by Jim Butcher
Billy’s expression came close to panic, and he held up both hands, palms out, giving me a pleading look. But my hangover ached, and life is too short to waste it taking verbal abuse from petty tyrants who watch bad talk shows.
“Okay, Billy’s stepmom,” I began.
Her eyes flashed. “Do not call me that.”
“You don’t care to be called a stepmother?” I asked.
“Not at all.”
“Though you obviously aren’t Georgia’s mother. Howsabout I call you trophy wife?” I suggested.
She blinked at me once, her eyes widening.
Billy put his face in his hands.
“Bed warmer?” I mused. “Mistress made good? Midlife crisis byproduct?” I shook my head. “When in doubt, go with the classics.” I leaned a little closer and gave her a crocodilian smile. “Gold digger.”
The blood drained out of Eve’s face, leaving ugly pinkish blotches high on her cheeks. “Why, you . . . you . . .”
I waved my hand. “No, it’s all right; I don’t mind finding alternate terms. I understand that you’re under pressure. Must be hard trying to look good in front of the old money when they all know that you were really just a receptionist or an actress or a model or something.”
Her mouth dropped completely open.
“We’re all having a tough day, dear.” I flipped my hand at her. “Shoo.”
She stared at me for a second, then let out a snarled curse you’d hardly expect from a lady of her station, spun on the heel of one Italian-leather pump, and stalked from the room. I heard a couple of beeps as she crossed to the shop’s door, and then she started screeching into a cell phone. I could hear her for about ten seconds after she went outside.
Mission accomplished. Spleen vented. Dragon lady routed. I felt pleased with myself.
Billy heaved a sigh. “You had to talk to her like that?”
“Yeah.” I glowered out after the departed Eve. “Once my mouth was open and my lips started moving, it was pretty much inevitable.”
“Dammit, Harry.” Billy sighed.
“Oh, come on, man. Sticks and stones may break her bones, but one wiseass will never hurt her. It’s not a big deal.”
“Not for you: You don’t have to live with it. I do. So does Georgia.”
I chewed on my lower lip for a second. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. I suddenly felt less than mature. “Ah,” I said. “Oh. Um. Maybe I should apologize?”
He bent his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Oh, God, no. Things are bad enough already.”
I frowned at him. “Is it really that important to you? The ceremony?”
“It’s important to Georgia.”
I winced. “Oh,” I said. “Ah.”
“Look, we’ve got a few hours. I’ll stay here and try to sort things out with Eve,” Billy said. “Do me a favor?”
“Hey, what’s a best man for? Other than tackling a panicked groom if he tries to run.”
He gave me a quick grin. “See if you can contact Georgia first? Maybe she’s had car trouble or overslept or something. Or maybe she just left her phone on all night and it went dead.”
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll take care of it.”
I CALLED BILLY and Georgia’s apartment and got no answer. Knowing Georgia, I expected her to be at the hospital, visiting Kirby. Billy might have been the combat leader of the merry band of college kids who had learned shapeshifting from an actual wolf, but Georgia was the manager, surrogate mom, and brains when there wasn’t any violence on.
Kirby was on painkillers and groggy, but he told me Georgia hadn’t been there. I talked to the duty nurse and confirmed that though his family was flying in from Texas to see him, he’d had no visitors since Billy and I had left.
Odd.
I thought about mentioning it to Billy, but I didn’t really know anything yet, and it wasn’t as though he needed more pressure.
“Don’t get paranoid, Harry,” I told myself. “Maybe she’s got a hangover, too. Maybe she ran off with a male stripper.” I waited to see if I was buying it, then shook my head. “And maybe Elvis and JFK are shacked up in a retirement home somewhere.”
I went to Billy and Georgia’s apartment.
They live in a place near the University of Chicago’s campus, in a neighborhood that missed being an ugly one by maybe a hundred yards. It still wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to hang around outside after dark. I didn’t have a key to get into the building, so I pressed buttons one at a time until someone buzzed me in, and I took the stairs up.
As I neared the apartment door, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I saw or heard anything, magical or otherwise, but when I stopped before the door, I had a nebulous but strong conviction that something bad had gone down.
I knocked. The door rattled and fell off the lower hinge. It swung open a few inches, drunkenly, upper hinges squealing. Splits and cracks, invisible until the door moved, appeared in the wood, and the dead bolt rattled dully against the inside of the door, loose in its setting.
I stopped there for a long second, waiting and listening. Other than the whirring of a window fan at the end of the hall and someone playing an easy-listening station on the floor above me, there was nothing. I closed my eyes for a moment and extended my wizard’s senses, testing the air nearby for any touch of magic upon it.
I felt nothing but the subtle energy that surrounded any home, a form of naturally occurring protective magic called the threshold. Billy and Georgia’s apartment was the nominal headquarters of the Werewolves, and members came and went at all hours. It was never intended to be a permanent home—but there had been a lot of living in the little apartment, and its threshold was stronger than most. I slowly pushed the door open with my right hand.
The apartment had been torn to pieces.
