Side Jobs df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “It was the rain,” I told him.

  Mouse sneezed, tail wagging.

  I glowered at him. I’m not sure I could take it if my dog was smarter than me.

  The falling rain would wash away the spell on the amulet if I left it out in the open, so I shielded it as carefully as I could with the building and my hand. A hat would have come in handy for that purpose, actually. Maybe I should get one.

  I held up the amulet, focusing on the spell. It quivered on the end of its chain, then swung toward the far end of the alley, in a sharp, sudden motion.

  I drew my hand and the amulet back up into the sleeve of my duster, whistling. “She came right down this alley. And judging by the strength of the reaction, she was scared bad. Left a really big trail.”

  At that, Mouse made a chuffing sound and started down the alley, snuffling. The end of his short lead, mostly there for appearance’s sake, dragged the ground. I kept pace, and by the time Mouse was twenty yards down the alley, he had begun growling low in his throat.

  That was an occasion worth a raised eyebrow. Mouse didn’t make noise unless there was Something Bad around. He increased his pace, and I lengthened my stride to keep up.

  I found myself growling along with him. I’d gotten sick of Bad Things visiting themselves upon people in my town a long time ago.

  When we hit the open street, Mouse slowed. Magic wasn’t the only thing that a steady rain could screw up. He growled again and looked over his shoulder at me, tail drooping.

  “I got your back,” I told him. I lifted a section of my long leather duster with my staff, so that I could hold the amulet in the shelter it offered. I looked only moderately ridiculous while doing so.

  I’m going to get a hat one of these days. I swear.

  The tracking spell held, and the amulet led me down the street, toward Wrigley. The silent stadium loomed in the cold grey rain. Mouse, still snuffling dutifully, abruptly turned down another alley, his steps hurrying to a lope. I propped up my coat and consulted the amulet again.

  I was so busy feeling damp and cold and self-conscious that I forgot to feel paranoid, and Caine came out of nowhere and swung something hard at my skull.

  I turned my head and twitched sideways at the last second, taking the blow just to one side of the center of my forehead. There was a flash of light, and my legs went wobbly. I had time to watch Caine wind up again and saw that he was swinging a long, white, dirty athletic sock at me. He’d weighted one end with something, creating an improvised flail.

  My hips bounced off a municipal trash can, and I got one arm between the flail and my face. The protective spells on my coat are good, but they’re intended to protect me against gunfire and sharp, pointy things. The flail smashed into my right forearm. It went numb.

  “So what, you steal my keg for Braddock, so his homo-bee cinnamon crap would win the division? I’m gonna take it out of your ass.”

  And with that pleasant mental image, Caine wound up again with that flail.

  He’d made a mistake, though, pausing to get in a little dialogue like that. If he’d hit me again, immediately, he probably could have beaten me unconscious in short order. He hadn’t hesitated long—but it had been long enough for me to pull my thoughts together. As he came in swinging, I snapped the lower end of my heavy staff into a rising quarter spin, right into his testicles. The thug’s eyes snapped wide-open, and his mouth locked into a silent scream.

  It’s the little things in life you treasure.

  Caine staggered and fell to one side, but one of the Cainettes came in hard behind him and pasted me in the mouth. By itself, I might have shrugged it off, but Caine had already rung my bells once. I went down to one knee and tried to figure out what was going on. Someone with big motorcycle boots kicked me in the guts. I fell to my back and drove a heel into his kneecap. There was a crackle and a pop, and he fell, howling.

  The third guy had a tire iron. No time for magic—my damn eyes wouldn’t focus, much less my thoughts. By some minor miracle, I caught the first two-handed swing on my staff.

  And then two hundred pounds of wet dog slammed into Cainette Number Two’s chest. Mouse didn’t bite, presumably because there are some things even dogs won’t put in their mouths. He just over-bore the thug and smashed him to the ground, pinning him there. The two of them thrashed around.

  I got up just as Caine came back in, swinging his flail.

