by Jim Butcher
“You may know,” Ms. Gard said, as we walked, “that Mr. Marcone’s business interests are varied. Some of them have fierce competitors.”
“Drugs,” I said. “Extortion. Prostitution. Those are the money-makers. There’s always competition for territory.”
Gard continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “Competition has increased rather dramatically of late, and it has consisted of increasingly competent personnel. We’ve also had a number of issues with involuntary employee dereliction.”
Will let out a snort. “Does she mean what I think she means?”
“Hitters,” I said quietly. “Marcone’s been losing people.” I frowned. “But there hasn’t been any particular increase in the number of homicides.”
“They haven’t been killed,” Gard said, frowning. “They’ve vanished. Quickly. Quietly. Sometimes with minimal signs of a struggle.”
Will inhaled sharply. “Georgia.”
Gard passed me the folder. I opened it and found a simple printout of a Web browser document. “‘Craigslist,’” I read, for Will’s benefit. “‘Talent search, Chicago. Standard compensation for new talent. Contact for delivery dates.’ And there’s an e-mail address.”
“I know some of the business Dresden was involved in yesterday,” she said quietly. “In the past twenty-four hours, announcements like this have appeared in London, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Berlin. . . .”
“I get the point,” I said. “Something big is happening.”
“Exactly,” Gard said. She glanced at Will and said, “Someone is rounding up those mortals possessed of modest supernatural gifts.”
“Talent search,” I said.
“Yes,” Gard said. “I don’t know who or what is behind it. We haven’t been able to get close. Whoever they are, they’re quite well-informed, and they know our personnel.”
“Why was Hendricks at my apartment?” Will asked.
“Maria saw someone force your wife and another young woman out of the building and into a car. We know about your gifts, obviously. Marcone sent Hendricks to case the scene to look for any evidence of our opponent’s identity. He found nothing.” She shook her head. “From here on, I have only conjecture,” Gard said. “I’ll give it to you if you want it.”
“You don’t need to,” I told her. “Someone started picking on the little guys in town within a few hours of Dresden’s shooting. He never would have stood for something like that. So whoever is responsible for these disappearances might well be behind the shooting, too.”
“Excellent,” Gard said, nodding in approval. “We don’t really specialize in finding people.” She glanced down at me. “But you do.”
“I am not doing this for Marcone,” I snarled.
We reached the building’s entrance, and Ms. Gard looked at me thoughtfully. “A word of advice: Be cautious what official channels you use for assistance. We aren’t the only ones who have compromised the local authorities.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know how it works.”
Gard frowned at me and then nodded her head a little more deeply than was usual. “Of course. My apologies.”
I frowned at her, trying to figure out what she meant. There wasn’t any trace of sarcasm or irony in her words or her body language. Damn. I wasn’t used to confronting non-Martians. “Nothing to apologize for,” I said, after a hesitation. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
She studied me for a moment. “I can’t tell if what I’m seeing in you is courage or despair. I’d ask, but I’m almost sure you wouldn’t know the answer.”
“Excuse me?”
Gard nodded. “Exactly.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. About Dresden. He was a brave man.”
I suddenly felt furious that she had spoken of Harry in the past tense. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t done in my thoughts—but I hadn’t spoken the words aloud, either. “They haven’t found a body,” I told her, and I heard a fierceness in my voice I had not intended. “Don’t write him off just yet.”
The Valkyrie gave me a smile that bared her canine teeth. “Good hunting,” she bade us, and then went back inside the building.
I turned to Will and said, “Let’s take care of your arm.”
“It’s fine,” Will said.
“Don’t play tough guy with me,” I said. “Let me see.”
Will sighed. Then he took his hand away from the wound. There was a slit in his shirtsleeve, where the knife had gone in. It was too high up on his arm to make rolling the sleeve up practical, so I tore it a little wider and examined the wound.
It wasn’t bleeding. There was an angry, swollen purple line over the puncture mark. It wasn’t a scab, either. It was just . . . healing, albeit into a damn ugly scar.
I whistled softly. “How?”
“We’ve been experimenting,” Will said quietly. “Closing an injury isn’t really much different from shifting back into human form. My arm still hurts like hell, but I can stop bleeding—probably. If it isn’t too bad. We’re not sure about the limits. Leaves a hell of a mark, though.” His stomach gurgled. “And the energy for it has to come from somewhere. I’m starving.”
“Neat trick.”
“I thought so.” Will kept pace beside me as we headed back to the car. “What do we do next?”
“Food,” I said. “Then we contact the bad guys.”
He frowned. “Won’t that just, you know . . . warn them that we’re on to them?”
“No,” I said. “They’ll want to meet me.”
“Why?”
I looked up at him. “Because I’m going to be selling them some new talent.”
WE WENT TO my place.
There wasn’t much point in setting the dogs on the owner of the e-mail address. It would prove to be anonymous, and given what I had for hard evidence, even if I could get someone to pay attention to me, by the time it went through channels and peeled away all the red tape and got a judge somewhere to move, I was sure the address would be old news, and anyone connected to it would long since have departed.
