by Jim Butcher
There was a tiny flicker of orange lights in one of the eye sockets of the skull. Then the flicker grew brighter, and was joined by a second in the other socket. The skull twitched on the shelf, turning a little toward me, and said, “Holy Clay Face, Batman. What happened to you?”
I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, debating on what to tell the skull. I knew that Bob was Harry’s lab assistant and technical adviser in matters magical, that he was some sort of spirit who resided inside the skull, and not a mortal being in his own right. All the same, he was beholden to Harry, and whatever Bob knew, Harry could potentially learn.
“There isn’t much I can tell you,” I said. “Harry’s new client isn’t what she appears to be. I was trying to warn him. She tricked me into following her and did this to my face. I think she did it to make it harder for me to warn Harry about her.”
“Uh-huh,” Bob said. “What do you want from me?”
“Help me get this thing off my face. Then help me find Harry so I can get him off this case before he gets hurt.”
Bob snorted. “Yeah, right.”
I frowned. “What? You think I’m lying to you?”
“Look, Thomas,” the skull said, its tone patently patronizing. “I acknowledge you’re cool beyond cool. You’re good-looking, you get all the girls, and you send naked chicks to Harry’s apartment dressed only in bits of red ribbon, all of which I admire in a person—but, uh. You’re still kind of a vampire. From a house of vampires famous for being mind benders, no less.”
I ground my teeth. “You think someone’s controlled me into doing this?”
“I think that generally speaking, you don’t have secrets from your brother, man,” Bob said, yawning. “And besides, once Harry gets onto a case for a client, he doesn’t come off it. He’s like a tick, only his head doesn’t come off quite as easy, and there’s less chance of his giving you an infection.”
“This is important, Bob,” I told him.
“So is finding lost children,” Bob said. “Or at least it is to Harry. I thought it might be because then their mother would be all appreciative and jump into bed with him, but apparently it’s one of those morality things. Finding kids hits some kind of good-versus-evil hot button in his head.”
That was what Lara had meant when she said the Stygian had taken a child. Crap. Now I could see the Stygian Sisterhood’s plan.
And if I didn’t stop them—stop Harry—the Oblivion War could be lost in a night.
“Dammit,” I growled. “Bob, I need the help. I need you to do this.”
“Sorry, chief,” Bob said. “Don’t work for you. Harry tells me different, that’s a different story.”
“But he’s in trouble,” I said.
“So you say. But you aren’t offering me any details, which makes it sound fishy.”
“Because if I gave you any details, they might get back to Harry, and he might be in even more trouble than he is right now.”
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “I hereby promote you from mackerel to tuna fish.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking. Bob was a spirit. Such beings were bound by their words and promises, by the contracts they made with mortals. “Okay, look. You serve Harry, right?”
“Yep.”
“If I give you this information,” I said, “and if in your judgment his possession of this information could prove detrimental to his well-being, I want you to swear to me that you will keep it from him or anyone else who asks you about it.”
“Okay,” Bob said, drawing out the word with tremendous skepticism.
“If you do that,” I said, “I’ll tell you. If you can’t, I won’t. And bad things are going to happen.”
The skull’s eyelights brightened with what looked surprisingly like curiosity. “Okay, okay. I’ll bite. You have a bargain. I do so swear it to you, Vampire.”
I took a deep breath and glanced around. If another Venator knew what I was doing, they’d put a bullet in my head without thinking twice.
“Have you ever heard of the Oblivion War?”
“No,” the skull said promptly.
“For a reason,” I said. “Because it’s a war being waged for the memory of mankind.”
“Uh,” Bob said. “What?”
I sighed and brushed my gloved hand back over my hair. “Look. You know that for the most part, the old gods have grown less powerful over the years, or have changed as they were incorporated into other beliefs.”
“Sure,” Bob said. “There hasn’t been a First Church of Marduk for a while now. But Tiamat got an illustration in the Monster Manual and had that role in that cartoon, so she’s probably better off.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about, but generally speaking, you’re right. Beings like Tiamat needed a certain amount of mortal belief to connect them to the mortal world.”
The eyelights brightened. “Ah!” the skull said. “I get it! If no one remembers some has-been god, there’s no connection left! It can’t remain in the mortal world!”
“Right,” I said quietly. “And we’re not just talking about pagan gods. We’re talking about things that people of today have no words for, no concept to adequately define. Demons of such appetites and fury that the only way mortals in some parts of the world survived them at all was with the help of some of those early gods. Demons who had to be stopped, permanently.”
“You can’t destroy a primal spiritual entity,” Bob mused. “Even if you disperse it, it will just re-form in time.”
“But you can forget them,” I said. “Shut them away. Leave them forever lost, outside the mortal world and unable to do harm. You can consign them to Oblivion.”
Bob made a whistling sound.
What the hell? How? He doesn’t have any lips.
“Ballsy,” Bob admitted. “I mean, fighting a war like that . . . The more people you brought in to fight on your side, the more the information would spread, and the stronger a hold these demons would have. So you’d have to control who had the information. You’d have to lock that down hard.”
