Read Dead Beat for Free Online

frowned and took a deep breath. "You're saying that you chose to forget things about Kemmler."
    "Or was compelled to," Bob said. "Um. Harry, can I come out? Just inside the lab? You know, while we talk."
    I blinked a couple of times. Bob was full of mischief on the best of days. I didn't let him out except on specific intelligence-gathering missions anymore. And while he often pestered me to let him out on one of his perverted minirampages, he had never asked permission to leave his skull for the duration of a chat. "Sure," I told him. "Stay inside the lab and be back in the skull at the end of this conversation."
    "Right," Bob said. A small cloud of glowing motes of light the size of campfire sparks came sailing out of the skull's eyes and darted to the far corner of the lab. "So anyway, when are we going to work on the new blasting rod?"
    "Bob," I said. "We're talking about The Word of Kemmler."
    The lights shot restlessly over to the other side of the lab, swirling through the steps on my stair ladder in a glowing helix. " You're talking about The Word of Kemmler," Bob said. The glowing cloud stretched, motes now spiraling up and down the stairs simultaneously. " I'm working on my Vegas act. Lookit, I'm DNA."
    "Would you stop goofing around? Can you remember anything at all about Kemmler?"
    Bob's voice quavered, the motes becoming a vague cloud again. "I can."
    "Then tell me what you know."
    "Is that a command?"
    I blinked. "Do I have to make it one?"
    "You don't want to command me to remember, Harry."
    "Why not?" I demanded.
    The cloud of lights drifted in vague loops around the lab. "Because knowledge is what I am. Losing my knowledge of what I knew of Kemmler took away a… a big piece of my existence. Like if someone had cut off your arm. What's left of what I know of Kemmler is close to the missing pieces."
    I thought I started to understand him. "It hurts."
    The lights swirled uncertainly. "It also hurts. It's more than that."
    "If it hurts," I said, "I'll stop, and you can forget it again when we're done talking."
    "But—" Bob said.
    "It's a command, Bob. Tell me."
    Bob shuddered.
    It was a bizarre sight. The cloud of lights shivered for a second, as if in a trembling breath of wind, and then abruptly just shifted , flickering to one side as quickly as if I had been looking at it with one eye closed and suddenly switched to the other.
    "Kemmler," Bob said. "Right." The lights came to rest on the other end of the table in the shape of a perfect sphere. "What do you want to know, wizard?"
    I watched the lights warily, but nothing seemed all that wrong. Other than the fact that Bob was suddenly calm. And geometric. "Tell me what The Word of Kemmler is."
    The lights pulsed scarlet. "Knowledge. Truth. Power."
    "Uh," I said, "a little more specific?"
    "The master wrote down his teachings, wizard, so that those who came after him could learn from him. Could learn about the true power of magic."
    "You mean," I said, "so that they could learn about necromancy."
    Bob's voice took on the edge of a sneer. "What you call magic is nothing but a mound of parlor tricks, beside the power to master life and death itself."
    "That's an opinion, I guess," I said.
    "More than that," Bob said. "It is a truth. A truth that reveals itself to those who seek it out."
    "What do you mean?" I said slowly.
    There was a flash, and a pair of white eyes formed in the glittering cloud of red points of light. They weren't pleasant. "Shall I show you the start of the path?" Bob's voice said. "Death, Dresden, is a part of you. It is woven into the fabric of your being. You are a collection of pieces, each of them dying and in turn being reborn and remade."
    The white lights were cold. Not mountain-spring cold, either. Graveyard-mist cold. But I'd never seen anything quite like them before.
    And there was no sense interrupting Bob when he was finally spilling some information.
    Besides. Fascinating light.
    "Dead flesh adorns you even now. Nails. Hair.