JIM BUTCHER: SMALL FAVOR

“I wouldn’t say they handed me my ass,” I said.

Bob was nearly strangling on his laughter, and given that he had no lungs it seemed gratuitous somehow. “That’s because you can’t see yourself,” he choked out. “Your nose is all swollen up and you’ve got two black eyes. You look like a raccoon. Holding a dislocated ass.”

“You didn’t see these things in action,” I said. “They were strong, and pretty smart. And there were four of them.”

“Just like the Four Horsemen!” he said. “Only with petting zoos!”

I scowled some more. “Fine, fine,” I said. “I’m glad I can amuse you.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Bob said, his voice bubbling with mirth. “‘Help me, help me! It’s the Billy Goats Gruff!’”

I glared. “You’re missing the point, Bob.”

“It can’t be as funny as what has come through,” he said. “I’ll bet every Sidhe in Winter is giggling about it.”

“Bet they’re not,” I said. “That’s the point. The gruffs work for Summer. They’re some of Queen Titania’s enforcers.”

Bob’s laughter died abruptly. “Oh.”

I nodded. “After that business at Arctis Tor, I could understand if someone from Winter had come after me. I never figured to do this kind of business with Summer.”

“Well,” Bob pointed out, “you did kind of give Queen Titania’s daughter the death of a thousand cuts.”

I grunted. “Yeah. But why send hitters now? She could have done it years ago.”

“That’s faeries for you,” Bob said. “Logic isn’t exactly their strong suit.”

I grunted. “Life should be so simple.” I thumped my finger on the book, thinking. “There’s more to this. I’m sure of it.”

“How high are they in the Summer hierarchy?” Bob asked.

“They’re up there,” I said. “As a group, anyway. They’ve got a reputation for killing trolls. Probably where the nursery tale comes from.”

“Troll killers,” Bob said. “Trolls. Like Mab’s personal guard, whose pieces you found scattered all over Arctis Tor?”

“Exactly,” I said. “But what I did there ticked off Winter, not Summer.”

“I’ve always admired your ability to be unilaterally irritating.”

I shook my head. “No. I must have done something there that hurt Summer somehow.” I frowned. “Or helped Winter. Bob, do you know-”

The phone started ringing. I had run a long extension cord from the outlet in my bedroom down to the lab, after Molly had nearly broken her neck rushing up the stepladder to answer a call. The old windup clock on one shelf told me that it was after midnight. Nobody calls me that late unless it’s something bad.

“Hold that thought,” I told Bob.

“It’s me,” Murphy said when I answered. “I need you.”

“Why, Sergeant, I’m touched,” I said. “You’ve admitted the truth at last. Cue sweeping romantic theme music.”

“I’m serious,” she said. Something in her voice sounded tired, strained.

“Where?” I asked her.

She gave me the address and we hung up.

I barely ever got work from Chicago PD anymore, and between that and my frequent trips to other cities as part of my duties as a Warden, I hadn’t been making diddly as an investigator. My stipend as a Warden of the White Council kept me from bankruptcy, but my bank account had bled slowly down to the point where I had to be really careful to avoid bouncing checks.

I needed the work.

“That was Murphy,” I said, “making a duty call.”

“This late at night, what else could it be?” Bob agreed. “Watch your back extra careful, boss.”

“Why do you say that?” I said, shrugging into my coat.

“I don’t know if you’re up on your nursery tales,” Bob said, “but if you’ll remember, the Billy Goats Gruff had a whole succession of brothers.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Each of them bigger and meaner than the last.”

I headed out to meet Murphy.

Weregoats. Jesus.

I was standing there watching the fire with everyone else when the beat cop brought Murphy over to me.

“It’s about time,” she said, her voice tense. She lifted the police tape and beckoned me. I had already clipped my little laminated consultant’s ID to my duster’s lapel. “What took you so long?”

“There’s a foot of snow on the ground and it doesn’t show signs of stopping,” I replied.

She glanced up at me. Karrin Murphy is a wee little thing, and the heavy winter coat she wore only made her look smaller. The large, fluffy snowflakes still falling clung to her golden hair and glittered on her eyelashes, turning her eyes glacial blue. “Your toy car got stuck in a drift, huh? What happened to your face?”

I glanced around at all the normals. “I was in a snowball fight.”

Murphy grunted. “I guess you lost.”

“You should have seen the other guy.”

We were standing in front of a small five-story apartment building, and something had blown it to hell.

The front facing of the building was just gone, as if some unimaginably huge ax had sliced straight down it. You could see the floors and interiors of empty apartments, when you could get a glimpse of them through the pall of dust and smoke and thick falling snow. Fires burned in the building, insubstantial behind the haze of flame and winter. Rubble had washed out into the street, damaging the buildings on the other side, and the police had everyone cordoned off at least a block away. Broken glass and steel and brick lay everywhere. The air was acrid, thick with the stench of burning materials never meant to feed a fire.

Despite the weather, a couple of hundred people had gathered at the police cordons. Some enterprising soul was selling hot coffee from a big thermos, and I hadn’t been too proud to cough up a dollar for a foam cup of java, powdered creamer, and a packet of sugar.

“Lots of fire trucks,” I noted. “But only one ambulance. And the crew is drinking coffee while everyone else shivers in the cold.” I sipped at my cup. “The bastards.”

“Building wasn’t occupied,” Murphy said. “Being renovated, actually.”

“No one got hurt,” I said. “That’s a plus.”

Murphy gave me a cryptic look. “You willing to work off the books? Per diem?”

I sipped coffee to cover up a wince. I far prefer a two-day minimum. “I guess the city isn’t coughing up much money for consultants, huh?”

“SI’s been pooling the coffee money, in case we needed your take on something.”

This time I didn’t bother to hide the wince. Taking money from the city government was one thing. Taking money from the cops in SI was another.

Special Investigations was the CPD’s version of a pool filter. Things that slipped through the areas of interest of the other departments got dumped on SI. Lots of times those things included the cruddy work no one else wanted to do, so SI wound up investigating everything from apparent rains of toads to dogfighting rackets to reports of El Chupacabra molesting neighborhood pets from its lair in a local sewer. It was a crappy job, no pun intended, and as a result SI was regarded by the city as a kind of asylum for incompetents. They weren’t, but the inmates of SI generally did share a couple of traits-intelligence enough to ask questions when something didn’t make sense, and an inexcusable lack of ability when it came to navigating the murky waters of office politics.

When Sergeant Murphy had been Lieutenant Murphy, she’d been in charge of SI. She’d been busted for vanishing during twenty-four particularly critical hours of an investigation. It wasn’t like she could tell her superiors that she was off storming a frozen fortress in the near reaches of the Nevernever, now, could she? Now her old partner, Lieutenant John Stallings, was in charge of SI, and he was running the place on a strained, frayed, often knotted shoestring of a budget.