by Jim Butcher
The apartment had been torn to pieces.
A futon lay on its side, its metal frame twisted like a pretzel. The entertainment center had been pulled down from the wall, shattering equipment, scattering CDs and DVDs and vintage Star Wars action figures everywhere. The wooden table had been broken in two precisely at its center. One of the half-dozen chairs survived. The others were kindling. The microwave protruded from the drywall of an interior wall. The door of the fridge had taken out the bookcase across the room. Everything in the kitchen had been pulled down and scattered.
I moved in as quietly as I could—which was pretty damn quiet. I had done a lot of sneaking around. The bathroom looked like someone had taken a chain saw to it and followed up with explosives. The bedroom used to house computers and electronic stuff looked like the site of an airplane crash.
Billy and Georgia’s bedroom was the worst of all of them.
There was blood on the floor and one wall.
Whatever had happened, I had missed it. Dammit. I wanted to kill something, I wanted to scream in frustration, and I wanted to throw up in fear for Georgia.
But in my business, that kind of thing doesn’t help much.
I went back into the living room. The phone near the door had survived. I dialed.
“Lieutenant Murphy, Special Investigations,” answered a professional, bland voice.
“It’s me, Murph,” I told her.
Murphy knows me. Her tone changed at once. “My God, Harry, what’s wrong?”
“I’m at Billy and Georgia’s apartment,” I said. “The place has been torn apart. There’s blood.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Georgia’s missing.” I paused and said, “It’s her wedding day, Murph.”
“Five minutes,” she said at once.
“I need you to pick something up for me on the way.”
MURPHY CAME THROUGH the door eight minutes later. She was the head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations Department. They were the cops who got to handle all the crimes that didn’t fall into anyone else’s purview—stuff like vampire attacks and mystical assaults, as well as more mundane crimes like grave robbing, plus all the really messy cases the other cops didn’t want to bother with. SI is supposed to make everything fit neatly into the official reports, explaining away anything weird with logical, rational investigation.
SI spends a lot of time struggling with that last one. Murphy writes more fiction than most novelists.
Murphy doesn’t look like a cop, much less a monster cop. She’s five nothing. She’s got blond hair, blue eyes, and a cute nose. She’s also got about a zillion gunnery awards and a shelfful of open-tournament martial arts trophies, and I once saw her kill a giant plant monster with a chain saw. She wore jeans, a white tee, sneakers, a baseball cap, and her hair was pulled back into a tail. She wore her gun in a shoulder rig, her badge around her neck, and she had a backpack slung over one shoulder.
She came through the door and stopped in her tracks. She surveyed the room for a minute and then said, “What did this?”
I nodded at the twisted futon frame. “Something strong.”
“I wish I were a big-time private investigator like you. Then I could figure these things out for myself.”
“You bring it?” I asked.
She tossed me the backpack. “The rest is in the car. What’s it for?”
I opened the pack, took out a bleached-white human skull, and put it down on the kitchen counter. “Bob, wake up.”
Orange lights appeared in the skull’s shadowed eye sockets, and then slowly grew brighter. The skull’s jaws twitched and then opened into a pantomime of a wide yawn. A voice issued out, the sound odd, like when you talk while on a racquetball court. “What’s up, boss?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Murphy swore. She took a step back and almost fell over the remains of the entertainment center.
Bob the Skull’s eyelights brightened. “Hey, the cute blonde! Did you do her, Harry?” The skull spun in place on the counter and surveyed the damage. “Wow. You did! Way to go, stud!”
My face felt hot. “No, Bob,” I growled.
“Oh,” the skull said, crestfallen.
Murphy closed her mouth, blinking at the skull. “Uh. Harry?”
“This is Bob the Skull,” I told her.
“It’s a skull,” she said. “That talks.”
“Bob is actually the spirit inside. The skull is just the container it’s in.”
She looked blankly at me and then said, “It’s a skull. That talks.”
“Hey!” Bob protested. “I am not an it! I am definitely a he!”
“Bob is my lab assistant,” I explained.
Murphy looked back at Bob and shook her head. “Just when I start thinking this magic stuff couldn’t get weirder.”
“Bob,” I said, “take a look around. Tell me what did this.”
The skull spun obediently and promptly said, “Something strong.”
Murphy gave me an oblique look.
“Oh, bite me,” I told her. “Bob, I need to know if you can sense any residual magic.”
“Ungawa, bwana,” Bob said. He did another turnaround, this one slower, and the orange eyelights narrowed.
“Residual magic?” Murphy asked.
“Anytime you use magic, it can leave a kind of mark on the area around you. Mostly it’s so faint that sunrise wipes it away every morning. I can’t always sense it.”
“But be can?” Murphy asked.
“But he can!” Bob agreed. “Though not with all this chatter. I’m working over here.”
I shook my head and picked up the phone again.
“Yes,” said Billy. He sounded harried, and there was an enormous amount of background noise.
“I’m at your apartment,” I said. “I came here looking for Georgia.”
“What?” he said.
“Your apartment,” I said louder.
“Oh, Harry,” Billy said. “Sorry—this phone is giving me fits. Eve just talked to Georgia. She’s here at the resort.”
