survive, much less overcome. 'Look, boy, I think Harry might be in trouble. I need to talk to the skull.'
Mouse came over to me and sniffed at me carefully. Then he made a chuffing sound, padded over to one of the throw rugs on the apartment's floor, and dragged it to one side, revealing the lift-up trapdoor that led down to the subbasement.
I paced over to it and ruffled the dog's ears. 'Thanks, boy.'
Mouse wagged his tail at me.
A folding stepladder led down into my brother's laboratory, which I always pronounced with five syllables, just to give him a hard time. I unfolded it and went down, stopping as soon as I could see the whole place.
You don't just wander around a wizard's lab. It's a bad idea.
The place was piled high with god only knows what kind of horribly disturbing, rare, expensive, and inane junk. There was a lead box on one shelf in which he kept dust made from depleted uranium, for crying out loud. There was also an eight-foot-long scale model of the heart of the Chicago skyline on a table in the center of the room. It's obsessively detailed, down to models of trees that actually look like the trees they represent, and one of the downtown buildings that was recently demolished.
It's a little bit creepy, actually. My brother's got a voodoo doll of the entire town.
He also has a human skull that sits on its own wooden shelf, between a pair of candles that have been burned down and replaced so many times that little volcano lumps of colored wax have formed at either end. There are romance paperbacks stacked up on either side of the skull, along with an old issue of Playboy from the seventies, with Bo Derek on the cover, and a long strip of scarlet ribbon.
'Hey,' I said. 'Skull. Bob, isn't it?'
The skull didn't move.
I was going to feel really stupid if it turned out that Harry had been pulling my leg about the skull the whole time. My brother, the ventriloquist. 'Hey,' I said. 'Skull. Look, it's me, Thomas. I know I don't look like Thomas, but it's me. Harry's in trouble, and I need your help to go get him out of it.'
There was a tiny flicker of orange lights in one of the eye sockets of the skull. Then the flicker grew brighter, and was joined by a second in the other socket. The skull twitched on the shelf, turning a little toward me, and said, 'Holy Clay Face, Batman. What happened to you?'
I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, debating on what to tell the skull. I knew that Bob was Harry's lab assistant and technical adviser in matters magical, that he was some sort of spirit who resided inside the skull, and not a mortal being in his own right. All the same, he was beholden to Harry, and whatever Bob knew, Harry could potentially learn.
'There isn't much I can tell you,' I said. 'Harry's new client isn't what she appears to be. I was trying to warn him. She tricked me into following her and did this to my face. I think she did it to make it harder for me to warn Harry about her.'
'Uh-huh,' Bob said. 'What do you want from me?'
'Help me get this thing off my face. Then help me find Harry so I can get him off this case before he gets hurt.'
Bob snorted. 'Yeah, right.'
I frowned. 'What? You think I'm lying to you?'
'Look, Thomas,' the skull said, its tone patently patronizing. 'I acknowledge you're cool beyond cool. You're good-looking, you get all the girls, and you send naked chicks to Harry's apartment dressed only in bits of red ribbon, all of which I admire in a person-but, uh. You're still kind of a vampire. From a house of vampires famous for being mind benders, no less.'
I ground my teeth. 'You think someone's controlled me into doing this?'
'I think that generally speaking, you don't have secrets from your brother, man,' Bob said, yawning. 'And besides, once Harry gets onto a case for a client, he doesn't come off it. He's like a tick, only his head doesn't come off quite as easy, and there's less chance of his giving you an infection.'
'This is important, Bob,' I told him.
'So is finding lost children,' Bob said. 'Or at least it is to Harry. I thought it might be because then their mother would be all appreciative and jump into bed with him, but apparently it's one of those morality things. Finding kids hits some kind of good-versus-evil hot button in his head.'
That was what Lara had meant when she said the Stygian had taken a child. Crap. Now I could see the Stygian Sisterhood's plan.
And if I didn't stop them-stop Harry-the Oblivion War could be lost in a night.
'Dammit,' I growled. 'Bob, I need the help. I need you to do this.'
'Sorry, chief,' Bob said. 'Don't work for you. Harry tells me different, that's a different story.'
'But he's in trouble,' I said.
'So you say. But you aren't offering me any details, which makes it sound fishy.'
'Because if I gave you any details, they might get back to Harry, and he might be in even more trouble than he is right now.'
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, 'I hereby promote you from mackerel to tuna fish.'
'Okay,' I said, thinking. Bob was a spirit. Such beings were bound by their words and promises, by the contracts they made with mortals. 'Okay, look. You serve Harry, right?'
'Yep.'
'If I give you this information,' I said, 'and if in your judgment his possession of this information could prove detrimental to his well-being, I want you to swear to me that you will keep it from him or anyone else who asks you about it.'
'Okay,' Bob said, drawing out the word with tremendous skepticism.
'If you do that,' I said, 'I'll tell you. If you can't, I won't. And bad things are going to happen.'
The skull's eyelights brightened with what looked surprisingly like curiosity. 'Okay, okay. I'll bite. You have a bargain. I do so swear it to you, Vampire.'
I took a deep breath and glanced around. If another Venator knew what I was doing, they'd put a bullet in my head without thinking twice.
'Have you ever heard of the Oblivion War?'
'No,' the skull said promptly.
'For a reason,' I said. 'Because it's a war being waged for the memory of mankind.'
'Uh,' Bob said. 'What?'
I sighed and brushed my gloved hand back over my hair. 'Look. You know that for the most part, the old gods have grown less powerful over the years, or have changed as they were incorporated into other beliefs.'
'Sure,' Bob said. 'There hasn't been a First Church of Marduk for a while now. But Tiamat got an illustration in the Monster Manual and had that role in that cartoon, so she's probably better off.'
'Uh, okay,' I said. 'I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about, but generally speaking, you're right. Beings like Tiamat needed a certain amount of mortal belief to connect them to the mortal world.'
The eyelights brightened. 'Ah!' the skull said. 'I get it! If no one remembers some has-been god, there's no connection left! It can't remain in the mortal world!'
'Right,' I said quietly. 'And we're not just talking about pagan gods. We're talking about things that people of today have no words for, no concept to adequately define. Demons of such appetites and fury that the only way mortals in some parts of the world survived them at all was with the help of some of those early gods. Demons who had to be stopped, permanently.'
'You can't destroy a primal spiritual entity,' Bob mused. 'Even if you disperse it, it will just re-form in time.'
'But you can forget them,' I said. 'Shut them away. Leave them forever lost, outside the mortal world and unable to do harm. You can consign them to Oblivion.'
Bob made a whistling sound.
What the hell? How? He doesn't have any lips.
'Ballsy,' Bob admitted. 'I mean, fighting a war like that… The more people you brought in to fight on your side, the more the information would spread, and the stronger a hold these demons would have. So you'd have to control who had the information. You'd have to lock that down hard.'
'Very,' I said. 'I know there are fewer than two hundred Venatori in the world. But we're organized in cells. I
