I could picture the sad smile on her face as she spoke. "I'm dealing with a lot of scary things," she said. "I think you have to react to them. And you either laugh at them or you go insane. Or you become like Martin. Shut off from everything and everyone. Trying not to feel."

"So you joke," I said.

"I learned it from you."

"I should open a school."

"Maybe so," she said. "I love you, Harry. I wish things were different."

My throat got tight. "Me too."

"I'll get you a drop address. If you ever need my help, get in touch."

"Only if I need your help?" I asked.

She exhaled slowly and said, "Yeah."

I tried to say, "Okay," but my throat was too tight to speak.

"Good-bye, Harry," Susan said.

I whispered, "Good-bye."

And that was the end of that.

I woke up to a ringing telephone the next day. "Hoss," Ebenezar said. "You should watch the news today." He hung up on me.

I went down to a nearby diner for breakfast, and asked the waitress to turn on the news. She did.

"… extraordinary event reminiscent of the science-fiction horror stories around the turn of the millennium, what appeared to be an asteroid fell from space and impacted just outside the village of Casaverde in Honduras." The screen flickered to an aerial shot of an enormous, smoking hole in the ground, and a half-mile-wide circle of trees that had been blasted flat. Just past the circle of destruction stood a poor-looking village. "However, information coming in from agencies around the world indicates that the so-called meteor was in actuality a deactivated Soviet communications satellite which decayed in orbit and fell to earth. No estimates of the number of deaths or injuries in this tragic freak accident have yet reached authorities, but it seems unlikely that anyone in the manor house could possibly have survived the impact."

I sat slowly back, pursing my lips. I decided that maybe I wasn't sorry Asteroid Dresden turned out to be an old Soviet satellite after all. And I made a mental note to myself never to get on Ebenezar's bad side.

The next day I tracked down Marcone. It wasn't easy. I had to call in a couple of favors in the spirit world to get a beacon-spell going on him, and he knew all the tricks for losing a tail. I had to borrow Michael's truck so that I could have a prayer of following him inconspicuously. The Beetle may be way sexy, but subtle it ain't.

He changed cars twice and somehow called into effect the magical equivalent of a destructive electromagnetic pulse that scrambled my beacon-spell. Only quick thinking and some inspired thaumaturgy combined with my investigative skills let me stay with him.