I frowned. “What? Is she all right?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” Billy said. Someone started shrieking in the background. “Crap, this battery’s dying. Problem solved; come on up. I brought your tux.”
“Billy, wait.”
He hung up.
I called him back and got nothing but voice mail.
“Aha!” Bob said. “Someone used that wolf spell the naked chick taught to Billy and the Werewolves, back over there by the bedroom,” he reported. “And there were faeries here.”
I frowned. “Faeries. You sure?”
“One hundred percent, boss. They tried to cover their tracks, but the threshold must have taken the zing out of their illusion.”
I nodded and exhaled. “Dammit.” Then I strode into the bathroom and hunkered down, pawing through the rubble.
“What are you doing?” Murphy asked.
“Looking for Georgia,” I said. I found a plastic brush full of long strands the color of Georgia’s hair and took several of them in hand.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of my tracking spell, refining it over the years. I stepped out into the hall and drew a circle on the floor around me with a piece of chalk. Then I took Georgia’s hairs and pressed them against my forehead, summoning up my focus and will. I shaped the magic I wanted to create, focused on the hairs, and released my will as I murmured, “Interessari, interressarium.”
Magic surged out of me, into the hairs and back. I broke the circle with my foot, and the spell flowed into action, creating a faint sense of pressure against the back of my head. I turned, and the sensation flowed over my skull in response, over my ear, then over my cheekbone, and finally came to rest directly between my eyes.
“She’s this way,” I said. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?”
“I’m facing south,” I said.
“Which is a problem?”
“Bil
ly says she’s at the wedding. Twenty miles north of here.”
Murphy’s eyes widened in comprehension. “A faerie has taken her place.”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Are they trying to place a spy?”
“No,” I said quietly. “This is malicious. Probably because Billy and company backed me up during the battle when the last Summer Knight was murdered.”
“That was years ago.”
“Faeries are patient,” I said, “and they don’t forget. Billy’s in danger.”
“I’d say Georgia was the one in danger,” Murphy said.
“I mean that Billy’s in danger, too,” I said.
“How so?”
“This isn’t happening on their wedding day by chance. The faeries want to use it against them.”
Murphy frowned. “What?”
“A wedding isn’t just a ceremony,” I said. “There’s power in it. A pledging of one to another, a blending of energies. There’s magic all through it.”
“If you say so,” she said, her tone wry. “What happens to him if he marries a faerie?”
“Conservatives get real upset,” I said absently. “But I’m not sure, magically speaking. Bob?”
“Oh,” Bob said. “Um. Well, if we assume this is one of the Winter Sidhe, then he’s going to be lucky to survive the honeymoon. If he does, well, she’ll be able to influence him, long term. He’ll be bound to her, the way the Winter Knights are bound to the Winter Queens. She’ll be able to impose her will over his. Change the way he thinks and feels about things.”
I ground my teeth. “And if she changes him enough, it will drive him insane.”
“Usually, yup,” Bob said. His voice brightened. “But don’t worry, boss. Odds are he’ll be dead before sunrise tomorrow. He might even die happy.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” I said. I checked my watch. “The wedding is in three hours. Georgia might need help now.” I looked back at Murphy. “You carrying?”
“Two on me. More in the car.”
“Now, there’s a girl who knows how to party!” Bob said.
I popped the skull back into my backpack harder than I strictly had to and zipped it shut. “Feel like saving the day?”
Her eyes sparkled, but she kept her tone bored. “On the weekend? Sounds too much like work.”
We started from the apartment together. “I’ll pay you in doughnuts.”
“Dresden, you pig. That cop-doughnut thing is a vicious stereotype.”
“Doughnuts with little pink sprinkles,” I said.
“Professional profiling is just as bad as racial profiling.”
I nodded. “Yeah. But I know you want the little pink sprinkles.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said loftily, and we got into her car.
We buckled in, and I said more quietly, “You don’t have to come with me, Karrin.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I nodded and focused on the tracking spell, turning my head south. “Thataway.”
THE WORST THING about being a wizard is all the presumption; people’s expectations. Pretty much everyone expects me to be some kind of con artist, since it is a well-known fact that there is no such thing as magic. Of those who know better, most of them think I can just snap my fingers, poof, and have whatever I want. Dirty dishes? Snap my fingers and they wash themselves, like in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Need to talk to a friend? Poof, teleport them in from wherever they are, because the magic knows where to find them, all by itself.
Magic ain’t like that. Or I sure as hell wouldn’t drive a beat-up old Volkswagen.
It’s powerful, true, and useful, and enormously advantageous, but ultimately it is an art, a science, a craft, a tool. It doesn’t go out and do things by itself. It doesn’t create something from nothing. Using it takes talent and discipline and practice and a lot of work, and none of it comes free.
Which was why my spell led us to downtown Chicago and suddenly became less useful.
“We’ve circled this block three times,” Murphy told me. “Can’t you get a more precise fix on it?”
“Do I look like one of those GPS thingies?” I sighed.
“Define thingie,” Murphy said.
