Chapter Five
The man in the fedora took a step toward Butters, drumming a slender book against his thigh with one hand. "Stand aside," he muttered, and dead Phil sidestepped.
Butters had scrambled back into a corner, his eyes the size of glazed doughnuts behind his glasses. "Wow," he babbled. "Great entrance. Love the hat."
The guy in the fedora took a step forward and reached out with his other hand, at which point I decided to act. A raised hand isn't much in the regular world, but from a guy in a long coat with his own flock of zombies it had to be at least as menacing as pointing a gun.
"That will be enough," I said, and I said it loud enough to hurt ears. I stepped away from the wall with my left hand extended. My silver bracelet of heat-warped shields hung on my wrist, and I readied my will, pushing enough power into the bracelet to prepare a shield to leap up immediately. The bracelet was still pretty banged-up from the beating it had taken the last time I'd used it, and I'd only barely gotten it working again. As a result, it channeled the energy pretty sloppily, and blue-white sparks leaped out and fell to the floor in a steady drizzle. "Put your hand down and step away from the coroner."
The man turned to face me, book thumping steadily against his leg. For a second I thought he was another dead man himself, his face was so pale-but spots of color appeared high on his cheeks, faint but there. He had a long face, and though it was pale it was leathery, as if he'd spent years in the blowing desert wind and sand without seeing the sun. He had dark eyes, thick grey sideburns, no beard, and a scar twisted his upper lip into a perpetual sneer.
"Who," said the man, his accent thick and British, "are you?"
"The Great Pumpkin," I responded. "I've risen from the pumpkin patch a bit early because Butters is just that nifty. And you are?"
The man studied me in silence for a long second, eyes focused on my sparking wrist, then on my throat, where my mother's silver pentacle amulet was probably lying outside my shirt. "You may call me Grevane. Walk away, boy."
"Or what?" I said.
Grevane gave me a chilly little smile, thumping his book, and nodded at his unmoving companions. "There's room in my car for one more."
"I've got a job already," I said. "But there's no reason for this to get nasty. You're going to stand right there while Butters and me leave."
"And I," he said, his voice annoyed.
"What's that?"
"Butters and I, fool. Do you seriously think that a defensive shield barely held together by a clumsy, crude little focus will intimidate me into allowing you to leave?"
"No," I said, and drew my.44 revolver from my duster's pocket. I pointed it at him and thumbed back the trigger. "That's why I brought this."
He lifted his eyebrows. "You intend to murder me in cruor gelidus?"
"No, I'll do it right here," I said. "Butters, get up. Come over here to me."
The little guy hauled himself to his feet, shaking, and edged around the empty, staring gaze of the late Phil.
"Good," I said. "This is moving along nicely, Grevane. Keep it up and I won't need to make Forensics pick your teeth out of that wall behind you."
Butters scuttled over to me while Grevane thumped his book on his leg. The necromancer stared at me, barely sparing a glance for Butters. Then a slow and fairly creepy smile spread over his face. "You are not a Warden."
"I flunked the written."
His nostrils flared. "Not one of the Council's guard dogs. You are, in fact, more of my own persuasion."
"I really doubt that," I said.
Grevane had narrow, yellow teeth and a crocodile's smile. "Don't play games. I can smell the true magic on you."
The last person to talk about "true magic" had been necro-Bob. I had to fight off a shiver. "Uh. I guess that's the last time I buy generic deodorant."
"Perhaps we can make an arrangement," Grevane said. "This need not end in bloodshed-particularly not now, so close to the end of the race. Join me against the others. A living lieutenant is far more useful to me than a dead fool."
"Tempting," I told him in the voice I usually reserved for backed-up toilets. Butters got to me, and I bumped him toward the door with my hip. He took the hint instantly, and I sidestepped to the door of the room with him. I kept my eyes and my gun on Grevane, my readied bracelet drizzling heatless sparks to the floor. "But I don't think I like your management technique. Butters, check the hall."
Butters bobbed his head out and looked nervously around. "I don't see anyone."
"Can you lock that door?"
Keys rattled. "Yes," he said.
