“I don’t like this,” Murphy said. “Helen Beckitt has got plenty of reasons to dislike you.”
I snorted. “Who doesn’t?”
“I’m serious, Harry.” The elevator doors closed and we started up. The building was old, and the elevator wasn’t the fastest in the world. Murphy shook her head. “If what you said about people beginning to fear you is true, then there’s got to be a reason for it. Maybe someone is telling stories.”
“And you like Helen for that?”
“She already shot you, and that didn’t work. Maybe she figured it was time to get nasty.”
“Sticks and stones and small-caliber bullets may break my bones,” I said. “Words will never, et cetera.”
“It’s awfully coincidental to find her here. She’s a con, Harry, and she wound up in jail because of you. I can’t imagine that she’s making nice with the local magic community for the camaraderie.”
“I didn’t think cops knew about big words like ‘camaraderie,’ Murph. Are you sure you’re a real policeperson?”
She gave me an exasperated glance. “Do you ever stop joking around?”
“I mutter off-color limericks in my sleep.”
“Just promise me that you’ll watch your back,” Murphy said.
“There once was a girl from Nantucket,” I said. “Her mouth was as big as a bucket.”
Murphy flipped both her hands palms up in a gesture of frustrated surrender. “Dammit, Dresden.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You seem worried about me.”
“There are women up there,” she said. “You don’t always think very clearly where women are concerned.”
“So you think I should watch my back.”
“Yes.”
I turned to her and looked down at her and said, more quietly, “Golly, Murph. Why did you think I wanted you along?”
She looked up and smiled at me, the corners of her eyes wrinkling, though her voice remained tart. “I figured you wanted someone along who could notice things more subtle than a flashing neon sign.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be flashing.”
The elevator doors opened and I took the lead down the hall to Anna Ash’s apartment—and stepped into a tingling curtain of delicate energy four or five feet shy of the door. I drew up sharply, and Murphy had to put a hand against my back to keep from bumping into me.
“What is it?” she asked.
I held up my left hand. Though my maimed hand was still mostly numb to conventional stimuli, it had never had any trouble sensing the subtle patterns of organized magical energy. I spread out my fingers as much as I could, trying to touch the largest possible area as I closed my eyes and focused on my wizard’s senses.
“It’s a ward,” I said quietly.
“Like on your apartment?” she asked.
“It’s not as strong,” I said, waving my hand slowly over it. “And it’s a little cruder. I’ve got bricks and razor wire. This is more like aluminum siding and chicken wire. But it has a decent kick. Fire, I think.” I squinted up and down the hall. “Huh. I don’t think there’s enough there to kill outright, but it would hurt like hell.”
“And a fire would set off the building’s alarms,” Murphy added. “Make people start running out. Summon the authorities.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Discouraging your average prowler, supernatural or not. It’s not meant to kill.” I stepped back and nodded to Murphy. “Go ahead and knock.”
She gave me an arch look. “That’s a joke, right?”
“If this ward isn’t done right, it could react with my aura and go off.”
“Can’t you just take it apart?”
“Whoever did this was worried enough to invest a lot of time and effort to make this home safer,” I said. “Kinda rude to tear it up.”
Murphy tilted her head for a second, and then she got it. “And you’ll scare them if you just walk through it like it wasn’t there.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “They’re frightened, Murph. I’ve got to be gentle, or they won’t give me anything that can help them.”
Murphy nodded and knocked on the door.
She rapped three times, and the doorknob was already turning on the third rap.
A small, prettily plump woman opened the door. She was even shorter than Murphy, mid-forties maybe, with blond hair and rosy, cherubic cheeks that looked used to smiling. She wore a lavender dress and carried a small dog, maybe a Yorkshire terrier, in her arms. She smiled at Murphy and said, “Of course, Sergeant Murphy, I know who you are.”
Maybe half a second after the woman started speaking, Murphy said, “Hello, my name is Sergeant Murphy, and I’m a detective with the CPD.”
Murphy blinked for a second and fell silent.
“Oh,” the woman said. “I’m sorry; I forget sometimes.” She made an airy little gesture with one hand. “Such a scatterbrain.”
I started to introduce myself, but before I got my mouth open, the little woman said, “Of course, we all know who you are, Mister Dresden.” She put her fingers to her mouth. They were shaking a little. “Oh. I forgot again. Excuse me. I’m Abby.”
“Pleased to meet you, Abby,” I said quietly, and extended my hand, relaxed, palm down, to the little Yorkie. The dog sniffed at my hand, quivering with eagerness as he did, and his tail started wagging. “Heya, little dog.”
