I really wanted to itch at my eye.

The cut hadn't opened back up when Cowl had thrown me across the room, it had only seeped a little bit; the medic had cleaned it up, and I didn't think it worth mentioning. Seeing my breakfast come back up a second time had also done little more than pull at it, but it hadn't done much leaking. Just a tiny bit. Just enough not to notice at the time, and just enough that now it was dry again and i could feel it when I blinked.

I tried to focus on the road, on the few cars that were still driving around and the hurried pedestrians, only a few of which even slowed down as we passed. I'd officially called shotgun because I might be able to see threats of a magical nature from the front of the covered military truck I was in, but mostly it was because I didn't want to ride in the back where I wouldn't be able to see anything. The lieutenant (who really should have gone into the Navy to become Admiral Tarkin, his dislike of Star Wars be damned) was in the vehicle behind mine, and a military Hummer led our group. Andi, Kirby and Mouse were sitting in the somewhat open seats furthest back in my own truck, and they were going to jump out as soon as the Museum came into view. Hopefully, if there was an ambush they'd be able to warn us off.

I blinked.

No, the view of the city, half deserted as it was, was pointless. I wanted to think about that woman I'd somehow forgotten again. Why was I having trouble focusing on that?

I closed my eyes and envisioned the scene, where my Sight had burned those moments permanently into my memory: no footprints in the carpet, no book that she'd been holding, and no signs of magical residue but those I'd originally missed on the back shelves, where the knives had been hidden both in books and beneath a subtle veil.

I'd instinctively closed my sight before turning it back on Cowl. I regretted that now, but I was trying to focus on something else at the time. Namely, how screwed I was, and where the hell was my doggy back up?

I used the image burned into my memories as a baseline, and mentally walked myself through the entire thing again.

Enter store. Greet Bock, who hadn't... reacted at all to Cowl planting weapons all over his store?

Great. Five seconds in, and I already have more questions.

I wanted to itch my eye, but I clenched my fists and put the feeling aside.

So Bock was either in on it, or his mind was messed with. Neither option was good, and that went double with what was going on upstairs. If I saw him again, I'd take him down quick and clean, before things could get out of hand. Move on, what happened next?

Then, I saw her. She was blonde, bookish…

I took a deep breath, fighting to recall more details. That was a very, very bad sign. I'd seen her twice, I should have been able to pull up something.

The book she'd been holding, she'd-

She'd handed me a copy of it back in my apartment. It was the only thing that had looked nearly untouched in my entire place, with everything else either tossed around or destroyed. I had taken it, and somehow fit it in the pocket of my duster.

I didn't look down. I just reached for my pocket, and felt around.

Something large and square was still in my pocket, long since forgotten since I'd been handed it.

The vehicles didn't slow, and as far as anyone else knew, nothing had changed. But to me? The entire world felt distant and cold.

For a moment, I had this irrational thought that it might have been a bomb, and I was about to explode. It passed, if only because such a thing would have been based on technology and would have exploded during my fight against Cowl, but the lingering feeling that I was holding something dangerous and potentially deadly on my person didn't quite go away.

Had she been there from after the original attack, then snuck out past the police after giving me the book? Or was she another illusion, one powerful enough to convince me that I could smell her, take things from her?

I took a quick breath, and pulled the thing out of my pocket.

It was my box of depleted uranium, still sealed and locked.

I quickly shoved it back in my pocket, looking over at my driver.

He looked back at me with one eyebrow raised, then shook his head and focused back on the road.

I swallowed and pointedly looked out the window.

Still, that was not a good sign.

I searched my person a little more, but the book, if I'd ever had it, was gone.

Back to the idea that she hadn't been in those places in the first place, then. Or there was something else going on, and I didn't know enough to have a real answer just yet.

I walked myself through it all again: Enter, Bock says hi, I walk the shelves, there she is, reading Die Lied der Erlking. I can read the page she's on. Cowl comes up behind me, accuses me of pulling facts out of nowhere. I use my Sight, and there was never anything there (besides hidden knives). Cowl and I banter, he tells me to knock off the time travel or tell my "ally" to shut it down, then decides I've got no clue what's going on. He attacks, I shield, I go tail over teakettle backwards, lots of gunfire, and the National Guard steps in to say hi.

...something's missing.

I bring up just a touch of my willpower (careful to keep it in, so I won't burn out the truck's headlights or something), and I go over it again.

Enter, Bock, walk the aisles, lady with book, Cowl tells me I'm nuts, we banter, Necromancers know about time travel, he's going to hit you from all sides, shield, gunfire-

A woman's voice.

