by Butcher, Jim
Mouse looked at me with his head tilted as I shut the door.
“Something bad is running around out there,” I told him. “It might decide to send me a message. I’d rather he didn’t use Mister to do it.”
Mouse’s cavernous chest rumbled with a low growl.
“Or you, either, for that matter,” I told him. “I don’t know if you know what a skinwalker is, but it’s serious trouble. Watch yourself.”
Mouse considered that for a moment, and then yawned.
I found myself laughing. “Pride goes before a fall, boy.”
He wagged his tail at me and rubbed up against my leg, evidently pleased to have made me smile. I made sure both sets of bowls had food and water in them, and then went in to Morgan.
His temperature was up another half a degree, and he was obviously in pain.
“This isn’t heavy-duty stuff,” I told him, as I broke out the medical kit. “Me and Billy made a run up to Canada for most of it. There’s some codeine for the pain, though, and I’ve got the stuff to run an IV for you, saline, intravenous antibiotics.”
Morgan nodded. Then he frowned at me, an expression I was used to from him, raked his eyes over me more closely, and asked, “Is that blood I smell on you?”
Damn. For a guy who had been beaten to within a few inches of death’s door, he was fairly observant. Andi hadn’t really been bleeding when we picked her up in my coat. She was only oozing from a number of gouges and scrapes—but there had been enough of them to add up. “Yeah,” I said.
“What happened?”
I told him about the skinwalker and what had happened to Kirby and Andi.
He shook his head wearily. “There’s a reason we don’t encourage amateurs to try to act like Wardens, Dresden.”
I scowled at him, got a bowl of warm water and some antibacterial soap, and started cleaning up his left arm. “Yeah, well. I didn’t see any Wardens doing anything about it.”
“Chicago is your area of responsibility, Warden Dresden.”
“And there I was,” I said. “And if they hadn’t been there to help, I’d be dead right now.”
“Then you call for backup. You don’t behave like a bloody superhero and throw lambs to the wolves to help you do it. Those are the people you’re supposed to be protecting.”
“Good thinking,” I said, getting out the bag of saline, and suspending it from the hook I’d set in the wall over the bed. I made sure the tube was primed. Air bubbles, bad. “That’s exactly what we need: more Wardens in Chicago.”
Morgan grunted and fell silent for a moment, eyes closed. I thought he’d dropped off again, but evidently he was only thinking. “It must have followed me up.”
“Huh?”
“The skinwalker,” he said. “When I left Edinburgh, I took a Way to Tucson. I came to Chicago by train. It must have sensed me when the tracks passed through its territory.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Follow an injured wizard?” he asked. “Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal.”
“It eats magic?”
Morgan nodded. “Adds its victims’ power to its own.”
“So what you’re telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it’s stronger for having killed Kirby.”
He shrugged. “I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater.”
I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan’s upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. “Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter.”
Morgan shook his head. “Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn’t as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson.”
“Point,” I said, slipping the needle into his arm. “Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?” I thought about it. “The skinwalker’s got to go back to his home territory, though?”
Morgan nodded. “The longer he’s away, the more power it costs him.”
“How long can he stay here?” I asked.
He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. “More than long enough.”
“How do we kill it?” I frowned as I missed the vein again.
“Give me that,” Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.
I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.
“We probably don’t,” he said. “The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool’s game. We avoid it.”
I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. “Pretend for a minute that it isn’t going to cooperate with that plan.”
Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. “There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power—and it isn’t likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either.”
“It’s a tough target,” I admitted. “It knows magic, and how to defend against it.”
“Yes,” Morgan said. He watched me pick a preloaded syringe of antibiotics from the cooler. “And its abilities are more than the equal of both of us put together.”
“Jinkies,” I said. I primed the syringe and pushed the antibiotics into the IV line. Then I got the codeine and a cup of water, offering Morgan both. He downed the pills, laid his head back wearily, and closed his eyes.
“I Saw one once, too,” he said.
I started cleaning up. I didn’t say anything.
“They aren’t invulnerable. They can be killed.”
I tossed wrappers into the trash can and restored equipment to the medical kit. I grimaced at the bloodied rug that still lay beneath Morgan. I’d have to get that out from under him soon. I turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.
“How’d you do it?” I asked, without looking behind me.
It took him a moment to answer. I thought he’d passed out again.
“It was the fifties,” he said. “Started in New Mexico. It followed me to Nevada. I lured it onto a government testing site, and stepped across into the Nevernever just before the bomb went off.”
I blinked and looked over my shoulder at him. “You nuked it?”
He opened one eye and smiled.
It was sort of creepy.
“Stars and stones . . . that’s . . .” I had to call a spade a spade. “Kind of cool.”
“Gets me to sleep at night,” he mumbled. He closed his eye again, sighed, and let his head sag a little to one side.
I watched over his sleep for a moment, and then closed the door.
