Dead Beat (4 page)

Besides. Fascinating light.

"Dead flesh adorns you even now. Nails. Hair. You tend them and caress them like any other mortal. Your women decorate them. Entice with them. Death is not a thing to be feared, boy. She is a lover who waits to take you into her arms. You can feel her, if you know what her touch is like. Cold, slow, sweet."

He was right. A cold, tingling nonfeeling was glittering over my fingernails and my scalp. For a second I thought that it hurt, but then I realized that it was only a shivering sensation where that cold energy brushed close to the blood pulsing beneath my skin. It was where they met that it felt uncomfortable. Without the blood, the cold would be a pure, endless sweetness.

"Take a little of death inside, boy. And it will lead you to more. Open your mouth."

I did. I was staring at the light in any case, and it was amazing enough to merit a bit of gaping. I barely noticed a frozen mote of dark blue light, like the corpse of a tiny star, that appeared from one of the spirit's white eyes and began drifting toward my mouth. The cold sensation grew, and it hit my tongue like a thermonuclear peppermint, freezing hot, searingly bitter and sweet and—

—and
wrong
. I spat it out, recoiling, throwing my arms up in front of my face. I fell to the floor, numbness spreading.

"Too late!" crowed the spirit. It shot into the air, swirling around over me, gloating. "Whatever you have done to my thoughts, the master will not be pleased that you have meddled with his servant."

The cold started spreading, and it wasn't purely physical. There was an empty, heartless void to it, a starless, frozen quality that raked at me— not just my body, but
me
—with a mindless hunger. And I could feel it sending tendrils out through me, slowing my heartbeat, making it impossible to breathe.

"Do you know how long I've been waiting for that?" the spirit purred, drifting back and forth over me. "Sitting there locked behind my own thoughts? Waiting for the chance to fight free? Finally, you thick-witted ogre, I get to leave your stupidity behind."

"Bob," I choked out. "This conversation is over."

The spirit's scarlet lights flared to sudden, incandescent rage and it screamed, a wailing sound that rattled my shelves and felt like it was splitting my head. Then the cloud was ripped backward across the room, sucked into the eyeholes of the skull as though down a hellish drain.

Once of the last of the motes went flickering back into the skull, the horrible cold faltered a little, and I curled up, focusing my will and trying to push it away. It took me a while, and that hideous void-presence lingered against my fingernails, even after I could feel my fingers again, but after a little while I was able to sit up.

After that I just curled up my knees against my chest, shocked and scared half out of my mind. I had always known that Bob was an incredibly valuable asset, and that no spirit with as much knowledge as he had could be weak. But I had not been at all prepared for the sheer power he had wielded, or for the malice with which he did it. Bob wasn't supposed to be a sleeping nightmare waiting to wake up. Bob was supposed to be my wisecracking porta-geek.

Good Lord, I couldn't remember the last time I'd confronted a demon with that much raw psychic power. If I'd been a second slower, or— stars and stones—if I hadn't remembered the condition that would banish Bob back to the skull and once again remove the dark memories, I'd be dead now. Or maybe dead and then some.

And it would have been my own stupid fault, too.

"Harry?" Bob said.

I flinched and let out a small squeaking sound. Then I got hold of myself and blinked up at the skull. It rested on its shelf, and its orange-gold eye lights were back to their usual color. "Oh. Hey."

Bob's voice was very quiet. "Your lips are blue."

"Yeah."

"What happened?" Bob asked.

"It got kind of cold in here."

"Me."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry, Harry," Bob said. "I tried to tell you."

"I know," I said. "I had no idea."

"Kemmler was bad, Harry," Bob said. "He… he took what I was. And he twisted it. I destroyed most of my memories of my time with him, and I locked away everything I couldn't. Because I didn't want to be like that."

"You won't," I told him quietly. "Now hear this, Bob. I command you never to recover those memories again. Never to let them out again. Never to obey any command to unleash them again. From here on out they sleep with the fishes. Understand me?"

"If I do," Bob said carefully, "I won't be able to do much to help you, Harry. You'll be on your own."

"Let me worry about that," I said. "It's a command, Bob."

The skull let out a slow sigh of relief. "Thank you, Harry."

"Don't mention it," I said. "Literally."

"Right," he said.

"Okay. Let's see," I said. "Can you still remember general information about Kemmler?"

"Nothing you couldn't find in other places. But general knowledge I learned when Justin was with the Wardens, yes."

"All right, then. You—that is, that other you—said that Kemmler had written down his teachings, when I asked him what The Word of Kemmler was. So I figure it's a book."

"Maybe," Bob said. "Council records stated that Kemmler had written three books;
The Blood of Kemmler, The Mind of Kemmler
, and
The Heart of Kemmler
."

"He published them?"

"Self-published," Bob said. "He started spreading them around Europe."

"Resulting in what?"

