God help me, I nodded.
“Is this why the Council was so hard on you for so long? Because they thought you were a warlock about to relapse?”
“Yeah. Except for the part where you’re using the past tense.” I leaned forward, chewing on my lip for a second. “Murph, this is one of those things the cops can’t get involved in. I told you there would be things like this. I don’t like what happened anymore than you do. But please, don’t push this. It won’t help anyone.”
“I can’t ignore a dead body.”
“There won’t be one.”
She shook her head and stared at the Coke for a while more. “All right,” she said. “But if the body shows up or someone reports it, I won’t have any choice.”
“I understand.” I looked around for a change of subject. “So. There’s black magic afoot in Chicago, according to an annoyingly vague letter from the Gatekeeper.”
“Who is he?”
“Wizard. Way mysterious.”
“You believe him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So we should be on the lookout for killings and strange incidents and so on. The usual.”
“Right,” Murphy said. “I’ll keep an eye out for corpses, weirdos, and monsters.”
The door to the bedroom opened and my half brother Thomas emerged, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. He was right around six feet in height, and was built like the high priest of Bowflex-all lean muscle, sculpted and well formed, not too much of a good thing. He wore a pair of black trousers and black shoes, and was pulling a pale blue T-shirt down over his rippling abs as he came into the room.
Murphy watched him, blue eyes gleaming. Thomas is awfully pretty to look at. He’s also a vampire of the White Court. They didn’t go in for fangs and blood so much as pale skin and supernaturally hot sex, but just because they fed on raw life force rather than blood didn’t make them any less dangerous.
Thomas had worked hard to make sure that he kept his hunger under control, so that when he fed he wouldn’t hurt anyone too badly-but I knew it had been a difficult struggle for him, and he carried that strain around with him. It was visible in his expression, and it made all of his movements those of a lean, hungry predator.
“Monsters?” he asked, pulling the shirt down over his head. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Karrin, good afternoon.”
“That’s Lieutenant Murphy to you, Prettyboy,” she shot back, but her face was set in an appreciative smile.
He grinned back at her from under his hair, which even when wet and uncombed was carelessly curling and attractive. “Why, thank you for the compliment,” he said. He reached down to scratch Mouse’s ears, nodded to me, and seized up his big, black gym bag. “You have some more business come to town, Harry?”
“That’s the scuttlebutt,” I said. “I haven’t had time to look into it yet.”
He tilted his head to one side and frowned at me. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Car trouble.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He slung the bag’s strap over his shoulder. “Look, you need some help, just let me know.” He glanced at the clock and said, “Gotta run.”
“Sure,” I said to his back. He shut the door behind him.
Murphy arched an eyebrow. “That was abrupt. Are you still getting along?”
I grimaced and nodded. “He’s.. I don’t know, Murph. He’s been very distant lately. And gone almost all of the time. Day and night. He sleeps and eats here, but mostly when I’m at work. And when I do see him, it’s always like that-in passing. He’s in a hurry to get somewhere.”
“Where?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“You’re worried about him,” she said.
“Yeah. He’s usually a lot more tense than this. You know, the whole incubus hunger thing. I’m worried that maybe he’s decided appetite control was for the birds.”
“Do you think he’s hurting anyone?”
“No,” I said at once, a little too quickly. I forced myself to calm down and then said, “No, not as such. I don’t know. I wish he’d talk to me, but ever since last fall, he’s kept me at arm’s length.”
“Have you asked him?” Murphy said.
I eyed her. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t done that way,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because guys don’t do it like that.”
“Let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “You want him to talk to you, but you won’t actually tell him that or ask him any questions. You sit around with the silence and tension and no one says anything.”
“That’s right,” I said.
She stared at me.
“You need a prostate to understand,” I said.
She shook her head. “I understand enough.” She rose and said, “You’re idiots. You should talk to him.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eyes open. If I find anything odd, I’ll get in touch.”
“Thank you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Wait for sundown,” I said.
“Then what?” she asked.
I rubbed at my aching head, feeling a sudden surge of defiance for whoever had run me off the road and whatever black-magicky jerk had decided to mess around with my hometown. “Then I put on my wizard hat and start finding out what’s going on.”
Chapter Six
Murphy stayed until she was sure I wasn’t going to suddenly drop unconscious, but made me promise to call her in a couple of hours to be sure. Mouse escorted her to the door when she left, and Murphy swung it shut with two hands and a grunt of effort in order to make it close snugly into the frame. Her car started, departed.
I prodded my brain with a sharp stick until it figured out my next move. My brain pointed out that I knew the current Summer Knight of the Summer Court, and that the guy owed me some fairly big favors. I’d saved his life when he’d just been a terrified changeling trying not to get swallowed up by an incipient war between Winter and Summer. When everything settled, he was the new Summer Knight, the mortal champion of the Summer Court. It gave him a lot of influence with fully half of the Sidhe realm, and he’d probably know more about what was going on there than any other native of the real world. My brain thought it would be really wonderful if maybe I could make one little phone call to Fix and get all the information I needed about the Sidhe Courts handed to me on a silver platter.
My brain is sometimes overly optimistic, but I indulged it on the off chance that I came up a winner in the investigative lottery.
I reached for the phone. It rang eleven times before someone answered. “Yes?”
“Fix?” I asked.
“Mmmph,” answered a rumpled-sounding male voice. “Who is this?”
“Harry Dresden.”
“Harry!” His voice brightened with immediate, if somewhat sleepy, cheer, which seemed far more appropriate to the Summer Knight of the Sidhe Courts. “Hey, how are you? What’s up?”
“That’s the question of the day,” I said. “I need to talk to you about Summer business.”
The sleepiness vanished from his voice. So did the friendliness. “Oh.”
“Look, it’s nothing big,” I started. “I just need to-”
“Harry,” he said, his voice sharp. Fix had never cut me off before. In fact, if you’d asked my professional opinion a year before, I’d have told you he never interrupted anyone in his life. “We can’t talk about this. The line might not be secure.”
“Come on, man,” I said. “No one can monitor the phone line with a spell. It’d burn out in a second.”
“Someone isn’t playing by the old rules anymore, Harry,” he said. “And a phone tap is not a difficult thing to engineer.”