My car didn’t make it all the way to Kansas City. It broke down about thirty miles short of town, and I had to call a wrecker. I had planned on being there before dark, but between walking eleven miles to find an increasingly rare pay phone and dumping most of my cash into a tow-truck driver’s pocket, and the collapse of an office computer network that delayed picking up a rental car for an extra hour and a half, I wound up pulling to the curb of a residential address a couple of minutes before nine in the evening.

I’d gotten the address from a contact on the Paranet-the organization made up mostly of men and women who didn’t have enough magical power to be accepted into the ranks of the White Council or to protect themselves from major predators, but who had more than enough mojo to make them juicy targets. For the past year, I and others like me had been working hard to teach them how to defend themselves-and one of the first things they were to do was notify someone upstream in the Paranet’s organization that they were in trouble.

One such call had been bucked up to me, and here I was, answering.

Before I had closed the door of the car, a spare, tense-looking man in his forties came out of the house and walked quickly toward me.

“Harry Dresden?” he called.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re late.”

“Car trouble,” I said. “Are you Yardly?”

He stopped across the hood of the car from me, frowning severely. He was average height, and wore most of a business suit, including the tie. His black hair was cut into a short brush. He looked like the kind of guy who solved his problems through ferocious focus and mulish determination, and who tolerated no nonsense along the way.