by Jim Butcher
“Rosie,” I said, cutting into the middle of one of Murphy’s questions. “When was your last fix?”
Murphy glanced over her shoulder at me, frowning. Behind her, the girl gave me a guilty look, her eyes shifting to one side. “What do you mean?” Rosie asked.
“I figure it’s heroin,” I said. I kept my voice pitched to the barest level needed to be audible. “I saw the tracks on you last night.”
“I’m diab-” she began.
“Oh please,” I said, and let the annoyance show in my voice. “You think I’m that stupid?”
“Harry,” Murphy began. There was a warning note in her voice, but my head hurt too much to let it stop me.
“Miss Marcella, I’m trying to help you. Just answer the question.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Two weeks.”
Murphy arched a brow, and her gaze went back to the girl.
“I quit,” she said. “Really. I mean, once I heard that I was pregnant… I can’t do that anymore.”
“Really?” I asked.
She looked up and her eyes were direct, though nothing like confident. “Yes. I’m done with it. I don’t even miss it. The baby’s more important than that.”
I pursed my lips and then nodded. “All right.”
“Miss Marcella,” Murphy said, “thank you for your time.”
“Wait,” she said, as Murphy turned away. “Please. No one will tell us anything about Ken. Do you know how he’s doing? What room he’s in?”
“Ken’s your boyfriend?” Murphy asked in a careful tone.
“Yes. I saw them load him in the ambulance last night. I know he’s here…” Rosie stared at Murphy for a second, and then her face grew even more pale. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”
I was glad I’d gotten a gotten a look at her before she found out about her boyfriend. My imagination provided me with a nice image of watching the emotional wounds open up as though an invisible sword had begun slicing into her, but at least I didn’t have to see it with my Sight, too.
“I’m very sorry,” Murphy said quietly. Her voice was steady, her eyes compassionate.
Molly picked that moment to return with a cup of coffee. She took one look at Rosie, put the coffee down, and then hurried to her. Rosie broke down in choking sobs. Molly immediately sat on the bed beside her, and hugged her while she wept.
“We’ll be in touch,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on, Harry.”
Mouse stared at Rosie with a mournful expression, and I had to tug on his leash a couple of times to get him moving. We departed and headed for the nearest stairwell. Murphy headed for ICU, which was in the neighboring building.
“I didn’t see the track marks on her last night,” she said after a minute. “You pushed her pretty hard.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it might mean something. I don’t know what, yet. But we didn’t have time to waste listening to her denial.”
“She wasn’t straight with you,” Murphy said. “No one kicks heroin that fast. Two weeks. She should still be feeling some of the withdrawal.”
“Yeah,” I said. We went outside to go to the other building. Bright morning sunlight made my head hurt even more, and the sidewalk began revolving. I stopped to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light.
“You all right?” Murphy asked.
“It’s hard. Seeing someone like that,” I said quietly. “And she’s probably the least mangled of the three.”
She frowned. “What did you see?”
I tried to tell her what Rosie had looked like. It sounded surreal and garbled, even to me. I didn’t think I had conveyed it very well.
“You look terrible,” she said when I finished.
“It’ll pass. Just got this damned headache.” I shook my head and focused on taking steady breaths until I could force the pain to recede. “Okay. I’m good.”
“Did you learn what you were hoping for?” Murphy asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll need to look at the others, too. See if the injuries on them give me some kind of pattern.”
“They’re in ICU.”
“Yeah. I need to find a way to them without getting too close to someone on life support. I can’t stay around to talk. I’ll need maybe a minute, ninety seconds to look at them both. Then I’ll get out. Let you talk.”
Murphy took a deep breath and said, “You sure you should do this?”
“No,” I told her. “But I can’t help you if I don’t get to look at them. I can’t do that any other way. If I can stay calm and relaxed, it shouldn’t hurt anything for me to be there for a minute or two.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“When can I?”
She frowned at me, but nodded. “Let me go ahead of you,” she said. “Wait here.”
I found a chair, and took it down the hall and sat down with Mouse and Rawlins. We shared a companionable silence. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.
My headache finally began to fade away just as Murphy returned. “All right,” she said quietly. “We need to go down a floor and then use the back stairs. A nurse is going to let us in. You won’t have to walk past any of the other rooms before you get to our witnesses.”
“Okay,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”
Chapter Seventeen
I wasted no time. We went up the stairs, and I was already preparing my Sight. A nurse opened the door to the stairway, and I simply stepped into the first door on my left-the catatonic girl’s, Miss Becton’s. I stepped into the doorway and raised my Sight.
She was a young girl, still in her late teens, nervously thin, her hair a shocking color of red that for some reason did not strike me as a dye job. She lay on her front, her head turned to the side, muddy brown eyes open and blank. Her back had been covered in bandages.
As my Sight focused on her, I saw more. The girl’s psyche had been savagely mauled, and as I watched her, phantom bruises darkened a few patches of skin that remained, and blood and watery fluids oozed from the rest of her torn flesh. Her mouth was set in a continual, silent wail, and beneath the real-world glaze, her eyes were wide with terror. If there’d been enough left of her behind those eyes, Miss Becton would have been screaming.
