White Night (The Dresden Files 9)

I didn't look at my brother, but I said, "You need to eat."

"Maybe later," Thomas said. "I can't leave the women and children unguarded."

I grabbed a pad of cheap paper with the hotel's logo and found a pencil in one of my pockets. I wrote a number on it and passed it to Thomas. "Call Murphy. You won't be able to protect anyone if you're too weak, and you might kill one of them if you lose control of the hunger."

Thomas's jaw tightened with frustration, but he took the offered piece of paper from my hand only a little more roughly than necessary.

Elaine studied him as she walked to the door with me. Then she said to him, "You're different from most of them, aren't you?"

"Probably just more deluded," Thomas replied. "Good luck, Harry."

"Yeah," I said, feeling awkward. "Look. After this is done... we have to talk."

"There's nothing to talk about," my brother said.

We left and I closed the door behind us.

We took the Blue Beetle back to the Amber Inn and went to Elaine's room. The lights were off. The room was empty.

There was a terrible sewer smell in the air.

"Dammit," Elaine whispered. She suddenly sagged and leaned against the doorway.

I stepped past her and turned on the light in the bathroom.

Anna Ash's corpse stood in the shower, body stiff, leaning away from the showerhead, but held in place by the electrical cord of a hair dryer, tied in a knot about the showerhead and another around her neck. There hadn't been room enough for her to suspend herself with her feet off the floor. Ugly, purple-black ligature marks showed on her neck around the cord.

It was obviously a suicide.

It obviously wasn't.

We were too late.

Chapter Twenty-Five

"We've got to call the cops on this one," I said quietly to Elaine.

"No," she replied. "They'll want to question us. It will take hours."

"They'll want to question us a lot longer if someone else finds the body and they have to come looking for us."

"And while we're cooperating with the authorities, what happens to Abby, Helen, and Priscilla?" She stared at me. "For that matter, what happens to Mouse?"

That was a thought I'd been trying to avoid. If Mouse was alive and capable, there was no way he'd let any of the women be harmed. If someone had killed Anna when Mouse was near, it could have happened only over his dead body.

But there was no sign of him.

That could mean a lot of things. At worst it meant that he had been utterly disintegrated by whatever had come for the women. Not only was that assumption depressing as hell, it also didn't get me anywhere. A bad guy who could simply disintegrate anything that got in the way sure wouldn't be pussyfooting around the way these White Court yahoos had been.

Mouse wasn't here. There was no mess, no sign of a struggle, and believe you me, that dog can put up a struggle, as the vets found out when they misfiled his paperwork. They tried to neuter him instead of vaccinating him and getting his shoulder X-rayed where he'd bounced off of a moving minivan. I was lucky they were willing to let me pay the property damage and leave it at that.

It had to mean something else. Maybe my dog had left with the others, and Anna had remained behind, or gone back for something she forgot.

Or maybe Mouse had played on everyone's expectation that he was just a dog. He'd shown me that he was capable of that kind of subterfuge before, and it had been one of the first things that tipped me off to his distinctly superior-to-canine intellect. What if Mouse had played along and stayed close to the others?

Why would he do that, though?

Because Mouse knew I could find him. Unless the bad guys carried him off to the Nevernever itself, or put him behind a set of wards specifically designed to block such magic, my tracking spell could find him anywhere.

That was the path to take, even if Mouse didn't know anything was wrong. He would have stayed with any members of the Ordo that he could, and I had taken to planning ahead a little more than I used to do. I could use my shield bracelet to target the single small shield charm I'd hung from his collar for just such an emergency. Me and Foghorn Leghorn.

"Can you find the dog?" Elaine asked.

"Yeah. But we should try calling their homes before we go."

Elaine frowned. "You told them to stay here, or somewhere public."

"Odds are pretty good that they're scared. And when you're scared..."

"... you want to go home," Elaine finished.

"If they're there, it'll be the quickest way to get in touch. If not, it hasn't cost us more than a minute or two."

Elaine nodded. "Anna had all the numbers in a notebook in her purse." We turned up the purse after a brief search, but the notebook wasn't in it.

There wasn't anything for it but to make sure that Anna hadn't slipped it into a pocket before she died. I checked, and tried not to leave any prints almost as hard as I tried not to look at her dead, purpling face or glazed eyes. It hadn't been a clean death, and even though Anna hadn't been gone long enough to start decomposition, the smell was formidable. I tried to ignore it.

It was harder to ignore her face. The skin had the stiff, waxy look that dead bodies get. Worse, there was a distinct and unquantifiable quality of... absence. Anna Ash had been very much alive - fierce of will, protective, determined. I know plenty of wizards without the force of personality she had. She'd been the one thinking and acting when all of those around her were frightened. That takes a rare kind of courage.

None of which meant anything, since, despite my efforts, the killer had taken her anyway.

I shook my head and stepped away from the corpse, having turned up no notebook. Her willingness to face danger on behalf of her friends couldn't be allowed to vanish silently into the past. If some of those she sought to protect were still alive, then her own sacrifice and death could still mean something. I could be bitter about her death later. I would be doing a grave disservice to the woman if I let it do anything but make me more motivated to stop the killers before they had finished their work.

I came face-to-face with Elaine, who stood in the doorway, staring at Anna's body. There was no expression on her face, absolutely none. Tears, though, had reddened her eyes and streaked over her cheeks and down her nose. Some women are pretty when they cry. Elaine gets all blotchy and runny-nosed, and it brought out the dark, tired circles beneath her eyes.

It didn't look pretty. It just looked like pain.

She spoke, and her voice came out rough and quavering. "I told her I would protect her."