"Get ready to do it," I said. I stepped out in the hall, slammed the door shut, and snapped, "Lock it. Hurry."
Butters fumbled with a key. He jammed one in the door and turned it. Heavy security bolts slid to with a comfortably weighty snap an instant before something heavy and solid hit the door hard enough for me to feel the floor rattle through my boots. A second later the door jumped again, and a fist-sized dent mushroomed half an inch out of its center.
"Oh, God," Butters babbled. "Oh, God, that was Phil. What is that? What is happening?"
"Right there with you, man," I said. I grabbed him and started walking down the hall as quickly as I could drag the little guy. "Who else has keys to the door?"
"What?" Butters blinked for a second. "Uh. Uh. The other doctors. Day security. And Phil."
The door rattled again, dented again, and then went silent.
"Grevane's figured that out too," I said. "Come on, before he finds the right key. Do you have your car keys with you?"
"Yes, yes, wait, oh, yes, right here," Butters said. His teeth were chattering together so loudly that he could barely speak clearly, and he stumbled every couple of steps. "God. Oh, God, it's real."
In the halls behind us, metal clicked and scraped on metal. Someone was trying keys in a lock. "Butters," I said. I grabbed his shoulders and had to resist the urge to slap him in the face, like in the movies. "Do what I tell you. Stop thinking. Think later. Move now or there won't be a later."
He stared at me, and for a second I thought he was going to throw up. Then he swallowed, nodded once, and said, "Okay."
"Good. We run to your car. Come on."
Butters nodded and took off for the front of the building at a dead sprint. He accelerated a lot faster than I did, but I have long legs and I caught up pretty quickly. Butters stopped to hit the buzzer at the guard station, and I held the door open wide enough to let him out first. He turned right and ran for the parking lot, and I was only a couple of feet behind him.
We rounded the corner of the building, and Butters dashed toward a pint-sized pickup truck parked in the nearest space. I followed him, and after the silence of the morgue, the night sounds of the city were a blaring music. Traffic hissed by in an automotive river on the highway. Sirens sounded in the distance, ambulance rather than patrol car. Somewhere within a two-hundred-mile radius, one of those enormous, thumping bass stereos pounded out a steady beat almost too low to hear.
The light in the parking lot was out, making everything dark and hazy, but the scent of gasoline came sharp to my nose, and I seized Butters's collar and pulled. The little guy choked and all but fell down, but stopped.
"Don't," I said, and slipped my fingers under the pygmy truck's hood. It flipped up, already open.
The engine had been torn apart. A snapped drive belt hung out like the tongue of a dead steer. Wires were strewn everywhere, and finger-sized holes had been driven into plastic fluid tanks. Coolant and windshield cleaner still dribbled to the parking lot's concrete, and from the smell of it they were mixing with whatever gasoline had been in the tank.
Butters stared at it with wide eyes, panting. "My truck. They killed my truck."
"Looks like," I said, sweeping my gaze around.
"Why did they kill my truck?"
That heavy bass stereo kept rumbling through the October night. I paused for a second, focusing on the sound. It was changing, getting a little bit higher pitched with each beat. I recognized what that meant, and panic slammed through my head for a second.
Doppler effect. The source of the rumbling bass was coming toward us.
In the darkness of the industrial park's lanes a pair of headlights flashed on, revealing a car accelerating toward the Forensic Institute. The lights were spaced widely apart-an older car, and judging by the sound of the engine some kind of gas-guzzling dinosaur like a Caddy or a big Olds.
"Come on," I snapped to Butters, and started running to the lot next door, back to the Blue Beetle. We'd already been spotted, obviously, so I fired up my shield bracelet again, so that my hand looked like it had been replaced with a small comet. Butters followed, and I had to give the little guy credit-he was a good runner.
"There!" I shouted. "Get to my car!"
"I see it!"
Behind us the rumbling Cadillac swerved into the Institute's parking lot and lurched over a concrete-encased grassy median, sparks flying from its undercarriage. The car roared up onto the grass and skidded to a broadside stop. The door flew open and a man got out.