  I don’t think Caine knew much about quarterstaff fighting. Murphy had been teaching it to me, however, for almost four years. I got the staff up as Caine swung and intercepted the sock. The weighted end wrapped around my staff, and I jerked the weapon out of his hands with a sweeping twist. With the same motion, I brought the other end of the staff around and popped him in the noggin.

  Caine flopped to the ground.

  I stood there panting and leaning on my staff. Hey, I’d won a brawl. That generally didn’t happen when I wasn’t using magic. Mouse seemed fine, if occupied holding his thug down.

  “Jerk,” I muttered to the unconscious Caine, and kicked him lightly in the ribs. “I have no idea what happened to your freaking keg.”

  “Oh my,” said a woman’s voice from behind me. She spoke perfectly clear English, marked with an accent that sounded vaguely Germanic or maybe Scandinavian. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect you’d do that well against them.”

  I turned slightly, so that I could keep the thugs in my peripheral vision, and shifted my grip on the staff as I faced the speaker.

  She was a tall blonde, six feet or so, even in flat, practical shoes. Her tailored grey suit didn’t quite hide an athlete’s body, nor did it make her look any less feminine. She had ice blue eyes, a stark, attractive face, and she carried a duffel bag in her right hand. I recognized her. She was the supernatural security consultant to John Marcone, the kingpin of Chicago crime.

  “Miss Gard, isn’t it?” I asked her, panting.

  She nodded. “Mr. Dresden.”

  My arm throbbed and my ears were still ringing. I’d have a lovely goose egg right in the middle of my forehead in an hour. “Glad I could entertain you,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m working.”

  “I need to speak to you,” she said.

  “Call during office hours.” Caine lay senseless, groaning. The guy I’d kicked in the knee whimpered and rocked mindlessly back and forth. I glared at the thug Mouse had pinned down.

  He flinched. There wasn’t any fight left in him. Thank God. There wasn’t much left in me, either.

  “Mouse,” I said, and started down the alley.

  Mouse rose up off the man, who said, “Oof!” as the dog planted both paws in the man’s belly as he pushed up. Mouse followed me.

  “I’m serious, Mr. Dresden,” Gard said to my back, following us.

  “Marcone is only a king in his own mind,” I said without stopping. “He wants to send me a message, he can wait. I’ve got important things to do.”

  “I know,” Gard said. “The girl. She’s a brunette, maybe five foot five, brown eyes, green golf shirt, blue jeans, and scared half out of her mind.”

  I stopped and turned to bare my teeth at Gard. “Marcone is behind this? That son of a bitch is going to be sorry he ever looked at that—”

  “No,” Gard said sharply. “Look, Dresden, forget Marcone. This has nothing to do with Marcone. Today’s my day off.”

  I stared at her for a moment, and only partly because the rain had begun to make the white shirt she wore beneath the suit jacket become transparent. She sounded sincere—which meant nothing. I’ve learned better than to trust my judgment when there’s a blonde involved. Or a brunette. Or a redhead.

  “What do you want?” I asked her.

  “Almost the same thing you do,” she replied. “You want the girl. I want the thing that took her.”

  “Why?”

  “The girl doesn’t have enough time for you to play twenty questions, Dresden. We can help each other and save her, or she can die.”


  I took a deep breath and then nodded once. “I’m listening.”

  “I lost the trail at the far end of this alley,” she said. “Clearly, you haven’t.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Skip to the part where you tell me how you can help me.”

  Wordlessly, she opened up the duffel bag and drew out—I kid you not—a double-bitted battle-ax that must have weighed fifteen pounds. She rested it on one shoulder. “If you can take me to the grendelkin, I’ll deal with it while you get the girl out.”

  Grendelkin? What the hell was a grendelkin?

