Harry Dresden, Private Dick

She walked through my office door on legs so long, I was sure her toes must have been touching China. “Hello, Mr. Dresden,” she said, her accent English, her voice light as spider silk on a summer breeze.

Damn. Similes. I have to stop letting Bob read those Hammett books at me.

I swang my feet from my desk. “Hello, Miss...?”

“Mrs.,” she said, smiling vaguely. Her eyes... Her eyes looked like Marty Feldman as painted by Botticelli. Huge and silvery, they managed to be both fascinating and really weird. My favorite.

“Mrs....?”

“Yes.”

We waited there, the thick soup that passes for air in summertime Chicago barely bothering to acknowledge the ministrations of my ceiling fan.

“Mrs.... What?” I finally asked. She didn’t move. “Do you have a name?”

“Oh, of course I do.” She smiled, sort of—it was hard to tell. Her focus seemed to be somewhere past my face.

“Would you mind sharing it with me?”

“Oh, is that what you wanted?” The smile became more recognizable. “How silly of me. I thought we were still discussing my marital status.”

“Right.” By this point I had come to the conclusion that she was either a member of the steadiest part of my clientele—non-magical wack-jobs—or was literally from another world. Take your pick, it was fine with me—though I made sure my shield bracelet was out and my blasting rod in reach beneath my desk. “So, Mrs. What brings you here?”

“I’ve lost my husband.”

Ah. Wack-job. I get about a half a dozen ladies a month who want to hold a seance to raise the spirit of their dead husband, or child, or cat. Always ladies. Always mad as hatters who’ve been drinking too much of the special tea. And they always pay. So I let them. And they weren’t usually so young or so... Looking at the bulging eyes and flyaway hair—not to mention some of the other rather more nicely proportioned bits—I realized that it had been far too long since I’d played Hide-the-Chicago-Style for keeps. Even this female scarecrow was looking attractive. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs.”

Her thin blonde eyebrows bunched together. “Thank you, Mr.... Mr.”

“Welcome. So, I assume you want to raise his spirit, to commune with him?”

“Well, yes,” she said, tilting her head so that the mass of dirty blonde hair on the back of her head flopped toward her shoulder; what had looked head-on like a messy chinon turned out to be sloppy sort-of bun—Thomas would have been proud that I could even use words like chinon and bun and mean something you couldn’t eat—held together by a large and rather beat-up looking chopstick. “I would like to speak with him, rather urgently. But he was in perfectly good spirits when we last spoke, this morning.”

“This morning?” I hadn’t ever had a call for a seance before the corpse had even had time to cool.

“Well, yes,” she said, looking even more perplexed—and, given the size of her peepers to begin with, this was quite a discombobulating sight. “We were down in the Chicago Undertown—that’s the name, isn’t it?—hunting after Snorkacks, when a group of trolls galloped through the tunnel we were in and—”

“I’m sorry.” I blinked, but she was still there. “Did you say... Snorkacks?”

“Yes. We’ve just come down from the Arctic, you see, finishing tracking a pair of albino Lethifolds across the ice pack, and I’d heard some rumors of Snorkack sightings in Chicago, and so Rolf was kind enough to indulge me again, though we’ve had very little solid evidence to back up our researches to this point and I was beginning to despair. Nonetheless, when the rather pleasant werewolf (or, rather more properly, I suppose, a loup garou) we met in northern Nunavut mentioned that you could find just about anything beneath Chicago, Rolf thought it was worth one more try, and so we came here—but those trolls carried him off, you see, and when I tried to track them myself, I realized that they must have carried him into the Nevernever, and while I greatly enjoy astral travel, I am afraid that I don’t know what parts of Fairyland abut against this part of North America, and so I was rather upset, but then, when I was having my hair done, since it had got rather tangled in the fight with the trolls, this rather nice vampire told me that you were the person whom I should speak with, and I left before he’d finished, though I paid him anyway. Was he not right?”

I realized that I’d let my jaw flop open, and snapped it shut. Witch. British witch. Dirty blonde British witch with a spacy attitude and a taste for tangling with some of the more dangerous magical nasties. Something was trying to click. “Uh. Yeah. Yes. I think he was. I’m sure I can find your husband, Mrs.... What’s your name again?”

“Didn’t I say?” She blinked enormously. It was like watching a semaphore signal from one ship to another across a moonlit sea. “Luna Lovegood-Scamander. My husband is Rolf Love—”

“Right!” It clicked home—she was one of the group who’d helped some of the British Wardens a few years back. Captain Luccio had said this one had been impressive but... a bit odd. I tried to keep my burgeoning smile from becoming a smirk. “Of course—I’ve heard of you: you were part of the fight against that necromancer nut-case a few years back, what’s his name—”

“Voldemort,” she said, and her blithe smile dimmed slightly, which it hadn’t done even when she was talking about her husband’s abduction. “You remind me a bit of my friend, the one who actually defeated Voldemort. His name is Harry too. He’s a Warden—what we call an Auror—and he is rather skinny, just like you, and has messy black hair, though you are rather taller. I must say, I’ve always found it quite an attractive look.” The smile came back. “You aren’t in love with a redhead, are you?”

I thought about my apprentice Molly, Molly of the currently-flaming locks and the multiple piercings, and about how her latest plan to get past my unwillingness to see her as anything but a kid was to become a carrot-top. That, and wearing lots of clingy yoga togs, which didn't get her any further with me, but had certainly made my imagination a scarier place even than usual. “Uh, no. No. Not in love with anyone at all, at the moment,” which was true, if one happened to parse in love with in a very particular manner. Which suited me just fine in that moment. I mean, why count Susan, who was an almost-vampire because of me, or Luccio, who was my boss—not to mention my senior by more than a hundred years—and who’d been my occasional bedmate of late? Why even begin to menion whatever the hell Murphy was to me? “No.”

“Oh,” the witch sighed. “What a shame. I would imagine that you would be very sexy with a redhead. My friend Harry certainly is. They are quite sexy together, actually.” She said this last bit very enthusiastically; like just about everything else the woman had said or done, this was more than a bit disconcerting.

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” I shook my head to clear it. “So, Mrs.—”

“Luna. Please call me Luna.”

“All right... Luna.” I leaned forward, trying to get myself into a more businesslike pose, if not a more businesslike frame of mind. From my desk, I drew out a map of the Undercity, my blasting rod, and the keys to my venerable VW, the Blue Bug. “So, we’re going to find your husband.”

“Oh, how nice.” and she smiled like something really pleasant, like something that made me sorry that she was married, but also like something that made me feel relieved, somehow, that it wasn’t to me.

Most cases that come in through my door or over my phone (when it’s working) resemble each other way too much for my liking: mundane in everything but their supernatural trappings. Find a lost piece of junk. Find a lost loved one. Find a lost soul.

Sometimes, however, a case floats in on legs so long you’re sure the toes are touching China, with eyes like Marty Feldman as painted by Botticelli. “Yeah,” I said. “Nice.”