind of empathy for what had to be a horribly lonely way to exist.

Life’s easier when you can write off others as monsters, as demons, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared. The thing is, you can’t do that without becoming them, just a little. Sure, Lasciel’s shadow might be determined to drag my immortal soul down to Perdition, but there was no point in hating her for it. It wouldn’t do anything but stain me that much darker.

I’m human, and I’m going to stay that way.

So I felt a little bit bad for the creature whose purpose in the universe was to tempt me into darkness. Hell, once I’d thought about it, it was just about the only job I’d heard of that had to be even more isolated and frustrating than mine.

“How many shadows like you have ever stayed in a host like me for longer than a few weeks, huh? Longer than three years?”

“Never,” Lasciel’s shadow replied in a near-whisper. “Granted, you are unusually stiff-necked, for a mortal. Suicidally so, in fact.”

“So?” I said. “I’ve held out this long. Suppose I do it the whole way? Suppose I never pick up the coin. Shadow-you never goes back to real-you. Who’s to say that shadow-you can’t find some kind of life for herself?”

Hellfire eyes narrowed at me, but she did not reply.

“Lash,” I said quietly, and relaxed my will, releasing my hold on her. “Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn’t mean you can’t grow into something else.”

Silence.

Then her voice came out, a bare whisper. “Your plan has too many variables and will likely result in our destruction. Should you wish my assistance in your madness, my host, you have only to call.”

Then the form was gone, and Lasciel was absent from my apartment.

Technically, she had never been there at all. She was all in my head. And, technically, she wasn’t gone. She was just off somewhere where I couldn’t perceive her; and I knew on a gut level—or maybe my darker self was telling me—that she’d heard me. I was onto something. I was sure of that.

Either I’m one hell of a persuasive guy or I’m a freaking sucker.

“Get your head in the game, Harry,” I told myself. “Defeat the whole damn White Court now. Worry about taking on Hell later.”

I got back to work. The clock ticked down steadily, and there was nothing I could do but get ready and kill time, waiting for nightfall and the fight that would follow.

Chapter Thirty-Four

I let Mister back in after his morning ramble, which happened to fall between three and four P.M. that day—Mister has a complicated ramble schedule that changes on a basis so mystifying that I have never been able to predict it—and took Mouse out for a stroll to the area of the boardinghouse’s little backyard set aside for him.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

I took a bit of sandpaper to my staff and cleaned off some gunk on the bottom and some soot along the haft. I put on all my silver battle rings and took them to the heavy bag I’d hung in the corner. Half an hour’s worth of pounding on the bag wouldn’t bring them all up to charge, but something was better than nothing.

Tick, tock.

I showered after my workout. I cleaned my gun and loaded it. I pushed aside my coffee table and couch to lay out my coat on the floor and took the leather cleaner to it, being careful not to disrupt the protective spells I’d scored in the hide with tattoo needles and black ink.

In short, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about Anna Ash’s corpse in that cheap, clean little hotel room shower while the time crawled by.

Tick, tock.

At a quarter to six, there was a rapping sound outside my door. I checked out the peephole. Ramirez stood outside, dressed in a big red basketball-type tank top, black shorts, and flip-flops. He had a big gym bag over one shoulder and carried his staff, nearly as battle-scarred as mine, despite the difference in our ages, in his right hand. He rapped the end of the staff down on the concrete outside again, instead of touching my door.

I took down the wards and opened the steel security door. It didn’t take me more than five or six hard pulls to get it to swing all the way open.

“I thought you were going to get that fixed,” Ramirez said to me. He peered around the doorway before he eased forward through it, where I knew the presence of all the warding spells would be buzzing against his senses like a locomotive-sized electric razor, even though they were temporarily deactivated. “Jesus Christ, Harry. You beefed them up even more.”

“Got to exercise the apprentice’s talent somehow.”

Ramirez gave me an affable leer. “I’ll bet.”

“Don’t even joke about that, man,” I told him, without any heat in the words. “I’ve known her since she was in pigtails.”

Ramirez opened his mouth, paused, then shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

“No problem,” I said.

“But since I’m not an old man whose sex drive has withered from lack of use—”

(Don’t get me wrong. I like Carlos. But there are times, when his mouth is running, that I want to punch him in the head until all his teeth fall out.)

“—I’ll be the first to admit that I’d sure as hell find some uses for her. That girl is fine.” He frowned and glanced around—a little nervously, I thought. “Um. Molly’s not here, is she?”

“Nope,” I said. “I didn’t ask her on this operation.”

“Oh,” he said. His voice seemed to hold something of both approval and disappointment. “Good. Hey, there, Mouse.”

My dog came over to greet Ramirez with a gravely shaken paw and a wagging tail. Ramirez produced a little cloth sack and tossed it up to Mister, where he lay in his favored spot atop one of my bookcases. Mister immediately went ecstatic, pinning the sack down with one paw and rubbing his whiskers all over it.

“I disapprove of recreational drug use,” I told Ramirez sternly.

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, Dad. But since we all know who really runs this house”—Ramirez reached up to rub a finger behind one of Mister’s ears—“I’ll just keep on paying tribute lest I incur His Nibs’s imperial displeasure.”

I reached up to rub Mister’s ears when Ramirez was done. “So, any questions?”

“We’re going to stomp into the middle of a big meeting of the White Court, call a couple of them murderers, challenge them to a duel, and kill them right in front of all of their friends and relatives, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“It has the advantage of simplicity,” Ramirez said, his tone dry. He put his bag on my coffee table and opened it, drawing out a freaking Desert Eagle, one of the most powerful semiautomatic sidearms in the world. “Call them names and kill them. What could possibly go wrong with that?”

“We’re officially in a cease-fire,” I said. “And as we’ve announced ourselves as parties arriving to deliver challenge, they’d be in violation of the Accords to kill us.”

Ramirez grunted, checked the slide on the big handgun, and slapped a magazine into it. “Or we show up, they kill us, and then play like we left in good shape and vanished, and oh, dear, what a shame and loss to all those hot young women that that madman Harry Dresden dragged good-looking young Ramirez down with him when he went.”

I snorted. “No. In the first place, the Council would find out what happened one way or another.”

“If any of them looked,” Ramirez drawled.

“Ebenezar would,” I stated with perfect confidence.

“How do you know?” Ramirez asked.

I knew because my old mentor was the Blackstaff of the Council, their completely illegal, immoral, unethical, and secret assassin, free to break the Laws of Magic whenever he deemed it fit—such as the First Law, “Thou shalt not kill.” When Duke Ortega of the Red Court had challenged me to a formal duel and cheated, Ebenezar had taken it personally. He’d pulled an old Soviet satellite down onto the vamps’ heads, killing Ortega and his whole crew. But I couldn’t tell Carlos that.

“I know the old man,” I said. “He would.”

“You know that,” Ramirez said. “What if the Whites don’t?”

“We count on our second safety net. King Raith doesn’t want to get his finely accoutred ass deposed. Our challenge is going to remove a couple of potential deposers. He’ll want us to succeed. After that, I figure quid pro quo should be enough to get us out in one piece.”

Ramirez shook his head. “We’re doing the White King, our enemy, with whom we are at war, a favor by stabilizing his grasp on the throne.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are we doing that again?”

“Because it might give the Council a chance to catch its breath, at least, if we can recover while Raith hosts peace talks.” I narrowed my eyes. “And because those murdering sons of bitches have to pay for killing a lot of innocent people, and this is the only way to get to them.”

Ramirez pulled three round-sided grenades from the pack and put them down next to the Desert Eagle. “I like that second one better. It’s a fight I can get behind. Do we have any backup?”

“Maybe,” I said.

He paused and blinked up at me. “Maybe?”

“Most of the Wardens are in India,” I told him. “A bunch of old bad guys under some big daddy rakshasa started attacking some monasteries friendly to us while we were distracted with the vamps. I checked, and Morgan and Ebenezar have been hammering them for two days. You, me, your guys, and Luccio’s trainees are the only Wardens in North America right now.”

“No trainees.” Ramirez grunted. “And my guys haven’t had their cloaks for a year yet. They…are not up for something like this yet. Half a dozen vamps in an alley, sure, but there’s only the three of them.”

I nodded. “Keep this simple. Swagger in, look confident, kick ass. You dealt with White Court before?”

“Not much. They stay clear of our people on the coast.”

“They’re predators like the rest of them,” I said. “They react well to body language that tells them that you are not food. They’ve got some major mental influence skills, so keep focused and make sure your head is clear.”

Ramirez produced a well-worn web belt of black nylon. He clipped a holster to it and then fixed the grenades in place. “What’s going to stop them from smashing us the second we win this duel?”

That’s one of the things I love about working with Ramirez. The possibility of losing the duel simply didn’t enter into his calculations. “Their nature,” I said. “They like to play civilized, and do their wet work through cat’s-paws. They are not fond of direct methods and direct confrontation.”

Ramirez lifted his eyebrows, drew a slender, straight, double-edged blade of a type he called a willow sword from the bag, and laid it on the table, too. The tassel on the hilt had been torn off by a zombie the night we’d first fought together. He had replaced it, over the last few years, with a little chain strung with fangs taken from Red Court vampires he’d killed with it. They rattled against one another and the steel and leather of the hilt. “I get it. We’re the White King’s cat’s-paws.”

I walked to the icebox. “Bingo. And we can’t hang around as potential threats to his rebellious courtiers if he kills us outright after we help him out. It would damage his credibility with his allies, too.”

“Ah,” Ramirez said. “Politicians.”

I returned with two opened beers. I gave one to him, clinked my bottle against his, and we said, in unison, “Fuck ’em,” and drank.

Ramirez lowered the bottle, squinted at it, and said, “Can we do this?”

I snorted. “Can’t be any harder than Halloween.”

“We had a dinosaur then,” Ramirez said. Then he turned and pulled fatigue pants and a black Offspring T-shirt out of his bag. He gave me an up-and-down look. “Of course, we still do.”

I kicked the coffee table into his shins. He let out a yelp and hobbled off to change clothes in my bedroom, snickering under his breath the whole way.

When he came back out, the smile was gone. We got suited up. Swords and guns and grey cloaks and staves and magical gewgaws left and right, yeehaw. One of these days, I swear, as long as I’m playing supernatural sheriff of Chicago, I’m getting myself some honest-to-God spurs and a ten-gallon hat.

I got out a yellow legal pad and a pen, and Ramirez and I sat down over another beer. “The meeting is at the Raith family estate north of town. I’ve been in the house, but only part of it. Here’s what I remember.”

I started sketching it out for Ramirez, who asked plenty of smart questions about both the house and exterior, so that I had to go to a new page to map out what I knew of the grounds. “Not sure where the vamps will be having their meeting, but the duel is going to be in the Deeps. It’s a cave outside the house, somewhere out here.” I circled an area of the map. “There’s a nice deep chasm in them. It’s a great place to dispose of bodies, and no chance of being seen or heard.”

“Very tidy,” Ramirez noted. “Especially if we’re the ones who need disposing of.”

The doorknob twisted and began to open.

Ramirez went for his gun and had it out almost as quickly as I had my blasting rod pointed at the door. Something slammed against it, opening it five or six inches. I flicked my gaze aside for a minute, and then lowered the blasting rod. I put a hand on Ramirez’s wrist and said, “Easy, tiger. It’s a friendly.”

Ramirez glanced at me and lowered the gun, while I watched Mouse rise to his feet and pad toward the door, tail wagging.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“That backup we might be getting,” I said quietly.

The door banged open by inches and Molly slipped inside.

She’d ditched the Goth-wear almost entirely. She didn’t sport any of the usual piercings—nose rings are great fashion statements, but in anything like a fight, they just aren’t a good idea. Her clothing wasn’t all ripped up, either. She wore heavy, loose jeans, and not slung so low on the hips that they’d threaten to fall off and trip her if she twitched her spine just right. Her combat boots had been divested of their brightly colored laces. She wore a black shirt with a Metallica logo on it, and a web belt that bore a sheathed knife and the small first-aid kit I’d seen her mother carry into battle. She wore a dark green baseball cap, with her hair gathered into a tail and tucked up under it, where it wouldn’t provide an easy handle for anyone wanting to grab it.

Molly didn’t look up at us. She greeted the big dog first, kneeling to give him a hug. Then she rose, facing me, and looked up. “Um. Hi, Harry. Hello, Warden Ramirez.”

“Molly,” I replied, keeping my voice neutral. “Is this the third or fourth time in the last two days I’ve told you to stay home only to have you ignore me?”

“I know,” she said, looking down again. “But…I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m busy.”

“I know. But I really need to talk to you, sir. Please.”

I exhaled slowly. Then I glanced aside at Ramirez. “Do me a favor? Gas up the Beetle? There’s a station two blocks down the street.”

Carlos looked from me to Molly and back, then shrugged and said, “Um. Sure, yeah.”

I took the keys from my pocket and tossed them. Carlos caught them with casual dexterity, gave Molly a polite nod, and left.

“Shut the door,” I told her.

She did, pressing her back against it and using her legs to push. It cost her a couple of grunts of effort and a few ounces of dignity, but she got it shut.

“You can barely shut the door,” I said. “But you think you’re ready to fight the White Court?”

She shook her head and started to speak.

I didn’t let her. “Again, you’re ignoring me. Again, you’re here when I told you to stay away.”

“Yes,” she said. “But—”

“But you think I’m a frigging idiot too stupid to make these kinds of judgments on my own, and you want to go with me anyway.”

“It isn’t like that,” she said.

“No?” I said, thrusting out my chin belligerently. “How many beads can you move, apprentice?”

“But—”

I roared at her, “How many beads?”

She flinched away from me, her expression miserable. Then she lifted the bracelet and dangled it, heavy black beads lining up at the bottom of the strand. She faced it, her blue eyes tired and haunted, and bit her lip.

“Harry?” she asked softly.

She sounded very young.

“Yes?” I asked. I spoke very gently.

“Why does it matter?” she asked me, staring at the bead bracelet.

“It matters if you want to go into this with me,” I said quietly.

She shook her head and blinked her eyes several times. It didn’t stop a tear from leaking out. “But that’s just it. I…I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see that…” She glanced aside at Mouse and shuddered. “Blood, like that. I don’t remember what happened when you and Mother saved me from Arctis Tor. But I don’t want to see more of that. I don’t want it to happen to me. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

I let out a low, noncommittal sound. “Then why are you here?”

“B-because,” she said, searching for words. “Because I need to do it. I know that what you’re doing is necessary. And it’s right. And I know that you’re doing it because you’re the only one who can. And I want to help.”

“You think you’re strong enough to help?” I asked her.

She bit her lip again and met my eyes for just a second. “I think…I think it doesn’t matter how strong my magic is. I know I don’t…I don’t know how to do these things like you do. The guns and the battles and…” She lifted her chin and seemed to gather herself a little. “But I know more than most.”

“You know some,” I admitted. “But you got to understand, kid. That won’t mean much once things get nasty. There’s no time for thinking or second chances.”

She nodded. “All I can promise you is that I won’t leave you when you need me. I’ll do whatever you think I can. I’ll stay here and man the phone. I’ll drive the car. I’ll walk at the back and hold the flashlight. Whatever you want.” She met my eyes and her own hardened. “But I can’t sit at home being safe. I need to be a part of this. I need to help.”

There was a sudden, sharp sound as the leather strand of her bracelet snapped of its own volition. Black beads flew upward with so much force that they rattled off the ceiling and went bouncing around the apartment for a good ten seconds. Mister, still batting playfully at his gift sack of catnip, paused to watch them, ears flicking, eyes alertly tracking their movement.

I went up to the girl, who was staring at them, mystified.

“It was the vampire, wasn’t it,” I said. “Seeing him die.”

She blinked at me. Then at the scattered beads. “I…I didn’t just see it, Harry. I felt it. I can’t explain it any better than that. Inside my head. I felt it, the same way I felt that poor girl. But this was horrible.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re a sensitive. It’s a tremendous talent, but it has some drawbacks to it. In this case, though, I’m glad you have it.”

“Why?” she whispered.

I gestured at the scattered beads. “Congratulations, kid,” I told her quietly. “You’re ready.”

She blinked at me, her head tilted. “What?”

I took the now-empty leather strand and held it up between two fingers. “It wasn’t about power, Molly. It was never about power. You’ve got plenty of that.”

She shook her head. “But…all those times…”

“The beads weren’t ever going to go up. Like I said, power had nothing to do with it. You didn’t need that. You needed brains.” I thumped a forefinger over one of her eyebrows. “You needed to open your eyes. You needed to be truly aware of how dangerous things are. You needed to understand your limitations. And you needed to know why you should set out on something like this.”

“But…all I said was that I was scared.”

“After what you got to experience? That’s smart, kid,” I said. “I’m scared, too. Every time something like this happens, it scares me. But being strong doesn’t get you through. Being smart does. I’ve beaten people and things who were stronger than I was, because they didn’t use their heads, or because I used what I had better than they did. It isn’t about muscle, kiddo, magical or otherwise. It’s about your attitude. About your mind.”

She nodded slowly and said, “About doing things for the right reasons.”

“You don’t throw down like this just because you’re strong enough to do it,” I said. “You do it because you don’t have much choice. You do it because it’s unacceptable to walk away, and still live with yourself later.”

She stared at me for a second, and then her eyes widened. “Otherwise, you’re using power for the sake of using power.”

I nodded. “And power tends to corrupt. It isn’t hard to love using it, Molly. You’ve got to go in with the right attitude or…”

“Or the power starts using you,” she said. She’d heard the argument before, but this was the first time she said the words slowly, thoughtfully, as if she’d actually understood them, instead of just parroting them back to me. Then she looked up. “That’s why you do it. Why you help people. You’re using the power for someone other than yourself.”

“That’s part of it,” I said. “Yeah.”

“I feel…sort of stupid.”

“There’s a difference in knowing something”—I poked her head again—“and knowing it.” I touched the middle of her sternum. “See?”

She nodded slowly. Then she took the strand back from me and put it back on her wrist. There was just enough left to let her tie it again. She held it up so that I could see and said, “So that I’ll remember.”

I grinned at her and hugged her. She hugged back. “Did you get a lesson like this?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “From this grumpy old Scot on a farm in the Ozarks.”

“When do I stop feeling like an idiot?”

“I’ll let you know when I do,” I said, and she laughed.

We parted the hug and I met her eyes. “You still in?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“Then you’ll ride up with Ramirez and me. We’ll stop outside the compound and you’ll stay with the car.”

She nodded seriously. “What do I do?”

“Keep your eyes and ears open. Stay alert for anything you might sense. Don’t talk to anyone. If anyone approaches you, leave. If you see a bunch of bad guys showing up, start honking the horn and get out.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked a little pale.

I pulled a silver cylinder out of my pocket. “This is a hypersonic whistle. Mouse can hear it from a mile away. If we get in trouble, I’ll blow it and he’ll start barking about it. He’ll face where we are. Try to get the car as close as you can.”

“I’ll have Mouse with me,” she said, and looked considerably relieved.

I nodded. “Almost always better not to work alone.”

“What if…what if I do something wrong?”

I shrugged. “What if you do? That’s always possible, Molly. But the only way never to do the wrong thing—”

“—is never to do anything,” she finished.

“Bingo.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “Look. You’re smart enough. I’ve taught you everything I know about the White Court. Keep your eyes open. Use your head, your judgment. If things get bad and I haven’t started blowing the whistle, run like hell. If it gets past ten P.M. and you haven’t heard from me, do the same. Get home and tell your folks.”

“All right,” she said quietly. She took a deep breath and let it out unsteadily. “This is scary.”

“And we’re doing it anyway,” I said.

“That makes us brave, right?”

“If we get away with it,” I said. “If we don’t, it just makes us stupid.”

Her eyes widened for a second and then she let out a full-throated laugh.

“Ready?” I asked her.

“Ready, sir.”

“Good.”

Outside, gravel crunched as Ramirez returned with the Beetle. “All right, apprentice,” I said. “Get Mouse’s lead on him, will you? Let’s do it.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Château Raith hadn’t changed much since my last visit. That’s one of the good things about dealing with nigh-immortals. They tend to adjust badly to change and avoid it wherever possible.

It was a big place, north of the city, where the countryside rolls over a surprising variety of terrain—flat stretches of rich land that used to be farms, but are mostly big, expensive properties now. Dozens of little rivers and big creeks have carved hills and valleys more steep than most people expect from the Midwest. The trees out in that area, one of the older settlements in the United States, can be absolutely huge, and it would cost me five or six years’ worth of income to buy even a tiny house.

Château Raith is surrounded by a forest of those enormous, ancient trees, as if someone had managed to transplant a section of Sherwood Forest itself from Britain. You can’t see a thing of the estate from any of the roads around it. I knew it was at least a half-mile run through the trees before you got to the grounds, which were enormous in their own right.

Translation: You weren’t getting away from the château on foot speed alone. Not if there were vampires there to run you down.

There was one new feature to the grounds. The eight-foot-high stone wall was the same, but it had been topped with a double helix of razor wire, and lighting had been spaced along the outside of the wall. I could see security cameras at regular intervals as well. The old Lord Raith had disdained the more modern security precautions in favor of the protection of intense personal arrogance. Lara, however, seemed more willing to acknowledge threats, to listen to her mortal security staff, and to employ the countermeasures they suggested. It would certainly help keep the mortal riffraff out, and the Council had plenty of mortal allies.

More important, it said something about Lara’s administration: She found skilled subordinates and then listened to them. She might not look as overwhelmingly confident as Lord Raith had—but then, Lord Raith wasn’t running the show anymore, either, even if that wasn’t public knowledge in the magical community.

I reflected that it was entirely possible that I might have done the Council and the world something of a disservice by helping Lara assume control. Lord Raith had been proud and brittle. I had the feeling that Lara would prove to be far, far more capable and far more dangerous as the de facto White King.

And here I was, about to go to her aid again and help solidify her power even more.

“Stop here,” I told Molly quietly. The gates to the château were still a quarter mile down the road. “This is as close as you get.”

“Right,” Molly said, and pulled the Beetle over—onto the far side of the road, I noted with approval, where anyone wanting to come to her would have to cross the open pavement to get there.

“Mouse,” I said. “Stay here with Molly and listen for us. Take care of her.”

Mouse looked unhappily at me from the backseat, where he’d sat with Ramirez, but leaned forward and dropped his shaggy chin onto my shoulder. I gave him a quick hug and said in a gruff voice, “Don’t worry; we’ll be fine.”

His tail thumped once against the backseat, and then he shifted around to lay his head on Molly’s shoulder. She immediately started scratching him reassuringly behind the ear, though her own expression was far from comfortable.

I gave the girl half of a smile, and then got out of the car. Summer twilight was fading fast, and it was too hot to wear my duster. I had it on anyway, and I added the weight of the grey cloak of the Wardens of the White Council to the duster. Under all that, I wore a white silk shirt and cargo pants of heavy black cotton, plus my hiking boots.

“Hat,” I muttered. “Spurs. Next time, I swear.”

Ramirez slid out of the Beetle, grenades and gun and willow sword hanging from his belt, and staff gripped in his right hand. He paused to pull on a glove made out of heavy leather overlaid with a layer of slender steel plates, each inscribed with pictoglyphs that looked Aztec or Olmec or something.

“That’s new,” I commented.

He winked at me, and we checked our guns. My .44 revolver went back into my left-hand duster pocket, his back into its sheath.

“You sure you don’t want a grenade or two?” he asked.

“I’m not comfortable with hand grenades,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he replied. “How about you, Molly?”

He turned back to the car, hand on one of his grenades.

The car was gone. The engine was still idling audibly.

Ramirez let out a whistle and waved his staff into the space it had occupied until it clinked against metal. “Hey, not a bad veil. Pretty damned good, in fact.”

“She’s got a gift,” I said.

Molly’s voice came from nearby. “Thanks.”

Ramirez gave the approximate space where my apprentice sat a big grin and a gallant, vaguely Spanish little bow.

Molly let out a suppressed giggle. The car’s engine cut out, and she said, “Go on. I’ve got to keep compensating for the dust you’re kicking up, and it’s a pain.”

“Eyes open,” I told her. “Use your head.”

“You too,” Molly said.

“Don’t tell him to start new things now,” Ramirez chided her. “You’ll just confuse him.”

“I’m getting dumber by the minute,” I confirmed. “Ask anybody.”

From the unseen car, Mouse snorted out a breath.

“See?” I said, and started walking toward the entrance to the estate.

Ramirez kept up, but only by taking a skipping step every several paces. My legs are lots longer than his.

After a hundred yards or so, he laughed. “All right, you made your point.”

I grunted and slowed marginally.

Ramirez looked back over his shoulder. “Think she’ll be all right?”

“Tough to sneak up on Mouse,” I said. “Even if they realize she’s there.”

“Pretty, a body like that, and talent, too.” Ramirez stared back thoughtfully. “She seeing anyone?”

“Not since she drilled holes in her last boyfriend’s psyche and drove him insane.”

Ramirez winced. “Right.”

We fell silent and walked up to the gates to the estate, getting our game faces on along the way. Ramirez’s natural expression was a cocksure smile, but when things got hairy, he went with a cool, arrogant look that left his eyes focused on nothing and everything at the same time. I really don’t care what my game face looks like. Mine is all internal.

I kept Anna’s face and her serious eyes in mind as I tromped up to the gothic gate made of simulated wrought iron, but heavy enough to stop a charging SUV. I struck it three times with my staff and planted its end firmly onto the ground.

The gate buzzed and began to open of its own accord. Halfway through, something near the hinges let out a whine and a puff of smoke, and it stopped moving.

“That you?” I asked him.

“I took out the lock too,” he replied quietly. “And the cameras that can see the gate. Just in case.”

Ramirez doesn’t have my raw power, but he uses what he has well. “Nice,” I told him. “Didn’t feel a thing.”

His grin flickered by. “De nada. I’m the best.”

I stepped through the gate, keeping a wary eye out. The night was all but complete, and the woods were lovely, dark and deep. Tires whispered on pavement. A light appeared in the trees ahead, and resolved into headlights. A full-fledged limousine, a white Rolls with silver accents, swept down the drive to the gate, and purred to a halt twenty feet in front of us.

Ramirez muttered under his breath, “You want I should—”

“Down, big fella,” I said. “Save ourselves the walk.”

“Bah,” he said. “Some of us are young and healthy.”

The driver door opened and a man got out. I recognized him as one of Lara’s personal bodyguards. He was a bit taller than average, leanly muscled, had a military haircut and sharp, wary eyes. He wore a sports jacket, khakis, and wasn’t working to hide the shoulder rig he wore under the coat. He took a look at us, then past us at the gate and the fence. Then he took a small radio from his pocket and started speaking into it.

“Dresden?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Ramirez?”

“The one and only,” Carlos told him.

“You’re armed,” he said.

“Heavily,” I replied.

He grimaced, nodded, and said, “Get in the car, please.”

“Why?” I asked him, oh so innocently.

Ramirez gave me a sharp look, but said nothing.

“I was told to collect you,” the bodyguard said.

“It isn’t far to the house,” I said. “We can walk.”

“Ms. Raith asked me to assure you that, on behalf of her father, you have her personal pledge of safe conduct, as stipulated in the Accords.”

“In that case,” I said, “Ms. Raith can come tell me that her personal self.”

“I’m sure she will be happy to,” the bodyguard said. “At the house, sir.”

I folded my arms and said, “If she’s too busy to move her pretty ass down here, why don’t you go ask her if we can’t come back tomorrow instead?”

There was a whirring sound, and one of the back windows of the Rolls slid down. I couldn’t see much of anyone inside, but I heard a velvet-soft woman’s laugh saunter out of the night. “You see, George. I told you.”

The bodyguard grimaced and looked around. “They’ve done something to the gate. It’s open. You’re exposed here, ma’am.”

“If assassination was their intention,” the woman replied, “believe me when I say that Dresden could already have done it, and I feel confident that his companion, Mr. Ramirez, could have managed the same.”

Ramirez stiffened a little and muttered between clenched teeth, “How does she know me?”

“Ain’t many people ride zombie dinosaurs and make regional commander in the Wardens before they turn twenty-five,” I replied. “Betcha she’s got files on most of the Wardens still alive.”

“And some of the trainees,” agreed the woman’s voice. “George, if you please.”

The bodyguard gave us a flat, measuring look, and then opened the door of the car, one hand resting quite openly on the butt of the pistol hanging under one arm.

The mistress of the White Court stepped forth from the Rolls-Royce.

Lara is…difficult to describe. I’d met her several times, and each meeting had carried a similar impact, a moment of stunned admiration and desire at her raw physical appeal that did not lessen with exposure. There was no one feature about her that I could have pointed out as particularly gorgeous. There was no one facet of her beauty that could be declared as utter perfection. Her appeal was something far greater than the sum of her parts, and none of those were less than heavenly.

Like Thomas, she had dark, idly curling hair so glossy that the highlights were very nearly a shade of blue. Her skin was one creamy, gently curving expanse of milk white perfection, and if there were moles or birthmarks anywhere on her body, I couldn’t see them. Her dark pink lips were a little large for her narrow-chinned face, but they didn’t detract—they only gave her a look of lush overindulgence, of deliberate and wicked sensuality.

It was her eyes, though, that were the real killers. They were large, oblique orbs of arsenic grey, highlighted with flecks of periwinkle blue. More important, they were very alive eyes, alert, aware of others, shining with intelligence and humor—so much so, in fact, that if you weren’t careful, you’d miss the smoldering, demonic fires of sensuality in them, of a steady, predatory hunger.

Beside me, Ramirez swallowed. I knew only because I could hear it. When Lara makes an entrance, no one looks away.

She wore a white silk business suit, its skirt less than an inch too short to be considered dignified business wear, the heels of her white shoes just a tiny bit too high for propriety. It made it difficult not to stare at her legs. A lot of women with her coloring couldn’t pull off a white outfit, but Lara made it look like a goddess’s toga.

She knew the effect she had when we looked at her, and her mouth curled into a satisfied little smile. She walked toward us slowly, one leg crossing the other at a deliberate pace, hips shifting slightly. The motion was…awfully pretty. Sheer, sensual femininity gathered around her in a silent, unseen thundercloud, so thick that it could drown a man if he wasn’t careful.

After all, she had drowned her father in it, hadn’t she.

All is not gold that glitters, and how well I knew it. As delicious as she looked, as pants-rendingly gorgeously as she moved, she was capital-D Dangerous. More, she was a vampire, a predator, one who fed on human beings to continue her very existence. Despite our past cooperation, I was still human, and she was still something that ate humans. If I acted like food, there would be an enormous part of her that wouldn’t care about politics or advantage. It would just want to eat me.

So I did my best to look bored as she approached and offered me her hand, palm down.

I took her cold (smooth, pretty, deliciously soft—dammit, Harry, ignore your penis before it gets you killed!) fingers in mine, bent over them in a little formal bow, and released them without kissing her hand. If I had, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t take a few nibbles, just to test out the texture as long as I was there.

As I rose, she met my eyes for a dangerous second and said, “Sure you don’t want a taste, Harry?”

A surge of raw lust that was—probably—not my own flickered through my body. I smiled at her, gave her a little bow of my head, and made a small effort of will. The runes and sigils on my staff erupted into smoldering orange Hellfire. “Be polite, Lara. It would be a shame to get cinders and ashes all over those shoes.”

She tilted her head back and let out a bubbling, throaty laugh, then touched the side of my face with one hand. “Subtle, as always,” she replied. She lowered her hand and ran her fingertips over the odd grey material of my Warden’s cloak. “You’ve developed…an eclectic taste in fashion.”

“It’s the same color,” I said, “on both sides.”

“Ah,” Lara said, and inclined her head slightly to me. “I’d hardly respect you otherwise, I suppose. Still, should you ever desire a new wardrobe…” She touched the fabric of my shirt lightly. “You would look marvelous in white silk.”

“Said the spider to the fly,” I replied. “Forget it.”

She smiled again, batted her lashes at me while my heart skipped a beat, and then slid on to Ramirez. She offered him her hand. “You must be Warden Ramirez.”

This is the part where I got nervous. Ramirez loved women. Ramirez never shut up about women. Well, he never shut up about anything in general, but he’d go on and on about various conquests and feats of sexual athleticism and—

“A virgin?” Lara blurted. Lara blurted. She turned her head to me, grey eyes several shades paler than they had been, and very wide. “Really, Harry, I’m not sure what to say. Is he a present?”

I folded my arms and regarded Lara steadily, but said nothing. This was Ramirez’s moment to make a first impression, and if he didn’t do it on his own, Lara would regard him as someone who couldn’t protect himself. It would probably mark him as a target.

Lara turned to walk a slow circle around Ramirez, inspecting him the way you might a flashy new sports car. She was of a height with him, but taller in the heels, and there was nothing but a languidly sensual confidence in the way she moved. “A handsome young bantam,” she murmured. She trailed a finger across the line of his shoulders as she moved behind him. “Strong. Young. A hero of the White Council, I’ve heard.” She paused to touch a fingertip to the back of his hand, and then shuddered. “And power, too.” Her eyes went a few shades brighter as she completed the tour. “My goodness. I’ve recently fed, and still…Perhaps you’d care to ride with me back to the estate, and let Dresden walk. I promise to entertain you until he arrives.”

I knew the look on Ramirez’s face. It was the look of a young man who wants nothing so badly as to discard the complex things in life, like civilization, social mores, clothing, and speech, and see what happened next.

Lara knew it, too. Her eyes glittered brightly, and her smile was serpentine, and she pressed closer.

But Ramirez apparently knew about glittery gold, too. I didn’t know he’d hidden a knife up his sleeve, but it appeared in his hand an instant before its tip pressed into the bottom of Lara’s throat.

“I,” he said very quietly, “am not food.” And he met her eyes.

I hadn’t seen a soulgaze from the outside before. It surprised me, how simple and brief it looked, when one wasn’t being shaken to the core by it. Both of them stared, eyes widening, and then shuddered. Lara took a small step back from Ramirez, her breathing slightly quickened. I noticed, because I’m a professional investigator. She could have been concealing a weapon in that décolletage.

“If you meant to dissuade me,” Lara said a moment later, “you haven’t.”

“Not you,” Ramirez replied, lowering the knife. His voice was rough. “It wasn’t to dissuade you.”

“Wise,” she murmured, “for one so young. I advise you, young wizard, not to hesitate so long to act, should another approach you as I did. A virgin is…extremely attractive to our kind. One such as you is rare, these days. Give a less restrained member of the court an opportunity as you did me, and they’ll throw themselves on you in dozens—which would reflect poorly on me.”

She turned back to me and said, “Wizards, you have my pledge of safe conduct.”

I inclined my head to her and said, “Thank you.”

“Then I will await your company in the car.”

I nodded my head to her, and Lara walked back to her bodyguard, who looked like he was fighting off a fit of apoplexy.

I turned and eyed Ramirez.

He turned bright red.

“Virgin?” I asked him.

He turned more red.

“Carlos?” I asked.

“She’s lying,” he snapped. “She’s evil. She’s really evil. And lying.”

I rubbed at my mouth to keep anyone from seeing me grin.

Hey. On nights like this, you take your laughs where you can get them.

“Okay,” I said. “Not important.”

“The hell it isn’t!” he spat. “She’s lying! I mean, I’m not…I’m…”

I nudged him with an elbow. “Focus, Galahad. We’ve got a job to do.”

He exhaled with a growl. “Right.”

“You saw what was inside her?” I asked.

He shuddered. “That pale thing. Her eyes…she was getting more turned on, and they kept looking more like its eyes.”

“Yep,” I said. “It’s a tip-off to how close they are to starting to take a bite of you. You handled it right.”

“You think so?”

I couldn’t resist jibing him, just a little. “Just think. If you’d messed it up,” I said, as Lara slid into the car one long, perfect leg at a time, “you’d be in the limo with Lara ripping your clothes off right now.”

Ramirez looked at the car and swallowed. “Um. Yeah. Close one.”

“I’ve met several of the White Court,” I said. “Lara’s probably the smartest. She’s the most civilized, progressive, adaptable. She’s definitely the most dangerous.”

“She didn’t look that tough,” Ramirez said, but he was frowning in thought as he said it.

“She’s dangerous in a different way than most,” I said. “But I think her word is good.”

“It is,” Ramirez said firmly. “I saw that much.”

“It’s one of the things that makes her dangerous,” I said, and headed for the limo. “Stay cool.”

We walked over and I leaned down to see Lara in the back of the limo, seated on one of the dogcart-style seats, all poise and beauty and gorgeous grey eyes. She smiled at me as I looked in, and crooked a finger.

“Step into my limo,” said the spider to the fly.

And we did.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The limo rolled right past the enormous stone house that was the château proper. It was bigger than a parking garage, and covered with cornices and turrets and gargoyles, like some kind of neo-Medieval castle.

“We’re, uh,” I noted, “not stopping at the house.”

“No,” Lara said from the seat facing us. Even in the dark, you could see the glow of her luminous skin. “The conclave is being held in the Deeps.” Her eyes glittered at me. “Less walking for everyone, that way.”

I gave her a small smile and said, “I like the house. The whole castle-look thing. It’s always nice to know you’re living somewhere that could withstand a besieging army of Bohemian mercenaries if it had to.”

“Or American wizards,” she replied smoothly.

I gave her what I hoped was a wolfish smile, folded my arms, and watched the house go by. We turned down a little gravel lane and drove another mile or so before the car slowed and came to a stop. Bodyguard George got out and opened the door for Lara, whose thigh brushed against mine as she got out, and whose perfume smelled good enough to scramble my brain for a good two or three seconds.

Both I and Ramirez sat still for a second.

“That,” I said, “is an awfully lovely woman. I thought I should let you know, kid, in case your inexperience had blinded you to the fact.”

“Lying,” Ramirez stated, blushing. “Evil.”

I snickered and slid out of the car to follow Lara—and the three more bodyguards waiting for her—into the woods beside the gravel lane.

The last time I’d found the entrance to the Deeps, I’d been stumbling through the woods, focused on a tracking spell and tripping over roots and hummocks in the old-growth forest.

This time, there was a lighted path, with a red carpet, no less, leading down between the trees. The lights were all of soft blues and greens, small lamps that, upon a closer glance, proved to be elegant little crystal cages containing tiny, humanoid forms with wings. Faeries, tiny pixies, each surrounded by its own sphere of light, trapped and miserable, crouched in the cages.

Between each cage knelt more prisoners—humans, bound by nothing more than a single strand of white silk about their throats tied to a peg driven into the earth in front of them. They weren’t naked. Lara wouldn’t have gone in for anything that overt. Instead, they each wore a white silk kimono, accented with strands of silver thread.

Men and women, arrayed in a variety of ages, body types, hair colors, every single one of them beautiful, their eyes lowered as they knelt quietly. One of the young men sat shivering and was seemingly barely able to stay upright. His long, dark hair was marred with streaks of brittle white. His eyes were unfocused and he seemed totally unaware of anyone around him. His kimono was torn near the neck, leaving a broad swath of muscled chest exposed. There were raking nail marks, deep enough to draw tiny trickles of blood, all the way across one pectoral. There were repeated teeth marks deep in the slope of muscle between neck and shoulder, half a dozen sets of messy bruises and ugly little gashes. There were more nail marks, four side-by-side punctures, rather than rakes, on the other side of his neck.

He was also obviously, even painfully, aroused beneath the kimono.

Lara paused beside him and rolled her eyes in irritation. “Made-line?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said one of the bodyguards.

“Oh, for hunger’s sake.” She sighed. “Get him indoors before the conclave is over or she’ll finish him off on her way out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, turned aside, and began speaking to nobody. I spotted a wire running to an earpiece.

I kept walking down the long line of kneeling captives and trapped pixies, and got angrier with every step.

“They’re willing, Dresden,” Lara said a few paces later. “All of them.”

“I’m sure they are,” I said. “Now.”

She laughed. “There is no shortage of mortals who long to kneel before another, wizard. There never has been.”

We passed several more kneeling men and women who looked mussed and dazed, though none so badly as the first. We also walked past spaces where there was a peg and a strip of white cloth—but no person kneeling within.

“I’m sure they all knew that they might die by doing it,” I said.

She shrugged one shoulder. “It happens at these meetings. Guests have no need to dispose of a body, since as hosts we are responsible for such necessities. As a result, many of our visitors make no effort to control themselves.”

“You’re responsible, all right.” I gripped my staff harder and kept my voice neutral. “What about the little folk?”

“They trespassed upon our land,” she replied, her voice calm. “Most would simply have killed them, rather than pressing them into service.”

“Yeah. You’re all heart.”

“Where there is life, there is hope, Dresden,” Lara replied. “My father’s policies on such matters have changed of late. Death is…gauche, when it can be avoided. Alternative courses are far more profitable and agreeable to all involved. It is for precisely that reason that my father seeks to help create a peace between your folk and mine.”

I glanced aside at the shining eyes of a short-haired redhead in her early thirties, absolutely lovely, her kimono still open from whatever had fed on her, the tips of her small breasts taut as she panted, the muscles of a lean stomach still trembling. Behind us, the thralls stretched out into the darkness. Ahead of us, they went on for a hundred yards or more. So many of them.

I started to shudder, but the faces of the women the Skavis and his pretenders had murdered flickered through my mind, and I fought it down. Like hell was I going to let Lara see me look discomfited, no matter how sick the display of the White Court’s seductive power made me feel.

The path went for another hundred yards through the woods and stopped at the mouth of a cave. It wasn’t large or sinister or dramatic. It was simply a fissure in an almost-flat stretch of ground at the base of a tree, with the hypnotic sway of firelight dancing somewhere below. There were guards outside—set back in the woods, out of obvious sight. I spotted a couple of deer stands, occupied by dark shapes. There were others standing silent sentinel. I assumed that there would be more guards I could not see.

Lara turned to us. “Gentlemen,” she said. “If you will wait here for a moment, I will send someone when the White King is ready to receive you.”

I nodded once, settled my staff on the ground, and leaned on it a little, saying nothing. Ramirez took his cue from me.

Lara gave me a level look. Then she turned and descended into the Deeps, flawlessly graceful despite her high heels.

“You’ve met her before,” Ramirez noted quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Set of a porn movie. She was acting.”

He stared at me for a second. Then shrugged in acceptance and said, “What were you doing?”

“Stuntman,” I replied.

“Uh…” he said.

“I’d been hired by the producer to find out why people involved with the movie were being killed.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah.”

“So…did you and she…?”

“No,” I said. “You can tell from how I’m breathing and possessed of my own will.” I nodded toward the entrance of the cave, where a shadow briefly darkened the firelight from below. “Someone’s coming.”

A young woman in an especially fine white kimono, heavily embroidered with silver thread, emerged from the fissure. I thought she was blond for a second, but that was because of the light. As she approached us with slow, quiet steps, her hair turned blue, then green, passing through the light of the faerie lamps. Her hip-length hair was pure white. She was lovely, very nearly as much so as Lara, but there was none of the predatory sense of hunger in her that I’d come to associate with the White Court. She was slim, and sweetly shaped, and looked quite frail and vulnerable. It took me a second to recognize her.

“Justine?” I asked.

She gave me a little smile. It was oddly disconnected, as if her dark eyes were focused on something other than what she smiled at, and she never looked directly at me. She spoke, her words flecked with little pauses and emphasis on odd syllables, as if she were speaking a foreign language in which she had merely technical proficiency. “It’s Harry Dresden. Hello, Harry. You look dashing this evening.”

“Justine,” I said, accepting her hand as she offered it to me. I bowed over it. “You look…ambulatory.”

She gave me a shy smile and spoke in a dreamy singsong. “I’m healing. One day I’ll be all better and go back to my lord.”

Her fingers, though, tightened hard on mine as she spoke, a quick and measured sequence, to the rhythm of “shave and a haircut.”

I blinked for a second and then squeezed back on the beat for “six bits.” “I’m sure any man would be delighted to see you.”

She blushed daintily and bowed to us. “So kind, my lord. Would you accompany me, please?”

We did. Justine led us down into the fissure, which proved to be a smooth-walled descent into the earth. From there, our way forward entered a torchlit tunnel, its walls also polished smooth, and from far below us came the music of echoing voices and sounds dancing through the stone, being subtly changed and altered by the acoustics as they came up from below.

It was a long, winding descent down, though the tunnel was wide and the footing steady. I remembered the nightmarish flight from the Deeps the last time I’d been there, while Murphy and I dragged my half-dead half brother all the way up before we’d been consumed in a storm of psychic slavery Lara was whipping up to take control of her father, and through him the White Court. It had been a close one.

Justine stopped about two-thirds of the way down, at a spot that had been marked with a bit of chalk on the floor. “Here,” she said in a quiet—but not at all dreamy—voice. “We can’t be overheard from here.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded. “How are you walking around like this?”

“It doesn’t matter right now,” Justine said. “I’m better.”

“You aren’t crazy, are you?” I demanded. “You nearly scratched my eyes out that one time.”

She shook her head with a frustrated little motion. “Medication. It isn’t…Look, I’m all right for now. I need you to listen to me.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Lara wished me to tell you what to expect,” Justine said, dark eyes intent. “Right now, Lord Skavis is below, calling for an end to any plans for negotiations with the Council, citing the work of his son as an illustration of the profit of continuing hostilities.”

“His son?” I said.

Justine grimaced and nodded. “The agent you slew was the heir apparent of House Skavis.”

Mouse might have been the one to do the actual killing, but the Accords regarded him as a mere weapon, like a gun. I was the one who had pulled the trigger. “Who is in charge of Malvora?”

“Lady Cesarina Malvora,” Justine said, giving me a smile of approval. “Whose son Vittorio will be quite insulted by Lord Skavis’s lies about all the hard work he and Madrigal Raith did.”

I nodded. “When does Lara want me to make my entrance?”

“She told me that you would know best,” Justine said.

“Right,” I said. “Take me to where I can hear them talking, then.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” Justine said. “They’re speaking Ancient Etruscan. I can follow enough of it to give you an idea what—”

“It isn’t a problem,” I said.

Is it? I thought toward Lasciel’s shadow.

Naturally not, my host, came the ghostly reply.

Groovy, I thought. Thanks, Lash.

A startled second passed. Then she replied, You are welcome.

“Just get me to where I can hear them,” I told Justine.

“This way,” she replied at once, and hurried on down the passage, stopping not twenty feet shy of the main cavern. Even so close, I could see very little of the cavern beyond—though I could hear voices raised in speech that sounded strange and sibilant in my ears and English in my head.

“…the very heart of the matter,” a rolling basso voice orated. “That the mortal freaks and their ilk stand on the brink of destruction. Now is the time to tighten our grip and neuter the kine once and for all.” Lord Skavis, I presumed.

A strong and lazily confident baritone answered the speaker, and I recognized the voice of the remains of the creature who had killed my mother at once. “My dear Skavis,” answered Lord Raith, the White King, “I can hardly say that I find the notion of a neutered humanity entirely appealing.”

There was a round of silvery laughter, men and women alike. It rippled through the air and brushed against me like an idly ardent lover. I stood fast until it had gone by. Ramirez had to rest a hand on the wall to keep his balance. Justine swayed like a reed, her eyes fluttering shut and then opening again.

Skavis’s deep voice resumed. “Your personal amusements and preferences aside, my King, the freaks’ biggest weakness has always been the length of time it took them to develop their skills to the most formidable levels. For the first time in history, we have degraded or neutralized their many advantages altogether, partly due to the fortunes of war, and partly thanks to the resourcefulness of the kine in developing their arts in travel and communication. The House of Skavis has proven that we stand holding an unprecedented opportunity to crush the freaks and bring the kine under control at last. Only a fool would allow it to slip between his impotent fingers. My King.”

“Only a fool,” came a strident woman’s voice, “would make such a pathetic claim.”

“The Crown,” Raith interjected, “recognizes Cesarina, the Lady Malvora.”

“Thank you, my King,” Lady Malvora said. “While I cannot help but admire my Lord Skavis’s audacity, I fear that I have no choice but to cut short his attempt to steal glory not his own from the honorable House of Malvora.”

Raith’s voice remained amused. “This should be interesting. By all means, elaborate, dear Cesarina.”

“Thank you, my King. My son, Vittorio, was on the scene and will explain.”

A male voice, flat and a little nasal, spoke up, and I recognized Grey Cloak’s accent at once. “My lord, the deaths inflicted upon the freakishly blooded kine indeed happened as Lord Skavis describes. But in fact, it was no agent of his House who accomplished this deed. If, as he claims, his son accomplished it, then where is he? Why has he not come forward to bear testimony in person?”

The words fell on what I could only describe as a glowering silence. If Lord Skavis was anything like the rest of the Whites I’d met, Vittorio needed to bury him fast, or spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

“Then who did accomplish this fell act of warfare?” Raith asked, his tone mild.

Vittorio spoke again, and I could just imagine the way his chest must have puffed out. “I did, my King, with the assistance of Madrigal of the House of Raith.”

Raith’s voice gained an edge of anger. “This, despite the fact that a cessation of hostilities has been declared, pending the discussion of an armistice.”

“What is done is done, my King,” Lady Malvora interjected. “My dear friend Lord Skavis was correct in this fact: The freaks are weak. Now is the time to finish them—now and forever. Not to allow them time to regain their feet.”

“Despite the fact that the White King thinks otherwise?”

I could hear Lady Malvora’s smile. “Many things change, O King.”

There was a booming sound, maybe a fist slamming down onto the arm of a throne. “This does not. You have violated my commands and undermined my policies. That is treason, Cesarina.”

“Is it, O King?” Lady Malvora shot back. “Or is it treason to our very blood to show mercy to an enemy who is upon the brink of defeat?”

“I would be willing to forgive excessive zeal, Cesarina,” Raith snarled. “I am less inclined to tolerate the stupidity behind this mindless provocation.”

Cold, mocking laughter fell on a sudden, dead silence. “Stupidity? In what way, O weak and aged King? In what way are the deaths of the kine anything but sweetness to the senses, balm to the Hunger?” The quality of her voice changed, as if she changed her facing in the cavern. I could imagine her turning to address the audience, scorn ringing in her tone. “We are strong, and the strong do as they wish. Who shall call us to task for it, O King? You?”

If that wasn’t a straight line, my name isn’t Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.

I lifted my staff and slammed it down on the floor, forcing an effort of will through it to focus the energy of the blow into a far smaller area than the end of the staff. It struck the stone floor, shattering a chunk the size of a big dinner platter with a detonation almost indistinguishable from thunder. Another effort of will sent a rolling wave of silent fire, no more than five or six inches high, down the tunnel floor, in a red carpet of my very own.

I strode down it, Ramirez beside me, the fire rolling back away from our feet as we went, boots striking the stone together. We entered the cavern and found it packed with pale and startled beings, the entire place a wash of beautiful faces and gorgeous wardrobes—except for twenty feet around the entrance, where everyone had hurried away from the blazing herald of our presence.

I ignored everything, scanning the room until I found Grey Cloak, aka Vittorio Malvora, standing next to Madrigal Raith not thirty feet away. The murdering bastards were staring at us, mouths open in shock.

“Vittorio Malvora!” I called, my voice ringing with wrath in the echoing cavern. “Madrigal Raith! I am Harry Dresden, Warden of the White Council of Wizards. Under the Unseelie Accords, I accuse you of murder in a time of peace, and challenge you, here and now, before these witnesses, to trial by combat.” I slammed my staff down again in another shock of thunder, and Hellfire flooded the runes of the staff. “To the death.”

Utter silence fell on the Deeps.

Damn, there ain’t nothing like a good entrance.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Empty night,” Madrigal swore, in English, his eyes wide. “This isn’t happening.”

I showed him my teeth and replied quietly in the same tongue. “Time to pay the piper, prick.”

Vitto Malvora turned his head to look over his shoulder at a tiny woman no more than five feet tall, dressed in a white gown more like a toga than anything else. She was curved like the Greek goddesses the gown made her resemble. Her face was a stark, frozen mask.

She turned eyes the color of chrome toward me and wine-dark lips peeled back from very white teeth.

There was an immediate uproar from the vampires, a sudden chorus of shouts of protest and anger. If I’d been in a less defiant mood, it probably would have scared the crap out of me. As it was, I simply shifted my stance, turning slightly to my left while Ramirez did the same in the opposite direction, so that we stood back-to-back. There wasn’t much else to do but prepare to fight in the event that someone decided to kick off a good old-fashioned wizard-smashin’ for the evening’s group activity.

That gave me a moment to look around the cavern. It was built on the scale of Parisian cathedrals, with an enormously high, arched ceiling that vanished into shadow far overhead. The floor and walls were of living stone, smooth and grey, shot through here and there with strands of green, dark red, and cobalt blue. Everything was rounded and smooth, not a jagged edge or sharp corner in sight.

The decor had changed a bit since I was there last. There were soft amber, orange, and scarlet lights splashing onto the walls of the cavern, and the lamps they came from had to have been automated, because they moved slightly, mixing color, making all the shadows twitch, and generally giving the overall impression of crude firelight without surrendering any of the clarity of electric lighting. Furniture had been arranged in three large groupings, with a large open space in the center of the floor, and they were occupied by what I could only presume were the leading members of the three major Houses—somewhere near a hundred vampires in all. Servants, dressed in the same kind of more heavily embroidered kimono Justine had been wearing, hovered at the walls, bearing trays of drinks and food and so on.

The floor rose in a series of inch-high ripples toward the far side of the chamber, where the White King sat looking down upon his Court.

Raith’s throne was an enormous chair of bone-white stone. Its back flared out like the hood of a cobra, spreading out into an enormous crest decorated with all manner of eye-twisting carvings, everything from rather spidery Celtic-style designs to bas-relief scenes of beings I could not easily identify engaged in activities I had no desire to contemplate. A thin sheet of fine mist fell behind the throne, the light playing delicately through it, sending ribbons and streams of color and refracted rainbows dancing around the throne. Behind that veil of obscuring mist, the floor abruptly ended, opening up into a yawning abyss that dropped into the bowels of the earth and, for all I knew, all the way through its intestinal tract.

The White King sat upon the throne. Thomas favored his father heavily, and at first glance, Lord Raith could have been Thomas. He had the same strong, appealing features, the same glossy dark hair, the same lean build. He looked little older than Thomas, but his face was very different. It was the eyes, I think. They were…stained, somehow, with contempt and calculation and a serpentine dispassion.

The White King wore a splendid outfit of white silk, something somewhere between Napoleonic finery and Chinese Imperial garb. Silver and gold thread and sapphires flickered over the whole of his outfit, and a circlet of glittering silver stood out starkly against his raven hair.

Around the throne stood five women—every one of them a vampire, in less elaborate and more feminine versions of his own regalia. Lara was one of them, and not the prettiest, though they all bore her a strong likeness. Raith’s daughters, I supposed, each beautiful enough to haunt a lifetime of dreams, each deadly enough to kill an army of fools who sought to make such a fantasy come true.

The noise continued to rise all around us, and I could feel Ramirez’s shoulders tightening, and sense the power he had begun to gather.

Raith rose from his throne with lazy magnificence and roared, “SILENCE!”

I thought my speaking voice had been loud, but Raith’s shook small stones loose from the unseeing ceiling of the cavern far overhead, and the whole place went dead still.

Lady Malvora wasn’t having any intimidation, though. She strode into the open space before the throne, maybe ten feet from Ramirez and me, and faced the White King. “Ridiculous!” she snapped. “We are not in a time of peace with the White Council. A state of war has been ongoing for years.”

“The victims were not members of the Council,” I said, and gave her a sweet smile.

“And they are not signatories to the Accords!” Lady Malvora snapped.

“Given their status as members of the magical community, they are, however, within the purview of the White Council’s legitimate political concerns, and as such are subject to the stipulations for protection and defense found within the Accords. I am well within my rights to act as their champion.”

Lady Malvora stared daggers at me. “Sophistry.”

I smiled at her. “That is, of course, for your King to decide.”

Lady Malvora’s glare became even more heated, but she turned her gaze from me to the white throne.

Raith sat down again slowly, carefully fussy with his sleeves, his eyes alight with pure pleasure. “Now, now, dear Cesarina. Moments ago, you were claiming credit for dealing what could prove a mortal blow to the freaks, at least in the long term. Just because said freaks are here to object, as is their right under the Accords, you can hardly claim that they have no vested interest in trying to stop you.”

Comprehension dawned on Lady Malvora’s lovely face. Her voice lowered to a pitch that couldn’t have carried much farther than myself, and maybe to Raith’s own enhanced senses. “You snake. You poisonous snake.”

Raith gave her a chill smile and addressed the assembly. “We find that we have little choice but to acknowledge the validity of the freak’s right of challenge. Under our agreement in the Accords, then, we must abide by its terms and permit the trial to proceed.” Raith rolled a droll hand at Vitto and Madrigal. “Unless, of course, our war heroes here lack the courage to withstand this utterly predictable response to their course of action. They are, of course, free to decline the challenge, should they feel themselves unable to face the consequences of their deeds.”

Silence fell again, almost viciously anticipatory. The weight of the attention of the White Court fell squarely on Vitto and Madrigal, and they froze the way birds will before a snake, remaining carefully motionless.

This was the ticklish part. If the duo declined the trial by combat, Raith would have to pay the Council a weregild for the dead, and that would be that. Of course, doing so would be a public admission of defeat, and would effectively neuter any influence they had in the White Court, and by extension would weaken Lady Malvora’s position—not so much because they declined to fight as because they would have been outmaneuvered and forced to flee a confrontation.

Of course, being proven slow and incompetent in front of a hundred ruthless predators, be they ever so well dressed, would probably prove lethal itself, in the long run. Either way, Lady Malvora’s attempted influence coup would be finished. The bold and daring plan would have been proven overt and liable to attract far too much attention, both of which were simply not of value within the vampires’ collective character. As a result, the White King, not Lady Malvora, would determine the course of the White Court’s policy.

Lady Malvora’s only way out was through a victory in the trial, and I was counting on it. I wanted Vitto and Madrigal to fight. Weregild wasn’t good enough to atone for what these creatures had done to far too many innocent women.

I wanted to give these monsters an object lesson.

Madrigal turned to Vitto and spoke in a quiet hiss. I half closed my eyes and Listened in on the conversation.

“No,” Madrigal said, again in English. “No way. He’s a stupid thug, but this is exactly what he does best.”

Vitto and Lady Malvora traded a long stare. Then Vitto turned to Madrigal and said, “You were the imbecile who set out to attract his attention and got him involved. We fight.”

“Like hell we fight,” Madrigal snarled. “Empty night, Ortega couldn’t take him in a straight fight.”

“Don’t act like such a kine, Madrigal,” Vitto replied. “That was a duel of wills. A trial by combat allows us any weapons or tactics we wish.”

“Have fun. I won’t be one of the people fighting him.”

“Yes, you will,” Vitto replied. “You can face the wizard. Or you can face dear Auntie Cesarina.”

Madrigal froze again, staring at Vitto.

“I promise you that even if he burns you to death, it will be swift and painless by comparison. Decide, Madrigal. You are with Malvora or against us.”

Madrigal swallowed and closed his eyes. “Son of a bitch.”

Vitto Malvora’s mouth widened into a smile, and he turned to address the White King, his language shifting back to Etruscan or whatever. “We deny the freak’s baseless accusation and accept his challenge, of course, my King. We will prove the injustice of it upon his body.”

“W-weapons,” came Madrigal’s unsteady voice. Lasciel’s translation was flawlessly smooth, but it wasn’t hard to extrapolate that Madrigal’s Etruscan was about as bad as my Latin. “Weapons for our own we must have to fight. To get them we must send slaves for to find them.”

Raith settled back in his throne and folded his arms. “I find this an only reasonable request. Dresden?”

“No objection,” I told him.

Raith nodded once, and clapped his hands. “Music, then, while we wait, and another round of wine.”

Lady Malvora snarled, turned on a heel, and stalked back into one of the groups of furniture, where she became the immediate center of an intent conference.

Musicians struck up from somewhere nearby, hidden behind a screen, a chamber orchestra, and a pretty good one. Vivaldi, maybe? I’m weaker on smaller-scale music than I am on symphonies. An excited buzz of voices rose up as servants began circulating with silver trays and crystal flute glasses.

Ramirez gave the chamber a somewhat disbelieving stare and then shook his head. “This is a nuthouse.”

“Cave,” I said. “Nutcave.”

“What the hell is going on?”

Right. Ramirez didn’t have his own photocopy of a demon’s personality to translate Ancient Etruscan. So I summed up the conversation and the players, and gave him the best quotes.

“What’s this freak stuff?” Ramirez demanded in a low, outraged tone.

“I think it’s a perspective thing,” I said. “They call humans kine—deer, herd animals. Wizards are deer who can call down the lightning and whip up firestorms. From that perspective, we’re fairly freakish.”

“So we’re going to kick their asses now, right?”

“That is the plan.”

“Incoming,” Ramirez said, stiffening.

Lara Raith approached us, demure in her white formal getup, bearing a silver tray with drinks upon it. She inclined her head to us, her grey eyes pale and shining. “Honored guests. Would you care for wine?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m driving.”

Lara’s lips twitched. I had no idea how she had switched into the complex kimono so quickly. Chalk it up to the same sexy vampire powers that had once let her shoot a layer of skin off my ear while standing on gravel in stiletto heels. Poof, business suit. Whoosh, whoosh, silk negligee. I shook my head a little and got my thoughts under control. Adrenaline can make me a little silly.

Lara turned to Carlos and said, “May I offer you a taste of something sweet, bantam?”

“Well,” he said. “As long as you’re offering stuff, how about a little assurance that somebody isn’t going to shoot us in the back for fun once we’re stomping on Beavis and Butthead over there?”

Lara arched a brow. “Beavis and…”

“I would have gone with Hekyll and Jekyll,” I told him.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “Please be assured that the White Throne wishes nothing more than for you to prevail and humiliate its foes. I am sure that my father will react most harshly to any violation of the Accords.”

“Okay,” Ramirez said, drawing the word out. He nodded toward the Malvoran contingent, still huddled around Cesarina. “So, what’s stopping Il Duca there from taking a whack at you and the King and everybody? If she offs you, she gets to kill us, take over the organization, and just do whatever she likes.”

Lara looked at him and her expression twisted with distaste, to the point that a little shudder actually flickered along her body. Which I noticed because I am a trained observer of body language and not because of the way the kimono was perfectly outlining one of her thighs. “You don’t understand….” She shook her head, holding her mouth as if she’d unexpectedly bitten into a lemon. “Dresden, can you explain it to him?”

“The White Court vamps can be violent,” I said quietly. “Savage, even. But that isn’t their preferred mode of operation. You’re worried that Malvora is going to come smashing in here like a big old grizzly bear and kill anything in her way. But they aren’t like grizzly bears. They’re more like mountain lions. They prefer not to be seen acting at all. When they do attack, they’re going after a victim, not seeking an opponent. They’ll try to isolate them, hit them from behind, preferably destroy them before they even know that they’re being attacked. If Lady Malvora threw down right now, it’d be a stand-up fight. They hate those. They won’t do them unless there’s no alternative.”

“Oh,” Ramirez said.

“Thank you,” Lara told me.

“Of course,” I said, “there’s been some uncharacteristic behavior going around lately.”

Lara tilted her head at me, frowning.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You think it’s a little odd the faeries didn’t immediately stomp all over the Red Court when they violated Unseelie territory a couple of years back? Don’t tell me you’re trapping the little faeries because it’s cheaper than getting those paper party lanterns.”

Lara narrowed her eyes at me.

“You’re testing their reaction,” I said. “Giving a minor but deliberate insult and seeing what happens.”

Her lips turned up very, very slowly. “Are you sure you’re quite determined to remain attached to that sad little clubhouse of old men?”

“Why? Do you take care of your own?” I asked.

“In a great many senses, wizard,” she promised.

“The way you took care of Thomas?” I asked.

Her smile turned brittle.

“Pride goeth, Lara,” I said.

“Each is entitled to his opinion.” She glanced up and said, “The runners have returned with your foes’ weaponry. Good hunting, gentlemen.”

She bowed to us again, her expression a mask, and drifted away, back toward her place behind the throne.

The music came to an end, and it seemed to be a signal to the vampires. They withdrew from the center of the chamber to stand on either side, leaving the long axis of the cavern open, the entrance upon one end, the White Throne upon the other. Last of all, the White King himself rose and descended from the enormous throne to move to one side of the cavern. On the right side of the room were all the members of Malvora and Skavis, and on the left gathered the members of House Raith. The Skavis and Malvora weren’t actually standing together, but…there was a sense of hungry anticipation in the air.

“Vampires standing on both sidelines,” Ramirez said. “Guess no one wants to catch a stray lightning bolt.”

“Or bullet,” I muttered. “But it won’t help them much if things get confused and turned around once the fight starts.”

Raith snapped a finger, and thralls in their white kimonos began filing into the room. They swayed more than walked, filing down the “sidelines” of the dueling ground, and then simply knelt down, in a pair of double ranks, in front of the vampires on either side of the chamber. They formed, taken together, a wall like that around a hockey arena—but one made of living, human flesh.

Crap. Any form of mayhem that spread to the sidelines was going to run smack into human victims—and my own powers, in a fight, were not exactly surgical instruments. Torrents of flame, blasts of force, and impenetrable bastions of will were sort of my thing. You will note, however, how seldom words like torrent, blast, and bastion get used in conjunction with terms that denote delicacy and precision.

Ramirez was going to be better off than I was, in that regard. His combat skills ran more to speed and accuracy, versus my own preference for massive destruction, but they were no less deadly in their own way.

Carlos looked back and forth, then said to me, “They’re going to try to stay on our flanks. Use those people in the background to keep us from cutting loose.”

“I know I never went to Warden combat school,” I told him. “But I feel I should remind you that this is not my first time.”

Ramirez grimaced at me. “You just aren’t going to let that go, are you?”

I showed him my teeth. “So I hit them fast and hard while you keep them off me. If they flank, you’re on offense while I keep them off of you. Try to maneuver them out to where I’ll have a clean shot.”

Ramirez scowled, and his voice came out with more than the usual heat. “Yes, thank you, Harry. You want to tie my shoes for me before we start?”

“Whoa, what’s that?” I asked him.

“Oh, come on, man,” Ramirez said quietly, his voice tight and angry. “You’re lying to me. You’re lying to the Council.”

I stared at him.

“I’m not an idiot, man,” Ramirez said, his expression neutral. “You can barely get by in Latin, but you speak ghoul? Ancient Etruscan? There’s more going on here than a duel and internal politics, Dresden. You’re involved with these things. More than you should be. You know them too well. Which is a really fucking disturbing thing to realize, considering we’re talking about a race of mind-benders.”

Vitto and Madrigal emerged from the Malvoran contingent. Vitto bore a long rapier at his side, and there were a number of throwing knives on his belt, as well as a heavy pistol in a holster. Madrigal, meanwhile, carried a spear with a seven-foot haft, and his arms were wrapped with two long strips of black cloth covered in vaguely oriental characters in metallic red thread. I’d have guessed that they were constructs of some kind, even before I felt the ripple of magical energy in them as he walked with Vitto to stand facing us from thirty feet away.

“Carlos,” I said. “This is one hell of a time to start having doubts about my loyalty.”

“Dammit, Harry,” he said. “I’m not backing out on you. It’s too late for that, even if I wanted to. But this whole thing feels more and more like a setup every second.”

I couldn’t argue with him there.

I was pretty sure it was.

I looked back and forth down the length of the ranks of vampires, all of whom watched in total silence now, grey eyes bright, edging over into metallic silver with their rising hunger. The formalities of the Accords had kept us alive and largely unmolested, here amidst the monsters, but if we deviated from the conventions, we’d never live to see the surface again. We were in the same position as Madrigal and Vitto, really: Win or die.

And I didn’t delude myself for one single second that this was going to be as simple as a stand-up fight. Part of the nature of the White Court was treachery, as well. It was only a matter of time, and timing, before one of them turned on us, and if we weren’t ready when it happened, we’d either be dead or getting fitted for our own white robes.

Vitto and Madrigal squared off against us, hands on their weapons.

I took a deep breath and faced them. Beside me, Ramirez did the same.

Lord Raith reached up his sleeve and withdrew a handkerchief of red silk. He offered it to Lara, who took it and walked slowly down the lines of kneeling thralls. She stopped at the sidelines, midway between us, and slowly lifted the red silk. “Gentlemen,” she said. “Stand ready. Let no weapon of any kind be drawn until this cloth reaches the earth.”

My heart started pounding faster, and I drew my duster back enough to put a hand near the handle of my blasting rod.

Lara flicked the scarlet silk cloth into the air, and it began to fall.

Ramirez was right. This was a trap. I had done everything I could to prepare for it, but the bottom line was that I was not sure what was going to happen.

But like the man said: It was too late to back out now.

The cloth hit the floor and my hand blurred for my blasting rod as the duel began.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Some people are faster than others. I’m fast. Always have been, especially for a man my size, but this duel had gotten off to a fair start, and no merely mortal hand is faster than a vampire’s.

Vitto Malvora’s gun cleared its holster before my fingers had tightened on the blasting rod’s handle. The weapon resembled a fairly standard Model 1911, but it had an extension to the usual ammunition clip sticking out of the handle, and it spat a spray of bullets in the voice of a yowling buzz saw.

Some vampires are faster than others. Vitto was fast. He’d drawn and fired more swiftly than I’d ever seen Thomas move, more swiftly than I’d seen Lara shoot. But bodies, even nigh-immortal vampire bodies, are made of flesh and blood, and have mass and inertia. No hand, not even a vampire’s, is swifter than thought.

Ramirez already had his power held ready when the scarlet cloth hit the ground, and in that instant he hissed a single syllable under his breath and flipped his left hand palm up. That bizarre glove he wore flashed and let out a rattling buzz of furious sound.

A sudden, gelatinous cloud of green light interposed itself between us and the vampires before even Vitto could fire. The bullets struck against that gooey cloud, sending watery ripple patterns racing across it, plowing a widening furrow through the semisolid mass. There was a hissing sound, a sharp pain high up on my left cheek, and then I was slapped across the chest by a spray of tiny, dark particles the size of grains of sand.

Ramirez’s shield was nothing like my own. I used raw force to create my own steel-hard barrier. Ramirez’s spell was based on principles of entropy and water magic, and focused on disrupting, shattering, and dispersing any objects trying to pass through it, turning their own energy against them. Even magic must do business with physics, and Carlos couldn’t simply make the energy the bullets carried go away. Instead, the spell reduced their force by shattering the bullets with their own momentum, breaking them into zillions of tiny pieces, spreading them out, so that their individual impact energy would be negligible.

When the dispersed cloud of leaden sand struck me, it was unpleasant and uncomfortable, but it had lost so much power that it wouldn’t have gotten through an ordinary leather coat, or even a thick shirt, much less my spell-laced duster.

If I’d had time to breathe a sigh of relief, I would have. I didn’t. Every bit of focus I had was bent on slamming a surge of energy and will through my blasting rod, even before I had the business end lifted all the way up.

“Fuego!” I cried.

A column of fire as thick as a telephone pole flew from the tip of the rod, struck the ground twenty feet away, and then whipped across the floor toward Vitto as I finished lifting my weapon.

He was fast. He’d barely had time to register that his bullets had missed their target before the fire came for him, but he flung himself to one side in a desperate dive. As he went, he gained enough of an angle to get him just around the edge of Rodriguez’s highly visible shield, and the vampire’s hand flickered to his belt to whip one of those knives at me in a side-armed throw.

It would have been a waste of time for any human. Thrown knives aren’t terribly good killing weapons to begin with—I mean, in the movies and TV, every time someone throws a knife it kills somebody. Wham, it slams to the hilt in their chest, right into the heart, or glurk, it sinks into their throat and they die instantly. Real knives don’t generally kill you unless the thrower gets abnormally lucky. Real knives, if they hit with the pointy part at all, generally only inflict a survivable—if very distracting—injury.

Of course, when real people throw real knives, they don’t fling them at a couple of hundred miles an hour. Most of them haven’t had centuries to practice, either.

That knife flickered as it came, and if I hadn’t hunched up my shoulder and tucked my face down behind it, the knife might have found the flesh of my neck and killed me. Instead, its tip struck the duster’s mantle at an oblique angle, and the weapon skittered off the spell-armored coat and tumbled off on a wobbly arc.

Vitto landed in a tumble, teeth clenched over a scream of pain. His left leg was on fire from the knee down, but he was smart—he didn’t stop, drop, and roll. In fact, he didn’t stop at all, and it was the only thing that kept my second blast from immolating him. The lance of flame missed him by a foot and momentarily smashed the curtain of falling water behind the white throne into steam. Beside me, I heard Ramirez fling out one of those green blasts.

“Harry!” Ramirez screamed.

I turned my head in time to see Madrigal coming at us from nearly straight ahead, his spear in hand. Ramirez hurled a second shaft of green light at him, but it splashed against an unseen barrier a foot away from his body. Glitters of golden light ran up and down the symbols on the cloth strips wrapped around his arms. I understood, then. Ramirez’s second shot had been a demonstration.

“He’s warded!” Ramirez snarled.

“Drop back!” I snapped, as Vitto came streaking toward me down the other sideline. He was reloading the gun as he came, dropping the old magazine, slapping a new one in. I lifted my shield bracelet, readying it—then hesitated for a fraction of a second to get the timing just right, gauging angles of incidence and refraction.

Vitto’s hand game up and the gun snarled again.

I brought the shield up at the last second, a flat plane perpendicular to the floor, and Ramirez took a hopping step back just in time to get behind the shield as it formed. Twenty or thirty bullets ricocheted off the invisible barrier in a shower of sparks—and spalled more or less toward Madrigal Raith and his magical protection.

The nifty armbands apparently weren’t made to stop physical projectiles, because one of the bouncing bullets ripped through the outside of his thigh with an ugly explosion of torn cloth and a misty burst of pale blood. He screamed and faltered, throwing out one hand to catch his balance before he could hit the floor.

“Drop it!” Ramirez shouted. His hand blurred toward his pistol, and he drew it before Madrigal could get moving again.

I pivoted the shield to clear Ramirez, taking a couple of steps forward to wall Vitto away from Carlos’s flank, and transmuted the far surface of the shield into a reflective mirror.

Ramirez’s gun began to roar beside me—measured shots that were actually aimed, as opposed to the rapid crack-crack-crack of panic fire.

Vitto reacted to the gunfire and the suddenly appearing mirrored wall ten feet long and eight feet high with instant violence. He flung the heavy handgun at a suddenly appearing and swift-moving target before he could realize that it was his own reflection. The gun had its slide locked open, and when it hit the shield at the speed he threw it, something in the assembly slipped, and it bounced off in several pieces.

Vitto slowed down for a step, eyes widening, and I didn’t blame him one bit. It would have made me blink for a second if my opponent had suddenly changed open air into the back wall of a dance studio.

Then he accelerated again and did something I wasn’t ready for. He bounded straight up into the air, a good ten or twelve feet, arching over the top of my shield in an instant and flinging knives with each hand as he came. I threw up my right arm, trying to interpose it with the oncoming knife as far out from my body as I could. The knife hit flat, which was fine, where the leather of my duster’s sleeve covered my arm. The handle of the knife, though, hit my naked wrist, and my right hand abruptly went numb. I heard the other knife whisper as it tumbled through the air beside me, missing me.

“Madre de Dios!” Carlos screamed.

The blasting rod tumbled from my useless fingers.

I cursed and flung myself to one side as Vitto landed on the inside of my shield, his sword whipping from its scabbard in a horizontal slash at my throat. My tactical thinking had been limited to two dimensions, maybe reinforced by the mockery of the sports field we fought on. The second knife had missed me because Vitto hadn’t been aiming for me. Its handle now protruded from Ramirez’s right calf.

I couldn’t move my fingers correctly, which precluded the use of the energy rings on my right hand. I dropped the shield—all it would do with him already so close was slow down my movement. I’d have to re-form it between me and him the second I got a chance, which he didn’t seem inclined to give me. He sent a lightning-quick thrust at my guts, and I had to dance back a pair of steps to buy myself enough time to parry it with a sweep of the staff in my left hand.

There was no way I could fence with Vitto. Even if he didn’t totally outclass me, physically, fighting one-armed with a staff against a competent fighter with a rapier is not a winning proposition. If I tried it, I’d be backing away from him in circles until I tripped, he slashed a few of my fingers off and finished me, or else forced me away from Ramirez long enough to double-team him and kill him. I couldn’t sling magic at him, either. His back was to the crowd of vampires and the human victims shielding them, and he was damned fast. Anything I could throw that would have hurt him could miss—and if it missed, it’d kill anyone who got in the way.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Vitto for a second—I had to hope that Ramirez was holding his own against Madrigal. I had to buy time and distance. I slammed will and Hellfire through my staff, snarled, “Forzare!” and released it in a broad wave that lashed out into absolutely everything in front of me.

The wave of force caught Vitto and flung him from his feet. He hit a brawny thrall with a neatly clipped goatee, and then the wave caught up and struck the man, too, as well as the folk on either side of him. They were flung back into the second row of kneeling thralls, and they, in turn, were all bowled back into the crowd of vampires behind them, to a general scream of surprise and dismay.

It hadn’t been a lot of force by the time it got to the thralls, not all spread out like that. I could have delivered tackles that hit harder. It had been enough, though, to tangle Vitto—whose leg was still on fire, by the way—in a pile of courtiers and thralls.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” I hollered, “to Bowling for Vampires!”

To my intense discomfort, a round of laughs went up from the Raith contingent, and I got a smattering of applause. I raised my shield again, into a shimmering half dome of glittering silver and blue light this time, and twisted my head around to look for Ramirez.

I turned in time to see Madrigal, bleeding from several gunshot wounds, rush forward, spear held high. Ramirez had fallen to one knee, his wounded leg unable to support his weight, and as I watched he dropped the Desert Eagle and gathered another bolt of disintegrating emerald force in his right hand.

Madrigal laughed at him, the sound silvery and scornful, and now that he was in motion I could see the chromium glitter of the demonic Hunger in his eyes. His protective armbands flickered brightly as he rushed forward.

“Ramirez!” I screamed.

Madrigal raised the spear.

Ramirez flung the gathered energy in a last useless strike……that missed Madrigal entirely and splashed on the stone at his feet.

A section of stone the size of a big bathtub glowed green for a split second, then shattered into dust so fine that its individual grains would be almost invisible to the naked eye.

Just as my average preparation session for a fight does not involve considering twelve-foot kung fu leaps from knife-throwing masters, I guess Madrigal’s practices didn’t take into account floors that might suddenly become pools of nearly frictionless dust. He let out a shriek and plunged into it, flailing wildly. I could see the wheels spinning in his head, trying to work out what had happened and how the hell he would get out of it.

Ramirez shot a look over his shoulder and snarled, “Harry!”

The fingers of my right hand were tingling. I raised it, clenching it into a weak fist. It was good enough to align the rings with my thoughts. “Go!”

Madrigal had worked it out. He thrashed to one side of the trough Ramirez’s spell had eaten in the floor, thrust the handle of his spear down into the ultrafine dust, and shoved himself roughly up and out of the sand trap.

But not before Ramirez drew the silver Warden’s blade from his hip, the sword designed to let the Wardens of the White Council slice into any enchantment, unraveling it with a single stroke. Carlos drew it, lunged out onto his wounded leg with a cry of pain and challenge, and sliced the willow blade left and right at Madrigal while the spear was grounded and locked into place, supporting him.

The sword cut through the wooden haft of the spear, snicker-snack, which was itself an indicator of just how unbelievably sharp an edge it had to have carried. Luccio did good work. That was just collateral damage, though.

The Warden blade also licked lightly across each of Madrigal’s arms.

The black cloth armbands erupted into sudden flame, the embroidered symbols on them flaring into painfully brilliant light, as if the scarlet thread had been made of magnesium. Any construct that held enough energy to counteract the magic of a major-league wizard, especially a combat specialist like Ramirez, had to have been holding all kinds of energy. Ramirez had just cut it loose.

Madrigal stared down in sudden panic at the fire writhing up his arms and let out a horrified scream.

I crouched, clenched my fist a little tighter, narrowed my eyes, and with a single thought released every bit of energy in the rings—what had been left over after the ghoul attack and what I had added later, all at the same time.

The power hit Madrigal low in the belly, at a slightly upward angle. It slammed him from his feet as the fire blazed over his arms, lifted him up over the heads of the gathered Raith contingent like a living, sizzling comet, and slammed him into the cavern wall behind them with literally bone-shattering power.

Broken, bleeding wreckage tumbled limply down.

“And the wizards,” I snarled, “pick up the spare.”

I turned back to face Vitto, who was only then clawing his way out of a pile of confused and unhappy Skavis and Malvora vampires and meekly passive thralls. He came to his feet with his sword in hand.

I faced him through the glowing dome. I heard a grunt, and then Ramirez stepped up beside me, silver sword in hand, still stained with Madrigal’s pinkish blood, his staff in the other, taking some of the weight from his injured foot. I kept the dome up, recovered my blasting rod, and raised it, calling up my will, letting fire illuminate the runes carved down its length one sigil at a time. The new shield was more taxing than the old, and I was getting tired—but there was nothing to do about that but keep going.

There were rustling sounds all around us. Vampires came to their feet. They edged closer to the thralls, shifted position so that they would be able to see. There were murmurs and whispers all around us as the White Court sensed that the end was near. Vitto’s aunt was not far from him, and she stood with one hand to her delicate throat—but she stood fast, watching, anxiety and calculation warring for space in her eyes. Just over one shoulder, I could just barely make out Lara’s profile as she leaned forward over the thrall kneeling between her and the fight—Justine—to watch the end, her lips parted and glistening wet, her eyes glowing.

The spectacle of it sickened me, but I thought I understood something of what triggered it in them.

Death did not come swiftly to vampires—but the old Reaper was in the house, and when he struck, he would take lives that should have lasted for centuries more. That realization let me understand something else about the White Court—that for all of their allure, that forbidden attraction, the unnatural magnetism of a creature so beautiful outside and so twisted within, with their ability to give you the greatest pleasure of your life, even as they snuffed it out—they, the vampires themselves, were not immune to that dark attraction.

They were regular, near-eternal voyeurs to death’s handiwork, after all. They saw the mingled ecstasy and terror on the faces of those they took. They fed upon the surrender of life and passion to the endless silence—knowing, all the while, that in the end, they were no different. One day, one night, it would be their turn to face the scythe and the dark cowl, and that they would fall, fall just as helplessly as their own prey had, over and over and over.

Death had already taken Madrigal Raith. And it would soon take Vitto Malvora. And the White Court, one and all, longed to see it happen, to feel Death brush close by, to be tantalized by its nearness, to revel in its presence and passing.

Words could not express how badly they needed therapy.

Dysfunctional sickos.

I put it out of my head. I still had work to do.

“All right,” I growled to Ramirez. “You ready?”

He bared his teeth in a ferocious smile. “Let’s get it on.”

Vitto Malvora, the last of Anna’s killers, faced me steadily, his eyes gone white. I thought that for a man about to face two fairly deadly wizards determined to kill him, he did not look terribly frightened.

In fact, he looked…

…pleased.

Oh, crap.

Vitto threw back his head and spread his arms.

I dropped the shield and shouted, “Kill him!”

Vitto lifted his voice in a sudden, thunderous roar, and I could sense the will and the power that underlay his call. “MASTER!”

Ramirez was a beat slow in transferring his sword to his other hand so that he could fling green fire at Vitto, and the vampire lowered his arms and crossed them in front of him, hissing words in some strange tongue as he did. Ramirez’s strike shattered upon that defense, though bits of greenish fire dribbled onto Vitto’s arms, each of them chewing out a scoop of flesh as far across as a nickel.

“Crap!” Ramirez snarled.

But I didn’t have time to listen.

I could feel it. Feel power building on the cave floor in front of the white throne. It wasn’t explosive magic, but it was strong, quivering on a level so fundamental that I could feel it in my bones. A second later, I recognized this power. I had felt the dim echoes of its passing, months before, in a cave in New Mexico.

There was a deep throb. Then another. Then a third. And then the air before the white throne suddenly swirled. It spun for a moment, and then there was abruptly an oblong disk of darkness hanging in the air. It spun open, pushing the space of the cavern aside, and a dank, musty, mildew-scented flood of cold air washed out of the passage that had been opened from the Nevernever and into the Deeps.

Seconds later, there was movement in the passage, and then a ghoul sprang through it.

Well. I call it a ghoul. But just looking at it, I knew I was seeing something from another age. It was…like seeing drawings of things from the last ice age—familiar animals, most of them, but they were all too large, too heavy with muscle, many of them festooned with extra tusks, spurs of horn, and lumpy, armored hide.

This thing, this ghoul, was of the same order. Eight feet tall if it was an inch, and its hunched shoulders were so wide that it made the thing look more like a gorilla than it did a hyena or baboon, the way most of them did. It had serrated ridges of horn on its stark cheekbones, and its jaw was far more massive with muscle. Its forearms were even longer than a normal ghoul’s, its claws heavier, longer, and backed by knobbed ridges of horn that would let the thing crush and smash as effectively as it sliced and diced. Its brow ridge was far heavier, too, and its eyes, so recessed as to be little more than glitters from the indirect lighting, could hardly be seen.

The ghoul crouched and leaped twenty feet forward with an easy grace, then landed with a roar that made my knees feel a little weak.

More of them poured out of the gate. Ten. Twenty. They kept coming and coming.

“Hell’s bells,” I whispered.

Beside me, Ramirez swallowed. “I,” he said, “am going to die a virgin.”

Vitto let out a wild cackle of glee, and howled, “At last!” He actually capered a little dance step in place. “At last the masquerade ends! Kill them! Kill them all!”

I don’t know if it was one of the vampires or one of the thralls, but suddenly a woman screamed in utter terror, and the Ghouls went mad with bloodlust and surged forward in an unstoppable wave.

I dropped all the power in my shield, and all that I had put into the blasting rod, too. Neither of them would get me out of the hellish Cuisinart of pain and death that this cavern was about to become.

“Right, then,” I panted. “This would be the trap.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“I knew it,” Ramirez snarled. “I knew it was a setup.”

He turned to look and me and then blinked. It was only then that I realized that I had my teeth bared in a wide smile.

“That’s right,” I told him. “It is.”

I have seen some real pros open gateways to the Nevernever. The youngest of the Summer Queens of the Sidhe could open them so smoothly that you’d never see it happening until it was over. I’d seen Cowl open ways to the Nevernever as casually and easily as a screen door, with the gate itself being barely noticeable until it vanished a few seconds later, leaving behind it the same musty smell now flooding the cavern.

I couldn’t do it that smoothly or with that much subtlety.

But I could do it just as quickly, and just as effectively.

I spun on my heel as the ghouls flooded the cavern and plunged into the gathered members of the White Court in a killing frenzy.

“Go!” Ramirez shouted. “I can’t run anyway. I’ll hold them; get out of here!”

“Get over yourself and cover my back!” I snarled.

I gathered my will again, shifting my staff into my right hand. The runes on the staff blazed to life, and I pointed the staff across my body, at the air four feet off the cavern floor. Then I released my gathered will, focused by my intentions and the energies aligned in my staff, and shouted, “Aparturum!” Furious golden and scarlet light flowed down the length of wood, searing a seam in reality. I drew the staff from left to right, drawing a line of fire in the air—and after a heartbeat, that line expanded, burning up like a fire running up a curtain, down like rain sluicing down a car window, and left behind it a gateway, an opening from the Raith Deeps to the Nevernever.

The gate opened on a cold and frozen woodland scene. Silvery moonlight slipped through, and a freezing wind gusted, blowing powdery white snow into the cavern—substance of the spirit world, which transformed into clear, if chilly, gelatin, the ectoplasm left behind when spirit matter reverted to its natural state.

There was a stir of shadows, and then my brother burst through the opening, saber in one hand, sawed-off shotgun in the other. Thomas was dressed in heavy biker leather and body armor, with honest-to-God chain mail covering the biker’s jacket. His hair was tied back in a tail, and his eyes were blazing with excitement. “Harry!”

“Take your time,” I barked back at him. “We’re not in a crisis or anything!”

“The others are right beh—Look out!”

I spun in time to see one of the ghouls bound into the air and sail toward me, the claws on both its hands and feet extended to rip and slash.

Ramirez shouted and flung one of his green blasts at the thing. It caught the ghoul at the apex of its flight and simply bored a hole the size of a garbage can in its lower abdomen.

The ghoul landed in a splatter of gore and fury. It kept fighting, though its legs flopped around like a seal’s tail, of almost no use to it.

I sprang back—or at least, I tried to spring. Opening a gate to the Nevernever is not complicated, but it isn’t easy, either, and between that and all the fighting I’d done, I was beginning to bump up against my physical limits. My legs wobbled, and my spring was more like the lazy, hot, and motionless end of summer.

Thomas dragged me the last six inches or I wouldn’t have avoided the ghoul’s claws. He extended his arm, shotgun in hand, and blew the ghoul’s head off its shoulders in a spray of flying bits of bone and horn and a mist of horrible black blood.

After which, the ghoul seized him with one arm and began raking its talons at him with the other.

The terrible power of the mangled ghoul was enormous. Links of chain mail snapped and went flying, and Thomas let out a scream of surprise and outrage.

“What the hell!” he snarled. He dropped the shotgun and took off the ghoul’s attacking arm with his saber. Then he broke the grip of the last clawed hand, and flung the ghoul’s body away from him.

“What the hell was that?” he gasped, recovering the shotgun.

“Uh,” I said. “That was one.”

“Harry!” Ramirez said, backpedaling as best he could with the wounded leg, and bumped into me. I steadied him before he lost his balance. That damned knife was still sticking out of his calf.

A dozen more ghouls were charging us.

Everything slowed down, the way it sometimes does when fresh adrenaline shifts me into overdrive.

The cavern had gone insane. The ghouls had been there for maybe thirty seconds, but there were several dozen of them at least, with more pouring out of the neat oval gate on the other side of the cavern. The ghouls had apparently attacked everyone with equal amounts of ferocity and fury. More of them had poured into the Malvoran and Skavis contingent than the Raith side, but that might have been a function of simple numbers and proximity.

The vampires, most of them unarmed and unprepared for a fight, had been taken off guard. That doesn’t mean as much to vamps as it does to regular folks, but the walls had been splattered with pale blood where the ghouls had rushed in among them, and the battle now raging was horrific.

In one spot, Lady Malvora ripped the arm from a ghoul’s socket, her skin gone marble-white and hard-looking, and proceeded to beat it about the head and shoulders with its own detached limb. The ghoul went down with a shattered skull, but four more of the creatures buried the White Court noblewoman under their weight and power, and literally ripped her to pieces in front of my eyes.

Elsewhere, a male vampire picked up an eight-foot-long sofa and slammed its end down onto a pair of ghouls ripping at the body of a fallen thrall. Still elsewhere, Lord Skavis had rallied a number of his retainers to him, standing off against the maddened ghouls like a rock ignoring a flash flood—for the moment, at least.

Other sights weren’t nearly so pleasant.

A vampire, trying to flee, tripped over a human thrall, a girl no more than eighteen, and dealt her a blow of his fist in pure frustration, snapping her neck. He was brought down by ghouls a breath later. Elsewhere, other vampires seemed to have lost control of their demonic Hunger completely, and they had thrown down whatever thralls they could seize, with no regard for gender or for what their particular favorite food might be. One thrall, writhing under a Skavis, was screaming and pushing her thumbs into her own eyes. Another shuddered under the fear-compulsion of a Malvora, clearly in the midst of a seizure or heart attack, right up until a tide of ghouls overran predator and prey alike. The Raith didn’t seem to be as wholly frenzied as the other Houses—or maybe they’d just eaten more today. I saw only a couple of thralls downed by them, being torn out of their clothes and ravaged on the stone.

Like those near Lord Skavis, a core of organization had formed around Lara and her father. Someone—I saw a flash of Justine’s terrified face—was holding a little air horn up and triggering it wildly. I spotted Vitto Malvora, charging the ghouls around his fallen aunt—and watched as he threw himself on the remains with an inhuman howl, and began feasting beside the creatures who had killed her.

It had taken seconds for intrigue to devolve into insanity in a thousand simultaneous nightmare-inducing vignettes—none of which I could afford to think significant, save one: the dozen ghouls plunging directly toward me like a football team on the kickoff, huge and fast and ferocious, charging me on a straight line from the enemy gate.

For a second, I thought I saw a dark shape in that gate, the suggestion of an outlined hood and cloak. It might have been Cowl. I’d have hit him with all the fire I could call if I’d had a second to spare, but I didn’t.

I brought my shield up as the ghouls came over the floor, and held it fast as the leader of the pack slammed into it in a flare of blue and silver light and a cloud of sparks. The ghoul only howled and began slamming at the barrier with his fists. Every single one hit with the energy of a low-speed car crash, and even with my nifty new bracelet, I could feel the surge of power I needed to keep the shield steady when each of the blows came thundering down.

Boots thudded behind me. Someone was shouting.

Bam, bam, bam. The ghoul slammed against my shield, and it was an almost painful effort to hold it.

“Justine!” Thomas screamed.

I wouldn’t be able to hold this ghoul off for long—which was all right, because the other eleven were going to go right around my shield while he forced me to hold it steady against him, and tear me into tiny pieces and eat me. Hopefully in that order.

Bootsteps thudded behind me, and a voice barked. A second ghoul, several steps in front of the rest, flung itself around my shield but was intercepted by Ramirez. It leaped at him and hit that gelatinous-looking green cloud of a shield he used.

What happened to the ghoul as its speed carried its whole mass all the way through the shield does not bear thinking on. But Ramirez was going to need new clothes.

Bam. Bam. BAM!

Murphy screamed, “Harry, Thomas, Ramirez, down!”

I dropped and dragged Carlos down with me, lowering my shield as I went. Thomas hit the ground a fraction of a second after I did.

And the world came apart in thunder. Sound hammered at my head and ears, and I found myself screaming in pain and shock, before I ground my teeth and shot a quick glance behind me, trying not to lift my head any higher than I had to.

Murphy knelt on the ground by my feet in her dark fatigues, body armor, black baseball cap, and amber safety glasses. She had a weird little rectangular gun about the size of a big box of chocolates held to one shoulder. It had a tiny little barrel, one of those little red dot optical sights, and Murphy’s cheek was laid on it, one eye aligned with the sight as she poured automatic fire into the oncoming ghouls in neat, chattering bursts that ripped the ghoul that had been pounding on my shield into a spray of broken bits. It went over backward, thrashing one arm and howling in agony.

Beside Murphy, playing Clifford the Big Red Dog to her Emily Elizabeth, was Hendricks. The huge redheaded enforcer was also kneeling and firing, but the gun he held to his shoulder was approximately the size of an intercontinental ballistic missile and spat out a stream of tracer rounds that ripped into the attacking creatures with a vengeance. Several men I recognized from Marcone’s organization were lined up next to him, all firing. So were several more men I didn’t recognize, but whose clothing and equipment were sufficiently different to make me think they were freelancers, hired for the job. A few more were still pouring through the open gate and into the cavern.

The ghouls were hardy as hell, but there is a difference between shrugging off a few rounds from a sidearm and wading through the disciplined hail of assault-weapon fire that Marcone’s people laid down on them. Had it been one man firing at one ghoul, it might have been different—but it wasn’t. There were at least twenty of them shooting into a packed mass, and they kept shooting, even after the targets were thrashing on the ground, until their guns were empty. Then they reloaded, and returned to firing. Marcone had given his men the instructions I’d advised—and I imagined the guns he had hired on must have been used to facing supernatural threats of this sort as well. Marcone was nothing if not resourceful.

Murphy stopped shooting and screamed something at me, but it wasn’t until Marcone stepped forward into the peripheral vision of the armed gunmen and held up a hand with a closed fist that they stopped firing.

For a second, nothing but a high, heavy tone buzzed in my ears, making me deaf to the other sounds in the cavern. The air was full of the sewer stench of wounded ghoul and the sharp scent of burning cordite. A swath of stone floor ten yards across and thirty deep had just been carpeted in pureed ghoul.

The fight was still going on all around us, but the main force of ghouls was concentrating on the hard-pressed vampires. We’d bought ourselves a temporary quiet spot, but it couldn’t last.

“Harry!” Murphy screamed over the merely horrific cacophony of the slaughter.

I gave her a thumbs-up. I pushed myself to my feet. Someone gave me a hand up and I took it gratefully—until I saw that it was Marcone, dressed in his black fatigues, holding a shotgun in his other hand. I jerked my fingers away as if he were more disgusting than the things fighting and dying all around us.

His cold green eyes wrinkled at the corners. “Dresden. If it’s all right with you, I think it would be prudent to retreat back through the gate.”

That was probably a very smart idea. The gate was six feet away from me. We could pull up stakes, hop through, and close it behind us. Gates to the spirit world paid absolutely no attention to trivial things like geography—they obeyed laws of imagination, intention, patterned thought. Even if Cowl was back there, he wouldn’t be able to open a gate to the same place as mine, because he didn’t think like me, feel like me, or share my intent and purpose.

Seeing fallout from the war with the Red Court had convinced me that running when you didn’t have to fight was a really great idea. In fact, the Merlin had written a letter to the Wardens directing them to do so, rather than lose even more of our dwindling combat resources. If we hung around much longer, no one was getting out of this abattoir.

Thomas’s sword came down on a thrashing ghoul, and he shouted, with desperation bordering on madness, “Justine!” He spun to me. “Harry, help me!”

Leaving was smart.

But my brother wasn’t leaving. Not without the girl.

So I wasn’t leaving without her, either.

Come to think of it, there were a whole lot of people who didn’t need to be here. And, in point of fact, there were some damned compelling reasons to take them with us when we went. Those reasons didn’t make it any less dangerous, and they sure as hell didn’t make the idea any less scary, but that didn’t stop them from existing.

Without Lara’s peace initiative (fronted by her puppet father), the White Court would pitch in more heavily with the Reds than they already had. If I didn’t get Lara and her puppet out, what was already a grim war with the vampires would quite possibly become an impossible one. That was a damned good reason to stay.

But it wasn’t the one that kept me there.

I saw another ghoul tear into a helpless, unresisting thrall, closed my eyes for a second, and realized that if I did nothing to save as many as I could, I would never leave this cavern. Oh, sure, I might get out alive. But I’d be back here every time I closed my eyes.

“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. “I agreed to an extraction. Not to a war.”

“A war’s all we’ve got!” I shouted back. “We’ve got to get Raith out of this in one piece, or the whole thing was for nothing and no one pays you off!”

“No one will pay me off if I’m dead, either,” Marcone said.

I snarled and stepped closer, getting into Marcone’s face.

Hendricks rolled a half a step toward me and growled.

Murphy seized the huge man by one enormous paw, did something that involved his wrist and his index finger, and with a grunt Hendricks dropped to one knee while Murphy held one of his arms out straight behind him and angled painfully upward. “Take it easy, big guy,” she said. “Someone might get hurt.”

“Don’t move,” Marcone snarled—to his men, not to me. His eyes never wavered from mine. “Yes, Dresden?”

“I could tell you to do it or I’d strand you all in the Nevernever on the way home,” I said quietly. “I could tell you to help me or I’d close the gate, and we’d all die here. I could even tell you to do it or I’d burn you to ashes where you stand. But I won’t tell you that.”

Marcone narrowed his eyes. “No?”

“No. Threats won’t deter you. We both know that. I can’t force you to do anything, and we both know that, too.” I jerked my head at the cavern. “People are dying, John. Help me save them. God, please help me.”

Marcone’s head rocked back as if I’d slapped him. After a second he asked, “Who do you think I am, wizard?”

“Someone who can help them,” I said. “Maybe the only one.”

He stared at me with empty, opaque eyes.

Then he said, very quietly, “Yes.”

I felt a fierce smile stretch my mouth and turned to Ramirez at once. “Stay here with these guys and hold the gate.”

“Who are these people?” Ramirez said.

“Later!” I whirled back to Marcone. “Ramirez is with the Council, like me. Keep him covered and hold the gate.”

Marcone pointed at several of the men. “You, you, you. Guard this man and hold the gate.” He pointed out several more. “You, you, you, you, you, start rounding up anyone close enough to us to get to without undue risk and help them through.”

Men leaped to obey, and I felt impressed. I’d never seen Marcone quite like this before: animated, decisive, and totally confident despite the nightmare all around. There was a power to it, something that brought order to the terrifying chaos around us.

I could see why men followed him, how he had conquered the underworld of Chicago.

One of the hired guns cut loose with a burst of fire, still shockingly loud enough to make me flinch. “You know what else?” I asked Marcone. “I don’t really need this cave. Neither do you.”

Marcone narrowed his eyes at me, then nodded once, and said something over his shoulder to one of the hired guns. “Dresden, I would appreciate it if you would ask the sergeant to release my employee.”

“Murph,” I complained, “can’t you pick on someone your own size?” I took a second to admire Hendricks’s expression, but said, “We need him with his arm still attached.”

Murphy eased up on the pressure and then released Hendricks’s arm. The big man eyed Murphy, rubbing his arm, but regained his feet and his enormous machine gun.

“Harry,” Thomas said, voice tight. “We need to move.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thomas, Murphy, and…” We needed mass. “Hendricks, with me.”

Hendricks checked that with Marcone, who nodded.

“Follow me,” I told them. “Stay—What are you doing, Marcone?”

Marcone had accepted a weapon from one of his gunmen, a deadly little MAC-10 that could spew out about a berjillion bullets in a second or two. He checked it and clipped a strap hanging from it to a ring on his weapon harness. “I’m going with you. And you don’t have enough time to waste any more of it arguing with me about it.”

Dammit. He was right.

“Fine. Follow my lead and stay close. We’re going to go round up Lord Raith and get him and everyone else we can out of here before—”

Marcone abruptly raised his shotgun and put a blast through one of the nearer fallen ghouls that had begun to move. It thrashed, and he put a second shell into it. The ghoul stopped moving.

That was when I noticed that the black ichor that spewed from the ghouls was on the ground…

…and it was moving.

By itself.

The black fluid rolled and ran like liquid mercury, gathering together in little droplets, then larger gobs. Those, in turn, ran over the floor—uphill, in some cases—back toward broken ghoul bodies. As I watched, bits of missing flesh ripped from the ghouls began to fill in again as the ichor returned to their bodies. The one Thomas had beheaded actually came crawling back over the floor, having regained some of the use of its legs. It was holding its head up against the stump of its neck with its one arm, and the ichor was flowing from both the severed head and the stump, merging, reattaching it. I saw the ghoul’s jaws suddenly stretch, its eyes blink and then focus.

On me.

Holy crap.

Time. We didn’t have much time. If even the gutted and mangled ghouls could get back up again, there was no way the vampires were winning this one. The best they could hope for was to run—and when more vamps ran, more ghouls would be free to overwhelm us. Or possibly they’d do something even more disgusting than they already had, and we’d all puke ourselves to death.

“This just can’t get much more disturbing,” I muttered. “Follow me.”

I gripped my staff in both hands and charged ahead, into the mass of maddened vampires and ghouls, to save one monster from another.

Chapter Forty

I sprinted toward the little knot of struggling vampires around the White King, while dozens of über-ghouls ripped into the leading families of the White Court. I slipped on some slimy ichor, but didn’t fall on my ass. For me, that’s actually pretty good.

I noted more details on the way, and started trying to think ahead of the next few seconds. Assuming we got to the White King in one piece and convinced Lara to team up and follow us, then what? What was the next step?

At least a dozen ghouls bounded out the tunnel, heading up that long slope to the cave’s entrance. They’d be in a good position to stop Lara’s mortal security forces from pushing through the tunnel to rescue the King. Stopping a charge over open ground with firearms is one thing. Using a gun to charge a large, deadly, powerful predator in close quarters is a different proposition entirely—and not a winning one.

Naturally, the ghouls in the tunnel would also be in position to intercept anyone who tried to flee, which meant that we had to leave through the gate, which meant that if Ramirez and Marcone’s men lost it, we were screwed. And that meant that if Cowl was over there and saw what was going on, he would hardly sit by doing nothing.

I might be able to counter him if I were defending the gate. My skills aren’t fine, but I’m pretty strong, and I’m good at adapting them on the fly. Cowl had cleaned my clock in two fights already, but slowing and delaying him wasn’t the same as trying to wipe the walls with him. Even if I couldn’t be a real threat to him, personally, I could tie him up long enough to hold the gate until we could skedaddle.

Ramirez couldn’t. He was a dangerous combat wizard, but his skills just weren’t strong enough or broad enough to pose a significant obstacle to Cowl. If Cowl—or Vitto, for that matter—saw what was going on, and the ghouls concentrated on the gate…

The shrieks and roars of the struggle on our right suddenly got louder, and I saw the resistance around Lord Skavis and his henchmen suddenly buckle. The horrible glee of the ghouls rushing into the opening was almost more terrifying than the carnage that followed. I caught a glimpse of Vitto Malvora in the middle of the mess, shoving a ghoul toward a wounded vampire, snarling at others, giving orders. The largest of the ghouls were with Vitto.

“That vampire has the strongest and largest of those creatures with him!” Marcone called to me as we ran. “He’ll hit any pockets of resistance with them, use them as a hammer.”

“I can see that,” I snapped. “Murphy, Marcone, cover our right. Hendricks, Thomas, get ready to go in.”

“Go in where?” Hendricks asked.

I took my staff in hand, focused on the fight raging around the White King, and called up my will and Hellfire. “In the hole I’m about to make,” I growled. “Get them out.”

“They’re mostly…eating now. But the second we start to break them free,” Marcone cautioned from behind me, “these others are going to come after us.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

I felt something warm press up against my lower back—Murphy’s shoulders. “We’ll make sure that—” Her voice broke off suddenly, and that boxy little submachine gun chattered in three quick bursts, punctuated by a single throaty roar from Marcone’s shotgun. “Holy crap, that was close.”

“Another,” Marcone warned, and the shotgun blasted again.

The air horn in Justine’s hand started blaring more desperately.

“Harry!” Thomas shouted.

“Go!” I shouted at Thomas and Hendricks. Then I leveled the staff at the nearest clump of the enormous ghouls and shouted, “Forzare!”

My will lashed out, leashed to Lasciel’s Hellfire, and rushed upon the ghouls, exploding in a sphere of raw force that blazed with flickers of sulfurous flame. It blew them up and outward like extras on the set of The A-Team, flying in high arcs. Some of them flew right through the falling curtain of water behind the throne and into the abyssal depths below. Others slammed hard into the nearest wall, and still others fell among the frenzied ghouls now finishing off Lord Skavis and his retainers.

Thomas and Hendricks charged forward. My brother had slipped his shotgun into a sheath over one shoulder, and now wielded his saber in one hand and that inward-bent knife in the other. The first ghoul he reached was still staggered from the blast that had sent his companions flying, and Thomas never gave him a chance to recover. The saber removed its arm, and a scything, upward-sweeping slash of the crooked knife struck its head from its shoulders. A vicious kick to the small of its back crunched into its spine and sent the maimed, beheaded creature flying into the next in the line.

Hendricks came in at Thomas’s side. The big man could not possibly overpower one of the ghouls, despite all the muscle, but he did have an important factor on his side: mass. Hendricks was a huge man, three hundred pounds and more, and once I saw him hit the ghouls, I no longer had any doubts about whether he had played football. He hit an unbalanced ghoul in the back, knocking the creature sprawling, slammed the stock of the huge gun into the neck of a ghoul who turned to follow Thomas’s motion, then ducked a shoulder and slammed it into the stunned creature’s flank, sending it sprawling.

Thomas hacked down another ghoul, Hendricks powered through a single creature who never had the chance to set itself against his locomotive rush, and we were suddenly faced with a line of savage goddesses bathed in black blood.

Lara stood in the center, her white robes pressed against her skin, soaked in the dark fluids leaking from crushed and broken ghouls, and it left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Her hair, too, had been soaked flat to her skull, and it clung to the skin of her black-spattered cheek and to the lines of her dark-stained throat. In each hand she held a long, wavy-bladed knife, long enough to qualify as a small sword, though God only knew where she’d concealed the weapons before. Her eyes were chrome silver, wide and triumphant, and I jerked my gaze away from them as I felt a mad desire just to stare and see what happened.

In that moment, Lara was more than simply a vampire of the White Court, a succubus, pale and deadly. She was a reminder of days gone by, when mankind paid homage to blood-soaked goddesses of war and death, revered the dark side of the protective maternal spirit, the savage core of the strength that still allowed tiny women to lift cars off of their children, or to turn upon their tormentors with newfound power. Lara’s power, at that moment, hovered around her, deadly in its primal seduction, its sheer strength.

On either side of her stood two of her sisters, all of them tall, all of them beautiful, all of them gorgeous and soaked in gore, all of them armed with those wavy-bladed short swords. I didn’t know any of them, but they stared at me with ravenous energy, with maddeningly seductive destruction spattered all over them, and it took me two or three seconds to remember what the hell was going on.

Lara swayed a step toward me, all the motion in her thighs and hips, her eyes brilliant and steady, focused on me, and I felt a sudden urge to kneel that vibrated in my brain and…elsewhere. I mean, how bad could that be? Just think of the view from down there. And it had been a long time since a woman had…

I dimly heard Murphy’s gun chattering again, and Marcone’s, and I shook my head and kept my feet. Then I scowled at Lara and croaked, “We don’t have time for this. Do you want out or not?”

“Thomas!” Justine cried. She appeared from behind Lara and the Raith sisters and threw herself bodily upon my brother. Thomas wrapped an arm around her without releasing his grip on his knife, and pressed her hard against him. I could see his profile as she held him back, and his face…was transported, I suppose. Thomas always had a certain look. Whether he was making a joke, working out, or giving me a hard time about something, the sense of him was always the same: self-contained, confident, pleased with himself and unimpressed with the world around him.

In Justine’s arms he looked like a man in mourning. But he bent his whole body to her, holding her with every fiber and sinew, not merely his arm, and every line of his face became softer, somehow, gentler, as though he had been suddenly relieved of an intolerable agony I had never realized he felt—though I noticed that neither he nor Justine touched each other’s skin.

“Ah,” Lara said. Her voice was a quavering, silvery thing, utterly fascinating and completely inhuman. “True love.”

“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. Hendricks spun away from where he had been staring at the Raith sisters with much the same expression I must have had, and stomped past me. I shortly heard him adding the racket of his big gun to that of Marcone’s and Murphy’s.

“Raith!” I shouted. “I propose an alliance between yours and mine, until we get out of here alive.”

Lara stared at me with her empty silver eyes for a second. Then she blinked them once, and they turned, darkening by a few degrees. They went out of focus for a moment, and she tilted her head. Lord Raith abruptly stepped forward, appearing from behind his daughters. “Naturally, Dresden,” he said in a smooth tone. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you’d never have seen the glassy shine in his eyes, or heard the slightly stilted cadence of his words. He put on a good act, but I had to wonder just how much of his mind Lara had left him. “Though I regard myself as bound by honor to see to your protection in the face of this treachery, I can only be humbled by the nobility of you offering me your—”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, all right,” I snapped, glaring past him at Lara. “Run away now, speeches later.”

Lara nodded, and looked quickly around her. Maybe twenty of the Raith clan had survived the fight. The remaining ghouls had sprung away during our unexpected assault, and now prowled in circles around us well out of arm’s reach, but close enough to rush back in if they saw a weakness. They were waiting for the others to finish off the last of the Skavis and Malvora. Once they got here, they’d overrun us easily.

Near the gate, Marcone’s soldiers had a steady line of white-robed thralls moving out of the cavern. There were rather more of them still alive than I had supposed there would be, until I saw that the circling ghouls were largely ignoring the passive thralls, focused instead on what they knew to be the real threat—the keepers of the mind-numbed herds.

“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. His shotgun boomed once more and then clicked empty. I heard him feeding new shells in as Murphy’s gun chattered. “They’re coming.”

I grunted acknowledgment and said to Lara, “Bring the thralls.”

“What?”

“Bring the bloody thralls!” I snarled. “Or you can damned well stay here!”

Lara gave me a look that might have made me a little nervous about getting killed if I weren’t such a stalwart guy, but then Lord Raith snapped to the vamps around him, “Bring them.”

I turned, drawing more Hellfire into the staff, and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to manage much more in the way of magic. I had just done too much, and I was on my last legs. I had to pull off one more spell if any of us were going to make it out. Murphy’s gun kept rattling away, as did Hendricks’s, and I could hear gunfire coming from the soldiers around the gate now, as well, as the ghouls on the opposite side of the cavern began to turn from the ruined remains of the leaders of House Skavis and Malvora.

“Go!” I said. “Go, go, go!”

We headed for my gate. The vampires seized thralls as they went, tossing them into the center of the group, forming a ring around them. Raith formed the core of the group, with his daughters and their swords around him—and the thralls forming a thick human shield around them, in turn. Trust Lara to turn what she had seen as a hindrance to her advantage. It was the way her mind worked.

We started out at a quick pace—and then an almost-human voice cried out, there was a surge of magic that flashed against my wizard’s senses, and the lights went out.

The cavern’s lighting had been of excellent quality. It had remained functional all through the duel, despite the magic Ramirez and I had been hurling around, and through the opening of not one, but two gates to the Nevernever. That implied that Raith had invested in lighting with a long track record of high performance and reliability, to continue functioning through so much—but there’s never been an electrical system a wizard couldn’t put down with a little direct effort, and this one was no exception.

Even as I lifted my staff to call up more light, my brain was paddling up the logic stream. Vittorio had seen us making a break for it—or Cowl had, though again, I had to remind myself that Cowl’s presence was still theoretical, however well supported by circumstantial evidence the theory might be. Killing the lights wasn’t going to be a hindrance to the vampires or to the ghouls, which meant that he was trying to hamper us people. Sinking the cavern into Stygian blackness would make Marcone’s troops almost impotent, hamper and slow any of the escaping thralls, therefore slowing the vampires apparently intent upon protecting them.

My staff hadn’t been made to produce light, but it was a flexible tool, and I sent more Hellfire through it as I lifted it overhead to light our way, sending out red-orange light in the shape of the runes and sigils carved into the staff out over the darkness.

And, just as I did, I realized what else the darkness would do.

It would force the humans to produce light.

Specifically, it would draw the response from wizards that being sunk into darkness always did. We called light. By one method or another, it was the first thing any wizard would do in a situation like this one. We’d do it fast, too—faster than anyone without magic could pull out a light of his own.

So, as my staff lit up, I realized that I had just declared my exact position to every freaking monster in the whole freaking cavern. The darkness had been a trap designed to elicit this very response, and I had walked right into it.

Ghouls let out howls of fury and surged toward me through a hundred rune-shaped scarlet spotlights that glinted on their bloodied fangs, their talons, those horrible, hungry, sunken eyes.

Guns roared all around me, splattering the nearest ghouls into black-blooded slurry. It wasn’t enough. The creatures simply surged forward, being torn apart, until Murphy’s gun clicked empty.

“Reloading!” she screamed, ejecting the weapon’s magazine, hopping a step back as the ghoul she’d only wounded continued toward me.

Marcone’s gun roared and that ghoul went away, but when he pumped the weapon it clicked on an empty chamber. He dropped it for the little submachine gun clipped to his harness, and for a second or two it cut through ghouls like a scythe, ripping in a great horizontal swath—and then it ran empty.

I stepped forward as another wave of ghouls bounded over those the gunfire had held off.

Murphy and Marcone had bought me time enough for the spell I’d been forming in my mind to meet with my will and congeal into fire. I whirled the staff overhead, and then brought it down gripped in both hands, striking its end to the stone floor as I cried, “Flam-mamurus!”

There was a crackling howl, and fire ripped its way up out of the stones of the floor. It rippled out from the point of impact in a line running thirty or forty yards in either direction, a sudden fountain of molten stone that shot up in an ongoing curtain ten or twelve feet high, angled toward the ghouls charging us from the far side of the cavern. Blazing liquid stone fell down over them, among them, and the oncoming tide of screaming ghouls broke upon that wall of stone and fire with screams of agony and, for the first time, of fear.

The wall held off fully half the ghouls in the cavern and screened us from Vittorio’s sight. It also provided all the humans with plenty of light to see by.

“Hell’s bells, I’m good,” I wheezed.

The effort of the spell was monumental, even with the Hellfire to help me, and I staggered, the light vanishing from the runes of my staff.

“Harry, left!” Murphy screamed.

I turned my head to my left in time to see a ghoul, half of its body a charred ruin, slam Hendricks aside as if the huge man had been a rag doll, and throw itself at me, while two more leaped over the group from behind, and tried to follow in its wake.

I was pretty sure I could have taken the ghoul, provided he wasn’t much heavier than a loaf of bread and had no idea how to use those claws and fangs. But just in case he was heavier than he looked and competent at ripping things apart, I flung up my shield bracelet.

It sputtered into life for a second, and the ghoul bounced off it—and the effort it cost me nearly made me black out. I fell.

The ghoul recovered and thrashed toward me, even as I saw Thomas appear from the ranks of vampires and thralls and attack its two companions from behind. My brother’s pale face was all but glowing, his eyes were wide with fear, and I hadn’t ever seen him move that fast. He hamstrung both of the other ghouls with the blades in his hands—well, if hacking through three-quarters of the leg, including the thick, black thighbones, could be considered “hamstringing.” He left them on the ground while other Raiths tore them to pieces. Thomas leaped at the lead ghoul.

He wasn’t fast enough.

The ghoul came at me with a dreadful howl. I didn’t have enough energy left to lift my body up off the floor and face my killer head-on.

Fortunately, I did have energy enough to draw the .44 from my duster pocket. I’d like to tell you that I waited till the last second for the perfect shot, coolly facing down the ghoul with nerves of steel. The truth is that my nerves were pretty much shot, and I was too tired to panic. I barely got the sights lined up before the ghoul’s jaws opened wide enough to engulf my entire head.

I never consciously pulled the trigger, but the gun roared, and the ghoul’s head snapped back before it crashed into me. There was pain and I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

“Harry!” Thomas cried.

The weight vanished from my chest and I sucked in a breath. I got my left hand free and pounded at the ghoul with the .44.

“Easy!” Murphy shouted. “Easy, Harry!” Her small, strong fingers caught my wrist and eased the gun out of it. I dimly realized that I was lucky it hadn’t gone off again while I was thrashing around with it.

Thomas flung the ghoul off me, and it landed in a heap. The back upper quarter of its head was gone. Just gone.

“Nice shot,” Marcone noted. I looked back to see him lifting a pale and sweating Hendricks, getting one of the big man’s arms over his shoulder and supporting his weight. “Shall we?”

Thomas hauled me to my feet. “Come on. No time to rest now.”

“Right,” I said. I raised my voice and called, “Lara, get them moving!”

We started toward the gate, keeping the curtain of molten fire on our flank. It was hard just moving one foot in front of the other. It took me a while to notice that Justine was under one shoulder, supporting part of my weight, and that I was walking amidst the thralls, near the White King and his guard.

The vampires were still the outer guard, spread out over a half circle, in what amounted to a running battle. Only we weren’t running. It was more of a steady walk, made all the more eerie by hellish light and shadow and desperation. Murphy’s gun chattered several more times, and then fell silent. I heard the throaty bellow of my .44. I checked my hand and sure enough, my gun wasn’t there.

“Leave them!” I heard Lara snap, her cold silver voice slithering around pleasantly in my ear. “Keep the pace steady. Stay together. Give them no opening.”

We walked, the vampires growing more desperate and less human as the fight went on. Ghouls roared and screamed and died. So did Raiths. The cold subterranean air of the cavern had grown greenhouse hot, and it felt as if there weren’t enough air left in the air. I panted hard, but it never seemed to get enough into my lungs.

I kept lifting one foot and putting it back down again, numbly noticing that Marcone was behind me with Hendricks, doing the same thing.

I glanced to my left and saw the fiery fountain of molten stone beginning to dwindle. It hadn’t been an ongoing spell I had to keep pumping power into. That’s the beauty of earth magic. Momentum. Once you get it moving, it doesn’t slow down very quickly. I’d poured fire magic into all that stone and forced it to expand out of the earth around it. It had simply taken this long for the spell to play out.

But that’s exactly what had happened. The spell was beginning to play out. Much as I had.

The curtain lowered slowly, thinning and growing less hot, and I could see ghouls behind it, ready to attack. I noted, idly, that they would be able to rush right into our group of dazed thralls, wounded gangsters, and weary wizards, with nothing much to oppose them.

“Oh, God,” Justine whimpered. She’d noticed, too. “Oh, God.”

The ghouls had all seen the curtain lowering. Now they rushed forward, to the very edge of the fading curtain, seemingly uncaring of the molten stone on the floor, dozens of them, a solid line of the creatures just waiting for the first chance to bounce over and eat our faces.

A blast of green light flashed down the line. It went completely through two ghouls, leaving them howling on the floor, severed a third ghoul’s arm at the shoulder, and continued on through the white throne, leaving a hole the size of a laundry basket in its back.

Ramirez had been waiting for them to line up like that.

He stood, his weight on one foot, at the far end of the lowering wall of flaming stone, on the ghoul side, arms akimbo. They whirled toward him, but Ramirez started lifting his arms alternately from his hip to extend before him, the motion like that of a gunfighter in the Old West, and every draw flung more silent green shafts of deadly light through the ghouls.

Those nearest him tried to rush forward for the kill, but Ramirez had their measure now, and he wasn’t content to leave a single gaping hole, trusting that it would incapacitate them sufficiently. He hurled blast after hideously ruinous blast, and left nothing but a scattered pile of twitching parts of the first ghouls to rush him, and those beyond them suffered nearly as greatly. Fresh-spilled black ichor rushed back and forth across the cavern floor until it looked like the deck of a ship pitching on a lunatic sea.

“What are you waiting for, Dresden?” Ramirez shouted. “One little bit of vulcanomancy and you get worn out!” A particularly well-aimed bolt tore the heads from a pair of ghouls at once. “How do you like that?”

We all began hurrying ahead. “Not bad,” I slurred back at him, “for a virgin.”

His rate of fire had begun to slacken, but the gibe drew a fresh burst of ferocity out of Ramirez, and he redoubled his efforts. The ghouls howled their frustration and bounded away from the wall of fire, out of its treacherous light and away from the power of the Warden of the White Council ripping them to shreds.

“It hurts!” bellowed Ramirez drunkenly, flinging a last pair of bolts at a fleeing ghoul. “Ow! Ow, it hurts! It hurts to be this good!”

There was a hiss of sound, a flicker of steel, and one of Vitto Malvora’s knives hit Ramirez’s stomach so hard that that it threw the young man off his feet and to the ground.

“Man down!” Marcone shouted. We were close enough to the gate that I could see the pale blue light that spilled through it. Marcone waved his hand through a couple of signals and flicked a finger at Ramirez, then at Hendricks. The armed men—mercenaries, they had to be; no gang of criminal thugs was so disciplined—rushed forward, taking charge of the wounded, seizing Ramirez and dragging him back toward the gate, roughly pushing and shoving the thralls ahead and toward the gate.

I went to Ramirez, staggering away from Justine. The knife had hit him in the guts. Hard. Ramirez had worn a Kevlar vest, which wasn’t much good for stopping sharp, pointy things, though it had at least kept the knife’s hilt from tearing right into the muscle and soft tissue. I knew there were some big arteries there, and more or less where they were located, but I couldn’t tell if the knife was at the right angle to have hit them. His face was terribly pale, and he blinked his eyes woozily as the soldiers started dragging him across the floor, and his legs thrashed weakly, bringing his own left leg up into his field of view.

“Bloody hell,” he gasped. “Harry. There’s a knife in my leg. When did that happen?”

“In the duel,” I told him. “Don’t you remember?”

“I thought you’d stepped on me and sprained my ankle,” Ramirez replied. Then he blinked again. “Bloody hell. There’s a knife in my guts.” He peered at them. “And they match.”

“Be still,” I warned him. Vampires and thralls and mercenaries were falling back through the gate now. “Don’t move around, all right?”

He began to say something, but a panicked vampire kicked his leg as he went past. Ramirez’s face twisted in pain and then suddenly slackened, his eyes fluttering closed. I saw his staff on the ground and grabbed it and pitched it through the gate after him, the men carrying him as the fight behind me got closer, while most of the retreating vampires still fought off the determined assault of the ghouls.

“How long?” I heard Marcone demand of one of the soldiers.

The man checked his watch—an expensive Swiss stopwatch, with springs and cogs, not some digital thing. “Three minutes, eleven seconds,” the soldier said.

“How many charges?”

“Six doubles,” he replied.

“Hey,” I snapped at Marcone. “Cutting it a little close, huh?”

“Any longer and they wouldn’t accomplish anything,” Marcone replied. “Can you walk?”

“Yes, I can walk,” I snapped.

“I could get someone to carry you,” Marcone said, his tone solicitous and sincere.

“Bite me,” I growled, and called, “Murphy?”

“Here!” Murphy called. She was among the last of those retreating from the ghoul onslaught. Her boxy little Volvo of a gun was hanging by its strap on one shoulder, and she held my .44 in both hands, though it looked almost comically overlarge for her.

“Ramirez has got a knife in the stomach,” I said. “I need you to look after him.”

“He’s the other Warden, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s already through the gate.”

“What about you?”

I shook my head and made sure my duster was still covering most of me. “Malvora is still out there. He might try to kill our gate, or try some other spell. I’ve got to be one of the last ones through.”

Murphy gave me a skeptical look. “You look like you’re about to fall over. You in any shape to do more magic?”

“True,” I said, and offered her my staff. “Hey, maybe you should do it.”

She gave me a hard look. “No one likes a wiseass, Harry.”

“Are you kidding? As long as the wiseass is talking to someone else, people love ’em.” I gave her half a smile and said, “Get out of here.”

“How are we getting back out again?” she asked. “Thomas led us there, but…”

“He’ll lead you back,” I said. “Or one of the others will. Or Ramirez, if some idiot doesn’t kill him trying to help him.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you did it, Harry.” She touched my hand, and departed through the broad oval of the gate. I saw her hurry through ankle-deep snow beneath what looked like sheltering pine trees to Ramirez’s side, where he lay limply on his cloak. The thralls looked confused, which of course they would be, and cold, which, given their wardrobe, of course they would be.

“That’s all of ours!” shouted the soldier to Marcone. “Two minutes, fifteen seconds!”

He had to shout. The nearest of the ghouls were about ten feet away, doing battle against, for lack of a more clichéd term, a thin white line of Raith, including my brother with his two blades spinning.

“Go!” Marcone said, and the soldier went through. Marcone, a fresh shotgun in hand, stepped up next to me. “Dresden?”

“What are you hanging around for?”

“If you recall,” he said, “I agreed to extract you alive. I’m not leaving until I have done so.” He paused and added, “Provided, of course, that it happens in the next two minutes.”

From where I was standing, I could see three two-brick bundles of C4, detonators thrust into their soft surfaces, each fitted with old-fashioned precision timepieces. They were simple charges on the floor. The other three must have been shaped charges affixed to the cavern walls. I had no idea how much destruction was going to be wrought by them, but I didn’t suppose it would be much fun to be there when they went boom. Alas, that the poor ghouls would most likely be staying for the fireworks.

“Thomas!” I called. “Time to go!”

“Go!” Thomas shouted, and the other vampires with him broke from their line and fled for the gate, except for one, a tall female Raith who…

I blinked. Holy crap. It was Lara.

The other vampires fled past me, through the gate, and Thomas and his sister stood alone against the horde of eight-foot ghouls. Stood against it, and stopped it cold.

Their skin gleamed colder and whiter than glacial ice, their eyes blazed silvery bright, and they moved with blinding speed and utterly inhuman grace. His saber fluttered and slashed, drawing a constant stream of blood, punctuated by devastating blows of his kukri.

(Ah, right, that was the name of that inward-bent knife. I knew I’d remember it eventually.)

Lara moved with him, trailing her damp, midnight hair and shredded silk kimono. She covered Thomas’s back like a cloak hung from his shoulders. She was no weaker than her younger brother, and perhaps even faster, and the wavy-bladed short sword in her hand had a penchant for leaving spills of ghoulish entrails in its wake. Together, the pair of them slipped aside from repeated rushes and dealt out deadly violence to one foe after another.

Ultimately, I think, their fight was futile—and all the more valiant and astonishing for being so doomed. No matter how lethal Thomas and Lara proved to be, or how many ghouls went screaming to the floor, their black blood continued to slither back into their fallen bodies, and the ghouls that had been taken down continued to gather themselves together to rise and fight again. Most of those who reentered the fight with renewed vigor and increased fury remained hideously maimed in some way. Some trailed their entrails like slimy grey ropes. Others were missing sections of their skulls. At least two entered the fray armless, simply biting with their wide jaws of vicious teeth. Beside the beauty of the brother and sister vampires, the ghouls’ deformed bodies and hideous injuries were all the more monstrous, all the more vile.

“My God,” Marcone said, his voice hushed. “It is the most beautiful nightmare I have ever seen.”

He was right. It was hypnotic. “Time?” I asked him, my voice rough.

He consulted his own stopwatch. “One minute, forty-eight seconds.”

“Thomas!” I bellowed. “Lara! Now!”

With that, the pair of them bounded apart, apparently the last thing the ghouls had been expecting, and dashed for the gate.

I turned to go—and that was when I felt it.

There was a dull pulse, a throb of some power that seemed at once alien and familiar, a sickening, whirling sensation and then a sudden stab of energy.

It wasn’t a magical attack. An attack implies an act of force that might be predicted, countered, or at least mitigated in some way. This was something far more existential. It simply asserted itself, and by its very existence, it dictated a new reality.

A spike of thought slammed into my being like a physical blow—it wasn’t any one single thought. It was, instead, a mélange of them, a cocktail of emotions so heavy, so dense, that it drove me instantly to my knees. Despair flooded through me. I was so tired. I had struggled and fought to achieve nothing but raw chaos, rendering the whole of my effort useless. My only true friends had been badly injured, or had run, leaving me in this hellish cavern. Those who currently stood beside me were monsters, of one stripe or another—even my brother, who had returned to his monstrous ways in feeding on other human beings.

Terror followed hard on its heels. I had been paralyzed, while surrounded by monsters of resilience beyond description. In mere seconds, they would fall on me. I had fallen with my face toward the gate, and though physical movement was beyond me, I could see that everyone, everyone had also pitched over onto the ground, vulnerable to the attack while the gate remained open. Vampires, thralls, and mortal warriors alike, they had all fallen.

Guilt came next. Murphy. Carlos. I had gotten them both killed.

Useless. It had all been useless.

Marcone’s stopwatch lay on the ground near his limply outstretched hand. He’d fallen next to me. The second hand was sweeping rapidly downward, and the watches on the charges of C4, the nearest of them about ten feet away, did the same.

Then I understood it. This was Vittorio Malvora’s attack. This hideous, paralyzing brew of everything darkest in the moral soul was what he had poured out, as the Raith administered desire, the Malvorans gave fear, and the Skavis despair. Vitto had gone beyond them all. He had taken all the worst of the human soul and forged it into a poisonous, deadly weapon.

And I hadn’t been able to do a damned thing to stop him.

I lay staring at Marcone’s stopwatch, and wondered which would kill us all first: the ghouls or the explosion.

Chapter Forty-One

Between 1:34 and 1:33, the backward-running hand of the stopwatch suddenly halted. Or it seemed that way. But several moments later, the hand twitched down to the next second, and the tick sounded more like a hollow thump. I just lay there staring at it, and wondering if this was how my mind was reacting to my own imminent death.

And then I thought that I’d had enough will to wonder about something, rather than just being crushed and suffocated by despair and terror. Maybe that was how I was reacting to my imminent death: with denial and escapist self-induced hallucinations.

“Not precisely, my host,” came Lasciel’s voice.

I blinked, which was a lot more voluntary movement than I’d had a second before. I tried to look around.

“Don’t try,” Lasciel said, her voice a little alarmed. “You could harm yourself.”

What the hell. Had she somehow slowed down time?

“Time does not exist,” she said, her tone firm. “Not the way you consider it, at any rate. I have temporarily accelerated the processes of your mind.”

The stopwatch thud-thumped again: 1:32.

Accelerating my brain. That made more sense. After all, we all use only about ten percent of our brain’s capacity, anyway. There was no reason it couldn’t handle a lot more activity. Well, except that…

“Yes,” she said. “It is dangerous, and I cannot maintain this level of activity for very long before it begins inflicting permanent damage.”

I presumed that Lasciel was about to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Her voice became sharp, angry. “Don’t be a fool, my host. If you perish, I perish. I simply seek to give you an option that might enable us to survive.”

Right. And by some odd coincidence, might that option just happen to involve the coin in my basement?

“Why do you continue to be so stubborn about this, my host?” Lasciel demanded, her voice tight with frustration. “Taking up the coin would not enslave you. It would not impede your ability to choose for yourself.”

Not at first, no. But it would finish up with me enslaved to the true Lasciel, and she knew it.

“Not necessarily,” she said. There was a tone of pleading to her voice. “Accommodations can be reached. Compromises made.”

Sure, if I’m willing to go along with her every plan, I’m sure she’d be quite agreeable.

“But you would be alive,” Lasciel cried.

It didn’t matter, given that the coin was buried in the stone under my lab anyway.

“Not an obstacle, my host. I can teach you how to call it to you within a few seconds.”

Thud-thump: 1:31.

A thud from behind me. Footsteps. The ghouls. They were coming. I could see part of Marcone’s face, twisted in agony under Vittorio Malvora’s psychic assault.

“Please,” Lasciel said. “Please, let me help you. I don’t want to die.”

I didn’t want to die, either.

I closed my eyes for another second.

Thud-thump: 1:30.

It took an effort of will, and what seemed like several moments of effort, but I managed to whisper aloud, “No.”

“But you will die,” Lasciel said, her voice anguished.

It was going to happen sooner or later. But it didn’t have to be tonight.

“Then quickly! First, you must picture the coin in your mind. I can help you—”

Not like that. She could help me.

Silence.

Thud-thump: 1:29.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

I thought she could.

“I can’t,” she replied, her voice anguished. “She would never forgive that. Never accept me back into her…just take the coin. Harry, just take the coin. P-please.”

I gritted my teeth.

Thud-thump: 1:28.

Again, I said, “No.”

“I can’t do this for you!”

Untrue. She’d already partially shielded me from the effects of Malvora’s attack. The situation was simple, for her: She could do more of what she’d already done. Or she could stand by and do nothing. It was her choice.

Lasciel appeared in front of me for the first time, on her hands and knees. She looked…odd. Too thin, her eyes too sunken. She had always looked strong, healthy, and confident. Now, her hair was a wreck, her face twisted with pain, and…

…and she was crying. She looked blotchy, and she needed a tissue. Her hands touched either side of my face.

“It could hurt you. It could inflict brain damage. Do you understand what that could mean, Harry?”

Never can tell. It might be nice to have brain damage. I already liked Jell-O. And maybe they’d have cable TV at whatever home they wound up sticking me in. Either way, it would be better than having my brains scooped out by ghouls.

Lasciel stared at me for a moment and then let out a choking little laugh. “It’s your brother. Your friends. That’s why.”

If frying my brain got Murphy, Ramirez, Thomas, and Justine out of the mess I’d gotten them into, it would be worth it.

She stared at me for another long moment.

Thud-thump: 1:27.

Then a look of almost childish resentment came over her face, and she looked over one shoulder before turning back to me. “I…” She shook her head and said, very softly, wonderingly, “She…doesn’t deserve you.”

Deserved or not, the fallen angel wasn’t getting me. Not ever.

Lasciel squared her shoulders and straightened. “You’re right,” she said. “It is my choice. Listen to me.” She leaned closer, her eyes intent. “Vittorio has been given power. That is how he can do this. He is possessed.”

I wished I could have raised my eyebrows. Possessed by what?

“An Outsider,” Lasciel said. “I have felt such a presence before. This attack is drawn directly from the mind of the Outsider.”

Gosh, that was interesting. Not relevant, but interesting.

“It is relevant,” Lasciel said, “because of the circumstances of your birth—because of why you were born, Harry. Your mother found the strength to escape Lord Raith for a reason.”

What the hell was she talking about?

Thud-thump: 1:26.

“There was a complex confluence of events, of energies, of circumstances that would have given a child born under them the potential to wield power over Outsiders.”

Which didn’t make any sense. Outsiders were all but immune to magic. It took power garnered only from centuries of study and practice, wielded by the most powerful wizards on the planet, even to slow them down.

“Strange, then, don’t you think, that you defeated one when you were sixteen years old?”

What? Since when? The only serious victory I’d had over a spiritual entity when I was that young had been when my old master had sent an assassin demon after me. It hadn’t turned out the way DuMorne had been hoping.

Lasciel leaned closer. “He Who Walks Behind is an Outsider, Harry. A terrible creature, the most potent of the Walkers, a powerful knight among their ruling entities. But when he came for you, you overthrew him.”

True. I had. It was all still a little blurry, but I remembered the end of the fight well enough. Lots and lots of kaboom, and then no more demon. And there was a burning building.

Thud-thump: 1:25.

“Listen,” Lasciel said, giving my head a little shake. “You have the potential to hold great power over them. You may be able to escape the power now held over you. If you are sure it is what you want, I can give you an opportunity to defy Malvora’s sending. But you’ll have to hurry. I don’t know how long it will take to throw it off, and they are almost upon you.”

After which, we were going to have a long talk about my mother and these Outsiders and their relation to the Black Court and exactly what the hell was going on.

Lasciel—Lash, rather—nodded once and said, “I will tell you all that I can, Harry.”

Then she rose and stepped past me and toward the oncoming ghouls and Vitto Malvora. Her clothes made a slow, soft rustle as she stepped away from me, and Marcone’s stopwatch went thud—

Tick, tick, tick…

For just a second, no more than a heartbeat or two, I remained impaled on that horrible pike of psychic anguish. Then an odd sensation fell over me, and I don’t know precisely how to describe it, except to say that it felt like stepping from brutal, burning sunlight into a sudden, deep shadow. Then that horrible pain eased—not much, but enough to let me suddenly move my arms and my head, enough to know that I could act.

So I froze in place.

“Mine!” howled a voice, so distorted with lust and violence that it sounded like nothing human. “She is mine!”

Footsteps came closer, thump-drag, thump-drag. I saw Vittorio’s horribly burned leg go by in my peripheral vision. The sensation of shade began to fade at the edges, with the power of Vittorio’s spell returning by slow degrees, like sunlight beginning to burn its way through a sheet of frosted glass.

“Little Raith bitch,” Vittorio snarled. “What I do to you will make your father’s blood run cold.”

There was the sound of a heavy blow. I twitched my head a tiny bit to one side to get a look at what was around me.

A lot of really huge ghouls, that was what, apparently no less fierce for being battered and torn by the battle. Vittorio stood over Lara, his face pale, his leg horribly burned. He had his right hand held out, the hand that projects energy, fingers spread, and I could still feel the terrible power radiating from them. He was maintaining the pressure of the spell that held everyone down, then—and I could see, from the reaction of the ghouls around him, that they were feeling the bite of the spell, too. It seemed only to make them flinch and cower a little, rather than incapacitating them entirely. Maybe they were more used to feeling such things.

He kicked Lara in the ribs, twice more, heavy and ugly kicks that cracked bones. Lara let out little sounds of pain, and I think it was that, more than anything, that let me push the paralyzing awl of hostile magic completely away from my mind. I moved one hand, and that slowly. From the lack of outcry, I took it that no one noticed.

“We’ll put a pin in this, for now, little Raith bitch.” He whirled toward my brother. “I had intended to find you, you know, Thomas,” Vittorio continued. “An outcast like you, I assumed, might be inclined to throw in his lot with someone with a more equitable vision for the future. But you’re like some sad dog, too ugly to be allowed into the house, but faithfully defending the master that holds him in contempt. Your end isn’t going to be pretty, either.” He started to turn toward me, smiling. “But first, we start with the busybody wizard.” He finished the turn, saying, “Burns hurt, Dresden. Have I mentioned how much I hate being exposed to fire?”

No sense in wasting perfectly good irony. I waited until he said fire to spin and pull the trigger on Marcone’s shotgun.

The weapon bucked hard—I hadn’t had time to brace it properly—and slammed into my shoulder with bruising force only partly attenuated by my duster. The blast pretty well removed Vittorio’s right hand at the middle of his forearm.

The way I hear it, amputation is bad for your concentration. It certainly wasn’t good for Vittorio’s, and you can’t hold up the pressure on a spell like he’d been using without concentration. There was a sudden surge of particularly intense discomfort through the spell as Vittorio’s physical trauma sent a flare of energy through it, like feedback on an enormous speaker. The ghouls howled in agonized reaction to the surge of discord, and it gave me a second or so to act.

I lashed out with both legs and got Vittorio in one of his knees—the one that wasn’t all burned. A kick to the knees doesn’t bother a vampire from the Red Court—their actual knees are all backward anyway. A Black Court vampire wouldn’t have been anything but annoyed at having a hand blown off with a shotgun.

Vitto wasn’t either.

When he wasn’t drawing upon the power gained from his Hunger, he was pretty much human. And while I’m a wizard and all, I’m also a fairly big guy. Tall and skinny, sure, but when you get tall enough, even skinny guys are pretty darned heavy, and I’ve got strong legs. His knee bent in backward and he fell with a scream.

Before he could recover, I was up on one knee with the shotgun’s stock against my shoulder and its long barrel against Vittorio’s nose. “Back off!” I shouted. I was going for cool and strong, but my voice came out sounding angry and not overly burdened with sanity. “Tell them to back off! Now!”

Vittorio’s face was twisted with surprise and pain. He blinked at the shotgun, then at me, and then at the stump of his right hand.

I couldn’t hear or see the stopwatch anymore, but my head provided the sound effect. Tickticktickticktick. How much time was left? Less than sixty seconds?

Around me, the ghouls, recovered from their moment of pain, began to let out a steady, low growl, like the rumbling engines of several dozen motorcycles. I kept my eyes focused on their boss. If I took a moment to get a good look at all the bits of feral anatomy around me that might start ripping into my flesh at any second, I would probably cry. That would be unmanly.

“B-back!” Vittorio stammered. Then he said something in a language that sounded vaguely familiar, but that I didn’t understand. He repeated it in a half scream, and the ghouls edged a couple of inches away from us.

Ticktickticktick.

“This is what happens,” I told Vittorio. “I take my people. I go through the gate. I close it. You get to live.” I leaned into the shotgun a little, making him flinch. “Or we can all go down together. I’m feeling ambivalent toward which way we go, so I’ll leave it up to you.”

He licked his lips. “Y-you’re bluffing. Pull that trigger, and the ghouls will kill everyone. You won’t l-let them die for the pleasure of killing me.”

“It’s been a long day. I’m tired. Not thinking real clearly. And the way I see it, you got me pretty much dead to rights here, Vitto.” I narrowed my eyes and spoke very quietly. “Do you really think I’ll let myself go down without taking you with me?”

He stared at me for a long moment, and licked his lips.

“G-go,” he said, then. “Go.”

“Thomas!” I shouted. “Wakey, wakey! Now is not the time to lie down and die.”

I heard my brother groan. “Harry?”

“Lara, can you hear me?”

“Quite,” she said. Thomas’s older sister was already on her feet, from the sound, and her voice was coming from close behind me.

“Thomas, get Marcone and get him through the gate.” I gave Vittorio a fierce glare. “Don’t move. Don’t even twitch.”

Vittorio, his face in agony, held up his left hand, fingers spread. He was bleeding, a lot, and started shivering. There wasn’t any fight left in his face. He’d hit me with his best shot, and I’d apparently shrugged it off. I think it had scared the hell out of him. Losing his hand hadn’t helped his morale any, either. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “Just…d-don’t shoot.” He shot a glance around at the ghouls and said, “L-let them go.”

I heard Marcone let out a groan, and Thomas grunted with effort. “Okay,” Thomas said from behind me. “I’m through.”

I kept the gun on Vittorio and stood up, trying not to let the barrel waver. How many seconds did I have left? Thirty? Twenty? I’ve heard about people who can keep track of wild situations like this while keeping a steady count, but apparently I wasn’t one of them. I took a step back, and felt Lara’s back pressing against mine. From the corner of my eye, I could see that the ghouls had spread out all around us. If she hadn’t been there, one of them could have blindsided me without any trouble the second I was a couple of feet away from Vittorio. Gulp.

I took a step back, forcing myself to move smoothly, steadily, when my instincts were screaming at me to run.

“Three more steps,” Lara told me in a whisper. “A little more to your left.”

I corrected the direction of my next step, trusting her word. One step more, and I could hear winter wind sighing behind me. Silver moonlight shone on the barrel of the shotgun.

And then I found out whether or not Cowl was actually there.

There was a surge of power, an abrasive scream against my arcane senses, and the offspring of a comet and a pterodactyl came hurtling out of the darkness at the far end of the cavern. My eyes had adjusted enough to see a dim oval of reddish light that outlined a heavily cloaked figure—Cowl, standing in his own gate.

“Master!” Vittorio cried, his voice slurred.

“Look out!” I screamed, and thrashed behind me with my arm as I ducked and lurched to one side, trying to sweep Lara out of the flying thing’s path as I did. It missed us by inches, but we got out of the way.

Cowl’s leathery, rasping voice hissed something in a slithering tongue, and a second surge of power lashed invisibly across the cavern—not at us, but at my gate.

And as quickly as that, my gate began to close, the opening sewing itself shut like a Ziploc bag—starting with the end closest to me.

Tickticktickticktick.

The gate was closing far more quickly than I could have gotten up and moved. I wasn’t getting out. But Lara might.

“Lara!” I shouted. “Go!”

Something with the strength of a freight train and the speed of an Indy car seized my duster and hauled on it so hard that it wrenched my neck and nearly dislocated my arms.

“Dresden!” called Marcone’s voice from the closing gate. “Nineteen!”

I hurtled through the air. Looking wildly around showed me that Lara had seized me and leaped for the far end of the collapsing gate.

“Eighteen!” came Marcone’s shout.

Lara and I flew through empty and unremarkable air.

The gate had closed.

We missed it.

Chapter Forty-Two

The only light was the dim scarlet glow from Cowl’s gate, and everything had become blood and shadows. The eyes of dozens of ghouls burned like nearly dead coals as they turned toward us, reflecting that lurid luminescence.

“Lara,” I hissed. “This cavern goes up in seventeen seconds, and there are ghouls in the tunnel out.”

“Empty night,” Lara swore. Her voice was thready with pain and fear. “What can I do?”

Good question. There had to be…Wait. There might be a way to survive this. I was too tired to work any magic, but…

“You can trust me,” I said. “That’s what you can do.”

She turned her pale, beautiful, gore-smattered face to me. “Done.”

“Get us to the tunnel’s mouth.”

“But if there are ghouls there already—”

“Hey!” I said. “Tick, tick!”

Before I’d gotten to the end of the first tick, Lara had seized me again and hauled us across the floor to the mouth of the tunnel. Behind me, Cowl was shouting something, and so was Vittorio, and the ghouls set up a howl and were running after us. Only one of the ghouls was close enough to get in the way, but Lara’s wicked little wavy-bladed sword ripped straight across its eyes and left the monster momentarily stunned with pain.

Lara dumped me at the mouth of the tunnel, and I took a couple of steps back in, checking the smooth tunnel walls as I shook out my shield bracelet. That demonic flying thing of Cowl’s banked around for another pass.

“What now?” Lara demanded. The ghouls were coming. They were nowhere near as fast as Lara had been, but they weren’t far away.

I took a deep breath. “Now,” I said. “Kiss me. I know it seems weir—”

Lara let out a single, ravenous snarl and was abruptly pressed up against me, arms sliding around my waist with sinuous, serpentine power. Her mouth met mine and…

…ohmygod.

Lara had once boasted that she could do more to me in an hour than a mortal woman could in a week. But it ain’t boasting if it’s true. The first, searing second of that kiss was indescribably intense. It wasn’t simply the texture of her lips. It was how she moved them, and the simple, naked hunger beneath every quiver of her mouth. I knew she was a monster, and I knew she would enslave and kill me if she could, but she wanted me with a passion so pure and focused that it was intoxicating. That succubus kiss was a lie, but it made me feel, within that single moment, strong and masculine and powerful. It made me feel that I was attractive enough, strong enough, worthy enough to deserve that kind of desire.

And it made me feel lust, a primal need for sex so raw, so scorching, that I felt sure that if I didn’t find expression for that need—here and now—that I would surely go insane. The fires that surged up in me weren’t limited to my loins. It was simply too hot, too intense for that, and my whole body felt suddenly aflame with need. Every inch of me was suddenly supernaturally aware of Lara, in all her blood-soaked sensuality, in all her wanton desirability, pressed against me, the mostly transparent white silk of her gown doing less to conceal her nudity than the black blood of her foes.

Now, my body screamed at me. Take her. Now. Fuck the stopwatch and the bombs and the monsters. Forget everything and feel her and nothing else.

It was a close thing, but I held back enough to keep from forgetting the danger. The lust nearly killed me—but lust is an emotion, too.

I embraced that lust, allowed it to enfold me, and returned the kiss with nearly total abandon. I slid my right hand around the succubus’s waist, and down, pulling her hips hard against me, feeling the amazing strength and elasticity and rondure of her body on mine.

With my left hand, I extended the shield bracelet toward the cavern, the bombs, the onrushing ghouls—and I fed that tidal force of lust through it, building up the energy I would need, some part of me shaping and directing it even as the rest of me concentrated on the mind-consuming pleasure of that single kiss.

The clocks stopped ticking.

The explosives went off.

Cleverness, determination, treachery, ruthlessness, courage, and skill took a leave of absence, while physics took over the show.

Tremendous heat and force expanded from the explosives. It swept through the cavern in an almighty sword of fire, laying low anything unfortunate enough to have remained within. I saw, for one flash-second, the outline of the ghouls, still charging us, unaware of what was about to happen, against the white-hot fireball that expanded through the chamber.

And then that blast hit my shield.

I didn’t try to withstand that incredible sledgehammer of expanding force and energy. It would have shattered my shield, melted my bracelet to my wrist, and crushed me like an egg. The shield wasn’t meant to do that.

Instead, I filled the space at the mouth of the cave with flexible, resilient energy, and packed layer upon layer of it behind the shield, and more of it all around us. I wasn’t trying to stop the energy of the explosion.

I was trying to catch it.

There was an instant of crushing compression, and I felt the pressure on my shield like a vast and liquid weight. It flung me from my feet, and I held hard to Lara, whose arms gripped me in return. I began to tumble, blinded by the flame, and fought to hold the shield, now hardening it all around us, into a sphere, constricting it around us until we were pressed body-to-body. We hurtled up the tunnel, flung out ahead of the explosion like a ship ahead of a hurricane—or, more accurately, like a ball being fired down the barrel of a long, stony musket. The shield banged against the smooth walls, dragging more effort out of me. A single outcropping might have stopped our progress for a disastrous instant, shattering stone, shield, succubus, and shamus into one big mess. Thank God the vanity of Lara’s family had made sure the walls of the tunnel were polished smooth and gleaming.

I didn’t see the ghouls guarding the upper reaches of the tunnel, so much as I felt them hit the shield and be smashed aside and splattered like bugs, only to be consumed by the flood of fire washing up the tunnel after us. I don’t know how fast we were going, beyond “very.” The explosion flung us up the long tunnel, and out into the night air and up through the branches of a couple of trees—which shattered under the force. Then we were arcing through the night, spinning, with stars above us whipping by and a long tongue of angry flame emerging from the entrance to the Deeps below.

And all the while, I was locked in the heated ecstasy of Lara’s kiss.

I lost track of what was happening somewhere near the top of the arc, right about when Lara’s legs twined with mine and she ripped aside my shirt and hers to press her naked chest against me. I had just begun wondering what it was I’d forgotten about how kissing Lara was not the best idea when there was a horrible crashing sound that went on for several seconds.

We weren’t moving. The shield wasn’t under pressure, and I was so dizzy and tired that I couldn’t string two thoughts together. I lowered the shield with a groan of relief that was lost in an answering moan of need from the succubus in my arms.

“St-stopped,” I said. “Lara…st-stop.”

She pressed closer, parted my lips with her tongue, and I thought that I was going to explode, when she suddenly let out a hiss and recoiled from me, a hand flying to her mouth—but not before I saw the blisters rising from the burned flesh around her lips.

I fell slowly to my back and lay there gasping in the near-dark. There were several small fires nearby. We were in a building of some kind. There were a lot of broken things.

I was sure to get blamed for this one.

Lara turned away from me, huddling in upon herself. “Bloody hell,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe you’re still protected. But it’s old…. My intelligence said Ms. Rodriguez hadn’t left South America.”

“She hasn’t,” I croaked.

“You mean…” She turned and blinked at me, astonishment on her face. “Dresden…do you mean to say that the last time you had relations with a woman was nearly four years ago?”

“Depressing,” I said. “Isn’t it.”

Lara shook her head slowly. “I had just always assumed that you and Ms. Murphy…”

I grunted. “No. She…she doesn’t want to get serious with me.”

“And you don’t want to be casual with her,” Lara said.

“There’s an outside chance that I have abandonment issues,” I said.

“Still…a man like you and it’s been four years…” She shook her head. “I have enormous personal respect for you, wizard. But that’s just…sad.”

I grunted again, too tired to lip off. “Saved my life just now, I suppose.”

Lara looked back at me for a moment and then she…turned pink. “Yes. It probably did. And I owe you an apology.”

“For trying to eat me?” I said.

She shivered, and the tips of her breasts suddenly stood out against the white silk. She’d rearranged her clothes to cover them. I was too tired to feel more than a little disappointed about it. “Yes,” she said. “For losing control of myself. I confess, I thought that we were facing our last moment. I’m afraid I didn’t restrain myself very well. For that, you have my apologies.”

I looked around and realized, dimly, that we were in some part of the Raith château itself. “Hngh. I’m, uh. Sorry about the damage to your home here.”

“Under the circumstances, I’m inclined to be gracious. You saved my life.”

“You could have saved yourself,” I said quietly. “When the gate was closing. You could have left me to die. You didn’t. Thank you.”

She blinked at me as if I had just started speaking in alien tongues. “Wizard,” she said after a moment. “I gave you my word of safe passage. A member of my Court betrayed you. Betrayed us all. I could not leave you to die without forsaking my word—and I take my promises seriously, Mister Dresden.”

I stared quietly at her for a moment and then nodded. Then I said, “I notice that you didn’t go terribly far out of your way to save Cesarina Malvora.”

Her lips twitched up at the corners. “It was a difficult time. I did all that I could to protect my House and then the other members of Court in attendance. More’s the pity that I could not save that usurping, traitorous bitch.”

“You couldn’t save that usurping, traitorous Lord Skavis, either,” I noted.

“Life is change,” Lara replied quietly.

“You know what I think, Lara?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed and fastened on me.

“I think someone got together with Skavis to plan his little hunt for the low-powered-magic folks. I think someone encouraged him to do it. I think someone pointed it out as a great plan to usurp mean old Lord Raith’s power base. And then I think that same someone probably nudged Lady Malvora to move, to give her a chance to steal Lord Skavis’s thunder.”

Lara’s eyelids lowered, and her lips spread in a slow smile. “Why would someone do such a thing?”

“Because she knew that Skavis and Malvora were going to make a move soon in any case. I think she did it to divide her enemies and focus their efforts into a plan she could predict, rather than waiting upon their ingenuity. I think someone wanted to turn Skavis and Malvora against one another, keeping them too busy to undermine Raith.” I sat up, faced her, and said, “It was you. Pulling their strings. It was you who came up with the plan to kill those women.”

“Perhaps not,” Lara replied smoothly. “Lord Skavis is—was—a well-known misogynist. And he proposed a plan much like this one only a century ago.” She tapped a finger to her lips thoughtfully and then said, “And you have no way of proving otherwise.”

I stared at her for a long moment. Then I said, “I don’t need proof to act on my own.”

“Is that a threat, dear wizard?”

I looked slowly around the ruined room. There was a hole in the house, almost perfectly round, right through the floors above us and the roof four stories above. Bits and pieces were still falling. “What threat could I possibly be to you, Lara?” I drawled.

She took in a slow breath and said, “What makes you think I won’t kill you right here, right now, while you are weary and weakened? It would likely be intelligent and profitable.” She lifted her sword and ran a fingertip languidly down the flat of the blade. “Why not finish you right here?”

I showed her my teeth. “You gave me your word of safe passage.”

Lara threw back her head in a rich laugh. “So I did.” She faced me more directly, set the sword aside, and rose. “What do you want?”

“I want those people returned to life,” I spat at her. “I want to undo all the pain that’s been inflicted during this mess. I want children to get their mothers back, parents their daughters, husbands their wives. I want you and your kind never to hurt anyone ever again.”

Right in front of my eyes, she turned from a woman into a statue, cold and perfectly still. “What do you want,” she whispered, “that I might give you?”

“First, reparations. A weregild to the victims’ families,” I said. “I’ll provide you with the details for each.”

“Done.”

“Second, this never happens again. One of yours starts up with genocide again, and I’m going to reply in kind. Starting with you. I’ll have your word on it.”

Her eyes narrowed further. “Done,” she murmured.

“The little folk,” I said. “They shouldn’t be in cages. Free them, unharmed, in my name.”

She considered that for a moment, and then nodded. “Anything else?”

“Some Listerine,” I said. “I’ve got a funny taste in my mouth.”

That last remark drew more anger out of her than anything else that had happened the entire night. Her silver eyes blazed with rage, and I could feel the fury roiling around her. “Our business,” she said in a whisper, “is concluded. Get out of my house.”

I forced myself to my feet. One of the walls had fallen down, and I walked creakily over to it. My neck hurt. I guess being moved around at inhuman speed gives you whiplash.

I stopped at the hole in the wall and said, “I’m glad to preserve the peace effort,” I said, forcing the words out. “I think it’s going to save lives, Lara. Your people’s lives, and mine. I’ve got to have you where you are to get that.” I looked at her. “Otherwise, I’d settle up with you right now. Don’t get to thinking we’re friends.”

She faced me, her face all shadowed, the light of slowly growing fires lighting her from behind. “I am glad to see you survived, wizard. You who destroyed my father and secured my own power. You who have now destroyed my enemies. You are the most marvelous weapon I have ever wielded.” She tilted her head at me. “And I love peace, wizard. I love talking. Laughing. Relaxing.” Her voice dropped to a husky pitch. “I will kill your folk with peace, wizard. I will strangle them with it. And they will thank me while I do.”

A cold little spear slid neatly into my guts, but I didn’t let it show on my face or in my voice. “Not while I’m around,” I said quietly.

Then I turned and walked away from the house. I looked blearily around me, got my directions, and started limping for the front gate. On the way there, I fumbled Mouse’s whistle out of my pocket and started blowing it.

I remember my dog reaching my side, and holding on to his collar the last fifty yards or so down the road out, until Molly came sputtering up in the Blue Beetle and helped me inside.

Then I collapsed into sleep.

I’d earned it.

Chapter Forty-Three

I didn’t wake up until I was back home, and then only long enough to shamble inside and fall down on my bed. I was out for maybe six hours, and then I woke up with my whole back fused into one long, enormous muscle cramp. I made some involuntarily pathetic noises, and Mouse rose up from the floor beside my bed and jogged out of my room.

Molly appeared from the living room a moment later and said, “Harry? What’s wrong?”

“Back,” I said. “My back. Freaking vampire tart. Wrenched my neck.”

Molly nodded once and vanished. When she came back, she had a small black bag. “You were holding yourself sort of strangely last night, so after I dropped you off, I borrowed Mother’s medicine bag.” She held up a bottle. “Muscle relaxants.” A jar. “Tiger Balm.” She held up a plastic container of dust. “Herbal tea mix Shiro found in Tibet. Great for joint pain. My father swears by it.”

“Padawan,” I said, “I’m doubling your pay.”

“You don’t pay me, Harry.”

“Tripling it, then.”

She gave me a broad smile. “And I’ll be happy to get you all set up just as soon as you promise to tell me everything that happened. That you can, I mean. Oh, and Sergeant Murphy called. She wanted to know as soon as you were awake.”

“Give her a ring,” I said. “And of course I’ll tell you about it. Is there any water?”

She went and got me some, but I needed her help to sit up enough to drink it. That was embarrassing as hell. I got more embarrassed when she took my shirt off with a clinical detachment, and then winced at all the bruises. She fed me the muscle relaxants and set to with the Tiger Balm, and it hurt like hell. For about ten minutes. Then the stuff started working, and the not-pain was a drug of its own.

After a nice cup of tea—which tasted horrible, but which made it possible to move my neck within ten or twenty minutes of drinking it—I was able to get myself into the shower and get cleaned up and into fresh clothes. It was heavenly. Nothing like a nightmarish near-death experience to make you appreciate the little things in life, like cleanliness. And not being dead.

I spent a minute giving Mister some attention, though apparently he’d slept with Molly, because he accepted maybe a whole thirty seconds of stroking and then dismissed me as unnecessary once he was sure I was in one piece. Normally, he needs some time spread across someone’s lap to be himself. I ruffled Mouse for a while instead, which he enjoyed dutifully, and then got myself some food and sat down in the chair across from Molly on the couch.

“Sergeant Murphy’s on the way,” Molly reported.

“Good,” I told her quietly.

“So tell me about it.”

“You first.”

She gave me a semiexasperated look, and started talking. “I sat in the car being invisible for…maybe an hour? Mouse kept me company. Nothing much happened. Then bells started ringing and men started shouting and shooting and the lights went out. A few minutes later, there was a great big explosion—it moved the rearview mirror out of position. Then Mouse started making noise like you said he would, and we drove to the gate and he jumped out of the car and came back with you.”

I blinked at her for a minute. “That sounds really boring.”

“But scary,” Molly said. “Very tense.” She took a deep breath and said, “I had to throw up twice, just sitting there, I was so nervous. I don’t know if…if I’m going to be cut out for this kind of thing, Harry.”

“Thank God,” I said. “You’re sane.” I took a few more bites of food and then said, “But I need to know how much you want to know.”

Molly blinked and leaned toward me a little. “What?”

“There’s a lot I can tell you,” I said. “Some of it is just business. Some of it is going to be dangerous for you to know about. It might even obligate you in ways you wouldn’t like very much.”

“So you won’t tell me that part?” she asked.

“Didn’t say that,” I said. “I’m willing. But some of this stuff you’d be safer and happier not knowing. I don’t want to endanger you or trap you into feeling you have to act without giving you a choice about it.”

Molly stared at me for a minute while I gobbled cereal. Then she frowned, looked down at her hands for a minute, and said, “Maybe just tell me what you think is best. For now.”

“Good answer,” I said quietly.

And I told her about the White Court, about the challenge and the duel, about Vittorio’s betrayal and how he gated in the ghouls and how I’d had my own backup standing by in the Nevernever.

“What?” Molly said. “How did you do that?”

“Thomas,” I said. “He’s a vampire, and they have the ability to cross into the Nevernever at certain places.”

“What kind of places?” Molly asked.

“Places that are, ah,” I said, “important to them. Relevant to them in a particular way.”

“Places of lust, you mean,” Molly said.

I coughed and ate more cereal. “Yeah. And places where significant things have happened to them. In Thomas’s case, he was nearly sacrificed by a cult of porn-star sorceresses in those caves a few years a—”

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, interrupting. “But it sounded like you said ‘cult of porn-star sorceresses.’”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, giving me a skeptical look. “Sorry, then. Keep going.”

“Anyway. He nearly died there, so I knew he could find it again. He led Marcone and Murphy there, and they were camped out, waiting for me to open a gate.”

“I see,” Molly said. “And you all ganged up on this Vittorio guy and killed him?”

“Not quite,” I said, and told her what happened, leaving out any mention of Lasciel or Cowl.

Molly blinked as I finished. “Well. That explains it, then.”

“Explains what?”

“There were all kinds of little lights going by the windows all night. They didn’t upset Mouse. I thought maybe it was some kind of sending, and figured the wards would keep it out.” She shook her head. “It must have been all the little faeries.”

“They hang around all the time anyway,” I said. “It just takes a lot of them before it’s obvious enough to notice.” I chewed Cheerios thoughtfully. “More mouths to feed. Guess I’d better call Pizza ’Spress and step up my standing order, or we’ll have some kind of teeny faerie clan war over pizza rights on our hands.”

I finished breakfast, found my back stiffening again, after sitting still, and was stretching out a little when Murphy arrived. She was still in her party clothes from the night before, complete with a loaded backpack.

After kneeling down to give Mouse his hug, she surprised me. I got one, too. I surprised myself with how hard I hugged back.

Molly occasionally displayed wisdom beyond her years. She did now, taking my car keys, showing them to me, and departing without a word, firmly shutting the door behind her.

“Glad you’re okay,” I told Murphy.

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice shook a little, even on that one word, and she took a deep breath and spoke more clearly. “That was fairly awful. Even by your usual standards. You made it out all right?”

“Nothing I won’t get over,” I told her. “You had any breakfast?”

“Don’t think my stomach is up for much, after all that,” she said.

“I have Cheerios,” I said, as if I’d been saying “dark chocolate caramel almond fudge custard.”

“Oh, God.” Murphy sighed. “How can I resist.”

We sat down on the couch, with Murphy’s heavy bag on the coffee table. Murphy snacked on dry Cheerios from a bowl with her fingers. “Okay,” I told her. “First things first. Where is my gun?”

Murphy snorted and nodded at her bag. I got in and opened it. My .44 was inside. So was Murphy’s boxy little submachine gun. I picked it up and eyed it, then lifted it experimentally to my shoulder. “What the hell kind of gun is this?”

“It’s a P90,” Murphy said.

“See-through plastic?” I asked.

“That’s the magazine,” she said. “You can always see how many rounds you have left.”

I grunted. “It’s tiny.”

“On a hyperthyroid stork like you, sure,” Murphy said.

I frowned and said, “Full automatic. Ah. Is this weapon precisely legal? Even for you?”

She snorted. “No.”

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“Kincaid,” she said. “Last year. Gave it to me in a box of Belgian chocolate.”

I took the weapon down from my shoulder, flipped it over, and eyed a little engraved plate on the butt. “‘We’ll always have Hawaii,’” I read aloud. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Murphy’s cheeks turned pink. She took the gun from me, put it in the bag, and zipped it firmly closed. “Did we ever decide who blew up my car?”

“Probably Madrigal,” I said. “You stood him up for that cup of coffee, remember?”

“Because he was busy kidnapping you and attempting to sell you on eBay,” Murphy said.

I shrugged. “Vindictive doesn’t equal rational.”

Murphy frowned, the suspicious-cop look on her face something I was long used to seeing. “Maybe. But it doesn’t feel right. He liked his vengeance personal.”

“Who then?” I asked. “Vittorio wasn’t interested in drawing out the cops. Neither was Lord Skavis’s agent. Lara Raith and Marcone don’t do bombs.”

“Exactly,” Murphy said. “If not Madrigal, then who?”

“Life is a mystery?” I suggested. “It was probably Madrigal. Maybe one of the others had a reason for it that we don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I hate that.” She shook her head. “Harry, wouldn’t a decent human being be inquiring after his wounded friends and allies about now?”

“I assumed if there was bad news, you’d have told me already,” I said.

She gave me a steady look. “That,” she said, “is so archetypically male.”

I grinned. “How is everyone?”

“Ramirez is in the hospital. Same floor as Elaine, actually, and we’re watching them both. Unofficially, of course.”

We meaning the cops. Murphy. Good people. “How is he?”

“Still had some surgery to go, when I left, but the doctor said his prognosis was excellent, as long as they can avoid infection. He got his guts opened up by that knife. That can always be tricky.”

I grunted, and had my suspicions about where Molly had gone when she borrowed my car. “He’ll make it. What about that poor no-neck you abused?”

“Mister Hendricks is there with two of those mercenaries. Marcone has some of his people guarding them, too.”

“Cops and robbers,” I said. “One big, happy family.”

“One wonders,” Murphy said, “why Marcone agreed to help.”

I settled back on the couch and rubbed at the back of my neck with one hand, closing my eyes. “I bribed him.”

“With what?” Murphy asked.

“A seat at the table,” I said quietly.

“Huh?”

“I offered Marcone a chance to sign on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord.”

Murphy was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “He wants to keep expanding his power.” She thought about it a minute more and said, “Or he thinks his power might be threatened from someone on that end.”

“Someone like the vampires,” I said. “The Red Court had de facto control of prostitution in Chicago until Bianca’s place burned down. And an agent of the White Court has just shown up and killed one of his prostitutes.”

“Are we sure it was Madrigal?”

“I am,” I said. “No way to prove it, but he was the Raith involved in this mess.”

“That was more or less an accident,” Murphy said. “Taking out one of Marcone’s people, I mean.”

“She’s just as dead,” I replied. “And Marcone won’t stand by when someone—anyone—kills one of his own.”

“How does becoming a…what was it? And how does it help?”

“Freeholding lord,” I said. “It means he’s entitled to rights under the Accords—like rights of challenge when someone kills his employees. It means that if a supernatural power tries to move in on him, he’ll have an opportunity to fight it and actually win.”

“Are there many of these lords?”

“Nope,” I said. “I had Bob look into it. Maybe twenty on the whole planet. Two dragons, Drakul—the original, not baby Vlad—the Archive, the CEO of Monoc Securities, some kind of semi-immortal shapeshifter guru in the Ukraine, people like that. The Accords let them sign on as individuals. They have the same rights and obligations. Most people who consider the idea aren’t willing to agree to be a good, traditional host for, let’s say, a group of Black Court vampires, and don’t want to get caught up as a mediator in a dispute between the major powers. They don’t want to make themselves the targets of possible challenges, either, so not many of them even try it.” I rubbed at my jaw. “And no one who is just a vanilla human being has tried it. Marcone is breaking new ground.”

Murphy shook her head. “And you were able to set him up for it?”

“You have to have three current members of the Accords vouch for you to sign on,” I said. “I told him I’d be one of them.”

“You can speak for the Council in this?”

“When it comes to defending and protecting my area of responsibility as a Warden, I damned well can. If the Council doesn’t like it, they shouldn’t have dragooned me into the job.”

Murphy chewed on some Cheerios, scrunched up her nose in thought, and then gave me a shrewd look. “You’re using Marcone.”

I nodded. “It’s only a matter of time before someone like Lara Raith tries to push for more power in Chicago. Sooner or later they’ll swamp me in numbers, and we both know SI will always have their hands tied by red tape and politics. If Marcone signs the Accords, he’ll have a strong motivation to oppose any incursion—and the means to do so.”

“But he’s going to use his new means to secure his position here even more firmly,” Murphy said quietly. “Make new allies, probably. Gain new resources.”

“Yeah. He’s using me, too.” I shook my head. “It isn’t a perfect solution.”

“No,” Murphy said. “It isn’t.”

“But he’s the devil we know.”

Neither of us said anything for several minutes.

“Yes,” Murphy admitted. “He is.”

Murphy dropped me off at the hospital and I headed straight for Elaine’s room.

I found her inside, dressing. She was just pulling a pair of jeans up over strong, slender legs that looked just as good as I remembered. When I opened the door, she spun, thorn-wand in hand.

I put my hands up and said, “Easy there, gunslinger. I’m not looking for any trouble.”

Elaine gave me a gentle glare and slipped the wand into a small leather case that clipped to the jeans. She did not look well, but she looked a lot weller than she had the last time I’d seen her. Her face was still quite pale and her eyes were sunken and bruised, but she moved with brisk purpose for all of that. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” she said.

“If I’d knocked, I might have woken you up.”

“If you’d knocked, you’d have missed out on an outside chance of seeing me getting dressed,” she shot back.

“Touché.” I glanced around and spotted her bag, all packed. My stomach twisted a little in disappointment. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

She shook her head. “Have you ever tried to watch daytime television? I was glad when the set finally blew. I’d lose my mind just lying here.”

“How you feeling?”

“A lot better,” Elaine said. “Stronger. Which is another reason to leave. I don’t want to have a nightmare and have my powers kill some poor grampa’s respirator.”

I nodded. “So it’s back to California?”

“Yes. I’ve done enough damage for one trip.”

I folded my arms and leaned against the door, watching her brush back her hair enough to get it into a tail. She didn’t look at me when she asked, “Did you get them?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She closed her eyes, shivered, and exhaled. “Okay.” She shook her head. “That shouldn’t make me feel better. It won’t help Anna.”

“It will help a lot of other people in the long run,” I said.

She abruptly slammed the brush against the rail of the bed, snapping it. “I wasn’t here trying to help a lot of other people, dammit.” She glanced down at the brush’s handle and seemed to deflate for a moment. She tossed it listlessly into a corner.

I went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “This just in. Elaine isn’t perfect. News at eleven.”

She leaned her cheek on my hand.

“You should know,” I said. “I got reparations out of the White Court. A weregild for their dependents.”

She blinked at me. “How?”

“My boyish charm. Can you get me contact information for the victims’ families? I’ll get somebody to get the money to them.”

“Yes,” she said. “Some of them didn’t have any dependents. Like Anna.”

I grunted and nodded. “I thought we might use that money to build something.”

Elaine frowned at me. “Oh?”

I nodded. “We use the money. We expand the Ordo, build a network of contacts. A hotline for middle-class practitioners. We contact groups like the Ordo in cities all around the country. We put the word out that if people are in some kind of supernatural fix, they can get word of it onto the network. Maybe if something like this starts happening again, we can hear about it early and stomp on the fire before it grows. We teach self-defense classes. We help people coordinate, cooperate, support one another. We act.”

Elaine chewed on her lip and looked up at me uncertainly. “We?”

“You said you wanted to help people,” I said. “This might. What do you think?”

She stood up, leaned up onto her toes, and kissed me gently on the lips before staring into my eyes, her own very wide and bright. “I think,” she said quietly, “that Anna would have liked that.”

Ramirez woke up late that evening, swathed in bandages, his injured leg in traction, and I was sitting next to his bed when he did. It was a nice switch for me. Usually I was the one waking up into disorientation, confusion, and pain.

I gave him a few minutes to get his bearings before I leaned forward and said, “Hey, there, man.”

“Harry,” he rasped. “Thirsty.”

Before he was finished saying it, I picked up the little sports bottle of ice water they’d left next to his bed. I put the straw between his lips and said, “Can you hold it, or should I do it for you?”

He managed a small glare, fumbled a hand up, and held on to the bottle weakly. He sipped some of the water, then laid his head back on the pillow. “Okay,” he said. “How bad is it?”

“Alas,” I said. “You’ll live.”

“Where?”

“Hospital,” I said. “You’re stable. I’ve called Listens-to-Wind, and he’s going to come pick you up in the morning.”

“We win?”

“Bad guys go boom,” I said. “The White King is still on his throne. Peace process is going to move ahead.”

“Tell me.”

So I gave him the battle’s last few minutes, except for Lash’s role in things.

“Harry Dresden,” Ramirez murmured, “the human cannonball.”

“Bam, zoom, right to the moon.”

He smiled a little. “You get Cowl?”

“Doubt it,” I said. “He was right by his gate. When he saw me running for the exit, ten to one he just stepped back through it and zipped it shut. In fact, I’m pretty sure he did. If there’d been an open gate there, the blast would have been able to spread into it. I don’t think we would have been thrown so far.”

“How about Vitto?”

I shook my head. “Vitto was pretty far gone even before the bombs went off. I’m pretty sure we nailed him, and those ghouls, too.”

“Good thing you had that army on standby, huh,” Ramirez said, a faint edge to his voice.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s late. I should let you get some rest.”

“No,” Ramirez said, his voice stronger. “We need to talk.”

I sat there for a minute, bracing myself. Then I said, “About what.”

“About how tight you are with the vamps,” he said. “About you making deals with scumbag mobsters. I recognized Marcone. I’ve seen his picture in the papers.” Ramirez shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Harry. We’re supposed to be on the same team. It’s called trust, man.”

I wanted to spit something hostile and venomous and well deserved. I toned myself down to saying, “Gee. A Warden doesn’t trust me. That’s a switch.”

Ramirez blinked at me. “What?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it,” I said. “I had Morgan sticking his nose into every corner of my existence for my entire adult life.”

Ramirez stared at me for a second. Then he let out a weak snort and said, “All hail the drama queen. Harry…” He shook his head. “I’m talking about you not trusting me, man.”

My increasingly angry retort died unspoken. “Uh. What?”

Ramirez shook his head wearily. “Let me make some guesses. One. You don’t trust the Council. You never have, but lately, it’s been worse. Especially since New Mexico. You think that whoever is leaking information to the vampires is pretty high up, and the less anyone in the Council knows about what you’re doing, the better.”

I stared at him and said nothing.

“Two. There’s a new player in the game. Cowl’s on the new team. We don’t know who they are, but they seem to have a hard-on for screwing over everyone equally—vampires, mortals, wizards, whoever.” He sighed. “You aren’t the only one who’s been noticing these things, Harry.”

I grunted. “What do you call them?”

“The Black Hats, after our Ringwraith-wannabe buddy, Cowl. You?”

“The Black Council,” I said.

“Oooh,” Ramirez muttered. “Yours is better.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“So you can’t trust our own people,” he said. “But you’re cutting deals with the vampires….” He narrowed his eyes. “You think you might be able to find the traitor coming in from the other side.”

I put my finger on my nose.

“And the gangster?” Ramirez asked.

“He’s a snake,” I said. “But his word is good. And Madrigal and Vitto had killed one of his people. And I know he isn’t working for Cowl’s organization.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Marcone works for Marcone.”

Ramirez spread his hands weakly. “Was that so damned hard, Dresden? To talk to me?”

I settled back in my chair. My shoulders suddenly felt loose and wobbly. I breathed in and out a few times, and then said, “No.”

Ramirez snorted gently. “Idiot.”

“So,” I said. “Think I should come clean to the Merlin?”

Ramirez opened one eye. “Are you kidding? He hates your guts. He’d have you declared a traitor, locked up, and executed before you got through the first paragraph.” He closed his eye again. “But I’m with you, man. All the way.”

You don’t have much endurance after going through something like Ramirez had. He was asleep before he realized it was about to happen.

I sat with him for the rest of the night, until Senior Council Member Listens-to-Wind arrived with his team of medical types before dawn the next morning.

You don’t leave an injured friend all alone.

The next day, I knocked on the door to the office at Executive Priority and went in without waiting for an answer.

“Tonight you will be visited by three spirits,” I announced. “The ghosts of indictment past, present, and future. They will teach you the true meaning of ‘you are still a scumbag criminal.’”

Marcone was there, sitting behind the desk with Helen Beckitt, or maybe Helen Demeter, I supposed. She wore her professionally suggestive business suit—and was sitting across Marcone’s lap. Her hair and suit looked slightly mussed. Marcone had his third shirt button undone.

I cursed my timing. If I’d come ten minutes later, I’d have opened the door in medias res. It would have been infinitely more awkward.

“Dresden,” Marcone said, his tone pleasant. Helen made no move to stir from where she was. “It’s nice to see you alive. Your sense of humor, of course, remains unchanged, which is unsurprising, as it seems to have died in your adolescence. Presumably it entered a suicide pact with your manners.”

“Your good opinion,” I said, “means the world to me. I see you got out of the Nevernever.”

“Simple enough,” Marcone said. “I had to shoot a few of the vampires, once we were clear of the fight. I did not appreciate the way they were attempting to coerce my employees.”

“Hell’s bells.” I sighed. “Did you kill any of them?”

“Unnecessary. I shot them enough to make my point. After that, we had an adequate understanding of one another—much as you and I do.”

“I understand that you settled matters with Anna’s killers, Mister Dresden,” Helen said. “With help, of course.”

Marcone smiled his unreadable little smile at me.

“The people who did the deed won’t be bothering anyone anymore,” I said. “And most of the people who motivated them have gone into early retirement.” I glanced at Marcone. “With help.”

“But not all of them?” Helen asked, frowning.

“Everyone we could make answer,” Marcone said, “has answered. It is unlikely we could accomplish more.”

Something made me say, “And I’m taking steps to prevent or mitigate this kind of circumstance in the future. Here and elsewhere.”

Helen tilted her head at me, taking that in. Then she nodded and said, very quietly, “Thank you.”

“Helen,” Marcone said. “Would you be so good as to excuse us for a few moments.”

“Won’t take long,” I added. “I don’t like being here.”

Helen smiled slightly at me and rose smoothly from Marcone’s lap. “If it makes you feel any better, Mister Dresden, you should know that he dislikes having you here as well.”

“You should see how much my insurance premiums go up after your visits, Dresden.” He shook his head. “And they call me an extortionist. Helen, could you send Bonnie in with that file?”

“Certainly.”

Helen left. Healthy brunette Bonnie, in her oh-so-fetching exercise outfit, bounced in with a manila folder, gave me a Colgate smile, and departed again. Marcone opened the folder, withdrew a stack of papers, and started flicking through them. He got to the last page, turned it around, slid it across the desk, and produced a pen from his pocket. “Here is the contract you faxed me. Sign here, please.”

I walked over to the desk, took the entire stack, and started reading it from page one. You never sign a contract you haven’t read, even if you aren’t a wizard. If you are one, it’s even more important than that. People joke about signing away their soul or their firstborn. In my world, it’s possible.

Marcone seemed to accept that. He made a steeple of his fingers and waited with the relaxed patience of a well-fed cat.

The contract was the standard one for approving a new signatory of the Accords, and though he’d had it retyped, Marcone hadn’t changed a word. Probably. I kept reading. “So you suggested the name Demeter for Helen?” I asked as I read.

Marcone’s expression never changed. “Yes.”

“How’s Persephone?”

He stared at me.

“Persephone,” I said. “Demeter’s daughter. She was carried away by the Lord of the Underworld.”

Marcone’s stare became cold.

“He kept her there in Hades, but Demeter froze the whole world until the other gods convinced him to return Persephone to her mother.” I turned a page. “The girl. The one in the coma, who you’re keeping in a hospital somewhere, and visiting every week. That’s Helen’s daughter, isn’t it. The one who got caught in the cross fire of one of your shoot-outs.”

Marcone didn’t move.

“Newspaper file on it said she was killed,” I said.

I read several more pages before Marcone answered. “Tony Vargassi, my predecessor, I suppose, had a son. Marco. Marco decided that I had become a threat to his standing in the organization. He was the shooter.”

“But the girl,” I said, “didn’t die.”

Marcone shook his head. “It put Vargassi in an awkward position. If the girl recovered, she might identify his son as the shooter, and no jury in the world would fail to send a thug to jail who’d shot a pretty little girl. But if the girl died, and it came back on Marco, he’d be looking at a murder charge.”

“And someone who murders little girls gets the needle in Illinois,” I said.

“Exactly. There was a great deal of corruption at the time—”

I snorted.

Marcone’s little smile returned for a moment. “Pardon me. Say instead that the Vargassis exerted their influence on official matters with a heavy hand. Vargassi had the little girl declared dead. He convinced the medical examiner to sign false paperwork, and he hid the girl away in another hospital.”

I grunted. “If Marco got identified as the shooter and put up for trial, Vargassi could produce the little girl. Look, she’s not dead. Mistrial.”

“One possibility,” Marcone replied. “And if things went quietly for a while, he could simply delete her records.”

“And her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Whatever happened to old Tony Vargassi?” I asked.

I saw a flash of Marcone’s teeth. “His whereabouts are unknown. As are Marco’s.”

“When did you find out about the girl?”

“Two years later,” he said. “Everything was set up through a dummy corporation’s trust fund. She could have just…” He looked away from me. “Just lain there. Indefinitely. No one would have known who she was. Known her name.”

“Does Helen know?” I asked him.

He shook his head. He was quiet for a moment more. “I can’t return Persephone from Hades. The child’s death almost destroyed Helen—and her world is still frozen. If she knew her daughter was…trapped…just lying there in a half-life…” He shook his head. “It would shatter her world, Dresden. And I shouldn’t wish that.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said quietly, “that most of the young ladies working here would be about the same age as her daughter.”

“Yes,” Marcone said.

“That isn’t exactly a healthy recovery.”

“No,” Marcone said. “But it’s what she has.”

I thought about it while I kept reading. Maybe Helen deserved to know about her daughter. Hell, she probably did. But whatever else Marcone was, he was no fool. If he thought news of her daughter’s fate might shatter Helen, he was probably right. Sure, she should know. But did I have the right to make that decision?

Probably not—even if Marcone wouldn’t do his best to have me killed if I tried. Hell, I probably had less right to decide than Marcone. He had way more invested in the girl and her fate than I did.

Because that was the secret I’d seen in a soulgaze with Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, years ago. The secret that gave him the strength and the will to rule the mean streets.

He felt responsible for the little girl who’d taken a bullet meant for him.

He’d taken over Chicago crime with ruthless efficiency, always cutting down on the violence. A couple of people had been hurt in gang-related crimes. The gangsters responsible hadn’t been heard from again. I’d always assumed it was because Marcone had decided to manipulate matters, to make himself appear to be a preferable alternative to more careless criminals who might take his place if the cops took him down.

I’d never even considered the idea that he might actually give a crap about innocents being harmed.

Granted, that didn’t change anything. He still ran a business that killed far more people than any amount of collateral damage. He was still a criminal. Still a bad guy.

But…

He was the devil I knew. And he probably could have been worse.

I got to the last page of the contract and found spaces for three signatures. Two of them were already filled.

“Donar Vadderung?” I asked Marcone.

“Current CEO of Monoc Securities,” Marcone replied. “Oslo.”

“And Lara Raith,” I murmured.

“Signing on behalf of her father, the White King, who is obviously in charge of the White Court.” There was a trace of irony in Marcone’s voice. He hadn’t been fooled by the puppet show.

I looked at the third open line.

Then I signed it, and left without another word.

It isn’t a perfect world. I’m doing the best I can.

“Hmmmm,” said Bob the Skull, peering at my left hand. “It looks like…”

I was sitting in my lab, my hand spread open on the table, while the skull examined my palm.

I’d worn a mark there for years—an unblemished patch of skin amidst all the burn scars, in the perfect shape of the angelic sigil that was Lasciel’s name.

The mark was gone.

In its place was just an irregular patch of unburned skin.

“It looks like there’s no mark there anymore,” Bob said.

I sighed. “Thank you, Bob,” I said. “It’s good to have a professional opinion.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Bob said. The skull swiveled around on the table and tilted up to look at my face. “Hmmmmm. And you say the entity isn’t responding to you anymore?”

“No. And she’s always jumped every time I said frog.”

“Interesting,” Bob said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, from what you told me, this psychic attack the entity blocked for you was quite severe.”

I shivered, remembering. “Yeah.”

“And the process she used to accelerate your brain and shield you was traumatic as well.”

“Right. She said it could cause me brain damage.”

“Uh-huh,” Bob said. “I think it did.”

“Huh?”

“See what I mean?” Bob asked cheerfully. “You’re thicker already.”

“Harry get hammer,” I said. “Smash stupid talky skull.”

For a guy with no legs, Bob backpedals swiftly and gracefully. “Easy there, chief; don’t get excited. But the brain damage thing is for real.”

I frowned. “Explain, please.”

“Well, I told you that the entity in your head was like a recording of the real Lasciel, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That recording was written in your brain, in portions you weren’t using.”

“Right.”

“I think that’s where the damage is. I mean, I’m looking at you right now, and your head has been riddled with tiny holes, boss.”

I blinked and rubbed my fingers over my scalp. “It doesn’t feel like that.”

“That’s because your brain doesn’t sense injuries. It manages sensing injuries for the rest of you. But trust me, there’s damage. I think it wiped out the entity.”

“Wiped out…you mean, like…”

“Killed it,” Bob said. “Technically, it was never alive, but it was constructed. It’s been deconstructed, and…”

I frowned. “And what?”

“And there’s, um, a portion of you missing.”

“I’m sure I would have felt that,” I said.

“Not your body,” Bob said scornfully. “Your life force. Your chi. Your soul.”

“Whoa, wait a minute. Part of my soul is gone?”

Bob sighed. “People get all excited when you use that word. The part of you that is more than merely physical, yes. You can call it whatever you want. There’s some missing, and it’s nothing to panic over.”

“Part of my soul is gone and I’m not supposed to be worried about that?” I demanded.

“Happens all the time,” Bob said. “You shared a bunch of yours with Susan, and she with you. It’s what protected you from Lara Raith. You and Murphy swapped some pretty recently, looks like—you must have gotten a hug or something. Honestly, Harry, you really ought to bang her and get it over wi—”

I reached under the worktable, drew out a claw hammer, and gave Bob a pointed look.

“Um, right,” he said. “Back to business. Uh, your soul. You give away pieces of yourself all the time. Everyone does. Some of it goes out with your magic, too. It grows back. Relax, boss.”

“If it’s no big deal,” I said, “then why is it so interesting?”

“Oh, well,” Bob said. “It is energy, you know. And I wonder if maybe…maybe…well, look, Harry. There was a tiny bit of Lasciel’s energy in you, supporting the entity, giving you access to Hellfire. That’s gone now, but the entity had to have had some kind of power source to turn against the essence of its own originator.”

“So it was running off my soul? Like I’m some kind of battery?”

“Hey,” Bob said, “don’t get all righteous. You gave it to her. Encouraging her to make her own choices, to rebel, to exercise free will.” Bob shook his head. “Free will is horrible, Harry, believe me. I’m glad I don’t have it. Ugh, no, thank you. But you gave her some. You gave her a name. The will came with it.”

I was quiet for a moment, then said, “And she used it to kill herself.”

“Sort of,” Bob said. “She chose which areas of your brain were going to take the worst beating. She took a psychic bullet for you. I guess it’s almost the same thing as choosing to die.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said quietly. “She didn’t choose to die. She chose to be free.”

“Maybe that’s why they call it free will,” Bob said. “Hey, tell me that at least you got a pony ride before the carnival left town. I mean, she could have made you see and feel anything at all, and…” Bob paused, and his eyelights blinked. “Hey, Harry. Are you crying?”

“No,” I snapped, and left the lab.

The apartment felt…very empty.

I sat down with my guitar and tried to sort out my thoughts. It was hard. I was feeling all kinds of anger and confusion and sadness. I kept telling myself that it was the emotional fallout of Malvora’s psychic assault, but it’s one thing to repeat that to yourself over and over, and quite another to sit there feeling awful.

I started playing.

Beautifully.

It wasn’t perfect performance—a computer can do that. It wasn’t a terribly complex bit of music. My fingers didn’t suddenly regain their complete dexterity—but the music became alive. My hands moved with a surety and confidence I usually felt only in bursts a few seconds long. I played a second piece, and then a third, and every time my rhythm was on, and I found myself seeing and using new nuances, variations on chords that lent depth and color to the simple pieces I could play—sweet sadness to the minor chords, power to the majors, stresses and resolutions I’d always heard in my head, but could never express in life.

It was almost like someone had opened a door in my head, like they were helping me along.

I heard a very, very faint whisper, like an echo of Lash’s voice.

Everything I can, dear host.

I played for a while longer, before gently setting aside my guitar.

Then I went to call Father Forthill and tell him to come over, so that he could pick up the blackened denarius as soon as I dug it out of my basement.

I picked up Thomas outside his apartment and tailed him as he crossed town. He took the El over toward the Loop, and hit the sidewalks again. He looked tense, and paler than usual. He’d blown an awful lot of energy killing those ghouls, and I knew he’d have to feed—maybe dangerously—to recover what he’d lost.

I’d called him the day after the battle and tried to talk to him, but he’d remained reticent, remote. I’d told him I was worried about him, after blowing that much energy. He’d hung up on me. He’d cut short two more calls since.

So, being as how I am a smart and sensitive guy who respects his brother’s feelings, I was tailing him to find out what the hell he was trying so hard not to talk to me about. This way, I was sparing him all the effort and trouble of telling me about it by finding out all on my own. Like I said, I’m sensitive. And thoughtful. And maybe a little stubborn.

Thomas wasn’t being very careful. I would have expected him to move around the city like a long-tailed cat at a rocking chair convention, but he sort of trudged along, fashionable in his dark slacks and loose, deep crimson shirt, his hands in his pockets, his hair hiding his face most of the time.

Even so, he attracted more than a little feminine attention. He was like a walking, talking cologne commercial, except that even silent and standing he was making women look over their shoulders at him, while coyly rearranging their hair.

He finally stalked into the Park Tower, and went into a trendy little boutique-slash–coffee shop calling itself the Coiffure Cup. I checked a clock, and thought about following him in. I could see a few people inside, where a coffee bar backed up to the front window. A couple of fairly pretty girls were getting things set up behind the counter, but I couldn’t see any more than that.

I found a spot where I could watch the door and loomed unobtrusively—which is easier than you’d think, even when you’re as tall as I am. A couple of women whose hair and nails screamed “beautician” came in later. The boutique opened for business a few minutes after Thomas got there, and immediately began doing a brisk trade. A lot of evidently wealthy, terribly attractive, generally young women started coming and going.

It put me in a quandary. On the one hand, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt because my brother had exerted himself so furiously on my behalf. On the other, I didn’t particularly care to go in and find my brother lording it over a roomful of worshipful women like some dark god of lust and shadow.

I chewed on my lip for a while, and decided to go on in. If Thomas had…if he had become the kind of monster his family generally did, I owed it to him to try to talk some sense into him. Or pound it in. Whichever.

I pushed open the door to the Coiffure Cup and was immediately, pleasantly assaulted by the aroma of coffee. There was techno music playing, thumping bouncily and mindlessly positive. The front room contained the coffee bar, a few little tables, and a little podium next to a heavy curtain. Even as I came in, one of the young women behind the bar came out to me, gave me a bubbly, caffeinated smile, and said, “Hi! Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said, glancing back at the curtains. “Um, I just need to talk to someone. One second.”

“Sir,” she said in protest, and tried to hurry into my path. My legs were longer. I gave her a smile and outdistanced her, pushing the curtain aside.

The techno music grew a little louder as I went through. The back room of the boutique smelled the way boutiques always do, of various tonsorial chemicals. A dozen styling stations, all in use, stood six on a side, marching up to a rather large and elaborate station on a little raised platform. At the base of the little platform was a pedicure station, and a young woman with a mud mask, and cucumber slices, and a body posture of blissful relaxation was lounging through a pedicure. On the other side, another young woman was under a dryer, reading a magazine, her expression heavy and relaxed with that postcoiffure glow. On the main chair on the platform, a deluxe number that leaned back to a custom shampoo sink, another young woman lay back with a blissful expression while having her hair washed.

By Thomas.

He was chatting with her amiably as he worked, and she was in the middle of a little laugh when I came in. He leaned down and said something in her ear, and though I couldn’t hear the substance of it, it came across in an unmistakable just-us-girls kind of tone, and she laughed again, replying in a similar manner.

Thomas laughed and turned away, practically prancing over to a tray of…styling implements, I supposed. He came back with a towel and, I swear to God, a dozen bobby pins held in his lips. He rinsed her hair and started pinning.

“Sir!” protested the coffee girl, who had followed me into the room.

Everyone stopped and looked at me. Even the woman with the cucumbers over her eyes took one of them off and peered at me.

Thomas froze. His eyes widened to the size of hand mirrors. He swallowed, and the bobby pins fell out of his mouth.

All the women looked back and forth between us, and there was an immediate buzz of whispers and quiet talks.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

“O-oh,” Thomas said. “Ah-ree.”

One of the stylists glanced back and forth between us and said, “Thomas.” (She pronounced it Toe-moss.) “Who is your friend?”

Friend. Oy vey. I rubbed at the bridge of my nose with one hand. I was never going to get away from this one. Not if I lived to be five hundred.

Thomas and I sat down at a table over cups of coffee.

“This?” I asked him without preamble. “This is your mysterious job? This is the moneymaking scam?”

“It was cosmetology school first,” Thomas said. He spoke in a French accent so thick that it barely qualified as English. “And night work as a security guard in a warehouse where no one else ever showed up, to pay for it.”

I rubbed at my nose again. “And then…this? Here I’m thinking you’ve created your own batch of personal thralls while running around as a hired killer or something, and…you’re washing hair?”

It was difficult to keep my voice quiet, but I made the effort. There were too many ears in that little place.

Thomas sighed. “Well. Yes. Washing, cutting, styling, dying. I do it all, baby.”

“I’ll bet.” Then it hit me. “That’s how you’re feeding,” I said. “I thought that took…”

“Sex?” Thomas asked. He shook his head. “Intimacy. Trust. And believe me, next to sex, washing and styling a woman’s hair is about as intimate as you can get with her.”

“You’re still feeding on them,” I said.

“It isn’t the same, Harry. It isn’t as dangerous—more like…sipping, I suppose, than taking bites. I can’t take very much, or very quickly. But I’m here all day and it…” He shivered. “It adds up.” He opened his eyes and met mine. “And there’s no chance I’m going to lose control of myself. They’re safe.” He shrugged a shoulder. “They just enjoy it.”

I watched the woman who’d been under the hair dryer come out, smile at Thomas, and pick up a cup of coffee on the way out. She looked…well, radiant, really. Confident. She looked like she felt sexy and beautiful, and it was quite pleasant to watch her move while she did.

Thomas watched her go with what I recognized as his look of quiet possession and pride. “They enjoy it a lot.” He gave me one of his brief, swift grins. “I imagine there’s a lot of husbands and boyfriends enjoying it, too.”

“But they’re addicted to it, I’d imagine.”

He shrugged again. “Some, maybe. I try to spread myself around as much as I can. It isn’t a perfect solution—”

“But it’s the one you’ve got,” I said. I frowned. “What happens when you try to wash somebody’s hair and it turns out that they’re in love? Protected?”

“True love isn’t as common as you’d think,” Thomas said. “Especially among people rich enough to afford me and superficial enough to think that it is money well spent.”

“But when they do show?” I asked.

“That’s why I’ve got all the hired help, man. I know what I’m doing.”

I shook my head. “All this time and…” I snorted and sipped at some coffee. It was amazing. Smooth and rich and just sweet enough, and it probably cost more than a whole fast-food meal. “They all think I’m your lover, don’t they.”

“This is a trendy, upper-class boutique, Harry. No one expects a man with a place like this to be straight.”

“Uh-huh. And the accent, Toe-moss?”

He smiled. “No one would pay that much money to an American stylist. Please.” He shrugged. “It’s superficial and silly, but true.” He glanced around, suddenly self-conscious. His voice lowered, and his accent dropped. “Look. I know it’s a lot to ask….”

It was an effort not to laugh at him, but I managed to give him a hard look, sigh, and say, “Your secret is safe with me.”

He looked relieved. “Merci.”

“Hey,” I said. “Can you stop by my place tonight after work? I’m putting something together that might help people if someone else starts something like those White Court bozos just tried. I thought maybe you’d want to be in on it.”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, we can talk about it.”

I sipped more coffee. “Maybe Justine could help, too. Might be a way to get her out, if you want to do it.”

“Are you kidding?” Thomas asked. “She’s been working for a year to get closer to Lara.”

I blinked up at him. “Hell’s bells, I thought she was acting weird,” I said. “She came on all zonked out, like the mindless party girl, but she dropped it a couple of times, where I could see. I just put it down to, well. Weirdness.”

He shook his head. “She’s been getting information to me. Nothing huge, so far.”

“Does Lara know about her?”

Thomas shook his head. “She hasn’t tipped to it yet. Justine is, as far as Lara is concerned, still one more helpless little doe.” He glanced up. “I talked it over with her. She wants to stay. She’s Lara’s assistant, most of the time.”

I exhaled slowly. Holy crap. If Justine stayed in place, and was willing to report on what she knew…intelligence gathered at that level could turn the entire course of the war—because even if the White Court’s peace proposal went through, it just meant a shift in focus and strategy. The vamps weren’t about to let up.

“Dangerous,” I said quietly.

“She wants to do it,” he said.

I shook my head. “I take it you’ve been in touch with Lara?”

“Of course,” Thomas said. “Given my recent heroism”—his voice turned wry—“in defense of the White King, I am now in favor in the Court. The prodigal son has been welcomed home with open arms.”

“Really?”

“Well,” Thomas amended, “with reluctant, irritated arms, anyway. Lara’s miffed about the Deeps.”

“Guess the bombs weren’t good for them.”

Thomas’s teeth showed. “The whole place just collapsed in on itself. There’s a huge hole in the ground, the plumbing at the manor got torn up, and the foundation cracked. It’s going to cost a fortune to fix it.”

“Poor Lara,” I said. “No more convenient corpse-disposal facilities.”

He laughed. “It’s nice to see her exasperated. She’s usually so self-assured.”

“I have a gift.”

He nodded. “You do.” We sat quietly for a few minutes.

“Thomas,” I said, finally, gesturing at the room. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

He shrugged and looked down. “At first? Because it was humiliating. I mean…working nights to put myself through cosmetology school? Starting my own place and posing as…” He waved a hand down at himself. “I thought…I don’t know. At first I thought you’d disapprove or…laugh at me or something.”

I kept a straight face. “No. Never.”

“And after that…well. I’d been keeping secrets. I didn’t want you to think I didn’t trust you.”

I snorted. “In other words you didn’t trust me. To understand.”

His cheeks turned very slightly pink and he looked down. “Um. I guess so, yeah. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He closed his eyes and nodded and said, “Thanks, Harry.”

I put a hand on his shoulder for a second, then dropped it again. Nothing else needed to be said.

Thomas gave me a suspicious look. “Now you’re going to laugh at me.”

“I can wait until you’ve turned your back, if you like.”

He grinned at me again. “It’s all right. I sort of stopped caring about it after I got fed steady for a few weeks straight. Feels too nice not to be starving again. Laugh all you want.”

I looked around the place for a minute more. The coffee girls were having a private conversation, evidently discussing us, if all the covert glances and quiet little smiles were any indication.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing, and it felt good.

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 first two books of the Codex Alera, Furies of Calderon and Academ’s Fury, as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.

—Jim

Furies of Calderon and Academ’s Fury are available in paperback from Ace Books.

SMALL FAVOR

ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

THE DRESDEN FILES

STORM FRONT

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

JIM BUTCHER

SMALL FAVOR

A NOVEL OF THE DRESDEN FILES

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published 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

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, En gland

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2008

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATA LOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Butcher, Jim, 1971–

Small favor: a novel of the Dresden files /Jim Butcher.

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-101-12862-3

1. Dresden, Harry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Wizards—Fiction. 3. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.U85S63 2008

813'.6—dc22       2007042136

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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 publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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.

For the forum-going fans at jim-butcher.com. I’m pretty sure your bosses would be upset if they saw your posting stats, guys, but I won’t tell if you won’t.

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

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Many folks deserve thanks as usual, particularly my family, who has to put up with my insanity during deadline crunches; my agent, Jenn, who has to make excuses to my editor when I’m late; and my editor, Anne, who in turn has to make excuses for me to her bosses; plus the Beta Asylum, who have the ongoing task of pointing out warts on my babies. The lunatics.

This time I have to add new folks to the list—the local and visiting players at NERO Central, who were good enough to step around me during various roleplay and combat actions, while I finished off the last few chapters of Small Favor in the corner of the tavern.

Chapter One

Winter came early that year; it should have been a tip-off.

A snowball soared through the evening air and smacked into my apprentice’s mouth. Since she was muttering a mantra-style chant when it hit her, she wound up with a mouthful of frozen cheer—which may or may not have been more startling for her than for most people, given how many metallic piercings were suddenly in direct contact with the snow.

Molly Carpenter sputtered, spitting snow, and a round of hooting laughter went up from the children gathered around her. Tall, blond, and athletic, dressed in jeans and a heavy winter coat, she looked natural in the snowy setting, her cheeks and nose turning red with the cold.

“Concentration, Molly!” I called. I carefully kept any laughter I might have wanted to indulge in from my voice. “You’ve got to concentrate! Again!”

The children, her younger brothers and sisters, immediately began packing fresh ammunition to hurl at her. The backyard of the Carpenter house was already thoroughly chewed up from an evening of winter warfare, and two low “fortress” walls faced each other across ten yards of open lawn. Molly stood between them, shivering, and gave me an impatient look.

“This can’t possibly be real training,” she said, her voice quavering with cold. “You’re just doing this for your own sick amusement, Harry.”

I beamed at her and accepted a freshly made snowball from little Hope, who had apparently appointed herself my squire. I thanked the small girl gravely, and bounced the snowball on my palm a few times. “Nonsense,” I said. “This is wonderful practice. Did you think you were going to start off bouncing bullets?”

Molly gave me an exasperated look. Then she took a deep breath, bowed her head again, and lifted her left hand, her fingers spread wide. She began muttering again, and I felt the subtle shift of energies moving as she began drawing magic up around her in an almost solid barrier, a shield that rose between her and the incipient missile storm.

“Ready!” I called out. “Aim!”

Every single person there, including myself, threw before I got to the end of aim, and snowballs sped through the air, flung by children ranging from the eldest, Daniel, who was seventeen, down to the youngest, little Harry, who wasn’t yet big enough to have much of a throwing arm, but who didn’t let that stop him from making the largest snowball he could lift.

Snowballs pelted my apprentice’s shield, and it stopped the first two, the frozen missiles exploding into puffs of fresh powder. The rest of them, though, went right on through Molly’s defenses, and she was splattered with several pounds of snow. Little Harry ran up to her and threw last, with both hands, and shrieked merry triumph as his bread-loaf-sized snowball splattered all over Molly’s stomach.

“Fire!” I barked belatedly.

Molly fell onto her butt in the snow, sputtered some more, and burst out in a long belly laugh. Harry and Hope, the youngest of the children, promptly jumped on top of her, and from there the lesson in defensive magic devolved into the Carpenter children’s longstanding tradition of attempting to shovel as much snow as possible down the necks of one another’s coats. I grinned and stood there watching them, and a moment later found the children’s mother standing beside me.

Molly took after Charity Carpenter, who had passed her coloring and build on to her daughter. Charity and I haven’t always seen eye-to-eye—well, in point of fact, we’ve hardly ever seen eye-to-eye—but tonight she was smiling at the children’s antics.

“Good evening, Mister Dresden,” she murmured.

“Charity,” I replied amiably. “This happen a lot?”

“Almost always, during the first real snowfall of the year,” she said. “Generally, though, it’s closer to Christmas than Halloween.”

I watched the children romping. Though Molly was growing quickly, in a number of senses, she reverted to childhood easily enough here, and it did me good to see it.

I sensed Charity’s unusually intense regard and glanced at her, lifting an eyebrow in question.

“You never had a snowball fight with family,” she said quietly, “did you?”

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the kids. “No family to have the fight with,” I said. “Sometimes the kids would try, at school, but the teachers wouldn’t let it happen. And a lot of times the other kids did it to be mean, instead of to have fun. That changes things.”

Charity nodded, and also looked back at the kids. “My daughter. How is her training progressing?”

“Well, I think,” I said. “Her talents don’t lie anywhere close to the same areas mine do. And she’s never going to be much of a combat wizard.”

Charity frowned. “Why do you say that? Do you think she isn’t strong enough?”

“Strength has nothing to do with it. But her greatest talents make her unsuited for it in some ways.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, she’s good with subtle things. Delicate things. Her ability at handling fine, sensitive magic is outstanding, and increasing all the time. But that same sensitivity means that she has problems handling the psychic stresses of real combat. It also makes the gross physical stuff a real challenge for her.”

“Like stopping snowballs?” Charity asked.

“Snowballs are good practice,” I said. “Nothing gets hurt but her pride.”

Charity nodded, frowning. “But you didn’t learn with snowballs, did you.”

The memory of my first shielding lesson under Justin DuMorne wasn’t a particularly sentimental one. “Baseballs.”

“Merciful God,” Charity said, shaking her head. “How old were you?”

“Thirteen.” I shrugged a shoulder. “Pain’s a good motivator. I learned fast.”

“But you aren’t trying to teach my daughter the same way,” Charity said.

“There’s no rush,” I said.

The noise from the children stopped, dropping to furtive whispers, and I winked at Charity. She glanced from the children to me, amusement evident in her face. Not five seconds later Molly shouted, “Now!” and multiple snowballs came zipping toward me.

I lifted my left hand, focusing my will, my magic, and drew it into the shape of a broad, flat disk in front of me. It wasn’t a good enough shield to stop bullets, or even well-thrown baseballs, but for snowballs it was just fine. They shattered to powder on my shield, revealing it in little flashes of pale blue light as a circular plane of force centered on the outspread fingers of my extended left hand.

The children laughed as they cried out their disapproval. I shouted, “Hah!” and lifted a triumphant fist.

Then Charity, standing behind me, dumped a double handful of snow down the neck of my coat.

I yelped as the cold ate my spinal cord, jumped up out of my tracks, and danced around trying to shake the snow out from under my clothes. The children cheered their mother on and began flinging snowballs at more or less random targets, and in all the excitement and frivolity I didn’t realize that we were under attack until the lights went out.

The entire block plunged into darkness—the floodlights illuminating the Carpenters’ backyard, house lights in every nearby home, and the streetlights were all abruptly extinguished. Eerie, ambient werelight reflected from the snow. Shadows suddenly yawned where there had been none before, and the scent of something midway between a skunk and a barrel of rotting eggs assaulted my nostrils.

I yanked my blasting rod out of its holder on the inside of my coat and said to Charity, “Get them inside.”

“Emergency,” Charity said in a far calmer voice than I had managed. “Everyone into the safe room, just like in practice.”

The children had just begun to move when three creatures I had never seen before came bounding through the snow. Time slowed as the adrenaline hit my system, and it felt like I had half an hour to study them.

They weren’t terribly tall, maybe five-foot-six, but they were layered with white fur and muscle. Each had a head that was almost goatlike, but the horns atop them curled around to the front like a bull’s rather than arching back. Their legs were reverse-jointed and ended in hooves, and they moved in a series of single-legged leaps more than running. They got better air than a Chicago Bull, too, which meant I was dealing with something with supernatural strength.

Though, thinking about it, I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d dealt with something that didn’t have supernatural strength, which is one of the drawbacks of the wizard business. I mean, some things are stronger than others, sure, but it wouldn’t much matter to my skull if a paranormal bruiser could bench-press a locomotive or if he was merely buff enough to juggle refrigerators.

I trained the tip of my blasting rod on the lead whatsit, and then a bunch of snow fell from above in my peripheral vision, landing on the ground beside me with a soft thump.

I threw myself into a forward dive, rolled over one shoulder, and came to my feet already moving laterally. I was just in time to avoid the rush of a fourth whatsit, which had knocked the snow loose just before it dropped down onto me from the tree house Michael had built for his kids. It let out a hissing, bubbling snarl.

I didn’t have time to waste with this backstabbing twit. So I raised the rod as its tip burst into scarlet flame, unleashed my will, and snarled, “Fuego!”

A wrist-thick lance of pure flame leapt from the blasting rod and seared the creature’s upper body to blackened meat. The excess heat melted snow all around it and sent up a billow of scalding steam. Judging by the tackle hanging between the thing’s legs as the steam burst up from the snow, it probably inflicted as much pain as the actual fire.

The whatsit went down, and I had to hope that it wasn’t bright enough to play possum: The Carpenter children were screaming.

I whirled around, readying the rod again, and didn’t have a clear shot. One of the white-furred creatures was running hard after Daniel, Molly’s oldest brother. He’d begun to fill out, and he ran with his fingers locked on the back of the coats of little Harry and Hope, the youngest children, carrying them like luggage.

He gained the door with the creature not ten feet behind him, its wicked-looking horns lowered as it charged. Daniel went through the door and kicked it shut with his foot, never slowing down, and the creature slammed into it head-on.

I hadn’t realized that Michael had installed all-steel, wood-paneled security doors on his home, just as I had on mine. The creature probably would have pulverized a wooden door. Instead it slammed its head into the steel door, horns leading the way, and drove a foot-deep dent into it.

And then it lurched away, letting out a burbling shriek of pain. Smoke rose from its horns, and it staggered back, swatting at them with its three-fingered, clawed hands. There weren’t many things that reacted to the touch of steel like that.

The other two whatsits had divided their attention. One was pursuing Charity, who was carrying little Amanda and running like hell for the workshop Michael had converted from a freestanding garage. The other was charging Molly, who had pushed Alicia and Matthew behind her.

There wasn’t time enough to help both groups, and even less to waste over the moral dilemma of a difficult choice.

I turned the rod on the beastie chasing Charity and let it have it. The blast hit it in the small of its back and knocked it from its hooves. It flew sideways, slamming into the wall of the workshop, and Charity dashed through the door with her daughter.

I turned my blasting rod back to the other creature, but I already knew that I wouldn’t be in time. The creature lowered its horns and closed on Molly and her siblings before I could line up for another shot.

“Molly!” I screamed.

My apprentice seized Alicia’s and Matthew’s hands, gasped out a word, and all three of them abruptly vanished.

The creature’s charge carried it past the space they’d been in, though something I couldn’t see struck its hoof and sent it staggering. It wheeled around at full speed, kicking up snow as it did, and I felt a sudden, fierce surge of exaltation and pride. The grasshopper might not be able to put up a decent shield, but she could do veils like they were going out of style, and she’d kept her focus and her wits about her.

The creature slowed, head sweeping, and then it saw the snow being disturbed by invisible feet, moving toward the house. It bawled out another unworldly cry and went after them, and I didn’t dare risk another blast of flame—not with the Carpenters’ house in the line of fire. So instead I lifted my right hand, triggered one of the triple-layered rings on it with my will, and sent a burst of raw force at the whatsit.

The unseen energy struck it in the knees, throwing its legs out from under it with such strength that its head slammed into the snow. The disturbance in the snow rushed around toward the front door of the house. Molly must have realized that the deformation of the security door would make it difficult, if not impossible, to open, and once again I felt fierce approval.

But it faded rather rapidly when the whatsit that had been playing possum behind me slammed into the small of my back like a sulfur-and-rotten-egg-driven locomotive.

The horns hit hard and it hurt like hell, but the defensive magic on my long black leather duster kept them from impaling me. The impact knocked the wind out of me, snapped my head back sharply, and flung me to the snow. Everything got confusing for a second, and then I realized that it was standing over me, ripping at the back of my neck with its claws. I hunched my shoulders and rolled, only to be kicked in the nose by a cloven hoof, and an utterly gratuitous amount of pain came with a side order of whirling stars.

I kept trying to get away, but my motions were sluggish, and the whatsit was faster than me.

Charity stepped out of the workshop with a steel-hafted ball-peen hammer in her left hand, and a heavy-duty contractor’s nail gun in her right.

She lifted the nail gun from ten feet away and started pulling the trigger as she walked forward. It made phut-phut-phut sounds, and the already seared whatsit started screaming in pain. It leapt up wildly, twisting in agonized gyrations in midair, and fell to the snow, thrashing. I saw heavy nails sticking up out of its back, and the smoking wounds were bleeding green-white fire.

It tried to run, but I managed to kick its hooves out from under it before it could regain its footing.

Charity whirled the hammer in a vertical stroke, letting out a sharp cry as she did, and the steel head of the tool smashed open the whatsit’s skull. The wound erupted with greyish matter and more green-white fire, and the creature twitched once before it went still, its body being consumed by the eerie flame.

I stood up, blasting rod still in hand, and found the remaining beasties wounded but mobile, their yellow, rectangular-pupiled eyes glaring in hate and hunger.

I ditched the blasting rod and picked up a steel-headed snow shovel that had been left lying next to one of the children’s snow forts. Charity raised her nail gun, and we began walking toward them.

Whatever these things were, they didn’t have the stomach for a fight against mortals armed with cold steel. They shuddered as if they had been a single being, then turned and bounded away into the night.

I stood there, panting and peering around me. I had to spit blood out of my mouth every few breaths. My nose felt like someone had superglued a couple of live coals to it. Little silver wires of pain ran all through my neck, from the whiplash of getting hit from behind, and the small of my back felt like one enormous bruise.

“Are you all right?” Charity asked.

“Faeries,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be faeries?”

Chapter Two

“Well,” Charity said, “it’s broken.”

“You think?” I asked. The light touch of her fingers on my nose was less than pleasant, but I didn’t twitch or make any sounds of discomfort while she examined me. It’s a guy thing.

“At least it isn’t out of place,” Michael said, knocking snow off of his boots. “Getting it set back is the sort of thing you don’t mind forgetting.”

“Find anything?” I asked him.

The big man nodded his head and set a sheathed broadsword in a corner against the wall. Michael was only a couple of inches shorter than me, and a lot more muscular. He had dark hair and a short beard, both of them peppered with silver, and wore blue jeans, work boots, and a blue-and-white flannel shirt. “That corpse is still there. It’s mostly a burned mess, but it didn’t dissolve.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Faeries aren’t wholly beings of the spirit world. They leave corpses behind.”

Michael grunted. “Other than that there were footprints, but that’s about it. No sign that these goat-things were still around.” He glanced into the dining room, where the Carpenter children were gathered at the table, talking excitedly and munching the pizza their father had been out picking up when the attack occurred. “The neighbors think the light show must have come from a blown transformer.”

“That’s as good an excuse as any,” I said.

“I thank God no one was hurt,” he said. For him it wasn’t just an expression. He meant it literally. It came of being a devout Catholic, and maybe from toting around a holy sword with one of the nails from the Crucifixion wrought into the blade. He shook himself and gave me a short smile. “And you, of course, Harry.”

“Thank Daniel, Molly, and Charity,” I said. “I just kept our visitors busy. Your family’s who got the little ones to safety. And Charity did all the actual smiting.”

Michael’s eyebrows went up, and he turned his gaze on his wife. “Did she now?”

Charity’s cheeks turned pink. She briskly swept up the various tissues and cloths I’d bloodied, and carried them out of the room to be burned in the lit fireplace in the living room. In my business, you don’t ever want samples of your blood, your hair, or your fingernail clippings lying around for someone else to find. I gave Michael the rundown of the fight while she was gone.

“My nail gun?” he asked, grinning, as Charity came back into the kitchen. “How did you know it was a faerie?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I just grabbed what was at hand.”

“We got lucky,” I said.

Michael arched an eyebrow at me.

I scowled at him. “Not every good thing that happens is divine intervention, Michael.”

“True,” Michael said, “but I prefer to give Him the credit unless I have a good reason to believe otherwise. It seems more polite than the other way around.”

Charity came to stand at her husband’s side. Though they were both smiling and speaking lightly about the attack, I noticed that they were holding hands very tightly, and Charity’s eyes kept drifting over toward the children, as if to reassure herself that they were still there and safe.

I suddenly felt like an intruder.

“Well,” I said, rising, “looks like I’ve got a new project.”

Michael nodded. “Do you know the motive for the attack?”

“That’s the project,” I said. I pulled my duster on, wincing as the motion made me move my stiffening neck. “I think they were after me. The attack on the kids was a diversion to give the one in the tree a shot at my back.”

“Are you sure about that?” Charity asked quietly.

“No,” I admitted. “It’s possible that they’re holding a grudge about that business at Arctis Tor.”

Charity’s eyes narrowed and went steely. Arctis Tor was the heart of the Winter Court, the fortress and sanctum sanctorum of Queen Mab herself. Some nasty customers from Winter had stolen Molly, and Charity and I, with a little help, had stormed the tower and taken Molly back by main force. The whole mess had been noisy as hell, and we’d pissed off an entire nation of wicked fae in the process of making it.

“Keep your eyes open, just in case,” I told her. “And let Molly know that I’d like her to stay here for the time being.”

Michael quirked an eyebrow at me. “You think she needs our protection?”

“No,” I said. “I think you might need hers.”

Michael blinked. Charity frowned quietly, but did not dispute me.

I nodded to both of them and left. Molly wasn’t rebelling against everything I told her to do purely upon reflex these days, but fait accompli remained the best way of avoiding arguments with her.

I shut the door to the Carpenter household behind me, cutting off the scent of hot pizza and the sound of loudly animated children’s voices, raucous after the excitement.

The November night was silent. And very cold.

I fought off an urge to shiver and hurried to my car, a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle that had originally been powder blue, but was now a mix of red, blue, green, white, yellow, and now primer grey on the new hood my mechanic had scrounged up. Some anonymous joker who had seen too many Disney movies had spray-painted the number 53 inside a circle on the hood, but the car’s name was the Blue Beetle, and it was going to stay that way.

I sat looking at the warm golden light coming from the house for a moment.

Then I coaxed the Beetle to life and headed for home.

Chapter Three

“And you’re sure they were faeries?” Bob the skull asked.

I scowled. “How many other things get their blood set on fire when it touches iron and steel, Bob? Yes, I think I know a faerie when I get my nose broken by one.”

I was down in my lab, which was accessed by means of a trapdoor in my basement apartment’s living room and a folding wooden stepladder. It’s a concrete box of a room, deep enough under the rest of the boardinghouse I live in to be perpetually cool. In the summer that’s nice. Come winter, not so much.

The lab consisted of a wooden table running down the center of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by tables and workbenches against the outer wall of the room, leaving a narrow walkway around the table. The workbenches were littered with the tools of the trade, and I’d installed those white wire shelving units you can get pretty cheap at Wal-Mart on the walls above the benches, creating more storage space. The shelves were covered with an enormous variety of containers, from a lead-lined box to burlap bags, from Tupperware to a leather pouch made from the genital sac of, I kid you not, an actual African lion.

It was a gift. Don’t ask.

Candles burned around the room, giving it light and twinkling off the pewter miniature buildings on the center table, a scale model of the city of Chicago. I’d brought down a single writing desk for Molly—all the room I had to spare—and her own notebooks and slowly accumulating collection of gear managed to stay neatly organized despite the tiny space.

“Well, it looks like someone is holding Arctis Tor against you,” Bob said. The skull, its eye sockets glowing with orange flickers of light like candles you couldn’t quite see, sat on its own shelf on the uncluttered wall. Half a dozen paperback romance novels littered the shelf around it, and a seventh had fallen from the shelf and now lay on the floor, obscuring a portion of the silver summoning circle I’d installed there. “Faeries don’t ever forget a grudge, boss.”

I shook my head at the skull, scooped up the fallen book, and put it back on the shelf. “You ever heard of anything like these guys?”

“My knowledge of the faerie realms is mostly limited to the Winter end of things,” Bob said. “These guys don’t sound like anything I’ve run into.”

“Then why would they be holding the fight at Arctis Tor against me, Bob?” I asked. “Hell, we weren’t even the ones who really assaulted Winter’s capital. We just walked in on the aftermath and picked a fight with some of Winter’s errand boys who had swiped Molly.”

“Maybe some of the Winter Sidhe hired out the vengeance gig as contract labor. These could have been Wyldfae, you know. There’s a lot more Wyld than anything else. They could have been satyrs.” His eyelights brightened. “Did you see any nymphs? If there are satyrs, there’s bound to be a nymph or two somewhere close.”

“No, Bob.”

“Are you sure? Naked girl, drop-dead gorgeous, old enough to know better and young enough not to care?”

“I’d have remembered that if I’d seen it,” I said.

“Feh,” Bob said, his eyelights dwindling in disappointment. “You can’t do anything right, Harry.”

I rubbed my hand against the back of my neck. It didn’t make it hurt any less, but it gave me something to do. “I’ve seen these goat guys, or read about them before,” I said. “Or at least something close to them. Where did I put those texts on the near reaches of the Nevernever?”

“North wall, green plastic box under the workbench,” Bob provided immediately.

“Thanks,” I said. I dragged out the heavy plastic storage box. It was filled with books, most of them leather-bound, handwritten treatises on various supernatural topics. Except for one book that was a compilation of “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strips. How had that gotten in there?

I picked up several of the books, carried them to the part of the table that was modeled as Lake Michigan, and set them down. Then I pulled up my stool and started flipping through them.

“How was the trip to Dallas?” Bob asked.

“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine. Someone was being stalked by a Black Dog.” I glanced up at the map of the United States hanging on the wall beneath Bob’s shelf on a thick piece of poster board. I absently plucked a green thumbtack from the board and poked it into Dallas, Texas, where it joined more than a dozen other green pins and a very few red ones, where the false alarms had been. “They contacted me through the Paranet, and I showed them how to give Fido the bum’s rush out of town.”

“This support network thing you and Elaine have going is really smart,” Bob said. “Teach the minnows how to gang up when a big fish shows up to eat them.”

“I prefer to think of it as teaching sparrows to band together and chase off hawks,” I said, returning to my seat.

“Either way, it means less exposure to danger and less work for you in the long run. Constructive cowardice. Very crafty. I approve.” His voice turned wistful. “I hear that they have some of the best strip clubs in the world in Dallas, Harry.”

I gave Bob a hard look. “If you’re not going to help me, at least don’t distract me.”

“Oh,” Bob said. “Check.” The romance I’d put back on the shelf quivered for a second and then flipped over and opened to the first page. The skull turned toward the book, the orange light from its eyes falling over the pages.

I went through one old text. Then two. Then three. Hell’s bells, I knew I’d seen or read something in one of these.

“Rip her dress off!” Bob shouted.

Bob the skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Bob hollered as more pages turned.

“They couldn’t have been satyrs,” I mumbled out loud, trying to draw my thoughts into order. My nose hurt like hell and my neck hurt like someplace in the same zip code. That kind of pain wears you down fast, even when you’re a wizard who learned his basics while being violently bombarded with baseballs. “Satyrs have human faces. These things didn’t.”

“Weregoats?” Bob suggested. He flipped another page and kept reading. Bob is a spirit of intellect, and he multitasks better than, well, pretty much anybody. “Or maybe goatweres.”

I stopped for a moment and gave the skull an exasperated look. “I can’t believe I just heard that word.”

“What?” Bob asked brightly. “Weregoats?”

“Weregoats. I’m fairly sure I could have led a perfectly rich and satisfying life even if I hadn’t heard that word or enjoyed the mental images it conjures.”

Bob chortled. “Stars and stones, you’re easy, Harry.”

“Weregoats,” I muttered, and went back to reading. After finishing the fifth book, I went back for another armload. Bob shouted at his book, cheering during what were apparently the love scenes and heckling most of the rest, as if the characters had all been live performers on a stage.

Which would probably tell me something important about Bob, if I were an astute sort of person. After all, Bob himself was, essentially, a spiritual creature created from the energy of thought. The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level—there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer’s work and skill and the reader’s imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Did Bob, as he read his books and imagined their events, regard those constructed beings as…siblings, of some sort? Peers? Children? Could a being like Bob develop some kind of acquired taste for a family? It was entirely possible. It might explain his constant fascination with fictional subject matter dealing with the origins of a mortal family.

Then again, he might regard the characters in the same way some men do those inflatable sex dolls. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

Good thing I’m not astute.

I found our attackers on the eighth book, about halfway through, complete with notes and sketches.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, sitting up straight.

“Find ’em?” Bob asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and held up the book so he could see the sketch. It was a better match for our goatish attackers than most police sketches of perpetrators. “If the book is right, I just got jumped by gruffs.”

Bob’s romance novel dropped to the surface of the shelf. He made a choking sound. “Um. Did you say gruffs?”

I scowled at him and he began to giggle. The skull rattled against the shelf.

“Gruffs?” He tittered.

“What?” I said, offended.

“As in ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff ’?” The skull howled with laughter. “You just got your ass handed to you by a nursery tale?”

“I wouldn’t say they handed me my ass,” I said.

Bob was nearly strangling on his laughter, and given that he had no lungs it seemed gratuitous somehow. “That’s because you can’t see yourself,” he choked out. “Your nose is all swollen up and you’ve got two black eyes. You look like a raccoon. Holding a dislocated ass.”

“You didn’t see these things in action,” I said. “They were strong, and pretty smart. And there were four of them.”

“Just like the Four Horsemen!” he said. “Only with petting zoos!”

I scowled some more. “Fine, fine,” I said. “I’m glad I can amuse you.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Bob said, his voice bubbling with mirth. “‘Help me, help me! It’s the Billy Goats Gruff!’”

I glared. “You’re missing the point, Bob.”

“It can’t be as funny as what has come through,” he said. “I’ll bet every Sidhe in Winter is giggling about it.”

“Bet they’re not,” I said. “That’s the point. The gruffs work for Summer. They’re some of Queen Titania’s enforcers.”

Bob’s laughter died abruptly. “Oh.”

I nodded. “After that business at Arctis Tor, I could understand if someone from Winter had come after me. I never figured to do this kind of business with Summer.”

“Well,” Bob pointed out, “you did kind of give Queen Titania’s daughter the death of a thousand cuts.”

I grunted. “Yeah. But why send hitters now? She could have done it years ago.”

“That’s faeries for you,” Bob said. “Logic isn’t exactly their strong suit.”

I grunted. “Life should be so simple.” I thumped my finger on the book, thinking. “There’s more to this. I’m sure of it.”

“How high are they in the Summer hierarchy?” Bob asked.

“They’re up there,” I said. “As a group, anyway. They’ve got a reputation for killing trolls. Probably where the nursery tale comes from.”

“Troll killers,” Bob said. “Trolls. Like Mab’s personal guard, whose pieces you found scattered all over Arctis Tor?”

“Exactly,” I said. “But what I did there ticked off Winter, not Summer.”

“I’ve always admired your ability to be unilaterally irritating.”

I shook my head. “No. I must have done something there that hurt Summer somehow.” I frowned. “Or helped Winter. Bob, do you know—”

The phone started ringing. I had run a long extension cord from the outlet in my bedroom down to the lab, after Molly had nearly broken her neck rushing up the stepladder to answer a call. The old windup clock on one shelf told me that it was after midnight. Nobody calls me that late unless it’s something bad.

“Hold that thought,” I told Bob.

“It’s me,” Murphy said when I answered. “I need you.”

“Why, Sergeant, I’m touched,” I said. “You’ve admitted the truth at last. Cue sweeping romantic theme music.”

“I’m serious,” she said. Something in her voice sounded tired, strained.

“Where?” I asked her.

She gave me the address and we hung up.

I barely ever got work from Chicago PD anymore, and between that and my frequent trips to other cities as part of my duties as a Warden, I hadn’t been making diddly as an investigator. My stipend as a Warden of the White Council kept me from bankruptcy, but my bank account had bled slowly down to the point where I had to be really careful to avoid bouncing checks.

I needed the work.

“That was Murphy,” I said, “making a duty call.”

“This late at night, what else could it be?” Bob agreed. “Watch your back extra careful, boss.”

“Why do you say that?” I said, shrugging into my coat.

“I don’t know if you’re up on your nursery tales,” Bob said, “but if you’ll remember, the Billy Goats Gruff had a whole succession of brothers.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Each of them bigger and meaner than the last.”

I headed out to meet Murphy.

Weregoats. Jesus.

Chapter Four

I was standing there watching the fire with everyone else when the beat cop brought Murphy over to me.

“It’s about time,” she said, her voice tense. She lifted the police tape and beckoned me. I had already clipped my little laminated consultant’s ID to my duster’s lapel. “What took you so long?”

“There’s a foot of snow on the ground and it doesn’t show signs of stopping,” I replied.

She glanced up at me. Karrin Murphy is a wee little thing, and the heavy winter coat she wore only made her look smaller. The large, fluffy snowflakes still falling clung to her golden hair and glittered on her eyelashes, turning her eyes glacial blue. “Your toy car got stuck in a drift, huh? What happened to your face?”

I glanced around at all the normals. “I was in a snowball fight.”

Murphy grunted. “I guess you lost.”

“You should have seen the other guy.”

We were standing in front of a small five-story apartment building, and something had blown it to hell.

The front facing of the building was just gone, as if some unimaginably huge ax had sliced straight down it. You could see the floors and interiors of empty apartments, when you could get a glimpse of them through the pall of dust and smoke and thick falling snow. Fires burned in the building, insubstantial behind the haze of flame and winter. Rubble had washed out into the street, damaging the buildings on the other side, and the police had everyone cordoned off at least a block away. Broken glass and steel and brick lay everywhere. The air was acrid, thick with the stench of burning materials never meant to feed a fire.

Despite the weather, a couple of hundred people had gathered at the police cordons. Some enterprising soul was selling hot coffee from a big thermos, and I hadn’t been too proud to cough up a dollar for a foam cup of java, powdered creamer, and a packet of sugar.

“Lots of fire trucks,” I noted. “But only one ambulance. And the crew is drinking coffee while everyone else shivers in the cold.” I sipped at my cup. “The bastards.”

“Building wasn’t occupied,” Murphy said. “Being renovated, actually.”

“No one got hurt,” I said. “That’s a plus.”

Murphy gave me a cryptic look. “You willing to work off the books? Per diem?”

I sipped coffee to cover up a wince. I far prefer a two-day minimum. “I guess the city isn’t coughing up much money for consultants, huh?”

“SI’s been pooling the coffee money, in case we needed your take on something.”

This time I didn’t bother to hide the wince. Taking money from the city government was one thing. Taking money from the cops in SI was another.

Special Investigations was the CPD’s version of a pool filter. Things that slipped through the areas of interest of the other departments got dumped on SI. Lots of times those things included the cruddy work no one else wanted to do, so SI wound up investigating everything from apparent rains of toads to dogfighting rackets to reports of El Chupacabra molesting neighborhood pets from its lair in a local sewer. It was a crappy job, no pun intended, and as a result SI was regarded by the city as a kind of asylum for incompetents. They weren’t, but the inmates of SI generally did share a couple of traits—intelligence enough to ask questions when something didn’t make sense, and an inexcusable lack of ability when it came to navigating the murky waters of office politics.

When Sergeant Murphy had been Lieutenant Murphy, she’d been in charge of SI. She’d been busted for vanishing during twenty-four particularly critical hours of an investigation. It wasn’t like she could tell her superiors that she was off storming a frozen fortress in the near reaches of the Nevernever, now, could she? Now her old partner, Lieutenant John Stallings, was in charge of SI, and he was running the place on a strained, frayed, often knotted shoestring of a budget.

Hence the lack of gainful employment for Chicago’s only professional wizard.

I couldn’t take their money. It wasn’t like they were rolling in it. But at the same time, they had their pride. I couldn’t take that, either.

“Per diem?” I told her. “Hell, my bank account is thinner than a tobacco lobbyist’s moral justification. I’ll go hourly.”

Murphy glowered up at me for a moment, then gave me a grudging nod of thanks. Proud doesn’t always outweigh practical.

“So what’s the scoop?” I asked. “Arson?”

She shrugged. “Explosion of some kind. Maybe an accident. Maybe not.”

I snorted. “Yeah, because you call me in on maybe-accidents all the time.”

“Come on.” Murphy pulled a dust mask from her coat pocket and put it on.

I took out a bandanna and tied it around my nose and mouth. All I needed was a ten-gallon hat and some spurs to complete the image. Stick ’em up, pahdner.

She glanced back at me, her face hard to read under the dust mask, and led me to the building adjacent to the ruined apartment. Murphy’s partner was waiting for us.

Rawlins was a blocky man in his fifties, comfortably overweight, and looked about as soft as a Brinks truck. He’d grown in a beard frosted with grey, a sharp contrast against his dark skin, and he wore a weather-beaten old winter coat over his off-the-rack suit.

“Dresden,” he said easily. “Good to see you.”

I shook his hand. “How’s the foot?”

“It aches when I’m about to get asked to leave,” he said soberly. “Ow.”

“It’s better if you’ve got deniability,” Murphy said, folding her arms in what an astute observer might have characterized as a tone of stubborn argument. “You’ve got a family to feed.”

Rawlins sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be out by the street.” He nodded to me and walked off. He’d recovered from being shot in the foot pretty well, and wasn’t limping. Good for him. Good for me, too. I’d been the one to get him into that mess.

“Deniability?” I asked Murphy.

“There hasn’t been anything specific,” Murphy said, “but people up the line from SI have made it very clear that you are persona non grata.”

That stung a bit, and my voice turned a shade more brittle than I had intended. “Oh, obviously. The way I keep helping CPD with things they couldn’t handle themselves is just inexcusable.”

“I know,” Murphy said.

“I’m lucky they haven’t charged me with gross competence and contributing to social order and had me locked away.”

She waved a tired, dismissive hand. “It’s always something. That’s the way organizations are.”

“Except that when the country club gets a bug up its nose and decides that someone is out, nobody dies as a result,” I said, and added, “mostly.”

Murphy glared at me. “What do you want me to do about it, Harry? I called in every chip I’d ever collected just to keep my fucking job. There’s no chance at all of me making command again, much less moving up to a position where I could effect real change within the department.”

I clenched my jaw and felt a flush rising up my neck. She hadn’t said it, but she’d lost her command and any bright future for her career because she’d been covering my back. “Murph—”

“No,” she said, her tone calmer and steadier than it might have been. “I’d really like to know, Dresden. I’ve paid you out of my own pocket when the city wouldn’t spend it. The rest of SI throws in all the money they can spare into the kitty to be able to pay you when we really need you. You think maybe I should moonlight at a burger joint to pay your fees?”

“Hell’s bells, Murph,” I said. “It isn’t about the money. It’s never been about the money.”

She shrugged. “So what are you bitching about?”

I thought about it for a second and said, “You shouldn’t have to tap-dance around the demands of all the ladder climbers to do your job.”

“No,” she said, her tone frank. “Not in a reasonable world. But if you haven’t noticed, that world must be in a different area code. And it seems to me that you’ve had to end-run your superiors once or twice.”

“Bah,” I said. “And touché.”

She smiled faintly. “It sucks, but that’s what we’ve got. You done whining?”

“Hell with it,” I said. “Let’s work.”

Murphy jerked her head at the rubble-choked alley between the damaged building and its neighbor, and we started down it, climbing over fallen brick and timber where necessary.

We’d gone about three feet before the stench of sulfur and acrid brimstone seared my nostrils, sharp even through the smell of the gutted apartment building. There’s only one thing that smells like that.

“Crap,” I muttered.

“I thought it smelled familiar,” Murphy said. “Like back at the fortress.” She glanced at me. “And…the other times I’ve smelled it.”

I pretended not to notice her glance. “Yeah. It’s Hellfire,” I said.

“There’s more,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on.”

We pressed on down the alley until we passed the edge of the wrecked portion of the gutted building. One step, there was nothing but wreckage. The next, the brick wall of the building reasserted itself. The demarcation between structure and havoc was a rough, jagged line stretching up into the dust and the snow and the smoke—all except for a portion of wall perhaps five feet off the ground.

There, instead of a broken line of shattered brick and twisted rebar, a perfectly smooth semicircle bit into the wall.

I leaned closer, frowning. The scent of Hellfire grew stronger, and I realized that something had melted its way through the brick wall—a shaft of energy like a giant drill bit. It had to have been almost unimaginably hot to vaporize brick and concrete and steel, leaving the rim of the area it had touched melted to smooth glass, though half of the basketball-sized circle was missing, carried away by the collapsing wall.

Any natural source of heat like that would have sent out a thermal bloom that would have scoured the alley I was standing in, leaving it blackened and sere. But the alley was littered with the usual city detritus, where it wasn’t choked with rubble, and several hours’ worth of snow had piled up there as well.

“Talk to me,” Murphy said quietly.

“No normal fire is this contained,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I gestured vaguely with my hands. “Fire generated with magic is still fire, Murph. I mean, sure, you can call up tremendous heat and energy, but once it gets to you it behaves like heat. It still does business with the laws of thermodynamics.”

“So we’re talking mojo,” Murphy said.

“Well, technically mojo isn’t—”

She sighed. “Are we dealing with magic or not?”

As if the scent of Hellfire weren’t enough to give it away. “Yeah.”

Murphy nodded. “You call up fire all the time,” she said. “I’ve seen it do a lot of things that didn’t look like normal fire.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, holding my hand over the surface of the flame-bored bricks. They were still warm. “But if you want to control it once you call it up, it takes additional energy to focus the fire into a desired course. Controlling the energy is usually as much effort as the fire itself, if not more.”

“Could you do something like this?” she asked, gesturing at the building.

Once upon a time she would have inflected that question a whole lot differently, and I’d have gotten nervous about whether the hands in her pockets were holding a gun and handcuffs. But that had been a long time ago. Of course, back then I probably wouldn’t have given her a straight answer either, like I would now.

“Not a chance in hell,” I said quietly, and not entirely metaphorically. “I’m pretty sure I couldn’t call up this much energy in the first place. And even if I could, I wouldn’t have anything left to control it with.” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to feel any lingering traces of power around the area, but the destruction and subsequent drift of dust and snow and smoke had obscured any coherent patterns that might have given me hints about how the working had been accomplished.

I did, however, notice something else. The surface of the cut was not perpendicular to the wall of the building. It went in at an angle. I frowned and squinted back behind me, trying to line it up with the wall of the building on the other side of the alley.

Murphy knew me well enough to see I’d noticed something, and I knew her well enough to see her sudden interest make furrows between her eyebrows as she forced herself to be quiet and let me work.

I got up and went to the far side of the alley. A light coating of snow and dust had coated the wall.

“Watch your eyes,” I murmured, squinting my own to slits. Then I raised my right hand, called up my will, and murmured, “Ventas reductas.”

The wind I called up wasn’t the usual burst I commonly used. It was far more toned-down than that, and it poured steadily from my outstretched hand. All the work I was doing with Molly had allowed me to rethink a lot of my basic evocations, the fast and dirty magic that wizards used in desperate and violent situations. I’d been trying to teach the spell to Molly, but she didn’t have the raw strength I had, and it would have practically knocked her unconscious to call up a heavy blast of air. I’d modified my teaching, just to get her comfortable with using a bit of air magic, and we’d accidentally developed a passable impersonation of an electric blow-dryer.

I used the dryer spell to gently brush away dust and snow from the wall. It took me about a minute and a half, and when I was finished I caught another scent under the brimstone stench and said, “Double crap.”

Murphy stepped forward with her flashlight and shone it on the wall.

The sigil had been painted on the wall in something thick and brown that smelled like blood. At first I thought it was a pentacle, but I saw the differences immediately.

“Harry,” Murphy said quietly. “Is it human?”

“Most likely,” I said. “Mortal blood is the strongest ink you can use for symbols like this in high-energy spells. I don’t think anything else could have contained the amounts of energy it would have taken to blow up this building.”

“It’s a pentacle, right?” Murphy asked. “Like the one you wear.”

I shook my head. “Different.”

“How so?” Her mouth twitched at one corner. “Other than the blood, I mean.”

“A pentacle is a symbol of order,” I said quietly. “Five points, five sides. It represents the forces of air, earth, water, fire, and spirit. It’s contained within a circle, the points touching the outer ring. It represents the forces of magic bound within human control. Power balanced with restraint.” I gestured at the symbol. “See here? The points of the star fall far outside the ring.”

She frowned. “What does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Gosh,” she said. “You’re worth the money.”

“Ha-ha. Look, even if I’d seen this symbol before, it could mean different things to different people. The Hindus and the Nazis have very different ideas about the swastika, for example.”

“Can you make a guess?”

I shrugged. “Off the top of my head? This looks uncomfortably like a combination of the pentacle and the anarchy symbol. Magic unrestrained.”

“Anarchist wizards?” Murphy asked.

“It’s just a guess,” I said. My gut told me it was a good one, though, and I got the impression that Murphy had the same feeling.

“What’s the symbol for?” Murphy asked. “What is it meant to do?”

“Reflect power,” I said. “My guess is that the energy that drove through the building was reflected from this sigil, which means…” I kayaked down a logic cascade as I spoke. “Which means that the energy had to come in from somewhere else first.” I turned around slowly, trying to judge the angles. “The incoming beam must have gone right through the collapsed part of the building and—”

“Beam?”

I pointed at the semicircular hole in the ruined wall. “Yeah. Heat energy, a whole lot of it.”

She studied the hole. “It doesn’t look like it would be big enough to take down the building.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Not in an explosion, anyway. This just drilled a hole. Might have started a fire as it went, but it couldn’t have sheared off the front of the building like that.”

Murphy frowned, tilting her head. “Then what did?”

“Working on it,” I mumbled. I judged the angles as best I could and took off down the alley. The firemen were still hard at work on the building, and we had to walk over several hoses as we emerged into the street at the back of the apartment building. I crossed the street and walked down the length of the building there, my hand raised, senses questing for any residual magic. I didn’t find any, but I did smell Hellfire again, and a couple of feet later I found another not-pentacle, identical to the first, also hidden under a light dusting of snow.

I kept going clockwise around the ruined building. I found two more symbols on the undamaged building on its next side, and one more across the street from the front of the ruined apartments, and then I completed the circle, arriving back at our original reflective symbol.

Five reflection points, which had guided a truly freaking frightening amount of energy through the building, forming one single, enormous shape as they did.

“It’s a pentagram,” I said quietly.

Murphy frowned. “What?”

I touched the round, smooth bore mark on the destroyed building’s wall. “The beam of energy that ripped through the building right here was one of five sides of a pentagram. A five-pointed star.”

Murphy regarded me blankly.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of chalk. “Okay, look. Everyone learns to draw this in grade school, right?” I quickly sketched out a star on a clear bit of brick wall—five strokes of the chalk, forming five points. “Right?”

“Right,” Murphy said. “You get them from the teacher when you get an A.”

“Another example of symbols having disparate meanings,” I said. “But look here, in the middle.” I filled in the closed shape in the center of the star. “That’s a pentagon shape, see? The center of the pentagram. That’s where you contain whatever it is you’re trying to contain.”

“What do you mean, contain?”

“A pentagram like this one is a symbol of power,” I said. “It’s got a lot of uses, depending on how you employ it. But most often you use it to isolate or contain an entity.”

“You mean like summoning a demon,” Murphy said.

“Sure,” I said. “But you can use it to trap other things too, if you do it right. Remember the circle of power at Harley MacFinn’s place? Five candles formed the pentagram on that one.”

Murphy shuddered. “I remember. But it wasn’t this big.”

“No,” I admitted. “And the bigger you make it, the more juice it takes to keep it going. I’ve never, ever heard of one that would take this much energy to activate.”

I drew little X shapes at the points of the star and drew the chalk from one to the next, thickening the lines of the example pentagram. “Get it? The beam streamed from one reflector to the next, melting holes through the building as it went. The reflectors formed the beam into one huge pentagram at ground level, more or less.”

Murphy frowned and squinted at the simple diagram. “The center of that shape couldn’t have covered the whole building.”

“No,” I said. “I’d need a good map to be sure, but I think the center of the pentagram must have been about twenty feet back from the front door. Which is why only the front half of the building collapsed.”

“The explosion came from inside this pentagon thing? Magical TNT?”

I shrugged. “The explosion came from inside the pentagram’s center, but not necessarily from the pentagram. I mean, it could have been a normal device of some kind.”

“Square in the middle of the giant, scary pentagram?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe,” I said, nodding. “It depends on what the pentagram was being employed for. And to know that, I’d have to know which way was its north.” I circled the topmost point of the chalk pentacle. “The direction of the first line, I mean.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Most everybody draws those stars just like I did. Bottom left to the topmost point as the first stroke. That’s how you draw it when you want to defend something, ward something away from a location, or banish a spiritual entity.”

“So this could have been a banishing spell?” Murphy asked.

“It’s possible. But you can do a lot of other things with it, if you draw it differently.”

“Like build a cage for things,” Murphy said.

“Yeah.” I frowned, troubled. “Or open a doorway for something.”

“Which, judging by your face, would be bad.”

“I…” I shook my head. I didn’t even want to know what kind of terror would need a pentagram that huge in order to squeeze into our world. “I think if something sized to fit this pentagram had come through it, there would probably be more than one building on fire.”

“Oh,” Murphy said quietly.

“Look, until I know what the pentagram’s purpose was, all I can do is speculate. And there’s something else weird here, too.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s not a trace of residual magic, and there should be. Hell, with this much power being tossed around, the whole area should practically be glowing. It isn’t.”

Murphy nodded slowly. “You’re saying they wiped their prints.”

I grimaced. “Exactly, and I have no idea how to do it. Hell’s bells, I didn’t know it was possible.”

I sipped at my coffee in the silence and pretended the shiver that went down my spine was from the cold. I passed the cup to Murphy, who took a sip from the opposite side and passed it back to me.

“So,” she said, “we’re left with questions. What is a major-league supernatural hitter doing placing a huge pentagram under an empty apartment building? What was his goal in creating it?”

“And why blow up the building afterward?” I frowned and thought of an even better question. “Why this building?” I turned to Murphy. “Who owns it?”

“Lake Michigan Ventures,” Murphy replied, “a subsidiary of Mitigation Unlimited, whose CEO is—”

“Triple crap,” I spat. “Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.”

Chapter Five

I tried to collect some of the blood in the reflective symbols and use it in a tracking spell to follow it back to its original owner, but it was a bust. Either the blood was already too dry to use or else the person who had donated it was dead. I had a bad feeling it wasn’t the winter air that made the spell fail.

Typical. Nothing was ever simple when Marcone was involved.

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the robber baron of the streets of Chicago, and the undisputed lord of its criminal underworld. Though he’d long been under legal siege, the bastions of paperwork defended by legions of lawyers had never been conquered, and his power base had grown steadily and quietly. They probably could have tried harder to take him down, but the heartless fact of the matter was that Marcone’s management style was a better alternative than most. He’d put the civil back in civil offender, harshly cutting down on violence against civilians and law enforcement alike. It didn’t make his business any less ugly, just tidier, but it could have been worse, as far as the city’s authorities were concerned.

Of course, the authorities didn’t know that it was worse. Marcone had begun expanding his power base into the supernatural world as well, signing on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord. It made him, in the eyes of the authorities of the supernatural world, a kind of small, neutral state, a recognizable power, and I had no doubt that he’d begun using that new power to do what he always did—create more of the same.

All of which had been made possible by Harry Dresden. And the truly galling thing about the entire situation was that it had been the least evil of the options that had been available to me at the time.

I looked up from the circle I’d chalked on the concrete beneath a sheltered overhang in the alley and shook my head. “Sorry. Can’t get anything. Maybe the blood is too dry. Maybe the donor is dead.”

Murphy nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on the morgues, then.”

I broke the circle with a swipe of my hand and rose from my knees.

“Can I ask you something?” Murphy said.

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you ever use pentagrams? All I ever see you draw is circles.”

I shrugged. “PR mostly. Run around making lots of five-pointed stars in this country and people start screaming about Satan. Including the satanists. I’ve got enough problems. If I need a pentagram, I usually just imagine it.”

“You can do that?”

“Magic’s in your head, mostly. Building an image in your mind and holding it there. Theoretically you could do everything without any chalk or symbols or anything else.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Because it’s a pointlessly difficult effort for identical results.” I squinted up at the still-falling snow. “You’re a cop. I need a doughnut.”

She snorted as we left the alley. “Stereotype much, Dresden?”

“Cops do a lot of running around in their cars, and they don’t always get to control their hours, Murph. Lots of times they can’t leave a crime scene to hit a drive-through. So they need food that can sit in a car for hours and hours without tasting foul or giving them food poisoning. Doughnuts are good for that.”

“So are granola bars.”

“Is Rawlins a masochist, too?”

Murphy casually bumped her shoulder against my arm when I was between steps, making me wobble, and I grinned. We emerged onto the mostly empty street. The firemen had been wrapping up their job when I arrived, and every truck but one had departed. Once the flames were out the show was over, and there were no rubberneckers anymore. Only a few cops were in sight, most of them in their cars.

“So what happened to your face?” Murphy asked.

I told her.

She concealed a smile. “‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff ’?”

“Hey. They’re tough, all right? They kill trolls.”

“I saw you do that once. How hard could it be?”

I found myself grinning. “I had a little help.”

Murphy matched my smile. “One more short joke and I’m taking a kneecap.”

“Murphy,” I chided, “petty violence is beneath you. Which is saying something.”

“Keep it up, wise guy. I’m always going to be taller than you once you’re lying unconscious on the ground.”

“You’re right. That was a low blow. I’ll try to rise above it.”

She showed me a clenched fist. “Pow, Dresden. Right to the moon.”

We reached Murphy’s car. Rawlins was in the passenger seat, pretending to snore. He wasn’t the sort to just fall asleep.

“So, Summer made a run at you,” Murphy said. “You think the attack on Marcone’s building is connected with that?”

“I lost my faith in coincidence,” I said.

“Get in,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

I shook my head. “There might be something I can do here, but I need to be alone. And I need a doughnut.”

Murphy arched a delicate dark-gold eyebrow. “Ooooooo-kay.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter and give me the damned doughnut.”

Murphy shook her head and got in her car. She tossed me a sack from Dunkin’ Donuts that was sitting on Rawlins’s side of the dashboard.

“Hey!” Rawlins protested without opening his eyes.

“For a good cause,” I told him, nodding my thanks to Murphy. “Call you when I know something.”

She frowned at my nose. “You sure you want to be alone?”

I winked one of my blackened eyes at her. “Some things a wizard has to do for himself,” I said.

Rawlins swallowed a titter.

I get no respect.

They drove off and left me in the silently falling snow in the still hours before dawn. There were still a couple of fire crews and uniform cops there, the latter blocking off the street, though the former weren’t actively firefighting. The building was out, and coated in a layer of ice—but I guess there always could have been something hidden in the walls and ready to pop out again. I overheard one of them telling another that the road crew that was supposed to clean the rubble out of the street was helping a city plow truck stuck in the snow, and would be there when they could.

I trudged to about a block away, found an alley not choked, and went in with my doughnut. I debated for a moment what approach I would take. My relationship with this particular source had changed over the years, after all. Reason indicated that sticking with longstanding procedure was my best bet. Instinct told me that reason had disappointed me more than once, and that it wasn’t thinking in the long term anyway.

Over the years, my instincts and I have gotten cozy.

So, instead of bothering with a simple bait-and-snare, I braced my feet, held out my right hand palm up, placed the doughnut upon it like an offering, and murmured a Name.

Names, capital N, have power. If you know something’s Name, you automatically have a conduit with which you can reach out and touch it, a way to home in on it with magic. Sometimes that can be a really bad idea. Speak the Name of a big, bad spiritual entity and you might be able to touch it, sure—but it can touch you right back, and the big boys tend to do it a lot harder than any mortal. It’s worth as much as your soul to speak the Name of beings like that.

But the Nevernever is a big place, and not to mix metaphors, but there are plenty of fish in that sea. There are literally countless beings of far less metaphysical significance, and it really isn’t terribly difficult to get one of them to do your bidding by invoking its Name.

(People have Names, too. Sort of. Mortals have this nasty habit of constantly reassessing their personal identity, their values, their beliefs, and it makes it a far more slippery business to use a mortal’s Name against them.)

I know a few Names. I invoked this one as lightly and gently as I could in an effort to be polite.

It didn’t take me long, maybe a dozen repetitions of the Name before the entity it summoned appeared. A basketball-sized globe of blue light dived out of the snow overhead and hurtled down the alley toward my face.

I stood steady as it came on. Even with relatively minor summonings, you never let them see you flinch.

The globe snapped to an instant halt about a foot away from the doughnut, and I could just make out the luminous shape of the tiny humanoid figure within. Tiny, but not nearly so tiny as the last time I had seen him. Hell’s bells, he must have been twice as tall as the last time we’d spoken.

“Toot-toot,” I said, nodding to the pixie.

Toot snapped to attention, piping, “My lord!” The pixie looked like an athletically slender youth, dressed in armor made of discarded trash. His helmet had been made from the cap to a three-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and tufts of his fine lavender hair drifted all around its rim. He wore a breastplate made from what looked like a carefully reshaped bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and carried a box knife sheathed in orange plastic on a rubber-band strap over one shoulder. Rough lettering on the box knife’s case, written in what looked like black nail polish, proclaimed, Pizza or Death! A long nail, its base carefully wrapped in layers of athletic adhesive tape, was sheathed in the hexagonal plastic casing of a ballpoint pen at his side. He must have lifted the boots from a Ken doll, or maybe a vintage GI Joe.

“You’ve grown,” I said, bemused.

“Yes, my lord,” Toot-toot barked.

I arched an eyebrow. “Is that the box knife I gave you?”

“Yes, my lord!” he shrilled. “This is my box knife! There are many who like it, but this one is mine!” Toot’s words were crisply precise, and I realized that he was imitating the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I throttled the sudden smile trying to fight its way onto my face. It looked like he was taking it seriously, and I didn’t want to crush his tiny feelings.

What the hell. I could play along. “At ease, soldier.”

“My lord!” he said. He saluted by slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead and then buzzed a quick circle around the doughnut, staring at it intently. “That,” he declared, in a voice much more like his usual one, “is a doughnut. Is it my doughnut, Harry?”

“It could be,” I said. “I’m offering it as payment.”

Toot shrugged disinterestedly, but the pixie’s dragonfly wings buzzed in excitement. “For what?”

“Information,” I said. I jerked my head at the fallen building. “There was a seriously large sigil-working done in and around that building several hours ago. I need to know anything the Little Folk know about what happened.” A little flattery never hurt. “And when I need information from the Little Folk, you’re the best there is, Toot.”

His Pepto-armored chest swelled up a bit with pride. “Many of my people are beholden to you for freeing them from the pale hunters, Harry. Some of them have joined the Za-Lord’s Guard.”

“Pizza Lord” was the title some of the Little Folk had bestowed upon me—largely because I provided them with a weekly bribe of pizza. Most don’t know it, even in my circles, but the Little Folk are everywhere, and they see a lot more than anyone expects. My policy of mozzarella-driven goodwill had secured the affections of a lot of the locals. When I’d demanded that a sometime ally of mine set free several score of the Folk who had been captured, I’d risen even higher in their collective estimation.

Even so, “Za-Lord’s Guard” was a new one on me.

“I have a guard?” I asked.

Toot threw out his chest. “Of course! Who do you think keeps the Dread Beast Mister from killing the brownies when they come to clean up your apartment? We do! Who lays low the mice and rats and ugly big spiders who might crawl into your bed and nibble on your toes? We do! Fear not, Za-Lord! Neither the foulest of rats nor the cleverest of insects shall disturb your home while we draw breath!”

I hadn’t realized that in addition to the cleaning service, I’d acquired an exterminator too. Handy as hell, though, now that I thought about it. There were things in my lab that wouldn’t react well to becoming rodent nest material.

“Outstanding,” I told him. “But do you want the doughnut or not?”

Toot-toot didn’t even answer. He just shot off down the alleyway like a runaway paper lantern, but so quickly that he left falling snow drifting in contrail spirals in his wake.

Typically speaking, faeries get things done in a hurry—when they want to, at any rate. Even so, I’d barely had time to hum through “When You Wish upon a Star” before Toot-toot returned. The edges of the sphere of light around him had changed color, flushing into an agitated scarlet.

“Run!” Toot-toot piped as he streaked down the alley. “Run, my lord!”

I blinked. Of all the things I’d imagined hearing from the little fae on his return, that had not been on my list.

“Run!” he shrilled, whirling in panicked circles around my head.

My brain was still processing. “What about the doughnut?” I asked, like an idiot.

Toot-toot zipped over to me, set his shoulders against my forehead and pushed for all he was worth. He was stronger than he looked. I had to take a step back or be overbalanced. “Forget the doughnut!” he shouted. “Run, my lord!”

Forget the doughnut?

That, more than anything, jarred me into motion. Toot-toot was not the sort to give in to panic. For that matter, the little fae had always seemed to be…not ignorant so much as innocent of the realization of danger. He’d always been oblivious to danger in the past, when there was mortal food on the line.

In the silence of the snowy evening I heard a sound coming from the far end of the alley. Footsteps, quiet and slow.

A quivering, fearful little voice in my head told me to listen to Toot, and I felt my heart speed up as I turned and ran in the direction he’d indicated.

I cleared the alley and turned left, slogging through the deepening snow. There was a police station only two or three blocks from here. There would be lights and people there, and it would probably serve as a deterrent to whatever was after me. Toot flew beside me, just over my shoulder, and he’d produced a little plastic sports whistle. He blew on it in a sharp rhythm, and through the falling snow I dimly saw half a dozen spheres of light of various colors, all smaller than Toot’s, appear out of the night and begin to parallel our course.

I ran for another block, then two, and as I did I became increasingly certain that something was following in my wake. It was a disturbing sensation, a kind of crawly tingle on the back of my neck, and I was sure that I had attracted the attention of something truly terrible. Mounting levels of fear followed that realization, and I ran for all I was worth.

I turned right and spotted the police station house, its exterior lighting a promise of safety, its lamps girded with haloes in the falling snow.

Then the wind came up and the whole world turned frozen and white. I couldn’t see anything, not my own feet as I struggled through the snow, and not the hand I tried holding up in front of my face. I slipped and went down, and then bounced back to my feet in a panic, certain that if my pursuer caught me on the ground, I would never stand again.

I slammed a shoulder into a light pole and staggered back from it. I couldn’t tell which way I was facing in the whiteout. Had I accidentally stumbled into the street? There would probably be no cars moving in this mess, but if one was, even slowly, I’d never see it in time to get out of the way. I wouldn’t be able to hear a car horn either.

The snow was coming so thick now that I had trouble breathing. I picked a direction that seemed as if it would take me to the police station and hurried on. Within a few steps I found a building with one outstretched hand. I used it to guide me, leaning one hand against the solid wall. That worked fine for twenty feet or so, and then the wall vanished, and I stumbled sideways into an alley.

The howling wind went silent, and the sudden stillness around me was a shock to my senses. I pushed myself to my hands and knees and looked behind me. On the street the blinding curtain of snow still swirled, thick and white and impenetrable, beginning as suddenly as a wall. In the alley the snow was barely an inch deep, and except for a distant moan of wind it was silent.

At that instant I realized that the silence was not an empty one.

I wasn’t alone.

The glittering snow on the alley floor blended seamlessly into a sparkling white gown, tinted here and there with streaks of frozen blue or glacial green. I lifted my eyes.

She wore the gown with inhuman elegance, its rippling fabric draping with feminine perfection, her body a perfect balance of curves and planes, beauty and strength. The gown was cut low, and left her shoulders and arms bare. Her skin made the snow seem a bit sallow by comparison. Glittering colors flickered at her wrists, her throat, and upon her fingers, always changing, cycling through deep blue and green and violet iridescence. Her fingernails glittered with the same impossibly shifting hues.

Upon her head was a circlet of ice, elegant and intricate, as if it had been formed from a single crystalline snowflake. Her hair was long, past her hips, long and silken and white, blending into the gown and the snow. Her lips—her gorgeous, sensual lips—were the color of frozen raspberries.

She was a vision of beauty, the kind that has inspired artists for centuries, immortal beauty that is rarely imagined, much less actually seen. Beauty like hers should have struck me senseless with joy. It should have made me weep and give thanks to the Almighty that I had been allowed to look upon it. It should have stopped my breath and made my heart lurch with delight.

It didn’t.

It terrified me.

It terrified me because I could also see her eyes. They were wide, feline eyes, vertically slitted like a cat’s. They shifted color in time with her gems—or, more likely, the gems changed color in time with her eyes. And though they, too, were beautiful beyond the bounds of mortality, they were cold eyes, inhuman eyes, filled with intelligence and desire, but empty of compassion or pity.

I knew those eyes. I knew her.

If fear hadn’t taken the strength from my limbs, I would have run.

A second form appeared from the darkness behind her and hovered in the shadows at her side like an attendant. It resembled the outline of a cat—if any domestic cat ever grew so large. I couldn’t see the color of its fur, but its green-gold eyes reflected the cold blue light, luminous and eerie.

“And well should you bow, mortal,” mewled the feline shape. Its voice was damned eerie, throbbing in strange cadences while producing human sound from an inhuman throat. “Bow before Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Bow before the monarch of the Unseelie fae, the Winter Court of the Sidhe.”

Chapter Six

I gritted my teeth and tried to summon up a salvo of snark. It wouldn’t come. I was just too scared—and with good reason.

Think of every fairy-tale villainess you’ve ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, sometime, they’ve all been real.

Mab gave them lessons.

Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d set up some sort of certification process, just to make sure they were all up to snuff.

Mab was the ruler of fully half of the realm of Faerie, those areas of the Nevernever, the spirit world, closest to our own, and she was universally respected and feared. I’d seen her, seen her in the merciless clarity of my wizard’s Sight, and I knew—not just suspected, but knew—exactly what kind of creature she was.

Fucking terrifying, that’s what. So terrifying that I couldn’t summon up a single wiseass comment, and that just doesn’t happen to me.

I couldn’t talk, but I could move. I pushed myself to my feet. I shook with the cold and the fear, but faced the Faerie Queen and lifted my chin. Once I’d done that, proved that I knew where my backbone was, I was able to use it as a reference point to find my larynx. My voice came out coarse, rough with apprehension. “What do you want with me?”

Mab’s mouth quivered at the corners, turning up into the tiniest of smiles. The feline voice spoke again as Mab tilted her head. “I want you to do me a favor.”

I frowned at her, and then at the dimly seen feline shape behind her. “Is that Grimalkin back there?”

The feline shape’s eyes gleamed. “Indeed,” Grimalkin said. “The servitor behind me bears that name.”

I blinked for a second, confusion stealing some of the thunder from my terror. “The servitor behind you? There’s no one behind you, Grimalkin.”

Mab’s expression flickered with annoyance, her lips compressing into a thin line. When Grimalkin spoke, his voice bore the same expression. “The servitor is my voice for the time being, wizard. And nothing more.”

“Ah,” I said. I glanced between the two of them, and my curiosity took the opportunity to sucker punch terror while confusion had it distracted. I felt my hands stop shaking. “Why would the Queen of Air and Darkness need an interpreter?”

Mab lifted her chin slightly, a gesture of pride, and another small smile quirked her mouth. “You are already in my debt,” the eerie, surrogate voice said for her. “An you wish an answer to that question, you would incur more obligation yet. I do not believe in charity.”

“There’s a shock,” I muttered under my breath. Whew. My banter gland had not gone necrotic. “But you missed the point of the question, I think. Why would Mab need such a thing? She’s an immortal, a demigod.”

Mab opened her mouth as Grimalkin said, “Ah. I perceive. You doubt my identity.” She let her head drift back a bit, mouth open, and an eerie little laugh drifted up from her servitor. “Just as you did in our first meeting.”

I frowned. That was correct. When Mab first walked into my office in mortal guise years ago, I noticed that something was off and subsequently discovered who she really was. As far as I knew, no one else had been privy to that meeting.

“Perhaps you’d care to reminisce over old times,” mewled the eerie voice. Mab winked at me.

Crap. She’d done that the last time I’d bumped into her. And once again, no one else knew anything about it. I’d been indulging in wishful thinking, hoping she was fake. She was the real Mab.

Mab showed me her teeth. “Three favors you owed me,” Mab said—sort of. “Two yet remain. I am here to create an opportunity for you to remove one of them from our accounting.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you going to do that?”

Her smile widened, showing me her delicately pointed canines. “I am going to help you.”

Yeah.

This couldn’t be good.

I tried to keep my voice steady and calm. “What do you mean?”

“Behold.” Mab gestured with her right hand, and the layer of snow on the ground stirred and moved until it had risen into a sculpture of a building, about eighteen inches high. It was like watching a sand castle melt in reverse.

I thought I recognized the building. “Is that…?”

“The building the lady knight asked you to examine,” confirmed Mab’s surrogate voice. It’s amazing what you can get used to if your daily allowance of bizarre is high enough. “As it was before the working that rent it asunder.”

Other shapes began to form from the snow. Rather disconcertingly detailed shapes of cars rolled smoothly by beside the building, typical Chicago traffic—until one of them, an expensive town car, turned down the alley beside the building, the one I’d walked down not an hour before. I had to take a couple of steps to follow it as it came to a halt and stopped. The snow car’s doors opened, and human shapes the size of the old Star Wars action figures came hurrying out of the vehicle.

I recognized them. The first was a flat-top, no-neck bruiser named Hendricks, Marcone’s personal bodyguard and enforcer. His mother was a Kodiak bear; his father was an Abrams tank, and after he got out of the car, he reached back into it and came out with a light machine gun that he carried in one hand.

While Hendricks was doing that, a woman got out of the other side of the car. Gard was tall, six feet or so, though Hendricks made her look petite. She wore a smart business suit with a long trench coat, and as I watched she opened the car’s trunk and removed a broadsword and an all-metal shield maybe two feet across. She passed her hand over the surface of the shield, and then quickly covered it with a section of cloth that had apparently been cut to fit it.

Both of them moved in a tense, precise, professionally concerned cadence.

The third man out of the car was Marcone himself, a man of medium height and build, wearing a suit that cost more than my car, and he looked as relaxed and calm as he always did. Marcone was criminal scum, but I’ll give the rat his due—he’s got balls that drag the ground when he walks.