I got a half-decent glance at him in the backwash of the Caddy's headlights. Medium height at most, long, thinning hair, and pale, loose skin with a lot of liver spots. He moved stiffly, like someone with arthritis, but he hauled a long shotgun out of the car with him and raised it to his shoulder with careful deliberation.
I juked to one side so that I was directly between the driver and Butters, twisted at the hips, extended my arm behind me, and raised my shield. It flickered to life in a ghostly half dome just a second before one barrel of the shotgun bloomed with light and thunder. The shield flashed and sent off a cloud of sparks the size of a small house. I felt it falter through the damaged bracelet on my wrist, but it solidified again in time to catch the second blast from the gun's other barrel. The old man with the shotgun howled in wordless outrage, broke the barrel, and started loading in fresh shells.
Butters was screaming, and I was yelling right along with him. We got to the Beetle and piled in. I stomped the engine to life, and the Beetle sputtered once and then gamely took off at its best clip. I screeched out of the parking lot and onto the road, started to skid, turned into it, fishtailed once, and then shot off down the street.
"Look out!" Butters screamed, pointing.
I snapped a glance over my shoulder and saw Phil and the other three dead men from the examination room sprinting across the grounds at us. I don't mean they were running. It was a full-out sprint, faster than Phil could have done even in the prime of his life. I stomped on the gas and kept my eyes on the road.
The Beetle lurched, and Butters cried out, "Holy crap!"
I looked back again and saw Dead Phil clinging to the back of the car. He had to have been standing on the rear bumper. The other three dead men weren't far behind him, keeping up with the car. Dead Phil drove his hand down at the back of the Beetle, and there was a wrenching sound of impact, then a series of snaps and squeals as he tore the back cover from the car, exposing the engine.
"Take the wheel!" I shouted to Butters. He reached over and seized the steering wheel. I twisted and thrust my right hand at Dead Phil. I focused my attention on the plain silver ring on my middle finger. It was another focus, like the shield bracelet, one designed to store back a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. I focused on the ring, clenched my hand into a fist, and shoved it directly at Dead Phil, releasing the energy within.
Dead Phil had raised his arm again, this time to tear apart the Beetle's engine, but I beat him to the punch. The unseen force unleashed from the ring hit him at the top of his thighs, kicking his whole lower body out straight. The force tore his grip loose from the car, and he tumbled away, hitting the street with heavy, crunching sounds of impact, arms and legs splayed. The other dead men ran past him, one leaping clear over, and Dead Phil lay twitching on the ground like a broken toy.
I got back to the wheel and shifted the car into the next gear. In my rearview mirror I saw the leading dead man spring at us again, but he missed the car by a couple of feet, and I left the rest of them behind in the darkness, scooting out of the industrial park and onto public streets.
I drove for a while, taking a lot of unnecessary turns. I didn't think anyone was pursuing us, but I didn't want to take the chance that the old man might have gotten back into his Caddy and onto our tails. Maybe ten minutes went by before I started breathing easier, and I finally felt safe enough to pull over into a well-lit convenience-store parking lot.
I started shaking as soon as I set the parking brake. Adrenaline does that to me. I usually get along just fine when the actual crisis is in progress, but after it's over, my body makes up for the lost terror. I closed my eyes and tried to keep my breathing slow and calm, but it was a fight to do it. There wasn't anything I could do about the trembling.
It had been getting harder and harder to maintain my composure ever since the battle where I nearly lost my hand. The emotions I'd always felt seemed to be hitting me harder and harder lately, and sometimes I had to literally close my eyes and count to ten to keep from losing control. Right then I wanted to scream and howl-partly in joy at being alive, and partly in rage that someone had tried to kill me. I wanted to call up my power and start laying waste with it, to feel the raw energy of creation scorching through my thoughts and body, mastered by raw will. I wanted to cut loose.
But I couldn't do that. Even among the strongest wizards on the planet, I'm no lightweight. I don't have the finesse and class and experience that a lot of the older practitioners do, but when it comes to raw metaphysical muscle, I rank in the top thirty or forty wizards alive. I had a ton of strength, but I didn't always have the fine control to go with it- that's why I had to use specially prepared articles such as my bracelet and my ring to focus that power. Even with them, it wasn't always easy to be precise. The last time I had surrendered my self-control and really cut loose with my power, I burned as many as a dozen people to scorched skeletons.
