by Jim Butcher
Of course, it was possible she’d put a bullet through my eye, too. Or through my throat. Or maybe my guts.
I felt a sudden, ethereal wind, cold and ugly. The curse was almost there, and it was deadlier, more potent than ever before. A bare second of concentration told me that I would have no prayer of blocking that much magic, and even redirecting so much raw power would be nearly impossible. I don’t know what had happened to make the curse that much stronger, that much deadlier, and it scared me half out of my mind.
I had to do something, and I had to do it now.
I needed a distraction, but the best I could do was to abruptly whip my head toward the door, and to shift my weight as if I might stand up.
“Don’t move,” Trixie snarled.
I licked my lips, staring at the door.
I saw her expression become uncertain. She rubbernecked toward the door—only for a second, but it would have to do.
I threw my still-steaming coffee at her. It sloshed across her shoulder and neck. She screamed in surprise and sudden pain. I lunged at her, lifting the handset of the telephone to swing at her head.
She cried out and stared at me, her lovely face stunned, terrified.
The Quixote reflexes kicked in.
I hesitated.
The gun went off from two feet away.
I recovered before I could lose much momentum and slammed into her, a full-body impact that drove her shoulder blades up against the wall beside the door. The gun roared again, and the sharp, acrid tang of cordite and the syrupy smell of blood flooded over me. I got my fingers around the wrist of her gun hand and slammed it against the wall. The gun barked some more, but finally tumbled from her fingers to the floor.
I kicked it across the room. Trixie clawed at my eyes with the nails of her free hand. Pain jolted through me. I got an arm around her waist and threw her bodily away from me, opposite the way I had kicked the weapon. She hit the table and folded over it, scattering a box of doughnuts and a plate of various fruits.
Then she sank to the floor, sobbing. One of her stockings had been soaked in blood, from ankle to calf, and she curled up, clutching at her wounded leg. I recovered the gun without touching the handle, checked, and found it empty. I turned my eyes to Trixie Vixen.
She shrank away from me, weeping in pain and terror. She held up her other arm as a useless shield. “No. No, please. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.”
The adrenaline rushed through me, wild and mindless.
I wanted to kill her.
A lot.
I hadn’t ever felt that before—a sudden surge of fury, contempt, and disdain mixed in with a physical excitement only a few degrees short of actual arousal. It wasn’t an emotion. It was nothing that tame and limited. It was a force, a dark and vast tide that picked me up and swept me along like a Styrofoam packing peanut. And I liked it.
There was something in me that took a deep and gloating satisfaction in seeing my enemy on the floor and helpless. That part of me wanted to see her screaming. And then see her die screaming.
I’m not sure how I kept myself from acting on that flood of violence and lust. But instead of gut-shooting Trixie, I stared coldly at her for a second, studying her injuries. One of the shots must have either bounced into her calf or entered directly when the gun had gone off during the struggle. She bled, but not enough to kill her anytime soon, and the lines of her calf and foot seemed twisted, slightly misshapen. The bullet must have broken a bone.
“Please,” she babbled, staring at the gun I now held. “I’ll do whatever you want. Just say it. Oh, God, please don’t kill me.”
I stalked to the door. I noted a couple of bullet holes in it, and heard myself speak, my voice quiet and deadly cold. “Shut up.”
She did, shuddering with sobs, hiding her face. The scent of urine joined the other smells in the room. I kept her revolver in hand and jerked the door open hard, to rush through it and back to the soundstage to deal with the curse.
I didn’t have to bother.
Emma’s corpse lay on its back in the hall outside. She had been wearing spandex biking shorts with a matching sports halter. There was blood forming a pool beneath her. A small, neat hole directly into her sternum accompanied the hole in her forehead, just over her right eyebrow. She lay with her knees bent beneath her, her arms spread a little. A prescription bottle lay on the ground, just barely touching one fingertip. She’d been dead before she fell, and her body had simply relaxed bonelessly to the ground.
The shots couldn’t have been more perfect if they’d been delivered by a professional assassin. The odds against stray bullets randomly hitting where they had were inconceivably high. The malocchio had killed her. The stray bullets had simply been its instrument.
I heard Trixie gasp behind me, and turned to see her staring at the body. “No,” she whispered, the timing of the words somehow disjointed and random. “That wasn’t in the plan. This wasn’t part of it. He never said that.”
I heard running footsteps coming down the hall, and looked up in time to see a couple of the camera guys, Jake, and Arturo round the corner. They came to an abrupt stop, staring at the scene in shock. Someone—Jake, I thought—let out a high-pitched, squawking cry.
I suddenly realized that I was standing over a dead woman while another bled from a bullet wound ten feet away—and that I was holding the gun that did it to them both.
Trixie’s eyes widened as if she recognized the opportunity. Her mouth twisted into a sudden, vindictive, mad-eyed rictus. She let out a scream, wailing, “Help me! Help me, oh, God, don’t let him kill me too!”
I didn’t have long to decide on a course of action, but I got the benefit of one of those crystallized moments, when nothing happens and it seems like you’ve got all the time in the world to think.
