Free Blood Rites by Jim Butcher Page A

messages. On the one hand, they told me that Joan was on the level. On the other, they also told me there was more to the woman than met the eye. Something told me that things were more serious than they appeared—that this situation was even more dangerous than I had originally believed.
    It bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
    Joan shut the last case and interrupted my train of thought. "Okay then," she said. "Let's get the studio powered up."
    "Um," I said. "Maybe I shouldn't be here when you do."
    She lifted her eyebrows, evidently waiting for an explanation.
    "Uh," I said. "I have a plate in my head. It's a little twitchy around electric fields. High-voltage equipment, that kind of thing. I'd rather come in when it was already up and running, so I can back off if there's a problem."
    Joan stared at me with a lot of skepticism. "Is that so?"
    "Yeah."
    She frowned. "How did you
get
this job?"
    Christ, I'm a terrible liar. I tried to think of an answer that didn't begin with, "Um."
    But I was interrupted.
    A surge of silent, invisible energy swept through the room, cold and foul. My stomach twisted with abrupt nausea, and my skin erupted in gooseflesh. Dark, dangerous magic swirled by, drawing my attention to the studio's exit. It was the kind of magic that destroys, warps, rots, and corrupts.
    The kind of magic you'd need to feed a deadly entropy curse.
    "What's wrong?" Joan shook me with one hand. "Harry? You're shaking. Are you all right?"
    I managed to choke out, "Who else is in the building?"
    "Jake, Bobby, Emma, and Giselle. No one else."
    I stumbled to my pack and picked it up. If Joan hadn't helped me balance, I might have fallen down. "Show me where."
    Joan blinked in confusion. "What?"
    I shoved the sensation of the dark magic away as best I could and snarled, "They're in danger. Show me where! Now!"
    My tone might have alarmed her, but her expression became more worried than frightened. Joan nodded and half ran out of the studio, leading me out a side door, up a flight of metal spiral stairs, and into another hallway. We sprinted down it to a room with a sign on it that said, dressing room .
    "Get back," I said, and stepped in front of her.
    I hadn't yet touched the doorknob when a woman began to scream.
     

Chapter Eight

    I tore the door open onto a room the size of my apartment, lined with freestanding mirrors, folding tables, and chairs. A cloud of foul energies slapped me in the face. Bobby stood off to my right, his expression registering surprise and confusion. To my left stood a woman in the corner of my vision, mostly naked. I didn't stop to goggle, but ran through the room to a second door. It was partly open and swinging closed again.
    I slammed through it into a bathroom as big as my bedroom, which I suppose isn't all that unusual. The air was hot, humid, and smelled like fresh soap. The shower was running, its glass door broken into jagged teeth. The floor was covered in more broken glass, a little water, and a lot of blood. Two rigid, motionless bodies lay on the floor.
    My instincts screamed a warning, and just before I stepped into the pool of bloodstained water, I threw myself into a jump. My shins hit heavily on the counter of the sink and I started to fall. I grabbed on to the faucet and hauled myself up. My shins hurt like hell, but I'd kept my feet off the floor. My brain caught up to my instincts, and I saw what was going on. The two people on the floor weren't motionless—they were locked into positions of rigid agony.
    Sparks leapt up in the back corner of the room. A heavy, high-voltage light fixture had broken loose from the ceiling and fallen, hauling exposed wiring to lie in the thin sheet of scarlet liquid on the floor.
    Like I said, I don't get along with technology when I'm trying to use it. But when I actually
want
to bust it up, I'm hell on wheels. I extended my right hand at the light fixture, snarled incoherently, and willed raw power over the electric menace like an invisible