Small Favor (The Dresden Files #10)

Small Favor (The Dresden Files #10) Page 2

Chapter Four

I was standing there watching the fire with everyone else when the beat cop brought Murphy over to me.

"It's about time," she said, her voice tense. She lifted the police tape and beckoned me. I had already clipped my little laminated consultant's ID to my duster's lapel. "What took you so long?"

"There's a foot of snow on the ground and it doesn't show signs of stopping," I replied.

She glanced up at me. Karrin Murphy is a wee little thing, and the heavy winter coat she wore only made her look smaller. The large, fluffy snowflakes still falling clung to her golden hair and glittered on her eyelashes, turning her eyes glacial blue. "Your toy car got stuck in a drift, huh? What happened to your face?"

I glanced around at all the normals. "I was in a snowball fight."

Murphy grunted. "I guess you lost."

"You should have seen the other guy."

We were standing in front of a small five-story apartment building, and something had blown it to hell.

The front facing of the building was just gone, as if some unimaginably huge ax had sliced straight down it. You could see the floors and interiors of empty apartments, when you could get a glimpse of them through the pall of dust and smoke and thick falling snow. Fires burned in the building, insubstantial behind the haze of flame and winter. Rubble had washed out into the street, damaging the buildings on the other side, and the police had everyone cordoned off at least a block away. Broken glass and steel and brick lay everywhere. The air was acrid, thick with the stench of burning materials never meant to feed a fire.

Despite the weather, a couple of hundred people had gathered at the police cordons. Some enterprising soul was selling hot coffee from a big thermos, and I hadn't been too proud to cough up a dollar for a foam cup of java, powdered creamer, and a packet of sugar.

"Lots of fire trucks," I noted. "But only one ambulance. And the crew is drinking coffee while everyone else shivers in the cold." I sipped at my cup. "The bastards."

"Building wasn't occupied," Murphy said. "Being renovated, actually."

"No one got hurt," I said. "That's a plus."

Murphy gave me a cryptic look. "You willing to work off the books? Per diem?"

I sipped coffee to cover up a wince. I far prefer a two-day minimum. "I guess the city isn't coughing up much money for consultants, huh?"

"SI's been pooling the coffee money, in case we needed your take on something."

This time I didn't bother to hide the wince. Taking money from the city government was one thing. Taking money from the cops in SI was another.

Special Investigations was the CPD's version of a pool filter. Things that slipped through the areas of interest of the other departments got dumped on SI. Lots of times those things included the cruddy work no one else wanted to do, so SI wound up investigating everything from apparent rains of toads to dogfighting rackets to reports of El Chupacabra molesting neighborhood pets from its lair in a local sewer. It was a crappy job, no pun intended, and as a result SI was regarded by the city as a kind of asylum for incompetents. They weren't, but the inmates of SI generally did share a couple of traits-intelligence enough to ask questions when something didn't make sense, and an inexcusable lack of ability when it came to navigating the murky waters of office politics.

When Sergeant Murphy had been Lieutenant Murphy, she'd been in charge of SI. She'd been busted for vanishing during twenty-four particularly critical hours of an investigation. It wasn't like she could tell her superiors that she was off storming a frozen fortress in the near reaches of the Nevernever, now, could she? Now her old partner, Lieutenant John Stallings, was in charge of SI, and he was running the place on a strained, frayed, often knotted shoestring of a budget.

Hence the lack of gainful employment for Chicago's only professional wizard.

I couldn't take their money. It wasn't like they were rolling in it. But at the same time, they had their pride. I couldn't take that, either.

"Per diem?" I told her. "Hell, my bank account is thinner than a tobacco lobbyist's moral justification. I'll go hourly."

Murphy glowered up at me for a moment, then gave me a grudging nod of thanks. Proud doesn't always outweigh practical.

"So what's the scoop?" I asked. "Arson?"

She shrugged. "Explosion of some kind. Maybe an accident. Maybe not."

I snorted. "Yeah, because you call me in on maybe-accidents all the time."

"Come on." Murphy pulled a dust mask from her coat pocket and put it on.

I took out a bandanna and tied it around my nose and mouth. All I needed was a ten-gallon hat and some spurs to complete the image. Stick 'em up, pahdner.

