by Jim Butcher
I got a sickly little feeling in my stomach. “Dead?”
Stallings’s jaw twitched. “You’d better come see for yourself.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to get frustrated. I didn’t have time for detours. It would take me hours to grind through Mort’s notes, and sundown, when the spirits would be able to cross over from the Nevernever, would come swiftly.
But Murphy did plenty for me. I owed her. She’d saved my life a couple of times, and vice versa. She was my main source of income, too. Karrin Murphy headed up Special Investigations, a post that had traditionally resulted in a couple of months of bumbling and then a speedy exit from the police force. Murphy hadn’t bumbled—instead, she’d hired the services of Chicago’s only professional wizard as a consultant. She was getting to where she had a pretty good grasp on the local preternatural predators, at least the most common of them, but when things got hairy she still called me in. Technically, I show up on the paperwork as an investigative consultant. I guess the computer records system doesn’t have numerical codes for demon banishment, divination spells, or exorcisms.
S.I. had gone toe to toe with one of the worst things anyone but a wizard like me was ever likely to see, only the year before—a half-ton of indestructible loup-garou. They’d taken some serious casualties. Six dead, including Murphy’s partner. Micky Malone had gotten hamstrung. He’d gone through therapy, and had come along for one last job when Michael and I took down that demon-summoning sorcerer. After that, though, he’d decided that his limp was going to keep him from being a good cop, and retired on disability.
I felt guilty for that—maybe irrational, true, but if I’d been a little smarter or a little faster, maybe I could have saved those people’s lives. And maybe I could have saved Micky’s health. No one else saw it that way, but I did.
“All right,” I said. “Give me a second to put these away.”
The ride was quiet, except for a little meaningless chatter from Stallings. Rudolph ignored me. I closed my eyes and ached along the way. Rudolph’s radio squawked and then fell abruptly silent. I could smell burnt rubber or something, and knew that it was likely my fault.
I opened one eye and saw Rudolph scowling back at me in the mirror. I half-smiled, and closed my eyes again. Jerk.
The car stopped in a residential neighborhood near West Armitage, down in Bucktown. The district had gotten its name from the number of immigrant homes once there, and the goats kept in people’s front yards. The homes had been tiny affairs, stuffed with too-large families and children.
Bucktown had been lived in for a century and it was all grown up. Literally. The houses on their tiny lots hadn’t had much room to expand out, so they’d grown up instead, giving the neighborhood a stretched, elongated look. The trees were ancient oaks and sycamores, and decorated the tiny yards in stately majesty, except where they’d been roughly hacked back from power lines and rooftops. Shadows fell in sharp slants from all the tall trees and tall houses, turning the streets and sidewalks into candy canes of light and darkness.
One of the houses, a two-story white-on-white number, had its small driveway full and another half-dozen cars parked out on the street, plus Murphy’s motorcycle leaning on its kickstand in the front yard. Rudolph pulled the car up alongside the curb across the street from that house and killed the engine. It went on rattling and coughing for a moment before it died.
I got out of the car and felt something wrong. An uneasy feeling ran over me, prickles of sensation along the nape of my neck and against my spine.
I stood there for a minute, frowning, while Rudolph and Stallings got out of the car. I looked around the neighborhood, trying to pin down the source of the odd sensations. The leaves in the trees, all in their autumn motley, rustled and sighed in the wind, occasionally falling. Dried leaves rattled and scraped over the streets. Cars drove by in the distance. A jet rumbled overhead, a deep and distant sound.
“Dresden,” Rudolph snapped. “Let’s go.”
I lifted a hand, extending my senses out, pushing my perception out along with my will. “Hang on a second,” I said. “I need to . . .” I quit trying to speak, and searched for the source of the sensation. What the hell was it?
“Fucking showboat,” Rudolph growled. I heard him start toward me.
“Hang on, kid,” Stallings said. “Let the man work. We’ve both seen what he can do.”
