Jim Butcher Read online

  “Not out the front!” I barked. “Inbound authorities!”

  I pounded past them and led them down a short hallway and out a side door, into an alley. Then we sprinted to the back of the building, down another alley, and away.

  We had made it to the next block when light flashed and a giant the size of the Sears building hauled off and swatted us all with a pillow from his enormous bed. We were flung from our feet. Susan and Martin landed in a roll, tumbling several times. By contrast, I crashed into a garbage can.

  It was, of course, full.

  I lay there for a moment, my ears putting out a constant, high-pitched tone. A cloud of dust and particles washed over me, mixing with whatever hideous stew was in the trash can and caking itself to my body.

  “I am not playing at the top of my game,” I mused aloud. I felt the words buzz in my throat, but I couldn’t hear them.

  A few seconds later, sounds began to drift back in. Car horns and car alarms were going off everywhere. Storefront security systems were screaming. Sirens—lots and lots of sirens—were closing in.

  A hand slipped beneath my arm and someone helped me stand up. Susan. She was lightly coated with dust. It filled the air so thickly that we couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet. I tried to walk and staggered.

  Martin got underneath my other arm, and we started shambling away through the dust. After a little while, things stopped spinning so wildly. I realized that Martin and Susan were talking.

  “—sure there’s not something left?” Susan was saying.

  “I’ll have to examine it sector by sector,” Martin said tonelessly. “We might get a few crumbs. What the hell was he thinking, throwing that kind of power around when he knew we were after electronic data?”

  “He was probably thinking that the information would be useless to the two of us if we were dead,” Susan said back, rather pointedly. “They had us. And you know it.”

  Martin said nothing for a while. Then he said, “That. Or he didn’t want us to get the information. He was quite angry.”

  “He isn’t that way,” she said. “It isn’t him.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Martin corrected her. “Are you the same person you were eight years ago?”

  She didn’t say anything for a while.

  I remembered how to walk, and started doing it on my own. I shook my head to clear it a little and looked back over my shoulder.

  There were buildings on fire. More and more sirens were on the way. The spot in the skyline where my office building usually sat from this angle was empty except for a spreading cloud of dust. Fires and emergency lights painted the dust orange and red and blue.

  My files. My old coffee machine. My spare revolver. My favorite mug. My ratty, comfortable old desk and chair. My frosted-glass window with its painted lettering reading, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.

  They were all gone.

  “Dammit,” I said.

  Susan looked up at me. “What was that?”

  I answered in a weary mumble. “I mailed in the rent on my office this morning.”

  5

  We got a cab. We got out of the area before the cops had cordoned off a perimeter. It wasn’t all that hard. Chicago has a first-rate police department, but nobody can establish that big a cordon around a large area with a lot of people in the dead of night quickly or easily. They’d have to call and get people out of bed and onto the job, and pure confusion would slow everything down.

  By morning, I knew, word of the explosion would be all over the news. There would be reporters and theories and eyewitness interviews with people who had sort of heard something happen and seen a cloud of dust. This hadn’t been a fire, like we’d seen a few times before. This had been an explosion, a deliberate act of destruction. They would be able to find out that much in the aftermath.

  There would be search and rescue on the scene.

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window. Odds were good that there was no one else in the building. All the tenants were businesses. None of them was prone to operating late at night. But all of them had keys to get in when they needed to, just like I did. There could have been janitors or maintenance people there—employees of the Red Court, sure, but they didn’t know that. You don’t explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.

  There could very well be dead people in that building who wouldn’t have been there except for the fact that my office was on the fourth floor.

  Jesus.

  I felt Susan’s eyes on me. None of us had spoken in front of the cabbie. Nobody spoke now, until Martin said, “Here. Pull over here.”

  I looked up. The cab was pulling up to a cheap motel.

  “We should stay together,” Susan said.

  “We can go over the disk here,” Martin said. “We can’t do that at his place. I need your help. He doesn’t.”

  “Go on,” I said. “People”—by which I meant the police—“are going to be at my place soon anyway. Easier if they only have one person to talk to.”

  Susan exhaled firmly through her nose. Then nodded. The two of them got out of the cab. Martin doled out some cash to the driver and gave him my home address.

  I rode home in silence. The cabbie was listening to the news on the radio. I was pretty beat, having tossed around a bunch of magic at the building. Magic can be awfully cool, but it’s exhausting. What was left buzzing around me wasn’t enough to screw up the radio, which was already alive with talk of the explosion. The cabbie, who looked like he was vaguely Middle Eastern in extraction, looked unhappy.

  I felt that.

  We stopped at my apartment. Martin had already paid him too much for the ride, but I duked him another twenty on top of that and gave him a serious look. “Your name is Ahmahd?”

  It was right there on his cabbie license. He nodded hesitantly.

  “You have a family, Ahmahd?”

  He just stared at me.

  I touched my finger to my lips in a hushing gesture. “You never saw me. Okay?”

  He grimaced, but dipped his head in a nod.

