Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

I scowled at him, got a bowl of warm water and some antibacterial soap, and started cleaning up his left arm. "Yeah, well. I didn't see any Wardens doing anything about it."

"Chicago is your area of responsibility, Warden Dresden."

"And there I was," I said. "And if they hadn't been there to help, I'd be dead right now."

"Then you call for backup. You don't behave like a bloody superhero and throw lambs to the wolves to help you do it. Those are the people you're supposed to be protecting."

"Good thinking," I said, getting out the bag of saline, and suspending it from the hook I'd set in the wall over the bed. I made sure the tube was primed. Air bubbles, bad. "That's exactly what we need: more Wardens in Chicago."

Morgan grunted and fell silent for a moment, eyes closed. I thought he'd dropped off again, but evidently he was only thinking. "It must have followed me up."

"Huh?"

"The skinwalker," he said. "When I left Edinburgh, I took a Way to Tucson. I came to Chicago by train. It must have sensed me when the tracks passed through its territory."

"Why would it do that?"

"Follow an injured wizard?" he asked. "Because they get stronger by devouring the essence of practitioners. I was an easy meal."

"It eats magic?"

Morgan nodded. "Adds its victims' power to its own."

"So what you're telling me is that not only did the skinwalker get away, but now it's stronger for having killed Kirby."

He shrugged. "I doubt the werewolf represented much gain, relative to what it already possessed. Your talents, or mine, are orders of magnitude greater."

I took up a rubber hose and bound it around Morgan's upper arm. I waited for the veins just below the bend of his elbow to pop up. "Seems like an awfully unlikely chance encounter."

Morgan shook his head. "Skinwalkers can only dwell on tribal lands in the American Southwest. It wasn't as if whoever is framing me would know that I was going to escape and flee to Tucson."

"Point," I said, slipping the needle into his arm. "Who would wanna go there in the summer, anyway?" I thought about it. "The skinwalker's got to go back to his home territory, though?"

Morgan nodded. "The longer he's away, the more power it costs him."

"How long can he stay here?" I asked.

He winced as I missed the vein and had to try again. "More than long enough."

"How do we kill it?" I frowned as I missed the vein again.

"Give me that," Morgan muttered. He took the needle and inserted it himself, smoothly, and got it on the first try.

I guess you learn a few things over a dozen decades.

"We probably don't," he said. "The true skinwalkers, the naagloshii, are millennia old. Tangling with them is a fool's game. We avoid it."

I taped down the needle and hooked up the catheter. "Pretend for a minute that it isn't going to cooperate with that plan."

Morgan grunted and scratched at his chin with his other hand. "There are some native magics that can cripple or destroy it. A true shaman of the blood could perform an enemy ghost way and drive it out. Without those our only recourse is to hit it with a lot of raw power-and it isn't likely to stand still and cooperate with that plan, either."

"It's a tough target," I admitted. "It knows magic, and how to defend against it."

"Yes," Morgan said. He watched me pick a preloaded syringe of antibiotics from the cooler. "And its abilities are more than the equal of both of us put together."

"Jinkies," I said. I primed the syringe and pushed the antibiotics into the IV line. Then I got the codeine and a cup of water, offering Morgan both. He downed the pills, laid his head back wearily, and closed his eyes.

"I Saw one once, too," he said.

I started cleaning up. I didn't say anything.

"They aren't invulnerable. They can be killed."

I tossed wrappers into the trash can and restored equipment to the medical kit. I grimaced at the bloodied rug that still lay beneath Morgan. I'd have to get that out from under him soon. I turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.

"How'd you do it?" I asked, without looking behind me.

It took him a moment to answer. I thought he'd passed out again.

"It was the fifties," he said. "Started in New Mexico. It followed me to Nevada. I lured it onto a government testing site, and stepped across into the Nevernever just before the bomb went off."

I blinked and looked over my shoulder at him. "You nuked it?"

He opened one eye and smiled.

It was sort of creepy.

"Stars and stones... that's..." I had to call a spade a spade. "Kind of cool."

"Gets me to sleep at night," he mumbled. He closed his eye again, sighed, and let his head sag a little to one side.

I watched over his sleep for a moment, and then closed the door.

I was pretty tired, myself. But like the man said:

"I have promises to keep," I sighed to myself.

I got on the phone, and started calling my contacts on the Paranet.

The Paranet was an organization I'd helped found a couple of years before. It's essentially a union whose members cooperate in order to protect themselves from paranormal threats. Most of the Paranet consisted of practitioners with marginal talents, of which there were plenty. A practitioner had to be in the top percentile before the White Council would even consider recognizing him, and those who couldn't cut it basically got left out in the cold. As a result, they were vulnerable to any number of supernatural predators.

Which I think sucks.

So an old friend named Elaine Mallory and I had taken a dead woman's money and begun making contact with the marginal folks in city after city. We'd encouraged them to get together to share information, to have someone they could call for help. If things started going bad, a distress call could be sent up the Paranet, and then I or one of the other Wardens in the U.S. could charge in. We also gave seminars on how to recognize magical threats, as well as teaching methods of basic self-defense for when the capes couldn't show up to save the day.

It had been going pretty well. We already had new chapters opening up in Mexico and Canada, and Europe wouldn't be far behind.

So I started calling up my contacts in those various cities, asking if they'd heard of anything odd happening. I couldn't afford to get any more specific than that, but as it turned out, I didn't need to. Of the first dozen calls, folks in four cities had noted an upswing in Warden activity, reporting that they were all appearing in pairs. Only two of the next thirty towns had similar reports, but it was enough to give me a good idea of what was going on-a quiet manhunt.