Read Online Fool Moon by Jim Butcher - Free Book Online

balanced stack of comic books (don’t ask), and started lighting the other candles that lay on dishes around the chilly room, finally bending to light up the kerosene heater that I keep down in the lab in an effort to at least blunt the cold. “Bob,” I said then. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
    Up on one of the shelves, huddled in the midst of a thick stack of hardbacks, was the bleached, smooth form of a human skull, its empty eye sockets gaping. Deep in those eye sockets, there was a flickering of orange light, which grew and solidified into twin points of lambent illumination. “Sleepyhead. Oh, that’s rich, Harry. With a sense of humor like that, you could make a living as a garbage man anywhere in the country.” The skull’s mouth gaped open in the parody of a yawn, though I knew the spirit within, Bob, didn’t feel fatigue in the same way that living beings did. I put up with his lip, so to speak—Bob had worked for several wizards over the course of a dozen mortal lifetimes, and he knew more about the nuts and bolts of magic than I ever would.
    “What are we doing, now?” Bob sniggered. “More weight-loss potions?”
    “Look, Bob,” I said. “That was only to get me through a rough month. Someone’s got to pay the rent around here.”
    “All right,” Bob said smugly. “You going to get into breast enhancement, then? I’m telling you, that’s where the money is.”
    “That isn’t what magic is for, Bob. How petty can you get?”
    “Ah,” Bob said, his eye lights flickering. “The question is, how pretty can you get them ? You aren’t a half-bad wizard, Dresden. You should think about how grateful all those beautiful women will be.”
    I snorted and started cleaning off a space on the center table, stacking things up to one side. “You know, Bob, some of us aren’t obsessed with sex.”
    Bob snorted, no easy feat for a guy with no nose or lips. “Some of us don’t take a real, working body and all five senses for granted, either, Harry. When’s the last time you saw Susan?”
    “I don’t know,” I responded. “Couple weeks ago. We’re both pretty busy with work.”
    Bob heaved a sigh. “A gorgeous woman like that, and here you are, down in your musty old lab, getting ready to do more ridiculous nonsense.”
    “Precisely,” I said. “Now, shut up and let’s get to work.”
    Bob grumbled something in Latin, but rattled a few times to shake the dust off of the skull. “Sure, what do I know? I’m just a pathetic little spirit, right?”
    “With a photographic memory, three or four hundred years’ worth of research experience, and more deduction capacity than a computer, Bob, yeah.”
    Bob almost seemed to smile. “Just for that, you get my best effort tonight, Harry. Maybe you’re not such an idiot after all.”
    “Great,” I said. “I want to work up a couple of potions, and I want to know everything you know about werewolves.”
    “What kind of potions, and what kind of werewolves?” Bob said promptly.
    I blinked. “There’s more than one?”
    “Hell, Harry. We’ve made at least three dozen different kinds of potions down here ourselves, and I don’t see why you wouldn’t—”
    “No, no, no,” I growled at Bob. “Werewolves. There’s more than one kind of werewolf?”
    “Eh? More than one kind of what?” Bob tilted his skull over to one side, as though cocking an invisible hand to his ear bones.
    “Werewolf, werewolf.”
    “ There wolf,” Bob replied solemnly, his voice seething with a hokey accent. “ There castle.”
    I blinked at him. “Uh. What the heck are you talking about?”
    “It’s a joke, Harry. Stars almighty, you never get out, do you?”
    I eyed the grinning skull and growled in frustration. “Don’t make me come up there.”
    “Okay, okay. Sheesh. Aren’t we grumpy tonight?” Bob’s jaws stretched in a yawn again.
    “I’m working another murder case, Bob, and I don’t have time to goof around.”
    “Murder. Mortal business is so