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m a wizard. I know about the supernatural. I could fill up a couple of loose-leaf notebooks with the names of various entities and creatures I recognized. That’s the thing about knowledge, though. The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn. The supernatural realms are bigger, far bigger, than the material world, and humanity is grossly outnumbered. I could learn about new beasties until I dropped dead of old age a few centuries from now and still not know a quarter of them.

  This one was new on me.

  “Dresden, seconds could matter, here,” Gard said. Beneath the calm mask of her lovely face, I could sense a shadow of anxiety, of urgency.

  As I absorbed that, there was a sharp clicking sound as a piece of broken brick or a small stone from roofing material fell to the ground farther down the alley.

  Gard whirled, dropping instantly into a fighting crouch. Both hands were on her ax, which she held in a defensive position across the front of her body.

  Yikes.

  I’d seen Gard square off against a world-class necromancer and her pet ghoul without batting a golden eyelash. What the hell had her so spooked?

  She came back out of her stance warily, then shook her head and muttered something under her breath before turning to me again. “What’s going to happen to that girl . . . ? You have no idea. It shouldn’t happen to anyone. So I’m begging you. Please help me.”

  I sighed.

  Well, dammit.

  She said please.

  THE RAIN WAS weakening the tracking spell on my amulet and washing away both the scent of the grendelkin and the psychic trail left by the terrified Elizabeth, but between Mouse and me, we managed to find where the bad guy had, literally, gone to earth. The trail ended at an old storm cellar-style door in back of the buildings on the east side of Wrigley Field, under the tracks of the El, near Addison Station. The doors were ancient and looked as if they were rusted shut—though they couldn’t have been, if the trail went through them. They were surrounded by a gateless metal fence. A sign on the fence declared the area dangerous and to keep out—you know, the usual sound advice that thrill-seeking blockheads and softhearted wizards with nagging headaches always ignore.

  “You sure?” I asked Mouse. “It went in there?”

  Mouse circled the fence, snuffling at the dry ground protected from the rain by the El track overhead. Then he focused intently on the doors and growled.

  The amulet bobbed weakly, less definitely than it had a few minutes before. I grimaced and said, “It went down here, but it traveled north after that.”

  Gard grunted. “Crap.”

  “Crap,” I concurred.

  The grendelkin had fled into Undertown.

  Chicago is an old city—at least by American standards. It’s been flooded, burned down several times, been constructed and reconstructed ad nauseam. Large sections of the city have been built up as high as ten and twelve feet above the original ground level, while other buildings have settled into the swampy muck around Lake Michigan. Dozens and dozens of tunnel systems wind beneath its surface. No one knows exactly how many different tunnels and chambers people have created intentionally or by happenstance, and since most people regard the supernatural as one big scam, no one has noticed all the additional work done by not-people in the meantime.

  Undertown begins somewhere just out of the usual traffic in the commuter and utility tunnels, where sections of wall and roof regularly collapse, and where people with good sense just aren’t willing to go. From there, it gets dark, cold, treacherous, and jealously inhabited, increasingly so the farther you go.

  Things live down there—all kinds of things.

  A visit to Undertown bears more resemblance to suicide than exploration, and those who do it are begging to be Darwined out of the gene pool. Smart people don’t go down there.

  Gard slashed a long opening in the fence with her ax, and we descended crumbling old concrete steps into the darkness.

  I murmured a word and made a small effort of will, and my amulet began to glow with a gentle blue-white light, illuminating the tunnel only dimly—enough, I hoped, to see by while still not giving away our approach. Gard produced a small red-filtered flashlight from her duffel bag, a backup light source. It made me feel better. When you’re underground, making sure you have light is almost as important as making sure you have air. It meant that she knew what she was doing.

  The utility tunnel we entered gave way to a ramshackle series of chambers, the spaces between what were now basements and the raised wall of the road that had been built up off the original ground level. Mouse went first, with me and my staff and my amulet right behind him. Gard brought up the rear, walking lightly and warily.

