Aftermath
Dresden 12.1
(2010)
Jim Butcher

Takes place an hour or two after the end ofChanges

	To quote a great man: 'Nuff said.

	I can't believe he's dead. 

	Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn't ever exactly teeming with business.

	Well, that's not entirely true. I knew better. I'd seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn't explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn't really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.

	But he was for real.

	Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.

	He was the real thing.

	God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.

	"Sergeant Murphy," said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We'd pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. "Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy."

	I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.

	"I'm Murphy," I said.

	"Um, right." He swallowed and looked around. "I don't know how to tell you this, but . . . my boss said I shouldn't be talking to you. He said you were on suspension."

	I looked at him calmly. He wasn't more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. "I get it," I said. "I won't tell anyone if you won't."

	He licked his lips nervously.

	"Jarvis," I said, "please." I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. "He is my friend." 

	I didn't say was—not out loud. You don't ever do that until you've found the remains. It's professional. 

	Jarvis exhaled and looked around. I thought he looked as if he might throw up.

	"The blood spatter suggests that whoever was struck there took a hit somewhere in his upper torso. It's impossible to be sure, but"—he swallowed—"it was a heavy spray. Maybe an arterial hit."

	"Or maybe not," I said.

	He was too young to notice the way I was grasping at straws. "Or maybe not," he agreed. "There's not enough blood on the site to call it a murder, but we think most of it . . . We didn't find the round. It went through the victim, and both walls of the, uh, boat there. It's probably in the lake."

	I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue. 

	"Smears on the deck and the guardrail suggest that the victim went over the side and into the water," Jarvis continued, his tone subdued. "There's a dive team on the way, but . . ."

	I used the Martian phrase for You needn't continue; I know what you're talking about. It sounded a lot like the first grunt to anyone without a Y chromosome, but I really did get it. 

	Lake Michigan is jealous and protective of her dead. The water's depth and the year-round cold temperatures that go with it mean that corpses don't tend to produce many gasses as they decompose. As a result, they often don't bob to the surface, like you see in all those cop shows on cable. They just lie on the bottom. No one knows how many poor souls' earthly remains rest in the quiet cold of Michigan's depths.

	"It hasn't been long," I said. "Even if he fell off the back, into the open water, he can't have gone far."

	"Yes, ma'am," Jarvis said. "Um. If you'll excuse me."

	I nodded at him and shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. Night was coming on, but it wouldn't make a lot of difference—the lake wasn't exactly crystal clear on the best days. The divers would have to use flashlights, day or night, even though we weren't more than fifty yards from shore, on the docks of the marina the Water Beetle called home. That would limit the area of water they could search at any given moment. The cold would impose limits on their dive time. Sonar might or might not be useful. This close to Chicago, the lake floor was cluttered with all kinds of things. They'd have to get lucky to get a good radar hit and find him. 

	If he was in there, he'd been there for several hours, and the wind had been rising the whole time, stirring the surface of the lake. Harry's corpse would have had plenty of time to fall to the bottom and begin to drift.

	The dive team probably wasn't going to find him. They'd try, but . . .

	Dammit.

	I stared hard at the lengthening shadows and tried to make my tears evaporate through sheer will.

	"I'm . . . very sorry, Sergeant," Jarvis said.

	I replied with the Martian for Thank you for your concern, but at the moment I need some space. That one's easy. I just stared forward without saying anything, and after a moment, Jarvis nodded and toddled off to continue working. 

	A while later, Stallings was standing next to me, wearing his badge prominently out on his coat. After I'd been busted back to sergeant, Stallings had replaced me as the head of Special Investigations, Chicago's unofficial monster squad. We dealt with the weird stuff no one would accept, and then lied about what we'd been doing so that everything fit neatly into a report.

	Stallings was a big, rawboned man, comfortably solid with age, his hair thinning on top. He had a mustache like Magnum's. I'd been his boss for nearly seven years. We got along well with each other. He never treated me like his most junior subordinate—more like an adviser who had been made available to the new commander.

	The forensics boys were sealing the doors of the little boat with crime scene tape, having taken enough samples and photographs to choke a rhinoceros, before anyone spoke.

	"Hey," he said.

	"Hey."

	He exhaled through his nose and said, "Hospital checks have come up with zip."

	I grimaced. They would. When Harry got hurt, the hospital was the last place he wanted to be. He felt too vulnerable there—and he worried that the way a wizard's presence disrupted technology could hurt or kill someone on life support, or do harm to some innocent bystander.

	But there was so much blood on the boat. If he was that badly hurt, he couldn't have gone anywhere on his own power. And down here, anyone who had found him would have called emergency services.

	And the blood trail led to the lake.

	I shook my head several times. I didn't want to believe it, but you can't make fact into fiction, no matter how much denial you've got to draw upon.

	Stallings sighed again. Then he said, "You're on suspension, Murphy. And this is a crime scene."

	"Not until we know a crime's been committed," I said. "We don't absolutely know anyone's been hurt or killed. Right now, it's just a mess."

	"God dammit," he said, his voice weary. "You're a civilian now, Karrin. Get away from the fucking scene. Before someone gets word to Rudolph about this and Infernal Affairs comes down here to toss your ass in jail."

	"On any other day, I would think you were talking sense," I said.

	"I don't care what you think," he said. "I care what you do. And what you're going to do is turn around, walk over to your car, get in it, go home, and get a good night's sleep. You look like a hundred miles of bad road. Through Hell."

	See, most women would have been a little put out by a remark like that. Especially if they were wearing slacks that flattered their hips and butt, with a darling red silk blouse and a matching silver necklace and two bracelets, studded with tiny sapphires, which they'd inherited from their grandmother. And more makeup than they usually wore in a week. And new perfume. And great shoes.

	By any measure, that kind of remark was insulting. When you were dressed for a date, it was more so.

	But Stallings wasn't trying to piss me off. The insult was Martian, too, for something along the lines of I have so much regard for you that I went out of my way to create this insult so that we can have the fun of a mildly adversarial conversation. See how much I care?

	"John," I replied, using his first name, "you are a sphincter douche."

	Translation: I love you, too.

	He gave me a quiet smile and nodded.

	Men.

	He was right. There was nothing I could do here.

	I turned my back on the last place I'd seen Harry Dresden and walked back to my car.

	It had been a long day, starting most of two days before, including a gunfight at the FBI building—which the news was still going insane about, especially after the office building bombing a couple of days before that—and a pitched battle at an ancient Mayan temple that ended in the utter destruction of the vampires of the Red Court.

	And after that, things had gotten really dangerous.

	I'd shown up to that ratty old boat where Harry was crashing, dressed in the outfit Stallings had insulted. Harry and I were supposed to go grab a few drinks and . . . and see what happened.

	Instead, I'd found nothing but his blood.

	I didn't think I would sleep, but two days plus of physical and psychological stress made it inevitable. Nightmares came to haunt me, but they didn't make much of an impression. I'd seen worse in the real world. I did cry, though. I remember that—waking up in the middle of the night from bad dreams that were old hat by now, sobbing my eyes out in pure reaction to the events of the past two days.

	It happens. You feel overwhelmed, you cry, you feel better, and you go back to sleep.

	If you don't get it, don't ask. It doesn't really translate into Martian.

	I woke up to a firm knock at my front door. I got out of bed, my Sig in my hand, and flicked a quick glance out the window at the backyard. It was empty, and there was no one at the door that led into my kitchen. Only after I had checked my six o'clock did I go to the front door, glancing quickly out the window in the hall as I went.

	I recognized the stout young man standing on the porch, and I relaxed somewhat. Since I slept in an oversized T-shirt, I grabbed a pair of sweats and hopped into them, then went to see the werewolf standing at my door.

	Will Borden didn't look like a werewolf. He was about five five, five six, and built like an armored car, all flat, heavy muscle. He wore glasses, his brown hair was cut short and neat, and you would never have guessed, from looking at him, that he and his friends had been responsible for a forty percent drop in crime in a six-block radius around the University of Chicago—and that didn't even take into account the supernatural predators that had been driven away and that now avoided the neighborhood. Strictly speaking, I probably should have arrested him as a known vigilante.

	Of course, strictly speaking, I wasn't a cop anymore. I wouldn't be arresting anybody. Ever again.

	That thought hit my stomach like a lead wrecking ball, and no amount of bravado or discipline could keep it from hurting. So I turned away from it.

	I answered the door, and said, "Hello, Will."

	"Sergeant Murphy," he said, nodding at me. "Got a minute?"

	"It's early," I said, not bothering to correct his form of address.

	"I need your help," he said.

	I took a deep breath through my nose.

	It wasn't as though I had to go to work. It wasn't as though I had a hot date waiting for me.

	Part of me longed to slam the door in Will's face and go back to bed. I'd always thought that kind of selfish reaction had been a fairly small portion of my character. Today, it felt huge.

	The house was silent and empty behind me.

	"Okay," I said. "Come in."

	I seated him at the kitchen table and went back to my room to put on clothes that looked a little less pajama-like. When I came back out, Will had gotten the coffeepot going, and brew was already a finger deep in the little glass pitcher.

	I popped some bread in the toaster and watched it carefully to make sure it didn't burn. My toaster was an old one, but even so I didn't need to be watching it. It just gave me something to do until the coffee was done.

	I took the finished toast and coffee to the table, a bit for each of us, and set out a jar of strawberry preserves. Will accepted the food readily and, naturally, wolfed it down. We did all of that in silence.

	"Okay," I said, settling back in my chair and studying him. "What help?"

	"Georgia's gone," he said simply.

	I kept myself from wincing. Georgia was Will's wife. They'd been together since they were barely out of high school. They'd learned to be werewolves together, apparently. I liked them both. "Tell me."

	"Work had me out of town," he said. "Omaha. Georgia is getting ready to defend her dissertation. She stayed home. We both watched the news—about Dresden's office building and the terrorists at the FBI. We were worried but . . . I got a call from her late last night. She was . . ." His face became pale. "She was almost incoherent. Terrified. She wasn't making any sense. Then the call cut off abruptly." His voice shook. "She was screaming. I tried to call the cops, but . . ."

	I nodded. "But if it was something bad enough to make her scream, there wouldn't be much the cops could do to help. And between the bombing and the attack, they were all overworked, anyway. They'll get to it as soon as they can."

	"Yeah," Will said. "So I left a message with Dresden's service and came back to Chicago. The apartment door was broken, maybe kicked in. The place was a wreck." He swallowed. "She was gone. And I couldn't pick up a trail. I went to Harry's place, but . . . There was still smoke coming up from what was left. Then I came here."

	I nodded slowly. Then I asked, "Why?"

	He blinked and looked at me as if I'd broken out into a musical number. "Seriously?"

	"Yeah."

	"He always told us that if we ever needed him but couldn't find him, we were supposed to go to you. That you were the person in this city who could help us better than anyone else."

	I stared at him for a minute. Then I said, "Yeah. I can just see him saying that." I shook my head. "And never bothering to mention it to me."

	I'll give Will credit—he was obviously terrified, but he managed to try a joke. "He probably thought you were formidable enough without the confidence boost from something like that."

	"Like I need his approval to be confident," I muttered. I studied Will for a moment. I knew him well enough to know there was something off in his behavior. He was too quiet. Will wasn't the sort of man to sit at a table fiddling with his napkin when his wife was missing and quite possibly in danger. He was terrified, frightened to such a degree that it was nearly paralytic. I recognized the look.

	I'd seen it in the mirror often enough.

	"What aren't you telling me, Will?" I asked quietly.

	He closed his eyes and shivered as a tear tracked down each cheek.

	"Georgia's pregnant," he whispered. "Seven months."

	I nodded. Then I pushed the rest of my coffee away and got up. "Let me get my coat."

	"It's supposed to be nice today," Will said.

	"With the coat, I can carry more guns," I said.

	"Oh," he said. "Right."

	Will's apartment was a wreck. The lock had been smashed, though the door was still in one piece. The furniture was askew. A few things were broken. Paperback books had been knocked off a shelf. A laptop computer lay on its side, a blue screen of death glaring from its monitor. A mug of cocoa had been spilled and lay in a drying puddle on the hardwood floor.

	I looked back and forth for a moment, frowning. The spill lay near the laptop, and both were to the right side of a comfortable-looking recliner, which had been bowled over backward. There was a therapeutic contoured pillow lying a few feet beyond that.

	"So," I said, "maybe it went like this. The attacker kicks in the door. There's a partial impression of a shoe's tread on it. Georgia's sitting in her chair, there, working on her computer." I frowned some more. "She drink a lot of cocoa?"

	"No," Will said. "Only when she's really upset. She jokes about it being self-medication."

	So she'd been upset already, even before the attack. She was sitting in the chair with her laptop and her cocoa and . . . I walked over to the fallen chair and found a simple household wireless phone lying behind it.

	"Something besides the prospect of an attack had upset her," I said. "She took the time to make a cup of cocoa, and you don't do that when there's a maniac at the door. She made herself a comfort drink and huddled up in her chair to call you. Do you have any idea what could have upset her like that?"

	Will shook his head. "Normally, no. But she's been on a hormone crazy train the past few months. She's overreacted to a lot of things."

	I nodded and stood there, just trying to absorb it all, to get an image of how things might have fit together. I pictured Georgia, a long, lean, willowy woman, curled up in the recliner, her face blotchy, her eyes red, almost curling up around her baby and the sound of her husband's voice.

	Someone broke the door in with a single kick and rushed her. Georgia was a fighter, accustomed to combat, even if it was mostly when she was in the form of another creature. She used the first defense she could bring to bear—her legs. As her attacker rushed her, she kicked out with both legs, trying to shove him away. But he had too much momentum, and instead Georgia's kick had flung her chair over backward.

	A pregnant woman nowhere near as lithe or graceful as she usually was, she turned and tried to get away.

	"There's no blood," I said.

	The attacker had dragged her out by main force. Either he'd beaten her with his fists and feet—easy, on a pregnant woman, who would instinctively curl her body around her unborn child, so that blows landed mostly on the back, ribs, and buttocks—or else he'd choked her unconscious. Either way, he'd subdued her without, apparently, drawing blood.

	Then they left.

	I shook my head.

	"What do you think?" Will asked.

	"I think you don't want to know."

