by Jim Butcher
“Christ,” Murphy said. “Isn’t that thing over with?”
I grimaced. “For a talk show host, Larry Fowler can really hold a grudge. He keeps doing one thing after another.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have burned down his studio and shot up his car, then.”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“That’s for a court to decide,” Murphy said in a pious tone. “You got an attorney?”
“I helped a guy find his daughter’s lost dog five or six years ago. He’s an attorney. He’s giving me a hand with the legal process, enough so it hasn’t actually bankrupted me. But it just keeps going and going.”
Neither of us got out of the car.
I closed my eyes and listened to the summer night. Music played somewhere. I could hear the occasional racing engine.
“Harry?” Murph asked after a while. “Are you all right?”
“Hungry. Little tired.”
“You look like you’re hurting,” she said.
“Maybe a little achy,” I said.
“Not that kind of hurt.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her, and then away. “Oh. That.”
“That,” she agreed. “You look like you’re bleeding, somehow.”
“I’ll get over it,” I told her.
“Is this about last Halloween?”
I shrugged a shoulder.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There was a lot of confusion in the blackout and right after. But they found a corpse in the Field Museum that had been savaged by an animal. Lab guessed it was a large dog. They found three different blood types on the floor, too.”
“Did they?” I asked.
“And at Kent College. They found eight dead bodies there. Six of them had no discernable means of death. One had its head half severed by a surgically sharp blade. The other had taken a .44 round to the back of the head.”
I nodded.
She stared at me for a while, frowning and waiting for me to continue. Then she said, in a quiet, certain voice, “You killed them.”
My memory played some bad clips in my head. My stomach twisted. “I didn’t do the headless guy.”
Her cool, blue eyes stayed steady and she nodded. “You killed them. It’s eating at you.”
“It shouldn’t. I’ve killed a lot of things.”
“True,” Murphy said. “But they weren’t faeries or vampires or monsters this time. They were people. And you weren’t in the heat of battle when they died. You made the choice cold.”
I couldn’t lift my eyes for some reason. But I nodded and whispered, “More or less.”
She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. “Harry,” she said. “You’re tearing yourself up over it. You’ve got to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me or here, but you’ve got to do it. There’s no shame in feeling bad about killing someone, not for any reason.”
I let out a short little laugh. It tasted bitter. “You’re the last person I’d expect to tell me not to feel bad about committing murder.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Sort of surprised myself,” she said. “But dammit, Harry. You remember when I shot Agent Denton?”
“Yeah.”
“Took me some time to deal with it, too. I mean, I know he’d lost it. And he was going to kill you if I didn’t do it. But it made me feel…” She squinted out at the Chicago night. “Stained. To take a life.” She swallowed. “And those poor people the vampires had controlled at the shelter. That was even worse.”
“All of those people were trying to kill you, Murph. You had to do it. You didn’t have an option. You thought about it. You knew that when you pulled the trigger.”
“Do you think you had an option?” she asked.
I shrugged and said, “Maybe. Maybe not.” I swallowed. “The point is that I never bothered to consider it. Never hesitated. I just wanted them dead.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“What if the Council is right about me?” I asked Murphy quietly. “What if I grow into some kind of monster? One who takes life without consideration for anything but his own will. Who cares more about end than means. More about might than right. What if this is the first step?”
“Do you think it is?” Murphy asked.
“I don’t—”
“Because if you think so, Harry, then it probably is. And if you decide that it isn’t, it probably isn’t.”
“The power of positive thinking?” I asked.
“No. Free will,” she said. “You can’t change what has already happened. But you choose what to do next. Which means that you only cross over to the dark side if you choose to do it.”
“What makes you think that I won’t?” I asked.
Murphy snorted, and reached over to touch my chin lightly with the fingers of one hand. “Because I’m not an idiot. Unlike some other people in this car.”
I reached up and gripped her fingers with my right hand, squeezing gently. Her hand was steady and warm. “Careful. That was almost a compliment.”
“You’re a decent man,” Murphy said, lowering her hand without removing it from my fingers. “Painfully oblivious, sometimes. But you’ve got a good heart. It’s why you’re so hard on yourself. You’re tired, hungry, and hurting, and you saw the bad guys do something you couldn’t stop. Your morale is low. That’s all.”
Her words were simple, frank, and direct. There was no sense of false comfort to her tone, not a trace of indulgent pity. I’ve known Murphy for a while. I knew that she meant every single word. Knowing that I had her support, even in the face of violation of the laws she worked to preserve, was a sudden and vast comfort.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Murphy is good people.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Hell’s bells, I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself and get to work.”
“Start with food and rest,” she said. “If you don’t hear from me, assume I’ll pick you up in the morning.”
“Right,” I said.
We sat there holding hands for a minute. “Karrin?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Her eyes looked very large, very blue. I couldn’t stare at them too long. “Have you ever thought about…you know. Us?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “But…the timing always seems to be off, somehow.”
She smiled a little. “I noticed.”
