My brain is sometimes overly optimistic, but I indulged it on the off chance that I came up a winner in the investigative lottery.
I reached for the phone. It rang eleven times before someone answered. "Yes?"
"Fix?" I asked.
"Mmmph," answered a rumpled-sounding male voice. "Who is this?"
"Harry Dresden."
"Harry!" His voice brightened with immediate, if somewhat sleepy, cheer, which seemed far more appropriate to the Summer Knight of the Sidhe Courts. "Hey, how are you? What's up?"
"That's the question of the day," I said. "I need to talk to you about Summer business."
The sleepiness vanished from his voice. So did the friendliness. "Oh."
"Look, it's nothing big," I started. "I just need to-"
"Harry," he said, his voice sharp. Fix had never cut me off before. In fact, if you'd asked my professional opinion a year before, I'd have told you he never interrupted anyone in his life. "We can't talk about this. The line might not be secure."
"Come on, man," I said. "No one can monitor the phone line with a spell. It'd burn out in a second."
"Someone isn't playing by the old rules anymore, Harry," he said. "And a phone tap is not a difficult thing to engineer."
I frowned. "Good point," I allowed. "Then we need to talk."
"When?"
"Soonest."
"Accorded neutral territory," he responded.
He meant McAnally's pub. Mac's place has always been a hangout for the supernatural crowd in Chicago. When the war broke out, someone managed to get it placed on a list of neutral territories where, by the agreements known as the Unseelie Accords, everyone respected the neutrality of the property and was expected to behave in a civil fashion when present. It might not have been a private rendezvous, but it was probably the safest place in town to discuss this kind of thing. "Fine," I said. "When?"
"I've got business tonight. The soonest I can do it is tomorrow. Lunch?"
"Noon," I replied.
There was a sleepy murmur on the other end of the phone-a woman's voice.
"Shhhhh," Fix said. "Sure, Harry. I'll see you there."
We hung up, and I regarded the phone with pursed lips. Fix sleeping this late in the day? And with a girl in bed with him, no less. And interrupting wizards without a second thought. He'd come a ways.
Of course, he'd had a lot of exposure to the faeries since the last time I'd seen him. And if he had anything like the power that I'd seen the champions of the Sidhe display before, he'd have had time to get used to his new strength. You can never tell how someone is going to handle power-not until you hand it to them and see what they do with it. Fix had certainly changed.
I got a little twist in my gut that told me I should employ a great deal more than average caution when I spoke to him. I didn't like the feeling. Before I could think about it for too long, I made myself pick up the phone and move on with what my brain told me was a reasonable step two- checking around to see if anyone had heard anything about bad juju running around town.
I called several people. Billy the Werewolf, recently married. Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer. Waldo Butters, medical examiner and composer of the "Quasimodo Polka," a dozen magical small-timers I knew, plus my ex's editor at the Midwestern Arcane. None of them had heard of anything, and I warned them all to keep an ear to the ground. I even put in a call to the Archive, but all I got was an answering service, and no one returned my call.
I sat and stared at the phone's base for a moment, the receiver buzzing a dial tone in my gloved left hand.
I hadn't called Michael, or Father Forthill. I probably should have, working on the basic notion that more help was better help. Then again, if the Home Office wanted Michael on the case, he'd be there regardless of whether or not anyone called him and how many immovable objects stood in the way. I've seen it happen often enough to trust that it was true.
It was a good rationalization, but it wasn't fooling anyone. Not even me. The truth was that I didn't want to talk to either one of them unless I really, really, really had to.
The dial tone turned into that annoying buzz-buzz-buzz of a no-connection signal.
I hung the phone back up, my hand unsteady. Then I got up, reached down to the clumsily trimmed area of carpet that covered the trapdoor set in the apartment's floor, and pulled it open onto a wooden stepladder that folded out and led down into my laboratory.
The lab is in the sub-basement, which is a much better name for it than the basement-basement. It's little more than a big concrete box with a ladder leading up and out of it. The walls are lined with overflowing white wire shelves, the cheap kind you can get at Wal-Mart. In my lab, they store containers of every kind, from plastic bags to microwave-safe plastic dinnerware to heavy wooden boxes-and even one lead-lined, lead-sealed box where I store a tiny amount of depleted uranium dust. Other books, notebooks, envelopes, paper bags, pencils, and apparently random objects of many kinds crowd each other for space on the shelves-all except for one plain, homemade wooden shelf, which held only candles at either end, four romance novels, a Victoria's Secret catalog, and a bleached human skull.
A long table ran down the middle of the room, leaving a blank section of floor at the far end kept perfectly clear of any clutter whatsoever. A ring of plain silver was set into the floor-my summoning circle. Underneath it lay a foot and a half or so of concrete, and then another heavy metal box, wrapped with its own little circle of wards and spells. Inside the box was a blackened silver coin.
My left palm, which had been so badly burned except for an outline of skin in the shape of Lasciel's angelic symbol, suddenly itched.
I rubbed it against my leg and ignored it.
My worktable had been crowded with material for most of the time it had been down in my lab. But that no longer was the case.
At that point I felt I owed someone an apology. When Murphy had asked me about the money from the Council, the answer I'd given her was true enough. They'd set the pay rate for Wardens in the fifties-but even the Council wasn't quite hidebound enough to ignore things like standard inflation, and the Warden's paychecks had kept pace through discretionary funding in-my God, I'm starting to sound like part of the establishment.
Long story short. The Wardens have sneaky ways of getting paid more, and the money I was getting from them, while not stellar, was nothing to sneeze at, either. But I hadn't been spending it on things like fixing up my apartment.
I'd been spending it on what was on my worktable.