by Jim Butcher
He lifted his hands. “Talking to things. I mean, you were talking to things when I was outside your door.”
“That was nothing,” I said.
“Okay,” Billy said, though his tone suggested that he was placating me rather than agreeing.
“What is this talking-to-things crap? Did Bock say I was doing that?”
“Harry—” Billy said.
“Because I wasn’t,” I said. “Good God, I do some crazy crap, but it’s usually the ‘this is never going to work but I have to try it’ variety of crazy. I’m not insane.”
Billy folded his arms, his eyes searching my face. “See, that’s the thing. If you were truly insane, would you be able to realize it?”
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. Because Bock said something about me, and because you heard me talking to myself, suddenly I’m ready for the room with rubber walls.”
“No,” he said. “Sort of. Harry, look, it isn’t like I’m trying to accuse—”
“That’s funny, because it sounds like an accusation from this end,” I said.
“I only—”
I slammed my staff down on the floor, and Billy flinched.
He tried to cover it, but I had seen the motion. Billy flinched like he was genuinely afraid that I was going to hurt him.
What the hell?
“Billy,” I said quietly. “There is some bad business going on. I don’t have time for this. I don’t know what Bock told you, but he’s had a bad couple of days. He’s rattled. I’m not going to hold anything against him.”
“All right,” he said quietly.
“I want you to go home,” I told him. “And I want you to start sending out word around to the in crowd. Everyone wants to be behind a threshold tonight.”
He frowned and took off his glasses, scrubbing at them with a corner of his shirt. “Why?”
“Because the White Council is sending a war party to town. You don’t want anyone you know to get caught in the backwash.”
Billy swallowed. “This is big, then?”
“And I have to get moving. I don’t have time for distractions.” I stepped forward and put my hand on his shoulder. “Hey, it’s me. Harry. I’m as sane as I ever am, and I need you to trust me for a little while. Tell people to keep their heads down. Okay?”
He took a deep breath and then nodded sharply. “I’ll do it, man.”
“Good. I don’t know why you’re so worried about me. But we’ll sit down and talk after the dust settles. Figure out what’s up. Make sure I haven’t stripped a gear when I wasn’t looking. I promise you.”
“Right,” he said, nodding. “Thank you. I’m sorry if this is…aw, hell, man.”
“Enough with sharing the emotions,” I said. “We’re gonna turn into women as we stand here. Get a move on.”
He chucked my arm with a mostly closed fist, and left.
I waited for him to go. I didn’t feel like riding down in the elevator with him, wondering if he was afraid of me suddenly turning on him with an ax or a butcher knife or something.
I leaned on my staff and thought about it for a second. Billy was really worried about me. Worried enough that he was afraid that I might do something to him. What the hell had I done to set that off?
And an even better question, which I had to ask myself, followed on the heels of that first one.
What if he was right?
I poked at my skull with a finger. It didn’t feel soft or anything. I didn’t feel insane. But if you’d really lost it, would you have enough left upstairs to know? Crazy people never thought they were crazy.
“I’ve always talked to things,” I said. “And to myself.”
“Good point,” myself agreed with me. “Unless that means you’ve been nuts all along.”
“I don’t need wiseass remarks,” I told myself severely. “There’s work to do. So shut up.”
All I could think was that it had been Georgia’s idea. She was always buried to the ears in her psych textbooks. Maybe she had fallen victim to some kind of inverted psychological hypochondria or something.
Thunder rumbled outside, and the rain started coming down harder.
I didn’t need any doubts distracting me right now. I shrugged off the whole conversation with Billy, tabling it for later. I loaded my gun, since not loading it would have been almost as good as not having it, then slipped it back into my pocket, locked up my office behind me, and headed for the car.
I had to get to Shiela and see if her remarkable memory could call up the poems and stanzas from that stupid book. And then I had to figure out how to call up a wild and deadly lord of the darker realms of Faerie and sidetrack him so that the heirs of Kemmler couldn’t use him to promote themselves to demigod status. And along the way, I had to find The Word of Kemmler and get it to Mavra, somehow, without the White Council learning what I was up to.
Easy as breathing.
As I rode down in the elevator, I had to admit that Billy might have a point.
Chapter
Twenty-eight
The Cabrini-Green tenement Shiela lived in had seen better days—but it had seen worse, too. The city had dumped a lot of money into urban renewal projects there, and it was an ongoing process. Shiela’s building was still undergoing renovation, and the lobby and many of the floors were only half-finished. No workmen were in the building when I went into the lobby, but there were dozens of tarps, stacks of drywall and raw lumber, heavy tool lockers that had been bolted to the floor, and other evidence of the contractors who would doubtless have been working had the city’s lights not been out.
I walked over to the elevators and to the security panel there, and found the button of Shiela’s apartment on the ninth floor. I pressed it and held it down for a minute before I realized that, duh, the power was out and I wasn’t going to be able to ring her apartment.