“Very,” I said. “I know there are fewer than two hundred Venatori in the world. But we’re organized in cells. I only know one other Venator.”
“Venatori?” Bob said. “There’s like five thousand of those dried-up old prunes. They’ve been helping the Council fight the war, remember?”
I waved a hand. “Those are the Venatori Umbrorum.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “The Hunters of the Shadows.”
“One way to translate their name,” I said, “and it’s the one they believe is correct. But it’s more accurate to call them the Shadows of the Hunters. They don’t know it, but we founded them. Gave them their store of knowledge. Use them to gather information, to help us keep an eye on things. And they’re camouflage, too, to make our enemies have to work a little harder to find us.”
“Enemies, right,” Bob said. “A war has to have two sides.”
I nodded. “Or more. There are a lot of . . . people . . . interested in the old demons. They’re weak compared to what they once were, but they’re still a route to power. Cults, priests, societies, individual lunatics. They’re trying to keep the demons nailed to this world. We’re trying to stop them.” I shook my head. “The Oblivion War has been going on for more than five thousand years. Sometimes decades will pass without a single battle being fought. Sometimes it all goes insane.”
“How many demons have you guys cut off?” Bob asked brightly. Then he chirped, “Oh, heh, I guess you wouldn’t know, would you. If you kacked ’em, you don’t even remember ’em.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Kind of a thankless way to fight a war.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “This is secret stuff, Bob. Just knowing it creates a kind of resonance in the mind. If someone knows to look for it, they can see it. If Harry finds out about the war, and anyone from either side realizes that he’s aware ...”
“The ba
d guys will assume he’s a Venator or a rival and kill him,” Bob said, his manner suddenly sober. “And the Venatori will assume he’s a threat like the rest of the nut balls. They’ll either consider him a security risk and kill him or impress him into joining their army. And he’s already fighting one war.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Um,” Bob said. “One wonders why they won’t do the same thing to me.”
“You aren’t mortal,” I said. “Your knowledge won’t bind anything to this world.”
The skull somehow looked reassured. “That’s true. Tell me about this client that’s with my boss.”
“You know about the Prosthanos Society?” I asked.
“Buncha lunatics in the Baltic region,” Bob replied immediately. “They lop off their bits and pieces and replace them with grafts from inhuman sources. Demons and ghouls and such. Patchwork immortality.”
I nodded. “The Stygian Sisterhood does the same thing—only with their psyches instead of with their physical bodies. They slice out the parts of their human personalities they don’t want, and replace them with pieces torn from inhuman minds.”
“Cheery,” Bob leered. “Sorority, huh? They hot?”
“It’s generally advantageous,” I said. “So for the most part, yes. They’re dedicated to the service of a number of old demon-goddesses whom they’re trying to keep in the world through the publication of a book of rituals called the Lexicon Malos.”
“So,” the skull said, “hot girl comes into Harry’s office. He drools on her shoes, acts like an idiot, and doesn’t take her up on her offer to do morally questionable things to him right then and there.”
“Uh,” I said. “I’m not sure if—”
“Being a stupid hero, he tells her not to worry, that he’ll find her obvious sob-story decoy—I mean, lost child. Only when he does find the kid, he finds this book of rituals, too.”
“And being a stalwart Warden of the White Council now . . .” I said.
Bob snorted. “He’ll take them this book of dangerous rituals anyone could use. And the Council will do with it what they did with the Necronomicon in order to defuse it.”
I nodded. “They publish it, because they think that by making the rituals available to every nut who wants to try them, the power that comes out of them will be so diffused that it will never amount to any harm.”
“Only the real danger isn’t the rituals,” Bob said. “But the knowledge of the beings behind them.”
“And we might never be rid of them—just as we’ll never be rid of the faeries.”
Bob looked suddenly wistful. “You were trying to ditch the faeries?”
“The Venatori tried, yes,” I said. “But the G-men stopped us cold.”
“G-men? What, like the government?” Bob asked. “Like the Men in Black?”
“Like Gutenberg and the Grimms,” I replied.
Bob narrowed his eyelights for a moment, apparently in thought. “This Stygian hottie. She laid a trap for you. She knew who you were, and what you’d do.”
“I’ve crossed swords with the Sisterhood before. They know me.” I shook my head. “I’ve got no idea why she messed up my face instead of killing me, though.”
“Because Dresden would have sensed it,” Bob said promptly.
“Eh?”
“Murdering someone with magic? It leaves an odor, and there isn’t a body spray on earth that can hide it completely so soon after a kill. If Harry got close enough to sense a whiff of black magic on her, there wouldn’t be any way she could pretend to be a damsel in distress.”
“He’d still be able to tell she was a practitioner.”
“Only if he actually touched her,” Bob said. “And even then, if she’s significantly different from a normal human, mentally, it’ll alter the sense of her aura. Besides, sensing a little tingle of magical potential in a client is a whole lot different from realizing that she’s spattered in supernatural gore.”
“I get it. So instead she changed my face.”