Marcone’s head whipped around abruptly, back down the alley the way they’d just come, though neither Hendricks nor Gard reacted with a similar motion. He produced a gun with such speed that it almost seemed magical, and little puffs of frost blazed out from the muzzle of the snow-sculpted weapon.

Hendricks reacted immediately, turning to bring that monster weapon to bear, and tiny motes of blue light flashed down the alley, representing tracer fire. Gard put her shield and her body between Marcone and whatever was at the end of the alley. They hurried into a side door of the building, one that had been destroyed in the collapse. Hendricks followed, still spraying bursts of fire down the alley. He, too, vanished into the building.

“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Marcone was inside?”

Mab flicked her hand in a slashing gesture, and the top two-thirds of the little snow building disintegrated under a miniature arctic gale. I was left with a cutaway image of the building’s interior. Marcone and his bodyguards moved through the place like rats through a maze. They sprinted down a flight of stairs. At the bottom Marcone stabbed at some kind of keypad with short, sharp, precise motions and then looked up.

Heavy sheets of what looked like steel fell into place at the top and bottom of the stairs simultaneously, and I could all but hear the ominous boom! as they settled into place. Gard reached up and touched the center of the near door, and there was a flash of light bright enough to leave little spots in my vision. Then they hurried down a short hallway to another keypad and repeated the process. More doors, more flashes of light.

“Locking himself in…” I muttered, frowning. Then I got it. “Wards. Blast doors. It’s a panic room. He built a panic room.”

Grimalkin made a low, lazy yowling sound that I took for a murmur of agreement.

My own apartment was set up with a similar set of protections, which I could invoke if absolutely necessary—though, granted, my setup was a little more Merlin and a little less Bond. But I had to wonder what the hell had rattled Marcone enough to send him scurrying for a deep hole.

Then Gard’s head snapped up, looking directly at where Mab currently stood, as if the little snow sculpture could somehow see the titanic form of the Winter Queen looking down upon her. Gard reached into her suit pocket, drew out what looked like a slender wooden box, the kind that really high-end pen sets come in sometimes, and took a small, rectangular plaque of some kind from the box. She lifted it, facing Mab again, and snapped the little plaque in her fingers.

The entire snow sculpture collapsed on itself and was gone.

“They saw the hidden camera,” I muttered.

“Within her limits, the Chooser is resourceful and clever,” Mab replied. “The Baron was wise to acquire her services.”

I glanced up at Mab. “What happened?”

“All Sight was clouded for several moments. Then this.”

At another gesture the building re-formed—but this time little clouds of frost simulated thick smoke roiling all around it, obscuring many details. The whole image, in fact, looked hazier, grainier, as if Mab had chosen to form it out of snowflakes a few sizes too large to illustrate details.

Even so, I recognized Marcone when he came stumbling out the front door of the building. Several forms hurried out behind him. They surrounded him. A plain van appeared out of the night, and the unknown figures cast him through its open doors. Then they entered and were gone.

As the van pulled away, the building shuddered and collapsed in on itself, sliding down into the wreckage and ruin I’d seen.

“I have chosen you to be my Emissary,” Mab said to me. “You will repay me a favor owed. You will find the Baron.”

“The hell I will,” I said before my brain had time to weigh in on the sentiment.

Mab let out a low, throaty laugh. “You will, wizard child. An you wish to survive, you have no choice.”

Anger flared in my chest and shoved my brain aside on its way to my mouth. “That wasn’t our deal,” I snapped. “Our bargain stipulated that I would choose which favors to repay and that you would not coerce me.”

Mab’s frozen-berry lips lifted in a silent snarl, and the world turned into a curtain of white agony that centered on my eyes. Nothing had ever hurt so much. I fell down, but I wasn’t lucky enough to hit my head and knock myself unconscious. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream.

Then there was something cold beside me. And something very soft and very cold touched my ear. I recognized the sensation, from the far side of the pain. Lips. Mab’s lips. The Queen of Air and Darkness placed a gentle row of kisses down the outside ridge of my ear, then sucked the lobe into her mouth and bit down quite gently.

In the other ear I heard Grimalkin’s voice speaking in a low, tense, hungry whisper. “Mortal brute. Whatever your past, whatever your future, know this: I am Mab, and I keep my bargains. Question my given word again, ape, and I will finish freezing the water in your eyes.”

The pain receded to something merely torturous, and I clenched my teeth down hard over a scream. I could move again. I flinched away from her, scrambling until my back hit a wall. I covered my eyes with my hands and felt some of my frozen eyelashes snap.

I sat there for a minute, struggling to control the pain, and my vision gradually faded from white to a deep red, and then to black. I opened my eyes. I could barely focus them. I felt a wetness on my face, touched it with a finger. There was blood in my tears.

“I have not coerced you, nor dispatched any agent of mine to do so,” Mab continued, as if the break in the conversation had never happened. “Nonetheless, if you wish to survive, you will serve me. I assure you that Summer’s agents will not rest until you are dead.”

I stared at her for a second, still half-dazed from the pain and once again deeply, sincerely, and wisely frightened. “This is another point of contention between you and Titania.”

“When one Court moves, the other perforce moves with it,” Mab said.

I croaked, “Titania wants Marcone dead?”

“Put simply,” she replied. “And her Emissary will continue to seek your death. Only by finding and saving the Baron’s life will you preserve your own.” She paused. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless you should agree to take up the mantle of the Winter Knight,” Mab said, smiling. “I should be forced to choose another Emissary if you did, and your involvement in this matter could end.” Her eyelids lowered, sleepily sensual, and her surrogate voice turned liquid, heady, an audible caress. “As my Knight you would know power and pleasure that few mortals have tasted.”

The Winter Knight. The mortal champion of the Winter Court. The previous guy who had that job was, when last I knew, still crucified upon a frozen tree within bonds of ice, tortured to the point of death and then made whole, only to begin the process again. He’d lost his sanity somewhere in one of the cycles. He wasn’t a real nice guy when I knew him, but no human being should have to suffer like that.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to end up like Lloyd Slate.”

“He suffers for your decision,” she said. “He remains alive until you take up the mantle. Accept my offer, wizard child. Give him release. Preserve your life. Taste of power like none you have known.” Her eyes seemed to grow larger, becoming almost luminous, and her not-voice was a narcotic, a promise. “There is much I can teach you.”

A decent person would have rejected her offer out of hand.

I’m not always one of those.

I could offer you some excuses, if you like. I could tell you that I was an orphan by the time I was six. I could tell you that the foster father who eventually raised me subjected me to more forms of psychological and physical abuse than you could shake a stick at. I could tell you that I’d been held in unjust suspicion for my entire adult life by the White Council, whose principles and ideals I’d done my best to uphold. Or maybe I could say that I’d seen too many good people get hurt, or that I’d looked upon a lot of nasty things with my indelible wizard’s Sight. I could tell you that I’d been caught and abused by the creatures of the night myself, and that I hadn’t ever really gotten over it. I could tell you that I hadn’t gotten laid in a really long time.

And all of those things would be true.

But the fact of the matter is that there’s simply a part of me that isn’t so nice. There’s a part of me that gets off on laying waste to my enemies with my power, that gets tired of taking undeserved abuse. There’s this little voice inside my head that sometimes wants to throw the rules away, stop trying to be responsible, and just take what I want.

And for a minute, I wondered what it might be like to accept Mab’s offer. Life among the Sidhe would be…intense. In every sense a mortal could imagine. What would it be like to live in a house? Hell, probably a big house, if not a freaking castle. Money. Hot showers every day. Every meal a feast. I’d be able to afford whatever clothes I wanted, whatever cars I wanted. Maybe I could do some traveling, see places I’d always wanted to see. Hawaii. Italy. Australia. I could learn to sail, like I always wanted.

Women, oh, yeah. Hot and cold running girls. Inhumanly beautiful, sensuous creatures like the one before me. The Winter Knight had status and power, and those are even more of an aphrodisiac to the fae than they are to us mortals.

I could have…almost anything.

All it would cost me was my soul.

And no, I’m not talking about anything magical or metaphysical. I’m talking about the core of my identity, about what makes Harry Dresden who and what he is. If I lost those things, the things that define me, then what would be left?

Just a heap of bodily processes—and regret.

I knew that. But all the same, the touch of Mab’s chilled lips on my ear lingered on, sending slow, pleasant ripples of sensation through me when I breathed. It was enough to make me hesitate.

“No, Mab,” I said finally. “I don’t want the job.”

She studied my face with calm, heavy eyes. “Liar,” she said quietly. “You want it. I can see it in you.”

I gritted my teeth. “The part of me that wants it doesn’t get a vote,” I said. “I’m not going to take the job. Period.”

She tilted her head to one side and stared at me. “One day, wizard, you will kneel at my feet and ask me to bestow the mantle upon you.”

“But not today.”

“No,” Mab said. “Today you repay me a favor. Just as I said you would.”

I didn’t want to think too hard about that, and I didn’t want to openly agree with her, either. So instead I nodded at the patch of ground where the sculptures had been. “Who took Marcone?”

“I do not know. That is one reason I chose you, Emissary. You have a gift for finding what is lost.”

“If you want me to do this for you, I’m going to need to ask you some questions,” I said.

Mab glanced up, as if consulting the stars through the still-falling snow. “Time, time, time. Will there never be an end to it?” She shook her head. “Wizard child, the hour has nearly passed. I have duties upon which to attend—as do you. You should rise and leave this place immediately.”

“Why?” I asked warily. I got to my feet.

“Because when your little retainer warned you of danger, wizard child, he was not referring to me.”

On the street outside the alley, the gale-force wind and the white wall of blowing snow both died away. On the other side of the street, two men in long coats and big Stetson hats stood facing the alley. I felt the sudden weight of their attention, and got the impression that they had been surprised to see me.

I whirled to speak to Mab—only to find her gone. Grimalkin, too, both of them vanished without a trace or a whisper of power to betray it.

I turned back to the street in time to see the two figures step off the sidewalk and begin moving toward me with long strides. They were both tall, nearly my own height, and thickly built. The snowfall hadn’t lightened, and the street was a smooth pane of unbroken snow.

They were leaving cloven footprints on it.

“Crap,” I spat, and fled back down the narrow, featureless alley.

Chapter Seven

At this sign of retreat, the two men threw back their heads and let out shrill, bleating cries. Their hats fell off when they did, revealing the goatlike features and curling horns of gruffs. But they were bigger than the first attack team—bigger, stronger, and faster.

And as they closed the distance on me, I noticed something else.

Both of them had produced submachine guns from beneath their coats.

“Oh, come on,” I complained as I ran. “That’s just not fair.”

They started shooting at me, which was bad news. Wizard or not, a bullet through the head will splatter my brains just as randomly as the next guy’s. The really bad news was that they weren’t just spraying bullets everywhere. Even with an automatic weapon, it isn’t easy to hit a moving target, and the old “spray and pray” method of fire relied upon blind luck disguised as the law of averages: Shoot enough bullets and eventually you have to hit something. Do your shooting like that and sometimes you’ll hit the target, and sometimes you won’t.

But the gruffs shot like professionals. They fired in short, burping little bursts, aimed fire, even if it suffered from the fact that they were moving while they did it.

I felt something hit my back, just to the left of my spine, an impact that felt somewhat like getting slugged in the back by someone with a single knuckle extended. It was a sharp, unpleasant sensation, and the way my balance wavered was more due to the fact that it surprised and frightened me than to the actual force it imparted. I kept running, ducking my head down as far as I could, hunching up my shoulders. The defensive magics woven into my coat could evidently stop whatever rounds the gruffs were using, but that didn’t mean an unlucky ricochet couldn’t bounce some lead into me from the front or sides, around the coat—and getting shot in the lower legs, ankles, or feet would probably kill me as certainly as one through the head. It would just take a little more effort on the gruffs’ part to make it stick.

It’s hard to think when someone’s trying to kill you. We human beings aren’t wired to be rational and creative when we know our lives are in danger of a swift and violent end. The body has definite ideas of which survival strategies it prefers to embrace, and those are generally limited to “rip threat to pieces” or “run like hell.” No thinking need be involved, as far as our instincts are concerned.

Our instincts were a long time in the making, though, and the threats that can come after us now have outpaced them. You can’t outrun a bullet, and you don’t go hand-to-hand with a gunman unless you’re certain you are about to die anyway. Speed and mindless aggression weren’t going to keep me alive. I needed to figure a way out.

I felt another bullet hit the lower part of my coat. It caught spell-strengthened leather and tugged it forward, just the way a thrown rock might have done. Admittedly, though, the rock wouldn’t have made that angry-hornet buzzing noise as it struck. I dumped a garbage can over behind me, hoping it might trip up the gruffs for a second and buy me a little time.

Hey, you try coming up with a cogent, rational course of action when you’re running down a frozen alley with genuine fairy-tale creatures chasing you, spitting bullets at your back. It’s way harder than it looks.

I didn’t dare turn to face them. I could have raised a shield to stop the gunfire, but once I had stopped moving, I figured odds were fantastic that one of them would just hop over me like a Kung Fu Theater extra, and they’d come at me from two directions at once.

In fact, if I were them, and had tracked me to that alley…

The chattering gunfire from behind me ceased, and I realized what was happening.

I raised my staff as I neared the far end of the alley, pointed it ahead of me, and screamed, “Forzare!”

My timing wasn’t perfect. The unseen force I released from the end of the staff rushed out ahead of me, an invisible battering ram. It struck the third gruff just as the fae-thug stepped around the corner, a massive oak cudgel readied in his hands. The blast didn’t hit him squarely. It would have thrown him a goodly ways if it had. Instead it caught the right side of his body, ripping the cudgel away from him and sending the gruff into a drunken, spinning stagger.

I don’t know much about goats, but I do know a little about horses, having taken care of my second mentor Ebenezar McCoy’s riding horses on his little farm in Missouri. Their feet are awfully vulnerable, especially considering how much weight they’re putting on such a relatively small area. Any one of a hundred little things can go wrong. One of them is the possibility that some of the surprisingly frail little bones just above the back of the hoof could be fractured or broken. A pastern or fetlock injury like that can lame a horse for weeks, even permanently.

So as I passed the staggered gruff, I swung my heavy staff like a baseball bat, aiming at the back of one of his hooves. I felt the impact in my hands and heard a sharp crack. The gruff let out a high-pitched and utterly bestial scream of surprise and pain, and tumbled to the snow. I all but flew on by, lengthening my stride, crossing the street and heading for the nearest corner, before his buddies could get a clear shot at me.

When you drive game, you’d damn well better be sure that the one you’re driving the prey toward is ready and able to handle it.

I ducked around the next corner maybe half a second before the guns behind me coughed and burped again, chewing chips of brick from the wall. There was a steel door on the side of the building, an exit-only door with no handle on the outside. I couldn’t stay ahead of the gruffs for long. I took a chance, stopped, and pressed my hand against the door, hoping like hell it had a push-bar opening mechanism and not a dead bolt.

Something went right. I felt the bar on the other side, reached out with my will and another murmur, “Forzare,” and directed the force against the other side of the door. It popped open. I went through and pulled it shut behind me.

The building was dark, silent, and almost uncomfortably warm in contrast with the night outside. I leaned my head against the metal door for a second, panting. “Good door,” I wheezed. “Nice door. Nice, locked, hostile-to-faeries door.”

My ear was in contact with the door, and it was the only reason I heard the movement immediately on its other side. Snow crunched quietly.

I froze in place.

I heard a scraping sound, and a snorted breath that sounded like something you’d hear from a horse. Then nothing.

It took me maybe three seconds to realize that the gruff on the other side of the door was doing the same thing I was: listening to see if he could hear who was on the other side.

It couldn’t have been more than six inches away.

And I was standing there in complete darkness. If something went wrong and the gruff came in after me, I could forget running. I couldn’t see the floor, the walls, or any obstacles that might trip me up. Like stairs. Or a mound of rusty razor blades.

I froze, not daring to move. Metal door or not, if the gruff had the right submachine gun and the right kind of ammunition, he could riddle me with holes right through the steel. There was no telling what other weapons he might be packing, either. I’d once seen a sobering demonstration of how to skewer someone on a sword from the other side of a metal door, and it hadn’t been pretty.

So I stood very still and tried to think quietly.

It was about then that I remembered one of those movies with the maniac in the ghost mask, where one of the kids in the opening segment leans against a bathroom stall, listening exactly the same way I was. The killer, in the neighboring stall, rams a knife into the victim’s ear.

It was a panic-inducing thought, and suddenly I had to fight the urge to bolt. My ear began to itch furiously. If I hadn’t known that the gruffs were trying to flush me out like a rabbit from his briar patch, I might not have managed to keep my cool. It was a near thing, but I did it.

A week and a half went by before I heard another exhalation from a larger-than-human chest, and a pair of quick, light crunches of cloven hooves on snow.

I pushed away from the door as silently as I could, trembling with adrenaline, fatigue, and cold. I had to think ahead of these assholes if I wanted to get out in one piece. Inky, Binky, and Pinky knew I’d come in here, and they weren’t about to give up the chase. Right now one of them was watching the door I’d come in to make sure I didn’t backtrack. The other two were circling the building, looking for a way in.

I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be hanging around when they found it.

I drew off the pentacle amulet I wore around my neck, murmured, and made a tiny effort of will. The amulet began to glow with gentle blue light.

I stood in a utility corridor of some kind. Bare concrete floor met unpainted drywall. There were a couple of doors on the right side of the hall, and another one at the far end. I checked them out. The first door opened into a room containing several commercial-grade heating and air-conditioning units, all hooked up to a ductwork octopus. No help there.

The next room was padlocked shut. I felt a little bad for doing it, but I lifted my staff, took a moment to close my eyes and concentrate, and then sent another pulse of energy down the rune-carved length of wood, this time focused into a blade of pure force. It sliced through the hasp and bit into the heavy wood of the door behind it. The lock fell to the floor, its cleanly severed steel glowing dull orange at the edges.

The room beyond was probably the workshop of the building’s handyman. It wasn’t large, but it was neatly organized. It held a woodworking bench, tools, and various supplies—lightbulbs, air filters for the units next door, replacement parts for doors, sinks, and toilets. I availed myself of a few things and dropped my last two twenties onto the workbench by way of apology. Then I stalked back out into the hallway and continued into the building.

The next door was locked, too. I jimmied it open with the crowbar I’d taken from the tool room. It made some noise.

A deep-throated bawl of animal sound came from the far side of the metal door. Something slammed against it, but not hard enough to bring it down, and the sound was followed by an immediate yowl of pain. I bared my teeth in a grin.

The far side of the door opened onto the lobby of an office building, very sparse. A light was blinking on a panel with a keypad on it, next to the door I’d just forced open. Apparently I had triggered the building’s security system. That was fine by me. The nearest police station was only a little more than a block from here, and the lights and the appearance of mortal police officers would probably make the gruffs fade and wait for a better moment to settle my hash.

But wait. If the building had a security system, I had to have tripped it when I came in the side door, and that had been a couple of minutes ago. Why hadn’t the cops shown up already?

The weather, most likely. Travel would be slow. Lines would be down, causing all kinds of power and communication problems. There would be traffic accidents everywhere there was traffic, and in the wake of all the manpower diverted to Marcone’s wrecked building, the station would be overloaded with work, even this late at night. It might take several minutes longer than usual for the police to respond.

A shadow moved outside the building’s front door, and one of the gruffs appeared there.

I didn’t have minutes.

I was moving before I had consciously recognized the fact, running for the elevators. The steel security gate inside the door would prevent the gruff from crashing through the glass to come at me, but that didn’t stop the gruff from lifting its submachine gun and opening up on me.

The gun sounded like heavy canvas ripping, only a thousand times louder. The window shattered and glass flew everywhere. Some of the bullets struck the security gate, throwing off sparks, most of them shattering, a couple bouncing wildly around the lobby. The rest came at me.

I had my left hand stretched out toward the gruff as I ran, and my will was focused on the bracelet on my wrist. Made of a braid of many metals, the chain of the bracelet was hung with multiple charms in the shape of medieval shields. The power of my will rushed into the bracelet, focused by the enchantments I’d laid upon it when I had prepared it. My will coalesced into a concave dome of barely visible blue energy between me and the gruff, and bullets slammed against it, shattering in bursts of light that rippled over the surface of the energy shield like tiny waves in a still pond.

All three of the elevator doors stood open, and I rushed into the nearest and rapidly hit the buttons for every floor up to the top of the building. Then I leapt out, repeated the process in the second elevator, and then jumped into the third and headed straight for the top. No sense in making it easy for the gruffs to follow me up, and even a moment’s delay might buy me the time I needed.

The elevator doors closed—then buzzed and sprang open again.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted, and hit the close-door button hard enough to hurt my thumb.

I growled and watched as the elevator twitched closed again, and then once more sprang open, a sad little ding emerging from a half-functioning bell. I was jabbing the button like a lunatic when the gruffs demonstrated their opinion of mortal security systems.

Sure, the touch of metal was anathema to the beings of Faerie. Sure, they couldn’t hammer their way through a metal door or bash through a heavy metal gate.

Brick walls, on the other hand, presented fewer problems.

There was a thunder crack of sound, and the wall beside the front door exploded inward. I don’t mean it fell in. It literally exploded as the momentum of a superhumanly powerful being struck the wall from the far side and shattered it. Bits of brick flew like bullets. A ceramic pot holding a plastic plant shattered. Several pieces zipped into the elevator and bounced around inside of it. A cloud of brick dust billowed through the lobby.

The gruff who had just one-upped the Big Bad Wolf bulled its way through the cloud, curling ram’s horns first. It staggered a step or two, shaking its head, then focused on me and let out another bleating howl.

“Augh!” I screamed at the elevator, jabbing the button. “Close, close, close!”

It did. The car began rising just as the stunned gruff brought his weapon to bear and opened up. Bullets ripped through the relatively flimsy metal of the elevator’s door, but my shield bracelet was ready and none of them found their target—who let out a howling, adrenaline-drunken laugh of defiance as the elevator rose.

What they say is true: There’s nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed. When the shooter happens to be a fairy-tale hit man, it just adds to the zest.

Fourteen floors later I emerged into a darkened hallway and, guided by the light of my upraised amulet, I found the door to the roof. It was an exterior door with a heavy dead bolt, and there was no way that the crowbar was going to get it open.

I took a step back, lifted my staff, and focused my will on the door. Once upon a time I would have just let fly with my will and blasted it right out of its frame, a fairly exhausting bit of spellcraft. Instead I pointed the end of the staff at the bottommost hinge on this side and barked, “Forzare!”

A blade of unseen energy, like that I had used on the padlock, severed the hinge with a miniature crack of thunder. I did it for the middle and lower hinges too, then used the crowbar to pry the heavy door out of its setting and hurried out onto the roof.

There was a lot of wind up this high, even though the night was fairly calm. The towers of the city could funnel even a mild breeze into a virtual gale, and tonight this rooftop was on the receiving end. The wind ripped my coat out to one side, and I had to lean against it. At least there wasn’t much snow—except where a portion of architecture created a lee against the wind. There it was piled deep.

It took me a second to orient. When you’re fourteen floors up, it gives you an alien perspective of streets and buildings that might otherwise be familiar. I figured out which side of the building I’d come in on and hurried to it, searching for the escape route I’d spotted on the way in.

It wasn’t the fire escapes, which decorated two sides of the building in a weathered steel framework. Those things are noisy as hell, and the gruffs would be watching them. Instead I leaned out over the edge and looked at the niche in the brick wall. It ran the entire vertical length of the building, a groove about three feet wide and two feet deep. There was one on either side of each corner of the building, probably there for the aesthetic value, rising like a three-walled chimney from the ground to the roof.

My breath went a little short. Fourteen floors is a much longer way down than it is up, especially when you aren’t using things like elevators and fire escapes. Especially when I noted the frost and ice forming on the building’s exterior.

I took a moment to debate the sanity of this plan. I’d cut the odds in my favor, assuming there were only three gruffs after me this time. One would have to watch the elevators. Another would have to watch the fire escape. That left only one to actively pursue me. I didn’t know how fast the gruff would get to the roof, but I had no doubt that he’d manage it in short order.

The idea of simply pushing the gruff off the roof with a blast of power had a certain appeal, but I decided against it. A fourteen-story drop might just piss the gruff off—and it would absolutely confirm my location. Better to slip away and leave them wondering if I was still hiding in the building.

So I climbed out onto the ledge amidst gusting winds. My nose and fingers went numb almost immediately. I tried to ignore them as I lowered my legs into the groove in the wall and braced my feet against the bricks on either side. Then, my heart pounding madly, I shifted my hips and wriggled a bit, until the outward pressure of my legs against the bricks was the only thing that kept me from kissing sidewalk. Once my arms were low enough, I was able to spread them and plant my forearms against the bricks as well, assisting my legs.

I cannot possibly explain to you how frightened I was, staring down. The swirling snow kept me from seeing the ground at times. Once I started there would be no going back. One slip, one miscalculation, one inconveniently placed patch of ice, and I would be able to add “pancake” to my impersonation repertoire.

I pushed hard with my arms and let my legs loosen. I slid them down a few inches and tightened them again, until they supported my weight once more. Then I loosened my arms and slid down a few inches before stopping, tightening my arms again and repeating the process.

I started climbing down, shifting my legs and arms in turn, five or six inches at a time, moving down the brick groove inchworm style. I made it about ten feet before an image invaded my mind: a gruff, aiming his gun down at me from a couple of feet away and casually popping several rounds through the top of my head.

I started climbing faster, my stomach turning with reaction to the height and the fear. I heard myself making desperate little grunting sounds. The wind howled, blowing snow into my eyes. Frost formed on my eyelashes. My coat did little to protect me from the wind swirling the length of my body, and I started shaking uncontrollably.

I lost the staff when I was about fifty feet up. It tumbled from my numbing fingers, and I held my breath. The rattle of its impact could attract the gruffs’ attention and ruin the whole purpose of taking the madman route off the building.

But the solid length of oak fell into a drift of snow and vanished silently into the white powder. I labored to emulate it, only less quickly.

I didn’t slip until I was ten feet up. I managed to take the fall well, mostly because I landed in the same snowdrift that had received my staff. I struggled up out of the freezing white, and almost went back down when my staff tangled in my legs. I took it up in mostly nerveless hands and staggered out of the drift.

A sphere of light whipped past the other end of the alley, then reappeared and shot toward me.

Toot-toot’s face was unusually sober, even grim. He zipped up to me and held a finger to his lips. I nodded at him and mouthed, I need to know how to get out.

Toot’s sphere of light bobbed once in acknowledgment and then sped away. I looked up. Other balls of glowing light darted about the skies, flickers that you would barely even notice if you didn’t know what to look for. I took a precaution while I waited.

As before, I didn’t wait long. Toot returned a moment later and beckoned me. He took the lead and I followed him. I was getting colder. The fall into the drift had covered me in a light layer of snow, which had then melted. Wet clothes are exactly the worst thing to be wearing in that kind of weather. I had to keep moving. Hypothermia isn’t as dramatic a death as being ripped apart by bullets, but it’ll get the job done.

When I got to the far end of the alley, I heard another bleating cry from a gruff, drifting on the moaning wind, softened by the falling snow. I glanced back and just barely saw motion as a gruff descended the side of the building the same way I had—though much more swiftly.

A second later there was an agonized, inhuman scream as the gruff got to the bottom and discovered that the snow had hidden the box of nails that I had stolen from the tool room and spread liberally over the ground. The screams went on for several seconds. One of the nails must have pierced the gruff ’s hoof, and as tired and cold as I was, I still had energy enough to grin. That one wasn’t going to be dancing in elf circles anytime soon.

I’d lamed two of them, and figured it would be enough to make them back off the chase, at least for the moment. But you never can tell. I wasted no time in following Toot through back alleys and away from the chosen emissaries of Summer. Around me the little glowing Christmas balls of light, the Za-Lord’s Guard, darted back and forth, a wary ring of sentinels spread in a perimeter that moved as I did.

Several blocks away I found an all-night grocery store and staggered in out of the cold. The clerk glared at me until I hobbled over, clumsily dug change out of my pockets, and left it next to the cash register before shuffling to the coffee counter. At that point the clerk evidently decided that he wouldn’t have to get out the shotgun or whatever he had behind the counter, and went back to staring out the window.

There were a few other shoppers there, and I saw a police car crunch through the snow on the street outside, probably responding to the alarm at the building. Nice and public. Probably safe. I was so cold I could barely fill up the cup. The coffee, which burned my tongue a little, was absolutely delicious, even served black. I guzzled the hot drink and felt sensation begin returning to my body.

I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and finished the coffee. Then I crushed the paper cup and tossed it into the trash.

Someone had snatched John Marcone, and I had to find him and protect him. I had a feeling that Murphy wasn’t going to be thrilled with the circumstances around this one. Hell’s bells, I wasn’t happy with it. But that really wasn’t what was bothering me.

What really worried me was that Mab had been involved.

What was the deal with having Grimalkin along to do her talking for her? Aside from making her seem even more extremely disturbing than usual, I mean. Oh, sure, Mab may have seemed fairly straightforward, but there was a lot more going on than she was saying.

For example: Mab had said that Summer’s hit men were after me because Mab had chosen me to be her Emissary. But for that to be true, she had to have done it hours ago, at least a little while before the first crew of gruffs had attacked me at the Carpenter place.

And that had happened several hours before the bad guys grabbed Marcone.

Someone was running a game, all right. Someone was keeping secrets.

I had a bad feeling that if I didn’t find out who, why, and how, Mab would toss me into the trash like a used paper cup.

Right after she crushed me, of course.

Chapter Eight

A wide-axled, full-of-itself, military-wannabe truck crunched through the snowy streets and came to a halt outside the little grocery store. The lights glared in through the doors. I squinted at it. After a minute the Hummer’s horn blared in two short beeps.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I hobbled to the door and out to the truck, which blended seamlessly with the background and the foreground, and with most of the air.

The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead, so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.

“Thomas,” I said. “A lesser man than me would hate you.”

He grinned. “There’s someone lesser than you?” He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. “Empty night, Harry. You look like…”

“Ten miles of bad road?”

He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. “I was going to go with ‘a raccoon.’”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Get in.”

He took the monorail to the other side of the Hummer’s cab to unlock the passenger-side door. I showed up eventually, and noticed every little ache in my body on the way—especially the throbbing burn centered on my broken nose. I tossed my staff into the back of Das Truck, half expecting an echoing clatter when it landed. I got in, shut the door, and put on my seat belt while Thomas got the truck moving. He peered carefully into the heavy snow, presumably looking for some runty little sedans he could drive over for fun.

“That’s gotta hurt,” he said after a moment.

“Only when I exhale,” I said testily. “What took you so long?”

“Well, you know how much I love getting called in the middle of the night to drive through snow and ice to play chauffeur for grumpy low-life investigators. The anticipation slowed me down.”

I grunted in what might have been construed as an apologetic manner by someone who knew me.

Thomas did. “What’s up?”

I told him everything.

Thomas is my half brother, my only family. I’m allowed.

He listened.

“And then,” I concluded, “I went for a ride in a monster truck.”

Thomas’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “It is kinda butch, isn’t it.”

I squinted around the truck. “Do TV shows start an hour later in the backseat than they do up here?”

“Who cares?” Thomas said. “It’s got TiVo.”

“Good,” I said. “It might be a little while before I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

Thomas let out a theatrical sigh. “Why me?”

“Because if I want to find Marcone, the best place to start is with his people. If word gets out that he’s gone missing, there’s no telling how some of them might react when I come snooping around. So you’ve got my back.”

“What if I don’t want your back?”

“Cope,” I said heartlessly. “You’re family.”

“You’ve got me there,” he admitted. “But I wonder if you’ve thought this through very thoroughly.”

“I try to make thinking an ongoing process.”

Thomas shook his head. “Look, you know I don’t try to tell you your business.”

“Except tonight, apparently,” I said.

“Marcone is a grown-up,” Thomas said. “He signed on to the Accords willingly. He knew what he was going to be letting himself in for.”

“And?” I said.

“And it’s a jungle out there,” Thomas said. He squinted through the thick snow. “Metaphorically speaking.”

I grunted. “He made his bed, and I should let him lie in it?”

“Something like that,” Thomas said. “And don’t forget that Murphy and the police aren’t going to be thrilled with a ‘Save the Kingpin’ campaign.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’d love to stand back and see what happens. But this isn’t about Marcone anymore.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Mab skinning me alive if I don’t give her what she wants.”

“Come on, Harry,” Thomas said. “You can’t really think that Mab’s motives and plans are that direct, that cut-and-dried.” He adjusted the setting of the Hummer’s wipers. “She wants Marcone for a reason. You might not be doing him any favors by saving him on Mab’s behalf.”

I scowled out at the night.

He held up a hand, ticking off fingers. “And that’s assuming that, one, he’s alive at all right now. Two, that you can find him. Three, that you can get him out alive. And four, that the opposition doesn’t cripple or kill you.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“That you’re playing against a stacked deck, and that you have no idea if Mab is going to be there to cover your bets when the bad guys call.” He shook his head. “It would be smarter for you to skip town. Go someplace warm for a few weeks.”

“Mab might take that kinda personal,” I said.

“Mab’s a businesswoman,” Thomas said. “Creepy and weird, but she’s cold, too. Calculating. As long as you still represent a potential recruit to her, I doubt she’d elect to depreciate your value prematurely.”

“Depreciate. I like that. You might be right—unless, to return to the original metaphor, Mab isn’t playing with a full deck. Which the evidence of recent years seems to imply with increasing frequency.” I nodded out the window. “And I’ve got a feeling that I’d have had even more trouble with the gruffs I’ve seen so far if we weren’t in the middle of a freaking blizzard. If I waltz off to Miami or somewhere warm, I’ll be putting myself that much nearer to the agents of Summer—who are also planning my murder.”

Thomas frowned and said nothing.

“I could run, but I couldn’t hide,” I said. “Better to face it here, on my home ground, while I’m still relatively rested”—I let out a huge and genuine yawn—“instead of waiting for faerie goons from one Court or the other to, ah, depreciate me by surprise after I’ve been on the run for a few weeks.”

“What about the Council?” Thomas demanded. “You’ve been wearing the grey cloak for how long, now? And you’ve fought for them how many times?”

I shook my head. “Right now the Council is still stretched to the limit. We might not be in open battle with the Red Court at the moment, but the Council and the Wardens have got years of catch-up work to do.” I felt my jaw tighten. “Lot of warlocks have come up in the past few years. The Wardens are working overtime to get them under control.”

“You mean kill them,” Thomas said.

“I mean kill them. Most of them teenagers, man.” I shook my head. “Luccio knows my feelings on the matter. She refuses to assign any of it to me. Which means that other Wardens are forced to pick up the slack. I’m not going to add to their workload by dragging them into this mess.”

“You don’t seem to mind adding to mine,” Thomas noted.

I snorted. “That’s because I respect them.”

“So long as we have that clear,” he said.

We drove past a city snowplow. It had foundered in a deep drift, like some kind of metallic Ice Age beast trapped in a tar pit. I watched it with bemusement as Thomas’s truck crunched slowly, steadily on by.

“By the way,” he asked, “where do you want to go?”

“First things first,” I said. “I need food.”

“You need sleep.”

“Tick-tock. Food will do for now.” I pointed. “There, an IHOP.”

He hauled the big truck into a slow, steady turn. “Then what?”

“I ask people impertinent questions,” I said. “Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.”

“Assuming someone doesn’t kill you while you do.”

“That’s why I’m bringing my very own vampire bodyguard.”

Thomas parked across three spaces in the tiny, otherwise unoccupied lot of an International House of Pancakes.

“I like the scarf,” I said. I leaned over and inhaled through my nose as best I could. It stung, but I detected a faint whiff of vanilla and strawberries. “She make it for you?”

Thomas nodded without saying anything. The leather-gloved fingers of one hand traced over the soft, simple yarn. He looked quietly sad. I felt bad for mentioning Justine, my brother’s lost lover. Then I understood why he wore the gloves: If she’d made it for him, a token of her love, he didn’t dare touch it with his skin. It would sear him like a hot skillet. So he kept it close enough for him to smell her touch upon it, but he didn’t dare let it brush against him.

Every time I think my romantic life is a wasteland, I look at my brother and see how much worse it could be.

Thomas shook his head and killed the engine and we sat for a moment in silence.

So I clearly heard a deep male voice outside the truck say, “Don’t either of you move.” There was the distinct click-clack of a shotgun’s pump working. “Or I will kill you.”

Chapter Nine

When there’s a gun pointed at you, you’ve got two options: Either you move, fast and unexpectedly, and hope that you get lucky, or you freeze and try to talk your way clear. Given that I had really limited room in which to attempt to dodge or run, I went with option B: I held still.

“I don’t suppose,” I asked hopefully, “that this is the full military model?”

“It has individually heated seats and a six-disk CD changer,” Thomas said.

I scowled. “Uh-huh. Those are way cooler than silly features like armor and bulletproof glass.”

“Hey,” Thomas said, “it’s not my fault you have special needs.”

“Harry,” said the man with the shotgun, “hold up your right hand, please.”

I arched an eyebrow at that. Typically the vocabulary of thugs holding guns to your head ran a little light on courtesy phrases like please.

“You want me to kill him?” Thomas murmured, barely audible.

I twitched my head in a tiny negative motion. Then I lifted up my right hand, fingers spread.

“Turn it around,” said the man outside. “Let me see the inside of your wrist.”

I did.

“Oh, thank God,” breathed the voice.

I’d finally placed it. I turned my head to one side and said through the glass, “Hey, there, Fix. Is that a shotgun you’re holding to my head, or are you just glad to see me?”

Fix was a young, slender man of medium height. His hair was silver-white and very fine, and though no one would ever accuse him of beauty, there was a confidence and surety in his plain features that gave them a certain appeal. He was a far cry from the nervous, scrawny kid I’d first met several years ago.

He wore jeans and a green silk shirt—nothing more. He obviously should have been freezing, and he just as obviously wasn’t. The thickly falling snowflakes weren’t striking him. Every single one seemed to find its way to the ground around him somehow. He held a pump-action shotgun with a long barrel against his shoulder, and wore a sword on a belt at his hip.

“Harry,” he said, his voice steady. His tone wasn’t hostile. “Can we have a polite talk?”

“We probably could have,” I said, “if you hadn’t started off by pointing a gun at my head.”

“A necessary precaution,” he said. “I needed to be sure you hadn’t taken Mab’s offer.”

“And become the new Winter Knight?” I asked. “You could have asked me, Fix.”

“If you’d become Mab’s creature,” Fix said, “you would have lied. It would have changed you. Made you an extension of her will. I couldn’t trust you.”

“You’re the Summer Knight,” I replied. “So I can’t help but wonder if that wouldn’t make you just as controlled and untrustworthy. Summer’s not all that happy with me right now, apparently. Maybe you’re just an extension of Summer’s will.”

Fix stared at me down the barrel of the shotgun. Then he lowered it abruptly and said, “Touché.”

Thomas produced from nowhere a semiautomatic pistol scaled to fit his truck, and had it trained on Fix’s head before the other man had finished speaking the second syllable of the word.

Fix’s eyes widened. “Holy crap.”

I sighed and took the gun gently from Thomas’s grip. “Now, now. Let’s not give him the wrong idea about the nature of this conversation.”

Fix let out a slow breath. “Thank you, Harry. I—”

I pointed the gun at Fix’s head, and he froze with his mouth partly open.

“Lose the shotgun,” I told him. I made no effort to sound friendly.

His mouth closed and his lips pressed into a thin line, but he obeyed.

“Step back,” I said.

He did it.

I got out of the car, carefully keeping the gun trained on his head. I recovered the shotgun and passed it back to Thomas. Then I faced the silver-haired Summer Knight in dead silence while the snow fell.

“Fix,” I said quietly, after a moment had passed. “I know you’ve been spending a lot of time in the supernatural circles lately. I know that plain old things like guns don’t seem like a significant threat, in some ways. I know that you probably meant it as a message, that you weren’t coming after me with everything you could bring to bear, and that I was supposed to consider it a token of moderation.” I squinted down the sight of Thomas’s gun. “But you crossed a line. You pointed a gun at my head. Friends don’t do that.”

More silence and snowfall.

“Point another weapon at me,” I said quietly, “and you’d damned well better pull the trigger. Do you understand me?”

Fix’s eyes narrowed. He nodded once.

I let him look down the gun’s barrel for a few more seconds and then lowered it. “It’s cold,” I said. “What do you want?”

“I came here to warn you, Harry,” Fix said. “I know Mab has chosen you to act as her Emissary. You don’t know what you’re getting into. I came to tell you to stand clear of it.”

“Or what?”

“Or you’re going to get hurt,” Fix said quietly. He sounded tired. “Maybe killed. And there’s going to be collateral damage along the way.” He held up a hand and continued, hurriedly, “Please understand. I’m not threatening you, Harry. I’m just telling you about consequences.”

“I’d have an easier time believing that if you hadn’t opened the conversation by threatening to kill me,” I said.

“The last Summer Knight was murdered by his Winter counterpart,” Fix replied. “In fact, that’s how most of them die. If you’d taken service with Mab, I wouldn’t stand a chance in a fair fight against you, and we both know it. I did what I had to in order to warn you and still protect myself.”

“Oh,” I said. “It was a precautionary shotgun aimed at my skull. That makes it different.”

“Dammit, Dresden,” Fix said. “What do I have to do to get you to listen to me?”

“Behave in a vaguely trustworthy fashion,” I said. “For instance, next time you know that Summer’s hitters are about to make a run at me, maybe you could call me on a telephone and give me a little heads-up.”

Fix grimaced. His face twisted into an expression of effort. When he spoke his jaws stayed locked together, but I could, with difficulty, understand the words. “Wanted to.”

“Oh,” I said. A big chunk of my anger evaporated. It was probably just as well. Fix wasn’t the one who deserved to be on the receiving end of it. “I can’t back off.”

He drew in a breath and nodded as if in comprehension. “Mab’s got a handle on you.”

“For now.”

He gave me a rather bleak smile. “She isn’t the sort to let go of anyone she wants to keep.”

“And I’m not the sort who gets kept,” I replied.

“Maybe not,” Fix said, but he sounded dubious. “Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

“We’re going to have to agree to disagree.”

“Jesus,” Fix said, looking away. “I don’t want to square off against you, Dresden.”

“Then don’t.”

He stared quietly at me, his expression serious. “I can’t back off, either. I like you, Harry. But I can’t make you any promises.”

“We’re playing for opposite teams,” I said. “Nothing personal. But we’ll do what we have to do.”

Fix nodded.

We didn’t speak for almost a minute.

Then I laid the shotgun down in the snow, nodded, and got back into Thomas’s truck. I gave the huge automatic back to my brother. Fix made no move toward the shotgun.

“Harry,” he said, as the truck started to pull out. His mouth twitched a few times before he blurted, “Remember the leaf Lily gave you.”

I frowned at him, but nodded.

Thomas got the truck moving again and started driving. Windshield wipers squeaked. Snow crunched beneath tires, a steady white noise.

“Okay,” Thomas said. “What was that all about? Guy’s supposed to be a friend, and he screwed you over. I thought you were going to pistol-whip him for a minute. Then you start getting all teary-eyed.”

“Metaphorically speaking,” I said tiredly.

“You know what I mean.”

“He’s under a geas, Thomas.”

Thomas frowned. “Lily’s got him in a brain-lock?”

“I doubt she’d do that to Fix. They go back.”

“Who, then?”

“My money is on Titania, the Summer Queen. If she told him to keep his mouth shut and not to help me, he wouldn’t get a choice in the matter. Probably why he showed up armed and tried to intimidate me. He wouldn’t be able to speak to me outright, but if he’s delivering a threat in order to further Titania’s plans, it might let him get around the geas.”

“Seems pretty thin to me. You believe him?”

“Titania’s done it to him before. And she doesn’t really like me.”

“You kill someone’s daughter, that happens,” he said.

I shrugged wearily, tired to my bones. The combination of pain, cold, and multiple bursts of adrenaline had worn me down a lot more than I had realized. I couldn’t stop another yawn.

“What was he talking about as we pulled out?”

“Oh,” I mumbled. “After that mess at Arctis Tor, Lily gave me a silver pin in the shape of an oak leaf. It makes me an Esquire of Summer. Supposedly I can use it to whistle up help from Titania’s Court. It’s their way of balancing the scales for what we did.”

“Never a bad thing to be owed a favor,” Thomas agreed. “You got it on you?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was, in fact, in a little ring box within the inner coat of my duster. I got it out and showed it to Thomas.

He whistled. “Gorgeous work.”

“The Sidhe know pretty,” I agreed.

“Maybe you can use it and get them to back off.”

I snorted. “It’s never that simple. Titania could decide that the best way to help me would be to break my back, paralyze me from the waist down, and dump me into a hospital bed so her gruffs won’t have to kill me.”

Thomas grunted. “Then why would Fix mention it?”

“Maybe he was compelled to,” I said. “Maybe Titania’s hoping I’ll call for help and she’ll have a chance to squash me personally. Or maybe…”

I let my voice trail off for a moment, while I kicked my punch-drunk brain in the stomach until it threw up an idea.

“Or maybe,” I said, “because he wanted to warn me about it. The gruffs have found me twice now, and they haven’t been physically tailing or tracking me. Neither location was one of my regular hangouts. And how did Fix find me just now, in the middle of a blizzard? He sure as hell didn’t coincidentally pick a random IHOP.”

Thomas’s eyes widened in realization. “It’s a tracking device.”

I scowled at the beautiful little silver leaf and said, not without a certain amount of grudging admiration, “Titania. That conniving bitch.”

“Damn,” Thomas said. “I feel a little bad for pointing a gun at the shrimp, now.”

“I probably would, too,” I said, “if I wasn’t so weirded out by the fact that Fix is starting to be as crabwise and squirrelly as the rest of the Sidhe.”

Thomas grunted. “Better get rid of that thing before more of them show up.”

He hit the control that lowered the passenger window. It coughed and rattled a little before it jerked into motion, instead of smoothly gliding down. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well. To high-tech equipment I am the living avatar of Murphy’s Law: The longer I stayed in Thomas’s shiny new oil tanker, the more all the things that could go wrong, would go wrong.

I lifted the leaf to chuck it out, but something made me hesitate. “No,” I murmured.

Thomas blinked. “No?”

“No,” I said with more certainty, closing my hand around the treacherous silver leaf. “I’ve got a better idea.”

Chapter Ten

I finished the spell that I thought would keep the gruffs busy and climbed wearily out of my lab to find Thomas sitting by the fireplace. My big grey dog, Mouse, lay beside him, his fur reflecting highlights of reddened silver in the firelight, watching Thomas’s work with interest.

My brother sat cross-legged on the floor, with my gun lying disassembled on a soft leather cloth upon the hearth. He frowned in concentration as he cleaned the pieces of the weapon with a brush, a soft cloth, and a small bottle of oil.

Mister, my hyperthyroid tomcat, bounded over the minute I opened the trapdoor to the lab, and hurried down the folding staircase into the subbasement.

“Go get ’em, tiger,” I muttered after him by way of encouragement. “Make them run their little hooves off.”

I left the door open, heaved myself to the couch, and collapsed. Mouse’s tail thumped the floor gently.

“You all right?” Thomas asked.

“Tired,” I said. “Big spell.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, working industriously on the weapon’s barrel. “What building did you burn down?”

“Your apartment, if you don’t lay off the wiseass commentary,” I said. “Give me a minute and we’ll get moving.”

Thomas gave me a sidelong, calculating look. “I needed another minute or two anyway. When’s the last time you cleaned this thing?”

“Uh. Who’s the president now?”

Thomas clucked his teeth in disapproval and returned to the gun. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Just give me a minute to catch my breath,” I said.

When I woke up there was dim light coming from my mostly buried basement windows, and my neck felt like the bones had been welded together by a badly trained contractor. The various beatings I’d received the night before had formed a corporation and were attempting a hostile takeover of my nervous system. I groaned and looked around.

Thomas was sitting with his back against the wall beside the fireplace, as relaxed and patient as any tiger. His gun, mine, and the bent-bladed kukri knife he’d favored lately lay close at hand.

Down in my lab something clattered to the floor from one of the shelves or tables. I heard Mister’s paws scampering over the metal surface of the center table.

“What are you grinning at?” my brother asked.

“Mister,” I said.

“He’s been knocking around down there all morning,” Thomas said. “I was going to go round him up before he broke something, but the skull told me to leave him alone.”

“Yeah,” I said. I creaked to my feet and shuffled to my little alcove with delusions of kitchenhood. I got out the bottle of aspirin and downed them with a glass of water. “For your own safety. Mister gets upset when someone gets between him and his packet of catnip.”

I shuffled over to the lab and peered down. Sure enough, the little cloth bag containing catnip and the silver oak leaf pin still hung from the extra-large rubber band I’d snipped and fixed to the ceiling directly over Little Chicago. As I watched, Mister hopped up onto a worktable, then bounded into the air to bat at the cloth bag. He dragged it down to the table with him, claws hooked in the fabric, and landed on the model of Lincoln Park. My cat rubbed his face ecstatically against the bag for a moment, then released it and batted playfully at it as the rubber band sent it rebounding back and forth near him.

Then he seemed to realize he was being watched. He turned his face up to me, meowed smugly, flicked the stub of his tail jauntily, and hopped to the floor.

“Bob?” I called. “Is the spell still working?”

“Aye, Cap’n!” Bob said. “Arrrrr!”

“What’s with that?” Thomas murmured from right beside me.

I twitched hard enough to take me up off the floor, and glared at him. “Would you stop doing that?”

He nodded, his expression serious, but I could see the corners of his mouth quivering with the effort not to smile. “Right. Forgot.”

I growled and called him something unkind, yet accurate. “He wouldn’t stop begging me to take him to see that pirate movie. So I took him with me the last time I went to the drive-in down in Aurora, and he got into it. It’s been dying down, but if he calls me ‘matey’ one more time I’ll snap.”

“That’s interesting,” Thomas said, “but that’s not what I was asking about.”

“Oh, right,” I said. I pointed at the catnip bag. “The leaf ’s in there.”

“Isn’t that just going to draw Summer’s goons here?”

I let out a nasty laugh. “No. They can’t see it through the wards around the lab.”

“Then why the big rubber band?”

“I linked Summer’s beacon spell to the matrix around Little Chicago. Every time the leaf gets within a foot of the model, my spell transfers the beacon’s signal to the corresponding location in the city.”

Thomas narrowed his eyes in thought, and then suddenly grinned in understanding as Mister pounced on the catnip again, this time landing near the Field Museum. “If they’re following that beacon, they’ll be running all over town.”

“In two and a half feet of snow,” I confirmed, grinning.

“You’re sadistic.”

“Thank you,” I said solemnly.

“Won’t they figure it out?”

“Sooner or later,” I admitted, “but it should buy us a little time to work with. ’Scuse me.”

I shambled to the door and put on my coat.

“Where to first?” Thomas asked.

“Nowhere just yet. Sit tight.” I grabbed my square-headed snow shovel from the popcorn tin by the door, where it usually resided with my staff, sword cane, and the epically static magic sword, Fidelacchius. Mouse followed me out. It was a job of work to get the door open, and more than a little snow spilled over the threshold. I started with shoveling the stairs and worked my way up, a grave digger in reverse.

Once that was done, I shoveled the little sidewalk, the front porch of the boardinghouse, and the exterior stairs running up to the Willoughbys’ apartment on the second floor. Then I dug a path to the nest of mailboxes by the curb. It took me less time than I thought it would. There was a lot of snow, but it hadn’t formed any layers of ice, and it was basically a question of tossing powder out of the way. Mouse kept watch, and I tried not to throw snow into his face.

We returned to my apartment, and I slung the shovel’s handle back down into the popcorn tin.

Thomas frowned at me. “You had to shovel the walk? Harry…somehow I’m under the impression that you aren’t feeling the urgency here.”

“In the first place,” I said, “I’m not terribly well motivated to bend over backward to save John Marcone’s Armani-clad ass. I wouldn’t lose much sleep over him. In the second place, my neighbors are elderly, and if someone doesn’t clean up the walks they’ll be stuck here. In the third place, I’ve got to do whatever I can to make sure I’m on my landlady’s good side. Mrs. Spunkelcrief is almost deaf, but it’s sort of hard to hide it when assassin demons or gangs of zombies kick down the door. She’s willing to forgive me the occasional wild party because I do things like shovel the walk.”

“It’s easier to replace an apartment than your ass,” Thomas said.

I shrugged. “I was so stiff and sore from yesterday that I had to do something to get my muscles loosened up and moving. The time was going to be gone either way. Might as well take care of my neighbors.” I grimaced. “Besides…”

“You feel bad that your landlady’s building sometimes gets busted up because you live in it,” Thomas said. He shook his head and snorted. “Typical.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s not it.”

He frowned at me, listening.

I struggled to find the right words. “There are a lot of things I can’t control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days. I don’t know what I’m going to face, what kind of choices I’m going to have to make. I can’t predict it. I can’t control it. It’s too big.” I nodded at my shovel. “But that, I can predict. I know that if I pick up that shovel and clear the snow from the walkways, it’s going to make my neighbors safer and happier.” I glanced at him and shrugged. “It’s worthwhile to me. Give me a minute to shower.”

He regarded me for a second and then nodded. “Oh,” he said, with the tiniest of smiles. He mimed a sniff and a faint grimace. “I’ll wait. Gladly.”

I cleaned up. We were on the way out the door when the phone rang.

“Harry,” Murphy said. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“Why?” I asked. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“We’ve had at least two dozen…well, I suppose the correct term is ‘sightings.’ Everything from Bigfoot to mysterious balls of light. Naturally it’s all getting shunted to SI.”

I started to answer her, then paused. Marcone and the outfit were involved. While they didn’t have anywhere near the influence in civic affairs that they might have wanted, Marcone had always had sources of information inside the police department—sources his subordinates could, presumably, access as well. It would be best to exercise some caution.

“You calling from the station?” I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“We should talk,” I said.

Murphy might not want to admit that anyone she worked with could be providing information to the outfit, but she wasn’t the sort to stop believing the truth just because she didn’t like it. “I see,” she said. “Where?”

“McAnally’s,” I said. I checked a clock. “Three hours?”

“See you there.”

I hung up and started for the door again. Mouse followed close at my heels, but I turned and nudged him gently back with my leg. “Not this time, boy,” I told him. “The bad guys have a lot of manpower, access to skilled magic, and I need a safe place to come home to. If you’re here there’s no way anyone is going to sneak in and leave me a present that goes boom.”

Mouse huffed out a breath in a sigh, but sat down.

“Keep an eye on Mister, all right? If he starts getting sick, take the catnip away.”

My dog gave the door to the lab a dubious glance.

“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “You’re seven times as big as he is.”

Mouse looked none too confident.

Thomas blinked at me, and then at the dog. “Can he understand you?”

“When it suits him,” I grumped. “He’s smarter than a lot of people I know.”

Thomas took a moment to absorb that, and then faced Mouse a little uncertainly. “Uh, okay, look. What I said about Harry earlier? I wasn’t serious, okay? It was totally a joke.”

Mouse flicked his ears and turned his nose away from Thomas with great nobility.

“What?” I asked, looking between them. “What did you say?”

“I’ll warm up the car,” Thomas said, and retreated to the frozen grey outdoors.

“This is my home,” I complained to no one in particular. “Why do people keep making jokes at my expense in my own freaking home?”

Mouse declined to comment.

I locked up behind me, magically and materially, and scaled Mount Hummer to sit in the passenger seat. The morning was cold and getting colder, especially since I was fresh from the shower, but the seat was rather pleasantly warm. There was no way I’d admit to Thomas that the luxury feature was superior to armored glass, but gosh, it was cozy.

“Right,” Thomas said. “Where are we headed?”

“To where they treat me like royalty,” I said.

“We’re going to Burger King?”

I rubbed the heel of my hand against my forehead and spelled fratricide in a subvocal mutter, but I had to spell out temporary insanity and justifiable homicide, too, before I calmed down enough to speak politely. “Just take a left and drive. Please.”

“Well,” Thomas said, grinning, “since you said ‘please.’”

Chapter Eleven

Executive Priority Health was arguably the most exclusive gym in town. Located in downtown Chicago, the business took up the entire second floor of what used to be one of the grand old hotel buildings. Now it had office buildings on the upper levels and a miniature shopping center on the first floor.

Not just anyone could take the private elevator to the second floor. One had to be a member of the health club, and membership was tightly controlled and extremely expensive. Only the wealthiest and most influential men had a membership card.

Oh, and me.

The magnetic stripe on the back of the card didn’t work when I swiped it through the card reader. No surprise there. I’d had it in my wallet for several months, and I doubt the magnetic signature stored on the card had lasted more than a couple of days. I hit the intercom button on the console.

“Executive Priority,” said a cheerful young woman’s voice. “This is Billie, and how may I serve you?”

Thomas glanced at me and arched an eyebrow, mouthing the words, Serve you?

“You’ll see,” I muttered to him. I addressed the intercom. “My card seems to have stopped working. Harry Dresden and guest, please.”

“One moment, sir,” Billie said. She was back within a few seconds. “I apologize for the problem with your membership card, sir. I’m opening the elevator for you now.”

True to her word, the elevator opened, and Thomas and I got in.

It opened onto the main area of Executive Priority.

“You’re kidding me,” Thomas said. “Since when do you go to the gym?”

It looked pretty typically gymlike from here. Lots and lots of exercise machines and weight benches and dumbbells and mirrors; static bikes and treadmills stood in neatly dressed ranks. They’d paid some madman who thought he was a decorator a lot of money to make the place look hip and unique. Maybe it’s my lack of fashion sense talking, but I thought they should have held out for one of those gorillas who has learned to paint. The results would have been of similar quality, and they could have paid in fresh produce.

Here and there men, mostly white, mostly over forty, suffered through a variety of physical activities. Beside each and every one of them was a personal trainer coaching, supporting, helping.

The trainers were all women, none of them older than their late twenties. They all wore ridiculously brief jogging shorts so tight that it had to be some kind of minor miracle that allowed the blood to keep flowing through the girls’ legs. They all wore T-shirts with the gym’s logo printed on them, also tight—and every single woman there had the kind of body that made her outfit look fantastic. No gym in the world had that many gorgeous girls in its employ.

“Ah,” Thomas said after a moment of looking around. “This isn’t a typical health club, is it?”

“Welcome to the most health-conscious brothel in the history of mankind,” I told him.

Thomas whistled quietly through his teeth, surveying the place. “I’d heard that the Velvet Room had been retooled. This is it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

A brown-haired girl jiggled over to us, her mouth spread in a beauty-contest smile, and for a second I thought her shirt was about to explode under the tension. Bright gold lettering over her left breast read, BILLIE.

“Hello, Mister Dresden,” she chirped. She bobbed her head to Thomas. “Sir. Welcome to Executive Priority. Can I get you a drink before your workout? May I take your coats?”

I held up a hand. “Thanks, Billie, but no. I’m not here for the exercise.”

Her smile stayed locked in place, pretty and meaningless, and she tilted her head to one side.

“I’m here to speak to Ms. Demeter,” I said.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Billie said. “She isn’t in.”

The girl was a confection for the eyes, and I felt sure that the other four senses would feel just as well fed after a bit of indulgence, but she wasn’t a good liar. “Yeah, she is,” I said. “Tell her Harry Dresden is here.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said again, like a machine stuck on repeat. “Ms. Demeter is not in the building.”

I gave her my toothiest smile. “You’re kind of new here, eh, Billie?”

The smile flickered, then stabilized again.

“Thomas.” I sighed. “Give her a visual?”

My brother looked around, then went over to a nearby rack of steel dumbbells and picked up the largest set there, one in each hand. With about as much effort as I’d use to bundle twigs, he twisted the steel bars around each other, forming an asymmetric X shape. He held it up to make sure Billie saw it, and then dropped it at her feet. The weights landed with a forceful thump, and Billie flinched when they did.

“You should see the kinds of things he can bend and break,” I said. “Expensive exercise machines, expensive furniture, expensive clients. I don’t know how hard he could throw some of this stuff around, but I’d be lying if I told you that I wasn’t kinda curious.” I leaned down a little closer and said, “Billie, maybe you should kick this one up the line. I’d hate them to dock your pay to replace all the broken things.”

“I’ll be right back, sir,” Billie said in a squeaky whisper, and scurried away.

“Subtle,” Thomas noted.

I shrugged. “It saves time.”

“How’d you get a membership to a place like this?”

“It’s Marcone’s place. He thinks I’m less likely to trash it if I’m dazzled by friendly boobs.”

“Can’t say I blame him,” Thomas admitted. His eyes locked on one particular girl who was currently at a table, filling out paperwork. She froze in place, and then looked up, very slowly. Her lips parted as she stared at Thomas, and her dark eyes widened. She started breathing faster, and then shook herself and hurriedly looked down again, pretending to read her paperwork.

My brother closed his eyes slowly and then turned his head away from the girl with the kind of steady, deliberate motion one uses to shut a heavy door. When he blinked his eyes open again, their color had shifted from deep grey to a pale grey-white, almost silver.

“You okay?” I asked him quietly.

“Mmmm,” he murmured. “Sorry. Got distracted. There’s…a kind of energy here.”

Which I probably should have thought of, dammit. This building was home to constant, regular acts of lust and desire. Those kinds of activities left a sort of psychic imprint around them, a vibe Thomas must have picked up on.

Vampires like my brother take not blood, but life-energy from their victims. Showing off his supernatural strength might have simplified things for us, but it also cost Thomas some of that energy, the same way an afternoon of hiking might leave you and me particularly hungry.

Usually vampires of the White Court fed during the act of sex. They could induce desire in others, overwhelm their victims with undiluted, primal lust. If he wanted to Thomas could have paralyzed the girl where she stood, stalked over to her, and done whatever he pleased to her. There wouldn’t have been anything she could do to stop him. Hell, she would have begged him to do more, and to hurry up about it.

He wouldn’t do it. Not anymore, anyway. He’d fought that part of himself for years, and he’d finally found a way to keep it under control—by feeding in the equivalent of tiny, harmless nibbles from the customers in the upper-tier beauty salon he owned and operated. I gathered that while it did enable him to remain active and in control of himself, it was nowhere near as satisfying as acquiring energy the old-fashioned way—in a stalking seduction culminating in a burst of lust and ecstasy.

I knew that his Hunger, that inhuman portion of his soul that was driven by naked need, was screaming at him to do exactly that. If he did, though, it could do the girl serious harm, even kill her. My brother wasn’t like that—but denying his Hunger wasn’t something that came naturally. It was a fight. And I knew what drove him to it.

“That girl looks a little like Justine,” I commented.

He froze at the name, his expression hardening. By gradual degrees his eyes darkened to their usual color again. Thomas shook his head and gave me a wry smile. “Does she?”

“Enough,” I said. “You okay?”

“As I ever am,” he said. He didn’t actually thank me, but it was in his voice. I pretended that I hadn’t heard it there, which was what he expected me to do.

It’s a guy thing.

Billie came fibrillating back over to us. “This way, please, sir,” she said, her smile once again firmly in place. She led us rather nervously through the gym, passing the hallway that led to the showers and private “therapy” rooms in back. The door she led us through went to a very plain, practical, businesslike hallway, one you’d find in any office building. She nodded to the last door in the hall, the corner office, and then retreated quietly.

I ambled up to the door, knocked once, and then opened it to find Ms. Demeter sitting in her large but practical office behind her large but practical desk. She was a fit-looking woman in early middle age, lean, well dressed, and reserved. Her real name wasn’t Demeter, but she preferred the professional sobriquet, and now wasn’t the time to needle her.

“Ms. Demeter,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “Good day.”

She finished turning off her laptop, folded it shut, and put it away in a drawer before she looked up and gave me a quiet nod. “Mister Dresden. What happened to your face?”

“It’s always like this,” I said. “I forgot to put on my makeup today.”

“Ah,” she said. “Will you have a seat?”

“Thanks,” I said. I sat down across the desk from her. “I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced you.”

Her shoulder twitched in a nanoshrug. “It’s nice to know the limitations of those I’ve appointed my receptionist,” she replied. “What can I do for you?” Then she lifted her hand. “Wait. Allow me to rephrase. What can I do to most quickly get rid of you?”

A sensitive guy might have felt a little hurt by that remark. Good thing I’m me. “I’m looking for Marcone,” I told her.

“Have you called his office?”

I blinked slowly at her once. Then I repeated, “I’m looking for Marcone.”

“I’m sure you are,” Demeter said, her expression never flickering. “What does that have to do with me?”

I felt a tight smile strain my lips. “Ms. D, I can’t help but wonder why you instructed your receptionist to tell anyone who asked after you that you weren’t in the office.”

“Perhaps I had some paperwork I needed to get done.”

“Or perhaps you know that Marcone is missing, and you’re using it as a tactic to stall any of his lieutenants who come nosing around looking to fill the void.”

She stared at me for a moment, her expression giving away nothing. “I really can’t say that I know what you’re talking about, Mister Dresden.”

“You sure you don’t want to get rid of me?” I asked. “You want me to stay here and lean on you? I can make it really hard for you to do business, if I’m feeling motivated.”

“I’m sure,” Demeter replied. “Why would you want to find him?”

I grimaced. “I have to help him.”

She arched a single, well-plucked eyebrow. “Have to?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“And not terribly credible,” she replied. “I am well aware of your opinions regarding John Marcone. And even assuming that I had any information as to his whereabouts, I’m not sure that I’d wish to make a bad situation worse.”

“How could you do that?” I asked.

“By involving you,” she replied. “You clearly do not have Mr. Marcone’s best interests in mind, and your involvement could push his captors into precipitous action. I doubt you’d lose a moment’s sleep were he to be killed.”

I would have shot back a witty reply if I hadn’t slipped on a banana peel of self-recrimination, having said more or less those exact words not long before.

“But sir!” came Billie’s voice in protest from the hall outside.

The doorway darkened behind me, and I turned to find several large men standing there. The foremost of their number was a big guy, late forties, with an ongoing romance with beer, or maybe pasta. He wore his heart on his potbelly. His well-tailored suit mostly hid the gut, and it would have concealed the shoulder rig and sidearm he wore beneath it if he’d made the least effort to avoid exposing it as he moved.

“Demeter,” the big man said. “I need to speak to you privately.”

“You couldn’t afford me, Torelli,” Demeter replied smoothly. “And I’m in the middle of a business meeting.”

“Get one of your whores to get him off,” Torelli said. “You and I have to talk.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Regarding?”

“I need a list of your bank accounts, security passwords, and a copy of your records for the last six months.” He scowled, looming over her. Torelli was the kind of guy who was used to getting his way if he loomed and scowled enough. I knew the type. I tried to glance past the goons to see whether Thomas was in the hallway, but could detect no sign of him.

“One wonders if you have been partaking of your product,” Demeter said. “Why on earth should I provide you with my records, accounts, and funds?”

“Things are going to change around here, whore. Starting with your attitude.” Torelli glanced at two of the four men behind him and angled his head toward Demeter. The two goons, both of them medium-caliber Chicago bruisers, stepped around Torelli and walked toward her.

I grimaced. I didn’t care for Demeter much, personally, but I needed her, and I wouldn’t be able to talk her into helping me if she were laid up in intensive care. Besides, she was a girl, and you don’t hit girls. You don’t let two-bit hired bullies do it, either.

I stood up and turned to face Torelli’s men, staff in hand. I gave them my hardest look, which didn’t even slow them down. The one on the right threw something at my face, and I had no time to work out what it might be. I ducked, recognized it as a snow-speckled winter glove, and realized that it had been a distraction.

The guy on the left came in on me when I was ducking and kicked a steel-toed work boot at my left knee. I turned my leg and took it on the shin. It hurt like hell, but at least I could still move. I rolled to one side, placing the goon on my left between myself and the goon on the right. He threw a looping right hand at me, and I met his knuckles with my staff. Knuckles crunched. The goon howled.

The other one bulled past his pain-stunned partner and came at me, obviously planning on tackling me to the floor so that all of his buddies could circle up and kick me for a while.

Couldn’t have that. So I raised my right hand, clenched in a fist, baring four triple-wire bands, one on each finger. With a thought and a word I released the kinetic energy stored in one of the rings. It hit the goon like a locomotive, slamming him back and to the floor with a very satisfying thud.

I turned and kicked the stunned first goon in both shins, hah, then placed one of my heels against his hip and shoved him to the floor. He crumpled.

I turned to find myself staring down the barrel of Torelli’s gun.

“Not bad, kid,” the would-be kingpin said. “That judo or something?”

“Something like that.”

“I could use a man of your skills, once my health club finishes”—he gave Demeter a sour glance—“reprioritizing.”

“You couldn’t afford me,” I said.

“I’m going to be able to afford a lot,” he said. “Name your price.”

“One hundred and fifty-six gajillion dollars,” I said promptly.

He squinted at me, as if trying to decide if I was joking. Or maybe he was just trying to figure out how many zeros I was talking about. “Think you’re cute, huh?”

“I’m freaking adorable,” I said. “Especially with the raccoon face I’ve got going here.”

Torelli’s features darkened. “Kid. You just made the last mistake of your life.”

“God,” I said. “I wish.”

Thomas put the barrel of his Desert Eagle against the back of Torelli’s head and said in a pleasant voice, “Lose the iron, nice and slow.”

Torelli stiffened in surprise and wasted no time in complying. He turned his head slightly, looking for his other two goons. I could see a pair of feet lying toes-up in the hallway, but there was no other sign of them.

I stepped up to him and said calmly, “Take your men and get out. Don’t come back.”

He regarded me with dull eyes, then pressed his lips together, nodded once, and began gathering up his men. Thomas picked up Torelli’s gun and stuck it down the front of his pants, just like you’re not supposed to do. He walked quietly over to stand beside me, his eyes tracking every movement the thugs made.

They departed, half carrying the poor bastard with the broken hand, while the two in the hallway staggered along, barely recovered from being choked unconscious.

Once they were gone I turned to face Demeter. “Where were we?”

“I was questioning your motives,” she said.

I shook my head. “Helen. You know who I am. You know what I do. Yeah, I think Marcone is a twisted son of a bitch who probably deserves to die. But that doesn’t mean I’m planning on carrying out the deed.”

She stared at me in silence for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she turned to her desk, drew out a notepad, and wrote something on a piece of paper. She folded it and offered it to me. I reached out for it, but when I tugged she didn’t let go.

“Promise me,” she said. “Give me your word that you’ll do everything you can to help him.”

I sighed. Of course.

The words tasted like a rancid pickle coated in salt and vinegar, but I managed to say them. “I will. You have my word.”

Demeter let go of the paper. I looked at it. An address, nothing more.

“It might help you,” she said. “It might not.”

“That’s more than I had a minute ago,” I said. I nodded to Thomas. “Let’s go.”

“Dresden,” Demeter said as I walked to the door.

I paused.

“Thank you. For handling Torelli. He would have hurt some of my girls tonight.”

I glanced back at her and nodded once.

Then Thomas and I headed for the suburbs.

Chapter Twelve

Marcone’s business interests were wide and varied. They had to be when you’re laundering as much money as he was. He had restaurants, holding companies, import/export businesses, investment firms, financial businesses of every description—and construction companies.

Sunset Point was one of those boils festering on the face of the planet: a subdivision. Located half an hour north of Chicago, it had once been a pleasant little wood of rolling hills around a single tiny river. The trees and hills had all been bulldozed flat, exposing naked earth to the sky. The little river had been choked into a sludgy trough. Underneath the blanket of snow the place looked as smooth and white and sterile as the inside of a new refrigerator.

“Look at this,” I said to Thomas. I gestured at the houses, each of them on a lot that exceeded the building’s foundation by the width of a postage stamp. “People pay to live in places like this?”

“You live in the basement of a boardinghouse,” Thomas said.

“I live in a big city, and I rent,” I said. “Houses like these go for several hundred thousand dollars, if not more. It’ll take thirty years to pay them off.”

“They’re nice houses,” Thomas said.

“They’re nice cages,” I responded. “No space around them. Nothing alive. Places like this turn a man into a gerbil. He comes home and scurries inside. Then he stays there until he’s forced to go back out to the job he has to work so that he can make the mortgage payments on this gerbil habitat.”

“And they’re way nicer than your apartment,” Thomas said.

“Totally.”

He brought the Hummer to a crunching halt in the snow, glaring through the windshield. “Damn snow. I’m only guessing where the streets are at this point.”

“Just don’t drive into what’s going to be somebody’s basement,” I said. “We passed Twenty-third a minute ago. We must be close.”

“Twenty-third Court, Place, Street, Terrace, or Avenue?” Thomas asked.

“Circle.”

“Damned cul-de-sacs.” He started forward again, driving slowly. “There,” he said, nodding to the next sign that emerged from the haze. “That one?”

“Yeah.” Next to the customized street sign was a standard road sign declaring Twenty-fourth Terrace a dead end.

“Damned foreshadowing,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

We drove through the murky grey and white of a heavy snowfall, the light luminous, without source, reflected from billions of crystals of ice. The Hummer’s engine was a barely audible purr. By comparison the crunch of its tires on snow was a dreadful racket. We rolled past half a dozen model houses, all of them lovely and empty, the snow piling up around windows that gaped like eye sockets in a half-buried skull.

Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t have told you what, exactly, but I could feel it as plainly as I could feel the carved wood of the staff I gripped in my hands.

We weren’t alone.

Thomas felt it too. Moving smoothly, he reached an arm behind the driver’s seat and drew forth his sword belt. It bore an old U.S. Cavalry saber he’d carried on a number of dicey occasions, paired up with a more recent toy he’d become fond of, a bent-bladed knife called a kukri, like the one carried by the Ghurkas.

“What is that?” he asked quietly.

I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching out with my arcane senses, attempting to detect any energies that might be moving in around us. The falling snow muffled my magical perceptions every bit as much as it did my physical senses. “Not sure,” I said quietly. “But whatever it is, it’s a safe bet it knows we’re here.”

“How do you want to play it if the music starts?”

“I’ve got nothing to prove,” I said. “I say we run like little girls.”

“Suits me. But don’t let Murphy hear you talking like that.”

“Yeah. She gets oversensitive about ‘little.’”

My shoulders tightened with the tension as Thomas drove forward slowly and carefully. He stopped the car beside the last house on the street. It had a finished look to it, the bushes of its landscaping poking up forlornly through the snow. There were curtains in the windows, and the faint marks of tire tracks, not quite full of new snowfall, led up the drive and to the closed garage.

“Someone’s behind that third window,” Thomas said quietly. “I saw them move.”

I hadn’t seen anything, but then I wasn’t a supernatural predator, complete with a bucketful of preternaturally sharp senses. I nodded to let him know that I’d heard him, and scanned the ground around the house. The snow was untouched. “We’re the first visitors,” I said. “We’re probably making someone nervous.”

“Gunman?”

“Probably,” I said. “That’s what most of Marcone’s people are used to. Come on.”

“You don’t want me to wait out here?”

I shook my head. “There’s something else out here. It might be nothing, but you’re a sitting duck in the car. Maybe if you’d gotten the armored version…”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Thomas said.

“Let’s be calm and friendly,” I said. I opened the door of the Hummer and stepped out into snow that came up over my knees. I made sure not to move too quickly, and kept my hands out in plain sight. On the other side of the Hummer Thomas mirrored me.

“Hello, the house!” I called. “Anyone home?” My voice had that flat, heavy timbre you can only get when there’s a lot of snow, almost like we were standing inside. “My name is Dresden. I’m here to talk.”

Silence. The snow started soaking through my shoes and my jeans.

Thomas whipped his head around toward the end of the little street, where the subdivision ended and the woods that were next in line for the bulldozers began. He stared intently for a moment.

“It’s in the trees,” he reported quietly.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I hoped fervently that whatever was out there, it didn’t have a gun. “I’m not here for trouble!” I called toward the house. I held up two fingers and said, “Scout’s honor.”

This time I saw the curtain twitch, and caught a faint stir of motion behind it. The inner door to the house opened and a man’s voice said, “Come in. Hands where I can see them.”

I nodded at Thomas. He lifted his hand, holding his car key, and pointed it at the Hummer. It clunked and chirped, its doors locking. He came around the car, sword belt hanging over his shoulder, while I broke trail to the front porch, struggling through the snow. I knocked as much of the powder as I could off my lower body, using it as an excuse to give me time to ready my shield bracelet. I didn’t particularly want to step through a dark doorway, presenting a shooting-gallery profile to any gunman inside, without taking precautions. When I came in I held my shield before me, silent and invisible.

“Stop there,” growled a man’s voice. “Staff down. Show your hands.”

I leaned my staff against the wall and did so. I’d know those monosyllables anywhere. “Hi, Hendricks.”

A massive man appeared from the dimness in the next room, holding a police-issue riot gun in hands that made it look like a child’s toy. He was built like a bull, and you could apply thick and rocklike to just about everything in his anatomy, especially if you started with his skull. He came close enough to let me see his close-cropped red hair. “Dresden. Step aside.”

I did, and the shotgun was trained on my brother. “You, vampire. Sword down. Fingers laced behind your head.”

Thomas rolled his eyes and complied. “How come he doesn’t have to put his hands behind his head?”

“Wouldn’t make any difference with him,” Hendricks replied. Narrow, beady eyes swiveled like gun turrets back to me. “What do you want?”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Hendricks speak a complete sentence, much less string phrases together. It was sort of disconcerting, the way it would be if Mister suddenly developed the capacity to open his own cans of cat food. It took me a second to get over the mental speed bump. “Uh,” I said. “I want to…”

I realized how lame this was going to sound. I gritted my teeth and said it quickly. “I want to help your boss.”

There was a clicking sound from the wall, the sound of an audio speaker popping to life. A woman’s voice said, “Send the wizard up.”

Hendricks growled. “You sure?”

“Do it. The vampire stays downstairs.”

Hendricks grunted and tilted his head to the right. “Through there and up the stairs, Dresden. Move it.”

“Harry,” Thomas said quietly.

Hendricks brought his shotgun back up and covered Thomas. “Not you, prettyboy. You stay put. Or both of you get out.”

“It’s okay,” I said quietly to my brother. “I feel better if someone I trust is watching the door anyway. Just in case someone else shows up.” I cast my eyes meaningfully in the direction of the woods where Thomas had said something lurked.

He shook his head. “Whatever.” Then he leaned back against the wall, casual and relaxed, his hands behind his head as if they were there only to pillow his skull.

I brushed past Hendricks. Without slowing down or looking behind me, I said, “Careful with that gun. He gets hurt and it’s going to be bad for you, Hendricks.”

Hendricks ignored me. I had a feeling it was his strongest conversational ploy.

I went up the stairs, noting a couple of details as I went. First, that the carpet was even cheaper than mine, which made me feel more confident for some obscure reason.

Second, that there were bloodstains on it. A lot of them.

At the top of the stairs I found more bloodstains, including a long smear along one wall. I followed them down to one of three bedrooms on the upper level of the house. I paused and knocked on the door.

“Come in, Dresden,” said a woman’s voice.

I came in.

Miss Gard lay in bed. It had been hauled over to the window so that she could see out of it. She had a heavy assault rifle of a design I didn’t recognize next to her. The wooden handle of a double-headed battle-ax leaned against the bed, within reach of her hand. Gard was blond, tall, athletic, and while she wasn’t precisely beautiful, she was a striking woman, with clean-cut features, icy blue eyes, and an athlete’s build.

She was also a mess of blood.

She was soaked in it. So was the bed beneath her. Her shirt was open, revealing a black athletic bra and a long wound that ran the width of her stomach, just below her belly button. Slick grey-red ropy loops protruded slightly from the wound.

My stomach twisted, and I looked away.

“Goodness,” Miss Gard said, her voice quiet and rough, her face pale. “You’d think you never saw anyone disemboweled before.”

“Just relieved,” I said. I forced myself to face her. “First time today I’ve run into someone who looks worse than me.”

She showed me a weary smile for a moment.

“You need a doctor,” I said.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Yes,” I said. “You do. I’m surprised you haven’t bled to death already. Think of what it would cost Monoc Securities to replace you.”

“They won’t need to. I’ll be fine. The company has a great health care package.” She picked up a small tube of what looked like heavy-duty modeling glue from the bed at her side. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had my guts ripped out. It isn’t fun, but I’ll make it.”

“Damn,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Are they hiring?”

The question won another faint smile. “You don’t really fit the employee profile.”

“I am tired of being kept down by the man,” I said.

Gard shook her head wearily. “How did you find us?”

“Demeter,” I said.

She lifted a golden eyebrow. “I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. Though I’ve warned him. He’s too trusting.”

“Marcone? Is too trusting?” I widened my eyes at her. “Lady, that pretty much puts you in a paranoiac league of your own.”

“It isn’t paranoia—just practical experience. A safe house isn’t safe if it isn’t secret.” She reached down and pressed bloodied fingers against a loop of gore, gently kneading it back into the wound. She let out a hiss of pain as she did, but she didn’t let a little thing like an exposed internal organ get in the way of conversation. “You threatened her?”

“Uh. Mostly I told her I’d help Marcone.”

She lifted the tube of airplane glue and smeared some of it onto either side of the wound, where she’d pushed her guts back in. She bled a little more. I noted that several inches of the wound had already been closed and sealed together.

“You gave her your word?” Gard asked.

“Uh, yeah, but—” I couldn’t take it anymore. “Look, could you maybe not do that while we talk? It makes it sort of hard for me to focus on the conversation.”

She pressed the edges of the wound together, letting out a breathy curse in a language I didn’t know. “Did you know,” she said, “that this kind of glue was originally developed as an emergency battlefield suture?”

“Did you know that you’re about to find out what I had for breakfast this morning?” I countered.

“I don’t know if it’s true,” she continued. “I saw it in a movie. With—dammit—with werewolves.” She exhaled and drew her hands slowly from the wound. Another two or three inches of puckered flesh were now closed together. Gard looked awful, her face grey and lined with pain.

“Why, Dresden? Why are you looking for Marcone?”

“The short version? It’s my ass if I don’t.”

She squinted at me. “It’s personal?”

“Pretty much. I’ll give you my word on it, if you like.”

She shook her head. “It’s not…your word that I doubt. That’s…always been good.” She closed her eyes against the pain and panted for several seconds. “But I need something from you.”

“What?”

“The White Council,” she rasped. “I want you to call upon the White Council to recover Marcone.”

I blinked at her. “Uh. What?”

She grimaced and began packing another couple inches of intestine back into her abdomen. “The Accords have been breached. A challenge must be lodged. An Emissary summoned. As a Warden”—she gasped for a moment, and then fumbled the glue into place—“you have the authority to call a challenge.”

Her fingers slipped, and the wound sprang open again. She went white with pain.

“Dammit, Sigrun,” I said, more appalled at her pain than her condition, and moved to help her. “Get your hands out of the way.” When she did, I managed to close the wound a little more, giving the sharp-smelling glue a chance to bond the flesh closed.

She made an effort to smile at me. “We…we worked well together at the beer festival. You’re a professional. I respect that.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the guys who glue your stomach back together.”

“Call the Council,” Gard said. “Lodge the challenge.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Tell me where Marcone is, I’ll go get him and bring him home, and this will all be over.”

She started pushing the next bit back in, while I waited with the glue. “It isn’t that simple. I don’t know where he is.”

I caught on. “But you do know who took him.”

“Yes. Another signatory of the Accords, just as Marcone is now. I have no authority to challenge their actions. But you do. You may be able to force them into the light, bring the pressure of all the members of the Accords against them.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, laying out more glue. “The Council just loves it when one of their youngest members drags the entire organization into a fight that isn’t their own.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Gard rasped. “It’s not as though it would be the first time.”

I held the wound together, waiting on the glue. “I can’t,” I said quietly.

She was breathing too quickly, too hard. I could barely keep the wound closed. “Whatever you…nggh…say. After all…it’s your ass on the line.”

I grimaced and withdrew my fingers slowly, making sure the wound stayed closed. We’d gotten the last few inches, and the opening no longer gaped. “Can’t deny that,” I said. Then I squinted at her. “Who is it?” I asked. “Which signatory of the Accords swiped Marcone?”

“You’ve met them once already,” Gard said.

From downstairs Thomas suddenly shouted, “Harry!”

I whirled toward the door in time for the window, behind me, to explode in a shower of glass. It jounced off my spell-layered leather duster, but I felt a pair of hot stings as bits of glass cut my neck and my ear. I tried to turn and had the impression of something coming at my face. I slapped it aside with my left hand even as I ducked, then hopped awkwardly back from the intruder.

It landed in a crouch upon the bed, digging one foot into the helpless Gard’s wounded belly, a creature barely more than the size of a child. It was red and black, vaguely humanoid in shape, but covered in an insect’s chitin. Its eyes were too large for its head, multifaceted, and its arms ended in the serrated clamps of a preying mantis. Membranous wings fluttered at its back, a low and maddening buzzing.

And that wasn’t the scary part.

Its eyes gleamed with an inner fire, an orange-red glow—and immediately above the first set of eyes another set, this one blazing with sickly green luminescence, blinked and focused independently of the first pair. A sigil of angelic script burned against the chitin of the insect-thing’s forehead.

I suddenly wished, very much, that my staff weren’t twenty feet away and down a flight of stairs. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me.

No sooner had that thought come out than the Knight of the Blackened Denarius opened its insectoid maw, let out a brassy wail of rage, and bounded at my face.

Chapter Thirteen

At one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise.

But that time was pretty much in the past.

I’d spent the last several years on the fringes of a supernatural war between the White Council of the wizards and the Vampire Courts. In the most recent years, I’d gotten more directly involved. Wizards who go to a fight without getting their act together tend not to come home. Worse, the people depending on them for protection wind up getting hurt.

The second most important rule of combat wizardry is a simple one: Don’t let them touch you.

Whether you’re talking about vampires or ogres or some other kind of monstrous nasty, most of them can do hideous things to you if they get close enough to touch—as even a lesser member of the gruff clan had demonstrated on my nose the night before.

The prime rule of combat wizardry is simple too: Be prepared.

Wizards can potentially wield tremendous power against just about anything that might come along—if we’re ready to handle it. The problem is that the things that come after us know that too, so the favored tactic is the sudden ambush. Wizards might live a long time, but we aren’t rend-proof. You’ve got to think ahead in order to have enough time to act when the heat is on.

I’d made myself ready and taught young wizards with even less experience than me how to be ready too—for an occasion just such as this.

The coil of steel chain in my coat pocket came out smoothly as I drew it, because I’d practiced the draw thousands of times, and I whipped one end at the mantis-thing’s face.

It was faster than me, of course. They usually are. Those two clamps seized the end of the chain. The mantis’s jaws clamped down on it, and the creature ripped the chain from my hands with a wrench of its head and upper body, quicker than thought.

That was a positive thing, really. The mantis hadn’t had time to notice two important details about the chain: first, that the whole thing was coated in copper.

Second, that a standard electrical plug was attached to the other end.

I flipped my fingers at the nearest wall outlet and barked, “Galvineus!”

The plug shot toward the outlet like a striking snake and slammed home.

The lights flickered and went dim. The Denarian hopped abruptly into the air and then came down, thrashing and twitching madly. The electricity had forced the muscles in its jaws and clamps to contract, and it couldn’t release the chain. Acrid smoke began to drift up from various points on its carapace.

“Wizard!” Gard gasped. She gripped the wooden handle of her ax and tossed it weakly toward me. I heard shouting and the bellow of a shotgun coming from downstairs. It stayed in the background, unimportant information. Everything that mattered to me was nearly within an arm’s length.

The ax bounced and struck against my leg, but my duster prevented it from cutting into me. I picked up the ax—Christ, was it heavy—hauled off, and brought it straight down on the Denarian, as if I’d been splitting cordwood.

The ax crunched home, sinking to the eye somewhere in the Denarian’s thorax. The thing’s convulsions ripped the weapon out of my hands—and the plug from the wall outlet.

The mantis’s head whipped toward me, and it screamed again. It ripped out the ax and came to its feet in the same instant.

“Get clear!” Gard rasped.

I did, diving to the side and going prone.

The wounded woman emptied her assault rifle into the mantis in two or three seconds of howling thunder, shooting from the hip from about three feet away.

Words cannot convey how messy that was. Suffice to say that it would probably cost more to remove the ichor stains than it would to strip and refinish the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

Gard gasped, and the empty rifle slid from her fingers. She shuddered and pressed her hands to her belly.

I moved to her side and picked her up, trying not to strain her stomach. She was heavy. Not like a sumo wrestler or anything, but she was six feet tall in her bare feet and had more than the usual amount of muscle. She felt at least as heavy as Thomas. I grunted with effort, got her settled, and started for the door.

Gard let out a croaking little whimper, and more blood welled from her injury. Faint pangs of sympathetic pain flickered through my own belly. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. It had taken a lot to beat Gard’s apparent pain threshold, but it looked like the visit from the Denarian—and the activity it had forced on her—had done it.

The day just couldn’t have gotten any more disturbing.

Until the splattered mass that had been the Denarian started quivering and moving.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I shouted.

Where there had been one big bug thing, now there were thousands of little mantislike creatures. They all began bounding toward the center of the room, piling up into two mounds that gradually began to take on the shape of insectoid legs.

The shotgun downstairs roared again, and running footsteps approached.

“Harry!” Thomas shouted. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs, sword in hand, just as I hurried out the door, still toting Gard.

“We had company up here!” I called. I started down the stairs as quickly and carefully as I could.

“I think there are three more of them down here,” Thomas said, making way for me. He took note of Gard. “Holy crap.”

A corpse lay on the floor of the entry hall. It was black and furry and big, and I couldn’t tell much more about it than that. The top four-fifths of its head were gone and presumably accounted for the mess all over the opposite wall. Its guts were spilled out on either side of its body, steaming in the cold air drifting through the shattered front door. Hendricks crouched in the shadowed living room, covering the entryway with his shotgun.

Something scraped over the floorboards of the ceiling above us.

“What’s that?” Thomas asked.

“A giant preying mantis demon, dragging itself over the floor.”

Thomas blinked at me.

“That’s just a guess,” I said.

Hendricks growled, “How is she?”

“Not good,” I said. “This is a bad spot to be in. No defenses here, not even a threshold to work with. We need to bail.”

“Shouldn’t move her,” Hendricks said. “It could kill her.”

“Not moving her will kill her,” I countered. “Us too.”

Hendricks stared at me, but he didn’t argue.

Thomas was already reaching into his pocket. He was tense, his eyes flicking restlessly, maybe in an attempt to track things that he could hear moving around outside. He dug out his key ring and held it with his teeth. Then he took his saber in one hand, that monster Desert Eagle in the other, and started humming “Froggy Went A-Courting” under his breath.

Gard had slowly grown limp, and her head lolled bonelessly. I was having trouble keeping her steady. “Hendricks,” I said, nodding at Gard.

Without a word he set the shotgun aside and took the woman from me. I saw his eyes as he did, touched with worry and fear—and not for himself. He took her very gently, something I would never have imagined him doing, and growled, “How do I know you won’t leave us behind? Let them rip us apart while you run?”

“You don’t,” I said curtly, picking up my staff. “Stay if you want. These things will kill you both; I guarantee it. Or you take a chance with us. Your call.”

Hendricks glared at me for a moment, but when he glanced down at the unconscious woman in his arms, the rocky scowl faded. He nodded once.

“Harry?” Thomas asked. “How do you want to do this?”

“We head straight for your oil tanker,” I said. “Shortest route between two points and all.”

“They’ll have the door covered,” Thomas said.

“I hope so.”

“Okay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “As long as there’s a plan.”

Footsteps crossed the floor above us, and paused at the top of the stairs.

Thomas’s gun swiveled toward the stairs. I didn’t turn. I covered the doorway.

A voice like out-of-tune violin strings stroked by a rotting cobra hide drifted down the stairs. “Wizard.”

“I hear you,” I said.

“This situation might be resolved without further conflict. Are you willing to parley?”

“Why not,” I answered. I didn’t turn away from the door.

“Have I your word of safe passage?”

“You do.”

“Then you have mine,” the voice answered.

“Whatever,” I said. I lowered my voice to an almost subvocal whisper I was sure only Thomas could hear. “Watch them. They’ll try something the second they get a chance.”

“Why give them the opportunity?” Thomas murmured.

“Because we might find out something important by talking. It’s harder to question corpses. Switch with me.”

We traded places, and I kept my staff pointed at the stairs as the mantis-thing came down them. It crouched on the topmost step it could occupy while still maintaining visual contact with the entry hall. It looked none the worse for wear for being blown to hamburger by Gard’s rifle.

It crouched, the motion eerie and alien, and tilted its head almost entirely to the horizontal, first one way, then the other, as it looked at us. Then its stomach heaved. For a second I thought it was throwing up, as a yellow-and-pink mucus began to emerge from its mouth. After a second, though, it lifted its clamplike claws and gripped its head, then peeled it back and away from the mucus, the motion disturbingly akin to someone donning a too-small turtleneck sweater. A human face emerged from the mucus and gunk, while the split carapace of the head flopped about on its chest and upper back.

The Denarian looked like she was about fifteen years old, except for her hair, which was silvery grey, short, and plastered to her skull. She had huge and gorgeous green eyes, a heart-shaped face, and a delicate, pointy chin. Her skin was pale and clear, her cheekbones high, her features lovely and symmetrical. The second set of green eyes and the sigil of angelic script still glowed faintly on her forehead.

She smiled slowly. “I wasn’t expecting the chain. I thought fire and force were your weapons of choice.”

“You were standing on top of someone I knew,” I said. “I didn’t feel like burning her or blasting her through the wall.”

“Foolish,” the girl murmured.

“I’m still here.”

“But so am I.”

“You have five seconds to get to the fucking point,” I said. “I’m not going to let you stall while your buddies get into position.”

Mantis Girl narrowed her eyes. The eyes on her forehead narrowed as well. Très creepy. She nodded at Hendricks and Gard. “My business is with them. Not you, O Warden of the White Council. Give them to me. You may leave in peace. Once they are dead, I will gather my compatriots and we will depart the city without harm to any innocents.”

I grunted. “What if I need them alive?”

“If you wish, I can wait until you have interrogated them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I want: you, standing around behind my back.”

She lifted a talon. “I give you my solemn word. No harm will come to you or your companion.”

“Tempting,” I said.

“Shall I add in material reward as well?” Mantis Girl asked. “I’ll pay you two hundred thousand, in cash.”

“Why on earth would you do that?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “My quarrel is with the upstart Baron and his subjects—not the White Council. I would prefer to demonstrate my respect to your people, instead of causing an untoward altercation with them over the matter of your death.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her smile turned sharper. “If it pleases you, I might offer to entertain you, once business is done.”

I let out a harsh burst of laughter. “Oh,” I said, still chortling. “Oh, oh, oh. That’s funny.”

She blinked and stared at me, uncomprehending.

The expression made me laugh even harder. “You…you want me to…I mean, Hell’s bells, do you think I don’t know what happens to a mantis’s mate once the deed is done?”

She bared her teeth in sudden anger. They were shiny and black.

“You want me to trust you,” I went on, still laughing, “and you think waving some bling and some booty at me is going to get it done? God, that’s so cute I could just put you in my pocket.”

“Do not deny me what is mine, wizard,” she snarled. “I will have them. Make a pact with me. I will honor it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen the way you people honor your pacts. Let me make you a counteroffer. Give me Marcone, safe and whole, and get out of town, now, and I’ll let you live.”

“Suppose your offer appeals. Why should I believe you would allow us to leave in peace?”

I gave her a faint smile and quietly paraphrased a dead friend. “Because I know what your word is worth, Denarian. And you know the worth of mine.”

She stared at me for a moment. Then she said, “I will consult my companions and return in five minutes.”

I bowed my head slightly to her. She returned the gesture and started up the stairs again.

She vanished from sight. Glass broke somewhere upstairs.

Then a red-and-black blur flashed down the stairs toward us, simultaneously with a chorus of hellish cries from outside.

Treachery doesn’t work so well when the other guy expects it, and I’d had the spell ready to go since the second she’d turned her back. Mantis Girl didn’t get to the bottom of the stairs before I pointed my staff at her and snarled, “Forzare!”

A hammer of pure kinetic energy slammed against her. She went flying back the way she’d come, and when she reached the top of the stairs she kept going, crashing through the wall of the house with a tremendous crunch.

No time to lose. Something came charging through the doorway, to be met by Thomas’s sword and pistol. I didn’t get a good look at it, but got an impression of spiraling antlers and green scales. I drew in my will, pointed my staff at the front wall of the house and murmured, “Forzare,” sending out a slow pulse of motion. I let it press up against the front wall of the house, and then fed more energy into it, hardening it into a single striking surface.

Then I drew back and really let loose, roaring “Forzare!” at the top of my lungs. I unleashed everything I had into a blast of energy, which struck against the plate of force I’d just created. There was an enormous sound of screaming wood and steel, and the entire front wall of the house blasted free from its frame.

Demonic voices howled. I turned to find Thomas taking advantage of the distraction to whip his saber through scything arcs, rondello-style, cutting his opponent to ribbons. The Denarian bounded away, screaming in brassy pain.

“Dammit!” Thomas screamed at me. “That’s a brand-new car!”

“Quit whining and go!” I shouted back, suiting words to action. The front wall of the house had come down like a tidal wave, shattering into a small ocean of rubble, covering the hood of the Hummer. Somewhere beneath the rubble I could hear the other Denarians trying to get free.

We rushed for the Hummer and piled in. Thomas got it started just as Mantis Girl sailed down from overhead and landed on the hood of the Hummer, denting it in sharply.

“God dammit!” Thomas snarled. He slapped the Hummer into reverse and started driving backward—while emptying his gun into Mantis Girl. Bursts of fluttering insect forms flew up from the gunshots instead of sprays of blood, but judging by the screaming it hurt her plenty. She tumbled back off the hood and vanished.

Thomas manhandled the Hummer into a turn, and we left, heading back out into the heavy snowfall.

We all rode in silence for several moments while our heart rates slowed and the terror-fueled adrenaline rush faded.

Then Thomas said, “I don’t think we learned much.”

“The hell we didn’t,” I said.

“Like what?”

“We know that there are more than five Denarians in town. And we know that they’re signatories of the Accords—who apparently object to Marcone’s recent elevation.”

Thomas grunted acknowledgment. “What now?”

I shook my head wearily. That last spell had been a doozy. “Now? I think…” I turned my head and studied the unconscious Gard. “I think I’d better call the Council.”

Chapter Fourteen

Now that I had not one, but two supernatural hit squads with a good reason to come after me, my options had grown sort of limited. In the end there was really only one place I could take Gard and Hendricks without endangering innocent lives: St. Mary of the Angels Church.

Which was why I told Thomas to drive us to the Carpenter house.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” Thomas said quietly. The plow trucks were working hard, but so far they’d barely been keeping even with the snow, ensuring that the routes to the hospitals were clear. The streets in some places looked like World War I trenches, snow piled up head-high on either side.

“The Denarians know that we use the church as a safehouse,” I said. “They’ll be watching it.”

Thomas grunted and checked the rearview mirror. Gard was still unconscious, but breathing. Hendricks’s eyes were shut, his mouth slightly open. I didn’t blame him. I hadn’t been standing watch over a wounded comrade all night, and I felt like I could have taken a nap, too.

“What were those things?” Thomas asked.

“The Knights of the Blackened Denarius,” I replied. “You remember Michael’s sword? The nail worked into the hilt?”

“Sure,” Thomas said.

“There are two others like it,” I said. “Three swords. Three nails.”

Thomas’s eyes widened for a moment. “Wait. Those nails? From the Crucifixion?”

I nodded. “Pretty sure.”

“And those things were what? Michael’s opposite number?”

“Yeah. Each of those Denarian bozos has a silver coin.”

“Three silver coins,” Thomas said. “I’m drawing a blank.”

“Thirty,” I corrected him.

Thomas made a choking sound. “Thirty?”

“Potentially. But Michael and the others have several of them hidden away at the moment.”

“Thirty pieces of silver,” Thomas said, understanding.

I nodded. “Each coin has the spirit of one of the Fallen trapped inside. Whoever possesses one of the coins can draw upon the Fallen angel’s power. They use it to shapeshift into those forms you saw, heal wounds, all kinds of fun stuff.”

“They tough?”

“Certifiable nightmares,” I said. “A lot of them have been alive long enough to develop some serious talent for magic, too.”

“Huh,” Thomas said. “The one who came through the door didn’t seem like such a badass. Ugly, sure, but he wasn’t Superman.”

“Maybe you got lucky,” I said. “As long as they have the coins, ‘hard to kill’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”

“Ah,” Thomas said. “That explains it, then.”

“What?” I asked.

Thomas reached into his pants pocket and drew out a silver coin a little larger than a nickel, blackened with age, except for the shape of a single sigil, shining cleanly through the tarnish. “When I gutted Captain Ugly, this went flying out.”

“Hell’s bells!” I spat, and flinched away from the coin.

Thomas twitched in surprise, and the Hummer went into a slow slide on the snow. He turned into it and regained control of the vehicle without ever taking his eyes off me. “Whoa, Harry. What?”

I pressed my side up against the door of the Hummer, getting as far as I physically could from the thing. “Look, just…just don’t move, all right?”

He arched an eyebrow. “Ooookay. Why not?”

“Because if that thing touches your skin, you’re screwed,” I said. “Shut up a second and let me think.”

The gloves. Thomas had been wearing gloves earlier, when fingering Justine’s scarf. He hadn’t touched the coin with his skin, or he’d already know how much trouble he was in. Good. But the coin was a menace, and I strongly suspected that the entity trapped inside it might be able to influence the physical world around it in subtle ways—enough to go rolling away from its former owner, for example, or to somehow manipulate Thomas into dropping or misplacing it.

Containment. It had to be contained. I fumbled at my pockets. The only container I was carrying was an old Crown Royal whiskey bag, the one that held my little set of gaming dice. I dumped them out into my pocket and opened the bag.

I already had a glove on my left hand. My paw had recovered significantly from the horrible burns it had gotten several years before, but it still wasn’t what you’d call pretty. I kept it covered out of courtesy to everyone who might glance at it. I held the little bag open with two fingers of my left hand and said, “Put it in here. And for God’s sake, don’t drop it or touch me with it.”

Thomas’s eyes widened further. He bit his lower lip and moved his hand very carefully, until he could drop the inoffensive little disk into the Crown Royal bag.

I jerked the drawstrings tight the second the coin was in, and tied the bag shut. Then I slapped open the Hummer’s ashtray, stuffed the bag inside, and slammed it closed again.

Only then did I draw a slow breath and sag back down into my seat.

“Jesus,” Thomas said quietly. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Harry…is it really that bad?”

“It’s worse,” I said. “But I can’t think of any other precautions to take yet.”

“What would have happened if I’d touched it?”

“The Fallen inside the coin would have invaded your consciousness,” I said. “It would offer you power. Temptation. Once you gave in enough, it would own you.”

“I’ve resisted temptation before, Harry.”

“Not like this.” I turned a frank gaze to him. “It’s a Fallen angel, man. Thousands and thousands of years old. It knows how people think. It knows how to exploit them.”

His voice sharpened a little. “I come from a family where everyone’s an incubus or a succubus. I think I know a little something about temptation.”

“Then you should know how they’d get you.” I lowered my voice and said gently, “It could give Justine back to you, Thomas. Let you touch her again.”

He stared at me for a second, a flicker of wild longing somewhere far back in his eyes. Then he turned his head slowly back to the road, his expression slipping into a neutral mask. “Oh,” he said quietly. After a moment he said, “We should probably get rid of the thing.”

“We will,” I said. “The Church has been up against the Denarians for a couple of thousand years. There are measures they can take.”

Thomas glanced down at the ashtray for a second, then dragged his eyes away and glowered at the dented hood of his Hummer. “They couldn’t have shown up six months ago. When I was driving a Buick.”

I snorted. “As long as you’ve got your priorities in order.”

“I just met them, but already I hate these guys,” Thomas said. “But why are they here? Why now?”

“Offhand? I’d say that they were out to wax Marcone and prove to the other members of the Accords that vanilla mortals have no place among us weirdos—I mean, superhumans.”

“They’re members of the Accords?”

“I’d have to look it up,” I said. “I doubt they’re signed on as the ‘Order of Demon-possessed Psychotics.’ But from the way Mantis Girl was talking, yeah.”

Thomas shook his head. “So what do they get out of it? What does taking Marcone prove?”

I shrugged. I had already asked myself the same questions and hadn’t been able to come up with any answers. “No clue,” I said. “But they’ve got what it takes to have torn that building apart, and to get around or go through the kind of muscle Marcone keeps around him.”

“And what the hell are the Faerie Queens doing getting involved?” Thomas asked.

I shrugged again. I’d already asked myself that, too. I hate it when I have to answer my own questions like that.

We went the rest of the way to Michael’s place in grey-and-white silence.

His street was on one of the routes being kept plowed, and we had no trouble rolling right up into his driveway. Michael himself was there with his two tallest sons, each of them wielding a snow shovel as they labored to clear the driveway and the sidewalk and the porch of the ongoing snow.

Michael regarded the Hummer with pursed lips as Thomas pulled in. He said something to his sons that made them trade a look with each other, then hurry inside. Michael walked down the driveway to my side of the truck and looked at my brother, then at the passengers in the backseat.

I rolled down the window. “Hey,” I said.

“Harry,” he said calmly. “What are you doing here?”

“I just had a conversation with Preying Mantis Girl,” I said. I held up a notebook, where I’d scribbled down the angelic sigil while it was still fresh in my memory.

Michael took a deep breath and grimaced. Then he nodded. “I had a feeling they might be in town.”

“Oh?” I asked.

The front door of the house opened, and a large, dark-skinned man appeared, dressed in blue jeans and a dark leather jacket. He wore a gym bag over one broad shoulder, and had one hand resting casually inside it. He paced out into the cold and the snow as if he’d been wearing full winter-weather gear, rather than casual traveling clothes, and stalked over toward us.

Once he got close enough to make out the details his face split into a broad, brief grin, and he hurried to stand beside Michael. “Harry!” he said, his voice deep, rich, and thick with a Russian accent. “We meet again.”

I answered his grin. “Sanya,” I replied, offering my hand. He shook it with enough force to crack bones. “What are you doing here?”

“Passing through,” Sanya said, and hooked a thumb up at the snow. “I was on the last flight in before they closed the airport. Looks like I am staying for a few days.” His eyes went from my face to the notebook, and the pleasant expression on his dark face turned to a brief snarl.

“Somebody you know?” I asked.

“Tessa,” he said. “And Imariel.”

“You’ve met, huh?”

His jaw clenched again. “Tessa’s second…recruited me. Tessa is here?”

“With friends.” I sketched the sigil I’d seen on the blackened denarius a few moments before and held it up to them.

Sanya shook his head and glanced at Michael.

“Akariel,” Michael said at once.

I nodded. “He’s in a Crown Royal bag in the ashtray.”

Michael blinked. Sanya too.

“I hope you have one of those holy hankies. I’d have taken it to Padre Forthill, but I figured they’d have him under observation. I need someplace quiet to hole up.”

Sanya and Michael traded a long, silent look.

Sanya frowned, examining my brother. “Who is the vampire?”

I felt Thomas stiffen in surprise. As a rule, even members of the supernatural world can’t detect what a vampire of the White Court truly is, unless he’s actually in the middle of doing something vampity. It’s a natural camouflage for his kind, and they rely upon it every bit as much as a leopard does its spots.

But it can be tough to hide things from a Knight of the Cross. Maybe it’s a part of the power they’re given, or maybe it’s just a part of the personality of the men chosen for the job—don’t ask me which. I’m fuzzy on the whole issue of faith and the Almighty, and I swim those waters with extreme caution and as much brevity as possible. I just know that the bad guys rarely get to sneak up on a Knight of the Cross, and that the Knights have a propensity for bringing the truth to light.

I met Sanya’s gaze for a moment and said, “He’s with me. He’s also the reason Akariel has a date with the inside of a vault.”

Sanya seemed to consider that for a moment. He glanced at Michael, who gave a grudging nod.

The younger Knight pursed his lips thoughtfully at that, his gaze moving to the backseat.

Hendricks had woken up, but he hadn’t moved. He watched Sanya with steady, beady eyes.

“The woman,” Sanya said, frowning. “What is she?”

“Hurt,” I said.

Something like chagrin flickered over his features. “Da, of course. You would not bring her here if you thought her a danger.”

“Not to you or me,” I said. “Tessa might have a different opinion.”

Sanya’s eyebrows went up. “Is that how she was wounded?”

“That was after she was wounded.”

“Really.” Sanya peered a little more closely at Gard.

“Back off,” Hendricks rumbled. “Comrade.”

Sanya flashed that swift smile again and displayed open palms to Hendricks.

Michael nodded to Thomas. “Pull the truck around to the back of the house. With all this snow piled up it should be hidden from the street.”

“Thank you, Michael,” I said.

He shook his head. “There’s a heater in the workshop, and a couple of folding cots. I’m not exposing the children to this.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Michael asked gently. He thumped the truck’s dented hood once, lightly, and waved Thomas toward the back of the house.

Twenty minutes later we were all warm, if a bit crowded in Michael’s workshop.

Gard lay on a couch, sleeping, her color improving almost visibly. Hendricks sat down with his back to the wall beside Gard’s cot, presumably to stand watch, but he’d started snoring within a few minutes. Sanya, with the help of Molly and her siblings, was off rounding up food.

I watched as Michael wrapped Akariel up in a clean white hankie embroidered with a silver cross, muttering a prayer under his breath the whole while. Then he slipped the hankie into a plain wooden box, also adorned with a silver cross. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need to secure this.”

“Where do they keep those things?” Thomas asked, after Michael had departed.

I shrugged. “Some big warehouse with a gazillion identical boxes, probably.”

Thomas snorted.

“Don’t even think it,” I said. “It isn’t worth it.”

Thomas ran his gloved fingers over the white scarf. “Isn’t it?”

“You saw how these things operate. They’ll manipulate your emotions and self-control, and something bad would happen to Justine. Or they’d wait until they had you hook, line, and sinker and you were their meat puppet. And something bad would happen to Justine.”

Thomas shrugged. “I’ve got one demon in my head already. What’s one more?”

I studied his profile. “You’ve got one monster in your head already,” I countered. “She barely survived it.”

He was still for a moment. Then he slammed his elbow back against the workshop wall, a gesture of pure frustration. Wood splintered, and a little cold air whooshed in.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said in a dull voice.

“Holy crap,” I said. An idea crystallized in my head, and a chill went down my spine.

Thomas rubbed his elbow lightly. “What?”

“I just had a really unpleasant thought.” I gestured at Marcone’s exhausted retainers. “I don’t think the Denarians took Marcone so that they could erase him and make an example of him.”

My brother shrugged. “Why else would they do it?”

I bit my lip, my stomach turning in uncomfortable flips.

“Because,” I said, “maybe they want to recruit him.”

Chapter Fifteen

Thomas stood watch over our sleeping beauties while I went inside to talk with Michael and Sanya at the Carpenter kitchen table.

I laid all the cards down. See above regarding the general futility of lying to Knights of the Cross—and besides, they’d both more than earned my trust. It didn’t take me very long.

“So,” I said, “I think we’ve got to move fast, and get Marcone away from them before he’s forced to join up.”

Michael frowned and folded his broad, work-scarred hands on the table before him. “What makes you think he’s going to tell them no?”

“Marcone’s scum,” I said. “But he’s his own scum. He doesn’t work for anyone.”

“You are sure?” Sanya asked, frowning thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s why they wanted to grab Hendricks and Gard instead of killing them. So they could force him to take the coin or they’d kill his people.”

Michael grunted. “It’s a frequently used tactic.”

“Not for Tessa,” Sanya said, his voice absolutely certain. “She prefers to find those already well motivated to accept a coin. She regards their potential talents as a secondary factor to raw desire.”

Michael acceded the point with a nod. “Which would mean that Tessa isn’t giving the orders.”

Sanya showed his teeth in a sudden, fierce grin. “Nicodemus is here.”

“Fu—” I started to swear, but I glanced at Michael and changed it to, “Fudgesicles. Nicodemus nearly killed us all last time he was in town. And he did kill Shiro.”

Both of the Knights nodded. Michael bowed his head and murmured a brief prayer.

“Guys,” I said, “I know that your first instincts tend to be to stand watch against the night, turning the other cheek, and so on. But he’s here with maybe twice the demon-power he had on his last visit. If we wait for him to come to us, he’ll tear us apart.”

“Agreed,” Sanya said firmly. “Take the initiative. Find him and hit the snake before he can coil to strike.”

Michael shook his head. “Brother, you forget our purpose. We are not given our power so that we can strike down our enemies, no matter how much they might deserve it. Our purpose is to rescue the poor souls trapped by the Fallen.”

“Nicodemus doesn’t want to be rescued,” I said. “He’s in full collaboration with his demon.”

“Which changes nothing about our duty,” he said. “Anyone, even Nicodemus, can seek redemption, no matter what they’ve done, as long as they have breath enough to ask forgiveness.”

“I don’t suppose a pair of sucking chest wounds could get us around that?” I asked him. “Because if they would, I’d be tickled to provide them.”

Sanya let out a bark of laughter.

Michael smiled, but it was brief and strained. “My point is that we can undertake such an aggressive move in only the direst of circumstances.”

“Faerie stands poised on the brink of an internal war,” I said. “Which would probably reignite the war between the Council and the Vampire Courts—and in the bad guys’ favor, I might add. One of the most dangerous men I’ve ever known is about to have involuntary access to the knowledge and power of a Fallen angel, which would give the Denarians access to major influence within the United States. Not to mention the serious personal consequences for me if they succeed in making it happen.” I looked back and forth between the two Knights, and held up one hand straight over my head. “I vote dire. All in favor?”

Michael caught Sanya’s hand on the way up, and pushed it gently back down to the table. “This isn’t a democracy, Harry. We serve a King.”

Sanya frowned for a moment, glancing at me. But then he settled back in his chair, a silent statement of support for Michael.

“You want to talk to them?” I asked Michael. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Michael replied. “But I will not set out to simply murder them and have done. It’s a solution, Harry. But it isn’t good enough.”

I settled back in my chair and rubbed at my head with one hand. An ache was forming there. “Okay,” I said quietly, trying to make up a plan as I went along. “What if…I set up a talk? Could you be lurking nearby for backup?”

Michael sighed. “There’s a measure of sophistry in that. You know they’ll try to betray you if it seems to be to their advantage.”

“Yeah. And it’ll be their choice to do it. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Some way to deal with the problem while still giving them a choice about what to do? Preferably in some manner that will get as few good guys killed as possible?”

He looked pained, but Michael nodded.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll try to set it up.”

“How?” Sanya asked.

“Let me worry about that,” I said. I checked the clock on the wall. “Crap. I’m late for a meeting. Can I borrow your phone?”

“Of course,” Michael said.

I glanced around the quiet house on my way to the phone and frowned. “Where is everyone?”

“Charity took them elsewhere for a few days,” Michael said. “There won’t be school in this mess, anyway.”

I grunted. “Where’s Molly?”

Michael paused and then shook his head. “I’m not sure. I don’t think she went with them.”

I thought about it for a moment and thought I knew where she’d be. I nodded around the kitchen. “How do you keep things running around here with Molly under the roof? I figured things would be breaking down left and right.”

“Lots and lots of preventive maintenance,” Michael replied steadily. “And about twice as much repair work as I usually do.”

“Sorry.”

He smiled. “Small price. She’s worth it.”

The reasons I like Michael have nothing to do with swords and the smiting of evil.

I got on the phone and dialed McAnally’s Pub.

“Mac,” answered Mac, the ever-laconic owner.

“It’s Harry Dresden,” I said. “Is Sergeant Murphy there?”

Mac grunted in the affirmative.

“Put a beer on my tab and tell her I’m on the way?”

Mac grunted yes again.

“Thanks, man.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

I made another call and spoke to a humorless-sounding man with a Slavic accent. I muttered my password, so that no one in the kitchen would overhear it, but the connection was so bad that I wound up all but screaming it into the receiver. That kind of thing is to be expected when you’ve got a wizard on both ends.

It only took the Jolly Northman about ten minutes to get my call through to my party.

“Luccio,” said a young woman’s voice. “What’s gone wrong, Harry?”

“Hey!” I protested. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man, Captain. Just because I’m calling in doesn’t mean that there’s some kind of crisis.”

“Technically true, I suppose. Why are you calling?”

“Well. There’s a crisis.”

She made an mmmmmm sound.

“A group known as the Knights of the Blackened Denarius has kidnapped Baron Marcone.”

“The crime lord you took it upon yourself to assist in joining the Accords?” Luccio asked, amusement in her voice. “In what way is that relevant to the White Council?”

“These Denarian creeps are also signatories of the Accords,” I said. “Marcone’s retainers are crying foul. They’ve asked me to formally protest the abduction and summon an Emissary to resolve the dispute.”

Seconds of silence ticked by.

“In what way,” Luccio repeated, her voice much harder this time, “is that relevant to the White Council?”

“The Accords don’t mean anything if they aren’t enforced and supported,” I said. “In the long run, it’s in our own best interests to make sure they’re supported now, before a precedent is set and—”

“Don’t bullshit me,” the captain of the Wardens snarled, a hint of an Italian accent creeping into her speech. “If we take formal action it could provoke a war—a war we simply cannot afford. We all know the Red Court is only catching its breath. We can ill afford the losses we’ve already taken, much less those we might assume in a new conflict.”

I made sure to keep my voice steady, grim. “Mab has contacted me personally. She has indicated that it is strongly in our own best interests to intervene.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. I hadn’t ever specified who we meant. And with any luck the mention of Mab would keep Luccio’s attention completely. The only reason the Red Court hadn’t wiped us out in the years-long war was that Mab had given the Council right-of-way through the portions of the Nevernever under her control, allowing us wizards to stay as mobile as our opponents, who had considerably less difficulty employing mortal vehicles to maneuver its soldiery.

“Jesu Christi,” Luccio spat. “She means to withdraw our right-of-way through Winter if we don’t accede to her demands.”

“Well,” I said, “she never actually came out and said that.”

“Of course she didn’t. She never speaks plainly at all.”

“She does keep her deals, though,” I pointed out.

“She doesn’t make deals she can’t slide out of. She’s forbidden the Ways to her people but also to the Wyldfae as a gesture of courtesy. All she needs to do is relax her ban against the Wyldfae, and we’d be forced to travel in strength every time we went through the Ways.”

“She’s a sneaky bitch,” I agreed. I crossed my fingers.

Luccio exhaled forcefully through her nose. “Very well. I will forward the appropriate notifications, pending approval by the Senior Council. Which Emissary would you prefer?”

“The Archive. We have a working relationship.”

Luccio mmmmm ed again. I heard a pencil scratching. “Dresden,” she said, “I cannot stress to you enough how vital it is that we avoid general hostilities, even with a relatively small power.”

Translation: Don’t start another war, Harry.

“But,” she continued, “we can afford to lose the paths through Winter even less.”

Translation: Unless you really have to.

“I hear you,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

“Do better,” Luccio said, her tone blunt. “There are those on the Senior Council who hold the opinion that we’re already fighting one war because of your incompetence.”

I felt heat flush up my neck. “If they bring that up, remind them that my incompetence is the only reason they weren’t all blasted to molecules by a newborn god,” I shot back. “And after that, remind them that because of my incompetence, we’re enjoying a cease-fire that we desperately needed to replace our losses. And after that—”

“That is enough, Warden,” the captain snapped.

I fought down my frustration and clamped my mouth shut.

Hey, we were coming up on the holidays. They’re a time of miracles.

“I’ll notify you when I learn something,” Luccio said, and hung up the phone.

I hung up too, harder than I really needed to. I turned to find Michael and Sanya staring at me.

“Harry,” Michael said quietly, “that was Captain Luccio, was it not?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You never told us that Mab threatened to go back on her bargain.”

“Well, no.”

Michael watched me with troubled eyes. “Because she didn’t. You just lied to Luccio.”

“Yeah,” I said shortly. “Because I need the Council’s say-so to set up the meeting. Because I’ve got to set up the meeting so that the gang of murdering bastards who tortured Shiro to death will have a chance to prove to you that they’ve still got it coming.”

“Harry, if the Council learns that you’ve misled them—”

“They’ll probably charge me with treason,” I said.

Michael rose from his seat. “But—”

I stabbed a finger at him. “The longer we delay, the longer those creeps stay in town, the longer Summer’s hit men keep coming after me, and the more likely it is that innocent people are going to get hurt in the cross fire. I’ve got to move fast, and the best way to get the Council to move is to let it think its own ass is about to fall into the fire.”

“Harry—” Michael began.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t give me the speech about redemption and mercy and how everyone deserves a second chance. I’m all for doing the right thing, Michael. You know that. But this isn’t the time.”

“Then what is right changes because we’re in a hurry?” he asked gently.

“Even your Book says that there’s a time for all things,” I said. “A time to heal—and a time to kill.”

Michael looked from me to the corner by the back door, where the broadsword Amoracchius rested in its humble leather scabbard, its plain, crusader-style hilt bound in wire. “It isn’t that, Harry. I’ve seen more of what they’ve done than you have. I have no qualms with fighting them, if it comes to that.”

“They’ve already blown up a building, tried to murder me, and set off a situation that nearly got your own children burned down in the cross fire. In what way has it not come to that?”

Instead of answering, Michael shook his head, took up Amoracchius, and walked further into the house.

I scowled after him for a minute and muttered darkly under my breath.

“You confused him,” Sanya rumbled.

I glanced at the dark-skinned Knight. “What?”

“You confused him,” Sanya repeated. “Because of what you did.”

“What? Lying to the Council? I don’t see that I had much choice.”

“But you did,” Sanya said placidly. He reached into the gym bag on the floor next to him and drew out a long saber, an old cavalry weapon—Esperacchius. A nail worked into the hilt declared it a brother of Michael’s sword. He started inspecting the blade. “You could have simply moved to attack them.”

“By myself? I’m bad, but I’m not that bad.”

“He’s your friend. He would have come with you. You know that.”

I shook my head. “He’s my friend. Period. You don’t do that to your friends.”

“Precisely,” Sanya said. “So instead you have placed your own life in jeopardy in order to protect his beliefs. You risk your body to preserve his heart.” He brought out a smooth sharpening stone and began stropping the saber’s blade. “I suppose he considers it a particularly messianic act.”

“That’s not why I did it,” I said.

“Of course it isn’t. He knows that. It isn’t easy for him. Usually he’s the one protecting another, willing to pay the price if he must.”

I exhaled and glanced after Michael. “I don’t know what else I could have done.”

“Da,” Sanya agreed. “But he is still afraid for you.” He fell quiet for a moment, while his stone slid along the sword’s blade.

“Mind if I ask you something?” I said.

The big man kept sharpening the sword with a steady hand. “Not at all.”

“You looked a little tense when Tessa’s name came up,” I said.

Sanya glanced up at me for a second, his eyes shadowed and unreadable. He shrugged a shoulder and went back to his work.

“She do you wrong?”

“Barely ever noticed me. Or spoke to me,” Sanya said. “To her I was just an employee. One more face. She did not care who I was.”

“This second of hers, though. The one who recruited you.”

The muscles along his jawline twitched. “Her name is Rosanna.”

“And she done you wrong,” I said.

“Why do you say that?”

“’Cause when you talk about her, your face says that you been done wrong.”

He gave me a brief smile. “Do you know how many black men live in Russia, Dresden?”

“No. I mean, I figure they’re kind of a minority.”

Sanya stopped in midstrop and glanced at me for a pregnant moment, one eyebrow arched. “Yes,” he said, his tone dry. “Kind of.”

“More so than in the States, I guess.”

He grunted. “For Moscow I was very, very odd. If I went out to any smaller towns when I was growing up, I had to be careful about walking down busy streets. I could cause car accidents when drivers took their eyes off the road to stare at me. Literally. Many people in that part of the world had never seen a black person with their own eyes. That is changing slowly, but growing up I was a minority the way Bigfoot is a minority. A freak.”

I started putting things together. “That’s the kind of thing that is bound to make a young man a little resentful.”

He went back to sharpening the sword. “Oh, yes.”

“So when you say that Tessa prefers to take recruits she knows will be eager to accept a coin…”

“I speak from experience,” Sanya said, nodding. “Rosanna was everything that angry, poor, desperate young man could dream of. Pretty. Strong. Sensual. And she truly did not care about the color of my skin.” Sanya shook his head. “I was sixteen.”

I winced. “Yeah. Good age for making really bad decisions. I speak from experience, too.”

“She offered me the coin,” Sanya said. “I took it. And for five years the creature known as Magog and I traveled the world with Rosanna, indulged in every vice a young man could possibly imagine, and…obeyed Tessa’s commands.” He shook his head and glanced up at me. “By the end of that time, Dresden, I wasn’t much more than a beast who walked upright. Oh, I had thoughts and feelings, but they were all slaves to my baser desires. I did many things of which I am not—” He broke off and turned his face away from me. “I did many things.”

“She was your handler,” I said quietly. “Rosanna. She was the one getting you to try the drugs, to do the deeds. One little step at a time. Corrupting you and letting the Fallen take control.”

He nodded. “And the whole time I never even suspected it. I thought that she cared about me as much as I cared about her.” He smiled faintly. “Mind you, I never claimed to be of any particular intelligence.”

“Who got you out?” I asked him. “Shiro?”

“In a way,” Sanya said. “Shiro had just driven Tessa from one of her projects in…Antwerp, I believe. She came storming into Rosanna’s apartment in Venice, furious. She and Rosanna had an argument I never completely understood—but instead of leaving when I was told to do so, I stayed to listen. I heard what Rosanna truly felt about me, heard her report about me to Tessa. And I finally understood what an idiot I’d been. I dropped the coin into a canal and never looked back.”

I blinked at him. “That must have been difficult.”

“My entire life has been one of a snowball in Hell,” Sanya said cheerfully. “Though the metaphor is perhaps inverted. At the time I judged the action to be tantamount to suicide, since Tessa was certain to track me down and kill me—but Shiro had followed her to Venice, and he found me instead. Michael—not the Chicago Michael, the other one—met us at Malta and brought Esperacchius, here, with him, offering me the chance to work against some of the evil I’d helped to create. From there I have been Knighting. Is good work. Plenty of travel, interesting people, always a new challenge.”

I shook my head and laughed. “That’s putting a positive spin on it.”

“I am making a difference,” Sanya said with simple and rock-solid conviction. “And you, Dresden? Have you considered taking up Fidelacchius? Joining us?”

“No,” I said quietly.

“Why not?” Sanya asked, his tone reasonable. “You know for what we fight. You know the good we do for others. Your cause runs a close parallel to ours: to protect those who cannot protect themselves; to pit yourself against the forces of violence and death when they arise.”

“I’m not really into the whole God thing,” I said.

“And I am an agnostic,” Sanya responded.

I snorted. “Hell’s bells. Tell me you aren’t still clinging to that. You carry a holy blade and hang out with angels.”

“The blade has power, true. The beings allied with that power are…somewhat angelic. But I have met many strange and mighty things since I took up the sword. If one called them ‘aliens’ instead of ‘angels,’ it would only mean that I was working in concert with powerful beings—not necessarily the literal forces of Heaven, or a literal Creator.” Sanya grinned. “A philosophical fine point, true, but I am not prepared to abandon it. What we do is worthy, without ever bringing questions of faith, religion, or God into the discussion.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I admitted.

“So tell me,” Sanya said, “why have you not considered taking up the sword?”

I thought about it for a second and said, “Because it isn’t for me. And Shiro said I would know who to give it to.”

Sanya shrugged and nodded his head in acquiescence. “Reason enough.” He sighed. “We could use Fidelacchius’s power in this conflict. I wish Shiro were with us now.”

“Good man,” I agreed quietly. “He was a king, you know.”

“I thought he just liked the King’s music.”

“No, no,” I said. “Shiro himself. He was a direct descendent of the last king of Okinawa. Several generations back, but his family was royalty.”

Sanya shrugged his broad shoulders. “There have been many kings over the centuries, my friend, and many years for their bloodlines to spread through the populace. My own family can trace its roots back to Salahuddin.”

I felt my eyebrows rise. “Salahuddin. You mean Saladin? King of Syria and Egypt during the Crusades?”

Sanya nodded. “The same.” He paused in midstrop and looked up at me, his eyes widening.

“I know you’re agnostic,” I said. “But do you believe in coincidence?”

“Not nearly so much as I once did,” Sanya replied.

“That can’t be a coincidence. Both of you descended from royalty.” I chewed on my lip. “Could that have something to do with who can take up one of the swords?”

“I am a soldier and an amateur philosopher,” Sanya said. “You are the wizard. Could such a thing be significant?”

I waggled a hand in midair. “Yes and no. I mean, there are a lot of factors that tie magic to matters of inheritance—genetic or otherwise. A lot of the old rites were intimately bound up with political rulers.”

“The king and his land are one,” Sanya intoned solemnly.

“Well, yeah.”

Sanya nodded. “Michael showed me that movie.”

“Merlin was the only good thing about that movie. That and Captain Picard kicking ass in plate mail with a big ax.” I waved my hand. “The point is that in many cultures, the king or sultan or whatever held a position of duty and authority that was as much spiritual as physical. Certain energies could have been connected to that, giving the old kings a form of metaphysical significance.”

“Perhaps something similar to the power of the Swords?” Sanya asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe. By the time I was born the planet was running a little low on monarchs. It isn’t something I’ve looked at before.”

Sanya smiled. “Well. Now you need only find a prince or princess willing to lay down his or her life over matters of principle. Do you know any?”

“Not so much,” I said. “But I’ve got a feeling that we’re onto something.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s getting late. I’ll be back here in about two hours, or I’ll call.”

“Da,” Sanya said. “We will watch over your criminals for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went back out to the workshop. Hendricks had slumped to the floor and was sleeping. Gard was actually snoring. Thomas had been pacing restlessly when I entered.

“Well?” he asked.

“Gotta get to Mac’s and meet Murphy,” I said. “Let’s roll.”

Thomas nodded and headed for the door.

I reached into the trash can by the door, took out an empty motor oil can, and tossed it into the least cluttered corner of the workshop. It bounced off something in midair, and Molly let out a soft yelp, appearing there a moment later, rubbing a hand to her hip.

“Where’d she come from?” Thomas demanded crossly.

“What did I miss?” Molly demanded, her tone faintly offended. “I had all the senses covered. Even Thomas didn’t know I was there.”

“You didn’t miss anything,” I said. “I just know how you think, grasshopper. If I can’t make you stay where it’s safe, I might as well keep you where I can see you. Maybe you’ll even be useful. You’re with us.”

Molly’s eyes gleamed. “Excellent,” she said, and hurried over to join me.

Chapter Sixteen

I was more than an hour late, and Murphy was not amused.

“Your nose looks worse than it did yesterday,” she said when I sat down at the table. “I think the black eyes have grown, too.”

“Gosh, you’re cute when you’re angry,” I responded.

Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

“It makes your little button nose all pink and your eyes get bloodshot and even bluer.”

“Did you have any last words, Dresden, or should I just choke you now?”

“Mac!” I called, raising a hand. “Two pale!”

She fixed me with a steady look and said, “Don’t think you can buy your way out of this with good beer.”

“I don’t,” I said, rising. “I’m buying my way out of it with really, really good beer.”

I walked over to the bar as Mac set two bottles of his microbrewed liquid nirvana down and took off the caps with a deft twist of his hand, disdaining a bottle opener. I winked at him and picked up both bottles, then sauntered back over to Murphy.

I gave her my bottle, took mine, and we drank. She paused after the first taste and blinked at the bottle before drinking again more deeply. “This beer,” she pronounced after that, “just saved your life.”

“Mac’s a master beeromancer,” I replied. I’d never tell him, but at the time I wished he’d serve his brew cold. I’d have loved to hold a frosty bottle against my aching head for a moment. You’d think the pain from the damned broken nose would fade eventually. But it just kept on stubbornly burning.

We had settled down at a table along one wall of the pub. There are thirteen tables in the room, and thirteen wooden pillars, each extensively carved with scenes mostly out of Old World fairy tales. The bar is crooked and has thirteen stools, and thirteen ceiling fans whir lazily overhead. The setup of the entire place is designed to diffuse and refract random magical energies, the kind that often gather around practitioners of magic when they’re grumpy or out of sorts. It offers a measure of protection from accumulated negative energies, enough to make sure that annoying or depressing “vibes,” for lack of a more precise term, don’t adversely affect the moods and attitudes of the pub’s clientele.

It doesn’t keep out any of the supernatural riffraff—that’s what the sign by the door is for. Mac had the place legally recognized as neutral ground among the members of the Unseelie Accords, and members of any of the Accorded nations had a responsibility to avoid conflict in such a place, or at least to take it outside.

Still, neutral ground is safe only until someone thinks they can get away with violating the Accords. It’s best to be cautious there.

“On the other hand,” Murphy said, more quietly, “maybe you’re too pathetic to beat to death right now.”

“My nose, you mean. Compared to the way my hand felt, it’s nothing,” I said.

“Still can’t be much fun.”

“Well. No.”

She watched me through her next sip and then said, “You’re about to play the wizard card and tell me to butt out.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

She gave me her cop eyes, all professionally detached neutrality, and nodded once. “So talk.”

“Remember the guys from the airport a few years back?”

“Yeah. Killed the old Okinawan guy in the chapel. He died real bad.”

I smiled faintly. “I think he’d probably argue the point, if he could.”

She shrugged and said, tone quietly flat, “It was a mess.”

“The guys behind it are back. They’ve abducted Marcone.”

Murphy frowned, her eyes distant for a moment, calculating. “They’re grabbing his business?”

“Or forcing him onto their team,” I said. “I’m not sure yet. We’re working on it.”

“We?”

“You remember Michael?” I asked.

“Charity’s husband?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember that at the airport we found a couple of men with no tongues and fake identification. They’d been killed with long blades. Swords, if you can believe that in this day and age. It was messy, Harry.” She put her hands flat on the table and leaned toward me. “I don’t like messy.”

“I’m all kinds of sorry about that, Murph,” I said. It’s possible that a grain or two of sarcasm was showing in my reply. “I’ll be sure to ask them to put on the kid gloves. If I survive asking the question, I’ll let you know what they say.”

Murphy regarded me calmly. “They’re back, then?”

I nodded. “Only this time they brought more friends to the party.”

She nodded. “Where are they?”

“No, Murph.”

“Where are they, Harry?” Murph asked, her voice hard. “If they’re that dangerous, I’m not waiting for them to choose their ground so that we have to rush into a hostile situation in response to them. We’ll go after them right now, before they have a chance to hurt anyone else.”

“It’d be a slaughter, Murphy.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. You’d be surprised what kinds of resources the department has gotten its hands on, what with the whole War on Terror.”

“Right. And you’re going to tell your bosses what?”

“That the same terrorists who attacked the airport and murdered a woman in the marina are in the city, planning another operation. That the only way to ensure the safety of its citizens is to preemptively assault them. Then show up with SWAT, SI, every cop in town, anyone we can get from the Bureau, and all the military backup available on short notice.”

I sat back in my chair at that, startled at Murphy’s tone—and at the possibilities.

Hell. The kind of firepower she was talking about might give even the Denarians pause. And given the current climate, terrorist plot was all but synonymous with respond with overwhelming force. Oh, sure, most modern weaponry was far less effective on supernatural targets than anyone without knowledge of them would expect—but even reduced to the effectiveness of bee stings, enough bee stings can be just as deadly as a knife in the heart.

Humanity, at large, enjoys a dichotomous role in supernatural politics. On the one hand they are sneered at and held in contempt for being patently unable to come to grips with reality, to the point where the supernatural world hardly needed to bother to hide from them. Given half a chance, the average human being would rationalize the most bizarre of encounters down to “unusual but explainable” events. They are referred to as herd animals by a lot of the things that prey on them, and often toyed with and tormented.

On the other hand, no one wants to get them stirred up, either. Humanity, when frightened and angry, is a force even the supernatural world does not wish to reckon with. The torches and pitchforks are just as deadly, in their numbers and their simple rage, as they ever were—and it was my opinion that most of the supernatural crowd had very little appreciation for just how destructive and dangerous mankind had grown in the past century.

Which is why I found myself sorely tempted to let the Denarians get a big old faceful of angry cop. Five or six rifles like Gard’s might not kill Mantis Girl—but if you followed them up with thirty or forty pairs of stompy combat boots for all the little bugs, Little Miss Clamphands could go down for the count.

Of course, all that was predicated on the idea that the humans involved a) knew what they were up against and b) took it seriously and worked together tightly enough to get the job done. Murphy and the guys in SI might have a pretty good grasp of the situation, but the others wouldn’t. They’d be expecting a soldier movie, but they’d be getting something out of a horror flick instead. I didn’t for one second believe that Murphy or Stallings or anyone else in Chicago could make everyone involved listen to them once they started talking about demons and monsters.

I rubbed at my head again, thinking of Sanya. Maybe we could try to explain it in more palatable terms. Instead of “shapeshifting demons” we could tell them that the terrorists were in possession (ha-ha, get it?) of “experimental genetically engineered biomimetic armored suits.” Maybe that would give them the framework they needed to get the job done.

And maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they’d run into something out of a nightmare and start screaming in fear. Coordination and control would go right out the window, especially if the Denarians had anyone with enough magical juice to start blowing out technology. Then would come the panic and slaughter and terror.

“It’s an idea,” I said to Murphy. “Maybe even a workable idea. But I don’t think its time has come. At least, not yet.”

Her eyes flashed very blue. “And you’re the one who decides.”

I took another sip of beer and set the bottle down again, deliberately. “Apparently.”

“Says who?” Murphy demanded.

I leaned back in my chair. “In the first place,” I said quietly, “even if you brought in all that firepower, the best you could hope for is a hideously bloody, costly victory. In the second place, there’s a chance that I can resolve this whole thing through Council channels—or at least make sure that when the fur starts flying, we’re not in the middle of the bloody town.”

“But you—”

“And in the third place,” I continued, “I don’t know where they are.”

Murphy narrowed her eyes, and then some of the tension abruptly left her features. “You’re telling me the truth.”

“Usually do,” I said. “I could probably track them down, given a day or so. But it might not come to that.”

She studied my face for a moment. “But you don’t think that talk will stop them from whatever they’re doing here.”

“Not a chance in hell. But hopefully I’ll talk them out of the woodwork to someplace a little more out of the way.”

“What if someone gets hurt while you’re scheming?” she asked. “Those encounters people were having last night are getting attention. No one’s been hurt so far, but that could change. I’m not prepared to tolerate that.”

“Those were something else,” I said tiredly. “Something I don’t think will be a threat to the public.” I told her about Summer’s hitters.

She drank the rest of her beer in a single tip, then sighed. “Nothing’s ever simple with you.”

I shrugged modestly.

“Here’s the problem, Harry,” she said quietly. “Last time these maniacs were around, there were bodies. And there were reports. Several witnesses gave a fairly good description of you.”

“And nothing came of it,” I said.

“Nothing came of it because I was in charge of the investigation,” Murphy corrected me, her tone slightly sharpening. “The case was never closed. And if similar events bring it up again, there’s no way I can protect you.”

“Stallings wouldn’t…?”

“John would probably try,” Murphy said. “But Rudolph’s been ladder climbing over in Internal Affairs, and if he gets an opening he’ll start screaming about it and the case will get kicked up the line and out of SI’s control.”

I frowned at that, turning my bottle around slowly in my fingers. “Well,” I said, “that could complicate things.”

Murphy rolled her eyes. “You think? Dammit, Harry. A long time ago I agreed with you that there were some things that it was better the department didn’t get involved in. I promised not to go blowing whistles and raising alarms every time things got spooky.” She leaned forward slightly, her eyes intent. “But I’m a cop, Harry. Before everything else. My job is to defend and protect the people of this city.”

“And what do you think I’m doing?”

“The best you know how,” she said without heat. “I know your heart is in the right place. But you can be as sincere as hell and still be wrong.” She paused to let that sink in. “And if you’re wrong it could cost lives. Lives I’m sworn to protect.”

I said nothing.

“You asked me to respect your limits and I have,” she said quietly. “I expect you to return the favor. If for one second I think that letting you handle this is going to cost innocent lives, I’m not going to stand quietly in the wings. I’m going in and bringing everything I can get my hands on with me. And if I do that, I expect your complete support.”

“And you’re the one who gets to decide when that is?” I demanded.

She faced me without flinching, not a millimeter. “Apparently.”

I leaned back in my seat and sipped beer with my eyes closed.

Murphy didn’t know everything that was at stake here. More than anyone else on the force, sure, but she was operating under only partial knowledge. If she made the wrong call, she could really screw things up beyond all ability to conceive.

She’d probably had that same exact thought about me, and on more than one occasion.

I’d asked Murphy for a lot when I’d asked her to trust me.

How could I not return the favor and still call myself her friend?

Simple.

I couldn’t.

Hell, if she decided to go in, she’d do it with or without me. In that circumstance my presence could mean the difference between a bloody victory and a disaster, and…

And I suddenly felt a lot more empathy for Michael’s confusion.

I opened my eyes again and said quietly, “You decide to bring CPD in, you’ll have my cooperation. But you’ve got to believe me: This isn’t the time for that kind of solution.”

She ran her thumb over a scar in the wooden table. “What if that building had been full of people, Harry? Families. These Denarians could have killed hundreds.”

“Give me time,” I said.

She put her hands on the table’s edge and rose, facing me with those same neutral eyes again. As she started to speak I got a twisty feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I wish I could,” she said, “but—”

The door to the pub slammed open hard enough to strain its hinges and leave marks against the old wooden wall.

A…thing…came through the door. It was hard for me to tell what it was at first. Imagine a big man trying to squeeze into a doghouse. He has to crouch down and go in sideways, one shoulder at a time, moving very carefully to avoid harming himself on the door frame. That’s what this huge, grey-furred thing looked like. But with horns and cloven hooves.

The enormous gruff—several feet taller than any ogre or troll I’d ever seen—squeezed all the way through the door and then rose to a crouch. His head, shoulders, and the top part of his back pressed against the ceiling. Hunched awkwardly, he slowly scanned the room, his golden eyes gleaming around their rectangular pupils. Each knuckle of his closed fists was the size of a freaking cantaloupe, and a heavy, pungent animal scent filled the air.

Thanks to the snow, the pub wasn’t crowded—just a few regulars, plus Murphy and me. But even so, this wasn’t something you saw every day, and the room went totally still.

The gruff ’s gaze settled on me.

Then he duckwalked toward my table. Mac raced for the switch that turned off the fans, but the first couple of spinning blades the gruff passed struck sharply against his curling horns—and shattered. He did not so much as blink. He stopped beside my table and surveyed Murphy, then turned his huge, heavy gaze to me.

“Wizard,” he rumbled in a voice so deep that I could feel it better than I could hear it. “I have come hence to speak to thee about mine younger brothers.” The gruff ’s huge eyes narrowed, and its knuckles creaked like shipping hawsers as its fists tightened. “And the harms thou hast wrought upon them.”

Chapter Seventeen

I picked up my staff and rose to face the enormous gruff.

Murphy watched me with very, very wide eyes.

“This is neutral ground,” I said quietly.

“Aye,” the gruff agreed. “The Accords alone keep thy neck unbroken, thy skull uncracked.”

“Or your enormous ass uncooked,” I replied, staring up and setting my jaw. “Don’t start thinking it would be easy, Tiny.”

“Mayhap, and mayhap not,” the gruff rumbled. “’Tis a question answered only by the field.”

I breathed as shallowly as I could. The huge gruff didn’t smell bad, precisely—but he sure as hell smelled a lot. “Speak.”

“We find ourselves at odds, friend of Winter,” the gruff rumbled.

“Friend of Summer, too,” I said. “They gave me jewelry and everything.”

“Aye,” the huge gruff said. “You have done good service to my Court, if not to my Queen. I am surprised, then, at your use of the bane ’pon two of my younger kin.”

“The bane?” Murphy said quietly.

“Iron,” I clarified. I turned back to the gruff. “They were trying to kill me. I wanted to survive.”

“No friend of either Court would so employ the bane, wizard,” the gruff growled. “Did you not know this? It is more than a mere weapon, and the pain it causes more than simple discomfort. It is a poison, body and spirit, that you have used ’pon us.”

I glared at the big idiot. “They were trying to kill me,” I repeated, only more slowly, you know, so it would be all insulting. “I wanted to survive.”

The gruff narrowed its eyes. “Then you intend to continue as you have begun?”

“I intend to survive,” I replied. “I didn’t ask for this fight. I didn’t begin it.”

“Thou’rt fated to die in any case, mortal, soon or late. Why not face it with honor and make thy passing more peaceful thereby?”

“Peaceful?” I asked, barely containing a laugh. “If I go down fighting, Tiny, I plan for it to be about as unpeaceful as things get.” I jabbed a finger at him. “I’ve got nothing against you and your brothers, Tiny, except that you keep trying to freaking kill me. Back off, and it won’t have to get any uglier than it already has.”

The gruff growled. It sounded like a dump truck grinding its gears. “That I will not do. I will serve my Queen.”

“Then don’t expect anything but more of the same from me,” I replied.

“You would behave this way in the service of Winter?” the gruff demanded, incredulous. “You, who struck the heart of Arctis Tor? What hold has the Dark Queen ’pon you, mortal?”

“Sorry, Tiny, but you aren’t nearly as special as you think you are. This is pretty much the way I behave every time someone tries to whack me.” I gestured at him with my staff. “So if you came here to try to talk me into lying down and dying, you can leave the way you came in. And if you’re the one coming after me next, you’d better have more brains than your brothers did, or I’m going to leave you as a great big pile of cold cuts and spare ribs.”

The gruff growled again and gave me a stiff nod. “Then come out. And let us settle this.”

Uh. Uh-oh.

Showing bravado to the bad guys—or the not-so-bad guys, as the case may be—is a given, a part of the territory. But I’d never taken on anything with the sheer mass of Tiny the gruff, and I really didn’t think I’d care to try my hand against him without one hell of a lot of preparation first. I also had to remember that big didn’t necessarily equal stupid, not given the circles he apparently moved in.

In fact, most of the higher reaches of the Summer Court knew a formidable amount of countermagic. If Tiny here had half the ability I’d seen demonstrated in the past, I would be in real trouble in a straight fight. All he had to do was stand outside and wait. Mac’s place had only the one door.

Worse, Thomas and Molly were waiting outside in Thomas’s barge, and they would be sure to join in. I wasn’t sure what could happen at that point. Leaving totally aside the fact that we’d be brawling in the middle of Chicago in broad daylight, I had to think that the gruff might have backup waiting nearby to intervene if anyone outside the business of the Courts of Winter and Summer tried to interfere. Molly was of limited capability in a fight, and Thomas tended to believe that the best way to approach any given combat was with a maximum of power, speed, and aggressive ferocity.

Things could get really messy, really fast.

I was trying to think of a way of getting out of this without getting anyone killed when Murphy put her gun on the table and said in a very clear, loud, challenging tone, “I don’t think so.”

The gruff turned to stare at her in surprise.

So did Mac.

So did everyone else there.

Heck, so did I.

Murphy stood straight up and turned to face the enormous gruff with her feet spread. “I will not let this challenge to my authority pass.”

The gruff tilted its head to one side. Its horns dug furrows in the wooden ceiling.

Mac winced.

“Lady?” it rumbled.

“Do you know who I am?” Murphy asked.

“A lady knight, a shield bearer of this mortal demesne,” the gruff replied. “An…officer of the law, or so I believe it is called.”

“That’s right,” she said calmly.

“I make no challenge to your authority, Dame…”

“Murphy,” she said.

“Dame Murphy,” rumbled the gruff.

“But you do,” Murphy said. “You have threatened one I am sworn to protect.”

The gruff blinked—a considerable gesture on his scale—and glanced at me. “This wizard?”

“Yes,” Murphy said. “He is a citizen of Chicago, and I am sworn to protect and defend him against those who would harm him.”

“Dame Murphy,” the gruff said stiffly, “this matter is not one of mortal concern.”

“The hell it isn’t,” Murphy said. “This man lives in Chicago. He pays taxes to the city. He is beholden to its laws.” She glanced aside at me, and her mouth quirked wryly. “If he is to suffer the headaches of citizenry, as he must, then it is fair and lawful that he should enjoy the protections offered to every citizen. He is therefore under my protection, and any quarrel you have with him, you also have with me.”

The gruff stared at her for a moment, eyes narrowed in thought. “Art thou quite certain of thy position, Dame Murphy?”

“Quite certain,” she replied.

“Even knowing that the duty solemnly charged unto me and my kin might require us to kill thee?”

“Master Gruff,” Murphy replied, laying a hand on her gun for the first time, “consider for a moment what a steel-jacketed round would feel like as it entered your flesh.”

The gruff flicked its ears in surprise. A number of napkins were blown from the surface of a nearby table. “Thou wouldst aim such weapons of the bane at a lawful champion of the Seelie Court?”

“In your case, Master Gruff,” Murphy said, “I would hardly need to aim.” Then she picked up the gun and aimed it at the gruff ’s eyes.

I started to panic. Then I saw where I thought Murph was going with this one, and I had to work to keep myself from letting out a cheer.

The gruff ’s knuckles popped again. “This,” it growled, “is neutral ground.”

“Chicago,” she replied, “has never signed any Accords. I will fulfill my duty.”

“Attack me here,” the gruff said, “and I will crush you.”

“Crush me here,” Murphy said, “and you will have broken the Accords while acting on behalf of your Queen. Was that your intention in coming here?”

The gruff ground its teeth, a sound like creaking millstones. “My quarrel is not with you.”

“If you attempt to take the life of a citizen of Chicago, whom I am sworn to protect, you have made it my quarrel, Master Gruff. Does your Queen wish to declare war upon the mortal authorities of Chicago? Would she wish you to decide such a thing?”

The gruff stared at her, evidently pondering.

“Lady has a point, Tiny,” I drawled. “There’s nothing to be gained here but trouble, and nothing to be lost but a little time. Walk away. You’ll find me again soon enough.”

The gruff stared at Murphy, and then at me. If I’d been less intrepid and fearless, I would have held my breath, hoping I’d avoided a fight. As it was, I held my breath mostly to cut down on the smell.

Finally the gruff bowed its head toward Murphy, with more scraping of ceilings and wincing of bartenders. “Courage,” he rumbled, “should be honored. Though thou art less a man than I thought, wizard, hiding behind a mortal, however valiant she may be.”

I let out a long breath as silently as I could and said, “Gosh. Somehow I’ll try to live with myself.”

“It will not o’erburden you long. This I promise.” The gruff nodded once to Murphy, then turned and scuttled out the way he’d squeezed in. He even shut the door behind him.

Murphy let out her breath and put her gun away in its shoulder holster. It took her two or three tries.

I sank into my chair on weak legs. “You,” I said to Murphy, “are so hot right now.”

She gave me a weak smile. “Oh, now you notice.” She glanced at the door. “Is he really gone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figure he is. The Summer Court aren’t exactly sweetness and light, but they do have a concept of honor, and if any faerie gives his word, he’s good for it.”

Mac did something I’d rarely seen him do.

He got three black bottles out from beneath the bar and brought them over to the table. He twisted the tops off and put one down in front of me, and another in front of Murphy, then kept the third for himself.

I took up the bottle and sniffed at it. I wasn’t familiar with the brew, but it had a rich, earthy aroma that made my mouth water.

Without a word Mac held up his bottle in a salute to Murphy.

I joined him. Murphy shook her head tiredly and returned the salute.

We drank together, and my tongue decided that any other brew it ever had would probably be a bitter disappointment from this day forward. Too many flavors to count blended together into something I couldn’t describe if I’d had a week to talk about it. I’d never had anything like it. It was God’s beer.

Mac drained the bottle in a single pull, with his eyes closed. When he lowered it, he looked at Murphy and said, “Bravely done.”

Murphy’s face was flushed with relief and with a reaction to her beer that was at least as favorable as mine. I doubt Mac could have seen it, but I’d known Murph long enough to see that she started blushing, too.

Mac went back to the bar, leaving Murphy and me to finish our bottled ambrosia.

“Okay,” Murphy said in a weak voice. “Where were we?”

“You were about to tell me how you thought I was wrong and that the Chicago PD needed to intervene.”

“Oh,” Murph said. “Right.” She stared after the departed gruff for a moment. “You said that that thing was from the nicer of the two groups causing us grief?”

“Yep,” I said.

“We’ve gone up against the supernatural three times,” she said quietly. “It’s ended badly twice.”

We meaning the cops, of course. I nodded. One of those occasions had killed her partner, Ron Carmichael. He hadn’t been an angel or anything, but he had been a good man and a solid cop.

“All right,” she said quietly. “I’m willing to hold off for now. On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“I’m in from here on out. You obviously need someone to protect you from the big, bad billy goats.”

I snorted. “Yeah, obviously.”

She held up the last of her beer. I held up mine.

We clinked them, finished them, and went back out into the winter cold together.

Chapter Eighteen

“All right,” I said. “I hearby call this war council to order.”

We were all sitting around my tiny living room, eating Burger King. Thomas and Molly had voted for McDonald’s, but since I was paying, I sternly informed them that this was not a democracy, and Burger King it was.

Hail to the King, baby.

Murphy rolled her eyes over the whole thing.

“War council?” Molly asked, wide-eyed. “Are we going to start another war?”

“I sort of meant it as a metaphor,” I said, as I made sure the ketchup-mustard ratio on my burger was within acceptable parameters. “I need to decide on my next step, and I’ve been hit in the head a few times lately. Figured my brain could use a little help.”

“Just now worked that out, did you?” Thomas murmured.

“Quiet, you,” I growled. “The idea is to generate useful thoughts here.”

“Not funny ones,” Molly said, suppressing a laugh.

I eyed her. She ate a french fry.

Murphy sipped at her Diet Coke. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know how much advice I can give you until I know what you’re up against.”

“I told you in the car,” I said. “The Knights of the Blackened Denarius.”

“Fallen angels, old tarnished coins, psychotic killers, got it,” Murphy said. “But that doesn’t tell me what their capabilities are.”

“She’s got a point,” Thomas said quietly. “You haven’t said much about these guys.”

I blew out a breath and took a big bite of hamburger to give me a moment to think while I chewed. “There’s a lot that these things can do,” I said afterward. “Mostly, the coins seem to allow their users to alter their physical form into something better suited for a fight than a regular human body.”

“Battle shapeshifting,” Molly said. “Cool.”

“It isn’t cool,” I told her. Then I paused and admitted, “Okay, maybe a little. It makes them harder to hurt. It makes them faster. It arms them with various forms of weaponry. Claws, fangs, that kind of thing. Cassius looked like he might have had a poisonous bite, for example. Ursiel’s wielder could shift into this huge bear thing with claws and fangs and horns. Another one turned her hair into about a million strips of living titanium blade, and they were whipping all over the place and shooting through walls. Stretched out like twenty or thirty feet.”

“I have some customers like that,” Thomas quipped.

Murphy blinked and glanced at him.

I cleared my throat and gave Thomas another glare. “Another one of them, Nicodemus, didn’t seem to do any shapeshifting, but his freaking shadow could leap off the wall and strangle you. Creepy as hell.”

“They don’t all have, like, a uniform or something?” Molly asked.

“Not even close,” I replied. “Each of the Fallen seems to have its own particular preferences. And I suspect that those preferences adapt themselves differently to different holders of the coins. Quintus Cassius’s Fallen had this whole serpent motif going, and Cassius’s magic was pretty snake-intensive, too. But he was totally different from Ursiel, who was totally different from Mantis Girl from this morning, who was different from the other Denarians I’ve seen.”

Murphy nodded. “Anything else?”

“Goons,” I said. “More like a cult, really. Nicodemus had a number of followers whose tongues had been removed. They were fanatics, heavily armed, and crazy enough to commit suicide rather than be captured by his enemies.”

She winced. “The airport?”

“Yeah.”

“That it?”

“No,” I said. “Nicodemus also had these…call them guard dogs, I guess. Except that they weren’t dogs. I don’t know what they were, but they were ugly and ran fast and had big teeth. But all of that isn’t what makes them dangerous.”

“No?” Thomas said. “Then what is?”

“The Fallen,” I replied.

The room fell silent.

“They’re beings older than time who have spent two thousand years learning the ins and outs of the mortal world and the mortal mind,” I said quietly. “They understand things we literally could not begin to grasp. They’ve seen every trick, learned every move, and they’re riding shotgun for each coin holder—if they aren’t in the driver’s seat already. Every one of them has a perfect memory, a library of information at his immediate disposal, and a schemer that makes Cardinal Richelieu look like Mother Teresa hanging around in his brain as an adviser.”

Thomas stared at me very hard for a moment, frowning. I tried to ignore him.

Murphy shook her head. “Let’s sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change.” She gave me a look. “It’s sort of tough to plan for that, given how much we don’t know.”

“Well, then that’s what we do next, isn’t it?” Molly asked tentatively. “Find out more about them?”

Thomas flicked a glance at Molly and nodded once.

“To do that we’d have to find them,” I said.

“A tracking spell?” Molly suggested.

“I don’t have any samples to work with,” I replied. “And even if I did, somebody on their team was able to obscure Mab’s divining spells. I’m nowhere close to Mab’s league. My spells wouldn’t have a prayer.”

“If they’ve got that much of an entourage, they’re going to stick out anywhere even vaguely public,” Murphy mused. “A gang of toughs with no tongues? If the Denarians are in town, that should make them relatively easy to locate.”

“Last time they were holed up in Undertown,” I said. “Believe me, there’s plenty of room for badness down there.”

“What about the spirit world?” Thomas asked quietly. “Surely there’s an entity or two who could tell us something.”

“Possibly,” I said. “I’m on speaking terms with one or two of the loa. But that kind of information is either expensive or unreliable. Sometimes both. And remember who we’re talking about. The Fallen are heavyweights in the spirit world. No one wants to cross them.”

Molly made a frustrated sound. “If we can’t track them with magic, and we can’t find them physically, then how are we supposed to learn more about them?”

“Exactly, kid,” I said. “Hence the whole ‘war council’ concept.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Murphy said, “We’re coming at this from the wrong angle.”

“Eh?” I said wittily.

“We’re thinking like the good guys. We should be thinking like the bad guys. Figuring out what they had to face and get around.”

I leaned forward a little and nodded at her to go on.

“I don’t know as much about the supernatural aspects of this situation,” she said. “I don’t know much of anything about these Denarians. But I do know some things about Marcone. For example, I know that even if he has some underlings who want to take over the franchise, he’s got more who are personally loyal or who will figure that bailing him out will reap them some major profits.”

“Yeah,” I said, tilting my head at her. “So?”

“So wherever they took him, it has to be somewhere Marcone’s network can’t reach. We can be virtually certain that they aren’t hiding in plain sight.”

I grunted. “Hell’s bells, yeah. Not only that, but Marcone plans ahead. He had that panic room ready to go. In fact…” My eyes widened. “The location of your secret hidey-hole ought to be awfully secret, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Molly said. “What good is a hiding place if everyone knows where it is?”

“The Denarians knew exactly where he was going,” I said. “The spell they set up to tear down that building’s defenses was no spur-of-the-moment magic—it was too complex. It had been planned out ahead of time.”

“Son of a bitch,” Thomas swore. “Someone inside Marcone’s organization ratted him out.”

“So if we find the rat…” Murphy said, catching on.

“We might find a trail that leads back to the Nickelheads,” I finished with a fierce grin. “Was this war council concept a brilliant idea or what?”

Molly tittered. “Nickelheads.”

“I have a gift,” I said modestly. Then I added in a low voice, “And stop giggling. Wizards don’t giggle. Bad for the image.”

Molly buried her giggle in another mouthful of fries.

I slurped on my Coke and turned to Murphy. “So, what we need to do is figure out who’s going to backstab Marcone. Someone highly placed enough to know the location of the safehouse, and who will profit by Marcone’s absence.”

“You’re assuming the informant was complicit,” Murphy said. “That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Someone could have inadvertently given information away, or been compelled to cooperate.”

I paused to think about that. “True. So we’ll have to start by looking at who could have given away the safe house.”

Murphy raked her fingers through her dark-golden hair, frowning in thought. “To be honest, SI doesn’t cross trails with the outfit all that often. I’d have to make some calls to find out.”

Thomas drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “The FBI would have more, wouldn’t they?”

“And you know that guy Rick, right?” Molly said. “The one who was helping that jerk interrogate me?”

Murphy’s eyes narrowed. She made a noise that wasn’t quite an agreement, but wasn’t quite a denial, either. Murphy has issues with her ex-husband.

It took Molly about half a second to figure out the expression on Murphy’s face. She looked around the room somewhat desperately for a moment. “Uh, so, Harry, what’s with Mister? He’s been sleeping like a log the whole time we’ve been here.”

“Which brings us to the second part of the problem,” I said. “The hitters from the Summer Court. I think odds are good that they’ve got my place under surveillance.”

Thomas arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t sense anything coming in.”

“You didn’t sense anything walking through the front door of the pub, either,” Murphy said archly.

“I was circling the block,” Thomas said crossly. “Middle of a damned blizzard and you still can’t find a parking spot. I hate this town.”

“I’ve got warning spells spread out all around this place,” I said. “Anything gets within a block and I’ll probably know about it. And you’ve got to get up early in the morning to sneak past Mouse.”

Mouse, who was sitting in front of Molly making soulful eyes at her chicken sandwich, glanced at me and wagged his tail.

“If they were very close, I’d know it. They’re probably spread out in a loose ring, watching who comes and goes,” I said. “The gruffs don’t really want to kick my apartment door down—not yet, at any rate. They’d rather fight where there won’t be collateral damage. But I’ve got a feeling that they aren’t at their best in all this snow.”

Molly frowned. “You think Mab is influencing the weather for you?”

“Maybe the ongoing record snowfall is a coincidence,” I said. “But if so, it’s awfully convenient.”

“Nothing’s ever convenient with you, Dresden,” Murphy said.

“Exactly my point.” I rubbed at my jaw. I needed to shave, but my throbbing nose was bad enough without adding a couple of razor nicks to the mess. I didn’t trust my hands to be steady. There were too many scary things moving around, and if I stopped long enough to think about how far in over my head I was getting, I might just crawl into a hole and pull it in after me.

Don’t think, Harry. You know too much about what you’re up against.

Analyze, decide, and act.

“Okay. We can assume that the Summer crew saw us come in. As long as we don’t leave, they’ll assume that we’re still here.”

Molly said, “Aha. I wondered why you asked me along.”

I winked at her. “Know thyself, grasshopper. Yeah. When we leave, I want you to make sure that the gruffs and their crew don’t notice. Hopefully that will buy us some more time while they play patient hunter and wait for me to expose myself again.”

“Heh,” Thomas sniggered. “Expose yourself.”

Murphy tossed an onion ring at him, which he caught and popped in his mouth.

“Meanwhile, I’ve got a new toy for you to play with, Thomas.”

My brother arched his eyebrows and focused his attention on me.

I went into my tiny bedroom and came back out with a small figurine, a rough figure of clay that resembled Gumby more than anything. I lifted it to my mouth and breathed on it, then murmured a word and said, “Catch.”

I tossed it to Thomas. My brother caught it and—

—suddenly a tall man, too lanky to look altogether healthy and with too many rough edges to be handsome, sat in Thomas’s chair, dressed in his clothes. His hair had short waves in it, and looked perpetually rumpled. His eyes were a bit sunken in a permanent state of too little sleep, but the line of his chin, strong and clean, made him look harder and sharper than he might otherwise have appeared.

Hell’s bells. Did I really look like that? Maybe I needed a makeover or something.

Murphy sucked in a breath and looked back and forth between Thomas, in his new look, and me. Molly didn’t bother trying to hide her reaction, and just said, “Cool.”

“What?” Thomas asked. Though the figure speaking looked like me, the sound of my brother’s voice was unchanged, and a spot of ketchup from his burger still speckled one side of his mouth. He looked around for a moment, then scowled, rose, and ducked into my bedroom to look at himself in the little shaving mirror in the drawer in my bathroom. “You’ve invented a doll that turns people into their ugly half brothers, eh?”

“Get over yourself, prettyboy,” I called.

“If you think I’m letting you break my nose to complete the look, you’re insane.”

I grunted. “Yeah, that’s a problem. I had to set it up to look like I looked the day I finished it.”

“It isn’t a problem,” Molly said at once. “I’ll get my makeup kit and fix up his eyes for him, at least. I don’t know what we can do for his nose, but from a distance he should look right.”

“If he looks like you, Harry,” Murphy said, “doesn’t that mean he’s going to be attracting some sort of hostile attention?”

Thomas snorted and appeared in the doorway to my bedroom, his face ketchup-free. “Harry walks around looking like this all the time. Now, that would be awful. I can handle it for a few hours.”

“Don’t get cute on me,” I said. “Give us two or three hours’ lead time, and then head out. Stay on the roads and keep moving. Don’t give them a chance to surround you. You’ve got your cell phone?”

“I suppose,” he said. “But given how much I’ve been hanging around you two and the bad weather, I’d say the odds were against its working.” I grunted and tossed him my leather duster and my staff. He caught them and frowned. “You sure you don’t want these?”

“Just don’t lose them,” I said. “If the gruffs saw a double of me who wasn’t wearing the coat, they’d know something was up in a heartbeat. The idea is to keep them from getting suspicious in the first place. The charm should be good for another six, maybe seven hours. Once it drops, get back here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thomas said, sliding into my duster. The illusion magic didn’t make the thing fit him, and he had to fiddle with the sleeves, but it looked like it always did on me. “Karrin, don’t let him do anything stupid.”

Murphy nodded. “I’ll try. But you know how he is.” She picked up her coat and shrugged into it. “Where are we going?”

“Back to Gard,” I said. “The Carpenter place. I’m betting Marcone left her a sample of his hair to use to track him down, for just such an occasion as this.”

“But you said you couldn’t get through the, uh…the obscuring magic that the Nickelheads have.”

“Probably not. But if I know Marcone, he also collected samples of hair or blood from his people. To find them if they ever needed help or…”

Murphy grimaced. “If they rated early retirement.”

“I’m hoping Gard can give us an inside track on finding the leak, too,” I said.

Meanwhile, Molly hurried over to Thomas with her makeup kit and began modifying his face. Thomas’s face was about level with the chin of the illusion-me, if not a little lower, but I’d taught Molly the basics behind my illusion magic—such as it was. My skill with illusions was pretty basic, and it wouldn’t stand up to any serious examination. Molly was able to scrunch up her eyes and see past it.

Of course, you didn’t have to make the illusion utterly convincing if you could manage to keep people from having a good reason to take a hard look at it in the first place. The illusion doesn’t have to be fancy—it’s the misdirection behind it that really matters.

Molly had been caught in a Goth undertow of the youth culture, and it showed in her makeup. She had plenty of blues and purples and reds to darken Thomas’s eyes with, and the illusion of my face assumed an appearance fairly close to my own, sans the swollen nose.

“It’ll do,” I said. “Murph, you’re driving. Molly, if you don’t mind.”

My apprentice grinned as she hurriedly pulled on her coat. Then she stuck her tongue between her teeth, frowned fiercely, and waved her hand at me with a murmur. I felt the kid’s veil congeal about me like a thin layer of Jell-O, a wobbly and slippery sensation. The world went a little bit blurry, as if I were suddenly looking at everything through hazy green water, but Murphy’s face turned up into a grin.

“That’s very good,” she said. “I can’t see him at all.”

Molly’s face was set with concentration as she maintained the spell, but she glanced at Murphy and nodded her head in acknowledgment.

“Right,” I said. “Come on, Mouse.”

My dog hopped to his feet and trotted over eagerly, waving his tail.

Murphy looked in my general direction, and arched an eyebrow.

“If the gruffs don’t buy it, I want all the early warning I can get,” I told her.

She lowered her voice and murmured, “And maybe you’re a little nervous about going out without the coat and the staff?”

“Maybe,” I said.

It was only a half lie. Insulting nickname or not, coat and staff or not, the more I thought about what we were up against, the more worried I became.

I wasn’t nervous.

I was pretty much terrified.

Chapter Nineteen

It was dark by the time we got to Chez Carpenter, and we were beginning to slow down to turn into the driveway when Murphy said, “Someone’s tailing us.”

“Keep driving,” I snapped at once, from where I was crouched down in the back of Murphy’s Saturn. I felt like a groundhog trying to hide in a golf divot. “Go past the house.”

Murphy picked up speed again, accelerating very slowly and carefully on the snowbound streets.

I poked my head up just enough to peer into the night behind us. Mouse sat up with me and looked solemnly and carefully out the back window when I did. “The car with one headlight pointing a little to the left?” I asked.

“That’s the one. Spotted him about ten minutes ago. Can you see his plates?”

I squinted. “Not through this snow and with his lights in my eyes.”

Molly turned and knelt in the passenger seat, peering through the back window. “Who do you think it is?”

“Molly, sit down,” Murphy snapped. “We don’t want them to know that we’ve seen—”

The headlights of the car behind us grew brighter and began to sweep closer. “Murph, they saw her. Here they come.”

“I’m sorry!” Molly said. “I’m sorry!”

“Get your seat belts on,” Murphy barked.

Murphy began accelerating, but our pursuer closed the distance within a few seconds. The headlights grew brighter, and I could hear the roar of a big old throaty engine. I scrambled up to the backseat and clawed at the seat belt, but Mouse was sitting on the other side of the buckle, and before I could get it out from under him Murphy screamed, “Hang on!”

Collisions are always louder than I expect, and this one was no exception. The pursuing car smashed into the rear of the Saturn at maybe forty miles an hour.

Metal screamed.

Fiberglass shattered.

I got slammed back against my seat and then whiplashed into the back of the driver’s seat.

Mouse bounced around, too.

Molly screamed.

Murph swore and wrenched at the steering wheel.

It could have been worse. Murphy had gained enough speed to mitigate the impact, but the Saturn went into a spin on the snowy streets and revolved in a graceful, slow-motion ballet.

Slamming my nose into the back of Murphy’s seat didn’t feel very good. In fact, it felt so not-good that I lost track of what was going on for a few seconds. I was vaguely aware of the car spinning and then crunching broadside into an enormous mound of snow.

The Saturn’s engine coughed and died. My pounding heart sent thunder to my ears and agony to my nose. I barely heard the sound of a car door opening and closing somewhere nearby.

I heard Murphy twist around in her chair and gasp, “Gun.” She drew her weapon, unfastened her seat belt, and tried her door. It was pressed into a solid wall of white. She snarled and crawled across a stunned Molly’s lap, fumbling at the door.

I lurched to the other side of the car and clawed at the door until it opened. When it did I saw a slightly smashed-up car in the middle of the street, idling with both doors open. Two men stalked toward us through the snow. One was holding what looked like a shotgun, and his partner had an automatic in either hand.

Murphy threw herself out of the car and darted to one side. It wasn’t hard to figure out why—if she’d started shooting immediately, Molly would have been in the line of any return fire. Murphy moved swiftly, crouched as close to the ground as she could get, but to do so cost her a precious second.

The shotgun roared and spat fire.

The blast smashed Murphy to the ground like a blow from a sledgehammer.

At the sight my scrambled brain congealed. I drew up my will, flung out a hand, and screamed, “Ventas servitas!”

Wind roared forth from my outstretched fingers. I directed it at the snow-covered ground in front of our attackers, and a sudden storm of flying bits of ice and snow engulfed the gunmen.

I kept the pressure on them, maintaining the spell, as I shouted, “Molly! Get to Murphy! Veil and first aid!”

Molly shook her head and gave me a glassy-eyed stare, but she climbed out of the car and staggered over to Murphy. A second later both of them vanished from sight.

I let up on the wind spell. Moving enough air to keep a gale-force wind going is a lot more work than anyone thinks. The air went still again except for swirling eddies of wind, frost devils that danced about in half a dozen whirling helices of snow. The two gunmen were revealed, crouching low, their arms still upraised to shield their eyes from the wind and stinging flakes of ice.

I missed my staff. I missed my duster. But I wasn’t missing the .44 revolver I drew from my coat’s pocket and aimed at the bad guys, while I raised my left hand, shaking the shield bracelet there out from under the sleeve of my coat.

I recognized one of the two gunmen, the one with the brace of pistols. His name was Bart something or other, and he was muscle for hire—cheap muscle, at that, but at least you got what you paid for. Bart was the kind of guy you called when you needed someone’s ribs broken on a budget.

The other guy was familiar, too, but I couldn’t put a name to him. Come on, it wasn’t like I hung around in outfit bars, getting to know everyone. Besides, all I really needed to know was that he’d shot Murphy.

I started walking forward, straight at them, and stopped when I was maybe fifteen feet away. By the time I got there they were finally getting the ice and snow out of their eyes. I didn’t wait for them to get their vision back. I aimed carefully and put a bullet through shotgun boy’s right knee.

He went down screaming, and kept screaming.

Bart turned toward me and raised both guns, but my shield bracelet was ready. I made an effort of will, and a hemisphere of shimmering, translucent silver force flickered to life between Bart and me. He emptied both automatics at me, but he might as well have been shooting water pistols. My shield caught every shot, and I angled it to deflect the rounds up into the air rather than into one of the houses in the neighborhood around us.

Bart’s guns clicked empty.

I lowered the shield and lifted my revolver as he fumbled at his pockets for fresh magazines. “Bart,” I chided him, “Think this one through.”

He froze in place, and then slowly moved his hands away from his pockets.

“Thank you. Guess what I want you to do next?”

He dropped his guns. Bart was in his late thirties and good-looking, tall, with the frame of a man who spent a lot of his time at the gym. He had little weasel eyes, though, dark and gleaming. They darted left and right, as if seeking possible avenues of escape.

“Don’t make me shoot you in the back, Bart,” I said. “Bullet could hit your spine, paralyze you without killing you. That would be awful.” I moseyed over to him, keeping the gun trained on him and making sure I always had a clear view of the other gunman. He was still screaming, though it had a hoarse, thready sound to it now. “Do you know who I am?”

“Dresden, Jesus,” Bart said. “Nothing personal, man.”

“You tried to kill me, Bart. That’s just about as personal as it gets.”

“It was a job,” he said. “Just a job.”

And I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the other guy before: unconscious in the hallway outside Demeter’s office at Executive Priority. He was one of Torelli’s flunkies, and he did not appear to have much more savvy than his boss.

“Job’s gonna get you killed one day, Bart,” I said. “Maybe even right now.” I called out, “Molly? How is she?”

Murphy’s voice came back to me instead of Molly’s. “I’m fine,” she said. The words were clipped, as if she were in pain. “Vest stopped all but one of the balls, and that one isn’t bad.”

“Her arm is bleeding, Harry,” Molly said, her voice shaking. “It’s stopping, but I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.”

“Murph, get back to the car. Stay warm.”

“Like hell, Harry. I will—”

I completed the sentence for her. “—go into shock. Don’t be stupid, Murph. I can’t lug your unconscious body around and keep these guys under control.”

Murphy growled something vaguely threatening under her breath, but I heard Molly say, “Here, let me help you.”

Bart’s beady eyes were all but bugging out of his head as he searched for the source of the sound of Molly’s voice. “What? What the hell?”

By now, I was sure, people in the houses around us had called the police. I was sure that the cops would be a few moments longer than usual arriving, too. I wanted to be gone by then, which meant that I didn’t have much time. But Bart didn’t have to know that. Just like Bart didn’t have a clue what he’d gotten himself involved in.

I most likely didn’t have time to grill even one of the gunmen. Torelli’s goon was hurt and probably mad as hell at me. He was probably more loyal to Torelli, too, if he was a personal retainer. That really left me only one smart option for gathering information.

I stepped forward, shifting my gun to my left hand, and held out my right. I spoke a quiet word and a sphere of fire, bright as a tiny sun, kindled to life in the air above my right hand. I turned a slow stare on Bart and stepped close to him.

The thug flinched and fell onto his ass in the snowy street.

I released the sphere of fire, and it drifted closer to Bart. “Look, big guy,” I said in an amiable tone. “I’ve had a tense couple of days. And I’ve got to tell you, burning someone’s face off sounds like a great way to relax.”

“I was just a hire!” Bart stammered, scooting back on his buttocks from the little sphere of fire. “Just a driver!”

“Hired to do what?” I asked him.

“I was just supposed to put you off the road and cover the shooter,” Bart half screamed. He pointed a finger at the wounded man. “Him.”

I spread my fingers a little wider, and the flaming sphere jumped a few inches closer to the goon’s face. “Bart, Bart. Let’s not change the focus here. This is about you and me.”

“I’m just a contractor!” Bart all but screamed, writhing to get his face farther away from the fire. “They don’t tell guys like me shit!”

“Guys like you always know more than you’re told,” I said. “So you’ve got something you can give the cops to keep yourself out of jail.”

“I don’t!” Bart said. “I swear!”

I smiled at him and pushed the fire sphere a little closer. “Inhale blue,” I said. “Exhale pink. Hey, this is relaxing.”

“Torelli!” Bart screamed, throwing up his arms. “Jesus, it was Torelli! Torelli wanted the job done! He’s been getting ready to move on Marcone!”

“Since when?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. Couple of weeks, maybe. That’s when they brought me in! Oh, Jesus!”

I closed my hand and snuffed out the sphere of fire before it could do more than scorch the sleeves of Bart’s coat. He lay there on the ground breathing roughly, and refused to lower his arms.

The sound of sirens ghosted through the streets. It was time to go.

“He been talking to anyone lately?” I demanded. “Anyone new? Setting up an alliance?”

Bart shook his head, shuddering. “I ain’t one of his full-timers. I ain’t seen nothing like that.”

“Harry!” Molly screamed.

I’d gotten too intent on the conversation with Bart, and I’d been too worried about Murphy to remember to take everybody’s guns away. The gunman on the ground had recovered his shotgun and worked the action, ejecting a spent shell and loading a new round. I spun toward him, raising my shield bracelet. The problem was that my spiffy redesigned bracelet, while better in a lot of ways than the old one, took a lot more power to use, and as a result I could bring it up only so fast. I threw myself to the ground and tried to put Bart between me and Torelli’s hitter. Bart scrambled frantically to clear the line of fire, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get the shield up in time.

Mouse must have darted off to the side at the beginning of the confrontation, because he appeared out of the shadows and came bounding through nearly three feet of snow as if he’d been running on racetrack turf. He was moving so fast that a bow wave of flying snow literally preceded him, like when a speedboat cuts through the water. He hit Torelli’s hitter just as the man pulled the trigger.

Shotguns are loud. Bart screamed an impolite word.

Mouse seized Torelli’s man by his wounded leg, the one I’d shot a minute ago, and began wrenching him around by it, shaking him as easily as a terrier shakes a rat. The goon had another ear-piercing scream left in him, a high-pitched thing that sounded like it had come from a slaughterhouse hog. The shotgun flew from his fingers, and he began flopping like a rag doll, unconscious from the pain.

The sirens grew louder, and I pushed myself back to my feet. Bart lay on the ground, rocking back and forth and screaming. The wild shotgun blast had hit him right in the ass. There was a lot of blood on his jeans, but he didn’t seem to be gushing anything from a major artery. Granted, depending on how much of the shot he’d caught, the wound could potentially maim, cripple, or maybe even kill him if there was any internal bleeding. But there are worse places to get hit, and with all the adrenaline surging through me, it seemed pretty hilarious.

Cackling, I called to Mouse and ran for the car.

Molly already had Murph buckled into the passenger seat. I had to crawl across her to get to the driver’s side. She let out a blistering curse as I accidentally bumped her arm. The driver’s chair was practically touching the steering wheel, and for a second I thought I was going to have to push down the pedals with one hand and drive with the other, but I managed to find the lever that made the seat slide back, and the car started on the first try.

“Dammit, Dresden,” Murphy wheezed. “There were weapons involved. We have to go back.”

Mouse sailed into the backseat through the open door, and Molly closed both doors on that side of the car. I rocked the steering wheel and wiggled the Saturn loose from the snow, then started off down the street. I still had an irrational smile plastered on my face. My cheeks hurt. “Not a chance, Murphy.”

“We can’t just let them go.”

I suppressed another round of adrenaline giggles. “They aren’t going anywhere. And I’m persona non grata, remember? You want to get caught at the scene of a shooting with me mixed up in it?”

“But—”

“Dammit, Murphy,” I said, exasperated. “Do you want me to go to jail? If we go back now, Torelli’s goon tells them I shot him. They take my gun, and if they can find the bullet, or if it’s still in his leg, it’s assault with a deadly weapon.”

“Not if you were defending yourself,” Murphy grated.

“In a fair world, maybe,” I said. “As it is, if there’s no one but outfit goons there, two guys with records and a known association, both of them wounded, the cops are going to assume that they quarreled and shot each other. Two bad guys go away, you keep your job, and I don’t get pulled off of this case—which is the same thing as getting killed.” I glanced aside at her. “Who loses?”

Murphy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Everyone loses, Harry. The law is there to protect everyone. It’s supposed to apply equally to everyone.”

I sighed and paid attention to the road. I’d drive for a few minutes to be sure we were in the clear, and then circle back to Michael’s place. “That’s wishful thinking, Murph, and you know it. Pretty sure Marcone’s lawyers love that attitude.”

“The law isn’t perfect,” she replied quietly. “But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it work.”

“Do me a favor,” I said.

“What?”

“Hold your nose shut, put on a Philadelphia accent, and say, ‘I am the law.’”

Murphy snorted and shook her head. I glanced aside at her. Her face was pale with pain, her eyes a little glassy. Her left arm was wrapped up in what looked like strips torn from Molly’s T-shirt.

I checked the rearview. My apprentice was, indeed, wearing nothing but a green lace bra under her winter coat. She was crouched down with both arms around Mouse, her face buried in his snow-frosted fur.

“Hey, back there,” I said. “Anyone hurt?”

Mouse yawned, but Molly checked him over anyway. “No. We’re both fine.”

“Cool,” I said. I looked over my shoulder for a second to give Molly a smile. “Nice veil back there. Fast as hell. You did good, grasshopper.”

Molly beamed at me. “Did my face look like that when you did that little ball-of-fire thing to me?”

“I prefer to think of it as a little ball of sunshine,” I said. “And you were stoic compared to that guy, grasshopper. You did a good job too, furface,” I told Mouse. “I owe you one.”

Mouse opened his mouth in a doggy grin and wagged his tail. It thumped against Molly, scattering a little snow against bare skin. She yelped and burst into a laugh.

Murphy and I traded a look. If the gunman had squeezed the trigger a hundredth of a second sooner or later, Murphy would be dead. The blast could have taken her in the head or neck, or torn into an artery. Without Mouse I’d probably be dead, too. And if they’d gotten me and Murphy, I doubted they’d have left Molly behind to testify against them.

That one had been close—no supernatural opposition necessary. Molly might not realize that yet, but Murphy and I did.

“How’s the arm, Murph?” I asked quietly.

“Just hit muscle,” she said, closing her eyes. “It hurts like hell, but it isn’t going to kill me.”

“You want me to drive you to the emergency room?”

Murphy didn’t answer right away. There was a lot more to the question than the words in it. Doctors are required by law to report any gunshot wound to the authorities. If Murph went in for proper medical treatment, they’d report it to the cops. And, since she was a cop, it would mean that she had to answer all kinds of questions, and it would probably mean that the truth of what happened behind us would come out.

It was the responsible, law-abiding thing to do.

“No, Harry,” she said finally, and closed her eyes.

I exhaled slowly, relieved. That answer had cost her something. My hands had started shaking on the wheel. Generally speaking I’m fine when there’s a crisis in progress. It’s afterward that it starts getting to my nerves. “Sit tight,” I said. “We’ll get you patched up.”

“Just drive,” she said wearily.

So I drove.

Chapter Twenty

“This is getting awfully murky, Harry,” Michael said, worry in his voice. “I don’t like it.”

Snow crunched under our feet as we walked from the house to the workshop. The daylight was fading as a second front hit the city, darkening the skies with the promise of more snow. “I don’t like it much either,” I replied. “But nobody came rushing up to present me with options.” I stopped in the snow. “How’s Murphy?”

Michael paused beside me. “Charity is the one who’s had actual medical training, but it seemed a simple enough injury to me. A bandage stopped the bleeding, and we cleaned the wound thoroughly. She should be careful to monitor her condition for the next few days, but I think she’ll be all right.”

“How much pain is she in?” I asked.

“Charity keeps some codeine on hand. It isn’t as strong as the painkillers at a hospital, but it should let her sleep, at least.”

I grimaced and nodded. “I’m going to hunt up the Denarians, Michael.”

He took a deep breath. “You’re going to attack them?”

“I should,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d meant to. “Because there are people who don’t deserve a second chance, Michael, and if these losers don’t qualify for the permanent shit list, I don’t know who does.”

Michael gave me a small smile. “Everyone does, Harry.”

A little shiver went through me, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I just rolled my eyes. “Right, right. Original sin,

God’s grace, I’ve heard this part before.” I sighed. “But I’m not planning to assault them. I just want to learn whatever I can about them before we square off.”

Michael nodded. “Which is why we’re standing out in the snow talking, I take it.”

“I need whatever information you can give me. And I don’t need another philosophical debate.”

Michael grunted. “I already got in touch with Father Forthill. He sent over a report on who we think might be in town with Tessa.”

I spent a couple of seconds feeling like an argumentative jerk. “Oh,” I said. “Thank you. That…that could help a lot.”

Michael shrugged. “We’ve learned to be wary of even our own intelligence. The Fallen are masters of deception, Harry. Sometimes it takes us centuries to catch one of them lying.”

“I know,” I said. “But you must have something solid.”

“A little,” he said. “We are fairly certain that Tessa and Imariel are the second-eldest of the Denarians. Only Nicodemus and Anduriel have been operating longer.”

I grunted. “Are Tessa and Nicodemus rivals?”

“Generally,” Michael replied. “Though I suppose it bears mentioning that they’re also husband and wife.”

“Match made in Hell, eh?”

“Not that it seems to mean much to either of them. They very rarely work together, and when they do it’s never good. The last time they did so, according to the Church’s records, was just before the Black Plague came to Europe.”

“Plagues? The Nickelheads did that last time they were in town.” I shook my head. “You’d expect a different tune or two in a husband-and-wife act that had been running that long.”

“Variety is the key to a happy marriage,” Michael agreed solemnly. His mouth quivered. “Nickelheads?”

“I decided their name gave them too much dignity, given what they are. I’m correcting that.”

“Those who underestimate them generally don’t survive it,” Michael said. “Be careful.”

“You know me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Where were we?”

“Plagues.”

“Ah, yes. The Nickelheads have used plagues to instigate the most havoc and confusion in the past.”

I fought off a smile that threatened my hard-ass exterior as Michael continued.

“It’s proven a successful tactic on more than one occasion. Once a plague has gained momentum, there’s almost no limit to the lives they can claim and the suffering they can inflict.”

I frowned and folded my arms. “Sanya said that Tessa preferred choosing eager…subjects, I suppose, over talented ones.”

Michael nodded. “The Fallen who follow Imariel go through bearers very quickly. None of them are kind to those they bond with, but Imariel’s crew are the monsters among the monsters. Tessa chooses their hosts from among the downtrodden, the desperate, those who believe that they have nothing to lose. Those who will succumb to temptation the most rapidly.”

I grunted. “Lot of those around in the wake of a big nasty plague. Or any kind of similar chaos.”

“Yes. We believe that it is one reason she collaborates with Nicodemus from time to time.”

“She’s focused on short-term,” I said, getting it. “He’s all about the long view.”

“Exactly,” Michael said. “When he threw Lasciel’s coin at my son, it was a calculated gesture.”

“Calculated to rope me in,” I said.

“You,” Michael said, “or my son.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the air went through me. “Give the coin to a child?”

“A child who couldn’t defend himself. Who could be raised with the voice of a Fallen angel whispering in his ear. Shaping him. Preparing him to be used as a weapon against his own family. Imagine it.”

I stared around the yard that had been the scene of so much merriment only a few hours before. “I’d rather not,” I said.

Michael continued quietly. “In general, the families of the bearers of the Swords are sheltered against such evils. But things like that have happened before. And Nicodemus has borne a coin for a score of centuries. He has no difficulty with the notion of waiting ten or fifteen or twenty years to attain his goals.”

“That’s why you think he’s here,” I said. “Because going after someone like Marcone isn’t Tessa’s style.”

“It isn’t,” Michael said. “But I believe that if by helping it happen she could create the kind of environment she loves best, full of chaos and despair, it would be reason enough for her to join forces with her husband.”

“How many?”

“Tessa keeps a group of five other Fallen around her.” He gave me a quick smile. “Sorry. Four, now.”

“Thank Thomas,” I said. “Not me.”

“I intend to,” Michael said. “Nicodemus…” Michael shook his head. “I believe you’ve been told before that Nicodemus makes it a point to destroy any records the Church manages to build concerning him. That’s not going to be as easy to arrange in the future—”

“Hail the information age,” I interjected.

“—but our accounts regarding him are sketchy. We thought he had only three regular companions—but then he produced Lasciel’s coin, which had supposedly been in secure storage in a Chilean monastery. I think it would be dangerous to assume anything at this point.”

“Worst-case scenario,” I said, “how many other coins might he have with him?”

Michael shrugged. “Six, perhaps? But it’s just a guess.”

I stared at him. “You’re saying that they could have a dozen walking nightmares with them this time.”

He nodded.

“Last time they came to party, all three Swords were here. There were four Denarians. And we barely came out of it alive.”

“I know.”

“But you’re used to this, right?” I asked him. “The Knights take on odds like this all the time.”

He gave me an apologetic glance. “We like to outnumber them two to one if possible. Three to one when we can arrange it.”

“But Shiro said he had fought several duels against them,” I said. “One-on-one.”

“Shiro had a gift,” Michael said. “It was as simple as that. Shiro knew swordplay like Mozart knew music. I’m not like him. I’m not afraid of facing a single Denarian alone, but I would generally consider us evenly matched. My fate would be in God’s hands.”

“Super,” I sighed.

“Faith, Harry,” Michael said. “He will not abandon us. There will be a way for good to overcome.”

“Good overcame last time,” I said quietly. “More or less. But that didn’t stop them from killing Shiro.”

“Our lives belong to the Almighty,” Michael said evenly. “We serve and live for the sake of others. Not for our own.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure that will comfort your kids when they have to grow up without a father.”

Michael abruptly turned to face me squarely, and his right hand closed into a fist. “Stop talking,” he said in a low, hard tone. “Right now.”

So help me God, I almost took a swing at him out of sheer frustration. But sanity grabbed the scruff of my neck and turned me around. I stalked several paces away through the snow and stood with my back to him.

Sanity invited shame over for tea and biscuits. Dammit. I was supposed to be a wizard. Connected with my inner light, master of the disciplined mind, all of that kind of crap. But instead I was shooting my mouth off at a man who didn’t deserve it because…

Because I was scared. Really, really scared. I always started shooting my mouth off when something scared me. It had been an asset before, but it sure as hell wasn’t right now. When something scared me I almost always embraced my anger as a weapon against it. That, too, was usually an asset. But this time I’d let that fear and anger shape my thinking, and as a result I’d torn into my friend in the most tender spot he had, at a time when he could probably have used my support.

Then I realized why I was angry at Michael. I had wanted him to come flying in like Superman and solve my problems, and he’d let me down.

We’re always disappointed when we find out someone else has human limits, the same as we do. It’s stupid for us to feel that way, and we really ought to know better, but that doesn’t seem to slow us down.

I wondered if Michael had ever felt the same way about me.

“My last remark,” I muttered, “was out of line.”

“Yes,” Michael said. “It was.”

“You want to duke it out or arm wrestle or something?”

“There are better ways for us to spend our time. Nicodemus and Tessa should be our focus.”

I turned back to him. “Agreed.”

“This isn’t over,” he said, a harsh edge in his voice. “We’ll discuss it after.”

I grunted and nodded. Some of the tension left the air between us. Back to business. That was easier. “You know what I don’t get?” I said. “How do you step from Nicodemus’s end of recruiting Marcone all the way to Tessa’s end of a society steeped in chaos and despair?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. He moved his hand to the hilt of the sword he now wore belted to his side, an unconscious gesture. “But Nicodemus thinks he does. And whatever he’s doing, I’ve got a bad feeling that we’d better figure it out before he gets it done.”

Chapter Twenty-one

“If I knew of any trusted lieutenants preparing to betray my employer,” Miss Gard said with exaggerated patience, “they wouldn’t be trusted, now, would they? If you ask politely, I’m sure you can get someone to read the definition of treachery to you, Dresden.”

Michael smiled quietly. He sat at the workbench with one of his heavy daggers and a metal file, evidently taking some burrs out of the blade. Hendricks sat on a stool at the other end of the workbench. The huge enforcer had disassembled a handgun and was cleaning the pieces fastidiously.

“Okay, then,” I said to Gard. “Why don’t we start with everyone who knew the location of Marcone’s panic room.”

Gard narrowed her eyes, studying me. She looked better. Granted, it’s difficult to look much worse than disemboweled, but even so, she’d been reduced from ten miles of bad road to maybe two or three. She was sitting up in her cot, her back resting against the wall of the workshop, and though she looked pale and incredibly tired, her blue eyes were clear and sharp.

“I don’t think so,” she said quietly.

“There’s not going to be much need to keep Marcone’s secrets once he’s dead, or under the control of one of the Fallen.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Hell’s bells, I’m not asking you for the launch codes to nuclear missiles.”

She took a deep breath and enunciated each word. “I. Can’t.”

From the workbench Hendricks rumbled, “S’okay. Tell him.”

Gard frowned at his broad back but nodded once and turned to me. “Comparatively few people in the organization were directly aware of the panic room, but I’m not sure that’s our biggest concern.”

The change in gears, from stonewall to narration, made me blink a little. Even Michael glanced up, frowning at Gard.

“No?” I asked. “If that’s not our biggest concern, what is?”

“The number of people who could have pieced it together from disparate facts,” Gard replied. “Contractors had to be paid. Materials had to be purchased. Architects had to be hired. Any of a dozen different things could have indicated that Marcone was building something, and piqued someone’s curiosity enough to dig deeper.”

I grunted. “At which point he could probably find out a lot by talking to the architects or builders.”

“Exactly. In this instance he was unusually lax in his standard caution when it came to matters of security. I urged him to take conventional measures, but he refused.”

“Conventional measures,” I said. “You’re talking about killing everyone who worked on it.”

“Secret passages and secret sanctums are quite useless if they aren’t secret,” Gard replied.

“Maybe he didn’t feel like killing a bunch of his employees to cover his own ass.”

Gard shrugged. “I’m not here to make moral judgments, Dresden. I’m an adviser. That was my advice.”

I grunted. “So who would know? The builders. People handling books and paychecks.”

“And anyone they talked to,” Gard said.

“That makes the suspect pool a little larger than is useful,” I said.

“Indeed it does.”

“Stop,” I said. “Occam time.”

Gard gave me a blank stare. Maybe she’d never heard of MC Hammer.

“Occam?” she asked.

“Occam’s razor,” I said. “The simplest explanation is most often correct.”

Her lips quivered. “How charming.”

“If we define a circle of suspects that includes everyone who might possibly have heard anything, we get nowhere. If we limit the pool to the most likely choices, we have something we can work with, and we’re much more likely to find the traitor.”

“We?” Gard asked.

“Whatever,” I said. “Who would have had a lot of access? Let’s leave the contractors out of it. They generally aren’t out for blood, and Marcone owns half the developers in town anyway.”

Gard nodded her head in acceptance. “Very well. One of three or four accountants, any of the inner circle, and one of two or three troubleshooters.”

“Troubleshooters?” Michael asked.

“When there’s trouble,” I told him, “they shoot it.”

Gard let out a quick snort of laughter—then winced, clutching at her stomach with both hands.

“Easy there,” I said. “You all right?”

“Eventually,” Gard murmured. “Please continue.”

“What about Torelli?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“Could he be our guy?”

Gard rolled her eyes. “Please. The man has the intellect of a lobotomized turtle. Marcone’s been aware of his ambition for some time now.”

“If he’s been aware of it,” I asked, “how come Torelli is still paying taxes?”

“Because we were using him to draw any other would-be usurpers into the open, where they could be dealt with.”

“Hungh,” I said, frowning. “Could he have put pressure on any of the people in the know?”

“The bookkeepers, perhaps, but I think it highly unlikely. Marcone has made it clear that they enjoy his most enthusiastic protection.”

“Yeah, but Yurtle the Lobotomized isn’t all that bright.”

Gard blinked. “Excuse me?”

“My God, woman!” I protested. “You’ve never read Dr. Seuss?”

She frowned. “Who is Dr.—”

I held up a hand. “Never mind, forget it. Torelli isn’t all that bright. Maybe he figured he could strong-arm a bookkeeper and knock off Marcone before Marcone got a chance to demonstrate his enthusiasm.”

Gard pursed her lips. “Torelli has stupidity enough and to spare. But he’s also a sniveling, cowardly little splatter of rat dung.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so focused on him?”

“Oh,” I said, “I can’t put my finger on any one thing. But my finely tuned instincts tell me that he’s hostile.”

Gard smiled. “Tried to kill you, did he?”

“He started trying to put the muscle on Demeter while I was there this morning. I objected.”

“Ah,” she said. “I had wondered how you found us.”

“Torelli’s goons tried shooting me up right before I came here.”

“I see,” Gard said, narrowing her eyes in thought. “The timing of his uprising is rather too precise to be mere coincidence.”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of that.”

She tapped a finger against her chin. “Torelli is no genius, but he is competent at his job. He wouldn’t be operating that high in the organization if he weren’t. I suppose it’s possible that Torelli might have secured the information if he applied enough mean cunning to the task.” She glanced up at me. “You think the Denarians recruited him to be their man on the inside?”

“I think they had to get their information about Marcone’s panic room somewhere,” I said.

“Worked that out, did you?” Gard said with a wan smile.

“Yeah. Turned your own hidey-hole into a fox trap. That’s gotta sting the old ego, Miss Security Consultant.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much,” Gard said, a flinty light in her eyes. “But I’ll deal with that when it’s time.”

“You aren’t dealing with anything but more sleep for a little while,” I noted.

Her face twisted into a scowl. “Yes.”

“So let me do the heavy lifting,” I said.

“How so?”

I glanced around the workshop. “Could we speak privately for a moment?”

Hendricks, who had been reassembling his gun, turned his over-developed brow ridges toward me, scowling in suspicion. Michael glanced up, his face a mask.

Gard looked at me for a while. Then she said, “It’s all right with me.”

Hendricks finished putting the pistol back together, loaded it, and then loaded a round into the chamber. He made it a point to stare straight at me the entire while. Then he stood up, tugged on his coat, and walked straight toward me.

Hendricks wasn’t as tall as me, which cut down on the intimidation factor. On the other hand, he had muscle enough to break me in half and we both knew it. He stopped a foot away, put the gun in his pocket, and said, “Be right outside.”

“Michael,” I said. “Please.”

He rose, sheathing the dagger, and followed Hendricks out into the snow. The two kept a careful, even distance between them as they went, like dogs who aren’t yet sure whether they’re going to fight or not. I closed the door behind them and turned to Gard.

“Give me what I need to find and question Torelli.”

She shook her head. “I can get you his address and the locations of the properties he owns, places he frequents, known associates, but he won’t be at any of those places. He’s been in the business too long to make a mistake like that.”

“Oh, please,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’ve got blood or hair samples for all of your people somewhere. Get me Torelli’s.”

Gard stared at me with her poker face.

“For that matter,” I added, “get me Marcone’s. If I can get close enough, it might help me find him.”

“My employer keeps them under intense security. He’s the only one who can access them.”

I snorted. “So get me samples from the second collection.”

“Second collection?”

“You know, the one you’re keeping. The one Marcone doesn’t know about.”

Gard brushed a stray lock of gold from her cheek. “What makes you think I have any such samples?”

I showed her my teeth. “You’re a mercenary, Gard. Mercenaries have to be more cautious with their own employers than they do with the enemy they’ve been hired to fight. They take out insurance policies. Even if Marcone didn’t have samples collected, I’m betting you did.”

Her eyes drifted over to the door for a moment, and then back to me. “Let’s pretend, for a moment, that I have such a collection,” she said. “Why on earth would I hand it over to you? You’re antagonistic to my employer’s business, and could inflict catastrophic damage on it with such a thing in your possession.”

“Gosh, you’re squeamish, considering the catastrophic damage his business inflicts on thousands of people every day of the year.”

“I’m merely protecting my employer’s interests.” She showed me her teeth. “Almost as though I’m a mercenary.”

I sighed and folded my arms. “What if I only took Torelli’s and Marcone’s samples?”

“Then you would still be capable of using that against Marcone in the future.”

“If I want to hurt Marcone,” I said, “all I need to do is sit down with a six-pack of beer and a bag of pretzels and let him twist in the wind.”

“Perhaps,” Gard admitted. “Swear to me that you will use none of the samples but Torelli’s and Marcone’s, that you will use neither of them for harm of any kind, and that you will return both to me immediately upon my request. Swear it by your power.”

Oaths in general carry a lot of currency among the preternatural crowd. They’re binding in more senses than the theoretical. Every time you break a promise, there’s a kind of backlash of spiritual energies. A broken promise can inflict horrible pain on supernatural entities, such as the Sidhe. When a wizard breaks a promise, particularly when sworn by his own power, the backlash is different: a diminishing of that magical talent. It isn’t a crippling effect by any means—but break enough promises and sooner or later you’d have nothing left.

As dangerous as the world had been for wizards over the past few years, any of us would have been insane to take the chance that our talents, and thus our ability to defend ourselves, might be hampered, even if that reduction was relatively slight.

I squared my shoulders and nodded. “I swear, by my own power, that I will abide by those restrictions.”

Gard narrowed her eyes as I spoke, and when I finished she gave me a single nod. She reached into her pocket, moving very gingerly, and withdrew a single silver key. She held it out to me. “Union Station, locker two fourteen. Everything is labeled.”

I reached out to take the key, but Gard’s fingers tightened on it for a second. “Don’t let anything you care about stand directly in front of it when you open it.”

I arched an eyebrow at her as she released the key. “All right. Thank you.”

She gave me a quick, tight smile. “Stop wasting time here. Go.”

I frowned. “You’re that worried about your boss?”

“Not at all,” Gard said, closing her eyes and sagging wearily down on the cot. “I just don’t want to be in the vicinity the next time someone comes to kill you.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Murphy’s car looked like it might have been through a war zone, and there were odd-colored stains in the snow underneath it. As a result we’d taken Michael’s truck. I rode in the cab with Michael, while Mouse rode in the back. Yeah, I know, not safe, but the reality of the situation is that you don’t fit two people our size and a dog Mouse’s size into the cab of a pickup. There wouldn’t be any room left for oxygen.

Mouse didn’t seem to be the least bit distressed by the cold as we sallied forth to Union Station. He actually walked to the side of the truck and stuck his head out into the wind, tongue lolling happily. Not that there was a lot of wind to be had—Michael drove patiently and carefully in the bad weather.

After the third or fourth time we passed a car that had slid up onto a sidewalk or into a ditch, I stopped tapping my foot and mentally urging him to hurry. It would take a hell of a lot longer to walk to Union Station than it would to drive with what was obviously appropriate caution.

We didn’t talk on the way. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t like Michael is a chatterbox or anything. It’s just that he usually has something to say. He invites me to go to church with him (which I don’t, unless something is chasing us) or has some kind of proud-papa talk regarding something one of his kids has done. We’ll talk about Molly’s progress, or weather, or sports, or something.

Not this time.

Maybe he wanted to focus his whole attention on the road, I told myself.

Yeah. That was probably it. It couldn’t have anything to do with me opening my big fat mouth too much, obviously.

A mound of plowed snow had collapsed at the entrance of the parking garage, but Michael just built up a little speed and rumbled over and through it, though it was mostly the momentum that got him inside.

The parking garage’s lights were out, and with all that piled snow around the first level, very little of the ambient snow-light got inside. Parking garages are kind of intimidating places even when you can see them. They’re even more intimidating when they’re entirely black, except for the none-too-expansive areas lit by the glare of headlights.

“Well,” I said, “at least there’s plenty of available spaces.”

Michael grunted. “Who wants to travel in weather like this?” He wheeled into the nearest open parking space and the truck jerked to a stop. He got out, fetched the heavy sports bag he used to carry Amoracchius in public, and slung the bag from his shoulder. I got out, and Mouse hopped out of the back to the ground. The truck creaked and rocked on its springs, relieved of the big dog’s weight. I clipped Mouse’s lead on him, and then tied on the little apron thing that declared him a service dog. It’s an out-and-out lie, but it makes moving around in public with him a lot easier.

Mouse gave the apron an approving glance, and waited patiently until his disguise was in place.

“Service dog?” Michael asked, his expression uncomfortable. He had a flashlight in his right hand, and he shone it at us for a moment before sweeping it around us, searching the shadows.

“I have a rare condition,” I said, scratching the big dog under the chin. “Can’t-get-a-date-itis. He’s supposed to be some kind of catalyst or conversation starter. Or failing that, a consolation prize. Anyway, he’s necessary.”

Mouse made a chuffing sound, and his tail thumped against my leg.

Michael sighed.

“You’re awfully persnickety about the law all of a sudden,” I said. “Especially considering that you’re toting a concealed weapon.”

“Please, Harry. I’m uncomfortable enough.”

“I won’t tell anyone about your Sword if you won’t tell anyone about my gun.”

Michael sighed and started walking. Mouse and I followed.

The parking garage proved to be very cold, very dark, very creepy, and empty of any threat. We crossed the half-buried street, Mouse leading the way through the snow.

“Snow’s coming down thicker again now that the sun’s down,” Michael noted.

“Mab’s doing, maybe,” I said. “If it is, Titania would be less able to oppose her power after the sun went down. Which is also when Titania’s agents would be able to move most freely through town.”

“But you aren’t certain it’s Mab’s doing?” Michael asked.

“Nope. Could just be Chicago. Which can be just as scary as Mab, some days.”

Michael chuckled and we went into Union Station. It doesn’t look like that scene in The Untouchables, if you were wondering. That was shot in this big room they rent out for well-to-do gatherings. The rest of the place doesn’t look like something that fits into the Roaring Twenties. It’s all modernized, and looks more or less like an airport.

Sorta depressing, really. I mean, of all the possible aesthetic choices out there, airports must generally rank in the top five or ten most bland. But I guess they’re cost-effective. That counts for more and more when it comes to beauty. Sure, all the marble and Corinthian columns and soaring spaces were beautiful, but where do they fall on a cost-assessment worksheet?

The ghost of style still haunts the bits of the original Union Station that have been permitted to stand, but, looking around the place, I couldn’t help but get the same feeling I had when I looked at the Coliseum in Rome, or the Parthenon in Athens—that once, it had been a place of splendor. Once. But a long, long time ago.

“Which way are the lockers?” Michael asked quietly.

I nodded toward the northeast end of the building and started walking. The ticketing counters were closed, except for one, whose clerk was probably in a back room somewhere. There weren’t a lot of people walking around. Late at night train stations in general don’t seem to explode with activity. Particularly not in weather like ours. One harried customer-service representative from Amtrak was dealing with a small knot of angry-looking travelers who had probably just been stranded in town by the storm. She was trying to get them a hotel. Good luck. The airport had been closed since yesterday, and the hotels would be doing a brisk business already.

“You know your way around the station,” Michael commented.

“Trains are faster than buses and safer than planes,” I said. “I took a plane to Portland once, and the pilot lost his radio and computer and so on. Had to land without instruments or communications. We were lucky it was a clear day.”

“Statistically, it’s still the safest—” he began.

“Not for wizards it isn’t,” I told him seriously. “I’ve had flights that went smoothly. A couple of them just had little problems. But after that trip to Portland…” I shook my head. “There were kids on that plane. I’m going to live a long time. I can take a little longer to get there. Hey, Joe,” I said to a silver-haired janitor, walking by with a wheeled cart of cleaning supplies.

“Harry,” Joe said, nodding with a small smile as he passed by.

“I’ve been here a lot lately,” I said to Michael. “Traveling to support the Paranet, mostly. Plus Warden stuff.” I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t want the job, but I’ll be damned if I’ll do it half-assed.”

Michael looked back at the janitor thoughtfully for a moment, and then at me. “What’s that like?”

“Wardening?” I asked. I shrugged. “I’ve got four other Wardens who are, I guess, under my command.” I made air quotes around the word. “In Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Boston. But I mostly just stay out of their way and let them do their jobs, give them help when they need it. They’re kids. Grew up hard in the war, though that didn’t give them brains enough to keep from looking up to me.”

Mouse suddenly stopped in his tracks.

Me too. I didn’t rubberneck around. Instead I focused on the dog.

Mouse’s ears twitched like individual radar dishes. His nose quivered. One paw came up off the ground, but the dog only looked around him uncertainly.

“Lassie would have smelled something,” I told him. “She would have given a clear, concise warning. One bark for gruffs, two barks for Nickelheads.”

Mouse gave me a reproachful glance, put his paw back down, and sneezed.

“He’s right,” Michael said quietly. “Something is watching us.”

“When isn’t it?” I muttered, glancing around. I didn’t see anything. My highly tuned investigative instincts didn’t see anything either. I hate feeling like Han Solo in a world of Jedi. “I’m supposed to be the Jedi,” I muttered aloud.

“What’s that?” Michael asked.

The station’s lights went out. All of them. At exactly the same time.

The emergency lights, which are supposed to come on instantly, didn’t.

Beside me Michael’s coat rustled and something clicked several times. Presumably he was trying his flashlight, and presumably it didn’t work.

That wasn’t good. Magic could interfere with the function of technology, but that was more of a Murphy effect: Things that naturally could go wrong tended to go wrong a lot more often. It didn’t behave in a predictable or uniform fashion. It didn’t shut down lights, emergency lights, and battery-powered flashlights all at the same time.

I didn’t know what could do that.

“Harry?” Michael asked.

Mouse pressed up against my leg, and I felt his warning growl vibrating through his chest.

“You said it, Chewie,” I told my dog. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Chapter Twenty-three

People started screaming.

I reached for the amulet around my neck and drew it forth as I directed an effort of will at it to call forth light in the darkness.

And nothing happened.

I’d have stared at my amulet if I could have seen it. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t working. I shook the necklace, cursed at it, and raised it again, forcing more of my will into the amulet.

It flickered with blue-white sparks for a moment, and that was it.

Mouse let out a louder snarl, the one I hear only when he’s identified a real threat. Something close. My heart jumped up hard enough to bounce off the roof of my mouth.

“I can’t call a light!” I said, my voice high and thin.

A zipper let out a high-pitched whine in the dark next to me, and steel rasped against steel, then rang like a gently struck bell. “Father,” Michael’s voice murmured gently, “we need Your help.”

White light exploded from the sword.

About a dozen things crouching within three or four yards of us started screaming.

I’d never seen anything like them before. They were maybe five feet tall, but squat and thick, with rubbery-looking muscle. They were built more or less along the lines of baboons, somewhere between pure quadruped and biped, with wicked-looking claws, long, ropy tails, and massive shoulders. Some of them carried crude-looking weapons: cudgels, stone-headed axes, and stone-bladed knives. Their heads were apelike and nearly skeletal, black skin stretched tight over muscle and bone. They had ugly, almost sharklike teeth, so oversized that you could see where they were cutting their own lips and—

And they didn’t have any eyes. Where their eyes should have been there was nothing but blank, sunken skin.

They screamed in agony as the light from Michael’s sword fell on them, reeling back as if burned by a sudden flame—and if the sudden, smoldering reek that filled the air was any indicator, they had been.

“Harry!” Michael cried.

I knew that tone of voice. I crouched as quickly as I could, as low as I could, and barely got out of the way before Amoracchius swept through the space where my head had been—

—and slammed into the leaping form of one of the creatures that had been about to land on my back.

The thing fell back away from me and landed on the floor, thrashing. Its blood erupted into blue-white fire as it spurted from the wound.

I snapped my head around to stare at Amoracchius. More blood sizzled on the blade of the sword like grease on a hot skillet.

Iron.

These things were faeries.

I’d never seen them face-to-face before, but I’d read descriptions of them—including when I had been boning up on my book learning to figure out the identity of the gruffs. Given that this beastie was a faerie, there was only one thing it could be.

“Hobs!” I screamed at Michael as I drew the gun from my coat pocket. “They’re hobs!”

After that I didn’t have time to talk. A couple of the hobs around us had recovered enough from the shock of sudden exposure to light to fling themselves forward. Mouse let out his deep-chested battle roar and collided with one of them in midair. They went down in a tangle of thrashing limbs and flashing teeth.

The next hob leapt over them at me, stone knife in its knobby hand. I slipped aside from the line of his jump and pistol-whipped him with the barrel of the heavy revolver. The steel smashed into the hob’s eyeless face, scorching flesh and shattering teeth. The hob screamed in pain as it flew by, crashing into one of its fellows.

“In nomine Dei!” Michael bellowed. I felt his shoulder blades hit mine, and the light from the great sword bobbed and flashed, followed by another scream from a hob’s throat.

The hob wrestling with Mouse slammed the huge dog to the floor and rose up above him, baring its fangs.

I took a step toward it, jammed the revolver into its face, screamed, “Get off my dog!” and started pulling the trigger. I wasn’t sure what hurt the hob more—the bullets or the muted flashes of light from the discharge. Either way it recoiled so hard that it flung itself completely off of Mouse, who came to his feet still full of fight. I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back with me until I felt Michael at my back again.

The hobs withdrew to the shadows, but I could still hear them all around us. As bright as Michael’s sword was, I should have been able to see the ceiling far overhead, but it spread out for only twenty feet or so—far enough to keep the hobs from leaping onto us in a single bound, but not much more than that.

I could hear screams still, drifting through the interior of the station. I heard a gun go off, something smaller than my .44, the rapid shots of panic fire. Whoever was packing was presumably shooting blindly into the dark. Hell’s bells, this was going to turn into a real mess if I didn’t do something, and fast.

“We’ve got to get out of the open,” I said, thinking out loud. “Michael, head for the ticketing counter.”

“Can’t you clear the way?” Michael asked. “I can cover you.”

“I can’t see in this crap,” I said. “And there are other people in here. If I start tossing power around I could kill somebody.”

“Then stay close,” Michael said. He moved out at a stalk, sword held high over his head, ready to sweep down on top of anything stupid enough to come leaping at him. We went over two dead hobs, both of them covered in blue flames that gave off barely any light but consumed the bodies with voracious rapidity. I heard a scuffle of claws on the floor and shouted a wordless cry.

Michael pivoted smoothly as a hob armed with a pair of stone axes rushed into the light of the holy sword. The dark faerie flung one of the axes at Michael on the way. My friend slapped it aside with a contemptuous flick of his sword, and met the hob with a horizontal slash that shattered its second ax and split open its torso all the way back to its crooked spine. The hob dropped, spewing flame, and Michael kicked its falling body back into its companions, scattering them for a moment and gaining us another twenty feet.

“Nice,” I said, keeping close, trying to watch the bobbing shadows all around us. “You been working out? You look good.”

Michael’s teeth flashed in a quick smile. “Wouldn’t speaking give these creatures a fine means of tar—” He broke off as Amoracchius flicked in front of my face, deflecting a tumbling stone knife. “Targeting us,” he continued.

Me and my big mouth. I shut up the rest of the way to the ticketing counter.

I led Michael around behind it and all but tripped over the form of a wounded man in a business suit. He let out a choked scream of pain and clutched at the bloodied cloth over his lower leg. There was the broken shard of a stone blade still protruding from the man’s leg.

“Harry,” Michael said, “keep moving. They’re gathering for a rush.”

“Okay,” I said. I knelt down by the wounded businessman and said, “Come on, buddy; this is no place to be sitting around.” I grabbed him underneath the arms and started backpedaling down the counter. “There’s a doorway back here somewhere, goes to the rear area.”

“Perfect,” Michael said. “I can hold that for as long as you need.”

The wounded man struggled to help me, but mostly all he did was make it harder to move him. He was making continuous sounds of terror and pain. I was glad that we had the barrier of the counter between us and the encroaching hobs. I didn’t particularly care to find out what getting hit with a sharp stone ax felt like.

We reached the door behind the ticketing counter, which was closed. I jiggled the handle, but it was apparently locked. I didn’t have time for this crap. I lifted my right hand and focused on one of the energy rings I wore. There was one of them on each finger, a band made of three rings woven into a braid. The rings stored energy, saving back a little every time I moved my arm, and allowing me to unleash that stored energy all in one spot.

I brought my will to bear on the door as I lifted my hand in a closed fist, focusing the energy of the rings into as small an area as I could. I hadn’t designed them for this kind of work. They’d been made to shove things roughly away from me before they could rip my face off. But I didn’t have a lot of time to waste putting together something neater.

So I aimed as best I could, triggered the ring, and watched it rip the doorknob, the lock, and the plate they were all mounted in right out of the door, to send them tumbling into the room beyond. Unimpeded by any of those pesky metal security fittings, the door swung inward.

“Come on!” I said to Michael, seizing the wounded man again. “Mouse, lead the way.”

My dog padded through the doorway, crouched low and with his teeth bared. I practically walked on his tail as I came in behind him, and Michael was all but treading on the wounded man’s bloodied leg.

As the light from Amoracchius illuminated the room we entered, it revealed the harried customer-service rep we’d seen a few minutes before. She knelt on the floor, crucifix in hand, her head bowed as she frantically recited a prayer. As the light fell over her she blinked and looked up. The white fire of the holy sword painted the tear streaks on her face silver as her mouth dropped open in an expression of shock and stunned joy. She looked down at her crucifix, and back up at him again.

Michael took a quick glance around the room, smiled at the woman, and said, “Of course He’s there. Of course He listens.” He paused, then admitted, “Granted, He doesn’t always answer quite this quickly.”

There were other people in the room—the customers she’d been trying to find a hotel room for. When things had gone dark and scary she had somehow rounded them up and gotten them into the room. That took a lot more moxie than most people had. I also noted that she had been kneeling between the customers and the doorway. I liked her already.

“Carol,” I said, sharply enough to make her tug her gaze from Michael, who now stood in the doorway, holy Sword in hand. “Carol, I need you to give me a hand here.”

She blinked and then nodded jerkily and rose. She helped me drag the wounded man over to where the others were seated against the wall. “H-how did you know my name?” she stammered. “Are y-you two angels?”

I sighed and tapped a fingernail on the name tag she wore. “I’m sure as hell not,” I said. I jerked my head at Michael. “Though he’s about as close to one as you’re ever likely to see.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Harry,” Michael said. “I’m just a—” He broke off and ducked. Something solid whizzed past him and slammed a hole the size of my head into the drywall above us. Bits of dust rained down, and frightened people cried out.

Michael slammed the door shut, but without, you know, all those pesky metal security fittings, it swung open again. He slammed it closed and leaned one shoulder against it, panting. Something struck the door with a heavy thump. Then there was silence.

I ripped open the wounded man’s pant leg along the seam. The knife had hit him in the calf and he was a bloody mess, but it could have been worse. “Leave it in,” I told Carol, “and make sure he stays still. That’s close to some big veins, and I don’t want to open them trying to take it out. Stay close to him and keep him from trying to take it out. Okay?”

“I…Yes, all right,” Carol said. She blinked her eyes at me several times. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Me either,” I responded. I rose and went to stand beside Michael.

“Those things are quite a bit stronger than I am,” he said in a low rumble that the people behind us couldn’t hear. “If they rush this door I won’t be able to hold it shut.”

“I’m not sure they will,” I said.

“But you’re here.”

“I don’t think they’re after me,” I said. “If they were, they wouldn’t be going after everyone else, too.”

Michael frowned at me. “But you said they were faeries.”

“They are,” I said. “But I don’t think this was supposed to be a hit. There are too many of them for that. This is a full-blown assault.”

Michael grimaced. “Then there are people in danger. They need our help.”

“And they’re going to get it,” I said. “Listen, hobs can’t stand light. Any kind of light. It burns them and it can kill them. That’s why they called up this myrk before they came in.”

“Myrk?”

“It’s matter from the Nevernever. Think of it as a cellophane filter, only instead of being around a light, it is spread all through the air. That’s why we couldn’t see the light from my amulet, and why the muzzle flash of my gun was so muted. And that’s how we’re going to take them out.”

“We get rid of the myrk,” Michael said, nodding.

“Exactly,” I said. I raked my fingers back through my hair and started fumbling through my pockets to see what I had on me. Not much. I keep a small collection of handy wizarding gear in the voluminous pockets of my duster, but the pockets of my winter coat contained nothing but a stick of chalk, two ketchup packages from Burger King, and a furry, lint-coated Tic Tac. “Okay,” I said. “Let me think a minute.”

Something slammed into the other side of the door and shoved Michael’s work boots a good eighteen inches across the floor. A claw flashed through the opening at me. I got out of the way, but the sleeve of my coat didn’t. The hob’s claws ripped three neat slits in the fabric.

Michael lifted Amoracchius in one hand and drove its blazing length through the sturdy door. The hob screamed and pulled away. Michael slammed the door shut again and jerked the weapon clear. Dark blood sizzled on the holy blade. “I don’t mean to rush you,” he said calmly, “but I don’t think we have a minute.”

Chapter Twenty-four

“Dammit!” I swore. “This is my only winter coat!” I closed my eyes for a second and tried to focus my mind to the task. A myrk wasn’t like other forms of faerie glamour. Those could create appearance, and could simulate emotional states related to that appearance. The myrk was a conjuration, something physical, tangible, that actually did exist and would continue to do so as long as the hobs gave it enough juice, metaphorically speaking.

Wind might do it. A big enough wind could push the myrk away—but it would have to be an awful lot of wind. The little gale I’d called up to handle Torelli’s hitters would barely make a dent in it. I could probably do something more violent and widespread, but when it comes to moving matter around, you don’t get something for nothing. There was no way I’d be able to maintain that kind of blast long enough to get the job done.

I might be able to cut the myrk off from the hobs. If I could sever that connection it would prevent them from pouring constant energy into it, and poof, the myrk would resume its natural state as ectoplasm. Of course, cutting them off wouldn’t be a cakewalk. I would need some means of creating a channel to each and every hob in order to be sure I got the job done. I didn’t have anything I could use as a focus, and I had no idea how many of them were out there, anyway.

An empowered circle could cut the power to the spell from the other side of the equation, isolating the hobs from the flow of energy outside the circle. But the circle would need to encompass the entire freaking building. I doubted the hobs would be considerate enough to let me run outside and sprint around an entire Chicago city block to fire up a circle. Besides, I didn’t have that much chalk. Running water can ground out a spell if there’s enough of it, but given that we were inside a building, that wasn’t in the cards. So how the hell was I supposed to cut off this stupid spell, given the pathetic resources I had? It isn’t like there are a whole lot of ways to rob a widespread working of its power.

My nose throbbed harder, and I leaned my head back, turning my face upward. Sometimes doing that seemed to reduce the pressure and ease the pain a little. I stared up at the office ceiling, which had been installed at a height of ten or eleven feet, rather than leaving the place open to the cavernous reaches of the old station, and beat my head against the proverbial wall. The ceiling was one of those drop-down setups, a metal framework supporting dreary yet cost-effective rectangles of acoustic material, interrupted every few yards by the ugly little cowboy spur of an automatic firefighting sprinkler.

My eyes widened.

“Ha!” I said, and threw my arms up in the air. “Ha-ha! Ah-hahahaha! I am wizard; hear me roar!”

Mouse gave me an oblique look and sidled a step farther away from me.

“And well you should!” I bellowed, pointing at the dog. “For I am a fearsome bringer of fire!” I held up my right hand and with a murmur called up the tiny sphere of flame. The spell stuttered and coughed before it coalesced, and even then the light was barely brighter than a candle.

“Harry?” Michael asked in that tone of voice people use when they talk to crazy people. “What are you doing?”

The drywall to one side of the door suddenly buckled as a hob’s claws began ripping through it. Michael bobbed to one side, temporarily leaving the door, held his thumb up to the wall, as if judging where the stud would be, and then ran Amoracchius at an angle through the drywall. The Sword came back hissing and spitting, while another hob howled with pain.

“Without the myrk, these things are in trouble,” I said. “Carol, be a dear and roll that chair over here.”

Carol, her eyes very wide, her face very pale, did so. She gave the chair a little push, so that it came the last six feet on its own.

Michael’s shoulder hit the door as another hob tried to push in. The creature wasn’t stupid. It didn’t keep trying to force the door when Amoracchius plunged through the wood as if it had been a rice-paper screen, and Michael’s Sword came back unstained. “Whatever you’re going to do, sooner would be better than later.”

“Two minutes,” I said. I rolled the chair to the right spot and stood up on it. I wobbled for a second, then stabilized myself and quickly unscrewed the sprinkler from its housing. Foul-smelling water rushed out in its wake, which I had expected and mostly avoided. Granted, I hadn’t expected it to smell quite so overwhelmingly stagnant, though I should have. Many sprinkler systems have closed holding tanks, and God only knew how many years that water had been in there, waiting to be used.

I hopped down out of the chair and moved out from under the falling water. I pulled one of the pieces of chalk out of my pocket, knelt, and began to draw a large circle all around me on the low-nap carpet. It didn’t have to be a perfect circle, as long as it was closed, but I’ve drawn a lot of them, and by now they’re usually pretty close.

“E-excuse me,” Carol said. “Wh-what are you doing?”

“Our charming visitors are known as hobs,” I told her, drawing carefully, infusing the chalk with some of my will as I did so. “Light hurts them.”

A hob burst through the already broken drywall, this time getting its head and one shoulder through. It howled and raked at Michael, who was still leaning on the door. Michael’s hip got ripped by a claw, but then Amoracchius swept down and took the hob’s head from its shoulders in reply. Dark, blazing blood spattered the room, and some of it nearly hit my circle.

“Hey!” I complained. “I’m working here!”

“Sorry,” Michael said without a trace of sarcasm. A hob slammed into the door before he could return to it, and drove him several paces back. He recovered in time to duck under the swing of a heavy club, then swept Amoracchius across the creature’s belly and followed it up with a heavy, thrusting kick that shoved the wicked faerie out of the room and back into its fellows. Michael slammed the door shut again.

“B-but it’s dark,” Carol stammered, staring at Michael and me alternately.

“They’ve put something in the air called myrk. Think of it as a smoke screen. The myrk is keeping the lights from hurting the hobs,” I said. I finished the circle and felt it spring to life around me, an intangible curtain of power that walled away outside magic—including the myrk that had been caught inside the circle as it formed. It congealed into a thin coating of slimy ectoplasm over everything in the circle—which is to say, me. “Super,” I mumbled, and swiped it out of my eyes as best I could.

“S-so,” Carol said, “what are you doing, exactly?”

“I’m going to take their smoke screen away.” I held the sprinkler head in my right hand and closed my eyes, focusing on it, on its texture, its shape, its composition. I began pouring energy into the object, imagining it as a glowing aura of blue-white light with dozens of little tendrils sprouting from it. Once the energy was firmly wrapped around the sprinkler, I transferred it to my left hand and extended my right again.

“B-but we don’t have any lights.”

“Oh, we have lights,” I said. I held out my right hand and called forth my little ball of sunshine. In the myrk-free interior of the circle, it was as white-hot and as bright as usual, but I could see that outside of the circle it didn’t spread more than five or six feet through the myrk out there.

“Oh, my God,” Carol said.

“Actually, all the regular lights are on too—they’re just being blocked. The myrk isn’t shutting down the electricity. These computers are all on, for example—but the myrk is keeping you from seeing any of the indicator lights.”

“Harry!” Michael called.

“You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!” I called back in an annoyed tone. The rest of the spell was going to be a little tricky.

“H-how are you doing that?” Carol breathed.

“Magic,” I growled. “Hush.” I wore a leather glove over my left hand, as usual, which should offer my scarred skin a little protection. All the same, this wouldn’t be much fun. I murmured, “Ignus, infusiarus,” and thrust the end of the sprinkler into the flame floating over my right hand.

“How does this help us?” Carol demanded, her voice shaking and frightened.

“This place still has electricity,” I said. Maybe I was imagining the smell of burned leather as the heat from the flame poured into the metal sprinkler. “It still has computers. It still has phones.”

“Harry!” Michael said, swinging his head left and right, staring up at the ceiling. “They’re climbing. They’re going to come through the roof.”

I began to feel the heat, even in the nerve-damaged fingers of my left hand. It was going to have to be hot enough. I drew up more of my will, lifted the sprinkler and the flame, and visualized what I wanted, the tendrils of energy around it zipping out to every other sprinkler head in the whole building. “And it still has its sprinklers.”

I broke the circle with my foot, and energy lashed out from the sprinkler to every other object shaped like it in the surrounding area. Heat washed out of me in a wave, headed in dozens of different directions, and I poured all the energy I could into the little ball of sunshine, which suddenly had several dozen sprinkler heads to absorb its energy instead of only one.

It took maybe ten seconds before the fire detector let out a howl and the sprinkler system chattered to life. People let out surprised little shrieks, and a steady emergency klaxon wound to life somewhere out in the station. Sparks flew up from several phones, monitors, and computers.

“Okay,” I said. “So the office doesn’t have computers. But the rest still applies.”

Michael looked up at me and showed me his teeth in a ferocious grin. “When?”

I watched my little ball of sunshine intensely as the water came down. For maybe half a minute nothing happened, except that we got drenched. It was actually kind of surprising how much water was coming down—surprising in a good way, I mean. I wanted lots of water.

Somewhere around the sixty-second mark I felt my spell begin to flicker, its power eroded away by the constant downpour.

“Wait for it,” I said. “Ready…”

At two minutes my spell buckled, the connection to the other sprinklers snapping, the fire in my hand snuffing out. “Michael!” I shouted. “Now!”

Michael grunted and flung open the door. Before he’d stepped through it there was a sudden flutter of faltering power in the air, and the holy blade blazed with light brighter than the heart of the sun itself.

He plunged through the door, and as the burning light of Amoracchius emerged into the station at large, dozens or hundreds of hob throats erupted into tortured cries. The sound of the wicked faeries’ screams was so loud that I actually felt the pressure it put on my ears, the way you can at a really loud concert.

But louder still was the voice of Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Cross, avenging angel incarnate, bearer of the blade that had once belonged to a squire called Wart. “Lava quod est sordium!” Michael bellowed, his voice stentorian, too enormous to come from a human throat. “In nomine Dei, sana quod est saucium!”

After the Sword had left the room, I could see that all the office lights had come back, as well as those outside. “Mouse!” I screamed. “Stay! Guard the wounded!” I hurried after Michael and glanced back behind me. Mouse trotted forward and planted himself in the doorway between the hobs and the people in the office, head high, legs braced wide to fill the space.

Outside the sprinklers were doing a credible impersonation of a really stinky monsoon. I slipped in a puddle of water and burning hob blood a few feet outside the door. The light from the Sword was so bright, so purely, even painfully white that I had to shield my eyes with one arm. I couldn’t look directly at Michael, or even anywhere near him, so I followed him by the pieces of hob he left in his wake.

Several wicked faeries had been struck down by Michael’s sword.

They were the lucky ones.

Many more—dozens that I could see—had fallen too far away for Michael to have reached them with the blade. Those were simply lumps of smoldering charcoal spewing columns of greasy smoke, their meat flash-cooked away from bone. Some of the soon-to-be-former hobs were still thrashing as they burned.

Hell’s bells.

I don’t call him the Fist of God as a pet name, folks.

I followed Michael, alert for any dimming of the Sword’s light. If any of the sprinklers in the building were a different model from the one I’d used to focus my spell, it wouldn’t have been able to heat them and trigger them. If Michael wound up plunging back into the myrk, then the hobs, afforded a measure of protection from the light, would gang up on him—and fast.

But as luck (or maybe fate, or maybe God, but probably a cheap city contractor) would have it, it looked like they’d all been the same. Water came down everywhere, washing away the myrk as if it had been a layer of mud, replacing it with thousands upon thousands of fractured rainbows as the pure illumination of Amoracchius shone through the artificial downpour.

For the hobs, there was nowhere to hide.

I followed the trail of smitten fiends. Smiten fiends? Smited fiends? Smoted fiends? Don’t look at me. I never finished high school. Maybe learning the various conjugations of to smite had been in senior-year English. It sure as hell hadn’t been on my GED test.

I stopped and peered around as best I could through the blinding light and steady fall of water from the sprinklers, trying to get an idea of where Michael was headed.

I felt a sudden, swift vibration that rose through the soles of my shoes, and then a heavy thud accompanying a second such tremor. I whirled to face the front of the building as glass and brick and stone exploded from the entry door. Behind it was a vague flicker of haze in the air, but as whatever was behind the veil entered the glare of Amoracchius and my impromptu thundershower, the spell faltered and vanished.

Twenty feet and four or five tons of Big Brother Gruff erupted from the veil.

He wore armor made of some kind of translucent crystal, and the sword in his hand was longer than my freaking car. His mouth opened, and I felt his battle roar rather than hearing it over the cacophony of combat, a sound so deep and loud that it should have been made by a freaking whale.

“Oh, yeah,” I muttered. “Today just keeps getting better and better.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Anybody with an ounce of sense knows that fighting someone with a significant advantage in size, weight, and reach is difficult. If your opponent has you by fifty pounds, winning a fight against him is a dubious proposition, at best.

If your opponent has you by eight thousand and fifty pounds, you’ve left the realm of combat and enrolled yourself in Road-kill 101. Or possibly in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

My body was already in motion, apparently having decided that waiting on my brain to work things through was counterproductive to survival. It was thinking that the cat-and-mouse analogy was a pretty good one. While I was nimbler and could accelerate more swiftly than the huge gruff, he could build up more speed on a straightaway. Physically speaking, I had almost no chance of seriously harming him, while even a love tap from him would probably collapse my rib cage—another similarity.

Jerry wins on television, but in real life Tom would rarely end up with the short end of the stick. I don’t remember Mister ever coming home nursing mouse-inflicted wounds. For that matter, he hardly ever came home from one of his rambles hungry. Playing cat and mouse is generally only fun for the cat.

My body, meanwhile, had flung itself to one side, forcing Tiny to turn as he pursued me, limiting his speed and buying me a precious second or three—time enough for me to sprint toward a section of floor marked off by a pair of yellow caution signs, where Joe the janitor had been waxing the floor. I crossed the wet, slick floor at a sprint and prayed that I wouldn’t trip. If I went down it would take only one stomp of one of those enormous hooves to slice me in half.

Footgear like that isn’t so hot for slippery terrain, though. As soon as I crossed to the other side of the waxed floor I juked left as sharply as I could, changing direction. Tiny tried to compensate and his legs went out from under him.

That isn’t a big deal, by itself. Sometimes when you run something happens and you trip and you fall down. You get a skinned knee or two, maybe scuff up your hands, and very rarely you’ll do something worse, like sprain an ankle.

But that’s at human mass. Increase the mass to Tiny’s size, and a fall becomes another animal entirely, especially if there’s a lot of velocity involved. That’s one reason why elephants don’t ever actually run—they aren’t capable of it, of lifting their weight from the ground in a full running stride. If they fell at their size, the damage could be extreme, and evidently nature had selected out all those elephant wind sprinters. That much weight moving at that much speed carries a tremendous amount of energy—enough to easily snap bones, to drive objects deep into flesh, to scrape the ground hard enough to strip a body to the bone.

Tiny must have weighed twice what an elephant does. Five tons of flesh and bone came down all along one side of his body and landed hard—then slid, carrying so much momentum that Tiny more resembled a freight train than any kind of living being. He slid across the floor and slammed into the wall of a rental car kiosk, shattering it to splinters—and went right on through it, hardly even slowing down.

Tiny dug at the floor with the yellow nails of one huge hand, but they didn’t do anything but peel up curls of wax as he went sliding past me.

I slammed on the brakes and tried to judge where Tiny looked like he’d coast to a halt. Then I drew in my will.

It was difficult as hell in the falling water, but I didn’t need a lot of it. When it comes to intentionally screwing up technology, I’ve always had a gift.

I focused on the lights above the entire section of the station Tiny slid into, lifted my right hand, and snarled, “Hexus!” Some of them actually exploded in showers of golden sparks. Some of them let out little puffs of smoke—but every single one of them went out.

Michael had advanced down the concourse far behind me, and the light of Amoracchius was now shielded by the station’s interior walls. When I took out the electric lights, it created a genuine swath of heavy shadows.

The sudden island of darkness drew hobs like corpses draw flies: burned, terrified, furious hobs whose tidbit-filled night on the town had suddenly turned into a nightmare. They didn’t have eyes, but they found their way to the dark easily enough, and I saw more than a dozen rush in, one of them passing within a couple of feet of me without ever slowing down or taking note of my presence.

Tiny started bellowing a second later, his huge voice blending with the vengeful howls of angry hobs.

“Ain’t so big now,” I panted, “are you?”

But as it turned out, Tiny was just as big.

A crushed hob flew out of the shadows and splattered the floor maybe twenty feet away. I don’t mean that he was just rag-doll limp. He was crushed, crushed like a beer can, where Tiny’s huge fist had simply seized the hob, squeezed it hard enough to empty it of various internal liquids, and then thrown it away.

Light flashed in the shadows, a long streak of sparks, like flint drawn along a long, long strip of steel, and suddenly low blue flames surrounded the blade of Tiny’s sword. They were guttering, barely able to stay alight beneath the falling water, but they cast enough light to let me see what was happening.

The hobs had gone mad with hate.

It had been inevitable, I suppose. The minions of Winter and those of Summer do not play well with one another, and the denizens of Faerie do not behave like human beings. Their natures are far more primal, more immutable. They are what they are. Predators are swift to attack prey that has fallen and is vulnerable. Winter fae hate the champions of Summer. The hobs were both.

Several of them threw themselves at Tiny’s head, while the others just started hacking with their crude weapons or biting with their sharklike teeth. Tiny’s armor served him well in that mess, defending the most critical areas, and as hobs went for his throat the gruff started throwing his head back and forth. I thought it was panic for a second, until he slammed one of his horns into a hob with such power that it broke the wicked faerie’s skull. His sword slewed back and forth in two quick, precise motions, and half a dozen hobs fell, dead and burning.

The others let out shrieks of terror and bounded away, their hatred insufficient to the task of withstanding the fallen gruff. Tiny rolled to his knees and began to push himself up, and though his expression was contorted with pain his inhuman eyes swept around until they spotted me.

Oh, crap.

I didn’t wait for him to get up and kill me. I ran.

Of all the times to do without my jacket and staff. For crying out loud, what had I been thinking? That I had Summer so thoroughly outwitted that I wouldn’t need them? That life just hadn’t been challenging enough until now? Stupid, Harry. Stupid, stupid. I swore that if I lived through this, I’d make up dummy copies of my gear for when I needed Thomas to play stalking horse.

The ground started shaking as Tiny took up the chase behind me.

My options were limited. To my right was the exterior wall of the building, and I couldn’t go outside into the deepening snow. My imagination treated me to a dandy image of me floundering in hip-deep snow while Tiny, with his far greater height and mass, cruised effortlessly up behind me and beer-canned me. Ahead of me was an empty hallway leading to another wall, and on my left were nothing but rows and rows of……storage lockers.

I fumbled in my pocket again as I ran through the water sheeting the floor, and started trying to get a look at the numbers on the lockers. I spotted the one corresponding to Gard’s key, and I skidded to a halt on the watery floor. I jammed the key in the lock frantically as Tiny, running with a limp but still running, closed the last dozen yards between us.

I had to time it perfectly. I raised my right hand, aimed at the hoof on his wounded leg, and waited for all of his weight to come forward onto it before triggering every energy ring on my right hand, unleashing a rushing column of force that hit him with the power of a speeding car.

The gruff ’s hoof went out from under him again on the wet floor, and he pitched forward with a roar of frustration. He dropped his blade and reached for me with both hands as he fell.

I waited until the last second to jump back, ripping open the door to Gard’s locker as I went.

I could only describe what happened next as a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t lightning—not really. Real lightning did not have the raw, savage intensity of this…thing, and I realized with a startled flash of insight that this energy, whatever it was, was alive. White-hot power tinged with flashes of scarlet streaked out of the locker like a hundred hyperkinetic serpents, zigzagging with impossible speed. That living lightning ripped into Tiny, cutting through his crystalline armor as if it had been made of soft wax. It burned and slashed and pounded the flesh beneath in a long line from Tiny’s shoulder to his lower leg, letting out a screaming buzz of sound unlike anything I had ever heard before.

In the last fraction of a second before it vanished, the energy snapped back and forth like the tip of a whip, and Tiny’s left leg came off at the knee.

The gruff screamed. Whatever that thing had been, it had taken the fight out of Tiny.

Hell’s bells.

I stared at the maimed Summer champion and then at the open, innocent-looking locker. Then I walked slowly forward.

Tiny had only one eye open, and it didn’t look like it would focus on anything. His breathing was rough, quick, and ragged, which translated into a seething, oat-scented breeze anywhere within ten or fifteen feet of his head.

Tiny blinked his other eye open, and though they still wouldn’t focus he let out a weak-sounding grunt. “Mortal,” he rasped, “I am bested.” One of his ears flicked once and he exhaled in a sigh. “Finish it.”

I walked past the fallen gruff without stopping, noting as I did that the stroke of energy that had severed his leg had cauterized it shut, too. He wasn’t going to bleed to death.

I peered cautiously into the locker.

It was empty except for a single, flat wooden box about the size of a big backgammon kit. The back wall of the locker sported something else—the blackened outline of some sort of rune. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Gard employing some kind of rune-based magic, but I’d be damned if I knew how it was done. I reached out with my wizard’s senses cautiously, but felt nothing. Whatever energy had been stored there was gone now.

What the hell? I reached in and grabbed the box. Nothing ripped me into quivering shreds.

I scowled suspiciously and slowly withdrew the box, but nothing else happened. Evidently Gard had considered her security measures to be adequate for dealing with a thief. Or a dinosaur. Whichever.

Once I had the case, I turned back to the gruff.

“Mortal,” Tiny wheezed, “finish it.”

“I try not to kill anything unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I replied, “and I’ve got no need to kill you today. This wasn’t a personal matter. It’s done. That’s the end of it.”

The gruff focused his eyes and just stared at me for a startled moment. “Mercy? From a Winterbound?”

“I’m not bound,” I snapped. “This is purely temp work.” I squinted around. “I think the hobs have mostly cleared out. Can you leave on your own, or do you need me to send for someone?”

The gruff shuddered and shook his huge head. “Not necessary. I will go.” He spread the fingers of one hand on the ground and started sinking into it as if it were quicksand. As portals to Faerie went, that was a new one for me.

“This is a onetime offer,” I told him just before he was completely gone. “Don’t come back.”

“I shan’t,” he rumbled, his eyes sagging closed in weariness. “But mark you this, wizard.”

I frowned at him. “What?”

“My elder brother,” he growled, “is going to kill thee.”

Then Tiny sank into the floor and was gone.

“Another one?” I demanded of the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

I leaned against the lockers, banging my head gently against the steel for a moment. Then I pushed myself back onto my feet and started jogging back toward where I had parted with Michael. Just because the hobs were gone from this part of the station didn’t mean that there wasn’t still a fight going on. Michael might need my help.

I picked up the trail of body parts again, though by this time most of them were mounds of dark powder, like charcoal dust, pounded to a gooey paste by the building’s sprinklers. The patches of gunk got thicker as I continued in the direction I thought Michael had gone.

I followed the trail to the base of a ridiculously broad flight of stone stairs—the one that actually had been in The Untouchables. The parts were still recognizable as parts here. These hobs hadn’t been dead for long. They lay in a carpet of motionless, burning corpses on the stairs. Judging by the way they’d fallen they had been facing up the stairs when they died.

Several fallen hobs bore wounds that indicated that Michael had hewed his way through them from behind. White knight he might be, but once that sword comes out, Michael puts his game face on, and he plays as hard as almost anyone I’ve ever seen.

Not that I could blame him. Not all the remains I’d passed had been those of hobs.

Three security guards were down, one maybe ten feet from the stairs, the other two on the stairway itself. They had fallen separately in the darkness.

I’d passed several other bloodstains that had almost certainly been fatal to their donors, unless the falling water had made them look more extensive than they actually were. I’d never encountered hobs face-to-face before, but I knew enough about them to hope that whoever had spilled that blood was dead.

Hobs had a habit of hauling victims back into their lightless tunnels.

I shuddered. I’d give the troubleshooters from Summer that much: All the gruffs wanted to do was kill me, clean, and that would be the end of it. I’d been carried into the darkness by monsters before. It isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. Ever.

You don’t really live through it, even if you survive. It changes you.

I pushed away bad memories and tried to ignore them while I thought. Some of the hobs had obviously taken their victims and run. According to the books it was their modus operandi. Though this entire attack seemed to indicate a higher level of organization than the average rampage, obviously whoever was behind it wasn’t in complete control. Faeries share one universal trait—their essential natures are actively contrary, and they are notoriously difficult to command.

The hobs on the stairs were different from the ones I’d had to contend with at the front of the station. These all bore more advanced cutlery, probably made of bronze, and wore armor made of some kind of hide. To be clustered this thickly on the stairs, they had to have been at least a little organized, fighting in ranks, too.

Something had compelled these hobs to attack in unison. Hell, if the numbers of fallen hobs in front of me were any indication, the gang that came after Michael and me were probably stragglers who had gone haring off on their own, looking for a little carryout to take home.

So what had been the purpose of the attack? What the hell had drawn them all to the stairway?

Whatever was at the top, obviously.

Above me the light of the holy Sword flickered and began to fade. I chugged up the stairs as it did, still holding my fingers up to shield my eyes until the light dwindled, and caught up to Michael. He was breathing hard, Sword still raised over his head in a high guard and ready to come sweeping down. I noted, idly, that the stench of stagnant water had vanished, replaced by the quiet, strong scent of roses. I lifted my face again and felt cool, clean, rose-scented water fall on my face. Falling through the light of the holy Sword had improved it, it would seem.

The last hob to fall, a big brute the size of a freaking mountain gorilla, lay motionless near Michael’s feet. What was left of a bronze shield and sword lay in neatly sliced fragments around the body. Its blood spread sluggishly down the stairs, coated with blue-white flame as its body was slowly consumed by more of the same.

“Everybody can relax,” I panted as I caught up to Michael. “I’m here.”

Michael greeted me with a nod and a quick smile. “Are you all right?”

“Not bad,” I said, barely resisting the temptation to turn the second word into a barnyard sound. “Sorry I wasn’t much use to you once you waded in.”

“It couldn’t have happened without your help,” Michael said seriously. “Thank you.”

“De nada,” I replied.

I went up the last few stairs and got a look at what the hobs had been after.

Children.

There must have been thirty kids around ten years old up at the top of the stairs, all of them in school uniforms, all of them huddled together in a corner, all of them frightened, most of them crying. There was one dazed-looking woman in a blazer that matched those of the children, together with two women dressed in the casual uniforms of Amtrak stewards.

“A train had just arrived,” I murmured to Michael as I realized what had happened. “It must have gotten in through the weather somehow. That’s why the hobs were here now.”

Michael flicked Amoracchius to one side, shaking off a small cloud of fine black powder from the blade as he did. Then he put the weapon away. “It should be safe now, everyone,” he said, his voice calm. “The authorities should be here any minute.” He added in a quieter tone, “We should probably go.”

“Not yet,” I said quietly. I walked into the Great Hall far enough to see the area behind the first of the row of Corinthian pillars that lined the walls.

Three people stood there.

The first was a man, of a height with Michael, but built more leanly, more dangerously. He had hair of dark gold that fell to his shoulders, and the shadow of a beard resulting from several days without shaving. He wore a casual, dark-blue sports suit over a white T-shirt, and he held the bronze sword of a hob, stained with their dark blood, in either hand. He regarded me with the calm, remote eyes of a great cat, and he showed me some of his teeth when he saw me. His name was Kincaid, and he was a professional assassin.

Next to him was a young woman with long, curling brown hair and flashing dark eyes. Her jeans were tight enough to show off some nice curves, but not too tight to move in, and she held a slender rod maybe five feet long in one hand, carved with runes and sigils not too unlike mine. Captain Luccio had a long plastic tube hanging from a strap over one of her shoulders, its top dangling loose. Odds were good her silver sword was still stowed inside it. I knew that when she smiled, she had killer dimples—but from the expression on her face I wasn’t going to be exposed to that hazard anytime soon. Her features were hard and guarded, though they did not entirely hide a fierce rage. I hoped it was reserved for the attacking hobs and not for me. The captain was not someone I wanted angry at me.

Standing between and slightly behind the two adults was a girl not much older than all the other children who had taken refuge in the Hall. She’d grown more than a foot since the last time I’d seen her, about five years ago. She still looked like a neatly dressed, perfectly groomed child—except for her eyes. Her eyes were creepily out of place in that innocent face, heavy with knowledge and all the burdens that come with it.

The Archive put a hand on Kincaid’s elbow, and the hired killer lowered his swords. The girl stepped forward and said, “Hello, Mister Dresden.”

“Hello, Ivy,” I responded, nodding politely.

“If these creatures were under your command,” the little girl said in a level tone, “I’m going to execute you.”

She didn’t make it a threat. There wasn’t enough interest in her voice for it to be that. The Archive just stated it as a simple and undeniable fact.

The scary part was that if she decided to kill me, there’d be little I could do about it. The child wasn’t simply a child. She was the Archive, the embodied memory of humanity, a living repository of the knowledge of mankind. When she was six or seven I’d seen her kill a dozen of the most dangerous warriors of the Red Court. It took her about as much effort as it takes me to open the wrapper on a stack of crackers. The Archive was Power with a capital P, and operated on an entirely different level than I did.

“Of course they weren’t under his command,” Luccio said. She glanced at me and arched an eyebrow. “How could you even suspect such a thing?”

“I find it unlikely that an attack of this magnitude could be anything but a deliberate attempt to abduct or assassinate me. Mab and Titania have involved themselves in this business,” the Archive said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Mister Dresden is currently Winter’s Emissary in this affair—and need I remind you that hobs are beholden to Winter—to Mab?”

She hadn’t needed to remind me, though I’d been putting that thought off for a while. The fact that the hobs were Mab’s subjects meant that matters were even murkier than I thought, and that now was probably a reasonably good time to start panicking.

But first things first: Prevent the scary little girl from killing me.

“I have no idea who was ordering these things around,” I said quietly.

The Archive stared at me for an endless second. Then that ancient, implacable gaze moved to Michael. “Sir Knight,” she said, her tone polite. “Will you vouch for this man?”

Maybe it was just my imagination that it took Michael a second longer to answer than he might have done in the past. “Of course.”

She stared at him as well, and then nodded her head. “Mister Dresden, you remember my bodyguard, Kincaid.”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice didn’t exactly bubble with enthusiasm. “Hi, tough guy. What brings you to Chicago?”

Kincaid showed me even more teeth. “The midget,” he said. “I hate the snow. If it was up to me, I’d much rather be somewhere warm. Say, Hawaii, for example.”

“I am not a midget,” the Archive said in a firmly disapproving tone. “I am in the seventy-fourth percentile for height for my age. And stop trying to provoke him.”

“The midget’s no fun,” Kincaid explained. “I tried to get her to join the Girl Scouts, but she wasn’t having any of it.”

“If I want to glue macaroni to a paper plate, I can do that at home,” said the Archive. “It’s hours past my bedtime, and I have no desire to entangle ourselves with the local authorities. We should leave.” She frowned at Kincaid. “Obviously our movements have been tracked. Our quarters here are probably compromised.” She turned her eyes back to me. “I formally request the hospitality of the White Council until such time as I can establish secure lodgings.”

“Uh,” I said.

Luccio made a quick motion with one hand, urging me to accept.

“Of course,” I said, nodding at the Archive.

“Excellent,” the Archive said. She turned to Kincaid. “I’m soaked. My coat and a change of clothes are in my bag on the train. I’ll need them.”

Kincaid gave me a skeptical glance but, tellingly, he didn’t argue with the Archive. Instead he vanished quickly down the stairs.

The Archive turned to me. “Statistically speaking, the emergency services of this city should begin to arrive in another three minutes, given the weather and the condition of the roads. It would be best for all of us if we were gone by then.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. I grimaced. “Whoever did this is taking awful chances, moving this publically.”

The Archive’s not-quite-human gaze bored into me for a moment. Then she said, “Matters may be quite a bit worse than that. I’m afraid our troubles are just beginning.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Michael stopped in his tracks when he saw the gaping hole Tiny the gruff had left in the east wall of Union Station. “Merciful God,” he breathed. “Harry, what happened?”

“Little problem,” I said.

“You didn’t say anything to me.”

“You looked busy,” I told him, “and you already had a couple of hundred bad guys to handle.” I nodded at the hole. “I only had the one.”

Michael shook his head bemusedly, and I saw Luccio look at the hole with something like mild alarm.

“Did you get it?” Michael asked.

Luccio cocked her head at Michael when he spoke, and then looked sharply at me.

I gave Michael a level look and said, “Obviously.” Then I turned on my heel and whistled sharply. “Mouse!”

My dog, soggy but still enthusiastic, came bounding toward us over the water-coated marble floors. He slid to a stop, throwing up a little wave that splashed over my feet as he did. The Archive peered intently at Mouse as he arrived, and took a step toward him—but was prevented from going farther by Kincaid’s hand, which came to rest on her slender shoulder.

Michael frowned at the girl and then at the dog. “This,” he said, “brings up a problem.”

There was only so much room in the cab of Michael’s truck.

All of us were soaking wet, and there was no time to get dry before the authorities arrived. I didn’t think it completely fair that I got a number of less than friendly looks on the walk to the garage, after I explained that it had been me who set off the sprinkler system, but at least no one could claim that I hadn’t been willing to suffer the consequences right along with them.

The Archive might have been a creepy Billy Mumy–in–The Twilight Zone kind of child, but she was still a child. By general acclamation she was in the cab. Michael had to drive.

“I’m not letting her sit in there alone,” Kincaid stated.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “He’s a Knight of the freaking Cross. He isn’t going to hurt her.”

“Irrelevant,” Kincaid said. “What about when someone starts shooting at her on the way there? Is he going to throw his body in front of her to keep her from harm?”

“I—” Michael began.

“You’re damned right he will,” I growled.

“Harry,” Michael said, his tone placating, “I’d be glad to protect the child. But it would be somewhat problematic to do that and drive at the same time.”

Mouse let out a low, distressed sound, which drew my attention to the fact that the Archive had fallen uncharacteristically silent. She was standing beside Kincaid, shuddering, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“Dammit,” I said. “Get her into the truck. Go, Kincaid, Michael.”

Kincaid scooped her up at once, and he and Michael got into the cab of the truck.

“I-is y-your h-house far from here, Warden?” Luccio asked me.

She didn’t look good. Well, she looked good given the circumstances. But she also looked soaked and half-frozen already, kneeling to hug Mouse, ostensibly rubbing his fur to help dry it and fluff it out. I’d seen Luccio in action, as captain of the Wardens of the White Council, and I had formed my opinion of her accordingly. When I looked at the woman who’d faced Kemmler’s disciples without batting an eye, whom I’d once seen stand in the open under fire from automatic weapons to protect the apprentices under her care, I tended to forget that she was about five-foot-four and might have checked in at a hundred and thirty or forty pounds soaking wet.

Which she was.

In the middle of a blizzard.

“It isn’t far,” I said. Then I went up to the door beside Kincaid and said, “Put the kid on your lap.”

“She wears the seat belt,” Kincaid said. “She’s in danger enough from exposure already.”

“Luccio doesn’t weigh much more than Ivy does,” I said in a flat tone. “She’s in almost as much danger as the kid. So you’re holding Ivy on your lap and letting my captain ride in the cab, like a gentleman.”

Kincaid gave me a level look, his pale eyes cold. “Or what?”

“I’m armed,” I said. “You’re not.”

He looked at me levelly, then at my hands. One of them was in my coat pocket. Then he said, “You think I believe that you’d kill me?”

“If you try to make me choose between you and Luccio,” I said, with a brittle smile, “I’m pretty sure whom I’m going to bid aloha.”

His teeth flashed in a sudden, wolfish smile. And he moved over, drawing the freezing child onto his lap.

By the time I got back to Luccio she was upright only because Mouse sat placidly in the cold, supporting her. She mumbled some kind of protest in a faint, commanding tone, but since she said it in Italian I declared her brain frozen and assumed command of the local Warden detachment, which was handy, since it consisted of only me anyway. I bundled her into the truck’s cab and got her buckled in beside Kincaid. He helped with it—my fingers were too cold and stiff to manage very quickly.

“Harry,” Michael said. He reached back, drew a rolled-up thermal blanket from behind the truck’s front seat, and tossed it to me. I caught it and nodded my thanks with the cold already starting to chew at my belly.

That left me and Mouse in the back of the truck, both of us soaking wet, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a blizzard. The cold moved from my belly to my chest, and I curled up into a ball because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Magic wasn’t an option. My palm-sized ball of flame wouldn’t get along well with the back of a moving truck, especially given how much I was already shaking. I wanted to get warm, not set myself on fire.

“S-s-s-sometimes ch-ch-ch-chivalry s-s-s-sucks,” I growled to Mouse, teeth chattering.

My dog, whose thick winter coat wasn’t much good after it had gotten a good soaking, leaned against me as hard as I leaned against him, underneath the rough blanket, while the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy. So we made the trip in miserable, companionable silence. There might have been emergency lights going by us. I was too busy enjoying the involuntary rhythmic contractions of every muscle cell in my freaking body to notice.

Thirty seconds into the trip I was fairly certain that I was going to black out and wake up five hundred years in the future, but as it turned out I had to endure only a miserable twenty minutes or so before Michael pulled up outside my apartment.

Both vehicle doors opened to the weary but authoritative ring of Luccio’s voice. “Get him to the door while he can still let us in through his wards.”

“I’m fine,” I said, rising. Only it came out sounding more like, “Mmmmnnngh,” and when I tried to stand up I all but fell out of the truck. Michael caught me, and Kincaid moved quickly to help him lift me to the ground.

I dimly felt one of Kincaid’s hands enter my jacket pocket and turn it out empty. “Son of a bitch,” he said, grinning. “I knew it.”

Luccio emerged from the truck’s cab, carrying the entirely limp form of the Archive draped over one hip. The girl’s arms and legs flopped loosely, her mouth hung open in sleep, and her cheeks were bright pink. “Get up, Dresden,” she stated. Her voice was firm, but though warmed by the trip, she was still nearly as damp as she had been at the station, and I saw her buckle as the cold sank its teeth into her. “Hurry.”

I moved my feet in a vague shuffle, and remembered somewhere that when you walked, you moved them alternately. This improved our progress considerably. We reached a door, and someone said something about dangerous wards.

No kidding, I thought. I’ve got some wards on my place that’ll fry you to greasy spots on the concrete. But you should see the ones Gard can do.

Luccio snapped something to me about the wards, and I thought she looked cold. I had a fire at my place, which she could probably use. I opened the door for her, the way you’re supposed to for a lady, but the damned thing was stuck until Michael shoved it open with his shoulder and muttered something disparaging about amateur work.

Then everything got sort of muddled, and my arms and legs hurt a lot.

I ended up thinking: Man, my couch feels nice.

Mouse snuffled at my face and then all but squashed me as he laid his head and most of his upper body across mine. I thought about chewing him out for it, but opted for sleep on my wonderful couch instead.

Blackness ensued.

I woke up to a room illuminated only by the light from my fireplace. I was toasty, though my fingers and toes throbbed uncomfortably. There was a gentle weight pressing down on me that proved to be virtually every blanket I owned. The deep, slow, steady sound of my dog’s breathing whispered from the rug in front of the couch, and one of my hands was lying on the rough, warm, dry fur of Mouse’s back.

Water trickled nearby.

Luccio sat on a footstool in front of the fire, facing the flames. My teapot hung on its latch over the fire. A basin of steaming water sat upon the hearth. As I watched, she dipped a cloth in the hot water and slid it over her shoulder and down the length of one arm, her face in profile to me. Her eyes were closed in an expression of simple pleasure. The light of the fire made lovely, exquisitely feminine shadows along the slender lines of her naked back, down to the waist of her jeans as she moved, muscles shifting beneath soft skin that shimmered golden like the firelight for a second after the warm cloth glided over it, leaving little wisps of vapor in its wake.

Something else had never really occurred to me before, either.

Luccio was beautiful.

Oh, she wasn’t cover-girl pretty, though I suspected that with the right preparation she’d be damned close. Her features were appealing, particularly around her little Cupid’s bow of a mouth, framed by its dimples, contrasted with a rather squared-off chin that stopped half an eyelash shy of masculinity. She had dark eyes that flashed when she was angry or amused, and her medium-brown hair was long, curling, and lustrous. She obviously took really good care of it—but there was too much strength in that face for her to be conventionally pretty.

Beauty runs deeper than that.

There was an inexpressible quality of femininity about her that appealed to me tremendously—some critical mixture of gentle curves, quiet grace, and supple strength that I had only that second realized happened to reside in the same place as the head of the Wardens. Maybe more important, I knew the quality of the person under the skin. I’d known Luccio for years, been in more than one tight spot with her, and found her to be one of the only veteran Wardens whom I both liked and respected.

She shook her hair to the other side of her back and washed the other shoulder and arm just as slowly, and just as evidently taking pleasure in doing so.

It had been a while since I’d seen a woman’s naked back and shoulders. It had been considerably rarer than my views of the various nightmares my job kept exposing me to. I guess even among all the nightmares, sooner or later you’ll get lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a beautiful dream. And despite the trouble I was in, for just that moment there, under all those blankets, I looked at something beautiful. It made me wish I had the talent to capture the sight with charcoal or inks or oils—but that had never been my gift. All I could do was soak up that simple sight: beautiful woman bathing in firelight.

I didn’t actually notice when Luccio paused and turned her head to face me. I just noticed, suddenly, that she was returning my gaze, her dark eyes steady. I swallowed. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Sudden outrage, maybe, or a biting remark, or at least a blush. Luccio didn’t do any of that. She just returned my stare, calm and poised and lovely as you please, one arm folded across her breasts while the other dipped the cloth into the steaming basin again.

“Sorry,” I said finally, lowering my eyes. I was probably blushing. Dammit. Maybe I could pass it off as mild frostbite, heroically suffered on her behalf.

She let out a quiet little murmur of sound that was too relaxed to be a chuckle. “Did it displease you?”

“No,” I said, at once. “God, no, nothing like that.”

“Then why apologize?” she said.

“I, uh…” I coughed. “I just figured that a girl who came of age during the reign of Queen Victoria would be a little more conservative.”

Luccio let out a wicked little laugh that time. “Victoria was British,” she said. “I’m Italian.”

“Bit of a difference, then?” I asked.

“Just a little,” she replied. “When I was young, I posed for a number of painters and sculptors, you know.” She tilted her head back and washed her throat as she spoke. “Mmm. Though that was in my original body, of course.”

Right. The one that had been stolen by an insane necromancer, leaving Luccio’s mind permanently trapped in a loaner. A really young, fit, lovely loaner. “I don’t see how the one you’re in now could possibly come up short by comparison.”

She opened her eyes and flashed me a smile that was entirely too pleased and girlish. “Thank you. But I would not have you misunderstanding me. I’d avail myself of your shower, after being soaked in that foul soup, but the Archive is on your bed, and Kincaid has closed the door. He’s resting too, and I’d rather not have him go for my throat before he wakes. And you were asleep, so…” She gave a little shrug of her shoulders.

It did really interesting things to the shadows the fire cast upon her skin, and I was suddenly glad of all the blankets piled on me.

“Are you feeling all right?” Luccio asked me.

“I’ll live,” I said.

“It was gallant of you to face down Kincaid like that.”

“No problem. He’s an ass.”

“A very dangerous one,” Luccio said. “I wouldn’t have traveled with him if I had not seen him pass through the security checkpoint in Boston.” She rose, dropped the washcloth in the basin, and pulled her shirt on, giving me a rather intriguing view of her back and waist silhouetted against the firelight.

I sighed. Moment over. Back to business.

“What were you doing traveling with them?” I asked.

“Bringing them here for the parley,” she replied.

“Parley?”

“The Archive contacted Nicodemus Archleone regarding our accusations. He agreed to meet with us here, in Chicago, to discuss the matter. You are the initiating party in this instance, and I am here to serve as your second.”

I blinked at her. “You? My second?”

She turned to face me as she finished buttoning her shirt and smiled faintly. “Duty before ego. Relatively few of the Wardens with sufficient seasoning for the role were willing. I thought it might be best if you worked with me instead of Morgan.”

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Cap. That keen interpersonal insight.”

“That and because I’m quite good at killing things,” Luccio said, nodding. She turned to the fireplace and took Gard’s little wooden box off the mantel. “Dresden…”

“Hell’s bells,” I breathed, sitting up. “Captain, that thing is dangerous. Put it down.” I snapped out that last in a tone of pure authority, one I’d gotten used to when working with Molly and various folks I’d met through the Paranet.

She froze in her tracks and arched an eyebrow at me, but only for a split second. Then she smoothly replaced the box and stepped away from it. “I see. You were holding it when we dragged you in here. You wouldn’t let it go, in fact.”

“Well,” I said, “no.”

“Which, I take it, explains what you were doing at the station.”

“Well,” I said, “yes.”

“Quite a coincidence,” she said.

I shook my head. “In my experience, when there’s a Knight of the Cross around, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

She frowned at that. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to confession. Nearly a century, in fact. I’m not aware that the Almighty owes me any favors.”

“Mysterious ways,” I said smugly.

She laughed. “I take it they’ve used that line on you before?”

“Constantly,” I said.

“A good man,” she said. “You’re lucky to have him as a friend.”

I frowned and said quietly, “Yeah. I am.” I shook my head. “When’s the parley?”

“Noon, tomorrow.” She nodded at the mantel. “Can you tell me what’s in there?”

“Options,” I said. “If the parley fails.”

“Out with it, Dresden,” she said.

I shook my head.

She put a fist on one hip. “Why not?”

“Gave my word.”

She considered that for a moment. Then she nodded once and said, “As you wish. Get some more rest. You’ll need it.” Then she prowled over to my love seat, sank wearily down into it, and, without another word, curled up under a blanket. She was apparently asleep seconds later.

I thought about getting up and checking out Gard’s case, maybe calling Michael and Murphy, but the weariness that suddenly settled on my limbs made all of that sound impossibly difficult. So I settled in a little more comfortably and found sleep coming swiftly to me as well.

The last thing I noticed, before I dropped off, was that under all the blankets I was entirely undressed.

And I was clean.

Chapter Twenty-seven

“I still don’t see why I can’t go,” Molly said, folding her arms crossly.

“You know how you told me how much you hate it when your parents quote scripture at you to answer your questions?” I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not gonna do that. Because I don’t know this one well enough to get the quote right.”

She rolled her eyes.

“But it’s something about the best way to defeat temptation is to avoid it.”

“Oh, please,” Molly said.

“Actually, he’s right,” Thomas said, passing over my duster. “Seriously. I know temptation.”

Molly gave my brother a sidelong look and blushed faintly.

“Stop that,” I told him.

Thomas shrugged. “Can’t help it. I’m hungry. I wound up jumping rooftop to rooftop for half an hour, dodging a bunch of three-foot-tall lunatics with bows and arrows.”

“Elves,” I murmured. “Someone on Summer’s team was calling in backup, too. Interesting. I wonder which side tipped the scales first.”

“You’re welcome,” Thomas said.

“Hey,” Molly snapped. “Can we get back on topic? I know how to handle myself, Harry. This is supposed to be a talk, not a fight.”

I sighed, turning to her. We were talking to each other in the Carpenters’ kitchen, while everyone else geared up in the workshop. Thomas had sneaked in the front door of the house to pass my staff and coat back to me, after his evening of decoy work.

“Grasshopper,” I said, “think who we’re going to be talking to.”