"Way too many penny-ante sorcerers getting their hands on some real necromancy."

I nodded. "What happened?"

"The Wardens put on their own epic production of
Fahrenheit 451
," Bob said. "They spent about twenty years finding and destroying copies. They think they accounted for all of them."

I whistled. "So if
The Word of Kemmler
is a fourth manuscript?"

"That could be bad," Bob said.

"Why?"

"Because some of Kemmler's disciples escaped the White Council's dragnet," Bob said. "They're still running around. If they get a new round of necro-at-home lessons to expand their talents, they could use it to do fairly horrible things."

"They're wizards?"

"Black wizards, yes," Bob said.

"How many?"

"Four or five at the most, but the Wardens' information was very sketchy."

"Doesn't sound like anything the Wardens can't handle," I said.

"Unless what's in the fourth book contains the rest of what Kemmler had to teach them," Bob said. "In which case, we might end up with four or five Kemmlers running around."

"Holy crap," I said. I plunked my tired ass down on my stool and rubbed at my head. "And it's no coincidence that it's almost Halloween."

"The season when the barriers between the mortal realm and the spirit world will be weakest," Bob said.

"Like when that asshole the Nightmare was hunting down my friends," I said. I peered at Bob. "But for him to do that, he had to weaken the barriers even more. He and Bianca had tormented all those ghosts to start making the barriers more unstable. Would it have to be ghosts to stir up the kind of turbulence you'd need for big magic?"

"No," Bob said. "But that's one way. Otherwise you'd have to use some rituals or sacrifices of one kind or another."

"You mean deaths," I said.

"Exactly."

I frowned, nodding. "They'd have to invest some energy early to get things moving for a big necromantic working. Like bouncing on a diving board a couple of times before you jump."

"An accurate, if crude aphorism," Bob said. "You'd have to do a little prework if you wanted to start working Kemmler-level necromancy, even on Halloween." He sighed. "Though that doesn't really help you much."

I got up and headed for the stepladder. "It helps more than you know, man. I'm getting you new romances."

The skull's eye lights brightened. "You are? I mean, of course you are. But why?"

"Because if someone's setting up for big bad juju, they'll have left bodies. If they've done that, then I have a place to start tracking them and finding out what's going on."

"Harry?" Bob called up as I left the lab. "Where are you going?"

I stuck my head back down the trapdoor and said, "The morgue."

Chapter Four

Chicago has a bitchin' morgue. You can't call it a "morgue" anymore because it's the Forensic Institute now. It isn't run by a "coroner" either, because now it's a medical examiner. It's on West Harrison Street, which is located in a fairly swanky industrial park, mostly specializing in various biotech industries. It's pretty. There are wide green lawns, carefully kept and trimmed, complete with sculpted trees and bushes, a fantastic view of the city's skyline, and quick access to the freeway.

It's upscale, sure. But it's also very quiet. Despite the gorgeous landscaping and a more antiseptic naming scheme, it's where they bring the dead to be poked and prodded.

I parked the Blue Beetle in the visitor's parking lot—of the complex next door. The morgue had more than average security, and I didn't want to advertise my presence. I grabbed my bribe from the backseat and headed for the front door of the Office of the Medical Examiner. I knocked, flashing my little laminated card I got from the police that makes me look like an official policelike person. The door buzzed, and I went in, nodding to a comfortably heavyset security guard reading a magazine behind a nondescript desk to one side of the entry area.

"Phil," I said.

"Evening, Dresden," he said. "Official?"

I held up the wooden box packed with McAnally's microbrew. "Unofficial."

"Hosannah," drawled Phil. "I like unofficial better." He put his feet back up on the desk and opened up his magazine again. I left the beer on the floor next to the desk, where it would be out of sight from the door. "How come I never heard of this bar?"

"Just a little local tavern," I said. I didn't add,
that caters to the supernatural community and doesn't exactly try to attract the attention of locals
.

"I'll have to get you to take me by sometime."

"Sure," I said. "Is he here?"

"Back in the slabs," he said, reaching down for one of the ales. Phil opened the lid with a thumb and took a swig, eyes on his magazine again. "Ahhhhh," he said, his tone philosophical. "You know, if anyone had come through that door, I'd tell him to get his ass going before someone drives up or something."

"Gone," I said, and hurried back into the hallways behind the entry area.

There were several slabs—I mean, examination rooms—in the morgue—that is, in the Forensic Institute. But I knew that the guy I was looking for would be in the smallest, crummiest room, the one farthest away from the entrance.

Waldo Butters, other than having the extreme misfortune of being born to parents with little to no ability to bestow a manly name upon their son, had also been cursed with a sense of honesty, a measure of integrity, and enough moral courage to make him act on them. When he'd examined the corpses of a bunch of things I'd burned mostly to briquettes, he'd pronounced them "humanlike, but definitely nonhuman," in his report.

