by Jim Butcher
“Should I take it that you know who I am?” I asked them.
“They know,” Anna said quietly.
I nodded. “All right. Here’s what I know. Something has killed as many as five female practitioners. Some of the deaths have looked like suicides. Evidence suggests that they weren’t.” I took a deep breath. “And I’ve found messages left for me or someone like me with at least two of the bodies. Things the cops couldn’t have found. I think we’re looking at a serial killer, and I think that your order might represent a pool of victims that fit his—”
“Or her,” Murphy put in, not quite staring at Beckitt.
Beckitt’s mouth curled into a bitter little smile, though she did not otherwise move.
“Or her,” I allowed, “profile.”
“Is he serious?” asked one of the women I didn’t know. She was older than the others, early fifties. Despite the day’s warmth, she wore a thin turtleneck sweater of light green and a dark grey cardigan. Her hair, caught back in a severe bun, had once been deep, coppery red, though now it was sown liberally with steely grey. She wore no makeup, square, silver-rimmed spectacles over muddy brown-green eyes, and her eyebrows had grown out rather thicker than most women chose to allow.
“Very serious,” I replied. “Is there something I can call you? It doesn’t seem polite to name you Turtleneck without checking first.”
She stiffened slightly, keeping her eyes away from mine, and said, “Priscilla.”
“Priscilla. I’m pretty much floundering around here. I don’t know what’s going on, and that’s why I came to talk to you.”
“Then how did you know of the Ordo?” she demanded.
“In real life, I’m a private investigator,” I told her. “I investigate stuff.”
“He’s lying,” Priscilla said, looking back at Anna. “He has to be. You know what we’ve seen.”
Anna looked from Priscilla to me, and then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“What have you seen?” I asked Anna.
Anna looked around the room at the others for a moment, but none of them made any objections, and she turned back to me. “You’re correct. Several members of our order have died. What you might not know is that there are others who have vanished.” She took a deep breath. “Not only in the Ordo, but in the community as well. More than twenty people are unaccounted for since the end of last month.”
I let out a low whistle. That was serious. Don’t get me wrong; people vanish all the time—most of them because they want to do it. But the people in our circles were generally a lot closer-knit than most folks, in part because they were aware, to one degree or another, of the existence of supernatural predators who could and would take them, given the chance. It’s a herd instinct, plain and simple—and it works.
If twenty people had gone missing, odds were good that something was on the prowl. If the killer had taken them, I had a major problem on my hands, which admittedly wasn’t exactly a novel experience.
“You say people have seen something? What?”
“For…” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “For all three victims from within the order whose bodies have been found, they were last seen alive in the company of a tall man in a grey cloak.”
I blinked. “And you thought it was me?”
“I wasn’t close enough to tell,” Priscilla said. “It was after dark, and she was on the street outside my apartment. I saw them through a window.”
She didn’t quite manage to hide the fact that she’d almost said you instead of them.
“I was at Bock’s,” Abby added, her tone serious, her eyes fixed in the middle distance. “Late. I saw the man walk by with her outside.”
“I didn’t see that,” Helen Beckitt said. The words were flat and certain. “Sally left the bar with a rather lovely dark-haired man with grey eyes and pale skin.”
My stomach twitched. In my peripheral vision, Murphy’s facial expression went carefully blank.
Anna lifted a hand in a gesture beseeching Helen for silence. “At least two more reliable witnesses have reported that the last time they saw some of the folk who had disappeared, they were in the company of the grey-cloaked man. Several others have reported sightings of the beautiful dark-haired man instead.”
I shook my head. “And you thought the guy in the cloak was me?”
“How many tall, grey-cloaked men move in our circles in Chicago, sir?” Priscilla said, her voice frosty.
“You can get grey corduroy for three dollars a yard at a surplus fabric store,” I told her. “Tall men aren’t exactly unheard of in a city of eight million, either.”
Priscilla narrowed her eyes. “Who was it, then?”