	"No, I don't," he said. "But I need to."

	I nodded. I repeated my theory and its supporting evidence. It made Will go pale and silent.

	"How was her hand-to-hand?" I asked him.

	"Fair. She used to teach women's self-defense seminars on campus. I don't think she's ever had to use it in earnest. . . ." His voice trailed off as he stared at the fallen chair.

	"What did you find out that I couldn't?" I asked. "I mean, with the whole werewolf thing."

	He shook his head. "The human brain isn't wired for serious scent-processing," he said. "Not like a wolf's, anyway. Shifting . . . sort of turns up the volume in your nose, but it's really hard to sort things out. I can follow a trail if I'm on it soon enough, but when a bunch of scents get mixed together, it's a crap shoot. In here there's new paint, spilled cocoa, the last day or two of meals. . . ." He shrugged.

	"Magic never seems to make things any easier," I said.

	Will snorted faintly. "Dresden keeps saying the same thing."

	I felt an odd pain in my chest. I ignored it. I walked over to the apartment's little kitchen and studied it for a minute. Then I said, "So she's a cocoa junkie."

	"Well, she's functional."

	"She drink instant?"

	"Are you kidding?" The pitch and cadence of his voice changed a little, becoming slightly higher and more clearly inflected, in what was probably an unconscious imitation of his wife. "It's the Spam of cocoas."

	I got a pen out of my pocket and used it to lift a second cup, this one with a bit of lipstick smeared on the rim. The bottom of the cup was sticky with the residue of real cocoa, the kind you make from milk and chocolate. Some of it was still liquid enough to stir as the cup shifted. I showed it to him.

	"Georgia doesn't wear makeup," he half whispered.

	"I know," I said. "And the cocoa in this cup has been sitting out for about the same length of time as the cocoa in the other cup. So the next question we need to answer: Who was drinking cocoa with Georgia when the door broke in?"

	Will shook his head. "Either it's the attacker's scent or it's someone we know. Someone who is over a lot."

	I nodded. "Redhead, right? The one who likes wearing the tight shirts."

	"Andi," Will said. "And Marcy. She moved back to town after Kirby's funeral. Their scents are here, too."

	"Marcy?"

	"Little mousey girl. Brown hair. She and Andi had kind of a thing in school."

	"Liberal werewolves," I said. "Two words rarely seen adjacent to each other."

	"Lots of people experiment in college," Will said. "You probably did."

	"Yeah," I said. "I tried getting into watching European football. It didn't work out."

	"Neither did Marcy and Andi."

	"Bad blood there?"

	"Not that I know of. They were still roommates after they split."

	"But Marcy left town."

	Will nodded. "She wanted into the animation business. She pulled a job at Skywalker. Seriously cool stuff."

	"So cool that she left it to come back here?"

	Will shrugged a shoulder. "She said it was more important for her to be here to help us. And she lived in a cardboard box or something, socked most of her money into the bank. Says the interest is enough to get by on for now."

	I decided to remain skeptical on that story. "You happen to remember if either of them wears this color lipstick?"

	He shook his head. "Sorry. Not really the kind of thing I notice."

	If I remembered right, most guys who looked at Andi wouldn't be entirely certain whether or not she had lips afterward. But she'd probably have back problems at some point. "Okay," I said. "Maybe the cops will be here soon, and maybe not. Either way, I don't think we should wait around for them." 

	Will nodded. "What are we going to do?"

	"This isn't exactly high-dollar soundproof housing. Someone in this building must have heard or seen something."

	"Maybe," Will said, though he didn't sound confident.

	I turned to leave the apartment and tried not to notice the little crib and changing table that had already been set up just beyond the open door of the apartment's second bedroom. "We won't know until we ask. Come on."

	Canvassing a building isn't particularly fun work. It's awkward, boring, repetitive, and frustrating. Most of the people you talk to don't want to be talking to you and want out of the conversation as quickly as possible—or else they're just delighted to be talking to you, and want to keep talking to you even though they don't know a damn thing. You have to ask the same questions over and over again, get the same answers over and over again, and generally look like you're an idiot without a single clue. 

	And you pretty much are, or you wouldn't be canvassing the building in the first place. You grow a thick skin fast for that kind of thing when you do police work.

	"This is getting us nowhere," Will said after the umpteenth door, his frustration and worry finally boiling over to the point that it was beginning to outweigh his terror for his wife and child. He turned to face me, his stance unconsciously confrontational, his shoulders squared, his chest thrust out, his hands clenched into fists. "We need to do something else."

	Ah, masculine assertiveness—I've got nothing against it, as long as it helps get the job done instead of making it harder. "Yeah?" I asked him. "You think we'd be better off walking down the street calling her name, Will?"

	"N-no, but—"

	"But what?" I asked him, keeping my tone reasonable while facing him with an equal amount of ready-to-kick-your-ass Martian body language. You do not intimidate me. "You came to me for help. I'm giving it to you. Either you work with me or you tell me you want to go it alone. Right now." 

	He backed off, unclenching his hands and looking away. I relaxed as well. Will hadn't meant to deliver a threat to me, as such, but he was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I was. Stronger isn't everything, but simple mass and power mean a lot in a fight, and Will had the ferocity and killer instinct to make them count even more heavily than most. He'd never considered—hell, probably never noticed—the full depth of the statement he was making with his stance and clenched fists. 

	It's another in a long list of things that Martians hardly ever think about: Almost any woman knows that almost any man is stronger than she is. Oh, men know they're stronger, but they seldom actually stop to think through the implications of that simple reality—implications that are both unnerving and virtually omnipresent, if you aren't a Martian. You think about life differently when you know that half the people you see have the physical power to do things to you, regardless of whether you intend to allow it—and even implied threats of physical violence have to be taken seriously.

	Will hadn't intended to frighten me. He just wanted to find his wife.

	"I know it's frustrating," I told him, "but it's the best way to find out something we didn't know before."

	"We've been through the whole building," he snapped. "The most we've got is a neighbor a couple of floors up who heard a thump."

	"Which tells us there wasn't much of a fight," I said, "or they'd have probably heard it. Fights are loud, Will, even when only one person is fighting. A building like this, everyone knows it when the neighbor beats his wife."

	"Somebody should have heard her scream."

	"Maybe it wasn't as loud as you thought. It was right in your ear. And it upset you. If it ended quickly enough, it might not even have woken anyone up."

	I looked out the hallway window, toward more of the same sort of apartment building across the parking lot. Will wasn't going to be terribly helpful in his current state. "I'm going to check across the lot, see if anyone happened to see or hear anything last night. I want you to call Andi and Marcy. Get them over here if you can reach them. After that, go over your phone's caller ID, Georgia's cell phone's caller ID, her e-mail. See if anyone odd has been in contact with her."

	"Okay," he said, frowning—but nodding.

	"Control your emotions, Will. Stay calm," I told him. "Calm's the best way to think, and thinking's the best way to find Georgia and help her."

	He inhaled deeply, still nodding. "Look, Sergeant. . . . One of the guys in that building . . . Maybe you shouldn't go over there by yourself."

	I smiled sweetly at him.

	He lifted his empty hands as if I'd pointed a gun. "Right. Sorry."

	Three buildings had apartments in them that faced out on the common parking lot in general, and had a view of the Bordens' apartment in particular. I stood in the parking lot, looking up at the windows for a moment, and then started with the building on the left.

	Most of an hour later, I hadn't learned anything else, and I figured out my main problem: I wasn't Harry Dresden.

	Dresden would have looked around with a vague expression on his face and wandered around, bumping into things and barely comporting himself with professional caution, even at a crime scene. He'd ask a few questions that wouldn't make much sense on the surface, make a few remarks he thought were witty, and glibly insult anyone who appeared to be a repressive authority figure. Then he'd do something that didn't make any goddamn sense, and produce results out of thin air, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

	If Harry were here, he could have taken some hairs out of Georgia's hairbrush, done something stupid-looking with them, and followed her across the town or the state or, for all I knew, to the other side of the universe. He could have told me more about what had happened at Georgia's than I could have known, maybe even identified the perp, in general or specifically. And, if things got hot when we went after the bad guy, he would have been there, throwing fire and lightning around as if they were his own personal toys, created especially and exclusively for him to play with.

	Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone's eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.

	But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense that it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.

	Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.

	Not many "vanillas," as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously—but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden's power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.

	It wasn't the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That's fairly mild, as fear goes. That's Scooby Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution—that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know.

	I had come to terms with it. Not everyone would.

	In fact . . . it might be for that very reason that someone had put the hit on him. A bullet that strikes from long range and goes cleanly through a human body, and then through the hull of a boat, twice, leaving a series of neat holes, is almost certainly a very high-powered rifle round. A professional rifleman shooting from a good way out was one of the things Dresden had acknowledged had a real chance of taking him out cleanly. He might be a wizard, a wielder of tremendous power and knowledge (as if they're any different), but he wasn't immortal. 

	Quick, tough, tricky as hell, sure. But not untouchable.

	Not in any number of senses. I should know, having touched him—even if I hadn't touched him anywhere near soon or often enough. . . .

	And now I never would.

	Dammit.

	I pushed thoughts of the man out of my head before I started crying again. It's hard enough to pull off an air of authority when you're five feet tall, without also having red, watery eyes and a running nose.

	Dresden was gone. His cheesy jokes and his corny sense of humor were gone. His ability to know the unknowable, to fight the unfightable, and to find the unfindable was gone.

	The rest of us were just going to have to carry on as best we could without him.

	I knocked on doors and talked to a lot of people, most of them college-age kids attending school in town. I got a whole lot of nothing about Georgia, though I did get tips on some drug sales that had gone down in the parking lot. I'd pass them on to the right people on the force, where they would become more scenery for the endless march of the war on drugs and wouldn't amount to anything. The tips did prove the point I'd made to Will, though: Neighbors see things. Maybe I just hadn't talked to the right neighbor yet.

	When I hit building three, I felt the change in climate as I went through the door. It was more run-down than the other apartments. Some fresh graffiti marked an interior wall. More of the doors had double dead bolts on them. The carpet was old and stained. The pane of a window had been broken out and replaced with a piece of wood. The whole place screamed that unpleasant sorts were lurking about, making the building's super reluctant to maintain the halls and foyer, maybe forcing him to continue dealing with problems and damage over and over again.

	I couldn't hear any music.

	That's unusual in buildings like that one, mostly inhabited by students. Kids love their music, however mind-numbing or ear-rending it might be, and you can almost always hear at least a beat thumping somewhere nearby.

	Not here, though.

	I kept my eyes open, tried to grow a new pair for the back of my head, and started knocking on doors.

	"No," lied a small, fragile-looking woman who said her name was Maria, a resident of the third floor. She hadn't opened the door more than the security chain allowed. "I didn't hear or see anything."

	I tried to make my smile reassuring. "Ma'am, the way this usually works is that I ask you a question, and then you tell me a lie. If you give me a dishonest answer before I have the chance to ask the question, it offends my sense of propriety." 

	Her head shook in quick, jerky spasms as her eyes widened. "N-no. I'm not lying. I don't know anything."

	Maria tried to shut the door. I got my boot into it first. "You're lying," I said, gently. "You're scared. I get that. I've gotten the same treatment from almost everyone in the building."

	She looked away from me, as if seeking an escape route. "I'll c-call the police."

	"I am the police," I said. Which was technically true. They hadn't fired me yet.

	"Oh, God," she said. She shook her head more and more, desperation in the gesture. "I don't want to be . . . I can't be seen talking to you. Go away." 

	I lifted my eyebrows. "Ma'am, please. If you're in trouble . . ."

	I wasn't sure she'd even heard me. I'd seen women like her often enough to know the look. She was terrified of something, probably a husband or boyfriend or a string of husbands and boyfriends, and maybe a father before that. She was living scared, and she'd been doing it for a long time. Fear had ground away at her, and the only way she'd been able to survive was by capitulating.

	Maria was damaged goods. She shook her head, sobbing, and just started pushing at the door. I was about to pull my foot out and go away. You can't force someone to accept your help.

	"Is there some kind of problem here?" asked a booze-roughened voice.

	I turned to face a wooly mammoth of a man. He was well over six feet tall and probably weighed three of me, though more of it was mass than muscle. He wore a white undershirt that showed off his belly, and a button-down shirt with the name RAY embroidered on one breast.

	He looked at me and at the apartment door and scowled. "Mary, you got some kind of problem?"

	Maria had gone still, like a rabbit that suspects a predator is nearby. "No, Ray," she whispered. "It's nothing."

	"Sure as hell don't sound like nothing," Ray said. He folded his arms. "I'm trying to get the city out here to fix the lights on the street and the fuse box, and you're making enough noise to fuck up my conversation all the way down the hall."

	"I'm sorry, Ray," Maria whispered.

	Something flickered behind Ray's eyes, an ugly little light. "Jesus, I give you all that extra time to pay off on the rent, and you treat me like this?"

	Maria sounded as though someone were strangling her. "It was an accident. It won't happen again."

	"We'll talk," he said.

	Maria flinched as if the words had smeared her with grime.

	My hand clenched into a fist.

	Well, dammit.

	I'd seen Ray's type before, too—bullies who never managed to outgrow the playground; people who liked having power over others and who controlled them through fear. He was big, and he thought that made him more powerful than everyone else. The worm probably had a record, probably had done some time, probably for something fairly gutless. For guys like Ray, sometimes prison only convinces them what dangerous badasses they are, serving as a confirmation and validation of their status as predators.

	Ray looked from Maria to me, with that same ugly light in his eyes.

	"You're the super?" I asked.

	He grunted in Martian. Fuck off and die.

	It's an expressive language, Martian.

	"What's it to you?" he asked.

	"I'm the curious sort," I said.

	"Fuck off and die," Ray said, in English, this time. "Get out." He looked past me to Maria. "Close that goddamn door."

	"I—I've been trying," Maria said. My foot and my heavy black work boot were both still between the door and its frame.

	Flat rage hit Ray's eyes, and it was aimed at Maria. That made up my mind for me. Ray was obviously an abuser and one who took out his frustrations wherever he damn well pleased instead of upon their source. He was going to be unhappy with me, and when he realized he couldn't take it out on me, Maria would be the recipient of his rage. It more or less obliged me to protect her.

