“Ordo Lebes,” Murphy said. She took the lid off her coffee and blew some steam away from its surface. “My Latin is a little rusty.”
“That’s because you aren’t a master of arcane lore, like me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Right.”
“Lebes means a large cooking pot,” I told her. I tried to adjust the passenger seat of her car, but couldn’t manage to make it comfortable. Saturn coupes were not meant for people my height. “Translates out to the Order of the Large Cooking Pot.”
“Or maybe Order of the Cauldron?” Murphy suggested. “Since it sounds so much less silly and has a more witchy connotation and all?”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose.”
Murphy snorted at me. “Master of the arcane lore.”
“I learned Latin through a correspondence course, okay? We should have taken my car.”
“The interior of a Volkswagen Beetle is smaller than this one.”
“But I know where it all is,” I said, trying to untangle my right foot from where it had gotten wedged by the car’s frame.
“Do all wizards whine this much?” Murphy sipped her coffee. “You just want to be the one driving. I think you have control issues.”
“Control issues?”
“Control issues,” she said.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t find the woman’s address unless I let you drive, and I’m the one with issues?”
“With me, it’s less an issue and more a fact of life,” she said calmly. “Besides, that clown car of yours doesn’t exactly blend in, which is what you’re supposed to do on a stakeout.”
I glowered out the front window of her car and looked up at the apartment building where one Anna Ash was presumably hosting a meeting of the Order of the Large Cooking Po—er, uh, Cauldron. Murphy had found a spot on the street, which made me wonder if she didn’t have some kind of magical talent after all. Only some kind of precognitive ESP could have gotten us a parking space on the street, in the shadow of a building, with both of us in sight of the apartment building’s entrance.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Five minutes ago it was three o’clock,” Murphy said. “I can’t be certain, but I theorize that it must now be about three-oh-five.”
I folded my arms. “I don’t usually do stakeouts.”
“I thought it might be a nice change of pace for you. All that knocking down of doors and burning down of buildings must get tiring.”
“I don’t always knock down doors,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a wall.”
“But this way, we get a chance to see who’s going into the building. We might learn something.”
I let out a suspicious grunt. “Learn something, huh?”
“It’ll only hurt for a minute.” Murphy sipped at her coffee and nodded at a woman walking toward the apartment building. She wore a simple sundress with a man’s white cotton button-down shirt worn open atop it. She was in her late thirties, maybe, with pepper-and-salt hair worn in a bun. She wore sandals and sunglasses. “How about her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Recognize her. Seen her at Bock Ordered Books a few times.”
The woman entered the building at a brisk, purposeful pace.
Murphy and I went back to waiting. Over the next forty-five minutes, four other women arrived. I recognized two of them.
Murphy checked her watch—a pocket watch with actual clockwork and not a microchip or battery to be found. “Almost four,” she said. “Half a dozen at most?”
“Looks that way,” I agreed.
“And you didn’t see any obvious bad guys.”
“The wacky thing about those bad guys is that you can’t count on them to be obvious. They forget to wax their mustaches and goatees, leave their horns at home, send their black hats to the dry cleaner’s. They’re funny like that.”
Murphy gave me a direct and less-than-amused look. “Should we go on up?”
“Give it another five minutes. No force in the known universe can make a gang of folks naming their organization in Latin do much of anything on time. If they’re all there by four, we’ll know there’s some kind of black magic involved.”
Murphy snorted, and we waited for a few minutes more. “So,” she said, filling time. “How’s the war going?” She paused for a beat, and said, “God, what a question.”
“Slowly,” I said. “Since our little visit to Arctis Tor, and the beating the vampires took afterward, things have been pretty quiet. I went out to New Mexico this spring.”
“Why?”
“Helping Luccio train baby Wardens,” I said. “You’ve got to get way out away from civilization when you’re teaching group fire magic. So we spent about two days turning thirty acres of sand and scrub into glass. Then a couple of the Red Court’s ghouls showed up and killed two kids.”
Murphy turned her blue eyes to me, waiting.
I felt my jaw tighten, thinking back on it. It wouldn’t do those two kids any good, going over it again. So I pretended I didn’t realize she was giving me a chance to talk about it. “There haven’t been any more big actions, though. Just small-time stuff. The Merlin’s trying to get the vamps to the table to negotiate a peace.”
“Doesn’t sound like you think much of the idea,” Murphy noted.
“The Red King is still in power,” I said. “The war was his idea to begin with. If he goes for a treaty now, it’s only going to be so that the vamps can lick their wounds, get their numbers up again, and come back for the sequel.”
“Kill them all?” she asked. “Let God sort them out?”
“I don’t care if anyone sorts them or not. I’m tired of seeing people they’ve destroyed.” My teeth ground together. I hadn’t realized I was clenching my jaws so hard.
I tried to force myself to relax. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. Instead of feeling unclenched and less angry, I only felt tired. “Ah, Murph. Too many people get hurt. Sometimes I feel like no matter how fast I react, it doesn’t make any difference.”
“You’re talking about these killings, now,” she said.
“Them, too.”
“It isn’t your fault, Harry,” Murphy said in a steady voice. “Once you’ve done everything you can, you can’t do any more. There’s no sense in beating yourself up over it.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s what the counselors keep telling me,” she said. She regarded me thoughtfully. “It’s easier to see their point when I’m looking at you, though.”
“Thing is, Murph,” I said. “What if I could do more?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Something to deter these murdering animals.”
Something like New Mexico. Jesus. I didn’t want to think about that. I rubbed at the fresh headache sprouting between my eyebrows.
Murphy gave me a minute more to decide if I wanted to talk about it. When I stayed quiet, she asked, “Time to go up?”
Her voice had lightened, nudging us away from the topic. I nodded and tried to ease up on my tone. “Yeah. If my leg bones haven’t been deformed by this torture chamber you drive.” I opened the door and hauled myself out, stretching.
I hadn’t yet shut the door when I saw the woman walking down the street toward the apartment building. She was tall, lean, her hair cut shorter than mine. She wore no makeup, none at all, and time had not been kind to her stark features.
She’d looked a lot different the last time I’d seen her.
Back then, Helen Beckitt had been naked, and holding a dainty little .22-caliber revolver, and she’d shot me in the hip. She and her husband had gone down when a fledgling black sorcerer named Victor Sells had been introduced to his own killer creations, courtesy of Harry Dresden. They’d been on the ground floor of Victor’s nascent magic-assisted criminal empire. They’d been prosecuted for the criminal part, too, and gone to a federal penitentiary on drug charges.
I froze in place, going completely still, even though I was standing in plain sight. A sudden movement would only have served to draw her attention to me. She went on by, her steps brisk, her expression empty of any emotion or spark of life, just as I remembered. I watched her go into Anna Ash’s building.
Murphy, taking her cue from me, had frozen in place as well. She caught a glimpse of Helen Beckitt’s back as she went inside.
“Harry?” she asked. “What was that?”
“The plot,” I said, “thickening.”