Dead to Rites Read Online Free PDF Page A

it by now.
    I’d already run down all the leads I could come up with, all the hunches, and nada. I suppose I coulda gone to Elphame and asked around, but it ain’t as though I’d suddenly gotten popular over there in the last few months. Even if anyone there
could
help me, most wouldn’t, not without cost, and I already owed more people more’n I wanted. So that was out, too. I just didn’t have anything new to try.
    ’Cept… Huh. There was a thought. Maybe I didn’t
need
to try anything new. If Goswythe’d finally surfaced, if he was active or back in town or whatever’d changed, maybe now was a good time to retry something old.
    He was gonna need resources if he was up to something. For him, here in the mortal side of Chicago, that probably meant stealing. (Easy enough with his powers, right?) And if
that
was so, well, I had a pretty good idea who might know about it, might even be helping the bastard for a percentage.
    Hruotlundt’s office was only about a block or so away from where I’d left it. You remember; I told you all about this place. Connects to both worlds, solidly anchored on the Elphame side, little less so on this one. Doesn’t move
too
far, and you can find it easy enough if you’re already kinda wise to where it is.
    And no, I dunno what happens to whatever used to be there when it takes up a new spot, or why most of you mortal saps don’t ever seem to notice. It’s magic. You want a more detailed explanation than that, you feel free to step into the Otherworld and find an expert to ask. Me, I understand all I need to about it.
    So I walked a half mile or so from the L to the door of a rundown building that sorta resembled the last one I’d found him in, tromped on up a few flights of creaking stairs that didn’t even remotely resemble the ones I’d climbed last time, and…
    Say, you remember those spurts of ugly luck I told you I’d been havin’? Guess I was due again.
    I gawked across the landing at them. They gawked across the landing at me. A whole lotta mugs twisted into some real unfriendly expressions, and a few hands slipped under coats, reaching for iron or—in my case—hardwood.
    “I thought I made it real plain what was gonna happen if I saw your face again, pally,” Nolan Shea barked at me. “You gotta be fuckin’ stupid to be following us after that!”
    My noggin was spinning so hard I’m flabbergasted it didn’t just pop on off. What the
hell
were the Uptown Boys doing here? This was bad news in a dozen different ways, and the strong possibility I was about to come down with some serious lead poisoning wasn’t even close to the worst.
    “I ain’t following you,” I insisted, knowing he wasn’t gonna buy a word of it. “Hell, I promise I’m more surprised to see you here than you are me. I’m just here to chin-wag with the man for a spell.”
    “Yeah, right. And you just
happened
to show at the same time, after dark, that we did.”
    All I could do was shrug. “That’s more or less how my luck’s been lately, yeah.”
    “Boys, whack this—”
    “
Don’t.
” No finesse, no subtlety. I just thrust everything I had through my own peepers and into his. If my usual rummaging around and reorganizing people’s thoughts and emotions was somethin’ akin to pickpocketing, this was more a solid sock to the brain. Took more outta me than it should, too, but bad luck throws the rest of my mojo off some and I hadn’t drawn my wand, since I hadn’t wanted to start ’em shooting. Woulda been easier for me to do it the usual way, but not near as swift, and swift was what I’d needed right then.
    Shea locked up, frozen like a slab of beef in the freezer. His goons had drawn, but they weren’t shootin’. Fact that the boss hadn’t finished the order, that it looked to them as though he’d actually listened to me when I told him to stop, put ’em all at a loss.
    “We can solve this simply,” I said, slowly pulling back from the innards of Shea’s head.