“I haven’t seen shit that can’t be explained,” Rudolph growled. But he stayed put.
I drifted across the street, to the yard of the house in question, and found the first body in the fallen leaves, five feet to my left. A small, yellow-and-white-furred cat lay there, twisted so that its forelegs faced one way, its hindquarters the opposite. Something had broken its neck.
I felt a pang of nausea. Death isn’t ever pretty, really. It’s worst with people, but with the animals that are close to mankind, it seems to be a little nastier than it might be elsewhere in the wild kingdom. The cat couldn’t have reached its full growth, yet—maybe a kitten from early in the spring, roaming the neighborhood. There was no collar on its neck.
I could feel a little cloud of disturbance around it, a kind of psychic energy left by traumatic, agonizing, and torturous events. But this one little thing, one animal’s death, shouldn’t have been enough to make me aware of it all the way over from my seat in the police car.
Five feet farther on, I found a dead bird. I found its wings in two more places. Then two more birds, without heads. Then something that had been small and furry, and was now small and furry and squishy—maybe a vole or a ground squirrel. And there were more. A lot more—all in all, maybe a dozen dead animals in the front yard, a dozen little patches of violent energies still lingering. No single one of them would have been enough to disturb my wizard’s sense, but all of them together had.
So what the hell had been killing these animals?
I rubbed my palms over my arms, a sickly little feeling of dread rolling through me. I looked up to see Rudolph and Stallings following me around. Their faces looked kind of greenish.
“Jesus,” Stallings said. He prodded the body of the cat with one toe. “What did this?”
I shook my head and rolled my shoulders in a shrug. “It might take me a while to find out. Where’s Micky?”
“Inside.”
“Well then,” I said, and stood up, brushing off my hands. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twelve
I stopped outside the doorway. Micky Malone owned a nice house. His wife taught elementary school. They wouldn’t have been able to afford the place on his salary alone, but together they managed. The hardwood floors gleamed with polish. I saw an original painting, a seascape, hanging on one of the walls of the living room, adjacent to the entryway. There were a lot of plants, a lot of greenery that, along with the wood grain of the floors, gave the place a rich, organic glow. It was one of those places that wasn’t just a house. It was a home.
“Come on, Dresden,” Rudolph snapped. “The lieutenant is waiting.”
“Is Mrs. Malone here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Go get her. I need her to invite me in.”
“What?” Rudolph said. “Give me a break. Who are you, Count Dracula?”
“Drakul is still in eastern Europe, last time we checked,” I replied. “But I need her or Micky to ask me in, if you want me to do anything for you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I sighed. “Look. Homes, places that people live in and love and have built a life in have a kind of power of their own. If a bunch of strangers had been trouping in and out all day, I wouldn’t have any trouble with the threshold, but you’re not. You guys are friends.” Like Murphy had said—this one was personal.
Stallings frowned. “So you can’t come in?”
“Oh, I could come in,” I said. “But I’d be leaving most of what I can do at the door. The threshold would mess with me being able to work any forces in the house.�
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“What shit,” Rudolph snorted. “Count Dracula.”
“Harry,” Stallings said. “Can’t we invite you in?”
“No. Has to be someone who lives there. Besides, it’s polite,” I said. “I don’t like to go places where I’m not welcome. I’d feel a lot better if I knew it was all right with Mrs. Malone for me to be here.”
Rudolph opened his mouth to spit venom on me again, but Stallings cut him off. “Just do it, Rudy. Go get Sonia and bring her back here.”
Rudolph glowered but did what he was told, going into the house.
Stallings tapped out a cigarette and lit up. He puffed for a second, thoughtfully. “So you can’t do magic inside a house unless someone asks you in?”
“Not a house,” I said. “A home. There’s a difference.”
“So what about Victor Sells’s place? I hear you took him on, right?”
I shook my head. “He’d screwed up his threshold. He was running his business out of it, using the place for dark ceremonies. It wasn’t a home anymore.”
