"Wizards don't giggle," I said, hardly able to speak. "This is cackling."
She eyed me askance and sipped her beer. She waited until I had laughed myself out before speaking again. "You find out about Maggie yet?"
"Sort of," I said, abruptly sobered. "I think I know where she will be in the next few days." I gave her what we had learned about the duchess's intentions, leaving out the parts where I committed a bunch of crimes like theft, trespassing, and vandalism. "So right now," I concluded, "everyone's checking their contacts in Mexico while I'm talking to you."
"Susan?" she asked.
"And Father Forthill," I said. "Between them, they should be able to find out what's going on at Chichen Itza."
Murphy nodded and asked, casually, "How's she holding up?"
I took another pull from the bottle and said, "She thinks Molly has the hots for me."
Murphy snorted. "Wow. She must have used her vampire superpowers to have worked that one out."
I blinked at Murphy.
She stared at me for a second and then rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on on, Harry. Really? Are you really that clueless?"
"Uh," I said, still blinking. "Apparently."
Murphy smirked down at her beer and said, "It's always staggering to run into one of your blind spots. You don't have many of them, but when you do they're a mile wide." She shook her head. "You didn't really answer my question, you know."
I nodded. "Susan's a wreck. Maybe more so because of the whole vampire thing."
"I don't know, Harry. From what you've said, I don't think you'd need to look any further than the whole mommy thing."
"Could be," I said. "Either way, she's sort of fraying at the edges."
"Like you," Murphy said.
I scowled at her. "What?"
She lifted an eyebrow and looked frankly at me.
I started to get angry with her, but stopped to force myself to think. "Am I?"
She nodded slowly. "Did you notice that you've been tapping your left toe on the ground for the past five minutes?"
I frowned at her, and then down at my foot, which was tapping rapidly, to the point that my calf muscles were growing tired. "I ... No."
"I'm your friend, Harry," she said quietly. "And I'm telling you that you aren't too stable yourself right now."
"Monsters are going to murder my child sometime soon, Murph. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Soon. I don't have time for sanity."
Murphy nodded slowly, then sighed like someone setting down an unpleasant burden. "So. Chichen Itza."
"Looks like."
"Cool. When do we hit them?"
I shook my head. "We can't go all Wild Bunch Wild Bunch on these people. They'll flatten us." on these people. They'll flatten us."
She frowned. "But the White Council ..."
"Won't be joining us," I said. I couldn't keep a bit of the snarl out of my voice. "And to answer your question ... we're not sure when the ritual is supposed to take place. I've got to come up with more information."
"Rudolph," Murphy said thoughtfully.
"Rudolph. Someone who is a part of this, probably someone from the Red Court, is leaning on him. I plan on finding that someone and then poking him in the nose until he coughs up something I can use."
"I think I'd like to talk to Rudolph, too. We'll start from our ends and work toward the middle again, then?"
"Sounds like a plan." I waved at Mac and pantomimed holding a sandwich in front of me and taking a bite. He nodded, and glanced at Murphy. "You want a steak sandwich, too?"
"I thought you didn't have time to be sane."
"I don't," I said. "I don't have time to be hungry, either."
Chapter Twenty-four
"How does a police detective afford a place like this?" Molly asked.
We were sitting in the Blue Beetle Blue Beetle on a quiet residential street in Crestwood. It was late afternoon, with a heavy overcast. The houses on the street were large ones. Rudolph's place, whose address I'd gotten from Murphy, was the smallest house on the block-but it was on the block. It backed right up to the Cook County Forest Preserve, too, and between the old forest and the mature trees it gave the whole area a sheltered, pastoral quality. on a quiet residential street in Crestwood. It was late afternoon, with a heavy overcast. The houses on the street were large ones. Rudolph's place, whose address I'd gotten from Murphy, was the smallest house on the block-but it was on the block. It backed right up to the Cook County Forest Preserve, too, and between the old forest and the mature trees it gave the whole area a sheltered, pastoral quality.
"He doesn't," I said quietly.
"You mean he's dirty?" Molly asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe his family has money. Or maybe he managed to mortgage himself to the eyeballs. People get real stupid when it comes to buying homes. Pay an extra quarter of a million dollars for a place because it's in the right neighborhood. Buy houses they damned well know they can't afford to make the payments on." I shook my head. "They should make you take some kind of iota-of-common-sense quiz before you make an offer."
"Maybe it isn't stupid," Molly said. "Everybody wants home to mean something. Maybe the extra money they pay creates that additional meaning for them."
I grimaced. "I'd rather have my extra meaning come from the ancient burial ground under the swimming pool or from knowing that I built it with my own hands or something."
"Not everyone puts as low a value on the material as you do, boss," Molly said. "For them, maybe the extra material value represented by a higher price tag is is significant." significant."
I grunted. "It's still stupid."
"From your perspective," Molly said. "It's really all about perspective, isn't it."
"And from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn't blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis."
"Heh," Molly said. "And their house is much nicer than your house."
"And that," I said.
Mouse grumbled quietly in his sleep from the backseat, and I turned to reach back and rub his ears until he settled down again.
Molly sat quietly for almost a minute before she said, "What else do we do?"
"Other than sit tight and watch?" I asked. "This is a stakeout, Molly. It's what you do on a stakeout."
