by Jim Butcher
"Jessica Blanche." I checked the profiles. "Nineteen. And pretty. Or at least prettyish."
"Hard to tell with dead girls," Butters said. "But yeah, that was my take."
"But not a suicide."
"Like I said. Dead, and in hotel rooms."
"Then what's the connection to the other deaths?"
"Little things," Butters said. "Like, she had a purse with ID in it, but no clothes."
"Meaning someone had to have taken them away." I rolled up the papers into a tube and thumped them against my leg, thoughtfully. The door opened, and Molly came back in, wiping at her mouth with a paper towel. "This girl still here?"
Butters lifted his eyebrows. "Yeah. Miss Blanche. Why?"
"I think maybe Molly can help."
Molly blinked and looked up at me. "Um. What?"
"I doubt it's going to be pleasant, Molly," I told her. "But you might be able to read something."
"Off of a dead girl?" Molly asked quietly.
"You're the one who wanted to come along," I said.
She frowned, facing me, and then took a deep breath. "Yes. Um. Yes, I was. I mean, yes, I will. Try."
"Will you?" I asked. "You sure? Won't be fun. But if it gets us more information, it could save someone's life."
I watched her for a moment, until her expression set in determination and she met my eyes. She straightened and nodded once. "Yes."
"All right," I said. "Get yourself set for it. Butters, we need to give her a few minutes alone. Can we go get Miss Blanche?"
"Um," Butters said. "What's this going to entail, exactly?"
"Nothing much. I'll explain it on the way."
He chewed on his lip for a moment, and then nodded once. "This way."
He led me down the hall to the storage room. It was another exam room, like the one we'd just been in, but it also featured a wall of body-sized refrigerated storage units like morgues are supposed to have. This was the room we'd been in when a necromancer and a gaggle of zombies had put a bullet through the head of Butters's capacity to ignore the world of the supernatural.
Butters got out a gurney, consulted a record sheet on a clipboard, and wheeled it over to the fridges. "I don't like to come in here anymore. Not since Phil."
"Me either," I said.
He nodded. "Here, get that side."
I didn't want to. I am a wizard, sure, but corpses are inherently icky, even if they aren't animated and trying to kill you. But I tried to pretend we were sliding a heavy load of groceries onto a cart, and helped him draw a body, resting upon a metal tray and covered in a heavy cloth, onto the gurney.
"So," he said. "What is she going to do?"
"Look into its eyes," I said.
He gave me a somewhat skeptical look. "Trying to see the last thing impressed on her retinas or something? You know that's pretty much mythical, right?"
"Other impressions get left on a body," I said. "Final thoughts, sometimes. Emotions, sensations." I shook my head. "Technically, those kinds of impressions can get left on almost any kind of inanimate object. You've heard of object reading, right?"
"That's for real?" he asked.
"Yeah. But it's an easy sort of thing to contaminate, and it can be tricky as hell—and entirely apart from that, it's extremely difficult to do."
"Oh," Butters said. "But you think there might be something left on the corpse?"
"Maybe."
"That sounds really useful."
"Potentially."
"So how come you don't do it all the time?" he asked.
"It's delicate," I said. "When it comes to magic, I'm not much for delicate."
He frowned and we started rolling the gurney. "But your only half-trained apprentice is?"
"The wizarding business isn't standardized," I said. "Any given wizard will have an affinity for different kinds of magic, due to their natural talents, personalities, experiences. Each has different strengths."
"What are yours?" he asked.
"Finding things. Following things. Blowing things up, mostly," I said. "I'm good at those. Redirecting energy, sending energy out into the world to resonate with the energy of what I'm trying to find. Moving energy around or redirecting it or storing it up to use later."
"Aha," he said. "None of which is delicate?"
"I've practiced enough to handle a lot of different kinds of delicate magic," I said. "But… it's the difference between me strumming power chords on a guitar and me playing a complex classical Spanish piece."
Nutters absorbed that and nodded. "And the kid plays Spanish guitar?"
"Close enough. She's not as strong as me, but she's got a gift for the more subtle magic. Especially mental and emotional stuff. It's what got her in so much trouble with…"
I bit my tongue and stopped in midsentence. It wasn't my place to discuss Molly's violations of the White Council's Laws of Magic with others. She would have enough trouble getting past the horrible acts she'd committed in innocence without me painting her as a psycho monster-in-training.
Butters watched my face for a few seconds, then nodded and let it pass. "What do you think she'll find?"
"No clue," I said. "That's why we look."
"Could you do this?" he said. "I mean, if you had to?"
"I've tried it," I hedged. "But I'm bad about projecting things onto the object, and I can barely ever get something intelligible out of it."
"You said it might not be pleasant for her," Butters said. "Why?"
"Because if something's there, and she can sense it, she gets to experience it. First person. Like she's living it herself."
Butters let out a low whistle. "Oh. Yeah. I guess that could be bad."
We got back to the other room, and I peered in before opening the door. Molly was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, her legs folded lotus-style, her head tilted slightly up. Her hands rested on her thighs, the tips of her thumbs pressed lightly against the tips of her middle fingers.