She glanced back at me, her face hard to read under the dust mask, and led me to the building adjacent to the ruined apartment. Murphy's partner was waiting for us.

Rawlins was a blocky man in his fifties, comfortably overweight, and looked about as soft as a Brinks truck. He'd grown in a beard frosted with grey, a sharp contrast against his dark skin, and he wore a weather-beaten old winter coat over his off-the-rack suit.

"Dresden," he said easily. "Good to see you."

I shook his hand. "How's the foot?"

"It aches when I'm about to get asked to leave," he said soberly. "Ow."

"It's better if you've got deniability," Murphy said, folding her arms in what an astute observer might have characterized as a tone of stubborn argument. "You've got a family to feed."

Rawlins sighed. "Yeah, yeah. I'll be out by the street." He nodded to me and walked off. He'd recovered from being shot in the foot pretty well, and wasn't limping. Good for him. Good for me, too. I'd been the one to get him into that mess.

"Deniability?" I asked Murphy.

"There hasn't been anything specific," Murphy said, "but people up the line from SI have made it very clear that you are persona non grata."

That stung a bit, and my voice turned a shade more brittle than I had intended. "Oh, obviously. The way I keep helping CPD with things they couldn't handle themselves is just inexcusable."

"I know," Murphy said.

"I'm lucky they haven't charged me with gross competence and contributing to social order and had me locked away."

She waved a tired, dismissive hand. "It's always something. That's the way organizations are."

"Except that when the country club gets a bug up its nose and decides that someone is out, nobody dies as a result," I said, and added, "mostly."

Murphy glared at me. "What do you want me to do about it, Harry? I called in every chip I'd ever collected just to keep my fucking job. There's no chance at all of me making command again, much less moving up to a position where I could effect real change within the department."

I clenched my jaw and felt a flush rising up my neck. She hadn't said it, but she'd lost her command and any bright future for her career because she'd been covering my back. "Murph-"

"No," she said, her tone calmer and steadier than it might have been. "I'd really like to know, Dresden. I've paid you out of my own pocket when the city wouldn't spend it. The rest of SI throws in all the money they can spare into the kitty to be able to pay you when we really need you. You think maybe I should moonlight at a burger joint to pay your fees?"

"Hell's bells, Murph," I said. "It isn't about the money. It's never been about the money."

She shrugged. "So what are you bitching about?"

I thought about it for a second and said, "You shouldn't have to tap-dance around the demands of all the ladder climbers to do your job."

"No," she said, her tone frank. "Not in a reasonable world. But if you haven't noticed, that world must be in a different area code. And it seems to me that you've had to end-run your superiors once or twice."

"Bah," I said. "And touch§ٮ"

She smiled faintly. "It sucks, but that's what we've got. You done whining?"

"Hell with it," I said. "Let's work."

Murphy jerked her head at the rubble-choked alley between the damaged building and its neighbor, and we started down it, climbing over fallen brick and timber where necessary.

We'd gone about three feet before the stench of sulfur and acrid brimstone seared my nostrils, sharp even through the smell of the gutted apartment building. There's only one thing that smells like that.

"Crap," I muttered.

"I thought it smelled familiar," Murphy said. "Like back at the fortress." She glanced at me. "And...the other times I've smelled it."

I pretended not to notice her glance. "Yeah. It's Hellfire," I said.

"There's more," Murphy said quietly. "Come on."

We pressed on down the alley until we passed the edge of the wrecked portion of the gutted building. One step, there was nothing but wreckage. The next, the brick wall of the building reasserted itself. The demarcation between structure and havoc was a rough, jagged line stretching up into the dust and the snow and the smoke-all except for a portion of wall perhaps five feet off the ground.

There, instead of a broken line of shattered brick and twisted rebar, a perfectly smooth semicircle bit into the wall.

I leaned closer, frowning. The scent of Hellfire grew stronger, and I realized that something had melted its way through the brick wall-a shaft of energy like a giant drill bit. It had to have been almost unimaginably hot to vaporize brick and concrete and steel, leaving the rim of the area it had touched melted to smooth glass, though half of the basketball-sized circle was missing, carried away by the collapsing wall.

Any natural source of heat like that would have sent out a thermal bloom that would have scoured the alley I was standing in, leaving it blackened and sere. But the alley was littered with the usual city detritus, where it wasn't choked with rubble, and several hours' worth of snow had piled up there as well.

