Death Curse: Chapter 16
Three more chapters to go, including this one.
Chapter 15
It was pouring rain outside. I'm talking sheet-levels of torrential downpour. Even with my hat and duster, I was soaked in seconds. I hunched my shoulders and pulled up my collar in a fruitless effort to keep at least a little dry, and headed over to the Blue Beetle, fishing in my pocket for the keys. There was a parking ticket on the windshield. I swore. It never rains but it pours. Pun not intended. Still, it was nice to be back out in the field, and the Blue Beetle looked pleased to see me too. Well, inasmuch as a car can look pleased about anything. The Beetle isn't really blue anymore, as I've mentioned. The nature of my job, plus my own nature, tends to be very hard on most automobiles, and the Beetle has taken more than its fair share of lumps and bumps. The name is something of a misnomer now, since both doors have had to be replaced -one white, one green- and the lid of the trunk in the front got slagged by something I'd rather not go into now, and was replaced with the one from a red car, and the interior got snacked on by a monster fungus a couple of years ago. Unlike all the other cars I've managed to kill in my short but colourful career, though, the Beetle is still hanging in there, in no small part thanks to my genius mechanic, Mike. If I had more money, I would put Mike on permanent retainer, because not only is he a genius who makes my car go no matter what abuse I put it through, he also never asks a single question about all the weird damage I cause it.
While I was waxing eloquent to myself in my mind about how reliable my car was, it wheezed and rattled painfully when I turned the key in the ignition, and refused to start. I swore under my breath, and tried again. Nothing. It took several minutes of fiddling and coaxing before the engine gave a cough and roared into life. The windshield wipers didn't really cooperate, but after a while I got them to at least try half-heartedly, and so I drove slowly and carefully to the address Murphy had given me. At least the heavy rain had discouraged most people from venturing out, and the streets were virtually deserted, making the drive safer than it would have been otherwise.
The address turned out to be yet another deserted warehouse. I sighed. Warehouses and I don't get along all that well. I tend to set fire to them if I'm not careful. In my defence, it's usually because someone's trying to kill me at the time. I parked the Beetle and got out, hurrying to get in out of the rain before I drowned standing up.
Murphy was waiting for me behind the yellow tape.
"Body's back that way," she said, jerking her chin toward the back of the warehouse.
"Morning, Murphy," I tried sluicing the water off myself, with little success. "You're looking awfully grim. No coffee yet?"
She set her jaw, lips pressed together in a thin line. "You'll see when you get there. You look like hell, Dresden. You sure you're up for this?"
I shrugged. "I feel okay. It's been a rough week. Forgive me if I don't bounce back from this sort of thing the way my brother does -he has a significant metabolic advantage over me."
"I thought he didn't have a metabolism?"
"Exactly." I shivered in spite of myself. Water had dripped down the back of my neck and was now soaking my shirt. I gave Murphy what I hoped was a forbidding look, to forestall any more questions along the lines of was I all right and was I sure I could do this and so on. "What would you like me to look at?"
"Follow me," she turned on her heel and led me past the small troupe of uniforms and crime scene specialists who were milling about with a whole lot more equipment than I was strictly comfortable being around. I've already cost the department a lot of money in damaged equipment, although technically most of that wasn't my fault. "I figured that you ought to take a look around, since you haven't seen any of the crime scenes before this. It's about the same as the others, except the location is different. Sniff around, see if you can pick up whatever it is that happened to this guy? Official cause of death on the others is total hypovolimia, caused by, and I quote "we don't know what the hell it was."
"Murphy, speak English, please."
She turned and gave me a smirk. "Fever addled your command of the language, Dresden? Exsanguination. Complete blood loss. Hence the vampires."
"You could have just said right off," I grumbled. It was good to see she hadn't lost all her humour, though. That's when I knew things were bad.
The body belonged to a young man in his early twenties. Clean-cut, all-American boy, by the looks of him, dressed in jeans, keds and a grey hoodie, very obviously posed in a manner reminiscent of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, minus the extra limbs, obviously.
