Buy This From... Release Date: April 2010

Chapter One

I answered the phone, and Susan Rodriguez said, "They've taken our daughter."

I sat there for a long five count, swallowed, and said, "Um. What?"

"You heard me, Harry," Susan said gently.

"Oh," I said. "Um."

"The line isn't secure," she said. "I'll be in town tonight. We can talk then."

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

"Harry..." she said. "I'm not... I never wanted to..." She cut the words off with an impatient sigh. I heard a voice over the loudspeaker in the background, saying something in Spanish. "We'll have time for that later. The plane is boarding. I've got to go. About twelve hours."

"Okay," I said. "I'll... I'll be here."

She hesitated, as if about to say something else, but then she hung up.

I sat there with the phone against my ear. After a while, it started making that double-speed busy-signal noise.

Our daughter.

She said our daughter.

I hung the phone up. Or tried. I missed the base. The receiver clattered to the floor.

Mouse, my big, shaggy grey dog, rose up from his usual napping spot in the tiny kitchenette my basement apartment boasted, and came trotting over to sit down at my feet, staring up at me with dark, worried doggy eyes. After a moment, he made a little huffing sound, then carefully picked the receiver up in his jaws and settled it onto the base. Then he went back to staring worriedly at me.

"I..." I paused, trying to get my head around the concept. "I... I might have a child."

Mouse made an uncertain, high-pitched noise.

"Yeah. How do you think I feel?" I stared at the far wall. Then I stood up and reached for my coat. "I... think I need a drink," I said. I nodded, focusing on nothing. "Yeah. Something like this... yeah."

Mouse made a distressed noise and rose.

"Sure," I told him. "You can come. Hell, maybe you can drive me home or something."

I got honked at a lot on the way to McAnally's. I didn't care. I made it without crashing into anyone. That's the important thing, right? I pulled my battered, trusty old Volkswagen Bug over into the little parking lot next to Mac's place. I started inside.

Mouse made a whuffing sound.

I looked over my shoulder. I'd left the car door open. The big dog nosed it closed.

"Thanks," I said.

We went into the pub.

Mac's place looks like Cheers after a mild apocalypse. There are thirteen wooden pillars irregularly spaced around the room, holding up the roof. They're all carved with scenes of Old World fairy tales, some of them amusing, more of them sinister. There are thirteen ceiling fans spinning lazily throughout the place, and the irregularly shaped, polished wooden bar has thirteen stools. There are thirteen tables in the room, placed in no specific pattern.

"There're a lot of thirteens in here," I said to myself.

It was about two thirty in the afternoon. No one was in the pub except for me and the dog--oh, and Mac. Mac is a man of medium height and medium build, with thick, bony wrists and a shining smooth pate that never showed signs of growing in. He could be anywhere between thirty and fifty and, as always, he was wearing a spotless white apron.

Mouse stared intently at Mac for a moment. Then he abruptly sat down in the entryway at the top of the little stairs, turned around once, and settled down by the door, his chin on his paws.

Mac glanced toward us. "Harry."

I shambled over to the bar. Mac produced a bottle of one of his microbrews, but I shook my head. "Um. I'd say, 'Whiskey, Mac,' but I don't know if you have any whiskey. I need something strong, I think."

Mac raised his eyebrows and blinked at me. You've got to know the guy. He was practically screaming. But he poured me a drink of something light gold in a little glass, and I drank it. It burned. I wheezed a little, and then tapped a finger next to the glass.

Mac refilled it, frowning at me.

I drank the second glass more slowly. It still hurt going down. The pain gave me something to focus on. Thoughts started to coagulate around it, and then to crystallize into definite shape.

Susan had called me. She was on the way.

And we had a child.

And she had never told me.

Susan had been a reporter for a yellow rag that covered supernatural news. Most of the people who worked there thought they were publishing fiction, but Susan had clued in to the supernatural world on her own, and we'd crossed trails and verbal swords several times before we'd gotten together. We hadn't been together a terribly long time--a little less than two years. We were both young and we made each other happy.

Maybe I should have known better. If you don't stand on the sidelines and ignore the world around you, sooner or later you make enemies. One of mine, a vampire named Bianca, had abducted Susan and infected her with the blood thirst of the Red Court. Susan hadn't gone all the way over--but if she ever lost control of herself, ever took another's lifeblood, she would.

She left me, afraid that if she didn't, I'd be the kill that turned her into a monster, and set out into the world to find some way to cope.

I told myself that she had good reason to do so, but reason and heartbreak don't speak the same language. I'd never really forgiven myself for what had happened to her. I guess reason and guilt don't speak the same language, either.

It was probably a damned good thing I had gone into shock, because I could feel emotions that were stirring somewhere deep inside me, gathering power like a storm far out to sea. I couldn't see them. I could only feel their effects, but it was enough to know that whatever was rising inside me was potent. Violent. Dangerous. Mindless rage got people killed every day. But for me, it might be worse.

I'm a professional wizard.

I can make a lot more things happen than most people.

Magic and emotions are tied up inextricably. I've been in battle before, and felt the terror and rage of that kind of place, where it's a fight just to think clearly through the simplest problems. I'd used my magic in those kinds of volatile circumstances--and a few times, I'd seen it run wild as a result. When most people lose control of their anger, someone gets hurt. Maybe someone even gets killed. When it happens to a wizard, insurance companies go broke and there's reconstruction afterward.

