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.""That's why they pay you the big bucks, Murph."Murphy snorted.Butters came back in, and I made my good-byes.My eyes were getting heavy and I had aches in places where I hadn't known I had places.Sleep sounded like a great idea, and with so many things going on, the smart option was to get lots of rest in order to be as capably paranoid as possible.I walked the long route back out of the hospital, but found a hall blocked by a patient on some kind of life-support machinery being moved on a gurney from one room to another.I wound up heading out through the empty cafeteria, into an alley not far from the emergency room exit.A cold chill started at the base of my spine and slithered up over my neck.I stopped and looked around me, reaching for my blasting rod.I extended my magical senses as best I could, tasting the air to see what had given me the shivers.I found nothing, and the eerie sensation eased away.I started down the alley, toward a parking garage half a block from the hospital, and tried to look in every direction at once as I went.I passed a little old homeless man, hobbling along heavily on a thick wooden cane.A while farther on, I passed a tall young black man, dressed in an old overcoat and tattered and too-small suit, clutching an open bottle of vodka in one heavy-knuckled hand.He glowered at me, and I moved on past him.Chicago nightlife.I kept on moving toward my car, and heard footsteps growing closer, behind me.I told myself not to be too jumpy.Maybe it was just some other frightened, endangered, paranoid, sleep-deprived consultant who had been called to the morgue in the middle of the night.Okay.Maybe not.The steady tread of the footsteps behind me shifted, becoming louder and unsteady.I spun to face the person following me, raising the blasting rod in my right hand as I did.I turned around in time to see a bear, a freaking grizzly bear, fall to all four feet and charge.I had already begun preparing a magical strike with the rod, and the tip burst into incandescent light.Shadows fell harshly back from the scarlet fire of the rod, and I saw the details of the thing coming at me.It wasn't a bear.Not unless a bear can have six legs and a pair of curling ram's horns wrapping around the sides of its head.Not unless bears can somehow get an extra pair of eyes, right over the first set, one pair glowing with faint orange light and one with green.Not unless bears have started getting luminous tattoos of swirling runes on their foreheads and started sprouting twin rows of serrated, slime-coated teeth.It came charging toward me, several hundred pounds of angry-looking monster, and I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done.I turned around and ran like hell.Chapter SixI'd learned something in several years of professional wizarding.Never walk into a fight when the bad guys are the ones who set it up.Wizards can call down lightning from the heavens, rip apart the earth beneath their enemy's feet, blow them into a neighboring time zone with gale winds, and a million other things even less pleasant—but not if we don't plan things out in advance.And we're not all that much tougher than regular folks.I mean, if some nasty creature tears my head off my shoulders, I'll die.I might be able to lay out some serious magical pounding when I need to, but I'd made the mistake of tangling with a few things that had prepared to go up against me, and it hadn't been pretty.This bear-thing, whatever the hell it was, had followed me.Hence, it had probably picked its time and place.I could have stood and blasted away at it, but in the close quarters of the alley, if it was able to shrug off my blasts, it would tear me apart before I could try Plan B.So I ran.One other thing I'd learned.Wheezy wizards aren't all that good at running.That's why I'd been practicing.I took off at a dead sprint and fairly flew down the alley, my duster flapping behind me.The bear-thing snarled as it came after me, and I could hear it slowly gaining ground.The mouth of the alley loomed into sight and I ran as hard as I could for it.Once I was in the open with room to dodge and put obstacles between me and the creature, I might be able to take a shot at it.The creature evidently realized that, because it let out a vicious, spitting growl and then leapt.I heard it gather itself for the leap, and turned my head enough to see it out of the corner of my eye.It flew at my back
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