I grimaced and looked around for the stairs. Nine flights up on my leg wasn’t going to feel nice, but it wasn’t as though I had an infinite number of options.
The door to the stairs was locked, but it was a standard fire door with a push bar on the other side. I lifted my staff, looked around the lobby to make sure no one had wandered in to see me, and then gestured with the staff and murmured, “Forzare.”
I sent a bare whisper of my power through the door and then drew it back toward me with a sharp gesture. I caught the push bar on the other side with it, and the door trembled and then swung open by an inch or two. I thrust the end of my staff into it to hold it open, then grabbed on and heaved. I stared at the stairs for a second, but they didn’t get any shorter or turn into an escalator or anything, so I sighed and started painfully hauling myself up them, one step at a time.
Nine floors and 162 steps later, I paused to catch my breath, and then opened the door to the ninth-floor hallway in the same manner I had the one in the lobby. The ninth-floor hallway was still under construction, and several of the apartments in it were missing doors, and even walls. I limped along until I found Shiela’s apartment and then knocked on the door.
I felt a tingling tension over the door as I touched it—a magical ward of some kind. It was nowhere near as strong as the ones on my apartment had been, but it was stable. That was fairly impressive. Shiela might not have a ton of inborn talent, but she evidently had enough discipline to offset the lack. I held my hand out lightly, just over the surface of the door, sending my senses running over the ward, getting more of a feel for its strength. It couldn’t have stopped me if I used my power to force my way in, but it felt strong enough to give me a solid kick in the teeth if I tried it physically. It would certainly scare the hell out of a would-be burglar. Not bad.
After a minute I heard footsteps and the door opened a little. I could see a security chain and a slender stripe of her face that included one of Shiela’s dark, sparkling eyes. She let out a surprised little sound and then said, “Harry. Just a minute.”
I waited while she shut the door and took off the security
chain. Then she opened the door again, smiling at me. She had an infectious smile, and I found myself answering it with one of my own.
She was dressed in a scarlet sequined bodice that made her chest into something very difficult not to stare at, nearly translucent baggy leggings, leather sandals that wrapped around her calves, and 6.5 million pounds of bangles on her arms and ankles. Her hair had been caught up in a high ponytail fixed into place to rise over some kind of mesh headdress, and her smooth, bare shoulders looked lovely and strong.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said back. “Is your roommate Shiela in, Genie?”
She laughed. “You caught me in the nick of time. I was just about to leave to get together with some people I know.”
“Costume party?” I asked.
“No, I dress like this all the time.” Her eyes sparkled. “It is Halloween.”
“Even with the lights out?”
She bobbed her brows, her smile wicked for a second. “Who knows. That might make it more fun.”
I had been right about the curves that had been hidden under her loose clothing back at Bock’s. They were awfully pleasant ones. It was an effort of will to stay focused on her face—especially when she laughed. Her laugh made all sorts of interesting little quivers run over her. “Do you have a minute?” I asked.
“Maybe even two,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”
“I need your help with something,” I said. I looked up and down the hallway. As far as I knew I hadn’t been followed, and I’d been watching my back—but that didn’t mean that no one was there. I was pretty good at noticing such things, but there were plenty of people (and nonpeople) who were better than me. “If you don’t mind, can we talk about it inside?”
Her expression became a little wary, and she looked up and down the hall herself. “Are you in trouble? Is this about the people at the store?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “May I come in?”
“Of course, of course,” she said, and stepped back inside, holding the door open for me. I limped in. “Oh, my God,” she said, staring at me as I came in. “What happened?”
“A ghoul threw a knife into my leg,” I told her.
She blinked at me. “You mean…a real ghoul? An actual ghoul?”
“Yeah.”
Her face twisted up with dismay. “Oh. Wow. I’ve heard stories, but I never thought…you know. It’s hard to believe they’re really out there. Does that make me an idiot?”
“No,” I said. “It makes you lucky. If I never see another ghoul, it will be too soon.”
Her apartment was pretty typical of the kind: small, worn, rundown, but clean. She had mostly secondhand furniture, an ancient old fridge, mismatched bookshelves that overflowed with paperbacks and textbooks, and a tiny, aged television that looked as if it didn’t get much use.
“Sit down,” she said, picking up a couple of blankets and a throw pillow from the couch, clearing off a space for me. I tottered over to the couch and sat, which felt entirely too good. I grunted and got my leg elevated onto the coffee table, and it felt even better.
“Thanks,” I said.
She shook her head, staring at me. “You look frightful.”
“Been a tough couple of days.”
She studied me with serious eyes. “I suppose it must have been. What are you doing here?”
“The book,” I said. “The one on the Erlking that I got from Bock.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Um. What?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “You remember but I don’t, and the bad guys stole my copy. I need you to remember it for me.”
She frowned. “The whole thing?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There were several poems and stanzas in there. I think what I need is in one of them.”
“What do you need?” she said.
I stared at her for a second. Then I said, “It might be better if you don’t know.”
She lifted her chin and regarded me for a moment, as if I’d just said something bad about her mother. “Excuse me?”
