by Butcher, Jim
“Kirby,” I said.
“Jesus,” Murphy said. “What happened?”
“Something fast and mean was following me. The werewolves jumped it. Things went bad.”
Murphy nodded and stopped, and I dimly realized that we were standing next to her Saturn—an updated version of the one that had been blown up—blithely parked in front of a hydrant. She went around to the trunk and popped it open. “I took a look at that pile of parts you call a car.” She drew out the medical toolbox and cooler from her trunk and held them up. “These were on the passenger seat. I thought they might have been there for a reason.”
Hell’s bells. In the confusion of the attack and its aftermath, I had all but forgotten the whole reason I’d gone out in the first place. I took the medical kit from her as she offered it. “Yeah. Stars and stones, yeah, Murph. Thank you.”
“You need a ride?” she asked me.
I’d been planning on flagging down a cab, eventually, but it would be better not to spend the money if I didn’t need to. Wizarding might be sexy, but it didn’t pay nearly as well as lucrative careers like law enforcement. “Sure,” I said.
“What a coincidence. I need some questions answered.” She unlocked the door with an actual key, not the little what’s-it that does it for you automatically with the press of a button, and held it open for me with a gallant little gesture, like I’d done for her about a million times. She probably thought she was mocking me with that impersonation.
She was probably right.
This mess was getting stickier by the minute, and I didn’t want to drag Murphy into it. I mean, Jesus, the werewolves had been capable defenders of their territory for a long while, and I’d gotten half of them taken out in the first couple hours of the case. Murphy wouldn’t fare any better in the waters through which I was currently swimming.
On the other hand, I trusted Murph. I trusted her judgment, her ability to see where her limits lay. She’d seen cops carved to pieces when they tried to box out of their weight division, and knew better than to attempt it. And if she started throwing obstacles in my way—and she could, a lot of them, that I couldn’t do diddly about—then my life would get a whole lot harder. Even though she wasn’t running CPD’s Special Investigations department anymore, she still had clout there, and a word from her to Lieutenant Stallings could hobble me, maybe lethally.
So I guess you could say that Murphy was threatening to bust me if I didn’t talk to her, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy was offering to put her life on the line to help me, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy had done me a favor with the medical kit, in order to obligate me to her when she told me that she wanted to be dealt in, and you’d be right.
You could also say that I was standing around dithering when time was critical, and you’d be right about that, too.
At the end of the day, Murphy is good people.
I got in the car.
“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said, as we approached my apartment. “You’re hiding a fugitive from your own people’s cops, and you think the guy’s been set up in order to touch off a civil war within the White Council. And there’s some kind of Navajo boogeyman loose in town, following you around and attempting to kill you. And you aren’t sure they’re related.”
“More like I don’t know how they’re related. Yet.”
Murphy chewed on her lip. “Is there anyone on the Council who is in tight with Native American boogeymen?”
“Hard to imagine it,” I said quietly. “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind was a Senior Council member who was some kind of Native American shaman. He was a doctor, a healer, and a specialist in exorcisms and restorative magic. He was, in fact, a decent guy. He liked animals.
“But someone’s a traitor,” Murphy said quietly. “Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone.”
Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. “The reason treachery is so reviled,” she said in a careful tone of voice, “is because it usually comes from someone you didn’t think could possibly do such a thing.”
I didn’t say anything in reply. In a minute, her car crunched to a stop in the little gravel lot outside my apartment.
I picked up the medical kit, the cooler, and my staff, and got out of the car.
“Call me the minute you know something,” she said.
“Yep,” I told her. “Don’t take any chances if you see something coming.”
She shook her head. “They aren’t your kids, Harry.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything you can do to protect them in the hospital . . .”
“Relax,” she said. “Your werewolves won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”
I nodded and closed my eyes for a second.
“Harry?” she asked me.
“Yeah?”
“You . . . don’t look so good.”
“It’s been a long night,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Look. I know something about those.”
Murphy did. She’d had more than her share of psychic trauma. She’d seen friends die, too. My memory turned out an unwelcome flash from years before—her former partner, Carmichael, half eviscerated and bleeding to death on white institutional tile flooring.
“I’ll make it,” I said.
“Of course you will,” she said. “There’s just . . . there’s a lot of ways you could deal, Harry. Some of them are better than others. I care about what happens to you. And I’m here.”
I kept my eyes closed in order to make sure I didn’t start crying like a girl or something. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“Take care, Harry,” she said.
“You, too,” I said. It came out a little raspy. I tilted the toolbox at her in a wave, and headed into my apartment to see Morgan.
I had to admit—I hated hearing the sound of my friend’s car leaving.