Abby tittered, which made Toto wag his tail.
I pursed my lips in a moment of thought. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Murphy.”
Helen Beckitt snorted out a breath through her nose.
“This isn’t a joking matter,” Priscilla snapped.
“Oh. Sorry. Given that I only found out about a grey cloak sighting about two seconds ago, I had assumed the question was facetious.” I turned to face Anna. “It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t a Warden of the Council—or at least, it damned well better not have been a Warden of the Council.”
“And if it was?” Anna asked quietly.
I folded my arms. “I’ll make sure he never hurts anyone. Ever again.”
Murphy stepped forward and said, “Excuse me. You said that three members of the order had died. What were their names, please?”
“Maria,” Anna said, her words spaced with the slow, deliberate beat of a funeral march. “Janine. Pauline.”
I saw where Murphy was going.
“What about Jessica Blanche?” she asked.
Anna frowned for a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve heard the name.”
“So she’s not in the order,” Murphy said. “And she’s not in the, ah, community?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Anna replied. She looked around the room. “Does anyone here know her?”
Silence.
I traded a glance with Murphy. “Some of these things are not like the others.”
“Some of these things are kind of the same,” she responded.
“Somewhere to start, at least,” I said.
Someone’s watch started beeping, and the girl on the couch beside Priscilla sat up suddenly. She was young, maybe even still in her teens, with the rich, smoke-colored skin of regions of eastern India. She had heavy-lidded brown eyes, and wore a bandanna tied over her straight, glossy black hair. She was dressed in a lavender ballet leotard with cream-colored tights covering long legs, and she had the muscled, athletic build of a serious dancer. She wore a man’s watch that looked huge against her fine-boned wrist. She turned it off and then glanced up at Anna, fidgeting. “Ten minutes.”
Anna frowned and nodded at her. She started toward the door, a gracious hostess politely walking us out. “Is there anything else we can do for you, Warden? Ms. Murphy?”
In the investigating business, when someone starts trying to rush you out in order to conceal some kind of information from you, it is what we professionals call a clue. “Gee,” I said brightly. “What happens in ten minutes?”
Anna stopped, her polite smile fading. “We have answered your questions as best we could. You gave me your word, Warden, to abide by my hospitality. Not to abuse it.”
“Answering me may be for your own good,” I replied.
“That’s your opinion,” she said. “In my opinion, it is no business of yours.”
I sighed and nodded acquiescence. I handed her a business card. “There’s my number. In case you change your mind.”
“Thank you,” Anna said politely.
Murphy and I left, and were silent all the way down in the elevator. I scowled up a storm on the way, and brooded. It had never solved any of my problems in the past, but there’s always a first time.
When we walked back out int
o the sunshine, Murphy said, “You think they know anything else?”
“They know something,” I said. “Or think they do.”
“That was a rhetorical question, Harry.”
“Bite me.” I shook my head. “What’s our next move?”
“Dig into Jessica Blanche’s background,” she replied. “See what we turn up.”
I nodded. “Easier than searching Chicago for guys in big grey cloaks.”
She paused for a moment, and I knew her well enough to know that she was choosing her words carefully. “But maybe not easier than finding pale, beautiful, dark-haired men who may or may not have been the last person seen with a woman who died in the midst of sexual ecstasy.”
For a moment, our only conversation was footsteps.
“It isn’t him,” I said then. “He’s my brother.”
“Sure, yeah,” she agreed.
“I mean, I haven’t talked to him in a while, sure,” I admitted. A moment later I added, “And he’s on his own now. Making really good money doing…something. Though I don’t know what. Because he will never, ever say.”
Murphy nodded. “Yes.”
“And I guess it’s true that he’s awfully well fed these days,” I went on. “And that he won’t tell me how.” We went a few more steps. “And that he thinks of himself as a monster. And that he got sick and tired of trying to be human.”
We crossed the street in silence.
When I got to the other side, I stopped and looked at Murphy. “Shit.”