“Technically, she didn’t change it,” the skull said. “It’s an illusion. You’re still you under there. The question is why would she do that, particularly.”
I frowned. “To slow me down,” I said, thinking it through. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the Stygian had in mind, and I clenched my teeth in frustration. “Oh, empty night. She’s told Harry that there’s a villain in the piece. She’s shown him the picture of the bad man who took the poor kid.” I gestured at my face. “And she’s made me look like him.”
“Damn,” Bob said, admiration in his tone. “That’s sneaky. Harry’s awfully quick on the draw these days. If you mosey up, he might not give you a chance to explain anything.”
I sighed. “The kind of day I’m having, he probably wouldn’t. Are you going to help me or not?”
“Answer me one more question,” the skull said, quieter now.
“Okay.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why would vampires be a part of this? Why would something that eats people be interested in saving humanity from devouring demon gods?”
I snorted. “You want me to tell you that it’s because in our secret hearts, we long to be heroes? Or that deep down, there’s something in us that cries out for humanity, for redemption?” I shook my head and smiled at him, showing teeth. “At the end of the day? Because we don’t like competition.”
“Finally,” Bob said, with a roll of his eyelights. “A motive I can understand. Okay.”
“Okay?”
The skull turned on its shelf, to face the table. “I can show you how to find Harry. But the first thing we do is fix your face. Come on in, let me get a better look.”
Mnemonic lightning flashed and boomed between my ears, and I felt myself smile. “No,” I said.
The skull tilted slightly to one side, watching me. “No?”
“No. I’ve got a better idea.”
5
The skull tried to explain why the tracking spell he showed me was going to work when my own had failed, but about five seconds into the technical talk I started substituting “blah blah blah” for everything he was saying.
I’m not a wizard, okay? I’m a cheap hack. I don’t care why it works, as long as it works.
The Stygian had staged her little charade in a warehouse down in Hammond. When I caught up to my brother, he and the Stygian were lurking in an alley across the street from the warehouse, watching the place. The Stygian was playing her part, that of the frightened, nervous female, anxious with the need to bring her offspring safely home again. She was a reasonably good actress, too, for someone with so little humanity. She was probably a couple of centuries old. She’d had time to get in some practice.
I went up the side of the building adjacent to the warehouse, so that I could get a look at the place, too. There were a couple more ghouls guarding the building, wearing the brown uniforms of private security personnel. They kept up a regular walking routine around the warehouse’s exterior and interior, and they weren’t bothering to so much as glance up at the rooftop I was on. It was five floors up with no fire escape and nothing but bricks to hold on to. Why should they?
I paced down to the back side of the warehouse, where Harry and the Stygian couldn’t spot me, waited until the pacing ghouls were both out of sight, and then leapt the forty feet or so from my rooftop to the roof of the warehouse. I landed in a roll, in near-complete silence, and froze for a long moment, waiting to see if anyone raised an outcry.
No one did. I hadn’t been spotted.
I settled down to wait.
Harry made his move sometime between three and four in the morning, when the guards were most likely to be bored, tired, and convinced that nothing was going to happen tonight—and when there would be the fewest possible witnesses or innocent bystanders. From the front of the warehouse came his resonant baritone, crying out one of those pretend-Latin spell incantations he uses. There was a flash of light, a boom like thunder, and a crash of somethi
ng slamming into sheet metal with the force of a cannonball.
Scratch one ghoul. My brother hates the creatures with a passion so pure that it’s almost holy. If his first attack hadn’t killed the thing, he’d finish it off before long. I heard the other ghoul shriek as it began to transform.
Once everyone’s attention was on the attack at the front door, I went in through a skylight.
The warehouse was stacked high with years of accumulated junk, consisting mostly of the remains of shipping crates, stacks of loading pallets, and broken boxes. An area in the center of the floor had been cleared, and the concrete had been heavily marked up with occult symbols painted in blood, around a table that was obviously intended to be an altar. A kid, a little boy maybe nine years old, was bound hand and foot on the table, his face blotchy from crying. He was screaming and struggling against the ropes, but was firmly secured to the table.
Harry cried out again. The glass in both windows at the front side of the warehouse exploded inward in a flash of scarlet light. Something that looked disturbingly like a severed arm went tumbling by the open doorway.
I kept looking until I spotted it—the Lexicon Malos, a leather-bound book, like a big old handwritten journal, just the kind of impressive grimoire occult nut-jobs like the Stygians are so giddy about. It rested on a little pedestal beside the table. It didn’t actually have a flashing neon sign over it reading NOTICE ME, but it was pretty close.
I went hand over hand along the steel-beam rafters until I got to one of the girders that ran down the wall. Then I slid down it to the floor and hurried over to the altar and the pedestal. I opened the nylon backpack in my hands, stuffed the Lexicon Malos into it, zipped it closed, and then slid my arms through the shoulder straps.
I could have bailed then. I suppose it would have been the smartest thing. Once the book was removed from the equation, the Stygian’s entire operation was blown. Granted, she and the other members of the Sisterhood would try it again somewhere else, but they would have been stopped for the time being.
