by Butcher, Jim
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 candle
s, 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.