It was a fair enough description of the remains of a bunch of batlike Red Court vampires, but since everyone knew that there were no such things as "humanlike nonhumans," and the remains were obviously human corpses that had been horribly twisted by intense heat, Butters wound up sitting in a psych ward for ninety days for observation. After that, he had been forced to wage a legal battle just to keep his job. His superiors didn't want him around, and they handed him the worst parts of the job they could come up with, but Butters stuck it out. He mostly worked the overnight shift and weekends.

It had the happy side effect of producing an ME who regarded the establishment with the same sort of cheerful disrespect I myself occasionally indulged in. Which was damned handy when, for example, one needed a bullet removed from one's arm without intruding upon the law enforcement community's busy schedule.

The doctor was in. I heard polka music oompahing cheerfully through the hall as I approached the room. But the music was off, somehow. Butters normally played his polka records and CDs loud, and I had gotten used to hearing the elite performers of the polka universe. Whoever he was playing now sounded admirably energetic, but lumpy and uneven. There were odd jerks and breaks in the music, though the whole of it somehow managed to hang on the rhythm of a single bass drum. On the whole, it made the music happy, lively, and somehow misshapen.

I opened the door and regarded the source of the Quasimodo Polka.

Butters was a little guy, maybe five-foot-three in his shoes, maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. He was dressed in blue hospital scrubs and hiking boots. He had a shock of wiry black hair that gave him a perpetual look of surprise that stopped just short of being a perpetual look of recent electrocution. He was wearing Tom Cruise sunglasses and had transformed himself into Polkastein.

A bass drum was strapped to his back, and a couple of wires ran to his ankles from a pair of beaters mounted on the frame. The drum beat in time to stomps of his feet. A small but genuine tuba hung from his slender shoulders, and there were more strings attached to his elbows, which moved back and forth in time to "oom" and "pah" respectively. He held an accordion in his hands, strapped to the harness on his chest. A clarinet had been clamped to the accordion so that the end was near his mouth, and there was, I swear to God, a cymbal on a frame held to his head.

Butters marched in place, red-faced, sweating, and beaming as he thumped and oompahed and blared accordion music. I just stood there staring, because while I have seen a lot of weird things, I hadn't ever seen that. Butters wrapped up the polka and energetically banged his head against the tuba, producing a deafening clash from the cymbal. The motion brought me into his peripheral vision and he jumped in surprise.

The motion overbalanced him and he fell amidst a clatter of cymbal, a honk of tuba, a fitful stutter of drum, and then lay on the floor while his accordion wheezed out.

"Butters," I said.

"Harry," he panted from the pile of polka. "Cool pants."

"I can see you're busy."

He missed the sarcasm. "Heck, yeah. Gotta get set. Oktoberfest Battle of the Bands tomorrow night."

"I thought you weren't going to enter after last year."

"Hah," Butters said, sneering defiantly. "I'm not going to let the Jolly Rogers laugh at me like that. I mean, come on. Five guys named Roger. How much polka can be in their souls?"

"I have no freaking clue," I answered truthfully.

Butters flashed me a grin. "I'll get them this year."

I couldn't help it: I started smiling. "Need any help getting out of there?"

"Nah, I got it," he said brightly, and started unstrapping himself. "Surprised to see you. Your checkup isn't until next week. Hand bothering you?"

"Not really," I said. "Wanted to talk to you about—"

"Oh!" he said. He hopped up from the stuff and left it on the floor so that he could scamper toward a desk in the corner. "Before you get started, I found something interesting."

"Butters," I said, "I'd like to chat, man, but I'm in a pretty big hurry."

He paused, crestfallen. "Really?"

"Yeah. It's a case, and I need to find out if you know anything that could help me."

"Oh," he said. "Well, you have cases all the time.
This
is important. I've been doing a lot of research since you started seeing me about your hand, and the conclusions I've been able to extrapolate from—"

"Butters." I sighed. "Look, I'm in a huge hurry. Five words or less, okay?"

He leaned his hands on his desk and regarded me, eyes sparkling. "I know how wizards live forever." He paused for a thoughtful second and then said, "Wait, that's six words. Never mind, then. What did you want to talk about?"

My mouth fell open. I shut it and glared at him. "No one likes a wiseass, Butters."

He grinned. "I told you it was important."

"Wizards don't live forever," I said. "Just a really long time."

Butters shrugged and kept pulling out file folders. He flicked on a backlight for reading X-ray films, and started pulling them from the folders and putting them on the light. "Hey, I'm still not sure I buy into this whole hidden-world-of-magic thing. But from what you've told me, wizards can live five or six times as long as the average human. That's closer to forever than anyone I know. And what I've seen makes me think there must be something to it. Come here."

I did, frowning at the X-rays. "Hey. Aren't these mine?"

