by Butcher, Jim
“Never.”
“Then I might as well help you. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, here. And if you walk into this with your eyes closed, you’re going to be dead before the sun rises.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Dead before the sun rises,” I said. “Stars, Bob, why don’t you just go all the way over the melodramatic edge and tell me that I’m going to be sleeping with the fishes?”
“I’m not sure that much of you would be left,” Bob said, seriously. “Harry, look at this thing. Look at what it’s done. It crossed a threshold.”
“So what?” I asked. “Lots of things can. Remember that toad demon? It came over my threshold and trashed my whole place.”
“In the first place, Harry,” Bob said, “you’re a bachelor. You don’t have all that much of a threshold to begin with. This Malone, though—he was a family man.”
“So?”
“So it means his home has a lot more significance. Besides which—the toad demon came in and everything after that was pure physical interaction. It smashed things, it spat out acid saliva, that kind of thing. It didn’t try to wrench your soul apart or enchant you into a magical sleep.”
“This is getting to be a pretty fine distinction, Bob.”
“It is. Did you ask for an invitation before you went into the Malone’s house?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I did. It’s polite, and—”
“And it’s harder for you to work magic in a home you haven’t been invited into. You cross the threshold without an invitation, and you leave a big chunk of your power at the door. It doesn’t affect you as much because you’re a mortal, Harry, but it still gets you in smaller ways.”
“And if I was an all-spirit creature,” I said.
Bob nodded. “It hits you harder. If this Nightmare is a ghost, like you say, then the threshold should have stopped it cold—and even if it had gone past it, then it shouldn’t have had the kind of power it takes to hurt a mortal that badly.”
I frowned, drumming my pencil some more, and made some notes on the paper, trying to keep everything straight. “And certainly not enough to lay out a spell that powerful on Malone.”
“Definitely.”
“So what could do that, Bob? What are we dealing with, here?”
Bob’s eyes shifted restlessly around the room. “It could be a couple of things from the spirit world. Are you sure you want to know?” I glared at him. “All right, all right. It could be something big enough. Something so big that even a fraction of it was enough to attack Malone and lay that spell on him. Maybe a god someone’s dug up. Hecate, Kali, or one of the Old Ones.”
“No,” I said, flatly. “Bob, if this thing was so tough, it wouldn’t be tearing up people’s cars and ripping kitty cats apart. That’s not my idea of a godlike evil. That’s just pissed off.”
“Harry, it went through the threshold,” Bob said. “Ghosts don’t do that. They can’t.”
I stood up, and started pacing back and forth on the little open space of floor of my summoning circle. “It isn’t one of the Old Ones. Guardian spells all over the world would be freaking out, alerting the Gatekeeper and the Council of something like that. No, this is local.”
“Harry, if you’re wrong—”
I jabbed a finger at Bob. “If I’m right, then there’s a monster out there messing with my town, and I’m obliged to do something about it before someone else gets hurt.”
Bob sighed. “It blew through a threshold.”
“So . . .” I said, pacing and whirling. “Maybe it had some other way to get around the threshold. What if it had an invitation?”
“How could it have gotten that?” Bob said. “Ding-dong, Soul Eater Home Delivery, may I come in?”
“Bite me,” I said. “What if it took Lydia? Once she was out of the church, she could have been vulnerable to it.”
“Possession?” Bob said. “Possible, I guess—but she was wearing your talisman.”
“If it could get around a threshold, maybe it could get around that too. She goes to Malone’s, looks helpless, and gets an invite in.”
“Maybe.” Bob did a passable imitation of scrunching up his eyes. “But then why were all those little animals torn up outside? We are going way out on a branch here. There are a lot of maybes.”
I shook my head. “No, no. I’ve got a feeling about this.”
“You’ve said that before. You remember the time you wanted to make ‘smart dynamite’ for that mining company?”
I scowled. “I hadn’t had much sleep that week. And anyway, the sprinklers kicked in.”
