by Jim Butcher
I used the dryer spell to gently brush away dust and snow from the wall. It took me about a minute and a half, and when I was finished I caught another scent under the brimstone stench and said, “Double crap.”
Murphy stepped forward with her flashlight and shone it on the wall.
The sigil had been painted on the wall in something thick and brown that smelled like blood. At first I thought it was a pentacle, but I saw the differences immediately.
“Harry,” Murphy said quietly. “Is it human?”
“Most likely,” I said. “Mortal blood is the strongest ink you can use for symbols like this in high-energy spells. I don’t think anything else could have contained the amounts of energy it would have taken to blow up this building.”
“It’s a pentacle, right?” Murphy asked. “Like the one you wear.”
I shook my head. “Different.”
“How so?” Her mouth twitched at one corner. “Other than the blood, I mean.”
“A pentacle is a symbol of order,” I said quietly. “Five points, five sides. It represents the forces of air, earth, water, fire, and spirit. It’s contained within a circle, the points touching the outer ring. It represents the forces of magic bound within human control. Power balanced with restraint.” I gestured at the symbol. “See here? The points of the star fall far outside the ring.”
She frowned. “What does it mean?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Gosh,” she said. “You’re worth the money.”
“Ha-ha. Look, even if I’d seen this symbol before, it could mean different things to different people. The Hindus and the Nazis have very different ideas about the swastika, for example.”
“Can you make a guess?”
I shrugged. “Off the top of my head? This looks uncomfortably like a combination of the pentacle and the anarchy symbol. Magic unrestrained.”
“Anarchist wizards?” Murphy asked.
“It’s just a guess,” I said. My gut told me it was a good one, though, and I got the impression that Murphy had the same feeling.
“What’s the symbol for?” Murphy asked. “What is it meant to do?”
“Reflect power,” I said. “My guess is that the energy that drove through the building was reflected from this sigil, which means…” I kayaked down a logic cascade as I spoke. “Which means that the energy had to come in from somewhere else first.” I turned around slowly, trying to judge the angles. “The incoming beam must have gone right through the collapsed part of the building and—”
“Beam?”
I pointed at the semicircular hole in the ruined wall. “Yeah. Heat energy, a whole lot of it.”
She studied the hole. “It doesn’t look like it would be big enough to take down the building.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “Not in an explosion, anyway. This just drilled a hole. Might have started a fire as it went, but it couldn’t have sheared off the front of the building like that.”
Murphy frowned, tilting her head. “Then what did?”
“Working on it,” I mumbled. I judged the angles as best I could and took off down the alley. The firemen were still hard at work on the building, and we had to walk over several hoses as we emerged into the street at the back of the apartment building. I crossed the street and walked down the length of the building there, my hand raised, senses questing for any residual magic. I didn’t find any, but I did smell Hellfire again, and a couple of feet later I found another not-pentacle, identical to the first, also hidden under a light dusting of snow.
I kept going clockwise around the ruined building. I found two more symbols on the undamaged building on its next side, and one more across the street from the front of the ruined apartments, and then I completed the circle, arriving back at our original reflective symbol.
Five reflection points, which had guided a truly freaking frightening amount of energy through the building, forming one single, enormous shape as they did.
“It’s a pentagram,” I said quietly.
Murphy frowned. “What?”
I touched the round, smooth bore mark on the destroyed building’s wall. “The beam of energy that ripped through the building right here was one of five sides of a pentagram. A five-pointed star.”
Murphy regarded me blankly.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of chalk. “Okay, look. Everyone learns to draw this in grade school, right?” I quickly sketched out a star on a clear bit of brick wall—five strokes of the chalk, forming five points. “Right?”
“Right,” Murphy said. “You get them from the teacher when you get an A.”
“Another example of symbols having disparate meanings,” I said. “But look here, in the middle.” I filled in the closed shape in the center of the star. “That’s a pentagon shape, see? The center of the pentagram. That’s where you contain whatever it is you’re trying to contain.”
“What do you mean, contain?”
“A pentagram like this one is a symbol of power,” I said. “It’s got a lot of uses, depending on how you employ it. But most often you use it to isolate or contain an entity.”
“You mean like summoning a demon,” Murphy said.
“Sure,” I said. “But you can use it to trap other things too, if you do it right. Remember the circle of power at Harley MacFinn’s place? Five candles formed the pentagram on that one.”
Murphy shuddered. “I remember. But it wasn’t this big.”
“No,” I admitted. “And the bigger you make it, the more juice it takes to keep it going. I’ve never, ever heard of one that would take this much energy to activate.”
I drew little X shapes at the points of the star and drew the chalk from one to the next, thickening the lines of the example pentagram. “Get it? The beam streamed from one reflector to the next, melting holes through the building as it went. The reflectors formed the beam into one huge pentagram at ground level, more or less.”
Murphy frowned and squinted at the simple diagram. “The center of that shape couldn’t have covered the whole building.”