“Nicodemus. The head of the Denarians,” she said. “The man who tried to kill my father and my teacher, and did his best to put a demon inside my little brother’s head.”

I blinked. “How did you know about—”

“The usual, eavesdropping on Mom and Dad,” she replied impatiently. “The point being that I’m not going to be tempted to pick up one of his coins, Harry.”

“I’m not talking about you being tempted, kid,” I said. “I’m worried about Nicodemus. Given everything that’s going on, I’d rather not wave a Knight of the Cross’s brushed-with-darkness daughter under his nose. We’re trying to avoid a huge fight, not find new reasons to start one.”

Molly gave me a steady stare.

“Hey,” I said, “how’s that homework I gave you coming?”

She stared some more. She’d learned from Charity, so she was pretty good at it. I’d gotten Charity’s stare plenty, though, so I’d been inoculated. She turned in silence and stalked out of the kitchen.

Thomas snorted quietly.

“What?” I asked him.

“You really think you’re going to avoid a fight?”

“I think I’m not going to hand them any of Michael’s family as hostages,” I said. “Nicodemus has got something up his sleeve.” As I spoke, I made sure the little holdout knife in its leather sheath was still secured up mine. “The only question is who is going to start the music and where.”

“Where’s the meeting?”

I shrugged. “Neither party knows. Kincaid and the Archive are picking a neutral spot. They left my place early this morning. They’re going to call. But I doubt they’ll start it this soon. My money says that Nicodemus will want something in exchange for Marcone. That’s when he’ll make his move.”

“At the exchange?” Thomas asked.

I nodded. “Try to grab the whole tamale.”

“Uh-huh,” Thomas said. “Speaking of, I came by your place after I was done playing tag with assassin midgets last night. Got a whiff of perfume on the doorway and checked through the window on the south side of the house.” He gave me a sly grin. “About fucking time, man.”

I frowned at him. “What?”

The grin faded. “You mean you still didn’t…Oh, empty night, Harry.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw you, talking to a woman who had already taken half her clothes off for you, man.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Thomas, it wasn’t like that. She was just getting clean.” I gave him the short version of the previous evening.

Thomas gave me a look of his own. Then he thwapped me gently upside the head.

“Hey!” I said.

“Harry,” he said. “You were sleeping for hours. She had plenty of time to get clean. You think she sat around for all that time because she wasn’t tired just yet? You think she didn’t plan on you seeing her?”

I opened my mouth to answer and left it that way.

“For that matter, she could have settled down behind the couch, where you couldn’t have seen her if you did wake up,” Thomas continued. “Not right by the fire, where she made what I thought was quite a nice little picture for you.”

“I…I didn’t think she…”

He stared at me. “You didn’t make a move.”

“She’s…Luccio is my commanding officer, man. We…we work together.”

Thomas rolled his eyes. “That’s a twenty-first-century attitude, man. She’s a nineteenth-century girl. She doesn’t draw the lines the same way you and I do.”

“But I never thought—”

“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “Tell me you aren’t that stupid.”

“Stupid?” I demanded.

“Yeah,” he said bluntly. “Stupid. If she offered and you turned her down because you had a reason you didn’t want to, that’s one thing. Never realizing what she was talking about, though—that’s just pathetic.”

“She never said—”

My brother threw up his hands. “What does a woman need to do, Harry? Rip her clothes off, throw herself on top of you, and shimmy while screaming, ‘Do me, baby!’?” He shook his head. “Sometimes you’re a frigging idiot.”

“I…” I spread my hands. “She just went to sleep, man.”

“Because she was being thoughtful of you, you knob. She didn’t want to come on too strong and make you uncomfortable, especially given that she’s older and more experienced than you are, and your commanding officer to boot. She didn’t want to make you feel pressured. So she left you plenty of room to turn her down gracefully.” He rolled his eyes. “Read between the lines once in a while, man.”

“I…” I sighed. “I’ve never been hit on by a woman a hundred and fifty years older than me,” I said lamely.

“Try to use your brain around women once in a while, instead of just your juju stick.” Thomas tossed me my staff.

I caught it. “Everyone’s a critic.”

My brother purloined an apple from the basket on the island in the kitchen on his way to the door, glanced over his shoulder, and said, “Moron. Thank God Nicodemus is a man.”

He left, and I stood there for a second being annoyed at him. I mean, sure, he was probably right—but that only made it more annoying, not less.

Something else he was right about: Anastasia had looked simply amazing in front of that fire.

Huh.

I hadn’t really thought of her in terms of her first name before. Just as “Luccio” or “the captain” or “Captain Luccio.” Come to think of it, she’d been out of the dating game for even longer than I had. Could be that she hadn’t exactly been brimming with self-confidence last night, either.

The situation bore thinking upon.

Later.

For now, there was intrigue and inevitable betrayal afoot, and I had to focus.

I headed out to the workshop. The day was brighter than the one before, but the cloud cover still hadn’t gone. It had stopped snowing, though the wind kicked up enough powder to make it hard to tell. A check of the mirror had revealed that the tip of my nose, the tops of my ears, and the highest parts of my cheeks were rough and ruddy from exposure to cold and my brush with hypothermia. They looked like they’d suffered from a heavy sunburn. Added to my raccoon eyes, I thought them quite charming.

No wonder Luccio had thrown herself at me with such wanton abandon.

Dammit, Harry, focus, focus. Danger is afoot.

I opened the door to the workshop just as Michael folded his arms and said, “I still don’t see why I can’t go.”

“Because we’re trying to avoid a fight,” Luccio said calmly, “and an atmosphere of nervous fear is not going to foster a good environment for a peaceful exchange.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” Michael said.

“No,” Luccio said, smiling faintly. “But they’re afraid of you.”

“In any case,” Gard said, “neither the Church nor the Knights are signatories of the Accords. Not to put it too bluntly, Sir Michael, but this is quite literally none of your business.”

“You don’t know these people,” Michael said quietly. “Not the way I do.”

“I do,” I said quietly. “At least in some ways.”

Michael turned to give me a steady, searching look. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Do you think I should stay away?”

I didn’t answer him immediately. Gard watched me from where she sat on the edge of her cot, now dressed and upright, if not precisely healthy-looking. Hendricks sat at the workbench again, although he was sharpening a knife this time. Weapons nuts are always fiddling with their gear. Murphy, seated down the bench from Hendricks, was cleaning her gun. She wasn’t moving her wounded arm much, though she apparently had full use of that hand. Sanya loomed in a corner near the workbench, patiently working some kind of leather polish into Esperacchius’s scabbard.

“I don’t think this is where they’ll try to stick in the knife,” I said quietly. I turned my eyes to Luccio. “I also don’t think it would be stupid to have a couple of Knights on standby, in case I’m wrong.”

Luccio’s head rocked back a little.

“No reason not to hedge our bets,” I told her quietly. “These people don’t play nice like the Unseelie fae, or the Red Court. I’ve seen them in action, Captain.”

She pursed her lips, and her eyes never wavered from my face. “All right, Warden,” she said, finally. “It’s your city.”

“I did not agree to this,” Gard said, rising, her expression dark.

“Oh, deal with it, blondie,” I told her. “Beggars and choosers. The White Council is backing you up on this one, but don’t start thinking it’s because we work for you. Or your boss.”

“I’m going to be there too,” Murphy said quietly, without looking up from her gun. “Not just somewhere nearby. There. In the room.”

Pretty much everyone there said, “No,” or some variant of it at that point, except for Hendricks, who didn’t talk a lot, and me, who knew better.

Murphy put her gun back together during the protests and loaded it in the silence afterward.

“If you people want to have your plots and your shadowy wars in private,” she said, “you should take them to Antarctica or somewhere. Or you could do this in New York, or Boise, and this isn’t any of my business. But you aren’t in any of those places. You’re in Chicago. And when things get out of hand, it’s the people I’m sworn to protect who are endangered.” She rose, and though she was the shortest person in the room, she wasn’t looking up at anyone. “I’m going to be there as a moderating influence with your cooperation. Or we can do it the other way. Your choice, but I know a lot of cops who are sick and tired of this supernatural bullshit sneaking up on us.”

She directed a level gaze around the room. She hadn’t put the gun away.

I smiled at her. Just a little.

Gard looked at me and said, “Dresden.”

I shrugged and shook my head sadly. “What? Once we gave them the vote, it went totally out of control.”

“You’re a pig, Harry,” Murphy growled.

“But a pig smart enough to bow to the inevitable,” I said. I looked at Gard and said, “Far as I’m concerned, she’s got a legitimate interest. I’ll back it.”

“Warden,” Luccio said in a warning tone, “may I speak to you?”

I walked over to her.

“She can’t possibly know,” Luccio said quietly, “the kind of grief she could be letting herself in for.”

“She can,” I replied as quietly. “She’s been through more than most Wardens, Captain. And she’s sure as hell covered my back enough times to have earned the right to make up her own mind.”

Luccio frowned at me for a moment, and then turned to face Murphy. “Sergeant,” she said quietly. “This could expose you to a…considerable degree of risk. Are you sure?”

“If it were your town,” Murphy said, “your job, your duty? Could you stand around with your fingers in your ears?”

Luccio nodded slowly and then inclined her head.

“Besides,” Murphy said, half smiling as she put her gun in her shoulder holster, “it’s not as if I’m leaving you people much choice.”

“I like her,” Sanya rumbled in his deep, half-swallowed accent. “She is so tiny and fierce. I don’t suppose she knows how to—”

“Sanya,” Michael said, his voice very firm. “We have talked about this.”

The dark-skinned Russian sighed and shrugged. “It could not hurt to ask.”

“Sanya.”

He lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning, and fell silent.

The door to the house banged shut, and running footsteps crunched through the snow. Molly opened the door to the workshop and said, “Harry, Kincaid’s on the phone. He’s got the location for the meeting.”

“Kincaid?” Murphy said in a rather sharp voice.

“Yeah, didn’t I mention that?” I asked her, my tone perfectly innocent as I headed for the door. “He showed up last night.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We’ll talk.”

“Tiny,” Sanya rumbled to Michael, clenching a demonstrative fist. “But fierce.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

People think that nothing can possibly happen in the middle of a big city—say, Chicago—without lots of witnesses seeing everything that happened. What most people don’t really understand is that there are two reasons why that just ain’t so—the first being that humans in general make lousy witnesses.

Take something fairly innocuous, like a minor traffic accident at a busy pedestrian intersection. Beep-beep, crunch, followed by a lot of shouting and arm waving. Line up everyone at that intersection and ask them what happened. Every single one of them will give you a slightly different story. Some of them will have seen the whole thing start to finish. Some of them will have seen only the aftermath. Some of them will have seen only one of the cars. Some of them will tell you, with perfect assurance, that they saw both cars from start to finish, including such details as the expressions on the drivers’ faces and changes in vehicle acceleration, despite the fact that they would have to be performing simultaneous feats of bilocation, levitation, and telepathy to have done so.

Most people will be honest. And incorrect. Honest incorrectness isn’t the same thing as lying, but it amounts to the same thing when you’re talking about witnesses to a specific event. A relative minority will limit themselves to reporting what they actually saw, not things that they have filled in by assumption, or memories contaminated by too much exposure to other points of view. Of that relative minority, even fewer will be the kind of person who, by natural inclination or possibly training, has the capacity for noticing and retaining a large amount of detail in a limited amount of time.

The point being that once events pass into memory, they already have a tendency to begin to become muddled and cloudy. It can be more of an art form than a science to gain an accurate picture of what transpired based upon eyewitness descriptions—and that’s for a matter of relative unimportance, purely a matter of fallible intellect, with no deep personal or emotional issues involved.

Throw emotions into the mix, and mild confusion turns into utter havoc. Take that same fender-bender, make it an accident between a carload of neoskinhead types and some gangbangers at a busy crosswalk in a South Side neighborhood, and you’ve got the kind of situation that kicks off riots. No matter what happens, you probably aren’t going to be able to get a straight story out of anyone afterward. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to get any story out of anyone.

Once human emotions get tossed into the mix, everything is up for grabs.

The second reason things can go unnoticed in the middle of the big city is pretty simple: walls. Walls block line of sight.

Let me rephrase that: Walls block line of involvement.

The human animal is oriented around a sense of sight. Things aren’t real until we see them: Seeing is believing, right? Which is also why there are illusionists—they can make us see things that aren’t real, and it seems amazing.

If a human being actually sees something bad happening, there’s a better chance that he or she will act and get involved than if the sense of sight isn’t involved. History illustrates it. Oh, sure, Allied governments heard reports of Nazi death camps in World War II, but that was a far cry from when the first troops actually saw the imprisoned Jews as they liberated the camps. Hearst had known it before that: You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. And according to some, he did.

Conversely, if you don’t see something happening, it isn’t as real. You can hear reports of tragedies, but they don’t hit you the way they would if you were standing there in the ruins.

Nowhere has as many walls as big cities do, and walls keep you from seeing things. They help make things less real. Sure, maybe you hear loud, sharp noises outside some nights. But it’s easy to tell yourself that those aren’t gunshots, that there’s no need to call the police, no need to even worry. It’s probably just a car backfiring. Sure. Or a kid with fireworks. There might be loud wailing or screams coming from the apartment upstairs, but you don’t know that the drunken neighbor is beating his wife with a rolling pin again. It’s not really any of your business, and they’re always fighting, and the man is scary, besides. Yeah, you know that there are cars coming and going at all hours from your neighbor’s place, and that the crowd there isn’t exactly the most upright-looking bunch, but you haven’t seen him dealing drugs. Not even to the kids you see going over there sometimes. It’s easier and safer to shut the door, be quiet, and turn up the TV.

We’re ostriches and the whole world is sand.

Newbies who are just learning about the world of wizards and the unpleasant side of the supernatural always think there’s this huge conspiracy to hide it from everyone. There isn’t. There’s no need for one, beyond preventing actual parades down Main Street. Hell’s bells, from where I’m standing, it’s a miracle anyone ever notices.

Which is why I was fairly sure that our parley with the Archive and the Denarians in the Shedd Aquarium was going to go unremarked. Oh, sure, it was right in the middle of town, within a stone’s throw of the Field Museum and within sight of Soldier Field, but given the weather there wasn’t going to be a lot of foot traffic—and the Aquarium was in its off-season. There might be a handful of people there caring for the animals, but I felt confident that Kincaid would find a way to convince them to be somewhere else.

Murphy had rented a car, since hers was so busted-up. The past few days of snow had seen a load of accidents, and there weren’t any compact cars left, so she’d wound up with a silver Caddy the size of a yacht, and I’d called shotgun. Hendricks and Gard rode in the backseat. Gard had gotten to the car under her own power, though she had been moving carefully. Luccio sat beside Gard with her slender staff and her silver rapier resting on the floorboards between her feet, though my own staff was a lot longer and had to slant back between the front seats and past Gard’s head, up into the rear window well.

City work crews were still laboring to clear roads and access to critical facilities. An off-season tourist attraction was not high on anyone’s priority list. For that matter, the Field Museum had been closed due to the weather, which meant that there really weren’t any functioning public buildings for several hundred yards in any direction.

That could be a problem. Michael’s white truck wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere close without being spotted, which meant that he and Sanya were going to be two, maybe three minutes away from helping, provided they could be signaled at all. That was practically the other side of the world, where a violent confrontation is concerned. On the other hand, it also meant that the bad guys weren’t going to be able to bring in any help without being spotted, either.

Provided they were driving cars, of course.

Glass half-full, Harry, glass half-full. There was no profit to be had in a fight—not yet, anyway. Whatever Nicodemus was after, he’d have to make his demands before he had a chance to double-cross us out of whatever he wanted us to bring him. Besides, given what I’d seen of the Archive in action, he’d be freaking insane to try anything where she was officiating. She didn’t brook slights to her authority lightly.

The nearest street had been cleared by city trucks, but none of the parking lots had been done, and the excess snow from the streets formed small mountains on either side of the road.

“Looks like we’re going to have to walk in,” Murphy said quietly.

“Keep circling. They keep the animals here year-round,” I said quietly. “And they’ve got to be fed every day. The staff will have broken a trail in somewhere.”

“Perhaps they let the exhibits go hungry during the storm,” Gard suggested. “Few would venture into this for the sake of their paychecks.”

“You don’t do oceanography for the money,” I said. “And you sure as hell don’t take up working with dolphins and whales for the vast paycheck and the company car.” I shook my head. “They love them. Someone’s gone in every day. They’ll at least have broken a foot trail.”

“There,” Murphy said, pointing. Sure enough, someone had hacked a narrow opening into the mounded snow at the side of the road and dug out a footpath on the other side. Murph had to park at the side of the road, with the doors of the rental car just an inch from the snow walls. If someone came along going too fast, given the condition the streets were in, the Caddy was going to get smashed, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of choice.

We all piled out of the driver’s side of the car into the wan light of early afternoon. Luccio and I both paused to put on our grey Warden’s cloaks. Cloaks look cool and everything, but they don’t go well with cars. Luccio buckled on a finely tooled leather belt that held a sword on her left hip and a Colt on her right.

My .44 was back in my duster pocket, and the weight of both the coat and the gun felt greatly comforting. The wind caught my coat and the cloak both, and almost knocked me over until I got them gathered in close to my body again and under control. Hendricks, stolid and huge in his dark, sensible London Fog winter coat, went by me with a small smile on his face.

Hendricks took point, and the rest of us followed him through what could only generously be called a trail. Instead of the snow being up to our chests, on the trail we sank only to our knees. It was a long, cold slog up to the Aquarium, and then around the entire building, where the snow had piled up to truly impressive depths in the lee of the wind on the south side of the structure. Wind hustling in over the frozen lake felt like it had come straight from outer space, and everyone but Gard hunched up miserably against it. The trail led us to an employee’s door in the side of the building, which proved to have had the lock housing on its frame covered in duct tape, leaving it open.

Hendricks opened the door, and I stuck my head in and took a quick look around. The building was dark beneath its smothering blanket of snow, except for a few dim night-lights set low on the walls. I didn’t see anyone, but I took an extra moment or two to extend my senses into the building, searching for any lurking presences or hostile magicks.

Nothing.

But a little paranoia never hurts in a situation like this.

“Captain,” I said quietly, “what do you think?”

Luccio moved up beside me and studied the hall beyond the doorway, her dark eyes flickering alertly back and forth. “It seems clear.”

I nodded, said, “Excuse me,” and went through the door in a burst of raging anticlimax. I stomped the snow off my boots and jeans as best I could as the others came in behind me. I moved farther down the hall, straining to sense anyone approaching, which meant that I heard the soft scuff of deliberately obtrusive footsteps two or three seconds before Kincaid rounded the far corner. He was dressed in his customary black clothing again, fatigue pants, and a hunting jacket over body armor, and he had enough guns strapped to his body to outfit a terrorist cell, or a Texan nuclear family.

He gave his chin a sharp little lift toward me by way of greeting. “This way, ple…” His eyes focused past me and his voice died in midcourtesy. He stared over my shoulder for a second, sighed, and then told me, “She can’t be here.”

I felt my eyebrows rising. The corners of my mouth went along for the ride. I leaned in a little to Kincaid and murmured, “You tell her.”

His gaze went from Murphy to me. A less charitable man than I might have called his expression sour. He drummed one thumb on the handle of a sidearm and asked, “She threaten to call in the constabulary?”

“She’s got this funny thing where she takes her oath to protect the city and citizens of Chicago seriously. It’s as if her promises mean something to her.”

Kincaid grimaced. “I’ll have to clear it with the Archive.”

“No Murphy, no meeting,” I said. “Tell her I said that.”

The assassin grunted. “You can tell her yourself.”

He led me through the halls of the Shedd, to the Oceanarium. It was probably the most popular exhibit there—a great big old semicircular building containing the largest indoor aquatic exhibits in the world. Its outer ring of exhibits sported a number of absolutely huge pools containing millions of gallons of water and a number of dolphins and those little white whales whose names I can never remember. The same as the caviar. Beluga, beluga whales. There were rocks and trees built up around the outsides of the pools, complete with moss and plants and everything, to make it look like the Pacific Northwest. Although I was fairly sure that the bleacher seats, where the audience could marvel at whales and dolphins who would show up and do their usual daily health inspections for their trainers to the sound of applause, weren’t indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. I think those were actually Floridian in origin.

A pair of dolphins swept by us in the water, flicking their heads out to get a look at us as they went. One of them made a chittering sound that wasn’t very melodic. The other twitched its tail and splashed a little water our way, all in good fun. They weren’t the attractive Flipper kind of dolphins. They were regular dolphins that aren’t as pretty and don’t get cast on television. Maybe they just refused to sell out and see a plastic surgeon. I held up a fist to them. Represent.

Kincaid scanned the bleachers, frowning. “She’s supposed to be sitting here. Dammit.”

I sighed and circled back toward the stairs to the lower level. “She might be the Archive but she’s still a kid, Kincaid.”

He frowned and looked at me. “So?”

“So? Kids like cute.”

He blinked at me. “Cute?”

“Come on.”

I led him downstairs.

On the lower level of the Oceanarium there’s an inner ring of exhibits, too, containing both penguins and—wait for it—sea otters.

I mean, come on, sea otters. They open abalone with rocks while floating on their backs. How much cuter does it get than small, fuzzy, floating, playful tool users with big, soft brown eyes?

We found Ivy standing in front of one of the sea otter habitats, dressed much more warmly and practically this time, and carrying a small backpack. She was watching two otters chase each other around the habitat, and smiling.

Kincaid stopped in his tracks when he saw that. Just to see what he’d do, I tried to step past him. He shot me a look like he’d murder me if I tried to interrupt her, and my opinion of him went up a notch. I eased back and waited. No skin off my teeth to let the girl watch the otters for a minute.

It had been hard sometimes, when I was a kid, after my magic had started coming in. I’d felt weird and different—alone. It had gradually distanced me from the other kids. But Ivy had never had the luxury of belonging, even temporarily. From what I understood, she’d been the Archive since she was born, fully aware and stuffed full of knowledge from the time she’d opened her eyes. I couldn’t even imagine how hideous that would be.

Hell, the more I learned as I got older, the more I wished I were ignorant again. Well. Innocent, anyway. I remembered what it was like, at least.

Ivy had never been innocent.

I could let her smile at sea otters. You bet.

A shadow moved behind me, and I willed myself not to be creeped out. I turned and saw the two dolphins from the tank above cruise by, observing us again. The huge tanks contained observation windows running the whole length of the second-level gallery, so you could see the cute things on one side, and ogle the homely dolphins and the caviar whales on the other.

From down here you could also see the far wall of the big tank, which was a curved wall of glass that faced the open waters of Lake Michigan. That always seemed a little sadistic to me. I mean, here were animals whom nature had equipped to roam the open vastness of the deep blue sea, being kept in a mere three million gallons or so of water. Bad enough to do that to them without giving them a window seat onto all that open water too.

Or maybe it wasn’t. I hear it kind of sucks to be a whale or a dolphin in the open ocean these days, given the state of the fishing industry.

“I guess they’re looking at a can one way or another,” I muttered.

“Hmmm?” Kincaid said.

“Nothing.”

Ivy let out her breath in a satisfied sigh a moment later as the otters vanished into their den. Then she turned toward us and blinked. “Oh,” she said. Her cheeks colored slightly, and for a moment she looked very much like a young girl. “Oh.” She smoothed wrinkles that didn’t exist in her trousers, nodded at Kincaid, and said, “Yes?”

Kincaid nodded toward me. “Local law enforcement wants a representative present to observe. Dresden’s supporting it.”

She took that in for a moment. “Sergeant Murphy?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see.” She frowned. When she spoke, her tone was careful, as if she was considering each word before she spoke it. “Speaking as arbiter, I have no objection, provided both parties involved in the parley give their assent.”

“Right,” Kincaid said. He turned and started walking.

I nodded to Ivy, who returned the gesture. Then I turned and hurried to catch up to Kincaid. “So?” I asked him as we climbed the stairs.

“So,” he said, “let’s go talk to Nicodemus.”

Kincaid led me down the way from the Oceanarium and out to the main entry hall. It’s another grandiose collection of shining stone floor and towering Corinthian columns, arranged around a huge tank the size of a roller rink. It’s full of salt water and coral and seaweed and all kinds of tropical fish. Sometimes there’s a diver with a microphone built into his or her mask feeding the little sharks and fish and talking to gawking tourists. Diffused light floods in through an enormous, triangular-paneled cupola overhead.

The recent snow had blackened the panes of the cupola and drifted up over most of the glass front doors, so the only light in the room came from the little colored lights in the huge tank. Fish glided through the tank like wraiths, the odd light casting sinister shades over their scales, and their shadows drifted disembodied over the walls of the room, magnified by the distance and the glass walls of the aquarium.

It was eerie as hell.

One of the shadows drew my attention as some instinct picked out a strong, subtle sense of menace about it. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that this particular shadow disturbed me because it was human, and moving in a perfect, gliding pace around the wall, behind the shadow of one of the tank’s small but genuine sharks—even though the man who cast the shadow was standing perfectly still.

Nicodemus turned from contemplating the fish swimming in the tank so that I could see the outline of his profile against the softly colored lights. His teeth gleamed orange-red in the light of the nearest underwater lamp.

I stopped myself from taking an involuntary step back, but just barely.

“It is a metaphor,” he said quietly. He had a good voice, mellow and surprisingly deep. “Look at them. Swimming. Eating. Mating. Hunting, killing, fleeing, hiding, each to its nature. All of them so different. So alien to one another. Their world in constant motion, always changing, always threatening, challenging.” He moved one arm, sweeping it in a wider gesture. “They cannot know how fragile it is, or that they are constantly surrounded by beings with the power to destroy their world and kill them all with the twitch of a finger. It is no fault of theirs, of course.” Nicodemus shrugged. “They are simply…limited. Very, very limited. Hello, Dresden.”

“You’re playing the creepy vibe a little hard,” I said. “Might as well go for broke, put on a black top hat and pipe in some organ music.”

He laughed quietly. It didn’t sound evil as much as it did rich and supremely confident. “There’s some irregularity with the meeting, I take it?”

Kincaid glanced at me and nodded.

“Local law enforcement wishes a representative to be present,” I said.

Nicodemus’s head tilted. “Really? Who?”

“Does it matter?” Kincaid asked, his tone bored. “The Archive is willing to permit it, if you have no objections.”

Nicodemus turned all the way around finally. I couldn’t see his expression, just his outline against the tank. His shadow, meanwhile, kept circling the room behind the shark. “Two conditions,” he said.

“Go on,” Kincaid said.

“First, that the representative be unarmed, and that the Archive guarantee his neutrality in the absence of factors that conflict with matters of law-enforcement duty.”

Kincaid glanced at me. Murphy wouldn’t like the “unarmed” part, but she’d do it. If nothing else, she wouldn’t want to back down in front of me—or maybe Kincaid.

But I had to wonder, what was Nicodemus’s problem with an armed cop? Guns did not bother the man. Not even a little. Why that stipulation?

I nodded at Kincaid.

“Excellent,” Nicodemus said. “Second…” He walked forward, each footstep sounding clearly upon the marble floors, until we could see him in the nearest floorlights. He was a man of medium height and build, his features handsome, strong, his eyes dark and intelligent. Hints of silver graced his immaculate hair, though he was holding up pretty well for a man of two thousand. He wore a black silk shirt, dark pants, and what could have been mistaken for a grey Western tie at his throat. It wasn’t. It was an old, old rope from the same field as his coin. “Second,” he said, “I want five minutes alone with Dresden.”

“No offense, Nick,” I said, “but that’s about five minutes longer than I want to spend with you.”

“Exactly,” he replied, smiling. It was the kind of smile you see at country clubs and in boardrooms and on crocodiles. “There’s really never a good opportunity for us to have a civilized conversation. I’m seizing the chance for a chat.” He gestured at the building around us. “Sans demolition, if you think you can refrain.”

I scowled at him.

“Mister Archleone,” Kincaid said, “are you offering a peace bond? If so, the Archive will hold you to it.”

“I offer no such thing,” Nicodemus said without looking away from me. “Dresden would count it as worthless coin, and his is the only opinion that really matters in this particular situation.” He spread his hands. “A talk, Dresden. Five minutes. I assure you, if I wished to do you harm, even the Hellhound’s reputation”—he paused deliberately to glance at Kincaid with naked contempt in his gaze—“would not make me hesitate for an instant. I would have killed you already.”

Kincaid gave Nicodemus a chill little smile, and the air boiled with potential violence.

I held up a hand and said quietly, “Easy there, Wild Bill. I’ll talk with him. Then we’ll have our sit-down. All nice and civilized.”

Kincaid glanced at me and arched a shaggy, dark-gold eyebrow. “You sure?”

I shrugged a shoulder.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” He paused, then added, “If either of you initiates violence outside of the strictures of a formal duel, you’ll be in violation of the Accords. In addition, you will have offered an insult to the reputation and integrity of the Archive—which I will take personal action to amend.”

The wintry chill in his blue eyes was mostly for Nicodemus, but I got some of it too. Kincaid meant it, and I’d seen him in action before. He was one of the scarier people I knew; the more so because he went about matters with ruthless practicality, unhindered by personal ego or the pride one often encountered in the supernatural set. Kincaid wouldn’t care if he looked into my eyes as he killed me, if that was what he set out to do. He’d be just as happy to put a bullet through my head from a thousand meters away, or wire a bomb to my car and read about my death on the Internet the next morning. Whatever got the job done.

That kind of attitude doesn’t help you when it comes to finding flashy or dramatic ways to do away with your enemies, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up in economy. Marcone, whom this whole mess was about, worked the same way, and it had taken him far. You crossed such men at extreme peril.

Nicodemus let out another quiet, charming laugh. He didn’t look impressed by Kincaid. Maybe that was a good thing. Too much pride can kill a man.

On the other hand, from what I’d seen of him, maybe Nicodemus really was that tough.

“Run along, Hellhound,” Nicodemus said. “Your mistress’s honor is quite safe.” He drew an X on his chest. “Cross my heart.”

Maybe it was an inside reference. Kincaid’s eyes flashed with something hot and furious before they went glacial again. He nodded to me, then precisely the same way to Nicodemus, and left.

I’m pretty sure the room didn’t actually become darker and scarier and more threatening when I was left alone with the most dangerous man I’d ever crossed.

But it sure felt that way.

Nicodemus turned that toothy predator’s smile to me as his shadow began to glide around the walls of the entry hall. Circling me. Like a shark.

“So, Harry,” he said, walking closer, “what shall we talk about?”

Chapter Twenty-nine

“You’re the one who wanted a conversation,” I said. “And don’t call me Harry. My friends call me Harry.”

He turned one hand palm up. “And who is to say I cannot be your friend?”

“That would be me, Nick. I say. Here, I’ll show you.” I enunciated: “You can’t be my friend.”

“If I am to call you Dresden, it is only fair that you should call me Archleone.”

“Archleone?” I asked. “As in ‘seeking whom he may devour’? Kinda pretentious, isn’t it?”

For half of a second, the smile turned into something almost genuine. “For a godless heathen, you are entirely too familiar with scripture. You know that I can kill you, do you not?”

“We’d make a mess,” I said. “And who knows? I might get lucky.”

Really, really, really lucky.

Nicodemus moved a hand in acknowledgment. “But barring luck.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you offer such insouciance regardless?”

“Habit,” I said. “It doesn’t make you special or anything, believe me.”

“Oh, I picked the right coin for you.” He started to walk in a slow circle around me, the way you might a car at the dealership. “There are rumors that a certain Warden has been flinging Hellfire at his foes. How do you like it?”

“I’d like it better if it came in Pine Fresh and New Car instead of only Rotting Egg,” I said.

Nicodemus completed his circuit of me and arched an eyebrow. “You haven’t taken up the coin.”

“I would, but it’s in my piggybank,” I said, “and I can’t break the piggy, obviously. He’s too cute.”

“Lasciel’s shadow must be slipping,” Nicodemus said, shaking his head. “It has had years to reason with you, and still you refuse our gifts.”

“What with the curly little tail and the big, sad brown eyes,” I said, as if he hadn’t said anything.

One of his heels hit the ground with unnecessary force, and he stopped walking. He inhaled through his nose and out again. “Definitely the proper coin for you.” He folded his hands carefully behind his back. “Dresden, you have a skewed image of us. We were operating at cross-purposes the first time we met, and you probably learned everything you know about us from Carpenter and his cohorts. The Church has always had excellent propaganda.”

“Actually, the murder, torture, and destruction you and your people perpetrated spoke pretty loudly all by themselves.”

Nicodemus rolled his eyes. “Dresden, please. You have done all of those things at one time or another. Poor Cassius told me all about what you did to him in the hotel room.”

“Gosh,” I said, grinning. “If someone had walked in on us in the middle of that sentence, would my face be red or what?”

He stared at me for a second, and the emotion and expression drained out of his features like dewdrops vanishing under a desert sunrise. What was left behind was little more than desolation. “Harry Dresden,” he said, so softly that I could barely make it out. “I admire your defiance of greater powers than your own. I always have. But tempus fugit. For all of us.”

I blinked.

For all of us? What the hell did he mean by that?

“Have you not seen the signs around you?” Nicodemus asked. “Beings acting against their natures? Creatures behaving in ways that they should not? The old conventions and customs being cast aside?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re talking about the Black Council.”

He tilted his head slightly to one side. Then his mouth twitched at a corner and he nodded his head very slightly. “They move in shadows, manipulate puppets. Some of them may be on your Council, yes. As good a name as any.”

“Stop playing innocent,” I spat at him. “I saw the leftovers of the Black Council attack on Arctis Tor. I know what Hellfire smells like. One of yours was in on it.”

Nicodemus.

Blinked.

Then he surged forward—fast. So fast that by the time I’d registered that he was moving, my back had already hit the wall that had been twenty feet behind me. He hadn’t been trying to hurt me. If he had, the back of my head would have splattered open. He just pinned me there against the wall with one hand on my throat, tighter and harder than a steel vise.

“What?” he demanded, his voice still a whisper. His eyes, though, were very wide. Both sets of them. A second set, these glowing faintly green, had opened just above his eyebrows—Anduriel’s, I presumed.

“Ack,” I said. “Glarghk.”

His arm quivered for a second, and then he lowered his eyelids until they were almost closed. A moment later he very, very slowly relaxed his arm, allowing me to breathe again. My throat burned, but air came in, and I wheezed for a second or two while he stepped back from me.

I glared up at him and debated slamming him through one of those Corinthian columns by way of objecting to being manhandled. But I decided that I didn’t want to piss him off.

Nicodemus’s lips moved, but an entirely different voice issued from them—something musical, lyrical, and androgynous. “At least it has some survival instinct.”

Nicodemus shook his head as if buzzed by a mosquito and said, “Dresden, speak.”

“I’m not your friend,” I said, my voice rough. “I’m not your damned dog, either. Conversation over.” I took a few steps to one side so that I could move around him without taking my eyes off him, and started to leave.

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “Stop.”

I kept walking.

I was almost out of the room before he spoke again, resignation in his tone. “Please.”

I paused, without turning around.

“I…reacted inappropriately. Especially for this venue. I apologize.”

“Huh,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “Now I wish I had brought Michael. He’d have fainted.”

“Your friend and his brethren are tools of an organization with its own agenda, and they always have been,” Nicodemus said. “But that’s not the issue here.”

“No,” I said. “The issue is Marcone.”

Nicodemus waved a hand. “Marcone is an immediate matter. There are long-term issues in play.”

I turned to face him and sighed. “I think you’re probably full of crap. But okay, I’ll bite. What long-term issues?”

“Those surrounding the activities of your Black Council,” Nicodemus said. “Are you certain you saw evidence of Hellfire in use at the site of the attack on Arctis Tor?”

“Yes.” I didn’t add the word dummy. Who says I ain’t diplomatic?

Nicodemus’s fingers flexed into the shape of claws and then relaxed again. He pursed his lips. “Interesting. Then the only question is if the contamination is among standing members of our Order or…” He let the thought trail off and glanced at me, lifting an eyebrow.

I followed the logic to the only other people in possession of any of the coins. “Someone in the Church,” I whispered, with a sick feeling in my stomach.

“Historically speaking, we get about half of the coins back that way,” Nicodemus noted. “What would you say if I told you that you and I might have a great many common interests in the future?”

“I wouldn’t say much of anything,” I said. “I’d be too busy laughing in your face.”

Nicodemus shook his head. “Shortsighted. You can’t afford that. Come with me for a week and see if you feel the same way when we’re done.”

“Even assuming I was stupid enough to go anywhere with you for an hour, much less a week, I saw how you treated Cassius. I’m not real eager to slide my nameplate onto his office door.”

“He didn’t adjust to the times,” Nicodemus replied with a shrug. “I wouldn’t have been doing him any favors by coddling him. We live in a dangerous world, Dresden. One adapts and thrives or one dies. Living on the largesse of others is nothing but parasitism. I respected Cassius too much to let him devolve to that.”

“Gosh, you’re chatty,” I said. “You were right. This is so much fun. It’s almost like…”

A horrible thought hit me.

Nicodemus was many things, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew I wasn’t going to sign on for his team. Not after the way he treated me the last time we’d met. He knew that nothing he said was going to sway me. I might have surprised him with that little nugget of information about Arctis Tor, but that could have been an act, too. All in all, odds were high that this conversation was accomplishing absolutely nothing, and Nicodemus had to know that.

So why was he having it? I asked myself.

Because the goal of the conversation doesn’t have anything to do with the subject or the context of the conversation, I answered.

He wasn’t here to talk to me about anything or convince me of anything.

He wanted to talk to me and keep me here.

Which meant that something else was about to happen somewhere else.

Wheels within wheels.

My God, it was a metaphor.

This conversation was a metaphor for the parley as a whole. Nicodemus hadn’t come to talk to us about violations of the Accords. He’d engineered the parley, and his motivation had nothing to do with subverting Marcone’s talents to the service of a Fallen angel.

He was after bigger game.

I whipped my staff toward Nicodemus, slamming my will through it in a surge of panicked realization, screaming “Forzare!” as I did. Unseen force lifted him from his feet and slammed him into one of the huge Corinthian columns like a cannonball. Stone shattered with a deafening crash like thunder, and a lot of rock started to fall.

I didn’t stick around to see how much. It wouldn’t kill him. I only hoped it would slow him down enough for me to get to the others.

“Kincaid!” I shouted as I ran. My voice boomed through the empty halls in the wake of the collapsing rubble. “Kincaid!”

I knew I had only seconds before all Hell broke loose.

“Kincaid, get the kid out of here!” I screamed. “They’re coming for Ivy!”

Chapter Thirty

My brain flew along a lot faster than my feet.

Given the heavy snow outside, the first line of retreat the Archive would take would be into the Nevernever. The spirit world touches on the mortal world at all places and at all times. It gets weird once you realize that totally alien regions of the Nevernever might touch upon relatively close points in the real world. Crossing into the Nevernever is dangerous unless you know exactly where you’re going—I don’t use it as a fallback very often at all. But if you’ve really got your back to the wall, and you have more experience than I do at crossing over, you can get a feel for the crossing and almost always get to someplace relatively benign.

I figured it was safe to assume that the Archive would be savvy enough to feel comfortable stepping over—in fact, she would have chosen this location for the parley for precisely that reason. The Denarians would know it too, and they didn’t want the Archive to escape their ambush and come back loaded for bear. They would have prepared countermeasures, much as they had for Marcone.

No, scratch that. Exactly the way they had for Marcone, I realized. The huge spell that had been used to tear apart the defenses of the crime lord’s panic room hadn’t simply been a way for the Denarians to secure the bait in this scheme. It had been a field test for their means to cut off the magical energy from a large area, and access to the Nevernever with it—and to imprison something big at the same time.

It was a bear trap, custom-designed for Ivy. They were going to spring that monstrous pentagram again.

Only this time I was going to be standing inside it when it happened.

Fortunately, the Shedd was a lot squattier and more stable than Marcone’s old apartment building had been—though that didn’t mean pieces big enough to kill people wouldn’t fall when the beam ripped through the walls. And though a lot of stonework was used, there was still the danger of fire.

Fire. In an aquarium. Breathe in the irony.

But more important, once that pentagram came up—and it was coming now; I could feel it, a faint stirring of power that slid along the edges of my wizard’s senses like some huge and hungry snake passing by in the darkness—it was going to shut the building off from the rest of the world, magically speaking. That meant that I wasn’t going to be able to draw in any power to use to defend myself, any more than I’d be able to breathe if someone plunged my head underwater.

Usually, when you work a spell, you reach out into the environment around you and pull in energy. It flows in from everywhere, from the fabric of life in the whole planet. You don’t create a “hole” in the field of energy we call “magic.” It all pours in together, levels out instantly, all across the world. But the circle about to go up was going to change that. The relatively tiny area inside the Shedd would contain only so much energy. Granted, it would be a fairly rich spot—there was a lot of life in the building, and it had hosted a lot of visitors generating a lot of emotions, especially the energy given off by all those children. But even so, it was a sealed box, and given the number of people present who knew how to use magic, the local supply wasn’t going to last long.

Try to imagine a knife fight in an airtight phone booth—lots of heavy breathing and exertion, but not for long.

One way or the other, not for long.

That was their plan, of course. Without magic to draw upon, I was pretty much just a scrappy guy with a gun, whereas Nicodemus was still a nigh-invincible engine of destruction.

For a few seconds my steps slowed.

Put that way, it almost sounded a little crazy of me to be rushing into this. I mean, I was basically opting for a cage match with a collection of demons, and one that I would have to win within a matter of seconds or not at all—and I hadn’t been all that impressive against the Denarians when I’d had relatively few constraints on what power I could wield against them.

I did some mental math. If the symbol the Denarians were using was approximately the same size as the one at Marcone’s place, it would be big enough to encompass only the Oceanarium itself in the pentagram at its center. Murphy and the others, if they’d stayed where we’d come in, would probably be safe. More to the point, if they’d stayed where they were, they would have no way to enter the Oceanarium.

That meant it would be just me and Ivy and maybe Kincaid—against Nicodemus, Tessa, and every Denarian they could beg, borrow or steal. Those were long odds. Really, really long odds. Ridiculously long odds, really. When you have to measure them in astronomical units, it probably isn’t a good bet.

So, going in there would be bad.

If I didn’t go in, though, it would be just Ivy and Kincaid against all of them. In a deadly business, Kincaid was one of the deadliest, at the top of the field for centuries—but there was only one of him. Ivy had vast knowledge to draw upon, of course, but once she’d been cut off and expended whatever magic she had immediately available to her, the only thing she’d be able to do with all that knowledge would be to calculate her worsening odds of escape.

Every hair on my body tried to stand up all at the same time, and I knew that the symbol was being energized. In seconds it would howl to life.

I guess in the end it came down to a single question: whether or not I was the kind of man who walks away when he knows a little kid is in danger.

I’d been down this road before: Not going in there would be worse.

Heat shimmers filled the air in the hall in front of me as I sprinted toward the Oceanarium.

Fight smarter, not harder, Harry. I drew in power on the way—a lot of power. If there wasn’t going to be any magic available for the taking once the symbol went up, I’d just have to bring my own.

Usually I draw in power only when it’s ready to flow directly out of me again, channeling the energy through my mind and into the structure of a spell. This time I brought it in without ever letting it out, and it built up as a pressure behind my eyes. My body temperature jumped by at least four or five degrees, and my muscles and bones screamed with sudden pain while my vision went red and flickered with spots of black. Static electricity crackled with every single motion of my limbs, bright green and painfully sharp, until it sounded like I was running across a field of bubble wrap. My head pounded like every New Year’s hangover I’d ever had, all in the same spot, and my lungs felt like the air had turned to acid. I concentrated on keeping my feet underneath me and moving. One step at a time.

I pounded through the entry to the Oceanarium, felt a shivering sensation as I ran right through a veil I had not sensed was there, and all but barreled into a demonic figure crouched down on the floor. I skidded to a stop, and there was an instant of surprise as we stared at each other.

The Denarian was basically humanoid, as most of them were, a gaunt, even skeletal grey-skinned figure. Spurs of bone jutted out from every joint, slightly curved and wickedly pointed. Greasy, lanky hair hung from its knobby skull to its skinny shoulders, and its two pairs of eyes, one very human brown and one glowing demonic green, were both wide and staring in shock.

It was crouched amidst the preparations of a spell of some kind—a candle, a chalk circle on the floor, a cup made from a skull and filled with water—and it wore a heavy canvas messenger bag slung across one shoulder. One hand was still down in the bag, as if it had been in the midst of drawing something out of it when I’d come charging up.

Fortunately for me, my mind had been in motion. His had been tangled up in whatever spell he was doing, and he was slower to get back into gear than I was.

So I kicked him in the face.

He went down with a grunt, and a chip of broken tooth skittered across the floor. I didn’t know what spell he was getting together, but it seemed a good bet that I didn’t want him to finish it. I broke his circle with my will as I crossed it with my body, unleashing a ripple of random and diffused energies that had never had the chance to coalesce into something more coherent. I knocked his skull goblet into one of the enormous nearby tanks with my staff as I raised it and pointed one end of it at the stunned Denarian, snarling, “Forzare!”

Some of that searing storm of power I was holding in screamed out of my body and down through my staff, hurtling at the Denarian, an invisible cannonball surrounded by a cloud of static discharge. It was more power than I’d meant to unleash. If it hit him it was going to throw him halfway across Lake Michigan.

But while the Denarian’s mortal set of eyes may have still been blank with shock and surprise, the glowing green set was bright with rage. The thorny Denarian lifted his left hand in a sweeping gesture, made a rippling motion of his fingers, drawing his hand toward his mouth, and…

…and he just ate my spell.

He ate it. And then that gaunt, skeletal face spread in a toothy smile.

“That,” I muttered, “is incredibly unfair.”

I lifted my left hand just as the Denarian crouched and vomited out a spinning cloud of black threads that came whirling through the air in dozens of tiny, spiraling arcs. I brought up my shield, but none of the threads actually came down to touch me—they landed all around me instead, in a nearly perfect circle.

And an instant later my shield stuttered and shorted out. I still had the energy for it—I hadn’t been cut off. But somehow the Denarian’s weird spell had disrupted the magic as it left my body. I tried to throw another bolt of force at him, and got to feel supremely silly, waving my staff around to absolutely zero effect.

“Interruptions,” the Denarian said in an odd accent. “Always the interruptions.”

His left hand returned to rummaging in his bag, while his mortal eyes went back to the now-scattered remnants of the spell, evidently dismissing my existence. The green eyes remained focused on me, though, and darkness suddenly gathered around the forefinger of his upraised right hand.

Time slowed down.

Dark light leapt toward me.

Sheer defiance made me step forward, trying to brush past the little spinning columns of shadow that surrounded me, only to find them as solid as steel bars, and colder than a yeti’s fridge. I threw my magic against those bars to no avail as a shaft of dark lightning streaked toward my heart.

Something happened.

I don’t know how to describe it. I was trying to slam another bolt of force between the bars of my conjured prison when something…else…got involved. Ever been carrying something and had someone intentionally, unexpectedly jostle your elbow? It felt something like that—a tiny but critically timed nudge just as I threw my will into a last futile effort of defiance.

Power screamed as it wrenched its way out of my body. It shattered the black-thread bars of my prison and left a streak of metallic light on the air behind it for an instant, reflective, like a trail of liquid chrome. It caught the falling Denarian in a massive silvery simulacrum of my own fist.

I actually felt my fingers close over the gaunt, skeletal, grey-skinned figure, felt the numerous spurs of bone jutting from its joints press painfully into my flesh. I flung it away from me with a cry, and the huge silver hand flung the Denarian into the nearest wall, ripping through several feet of expensive stone terracing and carefully simulated Pacific Northwest.

I stared for a second, first at the stunned Denarian, and then at my own spread fingers—and at the floating silvery hand beyond, mirroring my movements. Then the skeletal Denarian gathered itself and rose, fast as hell—until I shoved the heel of my hand forward and drove his bony ass six inches into the wall of rock behind him.

“Oh, yeah, baby!” I heard myself howl, elated. “Talk to the hand!”

I picked up the thorny fiend by a leg and laughed as it raked and bit and scrabbled at the construct that held it. I could feel the pain of it—but it was a small thing, really, something I might have gotten from a rat. Unpleasant as hell, but I’d felt much, much worse, and it was nothing compared to the agony of the power still burning inside me. I slammed him into the wall again, then swung him twenty feet through the air, shoved him through a pane of unbroken three-inch-thick glass on the outer wall of the Oceanarium, drew him back through, and then rammed him through the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, cutting him to tatters as I did.

I had maybe half of a second’s warning, as my already overloaded nerves screamed that the circle was closing, that the Sign was rising, as I felt the surge of energy approaching from no more than a dozen yards away. There was still no time for a shield.

So Spinyboy would have to do.

I flung him between me and where my instinct warned me the inbound power was coming from, and then there was a roar like a dozen turbine engines howling to life in synchronization. Thirty feet from me the walls exploded in light and Hellfire. Heat, light, and sheer, intangible power slammed against my senses and threw me from my feet. Bits of molten rock hissed through the air, deadlier than any bullet.

Spinyboy caught a bunch of those. They flew out his back and left gaping, smoking, cauterized holes in it. I could see them through the silvery haze of the construct hand that still held him, could feel the heat as they bored through the construct, and—

—and then my head bumped the ground hard enough to make me see stars. I rolled to my feet and nearly wobbled over the railing and into the pool with the whales. I slammed the end of my staff into the ground with my left hand and leaned heavily against it, panting.

I was still alive. I still retained an agonizing amount of energy. So far, I thought woozily, everything was going exactly according to plan.

The skeletal, spiny Denarian lay twitching on the ground ten or twelve feet in front of me. There were big smoking holes in its body. One of its arms was moving. So was its head. But its legs and its lower body were completely limp. I could see the bones of its spine standing out sharply from its gaunt, emaciated back. Two of the smoking holes intersected that spine precisely. He—or she, I supposed, if it mattered—wasn’t going anywhere.

Great currents of energy, eight or nine feet thick, intersected maybe fifty feet away. It was like…looking at the cross-section of a river in flood—if the river had been made of fire instead of water, and if two rivers could have intersected and passed through each other without affecting each other’s courses. I turned my head and saw, through the walls of glass that I’d broken, more of the same beams, all around the Oceanarium in an unbroken wall.

The eerie part was that the fiery current of energy was silent. Absolutely silent. There was no crackle of flame, no roar of superheated air, no hiss of steam as snow and ice melted. I heard some rubble falling, stone landing on stone. I heard a broken electrical line somewhere, spitting and snapping for a few seconds before it, too, went silent.

That was when I realized a couple of things.

The silver energy construct that had gripped the Denarian was gone.

And I couldn’t feel my right hand.

I looked down in a panic, but found that it was still there, at least, flopping loosely at the end of my arm. I couldn’t feel anything below my wrist. My fingers were slightly curled and didn’t respond when I told them to move.

“Crap,” I muttered. Then I gathered my wits about me, gripped my staff more firmly in my left hand, and took several rapid steps until I stood over Spinyboy.

Then I bashed him over the head with the solid length of oak until he stopped moving.

Immobilized wasn’t the same as unconscious. He wouldn’t be the only one of his kind in the building, and I didn’t want him shouting my location to anybody the second my back was turned.

One down. Who knew how many to go.

I crouched in the walkway with the wall on my right, the windows facing the outside of the Oceanarium on my left, and the beam of Hellfire at my back. It was the most secure position I was likely to get. There was still no sound, which meant that they hadn’t tried to take the Archive yet. Kincaid would not go down quietly.

But they were in here with me. They had to be.

But they didn’t necessarily know I was in here with them.

That could be an advantage. Maybe even a huge advantage.

Sure, Harry. What cat ever expects the mouse to come after it?

I stuffed my numb right hand in my duster pocket, tried to ignore the bone-deep ache of unspent power racking my body and the limb-weakening tremors of raw terror radiating through my guts, and stalked silently forward to sucker punch some Fallen angels.

Chapter Thirty-one

I’ve read that dolphins are as smart as people. I’ve even read one article by a researcher who claimed that her results indicated that the dolphins she’d been working with had been throwing the tests, and it had taken us years to realize it—that in fact, they might be smarter than us. I’d read other positions that said that they were quite a bit dumber than that. Being as how I’d never really sat down for a game of checkers with a dolphin, my own personal meter for such things, I didn’t really have an opinion until that day in the Shedd.

That was when those ugly little dolphins swam by me in perfect silence, except for the swish of their dorsal fins breaking the surface to get my attention—and then raised holy hell seventy feet farther down the path beside the pool, around the curve and out of my sight, splashing and chattering and squeaking for all they were worth.

I stared stupidly for about half a second before the message got through: Bad guys sighted, and close. Evidently the aquatic Americans had decided that I was on the home team. As quickly as the chattering had begun it ended, the dolphins vanishing beneath the surface.

I heard a creaking, skittering sound, and instinct drew my face up. Shadows moved on the snow-covered glass roof of the Oceanarium.

More of Nicodemus’s plan in delaying me became clear. He’d needed time to let his people get into position within and atop the building, once he’d been able to determine generally where the Archive was within the Aquarium.

I threw myself into the heavy ferns planted next to the footpath beside the outer pools, crouching down in the thickest bunch of greenery I could find. I held on hard to the power I’d drawn into me and hoped I could make my sucker punch last for more than a single hit.

A breath later, glass shattered and fell. Dark, inhuman forms dropped silently from overhead.

I picked the outermost of the invading Denarians, the one farthest from the center of action and attention, pointed my staff at him from my hiding spot amidst the green, and snarled, “Forzare!” unleashing a moderate effort of will. Invisible force caught the shapeshifted fiend as he was falling. I never got much of a look at him, beyond the fact that he had a lot of muscle and a ridge of leathery plates running down his spine.

Muscle doesn’t do you any good in free fall, no matter how many Fallen angels you’ve got inside you. Unless you’ve got some wings to put it to use, you’re in the hands of Mother Earth and Sir Isaac Newton.

I wasn’t trying to smash him into the middle of the lake. I applied just enough force to alter his trajectory, shoving the falling Denarian thirty feet off course, and he landed in one of those beams of titanic energy.

There was a flash of white light, a brief shadow of a human skeleton burned onto my vision, and then a white-hot something went spinning out from the beam. It landed in one of the pools in an angry gush of steam. The dolphins darted away from it.

Then I froze, not moving.

Denarians fell like rain, more than a dozen of them, landing with heavy-sounding thumps and a couple of splashes…

…and a splat. One of them, a lizard-looking thing, had fallen into the foliage behind me and not five feet from my hiding spot, with about two-thirds of its head simply missing from its shoulders. It twitched wildly for several seconds, pumping very human-looking blood all over the place before it slowly went still and simply started draining.

My eyes tracked up to the roof and found a darkened corner.

Kincaid hung in it like a spider, suspended from some sort of harness and perfectly still, and I realized that he’d had the same idea I had: Remove them before they’d realized that the battle was well and truly begun, while they were still holding back all their power to unleash in concentration. He gave me a grim little smile, moved his head in an “after you” sort of gesture, and raised a rifle sporting a heavy, outsized silencer to his cheek.

Kincaid had once informed me, quite calmly, that if he ever wanted to kill me, it would be with a rifle from more than a mile away. This was more like a hundred feet, maybe less, but Kincaid had dropped the Denarian with a shot to the head, maybe more than one, while it fell to the ground amidst a shower of broken glass. He was deadly as hell, and he could just as easily be coming after me as my enemies, but somehow my terror had dwindled to something familiar—and ferocious.

Sure, I might be outnumbered, but I was no longer at all certain that I was outclassed. When the Fallen were calling the shots they were arrogant to the extreme, and they weren’t at all used to playing it by ear and adjusting to changes in the tempo. When the coin bearers were running things, they could be more dangerous—but no more so than anyone else I had crossed metaphorical swords with.

Nicodemus, then, was dangerous because he was Nicodemus—not because of a Fallen angel or a lack of one. And while I would be a fool to think him anything less than a deadly threat, I had survived him once, and seen the trap coming this time, even if it had been at the last minute.

I spared a glance for the splattered, twitching remains of the decapitated Denarian in the ferns. These creeps might have scary angels looking over their shoulders—but for the next couple of minutes, at least, so did I.

It didn’t make them any less dangerous. It just made me see that I had a chance of standing up to them.

No flash and thunder, then. I had no energy to spare for them. No wasted time, either. I rose and stole through the ferns toward where I thought the next-nearest Denarian had come down, up a steep hillside that was murder to move over silently. The Denarian who had landed hadn’t stayed immobile, though. I found the spread talon prints in the earth where it had touched down, like those of a turkey, but larger.

I froze as water splashed off to my right. From the corner of my eye I saw a Denarian haul herself out of the water of the dolphin pool—Mantis Girl, Tessa. She pulled herself over the pedestrian guardrail, moving fast and warily. I saw a flash of silver in the talons of one hand. She’d recovered the coin of the Denarian I’d shoved into the beam. She knew they weren’t alone. I didn’t have much in the way of cover between her and me, but I didn’t move, and I didn’t think she spotted me.

Mantis Girl landed on the concrete and vanished down the path and out of my sight. Something let out a chittering, monkeylike sound from somewhere in the vast room, but other than that everything remained silent.

I ghosted forward again, straining to hear. Where was the drama? Where were the explosions, the howling screams, the deafening sound track? This was just one big, eerie game of hide-and-seek.

Which, I suddenly realized, must have been the Archive’s counterstrategy. The energy output of the enormous symbol was too high to maintain for long. If she could simply remain hidden from her enemies until the symbol could no longer be maintained, she could depart at will. There would then be no need for her to burn through her precious little available energy in a last-ditch, desperate effort to defend herself—provided she could stay calm and focused enough to maintain a veil under these circumstances, of course. It would force the Denarians to hunt Ivy—expending their efforts on trying to pierce her veil, while Kincaid concentrated on isolating them and killing them while they were distracted. It was a deucedly clever countertactic.

On the far side of the room one of the Denarians started screaming, a wail of agony. My eyes snapped up to Kincaid’s position. He was gone. A rope now dangled down over the foliage below where he’d hung, but he’d abandoned the exposed shooting position after taking down one more enemy, it would seem.

I found myself grinning. Fine. If that was the game, I could play too. Ready or not, here I come.

I pressed on through the ferns, angling over toward the amphitheater seats, and dropped into a sudden crouch as the low mutter of voices came to me.

“Where is she?” demanded a heavy, thick-sounding man’s voice.

I couldn’t see the source of the voices from amidst the fake wilderness until I glanced up. Light and shadow played together in the room and conspired to create a reflective surface for me upon one of the panels of glass on the ceiling. Three of the Denarians had gathered on the bleacher seats. The one who spoke looked like nothing so much as a big, leathery gorilla, except for the goat’s horns and heavy claws.

“Shut up, Magog,” snarled Mantis Girl. “I can’t think with you running your stupid mouth.”

“We’re nearly out of time,” Magog growled.

“She knows that,” snapped a third Denarian. I recognized this one, which looked like a woman, except for the reverse-jointed legs ending in panther claws, the bright red skin, and the mass of metallic, ten-foot-long, independently moving blades in place of hair. Deirdre, Nicodemus’s darling daughter. She turned back to Tessa. “But Magog has a point, Mother. Scent tracking has been useless.” She held up a small pink sock. “Bits of clothing with her scent on them have been scattered everywhere.”

“That’s the Hellhound’s work,” Magog spat, bright green eyes glowing brightly over dull, animalistic brown ones. “He’s fought us before.”

“He hunts us,” Deirdre said, “while she forces us to focus on piercing a veil. They work too well together. He’s killed two of us. Three if you count Urumviel.”

Tessa bounced the silver coin in her palm. “Urumviel’s vessel may have been killed by his own idiocy,” she said. Her insectoid eyes seemed to narrow. “Or perhaps the wizard managed to return before the Sign was raised.”

“You think that pathetic sot bested Father?” Deirdre said with scorn.

I bristled.

“He wouldn’t need to best him, you moron,” Tessa said. “Only to run faster. And it would explain why Thorned Namshiel hasn’t appeared as well.”

Yeah. If Spinyboy ever woke up, it would be with one hell of a Dresden hangover. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Deedee.

“The wizard is nothing,” Magog growled. “If the girl is not found, and swiftly, none of this will matter to us.”

Tessa snapped her fingers and once again did that disgusting little trick where the mouth of the mantis form opened and the head of a pretty young girl emerged, smiling. “Of course,” she said, looking at Deirdre. “I should have thought of it sooner.”

Deirdre tilted her head. Blades whispered murderously against one another at the gesture. “Of what?”

“The entire strength of this plan is predicated upon attacking the child, not the Archive,” Tessa said, her smile turning vicious. “Ignore the girl. Bring me the Hellhound.”

Chapter Thirty-two

It took me about a second to see what Mantis Bitch had in mind, and half that long to hate her for it.

Ivy didn’t have a family. Until I’d given one to her, she hadn’t even had a name. She’d just been “the Archive.” What she had was a world of power and responsibility and knowledge and danger—and Kincaid. While the Archive would know that the proper decision would be to allow Kincaid to die in order to protect the sanctity of the Archive, Ivy wouldn’t be making the decision with the same detached calm. Kincaid was the closest thing she had to family. She wouldn’t let them hurt him. She couldn’t.

Damn them, to take a little girl’s loneliness and use it against her like that.

Grand schemes and sweeping plans to bring doom and darkness are all fine and scary, but they at least have the advantage of being impersonal. This was simple, calculated, cruel malice deliberately aimed at a child—a child—and it pissed me off.

Deirdre was closest. Fine.

I stepped out of the ferns, swept my staff in a broad backhanded swing, and unleashed some of the power I’d been painfully holding back, snarling, “Ventas servitas!”

A burst of wind gathered underneath Deirdre, lifting her out of the amphitheater seats and throwing her out over the pool like a dart shot from a child’s air gun. I’d thrown her at the nearest section of the pentagram’s beam, but the instant she’d gone airborne those snakelike strips of her hair had fanned out like a tattered parachute and begun thrashing at the air, slowing her and changing her course.

I didn’t stop to watch where she landed. Magog spun before Deirdre’s feet were more than a yard off the ground and broke into one of those diagonal simian charges, coming right up the bleachers as smoothly as if they’d been level ground. Forget what I’d said about not reacting quickly. Magog’s reaction time had been nothing, if not a little less. He had to have checked in at seven or eight hundred pounds, and he covered the forty feet between us in the space of a couple of seconds, the acceleration incredible.

Of course, reacting quickly isn’t always the same thing as reacting intelligently. Magog looked like he was used to being an unstoppable force.

I brought up my shield bracelet, slamming my will through it, pushing most of the painful load of power still remaining to me into the barrier that sprang to life. I shouted out in wordless challenge, my voice thin and strained beside the deep-chested bellow that Magog unleashed in answer. Normally my shield manifests as a shimmering dome of mixed blue and silver light.

This time I left it transparent, on the theory that what Magog didn’t know would hurt him. The shapeshifted Denarian slammed into the invisible barrier in an explosion of silver sparks and found it as immovable as the side of a mountain. The force of the gorilla-thing’s charge was not simply physical, though, and ugly red light clung to the silver power of my defenses. Excess energy bled through my bracelet as heat, scalding my skin—but the barrier held, and Magog staggered back, stunned.

“Hey,” I said as I let the shield fall. “Where’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit?” I took a step forward and kicked him as hard as I could, right in the coconuts, then followed up with a stomping kick to the neck. Magog shrieked in agony and went tumbling back down the bleachers. “Somewhere with lots of extra cushions, I guess, eh, Monkeyboy?”

My instincts screamed a warning at me, and I threw myself down behind the last row of bleacher seats just as Mantis Bitch pointed a finger at me and screamed, “Amal-bijal!” There was a crash of thunder, a flash of light, a wash of heat, and a cloud of glowing splinters flew up a few feet away, where a section of seating had been a second before.

Hell’s bells. A sorceress. A damned dangerous one, too.

I readied my shield, already acutely aware of how little energy remained to me. I kept it small, maybe three feet across, and had started to rise when I saw a shape flit into my peripheral vision above me: Tessa, in the middle of an airborne leap. She cried out again, and I yelped and pulled into a tight fetal curl behind my shield as another bolt of lightning ripped through the air.

Pressure slammed my shoulders against concrete floor. Light blinded me, and sound deafened me, leaving my world nothing but one long white tone. My lungs forgot their job for a couple of seconds, but my legs were on the ball, scrambling to get beneath me.

I had just managed to sort out where I was when another deafening flash and crack hit somewhere close and flung me to the ground again. And then a third. I tried to keep my shield up, but I couldn’t see anything but yellow spots, and there wasn’t anything left to put into it, anyway. It was like walking along and suddenly finding myself without any floor—which happened more literally a second later, when I tripped over a bleacher seat and fell a couple of rows down, banging myself up pretty well in the process.

Some dazed part of me realized that I’d made a mistake in my assumptions. Tessa wasn’t trying to take me out. She was just trying to keep me dazed and disoriented long enough for her people to arrive. That same part of me realized, even more belatedly, that I’d let myself be goaded into attacking by their words, let my heart rule my decision instead of playing it smart.

Something slapped my staff out of my hand. I went for my gun, only to be slammed to the ground by another terrific physical force. Then something like an iron bar slammed across my throat.

The light spots began to clear away in time for me to see a Denarian I’d never seen before atop me, this one like an androgynous, naked, bald statue of obsidian, green eyes glowing above human eyes of bright blue. A second shapeshifted creature, this one covered in a shaggy coat of grey, dusty-looking feathers, its face a grey mass of fleshy, hanging tendrils, had my wrists pinned to the ground.

Tessa stood over me, watching something on the far side of the room, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t choke him out,” she snapped. “He can’t talk if he’s unconscious.”

The obsidian statue eased up the pressure on my neck a little.

“Report,” Tessa said.

“We think the Hellhound is hiding in the bathrooms,” came a strained-sounding, harsh woman’s voice.

“You think?”

“Varthiel and Ordiel are down and McKullen is dead. They were searching there. The exit is watched. There’s no way for him to escape the room.”

“Their coins?” Tessa asked.

“Recovered, my lady.”

“Thank you, Rosanna. Any other word?”

“We’ve found Thorned Namshiel, unconscious and gravely wounded. There was extensive damage all around the area in which he fell.”

“Yes. And yet it was done fairly quietly. It seems our intelligence on our young wizard thug was faulty.”

Someone, presumably Mantis Bitch, kicked me in the ribs. It hurt. There wasn’t much I could do about it other than try to suck in a breath.

“Very well,” Tessa said. “Take Magog and Deirdre for the Hellhound. Take him alive. Do it within the next five minutes.”

“Yes, my lady,” Rosanna rasped. What sounded like hooves clopped away.

Tessa stepped into view again, sweetly pretty face visible atop the monstrous body. She was smiling. “You’re all kinds of feisty, boy. It’s cute. The sort of thing my husband likes in his recruits.” She kicked me again. “I find it endlessly annoying, personally. But I’m willing to play nice, since we might work together in the future. I’ll give you this chance to cooperate. Tell me where the little girl is.”

“I wish I knew,” I panted. “That way I could exercise free will while telling you to go fuck yourself.”

She let out a playful little laugh and reached down to tweak my broken nose.

Okay.

Ow.

“They say to give a man three chances to say no,” she said.

“Save us both time and breath,” I said. “No, twice. That’s three.”

“Suit yourself,” Tessa said.

She reached into the pocket of my duster, withdrew my revolver, pointed it at my head, and pulled the trigger.

I had just enough time to gawk and think, Wait, wait, this isn’t right.

The muzzle flashed.

There was a loud noise.

I reached for power, tried to shield, but there was simply nothing there, nothing to use. The magic was gone.

So it had to be someone else’s spell that neatly intersected the bullet’s course and bounced it into the shaggy-feathered thing holding my arms.

My stomach sank as I realized what was happening.

Ivy must have been there all along, quietly sitting on the bleachers, hidden by her veil from everything that was going on. Now she stood perhaps ten feet away, just a young girl, her expression solemn—but her eyes and cheeks were bright with tears.

“Get away from him,” she said quietly. “All of you. I will not permit you to hurt him.”

I hadn’t really extended my line of thinking beyond Kincaid. But of all the people who had dealt with the Archive, I’d been one of the only ones to take any interest in her as anything but a font of knowledge. I’d been the one to inquire after her personally. I’d been the one to give her a name. Sad but true, I was the closest thing that little girl had to a friend.

She couldn’t have let anything happen to me, either.

I’d just handed her to the Denarians.

Tessa threw back her head and loosed a long, triumphant cry.

Chapter Thirty-three

“Ivy,” I said in that tone you use with children who are up past their bedtime. I’m better at it than you’d think, after so much time working with an apprentice. “Get that veil back up and get out of here.”

Tessa kicked me in the ribs again, hard enough to keep me from breathing much or talking at all. “When I want an opinion from you, Dresden,” she said, “I’ll read it in your entrails.”

Ivy took two steps forward at Tessa’s gesture and narrowed her blue eyes. “For the benefit of the slow, Polonius Lartessa, I will repeat myself. I will not allow you to harm him. Step away.”

Tessa’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “You know my name.”

“I know everything about you, Lartessa,” Ivy said, her tone flat, passionless. “It was all recorded, of course. Everything was, in Thessalonica in those days. Your father’s failing business. Your sale to the temple of Isis. If you like, I could draw you a cost-benefit analysis of your training versus your earnings in your first year at the temple, before Nicodemus came. I could use charts to make it easier for you to understand. And color them in with crayons. I enjoy crayons.”

I wasn’t certain, but it sounded like the kid was trying to give the bad guys some guff on my behalf. She needed to work on her technique, but it was the thought that counted. If I could breathe, I might have gotten a little choked up.

“Do you think I’m intimidated that you know where I come from, child?” Tessa snarled.

“I know more about you than you do,” Ivy replied, her voice steady. “I know far more precisely than you how many you’ve harmed. How many bad situations you’ve made worse. Cambodia, Colombia, and Rwanda most recently, but whether in this century, the Wars of the Roses or the Hundred Years’ War, your story is the same stupid little story, told over and over again. You learned your lessons when you were a child, and you’ve never swerved from them. You’re a vulture, Lartessa. A maggot. You survive on diseased flesh and rotting meat. Anything whole and healthy frightens you.”

The little girl didn’t see the Denarian that came creeping through the ferns behind her and flung itself at her back, several hundred pounds of scales and fangs.

“Ivy!” I choked out.

She had it covered. There was a flash of light, an overwhelming scent of ozone and fresh laundry, and a silver denarius rolled away from a mound of ash that fell to the ground without ever getting within three feet of the small form of the Archive. The coin rolled past her, on a straight line toward Tessa—but Ivy stomped on it with one small shoe, flattening it to the floor and preventing it from returning to Tessa’s grasp.

“Tiny,” I said, in an overblown imitation of Sanya’s Russian accent, unable to keep a crazed giggle out of my voice. “But fierce.”

Tessa regarded the fallen coin with a faint smile. “Costly. How many such spells do you think you can manage before you are out of energy, little one?”

Ivy shrugged. “How many minions can you throw away? How many will be willing to die for you?”

Tessa called out, “Around her, everyone. Make sure she knows where you are.”

And nightmarish forms rose around the little girl, huge beside her single, slender little form. Deirdre, soaked and smelling of dead fish and seawater, gave me a sullen glare as she mounted the steps beside her mother. The shaggy-feathered thing that still held my hands bled quietly, keening under its breath. It was wounded, but it still kept my arms pinned. Magog came monkeying up over a bit of landscaping, grinning an evil grin, and I wondered where the hell Kincaid had wandered off to. The obsidian statue shifted its weight, keeping one hand resting on my chest—I had the feeling it could have shoved it right through to my spine if it wanted to.

There were half a dozen others. Rosanna proved to be a rather beautiful-looking woman, the classical demoness with scarlet skin and a goat’s legs, complete with leathery black wings and delicately curling horns—though her deep brown eyes were haunted beneath the demonic green glowing set. She had a bag slung on a strap over her shoulder, just like Spinyboy—Tessa had called him Thorned Namshiel—had carried with him. Most of the others just looked big and mean, in various unsettling flavors.

I guess even in Hell, it’s easier to find strong backs than strong brains.

Ivy faced them and lifted her arms into a pose that vaguely resembled a defensive martial arts stance. It wasn’t. She was preparing to manipulate defensive energies. I just hadn’t ever seen anyone getting ready to do two entirely separate spells in either hand at the same freaking time before.

Two questions occurred to me at that point. First, if the plan was for the Denarians to wear Ivy’s magic down and then take her by main force before their trap ran out of power, why weren’t they doing it already? And second…

What was that hissing sound?

It rose up around us, something I could just barely hear until I focused my senses on it, tuning out the musty reek and iron blood-scent of Shaggy Feathers and the cold solidity of Obsidian Statue’s hand.

A definite, steady hissing sound, like air escaping from a tire or…

Or hair spray issuing forth from a can.

I lifted my head, twisting around enough to see through the crouched limbs of Shaggy Feathers, which seemed to be neither arms or legs, but something that served it as both, like the extremities of a spider. I couldn’t see what it had my wrists pinned with, and I didn’t want to. What I could see was a couple of leaves trembling on a nearby fern, and a gleam of metal from somewhere near the source of the mysterious hiss.

Gas.

The entire strength of this plan is predicated upon attacking the child, not the Archive.

Children have very low body mass, compared to adults.

A toxin dispersed in the air would be far more effective against Ivy than one of the Denarians—or even a grown person. All the bad guys had to do was pick something that caused unconsciousness and skewed heavily toward body mass, and they’d have an ideal weapon to use against her. Tessa and Nicodemus must have had several of their more capable lackeys carry in canisters of the stuff, whatever it was. Then all they had to do was open the cans and wait for her to fall.

My thoughts flashed back to Thorned Namshiel’s spell, the one he’d been carrying out behind his concealing veil. A detail I’d barely noticed at the time suddenly leapt out at me. I’d been worried about what spell he was getting ready. I should have been paying attention to where he was getting ready to cast it—directly underneath a set of large vents. He’d probably been getting ready to set a wind spell in motion, to keep air pumping through the vents and spreading the gas through the Oceanarium.

Could I smell something sort of mediciney? Had the end of my nose gone numb? Hell’s bells, Harry, this is no time either to panic or to suddenly pass out. I had to warn Ivy.

I turned my head back toward her and caught Tessa’s gaze halfway. “Worked it out, did you?” Mantis Girl murmured. “If he speaks,” she said, presumably to Obsidian Statue, “crush his chest.”

A weirdly modulated voice issued from the general area of the androgynous statue’s head. “Yes, mis—”

And then there was a whup and a slap of air pressure against my skin, and Statue’s head—and Shaggy Feathers’s too—exploded in simultaneous eruptions of distinctly different forms of gore. The statue went out like some kind of faulty street-paving machine, splattering black sludge that looked like hot asphalt everywhere in a steadily spurting stream. It flung itself onto its back, then bounded to its hands and knees and started hammering its fists at the concrete. I guess it intended to smash me. I guess without a head, it didn’t know that it was actually six feet away, and digging a hole through the bleachers and into the material beneath.

Shaggy Feathers just fell in a welter of very human-looking, -smelling, and -tasting blood, and maybe three hundred pounds of limp, rubbery muscle landed on my chest.

“Ivy!” I screamed. “Gas! Get clear!”

And then things got noisy.

A series of cracking thumps came down faster than you could rapidly snap your fingers, and Denarians began to scream in pain and rage. I was vaguely aware of them bounding left and right, and saw a muzzle flash from the far side of the Oceanarium. At least I knew where Kincaid had been—getting into a position to kill both demon-taken madmen holding me down with a single freaking bullet, since anything less would have meant my certain death.

“He is nothing!” howled Tessa. “Tarsiel, take the Hellhound! Everyone else, the girl!”

Come on, Harry. Time to pay Kincaid back by getting the kid clear. Somehow. My right hand wasn’t moving much, and my singed left arm didn’t like it, but I heaved and strained and got enough of the dead Denarian off me to let me begin to squirm out from under it. Just as I was about to pull free, a silver coin rolled out from amidst the ruined tentacles that had passed for the thing’s head and dropped toward my face. I jerked my head aside in a panic.

The falling coin missed touching my bare flesh by a hair and bounced off the concrete floor. My left hand moved, faster and smoother than I would have thought possible, snapping the coin from the air on the bounce as smoothly and nimbly as if it had been whole and healthy and not burned and scarred and covered in a leather glove.

I looked between it and my numb-tingling right hand for a quarter of a second.

What. The hell.

That was not normal.

Worry about it later, Harry. I mean, sure, obviously Something Has Happened to you, but now is not the time to get distracted. Focus. Save the girl.

I jammed the cursed relic in my pocket, hoped to God my 501s didn’t have a hole in them, and spun toward Ivy.

I know I’m a wizard, a card-carrying member of the White Council and all. I know I’m a Warden, a certified combat expert of wizardkind, a cop, a soldier—have staff, will kick ass, if you will. I thought I’d seen some real professionals in action, the top of the wizarding game.

I was wrong.

It wasn’t that Ivy was slinging around a ton of power. She wasn’t. But think about this one for a moment: What’s really more impressive? A giant truck rumbling around on a great big old smoking engine? Or a little car just barely big enough to get the job done that’s powered by a couple of AA batteries?

Seven of them were going after Ivy with magic, and she was countering them. All of them.

Magog had charged her as he had me, but she hadn’t slammed him to a stop with a brick wall. She’d trapped him inside some kind of frictionless bubble, and he was spinning uselessly in circles half an inch off the floor, every motion making him spin faster. Whatever additional metaphysical mass he’d brought to the fight hadn’t cramped her style much. Her arms, bobbing and weaving continuously between all the workings she had up, flicked by the field containing him every few seconds and, I swear, struck his whirling snare for no reason other than to impart an additional, nausea-inducing vector to his spin.

Deirdre’s tangle of living locks danced with purple Saint Elmo’s fire, lashing out in a deadly webwork, but Ivy constantly cast out a spinning cat’s cradle of light, tiny, tiny threads of power that did not so much stop any of Deirdre’s attacks as they fouled any one of her locks with others near it, tangling them together into useless clumps—sort of an enforced bad-hair day. On the opposite side of Ivy, Rosanna launched more traditional lances of flame from her open palms, much like the ones I—

—a savage pain went through my skull for a second—son of a bitch—

—but Ivy dispersed them with delicately applied wedges of air, intercepting each burst of fire far enough short of her body to prevent the bloom of heat as they died from scorching her—though the two more physical Denarians who strained to force their way past the barrier of snapping sparks that formed whenever they tried to get close had far less luck. The Hellmaid’s flames scorched them badly.

The sixth, a wizened little thing that looked like a caricature of a woman carved from a dried tree root, seemed to be holding the end of a rope of liquid shadow that curled like a hungry serpent, darting now and then toward Ivy’s head. Ivy faced it down steadily, moving her head calmly in a dodge once, swatting it aside with a little burst of silver energy a second later.

But mostly she faced an amused-looking Tessa, who, apparently just for the fun of it, threw another thunderbolt at her now and again. That told me something right there. It told me Tessa was no punk sorceress. She was White Council material herself, if she could make that much flash and bang while expending that little energy. Either that or she’d been able to hold back one whale of a lot more power than I had when she took her deep breath before the battle. Either way she was a big-leaguer, and Ivy’s response to the attack confirmed it. Each time the Archive turned to fully face Tessa, and each time she dedicated one of her hands entirely to the defensive measure used to stop the incoming spell.

Gulp.

Holy moly. It was one thing to have an academic appreciation that I still had a lot to learn about magic. It was another to see a demonstration of exactly how much I still couldn’t do. In another circumstance it would be humbling. In this one it was freaking terrifying. For maybe ten seconds I stood there, trying to figure out how the hell to help without getting myself incinerated, skewered, or otherwise obliterated without accomplishing anything.

I felt a little surge of dizziness. The gas levels must be rising. Screw it. The only reason someone hadn’t killed me already was because I was so impotent, at the moment, that nobody gave a damn what I did. I might be able to get the kid to another part of the building, out of the gas—and if someone killed me on the way, I could try to level my death curse on them, maybe get her out of this mess.

So I rushed toward her, trying to use the hot zone and the trapped Magog as shields, and said, “Ivy, come on!”

Something took a swipe at me, and several feet away my gun went off. I ducked, but I guess Tessa wasn’t much of a shot. I didn’t get hit. A second later I grabbed Ivy by the waist and lifted her to my hip.

“Keep clear of my arms, please!” Ivy commanded.

I made sure to. I was getting dizzier, but anywhere was better than here.

“His legs!” Tessa commanded.

I had a feeling that those people tried to do a lot of disturbing things to my pins, but I didn’t stop to watch them try it. I ran for the stairs, trusting the skill of the Archive to keep me mobile. It was a good bet. Ivy murmured and waved her arms the whole while, and I felt her little body tingling with the live current of the energy she was working.

She was using what power she had left for all it was worth, but it wasn’t bottomless. She was running dry. This fight was almost over.

Time, I thought muzzily, panting. We just needed a little more time.

Gravity suggested that I keep on going down, and it seemed an excellent idea. I staggered down the stairs into the lower level, running past the underwater vistas of the whale and dolphin tanks, past the cute penguins and the sea otters, the Denarians in pursuit, their sorceries flashing past us while Ivy shielded us with the last bits of energy in her reservoir. I felt it when she ran dry, and labored to keep my legs moving, to keep ahead of the pursuit.

Then the ground hit me with an uppercut. Everyone else in the Oceanarium suddenly fell sideways.

Or wait. Maybe it was me.

I realized belatedly that, given that I’d been at ground level near that one container, and breathing hard with pain and exertion to boot, I’d probably given myself a nice large dose before I’d ever gotten up. Furthermore, if the gas was heavier than air, there was probably even more of it down here than there had been up in the bleachers.

I had bought us a few seconds. It just hadn’t been time enough.

Ivy landed beside me. She blinked, and her eyes abruptly went wide with panic. She lifted her arms again, but they came up slowly, sluggishly, and her fingers stayed half-closed, like a sleepy child’s.

The black rope-spell wrapped around Ivy’s throat, and dozens of Deirdre’s tendrils twined around her arms and legs. They jerked her out of my sight.

I looked up to find the Denarians standing as a group in the hallway, lit by the eerie blue light coming in from the big tanks. Rosanna stared intently at Ivy for a moment before she shuddered and folded her dark bat wings around herself, shivering as if with cold, and turned away from the scene, her glowing eyes narrowed. She reached into the bag and produced another canister. She offered it to Tessa without being prompted.

Tessa took it, twisted something on the nozzle, and gave Ivy a polite smile. Then she quite literally jammed the nozzle into the little girl’s mouth and held it there.

Ivy panicked and cried out. I saw her kick and twist. She must have bitten her tongue or cut her lip on one of her teeth. Blood ran from her mouth. She bucked and fought uselessly for a few seconds, and then went rag-doll limp.

“Finally,” Tessa said, expelling her breath in irritation. “Could it have been any more annoying?”

“Damn you,” I slurred. I shoved myself up to one knee and glared at Tessa. “Damn you all. You can’t have her.”

“Clichéd,” Tessa singsonged. “Boring.” She tapped her chin with one claw-hand. “Let me see. Where were we when we were so rudely interrupted? Ah!” She stepped closer, smiling cheerily, and lifted my .44.

Just then, I felt the snap of magic rushing back into the Oceanarium as the enormous symbol collapsed and the circle fell.

I took my frustration and rage and turned it into raw force, screaming, “Forzare!”

I didn’t direct it at Tessa and her crew.

I aimed it at the glass wall that was the only thing between all of us and three million gallons of seawater.

The force of my will and my rage lashed out and shattered the wall into powder.

The sea came in with a roar, one enormous impact that felt like the strike of a hammer being applied to every square inch of my body at once.

Then it was cold.

And black.

Chapter Thirty-four

The next thing I knew, I was coughing, and my chest hurt, and my head hurt, and everything else hurt, and I was colder than hell. I choked in a breath and felt my body getting ready to send up everything. I tried to roll onto my side and couldn’t, until someone pulled on my coat and helped me.

Fishy salt water and whatever had been in my stomach came out in equal proportions.

“Oh,” someone said. “Oh, thank You, God.”

Michael, then.

“Michael!” Sanya shouted from somewhere nearby. “I need you!”

Work boots pounded away at a sprint.

“Easy, Harry,” Murphy said. “Easy.” She helped me turn back over when I was done puking. I was lying at the top of the stairs to the lower level. My lower legs were actually on the stairs. My left foot was in cold water to the ankle.

I put a hand to my chest, wincing. Murphy smoothed a hand over my head, brushing hair and water away from my eyes. The lines in her face looked a little deeper, her eyes worried.

“CPR?” I asked her. My voice felt weak.

“Yeah.”

“Guess we’re even,” I said.

“Like hell we are,” she said quietly. “I only spit fruit punch into your mouth.”

I laughed weakly, and that hurt, too.

Murphy leaned down and rested her forehead gently against mine. “You are such an enormous pain in my ass, Harry. Don’t scare me like that again.”

Her fingers found mine and squeezed really tight. I squeezed back, too tired to do anything else.

Something brushed my foot, and I nearly screamed. I sat up, reaching for power, raising my right hand, while invisible force gathered around it in shimmering waves.

A corpse floated in the water, nude, facedown. It was a man I’d never seen before, his hair long, grey, and matted. His limp, outstretched hand had bumped against my foot.

“Jesus, Harry,” Murphy said, her voice shaking. “He’s dead. Harry, it’s okay. He’s dead, Harry.”

My right hand remained where it was, fingers outspread, ripples of light flickering over them. Then they started shaking. I lowered my hand again, releasing the power I’d gathered, and as I did I felt my fingers tingle and go numb once more.

I stared at them, puzzled. That wasn’t right. I was fairly sure that I should be a lot more worried about that than I was at the moment, but I couldn’t put together enough cohesive thought to remember why.

Murphy was still talking, her voice steady and soothing. I dimly realized, a minute later, that it was the tone of voice you use with crazy people and frightened animals, and that I was breathing hard and fast despite the lack of any exertion to explain it.

“It’s all right, Harry,” she said. “He’s dead. You can let go of me.”

That was when I realized that my left arm had pulled Murphy tight against me, drawing her across my body and away from the corpse as I’d gotten ready to do…whatever it was I had been about to do. She was, at the moment, more or less sitting across my lap. Wherever she was touching me, I was warm. It took me a moment to figure out exactly why it was a good idea to let her go. Eventually, though, I did.

Murphy slid carefully away from me, shaking her head. “God,” she said. “What happened to you, Harry? What did they do to you?”

I slumped, too tired to move my foot out of the water, too tired to try to explain that I’d failed to stop the demons from carrying away a little girl.

After a moment of silence Murphy said, “That’s it. I’m getting you to a doctor. I don’t care who these people think they are. They can’t just waltz into town and tear apart my—” She broke off suddenly. “Hngh. What do you make of this, Harry?”

She took a step down into the water and bent over.

“No!” I snapped.

She froze in place.

“Jesus, those things get predictable,” I muttered. “Silver coin just fall out of the corpse’s fingers?”

Murphy blinked and looked at me. “Yes.”

“Evil. Cursed. Don’t touch it.” I shook my head and stood up. The wall had to help me, but I made it all the way up, thinking out loud on the way. “Okay, we’ve got to make sure there’s no more of these lying around, first thing. I’m already carrying one. We limit the risk. I carry them all for now. Until they can be properly disposed of.”

“Harry,” Murphy said in a steady voice. “You’re mumbling, and what’s coming through is making a limited amount of sense.”

“I’ll explain. Bear with me.” I bent over and found another stained denarius gleaming guiltily in the water. “Moron,” I muttered at the coin, then picked it up with my gloved hand and put it in my pocket along with the other one. In for a penny, in for a pound, ah hah hah.

Damn, I’m clever.

Footsteps sounded, brisk and precise, and Luccio walked into view beside Gard. There was a subtle difference in Gard’s body language toward Luccio, something a shade more respectful than was there before. The captain of the Wardens was wiping her sword clean on her grey cloak—blood wouldn’t stain it, which made it handy for such things. Luccio paused for a moment upon seeing me, her expression carefully guarded, then nodded. “Warden. How are you feeling?”

“I’ll live,” I rasped. “What happened?”

“Two Denarians,” Gard replied. She nodded her head briefly to Luccio. “Both dead.”

Luccio shook her head. “They’d been half-drowned,” she said. “I only finished them off. I shouldn’t have liked to fight them fresh.”

“Take me to the bodies,” I said quietly. “Hurry.”

There was a sighing sound from behind us. I didn’t freak out about it this time, but Murphy did, her gun appearing in her hand. To be fair, Luccio had her sword half out of its sheath, too. I checked and found what I’d more or less expected: The body of the former Denarian, relieved of its coin, was decomposing with unnatural speed, even in the cold water. The Fallen angel in the coin might have been holding off the ravages of time, but the old man with the hourglass is patient, and he was collecting his due from the fallen Denarian with compounded interest.

“Captain, we’ve got to get every single coin we possibly can, and we’ve got to do it now.”

Luccio cocked her head at me. “Why?”

“Look, I don’t know what arrangements Kincaid made, but somebody is going to notice something soon, and then emergency services will be all over this place. I don’t want some poor fireman or cop accidentally picking up one of these things.”

“True enough,” she said, nodding—and then glanced at Murphy. “Sergeant, do you concur?”

Murphy grimaced. “Dammit, there’s always something….” She held up her hands as if pushing away a blanket that was wrapped too tightly around her and said, “Yes, yes. Round them up.”

“Michael,” I said. “Sanya?”

“When we got here,” Murphy said, “a bunch of those things were pulling you out of the water.”

“They ran. We went different directions, pursuing them,” Gard supplied.

“Where’s Cujo?” I asked.

Gard gave me a blank look.

“Hendricks.”

“Ah,” she said. “Lookout. He’ll give us a warning when the authorities begin to arrive.”

At least someone was thinking like a criminal. I suppose she was the right person for the job.

I raised my voice as much as I could. It came out sort of furry and rough. “Michael?”

“Here,” came the answer. He came walking around the curving path toward us a few moments later, wearing only his undershirt beneath his heavy denim jacket. I hadn’t seen him wearing that little before. Michael had some serious pecs. Maybe I should work out. He was carrying with both hands part of his blue-and-white denim shirt folded into a careful bundle in front of him.

Sanya came along behind Michael, soaking wet, his chest bare underneath his coat. Never mind Michael’s pecs. Sanya made us both look like we needed to eat more wheat germ or something. He was carrying Esperacchius and Amoracchius over one shoulder—and Kincaid over the other.

Kincaid wasn’t moving much, though he was clearly trying to support some of his weight. His skin was chalk white. He was covered in blood. The rest of Michael’s shirt, and both of Sanya’s, had been pressed into service as emergency bandages—and layers of duct tape had been wrapped around and around them, sealing them into place around both arms, over his belly, and around one leg.

Murphy hissed and went to him, her voice raw. “Jared.”

Jared. Huh.

“Dresden.” Kincaid gasped. “Dresden.”

They laid him down, and I shambled over. I managed not to fall down on him as I knelt beside him. I’d seen him wounded before, but it hadn’t been as bad as this. He’d used the tape the same way, though. I checked. Sure enough, there was a roll of tape hanging from a loop on Kincaid’s equipment harness.

“Just like the vampire lair,” I said quietly.

“No claymores here,” Kincaid said. “Should have had claymores.” He shook his head and blinked his eyes a couple of times, trying to focus them. “Dresden, not much time. The girl. They got out with her. She’s alive.”

I grimaced and looked away.

His bloody hand shot out and seized the front of my coat. “Look at me.”

I did.

I expected rage, hate, and blame. All I got was a look of…just, desperate, desperate fear.

“Go after them. Bring her back. Save her.”

“Kincaid…” I said softly.

“Swear it,” he said. His eyes went out of focus for a second, then glittered coldly. “Swear it. Or I’m coming for you. Swear it to me, Dresden.”

“I’m too damned tired to be scared of you,” I said.

Kincaid closed his eyes. “She doesn’t have anybody else. No one.”

Murphy knelt down by Kincaid across from me. She stared at me for a moment, then said quietly, “Jared, rest. He’s going to help her.”

I traded a faint, tired smile with Murphy. She knows me.

“But—” Kincaid began.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead, blood and all. “Hush. I promise.”

Kincaid subsided. Or passed out. One of the two.

“Dresden, get out of the way,” Gard said in a patient voice.

“Don’t tell me you’re a doctor,” I said.

“I’ve seen more battlefield injuries than any bone-saw-flourishing mortal hack,” Gard said. “Move.”

“Harry,” Murph said, her voice tight. “Please.”

I creaked to my feet and shambled over to Michael and Sanya, who stood looking out at the dolphins and the little whales in the big pool. The water level had dropped seven or eight feet, and the residents were giving the newly inundated area of the pool a wide berth. If the presence of the rotting thing behind me made the water feel anything like the air was starting to smell, I couldn’t blame them.

“He looks pretty bad,” I told them.

Michael shook his head, his eyes distant. “It isn’t his time yet.”

I spocked an eyebrow and gave him a look. Sanya gave him one very nearly as dubious as mine.

Michael glanced at me and then back out at the water. “I asked.”

“Uh-huh,” I said quietly.

Sanya smiled faintly and shook his head.

I glanced at him. “Still agnostic, huh?”

“Some things I am willing to take on faith,” Sanya said with a shrug.

“Luccio took down two,” I told Michael. “What’s the count?” I didn’t need to be any more specific than that.

Sanya’s grin broadened. “That is the good news.”

I turned to face Sanya. “Those assholes just carried off a child that they plan to torture into accepting a Fallen angel,” I said quietly. “There isn’t any good news.”

The big Russian’s expression sobered. “Good is where you find it,” he seriously.

“Eleven,” Michael said quietly.

I blinked at him. “What?”

“Eleven,” he repeated. “Eleven of them fell here today. Judging from the wounds, Kincaid killed five of them. Captain Luccio killed two more. Sanya and I caught a pair on the way out. One of them was carrying a bag with the coins of those who had already fallen.”

“We found the coin of Urumviel, which we knew to be in possession of a victim,” Sanya said, “but we were short by one body.”

“That one was mine,” I said. “He’s tiny pieces of soot and ash now. And that only brings us to ten.”

“One more drowned when that tank collapsed,” Michael said. “They’re floating down there. Eleven of them, Harry.” He shook his head. “Eleven. Do you realize what this means?”

“That if we whack one more, we get the complimentary steak knives?”

He turned to me, his eyes intent and bright. “Tessa escaped with only four other members of her retinue, and Nicodemus was nowhere to be found. We have recovered thirteen coins already—and eleven more today, assuming we can find them all.”

“Only six coins remain free to do harm,” Sanya said. “Only six. Those six are the last. And they are all here in Chicago. Together.”

“The Fallen in the coins have been waging a war for the minds and lives of mankind for two thousand years, Harry,” Michael said. “And we have fought them. That war could end. It could all be over.” He turned back to the pool and shook his head, his expression that of a man baffled. “I could go to Alicia’s softball games. Teach little Harry to ride a bicycle. I could build houses, Harry.”

The longing in his voice was so thick, I could practically feel it brushing against my face.

“Let’s round up the coins and get out of here before the flashing lights show up,” I said quietly. “Michael, open up the bundle.”

He frowned at me but did, revealing disks of tarnished silver. I drew the pair of coins I’d found from my pocket with my gloved hand and added them to the pile. “Thanks,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

I turned and walked away as Michael folded the cloth closed around the coins again, his eyes distant, presumably focused on some dream of shoving those coins down a deep, dark hole and living a boring, simple, normal life with his wife and kids.

I let him have it while he could.

I was going to have to take that dream away from him, dammit.

Whether he wanted to go along with the idea or not.

Chapter Thirty-five

I slept in the cab of Michael’s truck all the way back to his place, leaning against the passenger-side window. Sanya had the middle seat. I was dimly aware that they were speaking quietly to each other on the way home, but their voices were just low rumbles, especially Sanya’s, and I tuned them out until the truck crunched to a halt.

“It doesn’t matter,” Michael was saying in a patient voice. “Sanya, we don’t recruit members. We’re not a chapter of the Masons. It’s got to be a calling.”

“We act in the interests of God on a daily basis,” Sanya said in a reasonable voice. “If He is being slow to call a new wielder for Fidelacchius, perhaps it is a subtle hint that He wishes us to take on the responsibility for ourselves.”

“Don’t you keep assuring me you are undecided on whether or not God exists?” Michael asked.

“I am speaking to you in your idiom, to make you comfortable,” Sanya said. “She would make a good Knight.”

Michael sighed. “Perhaps the reason no new wielder has been called is because our task is nearly complete. Perhaps one isn’t needed.”

Sanya’s voice turned dry. “Yes. Perhaps all evil, everywhere, is about to be destroyed forever and there will be no more need for the strength to protect those who cannot protect themselves.” He sighed. “Or perhaps…” he began, glancing at me. He saw me blinking my eyes open and hurriedly said, “Dresden. How are you feeling?”

“Nothing a few days in a hospital, a new set of lungs, a keg of Mac’s dark, and a pair of feisty redheads couldn’t cure,” I mumbled. I tried for cavalier, but it came out a little flatter and darker than I’d meant it to. “I’ll live.”

Michael nodded and parked the truck. “When do we go after them?”

“We don’t,” I said quietly. “They’ve developed some kind of stealth defense against being found or scried upon magically.”

Michael frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure it’s really hard to defeat someone you can’t find, Michael.” I rubbed at my eyes and all but slapped my own hand away, it hurt so much. Ow. Stupid broken nose. Stupid Tessa tweaking it.

“You need to get some sleep, Harry,” Michael said quietly.

“And perhaps a shower,” Sanya suggested.

“You smell like dolphin water too, big guy,” I shot back.

“But not nearly so much,” he said. “And I didn’t throw up on myself.”

I glowered at him for a second. “Isn’t Sanya a girl’s name?”

Michael snorted. “Get some sleep first, Harry.”

“After,” I said. “First things first. War council in the kitchen. And if someone doesn’t make me a cup of coffee, I’m going to shimmy dry all over everything, like Mouse.”

“Mouse is too polite to do that in my house,” Michael said.

“Like somebody else’s dog then,” I said. “Crap, I forgot my staff.”

Michael swung out of the truck, reached into the bed of the pickup, and lifted my staff out of it. I got out, and he tossed it to me across the back of the truck. I caught it in my left hand and nodded to him. “Bless you. It’s a real pain to make one of these. Way harder to carve out than, uh…” I shook my head as my thoughts wandered off-track. “Sorry. Long day.”

“Get inside before you take a chill,” Michael said quietly.

“Good idea.”

We trooped in. The others arrived over the next twenty minutes or so. Gard had insisted on taking Kincaid by one of Marcone’s buildings—probably someplace where he kept medical supplies for those times when he didn’t want the police wondering why his employees came in with gunshot or knife wounds. To my amusement, Murphy had insisted on accompanying Kincaid—which meant that the cops were about to learn the location of another of Marcone’s secret stashes, maybe even the name of whatever doctor he had on his payroll. And since it was Murphy’s car, and Murphy was with me, and Gard needed my help, there wasn’t diddly Gard could do about it.

That’s my Murphy, manufacturing her own damned silver lining when the clouds didn’t cough one up.

Mouse was delighted to see me, and greeted me with much fond twitching and bumping against my legs and tail wagging. He, at least, thought I merely smelled interesting. Molly greeted us with only slightly less enthusiasm, and immediately set about making food for everyone. It turns out that Molly wasn’t her mother’s daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly…

Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don’t know how.

She could, however, make a mean cup of coffee.

Once Kincaid had been settled down on the guest bed in Charity’s sewing room, everyone else gathered in the kitchen. Murphy looked strained. I poured her a cup of joe, and she came to stand next to me. I offered Luccio one as well. She accepted with a small, grateful nod.

“How is he?” she asked Murphy.

“Sleeping,” Murphy said. “Gard got him some painkillers.”

I guzzled coffee, fighting off a round of chills. “Okay, people. Here’s the situation. We are bent over, greased up, and Nicodemus and his crew are about to drive one of those Japanese bullet trains right up our collective ass.”

The room went quiet.

“They took Ivy,” I said. “That’s bad.”

“Harry,” Murphy said, “I know I’m the new kid, but you’re going to have to explain this thing with the little girl to me again.”

“Ivy is the Archive,” I said quietly. “A long time ago—we don’t know when—somebody—we don’t know who—created the Archive. A kind of intellectual construct.”

“What?” Sanya asked.

“A kind of entity composed of pure information. Think of it as software for the brain,” Luccio said. “Like a very advanced database management system.”

“Ah,” Sanya said, nodding.

I arched an eyebrow at Luccio in surprise.

She shrugged, smiling a little. “I like computers. I read all about them. It’s…my hobby, really. I understand the theory behind them.”

“Right,” I said. “Ahem. Okay. The Archive is passed from one generation to the next, mother to daughter—all the memories of the previous bearers of the Archive, and all the facts they have gathered.

“All that knowledge makes the Archive powerful—and it was created as a repository of learning, a safeguard against the possibility of a cataclysm of civilization, a loss of all knowledge, the destruction of all learning. It was bound to neutrality, to the preservation and gathering of knowledge.”

“Gathering?” Murphy said. “So…the Archive reads a lot?”

“It goes deeper than that,” I said. “The Archive is a magic so complex that it’s practically alive—and it just knows. Anything that gets printed or written down, the Archive knows.”

Hendricks said a bad word.

“Sideways,” I agreed. “That’s what Nicky and the Nickelheads have taken.”

“With that kind of information at their disposal,” Murphy said, “they could…My God, they could blackmail officials. Control governments.”

“Launch nuclear warheads,” I said. “Stop thinking so small.” I nodded at Michael. “Remember, you told me that Nicodemus was playing Armageddon lotto. He makes big plans, but he plots them out so that he can make an incremental profit along the way. This was just one more scheme.”

Michael frowned. “He was after the Archive all along? He deliberately came here and provoked a confrontation to get you to call her in to arbitrate?”

“That isn’t much of a plan,” Luccio said. “You could have chosen any one of a dozen neutral arbiters.”

Murphy snorted. “But it’s Dresden. He’s lived in the same apartment since I first met him. Drives the same car. Drinks at that same little pub. Favorite restaurant is Burger King. He gets the same damned meal every time he goes there, too.”

“You can’t improve on perfection,” I said. “That’s why it’s called perfection. And what’s your point?”

“You’re a creature of habit, Harry. You don’t like change.”

There wasn’t much use denying that. “Even if I hadn’t called Ivy, Nicodemus still could realize some gains. Maybe recruit Marcone. Maybe kill off Michael or Sanya. Maybe ditch some deadwood within his own organization. Who knows? The point is, I did call Ivy in, he did get the opportunity to take her down, and it paid off.”

“But the Archive was created neutral,” Sanya said. “Constrained. You said so yourself.”

“The Archive was,” I said. “But Ivy wasn’t, and Ivy controls the Archive. She’s still a child. That child can be hurt. Frightened. Coerced. Tempted.” I rubbed at the spot between my eyes. “They want to make her one of them. Probably hoping to gobble up Marcone along the way.”

“God help us if they’re taken,” Murphy said quietly.

“God help them if they’re taken,” Michael murmured. “We have to find them, Harry.”

“Not even Mab could locate the Denarians with magic,” I said. “Gard. Could your firm do any better?”

She shook her head.

I glanced at Michael. “I don’t suppose anyone’s drawn a big flashing arrow in the sky for you two to see?”

Michael shook his head, his expression sober. “I looked.”

“Okay, then. Barring divine intervention we have no way of finding them.” I took a deep breath. “So. We’re going to make them find us.”

“That would be a good trick if we could do it,” Sanya said. “What did you have in mind?”

Hendricks lifted his head suddenly. “Coins.”

Everyone turned to stare at him.

Hendricks counted on his fingers for a second. “They only got six. And six people. So how they gonna get the creepy little girl a coin? Or one for the boss?”

“Good thinking, Cujo,” I said. “It’ll only hurt for a minute. But we’ve got to move fast to make it work. Nicodemus can’t afford to throw away any more manpower, but his conscience won’t hesitate for one itty-bitty second to kill one of his own people for their coin, if it comes to that. So we’re going to offer him a trade. Eleven old nickels in exchange for the girl.”

Michael and Sanya both came to their feet in an instant, speaking loudly and in two different languages. It was hard to make out individual words, but the gestalt of their protest amounted to, Are you out of your mind?

“Dammit all, Michael!” I said, swinging around to face him, thrusting out my jaw. “If Nicodemus manages to take the Archive, it won’t matter how many of the damned coins you have locked away.”

Silence. The clock in the entry hall ticked very loudly.

I didn’t back down. “Right now six demons are torturing an eleven-year-old girl. The same way they tortured me. The same way they tortured Shiro.”

Michael flinched.

“Look me in the eye,” I told him, “and tell me you think that we should let that child suffer when we have the means to save her.”

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Michael shook his head.

Sanya subsided, sinking back to lean against a cabinet again, his expression pensive and solemn.

“Nicodemus will never accept that trade,” Michael said quietly.

Luccio smiled, showing a lot of teeth. “Of course he will. Why sacrifice a useful retainer when he can show up for the exchange, double-cross us, steal the coins, and keep the Archive?”

“Bingo,” I said. “And we’ll be ready for him. Captain, do you know how to contact him through the channels outlined in the Accords?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Harry,” Michael said gently, “we’re taking a terrible risk.”

He and Luccio exchanged a glance pregnant with silence, swayed by deep undercurrents.

“At this point,” Luccio said, “the only riskier thing we can do is…” She shrugged and spread her hands. “Nothing.”

Michael grimaced and crossed himself. “God be with us.”

“Amen,” Sanya said, winking over Michael’s shoulder at me.

“Call Nicodemus,” I said. “Tell him I want to make a deal.”

Chapter Thirty-six

It takes time to go through channels.

The last thing I wanted to do was get wet again, but I was still freezing, and shaky, and as it turns out, there are a number of other inconvenient and unpleasant side effects to accidentally gulping down gallons of salt water. It’s the little things that get to you the most.

It took me a couple of hours to get my system straightened out, get showered, and get horizontal, and by the time I finally did it I was so tired that I could barely focus my eyes. Molly was committing dinner by that time, aided and abetted by Sanya, who seemed to take some kind of grim Russian delight in watching train wrecks in progress. I fell down on the couch to debate whether or not I wanted to risk putting anything else in the pipes, and Rip van Winkled my way right through the danger.

I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a dream where I wasn’t hurt, and no one was kicking me around. The walls were white and smooth and clean, lit only by frosty moonlight, and someone with a gentle voice was speaking quietly to me. But my right hand had broken into fierce tingling, all pins and needles, and sleep began to retreat. I started to wake slowly. Voices murmured in the room.

“…can she possibly be sure?” Murphy demanded in a heated whisper.

“It isn’t my area of knowledge,” Michael rumbled back. “Ma’am?”

Luccio’s tone was cautious. “It is a delicate area of the art,” she said. “But the girl does have a gift.”

“Then we need to say something.”

“You can’t,” Molly said, her tone quiet and sad. “It wouldn’t help. It might make things worse.”

“And you know that?” Murphy demanded. “You know that for a fact?”

I was so tired, I’d probably missed a sentence or three in there. I blinked my eyes open and said muzzily, “The kid knows what she’s talking about.” I fumbled about and found Mouse lying on the floor beside the couch, immediately under my arm. I decided sitting up could wait for a minute. “What are we talking about?”

Molly gave Murphy a look that said, There, see?

Murphy shook her head and said, “I’m going to see if Kincaid is awake yet.” She left, her expression set in stony displeasure.

Mouse set about industriously licking my right hand, a canine grooming ritual he sometimes pursued. It broke up the pins and needles a bit, so I didn’t argue. I still had no idea what was up with my hand. I’d never heard of anything like this happening to anyone—but it wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, and all things considered it wasn’t anywhere near the top of my priority list at the moment.

Nobody answered my question, though.

The silence got awkward. I coughed uncomfortably. “Uh. Anyone know what time it is?”

“Almost midnight,” Luccio said quietly.

I waited for a minute, but apparently no one was going to do me a favor and knock me unconscious again, so I did my best to ignore the aches and pains and sat up. “What’s the word from Nicodemus?”

“He hasn’t returned our call,” Luccio said.

“Not really a surprise,” I muttered, raking my fingers through my hair. I’d gone to sleep wearing one of Michael’s old pairs of sweats and one of his T-shirts, so my ankles stuck way out, and both shirt and sweats fit me as well as a tent. “Whatever they’re doing to keep Ivy restrained, it’s got to be pretty elaborate. I’d hold my calls until I was sure it was solid, too.”

“As would I,” Luccio agreed.

“Is she really that dangerous?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” Luccio said calmly. “The Council regards her as a significant power in her own right, on par with the youngest Queens of the Sidhe Courts.”

“If anything, I think that profile in the Wardens’ files underestimates her,” I said quietly. “She had barely anything to work with, and she was making Tessa and her crew look like pygmies trying to capture an elephant. If she hadn’t been cut off so entirely, I think she’d have eaten them alive.”

Luccio frowned, disturbed. “Truly?”

“You had to have seen it,” I said. “I’ve never seen anyone…You had to have seen it.”

“If she’s that powerful,” Michael said quietly, “can she be contained?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Absolutely. But it would take a greater circle—heavy-duty ritual stuff in a prepared location. And it would have to be freaking flawless, or she could break it.”

Molly screwed up her face in distress. “She won’t…won’t take one of the coins. Will she?” She glanced back and forth between Luccio and me and shrugged a little. “Because…it would be bad if she did.”

I looked at Michael. “The Fallen can’t just jump in and overwhelm someone, can they? Outright, nonconsensual possession?”

“Not normally,” Michael replied. “There are circumstances that can change that, though. Mentally damaged people can be susceptible to it. Other things can open a spirit to possession. Drugs, involvement with dark rituals, extended, deliberate contact with spiritual entities. A few other things.”

“Drugs,” I said tiredly. “Jesus.”

Michael winced.

“Sorry.”

“Even if a soul is made vulnerable to assault,” Michael said, “the mind and will can fight against an invasive spirit. Surely the Archive qualifies as a formidable mind and will.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Ivy does. Since she was born she’s been the Archive. She’s never had a chance to develop her own mind, her own personality.” I stood up, shaking my head, and started to pace restlessly around the room. “She’s going to be helpless, probably for the first time since she could walk. Alone. Scared.” I looked at Michael. “You think that those…people…won’t know how to terrify a little girl?”

He grimaced and bowed his head.

“And then along comes the Fallen and tells her how it can help her. How it wants to be her friend. How it can make the bad people stop hurting her.” I shook my head and clenched my hands. “Maybe she’ll know the facts. But those facts aren’t going to be much comfort to her. They aren’t going to feel tr—”

I blinked and looked at Michael. Then Molly. Then I stormed past them into the kitchen and grabbed the pad of paper Charity kept stuck to the fridge with a magnet to use to make grocery lists. I found a pencil on top of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table, writing furiously.

Ivy,

You are not alone.

Kincaid is alive. I’m all right. We’re coming after you.

Don’t listen to them. Hang on.

We’re coming.

You are not alone.

Harry

“Oh,” said Molly, reading over my shoulder. “That’s clever.”

“If it works,” Luccio said. “Will she know it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t know what else I can do.” I rubbed at my forehead. “Is there any food?”

“I made pot roast,” Molly said.

“But is there any food?”

She swatted me on the back of the head, though not too hard, and went to the refrigerator.

I made a sandwich out of things. I’m an American. We can eat anything as long as it’s between two pieces of bread. With enough mustard I almost couldn’t taste the roast. For a few minutes I paid attention to eating, and was hungry enough to actually enjoy part of the experience—the part where Molly’s pot roast finally terrified my growling stomach into silence.

The phone rang.

Michael answered. He listened for a moment and then said gently, “It isn’t too late to seek redemption. Not even for you.”

Someone laughed merrily on the other end of the phone.

“Just a moment,” Michael said a breath later. He turned, holding his hand over the phone, and said, “Harry.”

“Him,” I said.

Michael nodded.

I went to the phone and took it from him. “Dresden.”

“I’m impressed, Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “I expected the Hellhound to make a good showing, of course, but you surprised me. Your skills are developing quite rapidly. Tessa is furious with you.”

“I’m tired,” I replied. “Do you want to talk deal or not?”

“I wouldn’t have called, otherwise,” Nicodemus replied. “But let’s keep this a bit simpler, shall we? Just you and me. I have no desire to drag Chicago’s underworld or the rest of the White Council into this ugly little affair. Mutually guaranteed safe passage, of course.”

“We did that once,” I said.

“And despite the fact that you betrayed the neutrality of the meeting well before I or any of my people took action—which I take as a highly promising act on your part—I am willing to extend my trust to you once more.”

I bit out a little laugh. “Yeah. You’re a saint.”

“One day,” Nicodemus said. “One day. But for now, let’s say a face-to-face meeting. A talk. Just you and I.”

“So you and your posse can jump me alone? No, thanks.”

“Come now. As you say, I do want to talk deal. If you’re willing to extend your word of safe passage, we can even have it on your own ground.”

“Oh?” I asked. “And where would that be?”

“It doesn’t matter to me, as long as I don’t have to be seen with you while you’re wearing that ridiculous borrowed ensemble.”

The hairs on the back of my neck started crawling up into my hairline. I turned my head around very slightly. The windows to the Carpenters’ backyard had blinds and curtains, but neither was wholly drawn. The kitchen lights made the windows into mirrors. I couldn’t see beyond them.

“What is it going to be, Dresden?” Nicodemus asked. “Will you give me your word of safe passage for our talk? Or shall I have my men open fire on that lovely young lady at the kitchen sink?”

I glanced over my shoulder to where Molly was drying dishes. She watched me out of the corner of her eye, clearly interested in the discussion, but trying not to look like it.

I couldn’t possibly warn anyone before Nick’s men could open fire—and I believed that he had them there. Probably up in the tree house. It had a reasonably good view of the kitchen.

“All right,” I said, speaking so that everyone there could hear me. “I’m giving you my word of safe passage. For ten minutes.”

“And hope to die?” Nicodemus prompted.

I gritted my teeth. “At the rate we’re going, someone will.”

He laughed again. “Keep the subject matter of this conversation between you and I, and it won’t have to be anyone in the kitchen.”

The phone disconnected.

A beat later someone knocked at the front door.

Mouse’s growl rumbled through the whole house, even though he’d remained in the front room.

“Harry?” Michael asked.

I found my shoes and stuffed my bare feet into them. “I’m going out to talk to him. Keep an eye on us, but don’t do anything if he doesn’t start it. And watch your back. The last chat with him was a distraction.” I stood up, pulled on my duster, and picked up my staff. I met Michael’s eyes and said, “Watch your back.”

Michael’s head tilted slightly. Then he looked past me, to the windows to the backyard. “Be careful.”

I took my shield bracelet out of my duster pocket and fastened it on, wincing as it went over the mild burns on my wrist. “You know me, Michael. I’m always careful.”

I walked to the front door and looked out the window.

The lights on the street were all out, except for the streetlight in front of Michael’s house. Nicodemus stood in the center of the street outside. His shadow stretched out long and dark to one side of him—the side opposite the one it should have been on, given the position of the light.

Mouse came to my side and planted himself there firmly.

I rested my hand on my dog’s thick neck for a moment, searching the darkness outside for anything or anyone else. I saw nothing—which meant nothing, really. Anything could be out there in the dark.

But the only thing I knew was out there was a scared little girl.

“Let’s go,” I said to Mouse, and stalked out into the snow.

Chapter Thirty-seven

It was snowing again. Five or six inches had fallen since the last time anyone cleared the Carpenters’ front walk. My footsteps crunched through the silent winter air. You could have heard them a block away.

Nicodemus waited for me, stylishly casual in a deep green silk shirt and black trousers. He watched me come with a neutral expression, his eyes narrowed.

I shivered when a breath of cold wind touched me, and my weary muscles threatened to go out of control. Dammit, I was the one working for the Winter Queen. So how come everyone else got to be perfectly comfortable in the middle of a blizzard?

I stopped at the end of Michael’s driveway and planted my staff on the ground. Nicodemus stared silently at me for a while. The shadows had shifted to mask his expression, and I couldn’t see his face very well.

“What,” he said in a low, deadly tone, “is that?”

Mouse stared at Nicodemus, and let out a growl so low that individual snowflakes jumped up off the ground all around him. My dog bared his teeth, showing long white fangs, and his snarl rose in volume.

Hell’s bells. I’d never seen Mouse react like that, except in earnest combat.

And it looked like Nicodemus didn’t like Mouse much, either.

“Answer my question, Dresden,” Nicodemus growled. “What is that?”

“A precaution against getting stuck in deep snow,” I said. “He’s training to be a Saint Bernard.”

“Excuse me?” Nicodemus said.

I mimed covering one of Mouse’s ears with my hand and stage-whispered, “Don’t tell him that they don’t actually carry kegs of booze on their collars. Break his little heart.”

Nicodemus didn’t move, but his shadow shifted until it lay in a shapeless little pool between him and Mouse. His face came into view again, and he was smiling. “It’s been a little while since anyone was quite that insolent to my face. May I ask you a question?”

“Why not?”

“Do you always retreat into insouciance when you’re frightened, Dresden?”

“I don’t think of it as retreating. I think of it as an advance to the cheer. May I ask you a question?”

The smile widened. “Oh, why not?”

“How come some of you losers seem to have personal names, and the others just get called after the Fallen in the coin?”

“It isn’t complicated,” Nicodemus said. “Some of our order are active, willing minds, with strength enough to retain their sense of self. Others are”—he shrugged a shoulder, an elegant, arrogant little motion—“of little consequence. Disposable vessels, and nothing more.”

“Like Rasmussen,” I muttered.

Nicodemus looked puzzled for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed suddenly, focusing intently upon me. His shadow stirred again, and something made a noise that sounded like a disturbingly serpentine whisper. “Oh, yes, Ursiel’s vessel. Precisely.” He looked past me to the house. “Have your friends begun whispering behind your back yet?”

They sure as hell had, though I had no idea why. I hung on to my poker face. “Why would they?”

“Try to imagine the Aquarium from their point of view. They enter a building with you, along with someone they would not normally bring along—but you have insisted that the police detective accompany your group. As a result, you walk away to a private conference with just you, me, and the Archive’s guard dog. Then the sign goes up, and they can hear a terrible conflict raging. They race to the scene as quickly as possible and find my people dragging you out of the water—to take back the coin you had in your pocket, but your friends had no way of knowing that. They find the Archive gone, her bodyguard wounded or dead, and you being apparently assisted by my people.

“And they never saw what happened,” Nicodemus continued. “To a suspicious mind, you might seem an accomplice to the act.”

I swallowed. “I doubt that.”

“Oh?” Nicodemus said. “Even though you’re about to propose giving me back the coins you took at the Aquarium? Eleven coins, Dresden. Should I recover them, everything you and your people have done during the past few days will mean nothing. I’ll be just as strong and possess the power of the Archive to boot. It is hardly a stretch to consider that you would be ideally positioned to betray them at a critical moment—which this is.”

I…hadn’t thought of it like that.

“‘What if he’s finally falling to the influence of her shadow?’ they’re thinking. ‘What if he’s not wholly in control of his own decisions?’ they’re thinking. Treachery is a more dangerous weapon than any magic, Dresden. I’ve had two thousand years to practice arranging it, and your friends the Knights know it.”

Suddenly Michael’s attitude began to make a lot more sense, and the pot roast fought to come back up. I tried to keep my poker face, but it wouldn’t stick.

“Ouch,” Nicodemus said, his eyes widening. “After all those years of baseless suspicion and hostility from your own Council, that must be a painful realization.” He smirked at Mouse and then at me. “Your little heart must be breaking.”

Mouse pressed his shoulder against my leg and snarled savagely at Nicodemus, taking a step forward.

Nicodemus ignored him, his focus all on me. “It’s a tempting offer,” he said. “Exchanging the coins for the Archive? Presenting me with an opportunity to walk away with every jewel in the vault? It’s something I can hardly ignore. Well-done.”

“So?” I said. “Where do you want to set it up?”

He shook his head. “I don’t,” he said quietly. “This is endgame, Dresden, even if you and yours can’t accept it. Once I have the Archive, the rest is simply an exercise. Losing the coins will hurt, true, but I don’t need them. Thorned Namshiel is of no real use to me in his current condition, and I haven’t worked for two thousand years only to take a gamble at the last second. No deal.”

I swallowed. “Then why are you here?”

“To give you a chance to reconsider,” Nicodemus said. “I think you and I are not so very different. Both of us are creatures of will. Both of us live our lives for ideals, not material things. Both of us are willing to sacrifice to attain our goals.”

“Maybe we should wear matching outfits.”

He spread his hands. “I could be an ally far more effective and dangerous than any you have now. I’m willing to compromise with you, and make some of your goals my own. I can provide you with support beyond anything your own Council has ever done for you. The material gain of such a partnership is a passing matter, ultimately, but wouldn’t you enjoy living in something other than a musty basement? Don’t you get tired of coming home to cold showers, cheap food, and an empty bed?”

I just stared at him.

“A great deal of work needs to be done, and not all of it is repugnant to you. In fact, I should imagine that some of it would prove to be quite satisfying to your personal sense of right and wrong.”

To hell with the poker face. I sneered at him. “Like what?”

“The Red Court is one example,” Nicodemus said. “They’re large, well organized, dangerous to my plans, a plague upon mankind, and aesthetically repugnant. They’re parasites who are inconvenient in the short term, dangerous in the middle distance, and fatal to any long-range plan. They need to be destroyed at some point, in any case. I should have no objection to giving my assistance to you, and through you to the White Council in their efforts to do so.”

“Make the Council into cat’s-paws to wipe out the Red Court?” I asked.

“As if you have not been made into their tool on many occasions.”

“The Council doesn’t need my help to be a bunch of tools,” I muttered.

“And yet the reversal appeals to your sense of justice, as does the notion of visiting destruction upon the Red Court. Especially given what they did to Susan Rodriguez.” He tilted his head to one side. “It may be possible to help her, you know. If anyone might know of a means to free her of her condition, it is the Fallen.”

“Why not just offer me floating castles and world peace while you’re at it, Nick?”

He spread his hands. “I only suggest possibilities. Here is what is concrete: You and I share a great many foes. I am willing to help you fight them.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that you want me to work with you, and that I still get to keep being one of the good guys.”

“Good and evil are relative. You know that by now. But I would never ask you to work against your conscience. I have no need to do so in order to make use of your talents. Consider how many people you could help with the power I’m offering you.”

“Yeah. You seem like a real philanthropist.”

“As I said, I’m willing to work with you, and I am quite sincere.” He met my eyes. “Look upon my soul, Dresden. See for yourself.”

My heart ripped out about a thousand beats in two seconds, and I jerked my eyes away from him, terrified. I didn’t want to see what was behind Nicodemus’s dark, calm, ancient eyes. It could have been something monstrous, his soul, something that ripped away my sanity and left a stain of itself on my own like a smear of grease.

Or it could be even worse.

What if he was telling the truth?

I glanced back at the Carpenter house, feeling very cold and very tired. Tired of everything. Tired of all of it. I looked down at my borrowed clothes and my bare ankles, covered with snow just like my shoes.

“I don’t have anything against you personally, Dresden,” he said. “I respect your integrity. I would enjoy working with you. But make no mistake: If you stand in my way, I’ll mow you down beside everyone else.”

Silence reigned.

I thought about what I knew of Nicodemus.

I thought about my friends and those whispers behind my back. I thought about the awkward silences.

I thought about what the world might become if Nicodemus turned Ivy.

I thought about how scared the little girl must be right now.

And I thought about a little old man from Okinawa who had literally laid down his life for my own.

“You and I,” I said quietly, “are both willing to give things up to reach our goals.”

Nicodemus tilted his head, waiting.

“But we have real different ideas when it comes to deciding who does the sacrificing and who gets sacrificed.” I shook my head. “No.”

He took a slow, deep breath and said, “Pity. Good evening, Dresden. Best of luck to you in the new world. But I expect we won’t meet again in this life.”

He turned to go.

And my heart sped up again.

Shiro said I would know who to give the sword to.

“Wait,” I said.

Nicodemus paused.

“I’ve got more than coins to offer you.”

He turned, his face a mask.

“You give me Ivy and I give you eleven coins,” I said quietly, “plus Fidelacchius.”

Nicodemus froze. His shadow twisted and twitched. “You have it?”

“Yeah.”

That ugly whispering sound came again, louder and faster. Nicodemus glanced down at his shadow, frowning.

“Suppose you get Ivy,” I said. “Suppose you turn her and manage to control her. It’s a great scheme. Suppose you get your apocalypse and your neo Dark Age. Do you think that’s going to stop the Knights? Do you think that, one after the other, new men and women won’t take up the Swords and fight you? You think Heaven’s just going to sit there letting you do whatever you want?”

Nicodemus had a better poker face than me, but I had him. He was listening.

“How many times have the Swords broken up your plans?” I asked. “How many times have they forced you to abandon one position or another?” I took a stab in the dark that seemed worth it. “Don’t you get tired of waking up from nightmares about taking a sword through the heart or the neck? Turning you into one more discarded Dixie cup for the Fallen? Terrified of what you’re going to face once you shuffle off the mortal coil?

“I’ve got the Sword,” I said. “I’m willing to trade it and the coins alike.”

His teeth showed. “No, you aren’t.”

“I’m just as willing to give you the Sword and the coins as you are to give me the Archive,” I said. “I’m handing you an opportunity, Nick. A chance to destroy one of the Swords forever. Who knows? If things go well you might have a shot at taking out the other two at the same time.”

The whispering increased in volume and speed again.

Nicodemus stared at me. I couldn’t read his expression, but his right hand was slowly clenching and unclenching, as if eager to take up a weapon, and hate poured off him like heat from an oven.

“So,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, “where do you want to do the exchange?”

Chapter Thirty-eight

I walked back up to the house again a few minutes later, Mouse at my side. Michael had been right: Before we went inside, the big dog shook himself thoroughly. I decided to follow his example and stomped whatever snow I could off my numb feet, then went in.

I walked into the living room and found everyone there waiting for me—Luccio, Michael, Molly, Sanya, and Murphy. Everyone looked at me expectantly.

“He went for it. We’re going to have to haul ass in a minute. But I need to speak with you first, Michael.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Oh, certainly.”

“Alone,” I said quietly. “And bring your Sword.”

I turned and walked on through the house, out the barely functioning back door the gruff had damaged before all this began, and on to the workshop. I didn’t stop to look behind me. I didn’t need to look to know that everyone was trading Significant Glances.

If Nicodemus actually did have people in the tree house, they were gone now. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard to have been lying about them, just to keep me honest. I went inside the workshop and laid my staff down on the workbench. It had a lot of dings and nicks in it. It could benefit from a set of wood-carving tools, sandpaper, and patient attention.

Michael came in silently a moment later. I turned to face him. He wore his fleece-lined denim coat again, and bore Amoracchius in its sheath, attached to a belt he’d slung over one shoulder.

I took my duster off and put it next to the staff. “Draw it, please.”

“Harry,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

“Making a point,” I said. “Just do it.”

He frowned at me, his expression uncertain, but he drew the blade.

I added my energy rings to the pile on the workbench. Then my shield bracelet. Finally I took off my mother’s silver pentacle necklace and put it down there too. Then I turned and walked over to Michael.

I met his eyes steadily. I’d already looked upon Michael’s soul. I knew its quality, and he knew that of mine.

Then I reached down with my left hand, gently grasped Amoracchius’s blade, and lifted it to rest against the left side of my neck, just below my ear. The jugular vein. Or the carotid artery. I get them confused.

Michael went pale. “Harry—”

“Shut up,” I said. “For the past couple of days you’ve done all kinds of not-talking. You can do a little bit more of it until I’ve said my piece.”

He subsided, his eyes troubled, and stood very, very still.

What can I say? I have a gift for getting people’s attention.

I stared at him down the length of shining, deadly steel, and then, very slowly, took my hand off the Sword, leaving its wickedly sharp edge resting against the beat of my life. Then I spread my hands and just stood there for a minute.

“You are my friend, Michael,” I said, barely louder than a whisper. “I trust you.”

His eyes glittered and he closed them.

“And you want to know,” he said heavily, looking up again, “if I can say the same.”

“Talk is cheap,” I said, and moved my chin a little to indicate the Sword. “I want to know if you’ll show me.”

He lowered the Sword carefully from my neck. His hands shook a little, but mine didn’t. “It isn’t that simple.”

“Yes, it is,” I told him. “I’m your friend, or I’m not. You trust me—or you don’t.”

He sheathed the Sword and turned away, facing the window.

“That’s the real reason you didn’t want to hat up and go gunning for the Denarians right at first, the way I wanted to. You were worried I was leading you into a trap.”

“I didn’t lie to you, Harry,” Michael said. “But I’d be lying right now if I didn’t admit that, yes, the thought had crossed my mind.”

“Why?” I asked, my voice perfectly calm. “What reason have I ever given you for that?”

“It isn’t that simple, Harry.”

“I’ve fought and bled to defend you and your family. I put my neck in a noose for Molly, when the Council would have killed her. I can’t even tell you how much business I’ve missed out on because of the time I’ve got to spend teaching her. What was it that tipped you off to my imminent villainhood?”

“Harry…”

Nicodemus had been right about one thing: It hurt to be suspected by my friends. It hurt like hell. I didn’t even realize I had raised my voice until I’d already screamed, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Michael turned his face to me, his expression grim.

“Do you think I’ve decided to side with Nicodemus and his buddies?” I snarled. “Do you really think that? Because if you do, you might was well put that Sword through my neck right now.”

“I don’t know what to think, Harry,” he said quietly. “There’s a lot you haven’t said.”

“I don’t share everything with you,” I retorted. “I don’t share everything with anyone. That’s nothing new.”

“I know it isn’t,” he said.

“Then why?” Some of the fire went out of my voice, and I felt like a half-deflated balloon. “You’ve known me for years, man. We’ve covered each other plenty of times. Why are you doubting me now?”

“Because of Lasciel’s shadow,” Michael said quietly. “Because as long as it’s in you it will tempt you—and the longer it stays, the more able it will be to do so.”

“I gave Forthill the coin,” I said. “I figured that pretty much said it all.”

Michael grimaced. “The shadow can show you how to summon the coin. It’s happened before. That’s why we’re so careful not to touch them.”

“It’s over, Michael. There is no more shadow.”

Michael shook his head, his eyes filled with something very like pity. “It doesn’t work like that, Harry.”

The fire came back. The one thing I didn’t want or need was pity. I’d made my own choices, lived my own life, and even if they hadn’t all been smart choices, there weren’t many of them that I regretted. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Because in two thousand years, no one has rid themselves of the shadow of one of the Fallen—except by accepting the demon into them entirely, taking up the coin, and living to feel remorse and discarding it. And you claim that you never took up the coin.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Then either the shadow is still there,” Michael said, “still twisting your thoughts. Still whispering to you. Or you’re lying to me about taking up the coin. Those are the only options.”

I just stared at him for a minute. Then I said, “Hell’s bells. And I thought wizards had a monopoly on arrogance.”

He blinked.

“Or do you really expect me to believe that the Church has been there to document every single instance of anyone picking up any of the cursed coins. That they’ve followed through with everyone tempted by a Fallen’s shadow, taken testimony. Made copies. Hell, gotten it notarized. Especially given that you’ve told me that Nicodemus has worked as hard as he could to destroy the Church’s records and archives through the years.”

Michael’s weight settled back on his heels. He frowned.

“This is what they want, Michael. They want us at one another’s throats. They want us to distrust one another.” I shook my head. “And right now is not the time to give it to them.”

Michael folded his arms, studying me. “It could have done something to your mind,” Michael said quietly. “You might not be in control of yourself, Harry.”

I took a deep breath. “That’s…possible,” I admitted. “Anybody’s head can be messed with. But if you go rewiring someone’s brain, it damages them, badly. The bigger the changes you make, the worse it disorders their mind.”

“The way my daughter did to her friends,” Michael said. “I know.”

“So there are signs,” I said. “If you know the person well enough, there are almost always signs. They act differently. Have I been acting differently? Have I suddenly gone crazy on you?”

He arched an eyebrow.

“More so than usual,” I amended.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Then odds are pretty good no one has scrambled my noggin,” I said. “Besides which, it isn’t the sort of thing one tends to overlook, and as a grade-A wizard of the White Council, I assure you that nothing like that has happened to me.”

For a second he looked like he wanted to speak, but he didn’t.

“Which brings us back to the only real issue here,” I said. “Do you think I’ve gone over to them? Do you think I could do such a thing, after what I’ve seen?”

My friend sighed. “No, Harry.”

I stepped up to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Then trust me for a little longer. Help me for a little longer.”

He searched my eyes again. “I will,” he whispered, “if you answer one question for me.”

I frowned at him and tilted my head. “Okay.”

He took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “Harry,” he said quietly, “what happened to your blasting rod?”

For a second the question didn’t make any sense. The words sounded like noises, like sounds infants make before they learn to speak. Especially the last part of the sentence. “I…I’m sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”

“Where,” he said gently, “is your blasting rod?”

This time I heard the words.

Pain stabbed me in the head, ice picks plunging into both temples. I flinched and doubled over. Blasting rod. Familiar words. I fought to summon an image of what went with the words, but I couldn’t find anything. I knew I had a memory associated with those words, but try as I might, I couldn’t drag it out. It was like a shape covered by some heavy tarp. I knew an object was beneath, but I couldn’t get to it.

“I don’t…I don’t…” I started breathing faster. The pain got worse.

Someone had been in my head.

Someone had been in my head.

Oh, God.

I must have fallen at some point, because the workshop’s floor was cold underneath one of my cheeks when I felt Michael’s broad, work-calloused hand gently cover my forehead.

“Father,” he murmured, humbly and with no drama whatsoever. “Father, please help my friend. Father of light, banish the darkness that he may see. Father of truth, expose the lies. Father of mercy, ease his pain. Father of love, honor this good man’s heart. Amen.”

Michael’s hand felt suddenly red-hot, and I felt power burning in the air around him—not magic, the magic I worked with every day. This was something different, something more ancient, more potent, more pure. This was the power of faith, and as that heat settled into the spaces behind my eyes, something cracked and shattered inside my thoughts.

The pain vanished so suddenly that it left me gasping, even as the image of a simple wooden rod, a couple of feet long, heavily carved with sigils and runes, leapt into the forefront of my thoughts. Along with the image of the blasting rod came thousands of memories, everything I had ever known about using magic to summon and control fire in a hurry, evocation, combat magic, and they hit me like a sledgehammer.

I lay there shuddering for a minute or two as I took it all back in. The memories filled a hole inside me I hadn’t even realized was there.

Michael left his hand on my head. “Easy, Harry. Easy. Just rest for a minute. I’m right here.”

I decided not to argue with him.

“Well,” I rasped weakly a moment later. I opened my eyes and looked up to where Michael sat cross-legged on the floor beside me. “Somebody owes somebody here an apology.”

He gave me a small, concerned smile. “You don’t owe me anything. Perhaps I should have spoken sooner, but…”

“But confronting someone who’s had his brain twisted out of shape about the fact can prove traumatic,” I said quietly. “Especially if part of the twisting was making damned sure that he didn’t remember any such thing happening.”

He nodded. “Molly became concerned sometime yesterday. I asked her to have a look at you while you were sleeping earlier. I apologize for that, but I didn’t know any other way to be sure that someone had tampered with you.”

I shivered. Ugh. Molly playing in my head. That wasn’t necessarily the prettiest thing to think about. Molly had a gift for neuromancy, mind magic, but she’d used it to do some fairly nasty things to people in the past—for perfectly good reasons, true, but all the same it had been honest-to-evilness black magic. It was the kind of thing that people got addicted to, and it wasn’t the kind of candy store that I would ever want that kid to play in.

Especially considering that the inventory was me.

“Hell’s bells, Michael,” I murmured. “You shouldn’t have done that to her.”

“It was her idea, actually. And you’re right, Harry. We can’t afford to be divided right now. What can you remember?”

I shook my head, squinting while I sorted through the dump-truckload of loose memories. “The last time I remember having it was right after the gruffs attacked us here. After that…nothing. I don’t know where it is now. And no, I don’t remember who did it to me or why.”

Michael frowned but nodded. “Well. He doesn’t always give us what we want. Only what we need.”

I rubbed at my forehead. “I hope so,” I said sheepishly. “So. Um. This is a little awkward. After that thing with putting your Sword to my throat and all.”

Michael let his head fall back and belted out a warm, rich laugh. “You aren’t the sort of person to do things by halves, Harry. Grand gestures included.”

“I guess not,” I said quietly.

“I have to ask,” Michael said, studying me intently. “Lasciel’s shadow. Is it really gone?”

I nodded.

“How?”

I looked away from him. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

He frowned but nodded slowly. “Can you tell me why not?”

“Because what happened to her wasn’t fair.” I shook my head. “Do you know why the Denarians don’t like going into churches, Michael?”

He shrugged. “Because the presence of the Almighty makes them uncomfortable, or so I always supposed.”

“No,” I said, closing my eyes. “Because it makes the Fallen feel, Michael. Makes them remember. Makes them sad.”

I felt his startled glance, even with my eyes closed.

“Imagine how awful that would be,” I said, “after millennia of certainty of purpose. Suddenly you have doubts. Suddenly you question whether or not everything you’ve done has been one enormous, futile lie. If everything you sacrificed, you sacrificed for nothing.” I smiled faintly. “Couldn’t be good for your confidence.”

“No,” Michael said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose it would be.”

“Shiro told me I’d know who to give the Sword to,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I threw it into the deal with Nicodemus. The coins and the Sword for the child.”

Michael drew in a sharp breath.

“He would have walked away otherwise,” I said. “Run out the clock, and we’d never have found him in time. It was the only way. It was almost like Shiro knew. Even back then.”

“God’s blood, Harry,” Michael said. He pressed a hand to his stomach. “I’m fairly sure that gambling is a sin. And even if it isn’t, this probably should be.”

“I’m going to go get that little girl, Michael,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”

He rose, frowning, and buckled his sword belt around his hips.

I held up my right hand. “Are you with me?”

Michael’s palm smacked solidly into mine, and he hauled me to my feet.

Chapter Thirty-nine

As war councils go, our meeting was fast and dirty. It had to be.

Afterward I tracked down Murphy. She’d gone back to Charity’s sewing room to check on Kincaid.

I stood quietly in the door for a minute. There wasn’t much room to be had in there. It was piled high with plastic storage boxes filled with fabric and craft materials. There was a sewing machine on a table, a chair, the bed, and just enough floor space to let you get to them. I’d been laid up in this room before. It was a comforting sort of place, awash in softness and color, and it smelled like detergent and fabric softener.

Kincaid looked like the Mummy’s stunt double. He had an IV in his arm, and there was a unit of blood suspended from a small metal stand beside his bed—courtesy of Marcone’s rogue medical facilities, I supposed.

Murphy sat beside the bed, looking worried. I’d seen the expression on her face before, when I’d been the one lying horizontal. I expected to feel a surge of jealousy, but it didn’t happen. I just felt bad for Murph.

“How is he?” I asked her.

“This is his third unit of blood,” Murphy said. “His color’s better. His breathing is steadier. But he needs a doctor. Maybe we should call Butters.”

“If we do, he’s just going to look at us, do his McCoy impersonation, and tell you, ‘Dammit, Murphy. I’m a medical examiner, not a pasta chef.’”

Murphy choked out a little sound that was as much sob as chuckle.

I stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Michael says he’s going to make it.”

She sat stiffly underneath my hand. “He isn’t a doctor.”

“But he has very good contacts.”

Kincaid shuddered, and his breath rasped harshly for several seconds.

Murphy’s shoulder went steely with tension.

The wounded man’s breathing steadied again.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “Easy.”

She shook her head. “I hate this.”

“He’s tougher than you or me,” I said quietly.

“That’s not what I mean.”

I remained silent, waiting for her to speak.

“I hate feeling like this. I’m fucking terrified, and I hate it.” The muscles in her jaw tensed. “This is why I don’t want to get involved anymore. It hurts too much.”

I squeezed her shoulder gently. “Involved, huh?”

“No,” she said. Then she shook her head. “Yes. I don’t know. It’s complicated, Harry.”

“Caring about someone isn’t complicated,” I said. “It isn’t easy. But it isn’t complicated, either. Kinda like lifting the engine block out of a car.”

She gave me an oblique glance. “Leave it to a man to describe intimate relationships in terms of automotive mechanics.”

“Yeah. I was kinda proud of that one, myself.”

She huffed out a quiet breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and leaned her cheek down onto my hand. “The stupid part,” she said, “is that he isn’t interested in…in getting serious. We get along. We have fun together. For him, that’s enough. And it’s so stupid for me to get hung up on him.”

I didn’t think it was all that stupid. Murph didn’t want to get too close, let herself be too vulnerable. Kincaid didn’t want that kind of relationship either—which made him safe. It made it all right for her to care.

It also explained why she and I had never gotten anywhere.

In the event that you haven’t figured it out, I’m not the kind of person to be casually involved in much of anything.

I couldn’t fit any of that into words, though. So I just leaned down and kissed the top of her head gently.

She shivered. Her tears made wet, cool spots on the back of my hand. I knelt. It put my head more or less on level with hers, where she sat beside the bed. I put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against me. I still didn’t say anything. For Murph, that would be too much like I was actually in the room, seeing her cry. So she pretended that she wasn’t crying and I pretended that I didn’t notice.

She didn’t cry for long. A couple of minutes. Then her breathing steadied, and I could feel her asserting control again. A minute more and she sat up and away from me. I let her.

“They said you were under the influence,” she said, her tone calmer, more businesslike. “That someone had done something to your head. Your apprentice said that. But Michael didn’t want to say anything in front of the other wizard, I could tell. And no one wanted to say anything in front of me.”

“Secrets get to be a habit,” I said quietly. “And Molly was right.”

Murphy nodded. “She said that we should listen for the first words out of your mouth when you woke up. That if something had messed with your mind, your subconscious might be able to communicate that way, while you were on the edge of sleep. And you told us to listen to her.”

I thought about it and pursed my lips. “Huh. I did. Guess I’m smarter than I thought.”

“They shouldn’t have suspected you,” Murphy said. “I’m a paranoid bitch, and I gave up suspecting you a long time ago.”

“They had a good reason,” I said. I took a slow breath. It was hard, but I forced the words out. “Nicodemus threw one of those coins at Michael’s kid. I grabbed it before the kid could. And I had a photocopy of a Fallen angel living in my head for several years, trying to talk me into picking up the coin and letting the rest of it into me.”

Murphy glanced obliquely at me. “You mean…you could have become one of those things?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Couple of times, it was close.”

“Is it still…Is that what…?”

I shook my head. “It’s gone now. She’s gone now. I guess the whole time she was trying to change me, I was trying to change her right back. And in the Raith Deeps last year, she took a psychic bullet for me—at the very end, after everyone else had gotten out.” I shrugged. “I had…We’d sort of become friends, Murph. I’d gotten used to having her around.” I glanced at her and gave her a faint smile. “Crazy, huh? Get all broken up over what was essentially my imaginary friend.”

Her fingers found my hand and squeezed tight once. “We’re all imaginary friends to one another, Harry.” She sat with me for a moment, and then gave me a shrewd glance. “You never told Michael the details.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know why.”

“I do,” she said. “You remember when Kravos stuck his fingers in my brain?”

I shuddered. He’d been impersonating me when he did it. “Yeah.”

“You said it caused some kind of damage. What did you call it?”

“Psychic trauma,” I said. “Same thing happens when a loved one dies, during big emotional tragedies, that kind of thing. Takes a while to get over it.”

“But you do get over it,” Murph said. “Dresden, it seems to me that you’d lock yourself up pretty tight if someone took a regular bullet for you with a regular body. Much less if you were under psychic attack and this imaginary friend died right inside your own brain. Something like that happens, shouldn’t you have expected to be a basket case, at least for a little while?”

I frowned, staring down at my hands. “I never even considered that.”

She snorted gently. “There’s a surprise. Dresden forgets that he’s not invincible.”

She had a point there.

“This plan of yours,” she said. “Do you really think it’s going to work?”

“I think I’ve got to try it.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think you should be involved in this one, Murph. The Denarians have human followers. Fanatic ones.”

“You think we’re going to have to kill some of them,” Murphy said.

“I think we probably won’t have much choice,” I said. “Besides that, I wouldn’t put it past them to send someone here for spite, win or lose.”

Murphy glanced up at me rather sharply.

I shrugged. “They know that Michael and Sanya and I are going to be out there. They’ll know that there will be someone here, unprotected. Whether or not they get the coins, Nicodemus might send someone here to finish off the wounded.”

Murphy stared at me for a second, then looked back at Kincaid. “You bastard,” she said without emphasis.

“I’m not playing big brother with you, Karrin,” I replied. “But we are dealing with some very bad people. Molly’s staying with Kincaid. I’m leaving Mouse here too. I’d appreciate it if someone with a little more experience was here to give the kid some direction, if it was needed.”

She scowled at Kincaid. Then she said, “Trying to guilt me into playing worried girlfriend, domestic defender, and surrogate mother figure, eh?”

“I figured it would work better than telling you to shut up and get into the kitchen.”

She took a deep breath, studying the sleeping man. Then she reached out and touched his hand. She stood and faced me. “No. I’m coming with you.”

I grunted, rising. “You sure?”

“The girl is important to him,” Murphy said. “More important to him than anything has been for a long time, Harry. He’d die to protect her. If he was conscious, he’d be demanding to go with you. But he can’t do that. So I’ll have to do it for him.”

“Could be real messy, Murph.”

She nodded. “I’ll worry about that after the girl is safe.”

There was a clock ticking quietly on the wall. “The meeting’s in an hour.”

Murphy nodded and reached for her coat. The tears were gone, and there was no evidence of them in the lines of her face. “You’d better excuse me, then. If we’re going to have an evening out, I need to change into something more comfortable.”

“I never tell a lady how to accessorize.”

Going forth to do battle with the forces of darkness is one thing. Doing it in a pair of borrowed sweatpants and an ill-fitting T-shirt is something else entirely. Fortunately, Molly had been thoughtful enough to drop my own clothes into the washer, bless her heart. I could forgive her for the pot roast.

In the laundry room I had skinned out of Michael’s clothes and was in the act of pulling up my jeans when Luccio opened the door and leaned in, her expression excited. “Dresden. I think I know wh—Oh.”

I jerked my jeans the rest of the way up and closed them as hurriedly as I could without causing any undue discomfort. “Oh. Um. Excuse me,” I said.

Luccio smiled, the dimples in her cheeks making her look not much older than Molly. She didn’t blush. Instead she folded her arms and leaned one shoulder on the door frame, her dark eyes taking me in with evident pleasure. “Oh, not at all, Dresden. Not at all.”

I paused and returned her look for a moment. “Aren’t you supposed to be embarrassed, apologize, and quietly leave?”

Her smile widened lazily, and she shrugged a shoulder. “When I was a girl, perhaps. But even then I had difficulty forcing myself to act awkward when looking at something that pleased me.” She tilted her head and moved toward me. She reached out and rested her fingertips very lightly against a scar on my upper arm. She traced its outline and glanced up at me, lifting an eyebrow.

“Bullet wound,” I said. “FBI werewolves.”

She nodded. Then her fingers touched the hollow of my throat and slid slowly down over my chest and belly in a straight line. A shuddering sensation of heat fluttered through my skin in the wake of her fingertips. She looked up at me again.

“Hook knife,” I said. “Sorcerer tried to filet me at the Field Museum.”

Her touch trailed down my bare arms, lingering on my forearms, near my wrists, avoiding the red, scalded skin around my left wrist.

“Thorn manacles,” I said. “From when Madrigal Raith tried to sell me on eBay.”

She lifted my scarred left hand between hers, fingers stroking over the maimed flesh. These days I could move it pretty well, most of the time, and it didn’t look like some kind of hideous, half-melted wax image of a hand anymore, but it still wasn’t pretty. “A scourge of Black Court vampires had a Renfield that got creative. Had a homemade flamethrower.”

She shook her head. “I know men centuries older than you who have not collected so many scars.”

“Maybe they lived that long because they were smart enough not to get them,” I said.

She flashed me that grin again. At close range it was devastating, and her eyes looked even darker.

“Anastasia,” I said quietly, “in a few minutes we’re going to go do something that might get us killed.”

“Yes, Harry. We are,” she said.

I nodded. “But that’s not until a few minutes from now.”

Her eyes smoldered. “No. No, it isn’t.”

I lifted my still-tingling right hand to gently cup the line of her jaw, and leaned down to press my mouth to hers.

She let out a quiet, satisfied little moan and melted against me, her body pressing full-length to mine, returning the kiss with slow, sensuous intensity. I felt her slide the fingers of one hand into my hair, while the nails of the other wandered randomly over my chest and arm, barely touching. It left a trail of fire in my flesh, and I found myself sinking the fingers of my right hand into the soft curls of her hair, drawing her more deeply into the kiss.

I don’t know how long that went on, but it wound down deliciously. By the time she drew her mouth away from mine, both of us were breathing harder, and my heart was pounding out a rapid beat against my chest. And against my jeans.

She didn’t open her eyes for five or ten seconds, and when she did, they were absolutely huge and molten with desire. Anastasia leaned her head back and arched in a slow stretch, letting out a long, low, pleased sigh.

“You don’t mind?” I asked her.

“Not at all.”

“Good. I just…wanted to see what that was like. It’s been a long time since I kissed anyone. Almost forgot what it was like.”

“You have no idea,” she murmured, “how long it has been since I’ve kissed a man. I wasn’t sure I remembered how.”

I let out a quiet laugh.

Her dimples returned. “Good,” she said, satisfaction in her tone. She looked me up and down, taking in the sights again. This time it didn’t make me feel self-conscious. “You have a good smile. You should show it more often.”

“Once we’re done tonight,” I said, “maybe we could talk about that. Over dinner.”

Her smile widened, and color touched her cheeks. “That would please me.”

“Good,” I said. I arched an eyebrow at her. “I’ll put my shirt on now, if that’s all right.”

Anastasia let out a merry laugh and stepped back from me, though she didn’t lift her fingertips from my skin until the distance forced her to do it. “Very well, Warden. As you were.”

“Why, thank you, Captain.” I tugged the rest of my clothes back on. “What were you going to tell me?”

“Hmmm?” she said. “Oh, ah, yes. Before I was so cleverly distracted. I think I know where the Denarians are holding the Archive.”

I blinked. “You got through with a tracking spell?”

She shook her head. “No, it failed miserably. So I was forced to resort to the use of my brain.” She opened a hard-sided leather case hanging from her sword belt. She withdrew a plastic tube from it, opened one end, and withdrew a roll of papers. She thumbed through them, found one, and put the rest back. She unfolded the paper into what looked like a map, and laid it out on the lid of the dryer.

I leaned over to look at it. It was indeed a map, but instead of being marked with state lines, highways, and towns, it was dominated by natural features—most prominent of which was the outlines of the Great Lakes. Rivers, forests, and swamps figured prominently as well. Furthermore, a webwork of intersecting lines flowed over the map, marked in various colors of ink in several different thicknesses.

Footsteps approached and Molly appeared, carrying a plastic laundry basket full of children’s clothing. She blinked when she saw us, but smiled and came over immediately. “What’s that?”

“It’s a map,” I replied, like the knowledgeable mentor I was supposed to be.

She snorted. “I can see that,” she said. “But a map of what?”

Then I got it. “Ley lines,” I said, looking up at Luccio. “These are ley lines.”

Molly pursed her lips and studied the paper. “Those are real?”

“Yeah, we just haven’t covered them yet. They’re…well, think of them as underground pipelines. Only instead of flowing with water, they flow with magic. They run all over the world, usually running between hot spots of supernatural energy.”

“Connect the dots with magic,” Molly said. “Cool.”

“Exactly,” Luccio said. “The only method that would have a chance of restraining the Archive’s power would be the use of a greater circle—and one that uses an enormous amount of energy, at that.”

I grunted acknowledgment. “It would have to be dead solid perfect, too, or she could break loose at the flaw.”

“Correct.”

“How much energy are we talking about?” I asked her.

“You might be able to empower such a circle for half an hour or an hour, Dresden. I couldn’t have kept it up that long, even before my, ah”—she waved a hand down at herself—“accident.”

“So it would take loads of power,” I mused. “So how are they powering it?”

“That’s the real question,” she said. “After all, the Sign they raised at the Aquarium suggests that they have an ample supply.”

I shook my head. “No,” I stated. “That was Hellfire.”

Luccio pursed her lips. “You seem fairly certain of that.”

“I seem completely certain of that,” I said. “It’s powerful as Hell, literally, but it isn’t stable. It fluctuates and stutters. That’s why they couldn’t keep the Sign up any longer than they did.”

“To imprison the Archive, they would need a steady, flawless supply,” Luccio said. “A supply that big would also be able to support a very complex veil—one that could shield them from any tracking spell. In fact, it’s the only way they could establish a veil that impenetrable.”

“Ley lines,” I breathed.

“Ley lines,” she said with satisfaction.

“I know of a couple around town, but I didn’t realize there were that many of the things,” I said.

“The Great Lakes region is rife with them,” Luccio said. “It’s an energy nexus.”

“So?” Molly asked. “What does that mean?”

“Well, it’s one reason why so much supernatural activity tends to happen in this area,” I said. “Three times as many ships and planes have vanished in Lake Michigan as in the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Wow,” Molly said. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Next summer I think I’ll stick to the pool.”

Luccio started tracing various lines on the map with a fingertip. “The colors denote what manner of energy seems to be most prevalent in the line. Defensive energy here. Disruptive force here, restorative lines here and here, and so on. The thickness of the line indicates its relative potency.”

“Right, right,” I said, growing excited. “So we’re looking for an energy source compatible with the use of a greater circle, and strong enough to keep a big one powered up and stable.”

“And there are four locations that I think are most likely,” Luccio said. She pointed up toward the north end of Lake Michigan. “North and South Manitou islands both have heavy concentrations of dark energy running through them.”

“There’s plenty of spook stories around them, too,” I said. “But that’s better than two hundred miles away. If I were Nicodemus, I wouldn’t want to risk moving her that far.”

“Agreed. A third runs directly beneath the Field Museum.” She glanced up at me and arched an eyebrow as her voice turned dry. “But I think you’re already familiar with that one.”

“I was going to put the dinosaur back,” I said. “But I was unconscious.”

“Which brings us to number four,” Luccio said. Her fingertip came to rest on a cluster of tiny islands out in the center of the lake, northeast of the city, and the heavy, dark purple line running through it. “Here.”

Molly leaned across me and frowned down at the map. “There aren’t any islands in that part of Lake Michigan. It’s all open water.”

“Listens-to-Wind gave this map to me, Miss Carpenter,” Luccio said seriously. “He’s spent several centuries living in this general region.”

I grunted. “I hear a lot of things. I think that there are some islands out there. They were used as bases for wilderness fighters in several wars. Bootleggers used them as a transfer point for running booze in from Canada, back in the Prohibition days. But there were always stories around them.”

Molly frowned. “What kind of stories?”

I shrugged. “The usual scary stuff. Hauntings. People driven insane by unknown forces. People dragged into the water by creatures unknown, or found slaughtered by weaponry several centuries out-of-date.”

“Then why aren’t they on the maps and stuff?” Molly asked.

“The islands are dangerous,” I said. “Long way from any help, and the lake can be awfully mean in the winter. There are stone reefs out there, too, that could gut a boat that came too close. Maybe someone down at city hall figured that the islands would prove less of a temptation to people if everyone thought they were just stories, and invested some effort in removing them from the public record.”

“That wouldn’t be possible,” Molly said.

“It might be,” Luccio responded. “The energies concentrated around those islands would tend to make people unconsciously avoid them. If one did not have a firm destination fixed in mind, the vast majority of people in the area would swing around the islands without ever realizing what they were doing.”

I grunted. “And if there’s that much bad mojo spinning around out there, it would play merry hell with navigational gear. Twenty bucks says that the major flight lanes don’t come within five miles of the place.” I thumped my finger on the spot and nodded. “It feels right. She’s there.”

“If she is,” Molly asked, “then what do we do about it?”

Luccio tilted her head at me, frowning.

“Captain, I assume you already contacted the Council about getting reinforcements?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’ll be here as soon as possible—which is about nine hours from now.”

“Not fast enough,” I said, and narrowed my eyes in thought. “So we call in some favors.”

“Favors?” Luccio asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know a guy with a boat.”

Chapter Forty

I rushed around setting up details for the next half an hour. Everyone left to get into position except for me, Molly, and Kincaid. And Mouse.

My dog was clearly upset that I wasn’t going to be bringing him along, and though he dutifully settled down on the floor near Molly’s feet, he looked absolutely miserable.

“Sorry, boy,” I told him. “I want you here to help Molly and warn her about any danger.”

He sighed.

“I got along just fine without you for quite a while,” I told him. “Don’t you worry about me.”

He rolled onto his back and gave me another pathetic look.

“Hah. Just trying to cadge a tummy rub. I knew it.” I leaned down and obliged him.

A minute later the back door opened, and Thomas came in. “Finally,” he said. “I’ve been sitting in my car so long, I think I left a dent in the seat.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll live. What can I do to help?”

“Get back in your car and give me a ride to my place.”

Thomas gave me a level look. Then he muttered something under his breath, pulled his keys out of his pocket, and stalked back out into the snow.

“You’re horrible,” Molly said, grinning.

“What?” I said. “I’m expressing my brotherly affection.”

I shrugged into my coat and picked up my staff. “Remember the plan?”

“Man the phone,” Molly said, ticking off each point on her fingers. “Keep my eyes open. Make sure Mouse stays in the same room as me. Check on Kincaid every fifteen minutes.”

At one time she would have been sullen about the prospect of being forced to sit at home when something exciting was under way—but she had grown up enough to realize just how dangerous things could be out there, and to respect her own limitations. Molly was extraordinarily sensitive when it came to the various energies of magic. It was one of the things that made her so good at psycho-mancy and neuromancy. It also meant that when violent personal or supernatural events started happening, she experienced them in such agonizing clarity that it would often incapacitate her altogether, at least for a few minutes. Combat magic was never going to be her strong suit, and in a real conflict she could prove to be a lethal liability to her own allies.

But at least the kid knew it. She might not like it very much, but she’d applied herself diligently to finding other ways to help fight the good fight. I was proud of her.

“And don’t forget your homework,” I said.

She frowned. “I still don’t understand why you want to know about our family tree.”

“Humor me, grasshopper. I’ll buy you a snow cone.”

She glanced out the window at the world of white outside. “Goody.” She looked back at me and gave me a small, worried smile. “Be careful.”

“Hey, there were almost twenty of these losers at the Shedd. Now we’re down to six.”

“The six smartest, strongest, and oldest,” Molly said. “The ones who really matter.”

“Thank you for your optimism,” I said, and turned to go. “Lock up behind me.”

Molly bit her lip. “Harry?”

I paused.

Her voice was very small. “Look out for my dad. Okay?”

I turned and met her eyes. I drew an X over my heart and nodded.

She blinked her eyes quickly several times and gave me another smile. “All right.”

“Lock the door,” I told her again, and trudged out into the snow. The lock clicked shut behind me, and Molly watched me slog through the snow to the street. Thomas’s military moving van came rumbling through the snow, tires crunching, and I got in.

He turned the heater up a little while I stomped snow off of my shoes.

“So,” he said, starting down the street. “What’s the plan?”

I told him.

“That is a bad plan,” he said.

“There wasn’t time for a good one.”

He grunted. “November is not a good time to be sailing on Lake Michigan, Harry.”

“The aftermath of a nuclear holocaust isn’t a good time to be sailing there, either.”

Thomas frowned. “You aren’t just running your mouth, here, are you? You’re serious?”

“It’s a worst-case scenario,” I said. “But Nicodemus could do it, so we’ve got to proceed under the presumption that his intentions are in that category. The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they’d use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they’d crash the world economy. Maybe they’d turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.”

“That’s mostly done already, Harry.”

“Oh. Well. I’ve got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway.” We traded forced grins. “Regardless of what they do, the potential for Really Bad Things is just too damned high to ignore, and we need all the help we can get.”

“Even help from one of those dastardly White Court fiends?” Thomas asked.

“Exactly.”

“Good. I was getting tired of dodging Luccio. There’s a limited amount of help I can give you if I have to stay out of sight all the time.”

“It’s necessary. If the Council knew that you and I were related…”

“I know, I know,” Thomas said, scowling. “Outcast leper unclean.”

I sighed and shook my head. Given that the White Court’s modus operandi generally consisted of twisting people’s minds around in one of several ways, I didn’t dare let anyone on the Council know that Thomas was my friend, let alone my half brother. Everyone would immediately assume the worst—that the White Court had gotten to me and was controlling my head through Thomas. And even if I convinced them that it wasn’t the case, it would look suspicious as hell. The Council would demand I demonstrate loyalty, attempt to use Thomas as a spy against the White Court, and in general behave like the pompous, overbearing assholes that they are.

It wasn’t easy for either of us to live with—but it wasn’t going to change, either.

We got to my apartment and I rushed inside. It was cold. The fire had burned down to nothing in the time I’d been gone. I lifted my hand and murmured under my breath, the spell lighting half a dozen candles at the same time. I grabbed everything I was going to need, waved the candles out again, and hurried back out to Thomas’s car.

“You’ve got Mom’s pentacle with you, right?” I asked him. I had a matching pendant on a silver chain around my own neck—which, other than Thomas, was my mother’s only tangible legacy.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll find you. Where now?”

“St. Mary’s,” I said.

“Figured.”

Thomas started driving. I broke open my double-barreled shotgun, which I’d sawed down to an illegal length, and loaded two shells into it. Tessa the Mantis Girl had rudely neglected to return my .44 after the conclusion of hostilities at the Aquarium, and I have rarely regretted taking a gun with me into what could prove to be a hairy situation.

“Here,” I said when the truck got within a block or so of the church. “Drop me off here.”

“Gotcha,” Thomas said. “Hey, Harry.”

“Yeah?”

“What if they aren’t keeping the little girl on the island?”

I shook my head. “You’ll just have to figure something out. I’m making this up as I go.”

He frowned and shook his head. “What about those goons from Summer? What are you going to do if they show up again?”

“If? I should be so lucky.” I winked at him and got out of the Hummer. “The real question is, what am I going to do if they don’t show up, and at the worst possible time to boot? Die of shock, probably.”

“See you soon,” Thomas said.

I nodded to my brother, shut the door, and trudged across the street and into the parking lot of St. Mary of the Angels.

It’s a big church. A really, really big church. It takes up a full city block, and is one of the town’s more famous landmarks, Chicago’s version of Notre Dame. The drive leading up to the delivery doors in the back of the church had been cleared, as had the little parking lot outside it. Michael’s truck was there. The ambient glow of winter night showed me his form and Sanya’s, standing outside the truck, both of them wearing long white cloaks emblazoned with scarlet crosses over similarly decorated white surcoats—the Sunday-go-to-meeting wear of the Knights of the Cross. They wore their swords at their hips. Michael wore an honest-to-God breastplate, while Sanya opted for more modern body armor. The big Russian, always the practical progressive, also carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle on a sling over his shoulder.

I wondered if Sanya realized that Michael’s antiquated-looking breastplate was lined with Kevlar and ballistic strike plates. The Russian’s gear wouldn’t do diddly to stop swords or claws.

I’d made some modification to my own gear as well. The thong that usually secured my blasting rod, on the inside of my duster, now held up my shotgun. I’d tied a similar strip of leather thong to either end of the simple wooden cane that held Fidelacchius, and now carried the holy blade slung over my shoulder.

Michael nodded to me and then glanced down at his watch. “You’re cutting it a little fine, aren’t you?”

“Punctuality is for people with nothing better to do,” I said.

“Or for those who have already taken care of the other details,” murmured a woman’s voice.

She stepped out of the shadows across the street, a tall and striking woman in motorcycle leathers. She had eyes that were the warm brown shade of hot chocolate, and her hair was dark and braided tightly against her head. She wore no makeup, but even without it she was a knockout. It was the expression on her face that tipped me off to who she was—sadness mingled with regret and steely resolve.

“Rosanna,” I said quietly.

“Wizard.” She strode toward us, somehow arrogant and reserved at the same time, her hips rolling as she walked. The jacket was open almost all the way to her belly button, and there was nothing but skin showing where it was parted. Her eyes, however, remained on the Knights. “These two were not a part of the arrangements.”

“And it was supposed to be Nicodemus that met me,” I said. “Not you.”

“Circumstances necessitated a change,” Rosanna replied.

I shrugged one shoulder—the one bearing Fidelacchius. “Same here.”

“What circumstances are those?” Rosanna demanded.

“The ones where I’m dealing with a pack of two-faced, backstabbing, treacherous, murderous lunatics whom I trust no farther than I can kick.”

She regarded me with level, lovely eyes. “And what is the Knights’ intended role?”

“They’re here to build trust.”

“Trust?” she asked.

“Absolutely. I can kick you a lot farther when they’re around.”

A very small smile touched her mouth. She inclined her head slightly to me. Then she turned to Sanya. “Those colors hardly suit you, animal. Though it is more than agreeable to see you again.”

“I am not that man anymore, Rosanna,” Sanya replied. “I have changed.”

“No, you haven’t,” Rosanna said, those warm eyes locked onto Sanya’s now. “You still long for the fray. Still love the fight. Still revel in bloodshed. That was never Magog. That was always you, my beast.”

Sanya shook his head with a faint smile. “I still enjoy a fight,” he said. “I simply choose them a bit more carefully now.”

“It isn’t too late, you know,” Rosanna said. “Make a gift of that toy to my lord and my lady. They will accept you again with open arms.” She took a step toward him. “You could be with me again, animal. You could have me again.”

Something very odd happened to her voice on the last couple of sentences. It became…thicker somehow, richer, more musical. The individual sounds seemed to have little to do with meaning—but the voice itself carried a honey-slow swirl of sensuality and desire that felt like it was going to glide into my ears and start glowing gently inside my brain. I was only on the fringe of it, too, and had gotten only a watered-down version of the promise contained in that voice. Sanya got it at full potency.

He threw his head back and laughed, a rich, booming, basso laugh that bounced back and forth from the icy stones of the church and the cold walls of the buildings around us.

Rosanna took a step back at that, her expression showing surprise.

“I told you, Rosanna,” he rumbled, laughter still bubbling in his tone. “I have changed.” Then his expression sobered abruptly. “You could change, too. I know how much some of the things you have done disturb you. I’ve been there when you had the nightmares. It doesn’t have to be like that.”

She just stared at him.

Sanya spread his hands. “Give up the coin, Rosanna. Please. Let me help you.”

Her eyelids lowered into slits. She shuddered once and looked down. Then she said, “It is too late for me, Sanya. It has been too late for me for a long, long time.”

“It is never too late,” Sanya said earnestly. “Not as long as you draw breath.”

Something like contempt touched Rosanna’s features. “What do you know, stupid child.” Her gaze swung back to me. “Show me the Sword and the coins, wizard.”

I tapped the hilt of Shiro’s Sword, hanging from its improvised strap over one shoulder. Then I drew the purple Crown Royal bag out of my pocket and held it up. I shook it. It jingled.

“Give the coins to me,” Rosanna said.

I folded my arms. “No.”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Our bargain—”

“You can see them after I’ve seen the girl,” I replied. “Until then, you’ll have to settle for some jingle.” I shook the bag again.

She glowered at me.

“Make up your mind,” I said. “I haven’t got all night. Do you want to explain to Nicodemus how you threw away his chance of destroying the Swords? Or do you want to get moving and take us to the kid?”

Her eyes flickered with something like anger, and warm brown became brilliant gold. But she only gave me a small, stiff nod of her head, and said, “I will take you to her. This way. Please.”

Chapter Forty-one

The next few minutes were intense, and I didn’t dare let it show. If I’d been completely wrong in my deductions—which was possible; God knew it had happened before—then Michael, Sanya, and I were about to walk into the lion’s den together. Granted, that worked out for Daniel, but he was the exception to the rule. Most of the time it works out well only for the lions. That’s why the Persians used it as a means of execution.

Granted, Michael was working for the same employer, and technically Sanya was too, even if he wasn’t wholly decided on whether or not that was what he was doing. But me and the Almighty haven’t ever really sat down for a chat. I’m not really sure where He stands on the Harry Dresden issue, and as a result my theological stance has been pretty simple: I try not to get noticed by anything Godly, godly, or god-ish. I think we’re all happier that way.

All the same, given who I was up against, I didn’t think it would be inappropriate if a couple of breaks came my way. Hopefully Michael had put in a good word for me.

Rosanna walked down the street and lifted a hand. A van cruised up out of the night. It was occupied by a single driver, a thick-necked, broken-nosed type whose eyes didn’t look like he was all the way there. One of Nick’s fanatics, probably. They had their tongues ritually removed as a point of honor and practicality—from Nicodemus’s perspective, anyway. I supposed I could ask him to open up and confirm it, but it seemed a little gauche.

Michael stuck his head in the van and checked it out. Then he politely opened the passenger door for Rosanna. The Denarian stared levelly at him for a moment, and then nodded her head and slid into the van.

Sanya went in the van first, taking the rearmost seat. I went in after Michael. Rosanna muttered something to the driver, and the van took off.

I got nervous for a minute. The van headed west—in exactly the opposite direction from the lake. Then the driver turned north, and after a few minutes I realized that we were headed for one of the marinas at the north end of Lake Shore Drive. I forced myself to keep my breathing smooth and even. If the bad guys tumbled to the fact that we’d already guessed their location, the situation could devolve pretty quickly.

Michael sat calmly, his face imperturbable, his hands resting on the sheathed form of Amoracchius, the picture of saintly serenity. Sanya, behind us, let out a low, buzzing snore. It wasn’t as saintly as Michael, but it conveyed just as much blithe confidence. I tried to match their calm, with mixed results. Don’t get jittery, Harry. Play it cool. Ice water in your veins.

The van stopped at one of the marinas off Northerly Island. Rosanna got out without a word and we followed her. She stalked down to the shore, out onto the docks, and out to a modestly sized ski boat moored at the dock’s end. Michael and I went aboard after her. Sanya untied the lines holding the boat to the dock, pushed it away from the pier, and casually hopped across the widening distance and into the vessel.

It took her a couple of minutes, but Rosanna coaxed the old boat’s engines to life and turned us away from the lights of the city and out into the darkness of the great lake.

It was eerie how swiftly the world became pitch-black. That strange faerie-light of the night under a heavy snow vanished out on the waters of the lake, where the snow simply sank into the depths. The low overcast gave us a little light, for a time, reflecting the glow of the city, but as the boat continued skimming out into the center of the lake, even that faded away until I could barely distinguish the outline of the boat and its occupants against the water all around.

I wasn’t sure how long we went on like that in the dark. It seemed like an hour, but it couldn’t have been more than half that. The boat bounced across waves, whump, whump, whump, throwing up splashes of spray that coated the bow in a shining crust of ice. My stomach got a little queasy as I tried to anticipate the motion in the darkness and failed.

At length, the rumble of the boat’s engine died away, and then stopped altogether. The silence was disorienting. I’ve lived my entire adult life in Chicago. I’m used to the city, to its rhythms, its music. The hum and hiss of traffic, the clatter of elevated trains, the blaring radios, the beeping horns, cell phones, sirens, music, animals, and people, people, people.

But out here, in the center of the vast, empty cold of the lake, there was nothing. No heartbeat of the city, no voices, no nothing, except the glug and slap of water hitting the hull of the boat.

I waited for a couple of minutes while the boat was rocked by the waves of the lake. Now that we weren’t moving under power, I thought that they were rocking the boat to a really alarming degree, but I wasn’t going to be the one to start whimpering.

“Well?” Sanya demanded, about five seconds before I would have cracked. “What are we waiting for?”

“A signal,” Rosanna murmured. “I would as soon not tear out the boat’s bottom on rocks and drown us all, dear animal.”

I reached into my duster pocket and took out a chemical light. I tore it out of its package, snapped it, and shook it to life. Up sprang a greenish glow that lit up the immediate area well enough, considering how dark it had been for the past half an hour or so.

Rosanna turned to look at the light. Sometime during the trip her human form had changed, vanishing back into the shape of the scarlet-skinned, goat-legged, bat-winged demoness I had seen at the Aquarium. Her eyes, both the brown ones and the glowing green pair, focused on the chemical light, and she smiled, revealing white, delicately pointed fangs. “No magic, wizard? Are you so fearful about husbanding your strength?”

Out this far from shore, floating over this much water, it would have been difficult to put together a spell of any complexity—but I was sure Rosanna knew that as well as I did, if the flames I’d seen her tossing around back at the Shedd were any indication. It would have been a waste of energy I might need later. But I reminded myself about the ice water alleged to be in my veins.

“Mostly I just think the glow lights are fun,” I said. “Did you know that they used these things for the blood of the Predator in that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

The smile faltered. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s the problem with you nearly immortal types,” I said. “You couldn’t spot a pop culture reference if it skittered up and implanted an embryo down your esophagus.”

At the back of the boat, Sanya started coughing.

Rosanna stared at him for a moment, her eyes unreadable. Then the barest shadow of something mournful touched her features, and she turned away from him. She walked to the front of the boat and stood facing east into the darkness, her arms folded across her body in a posture of tightly closed insecurity, her wings wrapping around her like a blanket.

Sanya didn’t miss it. He’d been forcing himself to conceal a grin, but it faded into uneasy discomfort at Rosanna’s reaction. He looked like he was about to say something, then frowned and shook his head. He turned his face to stare out over the water. Large flakes of snow continued to drift down, flickers of crystalline green in the glow light. Michael started humming contentedly—“Amazing Grace.” He must have learned the song from some Baptists somewhere. He had a nice voice, rich and steady.

I stepped up next to Rosanna and said in a quiet voice, “Tell me something. This maiden-of-sorrow thing you’ve got going—how many Knights have you killed with it?”

Her eyes, both pairs, flicked aside to glance at me for a second, then back out at the night. “What do you mean?”

“You know. You’ve got that beautiful sad aura going. You look mournful and tragic and pretty. Radiate that ‘save me, save me’ vibe. Probably get all kinds of young men who want to carry you off on a white horse.”

“Is that what you think of me?” she asked.

“Lady,” I said, “a year or three ago, I’d have been the first in line. Hell, if I thought you were serious about getting out, I’d probably still help you. But I don’t think you want out. I think that if you were all that pathetic, you wouldn’t be controlling your Fallen—it would be controlling you. I think you’re Tessa’s trusted lieutenant for a reason. Which means that either this tragic, trapped-lady routine is a bunch of crocodile tears, or else it’s hypocrisy on such an epic scale that it probably qualifies as some kind of psychological dysfunction.”

She stared out into darkness and said nothing.

“You never did answer my question,” I said.

“Why not say it louder?” she asked me in a bitter undertone. “If that is what you think of me, then your friends need to be forewarned of my treachery.”

“Right,” I said. “I do that, and then your eyes well up with tears, and you turn away from me. You let them see one tear fall down your cheek, then turn your head enough to let the wind carry your hair over the rest. Maybe let your shoulders shake once. Then it’s the big bad suspicious wizard, who doesn’t forgive and doesn’t understand, picking on the poor little girl who is trapped in her bad situation and really just wants to be loved. Give me some credit, Rosanna. I’m not going to help you set them up.”

The glowing green eyes turned to examine me, and Rosanna’s mouth moved, speaking in an entirely different, feminine voice. “Lasciel taught you something of us.”

“You might say that,” I replied.

Ahead of us and slightly to the right a light flared up in the darkness—a bonfire, I thought. I couldn’t tell how far away it was, given the night and the falling snow.

“There,” Rosanna murmured. “That way. If you would excuse me.”

As she walked back to the wheel of the boat, a breath of wind sighed over the lake. In itself that wasn’t anything new. Wind had been blowing all the way through the snowstorm. Something about this breeze, though, caught my attention. It wasn’t right.

It took me another three or four seconds to realize what was wrong.

This was a south wind. And it was warm.

“Uh-oh,” I said. I held up the chemical light and started scanning the waters all around us.

“Harry?” Michael said. “What is it?”

“Feel that breeze?” I asked.

“Da,” Sanya said, confusion in his voice. “Is warm. So?”

Michael caught on. “Summer is on the way,” he said.

Rosanna shot a glance over her shoulder at us. “What?”

“Get us to shore,” I told her. “The things coming after me might not give a damn if they take you out along with me.”

She turned back to the wheel and turned the ignition. The boat’s engine stuttered and wheezed and didn’t turn over.

The breeze picked up. Instead of snowflakes, thick, slushy drops of half-frozen sleet began to fall. More ice began forming on the boat, thickening almost visibly in the green glow of my light. The waves began to grow steeper, rocking the boat more and more severely.

“Come on,” I heard myself saying. “Come on.”

“Look there!” Sanya called, pointing a finger down at the water beside the boat.

Something long, brown, fibrous, and slimy lashed up out of the water and wrapped around the Russian knight’s arm from wrist to elbow.

“Bozhe moi!”

Two more strands whipped up from different angles, one seizing Sanya’s upper arm, one wrapping around his face and skull, and jerked him halfway from the boat in the time it took me to shift my weight and reach for him. I managed to grab one of his boots before he could be pulled all the way over the side into the water. I planted one foot on the wall of the boat and hauled on Sanya’s leg for all I was worth. “Michael!”

The boat’s engine coughed, turned over, stuttered, and died.

“In nomine Dei Patri!” Michael roared as Amoracchius cleared its sheath. The broadsword flashed in a single sweeping slash, and severed the strands strangling Sanya. The edges of the slashed material burned away from the touch of Amoracchius’s steel like paper from an open flame.

I dragged Sanya back into the boat, and the big Russian whipped his saber from its sheath just in time to neatly sever another lashing brown tendril of animate fiber. “What is it?”

“Kelpies,” I growled. If they tangled up the blades of the engine our boat wasn’t going anywhere. I howled at Rosanna, “Come on!”

The boat suddenly rocked violently to the other side. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder and saw kelpies coming up over the sides. They were slimy, nebulous things, only vaguely humanoid in shape, made up of masses of wet weeds with gaping mouths and pinpoints of glittering silver light for eyes.

I turned and swept my arm in a slewing arc, unleashing my will as I cried out, “Forzare!”

Invisible force ripped the kelpies from the sides of the boat, leaving long strands of wet plant matter clinging limply to the fiberglass hull. They let out gurgling screams as they flew back and splashed into the water.

The boat’s engine caught and rose to a roar. The rear end of the boat sank, and its nose rose as it surged forward.

One of my feet flew out from underneath me. I went down, flailing my arms and legs, dimly aware that one of the kelpies had somehow gotten a limb tangled around my ankle. I got dragged to the back of the boat in a quick series of painful jerks and impacts, and had just enough time to realize that the boat was about to surge right out from under me, leaving me in the drink. Then it would just be a question of what killed me first—the icy water or the strangling embrace of the company within it.

Then there was a flash of scarlet and white, a whistle and a hissing sound, and a lance of fire on one of my feet. I went into free fall and bounced into the rear wall of the boat, then to the floor. Icy rain and freezing water splashed up against me, viciously cold. I looked down to find a strand of fibrous weed curling and blackening as it fell from my bleeding ankle. Sanya reached down and plucked the remains clear of my leg before tossing it over the rear of the boat and back into the water. My ankle was bleeding, my blood black in the green chemical light. More black stained the tip of Esperacchius.

I clutched at my ankle, hissing in pain. “Dammit, Sanya!”

Sanya peered out at the darkness behind the boat and then down at my leg. “Ah. Oops.”

Michael came back to kneel beside me and hunkered down over my foot. “Harry, hold still.” He poked at my ankle, and it hurt enough to make me snarl something about his parentage. “It isn’t bad. Long but shallow.” He opened a leather case on his sword belt, opposite the sheath of Amoracchius, and withdrew a small medical kit. Sanya’s sword had already slashed open my jeans, but Michael tore them a little more to get them out of the way of the cut. Then he cleaned the injury with some kind of disposable wipe, smeared it with something from a plastic tube, covered it with a thick white absorbent bandage, and wrapped it in tape. It took him all of two or three minutes, his hands quick and sure, which was just as well. By the time he was done the shock of the injury had worn off, and the hurt had started up.

“Not much to be done about the pain,” he said. “Sorry, Harry.”

“Pain I can live with,” I said, wincing. “Just give me a minute.”

“I am sorry, Dresden,” Sanya said.

“Yeah. Don’t you dare save my life ever again,” I told him. Then I lifted my leg onto one of the benches in the back of the boat to elevate it, and closed my eyes. There were a lot of ways to manage pain besides drugs. Granted, most of them wouldn’t help you much, unless you’d had several years of training in focus and concentration, but fortunately I had. Lasciel’s shadow had shown me a mental technique for blocking pain so effective that it was a little scary—when I’d used it before, I’d pushed myself until my body had collapsed, because I hadn’t been aware of exactly how bad my condition was. I could have died as a result.

Body or mind, heart or soul, we’re all human, and we’re supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.

That said, given what was ahead of us and coming up behind us, I could hardly put myself in any more danger, relatively speaking, and I couldn’t afford any distractions. So I closed my eyes, controlled my breathing, focused my mind, and began to methodically wall away the pain of my new injury, my broken nose, my aching body. It took me a couple of minutes, and by the time I was done the pitch of the boat’s engine had changed, dropping from a roar to a lower growl.

I opened my eyes to find Sanya and Michael standing on either side of me, swords in hand, watching over me. Up at the front of the boat Rosanna cut the engine still more and turned her head to stare intently at me for a slow beat. The side of her mouth curved up in a slight, knowing smile. Then she turned to face front again, and I realized that there was light enough to see the outline of her delicately curling demon horns.

I rose and found myself staring at an island that rose from the increasingly turbulent waters of the lake. It was covered in the woods and brush of the midwestern United States—lots of trees less than a foot thick, with the space beneath them filled in with brush, thickets, and thorns to a depth of four or five feet. Snow lay over everything, and the light reflecting from it was what let me see Rosanna’s profile.

The shoreline was covered in what looked like an old Western ghost town—only one that had been abandoned for so long that the trees had come back to reclaim the space. Most of the buildings had fallen down. Trees rose out of most of the ones that hadn’t, and the sight reminded me, somehow, of an insect collection: empty shells pinned to a card. A sign, weathered beyond reading, hung from its only remaining link of rusting chain. It swung in the wind, aged metal squeaking. There was the skeleton of an old dock down at the shoreline, all broken wooden columns, standing up out of the water like the stumps of rotten teeth.

Looking at the place filled me with a sense of awareness of the attention of an empty, sterile malevolence. This place did not like me. It did not want me there. It did not have the least regard for me, and the corpse of the little town ahead of me was a silent declaration that it had fought against folk like me before—and won.

“Gee,” I called to Rosanna. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

She pointed silently up. I followed the direction of her finger, up the slope of the island, and spotted the light I’d seen from farther out in the lake—definitely a bonfire, I saw now, up on a hill above the town, at what looked like the highest point on the island. Something stood starkly against the sky there, the dark shape of a building or tower, though I couldn’t make out any details.

Rosanna cut the engine completely, and the boat glided silently forward to the broken wooden post nearest the shore. She climbed into the front of the boat and was waiting with a rope when the prow of the vessel bumped the column. She tied the boat to the post, then hopped down into the water and waded the rest of the way ashore.

“Oh, good,” I muttered. “More wet.”

From back behind us, the still-rising wind carried forward a gurgling, warbling cry. I’d been up north a few times, and it might have been the call of a loon—but all of us there knew better. Summer was still on our trail.

“We aren’t going to make it any drier by waiting here,” Michael said quietly.

“There are men in those trees,” Sanya murmured, sheathing his sword and taking up the Kalashnikov again. “Thirty yards up, there, and over there. Those are machine-gun positions.”

I grunted. “Let’s get moving. Before they get bored and decide to start making like this is Normandy.”

“God go with us,” Michael prayed quietly.

I unlimbered my shotgun and said, “Amen.”

Chapter Forty-two

Michael had planned ahead. He had a dozen chemical heat bags with him, the kind made for hunters to slip inside the wristbands of their coats. He passed them around to us, and we put them inside our socks after we waded ashore. Otherwise I don’t know if we would have made it through the snow up that hill, not with our pants soaked to the knees.

Rosanna, of course, wasn’t having any issues with the weather. With her wings draped around her like a cloak, the demonic form she wore seemed inured to the cold, and her cloven hooves moved along the frozen, stony hillside as nimbly as a mountain goat’s, her barb-tipped tail lashing back and forth dramatically as she went. Sanya walked along behind her, then me, and Michael brought up the rear. It wasn’t a long walk, but it fit in a lot of unpleasantness into a little bit of time. The little town had been a company town, built up around what looked like an old cannery—a long building, falling to pieces now, at the very end of the ruined street.

Partway up the hill we ran across a trail that had obviously been in use over the past several days. Someone had kept it clear of snow, exposing a path that had been cut into the rock of the hillside, including stone stairs that led up to its summit. As we went up the stairs the shape at the top of the hill became clearer, as light from the large fire beside it revealed it more clearly.

“A lighthouse,” I murmured. “Or what’s left of one.”

It might have been a fifty-foot tower at one time, but it had been broken off perhaps twenty feet up as if snapped by a giant’s hand. Beacon towers dotted the shorelines and islands of all of the Great Lakes, and like all such structures they had accumulated more than their due of strange stories. I hadn’t heard any stories about this one—but staring up at the rough grey stones, I got the impression that it might have had something to do with the fact that in order for strange stories to spread, someone has to survive a dark encounter in order to start the tale.

This entire creepy place was giving me the idea that I wasn’t merely walking on haunted ground—but that I was walking on major-league haunted ground, the kind of place that had never bowed its head to the advance of progress and civilization, to science and reason, that had no more regard for those children of human intellect than it did for their progenitors. The island seemed almost alive, aware of my presence in a sense that I couldn’t really tangibly define—aware of it and sullenly, spitefully hostile to it.

But that wasn’t the creepy part.

The creepy part was that it felt familiar.

Walking up those stone steps, my legs settled into a steady pattern of motion, as if they’d already walked up that path a thousand times. I swerved slightly on one step, for no reason that I could see, only to hear Michael, behind me, continue walking in a straight line and slip as the stone he stepped on shifted beneath his foot. I found myself counting silently to myself, backward, and when I hit zero we mounted the last step and reached the summit of the hill.

Somehow I knew, even before I saw it, that one side of the old lighthouse would be torn open to the sky, revealing an interior that was as hollowed-out and empty as the inside of a rifle barrel. I knew that the little stone cottage built against the base of the tower would still be reasonably intact, though about half of the slate-tile roof had collapsed inward and would need repairs. I knew that it had been made from the stones of the collapsed lighthouse. I knew that the front door rattled when you opened it, and that the back door, which wasn’t in sight from here, would swell up during a rain and get stuck in its frame, much like the door at…

…at home.

I also knew that as freaking weird as all of that was, I couldn’t afford to let any of it matter right now.

Nicodemus and company were waiting for us.

The sleeting rain was starting to cover everything in a thin layer of ice, but the bonfire laid on the ground before the opening in the wall of the tower was large enough to ignore it. The flames leapt ten or twelve feet in the air, and burned with an eerie, violet-tinged light, and the ice forming everywhere created the illusion of a purple haze that clung to anything inanimate.

Beside the bonfire stones had been piled up into something that resembled the throne of some ancient pagan king. Nicodemus sat atop them, of course. Tessa stood at his right hand, entirely in human form for the first time since I had seen her. She was a little slip of a girl who barely looked old enough to hold a driver’s license, and was dressed in something black and skintight. Deirdre knelt at Nicodemus’s feet, and with the three of them together like that, I could see the blending of the parents’ features in their daughter. Especially around the eyes. Deirdre’s showed a full measure of both Nicodemus’s soulless calculation and Tessa’s heartless selfishness.

Magog crouched at the base of the pile of stones, apelike and enormous, sullen eyes burning with bloodlust. The spined Denarian I had beaten down with the silver construct-hand lay reclining on the ground beside Magog, his face twisted with hate, one hand twisting and clenching—but his maimed body was otherwise motionless.

My heart sped up in sudden excitement. There were still six of them. They hadn’t broken Ivy yet.

I held up a hand. We came to a stop, while Rosanna lightly mounted the steps to kneel down at Tessa’s right hand.

“Wow,” I drawled. “That isn’t a contrived tableau or anything. Are you here to do business, or did you get lost on your way to auditions for Family Feud?”

“Gunman in the cottage,” Sanya murmured, very quietly.

“Beasts in the shadows behind the tower,” Michael whispered.

I kept myself from looking. If my friends said there were bad guys there, they were there, end of story.

“Good evening, Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “Have you brought the merchandise?”

I jingled the Crown Royal bag and bumped the hilt of Shiro’s sword, hanging over my shoulder, with the side of my head. “Yep. But you knew that already, or Rosie, there, wouldn’t have brought us this far. So let’s skip the small talk. Show me the girl.”

“By all means,” Nicodemus said. He gestured with one hand, and the shadows—his shadow, I should say—suddenly fell away from the interior of the ruined lighthouse tower.

Red light filled that space, pouring up from the sigils and glyphs of the most elaborate greater circle I had ever seen—and I’d seen one made of silver, gold, and precious stones. This one incorporated all of those things plus art—grotesque pieces, mostly—sound, ringing forth in gentle, steady waves from upright tuning forks and tubular bells; and light, focused through prisms and crystals, refracted into dozens of colors that split and bent into perfectly geometric shapes in the air around the circle.

Ivy was trapped inside.

I’ve seen some fairly extreme abuse in my time, but it never gets easier to see more of it. Nick’s people had gone with most of the classics for breaking someone down, and then added in a few twists that wouldn’t be available to regular folks. They’d taken Ivy’s clothes, for starters, which in this weather was sadistic on multiple levels. They’d shaved her hair away, leaving her bald, except for a couple of sad, ragged little tufts of gold. She was curled up into a fetal position, and she floated in the air, spinning slowly and apparently at random. Her eyes were tightly closed, her face pale with disorientation, terrified.

Outside the circle they had chained a number of those hideous hunting beasts, hairless creatures that resembled nothing in the animal kingdom but fell somewhere between a big panther and a wolf. The creatures looked hungry, and stared intently at the floating morsel. One of them snarled and threw itself to the end of its chain in an effort to snap its fanged maw closed upon the girl’s vulnerable flesh. It couldn’t reach her, but Ivy twitched and let out a thready whimper.

As she spun and twirled—a deliberate echo of what she’d done to Magog at the Aquarium, I felt certain—the motion revealed dozens of tiny scratches and bruises, evidence of a small legion of petty cruelties. They would, however, seem nightmarish enough to a child who had never experienced real pain of her own. All of this—the pain, the helplessness, the indignity, all of it—would be that much more horrific and terrifying to Ivy for its novelty. Say what I would about pain being a part of the human condition, when it comes to seeing it inflicted on children, I’m as hypocritical as the day is long.

Some things just shouldn’t happen.

“There, you see?” the lord of the Denarians said. “Safe and sound, as agreed.”

I turned my gaze back to Nicodemus, who was about ten seconds from an ass kicking—

—and caught a little glimmer of something approximating satisfaction in his eyes that made my combat-readying reflexes cool off almost instantly.

Ivy’s treatment hadn’t been only about putting her in the proper frame of mind to manipulate her.

It had also been about manipulating me. It wasn’t even all that tough to understand why. After all, I’d been in a situation something like this before.

It wasn’t enough for the Denarians to simply acquire the Sword. They couldn’t break or smash or melt Fidelacchius, any more than the Church could smash or melt the thirty silver coins. The power of the Sword was more than merely physical, and as long as it was wielded by those of pure heart and intent, it would take more than mere physical means to undo it.

Of course, if you handed the Sword to, for example, a wizard who was known for playing it shady once in a while, and who was known for having a bad temper, and who was known for occasionally losing it, and maybe for burning down a building or two when he got angry, that could change the situation entirely. Put him in an intense situation, give him a really good reason to be angry, give him a mighty magical weapon near at hand, and he might well seize it and use it out of sheer outrage—despite the fact that he wouldn’t exactly be acting from entirely pure motives by doing so. After all, I had come here, ostensibly in peace, to offer up the Sword as a sacrifice for the life of a child. If I then took up that same weapon and used it to strike at Nicodemus and company instead, I, its rightful bearer, would be employing Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, in an act of treachery.

Once I’d done that, then the Sword would just be a sword, an object of steel and wood. Once I’d done that, then Nicodemus and his insane little family could destroy the weapon. They needed someone to make that mistake, someone to make that choice, in order to unmake the weapon, just as any bearer of a coin had to make the choice to give it up to be free of the Fallen inside. They needed someone with a right to the Sword to choose to abuse that right.

I’d made that mistake once already, on a stormy night much like this one, when Michael had asked me to carry Amoracchius for him. I’d used the Sword of Love to try to save my ass from the consequences of my own bad decisions and nearly gotten it destroyed as a result. It would have been unmade, in fact, if not for the intervention of my brother—even if I hadn’t known about our kinship at the time. Thomas had. He’d been looking out for his little brother even then.

Don’t get me wrong: At times I can be a little thick—particularly when there’s a woman involved. There’s just no way I’m stupid enough to make a mistake quite that enormous twice.

But…

Nicodemus didn’t know that I’d made it even once, now, did he?

Oh, he knew me pretty well. He knew how angry his actions had made me, how I would react to the sight of what they’d done to Ivy—and he was counting on me to react according to my nature, in order to help him unmake Fidelacchius.

This was going to be a dangerous game, going up against an opponent who had been around as long as Nick had, but I couldn’t win if I didn’t play—and I needed to buy a little more time and make sure that both of our prizes were on hand before we started the fireworks.

So I gave him what he wanted.

I slammed the end of my staff down onto the ground with my left hand, reached up to seize the hilt of Fidelacchius with my right, and snarled, “Get her the hell out of that thing, Nicodemus. Right now.”

They laughed at me, all of them together, relaxed and insulting. It would have sounded rehearsed if it were any less well coordinated. Instead, it came off like something they’d done so often over the years that it simply came naturally now. “Look at his face,” Tessa murmured, a little-girl giggle in her voice. “It’s all red.”

I clenched my jaw as hard as I could. It wasn’t much of a stretch to keep pretending to be angry, but I tried to go all Method actor on them. Eat your heart out, Sir Ian. I jerked the Sword a couple of inches from its sheath. “I’m warning you,” I said, trying to get a good look around. “Let the girl go before this gets ugly.”

I must have been doing a pretty good job with the acting. Michael’s voice, high-pitched with alarm, came from behind me. “Harry,” he said, urgently, “wait.”

I took two steps forward, ignoring Michael, and drew the Sword from its sheath. Fidelacchius was a classic, chisel-tipped katana, encased in what looked like an old wooden walking cane. I’d kept the blade clean and oiled while it was in my care. It came free of its casing without a sound and gleamed coldly in the violet light of the fire. “I brought the Sword,” I told Nicodemus, throwing some taunt into my tone. “See? You wanted this, right? In exchange for the girl?”

His eyes narrowed as he stared at the blade, and I noticed, for the first time, that he wore a sword of his own at his hip—as did Tessa, for that matter. Super. I made a mental note not to try fencing any of them. I’m tall and quick, and I’ve got a lunge that can hit from halfway across the county, but when it comes to deadly swordplay, I’m a piker compared to the serious swordsmen, like Michael—and Michael considered himself barely more than a mild challenge to Nicodemus.

“What on earth makes you think he’s going to go through with the deal, wizard?” Tessa asked me, her voice a purr. “Now that you’re here, the Sword is here, the coins are here?”

“Maybe it escaped your notice, bitch,” I snarled, “but the Sword is here. And the other two are as well. Maybe you want to think twice before making a fight of it.”

Thorned Namshiel let out a croaking laugh. “You think six of us fear facing two Knights?”

“I think there’s about five and a half of you, stumpy,” I shot back, taking another step toward them. I could see a little more of the tower’s interior from there. “And for all you know, you’re facing three Knights.”

Nicodemus smiled, showing teeth. “And for all Michael and Sanya know, Dresden, the two of them are facing seven Denarians, not six. You did lead them here, after all.”

“Harry,” Michael said again, his tone tense.

“Shut up!” I half screamed at Nicodemus, taking several steps closer. Almost.

Magog let out a snorting rumble and shuffled a yard closer to me, scraping at the ground with his feet and knuckles, shaking his shaggy, horned head threateningly.

I hefted the Sword and bared my teeth in a snarl. “Oh, you want some of this, Magilla?” I taunted, taking two more steps forward. “Come get some; I’ll show you what keeps happening to Kong.”

There! At the base of the tower wall, a crumpled human form, bloodied, bruised, half-frozen, but alive. He lifted his face as I came into sight and I met the gaze of Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.

They’d tied him to the wall with ropes—something of a mercy, since metal chains would probably have killed him, given the weather over the past few days. One side of his face was puffy with bruises, but both eyes were open. He had a lot of blood on one side of his head. In fact…

Hell’s bells. Something had ripped off the top half of his left ear. Not neatly, either. The flesh had been raggedly torn. The knuckles of his right hand were thickly crusted with blood. Marcone had torn them open on something before he’d been bound. He’d fought them.

I stopped talking trash and started backpedaling toward Michael and Sanya immediately.

Magog froze, his head tilted comically to one side, his expression confused.

Nicodemus sat up in place on the throne, sensing that the plan he’d thought was going along so swimmingly had begun to fall apart.

“Michael!” I said, and tossed Fidelacchius into the air behind me.

“Kill them!” Nicodemus snapped, his voice ringing over the hilltop. “Kill them now!”

Tessa let out a scream that sounded almost orgasmic, and sections of scarlet-and-black chitin seemed to simply rip their way out of her flesh, her body stretching and distending into her mantis shape. Deirdre hissed and arched her back in a kinetic echo of her mother, her hair lengthening into steely blades, her skin darkening. Rosanna howled, and called fire—specifically Hellfire—into her spread hands, while Thorned Namshiel lifted his hand into the air and gathered flickers of green lightning between his fingertips.

Magog simply bellowed and charged, and with howls of hunger and rage a dozen hairless beasts bounded from the shadows all around us and flung themselves at us with bloodthirsty disregard for their own lives. And, as if all of that weren’t enough, half a dozen points of brilliant red light, the emanations of laser sights of hidden gunmen, flashed at us through the mist and sleet.

Oh, yeah. Super plan, Harry.

I had them right where I wanted them.

Chapter Forty-three

I didn’t stop to see what happened to the sword I’d just thrown toward Michael. I plunged my hand into my duster and came out with the sawed-off shotgun. I dropped my staff, lifted the gun in both hands, turned my face away, and shouted, “Fire in the hole!” a second before I pulled the trigger.

Once upon a time I’d seen Kincaid use Dragon’s Breath rounds against Red Court vampires in a fight at Wrigley Field. It had been impressive as hell watching those shotgun rounds belch out jets of flame forty feet long. Since then I’d done a bit of research on fun things you can fire out of a shotgun, and as it turns out, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can shoot at people. It’s astonishing, really, the creativity that goes into the design of all the different specialized ammunition available on the market today.

My personal favorite: a round known as the Fireball.

It fires out a spray of superheated particles of metal—tiny, tiny bits of metal blazing away at a temperature of over three thousand degrees. They spread out into an enormous cone of fire and light more than two hundred and fifty feet long, brighter and hotter than any fireworks you’ve ever seen. Forestry services use them to start backfires, and special weapons units use them to create enormous, eye-catching diversions.

I unleashed two Fireball rounds simultaneously, straight up into the air, and for an instant turned that weirdly firelit hilltop as bright as a midsummer noon.

Even with my eyes closed and my face turned away, the world turned bright pink through my eyelids. I heard gunfire from the direction of the cottage, and more from the tree line off to the left, but whatever gunmen Nicodemus had positioned there had been blinded by the flash, and it would take time for their night vision to recover.

That had been half the point of using the Fireball rounds, there in the dark. It wouldn’t give us much time to act, no more than a handful of seconds—but a lot can happen in a handful of seconds, if you’re willing to use them well.

I dropped the shotgun, grabbed my staff, and charged forward, screaming like a madman.

Michael and Sanya came hard on my heels. Michael bore Amoracchius in his right hand and Fidelacchius in his left, and as he ran both blades suddenly became limned in a low, flickering silver light. One of the beasts that had been lurking behind the tower had bounded forward at Nicodemus’s command, even blinded by the flash, but it had the bad fortune to rush past me directly at Michael. The Knight of the Cross twisted his body left, then right, delivering a pair of slashes with each weapon. There were hiss-thumps of swift impact, a scream of pain from the beast, and Michael pounded on, barely even slowing his stride, leaving the still-twitching body of the beast on the ground behind him.

Then the air shook with the force of Magog’s battle roar, and I jerked my gaze around to find the huge Denarian thundering directly toward me. I’d already tested my will against Magog’s power, and I knew I could stop him if I had to do it. I also knew that it would take an enormous effort to manage it, and leave me vulnerable to one of his companions—so instead of trying to stop him, I called upon my will, and as the apelike creature bore down upon me, I swept my staff in an upcurving stroke, like the swing of a golf club, and cried, “Forzare!”

The unseen force of my will reached out, adding to the momentum of Magog’s charge and lifting him from the ground. With a howl Magog went flying over our heads and arched out into the air and over the steep, rocky hillside we’d just climbed. The animalistic howl broke out into savage words in some ancient-sounding tongue, interspersed with screams of fury and grunts of pain as the huge Denarian bounced down the stony, frozen hillside. He sounded more angry than injured, and I knew that I’d taken him out of the equation for only a moment, at most.

Hopefully, that would be enough.

Deirdre came down from the mound of stones, using all four limbs and individual blade-strands of her hair interchangeably for locomotion, so that she looked like some kind of bizarre, enormous spider—until Sanya raised his Kalashnikov and began firing at her. None of that spray-and-pray automatic fire, either. The Russian skidded to a stop and took swift aim. He bounced one round off a rock an inch to Deirdre’s left, put the second shot through her thigh, and raised a cloud of sparks from the steely blades of her hair near her skull with a third round. She let out a shriek of startled pain and fear, and scuttled sideways off into the shadows as swiftly as a roach caught out in the middle of the floor when the light comes on.

Gunfire came at us from both sides, still more or less blind and random, but no less lethal for that. Bullets are the damnedest things, going by. They aren’t dramatic. By themselves they sound almost like big bugs, like something that might buzz by you real fast out in the country on a hot, muggy summer afternoon. It’s almost hard to feel afraid of them, until it truly hits you exactly what they are. It’s kind of handy, actually, that moment of disconnection between the time your senses tell you that death is flicking around randomly a couple of feet away, and the time your mind manages to make you understand that moving around in it is an awful idea. It gives you time to act before you get so scared that you just find a shady spot and stay there.

“Go, go, go!” I called, still charging forward. Our only chance was to keep moving ahead, to rattle Nicodemus and company into jumping out of the way, and to get into the only shelter on that hilltop.

“Kill them!” Nicodemus roared, his voice furious, and then there was the sound of rushing wind from overhead. He must have taken to the sky, flying upon that shadow of his as if upon enormous bat wings.

More of the beasts had closed on Michael, and both Swords were at work again, striking out, silver light gleaming more brightly now from their blades. Sanya let out a shout, and more light flooded the hilltop, casting my own shadow out darker in front of me as Esperacchius joined the battle, and more of the beasts’ cries of pain shook the air.

In front of me Thorned Namshiel howled out in frustration and evident terror in some tongue I didn’t know, and I saw that both Tessa and Hellmaid Rosanna had pulled a vanishing act. Namshiel, his arm outstretched in the general direction of the far side of the stone throne, added, despair in his voice, “Come back!”

Then he turned toward me as he heard my feet churning through the wet snow. He still held a corona of green lightning in his spiny hand, and as his eyes focused on my general location he bared his teeth in a snarl of bitter hatred and flung out his hand, hurling a sphere of crackling emerald electricity at me.

My shield bracelet was ready to go, and I had terror and rage and determination in plenty to empower my defenses. I deflected the sphere at an angle and sent it rebounding harmlessly up into the sky.

“Amateur puppy,” Namshiel snarled, and began to gather more sickly green power at his fingertips. He made an odd little gesture and flicked his fingers, and suddenly five tiny threads of green light leapt toward me on five separate, spiraling paths.

I brought my shield around to intersect the new attack—and realized at the last second that each individual thread of energy was coming at me on a slightly different wavelength of the spectrum of magical energy, a variance of frequencies that my shield couldn’t stretch to cover. Not all at the same time, anyway. I countered three of them and nearly got the fourth, but it slipped by me, and I never even touched the fifth strand.

Something that felt like cold, greasy piano wire wrapped around my throat, and I couldn’t breathe.

“Insufferable, arrogant little monkey,” Namshiel hissed. “Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soulfire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck.”

It wasn’t so much being strangled to death that I objected to, or even the megalomaniacal monologue I was being subjected to in the process. I just wished that I knew what the hell he was talking about. Granted, I had busted him up pretty good with that silver hand thing, but he was taking it so freaking personally.

I lost track of what I’d been thinking. My head hurt. So did my neck. Thorned Namshiel was ranting about something. Practically foaming at the mouth, really—right up until Amoracchius flashed in a line of silver fire, and Thorned Namshiel’s head hopped up off his shoulders, tumbled twice, and fell into the snow.

Suddenly I took a deep breath and the world started sorting itself out again.

Michael stepped forward, took one look at Namshiel’s body, and hewed the right hand off at the wrist. He picked up the hand and dropped it into a pouch on his sword belt. Meanwhile, Sanya shouldered his rifle and dragged me to my feet.

“Go,” I choked out, barely able to get the words out through my half-crushed throat. I regained my own feet and waved Sanya off me, gesturing ahead. “The lighthouse. Fast.”

Sanya looked from me to the hollow tower and promptly sheathed his Sword to take up his rifle again. The big Russian advanced on the tower, the Kalashnikov at his shoulder, and began putting precise shots through the heads of each of the beasts that had been chained to the walls inside to torment Ivy, who still floated bound within the greater circle.

I followed Sanya as quickly as I could, wheezing in breaths through my aching neck. By the time Michael and I had gotten into the shelter of the mostly closed ring of the tower’s stones, the gunfire from around us had begun to close in on us again as the gunmen’s night vision returned. The tiny window of opportunity the flash of the Fireball rounds had created had waned.

“How did you know?” Michael asked, panting. “How did you know they would break if we charged them?”

“You don’t survive two thousand years in a game like this one without predator reflexes,” I replied. “Any predator in the world reacts the same way to a loud noise, a bright flash, and a noisy and unexpected charge. They get the hell out of the way. Can’t really help themselves. Habit of a couple millennia is a bitch to break.”

Sanya calmly shot another beast.

I shrugged. “Nicodemus and company thought that they knew how things were going to proceed, and when they didn’t go the way they expected, they got flustered. So the Nickelheads got clear.” I pursed my lips. “Of course, they’re going to be back in a minute. And very upset. Hey, there, Marcone.”

“Dresden,” Marcone said, as if we’d passed each other outside the coffee shop. He sounded a little tired, but calm. All things considered, that was probably an indicator of exactly how much moxie the crime lord had. “Can you help the child?”

Dammit. That’s the thing I hate most about Marcone. Every once in a while he says or does something that makes it difficult to label him “scum, criminal” and file him neatly away in a drawer somewhere. I glared at him. He returned the glare with a faint, knowing smile. I muttered under my breath and turned to study the elaborate circle, while Sanya finished the last of the beasts.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Michael said quietly, staring.

I didn’t blame him. Even among professionals this circle was impressive. Lots of luminous, glowing lines and swirls involved, and that always looks fantastic, especially at night. The gold and silver and precious stones didn’t hurt things, either. The light and music show being put on by the chimes and crystals added a wonderful little eerie edge to it all, especially given the grotesque art that framed the interior magical symbology. “This is some upper-tier stuff,” I said quietly. “It will be another century, maybe two, before I’m good enough to come close to this level of work. It’s delicate. One single thing a fraction of an inch out of place and the whole thing goes kablooie. It’s powerful. When you’re putting this together, if any one of a couple of dozen of the power flows slips for even an instant, the whole thing goes out of balance and could go up with enough force to blow the top off of this whole hillside. It took a freaking genius to put this together, Michael.”

I hefted my staff.

“Fortunately,” I said, and took a two-handed swing at the nearest stand of slender, delicate crystal. It shattered with gratifying ease, and the encasing light around the greater circle began to waver and dissipate. “It only takes a monkey with a big stick to take it apart.”

And I waded into the circle, smashing things with my staff. It was therapeutic. God knows how many times the bad guys had destroyed the careful work of lifetimes when they’d robbed people of homes, of loved ones, of life itself. It felt sort of nice to bring a little cup of Shiva D into their lives for a change. I shattered the crystals that bent light into a cage to hold the Archive prisoner. I bent and mashed the tuning forks that focused sound into chains. I crushed the depictions of bondage and imprisonment meant to restrain the very idea of freedom, and from there I went on to break ivory rune sticks, to crush glyph-scribed gems, to pound into illegibility golden plates inscribed with sigils of imprisonment.

I’m not sure at which point I started screaming in outrage. Somewhere along the line, though, it hit me that these people had taken magic, the power of life, of creation, a force meant to create and protect, to learn and preserve, and they had bent and twisted it into a blasphemy, an obscenity. They had used it to imprison and torment, to torture and maim, all in an attempt to enslave and destroy. Worse, they had turned magic against the Archive, against the safeguard of knowledge itself—and still worse, against a child.

I didn’t stop until I had shattered their expensive, elaborate, elegant torture chamber, until I could deliberately drag my staff across the last, smooth golden circle at the innermost point of the design, marring it all the way across its surface, breaking the last remaining structure of the spell.

The energies of the prison let loose with an outraged howl, sailing straight up into the air overhead in a column of furious purple light. I thought I could see faces twisting and spinning inside it for a few seconds, but then the light faded, and Ivy fell limply to the cold ground, just a naked little girl, bruised and scratched and half-unconscious with cold.

Michael was at my side at once, removing his cloak. I took it and wrapped Ivy in it. She made whimpering sounds of protest, but she wasn’t really conscious. I picked her up and held her close to me, getting as much of my own coat around her as I could.

I looked up and found Marcone watching me steadily. Sanya had cut him free from the wall and evidently given the crime lord the cloak off his back. Marcone now hunched against the sleet in the white cloak, holding one of the chemical warming packs between his hands. He stood just a bit over average height and was of medium build, so Sanya’s cloak covered him like a blanket. “Will she be all right?” Marcone asked.

“She will,” I said with determination. “She damned well will.”

“Down!” barked Sanya.

Bullets raised sparks off the inside of the lighthouse and rattled wildly around its interior. Everyone got down. I made sure I had my body and my duster between Ivy and any incoming rounds. Sanya leaned out for a second and squeezed off a couple of shots, then hurriedly got back under cover again. The volume of fire from the outside grew.

“They’re bringing up reinforcements from down the hill,” Sanya reported. “Heavier weapons, too.”

Marcone glanced around the featureless interior of the ruined lighthouse. “If any of them have grenades, this is going to be a relatively brief rescue operation.”

Sanya leaned out and snapped off another pair of shots, barely getting back before return fire started chewing at the stone where he’d been. He muttered under his breath and changed magazines on his rifle.

The enemy gunfire suddenly ceased. There was silence on the hilltop for twenty or thirty seconds. Then Nicodemus’s voice, filled with anger, came through the air. “Dresden!”

“What?” I called back.

“I’m going to give you one chance to survive this. Give me the girl. Give me the coins. Give me the sword. Do that, and I’ll let you walk away alive.”

“Hah!” I said. It was possible that I didn’t feel quite as confident as I sounded. “Or maybe I’ll just leave from here.”

“Cross into the Nevernever from where you’re standing?” Nicodemus asked. “You’d be better off asking the Russian to put a bullet through your head for you. I know what lives on the other side.”

Given that they’d chosen this location for the greater circle precisely because it was a source of intense dark energy, I had no trouble believing that it connected to some nasty portions of the Nevernever. There was every chance that Nicodemus was not bluffing.

“How do I know that you won’t kill me the minute you get what you want?” I called back.

“Harry!” Michael hissed.

I shushed him.

“We both know what my word is worth,” Nicodemus said, his voice dry. “Really, Dresden. If we can’t trust each other, what’s the point in talking at all?”

Heh. Gaining enough time to await the second half of what those Fireballs were supposed to accomplish, that’s what.

The twin two-hundred-fifty-foot jets of fire had briefly blinded our enemies, true.

But they’d done something else, too.

Marcone tilted his head to one side for a moment and then murmured, “Does anyone else hear…strings?”

“Ah,” I said, and pumped my fist in the air. “Ah-hahahah! Have you ever heard anything so magnificently pompous and overblown in your life?”

Deep, ringing French horns joined the string sections, echoing over the hilltop.

“What is that?” Sanya murmured.

“That,” I crowed, “is Wagner, baby!”

Never let it be said that a Chooser of the Slain can’t make an entrance.

Miss Gard brought the reconditioned Huey up from the eastern side of the island, flying about a quarter of an inch over the treetops, blasting “The Ride of the Valkyries” from loudspeakers mounted on the chopper’s underside. Wind, sleet, and all, still she flew flawlessly through the night, having used the twin jets of the Fireball rounds, visible for miles over the pitch-black lake, to orient herself as to where to arrive. The Huey turned broadside as it rose over the hilltop, music blaring loud enough to shake snow from the treetops. The side door of the chopper was open, revealing Mister Hendricks manning a rotating-barreled minigun fixed to the deck of the helicopter—completely illegally, of course.

But then, I suppose that’s really one major advantage to working with criminals. They just don’t care about that sort of thing.

The barrels began to spin, and a tongue of flame licked out from the front of the gun. Snow and earth erupted into the air in a long trench in front of the cannon. I risked a peek and saw men clad in dark fatigues leaping for cover as a swath of devastation slewed back and forth across the open hilltop and pounded the mound of stones into a mound of gravel.

“There’s our ride!” I said. “Let’s go!”

Sanya led the way, firing off more or less random shots at anyone who wasn’t already lying flat in an effort to avoid fire from the gun on the helicopter. Some of Nicodemus’s troops were crazier than others. Several of them jumped up and tried to come after us. That minigun had been designed to shoot down airplanes. What the rounds left of human bodies was barely recognizable as such.

There was no place for the chopper to land, but a line came down from the other side, lowered by a winch while the aircraft hovered above us. I looked up to see Luccio operating the winch, her face pale, but her eyes glittering with excitement. She was how Gard had been able to know where to look for the signal—I’d given Anastasia a couple of my hairs to use in a tracking spell, and she’d been following me ever since I left to meet Rosanna for the trade.

The line came down with a lift harness attached to it. “Marcone,” I shouted over the sound of the rotors and the minigun—which is to say, I was more or less mouthing it exaggeratedly. “You first. That was the deal.”

He shook his head and pointed his finger at Ivy.

I snarled and pushed the girl into his arms, then started slapping the harness over him. He got it after a second, and in a couple more we had him secured in the harness and holding the semiconscious Ivy tight against him. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Marcone and Ivy went zipping gracefully up the line to the chopper, wrapped in the white cloak, the scarlet crosses on it standing out sharply in the winter light. Luccio helped haul them in, and a second later the empty harness came down again.

“Sanya!” I said.

The Russian passed me the Kalashnikov and slipped into the harness, then ascended to the helicopter. Again the empty harness came down—though now there were occasional bursts of heavier rounds coming from down the slope of the hillside, as evidenced by tracer fire that would sometimes go tumbling by in the night. It would be immediately answered by the far heavier fire of the minigun, but Gard couldn’t possibly keep the chopper there for long.

“Harry!” Michael said, offering me the harness.

I was about to take it, but by chance I looked up and saw Gard looking down at us through the Plexiglas bubble around the pilot’s seat—looking at Michael with an absolutely unnerving intensity that I had seen on her face once before, and my heart started hammering in terror.

The last time she’d looked like that, I’d been in an alley outside Bock Ordered Books back in Chicago, and a necromancer named Corpsetaker and a ghoul named Li Xian had been about to murder me. A few minutes later Gard had told Marcone that she had seen that it was my fate to die then and there. The only reason that I survived it was that Marcone had intervened.

But even if I’d never seen that look on her face before, I figured that anytime a Valkyrie hovering over a battlefield suddenly gets real interested in a particular warrior, it ain’t good.

I’d made the grasshopper a promise. If things were about to get hairy for whoever was left on the ground, it wouldn’t be Molly’s dad that had to deal with it.

“You first,” I said.

He started to argue.

I shoved the harness into his chest. “Dammit, Michael!”

He grimaced, shook his head at me, and then sheathed Amoracchius. Still holding Fidelacchius in his hand, he shrugged quickly into the harness. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Michael began to rise. Gard frowned faintly, and some of my screaming tension started to ease.

Tessa and Rosanna came out from behind veils that were as good as anything Molly could have done, and I didn’t have to be Sherlock to deduce who had done the lion’s share of the work on the greater circle that had contained the Archive. I had half a second to act, but I got tangled in the strap of Sanya’s gun, which he’d handed me so that I could defend myself in case I was suddenly attacked. Thank you, Sanya.

Tessa, her pretty human face showing, her eyes gleaming with manic glee, swept a mantis claw at my head, and I at least managed to interpose the rifle before she ripped my head off. Only instead of smashing the gun, as I’d expected, she ripped it out of my hand, just as easily as taking candy from a baby and spun away from me.

Then she winked at me, blew me a kiss, and opened fire on Michael with the Kalashnikov on full automatic from no more than ten feet away.

My friend didn’t scream as bullets tore into him. He just jerked once in a spray of scarlet and went limp.

Fidelacchius tumbled from his fingers and fell to the ground.

Sparks flew from the Huey as the bullets tore into it, too, and a burst of flame and smoke poured from a vent on one side of its fuselage. It dipped sharply to one side, and for a second I thought it was simply going to roll over and into the ground—but then it recovered, drunkenly, gathering momentum like a car sliding down an icy hill, still dragging my friend’s unmoving body on the trailing cable like a baited hook at the end of a fishing line, and vanished into the darkness.

Chapter Forty-four

Even as some part of me noted all of that happening, the rest of me started screaming in raw, red rage, in agony, in denial.

I was pretty sure I had worked out who had taken my blasting rod away. I was pretty sure I knew why they’d done it. I even thought that, looked at from a certain point of view, it might not have been an entirely stupid idea.

But as of now, I officially did not care.

I didn’t have my blasting rod with me, and I was not sure that my raw power, no matter how furious, would be enough to hurt Tessa through the defenses the Fallen gave her. I had never been able to attain the kind of precision I would need without artificial aid.

As of right now, I officially did not care about that, either.

I focused my rage, focused my anger, focused my hate and my denial and my pain. I blocked away everything in the entire universe but the thought of my friend’s bloody body hanging from that rope, and a spot two inches across in the center of Tessa’s chest.

Then I drew in a breath, whirling a hand over my head and bellowed through my ragged throat, so loudly that it felt like something tore, “Fuego, pyrofuego!” I stabbed the first two fingers of my right hand forward as I did, unleashing my fury and my will. “Burn!”

A bar of blue-white fire so dense that it was nearly a solid object lashed across the distance from me to Tessa and slammed into her like an enormous spear.

The mantislike Denarian threw back her pretty face and screamed in agony as the shaft of fire bored cleanly through her, melting a wide hole that burned wider still before searing itself shut. She went down, howling and thrashing, burned by fire far deadlier and more destructive than any I had ever called before, with a blasting rod or without one.

I sensed something moving toward me from the side and rolled out of the way just as one of Rosanna’s cloven hooves slashed through the air where my thigh had been an instant before. If she’d struck she would have opened the flesh to the bone. I whipped my staff at her face, forcing her to duck away, and followed with a surge of will and a shout of, “Forzare!” It wasn’t my best kinetic strike, but it was a blow heavy enough to throw her a dozen feet through the air and into a tumble over the ground.

I seized the hilt of Fidelacchius from where the Sword had fallen. As my fingers closed around the weapon I realized several points of cold logic, as if having them explained to me by a calm, rational, wise old man who was utterly unperturbed by my rage.

First, I realized that I was now alone on an uncharted island in the middle of Lake Michigan, with nothing but madmen and fallen angels for company.

Second, that I still had the coins and the Sword that Nicodemus had been after—and that he was still going to be after them.

Third, that the Denarians were sure to be really ticked off, now that I’d taken their real prize from them.

Fourth…

The ground shook, as if with the impact of a heavy foot.

Fourth, that since I had confounded Summer’s attempt to track me via use of the little oak leaf pin, Eldest Brother Gruff had probably been waiting for me to use fire magic in battle—the same magic that I had entwined with the power of the Summer Lady two years ago at Arctis Tor. It was the most probable reason why Mab, the most likely suspect for messing with my head, would have taken my blasting rod and my memories of how to use fire magic in battle—to prevent me from inadvertently revealing my position to Summer every time I got into a tussle.

Only now that I had, Eldest Gruff was probably on his way to visit.

And fifth, and last, I realized that I had no way to get off this stupid and creepily familiar island—unless I could get down to the docks and to the boat I’d come in on.

I still burned with the need to strike back at the people who had hurt my friend, but the fact of the matter was that I couldn’t strike back at them and survive—and if they took me down, I’d only be handing them weapons to continue the war Michael had spent a lifetime fighting to end.

My only option was to run. Realistically, even escape wasn’t looking likely—but it was my only chance.

So I slid the Sword back into its scabbard, oriented myself toward the run-down little town where we’d first come ashore, and ran. Fast.

Now, I’m not as strong as those really big guys, like Michael and Sanya. I don’t do swordplay as well as folks like Nicodemus or Shiro. I don’t yet have the magical experience and know-how to outfinesse the really experienced wizards and sorcerers who have been hanging around for centuries, like the Gatekeeper or Thorned Namshiel.

But I’ll take any of those guys in a footrace. Guaranteed. I run—and not so that I’ll be skinny and look good, either. I run so that when something that wants to kill me is chasing me, I’ll be good at running. And when you’ve got legs as long as mine, you’re skinny, and in good shape, you can really move. I hit the woods running like a deer, sticking to the path we’d broken on the way up. The snow made it easy to see the way, and though in another hour or two it would be a sheet of frozen ice, for the moment the footing was excellent.

I was benefiting from the chaos caused by Gard’s entrance. I could hear all kinds of confusion as men shouted in the woods and tried to figure out what was going on, to get the wounded to help, and to follow what were probably conflicting orders thanks to holes ripped in their chain of command by Hendricks and his minigun. Radios clicked and voices buzzed over them, functioning unreliably, as they would in any area so rich with concentrated magical energy.

The fact that most of the men had had their tongues removed probably didn’t help anything, either. Nick should have taken my advice and read that evil-overlord list. Seriously.

Someone a few yards off to my right shouted something at me. It came out as totally mangled gobbledygook. I shouted back at him in similar wordless garbage, pretending that I didn’t have a tongue either, and added a rude gesture to the tirade. I don’t know if it was the perfect charade, or if it just shocked him into stunned silence, but either way it got the same effect. I went on by him without garnering any further reaction whatsoever.

I thought I was home free as I reached the ruins of the little company town and its one main drag along the shoreline.

And then I heard Magog’s bellow coming down the hill behind me—coming fast, too, easily making twice the speed I could manage. That was the damnedest thing about these demonic collaborator types. Even though they didn’t work out and practice, they still got to run faster than we dedicated roadsters who actually sweated and strained for our ability to haul ass. Jerks.

It seemed clear that Magog was coming in pursuit of me, or at least that he was coming down the hill toward the dock and the boat off the island to cut off any chance of escape. I had little time to pick and choose where to go to avoid his notice, and wound up ducking into the long, heavily shadowed, cavernous length of the building that looked as if it had once been a cannery.

The roof had fallen through in several places, and snow covered perhaps a third of the floor, providing the only thing even vaguely like light. Most of the walls were still standing, but I had grave doubts about the floor. There wasn’t space for much of a basement above the waterline, but there was plenty of room to break a leg if I fell through on a weak board. I would just have to stay close to the wall and hope for the best.

For once, enemy manpower was working in my favor. If Nicodemus had brought only his fellow Denarians along, there would have been nothing but the footprints of cloven hooves and giant mantises and Grape Apes and whatnot in the snow of the island. But no, he’d had to bring along dozens and dozens of foot soldiers, too, and as a result there were regular old footprints everywhere. One more set, more or less, wasn’t going to stand out. So all I had to do was get into the building, get out of sight, and lie low until Magog had gone past.

I had no sooner crouched down and begun my impersonation of a mouse than the ancient, half-rotted wood of the old cannery shuddered beneath me, a vibration that I felt in the soles of my feet. Then another, and another, rhythmic, like slow footsteps.

They were followed by the sound of Magog’s approach, a heavy, leathery shuffling through the snow, accompanied by the steady heave of lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows. Then I heard Magog slide to a sudden halt in the snow and snort in surprise—then let out an enormous roar of challenge.

And a voice, a very deep, resonant voice, said, “Be thou gone from this place, creature. My quarrel is not with thee.”

Magog answered with a howl and spat out words in a language I did not understand.

“Be that as it may, Elder One,” the huge voice said, gently and with respect, “I also have a duty from which I may not waver. We need not be at odds this night. Depart in peace, Elder One, with your beast of burden.”

Magog snarled again in that foreign tongue.

The deep voice hardened. “I seek no quarrel with thee, Fallen One. I pray thee, do not mistake peaceable intention for weakness. I do not fear thee. Begone, or I will smite thee down.”

The gorillalike Denarian howled. I heard its claws dig and rip at the ground as it hurtled forward toward the source of the resonant voice.

Magog, it seemed, had a really limited vocabulary when it came to repartee.

I couldn’t see what happened next. There was a flash of gold-green light, like sunlight reflected from fresh spring grass, and a detonation in the air, a sound that was not quite a crack of thunder, not quite an explosion of fire. It wasn’t even loud so much as it was pervasive, something that I felt along the whole surface of my body as much as I did on my eardrums.

The wall of the cannery shattered inward, and Magog—what was left of Magog—came hurtling through it. It landed on the ground about twenty feet away from me. Enormous sections were missing from the front of the gorillalike body, including its thighs and most of the front half of its torso. It wasn’t a messy wound, either. The empty chunks were limned with a gentle yellow-green glow that seemed to seal in any blood. Even as I watched, Magog quivered once, then went limp. Tiny sprouts of green flowered up from the fallen corpse over the course of a couple of seconds, leaves spreading, then budding out into wildflowers in a riot of colors.

The coating of flowering plants seemed to devour the body of the gorilla from around the mortal body beneath—that of a muscular young man, which gradually emerged, though was still modestly shrouded in a veil of flowers. He was thoroughly dead, his eyes glassy, empty, and there were flowers growing in a hole where his heart had been. He wore a leather collar, and hanging from it, in a little rubber frame like a dog tag, was another blackened denarius. He was a kid, Molly’s age at the oldest.

From outside there was a deep, resonant sigh. Then another heavy, ground-shuddering thump. And another.

Coming closer.

My heart jumped right up into my teeth. Sure, I had no idea who that really was out there, but all those thees just screamed that it was one of the Sidhe. They really got into the archaic modes of speech—or maybe it was fairer to say that they never got out of them. Anyway, odds were running high that this was Eldest Brother Gruff come to settle up with Winter’s champion in this affair, and given that he’d just swatted down one of the Denarians like he was an uppity pixie, it didn’t bode real well for me.

I found myself taking a step back as that thumping sound came again, and the floorboard beneath my foot creaked precariously.

That gave me an idea. The bigger they are, et cetera. If Eldest Gruff was even bigger than the last one had been, maybe I could use the rickety flooring against him—long enough to get myself out to the boat and off the island, in any case. Open water was another fantastic neutralizer for the enormous size discrepancy. Setting realistic goals has always been the key to my success. I didn’t have to win a fight with this thing. I just had to survive long enough to run away.

I took a chance, picked the most solid-looking floorboard I could see, and eased across the floor to the far side of the building, the one nearest the water, and turned to face the hole in the wall that Magog’s body had smashed open on its way in.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I readied my will and shook out my shield bracelet, in case I needed it. I lifted my staff and pointed it at where I thought Eldest Gruff ’s head might be when he came in, so he would know I was serious.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I adjusted the aim on the staff a little higher.

Thump. Thump.

Sweat trickled off my brow.

Thump. Thump.

How far did this guy have to walk?

Thump. Thump.

This was just getting ridiculous, now.

Thump. Thump.

And Eldest Gruff appeared in the opening.

He was five feet tall. Five-two, tops.

He wore a robe with a cowl, pulled back so that I could clearly see his curling ram’s horns, the goatlike features, the long white beard, the yellow eyes with their hourglass pupils.

And in his right hand he carried a wooden staff carved with runes that looked almost precisely like my own.

He took a limping step forward, leaning on his staff, and when he planted the tool on the ground, it flickered with green light that then splashed out onto the earth beneath it, spreading outward in a resonating wave. Thump.

The floorboards creaked beneath him, and he came to a cautious stop and faced me quietly, both hands on his staff. His robe was belted with an old bit of simple rope. There were three stoles hanging through it—purple ones, faded and frayed with the passage of time.

Those were the mantles worn by members of the Senior Council, the leaders of the White Council of Wizards. They were, generally speaking, the oldest and strongest wizards on the planet.

And Eldest Brother Gruff had, evidently, killed three of them in duels.

“This,” I said, “has really not been my day.”

The gruff regarded me solemnly. “Hail, young wizard.” He had a deep, resonant voice, far too huge and rich for the frame it came from. “Thou knowest why I have come.”

“To slay me, most likely,” I said.

“Aye,” said the gruff. “By my Queen’s command and in defense of Summer’s honor.”

“Why?” I asked him. “Why would Summer want Marcone taken by the Denarians? Why would Summer want the Archive under their control?”

The gruff only stared at me for a long moment, but when he spoke I could have sworn that his voice sounded pensive. Maybe even troubled. “It is not my place to know such things—or to ask.”

“The gruffs are Summer’s champion in this matter, aren’t they?” I demanded. “If not you, then who?”

“What of thee, wizard?” the gruff countered. “Hast thou asked why the wicked Queen of Winter would wish thee to prevent Marcone from being taken by those servants of the darkest shadow? Why she who embodies destruction and death would wish to protect and preserve the Archive?”

“I have, actually,” I said.

“And what answers hast thou found?”

“Gruff,” I said, “I find myself largely clueless about why mortal women do what they do. It will take a wiser man than me to understand what’s in a fae woman’s mind.”

Eldest Gruff stared at me blankly for a second. Then he threw back his head and made a sound that…well, more than anything it sounded like a donkey. Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw.

He was laughing.

I laughed, too. I couldn’t help it. The whole day had just been too much, and the laugh just felt too good. I laughed until my stomach hurt, and when the gruff saw me laughing, it only made him laugh harder—and more like a donkey—and that set me off in turn.

It was a good two or three minutes before we settled down.

“They tell children stories about you guys, you know,” I said.

“Still?” he said.

I nodded. “Stories about clever little billy goats outsmarting big mean trolls until their bigger, stronger brothers come along and put the trolls in their place.”

The gruff grunted. He said, “We hear tales of thee, young wizard.”

I blinked. “You, uh?”

“We too like stories about…” His eyes searched his memory for a moment before he smiled, pleased. The gesture looked pleasantly nonviolent on his face. “Underdogs.”

I snorted. “Well. I guess this is another one.”

The gruff ’s smile faded. “I dislike being cast as the troll.”

“So change the role,” I said.

The gruff shook his head. “That I cannot do. I serve Summer. I serve my Queen.”

“But it’s over,” I said. “Marcone is already free. So’s Ivy.”

“But thou art still here, upon the field of conflict,” the gruff said gently. “As am I. And so the matter is not closed. And so I must fulfill my obligations—to my great regret, wizard. I have only admiration for thee, in a personal sense.”

I tilted my head and stared hard at him. “You say that you serve Summer and the Queen. In that order?”

The gruff mirrored my gesture, his eyes questioning.

I fumbled in my pocket and came out with the other thing I had grabbed back at my apartment—the little silver oak leaf pin Mister had been batting all over Little Chicago. I’d figured that they’d stopped using it to chase me, once they’d gotten tired of Mister having his catnipped way with them.

The gruff ’s eyes widened. “The confounding enchantment thou didst employ upon our tracking spell was most efficacious. I had hoped to ask thee how it was done.”

“Trade secret,” I said. “But you know what came with this pin.”

“Indeed,” he said. “You were made an Esquire of Summer, and granted a boon, but…” He shook his head. “A boon can be a matter of importance, but not one this grave. Thou canst not ask me to yield to thee in a matter of conflict between the Courts themselves.”

“I won’t,” I said. “But just so we’re clear. Once both of us have left this island, the matter is closed?”

“Once thou art safe again in Chicago, aye, it would be.”

“Then I ask for Summer to honor its pledge to me, and the debt it incurred to me when I struck at Winter’s heart on its behalf.”

The gruff ’s ears stood up, facing me. “Aye?”

“I want you,” I said, “to get me a doughnut. A real, genuine, Chicago doughnut. Not some glamoured doughnut. An actual one. Freshly made.”

The gruff ’s teeth began to show as he smiled again.

“Of course,” I said, “you could deny me the boon I rightfully earned in blood and fire and kill me instead, thus ensuring that Summer would renege on a debt and never be able to make good on it. But I don’t think that would be very good for Summer and its honor. Do you?”

“Indeed not, wizard,” the gruff said. “Indeed it would not be.” He bowed his head to me. “Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?”

“Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles ’pon it instead,” I said solemnly, “and frosting of white.”

“It could take some time to locate such a pastry,” the gruff said seriously.

I bowed my head to him. “I trust in the honor of Summer’s champions that it will arrive in good time.”

He bowed his head in reply. “Understand, young wizard, I may not aid thee further.”

“You’re pushing the rules enough already,” I said dryly. “Believe me. I know how that is.”

Eldest Gruff ’s golden eyes glittered. Then he lifted the staff and thumped it quietly onto the floorboards. Once again there was a pulse of green light and a surge of gentle thunder—and he was simply gone.

So was the silver oak leaf pin. Just gone from my fingers, and I hadn’t felt a thing. Give it up for the fae; they can do disappearing like nobody’s business.

Maybe I should have taken some lessons. It might have helped me get out of this mess alive.

I made my way carefully back across the creaking floor to the body of the young man. He looked relaxed in death, peaceful. I had the impression that whatever Eldest Gruff had done to him, it had been painless. It seemed like the sort of thing the old faerie would do. I reached down with my gloved left hand and grasped the tag containing the blackened denarius of Magog. I jerked it sharply, pulling it off the collar, and pocketed it, careful not to let it touch skin. I was getting to be kind of blasé about handling these coins, but it was difficult to keep getting terrified over and over again, especially given the circumstances. The risk of once more exposing my immortal soul to a fiendish presence seemed only a moderate danger, compared to what still stalked the night outside the old building.

Speaking of which…I took a deep breath and made my way quietly back out to the street. I could still hear shouting from farther up the hillside. I heard the sound of a boat’s engine on the far side of the island. There must have been other vessels docked elsewhere along the shore.

Well, I’d known about only the one, and it was close. I slipped back out of the cannery and hurried down the street as quickly and quietly as I could.

Down past the bottom of the rough stone staircase the boat still floated, tied beside the broken stump of an old wooden column. I restrained the urge to let out a whoop, and settled for hustling down the frozen stones as fast as I could without breaking my neck. The water was viciously cold, but I still wasn’t feeling it—which probably wasn’t a good thing. There was going to be hell to pay in afterthought pain when this was over. But compared to the other problems I’d had recently, that one was a joy to think about.

I got to the boat, tossed my staff in, and clambered aboard. I heard a shout up the hillside and froze. A flashlight swept back and forth up in the trees, but then moved off in another direction. I hadn’t been seen. I grinned like a fool and crept up to the driver’s seat. Once I got the engine started it would attract attention, but all I had to do was drive west as fast as I could until I hit ground. The whole western shoreline hereabouts was heavily occupied, and it should be no problem to get to a spot public enough to avoid any further molestation.

I eased into the driver’s seat and reached for the ignition key.

But it was gone.

I felt around for it. Rosanna had left it in the ignition. I specifically remembered that she had done so.

The shadows rippled away from the passenger seat opposite the driver’s seat, revealing Nicodemus. He sat calmly in his black silk shirt and dark trousers, the grey noose worn like a tie around his throat, a naked sword across his lap, his left elbow resting on his left knee. In the fingertips of his left hand he held a key ring, dangling the grease-smeared ignition key of the boat.

“Good evening, Dresden,” he said. “Looking for this?”

Chapter Forty-five

The sleet had stopped coming down in favor of large, wet flakes of snow again. The boat rocked gently on the troubled waters of the lake. Water slapped against the sides and gurgled around the curve of the hull. Ice had begun to form all along the sides and front of the boat. I think there are boat words for all the pieces that were being covered, like prow and gunwale, but I’m only vaguely aware of them.

“Harry Dresden speechless,” Nicodemus said. “I can’t imagine this happens every day.”

I just stared at him.

“In the event that you hadn’t worked it out for yourself yet,” Nicodemus said, “this is endgame, Dresden.” The fingers of his right hand stroked the hilt of his sword. “Can you puzzle out the next part, or must I explain it to you?”

“You want the coins, the sword, the girl, the money, and the keys to the Monte Carlo,” I said. “Or you shoot me and drop me over the side.”

“Something like that,” he said. “The coins, Dresden.”

I reached into the pocket of my duster and…

“What the hell,” I said.

The Crown Royal bag was gone.

I checked my other pockets, careful of the coin I’d taken from Magog—and careful not to reveal its presence to Nicodemus. No bag. “It’s gone.”

“Dresden, don’t even try such a pathetic lie on m—”

“It’s gone!” I told him with considerable heat, none of it feigned. Eleven coins. Eleven freaking cursed coins. The last time I remembered definitely having them had been up at the tower, when I’d jingled them for Nicodemus.

He stared at me for a moment, his eyes searching, and then murmured something under his breath. Whispers rolled from the shadows around him. I didn’t recognize the language, but I did recognize the tone. I wondered if the angelic tongue had swear words, or if they just said nice words backward or something. Doog! Teews doog!

Nicodemus’s sword came up as swiftly as a flickering snake’s tongue and came to rest against my throat. I didn’t have time to flinch; it was that fast. I sucked in a quick breath and held very, very still.

“These marks,” he murmured. “Thorned Namshiel’s strangler spell.” His eyes drew a line from the last apparent mark on my neck down to the duster pocket that the bag of coins had been in. “Ah. The strangulation was the distraction. He picked your pocket with one of the other wires before he was incapacitated. He did that to Saint…someone-or-other, in Glasgow in the thirteenth century.”

There’s nothing like getting taken with an old trick, I guess. But that meant that Namshiel had been working together with someone else—someone else who had to have been hanging around to collect the coins after he’d taken them from my pocket and tossed them off to the side in the confusion. Someone who hadn’t been pulling a fade after all.

“Tessa and Rosanna,” I said quietly. “They got their collection of thugs back. They bailed at just the right moment to ruin your plan, too.”

“Deceitful bitches,” Nicodemus murmured. “One of them is our own Judas; I was sure of it.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “What?”

“That’s why I let them handle the more, shall we say, memorable aspects of the Archive’s initiation to our world,” Nicodemus said. “I suppose now that the child is free, she’ll have some rather unpleasant associations with those two.”

“And you’re telling me this why?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s somewhat ironic, Dresden, that I can talk to you about this particular aspect of family business. You’re the only one that I’m sure hasn’t gone over to this new force—this Black Council of yours.”

“How can you be so sure about me?” I asked him.

“Please. No one so obstreperous has been corrupted by anything but his own pure muleheadedness.” Nicodemus shook his head, never taking his eyes off me. “Still. My time here has not been wasted. The Knights carried away Namshiel’s coin, so Tessa has lost her sorcery teacher. I heard Magog’s bellow end quite abruptly a few moments ago, just before you walked out of the same building, so with any luck Tessa’s heaviest bruiser is out of the game for a time as well, eh?” Nicodemus smiled cheerily at me. “Perhaps his collar is in one of your pockets. And I have Fidelacchius. Removal of one of the Three is profit enough for one operation, even if I did lose this chance at gaining control of the Archive.”

“What makes you think,” I said, “that you have Fidelacchius?”

“I told you,” Nicodemus said. “This is endgame. No more playing.” The pitch and intonation of his voice changed, and though he still spoke in my direction, it was clear that he was no longer speaking to me. “Shadow, if you would, disable Dresden. We’ll talk some sense into him later, in a quieter setting.”

He was talking to Lasciel’s shadow.

Hell, wizards didn’t have a monopoly on arrogance.

Neither did the Knights of the Cross.

I stiffened in place, my mouth half-open. Then I fell over sideways, body resting against the boat’s steering wheel, my spine ramrod straight. I didn’t move, not one little twitch.

Nicodemus sighed and shook his head. “Dresden, I truly regret this necessity, but time is growing short. I must act, and your talents could prove useful. You’ll see. Once we’ve cleared some of these well-intentioned idiots out of our way…” He reached for Fidelacchius.

And I punched him in the neck.

Then I seized the noose and jerked it tight. I hung on, pulling it tighter. The noose, another leftover from Judas’s field, made Nicodemus more or less invulnerable to harm—from everything but itself. Nicodemus had worn the thing for centuries. As far as I knew,

I was the only one who had worked out how to hurt him. I was the only one who had truly terrified him.

He met my eyes for a panicked second.

“Lasciel’s shadow,” I told him, “doesn’t live here anymore. The Fallen have no power over me. And neither do you.”

I jerked the noose a little tighter.

Nicodemus would have screamed if he could have. He thrashed uselessly, reaching for his sword. I kicked it out of reach. He reached up and raked at my eyes, but I hunched my head down and hung on, and his motions were more panicked than practiced. His shadow rose up in a wave of darkness and fury—but as it plunged down to engulf me, white light shone forth from the slits in the wooden cane sheath of the holy sword on my back, and the shadow itself let out a hissing, leathery scream, flinching away from the light.

I was no Knight, but the sword did for me what it had always done for them—it leveled the field, stripping away all the supernatural trappings and leaving only a struggle of mind versus mind and will versus will, one man against another. Nicodemus and I fought for the sword and our lives.

He threw savage kicks into my wounded leg, and even through the blocks Lash had taught me to build, I felt them. I had a great handle on his neck, so in reply I slammed my forehead against Nicodemus’s nose. It broke with really satisfying crunching sounds. He hammered punches into my short ribs, and he knew how to make them hurt.

Unfortunately for him, I knew how to be hurt. I knew how to be hurt with the best of them. It was going to take a whole hell of a lot more pain than this loser could dish out in the time he had left to put me down, and I knew it. I knew it. I tightened my grip on that ancient rope and I hung on.

I took more blows to the body as his face turned red. He got one of my knees with a vicious kick as his face turned purple. I was screaming with the pain of it when the purple started looking more like black—and he collapsed, body loosening and then going completely limp.

A lot of people let up when that happens, when their opponent drops unconscious. But it could have been a trick.

Even if it hadn’t been I’d been planning to hang on.

I’m not a Knight.

In fact, I squeezed harder.

I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d had him down. Might have been thirty seconds. Might have been a minute and a half. But I saw a flash of furious green light and looked up to see Deirdre coming down the hillside toward me on her hair and three limbs, one leg bound up in white bandages. She had twenty or thirty tongueless soldier types with her, and her glowing eyes burned with verdant fury, like a pair of spotlights. She focused on me for half a second, hissed like a furious alley cat, and screamed, “Father!”

Crap.

I grabbed Nicodemus by the shirt and pitched him over the side, into the black waters of the lake. He went down with hardly a splash, his dark clothing making him all but invisible an instant after he hit the water.

I scanned the bottom of the boat frantically. There, the key. I scooped it up and jammed it into the ignition.

“Don’t shoot!” Deirdre screamed. “You might hit my father!” She bounded into the air, all that writhing hair folding back into a single, sharklike swimming tail as she dove, and hit the water with barely a splash.

I turned the key. The old boat’s engine coughed and wheezed.

“Come on,” I breathed. “Come on.”

If I didn’t get this boat moving before Deirdre found her daddy, game over. She’d order her soldiers to open fire. I’d have to raise a shield to stop the bullets, and once I did that the already wonky engine would sure as hell never get moving. I’d be stuck, and it would only be a matter of time before a combination of weariness, mounting pain, number of attackers, and wrathful daughter took me down.

Deirdre surfaced, cast a glance around to orient herself, and dove into the featureless darkness again.

The engine caught, and then turned over drunkenly.

“Boo-ya!” I screamed.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t untied the boat.

I lunged awkwardly up to the front and untied the rope, very much aware of all the guns pointing at me. The boat came free. I pushed off the pole, and the vessel began to sluggishly turn. I hobbled back to the steering wheel, cranked it around, and gave the engine some power. The boat throbbed and then roared and began to gather speed.

Deirdre surfaced maybe twenty feet in front of me, carrying her father. Before she even looked around she screamed, “Kill him, shoot him, shoot him!”

Cheerfully, I swerved the boat right at her. Something thumped hard against the hull. I hoped for some kind of lawn mower–like sound from the propellers, but I didn’t get one.

Gunfire erupted from the shore, meanwhile, and it wasn’t blinded by bright lights or hurried or panicked. It started ripping the boat to splinters all around me. I started shouting curse words and crouched down. Bullets hit my duster. For several seconds the range was pretty close, at least for the military-grade weapons they were using, and while the duster was up to the chore of stopping those rounds, it wasn’t any fun to experience. My back got hit with half a dozen major-league fastballs over the next few seconds.

And cold water washed over my feet.

And, half a minute later, over my ankles.

Double crap.

The engines were making really odd noises too. My back protested when I turned to look. It was damned dark out here on the lake, as I got farther and farther from shore, but the disappearing form of the island was being blotted by a lot of black smoke coming out of the boat’s engines.

The pain blocks were falling now. I was hurting a lot. The water in the bottom of the boat was up to the bottom of my calves now, and…

And there were three searchlights coming toward me from the direction of the island.

They’d sent out pursuit boats.

“This just isn’t fair,” I muttered to myself. I gave the engine all the power I could, but from the way it was rattling around that was more or less a formality. It wasn’t going to last long, and it was sinking in any case.

I knew that if I went into the water I’d have about four or five minutes to live, given the temperature. I also knew that I had to get past the stone reefs around the islands, the ones Rosanna had needed the beacon light to navigate through.

Nothing for it but to keep going.

I was struck by a sudden thought: Bob the skull was going to be crushed that he missed this one, a genuine pirate adventure. I started singing, “Blow the Man Down” at the top of my lungs.

Then there was a horrible noise, and the boat just stopped. The steering wheel hit me in the chest pretty hard, and then I bounced back into the driver’s seat.

Water started pouring in thick and fast and dark.

“Ahoy!” I slurred drunkenly. “Reef!”

I made sure I still had the coin and the sword. I grabbed up my staff and got out the pentacle amulet from around my neck. The lights of the pursuing boats were getting nearer by the moment. This was going to be a close one.

The old ski boat was literally breaking apart around me, its prow shattered on a thick spike of stone that had penetrated it just left of its center, up by the front of the boat. The old stone ridge that rose up through the waters of the lake came to within a couple of feet of the surface here. It would give me a place to do something besides instantly immerse myself in cold water and go into hypothermia.

And it would give me solid rock on which to plant my feet, and through which to draw power. The water of the lake would wash some of it away—not as much as free-running water, but some—but I would still be able to do something to defend myself.

So before the boat could capsize and dump me into the water, I gritted my teeth and jumped in.

My body immediately informed me that I had made an insane decision.

You have no idea what the depths of cold can be until you have jumped into near-freezing water.

I screamed my way into it, finding places to stand with my frozen feet, being careful of the leg that Nicodemus had rendered gimpy for me. Then I held up my mother’s amulet in my right hand and focused on it, forcing energy into it carefully and slowly. It happened sluggishly, the way everything was happening in the mounting cold, but I was able to draw power up through the stone beneath my feet, and to call silver-blue wizard light from the amulet—brighter and brighter, light that spread out over the waters in a literal beacon that read, clear as day, Here I am.

“T-T-Thomas,” I muttered to myself, shivering so hard I could barely stand. “Y-y-you’d b-better b-be c-c-close.”

Because Deirdre’s men were.

The searchlights oriented on me instantly, and the boats—rubber raft things that would skim right over the reefs—came bouncing toward me over the waves.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to sink one of the rafts. But it would have killed every man inside. And those weren’t people collaborating with demons for their own dark gain. They were just people, most of whom had been brought up from childhood to serve Nicodemus and company, and who probably thought that they were genuinely doing the right thing. I could kill someone like Nicodemus and sleep peacefully afterward. But I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I sent those rafts down into the lake and condemned the men in them to die. That isn’t what magic is for.

More to the point, killing them wouldn’t save me. Even if I managed to sink every other raft out there, send every man in them into the water, it wouldn’t stop me from freezing to death and drowning. It would just mean that I had a lot of company.

I’m not a Knight. But that doesn’t mean I don’t draw the line somewhere.

They started shooting from about a hundred yards away, and I raised a shield. It was hard to do in the icy waters, but I raised it and held it, a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Bullets smashed against it and skipped off it, sending out little concentric rings of spreading energy as their force was distributed over the shield. Most of the shots never really came anywhere close. Shooting from a moving rubber raft at a hundred yards isn’t exactly a recipe for precision marksmanship.

They got closer, and I got colder.

I held the light and the shield.

Please, brother. Don’t let me down.

I never heard anything until a wave of cold water hit my shoulder blades and all but knocked me over. Then the heavy chug-chug-chug of the Water Beetle’s engines shook the water around me as my brother’s battered old ship bellied up dangerously close to the reef, and I turned to find the ship wallowing broadside behind me.

I liked to give Thomas a hard time about the Water Beetle, teasing him that he’d stolen it from the prop room of Jaws. But the fact of the matter was that I didn’t know a damned thing about boats, and that I was secretly impressed that he could sail the thing around the lake so blithely.

“Harry!” Murphy called. She came hurrying down the frozen deck, slipping here and there on patches of ice as she did. She slapped a line attached to a harness she wore to the ship’s safety railing, and threw the other end of the line to me. “Come on!”

“It’s about time you got outside the reef,” Thomas complained from the top of the wheelhouse. As I watched, he drew his heavy Desert Eagle from his side, aimed, and loosed a round. A dark form on one of the oncoming rafts let out a cry and fell into the water with a splash.

I scowled at Thomas. He doesn’t even practice.

I stumbled forward and grabbed the line, wrapping it around my right arm. That was pretty much all I had enough energy left to do. Murphy began hauling it in, and started yelling for Thomas to help her.

“Cover me!” Thomas yelled.

He came down from the wheelhouse pirate style, just jumping down, all graceful and stylish despite the roll of the ship, despite the ice and the cold. Murphy, her feet planted, secured to the railing, shifted her grip and produced the little assault weapon she’d had on a strap around her back—the P-90 Kincaid had given her as a gift. She raised it to her shoulder, sighted through the scope at one of the oncoming rafts, and started calmly squeezing out rounds, one and two at a time. Fam. Famfam. Fam. Famfam. Fam. Fam.

One of the rafts foundered. Maybe she’d struck whoever was steering it and caused him to misguide it. Maybe the lake had simply swamped it. I don’t know. But a second raft immediately turned to start picking up men who had spilled into the water from the first. Murphy turned her gun onto the remaining raft.

Thomas started hauling me out of the water by the line around my arm, just pulling me up arm over arm as if I’d been a child and not an adult a hundred pounds heavier than he was. He doesn’t even work out.

I was tired enough that I just let him do it. As a result I had enough spare attention to notice when my feet cleared the water, and Deirdre surged out of the blackness and seized my ankles.

“Kill you!” she snarled. “Kill you for what you did to him!”

“Holy crap!” Thomas yelled.

“Ack!” I agreed.

Most of those deadly strands of her hair were thrust into the stone reef below, holding her down, but a few that were free whipped wildly at Thomas. He ducked aside with a yell, barely managing to hold on to the line.

It felt like she was going to pull my legs off at the ankles. I screamed and kicked at her as best I could, but my legs were so numb that I could barely move them, much less shake her off. Thomas had all that he could do to simply hold on to the line and prevent those bladed strands from severing it.

“Karrin!” he screamed.

Murphy swung her legs up over the railing of the ship, still attached to it by the line fastened to her harness. Then she swung herself out into empty air above the water until she hung alongside me.

Then she aimed the P-90 down at Deirdre and flicked the selector to full automatic.

But before she could pull the trigger, Deirdre hissed, and a flickering blade swept up and struck Murphy across the face. She screamed and recoiled as the blade continued, an S-shaped cut that missed Murphy’s throat by a finger’s breadth and sliced through the strap that held the P-90 on her body. The weapon tumbled into the water.

“Bitch!” Murphy snarled, one side of her face a sheet of blood. She tried to reach for her pistol—in its shoulder holster, beneath her harness, beneath her coat. It might as well have been on the surface of the moon.

“Murph!” I said. I twisted my shoulders and thrust the end of Fidelacchius to within reach of her hand.

Murphy’s fingers closed on the hilt of the holy blade.

She drew it maybe an inch from the scabbard.

White light blinded me. Blinded Deirdre. Blinded Murphy. Blinded Thomas. Blinded everyone.

“No!” Deirdre screamed, utter despair and terror in her voice. “No, no, no!”

The pressure on my ankles vanished, and I heard the Denarian splash into the water.

Murphy released the hilt of the sword. The light died. It took maybe half a minute before I could see anything else. Thomas recovered faster, of course, and by that time he had us both back onto the deck of the Water Beetle. There was no evidence of Deirdre anywhere, and the two boatloads of soldier boys were hightailing it away as fast as they could go.

Murphy, bleeding from a cut running parallel to her right eyebrow all the way into her hairline, was staring in shock at me and at the sword. “What the fuck was that?”

I slipped the sword off my shoulder. I felt really tired. I hurt everywhere. “Offhand,” I mumbled, “I’d say it was a job offer.”

“We’ve got to move before we get carried onto the reef,” Thomas muttered. He hurried off, pirate style. He looked good doing it. Of course. He doesn’t even moisturize.

Murphy stared at the sword for a second more. Then she looked at me, and her bloody face went tight with concern. “Jesus, Harry.” She moved to the side of my wounded leg and helped support my weight as I hobbled into the ship’s cabin. “Come on. Let’s get you warmed up.”

“Well?” I asked her as she helped me. “How ’bout it? I got this sword that needs somebody to use it.”

She sat me down on one of the bench seats in the ship’s cabin. She looked at the sword for a moment, seriously. Then she shook her head and said quietly, “I’ve got a job.”

I smiled faintly and closed my eyes. “I thought you’d say that.”

“Shut up, Harry.”

“Okay,” I said.

And I did. For hours. It was glorious.

Chapter Forty-six

I woke up covered in a couple of heavy down comforters and innumerable blankets, and it was morning. The bench seat on the Water Beetle had been folded out into a reasonably comfortable cot. A kerosene heater was burning on the other side of the cabin. It wasn’t exactly toasty, but it made the cabin warm enough to steam up the windows.

I came to slowly, aching in every joint, muscle and limb. The after-action hangover was every bit as bad as I had anticipated. I tried to remind myself that this was a deliriously joyous problem to deal with, all things considered. I wasn’t being a very good sport about it, though. I growled and complained bitterly, and eventually worked up enough nerve to sit up and get out from under the covers. I went to the tiny bathroom—though on a boat, I guess it’s called a “head” for some stupid reason—and by the time I zombie-shuffled out, Thomas had come down from the deck and slipped inside. He was putting a cell phone back into his jacket pocket, and his expression was serious.

“Harry,” he said. “How you doing?”

I suggested what he could do with his reproductive organs.

He arched an eyebrow at me. “Better than I’d expected.”

I grunted. Then I added, “Thank you.”

He snorted. That was all. “Come on. I’ve got coffee for you in the car.”

“I’m leaving everything to you in my will,” I said.

“Cool. Next time I’ll leave you in the water.”

I pulled my coat on with a groan. “Almost wish you had. Coin? Sword?”

“Safe, stowed below. You want them?”

I shook my head. “Keep them here for now.”

I followed him out to the truck, gimping on my bad knee. I noted that someone had, at some point in the evening, cleaned me up a bit and put new bandages on my leg, and on a number of scrapes and contusions I didn’t even remember getting. I was wearing fresh clothing, too. Thomas. He didn’t say anything about it, and neither did I. It’s a brother thing.

We got into the battered Hummer, and I seized a paper cup of coffee waiting for me next to a brown paper bag. I grabbed the coffee, dumped in a lot of sugar and creamer, stirred it for about a quarter turn of the stick, and started sipping. Then I checked out the bag. Doughnut. I assaulted it.

Thomas began to start the car but froze in place and blinked at the doughnut. “Hey,” he said. “Where the hell did that come from?”

I took another bite. Cake doughnut. White frosting. Sprinkles. Still warm. And I had hot coffee to go with it. Pure heaven. I gave my brother a cryptic look and just took another bite.

“Christ,” he muttered, starting the truck. “You don’t even explain the little things, do you?”

“It’s like a drug,” I said, through a mouthful of fattening goodness.

I enjoyed the doughnut while I could, letting it fully occupy all my senses. After I’d finished it, and the coffee started kicking in, I realized why I’d indulged myself so completely: It was likely to be the last bit of pleasure I was going to feel for a while.

Thomas hadn’t said a damned thing about where we were going—or how anyone was doing after the events of the night before.

The Stroger building, the new hospital that has replaced the old Cook County complex as Chicago’s nerve center of medicine, is only a few yards away from the old clump of buildings. It looks kind of like a castle. If you scrunch up your eyes a little, you can almost imagine its features as medieval ramparts and towers and crenellation, standing like some ancient mountain bastion, determined to defend the citizens of Chicago against the plagues and evils of the world.

Provided they have enough medical coverage, of course.

I finished the coffee and thought to myself that I might have been feeling a little pessimistic.

Thomas led me up to intensive care. He stopped in the hallway outside. “Luccio’s coordinating the information, so I don’t have many details. But Molly’s in there. She’ll have the rest of them for you.”

“What do you know?” I asked him.

“Michael’s in bad shape,” he said. “Still in surgery, last I heard. They’re waiting for him up here. I guess the bullets all came up from underneath him, and that armor he was wearing actually kept one of them in. Bounced around inside him like a BB inside a tin can.”

I winced.

“They said he only got hit by two or three rounds,” Thomas continued. “But that it was more or less a miracle that he survived it at all. They don’t know if he’s going to make it. Sanya didn’t go into anything more specific than that.”

I closed my eyes.

“Look,” Thomas said. “I’m not exactly welcome around here right now. But I’ll stay if you need me to.”

Thomas wasn’t telling me the whole truth. My brother wasn’t comfortable in hospitals, and I was pretty sure I’d figured out why: They were full of the sick, the injured, and the elderly—i.e., the kind of herd animals that predators’ instincts told them were weakest, and the easiest targets. My brother didn’t like being reminded about that part of his nature. He might hate that it happened, but his instincts would react regardless of what he wanted or didn’t want. It would be torture for him to hang around here.

“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

He frowned at me. “All right,” he said after a moment. “You’ve got my number. Call me; I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Thanks.”

He put a hand on my arm for a second, then turned, hunched his shoulders, bowed his head so that his hair fell to hide most of his face, and walked quickly away.

I went on into the intensive care ward and found the waiting area.

Molly was sitting inside, next to Charity. Mother and daughter sat side by side, holding hands. They looked strained and weary. Charity was wearing jeans and one of Michael’s flannel shirts. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she didn’t have any makeup on. She’d been pulled from her bed in the middle of the night to rush to the hospital. Her eyes were focused into the distance and blank.

Small wonder. This was her greatest nightmare come to life.

They looked up as I came in, and their expressions were exactly the same: neutral, distant, numb.

“Harry,” Molly said, her voice hollow, ghostly.

“Hey, kid,” I said.

It took Charity a moment to react to my arrival. She focused her eyes on the far wall, blinked them a couple of times, and then focused them on me. She nodded and didn’t speak.

“I, uh,” I said quietly.

Molly raised her hand to stop me from speaking. I shut up.

“Okay,” she said. “Uh, let me think.” She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration, and started ticking off one finger with each sentence. “Luccio says that the Archive is stable but unconscious. She’s at Murphy’s house and needs to talk to you. Murphy says to tell you her face will be fine. Sanya says that he needs to talk to you alone, and as soon as possible, at St. Mary’s.”

I waved a hand at all of that. “I’ll take care of it later. How’s your dad?”

“Severe trauma to his liver,” Charity said, her voice toneless. “One of his kidneys was damaged too badly to be saved. One of his lungs collapsed. There’s damage to his spine. One of his ribs was fractured into multiple pieces. His pelvis was broken in two places. His jaw was shattered. Subdural hematoma. There was trauma all through one ocular cavity. They aren’t sure if he’ll lose the eye or not. There might also be brain damage. They don’t know yet.” Her eyes overflowed and focused into the distance again. “There was trauma to his heart. Fragments of broken bone in it. From his ribs.” She shuddered and closed her eyes. “His heart. They hurt his heart.”

Molly sat back down beside her mother and put her arm around Charity’s shoulders. Charity leaned against her, eyes still spilling tears, but she never made a sound.

I’m not a Knight.

I’m not a hero, either.

Heroes keep their promises.

“Molly,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She looked up at me, and her lip started quivering. She shook her head and said, “Oh, Harry.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Charity’s face snapped up and she said, her voice suddenly very clear and distinct, “No.”

Molly blinked at her mother.

Charity stood up, her face blotched with tears, creased with strain, her eyes sunken with fatigue and worry. She stared at me for a long moment and then said, “Families stay, Harry.” She lifted her chin, sudden and fierce pride briefly driving out the grief in her eyes. “He would stay for you.”

My vision got a little blurry, and I sat down in the nearest chair. Probably just a reaction to all the strain of the past couple of days.

“Yeah,” I said, my throat thick. “He would.”

I called everyone on the list Molly had quoted me and told them they could wait to see me until we knew about Michael. Except for Murph, they all got upset about that. I told them they could go to hell and hung up on them.

Then I settled in with Molly and Charity and waited.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little bit too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights—another constant, those lights—humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation.

And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

The day crawled by. A doctor came to see Charity twice, to tell her that things were still bad, and that they were still working. The second visit came around suppertime, and the doc suggested that she get some food if she could, that they should know something more definite after the next procedure, in three or four hours.

He asked if Charity knew whether or not Michael had agreed to be an organ donor. Just in case, he said. They hadn’t been able to find his driver’s license. I could tell that Charity wanted to tell the doctor where he could shove his question and just how far it could go, but she told him what Michael would have told him—yes, of course he had. The doctor thanked her and left.

I walked down the cafeteria with Charity and Molly, but I didn’t feel like eating or having food urged upon me. I figured that Charity probably had a critical back pressure of mothering built up after this much time away from her kids. On the way, I claimed that I needed to stretch my legs, which was the truth. Sometimes when there’s too much going on in my head, it helps to walk around a bit.

So I walked down hallways, going nowhere in particular, just being careful not to pass too near any equipment that might be busy keeping someone alive at the moment.

I wound up sitting down in the hospital chapel.

It was the usual for such a place; quiet, subdued colors and lights, bench seating with an aisle in the middle, and a podium up at the front—the standard layout for the services of any number of faiths. Maybe it leaned a little harder toward Catholicism than most, but that might have been only natural. The Jesuits actually had a chaplaincy in residence, and held Mass there regularly.

It was quiet, which was the important thing. I sank onto a pew, aching, and closed my eyes.

Lots of details chased their way around my head. Michael had come in with gunshot wounds. The cops were going to ask lots of questions about that. Depending on the circumstances of the helicopter’s return to Chicago, that could get really complicated, really fast. On the other hand, given the depth of Marcone’s involvement, the problems might just vanish. He had his fingers in so many pies in Chicago’s city government that he could probably have any inquiry quashed if he really wanted it done.

Given what he’d been saved from, it would be consistent with his character for Marcone to repay the people who bailed him out with whatever aid he could render in turn. It irked me that Marcone could ever be in a position to offer significant aid to Michael, regardless of the circumstances.

Of course, for that to happen, Michael would first need to survive.

My thoughts kept coming full circle back to that.

Would he be in danger right now if I hadn’t insisted that he put on that harness? If I hadn’t shoved him onto that rope ahead of me, would he still be up there under the knife, dying? Could I really have been that arrogant to assume, based on one glance at Gard’s face, that I not only knew the future, but had the wisdom and the right to decide what that future should be?

Maybe it should be me up there. I didn’t have a wife and a family waiting for me to come home.

I’d expected Charity to scream and throw things at me. Maybe I’d even wanted that. Because while I intellectually understood that I’d had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and that I’d only been trying to protect my friend, a big part of me couldn’t help but feel that I deserved Charity’s fury. After all, it reasoned, I had gotten her husband killed as surely as if I’d murdered him myself.

Except that he wasn’t dead yet—and thinking like that was too much like giving up on him. I couldn’t do that.

I looked up at the podium, where Whoever would presumably be when someone was there delivering a sermon.

“I know that we don’t talk much,” I said, speaking out loud to the empty room. “And I’m not looking for a pen pal. But I thought You should know that Michael makes You look pretty good. And if after all he’s done, it ends like this for him, I’d think less of You. He deserves better. I think You should make sure he gets it. If You want to bill it to me, I’m fine with that. It’s no problem.”

Nobody said anything back.

“And while we’re on the subject,” I said, “I think the rules You’ve got set up suck. You don’t get involved as much as You used to, apparently. And Your angels aren’t allowed to stick their toes in unless the bad guys do it first. But I’ve been running some figures in my head, and when the Denarians pulled up those huge Signs, they had to have a lot of power to do it. A lot of power. More than I could ever have had, even with Lasciel. Archangel power. And I can only think of one of those guys who would have been helping that crew.”

I stood up and jabbed a finger at the podium, suddenly furious, and screamed, “The Prince of fucking Darkness gets to cheat and unload his power on the earth—twice!—and You just sit there being holy while my friend, who has fought for You his whole life, is dying! What the hell is wrong with You?”

“I guess this is a bad time,” said a voice from behind me.

I turned around and found a little old guy in a dark blue coverall whose stenciled name tag read, JAKE. He was pulling behind him a janitor’s cart with a trash bin and the usual assortment of brooms and mops and cleaning products. He had a round belly and short, curling silver hair that matched his beard, both cropped close to his dark skin. “Sorry. I’ll come back later.”

I felt like an idiot. I shook my head at him. “No, no. I’m not doing anything. I mean, you’re not keeping me from anything. I’ll get out of your way.”

“You ain’t in my way, young man,” said Jake. “Not at all. You ain’t the first one I ever seen upset in a hospital chapel. Won’t be the last, either. You sure you don’t mind?”

“No,” I said. “Come on in.”

He did, hauling the cart with him, and went over to the trash can in the corner. He took out the old liner. “You got a friend here, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down again.

“It’s okay to be mad at God about it, son. It ain’t His fault, what happened, but He understands.”

“Maybe He does,” I said with a shrug. “But He doesn’t care. I don’t know why everyone thinks He does. Why would He?”

Jake paused and looked at me.

“I mean, this whole universe, right? All those stars and all those worlds,” I continued, maybe sounding more bitter than I had intended. “Probably so many different kinds of people out there that we couldn’t count them all. How could God really care about what’s happening to one little person on one little planet among a practically infinite number of them?”

Jake tied off the trash bag and tossed it in the bin. He replaced the liner with a thoughtful look on his face. “Well,” he said, “I never been to much school, you understand. But seems to me that you assuming something you shouldn’t assume.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That God sees the world like you do. One thing at a time. From just one spot. Seems to me that He is supposed to be everywhere, know everything.” He put the lid back on the trash can. “Think about that. He knows what you’re feeling, how you’re hurting. Feels my pain, your pain, like it was His own.” Jake shook his head. “Hell, son. Question isn’t how could God care about just one person. Question is, how could He not.”

