wizard on the planet—strong enough to openly defy the White Council for decades.”
“Meaning . . . he learned a lot there,” Butters said.
“Probably,” Bob said cheerfully. “But it’s probably limited to pretty much destructive, poisonous, dangerous stuff. Nothing important.”
“That’s not important?” Butters squeaked.
“Destroying things is easy,” Bob said. “Hell, all you really have to do to destroy something is wait. Creation, now. That’s hard.”
“Bob, would you be willing to take on Evil Bob?”
Bob’s eyes darted nervously. “I’d . . . prefer not to. I’d really, really prefer not to. You have no idea. That me was crazy. And buff. He worked out.”
I sighed. “One more thing to worry about, then. And meanwhile, I still don’t know a damned thing about my murder.”
Butters brought the Road Runner to a stop and set the parking break. “You don’t,” he said. “But we do. We’re here. Come on.”
Chapter Eighteen
I gritted my teeth and got out of Butters’s car, then paused to look at my surroundings. The piled snow was deep, and the mounds on either side of the street were like giant-sized versions of the snow ramparts that appeared every year in the Carpenters’ backyard. They changed the outlines of everything—but something was familiar.
I stopped and took at least half a minute to turn in a slow circle. As I did, I noticed a pair of fleeting shadows moving easily over the snow—wolves. Murphy’s comment about sending shadows to escort Butters home made more sense in context. I watched one of the wolves vanish into the darkness between a pair of half-familiar pines, and only then did I recognize where we stood. By then, Butters had taken Bob from his holder in the car and was carrying him in the handheld spotlight case again. He shone the light around for a moment until he spotted me, then asked, “Harry?”
“This is my house,” I said after a moment. “I mean . . . where my house was.”
Things had changed.
A new building had been put up where my old boardinghouse—my home—had been. The new place was four stories tall and oddly cubical in appearance. The walls fell even farther out onto the lawn than those in the old building had, encasing it in a strip of yard only slightly wider than my stride.
I moved close enough to touch the wall and pushed my hand inside. It hurt, but the hurt never varied as I pushed in farther. This was no facade. It was made of stone. I’m not kidding. Freaking stone. Basalt, maybe? I’m no stonemason. It was dark grey with veins and threads of green and silver running through it, but I could only see them from up close.
The windows were narrow—maybe nine inches wide—and deep. There were bars on the outside. I could see more bars on the inside, and there was at least a foot between them. The roof was lined with a staggered row of blocks—real by-God crenellation. As the pièce de résistance, gargoyles crouched at the corners and at the midpoint of each wall, starting up at the second floor and moving in three rows of increasingly ugly statuary toward the roof.
Someone had turned the ruin of my home into a freaking fortress.
A plaque hung over what had to be the main entrance. It read, simply, BRIGHTER FUTURE SOCIETY.
Butters followed my gaze to the plaque. “Ah,” he said. “Yeah. We named it that because if we didn’t do something, there wasn’t going to be much of a future for this town. I wanted Brighter Future Group, actually, for the initialism, but I got voted down.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. I did some math. To build on the ruins of the boardinghouse, construction would have had to start practically the same day that I died. Actual stone is expensive to build with because it’s difficult and time-consuming. This place was as big as a small castle. It should have taken months and months and months to build. It had gone up in six. Probably significantly less, given the weather. “This place cost a damned fortune.”
“Meh,” Butters said, and walked to the front door. “Hang around a bit and you’ll take it for granted like the rest of us.” He entered a sequence of numbers on the keypad beside the door. They made a little mechanical clicking sound that reminded me of a manual typewriter. He put his hands back into his pockets and waited.
A moment later, a heavily accented basso voice emerged from a crackling speaker box. “Who goes there?”
“Butters,” he said.