“This is some bad business,” I said. “It might be safer for you if I don’t tell you much about it.”
“Well,” she said. “That’s quite patronizing of you, Harry. Thank you.”
I held up a hand. “It isn’t like that.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is. You want me to give you information, but you won’t tell me why or what you are going to do with it.”
“It’s for your own protection,” I said.
“Perhaps,” she replied. “But if I give you this information, I’m going to bear some responsibility for what you do with it. We don’t know each other very well. What if you took the information I gave you and used it to hurt someone?”
“I won’t.”
“And maybe that’s true,” she said. “But maybe it isn’t. Don’t you see? I have an obligation in this matter,” she said, “to use my talent responsibly. That means not using it blindly or recklessly. Can you understand that?”
“Actually,” I said, “I can.”
She pursed her lips and then nodded. “Then if you want me to help you, tell me why you need it.”
“You could be put at risk if you become involved in this,” I said. “It could be very dangerous.” I left a clear silence between the last two words for emphasis.
“I understand,” she said. “I accept that. So tell me.”
I stared at her for a second, and then sighed, a little frustrated. She had a point, after all. But dammit, I didn’t want to see anyone else get hurt because of Kemmler’s disciples. Particularly not anyone with such lovely breasts.
I jerked my eyes away from them and said, “The people you’ve seen around the store are going to use the book to call up the Erlking.”
She frowned. “But…he’s an extremely powerful faerie, yes? Can they do that?”
“Do you mean is it possible?” I asked. “Sure. I whistled up Queen Mab a few hours ago, myself.” Which was technically the truth.
“Oh,” she said, her tone mild. “Why?”
“Because I needed information,” I said.
“No, not that. Why are these people calling up the Erlking?”
“They’re going to use his presence on Halloween night to call up an extra-large helping of ancient spirits. Then they’re going to bind and devour those spirits in order to give themselves a Valhalla-sized portion of supernatural power.”
She stared at me, her mouth opening a little. “It’s…a rite of ascension?” she whispered. “A real one?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“But that’s…that’s insane.”
“So are these people,” I said. “What you tell me could stop it from happening. It could save a lot of lives—not least of which is my own.”
She folded her arms over her stomach as if chilled. Her face looked pale and worried. “I need the poems because I’m going to summon the Erlking before they can do it and to make sure that I sidetrack him long enough to ruin their plans.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” she asked.
“Not as dangerous as doing nothing,” I said. “So now you know why. Will you help me?”
She fretted her lower lip, as though mulling it over, but her eyes were sparkling. “Say please.”
“Please,” I said.
Her smile widened. “Pretty please?”
“Don’t push me,” I half growled, but I doubt it came out very intimidating.
She smiled at me. “It might take me few minutes. I haven’t looked at that book in some time. I’ll have to prepare. Meditate.”
“Is it that complicated?” I asked.
She sighed, the smile fading. “There’s so much of it, sometimes my head feels like a library. I don’t have a problem remembering. It’s finding where I’ve put it that’s a challenge. And not all of it is very pleasant to remember.”
“I know what that’s
like,” I said. “I’ve seen some things I would rather weren’t in my head.”
She nodded, and paced over to settle down on the couch next to me. She drew her feet up underneath her and wriggled a bit to get comfortable. The wriggling part was intriguing. I tried not to be too obviously interested, and fumbled my notebook and trusty pencil from my duster’s pocket.
“All right,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Give me a moment. I’ll speak it to you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And don’t stare at me.”
I moved my eyes. “I wasn’t.”
She snorted delicately. “Haven’t you ever seen breasts before?”
“I wasn’t staring,” I protested.
“Of course.” She opened one eye and gave me a sly oblique glance. Then she closed her eyes with a little smile and inhaled deeply.
“That’s cheating,” I said.
She smiled again, and then her expression changed, her features growing remote. Her shoulders eased into relaxation, and then her eyes opened, dark, distant, and unfocused. She stared into the far distance for several moments, her breathing slowing, and her eyes started moving as if she were reading a book.
“Here it is,” she said, her voice slow, quiet, and dreamy. “Peabody. He was the one to compile the various essays.”
“I just need the poems,” I said. “No need for the cover plate.”
“Hush,” she said. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.” Her fingers and hands twitched now and then while her eyes swept over the unseen book. I realized after a moment that she was turning the pages of the book in her memory. “All right,” she said a minute later. “Ready?”
I poised my pencil over my notepad. “Ready.”
She started quoting poetry to me, and I started writing it down. It wasn’t in the first poem or the second, but in the third one I recognized the rhythms and patterns of a phrase of summoning, each line innocent on its own, but each building on the ones preceding it. With the proper focus, intent, and strength of will, the simple poem could reach out beyond the borders of the mortal world and draw the notice of the deadly faerie hunter known as the Erlking, the lord of goblins.
“That’s the one,” I said quietly. “I need you to be completely sure of your accuracy of recollection.”
