Side Jobs (24 page)

Or for a corporate courier.

“Empty night,” I swore, viciously, suddenly furious.

Justine blinked at me. “What is it?”

“Lara,” I spat. “What did she tell you?”

Justine shook her head slowly, frowning at me, as though trying to read my thoughts from my expression. “She said to bring you a briefing on a situation you needed to know about. Nothing could be written down. I had to memorize it all and bring it to you, along with some photos, here.” She put a slender hand on a valise that sat on my coffee table.

I stared at her intently. Then I sat slowly down on one of the chairs in my apartment’s living room. It wasn’t a comfortable chair, but it was very, very expensive. “I need you to tell me everything she told you,” I said. “Absolutely every word.”

Justine stared back for a long moment, her frown deepening. “Why?”

Because
knowing
certain things, simply being
aware
of them, was dangerous. Because Justine had been providing me with information from within Lara’s operation, and which I had, in turn, been providing to Harry, and through him to the White Council. If Lara had found out about that, she might have brought Justine into the Oblivion War. If she had, I was going to kill my sister.

“I need you to trust me, love,” I said quietly. “But I can’t tell you.”

“But
why
can’t you tell me?”

The real bitch about the Oblivion War was that question.

“Justine,” I said, spreading my hands. “Please. Trust me.”

Justine narrowed her eyes in wary thought, which took me somewhat aback. It was not an expression I was used to seeing on her face.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and shoved my demon down again.

“My poor Thomas,” she said quietly, when I opened them again. She sat down across the table from me, her dark eyes compassionate. “When we were together, I never realized how hard it was for you. Your demon is much stronger than theirs. Stronger than any but hers, isn’t it.”

“It only matters if I give in to it,” I replied, more harshly than I meant to. “Which means it doesn’t matter. Tell me, Justine. Please.”

She folded her arms across her body, biting on her bottom lip. “It really isn’t much. She said to tell you that word had come to her through the usual channels that the Ladies of the Dark River were in town.” She opened the valise. “And that you would know which one you were dealing with.” She took out a full-page photo, and slid it across the table to me. It was grainy, but big enough to clearly show an image of a stark-featured, young-looking woman getting into a cab at O’Hare. The time stamp on the photo said it was from that morning.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I know her. I thought she was dead.”

“Lara said that this person had taken a child,” Justine continued. “Though she didn’t say how she knew that. And that her aim was to draw out one who could do her cause great good.”

I got a sick feeling in my stomach as Justine slid out the second photograph and pushed it across the table.

The photograph was simple, this time—a hallway, a picture of a door, its top half of frosted glass, bearing simple black lettering:

HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.

The door was closed, but I could see the outline of a tall, feminine form, facing an even taller, storkish, masculine outline.

The time stamp said it was barely two hours before.

So.

Lara had been trying to do me a favor, after all. She had protected Justine behind a layer of generalities. And I had dithered around cutting hair and indulging my Hunger and my suspicions, while the Stygian Sisterhood had suckered my brother into a ploy to bring back one of their monstrous matrons.

Justine had never been stupid. Even when she’d been deep in my influence, before, she’d walked into it with her eyes open. “He’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“And he doesn’t even know it yet,” I said quietly.

She pursed her lips in thought. “And you can’t tell him why, can you? Any more than you could tell me.”

I looked up at her helplessly.

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

I rose and reclaimed my knife and gun. “He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m going to cover his back.”

“How are you going to explain it to him?” she asked.

I tugged on a pair of leather gloves and went to her, so I could take her hands in mine, squeezing gently, before I turned to go.

“If he thinks he’s helping her, and you interfere, he’s not going to understand,” she said. “How are you going to explain it to him, Thomas?”

It sucks to be a Venator.

“I’m not,” I said quietly.

Then I and my demon went out to continue an ages-old silent war and help my brother.

I just hoped the two activities wouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

Justine had a driver circling the block, waiting for her to call. She did. I walked her to the elevator, holding her hand in my gloved fingers, the whole way. We didn’t speak again. She smiled at me, though, when the elevator arrived, and kissed my fingers through the glove.

Then she was gone.

Technically, there was always a huge empty place inside me—that was what the Hunger was, after all.

So I told myself that this wasn’t any different, and I went back to my apartment to get to work.

Purely for form, I tried Harry’s home and office phones before I left my apartment, but I got no answer at his apartment, and only his answering service at his office. I left a message that I needed to talk to him, but I doubted he would get it in time for it to be of any help. I grimaced as I took my cell phone out of my pocket and left it on my kitchen counter. There wasn’t any point in carrying it with me. Technology doesn’t get along well with magic. Twenty or thirty minutes in Harry’s company could kill a cell phone if he was in a bad mood—less if he was actively throwing spells around.

My own remedial skills weren’t any particular threat to the phone, but once I brought up the tracking spell I’d need to find my brother, my reception would go straight to hell, anyway.

Harry waxes poetic about magic. He’ll go on and on about how it comes from your feelings, and how it’s a deep statement about the nature of your soul, and then he’ll whip out some kind of half-divine, half-insane philosophy he’s cobbled together from the words of saints and comic books about the importance of handling power responsibly. Get him rolling, and he’ll go on and on and on.

For someone on Harry’s level, maybe it’s relevant. For the rest of us, here’s what you need to know about magic: It’s a skill. Anyone can learn it to one degree or another. Not very many people can be
good
at it. It takes a lot of practice and patience, it makes you tired, leaves you with headaches and muscle cramps, and everyone and their dog has an opinion about the “correct” way to do it.

Harry’s a master of the skill—as in simultaneous doctorates from MIT, Harvard, and Yale, and a master’s from Oxford. By comparison, I went to a six-month vo-tech—which means I skipped a bunch of the flowery crap and focused on learning some useful things that work.