What was stirring in me now made those previous feelings of battle rage seem like anemic kittens.

"I've got to talk to someone," I heard myself say quietly. "Someone with some objectivity, perspective. I've got to get my head straight before things go to hell."

Mac leaned on the bar and looked at me.

I cradled the glass in my hand and said quietly, "You remember Susan Rodriguez?"

He nodded.

"She says that someone took our daughter. She says she'll be here late tonight."

Mac inhaled and exhaled slowly. Then he picked up the bottle and poured himself a shot. He sipped at it.

"I loved her," I said. "Maybe love her still. And she didn't tell me."

He nodded.

"She could be lying."

He grunted.

"I've been used before. And I'm a sucker for a girl."

"Yes," he said.

I gave him an even look. He smiled slightly.

"She'd be... six? Seven?" I shook my head. "I can't even do the math right now."

Mac pursed his lips. "Hard thing."

I finished the second glass. Some of the sharper edges had gotten softer. Mac touched a finger to the bottle, watching me. I shook my head.

"She could be lying to me," I said quietly. "If she's not... then..."

Mac closed his eyes briefly and nodded.

"Then there's this little girl in trouble," I said. I felt my jaw clench, and the storm inside me threatened to come boiling up. I pushed it down. "My little girl."

He nodded again.

"Don't know if I ever told you," I said. "I was an orphan."

Mac watched me silently.

"There were times when... when it was bad. When I wanted someone to come save me. I wished for it so hard. Dreaming of... of not being alone. And when someone finally did come, he turned out to be the biggest monster of all." I shook my head. "I won't let that happen to my child."

Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a resonant baritone. "You've got to be very careful, Harry."

I looked at him, shocked. He'd... used grammar.

"Something like this will test you like nothing else," Mac said. "You're going to find out who you are, Harry. You're going to find out which principles you'll stand by to your death--and which lines you'll cross." He took my empty glass away and said, "You're heading into the badlands. It'll be easy to get lost."

I watched him in stunned silence as he finished his drink. He grimaced, as though it hurt his throat on the way down. Maybe he'd strained his voice, using it so much.

I stared down at my hands for a moment. Then I said, "Steak sandwich. And something for the pooch."

He grunted in the affirmative and started cooking. He took his time about it, divining my intentions with a bartender's instincts. I didn't feel like eating, but I had a little time to kill while the buzz faded.

He put my sandwich down in front of me. Then he took a bowl with some bones and some meat out to Mouse, along with a bowl of water. I ate my sandwich and idly noted that Mac never carried food out to anyone. Guess he was a dog person.

I ate my sandwich slowly and paid Mac.

"Thanks," I said.

He nodded. "Luck."

I got up and headed back for the car. Mouse followed beside me, his eyes lifted, watching me to see what I would do. I marshaled my thoughts. I had to be careful. I had to be wary. I had to keep my eyes open. I had to keep the storm inside me from exploding, because the only thing I knew for certain was that someone--maybe Susan, maybe my enemies--was trying to manipulate me.

Either way, Mac was right.

I was heading into the badlands.

Chapter Two

Susan arrived at around one in the morning.

I had gone back home from the pub and straight to my lab in the subbasement, and made with the wizardry, which demanded an intense focus on my tasks. Over the next several hours, I prepared a couple of things that might come in handy in the immediate future. Then I went back up the stepladder to my apartment and put on my force rings. Each of them is a braid of three individual rings, and I had enchanted them to store up a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. They were pretty efficient, but it wouldn't hurt to top them off, so I spent half an hour beating the tar out of the heavy bag hanging in one corner of my apartment's living area.

I showered, cleaned up, made some dinner, and generally never stopped moving. If I did that, thoughts might start to creep in, and I wasn't sure how I would deal with them.

I didn't even consider trying to sleep. It just wasn't going to happen.

So I stayed in motion. I cleaned the kitchen. I bathed Mouse and brushed out his coat. I picked up my living room, my room, my bathroom. I changed out my cat Mister's litter box. I tidied up the fireplace, and set out fresh candles to illuminate the room.

It took me a couple of hours of that to realize that I was trying to make my apartment look nice because Susan was coming over. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I was debating with myself whether or not I might need to clean Mister up (and having a narrow-eyed glare bestowed upon me from his perch atop my highest bookshelf) when there was a polite knock at the door.

My heart started being faster. I opened the door and found Susan facing me. She was a woman of medium height, which meant she was about a

foot shorter than me. Her features were leanly angular, except for her mouth. She had dark, straight hair and even darker eyes, and her skin had a sun-bronzed tone to it far deeper than I had ever seen on her before. She looked thinner. I could see the tendons and muscles beneath the skin of her neck, and her cheekbones seemed starker than they had before. She wore black leather pants, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket to complement the pants.

And she had not aged a day.

It had been most of a decade since I had beheld her. In that time, you expect people's appearance to change a little. Oh, nothing major. A few more pounds, maybe, a few more lines, a few silver hairs. People change. But Susan hadn't changed. At all.

I guess that's a nifty perk of being a half-turned vampire of the Red Court.

"Hi," she said quietly.

"Hi," I said back. I could meet her eyes without worrying about triggering a soulgaze. She and I had looked upon each other already.

She lowered her eyes and slipped her hands into her jacket pockets. "Harry... can I come in?"

I took half a step back. "I dunno. Can you come in?"

Her eyes flickered with a spark of anger. "You think I crossed over?"