I ignored the looks I was drawing and knelt next to the body. Exsanguination is a hell of a way to go, but that wasn't really what I was looking for. We already knew that vampires were responsible, after all. So the question was not who, but why? I pulled off the glove from my left hand, flexing the fingers gingerly. My hand still looks like a melted wax replica, but it's better than it was, and I've slowly been getting more sensation and increased mobility in it. Butters thinks it has something to do with the fact that wizards live a lot longer than most humans. It's not exactly super-human healing capabilities, but it's better than what most people could expect. My hand got burned beyond recognition the last time I faced off against Black Court vampires, and this whole situation was not making me feel all that optimistic. I stretched my hand over the body, concentrating: magic is like anything else, it leaves traces, if you know what you're looking for. It's a bit different for everyone, but I can usually feel it prickle against my skin, like electricity.
I felt nothing.
I blinked, surprised, and tried again. There was no way, knowing what I did, that there would be no residual magic hovering around. Still nothing. I sighed. I didn't want to open up my Sight yet again, at least not unless it was a last resort. Too many horrible things floating around in there already. Murphy cleared her throat from behind me, and I gave a jump, startled.
"Find anything?"
I shook my head. "I've only been here thirty seconds, Murph. I can't sense any magical energy, but I'm going to try something else."
"Try not to drip water on the corpse, okay?"
I ignored her, and rummaged in my pouch for some copper filings. "Has the scene been cleared yet? I want to scatter these around, but I don't want to contaminate anything."
She nodded. "You're good to go."
There are a lot of things about magic that don't make sense to me, even though I've been studying it for years. Copper is one of them. It works, and that's all there is to it. So when I scattered the filings around the body, they immediately took the shape of what had been done to this kid. I felt vaguely sick. Someone had traced a pentacle on the floor around him, although the body had been placed upside-down inside the figure, the tip of the pentagram sticking out from between his legs. I wear a silver pentacle around my neck, left to me by my mother, and using the sign of my religion -everything I believe in- and perverting it like this, well, it made my stomach turn. I heard Murphy suck in her breath with a small hiss.
"Dresden, is that what I think it is?"
I nodded, then got to my feet. Why hadn't I been able to sense it? "What else do we know about these murders?"
Murphy didn't answer. When I turned to her I found her looking at me, her eyes wide. "Dresden..." I felt something wet on my upper lip. Great. I was dripping rain water on her corpse after all. I reached up to wipe the rain away, and my fingertips came away crimson. She fumbled in a pocket, came up with a wad of tissues and handed them to me.
"Thanks," it came out a little muffled as I pinched my nose shut. Just great.
Murphy touched my elbow lightly. "Sit over here, and keep your head back."
I found a chair and complied. Arguing with Murphy is not something I undertake lightly, and the nosebleed was getting worse rather than better. I could taste copper in my mouth, and I knew it wasn't because of the shavings. I leaned over as I threatened to choke on my own blood, and was working on finding a way to stem the flow when another voice broke into my thoughts.
"Harry Dresden. It's bad enough I turned a blind eye while Murphy let you in on this, but do you have to bleed all over my crime scene, too? How am I supposed to explain your presence here if we trace anything back to you?"
"Stallings," I raised a hand in greeting, the other one still clamped over my nose. "Sorry about the mess. Not intentional."
"Who did you piss off?" he grinned at me.
"No one, I swear. It's an honest-to-God nosebleed. No one punched me. Not this time, anyway." I coughed and swallowed another mouthful of blood. Yuck.
"If you say so, Dresden. Now, unless you've managed to solve this thing in the last two minutes, I'm going to turn my back and walk in the other direction."
"It was nice not seeing you, Stallings."