“It’s my spell,” I said. “It’s oriented to the points of the compass. I didn’t really have the z-axis in mind when I designed it, and it only works for that when I’m right on top of the target. I keep meaning to go back and fix that, but there’s never time.”
“I had a marriage like that,” Murphy said. She stopped at a light and stared up. The block held six buildings—three apartments, two office buildings, and an old church. “In there. Somewhere. It could take a lot of time to search that.”
“So call in all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” I said.
She shook her head. “I might be able to get a couple, but since Rudolph moved to Internal Affairs, I’ve been flagged. If I start calling in people left and right without a damn good logical, rational, wholly normal reason . . .”
I grunted. “I get it. We need to get closer. The closer I get to Georgia, the more precise the tracking spell will be.”
Murphy nodded once and pulled over in front of a fire hydrant, parking the car. “Let’s be smart about this. Six buildings. Where would a faerie take her?”
“Not the church. Holy ground is uncomfortable for them.” I shook my head. “Not the apartments. Too many people there. Too easy for someone to hear or see something.”
“Office buildings on a weekend,” Murphy said. “Empty as you can find in Chicago. Which one?”
“Let’s take a look. Maybe the spell can give me an idea.”
It took ten minutes to walk around the outsides of both buildings. The spell remained wonderfully nonspecific, though I knew Georgia was within a hundred yards or so. I sat down at the curb in disgust. “Dammit,” I said, pushing at my hair. “There has to be something.”
“Would a faerie be able to magick herself in and out of there?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “She couldn’t just wander in through the wall, or poof herself inside. But she could walk in under a veil, so that no one saw her—or else saw an illusion of what she wanted them to see.”
“Can’t you look for residual whatsit again?”
It was a good idea. I got Bob and tried it, while Murphy found a phone and tried to reach Billy or anyone who could reach Billy. After an hour’s effort, we had accomplished enormous amounts of nothing.
“In case I haven’t mentioned it before,” I said, “dealing with faeries is a pain in the ass.” Someone in a passing car flicked a still-smoldering cigarette butt onto the concrete near me. I kicked it through a sewer grate in disgust.
“She covered her tracks again?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “Lot of ways. Scatter little glamours around to misdirect us. Only used her magic very lightly, to keep from leaving a big footprint. If she did her thing in a crowded area, enough people’s life force passing by would cover it. Or she could have used running water to—”
I stopped talking, and my gaze snapped back to the sewer grate.
I could hear water running through it in a low, steady stream.
“Down there,” I said. “She’s taken Georgia to Undertown.”
MURPHY STARED AT the stairs leading down to a tunnel with brick walls and shook her head. “I wouldn’t have believed this was here.”
We stood at the end of an uncompleted wing of Chicago’s underground commuter tunnels, at a broken section of wall hidden behind a few old tarps that led down into the darkness of Undertown.
Murphy had thrown on an old Cubs jacket over her shirt. She switched guns, putting her favorite Sig away in exchange for the Glock she wore holstered on one hip. The gun had a little flashlight built onto the underside of its barrel, and she flicked it on. “I mean, I knew there were some old tunnels,” Murphy said, “but not this.”
I grunted and
took off the silver pentacle amulet I wore around my neck. I held it in my right hand, my fingers clutching the chain against the solid, round length of oak in my right hand, about two feet long and covered with carved runes and sigils—my blasting rod. I sent an effort of will into the amulet, and the silver pentacle began to glow with a gentle, blue-white light. “Yeah. The Manhattan Project was run out of the tunnels here until they moved it to the Southwest. Plus the town kept sinking into the swamp for a hundred and fifty years. There are whole buildings sunk right into the ground. The Mob dug places during Prohibition. People built bomb shelters during the fifties and sixties. And other things have added more, plus gateways back and forth to the spirit world.”
“Other things?” Murphy asked, gun steady on the darkness below. “Like what?”
“Things,” I said, staring down at the patient, lightless murk of Undertown. “Anything that doesn’t like sunlight or company. Vampires, ghouls, some of the nastier faeries, obviously. Once, I fought this wacko who kept summoning up fungus demons.”
“Are you stalling?” Murphy asked.
“Maybe I am.” I sighed. “I’ve been down there a few times. Never been good.”
“How you wanna do this?”
“Like we did the vampire lair. Let me go first with the shield. Something jumps out at us, I’ll drop and hold it off until you kill it.”
Murphy nodded soberly. I swallowed a lump of fear out of my throat. It settled into my stomach like a nugget of ice. I prepared my shield, and the same color light as emanated from my pentacle surrounded it, drizzling heatless blue-white sparks in an irregular stream. I prepared myself to use my blasting rod if I had to, and started down the stairs, following the tracking spell toward Georgia.
The old brick stairs ended at a rough stone slope into the earth. Water ran down the walls and in rivulets down the sides of the tunnel. We went forward, through an old building that might have been a schoolhouse, judging by the rotted piles of wood and a single old slate chalkboard fallen from one wall. The floor was tilted to one side. The next section of tunnel was full of freezing, dirty, knee-deep water until it sloped up out of the water, went round a corner where the walls had been cut by rough tools, and then opened into a wider chamber.