"I think that taking unnecessary chances has lost its appeal to me,"

I said.

She pressed her lips together, but then nodded in acquiescence and stepped over the threshold of my apartment, the barrier of magical energy that surrounds any home--an action that simply would not have been possible for a vampire without first receiving my permission.

"Okay," I said, backing up to let her enter before I shut the door again. As I did, I saw a sandy-haired, plain-looking man seated casually on the top step of the concrete stairwell that led down to my apartment.

He wore khakis, a blue denim jacket, and was reclining just enough to display the lines of a shoulder holster beneath the jacket. He was Susan's ally and his name was Martin. "You," I said. "Joy."

Martin's lips twitched into the faint and distant echo of a smile. "Likewise."

I shut the door on him and, just to be obnoxious, clacked the dead bolt closed as loudly as I could.

Susan smiled a little and shook her head. She looked around the apartment for a moment--and then suddenly froze as a growl came rumbling from the darkened alcove of the minikitchen. Mouse didn't rise, and his growl was not the savage thing I had heard once or twice before--but it was definitely a sound of polite warning.

Susan froze in place, staring at the kitchen for a moment. Then she said, "You got a dog."

"He kind of got me," I replied.

Susan nodded and swept her eyes around the little apartment. "You redecorated a little."

"Zombies," I said. "And werewolves. Place has been trashed a few times."

"I never understood why you didn't move out of this musty little hole."

"Musty? Little? My home this is," I said. "Get you something? Coke, beer?"

"Water?"

"Sure. Have a seat." Susan moved silently over to one of the easy chairs framing the fireplace and settled down on its edge, her back straight. I got her some ice water, fetched myself a Coke, and brought the drinks over to her. I settled down in the other chair, so that we partly faced each other, and popped the tab on my drink.

"You're really going to leave Martin sitting outside?" she asked, amusement in her voice.

"I most certainly am," I said calmly, and took a sip of my drink.

She nodded and touched her glass to her lips. Maybe she sipped a little water.

I waited as long as I could stand it, maybe two or three whole seconds, before I broke the heavy silence. "So," I asked casually,"what's new?"

Her dark eyes regarded me obliquely for a moment before her lips thinned slightly. "This is going to be painful for both of us. Let's just have it done. We don't have time to dance around it."

"Okay. Our child?" I asked. "Yours and mine?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

She smoothed her face into a nonexpression. "There hasn't been anyone else, Harry. Not since that night with you. Not for more than two years before that."

If she was lying, it didn't show. I took that in for a moment and sipped some Coke. "It seems like something you should have told me."

I said it in a voice far calmer than I would have thought possible. I don't know what my face looked like when I said it. But Susan's darkly tanned skin became several shades lighter. "Harry," she said quietly, "I know you must be angry."

"I burn things to ash and smash holes in buildings when I'm angry," I said. "I'm a couple of steps past that point right now."

"You have every right to be," she said. "But I did what I thought was best for her. And for you."

The storm surged higher into my chest. But I made myself sit there without moving, breathing slowly and steadily. "I'm listening."

She nodded and took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then she said, "You don't know what it's like down there. Central America, all the way down to Brazil. There's a reason so many of those nations limp along in a state of near-anarchy."

"The Red Court," I said. "I know."

"You know in the abstract. But no one in the White Council has spent time there. Lived there. Seen what happens to the people the Reds rule." She shivered and folded her arms over her stomach. "It's a nightmare. And there's no one but the Fellowship and a few underfunded operatives of the Church to stand up to them."

The Fellowship of St. Giles was a collection of the supernatural world's outcasts and strays, many of them half vampires like Susan. They hated the Red Court with a holy passion, and did everything in their power to confound the vampires at every opportunity. They operated in cells, choosing targets, training recruits, planting bombs, and funding their operations through a hundred shady business activities. Terrorists, basically--smart, quick, and tough because they had to be.

"It hasn't been Disneyland in the rest of the world, either," I said quietly. "I saw my fair share of nightmares during the war. And then some."

"I'm not trying to belittle anything that the Council has done," she said. "I'm just trying to explain to you what I was facing at the time. Teams from the Fellowship rarely sleep in the same bed twice. We're always on the move. Always planning something or running from something. There's no place for a child in that."

"If only there had been someone with his own home and a regular income where she could have stayed," I said.

Susan's eyes hardened. "How many people have gotten killed around you, Harry? How many hurt?" She raked her fingers through her hair. "For God's sake. You said yourself that your apartment has been under attack. Would that have gone any better if you'd had a toddler to watch over?"

"Guess we'll never know," I said.

"I know," she said, her voice suddenly seething with intensity. "God, do you think I didn't want to be a part of her life? I cry myself to sleep at night--when I can sleep. But in the end, I couldn't offer her anything but a life on the run. And you couldn't offer her anything but a life under siege."

I stared at her.

But I didn't say anything.

"So I did the only thing I could do," she said. "I found a place for her. Far away from the fighting. Where she could have a stable life. A loving home."

"And never told me," I said.

"If the Red Court had ever learned about my child, they would have used her against me. Period. As a means of leverage, or simple revenge.

The fewer people who knew about her, the safer she was going to be. I didn't tell you, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew that it would make you furious because of your own childhood." She leaned forward, her eyes almost feverish from the heat in her words. "And I would do a thousand times worse than that, if it meant that she'd be better protected."

