by Jim Butcher
“It’s me,” I said.
The levity vanished from his voice. “Butters? What’s wrong?”
“I, uh,” I said. “I …”
I am the wrong person to be a Knight of the Cross, is what I wanted to say. But instead I said, “What are you doing?”
“You just caught us. Getting set to take Maggie and Mouse to the zoo to meet mighty Moe,” he replied, his voice holding gentle cheer. “Going to be a good time. You ever been to the zoo?”
“Not really an animal guy,” I said.
“You should come along, maybe,” he said.
I felt myself laugh weakly. “I can’t. Working.”
“Which hat you wearing?”
“The Jedi hat,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. He was quiet for a second, then exhaled slowly. “Guess they’re starting you early. How bad?”
“It’s bad,” I said. “I … I might need help.”
There was a long silence from the other end of the phone. It hissed and crackled with static. He was upset. Wizards play merry hell with electronics around them when they get emotional. Even on an old landline, nothing was a sure bet. Especially not around Harry Dresden.
“I won’t come,” he said quietly.
“What?” I asked. “Harry …”
“Michael told me something once that I thought was utter crap,” he said. “But I’m going to tell it to you now.”
“What?” I demanded.
“You’re a Knight now, Butters. You’re working for the freaking Almighty. And He won’t give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear.”
“Harry, He already has,” I said. I didn’t say it, honestly; I sort of gibbered it.
“Butters,” he snapped.
I’d heard him use that tone of voice one other time. Exactly once. It had been in a basement, and zombies had been coming to kill us.
“Polka will never die,” I breathed. It came out, smooth and automatic. It was kind of a mantra of mine.
“Good man,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I did. I stuttered a lot. I stammered a lot.
“Wait,” he said. “The thing’s shadow. A lion’s mane and a damned elephant’s trunk?”
I thought of the thrashing tendril in the thing’s shadow. “Yeah, uh, I guess it could have been.”
“And it had blue eyes, didn’t it?”
I hadn’t gotten to that part yet. “Yeah,” I said. “It did. They were crazy.”
“Hell,” he said. “It’s a baka baku.”
“What is that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that creature.”
“Because it isn’t real,” he said. “Or it wasn’t, until the nineties. I mean, there was a thing called a baku in Japanese lore, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. Look, some company made a kid’s stuffed toy, called it a dream-eater, said that it was a magical protector that ate bad dreams before children could have them. Came with a little book that explained the whole thing.”
“I’m fighting a stuffed animal?” I asked. My leg pounded. There would be a huge bruise there for weeks where the thing had kicked me.
“Nah,” he said. “Look, they were just making a toy, but they gave it to kids. Kids believing in things has freaking power. It either created the real ones or it gave access to something similar from the Never-never that used that belief to create a place for itself in reality.”
“Then why has it gone all Manson on these people?” I asked.
“Some laws are kind of universal. Like ‘You are what you eat,’ ” the wizard told me. “You eat enough nightmares, sooner or later you turn into one. Now, instead of protecting people from nightmares, it uses them to inflict torment. Probably gets energy from it.”
“Oh, fantastic,” I said. “What can they do?”
“Listen carefully. This thing has laid a fear whammy on you, man.”
“That stuff doesn’t work on Knights,” I said.
“Horse crap,” Harry said. “Look, the Knights have power, but you have to choose to use it, man. You don’t get any get-out-of-jail-free cards. What you get is the chance to fight when other people would get eaten. That thing has gotten into your head. It’s scaring you to death. Just like those people around you. It’s eating you.”
“Harry, I can’t see,” I stammered.
And, I swear to God, he shifted to a nearly perfect imitation of Alec Guinness in the original movie. “Your eyes can deceive you,” he said. “Don’t trust them.”
I barked out a laugh that felt like it was going to shatter something in my chest.
Or maybe actually did. Suddenly, I started to get my breath back.
“Butters,” he said. “Look. I know it’s hard. But there’s one way you deal with fear.”
“How?” I asked him.
“You stand up and you kick it in the fucking teeth,” he said, and there was a quiet, certain power in his voice that had nothing to do with magic. “You’ve forgotten the most important thing a Knight needs to remember, Butters.”
“What’s that?” I breathed.
“Knights of the Cross aren’t afraid of monsters,” he said. “Monsters are afraid of you. Act like it. Commit to it, hard. And have faith.”
Act like it. Commit. I could do those things.
Faith was harder. I’d never asked God to help me handle things before.
But I had faith in my friends.
One friend in particular.
“Got it,” I said quietly. “I guess I better go, Harry. Got work to do.”
“Good hunting, Knight.”
“Thank you, wizard.”
WHEN I OPENED the door, things had changed.
I’d taken a white sheet from Stan’s bed, draped it over my shoulders, and tied two corners around my neck. On the part of the sheet that draped over my chest, I’d taken a first-aid sticker from a drawer of supplies beside the bed and stuck the red-cross symbol over my heart.