"Talk to me," Murphy said quietly.

"No normal fire is this contained," I said.

"What do you mean?"

I gestured vaguely with my hands. "Fire generated with magic is still fire, Murph. I mean, sure, you can call up tremendous heat and energy, but once it gets to you it behaves like heat. It still does business with the laws of thermodynamics."

"So we're talking mojo," Murphy said.

"Well, technically mojo isn't-"

She sighed. "Are we dealing with magic or not?"

As if the scent of Hellfire weren't enough to give it away. "Yeah."

Murphy nodded. "You call up fire all the time," she said. "I've seen it do a lot of things that didn't look like normal fire."

"Oh, sure," I said, holding my hand over the surface of the flame-bored bricks. They were still warm. "But if you want to control it once you call it up, it takes additional energy to focus the fire into a desired course. Controlling the energy is usually as much effort as the fire itself, if not more."

"Could you do something like this?" she asked, gesturing at the building.

Once upon a time she would have inflected that question a whole lot differently, and I'd have gotten nervous about whether the hands in her pockets were holding a gun and handcuffs. But that had been a long time ago. Of course, back then I probably wouldn't have given her a straight answer either, like I would now.

"Not a chance in hell," I said quietly, and not entirely metaphorically. "I'm pretty sure I couldn't call up this much energy in the first place. And even if I could, I wouldn't have anything left to control it with." I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to feel any lingering traces of power around the area, but the destruction and subsequent drift of dust and snow and smoke had obscured any coherent patterns that might have given me hints about how the working had been accomplished.

I did, however, notice something else. The surface of the cut was not perpendicular to the wall of the building. It went in at an angle. I frowned and squinted back behind me, trying to line it up with the wall of the building on the other side of the alley.

Murphy knew me well enough to see I'd noticed something, and I knew her well enough to see her sudden interest make furrows between her eyebrows as she forced herself to be quiet and let me work.

I got up and went to the far side of the alley. A light coating of snow and dust had coated the wall.

"Watch your eyes," I murmured, squinting my own to slits. Then I raised my right hand, called up my will, and murmured, "Ventas reductas."

The wind I called up wasn't the usual burst I commonly used. It was far more toned-down than that, and it poured steadily from my outstretched hand. All the work I was doing with Molly had allowed me to rethink a lot of my basic evocations, the fast and dirty magic that wizards used in desperate and violent situations. I'd been trying to teach the spell to Molly, but she didn't have the raw strength I had, and it would have practically knocked her unconscious to call up a heavy blast of air. I'd modified my teaching, just to get her comfortable with using a bit of air magic, and we'd accidentally developed a passable impersonation of an electric blow-dryer.

I used the dryer spell to gently brush away dust and snow from the wall. It took me about a minute and a half, and when I was finished I caught another scent under the brimstone stench and said, "Double crap."

Murphy stepped forward with her flashlight and shone it on the wall.

The sigil had been painted on the wall in something thick and brown that smelled like blood. At first I thought it was a pentacle, but I saw the differences immediately.

"Harry," Murphy said quietly. "Is it human?"

"Most likely," I said. "Mortal blood is the strongest ink you can use for symbols like this in high-energy spells. I don't think anything else could have contained the amounts of energy it would have taken to blow up this building."

"It's a pentacle, right?" Murphy asked. "Like the one you wear."

I shook my head. "Different."

"How so?" Her mouth twitched at one corner. "Other than the blood, I mean."

"A pentacle is a symbol of order," I said quietly. "Five points, five sides. It represents the forces of air, earth, water, fire, and spirit. It's contained within a circle, the points touching the outer ring. It represents the forces of magic bound within human control. Power balanced with restraint." I gestured at the symbol. "See here? The points of the star fall far outside the ring."

She frowned. "What does it mean?"

"I have no idea," I said.

"Gosh," she said. "You're worth the money."

"Ha-ha. Look, even if I'd seen this symbol before, it could mean different things to different people. The Hindus and the Nazis have very different ideas about the swastika, for example."

"Can you make a guess?"

I shrugged. "Off the top of my head? This looks uncomfortably like a combination of the pentacle and the anarchy symbol. Magic unrestrained."

"Anarchist wizards?" Murphy asked.