I sipped some more Coke. "So," I said. "You kept her from me so that she would be safer. And you sent her away to be raised by strangers so that she would be safer." The storm in me pushed up higher, tingeing my voice with the echo of a furious howl. "How's that working out?"

Susan's eyes blazed. Red, swirling tribal marks began to appear on her skin, like tattoos done in disappearing ink, only backward--the Fellowship's version of a mood ring. They covered the side of her face, and her throat.

"The Fellowship has been compromised," she said, her words crisp. "Duchess Arianna of the Red Court found out about her, somehow, and had her taken. Do you know who she is?"

"Yeah," I said. I tried to ignore the way my blood had run cold at the mention of the name. "Duke Ortega's widow. She's sworn revenge upon me--and she once tried to buy me on eBay."

Susan blinked. "How did... No, never mind. Our sources in the Red Court say that she's planning something special for Maggie. We have to get her back."

I took another slow breath and closed my eyes for a moment.

"Maggie, huh?"

"For your mother," Susan whispered. "Margaret Angelica." I heard

her fumble at her pockets. Then she said, "Here."

I opened my eyes and looked at a little wallet-sized portrait of a dark-eyed child, maybe five years old. She wore a pink dress and had purple ribbons in her dark hair, and she was smiling a wide and infectious smile. Some calm, detached part of me filed the face away, in case I needed to recognize her later. The rest of me cringed away from looking any closer, from thinking about the image as anything but a bit of paper and ink.

"It's from a couple of years ago," Susan said quietly. "But it's my most recent picture." She bit her lip and offered it to me.

"Keep it," I told her quietly. She put it away. The red marks were fading from her skin, gone the way they had come. I rubbed at my eyes. "For now," I said slowly, "we're going to forget about your decision to edit me out of her life. Because chewing over it won't help her right now, and because her best chance is for us to work together. Agreed?"

Susan nodded.

I spoke the next words through my teeth. "But I haven't forgotten. Will never forget it. There will be a reckoning on that account later. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she whispered. She looked up at me with large, shining dark eyes. "I never wanted to hurt you. Or her. I was just..."

"No," I said. "Too late for that now. It's just wasting time we can't afford to lose."

Susan turned her face sharply away from me, to the fire, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her expression was under control. "All right," she said. "For our next step, we've got some options."

"Like?"

"Diplomacy," she said. "I hear stories about you. Half of them probably aren't true, but I know you've got some markers you could call in. If enough of the Accord members raise a voice, we might get her back without incident."

I snorted. "Or?"

"Offer reparations to the Red King in exchange for the child's life. He doesn't have a personal interest in this matter, and he outranks Arianna. Give him a bribe big enough and she'll have to let Maggie go."

"Right off the top of a building, probably," I growled.

Susan watched me steadily. "What do you think we should do?"

I felt my lips do something that probably didn't look like a smile. The storm had settled somewhere around my heart, and heady tendrils of its fury were curling up into my throat. It was a good ten seconds before I could speak, and even then it came out in a snarl.

"Do?" I said. "The Reds stole our little girl. We sure as hell aren't going to pay them for that."

A hot and terrible hunger flared up in Susan's eyes in response to my voice.

"We find Maggie," I said. "We take her back. And we kill anyone who gets in the way."

Susan shuddered and her eyes overflowed. She bowed her head and made a small sound. Then she leaned over and gently touched my left hand, the one still covered in slowly fading burn scars. She looked at my hand and winced, beginning to draw away.

I caught her fingers and squeezed hard. She settled her fingers against mine and did the same. We held hands for a silent moment.

"Thank you," she whispered. Her hand was shaking in mine. "Thank you, Harry."

I nodded. I was going to say something to stiff-arm her and keep the distance, but the warmth of her hand in mine was suddenly something I couldn't ignore. I was furious with Susan, furious with an intensity you can feel only when someone you care deeply about hurts you. But the corollary of that was unavoidable--I still cared, or I wouldn't be angry.

"We'll find her," I said. "And I will do everything in my power to bring her back safe."

Susan looked up at me, tears streaking her face, and nodded. Then she lifted a hand and traced her fingers lightly over the scar on my cheek. It was a newer one, still angry and colorful. I thought it made me look like some old-school German character from Golden Age Hollywood with a dueling scar on his cheek. Her fingertips were gentle and warm.

"I didn't know what I was going to do," she said. "There was no one willing to stand up to them. There was no one."

Our eyes met, and suddenly the old heat was there between us, quivering out from our joined hands, from her fingertips against my face. Her eyes widened a little, and my heart started pounding along rapidly. I was furious with Susan. But apparently my body just read that as "excited" and didn't bother examining the fine print. I met her eyes for a long moment and then said, through a dry throat, "Isn't this how we got into this mess?"

She let out a shaking sound that was meant to be a laugh, but was filled with awareness of the inherent irony, and drew her hands away. "I... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..." Her voice turned wry. "It's been a while for me."

I knew what she meant. I took several slow, deep breaths, separating mind from body. Then I said quietly, "Susan. Whatever happens from here... we're done." I looked up at her. "You know that. You knew it when you chose not to tell me."

She looked brittle. She nodded slowly, as if something might break off if she moved any more quickly than that. She folded her hands in her lap. "I... know that. I knew it when I did it."

Silence stretched.

"Right," I said finally. "Now..." I took another deep breath, and told myself it would help. "The way I see it, you didn't fly into Chicago just for a chat with me. You wouldn't need Martin for that."

