"Bock," I replied with a nod.
His eyes flickered over my staff, and I got the impression that he noticed or sensed the gun under the jacket.
"I need to get into the cage," I told him.
His shaggy eyebrows drew together. "The Wardens were here not a month ago. I run a clean shop. You know that."
I lifted my gloved hand in a pacifying gesture. "This isn't an inspection tour. Personal business."
He made a rumbling sound in his throat, something halfway between a sound of acknowledgment and one of apology. He reached behind him without looking and snagged a key from where it hung on a peg on the wall behind him. He flicked it at me. I had to let my staff fall into the crook of my left arm so that I could use my right hand to catch the key. I doubt it looked graceful, but at least I didn't drop the staff and the key both, which would have been more my speed.
"You want to come along?" I asked him. Bock didn't let customers peruse the books in the cage without supervision.
"What am I going to tell you?" he said, and turned the page in his magazine.
I nodded and started for the back of the store.
"Mister Dresden," Bock said.
"Hmm?"
"Word is on the street that there's dark business afoot. Will was through here today. Said things were getting nervous."
I paused. Billy Borden was the leader of a gang of genuine werewolves who called themselves the Alphas and lived in the neighborhood around campus. About four years before, the Alphas had learned how to shapeshift into wolves and had declared the campus area a monster-free zone. They backed it up by ripping monsters to shreds, and they did it well enough that the local underworld of vampires, ghouls, and various other nasties found it easier to hunt elsewhere.
The magical community of Chicago -of people, I mean-was centered around a number of different neighborhoods in town. The clump around campus was the smallest, but probably the most informed of them. Word has a way of getting around the occult crowd when something vicious is on the warpath, and sends them hurrying to seek shelter or keep their heads down. It was a survival instinct on behalf of those who were blessed with one form or another of talent for magic, but who didn't have enough power to be a credible threat, and one that I heartily encouraged. Things were bad enough without some amateur one-trick Willy deciding he was going to hat up and take on the bad guys.
Of course, that was precisely what Billy Borden had done. Billy and company were not up to taking on people on Grevane's level. Don't get me wrong: They were a real threat to your average dark whatever, especially working together, but they weren't used to dealing with someone in Grevane's weight class. Billy needed to keep his head down, but I couldn't contact him to tell him that. Hell, even if I did, he'd just stick his jaw out at me and tell me he could handle it. So I had to play another angle to get him to lie low.
"If you see him again," I told Bock, "let him know that I'd appreciate it if he'd keep his head down, his eyes open, and to get in touch with me before he moves on anything."
"Something's happening," Bock said. His eyes nickered over to his calendar.
I suddenly became conscious of the eyes of three or four other customers in the store. It was late, true, but the occult community doesn't exactly keep standard hours, and Halloween was only two days off. Scratch that, it was almost one a.m. Tomorrow was Halloween. That meant trick-or-treating for some people, but it meant sacred Samhain for others, and there were a number of other beliefs attached to the day in the occult circles. There was shopping to be done.
"It might be," I told Bock. "You might want to be behind a threshold after dark for the next day or two. Just to be careful."
Bock's expression told me that he thought I wasn't telling him everything. I gave him a look that told him to mind his own damned business, and headed for the back of the store.
Bock's shop was bigger than you'd have expected from the outside. It had been a speakeasy back in the day, fronting as a neighborhood grocery. The front of the store offered a browsing area for customers interested in purchasing everything from crystals to incense to candles to oils to wands and other symbolic instruments of ritual magic-your typical New Agey stuff. There were various statues and idols for personal shrines, meditation mats, bits of furniture and other decoration for any alternative religion you'd care to name, including some figures of Buddha and Ghanesh.
Behind the occult area were several rows of bookshelves holding one of the largest selections in town of books on the occult, the paranormal, and the mystical. Most of the books were chock-full of philosophy or religion-predominantly Wiccan of one flavor or another, but there were several texts slanted toward Hindu beliefs, drawn from the kabbalah, voodoo, and even a couple grounded in ancient beliefs in the Norse or Greek gods. I steered clear of the whole mess, myself. Magic wasn't something you needed God, a god, or gods to help you with, but a lot of people felt differently than I did. Even some wizards of the Council held deep religious convictions, and felt that they were bound intricately to their magic.
Of course, if they believed it, it was as good as true. Magic is closely interwoven with a wizard's confidence. Some would say that it is bound up with a wizard's faith, and it would mean practically the same thing. You have to believe in the magic for it to work-not just that it will happen, but that it should happen.
That's what makes people like Grevane so dangerous. Magic is essentially a force of creation, of life. Grevane's necromancy made a mockery of life, even as he used it to destroy. Besides being murderous and extremely icky, there was something utterly profane about using magic to create a rotting semblance of a human life. My stomach turned a little, just thinking about what it might be like to work a spell like that. And Grevane believed in it.
Which really seemed to make him look more and more like some kind of wacko. A deadly, powerful, calm, and intelligent lunatic. I shook my head. How do I get myself into this kind of crap?
I walked through the bookshelves to a door in the back wall. While it wasn't precisely hidden, the door had no frame and was set flush with the wall around it, and was covered with the same paneling as the wall. Once it had opened to allow customers to slip into a private area to drink illegal booze. Now it was locked. I used Bock's key to open it and let myself into the back of the store.
The rear area wasn't large-nothing more than a single room with an office built into one corner, and a pair of long bookshelves set behind a heavy iron grille on the wall opposite. The room was full of boxes, shelves, tables, where Bock would keep his spare inventory, if any, and where he handled his mail-order business. There were a couple of safety lights glowing on outlets on the walls. The office door was partly open, and the light was on. I heard the office radio playing quietly on a classic-rock station.
I went to the door set in the iron grille and unlocked it, then rolled open the cage door. Bock kept all of his valuable texts in the cage. He had an original first printing of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, autographed, on the highest shelf, carefully sealed in plastic, and several dozen other rare books, some of them even more valuable.
The remaining shelves were filled with serious texts on magic theory. A lot of them were almost as occluded with opinion and philosophy as their more modern counterparts on the shelves in the front of the store. The difference was that most of them were written by members of the Council at one time or another. There were very few volumes that addressed magic in its most elemental sense, as a pure source of energy, the way I'd been taught about it. One of the notable exceptions was Elementary Magic by Ebenezar McCoy. It was the first book most wizards ever handed an apprentice. It dealt with the nuts and bolts of moving energy around, and stressed the need for control and responsibility on behalf of the wizard.