Dead Beat

Chapter Eight

I paused just before I opened the shop's door and walked outside. It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie of my life must be really low-budget.

The trick was to figure out which movie I was in. If this was a variant on High Noon, then walking outside was probably a fairly dangerous idea. On the other hand, there was always the chance that I was still in the opening scenes of The Maltese Falcon and everyone trying to chase down the bird still wanted to talk to me. In which case, this was probably a good chance to dig for vital information about what might well be a growing storm around the search for The Word of Kemmler.

But just in case, I shook out my shield bracelet to the ready. I took my staff in hand and settled my fingers around it in a solid grip, curling them to the sigil-carved surface of the wood one by one.

Then I called up my power.

Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They're a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting "Hey!" in time to that damned song-they're all charged with magic.

My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I'm not a particularly good person. I'm no Charles Manson or anything, but I'm not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn't seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn't made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.

My stupid hand hurt like hell. I had half a dozen really gut-wrenchingly good reasons to be afraid, and I was. Worst of all, if I made any mistakes, Murphy was going to be the one to pay for it. If that happened, I didn't know what I would do.

I drew it all in, the good, the bad, and the crazy, a low buzz that coursed through the air and rattled the idols and candles and incense holders on their shelves in the store around me. In the glass door of the shop I saw my left hand vanish, replaced with an irregular globe of angry blue light that trailed bits of heatless fire to the floor. I pulled in the energy from all around me, readying myself to defend, to attack, to protect, or to destroy. I didn't know what the two cloaked figures wanted, but I wanted them to know that if they'd come looking for a fight, I'd be willing to oblige them.

I held my power around me like a cloak and slipped out to face the pair waiting for me on the sidewalk. I took my time, every step unhurried and precise. I kept an eye on them, but only in my peripheral vision. Otherwise I left my eyes on the ground and walked slowly, until the blue glow of my shield light fell on their dark robes, making the black look blue, darkening the shadows in the folds to hues too dark to have names. Then I stopped and lifted my eyes slowly, daring them to meet my gaze.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought the pair of them rocked back a little, swaying like reeds before an oncoming storm. October wind blew about us, freezing-cold air that took its chill from the icy depths of Lake Michigan.

"What do you want?" I asked them. I borrowed frost from the wind and put it in my voice.

The larger of the pair spoke. "The book."

But which book? I wondered. "Uh-huh. You're a Schubert fan boy, aren't you? You've got the look."

"Goethe, actually," he said. "Give it to me."

He was definitely after a copy of der Erlking, then. His voice was... odd. Male, certainly, but it didn't sound quite human. There was a kind of quavering buzz in it that made it warble, somehow, made the words slither uncertainly. The words were slow and enunciated. They had to be, in order to be intelligible.

"Bite me," I answered him. "Get your own book, Kemmlerite."

"I have nothing but disdain for the madman Kemmler," he spat. "Have a care what insults you offer. This need not involve you at all, Dresden."

That gave me a moment's pause, as they say. Taking on arrogant, powerful dark wizards is one thing. Taking on ones who have done their homework and who know who you are is something else entirely. It was my turn to be rattled.

The dark figure noted it. His not-human voice swayed into the night again in a low laugh.

"Touche, O dark master of evil bathrobes," I said. "But I'm still not giving you my copy of the book."

"I am called Cowl," he said. Was there amusement in his voice? Maybe. "And I am feeling patient this evening. Again I will ask it. Give me your copy of the book."

Die Lied der Erlking bumped against my leg through the pocket of my duster. "And again do I answer thee. Bite me."

"Thrice will I ask and done," said the figure, warning in its tone.

"Gee, let me think. How am I gonna answer this time," I said, planting my feet on the ground.

Cowl made a hissing sound, and spread its arms slightly, hands still low, by its hips. The cold wind off the lake began to blow harder.

"Thrice I ask and done," Cowl said, his voice low, hard, angry. "Give... me... the book."

Suddenly the second figure took a step forward and said, in a female version of Cowl's weird voice, "Please."

There was a second of shocked silence, and then Cowl snarled, "Kumori. Mind your tongue."

"There is no cost in being polite," said the smaller of the two, Kumori. The robes were too thick and shapeless to give any hint at her form, but there was something decidedly feminine in the gesture she made with one hand, a roll of her wrist. She faced me again and said,

"The knowledge in der Erlking is about to become dangerous, Dresden," she said. "You need not give us the book. Simply destroy it here. That will be sufficient. I ask it of you, please."

I looked between the two of them for a moment. Then I said, "I've seen you both before."

Neither of them moved.