"Stakeouts suck," Molly said, puffing out a breath that blew a few strands of hair out of her eyes. "How come Murphy isn't doing this part? How come we aren't doing magic stuff?"
"Murphy is keeping track of Rudolph at work," I said. "I'm watching his home. If his handler wanted him dead, this would be a logical place to bushwhack him."
"And we're not doing magic because ... ?"
"What do you suggest we do?"
"Tracking spells for Rudolph and Maggie," she said promptly.
"You got any of Rudolph's blood? Hair? Fingernail clippings?"
"No," she said.
"So, no tracking spell for him," I said.
"But what about Maggie?" she said. "I know you don't have any hair or anything from her, but you pulled a tracking spell for me using my mother's blood, right? Couldn't you use your blood for that?"
I kept my breathing steady, and prevented the flash of frustration I felt from coming out in my voice. "First thing I tried. Right after I got off the phone with Susan when this all started."
Molly frowned. "Why didn't it work?"
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe it's because there's something more than simple blood relation involved. Maybe there has to be a bond, a sense of family between the parent and child, that the tracking spell uses to amplify its effects. Maybe the Red Court is using some kind of magic that conceals or jams tracking spells-God knows, they would have been forced to come up with some kind of countermeasure during the war." I shook my head wearily. "Or maybe it was simple distance. I've never tracked anything more than a couple of hundred linear miles away. I've heard of tracking spells that worked over a couple of thousand miles, but not from anyone who had actually done it. Gimme some credit, grasshopper. Of course I tried that. I wouldn't have spent half a day summoning my contacts if I hadn't."
"Oh," Molly said. She looked troubled. "Yeah. Sorry."
I sighed and tipped my head back and closed my eyes. "No problem. Sorry, kid. I'm just tense."
"Just a little," she said. "Um. Should we be sitting out here in broad daylight? I mean, we're not hiding the car or anything."
"Yeah," I said. "We want to be visible."
"Why?"
"I'm gonna close my eyes," I told her. "Just for a bit. Stay alert, okay?"
She gave me a look, but said, "Okay."
I closed my eyes, but about half a second after I had, Molly nudged me and said, "Wake up, Harry. We have company."
I opened them again and found that the grey late afternoon had settled into the murk of early evening. I looked up into the rearview mirror and spotted a white sports car coming to a halt as it parked on the street behind us. The running lights went off as the driver got out.
"Took him long enough," I muttered.
Molly frowned at me. "What do you mean?"
"Asked him to meet me here. Didn't know where to find him."
Molly peered through the back window, and even Mouse lifted his head to look around. "Oh," Molly said, understanding, as Mouse's tail thumped hesitantly against the back of my seat.
I got out of the car and walked to meet my half brother, the vampire.
Thomas and I were a study in contrasts. I was better than six and a half feet tall and built lean. He was a hair under six feet, and looked like a fitness model. My hair was a muddy brown color, generally cut very short on the sides and in back, a little longer on top. It tended to stick up any which way within a few minutes of being ordered by a comb. Thomas's hair was black, naturally wavy, and fell to touch his shoulders. I wore jeans, a T-shirt, and my big black leather duster. Thomas was wearing custom-fitted pants made from white leather, a white silk shirt, and a coarser silk jacket, also in white, decorated with elaborate brocade. He had the kind of face that belonged on billboards. Mine belonged on wanted posters.
We had the same contour of chin, and our eyes resembled each other's unmistakably in shape, if not in color. Mom gave them to us.
Thomas and I had finally met as adults. He'd been right there next to me in some of the worst places I'd ever walked. He saved my life more than once. I'd returned the favor. But that had been when he decided to fight against his Hunger, the vampiric nature native to the vampires of the White Court. He'd spent years maintaining control of his darker urges, integrating with Chicago's society, and generally trying to act like a human being. We'd had to keep our kinship a secret. The Council would have used him to get at the White Court if they knew. Ditto for the vampires getting at the Council through me.
Then something bad happened to him, and he stopped trying to be human. I might have seen him for a total of two, even three minutes since he'd been knocked off the life- force nibbling wagon and started taking big hearty bites again.
Thomas swaggered up to me as if we'd been talking just yesterday, looked me up and down, and said, "You need an image consultant, stat, little brother."
I said, "Guess what. You're an uncle."
Thomas let his head fall back as he barked out a little laugh. "What? No, hardly, unless one of Father's by-blows actually survived. Which essentially just doesn't happen among-"
He stopped talking in midsentence and his eyes widened.
"Yeah," I said.
"Oh," he said, still wide-eyed, apparently locked into motionlessness by surprise. It was a little creepy. Human beings still look like human beings when they're standing still. Thomas's pale skin and bright blue eyes went still still, like a statue. "Oh."
I nodded. "Say 'oilcan.' "
Thomas blinked. "What?"
"You get to be the Tin Woodsman."
"What?"
"Never mind, not important." I sighed. "Look, without going into too many details: I have an eight-year-old daughter. Susan never told me. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court took her."
"Um," said Thomas. "If I'd known that, maybe I would have been here sooner."
"Couldn't say anything on the phone. The FBI and the cops are involved, having been made into roadblocks to slow me down." I tilted my head down the street. "The cop who lives in that house at the end of the street has been coerced into helping whoever is trying to stop me. I'm here hoping to nab either his handler or his cleaner and grab every bit of information I can."
Thomas looked at me and said, "I'm an uncle."