by Jim Butcher
Rudolph opened his mouth to spit venom on me again, but Stallings cut him off. “Just do it, Rudy. Go get Sonia and bring her back here.”
Rudolph glowered but did what he was told, going into the house.
Stallings tapped out a cigarette and lit up. He puffed for a second, thoughtfully. “So you can’t do magic inside a house unless someone asks you in?”
“Not a house,” I said. “A home. There’s a difference.”
“So what about Victor Sells’s place? I hear you took him on, right?”
I shook my head. “He’d screwed up his threshold. He was running his business out of it, using the place for dark ceremonies. It wasn’t a home anymore.”
“So you can’t mess with anything on its own turf?”
“Can’t mess with mortals, no. Monsters don’t get a threshold.”
“Why not?”
“How the hell should I know,” I said. “They just don’t. I can’t know everything, right?”
“Guess so,” Stallings said, and after a minute he nodded. “Sure, I see what you mean. So it shuts you down?”
“Not completely, but it makes it a lot harder to do anything. Like wearing a lead suit. That’s why vampires have to keep out. Other nasties like that. If you give them that much of a handicap, they have trouble just staying alive, much less using any freaky powers.”
Stallings shook his head. “This magic crap. I never would have believed it before I came here. I still have trouble with it.”
“Yeah? That’s good. Means you aren’t running into it too much.”
He blew out twin columns of smoke from his nostrils. “Could be changing. Last couple of days, we’ve had some people go missing. Bums, street people, folks some of the cops and detectives know.”
I frowned. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s all rumors so far. And people like that, they can just be gone the next day. But since I started working S.I., stuff like that makes me nervous.”
I frowned, and debated telling Stallings what I knew about Bianca’s party. Doubtless, there would be a whole flock of vampires in from out of town for the event. Maybe she and her flunkies were rounding up hors d’oeuvres. But I had no proof of that—for all I knew, the disappearances, if they were disappearances, could be related to the turbulence in the Nevernever. If so, the cops couldn’t do anything about it. And if it was something else, I could be starting a very nasty exchange with Bianca. I didn’t want to sic the cops on her for no reason. I’m pretty sure Bianca had the resources to send them back at me—and she could probably make it look like I’d done something to deserve it, too.
Besides that, in the circles of the supernatural community, an Old World code of conduct still ruled. When you have a problem, you settle it face to face, within the circle. You don’t bring in the cops and the other mortals as weapons. They’re the nuclear missiles of the supernatural world. If you show people a supernatural brawl going on, it’s going to scare the snot out of them and the next thing you know, they’re burning everything and everyone in sight. Most people wouldn’t care that one scary guy might have been right and the other was wrong. Both guys are scary, so you ace both of them and sleep better at night.
It had been that way since the dawn of the Age of Reason and the rising power of mortal kind. And more power to the people, I say. I hated all these bullies, vampires, demons, and bloodthirsty old deities rampaging around like they ruled the world. Never mind that, until a few centuries ago, they really had.
In any case, I decided to keep my mouth shut about Bianca’s gathering until I knew enough to be certain, either way.
Stallings and I made small talk until Sonia Malone appeared at the door. She was a woman of medium height, comfortably overweight and solid-looking. Her face would have been gorgeous when she was a young woman, and it still carried that beauty, refined by years of self-confidence and steady reliability. Her eyes were reddened, and she wore no makeup, but her features seemed composed. She wore a simple dress in a floral print, her only jewelry the wedding band on her finger.
“Mr. Dresden,” she said, politely. “Micky told me that you saved his life, last year.”
I coughed and looked down. Though I guess that was true, technically, I still didn’t see it that way. “We all did everything we could, ma’am. Your husband was very brave.”
“Detective Rudolph said that I needed to invite you in.”
“I don’t want to go where I’m not welcome, ma’am,” I replied.
Sonia wrinkled up her nose and eyed Stallings. “Put that out, Sergeant.”