“Do you think it’ll ever be right?”
She squeezed my hand gently, and then withdrew hers from mine. “I don’t know. Maybe sometime.” She frowned at her hand, and then said, “It would change a lot of things.”
“It would,” I said.
“You’re my friend, Harry,” Murphy said. “No matter what happens. Sometimes in the past…I haven’t really done right by you.”
“Like when you handcuffed me in my office,” I said.
“Right.”
“And when you chipped one of my teeth arresting me.”
Murphy blinked. “I chipped a tooth?”
“And when—”
“Yes, all right,” she said. She gave me a mild glare, her cheeks pink. “The point is that I should have seen that you were one of the good guys a lot sooner than I did. And…”
I blinked at her ingenuously, and waited for her to say it.
“And I’m sorry,” she growled. “Jerk.”
That had cost her something. Murphy has more pride than is good for her. And yes, I am aware of the proverb about glass houses and stones. So I didn’t give her any more of a hard time than I already had. “Don’t go all romantic on me now, Murph.”
She smiled a little and rolled her eyes. “If we ever did get together, I’d kill you inside a week. Now, go get some rest. You’re useless to me like this.”
I nodded and swung out of the car. “In the morning, then.”
“Around eight,” she said, and pulled out and back onto the street. She called to me, “Be careful!”
>
I looked after the car and sighed. My feelings about Murphy were still in a hopelessly complicated tangle. Maybe I should have said something to her sooner. Shared my feelings with her sooner. Acted more swiftly, taken the initiative.
Be careful, she said.
Why did I feel like I’d been too careful already?
Chapter Fifteen
My Mickey Mouse alarm clock went off at seven, and buzzed stubbornly at me until I kicked off the covers, sat up, and shut it off. I ached all over, felt stiff all over, but that sense of overwhelming exhaustion had faded, and since I was already vertical, I got moving.
I got into the shower, and tried not to jump too much when the first shock of freezing water hit me. I’ve had some practice at it. I’ve never had a water heater last me more than a week without some kind of technical problem coming up—and that was the kind of thing you just did not want to take chances on when you have a gas heater. So my showers were always either cold or colder. Given my dating life, and the inhuman charms available to some of the beings who occasionally faced off with me, it was probably just as well.
But, especially when I had bumps and bruises and sore muscles, I wished I could have a skin-blistering hot shower like everyone else in the country.
And suddenly the water shifted from ice-cold to piping hot. It was a shock, and I actually let out a little yelp and danced around in the shower until I could redirect the shower head so that it wasn’t scalding my bits and pieces. After the initial shock of the temperature change, I leaned my aching head and neck into the spray for a second, and let out a long groan. Then I said, “Dammit, I told you to stop that.”
Lasciel’s voice murmured in a quiet laugh under the sound of the water. The sensation of phantom fingertips dug into the wire-tight muscles at the base of my neck, easing soreness away. “You should use the technique I taught you last autumn to block out the discomfort.”
“I don’t need to,” I said, and tried for grouchy. But the heated water and massaging fingers, illusory though they were, were simply delicious. “I’ll be fine.”
“Your discomfort is my discomfort, my host,” she said, and sighed. “Literally, as all my perceptions can come only through your own.”
“This isn’t real,” I said quietly. “The water isn’t really hot. No one is actually massaging my neck. It’s an illusion you’re laying over my senses.”
“Does it not feel soothing?” her disembodied voice asked. “Does it not ease the tension?”
“Yes,” I sighed.
“What matter, then? It is real enough.”
I waved a hand as though trying to brush off an annoying fly from my neck, and the sensation of those strong, steady fingers retreated. “Go on,” I said. “Hands off. I don’t want to start my day with a psychic cage match, but if you push me to it, I will.”
“As you wish,” her voice said, and the sense of presence retreated. Then paused. “My host, I note that you made no mention of the hot water.”
I grunted and mumbled something under my breath, ducked my head under the seemingly scalding water for a few seconds, and then said, “Did you pick up on what happened last night?”
“Indeed,” the fallen angel replied.
“What was your read, then?”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence, and then Lasciel responded, “That Karrin feels a certain distance between the pair of you is a professional necessity, but that she is considering that time and circumstance might someday render it irrelevant.”
I sighed. “No,” I said. “Not that. Stars and stones, I don’t want dating advice from a freaking helltart. I meant the things that attacked people at the convention.”
“Ah,” Lasciel said, with no trace of offense in her tone. “It was obviously the attack of a spiritual predator.”
Takes one to know one, I thought. I rolled a stiff shoulder under the hot water. “If that’s true, then the attacks weren’t about violence,” I said thoughtfully. “Which explains what I saw in that bathroom, where the old man had been attacked. Whatever did it was intent on causing fear. Causing pain. Then devouring the…what? The psychic energy it generated in the victims?”
“That is a somewhat simplistic description,” she said, “but one that is as close as I expect a mortal can come to understanding.”
“What, you’re a mortality bigot now?”
