by Jim Butcher
“Damn,” Thomas said. “I feel a little bad for pointing a gun at the shrimp, now.”
“I probably would, too,” I said, “if I wasn’t so weirded out by the fact that Fix is starting to be as crabwise and squirrelly as the rest of the Sidhe.”
Thomas grunted. “Better get rid of that thing before more of them show up.”
He hit the control that lowered the passenger window. It coughed and rattled a little before it jerked into motion, instead of smoothly gliding down. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well. To high-tech equipment I am the living avatar of Murphy’s Law: The longer I stayed in Thomas’s shiny new oil tanker, the more all the things that could go wrong, would go wrong.
I lifted the leaf to chuck it out, but something made me hesitate. “No,” I murmured.
Thomas blinked. “No?”
“No,” I said with more certainty, closing my hand around the treacherous silver leaf. “I’ve got a better idea.”
Chapter Ten
I finished the spell that I thought would keep the gruffs busy and climbed wearily out of my lab to find Thomas sitting by the fireplace. My big grey dog, Mouse, lay beside him, his fur reflecting highlights of reddened silver in the firelight, watching Thomas’s work with interest.
My brother sat cross-legged on the floor, with my gun lying disassembled on a soft leather cloth upon the hearth. He frowned in concentration as he cleaned the pieces of the weapon with a brush, a soft cloth, and a small bottle of oil.
Mister, my hyperthyroid tomcat, bounded over the minute I opened the trapdoor to the lab, and hurried down the folding staircase into the subbasement.
“Go get ’em, tiger,” I muttered after him by way of encouragement. “Make them run their little hooves off.”
I left the door open, heaved myself to the couch, and collapsed. Mouse’s tail thumped the floor gently.
“You all right?” Thomas asked.
“Tired,” I said. “Big spell.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, working industriously on the weapon’s barrel. “What building did you burn down?”
“Your apartment, if you don’t lay off the wiseass commentary,” I said. “Give me a minute and we’ll get moving.”
Thomas gave me a sidelong, calculating look. “I needed another minute or two anyway. When’s the last time you cleaned this thing?”
“Uh. Who’s the president now?”
Thomas clucked his teeth in disapproval and returned to the gun. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Just give me a minute to catch my breath,” I said.
When I woke up there was dim light coming from my mostly buried basement windows, and my neck felt like the bones had been welded together by a badly trained contractor. The various beatings I’d received the night before had formed a corporation and were attempting a hostile takeover of my nervous system. I groaned and looked around.
Thomas was sitting with his back against the wall beside the fireplace, as relaxed and patient as any tiger. His gun, mine, and the bent-bladed kukri knife he’d favored lately lay close at hand.
Down in my lab something clattered to the floor from one of the shelves or tables. I heard Mister’s paws scampering over the metal surface of the center table.
“What are you grinning at?” my brother asked.
“Mister,” I said.
“He’s been knocking around down there all morning,” Thomas said. “I was going to go round him up before he broke something, but the skull told me to leave him alone.”
“Yeah,” I said. I creaked to my feet and shuffled to my little alcove with delusions of kitchenhood. I got out the bottle of aspirin and downed them with a glass of water. “For your own safety. Mister gets upset when someone gets between him and his packet of catnip.”
I shuffled over to the lab and peered down. Sure enough, the little cloth bag containing catnip and the silver oak leaf pin still hung from the extra-large rubber band I’d snipped and fixed to the ceiling directly over Little Chicago. As I watched, Mister hopped up onto a worktable, then bounded into the air to bat at the cloth bag. He dragged it down to the table with him, claws hooked in the fabric, and landed on the model of Lincoln Park. My cat rubbed his face ecstatically against the bag for a moment, then released it and batted playfully at it as the rubber band sent it rebounding back and forth near him.
Then he seemed to realize he was being watched. He turned his face up to me, meowed smugly, flicked the stub of his tail jauntily, and hopped to the floor.