"At Bianca's masquerade. You were there on the dais with her." As I spoke the words, I became increasingly convinced of them. The two figures I'd seen back then had never shown their faces, but there was something in the way that Cowl and Kumori moved that matched the two shadows back then precisely. "You were the ones who gave the Leanansidhe that athame."

"Perhaps," said Kumori, but there was an inclination to her head that ceded me the truth of my statement.

"That was such an amazingly screwed-up evening. It's been coming back to haunt me for years," I said.

"And will for years to come," said Cowl. "A great many things of significance happened that night. Most of which you are not yet aware."

"Hell's bells," I complained. "I'm a wizard myself, and I still get sick of that I-know-and-you-don't shtick. In fact, it pisses me off even faster than it used to."

Cowl and Kumori exchanged a long look, and then Kumori said, " Dresden, if you would spare yourself and others grief and pain, destroy the book."

"Is that what you're doing?" I asked. "Going around trashing copies?"

"There were fewer than a thousand printed," Kumori confirmed. "Time has taken most of them. Over the past month we have accounted for the rest, but for two here, in Chicago, in this store."

"Why?" I demanded.

Cowl moved his shoulders in the barest hint of a shrug. "Is it not enough that Kemmler's disciples could use this knowledge for great evil?"

"Are you with the Council?" I responded.

"Obviously not," Kumori replied from the depths of her hood.

"Uh- huh," I said. "Seems to me that if you were on the up-and-up you'd be working with the Council, rather than running around reinterpreting Fahrenheit 451 from a Ringwraith perspective."

"And it seems to me," Kumori answered smoothly, "that if you believed that their motives were as pure as they claim, you would already have notified them yourself."

Hello. Now that was a new tune, someone suggesting that the Council was bent and I was in the right. I wasn't sure what Kumori was trying to do, but it was smartest to play this out and see what she had to say. "Who says I haven't?"

"This is pointless," Cowl said.

Kumori said, "Let me tell him."

"Pointless."

"It costs nothing," Kumori said.

"It's going to if you keep dawdling," I said. "I'm going to start billing you for wasting my time."

She made a weird sound that I only just recognized as a sigh. "Can you believe, at least, that the contents of the book are dangerous?"

Grevane had seemed fond enough of his copy. But I wouldn't know for sure what the big stink was about until I had time to read the book myself. "For the sake of expediency, let's say that I do."

"If the knowledge inside the book is dangerous," Cowl said, "what makes you think that the Wardens or the Council would use it any more wisely than Kemmler's disciples?"

"Because while they are a bunch of enormous assholes, they always try to do the right thing," I said. "If one of the Wardens thought he might be about to practice black magic, he'd probably cut off his own head on pure reflex."

"All of them?" Kumori asked in a quiet voice. "Are you sure?"

I looked back and forth between them. "Are you telling me that someone on the Council is after Kemmler's power?"

"The Council is not what it was," said Cowl. "It has rotted from the inside, and many wizards who have chafed at its restrictions have seen the war with the Red Court reveal its weakness. It will fall. Soon. Perhaps before tomorrow night."

"Oh," I drawled. "Well, gee, why didn't you say so? I'll just hand you my copy of the book right now."

Kumori held up a hand. "This is no deception, Dresden. The world is changing. The Council's end is near, and those who wish to survive it must act now. Before it is too late."

I took a deep breath. "Normally I'm the first one to suggest we t.p. the Council's house," I said. "But you're talking about necromancy. Black magic. You aren't going to convince me that the Council and the Wardens have suddenly gotten a yen to trot down the left-hand path. They won't touch the stuff."

"Ideally," Cowl said. "You are young, Dresden. And you have much to learn."

"You know what young me has learned? Not to spend too much time listening to the advice of people who want to get something out of me," I said. "Which includes car salesmen, political candidates, and weirdos in black capes who mug me on the street in the middle of the night."

"Enough," Cowl said, anger making his voice almost unintelligible. "Give us the book."

"Bite my ass, Cowl."

Kumori's hood twitched back and forth between Cowl and me. She took three steps back.

"Just as well," Cowl murmured. "I have wanted to see for myself what has the Wardens so nervous about you."

The cold wind rose again, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose up stiffly. A flash of sensation flickered over me as Cowl drew in power. A lot of power.

"Don't," I said. I lifted my shield bracelet, weaving defensive energy before me with my thoughts. I solidified my hold on my own power, wrapping my fingers tight around my staff, and then slammed it down hard on the concrete. The cracking sound of it echoed back and forth from darkened buildings and the empty street. "Walk away. I'm not kidding."

"Dorosh," he snarled in reply, and extended his right hand.

