by Jim Butcher
“Not this time, I suppose,” the cop said.
“Damn the luck,” Thomas said.
She smiled at him, then frowned at me. “Aren’t you Harry Dresden?”
“Yeah.”
The cop nodded, putting on her hat. “Thought I recognized you. Lieutenant Murphy says you’re good people.”
“Thanks.”
“It wasn’t a compliment. A lot of people don’t like Murphy.”
“Aw, shucks,” I said. “I blush when I feel all flattered like that.”
The cop wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”
I kept a straight face. “Burned monkey poo.”
She eyed me warily for a second to see if I was teasing her, then rolled her eyes. The cop stepped up onto the sidewalk and began moving on down it. Thomas swung his legs off the car and pitched my keys at me. I caught them and got in on the driver’s side.
“Okay,” I said when Thomas got in. “Where do I meet this guy?”
“He’s holding a little soiree for his filming crew tonight in a condo on the Gold Coast. Drinks, deejay, snacks, that kind of thing.”
“Snacks,” I said. “I’m in.”
“Just promise me you won’t fill up your pockets with peanuts and cookies.” Thomas gave me directions to a posh apartment building a few miles north of the Loop, and I got moving. Thomas was silent during the drive.
“Up here on the right,” he said finally, then handed me a white envelope. “Give this to the security guys.”
I pulled in where Thomas told me to and leaned out of my car to offer the envelope to the guard in the little kiosk at the entrance of the parking lot.
A squeaky, bubbling growl erupted from directly below my seat. I flinched.
“What the hell is that?” Thomas said.
I pulled up to the guard kiosk and stopped. I reached for my magical senses and extended them toward the source of the continuing growl. “Crap. I think it’s one of the—”
A sort of greasy, nauseating cold flooded over my perceptions, stealing my breath. A ghostly charnel-house scent came with it, the smell of old blood and rotting meat. I froze, looking up at the source of the sensation.
The person I’d taken to be a security guard was a vampire of the Black Court.
It had been a young man. Its features looked familiar, but dessication had left its face too gaunt for me to be sure. The vampire wasn’t tall. Death had withered it into an emaciated caricature of a human being. Its eyes were covered with a white, rheumy film, and flakes of dead flesh fell from its decay-drawn lips and clung to its yellowed teeth. Hair like brittle, dead grass stood out from its head, and there was some kind of moss or mold growing in it.
It snatched at me with inhuman speed, but my wizard’s senses had given me enough warning to keep its skeletal fingers from closing on my wrist—just barely. The vampire caught a bit of my duster’s leather sleeve with the tips of its fingers. I jerked my arm back, but the vampire had as much strength in its fingertips as I did in my whole upper body. I had to pull hard, twisting with my shoulders to break free. I choked out a shout, and the sudden rush of fear made it high and thready.
The vampire rushed me, slithering out through the guardhouse window like a freeze-dried snake. I had a panicked instant to realize that if the vampire closed to wrestling range with me inside the car, they’d be harvesting my organs out of a mound of scrap metal and spare parts.
And I wasn’t strong enough to stop it from happening.
Chapter Three
Thomas’s senses evidently didn’t compete with mine, because the Black Court vampire was up to its shoulders in the Beetle before he choked out a startled, “Holy crap!”
I threw my left elbow at the vampire’s face. I couldn’t hurt the creature, but it might buy me a second to act. I connected, snapping its head to one side, and with my other hand I reached into a box on the floor between the seats, right by the stick, and withdrew the weapon that might keep me from getting torn to shreds. The vampire tore at me with its near-skeletal hands, its nails digging like claws. If I hadn’t laid those spells on my duster, it would have shoved its hand into my chest and torn out my heart, but the heavy, spell-reinforced leather held out for a second or two, buying me enough time to counterattack.
