by Jim Butcher
All ogres have an innate capacity for neutralizing magical forces to one degree or another. Grum had grounded out my spells like I’d been scuffing my feet on the carpet to give him a little static electricity zap. That meant that he was an old faerie, and a strong one. The quick and thorough shapeshifting supported that assessment as well. Your average club-swinging thewmonger couldn’t have taken human form, complete with clothing, so ably.
Smart plus strong plus quick equals badass. Most likely he was a trusted personal guard or a highly placed enforcer.
But for whom?
At a stop light I stared at the photograph I’d taken from Grum.
“Damn,” I muttered, “who are these people?”
I added it to the list of questions still growing like fungus in a locker room.
Ronald Reuel’s funeral had already begun by the time I arrived. Flannery’s Funeral Home in the River North area had been a family-run business until a few years before. It was an old place, but had always been well kept. Now the carefully landscaped shrubbery had been replaced with big rocks, which were no doubt easier to maintain. The parking lot had a lot of cracks in it, and only about half of the outdoor lights were burning. The sign, an illuminated glass-and-plastic number that read QUIET ACRES FUNERAL HOME, glared in garish green and blue above the front door.
I parked the Beetle, tucked the photo into my pocket, and got out of the car. I couldn’t casually take my staff or my blasting rod into the funeral home. People who don’t believe in magic look at you oddly when you walk in toting a big stick covered with carvings of runes and sigils. The people who know what I am would react in much the same way as if I had walked in draped in belts of ammo and carrying a heavy-caliber machine gun in each hand, John Wayne–style. There could be plenty of each sort inside, so I carried only the low-profile stuff: my ring, mostly depleted, my shield bracelet, and my mother’s silver pentacle amulet. My reflection in the glass door reminded me that I had underdressed for the evening, but I wasn’t there to make the social column. I slipped into the building and headed for the room where they’d laid out Ronald Reuel.
The old man had been dressed up in a grey silk suit with a metallic sheen to it. It was a younger man’s suit, and it looked too big for him. He would have looked more comfortable in tweed. The mortician had done only a so-so job of fixing Reuel up. His cheeks were too red and his lips too blue. You could see the dimples on his lips where thin lines of thread had been stitched through them to hold his mouth closed. No one would have mistaken this for an old man in the midst of his nap—it was a corpse, plain and simple. The room was about half full, people standing in little knots talking and passing back and forth in front of the casket.
No one was standing in the shadows smoking a cigarette or looking about with a shifty-eyed gaze. I couldn’t see anyone quickly hiding a bloody knife behind his back or twirling a moustache, either. That ruled out the Dudley Do-Right approach to finding the killer. Maybe he, she, or they weren’t here.
Of course, I supposed it would be possible for faeries to throw a veil or a glamour over themselves before they came in, but even experienced faeries have trouble passing for mortal. Mab had looked good, sure, but she hadn’t really looked normal. Grum had been much the same. I mean, he’d looked human, sure, but also like an extra on the set of The Untouchables. Faeries can do a lot of things really well, but blending in with a crowd generally isn’t one of them.
In any case, the crowd struck me as mostly relatives and business associates. No one matched the pictures, no one seemed to be a faerie in a bad mortal costume, and either my instincts had the night off or no one was using any kind of veil or glamour. Bad guys one, Harry zero.
I slipped out of the viewing room and back into the hallway in time to hear a low whisper somewhere down the hall. That grabbed my attention. I made the effort to move quietly and crept a bit closer, Listening as I went.
“I don’t know,” hissed a male voice. “I looked for her all day. She’s never been gone this long.”
“Just my point,” growled a female voice. “She doesn’t stay gone this long. You know how she gets by herself.”
“God,” said a third voice, the light tenor of a young man. “He did it. He really did it this time.”
“We don’t know that,” the first man said. “Maybe she finally used her head and got out of town.”
The woman’s voice sounded tired. “No, Ace. She wouldn’t just leave. Not on her own. We have to do something.”
“What can we do?” the second male said.
“Something,” the woman said. “Anything.”
“Wow, that’s specific,” the first male, apparently Ace, said with his voice dry and edgy. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it fast. The wizard is here.”
I felt the muscles in my neck grow tense. There was a short, perhaps shocked silence in the room down the hall.
“Here?” the second male echoed in a panicky tone. “Now? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I just did, dimwit,” Ace said.
“What do we do?” the second male asked. “What do we do, what do we do?”
“Shut up,” snapped the female voice. “Shut up, Fix.”
“He’s in Mab’s pocket,” said Ace. “You know he is. She crossed over from Faerie today.”
“No way,” said the second voice, presumably Fix. “He’s supposed to be a decent sort, right?”
“Depends on who you hear it from,” said Ace. “People who get in his way have had a habit of getting real dead.”
“God,” said Fix, panting. “Oh God, oh God.”
“Look,” said the woman, “if he’s here, we shouldn’t be. Not until we know what it means.” Furniture, maybe a wooden chair, creaked. “Come on.”
