by Jim Butcher
“Well, that’s just blindingly useful,” Bob muttered.
I grunted. “It’s possible that this is just miscellaneous junk. If you don’t think it has a specific purpose, then—”
“I didn’t say that,” Bob interrupted sourly. “Jeez, Harry. Ye of little faith.”
“Can you tell me anything or not?”
“I can tell you that you’re teetering on the edge of sanity, sahib.”
I blinked at that. “What?”
Bob didn’t look up from the pictures. “Your aura is all screwed up. It’s like looking at an exploding paint factory. Crazy people get that way.”
I grunted and considered Bob’s words for a moment. Then I shrugged. “I’m too close to this case, maybe.”
“You need some time in a quiet place, boss. Unkink your brain’s do. Mellow your vibe.”
“Thank you, Doctor Fraud,” I said. “I’ll take that under advisement. Can you tell me anything about those objects or what?”
“Not without getting to examine them,” Bob said.
I grunted. “Super. Another bad inning for the wizard gumshoe.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But all I can tell you from here is the trigger.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, those are objects of dark, dangerous magic,” Bob said. “I mean, obviously. Look at the angles. Nothing is proportional and balanced. They’re meant for something destructive, disruptive, deadly.”
I grunted. “That tracks. Rumor has it that the war is going to rev up again soon.” I ran my fingers tiredly through my hair. “What did you say the trigger was, again?”
“For something this dark?” Bob asked. “Only one thing’ll do.”
I felt myself freeze. My coffeeless gorge began to rise.
“Human sacrifice,” the skull chirped brightly. “The slaughter of an innocent.”
Chapter 10
I leaned on a table with my eyes closed.
The Red Court was preparing a destructive act of high black magic.
The ritual, whatever it was, required a human sacrifice to succeed.
In my head, I watched a movie of Maggie being bled out like a slaughtered sheep within a ritual circle, surrounded by an army of vampires beneath a nightmare sky.
There was a hideous elegance in it. In a single stroke my daughter would die, and her death would be used to lash out against the Council. It was bald guesswork, but it fit what I’d seen of the duchess. She could inflict the maximum amount of personal agony on me and launch a sorcerous attack simultaneously. Revenge and war would both be served—all while she smiled and smiled and offered promises of peace and understanding, protected from me by the same idiots she was plotting to destroy.
I could try to warn them, but few would listen. Ebenezar, maybe, and Anastasia, and some of the young Wardens—but even if they listened and believed, they would still have to convince others. The freaking Council never does anything quickly, and I had a bad feeling that tempus was fugiting furiously.
So. I’d just have to do it myself.
But to do that, I needed information.
I looked at my summoning circle again and took a slow, deep breath. There were things I could do. Horrible things. There were beings I could call up, malicious mavens and entities of wicked wisdom who might make the unknowable as plain as daylight.
If I did, there would be a terrible price.
I tore my eyes from the circle and shook my head. I wasn’t that desperate.
Yet.
Someone knocked loudly on my apartment door.
I went upstairs, closed the lab, and picked up my blasting rod. I carried it to the door and looked out the peephole. Murphy stood outside, her hands in her coat pockets, her shoulders hunched.
“Couldn’t use the phone,” she said when I opened the door. She stepped in and I closed it behind her.
“Yeah, we figure the Red Court might be tapping them.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know about that, Harry. But Internal Affairs has got mine wired.”
I blinked at her. “Those IA idiots? Again? Can’t Rudolph just let it rest?” Rudolph the Brown- nosed Cop-cop, as he was affectionately known at SI, had managed to kiss enough ass to escape SI and get reassigned to IA. He seemed to hold a grudge against his former coworkers, irrationally blaming them for his (now concluded) exile among the proles of SI.
“Apparently not,” Murphy said. “He’s making quite a name for himself over there.”
“Murph, you’re a good cop. I’m sure that—”
She slashed a hand at the air and shook her head. “That’s not important right now. Listen. Okay?”
I frowned and nodded at her.
“There’s a full-scale investigation going into the bombing of your office building,” Murphy said. “Rudolph talked to the lead FBI agent and the local lead detective in charge of the case and convinced them that you’re a suspicious character and good perpetrator material.”
I groaned. “Forensics will bear them out. The explosives were on my floor, some of them in the walls of my office.”
Murphy pushed her hair back with one hand. The bags beneath her eyes had grown visibly darker. “They’re going to bring you in and question you in the next couple of hours. They’ll probably hold you for the full twenty-four. More if they can find a charge to stick you with.”
“I don’t have time for that,” I said.
“Then you’ve got to get scarce,” Murphy said. “And I’ve got to go. Neither of us will be helped if we’re seen together.”
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. “I am going to throw Rudolph halfway across Lake Michigan and see if the slimy little turd floats.”
“I’ll bring the lead weights,” Murphy said. She drew the amulet I’d made to let her past my apartment’s magical defenses from her shirt and showed it to me. “Hopefully I won’t be able to find you. Get in touch with me when you need my help, huh?”