“Toto,” Abby said, and before I could respond said, “Exactly, a classic. If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” She nodded to me and said, “Excuse me; I’ll let our host speak to you. I was just closest to the door.” She shut the door on us.
“Certainly,” I said to the door.
Murphy turned to me. “Weird.”
I shrugged. “At least the dog liked me.”
“She knew what we were going to say before we said it, Harry.”
“I noticed that.”
“Is she telepathic or something?”
I shook my head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. She doesn’t exactly hide what she’s doing, and if she was poking around in people’s heads, the Council would have done something a long time ago.”
“Then how did she know what we were about to say?”
“My guess is that she’s prescient,” I said. “She can see the future. Probably only a second or two, and she probably doesn’t have a lot of voluntary control over it.”
Murphy made a thoughtful noise. “Could be handy.”
“In some ways,” I said. “But the future isn’t written in stone.”
Murphy frowned. “Like, what if I’d decided to tell her my name was Karrin Murphy instead of Sergeant, at the last second?”
“Yeah. She’d have been wrong. People like her can sense a…sort of a cloud of possible futures. We were in a fairly predictable situation here even without bringing any magical talents into it, basic social interaction, so it looked like she saw exactly what was coming. But she didn’t. She got to judge what was most probable, and it wasn’t hard to guess correctly in this particular instance.”
“That’s why she seemed so distracted,” Murphy said thoughtfully.
“Yeah. She was keeping track of what was happening, what was likely to happen, deciding what wasn’t likely to happen, all in a window of a few seconds.” I shook my head. “It’s a lot worse if they can see any farther than a second or two.”
Murphy frowned. “Why?”
“Because the farther you can see, the more possibilities exist,” I said. “Think of a chess game. A beginning player is doing well if he can see four or five moves into the game. Ten moves in holds an exponentially greater number of possible configurations the board could assume. Master players can sometimes see even further than that—and when you start dealing with computers, the numbers are even bigger. It’s difficult to even imagine the scope of it.”
“And that’s in a closed, simple environment,” Murphy said, nodding. “The chess game. There are far more possibilities in the real world.”
“The biggest game.” I shook my head. “It’s a dangerous talent to have. It can leave you subject to instabilities of one kind or another as side effects. Doctors almost always diagnose folks like Abby with epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, or one of a number of personality disorders. I got five bucks that says that medical bracelet on her wrist says she’s epileptic—and that the dog can sense seizures coming and warn her.”
“I didn’t see the bracelet,” Murphy admitted. “No bet.”
While we stood there talking quietly for maybe five minutes, a discussion took place inside the apartment. Low voices came through the door in tense, muffled tones that eventually cut off when a single voice, louder than the rest, overrode the others. A moment later, the door opened.
The first woman we’d seen enter the apartment faced me. She had a dark complexion, dark eyes, short, dark straight hair that made me think she might have had some Native Americans in the family a generation or three back. She was maybe five foot four, late thirties. She had a serious kind of face, with faint, pensive lines between her brows, and from the way she stood, blocking the doorway with solidly planted feet, I got the impression that she could be a bulldog when necessary.
“No one here has broken any of the Laws, Warden,” she said in a quiet, firm voice.
“Gosh, that’s a relief,” I said. “Anna Ash?”
She narrowed her eyes and nodded.
“I’m Harry Dresden,” I said.
She pursed her lips and gave me a speculative look. “Are you kidding? I know who you are.”
“I don’t make it a habit to assume that everyone I meet knows who I am,” I said, implying apology in my tone. “This is Karrin Murphy, Chicago PD.”
Anna nodded to Murphy and asked, in a neutral, polite tone, “May I see your identification, Ms. Murphy?”
Murphy already had her badge on its leather backing in hand, and she passed it to Anna. Her photo identification was on the reverse side of the badge, under a transparent plastic cover.
Anna looked at the badge and the photo, and compared it to Murphy. She passed it back almost reluctantly, and then turned to me. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” I said.
“About what?”
“The Ordo Lebes,” I said. “And what’s happened to several practitioners lately.”
Her voice remained polite on the surface, but I could hear bitter undertones. “I’m sure you know much more about it than us.”
“Not especially,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to correct.”
She shook her head, suspicion written plainly on her face. “I’m not an idiot. The Wardens keep track of everything. Everyone knows that.”
I sighed. “Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell–shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning. I was hoping you could just talk to me for a little while, the way you would with a human being.”
