The Law (The Dresden Files #17.4)(23)

“Get off me!” Tripp all but shrieked, and he tried to writhe out of my grip.

I crunched my grip down on his shoulders. I’m not superhumanly strong—but I am pretty much as strong as humans get, thanks to the various deals I’ve made. Tripp was in good shape—but he just didn’t have the power he’d need to get away from me unless he got violent first. I held him fast and frog-marched him toward the passenger door.

“Okay, okay!” he said. “I paid a guy!”

I tossed Tripp into the passenger door with a snarl, hard enough to bruise. “Idiot,” I snarled. “This is a public street. You have any idea how much attention a car bomb will attract here? How many people could get hurt!? What’s your man using as his trigger?”

“How the hell should I know?” Tripp complained. “All I did was hire him!”

“Moron,” I growled. “If he’s using a damned cell phone…” I took a deep breath and pushed my emotions down. I didn’t need a spare thought accidentally hexing the bomb’s trigger and setting the damned thing off. I pointed a finger at Tripp and said, “Don’t move a muscle or so help me…”

Then I dropped down to the ground and checked under the Munstermobile, even as I felt the subtle drop in temperature and the thrill of quiet energy that told me that sundown proper had arrived.

I had to squint in the twilight under the car. Tripp’s contractor had put the device on the gas tank, with wires running to the ignition. Blasting compound, it looked like, and hooked up to a battery and a cell phone. If I started the car or, presumably, if the creator (or some innocent robocaller) placed a call, it would detonate.

I expected to hear Tripp start running at any second, but he didn’t.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, pulling myself back out from under the vehicle and rising. “You just don’t know when to stop digging yourself in deeper, do you—”

I paused.

Because Tripp wasn’t even looking at me.

He was staring down the dark shadows of a nearby alley. And he was breathing hard and fast, making high, whimpering sounds in his throat.

The cloying, greasy feel of black magic washed over my wizard’s senses a second later, emanating from the alley in a wave of nauseating psychic bile.

Maybe a hundred feet down the alley, something was coming toward us.

At first, I saw a couple of gleaming eyes—pretty standard, really. There was pretty much always something with gleaming eyes out in the dark. But as it passed beneath a light over a doorway, the light bulb exploded in a shower of sparks that came cascading down for several seconds.

The sparks seemed to delineate the faint shape of a massive body, passing through it entirely, but showing a translucent outline—quadruped, hunched shoulders, ponderously moving limbs. A bear? A freaking bear. Its gait shifted as it passed through the sparks, changing to a bear’s galumphing run.

The next light exploded in more sparks, this time crashing down over the bear’s massive head—and they physically bounced off the thing’s skull, clearly visible through the silvery, translucent flesh.

I recognized the skull—the one from the bookshelf in Talvi Inverno’s office.

And its glowing eyes were focused solely upon Tripp Gregory.

“Oh crap,” I muttered. “An otso.”

“W-what?” Tripp said.

“Spirit bear,” I said. “Corrupted servitor of a Lapland hag, if I’m guessing right. And it’s pissed.”

“Heebie Jeebies,” Tripp babbled. “I’m having the Heebie Jeebies. I need to go lay down.”

“I can see it too, idiot,” I snarled.

He stared blankly at me and asked, “You’ve got them too?”

My brain went into overdrive. The best call here would have been to get in the car and drive the hell away—but Tripp Gregory, the blithering moron, had made that impossible. A simple circle would have protected us from the furious spirit, but with a high tech explosive device about five feet away, I didn’t dare use my power. It killed cell phones at the best of times, and I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t set off the bomb. Nor could I just depart and leave the damned thing where it was—there were too many people around, passing by in cars and on their way down Chicago’s streets on a muggy summer evening.

But all the potential bystanders meant that whoever had planted the bomb hadn’t had a lot of time. A couple of minutes, top. Odds were good that it hadn’t been wired to blow if removed—that could have been suicide for the bomber if someone had interrupted him, for example.

I decided to chance it. I reached under the car, seized the device, took a breath and then yanked it free. It had been held to the old metal gas tank by strong magnets and came loose readily enough, and suddenly I was holding a big fistful of kaboom in my hand. I straightened as the spirit bear closed to a dozen yards and—

--and thought about leaving Tripp to the thing.

It would solve so many problems.

But it was no way to live.

So I grabbed him by the jacket, screamed, “Run!” and hauled him into a sprint with me.

I’ll give Tripp this much: he was in shape. Though he was considerably shorter, he burst into a run that carried him half a step ahead of me within twenty yards, his eyes wide and panicked.

Behind us, the otso crashed out of the alley and slammed into the side of the Munstermobile, crumpling its front quarterpanel as if it had been made of aluminum instead of Detroit steel. The car jounced a foot out into the street, causing horns to honk and brakes to squeal. A jogger staggered to one side, staring in shock as the only semi-visible form of the otso regained its balance, shaking the very visible skull with a dazed-looking gesture, then oriented itself on us and set out in pursuit. Lights exploded into showers of sparks as it galumphed past them, leaving a swath of darkness and screams in its wake.