Bob chortled. “Or the time you tried to enchant that broomstick so that you could fly? Remember that? I thought it would take a year to get the mud out of your eyebrows.”
“Would you focus, please,” I complained. I pushed my hands against either side of my head to keep it from exploding with theories, and whittled them down to the ones that fit the facts. “There are only a couple of possibilities. A, we’re dealing with some kind of godlike being in which case we’re screwed.”
“And the Absurd Understatement Award goes to Harry Dresden.”
I glared at him. “Or,” I said, lifting a finger, “B, this thing is a spirit, something we’ve seen before, and it’s using smoke and mirrors within the rules we already know. Either way, I think Lydia knows more than she’s admitting.”
“Gee, a woman taking advantage of Captain Chivalry. What are the odds.”
“Bah,” I said. “If I can find her and find out what she knows, I could nail it today.”
“You’re forgetting the third possibility,” Bob said amiably. “C, it’s something new that neither of us understand and you’re sailing off in ignorance to plunge into the mouth of Charybdis.”
“You’re so encouraging,” I said, fastening on the bracelet, and slipping on the ring, feeling the quiet, humming power in them both.
Bob somehow waggled his eyebrow ridges. “Hey, you never went out with Charybdis. What’s the plan?”
“I loaned Lydia my Dead Man’s Talisman,” I said.
“I still can’t believe after all the work we did, you gave it to the first girl to wiggle by.”
I scowled at Bob. “If she’s still got it, I should be able to work up a spell to home in on it, like when I find people’s wedding rings.”
“Great,” Bob said. “Give ’em hell, Harry. Have fun storming the castle.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “She might not have it with her. If she’s in on this with the Nightmare, then she could have dumped it once she had it away from me. That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Bob squeaked.
“Yes. You’re going to head out, hit the streets, and talk to all of your contacts, see if we can get to her before sundown. We’ve only got a couple of hours.”
“Harry,” Bob pointed out, “the sun’s up. I’m exhausted. I can’t just flit around like some kinda dewdrop fairy.”
“Take Mister,” I said. “He doesn’t mind you riding around. And he could use the exercise. Just don’t get him killed.”
“Hooboy,” Bob said. “Once more into the breach, dear friends, eh? Harry, don’t quit your job to become a motivational speaker. I have your permission to come out?”
“Yep,” I said, “for the purposes of this mission only. And don’t waste time prowling around in women’s locker rooms again.”
I put out the candles and the heater and started up the stepladder. Bob followed, drifting out of the eye sockets of the skull as a glowing, candleflame-colored cloud, and flowed up the steps past me. The cloud glided over to where Mister dozed in the warm spot near the mostly dead fire, and seeped in through the cat’s grey fur. Mister sat up and blinked his yellow-green eyes at me, stretched his back, and flicked his stump of a tail back and forth before letting out a reproachful meow.
I scowled at Mister and Bob, shrugging into my duster, gathering up my blasting rod and my exorcism bag, and old black doctor’s case f
ull of stuff. “Come on, guys,” I said. “We’re on the trail. We have the advantage. What could possibly go wrong?”
Chapter Sixteen
Finding people is hard, especially when they don’t want to be found. It’s so difficult, in fact, that estimates run up near seven-digit figures on how many people disappear, without a trace, every year in the United States. Most of these people aren’t ever found.
I didn’t want Lydia to become one of these statistics. Either she was one of the bad guys and had been playing me for a sucker, or she was a victim who was in need of my help. If the former, then I wanted to confront her—I have this thing about people who lie to me and try to get me into trouble. If the latter, then I was probably the only one in Chicago who could help her. She could be possessed by one very big and very brawny spirit who needed to get some, pardon the pun, exorcise.