	And I wasn't going to enjoy doing it even one little bit, either. Honest.

	"Get your foot out of the door before I tear it off," Ray growled.

	"Suppose I don't," I said.

	"Last chance," Ray said, his eyes narrowing to slits. He was breathing faster, now, and I could see sweat beading on his brow. "Get out of here. Now."

	"Or what?" I asked, mildly. "You gonna hit me, Ray?"

	Self-control was not one of Ray's strong suits. He spat out the word "Bitch," spraying spittle with it as he did. He moved toward me, all three-hundred-and-change pounds of him, his hands balled into fists the size of cantaloupes.

	There was something Ray didn't know about me: I know martial arts.

	I'm not a truly advanced student, but I've practiced every day since I was seventeen. I started with Aikido, then Wing Chun, then Jujitsu. I've studied Kali, Savate, Krav Maga, Tae Kwan Do, Judo, boxing, and Shaolin Kung Fu. It sounds impressive laid out like that, but it really isn't. Once you get two or three arts down, the next dozen or so come pretty quick. Since they are all addressing the same problem, and because human bodies are human bodies, regardless of which continent you're on, they share characteristic motions and timing.

	Ray swept a fist at me in a looping punch a kiddie-league fighter could have avoided, so I took my foot out of Maria's door and ducked it. He kept coming forward in a fleshy avalanche, while I went under his arm and took a pair of steps to one side on a diagonal angle. He tried to grab me as I slipped loose, but he wound up losing his balance badly in doing it. I gave him a helpful push with the first two knuckles of my left fist, right in the kidney.

	Ray smashed into the drywall and left dents. I thought about how long it had taken him to build up speed, and I took several steps back. He turned, screaming a vicious oath, and came at me, gathering sluggish momentum like an overloaded tractor trailer. I had to back up another pair of steps to give him enough space to move into a wobbling run.

	He didn't bother with a punch this time. He simply grabbed at me with his huge arms. I timed it carefully, and dropped to the floor at the last instant, sweeping my leg out in an almost-gentle kick that did nothing except prevent his right foot from proceeding forward and to the floor in proper rhythm with his left.

	The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Ray fell pretty hard.

	He staggered up to his hands and knees and swiped a paw at me in another grab.

	Jesus Christ. Basic self-defense instructors would kill to have a video of this. He was coming at me with every stupid-aggressive move he possibly could, as if working his way through a list.

	There were a lot of things I could have done with the gift he'd made me of his hand, but in real conflict, I don't get fancy. I go with simple, fast, and reliable. I let him grab my wrist, then broke his grip, wrapped him into a wrist lock, and applied pressure.

	That kind of hold has very little to do with muscle or mass. That one is all about exploiting the machinery of the human body. It wouldn't have mattered if Ray was in shape. He could have looked like Schwarzenegger as Conan, and he would have been just as helpless. Human joints are all built to more or less the same specifications, out of similar materials, no matter how much muscle or lard is on top of them. They're vulnerable, if you know how to use them against your opponent.

	I did.

	Three hundred plus pounds of body odor, stupid and mean, slammed down onto the worn, dirty carpeting in the hallway, as if dropped from a crane.

	While he lay there, stunned, I twisted his wrist straight up and behind him, keeping his arm locked straight with my other hand. From there, I could literally take his arm out of his shoulder socket with about as much effort as it would take to push a grocery cart. And I could make him hurt—a lot, if need be—in order to discourage him from trying any more stupid moves.

	Being Ray, he tried stupid again, screaming and thrashing against the lock. I sighed and kept control, and he and his face relived his crushing impact with the carpet. We repeated that several times, until the lesson began to drill its way through to Ray—he wasn't going anywhere. It would hurt if he tried.

	"So I've been talking to people in several buildings," I said in a calm, conversational tone. Ray was puffing like an engine. "I was wondering if you could tell me if you saw anything odd or unusual last night? Probably between two and three in the morning?"

	"You're breaking my fucking arm!" Ray growled—or tried to. It had been watered down with whine.

	"No, no, no," I said. "If I broke your arm, you'd hear a snapping sound. It sounds a lot like a tree branch breaking, actually, though a little more muffled. What you have to worry about is me dislocating your arm at the shoulder and elbow. That's worse, overall. Just as painful and it takes a hell of a lot more effort to recover."

	"Jesus," Ray said.

	"Are you telling me that Jesus was visiting between two and three last night? I'm dubious, Ray."

	"I didn't see nothing!" he said a few panting seconds later. "All right? Jesus Christ, I didn't see nothing!"

	"Aha," I said. "You sound like an honest man." I used my bracing arm to reach for my coat pocket, then tossed my badge down onto the floor in front of him.

	He stared at it for a long second, and then his face went white.

	"Here's what happens," I said very quietly. "You're going to resign from your job. You'll write a very nice letter to your boss, and then you get out of this building. You're gone by noon tomorrow."

	"You can't do that," he said.

	"I can do whatever I want," I said. "Which of us do you think the judge will believe, Ray?"

	That isn't how I approached law enforcement. It isn't how any good cop does, either. But the criminals are always willing, even eager, to believe the absolute worst about cops. I think it makes them feel better if they can convince themselves that the police are just like them, only with badges and a paycheck.

	"You're going, one way or another. You don't play ball, I send the city inspector in here to verify all the code violations on this building. Fire extinguishers are missing. The smoke detectors are years old, and most of the ones that aren't missing entirely are just hanging from their wires. You've got mold and fungus issues all over the place. Lights are out. There's trash piling up outside." I yawned. "On top of that, there are drug deals going down in your parking lot, Ray. I figure you're in on that."

	"No," he said. "No, I'm not!"

	"Sure you are. It fits you, doesn't it? And here you are assaulting an officer." I shook my head sadly. "So when the building fails inspection, maybe even makes it into the paper, you'll be fired anyway. And on top of that, I'll finger you in the drug deals. I'll press charges for assault. How many strikes do you already have on you, big guy? Can you handle two more?"

	"You're bluffing," he said.

	"Maybe," I admitted. "On the other hand . . . maybe I just give John Marcone a call and tell him how you're helping some of his street-level guys run some deals behind his back."

	Invoking the name of Marcone to a Chicago criminal is as significant as invoking the name of a saint to a devout Catholic. He's the biggest fish in the pond, the head of organized crime in Chicago—and damn good at it. His people fear him, and even cops take him very, very seriously. One day he'd slip up and CPD, the FBI, or maybe the IRS would nail him. Until then, he was the deadliest predator in the jungle.

	Ray shuddered.

	"Look up, Ray," I said quietly.

	He did, and he saw what I had seen a moment before.

	Doors were open all up and down the hallway. People stood in them, men and women, children, parents, the elderly. They all stood there silently and watched a little blond woman handling big mean Ray as if he were an unruly child.

	Their eyes were very hard. And there wasn't any fear in them now.

	"Look at them, Ray," I said.

	He did. He shuddered again. Then his body stopped straining, and he sagged down.

	"I'll go," he said.

	"Fucking right you will." I shoved on his arm, and he screamed with pain—but I hadn't dislocated it. I only did it to give myself a moment to pick up my badge and step out of grab range, just in case he was too dumb to quit.

	He wasn't. He simply lay there like a beached shark.

	"I'll be checking back here, Ray. Regularly. If I think you've harmed any of these people, stolen or broken their property—hell, if I hear that you gave them a dirty look, I am going to find you and shove a bundle of rusty rebar up your ass. I promise." 

	I took out one of my business cards, now obsolete, I supposed, and wrote down a phone number. I took the card to Maria and held it out for her. "If you have any trouble, you call this number on the back. You ask for Lieutenant Stallings. Tell him Murphy gave you the number."

	Maria bit her lip. Then she looked at Ray and back to me.

	She took the card with a hurried, nervous little motion and scampered back, closing her apartment door. Several locks clicked shut.

	I didn't say anything else. I walked out of the building. I was halfway across the lot, heading back to Will's place, when I heard quick footsteps coming behind me. I turned with one hand close to my Sig, but relaxed when I recognized Maria.

	She stopped in front of me and said, "I s-saw something."

	I nodded and waited.

	"There were some odd sounds, late last night. Like . . . like thumps. And a little while later, a car rolled in. It pulled up to the building across the lot, and a man got out and left it running, like he wasn't worried about it being stolen."

	"Did you recognize him?" I asked.

	Maria shook her head. "But he was big. Almost as big as Ray, but he . . . You know, he moved better. He was in shape. And he was wearing an expensive suit."

	"What else can you tell me about him?" I asked.

	Maria shrugged. "Not . . . not anything, really. I saw him come out again, right away. Then he got into the car and drove away. I didn't see any plates or anything. I'm sorry."

	"Nothing to be sorry about," I said quietly. "Thank you."

	She nodded and turned to scurry back toward her building. Then she stopped and looked back at me. "I don't know if it matters," she said, "but the man had one of those army haircuts."

	I stiffened a little. "Do you remember what color hair?"

	"Red," she said. "Like, bright orange-red." She swallowed. "If it matters."

	It mattered—but I didn't want to scare her, so I nodded and smiled, then said, "Thank you, Maria. Seriously."

	She tried to smile back and did pretty well. Then she looked around her, as if uncomfortable standing in so much open space, and hurried back to her building.

	A big guy in a suit with a bright red crew cut—it was almost word for word the short description in the notes of the file that CPD kept for a man named Hendricks.

	Hendricks was a former college football player. He weighed upward of three hundred pounds, none of it excess. He had been under suspicion for several mysterious disappearances, mostly of criminal figures who seemed to have earned his boss's displeasure. And his boss had, presumably, sent him to Will and Georgia's building late last night.

	But why?

	To get an answer, I was going to have to talk to Hendricks's boss.

	I had to go see "Gentleman" John Marcone.

	The police know where Marcone can be reached. Finding him doesn't do diddly to let us nail him. The fact that he has his fingers in so many pies means that not only do we have to work against Marcone and his shadowy empire, but we have our own superiors and politicians breathing down our necks as well. Oh, they never say anything directly, like, "Stop arresting Marcone's most profitable pimps." Instead, we get a long speech about racial and socioeconomic profiling. We get screams from political action committees. We get vicious editorial pieces in the newspapers and on TV.

	We mostly stay quiet and keep plugging away at our jobs. Experience has taught us that hardly anyone ever cares what we think or have to say. They demand answers, but they don't want to listen.

	I'm not saying that cops are a bunch of white knights. I'm just saying that the politicians can spin things all sorts of ways if it means that they're guaranteed stacks of cash for their campaign chests—or that Marcone's blackmailers won't expose some dark secret from their pasts.

	I still had friends in the CPD. I called one who worked in the Organized Crime Division and asked him where I could find Marcone.

	"Aw, Murph," Malone said. He sounded weary. "This ain't the time."

	"Since when have you been big on punctuality?" I asked. "I need this. It's about Dresden."

	Malone grunted. Dresden had saved his uncle from some kind of possession or (and I still have trouble with the concept when I say it), an evil enchantment. The elder Malone had been suffering to a degree I had never seen elsewhere. Cops and medics and so on couldn't do a thing for the man. Dresden had walked in, shooed everyone else out of the room, and five minutes later Malone was sane again, if worse for wear. It had made an impression on Malone's nephew.

	"Okay," he said. "Give me a couple minutes. They got everyone with a star running around the city looking for bin Laden or Bigfoot or whoever else might have blown up that building. I ain't slept in two days. And the FBI is coming down like a freaking cloud of angry mama birds, after what happened at their office." He cleared his throat. "Um. I heard you might have been around there."

	I grunted. Neutrally.

	"Weird stuff, huh?"

	I sighed. Internal Affairs or the FBI might still have my phone tapped, and I was reluctant to say much.

	On the other hand, what were they going to do? Take my career away?

	"Serious weirdness. The same flavor as the kind that hit the old Velvet Room." That was where Dresden had fought a whole bunch of vampires and wound up burning down the entire house.

	Malone whistled. "Was it as bad as that guy down in the SI holding tank?"

	The kid meant the loup-garou. We were stupid enough to lock Harley MacFinn in a normal cell. He transformed into this hideous Ice Age-looking thing. It was half the size of an old Buick and it could only loosely be called a wolf. Brave men had died that night, fighting with weapons that were utterly useless against the loup-garou. Carmichael, my old partner, had died there, all but throwing himself into the thing's jaws to buy me a few seconds.

	I feel nauseated when I think about it.

	"I don't know, really. Things happened too fast. I rounded up some people, went down a stairway and out. SWAT went in, but by the time they did, there was nothing left but staff hiding in closets and under desks, and a lot of bodies."

	"Jesus," he said.

	"Malone, I need this," I pressed firmly.

	"Call you back in a minute," he said.

	I put my phone back into my coat pocket and looked at Will. We were both standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment.

	"This is crazy," Will said quietly. "Vampires hitting a government building? Blowing up buildings in a major city? They don't do that." 

	"If they followed all the rules, they wouldn't be bad guys," I said.

	"It's just . . ." He swallowed. "I really wish Harry was around. He'd have a take on it."

	"That makes two of us."

	Will shook his head. "I've been too crazy to even ask. . . . Where is he?"

	I glanced at him and away, keeping my face still.

	The color drained out of Will's cheeks. "No. He's not. . . . It doesn't work like that."

	"We don't know where he is," I said. "He was staying out on that ratty boat he uses until he could find somewhere else to sleep. We found blood. Bullet holes. Blood trail leading into the lake."

	Will shook his head. "But . . . if he was hurt, he wouldn't go to a hospital. He'd call Waldo Butters." He took his cell phone from his pocket. "He's in my contacts. We can call—"

	"I know about Butters, Will," I interrupted gently. "I called him first thing after I saw the blood. He hasn't heard from Harry."

	"Oh my . . . Oh my God," Will said, his voice a whisper.

	I felt like I'd just double-tapped Santa Claus.

	"Maybe he isn't dead," I said. "Maybe it was somebody else with the same blood type who got shot. Or maybe Dresden pulled one of his tricks and just vanished, whoosh, off to . . . a wizard hospital somewhere."

	"Yeah," Will said, nodding. "Yeah, maybe. I mean, he can do all kinds of things, right?"

	"All kinds of things," I said.

	Including dying. But I didn't say that.