It wasn’t like Sanya’s or Michael’s cloaks. But it would do.
More important, I’d put my headphones in my ears, plugged the jack into my phone, and blared “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!” at full volume on loop.
I could barely see. And I couldn’t hear anything but my goofy, beautiful polka, one of the songs I knew perfectly at that, which was kind of the point.
In the hallway, I could feel the emptiness stretching out around me and the low fear in the air. The baka baku had run everyone off the floor—I could dimly see hollow yellow squares retreating, tracking the workmen and nurses and doctors all leaving the floor by the stairs and elevators, leaving it to just the two of us and the trapped, dreaming victims.
The fluorescent lights were all flickering and flashing as if they needed changing.
I didn’t see the hostile red targeting carat.
But I didn’t need it.
I went to the center of the hall, lifted the Sword to a high guard, and felt it ignite and change the way shadows fell on the hall. As Yankovic translated popular music into polka in my ears, I shouted, “Baka baku! Betrayer of children! You have lost your path! Come and face me!”
And I closed my eyes and waited.
See, magic isn’t really magic. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the theory, and I know that for a fact. I mean, it is magic, obviously, but it doesn’t just happen in a giant vacuum, inexplicably creating miracles. Lots and lots of magic actually follows many of the physical laws of the universe. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, for example.
If the baka baku was sending magical fear into people’s brains, that fear had to be transmitted by something. It can’t just appear magically—poof—in someone else’s head. It’s a kind of broadcast—a signal. And that means that, like other magical broadcasts, such as those used on the communicators I’d designed and built in the past, waves on the EM spectrum were the most likely culprits for those transmissions.
Using those things had a side effect of causing distortions in near
by cell phones. It was even more noticeable in headphones.
So I listened to one of my recent favorites and waited. My inner ten-year-old was screaming at me to run.
I told him to shut his mouth and let me work.
And, sure enough, about the time Al was singing about looking incredible in your granddad’s clothes, I heard the sound distort suddenly in my left ear.
Moving quickly is not about effort. It isn’t about making every muscle explode in an instant in an effort to be fast. It’s about being relaxed, smooth, and certain. The instant I heard the distortion, my body just reacted, turning and sweeping the sword down, all in a single liquid motion.
I felt the Sword hit, and the blade’s hum shifted to a triumphant note. I opened my eyes to see a shape about the size and same general coloring as Miyamune reeling back.
There was a much smaller, flesh-colored shape lying on the floor not far from my feet.
I tugged out the earphones and heard Miyamune let out a moan of pain, and the last of my fear fell away from me.
The baka baku bounced off the wall and fell, and I advanced on it, slow and steady.
The creature’s huge, weird shadow spread onto the wall behind it, even as its human face stared up at me.
“Who are you?” the creature asked.
The words that came out of my mouth only sort of felt like my own. “Ehyeh ašer ehyeh,” I said quietly.
The walls of the empty hallway quivered slightly as the words washed over them, even though I never once raised my voice.
The creature just gaped at me.
“Even now,” I heard myself say, “it isn’t too late for you to turn aside. To be forgiven.”
I couldn’t really see its expression—but I saw the gathering tension in its blurry form, felt the anger in the way it suddenly exhaled and came at me.
And the Sword of Faith swept down one last time and ended it.
WHEN MICHAEL PICKED me up from the hospital in his old white pickup late that night, I was exhausted.
He handed me my spare pair of glasses first thing and I put them on gratefully.
“Have to do something about that,” I said. “Maybe sports goggles.”
“Seems like a good idea,” he said. “How’s Stan?”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “So will the kids.”
“What was hurting them?”
“Something that should have been protecting them,” I said quietly. I squinted out the window as he pulled away. “Just dissolved into nothing when I took it down.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked me, his deep voice gentle.
“I’m not sure I succeeded at this quest,” I said. “I kept trying to reach out to the creature. To give it a chance to turn away.”
“Sometimes they do,” Michael said. “Mostly, they don’t.”
“It’s just …” I said. “Killing is such a waste. What I did was necessary. But I’m not sure it was good.”
“Killing rarely is,” he said, “at least in my experience. Could you have done any differently?”
“Maybe?” I said. “I don’t know. With what I knew at the time … I don’t know.”
“Would they all be alive if you had done differently? The children? Stan?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then be content, Sir Knight,” he said.
“Didn’t even have to get my hand cut off to get there,” I said, and leaned my head against the truck’s window.
I never knew it when I fell asleep, relaxed and unafraid.
I never really meant for Harry to be a dad.
I mean, I knew what I was doing on a step-by-step basis. I knew that for Changes, I wanted to throw out an extinction-worthy threat from the bad guys, and a proportionate response from Dresden. For Harry, the ultimate motivation would be saving his own child—especially because of his own childhood experience as an orphan, where no one ever came to save him. And it was kind of baked into the cake of my unconscious assumptions that Harry would save his child, of course. Clumsy though the young wizard might be, and sloppy, and desperate, and uncoordinated, and I really feel like the word collateral needs to be worked into it somewhere, Dresden does tend to get the job done in the end.