"It's just a guess," I said. My gut told me it was a good one, though, and I got the impression that Murphy had the same feeling.

"What's the symbol for?" Murphy asked. "What is it meant to do?"

"Reflect power," I said. "My guess is that the energy that drove through the building was reflected from this sigil, which means..." I kayaked down a logic cascade as I spoke. "Which means that the energy had to come in from somewhere else first." I turned around slowly, trying to judge the angles. "The incoming beam must have gone right through the collapsed part of the building and-"

"Beam?"

I pointed at the semicircular hole in the ruined wall. "Yeah. Heat energy, a whole lot of it."

She studied the hole. "It doesn't look like it would be big enough to take down the building."

"It isn't," I said. "Not in an explosion, anyway. This just drilled a hole. Might have started a fire as it went, but it couldn't have sheared off the front of the building like that."

Murphy frowned, tilting her head. "Then what did?"

"Working on it," I mumbled. I judged the angles as best I could and took off down the alley. The firemen were still hard at work on the building, and we had to walk over several hoses as we emerged into the street at the back of the apartment building. I crossed the street and walked down the length of the building there, my hand raised, senses questing for any residual magic. I didn't find any, but I did smell Hellfire again, and a couple of feet later I found another not-pentacle, identical to the first, also hidden under a light dusting of snow.

I kept going clockwise around the ruined building. I found two more symbols on the undamaged building on its next side, and one more across the street from the front of the ruined apartments, and then I completed the circle, arriving back at our original reflective symbol.

Five reflection points, which had guided a truly freaking frightening amount of energy through the building, forming one single, enormous shape as they did.

"It's a pentagram," I said quietly.

Murphy frowned. "What?"

I touched the round, smooth bore mark on the destroyed building's wall. "The beam of energy that ripped through the building right here was one of five sides of a pentagram. A five-pointed star."

Murphy regarded me blankly.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of chalk. "Okay, look. Everyone learns to draw this in grade school, right?" I quickly sketched out a star on a clear bit of brick wall-five strokes of the chalk, forming five points. "Right?"

"Right," Murphy said. "You get them from the teacher when you get an A."

"Another example of symbols having disparate meanings," I said. "But look here, in the middle." I filled in the closed shape in the center of the star. "That's a pentagon shape, see? The center of the pentagram. That's where you contain whatever it is you're trying to contain."

"What do you mean, contain?"

"A pentagram like this one is a symbol of power," I said. "It's got a lot of uses, depending on how you employ it. But most often you use it to isolate or contain an entity."

"You mean like summoning a demon," Murphy said.

"Sure," I said. "But you can use it to trap other things too, if you do it right. Remember the circle of power at Harley MacFinn's place? Five candles formed the pentagram on that one."

Murphy shuddered. "I remember. But it wasn't this big."

"No," I admitted. "And the bigger you make it, the more juice it takes to keep it going. I've never, ever heard of one that would take this much energy to activate."

I drew little X shapes at the points of the star and drew the chalk from one to the next, thickening the lines of the example pentagram. "Get it? The beam streamed from one reflector to the next, melting holes through the building as it went. The reflectors formed the beam into one huge pentagram at ground level, more or less."

Murphy frowned and squinted at the simple diagram. "The center of that shape couldn't have covered the whole building."

"No," I said. "I'd need a good map to be sure, but I think the center of the pentagram must have been about twenty feet back from the front door. Which is why only the front half of the building collapsed."

"The explosion came from inside this pentagon thing? Magical TNT?"

I shrugged. "The explosion came from inside the pentagram's center, but not necessarily from the pentagram. I mean, it could have been a normal device of some kind."

"Square in the middle of the giant, scary pentagram?" Murphy asked.

"Maybe," I said, nodding. "It depends on what the pentagram was being employed for. And to know that, I'd have to know which way was its north." I circled the topmost point of the chalk pentacle. "The direction of the first line, I mean."

"Does it make a difference?"

"Yeah," I said. "Most everybody draws those stars just like I did. Bottom left to the topmost point as the first stroke. That's how you draw it when you want to defend something, ward something away from a location, or banish a spiritual entity."

"So this could have been a banishing spell?" Murphy asked.

"It's possible. But you can do a lot of other things with it, if you draw it differently."

"Like build a cage for things," Murphy said.