I pushed those thoughts away. Psychic trauma or not, I could fall to little pieces later.
I had work to do.
Chapter Seven
Morgan woke up when I opened the bedroom door. He looked bad, but not any worse than he did before, except for some spots of color on his cheeks.
“Lemme see to my roommates,” I said. “I got the goods.” I put the medical kit down on the nightstand.
He nodded and closed his eyes.
I took Mouse outside for a walk to the mailbox. He seemed unusually alert, nose snuffling at everything, but he didn’t show any signs of alarm. We went by the spot in the tiny backyard that had been designated as Mouse’s business area, and went back inside. Mister, my bobtailed grey tomcat, was waiting when I opened the door, and tried to bolt out. I caught him, barely: Mister weighs the next best thing to thirty pounds. He gave me a look that might have been indignant, then raised his stumpy tail straight in the air and walked haughtily away, making his way to his usual resting point atop one of my apartment’s bookcases.
Mouse looked at me with his head tilted as I shut the door.
“Something bad is running around out there,” I told him. “It might decide to send me a message. I’d rather he didn’t use Mister to do it.”
Mouse’s cavernous chest rumbled with a low growl.
“Or you, either, for that matter,” I told him. “I don’t know if you know what a skinwalker is, but it’s serious trouble. Watch yourself.”
Mouse considered that for a moment, and then yawned.
I found myself laughing. “Pride goes before a fall, boy.”
He wagged his tail at me and rubbed up against my leg, evidently pleased to have made me smile. I made sure both sets of bowls had food and water in them, and then went in to Morgan.
His temperature was up another half a degree, and he was obviously in pain.
“This isn’t heavy-duty stuff,” I told him, as I broke out the medical kit. “Me and Billy made a run up to Canada for most of it. There’s some codeine for the pain, though, and I’ve got the stuff to run an IV for
you, saline, intravenous antibiotics.”
Morgan nodded. Then he frowned at me, an expression I was used to from him, raked his eyes over me more closely, and asked, “Is that blood I smell on you?”
Damn. For a guy who had been beaten to within a few inches of death’s door, he was fairly observant. Andi hadn’t really been bleeding when we picked her up in my coat. She was only oozing from a number of gouges and scrapes—but there had been enough of them to add up. “Yeah,” I said.
“What happened?”
I told him about the skinwalker and what had happened to Kirby and Andi.
He shook his head wearily. “There’s a reason we don’t encourage amateurs to try to act like Wardens, Dresden.”
I scowled at him, got a bowl of warm water and some antibacterial soap, and started cleaning up his left arm. “Yeah, well. I didn’t see any Wardens doing anything about it.”
“Chicago is your area of responsibility, Warden Dresden.”
“And there I was,” I said. “And if they hadn’t been there to help, I’d be dead right now.”
“Then you call for backup. You don’t behave like a bloody superhero and throw lambs to the wolves to help you do it. Those are the people you’re supposed to be protecting.”
“Good thinking,” I said, getting out the bag of saline, and suspending it from the hook I’d set in the wall over the bed. I made sure the tube was primed. Air bubbles, bad. “That’s exactly what we need: more Wardens in Chicago.”
Morgan grunted and fell silent for a moment, eyes closed. I thought he’d dropped off again, but evidently he was only thinking. “It must have followed me up.”
“Huh?”
“The skinwalker,” he said. “When I left Edinburgh, I took a Way to Tucson. I came to Chicago by train. It must have sensed me when the tracks passed through its territory.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Follow an injured wizard?” he asked. “Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal.”
“It eats magic?”
Morgan nodded. “Adds its victims’ power to its own.”
“So what you’re telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it’s stronger for having killed Kirby.”
He shrugged. “I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater.”
I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan’s upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. “Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter.”
Morgan shook his head. “Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn’t as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson.”
“Point,” I said, slipping the needle into his arm. “Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?” I thought about it. “The skinwalker’s got to go back to his home territory, though?”
Morgan nodded. “The longer he’s away, the more power it costs him.”
“How long can he stay here?” I asked.
He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. “More than long enough.”
“How do we kill it?” I frowned as I missed the vein again.
“Give me that,” Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.
I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.
“We probably don’t,” he said. “The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool’s game. We avoid it.”
I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. “Pretend for a minute that it isn’t going to cooperate with that plan.”
Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. “There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power—and it isn’t likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either.”
“It’s a tough target,” I admitted. “It knows magic, and how to defend against it.”
“Yes,” Morgan said. He watched me pick a preloaded syringe of antibiotics from the cooler. “And its abilities are more than the equal of both of us put together.”
