only know one other Venator.'
'Venatori?' Bob said. 'There's like five thousand of those dried-up old prunes. They've been helping the Council fight the war, remember?'
I waved a hand. 'Those are the Venatori Umbrorum.'
'Yeah,' Bob said. 'The Hunters of the Shadows.'
'One way to translate their name,' I said, 'and it's the one they believe is correct. But it's more accurate to call them the Shadows of the Hunters. They don't know it, but we founded them. Gave them their store of knowledge. Use them to gather information, to help us keep an eye on things. And they're camouflage, too, to make our enemies have to work a little harder to find us.'
'Enemies, right,' Bob said. 'A war has to have two sides.'
I nodded. 'Or more. There are a lot of… people… interested in the old demons. They're weak compared to what they once were, but they're still a route to power. Cults, priests, societies, individual lunatics. They're trying to keep the demons nailed to this world. We're trying to stop them.' I shook my head. 'The Oblivion War has been going on for more than five thousand years. Sometimes decades will pass without a single battle being fought. Sometimes it all goes insane.'
'How many demons have you guys cut off?' Bob asked brightly. Then he chirped, 'Oh, heh, I guess you wouldn't know, would you. If you kacked 'em, you don't even remember 'em.'
'Yeah,' I said.
'Kind of a thankless way to fight a war.'
'Tell me about it,' I said. 'This is secret stuff, Bob. Just knowing it creates a kind of resonance in the mind. If someone knows to look for it, they can see it. If Harry finds out about the war, and anyone from either side realizes that he's aware…'
'The bad guys will assume he's a Venator or a rival and kill him,' Bob said, his manner suddenly sober. 'And the Venatori will assume he's a threat like the rest of the nut balls. They'll either consider him a security risk and kill him or impress him into joining their army. And he's already fighting one war.'
'Yeah,' I said.
'Um,' Bob said. 'One wonders why they won't do the same thing to me.'
'You aren't mortal,' I said. 'Your knowledge won't bind anything to this world.'
The skull somehow looked reassured. 'That's true. Tell me about this client that's with my boss.'
'You know about the Prosthanos Society?' I asked.
'Buncha lunatics in the Baltic region,' Bob replied immediately. 'They lop off their bits and pieces and replace them with grafts from inhuman sources. Demons and ghouls and such. Patchwork immortality.'
I nodded. 'The Stygian Sisterhood does the same thing-only with their psyches instead of with their physical bodies. They slice out the parts of their human personalities they don't want, and replace them with pieces torn from inhuman minds.'
'Cheery,' Bob leered. 'Sorority, huh? They hot?'
'It's generally advantageous,' I said. 'So for the most part, yes. They're dedicated to the service of a number of old demon-goddesses whom they're trying to keep in the world through the publication of a book of rituals called the Lexicon Malos.'
'So,' the skull said, 'hot girl comes into Harry's office. He drools on her shoes, acts like an idiot, and doesn't take her up on her offer to do morally questionable things to him right then and there.'
'Uh,' I said. 'I'm not sure if-'
'Being a stupid hero, he tells her not to worry, that he'll find her obvious sob-story decoy-I mean, lost child. Only when he does find the kid, he finds this book of rituals, too.'
'And being a stalwart Warden of the White Council now…' I said.
Bob snorted. 'He'll take them this book of dangerous rituals anyone could use. And the Council will do with it what they did with the Necronomicon in order to defuse it.'
I nodded. 'They publish it, because they think that by making the rituals available to every nut who wants to try them, the power that comes out of them will be so diffused that it will never amount to any harm.'
'Only the real danger isn't the rituals,' Bob said. 'But the knowledge of the beings behind them.'
'And we might never be rid of them-just as we'll never be rid of the faeries.'
Bob looked suddenly wistful. 'You were trying to ditch the faeries?'
'The Venatori tried, yes,' I said. 'But the G-men stopped us cold.'
'G-men? What, like the government?' Bob asked. 'Like the Men in Black?'
'Like Gutenberg and the Grimms,' I replied.
Bob narrowed his eyelights for a moment, apparently in thought. 'This Stygian hottie. She laid a trap for you. She knew who you were, and what you'd do.'
'I've crossed swords with the Sisterhood before. They know me.' I shook my head. 'I've got no idea why she messed up my face instead of killing me, though.'
'Because Dresden would have sensed it,' Bob said promptly.
'Eh?'
'Murdering someone with magic? It leaves an odor, and there isn't a body spray on earth that can hide it completely so soon after a kill. If Harry got close enough to sense a whiff of black magic on her, there wouldn't be any way she could pretend to be a damsel in distress.'
'He'd still be able to tell she was a practitioner.'
'Only if he actually touched her,' Bob said. 'And even then, if she's significantly different from a normal human, mentally, it'll alter the sense of her aura. Besides, sensing a little tingle of magical potential in a client is a whole lot different from realizing that she's spattered in supernatural gore.'
'I get it. So instead she changed my face.'
'Technically, she didn't change it,' the skull said. 'It's an illusion. You're still you under there. The question is why would she do that, particularly.'
I frowned. 'To slow me down,' I said, thinking it through. It didn't take me long to figure out what the Stygian had in mind, and I clenched my teeth in frustration. 'Oh, empty night. She's told Harry that there's a villain in the piece. She's shown him the picture of the bad man who took the poor kid.' I gestured at my face. 'And she's made me look like him.'
'Damn,' Bob said, admiration in his tone. 'That's sneaky. Harry's awfully quick on the draw these days. If you mosey up, he might not give you a chance to explain anything.'
I sighed. 'The kind of day I'm having, he probably wouldn't. Are you going to help me or not?'
'Answer me one more question,' the skull said, quieter now.
'Okay.'
'Why?' he asked. 'Why would vampires be a part of this? Why would something that eats people be interested in saving humanity from devouring demon gods?'
I snorted. 'You want me to tell you that it's because in our secret hearts, we long to be heroes? Or that deep down, there's something in us that cries out for humanity, for redemption?' I shook my head and smiled at him, showing teeth. 'At the end of the day? Because we don't like competition.'
'Finally,' Bob said, with a roll of his eyelights. 'A motive I can understand. Okay.'
'Okay?'
The skull turned on its shelf, to face the table. 'I can show you how to find Harry. But the first thing we do is fix your face. Come on in, let me get a better look.'
Mnemonic lightning flashed and boomed between my ears, and I felt myself smile. 'No,' I said.
The skull tilted slightly to one side, watching me. 'No?'
'No. I've got a better idea.'
5
The skull tried to explain why the tracking spell he showed me was going to work when my own had failed, but about five seconds into the technical talk I started substituting 'blah blah blah' for everything he was
