I finished bathing, dried, and slipped into my white robe. Then I knelt on the floor at the head of the stairs down to the lab, closed my eyes, and began meditating. Just as no other energies could be allowed into the ritual, my concentration had to be of similar purity. Random thoughts, worries, fears, and emotions would sabotage the spell. I focused on my breathing, upon stilling my thoughts, and felt my limbs grow a little chill as my heartbeat slowed. Worries of the day, my aches and pains, my thoughts of the future-all had to go. It took a while to get myself in the proper frame of mind, and by the time I was finished it had been dark for two hours and my knees ached somewhere in the background.
I opened my eyes and everything came into a brilliantly sharp focus that discounted the existence of anything except myself, my magic, and the ritual awaiting me. It had been a long, wearying preparation, and I hadn’t even started with the magic yet, but if the spell could help me nail the bad guys quicker, the hours of effort would be well worth it.
Silence and focus ruled.
I was ready.
And then the fucking phone rang about a foot from my ear.
It is possible that I made some kind of unmanly noise when I jumped. My posture-numbed legs didn’t respond as quickly as I needed them to, and I lurched awkwardly to one side, half falling onto the nearest couch.
“Dammit!” I screamed in sudden frustration. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
Mouse looked up from his lazy drowse and tilted his head to one side, ears up and forward.
“What are you looking at?” I snarled.
Mouse’s jaw dropped open into a grin, and his tail wagged.
I rubbed my hand at my face while the phone kept on ringing. It had been a while since I’d done any seriously focused magic like that, and granted, I really don’t get very many calls, but all the same I should have remembered to unplug the phone. Four hours of preparation gone to waste.
The phone kept ringing, and my head pounded in time with it. I ached. Stupid phone. Stupid car crash. I tried to think positive, because I read somewhere that it’s important to do that at times of stress and frustration. Whoever wrote that was probably selling something.
I picked up the phone and growled, “Screw thinking positive,” into the handset.
“Urn,” said a woman’s voice. “What did you say?”
“Screw thinking positive!” I half shouted. “What the hell do you want?”
“Well. Maybe I have the wrong number. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden?”
I frowned, my mind taking in details despite my temper’s bid to take over the show. The voice was familiar to me; rich, smooth, adult-but the speaker’s speech patterns had an odd hesitancy to them. Her words had an odd, thick edge on them, too. An accent?
“Speaking,” I said. “Annoyed as hell, but speaking.”
“Oh. Is this a bad time?”
I rubbed at my eyes and choked down a vicious response. “Who is this?”
“Oh,” she said, as if the question surprised her. “Harry, it’s Molly. Molly Carpenter.”
“Ah,” I said. I clapped one palm to my face. My friend Michael’s oldest daughter. Way to role-model, Harry. You sure do come off like a calm, responsible adult. “Molly, didn’t recognize you at first.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The “s” sound was a little bit thick. Had she been drinking? “Not your fault,” I said. Which it hadn’t been. For that matter, the interruption might have been a stroke of luck. If my head was still too scrambled from that afternoon’s automobile hijinks to remember to unplug the phone, I didn’t have any business trying to cast that spell. Probably would have blown my own head off. “What do you need, Molly?”
“Urn,” she said, and there was nervous tension in her voice. “I need… I need you to come bail me out.”
“Bail,” I said. “You’re being literal?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in jail?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Molly, I don’t know if I can do that. You’re sixteen.”
“Seventeen,” she said, with sparks of indignation and another thick
“s.”
“Whatever,” I said. “You’re a juvenile. You should call your parents.”
“No!” she said, something near panic in her voice. “Harry, please. I can’t call them.“
“Why not?”
“Because I only get the one call, and I used it to call you.”
“Actually, I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, Molly.” I sighed.
“In fact, I’m surprised that…”I frowned, thinking. “You lied about your age.”
“If I hadn’t, Mom and Dad would be here already,” she said. “Harry, please. Look, there’s… there’s a lot of trouble at home right now. I can’t explain it here, but if you’ll come get me, I swear, I’ll tell you all about it.”
I sighed again. “I don’t know, Molly…”
“Please?” she said. “It’s just this once, and I’ll pay you back, and I’ll never ask something like this of you again, I promise.”
Molly had long since earned her PhD in wheedling. She managed to sound vulnerable and hopeful and sad and desperate and sweet all at the same time. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t need half that much effort to wrap her father around a finger. Her mother, Charity, was probably a different story, though.
I sighed. “Why me?” I asked.
I hadn’t been talking to Molly, but she answered. “I couldn’t think who else to call,” she said. “I need your help.”
“I’ll call your dad. I’ll come down with him.”
“Please, no,” she said quietly, and I didn’t think she was feigning the quiet desperation in her voice. “Please.”
Why fight the inevitable? I’ve always been a sucker for ye olde damsel in distress. Maybe not as big a sucker now as I had been in the past, but the insanity did not seem much less potent than it had always been.
“All right,” I said. “Where?”
She gave me the location of one of the precincts not too far from my apartment.
“I’m coming,” I told her. “And this is the deaclass="underline" I’ll listen to what you have to say. If I don’t like it, I’m going to your parents.”
“But you don’t-”
“Molly,” I said, and I felt my voice harden. “You’re already asking me for a lot more than I feel comfortable with. I’ll come down there to get you. You tell me what’s up. After that, I make the call, and you abide by it.”
“But-”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “Do you want my help or not?”
There was a long pause, and she made a frustrated little sound. “All right,” she said. After a beat she hurried to add, “And thank you.”
“Yeah,” I said, and eyed the candles and incense, and thought about all the time I’d thrown away. “I’ll be along within the hour.”
I would have to call a cab. It wasn’t the most heroic way to ride to the rescue, but walkers can’t be choosers. I got up to dress and told Mouse, “I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”
When I came out of the bedroom in clean clothes, Mouse was sitting hopefully by the door. He batted a paw at his leash, which hung over the doorknob.
I snorted and said, “You ain’t pretty, furface.” But I clipped the leash to his collar, and called for a cab.
Chapter Eight
The cabby drove me to the Eighteenth District of the CPD, on Larrabee. The neighborhood around it has seen a couple of better days and thousands of worse ones. The once-infamous Cabrini Green isn’t far away, but urban renewal and the efforts of local neighborhood watches, community groups, church congregations from several faiths, and cooperation with the local police department had changed some of Chicago’s nastier streets into something resembling actual civilization.