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Worse, what if he hadn't? What if he was one of a set of people just as crazy and dangerous as he had been?
I started feeling even more nervous.
"My lord," Grey Cloak said, bowing his head. He left it that way;
There was a long moment of silence before Cowl spoke. Then he said, "You have failed."
"I have not yet succeeded," Grey Cloak replied with polite disagreement. "The curtain has not fallen."
"And the fool with you?"
"Still ignorant, my lord. I can preserve or dispose of him as you see fit." Grey Cloak took a deep breath and said, "He has gotten the wizard involved. There is some sort of vendetta between them, it would seem."
The little mist figure made a hissing sound. "The fool. There is not enough profit in Dresden's death to jeopardize the operation."
"He did not consult me on the matter, my lord," Grey Cloak said with another bow of his head. "Had he done so, I would have dissuaded him."
"And what followed?"
"I attempted to remove him along with the last of the culling."
"Dresden interfered?"
"Yes."
Cowl hissed. "This changes matters. What precautions have you taken?"
"I was not followed in flesh, my lord; of that I am certain."
Cowl held up a miniature hand for silence, a gesture that looked, somehow, stiff and pained. Then his hood panned around the room.
The figure's gaze met mine, and hit me like a literal, physical blow, a swift jab in the chest.
"He is there!" Cowl snarled. The misty figure turned to face me and lifted both hands.
An odd, cold pressure hit me like a wave and pushed me back several feet before I could gather up my will and exert pressure in return, coming to a stop several feet away from Grey Cloak and Cowl.
Cowl's hands clenched into claws. "Insolent child. I will rip your mind asunder."
I snarled at him and planted my insubstantial feet. "Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!"
Cowl screamed at me. He spoke a word that resonated in my head and thundered through the hazy confines of Grey Cloak's hideaway. Though I had braced myself to gather my will and pit it against his, his next strike hammered into me like a freight train. I could no more have resisted it than I could have stopped an ocean tide, and I felt it throwing me back and away.
In that last second before I was banished, I reached out with all the strength I had left, focusing on Grey Cloak, pouring everything I had into the spell to grant me a clear view of his face. I got it, for the barest instant, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, tall and lean and wolfish.
And then there was a geyser of scarlet pain, as if someone had seized both halves of my skull and torn it into two pieces.
Darkness followed.
Chapter Sixteen
I woke up with someone shaking my shoulder and someone else holding the back of my head against a running band saw.
"Harry," Molly said. She was speaking through some kind of megaphone pressed directly against the side of my head, evidently while pounding my skull with the pointy end of a claw hammer. "Hey, boss, can you hear me?"
"Ow," I said.
"What happened?"
"Ow," I repeated, annoyed, as if it should have been explanation enough.
Molly let out an exasperated, worried sound. "Do I need to take you to the hospital?"
"No," I croaked. "Aspirin. Some water. And stop screaming."
"I'm barely whispering," she said, and got up. Her combat boots slammed down on the floor in great Godzilla-sized rolls of thunder as she went up the stair steps.
"Bob," I said, as soon as she was gone. "What happened?"
"I'm not sure," Bob said, keeping his voice down. "Either she's been working out, or else she's started using some kind of cosmetics on her arms. She still had some baby fat when she got the tattoos, and that's always bound to make any kind of changes more noticeable, and - "
"Not her," I growled, images of genuine mayhem floating through my agonized brain. "Me."
"Oh ," Bob said. "Something hit the model, hard. There was an energy surge. Boom. The psychic backlash lit up your mental fusebox."
"How bad?"
"Hard to say. How many fingers am I holding up?"
I sighed. "How bad is Little Chicago, Bob?"
"Oh. You've got to be more specific with this stuff, Harry. Could be worse. A week to fix, at most."
I grunted. "Everything's too loud and bright." I tested my arms and legs. It hurt to move them, an odd and stretchy kind of pain, but they moved. "What happened, exactly?"
"You got lucky, is what. Something you met out there threw a big blast of psychic energy at you. But it had to come at you through your threshold and the model. The threshold weakened it, and Little Chicago shorted out when the blast hit, or..."
"Or what?" I asked.
"Or you wouldn't have that headache," Bob said. Then his eye-lights winked out.
Molly's boots clumped back down the stairs. She set down on the table a couple of fresh candles she'd brought, took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then very carefully used the same spell I did to light them.
The light speared into my brain and hurt. A lot. I flinched and threw my arm across my face.
"Sorry," she said. "I wasn't thinking. I couldn't even see you down here, and..."
"Next time just shove some pencils into my eyes," I muttered a minute later.
"Sorry, Harry," she said. "The aspirin?"
I held out a hand. She pressed a bottle of aspirin into it, and then pressed a cold glass into my other hand. I opened the aspirin with my teeth, dumped several into my mouth, and chugged them down with the water. Exhausted from this monumental effort, I lay on the floor and felt somewhat sorry for myself until, after several more mercilessly regular minutes, the painkiller started kicking in.
"Molly," I said. "Were we supposed to have a lesson today?"
"No," she said. "But Sergeant Murphy called our house, looking for you. She said you weren't answering the phone. I thought I should come over and check on you."
I grunted. "Good call. Any trouble getting through the wards?"
"No, not this time."
"Good." I opened my eyes slowly, until they started getting used to the glare of the candles. "Mouse. Mouse probably needs you to let him out."
I heard a thumping sound, and squinted up the stairs. Mouse was crouched at the top, somehow managing to look concerned.
