"Maybe," I said. "But I'm going to stop you all before I go. Tell Cowl to get out of the way now, and I won't hunt him down after all of this is over. He can walk. You too."

She shook her head again and said, "I'm sorry we could not work something out."

"Yeah," I said.

She hesitated. Then she asked me, her voice soft and genuinely curious, "Why?"

"Because this is what I have to do," I said. "I'm sorry you aren't going to let me help you."

"We all act as we think we must," she said. "I will see you by and by, Dresden."

"Count on it," I said.

Kumori left without another word, gliding silently down the stairs and out of sight.

I sat there for a moment, aching and tired and more scared than I had sounded a minute before.

Then I got up, shoved my pain and my fear aside, and hobbled out to the Blue Beetle.

I had work to do.

Chapter Thirty

I went back to my car, got in, and headed out to find a few things I would need to make the summoning of the Erlking marginally less suicidal. Serious summoning spells have to be personalized both to the entity to be summoned and to the summoner, and it took me a little while to find enough open businesses to get it all. Traffic on the streets grew steadily worse as the afternoon wore on, slowing me down even further.

More ominous than that, the tenor of the city had begun to slowly, steadily change. What had been an atmosphere of bemused enjoyment of an unanticipated holiday from the daily grind had turned into annoyance. As the sun tracked across the sky and the power still hadn't come back on, annoyance started turning into anger. By high noon, there were police visible on every street in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, and on foot.

"That all for ya?" asked an enterprising vendor. He was a potbellied, balding gardener selling fresh fruit and vegetables from the back of a pickup on a corner, and he was the only one I'd seen who wasn't trying to gouge Chicagoans in their moment of trial. He put the pumpkin I'd chosen in a thin plastic bag as he did, and took the money I offered him.

"That's everything," I said. "Thanks."

Shouting broke out somewhere nearby, and I looked up to see a whip-thin young man sprinting down the sidewalk across the street. A pair of cops chased him, one of them shouting at his uselessly squealing radio.

"Christ, look at that," the vendor said. "Cops everywhere. Why do they need the cops everywhere if this is just a power outage?"

"They're probably just worried about someone starting a riot," I said.

"Maybe," the vendor said. "But I hear some crazy things."

"Like what?" I asked.