She lifted an eyebrow at me and nodded. "True."

"Then why?"

She seemed to gather herself, her voice more businesslike. "There's a Red outpost here. It's a place to start."

"Okay," I said, rising. "Let's start."

Chapter Three

"I hope there are no hard feelings," Martin told me as he pulled out of the little gravel lot next to the house I board in.

Susan had yielded the passenger seat of the rental car to me, in deference to my storklike legs. "Hard feelings?" I asked.

"About our first meeting," Martin said. He drove the same way he did everything--blandly. Complete stops. Five miles an hour under the limit. Wherever we were headed, it was going to take forever to get there.

"You mean the way you used me to attempt to assassinate old Ortega?" I asked. "Thereby ensuring that the Code Duello was broken, the duel invalidated, and the vamps' war with the White Council continued?"

Martin glanced at me, and then into the rearview mirror at Susan.

"I told you," she said to Martin. "He's only dense in the short term. He sees everything eventually."

I gave Susan a slight, wry tilt of my head in acknowledgment. "Wasn't hard to realize what you were doing in retrospect," I said. "The Red Court's war with the White Council must have been the best thing to happen to the Fellowship in ages."

"I've only been with them for slightly over one hundred years," Martin said. "But it was the best thing to happen in that time, yes. The White Council is one of the only organizations on the planet with the resources to seriously threaten them. And every time the Council won a victory--or even survived what should have been a crushing defeat, it meant that the Red Court was tearing itself to shreds internally. Some of them have had millennia to nurse grudges with rivals. They are appropriately epic in scale."

"Call me wacky," I said, "but I had to watch a few too many children die in that war you helped guarantee. No hard feelings?" I smiled at him--technically. "Marty, believe me when I say that you don't want me to get in touch with my feelings right now."

I felt Martin's eyes shift to me, and a little tension gather in his body. His shoulder twitched. He was thinking about his gun. He was pretty good with firearms. The night of my duel with the Red Court vampire named Ortega, Martin had put a round from one of those enormous sniper rifles into Ortega about half a second before the vampire would otherwise have killed me. It had been a gross violation of the Code Duello, the set of rules for resolving personal conflicts between individuals of the nations who had signed the Unseelie Accords.

The outcome of a clean duel might have put an early end to the war between the Red Court and the White Council of Wizards, and saved a lot of lives. It didn't turn out that way.

"Don't worry, guy," I told him. "Ortega was already in the middle of breaking the Code Duello anyway. It would have fallen out the way it did regardless of what you had done that night. And your being there meant that he ate a bullet at the last second instead of me. You saved my life. I'm cognizant of that."

I kept smiling at him. It didn't feel quite right, so I tried to do it a little harder. "I'm also aware that if you could have gotten what you wanted by putting the bullet in my back instead of his chest, you would have done it without blinking. So don't go thinking we're pals."

Martin looked at me and then relaxed. He said, "It's ironic that you, the mustang of the White Council, would immediately cling to its self-righteous position of moral authority."

"Excuse me?" I said quietly.

He spoke dispassionately, but there was a fire somewhere deep down behind the words--the first I'd ever heard in him. "I've seen children die, too, Dresden, slaughtered like animals by a threat no one in the wise and mighty Council seemed to give a good goddamn about--because the victims are poor, and far away, and isn't that a fine reason to let them die. Yes. If putting a bullet in you would have meant that the Council brought its forces to bear against the Red Court, I would have done it twice and paid for the privilege." He paused at a stop sign, gave me a direct look, and said, "It is good that we cleared the air. Is there anything else you want to say?"

I eyed the man and said, "You went blond. It makes you look sort of gay."

Martin shrugged, completely unperturbed. "My last assignment was on a cruise ship catering to that particular lifestyle."

I scowled and glanced at Susan.

She nodded. "It was."

I folded my arms, glowered out at the night, and said, "I have literally killed people I liked better than you, Martin." After another few moments, I asked, "Are we there yet?"

Martin stopped the car in front of a building and said, "It's in here."

I eyed the building. Nothing special, for Chicago. Twelve stories, a little run-down, all rented commercial space. "The Reds can't-- Look,

it can't be here," I said. "This building is where my office is."

"A known factor, for Red Court business holdings purchased it almost eight years ago," Martin said, putting the car in park and setting the emergency brake. "I should imagine that was when you saw that

sudden rise in the rent."

I blinked a couple of times. "I've... been paying rent to the Red Court?"

"Increased rent," Martin said, with the faintest emphasis. "Duchess Arianna apparently has an odd sense of humor. If it's any consolation, the people working there have no idea who they're really working for. They think they're a firm that provides secure data backups to a multi-national import-export corporation."

"But this is... my building." I frowned and shook my head. "And we're going to do what, exactly?"

Martin got out of the car and opened the trunk. Susan joined him. I got out of the car on general principles.

"We," said Martin, definitely not including me, "are going to burgle the office and retrieve files that we hope will contain information that might point the way toward Arianna's locations and intentions. You are going to remain with the car."

"The hell I will," I said.

"Harry," Susan said, her tone brisk and reasonable, "it's computers."

I grunted as if Susan had nudged me with her elbow. Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries. All technology tends to behave unreliably in the presence of a mortal wizard, and the newer it is, the wonkier it seems to become. If I went along with them, well... you don't take your cat with you when you go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn't polite, but because he's a cat. "Oh," I said. "Then... I guess I'll stay with the car."