“Bob?” I called. “Is the spell still working?”
“Aye, Cap’n!” Bob said. “Arrrrr!”
“What’s with that?” Thomas murmured from right beside me.
I twitched hard enough to take me up off the floor, and glared at him. “Would you stop doing that?”
He nodded, his expression serious, but I could see the corners of his mouth quivering with the effort not to smile. “Right. Forgot.”
I growled and called him something unkind, yet accurate. “He wouldn’t stop begging me to take him to see that pirate movie. So I took him with me the last time I went to the drive-in down in Aurora, and he got into it. It’s been dying down, but if he calls me ‘matey’ one more time I’ll snap.”
“That’s interesting,” Thomas said, “but that’s not what I was asking about.”
“Oh, right,” I said. I pointed at the catnip bag. “The leaf ’s in there.”
“Isn’t that just going to draw Summer’s goons here?”
I let out a nasty laugh. “No. They can’t see it through the wards around the lab.”
“Then why the big rubber band?”
“I linked Summer’s beacon spell to the matrix around Little Chicago. Every time the leaf gets within a foot of the model, my spell transfers the beacon’s signal to the corresponding location in the city.”
Thomas narrowed his eyes in thought, and then suddenly grinned in understanding as Mister pounced on the catnip again, this time landing near the Field Museum. “If they’re following that beacon, they’ll be running all over town.”
“In two and a half feet of snow,” I confirmed, grinning.
“You’re sadistic.”
“Thank you,” I said solemnly.
“Won’t they figure it out?”
“Sooner or later,” I admitted, “but it should buy us a little time to work with. ’Scuse me.”
I shambled to the door and put on my coat.
“Where to first?” Thomas asked.
“Nowhere just yet. Sit tight.” I grabbed my square-headed snow shovel from the popcorn tin by the door, where it usually resided with my staff, sword cane, and the epically static magic sword, Fidelacchius. Mouse followed me out. It was a job of work to get the door open, and more than a little snow spilled over the threshold. I started with shoveling the stairs and worked my way up, a grave digger in reverse.
Once that was done, I shoveled the little sidewalk, the front porch of the boardinghouse, and the exterior stairs running up to the Willoughbys’ apartment on the second floor. Then I dug a path to the nest of mailboxes by the curb. It took me less time than I thought it would. There was a lot of snow, but it hadn’t formed any layers of ice, and it was basically a question of tossing powder out of the way. Mouse kept watch, and I tried not to throw snow into his face.
We returned to my apartment, and I slung the shovel’s handle back down into the popcorn tin.
Thomas frowned at me. “You had to shovel the walk? Harry…somehow I’m under the impression that you aren’t feeling the urgency here.”
“In the first place,” I said, “I’m not terribly well motivated to bend over backward to save John Marcone’s Armani-clad ass. I wouldn’t lose much sleep over him. In the second place, my neighbors are elderly, and if someone doesn’t clean up the walks they’ll be stuck here. In the third place, I’ve got to do whatever I can to make sure I’m on my landlady’s good side. Mrs. Spunkelcrief is almost deaf, but it’s sort of hard to hide it wh
en assassin demons or gangs of zombies kick down the door. She’s willing to forgive me the occasional wild party because I do things like shovel the walk.”
“It’s easier to replace an apartment than your ass,” Thomas said.
I shrugged. “I was so stiff and sore from yesterday that I had to do something to get my muscles loosened up and moving. The time was going to be gone either way. Might as well take care of my neighbors.” I grimaced. “Besides…”
“You feel bad that your landlady’s building sometimes gets busted up because you live in it,” Thomas said. He shook his head and snorted. “Typical.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s not it.”
He frowned at me, listening.
