by Butcher, Jim
I completed the thought. “We’re talking about three of them. Grey Cloak Malvora, Passenger Madrigal, and Serial Killer Skavis.” I frowned at Thomas. “Wait. Are you saying that—”
My brother’s expression became strained. “I’m not saying anything,” he replied. “Those are all things you already know.”
Elaine frowned. “You’re trying to maintain deniability,” she said. “Why?”
“So I can deny telling you anything, obviously,” Thomas snarled, his eyes suddenly flickering several shades of grey lighter as he stared at Elaine.
Elaine drew in a sharp breath. Then she narrowed her eyes a little, unfastened the clasp on her chain, and said, “Stop it, vampire. Now.”
Thomas’s lips pulled back from his teeth, but he jerked his face away from her and closed his eyes.
I stepped between them as I shrugged into my leather duster. “Elaine, back off. The enemy of my enemy. Okay?”
“I don’t like it,” Elaine said. “You know what he is, Harry. How do you know you can trust him?”
“I’ve worked with him before,” I said. “He’s different.”
“How? A lot of vampires feel remorse about their victims. It doesn’t stop them from killing over and over. It’s what they are.”
“I’ve gazed him,” I said quietly. “He’s trying to rise above the killer inside him.”
Elaine’s brows knit into a frown at those words, and she gave me a slow and reluctant nod. “Aren’t we all,” she murmured. “I’m still not comfortable with the notion of him near my clients. And we need to get moving.”
“Go ahead,” Thomas said.
I didn’t look at my brother, but I said, “You need to eat.”
“Maybe later,” Thomas said. “I can’t leave the women and children unguarded.”
I grabbed a pad of cheap paper with the hotel’s logo and found a pencil in one of my pockets. I wrote a number on it and passed it to Thomas. “Call Murphy. You won’t be able to protect anyone if you’re too weak, and you might kill one of them if you lose control of the hunger.”
Thomas’s jaw tightened with frustration, but he took the offered piece of paper from my hand only a little more roughly than necessary.
Elaine studied him as she walked to the door with me. Then she said to him, “You’re different from most of them, aren’t you?”
“Probably just more deluded,” Thomas replied. “Good luck, Harry.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling awkward. “Look. After this is done…we have to talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” my brother said.
We left and I closed the door behind us.
We took the Blue Beetle back to the Amber Inn and went to Elaine’s room. The lights were off. The room was empty.
There was a terrible sewer smell in the air.
“Dammit,” Elaine whispered. She suddenly sagged and leaned against the doorway.
I stepped past her and turned on the light in the bathroom.
Anna Ash’s corpse stood in the shower, body stiff, leaning away from the showerhead, but held in place by the electrical cord of a hair dryer, tied in a knot about the showerhead and another around her neck. There hadn’t been room enough for her to suspend herself with her feet off the floor. Ugly, purple-black ligature marks showed on her neck around the cord.
It was obviously a suicide.
It obviously wasn’t.
We were too late.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“We’ve got to call the cops on this one,” I said quietly to Elaine.
“No,” she replied. “They’ll want to question us. It will take hours.”
“They’ll want to question us a lot longer if someone else finds the body and they have to come looking for us.”
“And while we’re cooperating with the authorities, what happens to Abby, Helen, and Priscilla?” She stared at me. “For that matter, what happens to Mouse?”
That was a thought I’d been trying to avoid. If Mouse was alive and capable, there was no way he’d let any of the women be harmed. If someone had killed Anna when Mouse was near, it could have happened only over his dead body.
But there was no sign of him.
That could mean a lot of things. At worst it meant that he had been utterly disintegrated by whatever had come for the women. Not only was that assumption depressing as hell, it also didn’t get me anywhere. A bad guy who could simply disintegrate anything that got in the way sure wouldn’t be pussyfooting around the way these White Court yahoos had been.
Mouse wasn’t here. There was no mess, no sign of a struggle, and believe you me, that dog can put up a struggle, as the vets found out when they misfiled his paperwork. They tried to neuter him instead of vaccinating him and getting his shoulder X-rayed where he’d bounced off of a moving minivan. I was lucky they were willing to let me pay the property damage and leave it at that.
It had to mean something else. Maybe my dog had left with the others, and Anna had remained behind, or gone back for something she forgot.
Or maybe Mouse had played on everyone’s expectation that he was just a dog. He’d shown me that he was capable of that kind of subterfuge before, and it had been one of the first things that tipped me off to his distinctly superior-to-canine intellect. What if Mouse had played along and stayed close to the others?
Why would he do that, though?
Because Mouse knew I could find him. Unless the bad guys carried him off to the Nevernever itself, or put him behind a set of wards specifically designed to block such magic, my tracking spell could find him anywhere.
That was the path to take, even if Mouse didn’t know anything was wrong. He would have stayed with any members of the Ordo that he could, and I had taken to planning ahead a little more than I used to do. I could use my shield bracelet to target the single small shield charm I’d hung from his collar for just such an emergency. Me and Foghorn Leghorn.
“Can you find the dog?” Elaine asked.
“Yeah. But we should try calling their homes before we go.”