  I got out of the cab, feeling a little sick. I wouldn’t hurt the guy’s family, but he didn’t know that. And even if he did, that and the bribe together wouldn’t be enough to keep him from talking to the cops if they came asking—though I suspected it would be enough to keep him from jumping up to volunteer information. Buildings were exploding. Sane people would want to keep their heads down until it was over.

  I watched the car drive away, put my hands in my coat pockets, and shuffled wearily home. I’d cut into my physical and psychic resources pretty hard when I’d turned all that energy loose on the vampires, and now I was paying the price. I’d unintentionally poured soulfire into every blast I’d leveled at them—which was why I’d had the nifty silver-white blasts of flame instead of the red-orange of standard-issue fire. I felt like falling into bed, but it wouldn’t be the smart move. I debated doing it anyway.

  I had time to get a shower, take Mouse out for a much-needed trip outside, put on a pot of coffee, and was just finishing up cleaning the debris and trash from my leather duster with some handy-dandy leather-cleaning wipes Charity Carpenter, Molly’s mother, had sent over, when there was a knock at the door.

  Mouse lifted his head from where he lay near me, his brown eyes wary and serious. Then his ears perked up, and his tail began to wag. He got up and took a step toward the door, then looked at me.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m going.”

  I got up and opened the door. It stuck halfway. I pulled harder and got it open the rest of the way.

  A woman a little more than five feet tall stood at my door, her face weary and completely free of makeup. Her hair was golden blond, but hanging all over her face and badly in need of attention from a brush and maybe a curling iron. Or at least a scrunchie. She was wearing sweat-pants and an old and roomy T-shirt, and her
shoulders were hunched up in rigid tension.

  She stared at me for a moment. Then she closed her eyes and her shoulders relaxed.

  “Hiya, Murphy,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice a little feeble. I enjoyed the moment. I didn’t get to see Murphy’s soft side often. “Do I smell coffee?”

  “Made a fresh pot,” I said. “Get you some?”

  Murphy let out a groan of something near lust. “Marry me.”

  “Maybe when you’re conscious.” I stepped back and let her in. Murph sat down on the couch and Mouse came over to her and laid his head shamelessly on her lap. She yawned and scratched and petted him obligingly, her small, strong hands making his doggy eyes close in bliss.

  I passed her a cup of coffee and got one for myself. She took it black with a couple of zero-calorie sweeteners in it. Mine came with cream and lots and lots of sugar. We sipped coffee together, and her eyes became more animate as the caffeine went in. Neither of us spoke, and her gaze eventually roved over my apartment and me. I could hear the wheels spinning in her head.

  “You showered less than an hour ago. I can still smell the soap. And you just got done cleaning your coat. At four in the morning.”

  I sipped coffee and neither confirmed nor denied.

  “You were at the building when it blew up,” she said.

  “Not at it,” I said. “I’m good, but I don’t know about having a building fall on me.”

  She shook her head. She stared at the remainder of her coffee. “Rawlins called. Told me that your office building had exploded. I thought someone had gotten to you, finally.”

  “We on the record?” I asked. Murphy was a detective sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. It was the dead-end department of CPD and the only one with any clue whatsoever about the supernatural world. Even so, Murphy was a cop to the bone. She could stretch the line when it came to legality, but she had limits. I’d crossed them before.

  She shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

  “Red Court,” I said. “They bought the building a few years back. They wired it to blow if they wanted to do it.”

  Murphy frowned. “Why do it now? Why not blow you up years ago?”

  I grunted. “Personal grudge, I guess,” I said. “Duchess Arianna is upset about what happened to her husband when he tangled with me. She thinks it’s my fault.”

  “Is it?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  She swirled the coffee around the bottom of the cup. “So why not just kill you? Click, boom.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She figured it wasn’t enough, maybe. Click-boom is business. What I have going with her is personal.”

  My jaws creaked a little as I clenched them.

  Murphy’s blue eyes missed little. “Personal?” She looked around again. “Your place looks too nice. Who was it?”

  “Susan.”

  Her back straightened a little. It was the only sign of surprise she showed. Murphy knew all about Susan. “You want to talk about it?”

  I didn’t, but Murphy needed to know. I laid it out for her in sentences of three and four words. By the time I’d finished, she had set her mug on the coffee table and was listening to me intently.

  “Jesus and Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed. “Harry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That . . . that bitch.”

  I shook my head. “Pointing fingers does nothing for Maggie. We’ll do that later.”

  She grimaced, as if swallowing something bitter. Then she nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Martin and Susan are seeing what they can get off the disk,” I said. “They’ll contact me as soon as they know something. Meantime, I’ll get a couple hours horizontal, then start hitting my contacts. Go to the Council and ask them for help.”

  “That bunch of heartless, gutless, spineless old pricks,” she said.

  I found myself smiling, a little, at my coffee.

  “Are they going to give it to you?” Murphy asked.

  “Maybe. It’s complicated,” I said. “Are you going to get CPD to help me?”