He's going to hit you from all sides. Shielding head-on won't be enough.

Oh… shit.

My memory would never, ever fade, and it told me that she had never been standing there in the first place.

Something was in my head. Something was messing with my thoughts.

"We're here," the driver told me. "Do you see anything?"

I blinked, startled out of my realization, and then the left side of the truck seemed to jump six feet in the air, bouncing off something in the road. I grabbed onto the dashboard weakly with my left hand and grasped at anything on the car door with my right, but couldn't get a good hold. Just as suddenly, the truck bounced back down and then my side jumped up, and I did my best to compensate by sitting up and throwing myself in the other direction.

I must have overdone it, because I slammed my head about as hard as I could into the passenger side window.

Massive head trauma is a wonderful thing. For the first moment, you feel the pain all at once, but then it's just… gone. Or if it isn't gone, you're too busy looking at all the fine details of the world directly in front of your eyes, everything a couple shades of light too bright, while you attempt to understand what the fuck, precisely, just happened. In my case, I got a remarkably detailed view of the bottom corner of the truck cab where the door hinge meets the floor just under the dashboard, and I marveled at the intricate details of the grips set into the mat beneath my feet.

It didn't quite pass while the driver said something unimportant to me, and I didn't bother looking up as the car came to a stop. It wasn't that I wasn't capable, I just didn't care to. Didn't really want to move, right that moment, either.

Still, I had a job to do, so I might as well get to it.

I blinked, shaking myself out of it as best I could.

Years of potentially deadly situations over the course of my tenure as a detective forced me to set my personal issues aside and focus on the task at hand. I scanned the empty street in front of the blocks-wide building as we drove up to the front entrance. Nothing of note there, yet. Other than the lack of people, I didn't see anything wrong without opening my Sight, and I was going to hold off for the moment.

"Not yet. But my sources tell me if they aren't here now, they sure as hell were recently," I said back. I paused. What did he say? Nevermind, not important.

I heard a screech of metal as the other vehicles pulled to a stop, their brakes needing to be looked at, and I could feel the truck move as soldiers piled out of the back, quickly taking up positions pretty much everywhere, including behind the truck. I got out myself, and a wash of energy like a manifestation of gloom hit me as I stumbled to the pavement, missing the step because I'd reached back for my staff and been disoriented.

Thum. Thum. Thum.

Something was playing a heavy beat with a thick base, somewhere in the distance, grating against my head, tasting of ash and death, just like it had at the Morgue. It seemed like we had company after all.

"They're here!" I shouted, pointing my staff around. "The bastards from the Morgue are here!"

I grasped blindly at the amulet at my chest, my mother's silver heirloom, and poured some of my energy into it. The gloom didn't go away, and that frustrated the Hell out of me. I focused, pouring more energy into my not-spell. I could have sworn, just for a moment, that I caught a whiff of really rotten eggs, like brimstone, but it was gone before I could really be sure. The feelings sort of passed beneath notice, though.

The two dozen or so soldiers with us had already been creating a perimeter, but they double timed it taking cover by the double staircase leading up into the Field Museum. There were a number of glass doors serving as entrances, with one massive glass window above a huge set of double doors serving as the main entrance, but the breaching party took it slow and careful, moving up to the four marble columns at the top of the stairs a few at a time. I readied myself to join them, until Tarkin's voice came up beside me.

"Our other forces in the area should have met us by now," he muttered, then turned to me to confirm his suspicions. "How are you so sure the enemy is here?"

"The beat in the air," I told him. "I disrupted it at the end of my last run in with this guy, and he freaked out."

Lt. Tarkin grimaced, then nodded, then stepped back and spoke into a radio, passing the information along to whoever was on the other side of the line.

"Get going, carefully," He told me. "I'll be along in a moment."

Mouse found his way to my side, and I looked down at him. "Where are the others?" I asked my dog, meaning the Alphas.

He gave me a look, then pointed his nose up toward the entrance. I hoped he meant they were waiting to breach, not already inside.

Tarkin chuckled a little strangely, like he couldn't believe what had just occurred, looking at Mouse. "Wizards," he huffed, shaking his head.

I ignored him and shook out my shield charm. I held off on raising my shield just yet, and had a moment to worry about all the automatic guns that were about to enter a place that might be full to the brim with magic.

Instead of keeping it to myself, I figured it might help if my allies knew that.