Elaine frowned. “You told them to stay here, or somewhere public.”
“Odds are pretty good that they’re scared. And when you’re scared…”
“…you want to go home,” Elaine finished.
“If they’re there, it’ll be the quickest way to get in touch. If not, it hasn’t cost us more than a minute or two.”
Elaine nodded. “Anna had all the numbers in a notebook in her purse.” We turned up the purse after a brief search, but the notebook wasn’t in it.
There wasn’t anything for it but to make sure that Anna hadn’t slipped it into a pocket before she died. I checked, and tried not to leave any prints almost as hard as I tried not to look at her dead, purpling face or glazed eyes. It hadn’t been a clean death, and even though Anna hadn’t been gone long enough to start decomposition, the smell was formidable. I tried to ignore it.
It was harder to ignore her face. The skin had the stiff, waxy look that dead bodies get. Worse, there was a distinct and unquantifiable quality of…absence. Anna Ash had been very much alive—fierce of will, protective, determined. I know plenty of wizards without the force of personality she had. She’d been the one thinking and acting when all of those around her were frightened. That takes a rare kind of courage.
None of which meant anything, since, despite my efforts, the killer had taken her anyway.
I shook my head and stepped away from the corpse, having turned up no notebook. Her willingness to face danger on behalf of her friends couldn’t be allowed to vanish silently into the past. If some of those she sought to protect were still alive, then her own sacrifice and death could still mean something. I could be bitter about her death later. I would be doing a grave disservice to the woman if I let it do anything but make me more motivated to stop the killers before they had finished their work.
I came face-to-face with Elaine, who stood in the doorway, staring at Anna’s body. There was no expression o
n her face, absolutely none. Tears, though, had reddened her eyes and streaked over her cheeks and down her nose. Some women are pretty when they cry. Elaine gets all blotchy and runny-nosed, and it brought out the dark, tired circles beneath her eyes.
It didn’t look pretty. It just looked like pain.
She spoke, and her voice came out rough and quavering. “I told her I would protect her.”
“Sometimes you try,” I said quietly. “Sometimes that’s all you do. Try. That’s how the game works.”
“Game,” she said. The single word was caustic enough to melt holes in the floor. “Has it ever happened to you? Someone who came to you for help was killed?”
I nodded. “Couple of times. First time was Kim Delaney. A girl I had trained to keep her talent under control. Maybe a little stronger than the women in the Ordo, but not much. She got involved in bad business. Over her head. I thought I could warn her off, that she would listen to me. I should have known better.”
“What happened?”
I tilted my head back at the body behind me, without actually looking. “Something ate her. I go to her grave sometimes.”
“Why?”
“To bring her some flowers and sweep off the leaves. To remind me of the stakes I play for. To remind me that nobody wins them all.”
“And after?” Elaine asked me quietly. She hadn’t looked away from the corpse. Not for a second. “What did you do to the thing that killed her?”
It was a complicated answer, but it wasn’t what Elaine needed to hear right then. “I killed it.”
She nodded again. “When we catch up to the Skavis, I want it.”
I put a hand on her shoulder and said, very gently, “It won’t make you feel any better.”
She shook her head. “That’s not why I want to do it. It was my job. I’ve got to finish my job. I owe her that much.”
I didn’t think Elaine herself thought the statement was untrue, but I’d gone through this kind of thing before, and it can unbalance your tires pretty damned quick. There was no point, though, in trying to discuss it with her rationally. Reason had left the building.
“You’ll get him,” I said quietly. “I’ll help.”
She let out one little broken, cawing sob and pressed against my chest. I held her, warm and slender, and felt the terrible remorse and frustration and grief that coursed through her. I pressed my presence against her and tightened my arms around her and felt her body shaking with silent sobs. More than anything, at that moment, I wished I could make her torment go away.
I couldn’t. Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn’t change your heart. We’re all human.
We’re all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Not a full minute later, I could feel Elaine beginning the struggle to get her breathing under control. DuMorne’s methods of teaching us to discipline our emotions had not been gentle, but they worked. Before another minute went by Elaine’s breathing had steadied, and she leaned her head against my collarbone for a moment, a silent gesture of gratitude. Then she straightened, and I lowered my arms. She bowed her head toward Anna’s corpse, an almost formal gesture of respect or farewell.
When she turned around, I was waiting for her with a damp, cool washcloth. I said quietly, “Hold still,” and gently wiped her face clean. “You have to uphold the gumshoe image. Can’t go out blotchy. People will think we’re not hard-boiled. Very important to be hard-boiled.”
She watched me as I cleaned her face and talked, and her eyes looked huge. A very small smile touched them through the sadness. “I’m glad you’re here to tell me these things,” she said, her voice steady again before it slipped into a bourbon-tainted, lockjawed Humphrey Bogart impersonation. “Now stop flapping your gums and start walking.”
My tracking spell led us to an apartment building.
“This is Abby’s building,” Elaine said as I pulled over. The only close place to park was in front of a hydrant. I doubted any industrious civil servants would be handing out tickets this late, but even if they were, it would be cheap compared to what a long walk in the dark could cost me.