Lydia had been on foot when she left Father Forthill, and I don’t think she’d had much cash. Assuming she hadn’t come into any more resources, she’d likely still be in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, so I headed the Blue Beetle that way. The Beetle isn’t really blue any more. Both doors had to be replaced when they’d gotten clawed to shreds, and the hood had been slagged, with a big old hole melted in it. My mechanic, Mike, who can keep the Beetle running most days, hadn’t asked any questions. He’d just replaced the parts with pieces of other Volkswagens, so that the Blue Beetle was technically blue, red, white, and green. But my appellation stuck.
I tried to keep my cool as I drove, at least as best as I could. My wizard’s propensity for blowing out any kind of advanced technology seems to get worse when I’m upset, angry, or afraid. Don’t ask me why. So I did my best to Zen out until I got to my destination—parking strips alongside Wicker Park.
A brisk breeze made my duster flap as I got out. On one side of the street, tall town houses and a pair of apartment buildings gleamed as the sun began to go down over the western plains. The shadows of the trees in Wicker Park, meanwhile, stretched out like black fingers creeping toward my throat. Thank God my subconscious isn’t too symbolically aware or anything. The park had a bunch of people in it, young people, mothers with kids, while on the streets, business types began arriving in their business clothes, heading for one of the posh restaurants, pubs, or cafes that littered the area.
I got a lump of chalk and a tuning fork out of my exorcism bag. I glanced around, then squatted down on the sidewalk and drew a circle around myself, willing it closed as the chalk marks met themselves on the concrete. I felt a sensation, a crackling tension, as the circle closed, encasing the local magical energies, compressing them, stirring them.
Most magic isn’t quick and dirty. The kind of stunts you can pull off when some nasty thing is about to jump up in your face are called evocations. They’re fairly limited in what they can do, and difficult to master. I only had a couple of evocations that I could do very well, and most of the time I needed the help of artificial foci, such as my blasting rod or one of my other enchanted doodads, to make sure that I don’t lose control of the spell and blow up myself along with the slobbering monster.
Most magic is a lot of concentration and hard work. That’s where I was really good—thaumaturgy. Thaumaturgy is traditional magic, all about drawing symbolic links between items or people and then investing energy to get the effect that you want. You can do a lot with thaumaturgy, provided you have enough time to plan things out, and more time to prepare a ritual, the symbolic objects, and the magical circle.
I’ve yet to meet a slobbering monster polite enough to wait for me to finish.
I slipped my shield bracelet off of my wrist and laid it in the center of the circle—that was my channel. The talisman I’d passed off to Lydia had been constructed in a very similar manner, and the two bracelets would resonate on the same pitches. I took the tuning fork and laid it down beside the bracelet, with the two ends of the shield bracelet touching either tine, making a complete circle.
Then I closed my eyes, and drew upon the energy gathered in the circle. I brought it into me, molded it, shaped it into the effect I was looking for with my thoughts, fiercely picturing the talisman I’d given Lydia while I did. The energy built and built, a buzzing in my ears, a prickling along the back of my neck. When I was ready, I spread my hands over the two objects, opened my eyes and said, firmly, “Duo et unum.” At the words, the energy poured out of me in a rush that left me a little light-headed. There were no sparks, no glowing luminescence or anything else that would cost a special effects budget some money—just a sense of completion, and a tiny, almost inaudible hum.
I picked up the bracelet and put it back on, then took up the tuning fork and smudged the circle with my foot, willing it broken. I felt the little pop of the residual energies being released, and I rose up and fetched my exorcism bag from the Beetle. Then I walked away, down the sidewalk, holding my tuning fork out in front of me. After I’d taken several paces away, I turned in a slow circle.
The fork remained silent until I’d turned almost all the way around—then it abruptly shivered in my hand, and emitted a crystalline tone when I had it facing vaguely northwest. I looked up and sighted along the tines of the fork, then walked a dozen paces farther and triangulated as best I could. The direction change on the way the fork faced when it toned the second time was appreciable, even without any kind of instruments—Lydia must have been fairly close.
