Songs of Love & Death Read Free

happening?”
    “Three couples, apparently lovey-dovey as hell, have committed dual suicide in the past two weeks,” I told her. “The last two were brother and sister. There were some seriously irrational components to their behavior.”
    “You suspect mental tampering,” she said. Her voice was hard.
    Luccio had been a victim, too.
    I found myself smiling somewhat bitterly at no one. She had been, among other things, mindboinked into going out with me. Which was apparently the only way anyone would date me, lately. “It seems a reasonable suspicion. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”
    “Use caution,” she said. “Don’t enter any suspect situation without backup on hand. There’s too much chance that you could be compromised.”
    “Compromised?” I asked. “Of the two people having this conversation, which one of them exposed the last guy rearranging people’s heads?”
    “Touché,” Luccio said. “But he got away with it because we were overconfident. So use caution anyway.”
    “Planning on it,” I said.
    There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Anastasia said, “How have you been, Harry?”
    “Keeping busy,” I said. She had already apologized to me, sort of, for abruptly walking out of my personal life. She’d never intended to be there in the first place. There had been a real emotional tsunami around the events of last year, and I wasn’t the one who had gotten the most hurt by them. “You?”
    “Keeping busy.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I know it’s over. But I’m glad for the time we had together. It made me happy. Sometimes I—”
    Miss feeling that
, I thought, completing the sentence. My throat felt tight. “Nothing wrong with happy.”
    “No, there isn’t. When it’s real.” Her voice softened. “Be careful, Harry. Please.”
    “I will,” I said.
    I STARTED COMBING the supernatural world for answers and got almost nothing. The Little Folk, who could usually be relied on to provide some kind of information, had nothing for me. Their memory for detail is very short, and the deaths had happened too long ago to get me anything but conflicting gibberish.
    I made several mental nighttime sweeps through the city using the scale model of Chicago in my basement, and got nothing but a headache for my trouble.
    I called around the Paranet, the organization of folk with only modest magical gifts, the kind who often found themselves being preyed upon by more powerful supernatural beings. They worked together now, sharing information, communicating successful techniques, and generally overcoming their lack of raw magical muscle with mutually supportive teamwork. They didn’t have anything for me, either.
    I hit McAnnally’s, a hub of the supernatural social scene, and asked a lot of questions. No one had any answers. Then I started contacting the people I knew in the scene, starting with the ones I thought most likely to provide information. I worked my way methodically down the list, crossing out names, until I got to “ask random people on the street.”
    There are days when I don’t feel like much of a wizard. Or an investigator. Or a wizard investigator.
    Ordinary PIs have a lot of days like that, where you look and look and look for information and find nothing. I get fewer of those days than most, on account of the whole wizard thing giving me a lot more options—but sometimes I come up goose eggs anyway.
    I just hate doing it when lives may be in danger.
    Four days later, all I knew was that nobody knew about any black magic happening in Chicago, and the only traces of it I
did
find were the miniscule amounts of residue left from black magic wrought by those without enough power to be a threat. (Warden Ramirez had coined the phrase “dim magic” to describe that kind of petty, essentially harmless malice.) There were also the usual traces of dim magic performed subconsciously from a bed of dark emotions, probably by someone who might not even