metallic pressed to my chest.
“Clear!” shouted the voice.
A lightning bolt hit my chest, an agonizing ribbon of silver power that bent my body into a bow. I started screaming, and before my hips had come down, I shouted, “Hexus!” spewing out power into the air.
Someone shouted and someone else cursed, and sparks exploded all around me, including from the lightbulb above, which seemed to overload and shatter into powder.
The room was dark and quiet for a few seconds.
“D-did we lose him?” asked a steady, elderly man’s voice. Forthill.
“Oh, God,” said Molly’s quavering voice. “H-Harry?”
“I’m fine,” I said. My throat felt raw. “What the hell are you doing to me?”
“Y-your heart stopped . . .” said a third voice, the familiar one.
I felt my chest and found nothing there, or around my neck. My fingers quested out and touched the bed and the backboard beneath me, and found my necklace there, the ruby still fixed in place by an ugly glob of rubber. I gripped the chain and slipped a little of my will into it, and cold blue light filled the room.
“. . . so I did what any good mortician would,” Butters continued. “Hit you with a bolt of lightning and tried to reanimate you.” He held up two shock paddles, whose wires had evidently been melted right off them. They weren’t attached to anything now. He was a wiry little guy in hospital scrubs with a shock of black hair, narrow shoulders, and a thin, restless body. He held up his hands and mimed employing the shock paddles. Then he said, in a goofy voice that was probably meant to sound hollow, “It’s alive. Alliiiiiivve.” After a beat he added, “You’re welcome.”
“Butters.” I sighed. “Who called you into—” I stopped and said, “Molly. Never mind.”
“Harry,” she said. “We couldn’t be sure how badly you were hurt, and if you couldn’t feel, you couldn’t know either, and I thought we needed a real doctor, but the only one I knew you trusted was Butters, so I got him instead—”
“Hey!” Butters said.
I pushed the straps off of my head and kicked irritably at the straps on my legs.
“Whoa, there, tiger!” Butters said. The little medical examiner threw himself across my legs. “Hold your horses, big guy! Easy, easy!”
Forthill and Molly meant well. They joined in and the three of them flattened me to the backboard again.
I snarled out a curse and then went limp. I sat there not resisting for a moment, until I thought they’d be listening. Then I said, “We don’t have time for this. Get these straps off of me.”
“Dresden, you might have a broken back,” Butters said. “A pinched nerve, broken bones, damage to the organs in your lower abdomen—for God’s sake, man, what were you thinking, not going to a hospital?”
“I was thinking that I didn’t want to make an easy target of myself,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m better.”
“Good Lord, man!” sputtered Forthill. “Be reasonable. Your heart wasn’t beating three minutes ago.”
“Molly,” I said, my voice hard. “Unfasten the straps. Do it now.”
I heard her sniffle. But then she sat up and came up to where she could see my eyes. “Um. Harry. Are you still . . . you know. You?”
I blinked at her for a second, impressed. The grasshopper’s insight was evidently serving her well.
“I’m me,” I said, looking back at her eyes. That should be verification enough. If someone else had come back behind the wheel of my car, so much change to my insides and a look like that would certainly trigger a soulgaze and reveal what had happened. “For now, at least.”
Molly bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay. Okay, let him up.”
Butters sat up from my legs and then stood scowling. “Wait a minute. This is just . . . This is all moving a little too fast for me.”
The door behind him opened, and a heavyset man in street clothes lifted a gun and put two rounds into Butters’s back from three feet away. The sheer sound of the shots was incredible, deafening.
Butters dropped like a slaughtered cow.
The gunman’s eyes were tracking toward the rest of us before Butters hit the floor. I knew who he was looking for when his eyes swept over me and locked on.
He didn’t talk, didn’t bluster, didn’t hesitate. A professional. There were plenty of them in Chicago. He raised the gun to aim at my head—while I lay there, strapped to a board from the hips down and unable to move.