I like Stallings. He's a stand-up guy. He took over SI from Murphy after I inadvertently cost her her post and her rank. Again, not exactly my fault, and Murphy doesn't hold it against me. She wanted to come, wanted to help, and neither of us counted on the fact that time moves differently in the Nevernever, and she lost a whole day while we thought we were only gone for a couple of hours at best. Unexplained absences are usually worth an officer's badge, and in this case Murphy lost SI and was broken back down to Sergeant. She might not hold it against me, but I can't help but hold it against myself. Stallings got a promotion out of the deal, and he's certainly more open-minded than most cops. He also has a very fine line to walk, given the bad PR that SI has been getting of late. Again, sort of my fault. So he couldn't very well hire me as a consultant anymore, something which made my wallet a whole lot lighter these days. The only thing keeping me afloat, aside from the occasional client who found me through the phone book, was the stipend I was getting from the Council as a Warden. Yeah, I can't quite wrap my mind around the grey cloak either, but the Council kind of ran out of options during the war: with so many casualties, it was either offer me the cloak or else have most of the region go unpoliced.
I glanced up at Murphy. "Any chance I can see the rest of the files?"
She handed me another wad of tissues, as I'd soaked through the current handful, then squatted down on her heels, surveying the body. "I'll see what I can manage. What I just can't figure out is how they're picking their victims. There's no apparent link between them, apart from their age, and there's been a murder almost every week for the past month. It doesn't make any sense."
I dabbed at my nose with the tissues, the bleeding seemingly having stopped. "There might not be a connection," I said, annoyed at how congested I sounded. Stupid nosebleed. "It might just be random kids they're grabbing. I'd have to look at all the crime scene photos to be sure, but I think the connection is elsewhere."
"You feeling up to coming back to the precinct with me? I can't take the photos to you, but I can probably smuggle you into them, as long as you're really, really discreet, Dresden."
"You know me. Discretion is my middle name."
"I thought it was Blackstone Copperfield."
I glared at her. "Conjure by it at your own risk."
She rolled her eyes. "Perish the thought. Anything else you want to do here before we leave? I've got all I need for now. Unlike you, some of us have been working since before dawn."
I mimicked the motion of rolling up my sleeves. "Give me ten minutes to work my mojo, and then we can go."
"Okay, Dresden. Ten minutes."
Chapter 17
Chapter 15
It was pouring rain outside. I'm talking sheet-levels of torrential downpour. Even with my hat and duster, I was soaked in seconds. I hunched my shoulders and pulled up my collar in a fruitless effort to keep at least a little dry, and headed over to the Blue Beetle, fishing in my pocket for the keys. There was a parking ticket on the windshield. I swore. It never rains but it pours. Pun not intended. Still, it was nice to be back out in the field, and the Blue Beetle looked pleased to see me too. Well, inasmuch as a car can look pleased about anything. The Beetle isn't really blue anymore, as I've mentioned. The nature of my job, plus my own nature, tends to be very hard on most automobiles, and the Beetle has taken more than its fair share of lumps and bumps. The name is something of a misnomer now, since both doors have had to be replaced -one white, one green- and the lid of the trunk in the front got slagged by something I'd rather not go into now, and was replaced with the one from a red car, and the interior got snacked on by a monster fungus a couple of years ago. Unlike all the other cars I've managed to kill in my short but colourful career, though, the Beetle is still hanging in there, in no small part thanks to my genius mechanic, Mike. If I had more money, I would put Mike on permanent retainer, because not only is he a genius who makes my car go no matter what abuse I put it through, he also never asks a single question about all the weird damage I cause it.
While I was waxing eloquent to myself in my mind about how reliable my car was, it wheezed and rattled painfully when I turned the key in the ignition, and refused to start. I swore under my breath, and tried again. Nothing. It took several minutes of fiddling and coaxing before the engine gave a cough and roared into life. The windshield wipers didn't really cooperate, but after a while I got them to at least try half-heartedly, and so I drove slowly and carefully to the address Murphy had given me. At least the heavy rain had discouraged most people from venturing out, and the streets were virtually deserted, making the drive safer than it would have been otherwise.
The address turned out to be yet another deserted warehouse. I sighed. Warehouses and I don't get along all that well. I tend to set fire to them if I'm not careful. In my defence, it's usually because someone's trying to kill me at the time. I parked the Beetle and got out, hurrying to get in out of the rain before I drowned standing up.