"Yeah." I frowned, troubled. "Or open a doorway for something."

"Which, judging by your face, would be bad."

"I..." I shook my head. I didn't even want to know what kind of terror would need a pentagram that huge in order to squeeze into our world. "I think if something sized to fit this pentagram had come through it, there would probably be more than one building on fire."

"Oh," Murphy said quietly.

"Look, until I know what the pentagram's purpose was, all I can do is speculate. And there's something else weird here, too."

"What's that?"

"There's not a trace of residual magic, and there should be. Hell, with this much power being tossed around, the whole area should practically be glowing. It isn't."

Murphy nodded slowly. "You're saying they wiped their prints."

I grimaced. "Exactly, and I have no idea how to do it. Hell's bells, I didn't know it was possible."

I sipped at my coffee in the silence and pretended the shiver that went down my spine was from the cold. I passed the cup to Murphy, who took a sip from the opposite side and passed it back to me.

"So," she said, "we're left with questions. What is a major-league supernatural hitter doing placing a huge pentagram under an empty apartment building? What was his goal in creating it?"

"And why blow up the building afterward?" I frowned and thought of an even better question. "Why this building?" I turned to Murphy. "Who owns it?"

"Lake Michigan Ventures," Murphy replied, "a subsidiary of Mitigation Unlimited, whose CEO is-"

"Triple crap," I spat. "Gentleman Johnnie Marcone."

Chapter Five

I tried to collect some of the blood in the reflective symbols and use it in a tracking spell to follow it back to its original owner, but it was a bust. Either the blood was already too dry to use or else the person who had donated it was dead. I had a bad feeling it wasn't the winter air that made the spell fail.

Typical. Nothing was ever simple when Marcone was involved.

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the robber baron of the streets of Chicago, and the undisputed lord of its criminal underworld. Though he'd long been under legal siege, the bastions of paperwork defended by legions of lawyers had never been conquered, and his power base had grown steadily and quietly. They probably could have tried harder to take him down, but the heartless fact of the matter was that Marcone's management style was a better alternative than most. He'd put the civil back in civil offender, harshly cutting down on violence against civilians and law enforcement alike. It didn't make his business any less ugly, just tidier, but it could have been worse, as far as the city's authorities were concerned.

Of course, the authorities didn't know that it was worse. Marcone had begun expanding his power base into the supernatural world as well, signing on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord. It made him, in the eyes of the authorities of the supernatural world, a kind of small, neutral state, a recognizable power, and I had no doubt that he'd begun using that new power to do what he always did-create more of the same.

All of which had been made possible by Harry Dresden. And the truly galling thing about the entire situation was that it had been the least evil of the options that had been available to me at the time.

I looked up from the circle I'd chalked on the concrete beneath a sheltered overhang in the alley and shook my head. "Sorry. Can't get anything. Maybe the blood is too dry. Maybe the donor is dead."

Murphy nodded. "I'll keep an eye on the morgues, then."

I broke the circle with a swipe of my hand and rose from my knees.

"Can I ask you something?" Murphy said.

"Sure."

"Why don't you ever use pentagrams? All I ever see you draw is circles."

I shrugged. "PR mostly. Run around making lots of five-pointed stars in this country and people start screaming about Satan. Including the satanists. I've got enough problems. If I need a pentagram, I usually just imagine it."

"You can do that?"

"Magic's in your head, mostly. Building an image in your mind and holding it there. Theoretically you could do everything without any chalk or symbols or anything else."

"Then why don't you?"

"Because it's a pointlessly difficult effort for identical results." I squinted up at the still-falling snow. "You're a cop. I need a doughnut."

She snorted as we left the alley. "Stereotype much, Dresden?"

"Cops do a lot of running around in their cars, and they don't always get to control their hours, Murph. Lots of times they can't leave a crime scene to hit a drive-through. So they need food that can sit in a car for hours and hours without tasting foul or giving them food poisoning. Doughnuts are good for that."

"So are granola bars."

"Is Rawlins a masochist, too?"

Murphy casually bumped her shoulder against my arm when I was between steps, making me wobble, and I grinned. We emerged onto the mostly empty street. The firemen had been wrapping up their job when I arrived, and every truck but one had departed. Once the flames were out the show was over, and there were no rubberneckers anymore. Only a few cops were in sight, most of them in their cars.