	Detective Malone was good to his word, and five minutes later we were heading for a building on the north edge of Bucktown, another renovation project Gentleman Johnnie's mostly legitimate business interests had secured. He had purchased, refurbished, updated, and preserved more than a dozen buildings in the city over the past several years. He'd been feted and decorated and honored at various society functions, as a man who was preserving the native beauty of Chicago architecture, saving it from being destroyed and forgotten, et cetera.

	If you didn't consider the drugs, gambling, prostitution, extortion, and other shadow franchises he ruled, I guess he was a real citizen hero.

	Contractors were hard at work on the building as we came in, and a security guard in a white shirt and black pants walked over to us with a frown as I entered the building. Will was at my back. I hoped that if things went nutty, I wouldn't have to drag him with me when I shot my way out.

	I felt myself smile at that image, mostly because of its fantasy content. If blood was spilled in Marcone's headquarters, I wouldn't live long enough to drag anybody out.

	"No trespassers," the guard said firmly. "This is a construction site. Dangerous. You'll have to leave."

	I eyed the man and said, "I'm here to see John Marcone."

	The guard eyed me. Then he got on his little radio and spoke into it. A moment later, a voice squawked an answer. "Mr. Marcone is not available."

	"Yes, he is," I said. "Go tell him Karrin Murphy is here to see him."

	"I'm afraid not," he said. "You'll have to leave."

	He had a gun, a 9mm Glock, I noted.

	I took out the little leather wallet with my police ID in it, and said, "If you make me open this, it gets official. There will be official questions, official paperwork, and lots of men in uniform trespassing all over your site." I held the wallet out as if presenting a crucifix to a vampire, fingers poised as if to open it. "Do you want to be the one who gives your boss that kind of headache?"

	His eyes moved from me to Will. He looked quickly away. Then he took a few steps back toward the interior of the building and had a low, rather emphatic conversation with his radio.

	I folded my arms and tapped one foot impatiently.

	"Would you really do that?" Will asked me.

	"Can't," I said. "I'm getting fired. But they don't know that."

	Will made a choking sound.

	The guard came back and said, "Through that door. Two floors down. Then take your first left, and you'll see it." He coughed. "You'll have to leave any weapons with me."

	I snorted and said, "Like hell." Then I brushed past him, nudging him slightly aside with my shoulder as though spoiling for a fight. Martian for It is inappropriate for you to screw with me in any way.

	He got the message. He didn't try to stop us.

	Will's quiet chuckle followed me down the stairs.

	Marcone's office was located in what appeared to be a dining hall. The room was huge and tiled, and several contractors—most of them brawnier and more heavily tattooed than the average laborer—sat at long tables, eating. Caterers kept several serving tables of food stocked with the same attention and care that I would have expected in a high-society gala. It was brightly lit, and a raised stage at one end of the room, which would presumably host a full orchestral band if one were present, had instead been loaded with computers and office furniture.

	The portrait of a busy executive, Marcone sat at an enormous old desk, holding a phone to his ear with one shoulder, his business shirt rolled up to his elbows.

	Everything about him screamed "successful patriarch." His suit jacket, hung over the back of his chair, was worth more than some small nations. His loosened tie, a simple silver number rather than a bright "power" tie, bespoke confidence and strength that needed no such sartorial declaration. His hands were broad and looked strong. There were scars on his knuckles. His short, conservatively cut hair was dark, except for just enough silver at his temples to announce a man in his physical and mental prime. He was well built and obviously kept himself in shape, and his features were regular and appealing. He was by no means beautiful, but his face projected strength and competence.

	He looked like a man others would willingly follow.

	Two other people stood on the stage, slightly behind him, testimony to his ability to lead. The first was a woman, a blond amazon more than six feet tall in a grey business suit. She had the legs that had been cruelly denied me at birth, the bitch. Her name was Gard, and Dresden had believed she was an actual, literal Valkyrie.

	The other was Hendricks. He wasn't truly ugly, but he reminded me of a gargoyle, anyway, a slab-muscled being with a misshapen appearance and beady eyes, ready to leap into action on behalf of the man he watched over. His eyes tracked me as I approached. Gard's blue eyes focused on me for a moment, then skipped past me to Will. She narrowed her eyes and murmured something toward Marcone.

	Chicago's resident lord of the underworld gave no indication that he'd heard her, and I caught the last few lines of a conversation as I approached.

	"You'll just have to do it yourself." He paused, listening. Then he said, "I don't have the proper resources for such a thing—and even if I did, I wouldn't waste them by sending them there blind and unprepared. You'll have to use your own people." He paused again and then said, "Neither of us will ever be scratching each other's back, mutually or otherwise. I will not send my people into danger without more information. Should you change your mind, you may feel free to contact me. Good day."

	He hung up the phone and then turned toward me. He had eyes the color of several-days-old grass clippings. They were opaque, reptilian. He made a steeple of his fingertips and said, "Ms. Murphy."

	"News travels fast," I said.

	"To me. Yes." His mouth turned up in a heartless smile. "Which are you here for? Work or revenge?"

	"Why would I want revenge on such a pillar of the community?"

	"Dresden," he said simply. "I assume you're here because you think me responsible."

	"What if I am?" I asked.

	"Then I would advise you to leave. You wouldn't live long enough to take your gun from your coat."

	"And besides," I said, "you didn't do it. Right? And you have a perfectly rational reason to explain why you didn't even want him dead."

	He shrugged, a motion he managed to infuse with elegance. "No more than any other day, at any rate," he said. "I had no need to assassinate Dresden. He'd been working diligently to get himself killed for several years—as I pointed out to him a few days ago."

	I kept my heart on lockdown. The cocky bastard's tone made me want to scream and tear out his eyes. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd rattled me. "I'm here for another reason."

	"Oh?" he asked politely.

	Too politely. He knew. He'd known why I was coming since before I came through the door. I stopped and played the past several hours back in my imagination, before I spotted where I'd contacted his net.

	"Maria," I said. "She was one of yours."

	Hendricks eyed Gard.

	She rolled her eyes and withdrew a twenty-dollar bill from her jacket pocket. She passed it to the big man.

	Hendricks pocketed it with a small, complacent smile.

	Marcone took no evident note of the interaction. "Yes. The superintendent you met had been providing the means for some of my competitors to operate. Maria was observing his business partners, so that we could track them back to their source and encourage them to operate elsewhere."

	I stared at him, hard. "She just let Ray treat her like that?"

	"And was well paid to do it," Marcone replied. "Admittedly, she was looking forward to closing the contract."

	Maria hadn't been a broken little mouse. Hell, she was one of Marcone's troubleshooters. It was a widely used euphemism for hitters in Marcone's outfit. Everyone knew it was the troubleshooter's job to identify trouble within the organization—and shoot it.

	"And you're just standing there, sharing all this with me?" I asked.

	His expression turned bland. "It isn't as though I'm confessing to a police officer, is it, Ms. Murphy?"

	I clenched my teeth. I swear. Scratch out his goddamn eyes. "That was why Maria came running out after me—she took enough time to call in, report, and ask you for instructions."

	Marcone nodded his head, very slightly.

	"And she was also why Hendricks showed up," I continued. "Maria saw or heard something and reported in."

	Marcone spread his hands. "You apprehend the situation."

	I clenched a fist again to let out some of the anger his deliberate choice of words had inspired.

	"Why?" Will demanded suddenly, stepping forward to stand beside me. I noted that both Will and I were under average height. We stood staring up at Marcone on the raised stage. It was hard not to feel like an extra in the cast of Oliver— Please, sir, may I have some more?

	"Why?" he repeated. "Why did you send your man to my apartment?"

	Marcone tilted his head slightly to regard Will. "What are you willing to pay for such information, young man?"

	Will's upper lip lifted away from his teeth. "How about I don't tear you and your goons into hamburger?"

	Marcone regarded Will for maybe three seconds, his face blank. Then he made a single, swift motion. I barely saw the gleam of metal as the small knife flickered across the space between them, and buried itself two inches deep in Will's right biceps. Will let out a cry and staggered.

	My own hands went toward my coat, but Gard had lifted a shotgun from behind a cabinet, and leveled it on me as my fingers touched the handle of my Sig. Hendricks had produced a heavy-caliber pistol from his suit, though he hadn't aimed at anyone. I stopped, then moved my fingers slowly from my gun.

	Will ripped the knife out of his arm, then turned to Marcone, his teeth bared.

	"Don't confuse yourself with Dresden, Mr. Borden," Marcone said, his voice level and cold. His eyes were something frightening, pitiless. "You don't have the power to threaten me. The instant you begin to change, Ms. Gard here will fire on Ms. Murphy—and then upon you." His voice dropped to a barely audible murmur. "The next time you offer me a threat, I will kill you."

	Will's breaths came in pained gasps, each exhalation tinged with a growl. But he didn't answer. The room had become completely quiet. The men who were eating lunch had stopped moving, as if frozen in place. No one looked directly at the confrontation, but all of them were watching from the corners of their eyes. A lot of hands were out of sight.

	"He means it, Will," I said quietly. "This won't help her."

	Marcone left it like that for a moment, staring at Will, before he settled back into his chair again, his eyes becoming hooded and calm once more. "Have you given thought to your next career move, Ms. Murphy? I'm always looking for competent help. When I find it, I pay a premium for it."

	I wondered where he'd heard about my suspension, but I supposed it wasn't important. He had more access to the CPD than most cops. I asked him, calmly, "Does the job involve beating you unconscious and throwing you into a cell forever?"

	"No," Marcone said, "although it offers an excellent dental plan. And combined with your pension check, it would make you a moderately wealthy woman."

	"Not interested," I said. "I will never work for you."

	"Never is a very long time, Ms. Murphy." Marcone blinked slowly and then sighed. "Clearly, the atmosphere has become unproductive," he said. "Ms. Gard, please escort them both from the premises. Give them the information they want."

	"Yes, sir," Gard said. She lowered the shotgun slowly. Then she returned it to its place behind the desk, picked up a file folder from it, and walked out to Will and me. I stooped and picked up the dropped, bloodstained knife before she could reach it. Then I wiped it clean on a pocket handkerchief, taking the blood from it, before offering the handle to Ms. Gard. I was more or less ignorant about magic, but I knew that Gard knew more about it than I, and that blood could be used in spells or incantations or whatever, to the great detriment of the bleeder. By wiping the blood from the blade, I'd prevented them from having an easy way to get to Will.

	Gard smiled at me very slightly and nodded her head in what looked like approval. She took the knife, slipped it into a pocket, and then said, "This way, please."

	We followed her back out of the room. Will walked with his left hand pressed to his right biceps, his expression furious. There was blood, but not much of it. His shirt was soaking it up, and he'd clamped his hand hard over the wound. The knife hadn't hit any major blood vessels, or he'd have been on the floor by now. We'd clean it up once we were out of here.

	"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 said. 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."

	Will frowned. "So they can get a look at you first, right?"

	"Probably."

	"You shouldn't look like you," Marcy blurted. Her face colored slightly. "I mean, like, you're the supernatural cop in Chicago. Everyone knows that. And it makes sense that anyone planning something here wouldn't have much trouble finding out who might actually get in their way."

	"Unfortunately," I said, "I don't have a different look."

	Will looked at Marcy, frowning, and then said, "Ah. Makeover."

	"We have a little time," Marcy said, nodding.

	"Hey," I said.

	"She's right, Ms. Murphy," Will said. "You've been seen with Dresden a lot. And, no offense, but not many people look like you do."

	"Meaning?" I asked him. I smiled.

	Will's eyes might have checked the distance between himself and the door. "Meaning you're outside the norm for adult height and weight," he said. "Exceptionally so. We should do what we can to make it harder to identify you."

	Will had a point, I supposed. Annoying as it might be, his logic was sound. And I was almost certainly a little sensitive where my height was concerned. I sighed. "All right. But if I hear montage music starting to play, I'm cutting it short."

	Will, seeming to relax, nodded. "Cool."

	Marcy nodded with him. "So what about Will and me? I mean, what do the two of us do?"

	I looked at the pair of young werewolves and pursed my lips. "How do you feel about duct tape?"

	When I answered the pay phone outside a small grocery store on Belmont, I felt like an idiot. In the windows of a darkened shop across the street, I could see my reflection.

	Halloween had come early this year. I wore boots not unlike Herman Munster's, with elevator soles about three inches thick, making me look taller. My hair was dyed matte black and was slicked down to my skull. There was so much product in it, I was fairly sure it would deflect bullets. I wore some black dance tights Marcy had donated to the cause, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket in a youth size.

	My face was the worst part of the disguise. I was all but smothered beneath the makeup. Dark tones of silver that faded to black made a mess of my eyes, altering their shape by means of suggestion, through clever application of liner. In the evening light, I might have looked Asian. My lips were darkened, too, a shade of wine red that somehow managed to complement the eye shadow. The lipstick changed the shape of my mouth slightly and made my lips look fuller.

	I glowered at the reflection. This costume had exactly one thing going for it: I didn't look a thing like me.

	The phone rang and I picked it up, jerking it off the base unit as if impatient. I glared around me, my eyes tracking across every spot I thought could contain an observer, and said, "Yeah?"

	"The merchandise," murmured a soft, sibilant voice with an odd accent. "Describe."

	There was something intrinsically unsettling about the voice. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. "One male and one female, mid- to late-twenties. Shapeshifters."

	There was a rustle of static over the line, unless the speaker could make an extremely odd hissing sound. All things considered, I gave it even odds.

	"Ten thousand," said the voice.

	I could have played it a couple of different ways. The kinds of people who get into this sort of deal come in about three general types: greedy, low-life sons of bitches; cold professionals engaged in a business transaction; and desperate amateurs who are in over their heads. I'd already decided to try to come across as the first on the list.

	"Forty thousand," I shot back instantly. "Each."

	There was a furious sound on the other end of the phone. It wasn't a human sound, either.

	"I could pluck out your eyes and cut your tongue into slivers," hissed the voice. Something about it scared the hell out of me, touching on some instinctual level that Ray, in all his repulsive mass, had not. I felt myself shudder, despite my effort not to do so.

	"Whatever," I said, trying to sound bored. "Even if you could do it, it gets you nothing. But hey, no skin off my ass either way."