I had a responsibility to keep that destructive strength in check; to use it to help people, to protect them. It didn't matter that I still felt terrified. It didn't matter that my hand was screaming with pain. It didn't matter that my car had been mutilated yet again, or that someone had tried to kill one of the few people in town I considered a real friend.
I had to hold back. Be careful. Think clearly.
"Harry?" Butters asked after a minute. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Just give me a minute."
"I don't understand this," he said. His voice didn't sound any too steady either. "What just happened?"
"You don't want to know," I said.
"Yes, I do."
"Trust me," I said. "You don't want to be involved in this kind of business."
"Why not?"
"You'll get hurt. Or killed. Don't go looking for trouble."
He let out a frustrated neighing sound. "Those people came for me. I didn't go looking for them. They were looking for me."
He had a point, but even so, Butters was not someone I would want to see involved in a conflict between people like Grevane and his dead men and his liver-skinned partner. Mortals usually didn't fare too well when it came to tangling with preternatural bad guys. In my day I'd seen dozens of men and women die from it, despite everything I did to help them.
"This is unreal," Butters said. "I know you and Murphy have talked about this black-magic supernatural stuff a lot. And I've seen some things that are tough to explain. But... I never imagined something like this could happen."
"You're happier that way," I said. "Hell, if I could do it, I might want to forget I ever found out about any of it."
"I'm happier being scared?" he asked almost timidly. "I'm happier wondering if maybe my bosses were right the whole time, and I really am insane? I'm happier being in danger, and having no idea what to do about it?"
I didn't have a quick answer for that one. I stared at my hands. The trembling had almost stopped.
"Help me understand this, Harry," he said. "Please."
Well, dammit.
I raked the fingers of my right hand through my hair. Grevane had been after Butters, specifically. He had backup waiting outside, and he trashed Butters's truck to make sure the little guy couldn't escape. He openly said that he needed Butters, and needed him in one piece to boot.
All of which meant that Butters was in very real-and very serious- danger. And by now I've learned that I can't always protect everyone. I screw up sometimes, like everyone else. I make stupid mistakes.
If I kept quiet, if I forced Butters to wear blinders, he wouldn't be able to do jack to protect himself. If I made a bad call and something happened to him, it would be my fault that he didn't have every chance to survive. His blood would be on my hands.
I couldn't take that choice away from him. I wasn't his father or his guardian angel or his sovereign king. I wasn't blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, or with the foresight of a prophet. If I chose Butters's path for him, in some ways it would make me no different from Grevane, or any number of other beings, human and nonhuman alike, who sought to control others.
"If I tell you this," I said quietly, "it could be bad for you."
"Bad how?"
"It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life."
"Screw up my life?" He stared a me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, "Do your worst."
The words were light, but there was both fear and resolve just under the surface of them. Butters was smart enough to be scared. But he was also a fighter. I could respect him for both.
"Okay," I said. "Let's talk."
Chapter Six
Butters hadn't taken time to collect his coat when he left, and the last time the Beetle's heater had worked was before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I ducked into the store, got us each a cup of coffee, then untwisted the wire that holds down the lid of the storage trunk. I dug out a worn but mostly clean blanket that I kept in the trunk to cover the short-barreled shotgun I stored in the event that I would ever need to give Napoleon's charging hordes a taste of the grape. Given the way the night was going, I got the shotgun, too, and slipped it into the backseat.
Butters accepted the blanket and the coffee gratefully, though he shivered hard enough to slop a little of the drink over the side of the cup. I sipped a little coffee, slipped the cup into the holder I'd rigged on the car's dashboard, and got moving again. I didn't want to wait around in the same place for too long.
"All right," I told Butters. "There are two things you have to accept if you want to understand what's going on."
"Hit me."
"First the tough one. Magic is real."
I could feel him looking at me for a moment. "What do you mean by that?"