I slipped back down the hall and around the corner into the lobby as I heard footsteps leaving the small side room. They didn’t come toward me. Instead, they moved further down the hall, away from the lobby. They had to be heading for a back door. I chewed on my lip and weighed my options. Three very apprehensive folks, maybe human, maybe not, heading down a darkened hall toward a back door that doubtless led into an equally dark alley. It sounded like a recipe for more trouble.
But I didn’t think I had any options. I counted to five and then followed the footsteps.
I saw only a retreating shadow at the far end of the hall. I looked into the room the three had been in as I went past it and found a small lounge with several upholstered chairs. I hesitated for a moment at the corner and heard the soft click of a metal door opening, then closing again. As I rounded the corner, I saw a door with a faded sticker spelling EXIT.
I went to the door and opened it as quietly as I could, then poked my head out into the alley it opened into and rubbernecked around.
They were standing not five feet away—three of the young people from Reuel’s photo. The small, skinny man with the blond-white hair and dark tan was facing me. He was dressed in what looked like a secondhand brown suit and a yellow polyester clip-on tie. His eyes widened almost comically, and his mouth dropped open in shock. He squeaked, and it was enough to let me identify him as Fix.
Beside him was the other young man, Ace. He was the one with the dark curly hair and goatee, wearing a grey sport coat with a white shirt and dark slacks. He still had his sunglasses on when he turned to look at me, and he clawed at the pocket of his jacket upon seeing me.
The third was the brawny, homely young woman with the muddy green hair and heavy brow. She had on a pair of jeans tight enough to show the muscles in her thighs and a khaki blouse. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even look. She just turned, her arm sweeping out as she did, and fetched me a blow to my cheek with the back of one shovel-size hand. I managed to move with it a bit at the last second, but even so the impact threw me out of the doorway and into the alley. Stars and cartoon birdies danced in my vision, and I rolled, trying to get clear before she could hit me again.
Ace pulled a small-caliber semia
utomatic from his jacket pocket, but the woman growled at him, “Don’t be stupid! They’d kill us all.”
“Hebbity bedda,” I said, by way of attempting a greeting. My mouth had gone rather numb, and my tongue felt like a lead weight. “Jussa hangonna sayke hee.”
Fix jumped up and down, pointing at me, his voice shrill. “He’s casting on us!”
The woman kicked me in the ribs hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Then she picked me up by the back of my pants, grunting with the effort, and threw me into the air. I came down ten feet away in an open Dumpster and crunched down amid cardboard boxes and stinking refuse.
“Go,” the woman barked. “Go, go, go!”
I lay in the garbage for a minute, trying to catch my breath. The sound of three sets of running feet receded down the alley.
I had just sat up when a head popped into view over me, vague in the shadows. I flinched and threw up my left arm, willing power through the shield bracelet. I accidentally made the shield too big, and sparks kicked up where the shield intersected the metal of the Dumpster, but by their light I saw whose head it was.
“Harry?” Billy the Werewolf asked. “What are you doing in there?”
I let the shield drop and extended a hand to him. “Looking for suspects.”
He frowned and hauled me out of the trash. I wobbled for a second or two, until my head stopped spinning quite so quickly. Billy steadied me with one hand. “You find any?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
Billy nodded and peered up at me. “Did you decide that before or after they hit you in the face and threw you in the garbage?”
I brushed coffee grounds off my jeans. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”
“Actually, yeah. All the time.”
“Okay, okay,” I muttered. “Did you bring the pizza?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Got it back in the car. Why?”
I brushed at my shaggy hair. What I hoped were more coffee grounds fell out. I started walking down the alley toward the front of the building. “Because I need to make a few bribes,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at Billy. “Do you believe in faeries?”
Chapter Thirteen
Billy held the pizza while I drew the chalk circle on the ground, back in the alley. “Harry,” he said, “how is this supposed to work exactly?”
“Hang on,” I said. I didn’t quite complete the circle, but took the pizza box from him. I opened it, took out one piece, and put it down in the middle of the circle on a napkin. Then I dabbed a bit of blood from the corner of my mouth where the girl had slugged me onto the bottom of the piece of pizza, stepped back, and completed the circle without willing it closed.
“Pretty simple,” I said. “I’ll call the faerie in close to the pizza there. He’ll smell it, jump on it, eat it. When he does, he’ll get the bit of my blood, and it will be enough energy to close the circle around him.”
“Uh-huh,” Billy said, his expression skeptical. He took out a second piece and started to take a bite. “And then you beat the information out of him?”
I took the piece out of his hand, put it back in the box, and closed it. “And then I bribe the information out of him. Save the pizza.”
Billy scowled at me, but he left the pizza alone. “So what do I do?”
“Sit tight and make sure no one else tries to pop me while I’m talking to Toot-toot.”
“Toot-toot?” Billy asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“Hell’s bells, Billy, I didn’t pick the name. Just be quiet. If he thinks there are mortals around he’ll get nervous and leave before I can snare him.”
“If you say so,” Billy said. “I was just hoping to do more good than to deliver pizza.”
I raked my fingers through my hair. “I don’t know what you could do yet.”
“I could track those three in the picture you showed me.”
I shook my head. “Odds are they just got into a car and left.”