"If you go inside, be ready for your guns to jam!" I shouted carefully, trying to get my voice to raise enough to be heard outside, but not inside. "Automatics are worse than semi-autos, and simple revolvers are best! The older your munitions, the better they'll hold up!"

"Could have told us that before we came out here with the wrong fucking gear," somebody called back, lowering his tone, but one of the other guys told him to shut it.

I held my staff at the ready and came up on the massive column nearest to the doorway. There was a guy in the lead with a riot shield, and a girl at his back, hand on his shoulder, ready to move. They looked to their partners on the opposite side, then to me. A little surprised, but not put off, I nodded, then muttered to the woman in charge, "I don't look like it, but my shield is stronger than his. If I'm caught out and my arm is up, I'm fine. Other than that… let's go."

She nodded to me, then gave some signals to the guys on the other side. After a moment, she held up three fingers, then two, then one.

We moved.

Riot shields in front, rifles behind, the two sides hurried to the main door and shoved it open, and we poured into the museum, looking out for trouble.

The entrance to the museum let out into a massive open area, the ceiling at least two and a half stories up, and I felt uneasy at the obvious ambush possibilities that the also-open second floor walkways and banisters to our left and right presented as we moved. We bypassed the huge red velvet path to ticket sales and admissions in the middle of the gigantic hallway, each group bypassing it on one side or another.

The details of the rest of the room didn't seem important, because at the other end of the hall, a couple of football fields away, was Dinosaur Sue, the most intact skeleton of a T-rex in the United States, maybe in the whole world. There was some kind of scaffolding around and under her head for some reason (she normally just stands hunched over with a metal base, not needing anything to hold her from above), with four cables holding it suspended to the ceiling. Standing on that scaffolding just beneath the dinosaur head were a couple of familiar figures: Dr. Death, still wearing her medical overcoat with a new bit of blood splashed over her front, was talking up at the taller man responsible for turning the Morgue into a violent little carnival. Standing behind her was her Ghoul, holding a camo-sleeved arm. Just the arm. It was out in full eel-elongated-teeth mode, and it was chewing on the arm in question.

It stood out in contrast to the little snare drum strapped to the Ghoul's side. That, on the other hand, went nicely with the larger drum made out of bone, skin and several of what I strongly suspected were tendons that the scar-faced man was holding. He was hitting it rhythmically, steadily, and the air seemed to pulse with every beat.

The doctor, the Corpsetaker, was shouting, "This location has been suitably prepared, and it's my turn to twist the knife. Go prepare another location, Grevane, before-"

The other man, Grevane apparently, had turned to put us in his sights. He raised a hand to cut her off, smiling down at me. "You want this fight, luv?" He asked, backing away to the edge of the scaffolding, a smile tugging at the edge of his face. "It's all yours. Here, your reinforcements."

The soldiers opened fire, but the Corpsetaker just sneered and held up her hand. The bullets did precisely nothing against whatever defense she'd raised while Grevane held out the ritual drum to her, and she took it in her other hand. The Ghoul dropped his meal and pulled out a pair of drumsticks (wooden, not chicken), but the Corpsetaker shoved the new drum into it's hands instead. It took up the beat with bloodied, clawed hands as Grevane dropped down the ten or twenty feet to the ground, laughing, then glanced back just once as he ran away.

"Aren't you even curious as to why we're here?" The Corpsetaker taunted, but both groups of soldiers, as well as whatever backup we had, just took defensive positions while I drew in my will. They kept up the suppressing fire, keeping her honest and making her keep up her shield. She shrugged, apparently unconcerned. "I suppose it's not important. I will say, Dresden, that I am impressed with your magical strength. The old hunter doesn't seem to want to awaken, all our extra efforts be damned."

She looked at the Ghoul with a carefree smile, and the tempo it was beating into the drum doubled in speed, the air seeming to haze as my own heartbeat tried to speed up to match it.

I glanced up, just for a moment, then did a double take.

There were dozens of soldiers wearing the same uniforms as the men and women I'd come in with pouring out over the second floor banisters, stepping off into free fall over our forces. The most notable difference was definitely not that far fewer of them were carrying any sort of firearm. It was that a number of them were missing limbs or chunks of torso, and that despite their continued movements, they were obviously dead.

"Above us!" I shouted, turning my energies and staff to the group on the far side of the hall, and with a snarl of rage I called on the wind.

"Ventas Maximus!" I shouted, and that same whisper of nasty egg-fart blew past my nose as the zombie soldiers jumped over the railings on the second floor. My wind caught almost all of them, overpowering gravity just enough to lift some back up and slam the rest into the walls. The soldiers over there caught on pretty quickly, turning their attentions on the new enemies.