I was pretty tired, myself. But like the man said:
“I have promises to keep,” I sighed to myself.
I got on the phone, and started calling my contacts on the Paranet.
The Paranet was an organization I’d helped found a couple of years before. It’s essentially a union whose members cooperate in order to protect themselves from paranormal threats. Most of the Paranet consisted of practitioners with marginal talents, of which there were plenty. A practitioner had to be in the top percentile before the White Council would even consider recognizing him, and those who couldn’t cut it basically got left out in the cold. As a result, they were vulnerable to any number of supernatural predators.
Which I think sucks.
So an old friend named Elaine Mallory and I had taken a dead woman’s money and begun making contact with the marginal folks in city after city. We’d encouraged them to get together to share information, to have someone they could call for help. If things started going bad, a distress call could be sent up the Paranet, and then I or one of the other Wardens in the U.S. could charge in. We also gave seminars on how to recognize magical threats, as well as teaching me
thods of basic self-defense for when the capes couldn’t show up to save the day.
It had been going pretty well. We already had new chapters opening up in Mexico and Canada, and Europe wouldn’t be far behind.
So I started calling up my contacts in those various cities, asking if they’d heard of anything odd happening. I couldn’t afford to get any more specific than that, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Of the first dozen calls, folks in four cities had noted an upswing in Warden activity, reporting that they were all appearing in pairs. Only two of the next thirty towns had similar reports, but it was enough to give me a good idea of what was going on—a quiet manhunt.
But I just had to wonder. Of all the places the Wardens could choose to hunt for Morgan, why would they pick Poughkeepsie? Why Omaha?
The words “wild-goose chase” sprang to mind. Whatever Morgan was doing to mask his presence from their tracking spells, it had them chasing their tails all over the place.
At least I accomplished one positive thing. Establishing rumors of Wardens on the move meant that I had a good and non-suspicion-arousing motivation to start asking questions of my own.
So next, I started calling the Wardens I was on good terms with. Three of them worked for me, technically speaking, in several cities in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. I’m not a very good boss. I mostly just let them decide how to do their job and try to lend a hand when they ask me for help. I had to leave messages for two, but Bill Meyers in Dallas answered on the second ring.
“Howdy,” Meyers said.
I’m serious. He actually answered the phone that way.
“Bill, it’s Dresden.”
“Harry,” he said politely. Bill was always polite with me. He saw me do something scary once. “Speak of the devil and he appears.”
“Is that why my nose was itching?” I asked.
“Likely,” Bill drawled. “I was gonna give you a call in the morning.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Rumors,” Bill said. “I spotted two Wardens coming out of the local entrance to the Ways, but when I asked them what was up, they stone-walled me. I figured you might know what was going on.”
“Darn,” I said. “I called to ask you.”
He snorted. “Well, we’re a fine bunch of wise men, aren’t we?”
“As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms.”
“Eh?”
“Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.”
“I hear that,” Meyers said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep an ear to the ground,” I told him. “Captain Luccio will tell us sooner or later. I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. You do the same.”
“Gotcha,” he said.
We hung up, and I frowned at the phone for a moment.
The Council hadn’t talked to me about Morgan. They hadn’t talked to any of the Wardens in my command about him, either.
I looked up at Mister and said, “It’s almost like they want to keep me in the dark. Like maybe someone thinks I might be involved, somehow.”
Which made sense. The Merlin wasn’t going to be asking me to Christmas dinner anytime soon. He didn’t trust me. He might have given the order to keep me fenced out. That wouldn’t hit me as a surprise.
But if that was true, then it meant that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was going along with it. She and I had been dating for a while, now. Granted, she had a couple of centuries on me, but a run-in with a body-switching psychopath several years before had trapped her in the body of a coed, and she didn’t look a day over twenty-five. We got along well. We made each other laugh. And we occasionally had wild-monkey sex to our mutual, intense satisfaction.
I would never have figured Anastasia to play a game like that with me.
I got on the phone to Ramirez in LA, the other regional commander in the United States, to see if he’d heard anything, but just got his answering service.
At this rate, I was going to have to go to the spirit world for answers—and that was risky in more ways than one, not the least of which was the very real possibility that I might get eaten by the same entity I called up to question.
But I was running a little low on options.
I pulled back the rug that lay over the trapdoor leading down to my lab, and was about to go down and prepare my summoning circle when the phone rang.
“I’m meeting Justine in half an hour,” my brother told me.
“Okay,” I said. “Come get me.”
Chapter Eight
Chicago’s club scene is wide and diverse. You want to listen to extemporaneous jazz? We got that. You want a traditional Irish pub? A Turkish-style coffeehouse? Belly dancers? Japanese garden party? Swing dancing? Ballroom dancing? Beat poetry? You’re covered.
