White Night (The Dresden Files 9)

I started forward, but Elaine held up one hand to halt me, her eyes distracted. "Let me check. Another woman inside. Two dogs." She glanced at me, and lowered her hand. "One of them is your dog."

"Mouse?" I called.

The floor shook a little, and the big, dark grey dog nudged rather delicately past Abby and came to greet me, shoving his head into my stomach until I went down on one knee and got a sloppy kiss or two on the face.

I slapped his shoulders roughly a few times, because I'm supremely manly and did not tear up a little to see that he was all right and still attached to his collar. "Good to see you, too, furface."

Toto trotted out behind Mouse, like a tiny tugboat escorting an enormous barge, and gave a suspicious growl. Then he pattered over to me and sniffed me, sneezed several times, and evidently found me acceptable, underneath the smell of lake water. He hurried back over to Abby, gave me one more growl to make sure I'd learned my lesson, and bounced around her feet until she picked him up.

The plump little blonde settled the dog in her arms and faced me with concern. "What happened? I mean, the two of you left and what happened, where did you go, is Olivia - "

"Let's go inside," I said, rising. I traded a look with Elaine, and we all went into Abby's apartment. Mouse never left actual, physical contact with me, his shoulders pressing steadily, lightly, against my leg. I was the last through the door and closed it behind me.

Abby's place was a modest, hectic little apartment, segregated into neatly compartmentalized areas. She had a desk with a typewriter, a table with an old sewing machine, a chair beside a music stand with a violin (unless maybe it was a viola) resting on it, a reading niche with an armchair and overloaded shelves of romance novels, and what looked something like a shrine dedicated to ancestor worship, only in reverse, where the saints were all children with round cheeks and blond ringlets.

Priscilla was there, seated in the comfortable chair in the reading niche, looking haggard and much subdued. There was a cup of tea sitting on the little table beside the reading chair, but it had apparently gone cold without ever having been touched. She looked up at me, her eyes heavy and dull.

"Olivia's all right," I said quietly.

Abby brightened a second before I started speaking, drawing in a sharp little breath. The little dog in her arms caught her mood at once, and began wagging his tail at me. "Yes?"

"A... sometime associate of mine, the man in the pictures, has been taking women who were in danger of being a target of the killers out of the city. He learned Olivia was in danger and urged her to leave with him when he took several women to a safe house."

Priscilla stared at me hard for a long moment. Then she said, "What else?"

Elaine spoke, her voice quiet and unflinching. "Anna's dead. Back at the hotel room. An apparent suicide."

Abby let out a little gagging sound. She sat down very quickly in the chair by the violin. Toto let out small, distressed sounds. "Wh-what?" Abby asked.

Priscilla shuddered and bowed her head. "Oh. Oh, no. Oh, Anna."

"I need to know, ladies," I said quietly. "Why didn't you do as we instructed? Why did you leave the hotel?"

"It..." Abby began. Tears overflowed her cheeks. "It was... was..."

"She said," Priscilla said in a quiet, dull voice. "Said that she had to leave. That she had to go to work."

Son of a bitch. I knew it.

Elaine was half a beat behind me. "Who?"

"H-Helen," Abby sobbed. "It was Helen."

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I stood there fuming while Elaine coaxed the rest of the story out of Abby and Priscilla.

"It was only an hour or so after you left," Abby told Elaine. "Helen got a call on her cell phone."

"Cell phone?" I perked up. "She had one that worked?"

"She doesn't have a lot of talent that way," Abby said. "None of us do, really. Even my cell phone works most of the time."

I grunted. "Means she wasn't hiding a bigger talent, then. That's worth something."

"Harry," Elaine said quietly. It was a rebuke. "Please go on, Abby."

I zipped my mouth shut.

"She got a call, and she went into the bathroom to talk. I couldn't hear what she said, but when she came out, she said she had to go to work. That she was leaving."

I lifted my eyebrows. "That's quite a job, if she's risking exposure to a killer to show up for the shift."

"That's what I said," Priscilla said, her voice even more bitter, if such a thing was possible. "It was stupid. I never even thought to be suspicious of it."

"Anna argued with her," Abby went on, "but Helen refused to stay. So Anna wanted us all to take her there together."

"Helen wouldn't have any of it, of course," Priscilla said. "At the time, I thought she might just be ashamed of us seeing her working some nothing little job at a fast-food restaurant or something."

"We never really knew what she did," Abby said, her tone numb and apologetic. "She never wanted to talk about it. We always assumed it was an issue of pride." She petted the little dog in her arms idly. "She said something about keeping us separate from the rest of her life... in any case, Anna put her into a cab and made her promise to keep in touch with us. Calling in on the phone until she was safely around other people."

"You just let her walk?" I broke in.

"She's a sister of the Ordo," Priscilla said. "Not a criminal to be distrusted and watched."

"In point of fact," I said, "she is a criminal to be distrusted and watched. Ask her freaking parole officer."

Elaine frowned at me. "Dammit, Harry. This isn't helping."

I muttered under my breath, folded my arms again, and crouched down to give Mouse's ears and neck a good scratching. Maybe it would help me keep my mouth shut. There's a first time for everything.

"Helen called me about twenty minutes later," Priscilla said. "She said that she had been followed from the hotel. That our location had become known. That we had to leave. We did, just as you told us. Helen said that she would meet us here."

"I told you to head for somewhere public - " I began, snarling.

"Harry," Elaine said, her voice sharp.

I subsided again.

There was a moment of awkward silence. "Um. So we went," Abby said. "But when we got there, Helen wasn't around."

"No," Priscilla said, hugging her arms under her breasts, looking cold and miserable, even in the turtleneck. "She called again. Begged us to come to her apartment."