The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  “Got it,” Billy said. He picked me up the way you’d carry a child, barely grunting as he did. He carried me down the hall and into a dark bedroom. He laid me down on a bed, then crossed to the window—and pulled and locked a heavy steel security curtain over it, evidently another customization that he and Georgia had installed.

  “What do you need, Harry?” Billy asked.

  “Dark. Quiet. Explain it later.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Right.” Then he padded out of the room and shut the door.

  It left me in the dark with my thoughts—which is where I needed to be.

  “Come on, Harry,” I muttered to myself. “Get used to the idea.”

  And I thought about the thing I’d Seen.

  It hurt. But when I came back to myself, I did it again. And again. And again.

  Yes, I’d Seen something horrible. Yes, it was a hideous terror. But I’d Seen other things, too.

  I called up those memories, too, all of them just as sharp and fresh as the horror pressing upon me. I’d Seen good people screaming in madness under the influence of black magic. I’d Seen the true selves of men and women, good and bad, Seen people kill—and die. I’d Seen the Queens of Faerie as they prepared for battle, drawing all their awful power around them.

  And I’d be damned if I was going to roll over for one more horrible thing doing nothing but jumping from one rooftop to another.

  “Come on, punk,” I snarled at the memory. “Next to those others, you’re a bad yearbook picture.”

  And I hit myself with it, again and again, filling my mind with every horrible and beautiful thing I had ever Seen—and as I did, I focused on what I had bloody well done about it. I remembered the things I’d battled and destroyed. I remembered the strongholds of nightmares and terrors that I had invaded, the dark gates I’d kicked down. I remembered the faces of prisoners I’d freed, and the funerals of those I’d been too late to save. I remembered the sounds of voices and laughter, the joy of loved ones reunited, the tears of the lost and bereaved.

  There are bad things in the world. There’s no getting away from that. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done about them. You can’t abandon life just because it’s scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt.

  The memory of the thing hurt like hell—but pain wasn’t anything special or new. I’d lived with it before, and would do it again. It wasn’t the first thing I’d Seen, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  I was not going to roll over and die.

  Sledgehammers of perfect memory pounded me down into blackness.

  When I pulled myself back together, I was sitting on the bed, my legs folded Indian-style. My palms rested on my knees. My breathing was slow and rhythmically heavy. My back was straight. My head pounded painfully, but not cripplingly so.

  I looked up and around the room. It was dark, but I’d been in there long enough for my eyes to adjust to the light coming under the door. I could see myself in the dresser mirror. My back was straight and relaxed. I’d taken my coat off, and was wearing a black T-shirt that read “PRE-FECTIONIST” in small white letters, backward in the mirror. A thin, dark runnel of blood had streamed from each nostril and was now drying on my upper lip. I could taste blood in my mouth, probably from where I’d bitten my tongue earlier.

  I thought of my pursuer again, and the image made me shudder—but that was all. I kept breathing slowly and steadily.

  That was the upside of being human. On the whole, we’re an adaptable sort of being. Certainly, I’d never be able to get rid of my memory of this awful thing, or any of the other awful things I’d Seen—so if the memory couldn’t change, it would have to be me. I could get used to seeing that kind of horror, enough to see it and yet remain a reasoning being. Better men than I had done so.

  Morgan had.

  I shivered again, and not because of any memory. It was because I knew what it could mean, when you forced yourself to live with hideous things like that. It changed you. Maybe not all at once. Maybe it didn’t turn you into a monster. But I’d been scarred and I knew it.

  How many times would something like this need to happen before I started bending myself into something horrible just to survive? I was young for a wizard. Where would I be after decades or centuries of refusing to look away?

  Ask Morgan.

  Chapter Six

  Georgia told the EMTs she was Andi’s sister, which was true in a spiritual sense, I suppose, and rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital. The EMTs looked grim.

  The cops had gathered around Kirby’s body, and were busy closing off the scene.

  “I have to be here,” Billy said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m on the clock, Billy. I can’t stay. I can’t lose the time.”

  He nodded. “What do I need to know about skinwalkers?”

  “They’re . . . they’re just evil, man. They like hurting people. Shape-shifters, obviously—and the more afraid of them you are, the more powerful they get. They literally feed on fear.”

  Billy eyed me. “Meaning you aren’t going to tell me anything more. Because it won’t help me. You think it will scare me.”

  “We knew it was here, we were ready for a fight, and you saw what happened,” I said. “If it had hit us from a real ambush, it would have been worse.”

  He bared his teeth in a snarl. “We had it.”

  “We had it at a momentary disadvantage—and it saw that, and it was smart enough to leave and come back later. All we did was prove to it that it would have to take us seriously to kill us. We won’t get another opportunity like that one.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You and Georgia stay close to Andi. This thing likes hurting people. And it gets off on hunting down wounded prey. She’s still in danger.”

  “Got it,” he said quietly. “What are you going to do?”

  “Find out why it’s here,” I said. “There’s Council business afoot. Christ, I didn’t mean to bring you into this.” I stared toward the knot of officers around Kirby’s corpse. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “Kirby was an adult, Dresden,” Billy said. “He knew what could happen. He chose to be here.”

