I didn’t say anything until we got to the apartment. The Rolls went together with the gravel lot like champagne and Cracker Jacks. I turned the engine off and listened to it click as it began to cool down. The sun was gone over the horizon by that time, and the lengthening shadows began to trigger streetlights.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked quietly.

She looked out the window as she considered the question. Then she said, “Not unless I think it relevant.”

I turned to look at her. “You know what will happen if they know. They’ll use him.”

She gazed straight out the front of the car. “I know.”

I spoke quietly to put all the weight I could into each word I spoke next. “Over. My. Dead. Body.”

Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Her expression never flickered. She took her hand slowly, reluctantly from mine and put it in her lap. Then she whispered, “I pray to God it never comes to that.”

We sat in the car separately.

It seemed larger and colder, for some reason. The silence seemed deeper.

Luccio lifted her chin and looked at me. “What will you do now?”

“What do you think?” I clenched my fists so that my knuckles popped, rolled my neck once, and opened the door. “I’m going to find my brother.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Two hours and half a dozen attempted tracking spells later, I snarled and slapped a stack of notepads off the corner of the table in my subbasement laboratory. They thwacked against the wall beneath Bob the Skull’s shelf, and fell to the concrete floor.

“It was to be expected,” Bob the Skull said, very quietly. Orange lights like the flickers of distant campfires glittered in the eye sockets of the bleached human skull that sat on its own shelf high up on one wall of my lab, bracketed by the remains of dozens of melted candles and half a dozen paperback romances. “The parent-to-child blood bond is much more sympathetic than that shared by half siblings.”

I glared at the skull and also kept my voice down. “You just can’t go a day without saying that you told me so.”

“I can’t help it if you’re wrong all the time yet continually ignore my advice, sahib. I’m just a humble servant.”

I couldn’t scream at my nonmaterial assistant with other people in the apartment above me, so I consoled myself by snatching up a pencil from a nearby work shelf and flinging it at him. Its eraser end hit the skull between the eyes.

“Jealousy, thy name is Dresden,” Bob said with a pious sigh.

I paced up and down the length of my lab, burning off frustrated energy. It wasn’t much of a walk. Five paces, turn, five paces, turn. It was a dank little concrete box of a room. Work benches lined three of the walls, and I had installed cheap wire shelving above them. The work benches and shelves were crowded with all manner of odds and ends, books, reagents, instruments, various bits of gear needed for alchemy, and scores of books and notebooks.

A long table in the middle of the room was currently covered by a canvas tarp, and the floor at the far end of the lab had a perfect circle of pure copper embedded in it. The remains of several differently structured tracking attempts were scattered on the floor around the circle, while the props and foci from the most recent failure were still inside it.

“One of them should have gotten me something,” I told Bob. “Maybe not a full lock on Thomas’s position—but a tug in the right direction, at least.”

“Unless he’s dead,” Bob said, “in which case you’re just spinning your wheels.”

“He isn’t dead,” I said quietly. “Shagnasty wants to trade.”

“Uh-huh,” Bob scoffed. “Because everyone knows how honorable the naagloshii are.”

“He’s alive,” I said quietly. “Or at least I’m going to proceed on that assumption.”

Bob somehow managed to look baffled. “Why?”

Because you need your brother to be all right, whispered a quiet voice in my head. “Because anything else isn’t particularly useful toward resolving this situation,” I said aloud. “Whoever is behind the curtains is using the skinwalker and probably Madeline Raith, too. So if I find Thomas, I find Shagnasty and Madeline, and I’ll be able to start pulling threads until this entire mess unravels.”

“Yeah,” Bob said, drawing out the word. “Do you think it’ll take long to pull all those threads? Because the naagloshii is going to be doing something similar to your intestines.”

I made a growling sound in my throat. “Yeah. I think I got its number.”

“Really?”

“I keep trying to punch Shagnasty out myself,” I said. “But its defenses are too good—and it’s fast as hell.”

“He’s an immortal semidivine being,” Bob said. “Of course he’s good.”

I waved a hand. “My point is that I’ve been trying to lay the beating on it myself. Next time I see it, I’m going to start throwing bindings on it, just to trip it up and slow it down, so whoever is with me can get a clean shot.”

“It might work . . .” Bob admitted.

“Thank you.”

“. . . if he’s such an idiot that he only bothered to learn to defend himself from violent-energy attacks,” Bob continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Which I think is almost as likely as you getting one of those tracking spells to work. He’ll know how to defend himself from bindings, Harry.”

I sighed. “I’ve got gender issues.”

Bob blinked slowly. “Uh. Wow. I’d love to say something to make that more embarrassing for you, boss, but I’m not sure how.”

“Not my . . . augh.” I threw another pencil. It missed Bob and bounced off the wall behind him. “With the skinwalker. Is it actually a male? Do I call it a he?”

Bob rolled his eyelights. “It’s a semidivine immortal, Harry. It doesn’t procreate. It has no need to recombine DNA. That means that gender simply doesn’t apply. That’s something only you meat sacks worry about.”

“Then why is it that you stare at naked girls every chance you get,” I said, “but not naked men?”

“It’s an aesthetic choice,” Bob said loftily. “As a gender, women exist on a plane far beyond men when it comes to the artistic appreciation of their external beauty.”

“And they have boobs,” I said.

“And they have boobs!” Bob agreed with a leer.

I sighed and rubbed at my temples, closing my eyes. “You said the skinwalkers were semidivine?”

“You’re using the English word, which doesn’t really describe them very precisely. Most skinwalkers are just people—powerful, dangerous, and often psychotic people, but people. They’re successors to the traditions and skills taught to avaricious mortals by the originals. The naagloshii.”

“Originals like Shagnasty,” I said.

“He’s the real deal, all right,” Bob replied, his quiet voice growing more serious. “According to some of the stories of the Navajo, the naagloshii were originally messengers for the Holy People, when they were first teaching humans the Blessing Way.”

“Messengers?” I said. “Like angels?”

“Or like those guys on bikes in New York, maybe?” Bob said. “Not all couriers are created identical, Mr. Lowest-Common-Denominator. Anyway, the original messengers, the naagloshii, were supposed to go with the Holy People when they departed the mortal world. But some of them didn’t. They stayed here, and their selfishness corrupted the power the Holy People gave them. Voila, Shagnasty.”

I grunted. Bob’s information was anecdotal, which meant it could well be distorted by time and by generations of retelling. There probably wasn’t any way to know the objective truth of it—but a surprising amount of that kind of lore remained fundamentally sound in oral tradition societies like those of the American Southwest. “When did this happen?”

“Tough to say,” Bob said. “The traditional Navajo don’t see time the way most mortals do, which makes them arguably smarter than the rest of you monkeys. But it’s safe to assume prehistory. Several millennia.”