	There was a long silence on the other end of my phone. I thought I felt some kind of pressure building behind my eyelids. I told myself it was my imagination.

	"Yo, anyone there?" I complained. "Listen. Are you up for doing some business, or did I just waste my time?"

	After another pause, the voice hissed something in a bubbling, serpentine tongue. The phone rustled, as if changing hands, and a very deep male voice said, "Twenty thousand. Each."

	"I'm not selling the female for less than thirty."

	"Fifty total, then," rumbled the new voice. It sounded entirely human.

	"Cash," I demanded.

	"Done."

	I kept tracking the street with my eyes, looking for their spotter, but saw no one. "How do you handle delivery?"

	"There's a warehouse."

	"Fat chance. I pull in there, you'll just pop me and make the body disappear along with the freaks."

	"What do you suggest?" rumbled the voice.

	"Buttercup Park. Thirty minutes. One carrier. Carrier hands me half the cash. Then carrier verifies the merchandise in the back of my truck. Carrier hands me the rest of the money. I hand him the keys to the vehicle carrying the merchandise. We all walk away happy."

	The deep-voiced man thought about it for a moment and then grunted. Translation: Agreed. "How will you identify me?" 

	I snorted and said, "Park isn't huge, tough guy. And it ain't my first rodeo."

	I hung up on him, then went back to my motorcycle and left, heading for Buttercup Park. A lighted sign hanging outside a bank told me it was a quarter after nine. The metro traffic grid was dying down for the night. I got there in a little more than fifteen minutes, parked my Harley in a garage, and made my way to where Georgia's high-dollar SUV was waiting in the same structure. I went around to the back and opened the hatch. Will was just finishing wrapping Marcy in what appeared to be several layers of duct tape, covering her in a swath from her hips to her deltoids, trapping her arms against her sides. She was wearing a simple sundress with, I assumed, nothing underneath. I guess when you change into a wolf, you don't take your ensemble with you—being trapped in undies made for a different species could prove awkward in a fight. 

	Will looked up and gave me a quick nod of greeting. "All set?"

	"So far. You're sure you won't have a problem getting out?" I asked.

	Will snorted. "Claws, fangs. It'll sting a bit, when it tears out the hair. Nothing serious."

	"Spoken like someone who's never had his legs waxed," Marcy said in a nervous, forcedly jovial tone. She might have looked like a skinny little thing, but the muscles showing on her legs were lean and ropy.

	Will tore off the end of the duct tape and passed the roll to me. He sat down on the open floor in the back of the SUV, the seats of which had been folded away to make room for the "prisoners." He stripped out of his shirt, leaving only a pair of loose sweats. I started wrapping him.

	"Tighten your muscles," I said. "When I'm done, relax them. It should leave you enough room to maintain blood flow."

	"Right," Will said. "Houdini." He contracted the muscles in his upper body and the duct tape creaked. Damn, the kid was built. Given that I was more or less leaning against his naked back to reach around him with the roll of tape, it was impossible not to notice.

	Dresden hadn't been muscled as heavily as Will. Harry'd had a runner's build, all lean, tight, dense muscle that . . .

	I clenched my jaw and kept wrapping tape.

	"One more time," I said. "I meet the contact, then bring him here." I held up the SUV's remote control fob. "I'll disarm the security system so you know we're coming. If you hear me say the word red, it means things aren't going well. Get loose and help me jump the contact. We'll question him, find out where the other specials are being kept. Otherwise, sit tight, and make like you got hit with tranquilizer darts. I'll shadow you back to their HQ." 

	"What then?" Marcy asked.

	"We'll have to play that by ear," I said. "If there aren't many of them, we'll hit them and get your people out. If they've got a lot of muscle, I'll make a call. If I can get a large force here, they'll run rather than fight."

	"Can you be sure of that?" Will asked.

	"Dresden said that to the supernatural world, bringing in mortal authorities was equated with nuclear exchanges. No one wants to be the one to trigger a new Inquisition of some kind. So any group with a sense of reason will cut their losses rather than tangle with the cops."

	"The way they didn't tangle with FBI headquarters?" Will asked.

	I had sort of hoped no one would notice that flaw in my reasoning. "That was an act of war. This is some kind of profit-gaining scheme."

	"Come on, Karrin," Will said. "You've got to know better than that."

	"This is a professional operation," I said. "Whoever is behind it is depending on distraction and speed to enable them to get away with it. They'll already have their escape plan ready to go. If a bunch of cars and lights come at them, I think their first instinct will be to run rather than fight."

	"Yeah," Marcy said, nodding. "That makes sense. You've always said supernatural predators don't want a fight if they can avoid one, Will."

	"Lone predators don't," Will said, "but this is an organization. And you might have noticed how a lot of supernatural types are a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal. And I'm talking about more than here, tonight. More than Georgia and Andi. More than just Chicago."

	I frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

	He leaned forward, his eyes intent. "I mean that if Dresden just blew up the Red Court . . . that means the status quo is gone. There's a power vacuum, and every spook out there is going to try to fill it. The rules have changed. We don't know how these people are going to react." 

	A sobering silence fell over us.

	I hadn't followed the line of reasoning, like Will had. Or rather, I hadn't followed it far enough. I'd only been thinking of Dresden's cataclysm in terms of its effect on my city, upon people who were part of my life.

	But he was right. Dear God, he was right. The sudden demise of the Red Court, with consequences that would reach around the whole world, would make the fall of the Soviet Union look like a minor organizational crisis.

	"So, what?" I asked. "We back out?"

	"Are you kidding?" Will said. "They took my wife. We go get her and anyone else they've taken."

	"Right," Marcy said firmly, from where she lay on the bed of the vehicle.

	I felt a smile bare my teeth. "And if they fight?"

	Will's face hardened. "Then we kick their fucking ass."

	"Ass," said Marcy, nodding.

	I finished wrapping Will in the duct tape. He exhaled slowly and relaxed. He took a few experimental breaths and then nodded. "Okay. Good."

	"Lie down, both of you. I'll be back with the buyer."

	"Be careful," Will said. "If you aren't back in twenty minutes, I'll come looking."

	"If I'm not back in twenty minutes, there won't be much point in finding me," I said.

	Then I shut them into the SUV and headed for the park.

	Buttercup Park wasn't exactly overwhelming. There were grass, playground equipment, and a tree or two on an island bordered by four city streets. That was pretty much it. It was the sort of place my low-life persona would choose. It was out in the open, and there was not much to break up the line of sight. It was a good location for criminals with mutual trust issues to meet up. Each could be sure the other was alone. Each could be reasonably sure the other wouldn't start shooting, right out there in front of God and everybody.

	The park, as it should have been, was empty. The surrounding streetlights left little hidden on the green grass, but the playground equipment cast long, asymmetric shadows.

	A man sat on one of the swings. He was huge—the biggest individual I'd ever seen. He was heavy with muscle, though it was an athlete's balanced build—made for action, not for display. His hips strained the heavy flexible plastic seat of the swing to the horizontal. He must have been better than seven feet tall.

	He was quietly sitting there, completely still, watching and waiting. His head was shaved and his skin was dark. He wore a simple outfit—black chinos and a thin turtleneck sweater. If the October chill was bothering him, it didn't show. I stomped over toward him in my Munster boots. When I was about thirty feet away, he turned his head toward me. His gaze was startling. His eyes were blue-white, as on some northern sled dogs, and looked nearly luminous in the half shadows.

	He lifted his eyebrows as I came closer, then rose and bowed politely from the waist. I realized that he wasn't seven feet tall. He was more like seven foot four or five.

	"Good evening," he said. His basso rumble was unmistakable. This was the person I had spoken to earlier.

	I stopped in front of him and put a hand on my hip, eyeing him as if I wasn't much impressed. "As long as you brought the money, it will be," I drawled.

	He reached into a cavernous pocket in his pants and drew out a brick wrapped in plastic. He tossed it to me. "Half."

	I caught it and tore open the plastic with my teeth. Then I started counting the money, all of it in nonsequential Ben Franklins.

	A trace of impatience entered my contact's voice. "It's all there."

	"Talking to me is just going to make me lose count and start over," I said. "What am I supposed to call you?"

	"Nothing," he said. "No one. I am nothing to you."

	"Nothing it is," I replied. The bills were bound in groups of fifty. I counted one out and compared its thickness to that of the others, then flipped through just to be sure Nothing wasn't trying to short me by throwing some twenties into the middle of the stack. Then I stuck the money in my jacket pocket and said, "We're in business."

	Nothing inclined his head a bit. "The merchandise?"

	"Come with me," I said, injecting my voice with breezy confidence. I turned to stomp back toward the garage parking lot, and Nothing paced along beside me.

	Already, this wasn't going well. This guy was huge. I was good, but training and practice can get you only so far. The old saying is that a good big man will beat a good little man. Which is sexist as all get-out, but no less true. Levels of skill being equal, whoever has the size and weight advantage damn near always wins. Nothing probably outweighed all three of us together, and I already had a sense, from the way he held himself and moved, that he was a person accustomed to violence. He was good.

	I could shoot him (probably), but I didn't need a dead trafficker on my hands. I needed one who could talk—which meant I was going to have to let Will and Marcy be taken.

	"How long you fellas setting up shop?" I asked him as we walked. "Might be able to come up with another one, if the price is right."

	Nothing looked at me for a moment before speaking. "If you cannot do it by dawn, do not bother."

	"Maybe. We'll see how this plays out."

	Nothing shrugged and kept on walking. I caught sight of our reflection in a passing window—Biker Barbie and Bigfoot. I tried to keep out of his reach as we walked, but there was only so much sidewalk, and Nothing's arms looked long enough to slap me from the middle of the street.

	As we walked, I noticed the smell. The man just smelled wrong. I wasn't sure what it was—something . . . musty, vaguely like the scent of stagnant water and rotting fish. It hung in the air around him. 

	"You aren't really human, are you," I noted as we walked into the parking garage—and away from any potential witnesses.

	"Not anymore," he replied.

	As he spoke, the collar of the turtleneck . . . stirred. It rippled, as if something had moved beneath it.

	"Well, I am," I said. "Completely worthless for whatever you're doing collecting specials. So don't be thinking you can get three for the price of two."

	Nothing looked down at me with those unsettling eyes. "You are pathetic."

	I put a little extra swagger into my step. "Careful what you say there, big guy. You'll turn me on."

	Nothing made a small, quiet sound of disgust and shook his head. It was hard not to smile as I watched him pigeonhole me into "scum, treacherous, decadent."

	"It's right up here."

	"Before we approach the vehicle," he said, "you should know that if you have associates waiting in ambuscade, I will break their necks—and yours."

	I lifted my hands. "Jesus. Show a little trust, will you? We're all capitalists here." I pointed the fob at the SUV and disarmed the alarm with a little electronic chirp. The lights flashed once. I tossed him the keys. "That one. I'll stay back here if you like."

	"Acceptable," he said, and strode to the SUV. Watching him bend down to look in was like a scene from Jurassic Park. He opened the rear hatch and then lifted his hands to his neck for a moment. He tugged the turtleneck down a little. 

	The skin of Nothing's neck was deformed with narrow flaps of skin, somehow, and it took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at.

	Gills.

	The man had gills. And he was breathing through them. They opened and closed in a rhythm not far removed from a dog's sniffing. 

	"Werewolves," he said. "Valuable."

	"They make good pets?" I asked.

	He reached in and seized Will, lifting him with one hand. The young man remained limp, his eyes closed.

	"Their blood has unique properties. What did you use to subdue them?"

	"Roofies. The way my dating life has been going, I keep some on hand."

	He made a dissatisfied sound and tugged his collar up again. "The drug might lower their value."

	"I hope not," I said. "This has been such a nice conversation. I'd hate for it to end in a gunshot."

	Nothing turned his head slightly and gave me a very cold little smile.

	I felt threatened enough to produce my gun without even consciously thinking about it. I held it in two hands, pointed at the ground near his feet. We stayed that way, facing off for several seconds. Then he shrugged a shoulder. He produced another brick of bills and threw it to me, along with the truck keys. Then he gathered up Marcy and tossed her over one shoulder, and Will over the other.

	He turned to the entrance of the garage and made several sharp, popping clicks as he went, producing with an odd quiver of his chest and throat a sound that was somehow familiar. They must have been a signal. A moment later, a van with rental-agency plates pulled up to the curb and stopped.

	A man dressed identically to Nothing rolled open the side door. Nothing put the two werewolves inside, then followed them, somehow compressing his bulk enough to get into the van. The driver pulled back into traffic a second later. The entire pickup had taken less than ten seconds.

	I got back onto my motorcycle and rolled out of the garage with my lights off before their van had gotten to the end of the block. Then, settling in to follow them from several car lengths back, I tried to make like a hole in the air.

	Nothing and his driver headed for the docks, which was hardly unanticipated. Chicago supports an enormous amount of shipping traffic that travels through the Great Lakes, and offloads cargo to be transferred to railroads or trucking companies for shipment throughout the United States. Such ships remain one of the best means for moving illegal goods without being discovered.

	There are plenty of storage buildings down by the docks, and Nothing went to one of the seedier, more run-down warehouses on the waterfront. I noted the location and went on by without stopping. Then I circled around, killed the engine with the bike still in motion, and came coasting back over the cracked old asphalt, the whisper of my tires lost in the susurrus of city sounds and water lapping the lakeshore.

	There wasn't much to see. The warehouse had a single set of standard doors, and several large steel doors that would roll up to allow crates and shipping containers to be brought inside. They were all closed. A single guard, a man in a watch cap and a squall coat, wandered aimlessly around outside the building, smoking cigarettes and looking bored.

	I got rid of the damn clunky Munster boots and pulled on the black slippers I always wore on the practice mat. I pulled weapons and gear out of the bike's saddlebags, attached the items to the tactical harness under my coat, and slipped closer. I stayed where it was dark, using the shadows to hide my approach. Then I found a particularly deep patch of darkness and waited.

	It took a seemingly endless five minutes for the guard to get close enough for me to shoot him with a Taser.

	Darts leapt out and plunged into his chest, trailing shining wires, and I pulled the trigger while he jerked and twitched and fell to the ground. I wasn't sure if this guy was human or not, but I wasn't taking chances. I kept the juice on him until I was sure he was down for the count. When I let up, he just lay there on his side, curled up halfway into a fetal position, quivering and twitching while drool rolled out of his mouth.