She eyed me a bit warily. Lots of people react to my jokes like that. “Why should I?”
“Because I want to help you.”
“Of course you’d say that,” she said. “How do I know you mean it?”
“Ms. Ash,” Murphy put in quietly, “he’s on the level. We’re here to help, if we can.”
Anna chewed on her lip for a minute, looking back and forth between us and then glancing at the room behind her. Finally, she faced me and said, “Appearances can be deceiving. I have no way of knowing if you are who—and what—you say you are. I prefer to err on the side of caution.”
“Never hurts to be cautious,” I agreed. “But you’re edging toward paranoid, Ms. Ash.”
She began to shut the door. “This is my home. And I’m not inviting you inside.”
“Groovy,” I said, and stepped over the threshold and into the apartment, nudging her gently aside before she could close the door.
As I did, I felt the pressure of the threshold, an aura of protective magical energy that surrounds any home. The threshold put up a faintly detectable resistance as my own aura of power met it—and could not cross it. If Anna, the home’s owner, had invited me in, the threshold would have parted like a curtain. She hadn’t, and as a result, if I wanted to come inside, I’d have to leave much of my power at the door. If I had to work any forces while I was in there, I’d be crippled practically to the point of total impotence.
I turned to see Anna staring at me in blank surprise. She was aware of what I had just done.
“There,” I told her. “If I was of the spirit world, I couldn’t cross your threshold. If I had planned on hurting someone in here, would I have disarmed myself? Stars and stones, would I have shown up with a cop to witness me doing it?”
Murphy took her cue from me, and entered the same way.
“I…” Anna said, at a loss. “How…how did you know the ward wouldn’t go off in your face?”
“Judgment call,” I told her. “You’re a cautious person, and there are kids in this building. I don’t think you’d have slapped up something that went boom whenever anyone stepped through the doorway.”
She took a deep breath and then nodded. “You wouldn’t have liked what happened if you’d tried to force the door, though.”
“I believe you,” I told her. And I did. “Ms. Ash, I’m not here to threaten or harm anyone. I can’t make you talk to me. If you want me to go, right now, I’ll go,” I promised her. “But for your own safety, please let me talk to you first. A few minutes. That’s all I ask.”
“Anna?” came Abby’s voice. “I think you should hear them out.”
“Yes,” said another woman’s voice, quiet and low. “I agree. And I know something of him. If he gives you his word, he means it.”
Thinking on it, I hadn’t ever really heard Helen Beckitt’s voice before, unless you counted moans. But its quiet solidity and lack of inflection went perfectly with her quasi-lifeless eyes.
I traded an uneasy glance with Murphy, then looked back to Anna.
“Ms. Ash?” I asked her.
“Give me your word. Swear it on your power.”
That’s serious, at least among wizards in my league. Promises have power. One doesn’t swear by one’s magical talent and break the oath lightly—to do so would be to reduce one’s own strength in the Art. I didn’t hesitate to answer. “I swear to you, upon my power, to abide as a guest under your hospitality, to bring no harm to you or yours, nor to deny my aid if they would suffer thereby.”
She let out a short, quick breath and nodded. “Very well. I promise to behave as a host, with all the obligations that apply. And call me Anna, please.” She pronounced her name with the Old World emphasis: Ah-nah. She beckoned with one hand and led us into the apartment. “I trust you will not take it amiss if I do not make a round of introductions.”
Understandable. A full name, given from one’s own lips, could provide a wizard or talented sorcerer with a channel, a reference point that could be used to target any number of harmful, even lethal spells, much like fresh blood, nail clippings, or locks of hair could be used for the same. It was all but impossible to give away your full name accidentally in a conversation, but it had happened, and if someone in the know thought a wizard might be pointing a spell their way, they got real careful, real fast, when it came to speaking their own name.
“No problem,” I told her.
Anna’s apartment was nicer than most, and evidently had received almost a complete refurbishing in the past year or three. She had windows with a reasonably good view, and her furnishings were predominantly of wood, and of excellent quality.
Five women sat around the living area. Abby sat in a wooden rocking chair, holding her bright-eyed little Yorkie in her lap. Helen Beckitt stood by a window, staring listlessly out at the city. Two other women sat on a sofa, the third on a love seat perpendicular to them.
“Should I take it that you know who I am?” I asked them.
“They know,” Anna said quietly.
