The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

by Jim Butcher

  “It’s a bloody upper-class WASP neighborhood,” the passenger snarled. His voice was deeper, similarly obscured, and bore no trace of foreign accent. He sounded like a newscaster, standard Midwestern American. “There’s private security here. Police. If anyone raises any kind of alarm, it’s going to attract a great deal of attention in short order.”

  Grey Cloak let out a low laugh. “Which is why we are safe. It’s late at night. All the little dears are sleeping the sleep of the fat and happy. No one is awake to see us here.”

  The other said something rude. There was a flicker of light in the passenger seat, and it took me a second to work out that he’d just lit a cigarette. “Well?”

  “No.”

  “No?” the passenger said. “No kine? No wizard? What do you mean, no?”

  “Both,” Grey Cloak said. His tone turned cold. “You told me he was afraid of fire.”

  “He is,” the passenger said. “You should see his fucking hand.”

  I felt my left hand clench tight, and the crackle of popping knuckles in my very real laboratory drifted through the magical simulation of the city.

  Grey Cloak’s head whipped around.

  “What?” the passenger asked.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Something…” Grey Cloak said.

  I felt myself holding my breath, willing my fingers to unclench.

  The passenger looked around for a moment, then snorted. “You’re nervous about him. That’s all. You missed him and you’re nervous.”

  “Not nervous,” Grey Cloak said. “Understandably cautious. He has more resources and more versatility than your people realize. It’s quite possible that he’s keeping track of me in some way.”

  “I doubt that. It would take a subtle worker of the Art to manage that. He isn’t one.”

  “No?” Grey Cloak asked. “He managed to sense the fire before it could cut him off, to somehow waken the entire building from sound sleep all at the same time, and to track me after I departed.”

  The passenger tensed. “You came here with him behind you?”

  “No. I lost him before he could do so. But that does not preclude the use of more subtle means to engage in pursuit.”

  “He’s a thug,” the passenger said. “Plain and simple. His talents make him good at destruction and little else. He’s a beast to be prodded and directed.”

  There was silence for a moment. “It amazes me,” Grey Cloak said then, “that an idiot such as you survived crossing the wizard once.”

  Aha. Interesting. The passenger, at least, was someone I’d seen before. He’d walked away from it, too. Most of the individuals I’d faced hadn’t done that—which bothered me a hell of a lot, at times—but even so, there’d been more than a couple, and the passenger could be any number of them. That did narrow it down considerably from the several billion possibilities I’d had a moment before, though.

  And I felt something of a chill at Grey Cloak’s words. He was more aware of his surroundings than anyone running on five simple senses should be, and he was a thinker. That’s never a good quality in an enemy. A smart foe doesn’t have to be stronger than you, doesn’t have to be faster, and doesn’t even really have to be there to be a lethal threat. Hell, if that car bomb hadn’t been set off early, he’d have cooked Murphy and me both, and I would have died without even knowing he existed.

  “To be honest, I’m surprised the wizard lived the night,” the passenger said. “It doesn’t matter, either way. If we’d killed him, we could have claimed credit for his demise and it would have served our purpose. Now we let him rampage over the Skavis, and it does nothing but help.”

  “Unless,” Grey Cloak said sourly, “he happens to rampage over us as well.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Then the passenger said, “At least one thing is accomplished. He’s interested in stopping the culling.”

  “Oh, yes,” Grey Cloak said. “You’ve gotten his attention. The question, of course, is whether or not he will be as cooperative as you seem to believe.”

  “With a gathering of female wizardlings at risk? Oh, yes. He won’t be able to help himself. Now that he knows what the Skavis is up to, Dresden will be falling all over himself to protect them.”

  Aha. The Skavis. And they were maneuvering me to kick his ass.

  Finally, something useful.

  “Will he strike at the kine soon?” Grey Cloak asked, referring to the Skavis, I presumed.