"There's an entire world that exists alongside the everyday life of mankind. There are powers, nations, monsters, wars, feuds, alliances- everything. Wizards are a part of it. So are a lot of other things you've heard about in stories, and even more you've never heard of."
"What kind of things?"
"Vampires. Werewolves. Faeries. Demons. Monsters. It's all real."
"Heh," Butters said. "Heh, heh. You're joking. Right?"
"No joke. Come on, Butters. You know that there are weird things out there. You've seen the evidence of them."
He pushed a shaking hand through his hair. "Well, yes. Some. But, Harry, you're talking about something else entirely here. I mean, if you want to tell me that people have the ability to sense and affect their environment in ways we don't really understand yet, I can accept that. Maybe you call it magic, and someone else calls it ESP, and someone else calls it the Force, but it's not a new idea. Maybe there are people whose genetic makeup makes them better able to employ these abilities. Maybe it even does things like make them reproduce their DNA more clearly than other people so that they can live for a very long time. But that is not the same thing as saying that there's an army of weird monsters living right under our noses and we don't even notice them."
"What about those corpses you analyzed?" I said. "Humanoid but definitely not human."
"Well," Butters said defensively, "it's a big universe. I think it's sort of arrogant to assume that we're the only thinking beings in it."
"Those corpses were the bodies of vampires of the Red Court, and you don't want to meet a living one. There were a lot of them in town at one point. There aren't so many now, but there are plenty more where they came from. They're only one flavor of vampire. And vampires are only one flavor of supernatural predator. It's a jungle out there, Butters, and people aren't anywhere near the top of the food chain."
Butters shook his head. "And you're telling me that nobody knows about it?"
"Oh, lots of people know about it," I said. "But the ones who are in the know don't go around talking about it all that much."
"Why not?"
"Because they don't want to get locked up in a loony bin for three months for observation, for starters."
"Oh," Butters said, flushing. "Yeah. I guess I can see that. What about regular people who see things? Like sightings and close encounters and stuff?"
I blew out a breath. "That's the second thing you have to understand. People don't want to accept a reality that frightening. Some of them open their eyes and get involved-like Murphy did. But most of them don't want anything to do with the supernatural. So they leave it behind and don't talk about it. Don't think about it. They don't want it to be real, and they work really hard to convince themselves that it isn't."
"No," Butters said. "I'm sorry. I just don't buy that."
"You don't need to buy it," I said. "It's true. As a race, we're an enormous bunch of idiots. We're more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid."
"Wait a minute. You're saying that a whole world, multiple civilizations of scientific study and advancement and theory and application, all based around the notion of observing the universe and studying its laws is... what? In error about dismissing magic as superstition?"
"Not just in error," I said. "Dead wrong. Because the truth is something that people are afraid to face. They're terrified to admit that it's a big universe and we're not."
He sipped coffee and shook his head. "I don't know."
"Come on, Butters," I said. "Look at history. How long did the scholarly institutions of civilization consider Earth to be the center of the universe? And when people came out with facts to prove that it wasn't, there were riots in the streets. No one wanted to believe that we all lived on an unremarkable little speck of rock in a quiet backwater of one unremarkable galaxy. The world was supposed to be flat, too, until people proved that it wasn't by sailing all the way around it. No one believed in germs until years and years after someone actually saw one. Biologists scoffed at tales of wild beast-men living in the mountains of Africa, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, and pronounced them an utter fantasy-right up until someone plopped a dead mountain gorilla down on their dissecting table."
He chewed on his lip and watched the streetlights.
"Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether."
"You're saying that the entire human race is in denial," he said.
"Most of the time," I replied. "It's not a bad thing. It's just who we are. But the weird stuff doesn't care about that-it keeps on happening. Every family's got a ghost story in it. Most people I've talked to have had something happen to them that was impossible to explain. But that doesn't mean they go around talking about it afterward, because everyone knows that those kinds of things aren't real. If you start saying that they are, you get the weird looks and jackets with extra-long sleeves."
"For everyone," he said, voice still skeptical. "Every time. They just keep quiet and try to forget it."
