by Jim Butcher
Susan turned the car down my street, and we rolled slowly through the rain. The old boardinghouse huddled stoically beneath the downpour, its gutters gurgling and spouting streams of water. The streetlights glowed with silver halos as the rain came down. A bit down from my building, a plain brown sedan was parked, and a couple of shadowy forms could be seen inside it when Susan drove past.
“That’s them,” I said. “I recognize one of them from Murphy’s unit.”
Susan let out another breath and drew the car around the corner, parking it along the street. “Is there any way to sneak into your place? A back door?”
I shook my head. “No. There’s only the one door in, and you can see the windows from here. I just need the police to not be looking for a few minutes.”
“You need a distraction,” Tera said. “I will do it.”
I looked over my shoulder. “I don’t want any violence.”
She tilted her head to one side, her expression never changing. “Very well,” she said. “For MacFinn’s sake, I will do as you say. Open the door.”
I stared at her fathomless eyes for a second, searching for any signs of deception or betrayal. What if Tera was the killer? She had known about MacFinn, and was able to transform in one fashion or another. She could have committed the murders last month, as well as the one two nights past. But if so, why had she seemingly sacrificed herself so that MacFinn and I could escape? Why had she come to find me?
Then again, MacFinn had been captured. And her words at the gas station may have been calculated to make me give up trying to help him, if one looked at them from a certain point of view. What if she was trying to take care of both MacFinn and me by throwing us to the mundane legal system?
My head spun with pain and weariness. Paranoid, Harry, I told myself. You’ve got to trust someone, somewhere—or else MacFinn goes furry and Murphy and a lot of other good people die tonight. There wasn’t much choice.
I opened the door, and we both got out of the car. “What are you going to do?” I asked Tera.
Instead of answering, the amber-eyed woman stripped off my duster and handed it back to me, leaving herself nude and lovely under the rain. “Do you like to look at my body?” she demanded of me.
“Careful how you answer this one, buster,” Susan growled from the car.
I coughed, and glanced back at Susan, keeping my eyes off of the other woman. “Yeah, Tera. That will work fine, I guess.”
“Wait for twenty slow breaths,” she said. There was a note of amusement in her voice. “Pick me up at the far end of this block.” Then she turned on a bare heel and glided into the darkness between streetlights in a graceful lope. I frowned after her for a moment, and then drew my duster back on.
“You don’t have to look quite so hard,” Susan said. “Is she the human-interest angle for this story?”
I winced, holding my wounded arm close to my side, and leaned down to meet Susan’s eyes. “I don’t think she’s human,” I said. Then I stood and started walking down the street, slowing my steps so that I didn’t round the corner until Tera’s prescribed time limit had elapsed. Even when I did, I walked quickly, like someone hurrying home out of the rain, my hands in my pockets, keeping my head down against the grey downpour.
I crossed the street toward my apartment building, glancing at the sedan as I did.
The cops weren’t watching me. They were staring at the pool of light beneath the streetlight behind them, where Tera spun gracefully through the steps of some sort of gliding dance, moving to a rhythm and a music I could not hear. There was a primal sort of intensity to her motions, raw sexuality, feminine power coursing through her movements. Her back arched as she spun and whirled, offering out her breasts to the chill rain, and her skin was slick and gleaming with water.
I tripped over the curb on the far side of the street and felt my cheeks start to flame as I hurried down the steps to my apartment. I unlocked the door and went inside, shutting it behind me. I didn’t light any candles, relying upon my knowledge of the house to move around.
The two potions were in their plastic sports bottles on the counter where I had left them. I grabbed up my black nylon backpack from the floor and threw the bottles into it. Then I went into my bedroom and grabbed the blue coveralls with the little red patch over one breast pocket stenciled with MIKE in bold letters. My mechanic had accidentally left them in the trunk of the Blue Beetle the last time the Beetle was in the shop. I added a baseball cap, a first-aid kit, a roll of duct tape, a box of chalk, seven smooth stones from a collection of them I keep in my closet, a white T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, and a huge bottle of Tylenol, zipped up the backpack, and headed back out again. At the last moment, I took up my wizard’s staff from the corner by the door.
