“But someone’s a traitor,” Murphy said quietly. “Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone.”
Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. “The reason treachery is so reviled,” she said in a careful tone of voice, “is because it usually comes from someone you didn’t think could possibly do such a thing.”
I didn’t say anything in reply. In a minute, her car crunched to a stop in the little gravel lot outside my apartment.
I picked up the medical kit, the cooler, and my staff, and got out of the car.
“Call me the minute you know something,” she said.
“Yep,” I told her. “Don’t take any chances if you see something coming.”
She shook her head. “They aren’t your kids, Harry.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything you can do to protect them in the hospital . . .”
“Relax,” she said. “Your werewolves won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”
I nodded and closed my eyes for a second.
“Harry?” she asked me.
“Yeah?”
“You . . . don’t look so good.”
“It’s been a long night,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Look. I know something about those.”
Murphy did. She’d had more than her share of psychic trauma. She’d seen friends die, too. My memory turned out an unwelcome flash from years before—her former partner, Carmichael, half eviscerated and bleeding to death on white institutional tile flooring.
“I’ll make it,” I said.
“Of course you will,” she said. “There’s just . . . there’s a lot of ways you could deal, Harry. Some of them are better than others. I care about what happens to you. And I’m here.”
I kept my eyes closed in order to make sure I didn’t start crying like a girl or something. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“Take care, Harry,” she said.
“You, too,” I said. It came out a little raspy. I tilted the toolbox at her in a wave, and headed into my apartment to see Morgan.
I had to admit—I hated hearing the sound of my friend’s car leaving.
I pushed those thoughts away. Psychic trauma or not, I could fall to little pieces later.
I had work to do.
Chapter Seven
Morgan woke up when I opened the bedroom door. He looked bad, but not any worse than he did before, except for some spots of color on his cheeks.
“Lemme see to my roommates,” I said. “I got the goods.” I put the medical kit down on the nightstand.
He nodded and closed his eyes.
I took Mouse outside for a walk to the mailbox. He seemed unusually alert, nose snuffling at everything, but he didn’t show any signs of alarm. We went by the spot in the tiny backyard that had been designated as Mouse’s business area, and went back inside. Mister, my bobtailed grey tomcat, was waiting when I opened the door, and tried to bolt out. I caught him, barely: Mister weighs the next best thing to thirty pounds. He gave me a look that might have been indignant, then raised his stumpy tail straight in the air and walked haughtily away, making his way to his usual resting point atop one of my apartment’s bookcases.
Mouse looked at me with his head tilted as I shut the door.
“Something bad is running around out there,” I told him. “It might decide to send me a message. I’d rather he didn’t use Mister to do it.”
Mouse’s cavernous chest rumbled with a low growl.
“Or you, either, for that matter,” I told him. “I don’t know if you know what a skinwalker is, but it’s serious trouble. Watch yourself.”
Mouse considered that for a moment, and then yawned.
I found myself laughing. “Pride goes before a fall, boy.”
He wagged his tail at me and rubbed up against my leg, evidently pleased to have made me smile. I made sure both sets of bowls had food and water in them, and then went in to Morgan.
His temperature was up another half a degree, and he was obviously in pain.
“This isn’t heavy-duty stuff,” I told him, as I broke out the medical kit. “Me and Billy made a run up to Canada for most of it. There’s some codeine for the pain, though, and I’ve got the stuff to run an IV for you, saline, intravenous antibiotics.”
Morgan nodded. Then he frowned at me, an expression I was used to from him, raked his eyes over me more closely, and asked, “Is that blood I smell on you?”
Damn. For a guy who had been beaten to within a few inches of death’s door, he was fairly observant. Andi hadn’t really been bleeding when we picked her up in my coat. She was only oozing from a number of gouges and scrapes—but there had been enough of them to add up. “Yeah,” I said.
“What happened?”
I told him about the skinwalker and what had happened to Kirby and Andi.
He shook his head wearily. “There’s a reason we don’t encourage amateurs to try to act like Wardens, Dresden.”
I scowled at him, got a bowl of warm water and some antibacterial soap, and started cleaning up his left arm. “Yeah, well. I didn’t see any Wardens doing anything about it.”
“Chicago is your area of responsibility, Warden Dresden.”
“And there I was,” I said. “And if they hadn’t been there to help, I’d be dead right now.”
“Then you call for backup. You don’t behave like a bloody superhero and throw lambs to the wolves to help you do it. Those are the people you’re supposed to be protecting.”
“Good thinking,” I said, getting out the bag of saline, and suspending it from the hook I’d set in the wall over the bed. I made sure the tube was primed. Air bubbles, bad. “That’s exactly what we need: more Wardens in Chicago.”
Morgan grunted and fell silent for a moment, eyes closed. I thought he’d dropped off again, but evidently he was only thinking. “It must have followed me up.”
“Huh?”
“The skinwalker,” he said. “When I left Edinburgh, I took a Way to Tucson. I came to Chicago by train. It must have sensed me when the tracks passed through its territory.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Follow an injured wizard?” he asked. “Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal.”
“It eatsmagic?”
Morgan nodded. “Adds its victims’ power to its own.”
“So what you’re telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it’s stronger for having killed Kirby.”
He shrugged. “I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater.”
I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan’s upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. “Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter.”
Morgan shook his head. “Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn’t as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson.”
“Point,” I said, slipping the needle into his arm. “Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?” I thought about it. “The skinwalker’s got to go back to his home territory, though?”
Morgan nodded. “The longer he’s away, the more power it costs him.”
“How long can he stay here?” I asked.
He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. “More than long enough.”
“How do we kill it?” I frowned as I missed the vein again.
“Give me that,” Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.
I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.
“We probably don’t,” he said. “The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool’s game. We avoid it.”
I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. “Pretend for a minute that it isn’t going to cooperate with that plan.”
Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. “There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power—and it isn’t likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either.”