Side Jobs

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 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