	Actually, he sort of reminded me of my second husband in the morning.

	I jerked the darts out of him and shoved the Taser and the trailing wire into my jacket pocket. It would take too much time to reset it for use, and I had a bad feeling that the electronic device wouldn't do me much good inside the warehouse. I could have slapped some heavy restraining ties on him—but I would be happier if anyone who found the downed man had no idea what had happened to him.

	So much for the easy part.

	My P-90 hung easily from the tac harness, its stock high, its barrel hanging down the line of my body. I took a moment to screw a suppressor onto the end of the gun and lifted it to firing position against my shoulder. The little Belgian assault weapon was illegal for a civilian to own within city limits; the suppressor, too. If I got caught with them, I'd be in trouble. If I got caught using them, I'd do time. Both of those consequences were subordinate to the fact that if I didn't go in armed for bear, I might not live to congratulate myself on my sterling citizenship. 

	Well, there's no such thing as a perfect solution, is there.

	I moved quietly back to the entry door, silenced weapon tight against my shoulder. I duckwalked, my steps quick and small and rolling, to keep my upper body level as it moved. I'd put a red dot sight on the P-90, and it floated in my vision as a translucent crosshair of red light. The sight made the weapon, to some degree, point and click. The idea was for the bullets to go wherever the crosshairs were centered. I had it sighted for short work. Even though I'd seen more action than practically any cop in the country—thanks to Dresden—I could count on one hand the number of times I'd used a weapon in earnest against a target more than seven or eight yards away.

	Standing next to the entry door, I tested the knob. It turned freely. So, the folks inside had been relying on their guard to keep intruders out.

	I thought of the first hissing voice I'd spoken to on the phone and shivered. They wouldn't be relying on purely physical defenses. But I knew something about those, too. Harry's defenses had been deadly dangerous—but to create them, apparently you had to use the energy of a threshold, which only grew up around an actual home. This old warehouse was a place of business and didn't have a threshold. So, if a spell had been put up to guard the door, it would have to be fairly weak.

	Of course, weak was a relative term in Dresden's vocabulary. It might hit me only hard enough to break bones, instead of disintegrating me completely—if there was a spell there at all. 

	I hated this magic crap.

	Screw it. I couldn't just stand here all night.

	I turned the doorknob slowly, keeping my body as far to one side as possible. Then I pushed in gently, and the door swung open by an inch or three. When nothing exploded or burst into wails of alarm, I eased up next to it and peeked into the building.

	It was like looking into another world.

	Green and blue light crawled and slithered up the walls and over the warehouse's interior, eerie and subtly unsettling, each color moving in waves of differing widths and speeds. The strange scent of water and fish was strong inside. There were things on the wall— growths was all I could call them. Ugly patches of some kind of lumpy, rough substance I didn't recognize were clumped all around the walls and ceiling of the warehouse in roughly circular patches about six feet across. 

	Cages were scattered all around the floor—a bunch of five-foot cubes made of heavy steel grid. People were locked up in several of them, the doors held shut by heavy chains. Most of them just sat, staring at nothing, or lay upon their sides doing the same thing, completely motionless. That wasn't normal. Even someone who was drugged but conscious would show a little more animation than that. This meant magic was involved, some kind of invasive mental stuff, and a little voice in my head started screaming.

	I've been subjected to that kind of invasion, more than once.

	It's bad.

	My legs felt weak. My hands shook. The rippling colors of light on the walls became something sinister, disorienting, the beginnings of another attack on my mind. Jesus Christ, I wanted to turn around and scurry away, as swiftly and as meekly as possible. In fact, I tried to. My legs quivered as if preparing to move, but the motion drew my gaze across another row of cages, and I saw Georgia.

	She was naked, kneeling, her hands wrapped gently around her swelling stomach, cradling her unborn child. Her head was bowed in a posture of meekness, and her sleek shoulders and neck were relaxed. But I saw her eyes, open and staring at the bottom of the cage, and I saw the defiance flickering in them.

	Whatever held the others held Georgia as well—but she evidently had not been subdued as readily as they had. She was still fighting them.

	Something deep inside me, something hard and fierce and furious, locked my legs into place. I stared at Georgia, and I knew I couldn't run. I remembered that Will and Marcy were in there, waiting for me to announce that the moment was right to change form and fight. I remembered that nearly all of those people in the cages were young, even younger than the werewolves—including the youngest of all, in Georgia's cage.

	I remembered blood splattered on the weathered cabin of a boat—and that there was no one but me coming to help those kids.

	The fear changed form on me. It disguised itself as reason. Don't go in, it told me. Know your limits. Send for help.

	But the only serious help I could get would be SI—and they would be putting their own careers, as well as their lives, on the line if they came to my aid. I could send for the regular police, drop in an anonymous call, but in this part of town it might take half an hour for them to show up. Even when they did arrive, they'd be lambs to the slaughter. Most of the force had no idea what really went on in the city's darkest shadows.

	You could go get the Sword, said my fear. You know where it is. You know how strong it makes you. 

	Not many people could honestly say they'd wielded a magic sword against the forces of darkness, but I'm one of them. Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, lay waiting for the hand of someone worthy to wield it against the powers of darkness. In the final battle with the Red Court, that hand had been mine. In the darkest moment of that fight, when all seemed lost, it had been my hand upon Fidelacchius that had tipped the balance, enabling Dresden to prevail. And I had felt a Power greater than I supporting me, guiding my movements, and, for a single, swift moment, entering into me and making use of my lips and tongue to pronounce sentence upon the murderous creatures surrounding us. 

	I could go for the Sword. Odds were it would be of some help.

	But I knew that if I did, I would have taken the easy path. I would have turned away from a source of terror for the most excellent, rational of reasons. And the next time I faced the same kind of fear, it would be a little easier to turn away, a little easier to find good reasons not to act.

	The Sword was a source of incredible power—but it was nothing but cool, motionless steel without the hand that could grip it, the muscles that would move it, the eyes and the mind that would guide it. Without them, the Sword was nothing.

	I stopped and stared down at my shaking hand. Without my hand, my mind, my will, the Sword was nothing. And if that was true, then it must also be true that my hand was what mattered. That it had been my hand, my will that had made the difference.

	And my hand was right here. In fact, I had two of them.

	My breathing steadied and slowed. Sword or no Sword, I had sworn to serve and protect the people of this city. And if I turned away from that oath now, if I gave in to my fear, even for the most seductively logical of reasons, then I had no right to take up the Sword of Faith in any case.

	My hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed and steadied, bringing the terror under control. I whispered a quick, almost entirely mental prayer to St. Jude, the patron of lost causes and policemen. It sounded something like, "OhGodohGodohGod. Help." 

	I nudged the door open a few more inches, then slid into the warehouse, moving with as much speed and silence as I possessed, my gun at the level and ready.

	I moved down the length of the warehouse, mostly hidden behind a shelving unit more than twenty feet high. It was stacked with pallets, loading gear, storage bins, and the occasional barrel or box of unknown provenance. The shifting, constantly wavering light made an excellent cover for motion, and I timed my steps to move in rhythm with the dancing illumination.

	The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and it felt like every inch of my skin was covered in gooseflesh. I'd been in the presence of dangerous magic often enough to know the feeling of dark power in motion. It had been like this at Chichen Itza, and in the waters off the island of Demonreach, and in the Raith Deeps, and at Arctis Tor, and in the nest of Black Court vampires, and at . . .

	You get the point. This wasn't my first rodeo.

	The most important thing would be to take out Nothing's presumptive boss, and fast—preferably before anyone knew I was here at all. The warehouse reeked of magic, and if a mortal goes into a fair fight against a wizard, the mortal loses. Period. They have power that is literally almost unimaginable, and if the bad guy got a chance to defend himself, the only uncertainty remaining would be how much creativity he put into killing me.

	At the end of the shelving unit, there was a rolling ladder, one made to run all the way up and down the shelves and provide easy access. The warehouse was darker up near the ceiling than at floor level. I didn't even slow down. I went up the ladder to the top of the shelving unit and froze in place, getting a good, clear look at the enemy for the first time.

	There were half a dozen of them including Nothing, and they all shopped at the same store. Their outfits were conspicuous due to their uniformity, though some instinct made me think that they had been intended as disguises—that individuality, as a concept, wasn't of any particular concern to Nothing and his crew. Nothing was, by far, the largest of the men, though none of them looked like featherweights.

	They were loading cages into a railroad cargo container, a fairly common sight on large ships, some of which could carry hundreds of the metal boxes. The cages had been sized to stack exactly into the railroad car, two across and three high, with no consideration whatsoever for the human cargo. There were no blankets, no pads—nothing but metal cages and vulnerable skin.

	I spotted Andi's cage, not far from Georgia's. The redheaded girl had evidently lacked some critical capacity to resist whatever had been done to her. She lay on her back, staring blankly up at the roof of her cage. The werewolf girl was a bombshell. Even lying in completely passive relaxation, her curves beckoned the eye—but the hollow despair of her expression was haunting.

	Nothing was standing over Will and Marcy, who lay limp and motionless on the floor at his feet. A couple of turtlenecks were hauling an empty cage toward them. "How long will it take?" he was asking a third man.

	"Without knowing the exact drug, several hours," the man replied. His voice was plainly human, and sounded nothing like whoever it was I'd spoken to on the phone. "Perhaps more."

	Nothing frowned. "Can you make a determination of their viability by dawn?"

	"If I am able to isolate the substance that incapacitated them before then," he said. "I have no means of determining how many attempts will be required. It will take as long as it takes."

	"He will not be pleased," Nothing said.

	The man bowed his head. "My life for the master. I will do all in my power to serve him. Should he be disappointed in me, it is meet for him to take my life."

	Nothing nodded. "Be about it."

	The man turned and walked quickly away, holding two small vials of rich red blood in his hand—samples from Will and Marcy, I assumed.

	By then, the empty cage had arrived. Nothing picked up Marcy and lifted her toward the waiting cage. I bit down on a curse. If I let him imprison her, a full third of my team would be neutralized, as helpless as the prisoners who had already been taken. But if I started the music early, I risked throwing away my sucker punch. Nothing's master might show up at any time.

	On the other hand, Nothing seemed to be large and in charge. Perhaps the hissing person I'd spoken to on the phone had left matters in Nothing's shovellike hands. Or perhaps I'd read the situation incorrectly. What if one of the other turtlenecks had been the first speaker, and Nothing was really the boss?

	I made up my mind and settled the P-90's crosshair onto Nothing's head, a little below the tip of his nose. The weapon was set for automatic fire, and while I could control the weapon fairly well, especially when it was loaded with subsonic rounds, the recoil would tend to carry the weapon's muzzle higher after the first shot.

	Against anything human, more than one round to the head would be overkill: When the merely mortal goes up against the supernatural, there's no such thing as overkill. 

	I snuggled the gun in close and tight, took a deep breath in, let it halfway out, held it, and began to slowly squeeze the weapon's trigger.

	The instant before the trigger would have broken, there was a shimmering in the air and a man stepped out of it, appearing as if from nowhere.

	I backed off the tension on my finger, feeling my heart surge with unspent adrenaline.

	The man was of medium height, with sallow skin and greasy, straight black hair that hung past his shoulders. His lips were very thick and his mouth very wide, almost to the point of deformity. His large eyes were dark and watery and bulging, his nose sunken, as small as any I had ever seen. He was soaking wet and naked, his limbs scrawny and long, his hands very, very wide. Except for the hair, I couldn't help but compare him to a frog—a sullen, vicious frog.

	The man let out a sound somewhat like a muffled belch, then vomited water onto the floor. Flaps of skin at his neck flared in and out, spewing smaller sprays of water several times, until he drew in a breath through his mouth, evidently filling his lungs with air.

	All of the turtlenecks turned to face the creature and fell to their knees, including Nothing, who calmly set Marcy aside and went into a full kowtow, his palms flat on the floor, his forehead pressed down onto his knuckles.

	"Sssssso," he hissed, "did the inssssolent creature deliver our prizesss?"

	I recognized the voice from the telephone.

	"Yes, my lord," rumbled Nothing. "As promised and in plenty of time to move."

	"Did you sssstrike the bitch down?"

	Nothing rocked back and then bowed again, somehow giving the impression that he was doing it more deeply. "She was clever enough to build safeguards into the meeting. I could not do so without attracting attention."

	Frogface hissed. "I will sssettle with the mortal another time," he said. "Sssuch insssolence cannot be countenanced."

	"No, my lord."

	"Bring the new acquisitionsss. I will bind them."

	"They have been given drugs, my lord. The binding could damage them."

	Without looking particularly excited about it, Frogface kicked Nothing in the armpit. The blow was a more powerful one than Frogface's frame would suggest he was capable of giving. It flung Nothing from his hands and knees and onto his side by main force.

	"Bring them."

	"I obey," wheezed Nothing. He rose unsteadily and went to pick up Will. He dropped the young werewolf onto the floor beside Marcy.

	"Sssuch disgusssting thingsss, mortalsss," Frogface murmured. His eyes lifted to Georgia in her cage. "She hasss not yet capitulated."

	"No, my lord," Nothing muttered.

	"Interesssting," Frogface said, and a leer spread over his broad mouth. "When we arrive, transport her to my chambers. We will sssee what is left of her ssstrength when the ssspawn is taken from her womb."

	Jesus, men can be assholes. Even when they're barely human. Frogface was officially elected.

	Georgia shuddered. She lifted her head, very slowly, as if it had been held down with vast weights—and the glare she turned on Frogface was nothing less than murderous.

	Frogface chuckled at the expression and turned to face Will and Marcy. He dipped his fingers into a pouch that hung around his neck, almost invisible against his leathery skin, and withdrew what looked like a small seashell from it. He leered at the motionless Marcy and said, "Firssst, the female."

	He closed his eyes and made a low sound in his throat, then began chanting words that bubbled and gobbled out from between his rubbery lips.

	Now I've got you, I thought to myself, and sighted the gun on Frogface's rubbery lips. I didn't have Dresden's knowledge of magic, but I knew any wizard was vulnerable when they began working forces, the way Frogface was doing. The concentration needed was intense. If I'd understood Dresden correctly, it would mean that Frogface would have to be focusing his entire attention on his spell—leaving nothing remaining for defending his sallow hide. 