"Tell you what, Butters. Let's drive down to CPD and you can tell them how you were just attacked by a necromancer and four zombies. How they nearly outran a speeding car and murdered a security guard who then got up and threw your desk across the room." I paused for a moment to let the silence stretch. "What do you think they'd do?"
"I don't know," he said. He bowed his head.
"Unnatural things happen all the time," I said. "But no one talks about it. At least, not openly. The preternatural world is everywhere. It just doesn't advertise."
"You do," Butters said.
"But not many people take me seriously. For the most part even the ones who accept my help just pay the bill, then walk out determined to ignore my existence and get back to their normal life."
"How could someone do that?" Butters asked.
"Because it's terrifying," I said. "Think about it. You find out about monsters that make the creatures in the horror movies look like the Muppets, and that there's not a damned thing you can do to protect yourself from them. You find out about horrible things that happen- things you would be happier not knowing. So rather than live with the fear, you get away from the situation. After a while you can convince yourself that you must have just imagined it. Or maybe exaggerated it in the remembering. You rationalize whatever you can, forget whatever you can't, and get back to your life." I glanced down at my gloved hand and said, "It's not their fault, man. I don't blame them."
"Maybe," he said. "But I don't see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing."
"How big was your graduating class in high school?"
Butters blinked. "What?"
"Just answer me."
"Uh, about eight hundred."
"All right," I said. "Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah," I said. "You can check with the FBI. That's out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It's been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are."
Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "So?"
I arched an eyebrow at him. "So they're missing. Where did they go?"
"Well. They're missing. If they're missing, then nobody knows."
"Exactly," I said.
He didn't say anything back.
I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. "Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators."
Butters drew his knees up to his chest, huddling further under the blanket. "Really?"
"Yeah," I said. "Nobody talks about this kind of thing. But all those people are still gone. Maybe a lot of them just cut their ties and left their old lives behind. Maybe some were in accidents of some kind, with the body never found. The point is, people don't know. But because it's an extremely scary thing to think about, and because it's a lot easier to just get back to their lives they tend to dismiss it. Ignore it. It's easier."
Butters shook his head. "It just sounds so insane. I mean, they'd believe it if they saw it. If someone went on television and-"
"Did what?" I asked. "Bent spoons? Maybe made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Turned a lady into a white tiger? Hell, I've done magic on television, and everyone not screaming that it was a hoax was complaining that the special effects looked cheap."
"You mean that clip that WGN news was showing a few years back? With you and Murphy and the big dog and that insane guy with a club?"
"It wasn't a dog," I said, and shivered a little myself at the memory. "It was a loup-garou. Kind of a superwerewolf. I killed him with a spell and a silver amulet, right on the screen."
"Yeah. Everyone was talking about it for a couple of days, but I heard that they found out it was a fake or something."
"No. Someone disappeared the tape."
"Oh."
I stopped at a light and stared at Butters for a second. "When you saw that tape, did you believe it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He took a breath. "Well, because the picture quality wasn't very good. I mean, it was really dark-"
"Where most scary supernatural stuff tends to happen," I said.
"And the picture was all jumpy-"
"The woman with the camera was terrified. Also pretty common."
Butters made a frustrated sound. "And there was an awful lot of static on the tape, which made it look like someone had messed with it."
"Sort of like someone messed with almost all of my X-rays?" I shook my head, smiling. "And there's one more reason you didn't believe it, man. It's okay; you can say it."
He sighed. "There's no such things as monsters."
"Bingo," I said, and got the car moving again. "Look, Butters. You are your own ideal example. You've seen things you can't explain away. You've suffered for trying to tell people that you have seen them. For God's sake, twenty minutes ago you got attacked by the walking dead. And you're still arguing with me about whether or not magic is real."
Seconds ticked by.
"Because I don't want to believe it," he said in a quiet, numb voice.
I exhaled slowly. "Yeah."
Dead silence.
"Drink some coffee," I told him.
He did.
"Scared?"
"Yeah."
"Good," I said. "That's smart."
"Well, then," he murmured. "I m-must be the smartest guy in the whole world."
"I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has."
"What do I do?" Butters asked me.
"I'm taking you somewhere you'll be safe. Once I get you there, I'll figure out my next move. For now, ask me questions. I'll answer them."
