“When Asgard was strong,” she said, her expression serious, “they wouldn’t go to war with the svartalves. There are always more of them than you think. They always have something unexpected in store. And they don’t know how to quit. Remember that war is a craft, too. One-Eye learned much from them.”
A cold feeling slid through my guts. If they truly were that dangerous, Mab would certainly throw me off the sleigh, rather than expend the resources of her realm on an optional war.
“Do the nigh impossible or die,” I said. I finished off my bottle and waved at Mac. “Well. At least this feels familiar. Let’s go.”
This was turning out to be one hell of a year.
Chapter
Ten
“So you gotta find this vampire’s girlfriend,” Fitz said. “I don’t get it. You can’t get her hair or something?”
“Already tried,” I said. “The thing possessing her cleaned out the apartment before it vanished with her.”
I finished hand-driving a screw into the T-brace attached to the cardboard plank on the floor of the castle’s gunnery range. The city had pulled our permit for it when they had retracted all the other benefits Marcone had wrested out of them, but no municipal codes existed to address the indoor use of tactical magic.
“Could the White Council help?” Fitz asked.
“They won’t,” I said.
“Not like the official guys,” Fitz said. “I mean more like people you know there. When I was on the streets, we’d never have called the cops for help, right? But I knew a couple that were okay, and sometimes we could talk to them.”
“Get that end,” I said, and we set up the target. It was a rectangle about five feet tall and three across. I had taken some black paint and sketched in the rough form of a ghoul, complete with googly eyes and cartoon-quality teeth. “If I was going to go to anyone, there’s this contractor I know. And the money is right. But he already got a bite of this case during the battle and he doesn’t want anything else to do with it.” I stood up and walked back to the far end of the shooting range. “It would need to be someone based in mainland Europe, and my contactsthere are pretty limited. No one I know there would stick their neck out.”
Fitz frowned. “Well. How are you going to find her, then?”
“The spirit world might have answers,” I said.
“You don’t mean, like, shades, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Shades can be a really fantastic resource. But they can also be patchy and weird. I’m talking like voodoo-level stuff here. Entities that exist on a level of power somewhere between the shades of regular people and blue-collar angels.”
“So let’s get us a Ouija board and go to town.”
“Isn’t that simple,” I said. “Those spirits are dangerous, and they want what they want. Call up the wrong one, get the offering wrong, or ask them the wrong question, and I’ll have more troubles, not less.”
I didn’t want to mention that dealing with spiritual entities was very much a matter of focus, will, and intent, and I was still a wreck. Call up a spirit when you weren’t certain of yourself, your boundaries, and your power, and you could wind up just as possessed as Justine currently was.
“If you didn’t have any hair, how’d you try tracking her already?” Fitz asked, frowning.
“I had hair, actually. And some of her possessions,” I said. “Favorite jewelry, books she liked, that kind of thing.” It had actually felt a little creepy, building what amounted to an altar to my brother’s woman and using it in a painstakingly slow and careful ritual. “I barely got a reading, and that was only as specific as ‘Europe.’ There was too much water between us, and I suspect the entity is suppressing her personality full-time.”
“That’s fu—”
I glanced at him. Fitz was learning mental discipline. I’d had him quit cursing two weeks ago.
“Screwed up,” he corrected himself.
I nodded approval. “The vampires are running the mortal circuits,” I said. “They’ve got operatives in the field looking, trying to track her down by purely mortal means.” Which wasn’t quite true. A White Court vampire had senses to rival those of any predator on earth. If one of them ran across Justine’s scent, they could track her like a hound.
“Couldn’t you ask, like, an angel?”
“They have really limited avenues to exercise their power,” I said. “They only mix it up in human affairs when Hell crosses a line.”
“So ask Hell,” Fitz said. “On the streets, I knew outfit guys, too.”
“They only trade in names,” I said. “And they’ve got all but one of mine already. Last thing I need is to go all Linda Blair.” I cleared my throat and gestured down the range. “Okay, kid. Show me what you’ve got.”