I snorted and shook my head.

“More optimism than you want to hear right now,” Jake said. “I hear you, son.” He turned and started pushing the cart out the door. “Oh,” he said. “Can an old man offer you one more thought?”

“Sure,” I said, without turning around.

“You gotta think that maybe there’s a matter of balance, here,” he said. “Maybe one archangel invested his strength in this situation overtly and immediately. Maybe another one was just quieter about it. Thinking long-term. Maybe he already gave you a hand.”

My right hand erupted into pins and needles again.

I sucked in a swift breath and rose, spinning around.

Jake was gone.

The janitor’s cart was still there. A rag hanging off the back was still swinging back and forth slightly. A folded paperback book was shoved between the body of the cart and the handle. I went over to the cart and looked up and down the hall.

There was no one in sight, and nowhere they could have conveniently disappeared to.

I picked up the book. It was a battered old copy of The Two Towers. One page was dog-eared, and a bit of dialogue underlined in pencil.

“‘The burned hand teaches best,’” I read aloud. I made my way back to my seat and shook my head. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Grimalkin mewled from the pew beside me, “That your experience with resisting the shadow of the Fallen One has garnered the respect of the Watchman, my Emissary.”

I twitched violently enough that I came up off my seat an inch or two, and came back down with a grunt. I slid down as far as I could to the end of the pew. It wasn’t far. I bought myself only another inch or three before I turned to face Mab.

She sat calmly, dressed in a casual business suit of dark blue, wearing plenty of elegant little diamonds. Her white hair was bound up into a braided bun, held in place with ivory sticks decorated with lapis. She held Grimalkin on her lap like a favorite pet, though only a lunatic would have mistaken the malk for a domestic cat. It was the first time I’d seen Grimalkin in clear light. He was unusually large and muscular, even for a malk—and they tended to make your average lynx look a little bit scrawny. Grimalkin must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds, all of it muscle and bone. His fur was dark grey, patterned with rippling black fur almost like a subtle watermark. His eyes were yellow-green, very large, and far too intelligent for any animal.

“The Watchman?” I stammered.

Mab’s head moved slightly with the words, but it was Grimalkin’s mewling voice that actually spoke. “The Prince of the Host is all pomp and ceremony, and when he moves it is with the thunder of the wings of an army of seraphim, the crash of drums, and the clamor of horns. The Trumpeter never walks quietly when he can appear in a chorus of light. The Demon Binder takes tasks upon his own shoulders and solves his problems with his own hands. But the Watchman…” Mab smiled. “Of the archangels, I like him the most. He is the quiet one. The subtle one. The one least known. And by far the most dangerous.”

I sorted through what knowledge I had of the archangels. It was meager enough, but I knew that much, at least. “Uriel,” I said quietly.

Mab lifted a finger and continued speaking through the malk. “Caution is called for, Emissary mine. Were I in your position, I would speak his name sparingly, if ever.”

“What has he done to me?” I asked her.

Mab stared at me with iridescent eyes. “That is a question only you can answer. But I can say this much: He has given you the potential to be more of what you are.”

“Huh?”

She smiled, reached to the bench on the other side of her body, and produced my blasting rod. “The return of your property,” the malk said. “The need to keep it from you has passed.”

“Then I was right,” I said, accepting it. “You took it. And you took the memory of it happening.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I deemed it proper,” she replied, as if speaking to a rather slow-witted child. “You would have risked your own life—and my purpose—to protect your precious mortals had I not taken your fire from you. Summer would have tracked and killed you two days ago.”

“Not having it could have gotten me killed, too,” I said. “And then you’d have wasted all that time you’ve put in trying to recruit me to be the next Winter Knight.”

“Nonsense,” Mab said. “If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers.”

A little cold feeling shot through me. I hadn’t realized that Mab knew who he was. But I guess it made sense. My godmother, the Leanansidhe, had been tight with my mother, one way or another. If Lea had known, then it might make sense that Mab did, too. “He isn’t a mortal,” I said quietly. “I thought the Knights had to be mortals.”

“He is in love,” Grimalkin mrowled for Mab. “That is more than mortal enough for me.” She tilted her head. “Though I suppose I might make him an offer, while you yet live. He would give much to hold his love again, would he not?”

I fixed her with a hard gaze and said, “You will stay away from him.”

“I will do as I please,” she said. “With him—and with you.”

I scowled at her. “You will not. I do not belong to y—”

The next thing I knew I was on my knees in the center aisle, and Mab was walking away from me, toward the door. “Oh, but you do, mortal. Until you have worked off your debt to me you are mine. You owe one favor more.”

I tried to get up, and I couldn’t. My knees just wouldn’t move. My heart beat far too hard, and I hated how frightened I felt.

“Why?” I demanded. “Why did you want the Denarians stopped? Why send the hobs to kill the Archive? Why recruit me to save the Archive and Marcone in the event that the hobs failed?”

Mab paused, turned, casually showing off the gorgeous curves of her calves, and tilted her head at me. “Nicodemus and his ilk were clearly in violation of my Accords, and obviously planning to abuse them to further his ambition. That was reason enough to see his designs disrupted. And among the Fallen was one with much to answer for to me, personally, for its attack upon my home.”

“The Black Council attack on Arctis Tor,” I said. “One of them used Hellfire.”

Mab showed me her snow-white teeth. “The Watchman and I,” Grimalkin mewled for her, “had a common enemy this day. The enemy could not be allowed to gain the power represented by the child Archive.”

I frowned and thought of the silver hand that had batted the fallen angel and his master sorceries around as if he’d been a stuffed practice dummy. “Thorned Namshiel.”

Mab’s eyes flashed with sudden, cold fury and frost literally formed over every surface of the chapel, including upon my own eyelashes.

“There are others yet who will pay for what they have done,” Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous—not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.

“I am Sidhe,” she hissed. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab.” Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises—utterly insane. “And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them.”

There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.

I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I’d been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.

It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn’t been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I’d be able to tell if she had taken something else.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, shivering.

Because though I hadn’t been in on the original attack on Mab’s tower, and when I did attack it I had been unwittingly serving Mab’s interests, the fact remained that I had indeed offered her the same insult as Thorned Namshiel. The lacerating fury that turned her voice into razor blades could very well be directed at me in the near future.

I hurried out of the chapel and went down to the cafeteria.

Being bullied into eating dinner sounded a lot more pleasant than it had a few minutes ago.

The doctor came into the waiting room at ten seventeen that night.

Charity came to her feet. She’d spent much of the day with her head bowed, praying quietly. She was beyond tears, at least for the moment, and she put a sheltering arm around her daughter, pulling Molly in close to her side.

“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “The procedures went…” The doctor sighed. He looked at least as tired as either of the Carpenter women. “As well as could be expected. Better, really. I hesitate to make any claims at this point, but he seems to be stable, and assuming there are no complications in the next hour or two, I think he’ll pull through.”

Charity bit her lip hard. Molly threw her arms around her mother.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Charity whispered.

The doctor smiled wearily. “You should realize that…the injuries were quite extensive. It’s unlikely that he’ll be able to fully recover from them. Brain damage is a possibility—we won’t know until he wakes up. Even if that isn’t an issue, the other trauma was severe. He may need assistance, possibly for the rest of his life.”

Charity nodded calmly. “He’ll have it.”

“That’s right,” Molly said.

“When can I see him?” Charity asked.

“We’ll bring him up in an hour or two,” the doctor said.

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Doc. Is he going to be on a respirator?”

“For the time being,” the doctor said. “Yes.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

The doctor nodded to us, and Charity thanked him again. He left.

“Okay, grasshopper,” I said. “Time for us to clear out.”

“But they’re going to bring hi— Oh,” Molly said, crestfallen. “The respirator.”

“Better not to take any chances, huh?” I asked her.

“It’s all right, baby,” Charity said quietly. “I’ll call home as soon as he wakes up.”

They hugged tightly. Molly and I started walking out.

“Oh,” Molly said, her voice very tired. “I did that homework.”

I felt pretty tired, too. “Yeah?”

She nodded and smiled wearily up at me. “Charlemagne.”

I called Thomas, and he gave me and Molly a ride to Murphy’s place.

The night was clear. The cloud cover had blown off, and the moon and the stars got together with the snow to turn Chicago into a winter wonderland months ahead of schedule. The snow had stopped falling, though. I suppose that meant Mab had turned her attention elsewhere. Thomas dropped me off a short distance away, and then left to drive the grasshopper back to her home. I covered the last hundred yards or so on foot.

Murphy lives in a teeny little house that belonged to her grandmother. It was just a single story, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. It was meant for one person to live in, or possibly a couple with a single child. It was certainly overloaded by the mob of Wardens who had descended on the place. Luccio’s reinforcements had arrived.

There were four Wardens in the little living room, all of them grizzled veterans, two young members in the kitchen, and I was sure that there were at least two more outside, standing watch behind veils. I was challenged for a password in an amused tone by one of the young Wardens when I came in the kitchen door. I told him to do something impolite, please, and asked him where Luccio might be.

“That’s anatomically unlikely,” the young man replied in a British accent. He poured a second cup of steaming tea and said, “Drink up. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

“Thanks.”

I was sipping tea and sitting at Murphy’s table when Luccio came in a few minutes later. “Give us the room, please, Chandler, Kostikos.”

The younger men cleared out to the living room—a polite illusion, really. The house was too small to provide much in the way of privacy.

Luccio poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from me.

I felt my shoulders tense up a little. I forced myself to remain quiet, and sipped more tea.

“I’m concerned,” Luccio said quietly, “about the Archive.”

“Her name is Ivy,” I said.

She frowned. “That’s…part of my concern, Harry. Your personal closeness with her. It’s dangerous.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Dangerous? I’m in danger because I’m treating her like a real person?”

Luccio grimaced as if tasting something bitter. “Frankly? Yes.”

I thought about being diplomatic and polite. Honest, I really did. But while I was thinking about it, I accidentally bumped the button that puts my mouth on autopilot, because it said, “That’s a load of crap, Captain, and you know it.”

Her expression went still as the whole of her attention focused on me. “Is it?”

“Yes. She’s a kid. She’s alone. She’s not some computer database, and it’s inhuman to treat her like one.”

“Yes,” Luccio said bluntly. “It is. And it’s also the safest way to deal with her.”

“Safest for who?” I demanded.

Luccio took a sip of tea. “For everyone.”

I frowned down at my cup. “Tell me.”

She nodded. “The Archive…has been around for a long time. Always passed down in a family line, mother to daughter. Usually the Archive is inherited by a woman when she’s in her early to mid-thirties, when her mother dies, and after she’s given birth to her own daughter. Accidents are rare. Part of the Archive’s nature is a drive to protect itself, a need to avoid exposing the person hosting it to risk. And given the extensive knowledge available to it, the Archive is very good at avoiding risky situations in the first place. And, should they arise, the power available to the Archive generally ensures its survival. It is extremely rare for the host of an Archive to die young.”

I grunted. “Go on.”

“When the Archive is passed…Harry, try to imagine living your life, with all of its triumphs and tragedies—and suddenly you find yourself with a second set of memories, every bit as real to you as your own. A second set of heartaches, loves, triumphs, losses. All of them just as real—and then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And more and more and more. The perfect memory, the absolute recall of every Archive that came before you. Five thousand years of them.”

I blinked at that. “Hell’s bells. That would…”

“Drive one insane,” Luccio said. “Yes. And it generally does. There is a reason that the historical record for many soothsayers and oracles presents them as being madwomen. The Pythia, and many, many others, were simply the Archive, using her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future. She was a madwoman—but she was also the Archive.

“As a defense, the Archives began to distance themselves from other human beings, emotionally. They reasoned that if they could stop adding the weight of continuing lifetimes of experience and grief to the already immense burden of carrying so much knowledge, it might better enable them to function. And it did. The Archive keeps its host emotionally remote for a reason—because otherwise the passions and prejudices and hatreds and jealousies of thousands of lifetimes have the potential to distill themselves into a single being.

“Normally, an Archive would have her own lifetime of experience to insulate her against all these other emotions and memories, a baseline to contrast against them.”

I suddenly got it. “But Ivy doesn’t.”

“Ivy doesn’t,” Luccio agreed. “Her grandmother was killed in a freak accident, an automobile crash, I believe. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who was in love, and pregnant. She hated her mother for dying and cursing her to carry the Archive when she wanted to have her own life—and she hated the child for having a lifetime of freedom ahead of her. Ivy’s mother killed herself rather than carry the Archive.”

I started feeling a little sick. “And Ivy knows it.”

“She does. Knows it, feels it. She was born knowing exactly what her mother thought and felt about her.”

“How could you know this about her…” I frowned, thinking. Then said, “Kincaid. The girl was in love with Kincaid.”

“No,” Luccio said. “But Kincaid was working for Ivy’s grandmother at the time, and the girl confided in him.”

“Man, that’s screwed up,” I said.

“Ivy has remained distant her whole life,” Luccio said. “If she begins to involve her own emotions in her duties as the Archive, or in her life generally, she runs the serious risk of being overwhelmed with emotions and passions which she simply is not—and cannot be—psychologically equipped to handle.”

“You’re afraid that she could go out of control.”

“The Archive was created to be a neutral force. A repository of knowledge. But what if Ivy’s unique circumstance allowed her to ignore those limitations? Imagine the results of the anger and bitterness and desire for revenge of all those lifetimes, combined with the power of the Archive and the restraint of a twelve-year-old child.”

“I’d rather not,” I said quietly.

“Nor would I,” Luccio said. “That could be a true nightmare. All that knowledge, without conscience to direct it. The necromancer Kemmler had such a spirit in his service, a sort of miniature version of the Archive. Nowhere near as powerful, but it had been studying and learning beside wizards for generations, and the things it was capable of were appalling.” She shook her head.

I took a sip of tea, because otherwise the gulp would have been suspicious. She was talking about Bob. And she was right about what Bob was capable of doing. When I’d unlocked the personality he’d taken on under some of his former owners, he’d nearly killed me.

“The Wardens destroyed it, of course,” she said.

No, they hadn’t. Justin DuMorne, former Warden, hadn’t destroyed the skull. He’d smuggled it from Kemmler’s lab and kept it in his own—until I’d burned him to death, and taken it from him in turn.

“It was just too much power under too little restraint. And it’s entirely possible that the Archive could become a similar threat on a far larger scale. I know you care about the child, Harry. But you had to be warned. You might not be doing her any favors by acting like her friend.”

“Who’s acting?” I said. “Where is she?”

“We’ve been keeping her asleep,” Luccio said, “until you or Kincaid got here.”

“I get it,” I said. “You don’t think I should get close to her. Unless you’re worried about what’s going to happen when you wake her up and she’s really scared and confused.”

Luccio’s cheeks flushed and she looked away. “I don’t have all the answers, Dresden. I just have concerns.”

I sighed.

“Whatever,” I said. “Let me see her.”

Luccio led me into Murph’s guest bedroom. Ivy looked very tiny in the double bed. I sat down beside her, and Luccio leaned over to gently rest her hand on Ivy’s head. She murmured something and drew her hand away.

Ivy let out a small whimper and then blinked her eyes open, suddenly hyperventilating. She looked around wildly, her eyes wide, and let out a small cry.

“Easy, easy,” I said gently. “Ivy, it’s all right. You’re safe.”

She sobbed and flung herself tight against me.

I hugged her. I just rocked her gently and hugged her while she cried and cried.

Luccio watched me, her eyes compassionate and sad.

After a long while Ivy whispered, “I got your letter. Thank you.”

I squeezed a little.

“They did things to me,” she said.

“I know,” I said quietly. “Been there. But I was all right after a while. You’re going to be all right. It’s over.”

She hugged me some more, and cried herself back to sleep.

I looked up at Luccio and said, “You still want me to push her away? You want her baseline to be what she shared with those animals?”

Luccio frowned. “The Senior Council—”

“Couldn’t find its heart if it had a copy of Grey’s Anatomy, X-ray vision, and a stethoscope,” I said. “No. They can lay down the law about magic. But they aren’t telling me who I’m allowed to befriend.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then a slow smile curled up one side of her mouth. “Morgan told them you’d say that. So did McCoy and Listens-to-Wind. The Merlin wouldn’t hear it.”

“The Merlin doesn’t like to hear anything that doesn’t fit into his view of the world,” I said. “Japanese.”

“Excuse me?”

“Japanese. There’s a Japanese steakhouse I go to sometimes to celebrate. Surviving this mess qualifies. Come with me, dinner tomorrow. The teriyaki is to die for.”

She smiled more broadly and inclined her head once.

The door opened, and Murphy and Kincaid arrived. Kincaid was moving under his own power, though very gingerly, and with the aid of a walking stick. I got out of the way, and he came over to settle down next to Ivy. She woke up enough to murmur something about cookies and a Happy Meal. He settled down on the bed beside her, and she pressed up against his arm before settling down to rest again. Kincaid, evidently exhausted himself, drew a gun, took the safety off, placed it on his chest, and went to sleep too.

“It’s cute,” I whispered to Murphy. “He has a teddy Glock.”

She was looking at Kincaid and Ivy with a decidedly odd expression. She shook her head a little, blinked up at me, and said, “Hmm. Oh, hah, very funny. I had your car dug out of the snow, by the way.”

I blinked at her. “Thank you.”

“Got your keys?”

“Yeah.”

“Give you a ride to it,” she said.

“Groovy.”

We took off.

Once we were in the car and moving, Murphy said, “I like Luccio.”

“Yeah?”

“But she’s all wrong for you.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“You come from different worlds. And she’s your boss. There are secrets you have to keep from her. That’s going to make things difficult. And there are other issues that could come up.”

“Wait,” I said. I mimed cleaning out my ears. “Okay, go ahead. Because for a second there, it sounded like you were giving me relationship advice.”

Murphy gave me a narrow, oblique look. “No offense, Dresden. But if you want to compare total hours of good relationships and bad, I leave you in the dust in both categories.”

“Touché,” I said. Sourly. “Kincaid was looking awfully paternal in there, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, bite me,” Murphy said, scowling. “How’s Michael?”

“Gonna make it,” I said. “Hurt bad, though. Don’t know how mobile he’s going to be after this.”

Murphy fretted her lower lip. “What happens if he can’t…keep on with the Knight business?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

“I just…I didn’t think that taking up one of the swords was the sort of job offer you could turn down.”

I blinked at Murphy. “No, Murph. There’s no mandatory martyrdom involved. You’ve got a choice. You’ve always got a choice. That’s…sort of the whole point of faith, the way I understand it.”

She digested that in silence for a time. Then she said, “It isn’t because I don’t believe.”

“I know that,” I said.

She nodded. “It isn’t for me, though, Harry. I’ve already chosen my ground. I’ve taken an oath. It meant more to me than accepting a job.”

“I know,” I said. “If you weren’t the way you are, Murph, the Sword of Faith wouldn’t have reacted to you as strongly as it did. If someone as thick as me understands it, I figure the Almighty probably gets it too.”

She snorted and gave me a faint smile, and drove the rest of the way to my car in silence.

When we got there she parked next to the Blue Beetle. “Harry,” she said, “do you ever feel like we’re going to wind up old and alone? That we’re…I don’t know…doomed never to have anyone? Anything that lasts?”

I flexed the fingers of my still-scarred left hand and my mildly tingling right hand. “I’m more worried about all the things I’ll never be rid of.” I eyed her. “What brings on this cheerful topic?”

She gave me a faint smile. “It’s just…the center cannot hold, Harry. I think things are starting to fall apart. I can’t see it, and I can’t prove it, but I know it.” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just losing my mind.”

I looked intently at her, frowning. “No, Murph. You aren’t.”

“There are bad things happening,” she said.

“Yeah. And I haven’t been able to put many pieces together. Yet. But we shut down some of the bad guys last night. They were using the Denarians to get to the Archive.”

“What do they want?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “But it’s going to be big and bad.”

“I want in on this fight, Harry,” she said.

“Okay.”

“All the way. Promise me.”

“Done.” I offered her my hand.

She took it.

Father Forthill was already asleep, but Sanya answered the door when I dropped by St. Mary’s. He was rumpled and looked tired, but was smiling. “Michael woke and was talking.”

“That’s great,” I said, grinning. “What did he say?”

“Wanted to know if you made it out all right. Then he went back to sleep.”

I laughed, and Sanya and I traded a hug, a manly hug with a lot of back thumping, which he then ruined with one of those Russian kisses on both cheeks.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “I apologize for trying to rush you earlier. We wanted to be sure to collect the coins and get them safely stored as soon as possible.”

I exhaled. “I don’t have them.”

His smile vanished. “What?”

I told him about Thorned Namshiel.

Sanya swore and rubbed at his face. Then he said, “Come.”

I followed him through the halls in the back of the enormous church until we got to the staff ’s kitchen. He went to the fridge, opened it, and came out with a bottle of bourbon. He poured some into a coffee cup, drank it down, and poured some more. He offered me the bottle.

“No, thanks. Aren’t you supposed to drink vodka?”

“Aren’t you supposed to wear pointy hat and ride on flying broomstick?”

“Touché,” I said.

Sanya shook his head and flexed the fingers of his right hand. “Eleven. Plus six. Seventeen. It could be worse.”

“But we nailed Thorned Namshiel,” I said. “And Eldest Gruff laid out Magog like a sack of potatoes. I’ll get you his coin tomorrow.”

A flicker of satisfaction went through Sanya’s eyes. “Magog? Good. But Namshiel, no.”

“What do you mean, no? I saw Michael cut his hand off and drop it into his pouch.”

“Da,” Sanya said, “and the coin was under the skin of his right hand. But it was not in his pouch when he went to the hospital.”

“What?”

Sanya nodded. “We took off his armor and gear in helicopter, to stop the bleeding. Maybe it fell out into the lake.”

I snorted.

He grimaced and nodded. “Da, I know. That did not happen.”

I sighed. “Marcone. I’ll look into it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I know those people. I’ll go see them right now. Though I was looking forward to going home for a while.” I pushed my hips up off the counter they leaned on. “Well, what’s one more thing, right?”

“Two more things,” Sanya said. He vanished and returned a moment later.

He was carrying Amoracchius in its scabbard. He offered it to me.

I lifted both eyebrows.

“Instructions,” Sanya said. “I’m to give it to you and you will kn—”

“Know who to give it to,” I muttered. I eyed the ceiling. “Someone is having a huge laugh right now at my expense.” I raised my voice a little. “I don’t have to do this, You know! I have free will! I could tell You to go jump in a lake!”

Sanya stood there, offering me the sword.

I snatched it out of his hands, grumbling under my breath, and stalked out to my Volkswagen. I threw the sword into the back. “As if I didn’t have enough problems,” I muttered, slamming the passenger door and stalking around to the driver-side door. “No. I gotta be carrying around freaking Excalibur now, too. Unless it isn’t, who knows.” I slammed the driver-side door, and the old paperback copy of The Two Towers Uriel had left me, and which I’d dropped into the pocket of my duster, dug into my side.

I frowned and pulled it out. It fell open to the inside front cover, where there was writing in a flowing hand: The reward for work well-done is more work.

“Ain’t that the truth,” I muttered. I stuffed the book back in my pocket and hit the road again.

It took a phone call and an hour to set it up, but Marcone met me at his office on the floor over Executive Priority. I walked in carrying the sword to find Marcone and Hendricks in his office—a plain and rather Spartan place for the time being. He had only recently moved in, and it looked more like the office of an active college professor, functional and put together primarily from expediency, than that of a criminal mastermind.

I cut right to the chase. “Someone is backstabbing the people who saved your life, and I won’t have it.”

Marcone raised his eyebrows. “Please explain.”

I told him about Thorned Namshiel and the coin.

“I don’t have it,” Marcone said.

“Do any of your people?” I asked.

He frowned at that question. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his elbows on the arms of it, resting the fingertips of his hands together.

“Where is Gard?” I asked.

“Reporting to her home office,” he murmured. “I will make inquiries.”

I wondered if Marcone was lying to me. It wasn’t a habit of his, but that only meant that when he did tell a lie, it was all the more effective. I wondered if he was telling the truth. If so, then maybe Monoc Securities had just acquired their own Fallen angel and expert in magic and magical theory.

“The child,” Marcone said. “Is she well?”

“She’s safe,” I said. “She’s with people who care about her.”

He nodded. “Good. Was there anything else?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you should get some rest,” Marcone said. “You look”—his mouth twitched up at the corners—“like a raccoon. Who has been run over by a locomotive.”

“Next time I leave your wise ass on the island,” I said, scowling, and stalked out.

I was on the way out of the building when I decided to make one more stop.

Madam Demeter was in her office, dressed as stylishly as ever.

“Hello, Mister Dresden,” she said as she put several files away, neatly, precisely ordering them. “I’m quite busy. I hope this won’t take too long.”

“No,” I said. “I just wanted to share a theory with you.”

“Theory?”

“Yeah. See, in all the excitement and explosions and demonic brouhaha, everyone’s forgotten a small detail.”

Her fingers stopped moving.

“Someone gave the Denarians the location of Marcone’s panic room. Someone close to him. Someone who would know many of his secrets. Someone who would have a good reason to want to hurt him.”

Demeter turned just her head to face me, eyes narrowed.

“A lot of men talk to the women they sleep with,” I said. “That’s always been true. And it would give you a really good reason to get close to him.”

“He’s like a lot of men,” Demeter said quietly.

“I know you’ve got a gun in that drawer,” I told her. “Don’t try it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said.

“Because I’m not going to give you to Marcone.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I might ask you for information sometimes. If you could help me without endangering yourself, I’d appreciate it. Either way, it doesn’t affect whether or not I talk to Marcone.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Maybe I want to see him go down someday,” I said. “But mostly because it’s none of my damned business. I just wanted you to know that I’d seen you. This time maybe he won’t put it all together. He’s got more likely suspects than you inside his organization—and I’d be shocked if you hadn’t already realized what a great patsy Torelli is going to make.”

Demeter gave me a wintry smile.

“But don’t get overconfident. If you make another move that obvious, he’ll figure it out. And you’ll disappear.”

Demeter let out a bare laugh and shut the filing cabinet. “I disappeared years ago.” She gave me a steady look. “Are you here to do business, Mister Dresden?”

Granted, there was a building full of very…fit girls who would be happy to, ah, work on my tone. And my tone was letting me know that it would be happy to be worked on. The rest of my body, however, thought that a big meal and about two weeks of sleep was a much better idea. And once you got up to my neck, the rest of me thought that this whole place was looking prettier and hollower every time I visited.

“It’s done,” I said, and left.

At home, I couldn’t sleep.

Finally I had enough spare time to worry about what the hell was wrong with my right hand.

I wound up in my lab, dangling the packet of stale catnip for Mister and filling Bob in on the events of the past few days.

“Wow,” Bob said. “Soulfire. Are you sure he said soulfire?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily. “Why?”

“Well,” the skull said. “Soulfire is…well. It’s Hellfire, essentially. Only from the other place.”

“Heavenfire?”

“Well…” Bob said, “yes. And no. Hellfire is something you use to destroy things. Soulfire is used the opposite way—to create stuff. Look, basically what you do is, you take a portion of your soul and you use it as a matrix for your magic.”

I blinked. “What?”

“It’s sort of like using rebar inside concrete,” Bob said. “You put a matrix of rebar in, then pour concrete around it, and the strength of the entire thing together is a great deal higher than either one would be separately. You could do things that way that you could never do with either the rebar or the concrete alone.”

“But I’m doing that with my soul?” I demanded.

“Oh, come on, Harry. All you mortals get all hung up over your precious souls. You’ve never seen your soul, never touched it, never done anything with it. What’s all the to-do?”

“So what you’re saying is that this hand construct was made out of my soul,” I said.

“Your soul and your magic fused together, yeah,” Bob said. “Your soul converted into energy. Soulfire. In this case, the spirit energy drawn from your aura right around your right hand, because it fit the construct so well, it being a big version of your right hand and all. Your standard force-projection spell formed around the matrix of soulfire, and what had been an instantaneous exertion of force became a long-term entity capable of manipulation and exertion to the same degree. Not really more powerful than just the force spell, as much as it was more than simply the force spell.”

I wiggled my tingling fingers. “Oh. But my soul’s going to get better, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “Few days, a week or two at most, it’ll grow back in. Go out and have a good time, enjoy yourself, do some things that uplift the human spirit or whatever, and it’ll come back even faster.”

I grunted. “So what you’re saying is that soulfire doesn’t let me do anything new. It just makes me more of what I already am.”

“A lot more,” Bob said, nodding cheerfully from his shelf. “It’s how angels do all of their stuff. Though admittedly, they’ve got a lot more in the way of soul to draw upon than you do.”

“I thought angels didn’t have souls,” I said.

“Like I said, people get all excited and twitchy when that word gets used,” Bob said. “Angels don’t have anything else.”

“Oh. What happens if I, uh, you know. Use too much of it?”

“What’s five minus five, Harry?”

“Zero.”

“Right. Think about that for a minute. I’m sure you’ll come to the right conclusion.”

“It’s bad?”

“See? You’re not totally hopeless,” Bob said. “And hey, you got a new magic sword to custodianize, too? Merlin, eat your heart out; he only got to look after one! And working a case with Uriel! You’re hitting the big-time, Harry!”

“I haven’t really heard much about Uriel,” I said. “I mean I know he’s an archangel, but…”

“He’s…sort of Old Testament,” Bob said. “You know the guy who killed the firstborn children of Egypt? Him. Other than that, well. There’s only suspicions. And he isn’t the sort to brag. It’s always the quiet ones, you know?”

“Heaven has a spook,” I said. “And Mab likes his style.”

“And he did you a favor!” Bob said brightly. “You just know that can’t be good!”

I put my head down on the table and sighed.

But after that I was able to go upstairs and get some real sleep.

I always like the onion-volcano thing they do at the Japanese steak houses. Me and the other seven-year-olds at the table. I got to catch the shrimp in my mouth, too, when the chef flicked them up into a high arc with his knife. I did so well he hit me with two, one from a knife in either hand, and I got them both, to a round of applause from the table, and a genuine laugh from Anastasia.

We had a delicious meal, and the two of us lingered after everyone else at our little table-grill had left.

“Can I get your take on something?” I asked her.

“Certainly.”

I told her about my experience on the island, and the eerie sense of familiarity that had come with it.

“Oh, that,” Anastasia said. “Your Sight’s coming in. That’s all.”

I blinked at her. “Uh. What?”

“The Sight,” she replied calmly. “Every wizard develops some measure of precognizance as he matures. It sounds to me as if yours has begun to stir, and has recognized a place that may be of significance to you in the future.”

“This happens to everyone?” I said, incredulous.

“To every wizard,” she said, smiling. “Yes.”

“Then why have I never heard about it?” I demanded.

“Because young wizards who are anticipating the arrival of their Sight have an appalling tendency to ignore uncomfortable truths by labeling more appealing fantasies revelations of their Sight. Everything they care about turns into a prophecy. It’s vastly irritating, and the best way to avoid it is to keep it quiet until a young wizard finds out about it for himself.”

I mulled over that idea for a few moments. “Significant to my future, eh?”

“Potentially,” she replied quietly, nodding. “One must proceed with extreme caution when acting upon any kind of precognizant information, of course—but in this case, it seems clear that there is more to that island than meets the eye. If it were me, I’d look into it—cautiously.”

“Thank you,” I told her seriously. “For the advice, I mean.”

“It cost me little enough,” she said, smiling. “May I get your take on something?”

“Seems only fair.”

“I’m surprised at you, Harry. I always thought that you had an interest in Karrin.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Timing, maybe. It’s never seemed to be the right time for us.”

“But you do care for her,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “She’s gone with me into too many bad places for anything else.”

“That,” Anastasia said, her eyes steady, “I can understand.”

I tilted my head and studied her face. “Why ask about another woman?”

She smiled. “I wanted to understand why you were here.”

I leaned over to her, touching her chin lightly with the fingertips of my right hand, and kissed her very gently. She returned it, slowly, savoring the touch of my mouth on hers.

I broke off the kiss several moments after it had become inappropriate for a public venue and said, “Because it’s good for the soul.”

“An excellent answer,” she murmured, her dark eyes huge. “One that should, perhaps, be further explored.”

I rose and held out her chair for her, and helped her into her coat.

As it turned out, the rest of the night was good for the soul, too.

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.

ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

THE DRESDEN FILES

STORM FRONT

FOOL MOON

GRAVE PERIL

SUMMER KNIGHT

DEATH MASKS

BLOOD RITES

DEAD BEAT

PROVEN GUILTY

WHITE KNIGHT

SMALL FAVOR

“THE WARRIOR” IN MEAN STREETS (WITH SIMON R. GREEN, KAT RICHARDSON, AND THOMAS E. SNIEGOSKI)

THE CODEX ALERA

FURIES OF CALDERON

ACADEM’S FURY

CURSOR’S FURY

CAPTAIN’S FURY

PRINCEPS’ FURY

ROC

Published by New American Library, a division of

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Copyright ⓒ Jim Butcher, 2009 All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Butcher, Jim, 1971-

Turn coat: a novel of the Dresden files/Jim Butcher.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-03242-8

1. Dresden, Harry (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 3. Wizards—Fiction.

I. Title.

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For Bob. Sleep well.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Anne Sowards, my marvelous editor, my agent, Jenn Jackson, and my poor deluded beta readers. I’ve been facing the kinds of problems authors only dream about having, and you all have been a tremendous help to me. With luck, I’ll figure out how best to repay you for the time and effort you’ve all given me.

And, always, for Shannon and JJ, who like me even when I vanish into my own head for days at a time.

Chapter One

The summer sun was busy broiling the asphalt from Chicago’s streets, the agony in my head had kept me horizontal for half a day, and some idiot was pounding on my apartment door.

I answered it and Morgan, half his face covered in blood, gasped, “The Wardens are coming. Hide me. Please.”

His eyes rolled back into his skull and he collapsed.

Oh.

Super.

Up until that moment, I’d been laboring under the misapprehension that the splitting pain in my skull would be the worst thing to happen to me today.

“Hell’s frickin’ bells!” I blurted at Morgan’s unconscious form. “You have got to be kidding me!” I was really, really tempted to slam the door and leave him lying there in a heap. He sure as hell deserved it.

I couldn’t just stand there doing nothing, though.

“You need to get your head examined,” I muttered to myself. Then I deactivated my wards—the magical security system I’ve got laid over my apartment—grabbed Morgan under the arms, and hauled him inside. He was a big man, over six feet, with plenty of muscle—and he was completely limp. I had a hard time moving him, even though I’m no junior petite myself.

I shut the door behind me and brought my wards back up. Then I waved a hand at my apartment in general, focused my will, and muttered, “Flickum bicus.” A dozen candles spaced around the room flickered to life as I pronounced the simple spell, and I knelt beside the unconscious Morgan, examining him for injuries.

He had half a dozen nasty cuts, oozing and ugly and probably painful, but not life-threatening. The flesh on his ribs, beneath his left arm, was blistered and burned, and his plain white shirt had been scorched away. He also had a deep wound in one leg that was clumsily wrapped in what looked like a kitchen apron. I didn’t dare unwrap the thing. It could start the bleeding again, and my medical skills are nothing I’d want to bet a life on.

Even Morgan’s life.

He needed a doctor.

Unfortunately, if the Wardens of the White Council were pursuing him, they probably knew he was wounded. They would, therefore, be watching hospitals. If I took him to one of the local emergency rooms, the Council would know about it within hours.

So I called a friend.

Waldo Butters studied Morgan’s injuries in silence for a few moments, while I hovered. He was a wiry little guy, and his black hair stood up helter-skelter, like the fur of a frightened cat. He wore green hospital scrubs and sneakers, and his hands were swift and nimble. He had dark and very intelligent eyes behind black wire-rimmed spectacles, and looked like he hadn’t slept in two weeks.

“I’m not a doctor,” Butters said.

We’d done this dance several times. “You are the Mighty Butters,” I said. “You can do anything.”

“I’m a medical examiner. I cut up corpses.”

“If it helps, think of this as a preventative autopsy.”

Butters gave me an even look and said, “Can’t take him to the hospital, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Butters shook his head. “Isn’t this the guy who tried to kill you that one Halloween?”

“And a few other times before that,” I said.

He opened a medical kit and started rummaging through it. “I was never really clear on why.”

I shrugged. “When I was a kid, I killed a man with magic. I was captured by the Wardens and tried by the White Council.”

“I guess you got off.”

I shook my head. “But they figured that since I was just trying to survive the guy killing me with magic, maybe I deserved a break. Suspended sentence, sort of. Morgan was my probation officer.”

“Probation?” Butters asked.

“If I screwed up again, he was supposed to chop my head off. He followed me around looking for a good excuse to do it.”

Butters blinked up at me, surprised.

“I spent the first several years of my adult life looking over my shoulder, worrying about this guy. Getting hounded and harassed by him. I had nightmares for a while, and he was in them.” Truth be told, I still had nightmares occasionally, about being pursued by an implacable killer in a grey cloak, holding a wicked cold sword.

Butters began to wet the bandages over the leg wound. “And you’re helping him?”

I shrugged. “He thought I was a dangerous animal and needed to be put down. He really believed it, and acted accordingly.”

Butters gave me a quick glance. “And you’re helping him?”

“He was wrong,” I said. “That doesn’t make him a villain. It just makes him an asshole. It isn’t reason enough to kill him.”

“Reconciled, eh?”

“Not especially.”

Butters lifted his eyebrows. “Then why’d he come to you for help?”

“Last place anyone would look for him be my guess.”

“Jesus Christ,” Butters muttered. He’d gotten the improvised bandage off, and found a wound maybe three inches long, but deep, its edges puckered like a little mouth. Blood began drooling from it. “It’s like a knife wound, but bigger.”

“That’s probably because it was done with something like a knife, but bigger.”

“A sword?” Butters said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“The Council’s old school,” I said. “Really, really, really old school.”

Butters shook his head. “Wash your hands the way I just did. Do it thorough—takes two or three minutes. Then get a pair of gloves on and get back here. I need an extra pair of hands.”

I swallowed. “Uh. Butters, I don’t know if I’m the right guy to—”

“Oh bite me, wizard boy,” Butters said, his tone annoyed. “You haven’t got a moral leg to stand on. If it’s okay that I’m not a doctor, it’s okay that you aren’t a nurse. So wash your freaking hands and help me before we lose him.”

I stared at Butters helplessly for a second. Then I got up and washed my freaking hands.

For the record, surgeries aren’t pretty. There’s a hideous sense of intimately inappropriate exposure to another human being, and it feels something like accidentally walking in on a naked parent. Only there’s more gore. Bits are exposed that just shouldn’t be out in the open, and they’re covered in blood. It’s embarrassing, disgusting, and unsettling all at the same time.

“There,” Butters said, an infinity later. “Okay, let go. Get your hands out of my way.”

“It cut the artery?” I asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Butters said. “Whoever stabbed him barely nicked it. Otherwise he’d be dead.”

“But it’s fixed, right?”

“For some definitions of ‘fixed.’ Harry, this is meatball surgery of the roughest sort, but the wound should stay closed as long as he doesn’t go walking around on it. And he should get looked at by a real doctor soonest.” He frowned in concentration. “Just give me a minute to close up here.”

“Take all the time you need.”

Butters fell silent while he worked, and didn’t speak again until after he’d finished sewing the wound closed and covered the site in bandages. Then he turned his attention to the smaller injuries, closing most of them with bandages, suturing a particularly ugly one. He also applied a topical antibiotic to the burn, and carefully covered it in a layer of gauze.

“Okay,” Butters said. “I sterilized everything as best I could, but it wouldn’t shock me to see an infection anyway. He starts running a fever, or if there’s too much swelling, you’ve got to get him to one of two places—the hospital or the morgue.”

“Got it,” I said quietly.

“We should get him onto a bed. Get him warm.”

“Okay.”

We lifted Morgan by the simple expedient of picking up the entire area rug he was lying on, and settled him down on the only bed in the place, the little twin in my closet-sized bedroom. We covered him up.

“He really ought to have a saline IV going,” Butters said. “For that matter, a unit of blood couldn’t hurt, either. And he needs antibiotics, man, but I can’t write prescriptions.”

“I’ll handle it,” I said.

Butters grimaced at me, his dark eyes concerned. He started to speak and then stopped, several times.

“Harry,” he said, finally. “You’re on the White Council, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“And you are a Warden, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

Butters shook his head. “So, your own people are after this guy. I can’t imagine that they’ll be very happy with you if they find him here.”

I shrugged. “They’re always upset about something.”

“I’m serious. This is nothing but trouble for you. So why help him?”

I was quiet for a moment, looking down at Morgan’s slack, pale, unconscious face.

“Because Morgan wouldn’t break the Laws of Magic,” I said quietly. “Not even if it cost him his life.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

I nodded. “I am. I’m helping him because I know what it feels like to have the Wardens on your ass for something you haven’t done.” I rose and looked away from the unconscious man on my bed. “I know it better than anyone alive.”

Butters shook his head. “You are a rare kind of crazy, man.”

“Thanks.”

He started cleaning up everything he’d set out during the improvised surgery. “So. How are the headaches?”

They’d been a problem, the past several months—increasingly painful migraines. “Fine,” I told him.

“Yeah, right,” Butters said. “I really wish you’d try the MRI again.”

Technology and wizards don’t coexist well, and magnetic resonance imagers are right up there. “One baptism in fire-extinguishing foam per year is my limit,” I said.

“It could be something serious,” Butters said. “Anything happens in your head or neck, you don’t take chances. There’s way too much going on there.”

“They’re lightening up,” I lied.

“Hogwash,” Butters said, giving me a gimlet stare. “You’ve got a headache now, don’t you?”

I looked from Butters to Morgan’s recumbent form. “Yeah,” I said. “I sure as hell got one now.”

Chapter Two

Morgan slept. My first impression of the guy had stuck with me pretty hard—tall, heavily muscled, with a lean, sunken face I’d always associated with religious ascetics and half-crazy artists. He had brown hair that was unevenly streaked with iron, and a beard that, while always kept trimmed, perpetually seemed to need a few more weeks to fill out. He had hard, steady eyes, and all the comforting, reassuring charm of a dental drill.

Asleep, he looked . . . old. Tired. I noticed the deep worry lines between his brows and at the corners of his mouth. His hands, which were large and blunt-fingered, showed more of his age than the rest of him. I knew he was better than a century old, which was nudging toward active maturity, for a wizard. There were scars across both of his hands—the graffiti of violence. The last two fingers of his right hand were stiff and slightly crooked, as if they’d been badly broken, and healed without being properly set. His eyes looked sunken, and the skin beneath them was dark enough to resemble bruises. Maybe Morgan had bad dreams, too.

It was harder to be afraid of him when he was asleep.

Mouse, my big grey dog, rose from his usual napping post in the kitchen alcove, and shambled over to stand beside me, two hundred pounds of silent companionship. He looked soberly at Morgan and then up at me.

“Do me a favor,” I told him. “Stay with him. Make sure he doesn’t try to walk on that leg. It could kill him.”

Mouse nudged his head against my hip, made a quiet snorting sound, and padded over to the bed. He lay down on the floor, stretching out alongside it, and promptly went back to sleep.

I pulled the door most of the way shut and sank down into the easy chair by the fireplace, where I could rub my temples and try to think.

The White Council of Wizards was the governing body for the practice of magic in the world, and made up of its most powerful practitioners. Being a member of the White Council was something akin to earning your black belt in a martial art—it meant that you could handle yourself well, that you had real skill that was recognized by your fellow wizards. The Council oversaw the use of magic among its members, according to the Seven Laws of Magic.

God help the poor practitioner who broke one of the Laws. The Council would send the Wardens to administer justice, which generally took the form of ruthless pursuit, a swift trial, and a prompt execution—when the offender wasn’t killed resisting arrest.

It sounds harsh, and it is—but over time I’d been forced to admit that it might well be necessary. The use of black magic corrupts the mind and the heart and the soul of the wizard employing it. It doesn’t happen instantly, and it doesn’t happen all at once—it’s a slow, festering thing that grows like a tumor, until whatever human empathy and compassion a person might have once had is consumed in the need for power. By the time a wizard has fallen to that temptation and become a warlock, people are dead, or worse than dead. It was the duty of the Wardens to make a quick end of warlocks—by any means necessary.

There was more to being a Warden than that, though. They were also the soldiers and defenders of the White Council. In our recent war with the Vampire Courts, the lion’s share of the fighting had been carried out by the Wardens, those men and women with a gift for swift, violent magic. Hell, in most of the battles, such as they were, it had been Morgan who was in the center of the fighting.

I’d done my share during the war, but among my fellow Wardens, the only ones who were happy to work with me had been the newer recruits. The older ones had all seen too many lives shattered by the abuse of magic, and their experiences had marked them deeply. With one exception, they didn’t like me, they didn’t trust me, and they didn’t want anything to do with me.

That generally suited me just fine.

Over the past few years, the White Council had come to realize that someone on the inside was feeding information to the vampires. A lot of people died because of the traitor, but he, or she, had never been identified. Given how much the Council in general and the Wardens in particular loved me, the ensuing paranoia-fest had kept my life from getting too boring—especially after I’d been dragooned into joining the Wardens myself, as part of the war effort.

So why was Morgan here, asking for help from me?

Call me crazy, but my suspicious side immediately put forward the idea that Morgan was trying to sucker me into doing something to get me into major hot water with the Council again. Hell, he’d tried to kill me that way, once, several years ago. But logic simply didn’t support that idea. If Morgan wasn’t really in trouble with the Council, then I couldn’t get into trouble for hiding him from a pursuit that didn’t exist. Besides, his injuries said more about his sincerity than any number of words could. They had not been faked.

He was actually on the lam.

Until I found out more about what was going on, I didn’t dare go to anyone for help. I couldn’t very well ask my fellow Wardens about Morgan without it being painfully obvious that I had seen him, which would only attract their interest. And if the Council was after Morgan, then anyone who helped him would become an accomplice to the crime, and draw heat of his own. I couldn’t ask anyone to help me.

Anyone else, I corrected myself. I’d had little option but to call Butters in—and frankly, the fact that he was not at all involved in the supernatural world would afford him some insulation from any consequences that might arise from his complicity. Besides which, Butters had earned a little good credit with the White Council the night he’d helped me prevent a family-sized order of necromancers from turning one of their number into a minor god. He’d saved the life of at least one Warden—two, if you counted me—and was in far less danger than anyone attached to the community would be.

Me, for example.

Man, my head was killing me.

Until I knew more about what was going on, I really couldn’t take any intelligent action—and I didn’t dare start asking questions for fear of attracting unwanted attention. Rushing headlong into a investigation would be a mistake, which meant that I would have to wait until Morgan could start talking to me.

So I stretched out on my couch to do some thinking, and began focusing on my breathing, trying to relax the headache away and clear my thoughts. It went so well that I stayed right there doing it for about six hours, until the late dusk of a Chicago summer had settled on the city.

I didn’t fall asleep. I was meditating. You’re going to have to take my word for it.

I woke up when Mouse let out a low guttural sound that wasn’t quite a bark, but was considerably shorter and more distinct than a growl. I sat up and went to my bedroom, to find Morgan awake.

Mouse was standing next to the bed, leaning his broad, heavy head on Morgan’s chest. The wounded man was idly scratching Mouse’s ears. He glanced aside at me and started to sit up.

Mouse leaned harder, and gently flattened Morgan to the bed again.

Morgan exhaled in obvious discomfort, and said, in a croaking, dry voice, “I take it I am undergoing mandatory bed rest.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “You were banged up pretty bad. The doctor said that walking on that leg would be a bad idea.”

Morgan’s eyes sharpened. “Doctor?”

“Relax. It was off the books. I know a guy.”

Morgan grunted. Then he licked cracked lips and said, “Is there anything to drink?”

I got him some cold water in a sports bottle with a big straw. He knew better than to guzzle. He sipped at it slowly. Then he took a deep breath, grimaced like a man about to intentionally put his hand in a fire, and said, “Thank y—”

“Oh shut up,” I said, shuddering. “Neither of us wants that conversation.”

Maybe I imagined it, but it looked like he relaxed slightly. He nodded and closed his eyes again.

“Don’t go back to sleep yet,” I told him. “I still have to take your temperature. It would be awkward.”

“God’s beard, yes,” Morgan said, opening his eyes. I went and got my thermometer, one of the old-fashioned ones filled with mercury. When I came back, Morgan said, “You didn’t turn me in.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m willing to hear you out.”

Morgan nodded, accepted the thermometer, and said, “Aleron LaFortier is dead.”

He stuck the thermometer in his mouth, presumably to attempt to kill me with the suspense. I fought back by thinking through the implications, instead.

LaFortier was a member of the Senior Council—seven of the oldest and most capable wizards on the planet, the ones who ran the White Council and commanded the Wardens. He was—had been—skinny, bald, and a sanctimonious jerk. I’d been wearing a hood at the time, so I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected that his voice had been the first of the Senior Council to vote guilty at my trial, and had argued against clemency for my crimes. He was a hard-line supporter of the Merlin, the head of the Council, who had been dead set against me.

All in all, a swell guy.

But he’d also been one of the best-protected wizards in the world. All the members of the Senior Council were not only dangerous in their own rights, but protected by details of Wardens, to boot. Attempted assassinations had been semiregular events during the war with the vampires, and the Wardens had become very, very good at keeping the Senior Council safe.

I did some math from there.

“It was an inside job,” I said quietly. “Like the one that killed Simon at Archangel.”

Morgan nodded.

“And they blamed you?”

Morgan nodded and took the thermometer out of his mouth. He glanced at it, and then passed to me. I looked. Ninety-nine and change.

I met his eyes and said, “Did you do it?”

“No.”

I grunted. I believed him.

“Why’d they finger you?”

“Because they found me standing over LaFortier’s body with the murder weapon in my hand,” he replied. “They also turned up a newly created account, in my name, with several million dollars in it, and phone records that showed I was in regular contact with a known operative of the Red Court.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Gosh. That was irrational of them, to jump to that conclusion.”

Morgan’s mouth turned up in a small sour smile.

“What’s your story?” I asked him.

“I went to bed two nights ago. I woke up in LaFortier’s private study in Edinburgh, with a lump on the back of my head and a bloody dagger in my hand. Simmons and Thorsen burst into the room maybe fifteen seconds later.”

“You were framed.”

“Thoroughly.”

I exhaled a slow breath. “You got any proof? An alibi? Anything?”

“If I did,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had to escape custody. Once I realized that someone had gone to a lot of effort to set me up to take the blame, I knew that my only chance—” He broke off, coughing.

“Was to find the real killer,” I finished for him. I passed him the drink again, and he choked down a few sips, slowly relaxing.

A few minutes later, he turned exhausted eyes to mine. “Are you going to turn me in?”

I looked at him for a silent minute, and then sighed. “It’d be a lot easier.”

“Yes,” Morgan said.

“You sure you were going down for it?”

Something in his expression became even more remote than usual. He nodded. “I’ve seen it often enough.”

“So I could leave you hanging out to dry.”

“You could.”

“But if I did that, we wouldn’t find the traitor. And since you’d died in his place, he’d be free to continue operating. More people would get killed, and the next person he framed—”

“—might be you,” Morgan finished.

“With my luck?” I said glumly. “No might about it.”

The brief sour smile appeared on his face again.

“They’re using tracking spells to follow you,” I said. “I assume you’ve taken some kind of countermeasure, or they’d already be at the door.”

He nodded.

“How long is it going to last?”

“Forty-eight hours. Sixty at the most.”

I nodded slowly, thinking. “You’re running a fever. I’ve got some medical supplies stashed. I’ll get them for you. Hopefully we can keep it from getting any worse.”

He nodded again, and then his sunken eyes closed. He’d run out of gas. I watched him for a minute, then turned and started gathering up my things.

“Keep an eye on him, boy,” I said to Mouse.

The big dog settled down on the floor beside the bed.

Forty-eight hours. I had about two days to find the traitor within the White Council—something no one had been able to do during the past several years. After that, Morgan would be found, tried, and killed—and his accomplice, your friendly neighborhood Harry Dresden, would be next.

Nothing motivates like a deadline.

Especially the literal kind.

Chapter Three

I got in my busted-up old Volkswagen bug, the mighty Blue Beetle, and headed for the cache of medical supplies.

The problem with hunting down the traitor in the White Council was simple: because of the specific information leaks that had occurred, there were a limited number of people who could have possessed the information. The suspect pool was damn small—just about everyone in it was a member of the Senior Council, and everyone there was beyond reproach.

The second someone threw an accusation at one of them, things were going to get busy, and fast. If an innocent was fingered, they would react the same way Morgan had. Knowing full well that the justice of the Council was blind, especially to annoying things like facts, they would have little choice but to resist.

One punky young wizard like me bucking the system was one thing, but when one of the heavyweights on the Senior Council did it, there would be a world of difference. The Senior Council members all had extensive contacts in the Council. They all had centuries of experience and skill to back up enormous amounts of raw strength. If one of them put up a fight, it would mean more than resisting arrest.

It would mean internal strife like the White Council had never seen.

It would mean civil war.

And, under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine anything more disastrous for the White Council. The balance of power between the supernatural nations was a precarious thing—and we had barely managed to hang on throughout the war with the Vampire Courts. Both sides were getting their wind back now, but the vampires could replace their losses far more quickly than we could. If the Council dissolved into infighting now, it would trigger a feeding frenzy amongst our foes.

Morgan had been right to run. I knew the Merlin well enough to know that he wouldn’t blink twice before sacrificing an innocent man if it meant holding the Council together, much less someone who might actually be guilty.

Meanwhile, the real traitor would be clapping his hands in glee. One of the Senior Council was already down, and if the Council as a whole didn’t implode in the next few days, it would become that much rifer with paranoia and distrust, following the execution of the most capable and highly accomplished combat commander in the Wardens. All the traitor would need to do was rinse and repeat, with minor variations, and sooner or later something would crack.

I would only get one shot at this. I had to find the guilty party, and I had to be right and irrefutable the very first time.

Colonel Mustard, in the den, with the lead pipe.

Now all I needed was a clue.

No pressure, Harry.

My half brother lived in an expensive apartment on the very edge of the Gold Coast area, which, in Chicago, is where a whole lot of people with a whole lot of money live. Thomas runs an upscale boutique, specializing in the kind of upper-crust clientele who seem to be willing to pay a couple hundred dollars for a haircut and a blow-dry. He does well for himself, too, as evidenced by his expensive address.

I parked a few blocks west of his apartment, where the rates weren’t quite so Gold Coasty, and then walked in to his place and leaned on his buzzer. No one answered. I checked the clock in the lobby, then folded my arms, leaned against a wall, and waited for him to get home from work.

His car pulled into the building’s lot a few minutes later. He’d replaced the enormous Hummer that we’d managed to trash with a brand-new ridiculously expensive car—a Jaguar, with plenty of flash and gold trim. It was, needless to say, pure white. I kept on lurking, waiting for him to come around to the doors.

He did, a minute later. He was maybe a hair or three under six feet tall, dressed in midnight blue leather pants and a white silk shirt with big blousy sleeves. His hair was midnight black, presumably to complement the pants, and fell in rippling waves to just below his shoulders. He had grey eyes, teeth whiter than the Ku Klux Klan, and a face that had been made for fashion magazines. He had the build to go with it, too. Thomas made all those Spartans in that movie look like slackers, and he didn’t even use an airbrush.

He raised his dark brows as he saw me. “ ’Arry,” he said in the hideously accurate French accent he used in public. “Good evening, mon ami.”

I nodded to him. “Hey. We need to talk.”

His smile faded as he took in my expression and body language, and he nodded. “But of course.”

We went on up to his apartment. It was immaculate, as always, the furnishings expensive, modern, and oh so trendy, with a lot of brushed nickel finish in evidence. I went in, leaned my quarterstaff against the frame of the front door, and slouched down onto one of the couches. I looked at it for a minute.

“How much did you pay for this?” I asked him.

He dropped the accent. “About what you did for the Beetle.”

I shook my head, and tried to find a comfortable way to sit. “That much money, you’d think they could afford more cushions. I’ve sat on fences more comfy than this.”

“That’s because it isn’t really meant to be sat upon,” Thomas replied. “It’s meant to show people how very wealthy and fashionable one is.”

“I got one of my couches for thirty bucks at a garage sale. It’s orange and green plaid, and it’s tough not to fall asleep in it when you sit down.”

“It’s very you,” Thomas said, smiling as he crossed to the kitchen. “Whereas this is very much me. Or very much my persona, anyway. Beer?”

“Long as it’s cold.”

He returned with a couple of dark brown bottles coated in frost, and passed me one. We took the tops off, clinked, and then he sat down on the chair across from the couch as we drank.

“Okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Trouble,” I replied. I told him about Morgan.

Thomas scowled. “Empty night, Harry. Morgan? Morgan!? What’s wrong with your head?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think he did it.”

“Who cares? Morgan wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire,” Thomas growled. “He’s finally getting his comeuppance. Why should you lift a finger?”

“Because I don’t think he did it,” I said. “Besides. You haven’t thought it through.”

Thomas slouched back in the chair and regarded me with narrowed eyes as he sipped at his beer. I joined him, and let him mull it over in silence. There was nothing wrong with Thomas’s brain.

“Okay,” he said, grudgingly. “I can think of a couple of reasons you’d want to cover his homicidal ass.”

“I need the medical stuff I left with you.”

He rose and went to the hall closet—which was packed to groaning with all manner of household articles that build up when you stay in one place for a while. He removed a white toolbox with a red cross painted on the side of it, and calmly caught a softball that rolled off the top shelf before it hit his head. He shut everything in again, got a cooler out of his fridge, and put it and the medical kit on the floor next to me.

“Please don’t tell me that this is all I can do,” he said.

“No. There’s something else.”

He spread his hands. “Well?”

“I’d like you to find out what the Vampire Courts know about the manhunt. And I need you to stay under the radar while you do it.”

He stared at me for a moment, and then exhaled slowly. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I’ve got to know more about what’s going on. I can’t ask my people. And if a bunch of people know you’re asking around, someone is going to connect some dots and take a harder look at Chicago.”

My brother the vampire went completely still for a moment. It isn’t something human beings can do. All of him, even the sense of his presence in the room, just . . . stopped. I felt like I was staring at a wax figure.

“You’re asking me to bring Justine into this,” he said.

Justine was the girl who had been willing to give her life for my brother. And who he’d nearly killed himself to protect. “Love” didn’t begin to cover what they had. Neither did “broken.”

My brother was a vampire of the White Court. For him, love hurt. Thomas and Justine couldn’t ever be together.

“She’s the personal aide of the leader of the White Court,” I said. “If anyone’s in a good position to find out, she is.”

He rose, the motion a little too quick to be wholly human, and paced back and forth in agitation. “She’s already taking enough risks, feeding information on the White Court’s activities back to you when it’s safe for her to do it. I don’t want her taking more chances.”

“I get that,” I said. “But situations like this are the whole reason she went undercover in the first place. This is exactly the kind of thing she wanted to do when she went in.”

Thomas mutely shook his head.

I sighed. “Look, I’m not asking her to deactivate the tractor beam, rescue the princess, and escape to the fourth moon of Yavin. I just need to know what she’s heard and what she can find out without blowing her cover.”

He paced for another half a minute or so before he stopped and stared at me hard. “Promise me something, first.”

“What?”

“Promise me that you won’t put her in any more danger than she already is. Promise me that you won’t act on any information they could trace back to her.”

“Dammit, Thomas,” I said wearily. “That just isn’t possible. There’s no way to know exactly which information will be safe to use, and no way to know for certain which bits of data might be misinformation.”

“Promise me,” he said, emphasizing both words.

I shook my head. “I promise that I’ll do absolutely everything in my power to keep Justine safe.”

His jaws clenched a few times. The promise didn’t satisfy him—though it was probably more accurate to say that the situation didn’t satisfy him. He knew I couldn’t guarantee her complete safety and he knew that I’d given him everything I could.

He took a deep, slow breath.

Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

Chapter Four

About five minutes after I left Thomas’s place, I found myself instinctively checking the rearview mirror every couple of seconds and recognized the quiet tension that had begun to flow through me. My gut was telling me that I’d picked up a tail.

Granted, it was only an intuition, but hey. Wizard, over here. My instincts had earned enough credibility to make me pay attention to them. If they told me someone was following me, it was time to start watching my back.

If someone was following me, it wasn’t necessarily connected to the current situation with Morgan. I mean, it didn’t absolutely have to be, right? But I hadn’t survived a ton of ugly furballs by being thick all of the time. Generally, maybe, but not all the time, and I’d be an idiot to assume that my sudden company was unconnected to Morgan.

I took a few turns purely for fun, but I couldn’t spot any vehicles following mine. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. A good surveillance team, working together, could follow a target all but invisibly, especially at night, when every car on the road looked pretty much like the same pair of headlights. Just because I couldn’t see them didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt my shoulders ratcheting tighter with each passing streetlight.

What if my pursuer wasn’t in a car?

My imagination promptly treated me to visions of numerous winged horrors, soaring silently on batlike wings just above the level of the ambient light of the city, preparing to dive down upon the Blue Beetle and tear it into strips of sheet metal. The streets were busy, as they almost always were in this part of town. It was one hell of a public location for a hit, but that didn’t automatically preclude the possibility. It had happened to me before.

I chewed on my lower lip and thought. I couldn’t go back to my apartment until I was sure that I had shaken the tail. To do that, I’d have to spot him.

I wasn’t going to get through the next two days without taking some chances. I figured I might as well get started.

I drew in a deep breath, focused my thoughts, and blinked slowly, once. When I opened my eyes again, I brought my Sight along with them.

A wizard’s Sight, his ability to perceive the world around him in a vastly broadened spectrum of interacting forces, is a dangerous gift. Whether it’s called spirit vision, or inner sight, or the Third Eye, it lets you perceive things you’d otherwise never be able to interact with. It shows you the world the way it really is, matter all intertwined with a universe of energy, of magic. The Sight can show you beauty that would make angels weep humble tears, and terrors that the Black-Goat-with-a-Thousand-Young wouldn’t dare use for its kids’ bedtime stories.

Whatever you see, the good, the bad, the insanity-inducing—it sticks with you forever. You can’t ever forget it, and time doesn’t blur the memories. It’s yours. Permanently.

Wizards who run around using their Sight willy-nilly wind up bonkers.

My Third Eye showed me Chicago, in its true shape, and for a second I thought I had been teleported to Vegas. Energy ran through the streets, the buildings, the people, appearing to me as slender filaments of light that ran this way and that, plunging into solid objects and out the other side without interruption. The energies coursing through the grand old buildings had a solid and unmoving stability about them, as did the city streets—but the rest of it, the random energies generated by the thoughts and emotions of eight million people, was completely unplanned and coursed everywhere in frenetic, haphazard, garish color.

Clouds of emotion were interspersed with the flickering campfire sparks of ideas. Heavy flowing streams of deep thought rolled slowly beneath blazing, dancing gems of joy. The muck of negative emotions clung to surfaces, staining them darker, while fragile bubbles of dreams floated blissfully toward kaleidoscope stars.

Holy crap. I could barely see the lines on the road through all of that.

I checked over my shoulder, seeing each occupant of the cars behind me clearly, as brilliantly lit shapes of white that skittered with other colors that changed with thoughts, moods, and personalities. If I’d been closer to them, I’d have been able to see more details about them, though they would be subject to my subconscious interpretation. Even at this distance, though, I could tell that they were all mortals.

That was a relief, in some ways. I’d be able to spot any wizard strong enough to be one of the Wardens. If whoever was pursuing me was a normal, it was almost certain that the Wardens hadn’t caught up to Morgan yet.

I checked up above me and—

Time froze.

Try to imagine the stench of rotten meat. Imagine the languid, arrhythmic pulsing of a corpse filled with maggots. Imagine the scent of stale body odor mixed with mildew, the sound of nails screeching across a chalkboard, the taste of rotten milk, and the flavor of spoiled fruit.

Now imagine that your eyes can experience those things, all at once, in excruciating detail.

That’s what I saw: a stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing mass, blazing like a lighthouse beacon upon one of the buildings above me. I could vaguely make out a physical form behind it, but it was like trying to peer through raw sewage. I couldn’t get any details through the haze of absolute wrongness that surrounded it as it bounded from the edge of one rooftop to another, moving more than fast enough to keep pace with me.

Someone screamed, and I dimly noted that it was probably me. The car hit something that made it shriek in protest. It jounced hard up and down, wham-wham. I’d drifted into the curb. I felt the front wheels shimmy through the steering wheel, and I slammed on the brakes, still screaming, as I fought to close my Third Eye.

The next thing I knew, car horns were blaring an impatient symphony.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel until my knuckles were white. The engine had died. Judging from the dampness on my cheeks, I must have been crying—unless I’d started foaming at the mouth, which, I reflected, was a distinct possibility.

Stars and stones. What on God’s green earth was that thing?

Even brushing against the subject in my thoughts was enough to bring the memory of the thing back to me in all its hideous terror. I flinched and squeezed my eyes shut, shoving hard against the steering wheel. I could feel my body shaking. I don’t know how long it took me to fight my way clear of the memory—and when I did, everything was the same, only louder.

With the clock counting down, I couldn’t afford to let the cops take me into custody for a DWI, but that’s exactly what would happen if I didn’t start driving again, assuming I didn’t actually wreck the car first. I took a deep breath and willed myself not to think of the apparition—

I saw it again.

When I came back, I’d bitten my tongue, and my throat felt raw. I shook even harder.

There was no way I could drive. Not like this. One stray thought and I could get somebody killed in a collision. But I couldn’t remain there, either.

I pulled the Beetle up onto the sidewalk, where it would be out of the street at least. Then I got out of the car and started walking away. The city would tow me in about three point five milliseconds, but at least I wouldn’t be around to get arrested.

I stumbled down the sidewalk, hoping that my pursuer, the apparition, wasn’t—

When I looked up again, I was curled into a ball on the ground, muscles aching from cramping so tight. People were walking wide around me, giving me nervous sidelong glances. I felt so weak that I wasn’t sure I could stand.

I needed help.

I looked up at the street signs on the nearest corner and stared at them until my cudgeled brain finally worked out where I was standing.

I rose, forced to lean on my staff to stay upright, and hobbled forward as quickly as I could. I started calculating prime numbers as I walked, focusing on the process as intently as I would any spell.

“One,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen . . .”

And I staggered through the night, literally too terrified to think about what might be coming after me.

Chapter Five

By the time I’d reached twenty-two hundred and thirty-nine, I’d arrived at Billy and Georgia’s place.

Life had changed for the young werewolves since Billy had graduated and started pulling in serious money as an engineer, but they hadn’t moved out of the apartment they’d had in college. Georgia was still in school, learning something psychological, and they were saving for a house. Good thing for me. I wouldn’t have been able to walk to the suburbs.

Georgia answered the door. She was a tall woman, lean and willowy, and in a T-shirt and loose, long shorts, she looked smarter than she did pretty.

“My God,” she said, when she saw me. “Harry.”

“Hey, Georgia,” I said. “Twenty-two hundred and . . . uh. Forty-three. I need a dark, quiet room.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

“Twenty-two hundred and fifty-one,” I responded, seriously. “And send up the wolf-signal. You want the gang here. Twenty-two hundred and, uh . . . sixty . . . seven.”

She stepped back from the door, holding the door open for me. “Harry, what are you talking about?”

I came inside. “Twenty-two hundred and sixty . . . not divisible by three, sixty-nine. I need a dark room. Quiet. Protection.”

“Is something after you?” Georgia said.

Even with the help of Eratosthenes, when Georgia asked the question and my brain answered it, I couldn’t keep the image of that thing from invading my thoughts, and it drove me to my knees and would have sent me all the way to the floor—except that Billy caught me before I could get there. He was a short guy, maybe five six, but he had the upper body of a professional wrestler and moved with the speed and precision of a predator.

“Dark room,” I gasped. “Call in the gang. Hurry.”

“Do it,” Georgia said, her voice low and urgent. She shut the door and locked it, then slammed down a heavy wooden beam the size of a picnic table’s bench that they had installed themselves. “Get him into our room. I’ll make the calls.”

“Got it,” Billy said. He picked me up the way you’d carry a child, barely grunting as he did. He carried me down the hall and into a dark bedroom. He laid me down on a bed, then crossed to the window—and pulled and locked a heavy steel security curtain over it, evidently another customization that he and Georgia had installed.

“What do you need, Harry?” Billy asked.

“Dark. Quiet. Explain it later.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Right.” Then he padded out of the room and shut the door.

It left me in the dark with my thoughts—which is where I needed to be.

“Come on, Harry,” I muttered to myself. “Get used to the idea.”

And I thought about the thing I’d Seen.

It hurt. But when I came back to myself, I did it again. And again. And again.

Yes, I’d Seen something horrible. Yes, it was a hideous terror. But I’d Seen other things, too.

I called up those memories, too, all of them just as sharp and fresh as the horror pressing upon me. I’d Seen good people screaming in madness under the influence of black magic. I’d Seen the true selves of men and women, good and bad, Seen people kill—and die. I’d Seen the Queens of Faerie as they prepared for battle, drawing all their awful power around them.

And I’d be damned if I was going to roll over for one more horrible thing doing nothing but jumping from one rooftop to another.

“Come on, punk,” I snarled at the memory. “Next to those others, you’re a bad yearbook picture.”

And I hit myself with it, again and again, filling my mind with every horrible and beautiful thing I had ever Seen—and as I did, I focused on what I had bloody well done about it. I remembered the things I’d battled and destroyed. I remembered the strongholds of nightmares and terrors that I had invaded, the dark gates I’d kicked down. I remembered the faces of prisoners I’d freed, and the funerals of those I’d been too late to save. I remembered the sounds of voices and laughter, the joy of loved ones reunited, the tears of the lost and bereaved.

There are bad things in the world. There’s no getting away from that. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done about them. You can’t abandon life just because it’s scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt.

The memory of the thing hurt like hell—but pain wasn’t anything special or new. I’d lived with it before, and would do it again. It wasn’t the first thing I’d Seen, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I was not going to roll over and die.

Sledgehammers of perfect memory pounded me down into blackness.

When I pulled myself back together, I was sitting on the bed, my legs folded Indian-style. My palms rested on my knees. My breathing was slow and rhythmically heavy. My back was straight. My head pounded painfully, but not cripplingly so.

I looked up and around the room. It was dark, but I’d been in there long enough for my eyes to adjust to the light coming under the door. I could see myself in the dresser mirror. My back was straight and relaxed. I’d taken my coat off, and was wearing a black T-shirt that read “PRE-FECTIONIST” in small white letters, backward in the mirror. A thin, dark runnel of blood had streamed from each nostril and was now drying on my upper lip. I could taste blood in my mouth, probably from where I’d bitten my tongue earlier.

I thought of my pursuer again, and the image made me shudder—but that was all. I kept breathing slowly and steadily.

That was the upside of being human. On the whole, we’re an adaptable sort of being. Certainly, I’d never be able to get rid of my memory of this awful thing, or any of the other awful things I’d Seen—so if the memory couldn’t change, it would have to be me. I could get used to seeing that kind of horror, enough to see it and yet remain a reasoning being. Better men than I had done so.

Morgan had.

I shivered again, and not because of any memory. It was because I knew what it could mean, when you forced yourself to live with hideous things like that. It changed you. Maybe not all at once. Maybe it didn’t turn you into a monster. But I’d been scarred and I knew it.

How many times would something like this need to happen before I started bending myself into something horrible just to survive? I was young for a wizard. Where would I be after decades or centuries of refusing to look away?

Ask Morgan.

I got up and went into the bathroom attached to the bedroom. I turned on the lights, and winced as they raked at my eyes. I washed the blood from my face, and cleaned the sink of it carefully. In my business, you don’t leave your blood where anyone can find it.

Then I put my coat back on and left the bedroom.

Billy and Georgia were in the living room. Billy was at the window that led out to the tiny balcony. Georgia was on the phone.

“I’m not getting anything out here,” Billy said. “Is he sure?”

Georgia murmured into the phone. “Yes. He’s sure it circled this way. It should be in sight from where you are.”

“It isn’t,” Billy said. He turned his head over his shoulder and said, “Harry. Are you all right?”

“I’ll survive,” I said, and paced over to the window. “It followed me here, huh?”

“Something’s outside,” Billy said. “Something we’ve never run into before. It’s been playing hide-and-seek with Kirby and Andi for an hour. They can’t catch it or get a good look at it.”

I gave Billy a sharp look. There weren’t many things that could keep ahead of the werewolves, working together. Wolves are just too damn alert and quick, and Billy and company had been working Chicago almost as long as I had. They knew how to handle themselves—and in the past couple of months, I’d been teaching my apprentice a little humility by letting her try her veiling spells against the werewolves. They’d hunted her down in moments, every time.

“So whatever’s out there, it isn’t human,” I said. “Not if it can stay ahead of Kirby and Andi.” I crossed to the window and stared out with Billy. “And it can veil itself from sight.”

“What is it?” Billy asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s real bad.” I glanced back at Georgia. “How long was I down?”

She checked her watch. “Eighty-two minutes.”

I nodded. “It’s had plenty of time to try to come in, if that’s what it wanted.” I felt a nauseated little quiver in my stomach as a tight smile stretched my lips. “It’s playing with me.”

“What?” Billy said.

“It’s dancing around in front of us out there, under a veil. It’s daring me to use my Sight so that I’ll be able to spot it.”

From outside, there was a sound, a cry. It was short and high-pitched, loud enough to make the windows quiver. I’d never heard anything like it before. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, a purely instinctive reaction. My instincts had been tracking this thing well, so far, so I trusted them when they told me one more thing—that cry was a statement. The hunt was on.

An instant later, every light in sight blew out in a shower of sparks, and darkness swallowed several city blocks.

“Tell Andi and Kirby to get back here to the apartment!” I snapped at Georgia. I grabbed my staff from where it leaned against the wall by the door. “Billy, you’re with me. Get your game face on.”

“Harry?” Georgia said, confused.

“Now!” I snapped, flinging the bar off the door.

By the time I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, there was the sound of a heavy, controlled impact, and a wolf with hair the same dark brown as Billy’s hit the floor next to me. It was an enormous beast, easily as heavy as Mouse, but taller and leaner—a wolf the world has rarely seen between here and the last ice age. I slammed open the door and let Billy out ahead of me. He bounded over a parked car—and I mean completely over it, lengthwise—and shot toward the buildings at the back of the complex.

Billy had been in contact with Andi and Kirby, and knew their approximate positions. I followed him, my staff in hand, already summoning up my will. I wasn’t sure what was out here, but I wanted to be ready for it.

Kirby appeared from around the northernmost corner of the other building. He hurried along with a cell phone pressed to his ear, a lanky, dark-haired young man in sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt. The active phone painted half his face like a miniature floodlight. I checked the southern corner of the building at once, and saw a dark, furry shape trotting around the corner—Andi, like Billy, in her wolf form.

Wait a minute.

If the whatever-it-was had taken out the local lights, how in the hell had Kirby’s cell phone survived the hex? Magic and technology don’t get along so well, and the more complex electronic devices tended to fall apart most quickly. Cell phones were like those security guys in red shirts on old Star Trek: as soon as something started happening, they were always the first to go.

If the creature, whatever it was, had blown out the lights, it would have gotten the phone, too. Unless it hadn’t wanted to take the phone out.

Kirby was the only clearly lit object in sight—an ideal target.

When the attack came, it came fast.

There was a ripple in the air, as something moving beneath a veil crossed between me and the light cast by Kirby’s phone. There was an explosive snarl, and the phone went flying, leaving Kirby hidden in shadow.

Billy flung himself forward, even as I ripped the silver pentacle amulet from around my neck and lifted it, calling forth silver-blue wizard light with my will. Light flooded the area between the complex’s buildings.

Kirby was on his back, in the center of a splatter of black that could only be blood. Billy was standing crouched over him, his teeth bared in a snarl. He suddenly lunged forward, teeth ripping, and a distortion of the air in front of him bounded up and then to one side. I lurched forward, feeling as if I was running through hip-deep peanut butter. I got the impression of something four-legged and furry evading Billy’s attack, a raw flicker of vision like something seen out of the very corner of the eye.

Then Billy was on his back, slashing with canine claws, ripping savagely with his teeth, while something shadowy and massive overbore him, pinning him down.

Andi, a red-furred wolf that was smaller and swifter than Billy’s form, hurtled through the air and tore at the back of the attacker.

It screamed again, the sound deeper-chested than before, more resonant. The creature whirled on Andi, too swiftly to be believed, and a limb slammed into her, sending her flying into a brick wall. She hit with a yipping cry of pain and a hideous snapping sound.

I raised my staff, anger and terror and determination surging down into the wooden tool, and shouted, “Forzare!”

My will unspooled into a lance of invisible energy and slammed into the creature. I’ve flipped over cars with blasts of force like that, but the thing barely rocked back, slapping at the air with its forelimbs. The blast shattered against it in a shower of reddish sparks.

The conflicting energies disrupted its veil, just for a second. I saw something somewhere between a cougar and a bear, with sparse, dirty golden fur. It must have weighed several hundred pounds. It had oversized fangs, bloodied claws, and its eyes were a bright and sickly yellow that looked reptilian, somehow.

Its snarling mouth twisted in a way that no animal’s could, forming words, albeit words that I did not understand. Its form twisted, changing with liquid speed, and in maybe half a second, a cougar bigger than any mountain lion I’d ever even heard about was hurtling toward me, vanishing into the rippling colors of a veil as it came.

I brought up my left hand, slamming my will into the bracelet hung upon it. The bracelet, a braid of metals hung with charms in the shape of medieval shields, was another tool like the staff, a device that let me focus the energies I wielded more quickly and efficiently.

A quarter dome of blue-white light sprang into existence before me, and the creature slammed into it like a brick wall. Well. More like a rickety wooden wall. I felt the shield begin to give as the creature struck it—but at least initially, it stopped it in its tracks.

Billy hit it low and hard.

The great dark wolf sailed in, teeth ripping, and got hold of something. The creature howled, this time more in pain than fury, and whirled on Billy—but the leader of Chicago’s resident werewolves was already on the way back out, and he bounded aside from the creature’s counterattack.

It was faster than Billy was. It caught him, and I saw Billy hunch his shoulders against its attack, his fur being bloodied as he crouched low, standing his ground.

So that Georgia could hit it low and hard.

Georgia’s wolf form was dusty brown, taller and lither than Billy’s, and moved with deadly precision. She raked at the creature, forcing it to turn to her—only to be forced to keep whirling as Billy went after its flank.

I brandished my staff, timing my shot with my teeth gritted, and then screamed again as I sent another lance of force at the creature, aiming for its legs. The blast tore gashes in the asphalt and brought the nearly invisible thing to the ground, once more disrupting its veil. Billy and Georgia rushed toward it to keep it pinned down, and I raised my staff, calling up more energy. My next shot was going to pile-driver the thing straight down into the water table, by God.

But once more, its shape turned liquid—and suddenly a hawk with a wingspan longer than my car tore into the air, reptilian yellow eyes glaring. It soared aloft, its wings beating twice, and vanished into the night sky.

I stared after that for a second. Then I said, “Oh, crap.”

I looked around in the wildly dancing light of my amulet, and rushed toward Andi. She was unconscious, her body reverted to its human form—that of a redhead with a killer figure. One entire side of her body was a swelling purple bruise. She had a broken arm, shoulder, ribs, and her face was so horribly damaged that I had to worry about her skull as well. She was breathing, barely.

The shapeshifter had been strong.

Georgia arrived at my side in wolf form, her eyes, ears, and nose all alert, scanning around us, above us.

I turned my head to see Billy, nude and in human form, crouched over Kirby. I lifted my light and moved a couple of steps over toward him so I could see.

Kirby’s throat was gone. Just gone. There was a scoop of flesh as wide as my palm missing, and bare vertebrae showed at the back of it. The edges of the gaping wound were black and crumbling, as if charred to black dust. Kirby’s eyes were glassy and staring. His blood was everywhere.

“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. I stared at the dead young man, a friend, and shook my head hard once. “Billy, come on. Andi’s still alive. We can’t leave her out here. We’ve got to get her behind your threshold and get her an ambulance, now.”

Billy crouched over Kirby, his face twisted in confusion and rage.

“Will!” I shouted.

He looked up at me.

“Andi,” I said. “Help me get her inside.”

He nodded jerkily. Then the two of us went to her. We laid my duster out on the ground and got her onto it as gently as we could. Then we picked her up and carried her back toward the apartment building. People were calling out in the buildings around us, now. Flashlights and candles and chemical glow lights had begun to appear. I had no doubt that within a few minutes, we’d get sirens, too.

From somewhere above us, there was a contemptuous brassy cry—the same tone I heard before, though modulated differently now, coming from an avian throat.

“What was that?” Billy asked, his tone dull and heavy. “What was that thing?”

“I’m not certain,” I answered, breathing hard. Georgia was coming along behind us, dragging my staff in her jaws. “But if it’s what I think it is, things just got a lot worse.”

Billy looked up at me, Kirby’s blood all over his face and hands. “What is it, Harry?”

“A Native American nightmare,” I said. I looked at him grimly. “A skinwalker.”

Chapter Six

Georgia told the EMTs she was Andi’s sister, which was true in a spiritual sense, I suppose, and rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital. The EMTs looked grim.

The cops had gathered around Kirby’s body, and were busy closing off the scene.

“I have to be here,” Billy said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m on the clock, Billy. I can’t stay. I can’t lose the time.”

He nodded. “What do I need to know about skinwalkers?”

“They’re . . . they’re just evil, man. They like hurting people. Shape-shifters, obviously—and the more afraid of them you are, the more powerful they get. They literally feed on fear.”

Billy eyed me. “Meaning you aren’t going to tell me anything more. Because it won’t help me. You think it will scare me.”

“We knew it was here, we were ready for a fight, and you saw what happened,” I said. “If it had hit us from a real ambush, it would have been worse.”

He bared his teeth in a snarl. “We had it.”

“We had it at a momentary disadvantage—and it saw that, and it was smart enough to leave and come back later. All we did was prove to it that it would have to take us seriously to kill us. We won’t get another opportunity like that one.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You and Georgia stay close to Andi. This thing likes hurting people. And it gets off on hunting down wounded prey. She’s still in danger.”

“Got it,” he said quietly. “What are you going to do?”

“Find out why it’s here,” I said. “There’s Council business afoot. Christ, I didn’t mean to bring you into this.” I stared toward the knot of officers around Kirby’s corpse. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Kirby was an adult, Dresden,” Billy said. “He knew what could happen. He chose to be here.”

Which was the truth. But it didn’t help. Kirby was still dead. I hadn’t known what the skinwalker was before, beyond something awful, but that didn’t change anything.

Kirby was still dead.

And Andi . . . God, I hadn’t even thought about that part. Andi and Kirby had been an intense item. She was going to be heartbroken.

Assuming she didn’t die, too.

Billy—I just couldn’t think of him as Will—blinked tears out of his eyes and said, “You didn’t know it was going to come down like that, man. We all owe you our lives, Harry. I’m glad we got the chance to be there for you.” He nodded toward the police. “I’ll do the talking, then get to Georgia. You’d better go.”

We traded grips, and his was crushingly tight with tension and grief. I nodded to him, and turned to leave. The city lights were starting to come back on as I went out the back entrance to Will’s building, down a side street, and through an alley that ran behind an old bookstore where I wasn’t welcome anymore. I passed the spot in that alley where I’d nearly died, and shivered as I did. I’d barely dodged the old man’s scythe, that day.

Tonight, Kirby hadn’t.

My head felt dislocated, somehow. I should be feeling more than I was. I should be madder than hell. I should be shaking with fear. Something. But instead, I felt like I was observing events from a remote cold place somewhere up above and behind me. It was, I reasoned, probably a side effect of exposing myself to the skinwalker’s true form. Or rather, a side effect of what I’d had to do to get over it.

I wasn’t worried about the skinwalker sneaking up on me. Oh, sure, he might do it, but not cold. Supernatural beings like the skinwalker had so much power that reality itself gets a little strained around them wherever they go, and that has a number of side effects. One of them is a sort of psychic stench that goes with them—a presence that my instincts had twigged to long before the skinwalker had been in a position to do me any real harm.

Read a little folklore, the stuff that hasn’t been prettied up by Disney and the like. Start with the Brothers Grimm. It won’t tell you about skinwalkers, but it will give you a good idea of just how dark some of those tales can be.

Skinwalkers are dark compared to that. You’ve got to get the real stories from the peoples of the Navajo, Ute, and other Southwestern tribes to get the really juicy material. They don’t talk about them often, because the genuine and entirely rational fear the stories inspire only makes the creatures stronger. The tribes rarely talk about them with outsiders, because outsiders have no foundation of folklore to draw upon to protect themselves—and because you never know when the outsider to whom you’re telling dark tales might be a skinwalker, looking to indulge a sense of macabre irony. But I’ve been in the business awhile, and I know people who know the stories. They’d confided a handful to me, in broad daylight, looking nervously around them as they spoke, as if afraid that dredging up the dark memories might catch a skinwalker’s attention.

Because sometimes it did.

That’s how bad skinwalkers are. Even amongst the people who know the danger they represent, who know better than anyone else in the world how to defend against them, no one wants to talk about skinwalkers.

But in a way, it worked in my favor. Walking down a dark alley in the middle of a Chicago night, and stepping over the spot on the concrete where I’d almost been ripped to pieces just wasn’t spooky enough to encompass the presence of a skinwalker. If things got majorly Tales from the Darkside creepy and shivery, I’d know I was in real trouble.

As it was, the night was simply—

A small figure in a lightweight Cubs jacket stepped around the corner at the end of the alley. The newly restored streetlight shone on blond hair, and Sergeant Karrin Murphy said, “Evening, Dresden.”

—complicated.

“Murph,” I responded woodenly. Murphy was a sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department. When something supernaturally bad happened and the cops got involved, Murphy often contacted me to get my take on things. The city didn’t want to hear about “imaginary” things like skinwalkers or vampires. They just wanted the problem to go away—but Murphy and the rest of SI were the people who had to make it happen.

“I tip a guy down at impound to keep an eye out for certain vehicles,” Murphy said. “Pay him in bottles of McAnally’s ale. He calls me and tells me your car got brought in.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Murphy fell into pace beside me as I turned out onto the sidewalk. She was five feet nothing, with blond hair that fell a little past her shoulders and blue eyes. She was more cute than pretty, and looked like someone’s favorite aunt. Which seemed likely. She had a fairly large Irish Catholic family.

“Then I hear about a power outage,” she said, “and a huge disturbance at the same apartments where your werewolf friends live. I hear about a girl who might not make it and a boy who didn’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. It might have come out a little bleak.

“Who was it?” Murphy asked.

“Kirby,” I said.

“Jesus,” Murphy said. “What happened?”

“Something fast and mean was following me. The werewolves jumped it. Things went bad.”

Murphy nodded and stopped, and I dimly realized that we were standing next to her Saturn—an updated version of the one that had been blown up—blithely parked in front of a hydrant. She went around to the trunk and popped it open. “I took a look at that pile of parts you call a car.” She drew out the medical toolbox and cooler from her trunk and held them up. “These were on the passenger seat. I thought they might have been there for a reason.”

Hell’s bells. In the confusion of the attack and its aftermath, I had all but forgotten the whole reason I’d gone out in the first place. I took the medical kit from her as she offered it. “Yeah. Stars and stones, yeah, Murph. Thank you.”

“You need a ride?” she asked me.

I’d been planning on flagging down a cab, eventually, but it would be better not to spend the money if I didn’t need to. Wizarding might be sexy, but it didn’t pay nearly as well as lucrative careers like law enforcement. “Sure,” I said.

“What a coincidence. I need some questions answered.” She unlocked the door with an actual key, not the little what’s-it that does it for you automatically with the press of a button, and held it open for me with a gallant little gesture, like I’d done for her about a million times. She probably thought she was mocking me with that impersonation.

She was probably right.

This mess was getting stickier by the minute, and I didn’t want to drag Murphy into it. I mean, Jesus, the werewolves had been capable defenders of their territory for a long while, and I’d gotten half of them taken out in the first couple hours of the case. Murphy wouldn’t fare any better in the waters through which I was currently swimming.

On the other hand, I trusted Murph. I trusted her judgment, her ability to see where her limits lay. She’d seen cops carved to pieces when they tried to box out of their weight division, and knew better than to attempt it. And if she started throwing obstacles in my way—and she could, a lot of them, that I couldn’t do diddly about—then my life would get a whole lot harder. Even though she wasn’t running CPD’s Special Investigations department anymore, she still had clout there, and a word from her to Lieutenant Stallings could hobble me, maybe lethally.

So I guess you could say that Murphy was threatening to bust me if I didn’t talk to her, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy was offering to put her life on the line to help me, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy had done me a favor with the medical kit, in order to obligate me to her when she told me that she wanted to be dealt in, and you’d be right.

You could also say that I was standing around dithering when time was critical, and you’d be right about that, too.

At the end of the day, Murphy is good people.

I got in the car.

“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said, as we approached my apartment. “You’re hiding a fugitive from your own people’s cops, and you think the guy’s been set up in order to touch off a civil war within the White Council. And there’s some kind of Navajo boogeyman loose in town, following you around and attempting to kill you. And you aren’t sure they’re related.”

“More like I don’t know how they’re related. Yet.”

Murphy chewed on her lip. “Is there anyone on the Council who is in tight with Native American boogeymen?”

“Hard to imagine it,” I said quietly. “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind was a Senior Council member who was some kind of Native American shaman. He was a doctor, a healer, and a specialist in exorcisms and restorative magic. He was, in fact, a decent guy. He liked animals.

“But someone’s a traitor,” Murphy said quietly. “Right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Someone.”

Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. “The reason treachery is so reviled,” she said in a careful tone of voice, “is because it usually comes from someone you didn’t think could possibly do such a thing.”

I didn’t say anything in reply. In a minute, her car crunched to a stop in the little gravel lot outside my apartment.

I picked up the medical kit, the cooler, and my staff, and got out of the car.

“Call me the minute you know something,” she said.

“Yep,” I told her. “Don’t take any chances if you see something coming.”

She shook her head. “They aren’t your kids, Harry.”

“Doesn’t matter. Anything you can do to protect them in the hospital . . .”

“Relax,” she said. “Your werewolves won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”

I nodded and closed my eyes for a second.

“Harry?” she asked me.

“Yeah?”

“You . . . don’t look so good.”

“It’s been a long night,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Look. I know something about those.”

Murphy did. She’d had more than her share of psychic trauma. She’d seen friends die, too. My memory turned out an unwelcome flash from years before—her former partner, Carmichael, half eviscerated and bleeding to death on white institutional tile flooring.

“I’ll make it,” I said.

“Of course you will,” she said. “There’s just . . . there’s a lot of ways you could deal, Harry. Some of them are better than others. I care about what happens to you. And I’m here.”

I kept my eyes closed in order to make sure I didn’t start crying like a girl or something. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Take care, Harry,” she said.

“You, too,” I said. It came out a little raspy. I tilted the toolbox at her in a wave, and headed into my apartment to see Morgan.

I had to admit—I hated hearing the sound of my friend’s car leaving.

I pushed those thoughts away. Psychic trauma or not, I could fall to little pieces later.

I had work to do.

Chapter Seven

Morgan woke up when I opened the bedroom door. He looked bad, but not any worse than he did before, except for some spots of color on his cheeks.

“Lemme see to my roommates,” I said. “I got the goods.” I put the medical kit down on the nightstand.

He nodded and closed his eyes.

I took Mouse outside for a walk to the mailbox. He seemed unusually alert, nose snuffling at everything, but he didn’t show any signs of alarm. We went by the spot in the tiny backyard that had been designated as Mouse’s business area, and went back inside. Mister, my bobtailed grey tomcat, was waiting when I opened the door, and tried to bolt out. I caught him, barely: Mister weighs the next best thing to thirty pounds. He gave me a look that might have been indignant, then raised his stumpy tail straight in the air and walked haughtily away, making his way to his usual resting point atop one of my apartment’s bookcases.

Mouse looked at me with his head tilted as I shut the door.

“Something bad is running around out there,” I told him. “It might decide to send me a message. I’d rather he didn’t use Mister to do it.”

Mouse’s cavernous chest rumbled with a low growl.

“Or you, either, for that matter,” I told him. “I don’t know if you know what a skinwalker is, but it’s serious trouble. Watch yourself.”

Mouse considered that for a moment, and then yawned.

I found myself laughing. “Pride goes before a fall, boy.”

He wagged his tail at me and rubbed up against my leg, evidently pleased to have made me smile. I made sure both sets of bowls had food and water in them, and then went in to Morgan.

His temperature was up another half a degree, and he was obviously in pain.

“This isn’t heavy-duty stuff,” I told him, as I broke out the medical kit. “Me and Billy made a run up to Canada for most of it. There’s some codeine for the pain, though, and I’ve got the stuff to run an IV for you, saline, intravenous antibiotics.”

Morgan nodded. Then he frowned at me, an expression I was used to from him, raked his eyes over me more closely, and asked, “Is that blood I smell on you?”

Damn. For a guy who had been beaten to within a few inches of death’s door, he was fairly observant. Andi hadn’t really been bleeding when we picked her up in my coat. She was only oozing from a number of gouges and scrapes—but there had been enough of them to add up. “Yeah,” I said.

“What happened?”

I told him about the skinwalker and what had happened to Kirby and Andi.

He shook his head wearily. “There’s a reason we don’t encourage amateurs to try to act like Wardens, Dresden.”

I scowled at him, got a bowl of warm water and some antibacterial soap, and started cleaning up his left arm. “Yeah, well. I didn’t see any Wardens doing anything about it.”

“Chicago is your area of responsibility, Warden Dresden.”

“And there I was,” I said. “And if they hadn’t been there to help, I’d be dead right now.”

“Then you call for backup. You don’t behave like a bloody superhero and throw lambs to the wolves to help you do it. Those are the people you’re supposed to be protecting.”

“Good thinking,” I said, getting out the bag of saline, and suspending it from the hook I’d set in the wall over the bed. I made sure the tube was primed. Air bubbles, bad. “That’s exactly what we need: more Wardens in Chicago.”

Morgan grunted and fell silent for a moment, eyes closed. I thought he’d dropped off again, but evidently he was only thinking. “It must have followed me up.”

“Huh?”

“The skinwalker,” he said. “When I left Edinburgh, I took a Way to Tucson. I came to Chicago by train. It must have sensed me when the tracks passed through its territory.”

“Why would it do that?”

“Follow an injured wizard?” he asked. “Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal.”

“It eats magic?”

Morgan nodded. “Adds its victims’ power to its own.”

“So what you’re telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it’s stronger for having killed Kirby.”

He shrugged. “I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater.”

I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan’s upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. “Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter.”

Morgan shook his head. “Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn’t as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson.”

“Point,” I said, slipping the needle into his arm. “Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?” I thought about it. “The skinwalker’s got to go back to his home territory, though?”

Morgan nodded. “The longer he’s away, the more power it costs him.”

“How long can he stay here?” I asked.

He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. “More than long enough.”

“How do we kill it?” I frowned as I missed the vein again.

“Give me that,” Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.

I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.

“We probably don’t,” he said. “The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool’s game. We avoid it.”

I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. “Pretend for a minute that it isn’t going to cooperate with that plan.”

Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. “There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power—and it isn’t likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either.”

“It’s a tough target,” I admitted. “It knows magic, and how to defend against it.”

“Yes,” Morgan said. He watched me pick a preloaded syringe of antibiotics from the cooler. “And its abilities are more than the equal of both of us put together.”

“Jinkies,” I said. I primed the syringe and pushed the antibiotics into the IV line. Then I got the codeine and a cup of water, offering Morgan both. He downed the pills, laid his head back wearily, and closed his eyes.

“I Saw one once, too,” he said.

I started cleaning up. I didn’t say anything.

“They aren’t invulnerable. They can be killed.”

I tossed wrappers into the trash can and restored equipment to the medical kit. I grimaced at the bloodied rug that still lay beneath Morgan. I’d have to get that out from under him soon. I turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.

“How’d you do it?” I asked, without looking behind me.

It took him a moment to answer. I thought he’d passed out again.

“It was the fifties,” he said. “Started in New Mexico. It followed me to Nevada. I lured it onto a government testing site, and stepped across into the Nevernever just before the bomb went off.”

I blinked and looked over my shoulder at him. “You nuked it?”

He opened one eye and smiled.

It was sort of creepy.

“Stars and stones . . . that’s . . .” I had to call a spade a spade. “Kind of cool.”

“Gets me to sleep at night,” he mumbled. He closed his eye again, sighed, and let his head sag a little to one side.

I watched over his sleep for a moment, and then closed the door.

I was pretty tired, myself. But like the man said:

“I have promises to keep,” I sighed to myself.

I got on the phone, and started calling my contacts on the Paranet.

The Paranet was an organization I’d helped found a couple of years before. It’s essentially a union whose members cooperate in order to protect themselves from paranormal threats. Most of the Paranet consisted of practitioners with marginal talents, of which there were plenty. A practitioner had to be in the top percentile before the White Council would even consider recognizing him, and those who couldn’t cut it basically got left out in the cold. As a result, they were vulnerable to any number of supernatural predators.

Which I think sucks.

So an old friend named Elaine Mallory and I had taken a dead woman’s money and begun making contact with the marginal folks in city after city. We’d encouraged them to get together to share information, to have someone they could call for help. If things started going bad, a distress call could be sent up the Paranet, and then I or one of the other Wardens in the U.S. could charge in. We also gave seminars on how to recognize magical threats, as well as teaching methods of basic self-defense for when the capes couldn’t show up to save the day.

It had been going pretty well. We already had new chapters opening up in Mexico and Canada, and Europe wouldn’t be far behind.

So I started calling up my contacts in those various cities, asking if they’d heard of anything odd happening. I couldn’t afford to get any more specific than that, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Of the first dozen calls, folks in four cities had noted an upswing in Warden activity, reporting that they were all appearing in pairs. Only two of the next thirty towns had similar reports, but it was enough to give me a good idea of what was going on—a quiet manhunt.

But I just had to wonder. Of all the places the Wardens could choose to hunt for Morgan, why would they pick Poughkeepsie? Why Omaha?

The words “wild-goose chase” sprang to mind. Whatever Morgan was doing to mask his presence from their tracking spells, it had them chasing their tails all over the place.

At least I accomplished one positive thing. Establishing rumors of Wardens on the move meant that I had a good and non-suspicion-arousing motivation to start asking questions of my own.

So next, I started calling the Wardens I was on good terms with. Three of them worked for me, technically speaking, in several cities in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. I’m not a very good boss. I mostly just let them decide how to do their job and try to lend a hand when they ask me for help. I had to leave messages for two, but Bill Meyers in Dallas answered on the second ring.

“Howdy,” Meyers said.

I’m serious. He actually answered the phone that way.

“Bill, it’s Dresden.”

“Harry,” he said politely. Bill was always polite with me. He saw me do something scary once. “Speak of the devil and he appears.”

“Is that why my nose was itching?” I asked.

“Likely,” Bill drawled. “I was gonna give you a call in the morning.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“Rumors,” Bill said. “I spotted two Wardens coming out of the local entrance to the Ways, but when I asked them what was up, they stone-walled me. I figured you might know what was going on.”

“Darn,” I said. “I called to ask you.”

He snorted. “Well, we’re a fine bunch of wise men, aren’t we?”

“As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms.”

“Eh?”

“Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.”

“I hear that,” Meyers said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Keep an ear to the ground,” I told him. “Captain Luccio will tell us sooner or later. I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. You do the same.”

“Gotcha,” he said.

We hung up, and I frowned at the phone for a moment.

The Council hadn’t talked to me about Morgan. They hadn’t talked to any of the Wardens in my command about him, either.

I looked up at Mister and said, “It’s almost like they want to keep me in the dark. Like maybe someone thinks I might be involved, somehow.”

Which made sense. The Merlin wasn’t going to be asking me to Christmas dinner anytime soon. He didn’t trust me. He might have given the order to keep me fenced out. That wouldn’t hit me as a surprise.

But if that was true, then it meant that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was going along with it. She and I had been dating for a while, now. Granted, she had a couple of centuries on me, but a run-in with a body-switching psychopath several years before had trapped her in the body of a coed, and she didn’t look a day over twenty-five. We got along well. We made each other laugh. And we occasionally had wild-monkey sex to our mutual, intense satisfaction.

I would never have figured Anastasia to play a game like that with me.

I got on the phone to Ramirez in LA, the other regional commander in the United States, to see if he’d heard anything, but just got his answering service.

At this rate, I was going to have to go to the spirit world for answers—and that was risky in more ways than one, not the least of which was the very real possibility that I might get eaten by the same entity I called up to question.

But I was running a little low on options.

I pulled back the rug that lay over the trapdoor leading down to my lab, and was about to go down and prepare my summoning circle when the phone rang.

“I’m meeting Justine in half an hour,” my brother told me.

“Okay,” I said. “Come get me.”

Chapter Eight

Chicago’s club scene is wide and diverse. You want to listen to extemporaneous jazz? We got that. You want a traditional Irish pub? A Turkish-style coffeehouse? Belly dancers? Japanese garden party? Swing dancing? Ballroom dancing? Beat poetry? You’re covered.

You don’t have to look much harder to find all sorts of other clubs—the kind that Ma and Pa Tourist don’t take the kids to. Gay clubs, lesbian clubs, strip clubs, leather clubs, and more subtle flavors within the genre.

And then there’s Zero.

I stood with Thomas outside what looked like a fire-exit door at the bottom of a stairway, a story below street level in the side of a downtown building. A red neon oval had been installed on the door, and it glowed with a sullen, lurid heat. The thump of a bass beat vibrated almost sub-audibly up through the ground.

“Is this what I think it is?” I asked him.

Thomas, now dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and old blue jeans, glanced at me and arched one dark eyebrow. “Depends on if you think it’s Zero or not.”

Zero’s one of those clubs that most people only hear rumors about. It moves around the city from time to time, but it’s always as exclusive as a popular nightspot in a metropolis can possibly be. I’ve been a PI in Chicago for better than a decade. I’d heard of Zero, but that was it. It was where the rich and beautiful (and rich) people of Chicago went to indulge themselves.

“You know somebody here?” I asked. “Because they aren’t going to let us—”

Thomas popped a key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door for me.

“In,” I finished. A wash of heat and smoke heavy with legally questionable substances pushed gently against my chest. I could hear the whump-whump-whump of techno dance music somewhere behind the red-lit smoke.

“It’s a family business,” Thomas explained. He put the keys back in his pocket, an odd expression on his face. “I met Justine at Zero.”

“There any more of the other side of the family in there?” I asked him. White Court vampires were the least physically dangerous of any of the various vamps running around—and the most scary. Creatures of seduction, they fed upon the emotions and life energy of those they preyed upon. Their victims became addicted to the act, and would willingly offer themselves up over and over, until eventually there was nothing left to give. The poor suckers in thrall to a White Court vampire were virtually slaves. Tangling with them in any sense of the word was a bad idea.

Thomas shook his head. “I doubt it. Or Justine wouldn’t have chosen to meet us here.”

Unless she’d been forced to do so, I thought to myself. I didn’t say anything. I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.

“After you,” Thomas said, and then he calmly stripped his shirt off.

I eyed him.

“The club has an image they strive to maintain,” he said. He might have been just a little bit smug, the bastard. His abs look like they were added in with CGI. My abs just look like I can’t afford to feed myself very well.

“Oh,” I said. “Do I need to take my shirt off, too?”

“You’re wearing a black leather coat. That’s wardrobe enough.”

“Small favors,” I muttered. Then I went through the door.

We walked down a hallway that got darker, louder, and more illicitly aromatic as we went. It ended at a black curtain, and I pushed it aside to reveal a few more feet of hallway, a door, and two politely formidable-looking men in dark suits standing in front of it.

One of them lifted a hand and told me, “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a private—”

Thomas stepped up next to me and fixed the man with a steady grey gaze.

He lowered his hand, and when he spoke, it sounded rough, as if his mouth had gone dry. “Excuse me, sir. I didn’t realize he was with you.”

Thomas kept staring.

The bouncer turned to the door, unlocked it with a key of its own, and opened the door. “Will you be in need of a table, sir? Drinks?”

Thomas’s unblinking gaze finally shifted from the guard, as if the man had somehow vanished as a matter of any consequence. My brother walked by him without saying anything at all.

The bouncer gave me a weak smile and said, “Sorry about that, sir. Enjoy your evening at Zero, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said, and followed my brother into a scene that split the difference between a Dionysian bacchanal and a Fellini flick.

There was no white light inside Zero. Most of it was red, punctuated in places with pools of blue and plenty of black lights scattered everywhere so that even where shadows were thickest, some colors jumped out in disquieting luminescence. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall over the large room, a distance-distorting haze under the black lights.

We had entered on a kind of balcony that overlooked the dance floor below. Music pounded, the bass beat so loud that I could feel it in my lower stomach. Lights flashed and swayed in synchronicity. The floor was crowded with sweating, moving bodies dressed in a broad spectrum of clothing, from full leather coverings including a whole-head hood, at one extreme, to one girl clad in a few strips of electrical tape on the other. There was a bar down by the dance floor, and tables scattered around its outskirts under a thirty-foot-high ceiling. A few cages hung about eight feet over the dance floor, each containing a young man or woman in provocative clothing.

Stairways and catwalks led up to about a dozen platforms that thrust out from the walls, where patrons could sit and overlook the scene below while gaining a measure of privacy for themselves. Most of the platforms were furnished with couches and chaise longues rather than tables and chairs. There were more exotic bits of furniture up on the platforms, as well: the giant X shape of a St. Andrew’s cross, which was currently supporting the bound form of a young man, his wrists and ankles secured to the cross, his face to the wood, his hair falling down over his naked back. Another platform had a shiny brass pole in its center, and a pair of girls danced around it, in the middle of a circle of men and women sprawled over the couches and lounges.

Everywhere I looked, people were doing things that would have gotten them arrested anywhere else. Couples, threesomes, foursomes, and nineteensomes were fully engaged in sexual activity on some of the private platforms. From where I stood, I could see two different tables where lines of white powder waited to be inhaled. A syringe disposal was on the wall next to every trash can, marked with a bright biohazard symbol. People were being beaten with whips and riding crops. People were bound up with elaborate arrangements of ropes, as well as with more prosaic handcuffs. Piercings and tattoos were everywhere. Screams and cries occasionally found their way through the music, agony, ecstasy, joy, or rage all indistinguishable from one another.

The lights flashed constantly, changing and shifting, and every beat of the music created a dozen new frozen montages of sybaritic abandon.

The music, the light, the sweat, the smoke, the booze, the drugs—it all combined into a wet, desperate miasma that was full of needs that could never be sated.

That’s why the place was called Zero, I realized. Zero limits. Zero inhibitions. Zero restraint. It was a place of perfect, focused abandon, of indulgence, and it was intriguing and hideous, nauseating and viscerally hungry.

Zero fulfillment.

I felt a shudder run through me. This was the world as created by the White Court. This is what they would make of it, if they were given the chance. Planet Zero.

I glanced aside at Thomas and saw him staring around the club. His eyes had changed hue, from their usual grey to a paler, brighter silver, actual flecks of metallic color in his eyes. His eyes tracked over a pair of young women who were passing by us, dressed in black lingerie under long leather coats, and holding hands with their fingers intertwined. The women both turned their eyes toward him as if they’d heard him call their names, and stared for a second, their steps slowing and faltering.

Thomas dragged his eyes away, and let that inhuman stillness fill him again. The women blinked a few times, then continued on their way, their expressions vaguely puzzled.

“Hey,” I yelled through the music. “You all right?”

He nodded once, and then twitched his chin up at the highest platform in the building, on the far side of the dance floor. “Up there.”

I nodded, and Thomas took the lead. We negotiated the maze of catwalks and stairs. They had been purposefully designed to be just barely too narrow for two people to pass one another without touching, as I found out when Thomas and I passed a girl in leather shorts and a bustier, both of which strained to match themselves to a body whose curves were made ripe and inviting by the red light’s primitive rhythm. She slid by Thomas, her eyes locked on his chest, as if she was about to lean over and bite him.

He ignored her, but then the girl reached me—and I take up more room than Thomas. I felt her hip brush me, and she arched her back as I stepped past her, turned sideways. Her breasts pressed against my sternum, pliant, resilient warmth, and her lips were parted, her eyes too bright. Her hand brushed over my thigh, a touch that could have been accidental but wasn’t, and my body was suddenly demanding that I stop for a moment and see where this would lead.

You can’t trust your body when it tells you stuff like that. It doesn’t understand about things like actual affection, interaction, pregnancy, STDs. It just wants. I tried not to pay any attention to it—but there were other people on the catwalks, and evidently there was no such thing as a less than gorgeous woman inside Zero’s walls. Most of them seemed perfectly happy to make sure I knew it as they went by.

So did some of the men, for that matter, but that was less of an issue, as far as my focus went.

It probably didn’t help matters that we were walking by things that I hadn’t ever seen before, not even in movies. There was this one girl doing a thing with her tongue and an ice cube that—

Look, just trust me on this one. It was distracting as hell.

Thomas was walking faster as we approached the stairway leading up to the highest platform, and he took the last steps three at a time. I followed along behind him, scanning around me steadily, trying to be on the lookout for potential bad guys. This had the side effect of me getting to ogle more pretty girls than I’d ever seen in one place at one time. But it was professional ogling. One of them could have been concealing—

Well, actually, I was sort of shocked at what one of them was concealing.

I made it up the last stairway just in time to see Thomas throw himself into a woman’s arms.

Justine wasn’t particularly tall, for a girl, or at least she hadn’t been before she’d put on the boots with the five-inch heels. She looked like I remembered her last—a gorgeous face that still fell into the girl-next-door category, with a heart-melting smile. Her hair was silver-white, and was being held in a tight bun up high on the back of her head with a pair of white chopsticks.

Of course, the last time I’d seen her, she hadn’t been dressed in a formfitting white rubber cat suit that included gloves over her fingers. It emphasized absolutely everything and did it well.

Thomas fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her to him. She twined her rubber-covered arms around his neck and clung tightly. Both of them closed their eyes, and just stood there for a long minute, embracing without moving, just holding each other close.

It was an alien act in that place.

I turned away, leaned on the platform’s safety railing, and stared down at the club, trying to give my brother and the woman he loved a moment of privacy. Justine hadn’t worn the cover-everything suit for the sake of fashion. The touch of honest love, real and selfless love, was anathema to the White Court. Thomas had told me about White Court vampires who had been badly burned by the touch of some wedding rings, or the brush of a sweetheart’s rose. But most dangerous of all to them was the touch of someone who was loved and who loved in return.

I’d seen Thomas give himself a second-degree burn on his lips and mouth the last time he’d kissed Justine.

They hadn’t been together since the night she had laid down her life to save his, offering herself up to his hunger so that he could survive the evening. Thomas, in turn, had refused to devour her, denying his own darker nature. It had nearly killed her anyway, turning her hair white literally overnight. It had taken her years to recover her mind, after a long-term addiction to being fed upon by an incubus, but she’d done it. She was currently an assistant to Thomas’s older sister, Lara, and positioned to find out all kinds of juicy details about the White Court. Being protected by love meant that the vamps couldn’t feed on Justine, which Lara thought ideal in a personal assistant.

It also meant that my brother couldn’t touch the woman he loved. If he’d been like most of the White Court, only interested in feeding his hunger, he’d have been able to have her all he wanted. Instead . . .

Sometimes irony is a lot like a big old kick in the balls.

I stared down at the dance floor for a while, not so much ogling as simply taking in the light and motion as a whole, until I saw them part in my peripheral vision. Then I turned and walked over to join them, as Justine gestured for us to sit on a pair of couches that had been moved to face each other.

Thomas sat down in a corner of the couch, and Justine pressed up close against him, careful to keep what little of her was exposed from touching his skin. I settled down across from them, leaning my elbows forward onto my knees.

I smiled at Justine and nodded to her. The floor and half-wall railing of the platform must have been made from sound-absorbing material. The roar of the club was much reduced up here. “Justine. You look like the Michelin Man’s wet dream.”

She laughed, pink touching her cheeks. “Well. The club has a look we try to maintain. How are you, Harry?”

“Half buzzed on this smoke, and floundering,” I said. “Thomas told me you had some information.”

Justine nodded seriously, and picked up a manila file folder from the couch beside her. “Word is out about a hunt for a renegade Warden,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of details, but I was able to turn up this.”

She slid the folder over to me, and I opened it. The first page was a printout of a Web site of some kind. “What the hell is Craigslist?”

“It’s a site on the Internet,” Justine said. “It’s sort of like a giant classified ads section, only you can get to it from anywhere in the world. People use it to advertise goods they want to buy or sell.”

“Goods,” Thomas put in, “and services. Help wanted, with veiled language for the less-legal things. A lot of shady deals happen there because it’s relatively easy to do so anonymously. Escorts, mercenaries, you name it.”

There was an ad printed on it:

WANTED FOR PERMANENT POSITION,

DONALD MORGAN, 5MIL FINDER’S FEE,

CONSIDERATIONS.

lostwardenfound@yahoo.com.

“Hell’s bells,” I cursed quietly.

I passed the page to Thomas. “A wanted poster,” he said.

I nodded. “And not dead or alive, either. They just want him dead.”

Every supernatural hitter on the bloody planet was going to be coming after Morgan. Not so much for the money, probably, as for the favors that the ad promised. They carry a hell of a lot more weight than cash in the world of the weird. The five million was just there to provide scope, a sense of scale for the favors that would come with it.

“Every button man in the world and his brother,” I muttered. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“Why would your people do that?” Justine asked.

“They wouldn’t,” I said.

Thomas frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because the Council solves things in-house,” I said. Which was true. They had their own assassin for jobs like this, when he was needed. I grimaced. “Besides, even if they did put out a hit, they sure as hell wouldn’t use the Internet to do it.”

Thomas nodded, fingers idly stroking Justine’s rubberized shoulder. “Then who did?”

“Who indeed,” I said. “Is there any way to find out who put this here? Or who this e-mail thingy belongs to?”

Justine shook her head. “Not with any confidence.”

“Then we’ll have to make contact ourselves,” Thomas said. “Maybe we can draw them out.”

I scratched my chin, thinking. “If they’ve got a lick of sense, they won’t show themselves to anyone who isn’t established in the field. But it’s worth a try.” I sighed. “I’ve got to move him.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

I tapped the page with my finger. “When the hard cases start coming out of the woodwork, things are going to get messy, and old people live upstairs from me.”

Thomas frowned and nodded. “Where?”

I began to answer when the tempo of the beat suddenly changed below, and a wave of frenzied cries rolled up, deafening despite any soundproofing. A second after that, an odd frisson crawled across my nerves, and I felt my heart pound a little more quickly, and the earlier demands my body had been making returned in a rush.

Across from me, Justine shivered and her eyes slid almost completely closed. She took a deep breath, and her nipples tightened against the rubber cat suit. Her hips shifted in a small, unconscious movement, brushing against Thomas’s thigh.

My brother’s eyes flashed from light grey to cold, hard silver for a second, before he narrowed them and rose, carefully disentangling himself from Justine. He turned to face the dance floor, his shoulders tense.

I followed his example. “What is it?”

“Trouble,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at me. “Family’s come to visit.”

Chapter Nine

Thomas stared hard at the floor below, and then nodded once, as if in recognition. “Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice, “stay out of this.”

“Stay out of what?” I asked.

He turned to look at me, his expression inhumanly remote. “It’s family business. It won’t involve you. The House has given orders that wizards are not to be molested without clearance. If you don’t get involved, I won’t have to worry about you.”

“What?” I said. “Thomas . . .”

“Just let me handle it,” he said, his voice hard.

I was going to answer him when the vampire entered the room.

It was one of those sensations you have trouble remembering afterward—like the last moments of the dream you have just before waking. You know that once you’re outside the dream, you’re going to forget—and you can’t believe you could lose something so significant, so undeniably tangible.

I turned to look the second she entered—just like everyone else in the room.

She wore white, of course. A white dress, a simple shift made of some kind of glistening silken fabric, which fell to the top of her thighs. She was at least six feet tall, more so in the partially transparent shoes she wore. Her skin was pale and perfect, her hair dark and shining with highlights that changed color in the beat of the strobe lighting of the club. Her face was perfect beauty that remained unmarred by the obvious arrogance in her expression, and her body could have been used on recruiting posters for wet dreams.

She descended to the dance floor and crossed to the stairways and catwalks with a predator’s easy motion, each stride making her hips roll and shoulders sway, somehow in time to the music, and far more graceful than the efforts of the sweating dancers, more sensual than the frantic lovers.

At the foot of the first stairway, she came to a young man in leather pants and the scraps of a shirt that looked like it had been torn to pieces by ardent admirers. Without hesitation, she pushed him up against the railing beside the stairway and pressed her body up against his.

She twined her arms slowly around his neck and kissed him. A kiss, and that was all—but apparently no one told the young man that. From his reaction, you’d have thought that she’d mounted him then and there. Her lips were sealed to his, their tongues lashing one another, for maybe a minute. Then she turned away with that same precise grace, and began walking up the stairs—slowly, so that every shift and change of muscle in her perfectly formed legs danced in mesmerizing ripples beneath her soft white skin.

The young man simply melted onto the floor, muscles twitching, his eyes closed. I didn’t think he was actually aware that she had left.

The woman had every eye in the building and she knew it.

It wasn’t an enormous event, the way she took the attention of everyone there. It wasn’t a single large simultaneous, significant motion when everyone turned to look. There was no sudden silence, no deepening stillness. That would have been bad enough.

Her influence was a lot scarier than that.

It was simply a fact, like gravity, that everyone’s attention should be directed to her. Every person there, men and women alike, glanced up, or tracked her movement obliquely with their eyes, or paused for half a beat in their . . . conversations. For most of them it was an entirely unconscious act. They had no idea that their minds had already been ensnared.

And as I realized that, I realized that mine was in danger, too.

It was a real effort to close my eyes and remind myself of where I was. I could feel the succubus’s aura, like the silken brush of cobwebs against my eyelashes, something tingling and delicious and fluttering that swayed up my legs and through my groin on its way to my brain.

It was only a promise, a whisper to the flesh—but it was a good whisper. I had to make an effort to wall it away from my thoughts, until suddenly reason reasserted itself, and that fluttering haze froze and cracked and blew away under the chill wind of sensible fear.

When I opened my eyes, the woman was stalking toward us along that last catwalk, slithering nearer in her thin white dress as she mounted the last few stairs. She paused there, letting us look at her, knowing what effect she was having. Even on guard against it, I could feel the subtle sweetness of her presence calling out to me, whispering that I should relax and let my eyes run over her for a while.

She turned her cornflower blue eyes to me for a moment, and her mouth parted, spreading slowly into a smile that shrunk my pants about three sizes in as many seconds.

“Cousin Thomas,” she purred. “Still noble and starving, I see.”

“Madeline,” Thomas replied, a small smile showing white, perfect teeth. “Still undisciplined and blatant, I see.”

Madeline Raith’s mouth and eyes reacted in completely different ways to my half brother’s remark. Her smile widened into a beauty-pageant expression, wide and immobile, but her eyes narrowed and went completely white, the pale blue vanishing from her irises. She looked from Thomas to Justine.

“Lara’s little pet mortal,” Madeline said. “I wondered where you were running off to. Now I find you meeting with your old flame and . . .” Her eyes slid to me. “The enemy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Justine replied. Though her voice was calm, her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes dilated. “I came to go over the books, the way I do every week.”

“But this time you wore perfume,” Madeline said. “And a rather provocative ensemble, not that you don’t do it justice, darling. I find it”—her tongue touched her upper lip—“interesting.”

“Madeline,” Thomas said, in a tone of exaggerated patience, “please go away.”

“I have every right to be here,” she murmured. It didn’t seem right that she should be able to keep her voice so maddeningly soft and sensual over the beat of the club’s music. She turned to me and took a few steps my way, with her full attention on me.

I suddenly felt like a teenager—a little bit afraid, a whole lot excited, and filled with so many hormones demanding so many inexplicable things that I nearly lost the ability to focus my eyes.

She stopped just out of the reach of my hand. “Don’t mind my cousin’s horrible manners. The infamous Harry Dresden hardly needs an introduction.” She looked me up and down and twined a finger through a tendril of dark hair. “How could I come to Chicago so many times without meeting you?”

“But I’ve seen you,” I said. My voice was a little rough, but it worked.

“Oh?” she asked, the sexy smile widening. “Are you the sort who likes to watch, Harry?”

“You betcha,” I said. “And that time, I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

Her smile faltered a fraction.

“You are Jessica Rabbit, right?” I asked. “All slinky and overblown and obvious?”

The smile vanished.

“Because I know I’ve seen you somewhere, and gosh, I’ll be embarrassed if it turns out that you were the evil princess from Buck Rogers instead.”

“What?” she said. “Buck what?”

I gave her my best forced smile. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. You do that ensemble justice. But you’re trying too hard.” I leaned a little closer and fake-whispered, “Lara does more for me just sitting in a chair than you did with your whole entrance.”

Madeline Raith became as still and cold as a statue of a furious goddess, and the air temperature around us dropped several degrees.

I suddenly sensed Thomas’s presence beside me, and found my brother had leaned back against the railing on his elbows, his hands loose and relaxed. He was standing just a tiny bit closer to Madeline than I was.

“Madeline,” he said in the precise same tone he’d used a moment before, “go away before I beat you to death with my bare hands.”

Madeline jerked her head back as if Thomas had slapped her. “What?”

“You heard me,” he said calmly. “It isn’t quite cricket as family squabbles go, I know, but I’m tired, I don’t give a fuck what you or anyone else in the House thinks of me, and I don’t respect you enough to play games with you, even if I was in the mood.”

“How dare you?” Madeline snarled. “How dare you threaten me? Lara will have the skin flayed from your body for this.”

“Oh?” Thomas gave her a wintry smile. “After what you projected at the wizard, he’d be well within his rights to burn you right down to your overpriced shoes.”

“I never—”

“And despite the orders handed down from the King,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Lara’s getting tired of cleaning up after you, Mad. She’d probably buy me a new set of steak knives if I found a way to make her life a bit less trying.”

Madeline laughed. It reminded me of glass breaking. “And do you think she loves you any better, cousin mine? You refuse to appear with the House at meetings of the Court, and spend your time among the kine, grooming them and bringing shame upon your family. At least tell me you are planning to take the beasts to some sort of auction.”

“You aren’t capable of understanding why I do what I do,” Thomas said.

“Who would want to?” she retorted. “You’re as much a degenerate as any of those fools in Skavis and Malvora.”

Thomas’s mouth ticked at the corner, but that was all the reaction he gave her. “Go away, Madeline. Last warning.”

“Two members of the oldest bloodlines in Raith murdering each other?” Madeline said, sneering. “The White King could not tolerate such a divisive act and you know it.” She turned away from Thomas and walked toward Justine. “You’re bluffing,” she said over her shoulder. “Besides. We haven’t heard from our little pink rose yet.”

Her voice sank to a throaty purr, and Justine quivered in place, seemingly unable to move as Madeline approached.

“Pretty Justine.” Madeline put a hand on Justine’s shoulder and slid a single fingertip down the slope of one breast. “I don’t generally enjoy does as much as some, darling, but even I find the thought of taking you delicious.”

“You c-can’t touch me,” Justine stammered. She was breathing faster.

“Not yet,” Madeline said. “But there’s not enough will left in your pretty little head to control yourself for long.” Madeline stepped closer, sliding her hand along Justine’s waist. “Some night, perhaps I’ll come to you with some beautiful young buck and whisper pretty things to you until you’re mad to be taken. And after he has made use of you, little doe, I’ll take you in one big bite.” She licked her lips. “I’ll take you whole and make you scream how much you love it as it happen—”

Thomas broke a chair over Madeline’s head.

It was particularly impressive, given that all the chairs on the balcony were made of metal.

It happened fast, during an eye blink. One instant he was standing beside me, tightening with anger, and the next there were popped rivets zinging everywhere and Madeline had been crushed to the floor of the balcony.

The air went cold. Thomas dropped the ruined chair. Madeline bounced up from the floor and threw a blow at Thomas’s jaw. He hunched and twisted, a boxer’s defense, and took it on the shoulder with a grunt of pain. Then he seized her ankle and slammed her in a half circle, smashing a 36-24-36 dent into the drywall.

Madeline cried out and her limbs went loose. Thomas swung her in another arc that brought her crashing down onto the low coffee table between the couches. She lay there and let out a single choked gasp, her eyes unfocused. Without pausing, my brother snatched both chopsticks from Justine’s hair, letting the white-silver locks tumble down her back.

Then, in two sharp, swift motions, he slammed the chopsticks through Madeline’s wrists and into the table beneath them, pinning her like a butterfly to a card.

“You’re right of course,” he snarled. “Lara couldn’t ignore one member of the family murdering another. It would make the King look weak.” His hand closed over Madeline’s face, and he pulled her head up toward his, making her arms strain at a painful angle. “I was bluffing.”

He shoved her back down against the table. “Of course,” he said, “you’re family. Families don’t murder one another.” He looked up at Justine and said, “They share.”

She met his eyes. A very small, very hard smile graced Justine’s features.

“You wanted to taste her,” Thomas said, his fingers twining with Justine’s rubber-clad ones. “Well, Madeline. Be my guest.”

Justine leaned over and kissed Madeline Raith’s forehead, her silken silver hair falling to veil them both.

The vampire screamed.

The sound was lost in the pounding rhythm and flashing lights.

Justine lifted her head a few seconds later, and swept her hair slowly down the length of Madeline’s form. The vampire writhed and screamed again, while Thomas held her pinned to the table. Wherever Justine’s hair glided over exposed fleshed, the skin sizzled and burned, blackening in some places, forming blisters and welts in others. She left a trail of ruin down one of Madeline’s legs and then rose together with Thomas, two bodies making one motion.

Madeline Raith’s face was a ruin of burn marks, and the imprint of Justine’s soft mouth was a perfect black brand on pale flesh in the center of her forehead. She lay on the table, still pinned by the chopsticks, and quivered in jerking little motions, gasping and breathless with the pain.

Thomas and Justine walked, hand in hand, to the stairs leading down from our platform. I followed them.

They passed beneath an air-conditioning outlet, and a few strands of Justine’s hair blew against Thomas’s naked arm and chest. Small bright lines of scarlet appeared. Thomas didn’t flinch.

I walked over to them and passed Justine a pair of pencils, taken from my coat pocket. She took them with a nod of thanks, and quickly bound up her hair again. I looked over my shoulder as she did.

Madeline Raith lay helpless and gasping—but her white eyes burned with hate.

Thomas took his T-shirt from where he’d stowed it on a belt loop, and put it back on. Then he slid his arms around Justine again and pulled her against his chest, holding her close.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

Justine nodded, her eyes closed. “I’ll call the House. Lara will send someone for her.”

“You leave her there and it’s going to make trouble,” I told him.

He shrugged. “I couldn’t get away with killing her. But our House has rather stern views on poaching.” Something hard and hot entered his eyes. “Justine is mine. Madeline had to be shown that. She deserved it.”

Justine clung a little bit tighter to him. He returned the gesture.

We all started down the stairs together, and I was glad to be leaving Zero.

“Still,” I said. “Seeing her like that, I feel like maybe somebody went too far. I feel a little bit bad for her.”

Thomas arched an eyebrow and glanced back at me. “You do?”

“Yeah,” I said. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that Jessica Rabbit thing.”

Chapter Ten

The hot summer night outside Zero felt ten degrees cooler and a million times cleaner than what we’d left behind us. Thomas turned sharply to the right and walked until he’d found a spot of shadow between streetlights, and leaned one shoulder against the wall of the building. He bowed his head, and stayed that way for a minute, then two.

I waited. I didn’t need to ask my brother what was wrong. The display of strength and power he’d used on Madeline had cost him energy—energy that other vampires gained by feeding on victims, as Madeline had done to that poor sap inside. He wasn’t upset by what had happened in Zero. He was hungry.

Thomas’s struggle against his own hunger was complicated, difficult, and maybe impossible to sustain. That never stopped him from trying, though. The rest of the Raith family thought he was insane.

But I got it.

He walked back over to me a minute later, his cool features distant and untouchable as Antarctic mountains.

He fell into pace beside me as we began walking down the street toward the lot where he’d parked his car.

“Ask you a question?” I said.

He nodded.

“The White Court only get burned when they try to feed on someone touched by true love, right?”

“It isn’t as simple as that,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s got to do with how much control the hunger has over you when you touch.”

I grunted. “But when they feed, the hunger’s in control.”

Thomas nodded slowly.

“So why’d Madeline try to feed on Justine? She had to know it would hurt her.”

“Same reason I do,” Thomas said. “She can’t help it. It’s reflex.”

I frowned. “I don’t get it.”

He was quiet long enough to make me think he wasn’t going to say anything, before he finally spoke. “Justine and I were together for years. And she . . . means a lot to me. When I’m near her, I can’t think about anything else but her. And when I touch her, everything in me wants to be nearer to her.”

“Including your hunger,” I said quietly.

He nodded. “We agree on that point, my demon and I. So I can’t touch Justine without it being . . . close to the surface, I suppose you could call it.”

“And it gets burned,” I said.

He nodded. “Madeline is the other end of the spectrum. She thinks she should get to feed on anyone she wants, anywhere, anytime. She doesn’t see other people. She just sees food. Her hunger controls her completely.” He smiled a bitter little smile. “So for her it’s reflex, just like for me.”

“You’re different. For her it’s everyone,” I said, “not only Justine.”

He shrugged. “I don’t care about everyone. I care about Justine.”

“You’re different,” I said.

Thomas turned to face me, his expression rigid and cold. “Shut up, Harry.”

“But—”

His voice dropped to a low snarl. “Shut. Up.”

It was a little scary.

He stared hard at me for a while longer, then shook his head and exhaled slowly. “I’ll get the car. Wait here.”

“Sure,” I said.

He walked away on silent feet, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed. Every woman he passed, and some of the men, turned their heads to watch him go by. He ignored them.

I got a lot of looks, too, but that was because I was standing on a sidewalk near a lot of Chicago’s night spots on a hot summer night wearing a long leather coat and carrying a quarterstaff carved with mystic runes. Thomas’s looks had all been subtitled: Yum. My looks all said: Weirdo.

Tough to believe I was coming out ahead on that one.

While I waited, my instincts nagged me again, a hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck certainty that someone was focused on me. My instincts had been on a streak, so I paid attention to them, quietly preparing my shield bracelet as I turned my head in a slow, casual look up and down the street. I didn’t spot anybody, but my vision sort of flickered as it passed over an alley across the street. I focused on that point intently for a moment, concentrating, and was able to make out a vaguely human shape there.

Then the flicker was abruptly replaced with the form of Anastasia Luccio, who raised a hand and beckoned me.

Yikes.

I jaywalked over to her, timing my crossing in between the occasional passing car, and we took several steps back into the alley.

“Evening, Stacy,” I said.

She turned to me and, in a single motion, drew a curved saber from a sheath at her hip and produced a gun in her other hand. The tip of the blade menaced my face, and I had to jerk my head back, which put me off balance, and I wound up with my shoulders pressed up against a wall.

Anastasia arched an eyebrow, her soft mouth set in a hard line. “I hope for your sake that you are the true Harry Dresden, only using that abomination of a nickname to make sure that I was the true Anastasia”—she emphasized the word slightly—“Luccio.”

“Well, yes, Anastasia,” I said, being careful not to move. “And by your reaction, I can tell that it really is you.”

She dropped the sword’s point and lowered the gun. The tension faded from her body, and she put her hardware away. “Well, of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”

I shook my head. “I’ve had a bad shapeshifter night.”

She arched an eyebrow. Anastasia Luccio was the captain of the Wardens of the White Council. She had a couple of centuries of experience.

“I’ve had those,” she said, and put a hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”

We stepped into each other and hugged. I hadn’t realized how stiffly I’d been holding myself until I exhaled and relaxed a little. She felt slender and warm and strong in my arms. “So far I’m not dead,” I said. “I take it you used a tracking spell to run me down—since you don’t seem to be worried about whether or not I’m me.”

She lifted her face to mine and planted a soft kiss on my mouth. “Honestly, Harry,” she said, smiling. “Who would pretend to be you?”

“Someone who wanted to be kissed in dark alleys by seductive older women, apparently.”

Her smile widened for a second, and then faded. “I thought I was going to have to break down the door and come in after you. What were you doing in that White Court cesspit?”

I didn’t think I’d done anything to cause it, but we stepped out of each other’s arms. “Looking for information,” I said quietly. “Something’s up. And someone’s cut me out of the loop.”

Anastasia pressed her lips together and looked away. Her expression was closed, touched with anger. “Yes. Orders.”

“Orders,” I said. “From the Merlin, I guess.”

“From Ebenezar McCoy, actually.”

I grunted in surprise. McCoy had been my mentor when I was young. I respected him.

“I get it,” I said. “He was afraid that if I heard Morgan was on the run, I’d hat up and dish out some payback.”

She glanced up at me, and then across the street at Zero. She shrugged, without quite looking me in the face. “God knows you have enough cause to do so.”

“You agreed with him,” I said.

She looked up at me, her eyes a little wider. “If I did, then why am I standing here?”

I frowned at her and scratched my head. “Okay. You’ve got me on that one.”

“Besides,” she said. “I was worried about you.”

“Worried?”

She nodded. “Morgan’s done something that is hiding him from even the Senior Council’s abilities. I was afraid that he might come here.”

Poker face don’t fail me now. “That’s crazy,” I said. “Why would he do that?”

She squared her shoulders and faced me steadily. “Maybe because he’s innocent.”

“And?”

“There are a number of people who have sought permission from the Senior Council to investigate and interrogate you under the presumption that you were the traitor who has been feeding information to the Red Court.” She looked away again. “Morgan has been one of the most overt agitators.”

I took a deep breath. “You’re saying that Morgan knows he isn’t the traitor. And he thinks it’s me.”

“And he might be moving toward you, in an attempt to prove his own innocence or, failing that . . .”

“Kill me,” I said, quietly. “If he’s going to go down, you think he might have decided to take out the real traitor before he gets the axe.”

And suddenly I had to wonder if Morgan had shown up at my door for the reasons he’d given me. Anastasia had been Morgan’s mentor, when he was an apprentice. She’d known the man for the vast majority of his life, literally for generations.

What if her judgment of him was better than mine?

Sure, Morgan wasn’t in any shape to kill me personally—but he wouldn’t need to. All he had to do is call the Wardens and tell them where he was. A lot of people in the Council didn’t like me much. I’d go down with Morgan, for giving aid and comfort to a traitor.

I suddenly felt naive and vulnerable and maybe a little stupid.

“He was already in custody,” I said. “How did he get away?”

Luccio smiled faintly. “We aren’t sure. He thought of something we didn’t. And he put three Wardens in the hospital when he left.”

“But you don’t think he’s guilty.”

“I . . .” She frowned for a moment and then said, “I refuse to let fear turn me against a man I know and trust. But it doesn’t matter what I think. There’s enough evidence to kill him.”

“What evidence?” I asked.

“Other than finding him standing over LaFortier’s corpse with a literal bloody knife in his hand?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Other than that.”

She raked her fingers back through her curly hair. “The information the Red Court has attained was exclusive to a very small pool of suspects, of which he was one. We have telephone records of him in frequent contact with a known operative of the Red Court. We also tracked down an offshore account belonging to him, in which several million dollars had recently been deposited.”

I snorted derisively. “Yeah, that’s him. Morgan the mercenary, nothing but dollar signs in his eyes.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s what I mean about fear clouding people’s judgment. We all know that the Red Court is going to come after us again. We know that if we don’t eliminate the traitor, their first blow could be fatal. The Merlin is desperate.”

“Join the club,” I muttered. I rubbed at my eyes and sighed.

She touched my arm again. “I thought you had a right to know,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner.”

I covered her hand with mine and pressed gently. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You look awful.”

“You sweet talker, you.”

She lifted her hand to touch my face. “I’ve got a few hours before I need to be back on duty. I was thinking a bottle of wine and a massage might be in order.”

I only barely kept from groaning in pleasure at the very thought of one of Anastasia’s massages. What she didn’t know about inflicting merciless pleasure on a man’s aching body hadn’t been invented. But I sure as hell couldn’t have her back over to the apartment. If she found out about Morgan, and if he truly intended to betray me, it would be frighteningly easy for her head to wind up on the floor next to Morgan’s and mine.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to go to the hospital.”

She frowned. “What happened?”

“A skinwalker picked up my trail earlier tonight, when I was at Billy Borden’s place. Kirby’s dead. Andi’s in the hospital.”

She sucked in a breath, wincing in empathy. “Dio, Harry. I’m so sorry.”

I shrugged. I watched my vision blur, and realized that I wasn’t only making an excuse to keep her away from my place. Kirby and I hadn’t been blood brothers or anything—but he was a friend, a regular part of my life. Emphasis on the was.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

I shook my head. Then I said, “Actually, yeah.”

“Very well.”

“Find out whatever you can about skinwalkers. I’m going to kill this one.”

“All right,” she said.

“Meanwhile,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you?”

“For me?” She shook her head. “But . . . Morgan could use whatever help he can get.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like I’m gonna help Morgan.”

She lifted her hands. “I know. I know. But there’s not much I can do. Everyone knows he was my apprentice. They’re watching me. If I try to help him openly, they’ll suspend me as captain of the Wardens, at best.”

“Don’t you just love it when justice can’t be bothered with petty concerns like fact?”

“Harry,” she said. “What if he’s innocent?”

I shrugged. “The way I was all those years? I’m too busy admiring the karma to lend a hand to the bastard.” Out on the street, Thomas’s Jag cruised by the end of the alley, then pulled up to the curb and stopped.

I glanced at the car and said, “There’s my ride.”

Anastasia arched an eyebrow at Thomas and his car. “The vampire?”

“He owed me a favor.”

“Mmmm,” Anastasia said. Her look at Thomas did not say yum. She looked more like someone who was trying to judge by how much she would need to lead a moving target. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “The White King told him to play nice. He will.”

“Until he doesn’t,” she said.

“Walkers can’t be choosers,” I said.

“The Beetle died again?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why don’t you get a different car?” she asked.

“Because the Blue Beetle is my car.”

Anastasia smiled faintly up at me. “I wonder how you make something like that so endearing.”

“It’s my natural good looks,” I said. “I could make athlete’s foot endearing, if I really had to.”

She rolled her eyes, but was still smiling. “I’ll head back to Edinburgh and help coordinate the search. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

She put her hands on my cheeks. “I’m sorry about your friends. When this is over, we’ll find some quiet spot and relax.”

I turned my head to one side and kissed the pulse in her wrist, then gently clasped her hands with mine. “Look, I’m not making any promises. But if I see something that might help Morgan, I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

She stood up on her toes and kissed me goodbye. Then she turned and vanished into the shadows farther down the alley.

I waited until she was gone to turn around and join my brother in the white Jag.

“Damn, that girl is fit,” Thomas drawled. “Where to?”

“Stop looking,” I said. “My place.”

If Morgan was going to give me the shaft, I might as well find out now.

Chapter Eleven

Thomas stopped his Jag in front of the boardinghouse where my apartment was and said, “I’ll have my cell phone on me. Try to call me before things start exploding.”

“Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe I’ll work everything out through reason, diplomacy, dialogue, and mutual cooperation.”

Thomas eyed me.

I tried to look wounded. “It could happen.”

He reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a plain white business card with a phone number on it, and passed it to me. “Use this number. It’s to a clone.”

I looked at him blankly.

“It’s a supersecret sneaky phone,” he clarified. “No one knows I have it, and if someone traces your calls and goes looking for me, they’ll find someone else.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“You sure you don’t want to just load Morgan up and go?”

I shook my head. “Not until I give him the score. He sees me coming in with a vampire in tow, he’s going to flip out. As in try to kill us both.” I got out of the Jag, glanced at the house, and shook my head. “You stay alive for a dozen decades doing what Morgan does, paranoia becomes reflex.”

Thomas grimaced. “Yeah. Give me an hour or so to get what you need. Call me when you’ve got him ready to go.”

I glanced at the number, committed it to memory, and pocketed the card. “Thanks. I’ll pay you back for the gear.”

He rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Harry.”

I snorted out a breath, and nodded my head in thanks. We rapped knuckles, and he pulled out onto the street and cruised out into the Chicago night.

I took a slow look around the familiar shapes of dark buildings where only a few lights still burned. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years. You’d think I’d be confident about spotting anything out of the ordinary fairly quickly. But, call me crazy, there were just too many players moving in this game, with God only knew what kinds of abilities to draw upon.

I didn’t spot anyone out there getting set to kill me to get to Morgan. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

“If that’s not paranoid reflex,” I muttered, “I don’t know what is.”

I shivered and walked down the steps to my apartment. I disarmed the wards, and reminded myself, again, that I really needed to do something about the deep divots in the steel security door. The last thing I needed was for old Mrs. Spunkelcrief, my near-deaf landlady, to start asking me why my door looked like it had been shot a dozen times. I mean, I could always tell her, “because it has been,” but that isn’t the sort of conversation one has with one’s landlady if one wants to keep one’s home.

I opened the bullet-dented door, went inside, turned toward the bedroom door, and was faced with a bizarre tableau.

Morgan was off the bed, sitting on the floor with his back to it, his wounded leg stretched out in front of him. He looked awful, but his eyes were narrowed and glittered with suspicion.

Sprawled in the bedroom doorway was my apprentice, Molly Carpenter.

Molly was a tall young woman with a bunch of really well-arranged curves and shoulder-length hair that was, this month, dyed a brilliant shade of sapphire. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and a white tank top, and her blue eyes looked exasperated.

She was sprawling on the floor because Mouse was more or less lying on top of her. He wasn’t letting his full weight rest on her, because it probably would have smothered her, but it seemed obvious that she was not able to move.

“Harry!” Molly said. She started to say something else, but Mouse leaned into her a little, and suddenly all she could do was gasp for air.

“Dresden!” Morgan growled at about the same time. He shifted his weight, as if to get up.

Mouse turned his head to Morgan and gave him a steady look, his lips peeling back from his fangs.

Morgan settled down.

“Hooboy,” I sighed, and pushed the door shut, leaving the room in complete darkness. I locked the door, put the wards back up, and then muttered, “Flickum bicus.” I waved my hand as I spoke, and sent a minor effort of will out into the room, and half a dozen candles flickered to life.

Mouse turned to me and gave me what I could have sworn was a reproachful look. Then he got up off of Molly, padded into the alcove that served as my kitchen, and deliberately yawned at me before flopping down on the floor to sleep. The meaning was clear: now it’s your problem.

“Ah,” I said, glancing from Mouse to my apprentice to my guest. “Um. What happened here, exactly?”

“The warlock tried to sneak up on me while I slept,” Morgan spat.

Molly quickly stood up and scowled at Morgan, her hands clenched into fists. “Oh, that’s ridiculous.”

“Then explain what you’re doing here this late at night,” Morgan said. “What possible reason could you have to show up here, now?”

“I’m making concentration-supporting potions,” she said from between clenched teeth, in a tone that suggested she’d repeated herself about a hundred times already. “The jasmine has to go in at night. Tell him, Harry.”

Crap. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten that the grasshopper was scheduled to show up and pull an all-nighter. “Um,” I said. “What I meant to ask was, how is it that Mouse came to be sitting on you both?”

“The warlock summoned up her will and prepared to attack me,” Morgan said frostily. “The dog intervened.”

Molly rolled her eyes and glared at him. “Oh, please. You are such an asshole.”

The air in the room seemed to tighten a little, as power gathered around the young woman.

“Molly,” I said gently.

She glanced over at me, scowling. “What?”

I cleared my throat and gestured at her with one hand.

She blinked for a second, then seemed to catch on. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled it slowly. As she did, the ominous sense of stormy energy faded. Molly ducked her head a little, her cheeks flushing. “Sorry. But it wasn’t like that.”

Morgan snorted.

I ignored him. “Go on,” I told Molly. “Talk.”

“He just . . . I just got so angry,” Molly said. “He made me so upset. I couldn’t help it.” She gestured to Mouse. “And then he just . . . just flattened me. And he wouldn’t let me up, and he wouldn’t let Morgan move, either.”

“Seems to me that the dog had better sense than you,” I said. I glanced up at Morgan. “Either of you. You’re supposed to stay still. You wanna kill yourself?”

“It was a reaction to her approach,” Morgan said calmly. “I survived it.”

I shook my head. “And you,” I said to Molly. “How many months have we spent working on your emotional control?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s never good to use magic in anger. I know, Harry.”

“You’d better know it,” I said quietly. “If it’s so easy to get a rise out of you that one bitter old washed-up Warden can blow your O-ring, the first reactionary goomba to come along looking for an excuse to take you out is going to put you in a casket, claim it was self-defense, and get away with it.”

Morgan bared his teeth in an expression only remotely resembling a smile. “You’d know all about that, Dresden, wouldn’t you?”

“You son of a bitch!” Molly snarled and whirled toward Morgan, seizing a candlestick and hefting it like a club. The candle on it tumbled to the floor.

Morgan sat perfectly still with that same gruesome smile on his face, never flinching.

I lurched forward and grabbed Molly’s arm on her backswing, an instant before she would have brought the heavy candlestick crashing down on Morgan’s skull. Molly was strong for a woman, and I had to make a pretty serious effort to hold her back, my fingers digging into her wrist, while I snagged her around the waist with my other arm and bodily hauled her away from Morgan.

“No!” I demanded. “Dammit, Molly, no!” I actually had to lift her feet off the ground to turn her away from the bedroom. I tightened my grip on her wrist and said, “Drop the candlestick, Molly. Now.”

She let out a sound full of anger and laced with a little pain, and the heavy candlestick dropped to the floor, making a dull thud as it hit the rug-covered concrete. The air around her was alive with power, buzzing against my skin like a thousand tiny sparks of static electricity in a dry winter. “He can’t talk to you like that,” Molly snarled.

“Think,” I told her, my voice hard but measured. “Remember the lessons. They’re just words, Molly. Look for the thought behind them. He set you up for this reaction. You’re allowing him to make you embarrass me.”

Molly opened her mouth on an angry retort, then forced her mouth closed and turned her face away from me. She remained rigidly tense, and after a fuming half minute, she said, her voice more calm, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I replied as gently as I could. “Be disciplined. You can’t afford to let them rattle you. Not ever.”

She took another deep breath, exhaled, and then I felt her begin to ease down, relaxing her mental grasp on the power she’d instinctively prepared. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Harry.”

I let her go slowly. She began to rub at her right wrist with her other hand. I winced a little on her behalf. I thought I’d left bruises on her skin.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Take Mouse and grab the mail.”

“I’m fine. I don’t need—” she began. Then she stopped herself, shook her head, and looked at Mouse.

The big dog heaved himself up, walked over to the basket next to the door, grasped his leather lead in his jaws, and dragged it out. Then he looked up at Molly, his head cocked to one side, his tail wagging hopefully.

Molly let out a rueful little laugh and knelt down to hug the big dog. She clipped his lead onto his collar, and the two of them left.

I turned and eyed the candle. It had spilled hot wax onto a genuine Navajo rug on the floor, but it hadn’t set anything on fire. I bent down and picked up the candle, then started trying to clean up the spilled wax as best I could.

“Why?” I asked in a hard voice.

“It’s one way to take a measure of a man,” he said. “Looking at his students.”

“You didn’t look,” I said. “You needled her until she broke.”

“She’s a self-proclaimed warlock, Dresden,” he replied. “Guilty of one of the most hideous and self-destructive crimes a wizard can commit. Is there some reason she shouldn’t be tested?”

“What you did was cruel,” I said.

“Was it?” Morgan asked. “There are others she is going to meet, one day, who will be even less gracious. Are you preparing her to deal with those people?”

I glared at him.

His gaze never wavered. “You aren’t doing her any favors by going easy on her, Dresden,” he said, more quietly. “You aren’t preparing her for exams. She doesn’t receive a bad mark if she fails.”

I was quiet for a minute. Then I asked, “Did you learn shields as an apprentice?”

“Of course. One of my earliest lessons.”

“How did your master teach you?”

“She threw stones at me,” he said.

I grunted, without looking at him.

“Pain is an excellent motivator,” he said. “And it teaches one to control one’s emotions at the same time.” He tilted his head. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I told him. “She could have broken your head open, you know.”

He gave me that same unsettling smile. “You wouldn’t have let her.”

Molly came back into the apartment, carrying a handful of mail, including one of those stupid Circuit City fliers that they just won’t stop sending me. She shut the door, put the wards back up, and took Mouse’s lead off. The big dog went over to the kitchen and flopped down.

Molly put the mail on the coffee table, gave Morgan a level pensive look, and then nodded at him. “So . . . what’s he doing here, boss?”

I stared at Molly for a moment, and then at Morgan. “What do you think?” I asked him.

He shrugged a shoulder. “She already knows enough to implicate her. Besides, Dresden—if you go down with me, there’s no one left to take responsibility for her. Her sentence will not remain suspended.”

I ground my teeth together. Molly had made a couple of bad choices a few years back, and violated one of the Laws of Magic in doing so. The White Council takes a harsh view of such things—their reactions start with beheadings, and become progressively less tolerant. I’d staked my own life on the belief that Molly wasn’t rotten to the core, and that I could rehabilitate her. When I did it, I’d known that I was risking my own well-being. If Molly backslid, I’d bear the responsibility for it, and get a death sentence about twenty seconds after she did.

I hadn’t really considered that it would also work the other way around.

Say for a minute that it was Morgan’s intention to get caught and take me down with him. It also meant that Molly would take a fall. He’d get rid of both of the Council’s former warlocks with the same move. Two birds, one stone.

Well, crap.

“Okay,” I sighed. “I guess you’re in.”

“I am?” Molly looked at me with widening eyes. “Um. In what?”

I told her.

Chapter Twelve

“I don’t like it,” Morgan growled, as I pushed the wheelchair over the gravel toward the street and the van Thomas had rented.

“Gee. There’s a shock,” I said. Morgan was a lot to push around, even with the help of the chair. “You upset with how I operate.”

“He’s a vampire,” Morgan said. “He can’t be trusted.”

“I can hear you,” Thomas said from the driver’s seat of the van.

“I know that, vampire,” Morgan said, without raising his voice. He eyed me again.

“He owes me a favor,” I said, “from that coup attempt in the White Court.”

Morgan glowered at me. “You’re lying,” he said.

“For all you know it’s true.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said flatly. “You’re lying to me.”

“Well, yes.”

He looked from me to the van. “You trust him.”

“To a degree,” I said.

“Idiot,” he said, though he sounded like his heart wasn’t in it. “Even when a White Court vampire is sincere, you can’t trust it. Sooner or later, its demon takes control. And then you’re nothing but food. It’s what they are.”

I felt a little surge of anger and clubbed it down before it could make my mouth start moving. “You came to me, remember? You don’t like how I’m helping you, feel free to roll yourself right out of my life.”

Morgan gave me a disgusted look, folded his arms—and shut his mouth.

Thomas turned on the hazard lights as the van idled on the street; then he came around and opened up the side door. He turned to Morgan and picked up the wheelchair the wounded Warden sat in with about as much effort as I’d use to move a sack of groceries from the cart into my car’s trunk. Thomas put the wheelchair carefully into the van, while Morgan held the IV bag steady on its little metal pole clamped to the chair’s arm.

I had to give Morgan a grudging moment of admiration. He was one tough son of a bitch. Obviously in agony, obviously exhausted, obviously operating in the shambles of his own shattered pride, he was still stubborn enough to be paranoid and annoying. If he wasn’t aiming it all at me, I probably would have admired him even more.

Thomas slid the door shut on Morgan, rolled his eyes at me, and got back into the driver’s seat.

Molly came hurrying up, carrying a pair of backpacks, holding one end of Mouse’s leash. I held out my hand, and she tossed me the black nylon pack. It was my trouble kit. Among other things, it contained food, water, a medical kit, survival blankets, chemical light sticks, duct tape, two changes of clothing, a multitool, two hundred dollars in cash, my passport, and a couple of favorite paperbacks. I always kept the trouble kit ready and available, in case I need to move out in a hurry. It had everything I would need to survive about ninety percent of the planet’s environments for at least a couple of days.

Molly, acting on her own initiative, had begun putting her own trouble kit together the same day she’d learned about mine. Except that her backpack was pink.

“You sure about this?” I asked her, pitching my voice low enough that Morgan wouldn’t hear.

She nodded. “He can’t stay there alone. You can’t stay with him. Neither can Thomas.”

I grunted. “Do I need to search your bag for candlesticks?”

She gave me a chagrined shake of her head.

“Don’t feel too bad, kid,” I told her. “He had a couple of hours to work you up to that. And he’s the guy who nearly cut your head off, during that mess around SplatterCon.”

“It wasn’t that,” she said quietly. “It’s what he said to you. What he’s done to you.”

I put my hand on her arm and squeezed gently.

She smiled faintly at me. “I’ve never . . . never really felt . . . hate before. Not like that.”

“Your emotions got the better of you. That’s all.”

“But it isn’t,” she insisted, folding her arms against her stomach, her shoulders hunching a little. “Harry, I’ve seen you all but kill yourself to help people who were in trouble. But for Morgan, that doesn’t matter. You’re just this . . . this thing that did something wrong once, and you’ll never, ever be anything else.”

Aha.

“Kid,” I said quietly, “maybe you should think about who you were really angry with back there.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I mean there’s a reason you snapped when he started in on me. Maybe the fact that he was being Morgan just happened to be coincidental.”

She blinked her eyes several times, but not fast enough to stop one tear.

“You did a bad thing once,” I said. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”

Two more tears fell. “What if it does?” She wiped at her cheeks with a brusque frustrated motion. “What if it does, Harry?”

I nodded. “Because if Morgan’s right, and I’m just a ticking time-bomb, and I’m trying to rehabilitate you, you haven’t got a chance in hell. I get it.”

She pressed her lips together, and it made her words sound stiff. “Just before Mouse knocked me down, I wanted to . . . to do things to Morgan. To his mind. To make him act differently. I was so angry, and it felt right.”

“Feeling something and acting on it are two different things.”

She shook her head. “But who would want to do that, Harry? What kind of monster would feel that?”

I slung the pack over one shoulder so that I could put my hands on either side of her face and turn her eyes to mine. Her tears made them very blue.

“The human kind. Molly, you are a good person. Don’t let anyone take that away from you. Not even yourself.”

She didn’t even try to stop the tears. Her lip quivered. Her eyes were wide and her cheeks were fever-warm under my fingers. “A-are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She bowed her head, and her shoulders shook. I leaned down to rest my forehead against hers. We stayed that way for a minute. “You’re okay,” I told her quietly. “You aren’t a monster. You’re gonna be all right, grasshopper.”

A series of sharp, rapping sounds interrupted us. I looked over my shoulder and found Morgan glowering at me. He held up a pocket watch—an honest to God gold pocket watch—and jabbed a forefinger at it impatiently.

“Jerk,” Molly mumbled, sniffling. “Big fat, grumpy jerk.”

“Yes. But he has a point. Tick-tock.”

She swiped a hand at her nose and collected herself. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The storage rental facility was located a couple of blocks from Deerfield Square in a fairly upscale suburban neighborhood north of Chicago proper. Most of the buildings nearby were residential, and it was tough to go more than a quarter of an hour without spotting a patrol car.

I’d picked it as the spot for my bolt hole for one reason: shady characters would stand out against the upper-middle-class background like mustard stains under a black light.

Granted, it would probably work even better if I wasn’t one of them.

I used my key at the security gate, and Thomas pulled the van around to my unit, a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. I unlocked the steel door and rolled it up while Thomas got Morgan out of the van. Molly followed, and when I beckoned, she wheeled Morgan into the storage space. Mouse got down out of the van and followed us. I rolled the door back down, and called wizard light to the amulet I held up in my right hand, until its blue-white glow filled the unit.

The interior of the place was mostly empty. There was a camp cot, complete with sleeping bag and pillow, placed more or less in the middle of the room, along with a footlocker I had filled with food, bottled water, candles, and supplies. A second footlocker sat next to the first one, and was filled with hardware and magical gear—a backup blasting rod, and all manner of useful little items one could use to accomplish a surprisingly broad spectrum of thaumaturgic workings. A camp toilet with a couple of jugs of cleaning liquid sat on the opposite side of the cot.

The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were covered in sigils, runes, and magical formulae. They weren’t proper wards, like the ones I had on my home, but they worked on the same principles. Without a threshold to build them upon, no single one of the formulae was particularly powerful—but there were lots of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet.

“Wow,” Molly said, staring slowly around her. “What is this place, Harry?”

“Bolt hole I set up last year, in case I needed someplace quiet where I wouldn’t get much company.”

Morgan was looking, too, though his face was pale and drawn with pain. He swept his eyes around and said, “What’s the mix?”

“Concealment and avoidance, mostly,” I replied. “Plus a Faraday cage.”

Morgan nodded, glancing around. “It looks adequate.”

“What’s that mean?” Molly asked me. “A Faraday what?”

“It’s what they call it when you shield equipment from electromagnetic pulses,” I told her. “You build a cage of conductive material around the thing you want to protect, and if a pulse sweeps over it, the energy is channeled into the earth.”

“Like a lightning rod,” Molly said.

“Pretty much,” I said. “Only instead of electricity, this is built to stop hostile magic.”

“Once,” Morgan corrected me primly.

I grunted. “Without a threshold to work with, there’s only so much you can do. The idea is to protect you from a surprise assault long enough for you to go out the back door and run.”

Molly glanced at the back of the storage unit and said, “There’s no door there, Harry. That’s a wall. It’s kind of the opposite of a door.”

Morgan nodded his head at the back corner of the space, where a large rectangular area on the floor was clear of any runes or other markings. “There,” he said. “Where’s it come out?”

“About three long steps from one of the marked trails the Council has right of passage on in Unseelie territory,” I said. I nodded at a cardboard box sitting in the rectangle. “It’s cold there. There’re a couple of coats in the box.”

“A passage to the Nevernever,” Molly breathed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Hopefully whoever was coming after me wouldn’t, either,” I said.

Morgan eyed me. “One can’t help noting,” he said, “that this place seems ideally suited to hiding and sheltering a fugitive from the Wardens.”

“Hunh,” I said. “Now that you mention it, yeah. Yeah it does seem kind of friendly to that sort of purpose.” I gave Morgan an innocent look. “Just an odd coincidence, I’m sure, since I happen to be one of those paranoid lunatics, myself.”

Morgan glowered.

“You came to me for a reason, Chuckles,” I said. “Besides. I wasn’t thinking about the Wardens nearly so much as I was . . .” I shook my head and shut my mouth.

“As who, Harry?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know who they are,” I said. “But they’ve been involved in several things lately. The Darkhallow, Arctis Tor, the White Court coup. They’re way too handy with magic. I’ve been calling them the Black Council.”

“There is no Black Council,” Morgan snapped, with the speed that could only have been born of reflex.

Molly and I traded a look.

Morgan let out an impatient breath. “Any actions that may have been taken are the work of isolated renegades,” he said. “There is no organized conspiracy against the White Council.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Gosh, I’d have thought you’d be right on board with the conspiracy thing.”

“The Council is not divided,” he said, his voice as hard and cold as I had ever heard it. “Because the moment we turn upon one another, we’re finished. There is no Black Council, Dresden.”

I lifted both eyebrows. “From my perspective, the Council’s been turning on me for most of my life,” I said. “And I’m a member. I have a robe and everything.”

“You,” Morgan spat, “are . . .” He almost seemed to be choking on something before he blew out a breath and finished, “. . . vastly irritating.”

I beamed at him. “That’s the Merlin’s line, isn’t it?” I said. “There is no conspiracy against the Council.”

“It is the position of the entire Senior Council,” Morgan shot back.

“Okay, smart guy,” I said. “Explain what happened to you.”

He glowered again, only with more purple.

I nodded sagely, then turned to Molly. “This place should protect you from most tracking spells,” I said. “And the avoidance wards should keep anyone from wandering by or asking any questions.”

Morgan made a growling noise.

“Suggestions, not compulsions,” I said, rolling my eyes. “They’re in common usage and you know it.”

“What do I do if someone does come?” she asked.

“Veil and run,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know how to open a way to the Nevernever, Harry. You haven’t shown me yet.”

“I can show her,” Morgan said.

Both of us stopped and blinked at him.

He was very still for a second and then said, “I can do it. If she watches, maybe she’ll learn something.” He glared at me. “But doors open both ways, Dresden. What if something comes in through it?”

Mouse went over to the open space and settled down about six inches away from it. He sighed once, shifted his weight a bit, and went to sleep again, though his ears twitched at every noise.

I went to the first footlocker and opened it, took out a boxed fruit drink, and passed it to him. “Your blood sugar’s getting low. It’s making you grumpy. But if you do get an unexpected visitor from the other side . . .” I went to the second locker, opened it, and drew out a pump-action shotgun, its barrel cut to well below the minimum legal length. I checked it, and passed the weapon to Molly. “It’s loaded with a mix of steel shot and rock salt. Between that and Mouse, it should discourage anything that comes through.”

“Right,” Molly said. She checked the weapon’s chamber and then worked the pump, chambering a shell. She double-checked the safety, and then nodded at me.

“You taught her guns,” Morgan said. “But not how to open passages to the Nevernever.”

“There’s enough trouble right here in the real world,” I said.

Morgan grunted. “True enough. Where are you going?”

“Only one place I can go.”

He nodded. “Edinburgh.”

I turned toward the door and opened it. I looked from Morgan with his juice box to Molly with her shotgun. “You two play nice.”

Chapter Thirteen

Wizards and technology don’t get on so well, and that makes travel sort of complicated. Some wizards seemed to be more of a bad influence on technology than others, and if any of them were harder on machinery than me, I hadn’t met them yet. I’d been on a jet a couple of times and had one bad experience—just one. After the plane’s computers and guidance system went bad, and we had to make an emergency landing on a tiny commercial airfield, I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

Buses were better, especially if you sat toward the back, but even they had problems. I hadn’t been on a bus trip longer than three or four hundred miles without winding up broken down next to the highway in the middle of nowhere. Cars could work out, especially if they were fairly old models—the fewer electronics involved, the better. Even those machines, though, tended to provide you with chronic problems. I’d never owned a car that ran more than maybe nine days in ten—and most of them were worse than that.

Trains and ships were the ideal, especially if you could keep yourself a good way from the engines. Most wizards, when they traveled, stuck with ships and trains. Either that or they cheated—like I was about to do.

Back at the beginning of the war with the Vampire Courts, the White Council, with the help of a certain wizard private investigator from Chicago who shall remain nameless, negotiated the use of Ways through the near reaches of the Nevernever controlled by the Unseelie Court. The Nevernever, the world of ghosts and spirits and fantastic beings of every description, exists alongside our own mortal reality—but it isn’t the same shape. That meant that in places, the mortal world touched upon the Nevernever at two points that could be very close together, while in the mortal realm, they were very far apart. In short, use of the Ways meant that anyone who could open a path between worlds could use a major shortcut.

In this case, it meant I could make the trip from Chicago, Illinois, to Edinburgh, Scotland, in about half an hour.

The closest entry point to where I wanted to go in the Nevernever was a dark alley behind a building that had once been used for meat packing. A lot of things had died in that building, not all of them cleanly and not all of them cows. There’s a dark sense of finality to the place, a sort of ephemeral quality of dread that hangs so lightly on the air that the unobservant might not notice it at all. In the middle of the alley, a concrete staircase led down to a door that was held shut with both boards and chains—talk about overkill.

I walked down the steps to the bottom of the stairs, closed my eyes for a moment, and extended my otherworldly senses, not toward the door, but toward the section of concrete beside it. I could feel the thinness of the world there, where energy pulsed and hummed just beneath the seemingly rigid surface of reality.

It was a hot night in Chicago, but it wouldn’t be on the Ways. I wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, and a couple of pairs of socks beneath my hiking shoes. My heavy leather duster had me sweating. I gathered up my will, reached out my hand, and with a whisper of “Aparturum,” I opened a Way between worlds.

Honestly, it sounds quite a bit more dramatic than it looks. The surface of the concrete wall rippled with a quick flickering of color and began to put out a soft glow. I took a deep breath, gripped my staff in both hands, and stepped directly forward into the concrete.

My flesh passed through what should have been stone, and I emerged in a dark wood that lay covered in frost and a thin layer of snow. At least this time the ground in Chicago had been more or less level with the ground in the Nevernever. Last time, I’d had a three-inch drop I hadn’t expected, and I’d fallen on my ass into the snow. No harm done, I suppose, but this part of the Nevernever was just chock-full of things you did not want to think you were clumsy or vulnerable.

I took my bearings with a quick look around. The woods were the same, all three times I’d been through them. A hillside sank down ahead of me, and climbed steadily into the night behind me. At the top of the small mountain I stood upon, I was told, was a narrow and bitterly cold pass that led into the interior of the Unseelie Mountains, to Mab’s stronghold of Arctis Tor. Below me, the land sank into foothills and then into plains, where Mab’s authority ended and that of Titania the Summer Queen began.

I stood at a crossroads—which was only sensible, since I’d arrived from Chicago, one of the great crossroads of the world. One trail led upslope and down. The other crossed it at almost perfect right angles, and ran along the face of the hillside. I took a left, following the face of the hillside in a counterclockwise direction, also known as widdershins, in the parlance of the locals. The trail ran between frozen trees, their branches bowed beneath their burden of frost and snow.

I moved quickly, but not quickly enough to slip and blow out an ankle or brain myself on a low-hanging branch. The White Council had Mab’s permission to move through the woods, but they were by no means safe.

I found that out for myself about fifteen minutes into my walk, when snow suddenly fell softly from the trees all around, and silent black shapes descended to encircle me. It happened quickly, and in perfect silence—maybe a dozen spiders the size of ponies alit upon the frozen ground or clung to the trunks and branches of the surrounding trees. They were smooth-surfaced, sharp-edged creatures, like orbweavers, long-limbed and graceful and deadly-looking. They moved with an almost delicate precision, their bodies of a color of grey and blue and white that blended flawlessly with the snowy night.

The spider who had come down onto the trail directly in front of me raised its two forelegs in warning, and revealed fangs longer than my forearm, dripping with milky-white venom.

“Halt, man-thing,” said the creature.

That was actually scarier than the mere appearance of economy-sized arachnids. Between its fangs, I could see a mouth moving—a mouth that looked disturbingly human. Its multiple eyes gleamed like beads of obsidian. Its voice was a chirping, buzzing thing. “Halt, he whose blood will warm us. Halt, intruder upon the Wood of the Winter Queen.”

I stopped and looked around the circle of spiders. None of them seemed to be particularly larger or smaller than the others. If I had to fight my way clear, there wasn’t any obvious weak link to exploit. “Greetings,” I said, as I did. “I am no intruder, honored hunters. I am a Wizard of the White Council, and I and my folk have the Queen’s permission to tread these paths.”

The air around me shivered with chitters and hisses and clicks.

“Man-things speak often with false tongues,” said the lead spider, its forelimbs thrashing the air in agitation.

I held up my staff. “I guess they always have one of these, too, huh?”

The spider hissed, and venom bubbled from the tips of its fangs. “Many a man-thing bears such a long stick, mortal.”

“Careful, legs,” I said. “I’m on speaking terms with Queen Mab herself. I don’t think you want to play it like this.”

The spider’s legs shifted in an undulating motion, and the spider rippled two or three feet closer to me. The other spiders all shifted, too, moving a bit nearer. I didn’t like that, not even a little. If one of them jumped, they’d be all over me—and there were just too many of the damn big things to defend myself against them effectively.

The spider laughed, the sound hollow and mocking. “Mortals do not speak to the Queen and live to tell the tale.”

“It lies,” hissed the other spiders, the phrase a low buzzing around me. “And its blood is warm.”

I eyed all those enormous fangs and had an acutely uncomfortable flashback to Morgan driving his straw through the top of that damn juice box.

The spider in front of me flowed a little to the left and a little to the right, the graceful motion intended to distract me from the fact that it had gotten about a foot closer to me. “Man-thing, how are we to know what you truly are?”

In my professional opinion, you rarely get handed a straight line that good.

I thrust the tip of my staff forward, along with my gathered will, focusing it into an area the size of my own clenched fist as I shouted, “Forzare!”

An invisible force hammered into the lead spider, right in its disturbing mouth. It lifted the huge beast off all eight of its feet, drove it fifteen feet backward through the air, and ended at the trunk of an enormous old oak. The spider smacked into it like an enormous water bottle, making a hideous splattering sound upon impact. It bounced off the tree and landed on the frozen ground, its legs all quivering and jerking spasmodically. Maybe three hundred pounds of snow shaken loose by the impact came plummeting down from the oak tree’s branches and half buried the body.

Everything went still and silent.

I narrowed my eyes and swept my gaze around the circle of monstrous arachnids. I said nothing.

The spider nearest its dead companion shifted its weight warily from leg to leg. Then, in a much quieter voice, it trilled, “Let the wizard pass.”

“Damn right let him pass,” I muttered under my breath. Then I strode forward as though I intended to smash anything else that got in my way.

The spiders scattered. I kept walking without slowing, breaking stride, or looking back. They didn’t know how fast my heart was beating or how my legs were trembling with fear. And as long as they didn’t, I would be just fine.

After a hundred yards or so, I did look back—only to see the spiders gathered over the body of their dead companion. They were wrapping it up in silk, their fangs twitching and jerking hungrily. I shuddered and my stomach twisted onto itself.

One thing you can count on when visiting the Nevernever: you don’t ever get bored.

I turned off the forest path onto a foot trail at a tree whose trunk had been carved with a pentacle. The trees turned into evergreens and crowded close to the trail. Things moved out of sight among the trees making small scuttling noises, and I could barely hear high-pitched whispers and sibilant voices coming from the forest around me. Creepy, but par for the course.

The path led up to a clearing in the woods. Centered in the clearing was a mound of earth about a dozen yards across and almost as high, thick with stones and vines. Massive slabs of rock formed the posts and lintel of a black doorway. A lone figure in a grey cloak stood beside the doorway, a lean and fit-looking young man with cheekbones sharp enough to slice bread and eyes of cobalt blue. Beneath the grey cloak, he wore an expensive dark blue cashmere suit, with a cream-colored shirt and a metallic copper-colored tie. A black bowler topped off the ensemble, and instead of a staff or a blasting rod, he bore a silver-headed walking cane in his right hand.

He was also holding the cane at full extension, pointed directly at me with narrowed, serious eyes as I came down the trail.

I stopped and waved a hand. “Easy there, Steed.”

The young man lowered the cane, and his face blossomed into a smile that made him look maybe ten years younger. “Ah,” he said. “Not too obvious a look, one hopes?”

“It’s a classic,” I said. “How you doing, Chandler?”

“I am freezing off my well-tailored ass,” Chandler said cheerily, in an elegant accent straight from Oxford. “But I endure thanks to excellent breeding, a background in preparatory academies, and metric tons of British fortitude.” Those intense blue eyes took a second look at me, and though his expression never changed, his voice gained a touch of concern. “How are you, Harry?”

“Been a long night,” I said, walking forward. “Aren’t there supposed to be five of you watching the door?”

“Five of me guarding the door? Are you mad? The sheer power of the concentrated fashion sense would obliterate visitors on sight.”

I burst out in a short laugh. “You must use your powers only for good?”

“Precisely, and I shall.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you here.”

“I only visited once,” I said. “And that was a few years ago, right after they drafted me.”

Chandler nodded soberly. “What brings you out of Chicago?”

“I heard about Morgan.”

The young Warden’s expression darkened. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s . . . hard to believe. You’re here to help find him?”

“I’ve found murderers before,” I said. “I figure I can do it again.” I paused. For whatever reason, Chandler was almost always to be found working near the Senior Council. If anyone would know the scuttlebutt, he would. “Who do you think I should talk to about it?”

“Wizard Liberty is coordinating the search,” he replied. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind is investigating the scene of the murder. Ancient Mai is getting the word out to the rest of the Council to convene an emergency session.”

I nodded. “What about Wizard McCoy?”

“Standing by with a strike team, when last I heard,” Chandler replied. “He’s one of the few who can reasonably expect to overpower Morgan.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Morgan’s a pain in the ass, all right.” I shivered and stamped my feet against the cold. “I’ve got some information they’re going to want. Where do I find them?”

Chandler considered. “Ancient Mai should be in the Crystalline Hall, Wizard Liberty is in the Offices, Wizard McCoy should be somewhere near the War Room and Wizard Listens-to-Wind and the Merlin are in LaFortier’s chambers.”

“How about the Gatekeeper?” I asked.

Chandler shrugged. “Gatekeeping, I daresay. The only wizard I see less frequently than he is you.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Chandler.” I faced him soberly and put a formal solemnity in my voice as I adhered to security protocols more than five centuries old. “I seek entry to the Hidden Halls, O Warden. May I pass?”

He eyed me for a moment and gave me a slow, regal nod, his eyes twinkling. “Be welcome to the seat of the White Council. Enter in peace and depart in peace.”

I nodded to him and walked forward through the archway.

I’d come in peace, sure. But if the killer was around and caught onto what I was doing, I wouldn’t depart in peace.

Just in pieces.

Chapter Fourteen

The Hidden Halls of Edinburgh were the redoubt and fortress of the White Council of Wizardry from time immemorial. Well, actually, that last bit isn’t true. It’s been our headquarters for a little under five hundred years.

The White Council has existed since pre-Roman times, in one form or another, and its headquarters has shifted from time to time, and place to place. Alexandria, Carthage, Rome—we were in the Vatican in the early days of the Church, believe it or not—Constantinople and Madrid have all been home to the Council’s leadership at one time or another—but since the end of the Middle Ages, they’ve been located in the tunnels and catacombs hewn from the unyielding stone of Scotland.

Edinburgh’s tunnel network is even more extensive than those beneath the city of Chicago, and infinitely more stable and sturdy. The main headquarters of the complex is located deep beneath the Auld Rock itself—Castle Edinburgh, where kings and queens, lords and ladies, have defied, besieged, betrayed and slaughtered one another since pre-Christian times.

There’s a reason a fortress has been there for as long as mankind can remember—it is one of the world’s largest convergences of ley lines. Ley lines are the natural currents of magical energy running through the world. They are the most powerful means of employing magic known to man—and the lines that intersect in the earth deep below the Auld Rock represent a staggering amount of raw power waiting to be tapped by someone skilled or foolish enough.

I walked over a ley line about three steps after I entered the Hidden Halls, and I could feel its shuddering energy beneath my feet, rushing by like an enormous, silent subterranean river. I walked a bit faster for a few paces, irrationally nervous about being swept off of my feet by it, until I could only sense it as a dim and receding vibration in the ground.

I didn’t need to call up a light. Crystals set in the walls glowed in a rainbow of gentle colors, bathing the whole place in soft, ambient illumination. The tunnel was ancient, worn, chilly, and damp. Water always seemed ready to condense into a half-frozen dew the instant it was given the opportunity by an exhaled breath or a warm body.

The tunnel was about as wide as my spread arms, and maybe eight feet high. The walls were lined with bas-relief carvings in the stone. Some of them were renditions of scenes of what I’d been told were the historical high points of the White Council. Since I didn’t recognize anyone in the images, I didn’t have much context for them, so they mostly just looked like the crudely drawn cast of thousands you see on the Bayeux Tapestry. The rest of the carvings were wards—seriously world-class heavyweight wards. I didn’t know what they did, but I could sense the deadly power behind them, and I tread carefully as I passed deeper into the complex.

The entry tunnel from the Nevernever was more than a quarter of a mile long, sloping gently downward the whole way. There were metal gates every couple of hundred yards, each of them manned by a Warden backed up by a pair of Ancient Mai’s temple-dog statues.

The things were three feet high at the shoulder, and looked like escapees from a Godzilla movie. Carved from stone, the blocky figures sat inert and immobile—but I knew that they could come to dangerous life at an instant’s notice. I tried to think about what it might be like to be facing a pair of aggressive temple-dog statues in the relatively narrow hallway. I decided that I’d rather wrestle an oncoming subway locomotive. At least then it would be over quickly.

I exchanged polite greetings with the Wardens on guard until I passed the last checkpoint and entered the headquarters proper. Then I took a folded map from my duster pocket, squinted at it, and got my bearings. The layout of the tunnels was complex, and it would be easy to get lost.

Where to begin?

If the Gatekeeper had been around, I would have sought him out first. Rashid had been my supporter and ally on more than one occasion, God knew why. I wasn’t on what anyone would call good terms with the Merlin. I barely knew Martha Liberty or Listens-to-Wind. I found Ancient Mai to be a very scary little person. That left Ebenezar.

I headed for the War Room.

It took me the better part of half an hour to get there. Like I said, the tunnel complex is enormous—and after the way the war had reduced the ranks of the Council, it seemed lonelier and emptier than ever. My footsteps echoed hollowly back from stone walls for minutes at a time, unaccompanied by any other sound.

I felt intensely uncomfortable as I paced the Hidden Halls. I think it was the smell that did it. When I’d been a young man, hauled before the Council to be tried as a violator of the First Law of Magic, they had brought me to Edinburgh. The musty, wet, mineral smell of the place had been almost all I knew while I had waited, hooded and bound, in a cell for a full day. I remember being horribly cold and tortured by the knots my muscles worked themselves into after so many hours tied hand and foot. I remember feeling more alone than ever in my life, while I awaited whatever was going to happen.

I had been scared. So scared. I was sixteen.

It was the same smell, and that scent had the power to animate the corpses of some of my darkest memories and bring them lurching back into the front of my thoughts. Psychological necromancy.

“Brains,” I moaned to myself, drawing the word out.

If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.

In a stroke of improbable logic, the War Room was located between the central chambers of the Senior Council and the barracks rooms of the Wardens, which included a small kitchen. The smell of baking bread cut through the musty dampness of the tunnel, and I felt my steps quickening.

I passed the barracks, which would doubtless be empty, for the most part. Most of the Wardens would be out hunting Morgan, as evidenced by the skeleton guard I’d seen at Chandler’s post. I took the next left, nodded to the very young Warden on guard, opened a door, and passed into the War Room of the White Council.

It was a spacious vault, about a hundred feet square, but the heavy arches and pillars that supported the ceiling took away a lot of that room. Illuminating crystals glowed more brightly here, to make reading easier. Bulletin boards on rolling frames took up spaces between pillars, and were covered by maps and pins and tiny notes. Most of them had one or more chalkboards next to them, which were covered in diagrams, cryptic, brief notation, and cruder maps. Completely ordinary office furniture occupied the back half of the vault, broken up into cubicles.

Typewriters clacked and dinged. Men and women of the administrative staff, wizards all, moved back and forth through the room, speaking quietly, writing, typing, and filing. A row of counters on the front wall of the room supported coffeepots warmed by propane flames, and several well-worn couches and chairs rested nearby.

Half a dozen veteran Wardens lay sprawled on couches napping, sat in chairs reading books, or played chess with an old set upon a coffee table. Their staves and cloaks were all at hand, ready to be taken up at an instant’s notice. They were dangerous, hard men and women, the Old Guard, survivors of the deadly days of the early Vampire War. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross any of them.

Sitting in a chair slightly apart from them, staring at the flames crackling in a rough stone fireplace, sat my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy. He held a cup of coffee in his thick, work-scarred fingers. A lot of the more senior wizards in the Council had a sense of propriety they took way too seriously, always dressed to the nines, always immaculate and proper. Ebenezar wore an old pair of denim overalls with a flannel shirt and leather work boots that could have been thirty or forty years old. His silver hair, what he had left of it, was in disarray, as if he’d just woken from a restless sleep. He was aging, even by wizard standards, but his shoulders were still wide, and the muscles in his forearms were taut and visible beneath age-spotted skin. He stared at the fire through wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark eyes unfocused, one foot slowly tapping the floor.

I leaned my staff against a handy wall, got myself a cup of coffee, and settled down in the chair beside Ebenezar’s. I sipped coffee, let the warmth of the fire drive some of the wet chill out of my bones, and waited.

“They always have good coffee here,” Ebenezar said a few moments later.

“And they don’t call it funny names,” I said. “It’s just coffee. Not frappalattegrandechino.”

Ebenezar snorted and sipped from his cup. “Nice trip in?”

“Got tripped up by someone’s thugs on the Winter trail.”

He grimaced. “Aye. We’ve had our people harassed several times, the past few months. How are you, Hoss?”

“Uninformed, sir,” I said.

He eyed me obliquely. “Mmmm. I did as I thought best, boy. I won’t apologize for it.”

“Don’t expect you to,” I said.

He nodded. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?”

He shook his head. “I won’t take you on the strike team, Hoss.”

“You think I can’t pull my weight?”

He turned his eyes to me. “You have too much history with Morgan. This has got to be dispassionate, and you’re just about the least dispassionate person I know.”

I grunted. “You’re sure it was Morgan who did LaFortier?”

His eyes returned to the fire. “I would never have expected it. But too many things are in place.”

“No chance it’s a frame?”

Ebenezar blinked and shot me a look. “Why do you ask?”

“Because if the ass is finally getting his comeuppance, I want to make sure it’s on the level,” I said.

He nodded a couple of times. Then he said, “I don’t see how it could have been done. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, odds are it’s a damn duck. Occam’s razor, Hoss.”

“Someone could have gotten into his head,” I said.

“At his age?” Ebenezar asked. “Ain’t likely.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“As a mind grows older, it gets established,” he said, “more set in its ways. Like a willow tree. Supple when it’s young, but gets more brittle as it ages. Once you’ve been around a century or so, it generally ain’t possible to bend a mind without breaking it.”

“Generally?”

“You can’t push it that far,” Ebenezar said. “Push a loyal man into betraying everything he believes in? You’d drive him insane before you forced him into that. Which means that Morgan made a choice.”

“If he did it.” I shook my head. “I just keep asking myself who profits most if we axe Morgan ourselves.”

Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s ugly all the way around,” he said, “but there it is. I reckon you ’gazed him, Hoss, but it ain’t a lie detector. You know that, too.”

I fell silent for a while and sipped coffee. Then I asked, “Just curious. Who holds the sword when you catch him? It’s usually Morgan who does the head chopping.”

“Captain Luccio, I reckon,” Ebenezar said. “Or someone she appoints. But she ain’t the kind to foist something like that off on a subordinate.”

I got treated to the mental image of Anastasia decapitating her old apprentice. Then of me, taking Molly’s head. I shuddered. “That sucks.”

Ebenezar kept staring at the fire, and his eyes seemed to sink into his head, as if he had aged twenty years right in front of me. “Aye.”

The door to the War Room opened and a slender, reedy little wizard in a tan tweed suit entered, lugging a large portfolio. His short white hair was curled tightly against his head and his fingers were stained with ink. There was a pencil tucked behind one ear, and a fountain pen behind the other. He stopped and peered around the room for a moment, spotted Ebenezar, and bustled right on over.

“Pardon, Wizard McCoy,” he said. “If you have a moment, I need you to sign off on a few papers.”

Ebenezar put his coffee on the floor and accepted a manila folder from the little guy, along with the fountain pen. “What this time, Peabody?”

“First, power of attorney for the office in Jakarta to purchase the building for the new safe house,” Wizard Peabody said, opening the folder and turning a page. Ebenezar scanned it, then signed it. Peabody turned more pages. “Very good. Then an approval on the revision of wages for Wardens—initial there, please, thank you. And the last one is approval for ensuring Wizard LaFortier’s holdings are transferred to his heirs.”

“Only three?” Ebenezar asked.

“The others are eyes-only, sir.”

Ebenezar sighed. “I’ll drop by my office when I’m free to sign them.”

“Sooner is better, sir,” Peabody said. He blinked and seemed to notice me for the first time. “Ah. Warden Dresden. What brings you here?”

“I thought I’d come see if someone wanted help taking Morgan down,” I drawled.

Peabody gulped. “I . . . see.”

“Has Injun Joe found anything?” Ebenezar asked.

Peabody’s voice became laced with diffident disapproval as he answered. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind is deep in preparations for investigative divination, sir.”

“So, no,” I said.

Peabody sniffed. “Not yet. Between him and the Merlin, I’m sure they’ll turn up precisely how Warden Morgan managed to bypass Senior Council security.” He glanced at me and said, in a perfectly polite tone, “They are both wizards of considerable experience and skill, after all.”

I glowered at Peabody, but I couldn’t think of a good dig before he had accepted the papers and pen back from Ebenezar. Peabody nodded to him and said, “Thank you, sir.”

Ebenezar nodded absently as he picked up his coffee cup, and Peabody bustled out again.

“Paper-pushing twit,” I muttered under my breath.

“Invaluable paper-pushing twit,” Ebenezar corrected me. “What he does isn’t dramatic, but his organizational skills have been a critical asset since the outbreak of the war.”

I snorted. “Bureaucromancer.”

Ebenezar smiled faintly as he finished his cup, the first couple of fingertips of his right hand stained with blue ink. Then he rose and stretched, drawing several faint popping sounds from his joints. “Can’t fight a war without clerks, Hoss.”

I stared down at my half cup of coffee. “Sir,” I said quietly. “Speaking hypothetically. What if Morgan is innocent?”

He frowned down at me for a long moment. “I thought you wanted a piece of him.”

“I’ve got this weird tic where I don’t want to watch wrongly accused men beheaded.”

“Well, naturally you do. But, Hoss, you’ve got to underst—” Ebenezar froze abruptly and his eyes widened. They went distant with thought for a moment, and I could all but hear gears turning in his head.

His eyes snapped back to mine and he drew in a slow breath, speaking in a murmur. “So that’s it. You’re sure?”

I nodded my head once.

“Hell’s bells,” the old man sighed. “You’d best start asking your questions a lot more careful than that, Hoss.” He lowered his chin and looked at me over the rims of his spectacles. “Two heads fall as fast as one. You understand?”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t know what I can do for you,” he said. “I’ve got my foot nailed to the floor here until Morgan’s located.”

“Assuming it’s not a duck,” I said, “where do I start looking?”

He pursed his lips for a moment. Then he nodded slowly and said, “Injun Joe.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Senior Council members, as it turned out, do not live like paupers.

After I passed through still more security checkpoints, the stone hallway yielded to a hall the size of a ballroom that looked like something out of Versailles. A white marble floor with swirls of gold in it was matched in color to elegant white marble columns. A waterfall fell from the far wall, into a pool around which grew a plethora of plants, from grass to roses to small trees, forming a surprisingly complex little garden. The faint sound of wind chimes drifted through the air, and the golden light that poured down from crystals in the ceiling was indistinguishable from sunlight. Birds sang in the garden, and I saw the quick, darting black shape of a nightingale slalom between the pillars and settle in one of the trees.

A number of expensive, comfortable-looking sets of furniture were spaced in and near the garden, like the sets you sometimes see at the pricier hotels. A small table against one wall was covered with an eclectic buffet of foods, everything from cold cuts to what looked like the sautéed tentacles of an octopus, and a wet bar stood next to it, ready to protect the Senior Council members from the looming threat of dehydration.

A balcony ran around the entire chamber, ten feet up, and doors opened onto the Senior Council members’ private chambers. I paced through the enormous, grandiose space of the Ostentatiatory to a set of stairs that swept grandly up one wall. I looked around until I spotted which door had a pair of temple-dog statues standing guard along with a sleepy-looking young man in a Warden’s cape and a walking cast. I walked around the balcony and waved a hand at him.

I was just about to speak when both temple-dog constructs abruptly moved, turning their heads toward me with a grating sound of stone sliding against stone.

I stopped in my tracks, and held my hands up a little. “Nice doggy.”

The young Warden peered at me and said something in a language I didn’t recognize. He looked like someone from eastern Asia, though I couldn’t have guessed at his nation of origin. He stared at me for a second, and I recognized him abruptly as one of the young men on Ancient Mai’s personal staff. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been frozen half to death, trying to bear a message to Queen Mab. Now a broken ankle had presumably kept him from joining the search for Morgan.

Some people are just born lucky, I guess.

“Good evening,” I said to him, in Latin, the official tongue of the White Council. “How are you?”

Lucky stared at me for another moment before he said, “We are in Scotland. It is morning, sir.”

Right. My half hour walk had taken me six time zones ahead. “I need to speak with Wizard Listens-to-Wind.”

“He is occupied,” Lucky told me. “He is not to be disturbed.”

“Wizard McCoy sent me to speak to him,” I countered. “He felt it was important.”

Lucky narrowed his eyes until they were almost closed. Then he said, “Wait here, please. Do not move.”

The temple dogs continued staring at me. Okay, I knew they weren’t really staring. They were just rock. But for essentially mindless constructs, they had an intense gaze.

“That will not be a problem,” I told him.

He nodded and vanished through the door. I waited for ten uncomfortable minutes before he returned, touched each dog lightly on the head, and nodded to me. “Go in.”

I took a wary step, watching the constructs, but they didn’t react. I nodded and went on by them, trying not to look like a nervous cat as I passed from the Ostentatiatory into LaFortier’s chambers.

The first room I came to was a study, or an office, or possibly a curio shop. There was a massive desk carved out of some kind of unstained wood, though use and age had darkened the front edge, the handles of the drawers, and the area immediately in front of the modern office chair. A blotter lay precisely centered on the desk, with a set of four matching pens laid in a neat row. Shelves groaned with books, drums, masks, pelts, old weaponry, and dozens of other tokens that looked as though they came from exotic lands. The wall spaces between the shelves were occupied by shields fronted with two crossed weapons—a Norman kite shield with crossed broadswords, a Zulu buffalo-hide shield with crossed assegais, a Persian round shield with a long spike in its center with crossed scimitars, and many others. I knew museums that would declare Mardi Gras in the galleries if they could get their hands on a collection half that rich and varied.

A door at the far end of the study led into what was evidently a bedroom. I could see a dresser and the foot of a covered bed approximately the size of a railroad car.

I could also see red-black droplets of blood on the walls.

“Come on, Harry Dresden,” called a quiet, weathered voice from the bedroom. “We’re at a stopping point and waiting on you.”

I walked into the bedroom and found myself standing in a crime scene.

The stench hit me first. LaFortier had been dead for days, and the second I crossed the threshold into the room, the odor of decay and death flooded my nose and mouth. He lay on the floor near the bed. Blood was sprinkled everywhere. His throat gaped wide-open, and he was covered in a black-brown crust of dried blood. There were defensive wounds on his hands, miniature versions of the slash on his throat. There might have been stab wounds on his torso, under the mess, but I couldn’t be sure.

I closed my eyes for a second, swallowed down my urge to throw up, and looked around the rest of the room.

A perfect circle of gold paint had been inscribed on the floor around the body, with white candles burning at five equidistant points. Incense burned at five more points halfway between the candles, and take it from me—the scent of sandalwood doesn’t complement that of a rotting corpse. It just makes it more unpleasant.

I stood staring down at LaFortier. He had been a bald man, a little over average height, and cadaverously skinny. He didn’t look skinny now. The corpse had begun to bloat. The front of his shirt was stretched tight against its buttons. His back was arched and his hands had locked into claws. His teeth were bared in a grimace.

“He died hard,” said the weathered voice, and “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind stepped out of a doorway that led to a bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. His long hair was grey-white, with a few threads of black in it. His leathery skin was the ruddy bronze of a Native American complexion exposed to plenty of sunshine, and his eyes were dark and glittering beneath white brows. He wore faded blue jeans, moccasin boots, and an old Aerosmith T-shirt. A fringed leather bag hung from a belt that ran slantwise across his body, and a smaller, similar bag hung from a thong around his neck. “Hello, Harry Dresden.”

I bowed my head to him respectfully. Injun Joe was generally regarded as the most skilled healer on the White Council, and maybe in the world. He had earned doctoral degrees in medicine from twenty universities over the years, and he went back to school every decade or two to help him stay current with modern practice. “Went down fighting,” I agreed, nodding to LaFortier.

Injun Joe studied the body for a moment, his eyes sad. Then he said, “I’d rather go in my sleep, I think.” He glanced back at me. “What about you?”

“I want to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex with identical triplet cheerleaders,” I said.

He gave me a grin that briefly stripped a century or two of care and worry from his face. “I’ve known a lot of kids who wanted to live forever.” The smile faded as he looked back to the dead man. “Maybe someday that will happen. But maybe not. Dying is part of being alive.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that. I was quiet for a minute. “What are you setting up here?”

“His death left a mark,” the old wizard replied. “We’re going to reassemble the psychic residue into an image.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Is . . . that even possible?”

“Normally, no,” Injun Joe said. “But this room is surrounded on all sides by wards. We know what they’re all supposed to look like. That means we can extrapolate where the energy came from by what impact it had on the wards. It’s also why we haven’t moved the body.”

I thought about it for a minute. What Injun Joe was describing was possible, I decided, but only barely. It would be something like trying to assemble an image illuminated by a single flash of light by backtracking how the light in the flash had all bounced around the room. The amount of focus, concentration, and the sheer mental process that would be involved in imagining the spell that could reassemble that image were staggering.

“I thought this was open and shut already,” I said.

“The evidence is conclusive,” Injun Joe said.

“Then why are you bothering with this . . . this . . . thing?”

Injun Joe looked at me steadily and didn’t say anything.

“The Merlin,” I said. “He doesn’t think Morgan did it.”

“Whether he did it or not,” Injun Joe said, “Morgan was the Merlin’s right hand. If he is tried and found guilty, the Merlin’s influence, credibility, and power will wane.”

I shook my head. “Gotta love politics.”

“Don’t be a child,” Injun Joe said quietly. “The current balance of power was largely established by the Merlin. If he is undone as the leader of the Council, it will cause chaos and instability across the supernatural world.”

I thought about that for a minute. Then I asked, “You think he’s going to try to fake something?”

Injun Joe didn’t react for a moment, and then he shook his head slowly and firmly. “I won’t let him.”

“Why not?”

“Because LaFortier’s death has changed everything.”

“Why?”

Injun Joe nodded toward the study. “LaFortier was the member of the Council with the most contacts outside of the Western nations,” he said. “Many, many members of the Council come from Asia, Africa, South America—most of them from small, less powerful nations. They feel that the White Council ignores their needs, their opinions. LaFortier was their ally, the only member of the Senior Council who they felt treated them fairly.”

I folded my arms. “And the Merlin’s right-hand man killed him.”

“Whether Morgan is guilty or not, they think he did it, possibly on the Merlin’s orders,” Injun Joe said. “If he is found innocent and set free, matters could turn ugly. Very ugly.”

My stomach turned again. “Civil war.”

Injun Joe sighed and nodded.

Fantastic.

“Where do you stand?” I asked him.

“I would like to say that I stood with the truth,” he said, “but I cannot. The Council could survive the loss of Morgan without falling to pieces, even if it means a period of chaos while things settle out.” He shook his head. “A civil war would certainly destroy us.”

“So Morgan did it, and that’s all there is to it,” I said quietly.

“If the White Council falls, who will stand between humanity and those who would prey upon it?” He shook his head, and his long braid gently bumped his back. “I respect Morgan, but I cannot permit that to happen. He is one man balanced against mankind.”

“So it’s going to be Morgan, when you’re finished,” I said. “No matter who it really is.”

Injun Joe bowed his head. “I . . . doubt that it will work. Even with the Merlin’s expertise.”

“What if it does? What if it shows you another killer? You start picking who lives and who dies, and to hell with the truth?”

Injun Joe turned his dark eyes to me, and his voice became quiet and harder than stone. “Once, I watched the tribe I was expected to guide and protect be destroyed, Harry Dresden. I did so because my principles held that it was wrong for the Council or its members to involve itself in manipulating the politics of mortals. I watched and restrained myself, until it was too late for me to make a difference. When I did that, I chose who would live and who would die. My people died for my principles.” He shook his head. “I will not make that mistake again.”

I looked away from him, and remained silent.

“If you would excuse me,” he said, and walked from the room.

Hell’s bells.

I had been hoping to enlist Injun Joe’s aid—but I hadn’t counted on the additional political factors. I didn’t think he’d try to stop me if he knew what I was up to, but he certainly wasn’t going to help. The more I dug, the messier this thing kept getting. If Morgan was vindicated, doom. If he wasn’t vindicated, doom.

Doom, doom, and doom.

Damn.

I couldn’t even be angry at Injun Joe. I understood his position. Hell, if it was me on the Senior Council and I was the one making the call, I wasn’t completely confident that I wouldn’t react the same way.

My headache started coming on again.

How the hell was I supposed to do the right thing if there wasn’t a right thing?

Chapter Sixteen

I stared at LaFortier’s corpse for a moment longer, shook my head, and then pulled one of those disposable cameras you can get from a vending machine out of my duster pocket. I walked around the room snapping pictures of the body, the blood splatters, and the broken bits of furniture. I ran through the entire role of film, making the most complete record of the scene that I could, and then pocketed the camera again and turned to leave LaFortier’s chambers.

Back in the Ostentatiatory, I heard voices drifting up from below. I nodded pleasantly to Lucky, who gave me an inscrutable look, and walked to the balcony railing.

Listens-to-Wind and the Merlin were standing by the buffet table, speaking quietly. Peabody hovered in the background, carrying a different set of folders, ledgers, and pens.

I paused for a moment to Listen. It’s a trick I picked up somewhere along the line—not really magic, per se, as much as it is turning my mental focus completely to my sense of hearing.

“. . . to find out the truth,” the Merlin was saying as he loaded up a plate with tiny sandwiches and wedges of cheese and fresh green grapes. “Surely you have no objection to that.”

“I think the truth is already well established,” Listens-to-Wind replied quietly. “We’re just wasting time here. We should be focusing on controlling the fallout.”

The Merlin was a tall man, regal of bearing, with a long white beard and long white hair to go with it—every inch the wizard’s wizard. He wore a blue robe and a silver circlet about his brow, and his staff was an elegant length of pure white wood, completely free of any marking. He paused in loading his plate and regarded Injun Joe with a level gaze. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Injun Joe Listens-to-Wind sighed and held up his hands palms forward in a conciliatory gesture. “We’re ready to begin.”

“Let me get some food in me and I’ll be right in.”

“Ahem,” Peabody said diffidently. “Actually, Wizard Listens-to-Wind, if you could sign a few papers for me while the Merlin eats, it would be greatly appreciated. There are two files on your desk that need your approval and I have three . . .” He paused and began to juggle the load in his arms until he could peer into a folder. “No four, four others here with me.”

Injun Joe sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Come on.” The two of them walked toward the stairs leading up to the balcony, turned the opposite way I had when they reached the top, and entered a chamber on the far side of the room.

I waited until they were gone to descend the staircase to the ground level.

The Merlin had seated himself in the nearest group of chairs and was eating his sandwiches. He froze for a second as he saw me, and then smoothly resumed his meal. Funny. I didn’t like the Merlin much more than I would a case of flaming gonorrhea, but I had never seen him in this context before. I’d always seen him at the head of a convened Council, and as this remote and unapproachable figure of unyielding authority and power.

I’d never even considered the notion that he might eat sandwiches.

I was about to go on past him, but instead swerved and came to a stop standing over him.

He continued eating, apparently unconcerned, until he’d finished the sandwich. “Come to gloat, have you, Dresden?” he asked.

“No,” I said quietly. “I’m here to help you.”

He dropped the bit of cheese he’d been about to bite into. It fell to the floor, unnoticed, as his eyes narrowed, regarding me suspiciously. “Excuse me?”

I bared my teeth in a cold little smile. “I know. It’s like having a cheese grater shoved against my gums, just saying it.”

He stared at me for a silent minute before taking in a slow breath, settling back into the chair, and regarding me with steady blue eyes. “Why should I believe you would do any such thing?”

“Because your balls are in a vise and I’m the only one who can pull them out,” I said.

He arched an elegant silver eyebrow.

“Okay,” I said. “That came out a little more homoerotic than I intended.”

“Indeed,” said the Merlin.

“But Morgan can’t stay hidden forever and you know it. They’ll find him. His trial will last about two seconds. Then he falls down and breaks his crown and your political career comes tumbling after.”

The Merlin seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he shrugged a shoulder. “I think it’s far more likely that you will work very, very hard to make sure he dies.”

“I like to think I work smarter, not harder,” I said. “If I want him dead, all I need to do is stand around and applaud. It isn’t as though I can make his case any worse.”

“Oh,” said the Merlin. “I’m not so certain. You have vast talents in that particular venue.”

“He’s already being hunted. Half the Council is howling for his blood. From what I hear, all the evidence is against him—and anything I find out about him is going to be tainted against him by our antagonistic past.” I shrugged. “At this point, I can’t do any more damage. So what have you got to lose?”

A small smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Let’s assume, for a moment, that I agree. What do you want from me?”

“A copy of his file,” I said. “Everything you’ve found out about LaFortier’s death, and how Morgan pulled it off. All of it.”

“And what do you intend to do with it?” the Merlin asked.

“I thought I’d use the information to find out who killed LaFortier,” I said.

“Just like that.”

I paused to think for a minute. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

The Merlin took another bite of cheese and chewed it deliberately. “If my own investigations yield fruit,” he said, “I won’t need your help.”

“The hell you won’t,” I said. “Everyone knows your interests are going to lie in protecting Morgan. Anything you turn up to clear him is going to be viewed with suspicion.”

“Whereas your antagonism with Morgan is well-known,” the Merlin mused. “Anything you find in his favor will be viewed as the next best thing to divine testimony.” He tilted his head and stared at me. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Maybe I don’t think he did it.”

His eyebrows lifted in amusement that never quite became a smile.

“And the fact that the man who died was one of those whose hand was set against you when you were yourself held in suspicion has nothing to do with it.”

“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “There you go. There’s my self-centered, petty, vengeful motivation for wanting to help Morgan out. Because it serves that dead bastard LaFortier right.”

The Merlin considered me for another long moment, and then shook his head. “There is a condition.”

“A condition,” I said. “Before you will agree to let me help you get your ass out of the fire.”

He gave me a bleak smile. “My ass is reasonably comfortable where it is. This is hardly my first crisis, Warden.”

“And yet you haven’t told me to buzz off.”

He lifted a finger, a gesture reminiscent of a fencer’s salute. “Touché. I acknowledge that it is, technically, possible for you to prove useful.”

“Gosh, I’m glad I decided to be gracious and offer my aid. In fact, I’m feeling so gracious, I’m even willing to listen to your condition.”

He shook his head slowly. “It simply isn’t sufficient to prove that Morgan is innocent. The traitor within our ranks is real. He must be found. Someone must be held accountable for what happened to LaFortier—and not just for the sake of the Council’s membership. Our enemies must know that there are consequences to such actions.”

I nodded. “So not only prove Morgan innocent, but find the guy who did it, too. Maybe I can set the whole thing to music and do a little dance while I’m at it.”

“I feel obligated to point out that you approached me, Dresden.” He gave me his brittle smile again. “The situation must be dealt with cleanly and decisively if we are to avoid chaos.” He spread his hands. “If you can’t present that sort of resolution to the problem, then this conversation never happened.” His eyes hardened. “And I will expect your discretion.”

“You’d hang your own man out to dry. Even though you know he’s innocent.”

His eyes glittered with a sudden cold fire, and I had to work not to flinch. “I will do whatever is necessary. Bear that in mind as you ‘help’ me.”

A door opened upstairs, and in a few seconds Peabody began a precarious descent of the stairs, balancing his ledgers and folders as he did.

“Samuel,” the Merlin said, his eyes never leaving me. “Be so good as to provide Warden Dresden with a complete copy of the file on LaFortier’s murder.”

Peabody stopped before the Merlin, blinking. “Ah. Yes, of course, sir. Right away.” He glanced at me. “If you would come this way, Warden?”

“Dresden,” the Merlin said in a pleasant tone. “If this is some sort of ruse, you would be well-advised to be sure I never learn of it. My patience with you wears thin.”

The Merlin was generally considered to be the most capable wizard on the planet. The simple words with their implied threat were almost chilling.

Almost.

“I’m sure you’ll last long enough for me to help you out of this mess, Merlin.” I smiled at him and held up my hand, palm up, fingers spread, as if holding an orange in them. “Balls,” I said. “Vise. Come on, Peabody.”

Peabody blinked at me as I swept past him on the way to the door, his mouth opening and closing silently several times. Then he made a few vague, sputtering sounds and hurried to catch up with me.

I glanced back at the Merlin as I reached the door.

I could clearly see his cold, flat blue eyes burning with fury while he sat in apparent relaxation and calm. The fingers of his right hand twitched in a violent little spasm that did not seem to touch the rest of his body. For an instant, I had to wonder just how desperate he had to be to accept my help. I had to wonder how smart it was to goad him like that.

And I had to wonder if that apparent calm and restrained exterior was simply a masterful control of his emotions—or if, under the pressure, it had become some kind of quiet, deadly madness.

Damn Morgan, for showing up at my door.

And damn me, for being fool enough to open it.

Chapter Seventeen

Peabody went into an immaculate office lined with shelves bearing books arranged with flawless precision, grouped by height and color. Many of the shelves were loaded with binders presumably full of files and documents, similarly organized, in a dazzling array of hues. I guess it takes all kinds of colors to make a bureaucratic rainbow.

I started to follow him inside, but he turned on me with a ferocious glare. “My office is a bastion of order, Warden Dresden. You have no place in it.”

I looked down at him for a second. “If I was a sensitive guy, that would hurt my feelings.”

He gave me a severe look over his spectacles and said, as if he thought the words were deadly venom and might kill me, “You are an untidy person.”

I put my hand over my heart, grinning at him. “Ow.”

The tips of his ears turned red. He turned around stiffly and walked into the office. He opened a drawer and started jerking binders out of it with more force than was strictly necessary.

“I read your book, by the way,” I said.

He looked up at me and then back down. He slapped a binder open.

“The one about the Erlking?” I said. “The collected poems and essays?”

He took a folder out of the binder, his back stiff.

“The Warden from Bremen said you got the German wrong on the title,” I continued. “That must have been kind of embarrassing, huh? I mean, it’s been published for like a hundred years or something. Must eat at you.”

“German,” said Peabody severely, “is also untidy.” He walked over to me with the folder, a pad of paper, an inkwell, and a quill. “Sign here.”

I reached out for the quill with my right hand, and seized the folder with my left. “Sorry. No autographs.”

Peabody nearly dropped the inkwell, and scowled at me. “Now see here, Warden Dresden—”

“Now, now, Simon,” I said, taking vengeance on behalf of the German-speaking peoples of the world. “We wouldn’t want to screw up anyone’s plausible deniability, would we?”

“My given name is Samuel,” he said stiffly. “You, Warden Dresden, may address me as Wizard Peabody.”

I opened the file and skimmed over it. It was modeled after modern police reports, including testimony, photographs, and on-site reports from investigating Wardens. The militant arm of the White Council, at least, seemed to be less behind the times than the rest of us dinosaurs. That was largely Anastasia’s doing. “Is this the whole file, Sam?”

He gritted his teeth. “It is.”

I slapped it shut. “Thanks.”

“That file is official property of the Senior Council,” Peabody protested, waving the paper and the ink. “I must insist that you sign for it at once.”

“Stop!” I called. “Stop, thief!” I put a hand to my ear, listened solemnly for a few seconds and shook my head. “Never a Warden around when you need one, is there, Sam?”

Then I walked off and left the little wizard sputtering behind me.

I get vicious under pressure.

The trip back was quieter than the one in. No B-movie escapees tried to frighten me to death—though there were a few unidentifiable bits wrapped up in spider silk, hanging from the trees where I’d established the pecking order, apparently all that was left of the bug I’d smashed.

I came out of the Nevernever and back into the alley behind the old meatpacking plant without encountering anything worse than spooky ambience. Back in Chicago, it was the darkest hour of night, between three and four in the morning. My head was killing me, and between the psychic trauma the skinwalker had given me, the power I’d had to expend during the previous day, and a pair of winter wonderland hikes, I was bone-weary.

I walked another five blocks to the nearest hotel with a taxi stand, flagged down a cab, and returned to my apartment. When I first got into the business, I didn’t think anything of sacrificing my sleeping time to the urgency of my cases. I wasn’t a kid in my twenties anymore, though. I’d learned to pace myself. I wouldn’t help anyone if I ran myself ragged and made a critical error because I was too tired to think straight.

Mister, my bobtailed grey tomcat, came flying out of the darkened apartment as I opened the door. He slammed his shoulder into my legs, startled me half to death, and nearly put me on my ass. He’s the next best thing to thirty pounds of cat, and when he hits me with his shoulder block of greeting I know it.

I leaned down to grab him and prevent him from leaving, and wearily let myself into the house. It felt a lot quieter and emptier without Mouse in it. Don’t get me wrong: me and Mister were roommates for years before the pooch came along. But it had taken considerable adjustments for both of us to get used to sharing our tiny place with a monstrous, friendly dust mop, and the sudden lack of his presence was noticeable and uncomfortable.

But Mister idly sauntered over to Mouse’s bowl, ate a piece of kibble, and then calmly turned the entire bowl over so that kibble rolled all over the floor of the kitchen alcove. Then he went to Mouse’s usual spot on the floor and lay down, sprawling luxuriously. So maybe it was just me.

I sat down on the couch, made a call, left a message, and then found myself lacking sufficient ambition to walk all the way into my bedroom, strip the sheets Morgan had bloodied, and put fresh ones on before I slept.

So instead I just stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. Sleep was instantaneous.

I didn’t so much as stir until the front door opened, and Murphy came in, holding the amulet that let her in past my wards. It was morning, and cheerful summer sunlight was shining through my well windows.

“Harry,” she said. “I got your message.”

Or at least, that’s what I think she said. It took me a couple of tries to get my eyes open and sit up. “Hang on,” I said. “Hang on.” I shambled into the bathroom and sorted things out, then splashed some cold water on my face and came back into the living room. “Right. I think I can sort of understand English now.”

She gave me a lopsided smile. “You look like crap in the morning.”

“I always look like this before I put on my makeup,” I muttered.

“Why didn’t you call my cell? I’d have shown up right away.”

“Needed sleep,” I said. “Morning was good enough.”

“I figured.” Murphy drew a paper bag from behind her back. She put it down on the table.

I opened it. Coffee and donuts.

“Cop chicks are so hot,” I mumbled. I pushed Peabody’s file across the table to her and started stuffing my face and guzzling.

Murphy went through it, frowning, and a few minutes later asked, “What’s this?”

“Warden case file,” I said. “Which you are not looking at.”

“The worm has turned,” she said bemusedly. “Why am I not looking at it?”

“Because it’s everything the Council has about LaFortier’s death,” I said. “I’m hoping something in here will point me toward the real bad guy. Two heads are better than one.”

“Got it,” she said. She took a pen and a notepad from her hip pocket and set them down within easy reach. “What should I be looking for?”

“Anything that stands out.”

She held up a page. “Here’s something,” she said in a dry tone. “The vic was two hundred and seventy-nine years old when he died.”

I sighed. “Just look for inconsistencies.”

“Ah,” she said wisely.

Then we both fell quiet and started reading the documents in the file.

Morgan had given it to me straight. A few days before, a Warden on duty in Edinburgh heard a commotion in LaFortier’s chambers. She summoned backup, and when they broke in, they found Morgan standing over LaFortier’s still-warm corpse holding the murder weapon. He professed confusion and claimed he did not know what had happened. The weapon had been matched to LaFortier’s wounds, and the blood had matched as well. Morgan was imprisoned and a rigorous investigation had turned up a hidden bank account that had just received a cash deposit of a hell of a lot of money. Once confronted with that fact, Morgan managed to escape, badly wounding three Wardens in the process.

“Can I ask you something?” Murphy said.

“Sure.”

“One of the things that make folks leery of pulling the trigger on a wizard is his death curse, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “If you’re willing to kill yourself to do it, you can lay out some serious harm on your killer.”

She nodded. “Is it an instantaneous kind of thing?”

I pursed my lips. “Not really.”

“Then how long does it take? Minutes? Seconds?”

“About as long as it takes to pull a gun and plug somebody,” I said. “Some would be quicker than others.”

“A second or three, then.”

“Yeah.”

“Did Morgan get blasted by LaFortier’s death curse then?”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Um. It’s sort of hard to say. It isn’t always an immediate effect.”

“Best guess?”

I sipped at the last of the coffee. “LaFortier was a member of the Senior Council. You don’t get there without some serious chops. A violent death curse from someone like that could turn a city block to glass. So if I had to guess, I’d say no. LaFortier didn’t throw it.”

“Why not?”

I frowned some more.

“He had time enough,” Murphy said. “There was obviously a struggle. The vic has defensive wounds all over his arms—and he bled to death. That doesn’t take long, but it’s plenty of time to do the curse thing.”

“For that matter,” I mused, “why didn’t either of them use magic? This was a strictly physical struggle.”

“Could their powers have canceled each other out?”

“Technically, I guess,” I said. “But that sort of thing needs serious synchronization. It doesn’t often happen by accident.”

“Well. That’s something, then,” she said. “Both men either chose not to use magic or else were unable to use magic. Ditto the curse. Either LaFortier chose not to use it, or he was incapable of using it. The question is, why?”

I nodded. “Sound logic. So how does that help us get closer to the killer?”

She shrugged, unfazed. “No clue.”

That’s how investigation works, most of the time. Cops, detectives, and quixotic wizards hardly ever know which information is pertinent until we’ve actually got a pretty good handle on what’s happening. All you can do is accumulate whatever data you can, and hope that it falls into a recognizable pattern.

“Good thought, but it doesn’t help yet,” I said. “What else have we got?”

Murphy shook her head. “Nothing that I can see yet. But do you want a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

She held up the page with the details on the incriminating bank account. “Follow the money.”

“The money?”

“Witnesses can be mistaken—or bought. Theories and deductions can throw you completely off target.” She tossed the page back onto the coffee table. “But the money always tells you something. Assuming you can find it.”

I picked up the page and scanned it again. “A foreign bank. Amsterdam. Can you get them to show you where the payment came from?”

“You’re kidding,” Murphy said. “It would take me days, weeks, maybe months to go through channels and get that kind of information from an American bank, if I could get it at all. From a foreign bank specializing in confidentiality? I’ve got a better chance of winning a slam-dunk contest against Michael Jordan.”

I grunted. I got the disposable camera out of my duster pocket and passed it over to Murphy. “I snapped some shots of the scene—a lot more of them than are in the Wardens’ file. I’d like to get your take on them.”

She took the camera and nodded. “Okay. I can take them by a photo center and—”

My old rotary telephone rang, interrupting her. I held up a hand to her and answered it.

“Harry,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “We need you here. Now.”

I felt my body thrum into a state of tension. “What’s happening?”

“Hurry!” my brother snapped. “I can’t take them on by m—”

The line went dead.

Oh, God.

I looked up at Murphy, who took one look at my face and rose to her feet, car keys in hand, already moving toward the door. “Trouble?”

“Trouble.”

“Where?”

I rose, seizing my staff and blasting rod. “Storage rental park off Deerfield Square.”

“I know it,” Murphy said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Eighteen

The handy part about riding with a cop was that she has the cool toys to make it simpler to get places quickly, even on a busy Chicago morning. The car was still bouncing from sweeping into the street from the little parking lot next to my apartment when she slapped a whirling blue light on the roof and started a siren. That part was pretty neat.

The rest of the ride wasn’t nearly as fun. Moving “fast” through a crowded city is a relative term, and in Chicago it meant a lot of rapid acceleration and sudden braking. We went through half a dozen alleys, hopped one bad intersection by driving up over the curb through a parking lot, and swerved through traffic at such a rate that my freshly imbibed coffee and donuts started swirling and sloshing around in a distinctly unpleasant fashion.

“Kill the noise and light,” I said a couple of blocks from the storage park.

She did it, asking, “Why?”

“Because whatever is there, there are several of them and Thomas didn’t think he could handle them.” I drew my .44 out of my duster pocket and checked it. “Nothing’s on fire. So let’s hope that nothing’s gone down yet and we’ll be all sneaky-like until we know what’s happening.”

“Still with the revolvers,” Murphy said, shaking her head. She drove past the street leading to the storage units and went one block past it instead before she turned and parked. “When are you going to get a serious gun?”

“Look,” I said, “just because you’ve got twice as many bullets as me—”

“Three times as many,” Murphy said. “The SIG holds twenty.”

“Twenty!? Look the point is that—”

“And it reloads a lot faster. You’ve just got some loose rounds at the bottom of your pocket, right? No speed loader?”

I stuck the gun back in my pocket and tried to make sure none of the bullets fell out as we got out of the car. “That’s not the point.”

Murphy shook her head. “Damn, Dresden.”

“I know the revolver is going to work,” I said, starting toward the storage park. “I’ve seen automatics jam before.”

“New ones?”

“Well, no . . .”

Murphy had placed her own gun in the pocket of her light sports jacket. “It’s a good thing you’ve got options. That’s all I’m saying.”

“If a revolver was good enough for Indiana Jones,” I said, “it’s good enough for me.”

“He was a fictional character, Harry.” Her mouth curved up in a small smile. “And he had a whip.”

I eyed her.

Her eyes sparkled. “Do you have a whip, Dresden?”

I eyed her even more. “Murphy . . . are you coming on to me?”

She laughed, her smile white and fierce, as we rounded a corner and found the white rental van where Thomas had left it, across the street from the storage park.

Two men in similar grey suits and grey fedoras were standing nonchalantly in the summer-morning sunshine on the sidewalk next to the van.

On second glance, they were wearing the exact same grey suit, and the exact same grey hat, in fact.

“Feds?” I asked Murphy quietly as we turned down the sidewalk.

“Even feds shop at different stores,” she said. “I’m getting a weird vibe here, Harry.”

I turned my head and checked out the storage park through the ten-foot-high black metal fencing that surrounded it.

I saw another pair of men in grey suits going down one row of storage units. Two more pairs were on the next. And two more on the one after that.

“That makes twelve,” Murphy murmured to me. She hadn’t even turned her head. Murphy has cop powers of observation. “All in the same suit.”

“Yeah, they’re from out of town,” I said. “Lot of times when beings from the Nevernever want to blend in, they pick a look and go with it.” I thought about it for a couple of steps. “The fact that they all picked the same look might mean they don’t have much going for them in the way of individuality.”

“Meaning I’d only have to go on a date with one of them to know about the rest?” Murphy asked.

“Meaning that you need a sense of self to have a sense of self-preservation.”

Murphy exhaled slowly. “That’s just great.” She moved a hand toward her other pocket, where I knew she kept her cell. “More manpower might help.”

“Might set them off, too,” I said. “I’m just saying, if the music starts, don’t get soft and shoot somebody in the leg or something.”

“You’ve seen too many movies, Harry,” she said. “If cops pull the trigger, it’s because they intend to kill someone. We leave the trick shots to SWAT snipers and Indiana Jones.”

I looked at the booth beside the entrance to the storage park. There was normally an attendant there, during the day. But there was no one in the booth—or in sight on the street, for that matter.

“Where is your unit?” Murphy asked.

I waggled my eyebrows at her. “Right where it’s always been, dollface.”

She made a noise that sounded like someone about to throw up.

“First row past the middle,” I said. “Down at the far end of the park.”

“We have to walk past those two jokers by the van to see it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think these suits have found it yet. They’re still here, and still looking. If they had located Morgan, they’d be gone already.” As we approached, I noticed that the two tires next to the curb on the white rental van were flat. “They’re worried about a getaway.”

“Are you sure they aren’t human?” Murphy asked.

“Um. Reasonably?”

She shook her head. “Not good enough. Are they from the spirit world or not?”

“Might not be able to tell until we get closer,” I said. “Might even need to touch one of them.”

She took a slow, deep breath. “As soon as you’re certain,” she said, “tell me. Shake your head if you’re sure they aren’t human. Nod if you can’t tell or if they are.”

We were less than twenty feet away from the van and there was no time to argue or ask questions. “Okay.”

I took a few more steps and ran smack into a curtain of nauseating energy so thick and heavy that it made my hair stand on end—a dead giveaway of a hostile supernatural presence. I twitched my head in a quick shake, as the two men in grey suits spun around at precisely the same time at precisely the same speed to face me. Both of them opened their mouths.

Before any sound could come out, Murphy produced her sidearm and shot them both in the head.

Twice.

Double-tapping the target like that is a professional killer’s policy. There’s a small chance that a bullet to the head might strike a target at an oblique angle and carom off of the skull. It isn’t a huge possibility—but a double tap drops the odds from “very unlikely” to “virtually impossible.”

Murphy was a cop and a competition shooter, and less than five feet away from her targets. She did the whole thing in one smooth move, the shots coming as a single pulsing hammer of sound.

The men in grey suits didn’t have time to so much as register her presence, much less do anything to avoid their fate. Clear liquid exploded from the backs of their skulls, and both men dropped to the sidewalk like rag dolls, their bodies and outfits deforming like a snowman in the spring, leaving behind nothing but ectoplasm, the translucent, gooey gel that was the matter of the Nevernever.

“Hell’s bells,” I choked, as my adrenaline spiked after the fact.

Murphy kept the gun on the two until it was obvious that they weren’t going to take up a second career as headless horsemen. Then she looked up and down the street, her cold blue eyes scanning for more threats as she popped the almost-full clip from the SIG and slapped a fully loaded one back in.

She may look like somebody’s favorite aunt, but Murph can play hardball.

A couple of seconds later, what sounded like the howls of a gang of rabid band saws filled the air. There were a lot more than twelve of them.

“Come on!” I shouted, and sprinted forward.

The grey suits weren’t individualists. It wasn’t unthinkable that they would possess some kind of shared consciousness. Whacking the look-outs had obviously both alerted and enraged the others, and I figured that they would respond the way any colony-consciousness does when one of its members gets attacked.

The grey suits were coming to kill us.

We couldn’t afford to run, not when they were this close to Morgan and Molly, but if the grey suits caught us on the open street, we were hosed. Our only chance was to move forward, fast, to get into the storage park while they went screaming out of it, looking for us. If we were quick enough, we might have time to get to the storage unit, collect Morgan and company, and make a quick escape through the portal in the floor and into the Nevernever.

I pounded across the street and through the entrance, with Murphy on my heels. I threw myself forward as the howls grew louder, and made it into the center row just as maybe twenty or twenty-five grey suits came rushing out of the other rows. Some of them saw us and slammed on the brakes, throwing up gravel with their expensive shoes, putting up a new tone of howl. The others belatedly began to turn as well, and then we were all the way into the center row of storage units, still moving at a dead run.

The grey suits rushed after us, but Murphy and I had a good forty-yard lead, and they didn’t appear to be superhumanly light on their feet. We were going to make it.

Then I remembered that the door to the storage bay was locked shut.

I fumbled for the key as I ran, trying to pull it out of the front pocket of my jeans so that it would be ready. I figured that if I didn’t get the door unlocked and open on the first try, the grey suits would catch up to us and kill us both.

So naturally I dropped the damn key.

I cursed and slid to a stop, slipping on the gravel. I looked around wildly for the dropped key, horribly aware of the mob of grey suits rushing toward us, now in eerie silence.

“Harry!” Murphy said.

“I know!”

She appeared beside me in a shooting stance, aiming at the nearest grey suit. “Harry!”

“I know!”

Metal gleamed amongst the gravel and I swooped down on it as Murphy opened fire with precise, measured shots, sending the nearest grey suit into a tumbling sprawl. The others just vaulted over him and kept coming.

I’d found the key, but it was already too late.

Neither of us was going to make it to the shelter of my hideaway.

Chapter Nineteen

“Stay close!” I shouted. I thrust the end of my staff into the gravel and dragged it through, drawing a line in the dust and stones. I swiftly inscribed a quick, rough circle maybe four feet across around Murphy and me, actually getting between her gun and the grey suits for a second.

“Dammit, Harry, get down!” she shouted.

I did so, reaching out to touch the line in the gravel, slamming a quick effort of will into the simple design. Murphy’s gun barked twice. I felt the energy gather in the circle and coalesce in a rush, snapping into place in a sudden and invisible wall.

The nearest of the grey suits staggered, and then flung itself into a forward dive. Murphy flinched back, and I grabbed her, hard, before she could cross the circle and disrupt it.

The grey suit slammed into the circle as if striking a solid wall, rebounding from its surface in a flash of blue-white light that described a phantom cylinder in the air. An instant later, more of the grey suits did exactly the same thing, maybe twenty of them, each of them bouncing off the circle’s field.

“Easy!” I said to Murphy, still holding her against me. “Easy, easy!” I felt her relax a little, ceasing to struggle against being held in place. “It’s okay,” I said. “As long as we don’t break the circle, they can’t get through.”

We were both shaking. Murphy took a pair of gulping breaths. We just stood there for a moment, while the grey suits spread out around the circle, reaching out with their hands to find its edges. I had time to get a better look at them while they did.

They were all the same height and weight. Their features were unremarkable and similar, if not quite identical. They looked as if they could have all been from the same family. Their eyes were all the same color, an odd grey-green, and there was no expression, none whatsoever, on their faces.

One of them reached out as if to try to touch me, and his open hand flattened against the circle’s field. As it did, a freaking mouth opened on his palm, parallel to his fingers. It was lined with serrated sharklike teeth, and a slithering, coiling purple-black tongue emerged to lash randomly against the circle, as if seeking a way through. Yellowish mucus dripped thickly from the tongue as it did.

“Okay,” Murphy said in a small, toneless voice. “That is somewhat disturbing.”

“And it’s gonna get better,” I muttered.

Sure enough, the other grey suits started doing the same thing. Within seconds, we were completely surrounded by eerie hand-mouths, writhing tongues, and dripping slime.

Murphy shook her head and sighed. “Eckgh.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How long will this thing keep them off?”

“They’re spirit beings,” I said. “As long as the circle’s here, they’re staying outside it.”

“Couldn’t they just scuff dirt on it or something?”

I shook my head. “Breaking the circle isn’t just a physical process. It’s an act of choice, of will—and these things don’t have that.”

Murphy frowned. “Then why are they doing anything at all?”

I had to restrain myself from smacking my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Because someone summoned them from the Nevernever,” I said. “Their summoner, wherever he is, is giving them orders.”

“Could he break the circle?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Easily.”

“Which is an excellent note upon which to begin our conversation,” said a man’s voice with a heavy Cockney accent. “Make a hole, lads.”

The suits on one side of the circle lowered their hands and stood back, revealing a blocky bulldog of a man in a cheap maroon suit. He was average height, but heavy and solid with muscle, and he wore a few too many extra beers around his middle. His features were blunt and rounded, like water-worn stone. His hair was graying and cut into the shortest buzz you could get without going bald, and his eyes were small and hard—and the exact same color as those of the grey suits, a distinctive grey-green.

“Ah, love,” said the man, grinning. “I think it’s quite fine to see couples who aren’t afraid to express their affection for each other.”

I blinked at him, then down at Murphy, and realized I was still holding her loosely against me. By the expression on her face, Murph hadn’t really taken note of the fact, either. She cleared her throat and took a small step back from me, being careful not to step on the circle in the gravel.

He nodded at us, still grinning. “ ’Allo, Dresden. Why not make this easy for all of us and tell me which unit Donald Morgan is hiding in?”

I suddenly realized that I recognized this jerk from the profile the Wardens had on him. “Binder,” I said. “That’s what they call you, isn’t it?”

Binder’s smile widened and he bowed slightly at the waist. “The same.”

Murphy frowned at Binder and said, “Who is this asshole?”

“One of the guys the Wardens wish they could just erase,” I said.

“He’s a wizard?”

“I do have some skills in that direction, love,” Binder said.

“He’s a one-trick hack,” I said, looking directly at him. “Got a talent for calling up things from the Nevernever and binding them to his will.”

“So, Binder,” Murphy said, nodding.

“Yeah. He’s scum who sells his talent to the highest bidder, but he’s careful not to break any of the Laws of Magic, so the Wardens haven’t ever been able to take him down.”

“I know,” Binder said cheerfully. “And that’s why I am positively savoring the exquisite irony of me being the one to take down the famous Warden Donald Morgan. The self-righteous prig.”

“You haven’t got him yet,” I said.

“Matter of time, my lad,” Binder said, winking. He stooped and picked up a single piece of gravel. He bounced it thoughtfully on his palm and eyed us. “See, there’s a bit of competition for this contract, and it’s a fair bit of quid. So I’m willing to give you a chance to make my job easier in exchange for considerations.”

“What considerations?” I asked.

He held up the pebble between his thumb and forefinger. “I won’t pitch this into your circle and break it. That way, my lads won’t need to kill you both—and won’t that be nice?”

Behind Binder, down at the end of the row of storage units, the dust stirred. Something unseen moved across the gravel. Given how my life had been going, odds were good that it couldn’t be a good thing. Unless . . .

“Come on, Binder,” I said. “Don’t be a simp. What makes you think I won’t ask the lady here to put a bullet through that empty spot in your head where your brain’s supposed to go?”

“She does that, she lowers the circle, and my lads tear you apart,” Binder replied.

“That won’t be your problem, by then,” I said.

Binder grinned at me. “All of us go down in a blaze of gory, is it?”

Murphy calmly raised her gun and settled it on Binder’s face.

Binder faced her, his grin never fading. “Now, little lady. Don’t you be doing nothing you’ll regret. Without my, ah, personal guidance, my lads here will tear this good gentleman’s throat out right quick. But they’re considerably less, ah, professional with ladies.” His grin faded. “And you, miss, do not want to know what they’re like when they’re not professional.”

Fingers and slimy tongues and fangs continued pressing against the outer edge of the circle’s protective field.

Murphy didn’t let it show on her face, but I saw her shudder.

“Decision time, miss,” Binder said. “Either pull that trigger, right now, and live with what happens—or put it down like a proper lady and work through this politely.”

Murphy’s eyes narrowed at his comments. “For all I know, you’re about to toss that rock at us. I think I’ll keep the gun right where it is.”

“Bear something else in mind, Binder,” I said. “I know that you think you can just have your pets step in front of you and throw the rock from behind a wall of them, but think about what happens to you if you kill me.”

“Your death curse, is it?” he asked. Binder raised his hands and flattened his palms against his cheek in mock horror. “Oh no. A death curse. Whatever shall I do?”

I faced him with a chilly little smile. “You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to use magic, I think,” I said in a quiet, hopefully confident-sounding voice. “When I die, I take away your power. Forever. No more summoning. No more binding.”

Binder’s expression began to flatten out into neutrality.

“You ever had a job that you liked, Binder?” I asked him. “I’m betting you haven’t. I’ve read your file. You’re the kind who likes to sleep late, spend a lot of money impressing people. Always buys room service, always with the champagne. And you like the women the money gets you.” I shook my head. “How many bottles of champagne you think you’ll be able to afford when a paper hat becomes part of your professional wear? You’ve got enough talent to live a nice, long life, man. As a nobody.”

He stared at me in silence for a second. “You can’t do that,” Binder said. “Take away my talent. That isn’t possible.”

“I’m a wizard of the White Council, Binder. Not some stupid hack who spent his life using his gift to hurt people. Do you think we go around advertising everything we can do? If you knew half the things I’ve done that you think are impossible, you’d already be running.”

Binder faced me, beads of sweat suddenly standing out on his jowls.

“So I’d think real careful before I threw that rock, Binder. Real careful.”

A police siren sounded, from fairly nearby.

I smiled, showing teeth. “Hey, cops. This’ll get interesting.”

“You?” he asked, incredulously. “You’d bring the cops into a private matter?”

I pointed a finger sideways at Murphy, who produced her badge and tucked the back of its folder into her belt, so that the shield faced Binder.

“Already did,” Murphy said.

“Besides, the whole reason I picked this joint was how heavily the neighborhood was policed,” I said. “One gunshot and nobody reports anything. Half a dozen and people get nervous.”

Binder’s eyes narrowed, and he looked from us toward the front of the park.

“Tick-tock,” I said, applying the pressure as hard as I could. “It’s just a matter of time, my lad.”

Binder looked around him again, then shook his head and sighed. “Balls. It’s always messy when I have to deal with the cops. Idiots dying by the truckload. Buckets of blood.” He gestured at his men. “Identical suspects fleeing in all directions. Everyone out chasing them, and more people dying when they manage to catch them.” He stared hard at me. “How about it, wizard? Cop? Maybe you’ve got stones enough to take it when I threaten you. I can admire that.”

My stomach got a little sinking feeling. I had been counting out seconds, hoping that my nerves didn’t make me rush. There should have been enough time by now.

“How about those policemen? You willing to have their deaths on your conscience?” He rolled his neck a little, like a prizefighter warming up. “Because I’ll tell you right now that they aren’t going to stop me.”

I put my hand out and touched Murphy’s wrist. She glanced aside at me, and then lowered the gun.

“That’s better,” Binder said. There was no hint of jocularity in his manner now. “All I want is the Warden. He’s a dead man already, and you know it. What does it matter who takes him?”

Something stirred at the end of the row, behind Binder, and I started smiling.

“I’ve got no quarrel with you or with this town,” Binder continued. “Tell me where he is, I’ll leave peaceful, and Bob’s your uncle.”

Murphy drew in a sharp breath.

“Okay,” I said. “He’s right behind you.”

Binder’s smile, this time, was positively vulpine. “Dresden. We have a bit of banter going between us. We’re both here in a moment where neither of us wants to act rashly. And that’s all good fun. It’s one of the little things that makes a day more enjoyable.” His voice hardened. “But don’t do me the incredibly insulting disservice of assuming that I’m a bloody moron.”

“I’m not,” I told him. “He’s about forty feet behind you. In a wheelchair.”

Binder gave me a gimlet stare. Then he rolled his eyes and shot a brief glance over his shoulder—then did a double take as his mouth dropped open.

Morgan sat in his wheelchair about forty feet away from Binder, my shotgun in his hands. Mouse stood beside the chair, focused intently upon Binder and his minions, his body tensed and ready to spring forward.

“Hello, Binder,” Morgan said in a flat, merciless tone of voice. “Now, Miss Carpenter.”

Molly appeared out of literally nowhere as she dropped the veil she’d been holding over herself since I’d first seen her moving at the beginning of the conversation with Binder. She was holding my spare blasting rod in her hand, its far end covered with pale dust from being dragged through the gravel. She knelt beside the long, lazy arc of the circle she’d drawn in the dust and touched her hand to it, frowning in concentration.

Circles of power are basic stuff, really. Practically anyone can make one if they know how to do it, and learning how to properly establish a circle is the first thing any apprentice is taught. Circles create boundaries that isolate the area inside from the magical energies of the world outside. That’s why Binder’s minions couldn’t cross the plane of the circle I’d drawn on the ground—their bodies were made up of ectoplasm, held into a solid form by magical energy. The circle cut off that energy when they tried to cross it.

As it sprang to life at my apprentice’s will, Molly’s circle did the same thing as mine—only this time the grey suits were inside it. As the energy field rose up, it cut off the grey suits from the flow of energy they needed to maintain their solid forms.

And suddenly the next best thing to forty demonic thugs collapsed into splatters of transparent gook.

Binder let out a cry as it happened, spinning around desperately, mumbling some kind of incantation under his breath—but he should have saved himself the effort. If he wanted them back, he would have to get out of the isolating field of the enormous circle first, and then he would have to start from scratch.

“Ow, Binder,” I said in patently false empathy. “Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”

“Ernest Armand Tinwhistle,” Morgan thundered in a tone of absolute authority, raising the shotgun to his shoulder. “Surrender yourself or face destruction, you worthless little weasel.”

Binder’s intense grey-green eyes went from Morgan to the two of us. Then he seemed to reach some kind of conclusion and charged us like a bull, his head down, his arms pumping.

Murphy’s gun tracked to him, but with a curse she jerked the barrel up and away from Binder. He slammed a shoulder into her chest, knocking her down, even as I received a stiff arm in the belly.

I threw a leg at his as he went by, but I was off balance from the shove, and although I wound up on my ass, I forced him to stumble for a step or three. Murphy took the impact with fluid grace, tumbled onto her back, rolled smoothly over one shoulder, and came back up on her feet.

“Get them out of here,” she snarled as she spun and took off at a sprint after Binder.

Mouse came pounding up to my side, staring after Murphy with worried doggy eyes, then glancing at me.

“No,” I told him. “Watch this.”

Binder was running as hard as he could, but I doubted he had been all that light on his feet when he was young, much less twenty years and forty pounds later. Murphy worked out practically every day.

She caught him about ten feet before the end of the row, timed her steps for a second, and then sharply kicked his rearmost leg just as he lifted it to take his next step. His foot got caught on the back of his own calf as a result, and he went down in a sprawl.

Binder came to his feet with an explosive snarl of rage and whirled on Murphy. He flung a handful of gravel at her face, and then waded in with heavy, looping punches.

Murph ducked her head down and kept the gravel out of her eyes, slipped aside from one punch, and then seized his wrist on the second. The two of them whirled in a brief half circle, Binder let out a yelp, and then his bald head slammed into the steel door of a storage unit. I had to give the guy credit for physical toughness. He rebounded from the door a little woozily, but drove an elbow back at Murphy’s head.

Murphy caught that arm and continued the motion, using her own body as a fulcrum in a classic hip throw—except that Binder was facing in the opposite direction than usual for that technique.

You could hear his arm come out of its socket fifty feet away.

And then he hit the gravel face-first.

Binder got extra points for brains in my book, after that: he lay still and didn’t put up a struggle as Murphy dragged his wrists behind his back and cuffed him.

I traded a glance with Mouse and said, wisely, “Hard-core.”

The police sirens were getting louder. Murphy looked up at them, and then down the row at me. She made an exasperated shooing motion.

“Come on,” I said to Mouse. The two of us hurried down the row to Morgan’s chair.

“I couldn’t shoot him with this scatter pipe with the two of you standing there,” Morgan complained as I approached. “Why didn’t you do it?”

“That’s why,” I said, nodding to the park entrance, where a patrol car was screeching to a halt, its blue bubbles flashing. “They get all funny about corpses with gunshot wounds in them.” I turned to scowl at Molly. “I told you to bug out at the first sign of danger.”

She took the handles of Morgan’s wheelchair and we all started back toward the storage unit and its portal. “We didn’t know what was going on until we heard them all start shrieking,” she protested. “And then Mouse went nuts, and started trying to dig his way through a metal door. I thought you might be in trouble. And you were.”

“That isn’t the point,” I said. I glanced at the circle drawn in the gravel as we crossed it, breaking it and releasing its power. “Whose idea was the circle?”

“Mine,” Morgan said calmly. “Circle traps are a standard tactic for dealing with rogue summoners.”

“I’m sorry it took so long to draw,” Molly said. “But I had to make it big enough to get them all.”

“Not a problem. He was happy to kill time running his mouth.” We all entered the storage bay, and I rolled the door closed behind us. “You did good, grasshopper.”

Molly beamed.

I looked around us and said, “Hey. Where’s Thomas?”

“The vampire?” Morgan asked.

“I had him watching the outside of the park, just in case,” I said.

Morgan gave me a disgusted look and rolled himself forward toward the prepared portal into the Nevernever. “The vampire goes missing just before a bounty hunter who couldn’t possibly know my location turns up. And you’re actually surprised, Dresden?”

“Thomas called me and told me there was trouble,” I said, my voice tight. “If he hadn’t, you’d have been drowning in grey suits by now.”

Molly chewed her lip worriedly and shook her head. “Harry . . . I haven’t seen him since he dropped us off.”

I glanced back toward the entrance of the park, clenching my teeth.

Where was he?

If he’d been able to do otherwise, Thomas would never have let Murphy and me fight alone against Binder’s minions. He would have been right in there beside us. Except he hadn’t been.

Why not? Had circumstances forced him to leave before I arrived? Or worse, had someone else involved in the current crisis decided to take measures against him? Psycho bitch Madeline came uncomfortably to mind. And the skinwalker had already demonstrated that it was happy to murder my allies instead of striking directly at me.

Or maybe he’d simply been overwhelmed by a crowd of grey-suited demons. Maybe his body was already cooling in some nook or cranny of the storage park. My mouth went dry at the thought.

Hell’s bells.

What had happened to my brother?

Morgan spoke a quiet word and opened a shimmering rectangular portal in the floor. Molly walked over to it and stared down, impressed.

“Dresden,” Morgan said. “We can’t afford to become entangled with the local authorities.”

I wanted to scream at him, but he was right. More sirens had closed in on the park. We had to leave. I grabbed the handles to Morgan’s chair, started for the portal, and said, “Let’s go, people.”

Dammit, Thomas, I snarled to myself. Where the hell are you?

Chapter Twenty

The portal in my hideaway opened three steps from the trail in the Nevernever, all right, but those three steps weren’t handicapped-accessible. Molly and I each had to get under one of Morgan’s arms and half carry him to the trail. I left Molly and Mouse with him, went back and got the wheelchair, and dragged it up the frozen slope to a path that was all but identical to the one I’d been on earlier.

We loaded Morgan into the wheelchair again. He was pale and shaking by the time we were finished. I laid a hand against his forehead. It was hot with fever.

Morgan jerked his head away from my fingers, scowling.

“What is it?” Molly asked. She had thought to grab both coats I’d had waiting, and had already put one of them on.

“He’s burning up,” I said quietly. “Butters said that could mean the wound had been infected.”

“I’m fine,” Morgan said, shivering.

Molly helped him into the second coat, looking around at the frozen, haunted wood with nervous eyes. “Shouldn’t we get him out of the cold, then?”

“Yeah,” I said, buttoning my duster shut. “It’s maybe ten minutes from here to the downtown portal.”

“Does the vampire know about that, too?” Morgan growled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’d be walking into an obvious trap, Dresden.”

“All right, that’s it,” I snapped. “One more comment about Thomas and you’re going body sledding.”

“Thomas?” Morgan’s pale face turned a little darker as he raised his voice. “How many corpses is it going to take to make you come to your senses, Dresden?”

Molly swallowed. “Harry, um, excuse me.”

Both of us glared at her.

She flushed and avoided eye contact. “Isn’t this the Nevernever?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Obviously,” Morgan said at the same time.

We faced each other again, all but snarling.

“Okay,” Molly said. “Haven’t you told me that it’s sort of dangerous?” She took a deep breath and hurried her speech. “I mean, you know. Isn’t it sort of dumb to be standing here arguing in loud voices? All things considered?”

I suddenly felt somewhat foolish.

Morgan’s glower waned. He bowed his head wearily, folding his arms across his belly.

“Yeah,” I said, reining in my own temper. “Yeah, probably so.”

“Not least because anyone who comes through the Ways from Edinburgh to Chicago is going to walk right over us,” Morgan added.

Molly nodded. “Which would be sort of . . . awkward?”

I snorted quietly. I nodded my head in the proper direction, and started pushing the wheelchair down the trail. “This way.”

Molly followed, her eyes darting left and right at the sounds of movement in the faerie wood around us. Mouse fell into pace beside her, and she reached down to lay a hand on the dog’s back as she walked, an entirely unconscious gesture.

We moved at a steady pace and in almost complete silence for maybe five minutes before I said, “We need to know how they found out about you.”

“The vampire is the best explanation,” Morgan replied, his tone carefully neutral.

“I have information about him that you don’t,” I said. “Suppose it isn’t him. How did they do it?”

Morgan pondered that for a time. “Not with magic.”

“You certain?”

“Yes.”

He sounded like it.

“Your countermeasures are that good?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought about that for a minute. Then it dawned on me what Morgan had done to protect himself from supernatural discovery. “You called in your marker. The silver oak leaf. The one Titan—” I forced myself to stop, glancing uneasily around the faerie forest. “The one the Summer Queen awarded you.”

Morgan turned his head slightly to glance at me over his shoulder.

I whistled. I’d seen Queen Titania with my Sight once. The tableau of Titania and her counterpart, Mab, preparing to do battle with each other still ranked as the most humbling and awe-inspiring display of pure power I had ever witnessed. “That’s why you’re so certain no one is going to find you. She’s the one shielding you.”

“I admit,” Morgan said with another withering look, “it’s no donut.”

I scowled. “How’d you know about that?”

“Titania’s retainer told me. The entire Summer Court has been laughing about it for months.”

Molly made a choking sound behind me. I didn’t turn around. It would just force her to put her hand over her mouth to hide the smile.

“How long did she give you?” I asked.

“Sundown tomorrow.”

Thirty-six hours, give or take. A few hours more than I’d believed I had, but not much. “Do you have the oak leaf on you?”

“Of course,” he said.

“May I see it?”

Morgan shrugged and drew a leather cord from around his neck. A small leather pouch hung from the cord. He opened it, felt around inside, and came out with it—a small, exquisitely detailed replica of an oak leaf, backed with a simple pin. He held it out to me.

I took it and pitched it into the haunted wood.

Morgan actually did growl, this time. “Why?”

“Because the Summer Queen bugged them. Last year, her goon squad was using mine to track me down all over Chicago.”

Morgan frowned at me, and glanced out toward where I had thrown it. Then he shook his head and rubbed tiredly at his eyes with one hand. “Must be getting senile. Never even considered it.”

“I don’t get it,” Molly said. “Isn’t he still protected, anyway?”

“He is,” I said. “But that leaf isn’t. So if the Summer Queen wants him found, or if someone realizes what she’s doing and makes her a deal, she can keep her word to Morgan to hide him, and give him away. All she has to do is make sure someone knows to look for the spell on the oak leaf.”

“The Sidhe are only bound to the letter of their agreements,” Morgan said, nodding. “Which is why one avoids striking bargains with them unless there are no options.”

“So Binder could have been following the oak leaf?” Molly asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“It is still entirely possible that the Summer Queen is dealing in good faith,” Morgan said.

I nodded. “Which brings us back to the original question: how did Binder find you?”

“Well,” Molly said, “not to mince words, but he didn’t.”

“He would have found us in a matter of moments,” Morgan said.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “He knew you were in the storage park, but he didn’t know which unit, exactly. I mean, wouldn’t tracking magic have led him straight to you? And if Thomas sold you out, wouldn’t he have told Binder exactly which storage bay we were in?”

Morgan started to reply, then frowned and shut his mouth. “Hngh.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the grasshopper and gave her a nod of approval.

Molly beamed at me.

“Someone on the ground following us?” Morgan asked. “A tailing car wouldn’t have been able to enter the storage park without a key.”

I thought of how I’d been shadowed by the skinwalker the previous evening. “If they’re good enough, it would be possible,” I admitted. “Not likely, but possible.”

“So?” Morgan said. “Where does that leave us?”

“Baffled,” I said.

Morgan bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “Where to next, then?”

“If I take you back to my place, they’ll pick us up again,” I said. “If someone’s using strictly mortal methods of keeping track of our movements, they’ll have someone watching it.”

Morgan looked back and up at me. “I assume you aren’t just going to push me in circles around Chicago while we wait for the Council to find us.”

“No,” I said. “I’m taking you to my place.”

Morgan thought about that one for a second, then nodded sharply. “Right.”

“Where the bad guys will see us and send someone else to kill us,” Molly said. “No wonder I’m the apprentice; because I’m so ignorant that I can’t see why that isn’t a silly idea.”

“Watch and learn, grasshopper. Watch and learn.”

Chapter Twenty-one

We left the trail again, and for the second time in a day I emerged from the Nevernever into the alley behind the old meatpacking plant. We made two stops and then walked until we could flag down another cab. The cabbie didn’t seem to be overly thrilled with Mouse, or the wheelchair, or how we filled up his car, but maybe he just didn’t speak enough English to ably convey his enthusiasm. You never know.

“These really aren’t good for you,” Molly said through a mouthful of donut, as we unloaded the cab.

“It’s Morgan’s fault. He started talking about donuts,” I said. “And besides—you’re eating them.”

“I have the metabolic rate of youth,” Molly said, smiling sweetly. “You’re the one who needs to start being health-conscious, O venerable mentor. I’ll be invincible for another year or two at least.”

We wrestled Morgan into his chair, and I paid off the cabbie. We rolled Morgan over to the steps leading down to my apartment, and between the two of us managed to turn his chair around and get him down the stairs and into the apartment without dropping him. After that, I grabbed Mouse’s lead, and the two of us went up to get the mail from my mailbox, and then ambled around to the boardinghouse’s small backyard and the patch of sandy earth set aside for Mouse’s use.

But instead of loitering around waiting for Mouse, I led him into the far corner of the backyard, which is a miniature jungle of old lilacs that hadn’t been trimmed or pruned since Mr. Spunkelcrief died. They were in bloom, and their scent filled the air. Bees buzzed busily about the bushy plants, and as I stepped closer to them, the corner of the building cut off the traffic sounds.

It was the only place on the property’s exterior that was not readily visible from most of the rest of the buildings on the street.

I pressed past the outer branches of the lilacs and found a small and relatively open space in the middle. Then I waited. Within seconds, there was a buzzing sound, like the wings of a particularly large dragonfly, and then a tiny winged faerie darted through the lilacs to come to a halt in front of me.

He was simply enormous for a pixie, one of the Wee Folk, and stood no less than a towering twelve inches high. He looked like an athletically built youth dressed in an odd assortment of armor made from discarded objects and loose ends. He’d replaced his plastic bottle-cap helmet with one made of most of the shell of a hollowed-out golf ball. It was too large for his head, but that didn’t seem to concern him. His cuirass had first seen service as a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and hanging at his hip was what looked like the blade to a jigsaw, with one end wrapped in string to serve as a grip. Wings like those of a dragonfly buzzed in a translucent cloud of motion at his back.

The little faerie came to attention in midair, snapped off a crisp salute, and said, “Mission accomplished, my lord of pizza!”

“That fast?” I asked. It hadn’t been twenty minutes since I’d first summoned him, after we’d gotten donuts and before we’d gotten into the cab. “Quick work, Toot-toot, even for you.”

The praise seemed to please the little guy immensely. He beamed and buzzed in a couple of quick circles. “He’s in the building across the street from this one, two buildings toward the lake.”

I grunted, thinking. If I was remembering right, that was another boardinghouse converted into apartments, like mine. “The white one with green shutters?”

“Yes, that’s where the rapscallion has made his lair!” His hand flashed to his waist and he drew his saw-toothed sword from its transparent plastic scabbard, scowling fiercely. “Shall I slay him for you, my lord?”

I very carefully kept the smile off of my face. “I don’t know if things have escalated to that level just yet,” I said. “How do you know this guy is watching my apartment?”

“Oh, oh! Don’t tell me this one!” Toot jittered back and forth in place, bobbing in excitement. “Because he has curtains on the windows so you can’t see in, and then there’s a big black plastic box with a really long nose poking through them and a glass eye on the end of the nose! And he looks at the back of it all the time, and when he sees someone going into your house, he pushes a button and the box beeps!”

“Camera, huh?” I asked. “Yeah, that probably makes him our snoop.” I squinted up at the summer sunshine and adjusted the uncomfortably warm leather duster. I wasn’t taking it off, though. There was too much hostility flying around for that. “How many of your kin are about, Toot?”

“Hundreds!” Toot-toot declared, brandishing his sword. “Thousands!”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been splitting the pizza a thousand ways?”

“Well, lord,” he amended. “Several dozen, at any rate.”

The Wee Folk are a fractious, fickle bunch, but I’ve learned a couple of things about them that I’m not sure anyone else knows. First, that they’re just about everywhere, and anywhere they aren’t, they can usually get. They don’t have much of an attention span, but for short, simple tasks, they are hell on wheels.

Second—they have a lust for pizza that is without equal in this world. I’ve been bribing the Wee Folk with pizza on a regular basis for years, and in return they’ve given me their (admittedly erratic) loyalty. They call me the Za-Lord, and the little fair folk who take my pizza also serve in the Za-Lord’s Guard—which means, mostly, that the Wee Folk hang around my house hoping for extra pizza and protecting it from wee threats.

Toot-toot was their leader, and he and his folks had pulled off some very helpful tasks for me in the past. They had saved my life on more than one occasion. No one in the supernatural community ever expected everything of which they were capable. As a result, Toot and his kin are generally ignored. I tried to take that as a life lesson: never underestimate the little people.

This was a job that was right up Toot-toot’s alley. Almost literally.

“Do you know which car is his?” I asked.

Toot threw back his head, Yul Brynner style. “Of course! The blue one with this on the hood.” He threw his arms out and up at an angle and stood ramrod straight in a Y shape.

“Blue Mercedes, eh?” I asked. “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. . . .”

Five minutes later, I walked back around the side of the house to the front opposite the street. Then I turned to face the house where the snoop was set up and put on my most ferocious scowl. I pointed directly at the curtained second-floor windows, then turned my hand over and crooked my finger, beckoning. Then I pointed to the ground right in front of me.

One of the curtains might have twitched. I gave it a slow count of five, and then started walking briskly toward the other boardinghouse, crossing the busy street in the process.

A young man in his twenties wearing khaki shorts and a green T-shirt came rushing out of the converted boardinghouse and ran toward a blue Mercedes parked on the street, an expensive camera hanging around his neck.

I kept walking, not changing my pace.

He rushed around to the driver’s door, pointing some kind of handheld device at the car. Then he clawed at the door but it stayed closed. He shot another glance at me, and then tried to insert his key into the lock. Then he blinked and stared at his key as he pulled it back trailing streamers of a rubbery pink substance—bubble gum.

“I wouldn’t bother,” I said as I got closer. “Look at the tires.”

The young man glanced from me to his Mercedes and stared some more. All four tires were completely flat.

“Oh,” he said. He looked at his gum-covered key and sighed. “Well. Shit.”

I stopped across the car from him and smiled faintly. “Don’t feel too bad about it, man. I’ve been doing this longer than you.”

He gave me a sour look. Then he held up his key. “Bubble gum?”

“Coulda been superglue. Take it as a professional courtesy.” I nodded toward his car. “Let’s talk. Turn the air-conditioning on, for crying out loud.”

He eyed me for a moment and sighed. “Yeah. Okay.”

We both got in the car. He scraped the gum off of his key and put it in the ignition, but when he turned it, nothing happened.

“Oh. Pop the hood,” I said.

He eyed me and did. I went around to the front of the car and reconnected the loose battery cable. I said, “Okay,” and he started the engine smoothly.

Like I said, give Toot-toot and his kin the right job, and they are formidable as hell.

I got back in the car and said, “You licensed?”

The young man shrugged and turned his AC up to “deep freeze.” “Yeah.”

I nodded. “How long?”

“Not long.”

“Cop?”

“In Joliet,” he said.

“But not now.”

“Didn’t fit.”

“Why are you watching my place?”

He shrugged. “I got a mortgage.”

I nodded and held out my hand. “Harry Dresden.”

He frowned at the name. “You the one used to work for Nick Christian at Ragged Angel?”

“Yeah.”

“Nick has a good reputation.” He seemed to come to some kind of conclusion and took my hand with a certain amount of resignation. “Vince Graver.”

“You got hired to snoop on me?”

He shrugged.

“You tail me last night?”

“You know the score, man,” Graver said. “You take someone’s money, you keep your mouth shut.”

I lifted my eyebrows. A lot of PIs wouldn’t have the belly to be nearly so reticent, under the circumstances. It made me take a second look at him. Thin, built like someone who ran or rode a bicycle on his weekends. Clean-cut without being particularly memorable. Medium brown hair, medium height, medium brown eyes. The only exceptional thing about his appearance was that there was nothing exceptional about his appearance.

“You keep your mouth shut,” I agreed. “Until people start getting hurt. Then it gets complicated.”

Graver frowned. “Hurt?”

“There have been two attempts on my life in the past twenty-four hours,” I said. “Do the math.”

He focused his eyes down the street, into the distance, and pursed his lips. “Damn.”

“Damn?”

He nodded morosely. “There go the rest of my fees and expenses.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re bailing on your client? Just like that?”

“ ‘Accomplice’ is an ugly word. So is ‘penitentiary.’ ”

Smart kid. Smarter than I had been when I first got my PI license. “I need to know who backed you.”

Graver thought about that one for a minute. Then he said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I make it a personal policy not to turn on clients or piss off people who are into murder.”

“You lost the work,” I said. “What if I made it up to you?”

“Maybe you didn’t read that part of the book. The ‘I’ in PI stands for ‘investigator.’ Not ‘informer.’ ”

“Maybe I call the cops. Maybe I tell them you’re involved in the attacks.”

“Maybe you can’t prove a damned thing.” Graver shook his head. “You don’t get ahead in this business if you can’t keep your teeth together.”

I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms, studying him for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t make you. So I’m asking you. Please.”

He kept on staring out the windshield. “Why they after you?”

“I’m protecting a client.”

“Old guy in the wheelchair.”

“Yeah.”

Graver squinted. “He looks like a hard case.”

“You have no idea.”

We sat in the air-conditioning for a moment. Then he glanced at me and shook his head.

“You seem like a reasonable guy,” Graver said. “Hope you don’t get dead. Conversation over.”

I thought about pushing things, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize someone who was genuinely tough-minded when I see him. “You got a business card?”

He reached into his shirt pocket and produced a plain white business card with his name and a phone number. He passed it over to me. “Why?”

“Sometimes I need a subcontractor.”

He lifted both eyebrows.

“One who knows how to keep his teeth together.” I nodded to him and got out of the car. I leaned down and looked in the door before I left. “I know a mechanic. I’ll give him a call and he’ll come on out. He’s got a compressor on his truck, and he can fill up your tires. I’ll pay for it.”

Graver studied me with calm, intelligent eyes and then smiled a little. “Thanks.”

I closed the door and thumped on the roof with my fist. Then I walked back to my apartment. Mouse, who had waited patiently in the yard, came shambling up to greet me as I stepped out of the street, and he walked alongside me as I went back to the apartment.

Morgan was lying on my bed again when I came back in. Molly was just finishing up changing his bandages. Mister watched the entire process from the back of the couch, his ears tilted forward, evidently fascinated.

Morgan nodded to me and rasped, “Did you catch him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A local PI had been hired to keep track of me. But there was a problem.”

“What’s that?”

I shrugged. “He had integrity.”

Morgan inhaled through his nose and nodded. “Pretty rare problem.”

“Yeah. Impressive young man. What are the odds?”

Molly looked back and forth between us. “I don’t understand.”

“He’s quitting the job, but he won’t tell us what we want to know about his client, because he doesn’t think it would be right,” I said. “He’s not willing to sell the information, either.”

Molly frowned. “Then how are we going to find out who is behind all of this?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. But I told him I’d get someone to come by and put the air back in his tires. Excuse me.”

“Wait. He’s still out there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Blue Mercedes.”

“And he’s a young man.”

“Sure,” I said. “A little older than you. Name’s Vince Graver.”

Molly beamed. “Well, then, I’ll go get him to tell me.” She walked over to my icebox, opened it, pulled out a dark brown bottle of micro-brewery beer, and walked toward the door.

“How you gonna do that?” I asked her.

“Trust me, Harry. I’ll change his mind.”

“No,” Morgan said fiercely. He coughed a couple of times. “No. I would rather be dead—do you hear me? Be dead than have you use black magic on my behalf.”

Molly set the beer down on the shelf by the door and blinked at Morgan. “You’re right,” she said to me. “He is kind of a drama queen. Who said anything about magic?”

She pulled one arm into her T-shirt, and wriggled around a little. A few seconds later, she was tugging her bra out of the arm hole of her shirt. She dropped it on the shelf, picked up the bottle, and held it against each breast in turn. Then she turned to face me, took a deep breath, and arched her back a little. The tips of her breasts pressed quite noticeably against the rather strained fabric of her shirt.

“What do you think?” she asked, giving me a wicked smile.

I thought Vince was doomed.

“I think your mother would scream bloody murder,” I said.

Molly smirked. “Call the mechanic. I’ll just keep him company until the truck gets there.” She turned with a little extra hip action and left the apartment.

Morgan made a low, appreciative sound as the door closed.

I eyed him.

Morgan looked from the door to me. “I’m not dead yet, Dresden.” He closed his eyes. “Doesn’t hurt to admire a woman’s beauty once in a while.”

“Maybe. But that was just . . . just wrong.”

Morgan smiled, though it was strained with discomfort. “She’s right, though. Especially with a young man. A woman can make a man see everything in a different light.”

“Wrong,” I muttered. “Just wrong.”

I went to call Mike the mechanic.

Molly came back about forty-five minutes later, beaming.

Morgan had been forced to take more pain medication and was tossing in a restless sleep. I closed the door carefully so that we wouldn’t wake him.

“Well?” I asked.

“His car has really good air-conditioning,” Molly said smugly. “He never had a chance.” Between two fingers, she held up a business card like the one I’d gotten.

I did the same thing with mine, mirroring her.

She flipped hers over, showing me a handwritten note on the other side. “I’m worried about my job as your assistant.” She put the back of her hand against her forehead melodramatically. “If something happens to you, whatever will I do? Wherever shall I go?”

“And?”

She held out the card to me. “And Vince suggested that I might consider work as a paralegal. He even suggested a law firm. Smith Cohen Mackleroy.”

“His job-hunting suggestion, eh?” I asked.

She smirked. “Well, obviously he couldn’t just tell me who hired him. That would be wrong.”

“You are a cruel and devious young woman.” I took the card from her and read it. It said: Smith Cohen Mackleroy, listed a phone number, and had the name “Evelyn Derek” printed under that.

I looked up to meet Molly’s smiling eyes. Her grin widened. “Damn, I’m good.”

“No argument here,” I told her. “Now we have a name, a lead. One might even call it a clue.”

“Not only that,” Molly said. “I have a date.”

“Good work, grasshopper,” I said, grinning as I rolled my eyes. “Way to take one for the team.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Smith Cohen and Mackleroy, as it turned out, was an upscale law firm in downtown Chicago. The building their offices occupied stood in the shadow of the Sears Tower, and must have had a fantastic view of the lake. Having plucked out the enemy’s eyes, so to speak, I thought that I might have bought us some breathing space. Without Vince on our tail, I hoped that Morgan could get a few hours of rest in relative safety.

I’d figure out somewhere else to move him—just as soon as I leaned on Ms. Evelyn Derek and found out to whom she reported Vince’s findings.

I guess I looked sort of mussed and scraggly, because the building’s security guard gave me a wary look as I entered solidly in the middle of lunch hour. I could practically see him deciding whether or not to stop me.

I gave him my friendliest smile—which my weariness and stress probably reduced to merely polite—and said, “Excuse me, sir. I have an appointment with an attorney at Smith Cohen and Mackleroy. They’re on the twenty-second floor, right?”

He relaxed, which was good. Beneath his suit, he looked like he had enough muscle to bounce me handily out the door. “Twenty-four, sir.”

“Right, thanks.” I smiled at him and strode confidently past. Confidence is critical to convincing people that you really are supposed to be somewhere—especially when you aren’t.

“Sir,” said the guard from behind me. “I’d appreciate it if you left your club here.”

I paused and looked over my shoulder.

He had a gun. His hand wasn’t exactly resting on it, but he’d tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.

“It isn’t a club,” I said calmly. “It’s a walking stick.”

“Six feet long.”

“It’s traditional Ozark folk art.”

“With dents and nicks all over it.”

I thought about it for a second. “I’m insecure?”

“Get a blanket.” He held out his hand.

I sighed and passed my staff over to him. “Do I get a receipt?”

He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-ass.

“That’s Doctor Smart-ass,” I said. “I didn’t spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister.”

He leaned the staff against the wall behind his desk and sat back down at his chair.

I went to the elevator and rode up. It was one of those express contraptions that goes fast enough to compress your spine and make your ears pop. It opened on the twenty-fourth floor facing a reception desk. The law office, apparently, took up the entire floor.

The receptionist was, inevitably, a young woman, and just as unavoidably attractive. She went with the solid-oak furnishings, the actual oil paintings, and the handcrafted furniture in the reception area, and the faint scent of lemon wood polish in the air—variations on a theme of beautiful practicality.

She looked up at me with a polite smile, her dark hair long and appealing, her shirt cut just low enough to make you notice, but not so low as to make you think less of her. I liked the smile. Maybe I didn’t look like a beaten-up bum. Maybe on me it just looked ruggedly determined.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but the addiction-counseling center is on twenty-six.”

Sigh.

“I’m actually here to see someone,” I said. “Assuming that this is Smith Cohen and Mackleroy?”

She glanced rather pointedly—but still politely—at the front of her desk, where a plaque bore the firm’s name in simple sans serif lettering. “I see, sir. Who are you looking for?”

“Ms. Evelyn Derek, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said. “But she’ll want to talk to me.”

The receptionist looked at me as though she had some kind of bitter, unpleasant taste in her mouth. I’d timed my arrival correctly, then. The young lady clearly would have been much more comfortable handing me off to a secretary, or executive assistant, or whatever you’re supposed to call them now, and letting someone else decide if I was supposed to be there. And Ms. Evelyn Derek’s assistant was just as clearly out to lunch, which was the point of showing up during lunch hour. “Who shall I say is here?”

I produced Vincent Graver’s business card and passed it to her. “Please tell her that Vince has acquired some unexpected information and that she needs to hear about it.”

She pushed a button, adjusted her headset, and dutifully passed on the message to whoever was on the other end. She listened and nodded. “Straight back down the hall, sir, the second door on the left.”

I nodded to her and walked through the door behind her. The carpet got even thicker and the decor more expensive. A nook in the wall showcased a small rock fountain between a pair of two-thousand-dollar leather chairs. I shook my head as I walked through a hall that absolutely reeked of success, power, and the desire for everyone to know about it.

I bet they would have been seethingly jealous of the Ostentatiatory in Edinburgh.

I opened the second door on the left, went in, and closed it behind me, to find a secretary’s desk, currently unoccupied, and an open door to what would doubtless be an executive office appropriate to the status of Evelyn Derek, attorney at law.

“Come in, Mr. Graver,” said an impatient woman’s voice from inside the office.

I walked in and shut the door behind me. The office was big, but not monstrous. She probably wasn’t a full partner in the firm. The furnishings were sleek and ultramodern, with a lot of glass and space-age metal. There was only one small filing cabinet in the room, a shelf with a row of legal texts, a slender and fragile-looking laptop computer, and a framed sheepskin from somewhere expensive on the wall. She had a window, but it had been frosted over into bare translucency. The glass desk and sitting table and liquor cabinet all shone, without a smudge or a fingerprint to be seen anywhere. It had all the warmth of an operating theater.

The woman typing on the laptop might have come with the office as part of a complete set. She wore rimless glasses in front of the deepest green eyes I had ever seen. Her hair was raven black, and cut close to her head, showcasing her narrow, elegant features and the slender line of her neck. She wore a dark silk suit jacket with a matching skirt and a white blouse. She had long legs, ending in shoes that must have cost more than most mortgage payments, but she wore no rings, no earrings, and no necklace. There was something cold and reserved about her posture, and her fingers struck the keys at a rapid, decisive cadence, like a military drummer.

She said nothing for two full minutes, focusing intently on whatever she was typing. Obviously, she had something to prove to Vince for daring to intrude upon her day.

“I hope you don’t think you can convince me to rehire you, Mr. Graver,” she said, eventually, without looking up. “What is it that you think is so important?”

Ah. Vince had quit already. He didn’t let much grass grow under his feet, did he?

This woman was evidently used to being taken very seriously. I debated several answers and decided to start things off by annoying her.

I know. Me. Shocking, right?

I stood there treating her the same way she had treated me, saying nothing, until Evelyn Derek exhaled impatiently through her nose and turned a cool and disapproving stare toward me.

“Hi, cuddles,” I said.

I’ll give the lady this much—she had a great poker face. The disapproval turned into a neutral mask. She straightened slightly in her chair, though she looked more attentive than nervous, and put her palms flat on the desktop.

“You’re going to leave smudges,” I said.

She stared at me for a few more seconds before she said, “Get out of my office.”

“I don’t see any Windex in here,” I mused, looking around.

“Did you hear me?” she said, her voice growing harder. “Get. Out.”

I scratched my chin. “Maybe it’s in your secretary’s desk. You want me to get it for you?”

Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. She reached for the phone on her desk.

I pointed a finger at it, sent out an effort of will, and hissed, “Hexus.”