  Which was the truth. But it didn’t help. Kirby was still dead. I hadn’t known what the skinwalker was before, beyond something awful, but that didn’t change anything.

  Kirby was still dead.

  And Andi . . . God, I hadn’t even thought about that part. Andi and Kirby had been an intense item. She was going to be heartbroken.

  Assuming she didn’t die, too.

  Billy—I just couldn’t think of him as Will—blinked tears out of his eyes and said, “You didn’t know it was going to come down like that, man. We all owe you our lives, Harry. I’m glad we got the chance to be there for you.” He nodded toward the police. “I’ll do the talking, then get to Georgia. You’d better go.”

  We traded grips, and his was crushingly tight with tension and grief. I nodded to him, and turned to leave. The city lights were starting to come back on as I went out the back entrance to Will’s building, down a side street, and through an alley that ran behind an old bookstore where I wasn’t welcome anymore. I passed the spot in that alley where I’d nearly died, and shivered as I did. I’d barely dodged the old man’s scythe, that day.

  Tonight, Kirby hadn’t.

  My head felt dislocated, somehow. I should be feeling more than I was. I should be madder than hell. I should be shaking with fear. Something. But instead, I felt like I was observing events from a remote cold place somewhere up above and behind me. It was, I reasoned, probably a side effect of exposing myself to the skinwalker’s true form. Or rather, a side effect of what I’d had to do to get over it.

  I wasn’t worried about the skinwalker sneaking up on me. Oh, sure, he might do it, but not cold. Supernatural beings like the skinwalker had so much power that reality itself gets a little strained around them wherever they go, and that has a number of side effects. One of them is a sort of psy
chic stench that goes with them—a presence that my instincts had twigged to long before the skinwalker had been in a position to do me any real harm.

  Read a little folklore, the stuff that hasn’t been prettied up by Disney and the like. Start with the Brothers Grimm. It won’t tell you about skinwalkers, but it will give you a good idea of just how dark some of those tales can be.

  Skinwalkers are dark compared to that. You’ve got to get the real stories from the peoples of the Navajo, Ute, and other Southwestern tribes to get the really juicy material. They don’t talk about them often, because the genuine and entirely rational fear the stories inspire only makes the creatures stronger. The tribes rarely talk about them with outsiders, because outsiders have no foundation of folklore to draw upon to protect themselves—and because you never know when the outsider to whom you’re telling dark tales might be a skinwalker, looking to indulge a sense of macabre irony. But I’ve been in the business awhile, and I know people who know the stories. They’d confided a handful to me, in broad daylight, looking nervously around them as they spoke, as if afraid that dredging up the dark memories might catch a skinwalker’s attention.

  Because sometimes it did.

  That’s how bad skinwalkers are. Even amongst the people who know the danger they represent, who know better than anyone else in the world how to defend against them, no one wants to talk about skinwalkers.

  But in a way, it worked in my favor. Walking down a dark alley in the middle of a Chicago night, and stepping over the spot on the concrete where I’d almost been ripped to pieces just wasn’t spooky enough to encompass the presence of a skinwalker. If things got majorly Tales from the Darkside creepy and shivery, I’d know I was in real trouble.

  As it was, the night was simply—

  A small figure in a lightweight Cubs jacket stepped around the corner at the end of the alley. The newly restored streetlight shone on blond hair, and Sergeant Karrin Murphy said, “Evening, Dresden.”

  —complicated.

  “Murph,” I responded woodenly. Murphy was a sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department. When something supernaturally bad happened and the cops got involved, Murphy often contacted me to get my take on things. The city didn’t want to hear about “imaginary” things like skinwalkers or vampires. They just wanted the problem to go away—but Murphy and the rest of SI were the people who had to make it happen.

  “I tip a guy down at impound to keep an eye out for certain vehicles,” Murphy said. “Pay him in bottles of McAnally’s ale. He calls me and tells me your car got brought in.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Murphy fell into pace beside me as I turned out onto the sidewalk. She was five feet nothing, with blond hair that fell a little past her shoulders and blue eyes. She was more cute than pretty, and looked like someone’s favorite aunt. Which seemed likely. She had a fairly large Irish Catholic family.

  “Then I hear about a power outage,” she said, “and a huge disturbance at the same apartments where your werewolf friends live. I hear about a girl who might not make it and a boy who didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It might have come out a little bleak.

  “Who was it?” Murphy asked.

  “Kirby,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Murphy said. “What happened?”

  “Something fast and mean was following me. The werewolves jumped it. Things went bad.”

  Murphy nodded and stopped, and I dimly realized that we were standing next to her Saturn—an updated version of the one that had been blown up—blithely parked in front of a hydrant. She went around to the trunk and popped it open. “I took a look at that pile of parts you call a car.” She drew out the medical toolbox and cooler from her trunk and held them up. “These were on the passenger seat. I thought they might have been there for a reason.”