But I never really paused to work through the implications of the fact that Harry would be pathologically devoted to being there for his kid, and that he was going to save her life. I could see both 2s, but I had never added them up to 4: Maggie was going to be there, a presence in the story moving forward, and he was definitely going to want to be involved with her. Which meant that my hardboiled, unlucky-in-love PI wizard was also going to be a parent.
Which, of course, changes absolutely everything about one’s life. It restructures priorities in a way nothing else really can.
Which is something that is really, really contraindicated when you’re writing a long-running series. You don’t go majorly changing your main character without facing a loss of audience.
The easy, safe thing to do would have been to leave Maggie with the Carpenters, or shuffle her off into the Church’s supernatural witness protection program—which seems like a quite wizardly thing to do, maybe even for the child’s own good. But as I kept writing, I realized that I couldn’t do that and still have Dresden be Dresden, either. He believes too much in what it means to be a parent, as shown in the Bigfoot short stories, and the payment he demands from River Shoulders.
So, at the end of the day, the character was a-gonna change, one way or another. I went with the way that felt most true to who he is as a human being.
Harry’s a dad now. He might not know too much about it, but at least he has the jokes down.
My name is Harry Dresden. I am possibly one of the more dangerous wizards alive, and I have never once spent a whole day as a dad.
My memories of my father are few and faded. He was a good man, and he was kind, but he died before I got into first grade. Sometimes I wonder whether the memories I have of him are mine or they’re just the stories I’ve been retelling myself my whole life.
The point is, I don’t really have much in the way of a personal role model to base my dad technique on. The man who mostly shaped me was a sadistic monster, and by the time my grandfather came along, Ebenezar wasn’t parenting so much as enacting psychological damage control.
And besides, I’m pretty sure you don’t dad a furious, sullen, magically powered teenage boy the same way you do a ten-year-old girl. Not only that, but I was pretty sure I’d never really spoken to a ten-year-old girl for any length of time. Nor had I ever been one.
I was completely in the woods here, and sure of only one thing:
I really, really wanted to get this right.
Maggie walked next to me, taking maybe three steps to every one of mine. She was a tiny child, in the lowest percentile for height and weight in every class she’d ever been in, with pale skin, dark hair, and absolutely enormous dark eyes. She was wearing purple pants and a beige T-shirt that bore an image echoing the original Star Wars poster, but done in the style of Edo-period samurai art, and her shoes flickered with little red lights when she walked.
Next to her paced a granite grey mountain of muscle and soft fur named Mouse. Mouse was a genuine Temple Guardian, a Foo dog. He weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and the length of his fur was something like a mane around his neck and shoulders. He wore a red nylon vest that declared him a service dog, and walked as carefully as if he were avoiding baby chicks with every step. Maggie kept one of her little hands buried in his mane and her eyes on the ground.
“So, you haven’t been to the zoo before?” I asked.
Maggie shook her head and watched an elderly couple pass us on the sidewalk. She waited until they were several yards away before saying quietly, “Miss Molly tried to take me once, but there were too many people and too much sky, and I cried.”
I nodded. My daughter had seen some bad things. They’d left their marks
on her. “That’s okay, you know.”
“Miss Molly said that, too,” Maggie said. “I was little then.”
The spring afternoon sun peeked out from some clouds for a moment, and my shadow engulfed her and enough space for five or ten more of her. “That was probably it,” I said. “But if you need to, we can leave whenever you like.”
She looked up at me for a minute, her face thoughtful. She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, but everyone thinks that about their kid.
Maybe everyone is right.
“I want to see the gorillas,” she said finally. “So does Mouse.”
Mouse wagged his tail in agreement, and looked up at me with a doggy grin.
“Okay, then,” I said, as we approached the entrance to the zoo. “Let’s do that.”
Maggie looked at me for a moment more and frowned before saying, “Are you nervous?”
“Why would I be nervous?” I asked.
She looked down and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m nervous. I haven’t ever gone to the zoo with my dad before. What if I do it wrong?”
I felt a little jab in my chest and cleared my throat. Smart kid. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you get right or wrong.”
“What if … I don’t know. What if I set something on fire?”
“Maybe we’ll roast some marshmallows,” I said.
She didn’t laugh, and she kept her face down, but her cheeks rounded up with a smile. “You’re weird.”
“A little,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I think.” She stepped a little closer to Mouse. She could have ridden on his back and he wouldn’t much notice her weight. “Did you really save the gorillas from a monster?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said. It had been three hags, and I’d saved one gorilla from taking the fall for a murder one of them had perpetrated. A couple of people died. But that was a lot of dark and complicated conversation for my first dad-daughter outing.
Maggie nodded seriously. “So, you like animals. Like me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Even dinosaurs?”
“Especially dinosaurs. And dino-dogs.”
“Whuff,” said Mouse, pleased.