I might have gotten some help from a friend at the Bureau, except that in the wake of the Red Court attack on their headquarters building, they would be going crazy looking for the “terrorists” responsible. They, too, were long since departed. Dresden had seen to that.
The TV news was all about the bombing, the attack, while everyone speculated about who had done what and used the occasion to put forward their own social and political agendas.
People suck. But they’re the only ones around who can keep the lights on.
I turned Will loose on my fridge and then sent him out to make a few discreet inquiries of the local supernatural scene. I heard his car door close when he returned, about the time the daylight was turning golden orange. It looked like it would be another cold night.
There was the sound of a second car door closing.
Will knocked at the front door, and I answered it with my gun held low and against my leg. There proved to be a girl with him. She was a little taller than I, which still put her below average, and I had pencils bigger around than she was. Her glasses were oversized, her hair thin, straight, and the same brown of a house mouse’s fur. Still, there was something in the way she held herself that put up the hairs on the back of my neck. The young woman might be a lightweight, but so were rats—and you didn’t want to trap one of them in a corner if you could avoid it. She contained a measure of danger that demanded respect.
Her eyes flickered to my face and then down to my gun hand in the same first half second of recognition. She stopped slightly behind Will, her body language wary.
“Murphy,” Will said, nodding—but he didn’t try to come in or make any other movement that might force me to react. “Uh, maybe you remember Marcy? We were all at Marcone’s place, stuck down in that muddy pit? Drugged?”
“Good times?” the young woman asked hopefully.
“My partner died the day before, when the loup-garou gutted him. Not so much,” I sa
id. I looked at Will. “You trust her?”
“Sure,” Will said without a second’s hesitation.
Maybe I’m getting cynical as I age. I stared at Marcy hard for a second before I said, “I don’t.”
No one said anything for a minute. Then Will said, “I’m vouching for her.”
“You’re emotionally involved, Will,” I said. “It’s compromising your judgment. Marcone could have put a bullet through your head instead of tossing that little knife at you. If Dresden was standing here telling you to be suspicious, what would you do?”
Will’s expression darkened. But I saw him get ahold of himself and take a deep breath. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t know. I’ve known Marcy for years.”
“You knew her years ago,” I corrected him with gentle emphasis.
Marcy rubbed one foot against the other calf, and stood looking down, her eyes on her feet. It looked like a habitual stance, social camouflage. “She’s right, Will,” she said in a quiet voice.
Will frowned at her. “How?”
“She should be suspicious of me, given the circumstances. I’ve been back in town for what? Two weeks? And something like this happens? I’d be worried, too.” She looked up at me, her expression uncertain. “I want to help, Sergeant Murphy,” she said. “What do we do?”
I stared at them both, thinking. Dammit, this was another one of those Dresden things. He could have pinched his nose for a second, then swept his gaze over them and reported whether or not they were who they said they were. Supernatural creatures are big on shapeshifting. They use it to get in close to their prey. In an attack like that, a mortal has the next-best thing to zero probability of escaping.
I knew. It had been done to me. The sense of chagrin and helplessness is terrible.
“To start with,” I said, “let me see if you can come in.”
Marcy frowned at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you’re a shapeshifter or something, you might not have an easy time coming over the threshold.”
“Christ, Sergeant,” Will began. “Of course she’s a shapeshifter. So am I.”
I glowered at them both. “If she’s who she says she is, she won’t have a problem,” I said.
Will sighed and looked at Marcy. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” the young woman said. “It’s smart to be careful.”
Marcy held her hands out to her sides, in plain sight, and stepped
into the house. “Good enough?”
Houses are surrounded by a barrier of energy. Dresden always called it the threshold. It’s all murky magic stuff to me, but the general guideline is that anything that’s too hideously supernatural can’t come in without being invited. A threshold will stop spirits, ghosts, some vampires (but not others), and will generally ward away things that intend to eat your face.
Not everything. Not hardly. But a lot of things.
“No,” I said, and put my gun away. “But it’s a start.” I nodded to a chair in the living room. “Sit down.”
She did, and she sat looking down at her hands, which were folded in her lap.
Will followed Marcy in and gave me a look that meant, in Martian, What the hell do you think you’re doing?
I ignored him.
“Marcy,” I said, “why didn’t you respond to Will when he tried to contact you earlier?”
“I tried,” she said. “I called back as soon as I got the message, but I didn’t have Will’s cell number. Only Georgia’s.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Um,” she said, “I just got back into town. And Georgia doesn’t need any stress. And he’s married. I mean, you don’t just go asking for a husband’s phone number. You know?”
Which was reasonable, put that way. I nodded, neither approving nor disapproving.
“I left messages on the answering machine at the apartment,” Marcy said. “It was all I could do.”
“And I checked the messages after I’d run your errands,” Will said. “I called her back and had her come over. She swept for scents, and then we came here.”
“Will,” I said, firmly, “please let me handle this?”
