Toot frowned and scratched his head. "I don't know what it's for."
Mustn't laugh. Mustn't. It would crush his little feelings. "In a minute, I'm going to pull over and go into a building. I want guards to stay inside and around the car, and I want a couple more to go with me and make sure no one sneaks up on me when I'm not looking."
"Oh!" Toot said. "That's easy!"
"Good," I said, as I pulled the car over. "Make it so."
Toot saluted, leapt into the air, and zipped back to the rear compartment, piping orders as he went.
I set the old Caddy's parking brake and got out, wasting no time. I didn't hold the door open any longer than I would have if I'd been alone. The Little Folk do not need that kind of coddling. They're not always bright, but they're fast, tough, and resourceful. I'd have had trouble keeping them in the car if I wanted to.
Once I was out and moving, I was to all appearances alone. Whoever Toot had sent to watch my back would be silent and nearly invisible, and I didn't bother rubbernecking around to try to spot them. One thing about the Little Folk that held as well with every faerie-when they made a deal, they stuck to it. They'd had my back before, and they had it now. Heck, since I was committing a felony, they probably thought it was fun to come along for the ride.
It's tough to get one of the Little Folk to care about discipline. On the other hand, they really aren't terribly impressed with danger, either.
I walked about a block to the right apartment building, a brownstone blockhouse that had all the flair and imaginative design of a brick of baking chocolate. It wasn't an upscale place like where my brother lived, but it wasn't one of the projects at their worst, either. It didn't have a doorman, and the security wouldn't be top-of-the-line, and that was, for now, the important thing.
I got a little bit lucky on the way in-a resident, a man in his twenties who had apparently been out drinking, opened the door on his way home, and I called out, "Hold that, please?"
He did. He probably shouldn't have, but guys in tuxes, even without a tie, don't strike anyone as a criminal upon first impression. I nodded to him and thanked him with a smile. He muttered something bleary and turned down a side hallway. I hit the elevators and took one up.
Once I was on the right floor, the rest wasn't too tough. I walked calmly down the hallway to the proper door and leaned against it.
A ripple of gooseflesh washed up my arm, beginning on the back of my hand, and I jerked my fingers back in pure instinct. Huh. There were wards on the door, magical defenses. I hadn't expected that. Wards can do all kinds of things to an intruder, from suggesting that he turn around and leave, to giving him a stiff push away, to frying him like a bug zapper.
I took a moment to study the wards. They were a smooth patchwork of enchantment, probably the result of several lesser talents working together. Somebody like me can put up a ward that is like a huge iron wall. This was more like a curtain of tightly interwoven steel rings. For most purposes, both would serve fairly well-but with the right tool, the latter kind of wall is easily dealt with.
"And I'm the tool," I muttered. Then I thought about it, sighed, and shook my head. "One day," I told myself, "one brave and magnificent day, I will actually be cool."
I rested my fingertips lightly on the door and went over the wards in my thoughts. Aha. Had I tried to break in, the wards would have set off an enormous racket and a bunch of smoke, along with a sudden, intense sensation of claustrophobia. Fire alarms would have gone off, and sprinklers, and the authorities would have been summoned.
That was a nominally effective defense all by itself, but the claustrophobia bit was really masterful. The noise would trip off an instinctive adrenaline response, and that combined with the induced panic of the ward would send just about anything scurrying for the exit rather than take chances in what would have been a very noisy and crowded environment. That kind of subtle manipulation always works best amidst a flurry of distractions.
Washington's been doing it like that for decades.
I cut the wards off from their power source one at a time, trying to keep the damage to a minimum so that it would be easy to fix. I already felt bad enough over what I was about to do. Then, once the wards were off-line, I took a deep breath and leaned against the door with a sudden thrust of my legs and body. I'd been working out. The doorframe splintered and gave way, and I slipped quickly and quietly into Waldo Butters's apartment.
It was dark inside, and I didn't know it well enough to navigate without light. I left the door a little bit open so that the light from the hall would leak in. This was the dangerous part. If someone had heard the noise, they'd be calling the cops. I needed to be gone in the next five minutes.
I crossed the living room to the short hallway. Butters's bedroom was on the right, his computer room on the left. The bedroom door was closed. There was a faint light in the computer room. I entered. There were several computers set up around the walls of the room, which I knew Butters and company used for some kind of group computer game-related thingy they all did together. The computers were all turned off except for one, the biggest one in the corner, which sat facing out into the room. Butters called it the captain's chair. He sat there and coordinated some kind of game activity. Raids, I think they were called, and they went on into the wee hours. His job required him to work nights, and he claimed it helped him keep circadian rhythm to play video games on his off nights.
That monitor was on, and in the reflection in the glass of the room's single window, I could see that the screen had been divided into maybe a dozen sections, and every single one of them was playing a different pornographic scenario.
