"Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, "Do your worst."

The words were light, but there was both fear and resolve just under the surface of them. Butters was smart enough to be scared. But he was also a fighter. I could respect him for both.

"Okay," I said. "Let's talk."

Chapter Six

Butters hadn't taken time to collect his coat when he left, and the last time the Beetle's heater had worked was before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I ducked into the store, got us each a cup of coffee, then untwisted the wire that holds down the lid of the storage trunk. I dug out a worn but mostly clean blanket that I kept in the trunk to cover the short-barreled shotgun I stored in the event that I would ever need to give Napoleon's charging hordes a taste of the grape. Given the way the night was going, I got the shotgun, too, and slipped it into the backseat.

Butters accepted the blanket and the coffee gratefully, though he shivered hard enough to slop a little of the drink over the side of the cup. I sipped a little coffee, slipped the cup into the holder I'd rigged on the car's dashboard, and got moving again. I didn't want to wait around in the same place for too long.

"All right," I told Butters. "There are two things you have to accept if you want to understand what's going on."

"Hit me."

"First the tough one. Magic is real."

I could feel him looking at me for a moment. "What do you mean by that?"

"There's an entire world that exists alongside the everyday life of mankind. There are powers, nations, monsters, wars, feuds, alliances— everything. Wizards are a part of it. So are a lot of other things you've heard about in stories, and even more you've never heard of."

"What kind of things?"

"Vampires. Werewolves. Faeries. Demons. Monsters. It's all real."

"Heh," Butters said. "Heh, heh. You're joking. Right?"

"No joke. Come on, Butters. You know that there are weird things out there. You've seen the evidence of them."