We both started down the sidewalk to Murphy’s Saturn.
“Harry,” she said quietly. “I think you’re probably right about him. But there are lives at stake. We have to be sure.”
A flash of anger went through me, an instant and instinctive denial that my brother, my only living flesh and blood, could be involved in this mess. Intense, irrational fury, and an equally irrational sense of betrayal at Murphy’s gentle accusation, fed on each other, swelling rapidly. It took me off guard. I had never felt such volatile determination to destroy a threat to my brother outside of life-and-death struggles we’d found ourselves trapped within. The emotions roared through me like molten steel, and I found myself instinctively gathering my will under their searing influence. For just a second I wanted to smash things to powder, starting with anyone who even thought about trying to hurt Thomas—and the strength to do it welled up inside me like steam in a boiler.
I snarled and closed my eyes, forcing control upon myself. This was no life-and-death struggle. It was a sidewalk. There would be no noisy and satisfying release of that anger, but the energy that I had unconsciously gathered had the potential to be dangerous in any case. I reached down to brush the sidewalk with my fingertips, allowing the dangerous buildup of magic to ground itself more or less harmlessly into the earth, and only a trace amount of energy flared out into a disruptive pattern.
It saved our lives.
The instant I released the excess energy into the area around us, a nearby stoplight blew out, Murphy’s cell phone started blaring “Stars and Stripes Forever,” three car alarms went off—
—and Murphy’s Saturn coupe went up in a brilliant ball of fire and an ear-shattering blast of thunder.
Chapter
Seven
There was no time to do anything. Even if I’d been crouched, tense, and holding defensive magic ready to go, I wouldn’t have beaten the explosion to the punch. It was instant, and violent, and did not at all care whether I was on my guard or not. Something that felt vaguely like an enormous feather pillow swung by the Incredible Hulk slammed into my chest.
It lifted me up off the ground and dumped me on the sidewalk several feet later. My shoulder clipped a mailbox as I went by it, and then I had a good, steady view of the clear summer sky above me as I lay on my back and ached.
I’d lived, which was always a good start in this kind of situation. It couldn’t have been a very big explosion, then. It had to have been more incendiary than concussive, a big old rolling ball of flame that would have shattered windows and burned things and set things on fire, and pushed a whole lot of air out of the way along with one Harry Dresden, wizard, slightly used.
I sat up and peered at the rolling cloud of black smoke and red flame where Murphy’s Saturn was, which bore out my supposition pretty well. I squinted to one side and saw Murphy sitting slowly back up. She had a short, bleeding cut on her upper lip. She looked pale and shaken.
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing like a drunk.
“Well,” I said. “Under the circumstances, I’m forced to conclude that you were right. I am a control freak and you were one hundred percent right to be the one driving the car. Thank you, Murph.”
She gave me a slow, hard stare, drew in a deep breath, and said, through clenched teeth, “No problem.”
I grinned at her and slumped back down onto my back. “You okay?”
She dabbed at the blood on her lip with one hand. “Think so. You?”
“Clipped my shoulder on a mailbox,” I said. “It hurts a little. Not a lot. Maybe I could take an aspirin. Just one. Not a whole dose or anything.”
She sighed. “My God, you’re a whiner, Dresden.”
We sat there quietly for a minute while sirens began in the distance and came closer.
“Bomb, you think?” Murphy said, in that tone people use when they don’t know what else to say.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was grounding some extra energy out when it went off. It must have hexed up the bomb’s timer or receiver. Set it off early.”
“Unless it was intended as a warning shot,” she said.
I grunted. “Whose bomb, you think?”
“I haven’t annoyed anyone new lately,” Murphy said.
“Neither have I.”
“You’ve annoyed a lot more people than me, in toto.”
“In toto?” I said. “Who talks like that? Besides, car bombs aren’t really within…within the, uh…”
“Idiom?” Murphy asked, with what might have been a very slight British accent.
