Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

I nodded. "Which brings us back to the original question: how did Binder find you?"

"Well," Molly said, "not to mince words, but he didn't."

"He would have found us in a matter of moments," Morgan said.

"That's not what I mean," she said. "He knew you were in the storage park, but he didn't know which unit, exactly. I mean, wouldn't tracking magic have led him straight to you? And if Thomas sold you out, wouldn't he have told Binder exactly which storage bay we were in?"

Morgan started to reply, then frowned and shut his mouth. "Hngh." I glanced over my shoulder at the grasshopper and gave her a nod of approval.

Molly beamed at me.

"Someone on the ground following us?" Morgan asked. "A tailing car wouldn't have been able to enter the storage park without a key."

I thought of how I'd been shadowed by the skinwalker the previous evening. "If they're good enough, it would be possible," I admitted. "Not likely, but possible."

"So?" Morgan said. "Where does that leave us?"

"Baffled," I said.

Morgan bared his teeth in a humorless smile. "Where to next, then?"

"If I take you back to my place, they'll pick us up again," I said. "If someone's using strictly mortal methods of keeping track of our movements, they'll have someone watching it."

Morgan looked back and up at me. "I assume you aren't just going to push me in circles around Chicago while we wait for the Council to find us."

"No," I said. "I'm taking you to my place."

Morgan thought about that one for a second, then nodded sharply. "Right."

"Where the bad guys will see us and send someone else to kill us," Molly said. "No wonder I'm the apprentice; because I'm so ignorant that I can't see why that isn't a silly idea."

"Watch and learn, grasshopper. Watch and learn."

Chapter Twenty-one

We left the trail again, and for the second time in a day I emerged from the Nevernever into the alley behind the old meatpacking plant. We made two stops and then walked until we could flag down another cab. The cabbie didn't seem to be overly thrilled with Mouse, or the wheelchair, or how we filled up his car, but maybe he just didn't speak enough English to ably convey his enthusiasm. You never know.

"These really aren't good for you," Molly said through a mouthful of donut, as we unloaded the cab.

"It's Morgan's fault. He started talking about donuts," I said. "And besides-you're eating them."

"I have the metabolic rate of youth," Molly said, smiling sweetly. "You're the one who needs to start being health-conscious, O venerable mentor. I'll be invincible for another year or two at least."

We wrestled Morgan into his chair, and I paid off the cabbie. We rolled Morgan over to the steps leading down to my apartment, and between the two of us managed to turn his chair around and get him down the stairs and into the apartment without dropping him. After that, I grabbed Mouse's lead, and the two of us went up to get the mail from my mailbox, and then ambled around to the boardinghouse's small backyard and the patch of sandy earth set aside for Mouse's use.

But instead of loitering around waiting for Mouse, I led him into the far corner of the backyard, which is a miniature jungle of old lilacs that hadn't been trimmed or pruned since Mr. Spunkelcrief died. They were in bloom, and their scent filled the air. Bees buzzed busily about the bushy plants, and as I stepped closer to them, the corner of the building cut off the traffic sounds.

It was the only place on the property's exterior that was not readily visible from most of the rest of the buildings on the street.

I pressed past the outer branches of the lilacs and found a small and relatively open space in the middle. Then I waited. Within seconds, there was a buzzing sound, like the wings of a particularly large dragonfly, and then a tiny winged faerie darted through the lilacs to come to a halt in front of me.

He was simply enormous for a pixie, one of the Wee Folk, and stood no less than a towering twelve inches high. He looked like an athletically built youth dressed in an odd assortment of armor made from discarded objects and loose ends. He'd replaced his plastic bottle-cap helmet with one made of most of the shell of a hollowed-out golf ball. It was too large for his head, but that didn't seem to concern him. His cuirass had first seen service as a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and hanging at his hip was what looked like the blade to a jigsaw, with one end wrapped in string to serve as a grip. Wings like those of a dragonfly buzzed in a translucent cloud of motion at his back.

The little faerie came to attention in midair, snapped off a crisp salute, and said, "Mission accomplished, my lord of pizza!"

"That fast?" I asked. It hadn't been twenty minutes since I'd first summoned him, after we'd gotten donuts and before we'd gotten into the cab. "Quick work, Toot-toot, even for you."

The praise seemed to please the little guy immensely. He beamed and buzzed in a couple of quick circles. "He's in the building across the street from this one, two buildings toward the lake."

I grunted, thinking. If I was remembering right, that was another boardinghouse converted into apartments, like mine. "The white one with green shutters?"

"Yes, that's where the rapscallion has made his lair!" His hand flashed to his waist and he drew his saw-toothed sword from its transparent plastic scabbard, scowling fiercely. "Shall I slay him for you, my lord?"

I very carefully kept the smile off of my face. "I don't know if things have escalated to that level just yet," I said. "How do you know this guy is watching my apartment?"

"Oh, oh! Don't tell me this one!" Toot jittered back and forth in place, bobbing in excitement. "Because he has curtains on the windows so you can't see in, and then there's a big black plastic box with a really long nose poking through them and a glass eye on the end of the nose! And he looks at the back of it all the time, and when he sees someone going into your house, he pushes a button and the box beeps!"

"Camera, huh?" I asked. "Yeah, that probably makes him our snoop." I squinted up at the summer sunshine and adjusted the uncomfortably warm leather duster. I wasn't taking it off, though. There was too much hostility flying around for that. "How many of your kin are about, Toot?"

"Hundreds!" Toot-toot declared, brandishing his sword. "Thousands!"

I arched an eyebrow. "You've been splitting the pizza a thousand ways?"