The vampires of the Black Court had been around since the dawn of human memory. They had acres of funky vampire powers, right out of Stoker’s book. They had the weaknesses too—garlic, tokens of faith, sunlight, running water, fire, decapitation. Bram Stoker’s book told everyone how to kill them, and the Blacks had been all but exterminated in the early twentieth century. The vampires who survived were the most intelligent, the swiftest, the most ruthless of their kind, with centuries of experience in matters of life and death. Mostly death.
But even with centuries of experience, I doubted any of them had ever been hit with a water balloon.
Or with a holy-water balloon, either.
I kept three of them in the box in my car, in easy reach. I snatched one up, palmed it, and slammed it hard against the vampire’s face. The balloon broke, and the blessed water splattered over its head. Wherever it struck the vampire, there was a flash of silver light and the dead flesh burst into white, heatless flame as bright as a magnesium flare.
The vampire let out a dusty, rasping scream and convulsed in instant agony. It began thrashing around like a half-squashed bug. It slammed a flailing arm into my steering wheel and the metal bent with a groan.
“Thomas!” I snarled. “Help me!”
He was already moving. He tore his seat belt off, drew up his knees, and spun to his left. Thomas let out a shout and drove both feet hard into the vampire’s face. Thomas couldn’t have matched the Black Court vampire’s physical power, but he was still damned strong. The double kick threw the vampire out of the car and through the flimsy wooden wall of the guard kiosk outside.
The squeaky growling turned into ferocious little barks while the vampire struggled weakly. It tried to rise, its white-filmed eyes wide. I could see the damage the holy water had inflicted. Maybe a quarter of its head was simply gone, starting above its left ear and running down to the corner of its mouth. The edges of the holy-water burns glowed with faint golden fire. Viscous globs of gelatinous black fluid oozed forth from the wounds.
I picked up another water balloon and lifted my arm to throw it.
The vampire let out a hissing shriek of rage and terror. Then it turned and darted away, smashing through the back wall of the kiosk without slowing down. It fled down the street.
“He’s getting away,” Thomas said, and started getting out of the car.
“Don’t,” I snapped over all the barking. “It’s a setup.”
Thomas hesitated. “How do you know?”
“I recognize that guy,” I said. “He was at Bianca’s masquerade. Only he was alive back then.”
Thomas somehow grew even paler. “One of the people that creepy Black Court bitch turned? The one dressed like Hamlet’s shrink?”
“Her name is Mavra. And yeah.”
“Crap,” he muttered. “You’re right. It’s a lure. She’s probably hiding out there watching us right now, waiting for us to go running down a dark alley.”
I tried the steering wheel. It felt a little stiff, but it still functioned. Hail the mighty Blue Beetle. I found a parking space and pulled into it. The puppy’s barks became ferocious growls again. “Mavra wouldn’t need a dark alley. She’s got some serious talent for veils. She could be sitting on the hood and we might not see her.”
Thomas licked his lips, keeping his eyes on the parking lot. “You think she’s come to town for you?”
“Sure, why not. I cheated her out of destroying the sword Amoracchius, and she was an ally of Bianca’s up until I killed her. Plus we’re at war. I’m surprised she hasn’t shown up before now.”
“Christ on a crutch. She spooks the hell out of me.”
“Me too.” I bent over and reached beneath the driver’s seat. I f
elt a fuzzy tail, grabbed it, and drew the puppy out as gently as I could. It was the insane little notched-eared pup. He ignored me, still growling, and started shaking his head back and forth violently. “Good thing we had a stowaway. Vamp might have gotten us both.”
“What’s that he’s got in his mouth?” Thomas asked.
The puppy lost hold of whatever he was savaging, and it landed on the floor of the Beetle.
“Ugh,” I said. “It’s that vamp’s ear. Holy water must have burned it right off.”
Thomas glanced down at the ear and turned a bit green. “It’s moving.”
The puppy snarled and batted at the wriggling bit of rotted ear. I picked it up as lightly as I could and tossed it out. The grey-and-black puppy was evidently satisfied with that course of action. He sat down and opened his mouth in a doggie grin.