I struggled to find the right words. “There are a lot of things I can’t control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days. I don’t know what I’m going to face, what kind of choices I’m going to have to make. I can’t predict it. I can’t control it. It’s too big.” I nodded at my shovel. “But that, I can predict. I know that if I pick up that shovel and clear the snow from the walkways, it’s going to make my neighbors safer and happier.” I glanced at him and shrugged. “It’s worthwhile to me. Give me a minute to shower.”
He regarded me for a second and then nodded. “Oh,” he said, with the tiniest of smiles. He mimed a sniff and a faint grimace. “I’ll wait. Gladly.”
I cleaned up. We were on the way out the door when the phone rang.
“Harry,” Murphy said. “What the hell is going on out there?”
“Why?” I asked. “What the hell is going on out there?”
“We’ve had at least two dozen…well, I suppose the correct term is ‘sightings.’ Everything from Bigfoot to mysterious balls of light. Naturally it’s all getting shunted to SI.”
I started to answer her, then paused. Marcone and the outfit were involved. While they didn’t have anywhere near the influence in civic affairs that they might have wanted, Marcone had always had sources of information inside the police department—sources his subordinates could, presumably, access as well. It would be best to exercise some caution.
“You calling from the station?” I asked her.
“Yeah.”
“We should talk,” I said.
Murphy might not want to admit that anyone she worked with could be providing information to the outfit, but she wasn’t the sort to stop believing the truth just because she didn’t like it. “I see,” she said. “Where?”
“McAnally’s,” I said. I checked a clock. “Three hours?”
“See you there.”
I hung up and started for the door again. Mouse followed close at my heels, but I turned and nudged him gently back with my leg. “Not this time, boy,” I told him. “The bad guys have a lot of manpower, access to skilled magic, and I need a safe place to come home to. If you’re here there’s no way anyone is going to sneak in and leave me a present that goes boom.”
Mouse huffed out a breath in a sigh, but sat down.
“Keep an eye on Mister, all right? If he starts getting sick, take the catnip away.”
My dog gave the door to the lab a dubious glance.
“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “You’re seven times as big as he is.”
Mouse looked none too confident.
Thomas blinked at me, and then at the dog. “Can he understand you?”
“When it suits him,” I grumped. “He’s smarter than a lot of people I know.”
Thomas took a moment to absorb that, and then faced Mouse a little uncertainly. “Uh, okay, look. What I said about Harry earlier? I wasn’t serious, okay? It was totally a joke.”
Mouse flicked his ears and turned his nose away from Thomas with great nobility.
“What?” I asked, looking between them. “What did you say?”
“I’ll warm up the car,” Thomas said, and retreated to the frozen grey outdoors.
“This is my home,” I complained to no one in particular. “Why do people keep making jokes at my expense in my own freaking home?”
Mouse declined to comment.
I locked up behind me, magically and materially, and scaled Mount Hummer to sit in the passenger seat. The morning was cold and getting colder, especially since I was fresh from the shower, but the seat was rather pleasantly warm. There was no way I’d admit to Thomas that the luxury feature was superior to armored glass, but gosh, it was cozy.
“Right,” Thomas said. “Where are we headed?”
“To where they treat me like royalty,” I said.
“We’re going to Burger King?”
I rubbed the heel of my hand against my forehead and spelled fratricide in a subvocal mutter, but I had to spell out temporary insanity and justifiable homicide, too, before I calmed down enough to speak politely. “Just take a left and drive. Please.”
“Well,” Thomas said, grinning, “since you said ‘please.’”
Chapter Eleven
Executive Priority Health was arguably the most exclusive gym in town. Located in downtown Chicago, the business took up the entire second floor of what used to be one of the grand old hotel buildings. Now it had office buildings on the upper levels and a miniature shopping center on the first floor.
Not just anyone could take the private elevator to the second floor. One had to be a member of the health club, and membership was tightly controlled and extremely expensive. Only the wealthiest and most influential men had a membership card.
Oh, and me.