"So what happened to your face?" Murphy asked.

I told her.

She concealed a smile. "'The Three Billy Goats Gruff '?"

"Hey. They're tough, all right? They kill trolls."

"I saw you do that once. How hard could it be?"

I found myself grinning. "I had a little help."

Murphy matched my smile. "One more short joke and I'm taking a kneecap."

"Murphy," I chided, "petty violence is beneath you. Which is saying something."

"Keep it up, wise guy. I'm always going to be taller than you once you're lying unconscious on the ground."

"You're right. That was a low blow. I'll try to rise above it."

She showed me a clenched fist. "Pow, Dresden. Right to the moon."

We reached Murphy's car. Rawlins was in the passenger seat, pretending to snore. He wasn't the sort to just fall asleep.

"So, Summer made a run at you," Murphy said. "You think the attack on Marcone's building is connected with that?"

"I lost my faith in coincidence," I said.

"Get in," she said. "I'll give you a ride home."

I shook my head. "There might be something I can do here, but I need to be alone. And I need a doughnut."

Murphy arched a delicate dark-gold eyebrow. "Ooooooo-kay."

"Get your mind out of the gutter and give me the damned doughnut."

Murphy shook her head and got in her car. She tossed me a sack from Dunkin' Donuts that was sitting on Rawlins's side of the dashboard.

"Hey!" Rawlins protested without opening his eyes.

"For a good cause," I told him, nodding my thanks to Murphy. "Call you when I know something."

She frowned at my nose. "You sure you want to be alone?"

I winked one of my blackened eyes at her. "Some things a wizard has to do for himself," I said.

Rawlins swallowed a titter.

I get no respect.

They drove off and left me in the silently falling snow in the still hours before dawn. There were still a couple of fire crews and uniform cops there, the latter blocking off the street, though the former weren't actively firefighting. The building was out, and coated in a layer of ice-but I guess there always could have been something hidden in the walls and ready to pop out again. I overheard one of them telling another that the road crew that was supposed to clean the rubble out of the street was helping a city plow truck stuck in the snow, and would be there when they could.

I trudged to about a block away, found an alley not choked, and went in with my doughnut. I debated for a moment what approach I would take. My relationship with this particular source had changed over the years, after all. Reason indicated that sticking with longstanding procedure was my best bet. Instinct told me that reason had disappointed me more than once, and that it wasn't thinking in the long term anyway.

Over the years, my instincts and I have gotten cozy.

So, instead of bothering with a simple bait-and-snare, I braced my feet, held out my right hand palm up, placed the doughnut upon it like an offering, and murmured a Name.

Names, capital N, have power. If you know something's Name, you automatically have a conduit with which you can reach out and touch it, a way to home in on it with magic. Sometimes that can be a really bad idea. Speak the Name of a big, bad spiritual entity and you might be able to touch it, sure-but it can touch you right back, and the big boys tend to do it a lot harder than any mortal. It's worth as much as your soul to speak the Name of beings like that.

But the Nevernever is a big place, and not to mix metaphors, but there are plenty of fish in that sea. There are literally countless beings of far less metaphysical significance, and it really isn't terribly difficult to get one of them to do your bidding by invoking its Name.

(People have Names, too. Sort of. Mortals have this nasty habit of constantly reassessing their personal identity, their values, their beliefs, and it makes it a far more slippery business to use a mortal's Name against them.)

I know a few Names. I invoked this one as lightly and gently as I could in an effort to be polite.

It didn't take me long, maybe a dozen repetitions of the Name before the entity it summoned appeared. A basketball-sized globe of blue light dived out of the snow overhead and hurtled down the alley toward my face.

I stood steady as it came on. Even with relatively minor summonings, you never let them see you flinch.

The globe snapped to an instant halt about a foot away from the doughnut, and I could just make out the luminous shape of the tiny humanoid figure within. Tiny, but not nearly so tiny as the last time I had seen him. Hell's bells, he must have been twice as tall as the last time we'd spoken.

"Toot-toot," I said, nodding to the pixie.

