by Butcher, Jim
“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.”
“W
hy 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 Lasc
iel’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?”