back in. She was decked out in biker-grade denim and leather again. "I guess we're going somewhere."
"Rev up the Hog," I said. "You ready for another fight?"
Her teeth flashed. She tossed me a red motorcycle helmet and said, "Get on the bike, bitch."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Motorcycles aren't safe transport, as far as it goes. I mean, insurance statistics show that everyone in the country is going to wind up in a traffic accident of some kind and most of us are going to be involved in more than one. If you're driving around in a beat-up old Lincoln battleship and someone clips you at twenty miles an hour, it probably is going to frighten and annoy you. If you're sitting on a motorcycle when it happens, you'll be lucky to wind up in traction. Even if you aren't in an accident with another vehicle, it's way too easy to get yourself hurt or killed on a bike. Bikers don't wear all that leather around simply for the fashion value or possible felony assaults. It's handy for keeping the highway from ripping the skin from your flesh should you wind up losing control of the bike and sliding along the asphalt for a while.
All that said, riding a motorcycle is fun.
I put on the bulky, clunky red helmet, fairly certain that I had never before disguised myself as a kitchen match-stick. Murphy's black helmet, by comparison, looked like something imported from the twenty-fifth century. I sighed as the battered corpse of my dignity took yet another kick in the face and got on the bike behind Murphy. I gave her directions, and her old Harley growled as she unleashed it on the unsuspecting road.
I thought the bike was going to jump out from underneath me for a second, and my balance wobbled.
"Dresden!" Murphy shouted back to me, annoyed. "Hang on to my waist!"
"With what?" I shouted back. I waved my bandaged hand to one side of her field of vision and the hand holding the staff to the other.
In answer, Murphy took my staff and shoved the end of it down into some kind of storage rack placed so conveniently close to the rider's right hand that it couldn't have been mistaken for anything but a holster for a rifle or baseball bat. My staff stuck up like the plastic flagpole on a golf cart, but at least I had a free hand. I slipped my arm around Murphy's waist, and I could feel the muscles over her stomach tensing as she accelerated or leaned into turns, cuing me to match her. When we got onto some open road and zoomed out of the city, the wind took the ends of my leather duster, throwing them back up into the air of the bike's passage, and I had to hold tight to Murphy or risk having my coat turn into a short-term parasail.
We rolled through Little Sherwood and up to the entrance of Chateau Raith. Murphy brought the Harley to a halt. It might have taken me a few extra seconds to take my arm from around her waist, but she didn't seem to mind. She had her bored-cop face on as she took in the house, the roses, and the grotesque gargoyles, but I could sense that underneath it she was as intimidated as I had been, and for the same reasons. The enormous old house reeked of the kind of power and wealth that disdains laws and societies. It loomed in traditional scary fashion, and it was a long way from help.
I got off the bike and she passed me my staff. The place was silent, except for the sound of wind slithering through the trees. There was a small flickering light at the door, another at the end of the walk up to it, and a couple of splotches of landscape lighting, but other than that, nothing.
"What's the plan?" Murphy asked. She kept her voice low. "Fight?"
"Not yet," I said, and gave her the short version of events. "Watch my back. Don't start anything unless one of the Raiths tries to physically touch you. If they can do that, there's a chance they could influence you in one way or another."
Murphy shivered. "Not an issue. If I could help it they weren't going to be touching me anyway."
An engine roared and a white sports car shot through the last several hundred yards of Little Sherwood. It all but flew up the drive, narrowly missed Murphy's bike, spun, and screeched to