Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files #8) - Jim Butcher Page 0,16

before, Id have told you he never interrupted anyone in his life. We cant talk about this. The line might not be secure.

Come on, man, I said. No one can monitor the phone line with a spell. Itd burn out in a second.

Someone isnt playing by the old rules anymore, Harry, he said. And a phone tap is not a difficult thing to engineer.

I frowned. Good point, I allowed. Then we need to talk.

When?

Soonest.

Accorded neutral territory, he responded.

He meant McAnallys pub. Macs place has always been a hangout for the supernatural crowd in Chicago. When the war broke out, someone managed to get it placed on a list of neutral territories where, by the agreements known as the Unseelie Accords, everyone respected the neutrality of the property and was expected to behave in a civil fashion when present. It might not have been a private rendezvous, but it was probably the safest place in town to discuss this kind of thing. Fine, I said. When?

Ive got business tonight. The soonest I can do it is tomorrow. Lunch?

Noon, I replied.

There was a sleepy murmur on the other end of the phonea womans voice.

Shhhhh, Fix said. Sure, Harry. Ill see you there.

We hung up, and I regarded the phone with pursed lips. Fix sleeping this late in the day? And with a girl in bed with him, no less. And interrupting wizards without a second thought. Hed come a ways.

Of course, hed had a lot of exposure to the faeries since the last time Id seen him. And if he had anything like the power that Id seen the champions of the Sidhe display before, hed have had time to get used to his new strength. You can never tell how someone is going to handle powernot until you hand it to them and see what they do with it. Fix had certainly changed.

I got a little twist in my gut that told me I should employ a great deal more than average caution when I spoke to him. I didnt like the feeling. Before I could think about it for too long, I made myself pick up the phone and move on with what my brain told me was a reasonable step two checking around to see if anyone had heard anything about bad juju running around town.

I called several people. Billy the Werewolf, recently married. Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer. Waldo Butters, medical examiner and composer of the Quasimodo Polka, a dozen magical small-timers I knew, plus my exs editor at the Midwestern Arcane . None of them had heard of anything, and I warned them all to keep an ear to the ground. I even put in a call to the Archive, but all I got was an answering service, and no one returned my call.

I sat and stared at the phones base for a moment, the receiver buzzing a dial tone in my gloved left hand.

I hadnt called Michael, or Father Forthill. I probably should have, working on the basic notion that more help was better help. Then again, if the Home Office wanted Michael on the case, hed be there regardless of whether or not anyone called him and how many immovable objects stood in the way. Ive seen it happen often enough to trust that it was true.

It was a good rationalization, but it wasnt fooling anyone. Not even me. The truth was that I didnt want to talk to either one of them unless I really, really, really had to.

The dial tone turned into that annoying buzz-buzz-buzz of a no-connection signal.

I hung the phone back up, my hand unsteady. Then I got up, reached down to the clumsily trimmed area of carpet that covered the trapdoor set in the apartments floor, and pulled it open onto a wooden stepladder that folded out and led down into my laboratory.

The lab is in the sub-basement, which is a much better name for it than the basement-basement. Its little more than a big concrete box with a ladder leading up and out of it. The walls are lined with overflowing white wire shelves, the cheap kind you can get at Wal-Mart. In my lab, they store containers of every kind, from plastic bags to microwave-safe plastic dinnerware to heavy wooden boxesand even one lead-lined, lead-sealed box where I store a tiny amount of depleted uranium dust. Other books, notebooks, envelopes, paper bags, pencils, and apparently random objects of many kinds crowd each other for space on the shelvesall except for