“No,” I said. “I’d need a good map to be sure, but I think the center of the pentagram must have been about twenty feet back from the front door. Which is why only the front half of the building collapsed.”
“The explosion came from inside this pentagon thing? Magical TNT?”
I shrugged. “The explosion came from inside the pentagram’s center, but not necessarily from the pentagram. I mean, it could have been a normal device of some kind.”
“Square in the middle of the giant, scary pentagram?” Murphy asked.
“Maybe,” I said, nodding. “It depends on what the pentagram was being employed for. And to know that, I’d have to know which way was its north.” I circled the topmost point of the chalk pentacle. “The direction of the first line, I mean.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Most everybody draws those stars just like I did. Bottom left to the topmost point as the first stroke. That’s how you draw it when you want to defend something, ward something away from a location, or banish a spiritual entity.”
“So this could have been a banishing spell?” Murphy asked.
“It’s possible. But you can do a lot of other things with it, if you draw it differently.”
“Like build a cage for things,” Murphy said.
“Yeah.” I frowned, troubled. “Or open a doorway for something.”
“Which, judging by your face, would be bad.”
“I…” I shook my head. I didn’t even want to know what kind of terror would need a pentagram that huge in order to squeeze into our world. “I think if something sized to fit this pentagram had come through it, there would probably be more than one building on fire.”
“Oh,” Murphy said quietly.
“Look, until I know what the pentagram’s purpose was, all I can do is speculate. And there’s something else weird here, too.”
“Wh
at’s that?”
“There’s not a trace of residual magic, and there should be. Hell, with this much power being tossed around, the whole area should practically be glowing. It isn’t.”
Murphy nodded slowly. “You’re saying they wiped their prints.”
I grimaced. “Exactly, and I have no idea how to do it. Hell’s bells, I didn’t know it was possible.”
I sipped at my coffee in the silence and pretended the shiver that went down my spine was from the cold. I passed the cup to Murphy, who took a sip from the opposite side and passed it back to me.
“So,” she said, “we’re left with questions. What is a major-league supernatural hitter doing placing a huge pentagram under an empty apartment building? What was his goal in creating it?”
“And why blow up the building afterward?” I frowned and thought of an even better question. “Why this building?” I turned to Murphy. “Who owns it?”
“Lake Michigan Ventures,” Murphy replied, “a subsidiary of Mitigation Unlimited, whose CEO is—”
“Triple crap,” I spat. “Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.”
Chapter Five
I tried to collect some of the blood in the reflective symbols and use it in a tracking spell to follow it back to its original owner, but it was a bust. Either the blood was already too dry to use or else the person who had donated it was dead. I had a bad feeling it wasn’t the winter air that made the spell fail.
Typical. Nothing was ever simple when Marcone was involved.
Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the robber baron of the streets of Chicago, and the undisputed lord of its criminal underworld. Though he’d long been under legal siege, the bastions of paperwork defended by legions of lawyers had never been conquered, and his power base had grown steadily and quietly. They probably could have tried harder to take him down, but the heartless fact of the matter was that Marcone’s management style was a better alternative than most. He’d put the civil back in civil offender, harshly cutting down on violence against civilians and law enforcement alike. It didn’t make his business any less ugly, just tidier, but it could have been worse, as far as the city’s authorities were concerned.
Of course, the authorities didn’t know that it was worse. Marcone had begun expanding his power base into the supernatural world as well, signing on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord. It made him, in the eyes of the authorities of the supernatural world, a kind of small, neutral state, a recognizable power, and I had no doubt that he’d begun using that new power to do what he always did—create more of the same.
All of which had been made possible by Harry Dresden. And the truly galling thing about the entire situation was that it had been the least evil of the options that had been available to me at the time.
I looked up from the circle I’d chalked on the concrete beneath a sheltered overhang in the alley and shook my head. “Sorry. Can’t get anything. Maybe the blood is too dry. Maybe the donor is dead.”
Murphy nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on the morgues, then.”
I broke the circle with a swipe of my hand and rose from my knees.
“Can I ask you something?” Murphy said.
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you ever use pentagrams? All I ever see you draw is circles.”
I shrugged. “PR mostly. Run around making lots of five-pointed stars in this country and people start screaming about Satan. Including the satanists. I’ve got enough problems. If I need a pentagram, I usually just imagine it.”
“You can do that?”
“Magic’s in your head, mostly. Building an image in your mind and holding it there. Theoretically you could do everything without any chalk or symbols or anything else.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because it’s a pointlessly difficult effort for identical results.” I squinted up at the still-falling snow. “You’re a cop. I need a doughnut.”
She snorted as we left the alley. “Stereotype much, Dresden?”
“Cops do a lot of running around in their cars, and they don’t always get to control their hours, Murph. Lots of times they can’t leave a crime scene to hit a drive-through. So they need food that can sit in a car for hours and hours without tasting foul or giving them food poisoning. Doughnuts are good for that.”
“So are granola bars.”
“Is Rawlins a masochist, too?”
