Pain, simple pain, suddenly fell upon me as if my entire body had suddenly been thrust into a raging fire. I let out a strangled scream, my back arching, and fought to simply keep from plummeting from the roof myself.
“Bitch,” Page panted. He staggered across the roof, one hand desperately trying to stem a steady pulse of blood from what would be, in a few moments, a fatal wound. “Warden bitch. Dolor igni!”
Pain wiped everything else from my mind for the space of several seconds. By the time I could see again, I was sprawled back over the edge of the roof, about to fall, and a deathly pale Page stood over me, holding my own sword to my throat.
“You’ve killed me, bitch,” he gasped. “But I won’t go to hell alone.”
I tried to thrash aside, to push the blade, but my body simply did not respond to me. Pure, frenzied, helpless terror, the kind I had previously known only in terrible dreams of running through quicksand, surged through me.
Page let out a frenzied little giggle and leaned on the sword.
And with a crack of thunder, his head snapped back into a cloud of misty gore. My sword fell from his fingers, and his body dropped limply down onto his legs, collapsing into an awkward pile.
I turned my head slowly.
Wyatt Earp stood on the street below, a trail of nearly headless dis-animated corpses strewn behind him, along with all but the last of the revolvers he’d been carrying.
He lowered the gun, and touched a finger to the brim of his hat in solemn salute.
“YOU SURE YOU can’t stay, Miss Anastasia?” Earp asked.
I shook my head. Karl, now back in his disguise, stamped an angry hoof onto the dirt of Dodge City’s streets as I loaded his saddlebags with fresh supplies. “I’m afraid I can’t. Not with those two still out there.”
Earp grunted. “I never seen someone so determined to skin himself out of some ropes,” he said. “Who was that German?”
I felt my mouth twist with distaste, even as a sour taste of fear touched my tongue. “If our information at the White Council is accurate, his name is Kemmler,” I said. “That Briton was one of his apprentices, Grevane.”
“Bad men?”
“Some of the most dangerous alive,” I said. “I have to get onto their trail while I still can.”
He nodded. “I hear you. Shame about that dinner, though.”
I winked down at him and said, “Perhaps another time.”
He smiled and tipped his hat slightly. Then he offered me his hand.
I shook it.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Think maybe I’d have won that twenty dollars off you.”
Instead of answering him, I opened my purse, fished out a golden coin, and flicked it to him. He caught it, grinning openly. “Have a drink for me, Deputy.”
“Think maybe I’ll do that,” he said. “Good hunting.”
“Thank you,” I said.
KARL AND I headed out of town as the sun began to rise.
“I’m tired,” the n?cken said.
“As am I, Karl,” I replied.
“Kemmler,” said the n?cken contemptuously. “You only found him to spite me. To keep me in this horrible place.”
“Do not be tiresome,” I said with a sigh. I checked the little leather medicine bag dangling from a thong. Earp had been quite right about Kemmler’s skinning out of ropes with which he’d been bound. The man had left enough skin behind for me to lock onto him with a tracking spell. The bag swung back and forth gently in the direction in which the greatest necromancer in the history of man had gone. “We only do our duty.”
“Duty,” Karl said, disgusted. “I hate this land.”
“I am not overly fond of it myself,” I replied. “Come. Pick up the pace.”
Karl broke into a weary jog, and I settled my hat more firmly on my head. The sun began to rise behind us, golden and warm, as we traveled deeper into the West.
It is a source of considerable personal pride to me that I can honestly and without reservation type the next sentence: It came to me as a great shock and professional failure when one day I realized that I had made insufficient allowance in my work life for Bigfoot.
I mean, the Dresden Files was built from the ground up to embrace every creature of folklore and legend that I could dig up, regardless of where I might find them. I had made very careful plans for the roles of faeries, vampires, werewolves, angels, demons, and dozens of other beings at play in the story world. Imagine my shock when, several years into my entirely too-ambitious project, I realized that I hadn’t even considered where Sasquatch fit in.
(This may or may not have happened the same year Finding Bigfoot debuted. I have no specific information on the exact chronology. But it might well have been that year. I’m just saying.)
This was a travesty! An outrage! It had to be addressed decisively, and at once! Oh, and also, I had promised three short stories to three different lovely people, and they were already weeks late, so hadn’t I better get to work on them?
The result of my outrage at the oversight and time desperation was the trio of Bigfoot short stories, the first of which is in the following pages, and set just between the events of Fool Moon and Grave Peril.
When people come to the only professional wizard in the Chicago phone book for help, they’re one of two things: desperate or smart. Very rarely are they both.
The smart ones come to me because they know I can help; the desperate come because they don’t know anyone else who can. With a smart client, the meeting is brief and pleasant. Someone has lost the ring that was a family heirloom, and has been told I’m a man who can find lost things. Such people engage my services (preferably with cash), I do the job, and everyone’s happy.
Desperate clients, on the other hand, can pull all sorts of ridiculous nonsense. They lie to me about what kind of trouble they’ve gotten themselves into, or try to pass me a check I’m sure will bounce like a basketball. Occasionally they demand that I prove my powers by telling them what their problem is before they even shake my hand—in which case, the problem is that they’re idiots.
My newest client wanted something different, though. He wanted me to meet him in the woods.
This did not make me feel optimistic that he would be one of the smart ones.
Woods being in short supply in Chicago, I had to drive all the way up to the northern half of Wisconsin to get to decent timber. That took me about six hours, given that my car, while valiant and bold, is also a Volkswagen Beetle made around the same time flower children were big. By the time I got there and had hiked a mile or two out into the woods, to the appointed location, dark was coming on.
I’m not a moron, usually. I’ve made enemies during my stint as a professional wizard. So when I settled down to wait for the client, I did so with my staff in one hand, my blasting rod in the other, and a .38 revolver in the pocket of my black leather duster. I blew out a small crater in the earth with an effort of will, using my staff to direct the energy, and built a modest campfire in it.
Then I stepped out of the light of the campfire; found a comfortable, shadowy spot; and waited to see who was going to show up.
The whole PI gig is mostly about patience. You have to talk to a lot of people who don’t know anything to find the one who does. You have to sit around waiting a lot, watching for someone to do something before you catch them doing it. You have to do a lot of searching through useless information to get to one piece of really good information. Impatient PIs rarely conclude an investigation successfully, and never remain in the business for long. So when an hour went by without anything happening, I wasn’t too worried.
By two hours, though, my legs were cramping and I had a little bit of a headache, and apparently the mosquitoes had decided to hold a convention about ten feet away, because I was covered with bites. Given that I hadn’t been paid a dime yet, this client was getting annoying fast.