"Even odds we've been spotted or followed," Martin said to Susan. "We had to leave Guatemala in a hurry. It wasn't as smooth an exit as it could have been."

"We didn't have days to spare," Susan said, her voice carrying a tone of wearily familiar annoyance. It was like listening to a husband and wife having an often-repeated quarrel. She opened a case in the trunk and slipped several objects into her pockets. "Allowances have to be made."

Martin watched her for a moment, selected a single tool from the case, and then slid the straps of a backpack with a hard-sided frame over his shoulders. Presumably it had computer things in it. I stayed on the far side of the car from it and tried to think nonhostile thoughts.

"Just watch for trouble, Harry," Susan said. "We'll be back out in twenty minutes or less."

"Or we won't," Martin said. "In which case we'll know our sloppy exit technique caught up to us."

Susan made a quiet, disgusted sound, and the pair of them strode toward the building, got to the locked front doors, paused for maybe three seconds, and then vanished inside.

"And I'm just standing here," I muttered. "Like I'm Clifford the Big Red Dog. Too big and dumb to go inside with Emily Elizabeth. And it's my building." I shook my head. "Hell's bells, I am off my game. Or out of my mind. I mean, here I am talking to myself."

I knew why I was talking to myself--if I shut up, I would have nothing to think about but a small person, terrified and alone in a den of monsters. And that would make me think about how I had been shut out of her life. And that would make me think about the beast in my chest that was still clawing to get out.

When the local Red Court badass, the late Bianca, had stolen Susan away and begun her transformation into a full-fledged vampire of the Red Court, it had been the vampire's intention to take my girlfriend away from me. One way or another she had succeeded. Susan as she had been--always joking, always laughing, always touching or kissing or otherwise enjoying life in general and life with me in particular--was gone.

Now she was somewhere between Emma Peel and the She-Hulk. And we had loved each other once. And a child had been born because of it. And Susan had lied to--

Before I could begin circling the block a few more times on that vicious cycle, a cold feeling went slithering down my spine.

I didn't even look around. Several years of tense missions with Wardens not old enough to buy their own beer had taught me to trust my instincts when they went insane in a darkened city at two in the morning. Without even thinking about it, I crouched, reached into the air surrounding me, and drew a veil around myself.

Veils are subtle, tricky magic, using one of several basic theories to render objects or people less visible than they would be otherwise. I used to suck so badly at veils that I wouldn't even try them--but I'd had to bone up on them enough to be able to teach my apprentice, Molly Carpenter, how to use them. Molly had a real gift and had learned quickly, but I'd been forcing her to stretch her talents--and it had taken a lot of personal practice time for me to be able to fake it well enough to have credibility in front of the grasshopper.

Long story short--fast, simple veils were no longer beyond my grasp.

The street darkened slightly around me as I borrowed shadow and bent light. Being under a veil always reduced your own ability to see what was happening around you, and was a calculated risk. I figured it was probably worth it. If someone had a gun pointed my way, I had a long damned run before I could get around the corner of a nice thick building. It would be better to be unseen.

I crouched next to the car, not quite invisible but pretty close. The ability to be calm and still was critical to actually using a veil. It is hard to do when you think danger is close and someone might be planning to part you from your thoughts in a purely physical fashion. But I arrested the adrenaline surge and regulated my breathing. Easy does it, Harry.

So I had a dandy view of half a dozen figures that came darting toward the office building with a hideous, somehow arachnid grace. Two of them were bounding along rooftops, vaguely humanoid forms that moved as smoothly as if they were some kind of hunting cat. Three more were closing on the building from different angles at ground level, gliding from shadow to shadow. I couldn't sense much of them beyond blurs in the air and more shivers along my spine.

The last form was actually scuttling down the sides of buildings on the same street, bounding from one to the next, sticking to the walls like an enormous spider and moving with terrible speed.

I never got more of a look than that--flickering shadows moving with sinister purpose. But I knew what I was looking at.

Vampires.

Red Court vampires.

They closed on my office building like sharks on bloody meat. The tempest in my chest suddenly raged, and as I watched them vanish into the building--my fricking building--like cockroaches somehow finding a way to wriggle into places they shouldn't be, the anger rose up from my chest to my eyes and the reflections of streetlights in the window glass tinted red.

I let the vampires enter the building.

And then I gathered up my fury and pain, honing them like immaterial blades, and went in after them.

Chapter Four

My blasting rod was hanging from its tie on the inside of my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.

I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn't going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close--they'd be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.

I didn't take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above my office. That was probably where Martin and Susan were. It would be where the vampires were heading.

I hit the stairs and took a risk. Spells to dull sound and keep conversations private were basic fare for wizards of my abilities, and it wasn't much harder to make sure that sound didn't leave the immediate area around me. Of course, that meant that I was effectively putting myself in a sonic bubble--I wouldn't hear anything coming toward me, either. But for the moment, at least, I knew the vampires were here while they presumably were unaware of me. I wanted to keep it that way.

Besides, in quarters this close, by the time I reacted to a noise from a vampire I hadn't seen, I was as good as dead anyway.

So I murmured the words to a reliable bit of phonoturgy and went up the stairs clad in perfect silence. Which was a good thing. I run on a regular basis, but running down a sidewalk or a sandy beach isn't the same thing as running up stairs. By the time I got to the ninth floor, my legs were burning, I was breathing hard, and my left knee was killing me. What the hell? When had my knees become something I had to worry about?