“Idiom!” I declared in my best John Cleese impersonation. “The idiom of the entities I’ve ticked off. And you’re really turning me on with the Monty Python reference.”
“You’re pathetic, Harry.” Her smile faded. “But a car bomb is well within the idiom of ex-cons,” she said.
“Mrs. Beckitt was inside with us the whole time, remember?”
“And Mr. Beckitt?” Murphy asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Ah. Think he’s out by now?”
“I think we’ve got some things to find out,” she said. “You’d better go.”
“I should?”
“I’m not on the clock, remember?” Murphy said. “It’s my car. Simpler if there’s only one person answering all the questions.”
“Right,” I said, and pushed myself up. “Which end do you want?”
“I’ll take our odd corpse out and the Beckitts,” she said. I offered her a hand up. She took it, which meant more to the two of us than it would to anyone looking on. “And you?”
I sighed. “I’ll talk to my brother.”
“I’m sure he’s not involved,” Murphy said quietly. “But…”
“But he knows the incubus business,” I said, which wasn’t what Murphy had been about to say. It might have drawn an anger response out of me, but rationally speaking, I couldn’t blame her for her suspicion, either. She was a cop. She’d spent her entire adult life dealing with the most treacherous and dishonest portions of the human condition. Speaking logically, she was right to suspect and question until more information presented itself. People’s lives were at stake.
But Thomas was my brother, my blood. Logic and rationality had little to do with it.
The first emergency unit, a patrolling police car, rounded the corner a couple of blocks away. Fire trucks weren’t far behind.
“Time to go,” Murphy said quietly.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I told he
r, and walked away.
I took the El back to my neighborhood on high alert, watching for anyone who might be following, lying in wait, or otherwise planning malicious deeds involving me. I didn’t see anyone doing any of those things on the El, or as I walked to my apartment in the basement of an old boardinghouse.
Once there, I walked down a sunken concrete staircase to my front door—one of those nifty all-metal security doors—and with a muttered word and an effort of will, I disarmed the wards that protected my home. Then I used a key to open its conventional locks, and slipped inside.
Mister promptly hurtled into my shins with a shoulder block of greeting. The big grey cat weighed about thirty pounds, and the impact actually rocked me back enough to let my shoulder blades bump against the door. I reached down and gave his ears a quick rub. Mister purred, walking in circles around one of my legs, then sidled away and hopped up onto a bookshelf to resume the important business of napping away a summer afternoon in wait for the cool of evening.
An enormous mound of shaggy grey-and-black fur appeared from the shadows in the little linoleum-floored alcove that passed for my kitchen. It walked over to me, yawning as it came, its tail wagging in relaxed greeting. I hunkered down as my dog sat and thrust his head toward me, and I vigorously scratched his ears and chin and the thick ruff of fur over his neck with both hands. “Mouse. All quiet on the home front, boy?”
His tail wagged some more, jaw dropping open to expose a lethal array of very white teeth, and his tongue lolled out in a doggy grin.
“Oh, I forgot the mail,” I said. “You mind getting it?”
Mouse promptly rose, and I opened the door. He padded out in total silence. Mouse moves lightly for a rhinoceros.
I crossed my floor of mismatched carpets and rugs to slump into the easy chair by the old fireplace. I picked up my phone and dialed Thomas’s number. No answer. I glared at the phone for a minute and, because I wasn’t sure what else to do, I tried it again. No one answered. What were the odds.
I chewed on my lip for a minute and began to worry about my brother.
Mouse returned a moment later—long enough to have gone out to the designated dog-friendly little area in the house’s yard. He had several bits of mail held gently in his mouth, and he dropped them carefully onto the surface of the old wooden coffee table in front of my sofa. Then he went over to the door and leaned a shoulder against it. It hadn’t been installed quite right, and it was a real pain in the ass to open, and once it was open it was a pain in the ass to close. Mouse shoved at the door with a little snort of familiar effort and it swung to. Then he came back over to settle down by me.