Small Favor

I tossed it to Thomas. My brother caught it and-

– suddenly a tall man, too lanky to look altogether healthy and with too many rough edges to be handsome, sat in Thomas’s chair, dressed in his clothes. His hair had short waves in it, and looked perpetually rumpled. His eyes were a bit sunken in a permanent state of too little sleep, but the line of his chin, strong and clean, made him look harder and sharper than he might otherwise have appeared.

Hell’s bells. Did I really look like that? Maybe I needed a makeover or something.

Murphy sucked in a breath and looked back and forth between Thomas, in his new look, and me. Molly didn’t bother trying to hide her reaction, and just said, "Cool."

"What?" Thomas asked. Though the figure speaking looked like me, the sound of my brother’s voice was unchanged, and a spot of ketchup from his burger still speckled one side of his mouth. He looked around for a moment, then scowled, rose, and ducked into my bedroom to look at himself in the little shaving mirror in the drawer in my bathroom. "You’ve invented a doll that turns people into their ugly half brothers, eh?"

"Get over yourself, prettyboy," I called.

"If you think I’m letting you break my nose to complete the look, you’re insane."

I grunted. "Yeah, that’s a problem. I had to set it up to look like I looked the day I finished it."

"It isn’t a problem," Molly said at once. "I’ll get my makeup kit and fix up his eyes for him, at least. I don’t know what we can do for his nose, but from a distance he should look right."

"If he looks like you, Harry," Murphy said, "doesn’t that mean he’s going to be attracting some sort of hostile attention?"

Thomas snorted and appeared in the doorway to my bedroom, his face ketchup-free. "Harry walks around looking like this all the time. Now, that would be awful. I can handle it for a few hours."

"Don’t get cute on me," I said. "Give us two or three hours’ lead time, and then head out. Stay on the roads and keep moving. Don’t give them a chance to surround you. You’ve got your cell phone?"

"I suppose," he said. "But given how much I’ve been hanging around you two and the bad weather, I’d say the odds were against its working." I grunted and tossed him my leather duster and my staff. He caught them and frowned. "You sure you don’t want these?"

"Just don’t lose them," I said. "If the gruffs saw a double of me who wasn’t wearing the coat, they’d know something was up in a heartbeat. The idea is to keep them from getting suspicious in the first place. The charm should be good for another six, maybe seven hours. Once it drops, get back here."

"Yeah, yeah," Thomas said, sliding into my duster. The illusion magic didn’t make the thing fit him, and he had to fiddle with the sleeves, but it looked like it always did on me. "Karrin, don’t let him do anything stupid."

Murphy nodded. "I’ll try. But you know how he is." She picked up her coat and shrugged into it. "Where are we going?"

"Back to Gard," I said. "The Carpenter place. I’m betting Marcone left her a sample of his hair to use to track him down, for just such an occasion as this."

"But you said you couldn’t get through the, uh…the obscuring magic that the Nickelheads have."

"Probably not. But if I know Marcone, he also collected samples of hair or blood from his people. To find them if they ever needed help or…"

Murphy grimaced. "If they rated early retirement."

"I’m hoping Gard can give us an inside track on finding the leak, too," I said.

Meanwhile, Molly hurried over to Thomas with her makeup kit and began modifying his face. Thomas’s face was about level with the chin of the illusion-me, if not a little lower, but I’d taught Molly the basics behind my illusion magic-such as it was. My skill with illusions was pretty basic, and it wouldn’t stand up to any serious examination. Molly was able to scrunch up her eyes and see past it.

Of course, you didn’t have to make the illusion utterly convincing if you could manage to keep people from having a good reason to take a hard look at it in the first place. The illusion doesn’t have to be fancy-it’s the misdirection behind it that really matters.

Molly had been caught in a Goth undertow of the youth culture, and it showed in her makeup. She had plenty of blues and purples and reds to darken Thomas’s eyes with, and the illusion of my face assumed an appearance fairly close to my own, sans the swollen nose.

"It’ll do," I said. "Murph, you’re driving. Molly, if you don’t mind."

My apprentice grinned as she hurriedly pulled on her coat. Then she stuck her tongue between her teeth, frowned fiercely, and waved her hand at me with a murmur. I felt the kid’s veil congeal about me like a thin layer of Jell-O, a wobbly and slippery sensation. The world went a little bit blurry, as if I were suddenly looking at everything through hazy green water, but Murphy’s face turned up into a grin.

"That’s very good," she said. "I can’t see him at all."

Molly’s face was set with concentration as she maintained the spell, but she glanced at Murphy and nodded her head in acknowledgment.

"Right," I said. "Come on, Mouse."

My dog hopped to his feet and trotted over eagerly, waving his tail.

Murphy looked in my general direction, and arched an eyebrow.

"If the gruffs don’t buy it, I want all the early warning I can get," I told her.

She lowered her voice and murmured, "And maybe you’re a little nervous about going out without the coat and the staff?"

"Maybe," I said.

It was only a half lie. Insulting nickname or not, coat and staff or not, the more I thought about what we were up against, the more worried I became.

I wasn’t nervous.

I was pretty much terrified.

Chapter Nineteen

I t was dark by the time we got to Chez Carpenter, and we were beginning to slow down to turn into the driveway when Murphy said, "Someone’s tailing us."

"Keep driving," I snapped at once, from where I was crouched down in the back of Murphy’s Saturn. I felt like a groundhog trying to hide in a golf divot. "Go past the house."

Murphy picked up speed again, accelerating very slowly and carefully on the snowbound streets.

I poked my head up just enough to peer into the night behind us. Mouse sat up with me and looked solemnly and carefully out the back window when I did. "The car with one headlight pointing a little to the left?" I asked.

"That’s the one. Spotted him about ten minutes ago. Can you see his plates?"