I’d been too slow and now Emma was dead. Worse yet, I looked guilty as hell, short-term. In the long term, forensics would show that Trixie had been holding the gun when it went off, but I had never been on good terms with the largest part of Chicago’s legal system, either in the courts or law enforcement. At least one cop, now in Internal Affairs, would be glad to take this opportunity to crucify me, and if I took my chances with the law, the weapon plus the eyewitness testimony of a would-be victim could provide the state with a reasonable case. Even if they didn’t win, I could still spend the duration in prison, months or possibly years, until the case was decided—but all it would really take was one or two days. By then Mavra and her scourge would find me and kill me. I knew from bloody experience that not even the strongest jail cell meant much to supernatural beings with murder in mind.
I still didn’t know who was helping Trixie. If I didn’t figure out who was behind this mess, they could keep going, keep on killing. If I was out of the picture, they’d get away with it, and the thought stirred up my rage once more. Emma’s death had changed things. Before, there had been danger, but no one had died on my watch. Not for lack of trying, sure, but I’d been there in time to avert any deaths. But now Emma, whose worst crime probably had a lot to do with providing a decent living for her children, was lying there like so much meat, and her kids had no mommy.
I stared at Trixie for a hot, wild second, and the look choked her continued shrieks to whimpers. Trixie may have been female, but as of that moment she wasn’t a woman anymore. She’d crossed a line. As far as I was concerned, she and her allies had forfeited their membership card to the humanity club when they killed Emma.
And I’d be damned if I was going to let them get away with it. But I couldn’t do it from the inside of a cell.
I turned and hurried into an adjoining hall and toward the nearest door, but found it locked. I cursed and ran back, heading for the front door. Someone shouted but I ignored them. I sprinted the last twenty feet and was about to hit the door when it abruptly swung open.
Joan stepped in from the parking lot, panting. She wore old jeans and another flannel shirt over a tee. She had her keys in one han
d, and a clawhammer in the other. She’d gone through the locked door and beaten me to the exit.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I checked over my shoulder. I heard more shouts and running footsteps, heavy and fast. Bobby was running after me. If he tried to stop me here in the hall, I didn’t think I could get away from him without hurting him, maybe badly. But when I took another step toward Joan she swallowed, her face pale with fright but her eyes determined, and lifted the clawhammer.
“Joan,” I panted. “I have to go.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t let you leave. I heard gunshots. Emma and Trish are hurt.”
I didn’t have time to discuss it. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, wrapped it around the handle of Trixie’s gun to maybe preserve any prints, and lifted it, not quite pointing it at Joan. “There’s not time to explain, but if you don’t let me go it’s going to keep happening. Someone else on the crew will get hurt tonight.”
Her expression became angry. “Don’t you dare threaten these people.”
“It isn’t a threat,” I half screamed. I hated to do it, but I pointed the gun at her. “Move.”
She started shaking but adjusted her grip on the hammer and shook her head.
“I mean it,” I said, and took a step forward, radiating as much menace as I knew how.
Joan stared at the gun for a moment. Then an expression of resolution took the fear from her face. She lowered the hammer and took a step toward me, putting the barrel of the gun about six inches from her sternum. “I can’t let you hurt anyone else. If you want to leave,” she said quietly, “you’ll have to kill me too.”
I stared at her for a moment. Then I gripped the gun’s barrel with my left hand, left the handkerchief around the handle, and offered it to her.
She stared at me. “What are you doing?”
“Take it,” I said. “Trixie’s fingerprints are on the handle, so don’t touch it. She was the shooter. She’s working with someone and they’re responsible for all the deaths and injuries lately. But when the cops show, she’ll lie to them, and it looks bad for me. If the police arrest and hold me, I won’t be able to help you when they strike again tonight. I have to go.”
She shivered and took the gun. She held it like it might bite her. “I don’t understand.”
“Joan. If I was the one who shot them, I’d have shot you too. Would I give you the gun if I’d done it? Just leave the murder weapon here for the cops?”
She hesitated, uncertain.
“Help me,” I told her. There was a tense note of fear in my voice. “I need to get back to my place, get a few things, and go before the cops start watching it. Try to delay them. Just for five minutes, please. My God, it’s going to happen again if I don’t stop it.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the door.
“Please, Joan,” I said quietly. “God, please help me.” Silence fell heavily, except for more footsteps, coming closer.
“I must be insane,” she said. “I must be insane.”
She stepped aside.
I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. It made me look guilty as hell, but if I wanted to keep breathing I didn’t have much choice.
I ran.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I hit the parking lot at a run, piled into the Blue Beetle, and started it up. Behind me I heard the building’s fire alarm go off, a deafening ringing of emergency bells. In addition to the police, and probably an ambulance, a bunch of fire trucks were about to show up as well. It was going to be one hell of a mess to sort through, at least for the CPD. By the time they made sure the building had been evacuated, seen to Trixie’s wound, and taken statements from everyone in the building I could probably walk to Havana. She’d bought me at least ten minutes and probably more.
