Dead Beat(52)

He inhaled deeply. "Um. Well. I'm sort of afraid to."
I arched a brow at him, and scowled again.
"Look. You …  aren't acting right, Harry."
"Meaning?" I asked.
"Meaning not like yourself," Billy said. "People have been noticing."
"People?" I asked. My leg pounded. I had no time for this kind of psychological patty-cake. "What people?"
"People who respect you," he said carefully. "Maybe who are even a little bit afraid of you."
I just stared at him.
"I don't know if you know this, Harry. But you can be a really scary guy. I mean, I've seen what you can do. And even the people who haven't seen themselves have heard stories. Believe me, we're all glad you're one of the good guys, but if you weren't … "
"What?" I said, suddenly feeling more tired. "If I wasn't, then what?"
"You'd be scary. Really scary."
"Get to your damned point," I said quietly.
He nodded. "You've been talking to things."
"Excuse me?"
He lifted his hands. "Talking to things. I mean, you were talking to things when I was outside your door."
"That was nothing," I said.
"Okay," Billy said, though his tone suggested that he was placating me rather than agreeing.
"What is this talking-to-things crap? Did Bock say I was doing that?"
"Harry- " Billy said.
"Because I wasn't," I said. "Good God, I do some crazy crap, but it's usually the 'this is never going to work but I have to try it' variety of crazy. I'm not insane."
Billy folded his arms, his eyes searching my face. "See, that's the thing. If you were truly insane, would you be able to realize it?"
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. "So let me get this straight. Because Bock said something about me, and because you heard me talking to myself, suddenly I'm ready for the room with rubber walls."
"No," he said. "Sort of. Harry, look, it isn't like I'm trying to accuse-"
"That's funny, because it sounds like an accusation from this end," I said.
"I only- "
I slammed my staff down on the floor, and Billy flinched.
He tried to cover it, but I had seen the motion. Billy flinched like he was genuinely afraid that I was going to hurt him.
What the hell?
"Billy," I said quietly. "There is some bad business going on. I don't have time for this. I don't know what Bock told you, but he's had a bad couple of days. He's rattled. I'm not going to hold anything against him."
"All right," he said quietly.
"I want you to go home," I told him. "And I want you to start sending out word around to the in crowd. Everyone wants to be behind a threshold tonight."
He frowned and took off his glasses, scrubbing at them with a corner of his shirt. "Why?"
"Because the White Council is sending a war party to town. You don't want anyone you know to get caught in the backwash."
Billy swallowed. "This is big, then?"
"And I have to get moving. I don't have time for distractions." I stepped forward and put my hand on his shoulder. "Hey, it's me. Harry. I'm as sane as I ever am, and I need you to trust me for a little while. Tell people to keep their heads down. Okay?"
He took a deep breath and then nodded sharply. "I'll do it, man."
"Good. I don't know why you're so worried about me. But we'll sit down and talk after the dust settles. Figure out what's up. Make sure I haven't stripped a gear when I wasn't looking. I promise you."
"Right," he said, nodding. "Thank you. I'm sorry if this is …  aw, hell, man."
"Enough with sharing the emotions," I said. "We're gonna turn into women as we stand here. Get a move on."
He chucked my arm with a mostly closed fist, and left.
I waited for him to go. I didn't feel like riding down in the elevator with him, wondering if he was afraid of me suddenly turning on him with an ax or a butcher knife or something.
I leaned on my staff and thought about it for a second. Billy was really worried about me. Worried enough that he was afraid that I might do something to him. What the hell had I done to set that off?
And an even better question, which I had to ask myself, followed on the heels of that first one.
What if he was right?
I poked at my skull with a finger. It didn't feel soft or anything. I didn't feel insane. But if you'd really lost it, would you have enough left upstairs to know? Crazy people never thought they were crazy.
"I've always talked to things," I said. "And to myself."
"Good point," myself agreed with me. "Unless that means you've been nuts all along."
"I don't need wiseass remarks," I told myself severely. "There's work to do. So shut up."
All I could think was that it had been Georgia's idea. She was always buried to the ears in her psych textbooks. Maybe she had fallen victim to some kind of inverted psychological hypochondria or something.
Thunder rumbled outside, and the rain started coming down harder.
I didn't need any doubts distracting me right now. I shrugged off the whole conversation with Billy, tabling it for later. I loaded my gun, since not loading it would have been almost as good as not having it, then slipped it back into my pocket, locked up my office behind me, and headed for the car.
I had to get to Shiela and see if her remarkable memory could call up the poems and stanzas from that stupid book. And then I had to figure out how to call up a wild and deadly lord of the darker realms of Faerie and sidetrack him so that the heirs of Kemmler couldn't use him to promote themselves to demigod status. And along the way, I had to find The Word of Kemmler and get it to Mavra, somehow, without the White Council learning what I was up to.
Easy as breathing.
As I rode down in the elevator, I had to admit that Billy might have a point.

