Billy eyed me. “Meaning you aren’t going to tell me anything more. Because it won’t help me. You think it will scare me.”
“We knew it was here, we were ready for a fight, and you saw what happened,” I said. “If it had hit us from a real ambush, it would have been worse.”
He bared his teeth in a snarl. “We had it.”
“We had it at a momentary disadvantage-and it saw that, and it was smart enough to leave and come back later. All we did was prove to it that it would have to take us seriously to kill us. We won’t get another opportunity like that one.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You and Georgia stay close to Andi. This thing likes hurting people. And it gets off on hunting down wounded prey. She’s still in danger.”
“Got it,” he said quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“Find out why it’s here,” I said. “There’s Council business afoot. Christ, I didn’t mean to bring you into this.” I stared toward the knot of officers around Kirby’s corpse. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Kirby was an adult, Dresden,” Billy said. “He knew what could happen. He chose to be here.”
Which was the truth. But it didn’t help. Kirby was still dead. I hadn’t known what the skinwalker was before, beyond something awful, but that didn’t change anything.
Kirby was still dead.
And Andi… God, I hadn’t even thought about that part. Andi and Kirby had been an intense item. She was going to be heartbroken.
Assuming she didn’t die, too.
Billy-I just couldn’t think of him as Will-blinked tears out of his eyes and said, “You didn’t know it was going to come down like that, man. We all owe you our lives, Harry. I’m glad we got the chance to be there for you.” He nodded toward the police. “I’ll do the talking, then get to Georgia. You’d better go.”
We traded grips, and his was crushingly tight with tension and grief. I nodded to him, and turned to leave. The city lights were starting to come back on as I went out the back entrance to Will’s building, down a side street, and through an alley that ran behind an old bookstore where I wasn’t welcome anymore. I passed the spot in that alley where I’d nearly died, and shivered as I did. I’d barely dodged the old man’s scythe, that day.
Tonight, Kirby hadn’t.
My head felt dislocated, somehow. I should be feeling more than I was. I should be madder than hell. I should be shaking with fear. Something. But instead, I felt like I was observing events from a remote cold place somewhere up above and behind me. It was, I reasoned, probably a side effect of exposing myself to the skinwalker’s true form. Or rather, a side effect of what I’d had to do to get over it.
I wasn’t worried about the skinwalker sneaking up on me. Oh, sure, he might do it, but not cold. Supernatural beings like the skinwalker had so much power that reality itself gets a little strained around them wherever they go, and that has a number of side effects. One of them is a sort of psychic stench that goes with them-a presence that my instincts had twigged to long before the skinwalker had been in a position to do me any real harm.
Read a little folklore, the stuff that hasn’t been prettied up by Disney and the like. Start with the Brothers Grimm. It won’t tell you about skinwalkers, but it will give you a good idea of just how dark some of those tales can be.
Skinwalkers are dark compared to that. You’ve got to get the real stories from the peoples of the Navajo, Ute, and other Southwestern tribes to get the really juicy material. They don’t talk about them often, because the genuine and entirely rational fear the stories inspire only makes the creatures stronger. The tribes rarely talk about them with outsiders, because outsiders have no foundation of folklore to draw upon to protect themselves-and because you never know when the outsider to whom you’re telling dark tales might be a skinwalker, looking to indulge a sense of macabre irony. But I’ve been in the business awhile, and I know people who know the stories. They’d confided a handful to me, in broad daylight, looking nervously around them as they spoke, as if afraid that dredging up the dark memories might catch a skinwalker’s attention.
Because sometimes it did.
That’s how bad skinwalkers are. Even amongst the people who know the danger they represent, who know better than anyone else in the world how to defend against them, no one wants to talk about skinwalkers.
But in a way, it worked in my favor. Walking down a dark alley in the middle of a Chicago night, and stepping over the spot on the concrete where I’d almost been ripped to pieces just wasn’t spooky enough to encompass the presence of a skinwalker. If things got majorly Tales from the Darkside creepy and shivery, I’d know I was in real trouble.
As it was, the night was simply-
A small figure in a lightweight Cubs jacket stepped around the corner at the end of the alley. The newly restored streetlight shone on blond hair, and Sergeant Karrin Murphy said, “Evening, Dresden.”
– complicated.
“Murph,” I responded woodenly. Murphy was a sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department. When something supernaturally bad happened and the cops got involved, Murphy often contacted me to get my take on things. The city didn’t want to hear about “imaginary” things like skinwalkers or vampires. They just wanted the problem to go away-but Murphy and the rest of SI were the people who had to make it happen.
“I tip a guy down at impound to keep an eye out for certain vehicles,” Murphy said. “Pay him in bottles of McAnally’s ale. He calls me and tells me your car got brought in.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Murphy fell into pace beside me as I turned out onto the sidewalk. She was five feet nothing, with blond hair that fell a little past her shoulders and blue eyes. She was more cute than pretty, and looked like someone’s favorite aunt. Which seemed likely. She had a fairly large Irish Catholic family.
“Then I hear about a power outage,” she said, “and a huge disturbance at the same apartments where your werewolf friends live. I hear about a girl who might not make it and a boy who didn’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. It might have come out a little bleak.
“Who was it?” Murphy asked.
“Kirby,” I said.
“Jesus,” Murphy said. “What happened?”
“Something fast and mean was following me. The werewolves jumped it. Things went bad.”
Murphy nodded and stopped, and I dimly realized that we were standing next to her Saturn-an updated version of the one that had been blown up-blithely parked in front of a hydrant. She went around to the trunk and popped it open. “I took a look at that pile of parts you call a car.” She drew out the medical toolbox and cooler from her trunk and held them up. “These were on the passenger seat. I thought they might have been there for a reason.”
Hell’s bells. In the confusion of the attack and its aftermath, I had all but forgotten the whole reason I’d gone out in the first place. I took the medical kit from her as she offered it. “Yeah. Stars and stones, yeah, Murph. Thank you.”
“You need a ride?” she asked me.
I’d been planning on flagging down a cab, eventually, but it would be better not to spend the money if I didn’t need to. Wizarding might be sexy, but it didn’t pay nearly as well as lucrative careers like law enforcement. “Sure,” I said.
“What a coincidence. I need some questions answered.” She unlocked the door with an actual key, not the little what’s-it that does it for you automatically with the press of a button, and held it open for me with a gallant little gesture, like I’d done for her about a million times. She probably thought she was mocking me with that impersonation.
She was probably right.
This mess was getting stickier by the minute, and I didn’t want to drag Murphy into it. I mean, Jesus, the werewolves had been capable defenders of their territory for a long while, and I’d gotten half of them taken out in the first couple hours of the case. Murphy wouldn’t fare any better in the waters through which I was currently swimming.
On the other hand, I trusted Murph. I trusted her judgment, her ability to see where her limits lay. She’d seen cops carved to pieces when they tried to box out of their weight division, and knew better than to attempt it. And if she started throwing obstacles in my way-and she could, a lot of them, that I couldn’t do diddly about-then my life would get a whole lot harder. Even though she wasn’t running CPD’s Special Investigations department anymore, she still had clout there, and a word from her to Lieutenant Stallings could hobble me, maybe lethally.