I nodded. “All right. Here’s what I know. Something has killed as many as five female practitioners. Some of the deaths have looked like suicides. Evidence suggests that they weren’t.” I took a deep breath. “And I’ve found messages left for me or someone like me with at least two of the bodies. Things the cops couldn’t have found. I think we’re looking at a serial killer, and I think that your order might represent a pool of victims that fit his—”
“Or her,” Murphy put in, not quite staring at Beckitt.
Beckitt’s mouth curled into a bitter little smile, though she did not otherwise move.
“Or her,” I allowed, “profile.”
“Is he serious?” asked one of the women I didn’t know. She was older than the others, early fifties. Despite the day’s warmth, she wore a thin turtleneck sweater of light green and a dark grey cardigan. Her hair, caught back in a severe bun, had once been deep, coppery red, though now it was sown liberally with steely grey. She wore no makeup, square, silver-rimmed spectacles over muddy brown-green eyes, and her eyebrows had grown out rather thicker than most women chose to allow.
“Very serious,” I replied. “Is there something I can call you? It doesn’t seem polite to name you Turtleneck without checking first.”
She stiffened slightly, keeping her eyes away from mine, and said, “Priscilla.”
“Priscilla. I’m pretty much floundering around here. I don’t know what’s going on, and that’s why I came to talk to you.”
“Then how did you know of the Ordo?” she demanded.
“In real life, I’m a private investigator,” I told her. “I investigate stuff.”
“He’s lying,” Priscilla said, looking back at Anna. “He has to be. You know what we’ve seen.”
Anna looked from Priscilla to me, and then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“What have you seen?” I asked Anna.
Anna looked around the room at the others for a moment, but none of them made any objections, and she turned back to me. “You’re correct. Several members of our order have died. What you might not know is that there are others who have vanished.” She took a deep breath. “Not only in the Ordo, but in the community as well. More than twenty people are unaccounted for since the end of last month.”
I let out a low whistle. That was serious. Don’t get me wrong; people vanish all the time—most of them because they want to do it. But the people in our circles were generally a lot closer-knit than most folks, in part because they were aware, to one degree or another, of the existence of supernatural predators who could and would take them, given the chance. It’s a herd instinct, plain and simple—and it works.
If twenty people had gone missing, odds were good that something was on the prowl. If the killer had taken them, I had a major problem on my hands, which admittedly wasn’t exactly a novel experience.
“You say people have seen something? What?”
“For…” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “For all three victims from within the order whose bodies have been found, they were last seen alive in the company of a tall man in a grey cloak.”
I blinked. “And you thought it was me?”
“I wasn’t close enough to tell,” Priscilla said. “It was after dark, and she was on the street outside my apartment. I saw them through a window.”
She didn’t quite manage to hide the fact that she’d almost said you instead of them.
“I was at Bock’s,” Abby added, her tone serious, her eyes fixed in the middle distance. “Late. I saw the man walk by with her outside.”
“I didn’t see that,” Helen Beckitt said. The words were flat and certain. “Sally left the bar with a rather lovely dark-haired man with grey eyes and pale skin.”
My stomach twitched. In my peripheral vision, Murphy’s facial expression went carefully blank.
Anna lifted a hand in a gesture beseeching Helen for silence. “At least two more reliable witnesses have reported that the last time they saw some of the folk who had disappeared, they were in the company of the grey-cloaked man. Several others have reported sightings of the beautiful dark-haired man instead.”
I shook my head. “And you thought the guy in the cloak was me?”
“How many tall, grey-cloaked men move in our circles in Chicago, sir?” Priscilla said, her voice frosty.
“You can get grey corduroy for three dollars a yard at a surplus fabric store,” I told her. “Tall men aren’t exactly unheard of in a city of eight million, either.”
Priscilla narrowed her eyes. “Who was it, then?”
Abby tittered, which made Toto wag his tail.
I pursed my lips in a moment of thought. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Murphy.”
Helen Beckitt snorted out a breath through her nose.
“This isn’t a joking matter,” Priscilla snapped.
“Oh. Sorry. Given that I only found out about a grey cloak sighting about two seconds ago, I had assumed the question was facetious.” I turned to face Anna. “It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t a Warden of the Council—or at least, it damned well better not have been a Warden of the Council.”
“And if it was?” Anna asked quietly.
I folded my arms. “I’ll make sure he never hurts anyone. Ever again.”
Murphy stepped forward and said, “Excuse me. You said that three members of the order had died. What were their names, please?”
“Maria,” Anna said, her words spaced with the slow, deliberate beat of a funeral march. “Janine. Pauline.”
I saw where Murphy was going.
“What about Jessica Blanche?” she asked.
Anna frowned for a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve heard the name.”