Something flashed past my legs, moving out into the night, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Mister paused at the top of the stairs to look back at me, his cat eyes enigmatic and irritated, and then vanished into the darkness. I muttered something under my breath and locked the door behind me, then headed out once more, my heart rattling along too quickly to be comfortable.
Tera was on her hands and knees in the middle of the pool of light behind the sedan, her damp hair fallen all around her face, her lips parted, facing the two plainclothes officers, who had gotten out of the car and were speaking to her from several feet away. Her chest was heaving in and out, but having seen her in action, I doubted that it was merely from the exertion of her dancing. Looked nice, though. The policemen were sure as hell staring.
I gripped my staff in hand, along with the backpack, and walked away down the street again. It didn’t take long to make it back to Susan’s car, and she immediately wheeled the vehicle around the block without comment. Susan hardly had begun to slow down when Tera appeared from between a couple of buildings and loped over to the car. I leaned forward, opened the door, and she got into the backseat. I threw her the extra clothes I had picked up, and she began to dress without comment.
“It worked,” I said. “We did it.”
“Of course it worked,” Tera said. “Men are foolish. They will stare at anything female and naked.”
“She’s got that right,” Susan said, under her breath, and jerked the car into motion again. “Oh, we are going to talk about this one, mister. Next stop, Special Investigations.”
Outside the battered old police building downtown, I pulled the baseball cap a little lower over my eyes, and drank the blending potion. It didn’t really have any taste to it at all, but it twitched and bubbled all the way down my gullet until it hit my stomach.
I gave the potion a few seconds to work and shifted my hands on the handle of my wizard’s staff. Even though the end of it was shoved into a wheeled bucket, it still didn’t look much like the handle of a mop. And even though I was dressed in the dark blue coveralls, they were ridiculously short on me. I did not look much like a janitor.
That’s where the magic came in. If the potion worked, I would look like background to any casual observers, a part of the scenery that they wouldn’t glance at twice. So long as they didn’t give me an intense scrutiny, the potion’s power should be able to keep me from being noticed, which would let me get close to MacFinn, which would let me put the containment circle around him and keep his transformed self from going on a rampage.
Of course, if it didn’t work, I might just end up studying the inside of a jail cell for a few years—provided the transformed MacFinn didn’t tear me apart first.
I tried to ignore the pain in my shoulder, the nervous tension in my stomach. I was rebandaged, Tylenoled, and as reasonably refreshed as I could possibly have been without drinking the potion I had brewed just for that purpose.
If I could have had both potions going in my system without them making me too ill to move, I would have downed the refresher potion the moment I got my hands on it, but without the blending potion, there was no way I could get inside to MacFinn. I could only hope that I’d find a use for it eventu
ally. I’d hate the effort to go to waste.
I waited impatiently in the rain, sure for a moment that I had messed something up when making the potion, that it wasn’t going to have any effect at all.
And then I felt it start to work.
A sort of grey feeling came over me, and I realized with a start that the colors were fading from my vision. A sort of listless feeling came over me, a lassitude that advised me to sit down somewhere and watch the world go by, but at the same time the hairs on the back of my neck prickled up as the potion’s magic took effect.
I took a deep breath and walked up the stairs of the building with my bucket and my “mop,” pulled open the doors, and went inside. Shadows shifted and changed oddly, all greys and blacks and whites, and for a second I felt like an extra on the set of Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon.
The solid old matron of a sergeant sat at the front desk, thumbing through a glossy magazine, a portrait done in colorless hues. She glanced up at me for a second, and tinges of color returned to her uniform, her cheeks, and her eyes. She looked me over casually, sniffed, and lowered her face to her magazine again. As her attention faded, so did the colors from her clothing and skin. My perceptions of her changed as she paid attention to me or did not.
