Storm Front

She answered me with a swear word. "That’s not good enough, Harry. I need answers, and I need them yesterday."

"I’ll get to it as quick as I can."

"Get to it faster," she snarled. She was angry. Not that this was unusual for Murphy, but it told me that something else was going on. Some people panic when things get rough, harried. Some people fall apart. Murphy got pissed.

"Commissioner riding your back again?" City Police Commissioner Howard Fairweather used Murphy and her team as scapegoats for all sorts of unsolvable crimes that he had dumped in her lap. Fairweather was always lurking around, trying for an opportunity to make Murphy look bad, as though by doing so he could avoid being crucified himself.

"Like a winged monkey from The Wizard of Oz. Kind of makes you wonder who’s leaning on him to get things done." Her voice was sour as ripe lemons. I heard her drop an Alka-Seltzer into a glass of liquid. "I’m serious, Harry. You get me those answers I need, and you get them to me fast. I need to know if this was sorcery, and, if so, how it was done and who could have done it. Names, places – I need to know everything."

"It isn’t that simple, Mur – "

"Then make it simple. How long before you can tell me? I need an estimate for the Commissioner’s investigative committee in fifteen minutes or I might as well turn in my badge today."

I grimaced. If I was able to get something out of Bianca, I might be able to help Murph on the investigation – but if it proved fruitless, I was going to have spent the entire evening doing nothing productive, and Murphy needed her answers now. Maybe I should have made a stay-awake potion. "Does the committee work weekends?"

Murphy snorted. "Are you kidding?"

"We’ll have something by Monday, then."

"You can have it figured out by then?" she asked.

"I don’t know how much good it will do you, even if I can puzzle it out. I hope you’ve got more to go on than this."

I heard her sigh into the phone and drink the fizzy drink. "Don’t let me down, Harry."

Time to change the subject, before she pinned me down and smelled me lying. I had no intention of doing the forbidden research if I could find a way out of doing it. "No luck with Bianca?"

Another swear word. "That bitch won’t talk to us. Just smiles and nods and blows smoke, makes small talk, and crosses her legs. You should have seen Carmichael drooling."

"Well. Tough to blame him, maybe. I hear she’s cute. Listen, Murph. What if I just – "

"No, Harry. Absolutely not. You will not go over to the Velvet Room, you will not talk to that woman, and you will not get involved in this."

"Lieutenant Murphy," I drawled. "A little jealous, are we?"

"Don’t flatter yourself. You’re a civilian, Dresden, even if you do have your investigator’s license. If you get your ass laid out in the hospital or the morgue, it’ll be me that suffers for it."

"Murph, I’m touched."

"I’ll touch your head to a brick wall a few times if you cross me on this, Harry." Her voice was sharp, vehement.

"Hey, wind down, Murph. If you don’t want me to go, no problem." Whups. A lie. She’d be all over that like a troll on a billy goat.

"You’re a lousy liar, Harry. Godammit, I ought to take you down to lockup just to keep you from – "

"What?" I said, loudly, into the receiver. "Murph, you’re breaking up. I can’t hear you. Damn phone again. Call me back." Then I hung up on her.

Mister padded over to me and batted at my leg. He watched me with serious green eyes as I leaned down and unplugged the phone as it started to ring again.

"Okay, Mister. You hungry?"

I got us breakfast. Leftover steak sandwich for him, SpaghettiOs heated up on the wood stove for me. I rationed out my last can of Coke, which Mister craves at least as badly as I do, and by the time I was done eating and drinking and petting, I was awake and thinking again – and getting ready for sundown.

Daylight savings time hadn’t cut in yet, and dark would fall around six. I had about two hours to get set to go.

You might think you know a thing or two about vampires. Maybe some of the stuff you’ve heard is accurate. Likely, it’s not. Either way, I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of going into Bianca’s lair to demand information from her. I was going to assume that things were going to get ugly before all was said and done, just to make sure I didn’t get caught with my staff down.

Wizardry is all about thinking ahead, about being prepared. Wizards aren’t really superhuman. We just have a leg up on seeing things more clearly than other people, and being able to use the extra information we have for our benefit. Hell, the word wizard comes from the same root as wise. We know things. We aren’t any stronger or faster than anyone else. We don’t even have all that much more going in the mental department. But we’re god-awful sneaky, and if we get the chance to get set for something, we can do some impressive things.

As a wizard, if you’re ready to address a problem, then it’s likely that you’ll be able to come up with something that will let you deal with it. So, I got together all the things I thought I might need: I made sure my cane was polished and ready. I put my silver knife in a sheath that hung just under my left arm. I put the escape potion in its plastic squeeze-bottle into my duster’s pocket. I put on my favorite talisman, a silver pentacle on a silver chain – it had been my mother’s. My father had passed it down to me. And I put a small, folded piece of white cloth into my pocket.

I had several enchanted items around – or half-enchanted items, anyway. Carrying out a full enchantment is expensive and time-consuming, and I just couldn’t afford to do it very much. We blue-collar wizards just have to sling a few spells out where we can and hope they don’t go stale at the wrong time. I would have been a lot more comfortable if I had been carrying my blasting rod or my staff, but that would be like showing up at Bianca’s door in a tank, walking in carrying a machine gun and a flamethrower, while announcing my intention to fight.

I had to maintain a fine balance between going in ready for trouble and going in asking for trouble.

Not that I was afraid, mind you. I didn’t think Bianca would be willing to cause problems for a mortal wizard. Bianca wouldn’t want to piss off the White Council by messing with me.

On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly the White Council’s favorite guy. They might even look the other way if Bianca decided to take me quietly out of the picture.

Careful, Harry, I warned myself. Don’t get entirely paranoid. If you get like that, you’ll be building your little apartment into a Basement of Solitude.