Murphy was waiting for me behind the yellow tape.
"Body's back that way," she said, jerking her chin toward the back of the warehouse.
"Morning, Murphy," I tried sluicing the water off myself, with little success. "You're looking awfully grim. No coffee yet?"
She set her jaw, lips pressed together in a thin line. "You'll see when you get there. You look like hell, Dresden. You sure you're up for this?"
I shrugged. "I feel okay. It's been a rough week. Forgive me if I don't bounce back from this sort of thing the way my brother does -he has a significant metabolic advantage over me."
"I thought he didn't have a metabolism?"
"Exactly." I shivered in spite of myself. Water had dripped down the back of my neck and was now soaking my shirt. I gave Murphy what I hoped was a forbidding look, to forestall any more questions along the lines of was I all right and was I sure I could do this and so on. "What would you like me to look at?"
"Follow me," she turned on her heel and led me past the small troupe of uniforms and crime scene specialists who were milling about with a whole lot more equipment than I was strictly comfortable being around. I've already cost the department a lot of money in damaged equipment, although technically most of that wasn't my fault. "I figured that you ought to take a look around, since you haven't seen any of the crime scenes before this. It's about the same as the others, except the location is different. Sniff around, see if you can pick up whatever it is that happened to this guy? Official cause of death on the others is total hypovolimia, caused by, and I quote "we don't know what the hell it was."
"Murphy, speak English, please."
She turned and gave me a smirk. "Fever addled your command of the language, Dresden? Exsanguination. Complete blood loss. Hence the vampires."
"You could have just said right off," I grumbled. It was good to see she hadn't lost all her humour, though. That's when I knew things were bad.
The body belonged to a young man in his early twenties. Clean-cut, all-American boy, by the looks of him, dressed in jeans, keds and a grey hoodie, very obviously posed in a manner reminiscent of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, minus the extra limbs, obviously.
I ignored the looks I was drawing and knelt next to the body. Exsanguination is a hell of a way to go, but that wasn't really what I was looking for. We already knew that vampires were responsible, after all. So the question was not who, but why? I pulled off the glove from my left hand, flexing the fingers gingerly. My hand still looks like a melted wax replica, but it's better than it was, and I've slowly been getting more sensation and increased mobility in it. Butters thinks it has something to do with the fact that wizards live a lot longer than most humans. It's not exactly super-human healing capabilities, but it's better than what most people could expect. My hand got burned beyond recognition the last time I faced off against Black Court vampires, and this whole situation was not making me feel all that optimistic. I stretched my hand over the body, concentrating: magic is like anything else, it leaves traces, if you know what you're looking for. It's a bit different for everyone, but I can usually feel it prickle against my skin, like electricity.
I felt nothing.
I blinked, surprised, and tried again. There was no way, knowing what I did, that there would be no residual magic hovering around. Still nothing. I sighed. I didn't want to open up my Sight yet again, at least not unless it was a last resort. Too many horrible things floating around in there already. Murphy cleared her throat from behind me, and I gave a jump, startled.
"Find anything?"
I shook my head. "I've only been here thirty seconds, Murph. I can't sense any magical energy, but I'm going to try something else."
"Try not to drip water on the corpse, okay?"
I ignored her, and rummaged in my pouch for some copper filings. "Has the scene been cleared yet? I want to scatter these around, but I don't want to contaminate anything."
She nodded. "You're good to go."
There are a lot of things about magic that don't make sense to me, even though I've been studying it for years. Copper is one of them. It works, and that's all there is to it. So when I scattered the filings around the body, they immediately took the shape of what had been done to this kid. I felt vaguely sick. Someone had traced a pentacle on the floor around him, although the body had been placed upside-down inside the figure, the tip of the pentagram sticking out from between his legs. I wear a silver pentacle around my neck, left to me by my mother, and using the sign of my religion -everything I believe in- and perverting it like this, well, it made my stomach turn. I heard Murphy suck in her breath with a small hiss.
