The first ghoul led with a claw that was fast, but not fast enough. I left it on the floor of the hallway, hamstrung it on the back-stroke, and emptied the Desert Eagle into its back as it tried to flee, shattering its spine. It's one of a couple of ways to put a ghoul down fast and for keeps.
The second ghoul came at me a breath later, and hesitated for maybe a quarter of a second upon seeing what was left of the first ghoul. That isn't a long time in human terms. When you play in my league, the ghoul might as well have put a bullet through its own head. It would have amounted to the same thing.
I threw the kukri, hard, my demon lending me strength and precision, and the knife split the ghoul's skull open like rotten fruit-the other way to put ghouls down fast.
I slapped a new clip into the Desert Eagle and had it trained on the far end of the hall when the dark figure reappeared, lit by a faintly glowing green crystal she carried in her left hand. Her dark hair was tied back from her perfectly expressionless, motionless face, and her eyes were unreadably reptilian.
The Stygian.
'Balera, isn't it?' I asked her. The second ghoul's momentum had carried it to the ground beside me, and it lay there on his back, the handle of my knife sticking out of the center of its face, the interior of his skull open to view. One of his legs was still quivering. 'Or are you Janera?'
'It matters little to us,' she replied. Her voice was hollow, empty of something vital. It sounded about as much like a human voice as the old sixties electric pianos did like actual pianos. 'You cannot win, Venator. The Lexicon Malos will be renewed. Depart now. Live to fight another day.'
I leaned down and jerked my gore-soaked knife out of the dead ghoul. Then I started a steady, deliberate walk toward her. 'That's what the other two members of the Stygian Sisterhood I've met have said. So far, it hasn't worked out that way.' I started planning my shot. Every schmuck who can conjure up a shield that bounces bullets thinks he's hot stuff. But it takes concentration to do it, and the shields aren't omnidirectional. A ricochet shot can bounce right around a conjured shield-and besides, if I could get her focused on the gun, she might not realize I was using the knife on her until it was too late.
There was a nice, smooth, polished metal surface behind her, the cover to what must have been a heating unit or a lighting control panel or something. The steel looked heavy enough to suit my purpose. If I could put part of a shot into her back, even just a few fragments from a shattered bullet, it should be distraction enough to let me put her down. 'Let's make this simple,' I told her. 'Hold still, smile pretty, and your sisters can have an open- casket service.'
Her lower lip twitched down away from her teeth in a gesture that looked like something that had never been human attempting a smile. 'But yours,' she said, her voice suddenly a purr, 'will never know you.'
I stepped forward, ready to shoot, and caught a flicker of my own reflection in the metal behind the Stygian.
It wasn't me.
The man facing me wasn't me.
He looked older, rough faced, with shaggy greying hair and a scruff of a beard. His jaws were slightly distended, as were his lips, and I pegged him at once as a ghoul who had not quite managed to completely hide its true nature under a human outer appearance.
I lifted my left hand, and the knife in it, and the ghoul in the reflection did the same thing.
The Stygian gave me another not-smile and vanished around the corner.
It took me a second to recover and go running after her-but I needn't have bothered. A heavy door clanged shut as I rounded the corner, and flickering motes of greenish light danced over its surface before leaving me in total darkness. I'm not a member of the elite when it comes to the use of magic, but I knew better than to try to force that door against whatever energies the Stygian had laid across it in her wake.
I cursed savagely.
The entire affair had been an ambush, and I had walked right into it.
This was the difference between Harry's use of magic and mine. The link between our amulets was strong enough that his more sophisticated spells would never have been deceived. The Stygian must have used some kind of masking enchantment to trick my own grade-school version of a tracking spell, and then employed an illusion to give herself the appearance of my brother once she had lured me into position to… do whatever it was she had done to me.
Why change my face? The members of the Stygian Sisterhood were no amateurs when it came to dangerous, even lethal magic. Why had she done that instead of, for example, setting my intestines on fire? Even if my demon had been fully fed and at peak strength, I doubted I could have survived something like that.
Now that the actual fighting was over, I began to feel the fear. Had the Stygian wished it, I would be dead right now, and the knowledge was sobering, frightening. Harry had occasionally accused me of being reckless and overconfident-which is, believe me, hypocrisy of a staggering magnitude. But in this instance, he was probably right.
And after expending so much energy on running, fighting, and bending steel with my bare hands, I was hungry. The park outside this building was just brimming over with happy, oblivious kine. It would be so easy to cut one out of the herd, some tender little doe, and-
I had to focus and concentrate. I wasn't working with a safety net. Another stupid mistake could kill me.
'Get your game face on, Thomas,' I snarled to myself. 'Get your head together.'
The darkness of the building was almost complete, but my demon let me see clearly enough. The ghouls were already rotting away. They'd be nothing but a stinking mess of sludge in a few hours. We were far enough into the building that I doubted the sound of the shots had carried out of it-but the cops on patrol in the park would notice the door the ghouls had torn off the building, probably sooner rather than later. I couldn't stay there.
I found another way out of the building and hurried back toward my truck. I couldn't trust my tracking spell, obviously, which meant that I had to find Harry another way. Karrin Murphy of Chicago PD might be able to find out if anyone had seen his car, but I had no way of knowing Harry would be in it, or even nearby. And even if I did find him, it was going to be hell convincing him of anything when a stranger walked up, told Harry that he was his brother, and asked him to abandon a case.
First things first, I decided. I had to find him, or none of the rest of it would matter.
I knew someone who could help.
4
Harry is one of the top wizards on the planet, and he lives in a basement.
His boardinghouse is a little run-down, but roomy. I guess the rent is cheap. His basement apartment is tiny, but the neighbors are elderly and quiet. He seems to like it. I've known him for years, and I still can't quite believe that he really keeps on living there.
Personally, I think that's why he hasn't had more trouble at home-I don't think his enemies can bring themselves to believe it, either. Maybe they figure it's a decoy he's constructed solely to give them somewhere obvious to attack, where he can lure them to their deaths. Certainly, the ones who show up don't like the welcome they receive. The defensive spells around his home could charbroil a herd of charging buffalo.
I used the crystal he'd given me to disarm his wards, and the key he'd given me to unlock his door and let myself in. His apartment was spotlessly clean, as usual-he'd turned into a neat freak a few years ago, for some reason, though he'd never talked about why.
An enormous, shaggy grey dog, two hundred pounds of muscle and fur and white, sharp fangs, appeared from the little kitchen-equipped alcove and growled at me.
'Whoa,' I said, holding up my hands. 'Mouse, it's me. Thomas.'
Mouse's growl cut off suddenly. His ears twitched back and forth, and he tilted his head one way and then the other, peering at me, his nose twitching as he sniffed.
'Someone laid an illusion over me,' I said. Harry had told me his dog was special and could understand human speech. I still wasn't sure whether he'd been pulling my leg when he said it. Harry's got a weird sense of humor, sometimes. But speaking quietly to animals when they appear nervous is always a good idea, and I did not want Mouse deciding that I was a threat. He was a Foo dog, and I'd seen him take on things no mortal animal could