Fouling up technology is a fairly simple thing for a wizard to do. But it isn’t surgical in its precision. Sparks erupted from the phone, from her computer, from the overhead lights, and from something inside her coat pocket, accompanied by several sharp popping sounds.

Ms. Derek let out a small shriek and tried to flinch in three directions at once. Her chair rolled backward without her, and she wound up sprawled on the floor behind her glass-topped desk in a most undignified manner. Her delicate-looking glasses hung from one ear, and her deep green eyes were wide, the whites showing all around them.

Purely for effect, I walked a couple of steps closer and stood looking down at her in silence for a long moment. There was not a sound in that room, and it was a lot darker in there without the lights.

I spoke very, very quietly. “There are two shut doors between you and the rest of this office—which is mostly empty anyway. You’ve got great carpets, solid-oak paneling, and a burbling water feature out in the hallway.” I smiled slightly. “Nobody heard what just happened. Or they would have come running by now.”

She swallowed, and didn’t move.

“I want you to tell me who had you hire a detective to snoop on me.”

She made a visible effort to gather herself together. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shook my head, lifted my hand, and made a beckoning gesture at the liquor cabinet as I murmured, “Forzare,” and made a gentle effort of will. The door to the cabinet swung open. I picked a bottle of what looked like bourbon and repeated the gesture, causing it to flit from the opened cabinet across the room to my hand. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It tasted rich and burned my throat pleasantly on the way down.

Evelyn Derek stared at me in pure shock, her mouth open, her face whiter than rural Maine.

I looked at her steadily. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

“Evelyn,” I said in a chiding voice. “Focus. You hired Vince Graver to follow me around and report on my movements. Someone told you to do that. Who was it?”

“M-my clients,” she stammered. “Confidential.”

I felt bad scaring the poor woman. Her reaction to the use of magic had been typical of a straight who had never encountered the supernatural before—which meant that she probably had no idea of the nature of whoever she was protecting. She was terrified. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to hurt her.

But I was the only one in the room who did.

The thing about playing a bluff is that you have to play it all the way out, even when it gets uncomfortable.

“I really didn’t want this to get ugly,” I said sadly.

I took a step closer and put the bottle down on the desk. Then I slowly, dramatically, raised my left hand. It had been badly burned several years before, and while my ability to recover from such things was more intense than other human beings, at least in the long term, my hand still wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quite horror-movie special effects anymore, but the molten scars covering my fingers, wrist, and most of my palm were still startling and unpleasant, if you hadn’t ever seen them before.

“No, wait,” Evelyn squeaked. She backed across the floor on her buttocks, pressed her back to the wall and lifted her hands. “Don’t.”

“You helped your client try to kill people, Evelyn,” I said in a calm voice. “Tell me who.”

Her eyes widened even more. “What? No. No, I didn’t know anyone would get hurt.”

I stepped closer and snarled, “Talk.”

“All right, all right!” she stammered. “She—”

She stopped speaking as suddenly as if someone had begun strangling her.

I eased up on the intimidation throttle. “Tell me,” I said, more quietly.

Evelyn Derek shook her head at me, fear and confusion stripping away the reserve I’d seen in her only moments before. She started shaking. I saw her open her mouth several times, but only small choked sounds emerged. Her eyes lost focus and started flicking randomly around the room like a trapped animal looking for an escape.

That wasn’t normal. Not even a little. Someone like Evelyn Derek might panic, might be cowed, might be backed into a corner—but she would never be at a loss for words.

“Oh,” I said, mostly to myself. “I hate this crap.”

I sighed, and walked around the desk to stand over the cowering lawyer. “Hell, if I’d known that someone had . . .” I shook my head. She wasn’t really listening very hard to me, and she’d started crying.

It was one of about a thousand possible reactions when someone’s free will has been directly abrogated by some kind of psychic interdiction. I’d just created a situation in which every part of her logical, rational mind had been completely in favor of telling me who had hired her. Her emotions had been lined up right behind her reasoned thoughts, too.

Only I was betting that someone had gotten into her head. Someone had left something inside her that refused to let Ms. Derek speak about her employer. Hell, she might not even have a conscious memory of who hired her—despite the fact that she wouldn’t just hire some detective to spy on somebody for no reason.

Everyone always thinks that such obvious logical inconsistencies wouldn’t hold up, that the mind would somehow tear free of the bonds placed upon it using those flaws. But the fact is that the human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

It’s our nature. There’s plenty to distract us from the nastier truths of our lives, if we want to avoid them.

“Evelyn Derek,” I said in a firm, authoritative voice. “Look at me.”

She flinched closer to the wall, shaking her head.

I knelt in front of her. Then I reached out to touch her chin, and gently lifted her face to mine. “Evelyn Derek,” I said in a gentler voice. “Look at me.”

The woman lifted her dark green eyes to mine and I held her gaze for the space of a long breath before the soulgaze began.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then wizards are the souls’ voyeurs. When a wizard looks into another person’s eyes, we get to see something of that person, a vision of the very core of their being. We each go through the experience a little differently, but it amounts to the same thing—a look into another person’s eyes gives you an insight into the most vital portions of their character.

Evelyn Derek’s deep green eyes almost seemed to expand around me, and then I found myself staring at a room that was, if anything, almost identical to the woman’s office. The furniture was beautiful and minimalistic. Ms. Derek, it seemed, was not the kind of person to overly burden her soul with the care and mementos most people collect over the course of a lifetime. She had devoted her life to her mind, to the order and discipline of her thoughts, and she had never left herself much room for personal entanglements.

But as I stared at the room, I saw Ms. Derek herself. I would have expected her in her business clothing, or perhaps in student’s attire. Instead, she was wearing . . .

Well. She was wearing very expensive, very minimalistic black lingerie. Stockings, garters, panties, and bra, all black. She wore them, ahem, very well. She was kneeling on the floor, her knees apart, her hands held behind the small of her back. She faced me with her lips parted, her breath coming in quickened pants. I was able to change my viewpoint slightly, as if walking around her, and those green eyes followed me, pupils wide with desire, her hips shifting in little yearning rolls with every tiny correction of her balance.

Her wrists were bound behind her back with a long, slender ribbon of white silk.

I caught a motion in the corner of my eye, and I snapped my gaze up, to see a slender, feminine form vanish into the corridors of Evelyn Derek’s memory, showing me nothing more than a flash of pale skin—

—and a gleam of silver eyes.

Son of a bitch.

Someone had bound up Ms. Derek’s thoughts, all right, and woven those restraints together with her natural sexual desire, to give them permanence and strength. The method and the glimpses I’d seen of the perpetrator, flashes of memory that had managed to remain in her thoughts, perhaps, gave strong indicators as to who was responsible.

A vampire of the White Court.

And then there was a wrenching sensation and I was kneeling over Evelyn Derek. Her eyes were wide, her expression a mixture of terror and awe as she stared up at me.

Oh, yeah. That was the thing about a soulgaze. Whoever you look at gets a look back at you. They get to see you in just as much detail as you see them. I’ve never had anyone soulgaze me who didn’t seem . . . disconcerted by the experience.

Evelyn Derek stared at me and whispered, “Who are you?”

I said, “Harry Dresden.”

She blinked slowly and said, her voice dazed, “She ran from you.” Tears started forming in her eyes. “What is happening to me?”

Magic that invades the thoughts of another human being is just about as black as it gets, a direct violation of the Laws of Magic that the Wardens uphold. But there are grey areas, like in any set of laws, and there are accepted customs as to what was or was not allowed in practice.

There wasn’t much I could do for Evelyn. It would take a hand lighter and more skilled than mine to undo the harm that had been done to her mind, if it could be undone at all. But there was one thing I could do for her, a bit of grey magic that even the White Council acknowledged as an aid and a mercy, especially for those who had suffered the kind of psychic trauma Evelyn had.

I called up my will as gently as I could, and reached out with my right hand. I passed my fingertips gently over her eyes, causing her to close them, and as I passed my palm from her forehead down to her chin, I released that will with as much care as I possibly could, murmuring, “Dorme, dormius, Evelyn. Dorme, dormius.”

She let out a little whimpering sound of relief, and her body sagged to the floor in sudden and complete relaxation. She breathed in deeply once, exhaled, and then passed into simple and dreamless slumber.

I made her as comfortable as I could. With luck, when she woke, she would pass most of our confrontation off as a bad dream. Then I turned and left the law office behind me, quiet anger growing inside me with every step. I went by the security guard at the door as the anger started nudging over into fury. I slapped the receipt down on his desk, and with a gesture and a muttered word caused my staff to leap from where it leaned against the wall and into my hand.

The guard fell out of his chair, and I left without looking back.

The White Court was involved. They were trying to get Morgan killed—and me with him—and what’s more, they were preying on people in my town, ripping into their psyches and inflicting harm that could blossom into madness given the right circumstances. There was a broad difference between their usual predation and what had been done to Evelyn Derek.

Someone was going to answer for it.

Chapter Twenty-three

I got back to my apartment, shouldered open my door, and found a bizarre tableau.

Again.

Morgan lay on the floor about five feet from the bedroom door. He’d apparently seized my walking cane from the old popcorn tin by the door, where I keep things like Ozark folk art carved quarter staves, blasting rods, umbrellas, and so on. The cane is an old Victorian-style sword-cane. You twist the handle and pull, and you can draw a slender thirty-inch spring steel blade from the wooden cane. Morgan had. He lay on his side on the floor, his arm extended up at about a forty-five-degree angle, holding the sword.

Its tip rested against Molly’s carotid artery, just under her left ear.

Molly, for her part, leaned back against one of my bookcases, her knees bent a little, her arms spread out to either side, as if she’d stumbled over something and flung out her hands to brace herself against the bookcase as she fell back.

To the left of the door, Mouse crouched with his fangs bared and resting lightly against Anastasia Luccio’s throat. She lay on her back, and her gun lay on the rug-covered floor about two feet beyond the reach of her hand. She appeared to be quite relaxed, though I couldn’t see much of her face from where I stood.

Mouse’s deep brown eyes were focused steadily on Morgan. Morgan’s steely gaze was locked on Mouse’s jaws.

I stared at them aghast for a minute. No one moved. Except Mouse. When I looked at him, his tail wagged hopefully once or twice.

I blew out a heavy breath, set my staff aside, and plodded to the icebox, stepping over Anastasia’s leg on the way. I opened it, considered the contents for a moment, and then pulled out a cold Coke. I opened it and took a long drink. Then I picked up a dry kitchen towel, went to the couch, and sat down.

“I would ask what the hell happened,” I said to the room at large. “Except that the only one with any sense who witnessed it can’t actually talk.” I eyed the dog and said, “This had better be good.”

Mouse wagged his tail tentatively again.

“Okay,” I said. “Let her go.”

Mouse opened his jaws and sat up and away from Anastasia at once. He immediately padded over to me, and leaned against me as his gaze flicked from Anastasia to Morgan and back.

“Morgan,” I said. “Ease off the psycho throttle a little and put down the sword.”

“No,” Morgan said in a voice half strangled with fury. “Not until this little witch is bound and wearing a gag and a blindfold.”

“Molly’s already done duty as a beer-calendar model today,” I said. “We’re not dressing her up for a BDSM shoot next.” I put the Coke down and thought about it for a second. Threats weren’t going to have any effect on Morgan, except to make him more determined. It was one of the charming side effects of having such a rigid old-school personality.

“Morgan,” I said quietly. “You are a guest in my home.”

He flashed me a quick, guilty glance.

“You came to me for help and I’m doing my best. Hell, the kid has put herself into harm’s way, trying to protect you. I’ve done everything for you that I would have for blood family, because you are my guest. There are monsters from whom I would expect better behavior, once they had accepted my hospitality. What’s more, they’d give it to me.”

Morgan let out a pained sound. Then he turned his head sharply away from Molly and dropped the sword at the same time. The steel of the blade chimed as it bounced off the thin rug.

Morgan settled into a limp heap on the floor, and Molly sagged, lifting her hand and covering the vulnerable skin of her throat for a moment.

I waited until Anastasia sat up to toss her the towel I’d brought from the kitchen. She caught it, her expression neutral, and lifted it to begin drying her neck. Mouse is a great dog, but he has to work hard to control his slobber issues.

“So I take it things almost devolved into violence again,” I said to them. “And Mouse had to get involved.”

“She just came walking in here,” Molly protested. “She saw him.”

I blinked and looked at her. “And you did . . . what, exactly?”

“She blinded me,” Anastasia said calmly. “And then she hit me.” She lifted the towel and wiped at her nose. Some blood came away, though most of it stayed crusted and brown below one nostril. So they hadn’t been in the standoff for long. Anastasia gave Molly a steady gaze and said, “She hit me like a girl. For goodness’ sake, child, have you had no combat training at all?”

“There’s been a lot of material to cover,” I growled. “Blinded you?”

“Not permanently,” Molly said, more sullenly now. She rubbed at the knuckles of her right hand with her left. “I just . . . kind of veiled everything that wasn’t her.”

“An unnecessarily complicated way to go about it,” Anastasia said primly.

“For you, maybe,” Molly said defensively. “Besides, who was the one on the ground getting pounded?”

“Yes. You’re forty pounds heavier than me,” Anastasia said calmly.

“Bitch, I know you didn’t say just say that,” Molly bristled, stepping forward with her hands clenched.

Mouse sighed and heaved himself back to his feet.

Molly stopped, eyeing the big dog warily.

“Good dog,” I said, and scratched Mouse’s ears.

He wagged his tail without taking his serious brown eyes from Molly.

“I had to stop her,” Molly said. “She was going to report Morgan to the Wardens.”

“So you physically and magically assaulted her,” I said.

“What choice did I have?”

I eyed Morgan. “And you staggered up out of the bed you’re supposed to be staying in, grabbed the first pointy thing you could reach, and forced her off of Anastasia.”

Morgan eyed me wearily. “Obviously.”

I sighed and looked at Anastasia. “And you thought the only solution you had was to take them both down and sort everything out later, and Mouse stopped you.”

Anastasia sighed. “There was a blade out, Harry. The situation had to be controlled.”

I eyed Mouse. “And you wound up holding Anastasia hostage so Morgan wouldn’t hurt Molly.”

Mouse ducked his head.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said. “So think real careful about where this is coming from. Have you people ever considered talking when you’ve got a problem?”

That didn’t please anybody, and they gave me looks with varying degrees of irritation mixed with chagrin.

Except for Mouse, who sighed and said something like, “Uh-woof.”

“Sorry,” I told him at once. “Four-footed nonvocalizing company excepted.”

“She was going to get the Wardens,” Molly said. “If that happened before we proved who really killed LaFortier, all of us would be up the creek.”

“Actually,” Anastasia said, “that’s true.”

I turned my gaze to her. She rose and stretched, wincing slightly. “I assumed,” she said quietly, “that Morgan had recruited your apprentice to assist him in his escape scheme. And that they had done away with you.”

I made a small frustrated sound. “Why the hell would you assume something like that?”

She narrowed her eyes as she stared at me. “Why would Morgan flee to the home of the one wizard in the Council who had the most reason to dislike him?” she asked. “I believe your words were: ‘that would be crazy.’ ”

I winced. Ouch. “Uh,” I said. “Yeah. I . . .”

“You lied to me,” she said in a level tone. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed the undertone of anger and pain in her voice, or the almost imperceptible pause between each word. I could see bricks being mortared into place behind her eyes and I looked away from her.

The room was completely silent, until Morgan said, in a small and broken voice, “What?”

I looked up at him. His hard sour face had gone gray. His expression was twisted up in shock and surprise, like that of a small child discovering the painful consequences of gravity for the first time.

“Ana,” he said, almost choking on the words. “You . . . you think that I . . . How could you think that I would . . . ?”

He turned his face away. It couldn’t have been a tear. Not from Morgan. He wouldn’t shed tears if he had to execute his own mother.

But for a fraction of a second, something shone on one of his cheeks.

Anastasia rose and walked over to Morgan. She knelt down by him and put her hand on his head. “Donald,” she said gently, “we’ve been betrayed by those we trusted before. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That was them,” he said unsteadily, not looking up. “This is me.”

She stroked his hair once. “I never thought you had done it of your own free will, Donald,” she whispered quietly. “I thought someone had gotten into your mind. Held a hostage against your cooperation. Something.”

“Who could they have held hostage?” Morgan said in a bitter voice. “There’s no one. For that very reason. And you know it.”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

“You knew his wards,” Morgan went on. “You’ve been through them before. Often. You opened them in under a second when you came in. You have a key to his apartment.”

She said nothing.

His voice turned heavy and hollow. “You’re involved. With Dresden.”

Anastasia blinked her eyes several times. “Donald,” she began.

He looked up at her, his eyes empty of tears or pain or anything but weariness. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”

She met his eyes. I’d never seen such gentle pain on her face. “You’re running a fever. Donald, please. You should be in bed.”

He laid his head on the rug and closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Donald—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated dully.

Anastasia started crying in silence. She stayed next to Morgan, stroking her hand over his mottled silver-and-brown hair.

An hour later, Morgan was unconscious in bed again. Molly was down in the lab, pretending to work on potions with the trapdoor closed. I was sitting in the same spot with an empty can of Coke.

Anastasia came out of the bedroom and shut the door silently behind her. Then she leaned back against it. “When I saw him,” she said, “I thought he had come here to hurt you. That he had learned about the two of us and wanted to hurt you.”

“You,” I asked, “and Morgan?”

She was quiet for a moment before she said, “I never allowed it to happen. It wasn’t fair to him.”

“But he wanted it anyway,” I said.

She nodded.

“Hell’s bells,” I sighed.

She folded her arms over her stomach, never looking up. “Was it any different with your apprentice, Harry?”

Molly hadn’t always been the grasshopper she was today. When I’d first begun teaching her, she’d assumed that I would be teaching her all sorts of things that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with her being naked. And that had been more than all right with her.

Just not with me.

“Not much,” I acknowledged. “But he hasn’t been your apprentice for a long, long time.”

“I have always been of the opinion that romantic involvement was a vulnerability I could not afford. Not in my position.”

“Not always,” I said, “apparently.”

She exhaled slowly. “It was a much easier opinion to hold in my previous body. It was older. Less prone to . . .”

“Life?” I suggested.

She shrugged. “Desire. Loneliness. Joy. Pain.”

“Life,” I said.

“Perhaps.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “When I was young, I reveled in love, Harry. In passion. In discovery and in new experiences and in life.” She gestured down at herself. “I never realized how much of it I had forgotten until Corpsetaker left me like this.” She opened her pained eyes and looked at me. “I didn’t realize how much I missed it until you reminded me. And by then, Morgan wasn’t . . . He was like I had been. Detached.”

“In other words,” I said, “he’d made himself more like you. Patterned himself after you. And because he’d done that, after your change he wasn’t capable of giving you what you wanted.”

She nodded.

I shook my head. “A hundred years is a long time to carry a torch,” I said. “That one must burn like hell.”

“I know. And I never wanted to hurt him. You must believe me.”

“Here’s where you say, ‘The heart wants what the heart wants,’ ” I said.

“Trite,” she said, “but true all the same.” She turned until her right shoulder leaned on the door, facing me. “We should talk about where this leaves us.”

I toyed with the can of Coke. “Before we can do that,” I said, “we have to talk about Morgan and LaFortier.”

She exhaled slowly. “Yes.”

“What do you intend to do?” I asked.

“He’s wanted by the Council, Harry,” she said in a gentle voice. “I don’t know how he’s managed to avoid being located by magical means, but sooner or later, in hours or days, he will be found. And when that happens, you and Molly will be implicated as well. You’ll both die with him.” She took a deep breath. “And if I don’t go to the Council with what I know, I’ll be right there beside you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You really think he’s innocent?” she asked.

“Of LaFortier’s murder,” I said. “Yes.”

“Do you have proof?”

“I’ve found out enough to make me think I’m right. Not enough to clear him—yet.”

“If it wasn’t Morgan,” she said quietly, “then the traitor is still running around loose.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re asking me to discard the pursuit of a suspect with strong evidence supporting his guilt in favor of chasing a damn ghost, Harry. Someone we’ve barely been able to prove exists, much less identify. Not only that, you’re asking me to gamble your life, your apprentice’s life, and my own against finding this ghost in time.”

“Yes. I am.”

She shook her head. “Everything I’ve ever learned as a Warden tells me that it’s far more likely that Morgan is guilty.”

“Which brings us back to the question,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

Silence yawned.

She pushed off the door and came to sit down on the chair facing my seat on the couch.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

Chapter Twenty-four

“This is not how diplomacy is done,” Anastasia said as we approached the Château Raith.

“You’re in America now,” I said. “Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer.”

Anastasia’s mouth curved up at one corner. “You brought a sandwich?”

“Who do I look like, Kissinger?”

I’d been to Château Raith before, but it had always been at night, or at least twilight. It was an enormous estate most of an hour away from Chicago proper, a holding of House Raith, the current ruling house of the White Court. The Château itself was surrounded by at least half a mile of old-growth forest that had been converted to an idyllic, even gardenlike, state, like you sometimes see on centuries-old European properties. Huge trees and smooth grass beneath them dominated, with the occasional, suspiciously symmetrical outgrowth of flowering plants, often located in the center of golden shafts of sunlight that came down through the green-shadowed trees at regular intervals.

The grounds were surrounded by a high fence, topped with razor wire that couldn’t be readily seen from the outside. The fence was electrically charged, too, and the latest surveillance cameras—seemingly little more than glass beads with wires running out of them—monitored every inch of the exterior.

At night, it made for one extremely creepy piece of property. On a bright summer afternoon, it just looked . . . pretty. Very, very wealthy and very, very pretty. Like the Raiths themselves, the grounds were only scary when seen at the right time.

A polite security guard with the general bearing of ex-military had watched us get out of a cab, called ahead, and let us in with hardly a pause. We’d walked past the gate and up the drive through Little Sherwood until we reached the Château proper.

“How good are her people?” Anastasia asked.

“I’m sure you’ve read the file.”

“Yes,” she said, as we started up the steps. “But I’d prefer your personal assessment.”

“Since Lara’s taken over the hiring,” I said, “they’ve improved significantly. I don’t think they’re fed upon to keep them under control anymore.”

“And you base that assessment on what?”

I shrugged. “The before and after. The last batch of hired muscle was . . . just out of touch. Willing to die at a moment’s notice, but not exactly the sharpest tacks in the box. Pretty and vacant. And pretty vacant.” I gestured back at the entrance. “That guy back there had a newspaper nearby. And he was eating lunch when we showed up. Before, they just stood around like mannequins with muscle. I’m betting that most of them are ex-military. The hard-core kind, not the get-my-college-funded kind.”

“Officially,” she said, as we reached the top of the steps, “they remain untested.”

“Or maybe Lara’s just smart enough not to show them off until it’s necessary to use them,” I said.

“Officially,” Anastasia said dryly, “she remains untested.”

“You didn’t see her killing super ghouls with a couple of knives the way I did during the White Court coup,” I said. I rapped on the door with my staff and adjusted the hang of my grey cloak. “I know my word isn’t exactly respected among the old guard Wardens, but take it from me. Lara Raith is one smart and scary bitch.”

Anastasia shook her head with a faint smile. “And yet you’re here to hold a gun to her head.”

“I’m hoping that if we apply some pressure, we’ll get something out of her,” I said. “I’m low on options. And I don’t have time to be anything but direct.”

“Well,” she said, “at least you’re playing to your strengths.”

A square-jawed, flat-topped man in his thirties opened the door. He was wearing a casual beige sports suit accessorized by a gun in a shoulder holster and what was probably a Kevlar vest beneath his white tee. If that wasn’t enough, he had some kind of dangerous-looking little machine gun hanging from a nylon strap over one shoulder.

“Sir,” he said with a polite nod. “Ma’am. May I take your cloaks?”

“Thank you,” Anastasia said. “But they’re part of the uniform. If you could convey us directly to Ms. Raith, that would be most helpful.”

The security man nodded his head. “Before you accept the hospitality of the house, I would ask you both to give me your personal word that you are here in good faith and will offer no violence while you are a guest.”

Anastasia opened her mouth, as if she intended to readily agree, but I stepped slightly in front of her and said, “Hell, no.”

The security man narrowed his eyes and looked a little less relaxed. “Excuse me?”

“Go tell Lara that whether or not we rip this house to splinters and broken glass is still up for debate,” I said. “Tell her there’s already blood on the floor, and I think some of it is on her hands. Tell her if she wants a chance to clear the air, she talks to me. Tell her if she doesn’t that it is answer enough, and that she accepts the consequences.”

The guard stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, “You’ve got a real high opinion of yourself. Do you know what’s around you? Do you have any idea where you’re standing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Ground zero.”

More silence stretched, and he blinked before I did. “I’ll tell her. Wait here, please.”

I nodded to him, and he walked deeper into the house.

“Ground zero?” Anastasia muttered out of the corner of her mouth. “A trifle melodramatic, don’t you think?”

I answered her in a similar fashion. “I was going to go with ‘three feet from where they’ll find your body,’ but I figured that would have made it too personal. He’s just doing his job.”

She shook her head. “Is there some reason this can’t be a civil visit?”

“Lara’s at her most dangerous when everyone’s being civil,” I said. “She knows it. I don’t want her feeling comfortable. It’ll be easier to get answers out of her if she’s worried about all hell breaking loose.”

“It might also be easier to question her if we aren’t worried about it,” Anastasia pointed out. “She does hold the advantage here. One notes that there is fairly fresh plaster on the walls on either side of us, for instance.”

I checked. She was right. “So?”

“So, if I was the one preparing to defend this place, I think I might line the walls with antipersonnel mines wired to a simple charge and cover them in plaster until I needed them to remove a threat too dangerous to engage directly.”

I’d personally seen what an AP mine could do to human bodies. It wasn’t pretty. Imagine what’s left of a squirrel when it gets hit with large rounds from a heavy-gauge shotgun. There’s not much there but scraps and stains. It’s essentially the same when a human gets hit with a load of ball bearings the size of gumballs that spew from an AP mine. I glanced at either wall again. “At least I was right,” I said. “Ground zero.”

Anastasia smiled faintly. “I just thought I’d mention the possibility. There’s a fine line between audacity and idiocy.”

“And if she thinks she’s in danger, Lara might just detonate them now,” I said. “Preemptive self-defense.”

“Mmmm. Generally the favored method for dealing with practitioners. The customs of hospitality would have protected us from her as much as her from us.”

I thought about that for a second and then shook my head. “If we were all calm and polite, she’d never give away anything. And she won’t kill us. Not until she finds out what we know.”

She shrugged. “You could be right. You’ve dealt with the smart, scary bitch more often than me.”

“I guess we’ll know in a minute.”

A minute later, we were still there, and the security guy reappeared. “This way, please,” he said.

We followed him through the wealthy splendor of the house. Hardwood floors. Custom carved woodworking. Statues. Fountains. Suits of armor. Original paintings, one of them a van Gogh. Stained-glass windows. Household staff in formal uniform. I kept expecting to come across a flock of peacocks roaming the halls, or maybe a pet cheetah in a diamond-studded collar.

After a goodly hike, the guard led us to a wing of the house that had, apparently, been converted to corporate office space. There were half a dozen efficient-looking people working in cubicles. A phone with a digital ring tone chirruped in the background. Copiers wheezed. In the background, a radio played soft rock.

We went past the office, down a short hall past a break room that smelled of fresh coffee, and to the double doors at the end of the hallway. The guard held open one of the doors for us, and we went inside, to an outer office complete with a secretary’s desk manned by a stunning young woman.

By Justine, in fact, her white hair held back in a tail, wearing a conservative grey pantsuit.

As we entered, she rose with a polite, impersonal smile that could have taken any number of competitive pageants. “Sir, ma’am. If you’ll come this way, please, Ms. Raith is ready to see you.”

She went over to the door on the wall behind her desk, knocked once, and opened it enough to say, “Ms. Raith? The Wardens are here.” A very soft feminine voice answered her. Justine opened the door all the way and held it for us, smiling. “Coffee, sir, ma’am? Another beverage?”

“No, thank you,” Anastasia said, as we entered. Justine shut the door carefully behind us.

Lara Raith’s office had a few things in common with Evelyn Derek’s. It had the same rich furnishings—though her style was more rich, dark hardwood than glass—the same clarity of function and purpose. The resemblance ended there. Lara’s office was a working office. Mail was stacked neatly on a corner of the desk. Files and envelopes each had their own specific positions upon her desk and the worktable against one wall. A pen and ink set was in evidence on the desktop. Paperwork anarchy threatened the room, but order had been strongly imposed, guided by an obvious will.

Lara Raith, de facto ruler of the White Court, sat behind the desk. She wore a silk business suit of purest white, cut close to the flawless lines of her body. The cut of the suit elegantly displayed her figure, and contrasted sharply with the long blue-black hair, which hung in waves past her shoulders. Her features had the classically immortal beauty of Greek statues, balancing sheer beauty with strength, intelligence, and perception. Her eyes were a deep, warm grey, framed by thick sooty lashes, and just looking at her full soft mouth made my lips twitch and tingle as they demanded an introduction to Lara’s.

“Warden Dresden,” she murmured, her voice soothing and musical. “Warden Luccio. Please, be seated.”

I didn’t need to check with Anastasia. Both of us just stood there, staff in hand, regarding her quietly.

She leaned back in her chair and a wicked little smile played over that mouth without ever getting as far as her eyes. “I see. I’m being intimidated. Are you going to tell me why, or do I get three guesses?”

“Stop being cute, Lara,” I said. “Your lawyer, Evelyn Derek, hired a private eye to tail me and report on my movements—and every time I turn around, something nasty has shown up to make a run at me.”

The smile remained in place. “Lawyer?”

“I took a look at her head,” I said. “And found the marks of the White Court all over it—including a compulsion not to reveal who she was working for.”

“And you think it was my doing?” she asked.

“In these parts?” I asked. “Why not?”

“I’m hardly the only member of the White Court in the region, Dresden,” Lara said. “And while I’m flattered that you think so highly of me, the others of my kind do not love me so well as to consult with me before every action they take.”

Anastasia stepped in. “But they wouldn’t engage the White Council in this sort of business without your approval.” She smiled. “Such a thing would be seen as a challenge to your—to the authority of the White King.”

Lara studied Luccio for a while, grey eyes probing. “Captain Luccio,” she said, “I saw you dance in Naples.”

Anastasia frowned.

“It would have been . . . what? Two centuries ago, give or take a few decades?” Lara smiled. “You were exquisitely gifted. Granted, that was before your . . . current condition.”

“Ms. Raith,” Anastasia said, “that is hardly germane to the subject at hand.”

“It could be,” Lara murmured. “You and I attended the same party after your performance. I know the sort of appetites you indulged, back then.” Her lips curled into a hungry little smile, and it was suddenly all I could do to keep my knees from buckling in sheer, sudden, irrational sexual desire. “Perhaps you’d care to revisit old times,” Lara purred.

And, as quickly as that, the desire was gone.

Anastasia took a slow, deep breath. “I’m too old to be amused by such antics, Ms. Raith,” she replied calmly. “Just as I’m too intelligent to believe that you don’t know something of what’s been happening in Chicago.”

It took me a couple of seconds to pull my mind back from the places Lara had just sent it, but I managed. “We know you’re working with someone inside the Council,” I said quietly. “I want you to tell us who it is. And I want you to release Thomas.”

Lara’s eyes snapped to me on that last. “Thomas?”

I leaned on my staff and watched her face closely. “Thomas managed to warn me about the hit man Evelyn Derek had directed to me, but he disappeared before he could get involved. He’s not answering either of his phones and no one at the salon has seen him, either.”

Lara’s eyes went distant for a moment, and a frown line marred the perfection of her brow. “Is that all you have, Dresden? A fading psychic impression that one of my kind manipulated this lawyer and the apparent disappearance of my little brother? Is that the basis of reasoning that brought you here?”

“At the moment,” I said. Now that I’d laid down a lot of truth, I threw in the little lie. “But by the time we finish tracing the money back to its source, we’ll know for certain that you’re involved. And after that, there won’t be any going back.”

Lara narrowed her eyes at that. “You won’t find anything,” she said in a firm cold tone. “Because nothing of the sort is going on.”

Aha. That had touched a nerve. I applied pressure. “Come on, Lara. You know and I know how you and your folk do business—from behind proxies and cat’s-paws. You can’t possibly expect me to believe you when you say that you don’t have a hand in what’s going on.”

Lara’s eyes flickered in color, changing from deep grey to a far paler, more metallic shade, and she rose to her feet. “Frankly, I don’t care what you believe, Dresden. I have no idea what kind of evidence you think you’ve discovered, but I am not involved in any internal affairs of the White Council.” She lifted her chin as she sneered at us. “Contrary to your own perceptions, the world is a great deal larger than the White Council of Wizardry. You aren’t a vital body in today’s world. You’re a sad little collection of self-deluded has-beens whose self-righteous prattle has always taken second place to its hypocritical practice.”

Well. I couldn’t argue with that, but the words made Anastasia’s eyes narrow dangerously.

Lara leaned the heels of her hands on her desk and faced me, her words clipped and precise. “You think you can simply walk into my home and issue commands and threats as it pleases you? The world is changing, Wardens. The Council isn’t changing with it. It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under its own obsolescent weight. This kind of high-handed arrogance will only—”

She broke off suddenly, turning toward the window, her head tilted slightly to one side.

I blinked and traded a glance with Anastasia.

An instant later, the lights went out.

Red emergency lights snapped on immediately, though they weren’t needed in the office. A few seconds after that, a rapid, steady chiming sound filled the room, coming from speakers on the wall.

I looked down from the speaker to find Lara staring intently at me.

“What’s happening?” I asked her.

Her eyes widened slightly. “You don’t know?”

“How the hell should I know?” I demanded, exasperated. “It’s your stupid alarm system!”

“Then this isn’t your doing.” She gritted her teeth. “Bloody hell.”

Her head whipped toward the window again and this time I heard it—the sound of a man screaming in high-pitched, shameless agony.

And then I felt it: a nauseating quiver of wrongness in the air, a hideous sense of the presence of something ancient and vile.

The skinwalker.

“We’re under attack,” Lara snarled. “Come with me.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Justine knocked and entered the room, her eyes wide. “Ms. Raith?” “Security status?” Lara asked in a calm voice.

“Unknown,” Justine said. She was breathing a little too fast. “The alarm went off and I called Mr. Jones, but the radios cut out.”

“Most of your electronics are probably gone. You’ve been hexed,” I said. “It’s a skinwalker.”

Lara turned and stared hard at me. “Are you sure?”

Anastasia nodded and drew the sword from her hip. “I feel it, too.”

Lara nodded. “What can it do?”

“Everything I can, only better,” I said. “And it’s a shapeshifter. Very fast, very strong.”

“Can it be killed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s probably smarter to run.”

Lara narrowed her eyes. “This thing has invaded my home and hurt my people. Like hell.” She turned, drove her fist with moderate force into a wooden wall panel and dislodged it completely. In the empty space behind the panel was a rack hung with a belt bearing two wavy-bladed swords and a machine pistol, like a baby Uzi. She kicked out of her expensive shoes, shrugged out of her coat, and began strapping on weapons. “Justine, how many of the blood are in the house?”

“Four, counting you,” Justine replied immediately. “Your sisters, Elisa and Natalia, and your cousin Madeline.”

She nodded. “Wardens,” she said. “If you would not mind delaying our argument for a time, I would take it as a personal favor.”

“Hell with that,” I said. “This thing killed one of my friends.”

Lara glanced at the two of us. “I propose a temporary alliance against this invader.”

“Concur,” Anastasia said sharply.

“Doesn’t look like there’s any way to get out of it,” I said.

Gunfire erupted somewhere in the halls—multiple automatic weapons all going off at the same time.

Then there were more screams.

“Justine,” I said, holding out my hand. “Get behind me.”

The young woman hurried to comply, her expression strained but controlled.

Anastasia took up position on my right and Lara slid up next to me on the left. Her perfume was exquisite, and the surge of lust that hit me as I breathed it nearly had me turning to take a bite out of her, she smelled so good.

“It’s fast and tough,” I said. “And smart. But not invulnerable. We hit it from several directions at once and ran it off.”

A shotgun boomed, much closer to us than the earlier gunfire had been. It was immediately followed by the sounds of something heavy being slammed several times into the walls and floor.

The psychic stench of the skinwalker abruptly thickened and I said, “Here it comes!”

By the time I got to “it,” the skinwalker was already through the door to the outer office, seemingly moving faster than the splinters that flew off the door when the creature shattered it. Covered in a veil, it was just a flickering blur in the air.

I brought my shield up, focused far forward, filling the doorway to Lara’s office with invisible force. The skinwalker hit the barrier with all of its strength and speed. The shield held—barely—but so much energy had gone into the impact that wisps of smoke began curling up from the bracelet, and the skin on my wrist got singed. So much force surged into my shield that it physically drove me back across a foot of carpet.

As it hit, the energies of the skinwalker’s veil came into conflict with those in my shield, each canceling out the other, and for a second the creature was visible as an immensely tall, lean, shaggy, vaguely humanoid thing with matted yellow hair and overlong forelimbs tipped in long, almost delicate claws.

As the shield fell, Anastasia pointed a finger at the thing and hissed a word, and a blindingly bright beam of light no thicker than a hair flashed out from her finger. It was fire magic not unlike my own, but infinitely more intense and focused and far more energy efficient. The beam swept past the skinwalker, intersecting with its upper left arm, and where it touched fur burned away and flesh boiled and bubbled and blackened.

The skinwalker flashed to one side of the doorway and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a view of the smoking pinprick hole in the expensive paneling of the outer office.

I pointed my staff at the door and Lara did the same thing with the gun.

For maybe ten seconds, everything was silent.

“Where is it?” Lara hissed.

“Gone?” Justine suggested. “Maybe it got scared when Warden Luccio hurt it.”

“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It’s smart. Right now it’s looking for a better way to get to us.”

I looked around the office, trying to think like the enemy. “Let’s see,” I said. “If I was a shapeshifting killing machine, how would I get in here?”

The options were limited. There was the door in front of us and the window behind us. I turned to face the window, still looking. Silence reigned, except for the sigh of the air-conditioning, billowing steadily into the office from the—

From the vents.

I turned and thrust my staff toward a large air vent, covered with the usual slatted steel contraption, drew forth my will, and screamed, “Fulminos!”

Blue-white lightning suddenly filled the air with flickering fire, while a spear of blinding heat and force crackled forth from my staff and slammed into the metal vent. The metal absorbed the electricity, and I knew it would carry it back through the vent itself—and into anything inside.

There was a weird, chirping scream and then the vent cover flew outward, followed by a python-shaped blur in the air. Even as it arced toward us, that shape flowed and changed into that of something low-slung, stocky, and viciously powerful, like maybe a badger or a wolverine.

It hit Anastasia high on the chest and slammed her to the floor.

And on the way down, I caught a flash of golden-yellow eyes dancing with sadistic glee.

I turned to kick the thing off of Anastasia, but Lara beat me to the metaphorical punch. She slammed the barrel of her machine pistol into its flank as if driving a beer tap into a wooden keg with her bare hands, and pulled the trigger on the way.

Fire and noise filled the room, and the skinwalker went bouncing to one side. It hit the ground once, twisted itself in midair and raked its claws across Justine’s midsection. Using the reaction to control its momentum, it landed on its feet and hurled itself out of the room by way of the window behind Lara’s desk.

Justine staggered and let out a small cry of pain.

Lara stared at the window for a second, her eyes wide, then breathed,

“Empty night.”

I turned to Anastasia but she waved me off with a grimace. It didn’t look like she was bleeding. I turned to Justine and tried to assess her injuries. There were six horizontal lines sliced into the soft flesh of her abdomen, as neatly as if with a scalpel. Blood was welling readily from them—but I didn’t think any of them had been deep enough to open the abdominal cavity or reach an artery.

I seized Lara’s discarded coat, folded it hastily, and pressed it against Justine’s belly. “Hold it here,” I snapped to Justine. “You’ve got to control the bleeding. Hold it here.”

Her teeth were bared in pain, but she nodded and grasped at the improvised pad with both hands as I helped her up.

Lara looked from Justine to the window, her eyes a little wide. “Empty night,” she said again. “I’ve never seen anything that fast.”

Given that I had once seen her cover ground in a dead sprint at maybe fifty miles an hour, I figured she knew what she was talking about. We were never going to get that thing to hold still long enough to kill it.

I went to the window, hoping to spot it, and found myself staring into an oncoming comet of purple flame, presumably courtesy of the skinwalker. I fell back, hurling my left arm and its shield bracelet in an instinctive gesture, and the fiery hammer of the explosion flung me supine to the floor.

That otherworldly shriek sounded again, mocking and full of spite, and then there was a crash from somewhere below us.

“It’s back inside the house,” I said. I offered my hand to Anastasia to help her up. She took it, but as I began to pull, she clenched her teeth over a scream, and I eased her back onto the floor at once.

“Can’t,” she panted, breathing hard. “It’s my collarbone.”

I spat out a curse. Of every kind of simple fracture there is, a fractured collarbone is one of the most agonizing and debilitating injuries you can get. She wasn’t going to be doing any more fighting today. Hell, she wasn’t going to be doing any more standing.

The floor beneath my feet abruptly exploded. I felt a steel cable wrap my ankle and pull, and then I was falling with a hideous stench filling my nose. I crashed down onto something that slowed my fall but gave way, and I went farther down still. The noise was hideous. Then the fall stopped abruptly, though I wasn’t quite sure which way was up. About a hundred objects slammed into me all at the same time, pounding the wind out of my lungs.

I lay there stunned for a few seconds, struggling to remember how to breathe. The floor. The skinwalker had smashed its way up to me through the floor. It had pulled me down—but all the falling debris must have crashed through the floor the skinwalker had been standing on in turn.

I’d just fallen two stories amidst maybe a ton of debris, and managed to survive it. Talk about lucky.

And then, beneath my lower back, something moved.

The rubble shifted and a low growl began to reverberate up through it.

In a panic, I tried to force my dazed body to flee, but before I could figure out how it worked, a yellow-furred, too-long forearm exploded up out of the rubble. Quicker than you could say “the late Harry Dresden,” its long, clawed fingers closed with terrible strength on my throat and shut off my air.

Chapter Twenty-six

Here’s something a lot of people don’t know: being choked unconscious hurts.

There’s this horrible, crushing pain on your neck, followed by an almost instant surge of terrible pressure that feels like it’s going to blow your head to tiny pieces from the inside. That’s the blood that’s being trapped in your brain. The pain surges and ebbs in time with your heartbeat, which is probably racing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a waifish supermodel or a steroid-popping professional wrestler, because it isn’t an issue of strength or willpower—it’s simple physiology. If you’re human and you need to breathe, you’re going down. A properly applied choke will take you from feisty to unconscious in four or five seconds.

Of course, if the choker wants to make the victim hurt more, they can be sloppy about the choke, make it take longer.

I’ll let you guess which the skinwalker preferred.

I struggled, but I might as well have saved myself the effort. I couldn’t break the grip on my neck. The pile of rubble shifted and surged, and then the skinwalker sat up out of the wreckage, sloughing it off as easily as an arctic wolf emerging from a bed beneath the snow. The skinwalker’s nightmarishly long arms hung below its knees, so as it began moving down the hallway, I was able to get my hands and knees underneath me, at least part of the time, preventing my neck from snapping under the strain of supporting my own weight.

I heard boots hitting hardwood. The skinwalker let out a chuckling little growl and casually slammed my head against the wall. Stars and fresh pain flooded my perceptions. Then I felt myself falling through the air and landing in a tumble of arms and legs that only seemed to be connected to me in the technical sense.

I lifted dazed eyes to see the security guy from the entrance hall come around the corner, that little machine gun held to his shoulder, his cheek resting against the stock so that the barrel pointed wherever his eyes were focused. When he saw the skinwalker, uncovered from its veil, he stopped in his tracks. To his credit, he couldn’t have hesitated for more than a fraction of a second before he opened fire.

Bullets zipped down the hall, so close that I could have reached out a hand and touched them. The skinwalker flung itself to one side, a golden-furred blur, and rebounded off the wall toward the gunman, its form changing. Then it leapt into the air, flipping its body as it did, and suddenly a spider the size of a subcompact car was racing along the ceiling toward the security guy.

At that point, he impressed me again. He turned and ran, sprinting around a corner with the skinwalker coming hard behind.

“Now!” someone called, as the skinwalker reached the intersection of the two hallways, and a sudden howl of thunder filled the hallways with noise and light. Bullets ripped into the floor, the wall, and the ceiling, coming from some point out of sight around the corner, filling the air with splinters of shattered hardwood.

The skinwalker let out a deafening caterwaul of pain and boundless fury. The gunfire reached a thunderous, frantic crescendo.

Then men began screaming.

I tried to push myself to my feet, but someone had set the hallway on tumble dry, and I fell down again. I kept trying. Whoever had made the hall start acting like a Laundromat dryer had to run out of quarters eventually. By using the wall, I managed to make it to my knees.

I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned my head blearily toward the source of the noise and saw three pale, lithe forms drop silently from the floors above through the hole that the skinwalker had made. The first was Lara Raith. She’d torn her skirt up one side, almost all the way to her hip, and when she landed in a silent crouch, she looked cold and feral and dangerous with her sword in one hand and her machine pistol in the other.

The other two women were vampires as well, their pale skin shining with eerie beauty, their eyes glittering like polished silver coins—the sisters Justine had mentioned, I presumed. I guess I’d arrived in the middle of the night, vampire time, and gotten some people out of bed. The first sister wore nothing but weapons and silver body piercings, which gleamed on one eyebrow, one nostril, her lower lip, and her nipples. Her dark hair had been cropped close to her head except for where her bangs fell to veil one of her eyes, and she carried a pair of wavy-bladed swords like Lara’s.

The second seemed to be taller and more muscular than the other two. She wore what looked like a man’s shirt, closed with only a single button. Her long hair was a mess, still tousled from sleep, and she held an exotic-looking axe in her hands, its blade honed along a concave edge instead of the more conventional convex one.

Without any visible signal, they all started prowling forward at the same time—and it was a prowl, an atavistic, feline motion that carried what were very clearly predators forward in total silence. Lara paused when she reached me, glanced over my injuries with cold silver eyes and whispered, “Stay down.”

No problem, I thought dully. Down is easy.

The screaming stopped with a last stuttering burst of gunfire. The security guy came staggering around the corner. Blood matted his hair and covered half of his face. There was a long tear through his jacket on the left side. His left arm hung uselessly, but he still gripped the handle of his miniature assault weapon with his right. He wavered and dropped to one knee as he spotted the three vampires.

Lara gestured with a hand, and the other two spread out and moved forward, while she came to the side of the wounded guard. “What happened?”

“We hit it,” he said, his voice slurred. “We hit it with everything. Didn’t even slow it down. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

“You’re bleeding,” Lara said in a calm tone. “Get behind me. Defend the wizard.”

He nodded unsteadily. “Yeah. Okay.”

Lara’s guy had to be either incredibly lucky or really good to have survived a close-quarters battle with the skinwalker. I stared dully at security guy for a second before my impact-addled brain sent up a warning flag. Nobody was that lucky.

“Lara!” I choked out.

Security guy turned in a blur of motion, sweeping the machine gun at Lara’s head like a club—but she had begun moving the instant she’d heard my warning and he missed knocking her head off her shoulders by a fraction of an inch. She flung herself to one side and rolled as security guy’s other arm flashed out, lengthening and sprouting yellow fur and claws as it came. She avoided the worst of it, but the skinwalker’s claws left a triple line of incisions down one shapely thigh, and they welled with blood a little too pale and pearly to be human.

The skinwalker followed her motion, surging forward, its body broadening and thickening into the form of something like a great bear with oversized jaws and vicious fangs. It overbore her by sheer mass, slapping and raking with its clawed paws, snapping with its steely jaws. I heard a bone break, heard Lara cry out in rage—and then the skinwalker flew straight up into the ceiling, its head and shoulders slamming into it with such force that it went cleanly through it, and out onto the floor above.

Lara had rolled to her back, and had launched the thing away from her with her legs. They were long and smoothly muscled and utterly desirable, even as she lowered them and rolled lightly to her feet, holding one arm tucked in close to her side. Her skin shone with cold, alien power, and her eyes had become spheres of pure white. She stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, slowly lifting and straightening her arm as she did.

Her forearm had received a compound fracture. I could see bone poking out through the flesh. But over the next few seconds, the flesh seemed to ripple and become more malleable. The bone withdrew, vanishing beneath the skin of her arm—even the hole that the bone had torn in the skin sealed slowly closed, and in ten seconds I couldn’t even tell she’d been hurt.

She turned those empty white eyes to me and stared at me with an expression of focused naked hunger. For a second, I felt my body responding to her desire, even as woozy as I was, but that was quickly snuffed out by a surge of nausea. I turned my head and threw up onto the expensive floor while my head and neck screamed with pain.

When I looked up again, Lara had turned her head away from me. She picked up her fallen weapon—but the machine pistol had been bent into the shape of a comma by a blow from the skinwalker’s sledgehammer paws. She discarded it, recovered her sword, and drew the matching weapon from her belt. She was breathing quickly—not in effort, but in raw excitement, and the tips of her breasts strained against her dirtied blouse. She licked her lips slowly and said, evidently for my benefit, “I sometimes see Madeline’s point.”

There was a feminine scream from somewhere close by, a challenge that was answered by a leonine roar that shook the hallway. The short-haired sister flew into the wall at the T intersection ahead, and collapsed like a rag doll. There were sounds of swift motion from around the corner, and a gasp.

Then silence.

A moment later, a blur came around the corner, dragging the axe-wielding sister’s limp form by the hair. The veil faded as the skinwalker came closer, once more showing us its bestial, not-quite-human form. It stopped in front of us, maybe ten feet away. Then, quite casually, it lifted one of the unconscious vampire’s hands to its fanged mouth and, never looking away from Lara, calmly nipped off a finger and swallowed it.

Lara narrowed her eyes, and her rich mouth split into a wide, hungry smile. “Did you need a break before we continue?”

The skinwalker spoke, its voice weirdly modulated, as if several different creatures were approximating speech at the same time. “Break?”

With the word, it calmly snapped the vampire girl’s left arm in midhumerus.

Hell’s bells.

“I am going to kill you,” Lara said calmly.

The skinwalker laughed. It was a hideous sound. “Little phage. Even here at the center of your power, you could not stop me. Your warriors lay slain. Your fellow phages are fallen. Even the foolish pretenders to power visiting your house could not stop me.”

I’d gotten enough of my head back together to push myself to my feet. Lara never looked at me, but I could sense her attention on me nonetheless. I didn’t have time to gather my will for a magical strike. The skinwalker would feel me doing it long before it became a fact.

Fortunately, I plan for such contingencies.

The eight silver rings I wore, one on each of my fingers, served a couple of purposes. The triple bands of silver were moderately heavy, and if I had to slug someone, they made a passably good imitation of brass knuckles. But their main purpose was to store back a little kinetic energy every time I moved one of my arms. It took a while to build up a charge, but when they were ready to go, I could release the force stored in each ring with instant precision. A blast from a single band of a ring could knock a big man off his feet and take the fight out of him in the process. There were three bands to each ring—which meant that I had a dozen times that much force ready to go on each hand.

I didn’t bother to say anything to Lara. I just lifted my right fist and triggered every ring on it, unleashing a pile driver of kinetic energy at the skinwalker. Lara bounded forward at the same instant, swords spinning, ready to lay into the skinwalker when my strike threw it off balance and distracted it.

But the skinwalker lifted its left hand, fingers crooked into a familiar defensive gesture, and the wave of force that should have knocked it tail over teakettle bounced back from it like light from a mirror—and struck Lara full-on instead.

Lara let out a startled whuff as the equivalent force of a speeding car slammed into her, knocked her back, and flattened her against the mound of rubble still filling the hallway behind me.

The skinwalker’s mouth split into a leering smile of its own, and its bestial voice purred, “Break, little phage. Break.”

Lara gasped and lifted herself up with her arms. Her white eyes were fixed on the skinwalker, her lips twisted into a defiant snarl.

I stood there staring at the skinwalker. It was hard, and I had to use the wall to help me balance. Then I took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, moving very carefully, until I stood between the skinwalker and Lara. I turned to face it squarely.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have it.”

“Have what, pretender?” the skinwalker growled.

“You aren’t here to kill us,” I said. “You could have done it by now.”

“Oh, so true,” it murmured, its eyes dancing with malicious pleasure.

“You don’t have to gloat about it, prick,” I muttered under my breath. Then I addressed the skinwalker again. “You must want to talk. So why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

The skinwalker studied me, and idly nipped another finger from the unconscious vampire girl. It chewed slowly, with some truly unsettling snapping, popping sounds, and then swallowed. “You will trade with me.”

I frowned. “Trade?”

The skinwalker smiled again and tugged something from around its neck with one talon. Then it caught the object and tossed it to me. I caught it. It was a silver pentacle necklace, a twin to my own, if considerably less battered and worn.

It was Thomas’s necklace.

My belly went cold.

“Trade,” the skinwalker said. “Thomas of Raith. For the doomed warrior.”

I eyed the thing. So it wanted Morgan, too. “Suppose I tell you to fuck off.”

“I will no longer be in a playful mood,” it purred. “I will come for you. I will kill you. I will kill your blood, your friends, your beasts. I will kill the flowers in your home and the trees in your tiny fields. I will visit such death upon whatever is yours that your very name will be remembered only in curses and tales of terror.”

I believed the creature.

No reflexive comeback quip sprang from my lips. Given what I’d seen of the skinwalker’s power, I had to give that one a five-star rating on the threatometer.

“And to encourage you . . .” Its gaze shifted to Lara. “If the wizard does not obey, I will unmake you as well. I will do it every bit as easily as I have done today. And it will bring me intense pleasure to do so.”

Lara stared at the skinwalker with pure white eyes, her expression locked into a snarl of hate.

“Do you understand me, little phage? You and that rotting bag of flesh you’ve attached yourself to?”

“I understand,” Lara spat.

The skinwalker’s smile widened for an instant. “If the doomed warrior is not delivered to me by sundown tomorrow, I will begin my hunt.”

“It might take more time than that,” I said.

“For your sake, pretender, pray it does not.” It idly flung the unconscious vampire away from it, to land in a heap atop the other sister. “You may reach me through his speaking devices,” the skinwalker said.

Then it leapt lightly up through one of the holes in the ceiling, and was gone.

I slumped against the wall, almost falling.

“Thomas,” I whispered.

That nightmare had my brother.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Lara took charge of the aftermath.

A dozen security guards were dead, another dozen maimed and crippled. The walls in the hallway where the guards had sprung their ambush were so covered in blood that it looked like they had been painted red. At least a dozen more personnel hadn’t been able to reach the battle before it was over, it had all happened so swiftly—which meant that there was someone available to help stabilize the wounded and clean up the bodies.

The skinwalker’s hex had effectively destroyed every radio and cell phone in the Château, but the land lines, based on much older, simpler technology, were still up. Lara called in a small army of other employees, including the medical staff that the Raiths kept on retainer.

I sat with my back against the wall while all this happened, a little apart from the activity. It seemed appropriate. My head hurt. When scratching an itch, I noticed that there was a wide stripe of mostly dried blood covering my left ear and spreading down my neck. Must have been a scalp wound. They bleed like crazy.

After some indeterminately fuzzy length of time, I looked up to see Lara supervising the movement of her two wounded relatives. The two vampires were liberally smeared with their own blood, and both were senseless. When they were carried off in stretchers, the medics began helping wounded security guards, and Lara walked over to me.

She knelt down in front of me, her pale grey eyes concealing whatever thought was behind them. “Can you stand, wizard?”

“Can,” I said. “Don’t want to.”

She lifted her chin slightly and looked down at me, one hand on her hip. “What have you gotten my little brother involved in?”

“Wish I knew,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out where the bullets are coming from.”

She folded her arms. “The doomed warrior. The skinwalker meant the fugitive Warden, I presume.”

“It’s one way to interpret that.”

Lara studied me intently and suddenly smiled, showing neat white teeth. “You have him. He came to you for help.”

“Why the hell would you think that?” I asked.

“Because people in hopeless situations come to you for help on a regular basis. And you help them. It’s what you do.” She tapped her chin with one finger. “Now, to decide what is more advantageous. To play along with the skinwalker’s demands. Or to write Thomas off as a loss, take the Warden from you, and turn him into fresh political capital for those who are hunting him. There is a rather substantial reward for his capture or death.”

I eyed her dully. “You’re going to play along. You’re hoping that you’ll be able to act reluctant and get some concessions from me in exchange for your cooperation, but you’re going to give it to me anyway.”

“And why should I do that?” Lara asked.

“Because after the coup attempt in the Deeps, Thomas is a White Court celebrity. If you let some big bad shagnasty come along and kill him after it openly defies you in your own home, you look weak. We both know you can’t live with that.”

“And by giving in to his demands, I avoid the appearance of weakness?” she asked skeptically. “No, Dresden.”

“Damn right, no,” I said. “You’re going to play along, set Shagnasty up, and then take him out in the true, treacherous tradition of the White Court. You get Thomas back. You lay low a heavyweight. You gain status among your own folk.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, her expression giving me no hint to the direction of her thoughts. Then she said, “And when that is done, what if I should take the Warden and turn him over to the White Council myself? It would be a formidable bargaining chip to bring to the table with your folk in the future.”

“Sure it would. But you won’t do that.”

“Won’t I?” Lara asked. “What’s stopping me?”

“I am.”

“I always enjoy dealing with a man possessing a well-developed sense of self-worth.”

It was my turn to show my teeth in a smile. “Slugging matches aren’t your style, Lara. If you play this situation right, it will further your reputation and influence. Why jeopardize that by throwing down with me?”

“Mmmm,” she said, her eyes wandering over me. She idly smoothed her skirt with one hand, instantly drawing my eyes to the pale length of thigh showing through the torn seam. Trickles of blood from her wounds slithered lovingly over smooth flesh. “I wonder, occasionally, what it might be like to throw down with you Dresden. To go to the mat. I wonder what might happen.”

I licked my lips and jerked my eyes away with an effort, incapable of speech.

“Do you know how to really control someone, Harry?” she asked, her voice a low purr.

I cleared my throat and rasped, “How?”

Her pale grey eyes were huge and deep. “Give them what they want. Give them what they need. Give them what no one else can give. If you can do that, they’ll come back to you again and again.” She leaned down close and whispered in my ear, “I know what I can give you, Harry. Shall I tell you?”

I swallowed and nodded, not daring to look at her.

“Surcease,” she breathed into my ear. “I can make it stop hurting, wizard. I can take away the pains of the body. Of the mind. Of the heart. For a little time, I could give you something no one else can—freedom from your burdens of responsibility and conscience.” She leaned even closer, until I could feel the coolness of the air around her lips. “Sweet Dresden. I could give you peace. Imagine closing your eyes with no worries, no pain, no fears, no regrets, no appetites, and no guilt. Only quiet and darkness and stillness and my flesh against yours.”

I shivered. I couldn’t stop myself.

“I can give you that,” Lara said, her lips slinking into a smile. “You wear your pain like a suit of armor. But one day, it will be too heavy to bear. And you’ll remember this moment. And you’ll know who can give you what you need.” She let out a small, sensual sigh. “I don’t require more food, Dresden. I have that in plenty. But a partner . . . You and I could do much together that we could not alone.”

“Sounds swell,” I croaked, barely able to get the words out. “Maybe we’ll start with getting Thomas back.”

She straightened her spine and leaned back from me, her beautiful pale face full of lust and hunger. She closed her eyes and stretched a little in place, the way cats sometimes will. It was a mind-numbing display of lithe femininity. She nodded slowly, then rose and regarded me with her usual cool detachment. “You’re right, of course. Business first. You want me to help you.”

“I want you to help yourself,” I said. “We’ve both got the same problem.”

“And that would be?” she asked.

“Traitors within the organization,” I said. “Inciting conflict and destabilizing the balance of power.”

She arched a raven black eyebrow. “The Warden is innocent?”

“Only if I can find the guy who set him up.”

“You think there’s a connection between your traitor and the skinwalker.”

“And another connection that led me here,” I said. “One of your folk paid that lawyer and rewired her head.”

Lara’s mouth twisted with distaste. “If that’s true, then someone was hideously gauche. One never leaves such obvious and overt blocks behind—and especially not in a contact only one layer removed. Such things call too much attention to themselves.”

“So,” I said. “A White Court vampire who is gauche, overt, impatient. Oh, and who did not show up to defend the homestead when the skinwalker broke in. And who Thomas recently beat and humiliated in public.”

“Madeline,” Lara murmured.

“Madeline,” I said. “I think whoever is pulling the strings on this operation is using her. I think we need to find her and follow the strings back to the puppeteer.”

“How?”

I reached into my duster pocket and took out the sheet of paper with Morgan’s supposed account on it, along with a photocopy of the huge deposit check. “Find out who set up this account. Find out where the money came from.” I passed her the pages. “After that, see if you can’t find some way to track down where Thomas’s cell phone is.”

“His cell phone?”

“Shagnasty said we could contact him by calling Thomas’s phones. Isn’t there some way that they can track where those things are?”

“It depends on a number of factors.”

“Well I’m betting the skinwalker doesn’t have a subscription to Popular Science. He’ll probably have some kind of countermeasure for a tracking spell, but he might not even realize that it’s possible to physically trace the phone.”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” she said. One of the medics approached us and stood back respectfully. Lara turned to the young man. “Yes?”

He held up a clipboard. “The triage report you wanted.”

She held out her hand. He passed her the clipboard as if he didn’t want to move his feet too close to her. Lara scanned over the topmost page, and murmured, “Hennesy and Callo both have broken backs?”

“It’ll take an X-ray to confirm it,” the medic said nervously. “But from what I was told, the, uh, the attacker just broke them over his knee and threw them down. They’re paralyzed. Probably permanently.”

“And Wilson lost both eyes,” Lara murmured.

The medic avoided looking at her. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Very well,” Lara said. “Take Hennesy to Natalia’s chambers. Callo will go to Elisa.”

“Yes, ma’am. Should I send Wilson to the infirmary?”

Lara stared at him with absolutely no expression on her lovely face. Then she said, “No, Andrew. I’ll come for him in a moment.” She held out the clipboard, and the medic took it and hurried away.

I watched Lara for a moment and said, “You’re going to kill those men. When Elisa and Natalia wake up . . .”

“They will feed and their lives will be spared. Annoying as it may be to lose what I invested in those men, I can replace hired guns,” she said. “I cannot so easily replace members of my family and my House. As their leader, it is my responsibility to provide adequate care and sustenance in times of need—particularly when loyalty to the House is what created that need.”

“They’re your own men,” I said.

“That was before they became useless to the House,” she replied. “They know too much of our internal affairs to be allowed to leave. Lives must be lost if my kin are to survive their injuries. Rather than inflict that upon one who can still be of use to us, I preserve lives by seeing to it that these men serve us one last time.”

“Yeah. You’re a real humanitarian. A regular Mother Teresa.”

She turned that flat, empty gaze to me again. “At what point did you forget that I am a vampire, Dresden? A monster. A habitually neat, polite, civil, and efficient monster.” Her eyes drifted down the hallway, to where a well-muscled young man was being helped to sit down, while a medic secured bandages over his eyes. Lara stared intently at him, the color of her eyes lightening to silver, and her lips parted slightly. “I am what I am.”

I felt sick to my stomach. I pushed myself to my feet, and said, “So am I.”

She glanced obliquely at me. “Is that a threat, Dresden?”

I shook my head. “Just a fact. One day I’m going to take you down.”

Her eyes went back to the wounded man, her lips shifting to one side in a smirk. “One day,” she murmured. “But not today.”

“No. Not today.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you, wizard mine?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.

“I need a car.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

I sort of shambled up one floor and down a wing to the Château’s infirmary, escorted there by a guard who was being very careful not to limp on a wounded leg. The skinwalker had smacked my bean against hardwood and knocked something loose. I felt fairly confident that if I jumped up and down and wiggled my head, my brain would slosh squishily around the inside of my skull.

Not that I was going to be doing any of those things. Walking was hard enough.

In the infirmary, I found a white-coated young woman tending to the wounded. She moved with the brisk professional manner of a doctor, and was just finishing seeing to Justine’s injuries. The young woman was laid out on a bed, her midsection swathed in bandages, her eyes glazed with the distant, peaceful expression of someone on good drugs.

Anastasia sat on the bed next to Justine’s, her back straight, her expression calm. Her right arm was bound up close against her body in a black cloth sling. She came to her feet as I entered the room. She looked a little pale and shaky, but she stood without leaning on her slender wooden staff. “We’re leaving now?”

“Yeah,” I said. I moved to her side to support her. “You okay to walk?”

She leaned her staff toward me, stopping me from coming any closer, though she smiled slightly as she did. “I’ll bloody well walk out of here,” she said. And she said it in an atrocious Scottish accent.

I lifted both eyebrows at her in shock. “You told me you fell asleep during Highlander.”

Her dark eyes sparkled. “I always say that when I find myself at a vintage movie showing at a drive-in theater while in the company of a man two centuries younger than me.”

“And not because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings with your professional opinion of the swordsmanship on display?”

“Young men can be so delicate,” she said, her dimples making a brief appearance.

“We should get you to a hospital,” I said, nodding at her sling.

She shook her head. “The break is set back in place already. From here, all one can do is wear a sling and wait for it to stop hurting so badly.”

I grimaced. “I’ve got some meds at my place.”

She smiled again, but this time I could see how much she was straining to keep up appearances. “That would be lovely.”

“Harry,” said a soft voice.

I turned to face the wounded Justine, who looked at me with drowsy eyes. I turned to the bed and bent down to smile at her. “Hey there.”

“We heard that thing talking,” she said. All the hard consonants in her words had blurred, rounded edges. “We heard it talking to you and Lara.”

I glanced up at Anastasia, who gave me a short nod of her head.

“Yeah,” I said to Justine. I desperately did not want her to say anything she ought not to be saying. “I’ll take care of it.”

Justine smiled at me, though she looked like she could hardly keep her eyes open. “I know you will. He loves you, you know.”

I did not look up at Anastasia. “Uh. Yeah.”

Justine took my hand in one of hers, her eyes reaching for mine. “He always worried that he’d never be able to talk to you. That the world he came from was so different. That he wouldn’t know enough about being human to relate. That he wouldn’t know about being a br—”

“Brass-plated pain in my ass,” I said. “He knows that plenty well.” I avoided her eyes. The last thing I needed was to endure another soulgaze now. “Justine, you need to rest. I’ll dig him up. Don’t worry.”

She smiled again and her eyes closed all the way. “You’re like family to me, Harry. You always care.”

I bowed my head, embarrassed, and settled Justine’s hands back on the bed, then tugged the thin hospital blankets up over her.

Anastasia watched me with thoughtful eyes as I did.

We walked back to the front of the house, and past the fairly fresh plaster that might have hidden ridiculously lethal booby traps, out over a front porch the size of a tennis court, and down several steps to the circular drive, where the car Lara had lent me was waiting.

I stopped so suddenly that Anastasia nearly walked into my back. She caught her balance with a hiss of discomfort, and then looked up and caught her breath. “Oh, my.”

Nearly two tons of British steel and chrome sat idling in the drive. Its purring engine sounded like a sewing machine. The white Rolls limo was an old model, something right out of a pulp-fiction adventure film, and it was in gorgeous condition. Its panels shone, freshly waxed and without blemish, and the chrome of its grill gleamed sienna in the light of dusk over the Château.

I walked down to peer inside the Rolls. The passenger seating in the back was larger than my freaking apartment. Or at least it looked that way. The interior was all silver-grey and white leather and similarly colored woodwork, polished to a glowing sheen and accented with silver. The carpet on the floor of the Rolls was thicker and more luxurious than a well-kept lawn.

“Wow,” I said quietly.

Anastasia, standing beside me, breathed, “That’s a work of bloody art.”

“Wow,” I said quietly.

“Look at the filigree.”

I nodded. “Wow.”

Anastasia gave me a sidelong look. “And there’s plenty of room in back.”

I blinked and looked at her.

Her expression was innocent and bland. “All I’m saying is that it is rather crowded in your apartment right now. . . .”

“Anastasia,” I said. I felt my face getting a little warm.

The dimples reappeared. She was just teasing me, of course. In her condition it would be some time before she could engage in that kind of activity.

“What model is this?” she asked.

“Um,” I said. “Well, it’s a Rolls-Royce. It’s . . . I think it’s from before World War Two. . . .”

“It’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, of course,” said Lara’s voice from behind me. “At this house? What else would it be?”

I looked over my shoulder, to see Lara Raith standing in the shadowy doorway of the house.

“You have special needs, obviously,” she said. “So I provided you with an appropriate vintage. Nineteen thirty-nine.” She folded her arms, rather smugly, I thought, and said, “Bring it back with a full tank.”

I tilted my head at her in a gesture that wasn’t quite an affirmation, and muttered, as I opened the passenger-side door, “The loan officer will have to run a check on my credit first. What’s this thing get, about two gallons per mile?”

Anastasia slid into the car with a brief sound of discomfort. I winced and held out my hands in case she fell back, but she managed it without any other difficulty. I shut the door, and caught a glimpse of Lara taking a sudden step forward.

She focused sharply on Anastasia for a moment—and then upon me.

Lara’s eyes flickered several shades paler as her ripe lips parted in dawning realization. A very slow smile crept over her mouth as she stared at me.

I turned away from her rather hurriedly, got into the Rolls, and got it moving. And I didn’t look back again until the vampires’ house was five miles behind us.

Anastasia let me get most of the way back to town before she looked at me and said, “Harry?”

“Hmmm?” I asked. Driving the Rolls was like driving a tank. It had all kinds of momentum behind it, no power steering, and no power brakes. It was a vehicle that demanded that I pay my respects to the laws of physics and think a little bit further ahead than I otherwise might.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.

“Dammit,” I muttered.

She watched me with eyes much older than the face around them. “You were hoping I didn’t hear Justine.”

“Yeah.”

“But I did.”

I drove for another minute or two before asking, “Are you sure?”

She considered that for a moment before she said, more gently, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I have nothing to say to Captain Luccio,” I said. It came out harder than I had anticipated.

She reached out and put her left hand on my right, where it rested on the gearshift. “What about to Anastasia?” she asked.

I felt my jaw tighten. It took me a moment to make them relax and ask, “Do you have any family?”

“Yes,” she said. “Technically.”

“Technically?”

“The men and women I grew up with, who I knew? They’ve been dead for generations. Their descendants are living all over Italy, in Greece, and there are a few in Algeria—but it isn’t as though they invite their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt to their Christmas celebrations. They’re strangers.”

I frowned, thinking that over, and looked at her. “Strangers.”

She nodded. “Most people aren’t willing to accept a radical fact like the life span of our kind, Harry. There are some families who have—Martha Liberty, for example, lives with one of her multiple-great-granddaughters and her children. But mostly, it ends badly when wizards try to stay too close to their kin.” She bowed her head, apparently studying her sling as she spoke. “I look in on them every five or six years, without them knowing. Keep an eye out for any of the children who might develop a talent.”

“But you had a real family once,” I said.

She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, yes. It was a very long time ago.”

“I remember my father, a little. But I was raised an orphan.”

She winced. “Dio, Harry.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You never had anyone, did you?”

“And if I did find someone,” I said, feeling my throat constricting as I spoke, “I would do anything necessary to protect him. Anything.”

Anastasia looked out the window, letting out a hiss of what sounded like anger. “Margaret. You selfish bitch.”

I blinked and looked at her, and nearly got us both killed when a passing car cut me off and I almost couldn’t stop the monster Rolls in time. “You . . . you knew my mother?”

“All the Wardens knew her,” Anastasia said quietly.

“She was a Warden?”

Anastasia was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “She was considered a threat to the Laws of Magic.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that she made it a point to dance as close to the edge of breaking the Laws as she possibly could whenever she got the chance,” Anastasia replied. “It took her all of a year after she was admitted to the Council to start agitating for change.”

I had to focus on the road. This was more than I had ever heard from anyone in the Council about the enigmatic figure who had given me life. My hands were sweating and my heart was thudding. “What kind of change?”

“She was furious that ‘the Laws of Magic have nothing to do with right and wrong.’ She pointed out how wizards could use their abilities to bilk people out of their money, to intimidate and manipulate them, to steal wealth and property from others or destroy it outright, and that so long as the Laws were obeyed, the Council would do nothing whatsoever to stop them or discourage others from following their example. She wanted to reform the Council’s laws to embrace concepts of justice as well as limiting the specific use of magic.”

I frowned. “Wow. What a monster.”

She exhaled slowly. “Can you imagine what would happen if she’d had her way?”

“I wouldn’t have been unjustly persecuted by the Wardens for years?”

Anastasia’s lips firmed into a line. “Once a body of laws describing justice was applied to the Council, it would only be a short step to using that body to involve the Council in events happening in the outside world.”

“Gosh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right. A bunch of wizards trying to effect good in the world would be awful.”

“Whose good?” Anastasia asked calmly. “No one is an unjust villain in his own mind, Harry. Even—perhaps even especially—those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call ‘hard but necessary steps’ for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story.”

“Yeah. It was really hard to tell who the good guys and bad guys were in World War Two.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’ve read the histories written by the victors of that war, Harry. As someone who lived through it, I can tell you that at the time of the war, there was a great deal less certainty. There were stories of atrocities in Germany, but for every one that was true, there were another five or six that weren’t. How could one have told the difference between the true stories, the propaganda, and simple fabrications and myths created by the people of the nations Germany had attacked?”

“Might have been a bit easier if there’d been a wizard or three around to help,” I said.

She gave me an oblique look. “Then by your argument, you would have had the White Council destroy the United States.”

“What?”

“Your government has drenched its hands in innocent blood as well,” she replied, still calm. “Unless you think the Indian tribesmen whose lands were conquered were somehow the villains of the piece.”

I frowned over that one. “We’ve gone sort of far afield from my mother.”

“Yes. And no. What she proposed would inevitably have drawn the Council into mortal conflicts, and therefore into mortal politics. Tell me the truth—if the Council, today, declared war upon America for its past crimes and current idiocy, would you obey the order to attack?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there.”

She smiled faintly. “Exactly. And since the Council is made up of members from all over the world, it would mean that no matter where we acted, we would almost certainly be faced with dissidence and desertion from those who felt their homelands wronged.” She shrugged—and grimaced in pain before arresting the motion. “I myself would have issues if the Council acted against any of the lands where my family has settled. They may not remember me, but the reverse is not true.”

I thought about what she’d said for a long moment. “What you’re saying is that the Council would have to turn on some of its own.”

“And how many times would that happen before there was no Council?” she asked. “Wars and feuds can live for generations even when there isn’t a group of wizards involved. Settling the conflicts would have required even more involvement in mortal affairs.”

“You mean control,” I said quietly. “You mean the Council seeking political power.”

She gave me a knowing look. “One of the things that makes me respect you more than most young people is your appreciation for history. Precisely. And for gaining control over others, for gathering great power to oneself, there is no better tool than black magic.”

“Which is what the Laws of Magic cover already.”

She nodded. “And so the Council limits itself. Any wizard is free to act in whatever manner he chooses with his power—provided he doesn’t break any of the Laws. Without resorting to black magic, the amount of damage an individual can inflict on mortal society is limited. As harsh an experience as it has created for you, Harry, the Laws of Magic are not about justice. The White Council is not about justice. They are about restraining power.” She smiled faintly. “And, occasionally, the Council manages to do some good by protecting mankind from supernatural threats.”

“And that’s good enough for you?” I asked.

“It isn’t perfect,” she admitted. “But it’s better than anything else we’ve come up with. And the things I’ve spent my lifetime building are there.”

“Touché,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I stroked her fingers with my thumb. “So you’re saying my mother was short-sighted.”

“She was a complex woman,” Anastasia said. “Brilliant, erratic, passionate, committed, idealistic, talented, charming, insulting, bold, incautious, arrogant—and short-sighted, yes. Among a great many other qualities. She loved pointing out the areas of ‘grey’ magic, as she called them, and constantly questioning their legitimacy.” She shrugged. “The Senior Council tasked the Wardens to keep an eye on her. Which was damn near impossible.”

“Why?”

“The woman had a great many contacts among the Fey. That’s why everyone called her Margaret LaFey. She knew more Ways through the Nevernever than anyone I’ve ever seen, before or since. She could be in Beijing at breakfast, Rome at lunch, and Seattle for supper and stop for coffee in Sydney and Capetown in between.” She sighed. “Margaret vanished once, for four or five years. Everyone assumed that she’d finally run afoul of something in Faerie. She never seemed able to restrain her tongue, even when she knew better.”

“I wonder what that’s like.”

Anastasia gave me a rather worn sad smile. “But she didn’t spend all that time in Faerie, did she?”

I looked up at the rearview mirror, back toward Château Raith.

“And Thomas is the son of the White King himself.”

I didn’t answer.

She exhaled heavily. “You look so different from him. Except perhaps for something in the jaw. The shape of the eyes.”

I didn’t say anything until we got to the apartment. The Rolls went together with the gravel lot like champagne and Cracker Jacks. I turned the engine off and listened to it click as it began to cool down. The sun was gone over the horizon by that time, and the lengthening shadows began to trigger streetlights.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked quietly.

She looked out the window as she considered the question. Then she said, “Not unless I think it relevant.”

I turned to look at her. “You know what will happen if they know. They’ll use him.”

She gazed straight out the front of the car. “I know.”

I spoke quietly to put all the weight I could into each word I spoke next. “Over. My. Dead. Body.”

Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Her expression never flickered. She took her hand slowly, reluctantly from mine and put it in her lap. Then she whispered, “I pray to God it never comes to that.”

We sat in the car separately.

It seemed larger and colder, for some reason. The silence seemed deeper.

Luccio lifted her chin and looked at me. “What will you do now?”

“What do you think?” I clenched my fists so that my knuckles popped, rolled my neck once, and opened the door. “I’m going to find my brother.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Two hours and half a dozen attempted tracking spells later, I snarled and slapped a stack of notepads off the corner of the table in my subbasement laboratory. They thwacked against the wall beneath Bob the Skull’s shelf, and fell to the concrete floor.

“It was to be expected,” Bob the Skull said, very quietly. Orange lights like the flickers of distant campfires glittered in the eye sockets of the bleached human skull that sat on its own shelf high up on one wall of my lab, bracketed by the remains of dozens of melted candles and half a dozen paperback romances. “The parent-to-child blood bond is much more sympathetic than that shared by half siblings.”

I glared at the skull and also kept my voice down. “You just can’t go a day without saying that you told me so.”

“I can’t help it if you’re wrong all the time yet continually ignore my advice, sahib. I’m just a humble servant.”

I couldn’t scream at my nonmaterial assistant with other people in the apartment above me, so I consoled myself by snatching up a pencil from a nearby work shelf and flinging it at him. Its eraser end hit the skull between the eyes.

“Jealousy, thy name is Dresden,” Bob said with a pious sigh.

I paced up and down the length of my lab, burning off frustrated energy. It wasn’t much of a walk. Five paces, turn, five paces, turn. It was a dank little concrete box of a room. Work benches lined three of the walls, and I had installed cheap wire shelving above them. The work benches and shelves were crowded with all manner of odds and ends, books, reagents, instruments, various bits of gear needed for alchemy, and scores of books and notebooks.

A long table in the middle of the room was currently covered by a canvas tarp, and the floor at the far end of the lab had a perfect circle of pure copper embedded in it. The remains of several differently structured tracking attempts were scattered on the floor around the circle, while the props and foci from the most recent failure were still inside it.

“One of them should have gotten me something,” I told Bob. “Maybe not a full lock on Thomas’s position—but a tug in the right direction, at least.”

“Unless he’s dead,” Bob said, “in which case you’re just spinning your wheels.”

“He isn’t dead,” I said quietly. “Shagnasty wants to trade.”

“Uh-huh,” Bob scoffed. “Because everyone knows how honorable the naagloshii are.”

“He’s alive,” I said quietly. “Or at least I’m going to proceed on that assumption.”

Bob somehow managed to look baffled. “Why?”

Because you need your brother to be all right, whispered a quiet voice in my head. “Because anything else isn’t particularly useful toward resolving this situation,” I said aloud. “Whoever is behind the curtains is using the skinwalker and probably Madeline Raith, too. So if I find Thomas, I find Shagnasty and Madeline, and I’ll be able to start pulling threads until this entire mess unravels.”

“Yeah,” Bob said, drawing out the word. “Do you think it’ll take long to pull all those threads? Because the naagloshii is going to be doing something similar to your intestines.”

I made a growling sound in my throat. “Yeah. I think I got its number.”

“Really?”

“I keep trying to punch Shagnasty out myself,” I said. “But its defenses are too good—and it’s fast as hell.”

“He’s an immortal semidivine being,” Bob said. “Of course he’s good.”

I waved a hand. “My point is that I’ve been trying to lay the beating on it myself. Next time I see it, I’m going to start throwing bindings on it, just to trip it up and slow it down, so whoever is with me can get a clean shot.”

“It might work . . .” Bob admitted.

“Thank you.”

“. . . if he’s such an idiot that he only bothered to learn to defend himself from violent-energy attacks,” Bob continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Which I think is almost as likely as you getting one of those tracking spells to work. He’ll know how to defend himself from bindings, Harry.”

I sighed. “I’ve got gender issues.”

Bob blinked slowly. “Uh. Wow. I’d love to say something to make that more embarrassing for you, boss, but I’m not sure how.”

“Not my . . . augh.” I threw another pencil. It missed Bob and bounced off the wall behind him. “With the skinwalker. Is it actually a male? Do I call it a he?”

Bob rolled his eyelights. “It’s a semidivine immortal, Harry. It doesn’t procreate. It has no need to recombine DNA. That means that gender simply doesn’t apply. That’s something only you meat sacks worry about.”

“Then why is it that you stare at naked girls every chance you get,” I said, “but not naked men?”

“It’s an aesthetic choice,” Bob said loftily. “As a gender, women exist on a plane far beyond men when it comes to the artistic appreciation of their external beauty.”

“And they have boobs,” I said.

“And they have boobs!” Bob agreed with a leer.

I sighed and rubbed at my temples, closing my eyes. “You said the skinwalkers were semidivine?”

“You’re using the English word, which doesn’t really describe them very precisely. Most skinwalkers are just people—powerful, dangerous, and often psychotic people, but people. They’re successors to the traditions and skills taught to avaricious mortals by the originals. The naagloshii.”

“Originals like Shagnasty,” I said.

“He’s the real deal, all right,” Bob replied, his quiet voice growing more serious. “According to some of the stories of the Navajo, the naagloshii were originally messengers for the Holy People, when they were first teaching humans the Blessing Way.”

“Messengers?” I said. “Like angels?”

“Or like those guys on bikes in New York, maybe?” Bob said. “Not all couriers are created identical, Mr. Lowest-Common-Denominator. Anyway, the original messengers, the naagloshii, were supposed to go with the Holy People when they departed the mortal world. But some of them didn’t. They stayed here, and their selfishness corrupted the power the Holy People gave them. Voila, Shagnasty.”

I grunted. Bob’s information was anecdotal, which meant it could well be distorted by time and by generations of retelling. There probably wasn’t any way to know the objective truth of it—but a surprising amount of that kind of lore remained fundamentally sound in oral tradition societies like those of the American Southwest. “When did this happen?”

“Tough to say,” Bob said. “The traditional Navajo don’t see time the way most mortals do, which makes them arguably smarter than the rest of you monkeys. But it’s safe to assume prehistory. Several millennia.”

Yikes.

Thousands of years of survival meant thousands of years of accumulated experience. It meant that Shagnasty was smart and adaptable. The old skinwalker wouldn’t still be around if it wasn’t. I upgraded the creature, in my thoughts, from “very tough” to “damned near impossibly tough.”

But since it still had my brother, that didn’t change anything.

“Don’t suppose there’s a silver bullet we can use?” I asked.

“No, boss,” Bob said quietly. “Sorry.”

I grimaced, did a half-assed job of cleaning up the mess I’d made, and began to leave the lab. I paused before I left and said, “Hey, Bob.”

“Yeah?”

“Any thoughts as to why, when LaFortier was being murdered by a wizard, no one threw any magic around?”

“People are morons?”

“It’s damned peculiar,” I said.

“Irrationality isn’t.” Bob said. “Wizards just aren’t all that stable to begin with.”

Given what I had done with my life lately, I could hardly argue with him. “It means something,” I said.

“Yeah?” Bob asked. “What?”

I shook my head. “Tell you when I figure it out.”

I went back up into my living room through the trapdoor in its floor. The door was a thick one. Sound didn’t readily travel up from the lab when it was closed. Luccio was loaded with narcotics and asleep on my couch, lying flat on her back with no pillow, and covered with a light blanket. Her face was slack, her mouth slightly open. It made her look vulnerable, and even younger than she already appeared. Molly sat in one of the recliners with several candles burning beside her. She was reading a paperback, carefully not opening the thing all the way to avoid creasing the spine. Pansy.

I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. As I did, I reflected that I was getting really tired of sandwiches. Maybe I ought to learn to cook or something.

I stood there munching, and Molly came to join me.

“Hey,” she said in muted tones. “How are you?”

She’d helped me bandage the fairly minor cut on my scalp when I had returned. Strips of white gauze bandage were wound around my head to form a lopsided, off-kilter halo. I felt like the fife player in Willard’s iconic Spirit of ’76.

“Still in one piece,” I replied. “How are they?”

“Drugged and sleeping,” she said. “Morgan’s fever is up another half of a degree. The last bag of antibiotics is almost empty.”

I clenched my jaw. If I didn’t get Morgan to a hospital soon, he was going to be just as dead as he would be if the Council or Shagnasty got hold of him.

“Should I get some ice onto him?” Molly asked anxiously.

“Not until the fever goes over one hundred and four, and stays there,” I said. “That’s when it begins to endanger him. Until then, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do and slowing the infection.” I finished the last bite of sandwich. “Any calls?”

She produced a piece of notebook paper. “Georgia called. Here’s where Andi is. They’re still with her.”

I took the paper with a grimace. If I hadn’t let Morgan in my door half an eternity ago, he wouldn’t have been in Chicago, Shagnasty wouldn’t have been tailing me to find him, Andi wouldn’t be hurt—and Kirby would still be alive. And I hadn’t even tried to call and find out how she was. “How is she?”

“They still aren’t sure,” Molly said.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Did you find Thomas?”

I shook my head. “Total bust.”

Mouse came shambling over. He sat down and looked up at me, his expression concerned.

She chewed on her lip. “What are you going to do?”

“I . . .” My voice trailed off. I sighed. “I have no idea.”

Mouse pawed at my leg and looked up at me. I bent over to scratch his ears, and instantly regretted it as someone tightened a vise on my temples. I straightened up again in a hurry, wincing, and entertained wild fantasies about lying down on the floor and sleeping for a week.

Molly watched me, her expression worried.

Right, Harry. You’re still teaching your apprentice. Show her what a wizard should do, not what you want to do.

I looked at the paper. “The answer isn’t obvious, which means that I need to put some more thought into it. And while I’m doing that, I’ll go look in on Andi.”

Molly nodded. “What do I do?”

“Hold down the fort. Try to reach me at the hospital if anyone calls or if Morgan gets any worse.”

Molly nodded seriously. “I can do that.”

I nodded and grabbed my gear and the key to the Rolls. Molly went to the door, ready to lock it behind me when I left. I started to do just that—and then paused. I turned to my apprentice. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

She blinked at me. “Um. What did I do?”

“More than I asked of you. More than was good for you.” I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, Molly.”

She lifted her chin a little, smiling. “Well,” she said. “You’re just so pathetic. How could I turn away?”

That made me laugh, if only for a second, and her smile blossomed into something radiant.

“You know the drill,” I said.

She nodded. “Keep my eyes open, be supercareful, don’t take any chances.”

I winked at her. “You grow wiser, grasshopper.”

Molly started to say something, stopped, fidgeted for half a second, and then threw her arms around me in a big hug.

“Be careful,” she said. “Okay?”

I hugged her back tight and gave the top of her head a light kiss. “Hang in there, kid. We’ll get this straightened out.”

“Okay,” she said. “We will.”

Then I headed out into the Chicago night wondering how—or if—that was possible.

Chapter Thirty

I don’t like hospitals—but then, who does? I don’t like the clean, cool hallways. I don’t like the stark fluorescent lights. I don’t like the calm ring tones on the telephones. I don’t like the pastel scrubs the nurses and attendants wear. I don’t like the elevators, and I don’t like the soothing colors on the walls, and I don’t like the way everyone speaks in measured, quiet voices.

But mostly, I don’t like the memories I’ve collected there.

Andi was still in intensive care. I wouldn’t be able to go in to see her—neither would Billy and Georgia, if they hadn’t arranged for power of attorney for medical matters, a few years back. It was long after standard visiting hours, but most hospital staffs stretch rules and look the other way for those whose loved ones are in ICU. The world has changed a lot over the centuries, but death watches are still respected.

Billy had come to me on the down low to set up power of attorney for me, in case he should be hospitalized without Georgia being nearby to handle matters. Though neither of us said so, we both knew why he really did it. The only reason Georgia wouldn’t be there is if she was dead—and if Billy was in no shape to make decisions for himself, he didn’t want to hang around and find out what his world would be like without her in it. He wanted someone he could trust to understand that.

Billy and Georgia are solid.

I’d spent some endless hours in Stroger’s ICU waiting room, and it hadn’t changed since I’d been there last. It was empty except for Georgia. She lay on the sofa, sleeping, still wearing her glasses. A book by what was presumably a prominent psychologist lay open on her stomach. She looked exhausted.

I bypassed the waiting room and went to the nurses’ desk. A tired-looking woman in her thirties looked up at me with a frown. “Sir,” she said, “it’s well after visiting hours.”

“I know,” I said. I took my notepad out of my pocket and scribbled a quick note on it. “I’ll go back to the waiting room. The next time you go past Miss Macklin’s room, could you please give this to the gentleman sitting with her?”

The nurse relaxed a little, and gave me a tired smile. “Certainly. It will just be a few minutes.”

“Thanks.”

I went back to the waiting room and settled into a chair. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the wall, and drowsed until I heard footsteps on tile.

Billy entered with a rolled-up blanket under his arm, glanced around the room, and nodded to me. Then he went immediately to Georgia. He took her glasses off, very gently, and picked up the book. Georgia never stirred. He put the book on the end table, and her glasses on top of it. Then he took the blanket from under his arm and covered her up. She murmured and stirred, but Billy shushed her quietly and stroked his hand over her hair. She sighed and shifted onto her side, then snuggled down under the blanket.

I reached up a hand and flicked the light switch beside my head. It left the room dim, if not really dark.

Billy smiled his thanks to me, and nodded toward the door. I got up and we walked out into the hallway together.

“Should have tried to call you sooner,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “I know how it is, man. No apology needed.”

“Okay,” I said, without actually agreeing with him. “How is she?”

“Not good,” he replied simply. “There was internal bleeding. It took two rounds of surgery to get it stopped.” The blocky young man shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “They told us if she makes it through the night, she’ll be out of the worst of it.”

“How are you holding up?”

He shook his head again. “I don’t know, man. I called Kirby’s folks. I was his friend. I had to. The police had already contacted them, but it isn’t the same.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“They took it pretty hard. Kirby was an only child.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Kirby knew the risks. He’d rather have died than stand by and do nothing.”

“Georgia?”

“I’d have lost it without her. Pillar of strength and calm,” Billy said. He glanced back toward the waiting room and a smile touched the corners of his eyes. “She’s good at setting things aside until there’s time to deal with them. Once things have settled out, she’ll be a wreck, and it’ll be my turn to hold her up.”

Like I said.

Solid.

“The thing that did Kirby took Thomas Raith,” I said.

“The vampire you work with sometimes?”

“Yeah. As soon as I work out how to find it, I’m taking it down. The vampires are probably going to help—but I might need backup I can trust.”

Billy’s eyes flickered with a sudden fire of rage and hunger. “Yeah?”

I nodded. “It’s part of something bigger. I can’t talk to you about everything that’s going on. And I know Andi needs you here. I understand if you don’t—”

Billy turned his eyes to me, those same dangerous fires smoldering. “Harry, I’m not going to move forward blind anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that for years, I’ve been willing to help you, even though you could barely ever tell me what was actually happening. You’ve played everything close to the chest. And I know you had your reasons for that.” He stopped walking and looked up at me calmly. “Kirby’s dead. Maybe Andi, too.”

My conscience wouldn’t let me meet his gaze, even for an instant. “I know.”

He nodded. “So. If I’d had this conversation with you sooner, maybe they wouldn’t be. Maybe if we’d had a better idea about what’s actually going on in the world, it would have changed how we approached things. They follow my lead, Harry. I have a responsibility to make sure that I do everything in my power to make them aware and safe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see your point.”

“Then if you want my help, things are going to change. I’m not charging ahead blindfolded again. Not ever.”

“Billy,” I said quietly. “This isn’t stuff you can unlearn. Right now, you’re insulated from the worst of what goes on because you’re . . . I don’t want to be insulting, but you’re a bunch of amateurs without enough of a clue to be a real threat to anyone.”

His eyes darkened. “Insulated from the worst?” he asked in a quiet, dangerous voice. “Tell that to Kirby. Tell that to Andi.”

I took several steps away, pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, and closed my eyes, thinking. Billy had a point, of course. I’d been careful to control what information he and the Alphas had gotten from me, in an effort to protect them. And it had worked—for a while.

But now things were different. Kirby’s death had seen to that.

“You’re sure you don’t want to back out?” I asked. “Once you’re part of the scene, you aren’t getting out of it.” I clenched my jaw for a second. “And believe it or not, Billy, yes. You have been insulated from the worst.”

“I’m not backing off on this one, Harry. I can’t.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him fold his arms. “You’re the one who wants our help.”

I pointed a finger at him. “I don’t want it. I don’t want to drag you into what’s going on. I don’t want you walking into more danger and getting hurt.” I sighed. “But . . . there’s a lot at stake, and I think I might need you.”

“Okay, then,” Billy said. “You know what it will cost.”

He stood facing me solidly, tired eyes steady, and I realized something I hadn’t ever made into a tangible thought before: he wasn’t a kid anymore. Not because he’d graduated, and not even because of how capable he was. He’d seen the worst—death, heartless and nasty, come to lay waste to everything it could. He knew in his heart of hearts, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it could come for him, take him as easily as it had taken Kirby.

And he was making a choice to stand his ground.

Billy Borden, kid werewolf, was gone.

Will was choosing to stand with me.

I couldn’t treat him like a child anymore. Will was ignorant of the supernatural world beyond the fairly minor threats that lurked around the University of Chicago. He and the other werewolves had been kids who learned one really neat magic trick, almost ten years before. I hadn’t shared more with them, and the paranormal community in general is careful about what they say to strangers. He had, at best, only a vague idea of the scope of supernatural affairs in general, and he had not the first clue about how hot the water really was around me right now.

Will had picked his ground. I couldn’t keep him in the dark and tell myself that I was protecting him.

I nodded to a few chairs sitting along the wall at a nearby intersection of hallways. “Let’s sit down. I don’t have much time, and there’s a lot to cover. I’ll tell you everything when I get a chance, but for now all I can give you is a highlights reel.”

By the time I got done giving Will the CliffsNotes version of the supernatural world, I still hadn’t come up with a plan. So, working on the theory that the proper answers just needed more time to cook, and that they could do so while I was on the move, I went back to my borrowed car and drove to the next place I should have visited sooner than I had.

Murphy used to have an office at the headquarters of CPD’s Special Investigations department. Then she’d blown off her professional duty as head of the department to cover me during a furball that went bad on an epic scale. She’d nearly lost her job altogether, but Murph was a third-generation cop from a cop clan. She’d managed to gain enough support to hang on to her badge, but she had been demoted to Detective Sergeant and had her seniority revoked—a dead end for her career.

Now her old office was occupied by John Stallings, and Murphy had a desk in the large room that housed SI. It wasn’t a new desk, either. One leg was propped up with a small stack of triplicate report forms. It wasn’t unusual in that room. SI was the bottom of the chute for cops who had earned the wrath of their superiors or, worse, had taken a misstep in the cutthroat world of Chicago city politics. The desks were all battered and old. The walls and floor were worn. The room obviously housed at least twice as many work desks as it had been meant to contain.

It was late. The place was quiet and mostly empty. Whoever was on the night shift must have been out on a call of some kind. Of the three cops in the room, I only knew one of them by name—Murphy’s current partner, a blocky, mildly overweight man in his late fifties, with hair going steadily more silver in sharp contrast to the dark coffee tone of his skin.

“Rawlins,” I said.

He turned to me with a grunt and a polite nod. “Evening.”

“What are you doing here this late?”

“Giving my wife ammunition for when she drags my ass to court to divorce me,” he said cheerfully. “Glad you made it in.”

“Murph around?” I asked.

He grunted. “Interrogation room two, with the British perp. Go on down.”

“Thanks, man.”

I went down the hall and around the corner. To my left was a security gate blocking the way to the building’s holding cells. To the right was a short hallway containing four doors—two to the bathrooms, and two that led to the interrogation rooms. I went to the second room and knocked.

Murphy answered it, still wearing the same clothes she’d been in at the storage park. She looked tired and irritated. She grunted almost as well as Rawlins had, despite her complete lack of a Y-chromosome, and stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind her.

She looked up and studied my head for a second. “What the hell, Harry?”

“Got a visit from Shagnasty the Skinwalker when I went to talk to Lara Raith. Any trouble with Binder?”

She shook her head. “I figured he’d have a hard time doing whatever he does if he can’t get out of his chair or use his hands. I’ve been sitting with him, too, in case he tried to pull something.”

I lifted an eyebrow, impressed. There hadn’t been time to advise her how to handle Binder safely, but she’d worked it out on her own. “Yeah, that’s a pretty solid method,” I said. “What’s he in for, officially?”

“Officially, I haven’t charged him yet,” she said. “If I need to stick him with something, I can cite trespassing, destruction of property, and assault on a police officer.” She shook her head. “But we can’t keep this close an eye on him forever. If I do press charges, it won’t be long before he’s under lighter security. I don’t even want to think about what could happen if he got to turn those things loose inside a precinct house or prison.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Long term, I don’t think you can hold him.”

Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Hate it when I have to let pricks like that walk.”

“Happen much?”

“All the time,” she said. “Legal loopholes, incorrect procedures, crucial evidence declared inadmissible. A lot of perps who are guilty as hell walk out without so much as a reprimand.” She sighed and twitched her shoulders into something like a shrug. “Ah, well. It’s a messed-up world. Whatcha gonna do?”

“I hear that,” I said. “Want to compare notes?”

“Sure,” she said. “What did you get?”

I gave her the rundown of what had happened since I’d last seen her.

She grunted again when I finished. “Isn’t that sort of dangerous? Involving the vampires?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s Thomas. I think Lara is probably sincere about getting him back. Besides. Why worry about smoking in bed when your building is already on fire?”

“Point,” she said. “I got the photos. They don’t tell me anything new. I ran those account numbers you gave me through the system to see if anything came up. Brick wall.”

“Dammit.”

“It was a long shot anyway,” she said.

“Binder give you anything?”

Her mouth scrunched up as if she wanted to spit out something that tasted terrible. “No. He’s a hard case. Career criminal. He’s been grilled before.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And he knows that you can’t do anything but make him sit still for a little while. If he gives us anything on his employer, he’ll lose his credibility with clients—assuming that he lives that long.”

She leaned her shoulders back against the wall. “You say this Shagnasty thing has Thomas’s cell phone?”

“Yeah. Think you can track it?”

“As part of what investigation?” she asked. “I don’t have the kind of freedom to act that I used to. If I wanted to get what amounts to a wiretap, I’d have to get approval from a judge, and I don’t know any of them who would take ‘my friend the wizard’s vampire brother was kidnapped by a demonic Navajo shapeshifter’ as a valid justification for such a measure.”

“I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” I said.

She shrugged. “Honestly, I suspect Lara’s resources and contacts are better than mine, given the time constraints.”

I couldn’t quite suppress a growl of frustration. “If she learns anything. If she’s honest about what she learns.”

Murphy frowned, scrunching up her nose. “Where was Thomas taken from?”

“I’m not certain, but I think he was at the storage park. His rental van was there, and he said something about not being able to handle all of them on his own.”

“Them? The grey suits?”

I nodded. “Most likely. But since Thomas never pitched in during the fight, I figure Shagnasty probably snuck up on him and grabbed him while he was being distracted by Binder and his pets.”

“And you can’t track him down with magic.”

“No,” I growled through clenched teeth. “Shagnasty is countering it somehow.”

“How is that possible?”

I took a moment to assemble my thoughts. “Tracking spells are like any kind of targeted thaumaturgy. You create a link, a channel to the target, and then pour energy into that channel. In the case of a tracking spell, you’re basically just setting up a continuous trickle of energy, and then following it to the target—kind of like pouring water on a surface when you want to see which way is downhill.”

“Okay,” she said. “I get that, mostly.”

“The way to stymie a tracking spell is to prevent that channel from ever being formed. If it never gets created, then it doesn’t matter when the water gets poured. There’s nothing to cause it to start flowing. And the way you prevent the channel from forming is to shield the target away from whatever focus you’re using to create the link.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for example. If I had one of your hairs and wanted to use it as part of a tracking spell, you might beat it by shaving off your hair. If the hair in my spell doesn’t match up to an end somewhere on your head, no link gets created. So, unless I had a hair that had been torn out from the roots, and fairly recently, you’d be hidden.”

“And that’s the only way to beat a tracking spell?”

“Nah,” I said. “A good circle of power could probably screen you off, if you took the time and money to give it serious juice. Theoretically, you could also cross into the Nevernever. Thaumaturgy originating on the earth doesn’t cross into the spirit world very efficiently—and before you ask, yeah, I tried it from the Nevernever side, too. It was failed spell number three.”

Murphy frowned. “What about Justine?” she asked. “Justine was able to find him once before.”

I grimaced. “She was able to give us a vague direction a few hours after Thomas had ripped most of the life out of her. It isn’t the same this time.”

“Why not?”

“Because she wasn’t sensing Thomas so much as the missing part of her own life force. They haven’t been together like that in years. Thomas—digested, I guess you could say—all of that energy a long time ago.”

Murphy sighed. “I’ve seen you do some neat stuff, Harry. But I guess magic doesn’t fix everything.”

“Magic doesn’t fix anything,” I said. “That’s what the person using it is for.” I rubbed at my tired eyes.

“Speaking of,” she said. “Any thoughts as to why these wizards didn’t seem to be using magic?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Any thoughts as to the nature of our perpetrator?”

“A couple,” I said. “There are all these disparate elements in play—Shagnasty, Binder, Madeline Raith. There is serious money moving around. And if we don’t find this cockroach and drag him into the light, things are going to be bad for everyone. I don’t know what that tells us about him.”

“That he’s really smart,” Murphy said. “Or really desperate.”

I arched an eyebrow. “How do you figure?”

“If he’s superbrilliant, it’s possible that we haven’t even seen the shape of his plan yet. All of this could be one big boondoggle to set us up for the real punch.”

“You don’t sound like you think that’s the case.”

She gave me a faint smile. “Criminals aren’t usually the crispiest crackers in the box. And you have to remember that even though we’re flailing around looking for answers, the perp is in the same situation. He can’t be sure where we are, what we know, or what we’re doing next.”

“Fog of war,” I said thoughtfully.

She shrugged. “I think it’s a much more likely explanation than that our perp is some kind of James Bond super-genius villain slowly unfolding his terrible design. They’ve shown too much confusion for that.”

“Like what?”

“Shagnasty was following you a couple of nights ago, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, so was this PI you told me about. Why stick you with two tails? Maybe because the right hand didn’t know what the left one was doing.”

“Hngh,” I agreed.

“From what you say, Shagnasty isn’t exactly an errand boy.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“But it’s apparently coordinating with the perp, taking orders. It didn’t absolutely need to deliver its demand in person. I think it’s pretty obvious that it smashed its way into the Château to provide a distraction so that Madeline could make her getaway.”

I blinked. Once I’d alerted Lara to the probability of Madeline’s treachery, she most certainly would have taken steps to detain her. Madeline must have known that. I tried to remember how long it had been between the time Luccio and I arrived, and when the naagloshii attacked. Time enough for Madeline to hear about our presence, assume that the worst had happened, and make a phone call for help?

Maybe.

Murphy peered at me. “I mean, it is obvious, right?”

“I got hit on the head, okay?”

She smirked at me.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Yes, it’s obvious. But not necessarily stupid.”

“Not stupid, but I don’t think it would be unfair to call it a desperation move. I think Shagnasty was the perp’s ace in the hole. I think that when Morgan escaped, the perp figured out where he was headed, the pressure got to him, and he played his hole card. Only when Shagnasty found you, you weren’t actually with Morgan. He got spooked when you and the werewolves nearly pinned him down, and ran off.”

“The perp grabs one of his other tools,” I said, nodding. “Madeline. Tells her to find me and take me out, make me talk, whatever. Only Thomas beats her senseless instead.”

“Makes sense,” Murphy said.

“Doesn’t mean that’s how it happened.”

“Had to happen some way,” she said. “Say we’re in the right ballpark. What does that tell us?”

“Not much,” I said. “Some very bad people are in motion. They’re tough. The one guy we’ve managed to grab won’t tell us a damned thing. The only thing we’re certain we know is that we’ve got nothing.”

I was going to continue, but a thought hit me and I stopped talking.

I gave it a second to crystallize.

Then I started to smile.

Murphy tilted her head, watching, and prompted, “We’ve got nothing?”

I looked from Murphy to the door to the interrogation room.

“Forget it,” she said. “He isn’t going to put us on to anyone.”

“Oh,” I drawled. “I’m not so sure about that. . . .”

Chapter Thirty-one

Murphy went back into the interrogation room. Twenty minutes later, I came in and shut the door behind me. The room was simple and small. A table sat in the middle, with two chairs on each side. There was no long two-way mirror on the wall. Instead, a small security camera perched up high in one corner of the ceiling.

Binder sat on the far side of the table. His face had a couple of bruises on it, along with an assortment of small cuts with dark scabs. His odd green eyes were narrowed in annoyance. A foot-long hoagie sat on the table in front of him, its paper wrapper partially undone. He’d have been able to reach it easily—if he could have moved his arms. They were cuffed to the arms of the chair. A handcuff key rested centered on the edge of Murphy’s side of the table, in front of her chair.

I had to suppress a smile.

“Bloody priceless,” Binder said to Murphy as I entered. “Now you bring this wanker. It’s police torture, is what it is. My solicitor will swallow you whole and spit out the bones.”

Murphy sat down at the table across from Binder, folded her hands, and sat in complete silence, spearing him with an unfriendly stare.

Binder sneered at her, and then at me, presumably so I wouldn’t feel left out. “Oh, I get this now,” he said. “Good cop, bad cop, is it?” He looked at me. “Stone-cold bitch here makes me sit for bloody hours in this chair to soften me up. Then you come in here, polite and sympathetic as you please, and I buckle under the stress, yeah?” He settled more comfortably into the chair, somehow conveying an insult with the motion. “Fine, Dresden,” he said. “Knock yourself out. Good cop me.”

I looked at him for a second.

Then I made a fist and slugged his smug face hard enough to knock him over backward in the chair.

He just lay there for a minute, on his side, blinking tears out of his eyes. Blood trickled from one nostril. One of his shoes had come off in the fall. I stood over him and glanced at my hand. It hurts to punch people in the face. Not as much as it hurts to get punched in the face, granted, but you know you’ve done it. My knuckles must have grazed his teeth. They’d lost a little skin.

“Don’t give me this lawyer crap, Binder,” I said. “We both know the cops can’t hold you for long. But we also both know that you can’t play the system against us, either. You aren’t an upstanding member of the community. You’re a hired gun, wanted for questioning in a dozen countries.”

He looked up at me with a snarl. “Think you’re a hard man, do you?”

I glanced at Murphy. “Should I answer that one, or just kick him in the balls?”

“Seeing is believing,” Murphy said.

“True.” I turned to Binder and drew back my foot.

“Bloody hell!” Binder barked. “There’s a bloody camera watching your every move. You think you won’t get dragged off for this?”

An intercom on the wall near the camera clicked and buzzed. “He’s got a point,” said Rawlin’s voice. “I can’t see it all from here. Move him a couple of feet to the left and give me about thirty more seconds before you start on his nads. I’m making popcorn.”

“Sure,” I said, giving the camera a thumbs-up. Odds were good that it would fold if I was in the room for any length of time, but we’d made our point.

I sat down on the edge of the table, maybe a foot away from Binder and, quite deliberately, reached over to pick up the hoagie. I took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Mmm,” I said. I glanced at Murphy. “What kind of cheese is that?”

“Gouda.”

“Beef tastes great, too.”

“Teriyaki,” Murph said, still staring at Binder.

“I was really hungry,” I told her, my voice brimming with sincerity. “I haven’t eaten since, like, this morning. This is excellent.”

Binder muttered darkly under his breath. All I caught was “. . . buggering little bastard . . .”

I ate half the hoagie and put it back on the table. I licked a stray bit of sauce off of one finger and looked down at Binder. “Okay, tough guy,” I said. “The cops can’t keep you. So that leaves the sergeant, here, with only a couple of options. Either they let you walk . . .”

Murphy made a quiet growling sound. It was almost as impressive as her grunt.

“She just hates that idea.” I got off the table and hunkered down beside Binder. “Or,” I said, “we do it the other way.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll kill me—is that it?”

“Ain’t no one gonna miss you,” I said.

“You’re bluffing,” Binder snapped. “She’s a bloody cop.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Think about that one for a minute. You think a police detective couldn’t work out a way to disappear you without anyone being the wiser?”

He looked back and forth between us, his cool mask not quite faltering. “What do you want?”

“Your boss,” I said. “Give me that and you walk.”

He stared at me for half a minute. Then he said, “Set my chair up.”

I rolled my eyes and did it. He was heavy. “Hell’s bells, Binder. I get a hernia and the deal’s off.”

He looked at Murphy and jiggled his wrists.

Murphy yawned.

“Bloody hell,” he snarled. “Just one of them. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

I snorted. “Looks to me like you aren’t in any immediate danger of starvation.”

“You want cooperation,” he spat, “you’re going to have to show me some. Give me the bloody sandwich.”

Murphy reached out, picked up the handcuff key, and tossed it to me. I unlocked his left wrist. Binder seized the sandwich and started chomping on it.

“All right,” I said, after a moment. “Talk.”

“What?” he said through a mouthful of food. “No soda?”

I swatted the last inch or two of hoagie out of his hand, scowling.

Binder watched me, unperturbed. He licked his fingers clean, picked a bit of lettuce out of his teeth, and ate it. “All right then,” he said. “You want the truth?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He leaned a bit toward me and jabbed a finger at me. “The truth is that you ain’t killing no one, biggun. You ain’t and neither is the blond bird. And if you try to keep me, I’ll bring down all manner of horrible things.” He leaned back in his chair, openly wearing the smug smile again. “So you might as well stop wasting my valuable time and cut me loose. That’s the truth.”

I turned my head to Murphy, frowning.

She got up, walked around the table, and seized Binder by his close-cut head. It didn’t provide much of a grip, but she used it to shove his head roughly down to the top of the table. Then she took the key back from me, undid the other set of cuffs, and released him.

“Get out,” she said quietly.

Binder stood up slowly, straightening his clothes. He leered at Murphy, winked, and said, “I’m a professional. So there’s nothing personal, love. Maybe next time we can skip business and give pleasure a go.”

“Maybe next time you’ll get your neck broken resisting arrest,” Murphy said. “Get out.”

Binder smirked at Murphy, then at me, and then sauntered out of the room.

“Well?” I asked her.

She turned and held out her hand. Several short hairs, some dark and some grey, clung to her fingers. “Got it.”

I grinned at her, and took the hairs, depositing them in a white envelope I’d taken from Rawlin’s desk. “Give me about a minute and I’ll have it up.”

“Hubba hubba,” Rawlins said through the intercom speaker. “I like this channel.”

“This is a great way of chasing down the bad guy,” Murphy said half an hour later. She gave me a pointed look from her chair at her desk. “Sit here and don’t do anything.”

I sat in a chair next to her desk, my hand extended palm down in front of me, holding a bit of leather thong that ended in a simple quartz crystal in a copper-wire setting. My arm was getting tired, and I had gripped it under my forearm with the other hand to support it. The crystal didn’t hang like a plumb line. It leaned a bit to one side, as if being supported by a steady, silent puff of wind.

“Patience,” I said. “Binder might not be a crispy cracker, but he’s been in business for a couple of decades. He knows why you grabbed him by the hair. He’s learned to shake off something like this.”

Murphy gave me an unamused look. She glanced at Rawlins, who sat at his desk. The desks were set up back-to-back, so that they faced each other.

“Don’t look at me,” he said, without glancing up from his sudoku puzzle. “I don’t run as fast as I used to. I could get used to chasing down bad guys like this.”

The crystal abruptly dropped and began swinging back and forth freely.

“Ah!” I said. “There, there, you see?” I let them look for a second and then lowered my arm. I rubbed my sore muscles for a moment. “What did I tell you? He shook it off.”

“Oh, good,” Murphy said. “Now we have no clue where he is.”

I put the crystal into my pocket and grabbed Murphy’s desk phone. “Yet,” I said. I punched in a number and found out that you had to dial nine to get out. I started over, added a nine to the beginning of the number, and it rang.

“Graver,” Vince said.

“It’s Dresden,” I said. “Tell me what he just did, like thirty seconds ago.”

“Be patient,” Vince said, and hung up on me.

I blinked at the phone.

Murphy looked at me for a second and then smiled. “I just love it when I don’t know part of the plan, and the guy who does is all smug and cryptic,” she said. “Don’t you?”

I glowered at her and put the phone down. “He’ll call back.”

“He who?”

“The PI who is following Binder,” I said. “Guy named Vince Graver.”

Murphy’s eyebrows went up. “You’re kidding.”

Rawlins began to chortle, still working on his puzzle.

“What?” I said, looking back and forth between them.

“He was a vice cop in Joliet a couple of years ago,” Murphy said.

“He found out that someone was beating up some of the call girls down there. He looked into it. Word came down to tell him to back off, but he went and caught a Chicago city councilman who liked to pound on his women for foreplay. What’s-his-name.”

“Dornan,” Rawlins supplied.

“Right, Ricardo Dornan,” Murphy said.

“Huh,” I said. “Took some guts.”

“Hell, yeah,” Rawlins said. “And some stupid.”

“It’s a fine line,” Murphy said. “Anyway, he pissed off some people. Next thing he knows, he finds out he volunteered for a transfer to CPD.”

“Three guesses where,” Rawlins said.

“So he resigns,” Murphy said.

“Yeah,” Rawlins said. “Without even giving us a chance to meet him.”

Murphy shook her head. “Went into private practice. There’s a guy who is a glutton for punishment.”

Rawlins grinned.

“He drives a Mercedes,” I said. “Has his own house, too.”

Rawlins put his pencil down and they both looked up at me.

I shrugged. “I’m just saying. He must be doing all right for himself.”

“Hngh,” Rawlins said. Then he picked up his pencil and went back to the puzzle. “Ain’t no justice.”

Murphy grunted with nigh-masculine skill.

A couple of minutes later, the phone rang, and Murphy answered it. She passed it to me.

“Your guy’s a nut,” Vince said.

“I know that,” I told him. “What’s he doing?”

“Took a cab to a motel on the highway north of town,” Vince said.

“Stopped at a convenience store on the way. Then he goes to his room, shaves himself bald, comes out in his skivvies, and jumps in the damn river. Goes back inside, takes a shower—”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I broke into his room while he was doing it,” Vince said. “Maybe you could save your questions until the end of the presentation.”

“Hard to imagine you not fitting in with the cops,” I said.

Vince ignored the comment. “He takes a shower and calls another cab.”

“Tell me you followed the cab,” I said.

“Tell me your check cleared.”

“I’m good for it.”

“Yeah, I’m following the cab right now,” Vince said. “But I don’t need to. He’s headed for the Hotel Sax.”

“Who are you, the Amazing Kreskin?”

“Listened in on the cabbie’s CB,” he said. “ETA, eighteen minutes.”

“Eighteen?” I asked.

“Usually found between seventeen and nineteen,” he said. “I can’t guarantee I can stay on him at the hotel, especially if he tumbles to the tail. Too many ways out.”

“I’ll take it from there. Do not get close to him, man. You get an instinct he’s looking in your direction, run for the hills. This guy’s dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Vince said. “Hell, I’m lucky I haven’t wet my pants already.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are. It’s cute. Seventeen minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

“With my check. I’ve got a two-day minimum. You know that, right?”

“Right, right,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

“What have we got?” Murphy asked as I put the phone down.

“Binder thinks he shook me,” I said. “He’s headed for a meeting at Hotel Sax.”

She stood up and grabbed her car keys. “How do you know it’s a meeting?”

“Because he’s been made. If he was here alone, he’d be on his way out of town right now.” I nodded. “He’s running back to whoever hired him.”

“Who is that?” Murphy asked.

“Let’s find out.”

Chapter Thirty-two

The Hotel Sax is a pretty good example of its kind in the beating heart of downtown Chicago. It’s located on Dearborn, just across the street from the House of Blues, and if you look up while standing outside of the place, it looks like someone slapped one of those fish-eye camera lenses on the sky. Buildings stretch up and up and up, at angles that seem geometrically impossible.

Many similar sections of Chicago have wider streets than you find in other metropolises, and it makes them feel slightly less claustrophobic, but outside of the Sax, the street was barely three narrow lanes across, curb to curb. As Murphy and I approached, looking up made me feel like an ant walking along the bottom of a crack in the sidewalk.

“It bugs you, doesn’t it?” Murphy said.

We walked under a streetlight, our shadows briefly equal in length. “What?”

“Those big things looming over you.”

“I wouldn’t say it bothers me,” I said. “I’m just . . . aware of them.”

She faced serenely ahead as we walked. “Welcome to my life.”

I glanced down at her and snorted quietly.

We entered the lobby of the hotel, a place with a lot of glass and white paint with rich red accents. Given how late it was, it was no surprise only one member of the staff was visible: a young woman who stood behind one of the glass-fronted check-in counters. One guest reading a magazine sat in a nearby chair, and even though he was the only guy in the room, it took me a second glance to realize that he was Vince.

Vince set the magazine aside and ambled over to us. His unremarkable brown eyes scanned over Murphy. He nodded to her and offered me his hand.

I shook it, and offered a check to him with my left as we did. He took it, glanced at it noncommittally, and put it away in a pocket. “He took an elevator to the twelfth floor,” Vince said. “He’s in room twelve thirty-three.”

I blinked at him. “How the hell did you get that? Ride up with him?”

“Good way for me to get hurt. I stayed down here.” He shrugged. “You said he was trouble.”

“He is. How’d you do it?”

He gave me a bland look. “I’m good at this. You need to know which chair he’s in, too?”

“No. That’s close enough,” I said.

Vince looked at Murphy again, frowned, and then frowned at me. “Jesus,” he said. “You two look pretty serious.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I told you, this guy’s dangerous. He have anyone with him?”

“One person,” he said. “A woman, I think.”

Murphy suddenly smiled.

“How the hell do you know that?” I asked him.

“Room service,” she said.

Vince smiled in faint approval at Murphy and nodded his head. “Could have been someone else on twelve who ordered champagne and two glasses two minutes after he got off the elevator. But this late at night, I doubt it.” Vince glanced at me. “I’ll take the bill I duked the steward out of my fee.”

“Appreciated,” I said.

He shrugged. “That it?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Vince.”

“As long as the check clears,” he said, “you’re welcome.” He nodded to me, to Murphy, and walked out of the hotel.

Murphy eyed me, after Vince left, and smiled. “The mighty Harry Dresden. Subcontracting detective work.”

“They’re expecting me to be all magicky and stuff,” I said. “And I gave them what they expected to see. Binder wouldn’t have been looking for someone like Vince.”

“You’re just annoyed because they pulled that trick on you,” Murphy said. “And you’re taking your vengeance.”

I sniffed. “I like to think of it as symmetry.”

“That does make it sound nobler,” she said. “We obviously can’t just go up there and haul them off somewhere for questioning. What’s the plan?”

“Get more information,” I said. “I’m gonna listen in and see what they’re chatting about.”

Murphy nodded, glancing around. “Hotel security is going to have an issue with you lurking about the hallways. I’ll go have a word with them.”

I nodded. “I’ll be on twelve.”

“Don’t kick down any doors without someone to watch your back,” she warned me.

“No kicking at all,” I said. “Not until I know enough to kick them where it’s going to hurt.”

I went up to the twelfth floor, left the elevator, and pulled a can of Silly String out of my duster pocket. I shook it up as I walked down the hallway until I found room twelve thirty-three. Then, without preamble, I blasted a bit of the Silly String at the door. It slithered cheerfully through the air and stuck.

Then I turned and walked back down the hall until I found a door that opened onto a tiny room containing an ice dispenser and a couple of vending machines. I sat down, drew a quick circle around me on the tile floor with a dry-erase marker, and got to work.

I closed the circle with an effort of will, and it sprang up around me in a sudden invisible screen. It wasn’t exactly a heavy-duty magical construct, but such a quick circle would still serve perfectly well to seal away external energies and allow me to gather my own and shape it for a specific purpose without interference. I took the Silly String and sprayed a bunch of it into the palm of my left hand so that it mounded up sort of like shaving cream. Then I set the can down, held the mound of Silly String out in front of me, closed my eyes, and gathered my will.

Working magic is all about creating connections. Earlier, I’d taken Binder’s hairs to create a link back to him and used it for a tracking spell. I could have done any number of things with that connection, including some that were extremely nasty and dangerous. I’d seen it happen before, generally from the receiving end.

This time, I was creating a link between the Silly String in my hand, and the bit stuck to the door down the hall. They’d both come from the same can, and they’d been part of one distinct amount of liquid when they’d been canned. That meant I would be able to take advantage of that sameness and create a connection between them.

I focused my will on my desired outcome, gathered it all up together, and released it with a murmur of “Finiculus sonitus.” I reached out and smeared away a section of the circle I’d drawn, breaking it, and instantly began feeling a buzzing vibration in the palm of my left hand.

Then I tilted my head far to my right and slapped a bunch of Silly String into my left ear.

“Don’t try this at home folks,” I muttered. “I’m a professional.”

The first thing I heard was hectic-sounding, hyperactive music. A singer was screaming tunelessly and drums were pounding and someone was either playing electric guitars or slowly dipping partially laryngitic cats in boiling oil. None of the supposed musicians appeared to be paying attention to anything anyone else in the band was doing.

“Christ,” came Binder’s accented voice. “Not even you could dance to that tripe.”

There was a low-throated female laugh, and a slurred and very happy-sounding Madeline Raith replied, “This music isn’t about skill and precision, my sweet. It’s about hunger and passion. And I could dance to it to make your eyes fall out.”

“I am not ‘your sweet,’ ” Binder said, his voice annoyed. “I am not your anything, ducks, excepting your contracted employee.”

“I’m not sure I’d emphasize that if I were you, Binder,” Madeline said. “Since you’ve been a crushing disappointment as a hireling.”

“I told you when I got started that if anyone from the White Council showed up, I couldn’t make you any promises,” he shot back, his voice annoyed. “And lo and behold, what happens? That buggering lunatic Harry Dresden shows up with backup—and with the support of the local constabulary, to boot.”

“I’m getting so sick of this,” Madeline said. “He’s only one man.”

“One bloody member of the White bloody Council,” Binder countered. “Bear in mind that someone like him can do everything I can do and considerable besides. And even people on the bloody Council are nervous about that one.”

“Well, I’m sick of him,” spat Madeline. “Did you find out where he’s got Morgan hidden?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear, love, but I spent my day chained to a chair getting popped in the mouth.”

Madeline laughed, a cold, mocking sound. “There are places you’d have to pay for that.”

“Not bloody likely.”

“Did you find Morgan?”

Binder growled. “Dresden had him stashed in rental storage for a bit, but he hared off before the cops could pick him up. Probably took him into the Nevernever. They could be anywhere.”

“Not if Dresden is back in Chicago,” Madeline said. “He’d never let himself be too far from Morgan.”

“So check his bloody apartment,” Binder said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Madeline said. “That’s the first place anyone would look. He’s not a total moron.”

Yeah. I wasn’t. Ahem.

Binder snickered. “You’re money, Raith. Money never really gets it.”

Madeline’s voice turned waspish. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That not everyone has a bloody string of mansions around the world that they live in or extra cars that they never really drive or cash enough to not think twice about dropping two hundred bloody dollars on a bottle of forty-dollar room service champagne.”

“So?”

“So, Dresden’s a bloody kid by Council standards. Lives in that crappy little hole. And pays for an office for his business, to boot. He ain’t had a century or two of compounded interest to shore up his accounts, now, has he? And when he set himself up an emergency retreat, did he buy himself a furnished condo in another town? No. He rents out a cruddy little storage unit and stacks some camping gear inside.”

“All right,” Madeline said, her tone impatient. “Suppose you’re right. Suppose he’s got Morgan at his apartment. He won’t have left him unprotected.”

“Naturally not,” Binder replied. “He’ll have a bloody minefield of wards around the place. Might have some conjured guardians or some such as well.”

“Could you get through them?”

“Give me enough time and enough of my lads, and yeah,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be quick, quiet, or clean. There’s a simpler way.”

“Which is?”

“Burn the bloody place down,” Binder said promptly. “The apartment’s got one door. If Morgan comes scurrying out, we bag him. If not, we collect his bones after the ashes cool. Identify him with dental records or something and claim the reward.”

I felt a little bit sick to my stomach. Binder was way too perceptive for my comfort level. The guy might not be overly smart, but he was more than a little cunning. His plan was pretty much exactly the best way to attack my apartment, defensive magicks notwithstanding. What’s more, I knew he was capable of actually doing it. It would kill my elderly neighbors, the other residents of the building, but that wouldn’t slow someone like Binder down for half of a second.

“No,” Madeline said after a tense moment of silence. “I have my instructions. If we can’t take him ourselves, we at least see to it that the Wardens find him.”

“The Wardens have found him,” Binder complained. “Dresden’s a bloody Warden. Your boss should have paid up already.”

There was a quiet, deadly silence, and then Madeline purred, “You’ve been modestly helpful to him in the past, Binder. But don’t start thinking that you would survive telling him what he should or should not do. The moment you become more annoying than useful, you are a dead man.”

“No sin to want money,” Binder said sullenly. “I did my part to get it.”

“No,” Madeline said. “You lost a fight to one overgrown Boy Scout and one pint-sized mortal woman, got yourself locked up by the police, of all the ridiculous things, and missed your chance to earn the reward.” Sheets rustled, and soft footsteps whispered on the carpet. A moment later, a lighter flicked—Madeline smoked.

Binder spoke again, in a tone of voice that indicated he was changing the topic of conversation. “You going to clean that up?”

“That’s exactly why it’s there,” Madeline said. She took a drag and said, “Cleaning up. It’s too bad you didn’t get here five minutes sooner.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I probably would have waited to make the call.”

I felt myself leaning forward slightly and holding my breath.

“What call?” Binder said.

“To the Wardens, naturally,” Madeline said. “I told them that Morgan was in town and that Dresden was sheltering him. They should be here within the hour.”

I felt my mouth drop open and my stomach did a cartwheeling back-flip with an integrated quadruple axle.

Oh, crap.

Chapter Thirty-three

Murphy looked at the Rolls and said, “You’re kidding.” We’d driven down to the Sax separately, and she hadn’t seen the wheels I was using. I was parked closer to the hotel, so we were about to get into the Silver Wraith together.

“It’s a loaner,” I said. “Get in.”

“I am not a material girl,” she said, running a hand over the Rolls’s fender. “But . . . damn.”

“Can we focus, here?” I said. “The world’s coming to an end.”

Murphy shook her head and then got in the car with me. “Well. At least you’re going out in style.”

I got the Rolls moving. It got plenty of looks, even in the dead of night, and the other motorists out so late gave it a generous amount of room, as if intimidated by the Wraith’s sheer artistry.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m kind of finding the Rolls to be irrationally comforting.”

Murphy glanced aside at me. “Why’s that?”

“I know how I’m going to die, you know? One of these days, maybe real soon, I’m going to find out I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” I swallowed. “I mean, I just can’t keep from sticking my nose in places people don’t want it. And I always figured it would be the Council who punched my ticket, regardless of who believed what about me. Because there’s a bunch of assholes there, and I just can’t let them wallow in their own bull and pretend it’s an air of nobility.”

Murphy’s expression became more sober. She listened in silence.

“Now the Council’s coming. And they’ve got good reason to take me out. Or it looks like it to them, which is the same thing.” I swallowed again. My mouth felt dry. “But . . . I somehow just have the feeling that when I go out . . . it isn’t going to be in style.” I gestured at the Rolls with a vague sweep of one hand. “This just isn’t the car I drive to my death. You know?”

Murph’s mouth tucked up at one corner, though most of the smile was in her eyes. She took my hand between hers and held it. Her hands felt very warm. Maybe mine were just cold. “You’re right, of course, Harry.”

“You think?”

“Definitely,” she said. “This car just isn’t you. You’ll die in some badly painted, hideously recycled piece of junk that seems to keep on running despite the laws of physics that say it should be melted scrap by now.”

“Whew,” I said. “I thought I might be the only one who thought that.”

Her fingers tightened on mine for a moment, and I clung back.

The Council was coming.

And there wasn’t anything I could do to fight them.

Oh sure, maybe I could poke someone in the nose and run. But they would catch up to me sooner or later. There would be more of them than me, some of them every bit as strong as I was, and all of them dangerous. It might take a day or a week or a couple of weeks, but I had to sleep sooner or later. They’d wear me down.

And that pissed me off. My sheer helplessness in the face of this whole stupid mess was infuriating.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. . . . Mab still held a job offer open to me, for example. And it was more than possible that Lara Raith might have the resources to shield me, or broker me a better deal than the Council was going to offer. When I thought of how unfair the whole thing was, I had more than a passing desire to grab whatever slender threads I could reach, until I could sort things out, later.

Put that way, it almost sounded reasonable. Noble, even. I would, after all, be protecting other wrongly persecuted victims of the Council who littered the theoretical landscape of the future. It didn’t sound nearly so much like entering bargains that went against everything I believed so that I could forcibly impose my will over those who were against me.

I knew the truth. But just because it was true didn’t make it any less tempting.

What the hell was I going to do? I had a hidey-hole planned out, but it had already been compromised. There was nowhere even a little bit safe I could take Morgan but my apartment, and the Wardens were going to find him there. And on top of all that, I still had no freaking clue as to the identity of our mysterious puppet master.

Maybe it was time to admit it.

This one was too big for me. It had been from the very start.

“Murph,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.”

Silence filled the beautiful old car.

“When’s the last time you slept?” Murphy asked.

I had to take my hand back from hers to work the clutch. I gestured at my bandaged head. “I can barely remember what day of the week it is. This morning, a couple hours, I think?”

She nodded judiciously. “You know what your problem is?”

I eyed her and then started laughing. Or at least making an amused, wheezing sound. I couldn’t help it.

“Problem, singular,” I choked out, finally. “No, what?”

“You like to come off like you’re the unpredictable chaos factor in any given situation, but at the end of the day you obsess about having everything ordered the way you want it.”

“Have you seen my lab?”

“Again with the inappropriately timed come-ons,” Murphy said. “I’m serious, Harry.”

“I know some people who would really disagree with you. Like what’s-his-face, Peabody.”

“He’s Council?”

“Yeah. Says I have no place in his bastion of order.”

She smirked. “The problem is that your bastion of order is sort of tough to coexist with.”

“I have no bastions. I am bastionless.”

“Hah,” Murphy said. “You like the same car, the same apartment, the same restaurant. You like not needing to answer to anyone, and doing the jobs your conscience dictates you should do, without worrying about the broader issues they involve. You hang out, fairly happy without much in the way of material wealth and follow your instincts, and be damned to anyone who tells you otherwise. That’s your order.”

I eyed her. “Is there some other way it should be?”

She rolled her eyes. “I rest my case.”

“And how is this my problem?”

“You’ve never really compromised your order for someone else’s, which is why you drive the Wardens nuts. They have procedures, they have forms, they have reports—and you ignore them unless someone twists your arm to make you do it. Am I right?”

“Still don’t see how that’s a problem.”

She rolled down the passenger-side window and let one hand hang out. “It’s a problem because you never learned how to adjust inside someone else’s order,” she said. “If you had, you’d realize what an incredible force you have working on your side.”

“The A-Team?”

“Bureaucracy,” Murphy said.

“I would rather have the A-Team.”

“Listen and learn, maverick,” Murphy said. “The Wardens are an organization, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Lots of members.”

“Almost three hundred and growing,” I said.

“Lots of members who all have many obligations, who live in different areas, who speak different languages, but who have to communicate and work together somehow?”

“Yeah.”

“Behold,” Murphy said. “Bureaucracy. Organization to combat the entropy that naturally inhibits that kind of cooperative effort.”

“Is there going to be a quiz later, or . . . ?”

She ignored me. “Bureaucracies share common traits—and I think you’ve got more time to move in than you realize. If you weren’t tired and hurting and an obnoxious fly in the ointment to anyone’s order but your own, you’d see that.”

I frowned. “How so?”

“Do you think Madeline Raith called up the White Council on her home phone, identified herself, and just told them you were helping Morgan?” Murphy shook her head. “ ‘Hello, I’m the enemy. Let me help you for no good reason.’ ”

I sucked thoughtfully on my lower lip. “The Wardens would probably assume that she was trying to divert their resources during a manpower-critical situation.”

Murphy nodded. “And while they will look into it, they’ll never really believe it, and it will go straight to the bottom of their priority list.”

“So she calls in an anonymous tip instead. So?”

“So how many tips do you think the Wardens have gotten?” Murphy asked. “Cops go through the same thing. Some big flashy crime goes down and we have a dozen nuts claiming credit or convinced their neighbor did it, another dozen jerks who want to get their neighbor in trouble, and three times that many well-meaning people who have no clue whatsoever and think they’re helping.”

I chewed on that thought for a moment. Murphy wasn’t far off the mark. There were plenty of organizations and Lord only knew how many individuals who would want to stay on the Wardens’ good side, or who would want to impress them, or who would simply want to have a real reason to interact with them. Murph was probably right. There probably were tips flooding in from all over the world.

“They’ll check the tip out,” Murphy said. “But I’m willing to bet you real money that, depending on their manpower issues, it won’t happen until several hours after the tip actually makes it into the hands of the folks running the show—and with any luck, given the Council’s issues with technology and communication, that will take a while as well.”

I mulled that one over for a minute. “What are you saying?”

She put her hand on my arm and squeezed once. “I’m saying don’t give up yet. There’s still a little time.”

I turned my head and studied Murphy’s profile for a moment.

“Really?” I asked her quietly.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

I resettled my grip on the Rolls’s steering wheel. “Murph?”

“Mmm?”

“You’re one hell of a dame.”

“Sexist pig,” she said. She smiled out the windshield. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be ladylike.”

She shook her head as we neared my apartment. “If you like,” she said, “take him to my place. You can hide out there.”

I didn’t actually smile, but her words made me feel like doing it. “Not this time. The Wardens know where you live, remember? If they start looking hard at me . . .”

“. . . they’ll check me out, too,” Murphy said. “But you can’t keep him at your place.”

“I know that. I also know that I can’t drag anyone else into the middle of this clust—this mess.”

“There’s got to be somewhere,” she said. “Someplace quiet. And not well-known. And away from crowds.” She paused. “And where you can protect him from tracking magic. And where you’d have the advantage, if it did come to a fight.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Murphy said. “I guess maybe there aren’t any places like that around here.”

I snapped my head up straight.

“Hell’s bells!” I breathed. I felt a grin stretch my mouth. “I think maybe there is!”

Chapter Thirty-four

I came through my apartment door, took one look around the candlelit place, and half shouted, “Hell’s bells! What is wrong with you people!?”

Morgan sat slumped against the wall with the fireplace, and fresh spots of blood showed through his bandages. His eyes were only partly open. His hand lay on the floor beside him, limp, the fingers half curled. A tiny little semiautomatic pistol lay on the floor beneath his hand. It wasn’t mine. I have no idea where he’d been hiding it.

Molly was on the floor in front of the sofa, with Mouse literally sitting on her back. She was heaving breaths in and out, making the big dog rise and settle slightly as she did.

Luccio lay where I’d left her on the couch, flat on her back, her eyes closed, obviously still unconscious. Mouse had one of his paws resting lightly on her sternum. Given the nature of her recent injury, it seemed obvious that he would need to exert minimal pressure on her to immobilize her with pain, should she awaken.

The air smelled of cordite. Mouse’s fur, all down his left foreleg, was matted and caked with blood.

When I saw that, I rounded on Morgan in a fury, and if Murphy hadn’t stepped forward and grabbed my arm with both hands, I would have started kicking his head flat against my wall. I settled for kicking the gun away instead. If I got a couple of his fingers, too, it didn’t bother me much at the time.

Morgan watched me with dull, hardly conscious eyes.

“I swear,” I snarled. “I swear to God, Morgan, if you don’t explain yourself I’m going to strangle you dead with my own hands and drag your corpse back to Edinburgh by the balls.”

“Harry!” Murphy shouted, and I realized that she had positioned her entire body between me and Morgan and she was leaning against me like a soldier struggling to raise a flag.

Morgan bared his teeth, more rictus than smile. “Your warlock,” he said, his voice dry and leathery, “was trying to enter Captain Luccio’s mind against her will.”

I surged forward, and Murphy pushed me back again. I weighed twice what she did, but she had good leverage and focus. “And so you shot my dog?” I screamed.

“He interposed himself,” Morgan said. He coughed, weakly, and closed his eyes, his face turning greyer. “Never meant . . . to hit . . .”

“I swear to God,” I snarled, “that’s it. That is it. Molly and I are going right to the wall for you, and this is how you repay us? I am pushing your paranoid ass out my door, leaving you there, and starting a pool on who comes for you first—the Black Council, the Wardens, or the goddamn buzzards.”

“H-Harry,” Molly said in a weak, nauseated, and . . . shamed voice barely more than a whisper.

I felt my anger abruptly drain away, to be replaced by a wave of denial and a slowly dawning sense of horror. I turned, slowly, to look at Molly.

“He was right,” she wheezed, not looking at me, struggling to speak over the burden of Mouse’s weight. I could hear the tears reflected in her voice as they began to fall. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Harry. He was right.”

I leaned my shoulders back against the wall and watched as Mouse looked at me with grave, pained eyes and stayed right where he was—both holding Molly down and shielding her body with his.

We got Morgan put back into bed, and then I went over to Mouse. “Okay,” I said. “Move.”

Only then did Mouse remove himself from Molly’s back, limping heavily to one side. I knelt down by him and examined his leg. He flattened his ears and leaned away from me. I said firmly, “Stop that. Hold still.”

Mouse sighed and looked miserable, but he let me poke at his leg. I found the wound, up near his shoulder, and a hard lump under the skin.

“Get up,” I said to Molly, my tone steady. “Go to the lab. Get the medical kit under the table. Then get the little scissors and a fresh razor from the cabinet in my bathroom.”

She pushed herself up slowly.

“Move,” I said, my voice quiet and level and unyielding.

She was obviously still recovering from being pinned to the floor. But she moved quicker, and staggered down to my lab.

Murphy knelt down next to me and ruffled Mouse’s ears. He gave her a miserable look. She held up Morgan’s gun. “Twenty-five caliber,” she said. “Big as he is, wouldn’t have been easy to kill him with it, even on purpose.” She shook her head. “Or Molly, for that matter.”

“Meaning what?” I asked her.

“Meaning maybe Morgan didn’t intend the attack to be lethal. Maybe he used the smaller weapon for that reason.”

“He used the smaller weapon because it was the only one he had,” I said, my voice harsh. “He’d have killed Molly if he could have.”

Murphy was quiet for a moment before she said, “That’s attempted murder.”

I glanced up at her for a second. Then I said, “You want to arrest him.”

“It isn’t an issue of what I want,” she said. “I’m an officer of the law, Harry.”

I thought about that for a moment. “The Council might—they might—respect it,” I said quietly. “In fact, I’m certain they would. It would be the Merlin’s call, and he’d love nothing better than to buy more time to work out how to get Morgan out of this mess.”

“But others wouldn’t,” she said.

“Madeline and Shagnasty sure wouldn’t,” I said. “And if Morgan’s in jail, there’s no way to force Shagnasty into a confrontation where I have a chance to take Thomas back.” I looked at Mouse’s wound. “Or trade him.”

“You’d do that?” she asked.

“Morgan? For Thomas?” I shook my head. “I . . . Hell’s bells, it would make a mess. The Council would go berserk. But . . .”

But Thomas is my brother. I didn’t say it. I didn’t need to. Murphy nodded.

Molly reappeared with the things I’d sent her for, plus a bowl and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Smart girl. She poured rubbing alcohol into a bowl and started sterilizing the suture needle, the thread, the scalpel, and the pliers. Her hands moved like they knew what they were doing without need for her to consciously direct them. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Michael and Charity Carpenter’s eldest daughter had probably been taught to deal with injuries since the time she was physically large enough to do so.

“Mouse,” I said. “There’s a bullet inside you. Do you know what that is? The thing that a gun shoots that hurts?”

Mouse looked at me uncertainly. He was shaking.

I put my hand on his head and spoke steadily. “We’ve got to take it out of you or it could kill you. It’s going to hurt, a lot. But I promise you that it won’t take long and that you’re going to be all right. I’ll protect you. Okay?”

Mouse made a very soft noise that only the ungracious would have called a whine. He leaned his head against my hand, trembled, and then very slowly licked my hand, once.

I smiled at him and leaned my head against his for a second. “It will be all right. Lie down, boy.”

Mouse did, stretching slowly, carefully out on his side, the wounded shoulder up.

“Here, Harry,” Molly said quietly, gesturing at the tools.

I looked at her, my face hard. “You’re doing it.”

She blinked at me. “What? But what I did . . . I don’t even—”

“I? I? Mouse just took a bullet for you, Miss Carpenter,” I said, my words precise. “He wasn’t thinking of himself when he did it. He was putting his life at risk to protect you. If you want to remain my apprentice, you will stop saying sentences that begin with ‘I’ and repay his courage by easing his pain.”

Her face went white. “Harry . . .”

I ignored her and moved around to kneel by Mouse’s head, holding him down gently, stroking my hands over his thick fur.

My apprentice looked from me to Murphy, her expression uncertain. Sergeant Murphy stared back at her with calm cop eyes, and Molly averted her gaze hurriedly. She looked from her own hands to Mouse, and started crying.

Then she got up, went to the kitchen sink, and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. She washed her hands carefully, all the way to the elbow. Then she came back with the water, took a deep breath, and settled down beside the wounded dog, taking up the instruments.

She cut and shaved the area around the injury first, making Mouse flinch and quiver several times. I saw her cringe at each pained movement from the dog. But her hands stayed steady. She had to widen the tear in the dog’s flesh with the scalpel. Mouse actually cried out when the knife cut him, and she closed her eyes tight for a long count of three before she went back to work. She slid the pliers into the shallow injury and pulled out the bullet. It was a tiny thing, smaller than the nail on the end of my pinky, a distorted, oblong bit of shiny metal. Mouse groaned as she tugged it free.

She cleaned the site of the wound again, using the boiled water and disinfectant. Mouse flinched and cried out when she did so—the most agonized sound I had ever heard him make.

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, blinking tears out of the way. “I’m sorry.”

The injury was big enough to need a trio of stitches. Molly did them as swiftly as she possibly could, drawing more shudders of pain from Mouse. Then she cleaned the site again and covered it with a small pad that she cut to the proper size, affixing it to the bare-shaved skin around the injury with medical tape.

“There,” she said quietly. She leaned down and buried her face in the thick ruff of fur around Mouse’s throat. “There. You’ll be all right.”

Mouse moved very gingerly, moving his head to nudge against her hand. His tail thumped several times on the floor.

“Murph,” I said. “Give us a minute?”

“Sure,” she said quietly. “I need to make a call anyway.” She nodded to me and walked quietly to the apartment door—pointedly pausing to close the door from the living room to my small bedroom, shutting Morgan out of the conversation.

I sat with Mouse, stroking his head gently. “Okay,” I said to Molly. “What happened?”

She sat up and looked at me. She looked like she wanted to throw up. Her nose was running, now.

“I . . . it occurred to me, Harry, that . . . well, if the traitor wanted to really set the Council at one another’s throats, the best way to do it would be to force one of them to do something unforgiveable. Like, maybe force Morgan to kill Wizard LaFortier.”

“Gee,” I said. “That never once occurred to me, though I am older and wiser than you and have been doing this for most of your life, whereas you’ve been in the business for just under four years.”

She flushed. “Yes. Well. Then I thought that the best way to use that sort of influence wouldn’t be to use it on Morgan,” she said. “But on the people who would be after him.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Okay,” I said. “At this point, I have to ask you if you know how difficult it is to manipulate the mind and will of anyone of significant age. Most wizards who are eighty or a hundred years old are generally considered more or less immune to that kind of gross manipulation.”

“I didn’t know that,” Molly said humbly. “But . . . what I’m talking about wouldn’t be a severe alteration to anyone. It wouldn’t be obvious,” she said. “You wouldn’t make someone turn into a raving lunatic and murderer. I mean, that’s sort of noticeable. Instead, you make sure that you just . . . sort of nudge the people who are chasing after Morgan into being a little bit more like you want them to be.”

I narrowed my eyes. It was an interesting line of thought. “Such as?”

“Well . . .” she said. “If someone is naturally quick to anger and prone to fighting, you highlight that part of their personality. You give it more importance than it would have without intervention. If someone is prone to maneuvering politically to take advantage of a situation, you bring that to the forefront of their personality. If someone is nursing a grudge, you shine a spotlight on it in their thoughts, their emotions, to get them to act on it.”

I thought about that one for a second.

“It’s how I’d do it,” Molly said quietly, lowering her eyes.

I looked at the young woman I’d been teaching. When I saw Molly, I always saw her smile, her sense of humor, her youth, and her joy. She was the daughter of a close friend. I knew her family and was often a guest in their home. I saw my apprentice, the effort she put into learning, her frustrations, and her triumphs.

I had never, until that very moment, thought of her as someone who might one day be a very, very scary individual.

I found myself smiling bitterly.

Who was I to throw stones?

“Maybe,” I said finally. “It would be one hell of a difficult thing to prove.”

She nodded. “But if it was going to be used, there’s one person who would without doubt be a target.”

I glanced at Luccio. Her mouth was open slightly as she slept. She was drooling a little. It was ridiculous and adorable.

“Yeah,” Molly said. “But she would never have let me look. You know she wouldn’t have.”

“For good reason,” I said.

Molly’s jaw tensed up for a second. “I know.”

“So you thought you’d look while everyone was unconscious,” I said. “When you wouldn’t get caught.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“You told yourself that you were doing the right thing,” I said. “Just a peek, in and out.”

She closed her eyes. “I was . . . Harry, what if she isn’t being honest with you? What if all this time, she’s been getting close to you because she doesn’t trust you. What if she’s just like Morgan—only a lot better at hiding it?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“No?” She met my eyes. “Whose apprentice was he, Harry? Who taught him to be the way he is? Who did he idolize so much that he modeled himself after her?”

I just sat there for a second.

Molly pressed the issue. “Do you honestly think that she never knew how Morgan treated you?”

I took a deep breath. Then I said, “Yeah. I think that.”

She shook her head. “You know better.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You should,” she said fiercely. “I couldn’t take the chance that she would let you go down with Morgan. I had to know.”

I stared at her for a minute. Then I said, in a very quiet voice, “I always know when I’m being tempted to do something very, very wrong. I start sentences with phrases like, ‘I would never, ever do this—but.’ Or ‘I know this is wrong but.’ It’s the but that tips you off.”

“Harry,” Molly began.

“You broke one of the Laws of Magic, Molly. Willfully. Even though you knew it could cost you your life. Even though you knew that it could also cost mine.” I shook my head and looked away from her. “Hell’s bells, kid. I choose to trust Anastasia Luccio because that’s what people do. You don’t ever get to know for sure what someone thinks of you. What they really feel inside.”

“But I could—”

“No,” I said gently. “Even psychomancy doesn’t give you everything. We aren’t meant to know what’s going on in there. That’s what talking is for. That’s what trust is for.”

“Harry, I’m sorr—”

I lifted a hand. “Don’t apologize. Maybe I’m the one who let you down. Maybe I should have taught you better.” I petted Mouse’s head gently, looking away from her. “It doesn’t matter at the moment. People have died because I’ve been trying to save Morgan’s life. Thomas might still die. And now, if we do manage to save Morgan’s crusty old ass, he’s going to report that you’ve violated your parole. The Council will kill you. And me.”

She stared at me helplessly. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Get caught,” I said quietly. “Jesus Christ, kid. I trusted you.”

She wept more heavily now. Her face was a mess. She bowed her head.

“If Morgan goes down for this,” I said, “there’s going to be trouble like you wouldn’t believe. And even more people are going to die.” I stood up slowly. “So. I’m going to do everything in my power to save him.”

She nodded without looking up.

“So you’ve got a choice to make, grasshopper. You can come with me, knowing the cost if we succeed. Or you can go.”

“Go?” she whispered.

“Go,” I said. “Leave now. Run, for as long as you can. Hell, it looks a lot like I’m going to get myself killed anyway. Probably Morgan, too. In that case, things will go to hell, but the Wardens will be way too busy to chase you. You’ll be able to ignore what’s right all you want, do whatever you like—as long as you don’t get caught.”

She pressed her arms against her stomach. She sounded like she was about to throw up, through the sobs.

I put a hand on her head and said, “Or you can come with me. You can do something right. Something that has meaning.”

She looked up at me, her lovely young face discolored in anguish.

“Everyone dies, honey,” I said, very quietly. “Everyone. There’s no ‘if.’ There’s only ‘when.’ ” I let that sink in for a moment. “When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you’ve done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant?”

She stared at my eyes for a minute and a half of silence broken only by the sound of her muted weeping. Then her head twitched in a single tiny shake.

“I promise that I’ll be beside you,” I said. “I can’t promise anything else. Only that I’ll stand beside you for as long as I can.”

“Okay,” she whispered. She leaned against me.

I put my hand on her hair for a minute. Then I said gently, “We’re out of time. The Wardens will know Morgan is in Chicago within a few hours at most. They might be on their way already.”

“Okay,” she said. “Wh-what are we going to do?”

I took a deep breath. “Among other things, I’m going to attempt a sanctum invocation,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “But . . . you said that kind of thing was dangerous. That only a fool would take such a chance.”

“I agreed to help Donald freaking Morgan when he showed up at my door,” I sighed. “I qualify.”

She wiped at her eyes and nose. “What do I do?”

“Get my ritual box. Put it in the car Murphy’s cuddling up with outside.”

“Okay,” Molly said. She turned away but then paused and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“I know it was wrong, but . . .”

I looked at her sharply and frowned.

She shook her head and held up her hands. “Hear me out. I know it was wrong, and I didn’t get much of a look but . . . I swear to you. I think someone has tampered with Captain Luccio. I’d bet my life on it.”

I ignored the little chill that danced down my spine.

“Could be that you have,” I said quietly. “And mine, too. Go get the box.”

Molly hurried to comply.

I waited until she was outside to look at Mouse. The big dog sat up, his eyes gravely concerned. He wasn’t favoring his shoulder at all, and his movement was completely unimpaired.

Mouse got hit by the driver of a minivan once. He got back up, ran it down, and returned the favor. The Foo dog was very, very tough. I doubted he’d really needed the medical attention to recover, though I was also sure it would help speed things along. But I hadn’t been completely certain the injury wasn’t as serious as it looked.

In other words, the freaking dog had fooled Molly and me both.

“You were acting?” I said. “To make it hit Molly harder?”

His tail wagged back and forth proudly.

“Damn,” I said, impressed. “Maybe I should have named you Denzel.”

His jaws opened in a doggy grin.

“Earlier tonight,” I said, “when I was trying to figure out how to find Thomas, you interrupted me. I didn’t think about it before now, but you helped him track me down when Madrigal Raith was auctioning me off on eBay.”

His tail wagged harder.

“Could you find Thomas?”

“Woof,” he said, and his front paws bounced a couple of inches off the floor.

I nodded slowly, thinking. Then I said, “I’ve got another mission for you. One that could be more important. You game?”

He shook his fur out and padded to the door. Then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder at me.

“Okay,” I told him, walking to the door myself. “Listen up. Things are about to get sort of risky.”

Chapter Thirty-five

I looked at Luccio’s still-unconscious form. The stress of coordinating the search for Morgan for who knows how long before he showed up, coupled with the pains of her injuries and the sedative effect of the painkillers I’d given her, meant that she’d never stirred. Not when the gun went off, not when we’d been talking, and not when we’d all had to work together to get Morgan back up the stairs and out to the silver Rolls.

I made sure she was covered with a blanket. The moment I did, Mister descended from his perch atop one of my bookcases, and draped himself languidly over her lower legs, purring.

I scratched my cat’s ears and said, “Keep her company.”

He gave me an inscrutable look that said maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. Mister was a cat, and cats generally considered it the obligation of the universe to provide shelter, sustenance, and amusement as required. I think Mister considered it beneath his dignity to plan for the future.

I got a pen and paper and wrote.

Anastasia,

I’m running out of time, and visitors are on the way. I’m going someplace where I might be able to create new options. You’ll understand shortly.

I’m sorry I didn’t bring you, too. In your condition, you’d be of limited assistance. I know you don’t like it, but you also know that I’m right.

Help yourself to whatever you need. I hope that we’ll talk soon.

Harry

I folded the note and left it on the coffee table, where she’d see it upon waking. Then I bent over, kissed her hair, and left her sleeping safe in my home.

I parked the Rolls in the lot next to the marina. If we hurried, we could still get there before the witching hour, which would be the best time to try the invocation. Granted, trying it while injured and weary with absolutely no preritual work was probably going to detract more than enough from the ritual to offset the premium timing, but I was beggared for time and therefore not spoiling for choice.

“Allow me to reiterate,” Murphy said, “that I feel that this is a bad idea.”

“So noted,” I said. “But will you do it?”

She stared out the Rolls’s windshield at the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, a simple and enormous blackness against the lights of Chicago. “Yes,” she said.

“If there was anything else you could do,” I said, “I’d ask you to do it. I swear.”

“I know,” she said. “It just pisses me off that there’s nothing more I can add.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’re going to be in danger, too. Someone might decide to come by and try to use you against me. And if word gets back to the Council about how much you know, they’re going to blow a gasket.”

She smiled a bit. “Yes, thank you. I feel less left out now that I know someone might kill me anyway.” She shifted, settling her gun’s shoulder harness a little more comfortably. “I am aware of my limits. That isn’t the same thing as liking them.” She looked back at me. “How are you going to reach the others?”

“I’d . . . really rather not say. The less you know—”

“The safer I am?”

“No, actually,” I said. “The less you know, the safer I am. Don’t forget that we might be dealing with people who can take information out of your head, whether you want to give it or not.”

Murphy folded her arms and shivered. “I hate feeling helpless.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me, too. How’s he doing, Molly?”

“Still asleep,” Molly reported from the back of the limo. “I don’t think his fever is any higher, though.” She reached out and touched Morgan’s forehead with the back of one hand.

Morgan’s arm rose up and sharply slapped her arm away at the wrist, though he never changed the pace of his breathing or otherwise stirred. Christ. It was literally a reflex action. I shook my head and said, “Let’s move, people.”

Molly and I wrestled the wounded Warden into his wheelchair again. He roused enough to help a little, and sagged back into sleep as soon as he was seated. Molly slung the strap of my ritual box over her shoulder and started pushing Morgan across the parking lot to the marina docks. I grabbed a couple of heavy black nylon bags.

“And what do we have in there?” Murphy asked me.

“Party favors,” I said.

“You’re having a party out there?”

I turned my eyes to the east and stared out over the lake. You couldn’t see the island from Chicago, even on a clear day, but I knew it was there, a sullen and threatening presence. “Yeah,” I said quietly. A real party. Practically everyone who’d wanted to kill me lately would be there.

Murphy shook her head. “All of this over one man.”

“Over a hero of the Council,” I said quietly. “Over the most feared man on the Wardens. Morgan nearly took out the Red King himself—a vampire maybe four thousand years old, surrounded by some disgustingly powerful retainers. If he hadn’t bugged out, Morgan would have killed him.”

“You almost said something nice about him,” Murphy said.

“Not nice,” I said. “But I can acknowledge who he is. Morgan has probably saved more lives than you could count, over the years. And he’s killed innocents, too. I’m certain of it. He’s been the Council’s executioner for at least twenty or thirty years. He’s obsessive and tactless and ruthless and prejudiced. He hates with a holy passion. He’s a big, ugly, vicious attack dog.”

Murphy smiled faintly. “But he’s your attack dog.”

“He’s our attack dog,” I echoed. “He’d give his life without hesitation if he thought it was necessary.”

Murphy watched Molly pushing Morgan down the dock. “God. It’s got to be awful, to know that you’re capable of disregarding life so completely. Someone else’s, yours, doesn’t really matter which. To know that you’re so readily capable of taking everything away from a human being. That’s got to eat away at him.”

“For so long there’s not a lot left, maybe,” I said. “I think you’re right about the killer acting in desperation. This situation got way too confused and complicated for it to be a scheme. It’s just . . . a big confluence of all kinds of chickens coming home to roost.”

“Maybe that will make it simpler to resolve.”

“World War One was kind of the same deal,” I said. “But then, it was sort of hard to point a finger at any one person and say, ‘That guy did it.’ World War Two was simpler, that way.”

“You’ve been operating under the assumption that there is someone to blame,” Murphy said.

“Only if I can catch him.” I shook my head. “If I can’t . . . well.”

Murphy turned to me. She reached up with both hands, put them on the sides of my head, and pulled me down a little. Then she kissed my forehead and my mouth, neither quickly nor with passion. Then she let me go and looked up at me, her eyes worried and calm. “You know that I love you, Harry. You’re a good man. A good friend.”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “Don’t go all gushy on me, Murph.” She shook her head. “I’m serious. Don’t get yourself killed. Kick whatsoever ass you need to in order to make that happen.” She looked down. “My world would be a scarier place without you in it.”

I chewed my lip for a second, feeling very awkward. Then I said, “I’d rather have you covering my back than anyone in the world, Karrin.” I cleared my throat. “You might be the best friend I’ve ever had.”

She blinked quickly several times and shook her head. “Okay. This is going somewhere awkward.”

“Maybe we should take it from ‘whatsoever ass,’ ” I suggested.

She nodded. “Find him. Kick his ass.”

“That is the plan,” I confirmed. Then I bent down and kissed her forehead and her mouth, gently, and leaned my forehead against hers. “Love you, too,” I whispered.

Her voice tightened. “You jerk. Good luck.”

“You, too,” I said. “Keys are in the ignition.”

Then I straightened, hitched up the heavy bags, and stalked toward the docks. I didn’t look at her as I walked away, and I didn’t look back.

That way, we could both pretend that I hadn’t seen her crying.

My brother owned an ancient battered commercial fishing boat. He told me it was a trawler. Or maybe he said troller. Or schooner. It was one of those—unless it wasn’t. Apparently, nautical types get real specific and fussy about the fine distinctions that categorize the various vessels—but since I’m not nautical, I don’t lose much sleep over the misuse of the proper term.

The boat is forty-two feet long and could have been a stunt double for Quint’s fishing boat in Jaws. It desperately needed a paint job, as the white of its hull had long since faded to grey and smoke-smudged black. The only fresh paint on it was a row of letters on the bow that read Water Beetle.

Getting Morgan on board was a pain—literally, in his case. We got him settled onto the bed in the little cabin and brought all the gear aboard. After that, I climbed up onto the bridge, started the engines with my copy of the Water Beetle’s key, and immediately realized I hadn’t cast off the lines. I had to go back down to the deck to untie us from the dock.

Look, I just told you—I’m not nautical.

Leaving the marina wasn’t hard. Thomas had a spot that was very near the open waters of the lake. I almost forgot to flick on the lights, but got them clicked on before we got out of the marina and onto the open water. Then I checked the compass next to the boat’s wheel, turned us a degree or two south of due east, and opened up the engine.

We started out over the blackness of the lake, the boat’s engines making a rather subdued, throaty lub lub dub lub sound. The boat had originally been built for charter use in the open sea, and it had some muscle. The water was calm tonight, and the ride remained smooth as we rapidly built up speed.

I felt a little nervous about the trip. Over the past year, Thomas and I had gone out to the island several times so that I could explore the place. He’d been teaching me how to handle the boat, but this was my first solo voyage.

After a few minutes, Molly came partway up the short ladder to the bridge and stopped. “Do I need to ask permission to come up there or something?”

“Why would you?” I asked.

She considered. “It’s what they do on Star Trek?”

“Good point,” I said. “Permission granted, Ensign.”

“Aye aye,” she said, and came up to stand next to me. She frowned at the darkness to the east, and cast a wary glance back at the rapidly fading lights of the city. “So. We’re going out to the weird island, the one with that big ley line running through it?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Where my dad got . . .”

I tried not to remember how badly Michael Carpenter had suffered when he had gone there with me. “Crippled,” I said. “Yeah.”

She frowned quietly. “I heard him talking to my mom about the island. But when I tried to go look it up, I couldn’t find it on any of the maps. Not even in the libraries.”

“Yeah,” I said. “From what I hear, bad things happened to everyone who went out there. There used to be some kind of port facility for fishing and merchant traffic, big as a small town, but it was abandoned. Sometime in the nineteenth century, the city completely expunged the place from its records.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t want anyone to go out there,” I said. “If they merely passed a law, they knew that sooner or later some moron would go there out of sheer contrariness. So they pretty much unmade the place, at least officially.”

“And in more than a century, no one’s ever seen it?”

“That dark ley line puts off a big field of energy,” I said. “It makes people nervous. Not insane or anything, but it’s enough to make them subconsciously avoid the place, if they aren’t making a specific effort to get there. Plus, there are stone reefs around a big portion of the island, and people tend to swing wide around it.”

She frowned. “Couldn’t that be a problem for us?”

“I’m pretty sure I know where to get through them.”

“Pretty sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

Maybe she looked a little paler. “Oh,” she said. “Good. And we’re going there why?”

“The sanctum invocation,” I said. “The island has a kind of spirit to it, an awareness.”

“A genius loci,” she said.

I nodded approval. “Exactly that. And fed by that ley line, it’s a big, strong one. It doesn’t much care for visitors, either. It’s arranged to kill a bunch of them.”

Molly blinked. “And you want to do a sanctum invocation? There?”

“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I don’t want to. But I’ve got to find some way to give myself an edge tomorrow, or it’s all over but the crying.”

She shook her head slowly. Then she fell silent until we actually reached the island a little while later. It was dark, but I had enough moonlight and starlight to find the buoy Thomas and I had placed at the entry through the reef. I swung the Water Beetle through it, and began following the coastline of the island until I passed a second buoy and guided the boat into the small floating dock we’d constructed. I managed to get the vessel next to the dock without breaking anything, and hopped off with lines in hand to tie it off.

I looked up to find Molly holding my ritual box. She passed it to me and I nodded to her. “If this works, it should take me an hour or so,” I told her. “Stay with Morgan. If I’m not back by dawn, untie the boat, start the engine, and drive it back to the marina. It’s not too different from a car, for what you’ll be doing.”

She bit her lip and nodded. “What then?” she asked.

“Get to your dad. Tell him I said that you need to disappear. He’ll know what to do.”

“What about you?” she asked. “What will you be doing?”

I slipped the strap to the ritual box over one shoulder, took up my staff, and started toward the interior of the island.

“Not much,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ll be dead.”

Chapter Thirty-six

Grimm’s fairy tales, a compilation of the most widely known scary stories of Western Europe, darn near always feature a forest as the setting. Monstrous and terrifying things live there. When the hero of a given story sets out, the forest is a place of danger, a stronghold of darkness—and there’s a good reason for it.

It can be freaking frightening to be walking a forest in the dark. And if that isn’t enough, it’s dangerous, to boot.

You can’t see much. There are sounds around you, from the sigh of wind in the trees to the rustle of brush caused by a moving animal. Invisible things touch you suddenly and without warning—tree branches, spiderwebs, leaves, brush. The ground shifts and changes constantly, forcing you to compensate with every step as the earth below you rises or dips suddenly. Stones trip up your feet. So do ground-hugging vines, thorns, branches, and roots. The dark conceals sinkholes, embankments, and the edges of rock shelves that might drop you six inches or six feet.

In stories, you read about characters running through a forest at night. It’s a load of crap. Oh, maybe it’s feasible in really ancient pine forests, where the ground is mostly clear, or in those vast oak forests where they love to shoot Robin Hood movies and adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. But if you get into the thick native brush in the U.S., you’re better off finding a big stick and breaking your own ankle than you are trying to sprint through it blind.

I made my way cautiously uphill, passing through the ramshackle, decaying old buildings of what had been a tiny town, just up the slope from the dock. The trees had reclaimed it long since, growing up through floors and out broken old windows.

There were deer on the island, though God knows how they got there. It’s big enough to support quite a few of the beautiful animals. I’d found signs of foxes, raccoons, skunks, and wildcats, plus the usual complement of rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs. There were a few wild goats there as well, probably descendants of escapees from the former human residents of the island.

I began to sense the hostile presence of the island before I’d gone twenty steps. It began as a low, sourceless anxiety, one I barely noticed against the backdrop of all the perfectly rational anxiety I was carrying. But as I continued up the hill, it got worse, maturing into a fluttery panic that made my heart beat faster and dried out my mouth.

I steeled myself against the psychic pressure, and continued at the same steady pace. If I let it get to me, if I wound up panicking and bolted, I could end up a victim of the normal threats of a forest at night. In fact, that was probably what the island had in mind, so to speak.

I gritted my teeth and continued, while my eyes slowly adjusted to the night, revealing the shapes of trees and rocks and brush, and making it a little easier to move safely.

It was a short hike to the mountain’s summit. The final bit of hill was at an angle better than forty-five degrees, and the only way one could climb it safely was to use the old steps that had been carved into the rock face. They had felt weirdly familiar and comfortable the first time I went up them. That hadn’t changed noticeably in subsequent visits. Even now, I could go up them in the dark, my legs and feet automatically adjusting to the slightly irregular spacing of the steps, without needing to consult my eyes.

Once at the top of the stairs, I found myself on a bald crown of a hilltop. A tower stood there, an old lighthouse made of stone. Well, about three-quarters of it stood there, anyway. Some of it had collapsed, and the stones had been cannibalized and used to construct a small cottage at the foot of the tower.

The silent presence of the island was stronger here, a brooding and dangerous thing that did not care for visitors.

I looked around the moonlit hilltop, nodded once, marched over to the flat area in front of the cottage and planted my ritual box firmly on the ground.

What I was about to attempt had its beginnings in ancient shamanic practice. A given tribe’s shaman or wise one or spirit caller or whatever would set out into the wild near home and seek out a place of presence and power, such as this one. Depending on the culture involved, the practitioner would then invoke the spirit of the place and draw its full attention. The ritual that happened next wasn’t quite an introduction, or a challenge, or a staking of a claim on the land, or a battle of wills, but it incorporated elements of all of those things. If the ritual was successful, it would form a sort of partnership or peerage between the shaman and the genius loci in question.

If it wasn’t successful, well . . . It’s a bad thing to have the full attention of a dangerous spirit that can exert control over the environment around you. This spirit, bolstered by the dark energy of the ley line that ran beneath the tower, was more than capable of driving me insane or recycling me into food for its animals and trees.

“And yet here I am about to pop you in the nose,” I muttered. “Am I daring or what?”

I set my staff down and opened the box.

First, the circle. Using a short whisk broom, I quickly cleared dirt and dust from the rock shelf beneath me in an area about three feet across. Then I used a wooden-armed chalk compass, like those used in geometry classrooms, to draw out a perfect circle on the stone in faintly luminescent, glow-in-the-dark chalk. The circle didn’t have to be perfectly round in order to work, but it was a little bit more efficient, and I wanted every advantage I could get.

Next, I got five white candles out of the box, and checked a magnetic compass so that I could align them properly. The compass needle spun wildly and aimlessly. The turbulence of the nearby ley line must have been throwing it off. I put the thing away and sighted on the North Star, setting the candles out at the five points of a pentagram, its tip aligned with due north.

After that, I got out an old and genuine KA-BAR U.S. Marine combat knife, along with a plain silver chalice and a silver former Salvation Army bell with a black wooden handle.

I double-checked each of the objects and the circle, then stepped a few feet away and undressed completely, losing my rings, bracelet, and all my other magical gear except for the silver pentacle amulet around my neck. I didn’t have to do the ritual sky clad, but it reduced the chances of any of the enchantments on my gear causing interference by a small if significant amount.

All the while, the pressure from the island’s awareness kept doubling and redoubling. My head started pounding, which was just lovely in combination with the fresh bumps on it. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Mosquitoes began to whine and buzz around me, and I shuddered to think of the places that were going to get bitten while I did this.

I went to the circle, checked everything again, got a box of matches out of the ritual box, and then knelt down in the circle. Yes, I could have lit them with a spell—but again, that would have left an energy signature on the candles that could potentially interfere. So I did it the old-fashioned way. As I struck the first match and leaned down to light the northernmost candle, a screech owl let out an absolutely alien-sounding cry from so nearby that I almost jumped out of my skin. I barely kept from losing my balance and smudging the circle.

“Cheap shot,” I muttered. Then I lit a fresh match and began again. I lit the five candles, then turned to face the north and reached out to gently touch the chalk circle. A mild effort of will closed it, and the psychic pressure I’d been feeling for the last half hour or more abruptly vanished.

I closed my eyes and began to regulate my breathing, relaxing my muscles group by group, focusing my thoughts on the task at hand. I felt my will begin to gather. Outside my circle, the owl shrieked again. A wildcat let out an earsplitting yowl. A pair of foxes set up a yipping, howling chorale in the brush.

I ignored them until I felt that I had gathered all the strength I could. Then I opened my eyes and picked up the bell. I rang it sharply once, and filled my voice with the power of my will. “I am not some clueless mortal you can frighten away,” I said to the hilltop. “I am magi, one of the Wise, and I am worthy of your respect.”

A wind came rushing up from the lake. The trees muttered and sighed with the force of it, a sound like angry surf, enormous and omnipresent.

I rang the bell again. “Hear me!” I called. “I am magi, one of the Wise, and I know your nature and your strength.”

The wind continued to rise around me, making the candles flicker. With an effort of will, I steadied their flames, and felt the temperature of my body drop a couple of degrees in reaction.

I set the bell down, took up the knife, and drew it along the knuckles of my left hand, opening a thin line in my flesh. Blood welled up immediately. I put the knife down, took up the chalice, and let my blood trickle into the cup.

And as it did, I used the one thing that made me think it was possible—just possible—to pull this thing off.

Soulfire.

During a case a little more than a year ago, an archangel had decided to invest in my future. Uriel had replaced the power I’d lost when I resisted the temptations offered me by one of the Fallen. The demon’s Hellfire had been literal hell on wheels for destructive purposes. Soulfire was apparently the angelic equivalent of the same force, the flip side of the coin—fires of creation rather than those of destruction. I hadn’t experimented with it much. Soulfire used my own life force as its source of energy. If I poured too much into any given working, it could kill me.

As the blood dripped down into the chalice, I reached out to the place in my mind where the archangel’s gift resided, and poured soulfire into my blood. Silver-white sparks began to stream from the cuts and accompanied the blood down into the chalice, filling it with supernatural power far in excess of what my blood, a common source of magical energy, contained on its own.

I lifted the chalice in my right hand and the silver bell in my left. Droplets of blood and flickering sparks of soulfire fell on the silver, and when it rang again, the sound was piercing, the tone so perfect and pure that it could have shattered glass.

“Hear me!” I called, and my soulfire-enhanced voice rang out in a similar fashion, sharp and precise, strong and resonant. Small stones fell from a broken section of the tower wall. “I am magi, one of the Wise! I make of my blood this gift to you, to honor your strength and to show my respect! Come forth!” I set the bell down and prepared to break the circle and release the spell. “Come forth!” I bellowed, even louder. “COME FORTH!”

I simultaneously broke the circle, released my will, and poured out the scarlet and silver fire of my enhanced blood onto the stone of the hilltop.

Animals of the forest erupted into screams and howls. Birds exploded from their sleeping places to swarm in the skies above me. Half a dozen tree branches snapped all together in the rushing wind, the sounds crackling over the stony hilltop like rifle shots.

And, an instant later, a bolt of viridian lightning crashed down out of a completely clear sky and struck the ground in the center of the empty shell of the old lighthouse.

There was little enough in the lighthouse that could burn, but some brush and grasses grew there. Their light danced and flickered on the walls, if only for a few seconds—and then suddenly revealed an indistinct and solid shape inside.

I took a slow breath and rose to my feet, facing the lighthouse. It was a rare thing for such an entity to take material form, and I had thought it so unlikely to happen that I had scarcely bothered to plan for it.

The woods all around me rustled, and I darted my eyes left and right without moving.

Animals had appeared. Deer were the largest and most obvious, the stags’ horns wicked in the moonlight. Foxes and raccoons were there, too, as well as rabbits and squirrels and all manner of woodland creatures, predator and prey alike. They were all staring at me with obvious awareness that was far more than they should have had, and all of them were eerily still.

I did my best not to think about what it might be like to be overrun and chewed to death by hundreds of small wild animals. I turned my eyes back to the tower, and waited.

The dark shape, indistinct in the heavy shadows, moved and came closer, until it looked like . . . something that was not quite human. Its shoulders were too wide, its stance too crooked, and it walked with a slow, limping gait, drag-thump, drag-thump. It was covered with what appeared to be a voluminous dark cloak—oh, and it was eleven or twelve feet tall.

Yikes.

Green eyes the same color as the bolt of unnatural lightning burned inside the darkness of the cloak’s hood. They faced me and flashed brighter, once, and a gust of wind washed down onto me, almost taking me from my feet.

I gritted my teeth against it and endured, until a moment later it died away.

I looked at the dark shape for a moment, and then nodded. “Right,” I said. “I get you.” I reached for my will, infused it with a meager portion of soulfire, and hurled my right hand forward, calling, “Ventas servitas!”

Wind festooned with ribbons of silver light rushed from my outstretched hand, crashing into the figure. It didn’t move the thing—the entity was far too massive for that—but the wind cast the grey cloak back as sharply as a ship’s flag caught in a gale, making the fabric snap and pop.

My evocation died away, and the entity’s cloak settled down again. Once more, its eyes flashed, and the earth beneath my feet and slightly behind me erupted, solid rock splitting and cracking. Sharp shards flew up from the supernatural impact, and I instantly felt half a dozen hot, stinging cuts on my legs and back.

“Ow,” I muttered. “At least they weren’t in any tender spots, I guess.” Then again I summoned my will and soulfire, this time focusing on the earth near the entity. “Geodas!” I shouted, and the earth beneath the entity twisted and screamed, suddenly opening into a sinkhole.

The entity never moved. It just stood there on empty air, as if I hadn’t literally pulled the ground out from under it.

The entity’s eyes kindled to life again, but this time I had anticipated it. Flame gathered before it in a lance and rushed toward me, leaving a coating of sudden frost and ice on the ground beneath it as it came. But my own will had reached down into the ground below me, and found the water from the stream that fed the cottage’s little well. I drew it up through the cracks the entity had created in the rock, taking advantage of the work it had done, with a shout of, “Aquilevitas!” A curtain of water rose up to meet the onrushing flame, and they consumed one another, leaving only darkness and a cloud of steam.

I lifted a hand and my soulfire-enhanced will and shouted, “Fuego!” A column of silver-and-blue flame as thick as my chest roared across the ground and struck the entity hard in the center of its mass.

It rocked back at the impact. Not much. Maybe half an inch, though that column of fire would have blown apart a brick wall. But I had moved it that half an inch. There was no doubt about that.

Weariness was slowly seeping into my limbs as the entity stared at me. I forced myself to stand straight and face the being without blinking—and without looking weak.

“You want to keep it up?” I asked it aloud. “I could do this all night.”

The entity stared at me. Then it walked closer. Drag-thump. Drag-thump.

I was not at all scared. Even a little. The only reason my mouth was so dry was all that fire that had been flying around.

It stopped five feet away, towering over me.

And I realized that it was waiting.

It was waiting for me to act.

My heart pounded harder as I bowed my head respectfully. I don’t know why I said what I did, exactly. I just know that my instincts screamed at me that it was the right thing to say, my voice infused with my will.

“I am Harry Dresden, and I give thee a name, honored spirit. From this day on, be thou called Demonreach.”

Its eyes flashed, burning more brightly, sending out tendrils and streams of greenish fire in a nimbus around its head.

Then Demonreach mirrored my gesture, bowing its own head in reply. When it looked up, its head turned briefly toward the cottage. Then the wind rose again, and darkness fluttered over the hilltop.

When it passed, I was alone, the hilltop empty of entity and animal alike. I was also freezing.

I staggered toward my clothes and gathered them up, shaking so hard that I thought I might just collapse on the ground. As I rose with my gear in my arms, I saw a light flickering in the cottage.

I frowned and shambled over to it. The door, like the windows, had long since rotted away, and there was very little roof to speak of—but the cottage did have one thing in it that still functioned.

A fireplace.

A neat stack of fallen wood was burning in the fireplace, putting off a cheery warmth, its golden flames edged with flickers of green at their very edges.

I blinked at the fire for a moment, and then made my way over to it, reveling in the warmth as I dressed again. I glanced up, searching for that alien presence. I found it immediately, still there, still alien, still dangerous, though it no longer seemed determined to drive me away.

I slid will into my voice as I said, simply, “Thank you.”

The gentle wind that sighed through the trees of Demonreach may have been a reply.

Or maybe not.

Chapter Thirty-seven

I didn’t return to the dock by the same route I’d taken to the tower. There was a much shorter, easier way, down what looked like a sheer rock wall. It proved to have an ancient narrow gully worn into the stone, almost completely hidden by brush. The gully’s floor had a thin layer of silt in it, leaving little room for plants to grow, and was as easy to traverse as a sidewalk, even in the dark. Following it brought me back to the island’s shoreline in half the time it had taken to go up.

I didn’t wonder how I’d known about the path until I stepped out of the woods and saw the dock again. I hadn’t been that way before. I hadn’t known it existed. Yet when I decided to take that trail, the knowledge had come to me as completely and immediately as if I had lived there for years: pure information.

I paused and looked around me. I knew not to walk directly to the dock from where I stood. There was a large hornet’s nest in the earth at the base of a fallen tree, and I would risk arousing their anger if I accidentally crushed it while walking by. I also knew that a grumpy old skunk was trundling its way back to its den, thirty yards in the other direction, and that it would happily douse me with musk if I came anywhere close.

I glanced over my shoulder, back toward the tower, casting out my supernatural senses. The island’s awareness continued being that same constant presence I’d felt ever since leaving the tower. I considered going back, taking the old stairs this time, to see what would happen, and immediately I understood that there was a cottonmouth that made its home in a large crack on the twenty-sixth step. If I delayed the trip until later in the morning, the snake would be out on the stones, sun-bathing to build up its body heat for the day.

The dawn was approaching, and the sky had begun to lighten from black to blue. I could see the tower standing, lonely and wounded, but unbowed, a black shape against the sky. Demonreach began to awaken to the first trills of songbirds.

I walked down to the dock, thoughtfully, and walked out to where the Water Beetle was moored. “Molly,” I called.

Feet pounded on the deck, and Molly burst up out of the ship’s cabin. She flew across the distance between us, and nearly tackled me into the water on the far side of the dock with the enthusiasm of her hug. Molly, the daughter of two ferocious warriors, was no wilting violet. My ribs creaked.

“You came back,” she said. “I was so worried. You came back.”

“Hey, hey. I need my rib cage, kid,” I said, but I hugged her in return for a quiet moment, before straightening.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“I’m not exactly sure. God, I need something to drink.” We both boarded the Water Beetle, and I went below and removed a can of Coke from a cabinet. It was warm, but it was liquid, and more important, it was Coke. I guzzled the can’s contents and tossed it into the trash bin.

“How’s Morgan?” I asked.

“Awake,” Morgan rumbled. “Where are we?”

“Demonreach,” I said. “It’s an island in Lake Michigan.”

Morgan grunted without emphasis. “Luccio told me about it.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, good.”

“Miss Carpenter says you were attempting a sanctum invocation.”

“Yeah.”

Morgan grunted. “You’re here. It worked.”

“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“Why not?”

I shook my head. “I thought that when a bond was formed with the land in question, it gave you access to its latent energy.”

“Yes.”

Which meant that my magic would be subsidized by the island, whenever I was here. I’d get a lot more bang for my buck, so to speak. “I thought that was all it did.”

“Generally,” Morgan said. I saw him turn his head toward me in the dim cabin. “Why? What else has happened?”

I took a deep breath and told him about the hidden trail, the hornets, and the skunk.

Morgan sat up in his bunk by the time I got to the end. He leaned forward intently. “You’re sure you aren’t mistaken? Confrontations with a genius loci can leave odd aftereffects behind.”

“Hang on,” I said.

I went back to the woods where I knew the hornets were, and found their nest in short order. I retreated without crushing anything and went back to the boat.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Morgan sank back onto the bunk as if he was being slowly deflated. “Merciful God,” he said. “Intellectus.”

I felt my eyebrows go up. “You’re kidding.”

Molly muttered a couple of candles to light so that we could see each other clearly. “Intell-whatsis?” she asked me.

“Intellectus,” I said. “Um. It’s a mode of existence for a very few rare and powerful supernatural beings—angels have it. I’m willing to bet old Mother Winter and Mother Summer have it. For beings with intellectus, all reality exists in one piece, one place, one moment, and they can look at the whole thing. They don’t seek or acquire knowledge. They just know things. They see the entire picture.”

“I’m not sure I get that,” Molly said.

Morgan spoke. “A being with intellectus does not understand, for example, how to derive a complex calculus equation—because it doesn’t need the process. If you showed him a problem and an equation, he would simply understand it and skip straight to the answer without need to think through the logical stages of solving the problem.”

“It’s omniscient?” Molly asked, her eyes wide.

Morgan shook his head. “Not the same thing. The being with intellectus has to be focused on something via consideration in order to know it, whereas an omniscient being knows all things at all times.”

“Isn’t that pretty close?” Molly asked.

“Intellectus wouldn’t save you from an assassin’s bullet if you didn’t know someone wanted to kill you in the first place,” I said. “To know it was coming, you’d first need to consider the question of whether or not an assassin might be lurking in a dark doorway or on top of a bell tower.”

Morgan grunted agreement. “And since beings of intellectus so rarely understand broader ideas of cause and effect, they can be unlikely to realize that a given event might be an indicator of an upcoming assassination attempt.” He turned to me. “Though that’s a terrible metaphor, Dresden. Most beings like that are immortal. They’d be hard-pressed to notice bullets, much less feel threatened by them.”

“So,” Molly said, nodding, “it might be able to know anything it wants to know—but it still has to ask the right questions. Which is always harder than people think it is.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”

“And now you’ve got this intellectus, too?”

I shook my head. “It’s Demonreach that has it. It stopped when I got out over the water.” I tapped my finger against my forehead. “I’ve got nothing going on in here at the moment.”

I realized what I had said just as the last word left my mouth, and glanced at Morgan.

He lay on the bunk with his eyes closed. His mouth was turned up in small smile. “Too easy.”

Molly fought not to grin.

Morgan pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Can the entity feed you any other information, Dresden? The identities of those behind LaFortier’s murder, for example.”

I almost hit myself in the head with the heel of my hand. I should have thought of that already. “I’ll let you know,” I said, and went back to the shore.

Demonreach sensed me at the same time as I perceived it, and the mutual sensation felt oddly like a hand wave of acknowledgment. I frowned thoughtfully and looked around the island, concentrating on the issue of LaFortier’s killer.

Nothing sprang to mind. I tried half a dozen other things. Who was going to win the next World Series? Could I get the Blue Beetle out of impound yet? How many books had Mister knocked off my shelves in my absence?

Zip.

So I thought about hornet’s nests, and instantly felt certain that there were thirty-two of them spread around the hundred and fifty or so acres of the island, and that they were especially thick near the grove of apple trees on the island’s northern side.

I went back to the boat and reported.

“Then it only exists upon the island itself,” Morgun rumbled, “like any other genius loci. This one must be bloody ancient to have attained a state of intellectus, even if it is limited to its own shorelines.”

“Could be handy,” I noted.

Morgan didn’t open his eyes but bared his teeth in a wolf’s smile. “Certainly. If your foes were considerate enough to come all the way out here to meet you.”

“Could be handy,” I repeated, firmly.

Morgan arched an eyebrow and gave me a sharp look.

“Come on, grasshopper,” I said to Molly. “Cast off the lines. You’re about to learn how to drive the boat.”

By the time we made it back to the marina, the sun had risen. I coached Molly through the steps of bringing the Water Beetle safely into dock, even though I wasn’t exactly Horatio Hornblower myself. We managed to do it without breaking or sinking anything, which is what counts. I tied off the boat and went onto the dock. Molly followed me anxiously to the rail.

“No problem here, grasshopper. Take her out for about ten minutes in a random direction that you choose. Then turn off the engine and wait. I’ll signal you when I’m ready for you to pick me up.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t stay together or something?” she asked anxiously.

I shook my head. “Tracking spells can’t home in too well over water,” I said. “And you’ll know if someone’s coming for you from a mile away. Literally. Keep Morgan out there, and you should be as safe as anywhere.”

She frowned. “What if he gets worse?”

“Use your noggin, kid. Do whatever you think is most likely to keep you both alive.” I started untying the line. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of hours. If I don’t show, the plan is the same as when I went up to the tower. Get yourself vanished.”

She swallowed. “And Morgan?”

“Make him as comfortable as you can and leave him.”

She stared at me for a minute. “Really?”

“If I get taken out, I don’t think you’ll be able to protect him,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. “Or catch the real bad guy. So run like hell and let him look out for himself.”

I saw her think that over. Then she smiled slightly.

“It would really humiliate him if he found himself under the protection of a girl. An apprentice. And a possible warlock, to boot.”

I nodded. “True.”

Molly pursed her lips thoughtfully. “That might be worth staying for.”

“Kid,” I said, “the smart thing for you to do if it all goes sour is to run.”

“Smart,” she said. “But not right.”

I studied her soberly. “You sure? Because there’s a world of hurt waiting to fall.”

She nodded, her face pale. “I’ll try.”

And she would. I could see that in her eyes. She knew better than most exactly how dangerous such a thing would be for her, and it clearly terrified her. But she would try.

“Then if I’m taken off the board, see Murphy,” I said. “She knows everything I do about the case. Listen to her. She’s smart, and you can trust her.”

“All right,” she said.

I tossed the mooring lines back onboard. “Get a move on.”

I started walking down the dock. Behind me, Molly called, “Harry? What signal are you going to use?”

“You’ll know it,” I called back.

I left the docks in search of the tool that could rip apart this tangled web of suspicion, murder, and lies.

I found it in the marina’s parking lot.

A pay phone.

Lara answered on the second ring. “Raith.”

“Dresden,” I said. “What have you got for me?”

“Oh, to have straight lines like that more often,” she said, her tone wry. “What makes you think I have anything for you?”

“ ’Cause I’ve got something to trade.”

“Men generally seem to think that way. Most of them tend to overestimate the value of their wares.”

“Pheromone Lass,” I said, “can we have the rest of this conversation above the waistline?”

She let out that rich, throaty laugh of hers, and my hormones sounded the charge. I ignored them. Stupid hormones.

“Very well,” she said. “It should interest you to know that the money deposited in Warden Morgan’s account came from a dummy corporation called Windfall.”

“Dummy organization?” I asked. “Who owns it?”

“I do,” she said calmly.

I blinked. “Since you’re sharing this information, I take it that it happened without your knowledge.”

“You are quite correct,” she said. “A Mr. Kevin Aramis is the corporation’s manager. He is the only one, other than myself, with the authority to move that much money around.”

I thought furiously. Whoever aced LaFortier hadn’t just intended the Council to implode. He or they had also gone to a lot of trouble to incite hostility with the White Court.

Hell’s bells.

My imagination treated me to a prophetic nightmare. Morgan fights against the injustice of his frame. Hostilities erupt, creating strife between various factions of wizards. The Council eventually runs down the money trail, discovers Lara on the other end, and the Council seizes upon the opportunity to unify the factions again, thanks to a common enemy. Hostilities with the vampires start fresh. The Red Court sees the poorly coordinated Council exposing itself in battle with the White Court, and pounces, breaking the back of the Council. And after that, it would all be over but the heroic last stands.

Hell’s bells, indeed.

“We’re being played against one another,” I said.

“That was my conclusion as well.”

A couple more pieces clicked into place. “Madeline,” I said. “She got to this Aramis guy and coerced him into betraying you.”

“Yes,” Lara hissed. Barely suppressed, wholly inhuman rage filled her level, controlled voice. “When I catch up to her, I’m going to tear out her entrails with my bare hands.”

Which took care of my hormone problem. I shivered.

I’d seen Lara in action. I could never decide if it had been one of the most beautiful terrifying things I’d ever seen, or if it was one of the most terrifying beautiful things I’d ever seen.

“You might try looking at the Hotel Sax, room twelve thirty-three,” I said. “If I’m right, you’re going to find Mr. Aramis’s body there. Madeline’s working for someone, a man. She didn’t say anything that would help identify him. You should also know that she has hired the services of a mercenary named Binder. Not exactly a rocket scientist, but smart enough to be dangerous.”

Lara was silent for a second. Then she said, “How did you learn this?”

“Shockingly, with magic.”

I heard her speaking to someone in the room with her. Then she got back on the phone and said, “If Aramis is dead, Madeline has tied up the loose end in her plan. It will be impossible to provide credible evidence that I did not in fact pay for LaFortier’s murder.”

“Yeah. That’s why she did it.”

I heard her make a displeased sound, but it was still ladylike. “What do we intend to do about this, Harry?”

“Do you have a nice dress?”

“Pardon?”

I found myself grinning maniacally. “I’m throwing a party.”

Thomas’s phone rang four times before the connection opened. There was a moment of silence. Then Thomas spoke, his voice raw and ragged. “Harry?”

My heart just about stopped beating to hear my brother’s voice. “Thomas. How’s it going?”

“Oh,” he rasped, “I’m just hanging around.”

I’ve seen Thomas in agony before. He sounded exactly like this.

The phone emitted random noises, and then the yowl-purring voice of the skinwalker came over the line. “He is here. He is alive. For now. Give me the doomed warrior.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a moment of silent consternation from the far end of the line.

“Bring him to me,” it said.

“Nah. That isn’t going to happen.”

“What?”

“You’re coming to me.”

“Do you wish me to end his life this instant?”

“Frankly, Shaggy, I don’t give a damn,” I said, forcing boredom into my voice. “It’d be nice to be able to return one of the vampires to his own, get myself a marker I can call in some day. But I don’t need it.” I paused. “You, on the other hand, need Thomas to be alive, if you expect me to trade Morgan for him. So this is how it’s going to go down. At dusk, you will be contacted on this phone. You will be told where our meeting will take place. When you arrive, you will show me the vampire, alive and well, and when he is returned to me, you will take Morgan without contest.”

“I am not some mortal scum you can command, mageling,” Shagnasty seethed.

“No. You’re immortal scum.”

“You blind, flesh-feeding worm,” Shagnasty snarled. “Who are you to speak to me so?”

“The worm who’s got what you need,” I said. “Dusk. Keep the phone handy.”

I hung up on him.

My heart hammered against my chest and cold sweat broke out over my upper body. I felt myself shaking with terror for Thomas, with weariness, with reaction to the conversation with Shagnasty. I leaned my aching head against the earpiece of the phone and hoped that I hadn’t just ended my brother’s life.

One more call.

The White Council of Wizards uses telephone communications like everyone else, albeit with a lot more service calls. I gave headquarters a ring, gave them the countersign to their security challenge, and got patched through to one of the administrative assistants, an earnest young woman not quite finished with her apprenticeship.

“I need to get a message to every member of the Senior Council,” I told her.

“Very well, sir,” she said. “What is the message?”

“Get this verbatim. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

I cleared my throat and spoke. “Be advised that I have been sheltering Warden Donald Morgan from discovery and capture for the past two days. An informant has come to me with details of how Warden Morgan was framed for the murder of Senior Council Member LaFortier. Warden Morgan is innocent, and what’s more, I can prove it.

“I am willing to meet with you tonight, on the uncharted island in Lake Michigan, east of Chicago at sundown. The informant will be present, and will produce testimony that will vindicate Warden Morgan and identify the true culprit of the crime.

“Let me be perfectly clear. I will not surrender Warden Morgan to the alleged justice of the Council. Come in peace and we will work things out. But should you come to me looking for a fight, be assured that I will oblige you.”

The assistant had started making choking sounds after the very first sentence.

“Then sign it ‘Harry Dresden,’ ” I said.

“Um. Yes, sir. Sh-shall I read that back to you?”

“Please.”

She did. I’d heard sounds of movement in the background around her, but as she read aloud, all of those sounds died to silence. When she finished, she asked, in a rather small, squeaky voice, “Do I have that down correctly, sir?”

Murmurs burst out in the background over the phone, excited and low.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Perfect.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

I figured I had an hour, maybe, before someone was going to show up from Edinburgh. It was time enough to grab a cab and head to the hospital.

Back in the ICU, Will was sacked out in the waiting room and Georgia was the one sitting with Andi. A middle-aged couple who looked as if they hadn’t slept much was in there with her. I knocked on the glass. Georgia said something to the couple and rose to come out into the hallway with me. She looked tired but alert, and had her long, rather frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“Harry,” she said, hugging me.

I returned the hug, cutting it off a little early. “How is she?”

Georgia studied me for a second before she answered. “In bad shape. The doctors don’t seem to be willing to say whether or not she’ll recover.”

“Better that way,” I said. “If one of them said she’d be fine and then she wasn’t . . .”

Georgia glanced at the couple sitting beside Andi’s bed, holding each other’s hands. “I know. It would be cruel to offer false hope, but . . .”

“But you’re still irrationally angry that the docs haven’t saved her yet. You know better, but you’re upset anyway.”

She nodded. “Yes. Irrationality is not something I’m comfortable with.”

“It isn’t irrational,” I said. “It’s human.”

She gave me a small smile. “Will and I talked. And you’re in a hurry.”

I nodded. “I need you both, and right now.”

“I’ll get him,” Georgia said.

We took Georgia’s SUV back down to the marina and arrived with ten minutes to spare on my estimated time window. I definitely wanted to be out over open water by the time members of the Council started showing up. The water wouldn’t be a perfect protection from incoming magic, but it would make it a lot harder for anyone to target me solidly, and it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “You guys wait here for a minute.”

Will frowned. “Why?”

“I need to talk to someone who can be a little shy around strangers.

One minute.” I hopped out of the SUV and walked down the rows of cars until I found two vans parked together. I slipped between them, put the fingers of one hand to my lips, and let out a sharp whistle.

There was a whirring sound and Toot-toot streaked down from overhead, came to a hover in front of me, drew his little sword, and saluted. “Yes, my liege!”

“Toot, I have two missions for you.”

“At once, my lord!”

“No, I want you to do them one at a time.”

Toot lowered his sword, his expression crestfallen. “Oh.”

“First, I want you to find the boat out on the lake that my apprentice is in. She’s not more than a mile or two from shore.” I took off my silver pentacle amulet, wrapped the chain around it, and handed it to Toot-toot. “Leave this where she will notice it right away.”

Toot accepted the amulet gravely, tucking it under one arm. “It will be done.”

“Thank you.”

Toot-toot’s chest swelled out, and he stood a little bit straighter.

“Second,” I told him. “I need to know how many of the little folk you could convince to join the Guard for one night.”

He frowned and looked dubious. “I don’t know, Lord Harry. The pizza ration is already stretched as far as it can go.”

I waved a hand. “The Guard’s pay won’t change. I’ll order extra to pay for the new guys’ service. Call them the Za-Lord’s Militia. We only need them sometimes. How many do you think would agree to that?”

Toot buzzed in an excited circle. “For you? Every sprite and pixie and dewdrop faerie within a hundred miles knows that you saved our kind from being imprisoned by the Lady of the Cold Eyes! There’s not a one who didn’t have comrade or kin languishing in durance vile!”

I blinked at him. “Oh,” I said. “Well. Tell them that there may be great danger. Tell them that if they wish to join the Militia, they must obey orders while they serve. And I will pay them one large pizza for every fourscore volunteers.”

“That’s less than you pay the Guard, Harry,” Toot said smugly.

“Well, they’re amateurs, not full-time veterans like you and your men, are they?”

“Yes, my lord!”

I looked at him seriously. “If you can recruit a Militia and if they perform as asked, there’s a promotion in it for you, Toot.”

His eyes widened. “Does it come with cheese in the crust and extra toppings?”

“It isn’t a pizza.” I said. “It’s a promotion. Get this work done, and from that time forward, you will be . . .” I paused dramatically. “Major-General Toot-toot Minimus commanding the Za-Lord’s Elite.”

Toot’s body practically convulsed in a spasm of excitement. Had a giant yellow exclamation point suddenly appeared in the air over his head, I would not have been surprised. “A Major-General?”

I couldn’t resist. “Yes, yes,” I said solemnly. “A Major-General.”

He let out a whoop of glee and zipped up and down the little space between vans. “What do you wish us to do when I have them, my lord!”

“I want you to play,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. . . .”

I rejoined Will and Georgia, and ten minutes later, the Water Beetle came chugging back toward the marina. The grasshopper got my brother’s boat into dock with only a mildly violent impact. I secured lines quickly, and Will and Georgia jumped on. Almost before Will’s feet were on the deck, I was already untying the lines and following them onto the boat. Molly, for her part, already had the engine in reverse.

“Now what?” she called down to me from the wheel atop the cabin.

“Use the compass on the dashboard. One to two degrees south of due east, and call me when you spot the island.”

“Aye aye!”

Will squinted at Molly and then at me. “ ‘Aye aye’?”

I shook my head sadly. “Landlubbers. I’m going to go shiver timbers or something. I haven’t slept in a while.”

“Go ahead, Harry,” Georgia said. “We’ll wake you if anything happens.”

I nodded, shambled down to the second bunk, and passed out immediately.

Someone shook me two seconds later and I said, “Go away.”

“Sorry, Harry,” Will said. “We’re here.”

I said several uncouth and thoughtless things, then manned up and opened my eyes, always the hardest part of waking up. I sat up, and Will retreated from the cramped cabin with a glance at Morgan’s unconscious form. I sat there with my mouth feeling like it had been coated in Turtle Wax. It took me a second to identify a new sound.

Rain.

Raindrops pattered onto the deck of the boat and the roof of the cabin.

I shambled out onto the deck, unconcerned about the rain ruining my leather duster. One handy side effect of going through the painfully precise ritual of enchanting it to withstand physical force as if it had been plate steel was that the thing was rendered waterproof and stainproof as well—yet it still breathed. Let’s see Berman’s or Wilson’s do that.

Sufficiently advanced technology, my ass.

I climbed up to the bridge, keeping an eye on the sky as I did. Lowering clouds of dark grey had covered the sky, and the rain looked to be a long, steady soaker—a rarity in a Chicago summer, which usually went for rough-and-tumble thunderstorms. The heat hadn’t let up much, and as a result the air was thick and heavy enough to swim through.

I took the wheel from Molly, oriented myself by use of the compass and the island, now only a few minutes away, and yawned loudly. “Well. This makes things less pleasant.”

“The rain?” Molly asked. She passed me my pentacle.

I slipped it back over my head and nodded. “I’d planned on lying off the island until closer to dark.”

“Why?”

“Mostly because I just challenged the Senior Council to a brawl there at sundown,” I said.

Molly choked on her gum.

I ignored her. “I didn’t want to make it easy for them to slip up on me. Oh, and I’ve arranged to trade Thomas for Morgan with Shagnasty. He won’t get word of where to go until later, though. I think otherwise he’d cheat and show up early. He looks like a shifty character.”

The pun went past Molly, or maybe she was just that good at ignoring it. “You’re trading Morgan for Thomas?”

“Nah. I just want to get Shagnasty out here with Thomas in one piece so that the White Court can take him down.”

Molly stared at me. “The White Court, too?”

I nodded happily. “They’ve got a stake in this as well.”

“Um,” she said. “Why do you think the Senior Council will take you up on your challenge?”

“Because I told them I was going to be producing an informant who would give testimony about who really killed LaFortier.”

“Do you have someone like that?” Molly asked.

I beamed at her. “No.”

She stared at me for a moment, clearly thinking. Then she said, “But the killer doesn’t know that.”

My smile widened. “Why, no, Miss Carpenter. He doesn’t. I made sure word got around headquarters of my challenge to the Senior Council. He’s got no choice but to show up here if there’s any chance at all that I might actually have found an informant ready to blow his identity—which, by the way, would also provide substantial proof of the existence of the Black Council.”

Her golden brows knitted. “What if there’s no chance of such an informant existing?”

I snorted. “Kid, groups like these guys, the ones who maim and kill and scheme and betray—they do what they do because they love power. And when you get people who love power together, they’re all holding out a gift in one hand while hiding a dagger behind their back in the other. They regard an exposed back as a justifiable provocation to stick the knife in. The chances that this group has no one in it who might believably have second thoughts and try to back out by bargaining with the Council for a personal profit are less than zero.”

Molly shook her head. “So . . . he or she will call in the Black Council to help?”

I shook my head. “I think this is happening because the killer slipped up and exposed himself to LaFortier. He had to take LaFortier out, but with all the security at Edinburgh, there was every chance something could go wrong and it did. Everything else he’s done has smacked of desperation. I think that if the Black Council finds out that their mole has screwed up this thoroughly, they’d kill him themselves to keep the trail from leading back to them.” I stared at the glowering mass of Demonreach. “His only chance is to tie off any loose ends that might lead back to him. He’ll be here tonight, Molly. And he’s got to win. He has nothing to lose.”

“But you’re putting everyone together in a confined space, Harry,” Molly said. “This is going to be a huge mess.”

“Pressure cooker, padawan,” I said, nodding. “The perp is already desperate enough to be acting hastily and making mistakes. Especially the mistake of taking things a step too far and trying to incriminate the White Court in LaFortier’s death as well.”

Molly stared out at the water thoughtfully. “So you put him together in a confined space with two major groups of power who will want to kill him. His worst nightmare has got to be the wizards and the White Court being drawn into a closer alliance because of what he’s done. And with as much power as they have, there’s no way he’s going to be able to fight them all.”

I smiled at her. “Yeah. It sucks to feel helpless,” I said. “Especially for a wizard, because we usually aren’t. Or at least, we’re usually able to convince ourselves that we aren’t.”

“You think he’ll crack,” she said.

“I think he’ll be there. I think that with enough pressure, something is going to pop loose, somewhere. I think he’ll try something stupid. Maybe a preemptive spell, something to take everyone down before they know a fight is on.”

“A sneak attack,” Molly said. “Which won’t be a sneak attack if you know where he is and what he’s doing. Intellectus!”

I tapped my temple with a finger. “Capital thinking, grasshopper.”

Thunder rumbled far away.

I sighed. “Thomas can sail in bad weather, but I don’t know how to do it intelligently. Something like this could turn ugly, fast. We’re going to have to head into the dock and take our chances.”

I navigated. Sheesh, listen to me, “navigated.” The boat had a steering wheel and a lever to make it go faster. It was about as complicated to make move as a bumper car. Granted, simple isn’t the same thing as easy, but even so. The actual process of pointing the boat and making it go is not complicated enough to deserve to be called navigation.

I drove the Water Beetle around to the safe passage through the reef, and pulled her into the dock, much more smoothly this time. Will was waiting by the rail and ready. He hopped onto the dock and Georgia threw him the mooring lines.

“Don’t step onto the land until I get a chance to get there, first!” I called to them. “I want to, ah, sort of introduce you.”

Billy gave me an oblique look. “Um. Okay, Harry.”

I climbed down from the bridge and was just about to hop to the dock when a tall, slender figure in a black robe, black cape, and black hood appeared from behind a veil, standing at the very end of the dock. He lifted his old rune-carved staff, muttered a word, and then brought it smashing down onto the wooden planks.

A disk of sparkling blue light washed out from the point of impact. I had time, barely, to draw in my will, cross my arms at the wrists, holding them against my chest, and slam will into both my shield bracelet and into strengthening my mental defenses.

Smears of deep blue, purple, and dark green appeared like puffs of smoke where the expanding ring struck Molly, Will, and Georgia, and the three of them simply collapsed, dropping into sprawling heaps on the dock and the deck of the boat. My vision darkened and for an instant I felt unbearably tired—but in a panic I forced more energy into my defenses, and the instant passed.

The robed figure stood staring at me for a few seconds. Then it spoke in a deep voice. “Put the staff down, Dresden.” Swirling narcotic colors gathered around his staff, and he pointed it at me like a gun. “It is over.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

The rain came down steadily. I risked a glance at the others. They were all down, but breathing. Molly’s head, shoulders, and arms hung off the side of the boat. Wet, her sapphire-dyed hair looked like a much darker hue. Each rock of the boat made her hands swing. She was in danger of falling into the water.

I turned back to the cloaked figure and peered at him. Big billowy cloaks and robes are nicely dramatic, especially if you’re facing into the wind—but under a calm, soaking rain they just look waterlogged. The outfit clung to the figure, looking rather miserable.

The rain also made the cloth look darker than it was. Looking closer, I could see faint hints of color in the cloth, which wasn’t actually black. It was a purple so deep that it was close.

“Wizard Rashid?” I asked.

The Gatekeeper’s staff never wavered as he faced me. He lifted a hand and drew back his hood. His face was long and sharp-featured and weathered like old leather. He wore a short beard that was shot through with silver, and his silver hair was short, stiff brush. One of his eyes was dark. The other had a pair of horrible old silver scars running through it, from his hairline down to his jaw. The injury had to have ruined his natural eye. It had been replaced with something that looked like a stainless-steel ball bearing. “Indeed,” he said calmly.

“Should have seen it sooner. There aren’t many wizards taller than me.”

“Lay aside your staff, Wizard Dresden. Before anyone else is hurt.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“And I cannot permit you to openly challenge the White Council to battle.”

“No?” I asked, thrusting out my jaw. “Why not?”

His deep, resonant voice sounded troubled. “It is not yet your hour.”

I felt my eyebrows go up. “Not yet . . . ?”

He shook his head. “Places in time. This is not the time, or the place. What you are about to do will cost lives—among them your own. I wish you no harm, young wizard. But if you will not surrender, so be it.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “And if I don’t do this, an innocent man is going to die. I don’t want to fight you. But I’m not going to stand by and let the Black Council kill Morgan and dance off behind the curtains so that they can do it again in the future.”

He tilted his head slightly. “Black Council?”

“Whatever you want to call them,” I said. “The people the traitor is working for. The ones who keep trying to stir up trouble between the powers. Who keep changing things.”

The Gatekeeper’s expression was unreadable. “What things?”

“The weirdness we’ve been seeing. Mysterious figures handing out wolf belts to FBI agents. Red Court vampires showing up to fights with Outsiders on the roster. Faerie Queens getting idealistic and trying to overthrow the natural order of the Faerie Courts. The Unseelie standing by unresponsive when they are offered an enormous insult by the vampires trespassing on their territory. The attack on Arctis Tor. I can think of half a dozen other things to go with those, and those are just the things I’ve personally gotten involved with.” I made a broad gesture with one hand, back toward Chicago. “The world is getting weirder and scarier, and we’ve been so busy beating on one another that we can’t even see it. Someone’s behind it.”

He watched me silently for a long moment. Then he said, “Yes.”

I frowned at him, and then my lips parted as I realized what was going on. “And you think I’m with them.”

He paused before speaking—but then, he damn near always did. “Perhaps there is reason. Add to your list of upset balances such things as open warfare erupting between the Red Court and the White Council. A Seelie crown being passed from one young Queen to the next by bloody revolt, and not the will of Titania. Wardens consorting with White Court vampires on a regular basis. College students being taught magic sufficient to allow them to become werewolves. The Little Folk, Wyld fae, banding together and organizing. The most powerful artifacts of the Church vanishing from the world—and, as some signs indicate, being kept by a wizard who does not so much as pay lip service to the faith, much less believe.”

I scowled. “Yeah, well. When you put it like that.”

He smiled faintly.

I held up my hand, palm out. “I swear to you, by my magic, that I am not involved with those lunatics, except for trying to put out all these fires they keep starting. And if questionable things surround me, it’s because that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re as outclassed as I usually am. You have to find solutions where you can, not where convenient.”

The Gatekeeper pursed his lips thoughtfully, considering me.

“Look, can we agree to a short truce, to talk this out?” I said. “And so that I can keep my apprentice from drowning?”

His gaze moved past me to Molly. He frowned and lowered his staff at once. “Five minutes,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. I turned around and got Molly hauled back onto the boat. She never stirred. Once she was safely snoozing on deck, I went down the dock to stand in front of the Gatekeeper. He watched me quietly, holding his staff in both hands, leaning on it gently. “So,” I said. “Where’s the rest of the Senior Council?”

“On the way, I should think,” he said. “They’ll need to secure transportation to the island in Chicago and then find their way here.”

“But not you. You came through the Nevernever?”

He nodded, his eyes watching me carefully. “I know a Way. I’ve been here before.”

“Yeah?” I shook my head. “I thought about trying to find a Way out here, but I didn’t want to chance it. This isn’t exactly Mayberry. I doubt it hooks up to anything pleasant in the Nevernever.”

The Gatekeeper muttered something to himself in a language I didn’t understand and shook his head. “I cannot decide,” he said, “whether you are the most magnificent liar I have ever encountered in my life—or if you truly are as ignorant as you appear.”

I looked at him for a minute. Then I hooked my thumb up at my ridiculous head bandage. “Dude.”

He burst out into a laugh that was as rich and deep as his speaking voice, but . . . more, somehow. I’m not sure how to explain it. The sound of that laugh was filled with a warmth and a purity that almost made the air quiver around it, as if it had welled up from some untapped source of concentrated, unrestrained joy.

I think maybe it had been a while since Rashid had laughed.

“You,” he said, barely able to speak through it. “Up in that tree. Covered with mud.”

I found myself grinning at him. “Yeah. I remember.”

He shook his head and actually wiped tears away from his good eye. It took him another moment or two to compose himself, but when he spoke, his living eye sparkled, an echo of his laughter. “You’ve endured more than most young people,” he said. “And tasted more triumph than most, as well. It is a very encouraging sign that you can still laugh at yourself.”

“Well, gosh,” I said. “I’m just so ignorant, I don’t know what else to do.”

He stared at me intently. “You don’t know what this place is.”

“It’s out of the way of innocent bystanders,” I said. “And I know it better than most of the people who are on the way.”

He nodded, frowning. “I suppose that is logical.”

“So?”

“Hmm?”

I sighed. Wizards. “So? What is this place?”

He considered his words for a moment. “What do you think it is, beyond the obvious physical and tactical terrain?”

“Well,” I said. “I know there’s a ley line that comes through here. Very dark and dangerous energy. I know that there’s a genius loci present and that it is real strong and isn’t very friendly. I know that they tried to start up a small town here, linked with the shipping interests in the Great Lakes, but it went sour. Demonreach drove them away. Or insane, apparently.”

“Demonreach?” he asked.

“Couldn’t find a name on the books,” I said. “So I made up my own.”

“Demonreach,” the Gatekeeper mused. “It’s . . . certainly fitting.”

“So?”

He gave me a tight smile. “It wouldn’t help you for me to say anything more—except for this: one of your facts is incorrect. The ley line you speak of does not go through the island,” he said. “This is where it wells up. The island is its source.”

“Ah,” I said. “Wells up from what?”

“In my opinion, that is a very useful question.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And you aren’t going to give me anything else.”

He shrugged. “We do have other matters to discuss.”

I glanced back at my unconscious friends. “Yeah. We do.”

“I am willing to accept that your intentions are noble,” he said. “But your actions could set into motion a catastrophic chain of events.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “What I do know is that you don’t kill a man for a crime he didn’t commit. And when someone else tries to do it, you stop them.”

“And you think that this will stop them?” the Gatekeeper asked.

“I think it’s my best shot.”

“You won’t succeed,” he said. “If you press ahead, it will end in violence. People will die, you amongst them.”

“You don’t even know what I have in mind,” I said.

“You’re laying a trap for the traitor,” he said. “You’re trying to force him to act and reveal himself.”

A lesser man might have felt less clever than he had a moment before. “Oh.”

“And if I can work it out,” the Gatekeeper said, “then so can the traitor.”

“Well, duh,” I said. “But he’ll show up anyway. He can’t afford to do anything else.”

“And he’ll come ready,” the Gatekeeper said. “He’ll choose his moment.”

“Let him. I’ve got other assets.”

Then he did something strange. He exhaled slowly, his living eye closing. The gleaming steel eye tracked back and forth, as if looking at something, though I could only tell it was moving because of the twitches of his other eyelid. A moment later, the Gatekeeper opened his eye and said, “The chances that you’ll survive it are minimal.”

“Yeah?” I asked him. I stepped around him and hopped off the dock and onto the island, immediately feeling the connection with Demonreach as I turned to face him. “How about now?”

He frowned at me, and then repeated the little ritual.

Then he made a choking sound. “Blood of the Prophet,” he swore, opening his eyes to stare at me. “You . . . you’ve claimed this place as a sanctum?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How?”

“I punched it in the nose. Now we’re friends,” I said.

The Gatekeeper shook his head slowly. “Harry,” he said, his voice weary. “Harry, you don’t know what you’ve done.”

“I’ve given myself a fighting chance.”

“Yes. Today,” he replied. “But there is always a price for knowledge. Always.”

His left eyelid twitched as he spoke, making the scars that framed the steel orb quiver.

“But it will be me paying the price,” I said. “Not everyone else.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. We were both silent for several minutes, standing in the rain.

“Been longer than five minutes,” I said. “How do you want it to be?”

The Gatekeeper shook his head. “May I offer you two pieces of advice?”

I nodded.

“First,” he said, “do not tap into the power of this place’s well. You are years away from being able to handle such a thing without being altered by it.”

“I hadn’t planned on touching it,” I said.

“Second,” he said, “you must understand that regardless of the outcome of this confrontation, someone will die. Preferably, it would be the traitor—but if he is killed rather than captured, no one will be willing to accept your explanation of events, no matter how accurate it may be. Morgan will be executed. Odds are excellent that you will be as well.”

“I’m sure as hell not doing this for me.”

He nodded.

“Don’t suppose you’d be willing to lend a hand?”

“I cannot set foot on the island,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because this place holds a grudge,” he said.

I suddenly thought of the drag-thump limp of the island’s manifest spirit.

Damn.

He turned to the dock behind him and flicked a hand at the air. A neat, perfectly circular portal to the Nevernever appeared without a whisper or flicker of wasted power. The Gatekeeper gave me a nod.

“Your friends will awaken in a moment. I will do what I can to help you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He shook his head. “Do not. It may be that true kindness would have been to kill you today.”

Then he stepped through the portal and was gone. It vanished an instant later. I stood there in the rain and watched the others begin to stir. Then I sighed and walked back to them, to help them up and explain what was going on.

We had to get moving. The day wasn’t getting any younger, and there were a lot of things to do before nightfall.

Chapter Forty

We worked for three hours before I started dropping things, tripping on nice flat ground, and bumping into other people because I’d forgotten to keep an eye out for them.

“That’s it, Harry,” Georgia said firmly. “Your sleeping bag is in the cottage. Get some more sleep.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

“Harry, if anything happens to you, we aren’t going to have anyone we know looking out for us. You need to be able to focus. Go rest.”

It sounded awfully good, but my mouth opened on its own. “We’ve still got to lay out the—”

Will had come up behind me in complete silence. He pulled my arm behind my back in a capable, strong grip, and twisted carefully. It didn’t hurt, until he leaned gently into me and I had to move forward to keep the pressure off. “You heard the lady,” he said. “We can finish the rest of it on our own. We’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

I snorted, twisted at the waist, bumping Will off balance with my hip, and broke the lock. Will could have broken my arm and kept hold of me, but instead he let go before it could happen. “All right, all right,” I said. “Going.”

I shambled into the cottage and collapsed onto a sleeping bag that lay on top of a foam camp pad.

Four hours later, when Will shook me awake, I was lying in the exact same position. Late-afternoon light slanted into the half-ruined cottage from the west. Morgan lay on his own pallet, made by stripping the foam mattress from the bunk on the Water Beetle. His eyes were closed, his breathing steady. Will must have carried him up from the boat.

“Okay,” I slurred. “I’m up. I’m up.”

“Georgia has been patrolling the shoreline,” he said. “She says there’s a boat approaching.”

My heart began beating a little faster, and my stomach fluttered. I swallowed, closed my eyes for a moment, and imagined a tranquil tropical beach in an effort to calm my thoughts. But the beach kept getting overrun by shapeshifting zombie vampires with mouths on the palms of their hands.

“Well, that’s useless,” I said in sleepy disgust. I got to my feet and gathered my things. “Where’s it coming from?”

“West.”

“He’ll have to sail a third of the way around the island then, to get through the reefs,” I yawned. “Where’s Georgia?”

Claws scraped on hard-packed earth, and a large tawny wolf appeared in the doorway. She sat down and looked at me, her ears perked forward.

“Good work,” I told her. “Molly?”

“Here, Harry,” she called, as she hurried into the cottage. She held a crystal of white quartz about two inches thick and a foot long in her hands.

“Get to work, grasshopper. Don’t hesitate to use the crystal if things get dicey. And good luck to you.”

She nodded seriously and went to Morgan’s side. She reached out and took his limp hand, frowned in mild concentration, and they both vanished behind one of her wonder veils. “God be with you, Harry,” she said, her voice coming out of nowhere.

“Will,” I said. “Get your game face on.” I turned to Will to find the young man gone and a burly dark-furred wolf sitting in his place next to a pile of loose clothes. “Oh,” I said. “Good.”

I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable. I straightened my back, nodded once, and began to stride toward the cottage door. “Let’s go, people. Party time.”

It was getting darker over the enormous expanse of the lake. Twilight is a much different experience when you’re far away from the lights of a city or town. Modern civilization bathes us in light throughout the hours of darkness—lighted billboards, streetlights, headlights, airplane lights, neon decorations, the interior lights of homes and businesses, floodlights that strobe across the sky. They’re so much a part of our life that the darkness of night is barely a factor in our daily thinking anymore. We mock one another’s lack of courage with accusations of being afraid of the dark, all the while industriously making our own lights brighter, more energy efficient, cheaper, and longer-lasting.

There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to makes us cry out in fear.

Get a good ways out from civilization—say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake—and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts.

And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.

I walked down the ancient hillsides of Demonreach and felt acutely aware of that fact; night wasn’t falling, so much as sharpening its claws.

I walked out to the end of the floating dock alone. Billy and Georgia remained behind, in the woods. You would not believe how sneaky a wolf is capable of being until you’ve seen one in action. Wolves acting with human-level intelligence—and exceptional human intelligence at that—are all but invisible when they choose to be.

A boat was rounding the buoy that marked the opening in the reef. It was a white rental boat, like any number available to tourists in the area, a craft about twenty feet long and rigged for waterskiing. The wind had risen, coming in from the southwest, and the lake was getting choppier. The rental boat was wallowing a little, and bouncing irregularly against the waves, throwing up small shocks of spray.

I watched it come in over the last few hundred yards, until I could see who was on board. The boat was fairly new. Its engine made an odd, clattering noise, which served to identify the occupants. The White Council, it seemed, had arrived on time.

Ebenezar McCoy was at the wheel of the boat, his bald head shiny in the rain. Listens-to-Wind sat in the passenger seat, wearing a rain poncho, one hand gripping the side of the boat, the other holding on to the dashboard in front him. His weather-seamed face was grim.

In the center of the rear bench was a tiny figure in white silk embroidered with red flowers. Ancient Mai was Chinese, and looked as delicate and frail as an eggshell teacup. Her hair was pure white and long, held up with a number of jade combs. Though she was now old, even by the standards of the White Council, she was still possessed of a sizable portion of what would have been a haunting, ethereal beauty in her youth. Her expression was serene, her dark eyes piercing and merciless.

She frightened me.

Veteran Wardens sat on either side of Ancient Mai, dour in their grey cloaks, and three more were sitting or crouching elsewhere in the boat—all of them from the hard-bitten squad that had been on standby back in Edinburgh. They were all armed to the teeth, and their expressions meant business. Apparently Mai scared them at least as much as she did me: one of them was holding an umbrella for her.

I waited at the end of the dock, inviting Ebenezar by gesture to pull up on the side opposite the Water Beetle. He brought the boat in with considerably more skill than I had shown, killed the ailing engine while it was still moving, and got up to toss me a line. I caught it and secured the boat to the dock without taking my eyes off of anyone in the boat. No one spoke. Once the engine had fallen silent, the only sound was rain and wind.

“Evening,” I ventured, nodding to Ebenezar.

He was staring hard at me, frowning. I saw his eyes scan the shoreline and come back to me. “Hoss,” he said. He rose and stepped out onto the dock. One of the Wardens tossed him another line, and he secured the back end of the craft. Then he got off, walked up to me, and offered me his hand. I shook it.

“Rashid?” he whispered so low I could barely hear it over the rain.

“With us,” I replied as quietly, trying not to move my lips.

His head tipped me a tiny nod, and then he turned to beckon the others. Wardens and Senior Council members began clambering out of the boat. I walked down the dock beside Ebenezar, watching the Wardens over my shoulder. They were the sort of men and women who had no illusions about violence, magical or otherwise. If they decided that the best way to deal with me would be to shoot me in the back, they wouldn’t hesitate.

I stepped off the dock and onto the island again, and immediately felt the presence of Demonreach. At the moment, the only persons on the island were those I had brought with me.

Ebenezar followed me, and I felt it the instant he stepped onto the shore. It wasn’t as if someone had whispered in my ear. I simply knew, felt it, the way you know it when an ant is crawling across your arm. He stopped a step later, and I kept going until I was about ten feet away. I turned to face them as their group came down the dock to stand on the shore. I kept close track of them through the link with the island, making sure that there weren’t any Wardens hiding behind veils so that they could sneak up behind me and start delivering rabbit punches.

Ebenezar, Ancient Mai, and Listens-to-Wind, his expression bearing a faintly greenish cast, stood side by side, facing me. The Wardens fanned out behind them, wary eyes watching every possible route of approach, including from the lake.

“Well, Wizard Dresden,” Ebenezar said. He leaned on his staff and regarded me blandly. “We got your note.”

“I figured,” I said. “Did you get as far as the part where I said if you wanted a fight, I would oblige you?”

The Wardens didn’t actually bare their teeth and start snarling, but it was close.

“Aye, aye,” Ebenezar said. “I thought it might be more profitable if we could talk about things first.”

“Indeed,” said Ancient Mai. Her voice was too smooth and too confident to match the tiny fragile person speaking in it. “We can always kill you afterward.”

I didn’t actually break out into rivulets of sweat, but it was close.

“Obviously, the disrespect you have offered the White Council merits some form of response,” she continued. “Do not flatter yourself by thinking that we have come to you because we lack other options.”

Ebenezar gave Mai a mild look. “At the same time,” he said, “your reputation as an investigator is unrivaled within the Council. That, added to the nature of your relationship with the alleged murderer, is reason enough to hear what you have to say.”

“Wizard Dresden,” Listens-to-Wind said. “You said you had proof of Morgan’s innocence. You said you had a witness.”

“And more,” I replied.

“And where are they?”

“We need to wait a moment,” I said, “until everyone arrives.”

Ancient Mai’s eyes narrowed. The Wardens got even more alert, and spread out a bit, hands on their weaponry.

“What others, Hoss?” Ebenezar asked.

“Everyone directly involved in this plot,” I said. “Warden Morgan wasn’t the only one being set up as a patsy. When you manage to track down the source of the money found in Morgan’s account, you’ll find that it comes from a corporation owned by the White Court.”

Listens-to-Wind frowned. “How do you know this?”

“I investigated,” I said. “After further investigation, I concluded that the money had probably been moved without the knowledge of the White Court’s leaders. The guilty party not only wished LaFortier dead, and Warden Morgan to take the blame for it, he also wanted to manipulate the Council into renewing hostilities with the Vampire Courts.”

The Wardens traded looks with one another when I said that. It was getting darker, and I had trouble making out their expressions. Listens-to-Wind’s face became thoughtful, though. “And there is proof of this?” he asked.

“I believe there will be,” I replied. “But it might take time to find—longer than the duration of Morgan’s unjust trial and undeserved execution, anyway.”

Ancient Mai suddenly smiled, an expression with all the joy and life of frozen porcelain. “In other words,” she said, “whatever measures being taken to veil Morgan from our tracking spells were near their limits, forcing you to seek this meeting.”

I had to work hard to keep from twitching. The only thing worse than scary is smart and scary.

Mai turned to Ebenezar. “It seems obvious that Dresden was involved in this plot on some level, and if Dresden is here, Morgan is probably nearby. Arrest Dresden and resume attempting to track Morgan immediately. We can attend to the business in a proper and orderly fashion back at Edinburgh.”

Ebenezar eyed Mai and then looked at Listens-to-Wind.

The old medicine man stared at me for a time, and then reached up an ink-stained finger to pull back a few loose hairs that had been plastered to his face by the rain. He leaned on his staff and looked around the island for a long minute, his expression distant. “No mention was made of other parties being present,” he said, finally. “This is Council business, and no one else’s. Adding representatives of the White Court to this . . . meeting could prove as disastrous as the war you claim to be trying to avoid, Wizard Dresden.”

Ebenezar’s jaw tensed up. “That’s not the same thing as saying we should arrest him.”

Listens-to-Wind faced Ebenezar stolidly. “If what he says is so, the truth will come out. We can postpone a trial so that if this evidence exists, it can be found.”

“You know as well as I do,” Ebenezar said, “that the outcome of the trial is not going to be changed by the truth.”

Listen-to-Wind’s voice became hard and rough, holding a deep and burning anger that I had never heard from the old man before. “There is the world that should be,” he growled, “and the world that is. We live in one.”

“And must create the other,” Ebenezar retorted, “if it is ever to be.”

Listens-to-Wind looked down and shook his head. He looked very old and very tired. “There are no good paths to choose, old friend,” he said quietly. “All we can do is choose if many die, or a few.” He looked up at me, his face hard. “I am sorry, Hoss Dresden. But I must agree. Arrest him.”

Chapter Forty-one

Demonreach allowed me to sense Billy and Georgia slinking closer, and to feel an uncertain sense of excitement that could have been tension or fear or anger coming from them. It had a much more vague idea of the emotions of the Wardens, but I could tell that they weren’t eager to start a fight with me.

Which made me want to laugh. I mean, seriously. One on one, sure, maybe I could have been a handful for any of them. But there were three members of the Senior Council there, any one of which could have tied me in knots. And they had me outnumbered five to one, beyond that.

And then it hit me. They were dealing with something far more dangerous than me, Harry Dresden, whose battered old Volkswagen was currently in the city impound. They were dealing with the potential demonic dark lord nightmare warlock they’d been busy fearing since I turned sixteen. They were dealing with the wizard who had faced the Heirs of Kemmler riding a zombie dinosaur, and emerged victorious from a fight that had flattened Morgan and Captain Luccio before they had even reached it. They were dealing with the man who had dropped a challenge to the entire Senior Council, and who had then actually showed, apparently willing to fight—on the shores of an entirely too creepy island in the middle of a freshwater sea.

Granted, I technically was that person, but they had no idea how close several of those calls had been. They didn’t know the small details, the quirks of fate, or the assists from allies I probably didn’t deserve that allowed me to shamble out of those clouds of insanity in more or less one piece.

They just knew that I was the one still standing—and that fact inspired a healthy and rational fear. More than that, they were afraid of what they didn’t know I could do. And none of them knew that I would so much rather be back in my apartment, reading a good book and drinking a cold beer.

I didn’t move when Listens-to-Wind made his statement. I just stood there, as if I wasn’t much impressed. The Council had evidently sent the three Senior members as a kind of quorum, and I would think that the word of two of them would be enough to decide a course of action—but the oldest of the Wardens there, a large man with a big black beard whose name was Beorg, or Yorg, or Bjorn—definitely Scandinavian—turned to look at Ebenezar.

The wizard of the Ozarks stood looking at me, a small smile on his face. I recognized the smile. When I’d first gone to live with him, after I’d killed my foster father, we would go into town every week for supplies. A gang of teenage boys, bored, reacted to the presence of a new boy with typical adolescent thoughtlessness. One of them had tried to get me to fight him.

At the time, I remember being annoyed at the distraction from my day. Because I had just wiped out a major demon and a former Warden of the White Council in a pair of fair fights, local teenage bullies were really kind of beneath my notice. They were kids playing a game, and I had grown older very quickly. I could have killed them, all of them, without too much trouble, but the very idea was laughable. It would have been like using a flamethrower to clean cobwebs out of the house.

I’d stood there, just looking at them, while they tried to tease me into fighting. I hadn’t moved, or said anything, or done anything. I just stood there in a wall of silence and stillness, until that silence had become heavier and heavier. They had eventually been pushed back by it, and I had simply walked past them.

And I was doing the same thing again, letting the silence fuel their uncertainty.

I met Ebenezar’s gaze, and we both smiled faintly in acknowledgment of the memory.

“Well, gentlemen,” Ebenezar said, turning to face the Wardens. “You’ve heard the will of the Council, such as it is. But you should be advised that since you’d be doing something foolish at the behest of someone acting foolish, I won’t be assisting you.”

Mai’s head snapped around to focus on Ebenezar. “McCoy!”

Ebenezar bowed his head to her. “Wizard Mai, I would advise you not to seek a quarrel with the young man. He’s a fair hand in a fight.”

The old woman lifted her chin haughtily. “He was not truly your apprentice. You kept watch over him for a mere two years.”

“And came to know him,” Ebenezar said. He turned to eye Listens-to-Wind. “What did that raccoon pup you had think of him? You go on about what good judges of character young animals can be. Is he the sort of man who would involve himself in that kind of plot? You know the answer.”

Listens-to-Wind shook his head tiredly. “It isn’t about that and you know it.”

“If you do not assist us in subduing him,” Mai said, her voice crisp and thrumming with tension, “it could be considered treason, Wizard McCoy.”

“I am assisting you,” Ebenezar said. “By advising you to avoid conflict.” He paused and said, “You might try asking him.”

“Excuse me?” Mai said.

“Asking him,” Ebenezar said. He hooked a thumb in one strap of his overalls. “Ask him politely to come with you back to Edinburgh. Maybe he’d cooperate.”

“Don’t bother, sir,” I said. “I won’t.”

“Ancient Mai,” rumbled Warden Bjork. “If you would please return to the boat, we will see to this.”

I remained just as I’d been standing, and hoped that the others would be arriving soon. I didn’t want to start up the dance music until everyone had taken the floor, but if the Wardens pressed me, I might need to.

“Ancient Mai,” Warden Yorgi repeated. “Do you wish us to—”

He didn’t get to finish the phrase before there was a deafening roar and a helicopter swept over the hillside behind us, flying about an inch and a half above the treetops. It soared past us and then banked around in a turn over the lake, only to return and hover thirty feet above the shoreline, maybe a hundred yards away.

In the movies, special forces guys come zipping down on lines. I’ve even been the guy on a line once, sort of, though I was more sack of meal than Navy SEAL. But when the people jumping off the helicopter are vampires, you don’t bother with a lot of lines.

Or any lines. At all.

Three figures in white leapt from the hovering chopper, neatly flipped once on the way down, and landed together in a dancer’s crouch. Then they all rose, the movement as beautiful, smooth, and coordinated as anything you’d see at the Cirque du Soleil.

Lara and her two sisters walked toward us, and they were good at it. Lara was wearing a white sundress that showed off her curves, with two black leather belts that crossed on her hips. A handgun in a holster hung from one of the belts. The other belt supported a sword, a genuine rapier whose worn handle looked as if it had seen actual use. Her long black hair was pulled up in a net, and the top of her head was covered in a white cloth, a very Gypsy sort of look. She wore a choker made of pure platinum, the metal seeming to hold its own glow, even in the failing light, and a single large bloodred ruby hung from it.

As she walked, it was impossible not to notice the gorgeously feminine curves of her body, the casual sway of her hips from side to side, each movement emphasizing the fact that she carried deadly weapons. And, since it was raining on her white dress, it was impossible not to notice a whole lot of other things about Lara—such as the fact that other than the weapons and her shoes, it was all she was wearing.

I concentrated on keeping my tongue from hanging down past my chin, and forced my eyes to look elsewhere.

Her sisters were wearing much different gear. Though they also wore white, they had both donned what looked like motorcycle leathers—not like archetypical American bikers, but more like the gear you see professional racing motorcyclists wearing. It looked very high-tech, and was obviously armored. In standard gear, the armor was heavy plastic, there to protect the rider in the event of a collision or a fall. I was willing to bet that it had been upgraded to something a lot stronger in the Raith’s gear. They, too, were equipped with sidearms of both the past and present. Their hair was tied up and back, and like Lara, their skin was pale, their eyes were wide and grey, their lips dark and inviting.

I watched the three Raith sisters come and thought to myself that if there was any justice in the universe, I would get to watch that in slow motion.

Alas.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mai calmly lift a hand to Warden Berserkergang, motioning him to stand down. It didn’t surprise me. Ancient Mai had very strong notions of proper behavior and how it ought to be followed. She would never condone observable division amongst members of the Council where outsiders could witness it.

Lara stopped twenty feet away, and her sisters stopped a couple of feet behind her. Their eyes were on the Wardens, who returned the vampires’ stares with calm attention.

“Harry,” she said, her voice warm, as if we’d just run into one another at a soiree. “You are a wicked, wicked man. You didn’t tell me I’d have to share you with others tonight.”

“What can I say?” I asked, turning to face Lara. I smiled at her and bowed my head without taking my eyes off her. It was a more enjoyable paranoia than I’d observed for the Wardens, if no less wary. “I used to be a trusting, gentle soul, but the rigors of the cruel world have made me cynical and cautious.”

Lara looked from the Wardens to me, her expression speculative. Then she gave them a smile that could have melted plate steel and walked to me, somehow making a swagger look perfectly feminine. She extended both hands to me as she came.

I smiled in return, though mine was a lot stiffer and more artificial, and whispered, through my smiling teeth, “You have got to be kidding.”

She cast her eyes down demurely, toning the smile down to a smirk, and breathed, “Be nice to me, wizard mine, and I’ll return the favor.”

I don’t think I hesitated very long before I offered her my hands in return. We clasped them. Her fingers were silken-smooth and very cold. She smiled radiantly and inclined her head to me, a slow, graceful, formal gesture.

Then, faster than I could blink, much less move, she smacked me in the kisser.

She used her open hand, which prevented the blow from being a lethal one. Even so, it hit like a club. It knocked me several steps back, spinning me as I went, and I wound up caught in a drunken corkscrew that ended with my ass hitting the ground ten feet away.

“Once again you have lied to us,” Lara snarled. “Used us. I have had my fill of your deceits, wizard.”

I sat there with my mouth open, wondering if my jaw would start wobbling bonelessly in the rising breeze.

Fury radiated from her in a cold sphere, and every fiber of her body looked ready to do violence. She faced me with the members of the Council on her left, the darkness of the forest on her right. I focused on my shield bracelet, certain that there was every possibility that she might be about to draw her gun and plug me.

“If my brother is not returned to me whole this night,” she continued, her voice cold and deadly, “there will be blood between us and my honor will not be satisfied until one of us lies dead on the dueling ground.”

And then she winked at me with her right eye.

“Do you understand?” she demanded.

“Uh,” I said, trying to move my jaw. It was apparently whole. “Yeah. Message received.”

“Arrogant child.” She spat on the ground in my direction. Then she turned and walked purposefully toward the Senior Council members. She stopped about ten feet from Ancient Mai, just before the Wardens standing behind her would have snapped and started hurling thunder and fury. She came to a graceful stance of attention, and then bowed, rather deeply, to Ancient Mai.

Mai’s face revealed nothing. She returned the gesture, bowing less deeply.

“It is a pleasure to meet you in the flesh,” Lara said. “You must be Ancient Mai.”

“Lara Raith,” Mai replied. “I had not anticipated your presence at this meeting.”

“Nor I yours.” She gave me a rather disgusted glance. “Courtesy, it seems, is a devalued commodity in this world.” She bowed again, to Ebenezar and Listens-to-Wind, and greeted them by name. “Your reputations, gentlemen, precede you.”

Injun Joe nodded without speaking.

“Lady Raith,” Ebenezar said, calmly. “Touch that boy again and the only things left for your kin to bury will be your five-hundred-dollar shoes.”

“Ai ya,” Ancient Mai said in a flat tone.

Lara paused at Ebenezar’s statement. It didn’t rattle her, precisely, but she gave Ebenezar another look and then inclined her head to him. “Gentlemen, lady. Obviously we both have urgent concerns that must be addressed. Equally obviously, none of us anticipated the presence of the other, and a violent incident would benefit no one. On behalf of the White Court, I propose a formal agreement of nonaggression for the duration of this meeting.”

Ancient Mai gave Ebenezar a hard look, then lifted her chin slightly and turned away, somehow giving the impression that she had formally dismissed him from reality. “Agreed,” she said. “On behalf of the Council, I accept the proposal.”

I managed to stagger back to verticality. My wounded head felt like Lara had split it open, and I’d have a hand-shaped bruise on my cheek, but I wasn’t going to sit there moaning about getting slapped by a girl. Granted, the girl was hundreds of years old and could change a fire truck’s tires without using a jack, but there was a principle at work here. I got to my feet and then walked carefully over to stand beside Ebenezar, facing the vampires. One of the Wardens there made a little room for me, all his attention focused forward on Lara and her sisters.

Heh. They were much more comfortable with me when I was aimed at an enemy. I tried to keep a running portion of my awareness focused on Demonreach. I had done as much as I could in assembling this group. I was counting on my estimate of the killer to take it to the next level, and until he showed up, I had to keep stringing both Lara and the Council along.

The best way to do that, for the moment, was to keep quiet and let them talk.

“I suppose the first thing we must do is share knowledge,” Lara said to Ancient Mai. “Would you prefer it if I went first?”

Mai considered that for a moment and then bowed her head in a slight acknowledgment.

Lara proceeded without further ado. “My brother, Thomas Raith, has been taken by a skinwalker, one of the ancient naagloshii. The skinwalker has offered an exchange. My brother for Warden Donald Morgan.”

Mai tilted her head to one side. “How is Dresden involved in this matter?”

“He claims that he is attempting to establish Warden Morgan’s innocence in some sort of matter internal to the Council. As a gesture of goodwill to the Council and to help keep the peace within Chicago, I have instructed my brother to offer reasonably low-risk aid and assistance to Dresden.” She glanced at me. “He has abused my good intentions repeatedly. This time, he somehow involved my brother in his investigation, and Thomas was ambushed by the skinwalker.”

“And that is all?” Mai asked.

Lara glared at me again, and seemed to visibly force herself to take a moment to think. “He claims that a third party was behind Warden Morgan’s predicament, and attempting to set the Court against the Council. To my surprise, my own investigation did not immediately disprove his statements as lies. It seems possible that one of my financial managers may have been somehow coerced into embezzling the contents of a considerable account. Dresden claims the money was sent to an account that was made to appear to belong to Warden Morgan.”

Mai nodded. “Was it?”

Lara shrugged elegantly. “It is possible. My people are working to find evidence that will establish what happened more precisely.”

Mai nodded and was still for several seconds before she said, “Despite how carefully you have danced around the subject, you know exactly why we are here.”

Lara smiled very slightly.

“The tale Dresden tells us lacks the credibility of simplicity,” Mai continued. “Despite how carefully you have danced around saying the actual words, it seems that you wish us to believe that the White Court was not involved in the matter of LaFortier’s death. Thus, your story, too, lacks the credibility of simplicity.”

“In my experience, matters of state are rarely simple ones,” Lara responded.

Mai moved a hand, a tiny gesture that somehow conveyed acknowledgment. “Yet given recent history, the actions of a known enemy seem a far more likely source for LaFortier’s murder than those of some nameless, faceless third party.”

“Of course. You are, after all, wizards,” Lara said without a detectable trace of irony. “You are the holders of great secrets. If such a group existed, you would surely know of it.”

“It is possible that I am unfairly judging your people in accusing them of plotting LaFortier’s death,” Mai replied, her voice utterly tranquil. “You are, after all, vampires, and well-known for your forthright and gentle natures.”

Lara inclined her head, smiling faintly. “Regardless, we find ourselves here.”

“That seems incontrovertible.”

“I seek the safe return of my brother.”

Mai shook her head firmly, once. “The White Council will not exchange one of our own.”

“It seems to me,” Lara said, “that Warden Morgan is not in your company.”

“A transitory situation,” Mai said. She didn’t look at me, but I felt sure that the steel in her voice was aimed in my direction.

“Then perhaps a cooperative effort,” Lara said. “We need not allow the skinwalker to take the Warden.”

“Those who ally themselves with the White Court come to regret it,” Mai replied. “The Council has no obligation to assist you or your brother.”

“Despite the recent efforts made on your behalf by my King and his Court?” Lara asked.

Mai faced her without blinking and said nothing more.

“He is my blood,” Lara said quietly. “I will have him returned.”

“I appreciate your loyalty,” Mai said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t. “However, this matter of the skinwalker wishing an exchange is hardly germane to where we stand at the moment.”

“Actually,” I said. “It kind of is, Ancient Mai. I had someone tell Shagnasty where to meet me tonight. Depending on how he crosses the water, he could be here any moment.”

Ebenezar blinked. Then he turned his face to me, his expression clearly asking whether or not I was out of my damned mind.

“Wile E. Coyote,” I said to him soberly. “Suuuuuuper Genius.”

I saw him thinking and I recognized it when my old mentor got it, when he understood my plan. I could tell because he got that look on his face I’ve only seen when he knows things are about to go spectacularly wrong and he wants to be ready for it. He let his staff fall to rest against his chest and idly dug in a pocket, his eyes flicking across the woods around us.

I don’t know where Mai’s head was, or if she worked out anything at all. I had a feeling that she wouldn’t. Since her thought processes would all have to start from given assumptions that were incorrect, she didn’t have much of a chance of coming to a correct conclusion.

“All that means,” she said to me, “is that it would be wise to finish our business here and retreat from this place.”

“Sadly, I am reaching a similar conclusion,” Lara said deliberately. “Perhaps it is time for this meeting to adjourn.”

Behind her, one of her sisters shifted one hand very slightly.

Lightning flashed overhead, and thunder forced a pause into the conversation. The wind picked up again, and Listens-to-Wind suddenly lifted his head. His gaze snapped around to the north, and his eyes narrowed.

An instant later, I sensed a new presence on the island. More people had just touched down onto the far side of the bald hill where Demonreach Tower stood. There were twelve of them, and they began moving toward the hilltop at inhuman speed. White Court vampires, they had to be.

Seconds later, another pair of humanlike presences simply appeared in the woods four hundred yards away. And if that wasn’t enough, two more people arrived on the northwest shore of the island.

Mai took immediate note of Injun Joe’s expression and tilted her head, staring hard at Lara. “What have you done?” she demanded.

“I have signaled my family,” Lara replied calmly. “I did not come here to fight you, Ancient Mai. But I will recover my brother.”

I focused on the two smaller groups, both of them pairs of new presences, and found that their numbers were growing. On the beach, many, many more pairs of feet had begun beating the ground of Demonreach, thirty of them or more. In the forest nearby, a presence that the island had never before encountered appeared, followed by more and more and more of the same.

There was only one explanation for that—the new arrivals were calling forth muscle from the Nevernever. I was betting that the pair on the beach was Madeline and Binder, and that he had begun calling out his grey men the moment his feet hit the ground. The two who had simply appeared in the forest had to have taken a Way and emerged from the Nevernever onto the island directly. It was possible a second summoning like Binder’s was under way, but I thought it far more likely that someone had gathered up support and brought it with them, through the Way.

Meanwhile, Mai and Lara were beginning to bare their claws.

“Is that a threat, vampire?” Mai said in a flat tone.

“I would prefer that you regard it as a truth,” Lara replied, her own tone losing the charm and conviviality it had contained in some measure throughout the conversation.

The Wardens behind me started getting nervous. I could feel it, both for myself and through Demonreach. I heard leather creak as hands were put to the grips of holstered guns and upon hilts of swords.

Lara, in response, rested her fingertips lightly upon her own weapons. Her two sisters did the same.

“Wait!” I snapped. “Wait!”

Everyone turned to look at me. I must have looked like a raving mad-man, standing there with my eyes half focused, looking back and forth out of pure instinct and force of habit as the island’s intellectus informed me of the rapidly transpiring events. The White Court reinforcements had bypassed the tower hill and were headed for the beach to support Lara—which was something, at least. Lara’s helicopter hadn’t dropped them up there specifically to look for Morgan. It must have come up low, from the north, using the terrain of the hilltop to mask the sound of its arrival.

I forced my attention back to the scene around me. “Holy crap. I knew this would put the pressure on him. But this guy’s gone to war.”

“What?” Listens-to-Wind asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t start in on one another!” I snapped. “Lara, we need to work together or we’re all dead.”

She turned her head a little to one side, staring at me. “Why?”

“Because better than a hundred—one hundred ten, now—beings have just arrived at different points of the island and they aren’t here to cater the little mixer we’ve got going. There are only nine of us and fifteen of you. We’re outnumbered five to one. Six to one, now.”

Mai stared at me. “What?”

Howls slithered into the air, muffled by the falling rain, but were made all the more eerie by the lack of direction to them. I recognized them at once—Binder’s grey men. They were coming, moving with mindless purpose that cared nothing for the danger of a forest at night.

The second group was nearer. They’d stopped growing at a hundred and twenty-five, and were already on the move toward us. They weren’t as fast as the grey men, but they were moving steadily and spreading out into an enormous curved line meant to sweep the forest and then encircle their quarry when they found it. Red light began to pour through the trees in their direction, casting eerie black shadows and turning the rain to blood.

I forced myself to think, to ask Demonreach the right questions. A second’s consideration revealed that the two forces would converge on us at exactly the same time—they were working together.

The numbers disadvantage was too great. The Wardens might get some spells off, and the Senior Council members would probably leave mounds of corpses piled around them—but outnumbered six to one, on a dark night, when they would have trouble seeing their targets before they were within a few steps, they wouldn’t prevail. The large group would hit them from one side, and the smaller one would come from the other, boxing us in.

Unless . . .

Unless we could get to one of the two groups first and eliminate it before its partner reached us and hit us from behind.

Outnumbered as hideously as we were, the smartest thing would have been to run like hell—but I knew that no one would. The Council still had to recover Morgan. Lara still had to recover Thomas. Neither of them enjoyed the advantage I did. To them, the danger was only a vague threat, some howls in the dark, and it would remain so until it was too late to run.

Which left us only one option.

We had to attack.

The grey men howled again, from much closer.

I gave Ebenezar a desperate glance and then stepped forward, lifting my staff. “They’ve got us boxed in! Our only chance is to fight our way clear! Everyone, with me!”

Lara and her sisters stared at me in confusion. The Wardens did the same—but the fear in my voice and on my face was very real, and when one human being displays a fear response, those nearby it tend to find it psychologically contagious. The Wardens’ eyes immediately went to Ancient Mai.

I started jogging, beckoning as I went, and Ebenezar immediately fell in with me. “You heard the man!” Ebenezar roared. “Wardens, let’s move!”

At his bellow, the dam broke, and the Wardens surged forward to join us.

Lara stared at me for another half a second, and then cried, “Go, go!” to her sisters. They began running with us, effortlessly keeping pace, their motion so graceful and light that it hardly seemed possible that they would leave footprints.

I looked over my shoulder as I slowly increased the pace. Ancient Mai had turned toward the hateful red glare coming from the forest to the south, facing it calmly. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind, with me. Let us see if we can slow the progress of whatever is coming this way.”

Injun Joe went to her side, and the two of them stood there, gathering their will and muttering to each other.

I consulted Demonreach for the best route to follow toward the enemy, put my head down, and charged the demons that were coming to kill us, Wardens and vampires alike at my side.

Chapter Forty-two

Adrenaline does weird things to your head. You hear people talk about how everything slows down. That isn’t the case. Nothing is happening slowly. It’s just that you somehow seem to be able to fit a whole lot more thinking into the time and space that’s there. It might feel like things have slowed down, but it’s a transitory illusion.

For example, I had time to reflect upon the nature of adrenaline and time while sprinting through the woods at night. It didn’t make me run any faster, though. Although if I wasn’t actually moving my arms and legs faster than normal, then why was I twenty feet ahead of everyone else, the vampires included?

I heard someone curse in the dark behind me as they tripped over an exposed root. I didn’t trip. It wasn’t that I had become more graceful—I just knew where to put my feet. It was as if every step I took was over a path that I had walked so many times that it had become ingrained in my muscle memory. I knew when to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, when to bound forward at an angle to my last step in order to clear an old stump, exactly how much I needed to shorten a quick pair of steps so that I could leap a sinkhole by pushing off my stronger leg. Lara Raith herself was hard-pressed to keep pace with me, though she managed to close to within three or four yards, her pale skin all but glowing in the dark.

The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knew where they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.

The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”

It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.

After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.

Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.

Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.

Perfect.

I dropped to one knee, lifting my blasting rod, as the human-seeming demons shrieked at the sudden appearance of the bright lights. I trained it on the nearest hesitating grey man, slammed my will down through the wooden haft, and snarled, “Fuego!”

It was more difficult to do than it would have been if it hadn’t been raining, but it was more than up to the task. A javelin of red-gold flame hissed through the rain, leaving a trail of white steam behind it. It touched the nearest of the grey men on one flank, and his cheap suit went up as readily as if it was lined with tar instead of rayon.

The grey man yawled and began thrashing furiously. The fire engulfed him, throwing out light for a good thirty yards in every direction, and illuminating his companions.

I dropped flat, and an instant later the forest behind me belched forth power and death.

Guns roared on full automatic fire. That would be the Raiths. Lara and her sisters’ sidearms had been modified submachine guns, with an enlarged ammunition clip. Given the superhuman strength, perception, and coordination the vampires had at their disposal, they didn’t suffer the same difficulties a human shooter would have faced, running at full speed in the dark, firing a weapon meant to be braced by a shooter’s entire upper body in one hand—and their left hands at that. Bullets chewed into three different grey men, ten or eleven rounds each, all of them hitting between the neck and temple, blasting the demons back to ectoplasm.

Then it was the Wardens’ turn.

Fire was the weapon of choice when it came to combat magic. Though it was taxing upon the will and physical stamina of the wizard, it got a lot of energy concentrated into a relatively small space. It illuminated darkness, something that was nearly always to a wizard’s advantage—and it hurt. Every living thing had at least a healthy respect, if not an outright fear of fire. Even more to the point, fire was a purifying force in its non-physical aspect. Dark magic could be consumed and destroyed by fire when used with that intent.

The Wardens used the zipping little fireballs from the Roman candles and my own improvised funeral pyre to target their own spells, and then the real fireworks started.

Each individual wizard has his own particular quirks when it comes to how he uses his power. There is no industrial standard for how fire is evoked into use in battle. One of the Wardens coming up behind me sent forth a stream of tiny stars that slewed through the night like machine-gun fire, effortlessly burning holes through trees, rocks, and grey men with equal disdain. Another sent a stream of fire up in a high arc, and it crashed down among several grey men, splashing and clinging to any moving thing it struck like napalm. Lances of scarlet and blue and green fire burned through the air, reminding me for a mad moment of a scene from a Star Wars movie. Steam hissed and snarled everywhere, as a swath of woodland forty yards across and half as deep vanished into light and fury.

Hell’s bells. I mean, I’d seen Wardens at work before, but it had all been fairly precise, controlled work. This was pure destruction, wholesale, industrial-strength, and the heat of it was so intense that it sucked the air out of my lungs.

The grey men, though, weren’t impressed. Either they weren’t bright enough to attempt to preserve their own existence or they just didn’t care. They scattered as they advanced, spreading out. Some of them rushed forward, low to the ground and half hidden by the brush. Others bounded into the trees and came leaping and swinging forward, branch by branch. Still more of them darted to the sides, out of the harsh glare of the fires, spreading out around us.

“Toot!” I screamed over the roaring chaos. “Go after the flankers!”

A tiny trumpet added its own notes to the din, and the Pizza Patrol zipped out into the woods, two or three of the little faeries working together to carry fresh Roman candles. They gleefully kept on with the fireworks, sending the little sulfurous balls of flame chasing the grey men trying to slip around us through the shadows, marking their positions.

Lara let out a piercing call and came up to my side, gun in hand, snapping off snarling bursts every time a target presented itself. I pointed to either side and said, “They’re getting around us! We’ve got to stop them from taking Mai and Injun Joe from behind!”

Lara’s eyes snapped left and right, and she said something to her sisters in ancient Etruscan, the tongue of the White Court. One of them went in either direction, vanishing into the dark.

A grey man came crashing out of the flame twenty feet away from me, blazing like a grease fire. He showed absolutely no concern for the flame. He just sprinted forward and leapt at me, hands spread wide. I made it up to my knees and braced one end of my quarterstaff against the ground, aiming the other at the grey man’s center of mass. The staff struck it, but not squarely. It twisted to one side at the impact, bounced off the ground, took a fraction of a second to reorient itself on me—

And erupted into a cloud of ectoplasm as rounds from Lara’s gun took its head apart.

The next attacker was already on the way, out in the darkness beyond the firelight. I came to my feet and on pure instinct snapped off another blast of fire at the empty air twenty feet beyond Lara and about ten feet up. There was nothing there as I released the blast, and I knew it, but as the fire hissed through the falling rain, it illuminated the form of a grey man in the midst of a spectacular leap that would have ended at the small of Lara’s back. The blast struck him and hammered him to one side so that he came down like a burning jet, crashing across a dozen yards of ground before dissolving into flame-licked mounds of swiftly vanishing transparent jelly.

Lara didn’t see the attacker until he’d tumbled past. “Oh,” she said, her voice conversational. “That was gentlemanly of you, Dresden.”

“I’ve been known to pull out chairs and open doors, too,” I said.

“How very unfashionable,” Lara said, her pale eyes gleaming. “And endearing.”

Ebenezar stumped up to us, staff in hand, his eyes narrow and flickering all around us while Wardens continued to send blasts of power hammering into targets. Off in the woods behind us, submachine guns chattered. Apparently Lara’s sisters were still hunting the grey men who had gotten around us.

“We’ve got one Warden down,” Ebenezar said.

“How bad?”

“One of those things came out of a tree above her and tore her head off,” he said.

I tracked a slight motion in a nearby treetop and swiveled to point a finger. “Sir, up there!”

Ebenezar grunted a word, reached out a hand, and made a sharp, pulling motion. The grey man who had been clambering toward us was seized by an unseen force, ripped out of the tree, and sent sailing on an arc that would land it in Lake Michigan a quarter of a mile from the nearest shore.

“Where is the second group?” Ebenezar asked.

I thought about it. “They’re at the dock, at the edge of the trees. They’re closing on Mai and Injun Joe.” I glanced at Lara. “I think the vampires have been holding them off.”

Ebenezar spat a curse. “That summoner is still out there somewhere. His pets won’t last long in this rain, but we can’t afford to give him time to call up more. Can you find him?”

I checked. There was so much confusion and motion on the island that Demonreach had trouble distinguishing one being from another, but I had a solid if nonspecific idea of where Binder was. “Yeah.” I sensed more movement and pointed behind us, to where a trio of grey men had managed to close on a pair of Wardens who were standing on either side of a still, red-spattered form on the ground. “There!”

Ebenezar stopped talking to make another swift gesture, spoke a word, and one of the approaching grey men was suddenly and literally pounded flat by an invisible anvil. Ectoplasmic ichor flew everywhere. The two Wardens, warned by the magical strike and now facing even odds, made short work of the remaining two.

Ebenezar turned back to me and said, “Shut down that summoner, Hoss. I’m taking the Wardens back to support Injun Joe and Mai. Let’s go, vampire.”

“No,” Lara said. “If Binder is nearby, then so is my sweet cousin Madeline. I’ll stay with Dresden.”

Ebenezar didn’t argue with her. He just snarled, made a fist, and lifted it up, and Lara let out a short, choking cry and rose up ten feet into the air, her arms and legs snapping down straight, locking her body into a rigid board.

I put a hand against his chest. “Wait!”

He glanced at me from beneath shaggy grey brows.

“Let her down. She can come along.” Ebenezar had no way of knowing that I wasn’t out there alone. Georgia and Will were lurking nearby, and could be at my side in a couple of seconds if necessary. Between the two of them, they had accounted for three grey men, too. I tried to put that knowledge behind a very slight emphasis in my tone and told him, “I’ll be fine.”

Ebenezar frowned at me, then shot a glance out at the woods and gave me a reluctant nod. He turned back to Lara and released her from the grip of his will. She didn’t quite manage to fall gracefully, and landed in a sprawl that gave me a great look at her long, intriguingly lovely legs. The old man eyed her and said, “You just remember what I told you, missy.”

She rose to her feet, her expression unreadable—but I knew her well enough to know that she was furious. My old mentor had just insulted her on multiple levels, not the least of which was pointing out to her exactly how easy it would be for him to make good on his previous threat. “I’ll remember,” she said, her tone frosty.

“Wardens!” Ebenezar said. “On me!” The old man broke into a woodsman’s lope, a shuffle-footed, loose-kneed gait that managed unpredictable terrain well and covered ground with deceptive speed. The four remaining Wardens fell into a wedge shape behind him and they moved out heading south, back toward the docks and the confrontation with whoever had come forth from the Nevernever with his own army.

Lara turned to me and nodded her head once, gesturing me to lead. I tried to fix Binder’s presence firmly in mind, and was certain he was ahead of us and to the north, probably trying to circle widely around the scene of the battle with his minions. I started out through the woods again, pushing myself to move faster.

This time, Lara stayed close behind me. She mimicked my movements, down to the length of my stride, taking advantage of my instinctive knowledge of Demonreach.

“I have little interest in this mercenary,” she said to me as we ran. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Do with him as you would. But Madeline is mine.”

“She might know something,” I said.

“I can’t believe anyone with half a mind would entrust her with knowledge of any importance.”

“And I can’t believe the treacherous bitch wouldn’t steal every bit of information she could find to use against whoever she’s working with,” I replied, glancing back.

Lara didn’t dispute the statement, but her eyes hardened like silver mirrors, reflecting the dancing flames that were still burning here and there as we moved through the site of the battle and out the other side. “Madeline has betrayed me, my House, and my Court. She is mine. I prefer you remained a living, breathing ally. You will not interfere.”

What do you say to something like that? I shut my mouth and concentrated on finding Binder.

It took us about five minutes to reach the piece of shoreline where Binder and his companion had come ashore. A pair of Jet Skis lay discarded on the beach. So that’s how they’d done it. The tiny craft would have no problems at all skimming over the stone reefs surrounding the island, though they would have been hellish to ride in the rough water.

We swung past the discarded equipment and up a little ridgeline, running along a deer trail. I knew we were getting close, and suddenly Lara accelerated past me, supernaturally fleet of foot on the even ground.

I don’t know what triggered the explosion. It might have been a tripwire stretched across the trail. It’s possible that it was detonated manually, too. There was a flash of light, and something hit me in the chest hard enough to knock me down. An ugly asymmetrical shape was burned into my vision as I lay on my back, trying to sort out what had just happened.

Then my body tingled, and Madeline Raith appeared over me. I realized that she was straddling me. There was a fire burning somewhere close by, illuminating her. She was wearing a black surfer’s wet suit with short arms and legs, unzipped past her navel. She held a mostly empty bottle of tequila in one hand. Her eyes were wide and shining with a disorienting riot of colors as she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and . . .

And Hell’s freaking bells.

The pleasure that surged through me from that simple touch was delicious to the point of pain. Every nerve ending in my entire body lit up, as though someone had run up the wattage on my pleasure centers, or injected their engines with nitrous. I felt my body arch up and shudder, a purely sexual reaction to a physical bliss that went far beyond sexuality. I stayed that way, locked into a quivering arch of ecstasy. It took maybe ten or fifteen seconds to subside.

From a kiss on the forehead.

God. No wonder people came back to the vampires for more.

I could barely register what was happening around me. So I only dimly noticed when Madeline produced a gun of her own, the other favorite model of those with more than human strength—a Desert Eagle.

“Good night, sweet wizard,” Madeline purred, her hips grinding a slow rhythm against mine. She drew the half-inch-wide mouth of the gun over my cheek as she took a slug of tequila and then rested the gun’s barrel gently on the spot she’d just kissed. It felt obscenely good, like a caress on skin that has just been shaved smooth but hasn’t yet been touched. I knew that she was about to kill me, but I couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt. “And flights of angels,” she panted, her breath coming faster, her eyes alight with excitement, “sing thee to thy rest.”

Chapter Forty-three

I was still sorting things out after the titanic wallop the explosion had given the inside of my skull, when a dark-furred wolf emerged from the shadows of the night and slammed into Madeline Raith like a loaded armored car. I heard bones breaking under the impact, and she was ripped off me by the force of the dark wolf’s rush.

Will didn’t stop there. He’d already hammered her once, and he knew better than to try his strength infighting with a vampire, even if the members of the White Court were physically the weakest of the breed. He hit the ground and bounded away into the dark.

Madeline screamed in surprised rage, and her gun went off several times, but I’m not sure you could call it shooting. She was on her knees, firing that big old Desert Eagle with one delicate hand and holding the now-broken tequila bottle in the other when a sandy brown wolf swept by on silent paws and ripped at Madeline’s weapon hand with her fangs. The rip went deep into the muscles and tendons of Madeline’s forearm, an almost surgically precise attack. The gun tumbled from her fingers, and she whirled to swing the broken bottle at Georgia, but she was no more eager for a fair fight than Will had been, and by the time Madeline turned, Georgia was already bounding away—and Will, unnoticed, was on his way back in again.

Fangs flashed. Pale Raith blood flowed. The two wolves rushed back and forth in perfect rhythm, never giving the vampire a chance to pin one of them down. When Madeline finally realized how they were working her, she attempted to reverse herself suddenly the same instant Georgia began to retreat, to meet Will’s rush squarely—but Will and Georgia had learned their trade from a real wolf, and they’d had eight years of what amounted to low-intensity but deadly earnest combat duty, defending several square blocks around the University from the depredations of both supernatural and mortal predators. They knew when the reverse was coming, and Georgia simply pirouetted on her paws and blindsided Madeline again.

The vampire screamed in frustrated rage. She was furious—and she was slowing down. The members of the White Court were flesh and blood beings. They bled. Bleed them enough, and they would die.

I forced myself to start using my head again, finally shaking off the effects of both Madeline’s psychotically delicious kiss and the concussion of whatever had exploded. I realized that I was covered with small cuts and scratches, that I was otherwise fine, and that Binder was less than twenty feet away.

“Will, Georgia!” I screamed. “Gun!”

The wolves leapt out of sight and vanished into the forest with barely a leaf disturbed by their movements, half a second before Binder came out of the woods, a semiautomatic assault shotgun pressed against his shoulder. The mercenary was dressed in a wet suit as well, though he’d put on a combat jacket and equipment harness over it, and wore combat boots on his feet.

Binder aimed the weapon after Will and Georgia and started rapidly hammering the woods with shells, more or less at random.

Everyone thinks that shotgun pellets spread out to some ridiculous degree, and that if you aim a shotgun at a garage door and pull the trigger, you’ll be able to drive a car through the resulting hole. That isn’t so, even when a shotgun has a very, very short barrel, which allows the load of pellets to spread out more. A longer-barreled weapon, like Binder’s, will only spread the pellets out to about the size of my spread fingers at a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. Odds were good that he hadn’t hit a damned thing, and given his experience he probably knew it. He must have kept up the salvo to increase the intimidation factor and force the wolves to stay on the run.

In the heat and adrenaline of a battle, gunshots can be hard to count, but I knew he fired eight times. I knew because through Demonreach, I could feel the eight brass and plastic shell casings lying on the ground around him. He stood protectively over Madeline as he reached into his pockets, presumably to reload the weapon with fresh shells.

I didn’t give him the chance. I pulled my .44 out of my duster pocket, sat up, and tried to stop wobbling. I sighted on his center mass and pulled the trigger.

The revolver roared, and Binder’s left leg flew out from beneath him as if someone had hit it with a twenty-pound mallet. He let out a yelp of what sounded more like surprise than pain and hit the ground hard. In the odd little beat of heavy silence that came after the shot, I almost felt sorry for the guy. He’d had a tough couple of days. I heard him suck in a quick breath and clench his teeth over a howl of pain.

Madeline whirled toward me, her dark hair gone stringy and flat in the rain. Her eyes burned pure white, as the hunger, the demon inside her, fed her more and more of its power and asserted more and more control. Her wet suit had been torn open in several places, and paler-than-human blood smeared her paler-than-human flesh. She wasn’t moving as well as she should have been, but she stalked toward me in a hunter’s crouch, deliberate and steady.

My bells were still ringing hard, and I didn’t think I had time or focus to pull together a spell. And besides, my gun was already right there. It seemed like it would be a waste not to use it.

I sighted on the spot where Madeline’s heart should have been and shot her in the belly, which wasn’t terrible marksmanship under the circumstances. She cried out and staggered to one knee. Then she looked up, her empty white eyes furious, and stood up, continuing toward me.

I shot again and missed, then repeated myself. I gripped the gun with both hands, clenching my teeth as I did, knowing I only had two more rounds. The next shot ripped a piece of meat the size of a racquetball out of one of her biceps, sending her down to one knee and drawing another scream.

Before she could start moving again, I aimed and fired the last round.

It hit her in the sternum, almost exactly between her wet suit- contoured breasts. She jerked, her breath exploding from her in a little huff of surprise. She swayed, her eyelids fluttering, and I thought she was about to fall.

But she didn’t.

The vampire’s empty white eyes focused on me, and her mouth spread into a maniac’s sneer. She reached down and picked up her own fallen weapon. She had to do it left-handed. The right was covered in a sheet of blood and flopped limply.

Running low on options, I threw my empty gun at her face. She bat-ted my revolver aside with the Desert Eagle.

“You,” Madeline said, her voice hollow and wheezing, “are a bad case of herpes, wizard. You’re inconvenient, embarrassing, no real threat, and you simply will not go away.”

“Bitch,” I replied, wittily. I still hadn’t gotten my head back together. Everything’s relative, right?

“Don’t kill him,” Binder rasped.

Madeline shot him a look that could freeze vodka. “What?”

Binder was sitting on the ground. His shotgun was farther away than he could reach. He must have tossed it there, because when he had fallen it was still in his hands. Binder had realized precisely how badly the fight had gone for his side, that he had been lamed and therefore probably could not escape, and he was making damned sure that he didn’t look armed and dangerous. “Death curse,” he said, breathing hard. “He could level the island with it.”

I drew in my breath, lifted my chin, and tried to keep my eyes from slipping out of focus. “Boom,” I said solemnly.

Madeline looked bad. One of the bullets might have opened an artery. It was hard to tell in the near-darkness. “Perhaps you’re right, Binder,” she said. “If he was a better shot, I suppose I might be in trouble. As it is, I’m inconvenienced.” Her eyes widened slightly, and her tongue lashed quickly over her lips. “And I need to feed if I’m to repair it.” She lowered the gun as if it had suddenly become too heavy to keep supporting. “Don’t worry, Binder,” she said. “When he’s screaming my name he won’t be cursing anyone. And even if he tries it . . .” She shivered. “I’ll bet it will taste incredible.”

