Side Jobs

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 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.”