“Jinkies,” I said. I primed the syringe and pushed the antibiotics into the IV line. Then I got the codeine and a cup of water, offering Morgan both. He downed the pills, laid his head back wearily, and closed his eyes.
“I Saw one once, too,” he said.
I started cleaning up. I didn’t say anything.
“They aren’t invulnerable. They can be killed.”
I tossed wrappers into the trash can and restored equipment to the medical kit. I grimaced at the bloodied rug that still lay beneath Morgan. I’d have to get that out from under him soon. I turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.
“How’d you do it?” I asked, without looking behind me.
It took him a moment to answer. I thought he’d passed out again.
“It was the fifties,” he said. “Started in New Mexico. It followed me to Nevada. I lured it onto a government testing site, and stepped across into the Nevernever just before the bomb went off.”
I blinked and looked over my shoulder at him. “You nuked it?”
He opened one eye and smiled.
It was sort of creepy.
“Stars and stones . . . that’s . . .” I had to call a spade a spade. “Kind of cool.”
“Gets me to sleep at night,” he mumbled. He closed his eye again, sighed, and let his head sag a little to one side.
I watched over his sleep for a moment, and then closed the door.
I was pretty tired, myself. But like the man said:
“I have promises to keep,” I sighed to myself.
I got on the phone, and started calling my contacts on the Paranet.
The Paranet was an organization I’d helped found a couple of years before. It’s essentially a union whose members cooperate in order to protect themselves from paranormal threats. Most of the Paranet consisted of practitioners with marginal talents, of which there were plenty. A practitioner had to be in the top percentile before the White Council would even consider recognizing him, and those who couldn’t cut it basically got left out in the cold. As a result, they were vulnerable to any number of supernatural predators.
Which I think sucks.
So an old friend named Elaine Mallory and I had taken a dead woman’s money and begun making contact with the marginal folks in city after city. We’d encouraged them to get together to share information, to have someone they could call for help. If things started going bad, a distress call could be sent up the Paranet, and then I or one of the other Wardens in the U.S. could charge in. We also gave seminars on how to recognize magical threats, as well as teaching methods of basic self-defense for when the capes couldn’t show up to save the day.
It had been going pretty well. We already had new chapters opening up in Mexico and Canada, and Europe wouldn’t be far behind.
So I started calling up my contacts in those various cities, asking if they’d heard of anything odd happening. I couldn’t afford to get any more specific than that, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Of the first dozen calls, folks in four cities had noted an upswing in Warden activity, reporting that they were all appearing in pairs. Only two of the next thirty towns had similar reports, but it was enough to give me a good idea of what was going on—a quiet manhunt.
But I just had to wonder. Of all the places the Wardens could choose to hunt for Morgan, why would they pick Poughkeepsie? Why Omaha?
The words “wild-goose chase” sprang to mind. Whatever Morgan was doing to mask his presence from their tracking spells, it had them chasing their tails all over the place.
At least I accomplished one positive thing. Establishing rumors of Wardens on the
move meant that I had a good and non-suspicion-arousing motivation to start asking questions of my own.
So next, I started calling the Wardens I was on good terms with. Three of them worked for me, technically speaking, in several cities in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. I’m not a very good boss. I mostly just let them decide how to do their job and try to lend a hand when they ask me for help. I had to leave messages for two, but Bill Meyers in Dallas answered on the second ring.
“Howdy,” Meyers said.
I’m serious. He actually answered the phone that way.
“Bill, it’s Dresden.”
“Harry,” he said politely. Bill was always polite with me. He saw me do something scary once. “Speak of the devil and he appears.”
“Is that why my nose was itching?” I asked.
“Likely,” Bill drawled. “I was gonna give you a call in the morning.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Rumors,” Bill said. “I spotted two Wardens coming out of the local entrance to the Ways, but when I asked them what was up, they stone-walled me. I figured you might know what was going on.”
“Darn,” I said. “I called to ask you.”
He snorted. “Well, we’re a fine bunch of wise men, aren’t we?”
“As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms.”
“Eh?”
“Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.”
“I hear that,” Meyers said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep an ear to the ground,” I told him. “Captain Luccio will tell us sooner or later. I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. You do the same.”
“Gotcha,” he said.
We hung up, and I frowned at the phone for a moment.
The Council hadn’t talked to me about Morgan. They hadn’t talked to any of the Wardens in my command about him, either.
I looked up at Mister and said, “It’s almost like they want to keep me in the dark. Like maybe someone thinks I might be involved, somehow.”
Which made sense. The Merlin wasn’t going to be asking me to Christmas dinner anytime soon. He didn’t trust me. He might have given the order to keep me fenced out. That wouldn’t hit me as a surprise.
