Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

She shook her head. “On Valentine’s Day? Are you kidding? They’ll have barricaded themselves upstairs and forced the older kids to wear the little ones out so they’ll sleep through the noise.” Molly shuddered. “I’m not interrupting them. Way too disturbing.”

“Valentine’s Day,” I groaned. “Dammit.”

“What?”

“Oh, I forgot, what with the excitement. It’s, uh, someone’s birthday. I got them a present and wanted to get it to them today.”

“Oh?” Molly chirped. “Who?”

I hesitated for a minute, but Molly had earned a certain amount of candor—and trust. “Thomas,” I said.

“The vampire?” Molly asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wow, Harry,” she said, her blue eyes sparkling. “That’s odd. I mean, why would you get him a birthday present?” She frowned prettily. “I mean, you didn’t get my dad one, and you’re friends with him, and he’s a Knight of the Sword and one of the good guys, and he’s saved your life about twenty times and all.”

“More like four times,” I said testily. “And I do Christmas for hi—”

Molly was looking at me, a smug smile on her face.

“You figured it out,” I said.

“That Thomas was your brother?” Molly asked innocently. “Yep.”

I blinked at her. “How?”

“I’ve seen you two fight.” She lifted both pale eyebrows. “What? Have you seen how many brothers and sisters I have? I know my sibling conflicts.”

“Hell’s bells.” I sighed. “Molly—”

She lifted a hand. “I know, boss. I know. Big secret; safe with me.” Her expression turned serious, and she gave me a look that was very knowing for someone so young. “Family is important.”

I’d grown up in a succession of orphanages and foster homes. “Yeah,” I said, “it is.”

She nodded. “So you haven’t given family presents much. And your brother doesn’t exactly have a ton of people bringing him presents on his birthday, does he?”

I just looked at her for a second. Molly was growing up into a person I thought I was going to like.

“No,” I said quietly. “I haven’t, and he doesn’t.”

“Well, then,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go give him one.”

I FROWNED AT the intercom outside Thomas’s apartment building and said, “I don’t get it. He’s always home this time of night.”

“Maybe he’s out to dinner,” Molly said, shivering in the cold—after all, her backup clothing had been summer wear.

I shook my head. “He limits himself pretty drastically when it comes to exposing himself to the public.”

“Why?”

“He’s a White Court vampire, an incubus,” I said. “Pretty much every woman who looks at him gets ideas.”

Molly coughed delicately. “Oh. It’s not just me, then.”

“No. I followed him around town once. It was like watching one of those campy cologne commercials.”

“But he does go out, right?”

“Sure.”

She nodded and immediately started digging into her backpack. “Then maybe we could use a tracking spell and run him down. I think I’ve got some materials we can use.”

“Me, too,” I said, and produced two quarters from my pocket, holding them up between my fingers with slow, ominous flair, like David Blaine.

Then I took two steps to the pay phone next to the apartment building’s entrance, plugged the coins in, and called Thomas’s cell phone.

Molly gave me a level look and folded her arms.

“Hey,” I told her as it rang. “We’re wizards, kid. We have trouble using technology. Doesn’t mean we can’t be smart about it.”

Molly rolled her eyes and muttered to herself, and I paid attention to the phone call.

“’Allo,” Thomas answered, the word thick with the French accent he used in his public persona.

“Hello, France?” I responded. “I found a dead mouse in my can of French roast coffee, and I’ve called to complain. I’m an American, and I refuse to stand for that kind of thing from you people.”

My half brother sighed. “A moment, please,” he said in his accent. I could hear music playing and people talking behind him. A party? A door clicked shut and he said, without any accent, “Hey, Harry.”

“I’m standing outside your apartment in the freaking snow with your birthday present.”

“That won’t do you much good,” he said. “I’m not there.”

“Being a professional detective, I had deduced that much,” I said.

“A birthday present, huh?” he said.

“I get much colder and I’m going to burn it for warmth.”

He laughed. “I’m at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.”

I glanced at my watch. “This late?”

“Uh-huh. I’m doing a favor for one of my employees. I’ll be here until midnight or so. Look, just come back tomorrow evening.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “Your birthday is today. I’ll drive there.”

“Uh,” Thomas said. “Yeah. I guess, uh. Okay.”

I frowned. “What are you doing out there?”

“Gotta go.” He hung up on me.

I traded a look with Molly. “Huh.”

She tilted her head. “What’s going on?”

I turned and headed back for the car. “Let’s find out.”

WOODFIELD MALL IS the largest such establishment in the state, but its parking lots were all but entirely empty. The mall had been closed for more than an hour.

“How are we supposed to find him?” Molly asked.

I drove my car, the beat-up old Volkswagen Bug I had dubbed the Blue Beetle , around for a few minutes. “There,” I said, nodding at a white sedan parked among a dozen other vehicles, the largest concentration of such transport left at the mall. “That’s his car.” I started to say something else but stopped myself before I wasted an opportunity to Yoda the trainee. “Molly, tell me what you see.”

She scrunched up her nose, frowning, as I drove through the lot to park next to Thomas’s car. The tires crunched over the thin dusting of snow that had frosted itself over scraped asphalt, streaks of salt and ice melt, and stubborn patches of ice. I killed the engine. It ticked for a few seconds, and then the car filled with the kind of soft, heavy silence you get only on a winter night with snow on the ground.

“The mall is closed,” Molly said. “But there are cars at this entrance. There is a single section of lights on inside when the rest of them are out. I think one of the shops is lit inside. There’s no curtain down over it, even though the rest of the shops have them.”

“So what should we be asking?” I prompted.

“What is Thomas doing, in a group, in a closed mall, on Valentine’s Day night?” Her tone rose at the end, questioning.

“Good; the date might have some significance,” I said. “But the real question is this: Is it a coincidence that the exterior security camera facing that door is broken?”

Molly blinked at me, then frowned, looking around.

I pointed a finger up. “Remember to look in all three dimensions. Human instincts don’t tend toward checking above us or directly at our feet, in general. You have to make yourself pick up the habit.”

Molly frowned and then leaned over, peering up through the Beetle’s window to the tall streetlamp pole above us.

Maybe ten feet up, there was the square, black metal housing of a security camera. Several bare wires dangled beneath it, their ends connected to nothing. I’d seen it as I pulled the car in.

My apprentice drew in a nervous breath. “You think something is happening?”

“I think we don’t have enough information to make any assumptions,” I said. “It’s probably nothing. But let’s keep our eyes open.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than two figures stepped out of the night, walking briskly down the sidewalk outside the mall toward the lighted entrance.