Grave Peril (The Dresden Files #3) - Jim Butcher Page 0,34

you or anyone else is going to be able to stop it."

"But it's a ghost?"

He gave me a smile that showed me his canines. It was creepy on that florid, eyes-too-wide face. "It's a nightmare." He started to turn away. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn't. The man had become a liar, a sniveling con, but he hadn't always been.

I rose and beat him to the door, taking his arm in one hand. He spun to face me, jerking his arm away, glaring defiantly at my eyes. I avoided locking gazes. I didn't want to take a look at Mortimer Lindquist's soul.

"Morty," I said, quietly. "Get away from your seances for a while. Go somewhere quiet. Read. Relax. You're older now, stronger. If you give yourself a chance, the power will come back."

He laughed again, tired and jaded. "Sure, Dresden. Just like that."

"Morty"

He turned away from me and stalked out the door. He didn't bother to lock the place up behind him. I watched him head out to the cab, which waited by the curb. He lugged his bag into the backseat, and then followed it.

Before the cab pulled out, he rolled down the window. "Dresden," he called. "Under my chair there's a drawer. My notes. If you want to kill yourself trying to stand up to this thing, you might as well know what you're getting into."

He rolled the window back up as the cab pulled away. I watched it go, then went back inside. I found the drawer hidden in the base of the carved wooden chair, and inside I found a trio of old leather-bound journals, vellum pages covered in script that started out neat in the oldest one and became a jerky scrawl in the most recent entries. I held the books up to my mouth and inhaled the smell of leather, ink, paper; musty and genuine and real.

Morty hadn't had to give me the notes. Maybe there was some root of the person he had been, deep down somewhere, that wasn't dead yet. Maybe I'd done him a little good with that advice. I'd like to think that.

I blew out a breath, found a phone and called a cab of my own. I needed to get the Beetle out of impound if I could. Maybe Murphy could fix it for me.

I gathered the journals and went to the porch to wait for the cab, shutting the door behind me. Something big was coming through town, Morty had said.

"A nightmare," I said, out loud.

Could Mort be right? Could the barrier between the spirit world and our own be falling apart? The thought made me shudder. Something had been formed, something big and mean. And my gut instinct told me that it had a purpose. All power, no matter how terrible or benign, whether its wielder is aware of it or not, has a purpose.

So this Nightmare was here for something. I wondered what it wanted. Wondered what it would do.

And worried that, all too soon, I would find out.

Chapter Eleven

An unmarked car sat in my driveway with two nondescript men inside.

I got out of the taxi, paid off the cabby, and nodded at the driver of the car, Detective Rudolph. Rudy's clean-cut good looks hadn't faded in the year since he'd started with Special Investigations, Chicago's unspoken answer to the officially unacknowledged world of the supernatural. But the time had hardened him a bit, made him a little less white around the eyes.

Rudolph nodded back, not even trying to hide his glower. He didn't like me. Maybe it had something to do with the bust several months back. Rudy had cut and run, rather than stick it out next to me. Before that, I'd escaped police custody while he was supposed to be watching me. I'd had a darn good reason to escape, and it wasn't really fair of him to hold that against me, but hey. Whatever got him through the day.

"Heya, Detective," I said. "What's up?"

"Get in the car," Rudolph said.

I planted my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets with a certain nonchalance. "Am I under arrest?"

Rudolph narrowed his eyes and started to speak again, but the man in the passenger seat cut him off. "Heya, Harry," Detective Sergeant John Stallings said, nodding at me.

"How you doing, John? What brings you out today?"

"Murph wanted us to ask you down to a scene." He reached up and scratched at several days' worth of unshaven beard beneath a bad haircut and