“Murph,” I said. “If the authorities are getting set to come down on me . . . you can’t be around.”
Her eyebrows climbed a tiny fraction. It was a danger signal. “Excuse me?” she said politely.
“It’s already going to look bad enough, we’ve worked together so much. If you’re actually abetting me now . . . they won’t let you keep your badge. You know they won’t. And they might do even more than that. You could wind up in jail.”
The subliminal angry tension in her abruptly vanished. “God, Dresden. You are a simp.”
I blinked at her.
“If I go with you,” she said, “I could wind up in the ground. That didn’t seem to worry you.”
“Well,” I said. “I . . .”
“I choose my battles, Dresden. Not you.” She looked up at me calmly. “Let me put this in terms that will get through your skull: My friend is going to save a child from monsters. I’m going with him. That’s what friends do, Harry.”
I nodded and was silent for several seconds. Then I said, “I know you, Karrin. For you, dying in a good fight would not be a terrible end. You’ve known it was possible, and you’ve prepared yourself for it.” I took a deep breath. “But . . . if they took your shield away . . . I know what your job means to you. You’d die by inches. I don’t think I could handle watching that happen.”
“So you get to choose to shut me out? What I want doesn’t count?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“And you’re the one who decides?”
I thought about it for a moment. Then I said, “No.”
She nodded. “Good answer.” She touched her fingertips to the shape of her amulet under her T-shirt. “Call.”
“I will. Maybe by messenger, but I will.”
“It’s occurred to me that someone who wanted to make you suffer might start pulling the trigger on your friends. How do I verify the message?”
I shook my head. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that even here, in my own home, I couldn’t be
too careful about being overheard. My apartment was blanketed in protective magic, but there were plenty of people (and not-people) who were stronger, more experienced, or wilier than me. “If I have to send a messenger, I’ll make sure you know who it’s from.”
Murphy watched me answer. Then she glanced slowly around the room, as if looking for an unseen observer, and nodded her understanding. “All right. Don’t stay here long, Harry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, Murph.”
She made a face. “I’m not worried about just you. You’ve got at least one gun stashed here, and I’m betting there’s more illegal material in the lab. If they like you for a suspect, they’ll get a warrant. And the FBI, as far as I know, doesn’t have any amulets to get them in here alive.”
I groaned aloud. Murph was right. I had a couple of illegal weapons in my apartment. The Swords were still in the lab, too. Plus some miscellaneous material that the government probably wouldn’t want me owning, including depleted uranium dust, for when the answer to “Who you gonna call?” turns out to be “Harry Dresden.”
The wards that protected my apartment were going to be an issue as well. They wouldn’t do anything if someone walked up and knocked on the door, or even if they fiddled with the doorknob—but anyone who tried to force the door open was in for a shock. About seventy thousand volts of shock, in fact, thanks to the defenses I’d put in place around my door. The lightning was savage, but it was only the first layer of the defense. It hadn’t been so terribly long since an army of zombies tore their way into my living room, and I wasn’t going to repeat the experience.
But my wards wouldn’t have any way of differentiating between a zombie or a crazed vampire or a misguided FBI agent. They simply reacted to someone forcing his way inside. I’d have to deactivate the wards before someone got hurt. Then I’d have to remove any suspect gear from the house.
Hell’s bells. Like I didn’t have enough on my mind. I rubbed my thumb against the spot between my eyebrows where the headache was forming. “I did not need this on top of everything else. Which is why she did it.”
“Why who did what?”
“Duchess Arianna of the Red Court,” I said. I filled Murphy in on my day.
“That’s out of character, isn’t it?” Murphy asked. “I mean, for them to do something this obtrusive? Blowing up a building?”
“They did similar things several times during the war,” I said. “She was making a statement. Blowing up my place of business right in front of God and everybody, the same way the wizards took out her husband’s command post in Honduras. Plus she’s diverting my attention and energy, yanking more potential support out from under me.”
Murphy shook her head. “She’s so clever she’s making a mistake.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. If she was all that smart, she would have blown you to pieces in your office.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s the most practical way.”
“So why didn’t she?”
“Figure she wants to inflict the maximum amount of pain she can before she gets rid of me.”
Murphy lifted her eyebrows. “For vengeance? That’s . . . kind of like a bad movie script, isn’t it?” She put on a faint British accent. “No, Mr. Dresden. I expect you to die.”
I grunted. Murphy had a point. Duchess Arianna almost couldn’t have been the sort to enjoy indulging her sadistic side at the expense of practicality. You don’t survive millennia as a vampire without being deadly cold-blooded.
Which meant . . .
“There’s something else at work here,” I said. “Some other game going on.”
Murphy nodded. “How sure are you that Susan is being straight with you?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. It sounded a little hollow, even to me.
Murphy’s mouth twisted up into a bitter curl. “That’s what I thought. You loved her. Makes it easy to manipulate you.”
“Susan wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“I hope not,” Murphy replied. “But . . . she’s been gone awhile, Harry. Fighting a war, from the sounds of it. That’s enough to change anyone, and not for the better.”
