Side Jobs

“A bee,” she said, her eyes glittering. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

She swore again. “Mead.”

I blinked at her. “This thing ripped off a keg of mead and a girl? Is she supposed to be its . . . bowl of bar nuts or something?”

“It isn’t going to eat her,” Gard said. “It wants the mead for the same reason it wants the girl.”

I waited a beat for her to elaborate. She didn’t. “I’m rapidly running out of willingness to keep playing along,” I told her, “but I’ll ask the question—why does it want the girl?”

“Procreation,” she said.

“Thank you. Now I get it,” I said. “The thing figures she’ll need a good set of beer goggles before the deed.”

“No,” Gard said.

“Oh, right, because the grendelkin isn’t human. The thing is going to need the beer goggles.”

“No,” Gard said, harder.

“I understand. Just setting the mood, then,” I said. “Maybe it picked up some lounge music CDs, too.”

“Dresden,” Gard growled.

“Everybody needs somebody sometime,” I sang—badly.

Gard stopped in her tracks and faced me, her pale blue eyes frozen with glacial rage. Her voice turned harsh. “But not everybody impregnates women with spawn that will rip its own way out of its mother’s womb, killing her in the process.”

See, another answer. It was harsher than I would have preferred.

I stopped singing and felt sort of insensitive.

“They’re solitary,” Gard continued in a voice made more terrible for its uninflected calm. “Most of the time, they abduct a victim, rape her, rip her to shreds, and eat her. This one has more in mind. There’s something in mead that makes the grendelkin fertile. It’s going to impregnate her. Create another of its kind.”

A thought occurred to me. “That’s what kind of person still has her instructions taped to her birth control medication. Someone who’s never taken it until very recently.”

“She’s a virgin,” Gard confirmed. “Grendelkin need virgins to reproduce.”

“Kind of a scarce commodity these days,” I said.

Gard snapped out a bitter bark of laughter. “Take it from me, Dresden. Teenagers have always been teenagers. Hormone-ridden, curious, and generally ignorant of the consequences of their actions. There’s never been a glut on the virgin market. Not in Victorian times, not during the Renaissance, not at Hastings, and not now. But even if they were ten times as rare in the modern age, there would still be more virgins to choose from than at any other point in history.” She shook her head. “There are so many people, now.”

We walked along for several paces.

“Interesting inflection, there,” I said. “Speaking about those times as if you’d seen them firsthand. You expect me to believe you’re better than a thousand years old?”

“Would it be so incredible?” she asked.

She had me there. Lots of supernatural critters were immortal, or the next-best thing to it. Even mortal wizards could hang around for three or four centuries. On the other hand, I’d rarely run into an immortal who felt so human to my wizard’s senses.

I stared at her for a second and then said, “You wear it pretty well, if it’s true. I would have guessed you were about thirty.”

Her teeth flashed in the dim light. “I believe it’s currently considered more polite to guess twenty- nine.”

“Me and polite have never been on close terms.”

Gard nodded. “I like that about you. You say what you think. You act. It’s rare in this age.”

I kept on the trail, quiet for a time, until Mouse stopped in his tracks and made an almost inaudible sound in his chest. I held up a hand, halting. Gard went silent and still.

I knelt down by the dog and whispered, “What is it, boy?”

Mouse stared intently ahead, his nose quivering. Then he paced forward, uncertainly, and pawed at the floor near the wall.

I followed him, light in hand. On the wet stone floor were a few tufts of greyish hair. I chewed my lip and lifted the light to examine the wall. There were long scratches in the stone—not much wider than a thumbnail, but they were deep. You couldn’t easily see the bottom of the scratch marks.

Gard came up and peered over my shoulder. Amid the scents of lime and mildew, her perfume, something floral I didn’t recognize, was a pleasant distraction. “Something sharp made those,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” I said, collecting the hairs. “Hold up your ax.”

She did. I touched the hairs to the edge of the blade. They curled away from it as they touched it, blackening and shriveling, and adding the scent of burned hair to the mix.

“Wonderful.” I sighed.

Gard lifted her eyebrows and glanced at me. “Faeries?”

I nodded. “Malks, almost certainly.”

“Malks?”

“Winterfae,” I said. “Felines. About the size of a bobcat.”

“Nothing steel can’t handle, then,” she said, rising briskly.

“Yeah,” I said. “You could probably handle half a dozen.”

She nodded once, brandished the ax, and turned to continue down the tunnel.

“Which is why they tend to run in packs of twenty,” I added, a couple of steps later.

Gard stopped and gave me a glare.

“That’s called sharing information,” I said. I gestured at the wall. “These are territorial markings for the local pack. Malks are stronger than natural animals, quick, almost invisible when they want to be, and their claws are sharper and harder than surgical steel. I once saw a malk shred an aluminum baseball bat to slivers. And if that wasn’t enough, they’re sentient. Smarter than some people I know.”

“Od’s bodkin,” Gard swore quietly. “Can you handle them?”

“They don’t like fire,” I said. “But in an enclosed space like this, I don’t like it much, either.”

Gard nodded once. “Can we treat with them?” she asked. “Buy passage?”

“They’ll keep their word, like any fae,” I said. “If you can get them to give it in the first place. But think of how cats enjoy hunting, even when they aren’t hungry. Think about how they toy with their prey sometimes. Then distill that joyful little killer instinct out of every cat in Chicago and pour it all into one malk. They’re to cats what Hannibal Lecter is to people.”

“Negotiation isn’t an option, then.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we have anything to offer them that they’ll want more than our screams and meat, no.”

Gard nodded, frowning. “Best if they never notice us at all, then.”

“Nice thought,” I said. “But these things have a cat’s senses. I could probably hide us from their sight or hearing, but not both. And they could still smell us.”

Gard frowned. She reached into her coat pocket and drew out a slim box of aged, pale ivory. She opened it and began gingerly sorting through a number of small ivory squares.

“Scrabble tiles?” I asked. “I don’t want to play with malks. They’re really bad about using plurals and proper names.”

“They’re runes,” Gard said quietly. She found the one she was after, took a steadying breath, and then removed a single square from the ivory box with the same cautious reverence I’d seen soldiers use with military explosives. She closed the box and put it back in her pocket, holding the single ivory chit carefully in front of her on her palm.

I was familiar with Norse runes. The rune on the ivory square in her hand was totally unknown to me. “Um. What’s that?” I asked.

“A rune of Routine,” she said quietly. “You said you were skilled with illusion magic. If you can make us look