Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

I nodded and held tight to her hand for a minute. There wasn't any tension in that contact, no quivering sensation of excitement. Murphy was human and alive. She held my hand to remind me that I was too. I somehow managed to push the sense of visceral horror I'd seen filling the girl from my immediate thoughts, until I felt steadier. I squeezed her hand once and released it.

"Come on," I said, my voice rough. "Pell."

"Are you sure you don't need a minute?"

"It won't help," I said. I gestured at the radio and the lights. "I need to get this over with and leave."

She chewed on her lip but nodded at me, and led me to the door across the hall. I didn't want to do it, but I hauled up my Sight again and braced myself as I followed on Murphy's heels and Looked at Clark Pell.

Pell was a sour-looking old cuss made out of shoe leather and gristle. One arm and both legs were in casts, and he was in traction. One side of his face was swollen with bruising. A plastic tube for oxygen ran beneath his nose. Bandages swathed his head, though bits of coarse grey hair stuck out. One eye was swollen mostly shut. The other was open, dark, and glittering.

Beyond the physical surface, his wounds were very nearly as dire as those the girl had suffered. He had been brutally beaten. Phantom bruises slid around his wrinkled skin, and the shapes of distorted bones poked disquietingly at the surface. And I saw something about the old man, too. Beneath the shoe leather and gristle, there were more shoe leather and gristle. And iron. The old man had been badly beaten, but it wasn't the first such he had endured-physically or spiritually. He was a fighter, a survivor. He was afraid, but he was also angry and defiant.

Whatever had done this to him hadn't gotten what it wanted-not like it had with the girl. It had to settle for a physical beating when its attack hadn't elicited the terror and anguish it had expected. The old man had faced it, and he didn't have any power of his own, beyond a lifetime of stubborn will. If he'd done it, as painful and as frightening as it must have been, I could steel myself against Looking at the aftermath.

I released my Sight slowly and took a deep breath. Murphy, poised beside me as if she expected me to abruptly collapse, tilted her head and peered at me.

"I'm all right," I told her quietly.

Pell made a weak but rude sound. "Whiner. Not even a cast."

I faced the old man and said, "Who did this to you."

He shook his head, a feeble motion. "Crazy."

Murphy started to say something but I raised my hand and shook my head at her, and she fell silent, waiting.

"Sir," I said to Pell. "I swear to you. I'm not a cop. I'm not a doctor. I think you saw something strange."

He stared at me, his one eye narrowed.

"Didn't you?" I asked quietly.

"Ha... H-h-" he tried to say, but the word broke into a wracking, quiet cough.

I held up my hand and waited for him to recover. Then I said, "Hammerhands."

Pell's lip lifted, a faint little sneer. His good hand moved weakly, and I stepped over closer to him.

"You told Greene it was someone dressed like Hammerhands," I guessed.

Pell closed his eye tiredly. "Pretty much."

I nodded. "But it wasn't just a costume," I said quietly. "This was something more."

Pell gave a slow shudder, before opening his eye again, dull with fatigue. "It was him" the old man whispered. "Don't know how. Don't make no sense. But... you could feel it."

"I believe you," I told him.

He watched me for a second and then nodded, closing his eye. "Thing is. That was the only damn movie ever scared me. Wasn't even all that good." He gave a weak shake of his head and said, "Buzz off."

"Thank you," I told him quietly. Then I turned and walked toward the door.

Murphy followed at my side, and we headed back down the stairs. "Harry?" she asked. "What was that?"

"Pell," I said. "He gave us what we needed."

"He did?"

"Yeah," I said. "I think he did. This thing has got to be some kind of phobophage."

"A what?"

"It's a spiritual entity that feeds on fear. It attacks in order to scare people, and feeds on the emotion."

"It didn't give Pell those broken bones by shouting 'boo!' " Murphy said.

"Yeah. It's got to manifest a physical body in order to come to the real world. Pretty standard for all those demon types."

"How do we beat it?"

I shook my head. "I don't know yet. First I have to find out what kind of phobophage it is. But I've got a place to pick up a trail now. There are only going to be so many beings who could have crossed over to Chicago from the Nevernever to do what this thing did."

We emerged into the sunshine and I stopped for a minute, lifting my face up to the light.

The horror and misery I'd seen on the victims remained in place, a clear and terrible image, but the sunlight and the equally sharp memory of old Pell's defiance took the edge off.

"You going to be all right?" Murphy asked.

"I think so," I said quietly.

"Can you tell me what you saw?"

I did, in as few words as I could.

She listened, and then nodded slowly. "It hardly seems like what happened to them happened to Rosie."

"Maybe Rawlins and I got there in time," I said. "Maybe it hadn't had time to do more than a little foreplay"

"Or maybe there's another reason," Murphy said.

"Remind me to lecture you about the interest rate on borrowed trouble," I said. "Simplest explanation is the one to go with until we find out something to the contrary."

Murphy nodded. "If this creature hit the convention twice, it will probably do it again. Seems to me that maybe we should advise them to close it down. No convention, no attacks, right?"

"Too late for that," I said.

She tilted her head. "What do you mean?"

"The creature feeds on fear. It's attracted to it," I said. "If they shut down the convention, it will scare a lot of people."

"News reports will do that, too."

"Not the same way," I said. "A news report might unsettle some folks. But the people at the convention here, the ones who knew the victims, who were in the same buildings-it will hit them harder. It will make what happened here something dangerous. Something real."

"If the attacker is that dangerous, they should be afraid," Murphy said.

"Except that intense fear will attract the attacker again," I said. "In fact, enough of it would attract more predators of the same nature."