“Nice reflexes, Harry,” Thomas said. “When that vamp came at you. Real nice. Faster than mine. How the hell did you manage that?”
“I didn’t. I was trying to feel out this little nuisance after he started growling. I felt the vamp coming a couple seconds before it jumped me.”
“Wow,” Thomas said. “Talk about strokes of luck.”
“Yeah. It’s sort of a first for me.”
The pup abruptly spun, facing the direction the vampire had fled. He growled again.
Thomas went rigid. “Hey, Harry, you know what?”
“No, what?”
“I’m thinking we should get indoors.”
I picked up the puppy and scanned the darkness, but saw nothing. “Discretion is the better part of not getting exsanguinated,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Four
Thomas and I went into the apartment building, and found the guard who should have been in the booth outside drinking a cup of coffee with a second man behind a desk. We took the elevator to the top floor. There were only two doors in the hall, and Thomas knocked on the nearest. Music rolled and thumped inside while we waited, and the spotless carpet had been cleaned with something that smelled like snapdragons. Thomas had to knock twice more before the door finally opened.
A pretty woman somewhere around her mid-forties answered Thomas’s knock, and a tide of loud music came with her. She was maybe five-foot-six and had her dark brown hair held up with a couple of chopsticks. She held a pile of discarded paper plates in one hand and a couple of empty plastic cups in the other and wore an emerald knee-length knit dress that showed off the curves of a WWII pinup girl.
Her face lit with an immediate smile. “Thomas, how wonderful to see you. Justine said you’d be coming by.”
Thomas stepped forward with his own brilliant smile and kissed the woman on either cheek. “Madge,” he said. “You look great. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my apartment,” Madge replied, her tone dry.
Thomas laughed. “You’re kidding me. Why?"
“The old fool talked me into investing in his company. I need to make sure he doesn’t throw the money away. I’m keeping an eye on him.”
“I see,” Thomas said.
“Did he finally talk you into acting?”
Thomas put a hand on his chest. “A modest schoolboy like me? I blush to think.”
Madge laughed, a touch of wickedness to it, resting her hand lightly on Thomas’s biceps as she did. Either she liked speaking with Thomas or the hallway was colder than I thought. “Who is your friend?”
“Madge Shelly, this is Harry Dresden. I brought him by to talk business with Arturo. Harry’s a friend of mine.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” I smiled a bit and offered my hand.
She fumbled with plates and cups for a moment, and then laughed. “I’ll have to give you a rain check. Are you an actor?” Madge asked, her expression speculative.
“To be or not to be,” I said. “How now brown cow.”
She smiled and nodded at the puppy, who was riding in the curl of my left arm. “And who is your friend?”
“He’s the dog with no name. Like Clint Eastwood, but fuzzier.”
She laughed again, and said to Thomas, “I see why you like him.”
“He’s mildly amusing,” Thomas agreed.
“He’s up past his bedtime,” I said. “Don’t mean to be rude, but I need to talk to Arturo before I fall asleep on my feet.”
“I understand,” Madge said. “The music’s a little loud in the living room. Thomas, why don’t I show you both to the study, and I’ll bring Arturo to you.”
“Is Justine here?” Thomas asked. His voice held a note of quiet tension to it that I doubted Madge noticed.
“Somewhere,” she said vaguely. “I’ll tell her you’ve arrived.”
“Thank you.”
We followed Madge inside the apartment suite. The living room was fairly dim, but I saw maybe twenty people there, men and women, some of them dancing, others standing and drinking or laughing or talking, like most parties. There was a haze of smoke, and only some of it was from cigarettes. Colored lights shifted and changed in time with the music.
I watched Thomas as we walked through the room. His manner changed subtly, something I could sense without being able to define. He didn’t move any more quickly, but his steps became more fluid somehow. He looked around the room as we went through, his eyelids a little heavy, and he started drawing the eyes of every woman we walked past.