"Yep," Butters confirmed. "After I switched to one of the older machines, I got about fifteen percent of them to come out," he said. "And there are three or four from your records that managed to survive whatever it is about you that screws up X-rays."

"Ugh. This is that gunshot wound I got in Michigan," I said, pointing at the first. It showed a number of fracture lines in my hip bone, where a small-caliber bullet had hit me. I had barely avoided a shattered pelvis and probable death. "They got this one after they got the cast off."

"Right," Butters said. "And here, this is one from a couple of years ago." He pointed at a second shot. "See the fracture lines? They're brighter, where the bone re-fused. Leaves that signature."

"Right," I said. "So?"

"So," Butters said. "Look at this one." He flipped up a third X-ray. It was much like the others, but without any of the bright or dark lines. He flicked it with a finger and looked at me, eyes wide.

"What?" I asked.

He blinked, slowly. Then he said, "Harry. This is an X-ray I took two months ago. Notice the lack of anything wrong."

"So?" I asked. "It healed, right?"

He made an exasperated sound. "Harry, you are dense. Bones don't
do
that. You carry marks where they re-fused for the rest of your life. Or rather, I would.
You
don't."

I frowned. "What's that got to do with wizard life span?"

Butters waved his hand impatiently. "Here, here are some more." He slapped up more X-rays. "This is a partial stress fracture to the arm that didn't get shot. You got it in that fall from the train a couple nights after we met," he said. "It was just a crack. You didn't even know you had it, and it was mild enough that it just needed a splint for a few days. It was off before you were ambulatory."

"What's so odd about that?"

"Nothing," Butters said. "But look, here it is again. There's a fuse marker, and in the third one, poof, it's gone. Your arm is back to normal."

"Maybe I just drink too much milk or something," I said.

Butters snorted. "Harry, look. You're a tough guy. You've been injured a lot." He pulled out my medical file and thumped it down with a grunt of effort. Granted, there are phone books smaller than my hospital file. "And I'm willing to bet you've had plenty of boo-boos you never saw a doctor about."

"Sure," I said.

"You're at least as battered as a professional athlete," Butters said. "I mean, like a hockey player or football player. Maybe as much as some race-car drivers."

"They get battered?" I asked.

"When you go around driving half a ton of steel at a third the speed of sound for a living, you get all kinds of injuries," he said seriously. "Even the crashes that aren't spectacular are pretty vicious on the human body at the speeds they're going. Ever been in a low-speed accident?"

"Yeah. Sore for a week."

"Exactly," Butters said. "Multiply that. These guys and other athletes take a huge beating, right? They develop a mental and physical toughness that lets them ignore a lot of pain and overcome the damage, but the damage gets done to their bodies nonetheless. And it's cumulative. That's why you see football players, boxers, a lot of guys like that all beat to hell by the time they're in their thirties. They regain most of the function after an injury, but the damage is still there, and it adds up bit by bit."

"Again I ask, what's that got to do with me?"

"You aren't cumulative," Butters said.

"Eh?"

"Your body doesn't get you functional again and then leave off," Butters said. "It continues repairing damage until it's
gone
." He stared at me. "Do you understand how
incredibly significant
that is?"

"I guess not," I said.

"Harry, that's probably
why
people age to begin with," he said. "Your body is a big collection of cells, right? Most of them get damaged or wear out and die. Your body replaces them. It's a continual process. But the thing is, every time the body makes a replacement, it's a little less perfect than the one that came before it."

"That copy-of-a-copy thing," I said. "I've heard about that, yeah."

"Right," Butters said. "That's how you're able to heal these injuries. It's why you have the potential to live so long. Your copies are perfect. Or at least a hell of a lot closer to it than most folks."

I blinked. "You're saying I can heal any injury?"

"Well," he said, "Not like mutant X-factor healing. If someone cuts an artery, you're gonna bleed out. But if you survive it, given enough time your body seems to be able to replace things almost perfectly. It might take you months, even several years, but you can get better when other people wouldn't."

I looked at him, and then at my gloved hand. I tried to talk, but my throat wouldn't work.

"Yeah," the little doctor said quietly. "I think you're going to get your hand back at some point. It didn't mortify or come off. There's still living muscle tissue there. Given enough time, I think you'll be able to replace scar tissue and regrow the nerves."

"That…" I said, and choked up. I swallowed. "That would be nice."

"We can help it along, I think," Butters said. "Physical therapy. I was going to talk to you about it next visit. We can go over it then."

"Butters," I said. "Uh. Wow, man. This is…"

"Really exciting," he said, eyes gleaming.

"I was going to say amazing," I said quietly. "And then I was going to say thank-you."

He grinned and twitched a shoulder in a shrug. "I calls them like I see them."

I stared down at my hand and tried to twiddle my fingers. They sort of twitched. "Why?" I asked.