She came closer, all pale skin and mangled flesh, and my body suddenly went insane with lust. Stupid body. It had a lot more clout at the moment than it usually did, with my mind still reeling from the blast.

I aimed a punch at Madeline’s face. She caught my hand as the weak blow came in, and kissed the inside of my wrist. Sweet silver lightning exploded up my arm and down my spine. Whatever was left of my brain went away, and the next thing I knew she was pressing her chest against mine, her mouth against mine, slowly, sensuously overbearing me.

And then a burned corpse came out of the woods.

That was all I could think of to describe it. Half the body was blacker than a hamburger that had fallen through the bars of a charcoal grill. The rest was red and purple and swollen with bruises and bloody blisters, with very, very occasional strips of pale white skin. A few wisps of dark hair were attached to her skull. I say her because technically the corpse was female, though that hardly mattered amongst all the burned and pulverized meat that smelled slightly of tequila.

The only things I really recognized were the cold silver eyes.

Lara Raith’s eyes were bright with an insane rage and a terrible hunger as she snaked her bruised, swollen left arm around Madeline’s wind-pipe, and tightened it with a horrible strength.

Madeline cried out as her head was jerked back sharply—and then she made no sound at all as the wind was trapped inside her lungs. The burned, blackened corpse that was Lara Raith dug one fire-ruined hip into Madeline’s upper back, using Madeline’s own spine as a fulcrum against her.

Lara spoke, and her voice was something straight from Hell. It was lower, smokier, but every bit as lovely as it ever was. “Madeline,” she purred, “I’ve wanted to do this with you since we were little girls.”

Lara’s burned black right hand, withered, it seemed, down to bones and sinew, reached slowly, sensually around Madeline’s straining abdomen. Slowly, very slowly, Lara sunk her fingertips into flesh, just beneath the floating rib on Madeline’s left flank. Madeline’s face contorted and she tried to scream.

Lara shuddered. Her shoulders twisted. And she ripped an open furrow as wide as her four fingers across Madeline’s stomach, pale flesh parting, as wet red and grey things slithered out.

Lara’s tongue emerged from her mouth, bright pink, and touched Madeline’s earlobe. “Listen to me,” she hissed. Her burned hand continued pulling things out of Madeline’s body, a hideous intimacy. “Listen to me.”

Power shuddered in those words. I felt an insane desire to rush toward Lara’s ruined flesh and give her my ears, ripped off with my own fingers, if necessary.

Madeline shuddered, the strength gone out of her body. Her mouth continued trying to move, but her eyes went unfocused at the power in Lara’s voice. “For once in your life,” Lara continued, kissing Madeline’s throat with her burned, broken lips, “you are going to be useful.”

Madeline’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her body sagged helplessly back against Lara.

My brain got back onto the clock. I pushed myself away from Lara and Madeline’s nauseating, horribly compelling embrace. Binder was sitting with his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him away from the entwined Raiths, maybe fifty yards downhill, through some thick brush and around the bole of a large old hickory tree. Binder was obviously in pain as I pulled him—and he was pushing with his unwounded leg, doing his best to assist me.

“Bloody hell,” he panted, as I set him down. “Bloody hell and brimstone.”

I staggered and sat down across from him, panting to get my breath back and to push the sight of Lara devouring Madeline out of my head. “No kidding.”

“Some of the bloody fools I’ve known,” Binder said. “Can’t stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they’re just like us. Bloody idiots.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice raw.

We sat there for a few seconds. From up the slope, there was a low, soft, and eager cry.

We shuddered and tried to look as if we hadn’t heard anything.

Binder stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Why?”

“Once Lara got going, she might not be able to stop. She’d have eaten you, too.”

“Too right,” Binder agreed fervently. “But that ain’t the question. Why?”

“Somebody has to be human.”

Binder looked at me as if I was speaking in a language he’d never been very good at, and hadn’t heard in years. Then he looked sharply down and away. He nodded, without looking up, and said, “Cheers, mate.”

“Fuck you,” I told him tiredly. “How bad are you hit?”

“Broke the bone, I think,” he said. “Didn’t come out. Didn’t hit anything too bad or I’d be gone by now.”

He’d already tied a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. His wet suit was probably aiding it in acting as a pressure bandage.

“Who was Madeline working for?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Think,” I said. “Think hard.”

“All I know,” he said, “is that it was some bloke with a lot of money. I never talked to him. When she was on the phone with him, they spoke English. He wasn’t a native speaker. Sounded like he’d learned it from a Continental.”

I frowned. Television has most people confident that they could identify the nationality of anyone speaking English, but in the real world, accents could be muddy as hell, especially when you learned from a non-native speaker. Try to imagine the results, for example, of a Polish man learning English from a German teaching at a Belgian university. The resulting accent would twist a linguist’s brain into knots.

I eyed Binder. “Can you get out of here on your own?”

He shivered. “This place? I bloody well can.”

I nodded. Binder was responsible for the death of a Warden, but it wasn’t as though it had been personal. I could bill that charge to Madeline Raith’s corpse. “Do business in my town or against the Council again and I’ll kill you. Clear?”

“Crystal, mate. Crystal.”

I got up and started to go. I didn’t have my staff, my blasting rod, or my gun. They were back up the hillside.

I’d come back for them later.

“Wait,” Binder said. He grunted and took off his belt, and I nearly kicked him in the head, thinking he was going for a weapon. Instead, he just offered the belt to me. It had a fairly normal-looking black fanny pack on it.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Two more concussion grenades,” he said.

I put two and two together. My brain was back on the job. “You’d rather not be holding the matches to the one that got Lara, eh?”

“Too right,” he said. I started to turn away and he touched my leg. He leaned toward me a bit and said, very quietly, “Waterproof pocket inside has a phone in it. Boss lady had me hold it for her. It’s powered off. Maybe the lady cop would find it interesting.”

I stared hard at him for a second, and an understanding passed between us. “If this pans out,” I said, “maybe I’ll forget to mention to the Wardens that you survived.”

He nodded and sank back onto the ground. “Never want to see you again, mate. Too right I don’t.”

I snapped the belt closed and hung it across one shoulder, where I could get to the larger pouch in a hurry if I needed to. Then I got on to the next point of business—finding Will and Georgia.

They were both lying on the ground maybe sixty yards from where I’d last seen them. It looked like they’d been circling around the site of the battle with Madeline, planning on coming back in from the far side. I moved easily and soundlessly through the woods and found them on the ground, back in human form.

“Will,” I hissed quietly.

He lifted his head and looked around vaguely. “Uh. What?”

“It’s Harry,” I said, kneeling down next to him. I took off my pentacle amulet and willed a gentle light from it. “Are you hurt?”

Georgia murmured in discomfort at the light. The two of them were twined together rather intimately, actually, and I suddenly felt extremely, um, inappropriate. I shut off the light.

“Sorry,” he slurred. “We were gonna come back, but it was . . . really nice out here. And confusing.”

“I lost track,” Georgia said. “And fell over.”

Their pupils were dilated to the size of quarters, and I suddenly understood what had happened to them: Madeline’s blood. They’d been inadvertently drugged while ripping at a succubus with their fangs. I’d heard stories about the blood of the White Court, but I hadn’t been able to find any hard evidence, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Thomas would ever talk about.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, frustrated. Madeline seemed to have a habit of inflicting far more damage by coincidence than intention.

I heard a short, desperately pleasurable cry from nearby, in the direction where I knew Madeline and Lara were on the ground—then silence.

And Madeline wasn’t on the island anymore.

I lifted a hand in the air and let out a soft whistle. There was a fluttering sound, and then a small faerie hovered in the air beside me, suppressing the light that usually gathered around them when they flew. I could hear its wings buzzing and sensed its position through the island’s intellectus. It wasn’t Toot-toot, but one of his subordinates. “Put a guard around these two,” I said, indicating Will and Georgia. “Hide them and try to lead off anyone who comes close.”

The little faerie let its wings blur with blue light twice in acknowledgment of the order and zipped off into the dark. A moment later, a double dozen of the Militia were on the way, led by the member of the Guard.

Toot and company were generally reliable—within their limits. This was going to be pushing them. But I didn’t have any other way of helping Will and Georgia at the moment, and the insanity was still in progress. Putting the Little Folk on guard duty might not be a foolproof protection, but it was the only one I had. I’d just have to hope for the best.

I reached out to Demonreach to find out about Ebenezar and the others, when a sense of fundamental wrongness twitched through my brain and sent runnels of fear and rage that did not belong to me oozing down my spine. I focused on the source of those feelings, and suddenly understood the island’s outrage at the presence of a visitor it actively detested. It had come ashore on the far side of the island from Chicago, and was now moving swiftly through the trees, dragging a half-dead presence behind it.

My brother.

The naagloshii had come to Demonreach.

I stood there without allies, without most of my weapons, and grew sick with horror as the skinwalker bypassed the battle at the docks and moved in a straight line toward Demonreach Tower.

Toward Molly. Toward Donald Morgan. And it was moving fast.

I put my head down, found the fastest route up the hill, and broke out into a flat sprint, praying that I could beat the skinwalker to the tower.

Chapter Forty-four

As I ran, I tried to keep track of the battle between the White Council and the forces of the traitor who had brought them to the island. Whatever the enemy had brought with him, they weren’t anything close to human-shaped, and they were all over the place. The Council’s forces, together with the White Court, were arranged in a half circle at the shoreline, their backs protected by the lake. The attackers were stacked up at the tree line, where they would be able to hide, and they were probably making swift attacks at odd intervals. The two human-shaped presences who had arrived first were standing together in the forest, well back from the fight, and I felt a moment of severe frustration.

If I could only get word to the Wardens, to tell them where the traitor was, they might be able to launch an effective attack—but I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible. If I used more of the Little Folk, I’d have to stop to whistle some of them up and dispatch them to the task, and it was always possible that they wouldn’t find the right target to point out to the Council with their fireworks.

Then, too, a wizard would be a far different sort of threat to the Little Folk than a vampire or the grey men had been. A wizard, particularly one smart enough to remain hidden within the Council for years without betraying his treacherous goals, could swat Little Folk out of the air like insects, killing them by the score. Whether or not they thought they understood the risks, I wasn’t going to send them into that.

But I had to figure out something. The fight wasn’t going well for the home team: there was blood mixed heavily with the rain on the muddy ground in the center of their defensive position.

I gritted my teeth in frustration. I had to focus on my task, for my brother’s sake. If I stopped moving now, if I tried to bail the Council and Lara’s family out of their predicament, it could mean Thomas’s life. Besides, if Ebenezar, Listens-to-Wind, and Ancient Mai couldn’t hold off their attackers, it was pretty much a given that I wouldn’t be able to do any better.

They would have to manage without me.

I didn’t quite get up to the tower before the skinwalker, but it was damn near a tie. I guess being a nine-foot-tall shapeshifter with a nocturnal predator’s senses and superhuman strength was enough to trump even my alliance with the island’s spirit.

Taken as an omen for the rest of the evening, it was hardly encouraging, but if I did the smart thing every time matters got dangerous, the world would probably come to an end.

As it turned out, moving through the forest with perfect surety of where to put your feet is very nearly the same thing as moving in perfect silence. I reached the edge of the trees, and saw the skinwalker coming up the opposite side of the bald knoll. I froze in place, behind a screen of brush and shadows.

The wind had continued to rise and grow cooler, coming in from the northeast—which mean that it was at the skinwalker’s back. It would warn the creature should anything attempt to come slipping up his back trail, but it offered me a small advantage: Shagnasty wouldn’t be able to get my scent.

He came up the hill, all wiry limbs and stiff yellow fur that seemed entirely unaffected by what must have been a long swim or by the rain that was currently falling in intermittent splatters. The racing clouds overhead parted for a few seconds, revealing a moon most of the way toward being full, and a scythe of silver light swept briefly over the hilltop.

It showed me Thomas.

The naagloshii was dragging him by one ankle. His shirt was gone, and his upper body was covered in so many fine cuts and scratches that they looked like marked roads in a particularly detailed atlas. He’d been beaten, too. One eye was swollen up until it looked like someone had stuck half of a peach against the socket. There were dark bruises all over his throat, too—he’d been strangled, maybe repeatedly, maybe for fun.

His head, shoulders, and upper back dragged on the ground, and his arms followed limply along. When the naagloshii stopped walking, I saw his head move a little, maybe trying to spot some way to escape. His hair was still soaking wet and clinging to his head. I heard him let out a weak, wet cough.

He was alive. Beaten, tortured, half drowned in the icy water of Lake Michigan—but he was alive.

I felt my hands clench as a hot and hungry anger suddenly burned through me. I hadn’t planned on trying to take the naagloshii alone. I’d wanted Lara and her people and every member of the Council present to be there, too. That had been part of the plan: establish a common interest by showing them that they had a common enemy. Then take the naagloshii on with overwhelming force and force it to flee, at the very least, so that we could recover Thomas. I just hadn’t counted on the traitor showing up in such numerical strength.

Taking the naagloshii on alone would be a fool’s mistake. Anger might make a man bolder than he would be otherwise. It was possible that I could use it to help fuel my magic, as well—but anger alone wouldn’t give a man skill or strength that he didn’t have already, and it wouldn’t grant a mortal wizard undeniable power.

All it could do was get me killed if I let it control me. I swallowed down my outrage and forced myself to watch the naagloshii with cold, dispassionate eyes. Once I had a better opportunity, once I had spotted something that might give me a real chance at victory, I would strike, I promised my rage. I’d hit it with the best sucker punch of my life, backed by the ambient energy of Demonreach.

I focused my whole concentration on the skinwalker, and waited.

The skinwalker, I realized a moment later, was enormously powerful. I’d known that already, of course, but I hadn’t been able to appreciate the threat it represented beyond the purely physical, even though I’d viewed it through my Sight.

(That memory welled up again, trying to club me unconscious as it had before. It was difficult, but I shoved it away and ignored it.)

Through Demonreach, I could appreciate its presence in a more tactile sense. The skinwalker was virtually its own ley line, its own well of power. It had so much metaphysical mass that the dark river of energy flowing up from beneath the tower was partially disrupted by its presence, in much the same way as the moon causes tidal shifts. The island reflected that disruption in many subtle ways. Animals fled from the naagloshii as they might from the scent of a forest fire. Insects fell silent. Even the trees themselves seemed to grow hushed and quiet, despite the cold wind that should have been causing their branches to creak, their leaves to whisper.

It paced up to the cottage, where Morgan and my apprentice were hiding, and something odd happened.

The stones of the cottage began to glimmer with streamers of fox fire. It wasn’t a lot of light, only enough to be noticeable in the darkness, but as the naagloshii took another step forward, the fox fire brightened and resolved itself into symbols, written on each stone in gentle fire. I had no idea what script it was written in. I had never seen the symbols before.

The naagloshii stopped in its tracks, and another flicker of moonlight showed me that it had bared its teeth. It took another step forward, and the symbols brightened even more. It let out a low, snarling noise, and tried to take another step.

Suddenly, its wiry fur was plastered tight to the front of its body, and it seemed unable to take another step forward. It stood there with one leg lifted and let out a spitting curse in a language I did not know. Then it retreated several steps, snarling, and turned to the tower. It approached the ruined tower a bit more warily than it had the cottage, and once again those flowing sigils appeared upon the stones, somehow seeming to repulse the naagloshii before it could get closer than eight or ten feet to it.

It let out a frustrated sound, muttered something to itself, and flicked out a hand, sending unseen streamers of power fluttering toward the tower. The symbols only seemed to glow brighter for a moment, as if absorbing the magic that the skinwalker had presumably meant to disrupt them.

It cursed again, and then lifted Thomas idly, as though it planned on smashing its way through the stones using Thomas’s skull. Then it glanced at my brother, cursed some more, and shook its head, muttering darkly to itself. It fell back from the tower, clearly frustrated, and just as clearly familiar with the symbols that allowed the stones to shed the power of a skinwalker as swiftly and as easily as they shed rainwater.

Demonreach’s alien presence rarely seemed to convey anything understandable about itself—but for a few instants it did. As the skinwalker retreated, the island’s spirit allowed itself a brief moment of smug satisfaction.

What the hell was that stuff?

Never mind. It didn’t matter. Or, rather, it could wait for further investigation. The important thing was that the game had just changed.

I no longer had to get Thomas away from the skinwalker and then find a way to defeat it. All I had to do was get Thomas away. If I could grab my brother and drag him into the circle of the broken tower or into the sheltering walls of the cottage, it seemed as though we would be fine. If the very stones of the cottage repulsed the skinwalker’s presence, then all we’d need to do is let Molly activate the crystal and wait the naagloshii out. Regardless of the outcome of this night’s battle, the Council would win the day, eventually—and even the worst thing they might do to us would be a better fate than the skinwalker would mete out.

In an instant of rational clarity, I acknowledged to myself that there were about a million things that could go wrong with that plan. On the other hand, that plan had a significant advantage—there was at least one thing that could go right, which was exactly one more right thing than the previous “take back my brother away and beat the skinwalker up” plan could produce if I tried it unassisted.

I might actually pull this one off.

“Wizard,” the skinwalker called. It faced the cottage and began walking in a slow circle around it. “Wizard. Come forth. Give me the doomed warrior.”

I didn’t answer him, naturally. I was busy changing position. If he kept pacing a circle around the cottage, he would walk between me and the empty doorway. If I timed it right, I might be able to unleash a kinetic blast that would rip Thomas out of its grip and throw him into the cottage.

Of course, it might also fail to rip Thomas out of the skinwalker’s grip, in which case it might whiplash his limp body severely enough to break his neck. Or it might succeed and hit him hard enough to stop his heart or collapse a lung. And if my aim was off, I might be blasting Thomas out of the skinwalker’s hands and into a stone wall. Given how badly off he looked at the moment, that might well kill him.

Of course, the skinwalker would kill him if I did nothing.

So. I would just have to be perfect.

I got into position and licked my lips nervously. It was harder to work with pure, raw kinetic energy, with force, than almost any other kind of magic. Unlike using fire or lightning, summoning up pure force required that everything in the spell had to come from the wizard’s mind and will. Fire, once called, would behave exactly like fire unless you worked to make it otherwise. Ditto lightning. But raw will had no basis in the natural order, so the visualization of it had to be particularly vivid and intent in the mind of the wizard using it.

That was one reason I usually used my staff, or another article, to help focus my concentration when I worked with force. But my staff was several minutes away, and my kinetic energy rings, while powerful enough to handle the job, were essentially designed to send out lances of destructive energy—to hurt things. And I hadn’t designed the magic that supported them with on-the-fly modifications in mind. I couldn’t soften the blow, so to speak, if I worked with the rings. I could kill Thomas if I used them.

“Wizard!” the naagloshii growled. “I grow weary of this! I have come to honor the exchange of prisoners! Do not force me to take what I want!”

Just a few more steps, and it would be in position.

My legs were shaking. My hands were shaking.

I stared at them in shock for a second, and realized that I was terrified. The mind specter of the skinwalker hammered at the doors of my thoughts and raked savagely at my concentration. I remembered the havoc it had wrought, the lives it had taken, and how easily it had avoided or overcome every threat that had been sent its way.

Anything less than a flawless execution of the spell could cost my brother his life. What if the skinwalker was good enough to sense it coming? What if I misjudged the amount of force I needed to use? What if I missed? I wasn’t even using a tool to help me focus the power—and my control was a little shaky on the best of days.

What about the seconds after the spell? Even if I managed to do it right, it would leave me out in the open, with a vengeful and enraged naagloshii to keep me company. What would it do to me? The image of the half-cooked Lara ripping out Madeline’s intestines burned in my thoughts. Somehow I knew that the naagloshii would do worse. A lot worse.

Then came the nastiest doubt of all: what if this had all been for nothing? What if the traitor escaped while I flailed around here? What if the politics of power meant that Morgan would pay the price for LaFortier’s death despite everything?

God. I really wanted that cold beer and a good book.

“Don’t screw this up,” I whispered to myself. “Don’t screw it up.”

The skinwalker passed in front of the empty cottage doorway.

And, a second later, he dragged Thomas into line between the doorway and me.

I lifted my right hand, focusing my will and aligning my thoughts, while the constantly shifting numbers and formulae of force calculation went spinning through my head.

I suddenly spread my fingers and called, “Forzare!”

Something approximately the same size and shape as the blade of a bulldozer went rushing across the ground between my brother and me, tearing up earth and gravel, root and plant. The unseen force dug into the earth an inch beneath Thomas, hammered into his unmoving form, and ripped him free of the naagloshii’s grip. He went tumbling over ten feet of ground to the doorway—and struck his head savagely on the stone wall framing the door as he went through.

Had his head flopped about with a lethally rubbery fluidity after the impact? Had I just broken my brother’s neck?

I let out a cry of agony and chagrin. At the same time, the skinwalker whirled to face me, crouched, and let out a furious roar that shook the air all around, sending drops of water that had beaded upon the leaves of the trees raining to the earth in a fresh shower. That roar held all the fury of a mortally offended, maniacal ego and promised a death that could only be described with the assistance of an encyclopedia of torments, a thesaurus, and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.

The naagloshii in my crystalline memory of the recent past and the one standing in front of me in the here-and-now both rushed at me, huge and unstoppable, determined to hit me from either side and rip me to shreds.

And suddenly I did not care that this creature was a foe on par with any number of nightmares I would never dare to trade blows with. I did not care that I was probably about to die.

I saw Kirby’s still form in my head. I saw the small, broken figure of Andi in her hospital room. I saw my brother’s wounds, remembered the agony the thing had caused me when I had seen it through my Sight. This creature had no place here. And if I was to die, I was not going to go out in a gibbering heap of terror. If I was to die, it wouldn’t happen because I was half crippled with fear and Sight trauma.

If I was to die, it was going to be a bloody and spectacular mess.

“Bring it!” I screamed back at the naagloshii, my terror and rage making my voice sharp and high and rough. I cupped my right hand as if preparing to throw a baseball, drew up my will, and filled my palm with scarlet fire. I thrust out my left hand and ran my will through the shield bracelet hanging there, preparing a defense, and as I did I felt the power of the land beneath my feet, felt it spreading out around me, drawing in supportive energy. “Bring it! Bring it, you dickless freak!”

The naagloshii’s form shifted from something almost human to a shape that was more like that of a gorilla, its arms lengthening, its legs shortening. It rushed forward, bounding over the distance between us with terrifying speed, grace, and power, roaring as it came. It was also vanishing from sight, becoming one with the darkness as its veil closed around it, utterly invisible to the human eye.

But Demonreach knew where Shagnasty was. And so did I.

In some distant corner of my mind, where my common sense apparently had some kind of vacation home, my brain noted with dismay that I had broken into a sprint of my own. I don’t remember making the decision, but I was charging out to meet the skinwalker, screaming out a challenge in reply. I ran, embracing a rage that was very nearly madness, filling the fire in my hand with more and more power that surged higher every time one of my feet hit the ground, until it was blazing as bright as an acetylene torch.

The naagloshi leapt at me, horrible eyes burning and visible from within the veil, its clawed arms reaching out.

I dropped into a baseball player’s slide on my right hip, and brought my shield up at an angle oblique to the skinwalker’s motion. The creature hit the shield like a load of bricks and bounced up to continue in the same direction it had been leaping. The instant the naagloshii had rebounded, I dropped the shield, screaming, “Andi!” and hurled a miniature sun up at the skinwalker’s belly.

Fire erupted in an explosion that lifted the skinwalker another dozen feet into the air, tumbling it tail over teakettle—an expression that makes no goddamned sense whatsoever yet seemed oddly appropriate to the moment. My nose filled with the hideous scent of burning hair and scorched meat, and the naagloshii howled in savage ecstasy or agony as it came tumbling down, bounced hard a couple of times, and then rolled to its feet.

It came streaking toward me, its body shifting again behind its concealing veil, becoming something else, something more feline, maybe. It didn’t matter to me. I reached out to the wind and rain and rumbling thunder around us and gathered a levy of lightning into my cupped hand. Then, instead of waiting for its charge, I turned my left hand over and triggered every charged energy ring I had left, unleashing their deadly force in a single salvo.

The naagloshii howled something in a tongue I didn’t know, and the lances of force glanced off of his veil, leaving concentric rings of spreading color where they struck. A bare second later, I lifted my cupped had and screamed, “Thomas! Fulminas!”

Thunder loud enough to knock several stones loose from the tower shook the hilltop, and the blue-white flash of light was physically painful to the eyes. A thorny network of lightning leapt to the naagloshii, whose defenses had not yet recovered from deflecting the blasts of the force rings. The deadly-delicate tracery of lightning hammered into the exact center of its chest, stopping its charge in its tracks. Smaller strikes, spreading out from the main bolt like the branches of a tree, snapped into the rocky ground in half a dozen places, digging red-hot, skull-sized divots into the granite and flint.

Exhaustion hit me like a hammer, and stars swam in my vision. I had never thrown punches that hard before, and even with the assistance of Demonreach, the expenditure of energy needed to do so was literally staggering. I knew that if I pushed too hard, I’d collapse—but the skinwalker was still standing.

It stumbled to one side, its veil faltering for a second, its eyes wide with surprise. I could just see it going through the naagloshii’s head: how in the world was I hitting him so accurately when it knew that its veil rendered it all but perfectly invisible?

For one quick fraction of a second, I saw fear in its eyes, and triumphant fury roared through my weary body.

The skinwalker recovered itself, changing again. With what looked like trivial effort, it reached down and ripped a section of rock shelf the size of a sidewalk paving stone from the rock. It flung the stone at me, three or four hundred pounds coming at me like a major-league fastball.

I dove to the side, slowed by exhaustion, but fast enough to get out of the way, and as I went, I gathered my will. This time the silver-white streamers of soulfire danced and glittered around my right hand. I lay on the ground, too tired to get back up, and ground my teeth in determination as it charged me for what would, one way or another, be the last time.

I didn’t have the breath to scream, but I could snarl. “And this,” I spat, “is for Kirby, you son of a bitch.” I unleashed my will and screamed, “Laqueus!”

A cord of pure force, glittering and flashing with soulfire, leapt out at the skinwalker. It attempted to deflect it, but it clearly hadn’t been expecting me to turbocharge the spell. The naagloshii’s defenses barely slowed it, and the cord whipped three times around its throat and tightened savagely.

The skinwalker’s charge faltered and it staggered to one side, its veil falling to shreds by degrees. It started shifting form wildly, struggling to get loose of the supernatural garrote—and failing. The edges of my vision were blurry and darkening, but I kept my will on him, drawing the noose tighter and tighter.

It kicked and struggled wildly—and then changed tactics. It rolled up to a desperate crouch, extended a single talon, and swept it around in a circle, carving a furrow into the rock. It touched the circle with its will, and I felt it when the simple magical construct sprang up and cut off the noose spell from its source of power: me. The silver cord shimmered and vanished.

I lay there on the ground, barely able to lift my head. I looked toward the cottage and the safety it represented, standing only forty feet away. It might as well have been forty miles.

The naagloshii ran its talons along the fur at its throat and made a satisfied, growling noise. Then its eyes moved to me. Its mouth spread into a carnivorous smile. Then it stepped out of the circle and began to stalk nearer.

One bloody and spectacular mess, coming up.

Chapter Forty-five

The naagloshii walked over to me and stood there, smiling, as its inhuman features shifted and contorted, from something bestial back toward something almost human. It probably made it easier to talk.

“That was hardly pathetic at all,” it murmured. “Who gifted you with the life fire, little mortal?”

“Doubt you know him,” I responded. It was an effort to speak, but I was used to meeting the rigorous demands of life as a reflexive smart-ass. “He’d have taken you out.”

The skinwalker’s smile widened. “I find it astonishing that you could call forth the very fires of creation—and yet have no faith with which to employ them.”

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “I get sick of sadistic twits like you.”

It tilted its head. It dragged its claws idly across the stone, sharpening them. “Oh?”

“You like seeing someone dangling on a hook,” I said. “It gets you off. And once I’m dead, the fun’s over. So you feel like you have to drag things out with a conversation.”

“Are you so eager to leave life, mortal?” the naagloshii purred.

“If the alternative is hanging around here with you, I sure as hell am,” I replied. “Get it over with or buzz off.”

Its claws moved, pure, serpentine speed, and my face suddenly caught on fire. It hurt too much to scream. I doubled up, clutching my hands at the right side of my face, and felt my teeth grinding together.

“As you wish,” the naagloshii said. It leaned closer. “But let me leave you with this thought, little spirit caller. You think you’ve won a victory by taking the phage from my hands. But he was hanging meat for me for more than a day, and I left nothing behind. You don’t have words for the things I did to him.” I could hear its smile widening. “It is starving. Mad with hunger. And I smell a young female caller inside the hogan,” it purred. “I was considering throwing the phage inside with her before you so kindly saved me the bother. Meditate upon that on your way to eternity.”

Even through the pain and the fear, my stomach twisted into frozen knots.

Oh, God.

Molly.

I couldn’t see out of my right eye, and I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I turned my head far to the right so that my left eye could focus on the naagloshii crouching over me, its long fingers, tipped with bloodied black claws, twitching in what was an almost sexual anticipation.

I didn’t know if anyone had ever thrown a death curse backed by soulfire. I didn’t know if using my own soul as fuel for a final conflagration would mean that it never went to wherever it is souls go once they’re finished here. I just knew that no matter what happened, it wasn’t going to hurt for much longer, and that I wanted to wipe that grin off the skinwalker’s face before I went.

I wasn’t sure how defiant you could look with a one-eyed stare, but I did my best, even as I prepared the blast that would burn the life from my body as I unleashed it.

Then there was a blur of light, and something darted past the naagloshii’s back. It tensed and let out a snarl of surprise, whirling away from me to stare after the source of light. Its back, I saw, bore a long and shallow wound, straight across its hunched shoulders, as narrow and fine as if cut by a scalpel.

Or a box knife.

Toot-toot whirled about in midair, a bloodied utility knife clutched in one hand like a spear. He lifted a tiny trumpet to his lips and piped out a shrill challenge, the notes of a cavalry charge in high-pitched miniature. “Avaunt, villain!” he cried in a shrill, strident tone. Then he darted at the skinwalker again.

The naagloshii roared and swept out a claw, but Toot evaded the blow and laid a nine-inch-long slice up the skinwalker’s arm.

It whirled on the tiny faerie in a sudden fury, its form shifting, becoming more feline, though it kept the long forelimbs. It pursued Toot, claws snatching—but my miniature captain of the guard was always a hairsbreadth ahead.

“Toot!” I called, as loudly as I was able. “Get out of there!”

The naagloshii spat out an acidic-sounding curse as Toot avoided its claws again, and slapped a hand at the air itself, hissing out words in an alien tongue. The wind rose in a sudden, spiteful little gale, and it hammered Toot’s tiny body from the air. He crashed into a patch of blackberry bushes at the edge of the clearing, and the sphere of light around him winked out with a dreadfully sudden finality.

The naagloshii turned, kicking dirt back toward the fallen faerie with its hind legs. Then it stalked toward me again, seething in fury. I watched him come, knowing that there was nothing I could do.

At least I’d gotten Thomas away from the bastard.

The naagloshii’s yellow eyes burned with hate as it closed the distance and lifted its claws.

“Hey,” said a quiet voice. “Ugly.”

I turned and stared across the small clearing at the same time the skinwalker did.

I don’t know how Injun Joe managed to get through the ring of attackers and to the summit of the hill, but he had. He stood there in moccasins, jeans, and a buckskin shirt decorated with bone beads and bits of turquoise. His long silver hair hung in its customary braid, and the bone beads of his necklace gleamed pale in the night’s gloom.

The naagloshii faced the medicine man without moving.

The hilltop was completely silent and still.

Then Listens-to-Wind smiled. He hunkered down and rubbed his hands in some mud and loose earth that lightly covered the rocky summit of the hill. He cupped his hands, raised them to just below his face, and inhaled through his nose, breathing in the scent of the earth. Then he rubbed his hands slowly together, the gesture somehow reminding me of a man preparing to undertake heavy routine labor.

He rose to his feet again, and said, calmly, “Mother says you have no place here.”

The naagloshii bared its fangs. Its growl prowled around the hilltop like a beast unto itself.

Lightning flashed overhead with no accompanying rumble of thunder. It cast a harsh, eerily silent glare down on the skinwalker. Listens-to-Wind turned his face up to the skies and cocked his head slightly. “Father says you are ugly,” he reported. He narrowed his eyes and straightened his shoulders, facing the naagloshii squarely as thunder rolled over the island, lending a monstrous growling undertone to the old man’s voice. “I give you this chance. Leave. Now.”

The skinwalker snarled. “Old spirit caller. The failed guardian of a dead people. I do not fear you.”

“Maybe you should,” Listens-to-Wind said. “The boy almost took you, and he doesn’t even know the Diné, much less the Old Ways. Begone. Last chance.”

The naagloshii let out a warbling growl as its body changed, thickening, growing physically thicker, more powerful-looking. “You are not a holy man. You do not follow the Blessing Way. You have no power over me.”

“Don’t plan to bind or banish you, old ghost,” Injun Joe said. “Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears.” He clenched his hands into fists and said, “Let’s go.”

The skinwalker let out a howl and hurled its arms forward. Twin bands of darkness cascaded forth, splintering into dozens and dozens of shadowy serpents that slithered through the night air in a writhing cloud, darting toward Listens-to-Wind. The medicine man didn’t flinch. He lifted his arms to the sky, threw back his head, and sang in the wavering, high-pitched fashion of the native tribes. The rain, which had vanished almost entirely, came down again in an almost solid sheet of water that fell on maybe fifty square yards of hilltop, drenching the oncoming swarm of sorcery and melting it to nothing before it could become a threat.

Injun Joe looked back down again at the naagloshii. “That the best you got?”

The naagloshii snarled more words in unknown tongues, and began flinging power with both arms. Balls of fire like the one I had seen at Château Raith were followed by crackling spheres of blue sparks and wobbling green spheres of what looked like Jell-O and smelled like sulfuric acid. It was an impressive display of evocation. Had a kitchen sink gone flying toward Listens-to-Wind, conjured from who knows where, it wouldn’t have startled me. The naagloshii pulled out all the stops, hurling enough raw power at the small, weathered medicine man to scour the hilltop clean to the bedrock.

I have no idea how the old man countered it all, even though I watched him do it. Again he sang, and this time shuffled his feet in time with the music, bending his old body forward and back again, the motions obviously slowed and muted by his age but just as obviously part of a dance. He was wearing a band of bells on his ankles, and another on each wrist, and they jingled in time with his singing.

All of that power coming at him seemed unable to find a mark. Fire flashed by him as his feet shuffled and his body swayed without so much as singeing a hair. Crackling balls of lightning vanished a few feet in front of him, and resumed their course a few feet beyond him, apparently without crossing the space between. Globes of acid wobbled in flight and splattered over the earth, sizzling and sending up clouds of choking vapors, but not actually doing him any harm. The defense was elegant. Rather than trying to match force against force and power against power, the failure of the incoming sorcery to harm Listens-to-Wind seemed like part of the natural order, as if the world was a place in which such a thing was perfectly normal, reasonable, and expected.

But as the naagloshii hurled agony and death in a futile effort to overcome Listens-to-Wind’s power, it was also striding forward, closing the distance between them, until it stood less than twenty feet from the old medicine man. Then its eyes glittered with a terrible joy, and with a roar it hurled itself physically upon the old man.

My heart leapt into my throat. Listens-to-Wind might not have come down on my side in this matter, but he had helped me more than once in the past, and was one of the few wizards to hold Ebenezar McCoy’s respect. He was a decent man, and I didn’t want to see him get hurt in my defense. I tried to cry out a warning, and as I did, I caught the look on his face as the naagloshii pounced.

Injun Joe was smiling a fierce, wolfish smile.

The naagloshii came down, its mouth stretching into a wolflike muzzle, extending claws on all four of its limbs as it prepared to savage the old man.

But Listens-to-Wind spoke a single word, his voice shaking the air with power, and then his form melted and shifted, changing as fluidly as if he’d been made of liquid mercury that until that moment had only been held in the shape of an old man by an effort of will. His form simply resolved itself into something different, as naturally and swiftly as taking a deep breath.

When the naagloshii came down, it didn’t sink its claws into a leathery old wizard.

Instead, it found itself muzzle to muzzle with a brown bear the size of a minibus.

The bear let out a bone-shaking roar and surged forward, overwhelming the naagloshii with raw mass and muscle power. If you’ve ever seen a furious beast like that in action, you know that it isn’t something that can be done justice in any kind of description. The volume of the roar, the surge of implacable muscle beneath heavy pelt, the flash of white fangs and glaring red-rimmed eyes combine into a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s terrifying, elemental, touching upon some ancient instinctual core inside every human alive that remembers that such things equal terror and death.

The naagloshii screamed, a weird and alien shriek, and raked furiously at the bear, but it had outsmarted itself. Its long, elegantly sharp claws, perfect for eviscerating soft-skinned humans, simply did not have the mass and power they needed to force their way through the bear’s thick pelt and the hide beneath, much less the depth to cut through layers of fat and heavy muscle. It might as well have strapped plastic combs to its limbs, for all the good its claws did it.

The bear seized the skinwalker’s skull in its vast jaws, and for a second, it looked like the fight was over. Then the naagloshii blurred, and where a vaguely simian creature had been an instant before, there was only a tiny flash of urine yellow fur, a long, lean creature like a ferret with oversized jaws. It wiggled free of the huge bear and evaded two slaps of its giant paws, letting out a defiant, mocking snarl as it slid free.

But Injun Joe wasn’t done yet, either. The bear lifted itself into a ponderous leap, and came down to earth again as a coyote, lean and swift, that raced after the ferret nimbly, fangs bright. It rushed after the fleeing ferret—which suddenly turned, jaws opening wide, and then wider, and wider, until an alligator coated in sparse tufts of yellow fur turned to meet the onrushing canine, which found itself too close to turn aside.

The canine form melted as it shot toward the alligator’s maw, and a dark-winged raven swept into the jaws and out the far side as they snapped shut. The raven turned its head and let out mocking caws of laughter as it flew away, circling around the clearing.

The alligator shuddered all over, and became a falcon, golden and swift, its head marked by tufts of yellowish fur that almost looked like the naagloshii’s ears had in its near-human form. It hurtled forward with supernatural speed, vanishing behind a veil as it flew.

I heard the raven’s wings beat overhead as it circled cautiously, looking for its enemy—and then was struck from behind by the falcon’s claws. I watched in horror as the hooked beak descended to rip at the captured raven—and met the spiny, rock-hard back of a snapping turtle. A leathery head twisted and jaws that could cut through medium-gauge wire clamped onto the naagloshii-falcon’s leg, and it let out another alien shriek of pain as the two went plummeting to the earth together.

But in the last few feet, the turtle shimmered into the form of a flying squirrel, limbs extended wide, and it converted some of its falling momentum into forward motion, dropping to a roll as it hit the ground. The falcon wasn’t so skilled. It began to change into something else, but struck the stony earth heavily before it could finish resolving into a new form.

The squirrel whirled, bounded, and became a mountain lion in midleap, landing on the stunned, confused mass of feathers and fur that was the naagloshii. Fangs and claws tore, and black blood stained the ground to the sound of more horrible shrieks. The naagloshii coalesced into an eerie shape, four legs and batlike wings, with eyes and mouths everywhere. All the mouths were screaming, in half a dozen different voices, and it managed to tear its way free of the mountain lion’s grip and go flapping and tumbling awkwardly across the ground. It staggered wildly and began to leap clumsily into the air, bat wings beating. It looked like an albatross without enough headwind, and the mountain lion was hard on its heels the whole way, claws lashing out to tear and rake.

The naagloshii disappeared into the darkness, its howls drifting up in its wake as it fled. It continued to scream in pain, almost sobbing, as it rushed down the slope toward the lake. Demonreach followed its departure with a surly sense of satisfaction, and I couldn’t say that I blamed it.

The skinwalker fled the island. Its howls drifted on the night wind for a time, and then they were gone.

The mountain lion stared in the direction that the naagloshii had fled for long moments. Then he sat down, his head hanging, shivered, and became Injun Joe once more. The old man was sitting on the ground, supporting himself with both hands. He stood up slowly, and a bit stiffly, and one of his arms looked like it might be broken midway between wrist and elbow. He continued to look after his routed opponent, then snorted once and turned to walk carefully over to me.

“Wow,” I told him quietly.

He lifted his chin slightly. For a moment, pride and power shone in his dark eyes. Then he smiled tiredly at me, and was only a calm, tired-looking old man again. “You claimed this place as a sanctum?” he asked.

I nodded. “Last night.”

He looked at me, and couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether to laugh in my face or slap me upside the head. “You don’t get into trouble by halves, do you, son?”

“Apparently not,” I slurred. I spat blood from my mouth. There was a lot of that, at the moment. My face hadn’t stopped hurting just because the naagloshii was gone.

Injun Joe knelt down beside me and examined my wounds in a professional manner. “Not life-threatening,” he assured me. “We need your help.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I’m tapped. I can’t even walk.”

“All you need is your mind,” he said. “There are trees around the battle below. Trees that are under strain. Can you feel them?”

He’d barely said the words when I felt them through my link to the island’s spirit. There were fourteen trees, in fact, most of them old willows near the water. Their branches were bowed down, sagging beneath enormous burdens.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded distant to me, and full of detached calm.

“The island can be most swiftly rid of the beings in them,” Injun Joe said. “If it withdraws the water from the earth beneath those trees for a time.”

“So?” I said. “How am I supposed to—”

I broke off in midsentence as I felt Demonreach respond. It seemed to seize upon Injun Joe’s words, but then I understood that nothing of the sort had happened. Demonreach had understood Injun Joe only because it had understood the thoughts that those words created in my head. Communication by sound was a concept so inelegant and cumbersome and alien to the island’s spirit that it could never have truly happened. But my thoughts—those it could grasp.

I could all but feel the soil shifting, settling slightly, as the island withdrew the water in the ground beneath those trees. It had the predictable side effect that I realized Injun Joe had been going for. Once the ground around the trees’ roots had become arid, it began to leach water from the trees themselves, drawing it back out through the same capillary action that had brought it in. It flowed in from the outermost branches most quickly, leaving the structures behind it dry.

And brittle.

Tree branches began to break with enormous, popping cracks. A lot of branches broke, dozens, all within a few seconds, and it was like listening to packs of firecrackers going off. There was a sudden cacophony of thunder and gunfire that rose up from the docks below, and flashes of light that threw bizarre shadows against the clouds overhead.

I tried to focus on my other knowledge of the island, and I felt it—the surge in energy being released below, the increased flow of strange blood into the ground beneath the affected trees—blood that they drank thirstily, in their sudden drought conditions. The Wardens were moving forward, into the tree line. The vampires were racing ahead of them, their steps the light, swift stride of predators on the trail of wounded prey. Strange things were dying in the trees, amidst bursts of magic and flurries of gunfire.

A light rose over the island, a bright silver star that hung in the air for a long moment, like a flare.

Once he saw that, Injun Joe’s shoulders sagged a little, and he let out a slow, relieved breath. “Good. Good, that’s done for them.” He shook his head and looked at me. “You’re a mess, boy. Do you have any supplies here?”

I tried to sit up and couldn’t. “The cottage,” I blurted. “Molly. Thomas—the vampire.” I looked toward the bushes where one loyal little guardian had bought me precious seconds in the thick of the fight and started pushing my way to my feet. “Toot.”

“Easy,” Listens-to-Wind said. “Easy, easy, son. You can’t just—”

The rest of what he had to say was drowned out by a vast roaring noise, and everything, all my thoughts and fears, stopped making any noise at all inside my head. It was just . . . quiet. Gorgeously quiet. And nothing hurt.

I had time to think to myself, I could get to liking this.

Then nothing.

Chapter Forty-six

I heard voices speaking somewhere nearby. My head was killing me, and my face felt tight and swollen. I could feel warmth on my right side, and smelled the scent of burning wood. A fire popped and crackled. The ground beneath me was hard but not cold. I was lying on blankets or something.

“. . . really no point to doing anything but waiting,” Ebenezar said. “Sure, they’re under a roof, but it’s leaking. And if nothing else, morning should take care of it.”

“Ai ya,” Ancient Mai muttered. “I’m sure we could counter it easily enough.”

“Not without risk,” Ebenezar said in a reasonable tone. “Morgan isn’t going anywhere. What’s the harm in waiting for the shield to fall?”

“I do not care for this place,” Ancient Mai replied. “Its feng shui is unpleasant. And if the child was no warlock, she would have lowered the shield by now.”

“No!” came Molly’s voice. It sounded weirdly modulated, as if being filtered through fifty feet of a corrugated pipe and a kazoo. “I’m not dropping the shield until Harry says it’s okay.” After a brief pause she added, “Uh, besides. I’m not sure how.”

A voice belonging to one of the Wardens said, “Maybe we could tunnel beneath it.”

I exhaled slowly, licked my cracked lips, and said, “Don’t bother. It’s a sphere.”

“Oh!” Molly said. “Oh, thank God! Harry!”

I sat up slowly, and before I had moved more than an inch or two, Injun Joe was supporting me. “Easy, son,” he said. “Easy. You’ve lost some blood, and you got a knot on your head that would knock off a hat.”

I felt really dizzy while he said that, but I stayed up. He passed me a canteen and I drank, slowly and carefully, one swallow at a time. Then I opened my eyes and glanced around me.

We were all in the ruined cottage. I sat on the floor near the fireplace. Ebenezar sat on the hearth in front of the fireplace, his old wooden staff leaned up against one shoulder. Ancient Mai stood on the opposite side of the cottage from me, flanked by four Wardens.

Morgan lay on the bedroll where I’d left him, unconscious or asleep, and Molly sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, holding the quartz crystal in both hands. It shimmered with a calm white light that illuminated the interior of the cottage much more thoroughly than the fire did, and a perfectly circular dome of light the size of a small camping tent enclosed both Morgan and my apprentice in a bubble of defensive energy.

“Hey,” I said to Molly.

“Hey,” she said back.

“I guess it worked, huh?”

Her eyes widened. “You didn’t know if it would?”

“The design was sound,” I said. “I’d just never had the chance to field-test it.”

“Oh,” Molly said. “Um. It worked.”

I grunted. Then I looked up at Ebenezar. “Sir.”

“Hoss,” he said. “Glad you could join us.”

“We waste time,” Ancient Mai said. She looked at me and said, “Tell your apprentice to drop the shield at once.”

“In a minute.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the Wardens beside her looked a little more alert.

I ignored her and asked Molly, “Where’s Thomas?”

“With his family,” said a calm voice.

I looked over my shoulder to see Lara Raith standing in the doorway, a slender shape wrapped in one of the blankets from a bunk on the Water Beetle. She looked as pale and lovely as ever, though her hair had been burned down close to her scalp. Without it to frame her face, there was a greater sense of sharp, angular gauntness to her features, and her grey eyes seemed even larger and more distinct. “Don’t worry, Dresden. Your cat’s-paw will live to be manipulated another day. My people are taking care of him.”

I tried to find something in her face that would tell me anything else about Thomas. It wasn’t there. She just watched me coolly.

“There, vampire,” Ancient Mai said politely. “You have seen him and spoken to him. What follows is Council business.”

Lara smiled faintly at Ancient Mai and turned to me. “One more thing before I go, Harry. Do you mind if I borrow the blanket?”

“What if I do?” I asked.

She let it slip off of one pale shoulder. “I’d give it back, of course.”

The image of the swollen, bruised, burned creature that had kissed Madeline Raith as it pulled out her entrails returned to my thoughts, vividly.

“Keep it,” I told her.

She smiled again, this time showing teeth, and bowed her head. Then she turned and left. I idly followed her progress down to the shore, where she walked out onto the floating dock and was gone.

I looked at Ebenezar. “What happened?”

He grunted. “Whoever came through the Nevernever opened a gate about a hundred yards back in the trees,” he said. “And he brought about a hundred big old shaggy spiders with him.”

I blinked, and frowned. “Spiders?”

Ebenezar nodded. “Not conjured forms, either. They were the real thing, from Faerie, maybe. Gave us a real hard time. Some of them started webbing the trees while the others kept us busy, trying to trap us in.”

“Didn’t want us getting behind them to whoever opened the gate,” Listens-to-Wind said.

“Didn’t want anyone to see who it was, more likely,” I said. “That was our perp. That was the killer.”

“Maybe,” Ebenezar said quietly, nodding. “As soon as those trees and the webbing came down, we started pushing the spiders back. He ran. And once he was gone, the spiders scattered, too.”

“Dammit,” I said quietly.

“That’s what all this was about,” Ebenezar said. “There was no informant, no testimony.”

I nodded. “I told you that to draw the real killer out. To force him to act. And he did. You saw it with your own eyes. That should be proof enough that Morgan is innocent.”

Ancient Mai shook her head. “The only thing that proves is that someone else is willing to betray the Council and has something to hide. It doesn’t mean that Morgan couldn’t have killed LaFortier. At best, it suggests that he did not act alone.”

Ebenezar gave her a steady look. Then he said, “So there is a conspiracy now—is what you’re saying? What was that you were saying earlier about simplicity?”

Mai glanced away from him, and shrugged her shoulders. “Dresden’s theory is, admittedly, a simpler and more likely explanation.” She sighed. “It is, however, insufficient to the situation.”

Ebenezar scowled. “Someone’s got to hang?”

Mai turned her eyes back to him and held steady. “That is precisely correct. It is plausible that Morgan was involved. The hard evidence universally suggests that he is guilty. And the White Council will not show weakness in the face of this act. We cannot afford to allow LaFortier’s death to pass without retribution.”

“Retribution,” Ebenezar said. “Not justice.”

“Justice is not what keeps the various powers in this world from destroying the White Council and having their way with humanity,” Ancient Mai responded. “Fear does that. Power does that. They must know that if they strike us, there will be deadly consequences. I am aware how reprehensible an act it would be to sentence an innocent man to death—and one who has repeatedly demonstrated his dedication to the well-being of the Council, to boot. But on the whole, it is less destructive and less irresponsible than allowing our enemies to perceive weakness.”

Ebenezar put his elbows on his knees and looked at his hands. He shook his head once, and then said nothing.

“Now,” Ancient Mai said, turning her focus back to me. “You will instruct your apprentice to lower the shield, or I will tear it down.”

“Might want to take a few steps back before you do,” I said. “If anything but the proper sequence takes it apart, it explodes. It’ll take out the cottage. And the tower. And the top of the hill. The kid and Morgan should be fine, though.”

Molly made a choking sound.

“Hngh. Finally made that idea work, did you?” Ebenezar said.

I shrugged. “After those zombies turned up and just hammered their way through my defenses, I wanted something that would give me some options.”

“How long did it take you to make?”

“Nights and weekends for three months,” I sighed. “It was a real pain in the ass.”

“Sounds it,” Ebenezar agreed.

“Wizard McCoy,” Mai said sharply. “I remind you that Dresden and his apprentice aided and abetted a fugitive from justice.”

From behind me, Listens-to-Wind said, “Mai. That’s enough.”

She turned her eyes to him and stared hard.

“Enough,” Listens-to-Wind repeated. “The hour is dark enough without trying to paint more people with the same brush we’re going to be forced to use on Morgan. One death is necessary. Adding two more innocents to the count would be callous, pointless, and evil. The Council will interpret Dresden’s actions as ultimately to the support of the Laws of Magic and the White Council. And that will be the end of it.”

There was no expression on Mai’s face—absolutely none. I couldn’t have told you a darn thing about what was going on behind that mask. She stared at the two older wizards for a time, then at me. “The Merlin will not be pleased.”

“That is good,” Listens-to-Wind said. “No one should be pleased with this day’s outcome.”

“I’ll take Morgan into custody, Mai,” Ebenezar said. “Why don’t you take the Wardens back to the city in the boat? It should give you less trouble without me and Injun Joe on it. We’ll follow along in the other boat.”

“Your word,” Mai said, “that you will bring Morgan to Edinburgh.”

“Bring him and bring him unharmed,” Ebenezar said. “You have my word.”

She nodded her head once. “Wardens.”

Then she walked calmly out. The four Wardens fell into step behind her.

I kept track of them once they were outside. They started down the path that would lead them back to the dock.

I looked up at Listens-to-Wind. “I need your help with something.”

He nodded.

“There’s a patch of blackberry bushes out there. One of the Little Folk tried to play guardian angel for me. The naaglosh—”

“Don’t say the word,” Listens-to-Wind said calmly. “It draws power from fear, and from spreading its reputation. Referring to them by name can only increase their power.”

I snorted. “I saw you send it running. You think I’m giving it any fear?”

“Not at the moment,” Injun Joe said. “But speaking the word doesn’t accomplish anything good. Besides, it’s a sloppy habit to get into.”

I grunted. I could accept that. He’d probably phrased things that way intentionally. Besides, of the two of us, which one had a better track record against naagloshii? I decided to not be an idiot and listen to the medicine man.

“The creature,” I said, “knocked him out of the air. Maybe hurt or killed him.”

Injun Joe nodded. His broken arm had been splinted with a field dressing and wrapped in medical tape. The Wardens had probably brought their own gear. “I saw the very end of your fight. Which is why I felt it appropriate to give the creature the same treatment.” He shook his head. “It took a lion’s courage for the little one to do what he did. I already went looking for him.”

I felt a little bit sick. “Was he . . . ?”

Listens-to-Wind smiled faintly and shook his head. “Knocked senseless for a while, and wounded by blackberry thorns, though his armor protected him from the worst of it.”

I found myself barking out a short little laugh of relief. “That armor? You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “Worst thing hurt was his pride, I think.” His dark eyes sparkled. “Little guy like that, taking on something so far out of his weight class. That was a sight to see.”

Ebenezar snorted. “Yeah. Wonder where the pixie learned that.”

I felt my cheeks coloring. “I didn’t want to do it. I had to.”

“You picked a good fight,” Listens-to-Wind said. “Not a very smart fight. But that old ghost is as close to pure evil as you’ll ever see. Good man always stands against that.”

“You had it on the run,” I said. “You could have killed it.”

“Sure,” Listens-to-Wind said. “Would have been a chase, and then more fight. Might have taken hours. Would have made the old ghost desperate. It would have started using innocents as shields, obstacles, distractions.” The old medicine man shrugged. “Maybe I would have lost, too. And while it was going on, spiders would be eating fat old hill-billies and picking their fangs clean with their bones.”

Ebenezar snorted. “Never would have happened. I don’t much care for vampires, especially not those White Court weasels, but I’ll say this much for them. They can fight, when they have a mind to. After the first rush, those bugs were a lot more careful.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They didn’t have much of a spine when they tried to stop me on the trail to Edinburgh.”

Both of the old wizards traded a look, and then Injun Joe turned back to me. “You got jumped by spiders going through the Way?”

“Yeah,” I said. I thought about it and was surprised. Had it happened so recently? “Two days ago, when I came to Edinburgh. I told you about it. The killer must have had some kind of watch put on the Chicago end of the Way, to get them into position in time to intercept me.” I let out a weary little snigger.

“What’s so funny?” Ebenezar asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just appreciating irony and getting punchy. I guess he didn’t want me letting the Council know where Morgan was.”

“Sounds like a reasonable theory,” Injun Joe said. He looked at Ebenezar. “Got to be somebody at Edinburgh. Cuts the suspect pool down even more.”

Ebenezar grunted agreement. “But not much. We’re getting closer.” He exhaled. “But it won’t do Morgan any good.” He stood, and his knees popped a couple of times on the way. “All right, Hoss,” he said quietly. “I guess we can’t put this off any longer.”

I folded my arms and looked at Ebenezar evenly.

The old man’s face darkened. “Hoss,” he said quietly, “I hate this as much as you do. But as much as you don’t like it, as much as I don’t like it, Ancient Mai is right about this. The real killer will know that Morgan is innocent—but the other powers won’t. They’ll only see us doing business hard and quick, like always. Hell, it might even get the real killer enough confidence to slip up and make a mistake.”

“I told Morgan I’d help him,” I said. “And I will.”

“Son,” Injun Joe said quietly, “no one can help him now.”

I ground my teeth. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m not giving him to you. And I’ll fight you if you make me.”

Ebenezar looked at me and then shook his head, smiling sadly. “You couldn’t fight one of your little pixie friends right now, boy.”

I shrugged. “I’ll try. You can’t have him.”

“Harry,” said a quiet voice, weirdly mutated by the shield.

I looked up to see Morgan lying quietly on his pallet, his eyes open and focused on me. “It’s all right,” he said.

I blinked at him. “What?”

“It’s all right,” he said quietly. “I’ll go with them.” His eyes turned to Ebenezar. “I killed LaFortier. I deceived Dresden into believing my innocence. I’ll give you a deposition.”

“Morgan,” I said sharply, “what the hell are you doing?”

“My duty,” he replied. There was, I thought, a faint note of pride in his voice, absent since he had appeared at my door. “I’ve always known that it might call for me to give up my life to protect the Council. And so it has.”

I stared at the wounded man, my stomach churning. “Morgan . . .”

“You did your best,” Morgan said quietly. “Despite everything that has gone between us. You put yourself to the hazard again and again for my sake. It was a worthy effort. But it just wasn’t to be. No shame in that.” He closed his eyes again. “You’ll learn, if you live long enough. You never win them all.”

“Dammit,” I sighed. I tried to put my face in my hands and had to flinch back as my right cheek touched my skin and began to burn with pain. I still couldn’t see out of my right eye. “Dammit, after all this. Dammit.”

The fire popped and crackled and no one said anything.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” Listens-to-Wind said quietly, breaking the silence. “At least I can make him more comfortable. And you need some more attention, too.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Take the shield down. Please.”

I didn’t want to do it.

But this wasn’t about me.

I showed Molly how to lower the shield.

We got Morgan settled into a bunk on the Water Beetle and prepared to leave. Molly, troubled and worried about me, had volunteered to stay with Morgan. Listens-to-Wind had offered to show her something of what he did with healing magic. I grabbed some painkillers while we were there, and felt like I could at least walk far enough to find Will and Georgia.

Demonreach showed me where they were sleeping, and I led Ebenezar through the woods toward them.

“How did Injun Joe know about me claiming this place as a sanctum?” I asked.

“Messenger arrived from Rashid,” Ebenezar said. “He’s more familiar with what you can do with that kind of bond. So he went up to find you and get you to take those trees out from under the bugs.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never seen anyone do shapeshifting the way he did it.”

“Not many ever have,” Ebenezar said, with obvious pride in his old friend’s skills in his voice. After a moment, he said, “He’s offered to teach you some, if you want to learn.”

“With my luck? I’d shift into a duck or something, and not be able to come back out of it.”

He snorted quietly, and then said, “Not shifting. He knows more than any man alive about dealing with rage over injustice and being unfairly wronged. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s admirable that you have those kinds of feelings, and choose to do something about them. But they can do terrible things to a man, too.” His face was distant for a moment, his eyes focused elsewhere. “Terrible things. He’s been there. I think if you spent some time with him, you’d benefit by it.”

“Aren’t I a little old to be an apprentice?”

“Stop learning, start dying,” Ebenezar said, in the tone of a man quoting a bedrock-firm maxim. “You’re never too old to learn.”

“I’ve got responsibilities,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He nodded. Then he paused for a moment, considering his next words. “There’s one thing about tonight that I can’t figure out, Hoss,” my old mentor said. “You went to all the trouble to get everyone here. To lure the killer here. I give you a perfect excuse to roam free behind the lines with no one looking over your shoulder so you can get the job done. But instead of slipping up through the weeds and taking down the killer—which would clear up this whole business—you go up the hill and throw down with something you know damn well you can’t beat.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

Ebenezar spread his hands. “Why?”

I walked for several tired, heavy steps before answering. “Thomas got into trouble helping me.”

“Thomas,” Ebenezar said. “The vampire.”

I shrugged.

“He was more important to you than stopping the possible fragmentation of the White Council.”

“The creature was heading straight for the cottage. My apprentice and my client were both there—and he had Thomas, too.”

Ebenezar muttered something to himself. “The girl had that crystal to protect herself with. Hell, son, if it went off as violently as you said it would, it might have killed the creature all by itself.” He shook his head. “Normally, I think you’ve got a pretty solid head on your shoulders, Hoss. But that was a bad call.”

“Maybe,” I said quietly.

“No maybe about it,” he replied firmly.

“He’s a friend.”

Ebenezar stopped in his tracks and faced me squarely. “He’s not your friend, Harry. You might be his, but he isn’t yours. He’s a vampire. When all’s said and done, he’d eat you if he was hungry enough. It’s what he is.” Ebenezar gestured at the woods around us. “Hell’s bells, boy. We found what was left of that Raith creature’s cousin, after the battle. And I figure you saw what it did to its own blood.”

“Yeah,” I said, subdued.

“And that was her own family.” He shook his head. “Friendship means nothing to those creatures. They’re so good at the lie that sometimes maybe they even believe it themselves—but in the end, you don’t make friends with food. I been around this world a while, Hoss, and let me tell you—it’s their nature. Sooner or later it wins out.”

“Thomas is different,” I said.

He eyed me. “Oh?” He shook his head and started walking again. “Why don’t you ask your apprentice exactly what made her drop the veil and use that shield, then?”

I started walking again.

I didn’t answer.

We got back into Chicago in the witching hour.

Ancient Mai and the Wardens were waiting at the dock, to escort Ebenezar, Injun Joe, and Morgan to Edinburgh—“in case of trouble.” They left within three minutes of me tying the Water Beetle to the dock.

I watched them go, and sipped water through a straw. Listens-to-Wind had cleaned my wounds and slapped several stitches onto my face, including a couple on my lower lip. He told me that I hadn’t lost the eye, and smeared the entire thing with a paste that looked like guano and smelled like honey. Then he’d made me a shoo-in for first place in the International Walking Wounded Idiot competition, by covering that side of my face and part of my scalp with another bandage that wrapped all the way around my head. Added to the one I needed for the damn lump the skinwalker had given me, I looked like the subject of recent brain surgery, only surlier.

Will and Georgia were sleeping it off under a spread sleeping bag on an inflatable mattress on the rear deck of the Water Beetle, when I walked down the dock, over to the parking lot, and up to a parked Mercedes.

Vince rolled down his window and squinted at me. “Did you curse everyone who desecrated your tomb, or just the English-speaking guys?”

“You just lost your tip,” I told him. “Did you get it?”

He passed me a manila envelope without comment. Then he leaned over and opened his passenger door, and Mouse hopped down from the passenger seat and came eagerly around the car to greet me, wagging his tail. I knelt down and gave the big beastie a hug.

“Your dog is weird,” Vince said.

Mouse was licking my face. “Yeah. Whatcha gonna do?”

Vince grinned, and for just a second, he didn’t look at all nondescript. He had the kind of smile that could change the climate of a room. I stood up and nodded to him. “You know where to send the bill.”

“Yep,” he said, and drove away.

I went back down to the boat and poured some Coke into the now-empty water bottle. I sipped at it carefully so that I wouldn’t break open one of the cuts and bleed some more. I was too tired to clean it up.

Molly fussed around the boat for a few minutes, making sure it was tied down, and then took two sets of spare shorts and T-shirts from the cabin’s tiny closet and left them where Georgia and Will would find them. She finally wound up sitting down on the other bunk across the cabin from me.

“The shield,” I said quietly. “When did you use it?”

She swallowed. “The skinw—the creature threw Thomas into the cabin and he . . .” She shuddered. “Harry. He’d changed. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t him.” She licked her lips. “He sat up and started sniffing the air like . . . like a hungry wolf or something. Looking around for me. And his body was . . .” She blushed. “He was hard. And he did something and all of a sudden I wanted to just rip my clothes off. And I knew he wasn’t in control. And I knew he would kill me. But . . . I wanted to anyway. It was so intense. . . .”

“So you popped the shield.”

She swallowed and nodded. “I think if I’d waited much longer . . . I wouldn’t have been able to think of it.” She looked up at me and back down. “He was changed, Harry. It wasn’t him anymore.”

I left nothing behind. You don’t have words for the things I did to him.

Thomas.

I put the drink aside and folded my arms over my stomach. “You did good, kid.”

She gave me a tired smile. An awkward silence fell. Molly seemed to search for something to say. “They’re . . . they’re going to try Morgan tomorrow,” she said quietly. “I heard Mai say so.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“They expect us to be there.”

“Oh,” I said, “we will be.”

“Harry . . . we failed,” she said. She swallowed. “An innocent man is going to die. The killer is still loose. That entire battle took place and didn’t accomplish anything.”

I looked up at her. Then, moving deliberately, I opened the manila envelope Vince had given me.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Surveillance photos,” I said quietly. “Shot through a telephoto lens from a block away.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

“I hired Vince to take some pictures,” I said. “Well, technically Murphy hired him, because I was worried about my phone being bugged. But I’m getting the bill, so really, it was me.”

“Pictures? What pictures?”

“Of the Way to Chicago from Edinburgh,” I said. “Where it opens up into that alley behind the old meatpacking factory. I had Vince take pictures of anyone coming out of it, right after I informed Edinburgh about the meeting on the island.”

Molly frowned. “But . . . why?”

“Didn’t give them time to think, kid,” I said. “I was fairly sure the killer was in Edinburgh. So I made sure he or she had to come to Chicago. I made sure he didn’t have time to get here by alternate means.”

I drew out the pictures and started flipping through them. Vince had done a crisp, professional job. You could have used them for portraits, much less identification. McCoy, Mai, Listens-to-Wind, Bjorn Bjorngunnarson, the other Wardens were all pictured, both in a wide shot, walking in a Right Stuff group, and in tight focus on each face. “And I made sure Vince and Mouse were there to watch the only fast way into town from Scotland.”

While I did that, Molly puzzled through the logic. “Then . . . that entire scenario on the island . . . the meeting, the fight . . . the entire thing was a ploy?”

“Wile E. Coyote,” I said wisely. “Suuuuuper Genius.”

Molly shook her head. “But . . . you didn’t tell anyone?”

“Nobody. Had to look good,” I said. “Didn’t know who the traitor might be, so I couldn’t afford to give anyone any warning.”

“Wow, Obi-Wan,” the grasshopper said. “I’m . . . sort of impressed.”

“The smackdown-on-the-island plan might have worked,” I said. “And I needed it to get a crack at the skinwalker on friendly ground. But lately I’ve started thinking that you don’t ever plan on a single path to victory. You set things up so that you’ve got more than one way to win.

“What I really needed was a weapon I could use against the killer.” I stared at the last photo for a moment, and then flipped it over and showed it to her. “And now,” I said, a snarl coming unbidden into my voice, “I’ve got one.”

Molly looked at the picture blankly. “Oh,” she said. “Who’s that?”

Chapter Forty-seven

Morgan’s trial was held the next day, but since Scotland was six hours ahead of Chicago, I wound up getting about three hours’ worth of sleep sitting up in a chair. My head and face hurt too much when I lay all the way down.

When I got back to the apartment with Molly, Luccio was gone.

I had been pretty sure she would be.

I got up the next morning and took stock of myself in the mirror. What wasn’t under a white bandage was mostly bruised. That was probably the concussion grenade. I was lucky. If I’d have been standing where Lara had been when Binder’s grenade went off, the overpressure would probably have killed me. I was also lucky that we’d been outdoors, where there was nothing to contain and focus the blast. I didn’t feel lucky, but I was.

It could have been a fragmentation grenade spitting out a lethal cloud of shrapnel—though at least my duster would probably have offered me some protection from that. Against the blast wave of an explosion, it didn’t do jack. Having gained something like respect for Binder’s know-how, when it came to mayhem, I realized that he may have been thinking exactly that when he picked his gear for the evening.

I couldn’t shower without getting my stitches wet, so after changing my bandages, I took a birdbath in the sink. I wore a button-up shirt, since I would probably compress my brain if I tried to pull on a tee. I also grabbed my formal black Council robe with its blue stole and my Warden’s cape. I did my best to put my hair in order, though only about a third of it was showing. And I shaved.

“Wow,” Molly said as I emerged. “You’re taking this pretty seriously.” She was sitting in a chair near the fireplace, running her fingers lightly down Mister’s spine. She was one of the few people he deemed worthy to properly appreciate him in a tactile sense. Molly wore her brown apprentice’s robe, and if her hair was bright blue, at least she had it pulled back in a no-nonsense style. She never wore a lot of makeup, these days, but today she was wearing none at all. She had made the very wise realization that the less attention she attracted from the Council, the better off she would be.

“Yup. Cab here yet?”

She shook her head and rose, displacing Mister. He accepted the situation, despite the indignity. “Come on, Mouse,” she said. “We’ll give you a chance to go before we head out.”

The big dog happily followed her out the door.

I got on the phone and called Thomas’s apartment. There was no answer.

I tried Lara’s number, and Justine answered on the first ring. “Ms. Raith’s phone.”

“This is Harry Dresden,” I said.

“Hello, Mr. Dresden,” Justine replied, her tone businesslike and formal. She wasn’t alone. “How may I help you today?”

Now that the furor of the manhunt had blown over, my phone was probably safe to talk on. But only probably. I emulated Justine’s vocal mannerisms. “I’m calling to inquire after the condition of Thomas.”

“He’s here,” Justine said. “He’s resting comfortably, now.”

I’d seen what terrible shape Thomas was in. If he was resting comfortably, it was because he had fed, deeply and intently, with instinctive obsession.

In all probability, my brother had killed someone.

“I hope he’ll recover quickly,” I said.

“His caretaker—”

That would be Justine.

“—is concerned about complications arising from his original condition.”

I was quiet for a moment. “How bad is it?”

The businesslike meter of her voice changed, filling with raw anxiety. “He’s under sedation. There was no choice.”

My knuckles creaked as they tightened on the earpiece of the phone.

I left nothing behind. You don’t have words for the things I did to him.

“I’d like to visit, if that can be arranged.”

She recovered, shifting back into personal assistant mode. “I’ll consult Ms. Raith,” Justine said. “It may not be practical for several days.”

“I see. Could you let me know as soon as possible, please?”

“Of course.”

“My number is—”

“We have that information, Mr. Dresden. I’ll be in touch soon.”

I thanked her and hung up. I bowed my head and found myself shaking with anger. If that thing had done my brother as much harm as it sounded like, I was going to find the naagloshii and rip him to gerbil-sized pieces if I had to blow up every cave in New Mexico to do it.

Molly appeared in the doorway. “Harry? Cab’s here.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go spoil someone’s day.”

I tried not to think too hard about the fact that Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, pretty near always took a hideous beating at the hands of his foes, and finished the day by plunging off a two-mile-high cliff.

Well, then, Harry, I thought to myself, you’ll just have to remember not to repeat Wile E.’s mistake. If he would just keep going after he runs off the cliff, rather than looking down at his feet, everything would be fine.

They held the trial in Edinburgh.

There wasn’t much choice in that. Given the recent threats to the Senior Council and the unexpected intensity of the attack at Demonreach, they wanted the most secure environment they could get. The trial was supposed to be held in closed session, according to the traditions of how such things were done, but this one was too big. Better than five hundred wizards, a sizable minority of the whole Council, would be there. Most of them would be allies of LaFortier and their supporters, who were more than eager to See Justice Done, which is a much prettier thing to do than to Take Bloodthirsty Vengeance.

Molly, Mouse, and I took the Way, just as I had before. This time, when I reached the door, there was a double-sized complement of Wardens on duty, led by the big Scandinavian, all of them from the Old Guard. I got a communal hostile glare from them as I approached, with only a desultory effort to disguise it as indifference. I ignored it. I was used to it.

We went into the complex, past the guard stations—they were all fully manned, as well—and walked toward the Speaking Room. Maybe it said something about the mind-set of wizards in general that the place was called “the Speaking Room” and not “the Listening Room” or, in the more common vernacular, “an auditorium.” It was an auditorium, though, rows of stone benches rising in a full circle around a fairly small circular stone stage, rather like the old Greek theaters. But before we got to the Speaking Room, I turned off down a side passage.

With difficulty, I got the Wardens on guard to allow me, Mouse, and Molly into the Ostentatiatory while one of them went to Ebenezar’s room and asked him if he would see me. Molly had never been into the enormous room before, and stared around it with unabashed curiosity.

“This place is amazing,” she said. “Is the food for the bigwigs only, or do you think they’d mind if I ate something?”

“Ancient Mai doesn’t weigh much more than a bird,” I said. “LaFortier’s dead, and they haven’t replaced him yet. I figure there’s extra.”

She frowned. “But is it supposed to be only for them?”

I shrugged. “You’re hungry. It’s food. What do you think?”

“I think I don’t want to make anyone angry at me. Angrier.”

The kid has better sense than I do, in some matters.

Ebenezar sent the Warden back to bring me up to his room at once, and he’d already told the man to make sure Molly was fed from the buffet table. I tried not to smile, at that. Ebenezar was of the opinion that apprentices were always hungry. Can’t imagine who had ever given him that impression.

I looked around his receiving room, which was lined with bookshelves filled to groaning. Ebenezar was an eclectic reader. King, Heinlein, and Clancy were piled up on the same shelves as Hawking and Nietzsche. Multiple variants of the great religious texts of the world were shamelessly mixed with the writings of Julius Caesar and D. H. Lawrence. Hundreds of books were handmade and handwritten, including illuminated grimoires any museum worth the name would readily steal, given the chance. Books were crammed in both vertically and horizontally, and though the spines were mostly out, it seemed clear to me that it would take the patience of Job to find anything, unless one remembered where it had been most recently placed.

Only one shelf looked neat.

It was a row of plain leather-bound journals, all obviously of the same general design, but made with subtly different leathers, and subtly different dyes that had aged independently of one another into different textures and shades. The books got older and more cracked and weathered rapidly as they moved from right to left. The leftmost pair looked like they might be in danger of falling to dust. The rightmost journal looked new, and was sitting open. A pen held the pages down, maybe thirty pages in.

I glanced at the last visible page, where Ebenezar’s writing flowed in a strong, blocky style.

. . . seems clear that he had no idea of the island’s original purpose. I sometimes can’t help but think that there is such a thing as fate—or at least a higher power of some sort, attempting to arrange events in our favor despite everything we, in our ignorance, do to thwart it. The Merlin has demanded that we put the boy under surveillance at once. I think he’s a damn fool.

Rashid says that warning him about the island would be pointless. He’s a good judge of people, but I’m not so sure he’s right this time. The boy’s got a solid head on his shoulders, generally. And of all the wizards I know, he’s among the three or four I’d be willing to see take up that particular mantle. I trust his judgment.

But then again, I trusted Maggie’s, too.

Ebenezar’s voice interrupted my reading. “Hoss,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Full of questions,” I replied. I closed the journal, and offered him the pen.

My old mentor’s smile only touched his eyes as he took the pen from me: he’d intended me to see what he’d written. “My journal,” he said. “Well. The last three are. The ones before that were from my master.”

“Master, huh?”

“Didn’t used to be a dirty word, Hoss. It meant teacher, guide, protector, professional, expert—as well as the negative things. But it’s the nature of folks to remember the bad things and forget the good, I suppose.” He tapped the three books previous to his own. “My master’s writings.” He tapped the next four. “His master’s writings, and so on, back to here.” He touched the first two books, very gently. “Can’t hardly read them no more, even if you can make it through the language.”

“Who wrote those two?”

“Merlin,” Ebenezar said simply. He reached past me to put his own journal back up in place. “One of these days, Hoss, I think I’ll need you to take care of these for me.”

I looked from the old man to the books. The journals and personal thoughts of master wizards for more than a thousand years? Ye gods and little fishes.

That would be one hell of a read.

“Maybe,” Ebenezar said, “you’d have a thought or two of your own, someday, that you’d want to write down.”

“Always the optimist, sir.”

He smiled briefly. “Well. What brings you here before you head to the trial?”

I passed him the manila envelope Vince had given me. He frowned at me, and then started looking through pictures. His frown deepened, until he got to the very last picture.

He stopped breathing, and I was sure that he understood the implication. Ebenezar’s brain doesn’t let much grass grow under its lobes.

“Stars and stones, Hoss,” Ebenezar said quietly. “Thought ahead this time, didn’t you?”

“Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally,” I said.

He put the papers back in the envelope and gave it back to me. “Okay. How do you see this playing out?”

“At the trial. Right before the end. I want him thinking he’s gotten away with it.”

Ebenezar snorted. “You’re going to make Ancient Mai and about five hundred former associates of LaFortier very angry.”

“Yeah. I hardly slept last night, I was so worried about ’em.”

He snorted.

“I’ve got a theory about something.”

“Oh?”

I told him.

Ebenezar’s face darkened, sentence by sentence. He turned his hands palm up and looked down at them. They were broad, strong, seamed, and callused with work—and they were steady. There were scabs on one palm, where he had fallen to the ground during last night’s melee. Ink stained some of his fingertips.

“I’ll need to take some steps,” he said. “You’d best get a move on.”

I nodded. “See you there?”

He took his spectacles off and began to polish the lenses carefully with a handkerchief. “Aye.”

The trial began less than an hour later.

I sat on a stone bench that was set over to one side of the stage floor, Molly at my side. We were to be witnesses. Mouse sat on the floor beside me. He was going to be a witness, too, though I was the only one who knew it. The seats were all filled. That was why the Council met at various locations out in the real world, rather than in Edinburgh all the time. There simply wasn’t enough room.

Wardens formed a perimeter all the way around the stage, at the doors, and in the aisles that came down between the rows of benches. Everyone present was wearing his or her formal robes, all flowing black, with stoles of silk and satin in one of the various colors and patterns of trim that denoted status among the Council’s members. Blue stoles for members, red for those with a century of service, a braided silver cord for acknowledged master alchemists, a gold-stitched caduceus for master healers, a copper chevron near the collar for those with a doctorate in a scholarly discipline (some of the wizards had so many of them that they had stretched the fabric of the stole), an embroidered white Seal of Solomon for master exorcists and so on.

I had a plain blue stole with no ornaments whatsoever, though I’d been toying with the idea of embroidering “GED” on it in red, white, and blue thread. Molly was the only one in the room wearing a brown robe.

People were avoiding our gazes.

The White Council loved its ceremonies. Anastasia Luccio appeared in the doorway in her full regalia, plus the grey cloak of the Wardens. Her arm was still in a sling, but she carried the ceremonial staff of office of the Captain of the Wardens in one hand. She entered the room, and the murmuring buzz of the crowd fell silent. She slammed the end of the staff three times upon the floor, and the six members of the Senior Council entered in their dark robes and purple stoles, led by the Merlin. They proceeded to the center rear of the stage and stood solemnly. Peabody appeared, carrying a lap-sized writing desk, and sat down on the far end of the bench from Molly and me, to begin taking notes, his pen scratching.

I put my hand on Mouse’s head and waited for the show to begin—because that’s all this was. A show.

Two more Wardens appeared with a bound figure between them. Morgan was brought in and stood as all accused brought before the Council did—with his hands bound in front of him and a black hood over his head. He wasn’t in any shape to be walking, the idiot, but he was managing to limp heavily along without being physically supported by either Warden. He must have been on a load of painkillers to manage it.

The Merlin, speaking in Latin, said, “We have convened today on a matter of justice, to try one Donald Morgan, who stands accused of the premeditated murder of Senior Council Member Aleron LaFortier, conspiracy with the enemies of the White Council, and treason against the White Council. We will begin with a review of the evidence.”

They stacked things up against Morgan for a while, laying out all the damning evidence. They had a lot of it. Morgan, standing there with the murder weapon in his hand, over the still-warm corpse. The bank account with slightly less than six million dollars suddenly appearing in it. The fact that he had escaped detention and badly wounded three Wardens in the process, and subsequently committed sedition by misleading other wizards—Molly and I were just barely mentioned by name—into helping him hide from the Wardens.

“Donald Morgan,” the Merlin said, “have you anything to say in your defense?”

That part was sort of unusual. The accused were very rarely given much of a chance to say anything.

It clouded issues so.

“I do not contest the charges,” Morgan said firmly through his black hood. “I, and I alone, am responsible for LaFortier’s death.”

The Merlin looked like he’d just found out that someone had cooked up his own puppy in the sausage at breakfast that morning. He nodded once. “If there is no other evidence, then the Senior Council will now pass—”

I stood up.

The Merlin broke off and blinked at me. The room fell into a dead silence, except for the scratch of Peabody’s pen. He paused to turn to a new page and pulled a second inkwell out of his pocket, placing it on the writing desk.

Anastasia stared at me with her lips pressed together, her eyes questioning. What the hell was I doing?

I winked at her, then walked out into the center of the stage and turned to face the Senior Council.

“Warden Dresden,” Ebenezar said, “have you some new evidence to present for the Senior Council’s consideration?”

“I do,” I said.

“Point of order,” Ancient Mai injected smoothly. “Warden Dresden was not present at the murder or when the accused escaped custody. He can offer no direct testimony as to the truth or falsehood of those events.”

“Another point of order,” Listens-to-Wind said. “Warden Dresden earns a living as a private investigator, and his propensity for ferreting out the truth in difficult circumstances is well established.”

Mai looked daggers at Injun Joe.

“Warden Dresden,” the Merlin said heavily. “Your history of conflict with Warden Morgan acting in his role as a Warden of the White Council is well-known. You should be advised that any damning testimony you give will be leavened with the knowledge of your history of extreme, sometimes violent animosity.”

The Merlin wasn’t the Merlin for nothing. He had instincts enough to sense that maybe the game wasn’t over yet, after all, and he knew how to play to the crowd. He wasn’t warning me, so much as making sure that the wizards present knew how much I didn’t like Morgan, so that my support would be that much more convincing.

“I understand,” I said.

The Merlin nodded. “Proceed.”

I beamed at him. “I feel just like Hercule Poirot,” I said, in my reasonably functional Latin. “Let me enjoy this for a second.” I took a deep breath and exhaled in satisfaction.

The Merlin had masterful self-control. His expression never changed—but his left eye twitched in a nervous tic. Score one for the cartoon coyote.

“I first became suspicious that Morgan was being framed . . . well, basically when I heard the ridiculous charge against him,” I said. “I don’t know if you know this man, but I do. He’s hounded me for most of my life. If he’d been accused of lopping off the heads of baby bunny rabbits because someone accused them of being warlocks, I could buy that. But this man could no more betray the White Council than he could flap his arms and fly.

“Working from that point, I hypothesized that another person within the Council had killed LaFortier and set Morgan up to take the blame. So I began an independent investigation.” I gave the Senior Council and the watching crowd of wizards the rundown of the past few days, leaving out the overly sensitive and unimportant bits. “My investigation culminated in the theory that the guilty individual was not only trying to fix the blame upon Morgan, but planting the seeds of a renewed outbreak of hostilities with the vampire White Court, by implicating them in the death.

“In an effort to manipulate this person into betraying himself,” I continued, “I let it be known that a conspirator had come forward to confess their part in the scheme, and would address members of the White Council at a certain place and time in Chicago. Working on the theory that the true killer was a member of the Council—indeed, someone here at headquarters in Edinburgh—I hypothesized that he would have little choice but to come to Chicago through the Way from Edinburgh, and I had the exit of that Way placed under surveillance.” I held up the manila envelope. “These are the photographs taken at the scene, of everyone who came through the Way during the next several hours.”

I opened the envelope and began passing the Senior Council the photos. They took them, looking at each in turn. Ebenezar calmly confirmed that the images of the Wardens exiting the Way together with himself, Mai, and Listens-to-Wind were accurate.

“Other than this group,” I said, “I believe it is highly unlikely that anyone from Edinburgh should have randomly arrived at the Way in Chicago. Given that the group was indeed assaulted by creatures with the support of a wizard of Council-level skill at that meeting, I believe it is reasonable to state that the killer took the bait.” I turned, drawing out the last photo with a dramatic flourish worthy of Poirot, and held it up so that the crowd could see it while I said, “So why don’t you tell us what you were doing in the Chicago area last night . . . Wizard Peabody?”

If I’d had a keyboard player lurking nearby for a soap-opera organ sting, it would have been perfect.

Everyone on the Senior Council except Ebenezar and, for some reason, the Gatekeeper, turned to stare slack-jawed at Peabody.

The Senior Council’s secretary sat perfectly still beneath his little lap desk. Then he said, “I take it that you have proof more convincing than a simple visual image? Such things are easily manufactured.”

“In fact,” I said, “I do. I had a witness who was close enough to smell you.”

On cue, Mouse stood up and turned toward Peabody.

His low growl filled the room like a big, gentle drumroll.

“That’s all you have?” Peabody asked. “A photo? And a dog?”

Mai looked as if someone had hit her between the eyes with a sledgehammer. “That,” she said, in a breathless tone, “is a Foo dog.” She stared at me. “Where did you get such a thing? And why were you allowed to keep it?”

“He sort of picked me,” I said.

The Merlin’s eyes had brightened. “Mai. The beast’s identification is reliable?”

She stared at me in obvious confusion. “Entirely. There are several other wizards present who could testify to the fact.”

“Yes,” rumbled a stocky, bald man with an Asian cast to his features.

“It’s true,” said a middle-aged woman, with skin several tones darker than my own, maybe from India or Pakistan.

“Interesting,” the Merlin said, turning toward Peabody. There was something almost sharklike about his sudden focus.

“Working on the evidence Dresden found,” Ebenezar said, “Warden Ramirez and I searched Peabody’s chambers thoroughly not twenty minutes ago. A test of the inks he used to attain the signatures of the Senior Council for various authorizations revealed the presence of a number of chemical and alchemical substances that are known to have been used to assist psychic manipulation of their subjects. It is my belief that Peabody has been drugging the ink for the purpose of attempting greater mental influence over the decisions of members of the Senior Council, and that it is entirely possible that he has compromised the free will of younger members of the Council outright.”

Listens-to-Wind’s mouth opened in sudden surprise and understanding. He looked down at his ink-stained fingertips, and then up at Peabody.

Peabody may not have seen the man turn into a grizzly, but he was bright enough to know that Injun Joe was getting set to adjust another relative ass-to-ears ratio. The little secretary took one look around the room, and then at my dog. The expression went out of his face.

“The end,” he said, calmly and clearly, “is nigh.”

And then he flung his spare pot of ink onto the floor, shattering the glass.

Mouse let out a whuffing bark of warning, and knocked Molly backward off of the bench as a dark cloud rose up away from the smashed bottle, swelling with supernatural speed, tendrils reaching out in all directions. One of them caught a Warden who had leapt forward, toward Peabody.

It encircled his chest and then closed. Everything the slender thread of mist touched turned instantly to a fine black ash, slicing through him as efficiently as an electric knife through deli meat. The two pieces of the former Warden fell to the floor with wet, heavy thumps.

I’d seen almost exactly the same thing happen once before, years ago.

“Get back!” I screamed. “It’s mordite!”

Then the lights went out, and the room exploded into screams and chaos.

Chapter Forty-eight

The truly scary part wasn’t that I was standing five feet away from a cloud of weapons-grade deathstone that would rip the very life force out of everything it touched. It wasn’t that I had confronted someone who was probably a member of the Black Council, probably as deadly in a tussle as their members always seemed to be, and who was certainly fighting with his back to the wall and nothing to lose. It wasn’t even the fact that the lights had all gone out, and that a battle to the death was about to ensue.

The scary part was that I was standing in a relatively small, enclosed space with nearly six hundred wizards of the White Council, men and women with the primordial powers of the universe at their beck and call—and that for the most part, only the Wardens among them had much experience in controlling violent magic in combat conditions. It was like standing in an industrial propane plant with five hundred chain-smoking pyromaniacs double-jonesing for a hit: it would only take one dummy to kill us all, and we had four hundred and ninety-nine to spare.

“No lights!” I screamed, backing up from where I’d last seen the cloud. “No lights!”

But my voice was only one amongst hundreds, and dozens of wizards reacted in the way I—and Peabody—had known they would. They’d immediately called light.

It made them instant, easy targets.

Cloudy tendrils of concentrated death whipped out to strike at the source of any light, spearing directly through anyone who got in the way. I saw one elderly woman lose an arm at the elbow as the mordite-laden cloud sent a spear of darkness flying at a wizard seated two rows behind her. A dark-skinned man with gold dangling from each ear roughly pushed a younger woman who had called light to a crystal in her hand. The tendril missed the woman but struck him squarely, instantly dissolving a hole in his chest a foot across, and all but cut his corpse in half as it fell to the floor.

Screams rose, sounds of genuine pain and terror—sounds the human body and mind are designed to recognize and to which they have no choice but to react. It hit me as hard as the first time I’d ever heard it happen—the desire to be away from whatever was causing such fear, combined with the simultaneous engagement of adrenaline, the need to act, to help.

Calmly, said a voice from right beside my right ear—except that it couldn’t have been there because bandages covered that side of my head completely, and it was physically impossible for a voice to come through that clearly.

Which meant that the voice was an illusion. It was in my head. Furthermore, I recognized the voice—it was Langtry’s, the Merlin’s.

Council members, get on the ground immediately, said the Merlin’s calm, unshakable voice. Assist anyone who is bleeding and do not attempt to use lights until the mistfiend is contained. Senior Council, I have already engaged the mistfiend and am preventing it from moving any farther away. Rashid, prevent it from moving forward and disintegrating me, if you please. Mai and Martha Liberty, take its right flank, McCoy and Listens-to-Wind its left. It’s rather strong-willed, so let’s not dawdle, and remember that we must also prevent it from moving upward.

The entire length of that dialogue, though I could have sworn it was physically audible, was delivered in less than half a second—speech at the speed of thought. It came accompanied with a simplified image of the Speaking Room, as if it had been drawn on a mental chalkboard. I could clearly see the swirling outline of the mistfiend surrounded by short blocks, with each block labeled with the names of the Senior Council and drawn to represent a section of three-dimensional dome that would hem the cloudy terror in.

Hell’s bells. The Merlin had, in the literal length of a second and a half, turned pure confusion into an ordered battle. I guess maybe you don’t get to be the Merlin of the White Council by saving up frequent-flier miles. I’d just never seen him in motion before.

Warden Dresden, the Merlin said. Or thought. Or projected. If you would be so good as to prevent Peabody from escaping. Warden Thorsen and his cadre are on the way to support you, but we need someone to hound Peabody and prevent him from further mischief. We do not yet know the extent of his psychic manipulations, so trust none of the younger Wardens.

I love being a wizard. Every day is like Disneyland.

I ripped off my ridiculous stole, robe, and cloak as I turned toward the doorway. The frantic motions of panic made the two or three light sources that had not been instantly snuffed into independent stroboscopes. Running toward the room’s exit was a surreal experience, but I was certain that Peabody had planned his steps before he’d begun to move, and he’d had plenty of time to sprint across the room in the darkness and leave the auditorium.

I tried to think like a wizard who had just been outed as Black Council and marked for capture, interrogation, and probable death. Given that I had been fairly sure it was going to happen to me over the past few days, I’d already given consideration to how to get out of Council HQ, and I figured Peabody had taken more time to plan than I had.

If I was him, I’d rip open a Way into the Nevernever and close it behind me. I’d find a good spot to get out, and then I’d make sure it was prepared to be as lethally hostile to pursuers as I could make it. The centuries upon centuries of wards placed upon the Edinburgh tunnels by generations of wizards, though, prevented any opening to the Nevernever from inside the security checkpoints, so Peabody would have to get through at least one Warden-manned security gate before he enacted his plan.

I had to stop him before he got that far.

I plunged through the doorway and noted that both Wardens on guard outside were of the younger generation who had risen to the ranks since the disastrous battle with the Red Court in Sicily. Both young men were standing blankly at attention, showing no reaction whatsoever to the furor in the Speaking Room.

A corner of a black formal robe snapped as its wearer rounded a corner in the hallway to my right, and I was off and running. I felt like hell, but for a refreshing change of pace, I had an advantage over an older, more experienced wizard—I was younger and in better shape.

Wizards might stay alive and vigorous for centuries, but their bodies still tend to lose physical ability if they do not take great pains to stay in training. Even then, they still don’t have the raw capabilities of a young person—and running at a dead sprint is as raw as physical activity gets.

I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of Peabody, running up ahead of me. He turned another corner, and by the time I rounded that one, I had gained several steps on him. We blew through Administration and passed the Warden barracks, where three Wardens who were still freaking teenagers, the dangerous babies we’d hurried through military training for the war, emerged from the doors twenty feet ahead of Peabody.

“The end is nigh!” he snarled.

All three of them froze in their tracks, their expressions going blank, and Peabody went through the group, puffing, and knocked one of them down. I pushed harder, and he started glancing over his shoulder, his eyes wide.

He ducked around the next corner, and my instincts twigged to what he was about to try. I came around the corner and flung myself into a diving roll, and a spray of conjured liquid hissed as it went by overhead. It smacked against the wall behind me with a frantic chewing noise, like a thousand bottles of carbonated soda all shaken and simultaneously opened.

I hadn’t had time to recharge my energy rings, and they were still on my dresser back home, but I didn’t want Peabody to get comfortable taking shots at me over his shoulder. I lifted my right hand, snarled, “Fuego!” and sent a basketball-sized comet of fire flying down the hallway at him.

He spat out a few words and made a one-handed defensive gesture that reminded me of Doctor Strange, and my attacking spell splashed against something invisible a good three feet short of him. Even so, some of it wound up setting the hem of his formal robes on fire, and he frantically shucked out of it as he continued to flee.

I made up even more distance on him, and as he turned into one of the broad main hallways of the complex, I wasn’t twenty feet away, and the first security checkpoint was right in front of us. Four Wardens, all of them young, manned the gate—which was to say that, since all the grown-ups, grandpas, and fussbudgets who might object were at the trial, they were sitting on the floor playing cards.

“Stop that man!” I shouted.

Peabody shrieked, obviously terrified, “Dresden’s gone warlock! He’s trying to kill me!”

The young Wardens bounced to their feet with the reaction speed of youth. One of them reached for his staff, and another drew his gun. A third turned and made sure the gate was locked—and the fourth acted on pure instinct, whipping her hand around her head in a tight circle and making a throwing gesture as she shouted.

I brought up my shield in time to intercept an invisible bowling ball, but the impact hit the shield with enough force to stop me cold. My legs weren’t ready for that, and I staggered, bouncing a shoulder off of one wall.

Peabody’s eyes gleamed with triumph as I fell, and he snapped, “The end is nigh!” freezing the young Wardens in place, as he’d done before. He ripped the key on its leather thong from around the neck of one of the Wardens, opened the gate, then turned with a dagger in his hand and sliced it along the thigh of the young woman who had clobbered me. She cried out and her leg began spurting blood in rhythm with her heart, a telltale sign of a severed artery.

I got back to my feet and hurled a club of raw force at Peabody, but he defeated it as he had the fireball, leapt through the gate, and ripped at the air, peeling open a passage between this world and the next.

He plunged through it.

“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. None of the young Wardens were moving, not even the wounded girl. If she didn’t get help, she would bleed to death in minutes. “Dammit!” I swore. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I threw myself onto the girl, ripping the belt off of my jeans and praying that the wound was far enough down her leg for a tourniquet to do any good.

Footsteps hammered the floor, and Anastasia Luccio appeared, gun in her good hand, her face white with pain. She slid to a halt next to me, breathing hard, set the weapon on the floor, and said, “I’ve got her. Go!”

On the other side of the security gate, the Way was beginning to close.

I rose and rushed it, diving forward. There was a flash of light, and the stone tunnel around me abruptly became a forest of dead trees that smelled strongly of mildew and stagnant water. Peabody was standing right in front of the Way as he tried to close it, and I hit him in a flying tackle before he could finish the job. He went over backward and we hit the ground hard.

For a stunned half second, neither of us moved, and then Peabody shifted his weight, and I caught the gleam of the bloodied dagger at the edge of my vision.

He thrust the point at my throat, but I got an arm in the way. He opened a vein. I grabbed at his wrist with my other hand, and he rolled, gaining the upper position and gripping the dagger with both hands, leaning against my one arm with all of his weight. Drops of my own blood fell onto my face as he forced the point slowly toward my eye.

I struggled to throw him off me, but he was stronger than he looked, and it was clear that he had more experience in close-quarters fighting than I did. I clubbed at him with my wounded arm, but he shrugged it off.

I felt my triceps giving way and watched the tip of the knife come closer. The breaking point was at hand and he knew it. He threw more effort into his attack, and the dagger’s tip suddenly stung hot against my lower eyelid.

Then there was a huge noise, and Peabody went away. I remained still for a stunned moment, and then looked up.

Morgan lay on the ground just inside the still-open Way, Luccio’s gun smoking in his hand, his wounded leg a mass of wet scarlet.

How he’d managed to run after us given his injury, I had no idea. Even with painkillers, it must have hurt like hell. He stared at Peabody’s body with hard eyes. Then his hand started to shake, and he dropped the gun to the ground.

He followed it down with a groan.

I went to him, breathing hard. “Morgan.” I turned him over and looked at his wound. It was soaked in blood, but it wasn’t bleeding much anymore. His face was white. His lips looked grey.

He opened his eyes calmly. “Got him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You got him.”

He smiled a little. “That’s twice I pulled your ass out of the fire.”

I choked out a little laugh. “I know.”

“They’ll blame me,” he said quietly. “There’s no confession from Peabody, and I’m a better candidate politically. Let them pin it on me. Don’t fight it. I want it.”

I stared down at him. “Why?”

He shook his head, smiling wearily.

I stared down at him for long seconds, and then I got it. Morgan had been lying to me from the very start. “Because you already knew who killed LaFortier. She was there when you woke up in his chambers. You saw who did it. And you wanted to protect her.”

“Anastasia didn’t do it,” Morgan said, his voice intense and low. “She was a pawn. Asleep on her feet. She never even knew she was being used.” He shuddered. “Should have thought of that. She got put in that younger body, made her mind vulnerable to influence again.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Woke up, LaFortier was dead, and she had the knife. Took it from her, veiled her, and pushed her out the door,” Morgan said. “Didn’t have time to get both of us out.”

“So you took the blame thinking you’d sort things out in the aftermath. But you realized that the frame was too good for anyone to believe you when you tried to tell them what was up.” I shook my head. Morgan hadn’t given a damn about his own life. He’d escaped when he realized that Anastasia had still been in danger, that he wouldn’t be able to expose the real traitor alone.

“Dresden,” he said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t tell anyone about Molly. What she tried to do to Ana. I . . . I didn’t tell.”

I stared at him, unable to speak.

His eyes became cloudy. “Do you know why I didn’t? Why I came to you?”

I shook my head.

“Because I knew,” he whispered. He lifted his right hand, and I gripped it hard. “I knew that you knew how it felt to be an innocent man hounded by the Wardens.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to saying that he’d been wrong about me.

He died less than a minute later.

Chapter Forty-nine

Thorsen kept me from bleeding to death from the cut Peabody had given me. The Swede and his backup squad had been faced with a long run to catch up, a lot of locked gates, and the confusion we’d left in our wake. They reached me about three minutes after Morgan died. They did their best to revive Morgan, but his body had taken enough torment and lost too much blood. They didn’t even bother with Peabody. Morgan had double-tapped the traitor’s head with Luccio’s pistol.

They bundled me off to the infirmary, where Injun Joe and a crew of healers—some of whom had gone to medical school when the efficacy of leeches was still being debated—were caring for those wounded in the attack.

After that, things fell into place without requiring my participation.

The Senior Council managed to contain and banish the mordite-infused mistfiend, a rare and dangerous gaseous being from the far reaches of the Nevernever, before it had killed more than forty or fifty wizards. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse, but the fact that it had been the gathering of LaFortier’s former political allies who had been subject to the attack occasioned an enormous outcry of suspicion, with the offended parties claiming that the Merlin had disregarded their safety, been negligent in his security precautions, etc., etc. The fact that the attack had occurred while unmasking LaFortier’s true killer was brushed aside. There was political capital to be had.

Basically the entire supernatural world had heard about LaFortier’s death, the ensuing manhunt for Morgan, and the dustup during his trial, though most of the details were kept quiet. Though there was never any sort of official statement made, word got out that Morgan had been conspiring with Peabody, and that both of them had been killed during their escape attempt.

It was a brutal and callous way for the Council to save face. The Merlin decided that it was ultimately less dangerous for the wizards of the world if everyone knew that the Council responded to LaFortier’s murder with a statement of deadly strength and power—i.e., the immediate capture and execution of those responsible.

But I knew that whoever Peabody had been in bed with, the people who had really been responsible knew that the Council had killed an innocent man, and one of their largest military assets, at that, to get the job done.

Maybe the Merlin was right. Maybe it’s better to look stupid but strong than it is to look smart but weak. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to believe that the world stage bears that strong a resemblance to high school.

The Council’s investigators worked more slowly than Lara’s had, but they got to the same information by following the money, eventually. The Council confronted the White Court with the information.

Lara sent them the heads of the persons responsible. Literally. Leave it to Lara to find a way to get one last bit of mileage out of Madeline and the business manager’s corpses. She told the Council to keep the money, too, by way of apology. The next best thing to six million in cash buys a lot of oil to pour on troubled waters.

He might have wound up with his brains splattered all over a desolate little hellhole in the Nevernever, but Peabody had inflicted one hell of a lot of damage before he was through. A new age of White Council paranoia had begun.

The Merlin, the Gatekeeper, and Injun Joe investigated the extent of Peabody’s psychic infiltration. In some ways, the worst of what he’d done was the easiest to handle. Damn near every Warden under the age of fifty had been programmed with that go-to-sleep trance command, and it had been done so smoothly and subtly that it was difficult to detect even when the master wizards were looking and knew where to find it.

Ebenezar told me later that some of the young Wardens had been loaded up with a lot more in the way of hostile psychic software, though it was impossible for one wizard to know exactly what another had done. Several of them, apparently, had been intended to become the supernatural equivalent of suicide bombers—the way Luccio had been. Repairing that kind of damage was difficult, unpredictable, and often painful to the victim. It was a long summer and autumn for a lot of the Wardens, and a mandatory psychic self-defense regimen was instituted within weeks.

It was tougher for the members of the Senior Council, in my opinion, all of whom had almost certainly been influenced in subtle ways. They had to go back over their decisions for the past several years, and wonder if they had been pushed into making a choice, if it had been their own action, or if the ambiguity of any given decision had been natural to the environment. The touch had been so light that it hadn’t left any lasting tracks. For anyone with half a conscience, it would be a living nightmare, especially given the fact that they had been leading the Council in time of war.

I tried to imagine second-guessing myself on everything I’d done for the past eight years.

I wouldn’t be one of those guys for the world.

I was in the infirmary for a week. I got visits from McCoy, Ramirez, and Molly. Mouse stayed at my bedside, and no one tried to move him. Listens-to-Wind was a regular presence, since he was pretty much my doctor. Several of the young Wardens I had helped train stopped by to have a word, though all of them were looking nervous.

Anastasia never visited, though Listens-to-Wind said she had come by and asked after me when I was asleep.

The Gatekeeper came to see me in the middle of the night. When I woke up, he had already created a kind of sonic shield around us that made sure we were speaking in privacy. It made our voices sound like our heads were covered with large tin pails.

“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.

I gestured at my face, which was no longer bandaged. As Listens-to-Wind had promised, my eye was fine. I had two beautiful scars, though, one running down through my right eyebrow, skipping my eye, and continuing for an inch or so on my cheekbone, and another one that went squarely through the middle of my lower lip and on a slight angle down over my chin. “Like Herr Harrison von Ford,” I said. “Dueling scars and beauty marks. The girls will be lining up now.”

The quip didn’t make him smile. He looked down at his hands, his expression serious. “I’ve been working with the Wardens and administrative staff whose minds Peabody invaded.”

“I heard.”

“It appears,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that the psychic disruption to Anastasia Luccio was particularly severe. I was wondering if you might have any theories that might explain it.”

I stared across the darkened room quietly for a moment, then asked, “Did the Merlin send you?”

“I am the only one who knows,” he said seriously. “Or who will know.”

I thought about it for a moment before I said, “Would my theory make any difference in how she gets treated?”

“Potentially. If it seems sound, it might give me the insight I need to heal her more quickly and safely.”

“Give me your word,” I said. I wasn’t asking.

“You have it.”

“Before he died,” I said, “Morgan told me that when he woke up in LaFortier’s room, Luccio was holding the murder weapon.” I described the rest of what Morgan had told me of that night.

The Gatekeeper stared across the bed at the far wall, his face impassive. “He was trying to protect her.”

“I guess he figured the Council might do some wacky thing like sentencing an innocent person to death.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and then touched the fingertips of his right hand to his heart, his mouth, and his forehead. “It explains some things.”

“Like what?”

He held up his hand. “In a moment. I told you that the damage to Anastasia was quite extensive. Not because she had been persuaded to do violence—that much came easily to her. I believe her emotional attitudes had been forcibly altered.”

“Emotional attitudes,” I said quietly. “You mean . . . her and me?”

“Yes.”

“Because she always believed in keeping her distance,” I said quietly. “Until recently.”

“Yes,” he said.

“She . . . never cared about me.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “There had to have been some kind of foundation upon which to build. It’s entirely possible that she genuinely felt fond of you, and that something might have grown from it. But it was forced into place instead.”

“Who would do that?” I shook my head. “No, that’s obvious. Why would he do that?”

“To keep tabs on you, perhaps,” the Gatekeeper replied. “Perhaps to have an asset in position to remove you, if it became necessary. You were, after all, virtually the only younger Warden who never gave Peabody an opportunity to exploit you, since you never came to headquarters. You’re also probably the most talented and powerful of your generation. The other young Wardens like to associate with you, generally, so there was every chance you might notice something amiss. Taken as a whole, you were a threat to him.”

I felt a little sick. “That’s why she showed up in Chicago when she should have been back at headquarters helping with the manhunt.”

“Almost certainly,” he said. “To give Peabody forewarning if you should get closer to his trail, and to locate Morgan so that Peabody could make him disappear. Morgan dead at the hands of White Council justice is one thing. Had Peabody succeeded, killed Morgan, and gotten rid of the body, then as far as we knew the traitor would be at large in the world, and uncatchable. It would have been a continuous stone around our necks.”

“And a perfect cover for Peabody,” I said. “He could off whoever he wanted, and given the slightest excuse, everyone would assume that it had been Morgan.”

“Not only Peabody,” the Gatekeeper said. “Any of our enemies might have taken advantage of it the same way.”

“And it also explains why he came to Chicago after I dropped that challenge on the Council. He probably thought that the fake informant was Anastasia. He had to go there to find out if his brainlock was holding.” I shook my head. “I mean, he never needed to come through that Way since he already knew one out to Demonreach. Christ, I got lucky.”

“Also true,” the Gatekeeper said. “Though I would suggest that your forethought allowed you to make your own luck.” He shook his head. “If Morgan had not acted so quickly, things might have been even worse. Luccio would have stood accused as well, and neither of them would have had any idea what had happened. Accusing Morgan was bad enough—the Wardens would not have stood for both the Captain and her second to be placed under arrest. It might have begun a civil war all on its own.”

“Morgan . . . he loved Luccio,” I said.

The Gatekeeper nodded. “He wore his heart on his sleeve for quite a while when he was younger. But she never let anyone close. In retrospect, it was a personality shift that should have been noted, though she kept her relationship with you discreet.”

I snorted quietly. “Easy to expect tampering when someone turns into a foaming maniac,” I said. “When someone changes by becoming happy, it’s sort of hard not to be happy for them.”

He smiled, a brief flash of warmth. “Very true.”

“So she’s . . . I mean, when you help her start fixing the damage . . .”

“It’s already begun. Her subconscious has been struggling against the bindings placed in her mind for some time. Even if she’d felt something before, the fact that it was forced upon her will cause a backlash.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Things got sort of tense between us, I guess, after this whole situation got going. I mean, I sort of figured we’d already broken up, but . . .”

But this wasn’t a case of having loved and lost. She had never loved me. Madeline’s kiss, when she’d buried me in an avalanche of bliss while she took a bite from my life force, had proved that. Anastasia hadn’t ever been in love. Maybe she hadn’t ever really liked me. Or maybe she had. Or maybe it was all of the above.

Whatever it had been, it was over now, before it could grow into anything else, and neither of us had been given much of a choice in the matter.

I hadn’t expected it to hurt quite as much as it did.

Rashid put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you deserved to know.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “Thank you. I guess.” I found myself letting out a bitter little laugh.

The Gatekeeper tilted his head.

“I’ve been trying to work out why no one used magic on anyone at LaFortier’s murder.”

“What is your conclusion?”

“You can’t do anything with magic that you don’t really, truly believe in,” I said. “Some part of Luccio had to recognize that killing LaFortier was wrong. So she used a knife. Morgan could no more have unleashed magic upon a lawfully serving Senior Council member or onto his commanding officer than he could have apologized for how he’s treated me. And LaFortier never saw it coming from Anastasia. He probably died confused, never had a chance to use a spell.” I looked up at the Gatekeeper. “It wasn’t some big arcane, mysterious reason. It was because everyone was human.”

“In my experience,” he said, “that is more than mystery enough.”

I was gathering my things to leave and go back home when Ebenezar appeared in the doorway. “Hoss,” he said calmly. “Figured I would walk you home.”

“Appreciated, sir,” I told him. I had already sent Mouse home with Molly, and it was always a good idea to avoid walking the Ways alone. We started walking through the tunnels. I was heartily sick of them. I’m not claustrophobic or anything, but I think you’d need some kind of groundhog gene to enjoy living at White Council HQ.

We hadn’t gone far when I realized that Ebenezar was taking a roundabout route to the Way, through tunnels that were largely unused and unlit. He conjured a dim red light to his staff, just enough to let us see our way, and in the color least likely to be noticed.

“Well,” he said, “we filled LaFortier’s seat on the Senior Council today.”

“Klaus the Toymaker?” I asked.

Ebenezar shook his head slowly. “Klaus didn’t say it, but I suspect the Merlin asked him to decline. Gregori Cristos got the seat.”

I frowned. The seats on the Senior Council were awarded geriocratically. Whoever had the most years of service in the Council was offered the position of leadership, though there was nothing that required a wizard to accept a seat when it was available. “Who the hell is that? He’s not up at the top of the seniority list.”

My mentor grimaced. “Aye. A Greek, and an unpleasant bastard. He’s lived all through southern Asia over the past couple of centuries. Distinguished himself in the battle with that rakshasa raja the Council took on recently.”

“I remember when it happened,” I said. “I heard it was pretty crazy.”

Ebenezar grunted. “He was LaFortier’s protégé.”

I took that in, processing the logic. “I thought that bloc had been appeased.”

“When someone wants power, you can’t buy him off,” Ebenezar said. “He’ll take what you offer and keep on coming. And Cristos as much as told the Merlin that he and his allies would secede from the Council if he didn’t get the seat.”

“Jesus,” I said quietly.

He nodded. “Might as well give the Red Court the keys to all our gates and let them kill us in our sleep. Fewer bystanders would get hurt.”

“So the Merlin made a deal,” I said.

“Didn’t have a lot of choice. Cristos’s people gained a lot of support after they lost so many at the trial. He’d have taken a third of the Council with him.”

“Screw the selection process, huh?”

Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s never been codified by anything but tradition. Oh, the Merlin made a show of adhering to it, but I guarantee you it was arranged behind the scenes, Hoss.” He shook his head. “The Senior Council has issued official positions on LaFortier’s assassination.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Lone gunman.”

He frowned at that for a moment, and then nodded. “Oh, Kennedy. Yes. It was an act of individuals motivated by profit. There is no evidence to suggest the presence of an organized conspiracy. There is no Black Council.”

I stared blankly at Ebenezar. “That’s . . . stupid.”

“Damn right,” he said. “But they had a majority. The Merlin, Cristos, Mai, Martha Liberty, and the Gatekeeper.”

I shook my head. “What the hell does he think he’s accomplishing?”

Ebenezar shrugged. “He’s never been easy to read. And I’ve known him since I was sixteen years old. Two or three explanations come to mind.”

“Like, maybe he’s Black Council.”

Ebenezar walked for several steps in silence. Then he said, “Aye.”

“Or maybe Peabody got to him harder than we all think,” I said.

“Improbable,” Ebenezar said. “The drugs he slipped the Senior Council let him nudge them . . . us. But we’re all too crusty to bend more than that.”

“What then?”

“Well, Hoss,” he said, “maybe Langtry’s worried about the consequences of officially acknowledging the Black Council.”

I felt a little chill glide over the nape of my neck. “He’s worried that if enough people knew that the Black Council was real, they wouldn’t line up to fight them. They’d join.”

“Everyone loves a winner,” Ebenezar said. “And we haven’t been looking too good lately. People are afraid. Cristos is building his influence on it.”

I stopped in my tracks and all but threw up on the cold stone floor.

Ebenezar stopped, putting his hand on my arm, and frowned in concern. “What is it, boy?”

“Sir,” I said, hearing my voice shake. “When Peabody came to the island . . .”

“Yes?”

“He wasn’t alone. Someone else came with him. Someone we never saw.”

We said nothing for a long minute.

“That’s only one explanation, Hoss,” Ebenezar said. “It’s not even a calculated estimate. It’s a flat-out guess.”

There was no conviction in his voice, though. Ebenezar felt the same thing I did. A hard gut feeling that left me certain—not pretty sure, but certain—that I was right. Besides. We were talking in whispers in an out-of-the-way corridor of our own damn stronghold. If that didn’t tell you something was seriously wrong with the White Council, I don’t know what would.

“They’re inside,” I whispered.

My mentor faced me gravely.

“That’s why they whacked LaFortier. To get their own man into position.” I leaned against the wall and shook my head. “They won.”

“They won the round,” he said. “Fight isn’t over.”

“It is for Morgan,” I said.

“But not for you,” he said with harsh intensity. “Morgan thought that saving your life was worth losing his own.” Ebenezar took a deep breath. Then he said, very quietly, “Hoss, it ain’t over. Some of us are going to do something about it.”

I looked at him sharply. “Do something?”

“It’s just a few, for now. Some wizards. Some key allies. People we know we can trust. I’m the only one who knows everyone involved. We’ve got to take this fight to the enemy. Learn more about them. Determine their goals. Shut them down.”

“Fight fire with fire, eh?”

Ebenezar smiled wryly. “In denying the existence of one conspiracy, Langtry has necessitated another.”

“And got himself a twofer with a side order of irony,” I said. “If the Black Council finds out about us, they’re going to jump for joy. They’ll expose us, call us the Black Council, and go on their merry way.”

“ ‘Us’ already, is it?” His eyes gleamed as he nodded. “And given what we’ll be doing, if the White Council finds out, they’re going to call it sedition. They’ll execute us.”

See what I mean? Just like Disneyland.

I thought about it for a minute. “You know that in every objective sense, we’re making a Black Council of our own.”

“Aye.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“With pure hearts and good intentions,” he answered. “Our strength shall be the strength of ten.”

I snorted loudly.

Ebenezar smiled wearily. “Well, Hoss, we’re not going to have much choice other than to be walking down some mighty dark alleys. And doing it in mighty questionable company. Maybe we should think of ourselves as . . . a Grey Council.”

“Grey Council,” I said. We started walking again, and after a few minutes, I asked him, “The world’s gotten darker and nastier, even in just the past few years. Do you think what we do will make a difference?”

“I think the same thing you do,” Ebenezar said. “That the only alternative is to stand around and watch everything go to hell.” His voice hardened. “We’re not going to do that.”

“Damn right we’re not,” I said.

We walked the rest of the way to Chicago together.

Murphy drove me down to get my car out of impound, and I caught her up on most of what had happened on the way.

“You’re holding out on me,” she said, when I finished.

“Some,” I said. “Sort of necessary.”

She glanced at me as she drove and said, “Okay.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “It is?”

“You are beginning to deal with some scary people, Harry,” she said quietly. “And people are trusting you with secrets. I get that.”

“Thanks, Murph.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Harry. It means I’m trusting you to come to me when you’ve got something that intersects with my responsibilities. I’m a cop. If you screw me on something I should know . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know if we could ever patch something like that up.”

“I hear you,” I said.

She shook her head. “I never really cared for Morgan. But I wish it hadn’t ended that way for him.”

I thought about that for a minute and then said, “I don’t know. He went out making a difference. He took out the traitor who had gotten hundreds of wizards killed. He kept him from getting away with God only knows what secrets.” I shrugged. “A lot of Wardens have gone down lately. As exits go, Morgan’s was a good one.” I smiled. “Besides. If he’d been around any longer, he might have had to apologize to me. That would have been a horrible way to go.”

“He had courage,” Murphy admitted. “And he had your back.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did you go to his funeral?”

“No one did,” I said. “Officially, he was corpus non gratus. But we had a kind of a wake, later, unofficially. Told stories about him and came to the conclusion that he really was a paranoid, intolerant, grade-A asshole.”

Murphy smiled. “I’ve known guys like that. They can still be part of the family. You can still miss them when they’re gone.”

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Tell me you aren’t blaming yourself.”

“No,” I said, honestly. “I just wish something I’d done had made more of a difference.”

“You survived,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I think you did all right.”

“Maybe,” I said quietly.

“I went through that phone you sent me.” She meant Madeline’s phone, the one Binder had given me.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“The phone numbers to a lot of missing persons,” she said. “Where’s the owner?”

“With them.”

She pressed her lips together. “There were a lot of calls to a number I traced back to Algeria, and another in Egypt. A couple of restaurants, apparently.” She took an index card out of her pocket and passed it to me. It had the names and addresses of two businesses on it.

“What are they?” she asked.

“No clue,” I said. “Maybe Madeline’s contacts in the Black Council. Maybe nothing.”

“Important?”

“No clue. I guess we’ll file this under ‘wait and see.’ ”

“I hate that file,” she said. “How’s Thomas?”

I shrugged and looked down at my hands. “No clue.”

My apartment was a wreck. I mean, it’s never really a surgical theater—except for right after Morgan had shown up, I guess. But several days of frantic comings and goings, various injuries, and serving as Morgan’s sickbed had left some stains not even my faerie housekeepers could erase. The mattress wasn’t salvageable, much less the bedding, or the rug we’d transported his unconscious body on. It was all soaked in blood and sweat, and the various housekeeping faeries apparently didn’t do dry cleaning.

They’d taken care of the usual stuff, but there was considerable work still to be done, and moving mattresses is never joyful, much less when you’ve been thoroughly banged up by a supernatural heavyweight and then stabbed, just for fun, on top of it.

I set about restoring order, though, and I was hauling the mattress out to tie onto my car so that I could take it to the dump, when Luccio arrived.

She was dressed in grey slacks and a white shirt, and carried a black nylon sports equipment bag, which would hold, I knew, the rather short staff she favored and her Warden’s blade, among other things. The clothes were new. I realized, belatedly, that they’d been the sort that she’d favored when I first met her, wearing another body.

“Hey,” I panted. “Give me a second.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” she replied. She helped me maneuver the mattress onto the top of the Blue Beetle, and then we tied it off with some clothesline. She checked the knots, making sure everything was just so, and then leaned on the car, studying my face.

I looked back at her.

“Rashid said he talked to you,” she said.

I nodded. “Didn’t want to push.”

“I appreciate that. Quite a bit, actually.” She looked off to one side. Mouse, now that the work was done, came out of a shamelessly lazy doze he’d been holding in the doorway and trotted over to Luccio. He sat down and offered her his paw.

She smiled quietly and took it. Then she ruffled the fur behind his ears with her fingers, the way she knew he liked, and stood up. “I, ah . . . I wanted to be sure you were recovering.”

“That’s very responsible of you,” I said.

She winced. “Ah. Dammit to hell, Dresden.” She shook her head. “I spent almost two hundred years not getting close to anyone. For damn good reasons. As can be evidenced by what happened here.”

“Can it?”

She shook her head. “I was . . . distracted, by you. By . . . us, I suppose. Maybe if I hadn’t been, I’d have seen something. Noticed something. I don’t know.”

“I kind of thought that you were distracted by the mind mage who had you twisted in knots.”

She grimaced. “They’re separate things. And I know that. But at the same time, I don’t know that. And here I’m talking like some flustered teenager.” She put her hands on her hips, her mouth set in annoyance. “I’m not good at this. Help.”

“Well,” I said. “I take it that you came here to let me know that you weren’t going to keep pursuing . . . whatever it is we had.”

“It’s not because of you,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Never was, was it?”

She exhaled through her nose, a slow sigh. Her eyes lingered on me. “I’ve always liked you, Dresden. For a long time, I thought you were dangerous. Then I saw you in action against the Heirs of Kemmler, and I respected you.” She smiled slightly. “You’re funny. I like that.”

“But?” I asked.

“But someone pushed me toward you,” she said. “And that pisses me off. And . . .” She started weeping, though her posture and her voice didn’t waver. “And I thought that maybe I had broken through some kind of . . . scar. Or old wound. Or something. That I had grown closer to you, and maybe would keep growing closer to you, and it made me feel . . .” She shook her head as her voice finally broke. “Young. It made everything feel new.”

I walked around the car to stand in front of her. I reached a hand toward her shoulder, but she raised hers in a gesture of denial. “But it was a lie. I’m not young, Harry. I’m not new. I’ve seen and done things that . . . that you can’t understand. That I pray to God you’ll never need to understand.” She took a deep breath. “This is ridiculous. I should be better at handling this.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly. “I mean, other than the obvious.”

“I got to have sex again,” she snarled. “And I liked it. I really liked it. I had forgotten exactly how mind-numbingly incredible sex is. And right now I’m having trouble forming complete sentences because I want to rip your shirt off and bite your shoulder while you’re still sweating while you—” She broke off abruptly, her cheeks turning bright red. “You’re not even forty.”

I leaned against the car, looking at her, and started laughing quietly.

She shook her head, scowling ferociously at me, her dark eyes bright. “How am I supposed to give you orders, now?” she asked. “When you and I have . . . done all the things we’ve done.”

“Well. What if I promise not to put the pictures on the Internet.”

She blinked at me. “Pictures . . . you are joking, Dresden? Aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Because I had quite enough of that during my first young adult-hood,” she said. “Italy may not have had an Internet back then, but you’d be shocked how quickly pictures can circulate even when they’re painted on canvas.”

“Ana,” I said quietly.

She bit her lip and looked at me.

I reached out and took her hands. I squeezed them. Then I lifted them to my lips and kissed them each once, gently. “Whatever the reason, I’m happy to remember the time we had.”

She blinked her eyes several times, looking up at me.

“I get it,” I said. “Things have changed. And maybe that time is over. But you’ll be okay. And I’ll be okay. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.”

She lifted my hands to her lips and kissed them, once each, just as I had. A tear fell on my knuckle. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She nodded and looked up at me. I could see the calm, collected strength of the Captain of the Wardens, ready to assume its guiding role. I could see the uncertainty of Anastasia, who hadn’t been close to anyone in a long time. And maybe I could see something lonely and sad that was a part of who she had been when she was a young woman, well over a century before I was born.

“Goodbye, Harry,” she whispered.

“Goodbye, Ana,” I said.

She squeezed my hands and turned to walk away. She stopped after half a dozen paces and looked back.

“Dresden?”

I looked at her.

“Rashid doesn’t talk much about the night Morgan died. I barely remember anything myself, after Peabody said what he said.”

I knew what she was after. “He wasn’t alone,” I said. “I was with him. And he knew that he’d found the traitor. He was content.”

Something tight in her shoulders eased. “Thank you,” she said.

“Sure.”

Then she turned and strode purposefully away.

I looked at the bloodstained mattress on the Blue Beetle, and sighed. I didn’t feel like driving it anywhere. It was early. It could wait a few hours. I turned to Mouse and said, “Come on, boy. I need a beer.”

We descended out of the summer heat into the relative cool of my basement apartment.

Maybe I needed two.

It took Justine more than two weeks to get me that meeting with Thomas. When she called, she was speaking in her official secretary tone again. She stipulated a public meeting place, where both of us would have the protection of the need to maintain a low profile. It was a precaution that the White Court had required of me, given how tense things had been between the Council and the White Court’s leadership, of late.

I met Thomas on a Saturday afternoon outside the Great Cat House at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

As I came up, I spotted a pair of Lara’s security guys, trying to blend in. Thomas was leaning on the rail that looked into this big pit where they keep a couple of tigers. He was wearing tight blue jeans, and a big loose white shirt. Every woman there and a large chunk of the guys were looking at him, with various degrees of lust, longing, interest, and seething hatred. I walked up and leaned on the rail beside him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

We stood there watching the tigers for a few minutes.

“You asked for the meeting,” he said. “What do you want?”

I arched an eyebrow. “Thomas, I want to see you. Talk to you. Be sure you’re okay. You’re my brother, man.”

He didn’t react to my words. Not at all.

I studied his profile for a few moments. Then I said, “What’s wrong?”

He moved one shoulder in a careless gesture. “Nothing is wrong, per se. Unless . . . it was me.”

“You? Were wrong?”

“I was an idiot to try to live the way I’ve been living,” he said.

I looked at him sharply. “What?”

He rolled a hand in a lazy gesture. “The boutique. The constant nibbling, never sating myself. The . . .” He shrugged. “All of it.”

I stared hard at him. Then I asked, very quietly, “What did the skinwalker do to you?”

“He reminded me of what I really am.”

“Oh?”

Thomas turned to look at me with calm deep grey eyes. “Yes. It didn’t take him long, once he set about it.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “What happened?”

“He hung me up by my heels,” Thomas said. “And ripped strips of skin off of me. One at a time.”

I shuddered.

“It’s agonizing,” he said. “Not terribly dangerous to one of us. My demon didn’t really have any trouble regenerating the skin—but it did become hungry. Very, very hungry.” His eyes suddenly gleamed paler silver and he looked back at the tigers, which were now restlessly prowling the pit. “He’d taken a female kine to the lair where he had me prisoner. And he fed her to me.”

“Hell’s bells,” I breathed.

Thomas watched the tigers pace. “She was lovely. Sixteen or so? I don’t know, exactly. I didn’t ask for her name.” He spread his hands. “It was a fatal feeding, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever really explained to you exactly what that is like.”

“What is it like?” I asked in a quiet rasp.

“Like becoming light,” he said, his eyes drifting closed. “Like sinking into the warmth of a campfire when you’ve been shivering for hours. Like a hot steak after a day of swimming in cold water. It transforms you, Harry. Makes you feel . . .” His eyes became haunted, hollow. “Whole.”

I shook my head. “Thomas. Jesus.”

“Once she was gone and my body was restored, the skinwalker tortured me again, until I was in the same desperate condition. Then he fed me another doe.” He shrugged. “Rinse and repeat. Perhaps half a dozen times. He gave me young women and then put me in agony again. I was all but chewing out my own innards when he took me to the island. To tell you the truth, I barely remember it.” He smiled. “I remember seeing Molly. But you’ve taught her enough to protect herself, it seems.”

“Thomas,” I said gently.

He smirked. “If you ever get tired of her, I hope you’ll let me know.”

I stared at him, sickened. “Thomas.”

He looked at me again, still smirking—but he couldn’t hold it. Once again, his eyes looked hollow, touched with despair. He looked away from me. “You don’t get it, Harry.”

“Then talk to me,” I said, urgently. “Thomas, Jesus Christ. This is not you.”

“Yes, it is,” he spat, the words a bladed hiss. “That’s what it taught me, Harry. At the end of the day, I’m just an empty place that needs to be filled.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to kill those girls. But I did it. I killed them, over and over, and I loved how it felt. When I think back on the memory of it, it doesn’t make me horrified.” He sneered. “It just makes me hard.”

“Thomas,” I whispered. “Please, man. This isn’t what you want to be. I know you, man. I’ve seen you.”

“You’ve seen who I wanted to be,” he said. “Who I thought I was.” He shook his head and looked around at the people around us. “Play a game with me.”

“What game?”

He nodded toward a pair of young women walking by holding ice-cream cones. “What do you see when you look at them? Your first thought.”

I blinked. I looked. “Uh. Blonde and brunette, too young for me, not bad to look at. I bet the blonde paid too much for those shoes.”

He nodded and pointed at an old couple sitting on a bench. “Them?”

“They’re fighting with each other over something and enjoying it. They’ve been together so long, it’s comfortable for them. Later, they’ll hold hands and laugh over the fight.”

He pursed his lips, and pointed at a mother chivvying a trio of small children of various sizes along the zoo. “Them?”

“She’s got an expensive ring, but she’s here at the zoo alone. Her kids all have matching outfits. Her husband works a lot, and she doesn’t look as good as she used to—look how the shoes are biting into her feet. She’s worried that she’s a trophy wife, or maybe an ex-wife in progress. She’s about to start crying.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Can I give you my first thoughts?”

I nodded, frowning at him.

Thomas pointed a finger at the young women. “Food.” He pointed a finger at the old couple. “Food.” He pointed a finger at the mother and her children. “Food.”

I just stared at him.

He rolled his head, inhaling deeply and then exhaling. “Maybe it was all those kills together like that. Maybe he drove me insane with the torment.” He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I just know that things seem a lot simpler now.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked. “That you’re happy, now?”

“Happy,” he said, scorn ringing lightly in his voice. “I’m . . . not wandering around blind anymore. Not trying desperately to be something that I’m not.” He looked back down at the tigers. “Something I can never be.”

I just stood there, shaking my head.

“Oh, empty night, Harry,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m not some kind of ravaging monster. I’m not some kind of psychotic rampaging around the city devouring virgins.” He waved a hand in a casual gesture. “Killing when you feed feels fantastic, but it’s stupid. There are far too many advantages in ensuring that the kine survive. Not only survive, but grow and prosper.” He smiled a bit. “You know, I really think I might have something to offer the world. I never could have exerted any kind of influence on my kin as a moping exile, trying to be human. Maybe this way, I actually can accomplish something. Promote a more responsible standard of relations between humanity and my kind. Who knows?”

I stared at him and said, “Gosh, that’s noble.”

He eyed me.

I hit him with my heaviest sucker punch. “What does Justine think of it?”

He straightened and turned toward me, and there was imminent violence in the set of his body. “What?” he asked. “What did you say to me?”

“You heard me,” I said, without changing posture or rising to the threat.

His hands closed into fists, knuckles popping.

“Still stings, doesn’t it?” I said quietly. “Still burns you when you try to touch her?”

He said nothing.

“And you still remember what it was to hold her. Like you did the night you trashed Madeline at Zero.”

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” he said. He turned to face out, away from the tigers, and his voice was full of weariness. “I don’t know. I just know that it doesn’t hurt so bad all the time anymore.” He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, in a very quiet voice, “I have bad dreams.”

I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, to give him some support. But some instinct warned me that it wouldn’t be welcomed.

“You took a beating,” I said quietly. “What that thing did to you . . . ? Thomas, it knew exactly how to get to you. How to torment you the most. But it won’t last. You survived. You’ll get past it.”

“And go back to that miserable half life I had?” he whispered.

“Maybe,” I said quietly. “I don’t know.”

He looked at me.

“You’re my brother,” I said. “Nothing will ever change that. I’m here for you.”

“You’re a damn fool,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It would be easy to use you. Part of me thinks it’s a fantastic idea.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t an asshole. I said you were my brother.”

The bodyguards stirred. Nothing big. They just sort of animated and moved toward the exits.

Thomas grimaced. “Lara thinks I’ve made great progress. She’s . . .” He shrugged. “Proud of me.”

“I liked you better the other way,” I said. “So did Justine. Maybe that should tell you something.”

“I’ve got to go. She’s afraid you’ll think I’m all brainwashed. Didn’t want to risk you trying to deprogram me when I haven’t been programmed.”

“I confess. The idea occurred to me.”

“If someone had gotten into my head, I don’t think there’d be so many doubts,” he said. “This isn’t something you can help me with, Harry.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Either way, you’re still my brother.”

“Broken damn record,” he said.

I held up a fist.

He stared at it for a couple of silent beats before he made a fist of his own and rapped my knuckles against his.

“Don’t call me,” he said.

“I’ll be patient,” I said. “But not forever.”

He hesitated and then nodded once more. Then he thrust his hands into the hip pockets of his jeans and walked quickly away. The bodyguards fell in behind him. One of them said something while he had one hand pressed against his ear.

Purely from petty malice, I waved a hand and hexed his radio, or phone. Sparks flew out of his ear and he all but fell over trying to get the earbud out.

Thomas looked back.

He grinned. Not long but real.

After he was gone, I turned to regard the tigers. I wondered if I knew them for what they really were, or if all I could see were the stripes.

I’d missed Kirby’s funeral while I was in the infirmary in Edinburgh. A couple of weeks had gone by after that, and I’d talked to Will and Georgia by phone occasionally.

Gaming night came along, and as I had most weeks for the past several years, I showed up at Will and Georgia’s place. I had my Arcanos rule book with me, and a Crown Royal bag filled with dice. I was wearing a black T-shirt that had a monochrome image of several multisided dice and said, in block print, “COME TO THE DORK SIDE. DO NOT MAKE ME DESTROY YOU.”

Will answered the door and smiled at me. “Hey, Harry. Wow, your face is . . . manly.”

“Chicks dig scars,” I said.

“Who is it?” came Andi’s voice. It sounded limp, lifeless.

“It is I, Harry Dresden,” I said solemnly.

Georgia appeared behind Will, smiling. “Harry.” She looked at my shirt, and my gaming stuff. “Oh . . . we weren’t really going to . . .”

Kirby had been the one who ran the game for us.

I stepped aside, grabbed the geek standing behind me, and tugged him forward. “This is Waldo Butters,” I said. “And his geek penis is longer and harder than all of ours put together.”

Butters blinked, first at Georgia and Will, and then at me. “Oh,” he said. “Um. Thank you?”

Will looked from Butters to me, his eyes searching. “What is this?” he asked gently.

“Life,” I said. “It keeps going. Butters says he can handle an Arcanos game. Or he can run a bunch of other ones if we want to try something new.” I cleared my throat. “If you like, we can go over to my place. Change of view and so on.”

Georgia looked at me and gave me a small and grateful smile.

Will looked at me uncertainly. Then he turned back into the apartment. “Andi?”

She appeared beside Georgia. Andi looked absolutely withered. Multiple broken ribs and major surgery will do that to you. She was on her feet and moving, but it was clear that she’d been staying with Will and Georgia so that they could help care for her until she recovered.

I smiled at Andi and said, “I don’t think Kirby would want us to stop playing completely. What do you think? I mean it won’t be the same game, but it might be fun.”

She looked at me and then at Butters. Then she gave me a little smile and nodded.

Will swung the door open wide, and we went inside, where I introduced Butters to everyone and produced several bottles of Mac’s best ale.

See, here’s the thing. Morgan was right: you can’t win them all.

But that doesn’t mean that you give up. Not ever. Morgan never said that part—he was too busy living it.

I closed the door behind me, while life went on.

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 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 ever 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 up on 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 merciless horde of the 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,

Captain’s Fury, and Princeps’ Fury are available

from Ace Books.

ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER

THE DRESDEN FILES

STORM FRONT

FOOL MOON

GRAVE PERIL

SUMMER KNIGHT

DEATH MASKS

BLOOD RITES

DEAD BEAT

PROVEN GUILTY

WHITE NIGHT

SMALL FAVOR

TURN COAT

THE CODEX ALERA

FURIES OF CALDERON

ACADEM’S FURY

CURSOR’S FURY

CAPTAIN’S FURY

PRINCEPS’ FURY

FIRST LORD’S FURY

ROC

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First Printing, April 2010

Copyright © Jim Butcher, 2010 All rights reserved

eISBN : 978-1-101-18630-5

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Table of Contents

Title Page

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

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Author’s Note

Chapter One

I answered the phone, and Susan Rodriguez said, “They’ve taken our daughter.”

I sat there for a long five count, swallowed, and said, “Um. What?”

“You heard me, Harry,” Susan said gently.

“Oh,” I said. “Um.”

“The line isn’t secure,” she said. “I’ll be in town tonight. We can talk then.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

“Harry . . .” she said. “I’m not . . . I never wanted to—” She cut the words off with an impatient sigh. I heard a voice over the loudspeaker in the background, saying something in Spanish. “We’ll have time for that later. The plane is boarding. I’ve got to go. About twelve hours.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll . . . I’ll be here.”

She hesitated, as if about to say something else, but then she hung up.

I sat there with the phone against my ear. After a while, it started making that double-speed busy-signal noise.

Our daughter.

She said our daughter.

I hung the phone up. Or tried. I missed the base. The receiver clattered to the floor.

Mouse, my big, shaggy grey dog, rose up from his usual napping spot in the tiny kitchenette my basement apartment boasted, and came trotting over to sit down at my feet, staring up at me with dark, worried doggy eyes. After a moment, he made a little huffing sound, then carefully picked the receiver up in his jaws and settled it onto the base. Then he went back to staring worriedly at me.

“I . . .” I paused, trying to get my head around the concept. “I . . . I might have a child.”

Mouse made an uncertain, high-pitched noise.

“Yeah. How do you think I feel?” I stared at the far wall. Then I stood up and reached for my coat. “I . . . think I need a drink,” I said. I nodded, focusing on nothing. “Yeah. Something like this . . . yeah.”

Mouse made a distressed noise and rose.

“Sure,” I told him. “You can come. Hell, maybe you can drive me home or something.”

I got honked at a lot on the way to McAnally’s. I didn’t care. I made it without crashing into anyone. That’s the important thing, right? I pulled my battered, trusty old Volkswagen Bug over into the little parking lot next to Mac’s place. I started inside.

Mouse made a whuffing sound.

I looked over my shoulder. I’d left the car door open. The big dog nosed it closed.

“Thanks,” I said.

We went into the pub.

Mac’s place looks like Cheers after a mild apocalypse. There are thirteen wooden pillars irregularly spaced around the room, holding up the roof. They’re all carved with scenes of Old World fairy tales, some of them amusing, more of them sinister. There are thirteen ceiling fans spinning lazily throughout the place, and the irregularly shaped, polished wooden bar has thirteen stools. There are thirteen tables in the room, placed in no specific pattern.

“There’re a lot of thirteens in here,” I said to myself.

It was about two thirty in the afternoon. No one was in the pub except for me and the dog—oh, and Mac. Mac is a man of medium height and medium build, with thick, bony wrists and a shining smooth pate that never shows signs of growing in. He could be anywhere between thirty and fifty and, as always, he was wearing a spotless white apron.

Mouse stared intently at Mac for a moment. Then he abruptly sat down in the entryway at the top of the little stairs, turned around once, and settled down by the door, his chin on his paws.

Mac glanced toward us. “Harry.”

I shambled over to the bar.

Mac produced a bottle of one of his microbrews, but I shook my head. “Um. I’d say, ‘Whiskey, Mac,’ but I don’t know if you have any whiskey. I need something strong, I think.”

Mac raised his eyebrows and blinked at me.

You’ve got to know the guy. He was practically screaming.

But he poured me a drink of something light gold in a little glass, and I drank it. It burned. I wheezed a little, and then tapped a finger next to the glass.

Mac refilled it, frowning at me.

I drank the second glass more slowly. It still hurt going down. The pain gave me something to focus on. Thoughts started to coagulate around it, and then to crystallize into definite shape.

Susan had called me. She was on the way.

And we had a child.

And she had never told me.

Susan had been a reporter for a yellow rag that covered supernatural news. Most of the people who worked there thought they were publishing fiction, but Susan had clued in to the supernatural world on her own, and we’d crossed trails and verbal swords several times before we’d gotten together. We hadn’t been together a terribly long time—a little less than two years. We were both young and we made each other happy.

Maybe I should have known better. If you don’t stand on the sidelines and ignore the world around you, sooner or later you make enemies. One of mine, a vampire named Bianca, had abducted Susan and infected her with the blood thirst of the Red Court. Susan hadn’t gone all the way over—but if she ever lost control of herself, ever took another’s lifeblood, she would.

She left me, afraid that if she didn’t, I’d be the kill that turned her into a monster, and set out into the world to find some way to cope.

I told myself that she had good reason to do so, but reason and heart-break don’t speak the same language. I’d never really forgiven myself for what had happened to her. I guess reason and guilt don’t speak the same language, either.

It was probably a damned good thing I had gone into shock, because I could feel emotions that were stirring somewhere deep inside me, gathering power like a storm far out to sea. I couldn’t see them. I could only feel their effects, but it was enough to know that whatever was rising inside me was potent. Violent. Dangerous. Mindless rage got people killed every day. But for me, it might be worse.

I’m a professional wizard.

I can make a lot more things happen than most people.

Magic and emotions are tied up inextricably. I’ve been in battle before, and felt the terror and rage of that kind of place, where it’s a fight just to think clearly through the simplest problems. I’d used my magic in those kinds of volatile circumstances—and a few times, I’d seen it run wild as a result. When most people lose control of their anger, someone gets hurt. Maybe someone even gets killed. When it happens to a wizard, insurance companies go broke and there’s reconstruction afterward.

What was stirring in me now made those previous feelings of battle rage seem like anemic kittens.

“I’ve got to talk to someone,” I heard myself say quietly. “Someone with some objectivity, perspective. I’ve got to get my head straight before things go to hell.”

Mac leaned on the bar and looked at me.

I cradled the glass in my hand and said quietly, “You remember Susan Rodriguez?”

He nodded.

“She says that someone took our daughter. She says she’ll be here late tonight.”

Mac inhaled and exhaled slowly. Then he picked up the bottle and poured himself a shot. He sipped at it.

“I loved her,” I said. “Maybe love her still. And she didn’t tell me.”

He nodded.

“She could be lying.”

He grunted.

“I’ve been used before. And I’m a sucker for a girl.”

“Yes,” he said.

I gave him an even look. He smiled slightly.

“She’d be . . . six? Seven?” I shook my head. “I can’t even do the math right now.”

Mac pursed his lips. “Hard thing.”

I finished the second glass. Some of the sharper edges had gotten softer. Mac touched a finger to the bottle, watching me. I shook my head.

“She could be lying to me,” I said quietly. “If she’s not . . . then . . .”

Mac closed his eyes briefly and nodded.

“Then there’s this little girl in trouble,” I said. I felt my jaw clench, and the storm inside me threatened to come boiling up. I pushed it down. “My little girl.”

He nodded again.

“Don’t know if I ever told you,” I said. “I was an orphan.”

Mac watched me silently.

“There were times when . . . when it was bad. When I wanted someone to come save me. I wished for it so hard. Dreaming of . . . of not being alone. And when someone finally did come, he turned out to be the biggest monster of all.” I shook my head. “I won’t let that happen to my child.”

Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a resonant baritone, “You’ve got to be very careful, Harry.”

I looked at him, shocked. He’d . . . used grammar.

“Something like this will test you like nothing else,” Mac said. “You’re going to find out who you are, Harry. You’re going to find out which principles you’ll stand by to your death—and which lines you’ll cross.” He took my empty glass away and said, “You’re heading into the badlands. It’ll be easy to get lost.”

I watched him in stunned silence as he finished his drink. He grimaced, as though it hurt his throat on the way down. Maybe he’d strained his voice, using it so much.

I stared down at my hands for a moment. Then I said, “Steak sandwich. And something for the pooch.”

He grunted in the affirmative and started cooking. He took his time about it, divining my intentions with a bartender’s instincts. I didn’t feel like eating, but I had a little time to kill while the buzz faded.

He put my sandwich down in front of me. Then he took a bowl with some bones and some meat out to Mouse, along with a bowl of water. I ate my sandwich and idly noted that Mac never carried food out to anyone. Guess he was a dog person.

I ate my sandwich slowly and paid Mac.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded. “Luck.”

I got up and headed back for the car. Mouse followed beside me, his eyes lifted, watching me to see what I would do.

I marshaled my thoughts. I had to be careful. I had to be wary. I had to keep my eyes open. I had to keep the storm inside me from exploding, because the only thing I knew for certain was that someone—maybe Susan, maybe my enemies—was trying to manipulate me.

Either way, Mac was right.

I was heading into the badlands.

Chapter Two

Susan arrived at around one in the morning.

I had gone back home from the pub and straight to my lab in the subbasement, and made with the wizardry, which demanded an intense focus on my tasks. Over the next several hours, I prepared a couple of things that might come in handy in the immediate future. Then I went back up the stepladder to my apartment and put on my force rings. Each of them is a braid of three individual rings, and I had enchanted them to store up a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. They were pretty efficient, but it wouldn’t hurt to top them off, so I spent half an hour beating the tar out of the heavy bag hanging in one corner of my apartment’s living area.

I showered, cleaned up, made some dinner, and generally never stopped moving. If I did that, thoughts might start to creep in, and I wasn’t sure how I would deal with them.

I didn’t even consider trying to sleep. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So I stayed in motion. I cleaned the kitchen. I bathed Mouse and brushed out his coat. I picked up my living room, my room, my bathroom. I changed out my cat Mister’s litter box. I tidied up the fireplace, and set out fresh candles to illuminate the room.

It took me a couple of hours of that to realize that I was trying to make my apartment look nice because Susan was coming over. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I was debating with myself whether or not I might need to clean Mister up (and having a narrow-eyed glare bestowed upon me from his perch atop my highest bookshelf) when there was a polite knock at the door.

My heart started being faster.

I opened the door and found Susan facing me.

She was a woman of medium height, which meant she was about a foot shorter than me. Her features were leanly angular, except for her mouth. She had dark, straight hair and even darker eyes, and her skin had a sun-bronzed tone to it far deeper than I had ever seen on her before. She looked thinner. I could see the tendons and muscles beneath the skin of her neck, and her cheekbones seemed starker than they had before. She wore black leather pants, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket to complement the pants.

And she had not aged a day.

It had been most of a decade since I had beheld her. In that time, you expect people’s appearances to change a little. Oh, nothing major. A few more pounds, maybe, a few more lines, a few silver hairs. People change. But Susan hadn’t changed. At all.

I guess that’s a nifty perk of being a half-turned vampire of the Red Court.

“Hi,” she said quietly.

“Hi,” I said back. I could meet her eyes without worrying about triggering a soulgaze. She and I had looked upon each other already.

She lowered her eyes and slipped her hands into her jacket pockets. “Harry . . . can I come in?”

I took half a step back. “I dunno. Can you come in?”

Her eyes flickered with a spark of anger. “You think I crossed over?”

“I think that taking unnecessary chances has lost its appeal to me,” I said.

She pressed her lips together, but then nodded in acquiescence and stepped over the threshold of my apartment, the barrier of magical energy that surrounds any home—an action that simply would not have been possible for a vampire without first receiving my permission.

“Okay,” I said, backing up to let her enter before I shut the door again. As I did, I saw a sandy-haired, plain-looking man seated casually on the top step of the concrete stairwell that led down to my apartment. He wore khakis, a blue denim jacket, and was reclining just enough to display the lines of a shoulder holster beneath the jacket. He was Susan’s ally and his name was Martin. “You,” I said. “Joy.”

Martin’s lips twitched into the faint and distant echo of a smile. “Likewise.”

I shut the door on him and, just to be obnoxious, clacked the dead bolt closed as loudly as I could.

Susan smiled a little and shook her head. She looked around the apartment for a moment—and then suddenly froze as a growl came rumbling from the darkened alcove of the minikitchen. Mouse didn’t rise, and his growl was not the savage thing I had heard once or twice before—but it was definitely a sound of polite warning.

Susan froze in place, staring at the kitchen for a moment. Then she said, “You got a dog.”

“He kind of got me,” I replied.

Susan nodded and swept her eyes around the little apartment. “You redecorated a little.”

“Zombies,” I said. “And werewolves. Place has been trashed a few times.”

“I never understood why you didn’t move out of this musty little hole.”

“Musty? Little? My home this is,” I said. “Get you something? Coke, beer?”

“Water?”

“Sure. Have a seat.”

Susan moved silently over to one of the easy chairs framing the fireplace and settled down on its edge, her back straight. I got her some ice water, fetched myself a Coke, and brought the drinks over to her. I settled down in the other chair, so that we partly faced each other, and popped the tab on my drink.

“You’re really going to leave Martin sitting outside?” she asked, amusement in her voice.

“I most certainly am,” I said calmly, and took a sip of my drink.

She nodded and touched her glass to her lips. Maybe she sipped a little water.

I waited as long as I could stand it, maybe two or three whole seconds, before I broke the heavy silence. “So,” I asked casually, “what’s new?”

Her dark eyes regarded me obliquely for a moment before her lips thinned slightly. “This is going to be painful for both of us. Let’s just have it done. We don’t have time to dance around it.”

“Okay. Our child?” I asked. “Yours and mine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

She smoothed her face into a nonexpression. “There hasn’t been anyone else, Harry. Not since that night with you. Not for more than two years before that.”

If she was lying, it didn’t show. I took that in for a moment and sipped some Coke. “It seems like something you should have told me.”

I said it in a voice far calmer than I would have thought possible. I don’t know what my face looked like when I said it. But Susan’s darkly tanned skin became several shades lighter. “Harry,” she said quietly, “I know you must be angry.”

“I burn things to ash and smash holes in buildings when I’m angry,” I said. “I’m a couple of steps past that point right now.”

“You have every right to be,” she said. “But I did what I thought was best for her. And for you.”

The storm surged higher into my chest. But I made myself sit there without moving, breathing slowly and steadily. “I’m listening.”

She nodded and took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “You don’t know what it’s like down there. Central America, all the way down to Brazil. There’s a reason so many of those nations limp along in a state of near-anarchy.”

“The Red Court,” I said. “I know.”

“You know in the abstract. But no one in the White Council has spent time there. Lived there. Seen what happens to the people the Reds rule.” She shivered and folded her arms over her stomach. “It’s a nightmare. And there’s no one but the Fellowship and a few underfunded operatives of the Church to stand up to them.”

The Fellowship of St. Giles was a collection of the supernatural world’s outcasts and strays, many of them half vampires like Susan. They hated the Red Court with a holy passion, and did everything in their power to confound the vampires at every opportunity. They operated in cells, choosing targets, training recruits, planting bombs, and funding their operations through a hundred shady business activities. Terrorists, basically—smart, quick, and tough because they had to be.

“It hasn’t been Disneyland in the rest of the world, either,” I said quietly. “I saw my fair share of nightmares during the war. And then some.”

“I’m not trying to belittle anything that the Council has done,” she said. “I’m just trying to explain to you what I was facing at the time. Teams from the Fellowship rarely sleep in the same bed twice. We’re always on the move. Always planning something or running from something. There’s no place for a child in that.”

“If only there had been someone with his own home and a regular income where she could have stayed,” I said.

Susan’s eyes hardened. “How many people have gotten killed around you, Harry? How many hurt?” She raked her fingers through her hair. “For God’s sake. You said yourself that your apartment has been under attack. Would that have gone any better if you’d had a toddler to watch over?”

“Guess we’ll never know,” I said.

“I know,” she said, her voice suddenly seething with intensity. “God, do you think I didn’t want to be a part of her life? I cry myself to sleep at night—when I can sleep. But in the end, I couldn’t offer her anything but a life on the run. And you couldn’t offer her anything but a life under siege.”

I stared at her.

But I didn’t say anything.

“So I did the only thing I could do,” she said. “I found a place for her. Far away from the fighting. Where she could have a stable life. A loving home.”

“And never told me,” I said.

“If the Red Court had ever learned about my child, they would have used her against me. Period. As a means of leverage, or simple revenge. The fewer people who knew about her, the safer she was going to be. I didn’t tell you, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew that it would make you furious because of your own childhood.” She leaned forward, her eyes almost feverish from the heat in her words. “And I would do a thousand times worse than that, if it meant that she’d be better protected.”

I sipped some more Coke. “So,” I said. “You kept her from me so that she would be safer. And you sent her away to be raised by strangers so that she would be safer.” The storm in me pushed up higher, tingeing my voice with the echo of its furious howl. “How’s that working out?”

Susan’s eyes blazed. Red, swirling tribal marks began to appear on her skin, like tattoos done in disappearing ink, only backward—the Fellowship’s version of a mood ring. They covered the side of her face, and her throat.

“The Fellowship has been compromised,” she said, her words crisp. “Duchess Arianna of the Red Court found out about her, somehow, and had her taken. Do you know who she is?”

“Yeah,” I said. I tried to ignore the way my blood had run cold at the mention of the name. “Duke Ortega’s widow. She’s sworn revenge upon me—and she once tried to buy me on eBay.”

Susan blinked. “How did . . . No, never mind. Our sources in the Red Court say that she’s planning something special for Maggie. We have to get her back.”

I took another slow breath and closed my eyes for a moment.

“Maggie, huh?”

“For your mother,” Susan whispered. “Margaret Angelica.” I heard her fumble at her pockets. Then she said, “Here.”

I opened my eyes and looked at a little wallet-sized portrait of a dark-eyed child, maybe five years old. She wore a pink dress and had purple ribbons in her dark hair, and she was smiling a wide and infectious smile. Some calm, detached part of me filed the face away, in case I needed to recognize her later. The rest of me cringed away from looking any closer, from thinking about the image as anything but a bit of paper and ink.

“It’s from a couple of years ago,” Susan said quietly. “But it’s my most recent picture.” She bit her lip and offered it to me.

“Keep it,” I told her quietly. She put it away. The red marks were fading from her skin, gone the way they had come. I rubbed at my eyes. “For now,” I said slowly, “we’re going to forget about your decision to edit me out of her life. Because chewing over it won’t help her right now, and because her best chance is for us to work together. Agreed?”

Susan nodded.

I spoke the next words through my teeth. “But I haven’t forgotten. Will never forget it. There will be a reckoning on that account later. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She looked up at me with large, shining dark eyes. “I never wanted to hurt you. Or her. I was just . . .”

“No,” I said. “Too late for that now. It’s just wasting time we can’t afford to lose.”

Susan turned her face sharply away from me, to the fire, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her expression was under control. “All right,” she said. “For our next step, we’ve got some options.”

“Like?”

“Diplomacy,” she said. “I hear stories about you. Half of them probably aren’t true, but I know you’ve got some markers you could call in. If enough of the Accord members raise a voice, we might get her back without incident.”

I snorted. “Or?”

“Offer reparations to the Red King in exchange for the child’s life. He doesn’t have a personal interest in this matter, and he outranks Arianna. Give him a bribe big enough and she’ll have to let Maggie go.”

“Right off the top of a building, probably,” I growled.

Susan watched me steadily. “What do you think we should do?”

I felt my lips do something that probably didn’t look like a smile. The storm had settled somewhere around my heart, and heady tendrils of its fury were curling up into my throat. It was a good ten seconds before I could speak, and even then it came out in a snarl.

“Do?” I said. “The Reds stole our little girl. We sure as hell aren’t going to pay them for that.”

A hot and terrible hunger flared up in Susan’s eyes in response to my voice.

“We find Maggie,” I said. “We take her back. And we kill anyone who gets in the way.”

Susan shuddered and her eyes overflowed. She bowed her head and made a small sound. Then she leaned over and gently touched my left hand, the one still covered in slowly fading burn scars. She looked at my hand and winced, beginning to draw away.

I caught her fingers and squeezed hard. She settled her fingers against mine and did the same. We held hands for a silent moment.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her hand was shaking in mine. “Thank you, Harry.”

I nodded. I was going to say something to stiff-arm her and keep the distance, but the warmth of her hand in mine was suddenly something I couldn’t ignore. I was furious with Susan, furious with an intensity you can feel only when someone you care deeply about hurts you. But the corollary of that was unavoidable—I still cared, or I wouldn’t be angry.

“We’ll find her,” I said. “And I will do everything in my power to bring her back safe.”

Susan looked up at me, tears streaking her face, and nodded. Then she lifted a hand and traced her fingers lightly over the scar on my cheek. It was a newer one, still angry and colorful. I thought it made me look like some old-school German character from Golden Age Hollywood with a dueling scar on his cheek. Her fingertips were gentle and warm.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. “There was no one willing to stand up to them. There was no one.”

Our eyes met, and suddenly the old heat was there between us, quivering out from our joined hands, from her fingertips against my face. Her eyes widened a little, and my heart started pounding along rapidly. I was furious with Susan. But apparently my body just read that as “excited” and didn’t bother examining the fine print. I met her eyes for a long moment and then said, through a dry throat, “Isn’t this how we got into this mess?”

She let out a shaking sound that was meant to be a laugh, but was filled with awareness of the inherent irony, and drew her hands away. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” Her voice turned wry. “It’s been a while for me.”

I knew what she meant. I took several slow, deep breaths, separating mind from body. Then I said quietly, “Susan. Whatever happens from here . . . we’re done.” I looked up at her. “You know that. You knew it when you chose not to tell me.”

She looked brittle. She nodded slowly, as if something might break off if she moved any more quickly than that. She folded her hands in her lap. “I . . . know that. I knew it when I did it.”

Silence stretched.

“Right,” I said finally. “Now . . .” I took another deep breath, and told myself it would help. “The way I see it, you didn’t fly into Chicago just for a chat with me. You wouldn’t need Martin for that.”

She lifted an eyebrow at me and nodded. “True.”

“Then why?”

She seemed to gather herself, her voice more businesslike. “There’s a Red outpost here. It’s a place to start.”

“Okay,” I said, rising. “Let’s start.”

Chapter Three

“I hope there are no hard feelings,” Martin told me as he pulled out of the little gravel lot next to the house I board in.

Susan had yielded the passenger seat of the rental car to me, in deference to my storklike legs. “Hard feelings?” I asked.

“About our first meeting,” Martin said. He drove the same way he did everything—blandly. Complete stops. Five miles an hour under the limit. Wherever we were headed, it was going to take forever to get there.

“You mean the way you used me to attempt to assassinate old Ortega?” I asked. “Thereby ensuring that the Code Duello was broken, the duel invalidated, and the vamps’ war with the White Council continued?”

Martin glanced at me, and then into the rearview mirror at Susan.

“I told you,” she said to Martin. “He’s only dense in the short term. He sees everything eventually.”

I gave Susan a slight, wry tilt of my head in acknowledgment. “Wasn’t hard to realize what you were doing in retrospect,” I said. “The Red Court’s war with the White Council must have been the best thing to happen to the Fellowship in ages.”

“I’ve only been with them for slightly over one hundred years,” Martin said. “But it was the best thing to happen in that time, yes. The White Council is one of the only organizations on the planet with the resources to seriously threaten them. And every time the Council won a victory—or even survived what should have been a crushing defeat—it meant that the Red Court was tearing itself to shreds internally. Some of them have had millennia to nurse grudges with rivals. They are appropriately epic in scale.”

“Call me wacky,” I said, “but I had to watch a few too many children die in that war you helped guarantee. No hard feelings?” I smiled at him—technically. “Marty, believe me when I say that you don’t want me to get in touch with my feelings right now.”

I felt Martin’s eyes shift to me, and a little tension gather in his body. His shoulder twitched. He was thinking about his gun. He was pretty good with firearms. The night of my duel with the Red Court vampire named Ortega, Martin had put a round from one of those enormous sniper rifles into Ortega about half a second before the vampire would otherwise have killed me. It had been a gross violation of the Code Duello, the set of rules for resolving personal conflicts between individuals of the nations who had signed the Unseelie Accords.

The outcome of a clean duel might have put an early end to the war between the Red Court and the White Council of Wizards, and saved a lot of lives. It didn’t turn out that way.

“Don’t worry, guy,” I told him. “Ortega was already in the middle of breaking the Code Duello anyway. It would have fallen out the way it did regardless of what you had done that night. And your being there meant that he ate a bullet at the last second instead of me. You saved my life. I’m cognizant of that.”

I kept smiling at him. It didn’t feel quite right, so I tried to do it a little harder. “I’m also aware that if you could have gotten what you wanted by putting the bullet in my back instead of his chest, you would have done it without blinking. So don’t go thinking we’re pals.”

Martin looked at me and then relaxed. He said, “It’s ironic that you, the mustang of the White Council, would immediately cling to its self-righteous position of moral authority.”

“Excuse me?” I said quietly.

He spoke dispassionately, but there was a fire somewhere deep down behind the words—the first I’d ever heard in him. “I’ve seen children die, too, Dresden, slaughtered like animals by a threat no one in the wise and mighty Council seemed to give a good goddamn about—because the victims are poor, and far away, and isn’t that a fine reason to let them die. Yes. If putting a bullet in you would have meant that the Council brought its forces to bear against the Red Court, I would have done it twice and paid for the privilege.” He paused at a stop sign, gave me a direct look, and said, “It is good that we cleared the air. Is there anything else you want to say?”

I eyed the man and said, “You went blond. It makes you look sort of gay.”

Martin shrugged, completely unperturbed. “My last assignment was on a cruise ship catering to that particular lifestyle.”

I scowled and glanced at Susan.

She nodded. “It was.”

I folded my arms, glowered out at the night, and said, “I have literally killed people I liked better than you, Martin.” After another few moments, I asked, “Are we there yet?”

Martin stopped the car in front of a building and said, “It’s in here.”

I eyed the building. Nothing special, for Chicago. Twelve stories, a little run-down, all rented commercial space. “The Reds can’t—Look, it can’t be here,” I said. “This building is where my office is.”

“A known factor, for Red Court business holdings purchased it almost eight years ago,” Martin said, putting the car in park and setting the emergency brake. “I should imagine that was when you saw that sudden rise in the rent.”

I blinked a couple of times. “I’ve . . . been paying rent to the Red Court?”

“Increased rent,” Martin said, with the faintest emphasis. “Duchess Arianna apparently has an odd sense of humor. If it’s any consolation, the people working there have no idea who they’re really working for. They think they’re a firm that provides secure data backups to a multinational import-export corporation.”

“But this is . . . my building.” I frowned and shook my head. “And we’re going to do what, exactly?”

Martin got out of the car and opened the trunk. Susan joined him. I got out of the car on general principles.

“We,” said Martin, definitely not including me, “are going to burgle the office and retrieve files that we hope will contain information that might point the way toward Arianna’s locations and intentions. You are going to remain with the car.”

“The hell I will,” I said.

“Harry,” Susan said, her tone brisk and reasonable, “it’s computers.”

I grunted as if Susan had nudged me with her elbow. Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries. All technology tends to behave unreliably in the presence of a mortal wizard, and the newer it is, the wonkier it seems to become. If I went along with them, well . . . you don’t take your cat with you when you go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn’t polite, but because he’s a cat. “Oh,” I said. “Then . . . I guess I’ll stay with the car.”

“Even odds we’ve been spotted or followed,” Martin said to Susan. “We had to leave Guatemala in a hurry. It wasn’t as smooth an exit as it could have been.”

“We didn’t have days to spare,” Susan said, her voice carrying a tone of wearily familiar annoyance. It was like listening to a husband and wife having an often-repeated quarrel. She opened a case in the trunk and slipped several objects into her pockets. “Allowances have to be made.”

Martin watched her for a moment, selected a single tool from the case, and then slid the straps of a backpack with a hard-sided frame over his shoulders. Presumably it had computer things in it. I stayed on the far side of the car from it and tried to think nonhostile thoughts.

“Just watch for trouble, Harry,” Susan said. “We’ll be back out in twenty minutes or less.”

“Or we won’t,” Martin said. “In which case we’ll know our sloppy exit technique caught up to us.”

Susan made a quiet, disgusted sound, and the pair of them strode toward the building, got to the locked front doors, paused for maybe three seconds, and then vanished inside.

“And I’m just standing here,” I muttered. “Like I’m Clifford the Big Red Dog. Too big and dumb to go inside with Emily Elizabeth. And it’s my building.” I shook my head. “Hell’s bells, I am off my game. Or out of my mind. I mean, here I am talking to myself.”

I knew why I was talking to myself—if I shut up, I would have nothing to think about but a small person, terrified and alone in a den of monsters. And that would make me think about how I had been shut out of her life. And that would make me think about the beast in my chest that was still clawing to get out.

When the local Red Court badass, the late Bianca, had stolen Susan away and begun her transformation into a full- fledged vampire of the Red Court, it had been the vampire’s intention to take my girlfriend away from me. One way or another she had succeeded. Susan as she had been—always joking, always laughing, always touching or kissing or otherwise enjoying life in general and life with me in particular—was gone.

Now she was somewhere between Emma Peel and the She-Hulk. And we had loved each other once. And a child had been born because of it. And Susan had lied to—

Before I could begin circling the block a few more times on that vicious cycle, a cold feeling went slithering down my spine.

I didn’t even look around. Several years of tense missions with Wardens not old enough to buy their own beer had taught me to trust my instincts when they went insane in a darkened city at two in the morning. Without even thinking about it, I crouched, reached into the air surrounding me, and drew a veil around myself.

Veils are subtle, tricky magic, using one of several basic theories to render objects or people less visible than they would be otherwise. I used to suck so badly at veils that I wouldn’t even try them—but I’d had to bone up on them enough to be able to teach my apprentice, Molly Carpenter, how to use them. Molly had a real gift and had learned quickly, but I’d been forcing her to stretch her talents—and it had taken a lot of personal practice time for me to be able to fake it well enough to have credibility in front of the grasshopper.

Long story short—fast, simple veils were no longer beyond my grasp.

The street darkened slightly around me as I borrowed shadow and bent light. Being under a veil always reduced your own ability to see what was happening around you, and was a calculated risk. I figured it was probably worth it. If someone had a gun pointed my way, I had a long damned run before I could get around the corner of a nice thick building. It would be better to be unseen.

I crouched next to the car, not quite invisible but pretty close. The ability to be calm and still was critical to actually using a veil. It is hard to do when you think danger is close and someone might be planning to part you from your thoughts in a purely physical fashion. But I arrested the adrenaline surge and regulated my breathing. Easy does it, Harry.

So I had a dandy view of half a dozen figures that came darting toward the office building with a hideous, somehow arachnid grace. Two of them were bounding along rooftops, vaguely humanoid forms that moved as smoothly as if they were some kind of hunting cat. Three more were closing on the building from different angles at ground level, gliding from shadow to shadow. I couldn’t sense much of them beyond blurs in the air and more shivers along my spine.

The last form was actually scuttling down the sides of buildings on the same street, bounding from one to the next, sticking to the walls like an enormous spider and moving with terrible speed.

I never got more of a look than that—flickering shadows moving with sinister purpose. But I knew what I was looking at.

Vampires.

Red Court vampires.

They closed on my office building like sharks on bloody meat.

The tempest in my chest suddenly raged, and as I watched them vanish into the building—my fricking building—like cockroaches somehow finding a way to wriggle into places they shouldn’t be, the anger rose up from my chest to my eyes, and the reflections of streetlights in the window glass tinted red.

I let the vampires enter the building.

And then I gathered up my fury and pain, honing them like immaterial blades, and went in after them.

Chapter Four

My blasting rod was hanging from its tie on the inside of my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.

I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn’t going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close—they’d be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.

I didn’t take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building to where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above my office. That was probably where Martin and Susan were. It would be where the vampires were heading.

I hit the stairs and took a risk. Spells to dull sound and keep conversations private were basic fare for wizards of my abilities, and it wasn’t much harder to make sure that sound didn’t leave the immediate area around me. Of course, that meant that I was effectively putting myself in a sonic bubble—I wouldn’t hear anything coming toward me, either. But for the moment, at least, I knew the vampires were here while they presumably were unaware of me. I wanted to keep it that way.

Besides, in quarters this close, by the time I reacted to a noise from a vampire I hadn’t seen, I was as good as dead anyway.

So I murmured the words to a reliable bit of phonoturgy and went up the stairs clad in perfect silence. Which was a good thing. I run on a regular basis, but running down a sidewalk or a sandy beach isn’t the same thing as running up stairs. By the time I got to the ninth floor, my legs were burning, I was breathing hard, and my left knee was killing me. What the hell? When had my knees become something I had to worry about?

Cheered by that thought, I paused at the door to the ninth-floor hallway, opened it beneath the protection of my cloak of silence, and then dropped the spell so that I could listen.

Hissing, gurgling speech in a language I couldn’t understand came from the hallway before me, maybe right around the corner I could see ahead. I literally held my breath. Vampires have superhuman senses, but they are as vulnerable to distraction as anyone. If they were talking, they might not hear me, and regular human traffic in this building would probably hide my scent from them.

And why, exactly, a voice somewhere within the storm in my chest whispered, should I be hiding from these murdering scum in the first place? Red Court vampires were killers, one and all. A half-turned vampire didn’t go all the way over until they’d killed another human being and fed upon their life’s blood. Granted, an unwilling soul taken into the Red Court found themselves at the mercy of new and nearly irresistible hungers—but that didn’t change the fact that if they were a card-carrying member of the Red Court, they had killed someone to be there.

Monsters. Monsters who dragged people into the darkness and inflicted unspeakable torments upon them for pleasure—and I should know. They’d done it to me once. Monsters whose existence was a plague upon millions.

Monsters who had taken my child.

The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.

I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, “Fuck subtle.”

The gurgle-hissing from around the corner ahead stopped at a confused intersection of speech that needed no translation: Huh?

I lifted the blasting rod, aimed it at the corner ahead of me, and poured my rage, my will, and my power into it as I snarled, “Fuego!”

Silver-white fire howled down the hallway and bit into the corner ahead, blowing through it as easily as a bullet through a paper target. I drew the line of fire to my left, and as quickly as that, the fire gouged an opening as big as my fist through several sections of studs and drywall, blasting through to the perpendicular hallway where I’d heard the vampires talking. The din was incredible. Wood tore and exploded. Drywall flew into clouds of dust. Pipes screamed as they were severed as neatly as if I’d used a cutter. Wires erupted into clouds of popping sparks.

And something entirely inhuman let out a piercing shriek of pain, pain driven by unnaturally powerful lungs into a scream that was louder than gunshots.

I screamed in answer, in challenge, in defiance, and pelted forward. The runes on my blasting rod shone with white- hot fire, throwing brilliant silver-white light out ahead of me into the darkened building as I ran.

As I rounded the corner a shape was already in motion, coming toward me. My shield bracelet was ready. I lifted my left hand, fingers contorted into a gesture that had nothing to do with magic but that was generally considered insulting. My will poured into the charm bracelet hung with multiple tiny shields, and in an instant my power spread from there into a quarter-dome shape of pure, invisible force in front of me. The black shape of the vampire hit the shield, sending up concentric circles of blue light and white sparks, and then rebounded from it.

I dropped the shield almost before he was done rebounding, leveled the blasting rod with a flick of my wrist, and ripped the vampire in half with a word and a beam of silver fire. The pieces flew off in different directions, still kicking and thrashing hideously.

In the middle of the hallway was a second bisected vampire, which I’d apparently hit when firing blindly through the wall. It was also dying messily. Because I’ve seen too many bad horror movies and know the rules for surviving them, the instant I’d made sure the hallway was empty of more threats, I swung the rod up to point above me.

A vampire clung to the ceiling not twenty feet away. People have this image of vampires as flawless, beautiful gods of dark sex and temptation. And, while the Red Court can create a kind of outer human shell called a flesh mask, and while that mask was generally lovely, there was something very different underneath—a true, hideous, unrepentant monster, like the one looking down at me.

It was maybe six feet tall when standing, though its arms were scrawny and long enough to drag the backs of its claw-tipped hands along the ground. Its skin was rubbery and black, spotted here and there with unhealthy-looking bits of pink, and its belly hung down in flabby grotesquerie. It was bandy-legged and hunchbacked, and its face was somewhere between that of a vampire bat and something from H. R. Giger’s hallucinations.

It saw me round the corner, and its goggling black eyes seemed to get even larger. It let out a scream of . . .

Terror.

It screamed in fear.

The vampire flung itself away from me even as I unleashed a third blast, bounding away down the hall, flinging itself from the ceiling to the wall to the floor to the wall and back again, wildly dodging the stream of ruinous energy I sent after it.

“That’s right!” I heard myself scream. “You’d better run, pretty boy!” It vanished around the next corner and I shouted in incoherent rage, kicked the still-twitching head of one of the downed vampires with the tip of my steel-toed work boots, and rushed after it in pursuit, cursing up a storm.

The entire business had taken, at most, six or seven seconds.

After that, things got a little complicated.

I’d started half a dozen small fires with the blasts, and before I’d gone another half a dozen steps the fire alarms twittered shrilly. Sprinkler systems went off all around me. And at the same moment, gunfire erupted from somewhere ahead of me. None of that was good.

The alarms meant that the authorities would be on the way—and except for the smartest guys in CPD’s Special Investigations, they just weren’t ready to deal with a vampire. They’d be little more than victims and potential hostages to the supernatural predators.

The falling water wasn’t good, either. Running water grounds magical energies, and while it wouldn’t shut me down completely, it would make everything harder to do, like running through soft sand or over wet clay. And the gunshots weren’t good because a pair of bullets came through the wall not six feet away, and one of them tugged hard at the hem of my jeans over my left ankle.

“Ack!” I said.

Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that’s me.

I twisted my left wrist across the front of my body, brought my shield up again. A couple of bullets that probably wouldn’t have hit me anyway popped off of it, concentric circles of flickering blue light spreading from the points of impact. I dashed down the hall and around the corner, the blasting rod in my right hand lifted and ready.

There were two vampires in front of a door to an office. One of them was on the floor, thrashing and hissing in agony, clutching at its flabby belly. It was leaking blood all over the floor. Several dozen bullet holes—exit holes—in the door explained why. The injuries wouldn’t kill the vamp, but they were painful and robbed it of the source of its supernatural power—the blood it had devoured. The other was crouched to the side of the doorway, as if debating with itself whether or not it should try to rush the door as its companion apparently had.

My runner went by them, wailing in fear.

I slid to a stop on the rapidly moistening floor, lifted the rod, and cut loose with another blast. It howled down the hallway, and the running vamp seized the wounded one and pulled it up to intercept the shot I’d meant for it. The wounded vamp screamed and absorbed just enough of the energy to let the runner plunge through the drywall at the end of the hall. It vanished from sight, and a second later I heard the sound of glass breaking as it fled the building.

The luckless vampire was dead, or on the final approach to it, since the beam had sliced off almost everything to the left of its spine. The final vampire whirled toward me, hesitating.

It proved fatal. The wall behind it suddenly exploded outward, and Martin, his skin livid with dark tattoos, came crashing through it. He drove the vampire across the hallway and slammed it into the wall. One hand snaked around the surprised vampire’s belly, and a knife gleamed. Scarlet gore fountained against the wall, and the vampire collapsed, screaming breathlessly.

Martin leapt clear before the thrashing creature got lucky with one of its claws, snapped his gaze up and down the hallway, saw the hole in the far wall, and said, “Damnation. You let one get away?”

Before I could answer him, Susan appeared, slipping out through the hole in the wall. She had the computer backpack slung over one shoulder and a smoking gun in her hand, a .45 automatic with an extended magazine. She took a look at the vampire on the ground and lifted the gun, her dark eyes hard and cold.

“Wait,” I said. “There were six. He’s number four.”

“There are always six of them,” Susan said. “Standard operations team.”

She calmly pulled the trigger, letting loose a short, precise burst of automatic fire, and blew the wounded vampire’s head into disgusting mulch.

Martin looked at his watch. “We don’t have long.”

Susan nodded and they both started down the hallway, toward the stairs. “Come on, Harry. We found floor plans. The building’s wired.”

I blinked and ran after them. “Wired? To what?”

“The explosives are on the fourth floor,” Martin said calmly, “placed all around your office.”

“Those jerks,” I said. “They told us they were cleaning out asbestos!”

Susan barked out a short laugh, but Martin frowned her down. “When that runner gets them word about what happened, they’ll set them off. I suggest we hurry.”

“Holy crap,” I breathed.

We sprinted for the stairs. Going down them took a lot less time than going up, but it was harder to control. I stumbled once and Susan caught me by the arm, her fingers like bands of rigid steel. We reached the bottom together.

“Not out the front!” I barked. “Inbound authorities!”

I pounded past them and led them down a short hallway and out a side door, into an alley. Then we sprinted to the back of the building, down another alley, and away.

We had made it to the next block when light flashed and a giant the size of the Sears building hauled off and swatted us all with a pillow from his enormous bed. We were flung from our feet. Susan and Martin landed in a roll, tumbling several times. By contrast, I crashed into a garbage can.

It was, of course, full.

I lay there for a moment, my ears putting out a constant, high-pitched tone. A cloud of dust and particles washed over me, mixing with whatever hideous stew was in the trash can and caking itself to my body.

“I am not playing at the top of my game,” I mused aloud. I felt the words buzz in my throat, but I couldn’t hear them.

A few seconds later, sounds began to drift back in. Car horns and car alarms were going off everywhere. Storefront security systems were screaming. Sirens—lots and lots of sirens—were closing in.

A hand slipped beneath my arm and someone helped me stand up. Susan. She was lightly coated with dust. It filled the air so thickly that we couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet. I tried to walk and staggered.

Martin got underneath my other arm, and we started shambling away through the dust. After a little while, things stopped spinning so wildly. I realized that Martin and Susan were talking.

“—sure there’s not something left?” Susan was saying.

“I’ll have to examine it sector by sector,” Martin said tonelessly. “We might get a few crumbs. What the hell was he thinking, throwing that kind of power around when he knew we were after electronic data?”

“He was probably thinking that the information would be useless to the two of us if we were dead,” Susan said back, rather pointedly. “They had us. And you know it.”

Martin said nothing for a while. Then he said, “That. Or he didn’t want us to get the information. He was quite angry.”

“He isn’t that way,” she said. “It isn’t him.”

“It wasn’t him,” Martin corrected her. “Are you the same person you were eight years ago?”

She didn’t say anything for a while.

I remembered how to walk, and started doing it on my own. I shook my head to clear it a little and looked back over my shoulder.

There were buildings on fire. More and more sirens were on the way. The spot in the skyline where my office building usually sat from this angle was empty except for a spreading cloud of dust. Fires and emergency lights painted the dust orange and red and blue.

My files. My old coffee machine. My spare revolver. My favorite mug. My ratty, comfortable old desk and chair. My frosted-glass window with its painted lettering reading, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.

They were all gone.

“Dammit,” I said.

Susan looked up at me. “What was that?”

I answered in a weary mumble. “I mailed in the rent on my office this morning.”

Chapter Five

We got a cab. We got out of the area before the cops had cordoned off a perimeter. It wasn’t all that hard. Chicago has a first- rate police department, but nobody can establish that big a cordon around a large area with a lot of people in the dead of night quickly or easily. They’d have to call and get people out of bed and onto the job, and pure confusion would slow everything down.

By morning, I knew, word of the explosion would be all over the news. There would be reporters and theories and eyewitness interviews with people who had sort of heard something happen and seen a cloud of dust. This hadn’t been a fire, like we’d seen a few times before. This had been an explosion, a deliberate act of destruction. They would be able to find out that much in the aftermath.

There would be search and rescue on the scene.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window. Odds were good that there was no one else in the building. All the tenants were businesses. None of them was prone to operating late at night. But all of them had keys to get in when they needed to, just like I did. There could have been janitors or maintenance people there—employees of the Red Court, sure, but they didn’t know that. You don’t explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.

There could very well be dead people in that building who wouldn’t have been there except for the fact that my office was on the fourth floor.

Jesus.

I felt Susan’s eyes on me. None of us had spoken in front of the cabbie. Nobody spoke now, until Martin said, “Here. Pull over here.”

I looked up. The cab was pulling up to a cheap motel.

“We should stay together,” Susan said.

“We can go over the disk here,” Martin said. “We can’t do that at his place. I need your help. He doesn’t.”

“Go on,” I said. “People”—by which I meant the police—“are going to be at my place soon anyway. Easier if they only have one person to talk to.”

Susan exhaled firmly through her nose. Then nodded. The two of them got out of the cab. Martin doled out some cash to the driver and gave him my home address.

I rode home in silence. The cabbie was listening to the news on the radio. I was pretty beat, having tossed around a bunch of magic at the building. Magic can be awfully cool, but it’s exhausting. What was left buzzing around me wasn’t enough to screw up the radio, which was already alive with talk of the explosion. The cabbie, who looked like he was vaguely Middle Eastern in extraction, looked unhappy.

I felt that.

We stopped at my apartment. Martin had already paid him too much for the ride, but I duked him another twenty on top of that and gave him a serious look. “Your name is Ahmahd?”

It was right there on his cabbie license. He nodded hesitantly.

“You have a family, Ahmahd?”

He just stared at me.

I touched my finger to my lips in a hushing gesture. “You never saw me. Okay?”

He grimaced, but dipped his head in a nod.

I got out of the cab, feeling a little sick. I wouldn’t hurt the guy’s family, but he didn’t know that. And even if he did, that and the bribe together wouldn’t be enough to keep him from talking to the cops if they came asking—though I suspected it would be enough to keep him from jumping up to volunteer information. Buildings were exploding. Sane people would want to keep their heads down until it was over.

I watched the car drive away, put my hands in my coat pockets, and shuffled wearily home. I’d cut into my physical and psychic resources pretty hard when I’d turned all that energy loose on the vampires, and now I was paying the price. I’d unintentionally poured soulfire into every blast I’d leveled at them—which was why I’d had the nifty silver-white blasts of flame instead of the red-orange of standard-issue fire. I felt like falling into bed, but it wouldn’t be the smart move. I debated doing it anyway.

I had time to get a shower, take Mouse out for a much- needed trip outside, put on a pot of coffee, and was just finishing up cleaning the debris and trash from my leather duster with some handy-dandy leather-cleaning wipes Charity Carpenter, Molly’s mother, had sent over, when there was a knock at the door.

Mouse lifted his head from where he lay near me, his brown eyes wary and serious. Then his ears perked up, and his tail began to wag. He got up and took a step toward the door, then looked at me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m going.”

I got up and opened the door. It stuck halfway. I pulled harder and got it open the rest of the way.

A woman a little more than five feet tall stood at my door, her face weary and completely free of makeup. Her hair was golden blond, but hanging all over her face and badly in need of attention from a brush and maybe a curling iron. Or at least a scrunchie. She was wearing sweat-pants and an old and roomy T-shirt, and her shoulders were hunched up in rigid tension.

She stared at me for a moment. Then she closed her eyes and her shoulders relaxed.

“Hiya, Murphy,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, her voice a little feeble. I enjoyed the moment. I didn’t get to see Murphy’s soft side often. “Do I smell coffee?”

“Made a fresh pot,” I said. “Get you some?”

Murphy let out a groan of something near lust. “Marry me.”

“Maybe when you’re conscious.” I stepped back and let her in. Murph sat down on the couch and Mouse came over to her and laid his head shamelessly on her lap. She yawned and scratched and petted him obligingly, her small, strong hands making his doggy eyes close in bliss.

I passed her a cup of coffee and got one for myself. She took it black with a couple of zero-calorie sweeteners in it. Mine came with cream and lots and lots of sugar. We sipped coffee together, and her eyes became more animate as the caffeine went in. Neither of us spoke, and her gaze eventually roved over my apartment and me. I could hear the wheels spinning in her head.

“You showered less than an hour ago. I can still smell the soap. And you just got done cleaning your coat. At four in the morning.”

I sipped coffee and neither confirmed nor denied.

“You were at the building when it blew up,” she said.

“Not at it,” I said. “I’m good, but I don’t know about having a building fall on me.”

She shook her head. She stared at the remainder of her coffee. “Rawlins called. Told me that your office building had exploded. I thought someone had gotten to you, finally.”

“We on the record?” I asked. Murphy was a detective sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. It was the dead-end department of CPD and the only one with any clue whatsoever about the supernatural world. Even so, Murphy was a cop to the bone. She could stretch the line when it came to legality, but she had limits. I’d crossed them before.

She shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

“Red Court,” I said. “They bought the building a few years back. They wired it to blow if they wanted to do it.”

Murphy frowned. “Why do it now? Why not blow you up years ago?”

I grunted. “Personal grudge, I guess,” I said. “Duchess Arianna is upset about what happened to her husband when he tangled with me. She thinks it’s my fault.”

“Is it?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

She swirled the coffee around the bottom of the cup. “So why not just kill you? Click, boom.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She figured it wasn’t enough, maybe. Click-boom is business. What I have going with her is personal.”

My jaws creaked a little as I clenched them.

Murphy’s blue eyes missed little. “Personal?” She looked around again. “Your place looks too nice. Who was it?”

“Susan.”

Her back straightened a little. It was the only sign of surprise she showed. Murphy knew all about Susan. “You want to talk about it?”

I didn’t, but Murphy needed to know. I laid it out for her in sentences of three and four words. By the time I’d finished, she had set her mug on the coffee table and was listening to me intently.

“Jesus and Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed. “Harry.”

“Yeah.”

“That . . . that bitch.”

I shook my head. “Pointing fingers does nothing for Maggie. We’ll do that later.”

She grimaced, as if swallowing something bitter. Then she nodded. “You’re right.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Martin and Susan are seeing what they can get off the disk,” I said. “They’ll contact me as soon as they know something. Meantime, I’ll get a couple hours horizontal, then start hitting my contacts. Go to the Council and ask them for help.”

“That bunch of heartless, gutless, spineless old pricks,” she said.

I found myself smiling, a little, at my coffee.

“Are they going to give it to you?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe. It’s complicated,” I said. “Are you going to get CPD to help me?”

Her eyes darkened. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”

I spread my hands in a “there you are” gesture, and she nodded. She rose and paced over to the sink to put her cup down. “What can I do to help?”

“Be nice if the police didn’t lock me up for a while. They’ll realize that the explosives were around my office eventually.”

She shook her head. “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

“I want in,” she said. “You’re both too involved in this. You’ll need someone with perspective.”

I started to snap back something nasty, but shut my stupid mouth because she was probably right. I put my own coffee cup in the sink to give me an excuse not to talk while I tried to cool down. Then I said, “I would have asked you anyway, Murph. I need a good gun hand.”

Tiny Murphy might be, but she’d survived more scrapes with the supernatural than any other vanilla mortal I’d ever met. She’d keep her head in a crisis, even if the crisis included winged demons, howling ghouls, slavering vampires, and human sacrifice. She’d keep anyone—by which I meant Martin—from stabbing me in the back. She’d keep her gun up and firing, too. I’d seen her do it.

“Harry . . .” she began.

I waved a hand. “Won’t ask you to break any of Chicago’s laws. Or U.S. laws. But I doubt we’re going to be in town for this one.”

She absorbed that for a moment, folded her arms, and looked at the fire. Mouse watched her silently from where he sat near the couch.

She said, “I’m your friend, Harry.”

“Never had a doubt.”

“You’re going to take Maggie back.”

My jaw ached. “Damn right I am.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

I bowed my head, my eyes abruptly burning, the emotion clashing with the storm in my belly.

“Th—” I began. My voice broke. I tried again. “Thank you, Karrin.”

I felt her hand take mine for a moment, warm and steady.

“We will get her back,” she said, very quietly. “We will, Harry. I’m in.”

Chapter Six

I didn’t sleep long, but I did it well. When my old Mickey Mouse windup alarm clock went off at seven, I had to fight my way up from a deep place on the far side of dreamland. I felt like I could use another eighteen or twenty hours.

It was another instance of my emotions getting the better of me. Using soulfire on pure, instinctive reflex was a mistake—potentially a fatal one. The extramortal well of power that soulfire offered was formidable in ways I understood only imperfectly. I don’t know if it made my spells any more effective against the Red Court—though I had a hunch that it sure as H-E-double-hockey-sticks did—but I was dead certain that it had drawn upon my own life energy to do it. If I pulled on it too much, well. No more life energy kinda means no more life. And if that energy was indeed the same force that is commonly known as a soul, it might mean oblivion.

Depending on what actually happened when you got to the far side, I guess. I have no idea. And no mortal or immortal creature I had ever met had sounded like he knew for sure, either.

I did know that powerful emotions were an excellent source of additional energy for working magic, sort of a turbocharger. Throw a destructive spell in the grip of a vast fury, and you’d get a lot more bang for your effort than if you did it while relaxed on a practice field. The danger, of course, was that you could never really be sure how much effect such an emotion would have on a spell—which meant that you ran a much higher risk of losing control of the energy. Guys operating on my level can kill others or themselves at the slightest mistake.

Maybe the soulfire came from a similar place as the emotions. Maybe you couldn’t have one without at least a little bit of the other. Maybe they were all mixed together, like protein powder and skim milk in a health smoothie.

Didn’t matter, really. Less than sixty seconds of action the night before left me exhausted. If I didn’t get a handle on the soulfire, I could literally kill myself with it.

“Get it together, Harry,” I growled to myself.

I shambled out of bed and out into the living room to find that my apprentice, Molly, had come in while I was sleeping and was profaning breakfast in my tiny kitchen.

She wore a simple outfit—jeans and a black T-shirt that read, in very small white letters, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’D BETTER HAVE BOUGHT ME DINNER. Her golden hair was longer—she’d been letting it grow—and hung down to her shoulder blades in back. She’d colored it near the tips with green that darkened to blue as it went down.

I’m not sure if Molly was “bangin’,” or “slammin’,” or “hawt,” since the cultural catchphrase cycles every couple of minutes. But if you picked a word meant to be a term of praise and adoration for the beauty of a young woman, it was probably applicable. For me, the effect was somewhat spoiled, because I’d known her since she was a skinny kid somewhere between the ages of training wheels and training bra, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have an academic appreciation for her looks. When she paid any attention, men fell all over her.

Mouse sat alertly at her feet. The big dog was very good about not taking food off the table or from the stove or the counter or on top of the refrigerator, but he had drawn a line on the linoleum: If any bits fell to the floor, and he could get to them first, they were his. His brown eyes tracked Molly’s hands steadily. From the cheerful wag of his tail, she had probably already dropped things several times. She was a soft touch where the pooch was concerned.

“Morning, boss,” she chirped.

I glowered at her, but shambled out to the kitchen. She dumped freshly scrambled eggs onto a plate next to bacon, toast, and some mixed bits of fruit, and pressed a large glass of OJ into my hand.

“Coffee,” I said.

“You’re quitting this week. Remember? We had a deal: I make breakfast and you quit morning coffee.”

I scowled at her through the coffeeless haze. I dimly remembered some such agreement. Molly had grown up being interested in staying healthy, and had gotten more so of late. She was careful about what she ate, and had decided to pass that joy on to me.

“I hate morning people,” I said, and grabbed my breakfast. I stalked over to the couch and said, “Don’t feed Mouse anything. Not good for him.”

Mouse didn’t twitch an ear. He just sat there watching Molly and grinning.

I drank orange juice, which I found a completely inadequate beginning to my day. The bacon turned out to be made of turkey, and the edges were burned. I ate it anyway, along with toast that was not quite done enough. The grasshopper had talents, but cooking was not among them. “Things are up,” I said.

She stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan, and looked up at me interestedly. “Oh? What?”

I grunted and thought about the matter carefully for a moment. Molly was not much for combat. It just wasn’t her field. The next few days would certainly be hazardous for me, and I could live with that. But if Molly got involved, they might well be murderous.

I’d seen both sides of the “ignorance is safety” line of thinking in action. I’d seen people die who wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been told about the supernatural and its hazards, and I’d seen them die because they’d been forewarned, and it just wasn’t enough to really impress the scale of the threat upon them. There was just no way to know what would happen.

And because I had no way to know what would happen, I’d come to the conclusion that, absent factors that might make me believe to the contrary, I just wasn’t wise enough to deny them the choice. Molly was a part of my life. This would affect her strongly, in one way or another. The only responsible thing to do was to let her decide for herself how she wanted to live her life. That included endangering it, if that was what she felt was appropriate.

So, much as I had for Murphy, I laid it out for the grasshopper.

By the time I was finished, Molly was kneeling on the floor next to where I sat at the sofa, her blue eyes wide. “Wow, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wow.”

“You said that.”

“This changes everything.”

I nodded.

“How can I help?”

I hoped that she hadn’t just chosen to get herself killed. “You tell me. What’s the smart move, padawan?”

She chewed on her lip for a moment and then peered up at me. “We need information. And we need backup. Edinburgh?”

I drank the last swallow of my orange juice, resented its healthiness, and said, “Bingo.”

We took the Ways to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the weird geography of the spirit world to cover a lot more physical distance in the material world. Only certain previously explored routes were safe and reliable, and you had to have some serious supernatural juice to open the door, so to speak, between the real world and the Nevernever, but if you could do it, the Ways were darned handy. The Chicago-to-Edinburgh trip took us about half an hour.

The headquarters of the White Council of wizards is a dull, dim, drafty sort of place—not unlike the insides of the heads of a great many people who work there. It’s all underground, a network of tunnels, its walls covered in carvings of mystic runes and sigils, of stylized designs and genuinely beautiful artistry. The ceilings are kind of low for me in places. Some of the tunnels are pitch-black, but most of them are bathed in a kind of ambient light without a visible source, which is an awfully odd look—sort of like one of those black lights that makes certain other colors seem to glow.

We passed two security checkpoints and walked for another five minutes before Molly shook her head. “How big is this place?” Her subdued voice echoed down the empty tunnels.

“Big,” I said. “Almost as big as the city above, and it has multiple levels. Way more than we actually use.”

She trailed her fingers over an elaborate carving in the stone as we passed it, a mural depicting a forest scene, its edges and lines crisp and clean despite the smoke from occasional torches and the passage of centuries. Her fingers left little trails in the light layer of dust coating the wall. “Did the Council carve it out?”

“Nah,” I said. “That would have been too much like work. Rumor has it that it used to be the palace of the lord of the Daoine Sidhe. That the original Merlin won it from him in a bet.”

“Like, Merlin Merlin?” she asked. “Sword in the stone and so on?”

“Same guy,” I said. “Doubt he was much like in the movies.”

“Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too,” Molly said. “He must have been something else.”

“He must have been a real bastard,” I said. “Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don’t tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders.”

“You’re such a cynic,” Molly said.

“I think cynics are playful and cute.”

There was no traffic at all in the main corridor, which surprised me. I mean, it was never exactly crowded, but you usually bumped into someone.

I headed for Warden country. There was a large dormitory set up for the militant branch of the White Council, where I could generally be confident of finding a surly, suspicious face. It was also very possible that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was there. The cafeteria and the administrative offices were nearby, so it was hands down the busiest part of the stronghold.

Warden country and the cafeteria were both empty, though there was a deck of cards spread out on a table in one of the lounges. “Weird,” I muttered. “All the checkpoints are business-as-usual or I’d think something was wrong.”

Molly frowned. “Maybe someone got into the heads of the sentries.”

“Nah. They’re jerks, but they’re not incompetent jerks. No one around here is going to get away with mental buggery for a while.”

“Buggery?” Molly asked.

“Hey, we’re in the United Kingdom. When in Rome.”

We went across the hall to administration and, finally, found someone: a harried-looking woman who sat at an old switchboard—the kind with about a million holes and plugs that had to be manually inserted and removed to run it. She wore a pair of ancient- looking headphones and spoke into an old radio microphone. “No. No, we have no word at this time. When we learn something, you will be informed.” She jerked the wire out, plugged it in under another flashing light, and repeated her spiel. I watched that half a dozen times before I literally waved a hand in front of her face to get her to notice us.

She stopped and blinked up at me. She was a matronly- looking woman, iron grey woven smoothly through her brown hair, which meant that she could be anywhere between forty- five and two hundred years old. Her eyes flicked over me and then Molly, and I saw her body tense. She eased her rolling chair a few inches back from us—like most of the older crew of wizards, she probably regarded me as a sociopath looking for a nice bell tower. The switchboard lights blinked on and off steadily. They were the old kind that made little clicking sounds as they did.

“Ah,” she said. “Wizard Dresden. I am quite busy.”

“It looks like it,” I said. “Wizard MacFee, right? Where is everybody?”

She blinked at me again, as though I had spoken in Ewok. “Why, they’re in the Senior Council’s residence hall. It was the only place big enough for everyone who wished to witness it.”

I nodded pleasantly and tried to remain calm. “Witness what?”

“The ambassador,” MacFee said, impatience touching her voice. She gestured at the switchboard. “You haven’t heard?”

“Was sort of busy yesterday,” I said. “Heard what?”

“Why, the Red Court, of course,” she said. “They’ve sent an ambassador plenipotentiary.” She beamed. “They want to change the cease-fire into a genuine peace. They’ve sent no less than Duchess Arianna Ortega to ask for terms.”

Chapter Seven

I felt my stomach flutter around inside me.

The duchess was playing dirty. As the Red Court envoy, of course she’d have some advance knowledge about her people’s intentions. There was no way in hell that this was a coincidence. It was too perfect.

If the Red Court was offering a return to the status quo—and older wizards love status quo, let me tell you—and adding in something to sweeten it to boot . . . the Senior Council would never authorize an action that would jeopardize such a peace. Not for some random little girl—and certainly not for the offspring of the White Council’s most famous maybe-psychotic problem child, Harry Dresden, and a half-vampire terrorist.

Plenty of the people on the Council thought I should have been beheaded when I was sixteen. It made the younger wizards think I was cool and dangerous, which probably explained my popularity with them. The older members of the Council, though, held the lion’s share of its influence and authority. That set would be happy to take any reasonable excuse to leave me hanging in the wind, and Duchess Arianna clearly planned to give it to them.

She was cutting me off.

It wasn’t until then that I noticed that while my brain had been calmly paddling down the stream of logic, the raging cauldron in my belly had overflowed, and I was walking with smooth, swift strides down a hallway, my staff in my left hand, my blasting rod in my right, and the runes and carvings of both were blazing with carmine light.

That was somewhat alarming.

Someone was shaking my arm, and I looked down to see that Molly was hanging on to my left arm with both hands. I was dragging her sneakers forward across the stone floor, though she was clearly trying to stop me.

“Harry!” she said desperately. “Harry! You can’t!”

I turned my face away from her and kept walking.

“Harry, please!” she all but screamed. “This won’t help Maggie!”

It took me a few seconds to work out how to stop walking. I did it, and took a slow breath.

Molly leaned her forehead against my shoulder, panting, her voice shaking. She still held on tight. “Please. You can’t. You can’t go in there like this. They’ll kill you.” I heard her swallow down a mouthful of terror. “If we have to do it this way . . . at least let me veil you.”

I closed my eyes and took more deep breaths, concentrating on pushing my anger back down. It felt like swallowing acid. But when I opened my eyes, the runes on the staff and rod were quiescent once more.

I glanced at Molly. She looked up at me, her eyes reddened and afraid.

“I’m okay,” I told her.

She bit her lip and nodded. “Okay.”

I leaned over and kissed her hair gently. “Thank you, Molly.”

She offered me a hesitant smile and nodded again.

I stood there for a moment more before I said, gently, “You can let go of my arm now.”

“Oh, right,” she said, releasing me. “Sorry.”

I stared down the hallway in front of me, trying to order my thoughts. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“Harry?” Molly asked.

“This isn’t the time or the place to fight,” I said.

“Um,” Molly said. “Yes. I mean, clearly.”

“Don’t start,” I told her. “Okay. So the duchess is here to play games. . . .” I clenched my jaw. “Fine. Game on.”

I started forward again with a determined stride, and Molly hurried to keep up.

We proceeded to the White Council’s ostentatiatory.

I know. That isn’t a word. But it should be. If you’d seen the quarters of the Senior Council, you’d back me up.

I strode down the hall and nodded to the squad of twelve Wardens on guard outside the chambers of the Senior Council. They were all from the younger generation—apparently there were grown-up things happening on the other side of the large double doors, to which the children could contribute nothing but confusion.

For once, the Council’s geriatocracy had worked in my favor. If they’d left one of the old guard out here, he would certainly have tried to prevent me from entering on general principles. As it was, several of the doorkeepers nodded to me and murmured quiet greetings as I approached.

I nodded back briskly and never slowed my steps. “No time, guys. I need to get in.”

They hurried to open the doors, and I went through them without slowing down and stepped into the chambers of the Senior Council.

I felt impressed upon entering, as I always did. The place was huge. You could fit a Little League baseball field in it and have room left over for a basketball court. A rectangular central hall splayed out in front of me, its floor made of white marble with veins of gold running through it. Marble steps at the far end swept up to a balcony that circled the entire place, which was supported by Corinthian columns of marble that matched the floor. There was a quiet waterfall at the far end of the chamber, running down into a pool, surrounded by a garden of living trees and plants and the chirp of the occasional bird.

A platform stage had been erected in the middle of the room, complete with stagelike lighting from a number of brightly glowing crystals, plus another mounted on a wooden podium that would, I took it, provide amplified sound for anyone speaking near it. The place was packed with wizards standing on the floor in a miniature sea of humanity, with more of them lining the balcony above, filling the place to its capacity.

All in all, the ostentatiatory was so overdone that you couldn’t help but be impressed, which was the point, and though my brain knew it was hundreds of feet underground, my eyes insisted that it was lit by natural sunlight.

It wasn’t, though: There was a vampire standing on the platform stage, beside the newest member of the Senior Council, Wizard Cristos. He stood at the podium, smiling and addressing the assembly. The rest of the Senior Council, resplendent in their black formal robes and purple stoles, looked on with their hoods raised.

“. . . another example of how we must meet the future with our eyes—and minds—open to the possibility of change,” Cristos said. He had a great speaking voice, a strong, smooth baritone that rolled effortlessly through the enormous chamber. He spoke in Latin, the official language of the Council—which ought to tell you something about their mind-set. “Humanity is already beginning to move away from the cycle of unthinking violence and war, learning to coexist with its neighbors in peace, working together to find solutions to their mutual problems, rather than allowing them to devolve into bloodshed.” He smiled benevolently, a tall, spare man with a mane of flowing gray hair, a dark beard, and piercing dark eyes. He wore his formal robes open, the better to display the designer business suit beneath it.

“It is for this reason that I requested a telephone conference with the Red King,” he continued. He used the English word for telephone, since there wasn’t a proper Latin noun for it. It garnered a reaction from the assembled Council watching the proceedings. Such things were not done. “And after speaking with him for a time, I secured his support for a clearly defined, binding, and mutually acceptable peace. Creating the peace is in everyone’s best interests, and it is for this reason that I am pleased to present to you, wizards of the White Council, the Duchess Arianna Ortega of the Red Court.”

Several wizards not far from Cristos’s position on the stage began clapping enthusiastically, and it spread haltingly throughout the chamber, eventually maturing into polite applause.

Arianna stepped up to the podium, smiling.

She was gorgeous. I don’t mean “cutest girl at the club” gorgeous. I mean that she looked like a literal goddess. The details almost didn’t matter. Tall. Dark hair. Skin like milk, like polished ivory. Eyes as blue as the twilight sky. She wore a gown of red silk, with a neckline that plunged gorgeously. Jewels touched her throat, her ears. Her hair was piled up on her head, occasional loose ringlets falling out. Hers was a beauty so pure that it was nearly painful to behold—Athena heading out on a Friday night.

It took me a good five or six seconds of staring to realize that there was something beneath that beauty that I did not like at all. Her loveliness itself, I realized, was a weapon—such creatures as she had driven men literally insane with desire and obsession. More to the point, I knew that her beauty was only skin-deep. I knew what lurked beneath.

“Thank you, Wizard Cristos,” the duchess said. “It is a very great honor to be received here today in the interests of creating a peace between our two nations, and thereby finally putting an end to the abominable bloodshed between our peoples.”

The Applause Squad started up again as Arianna paused. People picked up on the cue faster this time. Outside of the wizards who stood on the floor beneath the raised stage, the applause was still polite and halfhearted.

I waited until it began to die before I released the door. It closed with a quiet boom precisely in the moment of silence between the end of the applause and the duchess’s next statement.

Nearly a thousand faces turned my way.

Silence fell. I could suddenly hear the little waterfall and the occasional twitter of a bird.

I stared hard at Arianna and said, my voice carrying clearly, “I want the girl, vampire.”

She met my gaze with polite serenity for a moment. Then the hint of a smile touched her face, bringing with it a shadow of mockery. It made my blood boil, and I heard my knuckles pop as they clenched harder at my staff.

“Wizard Dresden!” Cristos said in sharp rebuke. “This is neither the time nor the place for more of your warmongering idiocy.”

I was so impressed with his authority that I raised my voice and said, louder, “Give back the child you took from her family, Arianna Ortega, kidnapper and thief, or face me under the provisions of the Code Duello.”

Murmurs ran through the assembly like a rumble of thunder.

“Wizard Dresden!” Cristos cried, aghast. “This is an ambassador of an Accorded nation, promised safe conduct while she is here on a mission of peace. This is not done!” He looked around the room and pointed a finger at several grey-cloaked wizards standing not too far from me. “Wardens! Escort this man from the chamber!”

I shot a glance at them. They were all old guard, all dangerous, all tough, and they really didn’t like me. Six sets of eyes with all the mercy and pity of a gun’s mouth locked onto me.

I heard Molly gulp.

I looked back at them and said, in English, “You sure you want it to be like this, fellas?”

It must have come out sounding more threatening than I thought it had, because half a dozen White Council hard cases stopped walking. They traded looks with one another.

I turned from them back to the stage, and addressed the vampire. “Well, thief?”

Arianna turned to Cristos and gave him a rather sad and gentle smile. “I’m sorry about this disruption, Wizard Cristos. I’m not sure what this is about, but it’s quite clear that Wizard Dresden feels that he has been badly wronged by my people. Bear in mind that whether justly held or not, his feelings contributed to this war’s beginning.”

“I apologize for this outrageous behavior,” Wizard Cristos said.

“Not at all,” Arianna assured him. “I, too, have suffered personal loss in this conflict. It’s always difficult to control the emotions arising from such things—particularly for the very young. That’s just one of the problems we’ll need to overcome if we are to break the cycle of violence between your folk and mine. The veterans of wars suffer horrible mental and emotional scars, vampires and wizards alike. I take no offense at Wizard Dresden’s words or actions, and do not hold him responsible for them.” She turned to me and said, her voice compassionate, “I can sincerely say that I understand exactly how much pain you’re in right now, Wizard Dresden.”

I had to force myself not to raise my blasting rod and burn that false empathy off of the duchess’s face. I gripped my gear with both hands, to make sure they weren’t going to try anything without consulting me.

“We can never regain the loved ones this war has taken from us,” she continued. “All we can do is end the fighting—before even more of our loved ones get hurt. I’m here to avert any more needless deaths, Dresden. Surely you can see exactly why I would do such a thing.”

Boy, did I. It wasn’t enough for her simply to kill me. She wanted to defeat me utterly first, to have her cake and eat it, too. If she brought the fighting to a close this way, she would garner massive credibility in the supernatural community—and if she did it while simultaneously sticking it to me, it would only be that much more elegant a victory.

She smiled at me again, with that same tiny shading of mockery so faint that no one who wasn’t looking for it could possibly have seen it. It was just enough to make sure that I could see the malice behind it, to make sure that I damned well knew she was rubbing it in my face in front of the entire White Council. She’d probably practiced it in a mirror.

“I’m giving you a chance,” I said, my voice harsh. “Return the child and it ends. We’re quits. Make me take her from you and I’ll play hardball.”

She put long, elegant fingers to her chest, as if confused. “I don’t know why you’re so upset with me, or what I have to do with this child, sir,” Arianna said. “But I understand your outrage. And I wish that I could help you.”

Someone stepped up close to my side, a little in front of me. She was a young woman, not particularly tall, with curling brown hair and a heart-shaped face that was appealing and likable, if not beautiful. Her eyes were steady and hard.

“Harry,” said Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, “don’t do this. Please.”

I clenched my jaw and spoke in a heated whisper. “Ana, if you knew what she’d done.”

“You are not going to restart the war and tarnish whatever honor the White Council has left by attacking an ambassador visiting under a pledge of safe conduct,” she said evenly. “You’re strong, Dresden. But you aren’t that strong. If you try it, there are at least thirty wizards here who could take you alone. Working together, they wouldn’t just beat you. They’d swat you down like a bug—and then you’d be imprisoned until they decided what to do with you, three or four months from now.”

My belly and chest felt like they were on fire. I looked past Anastasia to Duchess Arianna again.

She was watching me—hell, probably listening to me, too, vampire hearing being what it was. Her smile was a scalpel drawn slowly over my skin.

Anastasia put her hand on my arm—very gently, not firmly. She was making a request. “Harry, please.”

Behind me, Molly added, “This won’t help Maggie, boss.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to fight.

On the stage one of the hooded figures of the Senior Council reached up and drew back his hood. My old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was a stocky old man with broad hands and scarred knuckles, bald except for a faint fringe of pale white hairs. His blunt, strong features were smooth and unreadable, but he met my gaze and gave me a very small, very precise nod. The message was clear. I could practically hear the old man’s voice growling, Trust me, Hoss. Go with her.

I felt my lip lift up from my teeth in a silent snarl.

Then I turned and stalked from the chamber, my work boots thumping heavily on the floor, my staff clenched in my hand. Anastasia walked with me, her hand still on my arm, making it clear that I was being escorted from the room, even if she’d used a gentler persuasion than Cristos would have preferred.

The Wardens closed the door behind me with a soft, solid boom, cutting me off from the assembled might of the White Council.

Chapter Eight

“Hey,” said one of the young Wardens outside the ostentatiatory. “Hey, Harry. What’s up, man?”

I owed Carlos Ramirez more than a quick shake of my head, but I couldn’t give it to him. I didn’t want to talk at all, because I wasn’t sure I could keep it from turning into furious shouting. I heard Molly turn quickly to him and say, “Not now. There’s a problem, we’re working on it, and I promise to call you if there’s something you can do to help.”

“But—” he said, taking a few steps after us.

“Warden,” Luccio said firmly. “Remain at your post.”

He must have obeyed. We kept on walking and he didn’t follow us.

Luccio marched me down a tunnel I had never seen before, took a few turns into the darker hallways lit only by light she called to hang in the air around us, and then opened a door into a warm, firelit room. It looked like a den. There was a large fireplace crackling, several candles lit, and a lot of comfortable furniture scattered around in solitary nooks and in groups, so that one could have as much or as little conversational company as one wished. There was also a bar. A very large, very well-stocked bar.

“Oh,” Molly said, as she came in behind me. “Cozy.”

Anastasia let go of my arm and marched straight to the bar. She got down a bottle of black glass and poured amber fluid into three shot glasses. She brought them to a nearby table, gestured for us to sit, and then put all three glasses in the middle of the table, leaving it to us to choose which we would drink—two centuries of Warden-level paranoia tends to sink into your bones.

I sat down at the table. I took a glass and downed it. The liquor left a scouring heat in my chest as it went down, and I wanted it.

Anastasia took hers and made it vanish without twitching an eye-lash. Molly looked at her glass, took a polite sip, and said, to the other woman’s amused glance, “Somebody should be the designated . . . not driver, but sober person.”

“Harry,” Anastasia said, turning to me. “What you did today was dangerous.”

“I could take the bitch,” I growled.

“There’s no way for us to know how old Arianna is,” she contradicted, “because humanity hasn’t had a written language for that long. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I pushed my empty glass away with my fingers and said, “I could take the prehistoric bitch.” I looked around the room for a moment and said, “What is this place?”

Anastasia leaned back in her chair and spread her hands, palms up. “Welcome to the Worry Room.”

“Worry Room, huh.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Didn’t you see the bar?”

Molly giggled, and suppressed it. “Sorry.”

Anastasia’s voice turned faintly ironic. “It’s a place where we crusty old Wardens can go when we’re sick of the softhearted wizards who are so lily-livered that they want us to permit wayward children with enough talent to go warlock to live instead of executing them. Like your apprentice, here. I guarantee you some drinks were poured in this room and bitter words said about how we would regret it after her trial.”

I grunted. “Were you pouring, drinking, or talking?”

She shrugged. “If not for her, then for plenty of others. I was here when Morgan drank himself into a stupor after your trial, Harry.”

“No wonder it feels so cozy.”

She smiled tightly. “It’s likely the most private and secure room in the complex.”

“Paranoia Central is only likely free of spies? You guys are getting sloppy.”

“Dammit, Harry.” Luccio shook her head. “You’ve done the Warden job for a while. Or most of it. You still think that the Wardens never have a reason for acting as . . . decisively as they sometimes do?”

I sighed. Life is never simple. I had railed against the Wardens for years for killing children, young men and women who had gone warlock, lost control of their magical talents and their minds by indulging in black magic. Then I had seen the results of a few warlocks on a spree. They were ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. “You’ve got good reason,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Doesn’t make it right.”

“Not everyone is so far over the edge they can’t come back,” Molly added softly. “Sometimes people just . . . just get lost. They just need someone to show them how to come back.”

“Yes. And in the time it takes to make that distinction, a lot of innocent people have died, Miss Carpenter,” Anastasia said, her tone frank and gentle. “The human population has expanded with unthinkable speed in the past two centuries. More and more wizard-level talents are being born. Every time one of them goes warlock, we have less and less time to confront the problem—and nowhere near enough help.”

“Prevention,” I said. “Find them early and they don’t go warlock.”

“Resources.” She sighed. We’d had this talk before. “If the entire Council did nothing but Warden duty, full-time, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

“Education,” I said. “Use the Paranet. Get the smaller talents to help identify the gifted.”

She smiled at me and said, “I’m still building support for it. It’s a good idea, Harry. It might even work. The problem is making some of the others in the Council understand it. They see it only as a security risk, especially after Peabody. But it’s a good idea. Its time will come—eventually.”

I grunted. I was quiet for a moment, and then I said, “Familiar argument, huh? Give me some routine. Calm me down. Is that it?”

“Anxiety, anger, and agitation cloud the mind. That’s why the Worry Room is here.” She smiled faintly. “I’m well aware of what it looks like when a wizard has been pushed to the brink.” She poured the two of us another shot and said, “So why don’t you tell me how the prehistoric bitch did it to you.”

I took the glass without drinking. “She took a little girl.”

“Vampires take a lot of children,” Anastasia said. “What makes this one so special?”

I said nothing. Silence reigned. I looked up and met her eyes.

Anastasia and I had seen each other for a while. She knew me better than most. She studied my face for maybe half a second, and then took a deep breath. “Harry,” she said, “don’t say anything about this to anyone you don’t trust with your life.”

I gave her a small, bitter smile and nodded. Knowledge was power. Anyone who knew Maggie was my daughter might use her for leverage against me. Anastasia wouldn’t, not for any reason—but others on the White Council would. Oh, they’d probably use softer gloves than Arianna had: I could just see being offered money to help support Maggie, give her access to nice schools, a privileged upbringing, and everything a father could want for his child—so that the offer could be withdrawn if I didn’t play ball. After all, these were the good guys.

But it could get worse. I literally shuddered to think what Nicodemus might do with the knowledge—or, joyous thought, Mab. (Yes, that Mab. Take it from me: The stories don’t do her justice.) I’d met some other real gems out there as well, and none of them had reasons to like me. On the other hand, I thought with a shiver, Arianna was the devil I didn’t know.

Regardless, it wouldn’t be helpful to let knowledge of Maggie become general. I had never planned on making an open case of her blood relation to me before the Council. It wouldn’t win sympathy—only interest. The fewer people who knew I was Maggie’s father, the safer she would be.

And yes.

I am aware of the irony.

I kept looking at Anastasia and asked, “Can I count on you?”

She put her hands flat on the table and looked down at them for a slow five count, considering her words before she answered. “I am not what I was in a fight, Harry.”

I ground my teeth. “So you’ll sit here where it’s safe.”

For the first time since I’d arrived in Edinburgh, Anastasia Luccio’s dark eyes flashed with real anger, and I suddenly remembered that this woman had been the captain of the Wardens for decades. The air between us grew literally physically hotter. “Think carefully,” she said in a very quiet voice, “before you call me a coward.”

Since the stern, iron-haired captain had been magically relocated to the body of a college grad student, her powers had diminished significantly—but her savvy and experience hadn’t. I wouldn’t care to fight Luccio, regardless of our relative strengths. And, hell, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen her fight more than once since then.

The anger inside me wanted to spill out onto her. But she deserved better than that from me. I stuffed it back down and lifted the fingers of one hand in a gesture of mute apology. Anastasia Luccio might be many things, but she was no coward—and she was born and raised in a day and age where such an accusation might literally require a duel to be refuted.

No, thank you.

She nodded, mollified, and some of the tension went out of her. “I was going to say that I would be of most use to you here—gathering intelligence, asking questions, and digging up resources for you to use. Of course you should fight—but you can’t do that until you find the girl, and some of our own people will have an interest in making sure you don’t disrupt the peace process. If I am working from here, I can circumvent them.”

I glanced down at my hands, suddenly embarrassed. She was thinking more clearly than I was. “I didn’t even think . . . Yeah. I’m sorry, Ana.”

She inclined her head. “It’s nothing.”

“It was unnecessary.” I scratched at my head. “You think you can sandbag the Merlin?”

She lifted both eyebrows.

“Hell’s bells, I’m shocked he didn’t rip off his hood and start screaming at me. Maybe challenge me, right there. No way he’s going to sit on his ass when he can stick it to me inste—” I broke off speaking as I noticed that Molly’s eyes had gone very wide. I turned to look behind me.

A painting on the wall had just finished sliding to one side, revealing a doorway hidden behind it. The door swung open soundlessly, and a wizard who was the solemn, movie- poster version of old Merlin himself came into the Worry Room.

Arthur Langtry was one of the oldest and the single most powerful wizard on the White Council. His hair and beard were long, all snowy white with threads of silver, and perfectly groomed. His eyes were winter sky blue and alert, his features long, solemn, and noble.

The Merlin of the White Council was dressed in simple white robes. What I could think of only as a gunslinger’s belt of white leather hung at his hips. It looked like it had been designed after tactical gear made for Special Forces operators, but in an insignificant flash of insight I realized that, if anything, the opposite was likely to be true. Multiple vials, probably potions, rode in individual leather cases. The leather-wrapped handle of an anemic rod or a stubby wand poked out of a holster. Several pouches were fastened closed, and looked as though they would contain bits and pieces of the standard wizarding gear I habitually carried with me when I was working. He also bore a long, white staff, a simple wooden pole made of an unfamiliar wood.

I stared at him for a moment. Then I said, “The peace talks are over?”

“Of course not,” the Merlin said. “Goodness, Dresden. We aren’t going to allow the entire Senior Council to stand on a stage within reach of a vampire’s claws. Are you mad?”

I blinked at him.

“Wizard McCoy was the only actual Senior Council member on the stage,” he said, and then grimaced. “Aside from Cristos, of course, who is unaware of the security measure. The envoy might well be an assassin.”

I worked my jaw a few times and said, “So. You left him up there by himself while you played it safe.”

The Merlin shrugged. “One of us had to be there to handle any questions. It was McCoy’s idea, Dresden. He is an irritating, arrogant, and formidable man.”

I scowled and mentally flogged my brain for slacking, forcing myself to see past my emotionally driven hostile response. “You don’t trust the vampires,” I said slowly. “You aren’t drinking the Kool- Aid on this peace conference.”

Langtry looked at me patiently. Then he looked at Luccio.

“Jonestown,” she provided. “The mass suicide last century.”

He frowned at that and then nodded. “Ah, I see the metaphor. No, Dresden, we are not willing to simply accept them at their word—but a great many people on the Council do not concur. Cristos has garnered an enormous number of supporters who very much want to embrace the terms of peace.”

“If you don’t want to call off the war,” I said, “then why the hell did you stop me, Captain Luccio? I could have fixed it for you right there.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Langtry said calmly. “You would have been knocked senseless and thrown in a hole.” A faint smile touched his lips as he spoke the words. “Granted, a pleasant notion, but not a practical one.”

Next to me, Molly put her elbows on the table and propped up her chin in her hands, staring at the Merlin thoughtfully.

My brain kept chugging. I think I can, I think I can. When it got to the top of the hill, my eyes widened. “You aren’t planning to smoke the peace pipe. You’re expecting an attack.”

He looked at me blandly, and rested one hand on the hilt of his combat wand as if by pure coincidence. “Egad. What gave it away, Dresden?”

I started to say something hot in reply, Merlin or no Merlin, but Anastasia put a hand on my wrist. “Our sources,” she said, overriding my incipient insult, “have reported a great deal of activity in the Red Court camp. They’re mobilizing.”

I looked back and forth between them. “You figure they’re trying a Trojan horse?”

“Or some variant thereof,” Langtry replied.

“So we’re getting ready for it,” Anastasia said. “As well as preparing the heaviest counterattack we’ve thrown at them yet.”

“Um,” Molly said, “what if they’re serious about making peace?”

Everyone looked at her, and my apprentice visibly wilted beneath the Merlin’s gaze.

“It might happen,” she said.

Langtry smiled faintly. “The leopard cannot change his spots, Miss Carpenter. Sheep can befriend a hungry wolf only briefly. The Red Court is all savagery and crocodile tears. If they make peace, it is only because they need the time to replenish themselves before fighting anew.”

“Really old things get set in their ways,” I confirmed to Molly, my tone including Langtry as a matter of course. “Always hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

Molly chewed her lip thoughtfully and nodded.

Langtry eyed me and said, “Need I explain why I have explained, Dresden?”

“Maybe you’d better,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t use illustrations or anything, Professor.”

Langtry inhaled, briefly closed his eyes, and then looked away from me.

“Um?” Molly said, frowning.

“We want the Red Court to attack, if that is their intention,” I told her. “We want the Red Court to think their trick is working. We want them to be overconfident. Then when they hit us, we hit them back so hard and fast that they don’t know it’s coming until it’s over.”

“No,” Langtry said. “So they never knew it was coming. Period. We will no longer wage a war with that filth, cold, hot, or otherwise. We’re going to destroy them, root and branch.” He lifted his chin slightly as his voice turned to frost. “We’re going to exterminate them.”

Silence followed. The fire crackled cheerfully.

I felt my hands clench into fists. “But you need them to expose themselves first. And that,” I whispered, “is why you’re going to ask me to lay off Duchess Arianna.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Langtry said in a calm, quiet voice. “I am not asking you. I am ordering you to desist, Warden Dresden.”

“And let the child die,” I said.

“In all probability the child is already dead, or else turned,” Langtry said. “And even if she still survives, we must face a cold truth: Uncounted billions now living and yet to be born will be saved if we stop the Red Court from feeding on humanity ever again.” His voice became even colder. “No one life, innocent or not, is worth more than that.”

I said nothing for several long, silent seconds.

Then I stood up. I faced the Merlin for a moment. I could feel the obdurate, adamant will that drove the man, and made his power the greatest well of mortal magic on the face of the earth.

“You’ve got it backward, you know,” I told him quietly. “No life is worth more than that? No, Merlin. No life is worth less.”

His expression never changed. But his fingers tightened slightly on his staff. His cold blue eyes touched lightly upon Molly, and then returned to me.

The threat was plain to see.

I leaned over close to his ear and whispered, “Go ahead, Arthur. Try it.” Then I straightened slowly away, letting every emotion and every thought drain out of my expression. The tension in the air was thick. No one moved. I could see Molly trembling where she sat.

I nodded slowly at the Merlin.

Then I said in a quiet, clear voice, “Grasshopper.”

Molly stood up immediately.

I kept myself between the girl and Langtry as we walked to the door. He didn’t offer any challenge, but his eyes were arctic and absolute. Behind him, Luccio gave me a single, tiny, conspiratorial nod.

Hell’s bells. She’d known who she would be working against all along.

Molly and I left Edinburgh behind and headed back home to Chicago.

Chapter Nine

I watched out for trouble all the way back to Chicago, but it didn’t show up.

The trip from Edinburgh would be a difficult one if limited by strictly physical means of transport. Wizards and jet planes go together like tornados and trailer parks, and with similarly disastrous results. Boats are probably the surest means of modern transport available to us, but it’s a bit of a ride from Scotland to Chicago.

So we do what a good wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat.

The Nevernever, the spirit world, exists alongside our own, sort of like an alternate dimension, but it isn’t shaped the same way as the mortal world. The Nevernever touches upon places in the mortal world that have something in common with it, a resonance of energies. So, if point A is a dark and spooky place in the Nevernever, it touches upon a dark and spooky place in the real world—let’s say, the stacks at the University of Chicago. But the space five feet away from point A in the Nevernever, point B, is only dark and sad, not really scary. Maybe point B attaches to a cemetery in Seattle.

If you’re a wizard, you could then start at the stacks at UC, open a doorway into the Nevernever, walk five feet, open another doorway back to the real world, and emerge into the cemetery in Seattle. Total linear distance walked, five or six feet. Total distance traveled, better than seventeen hundred miles.

Neat, huh?

Granted, it’s almost never as little as five feet you walk in the Nevernever, and that stroll just might introduce you to some gargantuan, tentacular horror so hideous that it drives you insane just by looking at it. The Nevernever is a scary place. You don’t want to go exploring without a whole lot of planning and backup, but if you know the safe paths—the Ways—then you can get a lot of traveling done nice and quick, and with a minimum incidence of spontaneous insanity.

Once upon a time, I would have refused even to enter the Nevernever except in the direst of emergencies. Now, the idea wasn’t much more stressful to me than the thought of hitting a bus station. Things change.

We were back in Chicago before lunchtime, emerging from the Nevernever into an alley behind a big old building that used to be a slaughterhouse. I’d parked the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen Bug, nearby. We went back to my apartment.

Susan and Martin were waiting. About two minutes after we got back, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find both half vampires standing on my doorstep. Martin carried a leather valise on a sling over his shoulder.

“Who is the girl?” Martin asked, his eyes calm and focused past me, on Molly.

“It’s nice to see you again, too, man,” I said. “And don’t mention it. I save people’s lives all the time.”

Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over—a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it’s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?

“Harry,” Susan said, kissing me on the cheek. I felt like a pine tree in cougar country. I’d just have to hope territorial scoring of my bark wasn’t next. “Who is this?”

“My apprentice, Molly Carpenter,” I said. “Grasshopper, this is Susan Rodriguez. That’s Marvin someone-or-other.”

“Martin,” he corrected me, unruffled, as he entered. “Can she be trusted?”

“Every bit as much as you trust me,” I said.

“Well.” Martin’s voice couldn’t have been any drier, but he tried. “Thank goodness for that.”

“I know who they are, Harry,” Molly said quietly. “They’re from the Fellowship of St. Giles, right? Vampire hunters?”

“Close enough,” Susan said, standing right next to me, well inside my personal space perimeter. It was an intimate distance. She touched my arm for a moment with fever-hot fingers, but never looked away from Molly. “An apprentice wizard? Really? What’s it like?”

Molly shrugged, averting her eyes, frowning slightly. “A lot of reading, a lot of boring practice, with occasional flashes of pure terror.”

Susan looked from Molly to me and seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. She drifted out of my personal space again. “Did you speak to the Council?”

“A bit,” I said. “The duchess was at headquarters. Spoke to her, too.”

Susan drew in a sharp breath. “What? She hasn’t left Mexico in more than a hundred and eighty years.”

“Call Guinness. She broke her streak.”

“Good God,” she said. “What was she doing there?”

“Being compassionate and understanding and forgiving me for challenging her to a duel in front of about a thousand fellow wizards.”

Martin made a choking sound. Susan’s eyes looked a little wide.

“I wanted a piece of her right there,” I said, “but she was operating under a pledge of safe conduct. Council intelligence says there’s all kinds of vampire activity starting up. I’ve got feelers out for any other word, but it will take a little time.”

“We already knew about the mobilization,” Susan said. “The Fellowship warned the Council three days ago.”

“Nice of the Council to inform everybody, I guess. But I’ll get whatever else the Council knows in the next few hours,” I said. “You guys turn up anything?”

“Sort of,” Susan said. “Come on.”

We went to the seating around the coffee table, and Martin plopped the valise down onto its surface. He drew out a manila folder and passed it to me.

“Out of nearly a petabyte of information—” he began.

“Petawhat?” I asked.

“One quadrillion bytes,” he clarified. Helpfully.

Susan rolled her eyes and said, “Several libraries’ worth of information.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Martin cleared his throat and continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “We retrieved fewer than three hundred files. Most of them were inventory records.”

I opened the folder and found several sheets of printer paper covered with lists, and several more that consisted of photographs of any number of objects accompanied by identification numbers.

“The objects in this file,” Susan said, “were all categorized as met a-capacitors.”

I grunted, paging through the photos more slowly. A stone knife. An ancient, notched sword. A soot-stained brick. An urn covered in odd, vaguely unsettling abstract designs. “Yeah. Can’t be sure without physically examining it, but this stuff looks like ritual gear.”

I frowned and started cross-referencing numbers on the lists. “And according to this, they were all checked out of a secure holding facility in Nevada and shipped as a lot. . . .” I glanced up at Susan. “When was Maggie taken, exactly?”

“A little less than twenty-four hours before I called you.”

I frowned at the timing. “They shipped it the same day Maggie was taken.”

“Yes,” she said. “About three hours after the kidnapping.”

“Shipped where?”

“That’s the question,” she said. “Assuming it’s connected with Maggie at all.”

“Odds are that it isn’t,” Martin said.

“Yeah. Your time would be better employed running down all those other leads we have, Marvin.” I spared him a glower, and went back to studying the pages. “If I can figure out what this gear is used for, maybe I can rule it out. For all I know it’s meant for a rain dance.” I tapped the pages on my knee thoughtfully. “I’ll do that first. While I do, Molly, I want you to go talk with Father Forthill, personally—we have to assume the phones aren’t safe. Forthill has some contacts down south. Tell him I’d like to know if any of them have reported anything unusual. Take Mouse to watch your back.”

“I can look after myself, Harry. It’s still daylight.”

“Your weapons, grasshopper,” I said in my Yoda voice. “You will not need them.”

She frowned at me in annoyance and said, “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.”

I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”

“That doesn’t even . . . Augh. It’s easier just to do it.” She stood up and held out her hand. I tossed her the keys to the Blue Beetle. “Come on, Mouse.”

Mouse rose from his position in the kitchen and shambled to Molly’s side.

“Hold up a second, kid. Susan,” I said. “Something about this is making the back of my neck itch. The bad guys knew where to find us last night. They must have some kind of tail on one of us, and we don’t need to walk around with a target painted on our backs. Maybe you and Martin could go see if you can catch our shadow.”

“They’ll see us and pull a fade as soon as we leave the apartment,” Martin said.

“Oh!” Molly said abruptly, her eyes brightening. “Right!”

I went out to get the mail and walk the dog around the little backyard while Molly, Susan, and Martin, under cover of one of Molly’s first-class veils, slipped out of the apartment. I gave Mouse five minutes, then called him and went back down into the apartment.

Molly had beaten me back inside, after walking Susan and Martin out of the view of any observers who had a line of sight to my apartment’s door. “How was that?” she asked. She tried for casual, but by now I knew her well enough to spot when my answer mattered.

“Smooth,” I said. “Did me proud.”

She nodded, but there was a little bit too much energy in it to be offhand agreement. Hell’s bells, I remembered what she was feeling: wanting, so badly, to prove my talent, my discipline, my skill—myself—to a teacher. It took me nearly a decade for my hindsight to come into focus, and to realize how inexperienced, how foolish, and how lucky I had been to survive my apprenticeship with both eyes and all my fingers intact.

I wasn’t too worried about sending the kid on a solo mission. It was pretty tame, and Forthill liked her. Molly wasn’t much in a fight, but she could avoid the hell out of them if she had an instant’s warning—which was where Mouse came in. Very little escaped the big dog’s solemn notice. If hostility loomed, Mouse would warn her, and hey- presto, they would both be gone.

She’d be fine.

“Don’t take too long,” I said quietly. “Eyes open. Play it safe.”

She beamed, her face alight. “You aren’t the boss of me.”

I could all but taste the pride she felt at making her talents useful to my cause. “The hell I’m not,” I told her. “Do it or I dock you a year’s pay.”

“You know you don’t pay me anything, right?”

“Curses,” I said. “Foiled again.”

She flashed me another smile and hurried out, bouncing eagerly up the steps. Mouse followed close on her heels, his ears cocked alertly up, his demeanor serious. He grabbed his leather lead from the little table by the door as he went by. Molly had forgotten it, but there were leash laws in town. I suspected that Mouse didn’t care about the law. My theory was that he insisted on his lead because people were more inclined to feel comfortable and friendly toward a huge dog when he was “safely restrained.”

Unlike me, he’s a people person. Canine. Whatever.

I waited until the Beetle had started and pulled out to close the door. Then I picked up Martin’s printed pages, tugged aside the rug that covered the trapdoor in the living room floor, and descended into my laboratory.

“My laboratory,” I said, experimentally, drawing out each syllable. “Why is it that saying it like that always makes me want to follow it with ‘mwoo-hah-hah-hah-hahhhhhh’?”

“You were overexposed to Hammer Films as a child?” chirped a cheerful voice from below.

I got to the bottom of the stepladder, murmured a word, and swept my hand in a broad gesture. A dozen candles flickered to life.

My lab wasn’t fancy. It was a concrete box, the building’s subbasement. Someone probably had neglected to backfill it with gravel and earth when the house was built. Tables and shelves lined the walls, covered in wizardly bric- a-brac. A long table ran down the middle of the room, almost entirely occupied by a scale model of downtown Chicago made of pewter, right down to the streetlights and trees.

My apprentice had a workstation at a tiny desk between two of the tables. Though she had continued to add more and more of her own notes, tools, and materials as her training continued, somehow she had kept the same amount of space open. Everything was neatly organized and sparkling clean. The division between Molly’s work area and the rest of the room was as sharp and obvious as the lines on a map.

I’d upgraded my summoning circle, which was set in the concrete floor at the far end of the little room, a five- foot hoop of braided copper, silver, and iron that had set me back three grand when I ordered it from a svartalf silversmith. The materials weren’t all that expensive, but it took serious compensation to convince a svartalf to work with iron.

Each metal strand in the circle’s braid was inscribed with sigils and runes in formulae that harnessed and controlled magical energies to a far greater degree than any simple circle. Each strand had its own string of symbols, work so tiny and precise that only svartalves and maybe Intel could have pulled it off. Flickers of light, like static discharge but more liquid, slithered around each strand of metal, red light, blue, and green dancing and intertwining in continuous spirals.

I’m still young for a wizard—but once in a while, I can make something that’s fairly cool.

One shelf was different from all the others in the room. It was a simple wooden plank. Volcanic mounds of melted candle wax capped either end. In the center of the shelf was a human skull, surrounded by paperback romance novels. As I watched, orange flickering light kindled in the skull’s empty eye sockets, then swiveled to focus on me. “Too many Hammer Films,” Bob the Skull repeated. “Or, possibly, one too many nights at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“Janet, Brad, Rocky, ugh,” I said dutifully. I went to the shelf, picked the skull up off of it (“Wheee!” said Bob), and then carried it over to a mostly clean space on one of the worktables. I set the skull down on top of a stack of notebooks, and then put Martin’s manila folder down in front of him.

“Need your take on something,” I said. I opened up the folder and started laying out the photographs Martin had given me.

Bob regarded them for a moment, and asked, “What are we looking at, here?”

“Metacapacitors,” I said.

“That’s weird. ’Cause they look like a bunch of ritual objects.”

“Yeah. I figure metacapacitor is code language for ritual object.”

Bob studied the pictures and muttered to himself under his breath. He isn’t actually a talking skull—he’s a spirit of intellect who happens to reside inside a specially enchanted skull. He’s been assisting wizards since the Dark Ages, and if he hasn’t forgotten more than I ever knew about the wide world of magic, it’s only because he doesn’t forget anything, ever.

“They’re traveling in a single group. I need to get a ballpark estimate on what they might be used for.”

“Tough to tell from two-dimensional images,” Bob said. “I start getting confused when there are any fewer than four dimensions.” He rattled the skull’s teeth together a few times, thoughtfully. “Is there anything else? Descriptions or anything?”

I opened the folder. “Just the inventory list.” I put my finger on the picture of the stone knife and read, “ ‘Flint blade.’ ” I touched an old brick with crumbling edges. “ ‘Brick.’ ”

“Well, that’s just blindingly useful,” Bob muttered.

I grunted. “It’s possible that this is just miscellaneous junk. If you don’t think it has a specific purpose, then—”

“I didn’t say that,” Bob interrupted sourly. “Jeez, Harry. Ye of little faith.”

“Can you tell me anything or not?”

“I can tell you that you’re teetering on the edge of sanity, sahib.”

I blinked at that. “What?”

Bob didn’t look up from the pictures. “Your aura is all screwed up. It’s like looking at an exploding paint factory. Crazy people get that way.”

I grunted and considered Bob’s words for a moment. Then I shrugged. “I’m too close to this case, maybe.”

“You need some time in a quiet place, boss. Unkink your brain’s do. Mellow your vibe.”

“Thank you, Doctor Fraud,” I said. “I’ll take that under advisement. Can you tell me anything about those objects or what?”

“Not without getting to examine them,” Bob said.

I grunted. “Super. Another bad inning for the wizard gumshoe.”

“Sorry,” he said. “But all I can tell you from here is the trigger.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, those are objects of dark, dangerous magic,” Bob said. “I mean, obviously. Look at the angles. Nothing is proportional and balanced. They’re meant for something destructive, disruptive, deadly.”

I grunted. “That tracks. Rumor has it that the war is going to rev up again soon.” I ran my fingers tiredly through my hair. “What did you say the trigger was, again?”

“For something this dark?” Bob asked. “Only one thing’ll do.”

I felt myself freeze. My coffeeless gorge began to rise.

“Human sacrifice,” the skull chirped brightly. “The slaughter of an innocent.”

Chapter Ten

I leaned on a table with my eyes closed.

The Red Court was preparing a destructive act of high black magic.

The ritual, whatever it was, required a human sacrifice to succeed.

In my head, I watched a movie of Maggie being bled out like a slaughtered sheep within a ritual circle, surrounded by an army of vampires beneath a nightmare sky.

There was a hideous elegance in it. In a single stroke my daughter would die, and her death would be used to lash out against the Council. It was bald guesswork, but it fit what I’d seen of the duchess. She could inflict the maximum amount of personal agony on me and launch a sorcerous attack simultaneously. Revenge and war would both be served—all while she smiled and smiled and offered promises of peace and understanding, protected from me by the same idiots she was plotting to destroy.

I could try to warn them, but few would listen. Ebenezar, maybe, and Anastasia, and some of the young Wardens—but even if they listened and believed, they would still have to convince others. The freaking Council never does anything quickly, and I had a bad feeling that tempus was fugiting furiously.

So. I’d just have to do it myself.

But to do that, I needed information.

I looked at my summoning circle again and took a slow, deep breath. There were things I could do. Horrible things. There were beings I could call up, malicious mavens and entities of wicked wisdom who might make the unknowable as plain as daylight.

If I did, there would be a terrible price.

I tore my eyes from the circle and shook my head. I wasn’t that desperate.

Yet.

Someone knocked loudly on my apartment door.

I went upstairs, closed the lab, and picked up my blasting rod. I carried it to the door and looked out the peephole. Murphy stood outside, her hands in her coat pockets, her shoulders hunched.

“Couldn’t use the phone,” she said when I opened the door. She stepped in and I closed it behind her.

“Yeah, we figure the Red Court might be tapping them.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know about that, Harry. But Internal Affairs has got mine wired.”

I blinked at her. “Those IA idiots? Again? Can’t Rudolph just let it rest?” Rudolph the Brown- nosed Cop-cop, as he was affectionately known at SI, had managed to kiss enough ass to escape SI and get reassigned to IA. He seemed to hold a grudge against his former coworkers, irrationally blaming them for his (now concluded) exile among the proles of SI.

“Apparently not,” Murphy said. “He’s making quite a name for himself over there.”

“Murph, you’re a good cop. I’m sure that—”

She slashed a hand at the air and shook her head. “That’s not important right now. Listen. Okay?”

I frowned and nodded at her.

“There’s a full-scale investigation going into the bombing of your office building,” Murphy said. “Rudolph talked to the lead FBI agent and the local lead detective in charge of the case and convinced them that you’re a suspicious character and good perpetrator material.”

I groaned. “Forensics will bear them out. The explosives were on my floor, some of them in the walls of my office.”

Murphy pushed her hair back with one hand. The bags beneath her eyes had grown visibly darker. “They’re going to bring you in and question you in the next couple of hours. They’ll probably hold you for the full twenty-four. More if they can find a charge to stick you with.”

“I don’t have time for that,” I said.

“Then you’ve got to get scarce,” Murphy said. “And I’ve got to go. Neither of us will be helped if we’re seen together.”

“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. “I am going to throw Rudolph halfway across Lake Michigan and see if the slimy little turd floats.”

“I’ll bring the lead weights,” Murphy said. She drew the amulet I’d made to let her past my apartment’s magical defenses from her shirt and showed it to me. “Hopefully I won’t be able to find you. Get in touch with me when you need my help, huh?”

“Murph,” I said. “If the authorities are getting set to come down on me . . . you can’t be around.”

Her eyebrows climbed a tiny fraction. It was a danger signal. “Excuse me?” she said politely.

“It’s already going to look bad enough, we’ve worked together so much. If you’re actually abetting me now . . . they won’t let you keep your badge. You know they won’t. And they might do even more than that. You could wind up in jail.”

The subliminal angry tension in her abruptly vanished. “God, Dresden. You are a simp.”

I blinked at her.

“If I go with you,” she said, “I could wind up in the ground. That didn’t seem to worry you.”

“Well,” I said. “I . . .”

“I choose my battles, Dresden. Not you.” She looked up at me calmly. “Let me put this in terms that will get through your skull: My friend is going to save a child from monsters. I’m going with him. That’s what friends do, Harry.”

I nodded and was silent for several seconds. Then I said, “I know you, Karrin. For you, dying in a good fight would not be a terrible end. You’ve known it was possible, and you’ve prepared yourself for it.” I took a deep breath. “But . . . if they took your shield away . . . I know what your job means to you. You’d die by inches. I don’t think I could handle watching that happen.”

“So you get to choose to shut me out? What I want doesn’t count?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“And you’re the one who decides?”

I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “No.”

She nodded. “Good answer.” She touched her fingertips to the shape of her amulet under her T-shirt. “Call.”

“I will. Maybe by messenger, but I will.”

“It’s occurred to me that someone who wanted to make you suffer might start pulling the trigger on your friends. How do I verify the message?”

I shook my head. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that even here, in my own home, I couldn’t be too careful about being overheard. My apartment was blanketed in protective magic, but there were plenty of people (and not- people) who were stronger, more experienced, or wilier than me. “If I have to send a messenger, I’ll make sure you know who it’s from.”

Murphy watched me answer. Then she glanced slowly around the room, as if looking for an unseen observer, and nodded her understanding. “All right. Don’t stay here long, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, Murph.”

She made a face. “I’m not worried about just you. You’ve got at least one gun stashed here, and I’m betting there’s more illegal material in the lab. If they like you for a suspect, they’ll get a warrant. And the FBI, as far as I know, doesn’t have any amulets to get them in here alive.”

I groaned aloud. Murph was right. I had a couple of illegal weapons in my apartment. The Swords were still in the lab, too. Plus some miscellaneous material that the government probably wouldn’t want me owning, including depleted uranium dust, for when the answer to “Who you gonna call?” turns out to be “Harry Dresden.”

The wards that protected my apartment were going to be an issue as well. They wouldn’t do anything if someone walked up and knocked on the door, or even if they fiddled with the doorknob—but anyone who tried to force the door open was in for a shock. About seventy thousand volts of shock, in fact, thanks to the defenses I’d put in place around my door. The lightning was savage, but it was only the first layer of the defense. It hadn’t been so terribly long since an army of zombies tore their way into my living room, and I wasn’t going to repeat the experience.

But my wards wouldn’t have any way of differentiating between a zombie or a crazed vampire or a misguided FBI agent. They simply reacted to someone forcing his way inside. I’d have to deactivate the wards before someone got hurt. Then I’d have to remove any suspect gear from the house.

Hell’s bells. Like I didn’t have enough on my mind. I rubbed my thumb against the spot between my eyebrows where the headache was forming. “I did not need this on top of everything else. Which is why she did it.”

“Why who did what?”

“Duchess Arianna of the Red Court,” I said. I filled Murphy in on my day.

“That’s out of character, isn’t it?” Murphy asked. “I mean, for them to do something this obtrusive? Blowing up a building?”

“They did similar things several times during the war,” I said. “She was making a statement. Blowing up my place of business right in front of God and everybody, the same way the wizards took out her husband’s command post in Honduras. Plus she’s diverting my attention and energy, yanking more potential support out from under me.”

Murphy shook her head. “She’s so clever she’s making a mistake.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If she was all that smart, she would have blown you to pieces in your office.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That’s the most practical way.”

“So why didn’t she?”

“Figure she wants to inflict the maximum amount of pain she can before she gets rid of me.”

Murphy lifted her eyebrows. “For vengeance? That’s . . . kind of like a bad movie script, isn’t it?” She put on a faint British accent. “No, Mr. Dresden. I expect you to die.”

I grunted. Murphy had a point. Duchess Arianna almost couldn’t have been the sort to enjoy indulging her sadistic side at the expense of practicality. You don’t survive millennia as a vampire without being deadly cold-blooded.

Which meant . . .

“There’s something else at work here,” I said. “Some other game going on.”

Murphy nodded. “How sure are you that Susan is being straight with you?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. It sounded a little hollow, even to me.

Murphy’s mouth twisted up into a bitter curl. “That’s what I thought. You loved her. Makes it easy to manipulate you.”

“Susan wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“I hope not,” Murphy replied. “But . . . she’s been gone awhile, Harry. Fighting a war, from the sounds of it. That’s enough to change anyone, and not for the better.”

I shook my head slowly and said, “Not Susan.”

Murphy shrugged. “Harry . . . I’ve got a bad feeling that . . .” She scrunched up her nose, choosing her words. “I’ve got a bad feeling that the wheels are about to come off.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Just . . . the building blowing up is all over the news. You can’t find an anchor talking about anything else. People are screaming about terrorists. The whole situation is gaining more attention from higher up in the government than anything else I’ve ever seen. You say that most of the White Council has been effectively placed under the control of this Cristos person. Now the upper ranks of the Red Court are getting involved, too, and from what you tell me everyone is reaching for their guns.” She spread her hands. “It’s . . . it’s like the Cuban missile crisis. Everyone’s at the edge.”

Hell’s bells. Murphy was right. The supernatural world was standing at the edge—and it was one hell of a long way down to the war of annihilation at the bottom.

I took a slow breath, thinking. Then I said, “I don’t care about that.”

Murphy’s golden eyebrows went up.

“I’m not responsible for everyone else in the world, Murph. I’m going to find a little girl and take her somewhere safe. That’s all. The rest of the world can manage without me.”

“What if that’s the last straw, Harry? The little girl. What will you do then?”

I growled as a column of pure rage rose up my spine and made my voice rough. “I will make Maggie safe. If the world burns because of that, then so be it. Me and the kid will roast some marshmallows.”

Murphy watched me thoughtfully for several empty seconds. Then she said, very gently, “You’re a good man, Harry.”

I swallowed and bowed my head, made humble by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face, more than the words themselves.

“Not always rational,” she said, smiling. “But you’re the best kind of crazy.”

“Thank you, Karrin.”

She reached out and squeezed my arm once. “I should go. Call me.”

“I will.”

She left a moment later and I began sanitizing my apartment for government scrutiny. It would take me a little precious time, but being locked in a cage would take even more. I was still tucking away the last of my contraband when there was a knock at the door. I froze. After a moment, the knock was repeated.

“Harry Dresden!” called a man’s voice. “This is Special Agent Tilly of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have a warrant to search this property and detain its occupants for questioning regarding last night’s explosion. If you do not open this door, we will be forced to break it down.”

Crap.

Chapter Eleven

I tore the rug from the trapdoor again. I’d packed almost all of my questionable materials into a large nylon gym bag. I slung it over my shoulder, grabbed my duster, staff, and blasting rod, and nearly killed myself trying to go down the ladder too quickly. I stopped a couple of steps from the bottom and reached up to close the trapdoor again. There was a pair of simple bolts on the lower side of the door, so that I or the grasshopper could signal the other that something delicate was in progress, and distractions might be dangerous. I locked the door firmly.

“What’s going on?” blurted Bob from his shelf.

“Bob, I need the wards down now.”

“Why don’t you just—”

“Because they’ll come back up five minutes after I’ve used the disarming spell. I need them down. Get off your bony ass and do it!”

“But that will knock them out for at least a week—”

“I know. Go do it, and hurry! You have my permission to leave the skull for that purpose.”

“Aye-aye, O captain, my captain,” Bob said sourly. A small cloud of orange sparkling light flowed out of the skull’s eye sockets and rushed upstairs through the cracks at the edge of the trapdoor.

I immediately started dumping things into my bag. I was making a mess doing it, too, but there was no help for that.

Less than half a minute later, Bob returned and flowed back into the skull again. “There’re a bunch of guys in suits and uniforms knocking on the door, Harry.”

“I know.”

“Why?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“Trouble,” I said. “What do I have in here that’s illegal?”

“Do I look like an attorney? These ain’t law books I’m surrounded by.”

There was a heavy slam of impact from upstairs. Whoever was up there was trying a ram on the door. Good luck with that, boys. I’d had my door knocked down before. I had installed a heavy metal security door that nothing short of explosives was going to overcome.

“Where’s the ghost dust?” I asked.

“One shelf over, two up, cigar tin in a brown cardboard box,” Bob said promptly.

“Thanks,” I said. “That section of rhino horn?”

“Under the shelf to your left, plastic storage bin.”

So it went, with Bob’s flawless memory speeding the process. I wound up stuffing the bag full. Then I tore the Paranet map off the wall and added it to the bag, and tossed the directory of contact numbers for its members in next to it. The last thing I needed was the FBI deciding that I was the hub of a network of terrorist cells.

Bob’s skull went in, too. I zipped the bag closed, leaving just enough opening for Bob to see out. Last, I took the two Swords (at least one of which had been used in murders in the Chicago area), slipped them through some straps on the side of the bag, and then hurriedly duct-taped them into place, just to be sure I wouldn’t lose them. Then I drew on my duster and slung the bag’s strap over my shoulder with a grunt. The thing was heavy.

Bangs and bumps continued upstairs. There was a sudden, sharp cracking sound. I winced. The door and its frame might be industrial-strength, but the house they were attached to was a wooden antique from the previous turn of the century. It sounded like something had begun to give.

“I told you,” Bob said. “You should have found out what was on the other side from here long before now.”

“And I told you,” I replied, “that the last thing I wanted to do was thin the barrier between my own home and the bloody Nevernever by going through it and then attracting the attention of whatever hungry boogity-boo was on the other side.”

“And you were wrong,” Bob said smugly. “And I told you so.”

There was a tremendous crash upstairs, and someone shouted, “FBI!” at the same time someone else was shouting, “Chicago PD!”

An instant later, someone let out a startled curse and a gun went off.

“What was that?” screamed a rather high-pitched voice.

“A cat,” said Agent Tilly’s voice, dripping with disdain. “You opened fire on a freaking cat. And missed.”

Mister. My heart pounded in my chest. I’d forgotten all about him. But, true to his nature, Mister seemed to have taken care of his own daring escape.

There were chuckles from several voices.

“It isn’t funny,” snapped the other voice. It was Rudolph, all right. “This guy is dangerous.”

“Clear,” called a voice from another room—which meant my bedroom and bathroom, since it was the only other room available. “Nothing in here.”

“Dammit,” Rudolph said. “He’s here somewhere. Are you sure your men spotted him through the window?”

“They saw someone moving around in here not five minutes ago. Doesn’t mean it was him.” There was a pause and then Agent Tilly said, “Or, gee. Maybe he’s down in the subbasement under that trapdoor over there.”

“You still have men in place at the windows?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes,” Tilly said wearily. He raised his voice a bit, as if speaking to someone on the far side of a large room. “This place is buttoned up. There’s nowhere for him to go. Let’s just hope he shows himself and gives himself up quietly. We’ll be sure to respect all his rights and everything, and if he cooperates, this could be over pretty quickly.”

I paused. I had some choices to make.

I could still do as Tilly suggested. In the long run, it was obviously the best choice for me. I’d be questioned and cleared by anyone reasonable (i.e., not Rudolph). I could even point them at the duchess’s business interests and turn them loose to become a thorn in her side. After that, I would be back to the status quo of wary cooperation with the authorities—but that process would take precious time. A couple of days at the very least.

I didn’t have that kind of time.

Agent Tilly struck me as someone not entirely unreasonable. But if I approached him now, protesting my innocence, and then vanished, I’d be up for resisting arrest at the very least. Even if everything else in this mess panned out in my favor, that could get me jail time, which I wished to avoid. Besides. There wasn’t anything Tilly could do for Maggie.

And, I had to admit it, I was angry. This was my home, dammit. You don’t just break down the door of a man’s home on the say-so of a snake like Rudolph. I had plenty of anger already stored up, but hearing those voices in my living room added another large lump to the mound. I doubted my ability to remain polite for very long.

So instead of stopping to talk, I turned to the summoning circle, stepped into it, summoned up my will, and whispered, “Aparturum.”

I waved my staff from left to right, infusing the tool with my will, and reality rolled up along it like a scroll. Soft green light began to emanate from the empty air in front of me in a rectangular area seven feet tall and half as wide—a doorway between my apartment and the Nevernever. I had no idea what was on the other side.

The bolts to the trapdoor began to rattle. I heard someone call for a saw. The door wasn’t closely fitted. They’d be able to slip a saw blade through the crack and slice those two bolts in seconds.

I gathered up my power into a defensive barrier around me, running it through my shield bracelet, and gritted my teeth. My heart pounded against my chest. It was entirely possible that walking through that doorway between worlds would take me to the bottom of a lake of molten lava, or over the edge of a rushing waterfall. There was no way to know until I actually stepped into it.

“I told you so!” Bob chortled.

An electric engine buzzed above me and then abruptly died. Someone made puzzled sounds. Then a slender steel blade slipped through the crack in the door and someone started cutting through the bolts by hand.

I stepped out of the real world and into the Nevernever.

I was braced for whatever would happen. Freezing cold. Searing heat. Crushing depth of water—even utter vacuum. The sphere of force around me was airtight, and would keep me alive even in someplace like outer space, at least for a few moments.

I emerged into the Nevernever, my shields at full strength, my blasting rod ready to unleash hell, as the invisible sphere of force around me slammed into—

—a rather lovely bed of daisies.

My shields mashed them flat. The entire bed, in its little white planter, immediately resembled a pressed-flower collection.

I looked around slowly, my body tight and ready, my senses focused.

I was in a garden.

It looked like an Italian number. Only a minority of the shrubs and flowers were planted in raised beds. The others had been laid out to give the impression that they had grown naturally into the space they occupied. Grassy paths wound through the irregularly shaped garden, twisting and turning this way and that. A hummingbird the size of a silver dollar darted down and tucked its beak into a particularly bright flower, and then vanished again. A bee buzzed by—just a regular old bumblebee, not some giant mutant monster thing.

Don’t laugh. I’ve seen them over there.

I adjusted the shielding spell to allow air to pass through it and took a suspicious, cautious sniff. It might look like a nice place, but for all I knew the atmosphere was laced with chlorine gas.

It smelled like autumn sunshine, where the days might be balmy but the nights could carry a heavy nip. Letting the air in meant that sound had an easier time getting past my shield. Birds chirped lazily. Somewhere nearby, there was running water.

Bob started tittering. “Look out! Look out for the vicious mega-squirrel, boss!” he said, hardly able to speak clearly. “My gosh! That ficus is about to molest you!”

I glowered down at the skull and returned to watching my surroundings for a moment more. Then I carefully lowered the shields. They burned a hell of a lot of energy. If I tried to hold them up for more than a few moments, I’d find myself too weary to function.

Nothing happened.

It was just a sleepy afternoon in a very pleasant, pretty garden.

“You should have seen your face,” Bob said, still twitching with muffled laughter. “Like you were going to face an angry dragon or something.”

“Shut up,” I told him quietly. “This is the Nevernever. And it’s way too easy.”

“Not every place in the spirit world is a nightmare factory, Harry,” Bob scolded me. “It’s a universe of balance. For every place of darkness, there is also one of light.”

I turned another slow circle, checking for threats, before I took my staff and waved it from left to right again, shutting the gateway back to my laboratory. Then I returned to cautiously scanning the area.

“Stars and stones, Harry,” Bob said merrily. “I guess wearing that grey cloak for so long rubbed off on you. Paranoid much?”

I glowered and never stopped scanning. “Way. Too. Easy.”

Five minutes later, nothing had happened. It’s difficult to stay properly intimidated and paranoid when there is no evident threat and when the surroundings are so generally peaceful.

“Okay,” I said, finally. “Maybe you’re right. Either way, we need to get moving. Hopefully we can find somewhere one of us recognizes that can get us back to the Ways.”

“You want to leave a trail of bread crumbs or something?” Bob asked.

“That’s what you’re for,” I said. “Remember how to get back here.”

“Check,” he said. “Which way are we going?”

There were three paths. One wandered among high grasses and soaring trees. Another was pebbled and ran uphill, with plenty of large rocks figuring in the landscaping. The third had greenish cobblestones, and led through a field of nice low flowers that left lots of visibility around us. I went with option three, and started down the cobbled path.

After twenty or thirty paces, I started to get uneasy. There was no reason for it that I could see. It was pure instinct.

“Bob?” I asked after a moment. “What kinds of flowers are these?”

“Primroses,” the skull replied instantly.

I stopped in my tracks. “Oh. Crap.”

The earth shook.

The ground heaved around my feet, and along the primrose path ahead of me, the walking stones writhed and lifted up out of the soil. They proved to be the gently rounded crowns of segments of exoskeleton. Said segments belonged to the unthinkably large green centipede that had just begun shaking its way loose from the soil as we spoke. I watched in sickly fascination as the creature lifted its head from the soil, fifty feet away from us, and turned to look our way. Its mandibles clacked together several times, reminding me of an enormous set of shears. They were large enough to cut me in half at the waist.

I looked behind us and saw another fifty or sixty feet of the path ripping free, and looked down to see that the walking stone I stood upon was also part of the creature, albeit the last to unplant itself.

I fought to keep my balance as the stone ripped free, but I wound up being dumped into a bed of primroses while the enormous centipede’s head slithered left and right and rolled toward me at a truly alarming rate.

Its enormous eyes glittered brightly, and slime dripped from its hungrily snapping jaws. Its hundreds of legs each dug into the ground to propel its weight forward, their tips like tent stakes, biting the earth. It sounded almost like a freaking locomotive.

I looked from the centipede down to the skull. “I told you so!” I screamed. “Way! Too! Easy!”

Chapter Twelve

Yeah.

This was not what I’d had in mind when I got out of bed that morning.

The damned thing should have been slow. By every law of physics, by every right, a centipede that big should have been slow. Dinosauric. Elephantine.

But this was the Nevernever. You didn’t play by the same rules here. Physics were sort of a guideline, and a very loose and elastic guideline at that. Here, the mind and heart had more sway than the material, and the big bug was fast. That enormous, predatory head shot at me like the engine of some psychotic locomotive, its killer jaws spreading wide.

Fortunately for me, I was, just barely, faster.

I brought forth my left hand, holding it out palm forth in a gesture of command and denial, a universal pose meaning one thing: Stop! Intent was important in this place. As the jaws closed, I brought up my spherical shield to meet it, the energy humming through my bracelet’s charms, which burst into shining light as the magic coursing through them shone through the ephemeral substance of mere material metals.

The jaws closed with a crunch and a crash, and my bracelet flared even brighter. The shield exploded in more colors and shapes than a company of kaleidoscopes, and turned aside the beast’s jaws—its strength, after all, was just one more bit of materially oriented power in an immaterial realm.

I brought my right hand out of my coat holding my blasting rod, and with a shouted word loosed a sledgehammer of searing power. It dipped down and then curled up an instant before it hit, landing a sorcerous uppercut on what passed for the centipede’s chin. It flung the creature’s head several yards up, and its entire body rippled in agony.

Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have caught me quite as off guard as it did.

The ground beneath my feet heaved and bucked, and I went flying, my arms whirling in a useless windmill. I landed in a sprawl amid ranks of primroses, which immediately began to move, lashing out with tiny stem-tendrils lined with wickedly sharp little thorns. Even as I struggled back to my feet, tearing them away from my wrists and ankles, I noticed that the flowers around me had begun to blush a deep bloodred.

“You know what, Harry!” Bob called. “I don’t think this is a garden at all!”

“Genius,” I muttered, as the centipede recovered its balance and began reorienting itself to attack. Its body flowed forward, following the motion of its head. I decided that all those legs hitting the earth like posthole diggers in steady sequence made the giant bug sound less like a locomotive than a big piece of farm equipment churning by.

I ran at it, focusing my will beneath me, planted my staff on the earth, and swung my legs up in a pole vaulter’s leap. I unleashed my will beneath and behind me as I did, and flew over the thing’s back as it continued surging forward. It let out a rumbling sound of displeasure as I went, the head twisting to follow me, forced to slow down enough to allow its own rearmost legs to get out of its way. It bought me only a few seconds.

Bigger doesn’t mean better, especially in the Nevernever. One second was time enough to turn, focus another beam of fire into a far smaller area, and bring it down like an enormous cutting torch almost precisely across the middle of the big bug’s body, an act of precision magic that I’d learned from Luccio, and which I was not at all confident I could have duplicated in the real world.

The beam, no bigger around than a couple of my fingers, sliced the creature in half as neatly and simply as if I’d used a paper cutter the size of a semi trailer.

It shrieked in pain, a brazen, bellowing sound that conveyed, even from such an alien thing, the depth of its physical agony. Its hindquarters just kept right on rolling forward, as if they hadn’t noticed that the head was gone. The front half of the thing began to veer and waver wildly, its limited brain perhaps overloaded by the effort of sending nerve impulses to bits of its anatomy that no longer existed. It settled into a pattern of chasing its own retreating midsection, rolling in a great circle that crushed the ranks of primroses on either side of the trail.

“Booya!” I shouted in pure triumph, the adrenaline turning my manly baritone into a rather terrified-sounding shriek. “What have you got for fiery beam of death, huh? You got nothing for fiery beam of death! Might as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, ’cause you don’t got game enough for me!”

It took me five or ten seconds to realize what was happening.

The wound I’d inflicted hadn’t allowed for much bleeding, cauterizing even as it sliced—but even that little bit of bleeding stopped on both severed halves of the monster. The front half’s wounded rear end suddenly rounded out. The second half’s wounded front end shuddered and suddenly warped in place, and then with a wriggling motion, a new head began to writhe free of the severed stump.

Within seconds, both halves had focused on me, and then two of the freaking things rolled at me, jaws clashing and snapping, equally strong, equally as deadly as before. Only they were going to come rushing at me from multiple directions now.

“Wow,” Bob said, in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact, conversational tone. “That is incredibly unfair.”

“Been that kind of day,” I said. I swapped my blasting rod for my staff. The rod was great for pitching fire around, but I needed to pull off something more complicated than it was really meant to handle, and my wizard’s staff was a great deal more versatile, meant for handling a broad range of possibilities. I called forth my will and laced it with the soulfire within me, then thrust the staff ahead and called, “Fuego murus! Fuego vellum!”

Energy rushed out of me, and silver-white fire rose up in a ring nearly sixty feet across, three feet thick, and three or four yards high. The roar of the flames seemed to be somehow intertwined with an odd tone that sounded like nothing so much as the voice of a great bell.

The centipedes (plural—Hell’s bells, I needed to stop being so arrogant) rose up onto their rearmost limbs, trying to bridge the wall in a living arch, but they recoiled from the flames even more violently than when I’d slammed the original head with a cannonball of fire.

“Hey, neat working!” Bob said. “The soulfire is a nice touch.”

The effort of managing that much energy caught up to me in a rush, and I found myself gasping and sweating. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Of course, now we’re trapped,” Bob noted. “And that wall is going to run out of juice soon. You can keep chopping them up for a while. Then they’ll eat you.”

“Nah,” I said, panting. “We’re in this together. We’ll both get eaten.”

“Ah,” Bob said. “You’d better open a Way back to Chicago, then.”

“Back to my apartment?” I demanded. “The FBI is there just waiting to slap cuffs onto me.”

“Then I guess you shouldn’t have become a terrorist, Harry!”

“Hey! I never—”

Bob raised his voice and shouted toward the centipedes, “I’m not with him!”

None of my options were good ones. Getting eaten by a supernaturally resilient centipede-demon would be an impediment to my rescue effort. Getting locked up by the FBI wouldn’t be much better, but at least with the feds putting me in a cell, I’d have a chance to walk out of it—unlike the centipedes’ stomach. Stomachs.

But I couldn’t walk back into my apartment with a bag full of no-nos. I’d have to hide them before I got there—and that meant leaving the bag here. That wasn’t exactly a brilliant idea, but I didn’t have much in the way of a choice. I would have to take whatever precautions I could to hide the bag and hope that they were enough.

Earth magic isn’t my forte. It is an extremely demanding discipline, physically speaking. You are, after all, talking about an awful lot of weight being moved around. Using magic doesn’t mean you get to ignore physics. The energy for creating heat or motion comes from a different source, but it still has to interact with reality along the same lines as any other kind of energy. That means that affecting tons of earth takes an enormous amount of energy, and it’s damned difficult—but not impossible. Ebenezar had insisted that I learn at least one very useful, if enormously taxing, spell with earth magic. It would be the effort of an entire day to use it in the real world. But here, in the Nevernever . . .

I lifted my staff, pointed it at the ground before me, and intoned in a deep, heavy monotone, “Dispertius!” I unleashed my will as I did, though I was already winded, and the earth and stone beneath my feet cracked open, a black gap opening like a stony mouth a few inches in front of my toes.

“Oh, no, no,” Bob said. “You are not going to put me in—”

It was an enormous effort to my swiftly tiring body, but I pitched the bag, with the Swords, Bob, and all, into the hole. It vanished into the dark, along with Bob’s scream of, “You’d better come back!”

The furious hissing of the enraged centipedes sliced through the air.

I pointed my staff at the hole again and intoned, “Resarcius!” More of my strength flooded out of me, and as quickly as that, the hole mended itself again, with the earth and stone that the bag and its contents displaced being dispersed into a wide area, resulting in little more than a very slight and difficult-to-see hump in the ground. The spell would make retrieval of the gear difficult for anyone who didn’t know exactly where it was, and I had put it deep enough to hide it from anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it. I hoped.

Bob and the Swords were as safe as it was possible for me to make them, under the circumstances, and my wall of silver fire was steadily dwindling. It was time to get going while I still could.

My legs were shaking with fatigue and I leaned hard on my staff to keep from falling over. I needed one more effort of will to escape this prettily landscaped death trap, and after that—

The ring of fire had fallen low enough that one of the centipedes arched up into the air, forming a bridge of its own body, and flowed over it and onto the ground outside. Its multifaceted eyes fixed upon me and its jaws clashed in hungry anticipation.

I turned away, focused my thoughts and will, and with a slashing motion of my hand cut a tiny slice into the air, opening a narrow doorway, a mere crack, between the Nevernever and reality. Then I threw myself at it.

I had never gone through such a narrow opening before. I felt as if it were smashing me flat in some kind of spiritual trash compactor. It hurt, an instant of such savage agony that it seemed to stretch out into an hour, all while my thoughts were compressed into a single, impossibly dense whole, a psychic black hole where every dark and leaden emotion I’d ever felt seemed to suffuse and poison every thought and memory, adding an overwhelming heartache to the physical torment.

The instant passed, and I was through the narrow opening. I sensed a fraction of a second in which the centipede tried to follow, but the slit I’d opened between worlds had healed itself almost instantaneously.

I tumbled through about three feet of empty air, banged my hip on the side of the worktable in my lab, and hit the concrete floor like a sack of exhausted bricks.

People started shouting and someone piled onto me, rolling me onto my chest and planting a knee in my spine as they hauled my arms around behind my back. There was a bunch of chatter to which I paid no heed. I hurt too much, and was too damned tired to care.

Honestly, the only thought in my mind at the time was a sense of great relief at being arrested. Now I could kick back and relax in a nice pair of handcuffs.

Or maybe a straitjacket, depending on how things went.

Chapter Thirteen

They took me to the Chicago division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Roosevelt. A crowd of reporters was outside the place, and immediately started screaming questions and snapping pictures as I was taken from the car and half carried into the building by a couple of patrolmen. None of the feds said anything to the cameras, but Rudolph paused long enough to confirm that an investigation into the explosion was ongoing and that several “persons of interest” were being detained, and that the good people of Chicago had nothing to fear, yadda, yadda, yadda.

A slender little guy in a fed suit with fish white skin and ink black hair strolled by Rudolph, put an arm around the other man’s shoulder in a comradely fashion, and almost hauled him off his feet and away from the reporters. Rudolph sputtered, but Slim gave him a hard look and Rudy subsided.