I drew no such looks, even with the grey puppy sleeping in the crook of my arm. It’s not like I’m Quasimodo or anything, but with Thomas walking through the room like a predator angel, it was tough to compete.
Madge led us past the party room and into a small room with bookshelves and a desk with a computer. “Have a seat and I’ll go find him,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and settled down onto the chair at the desk. She left, her eyes lingering on Thomas for a moment before she did. He perched on a corner of the desk, his expression pensive. “You look thoughtful,” I said, “which seems wrong somehow. What is it?”
“I’m hungry,” Thomas said. “And thinking. Madge is Arturo’s first ex-wife.”
“And she’s hosting a party for him?” I asked.
“Yeah. I never thought she liked the guy much.”
“What did she mean about investing?”
Thomas shrugged. “Arturo broke off from a larger studio on the West Coast to found his own. Madge is real practical. She’s the kind of person who could despise someone while still being professional and working with him. Acknowledging his talents. If she thought it was a winning bet, she wouldn’t be worried that she didn’t like the person in charge. It wouldn’t be out of character for her to have invested money in Arturo’s new company.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
“Not sure,” Thomas said. “Seven figures, maybe more. I’d have to get someone to look.”
I whistled. “Lot of money.”
“I guess,” Thomas said. Thomas was rich enough that he probably didn’t have much perspective on the value of a buck.
I started to ask him more questions, but the door opened, and a tall and vigorous man in his fifties entered, wearing dark slacks and a grey silk shirt rolled up over his forearms. He had a head of magnificent silver locks framing a strong face with a dark, short beard. He had a boater’s tan, pale smile lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and large, intelligent dark eyes.
“Tommy!” the man boomed, and strode to Thomas. “Hey, I was hoping I would see you tonight.” His voice had a thick accent, definitely Greek. He clapped both hands on Thomas’s shoulders and kissed him on either cheek. “You’re looking good, Tommy boy, real good. You should come work with me, huh?”
“I don’t look good on camera,” Thomas said. “But it’s good to see you, too. Arturo Genosa, this is Harry Dresden, the man I told you about.”
Arturo looked me up and down. “Tall son of a bitch, huh?”
“I ate my Wheaties,” I said.
“Hey, pooch,” Arturo said. He scratch
ed the grey puppy behind the ear. The little dog yawned, licked Arturo’s hand once, and promptly went back to sleep. “Your dog?”
“Temporarily,” I said. “Recovered him for a client.”
Arturo nodded, his expression calculating. “You know what a strega is, Mr. Dresden?”
“Practitioner of Italian folk magic,” I responded. “Divinations, love potions, fertility blessings, and protections. They also can manage a pretty vicious set of curses with a technique they call the malocchio. The Evil Eye.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Guess you know a thing or two, huh.”
“Just enough to get me into trouble,” I said.
“But do you believe in it?”
“In the Evil Eye?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen stranger things.”
Arturo nodded. “Tommy boy tell you what I need?”
“He said you were worried about a curse. Said some people close to you died.”
Arturo’s expression flickered for a second, and I saw grief undermine his confidence. “Yes. Two women. Good souls, both.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Assuming there is a curse involved, what makes you think it was meant for you?”
“They had no other contact with each other,” Arturo said. “Far as I know, I was the only thing they had in common.” He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a couple of manila file folders. “Reports,” he said. “Information about their deaths. Tommy says maybe you can help.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Why would someone curse you?”
“The studio,” Arturo said. “Someone wants to stop the company from getting off the ground. Kill it before the first picture gets made.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Protection,” Arturo said. “I want you to protect the people on my crew during the shoot. Don’t want anything else to happen to anyone.”
I frowned. “Can be a tough job. Do you know who would want to stop production?”
Arturo scowled at me and stalked across the room to a cabinet. He opened it and withdrew an already opened bottle of wine. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and took a swig. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to hire an investigator.”