  “Not yet. It isn’t his style. He’ll wait a day or two before moving again. He wants them to suffer, waiting for him.”

  “Mmmm,” Grey Cloak said. “I normally think the Skavis’s tastes repulsive, but in this particular instance, I suspect his might intersect with my own. Anticipation makes them taste sweeter.”

  “Oh, of course, by all means,” the passenger said sourly. “Throw away everything we might achieve in order to indulge your sweet tooth.”

  Grey Cloak let out a low chuckle. “Alas, not yet. I hardly think the Circle would react well to such a course. Speaking of which, how does your own endeavor fare?”

  “Less than well,” the passenger said. “He isn’t talking to me.”

  “Did you really expect him to?”

  The passenger shrugged. “He is family. But that’s of no matter. I’ll find them in time, whether he cooperates or not.”

  “For your sake, I hope so,” Grey Cloak said. “The Circle has asked me for a progress report.”

  The passenger shifted uneasily. “Have they. What are you going to tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “On the contrary,” Grey Cloak said.

  “They react badly to incompetence,” the passenger said.

  “And murderously to deception.”

  The passenger took another long drag on his cigarette and cursed again. Then he said, “No help for it, then.”

  “There is no need to soil yourself. We are not yet past our deadline, and they do not destroy tools that may still be of use.”

  The passenger let out a nasty laugh. “They’re hard but fair?”

  “They’re hard,” Grey Cloak replied.

  “If necessary,” the passenger said, “we can remove him. We have the resources for it. I could always—”

  “I believe it premature unless he proves more threatening than he has been thus far,” Grey Cloak said. “I expect the Circle would agree.”

  “When do I meet them?” the passenger asked. “Face-to-face.”

  “That is not my decision. I am a liaison. Nothing more.” He shrugged. “But, should this project proceed, I suspect they will desire an interview.”

  “I’ll succeed,” the passenger said darkly. “He can’t have taken them far.”

  “Then I suggest you get moving,” Grey Cloak said. “Before the Skavis beats you to the prize.”

  “Beats us,” the passenger said.

  I could hear a faint smile touch Grey Cloak’s voice. “Of course.”

  There was a smoldering silence, and then the passenger shoved the door open, exited the car, and left without a further word.

  Grey Cloak watched him until he’d vanished into the night. Then he got out of the car. Insubstantial, I willed myself forward into the vehicle and looked. The steering column had been cracked open, the vehicle hot-wired.

  I was torn for a second, which of the two to follow. The passenger was trying to get information out of someone. That could mean that he had a prisoner somewhere he was interrogating. On the other hand, it could just as likely mean that no matter how many drinks he poured, he couldn’t get an informant to open up on a given topic. I also knew that he had confronted me before at some point—which was a great deal more than I knew about Grey Cloak.

  He was something very different. He had tried to kill me a couple of times already, and was apparently responsible for at least some of the recent deaths. He was smart, and was connected to s
ome kind of shady group called “the Circle.” Could this be the reality of my heretofore theoretical Black Council?

  He was walking away from the car now, my spell’s anchor, and growing rapidly hazier as he walked away. If I didn’t pursue him closely, he’d vanish into the vastness of the city.

  Whoever the passenger had been, I had apparently sent him running once already. If I’d done it once, I could do it again.

  Grey Cloak, then.

  I pressed in close to Grey Cloak, focusing to keep the spell clearly fixed, and followed him. He walked several blocks, turned down a sharp alley, and then descended a flight of stairs that ended at a boarded-over doorway to what must have originally been a basement apartment like my own. He glanced around, tugged down a chain that looked like it had rusted flat to the wall beside the door, and opened it, disappearing within.

  Crap. If this place had a threshold on it, I’d never be able to follow him inside. I’d just bang my metaphysical head against the doorway like a bird hitting a windshield. Never mind that if it had the proper kinds of wards, they could conceivably disintegrate my spiritual self, or at least inflict some fairly horrible psychic damage. I could wind up on the floor of my lab, drooling, transformed from professional wizard into unemployed vegetable.

