White Night (The Dresden Files #9) - Jim Butcher Page 0,60

lot more than almost anything else: You find things that get lost. I'd first designed my tracking spell to catch up to the house keys I kept losing when I was about fourteen. I'd used it a few thousand times, now. Sometimes, it had helped me find things I really didn't want. Mostly, it helped me get into trouble.

This time, I was fairly sure it would do both.

I could have used my blood to trace Thomas's, probably, but I could use my silver pentacle amulet too. My mother had given me the one I habitually wore, and she'd given one to Thomas, too. I knew that he wore it just as habitually as I wore mine, and unless someone had taken it away from him, he'd be wearing it now.

So I revved up the spell, hung the amulet from the rearview mirror of the Blue Beetle, and headed out onto the Chicago streets. I kept an eye on my amulet, which leaned slightly, drawn as if by a light magnetic field toward Thomas's amulet. That wasn't a perfect way to track something down—the spell had no concern for streets and traffic flow, for example—but I'd been finding things like this for a good while, and I piloted the Beetle through the maze of buildings and one-way streets that make up the fair city.

Elaine watched me in silence the whole while. I knew that she was wondering what I had used to lock on to our apparent abductor/murderer. She didn't push, though. She just settled down and trusted me.

When I finally parked the car and got out, I brought my amulet with me and stared grimly at the necklace, which continued to lean steadily to the east, toward the Burnham Harbor piers that stretched out over Lake Michigan. An entire cove had been built into the lakeshore and decked out with an array of docks for dozens and dozens of small commercial boats, pleasure craft, and yachts.

"Boats," I muttered. "Why did it have to be boats?"

"What's wrong with boats?" Elaine asked.

"I haven't had a good time on boats," I said. "In fact, I haven't had a good time this close to the lake in general."

"It smells like dead fish and motor oil," Elaine noted.

"You never did like my cologne." I got my staff out of the car. "You need a big stick."

Elaine smiled sweetly at me, and drew out a heavy chain from her purse. She held both ends in one fist, leaving a doubled length of heavy metal links about two feet long. Each of the links glittered with veins of what might have been copper, forming sinuous text. "You're a prisoner to tradition, big guy. You should learn to be a little more flexible."

"Careful. If you tell me you've got bracelets and a magic lariat in there, I may lose control of my sexual impulses."

Elaine snorted. "You can't lose what you've never had." She glanced up at me. "Like the new shield, by the way."

"Yeah. Sexy, huh?"

"Complex," she replied. "Balanced. Strong. Sophisticated. I'm not sure I could have made a focus for something like that. It took real skill, Harry."

I felt myself actually blush, absurdly pleased by the compliment. "Well, it isn't perfect. It takes a lot more juice than the old shield did. But I figured getting tired faster is far preferable to getting dead fester."

"Seems reasonable," she said, and squinted at the docks. "Can you tell which boat it is?"

"Not yet. But once you get two or three hundred yards over the water, that spell would have grounded out. So we know it's one of these at the docks."

Elaine nodded. "You want to lead?"

"Yeah. We should be able to run it down fairly fast. Stay about ten or fifteen feet back from me."

Elaine frowned. "Why?"

"Any closer than that and we'd be a dandy target. Someone could take us both out with one burst from a machine gun."

Her face got a little pale. "I thought you trusted him."

"I do," I said. "But I don't know who might be there with him."

"And you've learned this kind of thing on the job? Machine guns?"

I felt my left hand twitch. "Actually, I learned it with flamethrowers. But it applies to machine guns, too."

She took a deep breath, green eyes flickering over the docks and ships. "I see. After you, then."

I readied my shield bracelet, got a good grip on my staff, and wrapped my amulet's chain around the first two fingers of my right hand, holding it up and out a