Dead Beat (The Dresden Files 7)

"Our offer is open as well. Stand aside, and no rancor will follow you."

"I can't," I said.

"Nor can I," she said. "Understand that I do not wish you any particular harm. But I will not hesitate to strike you down should you place yourself in our path."

I stared at her for a second. Then I said, "I'm going to stop you. I'm going to stop you and Cowl and Grevane and Corpsetaker, and your little drummers too. None of you are going to promote yourself to god-hood. No one is."

"I think you will die," she said, her tone even, without inflection.

"Maybe," I said. "But I'm going to stop you all before I go. Tell Cowl to get out of the way now, and I won't hunt him down after all of this is over. He can walk. You too."

She shook her head again and said, "I'm sorry we could not work something out."

"Yeah," I said.

She hesitated. Then she asked me, her voice soft and genuinely curious, "Why?"

"Because this is what I have to do," I said. "I'm sorry you aren't going to let me help you."

"We all act as we think we must," she said. "I will see you by and by, Dresden."

"Count on it," I said.

Kumori left without another word, gliding silently down the stairs and out of sight.

I sat there for a moment, aching and tired and more scared than I had sounded a minute before.

Then I got up, shoved my pain and my fear aside, and hobbled out to the Blue Beetle.

I had work to do.

Chapter Thirty

I went back to my car, got in, and headed out to find a few things I would need to make the summoning of the Erlking marginally less suicidal. Serious summoning spells have to be personalized both to the entity to be summoned and to the summoner, and it took me a little while to find enough open businesses to get it all. Traffic on the streets grew steadily worse as the afternoon wore on, slowing me down even further.

More ominous than that, the tenor of the city had begun to slowly, steadily change. What had been an atmosphere of bemused enjoyment of an unanticipated holiday from the daily grind had turned into annoyance. As the sun tracked across the sky and the power still hadn't come back on, annoyance started turning into anger. By high noon, there were police visible on every street in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, and on foot.

"That all for ya?" asked an enterprising vendor. He was a potbellied, balding gardener selling fresh fruit and vegetables from the back of a pickup on a corner, and he was the only one I'd seen who wasn't trying to gouge Chicagoans in their moment of trial. He put the pumpkin I'd chosen in a thin plastic bag as he did, and took the money I offered him.

"That's everything," I said. "Thanks."

Shouting broke out somewhere nearby, and I looked up to see a whip-thin young man sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. A pair of cops chased him, one of them shouting at his uselessly squealing radio.

"Christ, look at that," the vendor said. "Cops everywhere. Why do they need the cops everywhere if this is just a power outage?"

"They're probably just worried about someone starting a riot," I said.

"Maybe," the vendor said. "But I hear some crazy things."

"Like what?" I asked.

He shook his head. "That terrorists blew up the power plant. Or maybe set off some kind of nuke. They can disrupt electronics and stuff, you know."

"I think someone might have noticed a nuclear explosion," I said.

"Oh, sure," he said. "But hell, maybe somebody did. Practically no phones, radio is damned near useless. How would we know?"

"I dunno. The big boom? The vaporized city?"

The vendor snorted. "True, true. But something happened."

"Yeah," I said. "Something happened."

"And the whole damned city is getting scared." The vendor shook his head as more shouting broke out farther down the block. A police car, lights and sirens wailing, tried to bull through the traffic to move toward the disturbance, without much success.

"Getting worse," the vendor observed. "This morning it was all smiles. But people are getting afraid."

"Halloween," I said.

The vendor glanced at me and shivered. "Maybe that's part of it. Maybe just because it's getting darker. Clouding over. People get spooked sometimes. Just like cattle. If they don't get the lights on, tonight might be bad here."

"Maybe," I said. I juggled the bag with my staff, trying to work out how to carry them both back down the street to the Beetle.

"Here," said the vendor. "I'll help you, son."

"Thank you," I told him, though to be honest I felt embarrassed that I actually wanted his help, much less needed it. "That old Bug there."

He walked the fifty feet down the sidewalk with me. He dropped off the sack in the front-end trunk of the VW, nodded at me, and said, "About time I got my old self out of here anyway, I think. Getting tense around here. Thunderstorm's coming in."

"Newspaper weatherman said it was supposed to be clear," I said.

The vendor snorted and tapped his nose. "I lived around this old lake all my life. There's a storm coming."

Boy was there. In spades.

He nodded to me. "You should get home. Good night to stay in and read a book."

"That sounds nice," I agreed. "Thanks again."

I nudged the Beetle out into traffic by virtue of being more willing to accept a fender-bender than anyone else on the road. I had everything I needed to try to whistle up the Erlking, but it had eaten up a lot of my day. I'd tried to call Murphy's place every time I'd stopped the car, but I never got a line through to Thomas and Butters, and now, with the afternoon sun burning its way down toward the horizon, I had run out of daylight.

It was time to rendezvous with the Wardens, so I headed for McAnally's.

Mac's tavern was tucked in neatly beneath one tall building and surrounded by others. You had to go down an alley to get to the tavern, but at least it had its own dinky parking lot. I managed to find a spot in the lot and then limped down the alley to the tavern, taking the short flight of steps down to the heavy wooden door.

I opened the door onto a quiet buzz of activity. In times of supernatural crisis, McAnally's became a sort of functional headquarters for gossip and congregation. I understood why. The tavern was old, lit by a dozen candles and kerosene lamps, and smelled of wood smoke and the steaks Mac cooked for his heavenly steak sandwiches. There was a sense of security and permanence to the place. Thirteen wooden pillars, each one hand-carved with all manner of supernatural scenes and creatures, held up the low ceiling. Ceiling fans that normally turned in lazy circles were not moving now, thanks to the power outage, but the actual temperature of the bar was unchanged. There were thirteen tables scattered out irregularly around the room, and thirteen stools at the long bar.