by Butcher, Jim
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 o
ne 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 m
e 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.