He hit me with raw, invisible force-pure will, focused into a violent burst of kinetic energy. I knew it was coming, my shield was ready, and I braced myself against it in precisely the correct way. My defense was perfect.

It was all that saved my life.

I've traded practice blows with my old master Justin DuMorne, himself at one time a Warden. I fought him in earnest, too, and won. I've tested my strength in practice duels against the mentor who succeeded him, Ebenezar McCoy. My faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe, has a seriously nasty right hook, metaphysically speaking, and I've even gone up against the least of the Queens of Faerie. Throw in a couple of demons, various magical constructs, a thirteen-story fall in a runaway elevator, half a dozen spellslingers of one amount of nasty or another, and I've seen more sheer mystic violence than most wizards in the business. I've beaten them all, or at least survived them, and I've got the scars to show for it.

Cowl hit me harder than any of them.

My shield lit up like a floodlight, and despite all that I could do to divert the energy he threw at me, it hit me like a professional linebacker on an adrenaline frenzy. If I hadn't been able to smooth it out and take the blow evenly across the whole front of my body, it might have broken my nose or ribs or collarbone, depending on where the energy bled through. Instead it felt like the Jolly Green Giant had slugged me with a family-sized beanbag. If there had been any upward force on it, it would have thrown me far enough to make me worry about the fall. But the blow came head-on, driving me straight back.

I flew several yards in the air, hit on my back, scraped along the sidewalk, and managed to turn the momentum into a roll. I staggered to my feet, leaning hard against a parked car. I must have clipped my head at some point, because stars were swirling around in my vision.

By the time I got myself upright again, the panic had set in. No one had ever thrown power like that at me. Stars and stones, if I hadn't been absolutely prepared for that blow...

I swallowed. I'd be dead. Or at best broken, bleeding, and utterly at the mercy of an unknown wizard. One who was still nearby, and probably getting ready to hit me again. I forced thoughts and doubts from my mind and readied my shield, my bracelet already grown so warm that I could feel it through the ugly scars on the skin of my wrist. I couldn't even think about hitting back, because if my shield wasn't back up and ready for another blow, I wouldn't live long enough to get the chance.

Cowl walked slowly toward me down the sidewalk, all cloak and hood and shadows. "Disappointing," he said. "I hoped you were ready for the heavyweight division."

He flicked his wrist, and the next blow howled at me in the freezing wind blowing off the lake. This one came in at an angle, and I didn't even try to stop it cold. I sidestepped like a nervous horse, angling my shield to deflect the blow. Again energy leaked through, but this time it only shoved me across the sidewalk.

My shoulder hit the building, and it drove the breath out of me. I've had shoulder injuries before, and it probably made it feel worse than it was. I bounced off the building and kept my feet, but my legs wobbled- not from the effort of holding me up, but from the energy I'd had to expend to survive the attacks.

Cowl kept walking toward me. Hell's bells, it didn't even look like he was trying all that hard.

I got a cold feeling in my chest.

This man could kill me.

"The book, boy," Cowl said. "Now."

What rose up in me then wasn't outrage or terror. It wasn't righteous wrath. It wasn't confidence, or surety, or determination to protect a loved one. It was 100 percent pure, contrary stubbornness. Chicago was my town. I didn't care who this joker was; he wasn't going to come gliding down the streets of my town and push in my teeth for my milk money.

I don't get pushed around by anyone.

Cowl was strong, but his magic wasn't inhuman. It was huge, and it was different from what I worked with, but it didn't have that nauseating, greasy, somehow empty feel that I'd come to associate with the worst black magic. No, that wasn't entirely true. There was a lingering sense of black magic involved in his power. Then again, there's a little of it in mine, too.

The point being that Cowl wasn't some kind of demon. He was a wizard. Human.

And, behind the magic, just as fragile as me.

I poured power down my arm, whirled my staff, pointed it at the car on the street beside him, and snarled, "Forzare!"

The sigils on the staff burst into sudden, hellish scarlet light, as bright as the blaze of my shield, and shimmering waves of force flowed out from me. They flooded out over the sidewalk, under the Toyota parked on the street nearest Cowl. I snarled with effort, and the Hellfire force abruptly lashed up, underneath the street side of the car. The car flipped up as lightly and quickly as a man overturning a kitchen chair. Cowl was under it.

There was a crash, and Hell's bells, it was loud. Glass shattered everywhere, and sparks flew out in every direction. The car's alarm went off, warbling drunkenly, and alarms started going off all up and down the street. In apartment windows, lights started blinking on.