Toot snapped to attention, piping, "My lord!" The pixie looked like an athletically slender youth, dressed in armor made of discarded trash. His helmet had been made from the cap to a three-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and tufts of his fine lavender hair drifted all around its rim. He wore a breastplate made from what looked like a carefully reshaped bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and carried a box knife sheathed in orange plastic on a rubber-band strap over one shoulder. Rough lettering on the box knife's case, written in what looked like black nail polish, proclaimed, Pizza or Death! A long nail, its base carefully wrapped in layers of athletic adhesive tape, was sheathed in the hexagonal plastic casing of a ballpoint pen at his side. He must have lifted the boots from a Ken doll, or maybe a vintage GI Joe.

"You've grown," I said, bemused.

"Yes, my lord," Toot-toot barked.

I arched an eyebrow. "Is that the box knife I gave you?"

"Yes, my lord!" he shrilled. "This is my box knife! There are many who like it, but this one is mine!" Toot's words were crisply precise, and I realized that he was imitating the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I throttled the sudden smile trying to fight its way onto my face. It looked like he was taking it seriously, and I didn't want to crush his tiny feelings.

What the hell. I could play along. "At ease, soldier."

"My lord!" he said. He saluted by slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead and then buzzed a quick circle around the doughnut, staring at it intently. "That," he declared, in a voice much more like his usual one, "is a doughnut. Is it my doughnut, Harry?"

"It could be," I said. "I'm offering it as payment."

Toot shrugged disinterestedly, but the pixie's dragonfly wings buzzed in excitement. "For what?"

"Information," I said. I jerked my head at the fallen building. "There was a seriously large sigil-working done in and around that building several hours ago. I need to know anything the Little Folk know about what happened." A little flattery never hurt. "And when I need information from the Little Folk, you're the best there is, Toot."

His Pepto-armored chest swelled up a bit with pride. "Many of my people are beholden to you for freeing them from the pale hunters, Harry. Some of them have joined the Za-Lord's Guard."

"Pizza Lord" was the title some of the Little Folk had bestowed upon me-largely because I provided them with a weekly bribe of pizza. Most don't know it, even in my circles, but the Little Folk are everywhere, and they see a lot more than anyone expects. My policy of mozzarella-driven goodwill had secured the affections of a lot of the locals. When I'd demanded that a sometime ally of mine set free several score of the Folk who had been captured, I'd risen even higher in their collective estimation.

Even so, "Za-Lord's Guard" was a new one on me.

"I have a guard?" I asked.

Toot threw out his chest. "Of course! Who do you think keeps the Dread Beast Mister from killing the brownies when they come to clean up your apartment? We do! Who lays low the mice and rats and ugly big spiders who might crawl into your bed and nibble on your toes? We do! Fear not, Za-Lord! Neither the foulest of rats nor the cleverest of insects shall disturb your home while we draw breath!"

I hadn't realized that in addition to the cleaning service, I'd acquired an exterminator too. Handy as hell, though, now that I thought about it. There were things in my lab that wouldn't react well to becoming rodent nest material.

"Outstanding," I told him. "But do you want the doughnut or not?"

Toot-toot didn't even answer. He just shot off down the alleyway like a runaway paper lantern, but so quickly that he left falling snow drifting in contrail spirals in his wake.

Typically speaking, faeries get things done in a hurry-when they want to, at any rate. Even so, I'd barely had time to hum through "When You Wish upon a Star" before Toot-toot returned. The edges of the sphere of light around him had changed color, flushing into an agitated scarlet.

"Run!" Toot-toot piped as he streaked down the alley. "Run, my lord!"

I blinked. Of all the things I'd imagined hearing from the little fae on his return, that had not been on my list.

"Run!" he shrilled, whirling in panicked circles around my head.

My brain was still processing. "What about the doughnut?" I asked, like an idiot.

Toot-toot zipped over to me, set his shoulders against my forehead and pushed for all he was worth. He was stronger than he looked. I had to take a step back or be overbalanced. "Forget the doughnut!" he shouted. "Run, my lord!"

Forget the doughnut?

That, more than anything, jarred me into motion. Toot-toot was not the sort to give in to panic. For that matter, the little fae had always seemed to be...not ignorant so much as innocent of the realization of danger. He'd always been oblivious to danger in the past, when there was mortal food on the line.

In the silence of the snowy evening I heard a sound coming from the far end of the alley. Footsteps, quiet and slow.