“So you can’t mess with anything on its own turf?”
“Can’t mess with mortals, no. Monsters don’t get a threshold.”
“Why not?”
“How the hell should I know,” I said. “They just don’t. I can’t know everything, right?”
“Guess so,” Stallings said, and after a minute he nodded. “Sure, I see what you mean. So it shuts you down?”
“Not completely, but it makes it a lot harder to do anything. Like wearing a lead suit. That’s why vampires have to keep out. Other nasties like that. If you give them that much of a handicap, they have trouble just staying alive, much less using any freaky powers.”
Stallings shook his head. “This magic crap. I never would have believed it before I came here. I still have trouble with it.”
“Yeah? That’s good. Means you aren’t running into it too much.”
He blew out twin columns of smoke from his nostrils. “Could be changing. Last couple of days, we’ve had some people go missing. Bums, street people, folks some of the cops and detectives know.”
I frowned. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s all rumors so far. And people like that, they can just be gone the next day. But since I started working S.I., stuff like that makes me nervous.”
I frowned, and debated telling Stallings what I knew about Bianca’s party. Doubtless, there would be a whole flock of vampires in from out of town for the event. Maybe she and her flunkies were rounding up hors d’oeuvres. But I had no proof of that—for all I knew, the disappearances, if they were disappearances, could be related to the turbulence in the Nevernever. If so, the cops couldn’t do anything about it. And if it was something else, I could be starting a very nasty exchange with Bianca. I didn’t want to sic the cops on her for no reason. I’m pretty sure Bianca had the resources to send them back at me—and she could probably make it look like I’d done something to deserve it, too.
Besides that, in the circles of the supernatural community, an Old World code of conduct still ruled. When you have a problem, you settle it face to face, within the circle. You don’t bring in the cops and the other mortals as weapons. They’re the nuclear missiles of the supernatural world. If you show people a supernatural brawl going on, it’s going to scare the snot out of them and the next thing you know, they’re burning everything and everyone in sight. Most people wouldn’t care that one scary guy might have been right and the other was wrong. Both guys are scary, so you ace both of them and sleep better at night.
It had been that way since the dawn of the Age of Reason and the rising power of mortal kind. And more power to the people, I say. I hated all these bullies, vampires, demons, and bloodthirsty old deities rampaging around like they ruled the world. Never mind that, until a few centuries ago, they really had.
In any case, I decided to keep my mouth shut about Bianca’s gathering until I knew enough to be certain, either way.
Stallings and I made small talk until Sonia Malone appeared at the door. She was a woman of medium height, comfortably overweight and solid-looking. Her face would have been gorgeous when she was a young woman, and it still carried that beauty, refined by years of self-confidence and steady reliability. Her eyes were reddened, and she wore no makeup, but her features seemed composed. She wore a simple dress in a floral print, her only jewelry the wedding band on her finger.
“Mr. Dresden,” she said, politely. “Micky told me that you saved his life, last year.”
I coughed and looked down. Though I guess that was true, technically, I still didn’t see it that way. “We all did everything we could, ma’am. Your husband was very brave.”
“Detective Rudolph said that I needed to invite you in.”
“I don’t want to go where I’m not welcome, ma’am,” I replied.
Sonia wrinkled up her nose and eyed Stallings. “Put that out, Sergeant.”
Stallings dropped the cigarette and mushed it out with his foot.
“All right, Mr. Dresden,” she said. For a moment, her composure faltered and her lips began to tremble. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, smoothing over her features, then opened her eyes again. “If you can help my Micky, please come in. I invite you.”
“Thank you,” I said. I stepped forward, through the door, and felt the silent tension of the threshold parting around me like a beaded curtain rimed with frost.
We went through a living room where several cops, people I knew from S.I., sat around talking quietly. It reminded me of a funeral. They looked up at me as I went by, and talk ceased. I nodded to them, and we went on past, to a staircase leading up to the second floor.
