Chapter Six
You’re puttin’ me in jail again,” Tripp complained later that night. We were sitting in the library, and Tripp was sipping on a couple fingers of whiskey that Bear had brought him in a tumbler. She hovered nearby, massive and quiet, arms folded over her chest.
“Look, man,” I said. “Here in this castle, there aren’t going to be any weird magical threats coming at you.”
“I ain’t gonna be helping any kids, either,” Tripp said.
“I’d been a tiny second slower, that thing would have ripped your throat out,” I said. “You’re also not going to help any kids when you’re lying there dead.”
Tripp took a quick drink, swallowed, and frowned as the movement tugged at the slash on his face.
Bear had taken one look at the clumsy bandages on it and had re-treated him, closing the long wound with butterfly strips.
Tripp had borne it without making a sound of complaint.
I had to give the guy that much. He was tough-minded.
“Okay,” he admitted. “Yeah.”
“There’s a room for you,” I said. “Out the door, up the stairs, third one on the left. It isn’t fancy, but the bed is comfortable. Get some sleep. You’ll be safe here tonight.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He got up and walked to the door. He paused there, frowned, turned around, and said, “Thanks, Dresden.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly.
After he left, Bear looked at me and said, “Tell me again about the assassin-beast.”
I did, including every detail I could, finishing up with the sludgy sponge thing that had slithered off like greased lightning from the corpse.
The Valkyrie shook her head. “That’s a weird one. Even for me.”
Which said something. Bear was not a mortal being. She’d been around for a lot of time, even if it had been in a nonlinear fashion. She’d seen it all, done it all.
“I’ll see what I can find out on that part,” I said. “I have some other work for you.”
She frowned. “Other than bodyguarding you? Which, I remind you once again, is what I am contracted to do.”
“I need to know about this organization in Vegas. Bookie named Estevez. The kind of money Tripp laid down, he’s got to be part of a larger organization.”
Bear sighed. “And you think you’re going to get ten million dollars out of a criminal gang?”
“I once lifted a backpack of diamonds from Hell,” I said. “Walking uphill. Both ways.”
The Valkyrie snorted. “I’ll see what Monoc has in its files. But I’ll warn you, they’re more geared to track military organizations than criminal gangs.”
“Then talk to Gard,” I said. “Marcone knows something. It’s why he got me involved. His Valkyrie will know something.”
“That kind of information is privileged. Just like yours is.”
“Sure, if he doesn’t want me to know it. I’ll bet you a bag of donuts he’s told her to give me something if I come asking.”
“You’re on,” Bear said. She checked her watch. “Office is just opening now. I’ll see what I can do.”
“They’re not twenty-four seven?” I asked.
“Vadderung doesn’t believe in working his people at all hours,” Bear said, walking out. Maybe with a little annoyance. “Not even the ravens.”
“Yankee work ethic. You’ll never get a promotion with that attitude,” I called after her. “Tell Fitz I need him in the lab!”
“Hah!” she called back.
And I went down to my lab.
My lab was the last part of my old boardinghouse still standing, if you can call a sub-basement “standing.” It was the same old cramped, crowded little chamber it had always been—painted cinderblock walls, a long steel table running down the center, cheap, practical shelving around three of the walls, a small writing desk, and a rather serious summoning circle set in the floor in a limited open space at one end of the table.
I put on a nice warm secondhand bathrobe I’d gotten in a thrift store and descended the stepladder into the lab.
I murmured several candles to life with a wave of my hand, and broke out a couple of texts I had acquired over the past year as I rebuilt my lab.
It was organized a lot better than I used to keep it.
I had everything stored in plastic containers with tight lids and labels, stacked up neatly on the shelves.
Some of them even had subcontainers inside the larger ones.
They contained herbs, specialized stones, rare substances, feathers, an entire shelf of various bones along with the necessary tools to grind them to powder, eye of newt, wing of bat, sulfurous ash, rare incenses, a number of toxins, and dozens of dried bits of various creatures.
I’d been teaching Fitz about potions.
My apprentice came thumping down the ladder in heavy sweatpants and a thick hoodie, because I had apparently failed to instill in him the importance of traditional wizard robes in cold labs.
“Jeez, Harry,” Fitz said. “We couldn’t have done this early in the morning?”
I opened the robe enough to show him the bandages on my chest. “Trouble is afoot,” I said. “And we need to act now.”
“Oh,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “What happened?”
The kid was my apprentice. I was getting him ready for the real world. I told him everything.
“So,” I concluded, “we’re going to brew up a couple of modified veil potions to conceal Tripp from supernatural tracking and have him sip on them every few hours.
It won’t be perfect, but it should make it harder for anything else to find him.
And while that’s cooking, we’re going to go through the texts and see if there’s anything in there like this parasite thing that can take over animals and turbocharge them. ”
“For a guy who is definitely jerking you around,” Fitz noted.
“Maybe he isn’t,” I said.
“Known a lot of guys like that,” Fitz said. He’d grown up mostly on the streets. It hadn’t been a good way for him to become part of a high-trust society. “Slimeball’s gonna slimeball.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not, too. How much stealing have you done lately?”
He frowned. “Yeah, well. You and Mort showed me something better.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s kind of how it works.”
He grimaced. “Lot of people tried that on me before. Social workers. Church people. I figured they were just suckers.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Hell if I know,” he said. “Me, I guess.”
“Maybe Tripp can change too.”
“He’s still doing shady crap,” Fitz said. “He’s just aiming it a different direction.”
“A better direction,” I said. “And shady crap aimed in a good direction is pretty much my job description.”
Fitz snorted. “I guess.”
“You remember how to do a veil potion?” I asked.
“Sure,” Fitz said. He tapped a notebook sitting on the writing desk. “I wrote it down.”
“Sub in a base of holy water and add a quarter-gram of culinary silver,” I said. “That should give us a good screen against evil.”
“Evil, huh?” Fitz said skeptically.
“Kid, there’s plenty of evil out there. No-kidding, black-hat, malicious-as-Maleficent evil.
You don’t run into it every day. Most people can’t get there.
Most people don’t run into it in a lifetime.
But it’s real, and there’s no mistaking it when you find it.
Whatever this creature was, it was the genuine article. I mean, it hit a dog and everything.”
“Oh, well, then,” Fitz said. “In that case.”
Fitz started getting out the beakers and Bunsen burners, and we set to work on the slow, patient, highly wizardly business of making potions and doing research.