I felt my face stretch in a victorious smile. The potion had worked. I was inside. I had to suppress an urge to break into a soft-shoe routine. Sometimes, being able to use magic was so cool. I almost stopped hurting for a few seconds, from sheer enjoyment of the special effects. I would have to remember to tell Bob how much I liked the way this potion worked.
I kept my head down and moved past the desk sergeant, just one more janitor coming in to clean up the police station after hours. I picked up the bucket and my “mop” and went up the stairs, toward the holding cells and the Special Investigations office on the fifth floor. One cop passed me on the stairs and didn’t so much as look at me. His uniform and skin remained entirely devoid of color. I grew more confident and moved with more speed. I was effectively invisible.
Now all I had to do was find MacFinn, trick my way into seeing him, and save Murphy and all the other police from the monster MacFinn would become—before they arrested me for trying to do it.
And time was running out.
Chapter Seventeen
Ever wish you had an almanac?
I did, that night. I had no idea what time the moon was supposed to rise, and I hadn’t exactly had time to run to the library or a bookstore. I knew that it was supposed to happen an hour or so after sundown, but the way the clouds rolled in had made it uncertain exactly when sundown had happened. Did I have twenty minutes? Ten? An hour?
Or was I already too late?
As I climbed the stairs, I thought about being alone in the building with MacFinn after he had changed. For all my vaunted wizard’s knowledge, I had no real idea of his capabilities; although after seeing Kim’s body, I had something of an idea of what he could do. Bob had said that loup-garou were fast, strong, virtually immune to magic. What could I do against something like that?
I just had to pray that I would be able to get the circle up around MacFinn before I had to find out. I checked the bucket, to make sure I still had the chalk and the stones I would need to construct the greater circle around MacFinn. You didn’t necessarily have to make them out of silver and gold and whatnot. Mostly, you just had to understand how the construct channeled the forces that were being employed. If you knew that, you could figure out how to make it out of less pure materials. The very best wizards don’t need much more than chalk, table salt, and a wooden spoon to pull off some remarkable stuff.
My thoughts were rambling now, panic making them scamper around like a frightened chipmunk. That was bad. I needed focus, direction, concentration. I drove my legs a little harder, went up the stairs as fast as I dared, until I came out on the fifth floor. The door to Special Investigations was ten feet away. The holding cells were down the hall and around the corner, and I started that way at once.
“What do you mean, you can’t find him?” Murphy’s voice demanded as I walked past the office door.
“Just that. The men on his apartment said that they kept a real good eye on the place, but that he got in and out again without them seeing anything.” Carmichael’s voice was tired, frustrated.
Murphy snorted. “Christ, Carmichael. Is Dresden going to have to walk right into the office before you can find him?”
I hurried on past the door and down the hall. Tempting as it was to listen to a conversation about myself without the participants knowing, I just didn’t have time. I wheeled my wobbling, squeaking bucket down the hall, half jogging in my hurry.
Holding was set up, unsurprisingly, behind bars. There was a swinging barred door that the station guard had to buzz to open, if you didn’t have the key. Beyond that was a sort of antechamber with a couple of wooden chairs and not much else besides a counter with a window made of bulletproof glass. The jailer sat behind the glass at his desk, his expression baggy eyed and bored. Past the jailer’s window was another door, made of steel with a tiny little window, which led into the row of cells. The jailer had the controls to that door at his desk as well.
I went to the first barred door, kept my head down, and rapped on the metal slats. I waited for a while, but nothing happened, so I rapped on the bars again. It occurred to me that it would add a nice touch of irony if the same blending potion that got me into the building also kept me from being noticed by the jailer and let inside. I rapped on the bars again, harder this time, with the shaft of my wooden “mop.”
It took some determined rapping to get him to look up from his magazine, but he finally did, and peered at me through thick glasses. His colors swirled and gained a bit of tint before settling back toward grey. He frowned at me, glanced back at a calendar on the wall, and then pushed the button.