A quivering, fearful little voice in my head told me to listen to Toot, and I felt my heart speed up as I turned and ran in the direction he'd indicated.

I cleared the alley and turned left, slogging through the deepening snow. There was a police station only two or three blocks from here. There would be lights and people there, and it would probably serve as a deterrent to whatever was after me. Toot flew beside me, just over my shoulder, and he'd produced a little plastic sports whistle. He blew on it in a sharp rhythm, and through the falling snow I dimly saw half a dozen spheres of light of various colors, all smaller than Toot's, appear out of the night and begin to parallel our course.

I ran for another block, then two, and as I did I became increasingly certain that something was following in my wake. It was a disturbing sensation, a kind of crawly tingle on the back of my neck, and I was sure that I had attracted the attention of something truly terrible. Mounting levels of fear followed that realization, and I ran for all I was worth.

I turned right and spotted the police station house, its exterior lighting a promise of safety, its lamps girded with haloes in the falling snow.

Then the wind came up and the whole world turned frozen and white. I couldn't see anything, not my own feet as I struggled through the snow, and not the hand I tried holding up in front of my face. I slipped and went down, and then bounced back to my feet in a panic, certain that if my pursuer caught me on the ground, I would never stand again.

I slammed a shoulder into a light pole and staggered back from it. I couldn't tell which way I was facing in the whiteout. Had I accidentally stumbled into the street? There would probably be no cars moving in this mess, but if one was, even slowly, I'd never see it in time to get out of the way. I wouldn't be able to hear a car horn either.

The snow was coming so thick now that I had trouble breathing. I picked a direction that seemed as if it would take me to the police station and hurried on. Within a few steps I found a building with one outstretched hand. I used it to guide me, leaning one hand against the solid wall. That worked fine for twenty feet or so, and then the wall vanished, and I stumbled sideways into an alley.

The howling wind went silent, and the sudden stillness around me was a shock to my senses. I pushed myself to my hands and knees and looked behind me. On the street the blinding curtain of snow still swirled, thick and white and impenetrable, beginning as suddenly as a wall. In the alley the snow was barely an inch deep, and except for a distant moan of wind it was silent.

At that instant I realized that the silence was not an empty one.

I wasn't alone.

The glittering snow on the alley floor blended seamlessly into a sparkling white gown, tinted here and there with streaks of frozen blue or glacial green. I lifted my eyes.

She wore the gown with inhuman elegance, its rippling fabric draping with feminine perfection, her body a perfect balance of curves and planes, beauty and strength. The gown was cut low, and left her shoulders and arms bare. Her skin made the snow seem a bit sallow by comparison. Glittering colors flickered at her wrists, her throat, and upon her fingers, always changing, cycling through deep blue and green and violet iridescence. Her fingernails glittered with the same impossibly shifting hues.

Upon her head was a circlet of ice, elegant and intricate, as if it had been formed from a single crystalline snowflake. Her hair was long, past her hips, long and silken and white, blending into the gown and the snow. Her lips-her gorgeous, sensual lips-were the color of frozen raspberries.

She was a vision of beauty, the kind that has inspired artists for centuries, immortal beauty that is rarely imagined, much less actually seen. Beauty like hers should have struck me senseless with joy. It should have made me weep and give thanks to the Almighty that I had been allowed to look upon it. It should have stopped my breath and made my heart lurch with delight.

It didn't.

It terrified me.

It terrified me because I could also see her eyes. They were wide, feline eyes, vertically slitted like a cat's. They shifted color in time with her gems-or, more likely, the gems changed color in time with her eyes. And though they, too, were beautiful beyond the bounds of mortality, they were cold eyes, inhuman eyes, filled with intelligence and desire, but empty of compassion or pity.

I knew those eyes. I knew her.

If fear hadn't taken the strength from my limbs, I would have run.

A second form appeared from the darkness behind her and hovered in the shadows at her side like an attendant. It resembled the outline of a cat-if any domestic cat ever grew so large. I couldn't see the color of its fur, but its green-gold eyes reflected the cold blue light, luminous and eerie.

"And well should you bow, mortal," mewled the feline shape. Its voice was damned eerie, throbbing in strange cadences while producing human sound from an inhuman throat. "Bow before Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Bow before the monarch of the Unseelie fae, the Winter Court of the Sidhe."