"Quietly," I murmured. "No noise until she's finished. Okay?"
Butters nodded. I opened the door as silently as I could. We brought the gurney into the room, left it in front of Molly, and then at my beckon, Butters and I went to the far wall and settled in to wait.
It took Molly better than twenty minutes to focus her mind for the comparatively simple spell. Focus of intention, of will, is integral to any use of magic. I'd drawn myself up to focus power so often and for so long that I only had to actually make a conscious effort to do it when a spell was particularly complex, dangerous, or when I thought it wise to be slow and cautious. Most of the time, it took me less than a second to gather up my will—which is critical in any situation where speed is a factor. Drooling abominations and angry vampires don't give you twenty minutes to get a punch ready.
Molly, though she was learning quickly, had a long damned way to go.
When she finally opened her eyes, they were distant, unfocused. She rose to her feet with slow, careful movements, and drifted over to the gurney with the corpse. She pulled the sheet down, revealing the dead girl's face. Then Molly leaned down, her expression still distant, and murmured quietly beneath her breath as she opened the corpse's eyelids.
She got something almost instantly.
Her eyes flew open wide, and she let out a short gasp. Her breath rasped in and out frantically several times before her eyes rolled back up into her head. She stood frozen and rigid for a pair of quivering seconds, and then her breath escaped in a low, rough cry and her knees buckled. She did not fall to the floor so much as melt down onto it. Then she lay there, breathing hard and letting out a continuous stream of guttural whimpers.
Her breathing continued, fast and hard, her eyes unfocused. Her body rippled with several slow, undulating motions that drew the eye to her hips and breasts. Then she slowly went limp, her panting gradually easing, though little, unmistakably pleased sounds slithered from her lips on every exhalation.
I blinked at her.
Well.
&
nbsp; I hadn't been expecting that.
Butters gulped audibly. Then he said, "Uh. Did she just do what I think she just did?"
I pursed my lips. "Um. Maybe."
"What just happened?"
"She, um." I coughed. "She got something."
"She got something, all right," Butters muttered. He sighed. "I haven't gotten anything like that in about two years."
For me, it had been more like four. "I hear you," I said, more emphatically than I meant to.
"Is she underage?" he asked. "Legally speaking?"
"No."
"Okay. I don't feel quite so… Nabokovian, then." He raked his fingers back through his hair. "What do we do now?"
I tried to look professional and unfazed. "We wait for her to recover."
"Uh-huh." He looked at Molly and sighed. "I need to get out more."
Me and you both, man. "Butters, is there any way you could get her some water or something?"
"Sure," he said. "You?"
"Nah."
"Right back." Butters covered up the corpse and slipped out.
I went over to the girl and hunkered down by her. "Hey, grasshopper. Can you hear me?"
It took her longer than it should have to answer, like when you're on the phone with someone halfway around the world. "Yes. I… I hear you."
"You okay?"
"Oh, God." She sighed, smiling. "Yes."
I muttered under my breath, rubbed at the incipient headache beginning between my eyes, and thought dark thoughts. Dammit all, every time I'd opened myself up to some kind of horrible psychic shock in the name of investigation, I'd gotten another nightmare added to my collection. Her first time up to bat, and the grasshopper got…
What had she gotten?
"I want you to tell me what you sensed, right away. Sometimes the details fade out, like when you forget parts of a dream."
"Right," she murmured in a sleepy-sounding drawl. "Details. She…" Molly shook her head. "She felt good. Really, really good."
"I gathered that much," I said. "What else?"
Molly kept shaking her head slowly. "Nothing else. Just that. It was all sensation. Ecstasy." She frowned a little, as if struggling to order her thoughts. "As if the rest of her senses had been blinded by it, somehow. I don't think there was anything else. Not sight nor sound nor thought nor memory. Nothing. She didn't even know it when she died."
"Think about it," I said quietly. "Absolutely anything you can remember could be important."
Butters came back in just then, carrying a bottle of water beaded with drops of condensation. He tossed it to me, and I passed the cold drink to Molly. "Here," I told her. "Drink up."
"Thanks." She opened the bottle, turned on her side, and started guzzling it without even sitting up. The pose did a lot to make her clothing look tighter.
Butters stared for a second, then sighed and quite evidently forced himself to go over to his desk and start sharpening pencils. "So what do we know?"
"Looks like she died happy," I said. "Did you run a toxicology check on her?"
"Yeah. Some residual THC, but she could have gotten that from the contact high at a concert. Otherwise she was clean."
"Damn," I said. "Can you think of anything else that would do… that to a victim?"
"Nothing pharmacological," Butters said. "Maybe if someone ran a wire into the pleasure centers of her brain and kept stimulating them. But, uh, there's no evidence of open-skull surgery. I would have noticed something like that."
"Uh-huh," I said.
"So it must be something from the spooky side," Butters said.
"Could be." I consulted my packet again. "What did she do?"
"No one knew," Butters said. "No one seemed to know anything about her. No one came to claim the body. We couldn't find any relations. It's why she's still here."
"No local address, either," I said.
"No, just the one on an Indiana driver's license, but it dead-ended. Not much else in her purse."
"And the killer took her clothes."
