Jim Butcher: Side Jobs

“I’d say Georgia was the one in danger,” Murphy said.

“I mean that Billy’s in danger, too,” I said.

“How so?”

“This isn’t happening on their wedding day by chance. The faeries want to use it against them.”

Murphy frowned. “What?”

“A wedding isn’t just a ceremony,” I said. “There’s power in it. A pledging of one to another, a blending of energies. There’s magic all through it.”

“If you say so,” she said, her tone wry. “What happens to him if he marries a faerie?”

“Conservatives get real upset,” I said absently. “But I’m not sure, magically speaking. Bob?”

“Oh,” Bob said. “Um. Well, if we assume this is one of the Winter Sidhe, then he’s going to be lucky to survive the honeymoon. If he does, well, she’ll be able to influence him, long term. He’ll be bound to her, the way the Winter Knights are bound to the Winter Queens. She’ll be able to impose her will over his. Change the way he thinks and feels about things.”

I ground my teeth. “And if she changes him enough, it will drive him insane.”

“Usually, yup,” Bob said. His voice brightened. “But don’t worry, boss. Odds are he’ll be dead before sunrise tomorrow. He might even die happy.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” I said. I checked my watch. “The wedding is in three hours. Georgia might need help now.” I looked back at Murphy. “You carrying?”

“Two on me. More in the car.”

“Now, there’s a girl who knows how to party!” Bob said.

I popped the skull back into my backpack harder than I strictly had to and zipped it shut. “Feel like saving the day?”

Her eyes sparkled, but she kept her tone bored. “On the weekend? Sounds too much like work.”

We started from the apartment together. “I’ll pay you in doughnuts.”

“Dresden, you pig. That cop-doughnut thing is a vicious stereotype.”

“Doughnuts with little pink sprinkles,” I said.

“Professional profiling is just as bad as racial profiling.”

I nodded. “Yeah. But I know you want the little pink sprinkles.”

“That isn’t the point,” she said loftily, and we got into her car.

We buckled in, and I said more quietly, “You don’t have to come with me, Karrin.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

I nodded and focused on the tracking spell, turning my head south. “Thataway.”

THE WORST THING about being a wizard is all the presumption; people’s expectations. Pretty much everyone expects me to be some kind of con artist, since it is a well-known fact that there is no such thing as magic. Of those who know better, most of them think I can just snap my fingers, poof, and have whatever I want. Dirty dishes? Snap my fingers and they wash themselves, like in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . Need to talk to a friend? Poof, teleport them in from wherever they are, because the magic knows where to find them, all by itself.

Magic ain’t like that. Or I sure as hell wouldn’t drive a beat-up old Volkswagen.

It’s powerful, true, and useful, and enormously advantageous, but ultimately it is an art, a science, a craft, a tool. It doesn’t go out and do things by itself. It doesn’t create something from nothing. Using it takes talent and discipline and practice and a lot of work, and none of it comes free.

Which was why my spell led us to downtown Chicago and suddenly became less useful.

“We’ve circled this block three times,” Murphy told me. “Can’t you get a more precise fix on it?”

“Do I look like one of those GPS thingies?” I sighed.

“Define thingie ,” Murphy said.

“It’s my spell,” I said. “It’s oriented to the points of the compass. I didn’t really have the z-axis in mind when I designed it, and it only works for that when I’m right on top of the target. I keep meaning to go back and fix that, but there’s never time.”

“I had a marriage like that,” Murphy said. She stopped at a light and stared up. The block held six buildings—three apartments, two office buildings, and an old church. “In there. Somewhere. It could take a lot of time to search that.”

“So call in all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” I said.

She shook her head. “I might be able to get a couple, but since Rudolph moved to Internal Affairs, I’ve been flagged. If I start calling in people left and right without a damn good logical, rational, wholly normal reason . . .”

I grunted. “I get it. We need to get closer. The closer I get to Georgia, the more precise the tracking spell will be.”

Murphy nodded once and pulled over in front of a fire hydrant, parking the car. “Let’s be smart about this. Six buildings. Where would a faerie take her?”

“Not the church. Holy ground is uncomfortable for them.” I shook my head. “Not the apartments. Too many people there. Too easy for someone to hear or see something.”

“Office buildings on a weekend,” Murphy said. “Empty as you can find in Chicago. Which one?”

“Let’s take a look. Maybe the spell can give me an idea.”

It took ten minutes to walk around the outsides of both buildings. The spell remained wonderfully nonspecific, though I knew Georgia was within a hundred yards or so. I sat down at the curb in disgust. “Dammit,” I said, pushing at my hair. “There has to be something.”

“Would a faerie be able to magick herself in and out of there?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “She couldn’t just wander in through the wall, or poof herself inside. But she could walk in under a veil, so that no one saw her—or else saw an illusion of what she wanted them to see.”

“Can’t you look for residual whatsit again?”

It was a good idea. I got Bob and tried it, while Murphy found a phone and tried to reach Billy or anyone who could reach Billy. After an hour’s effort, we had accomplished enormous amounts of nothing.

“In case I haven’t mentioned it before,” I said, “dealing with faeries is a pain in the ass.” Someone in a passing car flicked a still-smoldering cigarette butt onto the concrete near me. I kicked it through a sewer grate in disgust.

“She covered her tracks again?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

I shrugged. “Lot of ways. Scatter little glamours around to misdirect us. Only used her magic very lightly, to keep from leaving a big footprint. If she did her thing in a crowded area, enough people’s life force passing by would cover it. Or she could have used running water to—”

I stopped talking, and my gaze snapped back to the sewer grate.

I could hear water running through it in a low, steady stream.

“Down there,” I said. “She’s taken Georgia to Undertown.”

MURPHY STARED AT the stairs leading down to a tunnel with brick walls and shook her head. “I wouldn’t have believed this was here.”

We stood at the end of an uncompleted wing of Chicago’s underground commuter tunnels, at a broken section of wall hidden behind a few old tarps that led down into the darkness of Undertown.

Murphy had thrown on an old Cubs jacket over her shirt. She switched guns, putting her favorite Sig away in exchange for the Glock she wore holstered on one hip. The gun had a little flashlight built onto the underside of its barrel, and she flicked it on. “I mean, I knew there were some old tunnels,” Murphy said, “but not this.”

I grunted and took off the silver pentacle amulet I wore around my neck. I held it in my right hand, my fingers clutching the chain against the solid, round length of oak in my right hand, about two feet long and covered with carved runes and sigils—my blasting rod. I sent an effort of will into the amulet, and the silver pentacle began to glow with a gentle, blue-white light. “Yeah. The Manhattan Project was run out of the tunnels here until they moved it to the Southwest. Plus the town kept sinking into the swamp for a hundred and fifty years. There are whole buildings sunk right into the ground. The Mob dug places during Prohibition. People built bomb shelters during the fifties and sixties. And other things have added more, plus gateways back and forth to the spirit world.”