  Screw it. You don’t do a job like mine by running away at any hint of danger.

  I steeled myself and willed myself forward, following Grey Cloak.

  Chapter Fifteen

  No threshold, which was good. No wards, which was even better. Grey Cloak hadn’t entered a living area—he’d entered Undertown.

  Chicago is an old city—at least by American standards. It has been standing, in one form or another, since the French and Indian War, before the United States even existed. Being as Chicago is basically one giant swamp, from a strictly geographic point of view, buildings tended to slowly settle into the earth over years and years. The old wooden streets did the same, and new streets had to be built atop them in successive layers.

  Wherever the ground isn’t slow-motion mud, there’s solid rock. Tunnels and cave systems riddle the area. The Manhattan Project had been housed briefly in such tunnels, before it got relocated to the middle of nowhere. Someone in the government had shown unaccountably good judgment in considering the notion that developing a freaking nuclear weapon smack in the middle of America’s second-largest city qualified as a Bad Idea.

  All of that had left behind an enormous labyrinth of passages, caves, half-collapsed old buildings, and crumbling tunnels seemingly ready to come thundering down at any moment. It was dark, human beings rarely went there, and as a result, Undertown had become a home, shelter, and hiding place to all kinds of nasty things—things no mortal, not even a wizard, had ever seen. Some of those things, in turn, had expanded some of the tunnels and caves, establishing jealously protected territories that never saw the face of the sun, never heard the whisper of wind. It’s dark, close, cold, and intensely creepy down there. The fact that it was inhabited by things that had no love for mankind and potential radioactivity to boot didn’t do much to boost its tourism industry.

  Grey Cloak paced swiftly through a crack in the back wall of the building and into Undertown’s tunnels. He grew even more indistinct as he did. I had to stay closer to him, and it cost me an increasingly greater effort of will to do so. Little Chicago hadn’t accurately modeled Undertown, partly because there were no maps to be had of the place, and because taking samples to incorporate into the model would have been an act just shy of active suicide. Mostly, though, it hadn’t happened because I had never considered doing so.

  Through the translucent veil of earth and stone and brick, I could still see the real me standing over the city. My hand was still held out, but my fingers were trembling, and sweat beaded my forehead. Odd that I couldn’t feel the strain on my body from here. I hadn’t anticipated that. It was entirely possible that I might have continued on without ever realizing what the effort was costing me. It could kill my physical body, leaving me…

  I don’t know what. It might kill me outright. It might kill my body while stranding my mind here. It might bind my awareness into place like some sort of pathetic ghost.

  Get tough, Dresden. You didn’t take up this career to run at the first hint of fatigue.

  I kept going—but all the same, I looked up to check on myself as often as I could.

  Grey Cloak was not long in reaching his goal. He found a narrow cleft in a rock wall, slipped inside it, and then pressed his hands and feet against either wall on the inside of the cleft and climbed up it with rapid precision. Eight or nine feet up, it opened into a room with three walls of brick and one of earth—a partially collapsed basement, I assumed. There were a few creature comforts in it—an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag, a lantern, a miniature barbecue next to a heavy paper bag of charcoal, and several cardboard boxes that contained supplies.

  Grey Cloak slipped a heavy grate over the hole he’d just climbed up, and weighted it down with several stones the size of cinder blocks. Then he opened a box, unwrapped a pair of those meal-replacement bars that people use to punish themselves when they think they’re overweight, ate them, and emptied a plastic bottle of water. Critical information, there. Glad I was risking my metaphysical neck to pick up vital clues like this.

  I checked up over my shoulder. My face had gone white and ran with sweat.

  I expected Grey Cloak to turn in, but instead he turned the lantern down low, opened a second box, withdrew a plaque the size of a dinner plate, and laid it down on the floor. It was a simple wooden base, inset with a ring of some reddish metal, probably copper.

