Summer Knight (The Dresden Files #4) - Jim Butcher Page 0,5

myself in the rearview mirror of the Beetle.

It came as a shock to me. I know, that sounds stupid, but I dont keep mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows, even doors, and it was a risk I preferred to skip entirely. I hadnt glanced at a mirror in weeks.

I looked like a train wreck.

More so than usual, I mean.

My features are usually kind of long, lean, all sharp angles. Ive got almost-black hair to go with the dark eyes. Now I had grey and purplish circles under them. Deep ones. The lines of my face, where they werent covered by several months of untrimmed beard, looked as sharp as the edges of a business card.

My hair had grown out long and shaggynot in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way. It didnt even have the advantage of being symmetrical, since a big chunk had been burned short in one spot when a small incendiary had been smuggled to me in a pizza delivery box, back when I could still afford to order pizza. My skin was pale. Pasty, even. I looked like Death warmed over, provided someone had made Death run the Boston Marathon. I looked tired. Burned out. Used up.

I sat back in my seat.

I hate it when Im wrong. But it looked like maybe Billy and the werewolves (stars and stones, they sounded like a bad rock band) had a point. I tried to think of the last time Id gotten a haircut, a shave. Id had a shower last week. Hadnt I?

I mopped at my face with my shaking hands. The days and nights had been blurring lately. I spent my time in the lab under my apartment, researching twenty-four seven. The lab was in the subbasement, all damp stone and no windows. Circadian rhythms, bah. Id pretty much dispensed with day and night. There was too much to think about to pay attention to such trivial details.

About nine months before, Id gotten my girlfriend nearly killed. Maybe more than killed.

Susan Rodriguez had been a reporter for a yellow journal called the Midwestern Arcane when we met. She was one of the few people around who were willing to accept the idea of the supernatural as a factual reality. Shed clawed for every detail, every story, every ounce of proof she could dig up so that she could try to raise the public consciousness on the matter. To that end, shed followed me to a vampire shindig.

And the monsters got her.

Billy had been right about that, too. The vampires, the Red Court, had changed her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they infected her. Though she was still human, technically, shed been given their macabre thirst. If she ever sated it, she would turn all the way into one of them. Some part of her would die, and she would be one of the monsters, body and soul.

Thats why the research. Id been looking for some way to help her. To create a vaccine, or to purge her body. Something. Anything.

Id asked her to marry me. She told me no. Then she left town. I read her syndicated column in the Arcane. She must have been mailing them in to her editor, so at least I knew she was alive. Shed asked me not to follow her and I hadnt. I wouldnt, until I could figure out a way to get her out of the mess Id gotten her into. There had to be something I could do.

Had to be. There had to be.

I bowed my head, suddenly grimacing so hard that the muscles of my face cramped, ached, and smoldered. My chest felt tight, and my body seemed to burn with useless, impotent flame. Im a wizard. I should have been able to protect Susan. Should have been able to save her. Should have been able to help her. Should have been smarter, should have been faster, should have been better.

Should have told her you loved her before it was too late. Right, Harry?

I tried not to cry. I willed myself not to with all of my years of training and experience and self-discipline. It would accomplish nothing. It wouldnt put me anywhere closer to finding a cure for Susan.

I was so damned tired.

I left my face in my hands. I didnt want someone walking by to see me bawling.

It took a long time to get myself back under control. Im