I shook my head slowly and said, “Not Susan.”
Murphy shrugged. “Harry . . . I’ve got a bad feeling that . . .” She scrunched up her nose, choosing her words. “I’ve got a bad feeling that the wheels are about to come off.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Just . . . the building blowing up is all over the news. You can’t find an anchor talking about anything else. People are screaming about terrorists. The whole situation is gaining more attention from higher up in the government than anything else I’ve ever seen. You say that most of the White Council has been effectively placed under the control of this Cristos person. Now the upper ranks of the Red Court are getting involved, too, and from what you tell me everyone is reaching for their guns.” She spread her hands. “It’s . . . it’s like the Cuban missile crisis. Everyone’s at the edge.”
Hell’s bells. Murphy was right. The supernatural world was standing at the edge—and it was one hell of a long way down to the war of annihilation at the bottom.
I took a slow breath, thinking. Then I said, “I don’t care about that.”
Murphy’s golden eyebrows went up.
“I’m not responsible for everyone else in the world, Murph. I’m going to find a little girl and take her somewhere safe. That’s all. The rest of the world can manage without me.”
“What if that’s the last straw, Harry? The little girl. What will you do then?”
I growled as a column of pure rage rose up my spine and made my voice rough. “I will make Maggie safe. If the world burns because of that, then so be it. Me and the kid will roast some marshmallows.”
Murphy watched me thoughtfully for several empty seconds. Then she said, very gently, “You’re a good man, Harry.”
I swallowed and bowed my head, made humble by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face, more than the words themselves.
“Not always rational,” she said, smiling. “But you’re the best kind of crazy.”
“Thank you, Karrin.”
She reached out and squeezed my arm once. “I should go. Call me.”
“I will.”
She left a moment later and I began sanitizing my apartment for government scrutiny. It would take me a little precious time, but being locked in a cage would take even more. I was still tucking away the last of my contraband when there was a knock at the door. I froze. After a moment, the knock was repeated.
“Harry Dresden!” called a man’s voice. “This is Special Agent Tilly of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have a warrant to search this property and detain its occupants for questioning regarding last night’s explosion. If you do not open this door, we will be forced to break it down.”
Crap.
Chapter 11
I tore the rug from the trapdoor again. I’d packed almost all of my questionable materials into a large nylon gym bag. I slung it over my shoulder, grabbed my duster, staff, and blasting rod, and nearly killed myself trying to go down the ladder too quickly. I stopped a couple of steps from the bottom and reached up to close the trapdoor again. There was a pair of simple bolts on the lower side of the door, so that I or the grasshopper could signal the other that something delicate was in progress, and distractions might be dangerous. I locked the door firmly.
“What’s going on?” blurted Bob from his shelf.
“Bob, I need the wards down now.”
“Why don’t you just—”
“Because they’ll come back up five minutes after I’ve used the disarming spell. I need them down. Get off your bony ass and do it!”
“But that will knock them out for at least a week—”
“I know. Go do it, and hurry! You have my permission to leave the skull for that purpose.”
“Aye-aye, O captain, my captain,” Bob said sourly. A small cloud of or
ange sparkling light flowed out of the skull’s eye sockets and rushed upstairs through the cracks at the edge of the trapdoor.
I immediately started dumping things into my bag. I was making a mess doing it, too, but there was no help for that.
Less than half a minute later, Bob returned and flowed back into the skull again. “There’re a bunch of guys in suits and uniforms knocking on the door, Harry.”
“I know.”
“Why?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“Trouble,” I said. “What do I have in here that’s illegal?”
“Do I look like an attorney? These ain’t law books I’m surrounded by.”
There was a heavy slam of impact from upstairs. Whoever was up there was trying a ram on the door. Good luck with that, boys. I’d had my door knocked down before. I had installed a heavy metal security door that nothing short of explosives was going to overcome.
“Where’s the ghost dust?” I asked.
“One shelf over, two up, cigar tin in a brown cardboard box,” Bob said promptly.
“Thanks,” I said. “That section of rhino horn?”
“Under the shelf to your left, plastic storage bin.”
So it went, with Bob’s flawless memory speeding the process. I wound up stuffing the bag full. Then I tore the Paranet map off the wall and added it to the bag, and tossed the directory of contact numbers for its members in next to it. The last thing I needed was the FBI deciding that I was the hub of a network of terrorist cells.
Bob’s skull went in, too. I zipped the bag closed, leaving just enough opening for Bob to see out. Last, I took the two Swords (at least one of which had been used in murders in the Chicago area), slipped them through some straps on the side of the bag, and then hurriedly duct-taped them into place, just to be sure I wouldn’t lose them. Then I drew on my duster and slung the bag’s strap over my shoulder with a grunt. The thing was heavy.
Bangs and bumps continued upstairs. There was a sudden, sharp cracking sound. I winced. The door and its frame might be industrial-strength, but the house they were attached to was a wooden antique from the previous turn of the century. It sounded like something had begun to give.