A futon lay on its side, its metal frame twisted like a pretzel. The entertainment center had been pulled down from the wall, shattering equipment, scattering CDs and DVDs and vintage Star Wars action figures everywhere. The wooden table had been broken in two precisely at its center. One of the half-dozen chairs survived. The others were kindling. The microwave protruded from the drywall of an interior wall. The door of the fridge had taken out the bookcase across the room. Everything in the kitchen had been pulled down and scattered.
I moved in as quietly as I could—which was pretty damn quiet. I had done a lot of sneaking around. The bathroom looked like someone had taken a chain saw to it and followed up with explosives. The bedroom used to house computers and electronic stuff looked like the site of an airplane crash.
Billy and Georgia’s bedroom was the worst of all of them.
There was blood on the floor and one wall.
Whatever had happened, I had missed it. Dammit. I wanted to kill something, I wanted to scream in frustration, and I wanted to throw up in fear for Georgia.
But in my business, that kind of thing doesn’t help much.
I went back into the living room. The phone near the door had survived. I dialed.
“Lieutenant Murphy, Special Investigations,” answered a professional, bland voice.
“It’s me, Murph,” I told her.
Murphy knows me. Her tone changed at once. “My God, Harry, what’s wrong?”
“I’m at Billy and Georgia’s apartment,” I said. “The place has been torn apart. There’s blood.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Georgia’s missing.” I paused and said, “It’s her wedding day, Murph.”
“Five minutes,” she said at once.
“I need you to pick something up for me on the way.”
MURPHY CAME THROUGH the door eight minutes later. She was the head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations Department. They were the cops who got to handle all the crimes that didn’t fall into anyone else’s purview—stuff like vampire attacks and mystical assaults, as well as more mundane crimes like grave robbing, plus
all the really messy cases the other cops didn’t want to bother with. SI is supposed to make everything fit neatly into the official reports, explaining away anything weird with logical, rational investigation.
SI spends a lot of time struggling with that last one. Murphy writes more fiction than most novelists.
Murphy doesn’t look like a cop, much less a monster cop. She’s five nothing. She’s got blond hair, blue eyes, and a cute nose. She’s also got about a zillion gunnery awards and a shelfful of open-tournament martial arts trophies, and I once saw her kill a giant plant monster with a chain saw. She wore jeans, a white tee, sneakers, a baseball cap, and her hair was pulled back into a tail. She wore her gun in a shoulder rig, her badge around her neck, and she had a backpack slung over one shoulder.
She came through the door and stopped in her tracks. She surveyed the room for a minute and then said, “What did this?”
I nodded at the twisted futon frame. “Something strong.”
“I wish I were a big-time private investigator like you. Then I could figure these things out for myself.”
“You bring it?” I asked.
She tossed me the backpack. “The rest is in the car. What’s it for?”
I opened the pack, took out a bleached-white human skull, and put it down on the kitchen counter. “Bob, wake up.”
Orange lights appeared in the skull’s shadowed eye sockets, and then slowly grew brighter. The skull’s jaws twitched and then opened into a pantomime of a wide yawn. A voice issued out, the sound odd, like when you talk while on a racquetball court. “What’s up, boss?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Murphy swore. She took a step back and almost fell over the remains of the entertainment center.
Bob the Skull’s eyelights brightened. “Hey, the cute blonde! Did you do her, Harry?” The skull spun in place on the counter and surveyed the damage. “Wow. You did! Way to go, stud!”
My face felt hot. “No, Bob,” I growled.
“Oh,” the skull said, crestfallen.
Murphy closed her mouth, blinking at the skull. “Uh. Harry?”
“This is Bob the Skull,” I told her.
“It’s a skull,” she said. “That talks.”
“Bob is actually the spirit inside. The skull is just the container it’s in.”
She looked blankly at me and then said, “It’s a skull. That talks.”
“Hey!” Bob protested. “I am not an it! I am definitely a he!”
“Bob is my lab assistant,” I explained.
Murphy looked back at Bob and shook her head. “Just when I start thinking this magic stuff couldn’t get weirder.”
“Bob,” I said, “take a look around. Tell me what did this.”
The skull spun obediently and promptly said, “Something strong.”
Murphy gave me an oblique look.
“Oh, bite me,” I told her. “Bob, I need to know if you can sense any residual magic.”
“Ungawa, bwana,” Bob said. He did another turnaround, this one slower, and the orange eyelights narrowed.
“Residual magic?” Murphy asked.
“Anytime you use magic, it can leave a kind of mark on the area around you. Mostly it’s so faint that sunrise wipes it away every morning. I can’t always sense it.”
“But be can?” Murphy asked.
“But he can!” Bob agreed. “Though not with all this chatter. I’m working over here.”
I shook my head and picked up the phone again.
“Yes,” said Billy. He sounded harried, and there was an enormous amount of background noise.
“I’m at your apartment,” I said. “I came here looking for Georgia.”
“What?” he said.
“Your apartment,” I said louder.
“Oh, Harry,” Billy said. “Sorry—this phone is giving me fits. Eve just talked to Georgia. She’s here at the resort.”
I frowned. “What? Is she all right?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” Billy said. Someone started shrieking in the background. “Crap, this battery’s dying. Problem solved; come on up. I brought your tux.”