Murphy casually bumped her shoulder against my arm when I was between steps, making me wobble, and I grinned. We emerged onto the mostly empty street. The firemen had been wrapping up their job when I arrived, and every truck but one had departed. Once the flames were out the show was over, and there were no rubberneckers anymore. Only a few cops were in sight, most of them in their cars.
“So what happened to your face?” Murphy asked.
I told her.
She concealed a smile. “‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff ’?”
“Hey. They’re tough, all right? They kill trolls.”
“I saw you do that once. How hard could it be?”
I found myself grinning. “I had a little help.”
Murphy matched my smile. “One more short joke and I’m taking a kneecap.”
“Murphy,” I chided, “petty violence is beneath you. Which is saying something.”
“Keep it up, wise guy. I’m always going to be taller than you once you’re lying unconscious on the ground.”
“You’re right. That was a low blow. I’ll try to rise above it.”
She showed me a clenched fist. “Pow, Dresden. Right to the moon.”
We reached Murphy’s car. Rawlins was in the passenger seat, pretending to snore. He wasn’t the sort to just fall asleep.
“So, Summer made a run at you,” Murphy said. “You think the attack on Marcone’s building is connected with that?”
“I lost my faith in coincidence,” I said.
“Get in,” she said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
I shook my head. “There might be something I can do here, but I need to be alone. And I need a doughnut.”
Murphy arched a delicate dark-gold eyebrow. “Ooooooo-kay.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter and give me the damned doughnut.”
Murphy shook her head and got in her car. She tossed me a sack from Dunkin’ Donuts that was sitting on Rawlins’s side of the dashboard.
“Hey!” Rawlins protested without opening his eyes.
“For a good cause,” I told him, nodding my thanks to Murphy. “Call you when I know something.”
She frowned at my nose. “You sure you want to be alone?”
I winked one of my blackened eyes at her. “Some things a wizard has to do for himself,” I said.
Rawlins swallowed a titter.
I get no respect.
They drove off and left me in the silently falling snow in the still hours before dawn. There were still a couple of fire crews and uniform cops there, the latter blocking off the street, though the former weren’t actively firefighting. The building was out, and coated in a layer of ice—but I guess there always could have been something hidden in the walls and ready to pop out again. I overheard one of them telling another that the road crew that was supposed to clean the rubble out of the street was helping a city plow truck stuck in the snow, and would be there when they could.
I trudged to about a block away, found an alley not choked, and went in with my doughnut. I debated for a moment what approach I would take. My relationship with this particular source had changed over the years, after all. Reason indicated that sticking with longstanding procedure was my best bet. Instinct told me that reason had disappointed me more than once, and that it wasn’t thinking in the long term anyway.
Over the years, my instincts and I have gotten cozy.
So, instead of bothering with a simple bait-and-snare, I braced my feet, held out my right hand palm up, placed the doughnut upon it like an offering, and murmured a Name.
Names, capital N, have pow
er. If you know something’s Name, you automatically have a conduit with which you can reach out and touch it, a way to home in on it with magic. Sometimes that can be a really bad idea. Speak the Name of a big, bad spiritual entity and you might be able to touch it, sure—but it can touch you right back, and the big boys tend to do it a lot harder than any mortal. It’s worth as much as your soul to speak the Name of beings like that.
But the Nevernever is a big place, and not to mix metaphors, but there are plenty of fish in that sea. There are literally countless beings of far less metaphysical significance, and it really isn’t terribly difficult to get one of them to do your bidding by invoking its Name.
(People have Names, too. Sort of. Mortals have this nasty habit of constantly reassessing their personal identity, their values, their beliefs, and it makes it a far more slippery business to use a mortal’s Name against them.)
I know a few Names. I invoked this one as lightly and gently as I could in an effort to be polite.
It didn’t take me long, maybe a dozen repetitions of the Name before the entity it summoned appeared. A basketball-sized globe of blue light dived out of the snow overhead and hurtled down the alley toward my face.
I stood steady as it came on. Even with relatively minor summonings, you never let them see you flinch.
The globe snapped to an instant halt about a foot away from the doughnut, and I could just make out the luminous shape of the tiny humanoid figure within. Tiny, but not nearly so tiny as the last time I had seen him. Hell’s bells, he must have been twice as tall as the last time we’d spoken.
“Toot-toot,” I said, nodding to the pixie.
Toot snapped to attention, piping, “My lord!” The pixie looked like an athletically slender youth, dressed in armor made of discarded trash. His helmet had been made from the cap to a three-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and tufts of his fine lavender hair drifted all around its rim. He wore a breastplate made from what looked like a carefully reshaped bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and carried a box knife sheathed in orange plastic on a rubber-band strap over one shoulder. Rough lettering on the box knife’s case, written in what looked like black nail polish, proclaimed, Pizza or Death! A long nail, its base carefully wrapped in layers of athletic adhesive tape, was sheathed in the hexagonal plastic casing of a ballpoint pen at his side. He must have lifted the boots from a Ken doll, or maybe a vintage GI Joe.