“Yes,” I said, and started off at a brisk walk, sweeping the tuning fork back and forth, setting my feet in the direction that it chimed. I kept on like that to the far side of the park, where the tuning fork pointed directly at a building that had once been some kind of manufacturing facility, perhaps, but now stood abandoned.
The lower floor was dominated by a pair of garage doors and a boarded-up front door. On the lower two floors, most of the windows had been boarded up. On the third floor, truly bored or determined vandals had pitched stones through those windows, and their shattered edges stood sharp and dusty against the blackness behind them, like dirty ice.
I took two more readings, from fifty feet on either side of the first. All pointed directly to the building. It glowered down at me, silent and spooky.
I shivered.
I would be smart to call Michael. Maybe even Murphy. I could get to a phone, try to get in touch with them. It wouldn’t take them long to get here.
Of course, it would be after sundown. The Nightmare, if it was inside Lydia, would be free to leave her then, to roam abroad. If I could get to her, exorcise this thing now, I could end the spree of destruction it was on.
If, if, if. I had a lot of ifs. But I didn’t have much time. The sun was swiftly vanishing. I reached inside my duster and got out my blasting rod, transferring my exorcism bag to the same hand as the tuning fork. Then I headed across the street, to the garage doors of the building. I tested one, and to my surprise it rolled upwards. I glanced left and right, then slipped inside into the darkness, shutting the door behind me.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The room was lit only by the fading light that slipped its fingers beneath the plyboard over the windows, the edges of the garage doors. It was a loading dock that encompassed almost the entire first floor, I judged. Stone pillars held the place up. Water dripped somewhere, from a broken pipe, and there were pools of it everywhere on the floor.
A brand-new side-panel van, its engine still ticking, cooling off, stood parked at the far side of the loading dock, next to a five-foot-high stone abutment, where trucks would once have backed up to load and unload goods. A sign hanging by one hinge, over the van, read SUMNER’S TEXTILES MFG.
I approached the van slowly, my blasting rod held loosely at my side. I swept the tuning fork, and my eyes, around the shadowed chamber. The fork hummed every time it swept past the van.
The white van all but glowed in the half-light. Its windows had been tinted, and I couldn’t see inside of them, even when I came within ten feet or so.
Something, some sound
or other cue that I hadn’t quite caught on the conscious level made the hair on the back of my neck prickle up. I spun to face the darkness behind me, the tip of my blasting rod rising up, my bruised fingers wrapped tight around its haft. I focused my senses on the darkness, and listened, honing my attention to the area around me.
Darkness.
Drip of water.
Creak of building, above me.
Nothing.
I put the tuning fork in my duster pocket. Then I turned back to the van, closed the distance quickly, and hauled open the side door, leveling my rod on the inside.
A blanket-wrapped bundle, approximately Lydia-sized, lay inside the van. One pale hand lay limp outside of it, my talisman, scorched-looking and bloodstained, wrapped around the slender wrist.
My heart leapt into my throat. “Lydia?” I asked. I reached out and touched her wrist. Felt the dull, slow throb of pulse. I let out a breath of relief, pulled the blankets from her pale face. Her eyes were open, staring, the pupils dilated until there was barely any color left in them at all. I waved my hand in front of her eyes and said again, “Lydia.” She didn’t respond. Drugged, I thought.
What the hell was she doing here? Lying in a van, covered up in blankets drugged and placed as neatly as could be. It didn’t make sense, unless she was . . .
Unless she was a distraction. The bait for a trap.
I turned, but before I got halfway around that cold energy I’d felt the night before flooded over the side of my face, my throat. Something blonde and incredibly swift slammed into me with the force of a rushing bull, throwing me off my feet and into the van. I spun around onto my elbows to see the vampire Kyle Hamilton coming for me, his eyes black and empty, his face screwed up into a grimace of hunger. He still wore his tennis whites. I kicked at his chest, and superhuman strength or no, it lifted him up off the ground for a second, brought me a half-breath of life. I lifted my right hand, the silver ring there gleaming, and cried, “Assantius!”