My stomach rolled and I barely spotted a trash can in time to throw up into it.
Murphy crouched down at my side, her hand on my back. “Harry? Are you okay?”
Anger and empathy and grief warred for first place in my thoughts. Across the room, I was dimly conscious of a clock radio warbling to life and dying in a puff of smoke. The room’s fluorescent lights began to flicker as the violent emotions played hell with the aura of magic around me.
“No,” I said in a vicious, half-strangled growl. “I’m not okay.”
Murphy stared at me for a second, and then looked at the girl. “Is she…”
“She isn’t coming back,” I said.
I spat a few times into the trash can and stood up. My headache started to return. The girl’s terrified eyes stayed bright and clear in my imagination. She’d been out for a fun time. A favorite movie. Maybe coffee or dinner with friends afterward. She sure as hell hadn’t woken up yesterday morning and wondered if today would be the day some kind of nightmarish thing would rip away her sanity.
“Harry,” Murphy said again, her voice very gentle. “You didn’t do this to her.”
“Dammit,” I said. I sounded bitter. She found my right hand with hers and I closed my fingers around hers with a kind of quiet desperation. “Dammit, Murph. I’m going to find this thing and kill it.”
Her hand was steady and strong, like her voice. “I’ll help.”
I nodded and held tight to her hand for a minute. There wasn’t any tension in that contact, no quivering sensation of excitement. Murphy was human and alive. She held my hand to remind me that I was too. I somehow managed to push the sense of visceral horror I’d seen filling the girl from
my immediate thoughts, until I felt steadier. I squeezed her hand once and released it.
“Come on,” I said, my voice rough. “Pell.”
“Are you sure you don’t need a minute?”
“It won’t help,” I said. I gestured at the radio and the lights. “I need to get this over with and leave.”
She chewed on her lip but nodded at me, and led me to the door across the hall. I didn’t want to do it, but I hauled up my Sight again and braced myself as I followed on Murphy’s heels and Looked at Clark Pell.
Pell was a sour-looking old cuss made out of shoe leather and gristle. One arm and both legs were in casts, and he was in traction. One side of his face was swollen with bruising. A plastic tube for oxygen ran beneath his nose. Bandages swathed his head, though bits of coarse grey hair stuck out. One eye was swollen mostly shut. The other was open, dark, and glittering.
Beyond the physical surface, his wounds were very nearly as dire as those the girl had suffered. He had been brutally beaten. Phantom bruises slid around his wrinkled skin, and the shapes of distorted bones poked disquietingly at the surface. And I saw something about the old man, too. Beneath the shoe leather and gristle, there were more shoe leather and gristle. And iron. The old man had been badly beaten, but it wasn’t the first such he had endured-physically or spiritually. He was a fighter, a survivor. He was afraid, but he was also angry and defiant.
Whatever had done this to him hadn’t gotten what it wanted-not like it had with the girl. It had to settle for a physical beating when its attack hadn’t elicited the terror and anguish it had expected. The old man had faced it, and he didn’t have any power of his own, beyond a lifetime of stubborn will. If he’d done it, as painful and as frightening as it must have been, I could steel myself against Looking at the aftermath.
I released my Sight slowly and took a deep breath. Murphy, poised beside me as if she expected me to abruptly collapse, tilted her head and peered at me.
“I’m all right,” I told her quietly.
Pell made a weak but rude sound. “Whiner. Not even a cast.”
I faced the old man and said, “Who did this to you.”
He shook his head, a feeble motion. “Crazy.”
Murphy started to say something but I raised my hand and shook my head at her, and she fell silent, waiting.
“Sir,” I said to Pell. “I swear to you. I’m not a cop. I’m not a doctor. I think you saw something strange.”
He stared at me, his one eye narrowed.
“Didn’t you?” I asked quietly.
“Ha… H-h-” he tried to say, but the word broke into a wracking, quiet cough.
I held up my hand and waited for him to recover. Then I said, “Hammerhands.”
Pell’s lip lifted, a faint little sneer. His good hand moved weakly, and I stepped over closer to him.
“You told Greene it was someone dressed like Hammerhands,” I guessed.
Pell closed his eye tiredly. “Pretty much.”
I nodded. “But it wasn’t just a costume,” I said quietly. “This was something more.”
Pell gave a slow shudder, before opening his eye again, dull with fatigue. “It was him” the old man whispered. “Don’t know how. Don’t make no sense. But… you could feel it.”
“I believe you,” I told him.
He watched me for a second and then nodded, closing his eye. “Thing is. That was the only damn movie ever scared me. Wasn’t even all that good.” He gave a weak shake of his head and said, “Buzz off.”
“Thank you,” I told him quietly. Then I turned and walked toward the door.
Murphy followed at my side, and we headed back down the stairs. “Harry?” she asked. “What was that?”
“Pell,” I said. “He gave us what we needed.”