“Bless you, Joan,” I muttered. I slapped the old car into reverse and cleared out, heading for my apartment. I was on the highway and gone before any sirens started converging. I drove carefully and under the limit, since getting pulled over for a citation could be fatal, and tried to think unobtrusive thoughts. But I found myself mulling over the details of the malocchio.
Trixie Vixen had been in the room with me when the last curse came down, and while she was clearly involved, it hadn’t come from her. She’d known about it in great detail, though, and she’d known enough about magic to screw up the hurried wards I’d raised around the studio. Couple that with bragging about her power, and I figured she’d been involved in the actual magic at some point—she probably had handled part of the ritual that brought the curse down.
It made sense. Trixie was a jumbo-sized self-obsessed drama queen, complete with melodramatic dialogue, tantrums, and smug confidence that she was the center of the universe. The deaths and near-deaths from the malocchio had given new depths to the term freak accident. Swarms of bees, bridge-jumping cars, and electrocution in a puddle of one’s own blood were some pretty ridiculous ways to kill someone. And that frozen turkey thing had come straight out of a cartoon.
They would have been funny if it hadn’t been for the deaths.
But the curse had been different today. No winding, slow buildup, no murder weapons manufactured by the Acme Corporation, and no spillover onto other people nearby. Unlike the others, Emma’s death had been the result of a surgical strike of focused, violent energy. The earlier editions of the curse had been more like a stone-headed hatchet than a scalpel. Today’s curse had been far stronger than the ones I’d felt before, too.
And Trixie was the lowest common denominator.
Any kind of magic spell requires certain things to happen. You have to gather in the energy for whatever it is you’re trying to do. Then you have to shape it with your thoughts and feelings into what you want it to do. And finally you have to release it in the direction you want it to go. To use a rough metaphor, you have to load the gun, aim it, and pull the trigger.
The problem was that with a curse that powerful, you were talking about a very big gun. Even with a ritual supplying the power for it, controlling that power was a task that not just anybody could do. Aiming and pulling the trigger were easier, but handling them all at once would be very difficult even for some wizards. That’s why for the big projects you need three people working together, and it’s the basis for the stereotype of three cackling witches casting spells in concert over a cauldron.
Trixie stormed off the set before the curse had come at Inari last night, and she hadn’t been in the studio when it happened twelve hours prior to that. But she had been there with me today. Trixie the Drama Queen’s personality was stamped all over the near-insane deaths, but I was damned sure that she wasn’t a wizard.
Therefore, she’d had help. Someone would need to manage the energy, while Trixie shaped the curse into some kind of ludicrous death scenario. And someone else had to pull the trigger, channeling the spell to its intended recipient—also something that required a little more skill and focus than I was willing to believe Trixie had. So it would take three of them.
Three stregas.
Three former Mrs. Arturo Genosas.
The curse that killed Emma had been different. It had been a hell of a lot stronger, for one thing, and it had come at her a hell of a lot faster. And the death it had brought down on her had been efficient and quick. If Trixie wasn’t with them, then it meant that either one of the others had some serious skill, or they’d been able to find a replacement witch who had been content with making the murder swift, clean, and simple.
Four killers working together. I was the only one around who could get in their way, and they knew I was getting closer to them. Under the circumstances, they had only one logical target for the next iteration of the spell, twelve hours from now.
Me.
That was assuming, of course, that Mavra and the vampire scourge—or possibly the man I’d hired to help me kill them—didn’t take me out first. Maybe they wouldn’t get their chance. See?
That’s the power of positive thinking.
I got back to my apartment and got out of the car just in time to see Mister flying down the sidewalk as fast as he could run. He looked both ways before crossing the street, and we entered the apartment together. I started gathering things and shoving them into a nylon gym bag, then opened the door down to the lab. Bob flowed out of Mister, who promptly shuffled over to the fire and collapsed into sleep.
“Well?” I called down as I finished packing the bag. “Did you find her?”
“Yeah, I found her,” Bob called.
“About time,” I said. I went down the ladder in a hurry, and flicked several candles alight with a muttered word. I got out a roll of parchment about a foot and a half square. Then I spread it onto the worktable in the lab’s center and set a fountain pen beside it. “Where?”
“Not far from Cabrini Green,” Bob said. “I got a good look around the place.”
“Good. You’ve got permission to come out long enough to show me what you found.”
He made a sighing sound but didn’t complain. The usual cloud of glowing orange motes of light slid out of the skull’s eye sockets, though perhaps it was a little less bright and swirly than usual. The cloud of light surrounded the pen, and it rose up of its own accord, then began scratching a drawing of the lair on the parchment. Bob’s voice, a little indistinct now, said, “You aren’t going to like this.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a shelter.”
“A homeless shelter?”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “Does some rehab work with drug addicts, too.”
“Stars and stones,” I murmured. “How could vampires take something that public?”
“There’s no real threshold on a public building, so they didn’t need an invitation. I think they probably came in from Undertown, right into the shelter’s basement.”
“How many people have they hurt?”
Bob’s pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob’s drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. “There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement,” Bob said. “A few of the shelter’s staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn’t been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet.”