  Her eyes darkened. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”

  I spread my hands in a “there you are” gesture, and she nodded. She rose and paced over to the sink to put her cup down. “What can I do to help?”

  “Be nice if the police didn’t lock me up for a while. They’ll realize that the explosives were around my office eventually.”

  She shook her head. “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want in,” she said. “You’re both too involved in this. You’ll need someone with perspective.”

  I started to snap back something nasty, but shut my stupid mouth because she was probably right. I put my own coffee cup in the sink to give me an excuse not to talk while I tried to cool down. Then I said, “I would have asked you anyway, Murph. I need a good gun hand.”

  Tiny Murphy might be, but she’d survived more scrapes with the supernatural than any other vanilla mortal I’d ever met. She’d keep her head in a crisis, even if the crisis included winged demons, howling ghouls, slavering vampires, and human sacrifice. She’d keep anyone—by which I meant Martin—from stabbing me in the back. She’d keep her gun up and firing, too. I’d seen her do it.

  “Harry . . .” she began.

  I waved a hand. “Won’t ask you to break any of Chicago’s laws. Or U.S. laws. But I doubt we’re going to be in town for this one.”

  She absorbed that for a moment, folded her arms, and looked at the fire. Mouse watched her silently from where he sat near the couch.

  She said, “I’m your friend, Harry.”

  “Never had a doubt.”

  “You’re going to take Maggie back.”

  My jaw ached. “Damn right I am.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

  I bowed my head, my eyes abruptly burning, the emotion clashing with the storm in my belly.

  “Th—” I began. My voice broke. I tried again. “Thank you, Karrin.”

  I felt her hand take mine for a moment, warm and steady.

  “We will get her back,” she said, very quietly. “We will, Harry. I’m in.”

  6

  I didn’t sleep long, but I did it well. When my old Mickey Mouse windup alarm clock went off at seven, I had to fight my way up from a deep place on the far side of dreamland. I felt like I could use another eighteen or twenty hours.

  It was another instance of my emotions getting the better of me. Using soulfire on pure, instinctive reflex was a mistake—potentially a fatal one. The extramortal well of power that soulfire offered was formidable in ways I understood only imperfectly. I don’t know if it made my spells any more effective against the Red Court—though I had a hunch that it sure as H-E-double-hockey-sticks did—but I was dead certain that it had drawn upon my own life energy to do it. If I pulled on it too much, well. No more life energy kinda means no more life. And if that energy was indeed the same force that is commonly known as a soul, it might mean oblivion.

  Depending on what actually happened when you got to the far side, I guess. I have no idea. And no mortal or immortal creature I had ever met had sounded like he knew for sure, either.

  I did know that powerful emotions were an excellent source of additional energy for working magic, sort of a turbocharger. Throw a destructive spell in the grip of a vast fury, and you’d get a lot more bang for your effort than if you did it while relaxed on a practice field. The danger, of course, was that you could never really be sure how much effect such an emotion would have on a spell—which meant that you ran a much higher risk of losing control of the energy. Guys operating on my level can kill others or themselves at the slightest mistake.

  Maybe the soulfire came from a similar place as the emotions. Maybe you couldn’t have one without at least a little bit of the other. May
be they were all mixed together, like protein powder and skim milk in a health smoothie.

  Didn’t matter, really. Less than sixty seconds of action the night before left me exhausted. If I didn’t get a handle on the soulfire, I could literally kill myself with it.

  “Get it together, Harry,” I growled to myself.

  I shambled out of bed and out into the living room to find that my apprentice, Molly, had come in while I was sleeping and was profaning breakfast in my tiny kitchen.

  She wore a simple outfit—jeans and a black T-shirt that read, in very small white letters, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’D BETTER HAVE BOUGHT ME DINNER. Her golden hair was longer—she’d been letting it grow—and hung down to her shoulder blades in back. She’d colored it near the tips with green that darkened to blue as it went down.

  I’m not sure if Molly was “bangin’,” or “slammin’,” or “hawt,” since the cultural catchphrase cycles every couple of minutes. But if you picked a word meant to be a term of praise and adoration for the beauty of a young woman, it was probably applicable. For me, the effect was somewhat spoiled, because I’d known her since she was a skinny kid somewhere between the ages of training wheels and training bra, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have an academic appreciation for her looks. When she paid any attention, men fell all over her.

  Mouse sat alertly at her feet. The big dog was very good about not taking food off the table or from the stove or the counter or on top of the refrigerator, but he had drawn a line on the linoleum: If any bits fell to the floor, and he could get to them first, they were his. His brown eyes tracked Molly’s hands steadily. From the cheerful wag of his tail, she had probably already dropped things several times. She was a soft touch where the pooch was concerned.

  “Morning, boss,” she chirped.

  I glowered at her, but shambled out to the kitchen. She dumped freshly scrambled eggs onto a plate next to bacon, toast, and some mixed bits of fruit, and pressed a large glass of OJ into my hand.