by Butcher, Jim
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.”