A human skull sat on the table, facing the monitor, and faint orange flickers of light danced in its eyes. Despite its utter inability to form any expression, it somehow gave the impression of a happily glazed look.
I'd been in the room for about two seconds when the computer made an awful sound, coughed out a little puff of smoke, and the monitor screen went black. I winced. My fault. Wizards and technology don't get along so well, and the more advanced the technology is, the sooner something seems to go wrong-especially with electronics. Butters had been cobbling together a theory to explain why the world worked like that, but I'd drawn the line at covering my head in a tinfoil hat in the name of science.
The skull let out a startled, disappointed sound, and after several disoriented flickers, its eyelights panned around the room and landed on me.
"Harry!" said the skull. It didn't move its jaws to form the words or anything. They just came out. "Hell's bells, you're back from the dead?"
"From the mostly dead," I replied. "You made it out of Omaha Beach, huh?"
"You kidding?" Bob said. "The minute you were clear, I ran like a bunny and hid!"
"You could have taken that jerk," I said.
"Why would I want to?" Bob asked. "So when do we set up the new lab? And can I have broadband?" His eyes gleamed with avarice or something near it. "I need need broadband, Harry." broadband, Harry."
"That's a computer thing, right?"
"Philistine," Bob the Skull muttered.
Bob wasn't a skull, per se. He was a spirit of air, or intellect, or one of any of a great many other terms used to describe such beings. The skull was the vessel that he inhabited, kind of like a djinni's bottle. Bob had been working as an assistant and adviser to wizards since before crossbows had gone out of style, and he'd forgotten more about the ins and outs of magical theory than I knew. He'd been my assistant and friend since I'd first come to Chicago.
I hadn't realized, until I actually heard his voice, how much I'd missed the demented little perv.
"When do we get to work?" Bob asked brightly.
"I am working," I said. "I need to talk to you."
"I'm all ears," Bob said. "Except for the ears part." Bob blinked. "Are you wearing a tux?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Tell me you did not get married."
"I didn't get married," I said. "Except for the whole Mab thing, which is creepy and weird. She spent the last three months trying to kill me once a day."
"Sounds like her style," Bob said. "How'd you get out of it?"
"Um," I said.
"Oh," Bob said. "Uh... oh. Maybe you should go, Harry."
"Relax," I said. "I know you've had your issues with Mab, but I'm the only one here."
"Yeah. That's kinda the part that bothers me."
I scowled at him. "Oh, come on. How long have you known me?"
"Harry... you're Mab's Mab's hit man hit man."
"Yeah, but I'm not here to hit you," I said.
"You could be lying," Bob said. "Maybe the Sidhe can't lie, but you can."
"Hell's bells, I'm not lying."
"But how do I know know that?" that?"
"Because I haven't hit you already?" I frowned at him. "Wait a minute.... You're stalling stalling me, aren't you?" me, aren't you?"
"Stalling you?" Bob asked brightly. "What do you mean?"
There was no warning. None at all. The door to Butters's bedroom exploded outward, sending splinters of cheap plywood sailing everywhere. A missile of living muscle hit me in the back at almost the same instant, shoving my chest forward and whiplashing my head back. My spine lit up like a casino, and I felt myself driven hard to the ground.
Something powerful and snarling and terribly strong came down on top of me, and I felt claws and fangs begin to rake at me.
Guess I used up all my evening's luck on the front door guy.
Chapter Ten
Claws shredded my tux, raking over my back, my buttocks, and the backs of my legs. Jaws would have bitten into my neck if I hadn't gotten my hands in the way, clamping them over the back of my neck and squeezing them as tight as I could, hoping that a finger wouldn't come up and be nipped off. Pain came in, hot and high, but the claws didn't dig as deep as they would have if this had been a malk or a ghoul, and I had to hope the damage wouldn't be too serious-unless the fight went on long enough for blood loss to weaken me.
Some analytical part of my head was going over those facts in a detached and rational fashion.
The rest of me went freaking berserk with anger.
I got one arm beneath me to brace myself and threw the other elbow back in a heavy strike that slammed into something soft and drew a startled yelp out of my attacker. The teeth vanished for a second and the claws slowed. I rolled, shoving with a broad motion of that same arm, and threw a wolf the size of a Great Dane off of my back. It hit one of the computer tables with a tremendous racket, sending bits of equipment tumbling.
I got my feet underneath me, seized a computer chair by its back, and lifted it. By the time the wolf with dark red fur was getting back onto its feet, the chair was already halfway through its swing, and I was snarling in incoherent fury.
Only at the last second did I recognize my attacker through my rage and divert the arc of the descending chair. It broke into about fifty pieces when it hit the floor just in front of the wolf, plastic and metal tumbling in every direction.