Butters took a slower sip of his coffee and nodded. His hands looked steadier. "Who was that man?"
"He goes by Grevane, but I doubt that's his real name. He's a necromancer."
"What's a necromancer?"
I rolled a shoulder in a shrug. "Necromancy is the practice of using magic to muck around with dead things. Necromancers can animate and control corpses, manipulate ghosts, access the knowledge stored in dead brains-"
Butters blurted out, "That's impos-" Then he stopped himself and coughed. "Oh. Right. Sorry."
"They can also do a lot of really freaky things involving the soul," I said. "Even in the weird circles, it isn't the kind of thing you talk about casually. But I've heard stories that they can inhabit corpses with their consciousness, possess others. I've even heard that they can bring people back from the dead."
"Jesus," Butters swore.
"I kinda doubt they had anything to do with that one."
"No, no, I meant-"
"I know what you meant. It was a joke, Butters."
"Oh. Right. Sorry." He swigged more coffee, and started looking around at the streets again. "But bringing the dead to life? That doesn't sound so bad."
"You're assuming that what the necromancer brings them back to is better than death. From what I've heard, they don't generally do it for humanitarian reasons. But that might be a load of crap. Like I said, no one talks about it."
"Why not?" Butters asked.
"Because it's forbidden," I told him. "The practice of necromancy violates one of the Laws of Magic laid down by the White Council. Capital punishment is the only sentence, and no one wants to even come close to being suspected by the Council."
"Why? Who are they?"
"They're me," I said. "Sort of. The White Council is a... well, most people would call it a governing body for wizards all over the world, but it's really more like a Masonic lodge. Or maybe a frat."
"I've never heard of a fraternity handing out a death sentence."
"Yeah. Well the Council has only seven laws, but if you break them..." I drew my thumb across my neck. "By the way, they aren't fond of regular folks knowing about them. So don't talk about them to anyone else."
Butters swallowed and touched the fingers of one hand to his throat. "Oh. So this guy, Grevane. He was like you?"
"He's not like me," I said, and it came out in a snarl that surprised even me. Butters twitched violently. I sighed and made an effort to lower my voice again. "But he's probably a wizard, yeah."
"Who is he? What does he want?"
I blew out a breath. "He's most likely a student of this badass black magic messiah named Kemmler. The Council burned Kemmler down a while back, but several of his disciples may have escaped. I think Grevane is looking for a book his teacher hid before he died."
"A magic book?"
I snorted. "Nah. Trinkets aren't too hard to come by. If my guess is correct, this book contains more of the knowledge and theory Kemmler used in his most powerful magics."
Butters nodded. "So... if Grevane gets hold of the book and learns, he gets to be the next Kemmler?"
"Yeah. And he mentioned that there were others involved in this business too. I think word of the presence of Kemmler's book came up, and his surviving students are showing up to grab it before their fellow necromancers do. For that matter, just about anyone involved in black magic might want to get their hands on it."
"So why doesn't the Council just grab them and...?" He drew his thumb across his throat.
"They've tried," I said. "They thought the disciples had all been accounted for."
Butters frowned. Then he said, "I guess wizards can go into denial about uncomfortable things too, huh?"
I barked out a laugh. "People are people, man."
"But now you can tell this Council about Grevane and this book, right?"
My stomach quivered a little. "No."
"Why not?"
Because if I did, Mavra would destroy my friend. The thought screamed across my brain in a blaze of frustration that I tried to keep concealed.
"Long story. The short version is that I'm not real popular with the Council, and they're pretty busy right now."
"With what?" he asked.
"A war."
He scrunched up his nose and tilted his head, studying me. "That's not the only reason you aren't calling them, is it?" Butters said.
"Egad, Holmes," I told him. "No, it isn't. Don't push."
"Sorry." He finished the coffee, then made a visible effort to cast around for a new conversational thread. "So. Those were actual zombies?"
"Never seen one before," I said. "But that seems like a pretty good guess."
"Poor Phil," Butters said. "Not a saint or anything, but not a bad guy."
"He have a family?" I asked.
