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"Kravos?" Susan asked. "Leonid Kravos?"
"Yeah, that might have been it, I think."
"Great," she said. "Super. Thank you, Harry." Her voice sounded a little tense, excited.
"Uh. Do you mind telling me what's going on?" I asked her.
"It's an angle I'm working on," she said. "Look, all I've got right now are rumors. I'll try to tell you more as soon as I've got something concrete."
"Fair enough. I'm sort of focused on something else right now, anyway."
"Anything you need help with?"
"God, I hope not," I said. I shifted the phone a little closer to my ear. "Did you sleep all right, last night?"
"Maybe," she teased. "It's hard to get really relaxed, when I'm that unsatisfied, but your apartment's so cold it's kind of like going into hibernation."
"Yeah, well. Next time I'll make sure it's a hell of a lot colder."
"I'm shivering already," she purred. "Call you tonight if I can?"
"Might not be here."
She sighed. "I understand. Potluck, then. Thanks again, Harry."
"Any time."
We said goodbye, hung up, and I went back to the stairs leading down into the sub-basement. I uncovered the trap door, opened it, got my lantern, and clumped on down the steep, folding staircase.
My lab never got any less cluttered, no matter how much more organization I imposed on it. The contents only grew denser. Counters and shelves ran along three walls. A long table ran down the center of the room, with enough space for me to slip sideways down its length on either side. Next to the ladder, a kerosene heater blunted the worst of the subterranean chill. On the far side of the table, a brass ring had been set into the floor - a summoning circle. I'd had to learn the hard way to keep it clear of the other debris in the lab.
Debris. Technically, everything in the lab was useful, and served some kind of purpose. The ancient books with their faded, moldering leather covers and their all-pervasive musty smell, the plastic containers with resealable lids, the bottles, the jars, the boxes - they all had something in them I either needed or had needed at one time. Notebooks, dozens of pens and pencils, paper clips and staples, reams of paper covered in my restless, scrawling handwriting, the dried corpses of small animals, a human skull surrounded by paperback novels, candles, an ancient battle axe, they all had some significance. I just couldn't remember what it was for most of them.
I took the cover off the lamp and used it to light up about a dozen candles around the room, and then the kerosene heater. "Bob," I said. "Bob, wake up. Come on, we've got work to do." Golden light and the smell of candle flames and hot wax filled the room. "I mean it, man. There's not much time."
Up on its shelf the skull quivered. Twin points of orangish flame flickered up in the empty eye sockets. The white jaws parted in a pantomime yawn, an appropriate sound coming out with it. "Stars and Stones, Harry," the skull muttered. "You're inhuman. It isn't even sundown yet."
"Stop whining, Bob. I'm not in the mood."
"Mood. I'm exhausted. I don't think I can help you out anymore."
"Unacceptable," I said.
"Even spirits get tired, Harry. I need rest."
"Time enough for rest when I'm dead."
"All right then," Bob said. "You want work, we make a deal. I want to do a ride-along the next time Susan comes over."
I snorted at him. "Hell's bells, Bob, don't you ever think about anything besides sex? No. I'm not letting you into my head while I'm with Susan."
The skull spat out an oath. "There should be a union. We could renegotiate my contract."
I snorted. "Any time you want to head back to the homeland, Bob, feel free."
"No, no, no," the skull muttered. "That's all right."
"I mean, there's still that misunderstanding with the Winter Queen, but - "
"All right, I said."
"You probably don't need my protection anymore. I'm sure she'd be willing to sit down and work things out, rather than putting you in torment for the next few hundred - "
"All right, I said!" Bob's eyelights flamed. "You can be such an asshole, Dresden, I swear."
"Yep," I agreed. "You awake yet?"
The skull tilted to one side in a thoughtful gesture. "You know," it said. "I am." The eye sockets focused on me again. "Anger really gets the old juices flowing. That was pretty sneaky."
I got out a relatively fresh notepad and a pencil. It took me a moment to clear off a space on the central table. "I've run into some new stuff. Maybe you can help me out. And we've got a missing person I need to look for."
"Okay, hit me."
I took a seat on the worn wooden stool and drew my warm robe a little closer about me. Trust me, wizards don't wear robes for the dramatic effect. They just can't get warm enough in their labs. I knew some guys in Europe who still operated out of stone towers. I shudder to think.
"Right," I said. "Just give me whatever you can." And I outlined the events, starting with Agatha Hagglethorn, through Lydia and her disappearance, through my conversation with Mort Lindquist and his mention of the Nightmare, to the attack on poor Micky Malone.
Bob whistled, no mean trick for a guy with no lips. "Let me get this straight. This creature, this thing, has been torturing powerful spirits for a couple of weeks with this barbed-wire spell. It tore up a bunch of stuff on consecrated ground. Then it blew through somebody's threshold and tore his spirit apart, and slapped a torture-spell on him?"
"You got it," I said. "So. What kind of ghost are we dealing with, and who could have called it up? And what is this girl's connection to it?"
"Harry," Bob said, his tone serious. "Leave this one alone."
I blinked at him. "What?"
"Maybe we could go on a vacation - Fort Lauderdale. They're having this international swimsuit competition there, and we could - "
I sighed. "Bob, I don't have time for - "
"I know a guy who's possessed a travel agent for a few days, and he could get us tickets cut rate. What do you say?"
I peered at the skull. If I didn't know any better, I would think that Bob sounded ... nervous? Was that even possible? Bob wasn't a human being. He was a spirit, a being of the Nevernever. The skull was his habitat, his home away from home. I let him stay in it, protected him, and bought him trashy romance novels on occasion in exchange for his help, his prodigious memory, and his affinity for the laws of magic. Bob was a records computer and personal assistant all rolled into one, provided you could keep his mind on the issue at hand. He knew thousands of beings in the Nevernever, hundreds of spell recipes, scores of formulae for potions and enchantments and magical constructions.