"Dresden, is that what I think it is?"
I nodded, then got to my feet. Why hadn't I been able to sense it? "What else do we know about these murders?"
Murphy didn't answer. When I turned to her I found her looking at me, her eyes wide. "Dresden..." I felt something wet on my upper lip. Great. I was dripping rain water on her corpse after all. I reached up to wipe the rain away, and my fingertips came away crimson. She fumbled in a pocket, came up with a wad of tissues and handed them to me.
"Thanks," it came out a little muffled as I pinched my nose shut. Just great.
Murphy touched my elbow lightly. "Sit over here, and keep your head back."
I found a chair and complied. Arguing with Murphy is not something I undertake lightly, and the nosebleed was getting worse rather than better. I could taste copper in my mouth, and I knew it wasn't because of the shavings. I leaned over as I threatened to choke on my own blood, and was working on finding a way to stem the flow when another voice broke into my thoughts.
"Harry Dresden. It's bad enough I turned a blind eye while Murphy let you in on this, but do you have to bleed all over my crime scene, too? How am I supposed to explain your presence here if we trace anything back to you?"
"Stallings," I raised a hand in greeting, the other one still clamped over my nose. "Sorry about the mess. Not intentional."
"Who did you piss off?" he grinned at me.
"No one, I swear. It's an honest-to-God nosebleed. No one punched me. Not this time, anyway." I coughed and swallowed another mouthful of blood. Yuck.
"If you say so, Dresden. Now, unless you've managed to solve this thing in the last two minutes, I'm going to turn my back and walk in the other direction."
"It was nice not seeing you, Stallings."
I like Stallings. He's a stand-up guy. He took over SI from Murphy after I inadvertently cost her her post and her rank. Again, not exactly my fault, and Murphy doesn't hold it against me. She wanted to come, wanted to help, and neither of us counted on the fact that time moves differently in the Nevernever, and she lost a whole day while we thought we were only gone for a couple of hours at best. Unexplained absences are usually worth an officer's badge, and in this case Murphy lost SI and was broken back down to Sergeant. She might not hold it against me, but I can't help but hold it against myself. Stallings got a promotion out of the deal, and he's certainly more open-minded than most cops. He also has a very fine line to walk, given the bad PR that SI has been getting of late. Again, sort of my fault. So he couldn't very well hire me as a consultant anymore, something which made my wallet a whole lot lighter these days. The only thing keeping me afloat, aside from the occasional client who found me through the phone book, was the stipend I was getting from the Council as a Warden. Yeah, I can't quite wrap my mind around the grey cloak either, but the Council kind of ran out of options during the war: with so many casualties, it was either offer me the cloak or else have most of the region go unpoliced.
I glanced up at Murphy. "Any chance I can see the rest of the files?"
She handed me another wad of tissues, as I'd soaked through the current handful, then squatted down on her heels, surveying the body. "I'll see what I can manage. What I just can't figure out is how they're picking their victims. There's no apparent link between them, apart from their age, and there's been a murder almost every week for the past month. It doesn't make any sense."
I dabbed at my nose with the tissues, the bleeding seemingly having stopped. "There might not be a connection," I said, annoyed at how congested I sounded. Stupid nosebleed. "It might just be random kids they're grabbing. I'd have to look at all the crime scene photos to be sure, but I think the connection is elsewhere."
"You feeling up to coming back to the precinct with me? I can't take the photos to you, but I can probably smuggle you into them, as long as you're really, really discreet, Dresden."
"You know me. Discretion is my middle name."
"I thought it was Blackstone Copperfield."
I glared at her. "Conjure by it at your own risk."
She rolled her eyes. "Perish the thought. Anything else you want to do here before we leave? I've got all I need for now. Unlike you, some of us have been working since before dawn."
I mimicked the motion of rolling up my sleeves. "Give me ten minutes to work my mojo, and then we can go."
"Okay, Dresden. Ten minutes."
Chapter 17