	The air began to shimmer around Frogface's hands, and fine, slithering tendrils emerged from the brightly colored shell and began to drift down toward Marcy, a cloud of tendrils as fine as a cobweb.

	Certain now of my target, I breathed, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

	Say what you like about the Belgians. They can make some fine weaponry.

	The silenced P-90 barely whispered when the burst of automatic fire erupted from the end of the suppressor. There was no flash, no thunder—just a soft, wheezing sound and the click of the gun's action cycling. Thanks to the subsonic ammunition, the discharge itself actually made less noise than the rounds striking Frogface's skull. 

	There were several wet, loud cracking sounds, and every one of the rounds I'd fired struck home. One round would have been messy enough. When half a dozen of them hit, Frogface's head quite literally exploded, shattered to pulp and shards of bone by the bullets' impact, and two-thirds of his skull, from the upper lip on up, simply vanished into green-blooded spray.

	There was a flash of angry red light from the seashell. Frogface let out a high-pitched, tinny scream, and the near-headless body began to topple, thrashing wildly.

	The turtlenecks all came to their feet, looking around in wide-eyed confusion. My weapon had given them absolutely no clue as to where the attack had come from. I sighted in on Nothing, but from my angle, any rounds that went through him would threaten Will and a caged prisoner, beyond him.

	I shifted targets, settling the red crosshairs on another turtleneck standing just past Will. I squeezed off another whispering burst of a half-dozen or so rounds, and the creature's neck exploded into a cloud of scarlet gore the consistency of mucus. It went limp, settling to the floor like a deflating balloon.

	Nothing's pale-eyed gaze snapped over toward me, and I saw his gaze track the fall of brass bullet casings from where they bounced off the floor back up to my position on the shelves.

	He let out an enraged sound, pulled a short tube from his pocket, and pointed it at me. I moved, sliding back down the ladder to the floor, hardly moving more slowly than if I'd fallen. There was a high-pitched whistle, and something that looked like a small, spiny sea urchin flew past me, just over my head, close enough for the wind of its passage to stir dark-dyed hairs. It slammed into the wall behind me and remained there, quivering, as its spines punched through the metal siding and stuck. Drops of yellow-green liquid fell from the tips of some of the spines, and began smoking and eating small holes in the concrete floor.

	Yikes.

	Throaty popping, clicking sounds from several sources filled the air, an exchange of what could only be language. I ran for the far end of the shelving unit as the dark forms of the turtlenecks started moving toward me. I caught glimpses of them between the boxes and containers stacked on the lowest shelf, running with the lithe, floating agility of professional athletes.

	I ran past a clump of the growth on the wall, a little lower than most, and as I approached, it suddenly fluoresced with bioluminescent color. On sheer instinct, I threw myself flat to the concrete floor and slid past on my belly as the lumpy growths began hissing, and jets of mist, the same color as the fluid covering the urchin spines, began to spray forth at random. The smell was hideous, and I scrambled back to my feet and kept running down the aisle, staying as far from the wall as I could.

	If I'd been half a step slower, I would have died. There was a great crash, and Nothing smashed through the lowest level of the shelving unit, thrusting aside a steel drum and a wooden crate the size of a coffin as if they'd been made of Styrofoam. His fingers missed grabbing onto me by inches.

	A second turtleneck beat me to the end of the shelf. I opened up with the P-90, praying that a ricochet wouldn't kill one of the prisoners, but my target moved with the speed of a striking serpent, bounding forward to plant a foot against the steel wall of the warehouse, six feet off the ground. Using only a single leg, he kicked off into a back-flip that carried him back past the end of the shelf and out of my line of fire.

	The damn thing hadn't been moving fast enough to dodge bullets—but he'd been moving fast enough to dodge me, and I was the one doing the aiming. A round might have clipped one of his legs, but that was all, and Nothing was pounding up behind me, gaining despite his mass. I felt like a squirrel being pursued by a German shepherd; if he caught me, it would end about the same way. 

	So I played squirrel, and instead of running in the open, I turned ninety degrees to my right and dove between two stacks of pallets on the lowest shelf. I took a little skin off an arm in hurling myself between them and emerged onto the open warehouse floor. I heard Nothing's shoes squealing on the floor as he applied the brakes behind me.

	A turtleneck was coming straight at me, on a direct line from the cages not yet loaded into the railroad car. I brought the P-90 up and dropped to one knee. The turtleneck rushed forward, his pale blue eyes wide and staring. He held an inward-curving knife in one hand and carried it low and close to his leg. He knew how to use it.

	I put the scarlet crosshairs on his sternum and squeezed the trigger. The instant before the shots would have sputtered out of the gun, the turtleneck leapt straight up, flipping once in the air as he went over me.

	After seeing the incredible quickness of the other not-quite-humans, I'd been waiting for the dodge. As soon as his feet left the floor, I spun to my left, opening fire the instant the end of the barrel was clear of the prisoners. Bullets hissed through the air like a great scythe—and in the edge of my vision, I saw the turtleneck I'd wounded seconds before. He'd come charging toward me while I'd aimed at his buddy, and the sudden turn took him by surprise. There was no aiming involved—it was a brute-force approach. I emptied the rest of the clip at him and prayed I could leave him no safe space in which to dodge.

	St. Jude gets a lot of business, but sometimes he comes through. The hissing, puffing little gun spat out a line of deadly projectiles and intersected the turtleneck's path, tearing a row of five or six holes across his upper body. The turtleneck screamed and went down.

	But the one who'd leapt over me dropped back down, adjusting swiftly to the situation, and then whipped the hooked knife across my belly.

	Almost anyone else in town would have been killed. The knife struck with enormous power, and its blade was sharp. Standard Kevlar-style body armor wouldn't have done a damn thing to stop it. I'd stopped wearing the standard stuff, thanks to one too many exciting outings with Dresden. I wore a double-thickness vest now—and sandwiched between the layers of antiballistic fabric was a corselet of tightly linked titanium rings, manufactured for me by one of Dresden's friends, the wife of a retired Fist of God.

	The knife sliced right through the Kevlar. It split a ring or three, but then the tip caught in the titanium. Instead of spilling my intestines upon the ground, the superhumanly powerful blow wound up dragging me along and flung me across the concrete floor. I went down into a roll and spread out the force of the fall, coming back up to my feet, already having released the empty magazine from the P-90. I was reaching for the fresh one when another turtleneck abruptly closed in on me from behind and slipped a slim, iron-hard arm around my neck.

	I barely got a hand inside the loop of his arm before he could lock the choke on me, and I twisted like an eel to get out. His strength was far superior to mine, but then, whose wasn't? Even in grappling, strength isn't absolutely everything. The turtleneck might have been faster than I, but I had the advantage of experience. My timing was good enough to let me sense the opening, the lack of pressure in the weakest part of his hold, and I managed to writhe out of his grip—only to have a forearm smash down across my shoulders, driving me to the floor.

	As I went down, I saw that the turtleneck with the knife was only a few steps away. I'd never escape a pair of them.

	I didn't have time to get another magazine into the P-90, so I rolled with it and smashed the heavy polymer stock of the weapon into the nearest turtleneck's kneecap.

	He screamed and seized me by the neck of the leather jacket, shaking me like a doll.

	At which point Will and Marcy gave Nothing's companions an object lesson as to why werewolves instill terror in mortal hearts and minds.

	There was a flash of dark fur, a snarl, a horrible, tearing sound, and the turtleneck screamed. He started listing to one side, and I realized that one of the werewolves had just severed the hamstring of the turtleneck's unwounded leg. We both went down. I twisted out of the leather jacket, though I had to drop the P-90 and let it hang from my harness to do it, and rolled free of the turtleneck. An instant later, a second, slightly lighter brown form, teeth gleaming, darted past the fallen turtleneck and ripped out what would have been the jugular vein on a human being.

	Apparently, it was close enough for government work. The turtleneck thrashed in dying agony as mucuslike red blood bubbled from the gaping wound.

	And suddenly there were two beasts from the nightmares of mankind standing on either side of me, facing the enemy. They were wolves, one large and dark, the other slightly smaller and lighter, but both heavily laden with muscle and thick fur, and their golden eyes burned with awareness—and fury.

	Faced with a pair of murderous werewolves, the knife-wielding turtleneck slid to a sudden, uncertain halt.

	In the sudden silence that followed, the sound of me slapping a fresh magazine into the P-90 and racking the first round into the chamber was a sharp trio of clicks. Pop. Click-clack.

	See, Nothing? I thought. I can make ominous noises, too.

	I brought the weapon back up and snarled, "Lose the knife."

	The turtleneck hesitated for half a second, eyes darting left and right, then released it. The steel chimed as the knife hit the floor.

	I kept the weapon on him, the trigger half pulled. Yeah, it wasn't the safe, smart way to operate, but frankly I wouldn't lose any sleep if I accidentally shot this guy. He was just too damn fast to give up any advantage at all.

	"There were five of them," I said to the wolves. "How many did you handle, including the one that was on me?"

	The more lightly colored wolf let out two precise, low barks.

	"I got two," I said. "That leaves this one and the big guy."

	A complex sequence of clicks and pops drifted through the air, and the lights went out, plunging the warehouse into perfect darkness.

	Instinctively, my finger tightened on the trigger, and I sent a burst of rounds out almost before the lights were gone. But I was literally shooting blind against a foe who had supernatural reflexes and had also known, thanks to those damn clicks, what was about to happen. I heard the rounds hammer through the far wall.

	The wolves snarled and started forward—the warehouse wasn't a light-tight darkroom, and a wolf's eyes actually see better in near darkness than in full light. The gloom was no obstacle to them. But I seized handfuls of fur and hissed, "Wait."

	Their momentum dragged me several inches forward before they slowed down, but I said, "The growths on the wall spray out acid, at least seven or eight feet. Don't get suckered in close to one. The big guy has something like a gun. Go."

	The wolves bounded out from beneath my hands, leaving me alone in the darkness.

	Clicks and pops continued to bounce around the empty space of the warehouse, impossible for me to localize. They were an ongoing thing, every couple of seconds, and I couldn't shake the idea that they were coming closer and closer to me.

	Even as I crouched there, defenseless and hating it, my hands were scrabbling at the pouch on my tac vest. If there was too much magic running amok, flashlights might not be reliable. Magic screws up technology when there's too much of both of them around, and you don't take chances with something as important as being effectively struck blind. I'd prepared the tac vest with this kind of situation in mind.

	I opened the pouch and pulled out a flare, popping the pull cord, which struck it to life as I did. Red light glared into the darkness, and I lifted the flare over my head and out of my own vision in my left hand. I held the P-90 in my right. The small weapon could be fired in one hand, no problem, and while it wouldn't be as accurate, I could still send bursts downrange almost as well as I could two-handed.

	The pops and clicks continued, everywhere and nowhere. I had no idea where Will and Marcy were, and Nothing and the other turtleneck had an awful lot of shadow to hide in. I realized I was essentially sitting in the middle of an open floor under a spotlight, a perfect target for Nothing and his weird little urchin-gun, and I retreated toward the caged prisoners.

	"Georgia," I said, crouching down beside her. I studied the door of the cage, and found that the thing wasn't even locked. It had a ring for a padlock on it, but the door's mechanism was simply cycled closed. I spun it open and pulled open the cage door. "Georgia. Can you move?"

	She lifted her head and stared at me grimly. Then she turned her body and leaned forward, moving as though underwater, and slowly began to crawl out of the cage. I hurried to Andi's cage and opened that door as well—but the girl did not so much as blink or stir a finger when I urged her to get out. So much for reinforcements. I felt useless. I couldn't go out there into the dark to join Will and Marcy in the hunt. I'd be worse than useless, stumbling around out there. They'd be forced to take their attention from their attack in order to protect me.

	"Murphy," Georgia said. "M-Murphy."

	I hurried to her side. "I'm here. Are you hurt?"

	She shook her head. "N-n-no . . . L-listen." She lifted her head to meet my eyes, her neck wobbling like a paraplegic's. "Listen."

	Clicks. Pops. Once, a hackle-raising snarl. The whishing sound of an urchin flying through the air, and the sharp pong of its hitting a metal exterior wall. 

	"The guards," Georgia said. "Sonar."

	I stared at her for a second, and then clued in to what she was talking about. The clicks and pops had sounded familiar because I had heard them before, or something very close to them—from dolphins, at the Shedd Aquarium. Dolphins sent out sharp pulses of sound and used them to navigate, and to find prey in the dark. 

	I dropped the flare on the ground well away from Georgia and began unscrewing the suppressor on the P-90. "Will! Marcy!" I shouted, unable to keep the snarl out of my voice. "They're about to go blind!"

	Then I pointed the weapon up and off at an angle that I thought would send the rounds into the nearby lake, flicked the selector to single fire, and began methodically triggering rounds. The second clip had been loaded with standard, rather than subsonic, ammo, and without the suppressor to dampen the explosion of the propellant, the supersonic rounds roared out, painfully loud. The flash at the muzzle lit the entire warehouse in strobes of white light. I didn't fire them in rhythm or any particular pattern. I had no idea how actual sonar worked in biological organisms, but I'd taken several nephews as a pack to see the Daredevil movie, and rhythmic sounds seemed to create a more ordered picture than random bursts of noise. 

	As I worked my way through the fifty-round magazine, I could all but hear Dresden's mockery, his voice edged with adrenaline, the words coming through a manic grin, as I'd heard several times before. Murph, when you're reaching out to movie concepts that involved millions of dollars in special effects for your tactical battle plan, I think you can pretty safely take that as an indicator that you are badly out of your depth. 

	But as the last round left the gun, I heard one of the turtlenecks screaming in pain—a horrible cry that ended abruptly. And then the warehouse fell silent again—only to be invaded by another steady series of rhythmic clicks.

	And this time they were definitely getting closer.

	I unclipped the P-90 and set it aside. I had only the two clips for the weapon. But my Sig came into my hand with the smooth familiarity of long practice, and I moved, away from Georgia and the other prisoners, around behind the empty cages that had been meant for Will and Marcy. I nearly screamed when I kicked a dead body and found the other turtleneck lying in a pool of viscous blood—apparently the other bad guy Will and Marcy had seen to.