The magnetic stripe on the back of the card didn’t work when I swiped it through the card reader. No surprise there. I’d had it in my wallet for several months, and I doubt the magnetic signature stored on the card had lasted more than a couple of days. I hit the intercom button on the console.
“Executive Priority,” said a cheerful young woman’s voice. “This is Billie, and how may I serve you?”
Thomas glanced at me and arched an eyebrow, mouthing the words, Serve you?
“You’ll see,” I muttered to him. I addressed the intercom. “My card seems to have stopped working. Harry Dresden and guest, please.”
“One moment, sir,” Billie said. She was back within a few seconds. “I apologize for the problem with your membership card, sir. I’m opening the elevator for you now.”
True to her word, the elevator opened, and Thomas and I got in.
It opened onto the main area of Executive Priority.
“You’re kidding me,” Thomas said. “Since when do you go to the gym?”
It looked pretty typically gymlike from here. Lots and lots of exercise machines and weight benches and dumbbells and mirrors; static bikes and treadmills stood in neatly dressed ranks. They’d paid some madman who thought he was a decorator a lot of money to make the place look hip and unique. Maybe it’s my lack of fashion sense talking, but I thought they should have held out for one of those gorillas who has learned to paint. The results would have been of similar quality, and they could have paid in fresh produce.
Here and there men, mostly white, mostly over forty, suffered through a variety of physical activities. Beside each and every one of them was a personal trainer coaching, supporting, helping.
The trainers were all women, none of them older than their late twenties. They all wore ridiculously brief jogging shorts so tight that it had to be some kind of minor miracle that allowed the blood to keep flowing through the girls’ legs. They all wore T-shirts with the gym’s logo printed on them, also tight—and every single woman there had the kind of body that made her outfit look fantastic. No gym in the world had that many gorgeous girls in its employ.
“Ah,” Thomas said after a moment of looking around. “This isn’t a typical health club, is it?”
“Welcome to the most health-conscious brothel in the history of mankind,” I told him.
Thomas whistled quietly through his teeth, surveying the place. “I’d heard that the Velvet Room had been retooled. This is it?”
“Yeah,” I
said.
A brown-haired girl jiggled over to us, her mouth spread in a beauty-contest smile, and for a second I thought her shirt was about to explode under the tension. Bright gold lettering over her left breast read, BILLIE.
“Hello, Mister Dresden,” she chirped. She bobbed her head to Thomas. “Sir. Welcome to Executive Priority. Can I get you a drink before your workout? May I take your coats?”
I held up a hand. “Thanks, Billie, but no. I’m not here for the exercise.”
Her smile stayed locked in place, pretty and meaningless, and she tilted her head to one side.
“I’m here to speak to Ms. Demeter,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Billie said. “She isn’t in.”
The girl was a confection for the eyes, and I felt sure that the other four senses would feel just as well fed after a bit of indulgence, but she wasn’t a good liar. “Yeah, she is,” I said. “Tell her Harry Dresden is here.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said again, like a machine stuck on repeat. “Ms. Demeter is not in the building.”
I gave her my toothiest smile. “You’re kind of new here, eh, Billie?”
The smile flickered, then stabilized again.
“Thomas.” I sighed. “Give her a visual?”
My brother looked around, then went over to a nearby rack of steel dumbbells and picked up the largest set there, one in each hand. With about as much effort as I’d use to bundle twigs, he twisted the steel bars around each other, forming an asymmetric X shape. He held it up to make sure Billie saw it, and then dropped it at her feet. The weights landed with a forceful thump, and Billie flinched when they did.
“You should see the kinds of things he can bend and break,” I said. “Expensive exercise machines, expensive furniture, expensive clients. I don’t know how hard he could throw some of this stuff around, but I’d be lying if I told you that I wasn’t kinda curious.” I leaned down a little closer and said, “Billie, maybe you should kick this one up the line. I’d hate them to dock your pay to replace all the broken things.”
“I’ll be right back, sir,” Billie said in a squeaky whisper, and scurried away.