  Grey Cloak pressed a fingernail against one of his gums, and when he withdrew it his fingertip glistened with blood that looked far more solid and real than the person it had come from. He touched it to the circle and began a low chant I did not recognize.

  A faint mist swirled up within the copper circle, and through the spell I could see the raw magic forming itself into a pattern, a vortex that vanished beneath the plaque.

  A second later, the mist resolved itself into a figure, in miniature, a vaguely humanoid shape wearing a heavy cloak and cowl that hid any possible details of appearance.

  Except that I’d seen him before—or at least someone who dressed exactly like him.

  The last time I’d seen Cowl, he’d been caught in the unbelievably savage backlash of an enormous power-summoning spell called a Darkhallow. It would have been impossible for the man to have survived that spell. There was no way, no way in hell that he’d lived through it. This couldn’t be the same person.

  Could it?

  Surely it had to be someone else. The Ringwraith look was hardly uncommon among those who fancied themselves dark wizards of one kind or another, after all. It could just as easily be someone else entirely, someone not at all connected to Cowl or my theoretical Black Council.

  On the other hand, Cowl had been the person whose actions had tipped me off to the possibility of the Black Council to begin with. Could he have been a part of the Circle that Grey Cloak had mentioned? After all, I dropped a freaking car onto Cowl’s head, and he’d hardly blinked at it. If he’d been that well protected, could he have survived the wild energies of the disintegrating Darkhallow?

  Worse, what if he hadn’t? What if he was one of a set of people just as crazy and dangerous as he had been?

  I started feeling even more nervous.

  “My lord,” Grey Cloak said, bowing his head. He left it that way.

  There was a long moment of silence before Cowl spoke. Then he said, “You have failed.”

  “I have not yet succeeded,” Grey Cloak replied with polite disagreement. “The curtain has not fallen.”

  “And the fool with you?”

  “Still ignorant, my lord. I can preserve or dispose of him as you see fit.” Grey Cloak took a deep breath and said, “He has gotten the wizard involved. There is some sort of vendetta between them, it would seem.”

>   The little mist figure made a hissing sound. “The fool. There is not enough profit in Dresden’s death to jeopardize the operation.”

  “He did not consult me on the matter, my lord,” Grey Cloak said with another bow of his head. “Had he done so, I would have dissuaded him.”

  “And what followed?”

  “I attempted to remove him along with the last of the culling.”

  “Dresden interfered?”

  “Yes.”

  Cowl hissed. “This changes matters. What precautions have you taken?”

  “I was not followed in flesh, my lord; of that I am certain.”

  Cowl held up a miniature hand for silence, a gesture that looked, somehow, stiff and pained. Then his hood panned around the room.

  The figure’s gaze met mine, and hit me like a literal, physical blow, a swift jab in the chest.

  “He is there!” Cowl snarled. The misty figure turned to face me and lifted both hands.

  An odd, cold pressure hit me like a wave and pushed me back several feet before I could gather up my will and exert pressure in return, coming to a stop several feet away from Grey Cloak and Cowl.

  Cowl’s hands clenched into claws. “Insolent child. I will rip your mind asunder.”

  I snarled at him and planted my insubstantial feet. “Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!”

  Cowl screamed at me. He spoke a word that resonated in my head and thundered through the hazy confines of Grey Cloak’s hideaway. Though I had braced myself to gather my will and pit it against his, his next strike hammered into me like a freight train. I could no more have resisted it than I could have stopped an ocean tide, and I felt it throwing me back and away.

  In that last second before I was banished, I reached out with all the strength I had left, focusing on Grey Cloak, pouring everything I had into the spell to grant me a clear view of his face. I got it, for the barest instant, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, tall and lean and wolfish.

  And then there was a geyser of scarlet pain, as if someone had seized both halves of my skull and torn it into two pieces.

  Darkness followed.