Part 29 (1/2)

The phenomenon referred to as a soulgaze is a fairly mysterious thing. No one's ever been able to get a really good grasp on exactly how it works. The best descriptions of it have always been more poetical than anything else.

The eyes are the windows of the soul.

Lock eyes with a wizard and the essence of who and what you are is laid bare. It is perceived in different ways by every individual. Ramirez had once told me that he heard it as a kind of musical theme that accompanied the person he was gazing upon. Others looked on a soul in a series of frozen images. My interpretation of a soulgaze was, perhaps inevitably, one of the most random and confusing I'd ever heard about. I see the other person in symbol and metaphor, sometimes in panorama and surround sound, sometimes in misty translucence and haunting whispers.

Whoever was gazed upon got a good look back. Whatever universal powers governed that kind of thing evidently decided that the soul's windows don't come in an optional issue of one-way mirrored gla.s.s. You saw them. They saw you, with the same kind of searing permanence.

For me, meeting someone's eyes is always risky. Every human being on earth knows what I'm talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking, and look them in the eyes. There's a certain amount of leeway for a second, or two, or three. And then there's a distinct sensation of sudden contact, of intimacy. That's when regular folks normally cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze.

All things considered, I shouldn't have been surprised that when Helen met my eyes, it got uncomfortably intimate before a second had pa.s.sed and...

... and I stood in Chicago, in one of the parks on Lake Michigan. Calumet, maybe? I couldn't see the skyline from where I was standing, so it was hard to be sure.

What I could see was the Beckitt family. Husband, wife, daughter, a little girl maybe ten or eleven years old. She looked like her mother-a woman with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and a white-toothed smile who very little resembled the Helen Beckitt I knew. But all the same, it was her.

They'd been on a family picnic. The sun was setting on a summer evening, golden sunset giving way to twilight as they walked back to the family car. Mother and father swung the little girl between them, each holding one hand.

I didn't want to see what was about to happen. I didn't have a choice in the matter.

A parking lot. The sounds of a car roaring up. m.u.f.fled curses, tight with fear, and then a car swerved up off the road and gunfire roared from its pa.s.senger window. Screams. Some people threw themselves down. Most, including the Beckitts, stared in shock. More loud, hammering sounds, not ten feet away.

I looked over my shoulder to see a very, very young-looking Marcone.

He wasn't wearing a business suit. He had on jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was longish, a little mussed, and he also sported a stubble of beard that gave him the kind of rakish look that would attract attention from the girls who fantasized about indulging with a bad boy.

His eyes were still green-but they were the green of a summer hunter's blind, bright and intelligent and predatory, but touched with more... something. Humor, maybe. More life. And he was skinnier. Not a lot skinnier or anything, but it surprised me how much younger it and the other minor changes made him look.

Marcone crouched next to another young man, a now-dead thug I'd christened Spike years ago. Spike had his pistol out, and was hammering away at the moving car. The barrel of his 1911-model Colt tracked the vehicle-and its course drew its muzzle into line with the Beckitt family.

Marcone snarled something and slapped the barrel of the gun away from the family. Spike's shot rang out wild and splashed into the lake. There was a last rattle of fire from the moving car, and it roared away. Marcone and Spike piled into their own car and fled the scene. Spike was driving.

Marcone was staring back over his shoulder.

They left the little girl's broken body, limp and spattered with scarlet, behind them.

Helen saw it first, looking down to the hand that gripped her daughter's. She let out a cry as she turned to her child.

In the wake of the gunshots, the silence was deafening.

I didn't want to see what was coming. Again, I had no choice.

The girl wasn't unconscious. There was a lot of blood. Her father screamed and knelt with Helen, trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his s.h.i.+rt, pressing it to the child's midsection. He babbled something to Helen and ran for the nearest phone.

His white s.h.i.+rt soaked through as Helen tried to hold it to the weakly struggling girl.

This was the worst part.

The child was in pain. She cried out with it. I expected her to sound horrible and inhuman, but she didn't. She sounded like every little kid who had ever suddenly found herself faced with her first experience of real, nontrivial pain.

”Owie,” she said, over and over, her voice rough. ”Owie, owie, owie.”

”Baby,” Helen said. The tears were blocking her vision. ”I'm here. I'm here.”

”Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” the girl said. ”Owie, owie, owie.”

The little girl said that.

She said it over and over.

She said it for maybe sixty seconds.

Then she went silent.

”No,” Helen said. ”No, no, no.” She leaned down and felt her daughter's throat, then desperately pressed her ear to the girl's chest. ”No, no, no.”

Their voices, I realized, sounded almost identical. They blazed with the same anguish, the same disbelief.

I watched Helen shatter, rocking back and forth, trying through blinding tears to apply CPR to the silent little form. Everything else became an unimportant blur. Ghostly figures of her husband, cops, paramedics. Dim little echoes of sirens and voices, a church organ.

I'd known that the Beckitts set out to tear Marcone down out of revenge for what the warring gangsters had done to their daughter-but knowing the story was one thing. Seeing the soul-searing agony the little girl's death had inflicted upon her helpless mother was something else.

And suddenly, everything was bright and new again. Helen and her family were laughing again. In a few moments, they were walking again toward the parking lot, and I could hear the engine of the car whose gunmen would miss Marcone and kill the little girl as it approached.

I tore my eyes away from it, fighting to end the soulgaze.

I could not go through that again, could not remain locked in that horrible moment that had shaped what Helen had become.

I came back to myself standing, turned half away from Helen, leaning heavily on my staff with my head bowed.

There was a long moment of silence before Helen said, ”I didn't call anyone in the Ordo, Dresden.”

She hadn't. Now I was sure of it.

If Helen hadn't led the Ordo on a merry chase around town, drawing them out into vulnerability for the Skavis hunting them, someone else had.

Priscilla.

She'd been the one receiving all the calls, reporting all the ”conversations” with Helen. That meant that she'd been working with the killer, drawing out Anna and the others on his behalf, isolating one of the women from the safety of the group so that he could take them alone.

And then I jerked my head up, my eyes wide.

Fact ten: In the middle of a Chicago summer, Priscilla, none too pretty a woman, had been wearing nothing but turtlenecks.

Priscilla hadn't been working with with the Skavis. the Skavis.

Priscilla was was the Skavis. the Skavis.