I remember stumbling through a checkpoint and an elevator and then being plopped down into a chair. Slim took the cuffs off my wrists. I promptly folded my arms on the table in front of me and put my head down. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, a rather stiff, dour-looking woman was shining a penlight into my eyes.

“No evidence of concussion,” she said. “Normal response. I think he’s just exhausted.”

Slim stood at the door to the little room, which had a single conference table, several chairs, and a long mirror on the wall. Rudolph was standing there with him, a young- looking man in a suit more expensive than his pay grade, with dark, insanely neat hair and an anxious hunch to his shoulders.

“He’s faking it,” Rudolph insisted. “He wasn’t out of our sight for more than a few minutes. How could he have worked himself to exhaustion in that time, huh? Without sweating? Not even really breathing hard? He’s dirty. I know it. We shouldn’t have given him an hour to come up with a story.”

Slim eyed Rudy without any expression showing on his lean, pale face. Then he looked at me.

“I guess that makes you Good Cop,” I said.

Slim rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Roz.”

The woman took a stethoscope from around her neck, gave me a look full of disapproval, and left the room.

Slim came over to the table and sat down across from me. Rudolph moved around to stand behind me. It was a simple psychological ploy, but it worked. Rudolph’s presence, out of my line of sight, was an irritant and a distraction.

“My name is Tilly,” said Slim. “You can call me Agent Tilly or Agent or Tilly. Whatever you’re most comfortable with.”

“Okay, Slim,” I said.

He inhaled and exhaled slowly. Then he said, “Why didn’t you just answer the door, Mr. Dresden? It would have been a lot easier. For all of us.”

“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “I was asleep down in the subbasement.”

“Bullshit,” said Rudolph.

Slim looked from me to Rudy and back. “Asleep, huh?”

“I’m a heavy sleeper,” I said. “Keep a pad underneath one of the tables in the lab. Snooze down there sometimes. Nice and cool.”

Slim studied me for another thoughtful minute. Then he said, “Nah, you weren’t asleep down there. You weren’t down there at all. There was no open space large enough to have hidden you in that subbasement. You were somewhere else.”

“Where?” I asked him. “I mean, not like it’s a big apartment. Living room, bedroom, bathroom, subbasement. You found me on the floor in the subbasement, which only has one entrance. Where else do you think I was? You think I just appeared out of thin air?”

Slim narrowed his eyes. Then he shook his head and said, “I don’t know. Seen a lot of tricks. Saw a guy make the Statue of Liberty disappear once.”

I spread my hands. “You think I did it with mirrors or something?”

“Could be,” he said. “I don’t have a good explanation for how you showed up all of a sudden, Dresden. I get grumpy when I don’t have good explanations for things. Then I go digging until I come up with something.”

I grinned at him. I couldn’t help it. “I was asleep in my lab. Woke up when you guys started twisting my arms. You think I came out of a secret compartment so well hidden that nobody found it in a full sweep of the room? Or maybe I appeared out of thin air. Which of those stories do you think will make more sense to the judge in the civil suit I bring against the CPD and the Bureau? Yours or mine?”

Slim’s expression turned sour.

Rudolph abruptly appeared to my right and slammed a fist down on the table. “Tell us why you blew up the building, Dresden!”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have a whole lot of energy, but I laughed until my stomach was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” I said a moment later. “I’m sorry. It was just so . . . ahhhh.” I shook my head and tried to get myself under control.

“Rudolph,” said Slim. “Get out.”

“You can’t order me out. I am a duly appointed representative of the CPD and a member of this task force.”

“You’re useless, unprofessional, and impeding this deposition,” Slim said, his tone flat. He turned his dark eyes to Rudolph and said, “Get. Out.”

Slim had a hell of a glare. Some men do. They can look at you and tell you, without saying a word, that they are perfectly capable of doing violence and willing to demonstrate it. That look doesn’t convey any particular, single emotion, nor anything that can be easily put into words. Slim didn’t need any words. He stared at Rudolph with some faint shadow of old Death himself in his eyes, and did nothing else.

Rudolph flinched. He muttered something about filing a complaint against the FBI and left the room.

Agent Tilly turned back to me. His expression softened, briefly, into something almost resembling a smile, and he said, “Did you do it?”

I met his eyes for a second and said, “No.”

Tilly pursed his lips. Then he nodded his head several times and said, “Okay.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Just like that?”

“I know when people lie,” he said simply.

“And that’s why this is a deposition, not an interrogation?”

“It’s a deposition because Rudolph lied his ass off when he fingered you to my boss,” Tilly said. “Now I’ve seen you for myself. And bomber doesn’t fit on you.”

“Why not?”

“Your apartment is one big pile of disorganized clutter. Disorganized bomb makers don’t have much of a life expectancy. My turn. Why is someone trying to tag you for the office building?”

“Politics, I think,” I said. “Karrin Murphy has pissed off a lot of money by wrecking some of their shadier enterprises. Money leans on politicians. I get some spillover because she’s the one who hired me as a consultant on some of it.”

“Fucking Chicago,” Tilly said, with real contempt in his voice. “The government in the whole state is about as corrupt as they get.”

“Amen,” I said.

“I read your file. Says you were looked at by my office before. Says four agents vanished a few days later.” He pursed his lips. “You’ve been suspected of kidnapping, murder, and at least two cases of arson, one of which was a public building.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “That building thing.”

“You lead an interesting life, Dresden.”

“Not really. Just a wild weekend now and then.”

“To the contrary,” Tilly said. “I’m very interested in you.”

I sighed. “Man. You don’t want to be.”

Tilly considered that, a faint frown line appearing between his brows. “Do you know who blew up your office building?”

“No.”

Tilly’s expression might have been carved in stone. “Liar.”

“If I tell you,” I said, “you aren’t going to believe me—and you’re going to get me locked up in a psycho ward somewhere. So no. I don’t know who blew up the building.”

He nodded for a moment. Then he said, “What you are doing now could be construed as obstructing and interfering with an investigation. Depending on who was behind the bombing and why, it might even get bumped up to treason.”

“In other words,” I said, “you couldn’t find anything in my apartment to incriminate me or give you an excuse to hold me. So now you’re hoping to intimidate me into talking with you.”

Agent Tilly leaned back in his chair and squinted at me. “I can hold you for twenty-four hours for no reason at all. And I can make them fairly unpleasant for you without coming close to violating any laws.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

Tilly shrugged. “And I wish you’d tell me what you know about the explosion. But I guess neither of us is going to get what we want.”

I propped my chin on my hand and thought about it for a moment. I gave it even odds that someone in the supernatural scene, probably the duchess, had pulled some strings to send Rudolph my way. If that was the case, maybe I could bounce this little hand grenade back to her.

“Off the record?” I asked Tilly.

He stood up, went out the door, and came back in a moment later, presumably after turning off any recording devices. He sat back down and looked at me.

“You’re going to find out that the building was wired with explosives,” I said. “On the fourth floor.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Someone I trust saw some blueprint files that showed where the charges had been installed, presumably at the behest of the building’s owners. I remember that a few years ago, there were crews tearing into the walls for a week or so. Said they were removing asbestos. The owners had hired them.”

“Nuevo Verita, Inc., owns the building. As insurance scams go, this isn’t a great one.”

“It isn’t about insurance,” I said.

“Then what is it about?”

“Revenge.”

Tilly tilted his head to one side and studied me intently. “You did something to this company?”

“I did something to someone far up the food chain in the corporate constellation that Nuevo Verita belongs to.”

“And what was that?”

“Nothing illegal,” I said. “You might look into the business affairs of a man calling himself Paolo Ortega. He was a professor of mythology in Brazil. He died several years ago.”

“Ah,” Tilly said. “His family is who is after you?”

“That’s a reasonably accurate description. His wife in particular.”

Tilly absorbed that, taking his time. The room was silent for several minutes.

Finally, Tilly looked up at me and said, “I have a great deal of respect for Karrin Murphy. I called her while you were resting. She says she’ll back you without reservation. Considering the source, that is a significant statement.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Considering the source, it is.”

“Frankly, I’m not sure if I can do anything to help you. I’m not in charge of the investigation, and it’s being directed by politicians. I can’t promise that you won’t be questioned again—though today’s events should make it harder to get judicial approval to move against you.”

“I’m not sure I understand your meaning,” I said.

Tilly waved a hand toward the rest of the building. “As far as they’re concerned, you’re guilty, Dresden. They’re already writing headlines and news text. Now it’s just a matter of finding the evidence to support the conclusion they want.”

“They,” I said. “Not you.”

Tilly said, “They’re a bunch of assholes.”

“And you aren’t?”

“I’m a different kind of asshole.”

“Heh,” I said. “Am I free to go?”

He nodded. “But since they’ve got nothing remotely like evidence that you were the one to plant the explosives, they’re going to be digging into you. Your personal life. Your past. Looking for things to use against you. They’ll play dirty.”

“Okay by me,” I said. “I can play, too.”

Tilly’s eyes smiled. “Sounds like. Yeah.” He offered me his hand. “Good luck.”

I shook it. I felt the very, very faint tingle of someone with a slight magical talent. It probably augmented Tilly’s ability to separate truth from fiction.

I got up and walked wearily toward the door.

“Hey,” Tilly said, just before I opened it. “Off the record. Who did it?”

I stopped, looked at him again, and said, “Vampires.”

His expression flickered with swiftly banished emotions: amusement, then realization, followed by doubt and yards and yards of rationalization.

“See,” I said to him. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”

Chapter Fourteen

I came out of the doors of the FBI building to find a ring of paparazzi surrounding it, waiting with predatory patience to get more material for their stories. A couple of them saw me and hurried toward me, beginning to ask me questions, thrust microphones toward me, that sort of thing. I winced. I was still pretty tired, but it was going to play merry hell with their gear if I got too close to it.

I looked around for a way to get down the sidewalks without messing up anybody’s equipment, and that was when they tried to kill me.

I’d been the target of a drive-by attempt once before. This one was considerably more professional than the first. There was no roar of engines to give me a warning, no wildly swerving vehicle. The only tip-off I had was a sudden prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck and a glimpse of a dark sedan’s passenger window rolling down.

Then something hit me in the left side of my chest and hammered me down onto the stairs. Stunned, I realized that someone was shooting at me. I could have rolled down the stairs and into the news crowd, put them between myself and the shooter, but I had no way of knowing whether the shooter wanted me bad enough to fire through a crowd in hopes of getting me. So I curled into a defensive ball and felt two more heavy blows land against me: one of them on my ribs, the second on my left arm, which I’d raised to cover my head.

There was an exclamation from below, and then there were several people standing over me.

“Hey, buddy,” said a potbellied cameraman in a hunting jacket. He offered me a hand to help me up. “Nasty fall, there. You still in one piece?”

I just stared at him for a second, the adrenaline coursing through me, and realized that the cameraman—all of the newsies, in fact—didn’t even know what had just happened.

It made a creepy kind of sense. I hadn’t heard anything. The assassin must have been using a suppressor. There hadn’t been any flashes, so he must have done it right, aiming at me through the car window while sitting far enough back to make sure the barrel of his gun didn’t poke out suspiciously—and that he never became a highly visible target. I had helped, too, by denying the onlookers the subtle clue of a dead body with little holes in the front of it and big ones in the back. No sound, no sight, and no victim. Why should they think that murder had just been attempted?

“Move!” I said, hauling myself up by the cameraman’s paw. I struggled to get higher, to look over the crowd and get a plate off of the dark sedan. It didn’t take much more than stepping around a couple of people and standing on tiptoe to get a view of the shooter’s vehicle, cruising calmly away, without roaring engines, without crashing up onto the sidewalk or running red lights. It just vanished into the traffic like a shark disappearing into the depths. I never got a clear look at the plates.

“Dammit,” I growled. Pain was starting to register on me now, especially in my arm. The protective spells I’d woven over my duster had held out against the bullets, but the leather had been pulled pretty tight over my skin and as a result it felt like someone had smashed a baseball bat into my forearm. The fingers of my left hand were tingling and refused to do more than twitch. I felt similar throbs from the other two hits, and ran my hands over the duster, just to be sure none of them had gone through without my noticing.

I found a bullet caught in the leather of my left sleeve. It hadn’t penetrated more than maybe a quarter of an inch, but it was trapped in the leather and deformed from the impact. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket, wrapped the bullet in it, and put it back again, managing to do the whole thing unnoticed while about a dozen people looked at me like I was a lunatic.

From the street came a wheezy little beep-beep! The Blue Beetle came slowly down the street and stopped in front of the building. Molly was behind the wheel, waving at me frantically.

I hurried down to the street and got in before the mismatched color scheme of my car sent the obsessive-compulsive federal personnel in the building behind me into a conniption. As Molly pulled away, I buckled up, then got a sloppy kiss on the face from Mouse, who sat in the backseat, his tail going thump-thump-thump against the back of the driver’s seat.

“Ick!” I told him. “My lips touched dog lips! Get me some mouthwash! Get me some iodine!”

His tail kept wagging and he smooched me again before settling down and looking content.

I sagged back into my seat and closed my eyes.

Maybe two minutes passed. “You’re welcome,” Molly said abruptly, her tone frustrated. “No problem, Harry. Whatever I can do to help.”

“Sorry, padawan,” I said. “This has been a long day already.”

“I came back from the church and saw a bunch of guys and cops were going in and out of your apartment. The door was broken down and the whole place looked like it had been ransacked.” She shuddered and clenched the wheel. “God. I was sure you were dead or in trouble.”

“You were about ninety percent right,” I said. “Someone told the feds I was the one who blew up the office building. They wanted to talk to me.”

Molly’s eyes grew wide. “What about the Swords? We’ve got to tell my dad, right away, or—”

“Relax,” I said. “I stashed them. They should be safe for now.”

Molly puffed out a breath and subsided in relief. “You look terrible,” she said, after a minute. “Did they beat you up or something?”

I swept my eyes left and right as we went on, searching. “Giant centipede.”

“Oh,” Molly said, drawing the word out, as though I had explained everything. “What are you looking for?”

I’d been scanning the traffic around us for a dark sedan. I’d found about thirty of them so far, being a master detective and all. “The car of the guy who just shot at me.” I produced the bullet, a little copper-jacketed round more slender than my pinkie and a little under an inch long.

“What is that?” Molly asked.

“Two-twenty-three Remington,” I said. “I think. Probably.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That it could have been almost anybody. It’s the round used in most NATO assault rifles. A lot of hunting rifles, too.” A thought struck me and I frowned at her. “Hey. How did you know where to find me?”

“I let Mouse drive.”

Thump, thump, thump.

I was tired. It took my brain a second to sort out the humor in her tone. “It isn’t funny when everyone does it, Molly. Not ready for the burden of constant wiseassery are you.”

She grinned widely, evidently pleased at having scored the point on me. “I used a tracking spell and the hair you gave me in case I ever needed to find you.”

Of course she had. “Oh, right. Well-done.”

“Um,” she said. “I’m not sure where we’re driving. As far as I know, your apartment is still crawling with guys.”

“Priorities, grasshopper. First things first.”

She eyed me. “Burger King, huh?”

“I’m starving,” I said. “Then back to the apartment. They should be gone by the time we get there, and it’s the only place where I’m sure Susan and Martin will be trying to make contact.”

She frowned. “But . . . the wards are down. It’s not safe there anymore. Is it?”

“It never was,” I said calmly. “If someone really wants to come kill you, it’s hard to stop them. All you can do is make it expensive for them to try it, and hope that they decide the price is too high.”

“Well, sure,” Molly said. “But . . . without the wards, aren’t you kind of having a super discount sale?”

Kid had a point. Anyone who ever wanted to take a whack at me had a peachy opportunity now. Attention, shoppers! Discount specials on Harry Dresden’s life. Slightly used, no refunds, limit one per customer. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.

I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, and said, “What’d Forthill tell you?”

“What he always says. That he couldn’t make any promises, but that he’d do whatever he could to help. He said to call him back in a few hours and he’d see what he could get from his peeps.”

“Pretty sure that Roman Catholic priests don’t have peeps,” I said gravely. “Too trendy and ephemeral. Like automobiles. And the printing press.”

Molly didn’t return fire against my comments, though I’d made them lightly. She was conflicted on the whole issue of the Church, which I thought was probably a fine state for her mind to be in. People who ask questions and think about their faith are the last ones to embrace dogma—and the last to abandon their path once they’ve set out on it. I felt fairly sure that the Almighty, whatever name tag He had on at the moment, could handle a few questions from people sincerely looking for answers. Hell, He might even like it.

“Harry,” she said. “We could talk to my father.”

“No,” I said in a calm and final tone. “That isn’t even on the table.”

“Maybe it should be. Maybe he could help you find Maggie.”

I felt a sharp stab of anger and pain go through me—a vivid memory. Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Sword and unflagging friend, had gotten his body torn and beaten to bits trying to help me with one of my cases. Bearing a Sword melded to one of the nails of the Crucifixion, given him by an archangel, he had been a bulwark against very real, very literal forces of evil in the world. It was incredibly comforting to have him on your side. We’d waded into all kinds of ridiculously lethal situations together and come out of them again.

Except that last time.

He was retired now, and happy, walking only with the aid of a cane, out of the evil-smiting business and spending his time building houses and being with his family, the way he’d always wanted to. So long as he stayed retired, I gathered that he had a certain amount of immunity against the powers of supernatural evil. It would not surprise me at all if there were literally an angel standing over his shoulder at all times, ready to protect him and his family. Like the Secret Service, but with swords and wings and halos.

“No,” I said again. “He’s out of the fight. He deserves to be. But if I ask for his help, he’ll give it, and he’ll have chosen to accept the consequences. Only he can’t protect himself or your family from them anymore.”

Molly took a very deep breath and then nodded, her worried eyes focused on the road. “Right,” she said. “Okay. It’s just . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I’m used to him being there, I guess. Knowing that . . . if I need him, he’s there to help. I guess I always had it in my head that if things ever went really, truly bad, he’d Show Up,” she said, putting gentle emphasis on the last words.

I didn’t answer her. My father had died when I was young, before I learned that there was anything stronger than he was. I’d been operating without that kind of support for my whole life. Molly was only now realizing that, in some ways, she was on her own.

I wondered if my daughter even knew that she had a father, if she knew that there was someone who wanted, desperately, to Show Up.

“You get yourself an apartment and your plumbing goes bad, he’ll still be there,” I said quietly. “Some guy breaks your heart, he’ll come over with ice cream. A lot of people never have a dad willing to do that stuff. Most of the time, it matters a hell of a lot more.”

She blinked her eyes several times and nodded. “Yeah. But . . .”

I got what she didn’t say. But when you need someone to break down the door and commence kicking ass, you really need it. And Michael couldn’t do that for his daughter anymore.

“Tell you what, Molly,” I said. “You ever need a rescue, I’ll handle that part. Okay?”

She looked at me, her eyes blurred with tears, and nodded several times. She clasped my hand with hers and squeezed tight. Then she turned her face back to the road and pressed down on the accelerator.

We hit a drive-through and went on back to my apartment.

At the top of the stairs that led down to my door, I felt myself starting to get angry. They’d hammered the door flat. There were some scuff marks on it, but not much more than that. Tough door. But the wooden frame around it was shattered. There would be no way to get the door mounted again without extensive repairs that were probably beyond my skill level.

I stood there shaking with rage. It wasn’t like I lived in an ivory tower or Bag End. It was just a dingy little hole in the ground. It wasn’t much of a place, but it was the only home I had, and I was comfortable there.

It was my home.

And Rudolph and company had trashed it. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm down.

Molly touched my shoulder for a second. “It’s not so bad. I know a good Carpenter.”

I sighed and nodded. I already knew that when all this was over, Michael would be Showing Up for me.

“Just hope Mister will be back soon. Might have to board him somewhere until the door is fixed.” I started down the stairs. “I just hope that—”

Mouse let out a sudden, deep growl.

I had my blasting rod out and my shield up in less than two seconds. Mouse is not an alarmist. I’ve never heard him growl outside the presence of danger of one kind or another. I checked to my right, and saw no Molly standing there. The grasshopper had vanished from view even more quickly than I’d readied my defenses.

I swallowed. I’d heard many variants on my dog’s snarl. This one wasn’t as threatening as it might have been—as it would be, in the presence of dark threats. His body posture was a balance of tension and relaxation, simple wariness rather than the fighting crouch he had exhibited before. He’d smelled something that he thought was extremely dangerous, but not necessarily something that had to be immediately attacked and destroyed.

Slowly, I went down the steps, shield at the ready, my left hand extended before me, my fingers in a warding gesture, my thumb, pinkie, and index fingers stiff and spread wide apart, center fingers folded. My right hand held the blasting rod extended before me, seething scarlet power boiling out from the carved runes and the tendril of bright flame at its tip, simultaneously ready to destroy and lighting my way. Mouse came down the stairs with me, his shoulder against my right hip. His growl was a steady tone, like the engine of a well-tuned car.

I came down the stairs and saw that there was a fire crackling in the fireplace. Between that and my blasting rod and the stray bits of afternoon sunlight, I could see fairly well.

The FBI could have done worse to my apartment, I supposed. Books had been taken off my bookshelves, but at least they had been stacked in piles, more or less, rather than tossed on the floor. They’d moved my furniture around, including taking the cushions off, but they’d put them back. Incorrectly, but they were back. Similarly, my kitchen had been dismantled with a kind of cursory courtesy, but not destroyed.

All of that was secondary in my mind, next to the pair of coffin-sized cocoons of what looked like green silk. One of the cocoons was stuck to my ceiling, the other to the wall beside the fireplace. Susan’s face protruded from the second cocoon, sagging in something near unconsciousness, her dark hair hanging limply. On the ceiling, I could see only a man’s mouth and part of his chin, but I was pretty sure it was Martin. They’d come back to my apartment, presumably after the feds left, and been captured.

“Mouse,” I murmured. “You smell any cordite?”

The dog shook his head as if to shed it of water, and his tags jingled.

“Me neither,” I said. So. Whatever had been done to them, it had happened fast, before an extremely quick Susan or an extremely paranoid Martin could employ a weapon.

One of my old recliners was faced away from the door. As I stepped across the threshold, it spun around (completely ignoring the fact that it was neither meant to spin nor mounted on any kind of mechanism that would make such a thing possible) and revealed, in firelight and shadow, an intruder and my cat.

She was tall and beyond beautiful—like most of the Sidhe are. Her skin was fair and flawless, her eyes enormous, slightly oblique orbs of emerald green. In fact, they almost mirrored Mister’s eyes as he sat primly in the Sidhe woman’s lap. Her lips were full and very red, and her long red hair, accented with streaks of pure white, spilled down in silken coils and waves over her dress of emerald green.

When she saw me she smiled, widely, and it revealed neatly pointed canine teeth, both dainty and predatory. “Ah,” she said warmly. “Harry. It’s been such a long time since we’ve spoken.”

I shivered and kept my blasting rod trained on the Sidhe woman. She was a faerie, and I’d learned, from long experience, that the folk of Faerie, Summer and Winter alike, were not to be underestimated. Only a fool would trust them—but on the other hand, only a madman would offend them. They set great store by the forms of courtesy, etiquette, and the relationship of guest to host. One flouted the proper forms at peril of . . . rather extreme reactions from the Sidhe, the lords of Faerie.

So instead of opening up with fire and hoping I got in a sucker punch, I lowered my blasting rod, gave the Leanansidhe a precise, shallow bow without ever taking my eyes off of her, and said, “Indeed. It’s been a while, Godmother.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Aren’t you pleased with me?” the Leanansidhe said. She gestured with one manicured hand to the two cocoons, then went back to caressing Mister. “I came upon these brigands ransacking your little cave and . . . What is the word?” Her smile widened. “I apprehended them.”

“I see,” I said.

“As I understand mortal business,” she said, “next there is a trial, followed by . . . What is the word mortal law uses for murder? Ah, an execution.” Her red-gold brows furrowed briefly. “Or is it execution and then trial?” She shrugged. “La. It seems largely a matter of semantics in any case. Harry, would you prefer to be the judge, the jury, or the executioner?”

I . . . just stared.

The last time I’d seen my faerie godmother, she had been ranting and raving in a couple of distinct personalities and voices while half-entombed in a sheet of ice at the heart of the Winter Court. Since I was sixteen, she’d pursued me relentlessly whenever I crossed into the Nevernever, apparently determined to transform me into one of her hounds.

For crying out loud. Now she was all smiles and bubbles? Protecting my apartment? Offering to play courtroom with me, as if I were a child and Martin and Susan were a pair of dolls?

“It isn’t that I don’t like to see you, Lea,” I said. “But I can’t help but wonder what it is you want.”

“Merely to ensure the well-being of your spiritual self,” she replied. “That is what a godmother is supposed to do, is it not?”

“I was sort of hoping your answer would be a bit more specific.”

She let out a musical laugh that rang like distant church bells over snow. “Sweet child. Have you learned nothing of the fae?”

“Does anyone, ever?”

Her slender fingers stroked Mister’s fur. “Do you think it so impossible?”

“Don’t you think it is?”

“In what way is my opinion relevant to the truth?”

“Are we going to stand around here all day answering each other’s questions with questions?”

Her smile widened. “Would you like that?”

I lifted a hand, capitulating.

She inclined her head to me, a gracious victor. Lea was better at that sort of wordplay than me, having had several centuries to practice.

Besides, losing to the guest with grace was a traditional courtesy, as well.

“What I would like,” I said, nodding toward the cocoons, “is for you to please release these two. They aren’t robbers. They’re guests. And this is, after all, my home.”

“Of course, child,” she said agreeably. “No harm done.” She snapped her fingers and the cocoons seemed to sublimate into a fine green mist that quickly dispersed. Susan fell limply from the wall, but I was waiting to catch her and lower her gently to the floor.

Martin plummeted from the ceiling and landed on a threadbare throw rug covering the concrete floor. Nobody was there to catch him, which was awful. Just awful.

I examined Susan quickly. She had no obvious wounds. She was breathing. She had a pulse. And that was pretty much the length and breadth of my medical knowledge. I checked Martin, too, but was disappointed. He was in the same condition as Susan.

I looked up at my godmother. Mister was sprawled in her lap on his back, luxuriating as she traced her long nails over his chest and tummy. His purr throbbed continuously through the room. “What did you do to them?”

“I lulled their predator spirit to sleep,” she said calmly. “Poor lambs. They didn’t realize how much strength they drew from it. Mayhap this will prove a useful lesson.”

I frowned at that. “You mean . . . the vampire part of them?”

“Of course.”

I sat there for a moment, stunned.

If the vampire infection within half vampires like Susan and Martin could be enchanted to sleep, then it was presumably possible to do other things to it as well. Suppress it, maybe permanently.

It might even be possible to destroy it.

I felt a door in my mind open upon a hope I had shut away a long time ago.

Maybe I could save them both.

“I . . .” I shook my head. “I searched for a way to . . . I spent more than a . . .” I shook my head harder. “I spent more than a year trying to find a way to . . .” I looked at my godmother. “How? How did you do it?”

She looked back at me, her lips curled into something that wasn’t precisely a smile. “Oh, sweet child. Information of that sort is treasure indeed. What have you to trade for such a precious gem of knowledge?”

I clenched my teeth. “It’s always about bargains with you, isn’t it.”

“Of course, child. But I always live up to my end. Hence, my protection of you.”

“Protection?” I demanded. “You spent most of a couple of decades trying to turn me into a dog!”

“Only when you strayed out of the mortal world,” she said, as if baffled at why I would be upset. “Child, we had a bargain. And you had not willingly provided your portion of it.” She smiled widely at Mouse. “And dogs are so charming.”

Mouse watched her with calm, wary eyes, his body motionless.

I frowned. “But . . . you sold my debt to Mab.”

“Precisely. At an excellent price, I might add. So now, all that remains twixt thou and I is your mother’s bargain. Unless you would prefer to enter another compact, of course . . .”

I shuddered. “No, thank you.” I finally lowered my shields. The Leanansidhe beamed at me. “I saw you in Mab’s tower,” I said.

Something dark flickered through her emerald eyes, and she turned her face slightly away from me. “Indeed,” she said quietly. “You saw what it means for my queen to heal an affliction.”

“What affliction?”

“A madness had beset me,” she whispered. “Robbed me of myself. Treacherous gifts . . .” She shook her head. “I can think on it no more, lest it make me vulnerable once again. Suffice to say that I am much better now.” She stroked a fingertip over an icy white streak in her hair. “The strength of my queen prevailed, and my mind is mine own.”

“Ensuring the well-being of my spiritual self,” I murmured. Then I blinked. “The garden, the one on the other side of this place . . . It’s yours.”

“Indeed, child,” she said. “Did you not think it strange that in your turmoil-strewn time here none of your foes—not one—ever sought to enter from the other side? Never sent a spirit given form directly into your bed, your shower, your refrigerator? Never poured a basket of asps into your closet so that they sought refuge in your shoes, your boots, the pockets of your clothing?” She shook her head. “Sweet, sweet child. Had you walked much farther, you would have seen the mound of bones of all the things that have attempted to reach you, and which I have destroyed.”

“Yeah, well. I nearly wound up there myself.”

“La,” she said, smiling. “My guardians were created to attack any intruder—including one that looked like you. We couldn’t have some clever shapeshifter slipping by, now, could we?” She sighed. “You took a terrible toll on my primroses. Honestly, child, there are elements other than fire, you know. You really ought to diversify. Now I have two gaping maws to feed instead of one.”

“I’ll . . . be more careful next time,” I said.

“I should appreciate such a thing.” She studied me quietly. “It has been true for your entire lifetime, child. I have followed you in the spirit world. Created guardians and defenses ’pon the other side to ward your sleep, to stand sentinel over your home. And you still have only the beginnings of an idea of how many have tried.” She smiled, showing her delicately pointed canine teeth again. “Tried, and failed.”

Which also explained how she was always near at hand whenever I had entered the Nevernever. How she would be upon my trail in seconds whenever I went in.

Because she had been there, protecting me.

From everything but herself.

“Now, then,” she said, her tone businesslike. “You left a considerable trove of equipment in my garden for safekeeping.”

“It was an emergency.”

“I had assumed that,” she said. “I will, of course, safeguard it or return it, as you wish. And, should you perish, I will deliver it to an heir of your designation.”

I let out a weary laugh. “You . . . Of course you will.” I eyed Mouse. “What do you think, boy?”

Mouse looked at me, and then at Lea. Then he sat down—but still kept watching her carefully.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that, too.”

The Leanansidhe smiled widely. “It is good that you have taken my lessons to heart, child. It is a cold and uncaring universe we live in. Only with strength of body and mind can you hope to control your own fate. Be wary of everyone. Even your protector.”

I sat there for a moment, thinking.

My mother had prepared protection for me with considerable foresight. She had anticipated my eventually looking for and finding my half brother, Thomas. Had she prepared other things for me, as well? Things I hadn’t yet guessed at?

How would I pass on a legacy to my child if I knew that I wasn’t going to be alive to see it happen? What kind of legacy did I have, other than a collection of magical gear that anyone could probably accumulate without help, in time?

My only real treasure was knowledge.

Ye gods and little fishes, but knowledge was a dangerous legacy. I imagined what might have happened if, at the age of fifteen, I had learned aspects of magic that had not come to me on their own until I was over thirty. It would have been like handing a child a cocked and loaded gun.

A safety mechanism was needed—something that would prevent the child from attaining said store of knowledge until she was mature enough to handle it wisely. Something simple, but telling, for a child. A wizard child.

I smiled. Something like being able to admit one’s own ignorance. Expressed in the simplest possible form: asking a question. And, as I now knew, my mother had not been called “LeFay” for nothing.

“Godmother,” I asked calmly. “Did my mother leave anything for you to give me when I was ready for it? A book? A map?”

Lea took a very slow, deep breath, her eyes luminous. “Well,” she murmured. “Well, well, well.”

“She did, didn’t she.”

“Yes, indeed. But I was told to give you fair warning. It is a deadly legacy. If you accept it, you accept what comes with it.”

“Which is?” I asked.

She shrugged a shoulder. “It varies from one individual to the next. Your mother lost the ability to sleep soundly. It might be worse for you. Or it might be nothing.”

I thought about that for a moment, and then nodded. “I want it.”

Lea never took her eyes off me. She lifted her empty palm, closed her fingers over it, and opened them again.

A small, gleaming ruby, bright as a drop of blood, carved in a pentagon, lay in her hand.

“It is the sum of her knowledge of the Ways,” Lea said quietly. “Every path, every shortcut, every connection. She developed enough skill at searching them out that she was eventually able to predict them. Ways may change from decade to decade, but your mother knew where they were and where they would be. Very few of mine own kind can say as much.” She narrowed her eyes. “That knowledge is the burden I hold in my hand, child. Mine own belief is that it will destroy thee. The choice must needs be thine.”

I stared at the gem for a long moment, forcing myself to breathe slowly. All the Ways. The ability to travel around the world without concern for geography. Knowledge like that could have won the war with the Red Court almost before it began. Whoever possessed that knowledge could regard laws with utter impunity, avoid retribution from mortal authorities or supernatural nations alike. Go anywhere. Escape from damned near anything. Gather more information than anyone else possibly could.

Hell’s bells. That gleaming little gem was a subtle strength that had the potential to be as potent as any I had seen. Such power.

Such temptation.

I wondered if I’d be able to handle it. I am not a saint.

At the same time, I had never seen a tool so obviously intended to help a man Show Up for his little girl. No matter where she was, I could go to her. Go to her and get away clean.

Maggie.

I reached out and took the gem from my godmother’s hand.

Chapter Sixteen

“Harry,” Molly called from up in the living room. “I think they’re waking up.”

I grunted and lifted my pentacle necklace to examine it. The little pentagonal ruby had been quite obviously cut for this particular piece of jewelry. Or it had been before I’d been forced to use the necklace as a silver bullet. My little pentacle, the five-pointed star within a circle, had been warped by the extremes of stress I’d subjected it to. I’d been straightening it out with the set of jeweler’s tools I used to update Little Chicago.

The jewel abruptly snapped into the center of the pentacle as if into a socket. I shook the necklace several times, and the gem stayed put. But there was no point in taking chances. I turned it over and smeared the whole back with a big blob of adhesive. It might not look pretty from the front after it had dried, but I was pressed for time.

“That’ll do, pig,” I muttered to myself. I looked up to Bob’s shelf, where Mister was sprawling, using a couple of paperbacks for pillows while he amused himself dragging his claws through the mounded candle wax. I reached up to rub his ears with my fingertips, setting him to purring, and promised myself I would get Bob back soon: For the time being, he was, like the Swords, too valuable and too dangerous to leave unguarded. In Lea’s bloodthirsty garden, they were probably safer than they had been in my apartment in the first place.

I left my mother’s amulet and the glittering ruby sitting on my worktable so that the glue could dry, and padded up the stepladder.

I had hefted Susan up onto the sofa and fetched a pillow for her head, and a blanket. Molly had managed to roll Martin onto a strip of camping foam, and given him a pillow and a blanket, too. Mouse had settled down on the floor near Martin to sleep. Even though his eyes were closed and he was snoring slightly, his ears twitched at every sound.

While I had been in the lab, Molly had been cleaning up. She probably knew where all the dishes went better than I did. Or she was reorganizing them completely. Either way, I was sure that the next time I just wanted to fry one egg, I wouldn’t be able to find the little skillet until after I had already used the big skillet and cleaned it off.

I hunkered down next to Susan, and as I did she stirred and muttered softly. Then she jerked in a swift breath through her nose, her eyes suddenly opening wide, as if she were panicked.

“Easy,” I said at once. “Susan. It’s Harry. You’re safe.”

It seemed to take several seconds for my words to sink in. Then she relaxed again, blinked a few times, and turned her head toward me.

“What happened to me?” she asked.

“You were mistaken for an intruder,” I said. “You were hit with a form of magic that made you sleep.”

She frowned tiredly. “Oh. I was dreaming. . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I was dreaming that the curse was gone. That I was human.” She shook her head with a bitter little smile. “I thought I was done having that one. Martin?”

“Here,” Martin slurred. “I’m all right.”

“But maybe not for long,” I said. “The apartment’s wards are down. We’re naked here.”

“Well,” Martin said in an acidic voice. “I think we learned our lesson about where that leads.”

Susan rolled her eyes, but the look she gave me, a little hint of a smile and a level stare with her dark eyes, was positively smoldering.

Yeah. That had been pretty good.

“Did you guys find out about our tail?” I asked.

“Tails, as it turns out. Three different local investigative agencies,” Martin supplied. “They were paid cash up front to follow us from the time we arrived. They all gave a different description of the woman who hired them. All of them were too beautiful to believe.”

“Arianna?” I asked.

Martin grunted. “Probably. The oldest of them can wear any flesh mask they wish, and go abroad in daylight, hidden from the sun in the shadow of their own mask.”

I lifted my eyebrows. That was news. I wasn’t even sure the Wardens had that kind of information. Martin must have been a little groggy from his naptime.

“How long were we out?” Susan asked.

“I got here about five hours ago. Sun’s down.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as if bracing herself for something, and nodded. “All right. Martin and I need to get moving.”

“Where?” I asked.

“The airport,” Martin said. “We should be able to be in Nevada by very late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Then we can move on the warehouse and look for more information.”

“We discussed it, Harry,” Susan said quietly. “You can’t take a plane, and we’re counting the minutes. A jet will get us there in about seven hours. The car will take two days. There’s no time for that.”

“Yeah, I can see your reasoning,” I said.

Martin stood up creakily and stretched. “Entering the facility may require a reconnaissance period. We’ll have to determine its weaknesses, patrol pacing, and so on before we—”

I interrupted him by slapping a piece of notebook paper down on the coffee table. “The storage facility is set into the side of a stone hill. There are some portable units stored outside in a yard with a twelve-foot razor-wire fence. A road leads into the hill and down into what I presume to be caverns either created for storage space or appropriated after a mining operation closed.” I pointed at the notebook paper, to different points on the sketch, as I mentioned each significant feature.

“There is a single watchtower with one guard armed with a longbarreled assault rifle with a big scope. There are two men and a dog walking a patrol around the perimeter fence with those little assault rifles—”

“Carbines,” Molly said brightly, from the kitchen.

“—and fragmentation grenades. They aren’t in a hurry. Takes them about twenty minutes; then they go inside for a drink and come back out. There are security cameras here, here, and here, and enough cars in the employee parking lot to make me think that the underground portion of the facility is probably pretty big, and probably has some kind of barracks for their security team.”

I nodded. “That’s about it on the surface, but there’s no way we can get inside to scout it out ahead of time. Looks pretty straightforward. We move up to it under a veil; I shut down the communications. We use a distraction to draw everyone’s attention, and when the reinforcements come running out, we’re in. Hopefully we can find a way to lock them outside. After that, it’s just a matter of . . .”

I trailed off as I looked up to find Martin and Susan staring at me, their jaws kind of hanging limply.

“What?” I said.

“How . . .” Martin began.

“Where . . .” Susan said.

Molly burst out into a fit of giggles she didn’t even try to hide.

“How do I know?” I reached over to the table and held up an old set of binoculars I’d left sitting there. “I went over to take a look. Took me about fifteen minutes, one way. I could bring you, if you want, but it’s cool if you guys want to take the plane. I’ll wait for you.”

Martin stared hard at me.

“You . . .” Susan began, something like anger in her tone. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “You insufferable, arrogant pig,” she said fondly. “I shouldn’t have underestimated you. You don’t always perform gracefully when everything is on the line—but you’re always there, aren’t you.”

“I hope so,” I said quietly. I stood up again. “Better eat something. I’ve got some things finishing up in the lab that might help us. We’ll go in one hour.”

Chapter Seventeen

We rolled out in fifty-five minutes.

The Blue Beetle was full, but we weren’t going more than a half dozen blocks. The entry into the proper Way was in an alleyway behind a brownstone apartment building in a fairly typical Chicago neighborhood. It was getting late, so there wasn’t much traffic, and Mouse ghosted along behind us, staying mostly in the shadows and easily keeping pace with the car.

Which speaks to my dog’s mightiness, and not to my car’s wimpiness. Seriously.

Molly pulled up to the mouth of the alley and stopped. She looked nervously around as we unloaded from the car. I gave Susan a hand out of the tiny backseat, and then held the door open as Mouse jumped up into the passenger seat.

I ruffled his ears and leaned down to speak to Molly. “Go get coffee or something. Give us about an hour, an hour and a half tops. We’ll be back by then.”

“What if you aren’t?” Molly asked. She reached one hand over to Mouse in an unconscious gesture, burying her fingers in his fur. “What do I do then?”

“If we don’t show up by then, go on back home to your folks’ place. I’ll contact you there.”

“But what if—”

“Molly,” I said firmly. “You can’t plan for everything or you never get started in the first place. Get a move on. And don’t take any lip from the dog. He’s been uppity lately.”

“Okay, Harry,” she said, still unhappily. She pulled out into the street again, and Mouse turned his head to watch us as she drove away.

“Poor kid,” Susan said. “She doesn’t like being left behind.”

I grunted. “That kid’s got enough power to take all three of us down if she caught us off guard,” I said. “Her strength isn’t an issue.”

“I’m not talking about that, obviously.”

I grunted. “What do you mean?”

Susan frowned at me briefly, and then her eyebrows rose. “Dear God. You don’t realize it.”

“Realize what?”

She shook her head, one corner of her mouth crooked into the same smile I remembered so well. It made my heart twitch, if such a thing is possible. “Molly has it bad for you, Harry.”

I frowned. “No, she doesn’t. We settled that early on. Isn’t happening.”

Susan shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe you settled it, but she didn’t. She’s in love.”

“Is not,” I said, scowling. “She goes on dates and stuff.”

“I said she was in love. Not dead.” Her expression went neutral. “Or half-dead.” She stared after the vanished car for a moment and said, “Can I share something with you that I’ve learned in the past few years?”

“I guess.”

She turned to me, her expression sober. “Life is too short, Harry. And there’s nowhere near enough joy in it. If you find it, grab it. Before it’s gone.”

It cost Susan something to say that. She hid it well, but not as well as I knew her. Giving breath to those thoughts had caused her very real pain. I was going to disagree again, but hesitated. Then I said, “I never stopped loving you. Never wanted you to be gone.”

She turned a little away from me, letting her hair fall across her face as a curtain. Then she swallowed thickly and said, her voice trembling slightly, “Same here. Doesn’t mean we get to be together.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

She suddenly balled her fists and straightened her spine. “I can’t do this. Not right now. We’ve got to focus. I . . .” She shook her head and started walking. She went to the end of the block, to stand there taking deep, slow breaths.

I glanced at Martin, who stood leaning against the wall of a building, his expression, of course, bland.

“What?” I snapped at him.

“You think what you’re feeling about your daughter is rage, Dresden. It isn’t.” He jerked his chin at Susan. “That is. She knew the Mendozas, the foster parents, and loved them like family. She walked into their house and found them. She found their children. The vampires had quite literally torn them limb from limb. One of the Mendozas’ four children was three years old. Two were near Maggie’s age.”

I said nothing. My imagination showed me terrible pictures.

“It took us half an hour to find all the pieces,” Martin continued calmly. “We had to put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. And the whole time, the blood thirst was driving us both mad. Despite the fact that she knew those people. Despite her terror for her daughter. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine Susan standing there, filled with the urge to rip into the bloody limb with her teeth, even though she knew that little dismembered leg might have been her daughter’s. Picture that.”

At that point, I didn’t think I could avoid it.

“It was only when the puzzle was finished that we realized that Maggie had been taken,” Martin continued, his words steady and polite. “She’s barely holding on. If she loses control, people are going to die. She might be one of them.” Martin’s eyes went hard and absolutely cold. “So I would take it as a fucking courtesy if you wouldn’t torture her by stirring up her emotions five minutes before we kick down the door of a high-security facility.”

I looked over my shoulder at Susan. She was still facing away from us, but she was in the act of briskly pulling her hair back into a tail.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“In this situation, your emotions are liabilities,” Martin said. “They won’t help Rodriguez. They won’t help the little girl. I suggest you postpone indulging them until this is all over.”

“Until what is all over?” Susan asked, returning.

“Uh, the trip,” I said, turning to lead them into the alley. “It won’t take us long—about thirty seconds of walking down a level hallway. But it’s dark and you have to hold your breath and nose the whole way.”

“Why?” Susan asked.

“It’s full of methane gas and carbon monoxide, among others. If you use a light source, you run the risk of setting off an explosion.”

Susan’s eyebrows rose. “What about your amulet?”

I shook my head. “The light from that is actually . . . Glah, it’s more complicated than you need to know. Suffice it to say that I feel there would be a very, very small possibility that it might make the atmosphere explode. Like those static electricity warnings at the gas stations. Why take the chance?”

“Ah,” Susan said. “You want us to walk blind through a tunnel filled with poisonous gases that could explode at the smallest spark.”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . you’re sure this is a good idea?”

“It’s a terrible idea,” I said. “But it’s the fastest way to the storage facility.” I lifted my fingertips to touch the red stone on my amulet as I neared the location of the Way. It was an old, bricked-over doorway into the ground level of the apartment building.

A voice with no apparent source began to speak quietly—a woman’s voice, throaty and calm. My mother’s voice. She died shortly after my birth, but I was certain, as sure as I had been of anything in my life: It was her voice. It made me feel warm, listening to it, like an old, favorite piece of music that you haven’t heard for years.

“The hallway on the other side is full of dangerous levels of methane and carbon monoxide, among other gases. The mixture appears to be volatile, and in the other side you can never be sure exactly which energies might or might not trigger an explosion. Forty-two walking steps to the far end, which opens on a ridge outside Corwin, Nevada.” There was a moment of silence, and then the same voice began to speak again, panting, shaking, and out of breath. “Notation: The hallway is not entirely abandoned. Something tried to grab me as I came through.” She coughed several times. “Notation secundus: Don’t wear a dress the next time you need to go to Corwin, dummy. Some farmer’s going to get a show.”

“Maybe it was a grue,” I murmured, smiling.

“What did you say?” Susan asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.” I put a hand on the doorway and immediately felt a kind of yielding elasticity beneath my fingertips. The separation between the world of flesh and spirit was weak here. I took a deep breath, laid out a fairly mild effort of will, and murmured, “Aparturum.”

A circle of blackness began to expand from the center of my palm beneath my hand, rapidly swelling, overlaying the wall itself. I didn’t let it get too big. The gate would close on its own, eventually, but smaller gates closed more quickly, and I didn’t want some poor fool going through it.

Present company excluded, of course.

I glanced back to Susan and Martin. “Susan, grab on to my coat. Martin, you grab hers. Take a deep breath and let’s get this done fast and quiet.”

I turned to the Way, took a deep breath, and then strode forward.

Mom’s gem hadn’t mentioned that it was flipping hot in there. When I’d stepped into the hallway on the first trip, I felt like I was inside about three saunas, nested together like those Russian dolls. I found the righthand wall and started walking, counting my steps. I made them a bit shorter than normal, and nailed the length of Mom’s stride more accurately this time. I hit the Way out at forty-three.

Another effort of will and a whispered word, and I opened that gate as well, emerging into a cold mountain wind, and late twilight. Susan and Martin came out with me, and we all spent a moment letting out our pent-up breaths. We were in desert mountains, covered with tough, stringy plants and quick, quiet beasts. The gate behind me, another circle, stood in the air in front of what looked like the entrance to an old mine that had been bricked over a long time ago.

“Which way?” Martin said.

“Half mile this way,” I said, and set out overland.

It was an awfully good hidey-hole, I had to admit. We were out so far in the desert hills that the commute to nowhere was a long one. The facilities had been cut into a granite shelf at the end of a box canyon. There was a single road in, and the floor of the canyon was wide and flat and empty of any significant features, like friendly rocks that one might try to take cover behind. The walls of the canyon had been blasted sheer. No one was coming down that way without a hundred yards of rope or a helicopter.

Or a wizard.

“All right,” I said. The night was growing cold. My breath steamed in the air as I spoke. “Take these. Drink half of ’em. Save the rest.” I passed out test tubes filled with light blue liquid to Martin and Susan.

“What is it?” Susan asked.

“A parachute,” I said. “Technically a flight potion but I watered it down. It should get us to the valley floor safely.”

Martin eyed his tube, and then me.

“Harry,” Susan began. “The last time I drank one of your potions, it became . . . awkward.”

I rolled my eyes. “Drop into a roll at the end.” Then I drank away half of my potion and stepped off the edge of the cliff.

Flight is a difficult thing for a wizard to pull off. Everyone’s magic works a little differently, and that means that, when it comes to flying, the only way to manage it is by trial and error. And, since flying generally means moving very quickly, a long way above the ground, would-be aeromancers tended to cut their careers (and lives) short at the first error.

Flying is hard—but falling is easy.

I dropped down, accelerating for a second, then maintaining a pace of somewhere around fifteen miles an hour. It didn’t take long to hit the desert floor, and I dropped into a roll to spread out the impact energy. I stood up, dusting myself off. Susan and Martin landed nearby and also rose.

“Nice,” Susan said. She bounced up in the air experimentally, and smiled when her descent was slowed. “Very cool. Then we drink more to climb out?”

“Should make that slope a piece of cake,” I said. “But we’ll need to move fast. Potion will last us maybe twenty minutes.”

Susan nodded, adjusting the straps on the small pack she wore. “Got it.”

“Get close to me,” I said. “I can’t veil all three of us unless we’re all within arm’s reach.”

They did, and after a few seconds of focus and concentration, I brought up a veil around us that should hide us from view and disperse our heat signature as well. It wouldn’t be perfect. We’d still show up on a night-vision scope, to one degree or another. I was counting on the fact that men guarding a building that isolated could not possibly deal with problems on a regular basis. They’d have a very comfortable, reliable routine, which was exactly the sort of thing to take the edge off a sentry’s wariness. That’s just human nature.

I beckoned, and the three of us began approaching the facility. There was no fluttering from shadow to shadow, or camouflage face paint. The veiling spell took care of that. We just walked over the uneven ground and focused on staying close together. That part may have been more fun if Martin weren’t there.

We got to within thirty yards of the fence, and I paused. I lifted my staff, pointed it at the first sentry camera, and whispered, “Hexus.”

I wasn’t used to holding something as demanding as a veil in one hand while performing another working with the other—even such an easy spell as a technology hex. For a second, I thought I’d lose the veil, but then it stabilized again. The lights on the camera had gone out.

We moved around the perimeter while I hexed the other two cameras into useless junk, but just as I’d taken down camera number three, Susan gripped my arm and pointed. The foot patrol was moving by on their sweep.

“The dog will get our scent,” Susan said.

Martin drew a short pistol from beneath his jacket, and screwed a silencer to its end.

“No,” I half growled. I fished in the pocket of my duster and found the second potion I’d made while preparing for the trip. It was in a delicate, round globe of glass about as thick as a piece of paper. I flipped the globe toward the path of the oncoming dog and heard it break with a little crackle.

The two patrolmen and the dog went by the area where I’d left my surprise, and the dog snuffled the new scent with thorough interest. At a jerk of the lead, the dog hurried to catch up to the guards, and all three of them went by without so much as glancing at us.

“Dog’ll have his senses of smell and hearing back in the morning,” I murmured. “These guys are just doing a job. We aren’t going to kill them for that.”

Martin looked nonplussed. He kept the pistol in his hand.

We circled around to where the fence met the canyon wall, opposite the large parking lot. Susan got out a pair of wire cutters. She opened them and prepared to cut through when Martin snatched her wrist, preventing her from touching the fence. “Electricity,” he whispered. “Dresden.”

I grunted. Now that he’d pointed it out, I thought I could feel it, too—the almost inaudible hum of current on the move, making the hairs on my arms stand up. Hexing something with a microchip in it is simple. Impeding the flow of electricity through a conductive material is considerably more difficult. I pitched my best hex at the wiring where it connected to a power line and was rewarded with the sudden scent of burned rubber. Martin reached out and touched the fence with the back of his hand. No electricity burned him.

“All right,” Susan whispered, as she began clipping us a way in, cutting a wire only when the gusting wind reached a crescendo and covered the sound of the clippers at work, then waiting for the next gust. “Where’s that distraction?”

I winked at her, lifted my blasting rod, thrust it between links of fence in front of us, and aimed carefully. Then I checked the tower guard, to be sure he was looking away, and whispered, “Fuego, fuego, fuego, fuego.”

Tiny spheres of sullen red light flickered out across the compound and into the parking lot opposite. My aim had been good. The little spheres hissed and melted their way through the rear quarter panel of several vehicles and burned on into the fuel tanks beneath.

The results were predictable. A gas tank explosion isn’t as loud as an actual bomb going off, but when you’re standing a few yards away from it, it could be hard to tell. There were several hollow booming sounds, and light blazed up from the cars that had been hit as flames roared up and consumed them.

The guard in the tower started screaming into a radio, but apparently could get no reply. No surprise. The second camera had been positioned atop his tower, and the hex that took it out probably got his radio, too. While he was busy, Susan, Martin, and I slipped through the opening in the fence and made our way into the shadows at the base of one of the portable storage units.

A car, parked between two flaming vehicles, went up with another whump of ignition, and it got even brighter. A few seconds later, red lights started to flash at several points around the facility, and a warning klaxon began to sound. The giant metal door to the interior of the facility began to roll upward, just like a garage door.

The two patrollers and their temporarily handi-capable German shepherd came running out first, and were followed, in a moment, by nearly a dozen other guys in the same uniforms, or at least in portions of them. It looked like some of them had hopped out of bed and tossed on whatever they could reach. Several were dragging fire extinguishers, as if they were going to be useful against fires that large. Good luck with that, boys.

The moment the last of them was past our position and staring agog at the burning automobiles, I hurried forward, putting everything I had into the veil, trusting that Martin and Susan would stay close. They did. We went through the big garage door and down a long ramp into the facility.

“Go ahead,” Martin said. He hurried to a control panel on the wall and whipped out some kind of multitool. “I’ll shut the door.”

“As long as we can get it open on the way out,” I muttered.

“Yes, Dresden,” Martin said crisply. “I’d been doing this for sixty years before you were born.”

“Better drop the invisibility thing, Harry,” Susan said. “What we’re looking for might be on a computer, so . . .”

“So I’ll hold off on the magic until we know. Got it.”

We went deeper into the facility. The caves ran very deep back into the stone, and we’d gone down maybe a hundred yards after moving about four hundred yards forward on a spiraling ramp. The air grew colder, to the ambient underground average.

More than that, though, it gained a definite spiritual chill. Malevolent energy hovered around us, slow and thick like half-frozen honey. There was a gloating, miserly quality to it, bringing to my mind images of old Smaug lying in covetous slumber upon his bed of treasure. That, then, was the reason the Red Court had hidden its dark treasures here. Ambient energy like this wasn’t directly dangerous to anyone—but with only the mildest of efforts it would protect and preserve the magical implements jealously against the passing of time.

The ramp opened up into a larger area that reminded me of the interior corridors of a sports stadium. Three doors faced us. One was hanging slightly open, and read, QUARTERS. The other was shut and read, ADMINISTRATION.

The last, a large steel vault door, was labeled, STORAGE. A concrete loading dock with its edges painted in yellow and black caution stripes stretched before us, doubtless at just the right height to make use of the large transport van parked nearby.

Oh, and there were two guards standing in front of the vault door with some hostile-looking black shotguns.

Susan didn’t hesitate. She blurred forward with nearly supernatural speed, and one of the guards was down before he realized he was in a fight. The other had already spun toward me with his weapon and opened fire. In his rush to shoot, he hadn’t aimed. People make a big thing about shotguns hitting absolutely everything you point them at, but it ain’t so. It still takes considerable skill to use a shotgun well under pressure, and in his panic the guard didn’t have it. Pellets buzzed around me like angry wasps as I took three swift steps to my left and threw myself through the open barracks door, carrying me out of his line of fire.

From outside, there was a crack of something hard, maybe the butt of a gun hitting a skull, and Susan said, “Clear.”

I came out of the emptied barracks nonchalantly. The two guards lay unconscious at Susan’s feet. “God, I’m good,” I said.

Susan nodded, and tossed both guns away from the unconscious men. “Best distraction ever.”

I went to her and eyed the door. “How we getting through that?”

“We aren’t,” she said. She produced a small kit of locksmith tools and went to the administration door, ignoring the vault completely. “We don’t need their treasures. We just need the receipts.”

I’d learned a little bit about how to tickle a lock, but Susan had obviously learned more. Enough so that she took one look at the lock, pulled a lock gun from her kit, and went through it damned near as fast as if she’d had a key. She swung the door open and said, “Wait here. And don’t break anything.”

I put my hands behind my back and tried to look righteous. A smile lit her face, fast and fierce, and she vanished into the office.

I walked over to the barracks. My guns had been riding with the rest of my contraband when it got buried in Lea’s garden, and I didn’t like going unarmed on general principles. Magic is pretty damned cool when things get rowdy, but there are times when there’s no replacing a firearm. They are excellent, if specialized, tools.

Two seconds of looking around showed me a couple of possibilities, and I picked up a big semiautomatic and a couple of loaded clips. I tucked them into a pocket of the duster. Then I picked up the assault rifle from its rack and found that two spare magazines were being held in this socklike device that went over the rifle’s stock.

Rifles weren’t my forte, but I knew enough to check the chamber and see that no round was in it. I made sure the safety was on and slung the assault rifle over my shoulder on its nylon-weave strap. Then I went back over to administration and waited outside.

Susan was cursing in streaks of blue and purple and vermilion inside. She appeared a moment later and spat, “Nothing. Someone was here first. They erased everything related to the shipment less than three hours ago.”

“What about the paper copy?” I asked.

“Harry,” Susan said. “Have you ever heard of the paperless office?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like Bigfoot. Someone says he knows someone who saw him, but you don’t ever actually see him yourself.” I paused. “Though I suppose I actually have seen Bigfoot, and he seems like a decent guy, but the metaphor still stands. Remember who owns this place. You think someone like the duchess is a computer whiz? Trust me. You get to be over a couple of hundred years old, you get copies of everything in triplicate.”

Susan arched an eyebrow and nodded. “Okay. Come on, then.”

We went in and ransacked the office. There were plenty of files, but we had the identification number of the shipment of magical artifacts (000937, if it matters), and it was possible to flick through them very rapidly. We came up all zeroes, again. Whoever had covered up the back trail had done it well.

“Dammit,” Susan said quietly. Her voice shook.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. We aren’t out of options yet.”

“This was the only lead we had,” she said.

I touched her arm briefly and said, “Trust me.”

She smiled at me a little. I could see the strain in her eyes.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before the cavalry arrives. Oh, here.” I passed her the assault rifle.

“That’s thoughtful of you,” she said, smiling more widely. Her hands went over the weapon, checking the chamber as I had, only a lot more smoothly and quickly. “I didn’t get you anything.”

I turned and eyed the moving van, then went back to its cargo doors. “Here. Open this door for me?”

She got out her tools and did it in less time than it took to say it.

There were several long boxes in the van, standing vertically, and I realized after a moment that they were garment boxes. I opened one up and . . .

And found a long, mantled cloak made from some kind of white and green feathers, hanging from a little crossbar in the top of the garment box. It was heavy, easily weighing more than fifty pounds. I found a stick studded with chips of razor-sharp obsidian in there, too, its handle carved with pictographs. I couldn’t read this particular form of writing very well, but I recognized it—and recognized that it was no ancient artifact, either. It had been carved in the past few decades.

“This is Mayan ceremonial costume,” I murmured, frowning. “Why is it loaded up on the next truck out . . . ?”

The answer jumped at me. I turned to Susan and we traded a look that conveyed her comprehension as well. She went to the front of the van and popped it open. She started grabbing things, shoving them into a nylon gym bag that she had apparently found in the truck.

“What did you get?” I asked.

“Later, no time,” she said.

We hurried back up the ramp to Martin.

The big door looked like it was having a tug-of-war with itself. It would shudder and groan and try to rise, and then Martin would do something with a pair of wires in the dismantled control panel and it would slam down again. I saw guards trying to stick their guns beneath the door for a quick shot, but they wound up being driven back by Martin’s silenced pistol.

“Finally,” Martin said as we came up to him. “They’re about to get through.”

“Damn,” I said. “I figured they’d be firefighting longer than that.” I looked around the barren tunnel. I was tired and shaking. If I were fresh, I would have no trouble with the idea of slugging it out with a bunch of guys with machine guns—provided they were all in front of me. But I was tired, and then some. The slightest wavering in concentration, and a shield would become porous and flexible. I’d be likely to take a bunch of bullets. The duster might handle most of them, but not forever, and I wasn’t wearing it over my head.

“Plan B,” I said. “Okay, right. We need a plan B. If we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.”

Susan let out a puff of laughter, and then I turned to her, my eyes alight.

“We have a great big truck,” Susan said.

“Then why didn’t you list that among our assets?” I said, in a bad British accent. “Go!”

Susan vanished back down the tunnel, moving scary-fast.

“Martin,” I said. “Get behind me!”

He did, as I lifted my left arm and brought up a purely physical shield, and within five or six seconds, the door had lifted two feet off the ground and a couple of prone shooters opened up on the first thing they saw—me.

I held the shield against the bullets as the door continued to rise, and they exploded into concentric circles of light spread across the front of the shield’s otherwise invisible surface. The strain of holding the shield grew as more of the guards opened fire. I saw one poor fellow take a ricochet in the belly and go down, but I didn’t have the time or the attention to spare to feel sorry for him. I ground my teeth and hung on to the shield as the guards kept a constant pressure on it.

Then there was a roar of large engines and Susan drove the cargo truck forward like some kind of berserk bison, charging the group of guards blocking the road out.

Men screamed and sprinted, trying to avoid the truck. They made it. I didn’t need Martin to tell me to move, as the truck slammed into a turn, throwing its rear end in a deadly, skidding arch. We both sprinted for it in the confusion and flung ourselves up into the cargo compartment, which Susan had thoughtfully left open.

One of the more alert guards tried the same trick, but Martin saw him coming, aimed the little pistol, and shot him in the leg. The man screamed and fell down as the truck picked up speed. Susan stomped the pedal flat, and metal and razor wire screamed as she drove through a section of the fencing and out onto the open valley floor. She immediately turned it toward our escape point, and the truck began to bounce and rattle as it raced away from the facility.

After that, it was simple.

We went back to our ascension point, drank our watered-down flying potions, and bounded up the rocky face of the valley wall like mountain goats. Or possibly squirrels. Either way, it made the eighty-degree incline feel about as difficult to handle as a long stairway.

“Harry,” Susan said, panting, as we reached the top. “Would you burn that truck for me?”

“My pleasure,” I said, and dealt with the cargo truck the same way I had the cars in the parking lot. Thirty seconds later, it huffed out its own explosion, and Susan stood there nodding.

“Okay,” she said. “Good. Hopefully that makes it harder for them to do whatever they’re going to do.”

“What did you find?” Martin asked.

“Mayan ceremonial gear,” I said. “Not focus items, but the other stuff. The props. They were on the truck to be shipped out next.”

Susan rustled in the nylon bag and held up a sheet of paper. “Bill of lading,” she said. “Shipment number 000938. The next outgoing package after the original shipment, and it was initiated two days after the focus items went out.”

Martin narrowed his eyes, thinking. “If it was going to the same place as the first shipment . . .”

“It means that we can make a pretty good guess that wherever it’s going, it’s within two days’ drive,” I said. “That gives the vampires time enough to get the first shipment, realize that some things got left out, and call in a second shipment to bring in the missing articles.”

Martin nodded. “So? Where are they?”

Susan was going through the contents of the bag she’d appropriated. “Mexico,” she said. She held up a U.S. passport, presumably falsified, since most people don’t tote their passports around in manila envelopes, along with a wallet full of new- looking Mexican cash. “They were planning on taking those cloaks and things to Mexico.”

I grunted and started walking back to the Way. Martin and Susan fell in behind me.

“Harry? Will destroying that gear ruin what they’re doing?”

“It’ll inconvenience them,” I said quietly. “Not much more than that. The actual magic doesn’t need the costumes. It’s the people performing it who need them. So any replacement sixty-pound cloak of parrot feathers will do—and if they want it badly enough, they can do the ritual even without replacing them.”

“They’ll know who was here,” Martin said. “Too many men saw us. Interior cameras might have gotten something, too.”

“Good,” I said. “I want them to know. I want them to know that their safe places aren’t safe.”

Susan made a growling sound that seemed to indicate agreement.

Even Martin’s mouth turned up into a chilly little smile. “So other than somewhat discomfiting the sleep of some of the Red Court, what did we actually accomplish here?”

“We know where they’re going to do their ritual,” Susan said.

I nodded. “Mexico.”

“Well,” Martin said. “I suppose it’s a start.”

Chapter Eighteen

Mrs. Spunkelcrief was a fantastic landlady. She lived on the ground floor of the old house. She rarely left her home, was mostly deaf, and generally didn’t poke her nose into my business as long as my rent check came in—which it pretty much always did, these days, on time or a bit early.

A small army of crazy-strong zombies had assaulted my home without waking her up, probably because they’d had the grace to do it after her bedtime, which was just after sundown. But I guess the visit from the cops and the FBI had been even louder than that, because as Molly pulled the Blue Beetle into the little gravel parking lot, I saw her coming up the stairs from my apartment, one at a time, leaning heavily on her cane. She wore a soft blue nightgown and a shawl to ward against the October chill in the night, and her bright blue eyes flicked around alertly.

“There you are,” she said irritably. “I’ve been calling your house all evening, Harry.”

“Sorry, Mrs. S,” I said. “I’ve been out.”

I don’t think she could make out the words very well, but she wasn’t stupid. “Obviously you’ve been out,” she said. “What happened to your nice new door? It’s wide-open! If we get another one of those freak thunderstorms, the rain will pour right in and we’ll have mold climbing up the walls before you can say Jack Robinson.”

I spread my hands and talked as loudly as I could without actually shouting. “There was a mix-up with the police.”

“No,” she said, “the lease is quite clear. You are responsible for any damages inflicted on the apartment while you are a tenant.”

I sighed and nodded. “I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

“Oh, not so much sorrow as surprise, Harry. You’re a good boy, generally.” She peered from me to Molly, Susan, and Martin. “Most of the time. And you help out so when the weather is bad.”

I smiled at her in what I hoped was an apologetic fashion. “I’ll take care of the door, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “I thought you would. I’ll come check in a few days.” Mouse emerged from the darkness, not even breathing very hard from running to keep up with the Beetle. He immediately went over to Mrs. Spunkelcrief, sat, and offered her his right paw to shake. She was so tiny and the dog so large that she hardly had to bend down to grip his paw. She beamed broadly at Mouse, shook, and then patted his head fondly. “You can tell a lot about a man from how he treats his dog,” she said.

Mouse walked over to me, sat down panting happily, and leaned his shoulders against my hip affectionately, all but knocking me down.

Mrs. Spunkelcrief nodded, satisfied, and turned to walk away. Then she paused, muttered something to herself, and turned back around again. She dug into her robe’s pocket and produced a white envelope. “I almost forgot. This was lying on your stairs, boy.”

I took it from her with a polite nod. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Welcome.” She shivered and wrapped her shawl a little more tightly around her. “What is the world coming to? People breaking down doors.”

I shot a glance at Molly, who nodded and immediately went to Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s side, offering an arm for support. My landlady beamed up at her, saying, “Bless you, child. My cane arm got tired on the way down.” Molly began helping her back up the little ramp to her apartment’s front door.

Mouse immediately went to the bottom of the stairs, his nose questing. Then he turned back to me, tail fanning the air gently. No surprises lurked in my apartment. I went on down into it, waving the candles and fireplace to life with a murmur and a gesture, tearing open the envelope as I went to the fireplace to open it.

Inside was a piece of folded paper and another, smaller envelope, upon which was written, in Luccio’s flowing writing, READ ME FIRST. I did:

If you are receiving this letter, it is because someone has rendered me unable to contact you. You must presume that I have been taken out of play entirely.

The bearer of this note is the person I trust the most among every Warden stationed at Edinburgh. I cannot know the particulars of my neutralization, but you can trust his description implicitly, and I have found his judgment to be uncommonly sound in subjective matters.

Good luck, Harry.

-A-

I stared at the note for a moment. Then I unfolded the second piece of paper, very slowly. This one was written in blocky letters so precise that they almost resembled a printed font, rather than handwriting:

Hullo, Dresden.

Luccio wanted me to bring this note to you in the event something happened to her. No idea what her note says, but I’m to give you whatever information I can.

I’m afraid it isn’t good news. The Council seems to have gone quite mad.

After your appearance at Cristos’s grandstand, a number of ugly things happened. Several young Wardens were caught debating amongst themselves about whether or not they should simply destroy the duchess in Edinburgh to ensure that the war continued—after all, they reasoned, the vampires wouldn’t be suing for peace if they could still fight. On Cristos’s orders, they were arrested and detained by older members of the Council, none of whom were Wardens, in order to Prevent Them from Destabilizing Diplomatic Deliberations.

Ramirez heard about what had happened and I suspect you can guess that his Spanish-by-way-of-America reaction was more passionate than rational. He and a few friends, only one of whom had any real intelligence, hammered their way into the wing where the Wardens were being detained—at which point every single one of them (except for the genius, naturally) was captured and similarly imprisoned.

It’s quiet desperation here. No one can seem to locate anyone on the Senior Council except Cristos, who is quite busily trying to Save Us from Ourselves by sucking up to Duchess Arianna. The Wardens’ chain of command is a smashing disaster at the moment. Captain Luccio went to Cristos to demand the release of her people and is, at this time, missing, as are perhaps forty percent of the seniormost Wardens.

She asked me to tell you, Dresden, that you should not return to Edinburgh under any circumstances until the Senior Council sorts this mess out. She isn’t sure what would happen to you.

She also wanted me to tell you that you were On Your Own.

I will send dispatches to you as events unfold—assuming I don’t Vanish, too.

“Steed”

PS—Why, yes, I can in fact capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.

I read over the letter again, more slowly. Then I sat down on the fireplace mantel and swallowed hard.

“Steed” was an appellation I’d stuck on Warden Chandler, who was a fixture of security in Edinburgh, one of the White Council’s home guards, and, once I had thought upon it, one of the guys who I’d always seen operating near Anastasia and in positions of trust: Standing as the sole sentinel at a post that normally required half a dozen. Brewing the Wardens and their captain their tea.

He and I had been the only ones present at the conversation where I’d tacked that nickname on him, thanks to the natty suit and bowler he’d been wearing, and the umbrella he’d accessorized—or maybe it was accessorised, in England—with, so the signature itself served as his bona fides. The flippant tone was very like Chandler, as well. I also knew Anastasia’s handwriting, and besides, the paper on which her letter was written was scented with one of the very gentle, very subtle perfumes she preferred.

The message was as legitimate as it was likely to get, under the circumstances.

Which meant we were in real trouble.

The White Council carried a fearsome reputation not simply because of its capability of engaging in direct action against an enemy, but because it wielded a great deal of economic power. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to get rich after two hundred and fifty years of compounded interest and open trading. There was an entire brigade of economic warriors for the White Council who constantly sought ways to protect the Council’s investments against hostile economic interests sponsored by other long-lived beings, like vampires. Money like that could buy a lot of influence. Not only that, but the Council could make the world a miserable place for someone who had earned their displeasure, in about a million ways, without ever throwing magic directly at someone. There were people in the Council who could play dirty with the most fiendish minds in history.

Taken as a whole, it seemed like a colossus, an institution as fixed and unmoving as a vast and ancient tree, filled with life, with strength, its roots sunk deep into the earth, a survivor of the worst storms the world had offered it.

But all of it, the power, the money, the influence, revolved around a critical core concept—every member of the White Council acted in concert. Or at least, that was the face that was supposed to be presented to the outside world. And it was mostly true. We might squabble and double-deal one another in peacetime, but when there was an enemy at hand we closed ranks. Hell, they’d even done that with me, and most of the Council thought that I was the next-best thing to Darth Vader. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of them secretly liked the idea of having Vader on the team when the monsters showed up. They didn’t love me, never would, and I didn’t need them to love me to fight beside them. When things got hairy, the Council moved together.

Except now we weren’t doing it.

I looked at the folded letter in my hands and had the sudden, instinctive impression that I was watching an enormous tree begin to fall. Slowly at first, made to seem so by its sheer size—but falling nonetheless, to the ruin of anything sheltered beneath its boughs.

I was pretty tired, which probably explained why I didn’t have any particular emotional reaction to that line of thought. It should have scared the hell out of me for a laundry list of reasons. But it didn’t.

Susan came over to stand near me. “Harry. What is it?”

I stared at the fire. “The White Council can’t help us find Maggie,” I said quietly. “There are things happening. They’ll be of no use to us.”

After all they had wrongly inflicted upon me, after all the times I had risked my neck for them, when I needed them, truly needed their help, they were not there.

I watched my hands crush the letters and envelopes without telling them to do it. I threw them into the fire and glowered as they burned. I didn’t notice that the fire in the fireplace had risen to triple its normal height until the blue-white brightness of the flames made me shade my eyes against them. Turning my face slightly away was like twisting the spigot of a gas heater—the fire immediately died back down to normal size.

Control, moron, I warned myself. Control. You’re a loaded gun.

No one spoke. Martin had settled down on one of the sofas and was cleaning his little pistol on the coffee table. Molly stood at the wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of something.

Susan sat down next to me, not quite touching, and folded her hands in her lap. “What do we have left?”

“Persons,” I said quietly.

“I don’t understand,” Susan said.

“As a whole, people suck,” I replied. “But a person can be extraordinary. I appealed to the Council. I told them what Arianna was doing. I went to that group of people looking for help. You saw what happened. So . . . next I talk to individuals.”

“Who?” she asked me quietly.

“Persons who can help.”

I felt her dark eyes on me, serious and deep. “Some of them aren’t very nice, I think.”

“Very few of them, in fact,” I said.

She swallowed. “I don’t want you to endanger yourself. This situation wasn’t of your making. If there’s a price to be paid, I should be the one to pay it.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” I said.

“He’s right,” Martin confirmed. “For example: You paid the price for his failure to sufficiently discourage you from investigating the Red Court.”

“I made my choice,” Susan said.

“But not an informed one,” I said quietly. “You made assumptions you shouldn’t have, because you didn’t have enough information. I could have given it to you, but I didn’t. And that situation wasn’t of your making.”

She shook her head, her expression resigned. “There’s no point in all of us fighting to hold the blame stick, I guess.”

Martin began to run a cleaning patch through his pistol’s barrel on a short ramrod and spoke in the tone of a man repeating a mantra. “Stay on mission.”

Susan nodded. “Stay on mission. Where do we start, Harry?”

“Not we,” I said, “me. I’m going down to the lab while you four stay up here and watch for trouble. Make sure you warn me when it shows up.”

“When it shows up?” Susan asked.

“Been that kind of day.”

Molly turned from the stove, her expression worried. “What are you going to do, boss?”

I felt as if my insides were all cloying black smoke, but I summoned up enough spirit to wink at Molly. “I gotta make a few long- distance calls.”

Chapter Nineteen

I went to my lab and started cleaning off my summoning circle. I’d knocked a few things onto it in the course of sweeping up anything incriminating. The FBI or Rudolph had added a bit to the mess. I pushed everything away from the circle and then swept it thoroughly with a broom. When you use a circle as a part of ritual magic, its integrity is paramount. Any object that falls across it or breaks its plane would collapse the circle’s energy. Dust and other small particles wouldn’t collapse a circle, but they did degrade its efficiency.

After I was done sweeping, I got a new shop cloth and a bottle of cleaning alcohol and wiped it down as thoroughly as if I were planning to perform surgery upon it. It took me about twenty minutes.

Once that was done, I opened an old cigar box on one shelf that was full of river rocks. All but one of them were decoys, camouflage. I pawed through it until I found the smooth piece of fire-rounded obsidian, and took it out of the box.

I went to the circle and sat in it, folding my legs in front of me. I touched the circle with a mild effort of will, and it snapped to life in a sudden curtain of gossamer energy. The circle would help contain and shape the magic I was about to work.

I put the black stone down on the floor in front of me, took a deep breath, straightened my back, and then began to draw in my will. I remained like that, relaxed, breathing deeply and slowly as I formed the spell in my head. This one was a fairly delicate working, and probably would have been beyond my skill before I had begun teaching Molly how to control her own power. Now, though, it was merely annoyingly difficult.

Once the energy was formed in my mind, I took a deep breath and whispered, “Voce, voco, vocius.” I waited a few seconds and then repeated myself. “Voce, voco, vocius.”

That went on for a couple of minutes, while I sat there doing my impression of a Roman telephone. I was just starting to wonder whether or not the damned rock was going to work when the lab around me vanished, replaced by an inky darkness. The circle’s energy field became visible, a pale blue light in the shape of a cylinder, stretching from the floor up into the infinite overhead space. Its light did not make my surroundings visible, as if the glow from the circle simply had nothing to reflect from.

“Uh,” I said, and my voice echoed strangely. “Hello?”

“Hold on to your horses,” said a grumpy, distant voice. “I’m coming.”

A moment later, there was a flash of light and a cylinder like my own appeared, directly in front of me. Ebenezar sat in it, legs folded the same way mine were. A black stone that was a twin to my own sat in front of him. Ebenezar looked tired. His hair was mussed, his eyes sunken. He was wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, and I was surprised at how much muscle tone he had kept, despite his age. Of course, he’d spent the last few centuries mostly working on his farm. That would put muscle on anyone.

“Hoss,” he said by way of greeting. “Where are you?”

“My place,” I said.

“Situation?”

“My wards are down. I’ve got backup but I don’t want to stay here for long. The police and FBI have gotten involved and the Reds have swung at me twice in the past two days. Where are you?”

Ebenezar grunted. “Best if I don’t say. The Merlin is preparing his counterstrike, and we’re trying to find out how much they already know about it.”

“When you say ‘we,’ I assume you mean the Grey Council.”

The Grey Council was the appellation that had stuck to our little rogue organization inside the White Council itself. It consisted of people who could see lightning, hear thunder, and admit to themselves that wizards everywhere were increasingly in danger of being exterminated or enslaved by other interests—such as the Vampire Courts or the Black Council.

The Black Council was mostly a hypothetical organization. It consisted of a lot of mysterious figures in black robes with delusions of Ringwraith-hood. They liked to call up the deadly dangerous demons from outside of reality, the Outsiders, and to infiltrate and corrupt every supernatural nation they could get to. Their motivations were mysterious, but they’d been causing trouble for the Council and everyone else for quite a while. I had encountered members of their team, but I had no hard proof of their existence, and neither did anyone else.

Cautionary rumors of their presence had been met with derision and accusations of paranoia by most of the White Council until last year, when a Black Council agent had killed more than sixty wizards and infiltrated the Edinburgh facility so thoroughly that more than 95 percent of the staff and security team had gotten their brains redecorated to one degree or another. Even the Senior Council members had been influenced.

The traitor had been stopped, if just barely, and at a heavy cost. And after that, the Council as a whole believed that there might be a faceless, nameless organization running amok in the world—and that any number of them could actually be members of the White Council itself, operating in disguise.

Paranoia and mistrust. They had been steadily growing within the White Council, whose leader, the Merlin, still refused to admit that the Black Council was real, for fear that our own people would start going over to the bad guys out of fear or ambition. His decision had actually had the opposite effect on the frightened, nervous wizards of the White Council. Instead of throwing the clear light of truth on the situation, the Merlin had made it that much more murky and shadowy, made it easier for fear to prey upon his fellow wizards’ thoughts.

Enter the Grey Council, which consisted of me and Ebenezar and unspecified others, organized in cells in order to prevent either one of the other Councils from finding out about us and wiping out all of us at once. We were the ones who were trying to be sane in an insane time. The whole affair could backlash on us spectacularly, but I guess some people just aren’t any good at watching bad things happen. They have to do something about it.

“Yes,” Ebenezar said. “That is who I mean.”

“I need the Grey Council to help me,” I said.

“Hoss . . . we’re all sitting under the sword of Damocles waiting for it to fall. The events unfolding in Edinburgh right now could mean the end of organized, restrained wizardry. The end of the Laws of Magic. It could drive us back to the chaos of an earlier age, unleash a fresh wave of warlock-driven monsters and faux demigods upon mankind.”

“For some reason, sir, I always feel a little more comfortable when I’m sitting under that sword. Must be all the practice.”

Ebenezar scowled. “Hoss . . .”

“I need information,” I said, my voice hard. “There’s a little girl out there. Someone knows something about where she is. And I know that the Council could dig something up. The White Council already shut the door in my face.” I thrust out my jaw. “What about the Grey?”

Ebenezar sighed, and his tired face looked more tired. “What you’re doing is good and right. But it ain’t smart. And it’s a lesson you haven’t learned yet.”

“What lesson?”

“Sometimes, Hoss,” he said very gently, “you lose. Sometimes the darkness takes everyone. Sometimes the monster escapes to kill again another day.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sometimes, Hoss, the innocent little ones are murdered. And there’s not one goddamned thing you can do about it.”

“Leave her to die,” I snarled. “That’s what you want me to do?”

“I want you to help save millions or billions of little girls, boy,” he said, his own voice dropping into a hard, hard growl. “Not throw them away for the sake of one.”

“I am not going to leave this alone,” I snapped. “She—”

Ebenezar made a gesture with his right hand and my voice box just stopped working. My lips moved. I could inhale and exhale freely—but I couldn’t talk.

His dark eyes flashed with anger, an expression I had seldom seen upon his face. “Dammit, boy, you’re smarter than this. Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving Arianna exactly what she wants. You’re dancing like a puppet on her strings. Reacting in precisely the way she wants you to react, and it will get you killed.

“I told you long ago that being a real wizard means sacrifice. It means knowing things no one else does,” he said, still growling. “I told you that it meant that you might have to act upon what you knew, and knew to be right, even though the whole world set its hand against you. Or that you might have to do horrible, necessary things. Do you remember that?”

I did. Vividly. I remembered the smell of the campfire we’d been sitting beside at the time. I nodded.

“Here’s where you find out who you are,” he said, his voice harsh and flat. “There’s a lot of work to do, and no time to do it, let alone waste it arguing with you over something you should know by now.” He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, as if bringing himself back under control. “Meet me at the Toronto safe house in twelve hours.” He spoke in a voice of absolute authority, something I’d heard from him only a handful of times in my life. He expected his order to be obeyed.

I turned my head from him. In the edge of my vision, I saw him scowl again, reach down, and pick up his own black stone—and suddenly I was sitting on the floor of my lab again.

I picked up my sending stone wearily and slipped it into my pocket. Then I just lay back on the floor, breaking the circle as I did, and stared up at the ceiling for a little while. I turned my head to my left, and spotted the green, extra-thick three- ring binder where I stored all my files on entities I could summon from the Nevernever.

No.

I looked away from the book. When you call things up for information, you’ve got to pay their price. It’s always different. It’s never been pleasant.

And the thought frightened me.

This would be the time those beings had been waiting for. When my need was so dire that I might agree to almost anything if it meant saving the child. For her, I might make a deal I would never consider otherwise.

I might even call upon—

I stopped myself from so much as thinking the name of the Queen of Air and Darkness, for fear that she might somehow detect it and take action. She had been offering me temptation passively and patiently for years. I had wondered, sometimes, why she didn’t make more of an effort to sell me on her offer. She certainly could have done so, had she wished.

Now I understood. She had known that in time, sooner or later, there would come a day when I would be more needful than cautious. There was no reason for her to dance about crafting sweet temptations and sending them out to ensnare me. Not when all she had to do was wait awhile. It was a cold, logical approach—and that was very much in her style.

But there were other beings I could question, in the light blue binder sitting on top of the green one—beings of less power and knowledge, with correspondingly lower prices. It seemed unlikely that I would get anything so specific from them, but you never knew.

I reached for the blue book, rose, and set about calling creatures into my lab to answer a few questions.

After three hours of conjuring and summoning, I came up with absolutely nothing. I had spoken with nature spirits in the shape of a trio of tiny screech owls, and with messenger spirits, the couriers between the various realms within the Nevernever. None of them knew anything. I plucked a couple of particularly nosy ghosts who lived around Chicago out of the spirit world, and summoned servants of the Tylwyth Teg, with whose king I was on good terms. I asked spirits of water what they and their kin had seen regarding Maggie, and stared into the flickering lights of creatures of sentient flame, whose thoughts were revealed in the images quivering inside them.

One of the fire spirits showed me an image that lasted for no more than three or four seconds—the face of the little girl in Susan’s picture, pale and a little grubby and shivering with fear or cold, reaching out to warm her hands over the fluttering lights of a fire. In profile, she looked a lot like her mother, with her huge dark eyes and slender nose. She’d gotten something of my chin, I think, which gave her little face the impression of strength or stubbornness. She was much paler than Susan, too, more like her father than her mother that way.

But then the image was gone.

That was as close as I got.

I sat down on my stool after three hours of work and felt more exhausted than at any time I could easily recall. I’d gotten nothing that would tell me where she was, nothing that would tell me what was in store for her. Except for the single flicker of knowledge that Maggie was still alive, I’d gotten nothing.

But even that might be enough. She was still breathing.

Hang in there, kid. Dad’s coming.

I sat there on the stool for a moment, wearily. Then I reached for a piece of paper, an old pencil, and wrote:

Ivy,

I need your help.

It’s for a little girl who is being held by bad people.

Please contact me.

Harry Dresd—

Before I’d gotten finished writing my name, the phone rang.

I’d just made contact with the Archive, with the magically constructed catalog of every bit of knowledge mankind has ever written down. It resided in the head of a teenager, the sum of human learning in the hands of a girl who should have been going to ninth grade this year.

Knowledge is power, and a couple of years before, the Archive had proved it. As a child not much older than Maggie, she had pitted her magic against the skills of beings with centuries of experience, and come out, for the most part, ahead. She was an unwholesomely powerful child, and while she had always comported herself with the gravity of a woman of forty, I had seen flashes of the child supporting the vast burden of the Archive. I knew what would happen if that child ever decided to take control of how the Archive was administered. It would probably look a lot like that episode of The Twilight Zone with the monstrous little kid with superpowers.

The phone rang again. I shivered and answered it. We’d run a long line down into the laboratory, and the old rotary phone sat near Molly’s desk, benefiting from being on the fringes of such a well-organized place. “Hello?”

“It’s Kincaid,” said a man’s baritone. Kincaid was Ivy’s driver, body-guard, cook, and all- around teddy bear. He was the single deadliest gunman I had ever had the terror of watching, and one of a relatively few number of people who I both disliked and trusted. He had once described the method he would use to kill me, if he had to, and I had to admit that he had an excellent chance of succeeding. He was tough, smart, skilled, and had a mercenary sense of honor—whoever held his contract was his charge, body and mind, and he never abrogated a contract once he had signed it.

“Dresden,” I replied. “This line probably isn’t clear.”

“I know,” Kincaid replied. “What do you want?”

“I need to find a child. She was taken by the Red Court a few days ago. We believe her to be somewhere in Mexico.”

“Somewhere in Mexico?” Kincaid said, and I could hear his grin. “You tried walking around and yelling her name really loud yet?”

“I’m getting there,” I said. “Look, does she know anything or not?”

Kincaid muffled the phone with something, probably his hand. I heard his low, buzzing voice as he asked a question. I might have heard a light soprano voice answering him.

Kincaid returned to the phone and said, “Ivy says she can’t get involved. That the business you’re on is deadly. She dares not unbalance it for fear of changing the outcome.”

I made a growling sound. “Goddammit, Kincaid. She owes me one. Remind her who came and took her away from those fucking Denarian lunatics.”

Kincaid’s voice became quieter, more sober. “Believe me, she remembers, Dresden. But she isn’t free to share her knowledge like you or me. When she says she can’t tell you, she’s being literal. She physically cannot let such information leave her head.”

I slammed the heel of my hand into a wall and leaned on it, closing my eyes. “Tell her,” I said, “that this is information I must have. If she can’t help me, I’ll be taking it up with other sources. The ones in my green notebook.”

Kincaid spoke with someone again. This time I definitely heard Ivy’s voice answering him.

“She can’t tell you where the girl is,” Kincaid said. There was a hint of steel in his voice, warning me not to push too hard. “But she says she can tell you someone who might.”

“Any help would be greatly appreciated,” I said, exhaling.

“She says to tell you that before you try the green book, there’s something else you might consider. The last man you want to see might have useful information.”

I understood what she was talking about at once and groaned. “Dammit,” I muttered. “Dammit.”

I dialed another number. A receptionist asked me how she could direct my call.

“This is Harry Dresden,” I said quietly. “Put me through to Mr. Marcone’s personal line, please.”

Chapter Twenty

“I don’t like it,” Molly said, scowling. “You sure you don’t want me to go in there with you? He’s got people.”

“Definitely not,” I said calmly. “I don’t want you showing up on his radar.”

“I’d like to see him try something,” Molly said, clenching one hand into a fist and thumping the Blue Beetle’s steering wheel for emphasis. “I’d eat him for breakfast.”

“No, Molly,” I said in a firm tone of voice. “You wouldn’t. Marcone might be vanilla mortal, but he’s dangerous. Most men have limits. He doesn’t. Never forget that.”

“If he’s so dangerous, why are you talking to him?”

“Because he also has rules,” I said. “And besides. I just had to see him here. Keep your eyes open for a third party interfering. I’ll worry about Marcone. Okay?”

“Okay,” Molly said, nodding, her eyes intent. In a spectacular bid for the Do as I Say, Not as I Do Award, she took a long pull from an energy drink in a can the size of a milk carton. “Okay.”

I got out of the Blue Beetle and walked into my meeting with Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, the undisputed gang lord of Chicago.

Burger King had just opened its dining area, but it was already half-full. I ignored Marcone upon coming in and got in line. A sausage biscuit and cup of coffee later, I went to the back corner where Marcone sat and his retinue stood.

Hendricks was there, of course, in an extra-large suit and a red haired buzz cut. Maybe he’d been working out, because he looked like he’d put on a few more pounds. If he got any bigger, he’d need a building permit. Miss Gard stood a little apart from Hendricks, covering the angles the big man couldn’t. She was just as blond and athletic and Amazonian as ever, her suit and tie muting her curves without reducing her appeal.

Marcone sat in the booth as if at a boardroom table. He wore a silk suit probably worth more than my car, and sat with his elbows on the table, his fingertips pressed together into a steeple. He looked like a man in his mature prime, neat and precise from his haircut to his polished leather shoes. He watched me come over to the table and slide my plastic tray into place before me. I dumped four or five packets of sugar into my coffee and stirred it with a little stick. “You’re not eating?”

He looked at his watch, and then at me. He had pale green eyes the color of old bills, but less personal. His stare was unsettling, and he met my eyes without concern. We had already taken the measure of each other’s souls. It was why I knew precisely how dangerous the man sitting across the table from me could be, and why I insisted upon treating him in as cavalier a fashion as possible. One doesn’t show dangerous predators weakness or fear. It makes them hungry.

I savored a bite of the biscuit, which was only a reminder of how good a real homemade biscuit and sausage was, but for the sake of my audience, I made sounds of enjoyment as I chewed and swallowed. “You sure?” I slurped some more coffee. “You’re missing out on ambrosia, here.”

“Dresden,” Marcone said, “this is aggravating. Even for you.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, and took another bite of sausage.

Hendricks made a growling sound.

I finished chewing and said, “You sure about that, big guy?”

“Hendricks,” Marcone said.

Hendricks subsided.

I nodded. Then I said, “You have information I want.”

“Undoubtedly,” Marcone said. “What information are you after, and what do you offer for it?”

“I’m not here to trade baseball cards with you, Marcone,” I said.

“And I am not a charity organization, Dresden,” he replied. “I take it this has something to do with your office building exploding.” He shook his head in a gesture of faint regret.

“Right,” I said. “You’re all broken up over the destruction.”

“I didn’t order it. I made no money on it. I failed to profit financially or politically from its destruction. And you survived. It was a complete waste.”

Hendricks made another growling sound that might have been gorilla for a laugh.

“Maybe it’s got something to do with the building. How much do you know about its owners?”

Marcone’s smile was a wintry thing. “That they are a part of the organization whose servitors have been attempting to intrude upon my business.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Someone’s muscling in on your territory?”

“Briefly,” Marcone said, “but incessantly.”

“Then we might have a common problem.”

Marcone looked at me as though I were a rather slow child. “Yes. Hence this meeting.”

I grunted and finished the biscuit. “The Red Court is on the move. Trouble is being stirred up between them and the Council. My interest in the matter is an eight-year-old girl. The Reds took her from her home. I believe that they’re holding her somewhere in Mexico. I need to know where.”

Marcone’s stare went on for several seconds before he said, “Somewhere. In Mexico. That’s as specific as you can be?”

“It’s as much as I know,” I said.

“For what purpose was she brought there?”

“Why does it matter?”

“If she was taken to be used as a sexual object, she would be in a different place than if she was going to be used as slave labor or harvested as an organ donor.”

I clenched my teeth and looked away briefly, treated to a number of delightful images by his words.

Marcone’s eyes narrowed. “Who is she to you, Dresden?”

“My client’s kid,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level and calm. “I think they’re going to use her in some sort of sacrificial ritual.”

“Then that narrows things considerably,” Marcone said. “As I understand the process, rituals such as the one you mention need to happen at a place of power.” He glanced up at Miss Gard, who nodded and immediately left the restaurant, heading for her car. “I suspect I can narrow it down even further for you, Dresden. Let’s talk price.”

“I’m going to use the information to put a major hurting on the people trying to take your territory away from you, Marcone,” I said. “That’s more than payment enough.”

“And if I do not agree?” Marcone asked.

“Then we throw down, right here, and after I toss your attack dogs over the top of the Sears building, I hurt you until you give me the information anyway.”

That cold smile returned. “Is that how you think it would happen?”

I shrugged a shoulder and kept my expression bland. “I think there’s only one way to find out.” I leaned forward a little and pitched my voice in a conspiratorial murmur. “But just between you and me, I don’t think the terrain favors you here.”

He stared across his steepled fingers at me for a time. Then he said, “It certainly doesn’t favor me in the manner I would prefer.” He laid his hands flat on the table and leaned back slightly. “There’s no sense in making a confrontation out of this. And I have never yet regretted it when I allowed you to rid me of an enemy.”

“I didn’t do it as a favor to you.”

He shrugged. “Your motivations are immaterial. The results are what matter.”

“Just remember that you’re on my list, Marcone. Soon as I get done with all the other evils in this town, you won’t be the lesser of them anymore.”

Marcone stared at me with half-lidded eyes and said, “Eek.”

“You think it’s funny?”

“I am not unduly concerned by dead men, Dresden.”

I bristled. “Is that a threat?”

“Hardly. One day, probably soon, you’ll get yourself killed thanks to that set of irrational compulsions you call a conscience, long before my name tops your list. I needn’t lift a finger.” He shrugged. “Giving you information seems an excellent way to accelerate that process. It will also tax the resources of my enemies.” Marcone mused for a moment, and then said, “And . . . I believe I have no objection to contributing against any organization which would victimize children so.”

I glowered at him. Partly because he was probably right, and partly because he’d once again shown the flash of humanity that prevented me from lumping him in with every other evil, hungry, predatory thing lurking in the wild world. For his own reasons, Marcone would go to extreme lengths to help and protect children. In Chicago, any adult was fair game for his businesses. Any child was off-limits. Rumor had it that he had vanished every single one of his employees who had ever crossed that line.

Gard reappeared, frowning, and walked over to our table.

Marcone glanced at her. “Well?”

Gard hesitated and then said, “He won’t speak of it over the line. He says that you have incurred no debt with him for asking the question. He will only speak to Dresden. Personally.”

Marcone lifted his eyebrows. “Interesting.”

“I thought so,” Gard said.

“Ahem,” I said. “Who wants to meet me?”

“My . . . employer,” Gard said. “Donar Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Securities.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Gard and I went to Oslo.

It sounds like it would be a long trip, but it’s a hell of a lot faster when you don’t have to worry about boarding, clearing security, going through customs, or actually moving a linear distance.

Gard opened a Way into the Nevernever down near the zoo, simply cutting at the fabric of reality with a rune-etched dagger. The Way took us on a short hike through a dark wood of dead trees, and ended when we emerged in what she said was Iceland. It sure as hell was cold enough. A second Way took us across the surface of a frozen lake, to stop before the roots of a vast old tree whose trunk could have contained my apartment with room to spare for a garage.

From there, we emerged into what seemed like a cold, damp basement, and I found myself face- to-face with two dozen men wearing body armor and pointing sleek-looking, high-tech assault rifles at the end of my nose.

I did absolutely nothing. Carefully.

One of the men with guns said something, a short phrase in a language I didn’t understand. Gard answered in what I presumed to be the same tongue, and gestured to me.

The leader of the guards eyed us both suspiciously for a moment, then said something quietly and all the rifles stopped pointing at me. Two guards returned to stand on either side of a doorway. Two more took up a station facing Gard and me, evidently cautious about getting more company through the same Way we’d just used. The rest returned to a couple of card tables and a few sleeping cots.

Gard shook her head and muttered, “Einherjar. Give them a little sip of renewed mortality, and four thousand years of discipline go right out the window.”

“I recognize some of these guys,” I said. I nodded toward a trio playing cards. “Those three. They were some of the mercenaries Marcone brought to that party in the Raith Deeps.”

Gard glanced at the three and then rolled her eyes. “Yes. And?”

“And they’re just available for hire?” I asked.

“If you can afford them,” Gard said, smiling so that her teeth showed. “Though be warned that prices may vary. This way, Dresden.”

I followed her out into a hallway and past several rooms filled with enough weaponry to win a minor war in a century of one’s choice. Racks of ash-wood spears stood side by side with old bolt- action Mausers, which stood next to modern assault rifles. Katana-style swords shared a room with flintlocks and Maxim guns. One shelving unit housed an evolutionary progression of grenades, from powder- filled crockery with ignitable fuses to the most modern miniature flash-bang grenades. Judging from the variety of the place’s contents, it was like looking at a museum—but from the quantities present, it could only be an armory.

We got to an elevator whose walls were a simple metal grid, so that we could see out of them as we went up. I stopped counting after seeing seven floors of similarly equipped armories go by.

“Guess your boss believes in being prepared,” I said.

Gard smiled. “It’s one of his things, yes.”

“It’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

She looked at me with an arched brow. Then she said, “One can have only as much preparation as he has foresight.”

I considered that for a moment, and decided that as cryptic statements went, it was all kinds of bad.

The elevator kept going up and up and up. Brief views of various floors went by. One floor looked like an enormous gym and was filled with sweating men and women working out. Another looked like an expensive legal office. Another was all done in antiseptic white, bathed with just a bit too much light, and smelled of disinfectant. Another was lit by candles and the murmuring of voices chanting. Still another was obviously some kind of enormous chemical laboratory. Still another level was filled with cells whose occupants could not be seen as anything other than shadowy presences. And so on.

I shook my head. “Hell’s bells. It’s like some kind of demented theme park.”

“The difference being that nothing you see here is meant to entertain,” Gard said. “And don’t bother asking questions. I won’t answer them. Ah, we’ve reached the ground floor.”

The elevator continued to rise up through an enormous atrium that housed ten or twelve stories of what looked like high-end corporate offices. Each floor was open to the atrium, and between the plants, decorative trees, the waterfall, and all the windows plus the skylights far above, the entire building looked like a single, massive garden. The sounds of office activity and equipment, birds, and the flowing waterfall all blended together into an active whole that formed a white noise bustling with life, variety, and movement. We soared up through the atrium and our open-sided elevator vanished into a short tunnel.

A moment later, the door opened on a rather novel reception area.

It had all the things such offices always did: a prominent desk, several seats in a waiting area, a coffee machine, and a table laden with magazines. In this office, however, all of those materials were made of stainless steel. So were the floors. So were the walls. As was the ceiling. Even the lamps and the coffeepot were made of stainless steel. The magazines alone stood out as shapeless, soft-looking blobs of garish color.

The logo for Monoc Securities stood out upon one wall, in basrelief, and somehow reminded me more of a crest upon a shield than a corporate marketing symbol: a thick, round circle bisected by a straight vertical line emerging from either side of the circle. It might have been a simplified, abstract representation of an eye being cut from its socket by some kind of blade—I have some of that symbol written in scar tissue on my own face, where a cut had run down from eyebrow to cheekbone but had barely missed my eye. It might have been simple abstract symbology, representing the female and the male with round and straight shapes, suggesting wholeness and balance. Or, heck, it could have been overlaid Greek lettering, omega and iota on top of each other. Omega-iota. The last detail? The final detail? Maybe it meant something more like “every last little thing.”

Or maybe it combined all of those things: the blind eye that sees all.

Yeah. That felt right.

Two women sat behind the big desk at computer monitors consisting of small clouds of very fine mist, wherein were contained all the drifting images and letters of the company cyber-reality, floating like the wispiest of illusions. Sufficiently advanced technology, I suppose.

The women themselves were, apparently, identical twins. Both had raven-dark hair cut in close-fitting caps, and it matched the exact shade of their identical black suits. Both had dark eyes that sparkled with intensity and intelligence. They were both pale and their features were remarkable, if not precisely beautiful. They would stand out in any crowd, and not in an unpleasant way, either—but they would never be mistaken for cover models.

The twins rose as the elevator doors opened, and their eyes looked very intent and very black as they stared at us. I’ve looked down the barrel of a gun before. This was like looking down four of them at once. They stood there, inhumanly motionless. Both wore headsets, but only one of them murmured into hers.

I started to step out of the elevator, but Gard put out a cautionary hand. “Don’t, until you’re approved,” she said. “They’ll kill you. Maybe me, too.”

“Like their receptionists tough in these parts, huh?”

“It would be wiser not to joke,” she said quietly. “They don’t miss anything—and they never forget.”

The receptionist who had spoken into her mike flexed one hand slowly closed and open. Her nails peeled up little silver curls from the stainless-steel desk.

I thought about making a manicure joke . . . and decided not to. Go, go, Gadget wisdom.

“Do you do oranges, too?” asked my mouth, without checking in with the rest of me. “What about sharpening table knives and scissors and lawn tools? My landlady’s lawn mower blade could use a hand job from a girl like y—”

“Dresden,” Gard hissed, her eyes both furious and wide with near-panic.

Both of the receptionists were focused on me intently now. The one who had remained silent shifted her weight, as though preparing to take a step.

“Come on, Sigrun,” I said to my companion. “I’m trying to be diplomatic. The wisdom of my ass is well- known. If I didn’t lip off to them, after shooting my mouth off to faerie queens and Vampire Courts—plural, Courts—demigods and demon lords, they might get their feelings hurt.”

Gard eyed me for a moment more, before her uncertain blue eyes gained a gleam of devil-may-care defiance. It looked a lot more natural on her than fear. “Perhaps your insults and insolence are not the valued commodities you believe them to be.”

“Heh,” I said. “Good one.”

The chatty twin tilted her head slightly to one side for a moment, then said, “Right away, sir.” She pointed her fingernail at me. “You are to enter the office through the doors behind me.” She aimed her nail at Gard next. “You are to accompany him and make introductions.”

Gard nodded shortly and then tilted her head in a “come along” sort of gesture. We walked out of the elevator and past the twins to the door behind them. They turned their heads as I went by, tracking my every movement. It was downright creepy.

On the other side of the door was a long hallway, also made of stainless steel. There were multiple ports or hatches of some kind in a row along the walls, all closed. They were about the size of dinner plates. I got a feeling that any visitors who tried the hors d’oeuvres served up from those plates would not be asking for the recipe later in the evening.

At the end of the hall was another set of steel doors, which gave way soundlessly before us, revealing another room done all in stainless steel, holding only a massive desk behind which was seated a man.

Donar Vadderung sat with his chin propped on the heel of his hand, squinting at a holographic computer display, and the first thing my instincts did was warn me that he was very, very dangerous.

He wasn’t all that imposing to look at. A man in good shape, maybe in his early fifties. Lean and spare, in the way of long-distance runners, but too heavy in the shoulders and arms for that to be all he did. His hair was long for a man, and just a bit shaggy. It was the color of a furious thundercloud, and his eye was ice blue. A black cloth patch over the other eye combined with a vertical scar similar to my own made me think that I’d been right about the corporate logo. He kept a short, neat beard. He was a striking- looking rogue, particularly with the eye patch, and looked like the sort of person who might have served thirty years of a triple life sentence and managed to talk the parole board into setting him free—probably to their eventual regret.

“Sigrun,” he said, his tone polite.

Gard went down to one knee and bowed her head. There was no hesitation whatsoever to the woman’s movements—the gesture was not simply a technicality she had to observe. She believed that Vadderung merited such obeisance.

“My lord,” Gard said. “I’ve brought the wizard, as you commanded.”

“Well done,” the grey-haired man said, and made a gesture to indicate that she should rise. I don’t think she saw it, with her head bowed like that, but she reacted to it anyway, and stood up. Maybe they’d just had a few hundred years to practice.

“My lord. May I present Harry Dresden, wizard and Warden of the White Council of wizards.”

I nodded to Vadderung.

“Wizard, this is Donar Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Secur—”

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what he’s in charge of,” I said quietly.

The old man’s mouth turned faintly up at the corners when I spoke. He gestured to a steel chair across the desk from him. “Please. Sit down.”

I pointed at the holographic display. “You sure you want to put that at risk? If I stand too close to it . . .”

Vadderung turned his face up to the ceiling and barked out a laugh of genuine amusement. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Suits me,” I said. I walked over to the desk and sat down in the steel chair across from Vadderung’s. It didn’t have a cushion or anything, but it was surprisingly comfortable nonetheless.

“Coffee?” he asked me. “Something to eat?”

I paused for a breath to think before answering. Duties such as this involved the obligations and responsibilities of guest to host and vice versa. If Vadderung was who I thought he was, he had been known, from time to time, to go forth and test people on how well they upheld that particular tradition—with generous rewards for the faithful, and hideous demises for the miserly, callous, or cruel.

In the supernatural world, such obligations and limits seem to be of vital importance to the overwhelming number of supernatural beings. I’m not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the thresholds of protective energy that form around a home.

“Only if it isn’t too much trouble,” I said.

“And something to eat,” Vadderung told Gard.

She bowed her head and said, “My lord.” Then she padded out.

Though the big man hadn’t stood up, I realized that he was big. Damned near a giant, really. Standing, he’d have more than a couple inches on me, and his shoulders made mine look about as wide as the spine of a book. He rested his chin on the heel of his hand again and studied me with his bright blue eye.

“Well,” he said. “I take it you believe you know who I am.”

“I’ve got a few guesses,” I said. “I think they’re good ones. Sigrun was kind of a tip-off. But honestly, that’s got nothing to do with why I’m here today.”

The blue eye wrinkled at the corners. “Doesn’t it?”

I frowned at him and tilted my head. “How so?”

He lifted a hand palm up as he explained. “Someone with enough foresight might, for example, arrange to be in a position to assist a hot-headed young wizard of the White Council one day. Perhaps who I am is directly responsible for why I am here.”

“Yeah. I guess that could be it,” I said. “It’s technically possible that your motives for assisting me are altruistic. On the other hand, it’s also technically possible that you are speaking with a forked tongue, and that all you’re really trying to do is find some way to take advantage of me when I’m under pressure.” I shrugged. “No offense intended, but there’s kind of a shortage of altruism out there.”

“So cynical for one so young.” He looked me up and down. “But you would be. You would be.”

“I’ve got questions,” I said. “Granted, they aren’t as profound as ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Why am I here?’ but they’re a lot more important to me at the moment.”

Vadderung nodded. “You’re looking for your daughter.”

I felt my body go rigid. “How . . . ?”

He smiled rather wolfishly. “I know things, Dresden. And if I don’t know something, I can find out. Like yourself, it is what I do.”

I stared at the man for most of a minute. Then I said, “Do you know where she is?”

“No,” he said in a quiet, firm voice. “But I know where she will be.”

I looked down at my hands. “What’s it going to cost me to find out?”

“Chichén Itzá,” Vadderung said.

I jerked my head up in surprise. I stared at the man for a moment. “I . . .”

“Don’t understand?” Vadderung asked. “It isn’t complicated. I’m on your side, boy.”

I raked my fingers back through my hair, thinking. “Why there?”

“The Red King and his inner circle, the Lords of Outer Night, have got some big juju to brew up. They need a site of power to do it. For this, they’ll use Chichén Itzá.”

“Why there?”

“They’re enacting a sacrifice. Like in the old days.” A snarl of anger touched his voice, and made it suddenly frightening. “They’re preparing a bloodline curse.”

“A what?”

“Death magic,” he said, “focused upon the bloodline. From the sacrifice, the child, to her brothers, sisters, and parents. From the parents to their brothers, sisters, and parents, and so on. Spreading up the family tree until there’s no one left.”

A chill hit my guts. “I’ve . . . never even heard of death magic on that kind of scale. The energy required for that . . . It’s enormous.” I stopped for a moment and then said, “And it’s stupid. Susan was an only child, and she’s already lost her parents. Same with me . . .”

Vadderung arched an eyebrow at me. “Is it? They like to be thorough, those old monsters.”

I smoothed my expression over, trying not to give away anything. This spell they were doing would kill me, if they pulled it off. It could also kill my only family, my half brother, Thomas. “How does it work?” I asked him, my voice subdued.

“It tears out the heart,” Vadderung said. “Rips it to bits on the way out, too. Sound familiar?”

“Hell’s bells,” I said quietly. It had been years since I had even thought about Victor Sells or his victims. They had featured in my nightmares for quite a while until I upgraded.

Vadderung leaned toward me, his blue eye very bright. “It’s all connected, Dresden. The whole game. And you’re only now beginning to learn who the players are.” He settled back into his seat, letting silence add emphasis to his statement before he continued. “The sorcerer who used the spell in Chicago before didn’t have strength enough to make it spread past the initial target. The Red Court does. No one has used Power on this scale in more than a millennium.”

“And they’re pointing it at me?”

“They say you can know a man by his enemies, Dresden.” He smiled, and laughter lurked beneath his next words, never quite surfacing. “You defy beings that should cow you into silence. You resist forces that are inevitable for no more reason than that you believe they should be resisted. You bow your head to neither demons nor angels, and you put yourself in harm’s way to defend those who cannot defend themselves.” He nodded slowly. “I think I like you.”

I arched an eyebrow and studied him for a moment. “Then help me.”

Vadderung pursed his lips in thought. “In that, you may be disappointed. I am . . . not what I was. My children are scattered around the world. Most of them have forgotten our purpose. Once the Jotuns retreated . . .” He shook his head. “What you must understand is that you face beings such as I in this battle.”

I frowned. “You mean . . . gods?”

“Mostly retired gods, at any rate,” Vadderung said. “Once, entire civilizations bowed to them. Now they are venerated by only a handful, the power of their blood spread out among thousands of offspring. But in the Lords of Outer Night, even the remnants of that power are more than you can face as you are.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” I said.

Vadderung just looked at me. Then he said, “Let me help you understand.”

And a force like a hundred anvils smashed me out of the chair and to the floor.

I found myself on my back, gasping like a landed fish. I struggled to move, to push myself up, but I couldn’t so much as lift my arms from the ground. I brought my will into focus, with the idea of using it to deflect some of that force from me and—

—and suddenly, sharply felt my will directly in contention with another. The power that held me down was not earth magic, as I had assumed it to be. It was the simple, raw, brute application of the will of Donar Vadderung, Thunder’s Father, the Father and King of the Aesir. Father Odin’s will held me pinned to the floor, and I could no more escape it or force it away than could an insect stop a shoe from descending.

In the instant that realization came to me, the force vanished, evaporating as if it had never been. I lay on the floor gasping.

“It is within my capabilities to kill you, young wizard,” Vadderung said quietly. “I could wish you dead. Especially here, at the center of my power on Midgard.” He got up, came around the desk, and offered me his hand. I took it. He pulled me to my feet, steady as a rock. “You will be at the center of their power. There will be a dozen of them, each nearly as strong as I am.” He put a hand on my shoulder briefly. “You are bold, clever, and from time to time lucky. All of those are excellent qualities to have in battles like yours. But against power such as this you cannot prevail as you are. Even if you are able to challenge the Red King at Chichén Itzá, you will be crushed down as you were a moment ago. You’ll be able to do nothing but watch as your daughter dies.”

He stared at me in silence for a time. Then the door to his office opened, and one of the receptionists leaned in. “Sir,” she said, “you have a lunch appointment in five minutes.”

“Indeed,” Vadderung said. “Thank you, M.”

She nodded and retreated again.

Vadderung turned back to me, as Gard returned to the room, carrying a covered tray. She set it down on the big steel desk and stepped back, unobtrusively.

“You’ve defied fate, Dresden,” Vadderung said. “You’ve stood up to foes much larger than you. For that, you have my respect.”

“Do you think I could swap in the respect for . . . I dunno . . . half a dozen Valkyries, a receptionist, and a couple of platoons of dead heroes?”

Vadderung laughed again. He had a hearty laugh, like Santa Claus must have had when he was young and playing football. “I couldn’t do without my receptionists, I’m afraid.” He sobered. “And those others . . . would be less strong at the center of the Red King’s power.” He shook his head. “Like it or not, this is a mortal matter. It must be settled by mortals.”

“You’re not going to help,” I said quietly.

He went to a steel closet and opened the door, removing an overcoat. He slipped into it, and then walked over to me again. “I’ve been in this game for a long, long time, boy. How do you know I haven’t given you exactly what you need?”

Vadderung took the lid off the covered tray, nodded to me pleasantly, and left.

I looked at the tray. A cup of tea steamed there, three empty paper packets of sugar beside it. The tea smelled like peppermint, a favorite. Next to the cup of tea was a little plate with two cake doughnuts on it, both of them covered in thick white frosting and unmarred by sprinkles or any other edible decorations.

I looked up in time to see Vadderung walk by, trailed by the pair of receptionists, and saw them all simply vanish, presumably into a Way.

“Well?” Gard asked me. “Are you ready to go?”

“Just a minute,” I said.

I sat back down. And I drank the tea and ate the doughnuts, thoughtfully.

Chapter Twenty-two

I needed sleep.

I rode back to my place with Molly in the midmorning. Mouse came padding up the stairs from the apartment as we got out of the car, his alert, wary stance relaxing into the usual waving of a doggy tail and enthusiastic sniffs and nudges of greeting. I shambled on into my apartment calmly. All was obviously well.

Susan and Martin were both inside, both busy, as Mister looked on from his lordly peak atop the highest bookshelf. Susan had been shaking out all the rugs and carpets that cover the floor of my living room, and was now rolling them back into place, probably not in the same order as they had been before. She picked up one end of a sofa with a couple of fingers of one hand to get an edge into place.

Martin was alphabetizing my bookshelves.

They used to kill men for sacrilege like that.

I suppressed my twitches as best I could, and told myself that they thought they were helping.

“Success,” Susan said. “Or at least a little of it. Our people found out exactly who is tailing us up here.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Who?”

“The Eebs,” she said.

Molly came in and frowned severely at what they were doing. Granted, the place was kind of a mess after the FBI and cops got done, but still. She was probably as used to the place as I was. “Sounds like the Scoobies, only less distinctive.”

Martin shook his head. “Esteban and Esmerelda Batiste,” he clarified. “One of the husband-wife teams the Red Court uses for fieldwork.”

“One of?” I asked.

“Couples traveling together attract less attention,” Susan said. “They’re often given the benefit of the doubt in any kind of judgment call made by various officers of the law. It smooths things out a little more than they would be otherwise.”

“Hence you and Martin,” I said.

“Yes,” said Martin. “Obviously.”

“Esteban and Esmerelda are notorious,” Susan said. “They’re unorthodox, difficult to predict, which is saying something when you’re talking about vampires. They’ll throw away their personnel, too, if that is what it takes to get results. Personally, I think it’s because they have some kind of gruesome variation of love for each other. Makes them more emotional.”

“They have complementary insanities,” Martin said. “Don’t dignify it with anything more.”

“The one you said got away, Harry?” Susan said. “Esteban, probably. He rabbits early and often, which probably explains why he’s still alive. Esmerelda would have been the spotter on top of a nearby building—also the one who probably triggered the explosives.”

“Gotta figure they’re behind the hit outside the FBI building, too,” I said. “Tinted windows on the car. Shooter was way back inside the backseat, away from the window.”

“Maybe, sure,” Susan said. “They’ll suit up in all-over coverage and head out in the daytime if they think it’s really necessary.”

I grunted. “So Esteban and Esmerelda . . .”

“Eebs,” Susan said firmly.

“So the Eebs aren’t really fighters. They’re planners. Fair to say?”

“Very much so,” said Martin. There might have been a faint note of approval in his voice.

I nodded. “So they and their vampire gang were supposed to follow you, only when they saw you heading into the data center, they were forced to do more than shadow you. They tried to protect the data. All rational.”

Susan began to frown and then nodded at me.

“Of course,” Martin said. “Difficult to predict but never stupid.”

“So why,” I said, “if they were here operating under orders from the duchess to foil your efforts, would they take the trouble to try an assassination on me?”

Martin opened his mouth, and then closed it again, frowning.

“I mean, Arianna wants to see me suffer, right? Thank God for clichéd mind-sets, by the way. I can’t do that if I’m dead. I go early, it cheats her of the fun.”

“There’s division in the ranks of the Red Court,” Susan murmured. “It’s the only thing that would explain it. Countervailing interests—and at the summit of their hierarchy, too.”

“Or,” Martin said, “it was not the”—he sighed—“Eebs . . . who made the attempt.”

“But I haven’t seen any of the other people who want to kill me lately,” I said. “I saw the Eebs just the other night. They’re the simplest explanation.”

Martin tilted his head slightly in allowance. “But remember that what you have is a theory. Not a fact. You are not blessed with a shortage of foes, Dresden.”

“Um, Harry?” Molly asked.

I turned to her.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to jump in with this kind of thing or not, but . . . if there’s some sort of internal schism going on inside the Red Court . . . what if the kidnapping and so on is . . . like a cover for something else she’s doing, inside her court? I mean, maybe it isn’t all about you. Or at least, not only about you.”

I stared at her blankly for a moment. “But for that to be true,” I said, “I would have to not be the center of the universe.”

Molly rolled her eyes.

“Good thought, grasshopper,” I said. “Something to keep in mind. Maybe we’re the diversion.”

“Does it matter?” Susan asked. “I mean, as far as our interests go?”

I shrugged. “We’ll have to see, I guess.”

She grimaced. “If the Eebs are working for a different faction than Arianna, then there goes our only lead. I was hoping I could convince them to tell us where Maggie was being held.”

“Worth a try in any case,” Martin said. “If we can catch them.”

“We could do that,” I said. “Or we could make sure we’ve got Chichén Itzá staked out and grab her when the Reds bring her there for their über-magic shindig.”

Susan whirled to face me, her eyes wide. “What?”

“They’re pulling off their big ceremony at Chichén Itzá,” I said. I met Susan’s eyes and nodded. “I found her. She’ll be there. And we’ll go get her.”

Susan let out a fiercely joyful cry and pounced upon me clear from the other side of the room. The impact drove my back up against one of the bookshelves. Susan’s legs twined around my waist and her mouth found mine.

Her lips were fever-hot and sweet, and when they touched mine silent fire spread out into my body and briefly consumed all thought. My arms closed around her—around Susan, so warm and real and . . . and so very, very here. My heart lurched into double time, and I started to feel a little dizzy.

Mouse’s growl rolled through the room, sudden and deep in his chest.

“Rodriguez,” Martin barked, his voice tense.

Susan’s lips lifted from mine, and when she opened her eyes, they were solid black, all the way across—just like a Red vampire’s. My lips and tongue still tingled at the touch of her mouth, a very faint echo of the insidious venom of one of the Reds. Bright red tattoos showed on her face, her neck, and winding down one arm. She stared at me for a moment, dazed, then blinked slowly and looked over her shoulder at Martin.

“You’re close,” he said, in a very quiet, very soothing voice. “You need to back down. You need to take some time to breathe.”

Something like rage filled Susan’s face for an instant. Then she shuddered, glancing from Martin to me and back, and then began disentangling herself from me.

“Sun’s out, and it’s warm,” Martin said, taking her elbow gently. “Come on. We’ll get some sun and walk and sort things out.”

“Sun,” Susan said, her voice still low and husky with arousal. “Right, some sun.”

Martin shot me a look that he probably hoped would kill me, and then he and Susan left the apartment and walked up into the morning’s light.

Molly waited until they were well away from the front door and said, “Well. That was stupid of you both.”

I looked over my shoulder at her and frowned.

“Call it like I see it,” my apprentice said quietly. “You know she has trouble controlling her emotions, her instincts. She shouldn’t have been all over you. And you shouldn’t have kissed her back.” Her mouth tightened. “Someone could have gotten hurt.”

I rubbed at my still-tingling lips for a moment and suppressed a flash of anger. “Molly . . .”

“I get it,” she said. “I do. Look. You care about her, okay. Maybe even loved her. Maybe she loved you. But it can’t be like that anymore.” She spread her hands and said, “As messed up as that is, it’s still the reality you have to live with. You can’t ignore it. You get close to her, and there’s no way for it to come out good, boss.”

I stared hard at her, all the rage inside me coming out in my voice, despite the fact that I tried to hold it in. “Be careful, Molly.”

Molly blanched and looked away. But she folded her arms and stood her ground. “I’m saying this because I care, Harry.”

“You care about Susan?” I asked. “You don’t even know her.”

“Not Susan,” she said. “You.”

I took a step toward her. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me and Susan, Molly.”

“I know that you already blame yourself for what happened to her,” she said, spitting out the words. “Think about what it’ll be like for her if she gets lost in a kiss with you and realizes, later, that she ripped your throat open and drank your blood and turned herself into a monster. Is that how you want your story, Susan and Harry, to end?”

The words made me want to start screaming. I don’t know what kept me from lashing out at the girl.

Other than the fact that she would never believe me capable of such a thing.

And she was right. That might have something to do with it.

So I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and fought down the rage again. I was getting tired of that.

When I spoke, a moment later, my voice sounded raw. “Study with a wizard has made you manipulative.”

She sniffed a couple of times, and I opened my eyes to see her crying silently. “N-no,” she said. “That was my mom.”

I made a sound of acknowledgment and nodded.

She looked at me, and made no move to wipe the tears from her face. “You look awful.”

“I found out some things,” I said.

She bit her lip. “It’s bad. Isn’t it.”

I nodded. I said, “Real bad. We’re . . .” I shook my head. “Without the Council’s support, I don’t see how it can be done.”

“There’s a way,” she said. “There’s always a way.”

“That’s . . . sort of the problem,” I said. I looked at the hopelessly organized bookshelf nearest me. “I . . . think I’d like to be by myself for a while,” I said.

Molly looked at me, her posture that of someone being careful, as if they’re concerned that any move might shatter a delicate object. “You’re sure?”

Mouse made a little whining noise in his throat.

“I’m not going to do anything desperate,” I told her. Not yet, anyway. “I just need some time.”

“Okay,” she said. “Come on, Mouse.”

Mouse watched me worriedly, but padded out of the apartment and up the stairs with Molly.

I went to my shower, started it up, stripped, and got under the cold water. I just stood there with it sheeting over me for a while and tried to think.

Mostly, I thought about how good Susan’s mouth had felt. I waited for the cold water to sluice that particular thought down to a bearable level. Then I thought about Vadderung’s warning about the Red Court.

I’ve taken on some tough customers in my time. But none of them had been godlike beings—or the remnants of them, or whatever the Lords of Outer Night and the Red King were. You couldn’t challenge something like that in a direct confrontation and win. I might have powers, sure. Hell, on a good day I’d go along with someone who said that I was one of the top twenty or thirty wizards on the planet, in terms of sheer magical muscle. And my finesse and skill continued to improve. Give me a couple of hundred years and I might be one of the top two or three wizards on the planet.

Of course, if Marcone was right, I’d never make it that high. And the boss predator of the concrete jungle was not stupid. In fact, I’d say that there was an excellent chance I wouldn’t live another two or three days.

I couldn’t challenge the masters of the Red Court and win.

But they had my little girl.

I know. It shouldn’t matter that she was my little girl in particular. I should have been just as outraged that any little girl was trapped in such monstrous hands. But it did matter. Maggie was my child, and it mattered a whole hell of a lot.

I stood in the shower until the cold water had muted away all the hormones, all the emotion, all the mindless power of blood calling to blood. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that three courses lay open to me.

The enemy was strong. So I could show up with more muscle on my side. I could round up every friend, every ally, every shady character who owed me a solid. Enough assistance could turn the tide of any battle—and I had no illusions that it would be a battle of epic proportions.

The problem was that the only people who would show up to that kind of desperate fight were my friends. And my friends would die. I would literally be using them to shield myself against the crushing power of the Red King and his court, and I had no illusions of what such a struggle would cost. My friends would die. Most of them. Hell, probably all of them, and me with them. Maybe I could get to the kid and get out, while my friends gave their lives to make it possible. But after that, then what? Spend my life running with Maggie? Always looking over my shoulder, never stopping in one place for longer than a few days?

The second thing I could do was to change the confrontation into something else. Find some way to sneak up close enough to grab the girl and vanish, skipping the whole doomed-struggle part of option one. That plan wouldn’t require me to get my friends killed.

Of course, to pull it off, I’d have to find some way to get more clever and sneakier than beings with millennia of practice and experience at just such acts of infiltration and treachery. You didn’t survive for as long as they had among a nation of predators without being awfully smart and careful. I doubted it would be as simple as bopping a couple of guards over the head, then donning their uniforms and sneaking in with my friends the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman.

(I had cast myself as the Scarecrow in that one. If I only had a brain, I’d be able to come up with a better plan.)

So, the stand-up fight with an all-star team was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work.

The sneaky smash-and-grab at the heart of Red Court power was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work, either.

And that left option three. Which was unthinkable. Or had been, a few days ago. Before I knew I was a father.

My career as a wizard has been . . . very active. I’ve smacked a lot of awfully powerful things in the kisser. I’ve mostly gotten away with it, though I bear the scars, physical and otherwise, of the times I didn’t. A lot of the major players looked at me and saw potential for one kind of mayhem or another.

Some of them had offered me power.

A lot of power.

I mean, if I went out, right now, and gathered together everything I could—regardless of the price tag attached to it—it would change the game. It would make me more than just a hotshot young wizard. It would give my power an intensity, a depth, a scope I could hardly imagine. It would give me the chance to call upon new allies to fight beside me. It would place an almost unlimited number of new weapons at my disposal, open up options that could never otherwise exist.

But what about after?

I wouldn’t have to go on the run with Maggie to protect her from the monsters.

I’d be one.

Maybe not that day. Maybe not that week. But one day before too long, the things I had taken into me would change me. And I probably wouldn’t mind, even if I bothered to notice it happening. That was the nature of such power. You didn’t feel it changing you.

There is no sensation to warn you when your soul turns black.

Option three shared one commonality with options one and two: I wouldn’t survive it. Not as the man I was. The one who tried to make the world a little brighter or more stable. The one who tried to help, and who sometimes screwed things up. The one who believed in things like family, like responsibility, like love.

But Maggie might survive it. If I did it right—only to be orphaned again, in one way or another.

I felt so tired.

Maybe there isn’t a way, whispered a voice in the back of my head.

I snapped the water off and reached for a towel. “Screw that kind of thinking, Dresden,” I ordered myself. “There’s a way through this. There’s a way. You’ve just got to find it.”

I dried myself off and stared intently at my stark, scarred, unshaven face in the mirror. It didn’t look like the kind of face a child would love. Kid would probably start crying when she got a good look at me.

But it might be the kind of face that belonged to a man who could pull her safely out of a mob of bloodthirsty beasts. It was too early to throw in the towel.

I had no idea what I was going to do.

I just knew that I couldn’t give up.

Chapter Twenty-three

I called Murphy’s cell phone.

“Murphy here.”

“Heya, Murph. How you doing?”

“This line isn’t—”

“I know,” I said. “I know. Mine either. Hello, FBI guys. Don’t you get bored doing this stuff all the time?”

Murphy snorted into the phone. “What’s up?”

“I’m thinking about getting a broken-down doormat to go with my broken-down door and the broken frame around it,” I said. “Thank you, FBI guys.”

“Don’t make demons of the Bureau,” Murphy said. “They aren’t much more inept than anyone else. There’s only so much they can do when they’re given bad intelligence.”

“What about your place?” I asked.

“They came, they searched, they left. Rawlins and Stallings and a dozen other guys from SI were here assisting. The Bureau dusted and took out my trash after they were done.”

I barked out a laugh. “The boys at SI got away with that?”

Murphy sounded decidedly smug. “They were there at the request of the new agent in charge.”

“Tilly?”

“You met him, huh?”

“Did, and glad to. Spoke well of you.”

“He’s an aikidoka,” Murphy said. “I’ve been to his dojo a few times to teach some practical application classes. He’s come out to Dough Joe’s to teach forms and some formal weapons classes.”

“Oh, right. He’s the guy who taught you staff fighting?”

“That’s him. We started off in the same class, many moons ago.”

I grunted. “Shame to meet him this way.”

“The Bureau generally aren’t a bad bunch. This is all about Rudolph. Or whoever is giving Rudolph his marching orders.”

A thought struck me, and I went silent for a moment.

“Harry? You still there?”

“Yeah, sorry. Was just about to head out for a steak sandwich. Interested?”

“Sure. Twenty?”

“Twenty.”

Murphy hung up and I said, to the still-open line, “Hey, if you’ve got someone watching my place, could you call the cops if anyone tries to steal my Star Wars poster? It’s an original.” Then I vindictively hung up on the FBI. It made my inner child happy.

Twenty minutes later, I walked into McAnally’s.

It was too early for it to be properly crowded, and Murphy and I sat down at a corner table, the one farthest from the windows, and therefore from laser microphones, in case our federal pursuers had doubled up on their paranoia meds.

I began without preamble. “Who said Rudolph was getting his orders from his direct superiors? Or from anyone in Chicago at all?”

She frowned and thought about it for a moment. I waited it out patiently. “You don’t really think that,” she said. “Do you?”

“I think it’s worth looking at. He looked shaky when I saw him.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said thoughtfully. “At my place, too.”

I filled her in on the details of what she’d missed, at my apartment and the FBI building, and by the time I was done she was nodding confidently. “Go on.”

“We both know that ladder climbers like Rudolph don’t usually get nervous, rushed, and pressured when they’re operating with official sanction. They have too much fun swaggering around beating people over the head with their authority club.”

“Don’t know if all of them do that,” she said, “but I know damned well that Rudolph does.”

“Yeah. But this time, he was edgy, impatient. Desperate.” I told her about his behavior in general, and specifically at my place and in the interrogation room downtown. “Tilly said that Rudolph had lied his ass off to point the FBI at me.”

“And you believe that?” Murphy asked.

“Don’t you?”

She shrugged. “Point. But that doesn’t mean he’s being used as some kind of agent.”

“I think it does,” I said. “He’s not operating with the full authority of his superiors. Someone else has got to be pushing him—someone who scared him enough to make him nervous and hasty.”

“Maybe that works,” Murphy said. “Why would he do it?”

“Someone wanted to make sure I wasn’t involved in the search for Maggie. So, maybe they sent Rudolph after me. Then, when Tilly turns me loose, they take things to the next level and try to whack me outside the FBI building.”

Murphy’s blue eyes were cold at the mention of the assassination attempt. “Could they have gotten someone into position that fast?”

I tried to work it through in my head. “After Tilly sent Rudolph out of the room, it didn’t take long for me to get out. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most. Time enough to call in his failure, and for his handler to send in a hit, you think?”

Murphy thought about it herself and then shook her head slowly. “Only if they were very, very close, and moved like greased lightning. But . . . Harry, that hit was too calm, too smooth for something thrown together at the last possible moment.”

I frowned, and we both clammed up as Mac came over to our table and put a pair of brown bottles down. He was a spare man, bald, and had been ever since I knew him, dressed in dark clothes and a spotless white apron. We both murmured thanks, and he withdrew again.

“Okay,” she said, and took a pull from the bottle. “Maybe Rudolph’s handler had already put the assassin in place as a contingency measure, in case you got loose despite Rudolph’s efforts.”

I shook my head. “It makes more sense if the assassin was already there, positioned to remove Rudolph, once he had served his purpose. Whoever his handler was, they would need a safety measure in place, a link they could cut out of the chain so that nothing would lead back to them. Only once Rudy calls them and tells them he isn’t able to keep me locked up, they have the shooter switch targets.”

Which meant . . . I had taken three bullets meant for Rudolph.

“Harry?” Murphy asked. “Why are you laughing?”

“I heard a joke yesterday,” I said. “I just got it.”

She frowned at me. “You need some rest. You look like hell. And you’re obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles.”

“Wizards don’t giggle,” I said, hardly able to speak. “This is cackling.”

She eyed me askance and sipped her beer. She waited until I had laughed myself out before speaking again. “You find out about Maggie yet?”

“Sort of,” I said, abruptly sobered. “I think I know where she will be in the next few days.” I gave her what we had learned about the duchess’s intentions, leaving out the parts where I committed a bunch of crimes like theft, trespassing, and vandalism. “So right now,” I concluded, “everyone’s checking their contacts in Mexico while I’m talking to you.”

“Susan?” she asked.

“And Father Forthill,” I said. “Between them, they should be able to find out what’s going on at Chichén Itzá.”

Murphy nodded and asked, casually, “How’s she holding up?”

I took another pull from the bottle and said, “She thinks Molly has the hots for me.”

Murphy snorted. “Wow. She must have used her vampire superpowers to have worked that one out.”

I blinked at Murphy.

She stared at me for a second and then rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Harry. Really? Are you really that clueless?”

“Uh,” I said, still blinking. “Apparently.”

Murphy smirked down at her beer and said, “It’s always staggering to run into one of your blind spots. You don’t have many of them, but when you do they’re a mile wide.” She shook her head. “You didn’t really answer my question, you know.”

I nodded. “Susan’s a wreck. Maybe more so because of the whole vampire thing.”

“I don’t know, Harry. From what you’ve said, I don’t think you’d need to look any further than the whole mommy thing.”

“Could be,” I said. “Either way, she’s sort of fraying at the edges.”

“Like you,” Murphy said.

I scowled at her. “What?”

She lifted an eyebrow and looked frankly at me.

I started to get angry with her, but stopped to force myself to think. “Am I?”

She nodded slowly. “Did you notice that you’ve been tapping your left toe on the ground for the past five minutes?”

I frowned at her, and then down at my foot, which was tapping rapidly, to the point that my calf muscles were growing tired. “I . . . No.”

“I’m your friend, Harry,” she said quietly. “And I’m telling you that you aren’t too stable yourself right now.”

“Monsters are going to murder my child sometime soon, Murph. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Soon. I don’t have time for sanity.”

Murphy nodded slowly, then sighed like someone setting down an unpleasant burden. “So. Chichén Itzá.”

“Looks like.”

“Cool. When do we hit them?”

I shook my head. “We can’t go all Wild Bunch on these people. They’ll flatten us.”

She frowned. “But the White Council . . .”

“Won’t be joining us,” I said. I couldn’t keep a bit of the snarl out of my voice. “And to answer your question . . . we’re not sure when the ritual is supposed to take place. I’ve got to come up with more information.”

“Rudolph,” Murphy said thoughtfully.

“Rudolph. Someone who is a part of this, probably someone from the Red Court, is leaning on him. I plan on finding that someone and then poking him in the nose until he coughs up something I can use.”

“I think I’d like to talk to Rudolph, too. We’ll start from our ends and work toward the middle again, then?”

“Sounds like a plan.” I waved at Mac and pantomimed holding a sandwich in front of me and taking a bite. He nodded, and glanced at Murphy. “You want a steak sandwich, too?”

“I thought you didn’t have time to be sane.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t have time to be hungry, either.”

Chapter Twenty-four

“How does a police detective afford a place like this?” Molly asked.

We were sitting in the Blue Beetle on a quiet residential street in Crestwood. It was late afternoon, with a heavy overcast. The houses on the street were large ones. Rudolph’s place, whose address I’d gotten from Murphy, was the smallest house on the block—but it was on the block. It backed right up to the Cook County Forest Preserve, too, and between the old forest and the mature trees it gave the whole area a sheltered, pastoral quality.

“He doesn’t,” I said quietly.

“You mean he’s dirty?” Molly asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe his family has money. Or maybe he managed to mortgage himself to the eyeballs. People get real stupid when it comes to buying homes. Pay an extra quarter of a million dollars for a place because it’s in the right neighborhood. Buy houses they damned well know they can’t afford to make the payments on.” I shook my head. “They should make you take some kind of iota-of-common-sense quiz before you make an offer.”

“Maybe it isn’t stupid,” Molly said. “Everybody wants home to mean something. Maybe the extra money they pay creates that additional meaning for them.”

I grimaced. “I’d rather have my extra meaning come from the ancient burial ground under the swimming pool or from knowing that I built it with my own hands or something.”

“Not everyone puts as low a value on the material as you do, boss,” Molly said. “For them, maybe the extra material value represented by a higher price tag is significant.”

I grunted. “It’s still stupid.”

“From your perspective,” Molly said. “It’s really all about perspective, isn’t it.”

“And from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn’t blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis.”

“Heh,” Molly said. “And their house is much nicer than your house.”

“And that,” I said.

Mouse grumbled quietly in his sleep from the backseat, and I turned to reach back and rub his ears until he settled down again.

Molly sat quietly for almost a minute before she said, “What else do we do?”

“Other than sit tight and watch?” I asked. “This is a stakeout, Molly. It’s what you do on a stakeout.”

“Stakeouts suck,” Molly said, puffing out a breath that blew a few strands of hair out of her eyes. “How come Murphy isn’t doing this part? How come we aren’t doing magic stuff?”

“Murphy is keeping track of Rudolph at work,” I said. “I’m watching his home. If his handler wanted him dead, this would be a logical place to bushwhack him.”

“And we’re not doing magic because . . . ?”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“Tracking spells for Rudolph and Maggie,” she said promptly.

“You got any of Rudolph’s blood? Hair? Fingernail clippings?”

“No,” she said.

“So, no tracking spell for him,” I said.

“But what about Maggie?” she said. “I know you don’t have any hair or anything from her, but you pulled a tracking spell for me using my mother’s blood, right? Couldn’t you use your blood for that?”

I kept my breathing steady, and prevented the flash of frustration I felt from coming out in my voice. “First thing I tried. Right after I got off the phone with Susan when this all started.”

Molly frowned. “Why didn’t it work?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because there’s something more than simple blood relation involved. Maybe there has to be a bond, a sense of family between the parent and child, that the tracking spell uses to amplify its effects. Maybe the Red Court is using some kind of magic that conceals or jams tracking spells—God knows, they would have been forced to come up with some kind of countermeasure during the war.” I shook my head wearily. “Or maybe it was simple distance. I’ve never tracked anything more than a couple of hundred linear miles away. I’ve heard of tracking spells that worked over a couple of thousand miles, but not from anyone who had actually done it. Gimme some credit, grasshopper. Of course I tried that. I wouldn’t have spent half a day summoning my contacts if I hadn’t.”

“Oh,” Molly said. She looked troubled. “Yeah. Sorry.”

I sighed and tipped my head back and closed my eyes. “No problem. Sorry, kid. I’m just tense.”

“Just a little,” she said. “Um. Should we be sitting out here in broad daylight? I mean, we’re not hiding the car or anything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We want to be visible.”

“Why?”

“I’m gonna close my eyes,” I told her. “Just for a bit. Stay alert, okay?”

She gave me a look, but said, “Okay.”

I closed my eyes, but about half a second after I had, Molly nudged me and said, “Wake up, Harry. We have company.”

I opened them again and found that the grey late afternoon had settled into the murk of early evening. I looked up into the rearview mirror and spotted a white sports car coming to a halt as it parked on the street behind us. The running lights went off as the driver got out.

“Took him long enough,” I muttered.

Molly frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“Asked him to meet me here. Didn’t know where to find him.”

Molly peered through the back window, and even Mouse lifted his head to look around. “Oh,” Molly said, understanding, as Mouse’s tail thumped hesitantly against the back of my seat.

I got out of the car and walked to meet my half brother, the vampire.

Thomas and I were a study in contrasts. I was better than six and a half feet tall and built lean. He was a hair under six feet, and looked like a fitness model. My hair was a muddy brown color, generally cut very short on the sides and in back, a little longer on top. It tended to stick up any which way within a few minutes of being ordered by a comb. Thomas’s hair was black, naturally wavy, and fell to touch his shoulders. I wore jeans, a T-shirt, and my big black leather duster. Thomas was wearing custom-fitted pants made from white leather, a white silk shirt, and a coarser silk jacket, also in white, decorated with elaborate brocade. He had the kind of face that belonged on billboards. Mine belonged on wanted posters.

We had the same contour of chin, and our eyes resembled each other’s unmistakably in shape, if not in color. Mom gave them to us.

Thomas and I had finally met as adults. He’d been right there next to me in some of the worst places I’d ever walked. He saved my life more than once. I’d returned the favor. But that had been when he decided to fight against his Hunger, the vampiric nature native to the vampires of the White Court. He’d spent years maintaining control of his darker urges, integrating with Chicago’s society, and generally trying to act like a human being. We’d had to keep our kinship a secret. The Council would have used him to get at the White Court if they knew. Ditto for the vampires getting at the Council through me.

Then something bad happened to him, and he stopped trying to be human. I might have seen him for a total of two, even three minutes since he’d been knocked off the life- force nibbling wagon and started taking big hearty bites again.

Thomas swaggered up to me as if we’d been talking just yesterday, looked me up and down, and said, “You need an image consultant, stat, little brother.”

I said, “Guess what. You’re an uncle.”

Thomas let his head fall back as he barked out a little laugh. “What? No, hardly, unless one of Father’s by-blows actually survived. Which essentially just doesn’t happen among—”

He stopped talking in midsentence and his eyes widened.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, still wide-eyed, apparently locked into motionlessness by surprise. It was a little creepy. Human beings still look like human beings when they’re standing still. Thomas’s pale skin and bright blue eyes went still, like a statue. “Oh.”

I nodded. “Say ‘oilcan.’ ”

Thomas blinked. “What?”

“You get to be the Tin Woodsman.”

“What?”

“Never mind, not important.” I sighed. “Look, without going into too many details: I have an eight-year-old daughter. Susan never told me. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court took her.”

“Um,” said Thomas. “If I’d known that, maybe I would have been here sooner.”

“Couldn’t say anything on the phone. The FBI and the cops are involved, having been made into roadblocks to slow me down.” I tilted my head down the street. “The cop who lives in that house at the end of the street has been coerced into helping whoever is trying to stop me. I’m here hoping to nab either his handler or his cleaner and grab every bit of information I can.”

Thomas looked at me and said, “I’m an uncle.”

I ran the palm of my hand over my face.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just thought this was going to be another chat, with you all worried that the evil White Court had been abusing me. I need to take a moment.”

“Make it a short moment,” I said. “We’re on the clock.”

Thomas nodded several times and seemed to draw himself back into order. “Okay, so you’re looking for . . . What’s her name?”

“Maggie.”

My brother paused for a couple of heartbeats, and bowed his head briefly. “That’s a good name.”

“Susan thought so.”

“So you’re looking for Maggie,” he said. “And you need my help?”

“I don’t know the exact date, but I know she’s going to be brought to Chichén Itzá. Probably tonight, tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Why?” Thomas asked. He then added, “And how does this have anything to do with me?”

“They’re using her in a bloodline curse,” I said. “When they sacrifice her, the curse kills her brothers and sisters, then her parents, then their brothers and sisters and so on.”

“Wait. Maggie has brothers and sisters? Since when have you ever gotten that busy?”

“No, dammit!” I half shouted in frustration. “That’s just an illustration for how the bloodline curse works.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, crap. You’re saying that it’s going to kill me, too.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I’m freaking saying. You tool.”

“Um,” Thomas said, “I’m against that.” His eyes widened again. “Wait. What about the other Raiths? Are they in any danger through me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Empty night,” he muttered. “Okay. You know where she’s going to be. You want me to saddle up and help you get Maggie back, like we did with Molly?”

“Not unless there’s no other choice. I don’t think we would survive a direct assault on the Red King and his retinue on their home turf.”

“Well, maybe you and I couldn’t, naturally. But with the Council behind y—”

“Way behind me,” I interrupted, my voice harsh with anger. “So far behind me you wouldn’t know they were there at all.”

My brother’s deep blue eyes flashed with an angry fire. “Those assholes.”

“Seconded, motion carried,” I agreed.

“So what do you think we should do?”

“I need information,” I said. “Get me whatever you can. Any activity at Chichén Itzá or a nearby Red stronghold, sightings of a little girl surrounded by Reds, anything. There’s got to be something, somewhere that will show us a chink in their armor. If we find out where they’re holding her, we can hit the place. If I can learn something about the defensive magic around the site, maybe I can poke a hole in it so that we can just grab the girl and go. Otherwise . . .”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Otherwise we have to take them on at Chichén Itzá. Which would suck.”

“It’s a couple of miles beyond suck.”

Thomas frowned. “What about asking Lara for help? She can command a lot of firepower from the other Houses of the White Court.”

“Why would she help me?” I asked.

“Self-preservation. She’s big on that.”

I grunted. “I’m not sure if the rest of your family is in any danger.”

“You aren’t sure they aren’t, either,” Thomas said. “And anyway, if you don’t know, Lara won’t.”

“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “No. If I go to her with this, she’ll assume it’s a ploy motivated by desperation.”

Thomas folded his arms. “A lame ploy, at that. But you’re missing another angle.”

“Oh?”

Thomas lowered his arms and then brought them up to frame his own torso the way Vanna White presents the letters on Wheel of Fortune. “Incontestably, I’m in danger. She’ll want to protect me.”

I looked at him skeptically.

Thomas shrugged. “I play for the team now, Harry. And everyone knows it. If she lets something bad happen to me when I ask for her help, it’s going to make a lot of people upset. And not in the helpful, ‘I sure don’t want to mess with her’ kind of way.”

“For that to work as leverage, the stakes would have to be known to the rest of the Court,” I said. “They’d have to know why you were in danger from a bloodline curse aimed at me. Then they’d all know about our blood relation. Not just Lara.”

Thomas frowned over that for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Still. It might be worth the effort to approach her. She’s a resourceful woman, my sister.” His expression smoothed over into neutrality. “Quite gifted when it comes to removing obstacles. She could probably help you.”

Normally I slap down suggestions like that without a second thought. This time . . .

I had the second thought.

Lara probably knew the Red Court as well as anyone. She’d been operating arm in arm with them, to one degree or another, for years. She was the power behind the throne of the White Court, which prided itself on its skills of espionage, manipulation, and other forms of indirect strength. If anyone was likely to know something about the Reds, it was Lara Raith.

The clock just kept on ticking. Maggie was running out of time. She couldn’t afford for me to be squeamish.

“I would prefer not to,” I said quietly. “I need you to find out whatever you can, man.”

“What happens if I can’t find it?”

“If that happens . . .” I shook my head. “If I do nothing, my little girl is going to die. And so is my brother. I can’t live with that.”

Thomas nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Don’t see it. Do it.”

It came out harsh enough that my brother flinched, though it was a subtle motion. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s—”

His head whipped around toward Rudolph’s house.

“What?” I asked.

He held up a hand for silence, turning to focus intently. “Breaking glass,” he murmured. “A lot of it.”

“Harry!” Molly called.

I turned to see the Beetle’s passenger door swing open. Molly emerged, hanging on to Mouse’s collar with both hands. The big dog was focused on Rudolph’s house as well, and his chest bubbled with the deep, tearing snarl I’d heard only a handful of times, and always when supernatural predators were nearby.

“Someone’s there for Rudolph,” I said, and launched myself forward. “Let’s go!”

Chapter Twenty-five

I looked like a cool guy leading the charge for about a second and a half, and then my brother and my dog left me and Molly eating their dust. If I hadn’t been a regular runner, Molly would have done the same, albeit more gradually. By the time I had covered half the distance, Thomas and Mouse had already bounded around to the back, one around either side of Rudolph’s house.

“Get gone, grasshopper!” I called, and even as we ran forward Molly vanished behind her best veil. It took us another quarter of a minute to cover the distance, and I went around the side of the house Thomas had taken. I pounded around the back corner to see that a large glass sliding door leading from a wooden deck into the house had been shattered. I could hear a big, thumping beat, as if from a subwoofer, pounding away inside the house.

I took the stairs up to the deck in a single jumping stride, and barely avoided a sudden explosion of glass, wood, drywall, and siding that came hurling toward me. I had an instant to realize that the projectile that had just come through the wall was my brother, and then something huge and black and swift came crashing through the same wall, expanding the hole to five times its original size.

The whatever-it-was stood within a step or two, and I was already sprinting. I kept doing it. I slapped one hand down and vaulted the railing on the far side of the deck. I barely jerked my hand from the rail before the thing smashed it to kindling with one huge, blindingly fast talon. That deep beat grew louder and faster as I landed, and I realized with a shock that I could hear the thing’s rising heart rate as clearly as if it had been pounding on a drum.

I was kidding myself if I thought I could run from something that fast. I had a step or two on the creature, but it reclaimed them within half a dozen strides and swiped at my head with terrible speed and power.

I whirled desperately, drawing my blasting rod and letting out a burst of flame, but I stumbled and fell during the spin. The fire hammered into the creature, and for all the good it did me I might as well have hit it with a rubber chicken.

I thought I was done for—until Mouse emerged from the house onto the back deck, bathed in a faint nimbus of blue light. He took a single, bounding, thirty-yard leap that ended at the attacking creature’s enormous, malformed shoulders. Mouse’s claws dug into the thing’s hide, and his massive jaws closed on the back of its thick, almost indistinguishable neck.

The creature arched up in pain, but it never made a sound. It tripped over me, too distracted to actually attack, but the impact of so much mass and power sent up flares of agony from my ribs and from one thigh.

Mouse rode the creature down into the dirt, tearing and worrying it, his claws digging furrows in the flesh of its back. His snarls reverberated in the evening air, and each shake and twist of his body seemed to send up little puffs of glowing blue mist from his fur.

Mouse had the thing dead to rights, but nobody seemed to have told the creature that. It twisted lithely, bouncing up from the ground as if made of rubber, seized Mouse’s tail, and swung the huge dog in a single, complete arc. Mouse hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound sledgehammer, drawing a high-pitched sound of pain from him.

I didn’t think. I lifted my blasting rod again, filling it with my will and with all the soulfire I could shove in, screaming, “Get off my dog!”

White fire slammed out of the rod and drew a line on the creature from hip to skull, digging into flesh and setting it ablaze. Once again, it convulsed in silent agony, and the boom-box beat of its heart ratcheted up even higher. It fell, unable to hold on to Mouse, and writhed upon the ground.

I tried to get up, but my injured leg wouldn’t support me, and the sudden surge of weariness that overtook me made my arms collapse, too. I lay there, panting and helpless to move. Mouse staggered slowly to his feet, his head hanging, his tongue dangling loosely from his mouth. Behind me, I heard a groan and twisted awkwardly to see Thomas sit up, one shoulder hanging at a malformed angle. His clothes had been ripped to shreds, there was a piece of metal protruding from his abdomen, just next to his belly button, and half his face was covered in a sheet of blood a little too pale to belong to a human.

“Thomas!” I shouted. Or tried to shout. The acoustics were odd in this tunnel within which I was suddenly sprawled. “Get up, man!”

He gave me a blank, concussed stare.

The creature’s movements had slowed. I turned to see it beginning to relax, its body shuddering, the drumbeat of its heart steadying, and I got a better look at it than I had before.

It was huge, easily the size of a full-grown bull, and it carried a stench with it that was similar in potency. Or maybe that was because I had just overcooked it. Its body was odd, seemingly able to move on two legs or four with equal efficiency. Its flesh was a spongy blackness, much like the true skin of a Red vampire, and its head was shaped like something mixing the features of a human being, a jaguar, and maybe a crocodile or wild boar. It was pitch-black everywhere, including its eyes, its tongue, and its mouth.

And, despite the punishment I had just dealt out, it was getting up again.

“Thomas!” I shouted. Or wheezed.

The creature shook its head and its dead-black eyes focused on me. It started toward me, pausing briefly to swat my stunned dog out of its path. Mouse landed in a tumble, seemingly struggling to find his balance but unable to do so.

I lifted my blasting rod again as it came on, but I didn’t have enough juice left in me to make the rod do anything but smoke faintly.

And then a stone sailed in from nowhere and struck the creature on the snout.

“Hey!” called Molly’s voice. “Hey, Captain Asphalt! Hey, tar baby! Over here!”

The creature and I turned to see Molly standing maybe twenty yards away, in plain sight. She flung another rock, and it bounced off the creature’s broad chest. Its heartbeat began to accelerate and grow louder again.

“Let’s go, gorgeous!” Molly called. “You and me!” She turned sideways to the thing, rolled her hips, and made an exaggerated motion of swatting herself on the ass. “Come get some!”

The thing tensed and then rushed forward, covering the ground with astonishing speed.

Molly vanished.

The creature smashed into the earth where she’d been standing, with its huge talons balled into furious fists, slamming them eight inches into the earth.

There was a peal of mocking laughter, and another rock bounced off of the thing, this time from the left. Furious, it whirled to rush Molly again—and again, she vanished completely. Once more it struck at empty ground. Once more, Molly got its attention with a rock and a few taunts, only to vanish from sight as it came at her.

Each time, she was a little closer to the creature, unable to match its raw speed. And each time, she led it a little farther away from the three of us. A couple of times, she even shouted, “Toro, toro! Olé!”

“Thomas!” I called. “Get up!”

My brother blinked his eyes several times, each time a little more quickly. Then he swiped a hand at the bloodied side of his face, shook his head violently to get the blood out of his eyes, and looked down at the section of metal bar sticking out of his stomach. He clenched it with his hand, grimaced, and drew it slowly out, revealing a six- inch triangle that must have been a corner brace in the wall he’d gone through. He dropped it on the ground, groaning in pain, and his eyes rolled briefly back into his head.

I saw his other nature coming over him. His skin grew paler, and almost seemed to take on its own glow. His breathing stabilized immediately, and the cut along his hairline where he’d been bleeding began to close. He opened his eyes, and their color had changed from a deep, contented blue to a hungry, metallic silver.

He got up smoothly and glanced at me. “You bleeding?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’m good.”

A few feet away, Mouse got to his feet and shook himself, his tags jingling. Molly had gotten as far as the street again, and there was an enormous crashing sound.

“This time, we do it smart,” Thomas said. He turned to Mouse instead of me. “I’m going to go in first and get its attention. Go for its strings. I think you’ll have to hit two limbs to really cripple it.”

Mouse woofed, evidently an affirmative, let out a grumbling growl, and once more very faint, very pale blue light gathered around him.

Thomas nodded, and picked up a section of ruined deck that had scattered around where he landed. He shouldered a corner post, a section of four-by-four about a yard and a half long, and said, “Don’t sweat, Harry. We’ll be back for you in a minute.”

“Go, Team Dresden,” I wheezed.

The two of them took off, zero to cheetah speed in about a second. Then they were out of sight. I heard Thomas let out a high-pitched cry that was a pretty darn good Bruce Lee impersonation, and there was a thunder crack of wood striking something hard.

An instant later, Mouse let out his battle roar. There was a flicker of strobing colors of light as Molly pitched a bit of dazzling magic at the creature. It wouldn’t hurt the thing, but the kid could make eye-searing light in every color imaginable burst from empty air, accompanied by a variety of sounds if she so chose. She called it her One-woman Rave spell, and during the last Independence Day, she had used it to throw up a fireworks display from her parents’ backyard so impressive that evidently it had caused traffic problems on the expressway.

It was hard to lie there twisted halfway around at the waist, to see only the occasional flash of light or to hear the thumps and snarls of combat. I tried my leg again and had no luck. So I just settled down and concentrated on not blacking out or breathing too hard. The creature had definitely cracked at least one of my ribs.

That was when I noticed the two sets of glowing red eyes staring at me from the forest, staring with the unmistakable fixation of a predator, and coming slowly, steadily, silently closer.

I suddenly realized that everyone around who might have helped me was sort of distracted at the moment.

“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, crap.”

Chapter Twenty-six

The eyes rushed toward me, and something dark and strong struck me across the jaw. I was already close to losing consciousness. The blow was enough to ring my bells thoroughly.

I was aware of being picked up and tossed over someone’s shoulder. Then there was a lot of rapid, sickening motion. It went on long enough for me to throw up. I didn’t have enough energy to aim at my abductor.

A subjective eternity later, I was thrown to the ground. I lay still, hoping to fool my captor into thinking I was barely conscious and weak as a kitten. Which should be easy, since I was. I’ve never really had much ambition as a performer.

“We don’t like it,” said a woman’s voice. “Its Power smells foul.”

“We must be patient,” replied a man’s voice. “It could be a great asset.”

“It is listening to us,” the woman said.

“We know that,” replied the man.

I heard soft footsteps, cushioned by pine needles, and the woman spoke again, more slowly and lower. She sounded . . . hungry. “Poor thing. So battered. We should give it a kiss and let it sleep. It would be merciful. And He would be pleased with us.”

“No, our love. He would be satisfied with us. There is a difference.”

“Have we not come to understand this simple fact?” she shot back, acid in her voice. “Never will He name us to the Circle, no matter how many prizes we bring into the Court. We are interlopers. We are not of the first Maya.”

“Many things can change in the span of eternity, our love. We will be patient.”

“You mean that He might fall?” She let out a rather disconcerting giggle. “Then why aren’t we currying favor with Arianna?”

“We shall not even consider it,” he replied, his voice hard. “Should we even think of it too often, He might know. He might act. Do we understand?”

“We do,” she said, her tone petulant.

Then someone grabbed my shoulder in iron- strong fingers and flipped me onto my back. The dark shapes of trees spun above me, nothing more than black outlines against the lights of Chicago reflecting from the overcast.

There was barely enough light to let me see the pale, delicate features of a tiny woman no larger than a child. Seriously, she might have been four-foot-six, though her proportions seemed identical to those of any adult. She had very pale skin with a light dusting of freckles, and looked as if she might be nineteen years old. Her hair was light brown and very straight. Her eyes were extremely odd-looking. One was pale, icy blue, the other deep, dark green, and I had an immediate instinct that whatever creature lurking behind those mismatched eyes was not a rational being.

She was wearing a gown with long, flowing sleeves, and some kind of sleeveless robe and corset over that. She was barefoot, though. I knew because I could feel her cold little foot when she planted it on my chest and leaned over to peer down at me.

“We’re too late. Look, it’s starting to go bad.”

“Nonsense,” said the male voice. “It’s a perfectly appropriate specimen. Mortal wizards are supposed to be worn and tough, our love.”

I looked up and saw the other speaker. He was perhaps five- foot-six, with a short brush of red hair, a black beard, and skin that looked darkened and bronzed by the sun. He wore black silk clothing, and looked like he’d just come from a dress rehearsal of Hamlet.

“Aha,” I said. “You must be Esteban and Esmerelda. I’ve heard about you.”

“We are famous,” hissed the little woman, beaming up at the man.

He gave her a stern look, sighed, and said, “Aye, we are. Here to stop you from allowing Arianna to proceed with her design.”

I blinked. “What?”

Esmerelda leaned closer. Her hair brushed my nose and lips. “Are its ears broken? If the ears are defective, can we detach them and send them back?”

“Peace, our love,” Esteban said. He hunkered down on his heels and eyed me. “It isn’t its fault. It doesn’t even realize how Arianna is manipulating it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Look, folks, no one wants to stop Arianna more than me.”

Esteban waved a vague hand. “Yes, yes. It feels it must rescue its spawn. It will try to take her back, from the very heart of His realm. Placing it at the center of vast moving powers where it might tip balances any number of ways.”

“It hardly looks large enough.” Esmerelda sniffed. “It’s just a ragged, dirty creature.”

Esteban shrugged. “We know, by now, that the outside hardly matters. What lies within is what holds importance. Would you agree, ragged wizard?”

I licked my lips. I really didn’t feel up to bantering with a couple of insane vampires, but it was probably my best course of action. Anything that lives long enough tends to lose track of passing time rather easily, on the minute-to-minute scale. After a few thousand years have gone by, an hour doesn’t really rate. If my brother and company were successful in their fight, they would realize I was gone within a few minutes—and I didn’t think the Eebs had carried me far enough away to let them evade Mouse. As far as I can tell, Mouse can follow a scent trail from space.

Talk to them. Stall.

“That depends upon the nature of the subject and observer,” I said. “But if you are using the metaphor in its simplest form, then yes. The true nature of any given being supersedes its outer appearance in terms of importance.” I tried a smile. “This is quite pleasant treatment, by the way,” I said. “I had expected something entirely different.”

“We wanted to eat you and kill you. Or kill you, then eat you,” Esmerelda said, smiling back. Hers was a lot crazier- looking than mine. I hoped. “And might still.”

“Obviously you had something else in mind, though,” I said. “Apparently you wish to talk. I’m more than willing to listen.”

“Excellent,” Esteban said. “We are pleased that you can address the matter rationally.”

“To which matter do you refer, specifically?”

“The matter of your involvement with Arianna’s plan,” Esteban said. “We wish you to discontinue your participation.”

“That . . . could be problematic. Since if she does what she intends to do, it’s going to kill me, along with the child’s mother.”

The two vampires traded a long, silent glance, their facial expressions shifting subtly. I got the impression that a lot of communication got done.

Esteban turned back to me. “How did you learn of this, ragged wizard?”

“It’s what I do,” I said.

“Oooo,” said Esmerelda. She slid her body on top of mine, straddling my hips with hers. She was so tiny that I could hardly feel her weight on me. She smelled . . . wrong. Like formaldehyde and mildew. “It is arrogant. We adore arrogance. It’s so sweet to watch arrogant little things succumb. Do you like our pretty eyes, ragged wizard? Which color do you like more? Look closely and carefully.”

You don’t look vampires in the eyes. Everyone knows that one. Even so, I’d had a couple of encounters with the stare of one of the Red Court and never had a problem shutting them out. It wasn’t even particularly difficult.

But evidently, those vampires had been noobs.

Ice blue and deep sea green swirled in my vision, and it was only at the very last instant that I realized what was happening, slamming closed the vaults of my mind, leaving only the hard, fortified places to attack, a castle of idea and memory, ready to withstand an assault.

“Stop that, please,” I said quietly a moment later. “The conversation isn’t getting anywhere like this.”

The little vampire pursed her lips, her head tilted as if she were deciding whether to be upset or amused. She went with amused. She giggled and wriggled her hips around a little. “Lovely, lovely, lovely. We are well pleased.”

“You do have options,” Esteban said. If he was put out by Esmerelda’s behavior, it didn’t show. Hell, he hadn’t even seemed to notice.

“By all means,” I said. “Enumerate them.”

“I suppose the simplest means to solve our problem would be for you to take your own life,” he said. “If you are dead, Arianna has no reason to harm your spawn.”

“Aside from the being-dead part, there are some minor problems with that idea.”

“By all means,” Esteban said, “enumerate them.”

“What confirmation would I have that the child was safe and returned to her mother? What security would I have to make me believe that Arianna might not do the same thing a month from now?”

“A contract could be drafted,” Esteban said. “Witnessed and signed, arbitrated by one of the neutral parties of the Accords. For security, we suppose we could ask our Lord if He would give his Word upon it that your mate and spawn were free of the cycle of vengeance.”

“A possibility worth consideration,” I said. “Though the part where I die seems to be something of a flaw.”

“Understandably,” Esteban said. “We might also offer you an alternative to death.”

The roll of Esmerelda’s hips became slower, more sensuous. I’ve been abused by Red Court vampires in the past. I still have nightmares sometimes. But the pretty-seeming girl atop me had that feminine mystique that defies description and definition. Being so close to her was making me nauseous, but my body was reacting to her with uncomfortable intensity.

“Alternative,” she said in a breathy little voice. “In this day, that means fashionable. And we do so love showing little mortals how to be fashionable.”

“You would make me like you,” I said quietly.

Esmerelda nodded, slowly, her mouth drawing up into a lazy, sensual smile, her hips still circling maddeningly against mine. Her fangs were showing.

“It would offer you several advantages,” Esteban said. “Even should Arianna complete the vengeance rite, the transformation of your blood would insulate you against it. And, of course, you would not be killed, captured, or tortured to death, as the White Council will be over the next six months or so.”

“It certainly bears consideration as well,” I said. “Very practical. Are there any other paths you think feasible?”

“One more,” Esteban said. “Gift your spawn to our Lord, the Red King.”

If I’d had the strength to take a swing at him, I would have. So it was probably a good thing that I didn’t. “And what would that accomplish?”

“He would then take possession of the spawn. She would, in fact, be under his protection, until such time as He deemed her unfit, unworthy, or unneeding of such care.”

Esmerelda nodded rapidly. “She would be his. He does so dote on his little pets. We think it quite endearing.” She opened her mouth in a little O, like a schoolgirl caught in the midst of a whispered conference about forbidden subjects. “Oh, my, would Arianna be upset. She would howl for centuries.”

“We could provide chattel in exchange to sweeten the deal, Dresden,” Esteban said. “We would be willing to go as high as seven young women. You could select them from our stock or from their natural habitat, and we would see to their preparation and disposition.”

I thought about it for a long moment and rubbed lightly at my chin. Then I said, “These are all very rational suggestions. But I feel that I do not understand something. Why does the Red King not simply order Arianna to desist?”

Both of the Eebs drew in breaths of scandalized surprise. “Because of her mate, Dresden,” said Esteban.

“Slain by the wizard of the black stick,” said Esmerelda. “A blood debt.”

“Sacred blood.”

“Holy blood.”

Esteban shook his head. “Not even our Lord can interfere in the collection of a blood debt. It is Arianna’s right.”

Esmerelda nodded. “As it was Bianca’s to collect from you, in the opening days of the war. Though many wished that she would not have done what she did, it was her right, even as a very, very young member of the Court. As her progenitor, Arianna’s mate took up that debt. As Arianna now has done herself.” She looked at Esteban and beamed. “We are so happy with the ragged wizard. It is so civil and pleasant. Completely unlike those other wizards. Might we keep it for our own?”

“Business, our love,” Esteban chided. “Business first.”

Esmerelda thrust out her lower lip—and abruptly turned, all motion ceasing, to focus intently in one direction.

“What is it, our love?” Esteban asked quietly.

“The Ik’k’uox,” she said in a distant, puzzled voice. “It is in pain. It flees. It . . .” She opened her eyes very wide, and suddenly they flooded in solid black, just as the creature’s had been. “Oh! It cheated!” Her face turned down to mine, and she bared her fangs. “It cheated! It brought a demon of its own! A mountain ice demon from the Land of Dreams!”

“If you don’t exercise them, they’re impossible,” I said, philosophically.

“The constable,” Esteban said. “Did it kill the constable?”

Esmerelda returned to staring at nothing for a moment and then said, “No. It was attacked only seconds after entering his home.” She shivered and looked up at Esteban. “The ragged wizard’s demon comes this way, and swiftly.”

Esteban sighed. “We had hoped to work out something civilized. This is your last chance, ragged wizard. What say you to my offer?”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

Esteban’s eyes went black and flat. “Kill him.”

Esmerelda’s body tightened in what looked like a sexual fervor, and she leaned down, teeth bared, letting out a low sound filled to the brim with erotic and physical need.

During the last few moments, the fingers of my right hand had undone the clasp on my mother’s amulet. As the little vampire leaned into me, she met the silver pentacle necklace, the symbol of what I believed. A five-pointed star, representing the four elements and the spirit, bound within a circle of mortal control, will, and compassion. I’m not a Wiccan. I’m not big on churches of any kind, despite the fact that I’ve spoken, face-to-face, with an archangel of the Almighty.

But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn’t about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn’t about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine.

Faith is about what you do. It’s about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It’s about making sacrifices for the good of others—even when there’s not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.

Faith is a power of its own, and one even more elusive and difficult to define than magic. A symbol of faith, presented with genuine belief and sincerity, is the bane of many an otherworldly predator—and one of the creatures most strongly affected were vampires of the Red Court. I don’t know how it works, or why. I don’t know if some kind of powerful being or Being must get involved along the line. I never asked for one of them to do that—but if so, one of them was backing me up anyway.

The pentacle flared into brilliant silver light that struck Esmerelda like a six-foot wave, throwing her off of me and tearing the flesh mask she wore to shreds, revealing the creature inside it.

I twisted and presented the symbol to Esteban, but he had already backed several paces away, and it only forced him to lift his hand to shade his eyes as he continued retreating.

There was a hissing, serpentine sound from Esmerelda, and I saw a gaunt, black-skinned creature stand up out of the ruins of gown and flesh mask alike. It was just as small as she was, but its limbs were longer, by at least a third, than hers had seemed, long and scrawny. A flabby black belly sagged down, and its face would make one of those really ugly South American bats feel better about itself.

She opened her jaws, baring fangs and a long, writhing tongue that was pink with black spots. Her all-black eyes were ablaze with fury.

Shadows shifted as a pale blue light began to grow nearer, and the woods suddenly rang out with Mouse’s triumphant hunting howl. He had found my scent—or that of the vampires—and was closing in.

Esmerelda hissed again, and the sound was full of rage and hate.

“We mustn’t!” Esteban snarled. He dashed around me with supernatural speed, giving the glowing pendant a wide berth. He seized the little vampire woman by the arm. They both stared at me for an instant with their cold, empty black eyes—and then there was the sound of a rushing wind and they were gone.

I sagged onto the ground gratefully. My racing heart began to slow, my fear to subside. My confusion as to what was happening remained, though. Maybe it was so tangled and impossible because I was so exhausted.

Yeah. Right.

Mouse let out a single loud bark and then the big dog was standing next to me, over me. He nudged me with his nose until I lifted a hand and scratched his ears a little.

Thomas and Molly arrived next. I was glad Thomas had let Mouse do the pursuit, while he came along more slowly so that my apprentice wouldn’t be alone in the woods. His eyes were bright silver, his mouth set in a smug line, and there was broken glass shining in his hair. The left half of Molly’s upper body was generously coated in green paint.

“Okay,” I slurred. “I’m backward.”

“What’s that?” Molly asked, kneeling down next to me, her expression worried.

“Backward. ’M a detective. Supposed to find things out. I been working backward. The more I look at it, the more certain I am that I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Can you stand?” Thomas asked.

“Leg,” I said. “Ribs. Might be broken. Can’t take the weight.”

“I’ll carry him,” Thomas said. “Find a phone.”

“Okay.”

My brother picked me up and carried me out of the woods. We went back to the car.

The car’s remains.

I stared dully at the mess. It looked as though something had taken Thomas’s white Jag and put it in a trash compactor with the Blue Beetle. The two cars, together, had been smashed down into a mass about four feet high. Liquids and fuel bled out onto the street below them.

Thomas gingerly put me down on my good leg as I stared at my car.

There was no way the Beetle was going to resurrect from this one. I found myself blinking tears out of my eyes. It wasn’t an expensive car. It wasn’t a sexy car. It was my car.

And it was gone.

“Dammit,” I mumbled.

“Hmmm?” Thomas asked. He looked considerably less broken up than me.

“My staff was inna car.” I sighed. “Takes weeks to make one of those.”

“Lara’s going to be annoyed with me,” Thomas said. “That’s the third one this year.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. I feel your pain. What happened with the big thing?”

“The fight?” Thomas shrugged. “Bullfighting tactics, for the most part. When it tried to focus on one, the other two would come at its back. Mouse did you rather proud.”

The big dog wagged his tail cheerily.

“Paint?” I asked.

“Oh, the thing threw a five-gallon bucket of paint at her, either trying to kill her with it or so it could try to see her through the veil. Worked for about five seconds, too, but then she fixed it and was gone again. She did fairly well for someone so limited in offense,” Thomas said. “Let me see if I can salvage anything from my trunk. Excuse me.”

I just sat down on the street in front of the car, and Mouse came up to sit with me, offering a furry flank for support. The Blue Beetle was dead. I was too tired to cry much.

“I called a cab,” Molly said, reappearing. “It will meet us two blocks down. Get him and I’ll veil us until it arrives.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said, and picked me up again.

I don’t remember being awake for the cab ride.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Thomas supported most of my weight as my injured leg began to buckle, and settled me in one of the chairs in the living room.

“We can’t be here long,” he said. “Those two Reds know he’s injured and exhausted. They’ll be back, looking for an opening or trying to pick one of us off when we’re vulnerable.”

“Right, right,” Molly said. “How is he?”

He crouched down in front of me and peered at me. His irises looked like polished chrome. “Still punchy.”

“Shock?”

“Maybe. He’s in a lot of pain.”

I was? Oh. I was. That might explain the way I wasn’t talking, I guessed.

“God,” Molly said, her voice shaking. “I’ll get some of his things.”

“This isn’t right,” Thomas said. “Get Bob.”

Molly sounded confused. “Get what?”

His expression flickered with surprise and then went neutral again. “Sorry. Lips disconnected from my brain. Get the Swords.”

“They aren’t here,” Molly said, moving around. Her voice came from my bedroom. “He moved them. Hid them, along with his ghost dust and a bunch of other illegal things.”

Thomas frowned at that and then nodded. “Okay. It’ll have to do. Where do we take him?”

Molly appeared in my field of vision and knelt down to peer at me. She took one of my hands in hers. “Wherever is good, I guess.”

Thomas took a slow breath. His silver eyes grew even brighter. It was creepy as hell and fascinating. “I was hoping you knew a good spot. I sure as hell can’t take him to my place.”

Molly’s voice sharpened. “I don’t even have a place,” she said. “I still live at my parents’ house.”

“Less whining,” Thomas said, his voice cool. “More telling me a place to take him where he won’t be killed.”

“I am—” Molly began. Then she closed her eyes for a second, and moderated her tone. “I am sorry. I’m just . . .” She glanced up at Thomas. “I’m just scared.”

“I know,” Thomas said through clenched teeth.

“Um,” Molly said. She swallowed. “Why do your eyes do that?”

There was a lengthy pause before Thomas answered. “They aren’t my eyes, Miss Carpenter. They’re my demon’s eyes. The better to see you with.”

“Demon . . .” Molly said. She was staring. “You’re hungry. Like, the vampire way.”

“After a fight like that?” Thomas said. “I’m barely sane.”

Both of them should have known better. Every time a wizard looks another person in the eyes, he runs the risk of triggering a deeper seeing, a voyeuristic peep through the windows of someone else’s soul. You get a snapshot of the true nature of that person, and they get a peek back at you.

It was only the second time I’d ever seen a soulgaze happen to someone else. There was an instant where both of them locked their eyes on each other’s. Molly’s eyes widened suddenly, like a frightened doe’s, and she jerked in a sharp breath. She stared at him with her chin twisting to one side, as if she were trying—and failing—to look away.

Thomas went unnaturally still, and though his eyes also widened, it reminded me more of a cat crouching down in anticipation, just before pouncing on its prey.

Molly’s back arched slightly and a soft moan escaped her. Her eyes filled with tears.

“God,” she said. “God. No. No, you’re beautiful. God, you hurt so much, need so much. . . . Let me help you. . . .” She fumbled for his hand.

Thomas never moved as her fingers touched his. Not a muscle. His eyes closed very slowly.

“Miss Carpenter,” he whispered. “Do not touch me. Please.”

“No, it’s all right,” Molly said. “It’s all right. I’m here.”

Thomas’s hand moved too quickly to be seen. He caught her wrist in his pale fingers, and she let out a short gasp. He opened his eyes and focused on hers, and Molly began to breathe harder. The tips of her breasts showed against her shirt and her mouth opened with another soft moan.

I think I made a quiet sound of protest. Neither of them heard it.

He leaned closer, the motion feline and serpentine at the same time. Molly began trembling. She licked her lips and began to slowly lean forward, toward him. Their lips met, and her body quivered, tensed, and then went rigid. A breathless sound escaped her as her eyes rolled back in her head, and Thomas was suddenly pressed against her. Molly’s hips rocked against his. Her hands came up and began clawing at his shirt, tearing the buttons from the silk so that her palms could flatten against his naked chest.

Mouse hit Thomas like a wrecking ball.

The big dog’s charge tore my brother away from my apprentice and slammed him into the brick of the fireplace. Thomas let out a sudden snarl of pure, surprised rage, but Mouse had him by the throat before he could recover.

The big dog’s jaws didn’t snap closed—but the tips of his teeth sank into flesh, and he held Thomas there, a growl bubbling from his chest. My brother’s hand flailed, reaching for the poker that hung beside the fireplace. Mouse took note of it and gave Thomas a warning shake, his teeth sinking a tiny bit deeper. My brother didn’t quit reaching for the weapon, and I saw the tension gathering in the big dog’s body.

I came rushing back into myself all at once and said, weakly, “Thomas.”

He froze. Mouse cocked an ear toward me.

“Thomas,” I croaked. “Don’t. He’s protecting the girl.”

Thomas let out a gasping, pained sound. Then I saw him grimace and force himself to relax, to surrender. His body slowly eased away from its fighting tension, and he held up both hands palms out, and lifted his chin a little higher.

“Okay,” he rasped. “Okay. It’s okay now.”

“Show me your eyes,” I said.

He did. They were a shade of pale, pale grey, with only flecks of reflective hunger dancing through them.

I grunted. “Mouse.”

Mouse backed off slowly, gradually easing the pressure of his jaws, gently taking his teeth out of Thomas’s throat. He took a pair of steps back and then sat down, head lowered to a fighting crouch that kept his own throat covered. He kept facing Thomas, made no sound, and didn’t move. It looked odd and eerie on the big dog.

“Can’t stay here,” Thomas said. The bite wounds in his throat looked swollen, angry. Their edges were slightly blackened, as if the dog’s teeth had been red- hot. “Not with her like that.” He closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean to. Sorry.”

I looked at Molly, who was curled into a fetal position and shaking, still breathing hard.

“Get out,” I said.

“How will you—”

“Thomas,” I said, and my voice was slightly stronger, hot with anger. “You could have hurt Molly. You could have killed her. My only defense is down here babysitting you instead of standing guard. Get out. You’re no good to me like this.”

Mouse let out another warning growl.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said again. “I’m sorry.”

Then he eased around Mouse and departed, his feet making little sound as he went up the stairs.

I sat there for a moment, hurting in practically every sense. My entire body tingled with unpleasant pinpricks, as though it had gone to sleep and was only now feeling the return of circulation. The soulfire. I must have pushed too much of it through me. Terror- adrenaline must have kept me rolling for a little while, but after that, I’d collapsed into pure passivity.

Terror on behalf of my brother and Molly had given me back my voice, my will, but it might not last. It hurt to sit upright. It hurt to breathe. Moving anything hurt, and not moving anything hurt.

So, I supposed, I might as well be moving.

I tried to get up, but my left leg wasn’t having any of it, and I was lucky not to end up on the floor. Without being told, Mouse got up and hurried into my room. I heard some heavy thumping as he rustled around under my bed, which had required him to lift it onto his massive shoulders. He came out a moment later, carrying one of my crutches, left over from injuries past, in his teeth.

“Who’s a good dog?” I said.

He wagged his tail at me and went back for the other one. Once I had them both, I was able to get up and gimp my way over to the kitchen. Tylenol 3 is good stuff, but it is also illegal stuff to have without a prescription if you aren’t Canadian, so it was currently buried in my godmother’s insane garden. I took a big dose of Tylenol the original, since I didn’t have my Tylenol 3 or its lesser- known, short-lived cousin, Tylenol Two: The Pain Strikes Back.

I realized that I was telling Mouse all of this out loud as I thought it, which had the potential to become awkward if it should become a habit. Once that was done, and I’d drunk a third glass of water, I moved over to Molly and checked her pulse. It was steady. Her breathing had slowed. Her eyes were slightly open and unfocused.

I muttered under my breath. The damned girl was going to get herself killed. This was the second time she’d come very close to being fed upon by a vampire, though admittedly the first had been in a vicarious fashion. Still, it couldn’t be good for her to be hit with it again. And if Thomas had actually begun to feed on her, there was no telling what it might do to her.

“Molly,” I said. Then louder, “Molly!”

She drew in a sudden little breath and blinked up at me.

“You’re smearing paint all over my rug,” I said wearily.

She sat up, looking down at herself and at the green paint smeared all over her. She looked up at me again, dazed. “What just happened?”

“You soulgazed Thomas. You both lost perspective. He nearly ate you.” I poked her with a crutch. “Mouse saved you. Get up.”

“Right,” she said. “Right.” She stood up very slowly, wincing and rubbing at one wrist. “Um. Is . . . is Thomas all right?”

“Mouse nearly killed him,” I said. “He’s scared, ashamed, half out of his mind with hunger, and gone.” I thumped her leg lightly with my crutch. “What were you thinking?”

Molly shook her head. “If you’d seen . . . I mean, if you’d seen him. Seen how lonely he was. Felt how much pain he was in, how empty he feels, Harry . . .” She teared up again. “I’ve never felt anything so horrible in my life. Or seen anyone braver.”

“Apparently, you figured you’d help him out by letting him rip the life out of you.”

She faced me for a moment, then flushed and looked away. “He . . . It doesn’t get ripped out. It gets . . .” She blushed. “I think the only phrase that works is ‘licked away.’ Like licking the frosting off of a cake. Or . . . or the candy coating off of one of those lollipops.”

“Except that as soon as you find out how many licks it takes him to get to your creamy center, you’re dead,” I said. “Or insane. Which is somewhat chilling to consider, given the things you can do. So I repeat.” I thumped her leg with the tip of my crutch on each word. “What. Were. You. Thinking.”

“It won’t happen again,” she said, but I saw her shiver as she said it.

I grunted skeptically, staring down at her.

Molly wasn’t ready. Not for something like we were about to do. She had too much confidence and not nearly enough sound judgment.

It was frustrating. By the time I had been her age, I had finished my apprenticeship in private investigation and was opening my own business. And I had been living under the Doom of Damocles for the better part of a decade.

Of course, I had an experience advantage on Molly. I had made my first dark compact, with my old master Justin DuMorne, when I was ten or eleven, though I hadn’t known what I was getting into at the time. I’d made a second one with the Leanansidhe when I was sixteen. And I’d wound up under round-the-clock observation from the paranoid Warden Morgan.

It had been a brief lifetime for me, at that point, but absolutely chock-full of lessons in the school of hard knocks. I had made plenty of dumb decisions of my own by then, and somehow managed to survive them.

But I also hadn’t been dallying around in situations as hot as this one was. A troll under a bridge or an upset spirit or two was as bad as it got. It had prepared me for what I faced today.

Molly was facing it cold. She’d been burned once before, but it had taken me more than one attempt to learn that lesson.

She might not survive her next test.

She looked up at me and asked, “What?”

“We need to move,” I said. “I met the Eebs while you three were playing with the Ik’k’ . . . with the Ik’koo-koo-kachoo . . .” I scrunched up my nose, trying to remember the name of the creature, and couldn’t. “With the Ick,” I said, “and they were charming in an entirely amoral, murderous sort of way. Thomas was right: They’ll be after me, looking for an opening. We’re going.”

“Where?”

“St. Mary’s,” I said. “The Red Court can’t walk on holy ground, and Susan knows I’ve used it as a fallback position before. She and Martin can catch up to me there. And I’ve got to get some rest.”

She rose, nodding. “Okay. Okay, I’ll get you a change of clothes, all right?”

“Call a cab first,” I said. “And pack the Tylenol. And some of Mouse’s food.”

“Right. Okay.”

I leaned on my crutches and stayed standing while she bustled around the room. I didn’t want to risk sitting down again. The Tylenol had taken the worst edge off the pain, and my thoughts, though tired and sluggish, seemed to be firmly connected to my body again. I didn’t want to risk relaxing into lassitude.

“Say that five times fast,” I murmured, and tried. It was something to do that I couldn’t screw up too badly.

A while later, Mouse made a whuffing sound from the top of the stairs outside, and Molly plodded up them wearily. “Cab’s here, Harry,” she called.

I got myself moving. Stairs on crutches isn’t fun, but I’d done it before. I took my time, moving slowly and steadily.

“Look out!” she yelled.

A bottle smashed against the top interior wall of the stairwell, and its contents splashed all over the place, fire spreading over them as they did. Ye olde Molotov cocktail, still a formidable weapon even after a century of use. There’s more to one of those things than simple burning fuel. Fire that hot sucks the oxygen out of the air around it, especially when it has a nice, dank stairway to use as a chimney. And you needn’t get splattered by the spilling fuel to get burned. When a fire is hot enough, it’ll burn exposed flesh from inches or feet away, turning the atmosphere around it into an oven.

I was only on the second or third step up from the bottom, but I staggered back before anything could get roasted—been there, done that, not going back. I tried to fall onto my uninjured side, figuring that it deserved a chance to join in the fun, too. I landed more or less the way I wanted to, and it hurt like hell, but at least I didn’t faint. I screamed, though, a number of vitriolic curses, as fire roared above me, leaping from my little stairwell to the rest of the house, chewing into the old wood like a hungry, living thing.

“Harry!” Molly called from somewhere beyond the flames. “Harry!”

Mouse let out a heartsick-sounding bay, and I saw fire beginning to climb the sides of the house. The fire was starting from the outside. By the time it started setting off fire alarms, it would be too late to escape.

At this time of night, somewhere up above me, Mrs. Spunkelcrief was asleep and unaware of the danger. And on the second floor, my elderly neighbors, the Willoughbys, would be in similar straits, and all because they were unlucky enough to live in the same building as me.

I’d dropped one of my crutches up on the stairs and one end had caught on fire. There was no way I was pulling much in the way of magic out of my hat, not until I’d had food and some rest. Hell’s bells, for that matter I didn’t know if I could stand up on my own. But if I didn’t do something, three innocent people—plus myself—were going to die in a fire.

“Come on, Harry,” I said. “You aren’t half-crippled. You’re half-competent.”

The fire roared higher, and I didn’t believe myself for a second.

But I put my hands on the ground and began heaving myself upright. “Do or die, Dresden,” I told myself fiercely, and firmly ignored the fear pounding in my chest. “Do or die.”

The dying really did seem a lot more likely.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I looked up at my apartment’s ceiling, hobbling along on my crutch. I found the spot I thought would be the middle of Mrs. S’s living room and noted that one of my old sofas was directly beneath it.

Using the crutch as a lever, I slipped one end of it behind one of my big old bookcases and heaved. The bookcase shuddered and then fell in a great crash of paperback novels and hardwood shelves, smashing down onto my couch. I grunted in satisfaction and climbed up onto the fallen bookcase, using its back as a ramp. I crawled painfully up to the end of the ramp, lifted my right hand, and triggered one of the rings I wore there.

They were magical tools, created to retain a little bit of kinetic energy every time I moved my arm, and when they were operating at capacity they packed one hell of a lot of energy—and I had freshly charged them up on the punching bag. When I cut loose with the ring, invisible force struck my ceiling, blowing completely through it and through the floor of the room above, tearing at faded carpeting the color of dried mustard.

I adjusted my aim a little and blew the entire charge out of the ring on the next finger, and another one after that, each one blasting the opening wider, until it was big enough that I thought I ought to fit through it.

I hooked the padded end of my crutch over the broken end of a thick floor joist and used it to haul myself up to my good leg. Then I tossed the crutch up through the hole and reached up to pull myself through.

Mister let out a harsh, worried meow, and I froze in place. My cat was still in my apartment.

I looked wildly around the room for him, and found him crouching in his usual favorite spot atop the highest bookshelf. His hair stood on end and every muscle on him seemed tight and strained.

I’d already tossed the crutch through. If I went back for him, I might not be able to stand once I’d made it back to the ramp. I had no idea how I’d hold him while climbing up, assuming I could do it at all. Mister weighs the next-best thing to thirty pounds. That’s one hell of a handicap on a pull-up.

For that matter, if the fire spread as quickly as I thought it would, the extra time it took might mean that I wound up trapped with no exit. And there would be no one to help Mr. S and the Willoughbys.

I loved my cat. He was family.

But as I stared at him I knew that I couldn’t help him.

“Unless you use your flipping brain, Harry,” I snapped at myself. “Duh. Never quit. Never quit.”

The sunken windows around my apartment were too small to be a means of escape for me, but Mister could clear them with ease. I took aim, used a single charge from my ring, and shattered the sunken window closest to the cat. Mister took the hint at once, and prowled down the tops of two bookcases. It was a five- foot leap from the top of the shelf to the window well, but Mister made it look casual. I felt myself grinning fiercely as he vanished through the broken window and into the cool air of the October night.

Stars and stones, at least I’d accomplished one positive thing that day.

I turned, reached up into the opening with my arms straight over my head, and hopped as hard as I could with one leg. It wasn’t much of a leap, but it was enough to let me get my arms through and my elbows wedged against either side of the opening. My ribs were on fire as I kicked and wriggled my way up through the hole and hauled myself into Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s living room.

It had last been decorated in the seventies, judging by the mustard yellow carpet and the olive green wallpaper, and it was full of furniture and knickknacks. I dragged myself all the way through the hole, knocking over a little display stand of collector’s plates as I did. The room was dimly lit by the growing flames outside. I grabbed my crutch, climbed to my feet through screaming pain, and hobbled farther into the apartment.

I found Mrs. S in the apartment’s one bedroom. She was sleeping mostly sitting up, propped on a pile of pillows. Her old television was on, sans volume, with subtitles appearing at the bottom of the screen. I gimped over to her and shook her gently.

She woke up with a start and slugged me with one tiny fist. I fell backward onto my ass, more out of pure surprise than anything else, and grimaced in pain—from the fall, not the punch. I shook it off and looked up again, to find the little old lady holding a little revolver, probably a .38. In her hands, it looked magnum-sized. She held it like she knew what she was doing, too, in two hands, peering down at me through the gun’s sights.

“Mr. Dresden!” she said, her voice squeaky. “How dare you!”

“Fire!” I said. “Mrs. S, there’s a fire! A fire!”

“Well, I won’t fire if you just sit still,” she said in a querulous tone. She took her left hand off the gun and reached for her phone. “I’m calling the police. You hold real still or I gotta shoot you. No bluff. This here is a grandfathered gun. Legal and proper.”

I tried to point toward the bedroom door without moving my body, indicating it with my fingertips and tilts of my head.

“Are you on drugs, boy?” she said, punching numbers on the phone without looking. “You are acting like a crazy junkie. Coming into an old woman’s . . .” She glanced past me, where there was some fairly bright light flickering wildly in the hallway outside the bedroom.

I kept wiggling my fingers and nodding toward it, desperately.

Mrs. S’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “Fire!” she said abruptly. “There’s a fire right there!”

I nodded frantically.

She lowered the gun and started kicking her way clear of covers and pillows. She wore flannel pajamas, but grabbed at a blue robe in any case and hurried toward the door. “Come on, boy! There’s a fire!”

I struggled desperately to my feet and started hobbling out. She turned to look at me, apparently surprised that she was moving faster than I was. You could hear the fire now, and smoke had begun to thicken the air.

I pointed up at the ceiling and shouted, “The Willoughbys! Willoughbys!”

She looked up. “Lord God almighty!” She turned and hurried down the hall, coming within ten feet of a wall that was already becoming a sheet of flame. She grabbed at something, cursed, then pulled her robe down over her hand and picked up something, using the material as an oven mitt. She hurried over to me with a ring of keys. “Come on! The front door’s already going up! Out the back!”

We both hurried out the back door of the house and into its minuscule little yard, and I saw at once that the entire front side of the house was aflame.

The stairs up to the Willoughbys’ place were already on fire.

I turned to her and shouted, “Ladder! Where’s the ladder? I need to use the ladder!”

“No!” she shouted back. “You need to use the ladder!”

Good grief.

“Okay!” I shouted back, and gave her a thumbs-up.

She hustled back to the little storage shed in the backyard. She picked a key and unlocked it. I swung the door open and seized the metal extending ladder I used to put up and take down Christmas lights every year. I ditched my crutch and used the ladder itself to take some of the weight. I went as fast as I could, but it seemed to take forever to position the ladder under the Willoughbys’ bedroom windows.

Mrs. Spunkelcrief handed me a loose brick from a little flower planter’s wall and said, “Here. I can’t climb this thing. My hip.”

I took the brick and dropped it in my duster pocket. Then I started humping myself up the ladder, taking a grip with both hands, then hopping up with a painful little jump. Repeat, each time growing more painful, more difficult. I clenched my teeth over the screams.

And then there was a window in front of me.

I got the brick out of my pocket, hauled off, and shattered the window.

Black smoke bellowed out, catching me on the inhale. I started coughing viciously, my voice strangled as I tried to shout, “Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby! Fire! You’ve got to get out! Fire! Come to the window and down the ladder!”

I heard two people coughing and choking. They were trying to say, “Help!”

Something, maybe the little propane tank on Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s grill, exploded with a noise like a dinosaur-sized watermelon hitting the ground. The concussion knocked Mrs. S down—and kicked the bottom of the ladder out from under me.

I fell. It was a horrible, helpless feeling, my body twisting uselessly as I tried to land well—but I’d had no warning at all, and it was a futile attempt. The small of my back hit the brick planter, and I achieved a new personal best for pain.

“Oh, God in Heaven,” Mrs. Spunkelcrief said. She knelt beside me. “Harry?”

Somewhere, sirens had begun to wail. They wouldn’t get there in time for the Willoughbys.

“Trapped,” I choked out, as soon as I was able to breathe again. “They’re up there, calling for help.”

The fire roared louder and grew brighter.

Mrs. S stared up at the window. She grabbed the ladder and wrestled it all the way back up into position, though the effort left her panting. Then she tried to put a foot up on the first step. She grasped the ladder, began to shift her weight—and groaned as her leg buckled and she fell to the ground.

She screamed, agony in her quavering voice. “Oh, God in Heaven, help us!”

A young black man in a dark, knee-length coat hurdled the hedges at the back of the yard and bounded onto the ladder. He was built like a professional lineman, moved more quickly than a linebacker, and started up the ladder like it was a broad staircase. The planet’s only Knight of the Cross flashed me a quick grin on the way up. “Dresden!”

“Sanya!” I howled. “Two! There’re two of them in the bedroom!”

“Da, two!” he replied, his deep voice booming. The curving saber blade of Esperacchius rode at his hip and he managed it with thoughtless, instinctive skill as he went through the window. He was back a moment later, with Mrs. Willoughby draped over one shoulder, while he supported most of Mr. Willoughby’s staggering body with the other.

Sanya went first, the old woman hanging limply over his shoulder, so that he could help Mr. Willoughby creep out the window and onto the ladder. They came down slowly and carefully, and as Sanya carefully laid the old woman out onto the grass, the first of the emergency response crews arrived.

“God in Heaven,” Mr. S said, weeping openly as she put her hand on Sanya’s arm. “He must have sent you to us, son.”

Sanya smiled at her as he helped Mr. Willoughby lower himself to the ground. Then he turned to my landlady and said, his Russian accent less heavy than the last time I had seen him, “It was probably just a coincidence, ma’am.”

“I don’t believe in those,” said Mrs. Spunkelcrief. “Bless you, son,” she said, and hugged him hard. Her arms couldn’t have gotten around half of him, but Sanya returned the hug gently for a moment.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you should direct the medical technicians to come back here.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, releasing him. “But now I have to go get those ambulance boys over here.” She paused and gave me a smile. “And thank you, Harry. Such a good boy.” Then she hurried away.

Mouse came racing around the side of the house where Mrs. S had just gone, and rushed to stand over me, lapping at my face. Molly wasn’t far behind. She let out a little cry and threw her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, God, Harry!” She shouldered Mouse aside and squeezed tight for several seconds. She looked up and said, “Sanya? What are you doing here?”

“Hey, hey,” I said. “Take it easy.”

Molly eased up on her hug. “Sorry.”

“Sanya,” I said, nodding to him. “Thanks for your help.”

“Part of the job, da?” he replied, grinning. “Glad to help.”

“All the same,” I said, my voice rough, “thank you. If anything had happened to them . . .”

“Oh, Harry,” Molly said. She hugged me again.

“Easy, padawan, easy,” I said quietly. “Think you should be careful.”

She drew back with a frown. “Why?”

I took a slow breath and said, very quietly, “I can’t feel my legs.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

It didn’t take me long to talk Sanya and Molly out of taking me to the hospital. The Eebs, as it turned out, had shown up, pitched their firebomb from a moving car, and kept going, a modus operandi that was consistent with the earlier attempt on my life, except this time they’d been identified. Molly’s description of the thrower was a dead ringer for Esteban.

I had to admit, the vampire couple had a very practical long- term approach to violence—striking at weakness and harassing the victim while exposing themselves to minimal risk. If I’d been a couple of steps higher up when that Molotov hit, I’d be dead, or covered in third-degree burns. Individually, their attempts might not enjoy a high success rate—but they needed to get it right only once.

It would be consistent with that practical, cold- blooded style to keep an eye on the hospitals in order to come finish me off—during surgery, for example, or while I was still in recovery afterward. Sanya, though, had EMT training of some kind. He calmly stole a backboard out of an open ambulance while its techs were seeing to the Willoughbys, and they loaded me onto it in a procedure that Sanya said would protect my spine. It seemed kind of “too little, too late” to me, but I was too tired to rib him over it.

I couldn’t feel anything below the waist, but that apparently didn’t mean that the rest of me got to stop hurting. I felt them carrying the board out, and when I opened my eyes it was only to see nearly a third of the building give way and crash down into the basement—into my apartment. The building was obviously a lost cause. The firemen were focusing on containing the blaze and preventing it from spreading to the nearby homes.

They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he’d reserved but couldn’t have. As it drove away during the confusion and before the cops could lock everything down, I got to watch my home burn down through the back window of the van.

Even after we were several blocks away, I could see the smoke rising up in a black column. I wondered how much of that smoke was made of my books. My secondhand guitar. My clothes. My comfy old furniture. My bed. My blankets. My Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The equipment in my lab that I’d worked so hard to attain or create—the efforts of years of patient effort, endless hours of concentration and spellcraft.

Gone.

Fire is as destructive spiritually as it is materially, a purifying force that can devour and scatter magical energy. In a fire that large everything I’d ever built, including purely magical constructs, would be destroyed.

Dammit.

Dammit, but I hated vampires.

I’d had one hell of a day, all in all, but practically the only thing I had left to me was my pride. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying. So I just kept quiet in the back of the van, while Mouse lay very close to me.

At some point, sorrow became sleep.

I woke up in the utility room at St. Mary of the Angels, where Father Forthill kept several spare folding cots and the bedding to go with them. I’d visited several times in the past. St. Mary’s was a surprisingly stout bastion against supernatural villains of nearly any stripe. The ground beneath it was consecrated, as was every wall, door, floor, and window, blessed by prayers and stately rituals, Masses, and communions over and over through the decades, until that gentle, positive energy had permeated the ground and the very stone from which the church was built.

I felt safer, but only a little. Vampires might not be able to set foot on the holy ground, but they knew that, and someone like the Eebs would certainly take that into account. Hired human killers could be just as dangerous as vampires, if not more so, and the protective aura around the building couldn’t make them blink an eye.

And, I supposed, they could always just set it on fire and burn it down around me if they really, really wanted to get me. I tried to imagine myself a century from now, still dodging vampires and getting my home burned to the ground on an irregular basis.

No way in hell was I gonna accept that. I’d have to deal with the Eeb problem.

And then I remembered my legs. I reached a hand down to touch my thigh.

I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. It felt like touching the limb of someone else entirely. I tried to move my legs and nothing happened. Maybe I’d been too ambitious. I pulled at my blanket until I could see my toes. I tried wiggling them. I failed.

I could feel the backboard beneath me, and the band around my head that kept me from moving it to look around. I gave up on my legs with a sharp surge of frustration and lifted my eyes to the ceiling.

There was a piece of paper taped to it, directly over my head. Molly’s handwriting in black marker was scrawled in large letters across it: Harry. Don’t try to get up, or move your neck or back. We’re checking in on you several times an hour. Someone will be there soon.

There was a candle burning nearby, on a folding table. It was the room’s only light. I couldn’t tell how long it had been burning, but it looked like a fairly long-lived candle, and it was nearly gone. I breathed in and out steadily, through my nose, and caught some half- remembered scents. Perfume of some kind, maybe? Or maybe just the scent of new leather, still barely tinged with the harsh aroma of tanning compounds and the gummy scent of dye. Plus I could smell the dusty old room. The church had only recently begun to use its heating system for the winter. I could smell the warm scent of singed dust that always emerges from the vents the first time anyone turns on a heater after it’s been unneeded for a while.

I was glad that I wasn’t cold. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, otherwise.

The candle guttered out and left me alone in the dark.

In my memories, a bloody old caricature of a man, his skin more liver spots than not, leered at me in mad satisfaction and whispered, “Die alone.”

I shivered and shook the image away. Cassius was thoroughly dead. I knew that. An outcast member of the society of demented freaks known as the Knights of the Blackened Denarius, Cassius had thrown in with an insane necromancer in order to get a chance to even a score with me. He’d come within a hairbreadth of dissecting me. I was able to take him down in the end—and he’d uttered a death curse as he croaked. Such a curse, a spell uttered in the last instants of life, could have hideous effects upon its victim. His curse, for me to die alone, was pretty vague as such things went. It might not even have had enough power or focus to take.

Sure. Maybe it hadn’t.

“Hello?” I said to the darkness. “Is anyone there?”

There wasn’t.

Die alone.

“Stop that,” I snapped out loud. “Control yourself, Dresden.”

That sounded like good advice. So I started taking deep, steady, controlled breaths and tried to focus my thoughts. Focus. Forethought. Reason. Sound judgment. That was what was going to get me through this.

Fact one: My daughter was still in danger.

Fact two: I was hurt. Maybe badly. Maybe forever. Even the efficient resilience of a wizard’s body had its limits, and a broken spine was quite likely beyond them.

Fact three: Susan and Martin could not get the girl out on their own.

Fact four: There wasn’t a lot of help forthcoming. Maybe, with Sanya along, the suicidal mission could be considered only mostly suicidal. After all, the Knights of the Cross were a big deal. Three of them were, apparently, enough Knights to protect the whole world. For the past few years, the dark-skinned Russian had been covering all three positions, and apparently doing it well. Which made a vague amount of sense, I suppose—Sanya was the wielder of Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope. We needed hope right now. At least, I did.

Fact five: I had missed the rendezvous with Ebenezar many hours ago. I’d never intended to go, and there was nothing I could do about the fact that he was going to be upset—but my absence had probably cost me the support of the Grey Council, such as it was.

Fact six: Sanya, Susan, Martin, and whatever other scanty help I could drum up couldn’t get to Chichén Itzá without me—and I sure as hell couldn’t get there in the shape I was in. According to the stored memories in my mother’s jewel, the Way required a swim.

Fact seven: I was going to Show Up for my daughter, and to hell with what it would cost.

And there were only so many options open to me.

I took the least terrifying one. I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My now- ruined improved summoning circle was in the floor. Candles were lit at five equidistant points around it. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and burned wax. It took a few minutes to picture it all, in perfect detail, and to hold it in my mind, as rock solid to my imagination as the actual room the construct was replacing.

That took considerable energy and discipline.

Magic doesn’t require props to function. That’s a conceit that has been widely propitiated by the wizarding community over the centuries. It helped prove to frightened villagers, inquisitions, and whoever else might be worried that a person was clearly not a wizard. Otherwise he’d have all kinds of wizardly implements necessary to his craft.

Magic doesn’t require the props, but magic is wrought by people, and people need them. Each prop has a symbolic as well as a practical reason for being a part of any spell. Simple stuff, lighting candles and the like, could be accomplished neatly in the mind, eventually becoming a task as easy and thoughtless as tying one’s shoe.

Once you got into the complicated stuff, though, you had an enormous number of things to keep track of in your mind, envisioning flows of energy, their manipulation, and so on. If you have the real props, they serve as a sort of mnemonic device: You attach a certain image to the prop, in your head, and every time you see or touch that prop, the image is packaged along with it. Simple.

Except that I didn’t have any props.

I was winging the whole thing. Pure imagination. Pure concentration.

Pure arrogance, really. But I was at a lower rock bottom than normal.

In my thoughts I lit the candles, walking slowly around the circle in a clockwise fashion—or deosil, as the fairy tales, Celtic songs, and certain strains of Wicca refer to it—gradually powering up the energy it required to operate. I realized that I had forgotten to make the floor out of anything specific, in my head, and the notional floor space, from horizon to horizon, suddenly became the linoleum from my first ratty Chicago apartment. Hideous stuff, green lines on a grey background, but simple to envision.

I imagined performing the spell without ever moving my body, envisioned every last detail, everything from the way the floor dug unpleasantly into my knees as I began to the slight clumsiness in the fingers of my left hand, which always seemed to be a little twitchy whenever I got nervous.

I closed the circle. I gathered the power. And then, when all was prepared, when I held absolutely everything in my imagination so vividly that it seemed more real than the room around me, I slid Power into my voice and called quietly, “Uriel, come forth.”

For a second, I couldn’t tell whether the soft white light had appeared only in my head or if it was actually in the room. Then I realized that it stabbed at my eyes painfully. It was real.

I kept the spell going in my head, easier now that it was a tableau. I just had to keep my concentration focused.

I squinted into the light and saw a tall young man there. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and a farmer’s duck coat. His blond hair fell over his eyes, but they were blue and bright and guileless as he looked around the room. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets and nodded slowly. “I was wondering when I’d get this call.”

“You know what’s happening, then?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” he answered, with perhaps the slightest bit of impatience in his tone. He turned his gaze to me and frowned abruptly. He leaned forward slightly, peering at me.

I carefully fortified and maintained the image of the restraining magical circle in my imagination. When an entity was called forth, the circle was the only thing protecting the caller from its wrath.

“Please, Dresden,” the archangel Uriel said. “It’s a very nice circle, but you can’t honestly think that it’s any kind of obstacle to me.”

“I like to play it safe,” I said.

Uriel let out a most unangelic snort. Then he nodded his head and said, “Ah, I see.”

“See what?”

He paused and said, “Why you called me, of course. Your back.”

I grunted. It was more effort than usual. “How bad is it?”

“Broken,” he said. “It’s possible that, as a wizard, your body might be able to knit the ends back together over forty or fifty years. But there’s no way to be sure.”

“I need it to be better,” I said. “Now.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have climbed that ladder in your condition.”

I let out a snarl and tried to turn toward him. I just sort of flopped a little. My body never left the surface of the backboard.

“Don’t,” Uriel said calmly. “It isn’t worth getting upset over.”

“Not upset?!” I demanded. “My little girl is going to die!”

“You made your choices,” Uriel told me. “One of them led you here.” He spread his hands. “That’s a fair ball, son. Nothing to do now but play it out.”

“But you could fix me if you wanted to.”

“My wishes have nothing to do with it,” he said calmly. “I could heal you if I were meant to do so. Free will must take precedence if it is to have meaning.”

“You’re talking philosophy,” I said. “I’m telling you that a child is going to die.”

Uriel’s expression darkened for a moment. “And I am telling you that I am very limited in terms of what I can do to help you,” he said. “Limited, in fact, to what I have already done.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Soulfire. Just about killed myself with that one. Thanks.”

“No one is making you use it, Dresden. It’s your choice.”

“I played ball with you when you needed help,” I said. “And this is how you repay me?”

Uriel rolled his eyes. “You tried to send me a bill.”

“You want to set a price, feel free,” I said. “I’ll pay it. Whatever it takes.”

The archangel watched me, his eyes calm and knowing and sad. “I know you will,” he said quietly.

“Dammit,” I said, my voice breaking. Tears started from my eyes. The colors and lines in my imagination began to blur. “Please.”

Uriel seemed to shiver at the sound of the word. He turned his face from me, clearly uncomfortable. He was silent.

“Please,” I said again. “You know who I am. You know I’d rather have my nails torn out than beg. And I am begging you. I am not strong enough to do this on my own.”

Uriel listened, never quite looking at me, and then shook his head slowly. “I have already done what I can.”

“But you’ve done nothing,” I said.

“From your point of view, I suppose that’s true.” He stroked his chin with a thumb, frowning in thought. “Though . . . I suppose it isn’t too much of an imbalance for you to know . . .”

My eyes were starting to cramp from looking to one side so fiercely without being able to move my head. I bit my lip and waited.

Uriel took a deep breath and looked as if he were considering his words with care. “Your daughter, Maggie, is alive and well. For now.”

My heart skipped a beat.

My daughter.

He’d called her my daughter.

“I know you wanted Susan to be the woman you loved and remembered. Wanted to be able to trust her. But even if you weren’t admitting it to yourself, you had to wonder, on some level. I don’t blame you for it,” he said. “Especially after those tracking spells failed. It’s natural. But yes.” He met my eyes. “Flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. Your daughter.”

“Why tell me that?” I asked him.

“Because I have done all that I can,” he said. “From here, it is up to you. You are Maggie’s only hope.” He started to turn away, then paused and said, “Consider Vadderung’s words carefully.”

I blinked. “You know Od . . . Vadderung?”

“Of course. We’re in similar fields of work, after all.”

I exhaled wearily, and stopped even trying to hold the spell. “I don’t understand.”

Uriel nodded. “That’s the difficult part of being mortal. Of having choice. Much is hidden from you.” He sighed. “Love your child, Dresden. Everything else flows from there. A wise man said that,” Uriel said. “Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”

And as quickly as that, he was gone.

I lay in the darkness, shivering with weariness and the effort of the magic. I pictured Maggie in my head, in her little-girl dress with ribbons in her hair, like the picture.

“For you, little girl. Dad’s coming.”

It took me less than half a minute to restore the spell, and not much longer than that to build up the next wave of energy I would need. Until the last second, I wondered if I could actually go through with it. Then I saw a horrible image of Maggie in her dress being snatched up by a Red Court vampire, and my whole outraged being seemed to fuse into a singularity, a single white-hot pinpoint of raw, unshakable will.

“Mab!” I called, my voice steady. “Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, Queen of the Winter Court! Mab, I bid you come forth!”

Chapter Thirty

The third repetition of her name hung ringing in the air, and deafening silence came after as I awaited the response.

When you trap something dangerous, there are certain fundamental precautions necessary to success. You’ve got to have good bait, something to draw your target in. You’ve got to have a good trap, something that works and works fast. And, once the target is in the trap, you’ve got to have a net or a cage strong enough to hold it.

Get any of those three elements wrong, and you probably won’t succeed. Get two of them wrong, and you might be looking at a result far more disastrous than mere failure.

I went into this one knowing damned well that all I had was bait. Mab, for her own reasons, had wanted to suborn me into her service for years. I knew that calling her by her name and title would be enough to attract her interest. Though the mechanism of my improved summoning circle would have been a fine trap—if it still existed, I mean—the cage of my will had always been the weakest point in any such endeavor.

Bottom line, I could get the tiger to show up. Once it was there, all I had was a really good chalk drawing of a pit on the sidewalk and “Nice kitty.”

I wasn’t going into it blind and ignorant, though. I was desperate, but not stupid. I figured I had the advantage of position. Mab couldn’t kill a mortal. She could only make him desperately wish he was dead, instead of enduring her attentions. I didn’t have a lot to lose. She couldn’t make me any more useless to my daughter than I was already.

I waited, in perfect darkness, for the mistress of every wicked fairy in every dark tale humanity had ever whispered in the night to put in an appearance.

Mab didn’t disappoint me.

Surprise me, yes. But she didn’t disappoint.

Stars began to appear in front of my eyes.

I figured that was probably a really bad thing, for a moment. But they didn’t spin around in lazy, dizzy motion like the kind of stars that mean your brain is smothering. They instead burned steady and cold and pure above me, five stars like jewels on the throat of Lady Night.

Seconds later, a cold wind touched my face, and I became conscious of a hard smoothness beneath me. I laid my hands carefully flat, but I didn’t feel the cot and the backboard under me. Instead, my fingers touched only cold, even stone, a planar surface that seemed level beneath my entire body. I wriggled my foot and confirmed that there was stone beneath it there, too.

I stopped and realized that I could feel my foot. I could move it.

My whole body was there. And it was naked. I wavered between yelping at the cold suddenly being visited upon my ass, and yelling in joy that I could feel it at all. I saw land to one side and scrambled to get off the cold slab beneath me, crouching down and hanging on to the edge of the slab for balance.

This wasn’t reality, then. This was a dream, or a vision, or something that was otherwise in between the mortal world and the spiritual realm. That made sense. My physical body was still back in St. Mary’s, lying still and breathing deeply, but my mind and my spirit were here.

Wherever “here” was.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw gentle mist and fog hanging in the air. Boiling clouds let a flash of moonlight in, and it played like a spotlight over the hilltop around me, and upon the ancient table of stone beside me. The moon’s touch made deeply carved runes all around the table’s edge dance with flickers of illumination, writing done in some language I did not know.

Then I understood. Mab had created this place for our meeting. It was known as the Valley of the Stone Table. It was a broad, bowl-shaped valley, I knew, though the mist hid most of it from me. In its exact center stood a mound maybe fifty feet across and twelve feet high at its center. Atop the mound stood the massive slab of stone, held up on four stumpy pillars. Other stones stood in a circle around it, some tumbled down, some broken, only one remaining in Stonehenge- like lintel. The stones all shed faint illumination in shades of blue and purple and deep, deep green. Cold colors.

Winter colors.

Yeah. It was after the equinox. So that tracked. The Table was in Winter’s domain. It was an ancient conduit of power, transferred in the most primitive, atavistic fashion of all—in hot blood. There were grooves and whorls in the table’s surface, coated with ancient stains, and it squatted on the hill, patient and hungry and immovable, like a snapping turtle waiting for warm, vital creatures to wander too close.

The blood spilled upon this table would carry the power of its life with it, and would flow into the well of power in the control of the Winter Queen.

A movement across the table from me drew my eye. A shadow seemed to simply congeal from the mist, forming itself into a slender, feminine shape draped in a cloak and cowl. Glittering green candle flames flickered in what looked like two eyes within the cowl’s hood.

My throat went dry. It took me two tries to rasp, “Queen Mab?”

The form vanished. A low, feminine laugh drifted through the mist to my right. I turned to face it.

A furious cat squall erupted from the air six inches behind me and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I spun to find nothing there, and the woman’s laugh echoed around the top of the misty mound, this time more amused.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you,” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “You told me so, didn’t you?”

Whispering voices hissed among the stones around me, none of them intelligible. I saw another flicker of mocking green eyes.

“Th-this is a limited-time offer,” I said, trying to make my voice sound steady. “It’s been forced by circumstance. If you don’t get off your royal ass and jump on it, I’m walking.”

“I warned you,” said a calm voice behind me. “Never let her bring you here, my godchild.”

I carefully kept myself from letting out a shriek. It would have been unwizardly. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned to find the Leanansidhe standing a few feet away, covered in a cloak the color of the last seconds of twilight, the deep blue-purple fabric hiding her completely except for her pale face inside the hood. Her green cat eyes were wide and steady, her expression solemn.

“But I’m here,” I said quietly.

She nodded.

Another shadow appeared beside her, green eyes burning. Queen Mab, I presumed, and noted that she was actually a couple of inches shorter than my godmother. Of course, especially in a place like this, Mab could be as gargantuan or Lilliputian as she chose.

Probably-Mab stepped closer, still covered in shadows despite the fact that she was nearer to me than my godmother was. Her eyes grew brighter.

“So many scars,” said my godmother, and her voice had changed subtly, growing cold and precise. “Your scars are beautiful things. Within and without.” The shadowed figure stepped behind one of the fallen stones and emerged from behind another on the opposite side of the circle. “Yes,” said the cold voice coming from the Leanansidhe’s lips. “I can work with this.”

I shivered. Because it was really cold and I was naked, I’m sure. I looked from the dark figure to my godmother and back, and asked, “You’re still using a translator?”

“For your sake,” said the cold voice, as a shadowed figure stepped behind the next menhir and appeared atop another. Walking deosil, clockwise.

Mab was closing the circle around me.

“Wh-why for my sake?” I asked.

The cold voice laughed through the Leanansidhe’s lips. “This conversation would quickly grow tedious if you kept falling to your knees, screaming in agony and clawing at your bleeding ears, my wizard.”

“Yeah. But why?” I asked. “Why would your voice hurt me?”

“Because she is angry,” answered the Leanansidhe in her natural voice. “Because her voice is a part of her power, and her rage is too great to be contained.”

I swallowed. Mab had spoken a few words to me a couple of years back, and I’d reacted exactly as she described. I’d lost a few minutes of time during the episode her words had provoked as well. “Rage?” I asked. “About what?”

The shadowed figure let out a spitting hiss, another feline sound that made me flinch and cringe away from it as if from the lash of a whip. My godmother jerked sharply to one side. She straightened only slowly, and as she did I saw that a long, fine cut had been drawn across one of her cheeks. Blood welled up and dripped down slowly.

My godmother bowed her head to Mab, and the cold voice came from her mouth again. “It is not for my handmaiden to judge or question me, nor to speak for me upon her own account.”

Lea bowed her head to Mab again, and not a flicker of either anger or chagrin showed in her features. Again, Mab moved from one stone to another without crossing the space in between. It should have been getting easier to deal with due to repetition. It wasn’t. Each time she did it I realized that she could just as easily have reappeared behind me with foul intentions, and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

“There are ancient proprieties to be honored,” Mab’s voice said, her tone measured and somehow formal. “There are words which must be said. Rites which must be observed. Speak your desire, mortal man.”

Now I really was shivering with the cold. I folded my arms and hunched in on myself. It didn’t help. “Power,” I said.

The shadowed figure froze in place and turned to stare at me. The burning green eyes tilted slightly, as if Mab had cocked her head to one side. “Tell me why.”

I fought to keep my teeth from chattering. “My body is badly injured, but I must do battle with the Red Court.”

“This you have done many a time.”

“This time I’m fighting all of them,” I said. “The Red King and his inner circle.”

The fire of her eyes intensified. “Tell me why.”

I swallowed and said, “They’ve taken my daughter.”

The shadowed figure shuddered, and her disembodied voice breathed a sigh of pleasure. “Ahhh. Yes. Not for your own life. But for your child’s. For love.”

I nodded jerkily.

“So many terrible things are done for love,” Mab’s voice said. “For love will men mutilate themselves and murder rivals. For love will even a peaceful man go to war. For love, man will destroy himself, and that right willingly.” She began walking in a physical circle now, though her movements were so touched with unexpected motions and alien grace that it almost seemed that there must be something else beneath the shrouding cloak. “You know my price, mortal. Speak it.”

“You want me to become the Winter Knight,” I whispered.

A laugh, both merry and cold, bubbled beneath her response. “Yes.”

“I will,” I said. “With a condition.”

“Speak it.”

“That before my service begins, you restore my body to health. That you grant me time enough to rescue my daughter and take her to safety, and strength and knowledge enough to succeed. And you give me your word that you will never command me to lift my hand against those I love.”

The figure kept its eerie pace as she circled me again, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees. “You ask me to risk my Knight in a place of dire peril, to no gain for my land and people. Why should I do this?”

I looked at her steadily for a moment. Then I shrugged. “If you don’t want to do business, I’ll go elsewhere. I could still call Lasciel’s coin to me in a heartbeat—and Nicodemus and the Denarians would be more than happy to help me. I am also one of the only people alive who knows how to pull off Kemmler’s Darkhallow. So if Nicky and the Nickelheads don’t want to play, I can damned well get the power for myself—and the next time I call your name, I won’t need to be nearly so polite.”

Mab let out a mirthless laugh through my godmother’s lips. “You are spoiled for choices, my wizard. What reason have you to select me over the others?”

I grimaced. “Please don’t take this as an insult. But you’re the least evil of my options.”

The cold voice told me nothing about her reaction. “Explain.”

“The Denarians would have me growing a goatee and gloating malevolently within a few years, if I didn’t break and turn into some kind of murderous tardbeast first. And I’d have to kill a lot of people outright, if I wanted to use the Darkhallow.” I swallowed. “But I’ll do it. If I have no other way to get my child out of their hands, I’ll do it.”

Silence reigned for an unbroken minute on the mound.

“Yes,” mused Mab’s voice. “You will, won’t you? And yes, you know that I do not kill indiscriminately, nor encourage my Knight to do so.” She paused and murmured, “But you have proven willing to destroy yourself in the past. You won your last confrontation with my handmaiden in just such a fashion, by partaking of the death angel. What prevents you from taking a similar action to cheat me of my prize?”

“My word,” I said quietly. “I know I can’t bluff you. I won’t suicide. I’m here to deal in good faith.”

Mab’s burning eyes stared at me for a long moment. Then she began to walk again, more slowly on this, her third traversing of the circle around me. “You must understand, wizard. Once you are my Knight, once this last quest of yours is complete, you are mine. You will destroy what I wish you to destroy. Kill whatsoever I wish you to kill. You will be mine, blood, bone, and breath. Do you understand this?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

She nodded slowly. Then she turned to stare at the Leanansidhe.

Lea bowed her head again, and snapped her fingers.

Six cloaked figures appeared out of the mists, small, misshapen things that might have been kobolds or gnomes or any of a half dozen other servitor races of the Sidhe. I couldn’t tell because the cloaks had rendered them faceless, without identity.

But I knew the man they were carrying strapped to a plank.

Like me, he was naked. He had been shorter than me, but more athletic, heavier on muscle. But that had been years ago. Now he was a wasted shell of a human being, a charcoal sketch that had been smudged by an uncaring hand. His eyes were missing. Gone, but neatly gone, as if removed surgically. There were tattoos covering his entire face, particularly his sunken eyelids, all of them simply a word in different languages and styles of lettering: traitor. His mouth was partly open, and his teeth had been inscribed with whorls and Celtic design, then stained with something dark and brown, turning his mouth into living scrimshaw.

His entire body, in fact, was adorned with either tattoos or artistic, ritually applied scars. He was held to the plank with seven lengths of slender silken cord, but his emaciated limbs looked like they would never have the strength to overcome even those frail bonds.

He was weeping, sobbing softly, the sound of it more like an animal in horrible pain than anything human.

“Jesus,” I said, and looked away from him.

“I am somewhat proud of this,” Mab’s cold voice said. “To be sure, the White Christ never suffered so long or so terribly as did this traitor. Three days on a tree. Hardly enough time for a prelude. When it came to visiting agony, the Romans were hobbyists.”

The servitors slid the plank up onto the stone table, positioning Slate in its center. Then they bowed toward Mab and retreated in measured silence. For a moment, the only sounds were those of a cold, gentle wind and Slate’s sobs.

“For a time, I was contented to torment him to the edge of sanity. Then I set out to see how far over the edge a mortal could go.” Her eyes glittered merrily in the shadows. “A pity that so little was left. And yet, he is the Winter Knight, young wizard. The vessel of my power amidst mortals, and consort to the Queens of Winter. He betrayed me. See where it has taken him.”

The thing that used to be Lloyd Slate made quiet, hopeless sounds.

I trembled, afraid.

The dark shape came closer, and a pale hand emerged from the folds of cloth. Something glittered coldly in the strange light and landed in the thick grass at my feet. I bent to take it up and found an ancient, ancient knife with a simple leaf-blade design, set into a wooden handle and wrapped with cord and leather. It was, I thought, made of bronze. Its double edge had a wickedly sharp shine to it, and its needle point looked hungry, somehow.

Energy surged through the little blade, power that was unfettered and wild, that mocked limits and scoffed at restraint. Not evil, as such—but hungry and filled with the desire to partake in its portion of the cycle of life and death. It thirsted for bloodshed.

“While Lloyd Slate lives and breathes, he is my Knight,” said Mab’s voice. “Take Medea’s bodkin, wizard. Take his life’s blood.”

I stood there holding the knife and looking at Lloyd Slate. The last time I’d heard him speak, he had begged me to kill him. I didn’t think he’d be capable of even that much now.

“If you would be my Knight, then this is the first death I desire of you,” Mab said, her voice almost gentle. She faced me across the Stone Table. “Send his power back to me. And I will render it unto thee.”

I stood in the cold wind, not moving.

What I did with the next moments would determine the course of the rest of my life.

“You know this man,” Mab continued, her voice still gentle. “You saw his victims. He was a murderer. A rapist. A thief. A monster in mortal flesh. He has more than earned his death.”

“That isn’t for me to judge,” I whispered quietly. Indeed not. I was tempted to hide behind that rationale, just for a moment—just until it was done. Lie to myself, tell myself that I was his lawful, rightful executioner.

But I wasn’t.

I could have told myself that I was ending his pain. That I was putting him out of his hideous misery in an act of compassion. Necessarily an act of bloodshed, but it would be quick and clean. Nothing should suffer as much as Lloyd Slate had. I could have sold myself that story.

But I didn’t.

I was a man seeking power. For good reasons, maybe. But I wasn’t going to lie to myself or anyone else about my actions. If I killed him, I would be taking a life, something that was not mine to take. I would be committing deliberate, calculated murder.

It was the least evil path, I told myself. Whatever else I might have done would have turned me into a monster in truth. Because of Lloyd Slate, I knew that whatever Mab might say, she did not control her Knight completely. Slate had defied her power and influence.

And look where it got him, a little voice whispered inside my head.

The full, round moon emerged from behind the clouds and bathed the whole Valley of the Stone Table in clear, cold light. The runes upon the table and the menhirs blazed into glittering, cold light.

“Wizard,” whispered Mab’s appropriated voice, seemingly directly into my ear. “The time has come.”

My heart began pounding very hard, and I felt sick to my stomach.

“Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden,” Mab’s voice said, almost lovingly. “Choose.”

Chapter Thirty-one

I stared at the broken man. It was easy enough to envision my own mutilated face, looking blindly up from the table’s surface. I took one step toward the table. Then two. Then I was standing over Lloyd Slate’s broken form.

If it was a fight, I wouldn’t think twice. But this man was no threat to me. He was no threat to anyone anymore. I had no right to take his life, and it was pure, overwhelming, nihilistic arrogance to say otherwise. If I killed Slate, how long would it take for my turn to come? I could be looking at myself, months or years from now.

I couldn’t, any more than I could cut my own throat.

I felt my hand drop back to my side, the knife too heavy to hold before me.

Mab suddenly stood at the opposite end of the Stone Table, facing me. Her right hand moved in a simple outward motion, and the mists over the Table suddenly thickened and swirled with color and light. For a few seconds, the image was hazy. Then it snapped into focus.

A little girl crouched in the corner of a bare stone room. There was hay scattered around, and a wool blanket that looked none too clean. She had dark hair that had been up in pigtails, but wasn’t anymore. One of the little pink plastic clips had evidently been lost or stolen, and now she had only one pigtail. Her face was red from crying. She’d evidently been wiping her nose on the knees of her little pink overalls. Her shirt, white with yellow flowers and a big cartoon bumblebee on it, showed stains of dirt and worse. She crouched in the tiniest ball she could make of her body, as if hoping that if something should come for her, she might be overlooked.

Her big brown eyes were quietly terrified—and I could see something familiar in them. It took me a moment to realize they reminded me of my reflection in a mirror. Other features showed themselves to me, muted shapes that maturity would bring forth eventually. The same chin and jawline Thomas and I shared. The same mouth as her mother’s. Susan’s straight, shining black hair. Her hands and her feet looked a little too large for her, like a puppy’s paws.

Dimly, as if from a great distance, I heard the cry of a Red Court vampire in its true form, and she flinched and started crying again, her entire body trembling in terror.

Maggie.

I remembered when Bianca and her minions had kept me prisoner.

I remembered the things they had done to me.

But it didn’t look like they had harmed my child—yet.

“Yes,” said Mab’s cold voice, empty of emotion. The image began to slowly fade away. “It is a true seeing of your child, as she is even now. I give you my word. No tricks. No deceptions. This is.”

I looked through the translucent image to where Mab and my godmother waited. Lea’s face was somber. Mab’s eyes were narrowed to glowing green slits within her hooded cloak.

I faced them both for a moment. The cold wind gusted over the hilltop and stirred the cloaks of the two Sidhe. I stared at them, at ancient eyes full of the knowledge of dark and wicked things. I knew that neither the child in the image nor the man on the table meant anything to them. I knew that if I went forward with Mab’s bargain, I would probably end up on the table myself.

Of course, that was why Mab had shown me Maggie: to manipulate me.

No. There was a distinction in what she had done. She had shown me Maggie to make perfectly clear exactly what choice I was about to make. Certainly, it might influence my decision, but when a stark naked truth stares you in the face . . . shouldn’t it?

I’m not sure it’s possible to manipulate someone with candor and truth.

I think you call that enlightenment.

And as I stared at my daughter’s fading image, my fear vanished.

If I wound up like Slate, if that was the price I had to pay to make my daughter safe, so be it.

If I was haunted for the rest of my life because Maggie needed me to make hard choices, so be it.

And if I had to die a horrible, lingering death so that my little girl could have a chance to live . . .

So be it.

I tightened my grip on the hideous weight of the ancient bronze knife.

I put one hand gently on Lloyd Slate’s forehead to hold him still.

And then I cut his throat.

It was a quick, clean death, which made it no less lethal than if I’d hacked him up with an ax. Death is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter how you get there. Just when.

And why.

He never struggled. Just let out a breath that sounded like a sigh of relief and turned his head to one side as if going to sleep. It wasn’t neat, but it wasn’t a scene from a gorefest slasher movie, either. It looked more like the kind of mess you’d see in a kitchen when preparing a big bunch of steaks. Most of his blood ran into the carved indentions on the table and seemed to become quicksilver once there, running rapidly outward through the troughs and down the lettering carved in the sides and the legs. The blood made the letters reflect the eerie light around us, giving them a sort of flickering fire of their own. It was a terrible, beautiful sight. Power hummed through that blood; the letters, the stone, and the air around me were shaken by its silent potency.

I sensed the two Sidhe behind me, watching with calm, predatory eyes as the Knight who had betrayed his queens died. I knew when it was over. The two of them let out small sighs of . . . appreciation, I suppose. I couldn’t think of any other phrase that fit. They recognized the significance of his death while in no way actually feeling any empathy for him. A life flowed from his broken body into the Stone Table, and they held the act in a respect akin to reverence.

I just stood there, blood dripping from the bronze knife in my hand onto the earth beneath my feet. I shivered in the cold and stared at the remains of the man I’d murdered, wondering what I was supposed to feel. Sadness? Not really. He’d been a son of a bitch of the first order, and I’d gladly have killed him in a straight-up fight if I had the chance. Remorse? None yet. I had done him a favor when I killed him. There was no getting him out of what he’d gotten himself into. Joy? No. None of that, either. Satisfaction? Precious little, except that it was over, the deed done, the dice finally cast.

Mostly? I just felt cold.

A minute or an hour later, the Leanansidhe lifted a hand and snapped her fingers. The cloaked servitors appeared from the mist as silently as they’d left, and gathered up what was left of Lloyd Slate. They lifted him in silence, carried him in silence, and vanished into the mist.

“There,” I said quietly to Mab. “My part is done. Time for you to live up to yours.”

“No, child,” said Mab’s voice through Lea’s lips. “Your part is only begun. But fear not. I am Mab. The stars will rain from the sky before Mab fulfills not her word.” She tilted her head slightly to one side, toward my godmother, and said, “I give thee this adviser for thy final quest, sir Knight. My handmaiden is among the most powerful beings in all of my Winter, second only to myself.”

Lea’s warmer, more languid voice came from her lips as she asked, “My queen, to what degree am I permitted to act?”

I thought I saw the fell light gleam on Mab’s teeth as Lea’s lips said, “You may indulge yourself.”

Lea’s mouth spread into a wide, dangerous smile of its own, and she bowed her head and upper body toward the Queen of Winter.

“And now, my Knight,” Mab’s voice said, as her body turned to face me exclusively. “We will see to the strength of your broken body. And I will make you mine.”

I swallowed hard.

Mab lifted a hand, a dismissive gesture, and the Leanansidhe bowed to her.

“I am no longer needed here, child,” Lea murmured. “I will be ready to go with thee whenever thou dost call.”

My throat was almost too dry to get any words out. “I’ll want the things I left with you, as soon as you can get them to me.”

“Of course,” she said. She bowed to me as well, and took several steps back into the mist, until it swallowed her whole.

And I was alone with Queen Mab.

“So,” I said into the silence. “I guess there’s . . . there’s a ceremony of some kind to go through.”

Mab stepped closer to me. She wasn’t an enormous, imposing figure. She was considerably shorter than me. Slender. But she walked with such perfect confidence that the role of predator and prey was clear to both of us. I edged back from her. It was pure instinct, and I could no more stop from doing it than I could have stopped shivering against the cold.

“Going to be hard for us to exchange oaths if you can’t talk, huh,” I said. My voice sounded thin and shaky, even to me. “Um. Maybe it’s paperwork or something.”

Pale hands slipped up from the dark cloak and drew her hood back. She shook her head left and right, and pale, silken tresses, whiter than moonlight or Lloyd Slate’s dead flesh, spilled forth.

My voice stopped working for a second. My bare thighs hit the Stone Table behind me, and I wound up sitting on it.

Mab kept pacing toward me, one slightly swaying step at a time. The cloak slid from her shoulders, down, down, down.

“Y-you, uh,” I said, looking away. “You m-must be cold.”

A throaty little laugh bubbled up out of her frozen-berry lips. Mab’s voice, touched with anger, could cause physical damage to living flesh. Her voice filled with simmering desire . . . did other things.

And the cold was suddenly the least of my concerns.

Her mouth closed on mine, and I gave up even trying to speak. This wasn’t a ceremony so much as a rite, and one as ancient as beasts and birds, earth and sky.

My memory gets shaky after the kiss.

I remember her body gleaming brightly above me, cold, soft, feminine perfection. I don’t have the words to describe it. Inhuman beauty. Elfin grace. Animal sensuality. And when her body was atop mine, our breaths mingled, cold sweetness with human imperfection. I could feel the rhythm of her form, her breath, her heart. I could feel the stone of the table, the ancient hill of the mound, the very earth of the valley around us pulsing in time to Mab’s rhythm. Clouds raced over the sky, and as she moved more quickly she grew brighter, and brighter, until I realized that the eerie luminescence around us all evening had been nothing but a dim, muffled reflection of Mab’s loveliness, veiled for the sake of the mortal mind it could have unmade.

She did not veil it as her breathing mounted. And it burned me, it was so pure.

What we did wasn’t sex, regardless of what it appeared to be. You can’t have sex with a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a furious winter gale. You can’t make love to a mountain, a lake of ice, a freezing wind.

For a few moments, I saw the breadth and depth of Mab’s power—and for a fleeting instant, the barest, tiniest glimpse of her purpose, as well, as our entwined bodies thrashed toward completion. I was screaming. I had been for a while.

Then Mab’s cry joined mine, our voices blending together. Her nails dug into my chest, chips of ice sliding beneath my skin. I saw her body drawn into an arch of pleasure, and then her green cat eyes opened and bored into—

Her mouth opened, and her voice hissed, “MINE.”

Absolute truth made my body vibrate like the plucked string of a guitar, and I jerked into a brief, violent contortion.

Mab’s hands slid down my ribs, and I could suddenly feel the fire of the cracked bones again, until those icy hands tightened as again she said, “MINE.”

Again, my body bowed into a violent bow, every muscle trying to tear its way off of my bones.

Mab hissed in eagerness as her hands slid around my waist, covering the numb spot where my spine had probably been broken. I felt myself screaming and struggling, with no control whatsoever over my body.

Mab’s feline eyes captured my own gaze, trapping my attention within their frozen beauty as again a jolt of terrible, sweet cold flowed out from her fingertips and she whispered, her voice a velvet caress, “. . . mine . . .”

“Again!” screamed a voice I vaguely recognized.

Something cold and metallic pressed to my chest.

“Clear!” shouted the voice.

A lightning bolt hit my chest, an agonizing ribbon of silver power that bent my body into a bow. I started screaming, and before my hips had come down, I shouted, “Hexus!” spewing out power into the air.

Someone shouted and someone else cursed, and sparks exploded all around me, including from the lightbulb above, which seemed to overload and shatter into powder.

The room was dark and quiet for a few seconds.

“D-did we lose him?” asked a steady, elderly man’s voice. Forthill.

“Oh, God,” said Molly’s quavering voice. “H-Harry?”

“I’m fine,” I said. My throat felt raw. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

“Y-your heart stopped . . .” said a third voice, the familiar one.

I felt my chest and found nothing there, or around my neck. My fingers quested out and touched the bed and the backboard beneath me, and found my necklace there, the ruby still fixed in place by an ugly glob of rubber. I gripped the chain and slipped a little of my will into it, and cold blue light filled the room.

“. . . so I did what any good mortician would,” Butters continued. “Hit you with a bolt of lightning and tried to reanimate you.” He held up two shock paddles, whose wires had evidently been melted right off them. They weren’t attached to anything now. He was a wiry little guy in hospital scrubs with a shock of black hair, narrow shoulders, and a thin, restless body. He held up his hands and mimed employing the shock paddles. Then he said, in a goofy voice that was probably meant to sound hollow, “It’s alive. Alliiiiiivve.” After a beat he added, “You’re welcome.”

“Butters.” I sighed. “Who called you into—” I stopped and said, “Molly. Never mind.”

“Harry,” she said. “We couldn’t be sure how badly you were hurt, and if you couldn’t feel, you couldn’t know either, and I thought we needed a real doctor, but the only one I knew you trusted was Butters, so I got him instead—”

“Hey!” Butters said.

I pushed the straps off of my head and kicked irritably at the straps on my legs.

“Whoa, there, tiger!” Butters said. The little medical examiner threw himself across my legs. “Hold your horses, big guy! Easy, easy!”

Forthill and Molly meant well. They joined in and the three of them flattened me to the backboard again.

I snarled out a curse and then went limp. I sat there not resisting for a moment, until I thought they’d be listening. Then I said, “We don’t have time for this. Get these straps off of me.”

“Dresden, you might have a broken back,” Butters said. “A pinched nerve, broken bones, damage to the organs in your lower abdomen—for God’s sake, man, what were you thinking, not going to a hospital?”

“I was thinking that I didn’t want to make an easy target of myself,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m better.”

“Good Lord, man!” sputtered Forthill. “Be reasonable. Your heart wasn’t beating three minutes ago.”

“Molly,” I said, my voice hard. “Unfasten the straps. Do it now.”

I heard her sniffle. But then she sat up and came up to where she could see my eyes. “Um. Harry. Are you still . . . you know. You?”

I blinked at her for a second, impressed. The grasshopper’s insight was evidently serving her well.

“I’m me,” I said, looking back at her eyes. That should be verification enough. If someone else had come back behind the wheel of my car, so much change to my insides and a look like that would certainly trigger a soulgaze and reveal what had happened. “For now, at least.”

Molly bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay. Okay, let him up.”

Butters sat up from my legs and then stood scowling. “Wait a minute. This is just . . . This is all moving a little too fast for me.”

The door behind him opened, and a heavyset man in street clothes lifted a gun and put two rounds into Butters’s back from three feet away. The sheer sound of the shots was incredible, deafening.

Butters dropped like a slaughtered cow.

The gunman’s eyes were tracking toward the rest of us before Butters hit the floor. I knew who he was looking for when his eyes swept over me and locked on.

He didn’t talk, didn’t bluster, didn’t hesitate. A professional. There were plenty of them in Chicago. He raised the gun to aim at my head—while I lay there, strapped to a board from the hips down and unable to move. And, as I lifted my left wrist, I noted that my shield bracelet was gone. Of course. They must have removed it so that the defibrillator’s charge wouldn’t have gotten any ideas, just as they’d taken the metal necklace from around my throat, and the rings from my fingers.

They were being helpful.

Clearly, this was just not my day.

Chapter Thirty-two

I was tied down, but my hands weren’t. I flexed the fingers of my right hand into the mystic position of attack—holding them like a pretend gun—and snapped, “Arctis!”

The spell tore the heat from all around the gun and drew water from the air into an instant, thick coating of ice, heaviest around the weapon’s hammer. The shooter twitched in reaction to the spell and pulled the trigger.

The encrusting ice held the hammer back and prevented it from falling.

The gunman blinked and tried to pull the trigger several more times, to no avail. Forthill hit him around the knees. Both men went down, and the gun came loose from the gunman’s cold-numbed fingers as they hit the floor, and went spinning across the room. It struck a wall, cracked the ice around its hammer, and discharged harmlessly into the wall with another roar.

The gunman kicked Forthill in the face and the old priest fell back with a grunt of pain. Molly threw herself at him in pure rage, knocking him flat again, and began pounding her fists into him with elemental brutality and no technique whatsoever. The gunman threw an elbow that got her in the neck and knocked her back, then rose, his eyes searching the floor, until he spotted his weapon. He started for it.

I killed the light from the amulet. He tripped and fell in the sudden darkness. I heard him scuffling with the dazed Forthill.

Then there was a single bright flash of light that showed me the gunman arching up in pain. Then it was gone and there was the sound of something large falling to the floor. Several people were breathing heavily.

I got my fingers onto my amulet again and brought forth light into the room.

Forthill sat against one wall, holding his jaw, looking pale. Molly was in a crouch, one hand lifted as if she’d been about to do something with her magical talents, the way she should have at the first sound of the shots, if she’d been thinking clearly. The gunman lay on his side, and began to stir again.

Butters wheezed, “Clear,” and touched both ends of the naked wires in his hands to the gunman’s chest.

The wires ran back to the emergency defib unit. When they’d been melted off the paddles, it had left several strands of pure copper naked on the ends of both of them. The current did what current does, and the gunman bucked in agony for a second and sagged into immobility again.

“Jerk,” Butters wheezed. He put a hand on the small of his back and said, “Ow. Ow, ow, ow, OW!”

“Butters!” Molly croaked, and hugged him.

“Urgckh,” Butters said. “Ow.” But he didn’t look displeased at the hug.

“Grasshopper, don’t strain him until we know how bad it is,” I said. “Dammit.” I started fumbling with the straps, getting them clear of my upper body so I could sit up and work on my legs. “Forthill? Are you all right?”

Father Forthill said something unintelligible and let out a groan of pain. Then he heaved himself to his feet and started helping me with the buckles. His jaw was purple and swollen on one side. He’d taken one hell of a hit and stayed conscious. Tough old guy, even though he looked so mild.

I got off the backboard, onto my feet, and picked up the gun.

“I’m all right,” Butters said. “I think.” His eyes went wide and he suddenly seemed to panic. “Oh, God, make sure I’m all right!” He started clawing at his shirt. “That maniac freaking shot me!”

He got the scrubs top off and turned around to show Molly his back. He was wearing an undershirt.

And on top of that, he was wearing a Kevlar vest. It was a light, underclothing garment, suitable only for protection against handguns—but the gunman had walked in with a nine- millimeter. He’d put both shots onto the centerline of Butters’s lower back, and the vest had done its job. The rounds were still there, flattened and stuck in the ballistic weave.

“I’m hit, aren’t I?” Butters stuttered. “I’m in shock. I can’t feel it because I’m in shock. Right? Was it in the liver? Is the blood black? Call emergency services!”

“Butters,” I said. “Look at me.”

He did, his eyes wide.

“Polka,” I said, “will never die.”

He blinked at me. Then he nodded and started forcing himself to take slower, deeper breaths. “I’m all right?”

“The magic underwear worked,” I said. “You’re fine.”

“Then why does my back hurt so much?”

“Somebody just hit it twice with a hammer moving about twelve hundred feet per second,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. He turned to look at Molly, who nodded at him and gave him an encouraging smile. Then he shuddered and closed his eyes in relief. “I don’t think I’m temperamentally suited for the action thing.”

“Yeah. Since when are you the guy in the bulletproof vest?” I asked him.

Butters nodded at Molly. “I put it on about ten seconds after she called me and said you needed help,” he said. He fumbled a small case from his pocket and opened it. “See? I got chalk, and holy water, and garlic, too.”

I smiled at him, but felt a little bit sick. The gunman had put Butters down for the simple reason that he had been blocking the shooter’s line of sight to the room. If he’d been trying for Butters, the two shots to clear his sight line would have included a third shot to the back of Butters’s head. Of course, if Butters hadn’t been in the way, my head wouldn’t have fared any better than his.

We’re all so damned fragile.

Footsteps sounded outside the door, and I raised the gun to cover it, taking a grip with both hands, my feet centered. I was lining up the little green targeting dots when Sanya came through the door carrying a platter of sandwiches. He stopped abruptly and lifted both eyebrows, then beamed broadly. “Dresden! You are all right.” He looked around the room for a moment, frowning, and said, “Did I miss something? Who is that?”

“I don’t think there’s anything broken,” Butters told Forthill, “but you’d better get an X-ray, just to be sure. Mandibular fracture isn’t anything to play around with.”

The old priest nodded from his chair in the living quarters of the church’s residents, and wrote something down on a little pad of paper. He showed it to Butters.

The little guy grinned. “You’re welcome, Father.”

Molly frowned and asked, “Should we take him to the emergency room?”

Forthill shook his head and wrote on his notepad: Things to tell you first.

Now I had a pair of guns I’d swiped from bad guys: the security guard’s .40-caliber and the gunman’s nine- millimeter. I was inspecting them both on the coffee table, familiarizing myself with their function, and wondering if I should be planning to file off the serial numbers or something. Mouse sat next to me, his flank against my leg and his serious brown eyes watching me handle the weapons.

“You found out something?” I asked Forthill.

In a way, he wrote back. There are major movements afoot throughout South and Central America. The Red Court’s upper echelon uses human servitors to interface with mortals. Many of these individuals have been sighted at airports in the past three days. All of them are bound for Mexico. Does Chichén Itzá have any significance to you?

I grunted. Donar Vadderung’s information seemed to have been solid, then. “Yeah, it does.”

Forthill nodded and continued writing. There is a priest in that area. He cannot help you with your fight, but he says he can offer you and your people sanctuary, care, and secure transportation from the area when you are finished.

“It seems like begging for trouble to plan for our victorious departure before we know if we can get there in the first place,” I said. “I can get us to the general area, but not into the ruins themselves. I need to know anything he can find out about the security the Red Court will be setting up in the area.”

Forthill frowned at me for a moment. Then he wrote, I’ll ask him. But I’ll need someone to talk for me.

I nodded. “Molly, you’re with the padre. Get a little sleep as soon as you can. Might not get a chance to before we move out, otherwise.”

She frowned but nodded instead of trying to talk me out of it. It’s nice how brushes with violent death can concentrate even the most stubbornly independent apprentice’s better judgment.

Forthill held up a hand. Then he wrote, First, I need to know how it is that you are back on your feet. Dr. Butters said that you would be too injured to get out of bed.

“Magic,” I said calmly, as if that should explain everything.

Forthill eyed me for a moment. Then wrote, I hurt too much to argue with you. Will make the calls.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

He nodded and wrote, God go with you.

“Thank you,” I repeated.

“What about me?” Butters asked. There were equal measures of dread and excitement in his voice.

“Hopefully, we won’t need any more of your help,” I said. “Might be nice if you were standing by, though. Just in case.”

“Right,” Butters said, nodding. “What else?”

I clenched a hand and resisted the urge to tell him that he would be better off hiding under his bed. He knew that already. He was as frightened as a bunny in a forest full of bears, but he wanted to help. “I think Father Forthill has a car. Yes, Father?”

He started to write something, then scratched it out and held out his hand in a simple thumbs-up.

“Stay with them,” I said. I slapped magazines into both guns, confident that I knew them well enough to be sure they’d go bang when I pulled the trigger. “Soon as Forthill is done, get him to an emergency room.”

“Emergency room,” Butters said. “Check.”

Forthill frowned and wrote, Are you certain we shouldn’t turn our attacker over to the police?

“Nothing in life is certain, Father,” I said, rising. I stuck a gun in either pocket of my duster. “But if the police get involved, they’re going to ask a lot of questions and take a long time trying to sort everything out. I can’t spare that time.”

You don’t think this gunman will go to the authorities?

“And tell them what?” I asked. “That he got kidnapped off the street by a priest from St. Mary’s? That we beat him up and took his illegal weapon away?” I shook my head. “He doesn’t want the cops involved any more than we do. This was business to him. He’ll make a deal to fess up to us if it means he gets to walk.”

And we let a murderer go free?

“It’s an imperfect world, Father,” I said. “On the other hand, you don’t hire professional killers to take out nice old ladies and puppy dogs. Most of the people this guy has an appointment with are underworld types—I guarantee it—mostly those who are going to turn state’s evidence on their organization. Sooner or later one of them gets lucky, and no more hit man.”

Live by the sword, die by the sword, Forthill wrote.

“Exactly.”

He shook his head and winced as the motion caused him discomfort. It will be hard to help a man like that.

I snorted. “It’s a noble sentiment, padre, but a guy like him doesn’t want any help. Doesn’t see any need for it.” I shrugged. “Some men just enjoy killing.”

He frowned severely, but didn’t write down any response. Just then, someone rapped on the door, and Sanya opened it and poked his head in. “Dresden,” the Knight said. “He’s awake.”

I rose, and Mouse rose with me. “Cool. Maybe get started on those calls, padre.”

Forthill gave me another thumbs-up rather than nodding. I walked out, Mouse stolid at my back, and went to the utility closet with Sanya to talk to our . . . guest, I suppose.

The blocky hit man lay on the backboard, strapped down to it, and further secured in a cocoon of duct tape.

“Stand him up,” I said.

Sanya did so, rather casually lifting the gunman, backboard and all, and leaning it back at a slight angle against the wall.

The gunman watched me with calm eyes. I picked up a wallet from the little folding card table we had set up and opened it. “Steven Douglas,” I read from the license. “That you?”

“Stevie D,” he said.

“Heard of you,” I said. “You did Torelli a couple of years back.”

He smiled, very slightly. “I don’t know any Torelli.”

“Yeah, I figured,” I said.

“How is he?” Stevie D asked.

“Who?”

“The little guy.”

“Fine,” I said. “Wearing a vest.”

Stevie D nodded. “Good.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Professional killer is happy he didn’t kill someone?”

“Had nothing against him. Wasn’t getting paid for him. Don’t wanna do time for hitting the wrong guy. Isn’t professional. But everything I heard about you said I shouldn’t dick around waiting to get the shot off, so I had to get him out of the way.”

“Stevie,” I said, “this can go a couple of different ways. The simplest is that you give me who hired you, and I let you go.”

His eyes narrowed. “No cops?”

I gestured at his bound form with one hand. “Does it look like we want cops all over this? Spill and you’re loose as fast as we can take the tape off.”

He thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “Nah.”

“No?”

He made a motion that might have been a shrug. “Did that for you, I might never work again. People get nervous when a contractor divulges personal information about their clients. I gotta think long-term.”

I nodded. “I can respect that. Honoring a bargain and all.”

He snorted softly.

“So we can go to option two. I’m going to go call Marcone. I’m going to tell him what happened. I’m going to ask him if he’s interested in talking to you, Stevie. I’m sure he’ll want to know who is purchasing hits in his territory, too. What impact will that have on your long-term productivity, do you think?”

Stevie’s nerve cracked. He licked his lips. “Um,” he said. “What’s option three?”

Sanya stepped forward. He beamed at Stevie D, picked the backboard up off the floor without too much trouble, and in his lowest voice and thickest Russian accent said, “I pick up this board, break in half, and put both halves into incinerator.”

Stevie D looked like a man who suddenly realizes he is sitting near a hornets’ nest and is trying desperately not to run away screaming. He licked his lips again and said, “Half of what I hear about you says Marcone wants you dead, that you hate his guts. The other half says you work for him sometimes. Kill the people he thinks need killing.”

“I wouldn’t pay much attention to rumors if I were you, Stevie,” I said.

“Which is it?” he asked.

“Find out,” I said. “Don’t tell me anything.”

Sanya put him back down again. I stood facing him expectantly.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “A broad.”

“Woman, huh. Who?”

“No name. Paid cash.”

“Describe her.”

Stevie nodded. “Five-nine, long legs, brown eyes,” he said. “Some muscle on her, weighed maybe one fifty. Long dark hair. Had these tattoos on her face and neck.”

My heart just about stopped in my chest.

I closed down every doorway and window in my head, to shut out the gale that was suddenly whipping up in my heart. I had to stay focused. I couldn’t afford to let the sudden tide of emotion drown my ability to think clearly.

I reached into my pocket and drew out my own wallet. I’d kept a picture of Susan in there for so long that when I pulled it out some of the image’s colors stuck to the plastic sleeve. I showed him the picture.

The hit man squinted and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s her.”

Chapter Thirty-three

“Give me the details,” I said quietly.

“She said you’d be here. Gave me twenty thousand up front, twenty more held in escrow until delivery was confirmed.”

Mouse made a soft, uncomfortable noise that never quite became a whine. He sat watching my face intently.

“When?” I asked.

“Last night.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then I tossed Stevie’s wallet back onto the folding card table and said, “Cut him loose. Walk him to the door.”

Sanya let out what seemed like a disappointed sigh. Then he produced a knife and began cutting Stevie free.

I walked down the hall, back toward the living area with my head bowed, thinking furiously.

Susan had hired a gunman to kill me. Why?

I stopped walking and leaned against a wall. Why would she hire someone to kill me? Or, hell, more to the point—why would she hire a gunman to kill me? Why not someone who stood a greater chance of success?

Granted, a gunman could kill even a wizard if he were taken by surprise. But pistols had to be fired at dangerously short ranges to be reliable, and Stevie D had a reputation as a brazen sidearm specialist. It meant that the wizard would have more time to see something bad coming, as opposed to being warned only when a high-powered rifle round hit his chest, and would have an easier time responding with hasty defensive magic. It was hardly an ideal approach.

If Susan wanted me dead, she wouldn’t really need to contract it out. A pretext to get me alone and another one to put us very close to each other would just about do it. And I’d never see that one coming.

Something about this just wasn’t right. I’d have called Stevie a liar, but I didn’t think he was one. I was sure he believed what he was saying.

So. Either Stevie was lying and I was just too dim to pick up on it, or he was telling the truth. If he was lying, given what kind of hot water I could get him into, he was also an idiot. I didn’t think he was one of those. If he was telling the truth, it meant . . .

It meant that either Susan really had hired someone to kill me, or else someone who could look like Susan had done business with Stevie D. If Susan had hired someone to kill me, why this guy, in particular? Why hire someone who didn’t have better than even chances of pulling it off? That was more the kind of thing Esteban and Esmerelda would come up with.

That worked a lot better. Esmerelda’s blue and green eyes could have made Stevie remember being hired by Mister Snuffleupagus, if that was what she wanted. But how would she have known where to find me? Had they somehow managed to tail Sanya back to the church from my apartment without being noticed by Mouse?

And just where the hell were Susan and Martin? They’d had more than enough time to get here. So why weren’t they?

Someone was running a game on me. If I didn’t start getting some answers to these questions, I had a bad feeling that it was going to turn around and bite me on the ass at the worst moment imaginable.

Right, then.

I guessed that meant it was time to go get some answers.

Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren’t ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated.

For instance, I had spent more than a couple of off hours trying to figure out how I might track someone through Chicago if I didn’t have some kind of object or possession of theirs to use as a focus. Basic tracking magic is completely dependent upon having a sample of whoever it is you want to follow. Hair, blood, and nail clippings are the usual thing. But let’s say you don’t have any of those, and you still want to find someone. If you have a sample of something in their possession, a piece snipped from their clothing, the tag just torn out of their underwear, whatever, you can get them that way, too.

But let’s say things are hectic and crazy and someone has just burned down your house and your lab and you still need to follow somebody.

That’s when you need a good, clear photograph. And minions. Lots of minions. Preferably ones who don’t demand exorbitant wages.

There’s a Pizza ’Spress less than two blocks from St. Mary’s. Sanya and I went straight there. I ordered.

“I do not see how this helps us,” Sanya said, as I walked out from the little shop with four boxes of pizza.

“You’re used to solving all your problems the simple way,” I said. “Kick down the door, chop up everybody who looks fiendish, save everyone who looks like they might need it. Yeah?”

“It is not always that simple,” Sanya said, rather stiffly. “And sometimes I use a gun.”

“Which I applaud you for, very progressive,” I said. “But the point is, you do your work directly. You pretty much know where you’re going, or get shown the way, and after that it’s just up to you to take care of business.”

“Da,” Sanya said as we walked. “I suppose.”

“My work is sort of the same,” I said. “Except that nobody ever points the way for me.”

“You need to know where to go,” Sanya said.

“Yes.”

“And you are going to consult four large pizzas for guidance.”

“Yes,” I said.

The big man frowned for a moment. Then he said, “There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.”

“That’s pretty rich coming from the agnostic Knight of the Cross with a holy Sword who takes his orders from an archangel,” I said.

“Gabriel could be an alien being of some kind,” Sanya said placidly. “It does not change the value of what I do—not to me and not to those whom I protect.”

“Whom,” I said, with as much Russian accent as I could fit into one word. “Someone’s been practicing his English.”

Sanya somehow managed to look down his nose at me, despite the fact that I was several inches taller. “I am only saying that I do not need the written code of a spiritual belief to act like a decent human being.”

“You are way kookier than me, man,” I said, turning into an alley. “And I talk to pizza.”

I laid out the four pizza boxes on top of four adjacent trash cans, and glanced around to be sure no one was nearby. It was getting near to lunch break, and it wasn’t the best time for what I was about to do, but it ought to work. I turned to look up and down the alley as best I could, drew a breath, and then remembered something.

“Hey, Sanya. Stick your fingers in your ears?”

The big Russian stared at me. “What?”

“Your fingers,” I said, wiggling all of mine, “in your ears.” I pointed to mine.

“I understand the words, obviously, as I am someone who has been practicing his English. Why?”

“Because I’m going to say something to the pizza and I don’t want you to hear it.”

Sanya gave the sky a single, long-suffering glance. Then he sighed and put his fingers in his ears.

I gave him a thumbs-up, turned away, cupped my hands around my mouth so that no one could lip-read, and began to murmur a name, over and over again, each utterance infused with my will.

I had to repeat the name only a dozen times or so before a shadow flickered overhead, and something the size of a hunting falcon dropped out of the sky, blurred wings humming, and hovered about two feet in front of me.

“Bozhe moi!” Sanya sputtered, and Esperacchius was halfway from its sheath by the time he finished speaking.

I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “There’s some real irony in your using that expression, O Knight of Maybe.”

“Go ahead!” piped a shrill voice, like a Shakespearean actor on helium. “Draw your sword, knave, and we will see who bleeds to death from a thousand tiny cuts!”

Sanya stood there with his mouth open and his sword still partly in its sheath. “It is . . .” He shook his head as if someone had popped him in the nose. “It is . . . a domovoi, da?”

The little faerie in question stood nearly fifteen full inches in height, appearing as a slender, athletic youth with the blurring wings of a dragonfly standing out from his shoulders and a tuft of hair like lavender dandelion fluff. He was dressed in garments that looked like they’d been thugged from someone’s old-school G.I. Joe doll, an olive-drab jump-suit with the sleeves removed and holes cut through it for his wings. He wore a number of weapons about his person, most of them on nylon straps that looked like they’d been lifted from convention badges. He was carrying one letter opener shaped like a long sword at his side and two more, crossed over each other, on his back. I’d given him the letter opener set last Christmas, advising him to keep half of them stashed somewhere safe, as backup weapons.

“Domovoi?” the little faerie shrilled, furious. “Oh, no, you didn’t!”

“Easy there, Major General,” I said. “Sanya, this is Major General Toot-toot Minimus, the captain of my house guard. Toot, this is my boon companion Sanya, Knight of the Cross, who has faced danger at my side. He’s okay.”

The faerie quivered with outrage. “He’s Russian! And he doesn’t even know the difference between a domovoi and a polevoi when he sees one two feet away!” Toot-toot let out a blistering string of words in Russian, shaking a finger at the towering Knight.

Sanya listened in bemusement at first, but then blinked, slid his sword away, and held up both hands. He said something that sounded somber and very formal, and only then did Toot’s ire seem to abate. He said one or two more harsh-sounding words toward Sanya, added a flick of his chin that screamed, So there, and turned back to me.

“Toot,” I said. “How is it that you speak Russian?”

He blinked at me. “Harry,” he said, as if the question made no sense at all, “you just speak it, don’t you. I mean, come on.” He gave me a formal bow and said, “How may I serve you, my liege?”

I peered at him a bit more closely. “Why is half your face painted blue?”

“Because we’re Winter now, my liege!” Toot said. His eyes darted to the side and down several times. “And . . . say, that doesn’t mean we have to eat the pizza cold, does it?”

“Of course not,” I said.

Toot looked relieved. “Oh. Good. Um. What were we talking about?”

“I have a job for you,” I said, “and for everyone you can get to help.” I nodded at the pizza. “Standard rates.”

“Very good, my liege,” Toot said, saluting. His eyes slid down again. “Maybe someone ought to check the pizza. You know. For poison and things. It would look real bad if someone poisoned your vassals, you know.”

I eyed him askance. Then I held up a finger and said, “All right. One piece. And after—Ack!”

Toot hit the pizza box like a great white shark taking a seal. He slammed into it, one bright sword slashing the top off of the box. Then he seized the largest piece and began devouring with a will.

Sanya and I both stood there, fascinated. It was like watching a man try to eat a pizza slice the size of a small car. Pieces flew up and were skewered on his blade. Sauce got everywhere, and it gave me a gruesome little flashback to the Stone Table.

“Harry?” Sanya asked. “Are you all right?”

“Will be soon,” I said.

“This creature serves you?” Sanya asked.

“This one and about a hundred smaller ones. And five times that many part-timers I can call in once in a while.” I thought about it. “It isn’t so much that they serve me as that we have a business arrangement that we all like. They help me out from time to time. I furnish them with regular pizza.”

“Which they . . . love,” Sanya said.

Toot spun in a dizzy, delighted circle on one heel, and fell onto his back with perfectly unself-conscious enthusiasm, his tummy sticking out as far as it could. He lay there for a moment, making happy, gurgling sounds.

“Well,” I said. “Yes.”

Sanya’s eyes danced, though his face was sober. “You are a drug dealer. To tiny faeries. Shame.”

I snorted.

“What was that he said about Winter?” Sanya asked.

“Harry’s the new Winter Knight!” Toot-toot burbled. “Which is fantastic! The old Winter Knight mostly just sat around getting tortured. He never went on adventures or anything.” He paused and added, “Unless you count going crazy, I guess.”

“Toot,” I said. “I’m . . . kind of trying to keep the Winter Knight thing low-profile.”

“Okay,” Toot said. “Why?”

I glanced from the little faerie to Sanya. “Look, I, uh . . . It’s personal, okay, and—”

“Because every creature in Faerie got to see the ceremony,” Toot said proudly. “Mab made sure of it! It was reflected in all the streams and ponds and lakes and puddles and every little drop of water!”

I stared at the engorged faerie, at something of a loss for words. “Um,” I said. “Oh. How . . . very, very disturbing.”

“Did it hurt when you kissed Mab?” Toot asked. “Because I always thought her lips looked so cold that they would burn. Like streetlamps in winter!” Toot sat up suddenly, his eyes wide. “Ooooooh. Did your tongue get stuck to her, like on that Christmastime show?”

“Okayyyyy,” I said with forced cheer, clapping my hands. “Way, way too personal. Um. The job. I have a job for you.”

Toot-toot leapt up to his feet. His stomach was already constricting back toward its normal size. “Yes, my liege!”

Where the hell did he put it all? I mean . . . it just wasn’t possible for him to eat that much pizza and then . . . I shook my head. Now wasn’t the time.

I produced my picture of Susan. “This human is somewhere in Chicago. I need your folk to find her. She’s probably accompanied by a human man with blond hair, about the same size she is.”

Toot took to his wings again and zoomed down to the picture. He picked it up and held it out at arm’s length, studying it, and nodded once. “May I have this, my lord, to show the others?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Be careful with it, though. I want it back.”

“Yes, my liege!” Toot said. He brandished his sword with a flourish, sheathed it, and zipped straight up into the October sky.

Sanya stood looking steadily at me.

I coughed. I waited.

“So,” he said. “Mab.”

I grunted vaguely in reply.

“You hit that,” Sanya said.

I did not look at him. My face felt red.

“You”—he scrunched up his nose, digging in his memory—“tapped that ass. Presumably, it was phat.”

“Sanya!”

He let out a low, rolling laugh and shook his head. “I saw her once. Mab. Beautiful beyond words.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And dangerous.”

“Yes,” I said, with emphasis.

“And you are now her champion,” he said.

“Everybody’s gotta be something, right?”

He nodded. “Joking about it. Good. You will need that sense of humor.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she is cold, Dresden. She knows wicked secrets Time himself has forgotten. And if she chose you to be her Knight, she has a plan for you.” He nodded slowly. “Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”

“That some kind of Russian saying?” I asked.

“Have you seen traditional folk dances?” Sanya asked. “Imagine them being done by someone with a bottle of vodka in them. Laughter abounds, and you survive another day.” He shrugged. “Or break your neck. Either way, it is pain management.”

His voice sounded almost merry, though the subject matter was grim as hell. If not more so.

I had expected him to try to talk me out of it. Or at least to berate me for being an idiot. He didn’t do either. There was a calm acceptance of terrible things that was part and parcel of Sanya’s personality. No matter how bad things got, I didn’t think anything would ever truly faze him. He simply accepted the bad things that happened and soldiered on as best he could.

There was probably a lesson for me in there, somewhere.

I was quiet for a while before I decided to trust him. “I get to save my girl first,” I said. “That was the deal.”

“Ah,” he said. He seemed to mull it over and nodded. “That is reasonable.”

“You really think that?”

He lifted both eyebrows. “The child is your blood, is she not?”

I nodded and said quietly, “She is.”

He spread his hands, as if it were a self-evident fact that needed no further exploration. “As horrible fates go, that is a good one,” he said. “Worthwhile. Save your little girl.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “If you turn into a hideous monster and I am sent to slay you, I will remember this and make it as painless as I can, out of respect for you.”

I knew he was joking. I just couldn’t tell which part of it he was joking about. “Uh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“It is nothing,” he said. We stood around quietly for another five minutes before he frowned, looking at the other pizza boxes, and asked, “Is there some purpose for the rest of th—”

A scene out of The Birds descended upon the alley. There was a rush of wing-beaten wind, and hundreds of tiny figures flashed down onto the pizza. Here and there I would spot one of the Pizza Lord’s Guard, recognizable thanks to the orange plastic cases of the box knives they had strapped to their backs. The others went by in twinkles and flashes of color, muted by the daylight but beautiful all the same. There were a lot of the Little Folk involved. If I’d been doing this at night, it might have induced a seizure or something.

The Little Folk love pizza. They love it with a passion so intense that it beggars the imagination. Watching a pizza being devoured was sort of like watching a plane coming apart in midair on those old WWII gun camera reels. Bits would fleck off here and there, and then suddenly in a rush, bits would go flying everywhere, each borne away by the individual fairy who had seized it.

It was over in less than three minutes.

Seriously. Where do they put it?

Toot came to hover before me and popped a little fistful of pizza into his mouth. He gulped it down and saluted.

“Well, Major General?” I asked.

“Found her, my liege,” Toot reported. “She is a captive and in danger.” Sanya and I traded a look.

“Where?” I asked him.

Toot firmly held up the picture, still in one piece, and two strands of dark hair, each curled into its own coil of rope in his tiny hands. “Two hairs from her head, my liege. Or if it is your pleasure, I will guide you there.”

Sanya drew his head back a little, impressed. “They found her? That quickly?”

“People underestimate the hell out of the Little Folk,” I said calmly. “Within their limits, they’re as good as or better than anything else I know for getting information—and there are a lot of them around Chicago who are willing to help me out occasionally.”

“Hail the Pizza Lord!” Toot-toot shrilled.

“Hail the Pizza Lord!” answered a score of piping voices that came from no apparent source. The Little Folk can be all but invisible when they want to be.

“Major General Minimus, keep this up and I’m making you a full general,” I said.

Toot froze. “Why? Is that bad? What did I do?”

“It’s good, Toot. That’s higher than a major general.”

His eyes widened. “There’s higher?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely. And you’re on the fast track for the very top.” I took the hairs from him and said, “We’ll get the car. Lead us to her, Toot.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good,” Sanya said, grinning. “Now we know where to go and have someone to rescue. This part I know how to do.”