  We went on for maybe ten minutes, through difficult-to-spot doorways and at one point through a tunnel flooded with a foot and a half of icy stagnant water. Twice, we descended deeper into the earth, and I began getting antsy about finding my way back. Spelunking is dangerous enough without adding in anything that could be described with the word ravening.

  “This grendelkin,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Like hell I don’t,” I said. “You want me to help you, you gotta help me. Tell me how we beat this thing.”

  “We don’t,” she said. “I do. That’s all you need to know.”

  That sort of offended me, being so casually kept ignorant. Granted, I’d done it to people myself about a million times, mostly to protect them, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating—just ironic.

  “And if it offs you instead?” I said. “I’d rather not be totally clueless when it’s charging after me and the girl and I have to turn and fight.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I stopped in my tracks and turned to regard her.

  She stared back at me, eyebrows lifted. Water dripped somewhere nearby. There was a faint rumbling above us, maybe the El going by somewhere overhead.

  She pressed her lips together and nodded, a gesture of concession. “It’s a scion of Grendel.”

  I started walking again. “Whoa. Like, the Grendel?”

  “Obviously.” Gard sighed. “Before Beowulf faced him in Heorot—”

  “The Grendel?” I asked. “The Beowulf?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it actually happened like in the story?” I demanded.

  “It isn’t far wrong,” Gard replied, an impatient note in her voice. “Before Beowulf faced him, Grendel had already taken a number of women on his previous visits. He got spawn upon them.”

  “Ick,” I said. “But I think they make a cream for that now.”

  Gard gave me a flat look. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “That’s the point of asking.”

  “You know all you need.”

  I ignored the statement, and the sentiment behind it to boot. A good private investigator is essentially a professional asker of questions. If I kept them coming, eventually I’d get some kind of answer. “Back at the pub, there was an electrical disruption. Does this thing use magic?”

  “Not the way you do,” Gard said.

  See there? An answer. A vague answer, but an answer. I pressed ahead. “Then how?”

  “Grendelkin are strong,” Gard said. “Fast. And they can bend minds in an area around them.”

  “Bend how?”r />
  “They can make people not notice them, or to notice only dimly. Disguise themselves, sometimes. It’s how they get close. Sometimes they can cause malfunctions in technology.”

  “Veiling magic,” I said. “Illusion. Been there, done that.” I mused. “Mac said there were two disruptions. Is there any reason it would want to steal a keg from the beer festival?”

  Gard shot me a sharp look. “Keg?”

  “That’s what those yahoos in the alley were upset about,” I said. “Someone swiped their keg.”

  Gard spat out a word that would probably have gotten bleeped out had she said it on some kind of Scandinavian talk show. “What brew?”

  “Eh?” I said.

  “What kind of liquor was in the keg?” she demanded.

  “How the hell should I know?” I asked. “I never even saw it.”

  “Dammit.”

  “But . . .” I scrunched up my nose, thinking. “The sign from his table had a drawing of a little Viking bee on it, and it was called Caine’s Kickass.”

  “A bee,” she said, her eyes glittering. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  She swore again. “Mead.”

  I blinked at her. “This thing ripped off a keg of mead and a girl? Is she supposed to be its . . . bowl of bar nuts or something?”

  “It isn’t going to eat her,” Gard said. “It wants the mead for the same reason it wants the girl.”

  I waited a beat for her to elaborate. She didn’t. “I’m rapidly running out of willingness to keep playing along,” I told her, “but I’ll ask the question—why does it want the girl?”

  “Procreation,” she said.

  “Thank you. Now I get it,” I said. “The thing figures she’ll need a good set of beer goggles before the deed.”

  “No,” Gard said.

  “Oh, right, because the grendelkin isn’t human. The thing is going to need the beer goggles.”

  “No,” Gard said, harder.

  “I understand. Just setting the mood, then,” I said. “Maybe it picked up some lounge music CDs, too.”

  “Dresden,” Gard growled.

  “Everybody needs somebody sometime,” I sang—badly.