In contrast, I had a zombie land almost directly on my back, slamming me into the floor.

I struggled to both turn myself over and to lift my shoulders to cover my neck with my spell-laced duster, but the damned thing was clawing and biting at the top of my head instead. I tried to do something about it, but a hand came around to grab my face and I felt the stiches in my eye get torn away, and I screeched as my vision was lost in blood again. Someone managed to yank the bastard off me, and I flipped over onto my back, staff raised, to catch half a glimpse of the woman from earlier twisting the undead's head between her legs, her hands on the ground, as she turned and flipped it sideways. Something cracked amidst the gunfire, and the next thing I knew she was dragging me to the side, out of the melee.

I got my bearings while she grabbed a pistol off her leg and started shooting at something. The adrenaline made the pain in my face unimportant, and with a careful wipe at my face, I could just barely see the fight out of the eye that hadn't been torn up again.

A second, staccato beat joined the first, and I glanced up at the Corpsetaker to see that she'd taken up the snare drum, a vicious smile on her lips. She shouted out a phrase in what I would later learn was Creole, and a green haze of fog seemed to raise up around her, indistinct figures holding swords forming in it. A touch of that hungry emptiness I'd felt when she ate my magic wafted out from the ground as agonized screams filled the air.

I grimaced, holding my ears as best I could with one hand weak and the other holding my staff, and a number of the soldiers dropped to the ground, defenseless, while the zombie army quickly took advantage and slaughtered them. The air shuddered, and the glass of every display case shattered.

Mouse, my faithful companion who I'd lost track of in the fight, wasn't having any of it.

A roaring bark, louder than a school's emergency alarm system, tore back into the shuddering of the air, and I could damn near feel it competing with the Necromantic energies and spellwork. The Corpsetaker shouted something else, the words oily and slithering against my ears, and I realized her focus was totally on my dog.

I raised my staff, pointing it at her, and my internal temperature rose. I breathed in, focusing my will and frustration at the loss of my blasting rod, and-

My breathing hitched. I snarled and threw that frustration into my spell as well.

Fire. I called upon the cleansing, unstoppable wildfire, burning itself into my very soul.

"Fuego! PYRO FUEGO!" I screamed, and the runes on my staff lit up red and angry, the scent of brimstone filling the air as the hottest flame I'd ever called on blasted out in a line, thicker than a telephone pole and almost as bright as burning magnesium, toward the Corpsetaker.

Her eyes widened for a moment as she dropped her drum and held out both hands, palms up as she crouched. Somehow, somehow, she managed to twist the flames and direct them up at damn near a 90 degree angle toward the ceiling.

I shuddered, the sensation of my left hand melting all over again coming unbidden to my mind, and I shivered more as the Corpsetaker's nasty smile seemed to look past me into my soul. She leaned down, eyes only for me, to pick up the drum again as her Ghoulish friend smiled a shark's smile.

Right up until Dinosaur Sue's massive skull fell off of her skeleton onto the scaffolding, crushing the both of them.

The redirected fire had cut straight up into it, and apparently wasn't all that good for the bindings.

The beat in the air cut out, and the zombies all dropped what they were doing for a moment. The green haze, whatever it was supposed to be, gradually faded away as what troops were left alive got the upper hand against the now-uncoordinated attack by the zombie army; without the beat guiding them, maybe half had just stopped and stood around, while the remainder either attacked each other or fought much less viciously against our own forces.

I idly wondered where the hell the Alphas had gone.

I could have helped clean up the last of the zombies, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

I was staring, unfeeling except for the burning, down into the glove of my left hand. It throbbed, the sensation curling my weak fingers, and I could smell the brimstone scent on the air. Mouse must have finished cleaning up the straggler zombies, because he came to sit in my lap. I don't remember falling to the floor with my back against one of the walls, but I must have. How else could Mouse have come to sit in my lap?

Everything felt sort of hazy.

I was blinking, just, so. Much.

My headache was

Die alone

Cowl stabbed me

Somebody was telling me to stay awake.

The graves were musty, my own empty grave

Drum beats, the screeching of birds

Mouse licked my face, whining.

I closed my eyes.

A.N.

There's a 360 view of the Field Museum interior online. It was EXTREMELY helpful, but indicated that there's no way for a cool scene later to occur. I'm going to flat-out ignore those inconsistencies, because this is a story and I like cool stuff.