	Some instinct warned me I was in danger, and I dropped flat. Another sea urchin projectile streaked over me; a second struck a bar in the empty cage and slammed into its floor, acid chewing at the steel. Then there was a third whispering projectile that rushed away from me.

	A wolf began to scream in agony—horrible, horrible high-pitched screams.

	Nothing had just pulled the same trick I had—shooting at me and enticing one of his other enemies into the open as he did, then spinning to fire at an unexpected moment. Will or Marcy had just paid a horrible price for their aggression.

	I came to my knees with a cry of fury and flung my flare. It went high into the air, spinning, spreading red light wide and thin around the inside of the warehouse. I saw a massive black form ahead of me, turning, the tube of his projectile weapon swinging back toward me.

	The Sig was faster.

	I had already slid into a Weaver stance, and I slammed out a trio of shots, swift, steady, and practiced, all aimed at the upper torso, to avoid any chance of hitting one of the wolves. I know at least one of the shots scored a hit on Nothing. The flare landed, still blazing. I saw the black outline of his silhouette twist in agony, then heard a quavering grunt escape him. He moved away from the flare and out of my vision. An instant later, I saw a wolf leap across the scarlet pool of light, and I started squeezing out more rounds from the Sig. I staggered them just as I had the shots from the P-90, hoping to blind Nothing as the wolf attacked.

	The magazine emptied in a few seconds, though I hadn't meant to fire that many shots. The excitement of the fight was making it hard to stay level. I ejected the empty mag, slapped in a fresh one, and pulled a second flare from my tac vest, bringing it to hissing life as I started forward, my gun extended.

	I could hear Nothing fighting with a wolf. His voice emanated from his huge chest, a basso growl of rage every bit as angry and animalistic as the snarls of the wolf fighting him. I used the sound as my guide and rushed forward. The other wolf kept on screaming in agony, its shrieks slowly changing and becoming more and more eerily human.

	The scarlet light of the flare fell across Nothing and the wolf-version of Will just as Nothing flung the wolf to the concrete floor with bone-jarring force. Will let out a shriek of pain, and bones popped and crackled—but he retained enough awareness to roll out of the way as Nothing sent one huge foot stomping down at his skull.

	I started putting rounds into Nothing's chest from maybe fifteen feet away.

	I was shooting one-handed and was hyped up on adrenaline. It wasn't an ideal state for marksmanship. But I wasn't trying for points on a target—this was instinct shooting, the kind of accuracy that comes only with endless hours of practice, with thousands and thousands of rounds sent downrange. It takes a lot of work to make that happen.

	I'd worked.

	I was using a 9mm weapon. The rounds were on the small side for real combat—and Nothing was on the other end of the combat universe from small. He turned toward me, and I saw he no longer had the projectile tube—or two of the fingers on the hand that had been holding it. One of the wolves had tried for his throat and evidently had torn open the fine cloth of the sweater's neck, because I could see his gills flaring as he charged me.

	Shots struck home in his torso. I was aiming for the heart, which few people realize is fairly low in the chest, a couple of inches below the left nipple. I hit him with every shot, six, seven, eight. . . .

	It takes an attacker about two seconds to close a gap of thirty feet and get within range for a strike with a knife or fist. Nothing was about five feet closer than that. Eight shots, all of them hits, was damn solid combat shooting.

	It just wasn't enough.

	Nothing plowed into me like a runaway truck, sending me sprawling. We both hit the concrete. Pushing against him, I barely managed to keep his weight from coming down on my chest so that it came down somewhere around my hips instead. He seized my right hand and squeezed.

	Pain. Tendons tearing. Bones cracking. He shook his arm once, and my Sig went tumbling away.

	I didn't hesitate. I just doubled up, leaning toward him, and rammed the blazing end of the flare into the open flap of his gills.

	He screamed, louder than a human being could have, and both hands flew to his throat to clutch at the flare. I got a leg free and kicked him in the chin, hard, driving down with all the power of my leg behind a crushing heel. I heard something crack, and he screamed, flinching. I freed my other leg and scrambled away from him, clutching awkwardly at my right ankle with my left hand.

	Nothing tore the flare out, his pale eyes nearly luminous with rage, and came after me, roaring.

	I had never been more frightened in my life. I couldn't get to the damn holdout gun before he reached me, so I did the only thing I could. I ran, blind, into the dark, and he came after me like a rabid locomotive.

	I knew I didn't have much room left. I knew that I would hit a wall in a few seconds, and that then he'd have me. I could only pray that the shots I'd put in him were more serious than his reaction to them indicated—that he was already bleeding massively, and that the extra few seconds would be enough time to let him die.

	But somewhere inside, I knew better.

	I was playing out of my league, and I had known that from the beginning.

	Beautiful light suddenly fluoresced in front of me—the acid growths on the walls. I slammed to a stop in front of the weird clumps of material and saw little tendrils and orifices on the growths tracking and orienting on me.

	I turned to face Nothing.

	He came in, insanely huge, insanely strong, and roaring in a terrible fury.

	But terrible fury alone doesn't win fights. In fact, it can be a deadly weakness. In the second it took him to reach me, I touched the center of calm in myself, earned with endless hours of practice and discipline. I judged the distance and the timing. It felt as if I had forever to work out what I would need to do.

	And then I did to Nothing exactly what I'd done to Ray.

	As he closed, I ducked under his huge hands, spinning to sweep my right leg across his right foot, just as it was about to hit the floor. Preternaturally strong though he may have been, gravity pulled him just as hard as it had Ray, and his joints operated in exactly the same fashion. His right foot was driven to tangle with his left, and he went smashing forward into the wall.

	Into the growth.

	Into the spurting cloud of acidic spray that erupted from it, aiming at me.

	I rolled away to one side, frantically, but I needn't have worried. Nothing's vast bulk shielded me from the acid spray. I turned over and backed away awkwardly on my butt and my left hand, staring at Nothing in sheer fascination.

	He didn't scream. I think he was trying. The acid must have torn his throat apart, first thing. He sort of recoiled, staggering, and fell to his knees. I could see his profile dimly in the distant light of the flare and the glow of the acid fungus. It . . . just dissolved; seeing it was like watching time-lapse photography of a statue being worn away by wind and rain. Fluids pooled around his knees. He took several agonized breaths—and then there were sucking sounds, as the acid ate into his chest wall. And then there were no sounds at all.

	He tried to get up, twice. Then he settled down onto his side as if going to sleep.

	The acid kept chewing at him, even after he was dead.

	The stench hit me, and I retched horribly.

	I backed farther away and sat for a second with my knees up against my chest, my good arm wrapped around them, and sobbed. I hurt so much.

	I hurt so much.

	And my arm throbbed dully.

	"Dammit, Dresden," I said into the silence in a choked voice. "Dammit. Here I am doing your job. Dammit, dammit, dammit."

	I got to my feet a moment later. I recovered the second flare. I found my gun. I went to do what I could for Will and Marcy, who would both live.

	After that, I went around the warehouse and methodically put another half-dozen rounds into the head of each and every fallen turtleneck. And I used a can of paint thinner I found in a corner to set their master on fire, just to be sure.

	There's no such thing as overkill.

	I stood in the open loading door with Will, facing into a wind that blew from the east, over the lake, cool and sweet. There was nothing between us and the water but forty feet of paved loading area. It was quiet. There had been no reaction to the events in the building.

	Behind us, lying in quiet rows on the concrete floors, were the prisoners, each of them freed from their respective cages. Even though his left shoulder had been badly dislocated, Will had done most of the heavy lifting, dragging the cages out of the railroad car so I could open them and, with Marcy's and Georgia's help, drag the prisoners out.

	Marcy came up to stand beside us, wearing her sundress once more. Her right shoulder looked hideous. The urchin projectile had struck her, and two tines had sunk in deeply. Acid had gone into the muscle and dribbled down from the other tines to slither over her skin, burning as it went. The tines had been barbed, but the acid had liquefied the skin immediately around the barbs, and I had been forced to pry the projectile out with a knife. Marcy had stopped the bleeding, the same way Will had, but her arm was somewhat misshapen, and the scar tissue was truly impressive in its hideousness.

	That didn't seem to overly worry the young woman, whom I would never again be able to compare to a mouse in any fashion. But she looked exhausted.

	"She's sleeping," Marcy reported quietly to Will.

	"Good," Will said. His voice sounded flat, detached. He was hurting a lot. He looked at me, eyes dull, and said, "Think this will work?"

	"Sunrise," I said quietly, nodding, and glanced back at the rows of motionless prisoners. "It has a kind of energy, a force of positive renewal in it. It should wipe away the spells holding them."

	"How do you know?" Will asked.

	"Dresden," I said.

	Marcy tilted her head suddenly and said, "Someone's coming."

	I stood by the door, ready to pull it down, as a car, a silver Beemer, came around the corner of the warehouse into the paved loading lot. It stopped maybe thirty feet away, and Ms. Gard got out of it. She looked at me for a moment, then came around to the front of the car and stood there, waiting. The eastern wind blew her long blond hair toward us, like a gently rolling banner.

	"Wait here," I said quietly.

	"You sure?" Will asked.

	"Yeah."

	He nodded. "Okay."

	I stepped out, went down a short set of concrete stairs to the level of the lot, and walked over to face Gard.

	She looked at me expressionlessly for a moment, and then at the prisoners. She shook her head slowly and said, "You did it."

	I didn't say anything.

	"That's fomor magic," she said quietly. "One of their lesser sorcerers and his retainers."

	"Why?" I asked her. "Why are they doing this?"

	Gard shook her head and shrugged. "I don't know. But there are teams like it operating all over the world right now."

	"Not in Chicago," I said quietly.

	"Not in Chicago," she agreed. And her mouth stretched into a slow, genuine grin. She bowed to me from the waist, a gesture of antiquated, stately grace, and said, "There are few mortals with courage enough to face the fomor and their minions. Fewer still with skill enough to face them and win." Her eyes grew serious, and she lost the smile. "Hail, Warrior."

	Dresden would have known how to respond to that kind of anachronistic gibberish. I nodded back to her and said, "Thank you."

	"My employer owes you a debt, it seems."

	"Didn't do it for him."

	"But your actions are significant regardless," she said. "This is the second time the fomor have attempted to move on Chicago—and failed." She was quiet for a moment and then said, "If you told him you wanted your job back, he could make it happen. Without further obligation."

	I stood very still for a long, silent minute.

	Then I sighed, very tired, and said, "Even if I was sure he wouldn't try to use it as leverage down the line . . . If Marcone got it for me, I wouldn't want it. I'll make my own way."

	Gard nodded, her eyes steady, and she looked back at the warehouse again. "There's another position you might consider. Monoc Securities is always hiring. My boss is always pleased to find those with the proper"—she pursed her lips—"frame of mind. Considering your experience and skill set, I think you could do very well as one of our security consultants."

	"And work for guys like Marcone?" I asked.

	"You should bear in mind that this is the second such incursion of the fomor," Gard said in a level voice. "And there have been a half-dozen others nosing at the city in the last eight months alone. All of them have been turned away, courtesy of Marcone."

	"He's swell," I said.

	"He keeps his word," Gard replied, "which puts him a step above most of your own superiors, in my opinion. Like him or not, he has defended this city. It's no minor thing."

	"Every predator defends its territory," I said. "Pass."

	Her eyes glittered with amusement, and she shook her head. "Vadderung would definitely find you interesting. You've even got the hair for it. Don't be surprised if you get a call sometime."

	"It's a free country," I said. "Is there anything else?"

	Gard turned to look at the rapidly lightening eastern horizon, and looked from there to the prisoners. "You seem to have things fairly well contained."

	I nodded.

	"Don't worry too much about the scene," Gard said. "Hardly anyone ever noses around places like this."

	But that wasn't what she meant. Gard was telling me that the evidence—the bodies, the rounds, the weapons, all of it—was going to disappear. Marcone's people were very, very good at making evidence vanish. In this particular case, I wasn't sure I minded. It would protect Will and Marcy, both of whom had left blood there, and it would also cover me.

	And Gard hadn't made me ask for it.

	She held up her hand, palm up—another one of those gestures, their meanings forgotten by everyone except for long-term wackjobs like Dresden. I returned it. She nodded in approval, got into her car, and left.

	Will came up to stand at my side, watching her go. Then both of us turned to watch the sun beginning to rise over the lake.

	"He's really gone," Will said quietly. "Dresden, I mean."

	I frowned and stared at the waters that had, by every rational indication, swallowed Dresden's lifeblood. I didn't answer him.

	"Was she telling the truth, you think? That Marcone's the one standing in the gap now?"

	"Probably," I said, "to some degree. But she was wrong."

	"Wrong how?"

	"Dresden's not gone," I said. I touched a hand lightly to my brow. "He's here." I touched Will's bare chest, on the left side. "Here. Without him, without what he's done over the years, you and I would never have been able to pull this off."

	"No," he agreed. "Probably not. Definitely not."

	"There are a lot of people he's taught. Trained. Defended. And he's been an example. No single one of us can ever be what he was. But together, maybe we can."

	"The Justice League of Chicago?" Will asked, smiling slightly.

	"Dibs on Batman," I said.

	His smile turned into a real grin for a minute. Then sobered. "You really think we can do it?"

	I nodded firmly. "We'll cover his beat."

	"That will be a neat trick, if you can do it," Will said.

	"If we can do it," I corrected him. "I'll need a deputy, Will. Someone I trust. You." 

	He was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded. "I'm in. But you're talking about some very, ah, disparate personalities. How long can you keep it up?"

	My answer surprised even me. "Until Dresden gets back."

	Will frowned. "You really think that's possible?"

	I shook my head. "It doesn't seem to be. But . . . There's this voice inside me that keeps pointing out that we haven't seen a body. Until I have . . ."

	The sun rose over the horizon, burning gently through the morning haze over the lake, and golden light washed over us, warm and strong. We turned to watch the prisoners, and as the light touched them, they began to shudder. Then they began to stir. The first to rise was Georgia.

	Will sucked in a long, slow breath, his eyes shining.

	"Until I have," I said quietly, "I can't believe he's dead."

	We walked back to the warehouse together, to see to the business of getting the prisoners safely home.

 
The End