“Which apartment?” I asked.
“Ninth floor,” Elaine replied. She shut the door of the Beetle a little harder than she had to.
“It occurs to me,” I said, “that if I was a bad guy and wanted to off a couple of intrepid hard-boiled wizards, I might be hanging around watching someplace like this.”
“It occurs to me,” Elaine said, her voice crisp, “that he would be exceptionally foolish to make the attempt.”
We walked together, quickly. Elaine was tall enough to keep up with me without taking the occasional skipping step. She’d slipped half a dozen coppery bracelets over each wrist, all of them slender, all of them hanging more heavily than they should have. Faint glints of golden energy played among them, and looked like little more than the glitter of light on metal—except that you could see them better when the bracelets were in deep shadows.
By silent agreement, we skipped the elevators. I had my shield bracelet ready to go, and my staff was quivering with leashed energy that made it wave and wobble incongruously to its weight and motion as I moved. That much readied magic could have unfortunate consequences on electrical equipment, like elevator control panels.
The doors to the stairs opened only from the other side, but I conjured a quick spell to shove against the pressure bar on the far side using my staff, and it swung open. We slipped into the stairway. Anyone waiting for us above would be watching the elevator first. Anyone chasing after us would have a hard time with the locked doors, and would make noise on the open concrete stairs.
I checked my gun with my left hand, safe in the pocket of my duster. Magic is groovy, but when it comes to dealing out death, regular mortal know-how can be just as impressive.
Nine floors up was enough to make me breathe hard, though not as hard as I once would have. A faint ghost of a headache came along with the elevated heart rate. Hell’s bells, I must have been hurt a lot worse than I thought, back at the harbor. Elaine looked a little strained, herself. If she’d really smoothed away that much of an injury, she had more skill than she’d told me she did. That kind of healing isn’t a matter of trivial effort, either. She might be more fragile than she appeared.
I opened the fire door on Abby’s floor, and let Elaine take the lead. She went down the center of the hallway in total silence, her hands slightly outstretched, and I got the sense that she was somehow perfectly aware of everything around her—more so than human senses would account for. The bracelets on her wrists glittered more brightly. Superior awareness as a defense, then, instead of my own, more direct approach of meeting power with power and stopping things cold. Just her style.
But neither hyperawareness nor irresistible force was called for. Elaine reached a door and raised a hand to knock. Just before it fell, the door opened, and a strained-looking Abby gave us a quick nod. “Good, a little early, that’s good; come in, yes, come in.”
I started forward, but Elaine held up one hand to halt me, her eyes distracted. “Let me check. Another woman inside. Two dogs.” She glanced at me, and lowered her hand. “One of them is your dog.”
“Mouse?” I called.
The floor shook a little, and the big, dark grey dog nudged rather delicately past Abby and came to greet me, shoving his head into my stomach until I went down on one knee and got a sloppy kiss or two on the face.
I slapped his shoulders roughly a few times, because I’m supremely manly and did not tear up a little to see that he was all right and still attached to his collar. “Good to see you, too, furface.”
Toto trotted out behind Mouse, like a tiny tugboat escorting an enormous barge, and gave a suspicious growl. Then he pattered over to me and sniffed me, sneezed several times, and evidently found me acceptable, underneath the smell of lake water. He hurried back over to Abby, gave me one more growl to make sure I’d learn
ed my lesson, and bounced around her feet until she picked him up.
The plump little blonde settled the dog in her arms and faced me with concern. “What happened? I mean, the two of you left and what happened, where did you go, is Olivia—”
“Let’s go inside,” I said, rising. I traded a look with Elaine, and we all went into Abby’s apartment. Mouse never left actual, physical contact with me, his shoulders pressing steadily, lightly, against my leg. I was the last through the door and closed it behind me.
Abby’s place was a modest, hectic little apartment, segregated into neatly compartmentalized areas. She had a desk with a typewriter, a table with an old sewing machine, a chair beside a music stand with a violin (unless maybe it was a viola) resting on it, a reading niche with an armchair and overloaded shelves of romance novels, and what looked something like a shrine dedicated to ancestor worship, only in reverse, where the saints were all children with round cheeks and blond ringlets.
Priscilla was there, seated in the comfortable chair in the reading niche, looking haggard and much subdued. There was a cup of tea sitting on the little table beside the reading chair, but it had apparently gone cold without ever having been touched. She looked up at me, her eyes heavy and dull.
“Olivia’s all right,” I said quietly.
Abby brightened a second before I started speaking, drawing in a sharp little breath. The little dog in her arms caught her mood at once, and began wagging his tail at me. “Yes?”
“A…sometime associate of mine, the man in the pictures, has been taking women who were in danger of being a target of the killers out of the city. He learned Olivia was in danger and urged her to leave with him when he took several women to a safe house.”
Priscilla stared at me hard for a long moment. Then she said, “What else?”
Elaine spoke, her voice quiet and unflinching. “Anna’s dead. Back at the hotel room. An apparent suicide.”
Abby let out a little gagging sound. She sat down very quickly in the chair by the violin. Toto let out small, distressed sounds. “Wh-what?” Abby asked.