been the combat leader of the merry band of college kids who had learned shapeshifting from an actual wolf, but Georgia was the manager, surrogate mom, and brains when there wasn’t any violence on.
Kirby was on painkillers and groggy, but he told me Georgia hadn’t been there. I talked to the duty nurse and confirmed that though his family was flying in from Texas to see him, he’d had no visitors since Billy and I had left.
Odd.
I thought about mentioning it to Billy, but I didn’t really know anything yet, and it wasn’t as though he needed more pressure.
“Don’t get paranoid, Harry,” I told myself. “Maybe she’s got a hangover, too. Maybe she ran off with a male stripper.” I waited to see if I was buying it, then shook my head. “And maybe Elvis and JFK are shacked up in a retirement home somewhere.”
I went to Billy and Georgia’s apartment.
They live in a place near the University of Chicago’s campus, in a neighborhood that missed being an ugly one by maybe a hundred yards. It still wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to hang around outside after dark. I didn’t have a key to get into the building, so I pressed buttons one at a time until someone buzzed me in, and I took the stairs up.
As I neared the apartment door, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I saw or heard anything, magical or otherwise, but when I stopped before the door, I had a nebulous but strong conviction that something bad had gone down.
I knocked. The door rattled and fell off the lower hinge. It swung open a few inches, drunkenly, upper hinges squealing. Splits and cracks, invisible until the door moved, appeared in the wood, and the dead bolt rattled dully against the inside of the door, loose in its setting.
I stopped there for a long second, waiting and listening. Other than the whirring of a window fan at the end of the hall and someone playing an easy-listening station on the floor above me, there was nothing. I closed my eyes for a moment and extended my wizard’s senses, testing the air nearby for any touch of magic upon it.
I felt nothing but the subtle energy that surrounded any home, a form of naturally occurring protective magic called the threshold. Billy and Georgia’s apartment was the nominal headquarters of the Werewolves, and members came and went at all hours. It was never intended to be a permanent home—but there had been a lot of living in the little apartment, and its threshold was stronger than most. I slowly pushed the door open with my right hand.
The apartment had been torn to pieces.
A futon lay on its side, its metal frame twisted like a pretzel. The entertainment center had been pulled down from the wall, shattering equipment, scattering CDs and DVDs and vintage Star Wars action figures everywhere. The wooden table had been broken in two precisely at its center. One of the half-dozen chairs survived. The others were kindling. The microwave protruded from the drywall of an interior wall. The door of the fridge had taken out the bookcase across the room. Everything in the kitchen had been pulled down and scattered.
I moved in as quietly as I could—which was pretty damn quiet. I had done a lot of sneaking around. The bathroom looked like someone had taken a chain saw to it and followed up with explosives. The bedroom used to house computers and electronic stuff looked like the site of an airplane crash.
Billy and Georgia’s bedroom was the worst of all of them.
There was blood on the floor and one wall.
Whatever had happened, I had missed it. Dammit. I wanted to kill something, I wanted to scream in frustration, and I wanted to throw up in fear for Georgia.
But in my business, that kind of thing doesn’t help much.
I went back into the living room. The phone near the door had survived. I dialed.
“Lieutenant Murphy, Special Investigations,” answered a professional, bland voice.
“It’s me, Murph,” I told her.
Murphy knows me. Her tone changed at once. “My God, Harry, what’s wrong?”
“I’m at Billy and Georgia’s apartment,” I said. “The place has been torn apart. There’s blood.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Georgia’s missing.” I paused and said, “It’s her wedding day, Murph.”
“Five minutes,” she said at once.
“I need you to pick something up for me on the way.”
MURPHY CAME THROUGH the door eight minutes later. She was the head of Chicago