     
 

      Chapter Twenty-eight
The Cabrini Green tenement Shiela lived in had seen better days-but it had seen worse, too. The city had dumped a lot of money into urban renewal projects there, and it was an ongoing process. Shiela's building was still undergoing renovation, and the lobby and many of the floors were only half-finished. No workmen were in the building when I went into the lobby, but there were dozens of tarps, stacks of drywall and raw lumber, heavy tool lockers that had been bolted to the floor, and other evidence of the contractors who would doubtless have been working had the city's lights not been out.
I walked over to the elevators and to the security panel there, and found the button of Shiela's apartment on the ninth floor. I pressed it and held it down for a minute before I realized that, duh, the power was out and I wasn't going to be able to ring her apartment.
I grimaced and looked around for the stairs. Nine flights up on my leg wasn't going to feel nice, but it wasn't as though I had an infinite number of options.
The door to the stairs was locked, but it was a standard fire door with a push bar on the other side. I lifted my staff, looked around the lobby to make sure no one had wandered in to see me, and then gestured with the staff and murmured, "Forzare."
I sent a bare whisper of my power through the door and then drew it back toward me with a sharp gesture. I caught the push bar on the other side with it, and the door trembled and then swung open by an inch or two. I thrust the end of my staff into it to hold it open, then grabbed on and heaved. I stared at the stairs for a second, but they didn't get any shorter or turn into an escalator or anything, so I sighed and started painfully hauling myself up them, one step at a time.
Nine floors and 162 steps later, I paused to catch my breath, and then opened the door to the ninth-floor hallway in the same manner I had the one in the lobby. The ninth-floor hallway was still under construction, and several of the apartments in it were missing doors, and even walls. I limped along until I found Shiela's apartment and then knocked on the door.
I felt a tingling tension over the door as I touched it-a magical ward of some kind. It was nowhere near as strong as the ones on my apartment had been, but it was stable. That was fairly impressive. Shiela might not have a ton of inborn talent, but she evidently had enough discipline to offset the lack. I held my hand out lightly, just over the surface of the door, sending my senses running over the ward, getting more of a feel for its strength. It couldn't have stopped me if I used my power to force my way in, but it felt strong enough to give me a solid kick in the teeth if I tried it physically. It would certainly scare the hell out of a would-be burglar. Not bad.
After a minute I heard footsteps and the door opened a little. I could see a security chain and a slender stripe of her face that included one of Shiela's dark, sparkling eyes. She let out a surprised little sound and then said, "Harry. Just a minute."
I waited while she shut the door and took off the security chain. Then she opened the door again, smiling at me. She had an infectious smile, and I found myself answering it with one of my own.
She was dressed in a scarlet sequined bodice that made her chest into something very difficult not to stare at, nearly translucent baggy leggings, leather sandals that wrapped around her calves, and 6.5 million pounds of bangles on her arms and ankles. Her hair had been caught up in a high ponytail fixed into place to rise over some kind of mesh headdress, and her smooth, bare shoulders looked lovely and strong.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said back. "Is your roommate Shiela in, Genie?"