Dead Beat

My stupid hand hurt like hell. I had half a dozen really gut-wrenchingly good reasons to be afraid, and I was. Worst of all, if I made any mistakes, Murphy was going to be the one to pay for it. If that happened, I didn’t know what I would do.

I drew it all in, the good, the bad, and the crazy, a low buzz that coursed through the air and rattled the idols and candles and incense holders on their shelves in the store around me. In the glass door of the shop I saw my left hand vanish, replaced with an irregular globe of angry blue light that trailed bits of heatless fire to the floor. I pulled in the energy from all around me, readying myself to defend, to attack, to protect, or to destroy. I didn’t know what the two cloaked figures wanted, but I wanted them to know that if they’d come looking for a fight, I’d be willing to oblige them.

I held my power around me like a cloak and slipped out to face the pair waiting for me on the sidewalk. I took my time, every step unhurried and precise. I kept an eye on them, but only in my peripheral vision. Otherwise I left my eyes on the ground and walked slowly, until the blue glow of my shield light fell on their dark robes, making the black look blue, darkening the shadows in the folds to hues too dark to have names. Then I stopped and lifted my eyes slowly, daring them to meet my gaze.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought the pair of them rocked back a little, swaying like reeds before an oncoming storm. October wind blew about us, freezing-cold air that took its chill from the icy depths of Lake Michigan.

"What do you want?" I asked them. I borrowed frost from the wind and put it in my voice.

The larger of the pair spoke. "The book."

But which book? I wondered. "Uh-huh. You’re a Schubert fan boy, aren’t you? You’ve got the look."

"Goethe, actually," he said. "Give it to me."

He was definitely after a copy of der Erlking, then. His voice was… odd. Male, certainly, but it didn’t sound quite human. There was a kind of quavering buzz in it that made it warble, somehow, made the words slither uncertainly. The words were slow and enunciated. They had to be, in order to be intelligible.

"Bite me," I answered him. "Get your own book, Kemmlerite."

"I have nothing but disdain for the madman Kemmler," he spat. "Have a care what insults you offer. This need not involve you at all, Dresden."

That gave me a moment’s pause, as they say. Taking on arrogant, powerful dark wizards is one thing. Taking on ones who have done their homework and who know who you are is something else entirely. It was my turn to be rattled.

The dark figure noted it. His not-human voice swayed into the night again in a low laugh.

"Touche, O dark master of evil bathrobes," I said. "But I’m still not giving you my copy of the book."

"I am called Cowl," he said. Was there amusement in his voice? Maybe. "And I am feeling patient this evening. Again I will ask it. Give me your copy of the book."

Die Lied der Erlking bumped against my leg through the pocket of my duster. "And again do I answer thee. Bite me."

"Thrice will I ask and done," said the figure, warning in its tone.

"Gee, let me think. How am I gonna answer this time," I said, planting my feet on the ground.

Cowl made a hissing sound, and spread its arms slightly, hands still low, by its hips. The cold wind off the lake began to blow harder.

"Thrice I ask and done," Cowl said, his voice low, hard, angry. "Give… me… the book."

Suddenly the second figure took a step forward and said, in a female version of Cowl’s weird voice, "Please."

There was a second of shocked silence, and then Cowl snarled, "Kumori. Mind your tongue."

"There is no cost in being polite," said the smaller of the two, Kumori. The robes were too thick and shapeless to give any hint at her form, but there was something decidedly feminine in the gesture she made with one hand, a roll of her wrist. She faced me again and said,

"The knowledge in der Erlking is about to become dangerous, Dresden," she said. "You need not give us the book. Simply destroy it here. That will be sufficient. I ask it of you, please."

I looked between the two of them for a moment. Then I said, "I’ve seen you both before."

Neither of them moved.

"At Bianca’s masquerade. You were there on the dais with her." As I spoke the words, I became increasingly convinced of them. The two figures I’d seen back then had never shown their faces, but there was something in the way that Cowl and Kumori moved that matched the two shadows back then precisely. "You were the ones who gave the Leanansidhe that athame."

"Perhaps," said Kumori, but there was an inclination to her head that ceded me the truth of my statement.

"That was such an amazingly screwed-up evening. It’s been coming back to haunt me for years," I said.

"And will for years to come," said Cowl. "A great many things of significance happened that night. Most of which you are not yet aware."

"Hell’s bells," I complained. "I’m a wizard myself, and I still get sick of that I-know-and-you-don’t shtick. In fact, it pisses me off even faster than it used to."

Cowl and Kumori exchanged a long look, and then Kumori said, " Dresden, if you would spare yourself and others grief and pain, destroy the book."

"Is that what you’re doing?" I asked. "Going around trashing copies?"

"There were fewer than a thousand printed," Kumori confirmed. "Time has taken most of them. Over the past month we have accounted for the rest, but for two here, in Chicago, in this store."

"Why?" I demanded.

Cowl moved his shoulders in the barest hint of a shrug. "Is it not enough that Kemmler’s disciples could use this knowledge for great evil?"

"Are you with the Council?" I responded.

"Obviously not," Kumori replied from the depths of her hood.

"Uh- huh," I said. "Seems to me that if you were on the up-and-up you’d be working with the Council, rather than running around reinterpreting Fahrenheit 451 from a Ringwraith perspective."

"And it seems to me," Kumori answered smoothly, "that if you believed that their motives were as pure as they claim, you would already have notified them yourself."

Hello. Now that was a new tune, someone suggesting that the Council was bent and I was in the right. I wasn’t sure what Kumori was trying to do, but it was smartest to play this out and see what she had to say. "Who says I haven’t?"

"This is pointless," Cowl said.