Songs of Love & Death

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Anastasia said, “How have you been, Harry?”

“Keeping busy,” I said. She had already apologized to me, sort of, for abruptly walking out of my personal life. She’d never intended to be there in the first place. There had been a real emotional tsunami around the events of last year, and I wasn’t the one who had gotten the most hurt by them. “You?”

“Keeping busy.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I know it’s over. But I’m glad for the time we had together. It made me happy. Sometimes I—”

Miss feeling that, I thought, completing the sentence. My throat felt tight. “Nothing wrong with happy.”

“No, there isn’t. When it’s real.” Her voice softened. “Be careful, Harry. Please.”

“I will,” I said.

I STARTED COMBING the supernatural world for answers and got almost nothing. The Little Folk, who could usually be relied on to provide some kind of information, had nothing for me. Their memory for detail is very short, and the deaths had happened too long ago to get me anything but conflicting gibberish.

I made several mental nighttime sweeps through the city using the scale model of Chicago in my basement, and got nothing but a headache for my trouble.

I called around the Paranet, the organization of folk with only modest magical gifts, the kind who often found themselves being preyed upon by more powerful supernatural beings. They worked together now, sharing information, communicating successful techniques, and generally overcoming their lack of raw magical muscle with mutually supportive teamwork. They didn’t have anything for me, either.

I hit McAnnally’s, a hub of the supernatural social scene, and asked a lot of questions. No one had any answers. Then I started contacting the people I knew in the scene, starting with the ones I thought most likely to provide information. I worked my way methodically down the list, crossing out names, until I got to “ask random people on the street.”

There are days when I don’t feel like much of a wizard. Or an investigator. Or a wizard investigator.

Ordinary PIs have a lot of days like that, where you look and look and look for information and find nothing. I get fewer of those days than most, on account of the whole wizard thing giving me a lot more options—but sometimes I come up goose eggs anyway.

I just hate doing it when lives may be in danger.

Four days later, all I knew was that nobody knew about any black magic happening in Chicago, and the only traces of it I did find were the miniscule amounts of residue left from black magic wrought by those without enough power to be a threat. (Warden Ramirez had coined the phrase “dim magic” to describe that kind of petty, essentially harmless malice.) There were also the usual traces of dim magic performed subconsciously from a bed of dark emotions, probably by someone who might not even know they had a gift.

In other words, goose eggs.

Fortunately, Murphy got the job done.

Sometimes hard work is way better than magic.

MURPHY’S SATURN HAD gotten a little blown up a couple of years back, sort of my fault, and what with her demotion and all, it would be a while before she’d be able to afford something besides her old Harley. For some reason, she didn’t want to take the motorcycle, so that left my car, the ever-trusty (almost always) Blue Beetle. It’s an old-school VW Bug which had seen me through one nasty scrape after another. More than once, it had been pounded badly, but always it had risen to do battle once more—if by battle one means driving somewhere at a sedate speed, without much acceleration and only middling gas mileage.

Don’t start. It’s paid for.

I stopped outside Murphy’s little white house, with its little pink rose garden, and rolled down the window on the passenger side. “Make like the Dukes of Hazzard,” I said. “Door’s stuck.”

Murphy gave me a narrow look. Then she tried the door. It opened easily. She slid into the passenger seat with a smug smile, closed the door, and didn’t say anything.

“Police work has made you cynical,” I said.

“If you want to ogle my butt, you’ll just have to work for it like everyone else, Harry.”

I snorted and put the car in gear. “Where we going?”

“Nowhere until you buckle up,” she said, putting her own seat belt on.

“It’s my car,” I said.

“It’s the law. You want to get cited? ’Cause I can do that.”

I debated whether or not it was worth it while she gave me her cop look. And produced a ball-point pen.

I buckled up.

Murphy beamed at me. “Springfield. Head for I-55.”

I grunted. “Kind of out of your jurisdiction.”

“If we were investigating something,” Murphy said. “We’re not. We’re going to the fair.”

I eyed her sidelong. “On a date?”

“Sure, if someone asks,” she said, offhand. Then she froze for a second, and added, “It’s a reasonable cover story.”

“Right,” I said. Her cheeks looked a little pink. Neither of us said anything for a little while.