by Jim Butcher
I was tired. “If I don’t take him out,” I said, “are you going to tonfa me to death?”
He blinked at me. “What?”
“Tonfa,” I said. “Imagine all the meal that isn’t getting ground so that you can do your job. All the knives going unsharpened.”
He smiled, and I could see him classify me as “drunk, harmless.” He put out one hand in a come-along sort of gesture.
“Your nightstick there. It’s called a tonfa. It was originally a pin that held a millstone or a big round grinding stone in a smithy. It got developed into an improvised weapon by people in southeast Asia, Okinawa, places like that, where big friendly security types like yourself took away all the real weapons in the interest of public safety.”
His smile faded a little. “Okay, buddy…” He put his hand on my shoulder.
Mouse opened his eyes and lifted his head.
That’s all. He didn’t growl at the brawny kid. He didn’t show his teeth. Like all the most dangerous people I know, he didn’t feel a need to make any displays. He just sort of took notice—with extreme prejudice.
The security kid was smart enough to get the picture and took a quick step back. His hand went from the nightstick to his radio. Even Patrick Swayze needed help sometimes.
Murphy came walking up, her badge hanging on a chain around her neck, and said, “Easy there, big guy.” She traded a nod with the security kid and hooked a thumb back at me. “He’s with us. The dog is a handicap-assist animal.”
The kid lifted his eyebrows.
“My mouth is partially paralyzed,” I said. “It makes it hard for me to read. He’s here to help me with the big words. Tell me if I’m supposed to push or pull on doors, that kind of thing.”
Murphy gave me a gimlet glance, and turned back to the guard. “See what I mean? I’ll have him out of your hair in a minute.”
The security guard glanced dubiously at me, but nodded at Murphy and said, “All right. I’ll check back in a bit, see if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” Murphy said, her tone even.
The guard departed. Murphy sighed and sat down next to me, her feet on the other side of Mouse. The dog gave her leg a fond nudge and settled back down again.
“He’ll be back to see if you need help,” I told Murphy in a serious voice. “A sweet little thing like you could get in trouble with a big, crazy man like me.”
“Mouse,” Murphy said. “If I knock Harry out and write, ‘Insufferable wiseass,’ on his head in permanent marker, will you help him read it?”
Mouse glanced up at Murphy and cocked his head speculatively. Then he sneezed and lay back down.
“Why’d you give him a hard time?” Murphy asked me.
I nodded at a pay phone on the wall next to a drinking fountain and a vending machine. “Waiting for a call.”
“Ah,” Murphy said. “Where’s Molly?”
“She was falling asleep on her feet. Rawlins took her home for me.”
Murphy grunted. “I said we’d talk about her.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What you did, Harry…” Murphy shook her head.
“She needed it,” I said.
“She needed it.” The words were crisp.
I shrugged. “The kid’s got power. She thinks that means she knows more than other people. That’s dangerous.”
Murphy frowned at me, listening.
“I’d been planning the little ball-of-face-melty-sunshine thing for a while now,” I said. “I mean, come on. Fire is hard to control. I couldn’t have done something like that without practicing it, and you can’t exactly use a nice, slow, dramatic face-melty fireball in a real fight, can you?”
“Maybe not,” Murphy said.
“I had a kind of face-melty thing come at me once, and it made an impression,” I said. “Molly…got off to a bad start. She took her magic and reshaped the stuff around her. The people around her. Murph…you can’t do anything with magic that you don’t believe in. Think about the significance of that for a minute. When Molly did what she did, she believed that it was right. That she was doing the right thing. Think about her parents. Think about how far they’re willing to go to do the right thing.”
Murphy did that, her blue eyes intense, her expression unreadable.
“I have to keep knocking her on her ass,” I said. “If I don’t, if I let her recover her balance before she gets smart enough to figure out why she should be doing things instead of just how to do them, or if she can do them, she’ll start doing the”—I used air quotes—“‘right’ thing again. She’ll break the Laws again, and they’ll kill her.”
“And you?” Murphy asked.
I shrugged. “That’s a ways down my worry list.”
“And you think what you did is going to help prevent that?” she asked.
“I hope it will,” I said. “I’m not sure what else to do. In the end, it’s up to the kid. I’m just trying to give her enough time to get it together. Despite herself. Hell’s bells, the girl has a thick skull.”
Murphy gave me a lopsided smile and shook her head.
“I know,” I said. “I know. Pot. Kettle. Black.”
“I wasn’t talking about the face-melty thing, Harry,” she said then. “Not directly. I’m talking about the stupid trash can. I’m talking about the look on your face right before you made the fire go away. I’m talking about what happened to that movie-monster thing in the hotel last year.”
It was my turn to frown. “What?”
Murphy stopped for a minute, evidently considering her words as carefully as a bomb technician considers wiring. “There are moments when I wonder if you are losing control of yourself. You’ve always had a lot of anger in you, Harry. But over the past few years, it’s gotten worse. A lot worse.”
“Bullshit,” I snarled.
Murphy arched an eyebrow and just looked at me.