“So she’s not in the order,” Murphy said. “And she’s not in the, ah, community?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Anna replied. She looked around the room. “Does anyone here know her?”
Silence.
I traded a glance with Murphy. “Some of these things are not like the others.”
“Some of these things are kind of the same,” she responded.
“Somewhere to start, at least,” I said.
Someone’s watch started beeping, and the girl on the couch beside Priscilla sat up suddenly. She was young, maybe even still in her teens, with the rich, smoke-colored skin of regions of eastern India. She had heavy-lidded brown eyes, and wore a bandanna tied over her straight, glossy black hair. She was dressed in a lavender ballet leotard with cream-colored tights covering long legs, and she had the muscled, athletic build of a serious dancer. She wore a man’s watch that looked huge against her fine-boned wrist. She turned it off and then glanced up at Anna, fidgeting. “Ten minutes.”
Anna frowned and nodded at her. She started toward the door, a gracious hostess politely walking us out. “Is there anything else we can do for you, Warden? Ms. Murphy?”
In the investigating business, when someone starts trying to rush you out in order to conceal some kind of information from you, it is what we professionals call a clue. “Gee,” I said brightly. “What happens in ten minutes?”
Anna stopped, her polite smile fading. “We have answered your questions as best we could. You gave me your word, Warden, to abide by my hospitality. Not to abuse it.”
“Answering me may be for your own good,” I replied.
“That’s your opinion,” she said. “In my opinion, it is no business of yours.”
I sighed and nodded acquiescence. I handed her a business card. “There’s my number. In case you change your mind.”
“Thank you,” Anna said politely.
Murphy and I left, and were silent all the way down in the elevator. I scowled up a storm on the way, and brooded. It had never solved any of my problems in the past, but there’s always a first time.
When we walked back out into the sunshine, Murphy said, “You think they know anything else?”
“They know something,” I said. “Or think they do.”
“That was a rhetorical question, Harry.”
“Bite me.” I shook my head. “What’s our next move?”
“Dig into Jessica Blanche’s background,” she replied. “See what we turn up.”
I nodded. “Easier than searching Chicago for guys in big grey cloaks.”
She paused for a moment, and I knew her well enough to know that she was choosing her words carefully. “But maybe not easier than finding pale, beautiful, dark-haired men who may or may not have been the last person seen with a woman who died in the midst of sexual ecstasy.”
For a moment, our only conversation was footsteps.
“It isn’t him,” I said then. “He’s my brother.”
“Sure, yeah,” she agreed.
“I mean, I haven’t talked to him in a while, sure,” I admitted. A moment later I added, “And he’s on his own now. Making really good money doing…something. Though I don’t know what. Because he will never, ever say.”
Murphy nodded. “Yes.”
“And I guess it’s true that he’s awfully well fed these days,” I went on. “And that he won’t tell me how.” We went a few more steps. “And that he thinks of himself as a monster. And that he got sick and tired of trying to be human.”
We crossed the street in silence.
When I got to the other side, I stopped and looked at Murphy. “Shit.”
We both started down the sidewalk to Murphy’s Saturn.
“Harry,” she said quietly. “I think you’re probably right about him. But there are lives at stake. We have to be sure.”
A flash of anger went through me, an instant and instinctive denial that my brother, my only living flesh and blood, could be involved in this mess. Intense, irrational fury, and an equally irrational sense of betrayal at Murphy’s gentle accusation, fed on each other, swelling rapidly. It took me off guard. I had never felt such volatile determination to destroy a threat to my brother outside of life-and-death struggles we’d found ourselves trapped within. The emotions roared through me like molten steel, and I found myself instinctively gathering my will under their searing influence. For just a second I wanted to smash things to powder, starting with anyone who even thought about trying to hurt Thomas—and the strength to do it welled up inside me like steam in a boiler.
I snarled and closed my eyes, forcing control upon myself. This was no life-and-death struggle. It was a sidewalk. There would be no noisy and satisfying release of that anger, but the energy that I had unconsciously gathered had the potential to be dangerous in any case. I reached down to brush the sidewalk with my fingertips, allowing the dangerous buildup of magic to ground itself more or less harmlessly into the earth, and only a trace amount of energy flared out into a disruptive pattern.
It saved our lives.
The instant I released the excess energy into the area around us, a nearby stoplight blew out, Murphy’s cell phone started blaring “Stars and Stripes Forever,” three car alarms went off—
—and Murphy’s Saturn coupe went up in a brilliant ball of fire and an ear-shattering blast of thunder.