“He did?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he did. This thing has got to be some kind of phobophage.”
“A what?”
“It’s a spiritual entity that feeds on fear. It attacks in order to scare people, and feeds on the emotion.”
“It didn’t give Pell those broken bones by shouting ‘boo!’ ” Murphy said.
“Yeah. It’s got to manifest a physical body in order to come to the real world. Pretty standard for all those demon types.”
“How do we beat it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know yet. First I have to find out what kind of phobophage it is. But I’ve got a place to pick up a trail now. There are only going to be so many beings who could have crossed over to Chicago from the Nevernever to do what this thing did.”
We emerged into the sunshine and I stopped for a minute, lifting my face up to the light.
The horror and misery I’d seen on the victims remained in place, a clear and terrible image, but the sunlight and the equally sharp memory of old Pell’s defiance took the edge off.
“You going to be all right?” Murphy asked.
“I think so,” I said quietly.
“Can you tell me what you saw?”
I did, in as few words as I could.
She listened, and then nodded slowly. “It hardly seems like what happened to them happened to Rosie.”
“Maybe Rawlins and I got there in time,” I said. “Maybe it hadn’t had time to do more than a little foreplay”
“Or maybe there’s another reason,” Murphy said.
“Remind me to lecture you about the interest rate on borrowed trouble,” I said. “Simplest explanation is the one to go with until we find out something to the contrary.”
Murphy nodded. “If this creature hit the convention twice, it will probably do it again. Seems to me that maybe we should advise them to close it down. No convention, no attacks, right?”
“Too late for that,” I said.
She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“The creature feeds on fear. It’s attracted to it,” I said. “If they shut down the convention, it will scare a lot of people.”
“News reports will do that, too.”
“Not the same way,” I said. “A news report might unsettle some folks. But the people at the convention here, the ones who knew the victims, who were in the same buildings-it will hit them harder. It will make what happened here something dangerous. Something real.”
“If the attacker is that dangerous, they should be afraid,” Murphy said.
“Except that intense fear will attract the attacker again,” I said. “In fact, enough of it would attract more predators of the same nature.”
“More?” Murphy said, her voice sharp.
“Like blood in the water draws in sharks,” I said. “Only instead of being at the convention, the targets will be scattered all over Chicago. Right now, the only advantage we have is that we know generally where the thing is going to strike again. If the convention closes, we lose that advantage.”
“And the next chance we get to pick up its trail will be when the next corpse turns up.” Murphy shook her head. “What do you need from me?”
“For now, a ride home,” I said. “I’ll have some consulting to do, and…” I suddenly ground my teeth. “Dammit, I almost forgot.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a lunch meeting I can’t miss.”
“More important than this?” she asked.
“I can’t let it slide,” I said. “Council stuff. Maybe important.”
She shook her head. “You take too much responsibility on yourself, Harry. You’re just one man. A good man, but you’re still only human.”
“This is what happens when I don’t wear the coat,” I opined. “People start thinking I’m not a superhero.”
She snorted and we started back toward her car. “I’m serious,” she said. “You can’t be everywhere at once. You can’t stop all the bad things that are going to happen.”
“Doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t try,” I said.
“Maybe. But you take it personal. You tear yourself up over it. Like with that girl just now.” She shook
her head. “I hate to see you like that. You’ve got worries enough without beating yourself up for things you didn’t do.”
I shrugged and fell quiet until we got back to the car. Then I said, “I just can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing people get hurt like that. I hate it.”
She regarded me steadily and nodded. “Me too.”
Mouse thumped his head against my leg and leaned on me so that I could feel his warmth.
That settled, we all got into Murphy’s car, so that I could track down I knew not what, just as soon as I got done opening an entirely new can of worms with the Summer Knight.
Chapter Eighteen
At my request, Murphy dropped me off a couple of blocks from home so that I could give Mouse at least a little chance to stretch his legs. He seemed appreciative and walked along sniffing busily, his tail fanning the air. I kept a watch out behind me, meanwhile, but my unknown tail did not appear. I kept an eye out for any other people or vehicles that might have been following me, in case he was working with a team, but I didn’t spot anyone suspicious. That didn’t stop me from keeping a paranoid eye over my shoulder until we made it back to the old boardinghouse, and I went down the stairs to my apartment door.
I muttered my defensive wards down, temporarily neutralizing powerful constructions of magic that I had placed around my apartment shortly after the beginning of the war with the Red Court. I opened the dead bolt on the steel door, twisted the handle, and then slammed my shoulder into the door as hard as I could to open it.
The door flew open to a distance of five or six whole inches. I kicked it a few times to open it the rest of the way, then tromped in with Mouse and looked up to find the barrel of a chopped-down shotgun six inches from my face.
“Those things are illegal, you know,” I said.
Thomas scowled at me from the other end of the shotgun and lowered the weapon. I heard a metallic click as he put the safety back on. “You’ve got to get that door fixed. Every time you come in it sounds like an assault team.”
“Boy,” I replied, letting Mouse off his lead. “One little siege and you get all paranoid.”