“Now and always,” she replied. “I mean no insult by it, but you should know that your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love. That kind of thing. It isn’t your fault, of course—but it does impose limits upon your ability to perceive and understand some matters.”
“I’m only human,” I said. “So enlighten me.”
“To do so, you would have to release your hold on mortality.”
I blinked and said, “I’d have to die?”
She sighed. “Again, you have only a partial understanding. But in the interest of expediency, yes. You would have to cease living.”
“Then don’t bother enlightening me,” I said. “I have plenty of would-be teachers already.” I rinsed and repeated my shampoo and made myself smell like Irish Spring. “The survivors of the attacks, then. They’re going to have taken a spiritual mauling.”
“If the theory is correct,” Lasciel’s voice responded. “If they are indeed wounded in spirit, it would seem conclusive.”
I shuddered. That kind of damage showed itself in a number of ways, and none of them were pretty. I’d seen men driven to agonies of madness by spiritual attacks. Murphy had been subjected to such an assault and spent years learning to cope with the night terrors it had spawned, until the spiritual and psychological wounds had finally healed. I’d seen some who had been subjected to a psychic sandblasting by vampires of the Black Court who had become nearly mindless bodies, obeying orders, and others of the same ilk who had turned into psychotic killing machines in service to their masters.
The worst part of it all was that almost the only way for me to see something like that was to open my Sight. Which meant that every horribly mangled psyche I’d come across remained fresh and bright in my memory. Always.
The top shelf of my mental trophy case was getting crowded with hideous keepsakes.
The not-truly-hot water coursed over me, a small but suddenly significant comfort. “Go away,” I told Lasciel. Then I added, “Leave me the hot water. Just this once.”
“As you wish,” the fallen angel’s voice replied, polite satisfaction in her tone. The sense of her presence vanished entirely.
I stayed in the shower until my fingers shriveled up. Or, more accurately, I stayed there until the fingers of my right hand shriveled up. The skin of my burned left hand always looked withered and shriveled, these days. The second I turned the water off, the full sensation of icy cold returned, and I shivered violently as I toweled off and got dressed.
I took care of Mouse and Mister’s various needs, ate several leftover biscuits from the fridge for breakfast, and opened a can of Coke. After a moment’s thought, I headed down to my lab and grabbed Bob’s skull from the shelf.
Faint orange lights flickered in the sockets. “Hey,” Bob mumbled in a sleep-slurred voice. “Where are we going?”
“Investigating,” I said. I went back upstairs with the skull and dropped it into my nylon backpack. “I might need you today. But there are going to be straights around, so keep your mouth shut unless I open the pack.”
“’Kay,” Bob said with a yawn, and the lights in the skull’s eye sockets winked out again.
I strapped on the magical arsenal—my shield bracelet, the energy ring, and my silver pentacle amulet. I slipped my newly carved blasting rod into a side pocket of the pack, leaving the handle out where I could reach up behind my right ear and whip it out in a hurry. I picked up my staff and eyed my leather duster, hanging on its hook by the door. I had layered spells over the duster in an effort to provide myself with a measure of protec
tion against various fangs and claws and bullets and such, and as a result the coat had effectively become a suit of armor.
But, like most suits of armor, it lacked its own air-conditioning system—and if I wore it around in the blazing summer heat, I’d probably die of heat prostration before anyone had the chance to bite, slice, or shoot me. Hell, even the blue jeans I was wearing would feel too heavy long before noon. The duster stayed on its hook.
That rattled me a little. I’m used to the duster, and the spells on its leather had saved my life before. It made me feel a little vulnerable to think of getting into some kind of supernatural conflict without it. So I grabbed Mouse’s lead, much to the dog’s tail-wagging approval, and clipped it onto his collar. “You’re with me today,” I told him. “I need someone to watch my back. Maybe to help me eat a hot dog later.”
Mouse’s tail wagged even more at the mention of hot dogs. He chuffed out a breath, nudged my hip with the side of his head in a fond gesture, and we went outside to wait for Murphy.
She pulled up and eyed Mouse warily as I opened the back door and he jumped up onto the backseat. The car rocked back and forth with his weight and sank a little.
“He’s car-broken, right?”
Mouse wagged his tail and gave Murphy an enthusiastic, vacant doggie grin, tilting his head back and forth quizzically. It was easy for my imagination to subtitle the look: Car-broken? What is that?
“Wiseass,” I muttered at the dog, and got in the passenger side. “Don’t worry, Murph. We did an insane amount of work on the whole bodily function issue as soon as I realized how big he was going to get. He’ll be good.” I glared at the backseat. “Won’t you?”
Mouse gave me that same grin and puzzled tilting of his head. I frowned at him more deeply. He leaned forward to nuzzle my shoulder with his heavy muzzle, and settled down in the backseat.
Murphy sighed. “If it was any other dog, I’d make him ride in the trunk.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You have dog issues.”
“Big dog issues,” Murphy corrected me. “Just big dogs.”
“Mouse isn’t big. He’s compactly challenged.”
