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."What's wrong with it?""It belongs on the set of El Dorado," she snapped."Who are you supposed to be, Ichabod Crane or the Marlboro Man?"I snorted."I'm a wizard."She gave me a look of skepticism you can really only get from children who have recently gone through the sobering trauma of discovering that there is no Santa Claus.(Ironically, there is--but he can't operate on the sort of scale that used to make everyone believe in him.More modern living.)"You've got to be kidding me," she said."I found you, didn't I?"She frowned at me."How did you find me? I thought that spot was perfect."I continued walking towards the bridge."It would have been, for another ten minutes or so.Then that dumpster would have been full of rats looking for something to eat."The girl's expression turned faintly green."Rats?"I nodded.With luck, maybe I could win the kid over."Good thing your mother had your brush in her purse.I was able to get a couple of hairs from it.""So?"I sighed."So, I used a little thaumaturgy and it led me straight to you.I had to walk most of the way, but straight to you.""Thauma-what?"Questions were better than kicks, any day.I kept answering them.Heck, I like to answer questions about magic.Professional pride, maybe."Thaumaturgy.It's ritual magic.You draw symbolic links between actual persons, places, or events, and representative models.Then you invest a little energy to make something happen on the small scale, and something happens on the large scale as well--"The kid bent her head the second I was distracted with answering her question and bit my hand.I yelled something I probably shouldn't have around a kid, and jerked my hand away.The kid dropped to the ground, agile as a monkey, and took off towards the bridge.I shook my hand, growled at myself and took off after her.She was fast, her pigtails flying out behind her, shoes and stained knee-socks flashing.She got to the bridge first, an ancient, two-lane affair that arched over the Chicago river and hurled herself out onto it."Wait!" I shouted after her."Don't!" She didn't know this town like I did."Sucker," she called back, her voice merry.She kept on running.That is, until a great, rubbery, hairy arm slithered out from beneath a manhole cover at the apex of the bridge and wrapped its greasy fingers around one of her ankles.The kid screamed in sudden terror, pitching forward onto the asphalt and raking the skin from both knees.Blood shone dark on her socks in the glow of the few functioning streetlights.I cursed beneath my breath and raced towards her along the bridge, lungs laboring.The hand tightened its grip, and started dragging her back and towards the manhole.I could hear deep, growling laughter coming from the darkness in the hole that led down to the understructure of the bridge.She screamed, "What is it, what is it, make it let go!""Kid!" I shouted.I ran towards the manhole, jumped, and came down as hard as I could on the hairy arm, right at the wrist, the heels of both hiking boots thumping down onto the grimy flesh.A bellow erupted from the manhole, and the fingers loosened.The girl twisted her leg, and though it cost her one of her expensive Oxfords and one knee sock, she dragged herself free of its grasp, sobbing.I gathered her up and backpedaled away, turning so that I wasn't leaving my back to the manhole.The troll shouldn't have been able to squeeze its way out of a hole that small, but it did.First came that grimy arm, followed by a lumpy shoulder, and then its malformed head and hideous face.It looked at me and growled, jerking its way out of the hole with a rubbery ease, until it stood in the middle of the bridge between me and the far side of the river, like some professional wrestler who had fallen victim to a correspondence course for plastic surgeons.In one hand, he held a meat cleaver approximately two feet long, with a bone handle and suspicious-looking stains of dark brown on it."Harry Dresden," the troll rumbled."Wizard deprive Gogoth of his lawful prey." He whipped the cleaver left and right.It made a little whistling sound.I lifted my chin and set my jaw.It's never smart to let a troll see that you're afraid of him."What are you talking about, Gogoth? You know as well as I do that mortals aren't all fair game any more.The Unseelie Accords settled that."The troll's face split into a truly disgusting leer."Naughty children," he rumbled."Naughty children still mine." He narrowed his eyes, and they started burning with malicious hunger."Give! Now!" The troll rolled towards me a few paces, gathering momentum.I lifted my right hand, forced out a little will, and the silver ring upon my third finger abruptly shone with a clear, cool light, brighter than the illumination around us [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]