chilly tonight!”
“There’s a reason we don’t get out more often, Bob,” I sighed. I should have known better than to drive through the club district on my way to Wrigley.
“I love the girls’ pants in this century,” Bob said. “I mean
I wasn’t touching that one.
I parked the car a couple of blocks from the stadium, stuck Bob in a pocket of my black leather duster, and walked in. The Cubs were on the road, and Wrigley was closed. It was a good time to knock around inside. But since Donovan was evidently prepared to deny and disavow all knowledge, I wasn’t going to be able to simply knock on the door and wander in.
So I picked a couple of locks at a delivery entrance and went inside. I didn’t hit it at professional-burglar speed or anything—I knew a couple of guys who could open a lock with tools as fast as they could with a key—but I wasn’t in any danger of getting a ticket for loitering, either. Once I was inside, I headed straight for the concourses. If I mucked around in the stadium’s administrative areas, I would probably run afoul of a full-blown security system, and the only thing I could reliably do to that would be to shut it down completely—and most systems are smart enough to tip off their home security company when that happens.
Besides. What I was looking for wouldn’t be in any office.
I took Bob out of my pocket so that the flickering golden-orange lights of his eyes illuminated the area in front of me. “All right,” I murmured. I kept my voice down, on the off chance that a night watchman might be on duty and nearby. “I’m angry at the Cubbies and I’m pitching my curse at them. Where’s it going to stick?”
“There’s really no question about that, is there?” Bob asked me.
“Home plate,” we said together.
I started forward, walking silently. Being quiet when you sneak around isn’t difficult, as long as you aren’t in any rush. The serious professionals can all but sprint in perfect silence, but the main thing you need isn’t agility—it’s patience and calm. So I moved out slowly and calmly, and it must have worked, because nobody raised a hue or a cry.
The empty, unlit stadium was … just wrong. I was used to seeing Wrigley blazing with sunlight or its lights, filled with fans and music and the smell of overpriced, fattening, and inexplicably gratifying food. I was used to vendors shouting, the constant sea-surge of crowd noise, and the buzz of planes passing overhead, trailing banners behind them.
Now Wrigley Field was vast and dark and empty. There was something silently sad about it—acres of seats with no one sitting, a green and beautiful field that no one was playing on, a scoreboard that didn’t have anything on it to read or anyone to read it. If the gods and muses were to come down from Olympus and sculpt unfulfilled potential as a physical form, they wouldn’t get any closer than that hollow house did.
I walked down the concrete steps and circled the infield until I could make my way to the seats behind home plate. Once there, I held Bob up and said, “What have we got?”
The skull’s eyelights flared brighter for a second, and he snorted. “Oh, yeah. Definitely tied the curse together right there.”
“What’s keeping it going?” I asked. “Is there a ley line passing underneath or something?”
“That’s a negative, boss,” Bob said.
“How fresh is it?”
“Maybe a couple of days,” the skull replied. “Maybe more. It’s an awfully tight weave.”
“How so?”
“This spell resists deterioration better than most mortal magic. It’s efficient and solid—way niftier than you could manage.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“I call ’em like I see ’em,” Bob said cheerfully. “So either a more experienced member of the White Council is sponsoring this curse, and refreshing it every so often, or else…”
I caught on. “Or else the curse was placed here by a nonmortal being.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “But that could be almost anything.”
I shook my head. “Not necessarily. Remember that the curse was laid upon the stadium during a game in the 1945 World Series.”
“Ah, yes,” Bob said. “It would have been packed. Which means that whatever the being was, it could blend in. Either a really great veil or maybe a shapeshifter.”
“Why?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why?” I repeated. “Why would this theoretical being have put out the curse on the Cubs?”
“Plenty of beings from the Nevernever really don’t need a motivation.”
“Sure they do,” I said. “The logic behind what they do might be alien or twisted beyond belief, but it makes sense to them.” I waved my hand at the stadium. “This being not only laid a curse on a nexus of human emotional power, it kept coming back week after week, year after year.”
“I don’t see what you’re driving at, boss.”
“Whoever’s doing this is holding a grudge,” I said thoughtfully. “This is vengeance for a genuine insult. It’s personal.”
“Maybe,” Bob said. “But maybe the emotional state of the stadium supercharged Sianis’s curse. Or maybe after the stadium evicted Sianis, who didn’t have enough power to curse anybody anyhow, someone decided to make it stick.”
“Or maybe…” My voice trailed off, and then I barked out a short bite of laughter. “Oh. Oh, that’s
Bob spun in my hand to look up at me.
“It wasn’t
The Llyn y Fan Fach Tavern and Inn was located down at the lakeside at the northern edge of the city. The place’s exterior screamed “PUB” as if it were trying to make itself heard over the roar of brawling football hooligans. It was all whitewashed walls and heavy timbers stained dark. The wooden sign hanging from a post above the door bore the tavern’s name, and a painted picture of a leek and a daffodil crossed like swords.
I sidled up to the tavern and went in. The inside matched the outside, continuing the dark-stained theme on its wooden floors, walls, and furnishings. It was just after midnight, which wasn’t really all that late, as bar scenes went, but the Llyn y Fan Fach Tavern was all but empty.
A big red-haired guy sitting in a chair by the door scowled at me. His biceps were thick enough to use steel- belted radials as armbands. He gave me the fisheye, which I ignored as I ambled on up to the bar.
I took a seat on a stool and nodded to the bartender. She was a pretty woman with jet-black hair and an obvious pride in her torso. Her white renaissance shirt had slipped entirely off both of her shapely shoulders and was only being held up by her dark leather bustier. She was busy wiping down the bar. The bustier was busy lifting and separating.
She glanced up at me and smiled. Her pale green eyes flicked over me, and the smile deepened. “Ah,” she said, her British accent thick and from somewhere closer to Cardiff than London. “You’re a tall one, aren’t you?”
“Only when I’m standing up.”
Her eyes twinkled with merry wickedness. “Such a crime. What are you drinking, love?”
“Do you have any cold beer?” I asked.
“None of that colonial piss here,” she replied.
“Snob,” I said, smiling. “Do you have any of McAnally’s dark? McAnally’s anything, really.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Whew. For a moment, there, I thought a heathen walked amongst us.” She gave me a full smile, her teeth very square and straight and white, and walked over to me before bending over and drawing a dark bottle from beneath the bar.
I appreciated her in a polite and politically correct fashion. “Is the show included in the price of the drink?”