I gritted my teeth and made myself ease back down into my previous slouch. I took a deep breath and counted to ten. Then I said, “You think I have anger issues.”
“When you destroyed that trash can—when you slagged it in a moment of pure frustration, destroyed it, inflicted thousands of dollars of damage on the city sidewalk, the building behind it, the shops inside—”
“All of which are in Marcone’s building,” I snapped.
“I’m sure the people who work the counter at”—she consulted her little notepad—“the Spresso Spress and run the registers at Bathwurks probably don’t know anything about Marcone, or care about him, either. They probably just go to work and try to pay their bills.”
I frowned at her. “What?”
“Both shops were hit by bits of concrete and molten metal. They’ll be closed for several weeks for repairs.”
“They’re insured,” I said. I didn’t sound like I believed it made a difference, even to me.
“People got hurt,” Murphy said. “No one’s face got melted, but that’s not the point. You know the score, Harry. You know the kind of damage you can do if you aren’t careful.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s just like being a cop. Knowing martial arts. I know that I can do some fairly awful things to people. It’s my business to make sure that awful things don’t happen to people. I’m careful about how I use what power I have—”
“I’ll tell that to my dentist,” I said.
“Don’t be petty, Harry,” she said, her voice serious. “I’ve made mistakes. Admitted them. Apologized to you. I can’t change what’s happened, and you’re a better man than that.”
Unless maybe I wasn’t. I felt ashamed for making the remark.
“My point is,” Murphy said quietly, “that you knew what kind of damage you could do. But if what you say is true, in the moment you used your magic you thought that what you were doing was right. You thought it was okay to destroy something because you were angry. Even though it might hurt someone else who didn’t deserve it.”
I felt another surge o
f rage and…
…and…
And holy crap.
Murphy was right.
The sigil of angelic script, the only unburned flesh on my left hand, itched madly.
“Oh, hell,” I said quietly. “Pot, kettle, black, all right. All day long.”
Murph sat beside me, not saying anything, not accusing me of anything. She just sat with me.
Friends do that.
I put my right hand out, palm up.
Murphy closed her hand on mine for a moment, her fingers warm and small and strong.
“Thanks,” I told her.
She squeezed tight for a moment. Then she got up and went to a vending machine. She came back with a can of Coke and a can of Diet Coke, and handed me the nonvile one. We popped open the cans together and drank.
“How’s the ex?” Murphy asked.
“Gonna make it,” I said. “She lost a lot of blood, but she’s AB neg. They stitched her shut and they’re topping off her tank. Shock’s the worry right now, the doc says.”
“It’s more than that, though, isn’t it.”
I nodded. “Thomas said it might take her a few days to get back on her feet, depending on how big a bite the Skavis took. Which is sort of a relief.”
Murphy studied me for a minute, frowning. “Are you bothered that she…I dunno. She kind of stole your thunder there at the end.”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t need to steal it, Murph. And even if she did, I got plenty of thunder.” I felt myself smile. “Got to admit, I’ve never seen her throw a big punch like that before, though.”
“Pretty impressive,” Murphy admitted.
I shrugged. “Yeah, but she had it under control. Nobody else got hurt. Building didn’t even burn down.”
Murph gave me a sideways look. “Like I said…”
I grinned easily and started to riposte, but the pay phone rang.
I hopped up, as much as I was capable of hopping, and answered it. “Dresden.”
John Marcone’s voice was as cool and eloquent as ever. “You must think me insane.”
“You read the papers I had faxed to you?”
“As has my counsel at Monoc,” Marcone replied. “That doesn’t mean—”
I interrupted him purely because I knew how much it would annoy him. “Look, we both know you’re going to do it, and I’m too tired to dance,” I told him. “What do you want?”
There was a moment of silence that might have been vaguely irritated. Being adolescent at someone like Marcone is good for my morale.
“Say please,” Marcone said.
I blinked. “What?”
“Say please, Dresden,” he replied, his tone smooth. “Ask me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Give me a break.”
“We both know you need me, Dresden, and I’m too tired to dance.” I could practically see the shark smile on his face. “Say please.”
I stewed for a sullen minute before I realized that doing so was probably building Marcone’s morale, and I couldn’t have that. “Fine,” I said. “Please.”
“Pretty please,” Marcone prompted me.
Some pyromaniacal madman’s thoughts flooded my forebrain, but I took a deep breath, Tasered my pride, and said, “Pretty please.”
“With a cherry on top.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up on him.
I kicked the base of the vending machine and muttered a curse. Marcone was probably laughing his quiet, mirthless little laugh. Jerk. I rejoined Murphy.
She looked at me. I stayed silent. She frowned a little, but nodded at me and picked up where we’d left off. “Seriously. What relieves you about Elaine being off her feet?”
“She won’t get involved in what comes next,” I said.
Murphy fell quiet for a minute. Then she said, “You think the Malvora are going to make their play for power in the White Court.”
“Yep. If anyone points out what happened to Mr. Skavis, they’ll claim he was trying to steal their thunder, and that their operation was already complete.”
