“Jinkies,” I said. I primed the syringe and pushed the antibiotics into the IV line. Then I got the codeine and a cup of water, offering Morgan both. He downed the pills, laid his head back wearily, and closed his eyes.

“I saw one once, too,” he said.

I started cleaning up. I didn’t say anything.

“They aren’t invulnerable. They can be killed.”

I tossed wrappers into the trash can and restored equipment to the medical kit. I grimaced at the bloodied rug that still lay beneath Morgan. I’d have to get that out from under him soon. I turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway.

“How’d you do it?” I asked, without looking behind me.

It took him a moment to answer. I thought he’d passed out again.

“It was the fifties,” he said. “Started in New Mexico. It followed me to Nevada. I lured it onto a government testing site, and stepped across into the Nevernever just before the bomb went off.”

I blinked and looked over my shoulder at him. “You nuked it?”

He opened one eye and smiled.

It was sort of creepy.

“Stars and stones . . . that’s . . .” I had to call a spade a spade. “Kind of cool.”

“Gets me to sleep at night,” he mumbled. He closed his eye again, sighed, and let his head sag a little to one side.

I watched over his sleep for a moment, and then closed the door.

I was pretty tired, myself. But like the man said:

“I have promises to keep,” I sighed to myself.

I got on the phone, and started calling my contacts on the Paranet.

The Paranet was an organization I’d helped found a couple of years before. It’s essentially a union whose members cooperate in order to protect themselves from paranormal threats. Most of the Paranet consisted of practitioners with marginal talents, of which there were plenty. A practitioner had to be in the top percentile before the White Council would even consider recognizing him, and those who couldn’t cut it basically got left out in the cold. As a result, they were vulnerable to any number of supernatural predators.

Which I think sucks.

So an old friend named Elaine Mallory and I had taken a dead woman’s money and begun making contact with the marginal folks in city after city. We’d encouraged them to get together to share information, to have someone they could call for help. If things started going bad, a distress call could be sent up the Paranet, and then I or one of the other Wardens in the U.S. could charge in. We also gave seminars on how to recognize magical threats, as well as teaching methods of basic self-defense for when the capes couldn’t show up to save the day.

It had been going pretty well. We already had new chapters opening up in Mexico and Canada, and Europe wouldn’t be far behind.

So I started calling up my contacts in those various cities, asking if they’d heard of anything odd happening. I couldn’t afford to get any more specific than that, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Of the first dozen calls, folks in four cities had noted an upswing in Warden activity, reporting that they were all appearing in pairs. Only two of the next thirty towns had similar reports, but it was enough to give me a good idea of what was going on—a quiet manhunt.

But I just had to wonder. Of all the places the Wardens could choose to hunt for Morgan, why would they pick Poughkeepsie? Why Omaha?

The words “wild-goose chase” sprang to mind. Whatever Morgan was doing to mask his presence from their tracking spells, it had them chasing their tails all over the place.

At least I accomplished one positive thing. Establishing rumors of Wardens on the move meant that I had a good and non-suspicion-arousing motivation to start asking questions of my own.

So next, I started calling the Wardens I was on good terms with. Three of them worked for me, technically speaking, in several cities in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. I’m not a very good boss. I mostly just let them decide how to do their job and try to lend a hand when they ask me for help. I had to leave messages for two, but Bill Meyers in Dallas answered on the second ring.

“Howdy,” Meyers said.

I’m serious. He actually answered the phone that way.

“Bill, it’s Dresden.”

“Harry,” he said politely. Bill was always polite with me. He saw me do something scary once. “Speak of the devil and he appears.”

“Is that why my nose was itching?” I asked.

“Likely,” Bill drawled. “I was gonna give you a call in the morning.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“Rumors,” Bill said. “I spotted two Wardens coming out of the local entrance to the Ways, but when I asked them what was up, they stone-walled me. I figured you might know what was going on.”

“Darn,” I said. “I called to ask you.”

He snorted. “Well, we’re a fine bunch of wise men, aren’t we?”

“As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms.”

“Eh?”

“Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.”

“I hear that,” Meyers said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Keep an ear to the ground,” I told him. “Captain Luccio will tell us sooner or later. I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. You do the same.”

“Gotcha,” he said.

We hung up, and I frowned at the phone for a moment.

The Council hadn’t talked to me about Morgan. They hadn’t talked to any of the Wardens in my command about him, either.

I looked up at Mister and said, “It’s almost like they want to keep me in the dark. Like maybe someone thinks I might be involved, somehow.”

Which made sense. The Merlin wasn’t going to be asking me to Christmas dinner anytime soon. He didn’t trust me. He might have given the order to keep me fenced out. That wouldn’t hit me as a surprise.

But if that was true, then it meant that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was going along with it. She and I had been dating for a while, now. Granted, she had a couple of centuries on me, but a run-in with a body-switching psychopath several years before had trapped her in the body of a coed, and she didn’t look a day over twenty-five. We got along well. We made each other laugh. And we occasionally had wild-monkey sex to our mutual, intense satisfaction.

I would never have figured Anastasia to play a game like that with me.

I got on the phone to Ramirez in LA, the other regional commander in the United States, to see if he’d heard anything, but just got his answering service.

At this rate, I was going to have to go to the spirit world for answers—and that was risky in more ways than one, not the least of which was the very real possibility that I might get eaten by the same entity I called up to question.

But I was running a little low on options.

I pulled back the rug that lay over the trapdoor leading down to my lab, and was about to go down and prepare my summoning circle when the phone rang.

“I’m meeting Justine in half an hour,” my brother told me.

“Okay,” I said. “Come get me.”