"No," Butters said. "Single. That's a mercy." He was silent for a second, then said, "No. I guess it isn't."
"Yeah."
"If those guys were zombies, how come they didn't want brains?" Butters said. He held both arms stiff out in front of him, rolled his eyes back in his head, and moaned, "Braaaaaaaaaaaains."
I snorted. He gave me a weak smile.
"Seriously," Butters said. "These guys were more like the Terminator."
"What's the use of a foot soldier who can't do anything but hobble along and moan about brains?"
"Good point," Butters said. He scrunched up his nose in thought. "Don't I remember something about sewing a zombie's lips shut with thread to kill them? Does that work?"
"No clue," I said. "But you saw those things. If you want to get close enough to find out, be my guest, but I'll be observing it through a freaking telescope."
"No, thank you," Butters said. "But how do we stop them?"
I sighed. "They're tough, but they're still flesh and bone. Massive trauma will do it sooner or later."
"How massive?"
I shrugged. "Run them over with a truck. Chop them to bits with an ax. Burn them to ashes. A gun or a baseball bat won't do it."
"This may come as a shock to you, Harry, but I don't have an ax with me. Is there something else? Maybe something that isn't so Bunyan-esque?"
"Plenty," I said. "If you can cut off the flow of energy into them, they'll drop."
"How do you do that?"
"You'd have to ground them out. Running water is the best way, but there needs to be a lot of it. A small stream, at least. I could also probably trap one in a magic circle and cut off any energy from getting to it. Either way, they'd just fall over, plop."
"Magic circles," Butters shook his head. "And nothing else?"
"Keep in mind that they aren't intelligent," I said. "Zombies follow orders, but they don't have much more intellect than your average animal. You have to outthink them-or the necromancer who is giving them orders. You could also cut off the necromancer's control of them."
"How?"
"Kill their drum."
"Uh, what?"
I shook my head. "Sorry. A zombie... well, it isn't really a person with thoughts and feelings and such, but the corpse is used to being a person. To eating, breathing-and to a beating heart. That's how the necromancer controls them. He plays a beat or some kind of rhythmic music, and uses magic to substitute his beat for the zombie's heartbeat. He links himself to the beat, the beat to the zombie's heart, and when the necromancer gives a command, as far as the zombie is concerned it's coming from inside him and he wants to do it. That's how they can control them so completely."
"That book," Butters said. "Grevane kept drumming it against his leg. And then outside, that huge bass woofer in that Cadillac."
"Exactly. Make the beat stop or get the zombies out of earshot, and he loses control of them. But that's really dicey."
"Why?"
"Because it won't destroy the zombie. It just frees it from the necromancer's control. Anything could happen. It could just shut down, or it could start killing everyone it sees. Totally unpredictable. If I'd stopped him from drumming in the exam room, they might have killed us all. Or run off in different directions to hurt other people. We couldn't afford to take the chance."
Butters nodded, absorbing this for a minute. Then he piped up with, "Grevane said you weren't a Warden. What is a Warden?"
"Wardens are the White Council's version of cops," I said. "They enforce the Laws of Magic, bring criminals in for a trial, and then they chop off their heads. Sometimes they get enthusiastic and just skip to the chopping."
"Well. That doesn't sound so bad."
"In theory," I said. "But they're so paranoid that next to them, Joe McCarthy looks like a friendly puppy. They don't ask many questions, and they don't hesitate to make up their minds. If they think you've broken a law, you might as well have."
"That's not fair," Butters said.
"No. It isn't. I'm not real popular with the Wardens. I'm not sure they'd come out to help me if I asked them."
"What about other wizards on the Council?"
I sighed. "The White Council is already at the limits of its resources. Even if they weren't, the Council really, really likes to not get involved."
He frowned. "Could the cops stop Grevane?"
"No way," I said, "Not a chance in hell are any of them prepared to handle him. And if they tried, a whole lot of good people would die."
Butters sputtered. "They'll just sit there and let people like Phil get killed?" he demanded, his voice outraged. "If regular people can't do it, and the Council won't get involved, who the hell is going to stop him?"
"I am," I said.