It took me a couple of minutes longer than it would have taken him, but I used the silver pentacle amulet my mother had given me for my fifth birthday to create a link to Harry’s amulet, a battered twin to mine.

Early springtime in Chicago can come at you with a psychotic array of weather. This spring had been pleasantly mild, and by the time I’d used the tracking spell to catch up to my little brother, the day had faded into a pleasantly brisk evening.

I held the silver amulet in my right hand, its chain wrapped around my knuckles, four or five inches above the pendant left dangling. The pendant swung steadily, back and forth in one direction, no matter which way I turned, as if it had been guided by a tiny gyroscope. I’d paid a small fortune to park the Hummer—money well spent. Now I followed the swing of the pendant, and the spell guiding it, across the grounds of Millennium Park.

Millennium Park is something fairly rare—a genuinely beautiful park in the middle of a large city. Granted, the buildings spaced around the grounds look like something inspired by an Escher painting and a period of liberal chemical xperimentation in an architect’s underclassman years, but even they have their own kind of madman’s charm. Even though night was coming on, the park was fairly busy. The skating rink stayed open until ten every night, and it would only stay open for a few more days before it would shut down until the seasons turned again. Kids and parents skated around the rink. Couples strolled together. Uniformed police officers patrolled in plain sight nearby, making sure the good people of Chicago were kept safe from predators.

I spotted Harry stalking along the side of the skating rink, walking away from me. He was head and shoulders taller than most of the people around him, professional-basketball-player tall, and rather forebidding in his big black duster. His head was down, his attention on something he was holding in his hands—probably a tracking spell of his own. I hurried across the distance to the skating rink to begin shadowing him.

I realized I was being followed about twenty seconds later.

Whoever they were, the Stygian hadn’t told them they were dealing with a vampire. They hadn’t stayed downwind, and a stray breeze had brought in the aromas of a couple of dozen humans who were nearby, the reek of a couple of trash cans, the scents of several nearby food vendors selling various temptations from their carts—and the distinct, rotten-meat and stale-sweat stench (badly hidden under generous splashes of Axe) of two ghouls.

That wasn’t good. Like me, ghouls can pass for human. They’re the cheap muscle-for-hire of the supernatural world. Doubtless, the Stygian had hired them on against the possibility of interference from the Venatori.

One ghoul I could handle, no problem. Though they were tough to kill, strong, fast, and vicious as the day is long, that’s nothing I haven’t slaughtered before. Two of them, though, changed the picture. It meant that if they had any brains going for them at all, they could make it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to take them out without being incapacitated myself.

True, hired thugs generally weren’t known for their brains, but it wasn’t a good time to start making assumptions about the opposition. I quickened my pace, attempting to catch up with Harry, and pretended I hadn’t noticed the ghouls.

Harry turned aside and hurried across the park grounds toward the Pavilion. It was an enormous structure, which I always thought looked something like a medieval Mongol’s war helmet. Giant Attila chapeau, turned into a building, where concerts were held on a regular basis for the good people of Chicago. Tonight, though, the Pavilion was dark and empty. It should have been locked up—and probably was. Locks, though, never seemed to pose much of an obstacle to my brother. He went to a door on the side of the stage building of the Pavilion and opened it, vanishing inside.

I hurried after him and called out his name. I was still a good fifty yards away, though, and he didn’t hear me.

The ghouls did, though. I heard one of them snarl something to the other, and their footsteps quickened to a run.

I ran faster. I beat them to the door, and my demon and I shut it behind me, hard—hard enough to warp the metal door in its metal frame.

“Harry!” I shouted. “Harry, we need to talk!”

The ghouls hit the door and tried to open it. They didn’t have much luck on the first try, but they settled in to wrench it open. The door was only metal. It wouldn’t hold them out for long.

The interior of the building was empty and completely unlit, except for the faintest greenish radiance, which came through dimly, as though reflecting from many other interior surfaces, several rooms away. My demon had no trouble seeing through it, and I went through the halls in silent haste, following the faint light source toward its origin.

One of the ghouls ripped the door off its hinges, the metal shrieking behind me. One of the ghouls bounded through, snarling, the pitch and tenor of its voice changing as it came. It was changing form, growing less human and more dangerous as it ran down its prey.

I rounded a corner and ran toward a tall figure in a dark coat at the end of a hall, lit by a green luminescence—and realized within a few steps that the figure my tracking spell had taken me after was not my brother.

I drew the Desert Eagle from under my coat and opened fire. The form crouched, lifting an arm, and bullets bounced off something and began skittering around the concrete of the hallway. A magical defense—the Stygian. A hand lifted, and a sphere of light flashed toward me. I dove under it, but the incoming spell matched my movement and fell to meet me.

There was a flash of brighter light, and an instant of heat that I expected to become agony. Instead, there was just a whirl of confusing dizziness, and then I was back on my feet—just as the first ghoul, its arms now half again as long as they were, and ending in grotesque claws, its face distended into a gaping, fanged muzzle, rounded the corner and leapt at me.

I’d brought the kukri. It’s a weapon that’s served the Gurkhas well for a couple of centuries, and with good reason. The bent-bladed knife, the size of a small sword, carries a tremendous amount of striking power along its inner edge when wielded properly, enough to strike limbs and heads from bodies, even when used by relatively small and less powerful mortals.

In the hands of a vampire, it’s the kind of thing that Jabberwocks get twitchy about.

The first ghoul led with a claw that was fast, but not fast enough. I left it on the floor of the hallway, hamstrung it on the back-stroke, and emptied the Desert Eagle into its back as it tried to flee, shattering its spine. It’s one of a couple of ways to put a ghoul down fast and for keeps.