Stallings dropped the cigarette and mushed it out with his foot.
“All right, Mr. Dresden,” she said. For a moment, her composure faltered and her lips began to tremble. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, smoothing over her features, then opened her eyes again. “If you can help my Micky, please come in. I invite you.”
“Thank you,” I said. I stepped forward, through the door, and felt the silent tension of the threshold parting around me like a beaded curtain rimed with frost.
We went through a living room where several cops, people I knew from S.I., sat around talking quietly. It reminded me of a funeral. They looked up at me as I went by, and talk ceased. I nodded to them, and we went on past, to a staircase leading up to the second floor.
“He was up late last night,” she told me, her voice quiet. “Sometimes he can’t sleep, and he didn’t come to bed until late. I got up early, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I let him sleep in.” Mrs. Malone stopped at the top of the stairs, and pointed down the hall at a closed door. “Th-there,” she said. “I’m sorry. I c-can’t . . .” She took another deep breath. “I need to see about lunch. Are you hungry?”
“Oh. Yes, sure.”
“All right,” she said, and retreated back down the stairs.
I swallowed and looked at the door at the end of the hall, then headed toward it. My steps sounded loud in my own ears. I knocked gently on the door.
Karrin Murphy opened it. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of a leader of a group of cops charged with solving every bizarre crime that fell between the lines of the law enforcement system. She didn’t look like someone who would stand, with her feet planted, putting tiny silver bullets into an oncoming freight train of a loup-garou, either—but she was.
Karrin looked up at me from her five-foot-nothing in height. Her blue eyes, normally clear and bright, looked sunken. She’d shoved her golden hair under a baseball cap, and wore jeans and a white T-shirt. Her shoulder harness wrinkled the cotton around the shoulder where her sidearm hung. Lines stood out like cracks in a sunbaked field, around her mouth, her eyes. “Hi, Harry,” she said. Her voice too was quiet, gruff.
“Hiya, Murph. You don’t look so good.”
She tried to smile. It looked ghastly. “I . . . I didn’t know who else to call.”
I frowned, troubled. On any other day, Murphy would have returned my mildly insulting comment with compounded interest. She opened the door farther, and let me in.
I remembered Micky Malone as an energetic man of medium height, balding, with a broad smile and a nose that peeled in the sun if he walked outside to get his morning paper. The cane and limp were additions too recent for me to have firmly stuck in my memory. Micky wore old, quality suits, and was careful never to get the jackets messy or his wife would never let him hear the end of it.
I didn’t remember Micky with a fixed, tooth-baring grin and eyes spread out in that helter-skelter gleam of madness. I didn’t remember him covered in small scratches, or his fingernails crusted with his own blood, or his wrists and ankles cuffed to the iron-framed bed. He panted, grinning around the neatly decorated little room. I could smell sweat and urine. There were no lights on in the room, and the curtains had been drawn over the windows, leaving it in a brownish haze.
He turned his head toward me and his eyes widened. He sucked in a breath and threw back his head in a long, falsetto-pitched scream like a coyote’s. Then he
started laughing and rocking back and forth, jerking on the steel restraints, making the bed shake in a steady, squeaking rhythm.
“Sonia called us this morning,” Murphy said, toneless. “She’d locked herself into her closet and had a cellular. We got here right before Micky finished breaking down the closet door.”
“She called the cops?”
“No. She called me. Said she didn’t want them to see Micky like this. That it would ruin him.”
I shook my head. “Damn. Brave lady. And he’s been like this ever since?”
“Yeah. He was just . . . crazy mean. Screaming and spitting and biting.”
“Has he said anything?” I asked.
“Not a word,” Murphy said. “Animal noises.” She crossed her arms and looked up at me, at my eyes for a second, before looking away. “What happened to him, Harry?”
Micky giggled and started bouncing his hips up and down on the bed as he rocked, making it sound as though a couple of hyperkinetic teenagers were coupling there. My stomach turned. No wonder Mrs. Malone hadn’t been willing to come back into this room.
