Death Masks

"Uh. Okay."

The doll nodded and fixed me with that unsettling, unblinking stare. "Should you seek the Shroud, Harry Dresden, you will most assuredly perish."

"All right," I said. "So what happens if I don’t?"

The doll lay down on her back, and wisps of light began flowing back out of her, back from whence Ulsharavas had come. Her voice came to me quietly, as if from a great distance. "If you do not, they all die. And this city with them."

Chapter Nine

I hate cryptic warnings. I know, the whole cryptic-remark concept is part and parcel of the wizard gig, but it doesn’t suit my style. I mean, what good is a warning like that? All three Knights and the population of Chicago would die if I didn’t get involved-and my number would be up if I did. That sounded like the worst kind of self-fulfilling crap.

There’s a case to be made for prophecy; don’t get me wrong. Mortals, even wizards, all exist at a finite point in the flow of time. Or, to make it simple, if time is a river, then you and I are like pebbles in it. We exist in one spot at a time, occasionally jostled back and forth by the currents. Spirits don’t always have the same kind of existence. Some of them are more like a long thread than a stone-their presence tenuous, but rippling upstream and down as a part of their existence, experiencing more of the stream than the pebble.

That’s how oracle spirits know about the future and the past. They’re living in them both at the same time they’re delivering mysterious messages to you. That’s why they only give brief warnings, or mysterious dreams or prophetic knock-knock jokes, or however they drop their clues. If they tell you too much, it will change the future that they’re experiencing, so they have to give out the advice with a light touch.

I know. It makes my head hurt too.

I don’t put much stock in prophecy. As extensive and aware as these spirits might be, they aren’t all-knowing. And as nutty as people are, I don’t buy that any spirit is going to be able to keep an absolute lock on every possible temporal outcome.

Maybe- genuine prophecies aside, I could hardly drop the case now. In the first place, I’d been paid up front, and I didn’t have the kind of financial breathing space I would need to be able to turn down the money and pay my bills at the same time.

In the second place, the risk of imminent death just didn’t hit me the same way it used to. It wasn’t that it didn’t scare me. It did, in that kind of horrible, uncertain way that left me with nothing to focus my fears upon. But I’ve beaten risks before. I could do it again.

You want to know another reason I didn’t back off? I don’t like getting pushed around. I don’t like threats. As well-intentioned and polite and caring as Michael’s threat had been, it still made me want to punch someone in the nose. The oracle’s prophecy had been another threat, of sorts, and I don’t let spirits from the Nevernever determine what I’m going to do, either.

Finally, if the prophecy was right, Michael and his brother Knights could be in danger, and they had saved my skinny wizard’s ass not long ago. I could help them. They might be heaven-on-wheels when it came to taking on bad guys in a fight, but they weren’t investigators. They couldn’t run these thieves down the way I could. It was just a question of making them see reason. Once I’d convinced them that the prophecy they’d received wasn’t wholly correct, everything would be fine.

Yeah, right.

I shoved those thoughts aside, and checked the clock. I wanted to move on Ulsharavas’s tip as soon as possible, but I was beat and likely to make mistakes. With all the bad guys running around town, there was no sense in going out there into the dark, exhausted and unprepared. I’d wait for the potions to be ready and Bob to come back from his mission, at least. Sunlight would cut down on the risk as well, since Red Court vampires got incinerated by it-and I doubted these Denarian fruitcakes would get along with it either.

Thus prioritized, I checked my notes, and started putting together a couple of potions that would offer me a few hours of protection from the narcotic venom of the Red Court. The potions were simple ones. Brewing any kind of potion required a base liquid, and then several other ingredients meant to bind the magic put into the potion to the desired effect. One ingredient was linked to each of the five senses, then one to the mind and one to the spirit.

In this case, I wanted something that would offset the venomous saliva of the Red Court vampires, a narcotic that rendered those exposed to it passively euphoric. I needed a potion that would ruin the pleasurable sensations of the poison.

I used stale coffee as my base ingredient. To that I added hairs from a skunk, for scent. A small square of sandpaper for touch. I tossed in a small photo of Meat Loaf, cut from a magazine, for sight. A rooster’s crow I’d stored in a small quartz crystal went in for hearing, and a powdered aspirin for taste. I cut the surgeon general’s warning label from a pack of cigarettes and chopped it fine to add in for the mind, and then lit a stick of the incense I sometimes used while meditating and wafted some of the smoke into the two bottles for the spirit. Once the potions were bubbling over a burner, I drew in my wearied will and released power into the mixes, suffusing them with energy. They fizzed and frothed with gratifying enthusiasm.

I let them simmer for a while, then took them from the fire and emptied them into a pair of small sports-drink bottles. After that, I slumped on a stool and waited for Bob to come home.

I must have nodded off, because when my phone rang, I jerked myself up straight and nearly fell off my stool. I clambered up the ladder and picked up the phone.

"Dresden."

"Hoss," said a weather-beaten voice on the other end. Ebenezar McCoy, a sometime teacher of mine, sounded businesslike. "Did I wake you up?"

"No, sir," I said. "I was up anyway. Working on a case."

"You sound tired as a coal-mine mule."

"Been up all night."

"Uh- huh," Ebenezar said. "Hoss, I just called to let you know not to worry about this duel nonsense. We’re going to slap it down."

By "we," Ebenezar meant the Senior Council members. Seven of the most experienced wizards on the White Council held positions of particular authority, especially during times of crisis, when quick decisions were needed. Ebenezar had turned down his chance at a seat on the Senior Council for nearly fifty years. He took it only recently to block a potentially fatal political attack directed against yours truly by some of the more conservative (read, fanatic) members of the White Council.

"Slap it down? No, don’t do that."

"What?" Ebenezar said. "You want to fight this duel? Did you fall and hit your head, boy?"