tracking spell I’d need to find my brother, my reception would go straight to hell, anyway.
Harry waxes poetic about magic. He’ll go on and on about how it comes from your feelings, and how it’s a deep statement about the nature of your soul, and then he’ll whip out some kind of half-divine, half-insane philosophy he’s cobbled together from the words of saints and comic books about the importance of handling power responsibly. Get him rolling, and he’ll go on and on and on.
For someone on Harry’s level, maybe it’s relevant. For the rest of us, here’s what you need to know about magic: It’s a skill. Anyone can learn it to one degree or another. Not very many people can be good at it. It takes a lot of practice and patience, it makes you tired, leaves you with headaches and muscle cramps, and everyone and their dog has an opinion about the “correct” way to do it.
Harry’s a master of the skill—as in simultaneous doctorates from MIT, Harvard, and Yale, and a master’s from Oxford. By comparison, I went to a six-month vo-tech—which means I skipped a bunch of the flowery crap and focused on learning some useful things that work.
It took me a couple of minutes longer than it would have taken him, but I used the silver pentacle amulet my mother had given me for my fifth birthday to create a link to Harry’s amulet, a battered twin to mine.
Early springtime in Chicago can come at you with a psychotic array of weather. This spring had been pleasantly mild, and by the time I’d used the tracking spell to catch up to my little brother, the day had faded into a pleasantly brisk evening.
I held the silver amulet in my right hand, its chain wrapped around my knuckles, four or five inches above the pendant left dangling. The pendant swung steadily, back and forth in one direction, no matter which way I turned, as if it had been guided by a tiny gyroscope. I’d paid a small fortune to park the Hummer—money well spent. Now I followed the swing of the pendant, and the spell guiding it, across the grounds of Millennium Park.
Millennium Park is something fairly rare—a genuinely beautiful park in the middle of a large city. Granted, the buildings spaced around the grounds look like something inspired by an Escher painting and a period of liberal chemical xperimentation in an architect’s underclassman years, but even they have their own kind of madman’s charm. Even though night was coming on, the park was fairly busy. The skating rink stayed open until ten every night, and it would only stay open for a few more days before it would shut down until the seasons turned again. Kids and parents skated around the rink. Couples strolled together. Uniformed police officers patrolled in plain sight nearby, making sure the good people of Chicago were kept safe from predators.
I spotted Harry stalking along the side of the skating rink, walking away from me. He was head and shoulders taller than most of the people around him, professional-basketball-player tall, and rather forebidding in his big black duster. His head was down, his attention on something he was holding in his hands—probably a tracking spell of his own. I hurried across the distance to the skating rink to begin shadowing him.
I realized I was being followed about twenty seconds later.
Whoever they were, the Stygian hadn’t told them they were dealing with a vampire. They hadn’t stayed downwind, and a stray breeze had brought in the aromas of a couple of dozen humans who were nearby, the reek of a couple of trash cans, the scents of several nearby food vendors selling various temptations from their carts—and the distinct, rotten-meat and stale-sweat stench (badly hidden under generous splashes of Axe) of two ghouls.
That wasn’t good. Like me, ghouls can pass for human. They’re the cheap muscle-for-hire of the supernatural world. Doubtless, the Stygian had hired them on against the possibility of interference from the Venatori.
One ghoul I could handle, no problem. Though they were tough to kill, strong, fast, and vicious as the day is long, that’s nothing I haven’t slaughtered before. Two of them, though, changed the picture. It meant that if they had any brains going for them at all, they could make it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to take them out without being incapacitated myself.
True, hired thugs generally weren’t known for their brains, but it wasn’t