The wolf flinched back from the flying bits, and lifted its eyes toward mine. It froze in what was an expression of perfect shock, and in a pair of seconds the wolf was gone, its form melting rapidly into the shape of a girl, a redhead with generous curves and not a stitch of clothing. She stared at me, gasping in short breaths, her expression pained, before she whispered, "Harry?"
"Andi," I said, standing straighter and trying to force my body to relax. The word came out in a snarl. Adrenaline still sang along my arms and legs, and more than anything in the whole world, at that moment I wanted to punch someone in the face. Anyone. It didn't matter who.
And that was not not right. right.
"Andi," I said, forcing myself to quiet and gentle my voice. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Me?" she breathed. "I... I'm not the one who's dead dead."
The night is young, thought the furious part of me, but I fought it down. "Rumors, death, exaggerated," I said instead. "And I don't have time to chat about it." thought the furious part of me, but I fought it down. "Rumors, death, exaggerated," I said instead. "And I don't have time to chat about it."
I turned toward Bob at his desk, and heard Andi open a drawer behind me. The sound an automatic makes when someone racks the slide and pops a round into the chamber is specific and memorable-and gets your attention as effectively as if it were also really, really loud.
"Get your hands away from the skull," said Andi's shortened, pained voice, "or I put a bullet in you."
I paused. My first impulse was to cover the floor of the computer room with frozen chunks of Andi, and what the hell was I thinking thinking? It was the anger that kept on rolling through me in cold waves that was pushing for that, for action, for violence. Don't get me wrong; it's not like I exactly have an allergy to either of those things-but I'd always done a reasonably good job of keeping my temper under control. I hadn't felt like this in years, not since the first days I'd nearly been killed by the White Council.
I fell back on what I'd learned then. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, reminding myself that the anger was just anger, that it was a sensation, like feeling hot or cold. It didn't mean anything by itself. It wasn't a reason to act. That's what thinking was for.
The old lessons helped, and I separated myself from the fury. I put my hands slowly out to my sides, making sure they were visible. Then I turned to face Andi. She stood with a pistol in a solid Weaver stance, like she'd learned how from someone who knew.
I could deflect bullets if I had to do it, but I couldn't stop stop them. And we were in a building full of innocent bystanders. "You know about the skull?" I asked. them. And we were in a building full of innocent bystanders. "You know about the skull?" I asked.
"Kind of hard not to," she said. "Since I live here."
I blinked several times. "You and... Damn. Way to go, Butters."
Andi stared steadily down the sights of her gun. She was holding herself a little hitched, as if her right side pained her. That elbow I'd thrown must have caught her in the ribs. I winced. I don't mind a little of the rough-and-tumble when necessary, but I don't hit my friends, I don't hit women, and Andi was both.
"Sorry about that," I said, nodding toward her. "I didn't know it was you."
"And I still don't know if it's you," she replied. "Especially with you dead and all. There are plenty of things that might try to look like Harry."
"Bob," I said over my shoulder. "Tell her it's me."
"Can't," Bob said in a dreamy tone. "Boobs."
Right. Because Andi was naked. I'd seen her that way before, because that was one of the hazards of being a werewolf. I knew several, and they'd been my friends. When they change form, clothes and things don't go with, so when they change back, they're stark naked.
I'll give Bob this much-the little creep had good taste. Changing into a wolf must be a really fantastic exercise regimen, because Andi and naked went really well together. Although at the moment, I was mostly impressed with her great big, slightly heaving gun.
"Bob," I said more urgently. I put my hand out, trying to get it between the skull and Andi without actually reaching for it. I said more urgently. I put my hand out, trying to get it between the skull and Andi without actually reaching for it.
"Hey!" Bob demanded. "Dammit, Harry! It's not like I get much of a chance to see 'em!"
Andi's eyes widened. "Bob... is it really him?"
"Yes, but he works for the bad guys now," Bob said. "It's probably safest to shoot him."
"Hey!" I said.
"Nothing personal," Bob assured me. "What would you you advise a client to do if the Winter Knight broke into her place, fought with her, and cracked two of her ribs?" advise a client to do if the Winter Knight broke into her place, fought with her, and cracked two of her ribs?"
"Not to shoot," I said. "The bullet's going to bounce and there are way too many people in the apartments around us."
At that, Andi took her finger off the trigger, though she left it extended and pressed against the guard. She exhaled slowly. "That's... more like what I would expect from... from you, Harry." She swallowed. "Is it really you?"
"Whatever's left of me," I said.
"We heard about your ghost. I could even sort of... sort of smell you, when you were near. I knew. We thought you were dead."
"Wasn't really my ghost," I said. "It was me. I just sort of forgot to bring my body along with me." I coughed. "Think you could maybe point that somewhere else?"
"My finger's not on the trigger," she said. "Don't be such a baby. I'm thinking." She watched me for a moment and said, "Okay, let's assume it's really you. What are you doing here?"