“Billy, wait.”
He hung up.
I called him back and got nothing but voice mail.
“Aha!” Bob said. “Someone used that wolf spell the naked chick taught to Billy and the Werewolves, back over there by the bedroom,” he reported. “And there were faeries here.”
I frowned. “Faeries. You sure?”
“One hundred percent, boss. They tried to cover their tracks, but the threshold must have taken the zing out of their illusion.”
I nodded and exhaled. “Dammit.” Then I strode into the bathroom and hunkered down, pawing through the rubble.
“What are you doing?” Murphy asked.
“Looking for Georgia,” I said. I found a plastic brush full of long strands the color of Georgia’s hair and took several of them in hand.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of my tracking spell, refining it over the years. I stepped out into the hall and drew a circle on the floor around me with a piece of chalk. Then I took Georgia’s hairs and pressed them against my forehead, summoning up my focus and will. I shaped the magic I wanted to create, focused on the hairs, and released my will as I murmured, “Interessari, interressarium.”
Magic surged out of me, into the hairs and back. I broke the circle with my foot, and the spell flowed into action, creating a faint sense of pressure against the back of my head. I turned, and the sensation flowed over my skull in response, over my ear, then over my cheekbone, and finally came to rest directly between my eyes.
“She’s this way,” I said. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?”
“I’m facing south,” I said.
“Which is a problem?”
“Billy says she’s at the wedding. Twenty miles north of here.”
Murphy’s eyes widened in comprehension. “A faerie has taken her place.”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Are they trying to place a spy?”
“No,” I said quietly. “This is malicious. Probably because Billy and company backed me up during the battle when the last Summer Knight was murdered.”
“That was years ago.”
“Faeries are patient,” I said, “and they don’t forget. Billy’s in danger.”
“I’d say Georgia was the one in danger,” Murphy said.
“I mean that Billy’s in danger, too,” I said.
“How so?”
“This isn’t happening on their wedding day by chance. The faeries want to use it against them.”
Murphy frowned. “What?”
“A wedding isn’t just a ceremony,” I said. “There’s power in it. A pledging of one to another, a blending of energies. There’s magic all through it.”
“If you say so,” she said, her tone wry. “What happens to him if he marries a faerie?”
“Conservatives get real upset,” I said absently. “But I’m not sure, magically speaking. Bob?”
“Oh,” Bob said. “Um. Well, if we assume this is one of the Winter Sidhe, then he’s going to be lucky to survive the honeymoon. If he does, well, she’ll be able to influence him, long term. He’ll be bound to her, the way the Winter Knights are bound to the Winter Queens. She’ll be able to impose her will over his. Change the way he thinks and feels about things.”
I ground my teeth. “And if she changes him enough, it will drive him insane.”
“Usually, yup,” Bob said. His voice brightened. “But don’t worry, boss. Odds are he’ll be dead before sunrise tomorrow. He might even die happy.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” I said. I checked my watch. “The wedding is in three hours. Georgia might need help now.” I looked back at Murphy. “You carrying?”
“Two on me. More in the car.”
“Now, there’s a girl who knows how to party!” Bob said.
I popped the skull back into my backpack harder than I strictly had to and zipped it shut. “
Feel like saving the day?”
Her eyes sparkled, but she kept her tone bored. “On the weekend? Sounds too much like work.”
We started from the apartment together. “I’ll pay you in doughnuts.”
“Dresden, you pig. That cop-doughnut thing is a vicious stereotype.”
“Doughnuts with little pink sprinkles,” I said.
“Professional profiling is just as bad as racial profiling.”
I nodded. “Yeah. But I know you want the little pink sprinkles.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said loftily, and we got into her car.
We buckled in, and I said more quietly, “You don’t have to come with me, Karrin.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I nodded and focused on the tracking spell, turning my head south. “Thataway.”
THE WORST THING about being a wizard is all the presumption; people’s expectations. Pretty much everyone expects me to be some kind of con artist, since it is a well-known fact that there is no such thing as magic. Of those who know better, most of them think I can just snap my fingers, poof, and have whatever I want. Dirty dishes? Snap my fingers and they wash themselves, like in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Need to talk to a friend? Poof, teleport them in from wherever they are, because the magic knows where to find them, all by itself.
Magic ain’t like that. Or I sure as hell wouldn’t drive a beat-up old Volkswagen.
It’s powerful, true, and useful, and enormously advantageous, but ultimately it is an art, a science, a craft, a tool. It doesn’t go out and do things by itself. It doesn’t create something from nothing. Using it takes talent and discipline and practice and a lot of work, and none of it comes free.
Which was why my spell led us to downtown Chicago and suddenly became less useful.
“We’ve circled this block three times,” Murphy told me. “Can’t you get a more precise fix on it?”
“Do I look like one of those GPS thingies?” I sighed.
“Define thingie,” Murphy said.
“It’s my spell,” I said. “It’s oriented to the points of the compass. I didn’t really have the z-axis in mind when I designed it, and it only works for that when I’m right on top of the target. I keep meaning to go back and fix that, but there’s never time.”