“He was up late last night,” she told me, her voice quiet. “Sometimes he can’t sleep, and he didn’t come to bed until late. I got up early, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I let him sleep in.” Mrs. Malone stopped at the top of the stairs, and pointed down the hall at a closed door. “Th-there,” she said. “I’m sorry. I c-can’t . . .” She took another deep breath. “I need to see about lunch. Are you hungry?”
“Oh. Yes, sure.”
“All right,” she said, and retreated back down the stairs.
I swallowed and looked at the door at the end of the hall, then headed toward it. My steps sounded loud in my own ears. I knocked gently on the door.
Karrin Murphy opened it. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of a leader of a group of cops charged with solving every bizarre crime that fell between the lines of the law enforcement system. She didn’t look like someone who would stand, with her feet planted, putting tiny silver bullets into an oncoming freight train of a loup-garou, either—but she was.
Karrin looked up at me from her five-foot-nothing in height. Her blue eyes, normally clear and bright, looked sunken. She’d shoved her golden hair under a baseball cap, and wore jeans and a white T-shirt. Her shoulder harness wrinkled the cotton around the shoulder where her sidearm hung. Lines stood out like cracks in a sunbaked field, around her mouth, her eyes. “Hi, Harry,” she said. Her voice too was quiet, gruff.
“Hiya, Murph. You don’t look so good.”
She tried to smile. It looked ghastly. “I . . . I didn’t know who else to call.”
I frowned, troubled. On any other day, Murphy would have returned my mildly insulting comment with compounded interest. She opened the door farther, and let me in.
I remembered Micky Malone as an energetic man of medium height, balding, with a broad smile and a nose that peeled in the sun if he walked outside to get his morning paper. The cane and limp were additions too recent for me to have firmly stuck in my memory. Micky wore old, quality suits, and was careful never to get the jackets messy or his wife would never let him hear the end of it.
I didn’t remember Micky with a fixed, tooth-baring grin and eyes spread out in that helter-skelter gleam of madness. I didn’t remember him covered in small scratches, or his fingernails crusted with his own blood, or his wrists and ankles cuffed to the iron-fr
amed bed. He panted, grinning around the neatly decorated little room. I could smell sweat and urine. There were no lights on in the room, and the curtains had been drawn over the windows, leaving it in a brownish haze.
He turned his head toward me and his eyes widened. He sucked in a breath and threw back his head in a long, falsetto-pitched scream like a coyote’s. Then he started laughing and rocking back and forth, jerking on the steel restraints, making the bed shake in a steady, squeaking rhythm.
“Sonia called us this morning,” Murphy said, toneless. “She’d locked herself into her closet and had a cellular. We got here right before Micky finished breaking down the closet door.”
“She called the cops?”
“No. She called me. Said she didn’t want them to see Micky like this. That it would ruin him.”
I shook my head. “Damn. Brave lady. And he’s been like this ever since?”
“Yeah. He was just . . . crazy mean. Screaming and spitting and biting.”
“Has he said anything?” I asked.
“Not a word,” Murphy said. “Animal noises.” She crossed her arms and looked up at me, at my eyes for a second, before looking away. “What happened to him, Harry?”
Micky giggled and started bouncing his hips up and down on the bed as he rocked, making it sound as though a couple of hyperkinetic teenagers were coupling there. My stomach turned. No wonder Mrs. Malone hadn’t been willing to come back into this room.
“You better give me a minute to find out,” I said.
“Could he be . . . you know. Possessed? Like in the movies?”
“I don’t know yet, Murph.”
“Could it be some kind of spell?”
“Murphy, I don’t know.”
“Dammit, Harry,” she snapped. “You’d damned well better find out.” She clenched her fists and shook with suppressed fury.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I will. Give me some time with him.”
“Harry, I swear, if you can’t help him—” Her voice caught in her throat, and tears sparkled in her eyes. “He’s one of mine, dammit.”