“Yeah,” he said, some forced patience in his voice. “But if I get their scent now, it might help me find them later on.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a bit stupid. Okay, so I hadn’t considered the whole shapeshifting angle. “Fine, if you want to. Just be careful, all right? I don’t know what all might be prowling around.”
“Okay, Mom,” Billy said. He set the pizza box on top of a closed trash can, fell back down the alley, and vanished.
I waited until Billy had gone to find a nice patch of shadows to step into. Then I closed my eyes for a moment, drawing up my concentration, and began to whisper the faerie’s Name.
Every intelligent being has a Name, a specific series of spoken sounds linked to its very being. If a practitioner knows the Name of something, knows it in every nuance and detail of pronunciation, then he can use that Name to open a magical conduit to that being. That’s how demons get summoned to the mortal world. Call something’s Name and you make contact with it—and if you’re a wizard, that means that you can then exercise power over it, no matter where in the world it is.
Controlling an inhuman being via its Name is a shady area of magic, only one step removed from taking over the will of another mortal. According to the White Council’s Seven Laws of Magic, that’s a capital crime—and they make zero-tolerance policies look positively lenient.
Given how much the Council loves me, I’m a tad paranoid about breaking any of the Laws of Magic, so while I was calling the faerie’s Name, I put only the tiniest trickle of compulsion into it, just enough to attract his unconscious attention, to make him curious about what might be down this particular alley. I whispered the faerie’s Name and stood in the shadows, waiting.
Maybe ten minutes later, something made from a hummingbird and a falling star spiraled down from overhead, a flickering ball of blue-white light. It alighted on the ground, the light dimming to a luminous sheen over the form of a tiny faerie, Toot-toot.
Toot stood about six inches tall. He had a mane of dandelion-fluff hair the color of lilacs and a pair of translucent dragonfly wings rising from his shoulders. Otherwise he looked almost human, his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe. On his head he wore what looked like a plastic Coke bottle cap. It was tied into place with a piece of string that ran under his chin, and his lilac hair squeezed out from beneath it all the way around, all but hiding his eyes. In one hand he carried a spear fashioned from a battered old yellow Number 2 pencil, some twine, and what must have been a straight pin, and he wore a little blue plastic cocktail sword through another piece of twine on his belt.
Toot landed in a cautious crouch near the pizza, as though streaking in like an errant shot from a Roman candle might not have alerted anyone watching to his presence. He tiptoed in a big circle around the piece of pizza, and made a show of looking all around, one hand lifted to shade his eyes. Then he raised his arm into the air, balled up a tiny fist, and pumped it up and down a few times.
Immediately, half a dozen similar streaks of glowing color darted down out of the air, each one a different color, each one containing a tiny faerie at its center. They alighted more or less together, and every one of them was armed with a weapon that might have been cobbled together from the contents of a child’s school box.
“Caption!” Toot-toot piped in a shrill, voice. “Report!”
A green-lit faerie beside Toot snapped to attention and slapped herself on the forehead with one hand, then turned sharply to her left and barked, “Loo Tender, report!”
A purple-hued faerie came to attention as well and smacked himself in the head with one hand, then turned to the next faerie beside him and snapped, “Star Jump, report!”
And so it went down the line, through the “Corpse Oral,” the “First Class Privy,” and finally to the “Second Class Privy,” who marched up to Toot-toot and said, “Everyone’s here, Generous, and we’re hungry!”
“All right,” Toot-toot barked. “Everyone fall apart for messy!”
And with that, the faeries let out
shrill hoots of glee, tossed aside their weapons and armaments, and threw themselves upon the piece of pizza.
As soon as the little faeries started eating, the magic circle snapped closed around them with a hardly audible pop as it sprang into place. The effect was immediate. The faeries let out half a dozen piercing shrieks of alarm and buzzed into the air, smacking into the invisible wall of the circle here and there, sending out puffs of glowing dust motes when they did. They fell into a panicked spiral, around the inside of the circle, until Toot-toot landed on the ground, looked up at the other faeries, and started shouting, “Ten Huts! Ten Huts!”
The other faeries abruptly came to a complete stop in the air, standing rigidly straight. Evidently, they couldn’t do that and keep their little wings going at the same time, because they promptly fell to the alley floor, landing with a half-dozen separate “ouches” and as many puffs of glowing faerie dust.
Toot-toot recovered his pencil spear and stood at the very edge of the closed circle, peering out at the alley. “Harry Dresden? Is that you?”
I stepped out from my hiding spot and nodded. “It’s me. How you doing, Toot?”
I expected a torrent of outraged but empty threats. That was Toot-toot’s usual procedure. Instead, he let out a hiss and crouched down in the circle, spear at the ready. The other tiny faeries took up their own weapons and rushed to Toot-toot’s side. “You can’t make us,” Toot said. “We haven’t been Called and until we are, we belong to ourselves.”
I blinked down at them. “Called? Toot, what are you talking about?”
“We’re not stupid, Emissary,” Toot-toot said. “I know what you are. I can smell the Cold Queen all over you.”
I wondered if they made a deodorant for that. I lifted my hand in a placating gesture. “Toot, I’m working for Mab right now, but it’s just another client, okay? I’m not here to take you anywhere or make you do anything.”