Cheered by that thought, I paused at the door to the ninth-floor hallway, opened it beneath the protection of my cloak of silence, and then dropped the spell so that I could listen.

Hissing, gurgling speech in a language I couldn't understand came from the hallway before me, maybe right around the corner I could see ahead. I literally held my breath. Vampires have superhuman senses, but they are as vulnerable to distraction as anyone. If they were talking, they might not hear me, and regular human traffic in this building would probably hide my scent from them.

And why, exactly, a voice somewhere within the storm in my chest whispered, should I be hiding from these murdering scum in the first place? Red Court vampires were killers, one and all. A half-turned vampire didn't go all the way over until they'd killed another human being and fed upon their life's blood. Granted, an unwilling soul taken into the Red Court found themselves at the mercy of new and nearly irresistible hungers--but that didn't change the fact that if they were a card-carrying member of the Red Court, they had killed someone to be there.

Monsters. Monsters who dragged people into the darkness and inflicted unspeakable torments upon them for pleasure--and I should know. They'd done it to me once. Monsters whose existence was a plague upon millions.

Monsters who had taken my child.

The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.

I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, "Fuck subtle."

The gurgle-hissing from around the corner ahead stopped at a confused intersection of speech that needed no translation: Huh?

I lifted the blasting rod, aimed it at the corner ahead of me, and poured my rage, my will, and my power into it as I snarled, "Fuego!"

Silver-white fire howled down the hallway and bit into the corner ahead, blowing through it as easily as a bullet through a paper target. I drew the line of fire to my left, and as quickly as that, the fire gouged an opening as big as my fist through several sections of studs and drywall, blasting through to the perpendicular hallway where I'd heard the vampires talking. The din was incredible. Wood tore and exploded. Drywall flew into clouds of dust. Pipes screamed as they were severed as neatly as if I'd used a cutter. Wires erupted into clouds of popping sparks.

And something entirely inhuman let out a piercing shriek of pain, pain driven by unnaturally powerful lungs into a scream that was louder than gunshots.

I screamed in answer, in challenge, in defiance, and pelted forward. The runes on my blasting rod shone with white-hot fire, throwing brilliant silver-white light out ahead of me into the darkened building as I ran.

As I rounded the corner a shape was already in motion, coming toward me. My shield bracelet was ready. I lifted my left hand, fingers contorted into a gesture that had nothing to do with magic but that was generally considered insulting. My will poured into the charm bracelet hung with multiple tiny shields, and in an instant my power spread from there into a quarter-dome shape of pure, invisible force in front of me. The black shape of the vampire hit the shield, sending up concentric circles of blue light and white sparks, and then rebounded from it.

I dropped the shield almost before he was done rebounding, leveled the blasting rod with a flick of my wrist, and ripped the vampire in half with a word and a beam of silver fire. The pieces flew off in different directions, still kicking and thrashing hideously.

In the middle of the hallway was a second bisected vampire, which I'd apparently hit when firing blindly through the wall. It was also dying messily. Because I've seen too many bad horror movies and know the rules for surviving them, the instant I'd made sure the hallway was empty of more threats, I swung the rod up to point above me.

A vampire clung to the ceiling not twenty feet away. People have this image of vampires as flawless, beautiful gods of dark sex and temptation. And, while the Red Court can create a kind of outer human shell called a flesh mask, and while that mask was generally lovely, there was something very different underneath--a true, hideous, unrepentant monster, like the one looking down at me.

It was maybe six feet tall when standing, though its arms were scrawny and long enough to drag the backs of its claw-tipped hands along the ground. Its skin was rubbery and black, spotted here and there with unhealthy-looking bits of pink, and its belly hung down in flabby grotesquerie. It was bandy-legged, hunchbacked, and its face was somewhere between that of a vampire bat and something from H. R. Giger's hallucinations.

It saw me round the corner, and its goggling black eyes seemed to get even larger. It let out a scream of...

Terror.

It screamed in fear.

The vampire flung itself away from me even as I unleashed a third blast, bounding away down the hall, flinging itself from the ceiling to the wall to the floor to the wall and back again, wildly dodging the stream of ruinous energy I sent after it.

"That's right!" I heard myself scream. "You'd better run, pretty boy!" It vanished around the next corner and I shouted in incoherent rage, kicked the still-twitching head of one of the downed vampires with the tip of my steel-toed work boots, and rushed after it in pursuit, cursing up a storm.

The entire business had taken, at most, six or seven seconds.

After that, things got a little complicated.

I'd started half a dozen small fires with the blasts, and before I'd gone another half a dozen steps the fire alarms twittered shrilly. Sprinkler systems went off all around me. And at the same moment, gunfire erupted from somewhere ahead of me. None of that was good.

The alarms meant that the authorities would be on the way--and except for the smartest guys in CPD's Special Investigations, they just weren't ready to deal with a vampire. They'd be little more than victims and potential hostages to the supernatural predators.

The falling water wasn't good, either. Running water grounds magical energies, and while it wouldn't shut me down completely, it would make everything harder to do, like running through soft sand or over wet clay. And the gunshots weren't good because a pair of bullets came through the wall not six feet away, and one of them tugged hard at the hem of my jeans over my left ankle.

"Ack!" I said.

Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that's me.

