not sure how long it was, but the shadows had changed and I was baking in the car, even with the windows down.
It occurred to me that it was stupid to be sitting there on the street for more vampire thugs to come find, plain as day. I was tired and dirty and hungry, but I didnt have the cash to get anything to eat, and by the sun I didnt have the time to go back to the apartment for soup. Not if I was to keep my appointment with Ms. Sommerset.
And I needed that appointment. Billy had been right about that, too. If I didnt start earning my keep again, I would lose the office and the apartment. I wouldnt get much magical research done from a cardboard box in an alley.
Time to get moving, then. I raked my fingers uselessly through my mop of hair and headed for my office. A passing clock told me that I was already a couple of minutes late for the appointment. Between that and my appearance, boy, was I going to wow the client. This day just kept getting better.
My office is in a building in midtown. It isnt much of a building, but it still looked too good for me that day. I got a glare from the aging security guard downstairs and felt lucky that he recognized me from previous encounters. A new guy probably would have given me the bums rush without blinking. I nodded at the guard and smiled and tried to look businesslike. Heh.
I walked past the elevator on my way to the stairs. There was a sign on it that said it was under repair. The elevator hadnt ever been quite the same since a giant scorpion had torn into one of the cars and someone had thrown the elevator up to the top of its chute with a torrent of wind in order to smash the big bug against the roof. The resulting fall sent the car plummeting all the way back to the ground floor and wreaked havoc with the building in general, raising everyones rents.
Or thats what I heard, anyway. Dont look at me like that. It could have been someone else. Okay, maybe not the orthodontist on four, or the psychiatrist on six. Probably not the insurance office on seven, or the accountant on nine either. Maybe not the lawyers on the top floor. Maybe. But it isnt always me when something goes catastrophically wrong.
Anyway, no one can prove anything.
I opened the door to the stairwell and headed up the stairs to my office, on the fifth floor. I went down the hall, past the quiet buzz of the consulting firm that took up most of the space on the floor, to my office door.
The lettering on the frosted glass read HARRY DRESDENWIZARD . I reached out to open the door. A spark jumped to my finger when my hand got within an inch or three of the doorknob, popping against my skin with a sharp little snap of discomfort.
I paused. Even with the buildings AC laboring and wheezing, it wasnt that cool and dry. Call me paranoid, but theres nothing like a murder attempt in broad daylight to make a man cautious. I focused on my bracelet again, drawing on my apprehension to ready a shield should I need it.
With the other hand I pushed open the door to my office.
My office is usually pretty tidy. Or in any case, I didnt remember it being quite as sloppy as it looked now. Given how little Id been there lately, it seemed unfair that it should have gotten quite that bad. The table by the door, where I kept a bunch of flyers with titles like "Magic for Dummies" and "Im a WizardAsk Me How" sat crookedly against the wall. The flyers were scattered carelessly over its surface and onto the floor. I could smell the faintest stink of long-burnt coffee. I must have left it on. Oops. My desk had a similar fungus coating of loose papers, and several drawers in my filing cabinets stood open, with files stacked on top of the cabinets or thrust sideways into their places, so that they stood up out of the drawers. My ceiling fan whirled woozily, clicking on every rotation.
Someone had evidently tried to straighten things up. My mail sat neatly stacked in three different piles. Both metal trash cans were suspiciously empty. Billy and company, then.
In the ruins of my office