by Jim Butcher
“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 her, 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 pl
anning 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.
“Thanks, boy.” I grabbed the mail, scratched his ears again, and flicked to life several candles on the end table next to the recliner with a muttered spell. “Bills,” I reported to him, going through the mail. “More bills. Junk mail. Another Best Buy catalog, Jesus, those people won’t give up. Larry Fowler’s new lawyer.” I put the unopened envelope against my forehead and closed my eyes. “He’s threatening me with another variation on the same lawsuit.” I opened the letter and skimmed it, then tossed it on the floor. “It’s as if I’m psychic.”
I opened the drawer in the end table, felt about with my fingertips, and withdrew a single silver metallic key, the only one on a ring marked with an oval of blue plastic that sported my business card’s logo: HARRY DRESDEN. WIZARD. PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS. CONSULTING, ADVICE, REASONABLE RATES.
I looked at the key. Thomas had given it to me, in case I should need to show up at his place in an emergency. He had a key to my place, too, even after he’d moved out. There had been a tacit understanding between us. The keys were there in case one or the other of us needed help. They had not been given so that one or the other of us could go snooping uninvited around the other one’s home and life.
(Though I suspected that Thomas had looked in on my place a few times, hoping to figure out how the place managed to get so clean. He’d never caught my housekeeping brownies at work, and he never would. They’re pros. The only drawback to having faerie housekeepers is that you can’t tell people about them. If you do, they’re gone, and no, I don’t know why.)
The faces of the dead women drifted through my thoughts, and I sighed and closed my fingers around the key. “Okay, boy,” I said. “Time to go visit Thomas.”
Mouse rose up expectantly, his tags jingling, his tail thrashing energetically. Mouse liked going for rides in the car. He trotted over to the door, pulled his lead down from where it hung on the doorknob, and brought it over to me.
“Hang on,” I told him. “I need the arsenal.”
I hate it when bad business goes down in summer. I put on my torturously warm leather duster. I figured I could take death from heat prostration to whole new levels given the potential presence of further firebombs. And that could land me a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Maybe even a Darwin Award.
See there? That’s called positive thinking.
I put on my new and improved shield bracelet, too, and slipped three silver rings onto the fingers of my right hand. I snagged my blasting rod, clipped Mouse’s lead on, took up my staff, and tromped on out to the car.
I told Mouse to stay back while I approached the Blue Beetle, my battered, often-repaired, mismatched Volkswagen Bug. I looked all around it, then lay down to check the vehicle’s undercarriage. I looked at the trunk and under the hood next. I even examined it for traces of hostile magic. I didn’t find anything that resembled a bomb or looked dangerous, unless you counted the half-eaten Taco Bell burrito that had somehow gotten tossed into the trunk about six months ago.
I opened the door, whistled for Mouse, and off we went to invade my brother’s privacy.
I hadn’t actually visited Thomas’s place before, and I was a little taken aback when I got there. I had assumed that the street address was to one of the new buildings in Cabrini Green, where urban renewal had been shoved down the throat of the former slum by the powers that be—largely because it bordered on the Gold Coast, the most expensive section of town, and the second-highest-income neighborhood in the world. The neighborhood around the Green had become slowly more tolerable, and the newer apartment buildings that had replaced the old were fairly nice.
But Thomas’s apartment wasn’t in one of those buildings. He was across the street, living in the Gold Coast. When Mouse and I got to the right apartment building, twilight was fading fast and I felt underdressed. The doorman’s shoes were nicer than any I owned.
I opened the outer door with Thomas’s key and marched to the elevators, Mouse walking smartly at heel. The doorman watched me, and I spotted two security cameras between the front door and the elevator. Security would have a pretty good idea who was a resident and who wasn’t—and an extremely tall and gangly man in a black coat with nearly two hundred pounds of dog with him wouldn’t be something they forgot. So I tried to stall them with body language, walking the walk of the impatient and confident in the hopes that it would make the security guys hesitate.
Either it worked or the building’s security people were getting paid too much. No one challenged me, and I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and walked down the hall to Thomas’s apartment.
I unlocked the door, gave it a couple of knocks, and then opened it without waiting. I slipped in with Mouse, and found the light switch beside the door before I closed it.
Thomas’s apartment was…well. Chic. The door opened onto a living room bigger than my entire apartment—which, granted, will never cause anxiety to agoraphobics. The walls were painted a deep crimson, and the carpeting was a rich charcoal grey. The furniture all matched, from the sofas to the chairs to the entertainment centers, all of it done in stainless steel and black, and a little more art deco than I would have preferred. He had a TV too big ever to fit into the Beetle, and a DVD player and surround sound and racks of DVDs and CDs. One of the newer video game systems rested neatly on a shelf, all its wires squared away and organized. Two movie posters decorated the walls: The Wizard of Oz and The Pirates of Penzance, the one with Kevin Kline as the Pirate King.
Well. It was good t
o see that my brother was doing well for himself. Though I had to wonder what he was doing that pulled down the kind of money this place would require.
The kitchen was like the living room—a lot of the same stainless steel and black in the appliances, though the walls had been painted white, as was the expensive tile floor. Everything was pristine. No dirty dishes, no half-open cupboards, no food stains, no papers lying about. Every single horizontal surface in the place was empty and sanitized. I checked the cupboards. The dishes stood in neat stacks, perfectly fitted to their storage in the cupboard.
None of which made sense. Thomas had a lot of positive qualities, but my brother was a fairly shameless slob. “I get it now. He’s dead,” I said aloud to Mouse. “My brother is dead, and he’s been replaced with some kind of obsessive-compulsive evil clone.”
I checked the fridge. I couldn’t help it. It’s one of those things you do when you’re snooping through someone’s house. It was empty, except for one of those boxes of wine, and about fifty bottles of Thomas’s favorite beer, one of Mac’s microbrewed ales. Mac would have killed Thomas for keeping it cold. Well. He would have scowled in disapproval, anyway. For Mac, that was tantamount to a homicidal reaction in other people.
I checked the freezer. It was packed, wall to wall, with TV meals in neat stacks. There were three different meals, stacked up in alternating order. There was room for maybe nine or ten more, and I presumed the others eaten. Thomas probably went shopping only every couple of months. That was more like him—beer, food cooked by pushing one button on a microwave. No dishes needed, and the drawer nearest the freezer yielded up a container of plastic forks and knives. Eat. Discard. No cooking or cleaning necessary.
I looked around at the rest of the kitchen, then at the fridge and freezer.
Then I went down the little hall that led to two bedrooms and a bath, and snorted in triumph. The bathroom was in total disarray, with toothbrushes and various grooming supplies tossed here and there, apparently at random. A couple of empty beer bottles sat out. The floor was carpeted with discarded clothing. Several half-used rolls of toilet paper sat around, with an empty cardboard tube still on the dispenser.
