and I almost dropped it. Exhaustion followed into the rest of my body a breath later, and I slumped against Murphy's back, looking behind us.
The car hadn't exploded, like they do on TV. But it had torn through ten or twelve feet of heavy hedge and slammed into a tree. The car lay on its side, steaming. Glass and broken bits of metal were spread on the ground around it in a field of debris at least fifty feet across. The air bags had deployed, and I could see a pair of crumpled forms inside. Neither of them was moving.
Murphy kept the Harley racing forward, and was casting laughter into the wind all the way down the road.
"What?" I called to her. "Why are you laughing?"
She half turned her head. Her face was flushed, her eyes sparkling. "I think you were right about the vibrator thing."
Half a mile later we rolled up to a house that could have handled a family of four without trouble. By the standards of the Raith estate, I guess that qualified it as a cottage. Murphy killed the bike's engine maybe two hundred yards out, and we coasted in the rest of the way, the only sound the crunching grind of gravel under the tires. She stopped the bike, and we both sat there in the silence for a minute.
"See a cave?" she asked me.
"Nope," I said. "But we can't wait for Lara to show up."
"Any ideas how to find it?" Murphy asked.
"Yeah," I said. "I've never heard of a ritual spell that didn't involve fire and some chanting and some smelly incense and stuff."
"Christ, Dresden. We don't have time to wander around the woods in the dark hoping to smell our way to the cave. Isn't there some way you could find it?"
"With magic? Iffy. I'm not sure what I would do to look for a cave."
Murphy frowned. "Then this is stupid," she said. "We'd be smarter to back off and come back with help and light. You could defend yourself against this curse, couldn't you?"
"Maybe," I said. "But that last one came in awfully strong and fast, and it changes everything. I can swing at a slow-pitch softball and hit it every time. Not even the best hitter can hit five hundred against major-league pitching."
"How did they do it?" she asked.
"Blood sacrifice," I said. "Has to be. Raith is involved with the ritual now." My voice twisted with bitter anger. "He's got experience using it. He's got Thomas now, which means he isn't going to target him with the curse. Raith's going to bleed him to help kill me. The only chance Thomas has is for me to stop the curse."
Murphy sucked in a breath. She hopped off the bike and drew her gun, holding it down by her leg. "Oh. You circle left and I'll circle right and we'll sniff for the cave, then."
"Argh, I'm an idiot," I said. I leaned my still-glowing staff against the bike and jerked the silver amulet off my neck. "My mother left this to me. Thomas has one like it. She had forged a link between them so that when one of us was touching both of them we got a… sort of a psychic voice mail."
"Meaning what?" Murphy asked.
I twisted the chain around the index finger of my burned hand, letting it dangle. "Meaning I can use that link to find the other amulet again."
"If he has it," Murphy said.
"He will," I said. "After last night, he won't take it off."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know it," I said. I held my right hand palm up and tried to focus upon it. I found the link, the channel through which my mother's latent enchantment had contacted Thomas and me, and I poured some of my will into it, trying to spread it out. "Because I believe it."
The amulet quivered on its string and then leaned out toward the night to our left.
"Stay close," I said, and turned in that direction. "Okay, Murph?"
There was no answer.
My instincts clamored in alarm. I dropped my concentration and looked around, but Murphy was nowhere in sight.
Directly behind me there was a muffled sound, and I turned to find Lord Raith standing there with an arm around Murphy's neck, covering her mouth and with a knife pressed up hard against her ribs. He was wearing all black this time, and in the autumn moonlight he looked like little more than a shadow, a pale and grinning skull, and a