I fell to one knee, suddenly exhausted, the light from staff and shield both dwindling to nothing and vanishing. I had never moved that much mass before, that quickly, with nothing but raw kinetic energy, and I could hardly find enough energy to focus my eyes. If I hadn't had the staff to lean on, I'd have been hugging the sidewalk.

There was the sound of metal grating on concrete.

"Oh, come on," I said panting.

The car shuddered, then slid a few inches to one side. Cowl straightened slowly. He'd gotten back to the very rear of the car's impact area somehow, and he must have been able to shield himself from the partial impact. As he straightened he wavered, then braced himself against a streetlight with one black-gloved hand. I felt a surge of satisfaction. Take that, jerk.

A low growling sound came warbling out of the black hood. "The book."

"Bite," I panted, "me."

But he hadn't been talking to me. Kumori stepped out of the shadows of a doorway and gestured with a whispered word.

I felt a sudden, strong tug at my duster's pocket. The flap covering it flew up, and the slender book in its paper bag started sliding out.

"Ack," I managed, which was all the repartee I was up for at the moment. I rolled and trapped the book between my body and the ground.

Kumori extended her hand again, and more forcefully. I slid two feet over the concrete, until I braced a boot against an uneven joint in the sidewalk and saw movement behind the two figures. "Game over," I said. "Stop it."

"Or what?" Cowl demanded.

"Ever see Wolfen?" I spat.

Wolves appeared, just freaking appeared out of the Chicago night. Big wolves, refugees from a previous epoch, huge, strong-looking beasts with white fangs and savage eyes. One was crouched on the wrecked Buick, within an easy leap of Cowl, bright eyes fastened on him. Another had appeared behind Kumori, and a third leapt lightly down from a fire escape, landing in a soundless crouch in front of her. One appeared on either side of me, and snarls bubbled out of the night.

More lights were coming on. A siren wailed in the night.

"What big teeth they have," I said. "You want to keep going until the cops show up? I'm game."

There wasn't even a pause for the two cloaked figures to look significantly at each other. Kumori glided to Cowl's side. Cowl gave me a look that I felt, even if I couldn't see his face, and he growled, "This isn't-"

"Oh, shut up," I said. "You lost. Go."

Cowl's fingers formed into a rigid claw and he snarled a word I couldn't quite hear, slashing at the air.

There was a surge of power, darker this time, somehow more nebulous. The air around them blurred, there was the sudden scent of mildew and lightless waters, a sighing sound, and as quickly as that, they were simply gone.

"Billy," I said a second later, angry. "What the hell are you doing? Those people could have killed you."

The wolf crouching on the wrecked car looked at me, and dropped its mouth open into a lolling grin. It leapt over the broken glass to land beside me, shimmered, and a second later the wolf was gone, replaced by a naked man crouching beside me. Billy was a little shorter than average, and had more muscle than a Bowflex commercial. Medium brown hair, matching eyes, and he wore a short beard now that made him look a lot older than when I'd met him years ago.

Of course, he was older than when I'd met him years ago.

"This is my neighborhood," he said quietly. "Can't afford to let anyone make me look bad here." He moved with quick efficiency, getting a shoulder under one of mine and hauling me to my feet by main strength. "How bad are you hurt?"

"Bruises," I said. The world spun a little as he hauled me up, and I wasn't sure I could have stood on my own. "Little wobbly. Out of breath."

"Cops will be here in about seventy seconds," he said, like someone who knew. "Come on. Georgia 's in the car at the other end of this alley."

"No," I said. "Look, just get me to my car. I can't be..." I couldn't be seen with him. If Mavra was watching me, or having me tailed, it might mean that she would release the dirt she had on Murphy. But I damn sure couldn't just explain everything to him. Billy wasn't the sort to stand by when he saw a friend in trouble.

And I was damned lucky he wasn't. I hadn't had much left in me but some hot air when Cowl had stood up again.

"No time," Billy said. "Look, we'll get you back here after things calm down later. Christ, Harry, you crushed that car like a beer can. I didn't know you were that strong."

"Me neither," I said. I couldn't get to my car on my own. I couldn't afford to be seen with Billy and the Alphas. But I couldn't allow myself to get detained or thrown into jail, either. Never mind that if Cowl and his sidekick had found me, there might be other interested parties after me, too. If I kept showing my face on the streets, someone would tear it off for me.

I had to go with Billy. I would cut things as short as I could. I didn't want them involved in this business any more than they already were, anyway, as much to protect them as Murphy. Dammit, Mavra would just have to show some freaking understanding. Maybe if I said please.

Yeah, right.

I might already have blown it and doomed Murphy, but I didn't have much choice.

I leaned on Billy the werewolf, and did the best I could to hobble along with him down the alley and off the street.