Side Jobs

I’m going to get a hat one of these days. I swear.

The tracking spell held, and the amulet led me down the street, toward Wrigley. The silent stadium loomed in the cold grey rain. Mouse, still snuffling dutifully, abruptly turned down another alley, his steps hurrying to a lope. I propped up my coat and consulted the amulet again.

I was so busy feeling damp and cold and self-conscious that I forgot to feel paranoid, and Caine came out of nowhere and swung something hard at my skull.

I turned my head and twitched sideways at the last second, taking the blow just to one side of the center of my forehead. There was a flash of light, and my legs went wobbly. I had time to watch Caine wind up again and saw that he was swinging a long, white, dirty athletic sock at me. He’d weighted one end with something, creating an improvised flail.

My hips bounced off a municipal trash can, and I got one arm between the flail and my face. The protective spells on my coat are good, but they’re intended to protect me against gunfire and sharp, pointy things. The flail smashed into my right forearm. It went numb.

“So what, you steal my keg for Braddock, so his homo-bee cinnamon crap would win the division? I’m gonna take it out of your ass.”

And with that pleasant mental image, Caine wound up again with that flail.

He’d made a mistake, though, pausing to get in a little dialogue like that. If he’d hit me again, immediately, he probably could have beaten me unconscious in short order. He hadn’t hesitated long—but it had been long enough for me to pull my thoughts together. As he came in swinging, I snapped the lower end of my heavy staff into a rising quarter spin, right into his testicles. The thug’s eyes snapped wide-open, and his mouth locked into a silent scream.

It’s the little things in life you treasure.

Caine staggered and fell to one side, but one of the Cainettes came in hard behind him and pasted me in the mouth. By itself, I might have shrugged it off, but Caine had already rung my bells once. I went down to one knee and tried to figure out what was going on. Someone with big motorcycle boots kicked me in the guts. I fell to my back and drove a heel into his kneecap. There was a crackle and a pop, and he fell, howling.

The third guy had a tire iron. No time for magic—my damn eyes wouldn’t focus, much less my thoughts. By some minor miracle, I caught the first two-handed swing on my staff.

And then two hundred pounds of wet dog slammed into Cainette Number Two’s chest. Mouse didn’t bite, presumably because there are some things even dogs won’t put in their mouths. He just over-bore the thug and smashed him to the ground, pinning him there. The two of them thrashed around.

I got up just as Caine came back in, swinging his flail.

I don’t think Caine knew much about quarterstaff fighting. Murphy had been teaching it to me, however, for almost four years. I got the staff up as Caine swung and intercepted the sock. The weighted end wrapped around my staff, and I jerked the weapon out of his hands with a sweeping twist. With the same motion, I brought the other end of the staff around and popped him in the noggin.

Caine flopped to the ground.

I stood there panting and leaning on my staff. Hey, I’d won a brawl. That generally didn’t happen when I wasn’t using magic. Mouse seemed fine, if occupied holding his thug down.

“Jerk,” I muttered to the unconscious Caine, and kicked him lightly in the ribs. “I have no idea what happened to your freaking keg.”

“Oh my,” said a woman’s voice from behind me. She spoke perfectly clear English, marked with an accent that sounded vaguely Germanic or maybe Scandinavian. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect you’d do that well against them.”

I turned slightly, so that I could keep the thugs in my peripheral vision, and shifted my grip on the staff as I faced the speaker.

She was a tall blonde, six feet or so, even in flat, practical shoes. Her tailored grey suit didn’t quite hide an athlete’s body, nor did it make her look any less feminine. She had ice blue eyes, a stark, attractive face, and she carried a duffel bag in her right hand. I recognized her. She was the supernatural security consultant to John Marcone, the kingpin of Chicago crime.

“Miss Gard, isn’t it?” I asked her, panting.

She nodded. “Mr. Dresden.”

My arm throbbed and my ears were still ringing. I’d have a lovely goose egg right in the middle of my forehead in an hour. “Glad I could entertain you,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m working.”

“I need to speak to you,” she said.

“Call during office hours.” Caine lay senseless, groaning. The guy I’d kicked in the knee whimpered and rocked mindlessly back and forth. I glared at the thug Mouse had pinned down.

He flinched. There wasn’t any fight left in him. Thank God. There wasn’t much left in me, either.

“Mouse,” I said, and started down the alley.

Mouse rose up off the man, who said, “Oof!” as the dog planted both paws in the man’s belly as he pushed up. Mouse followed me.

“I’m serious, Mr. Dresden,” Gard said to my back, following us.

“Marcone is only a king in his own mind,” I said without stopping. “He wants to send me a message, he can wait. I’ve got important things to do.”

“I know,” Gard said. “The girl. She’s a brunette, maybe five foot five, brown eyes, green golf shirt, blue jeans, and scared half out of her mind.”

I stopped and turned to bare my teeth at Gard. “Marcone is behind this? That son of a bitch is going to be sorry he ever looked at that—”

“No,” Gard said sharply. “Look, Dresden, forget Marcone. This has nothing to do with Marcone. Today’s my day off.”

I stared at her for a moment, and only partly because the rain had begun to make the white shirt she wore beneath the suit jacket become transparent. She sounded sincere—which meant nothing. I’ve learned better than to trust my judgment when there’s a blonde involved. Or a brunette. Or a redhead.

“What do you want?” I asked her.

“Almost the same thing you do,” she replied. “You want the girl. I want the thing that took her.”

“Why?”

“The girl doesn’t have enough time for you to play twenty questions, Dresden. We can help each other and save her, or she can die.”

I took a deep breath and then nodded once. “I’m listening.”

“I lost the trail at the far end of this alley,” she said. “Clearly, you haven’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Skip to the part where you tell me how you can help me.”

Wordlessly, she opened up the duffel bag and drew out—I kid you not—a double-bitted battle-ax that must have weighed fifteen pounds. She rested it on one shoulder. “If you can take me to the grendelkin, I’ll deal with it while you get the girl out.”

Grendelkin? What the hell was a grendelkin?

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a wizard. I know about the supernatural. I could fill up a couple of loose-leaf notebooks with the names of various entities and creatures I recognized. That’s the thing about knowledge, though. The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn. The supernatural realms are bigger, far bigger, than the material world, and humanity is grossly outnumbered. I could learn about new beasties until I dropped dead of old age a few centuries from now and still not know a quarter of them.

This one was new on me.

“Dresden, seconds could matter, here,” Gard said. Beneath the calm mask of her lovely face, I could sense a shadow of anxiety, of urgency.

As I absorbed that, there was a sharp clicking sound as a piece of broken brick or a small stone from roofing material fell to the ground farther down the alley.

Gard whirled, dropping instantly into a fighting crouch. Both hands were on her ax, which she held in a defensive position across the front of her body.