He clenched his jaw and subsided, leaning against a wall.
I turned back to where Marcy sat and continued towering over her, a posture of parental-style authority. “Tell me about your relationship to Georgia.”
“We’re friends,” Marcy said. “Close friends, really. I think of her as a close friend, I mean. She was very kind to me when Andi broke it off with me. And we were friends for years before that.”
I nodded. “Did Will explain what was going on?”
She nodded. “Georgia and Andi have been taken.”
“How do you know it was Andi with Georgia?”
“Because I was there,” Marcy said. “I mean, not last night, but the night before last. Will was out of town and we had a girls’ night.”
“Girls’ night?”
“We hung out and made fondue and watched movies and lied about how we all looked better now than when we first met. Well, except that Andi actually does.” She shook her head. “Um, anyway, we stayed up late talking, and Andi slept in the guest bed and I slept on the couch.” She glanced up at my eyes for the first time. “That was when we had the nightmares.”
“Nightmares?”
She shuddered. “I . . . I don’t want to think about it. But all three of us had an almost identical nightmare. It was the worst for Georgia. She was . . .” She looked at Will. “It was as if she hadn’t quite woken up out of the dream. She kept jerking and twitching.” She gave me a weak smile. “Took two cups of cocoa to snap her out of it.”
I kept my face neutral and gave her nothing. “Go on.”
“Me and Andi talked about it and decided that one of us should stay with her. We were going to trade off, like, until Will came home.”
“The first night was Andi, I take it?”
Marcy nodded, biting her lip. “Yes.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said. Reasonable, logical—and impossible to verify.
And the kid was shaking.
Jesus Christ, Karrin, said a gentler voice inside me. What are you doing? She’s scared to death.
I tried to make my tone a little warmer. “What do you know about their abduction, specifically, Marcy? Can you tell me anything at all that might point toward the identity of the kidnappers?”
She shook her head. “I can’t think of anything that I picked up beforehand. But I’m certain it was Andi and Georgia who were taken.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
Will cleared his throat and spoke quietly. “Marcy’s got a nose. She’s better with scents than any of the rest of us.”
I eyed Marcy. “Could you pick up their trail?”
“They were taken downstairs and loaded into the back of a car,” Marcy said promptly. “An older model, burning too much oil. But I couldn’t follow them after that. I think I’ll be able to recognize the scent of their captors, though, if I run into it.”
I nodded. She’d gotten a ton more out of the scene than Will had. Such a talent could be damn useful.
All the same, I wasn’t sure. She sounded sincere to me, and I’m pretty good at knowing when someone isn’t. But there’s always a better liar out there. I just wasn’t sure.
But . . . you have to trust someone, sometime. Even when it seems risky, when lives are on the line.
Maybe even especially then.
“Okay,” I said calmly, and took a seat in another chair. “Will,” I asked, “what did you find out?”
“There are half a dozen other folks who have gone missing in the past day and a half,” Will said. “At least, that’s how many Bock and McAnally know about. Word about the kidnappings is out on the Paranet, and has been spreading since yesterday morning. People are moving places in groups of three and four, at least. McAnally’s is packed. The community knows something is up. They’re scared.”
; Marcy nodded. “It isn’t just Chicago. It’s happening all over the country. Group leaders are keeping everyone informed, asking after their people, reporting them missing to the local cops, for whatever good that might do. . . .” Her voice trailed off into a little squeak as she looked at me. “Um. Sorry.”
I ignored her. Martian for This is easier for all of us if we just pretend I didn’t hear it. “Will, did you turn up anything we can use?”
He shook his head. “No one has seen or heard anything at any of the disappearances. But there are rumors that someone found a gang of Red Court vampires torn apart in a basement across town. Maybe that has something to do with what’s going on.”
“It doesn’t,” I said, firmly. “Not directly, at least. Dresden killed the Red Court.”
Will blinked. “You mean . . . those vampires in the basement?”
“I mean the Red Court,” I said. “All of them.”
Will let out a quiet whistle. “Uh. Wow. That’s pretty big magic, I guess.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Marcy’s face was twisted up in a frown of concentration. “Was . . . was this the night before last, by any chance?”
I glanced aside at her and nodded once.
“If there was a really big surge of magic . . . maybe that explains the dreams,” she said. “It wasn’t just the three of us. The night before last, a lot of people—Paranet people, I mean—had nightmares, too. Some of them were bad enough that people haven’t slept since. A couple of folks wound up in the hospital.” She blinked at Will. “That’s what happened with you, Will.”
“What do you mean?” Will said.
“When Georgia called you. She’d had the nightmare twice, during the day, when she tried to sleep. She must have had it again and tried to call you.”
“There’s no point in speculation for now.” I looked at Will. “In short, more people missing, bad dreams, everyone is gathering in defensive herds. That about it?”
“More or less,” Will said. “What did you get?”
“I sent an e-mail to the address Marcone gave us. Told them I had a talent in need of placement. I got a public phone location. I’m supposed to be there to answer a call at nine tonight.”