"Apparently," Butters said. "But why?"
I shrugged. "Must have been something on them he didn't want found." I pursed my lips. "Or something on them he didn't want me to find."
Molly abruptly sat up straight. "Harry, I remember something."
"Yeah?"
"Sensation," she said, resting one hand over her belly button. "It was like… I don't know, like hearing twenty different bands playing at the same time, only tactile. But there was a prickling sort of sensation over her stomach. Like one of those medical pinwheel things."
"A Wartenberg Pinwheel," Butters supplied.
"Eh?" I said.
"Like the one I use to test the nerves on your hand, Harry," Butters supplied.
"Oh, ow, right." I frowned at Molly. "How the hell do you know what one of those feels like?"
Molly gave me a lazy, wicked smile. "This is one of those things you don't want me to explain."
Butters let out a delicate cough. "They are sometimes used recreationally, Harry."
My cheeks felt warm. "Ah. Right. Butters, you got a felt-tip marker?"
He got one out of his desk and tossed it to me. I passed it to Molly. "Show me where."
She nodded, lay back down on her back, and pulled her shirt up from her stomach. Then she closed her eyes, took the lid off the marker, and traced it slowly over the skin of her abdomen, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
When she was finished, the black ink spelled out clear, large letters:
EX 22:18.
Exodus again.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said quietly. "We have a serial killer."
Chapter Four
Molly said little on the way back. She just leaned against the window with half-closed eyes, probably basking in the afterglow.
"Molly," I told her in my gentlest voice. "Heroin feels good, too, Ask Rosy and Nelson."
The little smile of pleasure faded into blankness, and she stared at me for a while. By degrees, her expression changed to a frown of consideration, and then to a nauseated grimace.
"It killed her," she said finally. "It killed her. I mean, it felt so good… but it wasn't."
I nodded.
"She never knew it. She never had a chance." Molly looked queasy for a minute. "It was a vampire, right? From the White Court? I mean, they use sex to feed on life energy, right?"
"That's one of the things it could be," I said quietly. "There are plenty of demonic creatures in the Nevernever that groove on the succubus routine, though."
"And she was killed in a hotel," she said. "Where there was no threshold to protect her from a demon."
"Very good, grasshopper," I said. "Once you consider that the other victims weren't done White Court style, it means that either there is more than one killer or the same one is varying his techniques. It's too early for anything but wild guesses."
She frowned. "What are you going to do next?"
I thought about it for a minute. "I've got to figure out what all of the killer's victims have in common, if anything."
"They're dead?" Molly offered.
I smiled a little. "Besides that."
"Okay," she said. "So what do you do?"
I nodded to the papers Butters had given me, now resting on the dashboard. "I start there. See what I can extrapolate from the data I've got. Then I look people up and ask questions."
"What do I do?" she asked.
"That depends. How many beads can you move?" I asked her.
She glowered at me for a minute. Then she unbound the bracelet of dark beads from her left wrist and held it up. The beads all slipped down to the bottom of the bracelet, leaving three or four inches of bare cord.
Molly focused on the bracelet, a device I'd created to help her practice focusing her mind and stilling her thoughts. Focus and stillness are important when you're slinging magic around. It's a primal force of creation, and it responds to your thoughts and emotions—whether you want it to or not. If
your thoughts get fragmented or muddled, or if you aren't paying complete attention to what you're doing, the magic can respond in any number of unpredictable and dangerous ways.
Molly was still learning about it. She had some real talent, don't get me wrong, but what she lacked was not ability, but judgment. That's what I'd been trying to teach her over the past year or so—to use her power responsibly, cautiously, and with respect for the dangers the Art could present. If she didn't get a more solid head on her shoulders, her talent with magic was going to get her killed—probably taking me with her.
Molly was a warlock.
She'd used magic to tinker with the minds of two of her friends in an effort to free them from drug addiction, but her motives had been mixed, and the results were moderately horrific. One of the kids still hadn't recovered enough to function on his own. The other had pulled through, but was still facing a lot of problems.
Normally, the White Council of wizards kills you for breaking one of the Laws of Magic. Practically the only time they didn't was when a wizard of the Council offered to take responsibility for the warlock's future conduct, until they could satisfy the Council that their intentions were good, their ways mended. If they could, fine. If not, the warlock died. So did the wizard who had taken responsibility for him.
I'd been a warlock. Hell, plenty of the Council wondered if I still was a ticking bomb getting ready to blow. When Molly had been bound and hooded and dragged before the Council for trial, I'd stepped in. I had to.
Sometimes I regretted the hell out of that decision. Once you've felt the power of dark magic, it could be awfully hard to resist using it again, and Molly's errors tended to run in that direction. The kid was good at heart, but she was just so damned young. She'd grown up in a strict household; she'd gone insane with freedom the minute she ran away and got out on her own. She was back home now, but she was still trying to find the balance and self-discipline she'd need to survive in the wizarding business.
Teaching her to throw a gout of fire at a target really wasn't terribly difficult. The hard part was teaching her why to do it, why not to do it, and when she should or should not do it. Molly saw magic as the best solution to any given problem. It wasn't, and she had to learn that.