“You better give me a minute to find out,” I said.
“Could he be . . . you know. Possessed? Like in the movies?”
“I don’t know yet, Murph.”
“Could it be some kind of spell?”
“Murphy, I don’t know.”
“Dammit, Harry,” she snapped. “You’d damned well better find out.” She clenched her fists and shook with suppressed fury.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I will. Give me some time with him.”
“Harry, I swear, if you can’t help him—” Her voice caught in her throat, and tears sparkled in her eyes. “He’s one of mine, dammit.”
“Easy, Murph,” I told her, making my voice as gentle as I knew how. I opened the door for her. “Go get some coffee, all right? I’ll see what I can do.”
She glanced up at me and then back at Malone. “It’s okay, Micky,” she said. “We’re all here for you. You won’t be alone.”
Micky Malone gave her that fixed grin and then licked his lips before bursting out into another chorus of giggles. Murphy shivered and then walked out of the room, her head bowed.
And left me alone with the madman.
Chapter Thirteen
I drew up a chair beside the bed and sat down. Micky stared at me with white-rimmed eyes. I rummaged around in the inside pocket of my duster. I had some chalk there, in case I needed to draw a circle. A candle and some matches. A couple of old receipts. Not much, magically speaking, to work with.
“Hi, there, Micky,” I said. “Can you hear me in there?”
Micky broke out in another fit of giggles. I made sure to keep my eyes away from his. Hell’s bells, I did not want to get drawn into a soulgaze with Micky Malone at the moment.
“All right, Micky,” I said, keeping my voice calm, low, like you do with animals. “I’m going to touch you—okay? I think I’ll be able to tell if there’s anything inside of you if I do. I’m not going to hurt you, so don’t freak out.” As I spoke, I reached out a hand toward his bare arm and laid it lightly upon Micky’s skin.
He was fever-hot to the touch. I could sense some kind of force at work on him—not the tingling energy of a practitioner’s aura, or the ocean-deep power of Michael’s faith, but it was there, nonetheless. Some kind of cold, crawling energy oozed over him.
What the hell?
It didn’t feel like any kind of spell I’d ever experienced. And it wasn’t a possession, I was sure of that. I would have been able to sense any kind of spirit-being in him, through a physical touch.
Micky stared at me for a second and then thrust his head at my hand, his teeth making snapping motions. I jerked back even though he couldn’t have reached me. Someone trying to bite you makes you react, more than if they take a punch at you. Biting is just more primal. Spooky.
Micky started giggling again, rocking the bed back and forth.
“All right,” I breathed. “I’m going to have to get a little desperate, here. If you weren’t a friend, Micky . . .” I closed my eyes for a moment, steeling myself, then focused my will into a spot right between my eyebrows, only a little higher. I felt the tension gather there, the pressure, and when I opened my eyes again, I’d opened my wizard’s Sight, too.
The Sight is a blessing and a curse. It lets you see things, things you couldn’t normally see. With my Sight, I can see even the most ethereal of spirits. I can see the energies of life stirring and moving, running like blood through the world, between the earth and the sky, between water and fire. Enchantments stand out like cords braided from fiber-optic cables, or maybe Las Vegas-quality neon, depending on how complicated or powerful they are. You can sometimes see the demons that walk among mankind in human form, this way. Or the angels. You see things the way they really are, in spirit and in soul, as well as in body.
The problem is that anything you see stays with you. No matter how horrible, no matter how revolting, no matter how madness-inducing or terrifying—it stays with you. Forever. Always right there in your mind in full technicolor, never fading or becoming easier to bear. Sometimes you see things that are so beautiful you want to keep them with you, always.
But more often, in my line of work, you see things like Micky Malone.
He was dressed in boxers and a white undershirt, stained with bits of blood and sweat and worse. But when I turned my Sight on him, I saw something different.