“In other words,” Murphy said after a minute, “they won. We did all that thrashing around trying to stop the Skavis so that it wouldn’t happen. But it’s happening anyway.”
“Depressing,” I said, “isn’t it.”
“What does it mean?” Murphy asked. “On the big scale?”
I shrugged. “If they’re successful, it will draw the White Court out of a prosettlement stance. Throw their support back to the Reds. They’ll declare open season on people like Anna, and we’ll have several tens of thousands of disappearances and suicides over the next few years.”
“Most of which will go unnoticed by the authorities,” Murphy said quietly. “So many people disappear already. What’s a few thousand more, spread out?”
“A statistic,” I said.
She was quiet for a minute. “Then what?”
“If the vamps are quiet enough about it, the war gets harder. The Council will have to spread our resources even thinner than they already are. If something doesn’t change…” I shrugged. “We lose. Now, a couple of decades from now, sometime. We lose.”
“Then what?” Murphy asked. “If the Council loses the war.”
“Then…the vampires will be able to do pretty much whatever they want,” I said. “They’ll take control. The Red Court will grab up all the spots in the world where there’s already plenty of chaos and corruption and blood and misery. They’ll spread out from Central America to Africa, the Middle East, all those places that used to be Stalin’s stomping grounds and haven’t gotten a handle on things yet, the bad parts of Asia. Then they’ll expand the franchise. The White Court will move in on all the places that regard themselves as civilized and enlightened and wisely do not believe in the supernatural.” I shrugged. “You guys will be on your own.”
“You guys?” Murphy asked me.
“People,” I said. “Living people.”
Mouse pressed his head a little harder against my boot. There was silence, and I felt Murphy’s stare.
“Come on, Karrin,” I said. I winked at her and pushed myself wearily to my feet. “That isn’t gonna happen while I’m still alive.”
Murphy rose with me. “You have a plan,” she stated.
“I have a plan.”
“What’s the plan, Harry?”
I told her.
She looked at me for a second and then said, “You’re crazy.”
“Be positive, Murph. You call it crazy. I call it unpredictable.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully for a second and then said, “I can’t go any higher than insane.”
“You in?” I asked her.
Murphy looked insulted. “What kind of question is that?”
“You’re right,” I said. “What was I thinking?”
We left together.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I was up late making arrangements that would, I hoped, help me take out Madrigal and his Malvora buddy, and put an end to the power struggle in the White Court. After which, maybe I would try turning water to wine and walking on water (though technically speaking, I had done the latter yesterday).
After I was through scheming, I dragged my tired self to bed and slept hard but not long. Too many dreams about all the things that could go wrong.
I was rummaging in my icebox, looking for breakfast, when Lasciel manifested her image to me again. The fallen angel’s manner was subdued, and her voice had something in it I had rarely heard there—uncertainty. “Do you really think it’s possible for her to change?”
“Who?”
“Your pupil, of course,” Lasciel said. “Do you really think she can change? Do you think she can take control of herself the way you would have her do?”
I turned from the fridge. Lasciel stood in front of my empty fireplace, her arms folded, frowning down at it. She was wearing the usual white tunic, though her hair seemed a little untidy. I hadn’t slept all that long or all that well. Maybe she hadn�
�t, either.
“Why do you ask?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “It only seems to me that she is already established in her patterns. She disregards the wisdom of others in favor of her own flawed judgment. She ignores their desires, even their will, and replaces them with her own.”
“She did that once,” I said quietly. “Twice, if you want to get technical. It might have been one of her first major choices, and she made a bad one. But it doesn’t mean that she has to keep on repeating it over and over.”
There was silence as I assembled a turkey sandwich and a bowl of Cheerios, plus a can of cold Coke: the breakfast of champions. I hoped. “So,” I said. “What do you think of the plan?”
“I think there is only a slightly greater chance of your enemies killing you than your allies, my host. You are a madman.”
“It’s the sort of thing that keeps life interesting,” I said.
A faint smile played on her lips. “I have known mortals for millennia, my host. Few of them ever grew that bored.”
“You should have seen the kind of plans I came up with a couple of years before you showed up. Today’s plan is genius and poetry compared to those.” There was no milk in the icebox, and I wasn’t pouring Coke onto breakfast cereal. That would just be odd. I munched on the Cheerios dry, and washed each mouthful down with Coke in a dignified fashion. Then I glanced at Lasciel and said, “I changed.”
There was silence for a moment, broken only by the crunching of tasty rings of oats or baked wheat or something. I just knew it was good for my heart and my cholesterol and for all the flowers and puppies and tiny children. The box said so.
The fallen angel spoke after a time, and her words came out quiet and poisonously bitter. “She has free will. She has a choice. That is what she is.”
“No. She is what she does,” I said quietly. “She could choose to change her ways. She could choose to take up black magic again.” I took a bite of sandwich. “Or she could ignore the choice. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Or pretend that she doesn’t have a choice, when in fact she does. That’s just another way of choosing.”
Lasciel gave me a very sharp look. The shadows shifted on her face, as if the room had grown darker. “We are not talking about me.”