  Hell’s bells. In the confusion of the attack and its aftermath, I had all but forgotten the whole reason I’d gone out in the first place. I took the medical kit from her as she offered it. “Yeah. Stars and stones, yeah, Murph. Thank you.”

  “You need a ride?” she asked me.

  I’d been planning on flagging down a cab, eventually, but it would be better not to spend the money if I didn’t need to. Wizarding might be sexy, but it didn’t pay nearly as well as lucrative careers like law enforcement. “Sure,” I said.

  “What a coincidence. I need some questions answered.” She unlocked the door with an actual key, not the little what’s-it that does it for you automatically with the press of a button, and held it open for me with a gallant little gesture, like I’d done for her about a million times. She probably thought she was mocking me with that impersonation.

  She was probably right.

  This mess was getting stickier by the minute, and I didn’t want to drag Murphy into it. I mean, Jesus, the werewolves had been capable defenders of their territory for a long while, and I’d gotten half of them taken out in the first couple hours of the case. Murphy wouldn’t fare any better in the waters through which I was currently swimming.

  On the other hand, I trusted Murph. I trusted her judgment, her ability to see where her limits lay. She’d seen cops carved to pieces when they tried to box out of their weight division, and knew better than to attempt it. And if she started throwing obstacles in my way—and she could, a lot of them, that I couldn’t do diddly about—then my life would get a whole lot harder. Even though she wasn’t running CPD’s Special Investigations department anymore, she still had clout there, and a word from her to Lieutenant Stallings could hobble me, maybe lethally.

  So I guess you could say that Murphy was threatening to bust me if I didn’t talk to her, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy was offering to put her life on the line to help me, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy had done me a favor with the medical kit, in order to obligate me to her when she told me that she wanted to be dealt in, and you’d be right.

  You could also say that I was standing around dithering when time was critical, and you’d be right about that, too.

  At the end of the day, Murphy is good people.

  I got in the car.

  “So let me get this straight,” Murphy said, as we approached my apartment. “You’re hiding a fugitive from your own people’s cops, and you think the guy’s been set up in order to touch off a civil war within the White Council. And there’s some kind of Navajo boogeyman loose in town, following you around and attempting to kill you. And you aren’t sure they’re related.”

  “More like I don’t know how they’re related. Yet.”

  Murphy chewed on her lip. “Is there anyone on the Council who is in tight with Native American boogeymen?”

  “Hard to imagine it,” I said quietly. “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind was a Senior Council member who was some kind of Native American shaman. He was a doctor, a healer, and a specialist in exorcisms and restorative magic. He was, in fact, a decent guy. He liked animals.

  “But someone’s a traitor,” Murphy said quietly. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone.”

  Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. “The reason treachery is so reviled,” she said in a careful tone of voice, “is because it usually comes from someone you didn’t think could possibly do such a thing.”

  I didn’t say anything in reply. In a minute, her car crunched to a stop in the little gravel lot outside my apartment.

  I picked up the medical kit, the cooler, and my staff, and got out of the car.

  “Call me the minute you know something,” she said.

  “Yep,” I told her. “Don’t take any chances if you see something coming.”

  She shook her head. “They aren’t your kids, Harry.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Anything you can do to protect them in the hospital . . .”

  “Relax,” she said. “Your werewolves won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes for a second.


  “Harry?” she asked me.

  “Yeah?”

  “You . . . don’t look so good.”

  “It’s been a long night,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Look. I know something about those.”

  Murphy did. She’d had more than her share of psychic trauma. She’d seen friends die, too. My memory turned out an unwelcome flash from years before—her former partner, Carmichael, half eviscerated and bleeding to death on white institutional tile flooring.

  “I’ll make it,” I said.

  “Of course you will,” she said. “There’s just . . . there’s a lot of ways you could deal, Harry. Some of them are better than others. I care about what happens to you. And I’m here.”

  I kept my eyes closed in order to make sure I didn’t start crying like a girl or something. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Take care, Harry,” she said.

  “You, too,” I said. It came out a little raspy. I tilted the toolbox at her in a wave, and headed into my apartment to see Morgan.

  I had to admit—I hated hearing the sound of my friend’s car leaving.

  I pushed those thoughts away. Psychic trauma or not, I could fall to little pieces later.

  I had work to do.

  Chapter Seven

  Morgan woke up when I opened the bedroom door. He looked bad, but not any worse than he did before, except for some spots of color on his cheeks.

  “Lemme see to my roommates,” I said. “I got the goods.” I put the medical kit down on the nightstand.

  He nodded and closed his eyes.

  I took Mouse outside for a walk to the mailbox. He seemed unusually alert, nose snuffling at everything, but he didn’t show any signs of alarm. We went by the spot in the tiny backyard that had been designated as Mouse’s business area, and went back inside. Mister, my bobtailed grey tomcat, was waiting when I opened the door, and tried to bolt out. I caught him, barely: Mister weighs the next best thing to thirty pounds. He gave me a look that might have been indignant, then raised his stumpy tail straight in the air and walked haughtily away, making his way to his usual resting point atop one of my apartment’s bookcases.