He had been ravaged. Torn apart. He was missing flesh, everywhere. Something had attacked him and taken out sections of him in huge bites. I’d seen pictures of people who’d been attacked by sharks, had hunks of meat just taken, gone. That’s what Micky looked like. It wasn’t visible to the flesh, but something had torn his mind, and maybe his soul, to bloody shreds. He bled and bled, endlessly, never staining the sheets.
And wound around him, starting at his throat and running down to one ankle was a strand of black wire, oversized barbs gouging into his flesh, the ends disappearing seamlessly into his skin.
Just like Agatha Hagglethorn.
I stared at him, horrified, my stomach writhing and heaving. I had to fight to keep from throwing up. Micky looked up at me and seemed to sense something was different, because he went abruptly still. His smile didn’t look mad to me anymore. It looked agonized, like a grimace of pain twisted and cranked until the muscles of his face were at the snapping point.
His lips moved. Shook, his whole face writhing with the expression. “Uh, uh, uh,” he moaned.
“It’s all right, Micky,” I said. I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. “I’m here.”
“Hurts,” he breathed at last, barely a whisper. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts . . .” He went on and on repeating it until he ran out of breath. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. Tears welled out and he broke into another helpless, maddened giggle.
What the hell could I do for that? The barbed wire had to be a spell of some kind, but it didn’t look like anything I had ever seen before. Most magic throbbed and pulsed with light, life, even if it was being used for malevolent purposes. Magic comes from life, from the energy of our world and from people, from their emotions and their will. That’s what I had always been taught.
But that barbed wire was dull, flat, matte-black. I reached out to touch it, and it almost seared my fingers with how cold it was. Micky, God. I couldn’t imagine what he must have been going through.
The smart thing to do would have been to fall back. I could get Bob and work on this, research it, figure out how to get the wire from around Micky without hurting him. But he had already been suffering through this for hours. He might not make it through many more—his sanity was going to be hard-pressed to survive the spiritual mauling he had taken. Adding another day of this torture onto it all might send him someplace from where he’d never come back.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. “I hope I’m right, Micky,” I told h
im. “I’m going to try to make it stop hurting.”
He let out a whimpering little giggle, staring up at me.
I decided to start at his ankle. I swallowed, steeling myself again, and reached down, getting my fingers between the burning cold barbed wire and his skin. I clenched my teeth, forcing will, power, into the touch, enough to be able to touch the material of the spell around him. Then I started pulling. Slowly, at first, and then harder.
The metal strands burned into me. My fingers never went numb—they just began to ache more and more violently. The barbed wire resisted, barbs clinging at Micky’s flesh. The poor man screamed aloud, agonized, though there was that horrible, tortured laughter added to it as well.
I felt tears burn into my eyes, from the pain, from Micky’s scream, but I kept pulling. The end of the wire tore free of his flesh. I kept pulling. Barb by barb, inch by inch, I tore the wire-spell free, drawing it up through his flesh at times, pulling that dead, cold energy away from Micky. He screamed until he ran out of breath and I heard whimpers coming from somewhere else in the room. I guess it was me. I started using both hands, struggling against the cold magic.
Finally, the other end slithered free from Micky’s neck. His eyes flew open wide and then he sagged down, letting out a low, exhausted moan. I gasped and stumbled back from the bed, keeping the wire in my hands.
It suddenly twisted and spun like a serpent, and one end plunged into my throat.
Ice. Cold. Endless, bitter, aching cold coursed through me, and I screamed. I heard footsteps running down the hall outside, a voice calling out. The wire whipped and thrashed around, the other end darting toward the floor, and I seized it in both hands, twisted it up and away from attaching itself at the other end. The loose strands near my neck started rippling, cold barbs digging into me through my clothes, my skin, as the dark energy tried to attach itself to me.
The door burst open. Murphy came through it, her eyes living flames of azure blue, her hair a golden coronet around her. She held a blazing sword in her hand and she shone so bright and beautiful and terrifying in her anger that it was hard to see. The Sight, I realized, dimly. I was seeing her for who she was.