Death Masks

I didn’t have much energy. After a few minutes, I hung panting and hurting and too tired to struggle any more, the water only getting colder, bound limbs screaming.

I hurt, but I figured the pain couldn’t possibly get any worse.

A few hours went by and showed me how wrong I was.

A door opened and firelight stabbed at my eyes. I would have flinched if I had been able to move that much. A couple of large, blocky men came through the door carrying actual flaming torches. The light let me see the room. The wall beside the door was finished stone, but the walls all around me were a mishmash of fallen rubble and ancient brick, and one was made of curved concrete-some kind of piping for the city’s water system, I supposed. The ceiling was all rough earth, some stone, some roots. Water poured down from somewhere, over me, and vanished down a groove worn in the floor.

They had taken me to Undertown, a network of caves, ruined buildings, tunnels, and ancient construction that underlay the city of Chicago. Undertown was dark, damp, cold, full of various creatures that shunned sunlight and human company, and might have been radioactive. The tunnels where the Manhattan Project had been housed were just the start of Undertown. The people who knew of its existence didn’t come down here-not even wizards like me-unless matters were desperate.

No one knew their way around down here. And no one would be coming to find me.

"Been working out pretty hard," I muttered to the two men, my voice a croak. "One of you guys got a cold beer? Maybe a freeze pop?"

They didn’t so much as look at me. One man took up a position on the wall to my left. The other took the wall to my right.

"I should have cleaned up, I know," I told them. "If I’d realized I was having company I’d have taken a shower. Mopped the floor."

No answer. No expression on their faces. No nothing.

"Tough room," I said.

"You’ll have to forgive them," said Nicodemus. He came through the door and into the torchlight, freshly dressed, shaved, and showered. He wore pajama pants, slippers, and a smoking jacket of Hugh Hefner vintage. The grey noose still circled his throat. "I like to encourage discretion in my employees, and I have very high standards. Sometimes it makes them seem standoffish."

"You don’t let your goons talk?" I asked.

He removed a pipe from his pocket, along with a small tin of Prince Albert tobacco. "I remove their tongues."

"I guess your human resources department isn’t exactly under siege, is it," I said.

He tamped tobacco into his pipe and smiled. "You’d be surprised. I offer an excellent dental plan."

"You’re going to need it when the formal-wear police knock your teeth out. This is a rented tux."

His dark eyes glittered with something ugly. "Little Maggie’s youngest. You’ve grown up to be a man of considerable strengths."

I stared at him for a long second, shivering and startled into silence. My mother’s name was Margaret.

And I was her youngest? As far as I knew, I had been an only child. But I knew precious little of my parents. My mother died giving birth to me. My father had suffered an aneurism when I had been about six years old. I had a picture of my father on a piece of yellowed newspaper I kept in a photo album. It showed him performing at a children’s benefit dinner in a small town in Ohio. I had a Polaroid instant picture showing my father and my mother, her stomach round with pregnancy, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I wore my mother’s pentacle amulet around my neck. It was scarred and dented, but that’s to be expected when you run around using it to kill werewolves.

They were the only concrete things I had left of my parents. I’d heard stories before, that my mother hadn’t run with a very pleasant crowd. Nothing of substance, just inferences made from passing comments. I’d had a demon tell me that my parents had been murdered, and the same creature had hinted that I might have relatives. I’d shied away from the whole concept, deciding that the demon had been a dirty liar.

And given that Nicodemus and Chauncy worked for the same organization, I probably couldn’t trust the Denarian either. He was probably lying. Probably.

But what if he wasn’t?

Keep him talking, I decided. Fish for information. It wasn’t like I had a lot to lose, and knowledge was power. I might find out something that would give me some kind of edge.

Nicodemus lit the pipe with a match and puffed on it a few times, watching my face with a little smile on his lips. He read me, easily. I avoided looking at his eyes.

"Harry- may I call you Harry?"

"Would it matter if I told you no?"

"It would tell me something about you," he said. "I’d like to get to know you, and I would rather not make this a trip to the dentist if I can avoid it."

I glared at him, shivering under the freezing water, the bump on my head pounding, and my limbs aching beneath the ropes. "I’ve got to ask-just what kind of freaking dentist do you go to? Ortho de Sade? Smokin’ Joe Mengele, DDS?"

Nicodemus puffed on the pipe and regarded my bonds. Another expressionless man came in, this one older, thin, with thick grey hair. He pushed a room-service cart. He unfolded a small table and set it up over to one side, where the water wouldn’t splash on it. Nicodemus toyed with the bowl of his pipe. "Dresden, may I be frank with you?"

I figured the cart would open up to show an array of hardware intended to frighten me with its potential torture applications. "If it’s okay with Frank, I guess I don’t mind."

Nicodemus watched the valet set out three folding chairs and cover the table with a white cloth. "You have faced a great many dangerous beings. But by and large, they have been idiots. I try to avoid that whenever I am able, and that is why you are bound and held under running water."

"You’re afraid of me," I said.

"Boy, you’ve destroyed three rival practitioners of the Arts, a noble of the vampire Courts, and even one of the Faerie Queens. They underestimated you as well as your allies. I don’t. I suppose you could think of your current position as a compliment."

"Yeah," I muttered, shaking freezing water out of my eyes. "You’re way too kind."

Nicodemus smiled. The valet opened the cart and something far more diabolical than torture hardware was there. It was breakfast. The old valet started setting out food on the table. Hash browns. Some cheese. Some biscuits, bacon, sausages, pancakes, toast, fruit. And coffee, dear God. Hot coffee. The smell hit my stomach, and even frozen as it was it started crawling around on the inside of my abdomen, trying to figure out how to get away and get some food.