The barred door buzzed and I shoved it open with my bucket, wheeling inside with my head down. “You’re early this week,” the jailer said, his eyes back on the magazine.
“Out of town on Friday. Trying to get done sooner,” I replied. I kept my voice in a monotone, as grey and boring as I could manage. To my surprise, it came out as I intended it. I’m usually not much of a liar or an actor, so the potion must have been helping me on some subtle and devious level. One thing I’ll say for Bob: He’s annoying as hell, but he knows his stuff.
“Whatever. Sign here,” the jailer said in a bored tone, and shoved a clipboard and a pen at me through a slot at the base of the Plexiglas window. He turned a page in his magazine, showing me a picture of an athletic-looking young woman doing something anatomically improbable with an equally improbable young man.
I hesitated. How in the hell was I supposed to sign in and out? I mean, Bob’s potion may have been good, but it wasn’t going to change a signature after I’d put it on the paper. I glanced at the inner door, and then at the clock on the wall. To hell with it. I didn’t have time to hang around. I went over to the counter and scribbled something unreadable on the admissions sheet.
“Have any trouble tonight?” I asked.
The jailer snorted, turning his magazine to the right by ninety degrees. “Just that rich guy they brought in earlier. He was yelling for a while, but he’s shut up now. Probably coming down off of whatever he was on.” He collected the clipboard, gave it a perfunctory glance, and hung it back up on its peg beside a bank of black-and-white monitors.
I leaned closer to the monitors, sweeping my eyes over them. Each was apparently receiving a signal from a security camera, because each one of them displayed a scene that was exactly the same except for the actors in it—a small cell, maybe eight feet by eight, with bars serving as one wall, smooth concrete for the other three, a bunk, a toilet, and a single door. Maybe two thirds of the monitors had a strip of masking tape stuck to the lower right-hand corner of the screen, with a name, like HANSON or WASHINGTON, written in black marker. I frantically scanned the bank of monitors until, in the lower c
orner, I found the one that said MACFINN. I looked at his monitor. The video was blurred, flecked with snow and static, but I could see well enough what had happened.
The cell was empty.
Concrete dust drifted in the air. The wall of bars was missing, apparently torn from the concrete and allowed to fall away. I could see the scraps of MacFinn’s denim shorts lying on the floor of the cell.
“Hell’s bells,” I swore softly. There was a flicker of motion on another monitor, the one next to MacFinn’s. The tape at the bottom of the screen read MATSON, and a starved-looking, unshaven man in a sleeveless white undershirt and blue jeans could be seen curled up on the bunk, his back pressed to the rear corner of the cell. His mouth was open and his chest straining, as though he was screaming, but I could hear nothing through the thick security door and the concrete walls. There was a flicker of motion, a huge and furry shape on the camera, out of focus, and Matson threw up his skinny arms to protect himself as something huge and quick shoved its way between the bars, like a big dog going through a rotten picket fence, and engulfed him.
There was a burst of static and violent motion, and then a spattering of black on the grey walls and floor of the cell, as though someone had shaken up a cola and sprayed the walls with it. Then the huge form was gone, and left behind was a ragged, quivering doll of torn flesh and blood-soaked clothing. Matson stared up at the security camera, his dying eyes pleading with mine—and then he jerked once and was gone.
The entire thing had taken perhaps three or four seconds.
My eyes swept over the other security monitors as a sick sort of fascination settled over me. Prisoners were straining to the front of their cells, shouting things out, trying to get enough of a look to see what was going on. I realized that they couldn’t see what was happening—they could only hear. They wouldn’t be able to look out and see the transformed MacFinn until he was at the bars of their cell.
Fear, sick and horrible and debilitating, swam over me and tangled up my tongue. The creature had gone through the bars of the cell as though they’d been made of cheap plastic, and it had killed without mercy. I stared at Matson’s dead eyes, at the ruined mess of what had been his guts, at the detached pieces of meat and bone that had once been his right arm and leg.