Chapter Thirty-four

“Admittedly,” Sanya said a few minutes later, “normally I do not storm headquarters buildings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And in broad daylight, too.”

We were parked down the block from the FBI’s Chicago office, where Toot had guided us, crouched on the dashboard and demanding to know why Sanya hadn’t rented one of the cars that could fly instead of the poky old landbound minivan he had instead. Toot hadn’t taken the answer that “cars like that are imaginary” seriously, either. He had muttered a few things in Russian that only made Sanya’s smile wider.

“Damn,” I said, staring at the building. “Toot? Was Martin with her?”

“The yellow-hair?” Toot sat on the dashboard facing us, waving his feet. “No, my liege.”

I grunted. “I don’t like that, either. Why wouldn’t they have been taken together? Which floor is she on, Toot?”

“There,” Toot said, pointing. I leaned over and hunkered down behind him so that I could look down the length of his little arm to the window he was pointing at.

“Fourth,” I said. “That was where Tilly was talking to me.”

Sanya reached down to produce a semiautomatic he’d hidden beneath the seat of the minivan and cycled a round into the chamber, his eyes glued to the outside mirror. “Company.”

A bald, slightly overweight bum in a shabby overcoat and cast- off clothing shambled down the sidewalk with vacant eyes—but he was moving a little too purposefully toward us to be genuine. I was watching his hands with my shield bracelet ready to go, expecting him to pull a weapon out from beneath the big coat, and it wasn’t until he was a few steps away that I realized it was Martin.

He stopped on the sidewalk next to the passenger window of the van and wobbled in place. He rapped on the glass and held out his hand as if begging a handout. I rolled down the window and asked him, “What happened?”

“The FBI did its legwork,” he said. “They tracked our rental car back to my cover ID, got my picture, put it on TV. One of the detectives we shook down confirmed my presence and told them I’d been seen at your place, and they were waiting there when we came back to get you. Susan created a distraction so that I could get away.”

“And you left her behind, huh?”

He shrugged. “Her identity is genuine, and while they know she arrived with me and was seen with me, they can’t prove that she’s done anything. I’ve been operating long enough that the Red Court has seen to it that I’m on multiple international lists of wanted terrorists. If I were caught, both of us would have been taken.”

I grunted. “What did you find out?”

“The last of the Red King’s inner circle arrived this morning. They’ll do the ceremony tonight,” he said. “Midnight, or a little after, if our astronomer’s assessment is solid.”

“Crap.”

Martin nodded. “How fast can you get us there?”

I touched a fingertip to my mother’s gem and double-checked the way there. “This one doesn’t have a direct route. Three hops, a couple of walks, one of them in bad terrain. Should take us ninety minutes, gets us to within five miles of Chichén Itzá.”

Martin looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, “I can’t help but find it somewhat convenient that you are suddenly able to provide that kind of fast transport to exactly the places we need to go.”

“The Red Court had their goodies stashed near a confluence of ley lines,” I said, “a point of ample magical power. Chichén Itzá is at another such confluence, only a lot bigger. Chicago is a crossroads, both physically and metaphysically. There are dozens of confluences either in the town or within twenty- five miles. The routes I know through the Nevernever mostly run from confluence to confluence, so Chicago’s got a direct route to a lot of places.”

Sanya made an interested sound. “Like the airports in Dallas or Atlanta. Or here. Travel nexuses.”

“Exactly.”

Martin nodded, though he didn’t look like he particularly believed or disbelieved me. “That gives us a little more than nine hours,” he said.

“The Church is trying to get us information about local security at Chichén Itzá. Meet me at St. Mary of the Angels.” I handed him the change scrounged from my pockets. “Tell them Harry Dresden said you were no Stevie D. We’ll leave from there.”

“You . . .” He shook his head a little. “You got the Church to help you?”

“Hell, man. I got a Knight of the Cross driving me around.”

Sanya snorted.

Martin studied Sanya with eyes that were a little wide. “I . . . see.” A certain energy seemed to enter him as he nodded, and I knew exactly what he was feeling—the positive upswing in his emotions, an electricity that came with the sudden understanding that not only was death not certain, but that victory might actually be possible.

Hope is a force of nature. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Martin nodded. “What about Susan?”

“I’ll get her out,” I said.

Martin ducked his head in another nod. Then he took a deep breath and said simply, “Thank you.” He turned and shambled away drunkenly, clutching his coins.

“Seems a decent fellow,” Sanya said. His nostrils flared a little. “Half-vampire, you say? Fellowship of St. Giles?”

“Yeah. Like Susan.” I watched Martin vanish into Chicago’s lunchtime foot traffic and said, “I’m not sure I trust him.”

“I would say the feeling is mutual,” Sanya said. “When a man lives a life like Martin’s, he learns not to trust anyone.”

I grunted sourly. “Stop being reasonable. I enjoy disliking him.”

Sanya chuckled and said, “So. What now?”

I took the guns out of my duster pockets and stowed them beneath the minivan’s passenger seat. “You go back to St. Mary’s. I go in and get Susan and meet you there.”

Sanya lifted his eyebrows. “You get her from in there?”

“Sure.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then shrugged. “Okay. I suppose it is your funeral, da?”

I nodded firmly. “Da.”

I walked into the building and through the metal detectors. They went beep. I stopped and dropped all the rings and the shield bracelet into a plastic tub, then tried again. They didn’t fuss at me the second time. I got my stuff back and walked up to a station in the center of the floor that looked like an information desk. I produced one of my cards, the ones that called me a private investigator. I had only half a dozen of them left. The rest had been in my desk drawer at the office. “I need to speak to Agent Tilly about his current investigation.”

The woman behind the desk nodded matter-of-factly, called Tilly’s office, and asked if he’d see me. She nodded once and said, “Yes, sir,” and smiled at me. “You’ll need a visitor’s badge. Here. Please make sure it is displayed at all times.”

I took the badge and clipped it to my duster. “Thanks. I know the drill.”

“Fourth floor,” she said, and nodded at the person in line behind me.

I walked down to the elevators, rode them up to four, and walked to Tilly’s office, which turned out to be right across the hall from the interrogation room. Tilly, small, dapper, and quick-looking, stood in the doorway, looking at a file in a manila folder. He let me see that there was a picture of Susan paper-clipped to the inside cover before he closed the file and tucked it under his arm.

“So,” he said. “It’s Mr. Known Associate. Just as well. I needed to talk to you again anyway.”

“I’m a popular guy this week,” I said.

“You’re telling me,” Tilly said. He folded his arms, frowning. “So. We got a car rented by a mystery man using a bogus identity, right outside a building that blows up. We got sworn testimony from two local snoops that this leggy looker named Susan Rodriguez was seen in his company. We got a pancaked Volkswagen Bug, belonging to Harry Dresden, and seventy thousand dollars’ worth of property damage near the house of a local crooked IA cop who lied his ass off to point me at you. We got a file that says that Susan Rodriguez was at one point your girlfriend. Eyewitnesses that place both her and the mystery man at your apartment—which seemed to be a little too clean of anything that could implicate you. But before we could go back and take a real hard close look at it for trace evidence, it burns to the ground. Fire chief is still working on the investigation, but his first impression is arson.” Tilly scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know if you’re current on investigative technique, but when there are this many connections between a relatively small number of people and events, it can sometimes be an indicator that they might be up to something nefarious.”

“Nefarious, huh?” I asked.

Tilly nodded. “Good word, isn’t it.” He scrunched up his nose. “Disappoints me, because my instincts said you were playing it level with me. Close to the chest, but level. I guess you can always run into someone better at lying than you are at catching them, huh.”

“Probably,” I said. “But you didn’t. At least not with me.”

He grunted. “Maybe. Maybe.” He glanced back into his office. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re playing with dynamite again, Tilly,” said Murphy’s voice.

“Murph,” I said, relieved. I leaned around Tilly and waved at her. She looked at me and shook her head. “Dammit, Dresden. Can’t you ever do anything quietly and in an orderly fashion?”

“No way,” I said. “It’s the only thing keeping Tilly here from deciding I’m some kind of bomb maker.”

Murphy’s mouth twitched up at one corner, briefly. She asked soberly, “Are you okay?”

“They burned down my house, Murph,” I said. “Mister got out, but I don’t know where he’s at. I mean, I know that a lost cat isn’t exactly a priority right now but . . .” I shrugged. “I guess I’m worried about him.”

“If he misses his feeding,” Murphy said wryly, “I’m more worried about me. Mister is the closest thing to a mountain lion for a few hundred miles. He’ll be fine.”

Tilly blinked and turned to Murphy. “Seriously?”

Murphy frowned at him. “What?”

“You still back him,” Tilly said. “Despite all the flags he’s setting off.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said.

Tilly exhaled slowly. Then he said, “All right, Dresden. Step into my office?”

I did. Tilly shut the door behind us.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

“You don’t want to know,” Murphy said. She’d beaten me to it.

“That’s funny,” Tilly said. “I just checked in with my brain about an hour ago, and at that time, it told me that it did want to know.”

Murphy exhaled and glanced at me.

I held up both hands. “I hardly know the guy. Your call.”

Murphy nodded and asked Tilly, “How much do you know about the Black Cat case files?”

Tilly looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at his identification badge, clipped to his jacket. “Funny. For a second there, I thought someone must have changed it to say ‘Mulder.’ ”

“I’m serious, Till,” Murphy said.

His dark eyebrows climbed. “Um. They were the forerunner to Special Investigations, right? Sixties, seventies, I think. They got handed all the weirdo stuff. The files make some claims that make me believe several of those officers were having fun with all the wonderful new psychotropic drugs that were coming out back then.”

“What if I told you they weren’t stoned, Till?” Murphy asked.

Tilly frowned. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“They weren’t stoned,” Murphy said.

Tilly’s frown deepened.

“SI handles all the same stuff the Black Cats did. It’s just been made real clear to us that our reports had better not sound like a drug trip. So the reports provide an explanation. They don’t provide much accuracy.”

“You’re . . . standing there, right in front of me, telling me that when Dresden told me it was vampires, he was being serious?”

“Completely,” Murphy said.

Tilly folded his arms. “Jesus, Karrin.”

“You think I’m lying to you?” she asked.

“You aren’t,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean there are vampires running around out there. It just means that you believe it’s true.”

“Maybe I’m just gullible,” Murphy suggested.

Tilly gave her a reproachful look. “Or maybe the pressure is getting to you and you aren’t seeing things objectively. I mean—”

“If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment,” Murphy interrupted, “I will break your arm in eleven places.”

Tilly pressed his lips together sourly. “Dammit, Murphy. Can you hear yourself? Vampires? For Christ’s sake. What am I supposed to think?”

Murphy spread her hands. “I’m not sure. Harry, what’s actually happening?”

I laid out the last couple of days, focusing on the events in Chicago and leaving out everything but the broadest picture of the White Council and the Red Court and their involvement.

“This vampire couple,” Murphy said. “You think they’re the ones who got to Rudolph?”

“Stands to reason. They could put pressure on him a lot of different ways. They wanted to remove him before he could squeal and sent their heavy to do it.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing here,” Tilly said.

“So when are you moving?” Murphy asked me, ignoring him.

“Tonight.”

“No one is moving anywhere until I get some answers,” Tilly said. To his credit, he didn’t stick any bravado into the sentence. He made it as a statement of simple fact.

“Don’t know how many of those I can give you, man,” I said, quietly. “There’s not much time. And my little girl is in danger.”

“This isn’t a negotiation,” Tilly said.

“Agent,” I said, sighing. “There’s still a little time. I’m willing to talk with you.” My voice hardened. “But not for long. Please believe me when I say that I can take Susan out of this building, with or without your cooperation.”

“Harry,” Murphy said, as if I’d just uttered something unthinkably rude for which I ought to be ashamed.

“Tick-tock, Murph,” I answered. “If he pushes me, I can’t afford to stand here and smile.”

“Now I’m curious,” Tilly said, bristling almost visibly. “I think I’d like to see you try that.”

“Till,” Murphy said in exactly the same voice. “Mother of God, boys, would it kill either of you to behave like adults? Please?”

I folded my arms, scowling. Tilly did the same. But we both shut up.

“Thank you,” Murphy said. “Till . . . Do you remember that tape that was on the news a few years back? After the deaths at Special Investigations?”

“The werewolf thing?” Tilly asked. “Yeah. Blurry, badly lit, out of focus, and terrible effects. The creature didn’t look anything like a werewolf. Only suddenly the tape mysteriously vanishes, so it can’t be verified by anyone. Secondhand versions are probably on the Internet somewhere.” He mused and said, “The actress they had playing you was pretty good, though.”

“That wasn’t an actress, Till,” Murphy said quietly. “I was there. I saw it happen. The tape was genuine. You have my word.”

Tilly frowned again. He ducked his head down slightly, dark eyes focused on his thoughts, as if he were reading from a report only he could see.

“Look, man,” I said quietly. “Think about it like this. What if you’d never heard me say the word vampire? What if I’d said drug cartel or terrorists instead? And I told you that this group of terrorists was financed by shady corporations and that one of them had blown the office building to prevent their illegal data from being stolen and exposed to the world? What if I had told you that because I’d pissed them off, a bunch of terrorists had taken my daughter? That they were going to cut her head off and put the video on the Internet? That Susan and the mystery man were spooks from an organization I was not at liberty to divulge, trying to help me find and recover the girl? Would it still sound crazy?”

Tilly cocked his head for a second. Then he said in a subdued voice, “It would sound like the plot of a cheesy novel.” He shrugged. “But . . . the logic would hold up. I mean . . . they don’t call those assholes ‘extremists’ for nothing.”

“Okay,” I said gently. “Then . . . maybe we can just pretend I said it was terrorists. And go from there. It’s my daughter, man.”

Tilly looked back and forth from me to Murphy. He said quietly, “Either you’re both crazy—or I am—or you’re telling me the truth.” He shook his head. “And . . . I’m not sure which of the possibilities disturbs me more.”

“You got a piece of paper?” I asked him.

Bemused, he opened his drawer and got out a pad.

I grabbed a pen and wrote on it:

Susan,

Tell him everything.

Harry

I tore off the page, folded the note, and said, “I guess Susan hasn’t said much to you.”

Tilly grunted. “Nothing, in fact. Literally nothing. Which is fairly hard-core, in my experience.”

“She can be stubborn,” I said. “Go give her this. You know I haven’t seen her in hours. Get her story, off the record. See how well it matches up.”

He took the note and looked at it. Then back at me.

“Hard to know who to trust,” I said. “Talk to her. Try to take the story apart. See if it stands up.”

He thought about it for a moment and said, “Keep him here, Murphy.”

“Okay.”

Tilly left.

There were two chairs, and neither looked comfortable. I settled down on the floor and closed my eyes.

“How bad is it?” she asked me.

“Pretty bad,” I said quietly. “Um. I need to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“If . . . Look. I have a will in a lockbox at the National Bank on Michigan. If something should happen to me . . . I’d appreciate it if you’d see to it. You’re on the list of people who can open it. Listed as executor.”

“Harry,” she said.

“Granted, there’s not much to have a will about at the moment,” I said. “Everything was in my house or office, but . . . there are some intangibles and . . .” I felt my throat tighten, and cut short my request. “Take care of it for me?”

There was silence, and then Murphy moved and settled down next to me. Her hand squeezed mine. I squeezed back.

“Sure,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“There’s . . . there’s nothing in there about Maggie, obviously,” I said. “But if I can’t be there to . . . I want her in a good home. Somewhere safe.”

“Hey, emo boy,” she said. “Time to take a gloom break. Right? You aren’t dead yet, as far as I can tell.”

I snorted quietly and opened my eyes, looking up at her.

“You’ll take care of her yourself when this is done.”

I shook my head slowly. “I . . . can’t, Murph. Susan was right. All I can offer her is a life under siege. My enemies would use her. She’s got to vanish. Go somewhere safe. Really safe. Not even I can know where she is.” I swallowed on a choking sensation in my throat. “Father Forthill at St. Mary’s can help. Mouse should go with her. He’ll help protect her.”

Murphy looked at me, troubled. “You aren’t telling me something.”

“It isn’t important for now,” I said. “If you could find Mister . . . Molly might like to have him around. Just so long as he’s taken care of.”

“Jesus, Harry,” Murphy said.

“I’m not planning a suicide run, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “But there’s a possibility that I won’t come back from this. If that happens, I need someone I can trust to know my wishes and carry them out. In case I can’t.”

“I’ll do it,” Murphy said, and let out a short laugh. “For crying out loud, I’ll do it, just so we can talk about something else.”

I smiled, too, and Rudolph entered Tilly’s office and found us both on the floor, grinning.

Everyone froze. No one looked certain of how to react.

“Well,” Rudolph said quietly. “I always figured this for what it was. But, boy, did you have everyone at your headquarters fooled, Murphy.”

“Hi, Rudy,” I said. “You’ve got a beautiful home.”

Rudolph gnashed his teeth and drew an envelope out of his pocket. He flicked it to the floor near Murphy. “For you. A cease-and-desist order, specifying that you aren’t allowed within two hundred yards of this case or anyone involved in the active investigation, until your competence and noncomplicity have been confirmed by a special tribunal of the Chicago Police Board. Also a written order from Lieutenant Stallings, specifying that you are to have nothing to do with the investigation into the explosion, and relieving you of duty forthwith if you do not comply.” His eyes shifted to me. “You. I haven’t forgotten you.”

“Shame,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten you, but you’ve ruined that. Walking into the room and all.”

“This isn’t over, Dresden.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’ve been having that kind of week.”

Murphy opened the envelope and read over a pair of pages. Then she looked at Rudolph and said, “What did you tell them?”

“You have your orders, Sergeant,” Rudolph said coldly. “Leave the building before I relieve you of your weapon and your shield.”

“You mosquito-dicked weasel,” she said, her voice coldly furious.

“That remark is going into my report for the tribunal, Murphy,” Rudolph said. There was a vicious satisfaction in his voice. “And once they read the rest, you’re done. With your record? They aren’t paying you any more slack, bitch. You’re gone.”

Something dark and ugly stirred in my chest, and the sudden image of Rudolph pinned to the wall by a ton of crystalline ice popped into my brain.

“Bitch?” Murphy said, rising.

“Whoa,” I said, drawing out the word as I came to my own feet, and speaking as much to myself as to the furious woman. “Murph, don’t play his game here.”

“Game?” Rudolph said. “You’re a menace, Murphy, and a disgrace. You belong behind bars. Once you’re out, it’ll happen, too. You and this clown both.”

“Clown?” I said, in the exact same tone Murphy had used.

And the lights went out.

There was a sudden hush all around us, as FBI headquarters was plunged into powerless darkness. After several seconds, the emergency lights still hadn’t come on.

“Harry,” Murphy said, her tone annoyed.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck crawling around. I lowered my voice and said, “That wasn’t me.”

“Where are the emergency lights?” Rudolph said. “Th-they’re supposed to turn on within seconds. Right?”

“Heh,” I said into the darkness. “Heh, heh. Rudy, old buddy, do you remember the night we met?”

Tilly’s office was adjacent to the elevator. And I distinctly heard the hunting scream of a Red Court vampire echoing around the elevator shaft.

It was followed by a chorus of screams, more than a score of individual hunting cries.

Lots of vampires in an enclosed space. That was bad.

The heavy, throbbing beat of a hideous heart underlay the screams, audible four stories up and through the wall. I shuddered.

Lots of vampires and the Ick in an enclosed space. That was worse.

“What is that?” Rudolph asked in a squeaky whisper.

I willed light into my amulet, prepared my shield bracelet, and drew my blasting rod out of my coat. Beside me, Murphy had already drawn her SIG. She tested the little flashlight on it, found it functional, and looked up at me with the serene expression and steady breathing that told me that she was controlling her fear. “What’s the play?” she asked.

“Get Susan and get out,” I said. “If I’m not here and she’s not here, they’ve got no reason to attack.”

“What is it?” Rudolph asked again. “What is that noise? Huh?”

Murphy leaned her head a bit toward Rudolph, questioning me with a quirked eyebrow.

“Dammit.” I sighed. “You’re right. We’ll have to take him with us, too.”

“Tell me!” Rudolph said, near panic. “You have to tell me what that is!”

“Do we tell him?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Murphy and I turned toward the door, weapons raised, and spoke in offhanded stereo. “Terrorists.”

Chapter Thirty-five

By the time Murphy and I had moved into the hall, gunfire had erupted on the floors below us. It didn’t sound like much—simple, staccato thumping sounds—but anyone who’d heard shots fired in earnest would never mistake them for anything else. I hoped that nobody was carrying rounds heavy enough to come up through the intervening floors and nail me. There just aren’t any minor injuries to be had from something like that.

“Those screams,” Murphy said. “Red Court, right?”

“Yeah. Where’s Susan?”

“Interrogation room, that way.” She nodded to the left, and I took the lead. I walked with my shoulder brushing the left-hand wall. Murph, after dragging the sputtering Rudolph out of the office, walked a step behind me and a pace to my right, so that she could shoot past me if she had to. We’d played this game before. If something bad came for us, I’d stand it off long enough to give her a clean shot.

That would be critical, buying her the extra second to place her shot. Vampires aren’t immune to the damage bullets cause, but they can recover from anything but the most lethal hits, and they know it. A Red Court vampire would almost always be willing to charge a mortal gunman, knowing how difficult it is to really place a shot with lethal effect, especially with a howling monster rushing toward you. You needed a hit square in the head, severing the spine, or in their gut, rupturing the blood reservoir, to really put a Red Court vampire down—and they could generally recover, even from those wounds, with enough time and blood to feed upon.

Murphy knew exactly what she was shooting at and had proved that she could be steady enough to deal with a Red—but the other personnel in the building lacked her knowledge and experience.

The FBI was in for a real bad day.

We moved down the hall, quick and silent, and when a frightened-looking clerical type stumbled out of a break room doorway toward us, I nearly sent a blast of flame through him. Murphy had her badge hanging around her neck, and she instructed him to get back inside and barricade the door. He was clearly terrified, and responded without question to the tone of calm authority in Murph’s voice.

“Maybe we should do that,” Rudolph said. “Get in a room. Barricade the door.”

“They’ve got a heavy with them,” I said to Murphy as I took the lead again. “Big, strong, fast. Like the loup- garou. It’s some kind of Mayan thing, an Ik-something-or-other.”

Murphy cursed. “How do we kill it?”

“Not sure. But daylight seems a pretty good bet.” We were passing down a hallway that had several offices with exterior windows. The light of the autumn afternoon, reduced by the occasional curtain, created a kind of murky twilight to move through, and one that my ambient blue wizard light did little to disperse.

Eerier than the lighting was the silence. No air ducts sighed. No elevators rattled. No phones rang. But twice I heard gunshots—the rapid bang-bang-bang of practically useless panic fire. Vampires shrieked out their hunting cries several different times. And the thub-dub of the Ick’s bizarre heartbeat was steady, omnipresent—and slowly growing louder.

“Maybe we need a lot of mirrors or something,” Murphy said. “Bring a bunch of daylight in.”

“Way harder to do than it looks in the movies,” I said. “I figure I’ll just blow open a hole in the side of the building.” I licked my lips. “Crud, uh. Which way is south? That’ll be the best side to do it on.”

“You’re threatening to destroy a federal building!” Rudolph squeaked.

Gunshots sounded somewhere close—maybe on the third floor, directly below us. Maybe on the other side of the fourth floor, muffled by a lot of cubicle walls.

“Oh, God,” Rudolph whimpered. “Oh, dear, sweet Jesus.” He just started repeating that in a mindlessly frightened whisper.

“Aha,” I said as we reached the interrogation room. “We have our Cowardly Lion. Cover me, Dorothy.”

“Remind me to ask what the hell you’re talking about later,” Murphy said.

I started to open the door, but paused. Tilly was armed, presumably smart enough to be scared, and it probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to just open the door of the room and scare him. So I moved as far as possible to one side, reached way over to the door, and knocked. In code, even. Shave and a haircut.

There was a lengthy pause and then someone knocked on the other side of the door. Two bits.

I twisted the knob and opened the door very, very slowly.

“Tilly?” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Susan?”

The interrogation room didn’t have any windows, and it was completely dark inside. Tilly appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. “Dresden?”

“Yeah, obviously,” I said. “Susan?”

“I’m here,” she said from the darkness, her voice shaking with fear. “I’m cuffed to the chair. Harry, we’ve got to go.”

“Working on it,” I said quietly.

“You don’t understand. That thing, that drumming sound. It’s a devourer. You don’t fight them. You run, and pray someone slower than you attracts its attention.”

“Yeah. Already met the Ick,” I said. “I’d rather not repeat the experience.” I held out a hand to Tilly. “I need cuff keys.”

Tilly hesitated, clearly torn between his sense of duty and order and the primal fear that had risen in the building. He shook his head, but it didn’t seem like his heart was in it.

“Tilly,” Murphy said. She turned to him, her expression ferociously determined, and said, “Trust me. Please just do it. People are going to die as long as these three are in the building.”

He passed me the keys.

I took them over to Susan, who was sitting in the same chair I had during my chat with the feds. She wore her dark leather pants and a black T-shirt and looked oddly vulnerable just sitting there during a situation like this. I went to her and started unfastening the cuffs.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I was getting a little worried there.”

“They must have come in through the basement somehow,” I said.

She nodded. “They’ll work their way up, floor by floor. Kill everyone they can. It’s how they operate. Remove the target and leave a message for everyone else.”

Tilly shook his head as if dazed. “That’s . . . What? That’s how some of the cartels operate in Colombia, Venezuela, but . . .”

Susan gave him an impatient look and shook her head. “What have I been telling you for the last fifteen minutes?”

A vampire let out a hunting scream, one not interdicted by floors.

“They’re here,” Susan whispered as she rubbed at her newly freed wrists. “We have to move.”

I stopped for a moment. Then I said quietly, “They’ll just keep on killing until they find the target, floor by floor,” I said.

Susan nodded tightly.

I bit my lip. “So, if we run . . . they’ll keep going. All the way up.”

Murphy turned her head to look at me, then jerked her eyes back out to the hallway, wary. “Fight?”

“We won’t win,” I said, certain. “Not here, on their timing. They’ve got all the advantages. But we can’t just abandon all those people, either.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, we can’t,” Murphy said. “So. What are we going to do?”

“Does anyone have an extra weapon?” Susan asked. No one said anything, and she nodded, turned to the heavy conference table, and flipped it over with one hand. She tore off a heavy steel leg as if it had been attached with a kindergartner’s glue rather than high-grade steel bolts.

Tilly stared, his mouth open. Then he said, very quietly, “Ah.”

Susan whirled the table leg once, testing its balance, and nodded. “It will do.”

I grunted. Then I said, “Here’s the plan. We’re going to show ourselves to the vampires and the Ick. We’re going to hit whoever they have out front with everything we have and squash them flat. That should make sure we have the attention of the entire strike team.”

“Yes,” Murphy said in a dry tone. “That’s brilliant.”

I made a face at her. “Once they’re good and interested, you, Tilly, and Rudolph are going to split off from the rest of us and hit the nearest emergency exit. If it comes down to it, you probably have better odds of surviving a jump out the window than you do staying in here. You with me?”

Murphy frowned. “What about you?”

“Susan, me, and your stunt doubles are going to jump over into the Nevernever and try to draw the bad guys after us.”

“Stunt doubles?” Murphy asked.

“We are?” Susan asked, alarmed.

“Sure. I need your mighty thews to protect me. You being superchick and all.”

“Okay,” Susan said, eyeing me as if she thought I was losing my mind—which, hey, I admit. Totally possible. “What’s on the other side?”

“No clue,” I said, and a touch to my mother’s gem told me that she hadn’t ever actually been in this building on her dimension- hopping jaunts. “We’ll hope it isn’t an ocean of acid or a patch of cloud five thousand feet above a big rock.”

Susan’s eyes widened slightly. And then she shot me a wolfish smile. “I love this plan.”

“Thought you would,” I said. “Meanwhile, you three get out. Does this place have an exterior fire escape?”

Rudolph just rocked back and forth, making soft moaning noises. Tilly still looked stunned at what he had just seen from Susan.

Murphy cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. “Hey. Barry.”

Tilly shook his head and looked at her. “Fire escape. No.”

“Find a stairwell, then,” I told Murphy. “Go quiet and fast, in case some of them were too stupid to follow me.”

Murphy nodded and gave Tilly’s shoulder a little shake. “Hey. Tilly. You’re in charge of Rudolph. All right? Keep him moving and out of any lines of fire.”

The slender little man nodded, slowly at first, and then more rapidly as he seemed to take control of himself. “Okay. I’m his nanny. Got it.”

Murphy gave him part of a grin and a firm nod.

“Right,” I said. “Is this a great plan or what? I’m point; Murph, you’ve got my six; Susan, you ride drag.”

“Got it,” Susan said.

The faint, constant drumbeat of the Ick’s throbbing heart got fractionally louder.

“Go,” I said, and hit the hallways again. At my request, Tilly steered us toward the central staircase running parallel to the elevator shafts, because I figured it would make sense for most of the strike team to use the central stairwell, while the others were covered by maybe a single guard.

We ran into another handful of people who were hovering, uncertain of what to do, and who looked at me in a manner that suggested they would find my advice less than credible.

“Tilly,” I said, half pleading.

Tilly nodded and started speaking in a calm, authoritative tone. “There’s some kind of attack under way. Tammy, you and Joe and Mickey need to get to one of the offices with a window. You got that? A window. Take the curtains down, let the light in, barricade the door, and sit tight.” He looked at me and said, “Help’s on the way.”

I swapped a look with Murphy, who nodded confidently at me. Tilly had gotten the supernatural shoved in his face pretty hard, but he’d rebounded with tremendous agility. Or maybe he’d simply cracked. I guessed we’d see eventually.

The federal personnel scurried to obey Tilly, running down the hall we’d just come from.

If we’d been about ten seconds slower, the vampire would have found them first instead of us.

I heard a scream, shrill and terrible, meant to send a jolt of terrorized surprise through the prey so that the vampire could close upon it. It really said something about the Red Court, that simple tactic. Animals would never have been startled into immobility that way. It takes a thinking mind, trying to reason its way to what was happening, to fall for a psychological ploy like that one.

And it probably said something about me that it completely failed to startle me. Or maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. As the Scarecrow, I felt that I had amply proven that I didn’t have much of a brain with which to be messed.

So instead of finding a helpless target waiting for him, the Red Court vampire found a field of adamant, invisible power as I brought my shield up. And while it might have supernatural strength, that didn’t increase its mass. It bounced off my shield like any other body would if abruptly meeting someone’s front bumper at fifty or sixty miles an hour.

There was a flash of blue light, and I released the shield with a little English on it, tossing the vampire to sprawl on the ground on the righthand side of the hallway, squarely in Murphy’s line of fire, and started moving forward again.

Murphy calmly put two bullets into the vampire’s head, which made an unholy mess of the wall behind it. She put two more into its blood-gorged belly on the way by, and as Susan passed, I heard an ugly, moist sound of impact.

Tilly stood there staring for a second, frozen. Then Susan nudged him into motion again. The agent grabbed Rudolph and dragged him after Murphy and me.

We found the first human body several steps later, a glassy-eyed young woman covered in her own blood. Beyond her, a man in a suit lay sprawled on his face in death, and the corpses of two more women lay within a few feet of him.

There was the most furtive of sounds from a darkened supply closet near an intersection of hallways, its doorway gaping wide open. I didn’t let on that I’d heard it.

“You know what?” I said quietly to no one in particular. “That makes me mad.”

I turned with my blasting rod’s runes blazing into sudden life and roared, “Fuego!”

A spear of white-hot fire erupted from the rod, blowing through the interior wall in a concussive chorus of shattering materials. I slewed it along the length of the closet at waist height, cutting through the wall like an enormous buzz saw.

A surprised scream of inhuman agony greeted my efforts, and I spun in place at once, bringing up the shield again. A second vampire bounded around the intersection ahead, running on all fours along the wall, and threw itself at me. At the same time, another of the rubbery black creatures exploded out of an air vent I would have sworn was too tiny to contain it, coming down from almost straight overhead.

I rebounded the first vamp from my shield, as I had only moments before, and Murphy’s gun began to bark the instant it bounced off the wall and to the floor.

I couldn’t get my shield up in time to stop the one plunging down from overhead.

It landed on me, a horrible, squishy weight, and with the crystalline perceptions of surging adrenaline I saw its jaws dropping open nightmarishly wide, unhinging like a snake’s. Its fangs gleamed. Black claws on all four limbs were poised to rake, and its two- foot-long tongue lashed at me as well, seeking exposed skin in order to deliver its stupefying venom.

I went down to the floor on my face, hurriedly covering my head with my arms. The vampire raked at me furiously, but the defensive spells on my duster held and prevented its claws from scoring. The vampire shifted tactics quickly, tossing me over like a rodeo cowboy taking down a calf. The writhing, slimy tongue lashed at my face, now vulnerable.

Susan’s hand closed on that tongue in midmotion, and with a twist of her wrist and shoulders, she ripped it out of the vampire’s mouth. The vamp threw its head back and shrieked—and my ex-sweetie’s improvised mace smashed its skull down into its torso.

The vampire in the closet, still out of sight, continued to wail its agony as I rose again and checked around me to make sure everyone was there. “Anyone hurt?”

“W-we’re fine,” Tilly said. For a guy who’d just had a couple of close encounters with imaginary creatures, he seemed to be fairly coherent. Rudolph had retreated to his happy place, and just kept on rocking, crying, and whispering. “What about you, Dresden?”

“Peachy.”

Murphy turned toward the closet, her face grim, her gun in her hand. I shook my head at her. “No. Let it scream. It’ll draw the others to us and away from anyone else.”

Murphy looked at me for a moment, frowning gently, but nodded. “God, that’s cold, Harry.”

“I lost my warm fuzzies for the Reds a long time ago,” I said. The wounded vampire just wouldn’t shut up. Fire’s tough on them. Their outer layer of skin is combustible. My attack had probably left it in two pieces, or otherwise pared down its body mass. It would be a smoldering lump of agony writhing on the floor, in so much pain that it could literally do nothing but scream.

And that suited me just fine.

“We aren’t just standing here, are we?” Tilly asked.

A pair of particularly loud, simultaneous shrieks came through the vents and shafts, ululating over and under each other. They were particularly strident and piercing, and went on for longer than the others. A chorus of lesser shrieks wailed briefly in reply.

The Eebs, as generals, sending orders to the troops. It had to be, coordinating the raid and directing it toward the injured member of the team.

“Indeed we are not. All right, folks. Murph, Tilly, Rudolph, get scarce. Follow Murphy and do whatever the hell she tells you to do if you want to get out of this alive.”

Murphy grimaced at that. “Be careful, Dresden.”

“You too,” I said. “See you at the church.”

She gave me a sharp nod, beckoned Tilly, and the two of them started off down another hallway to one of the side stairwells. With any luck, the Eebs had just sent everyone they had running toward me. Even if Murphy and Tilly weren’t lucky, I figured they’d probably have only a single sentry to deal with, at the most. I gave Murphy even odds of handling that. A 50 percent chance of survival wasn’t real encouraging, but it was about 50 percent higher than if they’d stayed.

Susan watched them go and then looked at me. “You and Murphy never hooked up?”

“You’re asking this now?” I demanded.

“Should I fix us both a nice cup of tea, in our copious free time?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “No. We haven’t.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“A lot of reasons. Bad timing. Other relationships. You know.” I took a long, deep breath and said, “Keep an eye out. I’ve got to pull off something hard here.”

“Right,” Susan said. She went back to watching the gloom, her club held ready.

I closed my eyes and summoned up my will. Time for some real razzle-dazzle stuff.

Illusions are a fascinating branch of magic. There are two basic ways to manage them. One, you can create an image and put it in someone else’s head. There’s no actual visible object there, but their brain tells them that it’s there, big as life—a phantasm. It’s walking real close to the borders of the Laws of Magic to go that way, but it could be very effective.

The second method is the creation of an actual visible object or creature—a kind of hologram. Those things are much harder to produce, because you have to pour a lot more energy into them, and while a phantasm uses a foe’s own mind to create consistency within the illusion, you’ve got to do it the hard way with holomancy.

Murph’s image was easy to fix in mind, as was Rudolph’s, though I admit that I might have made him look a bit skinnier and slouchier than he might actually have been. My holomancy, my rules.

The hardest was Tilly. I kept getting the image of the actor from The X Files confabulated with the actual Tilly, and the final result was kinda marginal. But I was in a rush.

I pictured the images with as much clarity as I could and sent my will, including a tiny bit of soulfire, into creating the mirages.

Soulfire isn’t really a destructive force. It’s sort of the opposite, actually. And while I used it in fights to enhance my offensive spells, it really shone when creating things.

I whispered, “Lumen, camerus, factum!” and released energy into the mental images. The holograms of Murphy, Tilly, and Rudolph shimmered into existence, so absolutely real- looking that even I thought they might have been solid matter.

“They’re coming!” Susan said abruptly. She turned to me and practically jumped out of her shoes upon seeing the illusions. Then she waved a hand at Tilly’s image, and it flickered straight through. She let out a low whistle and said, “Time to go?”

The thunder of the Ick’s heart grew abruptly louder, a vibration I could feel through the soles of my shoes.

Vampires boiled out of the central stairwell, a sudden tide of flabby, rubbery black bodies and all-black eyes, of spotted pink tongues and gleaming fangs. At their center, in their flesh- masked forms, were Esteban and Esmerelda. And looming behind them was the Ick.

Susan and I turned and sprinted. The three illusions did the same thing, complete with the sounds of running footfalls and heavy breathing. With a group howl the vampires came after us.

I ran as hard as I could, drawing up more of my will. I should have been feeling some of the strain by now, but I wasn’t. Go, go, Gadget Faustian bargain.

I gathered my will, shouted, “Aparturum!” and slashed at the air down the hallway with my right hand.

I’d used a lot of energy to open the Way, and it tore wide, a diagonal rip in the fabric of space, crooked and off center to the hallway. It hung there like some kind of oddly geometric cloud of mist, and I pointed at it, shouting wordlessly to Susan. She shouted something back, nodding, while behind us the vampires gained ground with every second.

We both screamed in a frenzy of wild fear and rampant adrenaline, and hit the Way moving at a dead run.

We plunged through—into empty air.

I let out a shriek as I fell, and figured I’d finally taken my last desperate gamble—but after less than a second, my flailing limbs hit solid stone and I dropped into a roll. I came back up to my feet and kept running through what appeared to be a spacious cavern of some kind, and Susan ran beside me.

We didn’t run far. A wall loomed up out of the blackness and we barely stopped in time to keep from braining ourselves against it.

“Jesus,” Susan said, panting. “Have you been working out?”

I turned, blasting rod in hand and ready, to wait for the first of the pursuing vampires to appear. There were shrieks and wails and the sound of scrabbling claws—but none of them emerged from the shadows.

Which . . . just couldn’t have been good.

Susan and I stood there, a solid wall to our backs, unsure of what to do next. And then a soft green light began to rise.

It intensified slowly, coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and within a few seconds I realized that we weren’t in a cave. We were in a hall. A medieval dining hall, to be precise. I was staring at a double row of trestle tables that stretched down the length of the hall, easily better than a hundred yards, leaving an open aisle between them. Seated at the tables were . . . things.

There was a curious similarity among them, though no two of the creatures were the same. They were vaguely humanoid. They wore cloth and leather and armor, all of it inscribed with odd geometric shapes in colors that could only with difficulty be differentiated from black. Some of them were tall and emaciated, some squat and muscular, some medium-sized, and every combination in between. Some of the creatures had huge ears, or no ears, or odd, saggy chins. None of them carried the beauty of symmetry. Their similarity was in mismatchedness, each individual’s body at aesthetic war with itself.

One thing was the same: They all had gleaming red eyes, and if ever a gang looked evil, these beings did.

They had one other thing in common. They were all armed with knives, swords, axes, and other, crueler implements of battle.

Susan and I had come in sprinting down the center aisle between the tables. We must have startled our hosts, who reacted only in time to catch the second batch of intruders to come through—and catch them they had. Some of the largest of the beings, easily weighing half a ton themselves, had piled onto the Ick and held it pinned to the earth. Nearby, the mob of vampires were lumped more or less together, each one entangled in nets made out of some material that I can only describe as flexible barbed wire.

Only Esteban and Esmerelda stood on their feet, back- to-back, between the Ick and the netted minions. There was blood on the floor near them, and two of the native creatures were lying still upon the stone floor.

“Jesus,” Susan whispered. “What are those things?”

“I . . .” I swallowed. “I think they’re goblins.”

“You think?”

“I’ve never seen one before,” I replied. “But . . . they match the descriptions I’ve heard.”

“Shouldn’t we be able to handle, like, a million of them?”

I snorted. “You liked those movies, too, huh?”

Her reply was a smile, one touched with sadness.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking of you when I saw them, too.” I shook my head. “And no. This is a case of folklore getting it wrong. These guys are killers. They’re sneaky and they’re smart and they’re ruthless. Like ninjas. From Krypton. Look what they did.”

Susan stared at the downed Red Court strike team for a moment. I watched the wheels turn in her head as she processed what had happened to the vampires and the Ick, in a handful of seconds, in complete darkness and in total silence.

“Um. I guess we’d better make nice, then, huh?” Susan asked. She slipped her club around behind her back and put on her old reporter’s smile, the one she used to disarm hostile interviewees.

And then I had a thought.

A horrible, horrible thought.

I turned slowly around. I looked at the wall I’d been standing against.

And then I looked up.

It wasn’t a wall, exactly. It was a dais. A big one. Atop it sat a great stone throne.

And upon the throne sat a figure in black armor, covered from head to toe. He was huge, nine feet tall at least, and had a lean, athletic look to him despite the armor. His helm covered his head and veiled his face with darkness, and great, savagely pointed antlers rose up from the helmet, though whether they were adornment or appendage I couldn’t say. Within the visor of that helmet was a pair of steady red eyes, eyes that matched the thousands of others in the hall.

He leaned forward, the Lord of the Goblins of Faerie, leader of the Wild Hunt, nightmare of story and legend and peer of the Queen of Air and Darkness, Mab herself.

“Well,” murmured the Erlking. “Well, well, well. Isn’t this interesting .”

Chapter Thirty-six

I stared up at the Erlking, and with my typical pithy brilliance said, “Uh-oh.”

The Erlking chuckled, a deep sound. It echoed around the hall, resonating from the stone, amplified into subtle music. If I’d had any doubts that I was standing at the heart of the Erlking’s power, that laugh and the way the hall had responded in harmony took care of them for me. “It seems, my kin, that we have guests.”

More chuckles rose up from a thousand throats, and evil red eyes crinkled with amusement.

“I confess,” the Erlking said, “that this is a . . . unique event. We are unaccustomed to visitors here. I trust you will be patient whilst I blow the dust from the old courtesies.”

Again, the goblins laughed. The sound seemed to press directly against whatever nerve raised the hairs on my arms.

The Erlking rose, smooth and silent despite his armor and his mass, and descended from the dais. He walked around to loom over us, and I took note of the huge sword at his side, its pommel and hilt bristling with sharp metal protrusions that looked like thorns. He studied us for a moment and then did two things I hadn’t really expected.

First, he took off his helmet. The horns were, evidently, fixed to the dark metal. I braced myself to view something horrible but . . . the Lord of Goblins was nothing like what I had expected.

Upon his face, the hideous asymmetries of the goblins of his hall were all reflected and somehow transformed. Though he, too, shared the irregular batch of features, upon him their fundamental repulsiveness was muted into a kind of roguish distinction. His crooked nose seemed something that might have been earned rather than gifted. Old, faint scars marred his face, but only added further grace notes to his appearance. Standing there before the Erlking, I felt as if I were looking at something handcrafted by a true master, perhaps carved from a piece of twisted drift-wood, given its own odd beauty, and then patiently refined and polished into something made lovely by its sheer, unique singularity.

There was power in that face, too, in his simple presence. You could feel it in the air around him, the tension and focus of a pure predator, and one who rarely failed to bring down his prey.

The second thing he did was to bow with inhuman elegance, take Susan’s hand, and bend to brush his lips across the backs of her fingers. She stared at him with wide eyes that were more startled than actually afraid, and she kept her smile going the whole time.

“Lady huntress,” he said. “The scent of fresh blood hangs upon you. Well does it become your nature.”

He looked at me and smiled, showing his teeth, which were white and straight and even, and I had to fight to keep from flinching from his gaze. The Erlking had a score to settle with me. I had better come up with a plan, and fast, or I was a dead man.

“And the new Knight of Winter,” he continued. “I nearly had thee at Arctis Tor, when the ogres caught up to thee upon the slopes. Hadst thou departed but threescore heartbeats later . . .” He shook his head. “Thou art an intriguing quarry, Sir Knight.”

I bowed to the Erlking in what I hoped was a respectful fashion. “I do thank thee for the compliment, O King,” I said. “Though it is chance, not design, that brought me hither, I am humbled by thy generosity in accepting us into thine home as guests. Mine host.”

The Erlking cocked his head slightly to one side, and then his mouth turned up into another amused smile. “Ah. Caught out by mine own words, ’twould seem. Courtesy is not a close companion unto me, so perhaps it is meet that in a duel of manners, thou wouldst have the advantage. And this hall honors cleverness and wisdom as much as strength.”

A murmur of goblin voices ran through the hall at his words, because I’d just done something impossibly impudent. I’d dropped myself into the dinner hall of the greatest hunter of Faerie—practically thrown myself onto a plate with an apple in my mouth, in fact—and then used an idle slip of his tongue to claim the ancient rights of protection as his guest, thus obligating him, as host, to uphold those responsibilities to me.

I’ve said it before. The customs of host and guest are a Big Deal to these people. It’s insane, but it’s who they are.

I bowed my head to him respectfully, rather than saying anything like, Gee, it’s not often one of the fae gets outwitted by a lowly human, which should be proof enough for anyone that I’m not entirely devoid of diplomatic skills. “I should not wish to intrude upon your hospitality any longer than is absolutely necessary, Lord of Hunters. With your goodwill, we will depart immediately and trouble you no more.”

“Do not listen to it, O Erlking,” called a woman’s clear soprano. It was easy to recognize Esmerelda. “It speaks honeyed words with a poisoned tongue, full intent upon deceiving you.”

The Erlking turned to regard the pair of vampires, still on their feet despite the efforts of the goblins who had initially attacked them. He studied them in complete silence for several seconds and then, after a glance at the fallen goblins near them, inclined his head. “Hunters of the Red Court, I bid ye continue. I listen. Pray tell me more.”

“Wiley game indeed, this wizard kin,” said Esteban. “It was well treed and out of tricks but for this shameful bid to escape the rightful conclusion of the hunt. With full intent did the wizard bring us here, into your demesne, intending to use you, O Erlking, to strike down his own foes.”

“When hunting a fox, one must be wary not to follow it into the great bear’s lair,” the Erlking replied. “This is common sense for any hunter, by my reckoning.”

“Well-spoken, Goblin King,” Esmerelda said. “But by this action, the wizard seeks to draw you into the war betwixt its folk and ours, for we hunt it upon the express wishes of our lord and master, as part of our rightly declared war.”

The Erlking’s red eyes narrowed and flicked back over to me. I could hear a low and angry undertone to his next words. “I desire naught of any other being, save to pursue my hunts in accordance with the ancient traditions without interference. I tell thee this aright, Sir Knight. Should this hunter’s words prove true, I will lay a harsh penalty upon thee and thine—one which the Powers will speak of in whispers of dread for a thousand years.”

I swallowed. I thought about it. Then I lifted my chin and said calmly, “I give thee my word, as Knight of the Winter Court, that I had no such intention when coming here. It was chance that brought this chase to thy hall, O Erlking. I swear it upon my power.”

The ancient fae stared hard at me for several more seconds, his nostrils flaring. Then he drew back his head slowly and nodded once. “So. I am given a riddle by my most thoughtful visitors,” he said, his voice rumbling. He looked from the Eebs and company back to Susan and me. “What to do with you all. For I wish not to encourage visits such as this one.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Now I am reminded why I do not indulge in courtesy as do the Sidhe. Such matters delight them. I find that they pall swiftly.”

A very large, very powerful-looking goblin near the front of the hall said, “My king, render blood judgment upon them all. They are intruders in your realm. Place their heads upon your gates as a warning to any who would follow.”

A rumble of agreement ran through the crowd of goblins.

The Erlking seemed to muse on the idea for a moment.

“Or,” I offered, “such an act might invite more interference. The express servants of the king of the Red Court would surely be missed should they not return. The White Council of wizards would, I assure you, have very strong feelings about my own disappearance. To say nothing, of course, of Mab’s reaction. I’m still quite new, and she hasn’t yet tired of me.”

The Erlking waved a hand. “Nay, nay. The Knight caught my words fairly. Guests they are, Lord Ordulaka, and I will not cheapen my honor by betraying that ancient compact.” He narrowed his eyes. “Mmmm. Guests they are. Perhaps I should treat them most courteously. Perhaps I should insist that you remain my guests, to be cared for and entertained, for the next century.” He gave me a chilly little smile. “After all, you are all but the first visitors to my realm. I could understandably find it greatly insulting were you not to allow me the opportunity to honor you appropriately.”

The Eebs looked at each other and then both bowed sinuously to the Erlking. “Generous host,” Esteban said, “you honor us greatly. We should be pleased to stay as your guests for whatever length of time you feel appropriate.”

“Harry,” Susan hissed, tensing.

She didn’t need to explain it to me. A delay of even a few hours might mean Maggie’s death.

“Honored host,” I said. “Such a path would be no less than your due, given the . . . unanticipated nature of our visit. But I would beg you only to consider my obligations to my Lady Mab. I pursue a quest that I may not lay aside, and which she has bidden me complete. It hinges upon things that occur in mortal time, and were you to insist upon your rights as host, it could compromise my own honor. Something I know that you, as mine host, would never wish to do.”

The Erlking gave me a look that blended annoyance with amusement and said, “Few Winter Knights have had swords as swift as your tongue, boy. But I warn thee: name your Lady a third time and you will not like what follows.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. Hell’s bells, he was right. Speaking Mab’s name here, in the Nevernever, could indeed summon her. At which point not only would she be an intruder in another ruler’s domain, perhaps vulnerable to his power or influence, but she would be extremely annoyed with one overtaxed wizard for having brought her. The clashing of such Powers in simple proximity could prove dangerous, even deadly.

I bowed my head again and said, “Of course, mine host.”

A goblin about five feet tall, and so slender that it looked like a stiff wind might blow him down, appeared from the shadows and diffidently took the Erlking’s helmet. He began to turn to carry it away, paused, and suggested, in a spidery, whispering, unpleasant voice, “We are all predators here, my lord. Let it be settled in a trial of blood.”

The Erlking spread his hands, as if he felt the suggestion should have been self-evident to everyone present. “Of course, Rafforut. Again, thou hast given excellent service.”

The wispy goblin bowed at the waist and retreated to the shadows, his mouth curling up in a small smile.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”

“What?” Susan asked.

I turned to speak quietly to her in a whisper pitched to register only to her more-than-human hearing, and hoped that the goblins didn’t hear even better than that. “The Erlking can’t harm us, or allow us to come to harm while we are his guests. Ditto for the Reds. But since we have competing claims that must be settled, he can establish a trial by combat to see who is correct—or at least, most committed to his version of the story.”

Susan’s eyes widened as she understood. “If we won’t fight for our side of the story, he decides against us and for the Eebs.”

I nodded. “At which point he can declare that we have abused his hospitality,” I said. “And he will be free to kill us, probably without repercussion.”

“But you just said—”

“M—The Winter Queen doesn’t feel a thing for me,” I said. “She might be annoyed. But this time next week, she’ll barely remember me.”

“But the Council—”

“I said they would feel strongly about it,” I said. “I never said they’d be upset.”

Susan’s eyes got a little wider.

“A trial of skill, then,” the Erlking said. “A match. The Knight and the lady huntress versus two of your own, Red hunters. Choose which will stand for your side of the issue.” He clapped his hands once, a sound like a small cannon going off. “Prepare the hall.”

Goblins leapt to obey, and cleared the long trestle tables outward with great energy and efficiency. Others began to rip at the stone with their bare, black-nailed hands. They tore it like wet earth, swiftly gouging out a great ring in the floor, a trench six inches wide, almost that deep, and thirty or forty yards across.

“We’re hardly armed properly for such a trial, mine host,” I said. “Whilst the Red hunters are fully equipped for battle as they are.”

The Erlking spread his hands again. “Ah, but they are armed with what they deemed necessary to them for the hunt. And a true hunter never leaves himself unprepared for what the world may bring to face him. Do you say, perhaps, that you are no hunter after all?”

“No,” Susan said at once. “Of course not.”

The Erlking looked at her and gave her a nod of approval. “I am glad you find yourselves appropriately armed.” He glanced over at the Eebs, who were discussing matters in furious whispers, probably employing a nonstandard use of pronouns. “Sooth, boy, you were quick enough at wordplay that I would fain feed thee and send thee on thy way, had you come here unpursued. But I will not rouse the wrath of the Lords of Outer Night lightly. A war with them would be a waste of dozens of excellent hunting moons.” He shrugged. “So. Prove yourselves worthy, and you may be on your way.”

I cleared my throat. “And our . . . fellow visitors?”

The Erlking didn’t smile or otherwise change his expression, but I suddenly got creeped out enough to have to fight to keep from stepping away from him. “My hall is fully furnished to receive all manner of outsiders. There are rooms in these caves filled with clever devices meant for the amusement of my kin, and lacking only the appropriate . . . participants.”

“What happens if we lose?” Susan asked.

“If fortune is kind, you will have clean deaths in the trial. If not . . .” He shrugged. “Certain of my kin—Rafforut, for example—are most eager to give purpose to all the rooms of my hall. You would amuse them for as long as you could respond. Which might be a very, very long time.”

Susan eyed the Erlking. Then she said, “Let’s do it, then. I, too, have promises to keep.”

He inclined his head to her. “As you wish, lady huntress. Sir Knight, lady, please enter the circle.”

I started toward it and Susan walked beside me.

“How should we do it?” she asked.

“Fast and hard.”

Her voice turned wry. “How did I know you’d want it like that?”

I let out a short bark of genuine laughter. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with one thing on his mind.”

“Oh, when we were younger, certainly,” she replied. “Now, though, our roles have reversed.”

“Meaning you want it fast and hard, too?”

She gave me a sly and very heated look with her dark eyes from beneath her dark lashes. “Let’s just say that there’s something to be said for that, once in a while.” She spun the table leg in a few circles. I watched. She stopped and glanced at me, arching an eyebrow inquisitively.

My godmother might have tipped me off to a cure, a way to free Susan of the creature that had devoured half of her being and thirsted for me, something the Fellowship of St. Giles had been trying—and failing—to do for hundreds of years. It was possible that, with a bit more work, I could make it happen for her, give her back control of her life.

But even if I did, we couldn’t be together. Not now.

Mab was bad enough . . . and Hell’s bells, I hadn’t even thought about it, I’d been so busy, but Mab’s understudy, Maeve, the Winter Lady, was arguably more psychotic than Mab herself. And she was unarguably pet-tier, more vicious, and more likely to want to play games with anyone close to me.

I wondered how long it would take me to lose myself. Weeks? Months? Neither Mab nor Maeve would want me to remain my own man. I wondered if, when I was what they wanted me to be, it would bother me to remember what I had been. What others had meant to me.

All I said was, “I miss you.”

She looked down and away, blinking. Then she gave me a rather hesitant smile as a tear fell—as if it were something she hadn’t done in a while, and was still remembering how to accomplish it. “I miss joking with you.”

“How could you do it?” I asked quietly. “How could you not tell me about her?”

“By tearing out a piece of myself,” she said quietly. “I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, and that . . . that I was going to regret it someday. But I had to keep her safe. I’m not asking you to forgive. Just . . . just understand.”

I thought about that moment of stillness and choice at the Stone Table.

“Yeah,” I said. I lifted a hand and touched her face with my fingertips. Then I leaned over to kiss her forehead. “I do understand.”

She stepped closer and we hugged. She felt surprisingly slender and fragile in my arms. We stayed that way for a little while, both of us feeling the fear of what was coming. We tried to ignore the hundreds of red eyes watching us. We more or less succeeded.

Another cannon clap of sound echoed around the vast hall, and the Erlking said, “Red hunters. Let your chosen champions enter the circle or else forfeit the trial.”

“Okay,” I said. “The Eebs will be tough but they’re doable. They rely on stealth tactics, and this is going to be as straight up as you can get. I’m going to hit them with something that should give you enough time to close. Take whichever one is on the left. Move too far to the right and you’ll be in my line of fire, so don’t. You smash one, I burn the other, and we go get some custom coffee mugs to memorialize the occasion later.”

Susan said, “I stopped drinking coffee. You know, the caffeine.”

I looked at her with mock disgust. “You heathen.”

“Fine!” Esmerelda said from the far side of the circle. She pointed a finger at one of the vampires trapped beneath the goblins’ nets. “You. You do it.” Impatiently, the tiny woman went to the trapped vampire, hideous and inhuman in its true form, and sliced through the odd material of the net with her nails, freeing the captive. Without ceremony, she pitched the vampire into the circle.

One of her foot soldiers? Okay. This might be easier than I’d thought.

Esteban appeared then, walking calmly forward.

The slowly accelerating lub-dub sound of the Devourer’s unsettling heartbeat came with him. The Devourer loomed over Esteban, horrible and hungry-looking, and at a command from the vampire, it shambled forward into the circle, its all- black eyes staring at us with unnerving intensity. I might have been projecting or something, but it seemed to me that the Ick was spoiling for some payback.

“Oh, crap,” Susan said in a very small voice.

“When the circle is closed,” said the Erlking’s deep baritone, “the trial begins. It will conclude when one party has been neutralized. Do the champions of the Red hunters stand ready?”

All of the vampires let out wailing shrieks, and even the Ick emitted a hissing burble, like an overfull teakettle.

“What are we going to do?” Susan whispered frantically.

I had no idea. “You take the scrub,” my mouth said. “I’ll handle the Devourer.”

“Right,” she said, her eyes wide. “Right.”

The Erlking appeared, halfway between the two parties, standing outside the circle. “Sir Knight! Do you and the lady huntress stand ready?”

We both nodded sharply, though our eyes were fixed upon our opponents, not the Erlking. I began drawing in my will, and power seethed in my belly and chest and became an odd pressure behind my eyes.

The Erlking drew his sword and held it high, and every goblin in the place began roaring. Fire licked up the blade of the sword, wreathing it in green flame, and then he dropped the sword, thrusting its tip into the trough in the stone the goblins had dug.

Green goblin fire flared up with a howl and clouds of foul smoke. It raced around the exterior of the circle in both directions, until the two tongues of flame met at the point opposite where they had begun.

Susan screamed. I screamed. The vampire screamed. The Ick . . . did that teakettle thing.

And then we all started trying to kill one another.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Vampires and Icks are fast, but I’d dueled their like before. Like the apocryphal Loki, my previous opponents had learned that no matter how quick you are on your feet, you aren’t faster than thought.

The spell I’d been holding ready lashed out before either of our opponents had moved more than a couple of feet, naked force howling out from my outstretched hand to seize not the Ick, but, in a sudden flash of inspiration, I directed it at the vampire beginning to bound along beside and a little behind it. Clearly, maybe even wisely, the vamp was hoping to stand in the Devourer’s shadow when the hurt started flying.

I cried out, “Forzare!” and my raw will hammered the vampire down and at an oblique angle—directly in front of and beneath the feet of the Ick.

If you have no weapons with which to fight the enemy, find a way to make your enemy be your weapon. If you can pull it off, it makes you look amazing.

The vampire went under the Ick’s feet with a wailing squeal and a crunchy-sounding splatter of vile fluids. The collision tripped up the massive hunting creature as its legs tangled with the vampire’s rubbery, sinuous limbs, and the Ick came crashing to the ground, its unnatural drumbeat heart thudding loud and furious, swiping and smashing in fury at the entanglement without ever bothering to consider what it might be destroying.

Susan adjusted almost instantly to what had happened, and closed on the sprawling Ick with incredible speed. Her arm blurred as the Ick began recovering its balance, smashing her club straight down onto its skull and driving its head down to rebound from the floor.

The Ick took the hit like it was a love tap, slashing at Susan with its claws—but she had already bounded into the air, jerking her knees up to avoid the grabbing claws and flying clear over the Devourer to a roar of approval from the watching goblins. She landed in a baseball player’s slide and shot forward over the gore-smeared stone, snapping one hand back to grab the throat of the downed vampire as she did.

The battered body came free of the Ick’s limbs, minus a limb or two of its own, and thrashed weakly, slowing Susan’s slide and stopping her forward motion a bare inch before her feet would have slid into the green flame surrounding the fighting ring.

The Ick whirled around as it staggered to its feet again, preparing to pursue her, when I lifted my blasting rod, snarled, “Fuego,” and hammered it with all the power I could shove through the magical focus. Blue-white fire, blindingly bright against the rather dim green flames of the Erlking’s will, drew a group scream of surprise and discomfort from the gathered goblins. The fire struck the Ick and gouged a chunk of black, rubbery flesh the size of a watermelon out of the massive muscles of its back. Its head whipped back so sharply that the top of its head practically touched its own spine, and it lost its balance for another second or two, slipping on the gore the first vampire had provided as it turned toward me.

I dimly took note of Susan as this happened. The half-crushed, half-dismembered vampire flailed wildly with its remaining claws and fangs, putting up an insanely desperate, vicious fight in an attempt to hang on to its life.

Susan took a hard blow to the side of the head, and when she turned back, her lip was bloodied, her teeth bared in a snarl, and the dark swirls and points of her tattoos began to spread over her face like black ink dripped upon water. She dropped the improvised club, got both hands on the vampire’s throat, and, with calm, precise strength, thrust its head into the green fire.

There was a bloody explosion as that fire devoured the vampire, and though its heat had seemed no greater than any campfire’s, the temperature within that fire had to be something as hot as the sun. As the vampire’s skull entered it, it simply disintegrated with a howl of vaporized liquids, spattering tiny bits of bone like shrapnel and covering Susan and the dying vampire both in an enormous, dark, foul-smelling cloud.

“Susan!” I shouted, and darted over to one side so that I wouldn’t be loosing blasts of fire blindly into that cloud if I missed. I hit the Devourer, gouging out a small trough in one of its arms, missed with the third blast, and scored with a fourth, burning a scorch mark as wide as my thigh across its hip. The drumbeat of its heart was a huge, pounding rhythm by now, like the double bass drums of a speed-metal band. The hits seemed only to make it more furious, and it shifted into a controlled forward rush meant to crowd me into the outer ring of fire or else leave me unable to escape its grasping claws.

But either the blow on the noggin or one of the blasts I’d unleashed had slowed the Ick down. I sprinted for the angle on its approach, for the path that would let me evade the Devourer and its outstretched claws, and got clear of its attack, beating the monster out on footwork and keeping from being trapped against the circle’s perimeter as it came at me.

I found a fierce smile spreading over my lips as I moved. I kept hurling blasts at its legs as I ran, attempting to slow it even more. I didn’t hit with more than a quarter of them, I think, but the missed bolts of fire splashed against the Erlking’s green fire in sizzling bursts of light. The adrenaline made my senses crystalline, bringing me every sight and sound with a cold purity, and I suddenly saw where the Devourer was weakest.

Though it was hard to tell with its alien movement, I realized that it was favoring one side ever so slightly. I darted in for a better look, nearly got my head ripped off by a flailing fist, and saw that the Ick’s leg was wounded, low on the back of its thigh, where the black flesh was twisted and mangled. Had it been mortal skin and tissue, I would have thought it the result of a severe burn—as long as whatever had done the burning had been molten- metal hot and shaped like Mouse’s teeth. The Foo dog had gotten to the Ick during its encounter with Thomas, with a wound that had threatened to cripple it. That was why it had been forced to withdraw. If it stayed and Mouse had managed another such strike, it would have been entirely immobilized.

“Good luck this time, big guy,” I heard myself say. “You’ve got nowhere to run.”

The part of my mind that was still mostly sane thought the statement was utterly crazy. Maybe stupid, too. The Ick was still chasing me, after all. If it hit me once with one of those enormous, clawed hands, it would liquefy the bones under whichever part of my body it hit. (With the possible exception of my head. I maintain that all evidence seems to point to the fact that someone did one of those adamantium upgrades on my skull when I wasn’t looking.)

I was scrambling and blasting away for all I was worth, and I couldn’t keep up a pace like that forever. I was scoring on the Ick, maybe slowing it even more, but I wasn’t even close to killing it.

It all came down to a simple question: Was the Ick better at taking it than I was at dishing it out? If so, then I was living on borrowed time, and the continuing onslaught of magic I threw at the thing amounted to an extremely high rate of interest.

Before I could find out, the fight changed.

The Ick made a painful-looking surge of effort, and got close enough to hit me. I barely got out of the way in time, almost fell, turned it into several spinning steps instead, and recovered my balance. The Ick turned to follow, and Susan burst out of the cloud of greasy smoke the instant it turned its back.

Her tattoos had flushed from black to a deep, deep crimson, and she moved with perfect grace and in perfect silence. So when she gracefully, silently swung that steel table leg at the side of the Ick’s knee joint—on its unmarred leg, no less—it took the monster entirely off guard.

There was a sharp, terrible crack, a sound that I would have associated only with falling timber or possibly small-caliber gunfire if I’d heard it somewhere else. The steel bar smashed the Ick’s knee unnaturally inward, until it made an angle of nearly thirty degrees.

It bellowed in agony and one arm swept back toward its attacker. The Ick hit Susan, and though it had been off balance, startled, and falling when it did so, it still knocked her ten feet backward and to the ground. Her club bounced out of her hand with a chiming, metallic clang, and tumbled, ringing like a tinny gong, into the circling flames.

The heat within the green fires sliced off half the table leg as neatly as any high-temperature torch possibly could have done. The colors of the flame briefly striated with tendrils of amber, violet, and coppery red. The severed end rolled free of the fire, and its edge was glowing white-hot.

I noticed it in the periphery of my heightened vision.

Susan had landed on the ground with her back twisted at an impossible angle.

The Ick lurched toward me as I stood there, frozen in shock for the briefest of instants. It was more than enough time for the Devourer to close, rake at me with its claws, and bat me twenty feet across the circle, all at the same time.

Again, the spells on my coat withstood the brute power of the Ick’s claws, but this hadn’t been a glancing blow, or incidental damage collected when it had tripped over me. This was a full-on sledgehammer slam of the kind that had probably tossed the Blue Beetle onto Thomas’s sports car du jour. It was exactly what I had dreaded, and as my body hit the ground, a kind of resolved calm washed over me, along with howls of goblin excitement.

I was a dead man. Simple as that. The only question was whether or not I would survive long enough to feel the pain that the shock of impact was delaying. And, of course, where to aim my death curse.

My limp arms and legs slowed my tumble and I wound up on my back with my hips twisted to one side as the Ick threw back its head and let out a burbling, teakettle scream. Its heart pounded like surreal thunder, and my body suddenly felt awash with cold, as if I’d landed in a pool of icy water. The Ick came at me, pain showing in its movements now. It howled and lifted both arms above its head, ready to smash them down onto my skull. I didn’t have much time to use my death curse, said the little sane voice in my head.

And then another voice in my head, one far louder and more furious, screamed denial. My few glimpses of Maggie whirled through my mind, along with images of her death—or worse—at Arianna’s hands. If I died here, there would be no one to take her out of darkness.

I had to try.

I thrust both fists at the Ick’s least injured leg and let go with every energy ring I had left.

I guess from the outside it must have looked like one of those kung fu-type double fist strikes, though the only thing my actual fists were doing was collecting a new round of bruises and little scars. The energy released from the rings, though, kicked the Ick’s leg so hard that it swept out parallel to the floor. The Ick toppled.

I rolled desperately, and escaped being crushed by its bulk by a hairbreadth. It landed in whistling agony.

And I suddenly saw a way to kill it that would never have been visible to me if I hadn’t been flat on my back and looking up.

I raised the blasting rod to point at the ceiling above, deeply shadowed but still barely visible. It was a natural cavern roof. The floor might have been carved and polished smooth to host the Erlking’s hall, but stalactites the size of city buses hung from the ceiling like some behemoth’s grim teeth. I checked to be sure that Susan was on the far side of the circle, as far away as possible from what I was about to bring down.

Then I hurled my fear and rage at the base of a great stone fang that was almost directly overhead, and put almost everything I had left into it.

Blue-white fire screamed through the blasting rod, so intense that the rune-carved implement itself exploded into a cloud of glowing splinters. It hit the far-above stalactite with a thunderous concussion. Beside me, the Ick rose up and reached for my skull with one enormous hand.

I threw up my hands, hissed, “Aparturum,” and, with the last of my will, ripped open the veil between the Erlking’s hall and the material world, tearing open a circular opening maybe four feet across—and floating three feet off the ground and parallel to the floor, oriented so that its entry point was on its upper side. Then I curled up into a fetal position beneath that opening and tried to cover my head with my arms.

Tons and tons of stone tumbled down with slow, deadly grace. The Devourer’s heartbeat redoubled its pace. Then there was an incredible noise, and the whole world was blotted away.

I lay there on my side for several moments, not daring to move. Stone fell for a while, maybe a couple of minutes, before the sounds of falling rocks slowly died away, like the pops from a pan of popcorn just before it starts to burn. Only, you know, rockier.

Only then did I allow myself to lift my head and look around.

I lay in a perfectly circular four-foot-across tomb that was maybe five feet deep. The sides of the tomb were perfectly smooth, though I could see from all the cracks and crevices that they were made from many mismatched pieces of rock, ranging from one the size of my fist to a boulder half as big as a car.

Above me, the open Way glowed slightly. All the stone that would have fallen on me had instead plunged through the open Way and back into the material world.

I took a deep breath and closed it again. I hoped that no one was hanging around wherever it was that Way emptied out. Maybe in the FBI cafeteria? No way to know, except to go through and look. I didn’t want to face the collateral damage of something like that.

My sane brain pointed out that there was every chance that we weren’t talking about falling stones at all. As matter from the spirit world, they would transform to simple ectoplasm when they reached the material world, unless ongoing energy was provided in order to preserve their solidity. I certainly hadn’t been trying to pump any energy into the stones as they hit the Way. So odds were that I just dumped several dozen tons of slime onto a random spot in the FBI building—and slime that would evaporate within moments. It would grossly reduce the chances of inflicting injuries on some hapless FBI staffer.

I decided that my sanity and I could live with that.

I closed the Way with a wave of my hand and an effort of will, and slowly stood up. As I did, I realized that I felt a bit creaky, and that I was shaking with fatigue. But what I didn’t feel was . . . pain.

I tried to dust myself off and get a good look at my injuries. I should have broken ribs. Ruptured organs. I should be bleeding all over the place.

But as far as I could tell, I didn’t even have whiplash.

Was that Mab’s power, running through me, wrapped around me? I didn’t have any other explanation for it. Hell, when Susan and I had run from the FBI building, she had been the one to get winded first, while I felt no more need to breathe heavily than I would have had walking out to my mailbox. For that matter, I’d outrun the Devourer during this fight.

I thought I should probably feel disturbed by the sudden increase in my physical speed and toughness. But given what I’d had to pay for them, I couldn’t feel anything but a certain sense of satisfaction. I would need every advantage I could get when I went to take Maggie away from the Red Court.

I looked up as the green fire of the fighting circle began to die away, and as it did the goblins of the hall erupted into an earsplitting, spine-chilling symphony of approving howls.

I climbed out of the hole, then over and around a couple of dump trucks’ worth of rubble, and hurried over to Susan’s side on the opposite end of the ring.

She lay limp and still. There were small cuts and bruises all over her. Her leather pants had hundreds of little holes in them—the shards of bone from the exploding vampire skull, I guessed. Her spine was bent and twisted. I couldn’t tell how bad it was. I mean . . . Susan had always been fairly limber, and I had more reason to know than most. With her entire body limp like that, it was hard to say.

She was breathing, and her tattoos were still there, now bright scarlet. Her pulse was far too slow, and I wasn’t sure it was steady. I leaned down and peeled back one eyelid.

Her eyes were black, all the way through.

I licked my lips. The tattoos were a warning indicator the Fellowship used. As Susan’s vampire nature gained more influence over her actions, the tattoos appeared, solid black at first, but lightening to bright red as the vampire within gained more control. Susan wasn’t conscious, but if she had been, she would have been insane with bloodlust. She’d nearly killed me the last time it had happened.

It was sort of what had started this whole mess, in fact.

Her body was covered in injuries of various sizes, and I thought I knew what was happening. It was instinctively drawing upon the vampire portion of her nature to restore her damaged flesh—but as she had not provided that nature with sustenance, it could offer her only limited assistance.

She needed blood.

But if she got it, woke up, and decided that she just had to have more . . . yikes.

Her breathing kept slowing. It caught for a moment, and I nearly panicked.

Then I shook my head, took my penknife from my duster’s pocket, and opened a cut in my left palm, in an area where the old burn scars were thickest, and which still didn’t have a lot of sensitivity.

I cupped my hand while I bled into my palm. Then, very carefully, I reached down and tipped my palm to carefully spill a few drops into Susan’s mouth.

You would have thought I’d just run a current of electricity through her body. She quivered, went rigid, and then arched her back into a bow. Strange popping sounds came from her spine. Her empty black eyes opened and she gasped, then stared blindly, trying to find my hand again with her mouth, the way a suckling baby finds its meals. I held my hand over her mouth and let the blood trickle in slowly.

She surged in languid motion beneath my hand, savoring the blood as if it were chocolate, a massage, good sex, and a new car all rolled into one. Two minutes of slow, dreamy, arching motion later, her eyes suddenly focused on me and then narrowed. She snatched at my arm with her hands—and I drove my right fist into her face.

I didn’t pull the punch, either. If her darker nature was allowed to continue, it would destroy her, killing me as a by-product of the process. Her head snapped back against the ground, and she blinked her eyes, stunned.

I stood up, took a few steps back, and stuffed my injured hand into my pocket. I was tired, and feeling shocky. My whole arm felt cold. I didn’t stop falling back until I was sure I could shield in time to hold her off if she came at me.

I recognized it when Susan checked back in. Her breathing slowed, becoming controlled and steady. It took her four or five minutes of focus to push her darker self away from control, but eventually she did. She sat up slowly. She licked at her bloodstained lips and shuddered in slow ecstasy for a second before dashing her sleeve across her mouth and forcing herself to her feet. She looked around wildly, a terrible dread in her eyes—until she spotted me.

She stared at me for a moment, and then closed her eyes. She whispered, “Thank God.”

I nodded to her and beckoned for her to stand at my side.

I waited until she reached me. Then we both turned to face the Erlking.

Off to one side, the members of the Red Court remained where they had been—save that Esteban and Esmerelda had been trapped in the goblins’ nets as well. I had apparently been too intent on Susan to hear the sound of any struggle in the aftermath of the duel, but I could guess what had happened. As soon as the Ick had begun to falter, they must have made a run for it. This time, though, they hadn’t had the advantage of showing up in a totally unexpected place, with the goblins intent upon their meals.

This time the goblins had taken them, probably before they had actually begun to flee. Both of the Eebs were staring at Susan and me with raw hatred written on their snarling faces.

The Erlking looked at the captured vampires for a moment, and smiled faintly. “Well fought,” he said, his deep voice resonant.

We both bowed our heads slightly to him.

Then he lifted his hand and snapped his fingers, once. It echoed like the report of a firearm.

Screams went up from the entire helpless Red Court crew as several hundred violence amped goblins fell on them in a wave. I watched for a moment in sickened fascination, but turned away.

I hate the Red Court. But there are limits.

The Erlking’s kin had none.

“What about the Red King?” I asked him. “The Lords of Outer Night?”

His red eyes gleamed. “His Majesty’s folk failed to prove their peaceful intentions. The trial established their deception to the satisfaction of law and custom. Let him howl his fury if he so wills it. Should he begin a war over this matter, all of Faerie will turn upon him in outrage. And his people will make fine hunting.”

Beneath the screams of the Red Court—Esmerelda’s were especially piercing—a ragged chuckle ran through the hall. The sound danced with its own echoes. It was like listening to the official sound track of Hell. A goblin wearing thick leather gloves appeared, holding what was left of Susan’s club as if it were red- hot. The touch of iron and its alloys is an agony to the creatures of Faerie. Susan accepted the steel calmly, nodding to the gloved goblin.

“I presume, then,” I said quietly, “that we are free to go?”

“If I did not release you now,” the Erlking said, his tone almost genial, “how should I ever have the pleasure of hunting you myself some fine, bright evening?”

I hoped my gulp wasn’t audible.

The Lord of the Hunt turned and gestured idly with one hand, and a Way shimmered into being behind us. The green light that had let us see began to darken rapidly. “May you enjoy good hunting of your own, Sir Knight, lady huntress. Please convey my greetings to the Winter Queen.”

My sane brain fell asleep at the switch, and I said, “I will. It was a pleasure, Erl.”

Maybe he didn’t get it. He just tilted his head slightly, the way a dog does at a new sound.

We all bowed to one another politely, and Susan and I stepped through the Way, careful not to take our eyes off of our host, until the world shimmered and that hall of horrors was gone.

It was replaced with an enormous, rustic-style building that appeared to be filled from the basement to the ceiling with everything you might possibly need to shoot, catch, find, stalk, hook, clean, skin, cook, and eat pretty much anything that ran, slithered, hopped, or swam.

“What the hell?” Susan said, looking around in confusion.

“Heh,” I said. “This is the Bass Pro in Bolingbrook, I think. Makes sense, I guess.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, and pointed. “Look.”

I followed her gaze to a large clock on the far wall of the big store.

It said that the time was currently nine thirty p.m.

Thirty minutes after our departure time.

“How can that be?” Susan demanded. “We were there for half an hour at the most. Look. My watch says it’s two.”

My heart began to beat faster. “Hell’s bells, I didn’t even think of it.”

“Of what?”

I started walking. Susan ditched her club behind a shelf and followed me. We must have made a charming sight, both of us all scuffed up, torn, ragged, and wounded. A few late shoppers stared, but no one seemed willing to approach us.

“Time can pass at a different rate in the Nevernever than it does here,” I said. “All those stories about people partying with the fae overnight and waking up in a new century? That’s why it happens.” The next link in the logic chain got forged, and I said, “Oh. Oh, dammit.”

“What?” Susan said.

“It’s a three-hour trip to Chichén Itzá,” I said quietly. “We can’t get there by midnight.” Lead ingots began to pile up in my belly and on my shoulders and the back of my neck. I bowed my head, my mouth twisting bitterly. “We’re too late.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

“No,” Susan said fiercely. “No. This isn’t set up on Greenwich mean time, Harry. These creatures aren’t performing their ceremony based on a clock. They’re using the stars. We only know an approximate time. It could happen after midnight.”

It could happen half an hour before midnight, I thought, but I didn’t say that to Susan. Instead, I nodded. She was right. What she was saying just didn’t feel right, but I knew, in my head, that she was on target. I forced myself to ignore that little whispering voice of defeat in my ear.

“Right,” I said. “Keep going, maximum speed. We need to get back to St. Mary’s and pick up everyone there.”

Susan nodded and said, “Half an hour back if there’s no traffic.”

“And if you have a car,” I said, “which we don’t.”

Susan’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Good thing there’s a whole parking lot full of them, then.”

I opened the front door for Susan, followed her out onto the sidewalk, and nearly got run over by an emerald green stretch limousine, its tail fins, elongated hood, and shining chrome grille marking it as something created in the extravagant years subsequent to the Second World War. The limo screeched to a halt, and the driver, dressed in a no-nonsense black suit, got out and hurried around to the door nearest us. He was medium height, thin, young, and good-looking enough to be acting or modeling—so much so, in fact, that I decided immediately that he wasn’t human.

Almost as soon as I had the thought, I suddenly saw the young Sidhe lord as he truly appeared—dressed in an emerald green tunic and tights, each with accents of deep violet. His sunny hair was bound back into a tight braid that fell past his waist, and his feline, cat-slitted amber eyes were piercing. He saw me staring and gave me a mocking little bow that only barely moved his head and chest, then opened the limo’s door.

The Leanansidhe leaned over from the far side of the passenger compartment, an exasperated look on her face. “And here thou art at last, child. What madness possessed thee to pay a social call upon the Hunter? He has a grudge against thee. Know you not what that means?”

Susan tensed and took a step back from her. My godmother noticed it and favored her with a toothy smile. “Fear not, half child. I’ve no reason to restrain thee again—unless, of course, thou wouldst like to see where it leads.” She glanced up at the night sky—mostly hidden behind all the light pollution—and said, “Granted, we would be forced to indulge such curiosity another time.”

“Godmother,” I said, staring. “What . . . a big car you have.”

She shook a finger at me. “The better to take you to the House of the Weeping Mother so that we may embark upon our quest, child. Glenmael, help them in, if you please. We race against time.”

The young Sidhe gestured gallantly toward the rear of the limo and offered me a supporting arm.

I scowled at him (provoking another smiling bow of his head) and helped Susan into the car. I got in without help of my own, and in short order we found ourselves seated facing the rear of the vehicle and my godmother as the young Sidhe pulled out of the lot and headed for I-55.

“Ridiculous,” Lea said, staring at me in disapproval. “You look utterly ridiculous.”

I blinked at her and then down at myself. Okay, well, granted. I’d been smeared with ichor and then rolled around in dirt and debris and I had a bleeding cut on one hand, which does not for neatness make. My jeans were a wreck, my T-shirt was beyond repair and going to get cut up for rags, and even my duster looked dirty and strained. Susan wasn’t in much better condition.

“I’m not going to a state dinner, Godmother,” I said.

Her voice turned wry. “That depends upon who wins the battle, me-thinks.” She looked me up and down and shook her head. “No. No, it won’t do at all. My queen has a certain reputation to maintain, after all. Your first engagement as the Winter Knight calls for something a bit less . . . postapocalyptic.” She studied Susan with a critical expression.

“Mmmm. And your concubine cannot be allowed to bring any shame upon you and, by extension, upon the queen.”

I sputtered.

Susan arched an eyebrow. “His concubine?”

“His lover, the mother of his child, yet to whom he is not wed? I believe the term applies, dear.” She waved a hand. “Words. La. Let us see.”

She rested a fingertip thoughtfully upon the end of her nose, staring at me. Then she said, “Let us begin with silk.”

She murmured a word, passed her hand over me, and my clothes started writhing as if they’d been made out of a single, flat organism, and one that hadn’t yet had the courtesy to expire. It was the damnedest feeling, and I hit my head on the roof of the limo as I jumped in surprise.

A few seconds later, clenching my head, I eyed my godmother and said, “I don’t need any help.”

“Harry,” Susan said in a strangled voice. She was staring at me.

I looked down and found myself garbed in silken clothing. My shirt had become a billowing affair of deep grey silk, fitted close to my torso by a rather long vest of midnight black seeded in patterns of deep amethysts, green-blue opals, and pale, exquisite pearls. The tights were also made of silk, closely fit, and pure white, while the leather boots that came up to my knees were the same deep grey as the shirt.

I stared at me. Then at Susan.

“Wow,” Susan said. “You . . . you really do have a fairy godmother.”

“And I’ve never been able to indulge,” Lea said, studying me absently. “This won’t do.” She waved her hand again. “Perhaps a bit more . . .”

My clothing writhed again, the sensation so odd and intrusive that I all but banged my head on the roof again.

We went through a dozen outfits in half as many minutes. A Victorian suit and coat, complete with tails, was nixed in favor of another silk outfit, this one inspired by imperial China. By then, Susan and Lea were actively engaged in the project, exchanging commentary with each other and ignoring absolutely every word that came out of my mouth. By the seventh outfit, I had given up trying to have any say whatsoever in how I was going to be dressed.

I was given outfits drawing inspiration from widely diverse cultures and periods of history. I lobbied for the return of my leather duster stridently, but Lea only shushed me and kept speaking to Susan.

“Which outfit is really going to get that bitch’s goat?” Susan asked her.

Finally, Lea’s mouth curled up into a smile, and she said, “Perfect.”

My clothes writhed one more time and I found myself dressed in ornate Gothic armor of the style used in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. It was black and articulated, with decorated shoulder pauldrons and an absurdly ornate breastplate. Gold filigree was everywhere, and the thing looked like it should weigh six hundred pounds.

“Cortés wore armor in just this style,” Lea murmured. She studied my head and said, “Though it needs . . .”

A weight suddenly enclosed my head. I sighed patiently and reached up to remove a conquistador’s helmet decorated to match the armor. I put it down on the floor of the limo and said firmly, “I don’t do hats.”

“Poo,” Lea said. “Arianna still hates the Europeans with a vengeance, you know. It was why she took a conquistador husband.”

I blinked. “Ortega?”

“Of course, child,” Lea said. “Love and hate are oft difficult to distinguish between. She won Ortega’s heart, changed him, wed him, and spent the centuries after breaking his heart over and over again. Calling for him and then sending him away. Giving in to him and then reversing her course. She said it kept her hatred fresh and hot.”

“Explains why he was working in bloody Brazil,” I said.

“Indeed. Hmmm.” She flicked a hand and added a Roman-style cloak of dark grey to my armor-broadened shoulders, its ties fastened to the front of the breastplate. Another flick changed the style of my boots slightly. She added a deep hood to the cloak. Then she thoughtfully wrought all the gold on the armor into a spectrum that changed from natural gold to a green that deepened along the color gradient to blue and then purple the farther it went from my face, giving the gold filigree a cold, eerily surreal look. She added front panels to the cloak, so that it fell like some kind of robe in the front, belted to my waist with a sash of deep, dark purple. A final adjustment made the armor over my shoulders a bit wider and thicker, giving me that football shoulder-pad profile I remembered from Friday nights in high school.

I looked down at myself and said, “This is ridiculous. I look like the Games Workshop version of a Jedi Knight.”

Susan and Lea blinked at me, then at each other.

“I want my duster back, dammit,” I clarified.

“That old rag?” Lea said. “You have an image to maintain.”

“And I’m gonna maintain it in my duster,” I said stubbornly.

“Harry,” Susan said. “She might have a practical point here.”

I eyed her. Then my outfit. “Practical?”

“Appearances and first impressions are powerful things,” she said. “Used correctly, they’re weapons in their own right. I don’t know about you, but I want every weapon I can get.”

Lea murmured, “Indeed.”

“Okay. I don’t see why my image can’t wear my duster. We need to be quick, too. This getup is going to be binding and heavier than hell.”

Lea’s mouth curled up at one corner. “Oh?”

I scowled at her. Then I shook my shoulders and twisted about a bit. There was a kind of springy flexibility to the base material of the armor that steel would never match. More to the point, now that I was actually moving about, I couldn’t feel its weight. At all. I might as well have been wearing comfortable pajamas.

“No mortal could cut through it by strength of mundane arms,” she said calmly. “It will shed blows from even such creatures as the vampires of the Red Court—for a time, at least. And it should help you to shield your mind against the wills of the Lords of Outer Night.”

“Should?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘should’?”

“They are an ancient power, godchild,” Lea replied, and gave me her cat’s smile again. “I have not had the opportunity to match my new strength against theirs.” She looked me up and down one more time and nodded, satisfied. “You look presentable. Now, child,” she said, turning to Susan. “Let us see what we might do for you.”

Susan handled the whole thing a lot better than I had.

I got distracted while they were working. I looked out the window and saw us blowing past a highway patrol car as if it were standing still instead of racing down the highway with its bulbs flashing and its siren wailing. We had to be doing triple digits to have left him eating our dust so quickly.

The patrolman didn’t react to our passage, and I realized that Glenmael must be hiding the car behind some kind of veil. He was also, I noticed, weaving and darting through the traffic with entirely impossible skill, missing other motorists’ bumpers and fenders by inches, with them apparently none the wiser. Not only that, but I couldn’t feel the motion at all within the passenger compartment. By all rights, we should have been bouncing off the windows and the roof, but it didn’t feel as if the car were moving at all.

Long story short: He got us to St. Mary’s in less than fifteen minutes, and gave me several dozen new grey hairs in the process.

We pulled up and Glenmael was opening the door to the rear compartment at seemingly the same instant that the car’s weight settled back against its parking brakes. I got out, the dark grey cowl covering my head. My shadow, on the sidewalk in front of me, looked friggin’ huge and scary. Irrationally, it made me feel a little better.

I turned to help Susan out and felt my mouth drop open a little.

Her outfit was . . . um, freaking hot.

The golden headdress was the first thing I noticed. It was decorated with feathers, with jade carved with sigils and symbols like those I had seen on the stone table, and with flickering gems of arctic green and blue. For a second, I thought her vampire nature had begun to rise again, because her face was covered in what I mistook for tattoos. A second glance showed me that they were some kind of precisely drawn design, sort of like henna markings, but far more primitive and savage-looking in appearance. They were also done in a variety of colors of black and deep, dark red. The designs around her dark brown eyes made them stand out sharply.

Under that, she wore a shift of some material that looked like simple, soft buckskin, split on the sides for ease of movement, and her feet were wrapped in shoes made of similar material, also decorated with feathers. The moccasins and shift both were pure white, and made a sharp contrast against the dark richness of her skin, and displayed the smooth, tight muscles of her arms and legs tremendously well.

A belt of white leather had an empty holster for a handgun on one of her hips, with a frog for hanging a scabbard upon it on the other. And over all of that, she wore a mantled cloak of feathers, not too terribly unlike the ones we had seen in Nevada—but the colors were all in the rich, cool tones of the Winter Court: glacial blue, deep sea green, and twilight purple.

She looked at me and said, “I’m waiting for you to say something about a Vegas showgirl.”

It took me a moment to reconnect my mouth to my brain. “You look amazing,” I said.

Her smile was slow and hot, with her dark eyes on mine.

“Um,” I said. “But . . . it doesn’t look very practical.”

Lea accepted Glenmael’s hand and exited the limo. She leaned over and murmured something into Susan’s ear.

Susan arched an eyebrow, but then said, “Okaaay . . .” She closed her eyes briefly, frowning.

And she vanished. Like, completely. Not behind a hard-to-pierce veil. Just gone.

My godmother laughed and said, “The same as before, but red, child.”

“Okay,” said Susan’s voice from empty air, and suddenly she was back again, smiling broadly. “Wow.”

“The cloak will hide you from the eyes and other senses as well, child,” my godmother said. “And while you wear those shoes, your steps will leave no tracks nor make the smallest sound.”

“Um, right,” I said. “But I’d feel better if she had some Kevlar along or something. Just in case.”

“Glenmael,” said my godmother.

The chauffeur calmly drew a nine- millimeter, pointed it at Susan’s temples from point-blank range, and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked.

Susan jerked her head to one side and staggered, clapping one hand to her ear. “Ow!” she snarled, rising and turning on the young Sidhe. “You son of a bitch, those things are loud. That hurt. I ought to kick your ass up between your ears for you.”

In answer, the Sidhe bent with consummate grace and plucked something from the ground. He stood and showed it to Susan, and then to me.

It was a bullet. The nose was smashed in flat, until it vaguely resembled a small mushroom.

Our eyes got kind of wide.

Lea spread her hands and said calmly, “Faerie godmother.”

I shook my head, stunned. It had taken me years to design, create, and improve my leather duster’s defensive spells, and even then, the protection extended only as far as the actual leather. Lea had whipped up a whole-body protective enchantment in minutes.

I suddenly felt a bit more humble. It was probably good for me.

But then I tilted my head, frowning. The power involved in my godmother’s gifts was incredible—but the universe just doesn’t seem to be willing to give you something for nothing. That was as true in magic as it was in physics. I could, with years of effort, probably duplicate what Lea’s gifts could do. The Sidhe worked with the same magic I did, though admittedly they seemed to have a very different sort of relationship. Still, that much power all in one spot meant that the energy cost for it was being paid elsewhere.

Like maybe in longevity.

“Godmother,” I asked, “how long will these gifts endure?”

Her smile turned a little sad. “Ah, child. I am a faerie godmother, am I not? Such things are not meant to last.”

“Don’t tell me midnight,” I said.

“Of course not. I am not part of Summer.” She sniffed, rather scornfully. “Noon.”

And that made more sense. My duster’s spells lasted for months, and I thought I’d worked out how to make them run for more than a year the next time I laid them down. Lea’s gifts involved the same kind of power output, created seemingly without toil—but they wouldn’t last like the things I created would. My self-image recovered a little.

“Lea,” I asked, “did you bring my bag?”

Glenmael opened the trunk and brought it over to me. The Swords in their scabbards were still strapped to the bag’s side. I picked it up and nodded. “Thanks.”

He bowed, smiling. I was tempted to tip him, just to see what would happen, but then I remembered that my wallet had been in my blue jeans, and was now, presumably, part of the new outfit. Maybe it would reappear at noon tomorrow—assuming I was alive to need it, I mean.

“I will wait here,” Lea said. “When you are ready to travel to the first Way, Glenmael will take us there.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go, princess.”

“Of course, Sir Knight,” Susan said, her eyes sparkling, and we went into the church.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Sanya was guarding the door. He swung it open wide for us, and studied Susan with a grin of appreciation. “There are some days,” he said, “when I just love this job.”

“Come on,” I said, walking past him. “We don’t have much time.”

Sanya literally clicked his heels together, took Susan’s hand, and kissed the back of it gallantly, the big stupidhead. “You are beyond lovely, lady.”

“Thank you,” Susan said, smiling. “But we don’t have much time.”

I rolled my eyes and kept walking.

There was a quiet conversation going in the living room. It stopped as I came through the door. I paused there for a second, and looked around at everyone who was going to help me get my daughter back.

Molly was dressed in her battle coat, which consisted of a shirt of tightly woven metal links, fashioned by her mother out of titanium wire. The mail was then sandwiched between two long Kevlar vests. All of that was, in turn, fixed to one of several outer garments, and in this case she was wearing a medium-brown fireman’s coat. Her hair was braided tightly against the back of her head—and back to its natural honey brown color—and a hockey helmet sat on a table near her. She had half a dozen little focus items I’d shown her how to create, none of which were precisely intended for a fight. Her face was a little pale, and her blue eyes were earnest.

Mouse sat next to her, huge and stolid, and rose to his feet and padded over to give me a subdued greeting as I came in. I knelt down and roughed up his ears for a moment. He wagged his tail, but made no more display than that, and his serious brown eyes told me that he knew the situation was grave.

Next came Martin, dressed in simple black BDU pants, a longsleeved black shirt, and a tactical vest, all of which could have been purchased from any military surplus or gun store. He was in the midst of cleaning and inspecting two sets of weapons: assault rifles, tactical shotguns, and heavy pistols. He wore a machete in a scabbard on his belt. A second such weapon rested in a nylon sheath on the table, next to a blade-sharpening tool kit. He never looked up at me, or stopped reassembling the pistol he’d finished cleaning.

A small chess set had been set up on the other end of the coffee table from Molly, next to Martin’s war gear. My brother sat there, with Martin (and, once he had finished greeting me, Mouse) between himself and the girl. He was wearing expensive- looking silk pants and a leather vest, both white. A gun belt bearing a large-caliber handgun and a sword with an inward-curving blade, an old Spanish falcata, hung over the corner of the couch, casually discarded. He lay lazily back on the couch, his eyes mostly closed, watching the move of his opponent.

Murphy was decked out in black tactical gear much like Martin’s, but more worn and better fitting. They don’t generally make gear for people Murph’s size, so she couldn’t shop off the shelf very often. She did have her own vest of Kevlar and mail, which Charity had made for her for Christmas the previous year, in thanks for the occasions when Murphy had gone out on a limb for them, but Murph had just stuck the compound armor to her tac vest and been done. She wore her automatic on her hip, and her odd- looking, rectangular little submachine gun, the one that always made me think of a box of chocolates, was leaned against the wall nearby. Murph was hunched over the chessboard, her nose wrinkled as she thought, and moved one of her knights into a thicket of enemy pieces before she turned to me.

She took one look at me and burst out giggling.

That was enough to set off everyone in the room except Martin, who never seemed to realize that there were other people there. Molly’s titters set off Thomas, and even Mouse dropped his jaws open in a doggy grin.

“Hah, hah, hah,” I said, coming into the room, so that Susan and Sanya could join us. No one laughed at Susan’s outfit. I felt that the injustice of that was somehow emblematic of the unfairness in my life, but I didn’t have time to chase that thought down and feed it rhetoric until the lightbulb over my head lit up.

“Well,” Murphy said, as the laughter died away. “I’m glad you got out all right. Went shopping after, did you?”

“Not so much,” I said. “Okay, listen up, folks. Time is short. What else did we manage to find out about the site?”

Murphy told Thomas, “Mate in six,” took a file folder from beneath her chair, and passed it to me.

“You wish,” Thomas drawled lazily.

I eyed him and opened the folder. There were multiple pages inside, color aerial and satellite photos of the ruins.

“Good grief,” I said. “How did you get these?”

“Internet,” Murphy said calmly. “We’ve got an idea of where they’re setting up and what security measures they’ll need to take, but before we can talk about an approach, we need to know where we’re going to arrive.”

I stroked a thumb over my mother’s gem and consulted the knowledge stored there. Then I went through the maps until I found one of the proper scale, picked up a pen from the table, and drew an X on the map. “Here. It’s about five miles north of the pyramid.”

Thomas whistled quietly.

“What?” I asked him. “You can’t do five miles?”

“Five miles of sidewalk, sure,” Thomas said. “Five miles of jungle is a bit different, Dresden.”

“He’s right,” Martin said. “And at night, too.”

Thomas spread his hands.

“Have done a little jungle,” Sanya said, coming over to study the map. “How bad is the bush there?”

“Tougher than the lower Amazon, not as bad as Cambodia,” Martin said calmly.

Sanya grunted. Thomas wrinkled his nose in distaste. I tried to pretend that Martin had given me some kind of tangible information, and idly wondered if Thomas and Sanya were doing the same thing as me.

“How long, Martin?” I asked him.

“Two hours, bare minimum. Could be more, depending.”

I grunted. Then I said, “We’ll see if Lea can’t do something to help us along.”

The room went still.

“Um,” Murphy said. “Your psycho faerie godmother? That Lea?”

“Harry, you told me she was dangerous,” Molly said.

“And I still have the scar to prove it,” Thomas added.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “She’s powerful and by any reasonable standard she’s insane and she’s currently pointed in the direction of our enemy. So we’re going to use her.”

“We’re using her, are we?” Sanya asked, grinning.

“He told us what Toot said about Mab, Harry,” Molly said softly.

There was a long stretch of quiet.

“You made a deal,” Murphy said.

“Yeah, I did. For Maggie, I did.” I looked around the room. “I’m me until this is all over. That was part of the deal. But if there’s anyone here who wants to bail on me and Susan, do it now. Otherwise, feel free to keep your mouth closed about the subject. My daughter doesn’t have time for us to debate the ethics of a choice that isn’t any of your goddamned business anyway.”

I looked around the room and Sanya said, “I am going. Who else goes with us?”

Mouse sneezed.

“I figured that,” I told him.

He wagged his tail.

“Me, obviously,” Martin said.

Murphy nodded. Molly did, too. Then Thomas rolled his eyes.

“Good,” I said. “Lea will probably have something to speed the trip,” I said.

“She’d better,” Thomas said. “Time’s short.”

“We will be there in time,” Sanya said confidently.

I nodded. Then I said, “And I have a favor to ask two of you.”

I put the bag down and pulled Fidelacchius from where I’d tied it. The ancient katana-style Sword had a smooth wooden handle that perfectly matched the wood of its sheath, so that when the weapon was sheathed it looked innocuous, appearing to be a slightly curved, sturdy stick of a good size to carry while walking. The blade was razor-sharp. I had dropped a plastic drinking straw across it as an experiment once. The rate of fall had been all the exquisite weapon had needed to slice the straw neatly in half.

“Karrin,” I said, and held out the Sword.

Sanya’s eyebrows climbed toward the roof.

“I’ve . . . been offered that Sword before, Harry,” she said quietly. “Nothing’s changed since then.”

“I’m not asking you to take up the mantle of a Knight,” I said quietly. “I want to entrust it to you for this night, for this purpose. This sword was made to fight darkness, and there’s going to be plenty to go around. Take it up. Just until my girl is safe.”

Murphy frowned. She looked at Sanya and said, “Can he do this?”

“Can you?” Sanya asked, looking at me.

“I was entrusted as the Sword’s guardian,” I said calmly. “Exactly what am I supposed to do with it if it is not my place to choose the Sword’s bearer to the best of my ability?”

Sanya considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Seems implicit to me. They gave you the power of choice when they entrusted you with the Swords. One of those things they seem to tell you without ever actually saying anything that sounds remotely related.”

I nodded. “Murph. Used for the right reasons, in good faith, the Sword is in no danger. You’re the only one who can know if you’re doing it for the right reasons. But I’m begging you. Take it. Help me save my daughter, Karrin. Please.”

Murphy sighed. “You don’t play fair, Harry.”

“Not for one second,” I said. “Not for something like this.”

Murphy was quiet for a moment more. Then she stood up and walked to me. She took the Sword from my hand. There was an old cloth strap fixed to the sheath, so that the weapon could be carried over one shoulder or diagonally across the back. Murphy slipped the weapon on and said, “I’ll carry it. If it seems right to me, I’ll use it.”

“That’s all I can ask for,” I said.

Then I picked up Amoracchius, a European long Sword with a crusader-style hilt and a simple, wire-wrapped handle.

And I turned to Susan.

She stared at me and then shook her head slowly. “The last time I touched one of those things,” she said, “it burned me so bad I could still feel it three months later.”

“That was then,” I said. “This is now. You’re doing what you’re doing because you love your daughter. If you stay focused on that, this Sword will never do you harm.” I turned the hilt to her. “Put your hand on it.”

Susan did so slowly, almost as if against her will. She hesitated at the last moment. Then her fingers closed on the blade’s handle.

And that was all. Nothing happened.

“Swear to harm no innocents,” I said quietly. “Swear to use it in good faith, to return your daughter safely home. Swear that you will safeguard the Sword and return it faithfully when that task is done. And I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to wield it.”

She met my eyes and nodded. “I swear.”

I nodded in reply and took my hands from the weapon. Susan drew it slightly from its sheath. Its edge gleamed, and its steel was polished as smooth and bright as a mirror. And when she moved to buckle it to her belt, the Sword fit there as if made for it.

My godmother was probably going to feel very smug about that.

“I hope that the Almighty will not feel slighted if I carry more, ah, innovative weaponry as well,” Susan said. She crossed to the table, slid one of Martin’s revolvers into her holster, and after a moment picked up the assault rifle.

Sanya stepped forward as well, and took the tactical shotgun with its collapsible shoulder stock. “If He exists, He has never given me any grief about it,” he said cheerfully. “Da. This is going very well already.”

Thomas barked out a laugh. “There are seven of us against the Red King and his thirteen most powerful nobles, and it’s going well?”

Mouse sneezed.

“Eight,” Thomas corrected himself. He rolled his eyes and said, “And the psycho death faerie makes it nine.”

“It is like movie,” Sanya said, nodding. “Dibs on Legolas.”

“Are you kidding?” Thomas said. “I’m obviously Legolas. You’re . . .” He squinted thoughtfully at Sanya and then at Martin. “Well. He’s Boromir and you’re clearly Aragorn.”

“Martin is so dour, he is more like Gimli.” Sanya pointed at Susan. “Her sword is much more like Aragorn’s.”

“Aragorn wishes he looked that good,” countered Thomas.

“What about Karrin?” Sanya asked.

“What—for Gimli?” Thomas mused. “She is fairly—”

“Finish that sentence, Raith, and we throw down,” said Murphy in a calm, level voice.

“Tough,” Thomas said, his expression aggrieved. “I was going to say ‘tough.’ ”

Martin had gotten up during the discussion. He came over to me and studied the map I’d marked. Then he nodded. As the discussion went on—with Molly’s sponsorship, Mouse was lobbying to claim Gimli on the basis of being the shortest, the stoutest, and the hairiest—Martin explained what they knew of the security measures around the ruins.

“That’s why we’re going in here,” he said, pointing to the eastern-most point of the ruins, where rows and rows and rows of great columns stood. Once, they had held up some kind of roof over a complex attached to the great temple. “Now,” Martin continued, “the jungle has swallowed the eastern end of it. They’re only using torchlight, so movement through the galleries should be possible. There will be considerable shadow to move through.”

“Means they’ll have guards there,” I said.

“True. We’ll have to silence them. It can be done. If we can move fully through the galleries, we’ll be within two hundred feet of the base of the temple. That’s where we think they’ll be performing the ritual. In the temple.”

“Plenty of temples got built on top of ley line confluences,” I said, nodding. I studied the map. “A lot can happen in two hundred feet,” I said. “Even moving fast.”

Martin nodded. “Yes, it can. And, if our various intelligence sources are correct, there are more than a thousand individuals nearby.”

“A thousand vampires?” I asked.

Martin shrugged. “Many. Many will be their personal guards. Others, the . . . highest-ranking servants, I suppose you would call them. They are like Susan and myself. There may also be mortal foot soldiers, there to keep the sacrifices in line.”

“Sacrifices, plural?”

Martin nodded. “The ceremonies of the Red Court of old could last for days, with blood sacrifices made every few minutes. There might be a hundred or two hundred others chosen to die before the ritual.”

I didn’t shudder, but only by sheer force of will. “Yeah. Priming the pump.” I nodded. “Probably they’re doing it right now.”

“Yes,” Martin said.

“What we need,” I said.

“A diversion,” Martin said.

I nodded. “Get everyone looking in one direction. Then Susan, Lea, and I will hit the temple, get the kid. Then we all run for Father Forthill’s sanctuary on holy ground.”

“They’ll catch us long before we can cover that distance.”

“You ever tried chasing a faerie through the woods at night?” I asked wryly. “Trust me. If we can break contact, we can make it a few miles.”

“Why not retreat directly to the spirit world?” Martin asked.

I shook my head. “No way. Creatures this old and powerful know all the tricks there, and they’ll be familiar with the terrain on the other side that close to their strong places. I won’t fight them on that ground unless there’s no other choice. We head for the church.” I pointed to the location of the church, in a small town only about two and a half miles from Chichén Itzá.

Martin smiled faintly. “Do you honestly think a parish chapel will withstand the might of the Red King?”

“I have to think that, Martin,” I said. “Besides, I think a parish chapel with all three Swords defending it, along with two members of the White Council and an elder sorceress of the Winter Sidhe, will be a tough nut to crack. And all we have to do is make it until dawn. Then we’re back in the jungle and gone.”

Martin mused on that for a moment and said, “It might work.”

“Yeah. It might,” I said. “We need to move. Our ride is outside waiting.”

“Right.”

Martin looked at Susan and nodded. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The good-natured discussion came to a halt and he said, “The car’s outside.”

“Let’s go, people,” I said quietly. “It’s the big green car.”

Everyone grew serious rather rapidly, and began gathering up their various forms of gear.

Susan went out first, to make sure there weren’t any problems with Lea, and everyone filed out after her, Sanya last.

“Sanya,” I said. “Who did I get cast as?”

“Sam,” Sanya said.

I blinked at him. “Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been.”

Sanya shrugged. “It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your godmother. You got Sam.” He started to leave and then paused. “Harry. You have read the books as well, yes?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Then you know that Sam was the true hero of the tale,” Sanya said. “That he faced far greater and more terrible foes than he ever should have had to face, and did so with courage. That he went alone into a black and terrible land, stormed a dark fortress, and resisted the most terrible temptation of his world for the sake of the friend he loved. That in the end, it was his actions and his actions alone that made it possible for light to overcome darkness.”

I thought about that for a second. Then I said, “Oh.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and left.

He didn’t mention the other part of the book. That following the heroes when they set out was the tenth member of their party. A broken creature who went through all the same dangers and trials, who had made a single bad choice and taken up a power he didn’t understand— and who had become a demented, miserable, living nightmare because of it. In the end, he had been just as necessary to the overthrow of the darkness.

But he sure as hell didn’t enjoy his part.

I shook my head and berated myself sharply. Here I was wasting time talking about a damned book. About a world of blacks and whites with precious little in the way of grey, where you could tell the good guys from the bad guys with about two seconds of effort.

And right now, I didn’t give a damn about good and bad. I just wanted a little girl home safe.

It didn’t matter which of them I was. As long as I got Maggie home.

I picked up my bag, left St. Mary’s behind me, and stalked out to my wicked godmother’s limo, pulling the soft hood of my dark cape up over my head.

If I was on the road to Hell, at least I was going in style.

Chapter Forty

There was room for everyone in the back of the limo. I was pretty sure that there hadn’t been the first time I’d ridden in it. But it had gotten several extra feet of seats along the walls, and everyone was sitting there being only a little bit crowded as Glenmael charged out to assault Chicago’s streets.

“I still think we should try a frontal assault,” Sanya argued.

“Suicidally stupid,” Martin said, his voice scornful.

“Surprise tactic!” Sanya countered. “They will not expect it after a thousand years of never being challenged. Harry, what do you think?”

“Uh,” I said.

And then Ebenezar’s voice said, quite clearly and from no apparent source, “Damn your stubborn eyes, boy! Where have you been?”

I went rigid with surprise for a second. I looked around the interior of the limo, but no one had reacted, with the exception of my godmother. Lea sighed and rolled her eyes.

Right. The speaking stones. I’d stuck mine in the bag, but since I was holding it on my lap now, it was close enough to be warmed by the heat of my body to function. It was possible to send terse messages through the stones without first establishing a clear connection, as my mentor and I had done back toward the beginning of this mess.

“Damnation and hellfire, Hoss!” growled Ebenezar’s voice. “Answer me!”

I looked from Sanya to my godmother. “Uh. I kind of have to take this call.”

Sanya blinked at me. Thomas and Murphy exchanged a significant glance.

“Oh, shut up,” I said crossly. “It’s magic, okay?”

I closed my eyes and fumbled through the bag until I found the stone. I didn’t really need to show up in my outlandish costume for this conversation, so I thought about my own physical body for a moment, concentrating on an image of my limbs and flesh and normal clothing forming around my thoughts.

“So help me, boy, if you don’t—”

Ebenezar appeared in my mind’s eye, wearing his usual clothing. He broke off suddenly as he looked at me and his face went pale. “Hoss? Are you all right?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here. What do you want?”

“Your absence from the conclave did not go over well,” he responded, his voice sharp. “There are people in the Grey Council who think you aren’t to be trusted. They’re very, very wary of you. By missing the meeting, you told them that either you don’t respect our work enough to bother showing up, or else that you don’t have the wisdom and the fortitude to commit to the cause.”

“I never saw the appeal of peer pressure,” I said. “Sir, I’m finding a little girl. I’ll come play Council politics after I get her home safe, if you want.”

“We need you here.”

“The kid needs me more. It’s not as noble as trying to save the whole White Council from its own stupidity, I know. But by God, I will bring that child out safe.”

Ebenezar’s mostly bald pate flushed red. “Despite my orders to the contrary.”

“We aren’t an army. You aren’t my superior officer. Sir.”

“You arrogant child,” he snapped. “Get your head out of your ass and get your eyes on the world around you or you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“With all due respect, sir, you can go to hell,” I snarled. “You think I don’t know how dangerous the world is? Me?”

“I think you’re doing everything in your power to isolate yourself from the only people who can support you,” he said. “You feel guilty about something. I get that, Hoss. You think you ain’t fit for company because of what you’ve done.” His scowl darkened still more. “In my time, I’ve done things that would curl your hair. Get over it. Think.”

“After I get the girl out.”

“Do you even know where she is?” Ebenezar demanded.

“Chichén Itzá,” I said. “She’s scheduled to be the centerpiece of one of the Red King’s shindigs in the next couple of hours.”

Ebenezar took a sharp breath, as if I’d poked him in the stomach with the end of a quarterstaff. “Chichén Itzá . . . That’s a confluence. One of the biggest in the world. The Reds haven’t used it in . . . Not since Cortés was there.”

“Confluence, yeah,” I said. “The Duchess Arianna is going to kill her and use the power to lay a curse on her bloodline—Susan and me.”

Ebenezar began to speak and then blinked several times, as if the sun had just come out of a cloud and into his eyes. “Susan and . . .” He paused and asked, “Hoss?”

“I meant to tell you the last time we spoke,” I said quietly. “But . . . the conversation wasn’t exactly . . .” I took a deep breath. “She’s my daughter by Susan Rodriguez.”

“Oh,” he said very quietly. His face looked grey. “Oh, Hoss.”

“Her name’s Maggie. She’s eight. They took her a few days ago.”

He bowed his head and shook it several times, saying nothing. Then he said, “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“H-how long have you known?”

“Since a day or so after she was taken,” I said. “Surprised the hell out of me.”

Ebenezar nodded without looking up. Then he said, “You’re her father and she needs you. And you want to be there for her.”

“Not want to be there,” I said quietly. “Going to be.”

“Aye-aye,” he said. “Don’t go back to the Edinburgh facility. We think Arianna laced it with some kind of disease while she was there. So far there are sixty wizards down with it, and we’re expecting more. No deaths yet, but whatever this bug is, it’s putting them flat on their backs—including Injun Joe, so our best healer isn’t able to work on the problem.”

“Hell’s bells,” I said. “They aren’t just starting back in on the war again. They’re going to try to decapitate the Council in one blow.”

Ebenezar grunted. “Aye. And without the Way nexus around Edinburgh, we’re going to have a hell of a time with that counterstroke.” He sighed. “Hoss, you got a damned big talent. Not real refined, but you’ve matured a lot in the past few years. Handle yourself better in a fight than most with a couple of centuries behind them. Wish you could be with us.”

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Ebenezar was generally considered the heavyweight champion of the wizarding world when it came to direct, face-to-face mayhem. And I was one of the relatively few people who knew he was also the Blackstaff—the White Council’s officially nonexistent hit man, authorized to ignore the Laws of Magic when he deemed it necessary. The old man had fought pretty much everything that put up a fight at one point or another, and he didn’t make a habit of complimenting anyone’s skills.

“I can’t go with you,” I said.

“Aye,” he said with a firm nod. “You do whatever you have to do, boy. Whatever you have to do to keep your little girl safe. You hear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Godspeed, son,” Ebenezar said. Then he cut the connection.

I released my focus slowly until I was once more in my body in the back of the limo.

“Who was it?” Molly asked. The others let her take the lead. She must have explained the whole speaking-stone concept to them. Which made me look less crazy, but I felt twitchy about her handing out information like that to the entire car. It wasn’t a big deadly secret or anything, but it was the principle of the thing that—

I rubbed at my face with one hand. Ye gods. I was becoming my mentors. Next I’d be grumbling about those darned kids and their loud music.

“Uh, the Council,” I said. “Big shock, they aren’t helping.”

Murphy looked like she might be asleep, but she snorted. “So we’re on our own.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. It’s more familiar.”

Lea let out a peal of merry laughter.

Murphy opened an eye and gave Lea a decidedly frosty look. “What?”

“You think that this is like what you have done before,” my godmother said. “So precious.”

Murphy stared at her for a moment and then looked at me. “Harry?”

I leaned my head back against the window, so that the hood fell over my eyes. Murphy was way too good at picking up on it when I lied. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”

It took Glenmael less than twenty minutes to get to Aurora. We got out at a park there, a pretty little community place. It was empty this time of night, and all the lights were out.

“Pitcher’s mound, folks,” I said, piling out and taking the lead.

I was walking with long, long strides, staying ahead of everyone. Murphy caught up to me, moving at a slow jog.

“Harry,” she said, her voice low. “Your godmother?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we trust her?”

I scowled. She wouldn’t be able to see the expression, with the hood and all. “Do you trust me?”

“Why do you think I’m asking you?”

I thought about it for a moment and then slowed down, so that everyone else was nearer. That included my godmother.

“Okay, folks. Let’s clear the air about the scary Sidhe lady. She’s under orders to go with me and to help. She will. She’s got a vested interest in making sure I come out of this all right, and if she doesn’t do it, she’s in trouble with the queen. As long as you all are helpful to her mission, getting me in and out in one piece, she’ll support you. The second she thinks you’re a liability or counterproductive to her mission, she’s going to let bad things happen to you. Maybe even do them herself.” I looked at Lea. “Is that about right?”

“That is precisely right,” she said, smiling.

Susan arched an eyebrow and looked from me to my godmother. “You have no shame about it at all, do you?”

“Shame, child, is for those who fail to live up to the ideal of what they believe they should be.” She waved her hand. “It was shame that drove me to my queen, to beseech her aid.” Her long, delicate fingers idly moved to the streaks of white in her otherwise flawless red tresses. “But she showed me the way back to myself, through exquisite pain, and now I am here to watch over my dear godson—and the rest of you, as long as it is quite convenient.”

“Spooky death Sidhe lady,” Molly said. “Now upgraded to spooky, crazy death Sidhe lady.”

The Leanansidhe bared her canine teeth in a foxlike smile. “Bless you, child. You have such potential. We should talk when this is over.”

I glowered openly at Lea, who looked unrepentant. “Okay, folks. The plan is going to be for me to stand where the fire is hottest. And if one of you gets cut off or goes down, I’m going to go back for you.” I kept glaring at my godmother. “Everyone who goes in with me is coming out again, dead or alive. I’m bringing you all home.”

Lea paused for a few steps and arched an eyebrow at me. Then she narrowed her eyes.

“If they can all carry themselves out,” I said, “I believe that would be more ‘quite convenient’ than if they couldn’t. Wouldn’t it, Godmother?”

She rolled her eyes and said, “Impossible child.” But there was a hint of a smile on her mouth. She bowed her head to me slightly, like a fencer acknowledging a touch, and I returned it.

Then I figured I’d best not threaten her ego any more than I had to. “Be careful when you speak to her,” I told the others. “Don’t make her any offers. Don’t accept any, not even in passing, not even things that seem harmless or that could only be construed through context. Words are binding around the Sidhe, and she is one of the most dangerous creatures in all of Faerie.” I bowed my head to her. “Fortunately for us. Before the night’s over, we’ll all be glad she’s with us.”

“Oh,” the Leanansidhe purred, all but literally preening. “A trifle obvious, but . . . how the child has grown.”

“Da,” said Sanya cheerfully. “I am glad that she is here. For the first time, I got to ride in a limousine. Already it is a good night. And if spooky crazy death Sidhe lady can help serve a good cause, then we who bear the Swords”—he paused for a smiling second—“all three of them”—he paused for another second, still smiling—“will welcome her aid.”

“Such charm, O Knight of the Sword,” Lea replied, smiling even more endearingly than Sanya. “We are all being so pleasant tonight. Please be assured that should one of the Swords be dropped or somehow misemployed, I will do everything in my power to recover it.”

“Sanya,” I said. “Please shut up now.”

He let out a booming laugh, settled the strap of the shotgun a little more firmly over his shoulder, and said nothing more.

I checked my mother’s memories and nodded as I reached the pitcher’s mound. “Okay, folks. First leg here. Should be a simple walk down a trail next to a river. Don’t get freaked when you notice the water is flowing uphill.” I stared at the air over the pitcher’s mound and began to draw in my will.

“Right,” I said, mostly to myself. “Annnnnd here we go. Aparturum.”

Chapter Forty-one

The first leg of the trip was simple, a walk down a forest trail next to a backward-flowing river until we reached a menhir—that’s a large, upright standing stone, to those of you without a pressing need to find out what a menhir is. I found where a pentangle had been inscribed on the stone, a five-pointed star within a circle, like the one around my neck. It had been done with a small chisel of some kind, and was a little lopsided. My mother had put it there to mark which side of the stone to open the Way on.

I ran my fingers over it for a moment. As much as my necklace or the gem that now adorned it, it was tangible proof of her presence. She had been real, even if I had no personal memories of her, and that innocuous little marking was further proof.

“My mother made this mark,” I said quietly.

I didn’t look back at Thomas, but I could all but feel the sudden intensity of his interest.

He had a few more memories than I did, but not many. And it was possible that he had me outclassed in the parental-figure issues department, too.

I opened another Way, and we came through into a dry gulch with a stone wall, next to a deep channel in the stone that might once have held a river—now it was full of sand. It was dark and chilly, and the sky was full of stars.

“Okay,” I said. “Now we walk.”

I summoned a light and took the lead. Martin scanned the skies above us. “Uh. The constellations . . . Where are we?”

I clambered up a stiff little slope that was all hard stone and loose sand, and looked out over a vast expanse of silver- white beneath the moon. Great shapes loomed up from the sand, their sides almost serrated in the clear moonlight, lines and right angles that clashed sharply with the ocean of sand and flatland around them.

“Giza,” I said. “You can’t see the Sphinx from this side, but I never claimed to be a tour guide. Come on.”

It was a stiff two or three miles from the hidden gully to the pyramids, and sand all the way. I took the lead, moving in a shambling, loosekneed jog. There wasn’t any worry about heat—dawn was under way, and in an hour the place would be like one giant cookie pan in an oven, but we’d be gone by then. My mother’s amulet led me directly to the base of the smallest and most crumbly pyramid, and I had to climb up three levels to reach the next Waypoint. I stopped to caution the party that we were about to move into someplace hot, and to shield their eyes. Then I opened the Way and we continued through.

We emerged onto a plain beside enormous pyramids—but instead of being made of stone, these were all formed of crystal, smooth and perfect. A sun that was impossibly huge hung in the sky directly overhead, and the light was painfully bright, rebounding up from the crystal plain to be focused through the pyramids and refracted over and over and over again.

“Stay out of those sunbeams,” I said, waving in the direction of several beams of light so brilliant that they made the Death Star lasers look like they needed to hit the gym. “They’re hot enough to melt metal.”

I led the group forward, around the base of one pyramid, into a slim corridor of . . . Well, it wasn’t shade, but there wasn’t quite so much light there, until we reached the next Waypoint—where a chunk the size of a large man’s fist was missing from one of the perfectly smooth edges of the pyramid. Then I turned ninety degrees to the right and started walking.

I counted five hundred paces. I felt the light—not heat, just the sheer, overwhelming amount of light—beginning to tan my skin.

Then we came to an aberration—a single lump of rock upon the crystalline plain. There were broad, ugly facial features on the rock, primitive and simple.

“Here,” I said, and my voice echoed weirdly, though there was seemingly nothing from which it could echo.

I opened another Way, and we stepped from the plain of light and into chilly mist and thin mountain air. A cold wind pushed at us. We stood in an ancient stone courtyard of some kind. Walls stood around us, broken in many places, and there was no roof overhead.

Murphy stared up at the sky, where stars were very faintly visible through the mist, and shook her head. “Where now?”

“Machu Picchu,” I said. “Anyone bring water?”

“I did,” Murphy said, at the same time as Martin, Sanya, Molly, and Thomas.

“Well,” Thomas said, while I felt stupid. “I’m not sharing.”

Sanya snorted and tossed me his canteen. I sneered at Thomas and drank, then tossed it back. Martin passed Susan his canteen, then took it back when she was finished. I started trudging. It isn’t far from one side of Machu Picchu to the other, but the walk is all uphill, and that means a hell of a lot more in the Andes than it does in Chicago.

“All right,” I said, stopping beside a large mound built of many rising tiers that, if you squinted up your eyes enough, looked a lot like a ziggurat-style pyramid. Or maybe an absurdly large and complicated wedding cake. “When I open the next Way, we’ll be underwater. We have to swim ten feet, in the dark. Then I open the next Way and we’re in Mexico.” I was doubly cursing the time we’d lost in the Erlking’s realm. “Did anyone bring any climbing rope?”

Sanya, Murphy, Martin—Look, you get the picture. There were a lot of people standing around who were more prepared than me. They didn’t have super-duper faerie godmother presents, but they had brains, and it was a sobering reminder to me of which was more important.

We got finished running a line from the front of the group to the back (except for my godmother, who sniffed disdainfully at the notion of being tied to a bunch of mortals), and I took several deep breaths and opened the next Way.

Mom’s notes on this Waypoint hadn’t mentioned that the water was cold. And I don’t mean cold like your roommate used most of the hot water. I mean cold like I suddenly had to wonder if I was going to trip over a seal or a penguin or a narwhal or something.

The cold hit me like a sledgehammer, and it was suddenly all I could do just to keep from shrieking in surprise and discomfort—and, some part of my brain marveled, I was the freaking Winter Knight.

Though my limbs screamed their desire to contract around my chest and my heart, I fought them and made them paddle. One stroke. Two. Three. Four. Fi—Ow. My nose hit a shelf of rock. I found my will and exhaled, speaking the word Aparturum through a cloud of blobby bubbles that rolled up over my cheeks and eyelashes. I tore open the next Way a little desperately—and water rushed out through it as if thrilled to escape.

I crashed into the Yucatán jungle on a tide of ectoplasmic slime, and the line we’d strung dragged everyone else through in a rush. Poor Sanya, the last in line, was pulled from his feet, hauled hard through the icy water as if he’d been flushed down a Jotun’s toilet, and then crashed down amidst the slimed forest. Peru to Mexico in three and a half seconds.

I fumbled back to the Way to close it and stopped the tide of ectoplasm from coming through, but not before the vegetation for ten feet in every direction had been smashed flat by the flood of slime, and every jungle creature for fifty or sixty yards started raising holy hell on the what-the-fuck-was-that party line. Murphy had her gun out, and Molly had a wand in each hand, gripped with white knuckles.

Martin let out a sudden, coughing bellow that sounded like it must have torn something in his chest—and it was loud, too. And the jungle around us abruptly went silent.

I blinked and looked at Martin. So did everyone else.

“Jaguar,” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They’re extinct here, but the animals don’t know that.”

“Oooh,” said my godmother, a touch of a child’s glee in her voice. “I like that.”

It took us a minute to get everyone sorted out. Mouse looked like a scrawny shadow of himself with his fur all plastered down. He was sneezing uncontrollably, having apparently gotten a bunch of water up his nose during the swim. Ectoplasm splattered out with every sneeze. Thomas was in similar straits, having been hauled through much as Sanya was, but he managed to look a great deal more annoyed than Mouse.

I turned to Lea. “Godmother. I hope you have some way to get us to the temple a little more swiftly.”

“Absolutely,” Lea purred, calm and regal despite the fact that her hair and her slime-soaked silken dress were now plastered to her body. “And I’ve always wanted to do it, too.” She let out a mocking laugh and waved her hand, and my belly cramped up as if every stomach bug I’d ever had met up in a bar and decided to come get me all at once.

It. Hurt.

I knew I’d fallen, and was vaguely aware that I was lying on my side on the ground. I was there for, I don’t know, maybe a minute or so before the pain began to fade. I gasped several times, shook my head, and then slowly pushed myself up onto all fours. Then I fixed the Leanansidhe with a glare and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Or tried to say that. What came out was something more like, “Grrrrrrbrrrr awwf arrrr grrrrr.”

My faerie godmother looked at me and began laughing. Genuine, delighted belly laughter. She clapped her hands and bounced up and down, spinning in a circle, and laughed even more.

I realized then what had happened.

She had turned us—all of us, except for Mouse—into great, gaunt, long-legged hounds.

“Wonderful!” Lea said, pirouetting upon one toe, laughing. “Come, children!” And she leapt off into the jungle, nimble and swift as a doe.

A bunch of us dogs stood around for a moment, just sort of staring at one another.

And Mouse said, in what sounded to me like perfectly understandable English, “That bitch.”

We all stared at him.

Mouse huffed out a breath, shook his beslimed coat, and said, “Follow me.” Then he took off after the Leanansidhe, and, driven by reflex-level instinct, the rest of us raced to catch up.

I’d been shapeshifted one other time—by the dark magic of a cursed belt, and one that I suspected had been deliberately designed to provide an addictive high with its use. It had taken me a long time to shake off the memory of that experience, the absolute clarity of my senses, the feeling of ready power in my whole body, of absolute certainty in every movement.

Now I had it back—and this time, without the reality-blurring euphoria. I was intensely aware of the scents around me, of a hundred thousand new smells that begged to be explored, of the rush of sheer physical pleasure in racing across the ground after a friend. I could hear the breath and the bodies of the others around me, running through the night, bounding over stones and fallen trees, slashing through bits of brush and heavy ground cover.

We could hear small prey animals scattering before us and to either side, and I knew, not just suspected but knew, that I was faster, by far, than any of the merely mortal animals, even the young buck deer who went soaring away from us, leaping a good twenty feet over a waterway. I felt an overwhelming urge to turn in pursuit—but the lead runner in the pack was already on another trail, and I wasn’t sure I could have turned aside if I had tried to do so.

And the best part? We probably made less noise, as a whole, than any one of us would have made moving in a clumsy mortal body.

We didn’t cover five miles in half the time, an hour instead of two.

It took us—maybe, at the most—ten minutes.

When we stopped, we could all hear the drums. Steady, throbbing drums, keeping a quick, monotonous, trance-inducing beat. The sky to the northwest was bright with the light of reflected fires, and the air seethed with the scents of humans and not-quite humans and creatures that made me growl and want to bite something. Occasionally, a vampire’s cry would run its shrill claws down my spine.

Lea stood upon a fallen log ahead of us, staring ahead. Mouse walked up to her.

“Gggrrrr rawf arrrgggrrrrarrrr,” I said.

Mouse gave me an impatient glance, and somehow—I don’t know if it was something in his body language or what—I became aware that he was telling me to sit down and shut up or he’d come over and make me.

I sat down. Something in me really didn’t like that idea, but when I looked around, I saw that everyone else had done it too, and that made me feel better.

Mouse said, again in what sounded like perfectly clear English, “Funny. Now restore them.”

Lea turned to look at the big dog and said, “Do you dare to give me commands, hound?”

“Not your hound,” Mouse said. I didn’t know how he was doing it. His mouth wasn’t moving or anything. “Restore them before I rip your ass off. Literally rip it off.”

The Leanansidhe tilted her head back and let out a low laugh. “You are far from your sources of power here, my dear demon.”

“I live with a wizard. I cheat.” He took a step toward her and his lips peeled up from his fangs in unmistakable hostility. “You want to restore them? Or do I kill you and get them back that way?”

Lea narrowed her eyes. Then she said, “You’re bluffing.”

One of the big dog’s huge, clawed paws dug at the ground, as if bracing him for a leap, and his growl seemed to . . . I looked down and checked. It didn’t seem to shake the ground. The ground was actually shaking for several feet in every direction of the dog. Motes of blue light began to fall from his jaws, thickly enough that it looked quite a bit like he was foaming at the mouth. “Try me.”

The Leanansidhe shook her head slowly. Then she said, “How did Dresden ever win you?”

“He didn’t,” Mouse said. “I won him.”

Lea arched an eyebrow as if baffled. Then she shrugged and said, “We have a quest to complete. This bickering does not profit us.” She turned to us, passed a hand through the air in our general direction, and murmured, “Anytime you want it back, dears, just ask. You’d all make gorgeous hounds.”

Again, agony overwhelmed me, though I felt too weak to scream about it. It took a subjective eternity to pass, but when it did I was myself again, lying on my side, sweating and panting heavily.

Mouse came over and nuzzled my face, his tail wagging happily. He walked around me, sniffing, and began to nudge me to rise. I got up slowly, and actually braced my hand on his broad, shaggy back at one point. I felt an acute need to be gripping a good solid wizard’s staff again, just to hold me up. I don’t think I’d ever appreciated how much of a psychological advantage (i.e., security blanket) it was, either. But I wouldn’t have one until I’d taken a month or so to make one: Mine had been in the Blue Beetle, and died with it, too.

I was on my feet before anyone else. I eyed the dog and said, “You can talk. How come I never hear you talk?”

“Because you don’t know how to listen,” my godmother said simply.

Mouse wagged his tail and leaned against me happily, looking up at me.

I rested my hand on his head for a moment and rubbed his ears.

Screw it.

The important things don’t need to be said.

Everyone was getting back up again. The canteens made a round, and I let everyone recover for five minutes or so. There was no point in charging ahead before people could get their breath back and hold a weapon in a steady hand.

I did say something quietly to Susan, though. She nodded, frowned, and vanished.

She was back a few minutes later, and reported what she’d found into my ear.

“All right, people,” I said then, still quietly. “Gather in.”

I swept a section of the jungle floor clean and drew with my fingertip in the dirt. Martin lit the crude illustration with a red flashlight, one that wouldn’t ruin our night vision and had less chance of being glimpsed by a nearby foe.

“There are guards stationed all over the big pyramid. The girl is probably there, in the temple on top. That’s where I’m going. Me, Susan, and Lea are going to move up through the gallery, here, and head for the temple.”

“I’m with Susan,” Martin said. “I go where she does.”

This wasn’t the time or place to argue. “Me, Susan, Lea, and Martin will go in that way. I want all eyes facing north when we head for the pyramid. So I want the rest of you to circle that way and come in from that direction. Right here, there’s a cattle truck where they’re storing their human sacrifices. Get close and spring them. Raise whatever hell you can, and run fast. Head west. You’ll hit a road. Follow it to a town. Get into the church there. Got it?”

There was a round of nods and unhappy expressions.

“With any luck, that will draw off enough of them to let us pull a smash and grab on the temple.

“Also,” I said, very seriously, “what happens in the Yucatán stays in the Yucatán. There will be no jokes about sniffing butts or chasing tails or anything like that. Ever. Agreed?”

More sober nods, this time with a few smiles.

“Okay, folks,” I said. “Just so you know, friends—I’m in your debt, and it’s one I’ll never be able to repay. Thank you.”

“Gush later,” Murphy said, her tone wry. “Rescue now.”

“Spoken like a true lady,” I said, and put my hand out. Everyone piled hands. Mouse had to wedge in close to put his paw on the pile. All of us, every single one of us, except maybe my godmother, were visibly, obviously terrified, a circle of shivers and short, fast breaths.

“Good hunting, people,” I said quietly. “Go.”

Everyone had just gotten to their feet when the brush rattled, and a half-naked man came sprinting almost directly into us, his expression desperate, his eyes wide with mindless terror. He smashed into Thomas, rebounded off him, and crashed to the ground.

Before anyone could react, there was a muted rustle, and a Red Court vampire in its black-skinned monstrous form came bounding out of the forest five yards away and, upon seeing us, went rigid with startled shock. An instant later, it tried to reverse its course, its claws gouging at the forest floor.

I’ve heard it said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

It’s true.

The vampire let out an earsplitting screech, and all hell broke loose.

Chapter Forty-two

A lot of things happened very quickly.

Mouse rushed forward and caught the vampire by one calf just before it could vanish into the thick brush. He set his legs as the vampire struggled wildly, trying to scream again.

Martin brought his pistol up in a one-handed grip, six inches of sound suppressor attached to its muzzle. Without hesitating for an instant, Martin took a step to one side for a clear shot and fired on the move. The gun made a sound no louder than a man clearing his throat, and blood spattered from the vampire’s neck. Though it kept struggling, its screams suddenly ended, and it bounded and writhed wildly to maneuver Mouse between itself and Martin.

That stopped abruptly when Thomas’s falcata took the vampire’s head from its shoulders.

The half-naked man looked at us, and babbled something in Spanish. Susan answered him with a curt gesture and a harsh tone, and then the man blurted something, nodding emphatically, then turned to keep running into the darkness.

“Quiet,” I breathed, and everyone dropped silent while I stood quite still, Listening for all I was worth.

I have a knack, a skill that some people seem to be able to learn. I’m not sure if it’s something biological or magical, but it allows me to hear things I wouldn’t otherwise pick up, and I figured it was a good time for it.

For a long breath, there was nothing but the continued rumble of the drums.

Then a horn, something that sounded a bit like a conch, began to blow.

A chorus of vampire screams arose and it didn’t take any supergood hearing to know that they were headed our way.

“There. You see?” Sanya said, his tone gently reproving. “Frontal assault.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Murphy said, her tone more disgusted than afraid.

“He’s right,” I said, my voice hard. “Our only chance is to hit them hard.” We had only a moment, and my mind raced, trying to come up with a plan that resulted in something other than us drowning in a flood of vampires.

“Harry,” Susan said. “How are we going to do this?”

“I need Lea,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. “I need Molly.”

Molly made a squeaking noise.

I turned to Susan and said, “We do it in two waves.”

We moved directly toward the enemy, entering the ancient gallery full of columns, and the vampires came boiling out of the shadows to meet us. I don’t know how many of them there were. More than a hundred, less than a million. I stepped out in front of everyone and said, “Attack!”

Sanya’s battle roar was loudest. He leapt forward, drawing Esperacchius , and blazing light shone forth from the blade.

Murphy ran forward upon his right, letting out a scream of her own and holding the shining length of Fidelacchius in her hands. An aura of soft blue light had surrounded her. On Sanya’s left, Susan ran, Amoracchius held aloft and wreathed in white fire, and her scream was something primal and terrible. Thomas flanked Murphy. Martin ran next to Susan, and both of them charged forward with blade and pistol in hand.

I saw the front ranks of vampires hesitate as they saw the pure, terrible light of the three Swords coming toward them, but it wasn’t enough to stop the momentum of that horde. It swallowed all five valiant figures in a tidal wave of dark, flabby bodies, claws, fangs, and lashing tongues.

Suckers.

I still stood forward of everyone else, and the meeting of the two ranks of combatants brought the horde to a halt. A brief halt, true, something that lasted no more than a handful of seconds—but it was time enough for me to reach down to touch the slow, terrible power of the ley line flowing beneath my feet.

The temple atop the pyramid in the ruins was the center of the confluence, but ley lines, each one a vast, roaring current of magical energy, radiated out in all directions—and the one beneath us was an enormous current of raw earth magic. Earth magic wasn’t my forte, and I knew only a couple of applications well enough to use them in a fight.

But one of them was a doozy.

I reached out and touched the power of that ley line, desperately wishing I had my staff with me to assist with the effort. I could sense the earth magic in my mind, feel it flowing by with a power that vibrated up through the soles of the big, stompy, armor-plated boots my godmother had put on me. I took a deep breath, and then thrust my thoughts down into that power.

I was immediately overwhelmed with a rush of images and alien sensations, contacting a power so intense and coherent that it nearly had its own awareness. In a single moment, I saw the ponderous dance of continents clashing against one another to form mountains, felt the slow sleepiness of the earth, its dreaming shivers felt as disasters by the ephemeral things that lived upon its skin. I saw wealth and riches beyond petty mortal imagination, gold and silver flowing hot in rivers, precious gems by the millions being born and formed.

I fought to contain the images, to control them and channel them, focusing all of those sensations into a well I could see only in my imagination, a point deep below the gallery of crumbling old stone that rested next to the pitifully temporary mortal structure on the surface.

Once I had the raw magic I needed, I was able to pull my mind clear of the ley line, and I was suddenly holding a whirlwind of molten stone in my head, seething against the containment of my will until it felt like my skull would burst outward from the pressure, and realized as I did that the use to which I was putting this pure, raw energy was almost childish in its simplicity. I was a frail wisp of mortality beside that energy, which could, quite literally, have moved mountains, leveled cities, shifted the course of rivers, and stirred oceans in their beds.

I set that well of energy to spinning, and directed its power as it spiraled up, a tornado of magic that reached out to embrace simple gravity. With the enormous energy of the ley line, I focused the pull of the earth for miles around into a circle a couple of hundred yards across and spoke a single word as I unleashed the torrent of energy, bound only, firmly if imperfectly, by my will. The spell, start to finish, had taken me a good sixty seconds to put together, and tapping into the ley line had been the last part of the process—far too long and far too destructive to use in any of the faster and more furious fights that I’d found myself in over the years.

Perfect for tonight.

For a quarter of a second, gravity vanished from Chichén Itzá, and the land for miles all around it, jerking everything that wasn’t fastened down, myself included, several inches into the air. For that time, all of that force was focused and concentrated into a circle perhaps two hundred yards across that embraced the entire gallery and every vampire inside it. There, the enormous power of that much focused gravity, nearly three hundred times normal, slammed everyone and everything straight down, as if crushed by a single, gigantic, invisible anvil.

The stone columns handled it better than I thought they would. Maybe half of them suddenly cracked, shattered, and fell into rubble, but the rest bore up under the strain as they had for centuries.

The assault force of the Red Court wasn’t nearly so resilient.

I could hear the bones breaking from where I stood, each snapping with hideously sharp pops and cracks. Down crashed the wave of vampires in a mass of shattered bones. Many of them were crushed beneath the falling stones of the weaker columns—each flabby black body smashed beneath a weight of scores of tons of stone, even if hit by only one piece from a single block.

The energy involved had been enormous, and as I was bounced up about a foot into the air, I was hit with the wave of exhaustion that came along with it. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Technically, I was only channeling and rearranging forces that were already in existence and motion, not creating them from my will, or I could never have managed to affect an area so big, and to do it so violently. But believe you me, it was still hard.

I was thrown several inches up along with everything and everyone else that wasn’t secured. I landed with only one foot beneath me, so I dropped to one knee, catching myself on my hands. Panting, I looked up to see the results of the spell.

A couple of acres of flat, dead, and a few horribly wounded and dying vampires lay strewn about like so many crushed ants, and standing over them, each in a combat pose, as if ready to keep on swinging, were the friends I had sent running ahead, entirely unaffected.

“Good,” I said, panting. “That’s enough, kid.”

I heard Molly, several feet behind me, let out a sigh of relief herself, and the lights and shining auras vanished from the three figures wielding a Sword.

“Well-done, little one,” the Leanansidhe said, and as she spoke the five figures themselves vanished. “A most credible illusion. It is always the little touches of truth that make for the most potent deceptions.”

“Well, you know,” Molly said, sounding a little flustered. “I just watched my dad a few times.”

Mouse stayed close at my side. His head was turned to the right, focused upon the trees and the darkness that way. A growl I felt more than heard came from deep in his chest.

Susan stepped up to my side and looked at the crushed vampires with undisguised satisfaction, but frowned. “Esclavos de sangre,” she said.

“Yes,” said Martin from somewhere behind me.

“What?” I asked.

“Blood slaves,” Susan said to me. “Vampires who have gone entirely feral. They can’t create a flesh mask. They’re almost animals. Scum.”

“Cannon fodder,” I said, forcing my lungs to start taking slower, deeper breaths. “A crowd of scum at a top-end Red Court function.”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out why they’d been there. Mouse’s interest in whatever it was he sensed in the trees was deepening. “The Red Court was expecting company.”

“Yes,” Susan said, her voice tight.

Well. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

That changed everything. A surprise raid upon an unsuspecting, unprepared target was one thing. Trying to simply kick in the teeth of a fully armed and ready Red Court obviously expecting someone with my firepower was something else entirely. Namely, sheer stupidity.

So.

I had to change the game and change it fast.

A gong began to clash slowly, a monstrous thing, the metallic roar of its voice something low and harsh that reminded me inexplicably of the roar Martin had produced earlier. The tension got thicker, and except for the sounds of the drum and the gong, there were no other noises, not of the creatures of the jungle or any other kind.

The quiet was far more terrifying than the noise had been.

“They’re out there,” I said quietly. “They’re moving right now.”

“Yes,” said Lea, who had suddenly appeared at my left side, opposite Mouse. Her voice was very calm, and her feline eyes roamed the night, bright and interested. “That mob of trash was merely a distraction. Our own tactic used against us.” Her eyes narrowed. “They are employing veils to hide themselves—and they are quite skilled.”

“Molly,” I said.

“On it, boss,” she replied.

“Our distraction was an illusion. It didn’t cost us any lives,” Murphy pointed out.

“Neither did theirs, from their perspective, Sergeant,” Martin said. “Creatures who cannot control themselves are of no use to the Red King, after all. Their deaths simply reduced the number of useless, parasitic mouths he had to feed. He may think of humans as a commodity, but he’d rather not throw that wealth away.”

“Harry?” Murphy asked. “Can you do that anvil thing again?”

“Hell. I’m sorta surprised I got away with it the first time. Never done anything with that much voltage.” I closed my eyes for a second and began to reach down for the ley line again—and my brain contorted. Thoughts turned into a harsh explosion of images and memories that left long lacerations on the inside of my skull, and even after I had moved my mind away from those images, it took several seconds before I could open my eyes again. “No,” I croaked. “No, that isn’t an option. Even if they gave me enough time to pull it off.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Thomas asked. He held a large pistol in his left hand, his falcata in his right, and stood at my back, facing the darkness behind us. “Stand here until they swarm us?”

“We’re going to show them how much it will cost to take us down,” I said. “How’s it coming, padawan?”

Molly let out a slow, thoughtful breath. Then she lifted one pale hand, rotated an extended finger in a circle around us, and murmured, “Hireki.”

I felt the subtle surge of her will wash out and drew in my own as it did. The word my apprentice whispered seemed to flow out from her in an enormous circle, leaving visible signs of its passing. It fluttered leaves and blades of grass, stirred small stones—and, as it continued, it washed over several shapes out in the night that rippled and became solid black outlines, where before there was only indistinct darkness and shadow.

“Not all that skilled,” Molly said, panting, satisfaction in her voice.

“Fuego!” I snarled, and threw a small comet of fire from my right hand. It sailed forth with a howling whistle of superheated air and smashed into the nearest of the shadowed forms, less than a dozen yards away. Fire leapt up, and a vampire screamed in rage and pain and began retreating through the trees.

“Infriga!” I barked, and made a ripping gesture with my left hand. I tore the fire from the stricken vampire—and then some. I sent the resulting fireball skipping over to the next form—and left the first target as a block of ice where the damp jungle air had emptied its water over the vampire’s body and locked it into place, rigid and very slightly luminous with the residue of the cold energy I felt in me, the gift of Queen Mab. Which was just as well—there were a dozen closing attackers in my immediate field of vision alone, which meant another fifty or sixty of them if they were circling in from all around us, plus the ones I couldn’t see, who may have employed more mundane techniques of stealth to avoid the eye.

I wanted them to see what I could do.

The second vampire fell as easily as the first, as did the third, and only then did I say quietly, “One bullet apiece, Martin.”

Martin’s silenced pistol coughed three times, and the slightly glowing forms of the ice-enclosed vampires shattered into several dozen pieces each, falling to the ground where the luminous energy of Winter began to bleed slowly away, along with the ice-riddled flesh.

They got the point. The vampires stopped advancing. The jungle became still.

“Fire and ice,” murmured the Leanansidhe. “Excellent, my godson. Anyone can play with an element. Few can manipulate opposites with such ease.”

“Sort of the idea,” I said. “Back me up.”

“Of course,” Lea said.

I stepped forward and slightly apart from the others and lifted my hands. “Arianna!” I shouted, and my voice boomed as though I’d been holding a microphone and using speakers the size of refrigerators. It was something of a surprise, and I looked over my shoulder to see my godmother smiling calmly.

“Arianna!” I called again. “You were too great a coward to accept my challenge when I gave it to you in Edinburgh! Now I am here, in the heart of the power of the Red King! Do you still fear to face me, coward?”

“What?” Thomas muttered under his breath.

“This is not an assault,” Sanya added, disapproval in his voice.

I ignored them. I was the one with the big voice. “You see what I have done to your rabble!” I called. “How many more must die before you come out from behind them, Duchess? I am come to kill you and claim my child! Stand forth, or I swear to you, upon the power in my body and mind, that I will lay waste to your strong place. Before I die, I will make you pay the price for every drop of blood—and when I die, my death curse will scatter the power of this place to the winds!

“Arianna!” I bellowed, and I could not stop the hatred from making my voice sharply edged with scorn and spite. “How many loyal servants of the Red King must die tonight? How many Lords of Outer Night will taste mortality before the sun rises? You have only begun to know the power I bring with me this night. For though I die, I swear to you this: I will not fall alone.”

I indulged in a little bit of melodrama at that point: I brought forth soulfire—enough to sheath my body in silver light—as my oath rolled out over the land, through the ruins, and bounced from tree to tree. It cast a harsh light that the nearest surviving vampires cringed away from.

For a long moment, there was no sound.

Then the drums and the occasional clash of the gong stopped.

A conch shell horn, the sound unmistakable, blew three high, sweet notes.

The effect was immediate. The vampires surrounding us all retreated until they were out of sight. Then a drumbeat began again, this time from a single drummer.

“What’s happening?” Thomas asked.

“The Red King’s agents spent the past couple of days trying to kill me or make sure I showed up here only as a vampire,” I said quietly. “I’m pretty sure it’s because the king didn’t want the duchess pulling off her bloodline curse against me. Which means that there’s a power play going on inside the Red Court.”

“Your explanation isn’t one,” Thomas replied.

“Now that I am here,” I said, “I’m betting that the Red King is going to be willing to attempt other means of undercutting the duchess.”

“You don’t even know he’s here.”

“Of course he is,” I said. “There’s a sizable force here, as large as any we’ve ever seen take the field during the war.”

“What if it isn’t his army? What if he’s not here to run it?” Thomas asked.

“History suggests that kings who don’t exercise direct control over their armies don’t tend to remain kings for very long. Which must be, ultimately, what this is all about—diminishing Arianna’s power.”

“And talking to you does that how?”

“The Code Duello,” I said. “The Red Court signed the Accords. For what Arianna has done, I have the right to challenge her. If I kill her, I get rid of the Red King’s problem for him.”

“Suppose he isn’t interested in chatting?” Thomas said. “Suppose they’re pulling back because he just convinced someone to drop a cruise missile on top of us?”

“Then we’ll get blown up,” I said. “Which is better than we’d get if we had to tangle with them here and now, I expect.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. “Just so we have that clear.”

“Pansy,” Murphy sneered.

Thomas leered at her. “You make my stamen tingle when you talk like that, Sergeant.”

“Quiet,” Sanya murmured. “Something is coming.”

A soft lamp carried by a slender figure in a white garment came toward us down the long row of columns.

It proved to be a woman dressed in an outfit almost exactly like Susan’s. She was tall, young, and lovely, with the dark red-brown skin of the native Maya, with their long features and dark eyes. Three others accompanied her—men, and obviously warriors all, wearing the skins of jaguars over their shoulders and otherwise clad only in loincloths and heavy tattoos. Two of them carried swords made of wood and sharpened chips of obsidian. The other carried a drum that rolled off a steady beat.

I thought there was something familiar about the features of the three men, but then I realized that they weren’t personally familiar to me. It was the subtle tension of their bodies, the hints of power that hung about them like a very faint perfume.

They reminded me quite strongly of Susan and Martin. Half vampires. Presumably just as dangerous as Susan and Martin, if not more so.

The jaguar warriors all came to a halt about twenty feet away, but the drum kept rolling and the girl kept walking, one step for each beat. When she reached me, she unfastened her feathered cloak and let it fall to the ground. Then, with the twist of a piece of leather at each shoulder, the shift slid down her body into a puddle of soft white around her feet. She was naked beneath, except for a band of leather around her hips, from which hung an obsidian-bladed knife. She knelt down in a slow, graceful motion, a portrait in supplication, then took up the knife and offered its handle to me.

“I am Priestess Alamaya, servant of the Great Lord Kukulcan,” she murmured, her voice honeyed, her expression serene. “He bids you and your retainers be welcome to this, his country seat, Wizard Dresden, and offers you the blood of my life as proof of his welcome and his compliance with the Accords.” She lowered her eyes and turned her head to the right to bare her throat, the carotid artery, while still holding forth the blade. “Do with me as you will. I am a gift to you from the Great Lord.”

“Oh, how thoughtful,” the Leanansidhe murmured. “You hardly ever meet anyone that polite, these days. May I?”

“No,” I said, and tried to keep the edge of irritation out of my voice. I took the knife from the girl’s hands and slid it into my sash, and let it rest next to the cloth sack I had made from a knotted inside- out Rolling Stones T-shirt. The shirt had been in my gym bag of contraband ever since it had been a gym bag of clean clothes for when I went to the gym. I had pressed the shirt (bah-dump-bump, ching) into service when I realized the one other thing I couldn’t do without during this confrontation. It was tied to my grey cloth sash.

Then I took the young woman’s arm and lifted her to her feet, sensing no particular aura of power around her. She was mortal, evidently a servant of the vampires.

She drew in a short breath as she felt my hand circle her wrist and rose swiftly, so that I didn’t have to expend any effort lifting her. “Should you wish to defile me in that way, lord, it is also well within your rights as guest.” Her dark eyes were very direct, very willing. “My body is yours, as is my blood.”

“More than a century,” Murphy muttered, “and we’ve gone from ‘like a fish needs a bicycle’ to this.”

I cleared my throat and gave Murphy a look. Then I turned to the girl and said, “I have no doubt about your lord’s integrity, Priestess Alamaya. Please convey us to his seat, that I may speak with him.”

At my words, the girl fell to her knees again and brushed her long, dark hair across my feet. “I thank you for my life, wizard, that I may continue to serve my lord,” she said. Then she rose again and made an imperious gesture to one of the jaguar warriors. The man immediately recovered her clothing and assisted her in dressing again. The feather cloak slid over her shoulders once more, and though I knew the thing had to be heavy, she bore it without strain. “This way, lord, if you please.”

“Love this job,” Sanya murmured. “Just love it.”

“I need to challenge more people to duels,” Thomas said in agreement.

“Men are pigs,” Murphy said.

“Amen,” said Molly.

Lea gave me a prim look and said, “I’ve not sacrificed a holy virgin in ages.”

“Completely unprofessional,” muttered Martin.

“Ixnay,” I said quietly, laying a hand on Mouse’s shoulders. “All of you. Follow me. And don’t look edible.”

And, following the priestess with her lamp, we entered the city of Chichén Itzá.

Chapter Forty-three

Chichén Itzá smelled like blood.

You never mistake blood for anything else, not even if you’ve never smelled it before. We’ve all tasted it—if nowhere else, when we lose our baby teeth. We all know the taste, and as a corollary, we all know the smell.

The main pyramid is known as El Castillo by most of the folk who go there today—literally, “the castle.” As we walked up out of the gallery of pillars, it loomed above us, an enormous mound of cut stone, every bit as large and imposing as the European fortifications for which it was named. It was a ziggurat-style pyramid, made all of square blocks. Levels piled one on top of another as it rose up to the temple at its summit—and every level of the pyramid was lined with a different form of guard.

At the base of the pyramid, and therefore most numerous, were the jaguar warriors we had already seen. They were all men, all appealing, all layered with the lean, swift muscle of a panther. They all wore jaguar skins. Many of them bore traditional weapons. Many more wore swords, some of them of modern make, the best of which were superior in every physical sense to the weapons manufactured in the past. Most of them also carried a Kalashnikov—again, the most modern versions of the weapons, made of steel and polymer, the finest of which were also readily superior to the weapons of earlier manufacture.

The next level up were all women, garbed in ritual clothing as Alamaya had been, but covered in tattoos, much as the jaguar warriors were. They, too, had that same subtle edge to them that suggested greater-than-mortal capability.

Hell’s bells. If the numbers were the same on every side of the pyramid, and I had no reason to believe that they were not, then I was looking at nearly a thousand of the jaguar warriors and priestesses. I am a dangerous man—but no one man is that dangerous. I was abruptly glad that we hadn’t tried a rope-a-dope or a forward charge. We’d have been swamped by sheer numbers, almost regardless of the plan.

Numbers matter.

That fact sucks, but that makes it no less true. No matter how just your cause, if you’re outnumbered two to one by a comparable force, you’re gonna have to be real creative to pull out a victory. Ask the Germans who fought on either front of World War II. German tankers would often complain that they would take out ten Allied tanks for every tank they lost—but the Allies always seemed to have tank number eleven ready to go.

I was looking at an impossible numerical disadvantage, and I did not at all like the way it felt to realize that truth.

And I was only on the second tier of the pyramid.

Vampires occupied the next several levels. None of them were in their monstrous form, but they didn’t have to be. They weren’t going all out on their disguises, and the all-black coloration of their eyes proclaimed their inhumanity with eloquence. Among the vampires, gender seemed to have no particular recognition. Two more levels were filled with fully vampire jaguar warriors, male and female alike, and the next two with vampire priests and priestesses. Above them came what I presumed to be the Red Court’s version of the nobility—individual vampires, male and female, who clearly stood with their own retinues. They tended to wear more and more gold and have fewer and fewer tattoos the higher up the pyramid they went.

Just before the top level were thirteen lone figures, and from what I could see they were taller than most mortals, seven feet or more in height. Each was dressed in a different form of traditional garb, and each had his own signature mask. My Mayan mythology was a bit rusty, but White Council intelligence reports said that the Lords of Outer Dark had posed as gods to the ancient Mayans, each with his own separate identity. What they didn’t say was that either they had been a great deal more than that, or that collecting worshipers had made them more than merely ancient vampires.

I saw them and my knees shook. I couldn’t stop it.

And a light shone in the temple at the top of the pyramid.

The smell of blood came from the temple.

It wasn’t hard to puzzle out. It ran down the steps that led up the pyramid, a trickling stream of red that had washed down the temple steps and onto the earth beyond—which was torn up as if someone had cruised through the bloodied earth with a rototiller and torn it to shreds. The blood slaves, I was willing to bet. My imagination provided me with a picture of that insane mob tearing at the earth, swallowing bloody gob-bets of it, fighting with one another over the freshest mud—until yours truly showed up and kicked off the party.

I looked left and right as we walked across the open courtyard. The cattle car Susan had told us about was still guarded, by a contingent of men in matching khakis and tactical vests—a private security company of some kind. Mercenaries. There were a load of security bozos around, several hundred at least, stationed here and there in soldierly blocks of fifty men.

Without pausing, Alamaya trod across the courtyard and began up the steps, moving with deliberate, reverent strides. I followed her, and everyone else present came with me. I got hostile stares all the way up, from both sides. I ignored them, as if they weren’t worth my notice. Alamaya’s calves were a lot more interesting anyway.

We reached the level below the temple and Alamaya turned to me. “My lord will speak to only one, Wizard Dresden. Please ask your retainers to wait here.”

Here. Right next to the Lords of Outer Night, the expired godlings.

If I made a mistake, and if this went bad, it was going to go really bad, really fast. The people who had been willing to risk everything to help me would be the first to suffer because of it. For a moment, I thought about cutting a deal. Send them away. Let me face the Red Court alone. I had enough lives on my conscience already.

But then I heard a soft, soft sound from the level above: a child weeping.

Maggie.

It was far too sad and innocent a sound to be the death knell for my friends—but that might be exactly what it was.

“Stay here,” I said quietly. “I don’t think this is going to turn into a John Woo film for a couple of minutes, at least. Murph, take the lead until I get back. Sanya, back her.”

She arched an eyebrow at me, but nodded. Sanya shifted his position by a couple of feet, to stand slightly behind her and at her right hand.

I moved slowly up the last few steps to the temple.

It was a simple, elegant thing: an almost cubic building atop the pyramid, with a single opening the size of a fairly standard doorway on each side. Alamaya went in first, her eyes downcast. The moment she was in the door, she took a step to one side and knelt, her eyes on the ground, as if she were worthy to move no farther forward.

I took a slow breath and stepped past her, to face the king of the Red Court.

He was kinda little.

He stood with his back to me, his hands raised over his head, murmuring in what I presumed to be ancient Mayan or something. He was five-two, five-three, well muscled, but certainly nothing like imposing. He was dressed in a kind of skirt- kilt thing, naked from the waist up and the kneecap down. His hair was black and long, hanging to the top of his shoulder blades. He gripped a bloodied knife in his hand, and lowered it slowly, delicately.

It was only then that I noticed the woman on the altar, bound hand and foot, her eyes wide and hopeless, fixed on that black knife as if she could not look away.

My hands clenched into fists. I wasn’t here to fight, I reminded myself. I wasn’t here to fight.

But I wasn’t here to stand around and let something like this happen, either. And I’ve never had a clear head when it comes to protecting women. Murphy says it makes me a Neanderthal.

She may be right, but I didn’t seize a bone and jump the guy. I just cleared my throat really, really obnoxiously, and said, “Hey.”

The knife paused.

Then the Red King lowered it and turned to face me. And I was forcibly reminded that nuclear warheads come in relatively small packages. He made absolutely no threatening gesture. He didn’t even glare.

He didn’t need to.

The pressure of his eyes was like nothing I had ever felt before—empty darkness that struck at me like a physical blow, that made me feel as if I had to physically lean away from him to keep from being drawn forward into that vacuum and lost to the void. I was suddenly reminded that I was alone, that I had none of my tools, that I was involved in matters way over my head, and that my outfit looked ridiculous.

And all of it was simply his physical presence. It was far too huge for the little body it came in, too large to be contained by the stone of this temple, a kind of psychic body heat that loomed so large that only a fool would not be instantly aware of how generally insignificant he was in the greater scheme of the universe. I felt my resolve being eroded, even as I stood there, and I clenched my jaw and looked away.

The Red King chuckled. He said something. Alamaya answered him, then rose and came to kneel down at his feet, facing me.

The slave on the altar remained in place, crying quietly.

I could hear another, smaller voice coming from behind the altar. Holy crap. I couldn’t have cut this one much closer. I focused on my daughter’s voice for a moment, small and sweet—and suddenly I didn’t feel nearly so small. I just felt angry.

The Red King spoke.

Alamaya listened and then said, “You do not speak the true tongue of the ages, wizard, so my lord will use this slave to ensure that understanding exists between us.”

“Radical,” I said. “Wicked cool.”

Alamaya eyed me for a moment. Then she said something to the Red King, apparently conveying the fact that I had obnoxiously used phrasing that was difficult to translate.

He narrowed his eyes.

I mimicked his expression. I didn’t know if he got it, but he sure didn’t like it.

He said something in a short, curt tone.

“My lord demands to know why you are here,” the priestess said.

“Tell him he fucking well knows why I’m here,” I said.

She stared at me in shock. She stammered several times as she translated for me. I don’t know if Ancient Mayan has a word for bleep or if she used it.

The Red King listened, his expression slipping from displeasure into careful neutrality. He stared at me for several moments before he spoke again.

“ ‘I was given a gift by she you know as Duchess Arianna,’ ” the girl translated. “ ‘Are you saying that the gift was wrongfully obtained?’ ”

“Yes,” I said, not looking away from him. “And you know it.” I shook my head. “I’m sick of dancing. Tell him that I’ll kill Arianna for him, take my daughter with me, and leave in peace. Tell him if he does that, it stops being personal. Otherwise, I’m prepared to fight.”

The girl translated, her face once more fearful. When she finished, the Red King burst out laughing. He leaned back against the altar, his mouth wide in a grin, his black eyes utterly unsettling. He spoke a few terse sentences.

“My lord says that he will throw one of your limbs from each door if you lift your hand against him.”

I snorted. “Yes. But I won’t even try to kill him.” I leaned forward, speaking to the Red King, not the girl, and showing him my teeth. “I’ll try to cripple him. Wound him. Weaken him. Ask him if he thinks the death curse of a wizard of the White Council can deal him a wound. Ask him how well he trusts the people on the nearest couple of levels of the pyramid. Ask him if he thinks that they’ll visit and send gifts when they realize he’s been hurt.”

Alamaya spoke in a fearful whisper, earning a sharp word of reproof and a command from the Red King. I guessed at the subject matter: “I don’t want to tell you this, my lord.” “Stupid slave, translate the way I damned well told you to do or I’ll break my foot off in your ass.”

Okay. Maybe not that last part.

Alamaya got on with her unpleasant job, and the words pushed the Red King into a rage. He gritted his teeth, and . . . things moved beneath his skin, shifting and rolling where nothing should have existed that could shift and roll.

I stared at him with one eyebrow lifted and that same wolf smile on my face, waiting for his reaction. He hadn’t been talked to like this in a long time, if ever. He might not have much of a coping mechanism for dealing with it. If he didn’t, I was going to die really horribly.

He did. He mastered himself, but I thought it was close—and it cost the woman on the altar her life.

He spun and slammed the obsidian knife into her right eye with such force that the blade broke off. She arched her body up as much as her restraints allowed and let out a short, choked scream of agony, throwing her head left and right—and then she sort of slowly relaxed into death. One leg kept twitching and moving.

The Red King ran two fingertips through the blood that was seeping from her eye socket. He slipped the fingers into his mouth and shuddered. Then he turned to face me, completely composed again.

I’d seen behavior like that before. It was the mark of an addict scoring a fix and full of contentment that he had a body full of booze or drugs or whatever, and therefore the illusion that he could handle emotional issues more capably.

That . . . explained a lot about how the Red Court had behaved during the war. Hell’s bells, their king was a junkie. No wonder they had performed so inconsistently—brilliant and aggressive one moment, capable of making insane and idiotic mistakes the next. It also explained why there was strife within the Court. If the mark of power was control of one’s blood thirst, indulging it only when and where one chose, and not with every random impulse, then anyone who knew about the Red King’s condition would know that he was weak, inconsistent, and irrational.

Hell’s bells. This guy wasn’t just a monster. He was also paranoid. He had to be, because he knew that his bloodlust would be seen as a sign that he should be overthrown. If it had been happening for very long, it would have driven him insane. Even for one of the Red Court, I mean.

And that must be what had happened. Arianna had somehow tumbled to the Red King’s weakness, and was building a power base aimed at deposing him. She’d be building her own power, personal, political, and social, inasmuch as the vampires had a psychotic, blood-spattered, ax-murdering version of a society. Dealing appropriately with one’s enemies was critical to maintaining standing in any society—and for the Red Court, the only two enemies were those who had been dealt with appropriately and those who were still alive. She literally had no choice but to take me down if she was to succeed. And a Pearl Harbor for the White Council wouldn’t hurt her any either, if she pulled it off.

Oh, I had to make sure this little lunatic stayed king. As long as he was, the Council would never face a competent, united Red Court.

The Red King spoke a moment later, and wiped off his fingers in Alamaya’s hair as he did.

“My lord accepts your petition to challenge the duchess. This slave will be sent to fetch her while you wait.”

“Not so fast,” I said, as Alamaya began to rise. “Tell him I want to see the girl.”

She froze between us, wide-eyed.

The king moved a hand in a permissive gesture. She spoke quietly to him.

His lip twitched up away from his teeth a couple of times. But he gave me a curt nod and gestured at the altar. Then he stepped to one side and watched me.

I kept track of him out of the corner of my eye as I approached the altar.

Maggie, wearing little metal restraints that had, ugh, been made to fit children, huddled on the far side of the altar. Blood had spilled out from the altar, and she had retreated from it until she was pressed against the wall, trying to keep her little shoes and dress, both filthy already, out of the blood. Her hair was a tangled mess. Her dark eyes were wide and bloodshot. She was shivering. It wasn’t terribly cold out tonight—but it was cold enough to torment a child dressed in only a little cotton dress.

I wanted to go to her. Take those restraints off. Wrap her up in my ridiculous cloak and get her some food and some hot chocolate and a bath and a comb and a brush and a teddy bear and a bed and . . .

She saw me and flinched away with a whimper.

Oh, God.

I ached, seeing her there, frightened and miserable and alone. I know how to handle pain when I’m the one feeling it. But the hurt that went through me upon seeing my child, my blood, suffering there in front of my eyes—it went to a whole new level, and I had no idea how to deal with it.

But I thought it would probably start with tearing some more vampires to bloody shreds.

I took that pain and fed it to the storm inside me, the one that had been raging for endless hours and that flared up white-hot again. I waited until my rage had been stoked hot enough to dry the tears in my eyes. Then I turned to the Red King and nodded.

“Deal,” I said. “Go get the duchess. I’ll take out the garbage for you.”

Chapter Forty-four

A lamaya departed the temple in silence. Within a minute she was back. She bowed to the Red King—a full, kneeling bow, at that—and said something quietly.

The Red King narrowed his eyes. He murmured something to the girl and walked out. Conch horns blew and the drums began again as he appeared to those outside.

Alamaya had to raise her voice slightly to be heard. “My lord wishes you to know that this place is watched and warded. Should you attempt to leave with the child, you will be destroyed, and she with you.”

“Understood,” I said calmly.

Alamaya gave me a more conventional bow and hurried out after the Red King.

When she was gone, I took two steps over to the altar and the dead woman upon it. Then I said, “All right. Tell me what I’m looking at.”

From the improvised Rolling Stones T- shirt bag tied to my sash, Bob the Skull said, in his most caustic voice, “A giant pair of cartoon lips.”

I muttered a curse and fumbled with the shirt until one of the skull’s glowing orange eye sockets was visible.

“A big goofy magic nerd!” Bob said.

I growled at him and aimed his eye at the altar.

“Oh,” Bob said. “Oh, my.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The ritual curse they’re setting up,” Bob said. “It’s a big one.”

“How does it work? In ten seconds or less.”

“Ten sec—Argh,” Bob said. “Okay. Picture a crossbow. All the human sacrifices are the effort you need to pull back the string and store the energy. This crossbow has its string all the way back, and it’s ready to fire. It just needs a bolt.”

“What do you mean, a bolt?”

“Like the little girl hiding back behind it,” Bob said. “Her blood will carry the stored energy out into the world, and conduct that energy to the target. In this case, her blood relatives.”

I frowned for a second. Then I asked, “Does it have to be Maggie, specifically?”

“Nah. One bolt is pretty much like another. Long as you use a compatible knife to spill the blood, it should work.”

I nodded. “So . . . what if we used a different bolt?”

“The same thing would happen,” Bob said. “The only difference would be who is on the receiving end.”

“It’s a loaded gun,” I said quietly. I frowned. “Then why’d they leave me alone with it?”

“Who you gonna kill to set it off?” Bob asked. “Your little girl? Yourself? Come on, boss.”

“Can we disarm it then? Scramble it?”

“Sure. It’d blow this temple halfway to orbit, but you could do that.”

I ground my teeth. “If it goes off the way they mean it to, will it kill Thomas?”

“The girl’s human,” Bob said. “So only the human bits. His body, his mind. I suppose if he got lucky, he might wind up a vegetable in which his Hunger demon was trapped, but it won’t spread any farther into the White Court than that.”

“Dammit,” I said. I started to say more, but caught motion out of the corner of my eye. I stuffed Bob all the way back into the sack, admonishing him to shut up, and turned to find Alamaya entering the temple with a dozen of the full-vampire jaguar warriors at her back.

“If you would follow me, lord wizard,” the girl said, “I will conduct you to she who has wronged you. My lord wishes you to know that he gives his word that your daughter will be spared from any harm until the duel is concluded.”

“Thank you,” I said. I turned to look at my little girl one more time. She huddled against the wall, her eyes open but not fixed on anything, as if she were trying to watch everything around her at once.

I moved over to the child, and she flinched again. I knelt down in front of her. I didn’t try to touch her. I didn’t think I would be able to keep cool if I saw her recoil from my hand.

“Maggie,” I said quietly.

Her eyes flashed up to me, surprise evident there.

“I’m going to take you away from the mean people,” I said, keeping my voice as soft and gentle as I knew how. I didn’t know if she even understood English. “Okay? I’m taking you out of here.”

Her lip trembled. She looked away from me again.

Then I stood up and followed the priestess of the junkie god to face my enemy.

Outside, things had changed. The Red Court had filed down from the pyramid and were on the move, walking in calm, ordered procession to another portion of the ruins. My companions waited at the bottom of the stairs.

“Right,” I said, once I reached them. “Duel time.”

Sanya shook his head. “Mark my words. This will not be settled in a dueling circle. Things like this always go to hell.”

“The Accords are serious,” I said. “He’ll play it straight. If I win, I get the girl and we’re gone.”

Martin shook his head.

“What?” I asked him.

“I know them,” he said levelly. “None of us are leaving this place alive.”

His words had an instant effect on everyone. They hit Molly the hardest. She was already pale. I saw her swallow nervously.

“Maybe you know the monsters, Martin,” Murphy said quietly. “But I know the guy who stops them. And if they don’t return the girl, we’ll make them regret it.” She nodded at me and said, “Let’s go. We can watch Dresden kill the bitch.”

I found myself smiling. Murphy was good people.

Once the last of the half- mortal jaguar warriors had departed, we fell into step behind them, and followed them toward what looked like another temple, on the north end of the ruins.

As we went beneath the temple doorway, though, we found ourselves passing through it into the open space beyond—a swath of green grass at least a hundred and fifty yards long and seventy or eighty yards wide. Stone walls about thirty feet high lined the long sides of the rectangle, while the far end boasted a temple like the one we’d just entered.

“It’s a stadium,” I murmured, looking around the place.

“Ugh,” Molly said. “There are some pretty horrific stories about the Mayans’ spectator sports, boss.”

“Indeed.” Lea sighed happily. “They knew well how to motivate their athletes.”

Alamaya turned to me and said, “Lord, your retainers may wait here. Please come with me.”

“Keep your eyes open, folks,” I said. Then I nodded to Alamaya and followed her onto the field. Even as I started out, a woman began walking toward me from the opposite end. As she approached, I saw that Arianna had the same facial features, more or less, but she had traded in her pale skin for red-brown, her icy eyes for vampire black, and she’d dropped six inches from her height. She wore a simple buckskin shift and more gold jewelry than a Mr. T look-alike convention. Her nose was a little sharper, a little longer, but as we stopped and faced each other from about ten feet away, I could see the hate boiling behind her eyes. I had no doubt that this was the duchess.

I smiled at her and said, “I gotcha now.”

“Yes,” Arianna replied. Her eyes flicked up and around us in a quick circle, taking in the thousands of members of the Red Court and their retainers. “I may faint with the terror.”

“Why?” I demanded of her. “Why bring the child into this? Why not just come straight to me?”

“Does it matter at this point?”

I shrugged. “Not really. I’m curious.”

She stared at me for a moment and then she smiled. “You don’t know.”

I eyed her warily. “Don’t know what?”

“Dear boy,” she said. “This was never about you.”

I scowled. “I don’t understand.”

“Obviously,” Arianna said, and gave me a stunning smile. “Die confused.”

A conch horn moaned and Alamaya turned to bow toward the temple I’d just come through. I could see the Red King seated upon a throne made of dark, richly polished wood, decorated with golden filigree and designs.

Alamaya rose and turned to us. “Lord and lady, these are the limits within which you must do battle. First . . .”

I scowled. “Hey. This is an Accords matter. We abide by the Code Duello.”

The Red King spoke, and though he was more than two hundred feet away, I heard him clearly. Alamaya listened and bowed. “My lord replies that this is a holy time and holy ground to our people, and has been from time immemorial. If you do not wish to respect the traditions of our people, he invites you to return tomorrow night. Unfortunately, he can make no promises about the fate of his newest chattel should you choose to do so.”

I eyed the Red King. Then I snorted. “Fine,” I said.

Alamaya nodded and continued. “First,” she said. “As you are both wielders of Power, you will duel with Power and Power alone. Physical contact of any kind is forbidden.”

Arianna’s eyes narrowed.

Mine did, too. I knew that the Red Court had dabblers in magic—hell, the first Red Court vampire I’d ever met had been a full-blown sorceress by the time she’d been elevated to the Red Court’s nobility. Judging by Arianna’s jewelry, her proper place had been on the eleventh tier of the pyramid—the one directly below the Lords of Outer Night themselves. It stood to reason that even a dabbler could have accrued way too much experience and skill over the course of millennia.

“Second,” the mortal priestess said, “your persons and whatsoever power you use must be contained within the walls of this court. Should either of you violate that proscription, you will be slain out of hand by the wills of my lord and the Lords of Outer Night.”

“I have this problem with buildings,” I said. “Maybe you noticed the columns back the other way . . . ?”

Alamaya gave me a blank look.

I sighed. Nobody appreciates levity when they’re in the middle of their traditional mumbo jumbo, I guess. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“Third,” Alamaya said. “The duel will begin at the next sounding of the conch. It will end only when one of you is no more. Do you understand the rules as I have given them to you?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Yes,” said Arianna.

“Have you anything else to say?”

“Always,” I said. “But it can wait.”

Arianna smiled slightly at me. “Give my father my thanks, and tell him that I will join him in the temple momentarily.”

Alamaya bowed to us both. Then she retreated from the field and back over to her boss.

The night grew silent. Down in the stadium, there wasn’t even the sound of wind. The silence gnawed at me, though Arianna looked relaxed.

“So,” I said, “your dad is the Red King.”

“Indeed. He created me, as he created all of the Thirteen and the better part of our nobility.”

“One big bloodsucking Brady Bunch, huh? But I’ll bet he missed all the PTA meetings.”

The duchess studied me and shook her head. “I shall never understand why someone hasn’t killed you before now.”

“Wasn’t for lack of trying,” I said. “Hey, why do you suppose he set up the rules the way he did? If we’d gone by the Code Duello, there’s a chance it could have been limited to a physical confrontation. Really seems to be taking away most of your advantages, doesn’t he?”

She smiled. “A jaded person might consider it a sign of his weakness.”

“Nice spin on that one. Purely out of curiosity, though: Once you kill me, what comes next?”

She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I continue to serve the Red Court to the best of my ability.”

I showed her my teeth. “Meaning you’re going to knock Big Red out of that chair, right?”

“That is more ambitious than reasonable,” she said. “One of the Thirteen, I should think, will ascend to become Kukulcan.”

“Creating an opening in the Lords of Outer Night,” I said, getting it. “Murdering your father to get a promotion. You’re all class.”

“Cattle couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Couldn’t understand that Daddy’s losing it?” I asked. “That he’s reverting into one of your blood slaves?”

Her mouth twitched, as if she were restraining it from twisting into a snarl. “It happens, betimes, to the aged,” Arianna said. “I love and revere my father. But his time is done.”

“Unless you lose,” I said.

“I find that unlikely.” She looked me up and down. “What a . . . novel outfit.”

“I wore it especially for you,” I said, and fluttered my eyelashes at her.

She didn’t look amused. “Most of what I do is business. Impersonal. But I’m going to enjoy this.”

I dropped the wiseacre attitude. The growing force of my anger burned it away. “Taking my kid isn’t impersonal,” I said. “It’s a Kevorkianesque cry for help.”

“Such moral outrage. Yet you are as guilty as I. Did you not slay Paolo’s child, Bianca?”

“Bianca was trying to kill me at the time,” I said. “Maggie is an innocent. She couldn’t possibly hurt you.”

“Then you should have considered that before you insulted me by murdering my grandchild,” she hissed, her voice suddenly tight and cold. “I am patient, wizard. More patient than you could imagine. And I have looked forward to this day, when the consequences of your arrogance shall fall upon both you and all who love you.”

The threat lit a fire in my brain, and I thought the anger was going to tear its way free of my chest and go after her without me.

“Bitch,” I spat. “Come get some.”

The horn blew.

Chapter Forty-five

Both of us had been gathering up our wills during the snark-off, and the first instant of the duel nearly killed us both.

I called forth force and fire, both laced with the soulfire that would help reinforce its reality, making the attack more difficult to negate or withstand. It took the shape of a sphere of blue-white fire the size of an inflatable exercise ball.

Meanwhile, Arianna fluttered her hands in an odd, twisting gesture and a geyser of water erupted from the soil with bone-crushing force.

The two attacks met halfway between us, with results neither of us could prevent. Fire and water turned to scalding- hot steam in a detonation that instantly washed back over us both. My shield bracelet was ready to go, and a situation something like this one that had rendered my left hand into a horror prop had inspired me to be sure I could protect myself from this kind of heat in the future.

I leapt back and landed in a crouch, raising the shield into a complete dome around me as the cloud of steam swept down, its heat boiling the grass as it came. It stayed there for several seconds before beginning to disperse, and when it finally did, I couldn’t see Arianna anywhere on the field.

I kept the all- around shield in place for a moment, and rapidly focused upon a point a little bit above and midway between my eyebrows. I called up my Sight and swept my gaze around the stadium, to see Arianna, forty yards away and running to put herself in position to shoot me in the back. A layer of greasy black magic seemed to infest the air around her—the veil that my physical eyes hadn’t been able to see. To my Sight, she was a Red Court vampire in its true form, only even more flabby and greasy than the normal vamp, a creature ancient in power and darkness.

I tried not to see anything else, but there was only so much I could do. I could see the deaths that had been heaped upon this field over centuries, lingering in a layer of translucent bones that covered the ground to a depth of three or four feet. In the edges of my vision, I could see the grotesqueries that were the true appearance of the Red Court, every one of them a unique and hideous monster, according to his particular madness. I didn’t dare look directly up at the spectators, and especially not those gathered on the second floor of the little temple at the end of the stadium. I didn’t want to look at the Red King and his Lords unveiled.

I kept my gaze moving, as if I hadn’t spotted Arianna on the prowl, and kept turning in a circle, timing when my back was going to be exposed to her before I dropped the shield and rose, panting, as if I couldn’t have held it any longer than that. I kept on turning, and an instant before she would have released her spell, I whirled on her, pointed a finger, and snarled, “Forzare!”

Raw will lashed out and exploded against her chest just before the flickers of electricity she’d gathered could congeal into a real stroke of lightning. It threw her twenty feet back and slammed her against the ancient rock wall along the side of the ball court.

Before she could fall, I looked up at the top of the wall, seized a section of large stones in fingers of unseen will, and raked them out of their resting places, so that they plunged thirty feet down toward Arianna.

She was superhumanly quick, of course. Anyone mortal would have been crushed. She got away with only a glancing blow from one of the smaller stones and darted to the side, rolling a sphere of lurid red light into a ball between her hands as she went.

I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, whatever it was. So I kept raking at the wall, over and over again, bringing down dozens of the stones and forcing her to keep moving, while I ran parallel to her and kept our spacing static.

We were both slinging magic on the run, but she had more one- on-one experience than me. Like a veteran gunslinger in the Old West, she took her time lining up her shot while I flailed away at her with rushed actions that had little chance to succeed. All told, I must have dropped several dozen tons of rock down onto her as we ran, inflicting nothing worse than a few abrasions and heavy bruises.

She threw lightning at me once.

The world flashed red-white and something hard hit me in the back. My legs went wobbly and I sat there for a subjective hour, stunned, and realized that whatever she had packed her lightning bolt with, it had been sufficient to throw me twice as far as my heavy punch had thrown her. I’d bounced off the opposite wall. I looked down at myself, expecting to see a huge hole with burned edges—and instead found a black smudge on my overdone breastplate, and a couple of flaws in the gold filigree where the metal had partially melted.

I was alive.

My head came back together in a sudden rush, and I knew what was coming. I flung up my shield, shaping it not into a portion of a sphere, as I usually did, but into a lengthy triangle in the shape of a pup tent. I crouched beneath it and no sooner had I done so than stones from the wall above me, torn free by Arianna’s will, began to slam into the shield. I crouched there, rapidly being buried in grey stone, and tried desperately to get my impact-dizzied brain to think of a plan.

The best I came up with under the circumstances was this: What would Yoda do?

There was a tiny moment between one rock falling and the next and I dropped the shield. As the next rock began to fall, I stretched out my hand and my will, catching it before gravity could give it much velocity. Again I screamed, “Forzare!” and with an enormous effort of will I altered the course of the stone’s fall, flinging it as hard as I could at Arianna, abetted by gravity and the remnants of her own magic.

She saw it coming, but not until it was too late. She lifted her hands, her fingers making warding gestures as she brought her own defensive magic to bear. The stone smashed through it in a flash of reddish light, and then struck her in the hip, spinning her about wildly and sending her to the ground.

“Harry Dresden, human catapult!” I screamed drunkenly.

Arianna was back on her feet again in an instant: Her shield had bled enough of the energy from the stone to prevent it from smashing into her with lethal force, but it had bought me enough time to get out of the pile of rocks around me and away from the stadium wall. I smashed at her with more fire, and she parried each shaft deftly, congealing water out of the air into wobbling spheres that intercepted the bolts of flame and exploded into concealing steam. By the fifth or sixth bolt, I couldn’t see her with my physical eyes, but I did see energies in motion behind the steam as she pulled another dark sheath of veiling energy around her, and I saw her take off into an animal-swift sprint, again circling me to attack me from behind.

No. She couldn’t be trying the same thing twice.

Duels between wizards are about more than swatting each other with various forms of energy, just as boxing is about more than throwing hard punches. There is an art to it, a science to it, in which one attempts to predict the other’s attack and counter it effectively. You have to imagine a counter to what the opponent might do, and have it ready to fly at an instant’s notice. Similarly, you have to imagine your way around the strength of his defenses. A duel of magic is determined almost purely by the imaginations and raw power of those involved.

Arianna had obviously prepared against my favorite weapon—fire—which was only intelligent. But she had tried this backstabbing ploy on me once before, and nearly got burned doing it. A wizard of any experience would tell you that she would never have tried that one again, for fear that the enemy would exploit it even further.

Arianna was an experienced killer, but she hadn’t done a lot of dueling with nothing to rely on except her magic. She’d always had the cushion of her extraordinary strength and speed to fall back upon. Hell, it would have been the smart way to kill me—come straight in, shedding attacks and maybe taking some hits to get close enough to end it decisively.

Except here, she couldn’t. And she wasn’t adjusting well to the handicap. Flexibility of thought is almost never a strength of the truly ancient monsters of the world.

Instead of obliging her by standing in place, as I had last time she’d tried to give me the runaround, I darted forward, into the edges of the concealing steam. I got burned, and accepted it as the price of doing business. I clenched my teeth, focusing past my pain, and tracked Arianna’s energy with my Sight, waiting for my shot and hoping that she didn’t have the Sight as well.

Apparently she didn’t, or wasn’t bothering to use it, relying upon her superior senses instead. She got into position and seemed to realize that I’d gone into the steam. She began to advance cautiously, gathering more lightning to her cupped hands. I saw the instant in which she began to spot my outline, the way she drew a breath to speak the word to unleash the lightning upon me.

“Infriga,” I hissed, and threw both hands forward. “Infriga forzare!”

And the entire cloud bank of steam in the air around me congealed into needle-pointed spears of ice that flew at her as if fired from a gun.

They struck her just as she unleashed her lightning bolt, which shattered one of the spears and tore a two-foot furrow in the dirt some twenty feet to my side.

Arianna stood still for a moment, her black eyes wide with disbelief, staring down at the spears and shards of ice that had slammed deep into her flesh. She looked up at me for a second and opened her mouth.

A blob of black blood burst out and spilled down over her chin. Then she shuddered and fell, simply limp, to the ground.

From the far end of the ball court, I heard my godmother throw back her head and let out an eerie howl of excitement and triumph, bubbling with laughter and scorn.

I watched Arianna twisting upon the spears of ice. She’d been pierced in dozens of places. The worst hit came from an icicle as thick as my forearm, which had impaled her through the belly and come out the back, bursting the blood reservoir of the creature beneath Arianna’s flesh mask. The pure, crystalline- clear ice showed a glimpse of her insides, as if seen through a prism.

She gasped a word I didn’t recognize, again and again. I didn’t know what language it was, but I knew what it meant: No, no, no, no.

I stood over her for a moment. She struggled to bring some other form of magic to bear against me, but the cruel torment of those frozen spears was a pain she had never experienced and did not know how to fight. I stared down at the creature that had taken my daughter and felt . . .

I felt only a cold, calm satisfaction, whirling like a blizzard of snow and sleet in the storm of my wrath.

She stared up at me with uncomprehending eyes, black blood staining her mouth. “Cattle. You are c-cattle.”

“Moo,” I said. And I lifted my right hand.

Her eyes widened further. She gasped a word I didn’t know.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the Red King rise from his distant throne.

I poured all that was left of my fury into my hand and snarled, “No one touches my little girl.”

The explosion of force and fire tore a crater in the ground seven feet across and half as deep.

Arianna’s broken, headless corpse lay sprawled within it.

Silence fell over the ruined city.

I turned toward the Red King and started walking that way. I stopped on what would have been the ten- yard line in a football stadium and faced him. “Now give me my daughter,” I said.

He stared at me, bleak and remote as a far mountain. And then he smiled and said, in perfect English, “I think not.”

I clenched my teeth. “We had a deal.”

He looked at me with uncaring eyes and said, “I never spoke a word to you. A god does not converse or bargain with cattle. He uses and dispenses with them as he sees fit. You have served your purpose, and I have no further use for you—or the mewling child.”

I snarled. “You promised that she would not be harmed.”

“Until after the duel,” he said, and sycophantic chuckles ran through the vampires all around me. “It is after the duel.” He turned his head to one side and said to one of the jaguar warrior vampires in his retinue, “Go. Kill the child.”

I almost got the Red King while his head was turned, but some instinct seemed to warn him at the last instant, and he ducked. The bolt of flame I’d hurled at him blew the jaguar warrior vamp’s jaw off of his head and set him on fire. He fell back, stumbling and screaming, his monstrous form tearing free of his mask of flesh.

The Red King whirled toward me in a fury, and those black eyes pressed down upon me with all the crushing weight of the ages. I was driven to my knees by a blanket of pure will—and not just will, but horrible pain, pain that originated not in my body but in the nerves themselves—pain I was helpless to resist.

I heard someone shout, “Harry!” and saw the masked figures upon the temple with the Red King step forward. A gun went off, and then someone screamed. I heard a bellow, and looked up to see my friends and my godmother facing the masked Lords of Outer Night. Sanya was on his feet but motionless, grimly clutching Esperacchius in both hands. Murphy was on one knee and had dropped her P-90. One hand was moving slowly, determinedly toward the sword on her back. Martin was on the ground.

I couldn’t see any of the others. I couldn’t turn my head far enough. But nobody was up to fighting. None of us could move beneath the horrible pressure of will of the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night.

“Insolent beast,” snarled the Red King. “Die in agony.” He seized another guard by his jaguar skin and jerked him close, as if the brawny vampire had been a child. “Need I repeat myself?” he seethed, and shoved his bloodstained ritual knife into the warrior’s hands. “Place that child upon the altar and kill her.”

Chapter Forty-six

Guys like the Red King just don’t know when to shut up.

I fought to raise my hand, and it was more effort than anything I’d done that night. My hand shook and shook harder, but finally moved six inches, to touch the surface of the skull in the cloth bag on my hips.

Bob! I screamed, purely in my head, as I would have using Ebenezar’s sending stone.

Hell’s bells, he replied. You don’t have to scream. I’m right here.

I need a shield. Something to ward off his will. I figure this is a spiritual attack. A spirit should be able to counter it.

Oh, sure. But no can do from in here, boss, Bob said.

You have my permission to leave the skull for this purpose! I thought desperately.

The skull’s eye sockets flared with orange-red light, and then a cloud of glowing energy flooded out of the eyes and rose, gathering above my head and casting warm light down around me.

Seconds later, I heard Bob thinking, Take this, shorty!

And suddenly the Red King’s will was not enough to keep me down. The pain receded, smothered and numbed by an exhilarating, icy chill that left my nerves tingling with energy. I clenched my teeth, freed from the burden of pain, and thrust my own will against his. I was a child arm wrestling a weight lifter—but his last remark gave me some extra measure of strength, and suddenly I drove myself to my feet.

The Red King turned to face me fully again, and extended both hands toward me, his face twisting with rage and contempt. The horrible pressure began to swell and redouble. I heard his voice quite clearly when he said, “Bow. Down. Mortal.”

I took one dragging step toward my friends. Then another. And another. And another, moving forward with increasing steadiness. Then I snarled through clenched teeth and said, “Bite. Me. Asshole.”

And I put my hand on Murphy’s left shoulder.

She’d already moved her hand halfway to the sword. As I touched her, touched our auras together, spreading my own defenses over hers, and felt the direct and violent strength of her own will to defy the immortal power brought against us, her hand flashed up to the hilt of Fidelacchius and drew the katana from its plain scabbard.

White light like nothing that ancient stadium had ever seen erupted from the sword’s blade, a bright agony that reminded me intensely of the crystalline plain. Howls of pain rose from around us, but were drowned by Murphy’s sudden, silvery cry, her voice swelling throughout the stadium and ringing off the vaults of the sky:

“False gods!” she cried, her blue eyes blazing as she stared at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night. “Pretenders! Usurpers of truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crimes against the Mayans, against the peoples of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgment Almighty!”

I think I was the only one close enough to see the shock in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t Murphy speaking the words—but someone else speaking them through her.

Then she swept her sword in an arc, slashing the very air in front of us in a single, whistling stroke.

And the will of the Red King vanished. Gone.

The Red King let out a scream and clutched at his eyes. He screamed something, pointing in Murphy’s direction, and in the same instant the rest of my friends gasped and rocked in place, suddenly free.

Every golden mask turned toward my friend.

Bob! I cried. Go with her! Keep her free!

Wahoo! the skull said, and gold-orange light fell from my head toward Murphy and gathered about her blond hair, even as the joined wills of the Lords of Outer Night fell upon her, so thick and heavy that I was knocked away from her as if by a physical force. The very air around her warped with its intensity.

White light from the sword flowed down and over her, and her garments literally transformed, as if that light had flowed into them, become a part of them, turning night to day, black to white. She staggered to one knee and looked up, her jaw set in stubborn determination, her teeth bared, her blue eyes, through the distortion, blazing like fire in defiance of thirteen dark gods—and with one of the most powerful spirits I’d ever met gathered around her head in a glowing golden halo.

Murphy came to her feet with a shout and a smooth stroke of the sword. The Lords of Outer Night all reacted, jerking back as if they’d been struck a blow in the face. Several golden masks were ripped from their faces, as if the blow had physically touched them—and the molten presence of their joined wills was suddenly gone.

With a scream, the jaguar warriors, half-breed and vampire alike, surged toward Murphy.

She ducked the swing of a modern katana, shattered a traditional obsidian sword with a contemptuous sweep of Fidelacchius, and struck down the warrior wielding it with a precise horizontal cut.

But she was outnumbered. Not by dozens or scores, but by the hundreds, and the jaguar warriors immediately fanned out to come at her from several directions. They knew how to work together.

But then, so did Sanya and I.

Sanya came forward with Esperacchius, and as it joined the fray, it too kindled into blazing white light that seemed to lick out at the vampires, forcing them to duck, to slap at white sparks that danced in their eyes. His booted foot caught one jaguar warrior in the small of the back, and the raw power of the kick snapped the warrior’s head back with force enough to break his neck.

I followed Sanya in, unleashing a burst of freezing wind that took two warriors from their feet when they tried to flank Murphy from the other side.

She and Sanya went back-to-back, cutting down jaguar warriors with methodical efficiency for several seconds, as more and more of the enemy swarmed toward them. I kept slapping them away—not able to do any real harm, but preventing them from focusing overwhelming numbers on Murph and Sanya—but I could feel the fatigue setting in now. I couldn’t keep this up forever.

There were quick footsteps beside me, and then Molly pressed her back to mine. “You take that side!” she said. “I’ll take this one!”

DJ Molly C lifted both of her wands and turned the battle chaos to eleven.

Color and light and screaming sound erupted from those two little wands. Bands of light and darkness flowed around and over the oncoming jaguar warriors, fluttering images of bright sunshine intertwining with other images of yawning pits suddenly gaping before the feet of the attackers. Bursts of sound, shrieks and clashes and booms, and high-pitched noises like feedback on steroids sent the hyperkeen senses of full vampires into overload, literally forcing them back onto the weapons of those coming behind them.

Vampires staggered through the handiwork of the One-woman Rave, not stopped but slowed and stunned by the incredible field of sound and light.

“I love a good party,” Thomas shouted merrily, and he began to dance along the edges of Molly’s dance floor, his falcata whipping into the limbs and necks of the jaguar warriors as they wobbled forward, struck down before they could recover. I didn’t think anyone could have moved fast enough to catch them, but my brother evidently didn’t agree. He struck down the foe as they came for us, and he threw in a few dance moves along the way. The part he borrowed from break dancing, where a wave traveled up one arm and down the other, was particularly effective, aesthetically, when it was bracketed by his falcata beheading one vamp and his automatic blowing apart the skull of another.

The pressure of numbers increased, and Thomas started moving more swiftly, more desperately—until Mouse leapt in to help plug the leak in the dam of confusion that held the full power of the Red Court at bay.

I had my own side of the store to mind. Again I reached into the well of cold, ready power, and with a word blanketed the field before me in smooth, slick ice. Howling wind rose to greet any foe who stepped out onto the ice, forcing them to work around to the killing machine that was Sanya and Murphy, or else circle around to attempt an approach through Molly’s murderous light and sound show.

Someone touched my arm and I nearly roasted him without looking.

Martin flinched, as though he’d had a dodge ready to go if I had something for him. “Dresden!” he called. “Look!”

I looked. Up on the little temple at the end of the ball court, the Lords of Outer Night and the Red King were standing in a circle, and they were all gathering magical power—probably from one of the bloody ley lines, to boot. Whatever they were going to do, I had a bad feeling that I was reaching the very end of my bag of tricks.

I heard booted feet and saw the mortal security guards lining up along the sides of the stadium, rifles at the ready. When they were in position they would open fire, and the simple fact was that if they piled enough rounds into us, we would go down.

Who was I kidding?

I couldn’t keep the field of ice and wind together for very long. And I knew Molly couldn’t maintain her Rave at that intensity for long, either. Dozens of jaguar warriors had fallen, but that meant little. Their numbers had not been diminished by any significant measure.

We could fight as hard as we wanted—but despite everything, in the end it was going to be futile. We were never getting out of that stadium.

But we had to try.

“Lea!” I screamed.

“Yes, child?” she asked, her tone pleasant and conversational. I could still hear her perfectly clearly. Neat trick.

“The king and his jokers are about to hit us with something big.”

“Oh, my, yes,” the Leanansidhe said, looking skyward dreamily.

“So do something!” I howled at her.

“I already am,” she assured me.

She removed a small emerald from a pocket of her gown and flung it skyward. It sparkled and flashed, and flew up out of the light of torches and swords, and vanished into the night. A few seconds later, it exploded in a cloud of merry green sparks.

“There. That place will do,” she said, clapping her hands and bouncing up and down on her toes. “Now we shall see a real dance.”

Green lightning split the sky, erupting with such a burst of thunder that the ground shook. Instead of fading, though, the thunder grew louder as more and more strokes of lightning flared out from the area of sky where Lea’s gem had exploded into light.

Then a sheet of a dozen separate green bolts of lightning fell all at the same time onto the ground of the ball court twenty yards away, blowing smoking craters in the ground.

It took my dazzled eyes a few seconds to recover from that, and when they did, my heart almost stopped.

Standing on the ball court were twelve figures.

Twelve people in shapeless grey robes. Grey cloaks. Grey hoods.

And every single one of them held a wizard’s staff in one hand.

The Grey Council.

The Grey Council!

The nearest figure was considerably shorter than me and stout, but he stood with his feet planted as if he intended to move the world. He lifted his staff, smote it on the ground, then boomed, “Remember Archangel!” He spoke a single, resonating word as he thrust the tip of the implement at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night.

The second floor of the stadium-temple where they stood . . . simply exploded. A force hit the ancient structure like an enormous bulldozer blade rushing forward at Mach 2. It smashed into the temple. Stone screamed. The Red King, the Lords of Outer Night, and several thousand tons of the temple’s structure went flying back through the air with enough violent energy to send a shock wave rebounding from the point of impact.

The massive display of force brought a second of stunned silence to the field—and I was just as slack-jawed as anyone.

Then I threw back my head and let out a primal scream of triumph and glee. The Grey Council had come.

We were not alone.

The echo of my scream seemed to be a signal, sending the rest of us back to fighting for our lives. I blew a few more vampires away from my friends, and then sensed a rush of supernatural energy coming at me. I turned and caught a tide of ruinous Red power upon my shield, and hurled a blast of flame back at a Red Court noble in massive amounts of jewelry. Others in their ranks began to open up on the newly arrived Grey Council, who responded in kind, and the air was filled with a savage crisscross of exchanged energies.

The stocky figure in grey stumped up to me and said casually, “How you doing, Hoss?”

I felt my face stretch into a fierce grin, but I answered him just as casually. “Sort of wish I’d brought a staff with me. Other than that . . . can’t complain.”

From within his hood, Ebenezar grunted. “Nice outfit.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I liked your ride. Good mileage?”

“As long as there’s some carpet to scuff your feet on,” he said, and tossed me his staff. “Here.”

I felt the energies moving through the implement at once. It was a better-made staff than mine, but Ebenezar had been the one to teach me how they were made, and both staves I had used over the years had been carved from branches of the lightning-struck oak in the front yard of his little farm in the Ozarks. I could make use of this staff almost as well as if it were my own.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Don’t you want it?”

He batted a precisely aimed thrown ax from the air with a flick of his hand and a word of power, and drawled, “I got another one.”

Ebenezar McCoy extended his left hand and spoke another word, and darkness swirled from the shadows and condensed into a staff of dark, twisted wood, unmarked by any kind of carving whatsoever.

The Blackstaff.

“Fuego!” shouted someone on the walls—and for a second I was hit with a little sting of insult. Someone was shouting “fuego” and it wasn’t me.

While I was feeling irrational pique, guns started barking, and they aimed at me first. Bullets rang sharply as they hit my armor, rebounding from it and barely leaving a mark. It was like getting hit with small hailstones: uncomfortable but not really dangerous—unless one of them managed a head shot.

Ebenezar turned toward the walls from which the soldiers were firing. Hits thumped into his robes, but seemed to do little but stir the fabric and then fall at his feet. The old man said, mostly to himself, “You took the wrong contract, boys.”

Then he swept the Blackstaff from left to right, murmured a word, and ripped the life from a hundred men.

They just . . . died.

There was absolutely nothing to mark their deaths. No sign of pain. No struggle. No convulsion of muscles. No reaction at all. One moment they were firing wildly down at us—and the next, they simply—

Dropped.

Dead.

The old man turned to the other wall, and I saw two or three of the brighter soldiers throw their guns down and run. I don’t know if they made it, but the old man swept the Blackstaff through the air again, and the gunmen on that side of the field dropped dead where they stood.

My godmother watched it happen, and bounced and clapped her hands some more, as delighted as a child at the circus.

I stared for a second, shocked. Ebenezar had just shattered the First Law of Magic: Thou shalt not kill. He had used magic to directly end the life of another human being—nearly two hundred times. I mean, yes, I had known what his office allowed him to do. . . . But there was a big difference between appreciating a fact and seeing that terrible truth in motion.

The Blackstaff itself pulsed and shimmered with shadowy power, and I got the sudden sense that the thing was alive, that it knew its purpose and wanted nothing more than to be used, as often and as spectacularly as possible.

I also saw veins of venomous black begin to ooze their way over the old man’s hand, reaching up slowly, spreading to his wrist. He grimaced and held his left forearm with his right hand for a moment, then looked over his shoulder and said, “All right!”

The farthest grey figure, tall and lean, lifted his staff. I saw light gleam off of metal at one end of the staff, and then green lightning enfolded the length of wood as he thrust the metal end into the ground. He took the staff back—but the twisting length of green lightning stayed. He drove the staff down again about six feet away, and again lightning sheathed it. Then he removed the staff, reversed his grip on it, and with a sweep of his arm drew another shaft of lightning between the two upright columns of electricity, bridging the gap.

He was opening a Way.

There was a flash of light, and the space between the bolts of lightning warped and went dark—then exploded with black figures bearing swords. For the first moment, I thought that they were wearing odd costumes, or maybe weird armor. Their faces were shaped something like a crow’s, complete with a long yellow beak. They were wearing clothes that seemed to be made from feathers—and then I got it.

They actually were beak- faced creatures, covered in soft black feathers and carrying swords, each and every one of them a Japanese-style katana. They poured out of the gate by the score, by the hundreds, and began to bound forward with unnaturally long leaps that seemed only technically different from flying. They looked deadly and beautiful, all grace, speed, and perfection of motion. The wild light of the One-woman Rave glittered off of their blades and glassy black eyes.

“The kenku owed me a favor,” Ebenezar drawled. “Seemed like a good time to call it in.”

With sharp whistles and wails of fury, the strange creatures bounded up out of the ball court and began to engage the Red Court in numbers.

It was too much to take in. Sorcery flew beside bullets on a scale larger than anything I’d ever seen. Stone weapons clashed against steel. Blood flew: the black of the vampires, the blue of the kenku, and, mostly, flashes of scarlet mortal blood. There was too much terror and incongruous beauty in it, and I think my head reacted by tuning out everything that wasn’t threatening my life, or was more than a few yards away.

“Maggie,” I said. I grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “I’ve got to get to her.”

He grimaced and nodded his head. “Where?”

“The big temple,” I said, pointing at the pyramid. “And about four hundred meters north of the temple, there’s a trailer cattle car,” I said. “It was guarded the last time I looked. There are human prisoners still in it.”

Ebenezar grunted and nodded. “Get the girl. We’ll take care of the Red Court and their Night Lords.” The old man spat on the ground, his eyes alight with excitement. “We’ll see how the slimy bastards like eating what they’ve been dishing out.”

I gripped his hand, hard, then put my other one on the old man’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.”

His eyes welled up for an instant, but he only snorted and squeezed back. “Get your girl, Hoss.”

The old man winked at me. I blinked a few times myself and then turned away.

Time was running out—for Maggie, and for me.

Chapter Forty-seven

“Godmother!” I shouted, turning toward the pyramid.

Lea appeared at my side, her hands now filled with emerald and amethyst light—her own deadly sorcery. “Shall we pursue the quest now?”

“Yeah. Stay close. We’ll round up the team and move.”

Molly was nearest. I went to my apprentice and shouted in her ear, “Come on! Let the birdmen take it from here! We’ve got to move.”

Molly gave me a vague nod, and finally lowered the little wands as the kenku’s charge drove into the Red Court and took the pressure from our flanks. The tips of her wands, both of them made of ivory, were cracked and chipped. Her arms hung limply and swung at her sides, and she looked even paler now than she had going in. She turned to me, gave me a quivering smile, and then suddenly sank to the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.

I stared at her in shock for a second, and then I was on my knees next to her, my amulet glowing as I used its light to check her for injuries. In the chaos, I hadn’t seen that one of her legs, at midthigh, was a mass of blood. One of the wild shots from the security goons had hit her beneath the armored vest. She was bleeding out. She was dying.

Thomas crashed to the ground next to me. He ripped off his belt and whipped it around her leg as a tourniquet. “I’ve got this!” he said, looking up at me, his expression remote, calm. “Go, go!”

I stared at him for a second, uncertain. Molly was my apprentice, my responsibility.

He regarded me and his calm mask cracked for a second, showing me his tension, the fear he was holding in check at the scale of the conflict around us. “Harry,” he said. “I’ll guard her with my life. I swear it.”

I nodded, and then clenched a fist, looking around. That much spilled blood would start drawing vampires to the wounded girl like bees to flowers. Thomas couldn’t care for her and fight. “Mouse,” I called, “stay with them!”

The dog rushed over to Molly and literally stood over her head, his eyes and ears everywhere, a guardian determined not to fail.

Then I ran to Murphy and Sanya, who both bore small cuts and abrasions, and who looked like they were about to charge into the nearest portion of the fray. Martin tagged along with me, apparently calm, and by all appearances unaware that he was in the middle of a battle. Say what I would about Martin, his blandness, his boring demeanor, and his noncombative body language were very real armor in this situation. He simply didn’t look like an important or threatening target, and he was untouched.

I looked around them and picked up a sword that had been dropped by one of the warriors they had killed, a simple Chinese straight sword known as a jian. It was light, razor-sharp on both edges, and suited me just fine.

“We’re going to the pyramid,” I called to Murphy and Sanya. A group of thirty or forty kenku went over us, witch shadows against the rising moon, and entered the fray against the jaguar warriors who still stood between us and an exit from the ball court. “There!” I said. “Go, go, go!”

I suited action to my words and plunged toward the opening Ebenezar’s allies were cutting for us. There was a surge of magic and a flash of motion ahead of us, as another vampire noble tossed another flare of power at me. I caught a small stroke of lightning on my mentor’s staff—it was shorter, thicker, and heavier than mine—conducting the attack down my arm, across my shoulder, and out the tip of my newly acquired sword. The lightning bolt chewed a hole in the belly of the Red Court noble. He staggered as I closed on him. I spun the staff to the horizontal, and checked him in the nose as I went by, dropping him to the ground.

We went past the remains of the temple and out into the open space between the buildings. It was chaos out there. Jaguar warriors and priest types were everywhere, and most of them were armed. Mortal security folks were forming into teams and racing toward the ball court to reinforce the Red Court. I realized that at some point Murphy, her clothing shining with white light, her halo a blaze of molten gold, had begun racing along on my right side, with Sanya on my left. The brilliant light of the two Swords was a terror to the vampires and half- breeds alike, and they recoiled from that aura of power and fear—but that wasn’t the same thing as retreating. They simply fell back, while other creatures closed a large circle about us, drawing it slowly tighter as we moved toward the pyramid.

“We aren’t going to make it,” Murphy said. “They’re getting ready to rush us from all sides.”

“Always they are doing that,” Sanya said, panting, his cheerful voice going slightly annoyed. “Never is it anything new.”

They were right. I could sense the change in motion of the villains around us, how they were retreating more slowly before us, pressing in more closely behind us.

I felt my eyes drawn up to the pyramid ahead—and there, standing on the fifth level of the pyramid, looking down, was a figure in a golden mask. Evidently, one of the Lords of Outer Night had been knocked all the way over to the pyramid by Ebenezar’s entrance. And I could feel his will at work in the foes around us—not used to overcome an enemy with immobility now, but to infuse his troops with confidence and aggression.

“That guy,” I said, nodding at him. “Gold mask. We take him down and we’re through.”

Murphy scanned the pyramid until she spotted him. Then her eyes tracked down to the base of the stairs and she nodded shortly. “Right,” she said.

And she raised Fidelacchius, let out a scream that had startled a great many large men working out at her dojo, and plunged into the warriors of the Red Court like a swimmer breasting a wave.

Sanya blinked.

Holy crap, I hadn’t meant she should do that.

“Tiny,” Sanya said, letting out a belly laugh as he began to move. “But fierce!”

“You’re all insane!” I screamed, and plunged forward with them, while Martin backpedaled and tried to keep up with us while simultaneously warding off the vampires closing in from behind.

Murphy did what no mortal should have been able to do—she cut a path through a mob of warrior vampires. She went through them as if they’d been no more than a cloud of smoke. Fidelacchius blazed, and no weapon raised against the Sword of Faith, neither modern steel nor living relic, could withstand its edge.

Murphy hardly seemed to actually attack anyone. She simply moved forward, and when attacks came at her, bad things happened to whoever had attempted to strike her. Sword thrusts were slid gently aside while she continued onward, her own blade seeming to naturally, independently pass through an S-shaped slash upon the opponent’s body on the way through, wreaking terrible damage with delicate speed. Warriors who flung themselves upon her found their hands grabbing nothing, their bodies being sent tumbling through the air—and that horrible Sword of light left wounds in each and every opponent, their edges black and sizzling.

They’d come at her in twos, and once, three of the jaguar warriors managed to coordinate an attack. It didn’t do them any good. Murphy had been handling opponents who were bigger and stronger and faster than her, in situations of real danger, since she was a rookie cop. The vampires and half-breeds, swift and strong as they were, seemed no more able to beat her down than had all of those thugs and criminals. Stronger though her enemies were, the blazing light of the Sword seemed to slow them, to undermine their strength—not much, but enough to make the difference. Murphy dodged and feinted and tossed warriors into one another, using their own strength against them. The three-on-one she faced almost seemed unfair. One of the jaguar warriors, armed with an enormous club, wound up smashing his two compatriots, courtesy of the intern Knight, only to find his club sliced into three pieces that wound up on the ground next to his own severed leg.

Karrin Murphy led the charge, and Sanya and I tried to keep up. She went through that sea of foes like a little speedboat, her enemies spun and tossed and turned and disoriented in her wake. Sanya and I hacked our way through stunned foes, pushing and chopping with unsophisticated brutality—and that big Russian lunatic just kept laughing the whole time.

We hit the stairs, and resistance thinned sharply. Murphy surged ahead, and the Lord of Outer Night raised a bejeweled hand against her, his sheer will causing the air to ripple and thicken. Sanya and I hit it like a brick wall and staggered to a halt, but it seemed to slide off of Murphy, as had every other attack to come at her, her halo burning still brighter. Panicked, the enemy raised a hand and sent three shafts of sorcerous power howling at her, one right after another. Murphy’s feet, sure and swift on the stairs, carried her into a version of a boxer’s bobbing dance, and each shaft went blazing uselessly past her.

Sanya yelped and dropped, dodging the bolt that nearly clobbered him. I blocked one on my shield and took the other in the shin. My godmother’s armor protected my flesh, but I hit the stone stairs of the pyramid pretty hard.

I jerked my eyes up in time to see Murphy rush the Lord of Outer Night and speed straight past him, her sword sweeping up in a single, upward, vertical slash.

The gold mask fell from the vampire’s head—along with the front half of its skull. Silver fire burned at the revealed, twisted, lumpy lobes of the vampire’s brain, and as its blood flowed out and touched that fire, it went up in a sudden pyre of silver-white flame. The Lord of Outer Night somehow managed to scream as fire consumed it, and flung more bursts of magic blindly and in all directions for several more seconds, until it finally fell into blackened ash and ugly smears on the stone.

Only then did the barrier of its will vanish, and Sanya, Martin, and I hustled up the stairs toward the temple.

Still, the enemy pursued us—there were so damned many of them— and as I gained more height I was able to look back and see that the Red Court had begun to contain the kenku incursion. The battle was still furiously under way within the ball court, and though the feathered warriors were the match of any two or three vampires or half-breeds, the enemy had numbers to spare. I could only be grateful that so many of their spell-slingers were duking it out with the Grey Council instead of getting in our way.

“Dammit,” I said, looking up the steps toward the temple at their summit. Shadows moved inside. “Dammit!” I looked around me wildly and suddenly felt a hand grasp mine, where I clutched my staff.

Murphy shook my hand until I looked at her. “Sanya and I will stay here,” she said, panting. “We’ll hold them until you get Maggie.”

I looked down the slope of the pyramid. Hundreds of the Red Court were coming up, and they were tearing free of their flesh masks now, revealing the monsters beneath. Hold them? It would be suicide. The Swords gave their wielders immense power against things out of nightmares, but it didn’t make them superhuman. Murphy and Sanya had both been fighting for twenty minutes—and there is no aerobic exercise that compares with the physical demands of combat. Both of them were breathing hard, growing tired.

Suicide.

But I needed to get up there.

“Dresden,” Martin called. “Come on!”

I hadn’t even realized he was shaking me, trying to get me up the stairs.

I guess I was getting pretty tired, too.

I narrowed my focus to Martin, to the stairs up, and tried to ignore the burning in my arms, my legs, my chest. I drew in a sharp breath, and it was like inhaling sudden cool, clean wind. I thought I heard someone whispering to me, something in a tongue I didn’t understand—but I knew my queen’s voice. I became aware that a cloud of white mist and vapor was gathering around me as I continued, a little faster, the humid air of the Yucatán boiling around the frost that had formed on my armor.

Then the cold washed away the hot fatigue, and I felt the ice flowing into me, implacable, merciless, relentless. My legs began to churn like the pistons of an engine. Suddenly one step per stride simply wasn’t enough, and I started flying up them two at a time, rapidly leaving Martin behind.

I reached the top and a half-breed jaguar warrior flung himself toward me. I snarled, batted his sword aside with mine, and lashed out with one foot, landing a stomping kick in the center of his chest.

His sternum cracked audibly, and he flew backward as if rammed by a truck. He hit the stone wall behind him hard enough to shake dust from the roof overhead, and crumpled like a broken toy. Which was exactly the kind of power the Winter Knight was supposed to have, and as I watched the poor idiot drop, I felt nothing but satisfaction.

The square temple had four doorways, one on each side, and in the one to my immediate right a vampire torn free of its flesh mask appeared, a jaguar skin still draped over its shoulders. It clutched an obsidian knife in its hand—the Red King’s dagger. It was the vamp he’d dispatched to kill Maggie.

“Fog of war, huh?” I asked him, and felt myself smiling. “Buddy, did you ever walk through the wrong door at the wrong time.”

Its eyes flicked to the floor to my left for an instant, and I looked, too. Maggie crouched there, directly between the altar and the door on my left, chained and shivering, huddling low to the ground as if hoping to be overlooked.

“Go on,” I said, looking back at the vampire. I bounced the sword in my hand lightly. White mist poured off the blade. So did a few snow-flakes. “Go for it, tough guy. Take one step toward that girl and see what happens.”

The door opposite me suddenly darkened.

The Red King and no fewer than four of his Lords stood there, gold masks shining, throwing back weird reflections from the dazzling array of flickering lights and fires in the darkness outside.

His face twisted with rage, and his will and the wills of the Lords behind him fell upon me like blows from individual sledgehammers. I staggered, planted my mentor’s staff firmly on the stone floor, and barely kept myself from being driven to the ground.

“Now,” the Red King said, his voice strangled with fury. “Put that little bitch on the altar.”

One of the Lords stepped forward and bent down to seize the child by her hair. Maggie screamed.

“No!” I shouted.

The Red King went to the altar and kicked the corpse of the dead woman from it. “Mortal,” he spat. “Still so certain that his will matters. But you are nothing. A wisp. A shadow. Here and then gone. Forgotten. It is fated. It is the way of the universe.” He jerked the ritual knife from the hands of the warrior and glared at me, his true nature writhing and twisting beneath his skin. The Lord dragged the shackled, screaming child to the altar, and the Red King’s black eyes gleamed.

“This is your only role, mortal,” he said, “your only grace, the only thing you are truly meant to do.” He stared at Maggie and bared his teeth, all long fangs, slaver running out of his mouth and down over his chin. “Die.”

Chapter Forty-eight

The Red King raised the knife over my daughter, and she let out a quavering little scream, a helpless, hopeless wail of terror and despair—and as hard as I fought with the new strength given me by Queen Mab, with the protection granted by my godmother’s armor, I could not do a damned thing about it.

I didn’t have to.

White light erupted over the altar from no visible source, and the Red King let out a scream. The shackles of his will vanished, even as his right hand, the one holding the stone knife, leapt off of his arm and went spinning through the air. It fell to the stone floor, still clutched hard around the leather-wrapped hilt of the knife, and the obsidian blade shattered like a dropped dish.

I let out a shout as I felt the Red King’s will slip off of me. The others still held me in place, but I suddenly knew that I could move, knew that I could fight. As the Red King reeled back screaming, I lifted a hand, snarled, “Fuego!” and sent a wash of fire to my right, engulfing the jaguar warrior who still stood a couple of feet inside the doorway. He tried to flee, and only wound up screaming and falling down the deadly steep steps of the pyramid while the soulfire lacing my spell found his flesh and set it aflame.

I whirled back to the Lords facing me from the far side of the altar. I couldn’t have risked throwing destructive energy at them with my daughter lying on the altar between us, and I’d had no choice but to take out the immediate threat of the warrior so that I could focus on the Lords and the Red King—otherwise it would have been relatively simple for him to come over and cut my throat while I was engaged by the vampire elite.

But two could play at that game—and my physical backup was a hell of a lot better than theirs.

I drew in my own will and lifted my borrowed staff—and as I did four more beings in golden masks entered the temple.

Where did all these yo-yos come from?

“Hold the wizard!” snarled the Red King, and the pressure of hostile minds upon me abruptly doubled. My left arm shook and the staff I held in it slowly sank down. My right arm just ran out of gas, as if the muscles in it had become totally exhausted, and the tip of the sword clinked as it hit the stone floor.

The Red King rose, and stared for a moment at the altar and at the column of shimmering light over it. As he did, his freaking hand began to writhe like a spider—and a second later, it flipped itself over and began to crawl back over toward him. The king just stood there, staring at the light. I tried to fight my way out of the mass of dark will directed against me. The light could only be Susan, veiled behind the Leanansidhe’s handiwork and wielding Amoracchius. I mean, how many invisible sources of holy light interested in protecting my daughter could there be running around Chichén Itzá? She hadn’t attacked yet, instead standing over Maggie—I wanted to scream at her to take him, that it was her only chance. If she didn’t, the Red King and his Lords could take her out almost as swiftly and easily as I had the jaguar warrior.

But he didn’t—and in a flash of insight, I understood why he didn’t.

He didn’t know what the light was.

He knew only that it had hurt him when he had tried to murder the child. From his perspective, it could have been almost anything—an archangel standing guard, or a spirit of light as terrible as the Ick had been foul. I thought back to the voice coming from Murphy’s mouth, pronouncing judgment upon the Red Court, and suddenly understood what was making the Red King hesitate, what he was really thinking: that the entity over the altar might be something he did not think actually existed—like maybe the real Kukulcan.

And he was afraid.

Susan couldn’t do anything. If she acted, if she revealed what she was, the enemy’s uncertainty would vanish and the conflict would immediately ensue again. Outnumbered so heavily, she wouldn’t have a chance.

But she knew what she had, in uncertainty and fear, and she neither moved nor made a sound. It was a weapon as potent as the wills of the demigods themselves—it had, after all, paralyzed the Red King. But it was a fragile weapon, a sword made of glass, and I felt my eyes drawn to the broken pieces of obsidian on the floor.

I couldn’t move—and time was not our ally. With every moment that passed, the more numerous enemy would become more organized, recover more from the shock of the sudden invasion of a small army smack in the middle of their holiday celebration. I needed an opportunity, a moment, if I was going to get Maggie out of this mess. And I needed it soon.

I strained against the wills of the Lords of Outer Night, unable to move—and keeping their attention locked upon me. One by one, my gaze traveled over each of the golden masks. I focused on the last one for a time, then began again with the first, tried to test each individual will, to find out which would be the weakest point of attack when my moment came.

Just then, Martin ghosted into the temple through the fourth door, making absolutely no sound, and it looked to me like the moment was freaking nigh. All of the Lords present were focused on me. The Red King stood intently distracted by Susan’s light show, while his severed hand crawled its way up his leg and hopped over to his wounded arm, where rubbery tendrils of black ooze immediately extruded from whole and wounded flesh alike, and began intertwining.

Martin had walked into what had to be a Fellowship operative’s wet dream: the Red King’s naked back, and no one to stop him from going medieval on the leader of the vile edifice of power and terror that was the Red Court.

He took the machete from its sheath without a whisper of steel on nylon and drew back, readying himself to strike. There was an intensity of focus in his face that I had never seen before.

He closed the last two steps in a superquick blur, went into a spin, and I was getting ready to cheer—

—when his foot swept up to streak savagely through the air beneath the glowing white light.

I heard Susan let out a cry as she fell, startled by the blow. Martin, moving with his eyes closed, got close to her, his arms lashing out, and caught something between them. He ripped hard with his left arm, twisting the machete up with the right as he did—and suddenly Susan was fully visible, bowed into a painful arch by Martin’s grip on her. The feather cloak had fallen from her, and the blade of Martin’s machete rested against her throat.

I screamed in rage. It came out as a sort of vocalized seethe.

The Red King took a swift step back as Martin attacked, his eyes intent. Then, when Susan appeared, his head tilted as he worked through what he was seeing.

“Please excuse me, my lord,” Martin murmured, giving a slight bow of his head to the Red King. “Drop it,” he said in a flat voice to Susan. He twisted his body more, bending her painfully, and pressing the machete’s edge against her throat even harder, until Susan’s fingers opened and Amoracchius fell to the floor, its light slowly dying.

“A trick,” said the Red King. Anger began to pour off of him. “A charlatan’s trick.” His eyes moved from Susan up to Martin. “And you have revealed yourself.”

“I beg your forgiveness, my lord,” Martin said. “It seemed the proper time. On my initiative, strike teams began removing Fellowship personnel and safe houses two hours ago. By this time tomorrow, there won’t be an operative left alive south of the United States. And our financial division will have taken or destroyed well over ninety percent of their accounts.”

“You son of a bitch,” Susan said, her voice overflowing with pain. “You fucking traitor.”

Martin’s expression flickered at her words. But his eyes never left the Red King. “I give you the Fellowship of St. Giles, my lord,” he said. “And I beg you to grant me my reward.”

“Reward,” Susan said, loading more contempt and hate into the word than should have been possible. “What could they possibly give you, Martin, to make it worth what you’ve done?”

The Red King stared at Susan and said, “Explain it to her.”

“You misunderstand,” Martin said calmly. “I have not betrayed the Fellowship, Susan. This was the plan from the moment I joined it. Think. You’ve known me for less than a decade and you’ve seen how near some of our scrapes have been. Did you truly believe I had survived a hundred and fifty years of battle against the Red Court, outlived every other operative ever to serve the Fellowship on my own merits?” He shook his head. “No. Escapes were provided. As were targets. It took me fifty years and I had to personally kill two of my fellows and friends working much as I was, to win the trust of the Fellowship. Once they admitted me to the inner circle, their time had come. Trust is a poison, Susan. It took another century to ferret out their secrets, but it is finally done. And our people will finish removing the Fellowship, in every meaningful sense, by tomorrow. It is over.”

Susan’s eyes flickered over to me, and Maggie continued to weep quietly, huddling in on herself. Susan’s face was twisted with pain. There were furious tears in her eyes as she looked at me.

And I couldn’t even speak to her.

“And what do you get?” Susan asked her, voice shaking.

“Ascension,” said the Red King. “I have no interest in admitting bloodthirsty lunatics to the nobility of my Court. Martin has proven himself—his dedication, his self-control, and, most important, his competence, over the course of decades. He was a priest for fifty years before he was even permitted to attempt this service.”

“Honestly, Susan,” Martin said. “I told you many times that you can never let emotion interfere with your duties. If you had listened to me, I’m certain you would have caught on. I would have been forced to kill you, as I have several others who were too wise for their own good, but you would have known.”

Susan closed her eyes. She was shaking. “Of course. You could make contact as often as you wished. Every time I visited Maggie.”

“Correct,” he said quietly. He turned back to the Red King. “My lord, I beg your forgiveness. I sought only to give you that which you wished, and the timing made it necessary for me to act, or see the opportunity pass us by.”

“Under the circumstances, I think I will not object, priest,” the Red King said. “If the strike teams are as successful as you predict, you will have your reward and my gratitude.”

Martin bowed his head to the Red King, and then looked up at me. He studied my face for a moment before he said, “The wizard has Alamaya’s dagger in his sash, my lord, should you wish to complete the ritual.”

The Red King took a deep breath and then blew it out, his expression becoming almost benevolent. “Martin, Martin, the voice of practicality. We’ve been lost without you.”

“My lord is too kind,” Martin said. “Please accept my condolences on the loss of Arianna, my lord. She was a remarkable woman.”

“Remarkably ambitious,” the Red King said. “Determined to cling to the past, rather than exploring new opportunities. She and her entire coterie, determined to undermine me. Had she destroyed this animal and then made good upon her promise to break the back of the accursed White Council, she would have been a real threat to my power. I take no pleasure in thinking on it, but her death was meant to be.”

“As you say, my lord,” Martin said.

The Red King approached me, smiling, and reached for the dagger in my sash.

Susan bared her teeth, still straining, but Martin was more than her equal, it seemed.

There was nothing I could do. The deck had been stacked so hard against me that even with Martin on our side, things had looked grim. His treachery had come at the ideal moment, damn him. Damn them all. There was nothing I could . . .

Long ago, when I was little more than a child, my first lover and I had devised a spell to let us speak silently to each other in class. It was magic much like the speaking stone Ebenezar had crafted, but simpler, with a much shorter range. I had never used to it communicate with anyone but Elaine, but Susan had been intimate with me—and I thought that at that moment, the only thought on our minds was Maggie.

It might be enough to establish the link, even if it was only one-way.

I grasped for the minor magic, fighting to pull it together through the dragging chains of the wills of the Lords of Outer Night, and cast my thought at Susan as clearly as I could. He doesn’t know all of it, I sent to her desperately. He doesn’t know about the enchantment protecting your skin. He only knows about the cloak because he saw you use it when we got here.

Susan’s eyes widened briefly. She’d heard me.

The altar, I thought. The ritual meant to kill us can be turned back upon them. If one of them dies on that knife, the curse will go after their bloodline, not ours.

Her eyes widened more. I saw her thinking furiously.

“Martin,” she asked quietly. “Why did Arianna target my daughter?”

Martin looked down at Susan, at Maggie, and then away. “Because the child’s father is the son of Margaret LeFay, the daughter of the man who killed her husband. By killing her, this way she would avenge herself upon all of you.”

If I hadn’t already been more or less motionless, I would have frozen in place.

Margaret LeFay. Daughter of the man who had killed Arianna’s husband (and vampire child), Paolo Ortega.

Duke Ortega. Who had been destroyed by the Blackstaff.

Ebenezar McCoy.

One of the most dangerous wizards in the world. A man of such personal and political power that she would never have been able to take him down directly. So she had set out to strike at him through his bloodline. From him to my mother. From her to me. From me to Maggie. Kill the child and kill us all.

That was what Arianna had meant when she said it wasn’t about me.

It was about my grandfather.

Suddenly it made sense that the old man had put his life on the line by declaring himself my mentor when the Council would have killed me for slaying Justin DuMorne. Suddenly it made sense why he had been so patient with me, so considerate, so kind. It hadn’t just been an act of random kindness.

And suddenly it made sense why he would barely ever speak of his apprentice, Margaret LeFay—a name she’d earned for herself, when her birth certificate must have read Margaret McCoy. Hell, for that matter, he probably never told the Council that Margaret was his daughter. I sure as hell had no intentions of letting them know about Maggie, if I got her out of this mess.

My mother had eventually been killed by enemies she had made—and Ebenezar, her father, the most dangerous man on the White Council, had not been there to save her. The circumstances wouldn’t matter. No matter what he’d accomplished, I knew the old man would never forgive himself for not saving his daughter’s life, any more than I would if I failed Maggie. It was why he had made a statement, a demonstration of what would happen to those who came at me with a personal vengeance—he was trying, preemptively, to save his grandson.

And it explained why he had changed the Grey Council’s focus and led them here. He had to try to save me—and to save my little girl.

And, some cynical portion of me added, himself. Though I wasn’t even sure that would be a conscious thought on his part, underneath the mountain of issues he had accrued.

No wonder Arianna had been so hot and bothered to use the bloodline curse, starting with Maggie. She’d avenge herself upon me, who hadn’t had the good grace to die in a duel, and upon Ebenezar, who had simply killed Ortega as you would a dangerous animal, a workaday murder performed with expedience and an extremely high profile. Arianna must have lost a lot of face in the wake of that—and my ongoing exploits against the Reds and their allies would only have made her more determined to show me my place. With a single curse, she’d kill one of the Senior Council and the Blackstaff all at once. My death would be something to crow about, too—since, as Arianna herself had noted, no one had pulled it off yet—and I felt I could confidently lay claim to the title of Most Infamous Warden on the Council, after Donald Morgan’s death.

For Arianna, what a coup. And after that, presumably . . . a coup.

Of course, if the Red King was holding the knife, he got the best of all worlds. Dead enemies, more prestige, and a more secure throne. No-brainer.

He took the knife from my belt, smiling, and turned toward the altar—and my daughter.

Dear God, I thought. Think, Dresden. Think!

One day I hope God will forgive me for giving birth to the idea that came next.

Because I never will.

I knew how angry she was. I knew how afraid she was. Her child was about to die only inches beyond her reach, and what I did to her was as good as murder.

I focused my thoughts and sent them to Susan. Susan! Think! Who knew who the baby’s father was? Who could have told them?

Her lips peeled away from her teeth.

His knife can’t hurt you, I thought, though I knew damned well that no faerie magic could blithely ignore the touch of steel.

“Martin,” Susan said, her voice low and very quiet. “Did you tell them about Maggie?”

He closed his eyes, but his voice was steady. “Yes.”

Susan Rodriguez lost her mind.

One instant she was a prisoner, and the next she had twisted like an eel, too swiftly to be easily seen. Martin’s machete opened up a long cut on her throat, but she paid as little attention to it as a thorn scratch gained while hiking.

Martin raised a hand to block the strike he thought was coming—and it was useless, because Susan didn’t go after him swinging.

Instead, her eyes full of darkness and rage, her mouth opened in a scream that showed her extended fangs, she went for his throat.

Martin’s eyes were on mine for a fraction of a second. No more. But I felt the soulgaze begin. I saw his agony, the pain of the mortal life he had lost. I saw his years of service, his genuine devotion, like a marble statue of the Red King kept polished and lovingly tended. And I saw his soul change. I saw that image of worship grow tarnished as he spent year after year among those who struggled against the Red King and his empire of terror and misery. And I saw that when he had come into the temple, he knew full well that he wasn’t going to survive. And that he was content with it.

There was nothing I could do in time to prevent what was coming next, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Martin said that it had taken him years and years to run a con on the Fellowship of St. Giles. But it had taken him most of two centuries to run the long con on the Red King. As a former priest, Martin must have known of the bloodline curse, and its potential for destruction. He must have known that the threat to Maggie and the realization of his betrayal would be certain to drive Susan out of control.

He’d told me already, practically the moment he had come to Chicago, that he would do anything if it meant damaging the Red Court. He would have shot me in the back. He would have betrayed Maggie’s existence, practically handing her to the murderous bastards. He would betray the Fellowship to its enemies.

He would destroy Susan.

And he would die, himself.

Everything he had done, I realized, he had done for one reason: to be sure that I was standing here when it happened. To give me a chance to change everything.

Susan rode him to the stone floor, berserk with terror and rage, and tore out his throat, ripping mouthful after mouthful of flesh from his neck with supernatural speed.

Martin died.

Susan began to turn.

And that was my moment.

I flung myself against the wills of the Lords of Outer Night with everything in my body, my heart, my mind. I hurled my fear and my loneliness, my love and my respect, my rage and my pain. I made of my thoughts a hammer, infused with the fires of creation and tempered in the icy power of the darkest guardian the earth had ever known. I raised my arms with a scream of defiance, bringing as much of the armor as I could between my head and theirs, and wished for a fleeting second that I had just worn the stupid hat.

And I threw it all at the second Lord from the left—the one whose will seemed the least concrete. He staggered and made a sound that I’d once heard from a boxer who’d taken an uppercut to the nuts.

With that, the last Lord of Outer Night to enter the temple—the one wearing the mask I had seen once before, when Murphy had sliced it from its owner’s head—raised her hands and sent ribbons of green and amethyst power scything through her apparent compatriots.

The blast killed two of them outright, with spectacular violence, tearing their bodies to god- awful shreds and spattering the inside of the temple with black blood. All of the remaining Lords staggered, screaming in surprise and pain, their true forms beginning to claw their way free of the flesh that contained them.

My godmother, too, discarded her disguise, flinging the gold mask at the nearest Lord as she allowed the illusion that concealed her true form to fade away, taking with it the clothes and trappings that had let her insinuate herself among the enemy. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. Bloodlust and an eager, nearly sexual desire to destroy radiated from her like heat from a fire. She howled her glee and began hurling streaks and bolts and webworks of energy at the stunned Lords of Outer Night, spinning power from her flickering fingertips even as they brought the force of their wills and their own sorcery to bear upon her.

Not one of the Lords of Outer Night remembered to keep me down.

I was suddenly free.

I hurled myself at the Red King’s back with a scream, and saw him spin to face me, knife in hand. His dark eyes suddenly widened, and the awful power of his will descended upon me like a dozen leaded blankets.

I staggered, but I did not stop. I was hysterical. I was not well. I was invincible. My armor and my grandfather’s staff and the sight of my frightened child and the cold power flowing through my limbs allowed me to push forward one step, and another, and another, until I stood nearly toe-to-toe with him.

The Red King’s restored right hand snapped forward to bury the obsidian knife in my throat.

My left hand dropped the staff and intercepted his wrist. I stopped the knife an inch from my throat, and his eyes widened as he felt my strength.

His left hand shot out to clench my throat with crushing power.

I formed the thumb and forefinger of my right hand into a C-shape, ice crackling as it spread over them, rigid and crystal clear.

I plunged them into both of his black, black eyes.

And then I sent my will coursing down my arm, along with all the soulfire I could find as I screamed, “Fuego!”

Fire seared and split and cooked and steamed, and the king of the Red Court, the most ancient vampire of their kind, the father and creator of their race, screamed in anguish. The sound was so loud that it blew out my left eardrum, a novel new agony for my collection.

And when the Red King screamed, every single member of his Court screamed with him.

This close to him I could almost feel it, feel the power of his will calling them, drawing vampires to him with a summoning beyond self-interest, beyond reason. But even if I hadn’t been there touching him, the sudden storm of cries from outside would have told me the same story.

The vampires were coming toward us in a swarm, a storm, and nothing on earth would stop them from going to their king’s aid. His grip on my throat faltered, and he staggered back and away from me. My fingers came free of his head, and I grabbed his knife hand at the wrist with both hands. Then, screaming in rage, coating his arm with frost, I snapped his forearm in half—and caught the dagger before it could fall to the floor.

Freed, the Red King staggered away, and even blinded and in sanity-destroying pain, he was dangerous. His will, unleashed at random, blew holes in the stone walls. Sorcery lashed out, the scarlet lightning that seemed to be a motif around here raking over one of his own Lords and cutting the struggling vampire in half.

The eldest vampire of the Red Court screamed in his agony as a tide of his creatures came to obliterate us.

And the youngest vampire of the Red Court knelt on the ground over Martin, staring at her hands.

I watched for a second as the skin around her fingers seemed to burst at the tips. Then I saw her fingers begin to lengthen, nails growing into claws, muscle tissue tearing free of skin with audible, obvious torment. Susan stared at them with her all-black eyes, shaking her head, her face a mask of blood. She was moaning, shuddering.

“Susan,” I said, kneeling down in front of her. The howl of sorcerous energies filled the temple with a symphony of destruction. I took her face in my hands.

She looked up at me, terrified and tortured, despair written over her face.

“They’re coming,” she rasped. “I can feel them. Inside. Outside. They’re coming. Oh, God.”

“Susan!” I shouted. “Remember Maggie!”

Her eyes seemed to focus on me.

“They wanted Maggie because she was the youngest,” I said, my voice cold. “Because her death would have taken us all with her.”

She contorted around her stomach, which was twisting and flexing and swelling obscenely, but she kept her eyes on my face.

“Now you’re the youngest,” I hissed at her, my voice fierce. “The youngest vampire in the entire and literally damned Court. You can kill them all.”

She shuddered and moaned, and I saw the conflicting desires at war within her. But her eyes turned to Maggie and she clenched her jaw. “I . . . I don’t think I can do it. I can’t feel my hands.”

“Harry!” screamed Murphy desperately, from somewhere nearby. “They’re coming!”

Lightning split the air outside with thunder that would register on the Richter scale.

There was a sudden, random lull in the cacophony of sorcerous war, no more than a couple of seconds long.

Susan looked back at me, her eyes streaming her last tears. “Harry, help me,” she whispered. “Save her. Please.”

Everything in me screamed no. That this was not fair. That I should not have to do this. That no one should ever have to do this.

But . . . I had no choice.

I found myself picking Susan up with one hand. The little girl was curled into a ball with her eyes closed, and there was no time. I pushed her from the altar as gently as I could and let her fall to the floor, where she might be a little safer from the wild energies surging through the temple.

I put Susan on the altar and said, “She’ll be safe. I promise.”

She nodded at me, her body jerking and twisting in convulsions, forcing moans of pain from her lips. She looked terrified, but she nodded.

I put my left hand over her eyes.

I pressed my mouth to hers, swiftly, gently, tasting the blood, and her tears, and mine.

I saw her lips form the word, “Maggie . . .”

And I . . .

I used the knife.

I saved a child.

I won a war.

God forgive me.

Chapter Forty-nine

Everything changed the night the Red Court died. It made the history books.

First, for the unexplained destruction of several structures in Chichén Itzá. A thousand years of jungle hadn’t managed to bring the place down, but half an hour of slugfest between practitioners who know what they’re doing can leave city blocks in ruins. It was later attributed to an extremely powerful localized earthquake. No one could explain all the corpses—some of them with dental work featuring techniques last used a hundred years before, some whose hearts had been violently torn from their chests, and whose bodies had been affected by some kind of mutation that had rendered their bones almost unrecognizable as human. Fewer than 5 percent of them were ever identified—and those were all people who had abruptly gone missing in the past ten or fifteen years. No explanation was ever offered for such a confluence of missing persons, though theories abounded, none of them true.

I could have screamed the truth from the mountaintops and blended right in with all the rest of the nuts. Everyone knows that vampires aren’t real.

Second, it made the books because of all the sudden disappearances or apparent outright murders of important officials, businessmen, and financiers in cities and governments throughout Latin America. The drug cartels took the rap for that one, even in the nations where they weren’t really strong enough to pull such tactics off. Martial law got declared virtually everywhere south of Texas, and a dozen revolutions in eight or ten different countries all kicked off, seemingly on the same night.

I’ve heard that nature abhors a vacuum—though if that’s true, then I can’t figure why about ninety-nine zillion percent of creation is vacuum. But I do know that governments hate ’em, and always rush to fill them up. So do criminals. Which probably tells you more about human beings than it does about nature. Most of the nations in South America proper kept their balance. Central America turned into a war zone, with various interests fighting to claim the territory the vampires had left behind them.

Finally, it made the books in the supernatural community as the night of bad dreams. Before the next sunset, the Paranet was buzzing with activity, with men and women scattered over half the world communicating about the vivid and troubling dreams they’d had. Pregnant women and mothers who had recently delivered had been hardest hit. Several had to be hospitalized and sedated. But everyone with a smidge of talent who was sleeping at the time was troubled by dreams. The general theme was always the same: dead children. The world in flames. Terror and death spreading across the globe in an unstoppable wave, destroying anything resembling order or civilization.

I don’t remember what happened when the ritual went off. There’s a blank spot in my head about two minutes wide. I had no desire whatsoever to find out what was there.

The next thing I remember is standing outside the temple with Maggie in my arms, wrapped up in the heavy feather cloak her mother had left behind. She was still shivering and crying quietly, but only in sheer reaction and weariness now, rather than terror. The shackles lay broken on the ground behind me. I don’t remember how I got them off her without hurting her. She leaned against me, using a fold of the cloak as a pillow, and I sat down on the top step, holding her, to see what I had paid for.

The Red Court was dead. Gone. Every one of them. Most of the remains were little more than black sludge. That, I thought, marked the dead vampires. The half-breeds, though, only lost the vampire parts of their nature. The curse had cured them.

Of course, it was the vampire inside them that had kept them young and beautiful.

I saw hundreds of people on the ground aging a year for every one of my breaths. I watched them wither away to nothing, for the most part. It seemed that half-breeds came in a couple of flavors—those who had managed to discipline their thirst for blood, and thus carried on for centuries, and those who had not been half-vampires for very long. Very few of the latter had ranked in the Red King’s Court. It turned out that most of the young half vampires had been working for the Fellowship, and many had already been killed by the Reds—but I heard later that more than two hundred others had been freed from their curse.

But for me, it wouldn’t matter how many I’d freed in that instant of choice. No matter how high the number, it would need to be plus one to be square in my book.

Inevitably, the Red Court had contained a few newbies, and after the ritual went off, they were merely human again. They, and the other humans too dim to run any sooner, didn’t last long once the Grey Council broke open the cattle car and freed the prisoners. The terror the Reds had inflicted on their victims became rage, and the deaths the Reds and their retainers suffered as a result weren’t pretty ones. I saw a matronly woman who was all alone beat Alamaya to death with a rock.

I didn’t get involved. I’d had enough for one day.

I sat and I rocked my daughter until she fell asleep against me. My godmother came to sit beside me, her gown singed and spattered with blood, a contented smile upon her face. People talked to me. I ignored them. They didn’t push. I think Lea was warning them off.

Ebenezar, still bearing the Blackstaff in his left hand, came to me sometime later. He looked at the Leanansidhe and said, “Family business. Please excuse us.”

She smirked at him and inclined her head. Then she stood up and drifted away.

Ebenezar sat down next to me on the eastern steps of the temple of Kukulcan and stared out at the jungle around us, beneath us. “Dawn’s about here,” he said.

I looked. He was right.

“Locals stay hidden in their houses until sunrise around here. Red Court would meet here sometimes. Induct new nobility and so on. Survival trait.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was like that a lot, especially in nations that didn’t have a ton of international respect. Something weird happens in Mexico; twenty million people can say that they saw it and no one cares.

“Sun comes up, they’ll be out. They’ll call authorities. People will ask questions.”

I listened to his statements and didn’t disagree with any of them. After a moment, I realized that they were connected to a line of thought, and I said, “It’s time to go.”

“Aye, soon,” Ebenezar said.

“You never told me, sir,” I said.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ve done things in my life, Hoss. Bad things. I’ve made enemies. I didn’t want you to have them, too.” He sighed. “At least . . . not until you were ready.” He looked around at the remains of the Red Court. “Reckon you more or less are.”

I thought about that while the sky grew lighter. Then I said, “How did Arianna know?”

Ebenezar shook his head. “A dinner. Maggie—my Maggie—asked me to a dinner. She’d just taken up with that Raith bastard. Arianna was there. Maggie didn’t warn me. They had some scheme they wanted my support on. The vampires thought I was just Maggie’s mentor, then.” He sighed. “I wanted nothing to do with it. Said she shouldn’t want it, either. And we fought.”

I grunted. “Fought like family.”

“Yes,” he said. “Raith missed it. He’s never had any family that was sane. Arianna saw it. Filed it away for future reference.”

“Is everything in the open now?” I asked.

“Everything’s never in the open, son,” he responded. “There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times. Or that’s been my experience.”

I nodded.

“Sergeant Murphy told me what happened.”

I felt my neck tense. “She saw it?”

He nodded. “Reckon so. Hell of a hard thing to do.”

“It wasn’t hard,” I said quietly. “Just cold.”

“Oh, Hoss,” he said. There was more compassion in the words than you’d think would fit there.

Figures in grey gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Ebenezar eyed them with a scowl. “Time for me to go, looks like.”

I nudged my brain and looked down at them. “You brought them here. For me.”

“Not so much,” he said. He nodded at the sleeping child. “For her.”

“What about the White Council?”

“They’ll get things sorted out soon,” he said. “Amazing how things fell apart just long enough for them to sit them out.”

“With Cristos running it.”

“Aye.”

“He’s Black Council,” I said.

“Or maybe stupid,” Ebenezar countered.

I thought about it. “Not sure which is scarier.”

Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. “Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.”

“How’d Lea arrange a signal with you?” I asked.

“That,” Ebenezar said sourly. “On that score, Hoss, I think our elders ran their own game on us.”

“Elders?”

He nodded down the stairs, where the tall figure with the metal-headed staff had begun creating another doorway out of green lightning. Once it was formed, the space beneath the arch shimmered, and all the hooded figures at the bottom of the stairs looked up at us.

I frowned and looked closer. Then I realized that the metal head of the staff was a blade, and that the tall man was holding a spear. Within the hood, I saw a black eye patch, a grizzled beard, and a brief, grim smile. He raised the spear to me in a motion that reminded me, somehow, of a fencer’s salute. Then he turned and vanished into the gate. One by one, the other figures in grey began to follow him.

“Vadderung,” I said.

Ebenezar grunted. “That’s his name this time. He doesn’t throw in often. When he does, he goes to the wall. And in my experience, it means things are about to get bad.” He pursed his lips. “He doesn’t give recognition like that lightly, Hoss.”

“I talked to him a couple of days ago,” I said. “He told me about the curse. Put the gun in my hand for me and showed me where to point it.”

Ebenezar nodded. “He taught Merlin, you know. The original Merlin.”

“How’d Merlin make out?” I asked.

“No one’s sure,” Ebenezar said. “But from his journals . . . he wasn’t the kind to go in his sleep.”

I snorted.

The old man stood and used his right hand to pull his hood up over his face. He paused and then looked at me. “I won’t lecture you about Mab, boy. I’ve made bargains myself, sometimes.” He twitched his left hand, which was still lined with black veins, though not as much as it had been hours before. “We do what we think we must, to protect who we can.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She might lean on you pretty hard. Try to put you into a box you don’t want to be in. But don’t let her. She can’t take away your will. Even if she can make it seem that way.” He sighed again, but there was bedrock in his voice. “That’s the one thing all these dark beings and powers can’t do. Take away your ability to choose. They can kill you. They can make you do things—but they can’t make you choose to do ’em. They almost always try to lie to you about that. Don’t fall for it.”

“I won’t,” I said. I looked up at him and said, “Thank you, Grandfather.”

He wrinkled up his nose. “Ouch. That doesn’t fit.”

“Grampa,” I said. “Gramps.”

He put his hand against his chest.

I smiled a little. “Sir.”

He nodded at the child. “What will you do with her?”

“What I see fit,” I said, but gently. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t know.”

Both pain and faintly amused resignation showed in his face. “Maybe it is. See you soon, Hoss.”

He got halfway down the stairs before I said, “Sir? Do you want your staff?”

He nodded at me. “You keep it, until I can get you a new blank.”

I nodded back at him. Then I said, “I don’t know what to say.”

His eyes wrinkled up even more heavily at the corners. “Hell, Hoss. Then don’t say anything.” He turned and called over his shoulder, “You get in less trouble that way!”

My grandfather kept going down the stairs, walking with quick, sure strides. He vanished through the doorway of lightning.

I heard steps behind me, and turned to find Murphy standing in the entrance of the temple. Fidelacchius rode over one shoulder, and her P-90 hung from its strap on the other. She looked tired. Her hair was all coming out of its ponytail, strands hanging here and there. She studied my face, smiled slightly, and came down to where I sat.

“Hey,” she said, her voice hushed. “You back?”

“I guess I am.”

“Sanya was worried,” she said, with a little roll of her eyes.

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Tell him not to worry. I’m still here.”

She nodded and stepped closer. “So this is her?”

I nodded, and looked down at the sleeping little girl. Her cheeks were pink. I couldn’t talk.

“She’s beautiful,” Murphy said. “Like her mother.”

I nodded and rolled one tired and complaining shoulder. “She is.”

“Do you want someone else to take her for a minute?”

My arms tightened on the child, and I felt myself turn a little away from her.

“Okay,” Murphy said gently, raising her hands. “Okay.”

I swallowed and realized that I was parched. Starving. And, more than anything, I was weary. Desperately, desolately tired. And the prospect of sleep was terrifying. I turned to look at Murphy and saw the pain on her face as she watched me. “Karrin,” I said. “I’m tired.”

I looked down at the child, a sleepy, warm little presence who had simply accepted what meager shelter and comfort I had been able to offer. And I thought my heart would break. Break more. Because I knew that I couldn’t be what she needed. That I could never give her what she had to have to stand a chance of growing up strong and sane and happy.

Because I had made a deal. If I hadn’t done it, she’d be dead—but because I had, I couldn’t be what she deserved to have.

Never looking away from the little girl’s face, I whispered, “Will you do me a favor?”

“Yes,” Karrin said. Such a simple word, to have so much reassuring mass.

My throat tightened and my vision blurred. It took me two tries to speak. “Please take her to Father Forthill, when we get b-back,” I said. “T-tell him that she needs to disappear. The safest place he has. That I . . .” My voice failed. I took deep breaths and said, “And I don’t need to know where. T-tell him that for me.”

I turned to Murphy and said, “Please?”

She looked at me as if her heart were breaking. But she had a soul of steel, of strength, and her eyes were steady and direct. “Yes.”

I bit my lip.

And, very carefully, I passed my little girl over into her arms. Murphy took her, and didn’t comment about the weight. But then, she wouldn’t.

“God,” I said, not two full seconds later. “Molly. Where is she?”

Murphy looked up at me as she settled down to hold the child. The girl murmured a sleepy complaint, and Murphy rocked her gently to soothe her back to sleep. “Wow. You were really out of it. You didn’t see the helicopter?”

I raked through my memories of the night. “Um. No.”

“After . . .” She glanced at me and then away. “After,” she said more firmly, “Thomas found a landline and made a call. And a navy helicopter landed right out there on the lawn less than an hour later. Lifted him, Molly, and Mouse right out.”

“Mouse?”

Murphy snorted gently. “No one was willing to tell him he couldn’t go with Molly.”

“He takes his work seriously,” I said.

“Apparently.”

“Do we know anything?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Murphy said. “Sanya’s manning the phone in the visitors’ center. We gave Thomas the number before he left.”

“Be honest, Sergeant Murphy,” the Leanansidhe said quietly as she glided back over to me. “You gave the dog the number.”

Murphy eyed her, then looked at me and said defensively, “Thomas seemed to have enough on his mind already.”

I frowned.

“Not like that,” Murphy said sternly. “Ugh. I wouldn’t have let him go with her if he’d seemed . . . all weird.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Mouse wouldn’t have, either, would he.”

“He was in no danger of losing control,” my godmother said calmly. “I would never let such a promising prospect be accidentally devoured.”

Sanya appeared, jogging around the lower end of the pyramid from its far side. Esperacchius hung at his side—and Amoracchius, still in its sheath on Susan’s white leather belt, hung from his shoulder.

I stared at the belt for a moment.

It hurt.

Sanya came chugging up the stairs, moving lightly for a big guy with so much muscle. He gave my godmother a pleasant smile, one hand checking to be sure that Amoracchius was still on his shoulder.

“Next time,” Lea murmured.

“I think not,” Sanya said, beaming. He turned to me. “Thomas called. He seemed surprised it was me. Molly is on navy cruiser on maneuvers in Gulf of Mexico. She will be fine.”

I whistled. “How did . . . ?” I narrowed my eyes.

“Lara?” Murphy asked quietly.

“Got to be,” I answered.

“Lara has enough clout to get a navy chopper sent into another country’s airspace for an extraction?” Murphy kept on rocking Maggie as she spoke, seemingly unaware that she was still doing it. “That’s . . . scary.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe she sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mister President.’ ”

“Not to be rude,” Sanya said, “but I saw some people come up road in car and drive away very fast. Now would be a good time to . . .” He glanced over his shoulder and frowned. “Who left that lightning door there?”

“I arranged that,” Lea said lightly. “It will take you directly back to Chicago.”

“How’d you manage that?” I asked.

The Leanansidhe smoothed her gown, a hungry little smile on her lips, and folded her hands primly in her lap. “I . . . negotiated with its creator. Aggressively.”

I made a choking sound.

“After all, your quest must be completed, my child,” my godmother said. “Maggie must be made safe. And while I found the swim bracing, I thought it might not be safe for her. I’m given to understand that the little ones are quite fragile.”

“Okay,” I said. “I . . .” I looked back up at the temple. “I can’t just leave her there.”

“Will you take her back to Chicago, child?” my godmother asked. “Allow your police to ask many questions? Perhaps slip her into your own grave at Graceland Boneyard, and cover her with dirt?”

“I can’t just leave her,” I said.

The Leanansidhe looked at me and shook her head. Her expression was . . . less predatory than it could have been, even if it wasn’t precisely gentle. “Go. I will see to the child’s mother.” She lifted her hand to forestall my skeptical reply. “With all the honor and respect you would wish to bestow yourself, my godson. And I will take you to visit when you desire. You have my word.”

A direct promise from one of the Sidhe is a rare thing. A kindness is even rarer.

But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: Even in Winter, the cold isn’t always bitter, and not every day is cruel.

Sanya, Murphy, and I went down the stairs and through the lightning gate. Murphy politely refused Sanya’s offer to carry Maggie for her. He didn’t know how to work her the right way to get her to accept help.

I offered to carry her gear.

She surrendered the Sword and her guns willingly enough, and I lagged a few steps behind them while I settled the straps and weaponry about myself. I hung the P-90, the only object Murph was carrying with enough open space in it to hide an itinerant spirit, so that it bumped against the skull still in the improvised bag on my belt and murmured, very quietly, “Out of the gun.”

“About time,” Bob whispered back. “Sunrise is almost here. You trying to get me cooked?” Orange light flowed wearily out of the apertures of the P-90 and back into the safety of the skull. The lights in the eye sockets flickered dimly, and the spirit’s slurred voice whispered, “Don’ gimme any work for a week. At least.” Then they flickered out.

I made sure the T-shirt was still tied firmly, and that the gun wasn’t going to scratch the skull. Then I caught up to the others, and was the first one through the gateway.

It was like walking through a light curtain into another room. A step, a single stride, took me from Chichén Itzá to Chicago. Specifically, we emerged into Father Forthill’s storage room-slash-refugee closet, and the lightning gate closed behind us with a snap of static discharge.

“Direct flight,” said Sanya with both surprise and approval, looking around. “Nice.”

Murphy nodded. “No stops? No weird places? How does that work?”

I had no idea. So I just smiled, shrugged, and said, “Magic.”

“Good enough,” Murphy said with a sigh, and immediately settled Maggie down onto one of the cots. The child started to cry again, but Murphy shushed her and tucked her beneath the blankets and slipped a pillow beneath her head, and the little girl was out in seconds.

I watched Maggie without getting involved.

Her mother’s blood was on my hands. Literally.

Sanya stepped up next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He nodded toward the hallway and said, “We should talk.”

“Go ahead,” Murphy said. “I’ll stay with her.”

I nodded my thanks to her, and went out into the hallway with Sanya.

Wordlessly, he offered me Amoracchius. I stared at the Sword for a moment.

“I’m not so sure I should have that,” I said.

“If you were,” he said, “I wouldn’t want you to have it. Uriel placed it in your care. If he wanted it moved, he should say so.”

After a moment, I took the sword and hung its belt over the same shoulder as Fidelacchius. The Swords felt very heavy.

Sanya nodded. “Before he left, Thomas said to give you this. That you would know what it was.” He passed me a key.

I recognized it from the stamp on the head reading, WB. It stood for the name of the Water Beetle, Thomas’s beat-up old commercial fishing boat. It had a bathroom, a shower, a little kitchen, some bunks. And I had a couple of changes of clothing there, from overnight trips to one of the islands in Lake Michigan.

My brother was offering me a place to stay.

I had to blink my eyes several times as I took the key. “Thank you,” I said to Sanya.

He studied my face for a second, thoughtfully. Then he said, “You’re leaving now, aren’t you?”

I looked back toward Forthill’s quiet little haven. “Yeah.”

He nodded. “When will Mab come for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “Soon, I guess.”

“I will talk to Michael for you,” he said. “Tell him about his daughter.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “Just so you know . . . Murphy knows my wishes regarding Maggie. She’ll speak for me.”

“Da,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a metal flask. He sipped from it, and offered it to me. “Here.”

“Vodka?”

“Of course.”

“On an empty stomach,” I said, but took the flask, tilted it to him in a little salute, and downed a big swallow. It burned going in, but not necessarily in a bad way.

“I am glad that we fought together,” he said, as I passed the flask back. “I will do everything in my power to help make your daughter safe until you can return.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Returning . . . isn’t really in the cards, man.” “I do not play cards,” he said. “I play chess. And in my opinion, this is not your endgame. Not yet.”

“Being the Winter Knight isn’t the kind of job you walk out of.”

“Neither is being Knight of the Sword,” he said. “But Michael is with his family now.”

“Michael’s boss was a hell of a lot nicer than mine.”

Sanya let out a rolling laugh, and took another sip from the flask before slipping it back into his coat. “What will be, will be.” He offered me his hand. “Good luck.”

I shook it. “And you.”

“Come,” the Russian said. “I will call you a cab.”

I went down to the Water Beetle. I took off the armor. I hid the swords in the concealed compartments Thomas had built into the boat for just such an occasion, along with Bob’s skull. And I took a long, long shower. The water heater on the tub wasn’t much, but I was used to not having hot water. Being the Winter Knight didn’t help when it came to the cold water, which seemed a complete rip-off to me—in other words, typical. I scrubbed and scrubbed at myself, especially my hands. I couldn’t decide if Susan’s blood was coming off my skin or just sinking in.

I moved mechanically after that, with the routine of a longtime bachelor. There was chicken soup and chili in the kitchen—sorry, galley. I heated them both up and ate them. I had a choice between white wine, orange juice, or warm Coke to go with them. The orange juice was about to go bad, so it won the decision. Hot soups and cold juice got along better than I thought they would, and I lay down on a bunk. I thought I would sleep.

I couldn’t.

I lay there feeling the gentle motion of the great lake rocking the boat. Water made soft slaps and gurgles against the hull. Sunlight warmed the cabin. I was clean and dressed in an old pair of sweats and lying in a bed that was surprisingly comfortable—but I couldn’t sleep.

The old clock on the wall—sorry, bulkhead—ticked with a steady, soothing rhythm.

But I couldn’t sleep.

Chicken soup and chili. That was one hell of a last meal.

Maybe I should have had the cab stop at Burger King.

As noon closed in, I sat up and stared at my godmother’s armor, which had stopped bullets and lightning bolts and maybe worse. I’d found several marks on the back and sides, but no corresponding memories matching them to any of the attacks I knew about. Evidently, it had handled a number of hits I hadn’t noticed, and I knew that without the ridiculously ornate stuff I’d be dead.

The little ticking clock chimed twelve times at noon, and on the twelfth chime the armor changed. It . . . just melted back into my leather duster. The one Susan had given me before a battle a long, long time ago.

I picked up the coat. There were gaping wounds in it. Slashes. Patches burned away. Clearly visible bullet holes. There was more hole than there was coat, really, and even the surviving leather was cracked, dried, stiff, and flaking. It began to fall apart while I stood there examining it.

I guess nobody tried making a pie out of Cinderella’s pumpkin once it got through being a carriage. Though in some versions of the story, I guess it had been an onion. Maybe you could have made soup.

I dropped the coat into the lake and watched it sink. I washed my face in the bathroom and squinted at the little mirror. My mother’s amulet and gem gleamed against my bare chest.

Three days ago, my life had been business as usual. Now that little bit of silver and stone was just about the only thing I had left. Not my office. Not my house. Not my car. Not my dog—or my cat. God, where had Mister gone after the fire? Not my integrity. Not my freedom. Not my friends—not after Mab finished with me.

What was left?

A little bit of silver and a tiny rock.

And Maggie.

I sat down and waited to see what happened.

Footsteps came down the dock and then onto the boat. A moment later, Murphy knocked on the door, and then let herself into the cabin.

She looked like she’d come straight here from the church, since she was still in her whitened battle wear, and from her expression she hadn’t slept. She exhaled slowly and nodded. “I thought so.”

“Murph,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”

“I had to see you,” she said. “You . . . you just left.”

“Wanted to say good-bye?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I don’t want to say it.” She swallowed. “Harry . . . it’s just that . . . I was worried about you. I’ve never seen you like this.”

“I’ve never murdered my child’s mother before,” I said tonelessly. “That’s bound to take a little adjustment.”

She shivered and looked away. “I just . . . just came to make sure that you aren’t doing this to punish yourself. That you aren’t going to . . . do anything dramatic.”

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing dramatic. That’s me.”

“Dammit, Dresden.”

I spread my hands. “What do you want from me, Murphy? There’s nothing left.”

She came and sat down next to me, her eyes on my face, on my chest and shoulders, taking in all the scars. “I know how you feel,” she said. “After Maggie was settled, I called in to the office. There’s . . . been another investigation launched. That putz Rudolph.” She swallowed, and I could practically smell the pain on her. “The game’s rigged. Stallings thinks he can get me early retirement. Half pension.”

“Jesus, Murphy,” I said, quietly.

“I’m a cop, Harry,” she whispered. “But after this . . .” She spread her hands, to show me that nothing was in them.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I got you into this.”

“The fuck. You. Did.” She turned angry blue eyes to me. “Don’t try that bullshit with me. I knew what I was doing. I took the risks. I paid for it. And I’ll keep doing it for as long as I damned well please. Don’t try to take that from me.”

I looked away from her and felt a little bit ashamed. She was probably right. She could have backed off from me a long time ago. She’d chosen to be my friend, even though she’d known the danger. It didn’t exactly make me feel any better about myself, but it made me respect her a little more.

Is it wrong of me to admire a woman who can take a hit? Take it with as much fortitude as anyone alive, and stand up again with the fire still in her eyes?

If it is, I guess I can blame it on a screwed-up childhood.

“Do you want the Sword?” I asked.

She let out a quiet groan. “You sound like Sanya. That was the first thing he said.” She twisted her face into a stern mask wearing a big grin and mimicked his accent. “ ‘This is excellent! I have been doing too much of the work!’ ”

I almost laughed. “Well. I must say. It looks good on you.”

“Felt good,” she said. “Except for that pronouncement-of-doom thing. It was like someone else was using me as a sock puppet.” She shivered. “Ugh.”

“Yeah, archangels can be annoying.” I nodded toward the hidden compartment. “There’s a space behind that panel. You ever want the Sword, check there.”

“I’m not rushing into anything. I’ve had rebound boyfriends. Not interested in a rebound career.”

I grunted. “So. What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to make any more decisions. So . . . I think I’m going to go get really drunk. And then have mindless sex with the first reasonably healthy male who walks by. Then have a really awkward hangover. And after that, we’ll see.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I said. And my mouth kept going without checking in with the rest of me. Again. “Do you want some company?”

There was a sharp, heavy silence. Murphy actually stopped breathing. My heart rate sped up a little.

I wanted to curse my mouth for being stupid, but . . .

Why the hell not?

Bad timing is for people who have time.

“I . . .” She swallowed, and I could see her forcing herself to speak casually. “I suppose you exercise. It would make things simpler.”

“Simple,” I said. “That’s me.”

Her hand went to her hair and she forced it back down. “I want to . . .” She took a breath. “I’ll pick you up in an hour?”

“Sure,” I said.

She stood up, her cheeks pink. Hell’s bells, it was an adorable look on her. “An hour, then,” she said.

Before she could leave, I caught her hand. Her hands were small and strong and just a little rough. She had bandages over a couple of burst blisters the sword had worn on her during half an hour or so of hard work. I bent over it and kissed the back of her fingers, one for each. I let her go reluctantly and said, my stomach muscles twitching with butterflies, “An hour.”

She left and I saw her walking very quickly toward her car. Her ragged ponytail bobbed left and right with her steps.

The only thing certain in life is change. Most of my changes, lately, hadn’t been good ones.

Maybe this one wouldn’t be good either . . . but it didn’t have that feel to it.

I took forty minutes shaving and putting on my nicest clothes, which amounted to jeans and a T-shirt and my old fleece-lined denim jacket. I didn’t have any cologne, so the deodorant and soap would have to do. I didn’t allow myself to think about what was going on. In a dream, if you ever start realizing it’s a dream, poof, it’s gone.

And I didn’t want that to happen.

After that I spent a few minutes just . . . breathing. Listening to the water around me. The ticking of the clock. The peaceful silence. Drinking in the comforting sense of solitude all around me.

Then I said out loud, “Screw this Zen crap. Maybe she’ll be early.” And I got up to leave.

I came out of the cabin and into the early-afternoon sun, quivering with pleasant tension and tired and haunted—and hopeful. I shielded my eyes against the sun and studied the city’s skyline.

My foot slipped a little, and I nearly lost my balance, just as something smacked into the wall of the cabin behind me, a sharp popping sound, like a rock thrown against a wooden fence. I turned, and it felt slow for some reason. I looked at the Water Beetle’s cabin wall, bulkhead, whatever, behind me and thought, Who splattered red paint on my boat?

And then my left leg started to fold all by itself.

I looked down at a hole in my shirt, just to the left of my sternum.

I thought, Why did I pick the shirt with a bullet hole in it?

Then I fell off the back of the boat, and into the icy water of Lake Michigan.

It hurt, but only for a second. After that, my whole body felt deliciously warm, monstrously tired, and the sleep that had evaded me seemed, finally, to be within reach.

It got dark

It got quiet.

And I realized that I was all by myself.

“Die alone,” whispered a bitter, hateful old man’s voice.

“Hush, now,” whispered a woman’s voice. It sounded familiar.

I never moved, but I saw a light ahead of me. With the light, I saw that I was moving down a tunnel, directly toward it. Or maybe it was moving toward me. The light looked like something warm and wonderful and I began to move toward it.

Right up until I heard a sound.

Typical, I thought. Even when you’re dead, it doesn’t get any easier.

The light rushed closer, and I distinctly heard the horn and the engine of an oncoming train.

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 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 to 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 up on 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 the merciless horde of the 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, Captain’s Fury,

Princeps’ Fury, and First Lord’s Fury are available from Ace Books.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Dead Beat

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

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

Chapter Forty-three

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Proven Guilty

Copyright

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

AUTHOR’S NOTE

White Night

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

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

Chapter Forty-Three

Author’s Note

Small Favor

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

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Author’s Note

Turn Coat

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Author’s Note

Changes

Copyright Page

Table of 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

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Author’s Note