Grave Peril (The Dresden Files #3) - Jim Butcher Page 0,65

underneath."

The girl licked her lips and gave us a calculating look. "Maybe I have," she said. "What's in it for me?"

Michael rolled forward a step, a growl bubbling up out of his throat. I grabbed at his shoulder and leaned back. "Whoah, whoah, Michael," I yelped. "Slow down, man."

"There isn't time to slow down," Michael muttered. "You detect. I'm looking." With that, he turned and strode off deeper into the store, casually carrying the sword in his left hand, his right upon the weapon's grip. "Charity!"

I muttered something unflattering under my breath, then turned back to the cashier. I fumbled in my pockets for my billfold, and managed to produce a sorry trio of wrinkled fives. I held them up and said, "Okay. My evil twin or else a pregnant woman. You seen either one?"

The girl looked at the bills and then back at me and rolled her eyes. Then she leaned out from her counter and plucked them from my hands. "Yeah," she said. "She went down aisle five a few minutes ago. Back toward the freezer section."

"Yeah?" I asked. "Then what?"

She smiled. "What? Is this your brother or something, running around with your woman? Am I going to see this on Larry Fowler tomorrow?"

I narrowed my eyes. "It's complicated," I said. "What else did you see?"

She shrugged. "She paid for some stuff, and went to that van out there. It wouldn't start. I saw youor the guy that looks like you, come up to her and start talking to her. She looked pretty pissed at him, but she walked off with him. I didn't think anything of it."

My stomach gave a little lurch. "Walked off?" I said. "Which way?"

The cashier shrugged. "Look, mister, she just looked like she was getting a ride somewhere. She wasn't fighting or nothing."

"Which way!" I thundered. The cashier blinked, and her jaded exterior wobbled for a moment. She pointed down the streettoward Graceland.

"Michael!" I shouted. "Come on!" Then I turned around and banged my way back outside and into the rain and the dark. I stopped at Charity's van for a second, and tapped at the hood. It wobbled up without resistance, to reveal a mess of torn wires and shredded belts and broken pieces of metal. I winced, and shielded my eyes from the rain, trying to scan down the street toward the cemetery.

In the far distance, just barely, I saw two figuresone ungainly, with long hair. The other stood tall over her, slender, walking toward the cemetery holding her firmly by the hair.

They vanished into the shadows at the base of the stone wall around Graceland. I gulped, and looked around. "Michael!" I shouted again. I peered through the grocery's windows, but I couldn't see him anywhere.

"Dammit!" I said, and kicked at the front bumper of the van. I was in no shape to go after the Nightmare on my own. It was full of power it had stolen from me. It had the booga booga factor going for it. And it had my friend's wife and unborn child as hostages.

Hell's bells, all I had was a headache, an hourglass quickly running out of sand, and a case of the shakes. Chicago's biggest cemetery, on a dark, rainy night, when the border between here and the spirit world was leaking like a sieve. It would be full of spooks and crawlies, and I would be alone.

"Yeah," I muttered. "That figures."

I sprinted for the darkness into which I had seen the Nightmare disappear with Charity.

Chapter Twenty-one

I've done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes singlehandedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.

Which put me one step ahead of where I was, now. I had already killed the Nightmareor helped to kill it, at least. Something about that just didn't seem fair. There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.

Rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sluicing down into my eyes. I had to keep on wiping my brow, sweeping water away, only to have it fill my vision again. I started to give serious thought to what it might be like to drown, right there on the sidewalk.

I cut across the street toward the cemetery fence. Seven feet of red brick, the fence rose in a jagged stair-step fashion every