I twisted my left wrist across the front of my body, brought my shield up again. A couple of bullets that probably wouldn't have hit me anyway popped off of it, concentric circles of flickering blue light spreading from the points of impact. I dashed down the hall and around the corner, the blasting rod in my right hand lifted and ready.

There were two vampires in front of a door to an office. One of them was on the floor, thrashing and hissing in agony, clutching at its flabby belly. It was leaking blood all over the floor. Several dozen bullet holes--exit holes--in the door explained why. The injuries wouldn't kill the vamp, but they were painful and robbed it of the source of its supernatural power--the blood it had devoured. The other was crouched to the side of the doorway, as if debating with itself whether or not it should try to rush the door as its companion apparently had.

My runner went by them, wailing in fear.

I slid to a stop on the rapidly moistening floor, lifted the rod, and cut loose with another blast. It howled down the hallway, and the running vamp seized the wounded one and pulled it up to intercept the shot I'd meant for it. The wounded vamp screamed and absorbed just enough of the energy to let the runner plunge through the drywall at the end of the hall. It vanished from sight, and a second later I heard the sound of glass breaking as it fled the building.

The luckless vampire was dead, or on the final approach to it, since the beam had sliced off almost everything to the left of its spine. The final vampire whirled toward me, hesitating.

It proved fatal. The wall behind it suddenly exploded outward, and Martin, his skin livid with dark tattoos, came crashing through it. He drove the vampire across the hallway and slammed it into the wall. One hand snaked around the surprised vampire's belly, and a knife gleamed. Scarlet gore fountained against the wall, and the vampire collapsed, screaming breathlessly.

Martin leapt clear before the thrashing creature got lucky with one of its claws, snapped his gaze up and down the hallway, saw the hole in the far wall, and said, "Damnation. You let one get away?"

Before I could answer him, Susan appeared, slipping out through the hole in the wall. She had the computer backpack slung over one shoulder and a smoking gun in her hand, a .45 automatic with an extended magazine. She took a look at the vampire on the ground and lifted the gun, her dark eyes hard and cold.

"Wait," I said. "There were six. He's number four."

"There are always six of them," Susan said. "Standard operations team."

She calmly pulled the trigger, letting loose a short, precise burst of automatic fire, and blew the wounded vampire's head into disgusting mulch.

Martin looked at his watch. "We don't have long."

Susan nodded and they both started down the hallway, toward the stairs. "Come on, Harry. We found floor plans. The building's wired."

I blinked and ran after them. "Wired? To what?"

"The explosives are on the fourth floor," Martin said calmly, "placed all around your office."

"Those jerks," I said. "They told us they were cleaning out asbestos!"

Susan barked out a short laugh, but Martin frowned her down. "When that runner gets them word about what happened, they'll set them off. I suggest we hurry."

"Holy crap," I breathed.

We sprinted for the stairs. Going down them took a lot less time than going up, but it was harder to control. I stumbled once and Susan caught me by the arm, her fingers like bands of rigid steel. We reached the bottom together.

"Not out the front!" I barked. "Inbound authorities!" I pounded past them and led them down a short hallway and out a side door, into an alley. Then we sprinted to the back of the building, down another alley, and away.

We had made it to the next block when light flashed and a giant the size of the Sears building hauled off and swatted us all with a pillow from his enormous bed. We were flung from our feet. Susan and Martin landed in a roll, tumbling several times. By contrast, I crashed into a garbage can.

It was, of course, full.

I lay there for a moment, my ears putting out a constant, high-pitched tone. A cloud of dust and particles washed over me, mixing with whatever hideous stew was in the trash can and caking itself to my body.

"I am not playing at the top of my game," I mused aloud. I felt the words buzz in my throat, but I couldn't hear them.

A few seconds later, sounds began to drift back in. Car horns and car alarms were going off everywhere. Storefront security systems were screaming. Sirens--lots and lots of sirens--were closing in.

A hand slipped beneath my arm and someone helped me stand up. Susan. She was lightly coated with dust. It filled the air so thickly that we couldn't see more than ten or twenty feet. I tried to walk and staggered.

Martin got underneath my other arm, and we started shambling away through the dust. After a little while, things stopped spinning so wildly. I realized that Martin and Susan were talking.

"--sure there's not something left?" Susan was saying.

"I'll have to examine it sector by sector," Martin said tonelessly. "We might get a few crumbs. What the hell was he thinking, throwing that kind of power around when he knew we were after electronic data?"

"He was probably thinking that the information would be useless to the two of us if we were dead," Susan said back, rather pointedly. "They had us. And you know it."

Martin said nothing for a while. Then he said, "That. Or he didn't want us to get the information. He was quite angry."

"He isn't that way," she said. "It isn't him."

"It wasn't him," Martin corrected her. "Are you the same person you were eight years ago?"

She didn't say anything for a while.

I remembered how to walk, and started doing it on my own. I shook my head to clear it a little and looked back over my shoulder.

There were buildings on fire. More and more sirens were on the way. The spot in the skyline where my office building usually sat from this angle was empty except for a spreading cloud of dust. Fires and emergency lights painted the dust orange and red and blue.

My files. My old coffee machine. My spare revolver. My favorite mug. My ratty, comfortable old desk and chair. My frosted-glass window with its painted lettering reading, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.

They were all gone. "Dammit," I said.

Susan looked up at me. "What was that?"

I answered in a weary mumble. "I mailed in the rent on my office this morning."