You don’t have to look much harder to find all sorts of other clubs—the kind that Ma and Pa Tourist don’t take the kids to. Gay clubs, lesbian clubs, strip clubs, leather clubs, and more subtle flavors within the genre.
And then there’s Zero.
I stood with Thomas outside what looked like a fire-exit door at the bottom of a stairway, a story below street level in the side of a downtown building. A red neon oval had been installed on the door, and it glowed with a sullen, lurid heat. The thump of a bass beat vibrated almost sub-audibly up through the ground.
“Is this what I think it is?” I asked him.
Thomas, now dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and old blue jeans, glanced at me and arched one dark eyebrow. “Depends on if you think it’s Zero or not.”
Zero’s one of those clubs that most people only hear rumors about. It moves around the city from time to time, but it’s always as exclusive as a popular nightspot in a metropolis can possibly be. I’ve been a PI in Chicago for better than a decade. I’d heard of Zero, but that was it. It was where the rich and beautiful (and rich) people of Chicago went to indulge themselves.
“You know somebody here?” I asked. “Because they aren’t going to let us—”
Thomas popped a key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door for me.
“In,” I finished. A wash of heat and smoke heavy with legally questionable substances pushed gently against my chest. I could hear the whump-whump-whump of techno dance music somewhere behind the red-lit smoke.
“It’s a family business,” Thomas explained. He put the keys back in his pocket, an odd expression on his face. “I met Justine at Zero.”
“There any more of the other side of the family in there?” I asked him. White Court vampires were the least physically dangerous of any of the various vamps running around—and the most scary. Creatures of seduction, they fed upon the emotions and life energy of those they preyed upon. Their victims became addicted to the act, and would willingly offer themselves up over and over, until eventually there was nothing left to give. The poor suckers in thrall to a White Court vampire were virtually slaves. Tangling with them in any sense of the word was a bad idea.
Thomas shook his head. “I doubt it. Or Justine wouldn’t have chosen to meet us here.”
Unless she’d been forced to do so, I thought to myself. I didn’t say anything. I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.
“After you,” Thomas said, and then he calmly stripped his shirt off.
I eyed him.
“The club has an image they strive to maintain,” he said. He might have been just a little bit smug, the bastard. His abs look like they were added in with CGI. My abs just look like I can’t afford to feed myself very well.
“Oh,” I said. “Do I need to take my shirt off, too?”
“You’re wearing a black leather coat. That’s wardrobe enough.”
“Small favors,” I muttered. Then I went through the door.
We walked down a hallway that got darker, louder, and more illicitly aromatic as we went. It ended at a black curtain, and I pushed it aside to reveal a few more feet of ha
llway, a door, and two politely formidable-looking men in dark suits standing in front of it.
One of them lifted a hand and told me, “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a private—”
Thomas stepped up next to me and fixed the man with a steady grey gaze.
He lowered his hand, and when he spoke, it sounded rough, as if his mouth had gone dry. “Excuse me, sir. I didn’t realize he was with you.”
Thomas kept staring.
The bouncer turned to the door, unlocked it with a key of its own, and opened the door. “Will you be in need of a table, sir? Drinks?”
Thomas’s unblinking gaze finally shifted from the guard, as if the man had somehow vanished as a matter of any consequence. My brother walked by him without saying anything at all.
The bouncer gave me a weak smile and said, “Sorry about that, sir. Enjoy your evening at Zero, sir.”
“Thanks,” I said, and followed my brother into a scene that split the difference between a Dionysian bacchanal and a Fellini flick.
There was no white light inside Zero. Most of it was red, punctuated in places with pools of blue and plenty of black lights scattered everywhere so that even where shadows were thickest, some colors jumped out in disquieting luminescence. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall over the large room, a distance-distorting haze under the black lights.
We had entered on a kind of balcony that overlooked the dance floor below. Music pounded, the bass beat so loud that I could feel it in my lower stomach. Lights flashed and swayed in synchronicity. The floor was crowded with sweating, moving bodies dressed in a broad spectrum of clothing, from full leather coverings including a whole-head hood, at one extreme, to one girl clad in a few strips of electrical tape on the other. There was a bar down by the dance floor, and tables scattered around its outskirts under a thirty-foot-high ceiling. A few cages hung about eight feet over the dance floor, each containing a young man or woman in provocative clothing.
Stairways and catwalks led up to about a dozen platforms that thrust out from the walls, where patrons could sit and overlook the scene below while gaining a measure of privacy for themselves. Most of the platforms were furnished with couches and chaise longues rather than tables and chairs. There were more exotic bits of furniture up on the platforms, as well: the giant X shape of a St. Andrew’s cross, which was currently supporting the bound form of a young man, his wrists and ankles secured to the cross, his face to the wood, his hair falling down over his naked back. Another platform had a shiny brass pole in its center, and a pair of girls danced around it, in the middle of a circle of men and women sprawled over the couches and lounges.